The quiet and calm of it all deeply impressed me. The extreme opposite in temperament and action from his friend Roosevelt, there was nothing “strenuous” about this plodding old man, nor ever had been. “Serene I fold my hands and wait” he had written in his twenty-third year, and had practiced all these four-and-eighty years. Yet look at this amount of durable work accomplished. It is well for us Americans to remember just now that there is another than the “strenuous” type of life, which is just as worthy of emulation, and which is likely to be even more effective. This was an October day at Woodchuck Lodge. Sixty-one years before the “Atlantic Monthly” was actually printing Burroughs’s first essay, “Expression.” I looked at the old man beside me with the pen in his fingers. Was it the same man? the same pen? Lowell was the editor; then Fields, Howells, Aldrich, Scudder, Page, Perry, to the present editor, who has held his chair these dozen years; and I watched the pen in Burroughs’s hand travel slowly across a corrected line of the manuscript and I remembered that in all the years since Lowell was editor, not for a single year had that pen failed to appear in the pages of the “Atlantic.” Was it strange that as I looked from the pen away to the Catskills surrounding me I wondered if I were really looking into Montgomery Valley and not into Sleepy Hollow? We guests had a plenty that night, but Burroughs went to bed supperless. We guests slept indoors, but Burroughs made his bed out on the front porch, where he could see the stars come over the mountains, and the gates of dawn swing wide on the wooded crests, when the new sweet day should come through and down into Montgomery Valley. For Burroughs has lived and loved everything he has written. He cannot write of anything else. Our present-day writers, especially our poets and nature writers, take the wings of the morning (or of the night) unto the uttermost parts of the earth for copy. Burroughs visited distant places; but he always wrote about the things at home. “Fresh Fields,” to be sure, is out of England; yet England was only an older home. Burroughs had seen strange, extraordinary, tropical things; seen them, to write little about them, however, for it is only the homely, the ordinary, the familiar things that stirred his imagination and moved his pen. These were his things, the furniture of his house, the folks of his town; for it was the hearth where he lived, his home, that he loved, and it was the creatures living on it with him that gave him his great theme. “The whole gospel of my books,” he wrote, “is stay at home, see the wonderful and beautiful and the simple things all about you. Make the most of the near at hand.” * * * * *