Heroes of To-Day

by Mary Rosetta Parkman

Do you remember the story of the monk of long ago who, while copying in his cell a page from the Holy Book, chanced to ponder on the words that tell us that a thousand years in God’s sight are but as a day? As the monk wondered and doubted how such a thing might be, he heard through his window the song of a strange, beautiful bird, and followed it through the garden into the woods beyond. Wandering on and listening, with every sense alive to the delights about him, it seemed that he had spent the happiest hour he had ever known. But when he returned to his monastery, he found himself a stranger in a place that had long forgotten him. He had been wandering for a hundred years in the magic wood, listening to the song of the wonderful bird.

In somewhat the same way John Burroughs followed where the gleam of the little bluish warbler led him through woods and fields for more than seventy years. That is why Time missed him out of the great reckoning. One who listens to the song of life knows nothing of age or change. So it is that the boy John never slipped away from Burroughs, the man. So it is that the Seer of Woodchuck Lodge is eighty years young.

Do you know what it means to be a seer? A seer is one who has seeing eyes which clearly note and comprehend what most people pass a hundred times nor care to see. He looks, too, through the outer shell or appearance of things, and learns to read something of their hidden meaning. He has sight, then, and also insight. He looks with his physical eyes and also with the eyes of the mind and spirit.

We always think of a seer as an old man, but little John Burroughs—John o’ Birds, as some one has called him—began to be “an eye among the blind” that Sunday in the woods when he was a lad of seven. He led a new, charmed life as he weeded the garden and later plowed the fields. He saw and heard life thrilling about him on every side, and all that he saw became part of his own life. He drank in the joy of the bobolink and the song-sparrow with the air he breathed, as the warm sunshine and good, earth smell of the freshly turned furrow entered at every pore.

Another day almost as memorable as that which brought the flash of the strange bird was the one which gave him a glimpse into the unexplored realm of ideas. A lady visiting at the farm-house noticed a boyish drawing of his, and said, “What taste that boy has!” Taste, then, might belong to something besides the food that one took into one’s mouth. It seemed that there were new worlds of words—and thoughts—of which his farmer folk little dreamed.

Again, one day when watching some roadmakers down by the school-house turn up some flat stones, he heard a man standing by exclaim, “Ah, here we have, perhaps, some antiquities!” Antiquities! How the word rang in his fancy for days! Oh, the magic lure of the world of words!

It seemed that school and books might give him the freedom of that world. He went to the district school at Roxbury, New York, summers until he was ten, when his help was needed on the farm. After that, he was permitted to go only during the winters. In many ways he was the odd one of the family, and his unaccountable interest in things that could never profit a farmer often tried the patience of his hard-working father.

One day the boy asked for money to buy an algebra. What was an algebra, anyway, and why should this queer lad be demanding things that his father and brothers had never had? John got the algebra, and other precious books beside, but he earned the money himself by selling maple sugar. He knew when April had stirred the sap in the sugar-bush a week or more before any one else came to tap the trees, and his early harvest always found a good market.

And what a joyous time April was! “I think April is the best month to be born in,” said John Burroughs. “One is just in time, so to speak, to catch the first train, which is made up in this month. My April chickens are always the best.... Then are heard the voices of April—arriving birds, the elfin horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sun-down, the camp-fire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising from the trees, the tinge of green that comes so suddenly on the sunny slopes. April is my natal month, and I am born again into new delight and new surprises at each return of it. Its name has an indescribable charm to me. Its two syllables are like the calls of the first birds—like that of the phœbe-bird or of the meadow-lark.”

The keen joy in the feel of the creative sunlight and springing earth—the eager tasting of every sight and sound and scent that the days brought—were not more a part of his own throbbing life than the desire to know and understand. When he was fifteen he had the promise that he might go to the academy in a neighboring town. That fall, as he plowed the lot next the sugar-bush, each furrow seemed to mark a step on the way.