Now, all this is valuable, and the use made of it is laudable, but would we not rather have the account than the cow, especially from Burroughs? Certainly, because to us it is the _account_ that he has come to stand for. And so, if we do not love his scientific animals more, and his scientific findings more, we shall, I think, love all his other books more; for we see now that, from the beginning, he has regarded the facts of nature as the solid substance of his books, to be kept as free from fancy and from false report, as his interpretation of them is to be kept free from all exaggeration and cant. Here, then, are a score of volumes of honest seeing, honest feeling, honest reporting. Such honesty of itself may not make good nature-literature, but without such honesty there can be no good nature-literature. Nature-literature is not less than the truth, but more; how much more, Burroughs himself suggests to us in a passage about his literary habits. "For my part," he says, "I can never interview Nature in the reporter fashion. I must camp and tramp with her to get any good, and what I get I absorb through my emotions rather than consciously gather through my intellect.... An experience must lie in my mind a certain time before I can put it upon paper--say from three to six months. If there is anything in it, it will ripen and mellow by that time. I rarely take any notes, and I have a very poor memory, but rely upon the affinity of my mind for a certain order of truths or observations. What is mine will stick to me, and what is not will drop off. We who write about Nature pick out, I suspect, only the rare moments when we have had glimpses of her, and make much of them. Our lives are dull, our minds crusted over with rubbish like those of other people. Then writing about Nature, or about most other subjects, is an expansive process; we are under the law of evolution; we grow the germ into the tree; a little original observation goes a good way." For "when you go to Nature, bring us good science or else good literature, and not a mere inventory of what you have seen. One demonstrates, the other interprets." Careful as John Burroughs has been with his facts, so careful as often to bring us excellent science, he yet has left us no inventory of the out-of-doors. His work is literature; he is not a demonstrator, but an interpreter, an expositor who is true to the text and true to the whole of the context. Our pleasure in Burroughs as an interpreter comes as much from his wholesome good sense, from his balance and sanity, I think, as from the assurance of his sincerity. Free from pose and cant and deception, he is free also from bias and strain. There is something ordinary, normal, reasonable, companionable, about him; an even tenor to all his ways, a deliberateness, naturalness to all his paths, as if they might have been made originally by the cows. So they were.