While passing back and forth through the
room in our preparations, we heard the men of the party talk in
fragments, and amusing fragments they were. Once when Mr. Browne,
the editor of the "Dial," was discussing some point in connection
with the Spanish-American War, I heard Mr. Muir say, with a sigh of
relief, "I was getting flowers up on the Tuolumne meadows then, and
didn't have to bother about those questions." When another friend
was criticizing Mr. Roosevelt for the reputed slaughter of so many
animals in Africa, and Mr. Burroughs declared he did not credit half
the things the papers said the hunter was doing, Mr. Muir said, half
chidingly, half tolerantly, "Roosevelt, the muggins, I am afraid he
is having a good time putting bullets through those friends of his."
Now I had heard him call Mr. Burroughs "You muggins" in the same
winning, endearing way he said "Johnnie"; I had heard him speak of
a petrified tree in the Sigillaria forest as a "muggins"; of a bear
that trespassed on his flowery domains in the Sierra meadows as a
"muggins" that he tried to look out of countenance and failed; of
a "comical little muggins of a daisy" that some one had named
after him; and one day he had rejoiced my heart by dubbing me "You
muggins, you"; and behold! here he was now applying the elastic term
to our many-sided (I did not say "strenuous") ex-President! Later
I heard him apply it to a Yosemite waterfall, and by then should not
have been surprised to hear him speak of a mighty glacier, or a
giant sequoia, as a "muggins.
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