It was on the watershed of the Pepacton (the East Branch of the
Delaware), in the town of Roxbury, Delaware County, New York, that
John Burroughs was born, and there that he gathered much of the
harvest of his earlier books; it was there also that most of his
more recent books were written. Although he left the old scenes
in his youth, his heart has always been there. He went back many
years ago and named one of his books ("Pepacton") from the old
stream, and he has now gone back and arranged for himself a simple
summer home on the farm where he first saw the light.
Most of his readers have heard much of Slabsides, the cabin in
the wooded hills back of the Hudson, and of his conventional home,
Riverby, at West Park, New York; but as yet the public has heard
little of his more remote retreat on his native heath.
[Illustration: Woodchuck Lodge and Barn. From a photograph
by Charles S. Olcott]
For several years it has been his custom to slip away to the old
home in Delaware County on one pretext or another--to boil sap
in the old sugar bush and rejoice in the April frolic of the
robins; to meander up Montgomery Hollow for trout; to gather wild
strawberries in the June meadows and hobnob with the bobolinks; to
saunter in the hemlocks in quest of old friends in the tree-tops;
and--yes, truth compels me to confess--to sit in the fields with
rifle in hand and wage war against the burrowing woodchuck which
is such a menace to the clover and vegetables of the farmer.
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