writes. And again, “The hum of the wind in the tree-tops has 
always been good music to me, and the face of the fields has 
often comforted me more than the faces of men.” “The youth 
enjoys what the man tries to understand. Lucky is he who can 
get his grapes to market and keep the bloom upon them, who 
can carry some of the freshness and eagerness and simplicity of 
youth into his later years, who can have a boy’s heart below a 
man’s head.’’ And John Burroughs’ grapes always arrived at 
market with the bloom intact. 
But perhaps you wonder what manner of man this was, how 
he lived, what his associates were, and what one thought who 
was privileged to have seen him at his own fireside. His life 
has often been recited in the public prints. His writings, both 
from a literary and a scientific standpoint, have stood the fire of 
the critics. 
To me, John Burroughs was a boyhood hero,— a hero I hesi- 
tated ever to see in flesh and blood, because a boy’s heroes often 
come down from their high pedestals when viewed through the 
mature eyes of the grown man. 1 knew him -when I was a child 
— a child who was a lonesome, natural history loving farm boy in 
South Dakota. He became my friend through a copy of “Fresh 
Fields,’’ wherein 1 read his experiences in England in his efforts 
to hear the nightingale’s song. I wrote him; he answered. The 
great naturalist encouraged me to believe that some daj r I too 
might become a writer — that I too might express myself interest- 
ingly about the things I saw and the thoughts I thought. That 
episode, perhaps more than any other outside influence, deter- 
mined my choice of a life work. I would write some day about 
the wild life of the Dakotas — I would make the mourning doves 
among the fluttering cottonwood leaves sing their mournful coo 
for the whole world. The rosy-breasted gulls wheeling in circles 
over the ploughboy’s head would be pictured in black type, so 
that they would live for all and forever. I kept a journal. Its 
pages are full of the blooming of flowers, of the hatching of 
grasshopper’s eggs, of wild geese travelling north and south, 
and of the doings of beetles. Years passed. I found myself a 
grown man— at the beginning of a scientific career. Often I 
looked back over the years, wondering what influences had 
served to mold me. I thought again and again of Burroughs, 
of his books and of his kind, encouraging letter. I thought of 
Walden, my sacred book, and how I had come to read it. I came 
east. I often planned to visit “Slabsides” and West Park. Could 
I risk it? Should I see him. Through a friend’s insistence, one 
drizzly afternoon I found myself before my hero. We talked 
through the afternoon,— four of us— my friend and I, and Dr. 
Barrus and John Burroughs, and later dined together. He told 
me he would rather have been the author of “Walden” than of 
any other book he knew. We parted on the roadway to which 
John Burroughs had insisted on lighting us. And my friend 
said, ‘•‘Well, White, he was real, was?i't he?” And he was — one 
