Mine host
reached over and, putting a big white centre of celery on my plate,
said: "What's the use taking the outside of things when one can
have the heart?" This is typical of John Burroughs's life as well
as his art--he has let extraneous things, conventionalities, and
non-essentials go; has gone to the heart of things. It is this that
has made his work so vital.
As we arose from the table, I began picking up the dishes.
"You are going to help, are you?"
"Of course," I replied; "where is your dish-cloth? "--a natural
question, as any woman will agree, but what a consternation it
evoked! A just perceptible delay, a fumbling among pots and pans,
and he came toward me with a most apologetic air, and with the
sorriest-looking rag I had ever seen--its narrow circumference
encircling a very big hole.
"Is /that/ the best dish-cloth you have?" I asked.
For answer he held it up in front of his face, but the most of it
being hole, it did not hide the eyes that twinkled so merrily that
my housewifely reproof was effectually silenced. I took the sorry
remnant and began washing the dishes, mentally resolving, and
carrying out my resolution the next day, to send him a respectable
dish-cloth. Prosaic, if you will, but does not his own Emerson
say something about giving--
"to barrows, trays, and pans,
Grace and glimmer of romance"?
And what graces a dish-pan better than a clean, whole,
self-respecting dish-cloth?
So there we stood, John Burroughs and his humble reader, washing and
wiping dishes, and weighing Amiel and Schopenhauer in the balance at
the same time; and a very novel and amusing experience it was.
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