"I must have been a sport," he says of himself—a born word worshipper, a man fired with unquenchable literary ambition, a lover of the best of the world's books, born of parents who knew not the meaning even of the words. I doubt very much that any of his immediate family, that is of his own generation, read a line in any of his books. His sister told him not to write, that "it was bad for the head"—how different he was from them all is shown in an incident Mother once related, and which can be told only with a word of explanation. During the war he and Mother had gone "out home," as he always spoke of visiting the parents on the homestead, and during dinner Grandfather exclaimed: "I'd like to see Abe Lincoln hung higher than Haman and I'd like to have hold of the rope!" Father sat speechless with pain and amazement, then silently pushing back his plate he rose and silently walked from the room. Then Grandmother "went for" Grandfather. But Grandfather did not realize what he was saying, and he would have been one of the very last to have harmed Lincoln, or any one else for that matter. The incident shows how different those passionate, intense, and bitter-feeling times were from ours, and how the spread of the magazines and the illustrated papers has broadened and mellowed the feelings of the people.
Father often spoke of his joy when the Atlantic accepted his first article, the one on "Expression" which was attributed to Emerson—he felt a new world had opened up for him, new worlds to explore and conquer with unlimited possibilities. His ambition to write got a tremendous incentive. At that time he was teaching school at a small town near Newburgh and when Saturday came he wanted to go into the parlour for his day's work. That was the time of the supremacy of the parlour, the darkened room held sacred for special occasions, funerals, and Sunday company and such, and Mother had no notion of its order being disturbed and its sanctity profaned by such a frivolous thing as writing—she locked the door. I think Father took it as an insult, not to himself, but to his calling, a deadly insult to his god of literature, and in what to me was a fine and noble and justifiable frenzy he smashed and kicked the door into "smithereens." I applaud; I'm glad he did it; he proved himself worthy of his chosen god. Mother no doubt cried. Poor demolished door—a small and material sacrifice indeed for the great god of letters!
Those years were hard ones in many ways for Father, the years in the late '50's when he was teaching school and trying many things, trying to find himself and make a living and appease the material ambitions of Mother. One summer he spent on the old homestead and grew onions; the seed he used was poor, few came up, and a summer of hard work, for both him and Mother, came to nothing. For a time he studied medicine in the office of Doctor Hull near Ashokan, and there, sitting in the little office at a spot now just on the edge of the water of what is now the great Ashokan Reservoir, he wrote his poem, "Waiting." One cannot but marvel at the prophecy of it, the vision of the discouraged boy of twenty-five every line of which has had such a fulfilment. He tried several ventures, blindly groping, hoping for success which never came to any of them. One of his ventures was a share in a patent buckle from which he was to get rich, but from which he got losses and discouragement—in fact, he had borrowed money to go into it and on his non-payment he was arrested and brought up the river on a night boat. Waking when the boat stopped at Newburgh and finding his guard was asleep, he got up and dressed and went ashore. His arrest was not legal anyway, and soon the matter was settled. He continued to teach, and finally, in the early years of the war, drifted to Washington. A friend of his wanted him to come, saying there were many opportunities and also holding out the inducement that he could meet Walt Whitman. Finally he got a position in the Treasury Department and from Hugh McCulloch, Secretary of the Treasury, in his "Men and Measures of Half a Century," we get a picture of the young John Burroughs seeking a job, a picture that Father said was not accurate, but which at least shows how he impressed a man used to seeing many job-seekers:
One day a young man called at my office and said to me that he understood that the force of the bureau was to be increased, and that he should be glad to be employed. I asked him if he had any recommendations. "I have not," he replied; "I must be my own." I looked at his sturdy form and intelligent face, which impressed me so favourably that I sent his name to the Secretary, and the next day he was at work as a twelve-hundred-dollar clerk. I was not mistaken. He was an excellent clerk, competent, faithful, willing.
