ss
region, and "A Taste of Maine Birch" (true, Thoreau gave us this, also,
and other "Excursions" as well); we have walked with him the lanes of
"Mellow England"; journeyed "In the Carlyle Country"; marveled at
the azure glaciers of Alaska; wandered in the perpetual summerland
of Jamaica; camped with him and the Strenuous One in the Yellowstone;
looked in awe and wonder at that "Divine Abyss," the Grand Canon of the
Colorado; felt the "Spell of Yosemite," and idled with him under the
sun-steeped skies of Hawaii and by her morning-glory seas.

Our essayist is thus seen not to be untraveled, yet he is no wanderer.
No man ever had the home feeling stronger than has he; none is more
completely under the spell of a dear and familiar locality. Somewhere he
has said: "Let a man stick his staff into the ground anywhere and say,
'This is home,' and describe things from that point of view, or as they
stand related to that spot,--the weather, the fauna, the flora,--and
his account shall have an interest to us it could not have if not thus
located and defined."

(Illustration of Riverby from the Orchard. From a photograph by Charles
S. Olcott)

Before hunting out Mr. Burroughs in his mountain hermitage, let us
glance at his conventional abode, Riverby, at West Park, Ulster County,
New York. This has been his home since 1874. Having chosen this place
by the river, he built his house of stone quarried from the neighboring
hills, and finished it with the native woods; he planted a vineyard
on the sloping hillside, and there he has successfully combined the
business of grape-culture with his pursuits and achievements as a
literary naturalist. More than half his books have been written since
he has dwelt at Riverby, the earlier ones having appeared when he was a
clerk in the Treasury Department in Washington, an atmosphere supposedly
unfriendly to literary work. It was not until he gave up his work in
Washington, and his later position as bank examiner in the eastern part
of New York State, that he seemed to come into his own. Business life,
he had long known, could never be congenial to him; literary pursuits
alone were insufficient; the long line of yeoman ancestry back of him
cried out for recognition; he felt the need of closer contact with the
soil; of having land to till and cultivate. This need, an ancestral one,
was as imperative as his need of literary expression, an individual
one. Hear what he says after having ploughed in