ine on the bees;
shelled beechnuts and cracked butternuts for the chipmunks; caught
skunks in a trap, just to demonstrate that a skunk can be carried by the
tail with impunity, if you only do it right (and, though succeeding one
day, got the worst of the bargain the next); and waged war early and
late on the flabby woodchucks which one could see almost any hour in the
day undulating across the fields. We called these boys "John of Woods,"
and "John of Woodchucks"; and it was sometimes difficult to say which
was the veriest boy, the one of eleven or the one of seventy-four.

One morning I heard them laughing gleefully together as they were
doing up the breakfast work. Calling out to learn the cause of their
merriment, I found the elder John had forgotten to eat his egg--he had
just found it in his coat-pocket, having put it in there to carry from
the kitchen to the living-room.

He often amused us by his recital of Thackeray's absurd "Little Billee,"
and by the application of some of the lines to events in the life at
Woodchuck Lodge.

(Illustration of Living-Room, Woodchuck Lodge, with Rustic Furniture
made by Mr. Burroughs. From a photograph by M. H. Fanning)

As the evenings grew longer and cooler, we would gather about the table
and Mr. Burroughs would read aloud, sometimes from Bergson's "Creative
Evolution," under the spell of which he was the entire summer of 1911,
sometimes from Wordsworth, sometimes from Whitman. "No other English
poet has touched me quite so closely," he said, "as Wordsworth.... But
his poetry has more the character of a message, and a message special
and personal, to a comparatively small circle of readers." As he read
"The Poet's Epitaph" one evening, I was impressed with the strong
likeness the portrait there drawn has to Mr. Burroughs:--

"The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses of deeper birth
Have come to him in solitude.

In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart,--
The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart."

What are the books, and notably the later philosophical essays, of Mr.
Burroughs but the "harvest of a quiet eye"? His "Summit of the Years,"
his "Gospel of Nature" (which one of his friends calls "The Gospel
according to Saint John"), his "Noon of Science," his "Long Road"?
And most of this rich harvest he has gathered in his jour