Our Friend John Burroughs Part 4

The first suit of clothes I remember having, she cut and made. Then the quilts and coverlids she pieced and quilted! We used, too, in my boyhood to make over two tons of b.u.t.ter annually, the care of which devolved mainly upon her, from the skimming of the pans to the packing of the b.u.t.ter in the tubs and firkins, though the churning was commonly done by a sheep or a dog. We made our own cheese, also. As a boy I used to help do the wheying, and I took toll out of the sweet curd. One morning I ate so much of the curd that I was completely cloyed, and could eat none after that.

I can remember Mother's loom pounding away hour after hour in the chamber of an outbuilding where she was weaving a carpet, or cloth. I used to help do some of the quilling--running the yarn or linen thread upon spools to be used in the shuttles. The distaff, the quill-wheel, the spinning-wheel, the reel, were very familiar to me as a boy; so was the crackle, the swingle, the hetchel, for Father grew flax which Mother spun into thread and wove into cloth for our s.h.i.+rts and summer trousers, and for towels and sheets. Wearing those s.h.i.+rts, when new, made a boy's skin pretty red. I dare say they were quite equal to a hair s.h.i.+rt to do penance in; and wiping on a new home-made linen towel suggested wiping on a brier bush. Dear me! how long it has been since I have seen any tow, or heard a loom or a spinning-wheel, or seen a boy breaking in his new flax-made s.h.i.+rt! No one sees these things any more.

Mother had but little schooling; she learned to read, but not to write or cipher; hence, books and such interests took none of her time. She was one of those uneducated countrywomen of strong natural traits and wholesome instincts, devoted to her children; she bore ten, and nursed them all--an heroic worker, a helpful neighbor, and a provident housewife, with the virtues that belonged to so many farmers' wives in those days, and which we are all glad to be able to enumerate in our mothers.

She had not a large frame, but was stout; had brown hair and blue eyes, a fine strong brow, and a straight nose with a strong bridge to it. She was a woman of great emotional capacity, who felt more than she thought.

She scolded a good deal, but was not especially quick-tempered. She was an Old-School Baptist, as was Father.

She was not of a vivacious or sunny disposition--always a little in shadow, as it seems to me now, given to brooding and to dwelling upon the more serious aspects of life. How little she knew of all that has been done and thought in the world! and yet the burden of it all was, in a way, laid upon her. The seriousness of Revolutionary times, out of which came her father and mother, was no doubt reflected in her own serious disposition. As I have said, her happiness was always shaded, never in a strong light; and the sadness which motherhood, and the care of a large family, and a yearning heart beget was upon her. I see myself in her perpetually. A longing which nothing can satisfy I share with her. Whatever is most valuable in my books comes from her--the background of feeling, of pity, of love comes from her.

She was of a very different temperament from Father--much more self-conscious, of a more breeding, inarticulate nature. She was richly endowed with all the womanly instincts and affections. She had a decided preference for Abigail and me among her children, wanted me to go to school, and was always interceding with Father to get me books.

She never read one of my books. She died in 1880, at the age of seventy-three. I had published four of my books then.

She had had a stroke of apoplexy in the fall of 1879, but lived till December of the following year, dying on father's seventy-seventh birthday. (He lived four years more.) We could understand but little of what she said after she was taken ill. She used to repeat a line from an old hymn--"Only a veil between."

She thought a good deal of some verses I wrote--"My Brother's Farm"--and had them framed. (You have seen them in the parlor at the Old Home. I wrote them in Was.h.i.+ngton the fall that you were born. I was sick and forlorn at the time.)

I owe to Mother my temperament, my love of nature, my brooding, introspective habit of mind--all those things which in a literary man help to give atmosphere to his work. In her line were dreamers and fishermen and hunters. One of her uncles lived alone in a little house in the woods. His hut was doubtless the original Slabsides. Grandfather Kelly was a lover of solitude, as all dreamers are, and Mother's happiest days, I think, were those spent in the fields after berries.

