6 
INTRODUCTION 
book “Under the Maples,” John and 
Theodore were gone beyond the farthest 
flight of their beloved birds. But the 
music of wren and warbler and the frag¬ 
rance of that friendship breathes from 
those pages whenever a sympathetic 
reader opens the volume. “He taught 
me Bewick’s wren and the prairie warb¬ 
ler,” wrote Burroughs, “and 1 taught him 
the swamp sparrow and one of the rare 
warblers; I think it was the pine warbler. 
If he had found the Lincoln sparrow 
again, he would have been one ahead of 
me.” A happy rivalry, free from the 
bitterness of political campaigns. 
Burroughs meditated more deeply on 
what he saw out of doors than did Roose¬ 
velt or the superb Audubon whose pic¬ 
tures form the illustrations of this book. 
They were men of action and it is hard 
to imagine a war going on in their time 
without their trying to get into it. Bur¬ 
roughs began the essay reprinted in this 
volume while the guns of Gettysburg 
were singing a sterner music. He always 
regretted that he had not been in the 
Civil War. It was not from indifference 
