It was an October day. And how it rained that day! An October day in the Catskills, and I was making my way, with my friend DeLoach, out of the little village of Roxbury by the road that winds up the hills to Woodchuck Lodge. Hardscrabble Creek knew it was raining, and met me noisily at a turn of the road, just before I came to the square stone schoolhouse (now a dwelling) where little Johnny Burroughs had gone for his book learning some seventy-five years before. Leaving the creek, I found myself on a roller-coaster road athwart the hills, making up with spurt and dip to a low, weathered farmhouse, thin and gray and old, that seemed to be resting by the roadside thus far over the mountain on its way to the valley. I knew it from the distance and through the rain, only it seemed even older, smaller, poorer than I had expected to find it. But how close it sat to the roadside, and how eagerly it gazed down into the valley where the store and the station and the meeting-house were--to see who might be stirring, I thought, down there in the valley! Or perhaps it sat here for the landscape. I was approaching Woodchuck Lodge, and it seemed very old and lonely in the rain that slanted along the wide gray slopes, and too frail to stand long against the pull of the valley and the push of the heights crowding hard upon it from behind. A tiny kitchen garden at its corner, and across the road a stone wall, an orchard of untrimmed apple trees bent with fruit, and a small barn on the edge of a sharply falling field--this was the picture in the rain, the immediate foreground of the picture, which stood out on a field of hay-lands and pastures rolling out of the rainy sky and down, far down where their stone walls ran into the mists at the bottom of the valley. These were the ancestral fields. Burroughs was born a little farther along this road, the house no longer standing. Here at the Lodge he was now living, and in the old barn across the road he had a study. These were his fields by right of pen, not plough; these were his buildings, too, and they showed it. They sheltered him and gave him this outlook, but they utterly lacked the pride of the gilded weathervane, the stolid, four-square complacency, that well-fed, well-stocked security of the prosperous American farm. An old pair of tramps were house and barn, lovers of the hills, resting here above the valley. It was in that old barn, on an overturned chicken-coop, with a door or some other thing as humble for table, that Burroughs had written most of the chapters in “The Summit of the Years,” in “Time and Change,” “The Breath of Life,” and “Under the Apple-Trees.”