hn Burroughs, and once when he
came out to see me I was able to show them to him.

When I was President, we owned a little house in western Virginia; a
delightful house, to us at least, although only a shell of rough boards.
We used sometimes to go there in the fall, perhaps at Thanksgiving, and
on these occasions we would have quail and rabbits of our own shooting,
and once in a while a wild turkey. We also went there in the spring. Of
course many of the birds were different from our Long Island friends.
There were mocking-birds, the most attractive of all birds, and blue
grosbeaks, and cardinals and summer redbirds, instead of scarlet
tanagers, and those wonderful singers the Bewick's wrens, and Carolina
wrens. All these I was able to show John Burroughs when he came to visit
us; although, by the way, he did not appreciate as much as we did one
set of inmates of the cottage--the flying squirrels. We loved having the
flying squirrels, father and mother and half-grown young, in their nest
among the rafters; and at night we slept so soundly that we did not in
the least mind the wild gambols of the little fellows through the rooms,
even when, as sometimes happened, they would swoop down to the bed and
scuttle across it.

One April I went to Yellowstone Park, when the snow was still very deep,
and I took John Burroughs with me. I wished to show him the big game of
the Park, the wild creatures that have become so astonishingly tame and
tolerant of human presence. In the Yellowstone the animals seem always
to behave as one wishes them to! It is always possible to see the sheep
and deer and antelope, and also the great herds of elk, which are shyer
than the smaller beasts. In April we found the elk weak after the
short commons and hard living of winter. Once without much difficulty
I regularly rounded up a big band of them, so that John Burroughs could
look at them. I do not think, however, that he cared to see them as much
as I did. The birds interested him more, especially a tiny owl the size
of a robin which we saw perched on the top of a tree in mid-afternoon
entirely uninfluenced by the sun and making a queer noise like a cork
being pulled from a bottle. I was rather ashamed to find how much
better his eyes were than mine in seeing the birds and grasping their
differences.

When wolf-hunting in Texas, and when bear-hunting in Louisiana and
Mississippi, I was not only enthralled by the sport, but also by the
strange ne