y "A White Day
and a Red Fox." "I shot the fox and got five dollars for it," said
Mr. Eden Burroughs, "and John wrote a piece about it, and got
seventy-five.")

Abigail, the favorite sister of our author, appreciated her brother's
books and his ideals more than any other member of the family. She
married and had two children. At the time of her death, in 1901, of
typhoid fever (at the age of fifty-eight) the band of brothers and
sisters had been unbroken by death for more than thirty-seven years.
Her loss was a severe blow to her brother. He had always shared his
windfalls with her; she had read some of his essays, and used to talk
with him about his aspirations, encouraging him timidly, before he had
gained recognition.

Eveline died at the age of five years.

The death of his brother Hiram, in 1904, made the past bleed afresh for
Mr. Burroughs. "He was next to Father and Mother in my affections,"
he wrote. "Oh! if I had only done more for him--this is my constant
thought. If I could only have another chance! How generous death makes
us! Go, then, and make up by doing more for the living."

As I walked with him about the Old Home, he said, "I can see Hiram in
everything here; in the trees he planted and grafted, in these stone
walls he built, in this land he so industriously cultivated during the
years he had the farm."

So large a place in his affections did this brother hold, and yet how
wide apart were these two in their real lives! I know of no one who has
pictured the pathos of lives so near and yet so far apart as has George
Eliot when she says: "Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it.
Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and
muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning
and repulsion, and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar
us at every moment. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our
own uttering the thoughts we despise; we see eyes--ah! so like our
mother's--averted from us in cold alienation."

We cannot tell why one boy in a family turns out a genius, while the
others stay in the ancestral ruts and lead humdrum, placid lives, any
more than we can tell why one group of the hepaticas we gather in the
April woods has the gift of fragrance, while those of a sister group in
the same vicinity are scentless. A caprice of fate, surely, that "mate
and mate beget such different issues."

"Hiram was with me at Slabsides," said Mr