A day with John Burroughs at Woodchuck Lodge will always seem torn from the calendar of ordinary living, a day apart, free, wholesome, and untouched by petty care. His world is indeed “so full of a number of things” that all who come within the spell of its serene content are “as happy as kings.”
As he makes whistles of young shoots of dogwood for his small grandson he tells of his school-days, when necessity taught his hand the cunning to make his own pens, slate-pencils, and ink-wells. “And they were a very good sort, too,” he adds. “Those were home-made days. I remember my homespun shirts, made of our own flax, yellow at first and as good as ever hair-shirt could have been in the way of scratching penance. All my playthings were home-made. How well I remember my trout-lines of braided horsehair, and the sawmill in the brook that actually cut up the turnips, apples, and cucumbers that I proudly fed it.”
“These, too, are home-made days of the best sort,” we think as we look about the rustic porch and chairs made of silvery birch, and at the silver-haired seer, surrounded by his grandchildren and the friends who gather about him with the happy feeling of being most entirely at home.
“You like my chairs with the bark on?” he says. “It’s a sort of hobby of mine to see how the natural forks and crooks and elbows which I discover in the saplings and tree-boles can be coaxed into serving my turn about the house, and I make it a point to use them as nearly as possible as they grow.”
We sit on the porch at his feet, watching the chipmunks frisk along the fences and the woodchucks creep furtively out of their holes. We do not speak for several long minutes, because we want to taste the quiet life he loves in the heart of the blue hills. We fancy that we can hear in the twitter of the tree-tops a clearly understood mingling of familiar voices, and that we feel in our hearts an answering echo that proves us truly akin to the creatures in feathers and fur.
“Home sights and sounds are best of all,” says our friend, as he gazes across at the purple shadows on Old Clump. “The sublime beauty of the Yosemite touched me with wonder and awe, but when I heard the robin’s note it touched my heart. Bright Angel Creek in the Grand Cañon found its way into the innermost recesses of my consciousness in the moment when it reminded me of the trout-stream at home.”
There is another pause, in which the silver-clear notes of the vesper-sparrow come to us with their “Peace, good will and good night.”
“I think I am something like a turtle in the way I love to poke about in narrow fields,” he adds whimsically; “but why should I rush hither and yon to see things when I can see constellations from my own door-step?”
And so it is indeed true that the Seer of Woodchuck Lodge can still find in a ramble among his own hills the land of wonder and beauty which he found as a boy when he followed the flash of the unknown bird, and in the glowing twilight of his years, with eyes that look into the heart and meaning of things, can, from his door-step, trace constellations undreamed of by day.