"
One afternoon a neighbor came and took him in her automobile a
ride of fifty miles or more, the objective point of which was
Ashland, the place where he had attended a seminary in 1854 and
1855. On his return he said it seemed like wizard's work that
he could be whisked there and back in one afternoon, to that
place which had been the goal of his youthful dreams! They had
also called on a schoolmate whom he had not seen for forty years.
He told us how a possession of that boy's had been a thing he had
coveted for many months--a slate pencil with a shining copper
gun-cap! "How I longed for that pencil! I tried to trade for
buttons (all I had to offer in exchange), but it was too precious
for my small barter, and I coveted it in vain." The wistful Celt
began early to sigh for the unattainable.
We picked wild strawberries in June from the "clover lot" where
the boy John Burroughs and his mother used to pick them. "I can
see her now," he said reminiscently, "her bent figure moving slowly
in the summer fields toward home with her basket filled. She would
also go berrying on Old Clump, in early haying, long after the
berries were gone in the lowlands."
During this summer of which I speak, the fields were a gorgeous mass
of color--buttercups and daisies, and the orange hawkweed--a display
that rivaled the carpet of gold and purple we had seen in the San
Joaquin Valley, in company with John Muir three summers before.
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