The Celtic element, which I get mostly from her side, has no doubt played an important part in my life. My idealism, my romantic tendencies, are largely her gift.

On my father's side I find no fishermen or hermits or dreamers. I find a marked religious strain, more active and outspoken than on Mother's. The religion of the Kellys was, for the most part, of the silent, meditative kind, but there are preachers and teachers and scholars on Father's side--one of them, Stephen Burroughs (b. 1765), a renegade preacher.

Doubtless most of my own intellectual impetus comes from this side of the family. There are also cousins and second cousins on this side who became preachers, and some who became physicians, but I recall none on the Kelly side.

In size and physical make-up I am much like my father. I have my father's foot, and I detect many of his ways in my own. My loud and harmless barking, when I am angered, I get from him. The Kellys are more apt to bite. I see myself, too, in my brothers, in their looks and especially in their weaknesses. Take from me my special intellectual equipment, and I am in all else one of them.

(Speaking of their characteristics as a family, Mr. Burroughs says that they have absolute inability to harbor resentment (a Celtic trait); that they never have "cheek" to ask enough for what they have to sell, lack decision, and are easily turned from their purpose. Commenting on this, he has often said: "We are weak as men--do not make ourselves felt in the community. But this very weakness is a help to me as a writer upon Nature. I don't stand in my own light. I get very close to bird and beast. My thin skin lets the shy and delicate influences pa.s.s. I can surrender myself to Nature without effort. I am like her.... That which hinders me with men, makes me strong with impersonal Nature, and admits me to her influences.... I am lacking in moral fibre, but am tender and sympathetic.")

To see Mr. Burroughs stand and fondly gaze upon the fruitful, well-cultivated fields that his father had cared for so many years, to hear him say that the hills are like father and mother to him, was to realize how strong is the filial instinct in him--that and the home feeling. As he stood on the crest of the big hill by the pennyroyal rock, looking down on the peaceful homestead in the soft light of a midsummer afternoon, his eye roamed fondly over the scene:--

"How fertile and fruitful it is now, but how lonely and bleak the old place looked in that winter landscape the night I drove up from the station in the moonlight after hearing of Father's death! There was a light in the window, but I knew Father would not meet me at the door this time--beleaguering winter without, and Death within!

"Father and Mother! I think of them with inexpressible love and yearning, wrapped in their last eternal sleep. They had, for them, the true religion, the religion of serious, simple, hard-working.

G.o.d-fearing lives. To believe as they did, to sit in their pews, is impossible to me--the Time-Spirit has decreed otherwise; but all I am or can be or achieve is to emulate their virtues--my soul can be saved only by a like truthfulness and sincerity."

The following data concerning his brothers and sisters were given me by Mr. Burroughs in conversation:--

Hiram, born in 1827, was an unpractical man and a dreamer; he was a bee-keeper. He showed great apt.i.tude in the use of tools, could make axe-handles, neck-yokes, and the various things used about the farm, and was especially skilled in building stone walls. But he could not elbow his way in a crowd, could not make farming pay, and was always pushed to the wall. He cared nothing for books, and although he studied grammar when a boy, and could pa.r.s.e, he never could write a grammatical sentence. He died at the age of seventy-five.

Olly Ann was about two years younger than Hiram. Mr. Burroughs remembers her as a frail, pretty girl, with dark-brown eyes, a high forehead, and a wasp-like waist. She had a fair education for her time, married and had two children, and died in early womanhood of phthisis.

Wilson was a farmer, thrifty and economical. He married but had no children. He was evidently somewhat neurotic; as a child, even when well, he would groan and moan in his sleep, and he died, at the age of twenty-eight, after a short illness, of a delirious fever.

Curtis also was a farmer, but lacked judgment; could not look ahead; thought if he gave his note a debt was canceled, and went on piling up other indebtedness. He had a very meagre schooling, but was apt at witty remarks. He was temperate; was much given to reading "The Signs of the Times," like his father before him. He married and had five children.

