ew practice.

"The thing which a man's nature calls him to do--what else so well worth
doing?" asks this writer. One's first impression after glancing about
this well-built cabin, with the necessities of body and soul close at
hand, is a vicarious satisfaction that here, at least, is one who has
known what he wanted to do and has done it. We are glad that Gilbert
White made pastoral calls on his outdoor parishioners,--the birds, the
toads, the turtles, the snails, and the earthworms,--although we
often wonder if he evinced a like conscientiousness toward his human
parishioners; we are glad that Thoreau left the manufacture of lead
pencils to become, as Emerson jocosely complained, "the leader of a
huckleberry party",--glad because these were the things their natures
called them to do, and in so doing they best enriched their fellows.
They literally went away that they might come to us in a closer, truer
way than had they tarried in our midst. It must have been in answer to
a similar imperative need of his own that John Burroughs chose to hie
himself to the secluded yet accessible spot where his mountain cabin is
built.

"As the bird feathers her nest with down plucked from her own breast,"
says Mr. Burroughs in one of his early essays, "so one's spirit must
shed itself upon its environment before it can brood and be at all
content." Here at Slabsides one feels that its master does brood and
is content. It is an ideal location for a man of his temperament; it
affords him the peace and seclusion he desires, yet is not so remote
that he is shut off from human fellowship. For he is no recluse; his
sympathies are broad and deep. Unlike Thoreau, who asserts that "you
cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature," and that "those
qualities that bring you near to the one estrange you from the other,"
Mr. Burroughs likes his kind; he is doubtless the most accessible of all
notable American writers,--a fact which is perhaps a drawback to him in
his literary work, his submission to being hunted out often being
taken advantage of, no doubt, by persons who are in no real sense
nature-lovers, but who go to his retreat merely to see the hermit in
hiding there.

After twelve years' acquaintance with his books I yielded to the
impulse, often felt before, to tell Mr. Burroughs what a joy his
writings had been to me. In answering my letter he said: "The genuine
responses that come to an author from his unknown readers, judging