As a child I think I must
have been more than usually fluid and impressionable, and that my
affiliations with open-air life and objects were very hearty and
thorough. As I grow old I am experiencing what, I suppose, all
men experience, more or less; my subsequent days slough off, or
fade away, more and more, leaving only the days of my youth as a
real and lasting possession.
When I began, in my twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year, to write
about the birds, I found that I had only to unpack the memories of
the farm boy within me to get at the main things about the common
ones. I had unconsciously absorbed the knowledge that gave the life
and warmth to my page. Take that farm boy out of my books, out of
all the pages in which he is latent as well as visibly active, and
you have robbed them of something vital and fundamental, you have
taken from the soil much of its fertility. At least, so it seems
to me, though in this business of self-analysis I know one may easily
go far astray. It is probably quite impossible correctly to weigh
and appraise the many and complex influences and elements that have
entered into one's life.
When I look back to that twilight of early youth, to that half-mythical
borderland of the age of six or seven years, or even earlier, I can
see but few things that, in the light of my subsequent life, have
much significance.
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