But to return to Woodchuck Lodge, to the old man with the boy’s jack-knife in his hand, and the boy’s heart in his breast--and so, the poet’s outlook in his eyes. For he was more poet than scientist, more poet than theologian, though every poet, like all Gaul, is divided into three parts, and these--science, music, and theology--are the parts. The theologian is the ultimate thinker. His chief attribute is consistency--even unto death. Nothing will shatter a system of theology as will a trifling inconsistency. Burroughs was a bad theologian, the worst I know by the test of consistency. Yet who among the theologians is more religious? Or leaves us with a realer consciousness of the presence of God in nature? “You and I approach this thing from different angles,” he said to me. “We come to God down different roads. Our terms differ. You say ‘Father.’ I say ‘Nature.’ But whatever we call Him, He is the same, and the same for each of us. Our divergent paths at the start, come out together at the end. We worship the same God.” We did differ radically in our approach, in our terminology, and as I had always thought, must of necessity differ as radically in our faiths and works. That was a foolish, vainglorious conceit. I wish every disconcerted reader of “The Light of Day” and “Accepting the Universe” had heard the old author interpret himself that day. That reader would have understood, as he sat there watching the light of a real day breaking in over the rainy autumn landscape, what Carruth meant by, “A haze on the far horizon, The infinite tender sky, The ripe rich tint of the corn-fields, And the wild geese sailing high, And all over upland and lowland The charm of the goldenrod-- Some of us call it Autumn, And others call it God!” The pelt was finally off; the carcass in pickle for me; and the sun was out, flooding Montgomery Valley and the heaving ranges beyond. An automobile load of callers came, stopped a little time, and went away; another load came and went away, and Burroughs, now quite rested, brought out the manuscripts of two new books, which were about ready for the publishers. I looked at the piles of work, then at the frail old man who had heaped them up, and thought with shame of my own strength--and laziness. To be approaching eighty-four with one book on the press and two other books in manuscript! What a long steady stroke he had pulled across these more than sixty years of writing to be bringing him in at the finish, two full volumes ahead of the race! Three volumes indeed, for “Accepting the Universe” had not yet come from the press.