stinguished, he
went to school winters and worked on the farm in summer. He grew up
among people who neither read books nor cared for them, and he considers
this circumstance best suited to his development. Early intercourse with
literary men would, he believes, have dwarfed his original faculty.

[Illustration: JOHN BURROUGHS]

He began to write essays at the age of fourteen, but these early
literary efforts give little hint of his later work, of that faculty for
seeing, and commenting on all that he saw in nature, which became his
chief characteristic. He was especially fond of essays; one of his first
purchases with his own money was a full set of Dr. Johnson, and for a
whole year he lived on 'The Idler' and 'The Rambler' and tried to
imitate their ponderous prose. His first contributions to literature,
modeled on these essays, were promptly returned. By chance he picked up
a volume of Emerson, the master who was to revolutionize his whole
manner of thinking; and as he had fed on Dr. Johnson he fed on the
'Essays and Miscellanies,' until a paper he wrote at nineteen on
'Expressions' was accepted by the editor of the Atlantic, with a lurking
doubt whether it had not come to him on false pretenses, as it was very
much like an early essay of Emerson.

Mr. Burroughs ascribes to Emerson, who stimulated his religious nature,
his improved literary expression; while Whitman was to him a great
humanizing power, and Matthew Arnold taught him clear thinking and clean
writing. He had passed through these different influences by the time he
was twenty-one or twenty-two; had taught for a while; and from 1863 to
1873 was vault-keeper and afterwards chief of the organization division
of the Bureau of National Banks, in the Treasury Department. For several
years afterward he was a special national bank examiner.

The literary quality of his writings from the first captivates the
reader. He has the interpretive power which makes us see what he sees
and invites us to share his enjoyment in his strange adventures. The
stories of the wary trout and the pastoral bee, the ways of sylvan folk,
their quarrels and their love-making, are so many character sketches on
paper, showing a most intimate acquaintance with nature.

He is a born naturalist. He tells us that from childhood he was familiar
with the homely facts of the barn, the cattle and the horses, the
sugar-making and the work of the corn-field, the hay-field, the
threshing, the