And Father has said that of the hundred dollars a month he received, he and Mother saved just half. And the real cost of living then was as high as it is now; the actual cost of food and clothing and the manner of living have changed. Father's first book: "Notes on Walt Whitman, Poet and Person," published in 1867, now long out of print, a small brown volume with gilt lettering, was brought out in those Washington days. The book was not a success and though Father took a loss on its publication, he did not have to deduct it from his income tax. Of all that life there in Washington he has spoken so much in his books, "Winter Sunshine," "Indoor Studies," "Whitman, a Study," and so on that I will leave it and return to the vineyard here on the banks of the Hudson.
It was in 1872 that Father and Mother came here and bought about a nine-acre place, sloping from the road down to the water, living for a time, nearly a year, in a small house up by the road, during which time they were building the stone house, the building of which Father has described in "Roof-Tree." He had wanted a stone house, and here was plenty of stone, "wild stone" as a native called them, to be picked up, weathered and soft in colouring, only a short haul and a few touches with the hammer or peen needed to make them into building stone. He has often spoken of Mother's first visit to her new home, just as the foundation was nicely started, and of her grief and disappointment when she saw the size of the building. The foundation of a house, open to the sky, gives no idea of the size of the finished building, and it was in vain that Father tried to explain this. "I showed her the plans," he often said, "so many feet this way and so many that, such a size to this room and such a size to that, but it was no use, she cried and took on at a great rate." Father was bank receiver then, getting three thousand a year, and on that he was building this big, three-story stone house. He took great pleasure in it—he loved to tell of the Irish mason who went off on a drunk just when he was working on the stone chimney. Disgusted at the delay Father went up, and with hammer and trowel went at the chimney himself, and the sobering mason could see him from Hyde Park, across the river. When he was sober enough to come back and go on with his work he carefully inspected what Father had done and exclaimed, "and you are a hondy mon, ye are."
The southwest bedroom on the third floor Father was to have for his room, his study, where he could write. This room he panelled to the ceiling with native woods: maple, oak, beech, birch, tulip, and others, and I like to think of his happy anticipation, his dreams of the happy hours he would spend in this room, and of the writing he would do. But he did no writing here, for a few years later he built the bark-covered study down on the edge of the bank, then a few years later yet he built Slabsides, two miles over the low mountain. It was there, especially in the study, that he did the bulk of all his literary work.
Mother was a materialist; she never rated literary efforts very high; she often seemed to think that Father should do the work of the hired man and then do his writing nights and holidays. She could see no sense in taking the best hours of the day for "scribbling," and it was only in the later years when Father had a steady income from his writings that her point of view softened. She was what they called in those days a "good housekeeper" and she kept it so well that Father had to move out for his working hours, first to the study, then two miles away. When it came to housework, Mother possessed the quality called inevitableness to an extraordinary degree. She had a way of fastening a cloth about her head, a sort of forerunner of the boudoir cap of to-day, a means of protecting her hair from any imaginary dust, and this became a symbol, a battle flag of the goddess of housecleaning. Father was ordered out of the library, where he did his writing, and his thread was rudely broken; it was a day when sap did not run. For a high-strung, temperamental being, hasty and quick tempered, I think he showed wonderful patience, a patience that does him great credit. And yet in many ways Mother was an invaluable helpmate, she was a balance wheel that kept their world moving steadily, and I am sure saved Father from many mistakes and extravagances.
It was only years afterward, when he began to ship grapes, that Father named his place "Riverby." He had been reading a book of adventure to me, Stevenson's "Black Arrow," and in it there was a place named "Shoreby," or "by-the-shore." This suggested the name of "Riverby," or "by-the-river," to Father for his place. So it was adopted and became the trademark, "Riverby Vineyards," an oval stamp with a bunch of grapes in the middle and the address below. It became the name of the place, the name of one of Father's books, and was stamped on the lid of every crate or basket of grapes.
Father was an absolutely honest man, honest not only in packing a crate of grapes, but honest as to his own weaknesses and shortcomings. I can never forget how he admired an exclamation attributed to General Lee at Gettysburg. Pickett had made his famous charge and his veterans had come back, a few of them, defeated, and Lee said to them, "It's all my fault, boys!" "That is the true spirit of greatness," Father said, thoughtfully. And when the Titanic went down in mid-ocean with such a loss of life, and the order was for the women and children first to the lifeboats, men to keep back, Father said: "That took real grit. I hope I'll never have to face such a crisis."