married and
had two children, and died in early womanhood of phthisis.

Wilson was a farmer, thrifty and economical. He married but had no
children. He was evidently somewhat neurotic; as a child, even when
well, he would groan and moan in his sleep, and he died, at the age of
twenty-eight, after a short illness, of a delirious fever.

Curtis also was a farmer, but lacked judgment; could not look ahead;
thought if he gave his note a debt was canceled, and went on piling up
other indebtedness. He had a very meagre schooling, but was apt at witty
remarks. He was temperate; was much given to reading "The Signs of the
Times," like his father before him. He married and had five children.
For many years previous to his death he lived at the homestead, dying
there in his eightieth year, in the summer of 1912. Two of his unmarried
children still live at the Old Home,--of all places on the earth the one
toward which Mr. Burroughs turns with the most yearning fondness.

Edmund died in infancy.

Jane, a tender-hearted, old-fashioned woman, who cried and fretted
easily, and worried over trifles, was a good housekeeper, and a fond
mother--a fat, dumpy little woman with a doleful voice. She was always
urging her brother not to puzzle his head about writing; writing and
thinking, she said, were "bad for the head." When he would go away on
a journey of only a hundred miles, she would worry incessantly lest
something happen to him. She married and had five daughters. Her death
occurred in May, 1912, at the age of seventy-seven. "Poor Jane!" said
Mr. Burroughs one day, when referring to her protests against his
writing; "I fear she never read a dozen printed words of mine--or shall
I say 'lucky Jane'?"

John, born in 1837, was always "an odd one." (One is reminded of what
William R. Thayer said of the Franklin family: "Among the seventeen
Franklin children one was a Benjamin, and the rest nobodies.")

Eden was born in 1839. Frail most of his life, in later years he has
become robust, and now (1913) is the only surviving member of the family
besides Mr. Burroughs. He is cheery and loquacious, methodical and
orderly, and very punctilious in dress. (One day, in the summer of 1912,
when he was calling at "Woodchuck Lodge,"--the summer home where Mr.
Burroughs has lived of late years, near the old place where he
was born,--this brother recounted some of their youthful exploits,
especially the one which yielded the material for the essa