“I should like,” I said, “to illustrate your point of view from the details of your own life.”
“Students of nature do not, as a rule, have eventful lives. I was born at Roxbury, New York, in 1837. That was a time when conditions were rather primitive. My father was a farmer, and I was raised among the woods and fields. I came from an uncultivated, unreading class of society, and grew up among surroundings the least calculated to awaken the literary faculty. I have no doubt that daily contact with the woods and fields awakened my interest in the wonders of nature, and gave me a bent toward investigation in that direction.”[[10]]
[10]. “Blessed is he whose youth was passed upon a farm,” writes Mr. Burroughs; “and if it was a dairy farm his memories will be all the more fragrant. The driving of the cows to and from the pasture every day and every season for years,—how much of summer and of nature he got into him on these journeys! What rambles and excursions did this errand furnish the excuse for! The birds and birds’ nests, the berries, the squirrels, the woodchucks, the beech woods into which the cows loved so to wander and browse, the fragrant wintergreens, and a hundred nameless adventures, all strung upon that brief journey of half a mile to and from the remote pasture.”
“Did you begin early to make notes and write upon nature?” I questioned.
“Not before I was sixteen or seventeen. Earlier than that, the art of composition had anything but charms for me. I remember that while at school, at the age of fourteen, I was required, like other students, to write ‘compositions’ at stated times, but I usually evaded the duty one way or another. On one occasion, I copied something from a comic almanac, and unblushingly handed it in as my own. But the teacher detected the fraud, and ordered me to produce a twelve-line composition before I left school. I remember I racked my brain in vain, and the short winter day was almost closing when Jay Gould, who sat in the seat behind me, wrote twelve lines of doggerel on his slate and passed it slyly over to me. I had so little taste for writing that I coolly copied that, and handed it in as my own.”
“You were friendly with Gould then?”
“Oh, yes, ‘chummy,’ they call it now. His father’s farm was only a little way from ours, and we were fast friends, going home together every night.”
“His view of life must have been considerably different from yours.”
“It was. I always looked upon success as being a matter of mind, not money; but Jay wanted the material appearances. I remember that once we had a wrestling match, and as we were about even in strength, we agreed to abide by certain rules,—taking what we called ‘holts’ in the beginning and not breaking them until one or the other was thrown. I kept to this in the struggle, but when Jay realized that he was in danger of losing the contest, he broke the ‘holt’ and threw me. When I remarked that he had broken his agreement, he only laughed and said, ‘I threw you, didn’t I?’ And to every objection I made, he made the same answer. The fact of having won was pleasing to him. It satisfied him, although it wouldn’t have contented me.”
“Did you ever talk over success in life with him?”