Classic Audiobook Collection - The Story of My Boyhood and Youth by John Muir ~ Full Audiobook [biography]

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth by John Muir audiobook. Genre: biography 'The only fire for the whole house was the kitchen stove, with a fire box about eighteen inches long and eight inches wide and deep,- scant space for three or four small sticks, around which in hard zero weather all the family of ten shivered, and beneath which in the morning we found our socks and coarse, soggy boots frozen solid.' Thus, with perceptive eye for detail, the American naturalist, John Muir, describes life on a pioneer Wisconsin farm in the 1850's. Muir was only eleven years old when his father uprooted the family from a relatively comfortable life in Dunbar, Scotland, to settle in the backwoods of North America. The elder Muir was a religious fundamentalist. What his father taught, John Muir writes, was 'grim self denial, in season and out of season, to mortify the flesh, keep our bodies in subjection to Bible laws, and mercilessly punish ourselves for every fault, imagined or committed.' Muir's father believed that the Bible was 'the only book human beings could possibly require,' while John secretly read every volume of poetry and literature he could get his hands on. With no formal schooling after leaving Scotland, John also learned from nature--keenly observing details of the seasons, the life of the farm oxen, and wild animals and birds. John also became an amateur inventor, eking out time from farm chores by getting up at 1 a.m. to whittle intricate wooden clocks by candlelight in the unheated farm house basement. Muir finally made a break for freedom--his decision was to go to Madison, Wisconsin, and enter his clocks in the State Fair, with the hope that somebody might see them and offer him a job in a machine shop! All the baggage he carried the day he left home was a package made up of 'two clocks and a small thermometer made of a piece of old washboard, all three tied together with no covering or case of any sort, the whole looking like one very complicated machine.' His father's goodbye was to admonish John about the 'wicked world' and to warn him sternly that if he should find himself in need of money, none would be forthcoming. John would have to depend on himself. How John Muir made his way from that Wisconsin farm to become the great American naturalist, spokesman for Yosemite and the California redwoods, is the stuff of legend: which makes Muir's autobiographical account of his early boyhood a fascinating read For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:56:43) Chapter 02 (01:40:14) Chapter 03 (02:31:41) Chapter 04 (03:08:10) Chapter 05 (03:41:31) Chapter 06 (04:29:56) Chapter 07 (04:56:18) Chapter 08 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth by John Muir. Chapter 1 A Boyhood in Scotland Earliest Recollections The Dandy Doctor Terror Deeds of Daring The Savagery of Boys School and Fighting

Birds Nesting When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild And all my life I've been growing Fonder and Fonder of wild places and wild creatures fortunately around my native town of Dunbar by the stormy North Sea there was no lack of wildness though most of the land lay in smooth cultivation with red-blooded playmates wild as myself

I love to wander in the fields to hear the birds sing and along the seashore to gaze and wonder at the shells and seaweeds eels and crabs in the pools among the rocks when the tide was low, and best of all to watch the waves in awful storms, thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle when the sea and the sky, the waves and the clouds, were mingled together as one. We never thought of playing truant, but after I was five or six years old, I ran away to the seashore or the fields almost every Saturday, and every day in the school vacations except Sundays, though solemnly warned that I must play at home in the garden and backyard, lest I should learn to think bad thoughts and say bad words.

All in vain, in spite of the sure, sore punishments that followed like shadows, the natural inherited wildness in our blood ran true on its glorious course, as invincible and unstoppable as stars. My earliest recollections of the country were gained on short walks with my grandfather, when I was perhaps not over three years old. On one of these walks, Grandfather took me to Lord Lauderdale's gardens, where I saw figs growing against a sunny wall

and tasted some of them, and got as many apples to eat as I wished. On another memorable walk in a hayfield, when we sat down to rest on one of the haycocks, I heard a sharp, prickly, stinging cry, and, jumping up eagerly called Grandfather's attention to it. He said he heard only the wind, but I insisted on digging into the hay and turning it over

until we discovered the source of the strange, exciting sound, a mother-field mouse with half a dozen naked young hanging to her teats. To me, this was a wonderful discovery. No hunter could have been more excited on discovering a bear and her cubs in a wilderness den. I was sent to school before I had completed my third year. The first school day was doubtless, full of wonders,

but I am not able to recall any of them. I remember the servant washing my face and getting soap in my eyes, and mother hanging a little green bag with my first book in it around my neck so I would not lose it, and it's blowing back in the sea wind like a flag. But before I was sent to school, my grandfather, as I was told, had taught me my letters from shop signs across the street. I can remember distinctly how proud I was when I had spelled my way through the little first book into the second, which seemed large and important, and so on to the third.

Going from one book to another formed a grand triumphal advancement, the memories of which still stand out in clear relief. The third book contained interesting stories as well as plain reading and spelling lessons. To me, the best story of all was Llewellyn's dog, the first animal that comes to mind after the needle-voiced field mouse. It's so deeply interested and touched me and some of my classmates that we read it over and over with aching hearts, both in and out of school, and shed bitter tears over the brave, faithful dog, gallert, slain by his own master, who imagined that he had devoured his son because he came to him all bloody when the boy was lost, though he had saved the child's life by killing a big wolf.

we have to look far back to learn how great may be the capacity of a child's heart for sorrow and sympathy with animals, as well as with human friends and neighbors. This old Langzine story stands out in the throng of old school day memories as clearly as if I had myself been one of that Welsh hunting party, heard the bugles blowing, seen Gellard slain, joined in the search for the lost child, discovered it at last, happy and smiling among the grass and bushes beside the dead mangled wolf and wept with llewellyn over the sad fate of his noble faithful dog friend another favorite in this book was southey's poem the inch cape bell a story of a priest and a pirate a good priest in order to warn seamen in dark stormy weather hung a big bell on the dangerous inch cape rock the greater the storm and higher the waves the louder rang the one warning bell until it was cut off and sunk by wicked Ralph the rover. One fine day, as the story goes, when the bell was ringing gently, the pirate put out to the

rock, saying, I'll sink that bell and plagued the abbot of Aberbrothock. So he cut the rope and down went the bell with a gurgling sound. The bubbles rose and burst around, etc. Then Ralph the rover sailed away. He scoured the seas for many a day. And now, grown rich with plundered store, he steers his course for Scotland's shore. Then came a terrible storm with cloud darkness and night darkness and high roaring waves. Now where we are, cried the pirate, I cannot tell, but I wish I could hear the inch cape bell. And the story goes on to tell how the wretched rover tore his hair and cursed himself in his despair when, with a shivering shock, the stout ship struck on the Inch Cape Rock, and went down with Ralph and his plunder beside the good priest's

bell. The story appealed to our love of kind deeds and of wildness and fair play. A lot of terrifying experiences connected with these first school days grew out of crimes committed by the keeper of a low lodging house in Edinburgh, who allowed poor homeless wretches to sleep on benches or the floor for a penny or so a night, and when kind death came to their relief, sold the bodies for dissection to Dr. Hare of the medical school. None of us children ever heard anything like the original story. The servant girls told us that dandy doctors clad in long black cloaks and supplied with a store of sticking plaster of wondrous adhesiveness, prowled at night about the country lanes and even the town streets, watching for children to chloecter.

choke and sell. The dandy doctor's business method, as the servants explained it, was with lightning quickness to clap a sticking plaster on the face of a scholar, covering mouth and nose, preventing breathing or crying for help. Then pop us under his long black cloak and carry us to Edinburgh to be sold and sliced into small pieces for folk to learn how we were made. We always mention the name dandy doctor in a fearful whisper. and never dared venture out of doors after dark. In the short winter days, it got dark before school closed, and in cloudy weather we sometimes had difficulty in finding our way home

unless a servant with a lantern was sent for us. But during the dandy doctor period, the school was closed earlier, for if detained until the usual hour the teacher could not get us to leave the schoolroom. We would rather stay all night, supperless, than dare the mysterious doctors supposed to be lying in way, for us. We had to go up a hill called the Daval Bray that lay between the schoolhouse and the main street. One evening, just before dark, as we were running up the hill, one of the boys shouted, a dandy doctor, a dandy doctor, and we all fled pell-mell back into the schoolhouse to the

astonishment of Mungo Siddens, the teacher. I can remember to this day the amused look on the good Dominie's face as he stared and tried to guess what had. got into us until one of the older boys breathlessly explained that there was an awful big dandy doctor on the bray and we couldn't go home. Others corroborated the dreadful news. Yes, we saw him plain as anything with his long black cloak to hide us in, and some of us thought we saw a stick and plaster ready in his hand. We were in such a state of fear and trembling that the teacher saw he wasn't going to get rid of us without going himself as leader. He went only a short distance, however, and turned us over to the care of the two biggest scholars, who led us to the top of the bray,

and then left us to scurry home and dash into the door like pursued squirrels diving into their holes. Just before school scaled, closed, we all arose and sang the fine hymn, Lord, dismiss us with thy blessing. In the spring, when the swallows were coming back from their winter homes, we sang, Welcome, welcome, welcome, little stranger, welcome from a foreign shore, safe escape from many a danger. And while singing, we all swayed in rhythm with the music. The cuckoo, that always told his name in the spring of the year, was another favorite song, and when there was nothing in particular to call to mind any special bird or animal, the songs we sang were widely varied, such as, The whale, the whale is the beast for me, plunging along through the deep, deep sea.

But best of all was, Lord dismisses with thy blessing, though at that time the most significant part I fear was the first three words. With my school lessons, Father made me learn hymns and Bible verses. For learning rock of ages, he gave me a penny, and I thus became suddenly rich. Scotch boys are seldom spoiled with money. We thought more of a penny those economical days than the poorest American schoolboy thinks of a dollar. To decide what to do with that first penny was an extravagantly serious affair. I ran in great excitement up and down the street, examining the tempting goodies in the shop windows before venturing on so important an investment. My playmates also became excited when the wonderful news got abroad that Johnny Muir had a penny,

hoping to obtain a taste of the orange, apple, or candy it was likely to bring forth. At this time, infants were baptized and vaccinated a few days after birth. I remember very well a fight with the doctor when my brother David was vaccinated, This happened, I think, before I was sent to school. I couldn't imagine what the doctor, a tall, severe-looking man in black was doing to my brother. But as mother, who was holding him in her arms, offered no objection, I looked on quietly while he scratched the arm until I saw blood. Then, unable to trust even my mother, I managed to spring up high enough to grab and bite the doctor's arm,

yelling that I wasn't going to let him hurt my Bonnie Brither, while to my utter astonishment, mother and the doctor only laughed at me. So far from complete at times is sympathy between parents and children, and so much like wild beasts are baby boys, little fighting, biting, climbing, pagans. Father was proud of his garden and seemed always to be trying to make it as much like Eden as possible, and in a corner of it he gave each of us a little bit of ground for our very own in which we planted what we best liked, wondering how the hard, dry seeds could change into soft leaves and flowers and find their way out to the light, and to see how they were coming on, we used to dig up the larger ones, such as peas and beans every day.

My aunt had a corner assigned to her in our garden, which she filled with lilies, and we all looked with the utmost respect and admiration at that precious lily bed, and wondered whether when we grew up we should ever be rich enough to own one anything like so grand. We imagined that each lily was worth an enormous sum of money and never dared to touch a single leaf or petal of them. We really stood in awe of them. Far, far was I then from the wild lily gardens of California that I was destined to see in their glory.

When I was a little boy at Mungal Sidden's school, a flower show was held in Dunbar, and I saw a number of the exhibitors carrying large handfuls of dahlias, the first I had ever seen. I thought them marvelous in size and beauty, and, as in the case of my aunt's lilies, wondered if I should ever be rich enough to own some of them.

Although I never dared to touch my aunt's sacred lilies, I have good cause to remember stealing some confidence, flowers from an apothecary, Peter Lawson, who also answered the purpose of a regular physician to most of the poor people of the town and adjacent country. He had a pony which was considered very wild and dangerous, and when he was called out of town, he mounted this wonderful beast, which, after standing long in the stable, was frisky and boisterous, and often to our delight reared and jumped and danced about from side to side of the street, before, he could be persuaded to go ahead.

We boys gazed in awful admiration and wondered how the druggist could be so brave and able as to get on and stay on that wild beasts back. This famous Peter loved flowers and had a fine garden surrounded by an iron fence, through the bars of which, when I thought no one saw me, I oftentimes snatched a flower and took to my heels. One day Peter discovered me in this mischief, dashed out into the street and caught me. I screamed that I wouldn't steal any more if he would let me go. He didn't say anything, but just dragged me along to the stable, where he kept the wild pony, pushed me in right

back of its heels, and shut the door. I was screaming, of course, but as soon as I was imprisoned, the fear of being kicked quenched all noise. I hardly dared breathe. My only hope was in motionless silence. Imagine the agony I endured. I did not steal any more of his flowers. He was a good, hard judge of boy nature. I was in Peter's hand sometime before this when I was about two and a half years old. The servant girl bathed us small folk before putting us to bed. The smarting, soapy scrubbings of the Saturday nights in preparation for the Sabbath were particularly severe, and we all dreaded them. My sister, Sarah, the next older than me, wanted the long-legged stool I was sitting on awaiting my turn,

so she just tipped me off. My chin struck on the edge of the bathtub, and as I was talking at the time, my tongue happened to be in the way of my teeth when they were closed by the blow, and a deep gash was cut on the side of it, which bled profusely. Mother came running at the noise I made, wrapped me up, put me in the servant girl's arms, and told her to run with me, through the garden and out by a backway to Peter Lawson to have something done to stop the bleeding. He simply pushed a wad of cotton into my mouth after soaking it in some brown, stringent stuff, and told me to be sure to keep my mouth shut, and all would soon be well.

Mother put me to bed, calm my fears, and told me to lie still and sleep like a good bairn. But just as I was dropping off to sleep, I swallowed the bulky wad of medicated cotton, and with it, as I imagine, my tongue also. My screams over so great a loss brought mother, and when she anxiously took me in her arms and inquired what was the matter, I told her that I had swallowed my tongue. She only laughed at me, much to my astonishment,

when I expected that she would bewail the awful loss her boy had sustained. My sisters, who were older than I, oftentimes said, when I happened to be talking too much, it's a pity you hadn't swallowed at least half of that long tongue of yours when you were little. It appears natural for children to be fond of water, although the Scotch method of making every duty dismal contrived to make necessary bathing for health terrible to us. I well remember among the awful experiences of childhood being taken by the servant to the seashore when I was between two and three years old, stripped at the side of a deep pool in the world,

the rocks, plunged into it among crawling crawfish and slippery wriggling snake-like eels, and drawn up, gasping and shrieking, only to be plunged down again and again. As the time approached for this terrible bathing, I used to hide in the darkest corners of the house, and oftentimes a long search was required to find me. But after we were a few years older, we enjoyed bathing with other boys as we wandered along the shore. Careful, however, not to get into a pool that had an invisible boy-divouring monster at the bottom of it. Such pools, miniature maelstroms, were called Sukin-in-Goats, and were well-known to most of us. Nevertheless, we never ventured into any pool on strange parts of the coast before we had thrust a stick into it.

If the stick were not pulled out of our hands, we boldly entered, and enjoyed plashing and ducking, long air we had learned to swim. One of our best playgrounds was the famous old Dunbar Castle, to which King Edward fled after his defeat at Vanockburn. It was built more than a thousand years ago, and though we know little of its history, we had heard many mysterious stories of the battles fought about its walls, and firmly believed that every bone we found in the ruins belonged to an ancient warrior. We tried to see who could climb highest on the crumbling peaks and crags, and took chances that no cautious mountaineer would try.

That I did not fall and finish my rock scrambling in those adventurous boyhood days seems now a reasonable wonder. Among our best games were running, jumping, wrestling, and scrambling. I was so proud of my skill as a climber that when I first heard of hell from a servant girl who loved to tell its horrors and warn us that if we did anything wrong we would be cast into it,

I always insisted that I could climb out of it. I imagined it was only a sooty pit with stone walls like those of the castle, and I felt sure there must be chinks and cracks in the masonry for fingers and toes. Anyhow, the terrors of the horrible place seldom lasted long beyond the telling, for natural faith casts out fear. Most of the Scotch children believe in ghosts, and some, under peculiar conditions, continued to believe in them all through. life. Grave ghosts are deemed particularly dangerous, and many of the most credulous will go far out

of their way to avoid passing through or near a graveyard in the dark. After being instructed by the servants in the nature, looks, and habits of the various black and white ghosts, boo-wuzzies, and witches, we often speculated as to whether they could run fast, and tried to believe that we had a good chance to get away from most of them. To improve our speed and wind, we often took long runs into the country. Tamashander's mayor outran a lot of witches, at least until she reached a place of safety beyond the keystone of the bridge, and we thought, perhaps, we also might be able to outrun them. Our house formerly belonged to a physician, and a servant girl told us that the ghost of the dead doctor haunted one of the unoccupied rooms in the second story that was kept dark on account of a heavy

window tax. Our bedroom was adjacent to the ghost room, which had in it a lot of chemical apparatus, glass tubing, glass and brass retorts, test tubes, flasks, etc. And we thought that those strange articles were still used by the old dead doctor in compounding physics. In the long summer days, David and I were put to bed several hours before sunset. Mother tucked us in carefully, drew the curtains of the big old-fashioned bed, and told us to lie still and sleep like good barons. But we were usually out of bed playing games of daring called scutures about as soon as our loving mother reached the foot of the stairs, for we couldn't lie still, however hard we might try. Going into the ghost room was regarded as a very great scocher. After venturing in a few steps,

and rushing back in terror, I used to dare David to go as far without getting caught. The roof of our house, as well as the craigs and walls of the old castle, offered fine mountaineering exercise. Our bedroom was lighted by a dormer window. One night I opened it in search of good scutures and hung myself out over the slates, holding on to the sill, while the wind was making a balloon of my nightgown. I then dared David to try the adventure, and he'd did. Then I went out again and hung by one hand, and David did the same. Then I hung by one finger, being careful not to slip, and he did that too. Then I stood on the sill and examined the edge of the left wall of the window, crept up the slates along its side by slight finger holds, got astride

of the roof, sat there a few minutes looking at the scenery over the garden wall, while the wind was howling and threatening to blow me off, then managed to slip down, catch hold of the sill, and get safely back into the room. But before attempting this scocher, recognizing its dangerous character with commendable caution, I warned David that in case I should happen to slip, I would grip the rain trough when I was going over the ease and hang on, and that he must then run fast downstairs and tell father to get a ladder for me, and tell him to be quick, because I would soon be tired hanging dangling in the wind by my hands. After my return from this capital scroocher, David, not to be outdone, crawled up to the top of the window roof and got

bravely astride of it. But in trying to return, he lost courage and began to greet, to cry, I cannot get down, I cannot get down. I leaned out of the window and shouted encouragingly, dinah greet, dinah greet, I'll help you down. If you greet, father will hear, and he'll give us an awful scalping. Then, standing on the sill and holding on by one hand to the window casing, I directed him to slip his feet down within reach, and, after securing a good hold, I jumped inside and dragged him in by his heels. This finished scuture scrambling for the night and frightened us into bed. In the short winter days when it was dark even at our early bedtime, we usually spent the hours before going to sleep, plain voyages around the world under the bed clothing.

after mother had carefully covered us, bade us good night, and gone downstairs, we set out on our travels. Burrowing like moles, we visited France, India, America, Australia, New Zealand, and all the places we had ever heard of. Our travels never ending until we fell asleep. When mother came to take a last look at us before she went to bed, to see that we were covered, we were oftentimes covered so well that she had difficulty in finding us, for we were hidden in all sorts of positions where sleep happened to overtake us. But in the morning we always found ourselves in good order lying straight, like good barons, as she said. Some 50 years later, when I visited Scotland, I got one of my Dunbar schoolmates to introduce me to the owners of our old home,

from whom I obtained permission to go upstairs to examine our bedroom window and judge what sort of adventure getting on its roof must have been. And with all my after experience in mountaineering, found that what I had done in daring boyhood was now beyond my skill. Boys are often at once cruel and merciful, thoughtlessly hard-hearted and tender-hearted, sympathetic, pitiful and kind in ever-changing contrasts. Love of neighbors, human or animal, grows up amid savage traits, coarse and fine. When father made out to get us securely locked up in the backyard to prevent our sure and field wanderings, we had to play away the comparatively dull time as best we could.

One of our amusements was hunting cats without seriously hurting them. These sagacious animals knew, however, that, though not very dangerous, boys were not to be trusted. One time in particular, I remember, when we began throwing stones at an experienced old Tom, not wishing to hurt him much, though he was a tempting mark. He soon saw what we were up to, fled to the stable and climbed to the top of the haymanger. He was still within range, however, and we kept the stones flying faster and faster, but he just blinked and played possum without wincing either at our best shots or at the noise we made. I happened to strike him pretty hard with a good-sized pebble, but he still blinked and sat still

as if without feeling. He must be mortally wounded, I said, and now we must kill him to put him out of pain, the savage in us rapidly growing with indulgence. all took heartily to this sort of cat mercy and began throwing the heaviest stones we could manage but that old fellow knew what characters we were and just as we imagined him mercifully dead he evidently thought the play was becoming too serious and that it was time to retreat for suddenly with a wild whirr and gur of energy he launched himself over our heads rushed across the yard in a blur of speed climbed to the roof of another building and over the garden wall out of pain and bad company with all his lives wide awake and in good working order after we had thus learned that tom had at least nine lives we tried to verify the common saying that no matter how far cats fell they always landed on their feet unhurt we caught one in our back yard not tom but a smaller one of manageable size and somehow got him smuggled up to the top story of the house i don't know how in the world we managed to let go of him for as soon as we opened the window and held him over the sill he knew his danger and made violent efforts to scratch and to scratch and bite his way back into the room, but we determined to carry the thing through and at last managed

to drop him. I can remember to this day how the poor creature in danger of his life, strained and balanced as he was falling and managed to alight on his feet. This was a cruel thing for even wild boys to do, and we never tried the experiment again, for we sincerely pitied the poor fellow when we saw him creeping slowly away, stunned and frightened with a swollen black and blue chin. again showing the natural savagery of boys we delighted in dog fights and even in the horrid red work of slaughterhouses often running long distances and climbing over walls and roofs to see a pig killed as soon as we heard the desperately earnest squealing and if the butcher was good-natured we begged him to let us get a near view of the mysterious insides and to give us a bladder to blow up for a football but here is an illustration of the better side of boys nature. In our backyard there were three elm trees, and in the one nearest the house, a pair of robin redbreasts had their nest. When the young were almost able to fly a troop of the celebrated

Scottish graze visited Dunbar, and three or four of the fine horses were lodged in our stable. When the soldiers were polishing their swords and helmets, they happened to notice the nest, and just as they were leaving, one of them climbed the tree and robbed it. With sore sympathy, we watched the young birds as the hard-hearted robber pushed them one by one beneath his jacket, all but two that jumped out of the nest and tried to fly. But they were easily caught as they flooded on the ground and were hidden away with the rest. The distress of the bereaved parents as they hovered and screamed over the frightened, crying children they so long had loved and sheltered and fed was pitiful to see. But the shining soldier rolled grandly away on his big gray horse,

caring only for the few pennies the young songbirds would bring and the beer they would buy, while we all, sisters and brothers, were crying and sobbing. I remember as if it happened this day how my heart fairly ached and choked me. Mother put us to bed and tried to comfort us, telling us that the little birds would be well fed and grow big and soon learned to sing in pretty cages. But again and again we rehearsed the sad story of the poor bereaved birds and their frightened children and could not be.

be comforted. Father came into the room when we were half asleep and still sobbing, and I heard mother telling him that, ah, the baron's hearts were broken over the robbing of the nest in the elm. After attaining the manly, belligerent age of five or six years, very few of my school days passed without a fistfight, and half a dozen was no uncommon number. When any classmate of our own age questioned our rank in standing as fighters, we always made haste to settle the matter at a quiet place on the dovil bray. To be a good fighter was our highest ambition, our dearest aim in life in or out of school. To be a good scholar was a secondary consideration, though we tried hard to hold high places in our classes and gloried in being ducks. We fairly reveled in

the battle stories of glorious William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, with which we were which every breath of scotch air is saturated, and of course we were all going to be soldiers. On the Daublebrae battleground, we often manage to bring on something like real war, greatly more exciting than personal combat. Choosing leaders, we divided into two armies. In winter, damp snow furnished plenty of ammunition to make the thing serious, and in summer sand and grass sods, cheering and shouting some battle cry such as Banach-burn, Banach-Barn. burn Scotland forever, the last war in India. We were led bravely on. For heavy battery work, we stuffed our scotch blue bonnets with snow and sand, sometimes mixed with gravel,

and fired them at each other as cannonballs. Of course, we always looked eagerly forward to vacation days and thought them slow in coming. Old Mungo Siddens gave us a lot of gooseberries are currents and wished us a happy time. Some sort of special closing exercises, singing, recitations, etc., celebrated the great day, but I remember only the berries, freedom from schoolwork, and opportunities for running away rambles in the fields and along the wave-beaten seashore. An exciting time came when at the age of seven or eight years I left the old Davlebray school for the grammar school. Of course, I had a terrible lot of fighting to do because a new scholar had to meet every one of his age who dared to challenge him, this being the common introduction

to a new school. It was very strenuous for the first month or so, establishing my fighting rank, taking up new studies, especially Latin and French, getting acquainted with new classmates and the master and his rules. In the first few Latin and French lessons, the new teacher, Mr. Lyon, blandly smiled at our comical blunders, but pedagogical weather of the severest kind quickly set in,

when for every mistake, everything short of perfection, the taus was promptly applied. We had to get three lessons every day in Latin, three in French, and as many in English, besides spelling, history, arithmetic, and geography. Word lessons in particular, the woods, couldst, shouldst, have loved kind, were kept up with much warlike thrashing until I had committed the whole of the French, Latin, and English grammars to memory,

and in connection with reading lessons, we were called on to recite parts of them with the rules over and over again, as if all the regular and irregular, incomprehensible verb stuff was poetry. In addition to all this, Father made me learn so many Bible verses every day that by the time I was 11 years of age, I had about three-fourths of the Old Testament and all of the new by heart and by sore flesh.

