Mr. Burroughs tells of his visit, in October, to the graves of his
maternal grandparents:--
"They died in 1854, my first season away from home, and there
they have lain for fifty-seven years, and I had never been to
their graves! I'm glad I went; it made them live again for me.
How plainly I could see the little man in his blue coat with
brass buttons, with his decidedly Irish features! And Grandmother,
a stout woman, with quaint, homely ways. The moss is on their
gravestones now, and two evergreen trees wax strong above them.
I found an indigo-bird had built her nest above their graves.
I broke off the branch and brought it home."
"There! get up and use that water before it freezes over," the host
calls out the next morning, as, mounting the stairs, he places a
pitcher of hot water by the door. It is bitter cold, one's fingers
ache, and one wonders if, after all, it is so much fun to live in
a cabin in the woods in the dead of winter. But a crackling fire
below and savory smells of bacon and coffee reconcile one, and the
day begins right merrily.
And what a dinner the author sets before us! what fun to see him
prepare it, discussing meanwhile the glory that was Greece and the
grandeur that was Rome, recounting anecdotes of boyhood, touching
on politics and religion, on current events, on conflicting views
of the vitalists and the chemico-physicists, on this and on that,
but never to the detriment of his duck.
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