For many years previous to his death he lived at the homestead, dying there in his eightieth year, in the summer of 1912. Two of his unmarried children still live at the Old Home,--of all places on the earth the one toward which Mr. Burroughs turns with the most yearning fondness.

Edmund died in infancy.

Jane, a tender-hearted, old-fas.h.i.+oned woman, who cried and fretted easily, and worried over trifles, was a good housekeeper, and a fond mother--a fat, dumpy little woman with a doleful voice. She was always urging her brother not to puzzle his head about writing; writing and thinking, she said, were "bad for the head." When he would go away on a journey of only a hundred miles, she would worry incessantly lest something happen to him. She married and had five daughters. Her death occurred in May, 1912, at the age of seventy-seven. "Poor Jane!" said Mr. Burroughs one day, when referring to her protests against his writing; "I fear she never read a dozen printed words of mine--or shall I say 'lucky Jane'?"

John, born in 1837, was always "an odd one." (One is reminded of what William R. Thayer said of the Franklin family: "Among the seventeen Franklin children one was a Benjamin, and the rest n.o.bodies.")

Eden was born in 1839. Frail most of his life, in later years he has become robust, and now (1913) is the only surviving member of the family besides Mr. Burroughs. He is cheery and loquacious, methodical and orderly, and very punctilious in dress. (One day, in the summer of 1912, when he was calling at "Woodchuck Lodge,"--the summer home where Mr.

Burroughs has lived of late years, near the old place where he was born,--this brother recounted some of their youthful exploits, especially the one which yielded the material for the essay "A White Day and a Red Fox." "I shot the fox and got five dollars for it," said Mr. Eden Burroughs, "and John wrote a piece about it, and got seventy-five.")

Abigail, the favorite sister of our author, appreciated her brother's books and his ideals more than any other member of the family. She married and had two children. At the time of her death, in 1901, of typhoid fever (at the age of fifty-eight) the band of brothers and sisters had been unbroken by death for more than thirty-seven years.

Her loss was a severe blow to her brother. He had always shared his windfalls with her; she had read some of his essays, and used to talk with him about his aspirations, encouraging him timidly, before he had gained recognition.

Eveline died at the age of five years.

The death of his brother Hiram, in 1904, made the past bleed afresh for Mr. Burroughs. "He was next to Father and Mother in my affections,"

he wrote. "Oh! if I had only done more for him--this is my constant thought. If I could only have another chance! How generous death makes us! Go, then, and make up by doing more for the living."

As I walked with him about the Old Home, he said, "I can see Hiram in everything here; in the trees he planted and grafted, in these stone walls he built, in this land he so industriously cultivated during the years he had the farm."

So large a place in his affections did this brother hold, and yet how wide apart were these two in their real lives! I know of no one who has pictured the pathos of lives so near and yet so far apart as has George Eliot when she says: "Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it.

Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion, and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every moment. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the thoughts we despise; we see eyes--ah! so like our mother's--averted from us in cold alienation."

We cannot tell why one boy in a family turns out a genius, while the others stay in the ancestral ruts and lead humdrum, placid lives, any more than we can tell why one group of the hepaticas we gather in the April woods has the gift of fragrance, while those of a sister group in the same vicinity are scentless. A caprice of fate, surely, that "mate and mate beget such different issues."

"Hiram was with me at Slabsides," said Mr. Burroughs, "much of the time when I was writing the Whitman book, but never referred to it in any way. When it came from the press, I said to him, 'Hiram, here is the book you have heard me speak about as having cost me nearly four years'

work, and which I rewrote four times.'"

"'That's the book, is it?' he replied, showing no curiosity about it, or desire to look into it, but kept drumming on the table--a habit of his that was very annoying to me at times, but of which he was not aware.

When 'A Year in the Fields' came out, he looked at some of the pictures, but that was all."

