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In every man’s life we may read some lesson. What may be read in mine? If I see myself correctly, it is this: that the essential things are always at hand; that one’s own door opens upon the wealth of heaven and earth; and that all things are ready to serve and cheer one. Life is a struggle, but not a warfare; it is a day’s labor, but labor on God’s earth, under the sun and stars with other laborers, where we may think and sing and rejoice as we work.

John Burroughs.

SOME farm-boys were having a happy Sunday in the woods gathering black birch and wintergreens. As they lay on the cool moss, lazily tasting the spicy morsels they had found and gazing up at the patches of blue sky through the beeches, one of the boys caught sight of a small, bluish bird, with an odd white spot on its wing, as it flashed through the trembling leaves. In a moment it was gone, but the boy was on his feet, looking after it with eyes that had opened on a new world.

So “Deacon Woods,” the old familiar playground that he thought he knew so well, where blue-jays, woodpeckers, and yellow-birds were every-day companions, contained wonders of which he had never dreamed. The older brothers knew nothing and cared nothing about the unknown bird. What difference did it make, anyway? But the little lad of seven who followed its flight with startled, wondering eyes seemed to have been born again. His eyes were opened to many things that had not existed for him before.

Do you remember the story of the monk of long ago who, while copying in his cell a page from the Holy Book, chanced to ponder on the words that tell us that a thousand years in God’s sight are but as a day? As the monk wondered and doubted how such a thing might be, he heard through his window the song of a strange, beautiful bird, and followed it through the garden into the woods beyond. Wandering on and listening, with every sense alive to the delights about him, it seemed that he had spent the happiest hour he had ever known. But when he returned to his monastery, he found himself a stranger in a place that had long forgotten him. He had been wandering for a hundred years in the magic wood, listening to the song of the wonderful bird.

In somewhat the same way John Burroughs followed where the gleam of the little bluish warbler led him through woods and fields for more than seventy years. That is why Time missed him out of the great reckoning. One who listens to the song of life knows nothing of age or change. So it is that the boy John never slipped away from Burroughs, the man. So it is that the Seer of Woodchuck Lodge is eighty years young.

Do you know what it means to be a seer? A seer is one who has seeing eyes which clearly note and comprehend what most people pass a hundred times nor care to see. He looks, too, through the outer shell or appearance of things, and learns to read something of their hidden meaning. He has sight, then, and also insight. He looks with his physical eyes and also with the eyes of the mind and spirit.

We always think of a seer as an old man, but little John Burroughs—John o’ Birds, as some one has called him—began to be “an eye among the blind” that Sunday in the woods when he was a lad of seven. He led a new, charmed life as he weeded the garden and later plowed the fields. He saw and heard life thrilling about him on every side, and all that he saw became part of his own life. He drank in the joy of the bobolink and the song-sparrow with the air he breathed, as the warm sunshine and good, earth smell of the freshly turned furrow entered at every pore.

Another day almost as memorable as that which brought the flash of the strange bird was the one which gave him a glimpse into the unexplored realm of ideas. A lady visiting at the farm-house noticed a boyish drawing of his, and said, “What taste that boy has!” Taste, then, might belong to something besides the food that one took into one’s mouth. It seemed that there were new worlds of words—and thoughts—of which his farmer folk little dreamed.

Again, one day when watching some roadmakers down by the school-house turn up some flat stones, he heard a man standing by exclaim, “Ah, here we have, perhaps, some antiquities!” Antiquities! How the word rang in his fancy for days! Oh, the magic lure of the world of words!

It seemed that school and books might give him the freedom of that world. He went to the district school at Roxbury, New York, summers until he was ten, when his help was needed on the farm. After that, he was permitted to go only during the winters. In many ways he was the odd one of the family, and his unaccountable interest in things that could never profit a farmer often tried the patience of his hard-working father.

One day the boy asked for money to buy an algebra. What was an algebra, anyway, and why should this queer lad be demanding things that his father and brothers had never had? John got the algebra, and other precious books beside, but he earned the money himself by selling maple sugar. He knew when April had stirred the sap in the sugar-bush a week or more before any one else came to tap the trees, and his early harvest always found a good market.

And what a joyous time April was! “I think April is the best month to be born in,” said John Burroughs. “One is just in time, so to speak, to catch the first train, which is made up in this month. My April chickens are always the best.... Then are heard the voices of April—arriving birds, the elfin horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sun-down, the camp-fire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising from the trees, the tinge of green that comes so suddenly on the sunny slopes. April is my natal month, and I am born again into new delight and new surprises at each return of it. Its name has an indescribable charm to me. Its two syllables are like the calls of the first birds—like that of the phœbe-bird or of the meadow-lark.”

The keen joy in the feel of the creative sunlight and springing earth—the eager tasting of every sight and sound and scent that the days brought—were not more a part of his own throbbing life than the desire to know and understand. When he was fifteen he had the promise that he might go to the academy in a neighboring town. That fall, as he plowed the lot next the sugar-bush, each furrow seemed to mark a step on the way.

When the time drew near, however, it proved as strange and unusual a desire as that for the algebra. The district school had been good enough for his brothers. So he put his disappointment behind him as he went for another winter to the Roxbury school. “Yet I am not sure but I went to Harpersfield after all,” said Mr. Burroughs; “the long, long thoughts, the earnest resolve to make myself worthy, the awakening of every part and fiber of me, helped me on my way as far, perhaps, as the unattainable academy could have done.”

The next year found the youth of seventeen teaching a country school for eleven dollars a month and “board around.” How homesick he felt for the blue hills at home, for the old barn, with the nests of the swallows and phœbe-birds beneath its roof, for the sugar-bush, and the clear, laughing trout-streams. He could see his mother hurrying through her churning so that she might go berrying on the sunny slope of Old Clump, and he knew what she brought back with the strawberries—dewy dreams of daisies and buttercups, lilting echoes of bobolinks and meadow-larks.

In October the long term was over and he went home with nearly all his earnings,—over fifty dollars,—enough to pay his way at the Hedding Literary Institute for the winter term.

In the spring of 1855 he went to New York City for the first time, hoping to find a position as teacher. He was not successful in this quest, but the trip was memorable for a raid on the second-hand book-stalls. He reached home some days later “with an empty pocket and an empty stomach, but with a bagful of books.”

Always attracted chiefly to essays, the works of Emerson influenced him greatly. He absorbed their spirit as naturally and completely as he had absorbed the sights and sounds of his native hill-country. His first article—an essay called “Expression,” which was printed without signature in The Atlantic Monthly—was by many attributed to Emerson. Lowell, who was at that time editor of The Atlantic, told, with much amusement, that before accepting the contribution he had looked through all of Emerson’s works expecting to find it and confound this plagiarizing Burroughs with a proof of his rascality.

While teaching school near West Point he one day found, in the library of the Military Academy, a volume of Audubon—and entered upon his kingdom. Here was a complete chart of that bird world which he had never ceased to long to explore since that memorable day when he had seen the little blue warbler. There was time, too, for long walks, time to live with the birds—to revive old ties as well as to make new friends.

In speaking of his study of the birds, Mr. Burroughs once said:

“What joy the birds have brought me! How they have given me wings to escape the tedious and deadly. Studied the birds? No, I have played with them, camped with them, summered and wintered with them. My knowledge of them has come to me through the pores of my skin, through the air I have breathed, through the soles of my feet, through the twinkle of the leaves and the glint of the waters.”

At once he felt a longing to write something of the joy he was gaining through this comradeship with his feathered friends. There was nothing that spoke of Emerson or any other model in his pages now. He had found his own path. He was following the little blue bird into a world of his own.

A chance came to go to Washington to live. For several years, while working as a clerk in the Treasury, he spent all his spare moments with the birds. He knew what nests were to be found near Rock Creek and along Piney Branch. It seemed that he heard the news as soon as a flock of northbound songsters stopped to rest for a day or two in the Capitol grounds.

While watching a vault where great piles of the Nation’s gold lay stored, he lived over in memory the golden days of his boyhood spent in climbing trees, tramping over hills, and through grassy hollows, or lying with half-shut eyes by the brookside to learn something of the life-story of the birds. There were leisure afternoons which brought no duty save that of sitting watchful before the iron wall of the vault. At such times he often tried to seize some of the happy bits that memory brought, a twig here, a tuft there, and now a long, trailing strand—stray scraps of observation of many sorts—which he wove together into a nest for his brooding fancy. And we, too, as we read those pages hear the “wandering voice” of the little bird of earth and sky, who wears the warm brown of one on his breast and the blue of the other on his wings; we see the dauntless robin a-tilt on the sugar-bush; we catch the golden melody of the wood-thrush—and “the time of singing birds” has come to our hearts. He has not only seeing eyes, but an understanding heart, this seer and lover of the birds, and so his bits of observation have meaning and value. He called the book in which these various bird-papers were gathered together “Wake Robin,” the name of a wild-flower that makes its appearance at the time of the return of the birds.

This book was well named, not only because it suggested something of the spirit and feeling of the essays, but also because it was the herald of several other delightful volumes such as “Signs and Seasons,” “Winter Sunshine,” “Birds and Poets.”

Do you remember how Emerson says in his poem “Each and All”