I could recite the New Testament from the beginning of Matthew to the end of Revelation without a single stop. The dangers of cramming and of making scholars study at home instead of letting their little brains rest were never heard of in those days. We carried our schoolbooks home in a strap every night and committed to memory our next day's lessons before we went to bed, and to do that we had to bend our attention as closely on our tasks as lawyers on great million-dollar cases.

I can't conceive of anything that would now enable me to concentrate my attention more fully than when I was a mere stripling boy, and it was all done by whipping, thrashing in general. Old-fashioned Scotch teachers spent no time in seeking short roads to knowledge or in trying any of the newfangled psychological methods so much in vogue nowadays. There was nothing said about making the seats easy or the lessons easy. We were simply driven, point blank against our books like soldiers against the enemy and sternly ordered up and atom commit your lessons to memory if we failed in any part however slight we were whipped for the grand simple all-sufficing scotch discovery had been made that there was a close connection between the skin and the memory and that

irritating the skin excited the memory to any required degree. Fighting was carried on still more vigorously in the high school than in the common school. Whenever anyone was challenged, either the challenge was allowed or it was decided by a battle on the seashore, where with stubborn enthusiasm we battered each other as if we had not been sufficiently battered by the teacher. When we were so fortunate as to finish a fight without getting a black eye, we usually escaped a thrashing at home and another next morning at school. For other traces of the fray could be easily washed off at a well on the church bray or concealed or passed as results of playground accidents, but a black eye could never be explained away from

downright fighting. A good double thrashing was the inevitable penalty, but all without avail. fighting went on without the slightest abatement, like natural storms, for no punishment less than death, could quench the ancient inherited belligerents burning in our pagan blood. Nor could we be made to believe it was fair that father and teacher should thrash us so industriously for our good, while begrudging us the pleasure of thrashing each other for our good. All these various thrashings, however, were admirably influential in development. not only memory but fortitude as well. For if we did not endure our school punishments and fighting pains without flinching and making faces, we were mocked on the playground and public

opinion on a Scotch playground was a powerful agent in controlling behavior. Therefore, we at length managed to keep our features in smooth repose while enduring pain that would try anybody but an American Indian. Far from feeling that we were called on to endure too much pain, one of our playground games was thrashing each other with whips, about two feet long made from the tough, wiry stems of a species of polygonum fastened together in a stiff, firm braid. One of us handing two of these whips to a companion to take his choice, we stood up close together and thrashed each other on the legs until one succumbed to the intolerable pain and thus lost the game. Nearly all of our playground games were strenuous. Shin battering, shiny,

wrestling, prisoners base, and dogs and hares, all augmenting in no slight degree are lessons in fortitude. Moreover, we regarded our punishments and pains of every sort as training for war, since we were all going to be soldiers. Besides, single combats we sometimes assembled on Saturdays to meet the scholars of another school, and very little was required for the growth of strained relations and war. The immediate cause might be nothing more than a saucy stare. Perhaps the scholar stared at would insolently inquire. What are you glaring at, Bob? Bob would reply, I'll look where I have mind and hinder me if you dare. Well, Bob, the outraged, stared at scholar would reply, I'll soon let you see whether I

dare or no, and give Bob a blow on the face. This opened the battle, and every good scholar belonging to either school was drawn into it. After both sides were sore and weary, a strong, lunged warrior would be heard above the din of battle, shouting, I'll tell you what we do with ye, if ye let us alone we'll let ye alone and the school war ended as most wars between nations do and some of them begin in much the same way notwithstanding the great number of harshly enforced rules not very good order was kept in school in my time there were two schools within a few rods of each other one for mathematics navigation etc the other called the grammar school that i attended the masters lived in a big freestone house within eight or ten yards of the schools so that they could easily step out for anything they wanted or send one of the scholars. The moment our master disappeared, perhaps for a book or a drink, every scholar left his seat and his lessons, jumped on top of the benches and desks or crawled beneath them, tugging, rolling, wrestling, accomplishing in a minute

a depth of disorder and din unbelievable, saved by a Scottish scholar. We even even, carried on war, class against class, in those wild, precious minutes. A watcher gave the alarm when the master opened his house door to return, and it was a great feat to get into our places before he entered, adorned in awful majestic authority, shouting silence, and striking, resounding blows with his cane on a desk or on some unfortunate scholars back. 47 years after leaving this fighting school, I returned on a visit to Scotland, and a cousin in Dunbar introduced me to a minister who was acquainted with the history of the school, and obtained for me an invitation to dine with the new master. Of course, I gladly accepted, for I wanted to see the old

place of fun and pain and the battleground on the sands. Mr. Lyon, our able teacher and thrasher, I learned, had held his place as master of the school for 20 or 30 years after I left it, and had recently died in London after preparing many young men for the English universities. At the dinner table, while I was recalling the amusements and fights of my old school days, the minister remarked to the new master, now don't you wish that you had been teacher in those days and gained the honor of walloping John Muir? This pleasure, so merrily suggested, showed that the minister also had been a fighter in his youth. The old Freestone School building was still perfectly sound, but the carved ink-stained desks were almost whittled away.

The highest part of our playground back of the school commanded a view of the sea, and we loved to watch the passing ships and, judging by their rigging, make guesses as to the ports they had sailed from, those to which they were. were bound, what they were loaded with, their tonnage, etc. In stormy weather, they were all smothered in clouds and spray, and showers of salt scud torn from the tops of the waves came flying over the playground wall. In those tremendous storms many a brave ship foundered or was tossed and smashed on the rocky shore. When a wreck occurred within a mile or two of the town, we often managed by running fast to reach it and pick up some of the spoils.

In particular, I remember visiting the battered fragments of an unfortunate brig or schooner that had been loaded with apples, and finding fine, unpidiful sport in rushing into the spent waves and picking up the red-cheeked fruit from the frothy, seething foam. All our school books were extravagantly illustrated with drawings of every kind of sailing vessel, and every boy owned some sort of craft, whittled from a block of wood and trimmed with infinite panes, sloops, schooners, brigs, and full-rigged ships, with their sails and string ropes properly adjusted

and named for us by some old sailor. These precious toy craft with lead keels, we learned to sail on a pond near the town. With a sail set at the proper angle to the wind, they made fast, straight voyages across the pond to boys' on the other side, who readjusted the sails and started them back on the return voyages. Oftentimes, fleets of half a dozen or more were started together in exciting races. Our most exciting sport, however, was playing with gunpowder.

We made guns out of gas pipe, mounted them on sticks of any shape, clubbed our pennies together for powder, gleaned pieces of lead here and there and cut them into slugs, and while one aimed another applied a match to the touch hole with these awful weapons we wandered along the beach and fired at the gulls and solon geese as they passed us fortunately we never heard any of them that we knew of we also dug holes in the ground put in a handful or two of powder

tamped well around a fuse made of a wheat stock and reaching cautiously forward touched a match to the straw this we called making earthquakes oft times we went home with singed hair and faces well peppered with powder grains that could not be washed out. Then, of course, came a correspondingly severe punishment from both father and teacher. Another favorite sport was climbing trees and scaling garden walls. Boys eight or ten years of age could get over almost any wall by standing on each other's shoulders, thus making living ladders.

To make walls secure against marauders, many of them, them were finished on top with broken bottles embedded in lime, leaving the cutting edges sticking up. But with bunches of grass and weeds, we could sit or stand in comfort on top of the jaggedists of them. Like squirrels that begin to eat nuts before they are ripe, we began to eat apples about as soon as they were formed, causing, of course, desperate gastric disturbances to be cured by castor oil. Serious were the risks we ran in climbing and squeezing through hedges, and, of course, among the country folk, we were far from welcome. Farmers passing us on the roads often shouted by way of greeting, Oh, you vagabonds, back to the town with ye, gang back where ye belong.

You're up to mischief, I's warrant, I can see it. The gamekeeper will catch ye, and most like Yila be hanged some day. breakfast in those old Langzine days was simple oatmeal porridge, usually with a little milk or triacal, served in wooden dishes called luggies, formed of staves hooped together like miniature tubs about four or five inches in diameter. One of the staves, the lug or ear, a few inches longer than the others, served as a handle, while the number of luggies ranged in a row on a dresser indicated the size of the family. We never dreamed of anything to come. We never dreamed of come after the porridge or of asking for more. Our portions were consumed in about a couple of minutes, then off to school. At noon we came racing home ravenously hungry. The midday meal called dinner

was usually vegetable broth, a small piece of boiled mutton, and barley meal scone. None of us like the barley scone bread, therefore we got all we wanted of it, and in desperation had to eat it, for we were always hungry, about as hungry after as before. meals. The evening meal was called tea and was served on our return from school. It consisted, as far as we children were concerned, of half a slice of white bread without butter, barley scone, and warm water with a little milk and sugar in it, a beverage called content, which warmed but neither cheered nor inebriated. Immediately after tea, we ran across the street with our books to Grandfather Gillery, who took pleasure in seeing us and hearing us recite,

our next day's lessons, then back home to supper, usually a boiled potato and piece of barley scone, then family worship and to bed. Our amusements on Saturday afternoons and vacations depended mostly on getting away from home into the country, especially in the spring when the birds were calling loudest. Father sternly forbade David and me from playing truant in the fields with plundering wanderers like ourselves, fearing we might go on from bad to worse, get hurt in climbing over walls, caught by gamekeepers, or lost by falling over a cliff into the sea. Play as much as you like in the backyard and garden, he said, and mind what you'll get when you forget and disobey. Thus he warned us with an awfully stern countenance, looking very hard-hearted,

while naturally his heart was far from hard, though he devoutly believed in eternity. punishment for bad boys both here and hereafter. Nevertheless, like devout martyrs of wildness, we stole away to the seashore or the green sunny fields with almost religious regularity, taking advantage of opportunities when Father was very busy to join our companions, oftenest to hear the birds sing and hunt their nests, glorying in the number we had discovered and called our own. A sample of our nest chatter was something like this. Willie Chisholm would proudly exclaim, I can, no, 17 nests, and you, Johnny, can only 15.

But I wouldn't give my 15 for your 17. For five of mine are larks and mavis's. You can only three are the best singers. Yes, Johnny, but I can six goldies, and you can only one. Most of years are only sparrows and linties and robin red breasts. Then perhaps Bob Richardson would loudly declare that he kinned more nests than anybody, for he can twenty-three, with about fifty eggs in them and more than fifty young birds, maybe a hundred, some of them nothing but raw gorblins,

but lots of them as big as their mithers and ready to flee, and about 50 crow's nests and three fox dens. Oh, yes, Bob, but that's no fair, for nobody counts crows nests in foxholes, and then you live in the country at Belle Haven where ye have the best chance. Yes, but I can a lot of Bumby's nests, both the red-legged and the yellow-legged kind.

Oh, what cares for Bumby's nests? Well, but here's something. My father let me gang to a fox hunt, and man, it was grand to see the hounds and the long-legged horses loping the dikes and burns and hedges. The nests, I fear, with the beautiful eggs and young birds, were prized quite as highly as the songs of the glad parents. But no Scotch boy that I know of ever failed to listen with enthusiasm to the songs of the skylarks. oftentimes on a broad meadow near Dunbar we stood for hours enjoying their marvelous singing and soaring. From the grass where the nest was hidden, the male would suddenly rise, as straight as if shot up, to a height of perhaps 30 or 40 feet, and sustaining himself with rapid wing beats poured down the most delicious melody, sweet and clear and strong,

overflowing all bounds. Then suddenly he would soar higher again and again, ever higher and higher, soaring and singing until lost to sight even on perfectly clear days, and oftentimes in cloudy weather, far in the downy cloud, as the poet says. To test our eyes, we often watched a lark until he seemed a faint speck in the sky, and finally passed beyond the keenest sighted of us all. I see him yet, we would cry. I see him yet. I see him yet. I see him yet as he soared. And finally, only one of us would be left to claim that he still saw him. At last, he too would have to admit that the singer had soared beyond his sight. And still the music came pouring down to us in glorious profusion from a height far above our vision, requiring marvelous power

of wing and marvelous power of voice for that rich, delicious, soft, and yet clear music was distinctly heard long after the bird was out of sight. Then, suddenly ceasing, the glorious singer would appear, falling like a bolt straight down to his nest where his mate was sitting on the eggs. It was far too common of practice among us to carry off a young lark just before it could fly, place it in a cage, and fondly, laboriously feed it. Sometimes we succeeded in keeping one alive for a year or two, and when awakened by the spring weather, it was pitiful to see the quivering, imprisoned, soarer of the heavens, rapidly beating its wings and singing as though it were flying and hovering in the air

like its parents. To keep it in health, we were taught that we must supply it with a sod of grass, the size of the bottom of the cage to make the poor bird feel as though it were at home on its native meadow a meadow perhaps a foot or at most two feet square again and again it would try to hover over that miniature meadow from its miniature sky just underneath the top of the cage at last conscience-stricken we carried the beloved prisoner to the meadow west of dunbar where it was born and blessing its sweetheart bravely set it free, and our exceeding great reward was to see it fly and sing in the sky. In the winter, when there was but little doing in the fields, we organized running matches.

A dozen or so of us would start out on races that were simply tests of endurance, running on and on along a public road over the breezy hills, like hounds, without stopping or getting tired. The only serious trouble we ever felt, in these long races was an occasional stitch in our sides. One of the boys started the story that sucking raw eggs was a sure cure for the stitches. We had hens in our backyard, and on the next Saturday we managed to swallow a couple of eggs apiece, a disgusting job, but we would do almost anything to mend our speed. And as soon as we could get away after taking the cure, we set out on a 10 or 20-mile run to prove its worth. We thought nothing of running right ahead. We thought nothing of running right

ahead ten or a dozen miles before turning back, for we knew nothing about taking time by the sun, and none of us had a watch in those days. Indeed, we never cared about time until it began to get dark. Then we thought of home and the thrashing that awaited us. Late or early, the thrashing was sure, unless father happened to be away. If he was expected to return soon, mother made haste to get us to bed before his arrival. We escaped the thrashing next morning, for Father never felt like thrashing us in cold blood on the calm Holy Sabbath. But no punishment, however sure and severe, was of any avail against the attraction of the fields and woods. It had other uses, developing memory, etc., but in keeping us at home it was of no use at all. Wildness was ever sounding in our ears,

and nature saw to it that besides school lessons and church lessons, some of her own lessons should be learned, perhaps with a view to the time when we should be called to wander in wildness to our hearts content. O the blessed enchantment of those Saturday runaways in the prime of the spring, how our young wandering eyes reveled in the sunny, breezy, glory of the hills and the sky, every particle of us thrilling and tingling with the bees and glad, birds and glad streams. Kings may be blessed. We were glorious. We were free. School cares and scoldings, heart thrashings and flesh thrashings alike were forgotten

in the fullness of nature's glad wildness. These were my first excursions, the beginnings of lifelong wanderings. End of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 of the story of my boyhood and you. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Sue Anderson The Story of My Boyhood and Youth by John Muir Chapter 2 A New World Stories of America

Glorious News Crossing the Atlantic The New Home A Baptism in Nature New Birds The Adventures of Watch Scotch Correction Marauding Indians

Our Grammarer School Reader called, I think Macalais's course of reading contained a few natural history sketches that excited me very much and left a deep impression, especially a fine description of the fish hawk and the bald eagle by the Scotch

ornithologist Wilson, who had the good fortune to wander for years in the American woods while the country was yet mostly wild. I read his description over and over again, till I got the vivid picture he drew by heart, the long-winged hawk,

circling over the heaving waves, every motion watched by the eagle perched on the top of a craig or dead tree, the fish hawk poising for a moment to take aim at a fish and plunging under the water. The eagle with kindling eye spreading his wings ready for instant flight in case the attack should prove successful. The hawk emerging with a struggling fish in his talons and proud flight, the eagle launching himself in pursuit, the wonderful wingwork in the sky, the fish hawk, though encumbered with his prey circling higher, higher, striving hard to keep above the robber eagle, the eagle at length soaring above him, compelling him with a cry of despair to drop his hard one prey. Then the eagle steadying himself for a moment to take aim,

descending swift as a lightning bolt, and seizing the falling fish before it reached. the sea. Not less exciting and memorable was Audubon's wonderful story of the passenger pigeon, a beautiful bird flying in vast flocks that darkened the sky like clouds, countless millions assembling to rest and sleep and rear their young in certain forests, miles in length and breadth, 50 or a hundred nests on a single tree, the overloaded branches bending low and often breaking, the farmers gathering from far and near, beating down countless thousands of, of the young and old birds from their nests and roosts with long poles at night, and in the morning driving their bands of hogs, some of them brought from farms a hundred miles distant to fatten on the

dead and wounded covering the ground. In another of our reading lesson, some of the American forests were described. The most interesting of the trees to us boys was the sugar maple, and soon after we had learned this sweet story, we heard everybody talking about the discovery of gold in the same wonder-filled country. One night when David and I were at Grandfather's fireside, solemnly learning our lessons as usual, my father came in with news, the most wonderful, most glorious that wild boys ever heard. Barrens, he said, you needn't learn your lessons tonight, for we're going to America the morn. No more grammar, but boundless woods full of mysterious good things, trees full of sugar growing

in ground full of gold, hawks, eagles, pigeons filling the sky, millions of birds' nests, and no gamekeepers to stop us in all the wild, happy land. We were utterly blindly glorious. After father left the room, Grandfather gave David and me a gold coin apiece for a keepsake and looked very serious, for he was about to be deserted in his lonely old age. And when we, in fullness of young joy, spoke of what we were going to do, of the wonderful birds in their nests that we should find the sugar and gold, etc., and promised to send him a big box full of that tree sugar, packed in gold from the glorious

paradise over the sea, poor lonely grandfather about to be forsaken, looked with downcast eyes on the floor and said in a low, trembling, troubled voice, ah, poor laddies, poor laddies, you'll find something else over the sea, for by gold and sugar, birds nests and freedom for lessons in schools, you'll find plenty hard, hard work. And so we did. But nothing he could say could cloud our joy or abate the fire of youthful, hopeful, fearless adventure, nor could we in the midst of such measureless excitement see or feel the shadows and sorrows of his darkening old age. To my schoolmates, met that night on the street, I shouted the glorious news, I'm going to a me.

America the morn. None could believe it. I said, well, just you see if I am at the school the morn. Next morning, we went by rail to Glasgow, and thence joyfully sailed away from beloved Scotland, flying to our fortunes on the wings of the winds, carefree as thistle seeds. We could not then know what we were leaving, what we were to encounter in the new world, nor what our gains were likely to be. We were too young and full of hope for fear, or regret. But not too young to look forward with eager enthusiasm to the wonderful, schoolless, bookless American wilderness. Even the natural heart pain of parting from grandfather and grandmother Gilry, who loved us so well, and from mother and sisters and brother, was quickly quenched in young

joy. Father took with him only my sister Sarah, 13 years of age, myself, 11, and brother David, nine, leaving my eldest sister Margaret and the three youngest of the family, Daniel, Mary, and Anna, with mother to join us after a farm had been found in the wilderness and a comfortable house made to receive them. In crossing the Atlantic before the days of steamships or even the American clippers, the voyages made in old-fashioned sailing vessels were very long. Ours was six weeks and three days, but because we had no lessons to get, that long voyage had not a dull moment for us boys. Father and sister Sarah, with most of the old folks, stayed below in rough weather, groaning in the miseries of seasickness. Many of the passengers wishing they had

never ventured in the old rock and creel, as they called our bluff-bowed wave-beating ship. And when the weather was moderately calm singing songs in the evenings, the youthful sailor, Frank and bold, oh, why left I my home, why did I cross the deep, etc. But, but no matter how much the old tub tossed about and battered the waves, we were on deck every day, not in the least seasick, watching the sailors at their rope hauling and climbing work, joining in their songs, learning the names of the ropes and sails, and helping them as far as they would let us, playing games with other boys in calm weather when the deck was dry, and in stormy weather rejoicing in sympathy with the big curly-topped waves.

The captain occasionally called David and me into his cabin and asked us about our schools, handed us books to read, and seemed surprised to find that Scotch boys could read and pronounce English with perfect accent and knew so much Latin and French. In Scotch schools, only pure English was taught, although not a word of English was spoken out of school. All through life, however well-educated, the Scotch spoke Scotch among their own folk, accepted times when unduly excited. on the only two subjects on which Scotsmen get much excited, namely, religion and politics. So long as the controversy went on with fairly level temper, only good-braid Scots was used, but if one became angry, as was likely to happen, then he immediately began speaking severely

correct English. While his antagonist, drawing himself up, would say, well, there's no use pursuing this subject any further, for I see ye have gotten to your English, as we neared the shore of the great new land with what eager wonder we watched the whales and dolphins and porpoises and seabirds and made the good-natured sailors teach us their names and tell us stories about them there were quite a large number of emigrants aboard many of them newly married couples and the advantages of the different parts of the new world they expected to settle in were often discussed my father started with the intention of going to the back woods of Upper Canada. Before the end of the voyage, however, he was persuaded that the states offered superior advantages, especially Wisconsin and Michigan, where the land was said to be as good as in Canada and far more easily brought under cultivation. For in Canada, the woods were so close and heavy that a man might wear out his life in getting a few acres cleared of trees and stumps. So he changed his mind and concluded to go to one of the western states.

