Most of his books--“Wake Robin,” “Birds and Poets,” “Winter Sunshine,” etc.--were written in the library of his house, a small room, fitted with book-shelves both glazed and open, and enjoying a splendid view of the Hudson to and beyond Poughkeepsie. But he has lately built himself a study, several hundred yards from the house and more directly overlooking the river. Here he has pretty complete immunity from noise and from interruptions of all sorts. It is a little, square building, the walls rough-cast within and faced with long strips of bark without. Papers, magazines, books, photographs, lithographs lie scattered over the table, the window-sills and the floor, and fill some shelves let into a little recess in the wall. A student’s lamp on the table shows that the owner sometimes reads here at night. His room-mates at present are some wasps hatched out of a nest taken last winter and suspended to the chimney. This primitive erection is further ornamented with a lot of pictures of men and birds, the men mostly poets--Carlyle being the only exception--and the birds all songsters. Two steps from the study is a summer-house of hemlock branches, with gnarled vine-stocks twisted in among them, where one may sit of an afternoon and read the New York morning papers, or watch the boats or the trains on the opposite bank, or the antics of a squirrel among the branches of the apple-tree overhead, or the struggles of a honey-bee backing out of a flower of yellow-rattle. Mr. Burroughs has been his own architect; and I know many people who might wish that he had been theirs too. He planned and superintended the erection of his house, which is a four-gabled structure, with a porch in front and a broad balcony in the rear. Most of the timber for the upper story is oak from his old Delaware County farm. The stone of which the two lower stories are built was obtained on the spot, and is a dark slate plentifully veined with quartz. Great pains were taken in the building to turn the handsomest samples of quartz to the fore, and to put them where they would do the most good, artistically. Over the lintel of the door, for example, is a row of three fine specimens; and a big chunk, with mosses lying between its crystals, protrudes from the wall near the porch. The variety of color so obtained, with the drab woodwork of the upper story and the red Virginia vine, keeps the house, at all seasons, in harmony with its surroundings. It is no less so within; for doors, wainscots, window-frames, joists, sills, skirting-boards, floor and rafters are all of native woods, left of their natural colors, and skillfully contrasted with one another; one door being of Georgia pine with oak panels, another of chestnut and curled maple, a third of butternut and cherry, and so on. Grayish, or brownish, or russet wall-papers, and carpets to match, give the house very much of the appearance of a nest, into the composition of which