stand in my own light. I get very close to bird and
beast. My thin skin lets the shy and delicate influences pass. I can
surrender myself to Nature without effort. I am like her.... That which
hinders me with men, makes me strong with impersonal Nature, and admits
me to her influences.... I am lacking in moral fibre, but am tender and
sympathetic.")

To see Mr. Burroughs stand and fondly gaze upon the fruitful,
well-cultivated fields that his father had cared for so many years, to
hear him say that the hills are like father and mother to him, was to
realize how strong is the filial instinct in him--that and the home
feeling. As he stood on the crest of the big hill by the pennyroyal
rock, looking down on the peaceful homestead in the soft light of a
midsummer afternoon, his eye roamed fondly over the scene:--

"How fertile and fruitful it is now, but how lonely and bleak the old
place looked in that winter landscape the night I drove up from the
station in the moonlight after hearing of Father's death! There was a
light in the window, but I knew Father would not meet me at the door
this time--beleaguering winter without, and Death within!

"Father and Mother! I think of them with inexpressible love and
yearning, wrapped in their last eternal sleep. They had, for them,
the true religion, the religion of serious, simple, hard-working.
God-fearing lives. To believe as they did, to sit in their pews, is
impossible to me--the Time-Spirit has decreed otherwise; but all I am or
can be or achieve is to emulate their virtues--my soul can be saved only
by a like truthfulness and sincerity."

The following data concerning his brothers and sisters were given me by
Mr. Burroughs in conversation:--

Hiram, born in 1827, was an unpractical man and a dreamer; he was a
bee-keeper. He showed great aptitude in the use of tools, could make
axe-handles, neck-yokes, and the various things used about the farm, and
was especially skilled in building stone walls. But he could not elbow
his way in a crowd, could not make farming pay, and was always pushed
to the wall. He cared nothing for books, and although he studied
grammar when a boy, and could parse, he never could write a grammatical
sentence. He died at the age of seventy-five.

Olly Ann was about two years younger than Hiram. Mr. Burroughs remembers
her as a frail, pretty girl, with dark-brown eyes, a high forehead, and
a wasp-like waist. She had a fair education for her time,