On our wavering westward way, a grain dealer in Buffalo told father that most of the wheat he handled came from Wisconsin, and this influential information finally determined my father's choice. At Milwaukee, a farmer who had come in from the country near Fort Winnebago with a load of wheat, agreed to haul us and our formidable load of stuff to a little town called Kingston for $30. On that hundred-mile journey just after the spring thaw, the roads over the prairies were heavy and miry,

causing no end of lamentation, for we often got stuck in the mud, and the poor farmer sadly declared that never, never again would he be tempted to try to haul such a cruel, heartbreaking, wagon-breaking, horse-killing load. No, not for a hundred dollars. In leaving Scotland, father, like many other home-seeked, burdened himself with far too much luggage, as if all America was still a wilderness in which

little or nothing could be bought. One of his big iron-bound boxes must have weighed about 400 pounds, for it contained an old-fashioned beam scales with a complete set of cast-iron counterweights, two of them 56 pounds each, a 28 and so on down to a single pound. Also, a lot of iron wedges, carpenters, tools, and so forth, and at Buffalo, as if on the very edge of the wilderness, he gladly added to his burden a big cast-iron stove with pots and pans, provisions enough for a long siege, and a scythe and cumbersome cradle for cutting wheat, all of which he succeeded in landing in the primeval Wisconsin woods. A land agent in Kingston gave father a note to a farmer by the name of Alexander Graham,

who lived on the border of the settled part of the country, knew the section lines, and would probably help him find a good place for a farm. So father went away to spy out the land, and in the meantime left us children in Kingston in a rented room. It took us less than an hour to get acquainted with some of the boys in the village. We challenged them to wrestle, run races, climb trees, etc. And in a day or two we felt at home, carefree and happy,

notwithstanding our family was so widely divided. When father returned, he told us that he had found fine land for a farm in sunny, open woods on the side of a lake, and that a team of three yoke of oxen with a big wagon was coming to Hollis to Mr. Gray's place. We enjoyed the strange ten-mile ride through the woods very much, wondering how the great oxen could be so strong and wise and tame as to pull so heavy a load with no other harness than a chain, and a crooked piece of wood on their necks, and how they could sway so obediently to right and left, past roadside trees and stumps when the driver said,

ha, and gee. At Mr. Gray's house, Father again left us for a few days to build a shanty on the quarter section he had selected four or five miles to the westward. In the mean, while we enjoyed our freedom as usual, wandering in the fields and meadows, looking at the trees and flowers, snakes and birds and squirrels. With the help of the nearest neighbors, the little shanty was built

in less than a day after the rough bur oak logs for the walls and the white oak boards for the floor and roof were got together. To this charming hut in the sunny woods overlooking a flowery glacier meadow and a lake rimmed with white water lilies, we were hauled by an ox team across trackless, carrick swamps and low rolling hills sparsely dotted with round-headed. oaks. Just as we arrived at the shanty before we had time to look at it or the scenery about it, David and I jumped down in a hurry off the load of household goods, for we had discovered a Blue Jays nest, and in a minute or so we were up the tree beside it, feasting our eyes on the beautiful green eggs and beautiful birds, our first memorable discovery. The handsome birds had not

seen Scotch boys before and made a desperate screaming as if we were robbers like that. We're themselves, though we left the eggs untouched, feeling that we were already beginning to get rich and wondering how many more nests we should find in the grand sunny woods. Then we ran along the brow of the hill that the shanty stood on and down to the meadow, searching the trees and grass tufts and bushes, and soon discovered a bluebirds and a woodpecker's nest, and began an acquaintance with the frogs and snakes and turtles in the creeks and springs. This sudden plash into pure Wildness, baptism in nature's warm heart, how utterly happy it made us. Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons,

so unlike the dismal grammar, ashes, and cinders so long thrashed into us. Here, without knowing it, we were still at school. Every wild lesson, a love lesson, not whipped, but charmed into us. Ah, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness, everything new and pure in the very prime of the spring, when nature's pulses were beating highest and mysteriously keeping time with our own. Young hearts, young leaves, flowers, animals, the winds and the streams, and the sparkling lake all wildly gladly rejoicing together. Next morning, when we climbed to the precious J-nest to take another admiring look at the eggs,

we found it empty. Not a shell fragment was left, and we wondered how in the world the birds were able to carry off their thin-shelled eggs, either in their bills or in their feet without breaking them, and how they could be kept warm while a new nest was being built. Well, I am still asking these questions. When I was on the Harriman expedition, I asked Robert Ridgeway, the eminent or anthologists, how these sudden flittings were accomplished, and he, frankly, confessed that he didn't know. But guess that Jays and many other birds carried their eggs in their mouths. And when I objected that a J's mouth seemed too small to hold its eggs, he replied that birds' mouths were larger than the narrowness of their bills indicated. Then I asked him what he

thought they did with the eggs, while a new nest was being prepared. He didn't know, neither do I to this day, a specimen of the many puzzling problems presented to the naturalist. We soon found many more nests belonging to birds that were not half so suspicious. The handsome and notorious Blue Jay plunders the nests of other birds, and, of course, he could not trust us. Almost all the others, brown thrushes, bluebirds, song sparrows, kingbirds, henhocks, nighthawks, whippoorwills, woodpeckers, etc., simply tried to avoid being seen to draw or drive us away or paid no attention to us.

We used to wonder how the woodpeckers could bore holes so perfectly round, true mathematical circles. We ourselves could not have done it even with gouges and chisels. We loved to watch them feeding their young and wondered how they could glean food enough for so many clamorous, hungry, unsatisfiable babies, and how they managed to give each one its share, for after the young grew strong, one would get its head out of the doorhole and try to hold possession of it to meet the food later. parents. How hard they work to support their families, especially the red-headed and speckledy woodpeckers and flickers, digging, hammering on scaly bark and decaying trunks and branches from dawn to dark, coming and going at intervals of a few minutes all the live-long day.

We discovered a hen-hawks nest on the top of a tall oak, 30 or 40 rods from the shanty, and approached it cautiously. One of the pair always kept watch. soaring in wide circles high above the tree, and when we attempted to climb it, the big, dangerous-looking bird came swooping down at us and drove us away. We greatly admired the plucky kingbird. In Scotland, our great ambition was to be good fighters, and we admired this quality in the handsome little chattering fly-catcher that whips all the other birds. He was particularly angry when plundering jays and hawks came near his home and took pains to thrash them, not only away from the nest tree, but out of the neighborhood.

The nest was usually built on a bur oak near a meadow where insects were abundant, and where no undesirable visitor could approach without being discovered. When a henhawk hove in sight, the male immediately set off after him, and it was ridiculous to see that great strong bird hurrying away as fast as his clumsy wings would carry him. as soon as he saw the little waspish kingbird coming. But the kingbird easily overtook him, flew just a few feet above him, and with a lot of chattering, scolding notes,

kept diving and striking him on the back of the head until tired. Then he alighted to rest on the hawk's broad shoulders, still scolding and chattering as he rode along, like an angry boy pouring out vials of wrath. Then up and at him again with his sharp bill, and after he had thus driven and ridden his bill, big enemy a mile or so from the nest, he went home to his mate, chuckling and bragging as if trying to tell her what a wonderful fellow he was. This first spring, while some of the birds were

still building their nests and very few young ones had yet tried to fly, father hired a Yankee to assist in clearing eight or ten acres of the best ground for a field. We found new wonders every day and often had to call on this Yankee to solve puzzling questions. We asked him one day if there was any bird in America that the king bird couldn't whip. What about the sandhill crane? Could he whip that long-legged, long-billed fellow? A crane never goes near kingbird's nests or notices so small a bird, he said, and therefore there could be no fighting between them. So we hastily concluded that our hero could whip every bird in the country, except perhaps the sandhill crane. We never tired listening to the wonderful Whipper Will.

One came every night about dusk and sat on a log about 20 or 30 feet from our cabin door and began shouting, Whipper Will, whiperwill! With loud, emphatic earnestness. What's that? What's that? We cried when this startling visitor first announced himself.

What do you call it? Why, it's telling you its name, said the Yankee. Don't you hear it? And what he wants you to do? He says his name is poor Will and he wants you to whip him. and you may if you're able to catch him. Poor Will seemed the most wonderful

of all the strange creatures we had seen. What a wild, strong, bold voice he had, unlike any other we had ever heard on sea or land. A near relative, the bull bat or night hawk, seemed hardly less wonderful. Towards evening, scattered flocks kept the sky lively as they circled around on their long wings a hundred feet or more above the ground,

hunting moths and beetles, interrupting their rather slow but strong regular wing beats at short intervals with quick, quivering strokes while uttering keen, squeaky cries, something like, fee, fee, and every now and then diving nearly to the ground with a loud, ripping, bellowing sound like bull-roaring, suggesting its name, then turning and gliding swiftly up again. These fine, wild gray birds about the size of a pigeon, lay their two, eggs on bare ground without anything like a nest or even a concealing bush or grass tuft. Nevertheless, they are not easily seen, for they are colored like the ground. While sitting on their eggs, they depend so much upon not being noticed that if you are

walking rapidly ahead, they allow you to step within an inch or two of them without flinching. But if they see by your looks that you have discovered them, they leave their eggs or young, and, like a good many other birds, pretend they are sorely wounded. fluttering and rolling over on the ground and gasping as if dying to draw you away. When pursued, we were surprised to find that just when we were at the point of overtaking them, they were always able to flutter a few yards further, until they had led us a quarter of a mile away from the nest. Then, suddenly, getting well, they quietly flew home by a roundabout way to their precious babies or eggs,

over the ills of life victorious, bad boys among the worst. The Yankee took particular pleasure in encouraging us to pursue them. Everything about us was so novel and wonderful that we could hardly believe our senses except when hungry or while father was thrashing us. When we first saw Fountain Lake Meadow on a sultry evening, sprinkled with millions of lightning bugs throbbing with light, the effect was so strange and beautiful that it seemed far too marvelous to be real. Looking from our shanty on the hill, I thought that the whole wonderful,

fairy show must be in my eyes, for only in fighting when my eyes were struck had I ever seen anything in the least like it. But when I asked my brother if he saw anything strange in the meadow, he said, yes, it's all covered with shaky fire sparks. Then I guess that it might be something outside of us, and applied to our all-knowing Yankee to explain it. Oh, it's nothing but lightning bugs, he said, and kindly let us down the hill to the edge of the fiery meadow, caught a few of the wonderful bugs, dropped them into a cup, and carried them to the shanty, where we watched them throbbing and flashing out their mysterious light at regular intervals, as if each little passionate glow were caused by the beating of a heart.

Once I saw a splendid display of glow-worm light in the foothills of the Himalayas, north of Calcutta, but glorious as it appeared in pure starry radiance, it was far less impressive than the extravagant, abounding, quivering, dancing fire on a Wisconsin meadow. Partridge drumming was another great marvel. When I first heard the low, soft, solemn sound, I thought it must be made by some strange disturbance in my head or stomach. But as all seems serene within, I asked David whether he heard anything queer. Yes, he said, I hear something saying, boom, bump, boom, and I'm wondering at it. Then I was half satisfied that the source of the mysterious sound must be in something outside of us, coming perhaps from the ground or from some

ghost or bogie or woodland fairy. Only after long, watching and listening, did we at last discover it in the wings of the plump brown bird. The love song of the common jack snipe seemed not a whit less mysterious than the partridge drumming. It was usually heard on cloudy evenings, a strange, unearthly, winnowing, spirit-like sound, yet easily heard, and at a distance of a third of a mile. Our sharp eyes soon detected the bird while making it, as it circled high in the air over the meadow with wonderfully strong and rapid wing beats,

suddenly descending and rising again and again in deep wide loops, the tones being very low and smooth at the beginning of the descent, rapidly increasing to a curious little whirling storm roar at the bottom and gradually fading lower and lower until the top was reached. It was long, however, before we identified this mysterious wing-singer as the little brown jack snipe that we knew so well and had so often marched as he silently probed the mud around the edges of our meadow stream and springholes, and made short zig-zag

flights over the grass, uttering only little short, crisp quacks and chucks. The love songs of the frogs seemed hardly less wonderful than those of the birds, their musical notes varying from the sweet, tranquil, soothing, peeping, and purring of the highless to the awfully deep, low bass, blunt bellowing of the bullfrogs. Some of the smaller species have wonderfully sharp, clear voices, and told us their good Bible names in musical tones about as plenty as the Whippoor Will. Isaac, Isaac, Jacob, Jacob, Israel, Israel shouted in sharp, ringing, far-reaching tones, as if they had all been to school and severely drilled in elocution.

In the still warm evenings, big bunchy bullfrogs bellowed, drunk, drunk, drunk, juggerum, juggerum. And early in the spring, countless thousands of the commonest species up to the throat in cold water sang in concert, making a mass of music, such as it was, loud enough to be heard at a distance of more than half a mile. Far apart from this loud marsh music is that of the many species of Hila, a sort of soothing immortal melody filling the air like light. We reveled in the glory of the sky scenery as well as that of the woods and meadows and rushy lily bordered lakes. The great thunderstorms in particular interested us, so unlike anything in Scotland, exciting, awful, wondering, admiration. Gazing awe-stricken, we watched the upbuilding of the sublime cloud mountains, glowing, sun-beaten,

pearl and alabaster cumulay, glorious in beauty and majesty, and looking so firm and lasting that birds we thought might build their nests amid their downy bosses. The black-browne storm clouds marching in awful grandeur across the landscape, trailing broad gray sheets of hail and rain like vast cataracts, and ever and anon flashing down vivid zigzag lightning followed by terrible crashing thunder. We saw several trees shattered, and one of them a punky old oak was set on fire, while we wondered why all the trees and everybody and everything did not share the same fate, for oftentimes the whole sky blazed. After sultry storm days, many of the nights were darkened by smooth, black, apparently structureless cloud mantles, which at short intervals were illumined with

startling suddenness to a fiery glow by quick quivering lightning flashes, revealing the landscape in almost noonday brightness to be instantly quenched in solid blackness. But those first days and weeks of unmixed enjoyment and freedom, reveling in the wonderful wildness about us, were soon to be mingled with the hard work of making a farm. I was first put to burning brush in clearing land for the plow. Those magnificent brush fires with great white hearts and red flames, the first big, wild outdoor fires I had ever seen, were wonderful sights for young eyes. Again and again when they were burning fiercest so that we could hardly approach near enough to throw on another branch. Father put them to awfully practical use as warning lessons, comparing their heat with that of

hell and the branches with bad boys. Now John, he would say, now John, just think what an awful thing it would be to be thrown into that fire. And then think of hellfire that is so many times hotter. Into that fire, all bad boys with sinners of every sort who disobey God will be cast as we are casting branches into this brush fire. And although suffering so much, their sufferings will never, never end because neither the fire nor the sinners can die. But those terrible fire lessons quickly faded away in the blithe wilderness air, for no fire can be hotter than the heavenly fire of faith and hope that burns in every healthy boy's heart. Soon after our arrival in the woods, someone added a cat and puppy to the animal's father had

brought. The cat soon had kittens, and it was interesting to watch her feeding, protecting, and training them. After they were able to leave their nest and play, she went out hunting and brought in many kinds of birds and squirrels for them, mostly ground squirrels, spermophiles, called gophers in Wisconsin. When she got within a dozen yards or so of the shanty, she announced her approach by a peculiar call, and the sleeping kittens immediately bounced up and ran to meet her, all racing for the first bite of they knew not what.

And we too ran to see what she brought. She then laid down a few minutes to rest and enjoy the enjoyment of her feasting family, and again vanished in the grass and flowers, coming and going every half hour or so. Sometimes she brought in birds that we had never seen before, and occasionally a flying squirrel, chipmunk, or big fox squirrel. We were just old enough, David and I,

to regard all these creatures as wonders, the strange inhabitants of our new world. The pup was a common cur, though very uncommon to us, a black and white short-haired mongrel that we named Watch. We always gave him a pan of milk in the evening, just before we knelt in family worship, while daylight still lingered in the shanty. And instead of attending to the prayers, I too often studied the small wild creatures playing around us. Field mice scampered about the cabin as though it had been built for them alone,

and their performances were very amusing. About dusk on one of the calm, sultry nights so grateful to maws and beetles, when the puppy was lapping his milk and we were on our knees, in through the door came a heavy broad-shouldered beetle about as big as a mouse, and after it had droned and boomed around the cabin two or three times, the pan of milk, showing white in the gloaming, caught its eyes, and, taking good aim, it alighted with a slanting, glinting plash in the middle of the pan, like a duck alighting in a lake.

Baby Watch, having never before seen anything like that beetle, started back, gazing in dumb astonishment and fear at the black sprawling monster trying to swim. Recovering somewhat from his fright, he began to bark at the creature and ran around and round his milk pan, woof-wuffing, gurring, growling, like an old dog barking at a wild cat or a bear. The natural astonishment and curiosity of that boy dog getting his first entomological lesson in this wonderful world was so immoderately funny that I had great difficulty in keeping from laughing out loud. Snapping turtles were common throughout the woods, and we were delighted to find that they would snap at a stick and hang on like bulldogs,

and we amused ourselves by introducing watch to them, enjoying his curious behavior and theirs in getting acquainted with each other. One day we assisted one of the smallest of the turtles to get a good grip of poor watch's ear, then away he rushed, holding his head sideways, yelping and terror-stricken, with the strange, bug-like reptile biting hard and clinging fast, a shameful amusement even for wild boys. As a playmate, watch was too serious, though he learned more than any stranger would judge him capable of,

was a bold, faithful watchdog, and in his prime a grand fighter, able to whip all the other dogs in the neighborhood. Comparing him with ourselves, we soon, learned that, although he could not read books, he could read faces, was a good judge of character, always knew what was going on and what we were about to do, and like to help us. We could run nearly as fast as he could, see about as far and perhaps here as well, but in sense of smell his nose was incomparably better than ours. One sharp winter morning when the ground was covered with snow,

I noticed that when he was yawning and stretching himself after leaving his bed, he suddenly caught the scent of something that excited him, went round the corner of the house, and looked intently to the westward across a tongue of land that we called West Bank, eagerly questioning the air with quivering nostrils, and bristling up as though he felt sure that there was something dangerous in that direction

and had actually caught sight of it. Then he ran toward the bank, and I followed him, curious to see what his nose had discovered. The top of the bank commanded a view, of the north end of our lake and meadow. And when we got there, we saw an Indian hunter with a long spear going from one muskrat cabin to another, approaching cautiously, careful to make no noise, and then suddenly thrusting his spear down through the house. If well aimed, the spear went through the poor beaver rat as it lay cuddled up in the snug nest it had made for itself in the fall

with so much far-seeing care. And when the hunter felt the spear quivering, he dug down the mossy hut with his tomahawk and secured his prey, the flesh for food, and the skin to sell for a dime or so. This was a clear object lesson on dog's keenness of scent. That Indian was more than half a mile away across a wooded ridge. Had the hunter been a white man, I suppose watch would not have noticed him. When he was about six or seven years old, he not only became cross so that he would do only what he liked, but he fell on evil ways, and was accused by the neighbors who had settled around us of catching and devouring whole broods of chickens, some of them only a day or two out of the shell. We never imagined he would do anything so grossly undog-like, he never did at home,

but several of the neighbors declared over and over again that they had caught him in the act and insisted that he must be shot. At last, in spite of tearful protest, he was condemned and executed. father examined the poor fellow's stomach in search of sure evidence and discovered the heads of eight chickens that he had devoured at his last meal. So, poor watch was killed simply because his taste for chickens was too much like our own. Think of the millions of squabs that preaching, praying men and women kill and eat with all sorts of other animals great and small, young and old, while eloquently discoursing on the coming of the blessed, peaceful, bloodless millennium.

Think of the passenger pigeons that 50 or 60 years ago filled the woods and sky over half the continent, now exterminated by beating down the young from the nests, together with the brooding parents, before they could try their wonderful wings, by trapping them in nets, feeding them to hogs, etc. None of our fellow mortals is safe who eats what we eat, who in any way interferes with our pleasures, or who may be used for work or food, clothing, or ornament or mere cruel, sportish amusement. Fortunately, many are too small to be seen and therefore enjoy life beyond our reach.

And in looking through God's great stone books made up of records reaching back millions and millions of years, it is a great comfort to learn that vast multitudes of creatures great and small and infinite in number lived and had a good time in God's love before man was created. The old scotch fashion of whipping for every act of disobedience or of simple, playful forgetfulness was still kept up

in the wilderness. And, of course, many of those whippings fell upon me. Most of them were outrageously severe and utterly barren of fun. But here is one that was nearly all fun. Father was busy hauling lumber for the frame house that was to be got ready for the arrival of my mother, sisters, and brother left behind in Scotland. One morning, when he was ready to start for a another load, his oxwhip was not to be found. He asked me if I knew anything about it. I told him I didn't know where it was, but Scotch conscience compelled me to confess that when I was playing with it, I had tied it to watch his tail and that he ran away, dragging it through the grass, and came back without it. It must have slipped off his tail, I said, and so I didn't know where it was. This honest,

straightforward little story made father so angry that he exclaimed with heavy foreboding emphasis the very devils in that boy. David, who had been playing with me and was perhaps about as responsible for the loss of the whip as I was, said never a word, for he was always prudent enough to hold his tongue when the parental weather was stormy, and so escaped nearly all punishment. And strange to say this time I also escaped, all except a terrible scolding, though the thrashing weather seemed darker than ever. As if unwilling to let the sun see the shameful job, Father took me into the cabin where the storm was to fall and sent David to the woods for a switch. While he was out selecting the switch, Father put in the spare time

sketching my play wickedness in awful colors, and of course referred again and again to the place for bad boys. In the midst of this terrible word storm, dreading most the impending thrashing, I whimpered that I was only playing because I couldn't help it, didn't know I was doing wrong, wouldn't do it again, and so forth. After this miserable dialogue was about exhausted, father became impatient at my brother for taking so long to find the switch, and so was I, for I wanted to have the thing over and done with. At last in came David, a picture of open-hearted innocence, solemnly dragging a young burr-oak sapling and handed the end of it to father, saying it was the best switch he could find. It was an awfully heavy one, about two and a half

inches thick at the butt and ten feet long, almost big enough for a fence pole. There wasn't room enough in the cabin to swing it, and the moment I saw it, I burst out laughing in the midst of my fears. But father failed to see the fun and was very angry at David, heaved the burroweck outside and passionately demanded his reason for fetching such a muckle rail like that instead of a switch. Do you call that a switch? I have a good mind to thrash you instead of John. David, with demure, downcast eyes, looked preternaturally righteous, but as usual, prudently answered, never a word. It was a hard job in those days to bring up Scotch boys in the way they should go, and poor overworked father was determined to do it if enough of the right kind of switches could be found. But this time,

as the son was getting high, he hitched up old Tom and Jerry and made haste to the Kingston lumberyard, leaving me unscathed and as innocently wicked as ever. For hardly had father got fairly out of sight among the oaks and hickories, ere all our troubles, health-threatnings, and exhortations were forgotten. In the fun we had lassoing a stubborn old sow and laboriously trying to teach her to go reasonably steady in rope harness. She was the first hog that father bought to stock the farm, and we boys regarded her as a very wonderful beast. In a few weeks, she had a lot of pigs, and of all the queer, funny animal children we had yet seen, none amused us more. They were so comic in size and shape, in their gait and gestures, their merry sham fights, and the false alarms they got up for the fun of

scampering back to their mother and begging her in most persuasive little squeals, to lie down and give them a drink. After her darling, short-snouted babies were about a month old, she took them out to the woods and gradually roamed further and further from the shanty in search of acorns and roots. One afternoon we heard a rifle shot, a very noticeable thing as we had no near neighbors as yet. We thought it must have been fired by an Indian on the trail that followed the right bank of the Fox River between portage and Pakwocky Lake,

and passed our shandy at the distance of about three-quarters of a mile. Just a few minutes after that shot was heard, along came the poor mother, rushing up to the shanty for protection with her pigs, all out of breath and terror-stricken. One of them was missing, and we supposed, of course, that an Indian had shot it for food. Next day I discovered a blood puddle where the Indian trail crossed the outlet of our lake.

