Mr.
Muir was done before starting for South America. He had promised
to come to the Catskills, but had to keep putting it off to get
copy ready, and the Laird of Woodchuck Lodge was exasperated that
the mountaineer would stay in that hot Babylon,--he, the lover
of the wild,--when we in the Delectable Mountains were calling him
hither. As we looked upon the riot of color one day, Mr. Burroughs
said, "John Muir, confound him! I wish he was here to see this
at its height!"
Returning to the little gray farmhouse in the gathering dusk one
late September day, Mr. Burroughs paused and turned, looking back
at the old home, and up at the cattle silhouetted against the
horizon. He gazed upon the landscape long and long. How fondly
his eye dwells upon these scenes! So I have seen him look when
about to part from a friend--as if he were trying to fix the
features and expression in his mind forever.
"The older one grows, the more the later years erode away, as do
the secondary rocks, and one gets down to bed-rock,--youth,--and
there he wants to rest. These scenes make youth and all the early
life real to me, the rest is more like a dream. How incredible it
is!--all that is gone; but here it lives again."
[Illustration: On the Porch at Woodchuck Lodge.
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