"The dome of day o'erbrims with sound
From humming wings on errands bound
Above the sleeping fields."
What a picture of bees in the upper air freighting honey from field to hive and storing it away for the winter supply! The two following stanzas perhaps interpret the beauty of the situation better than any other part of the poem:
"Poisèd and full is summer's tide
Brimming all the horizon wide,
In varied verdure dressed;
Its viewless currents surge and beat
In airy billows at my feet
Here on the mountain crest.
"Through pearly depths I see the farms,
Where sweating forms and bronzèd arms
Reap in the land's increase;
In ripe repose the forests stand
And veilèd heights on every hand
Swim in a sea of peace."
The truth of these lines lay out before us. There lay the grain in the fields where the cradlers had reaped in the land's increase. There stood the veiled heights on every side which John Burroughs named beginning on the right: Table mountain, Slide mountain, Double Top mountain and Graham. From the front of Woodchuck Lodge he had already named for us Bald Mountain, Hack's Flats, Schutle's and the one we were now on. Truly they were all veiled heights as we viewed them from the summit of the Old Clump.
As I loitered about among the boulders on the mountain I became much interested in the names cut in the large boulders of people who had lived in the Burroughs community, and seeing that Mr. Burroughs himself was also interested in them, I began to ask him about them, and I copied many of them in my note book. Nothing pleased the Naturalist better than to tell of the people who used to be his neighbors, and I think he remembered them all. As we looked out again across the valley, his eyes got a glimpse of the old Betsy Bouton place, and he recalled that she was a widow who had one daughter and two sons. "These were the laziest human beings I ever saw,—these boys. They would sit up by the fire and mumble, while the mother brought in the wood and the water, and cooked the meals, and the daughter would do the milking. Nothing could the mother get out of them, but to sit around the open fire and grumble at their hard lot, and that they had so much to do. She used to have a hard time getting them up and ready for school."
From here we could see the vicinity of the little red school house where John Burroughs had gone to school sixty years before, and he told of his experience with Jay Gould. Jay paid him for writing an essay, and he paid Jay eighty cents for a grammar and an algebra. "These were my first grammar and algebra, and I paid for them with the money I had earned selling sugar from my individual boiling pan in the sugar bush. I shall tell you about it and show you where I boiled the sugar, as we go down that way."
UNDER THE OLD GRAY LEDGE
He enjoyed telling of one certain student—a schoolmate of his who had long curly hair. "His hair was as curly as you ever saw and turned under at the bottom. O, how I longed to have my hair look like his did! I thought it was the prettiest hair I ever saw grow."