. Burroughs, "much of the time
when I was writing the Whitman book, but never referred to it in any
way. When it came from the press, I said to him, 'Hiram, here is the
book you have heard me speak about as having cost me nearly four years'
work, and which I rewrote four times.'"

"'That's the book, is it?' he replied, showing no curiosity about it, or
desire to look into it, but kept drumming on the table--a habit of his
that was very annoying to me at times, but of which he was not aware.
When 'A Year in the Fields' came out, he looked at some of the pictures,
but that was all."

There is something very pathetic in all this--these two brothers living
in that isolated cabin in the woods, knit together by the ties of
kinship, having in common a deep and yearning love for each other,
and for the Old Home in the Catskills,--their daily down-sittings and
up-risings outwardly the same, yet so alienated in what makes up one's
real existence. The one, the elder, intent on his bees, his thoughts
by day revolving about his hives, or concerned with the weather and the
daily happenings; at night, as he idly drums with his fingers, dreaming
of the old days on the farm--of how he used to dig out rocks to build
the fences, of the sugar-making, of cradling the oats in July; while the
other--ah! the other, of what was he not thinking!--of the little
world of the hives (his thoughts yielding the exquisite "Idyl of the
Honey-Bee"), of boyhood days upon the farm, of the wild life around his
cabin, of the universe, and of the soul of the poet Whitman, that then
much misunderstood man, than whom no one so much as he has helped us to
appreciate. Going out and in, attending to his homely tasks (for these
brothers did their own housework), the younger brother was all the time
thinking of that great soul, of all that association with him had meant
to him, and of all that Whitman would mean to America, to the world,
as poet, prophet, seer--thinking how out of his knowledge of Whitman as
poet and person he could cull and sift and gather together an adequate
and worthy estimate of one whom his soul loved as Jonathan loved David!

The mystery of personality--how shall one fathom it? I asked myself this
one rainy afternoon, as I sat in the Burroughs homestead and looked from
one brother to another, the two so alike and yet so unlike. The one
a simple farmer whose interests are circumscribed by the hills which
surround the farm on which as childre