We called these boys "John of Woods," and "John of Woodchucks";
and it was sometimes difficult to say which was the veriest boy,
the one of eleven or the one of seventy-four.
One morning I heard them laughing gleefully together as they were
doing up the breakfast work. Calling out to learn the cause of
their merriment, I found the elder John had forgotten to eat his
egg--he had just found it in his coat-pocket, having put it in
there to carry from the kitchen to the living-room.
He often amused us by his recital of Thackeray's absurd "Little
Billee," and by the application of some of the lines to events
in the life at Woodchuck Lodge.
[Illustration: Living-Room, Woodchuck Lodge, with Rustic Furniture
made by Mr. Burroughs. From a photograph by M. H. Fanning]
As the evenings grew longer and cooler, we would gather about the
table and Mr. Burroughs would read aloud, sometimes from Bergson's
"Creative Evolution," under the spell of which he was the entire
summer of 1911, sometimes from Wordsworth, sometimes from Whitman.
"No other English poet has touched me quite so closely," he said,
"as Wordsworth. . . . But his poetry has more the character of a
message, and a message special and personal, to a comparatively
small circle of readers." As he read "The Poet's Epitaph" one
evening, I was impressed with the strong likeness the portrait
there drawn has to Mr.
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