There is something very pathetic in all this--these two brothers living in that isolated cabin in the woods, knit together by the ties of kins.h.i.+p, having in common a deep and yearning love for each other, and for the Old Home in the Catskills,--their daily down-sittings and up-risings outwardly the same, yet so alienated in what makes up one's real existence. The one, the elder, intent on his bees, his thoughts by day revolving about his hives, or concerned with the weather and the daily happenings; at night, as he idly drums with his fingers, dreaming of the old days on the farm--of how he used to dig out rocks to build the fences, of the sugar-making, of cradling the oats in July; while the other--ah! the other, of what was he not thinking!--of the little world of the hives (his thoughts yielding the exquisite "Idyl of the Honey-Bee"), of boyhood days upon the farm, of the wild life around his cabin, of the universe, and of the soul of the poet Whitman, that then much misunderstood man, than whom no one so much as he has helped us to appreciate. Going out and in, attending to his homely tasks (for these brothers did their own housework), the younger brother was all the time thinking of that great soul, of all that a.s.sociation with him had meant to him, and of all that Whitman would mean to America, to the world, as poet, prophet, seer--thinking how out of his knowledge of Whitman as poet and person he could cull and sift and gather together an adequate and worthy estimate of one whom his soul loved as Jonathan loved David!

The mystery of personality--how shall one fathom it? I asked myself this one rainy afternoon, as I sat in the Burroughs homestead and looked from one brother to another, the two so alike and yet so unlike. The one a simple farmer whose interests are circ.u.mscribed by the hills which surround the farm on which as children they were reared; the other, whose interests in the early years were seemingly just as circ.u.mscribed, but who felt that nameless something--that push from within--which first found its outlet in a deeper interest in the life about him than his brothers ever knew; and who later felt the magic of the world of books; and, still later, the need of expression, an expression which finally showed itself in a masterly interpretation of country life and experiences. The same heredity here, the same environment, the same opportunities--yet how different the result! The farmer has tended and gathered many a crop from the old place since they were boys, but has been blind and deaf to all that has there yielded such a harvest to the other. That other, a plain, una.s.suming man, "standing at ease in nature," has become a household word because of all that he has contributed to our intellectual and emotional life.

A man who as a lad had roamed the Roxbury hills with John Burroughs and his brothers, and had known the boy John as something of a dreamer, and thought of him in later years as perhaps of less account than his brothers (since they had settled down, owned land, and were leading industrious lives), was traveling in Europe in the eighties. On the top of a stage-coach in the Scottish Highlands he sat next a scholarly-looking man whose garb, he thought, betokened a priest. From some question which the traveler put, the Englishman learned that the stranger was from America. Immediately he showed a lively interest.

"From America! Do you, then, know John Burroughs?"

Imagine the surprise of the Delaware County farmer at being questioned about his schoolmate, the dreamer, who, to be sure, "took to books"; but what was he that this Englishman should inquire about him as the one man in America he was eager to learn about! Doubtless Mr. Burroughs was the one literary man the Delaware County farmer did know, though his knowledge was on the personal and not on the literary side. And imagine the surprise of the priest (if priest it was) to find that he had actually lighted upon a schoolmate of the author!--C. B.)

CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

I seem to have been a healthy, active child, very impressionable, and with more interests and a keener enjoyment of things than most farm boys have. I was fond of the girls back as early as I can remember, and had my sweethearts at a very early age....

I learned my letters at school, when I was five or six, in the old-fas.h.i.+oned way by being called up to the teacher several times a day and naming the letters as he pointed at them where they stood in a perpendicular column in Cobb's Spelling-Book. The vowels and consonants stood in separate columns, and had to be learned one by one, by continued repet.i.tion. It took me a long time, I remember, to distinguish _b_ from _d_, and _c_ from _e_. When and how I learned to read I do not remember. I recall Cobb's Second Reader, and later Olney's Geography, and then Dayb.a.l.l.s Arithmetic.