ey had also called on a schoolmate whom he had not seen for
forty years. He told us how a possession of that boy's had been a thing
he had coveted for many months--a slate pencil with a shining copper
gun-cap! "How I longed for that pencil! I tried to trade for buttons
(all I had to offer in exchange), but it was too precious for my small
barter, and I coveted it in vain." The wistful Celt began early to sigh
for the unattainable.

We picked wild strawberries in June from the "clover lot" where the boy
John Burroughs and his mother used to pick them. "I can see her now," he
said reminiscently, "her bent figure moving slowly in the summer fields
toward home with her basket filled. She would also go berrying on
Old Clump, in early haying, long after the berries were gone in the
lowlands."

During this summer of which I speak, the fields were a gorgeous mass of
color--buttercups and daisies, and the orange hawkweed--a display that
rivaled the carpet of gold and purple we had seen in the San Joaquin
Valley, in company with John Muir three summers before. Mr. Muir was
done before starting for South America. He had promised to come to the
Catskills, but had to keep putting it off to get copy ready, and the
Laird of Woodchuck Lodge was exasperated that the mountaineer would
stay in that hot Babylon,--he, the lover of the wild,--when we in the
Delectable Mountains were calling him hither. As we looked upon the riot
of color one day, Mr. Burroughs said, "John Muir, confound him! I wish
he was here to see this at its height!"

Returning to the little gray farmhouse in the gathering dusk one late
September day, Mr. Burroughs paused and turned, looking back at the old
home, and up at the cattle silhouetted against the horizon. He gazed
upon the landscape long and long. How fondly his eye dwells upon these
scenes! So I have seen him look when about to part from a friend--as if
he were trying to fix the features and expression in his mind forever.

"The older one grows, the more the later years erode away, as do the
secondary rocks, and one gets down to bed-rock,--youth,--and there he
wants to rest. These scenes make youth and all the early life real to
me, the rest is more like a dream. How incredible it is!--all that is
gone; but here it lives again."

(Illustration of On the Porch at Woodchuck Lodge. From a photograph by
Charles S. Olcott)

And yet, though he is face to face with the past at his old home, his
days there are