not sure but it is worthy of imitation." Or, in writing of work on the
farm, especially stone-fence making, he speaks of clearing the fields of
the stones that are built into boundaries: "If there are ever sermons
in stones, it is when they are built into a stone wall--turning your
hindrances into helps, shielding your crops behind the obstacles to
your husbandry, making the enemies of the plough stand guard over its
products." But do we find such sermonizing irksome?

Just as "all architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it,"
so is all nature. Lovers of Nature muse and dream and invite their
own souls. They interpret themselves, not Nature. She reflects their
thoughts and minds, gives them, after all, only what they bring to
her. And the writer who brings much--much of insight, of devotion, of
sympathy--is sure to bring much away for his reader's delectation. Does
not this account for the sense of intimacy which his reader has with
the man, even before meeting him?--the feeling that if he ever does meet
him, it will be as a friend, not as a stranger? And when one does meet
him, and hears him speak, one almost invariably thinks: "He talks just
as he writes." To read him after that is to hear the very tones of his
voice.

We sometimes hear the expression, "English in shirt-sleeves," applied to
objectionable English; but the phrase might be applied in a commendatory
way to good English,--to the English of such a writer as Mr.
Burroughs,--simple, forceful language, with homely, everyday
expressions; English that shows the man to have been country-bred,
albeit he has wandered from the home pastures to distant woods and
pastures new, browsing in the fields of literature and philosophy,
or wherever he has found pasturage to his taste. Or, to use a figure
perhaps more in keeping with his main pursuits, he is one who has
flocked with birds not of a like feather with those that shared with him
the parent nest. Although his kin knew and cared little for the world's
great books, he early learned to love them when he was roaming his
native fields and absorbing unconsciously that from which he later
reaped his harvest. It is to writers of _this_ kind of "English
in shirt-sleeves" that we return again and again. In them we see
shirt-sleeves opposed to evening dress; naturalness, sturdiness,
sun-tan, and open sky, opposed to the artificial, to tameness,
constriction, and characterless conformity to prescribed customs.