He had a very meagre schooling, but was apt
at witty remarks. He was temperate; was much given to reading "The
Signs of the Times," like his father before him. He married and had
five children. For many years previous to his death he lived at the
homestead, dying there in his eightieth year, in the summer of 1912.
Two of his unmarried children still live at the Old Home,--of all
places on the earth the one toward which Mr. Burroughs turns with
the most yearning fondness.
Edmund died in infancy.
Jane, a tender-hearted, old-fashioned woman, who cried and fretted
easily, and worried over trifles, was a good housekeeper, and a
fond mother--a fat, dumpy little woman with a doleful voice. She
was always urging her brother not to puzzle his head about writing;
writing and thinking, she said, were "bad for the head." When
he would go away on a journey of only a hundred miles, she would
worry incessantly lest something happen to him. She married and
had five daughters. Her death occurred in May, 1912, at the age
of seventy-seven. "Poor Jane!" said Mr. Burroughs one day, when
referring to her protests against his writing; "I fear she never
read a dozen printed words of mine--or shall I say 'lucky Jane'?"
John, born in 1837, was always "an odd one.
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