He knew, as I knew, that he might never rest against this rock again. He had played upon it as a child. He now sleeps beside it. But so interesting was the simplest, the most familiar thing to him, that the long, long twilight, already filling the valley and creeping up toward him, still gave him a chance, as we sat there, to watch the woodchuck slipping from his burrow. Had I been the sculptor, I should have made the old naturalist lying flat on the round of that rock, his white beard a patch of lichen, his eyes peering from under his slouch hat over the top of the boulder at something near at hand--at the woodchuck feeding below in the pasture. He was the simplest man I ever knew, simpler than a child; for children are often self-conscious and uninterested, whereas Burroughs's interest and curiosity grew with the years, and his directness, his spontaneity, his instant pleasure and his constant joy in living, his utter naturalness and naïveté amounted to genius. They were his genius--and a stumbling-block to many a reader. _Similia similibus curantur_, or a thief to catch a thief, as we say; and it certainly requires such a degree of simplicity to understand Burroughs as few of us possess. Not every author improves upon personal acquaintance, but an actual visit with Burroughs seems almost necessary for the right approach to his books. Matter and manner, the virtues and faults of his writings, the very things he did not write about, are all explained in the presence of a man of eighty-three who brings home a woodchuck from the field for dinner, and saves its pelt for a winter coat. And with me at dinner that day were other guests, a lover of Whitman from Bolton, England, a distinguished American artist, and others. The country road, hardly more than a farm lane, shies up close to Woodchuck Lodge as it goes by. Here on the vine-grown porch was the cot of the old naturalist, as close to the road as it could get. Burroughs loved those remote ancestral hills, and all the little folk who inhabitated them with him. He was as retiring and shy as a song sparrow--who nests in the bushes, and sings from the fence stake. No man loved his fellow-man more than Burroughs. Here in his cot he could watch the stars come out upon the mountain-tops and see the fires of dawn kindle where the stars had shone, and here, too, he could see every passer-by and, without rising, for he had need to rest, he could reach out a hand of welcome to all who stopped on their journey past.