Transcriber's Note: Alternative spelling for chippie/chippy has been retained as it appears in the original publication, and if you cannot read "Phœbe" clearly please change the encoding of your text reader to UTF-8. UNDER THE MAPLES [Illustration: _Copyright, 1921, by Charles F. Lummis. All rights reserved._ THE LAST PORTRAIT OF JOHN BURROUGHS (March 23, 1921; six days before his death) Made at Pasadena Glen, California, by his long-time friend Charles F. Lummis] UNDER THE MAPLES BY JOHN BURROUGHS [Illustration: The Riverside Press] BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PREFACE It was while sitting in his hay-barn study in the Catskills and looking out upon the maple woods of the old home farm, and under the maples at Riverby, that the most of these essays were written, during the last two years of the author's life. And it was to the familiar haunts near his Hudson River home that his thoughts wistfully turned while wintering in Southern California in 1921. As he pictured in his mind the ice breaking up on the river in the crystalline March days, the return of the birds, the first hepaticas, he longed to be back among them; he was there in spirit, gazing upon the river from the summer-house, or from the veranda of the Nest, or seated at his table in the chestnut-bark Study, or busy with his sap-gathering and sugar-making. Casting about for a title for this volume, the vision of maple-trees and dripping sap and crisp March days playing constantly before his mind, one day while sorting and shifting the essays for his new book, he suddenly said, "I have it! We'll call it _Under the Maples_!" His love for the maple, and consequently his pleasure in having hit upon this title, can be gathered from the following fragment found among his miscellaneous notes: "I always feel at home where the sugar maple grows It was paramount in the woods of the old home farm where I grew up. It looks and smells like home. When I bring in a maple stick to put on my fire, I feel like caressing it a little. Its fiber is as white as a lily, and nearly as sweet-scented. It is such a tractable, satisfactory wood to handle--a clean, docile, wholesome tree; burning without snapping or sputtering, easily worked up into stovewood, fine of grain, hard of texture, stately as a forest tree, comely and clean as a shade tree, glorious in autumn, a fountain of coolness in summer, sugar in its veins, gold in its foliage, warmth in its fibers, and health in it the year round." CLARA BARRUS _The Nest at Riverby_ _West Park on the Hudson_ _New York_ CONTENTS I. THE FALLING LEAVES 1 II. THE PLEASURES OF A NATURALIST 11 III. THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS 32