ar the mint-patches recalled
to Mr. Burroughs the first time he had heard the word "taste" used,
except in reference to food. The woman who had lived in this house,
while calling at his home and seeing his attempt at drawing
something, had said, "What taste that boy has!" "It made me open my
eyes--'taste'!--then there was another kind of taste than the one I knew
about--the taste of things I ate!"

At a place in the road near the old stone schoolhouse, he showed me
where, as a lad of thirteen, perhaps, he had stopped to watch some men
working the road, and had first heard the word "antiquities" used. "They
had uncovered and removed a large flat stone, and under it were other
stones, probably arranged by the hands of earlier roadmakers. David
Corbin, a man who had had some schooling, said, as they exposed the
earlier layers, 'Ah! here are antiquities!' The word made a lasting
impression on me."

(Illustration of View of the Catskills from Woodchuck Lodge. From a
photograph by Charles S. Olcott)

One of our favorite walks at sunset was up the hill beyond the old
home where the road winds around a neglected graveyard. From this high
vantage-ground one can see two of the Catskill giants--Double Top and
Mount Graham. It was not a favorite walk of the boy John Burroughs. He
told how, even in his early teens, at dusk, he would tiptoe around the
corner past the graveyard, afraid to run for fear a gang of ghosts would
be at his heels. "When I got down the road a ways, though, how I would
run!" He was always "scairy" if he had to come along the edge of the
woods alone at nightfall, and was even afraid of the big black hole
under the barn in the daytime: "I was tortured with the thought of what
might lurk there in that great black abyss, and would hustle through my
work of cleaning the stable, working like Hercules, and often sending in
'Cuff,' the dog, to scare 'em out."

Fed on stories of ghosts and hobgoblins in childhood, his active,
sensitive imagination became an easy prey to these fears. But we do
outgrow some things. In the summer of 1911 this grown-up boy waxed so
bold that he sat in the barn with its black hole underneath and wrote
of "The Phantoms Behind Us." There was still something Herculean in his
task; he looked boldly down into the black abysms of Time, not without
some shrinking, it is true, saw the "huge first Nothing," faced the
spectres as they rose before him, wrestled with them, and triumphantly
conquer