or scientific friends discuss weighty themes; to hear
his sane, wise, and often humorous comments on the daily papers, and his
absolutely independent criticism of books and magazines--to witness and
experience all this, and more, is to enjoy a privilege so rare that I
feel selfish unless I try to share it, in a measure, with less fortunate
friends of Our Friend.

(Illustration of Cradle in which John Burroughs was rocked. From a
photograph by Dr. John D. Johnson)

It has been my good fortune to spend many delightful summers with Mr.
Burroughs at his old home, and also at Woodchuck Lodge. On my first
visit he led me to a hilltop and pointed off toward a deep gorge where
the Pepacton, although it is a placid stream near Roxbury, rises amid
scenery wild and rugged. It drains this high pastoral country, where the
farms hang upon the mountainsides or lie across the long, sloping hills.
The look of those farms impressed me as the fields of England impressed
Mr. Burroughs--"as though upon them had settled an atmosphere of ripe
and loving husbandry." I was often reminded in looking upon them of that
line of Emerson's: "The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the wide,
warm fields." There is a fresh, blue, cleansed appearance to the hills,
"like a newly-washed lamp chimney," as Mr. Burroughs sometimes said.

Our writer's overmastering attachment to his birthplace seems due
largely to the fact that the springs, the hills, and the wooded
mountains are inextricably blended with his parents and his youth. As he
has somewhere said, "One's own landscape comes in time to be a sort of
outlying part of him; he has sown himself broadcast upon it... planted
himself in the fields, builded himself in the stone walls, and evoked
the sympathy of the hills in his struggle."

From a hilltop he pointed off to the west and said, "Yonder is the
direction that my grandparents came, in the 1790's, from Stamford,
cutting a road through the woods, and there, over Batavia Hill, Father
rode when he went courting Mother."

Then we went up the tansy-bordered road, past the little graveyard,
and over to the site where his grandfather's first house stood. As
we wandered about the old stone foundations, his reminiscences were
interrupted by the discovery of a junco's nest. On the way back he
pointed across the wide valley to the West Settlement schoolhouse where
he and his brothers used to go, although his first school was in a
little stone building whi