It was a constant wonder to me how one could be so simple as Burroughs, and yet know so many places, persons, and books. Burroughs had met many people; he had read many books, and had written more than a score himself; yet he was the simplest man I ever knew, as simple as a child,--simpler, indeed. For children may be suspicious and self-conscious, and even uninterested; but Burroughs’s interest and curiosity grew with the years. He carried his culture and his knife and his whetstone in his pocket. They belonged to him; but he belonged strictly to himself. He remained to the end what the Lord made him--and that is to be original. Pietro, the sculptor, has made Burroughs in bronze, resting on a rock, his arm shading his face, his eyes peering keenly into the future or the far-away. Pietro has made him a seer or a prophet. He was much more the lover and the poet. I sat with Burroughs on that same rock, the morning after the rainy day at the Lodge, and talked with him of some things long past, of many things round about us, but of few things of the future. I saw him shield his face with his arm, and look far off from the rock--to the rounded, green-crested hills in the distance, and down into the beautiful valley below. But most of the time he was watching a chipmunk near by, or scanning the pasture for woodchucks. Had I been Pietro I should have made the old man flat on that boulder, his beard a patch of lichen, his slouch hat hard down on his eyes, his head just over the round of the rock--and down the slope, at the mouth of his burrow, a big woodchuck on his haunches. “I’ve been studying the woodchuck all my life,” he said, as we sat there on the rock, “and there is no getting to the bottom of him.” I do not know whether Burroughs climbed over the walls and up through the field again to this favorite spot of his boyhood in the few remaining days he had at the Lodge. This may have been the last time he looked out with seeing eyes over this landscape of valley and mountain that had been one of the deepest, most abiding influences of his life. As we sat there together, the largeness and glory of the world: colors, contours, the valley depths, the quiet hills, the wealth of life, the full, deep flood of autumn light--almost too much for common human eyes--the old man beside me said, with a sigh: “I love it. But it is hard to live up to it. Sometimes, especially of late, I feel it a burden too great to bear.” Then, as if guilty of some evil thought, he brightened instantly, pointed out a dam that he had built as a boy in the field below us, for his own swimming-hole, the ridge of sod and stone still showing; told me stories of his parents; described his sugar-making in the “bush” behind us; nor referred again to the burden of the years, weighing so heavily now upon him, until we were leaving. Then, as he came out to the road to see us off, he said with tears in his eyes: