at which I am.

I am certain, as I have told you before, that I derived more from
my mother than from my father. I have more of her disposition--her
yearning, breeding nature, her subdued and neutral tones, her curiosity,
her love of animals, and of wild nature generally. Father was neither a
hunter nor a fisherman, and, I think, was rarely conscious of the beauty
of nature around him. The texture of his nature was much less fine than
that of Mother's, and he was a much easier problem to read; he was as
transparent as glass. Mother had more of the stuff of poetry in her
soul, and a deeper, if more obscure, background to her nature. That
which makes a man a hunter or a fisherman simply sent her forth in quest
of wild berries. What a berry-picker she was! How she would work to get
the churning out of the way so she could go out to the berry lot! It
seemed to heal and refresh her to go forth in the hill meadows for
strawberries, or in the old bushy bark-peelings for raspberries. The
last work she did in the world was to gather a pail of blackberries as
she returned one September afternoon from a visit to my sister's, less
than a mile away.

I am as fond of going forth for berries as my mother was, even to this
day. Every June I must still make one or two excursions to distant
fields for wild strawberries, or along the borders of the woods for
black raspberries, and I never go without thinking of Mother. You could
not see all that I bring home with me in my pail on such occasions;
if you could, you would see the traces of daisies and buttercups and
bobolinks, and the blue skies, with thoughts of Mother and the Old Home,
that date from my youth. I usually eat some of the berries in bread and
milk, as I was wont to do in the old days, and am, for the moment, as
near a boy again as it is possible for me to be.

(Illustration of One of Mr. Burroughs's Favorite Seats, Roxbury, New
York. From a photograph by Clifton Johnson)

No doubt my life as a farm boy has had much to do with my subsequent
love of nature, and my feeling of kinship with all rural things. I feel
at home with them; they are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. It
seems to me a man who was not born and reared in the country can hardly
get Nature into his blood, and establish such intimate and affectionate
relations with her, as can the born countryman. We are so susceptible
and so plastic in youth; we take things so seriously; they enter into
and color and