not so sad as some of his reminiscent talk would seem to
indicate. In truth, he is serenely content, so much so that he sometimes
almost chides himself for living so much in the present. "Oh, the power
of a living reality to veil or blot out the Past!" he sighed. "And yet,
is it not best so? Does not the grass grow above graves? Why should
these lovely scenes always be a cemetery to me? There seems to have been
a spell put upon them that has laid the ghosts, and I am glad." And to
see him bird-nesting with his grandchildren, hunting in the woods for
crooked sticks for his rustic furniture, waking the echo in the "new
barn" (a barn that was new in 1844), routing out a woodchuck from a
stone wall, blackberrying on the steep hillsides, or going a half-mile
across the fields just to smell the fragrance of the buckwheat bloom, is
to know that, wistful Celt that he is, and dominated by the spell of
the Past, he is yet very much alive to the Present, out of which he is
probably getting as full a measure of content as any man living to-day.

He looked about him at the close of his first stay at Woodchuck Lodge
after the completion of the repairs which had made the house so homelike
and comfortable, and said contentedly: "A beautiful dream come true! And
to think I've stayed down there on the Hudson all these years with never
the home feeling, when here were my native hills waiting to cradle me
as they did in my youth, and I so slow to return to them! I've been
homesick for over forty years: I was an alien there; I couldn't take
root there. It was a lucky day when I decided to spend the rest of my
summers here"

CAMPING WITH BURROUGHS AND MUIR

In February, 1909, I was one of a small party which set out with Mr.
Burroughs for the Pacific Coast and the Hawaiian Islands. The lure held
out to him by the friend who arranged his trip was that John Muir
would start from his home at Martinez, California, and await him at
the Petrified Forests in Arizona; conduct him through, that weirdly
picturesque region, and in and around the Grand Canon of the Colorado;
camp and tramp with him in the Mojave Desert; tarry awhile in Southern
California; then visit Yosemite before embarking on the Pacific
preparatory to lotus-eating in Hawaii. The lure held out to the more
obscure members of the party was all that has been enumerated, plus that
of having these two great, simple men for traveling companions. To see
the wonders of the Southwe