a fumbling among pots and pans, and he came
toward me with a most apologetic air, and with the sorriest-looking rag
I had ever seen--its narrow circumference encircling a very big hole.

"Is _that_ the best dish-cloth you have?" I asked.

For answer he held it up in front of his face, but the most of it
being hole, it did not hide the eyes that twinkled so merrily that my
housewifely reproof was effectually silenced. I took the sorry remnant
and began washing the dishes, mentally resolving, and carrying out my
resolution the next day, to send him a respectable dish-cloth. Prosaic,
if you will, but does not his own Emerson say something about giving--

"to barrows, trays, and pans,
Grace and glimmer of romance"?

And what graces a dish-pan better than a clean, whole, self-respecting
dish-cloth?

So there we stood, John Burroughs and his humble reader, washing and
wiping dishes, and weighing Amiel and Schopenhauer in the balance at the
same time; and a very novel and amusing experience it was. Yet it did
not seem so strange after all, but almost as though it had happened
before. Silly Sally purred beseechingly as she followed her master about
the room and out to the wood-pile, reminding him that she liked chicken
bones.

While putting the bread in the large tin box that stood on the
stair-landing, I had some difficulty with the clasp. "Never mind that,"
said Mr. Burroughs, as he scraped the potato skins into the fire; "a
Vassar girl sat down on that box last summer, and it's never been the
same since."

The work finished, there was more talk before the fire. It was here
that the author told his guest about Anne Gilchrist, the talented,
noble-hearted Englishwoman, whose ready acceptance of Whitman's message
bore fruit in her penetrating criticism of Whitman, a criticism which
stands to-day unrivaled by anything that has been written concerning the
Good Gray Poet.

Like most of Mr. Burroughs' readers, I cherish his poem "Waiting," and,
like most of them, I told him so on seeing him seated before the fire
with folded hands and face serene, a living embodiment of the faith and
trust expressed in those familiar lines. It would seem natural that
he should write such a poem after the heat of the day, after his ripe
experience, after success had come to him; it is the lesson we expect
one to learn on reaching his age, and learning how futile is the fret
and urge of life, how infinitely better is the