in. I was better
unhelped, as it proved, and better for all I could help him. But he was
a loving father all the same. He couldn't understand my needs, but love
outweighs understanding.

He did not like my tendency to books; he was afraid, as I learned later,
that I would become a Methodist minister--his pet aversion. He never
had much faith in me--less than in any of his children; he doubted if
I would ever amount to anything. He saw that I was an odd one, and had
tendencies and tastes that he did not sympathize with. He never alluded
to my literary work; apparently left it out of his estimate of me.
My aims and aspirations were a sealed book to him, as his peculiar
religious experiences were to me, yet I reckon it was the same leaven
working in us both.

I remember, on my return from Dr. Holmes's seventieth birthday
breakfast, in 1879, a remark of father's. He had overheard me telling
sister Abigail about the breakfast, and he declared: "I had rather go to
hear old Elder Jim Mead preach two hours, if he was living, than attend
all the fancy parties in the world." He said he had heard him preach
when he did not know whether he was in the body or out of the body. The
elder undoubtedly had a strong natural eloquence.

Although Father never spoke to me of my writings, Abigail once told me
that when she showed him a magazine with some article of mine in, and
accompanied by a photograph of me, he looked at it a long time; he said
nothing, but his eyes filled with tears.

He went to school to the father of Jay Gould, John Gould--the first
child born in the town of Roxbury (about 1780 or 1790).

He married Amy Kelly, my mother, in 1827. He was six years her senior.
She lived over in Red Kill where he had taught school, and was one of
his pupils. I have often heard him say: "I rode your Uncle Martin's old
sorrel mare over to her folks' when I went courting her." When he
would be affectionate toward her before others, Mother would say, "Now,
Chauncey, don't be foolish."

Father bought the farm of 'Riah Bartram's mother, and moved on it in
1827. In a house that stood where the Old Home does now, I was born,
April 3, 1837. It was a frame house with three or four rooms below and
one room "done off" above, and a big chamber. I was the fifth son and
the seventh child of my parents.

(Illustration of Birthplace of John Burroughs, Roxbury, New York. From a
photograph by Charles S. Olcott)

Mother was in her twenty-ninth year