The venerable John Burroughs, a frequent visitor at Yama-no-uchi, has hit the spirit of the place in his remark: “I come here to find 
myself; it is so easy to get lost in the world.” 
“Yama-no-Uchi” 
“THE HOME IN THE MOUNTAINS,” WHERE MR. FRANK SEAMAN FINDS OPPORTUNITY FOR A NEVER-ENDING 
ACTIVITY IN BUILDING AFTER THE JAPANESE METHODS, BREEDING CHICKENS AND HATCHING TROUT 
by Robert Allister 
Photographs by Helena D. Van Eaton 
(158) 
O finer compliment was ever offered to a 
human habitation or to any spot in this 
broad country, than that voiced by John 
Burroughs as he sat in this log cabin in the 
midst of these old American hills. 
“I come here to find myself; it is so easy 
to get lost in the world.” 
And so they engraved the words in cop¬ 
per and set the tablet into the gray stones 
of the chimney. 
“Wu” One day a visitor, pausing in his journey 
into the further Catskills, looked over the 
stones and timbers and remarked: “I live in an old house myself. 
It was built in 1730.” Not an awkward tribute to a cabin scarcely 
three years old! 
The cabin crouches like a big black hen on the brink of the val¬ 
ley. There is a splendid swirl of country all about it. The rise be¬ 
yond is gentle. The dip below is sharp, shadowy, sunlit, all patches 
of light and shade, rise and fall, rock and fern-dell, softness and 
sharpness, the big range of hills on the other side of the valley 
looking strangely remote in shimmery weather, stalwart and im¬ 
posing when picked out with snow. 
Down in the immediate hollow are the trout ponds, five of them, 
one emptying into the other and spilling over at last into the 
stream that turns a picturesque wheel, ducks under an arching 
Japanese bridge and ends, you never find out just where, among 
stepping stones, orchid-spotted dim places and rocky vistas of 
sunlighted currents. Midway is the tea house, that might have 
been lifted out of Nippon — making you think that the Indian 
Napanoch of the village might have been Nipponoch — the Jap¬ 
anese stables that remind you of the way the Tokio castle lifts 
itself beyond the bridged moat; the hatchery by the middle lake 
and the trout man’s cottage a pole-length away. The sound from 
below is the mutter of a waterfall, a busy tumble of water that in 
winter builds fantastic castles of ice. 
If you come up directly from the ponds you mount by irregular 
stones that seem to have happened, but which tell of that subtle 
Japanese ground art in which not a chip of stones goes unnum¬ 
bered. 
Think of it as just the opposite of the Italian notion in which 
garden beauty is art cut out with a knife. Your Japanese thinks 
that in landscape nature’s way is a good way and must not be 
spoiled. Nature’s way is imitated in his art, and if you guess the 
device too quickly it is bad art. So that here in this American 
version every little splash of moss, or turn of path, or glimmer 
of wood flower must seem to have been discovered and not in¬ 
vented. In the large it is nature arranged, and the nature of this 
region, rather than nature bedecked or disfigured. 
It is here in this garden spot, that we shall ultimately see a true 
Japanese house — a house of which the stables, the water-wheel, the 
bridges, and the fairy tea house are prophetic — a true Japanese 
house in the vestibule of which, if you please, you shall remove 
your shoes before entering the prim, paper-screened rooms with 
all of their straight beauty, all of their intellectual nicety and 
