"Trout streams gurgled about the roots of my family tree," he was wont to say as he told of his grandfather Kelly's ardor for the pastime. One day, in crossing the fields near the old home, he showed me the stone wall where he and his grandfather tarried the last time they went fishing together, he a boy of ten and his grandfather past eighty. As they rested on the wall, the old man, without noticing it, sat on the lad's hand as it lay on the wall. "It hurt," Mr. Burroughs said, "but I didn't move till he got ready to get up."
It was a great pleasure to go through the old sap bush with Mr. Burroughs, for there he always lives over again the days in early spring when sugar-making was in progress. He showed where some of the old trees once stood,—the grandmother trees,—and mourned that they were no more; but some of the mighty maples of his boyhood are still standing, and each recalls youthful experiences. He sometimes goes back there now in early spring to re-create the idyllic days. Their ways of boiling sap are different now, and he finds less poetry in the process. But the look of the old trees, the laugh of the robins, and the soft nasal calls of the nuthatch, he says, are the same as in the old times. "How these sounds ignore the years!" he exclaimed as a nuthatch piped in the near-by trees.
Sometimes he would bring over to Woodchuck Lodge from the homestead a cake of maple sugar from the veteran trees, and some of the maple-sugar cookies such as his mother used to make; though he eats sparingly of sweets nowadays. Yet, when he and a small boy would clear the table and take the food down cellar, it was no uncommon thing to see them emerge from the stairway, each munching one of those fat cookies, their eyes twinkling at the thought that they had found the forbidden sweets we had hidden so carefully.
He and this lad of eleven were great chums; they chased wild bees together, putting honey on the stone wall, getting a line on the bees; shelled beechnuts and cracked butternuts for the chipmunks; caught skunks in a trap, just to demonstrate that a skunk can be carried by the tail with impunity, if you only do it right (and, though succeeding one day, got the worst of the bargain the next); and waged war early and late on the flabby woodchucks which one could see almost any hour in the day undulating across the fields. We called these boys "John of Woods," and "John of Woodchucks"; and it was sometimes difficult to say which was the veriest boy, the one of eleven or the one of seventy-four.
One morning I heard them laughing gleefully together as they were doing up the breakfast work. Calling out to learn the cause of their merriment, I found the elder John had forgotten to eat his egg—he had just found it in his coat-pocket, having put it in there to carry from the kitchen to the living-room.
He often amused us by his recital of Thackeray's absurd "Little Billee," and by the application of some of the lines to events in the life at Woodchuck Lodge.
(Illustration of Living-Room, Woodchuck Lodge, with Rustic Furniture made by Mr. Burroughs. From a photograph by M. H. Fanning)
As the evenings grew longer and cooler, we would gather about the table and Mr. Burroughs would read aloud, sometimes from Bergson's "Creative Evolution," under the spell of which he was the entire summer of 1911, sometimes from Wordsworth, sometimes from Whitman. "No other English poet has touched me quite so closely," he said, "as Wordsworth.... But his poetry has more the character of a message, and a message special and personal, to a comparatively small circle of readers." As he read "The Poet's Epitaph" one evening, I was impressed with the strong likeness the portrait there drawn has to Mr. Burroughs:—
"The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.
In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart,—
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart."
What are the books, and notably the later philosophical essays, of Mr. Burroughs but the "harvest of a quiet eye"? His "Summit of the Years," his "Gospel of Nature" (which one of his friends calls "The Gospel according to Saint John"), his "Noon of Science," his "Long Road"? And most of this rich harvest he has gathered in his journeys back to Pepacton, inspired by the scenes amid which he first felt the desire to write.