The Seer of Slabsides

There are many texts in these volumes, many themes; and in them all there is one real message: that this is a good world to live in; that these are good men and women to live with; that life is good, here and now, and altogether worth living.

III

It was in October that I last saw him – at Woodchuck Lodge. November 22 he wrote:

I neglected to make any apologies for the long letter I wrote you the other day. I promise not to do so again. I am enclosing an old notebook of mine, filled with all sorts of jottings as you will see. I send it for a keepsake.

We are off for California to-morrow. Hope to be there in early December. We leave Chicago on the 29th. My address there will be La Jolla, San Diego. Good luck to you and yours.

    Always your friend
    John Burroughs

He kept his promise too too well. This was the last letter I ever had from him.

He dreaded that California journey. San Diego is a long, long way from Woodchuck Lodge when one is nearing eighty-four. Dr. Barrus and two of her nieces made the trip with him, Henry Ford, out of his friendship, meeting the expenses of the winter sojourn. But California had no cure for the winter that had at last fallen upon the old naturalist. Sickness, and longing for home, and other ills befell him. He was in a hospital for many days. But visitors came to see him as usual; he went among the schools speaking; nor was his pen idle – not yet; one of the last things, if not the very last he wrote for publication, being a vigorous protest against free verse, called "The Reds of Literature." But all the while he was thinking of home, and planning for his birthday party at the Lodge back on the ancestral farm.

We celebrated it. He was there. But he did not know. On the third day of April, his eighty-fourth birthday, followed by a few of his friends, mourned by all the nation, he was laid to rest in the hill pasture, beside the boulder on which he had played as a child, and where only a few months before he had taken me to see the glory of hill and sky that had been his lifelong theme, and that were to be his sleep forever.

He died on the train that was bringing him back from California, his last desire not quite fulfilled. He was a wholly human man; and an utterly simple man; and so true to himself, that his last words, uttered on the speeding train, expressed and completed his whole life with singular beauty: "How far are we from home," he asked, – and the light failed; and the train sped on as if there were need of hurry now!

"Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea,
I rave no more 'gainst Time or Fate
For lo! my own shall come to me."

THE END