This called for woodchuck, or “Roxbury Lamb,” as you preferred; and for roast Roxbury Lamb the rule for rabbit-stew prevails: first get your woodchuck; not always readily done, for the meat-market down at the village is sometimes out of woodchuck. So the Laird of the Lodge keeps them canned ahead. The clouds cleared in the afternoon, the sun came down upon the mountains, and we looked out from the porch over a world so large and new and lovely that I remember it still as a keen pain, so unprepared was I for it, with my level background of meadow and marsh and bay. Endless reaches of river and bay, of wavy marshland and hazy barrens of pine, were my heritage of landscape as a child. And I have never been able to measure up to the mountains, nor to this scene, here from the porch--this reach without level; space both deep and high as well as wide; this valley completely hiding a village below you; ridges above you where stone walls climb over the sky; mountains far across with forests flung over their shoulders, and farms, like colored patchwork, stitched into the rents of the forests; runnels singing down the pastures; and roads, your road to school, so close to the verge that only the stone wall stays you from stepping off the edge of the world! None of this had I known as a boy. “Who couldn’t write,” I muttered, “born into this glorious world!” I have seen much grander mountains. “Not a rugged, masculine touch in all the view,” Burroughs said to me. “It is all sweet and feminine, and doubtless has had a feminizing influence upon my character and writing.” It may be so. There is a plenty of wilder, stormier landscape than this in these Western Catskills, but certainly none that I ever saw that is lovelier for a human home. And here Burroughs now sleeps, under the boulder where he played as a child, and where all this beauty of winding valley and blue, bending sky upon the mountains lies forever about him. There is something terribly important and lasting about childhood. Almost any environment will do, if only the child is happy. It is the child who counts. In every child the world is recreated and in his memory stays recreated. More and more, as the years lengthen, do we find ourselves longing--for the pine barrens, for the vast green reach of the marshes; and were my feet free this summer day, they would run with my heart to the river--not to the mountains; to the river, the Maurice River, where the bubbling wrens build in the smother of reed and calamus, and where this very day the pink-white marshmallows make, at high noon, a gorgeous sunset over miles of the meadows. I love and understand those great, green levels of marshland as I shall love and understand no other face of nature, it may be. I know perfectly what Lanier means when he sings,