One of fathers hired men told us that the Indians thought nothing of levying this sort of blackmail whenever they were hungry. The solemn awe and fear in the eyes of that old mother and those little pigs I never can forget. It was as unmistakable and deadly a fear as I ever saw expressed by any human eye and corroborates in no uncertain way the oneness of all of us.

End of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 of the story of my boyhood and youth. This Libre Vox recording is, is in the public domain. Recording by Sue Anderson. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth by John Muir, Chapter 3, Life on a Wisconsin Farm. Humanity in Oxen, Jack the Pony,

Learning to Ride, Knob and Nell, snakes, mosquitoes and their kin, fish and fishing, considering the lilies, learning to swim. a narrow escape from drowning and a victory, accidents to animals. Coming direct from school in Scotland, while we were still hopefully ignorant and far from tame, notwithstanding the unnatural profusion of teaching and thrashing lavished upon us,

getting acquainted with the animals about us was a never-failing source of wonder and delight. At first my father, like nearly all the backwood settlers, bought a yoke of oxen to do the farm work, and as field after field was cleared, the number was gradually increased until we had five yoke. These wise, patient, plotting animals did all the plowing,

logging, hauling, and hard work of every sort for the first four or five years, and never having seen oxen before, we looked at them with the same eager freshness of conception as we did at the wild animals. We worked with them, sympathized with them in their rest and toil and play,

and thus learned to know them far better than we should have had we been only trained scientific naturalists. We soon learned that each ox and cow and calf had individual character. Old white-faced buck, one of the second yoke of oxen we owned, was a notably sagacious fellow. He seemed to reason sometimes almost like ourselves. In the fall we fed the cattle lots of pumice, and had to split them open so that mouthfuls could be readily broken off.

But Buck never waited for us to come to his help. The others, when they were hungry and impatient, tried to break through the hard brine with their teeth, but seldom with success if the pumpkin was full grown. Buck never wasted time in this mumbling, slavering way, but crushed them with his head. He went to the pile, picked out a good one, like a boy choosing an orange or apple,

rolled it down onto the open ground, deliberately kneeled in front of it, placed his broad, flat brow on top of it, brought his weight hard down and crushed it, then quietly arose and went on with his meal in comfort. Some would call this instinct, as if so-called blind instinct must necessarily make an ox stand on its head to break pumpkins when his teeth got sore, or when nobody came with an axe to split them. Another fine ox showed his skill when hungry by opening all the fences that stood in his way to the cornfields. The humanity we found in them came partly through the expression of their eyes when tired, their tones of voice when hungry and calling for food, their patient plodding and pulling in hot weather, their long, drawn-out, sighing breath when exhausted and suffering like ourselves, and their enjoyment of rest with the same grateful look as ours. We recognized their kinship also by their yawning like ourselves once sleepy and evidently enjoying the same peculiar pleasure at the roots of their jaws by the way they stretched themselves in the morning after a good rest.

By learning languages, Scotch, English, Irish, French, Dutch, a smattering of each as required in the faithful service they so willingly wisely rendered, by their intelligent, alert, curiosity manifested in listening to strange sounds, their love of play, the attachments they made, and their mourning long continued when a companion was killed. When we went to portage, our nearest town, about ten or twelve miles from the farm, it would oftentimes be late before we got back. And in the summertime, in sultry, rainy weather, the clouds were full of sheet lightning, which every minute or two would suddenly illumine the landscape, revealing all its features the hills and valleys, meadows and trees about as fully and clearly as the noonday sunshine, then as suddenly the glorious

light would be quenched, making the darkness seem denser than before. On such nights the cattle had to find the way home without any help from us, but they never got off the track, for they followed it by scent like dogs. Once father returning late from Portage or Kingston compelled Tom and Jerry our first oxen to leave the dim track, imagining they must be going wrong. At last they stopped and refused to go further. Then father unhitched them from the wagon, took hold of Tom's tail, and was thus led straight to the shanty. Next morning he set out to seek his wagon and found it on the brow of a steep hill above an impassable swamp. We learned less from the cows because we did not enter so far into their lives, working with them, suffering heat and cold, hunger and thirst,

and almost deadly weariness with them. But none with natural charity could fail to sympathize with them in their love for their calves, and to feel that it in no way differed from the divine mother love of a woman in thoughtful self-sacrificing care, for they would brave every danger, giving their lives for their offspring. Nor could we fail to sympathize with their awkward, blunt-nosed baby calves, with such beautiful, wandering eyes, looking out on the world and slowly getting acquainted with things, all so strange to them, and awkwardly learning to use their legs and play and fight. Before leaving Scotland, Father promised us a pony to ride when we got to America, and we saw to it that this

promise was not forgotten. Only a week or two after our arrival in the woods, he bought us a little Indian pony for $13 from a storekeeper in Kingston, who had obtained him from a Winnebago or Monominee Indian in trade for goods. He was a stout, handsome bay with long black mane and tail, and though he was only two years old, the Indians had already taught him to carry all sorts of burdens, to stand without being tied, to go anywhere over all sorts of ground, fast or slow, and to jump and swim and fear nothing, a truly wonderful creature, strangely different from the shy, skittish, nervous, superstitious, civilized beasts. We turned him loose, and, strange to say, he never ran away from us or refused to be caught.

but behaved as if he had known Scotch boys all his life, probably because we were about as wild as young Indians. One day when Father happened to have a little leisure, he said, Now, Barons, run down the meadow and get your pony and learn to ride him. So we let him out to a smooth place near an Indian mound back of the shanty, where Father directed us to begin. I mounted for the first memorable lesson, crossed the mound,

and set out at a slow walk along the wagon track made in hauling lumber. Then father shouted, hop him up, John, hop him up, make him gallop. Galloping is easier and better than walking or trotting. Jack was willing, and away he sped at a good fast gallop. I managed to keep my balance fairly well by holding fast to the main, but could not keep from bumping up and down, for I was plump and elastic, and so was Jack. Therefore, about half of the time I was in the air.

after a quarter of a mile or so of this curious transportation i cried whoa jack the wonderful creature seemed to understand scotch for he stopped so suddenly i flew over his head but he stood perfectly still as if that flying method of dismounting were the regular way Jumping on again, I bumped and bobbed back along the grassy flowery track. Over the Indian mound, cried, whoa, Jack, flew over his head and alighted in father's arms as gracefully as if it were all intended for circus work. After going over the course five or six times in the same free, picturesque style, I gave place to Brother David, whose performances were much like my own. in a few weeks, however, or a month, we were taking adventurous rides more than a mile long out to a big meadow frequented by Sand Hill cranes and returning safely with wonderful stories

of the great long-legged birds we had seen, and how on the whole journey away and back we had fallen off only five or six times. Gradually, we learned to gallop through the woods without roads of any sort, bareback and without rope or bridle, guiding only by leaning from side to side or by slight knee pressure. In this free way we used to amuse ourselves, riding at full speed across a big kettle that was on our farm without holding on by either mane or tail. These so-called kettles were formed by the melting of large, detached blocks of ice that had been buried in moraine material thousands of years ago when the ice sheet that covered all this region was receding. As the buried ice melted, of course the moraine material

above and about it fell in, forming hopper-shaped hollows, while the grass growing on their sides and around them prevented the rain and wind from filling them up. The one we performed in was perhaps 70 or 80 feet wide and 20 or 30 feet deep, and without a saddle or hold of any kind, it was not easy to keep from slipping over Jack's head in diving. into it or over his tail climbing out. This was fine sport on the long summer Sundays when we were able to steal away before meeting time without being seen. We got very warm and red at it, and oftentimes poor Jack, dripping with sweat like his riders, seemed to have been boiled in that kettle. In Scotland, we had often been admonished to be bold, and this advice we passed on to Jack,

who had already got many a wild lesson from Indian boy. Once, when teaching him to jump muddy streams, I made him try the creek in our meadow at a place where it is about twelve feet wide. He jumped bravely enough, but came down with a grand splash hardly more than halfway over. The water was only about a foot in depth, but the black vegetable mud half afloathe was unfathomable. I managed to wallow ashore, but poor Jack sank deeper and deeper until only his head was visible in the black abyss, and his Indian fortitude was desperately tried. His foundering, so suddenly in the treacherous Gulf, recalled the story of the abbot of Aberbothock's bell, which went down with a gurgling sound while bubbles rose and burst around.

I had to go to Father for help. He tied a long hemp rope brought from Scotland around Jack's neck, and Tom and Jerry seemed to have all they could do to pull him out, after which I got a solemn scolding for asking the poor beast to jump into such a soft bottomless place. We moved into our frame house in the fall when Mother, with the rest of the family, arrived from Scotland, and when the winter snow began to fly, the Burr Oak shanty was made into a stable for Jack. father told us that good meadow hay was all he required but we fed him corn lots of it and he grew very frisky and fat about the middle of winter his long hair was full of dust and as we thought required washing so without taking the frosty weather into account we gave him a thorough soap and water scouring and as we failed to get him rub dry a row of icicles formed under his belly

father happened to see him in this condition and angrily asked what we had been about we said jack was dirty and we had washed him to make him healthy he told us we ought to be ashamed of ourselves soaking the poor beast in cold water at this time a year and when we wanted to clean him we should have sensed enough to use the brush and curry comb. In summer, Dave or I had to ride after the cows every evening about sundown, and Jack got so accustomed to bringing in the drove that when we happened to be a few minutes late, he used to go off alone at the regular time and bring them home at a gallop. It used to make Father very angry to see Jack chasing the cows like a shepherd dog, running from one to the other and giving each a bite on the rump to keep them on the run, flying before him as if pursued by wolves.

Father would declare at times that the wicked beast had the devil in him and would be the death of the cattle. The corral and barn were just at the foot of a hill, and he made a great display of the drove on the home stretch as they wallop down that hill with their tails on end. One evening, when the Pelmel Wild West show was at its wildest, it made Father so extravagantly mad that he ordered me to shoot Jack, i went to the house and brought the gun suffering most horrible mental anguish such as i suppose unhappy abraham felt when commanded to slay isaac

jack's life was spared however though i can't tell what finally became of him i wish i could after father bought a span of work-horses he was sold to a man who said he was going to ride him across the plains to california we had him i think some five or six years he was the stoutest gentlest bravest little horse i ever saw he never seemed tired could canter all day with a man about as heavy as himself on his back and feared nothing once fifty or sixty pounds of beef that was tied on his back slid over his shoulders along his neck and weighed down his head to the ground fairly anchoring him but he stood patient and still for half an hour or so without making the slightest struggle to free himself while i was away getting help to untie the pack-rope and set the load back in its place as i was the eldest boy i had the care of our first span of work-horses their names were nob and nell nob was very intelligent and even affectionate and could learn almost anything nell was entirely different bulky and stubborn though we managed to teach her a good many circus tricks but she never seemed to like to play with us in anything like an affectionate way as nob did we turned them out one day into the pasture and an indian hiding in the brush that had sprung up after the grass fires had been kept out managed to catch nob tied a rope to her jaw for a bridle rode her to green lake about thirty or forty miles away and tried to sell her for fifteen dollars all our hearts were sore as a as if one of the family had been lost we hunted everywhere and could not at first imagine what had become of her we discovered her track where the fence was broken down

and following it for a few miles made sure the track was nobs and a neighbor told us he had seen an indian riding fast through the woods on a horse that looked like knob but we could find no further trace of her until a month or two after she was lost and we had given up hope of ever seeing her again then we learned that she had been taken from an indian by a farmer at green lake because he saw that she had been shod and had worked in harness so when the indian tried to sell her the farmer said you are a thief this is a white man's horse you stole her no said the indian i bought her from prairie du chine and she has always been mine the man pointing to her feet and the marks of the harness said you are lying i will take that horse away from you and put her in my pasture and if you come near it i will come near it i will come near it I will set the dogs on you. Then he advertised her. One of our neighbors happened to see the advertisement and brought us the glad news, and great was our rejoicing when Father brought her home. That Indian must have treated her with terrible cruelty, for when I was riding her through the pasture several years afterward, looking for another horse that we wanted to catch, as we approached the place where she had been captured, she stood stock still, gazing through the bushes, fearing the Indian

might still be hiding there ready to spring. And she was so excited that she trembled, and her heartbeats were so loud that I could hear them distinctly as I sat on her back. Bump, bump, bump, like the drumming of a partridge. So vividly had she remembered her terrible experiences. She was a great pet and favorite with the whole family, quickly learned playful tricks,

came running when we called, seemed to know everything we said to her, and had the utmost confidence in our friendly kindness. We used to cut and shock and husk the Indian corn in the fall until a keen Yankee stopped overnight at our house and among other labor-saving notions, convinced Father that it was better to let it stand and husk it at his leisure during the winter,

then turn in the cattle to eat the leaves and trample down the stalks so that they could be plowed under in the spring. In this winter method, each of us took two rows and husked into baskets and emptied the corn on the ground in piles of 15 to 20 basketfuls, then loaded it into the wagon to be hauled to the crib. This was cold, painful work, the temperature being oftentimes far below zero, and the ground covered with dry, frosty snow, giving rise to miserable crops of chillblains and frosted fingers. A sad change from the merry Indian summer husking when the big yellow pumpkins covered the cleared field.

fields. Golden corn, golden pumpkins gathered in the hazy golden weather. Sad change indeed, but we occasionally got some fun out of the nipping, shivery work from hungry prairie chickens and squirrels and mice that came about us. The piles of corn were often left in the field several days, and while loading them into the wagon we usually found field mice in them, big, blunt-nosed, strong-scented fellows that we were taught to kill just because they nibbled a few grains of corn. I used to hold one, while it was still warm, up to Nob's nose for the fun of seeing her make faces and snort at the smell of it, and I would say, Here Nob, as if offering her a lump of sugar. One day I offered her an extra fine, fat, plump specimen, something like a little

woodchuck or muskrat, and to my astonishment, after smelling it curiously and doubtfully, as if wondering what the gift might be, and rubbing it back and forth in the palm of my hand, with her upper lip, she deliberately took it into her mouth, crunched and munched and chewed it fine, and swallowed it, bones, teeth, head, tail, everything. Not a single hair of that mouse was wasted. While she was chewing it, she nodded and grunted, as though critically tasting and relishing it.

My father was a steadfast enthusiast on religious matters, and, of course, attended almost every sort of church meeting, especially revival meetings. They were occasionally held in summer, but mostly in winter when the slaying was good and plenty of time available. One hot summer day father drove Nob to Portage

and back, 24 miles over a sandy road. It was hot, hard, sultry day's work, and she had evidently been overdridden in order to get home in time for one of these meetings. I shall never forget how tired and wilted she looked that evening when I unhitched her. how she drooped in her stall too tired to eat or even to lie down. Next morning it was plain that her lungs were inflamed.

All the dreadful symptoms were just the same as my own when I had pneumonia. Father sent for a Methodist minister, a very energetic, resourceful man, who was a blacksmith, farmer, butcher, and horse doctor as well as minister. But all his gifts and skill were of no avail. Nob was doomed. we bathed her head and tried to get her to eat something, but she couldn't eat. And in about a couple of weeks, we turned her loose to let her come round the house and see us in the weary suffering and loneliness of the shadow of death. She tried to follow us children so long her friends and workmates and

playmates. It was awfully touching. She had several hemorrhages, and in the forenoon of her last day, after she had had one of her dreadful spells of bleeding and gasping for breath, she came to me trembling with beseeching, heartbreaking looks, and after I had bathed her head and tried to soothe and pet her, she lay down and gasped and died. All the family gathered about her weeping with aching hearts, then dust to dust. She was the most faithful, intelligent, playful, affectionate, human-like horse I ever knew, and she won all our hearts. Of the many advantages of farm life for boys, one of the greatest is the gaining a real knowledge of animals as fellow mortals, learning to respect them and love them, and even to win some of their love. Thus,

God-like sympathy grows and thrives and spreads far beyond the teachings of churches and schools, where too often the mean, blinding, loveless doctrine is taught that animals have neither mind nor soul, have no rights that we are bound to respect, and were made only for man to be petted, spoiled, slaughtered, or enslaved. At first, we were afraid of snakes, but soon learned that most of them were harmless. The only venomous species seen on our farm were the rattlesnake and the copperhead, one of each. David saw the rattlesnake. David saw the rattlesnake. and we both saw the copperhead. One day when my brother came in from his work, he reported that he had seen a snake that made a queer buzzing noise with its tail. This was the only rattlesnakes seen on our

farm, though we heard of them being common on limestone hills eight or ten miles distant. We discovered the copperhead when we were plowing and we saw and felt at the first long, fixed, half-charmed, admiring stare at him that he was an awfully dangerous fellow. Every fiber of his his strong, lithe, quivering body, his burnished copper-colored head, and, above all, his fierce, able eyes seemed to be overflowing full of deadly power and bade us beware. And yet, it is only fair to say that this terrible, beautiful reptile showed no disposition to hurt us until we threw clods at him and tried to head him off from a log fence into which he was trying to escape. We were barefooted and, of course, afraid to let him get very near,

while we vainly battered him with the loose sandy clods of the freshly plowed field to hold him back until we could get a stick. Looking us in the eyes after a moment's pause, he probably saw we were afraid, and he came right straight at us, snapping and looking terrible, drove us out of his way and won his fight. Out on the open sandy hills there were a good many thick, burly blow snakes, the kind that puffed themselves up and hiss. Our Yankee declared that their breath was very poisonous and that we must not go near them. A handsome ringed species common in damp, shady places was, he told us the most wonderful of all the snakes, for if chopped into pieces, however small,

the fragments would wriggle themselves together again, and the restored snake would go on about its business as if nothing had happened. The commonest kinds were the striped slender species of the meadows and streams, good swimmers that lived mostly on frogs. Once I observed one of the larger ones about two feet long, pursuing a frog in our meadow, and it was wonderful to see how fast the legless, footless, wingless, finless hunter could run. The frog, of course, knew its enemy and was making desperate efforts

to escape to the water and hide in the marsh mud. He was a fine, sleek, yellow muscular fellow, and was springing over the tall grass in wide-arching jumps. the green-striped snake gliding swiftly and steadily was keeping the frog in sight, and, had I not interfered, would probably have tired out the poor jumper. Then perhaps, while digesting and enjoying his meal, the happy snake would himself be swallowed, frog and all, by a hawk. Again to our astonishment, the small specimens were attacked by our hens.

They pursued and pecked away at them until they killed and devoured them, oftentimes quarreling over the division of the spoil, though it was not easily divided. We watched the habits of the swift darting dragonflies, wild bees, butterflies, wasps, beetles, etc., and soon learned to discriminate between those that might be safely handled and the pinching or stinging species. But of all our wild neighbors, the mosquitoes were the first with which we became very intimately acquainted. The beautiful meadow, lying warm in the spring sunshine, outspread between our lily-rimmed lake and the hill slope that our shanty stood on, sent forth thirsty swarms of a little gray, speckily, singing, stinging pests,

and how tellingly they introduced themselves. Of little avail were the smudges that we made on muggy evenings to drive them away, and amid the many lessons which they insisted upon teaching us, we wondered more and more at the extent of their knowledge. especially that in their tiny flimsy bodies room could be found for such cunning palates they would drink their fill from brown smoky indians or from old white folk flavored with tobacco and whiskey when no better could be had but the surpassing fineness of their taste was best manifested by their enthusiastic appreciation of boys full of lively red blood and of girls in full bloom fresh from cool scotland or england on these it was pleasant to witness their enjoyment as they feasted. Indians, we were told, believed that if they were brave fighters, they would go after death to a happy country abounding in game, where there were no mosquitoes and no cowards. For cowards were driven away by themselves to a miserable country where there was

no game fit to eat, and where the sky was always dark with huge gnats and mosquitoes as big as pigeons. We were great admirers of the little black waterbugs. Their whole lives seemed to be played, skimming, swimming, swirling, and waltzing together in little groups on the edge of the lake and in the meadow springs, dancing to music we never could hear. The long-legged skaters, too,

seemed wonderful fellows shuffling about on top of the water with air bubbles like little bladders tangled under their hairy feet, and we often wish that we also might be shod in the same way to enable us to skate on the lake in summer as well as an icy winter. Not less wonderful were the boatmen swimming on their backs, pulling themselves along with a pair of ore-like legs. Great was the delight of brothers David and Daniel and myself when Father gave us a few pine boards for a boat,

and it was a memorable day when we got that boat built and launched into the lake. Never shall I forget our first sail over the gradually deepening water, the sunbeams pouring through it, revealing the strange plants covering the bottom, and the fishes coming about us, staring and wondering as if the boat were a monstrous, strange fish. The water was so clear that it was almost invisible, and when we floated slowly out over the plants and fishes, we seemed to be miraculously sustained in the air while silently exploring a veritable fairyland. We always had to work hard, but if we worked still harder, we were occasionally allowed a little spell in the long summer evenings about sundown to fish, and on Sundays an hour or two to sail quietly without fishing rod or gun when the lake was calm.

Therefore, we gradually learned something about its inhabitants. Pickerel, sunfish, black bass, perch, shiners, pumpkin seeds, ducks, loons, turtles, muskrats, etc. we saw the sunfishes making their nests in little openings in the rushes where the water was only a few feet deep ploughing up and shoving away the soft gray mud with their noses like pigs forming round bowls five or six inches in depth and about two feet in diameter in which their eggs were deposited and with what beautiful unwearable devotion they watched and hovered over them and chased away prowling spawn-eating and ventured within a rod or two of the precious nest. The pickerel is a savage fish, endowed with marvelous strength and speed. It lies in wait for its prey on the bottom, perfectly motionless like a waterlogged stick, watching everything that moves with fierce, hungry eyes. Oftentimes when we were fishing for some other kinds over the edge of the boat, a pickerel that we had not noticed would come like a

bolt of lightning and seize the fish we had caught before we could get it into the boat. The very first pickerel that I ever caught jumped into the air to seize a small fish dangling on my line, and, missing its aim, fell plump into the boat as if it had dropped from the sky. Some of our neighbors fished for pickerel through the ice in midwinter. They usually drove a wagon out onto the lake, set a large number of lines baited with live minnows, hung a loop of the lines over a small bush planted at the side of each hole, and watched to see the loops pulled off when a fish had taken the bait. Large quantities of pickerel were often caught in this cruel way.

Our beautiful lake, named Fountain Lake by father, but Mears Lake by the neighbors, is one of the many small glacier lakes that adorned the Wisconsin landscapes. It is fed by 20 or 30 meadow springs, is about a half a mile long, half as wide, and surrounded by low, finely-modeled hills dotted with oak and hickory. and meadows full of grasses and sedges and many beautiful orchids and ferns. First there is a zone of green shining rushes, and just beyond the rushes, a zone of white and orange water lilies 50 or 60 feet wide, forming a magnificent border.

On bright days, when the lake was rippled by a breeze, the lilies and sun spangles danced together in radiant beauty, and it became difficult to discriminate between them. On Sundays after or before chores and sermons and Bible lessons, we drifted about on the lake for hours, especially in lily time, getting finest lessons and sermons from the water and flowers, ducks, fishes, and muskrats. In particular, we took Christ's advice and devoutly considered the lilies, how they grow up in beauty out of gray lime mud, and ride gloriously among the breezy sun spangles. On our way home, we gathered, grand bouquets of them to be kept fresh all the week. No flower was hailed with greater wonder

and admiration by the European settlers in general, Scotch, English, and Irish, than this white water lily. Nymphfea adorata. It is a magnificent plant, queen of the inland waters, pure white, three or four inches in diameter, the most beautiful, sumptuous and deliciously fragrant of all our Wisconsin flowers. No lily garden in civilization. No lily garden in civilization. we had ever seen could compare with our Lake Garden. The next most admirable flower in the estimation of settlers in this part of the new world was the Pasque flower or windflower, anemone patents, variant New Taliana. It is the very first to appear in the spring, covering the cold, gray black ground with cheery blossoms.

