Our talk turned to poetry--the skinning still going forward--the woodchuck brimming full of verse; for Burroughs, at every other turn of his knife, would seem to open up a vein of song. The beauty of nature to Burroughs had always been more than skin deep. He wanted the skin for a coat; the carcass he wanted for a roast; but here was a chance for him to look into some of the hidden, fearful things of nature, and the sight inside of that woodchuck made him stop and sing. But how old and frail he looked! And he was old, very old, eighty-four the coming April 9. And he was suddenly sad. Resting a bit from his labor, he began to chant to the slackening rain: “’Tis a dull sight To see the year dying. When winter winds Set yellow woods sighing, Sighing, O sighing. “When such a time cometh, I do retire Into an old room Beside a bright fire; Oh, pile a bright fire! “I never look out Nor attend to the blast, For all to be seen Is the leaves falling fast, Falling, falling!” And he rubbed his thin hands together, spread them to the warmth, and repeated two or three times, “Oh, pile a bright fire!” “Oh, pile a bright fire!” More than once, I heard him returning to those lines; and saw him several times reading the last stanzas of the poem from a typewritten copy on his porch table, chafing his hands the while, and extending them before the imaginary fire as if they were cold, or as if he felt through his hands, so sensitive was he physically, an actual fire in the written lines. The poem is Edward Fitzgerald’s “Old Song,” and I am sure Burroughs was learning it by heart, and making rather hard work of it, I thought, for one who had already in memory so much good poetry. But he was getting very old. Then, at my request he said some of the lines of his own poem, “Waiting.” “The only thing I ever did,” he remarked, “with real poetry in it.” “How about the philosophy in it,” I inquired, “Do you find it sound after all these years?” There was an audible chuckle inside of him. Then rather solemnly he replied: “My father killed himself early trying to clear these acres of debts and stones. I might have been in my grave, too, these forty years had I tried to hurry it his way. I waited. By and by Henry Ford came along and cleared up the whole farm for me. Here I am, and here “Serene, I fold my hands and wait, Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea; I rave no more ’gainst Time or Fate, For lo! my own shall come to me.” We were soon deep in a discussion of free verse, no hungry trout ever rising to the fly with more snap than Burroughs. He called the free-verse writers the Reds of American literature, the figure sticking to him, until some months later in California he worked the idea out into a brief newspaper article under that title, the last piece, I think, for publication from his pen. “Name me one good modern poem,” I said, “moulded on the old forms, with rhyme and meter.”