s such; yet if his
sentences are clothed like the lilies of the field, so much the better.
Unconscious beauty that flows inevitably and spontaneously out of the
subject, or out of the writer's mind, how it takes us!

My own first attempts at writing were, of course, crude enough. It took
me a long time to put aside all affectation and make-believe, if I have
ever quite succeeded in doing it, and get down to what I really saw
and felt. But I think now I can tell dead wood in my writing when I see
it--tell when I fumble in my mind, or when my sentences glance off and
fail to reach the quick.

(In August, 1902, Mr. Burroughs wrote me of a visit to Cooperstown,
after all these years: "I found Cooperstown not much changed. The lake
and the hills were, of course, the same as I had known them forty-six
years ago, and the main street seemed but little altered. Of the old
seminary only the foundations were standing, and the trees had so grown
about it that I hardly knew the place. I again dipped my oar in the
lake, again stood beside Cooper's grave, and threaded some of the
streets I had known so well. I wished I could have been alone there....
I wanted to muse and dream, and invoke the spirit of other days, but the
spirits would not rise in the presence of strangers. I could not quite
get a glimpse of the world as it appeared to me in those callow days. It
was here that I saw my first live author (spoken of in my 'Egotistical
Chapter') and first dipped into Emerson."

After leaving the Seminary at Cooperstown in July of 1856, the young
student worked on the home farm in the Catskills until fall, when he
began teaching school at Buffalo Grove, Illinois, where he taught until
the following spring, returning East to marry, as he says, "the girl I
left behind me."

He then taught in various schools in New York and New Jersey, until the
fall of 1863. As a rule, in the summer he worked on the home farm.

During this period he was reading much, and trying his hand at writing.
There was a short intermission in his teaching, when he invested his
earnings in a patent buckle, and for a brief period he had dreams of
wealth. But the buckle project failed, the dreams vanished, and he began
to read medicine, and resumed his teaching.

From 1859 to 1862 he was writing much, on philosophical subjects mainly.
It was in 1863 that he first became interested in the birds.--C. B.)

Ever since the time when in my boyhood I saw the strange