Before the axe or plow had touched the oak openings of Wisconsin, they were swept by running fires almost every autumn after the grass became dry. If from any cause such as early snowstorms or late rains, they happened to escape the autumn fire besom, they were likely to be burned in the spring after the snow melted. But whether burned in the spring or fall, ashes and bits of charred twigs and grass stems made the whole country look dismal. Then, before a single grass blade had sprouted, a hopeful multitude of large, hairy, silky buds about as thick as one's thumb came to light, pushing up through the black and gray ashes and cinders, and before these buds were fairly free from the ground they opened wide and displayed purple blossoms about two inches in diameter,

giving beauty for ashes in glorious abundance. Instead of remaining in the ground awaiting for warm weather and companions this admirable plant seems to be in haste to rise and cheer the desolate landscape then at its leisure after other plants had come to its help it spread its leaves and grew up to a height of about two or three feet the spreading leaves formed a whorl on the ground and another about the middle of the stem as an involucor and on top of the stem the silky hairy long-tailed seeds formed a head like a second flower a little church was established among the early settlers and the meetings at first were held in our house after working hard all the week it was difficult for boys to sit still through long sermons without falling asleep especially in warm weather in this drowsy trouble the charming anemone came to our help a pocketful of the pungent seeds industriously nibbled while the discourses were at their dullest kept us awake and filled our minds with flowers The next great flower wonders on which we lavished admiration, not only for beauty of color and size, but for their curious shapes, were the cypropediums called ladies slippers or Indian moccasins.

They were so different from the familiar flowers of Old Scotland. Several species grew in our meadow and on shady hillsides, yellow, rose-colored, and some nearly white, an inch or more in diameter, and shaped exactly like Indian moccasins. They caught the eye of all the European settlers and made them gaze and wonder like children. And so did Calopogon, Pogonia, Sparanthes, and many other fine plant people that lived in our meadow. The beautiful Turks turban, lilium-suporbum, growing on stream banks, was rare in our neighborhood.

But the orange lily grew in abundance on dry ground beneath the burr oaks, and often brought Aunt Ray's lilybed in Scotland to mine. The butterfly weed, with its brilliant scarlet flowers, attracted flocks of butterflies, and made fine masses of color. With autumn came a glorious abundance and variety of asters, those beautiful plant stars, together with golden rods, sunflowers, daisies, and laatrous of different species, while around the shady margin of the meadow many ferns in beds and vase-like groups spread their beautiful fronds, especially the Osmundus, Claytoniana, Regalis, and Cinemomae, and the sensitive and ostrich ferns. Early in summer we feasted on strawberries that grew in rich beds beneath the meadow grasses and sedges,

as well as in the dry, sunny woods. And in different bogs and marshes and around their borders on our own farm and along the Fox River, we found dewberries and cranberries and a glorious profusion of huckleberries, the fountain heads of pies of wondrous taste and size, colored in the heart like sunsets. Nor were we slow to discover the value of the hickory trees, yielding both sugar and nuts. We carefully counted the different kinds on our farm,

and every morning when we could steal a few minutes before breakfast, after doing the chores, we visited the trees that had been wounded by the axe to scrape off and enjoy the thick, white, delicious syrup that exuded from them, and gathered the nuts as they fell in the mellow Indian summer, making haste to get a fair share with the sap-suckers and squirrels. The hickory makes fine masses of color in the fall,

every leaf a flower, but it was a sweet sap and sweet nuts that first interested us. No harvest in the Wisconsin woods was ever gathered with more pleasure and care. Also, to our delight, we found plenty of hazel nuts, and in a few places abundance of wild apples. They were desperately sour, and we used to fill our pockets with them and dare each other to eat one without making a face. No easy feet. One hot summer day father told us that we ought to learn to swim.

This was one of the most interesting suggestions he had ever offered, but precious little time was allowed for trips to the lake, and he seldom tried to show us how. Go to the frogs, he said, and they will give you all the lessons you need. Watch their arms and legs and see how smoothly they can. kick themselves along and dive and come up. When you want to dive, keep your arms by your side or over your head and kick, and when you want to come up, let your legs drag and paddle with your hands. We found a little basin among the rushes at the south end of the lake, about waist deep and a rod or two wide, shaped like a sunfish's nest. Here we kicked and plashed for many a lesson,

faithfully trying to imitate frogs, but the smooth, comfortable sliding gait of our amphibious teachers seemed hopelessly hard to learn. When we tried to kick frog fashion, down went our heads as if weighted with lead the moment our feet left the ground. One day it occurred to me to hold my breath as long as I could and let my head sink as far as it liked without paying any attention to it and try to swim under the water instead of on the surface. This method was a great success, for at the very first trial I managed to cross the basin

without touching bottom, and soon learned the use of my limbs. Then, of course, swimming with my head above water soon became so easy that it seemed perfectly natural. David tried the plan with the same success. Then we began to count the number of times that we could swim around the basin without stopping to rest, and after 20 or 30 rounds failed to tire us, we proudly thought that a little more practice would make us about as amphibious as frogs. On the 4th of July, of this swimming year, one of the Lawson boys came to visit us, and we went down to the lake to spend the great warm day with the fishes and ducks and turtles. After gliding about on the smooth mirror water, telling stories and enjoying the company of the happy creatures about us, we rode to

our bathing pool, and David and I went in for a swim, while our companion fished from the boat a little way out beyond the rushes. After a few turns in the pool, it occurred to me that it was now about time to tried deep water. Swimming through the thick growth of rushes and lilies was somewhat dangerous, especially for a beginner, because one's arms and legs might be entangled among the long, limber stems. Nevertheless, I ventured and struck out boldly enough for the boat, where the water was 20 or 30 feet deep. When I reached the end of a little skiff, I raised my right hand to take hold of it to surprise Lawson, whose back was toward me and who was not aware of my approach, but I failed to reach high enough, and of course the weight of my arm and the stroke against the overleaning

stern of the boat shoved me down, and I sank, struggling, frightened, and confused. As soon as my feet touched the bottom, I slowly rose to the surface, but before I could get breath enough to call for help, sank back again and lost all control of myself. After sinking and rising, I don't know how many times some water got into my lungs and I began to drown. Then, suddenly, my mind seemed to clear. I remembered that I could swim underwater and making a desperate struggle toward the shore, I reached a point where with my toes on the bottom, I got my mouth above the surface, gasped for help, and was pulled into the boat. This humiliating accident spoiled the day, and we all agreed to keep it a profound secret. My sister Sarah had heard my cry

for help, and on our arrival at the house inquired what had happened. Were you drowning, John? I heard you cry. You couldn't get out. Lawson made haste to reply, Oh, no, he was just havering, making fun. I was very much ashamed of myself, and at night, after calmly reviewing the affair, concluded that there had been no reasonable cause for the accident, and that I ought to punish myself for so nearly losing my life from unmanly fear. Accordingly, at the very first opportunity, I stole away to the lake by myself, got into my boat, and instead of going back to the old swimming bowl for further practice or to try to do sanely and well what I had so anonymously failed to do in my first adventure, that is, to swim out through the rushes and lilies, I rode directly out to the middle of the lake, stripped, stood up on the seat in the stern, and with grim deliberation took a header and dove straight down 30 or 40 feet, turned easily, and letting my feet drag, paddle straight to the surface with my hands, as Father had at first directed me to do. I then swam around the boat, glorying in my suddenly acquired confidence

and victory over myself, climbed into it, and dived again with the same triumph and success. I think I went down four or five times, and each time as I made the dive spring shouted aloud, take that, feeling that I was getting most gloriously even with myself. never again from that day to this have i lost control of myself in water if suddenly thrown overboard at sea in the dark or even while asleep i think i would immediately write myself in a way some would call instinct rise among the waves catch my breath and try to plan what could be better done never was victory over self more complete i have been a good swimmer ever since at a slow gait i think i could swim all day in smooth water moderate in temperature when i was a student at madison i used to go on long swimming journeys called exploring expeditions along the south shore of lake mendota on saturdays sometimes alone sometimes with another amphibious explorer by the name of fuller my adventures in fountain lake called to mind the story of a boy who in climbing a tree to rob a crow's nest fell and broke his leg but as soon as it healed compelled himself to climb to the top of the tree he had fallen from like scotch children in general we were taught grim self-denial in season and out of season to mortify the flesh keep our bodies in subjection to bible laws and mercilessly punish ourself for every fault imagined or committed

a little boy while helping his sister to drive home the cows happened to use a forbidden word i'll have to tell father on ye said the horrified sister i'll tell him that ye said a bad word well the boy by way of excuse i couldn't help the word coming into me and it's not war to speak oot than to let it run through ye the scotch fiddler playing at a wedding drank so much whiskey than on the way home he fell by the roadside in the morning he was ashamed and angry and determined to punish himself making haste to the house of a friend a gamekeeper he called him out and requested the loan of a gun the alarmed gamekeeper not liking the fiddler's looks and and voice anxiously inquired what he was going to do with it surely he said you're not going to shoot yourself no with characteristic candor replied the penitent fiddler i didn't think i was just exactly kill myself but i was going to take a dander dune the burn brook with the gun and give myself a divo of a flag fright one calm summer evening a red-headed woodpecker was drowned in our lake the accident happened at the south end opposite our memorable swimming-hole a few rods from the place where I came so near being drowned years before. I had returned to the old home during a summer vacation of the State University, and having made a beginning in botany, I was, of course, full of enthusiasm, and ran eagerly to my beloved Pogonia, callopogan, and Cypropedium gardens,

osmunda fernaries, and the lake lilies and pitcher plants. A little before sundown, the day breeze died away, and the lake, reflecting the wooded hills like a mirror, was dimpled and dotted and streaked here and there, where fishes and turtles were poking out their heads, and muskrats were sculling themselves along with their flat tails, making glittering tracks. After lingering a while, dreamily recalling the old hard, half-happy days,

and watching my favorite red-headed woodpeckers pursuing maws like regular fly-catchers, I swam out through the rushes and up the middle of the lake, to the north end and back, gliding slowly looking about me, enjoying the scenery as I would in a saunter along the shore and studying the habits of the animals as they were explained and recorded on the smooth glassy water. On the way back when I was within a hundred rods or so of the end of my voyage, I noticed a peculiar plashing disturbance that could not, I thought, be made by a jumping fish or any other inhabitant of the lake, for instead of low regular out-circling ripples such as are made by the popping up of a head, or like those

raised by the quick splash of a leaping fish or diving loon or muskrant, a continuous struggle was kept up for several minutes, ere the outspreading interfering ring waves began to die away. Swimming hastily to the spot to try to discover what had happened, I found one of my woodpeckers floating motionless with outspread wings. All was over. Had I been a minute or two earlier I might have saved him. He had glanced on the water, I suppose, in pursuit of a moth, was unable to rise from it, and died struggling, as I nearly did at this same spot. Like me, he seemed to have lost his mind in blind confusion and fear. The water was warm, and had he kept still with his head a little above the surface, he would sooner or later have

been wafted ashore. The best aimed flights of birds and man gang aft angly, but this This was the first case I had witnessed of a bird losing its life by drowning. Doubtless accidents to animals are far more common than is generally known. I have seen quails killed by flying against our house when suddenly startled. Some birds get entangled in hairs of their own nests and die. Once I found a poor snipe in our meadow that was unable to fly on account of difficult eggbirth. Pitying the poor mother, I picked her up out of the grass and helped her as gently as I could. and as soon as the egg was born she flew gladly away.

Oftentimes I have thought it strange that one could walk through the woods and mountains and plains for years without seeing a single blood spot. Most wild animals get into the world and out of it without being noticed. Nevertheless, we at last sadly learned that they are all subject to the vicissitudes of fortune like ourselves. Many birds lose their lives in storms. I remember a particularly severe Wisconsin winter when the temperature was many degrees below zero and the snow was deep, preventing the quail which feed on the ground

from getting anything like enough of food, as was pitifully shown by a flock I found on our farm frozen solid in a thicket of oak sprouts. They were in a circle about a foot wide with their heads outward, packed close together for warmth. Yet all had died without a struggle, perhaps more from starvation than frost. Many small birds lose their lives in the storms of early spring, or even summer.

One mild spring morning I picked up more than a score out of the grass and flowers, most of them darling singers that had perished in a sudden storm of sleety rain and hail. In a hollow at the foot of an oak tree that I had chopped down one cold winter day, I found a poor ground squirrel frozen solid in its snug grassy nest, in the middle of a store of nearly a peck of wheat it had carefully gathered. I carried it home and gradually thawed and warmed it in the kitchen, hoping it would come to life like a pickerel I caught in our lake through a hole in the ice, which, after being frozen as hard as a bone and thawed at the fireside,

squirmed itself out of the grasp of the cook when she began to scrape it, bounced off the table and danced about on the floor, making wonderful springy jumps as if trying to find its way back home, to the lake but for the poor spermophile nothing i could do in the way of revival was of any avail its life had passed away without the slightest struggle as it lay asleep curled up like a ball with its tail wrapped about it end of chapter three chapter four of the story of my boyhood and youth this levervox recording is in the public domain recording by sue anderson the story of my boyhood and youth by john muir chapter four a paradise of birds bird favorites the prairie chickens waterfowl a loon on the defensive passenger pigeons the wisconsin oak openings were a summer paradise for songbirds and a fine place to get acquainted with them for the trees stood wide apart allowing one to see the happy home seekers as they arrived in the spring. Their mating, nest building, the brooding and feeding of the

young, and after they were full-fledged and strong, to see all the families of the neighborhood gathering and getting ready to leave in the fall. Accepting the geese and ducks and pigeons, nearly all of our summer birds arrived singly or in small, draggled flocks, but when frost and falling leaves brought their winter homes to mind. They assembled in large flocks on dead or leafless trees by the side of a meadow or field, perhaps to get acquainted and talk the thing over. Some species held regular daily meetings for several weeks before finally setting forth on their long southern journeys. Strange to say, we never saw them start. Some morning we would find them gone. Doubtless they migrated in the nighttime. Comparatively few species remained all winter, the nut hatch, chickadee, owl,

prairie chicken, quail, and a few stragglers from the main flocks of ducks, jays, hawks, and bluebirds. Only after the country was settled did either jays or bluebirds winter with us. The brave, frosty-fying chickadeys and nut hatches stayed all the year, wholly independent of farms and man's food and affairs. With the first hints of spring came the brave little bluebirds, darling singers as blue as the best sky, and of course we all love them.

Their rich, crisp, warbling is perfectly delightful, soothing and cheering, sweet and whisperingly low. Nature's fine love touches every note, going straight home into one's heart. And with all, they are hearty and brave,

fearless fighters in defense of home. When we boys approached their not-whole nests, the bold little fellows kept scolding and diving at us and tried to strike us in the face, and oftentimes we were afraid they would prick our eyes. But the boldness of the little housekeepers only made us love them the more. None of the bird people of Wisconsin welcomed us more heartily than the common robin, far from showing alarm at the coming of settlers into their nation,

woods, they reared their young around our gardens as if they liked us. And how heartily we admired the beauty and fine manners of these graceful birds and their loud, cheery song of, Fear not, fear not, chirrup. It was easy to love them, for they reminded us of the Robin Redbreast of Scotland. Like the bluebirds, they dared every danger in defense of home, and we often wondered that birds so gentle could be so bold, and that sweet-voiced singers could be so bold, and that sweet-voiced singers could so fiercely fight and scold. Of all the great singers that sweetened Wisconsin, one of the best known and best loved

is the brown thrush or thrasher, strong and able without being familiar, and easily seen and heard. Rosie purple evenings after thunder showers are the favorite song times when the winds have died away and the steaming ground and the leaves and flowers fill the air with fragrance.

Then the male makes haste to the topmost spray of an oak tree, and sings loud and clear, with delightful enthusiasm until sundown. Mostly, I suppose, were his mate sitting on the precious eggs in a brush heap, and how faithful and watchful and daring he is. Woe to the snake or squirrel that ventured to go nigh the nest. We often saw him diving on them, pecking them about the head, and driving them away as bravely as the kingbird drives away hawks. Their rich and varied strains made the air fairly quiver. We boys often tried to interpret the wild, ringing melody and put it into words. After the arrival of the thrushes came the bobbolinks, gushing, gurgling, inexhaustible

fountains of song, pouring forth floods of sweet notes over the broad Fox River meadows in wonderful variety and volume, crowded and mixed beyond description, as they hovered on quivering wings above their hidden nests in the grass. It seemed marvelous to us that birds so moderate in size could hold so much of this wonderful song stuff. Each one of them poured forth music enough for a whole flock, singing as if its whole body, feathers and all, were made up of music, flowing, glowing, bubbling melody, interpenetrated here and there with small scintillating prickles and spicules. We never became so intimately acquainted with the bobbolinks as with the thrushes, for they lived far out on the broad Fox River meadows,

while the thrushes sang on the treetops around every home. The bobbolinks were among the first of our great singers to leave us in the fall, going apparently direct to the rice fields of the southern states, where they grew fat and were slaughtered in countless numbers for food, sad fate for singers so purely divine. One of the gayest of the singers is the Red Wing Blackbird. In the spring, when his scarlet epaulets shine brightest and his little modest gray wife is sitting on the nest,

built on rushes in a swamp, he sits on a nearby oak and devotedly sings almost all day. His rich simple strain is Bompali, Bompoli. or bopali as interpreted by some in summer after nesting cares are over they assemble in flocks of hundreds and thousands to feast on indian corn when it is in the milk scattering over a field each selects an ear strips the husk down far enough to lay bare an inch or two of the end of it enjoys an exhilarating feast and after all are full they rise simultaneously with a quick of wings, like an old-fashioned church congregation, fluttering to their feet when the minister, after giving out the hymn says,

let the congregation arise and sing. Alighting on nearby trees, they sing with a hearty vengeance, bursting out without any puttering prelude in glorious glad concert, hundreds or thousands of exulting voices with sweet gurgling bompelis mingled with chippy, vibrant, and exploding gobulees, of musical notes, making a most enthusiastic, indescribable joy song, a combination unlike anything to be heard elsewhere in the Bird Kingdom, something like bagpipes, flutes, violins, pianos, and human-like voices, all bursting

and bubbling at once. Then suddenly someone of the joyful congregation shouts, cheer, cheer! And all stop as if shot. The sweet-voiced meadowlark with its placid simple song of piriiri-orico was another favorite and we soon learned to admire the baltimore orio and its wonderful hanging nests and the scarlet tanager glowing like fire amid the green leaves but no singer of them all got farther into our hearts than the little speckle-breasted song-spiral one of the first to arrive and begin nest-building and singing the richness sweetness and pathos of this song-sparall. small darling song as he sat on a low bush often brought tears to our eyes. The little cheery, modest chickadey midget, loved by every innocent boy and girl, man and woman, and by many not altogether innocent, was one of the first of the birds to attract our attention, drawing nearer and nearer to us as the winter advanced, bravely singing his faint, silvery,

lisping, tinkling notes, ending with a bright, D, D, D, however frosty the weather. The nut hatches, who also stayed all winter with us, were favorites with us boys. We love to watch them as they traced the bark furrows of the oaks and hickories, head downward, deftly flicking off loose scales and splinters in search of insects, and braving the coldest weather

as if their little sparks of life were as safely warm in winter as in summer, unquenchable by the severest frost. With the help of the chickadees they made a delightful stir in the solemn winter days, and when we were out chopping, we never ceased to wonder how their slender naked toes could be kept warm when our own were so painfully frosted, though clad in thick socks and boots. And we wondered and admired the more when we thought of the little midgets sleeping in knot holes when the temperature was far below zero, 35 degrees below, and in the morning, after a minute breakfast of a few frozen insects and hoar-frost crystals, playing and chatting in cheery tones as if food, weather, and everything

was according to their own warm hearts. Our Yankee told us that the name of this darling was Devil Downhead. Their big neighbors, the owls, also made good winter music, singing out loud in wild, gallant strains, bespeaking brave comfort. let the frost bite as it might. The solemn hooting of the species with the widest throat seemed to us the very wildest of all the winter sounds. Prairie chickens came strolling in family flocks about the shanty, picking seeds and grasshoppers like domestic fowls,

and they became still more abundant as wheat and cornfields were multiplied, but also wilder, of course, when every shotgun in the country was aimed at them. The booming of the males during the mating season was one of the loudest and strangest of the early spring sounds, being easily heard on calm mornings at a distance of half or three-fourths of a mile. As soon as the snow was off the ground, they assembled in flocks of a dozen or two on an open spot, usually on the side of a plowed field, ruffled up their feathers, inflated the curious colored sacks on the sides of their necks, and strutted about with queer gestures, something like turkey goblers,

uttering strange, loud, rounded drumming calls, boom, boom, interrupted by choking sounds. My brother Daniel caught one while she was sitting on her nest in our cornfield. The young are just like domestic chicks, run with the mother as soon as hatched, and stay with her until autumn, feeding on the ground, never taking wing unless disturbed. in winter when full-grown they assemble in large flocks fly about sundown to selected roosting places on tall trees and to feeding places in the morning unhusked cornfields if any are to be found in the neighborhood or thickets of dwarf birch and willows the buds of which furnish a considerable part of their food when snow covers the ground The wild rice marshes along the Fox River and around Puckaway Lake were the summer homes of millions of ducks,

and in the Indian summer, when the rice was ripe, they grew very fat. The magnificent mallards in particular afforded our Yankee neighbors' royal feasts almost without a price, for often as many as a half-dozen were killed at a shot. But we seldom were allowed a single hour for hunting, and so got very few. the autumn duck season was a glad time for the indians also for they feasted and grew fat not only on the ducks but on the wild rice large quantities of which they gathered as they glided through the midst of the generous crop in canoes bending down handfuls over the sides and beating out the grain with small paddles the warmth of the deep spring fountains of the creek in our meadow kept it open all the year and a few pairs of wood ducks the most beautiful we thought of all the ducks wintered in it i well remember the first specimen i ever saw father shot it in the creek during a snowstorm brought it into the house and called us around him saying come barons and admire the work of god displayed in this bonny bird nobody but god could paint feathers like these just look at the colors how they shine and how fine they overlap and blend together like the colors of the rainbow and we all agreed that never never before

had we seen so awful Bonnie a bird. A pear nested every year in the hollow top of an oak stump about 15 feet high that stood on the side of the meadow, and we used to wonder how they got the fluffy young ones down from the nest and across the meadow to the lake when they were only helpless, featherless midgets. Whether the mother carried them to the water on her back or in her mouth. I never saw the thing done or found anybody who had until this summer, when Mr. Holibird, a keen observer, told me that he once saw the mother carry them from the nest tree in her mouth, quickly coming and going to a nearby stream, and in a few minutes get them all together and proudly sail away. Sometimes a flock of swans were seen passing over at a great height on

their long journeys, and we admired their clear bugle notes. But they seldom visited any of the lakes in our neighborhood, so seldom that when they did it was talked of for years. One was shot by a blacksmith on a mill pond with a long-range sharps rifle, and many of the neighbors went far to see it. The common gray goose, Canada honker, flying in regular harrow-shaped flocks, was one of the wildest and warriest of all the large birds that enlivened the spring and autumn. They seldom ventured to alight in our small lake, fearing, I suppose, that hunters might be concealed in the rushes, but on account of their fondness for the young leaves of winter wheat, when they were a few inches high, they often alighted on our fields when passing on their way south,

and occasionally even in our cornfields, when a snowstorm was blowing and they were hungry and wing-werey, with nearly an inch of snow on their backs. In such times of distress were used to pity them, even while trying to get a shot at them. They were exceedingly cautious and circumspect, usually flew several times around the adjacent thickets and fences to make sure that no enemy was near before settling down, and one always stood on guard,

relieved from time to time while the flock was feeding. Therefore, there was no chance to creep up on them unobserved. you had to be well hidden before the flock arrived. It was the ambition of boys to be able to shoot these wary birds. I never got but two, both of them, at one so-called lucky shot. When I ran to pick them up, one of them flew away. But as the poor fellow was sorely wounded, he didn't fly far. When I caught him after a short chase, he uttered a piercing cry of terror and despair,

which the leader of the flock heard at a distance of about a hundred rods. They had flown off in frightened disorder, of course, but had got into the regular, harrow-shaped order when the leader heard the cry, and I shall never forget how bravely he left his place at the head of the flock, and hurried back, screaming, and struck at me in trying to save his companion. I dodged down and held my hands over my head, and thus escaped a blow of his elbows. Fortunately, I had left my gun at the fence, and the life of this noble bird was spared, after he had risked it in trying to save his wounded friend or neighbor or family relation. For so shy a bird boldly to a tachy hunter showed wonderful sympathy and courage.

