e-writer. In him it took the form
of a love of angling, and a love for the Bible. He went from the Book to
the stream, and from the stream to the Book, with great regularity. I do
not remember that he ever read the newspapers, or any other books than
the Bible and the hymn-book. When he was over eighty years, old he would
woo the trout-streams with great success, and between times would pore
over the Book till his eyes were dim. I do not think he ever joined the
church, or ever made an open profession of religion, as was the wont
in those days; but he had the religious nature which he nursed upon
the Bible. When a mere boy, as I have before told you, he was a soldier
under Washington, and when the War of 1812 broke out, and one of his
sons was drafted, he was accepted and went in his stead. The half-wild,
adventurous life of the soldier suited him better than the humdrum of
the farm. From him, as I have said, I get the dash of Celtic blood in my
veins--that almost feminine sensibility and tinge of melancholy that, I
think, shows in all my books. That emotional Celt, ineffectual in some
ways, full of longings and impossible dreams, of quick and noisy
anger, temporizing, revolutionary, mystical, bold in words, timid
in action--surely that man is in me, and surely he comes from my
revolutionary ancestor, Grandfather Kelly.

I think of the Burroughs branch of my ancestry as rather retiring,
peace-loving, solitude-loving men--men not strongly sketched in on
the canvas of life, not self-assertive, never roistering or
uproarious--law-abiding, and church-going. I gather this impression from
many sources, and think it is a correct one.

Oh, the old farm days! how the fragrance of them still lingers in my
heart! the spring with its farm, the returning birds, and the full,
lucid trout-streams; the summer with its wild berries, its haying,
its cool, fragrant woods; the fall with its nuts, its game, its
apple-gathering, its holidays; the winter with its school, its sport
on ice and snow, its apple-bins in the cellar, its long nights by the
fireside, its voice of fox-bounds on the mountains, its sound of flails
in the barn--how much I still dream about these things!

But I am slow in keeping my promise to try to account for myself. Yet
all these things are a part of my antecedents; they entered into my very
blood--father and mother and brothers and sisters, and the homely life
of the farm, all entered into and became a part of th