This is one of my strangest hunting experiences. Never before had I regarded wild geese as dangerous or capable of such noble self-sacrificing devotion. The loud, clear call of the handsome Bobwhites was one of the pleasant and most characteristic of our spring sounds, and we soon learned to imitate it so well that a bold cock often accepted our challenge and came flying to fight. The young run as soon as they are hatched and follow their parents until spring, roosting on the ground in a close bunch, heads out ready to scatter and fly. These fine birds were seldom seen when we first arrived in the wilderness. But when wheat fields supplied abundance of food, they multiplied very fast,

although oftentimes sore pressed during hard winters when the snow reached a depth of two or three feet, covering their food, while the mercury fell to 20 or 30 degrees below zero. Occasionally, although shy on account of being persistently hunted, under pressures of extreme hunger in the very coldest weather when the snow was deepest, they ventured into barnyards and even approached the doorsteps of houses searching for any sort of scraps and crumbs, as if piteously begging for food. One of our neighbors saw a flock come creeping up through the snow,

unable to fly, hardly able to walk, and while approaching the door, several of them actually fell down and died, showing that birds usually so vigorous and apparently independent of fortune suffer and lose their lives in extreme weather like the rest of us frozen to death like settlers caught in blizzards none of our neighbors perished in storms though many had feet ears and fingers frost-nipped or solidly frozen as soon as the lake ice melted we heard the lonely cry of the loon

one of the wildest and most striking of all the wilderness sounds, a strange, sad, mournful, unearthly cry, half laughing, half wailing. Nevertheless, the great northern diver, as our species is called, is a brave, hearty, beautiful bird, able to fly underwater about as well as above it, and to spear and capture the swiftest fishes for food. Those that haunted our lake were so well,

none was shot for years, though every boy hunter in the neighborhood was ambitious to get one to prove his skill. On one of our bitter, cold New Year holidays, I was surprised to see a loon in the small, open part of the lake at the mouth of the inlet that was kept from freezing by the warm spring water. I knew that it could not fly out of so small a place, for these heavy birds have to beat the water for half a mile or so before they can get fairly on the wing. Their narrow, fin-like wings are very small as compared with the weight of the body and are evidently made for flying through water as well as through the air. And it is by means of their swift flight through the water and the swiftness of the blow they strike with their long, spear-like bills that they are able to capture the fishes on which they feed.

I ran down the meadow with the gun, got into my boat, and pursued that poor winter-bound straggler. Of course he dived again and again but had to come up to breathe, and I at length got a quick shot at his head and slightly wounded or stunned him, caught him, and ran proudly back to the house with my prize. I carried him in my arms. He didn't struggle to get away or offer to strike me, and when I put him on the floor in front of the kitchen stove,

he just rested quietly on his belly, as noiseless and motionless as if he were a stuffed specimen on a shelf. held his neck erect, gave no sign of suffering from any wound, and though he was motionless, his small black eyes seemed to be ever keenly watchful. His formidable bill, very sharp, three or three and a half inches long and shaped like a pickaxe was held perfectly level. But the wonder was that he did not struggle or make the slightest movement. we had a tortoise shell cat, an old tom of great experience,

who was so fond of lying under the stove in frosty weather that it was difficult even to poke him out with a broom. But when he saw and smelled that strange big fishy, black and white, speckily bird, the like of which he had never before seen, he rushed wildly to the farther corner of the kitchen, looked back cautiously and suspiciously, and began to make a careful study of the handsome but dangerous-looking stranger.

Becoming more and more curious and interested, he at length advanced a step or two for a nearer view and nearer smell, and as the wonderful bird kept absolutely motionless, he was encouraged to venture gradually nearer and nearer until within perhaps five or six feet of its breast. then the wary loon, not liking Tom's looks in so near a view, which perhaps recalled to his mind the plundering minks and muskrats he had to fight when they approached his nest, prepared to defend himself by slowly, almost imperceptibly drawing back his long pickax bill, and without the slightest fuss or stir, held it at level and ready just over his tail. With that dangerous bill drawn so far back out of the way, Tom's confidence in the stranger's peaceful intentions seemed almost complete,

and thus encouraged he at last ventured forward with wondering, questioning eyes, and quivering nostrils until he was only 18 or 20 inches from the loon's smooth white breast. When the beautiful bird apparently as peaceful and inoffensive as a flower saw that his hairy yellow enemy had arrived at the right distance, the loon, who evidently was a fine judge of the reach of his spear, shot it forward quick as a lightning flash in marvelous contrast to the wonderful slowness of the preparatory posing backward motion. The aim was true to a hairbread. Tom was struck right in the center of his forehead between the eyes. I thought his skull was cracked. Perhaps it was. The sudden astonishment of that outraged cat, the virtuous indignation and wrath, terror, and pain are far beyond

description. His eyes and screams and desperate retreat told all that. When the blow was received, he made a noise that I never heard a cat make before or since. An awfully deep, condensed, screechy, explosive, as he bounced straight up in the air like a bucking bronco. and when he alighted after his spring, he rushed madly across the room and made frantic efforts to climb up the hard, finished plaster wall, not satisfied to get the width of the kitchen away from his mysterious enemy, for the first time that cold winter he tried to get out of the house, anyhow, anywhere out of that loon-infested room. When he finally ventured to look back and saw that the barbarous bird was still there,

tranquil and motionless in front of the stove. He regained command of some of his shattered senses and carefully commenced to examine his wound. Backed against the wall in the farthest corner and keeping his eye on the outrageous bird, he tenderly touched and washed the sore spot, wetting his paw with his tongue, pausing now and then as his courage increased to glare and stare and growl at his enemy with looks and tones wonderfully human, as if saying you, unfounded, fishy, unfair rascal. What did you do that for? What had I done to you? Faithless, legless, long-nosed wretch! Intense experiences like the above bring out the humanity that is in all animals. One touch of nature, even a cat and loon touch, makes all the world kin.

It was a great, memorable day when the first flock of passenger pigeons came to our farm, calling to mind the story we had read about them when we were at school in Scotland. Of all God's feathered people that sailed the Wisconsin sky, no other birds seemed to us so wonderful. The beautiful wanderers flew like the winds in flocks of millions from climate to climate in accord with the weather, finding their food, acorns, beech nuts, pine nuts, cranberries, strawberries, huckleberries, juniper berries,

hackberries, buckwheat, rice, wheat, oats, corn, in fields and forests thousands of miles apart. I have seen flocks streaming south in the fall so large that they were flowing over from horizon to horizon in an almost continuous stream all day long at the rate of 40 or 50 miles an hour, like a mighty river in the sky, widening, contracting, descending like falls and cataracts and rising suddenly here and there in huge ragged masses like high-plashing spray. How wonderful the distances they flew in a day, in a year, in a lifetime. They arrived in Wisconsin in the spring just after the sun had cleared away the snow and alighted in the woods to feed on the fallen acorns that they had missed the previous autumn.

A comparatively small flock swept thousands of acres perfectly clean of acorns in a few minutes by moving straight ahead with a broad front. All got their share, for the rear constantly became the van by flying over the flock and alighting in front. The entire flock constantly changing from rear to front, revolving something like a wheel with a low buzzing wing roar that could be heard a long way off. In summer they feasted on wheat and oats and were easily approached as they rested on the trees along the sides of the field after a good full meal, displaying beautiful, iridescent colors as they moved their necks backward and forward when we went very near them. Every shotgun was aimed at them and everybody feasted on pigeon pies,

and not a few of the settlers feasted also on the beauty of the wonderful birds. The breast of the male is a fine rosy red, the lower part of the neck behind and along the sides, changing from the red of the breast to gold, emerald green, and rich crimson. The general color of the upper parts is grayish blue and the underparts white. The extreme length of the bird is about 17 inches. The finely modeled slender tail about 8 inches and extent of wings 24 inches. The females are scarcely less beautiful. Oh, what bonnie, bonny, bonny birds, we exclaimed over the first that fell into our hands.

Oh, what colors! Look at their breasts, Bonnie as roses, and at their necks are glowing with every color, just like the wonderful wood ducks. Oh, the bonny, bonny creatures, they beat up. Where did they come from? And where they are going? It's awful like a sin to kill them. To this some smug, practical old sinner would remark, it's a pity as ye say to kill the bonny things but they were made to be killed and sent for us to eat as the coils were sent to god's chosen people the israelites when they were starving in the desert a yon to the red sea and i must confess that meat was never put up in neater handsomer painted packages in the new england and canada woods beech nuts were their best and most abundant food further north cranberries and huckleberries after everything was was cleaned up in the north and winter was coming on, they went south for rice, corn, acorns, haws, wild grapes, crab apples, sparkle berries, etc. They seemed to require more than half

of the continent for feeding grounds, moving from one table to another, field to field, forest to forest, finding something ripe and wholesome all the year round. In going south in the fine Indian summer weather, they flew high and followed one another, though the head of the flock might be hundreds of miles in advance, but against headwinds they took advantage of the inequalities of the ground, flying comparatively low. All followed the leaders' ups and downs over hill and dale, though far out of sight, never hesitating at any turn of the way, vertical or horizontal, that the leaders had taken, though the largest flock stretched across several states and belts of different kinds of weather. There were no roosting or breeding places near our farm, and I never saw any of them until long after the great flocks were exterminated.

I therefore quote from Audubon's and Pocagans' vivid descriptions. Towards evening, Audubon says they depart for the roosting place, which may be hundreds of miles distant. one on the banks of Green River, Kentucky, was over three miles wide and 40 long. My first view of it, says the great naturalist, was about a fortnight after it had been chosen by the birds, and I arrived there nearly two hours before sunset. Few pigeons were then to be seen, but a great many persons with horses and wagons and armed with guns, long poles, sulfur pots, pine pitch, torches, etc., had already established. established encampments on the borders. Two farmers had driven upwards of 300 hogs, a distance of

more than a hundred miles, to be fattened on slaughtered pigeons. Here and there, the people employed in plucking and salting what had already been secured were sitting in the midst of piles of birds. Dung, several inches thick, covered the ground. Many trees, two feet in diameter, were broken off at no great distance from the ground, and the branches of many of the tallest and largest had given way, as if the forest had been swept by a tornado. Not a pigeon had arrived at sundown. Suddenly a general cry arose, here they come! The noise they made, though still distant, reminded me of a hard gale at sea, passing through the rigging of a close-reefed ship. Thousands were soon knocked down by the polemen. The birds,

continued to pour in. The fires were lighted and a magnificent as well as terrifying sight presented itself. The pigeons pouring in alighted everywhere one above another until solid masses were formed on the branches all around. Here and there the perches gave way with a crash and falling destroyed hundreds beneath, forcing down the dense groups with which every stick was loaded, a scene of uproar and conflict. I found it. useless to speak or even to shout to those persons nearest me. Even the reports of the guns were seldom heard, and I was made aware of the firing only by seeing the shooters reloading. None dared venture within the line of devastation. The hogs had been penned up in due time,

the picking up of the dead and wounded being left for the next morning's employment. The pigeons were constantly coming in, and it was after midnight before I perceived a decrease in the number of those that arrived. The uproar continued all night, and anxious to know how far the sound reached I sent off a man who, returning two hours after, informed me that he had heard it distinctly three miles distant. Toward daylight, the noise in some measure subsided. Long before objects were distinguishable, the pigeons began to move off in a direction quite different from that in which they had arrived the evening before, and at sunrise all that were able to fly had disappeared. The howling of the wolves now reached our ears, and the foxes, lynxes, cougars, bears, coons,

opossums, and pole cats were seen sneaking off, while eagles and hawks of different species, accompanied by a crowd of vultures, came to supplant them and enjoy a share of the spoil. Then the authors of all this devastation began their entry amongst the dead, the dying, and mangled. The pigeons were picked up and piled in heaps until each had as many as they could possibly dispose of, when the hogs were let loose to feed on the remainder. The breeding places are selected with reference to abundance of food and countless myriads resort to them. At this period the note of the pigeon is coo, coo, coo, like that of the demer. species, but much shorter. They caress by billing, and during incubation the male supplies the

female with food. As the young grow, the tyrant of creation appears to disturb the peaceful scene. Armed with axes to chop down the squab-laden trees and the abomination of desolation and destruction produced far surpasses even that of the roosting places. Pocagon, an educated Indian writer, says, I saw one nesting place in Wisconsin, 100 miles long and from 3 to 10 miles wide. Every tree, some of them quite low and scrubby, had from 1 to 50 nests on each.

Some of the nests overflow from the oaks to the hemlock and pine woods. When the pigeon hunters attack the breeding places, they sometimes cut the timber from thousands of acres. Millions are caught in nets with salt or grain for bait, and schooners, sometimes loaded down with the birds, are taken to New York, where they are sold for a cent apiece. End of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 of The Story of My Boyhood and Youth.

This Libre Vox recording is in the public domain. Reading by Sue Anderson. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth by John Muir, Chapter 5. young hunters, American headhunters, deer, a resurrected woodpecker, muskrats, boxes and badgers, a pet coon, bathing, squirrels, gophers, a burglaria strike. In the older eastern states, it used to be considered great sport for an army of boys to assemble to hunt birds, squirrels, and every other unclaimed, unprotected, live thing of shootable size. they divided into two squads and choosing leaders, scattered through the woods in different directions,

and the party that killed the greatest number enjoyed a supper at the expense of the other. The whole neighborhood seemed to enjoy the shameful sport, especially the farmers afraid of their crops. With a great air of importance, laws were enacted to govern the gory business. For example, a gray squirrel must count four heads, a woodchuck six heads, common red squirrel two heads, black squirrel ten heads a partridge five heads the larger birds such as whippoor wills and nighthawks two heads each the wary crows three and bob whites three but all the blessed company of mere songbirds warblers robins thrushes orioles with nut hatches chickadees blue jays woodpeckers etc counted only one head each the heads of the birds were hastily wrung off and thrust into the game bags to be counted saving the bodies only of what were called game, the larger squirrels, Bob White's partridges, etc. The blood-stained bags of the best slayers were soon bulging full. Then at a given hour all had to stop and repair to the town.

Empty their dripping sacks, count the heads, and go rejoicing to their dinner. Although like other wild boys I was fond of shooting, I never had anything to do with these abominable head hunts. And now, the farmers having learned that birds are, their friends, wholesale slaughter has been abolished. We seldom saw deer, though their tracks were common. The Yankee explained that they traveled and fed mostly at night and hid in Tamarack swamps and brushy places in the daytime and how the Indians knew all about them and could find them whenever they were hungry. Indians belonging to the Menominee and Winnebago tribes occasionally visited us at our cabin

to get a piece of bread or some matches or to sharpen their knives on our grindstone, and we boys watched them closely to see that they didn't steal Jack. We wondered at their knowledge of animals when we saw them go direct to trees on our farm, chop holes in them with their tomahawks, and take out coons of the existence, of which we had never noticed the slightest trace.

In winter, after the first snow, we frequently saw three or four Indians hunting deer in company running like, hounds on the fresh, exciting tracks. The escape of the deer from these noiseless, tireless hunters was said to be well-nigh impossible. They were followed to the death. Most of our neighbors brought some sort of gun from the old country, but seldom took time to hunt, even after the first hard work of fencing and clearing was over, except to shoot a duck or prairie chicken now and then that happened to come in their way. It was only the less industrious American

settlers who left their work to go far a hunting. Two or three of our most enterprising American neighbors went off every fall with their teams to the pine regions and cranberry marshes in the northern part of the state to hunt and gather berries. I well remember seeing their wagons loaded with game when they returned from a successful hunt. Their loads consisted usually of half a dozen deer or more, one or two black bears, and 15 or 20 bushels of cranberries, all solidly frozen. Part of both the berries and meat was usually sold in portage. The balance furnished their families with abundance of venison, bear grease, and pies. Winter wheat is sewn in the fall, and when it is a month or so old, the deer, like the wild geese, are very fond of it.

especially since other kinds of food are then becoming scarce. One of our neighbors across the Fox River killed a large number, some 30 or 40, on a small patch of wheat, simply by lying in wait for them every night. Our wheat field was the first that was sown in the neighborhood. The deer soon found it and came in every night to feast, but it was eight or nine years before we ever disturbed them. David then killed one deer, the only one. killed by any of our family. He went out shortly after sundown at the time of full moon to one of

our wheat fields, carrying a double-barreled shotgun loaded with buckshot. After lying in wait an hour or so, he saw a doe and her fawn jumped the fence and come cautiously into the wheat. After they were within 60 or 70 yards of him, he was surprised when he tried to take aim that about half of the moon's disc was mysteriously darkened as if covered by the edge of a dense cloud. This proved to be an eclipse. Nevertheless, he fired at the mother and she immediately ran off, jumped the fence, and took to the woods by the way she came. The fawn danced about, bewildered, wondering what had become of its mother, but finally fled to the woods. David fired at the poor deserted thing as it ran past him, but happily missed it. Hearing the shots, I joined David to learn his

luck. He said he thought he must have wounded the mother, and when we were strolling about in the woods in search of her, we saw three or four deer on their way to the wheat field, led by a fine buck. They were walking rapidly, but cautiously halted at intervals of a few rods to listen and look ahead and sent the air. They failed to notice us, though by this time the moon was out of the eclipse shadow and we were standing only about 50 yards from them. I was carrying the gun, david had fired both barrels but when he was reloading one of them he happened to put the wad intended to cover the shot into the empty barrel and so when we were climbing over the fence the buck shot had rolled out and when i fired at the big buck i knew by the report that there was nothing but powder in the charge the startled deer danced about in confusion for a few seconds uncertain which way to run until they caught sight of us when they bounded off through the woods Next morning we found the poor mother lying about 300 yards from the place where she was shot.

She had run this distance and jumped a high fence after one of the buckshot had passed through her heart. Accepting Sundays, we boys had only two days of the year to ourselves, the 4th of July and the 1st of January. Sundays were less than half our own on account of Bible lessons, Sunday school lessons and church services. All the others were labor days, rain, or or shine, cold, or warm. No wonder then that our two holidays were precious and that it was not easy to decide what to do with them. They were usually spent on the highest rocky hill in the neighborhood called the Observatory, in visiting our boyfriends on adjacent farms to hunt, fish, wrestle, and play games, in reading some new favorite book we had managed to borrow or

buy, or in making models of machines I had invented. One of our July days was spent with two Scotch boys of our own age, hunting red-wing blackbirds then busy in the cornfields. Our party had only one single-barreled shotgun, which, as the oldest, and perhaps because I was thought to be the best shot, I had the honor of carrying. We marched through the corn without getting sight of a single red-wing, but just as we reached the far side of the field, a red-headed woodpecker flew up, and the Lawson boys cried, shoot him, shoot him! He is just as bad as the blackbird. He eats corn. This memorable woodpecker alighted in the top of a white oak tree about 50 feet high. I fired from a position almost immediately beneath him, and he fell straight

down at my feet. When I picked him up and was admiring his plumage, he moved his legs slightly, and I said, poor bird, he's no dead yet, and will have to kill him to put him out of pain, sincerely pitying him, after we had taken pleasure in shooting him. I had seen servant-groom. I had seen servant-girt. wringing chicken necks, so with desperate humanity I took the limp, unfortunate by the head, swung him around three or four times, thinking I was wringing his neck, and then threw him hard on the ground to quench the last possible spark of life and make quick death doubly sure. But to our astonishment, the moment he struck the ground, he gave a cry of alarm, and flew right straight up like a rejoicing lark into the top of the

same tree and perhaps to the same branch he had fallen from and began to adjust his ruffled feathers, nodding and chirping and looking down at us as if wondering what in the bird world we had been doing to him. This, of course, banished all thought of killing as far as that revived woodpecker was concerned, no matter how many ears of corn he might spoil, and we all heartily congratulated him on his wonderful, triumphant resurrection from three kinds of death, shooting, neck-wringing, and destructive concussion. I suppose only one pellet had touched him, glancing on his head. Another extraordinary shooting affair happened one summer morning shortly after daybreak. When I went to the stable to feed the horses, I noticed a big white-breasted hawk on a tall oak in front of the chicken house,

evidently waiting for a chicken breakfast. I ran to the house for the gun, and when I fired he fell about halfway down the tree, caught a branch with his claws, hung back downward, and fluttered a few seconds, then managed to stand erect. I fired again to put him out of pain, and to my surprise the second shot seemed to restore his strength instead of killing him, for he flew out of the tree and over the meadow with strong and regular wing-beats for 30 or 40 rods, apparently as well as ever, but died suddenly in the air and dropped like a stone. We hunted muskrats whenever we had time to run down to the lake. They are brown bunchy animals about 23 inches long, the tail being about nine inches in length,

black in color and flattened vertically for sculling, and the hind feet are half-webbed. They look like little beavers, usually have from 10 to a dozen young, are easily tamed and make interesting pets. We like to watch them at their work and at their meals. In the spring when the snow vanishes and the lake ice begins to melt, the first open spot is always used as a feeding place

where they dive from the edge of the ice and in a minute or less reappear with a muscle or a mouthful of pontadaria or water lily leaves, climb back onto the ice and sit up to nibble their food, handling it very much like squirrels or marmots. It is then that they are most easily shot. A solitary hunter oftentimes shooting 30 or 40 in a single day. Their nests on the rushy margins of lakes and streams, far from being hidden like

those of most birds, are conspicuously large and conical in shape like Indian wigwams. They are built of plants, rushes, sedges, mosses, etc., and ornamented around the base with muscle shells. It was always pleasant and interesting to see them in the fall as soon as the nights began to be frosty, hard at work cutting sedges on the edge of the meadow or swimming out through the rushes, making long, glittering ripples as they sculled themselves along, diving where the water is perhaps six or eight feet deep and reappearing in a minute or so with large mouthfuls of the weedy, tangled plants gathered from the bottom, returning to their big wigwams, climbing up, and depositing their loads where most needed to make them yet larger and firmer and warmer.

foreseeing the freezing weather just like ourselves when we banked up our house to keep out the frost. They lie snug and invisible all winter, but do not hibernate. Through a channel carefully kept open, they swim out under the ice for mussels, and the roots and stems of water lilies, etc., on which they feed just as they do in summer. Sometimes the oldest and most enterprising of them ventured to orchards near the water in search of fallen apples. Very seldom, however, do they interfere with anything belonging to their mortal enemy, man. Notwithstanding, they are so well hidden and protected during the winter, many of them are killed by Indian hunters, who creep up softly and spear them through the thick walls of their cabins.

Indians are fond of their flesh, and so are some of the wildest of the white trappers. They are easily caught in steel traps, and after vainly trying to drag their feet from the cruel, crushing jaws, they sometimes in their agony gnaw them off. Even after having gnaw off a leg, they are so guileless that they never seem to learn to know and fear traps, for some of them are occasionally found that have been caught twice and have gnawed off a second foot. Many other animals suffering excruciating pain in these cruel traps gnaw off their legs.

Crabbs and lobsters are so fortunate as to be able to shed their limbs when caught or merely frightened, apparently without suffering any pain. simply by giving themselves a little shivery shake. The muskrat is one of the most notable and widely distributed of American animals, and millions of the gentle, industrious, beaver-like creatures are shot and trapped and speared every season for their skins worth a dime or so, like shooting boys and girls for their garments. Surely a better time must be drawing nigh when God-like human beings will become truly

humane and learn to put their animal fellow mortals in their hearts instead of on their backs or in their dinners. In the meantime, we may just as well as not learn to live clean, innocent lives instead of slimy, bloody ones. All hail red-blooded boys are savage, the best and boldest, the savages, fond of hunting and fishing. But when thoughtless childhood is past, the best rise the highest above all this bloody flesh and sport business, the wild foundational animal dying out day by day as divine, uplifting, transfiguring charity grows in. Hairs and rabbits were seldom seen when we first settled in the Wisconsin woods, but they multiplied rapidly after the animals that preyed upon them had been thinned out or exterminated, and food and shelter supplied in grain

fields and log fences, and the thickets of young oaks that grew up. in pastures after the annual grass fires were kept out. Catching hairs in the wintertime when they were hidden in hollow fence logs was a favorite pastime with many of the boys whose fathers allowed them time to enjoy the sport. Occasionally a stout lithe hair was carried out into an open snow-covered field set free and given a chance for its life in a race with a dog. When the snow was not too soft and deep, it usually made good its escape, for our dogs were only fat, short-legged mongrels. We sometimes discovered hares in standing hollow trees, crouching on decayed punky wood at the bottom, as far back as possible from the opening, but when alarmed, they managed to climb

to a considerable height if the hollow was not too wide, by bracing themselves against the sides. Foxes, though not uncommon, we boys, held steadily to work, seldom saw, and as they found plenty of prairie chickens for themselves and families, they did not often come near the farmer's hen moosts. Nevertheless, the discovery of their dens was considered important. No matter how deep the den might be, it was thoroughly explored with pick and shovel by sport-loving settlers at a time when they judged the fox was likely to be at home. But I cannot remember. any case in our neighborhood where the fox was actually captured. In one of the dens a mile or two from our farm, a lot of prairie chickens were found and some smaller birds. Badger dens were far more common than fox dens. One of our fields was named Badger Hill from the number of badger holes in a hill at the end of it, but I cannot remember seeing a single one of the inhabitants. On a stormy day in the middle of an unusually severe winter, a black bear, hungry, no doubt, and seeking something to eat, came strolling down through our neighborhood from the northern pine woods. None had been seen

here before, and it caused no little excitement and alarm. For the European settlers imagined that these poor, timid, bashful bears were as dangerous as man-eating lions and tigers, and that they would pursue any human being that came in their way. This species is common in the North part of the state, and few of our enterprising Yankee hunters who went to the pineries in the fall failed to shoot at least one of them. We saw very little of the owlish, serious-looking coons, and no wonder, since they lie hidden nearly all day in hollow trees and we never had time to hunt them. We often heard their curious, quavering, whinnying cries on still evenings, but only once succeeded in tracing an unfortunate family through our cornfield to their den in a big oak,

and catching them all. One of our neighbors, Mr. McRath, a Highland Scotchman, caught one and made a pet of it. It became very tame and had perfect confidence in the good intentions of its kind friend and master.

He always addressed it in speaking to it as a little man. When it came running to him and jumped on his lap or climbed up his trousers, he would say while patting its head as if it were a dog or a child, Kuni Mamani,

Kuni Mamani, how are ye the day? I think you're hungry, as the comical pet began to examine his pockets for nuts and bits of bread. Nah, nah, there's nothing in my pooch for you the day, my ween manny, but I'll get you something. He would then fetch something it liked, bread, nuts, a carrot, or perhaps a piece of fresh meat. Anything scattered for it on the floor it felt with its paw instead of looking at it, judging of its worth more by touch than sight. The outlet of our fountain lake flowed past Mr. McGrath's door, and the coon was very fond of swimming in it and searching for frogs and muscles. It seemed perfectly satisfied to stay about the house without being confined, occupied a comfortable bed in a section of a hollow tree, and never wandered far.

How long it lived after the death of its kind master, I don't know. I suppose that almost any wild animal may be made a pet, simply by sympathizing you. with it and entering as much as possible into its life. In Alaska, I saw one of the common gray mountain marmots kept as a pet in an Indian family. When its master entered the house, it always seemed glad, almost like a dog, and when cold or tired, it snuggled up in a fold of his blanket with the utmost confidence. We have all heard of ferocious animals, lions and tigers, etc., that were fed and spoken to only by their masters, becoming perfectly tame, and, as is well known, the faithful dog that follows man and serves him, and looks up to him and loves him as if he were a

god, is a descendant of the bloodthirsty wolf or jackal. Even frogs and toads and fishes may be tamed, provided they have the uniform sympathy of one person with whom they become intimately acquainted without the distracting and varying attentions of strangers. And surely all God's people, however serious and savage, great or small, like to play, whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes, all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them. As far as I know, all wild creatures keep themselves clean. birds, it seems to me, take more pains to bathe and dress themselves than any other animals.

Even ducks, though living so much in water, dip and scatter cleansing showers over their backs and shake and preen their feathers as carefully as land birds. Watching small singers taking their morning baths is very interesting, particularly when the weather is cold. A lighting in a shallow pool, they oftentimes show a sort of dread of dipping into it. like children hesitating about taking a plunge as if they felt the same kind of shock and this makes it easy for us to sympathize with the little feathered people occasionally i have seen from my study window red-headed linnet's bathing in dew when water elsewhere was scarce a large monterey cypress with broad branches and innumerable leaves on which the dew lodges in still nights made favorite bathing places alighting gently as if afraid to waste the water-oise the dew, they would pause and fidget as they do before beginning to plash in pools, then dip and scatter the drops in showers and get as thorough a bath as they would in a pool. I have also seen

the same kind of baths taken by birds on the boughs of silver furs on the edge of a glacier meadow. But nowhere have I seen the dew drops so abundant as on the Monterey Cyprus, and the picture made by the quivering wings and iris dew was memorably beautiful. Children too make fine pictures splashing and crowing in their little tubs, how widely different from wallowing pigs, bathing with great show of comfort and rubbing themselves dry against rough bark trees. Some of our own species seemed fairly to dread the touch of water. When the necessity of absolute cleanliness by means of frequent baths was being preached by a friend who had been reading Combe's physiology in which he had learned something of the wonders of the skin with its millions

of pores that had to be kept open for health, one of our neighbors remarked, oh, that's unnatural. It's well enough to wash in a tub maybe once or twice a year, but not to be paddling in the water all the time like a frog in a springhole. Another neighbor who prided himself on his knowledge of big words said with great solemnity, I never can believe that man is amphibious. natives of Tropic Islands pass a large part of their lives in water and seem as much at home in the sea as on the land. Swim and dive pursue fishes, play in the waves like surf ducks and seals and explore the coral gardens and groves and seaweed meadows as if truly amphibious.

Even the natives of the Far North Bay that times, I once saw a lot of Eskimo boys ducking and plashing right merrily in the Arctic Ocean. It seemed very wonderful to us that the wild animals could keep themselves warm and strong in winter when the temperature was far below zero. Feble-looking rabbits scud away over the snow, lithe and elastic, as if glorying in the frosty, sparkling weather, and sure of their dinners. I have seen gray squirrels dragging ears of corn about as heavy as themselves out of our field through loose snow and up a tree, balancing them on limbs and eating in comfort with their dry,

electric tails spread airily over their backs. Once I saw a fine, hardy fellow go into a knot hole. Thrusting in my hand, I caught him and pulled him out. As soon as he guessed what I was up to, he took the end of my thumb in his mouth and sunk his teeth right through it, but I gripped him hard by the neck, carried him home, and shut him up in a box that contained about half a bushel of hazel and hickory nuts,

hoping that he would not be too much frightened and discouraged to eat, while thus imprisoned after the rough handling he had suffered. I soon learned, however, that sympathy in this direction was wasted. For no sooner did I pop him in that he fell to with right-hearted appetite, gnawing and munching the nuts as if he had gathered them himself, and was very hungry that day. Therefore, after allowing time enough for a good square meal, I made haste to get him out of the nut-box and shut him up in a spare bedroom,

in which father had hung a lot of selected ears of Indian corn for seed. They were hung up by the husks on cords stretched across from side to side of the room. The squirrel managed to jump from the top of one of the bedposts to the cord, cut off an ear, and let it drop to the floor. He then jumped down, got a good grip of the heavy ear, carried it to the top of one of the slippery, polished bedposts, seated himself comfortably, and, holding it well balanced, deliberately pried out one kernel at a time with his long chiseled teeth, ate the soft sweet germ and dropped the hard part of the colonel. In this masterly way, working at high speed,

he demolished several ears a day, and with a good warm bed in a box made himself at home and grew fat. Then naturally, I suppose, free romping in the snow and tree-tops, with companions, came to mind. Anyhow, he began to look for a way of escape. Of course, he first tried the window, but found that his teeth made no impression on the glass. next he tried the sash and nod the wood off level with the glass.

Then father happened to come upstairs and discovered the mischief that was being done to his seed corn and window and immediately ordered him out of the house. The flying squirrel was one of the most interesting of the little animals we found in the woods, a beautiful brown creature with fine eyes and smooth soft fur like that of a mole or field mouse. He is about half as long as the gray squirrel, but his wide, widespread tail and the folds of skin along his sides that form the wings make him look broad and flat, something like a kite. In the evenings our cat often brought them to her kittens at the shanty, and later we saw them fly during the day from the trees we were chopping. They jumped and glided

off smoothly and apparently without effort, like birds. As soon as they heard and felt the breaking shock of the strained fibers at the stump when the trees they were in began to totter and grown. They can fly, or rather, glide 20 or 30 yards from the top of a tree, 20 or 30 feet to the foot of another, gliding upward as they reach the trunk. Or if the distance is too great, they alight comfortably on the ground and make haste to the nearest tree and climb just like the wingless squirrels. Every boy and girl loves the little fairy, airy-striped chipmunk, half squirrel, half-spermophile. He is about the size of a field mouse and often made us think. of linets and song sparrows as he frisked about gathering nuts and berries. He likes almost all kinds

of grain, berries and nuts, hazelnuts, hickory nuts, strawberries, huckleberries, wheat, oats, corn. He is fond of them all and thrives on them. Most of the hazel bushes on our farm grew along the fences as if they had been planted for the chipmunks alone, for the rail fences were their favorite highways. We never worried watching them, especially when the hazel nuts were ripe. and the little fellows were sitting on the rails nibbling and handling them like tree squirrels. We used to notice, too, that although they are very neat animals, their lips and fingers were dyed red like our own when the strawberries and huckleberries were ripe. We could always tell when the wheat and oats were in the milk by seeing the chipmunks feeding on the ears. They kept nibbling at the wheat until it was harvested and then gleaned in the stubble,

keeping up a careful watch for their enemies, dogs, hawks, and shrikes. They are as widely distributed over the continent as the squirrels, various species inhabiting different regions on the mountains and lowlands, but all the different kinds have the same general characteristics of light, airy cheerfulness, and good nature. Before the arrival of farmers in the Wisconsin woods, the small ground squirrels called gophers, live chiefly on the seeds of wild grasses and weeds. but after the country was cleared and plowed, no feasting animal fell too more heartily on the farmer's wheat and corn.

Increasing rapidly in numbers and knowledge, they became very destructive, especially in the spring when the corn was planted, for they learned to trace the rows and dig up and eat the three or four seeds in each hill about as fast as the poor farmers could cover them. And unless great pains were taken to diminish the numbers of the cunning little robbers, the fields had to be planted two or three times over, and even then large gaps in the rows would be found. The loss of the grain they consumed after it was ripe, together with the winter stores laid up in their burrows,

amounted too little as compared with the loss of the seed on which the whole crop depended. One evening about sundown, when my father sent me out with a shotgun, to hunt them in a stubble field, I learned something curious and interesting in connection with these mischievous gophers. though just then they were doing no harm.

As I strolled through the stubble watching for a chance for a shot, a shrike flew past me and alighted on an open spot at the mouth of a burrow about thirty yards ahead of me. Curious to see what he was up to, I stood still to watch him. He looked down the gopher hole in a listening attitude, then looked back at me to see if I was coming, looked down again and listened and looked back at me. I stood perfectly still, and he looked at me.

kept twitching his tail, seeming uneasy and doubtful about venturing to do the savage job that I soon learned he had in mind. Finally, encouraged by my keeping so still, to my astonishment, he suddenly vanished in the gopher hole. A bird going down a deep, narrow hole in the ground like a ferret or a weasel seemed very strange, and I thought it would be a fine thing to run forward, clap by hand over the hole and have the fun of imprisoning him and seeing what he would do when he tried to get out. So I ran forward but stopped when I got within a dozen or 15 yards of the hole, thinking it might perhaps be more interesting to wait and see what would naturally happen without my interference. While I stood there looking and listening, I heard a great disturbance going on in the burrow,

a mixed lot of keen squeaking, shrieking, distressful cries, telling the, that down in the dark something terrible was being done. Then suddenly out popped a half-grown gopher, four and a half or five inches long, and without stopping a single moment to choose a way of escape, ran screaming through the stubble straight away from its home, quickly followed by another and another until some half-dozen were driven out. All of them crying and running in different directions as if at this dreadful time home, sweet home was the most dangerous and least desirable of any place in the wide world. Then out came the Shrike, flew above the runaway gopher children, and diving on them killed them one after another, with blows at the back of the skull. He then seized

one of them, dragged it to the top of a small clod so as to be able to get a start, and laboriously made out to fly with it about ten or fifteen yards when he alighted to rest. Then he dragged it to the top of another clod and flew with it about the same distance. repeating this hard work over and over again until he managed to get one of the gophers onto the top of a log fence. How much he ate of his hard-won prey, or what he did with the others, I can't tell, for by this time the sun was down and I had to hurry home to my chores. End of Chapter 5. Chapter 6 of the story of my boyhood and youth. This Libre Vox recording is in the public domain.

recording by Sue Anderson The Story of My Boyhood and Youth by John Muir Chapter 6 The Plow Boy The Crops Doing Chores The Sites and Sounds of Winter

Roadmaking The Spirit Rapping Crays Tuberculosis Among the Settlers A Cruel Brother The Rights of the Indians Put to the Plow at the age of 12 in the harvest field over industry among the settlers running the breaking plow digging a well choke damp lining bees

at first wheat corn and potatoes were the principal crops we raise wheat especially but in four or five years the soil was so exhausted that only five or six bushels an acre even in the better fields was obtained although when when first plowed 20 and 25 bushels was about the ordinary yield. More attention was then paid to corn, but without fertilizers, the corn crop also became very meager. At last, it was discovered that English clover would grow on even the exhausted fields, and that, when plowed under and planted with corn, or even wheat, wonderful crops were raised. This caused a complete change in farming methods.

The farmers raised fertilizing clover, planted corn, and fed the crock to cattle and hogs. But no crop raised in our wilderness was so surprisingly rich and sweet and purely generous to us boys, and indeed to everybody, as the watermelons and muskmelons. We planted a large patch on a sunny hill slope the very first spring, and it seemed miraculous that a few handfuls of little flat seeds should in a few months, sunned up a hundred wagon loads of crisp sumptuous red-hearted and yellow-hearted fruits covering all the hill we soon learned to know when they were in their prime and when overripe and mealy also that if a second crop was taken from the same ground without fertilizing it the melons would be small and what we called soapy that is soft and smooth utterly uncrisp and without a trace of the lively freshness and sweet of those raised on virgin soil.

Coming in from the farmwork at noon, the half dozen or so of melons we had placed in our cold spring were a glorious luxury that only weary, bare-footed farm boys can ever know. Spring was not very trying as to temperature, and refreshing rains fell at short intervals. The work of plowing commenced as soon as the frost was out of the ground. Corn and potato planting and the sewing of spring wheat

were comparatively light work while the nesting birds sank cheerily grass and flowers covered the marshes and meadows and all the wild uncleared parts of the farm and the trees put forth their new leaves those of the oaks forming beautiful purple masses as if every leaf were a petal and with all this we enjoyed the mild soothing winds the humming of innumerable small insects and hila's and the freshness and fragrance of everything then too came the wonderful passenger pigeons streaming from the south and flocks of geese and cranes filling all the sky with whistling wings the summer work on the contrary was deadly heavy especially harvesting and corn-hoeing all the ground had to be hoed over for the first few years before father bought cultivators or small weed-covering plows, and we were not allowed a moment's rest. The hose had to be kept working up and down as steadily as if they were moved by machinery. Plowing for winter wheat was comparatively easy when we walked barefooted in the furrows, while the fine autumn tints kindled in the woods and the hillsides were covered with golden pumpkins. In summer, the chores were grinding size, feeding the animals, chopping stovewood,

and carrying water up the hill from the spring on the edge of the meadow, etc. Then breakfast, and to the harvest or hayfield. I was foolishly ambitious to be first in mowing and cradling, and by the time I was 16 led all the hired men. An hour was allowed at noon for dinner and more chores. we stayed in the field until dark then supper and still more chores family worship and to bed making altogether a hard sweaty day of about sixteen or seventeen hours think of that ye blessed eight-hour day laborers in winter father came to the foot of the stairs and called us at six o'clock to feed the horses and cattle grind axes bring in wood and do any other chores required then breakfast and out to work in the mealy frosty snow by daybreak chopping fencing etc so in general our winter work was about as restless and trying as that of the long day summer no matter what the weather there was always something to do during heavy rains or snowstorms we worked in the barn shelling corn fanning wheat thrashing with the flail making axe handles or ox-yokes mending things or sprouting and sorting potatoes in the cellar.

No pains were taken to diminish or in any way soften the natural hardships of this pioneer farm life. Nor did any of the Europeans seem to know how to find reasonable ease and comfort if they would. The very best oak and hickory fuel was embarrassingly abundant

and cost nothing but cutting and common sense. But instead of hauling great heart-chearing loads of it for wide open, all- welcoming, climate-changing, beauty-making, godlike ingle fires, it was hauled with weary, heartbreaking industry into fences and waste places to get it out of the way of the plow and out of the way of doing good.

The only fire for the whole house was the kitchen stove, with a fire box about 18 inches long and 8 inches wide and deep, scant space for three or four small sticks, around which in hard zero weather all the family of ten persons shivered, and beneath which in the morning we found our socks and coarse soggy boots, frozen solid. We were not allowed to start even this despicable little fire in its black box to thaw them.

No, we had to squeeze our throbbing, aching, chill-blane feet into them, causing greater pain than toothache and to hurry out to chores. fortunately the miserable chill-blane pain began to abate as soon as the temperature of our feet approached the freezing point, enabling us in spite of hard work and hard frost to enjoy the winter beauty, the wonderful radiance of the snow when it was starry with crystals, and the dawns and the sunsets and white noons, and the cheery and livening company of the brave chickadees and nut hatches. The winter stars far surpassed those of our stormy Scotland in brightness,

and we gazed and gazed as though we had never seen stars before. Oftentimes the heavens were made still more glorious by auroras, the long lance rays called merry dancers in Scotland, streaming with startling, tremulous motion to the zenith. Usually the electric auroral light is white or pale yellow, But in the third or fourth of our Wisconsin winters, there was a magnificently colored aurora that was seen and admired over nearly all the continent. The whole sky was draped in graceful purple and crimson folds, glorious beyond description.

Father called us out into the yard in front of the house where we had a wide view, crying, come, come, mother, come barons, and see the glory of God. all the sky is clad in a robe of red light. Look straight up to the crown where the folds are gathered. Hush and wonder and adore, for surely this is the clothing of the Lord himself. And perhaps he will even now appear looking down from his high heaven. This celestial show was far more glorious than anything we had ever yet beheld, and throughout that wonderful winter hardly anything else was spoken of.

we even enjoyed the snowstorms the thronging crystals like daisies coming down separate and distinct were very different from the tufted flakes we enjoyed so much in scotland when we ran into the midst of the slow falling feathery throng shouting with enthusiasm jenny's plucking her dues jenny's plucking her doves nature has many ways of thinning and pruning and trimming her forests lightning strokes heavy snow and storm winds to shatter and blow down whole trees here and there, or break off branches as required. The results of these methods I have observed in different forests, but only once have I seen pruning by rain. The rain froze on the trees as it fell and grew so thick and heavy that many of them lost a third or more of their branches. The view of the woods after the storm had passed, and the sun shone forth, was something never. to be forgotten. Every twig and branch and rugged trunk was encased in pure crystal ice,

and each oak and hickory and willow became a fairy crystal palace. Such dazzling brilliance, such effects of white light and iris light, glowing and flashing I had never seen before, nor have I since. This sudden change of the leafless woods to glowing silver was, like the great Aurora spoken of for years and is one of the most beautiful of the many pictures that enriches my life. And besides the great shows, there were thousands of others, even in the coldest weather, manifesting the utmost fineness and tenderness of beauty, and affording noble compensation for hardship and pain. One of the most striking of the winter sounds was the loud, roaring, and rumbling of the ice

on our lake, from its shrinking and expanding with the changes of the winter. weather. The fishermen who were catching pickerel said that they had no luck when this roaring was going on above the fish. I remember how frightened we boys were when on one of our New Year holidays we were taking a walk on the ice and heard for the first time the sudden rumbling roar beneath our feet and running on ahead of us, creaking and whooping as if all the ice 18 or 20 inches thick was breaking. In the neighborhood of our Wisconsin farm, there were extensive swamps consisting in great part of a thick sod of very tough kerak's roots, covering thin, watery lakes of mud. They originated in glacier lakes that were gradually overgrown. This sod was so tough

that oxen with loaded wagons could be driven over it without cutting down through it, although it was afloat the carpenters who came to build our frame house noticing how the sedges sunk beneath their feet said that if they should break through they would probably be well on their way to california before touching bottom On the contrary, all these lake basins are shallow as compared with their width. When we went into the Wisconsin woods, there was not a single wheel track or cattle track. The only man-made road was an Indian trail along the Fox River between portage and Pockwocky Lake. Of course, the deer, foxes, badgers, coons, skunks, and even the squirrels had well-beaten tracks from their dens and hiding places in thickets, hollow trees, and the ground. but they did not reach far, and but little noise was made by the soft-footed travelers in passing over them,

only a slight rustling and swishing among fallen leaves and grass. Corderoring the swamps formed the principal part of road-making among the early settlers for many a day. At these annual road-making gatherings, opportunity was offered for discussion of the news, politics, religion, war, the state of the crops, comparative advantages of the new country over the old, and so forth. But the principal opportunities recurring every week were the hours after Sunday church services. I remember hearing long talks on the wonderful beauty of the Indian corn, the wonderful melons so wondrous fine for sloak on the body on hot days, their contempt for tomatoes so fine to look at with their sunny colors and so disappointing in taste.

The miserable cucumbers, the Yankee bodies ate, though tasteless as rushes, the character of the Yankees, etc. Then there were long discussions about the Russian war, news of which was eagerly gleaned from Greeley's New York Tribune, the great battles of the Alma, the charges at Balaclava and Inkerman, the siege of Sebastopol, the military genius of Taudleben, the character of Nicholas, the character of the Russian soldier, his stubborn bravery, who, for the first time in history, withstood the British bayonet charges, the probable outcome of the terrible war, the fate of Turkey, and so forth. Very few of our old country neighbors gave much heed to what are called spirit wrappings. On the contrary, they were regarded as a sort of slight of hand, humbug.

Some of these spirits seem to be stout, able-bodied fellows, judging by the weights they lift and the heavy furniture they bang about. But they do no good work that I know of, never saw wood, grind corn, cook, feed the hungry, or go to the help of poor, anxious mothers at the bedsides of their sick children. I noticed when I was a boy that it was not the strongest characters who followed so-called mediums. When a rapping storm was at its height in Wisconsin, one of our neighbors and old Scotchmen remarked, Their pure, silly, medium bodies may gain to the devil with their rapid spirits, for the de no good, and I think the devil's their father. Although in the spring of 1849, there was no other settler within a radius of four miles of our Fountain Lake Farm,

in three or four years almost every quarter section of government land was taken up, mostly by enthusiastic home-seekers from Great Britain, with only here and there Yankee families from adjacent states, who had come drifting indefinitely westward and covered wagons, seeking their fortunes like winged seeds, all alike striking root and gripping the glacial drift soil as naturally as oak and hickory trees, happy and hopeful, establishing homes and making wider and wider fields in the hospitable wilderness.

The axe and plow were kept very busy, cattle, horses, sheep, and pigs multiplied. Barns and corn cribs were filled up, and man and beast were well fed. A schoolhouse was built, which was used also for a church, and in a very short time the new country began to look like an old one. Comparatively few of the first settlers suffered from serious accidents. One of our neighbors had a finger shot off, and on a bitter frosty night had to be taken to a surgeon in portage in a sled drawn by slow, plodding oxen to have the shattered stump dressed. Another fell from his wagon and was killed by the wheel passing over his body. An acre of ground was reserved and fenced for graves, and soon consumption

came to fill it. One of the saddest instances was that of a Scotch family from Edinburgh, consisting of a father, son, and daughter, who settled on 80 acres of. of land within a half mile of our place. The daughter died of consumption the third year after their arrival. The son, one or two years later, and at last the father followed his two children. Thus sadly ended bright hopes and dreams of a happy home in rich and free America. Another neighbor, I remember, after a lingering illness died of the same disease in midwinter, and his funeral was attended by the neighbors in Slays during a driving snowstorm.

when the thermometer was 15 or 20 degrees below zero. The great white plague carried off another of our near neighbors, a fine Scotchman, the father of eight promising boys, when he was only about 45 years of age. Most of those who suffered from this disease seemed hopeful and cheerful up to a very short time before their death. But Mr. Reed, I remember, on one of his last visits to our house, said, with brave resignation,

I know that never more in this world can I be well, but I must submit. I must just submit. One of the saddest deaths from other causes than consumption was that of a poor, feeble-minded man whose brother, a sturdy blacksmith and preacher, etc., was a very hard taskmaster. Poor half-witted Charlie was kept steadily at work, although he was not able to do much, for his body was about as feeble as his mind. he never could be taught the right use of an axe, and when he was set to chopping down trees for firewood, he feebly hacked and chipped round and round them,

sometimes spending several days in nibbling down a tree that a beaver might have gnawed down in half the time. Occasionally, when he had an extra large tree to chop, he would go home and report that the tree was too tough and strong for him and that he could never make it fall. Then his brother, calling him a useless creature, would fell it with a few well-directed strokes, and leave Charlie to nibble away at it for weeks,

trying to make it into stovewood. The brawny blacksmith minister punished his feeble brother without any show of mercy for every trivial offense or mistake or pathetic little shortcoming. All the neighbors pitied him, especially the women, who never missed an opportunity to give him kind words,

cookies, and pie. Above all, they bestowed natural sympathy, on the poor imbecile, as if he were an unfortunate motherless child. In particular, his nearest neighbors, Scotch Highlanders, warmly welcomed him to their home, and never wearied in doing everything that tender sympathy could suggest. To those friends he ran away at every opportunity, but after years of suffering from overwork and punishment,

his feeble health failed, and he told his Scotch friends one day that he was not able to work anymore or do anything that his brother wanted him to do, that he was beaten every day, and that he had come to thank them for their kindness, and to bid them goodbye, for he was going to drown himself in Mears Lake. Oh, Charlie, Charlie, they cried.

You mustn't talk that way. Cheer up. You'll soon be stronger. We all love you. Cheer up, cheer up. And always come here whenever you need anything. Oh, no, he pathetically replied. I know you love me, but I can't cheer up anymore.

My heart's gone, and I want to die. Next day, when Mr. Anderson, a carpenter, whose house was on the west shore of our lake, was going to a spring, he saw a man weighed out through the rushes and lily pads and throw himself forward into deep water. This was poor Charlie. Fortunately, Mr. Anderson had a skiff close by, and as the distance was not great, he reached the broken-hearted imbecile in time to save his life, and after trying to cheer him, took him home to his brother.

But even this terrible proof of despair failed to soften the latter. He seemed to regard the attempted suicide simply as a crime calculated to bring the reproach of the neighbors upon him. One morning, after receiving another beating, Charlie was set to work chopping firewood in front of the house, and after feebly swinging his axe a few times he pitched forward on his face and died on the woodpile. The unnatural brother then walked over to the neighbor who had saved Charlie from drowning, and after talking on ordinary affairs, crops, the weather, etc., said in a careless tone,

I have a little job of carpenter work for you, Mr. Anderson. What is it, Mr. I want you to make a coffin. A coffin? said the startled carpenter, who was dead? Charlie, he coolly replied. All the neighbors were in tears over the poor child man's fate, but strange to say, in all that excessively law-abiding neighborhood, none was bold enough or kind enough to break the blacksmith's jaw. The mixed lot of settlers around us offered a favorable field for observation

of the different kinds of people of our own race. we were swift to note the way they behaved, the differences in their religion and morals, and in their ways of drawing a living from the same kind of soil under the same general conditions, how they protected themselves from the weather, how they were influenced by new doctrines and old ones seen in new lights in preaching, lecturing, debating, bringing up their children, etc. And how they regarded the Indians, those first settlers and owners of the ground that was being made, into farms. I well remember my father's discussing with a Scotch neighbor, a Mr. George Mayor, the Indian question as to the rightful ownership of the soil. Mr. Mayor remarked one day that it was

pitiful to see how the unfortunate Indians, children of nature, living on the natural products of the soil, hunting, fishing, and even cultivating small cornfields on the most fertile spots, were now being robbed of their lands and pushed ruthlessly back. into narrower and narrower limits by alien races who were cutting off their means of livelihood. Father replied that surely it could never have been the intention of God to allow Indians to rove and hunt over so fertile a country and hold it forever in unproductive wilderness, while Scotch and Irish and English farmers could put it to so much better use, where an Indian required thousands of acres for his family,

those acres in the hands of industrious, god-fearing farmers, would support ten or a hundred times more people in a far worthier manner, while at the same time helping to spread the gospel. Mr. Mayor urged that such farming as our first immigrants were practicing was in many ways rude and full of mistakes of ignorance. Yet, rude as it was and ill-tilled as were most of our Wisconsin farms by unskilled, inexperienced settlers who had been merchants and mechanics and servants in the old countries, how should we like to have specially trained and educated farmers drive us out of our homes and farms,

such as they were, making use of the same argument that God could never have intended such ignorant, unprofitable, devastating farmers as we were to occupy land upon which scientific farmers could raise five or ten times as much on each acre as we did. And I well remember thinking that Mr. Mayor had the better side of the argument. It then seemed to me that, whatever the final outcome might be, it was at this stage of the fight only an example of the rule of might, with but little or no thought for the right or welfare of the other fellow, if he were the weaker, that they should take who had the power,

and they should keep who can, as Wordsworth makes the marauding Scottish Highlanders say, many of our old neighbors toiled and sweated and grubbed themselves into their graves years before their natural dying days in getting a living on a quarter section of land and vaguely trying to get rich while bread and raiment might have been serenely won on less than a fourth of this land and time gained to get better acquainted with God. I was put to the plow at the age of twelve when my head reached but little above the handles and, For many years I had to do the greater part of the plowing. It was hard work for so small a boy. Nevertheless, as good plowing was exacted from me as if I were a man, and very soon I had to become a good plowman, or rather, plowboy. None could draw a straighter furrow. For the first few years the work was particularly hard on account of the tree stumps that had to be dodged.

later the stumps were all dug and chopped out to make way for the McCormick Reaper, and because I proved to be the best chopper and stump digger, I had nearly all of it to myself. It was dull, hard work leaning over on my knees all day, chopping out those tough oak and hickory stumps, deep down below the crowns of the big roots. Some, though, fortunately not many were two feet or more in diameter. And as I was the eldest boy, the greater part of all,

the other hard work of the farm quite naturally fell on me. I had to split rails for long lines of zigzag fences. The trees that were tall enough and straight enough to afford one or two logs ten feet long were used for rails. The others, too naughty or cross-grained, were disposed of in log and cordwood fences. Making rails was hard work and required no little skill. I used to cut and split a hundred a day from our short, naughty oak timber, swinging the axe and heavy mallet, often with sore hands, from early morning to night. Father was not successful as a rail splitter. After trying to work with me a day or two, he, in despair, left it all to me.

I rather liked it, for I was proud of my skill and tried to believe that I was as tough as the timber I mauled, though this and other heavy jobs stopped my growth and earned for me the title, Runt of the Family. In those early days, long before the great labor-saving machines came to our help, almost everything connected with wheat raising abounded in trying work, cradling in the long, sweaty dog days, raking and binding, stacking, thrashing, and it often seemed to me that our fierce, over-industrious way of getting the grain from the ground, was too closely connected with grave-digging. The staff of life, naturally beautiful,

oftentimes suggested the grave-digger's spade. Men and boys, in those days, even women and girls, were cut down while cutting the wheat. The fat folk grew lean and the lean-leener, while the rosy cheeks brought from Scotland and other cool countries across the sea faded to yellow like the wheat. We were all made slaves through the vice of over,

were industry. The same was in great part true in making hay to keep the cattle and horses through the long winters. We were called in the morning at four o'clock and seldom got to bed before nine, making a broiling, seething day, 17 hours long, loaded with heavy work, while I was only a small, stunted boy, and a few years later my brothers, David and Daniel, and my older sisters, had to endure about as much as I did. In the harvest dog days and dog nights and dog mornings, when we arose from our clammy beds, our cotton shirts clung to our backs as wet with sweat

as the bathing suits of swimmers and remained so all the long, sweltering days. In mowing and cradling, the most exhausting of all the farmwork, I made matters worse by foolish ambition in keeping ahead of the hired men. never a warning word was spoken of the dangers of overwork on the contrary even when sick we were held to our tasks as long as we could stand once in harvest time i had the mumps and was unable to swallow any food except milk but this was not allowed to make any difference while i staggered with weakness and sometimes fell headlong among the sheaves only once was i allowed to leave the harvest field when i was stricken down with weakness and sometimes fell headlong among the sheaves only once was i allowed to leave the harvest field when i was stricken down

with pneumonia. I lay gasping for weeks, but the Scotch are hard to kill, and I pulled through. No physician was called, for Father was an enthusiast, and always said and believed that God and hard work were by far the best doctors. None of our neighbors was so excessively industrious as Father, though nearly all of the Scotch, English, and Irish worked too hard, trying to make good homes and to lay up money enough for comfortable independence. Accepting small garden patches, few of them had owned land in the old country. Here their craving land hunger was satisfied, and they were naturally proud of their farms, and tried to keep them as neat and clean and well-tilled as gardens.

To accomplish this without the means for hiring help was impossible. Flowers were planted about the neatly kept log or frame houses, barnyards, granaries, etc. were kept in about as neat order as the homes, and the fences and cornrows were rigidly straight. But every uncut weed distressed them, so also did every ungathered ear of grain, and all that was lost by birds and gophers, and this over-carefulness bred endless work and worry. As for money, for many a year there was precious little of it in the country, for anybody. eggs sold at six cents a dozen in trade and five cent calico was exchanged at 25 cents a yard wheat brought 50 cents a bushel in trade to get cash for it before the portage railroad was built it had to be hauled to milwaukee a hundred miles away on the other hand food was abundant eggs chickens pigs cattle wheat corn potatoes garden vegetables of the best and wonderful melons as luxuries no other wild country I have ever known extended a kinder welcome to poor immigrants.

On the arrival in the spring a log house could be built. A few acres plowed, the virgin sod planted with corn, potatoes, etc., and enough raised to keep a family comfortably the very first year, and wild hay for cows and oxen grew in abundance on the numerous meadows. The American settlers were wisely content with smaller fields and less of everything. kept indoors during excessively hot or cold weather rested when tired went off fishing and hunting at the most favorable times and seasons of the day and year gathered nuts and berries and in general tranquilly accepted all the good things the fertile wilderness offered after eight years of this dreary work of clearing the fountain-like farm fencing it and getting it in perfect order building a frame house and the necessary outbuildings for the cattle and horses after all this had been victoriously accomplished, and we had made out to escape with life, father bought a half section of wild land about four or five miles to the eastward,

and began all over again to clear and fence and break up other fields for a new farm, doubling all the stunting, heartbreaking, chopping, grubbing, stump digging, rail splitting, fence building, barn building, house building, and so forth. By this time, I had learned to run the breaking plow. Most of these plows were very large, turning furrows from 18 inches to two feet wide, and were drawn by four or five yoke of oxen. They were used only for the first plowing in breaking up the wild sod woven into a tough mass, chiefly by the cord-like roots of perennial grasses, reinforced by the tap roots of oak and hickory bushes called grubs, some of which were more than a century old and four or five inches in diameter.

In the hardest plowing on the most difficult ground, the grubs were said to be as thick as the hair on a dog's back. If in good trim, the plow cut through and turned over these grubs as if the century old wood were soft, like the flesh of carrots and turnips. but if not in good trim the grubs promptly tossed the plow out of the ground a stout highland scott our neighbor whose plow was in bad order and who did not know how to trim it was vainly trying to keep it in the ground by main strength while his son who was driving and merrily whipping up the cattle would cry encouragingly hold her in father hold her in but how in the divil can i hold her in when she'll no stop in his perspiring father would reply gasping for breath between each word on the contrary with the share and colter sharp and nicely adjusted the plough instead of shying at every grub and jumping out ran straight ahead without need of steering or holding and gripping the ground so firmly that it could hardly be thrown out at the end of the furrow our breaker turned a furrow two feet wide and on our best land where the sod was toughest held so firm a grip that at the end of the field my brother who was driving the oxen had to come to my assistance in throwing it over on its side to be drawn around the end of the landing and it was all i could do to set it up again

But I learned to keep that plow in such trim that after I got started on a new furrow, I used to ride on the crossbar between the handles with my feet resting comfortably on the beam without having to steady or steer it in any way on the whole length of the field, unless we had to go around a stump, for it sawed through the biggest grubs without flinching. The growth of these grubs was interesting to me, when an acorn or hickory nut had sent up its first-season sprout, a few inches long, it was burned off in the autumn grass fires. But the root continued to hold on to life, forming a callous over the wound, and sent up one or more shoots the next spring.

Next autumn, these new shoots were burned off, but the root and calloused head, about level with the surface of the ground, continued to grow and send up more new shoots, and so on, almost every year, until very old, probably far more than a century, while the tops, which would naturally have become tall, broad-headed trees, were only mere sprouts, seldom more than two years old. Thus the ground was kept open like a prairie, with only five or six trees to the acre, which had escaped the fire by having the good fortune to grow on a bare spot

at the door of a fox or badger den, or between straggling grass tufts wide apart on the, poorest sandy soil. The uniformly rich soil of the Illinois and Wisconsin prairies produced so close and tall a growth of grasses for fires that no tree could live on it. Had there been no fires, these fine prairies, so marked a feature of the country, would have been covered by the heaviest forests. As soon as the oak openings in our neighborhood were settled and the farmers had prevented running grass fires, the grubs grew up into trees and formed tall thickets so dense that it was difficult to walk through them, and every trace of the sunny openings vanished. We called our second farm

Hickory Hill from its many fine hickory trees and the long, gentle slope leading up to it. Compared with Fountain Lake Farm, it lay high and dry. The land was better, but it had no living water, no spring or stream or meadow or lake. A well 90 feet deep had to be dug, all except the first 10 feet or so in fine-grained sandstone. When the sandstone was struck, my father, on the advice of a man who had worked in mines, tried to blast the rock, but from lack of skill, the blasting went on very slowly, and father decided to have me do all the work with Mason's chisels, a long, hard job with a good deal of danger in it. I had to sit cramped in a space about three feet in diameter and wearily chip, chip with heavy hammer and chisels from early morning until dark. Day after day,

for weeks and months. In the morning, Father and David lowered me in a wooden bucket by a windlass, hauled up what chips were left from the night before, then went away to the farmwork and left me until noon, when they hoisted me out for dinner. After dinner, I was promptly lowered again. The forenoon's accumulation of chips hoisted out of the way, and I was left until night. One morning, after the dreary bore was about 80 feet deep, my life was all but lost in deadly choke-damp, carbonic acid gas that had settled at the bottom during the night. instead of clearing away the chips as usual when I was lowered to the bottom, I swayed back and forth and began to sink under the poison.

Father, alarmed that I did not make any noise, shouted, What's keeping you so still? To which he got no reply. Just as I was settling down against the side of the wall, I happened to catch a glimpse of a branch of a burr oak tree which leaned out over the mouth of the shaft. This suddenly awakened me, and to Father's excited shouting, I feebly murmured, Take me out. But when he began to hoist, he found I was not in the bucket. And in wild alarm shouted,

Get in, get in the bucket, and hold on, hold on. Somehow I managed to get into the bucket, and that is all I remembered until I was dragged out violently gasping for breath. one of our near neighbors a stone-mason and miner by the name of william duncan came to see me and after hearing the particulars of the accident he solemnly said well johnny it's god's mercy that you're alive many a companion of mine i have seen dead with choke damp but none that i ever saw or heard of was so near to death in it as you were and escaped without help mr duncan taught father to throw water down the shaft to absorb the gas and also to drop a bundle or brush of hay attached to a light rope, dropping it again and again to carry down pure air and stir up the poison. When, after a day or two, I had recovered from the shock, Father lowered me again to my work, after taking the precaution to test the air with a candle

and stir it up well with a brush and hay bundle. The weary hammer and chisel chipping went on as before, only more slowly until 90 feet down when at last I struck a fine hardy gush of water. Constant dropping wears away stone, so does constant chipping, while at the same time wearing away the chipper. Father never spent an hour in that well. He trusted me to sink it straight and plumb, and I did, and built a fine covered top for it and swung two iron-bound buckets

in it from which we all drank for many a day. The honeybee arrived in America long before we boys did, but several years past ere we noticed any on our farm. The introduction of the honey bee into flowery America formed a grand epoch in bee history. This sweet, humming creature, companion and friend of the flowers, is now distributed over the greater part of the continent, filling countless hollows in rocks and trees with honey

as well as the millions of hives prepared for them by honey farmers who keep and tend their flocks of sweet-winged cattle as shepherds keep sheep, a charming employment, like directing sunbeams as Thoreau says. The Indians call the honeybee the white man's fly, and though they had been long acquainted with several species of bumblebees that yielded more or less honey, how gladly surprised they must have been when they discovered that in the hollow trees where before they had found only coons or squirrels,

they found swarms of brown flies with 50 or even a hundred pounds of honey sealed up in beautiful cells. With their keen hunting senses they, of course, were not slow to learn the habits of the little brown immigrants and the best methods of tracing them to their sweet homes, however well hidden. During the first few years none were seen on our farm, though we sometimes heard fathers hired men talking about lining bees. None of us boys ever found a bee tree or tried to find any until about ten years after our arrival in the woods. On the Hickory Hill farm there is a ridge of moraine material, rather dry but flowery with golden rods and asters of many species, upon which we saw bees feeding in the late autumn, just when their hives were fullest of honey. And it occurred to me one day that I was of age and my own master

that I must try to find a bee tree. I made a little box about six inches long and four inches deep and wide, bought half a pound of honey, went to the goldenrod hill, swept a bee into the box and closed it. The lid had a pane of glass in it so I could see when the bee had sucked its fill and was ready to go home. At first it groped around trying to get out. out. But smelling the honey, it seemed to forget everything else, and while it was feasting,

I carried the box and a small, sharp-pointed steak to an open spot where I could see about me, fixed the steak in the ground, and placed the box on the flat top of it. When I thought that the little feaster must be about full, I opened the box, but it was in no hurry to fly. It slowly crawled up to the edge of the box, lingered a minute or two cleaning its legs that had become sticky with honey, and when it took wing, instead of making what is called a beeline for home, it buzzed around the box and minutely examined it as if trying to fix a clear picture of it in its mind so as to be able to recognize it when it returned for another load. Then circled around at a little distance as if looking for something to locate it by. I was the nearest object,

and the thoughtful worker buzzed in front of my face and took a good stare at me, and then, flew up to the top of an oak on the side of the open spot in the center of which the honeybox was. Keeping a keen watch after a minute or two of rest or wing cleaning, I saw it fly in wide circles round the tops of the trees nearest the honeybox, and after apparently satisfying itself, make a bee line for the hive. Looking endwise on the line of flight, I saw that what is called a beeline is not an absolutely straight line. But a line, but a line of the line of in general straight made of many slight wavering lateral curves. After taking as true a bearing as I could, I waited and watched. In a few minutes, probably ten, I was surprised to see that B arrive at the

end of the outleaning limb of the oak mentioned above, as though that was the first point it had fixed in its memory to be dependent on in retracing the way back to the honeybox. From the tree top, it came straight to my head, then straight to the box. entered without the least hesitation filled up and started off after the same preparatory dressing and taking of bearings as before then i took particular pains to lay down the exact course so i would be able to trace it to the hive before doing so however i made an experiment to test the worth of the impression i had that the little insect found the way back to the box by fixing telling points in its mind While it was away, I picked up the honey-box and set it on the stake a few rods from the position it had thus far occupied and stood there watching. In a few minutes I saw the bee arrive at its guide mark, the over-leaning branch on the tree-top, and thence came bouncing down right to the spaces in the air which had been occupied by my head and the honey-box.

And when the cunning little honey-gleaner found nothing there but empty air, it whirled round and round as if confused and lost. And although I was standing with the open honey-box within 50 or 60 feet of the former feasting spot, it could not, or at least did not, find it. Now that I had learned the general direction of the hive, I pushed on in search of it. I had gone, perhaps a quarter of a mile, when I caught another bee, which, after getting loaded, went through the same performance of circling round and round the honey-box, buzzing in front of me and staring me in the face to be able to recognize me.

But as if the adjacent trees and bushes were sufficiently well known, it simply looked around at them and bolted off without much dressing, indicating I thought that the distance to the hive was not great. I followed on and very soon discovered it in the bottom log of a cornfield fence, but some lucky fellow had discovered it before me and robbed it. The robbers had chopped a large hole, in the log, taken out most of the honey and left the poor bees late in the fall when winter was approaching to make haste to gather all the honey they could from the latest flowers to avoid

starvation in the winter. End of Chapter 6. Chapter 7 of The Story of My Boyhood and Youth This Lieber Vox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Sue Anderson The Story of My Boyhood and Youth by John Muir Chapter 7 Knowledge and Inventions Hungry for Knowledge, Barrowing Books, Paternal Opposition Snatched Moments

Early Rising Proves a Way Out of Difficulties The Cellar Workshop, Inventions, An Early Rising Machine, Novel Clocks, Higrometers, etc. A neighbor's advice. I learned arithmetic in Scotland without understanding any of it, though I had the rules by heart.

But when I was about 15 or 16 years of age, I began to grow hungry for real knowledge and persuaded father, who was willing enough to have me study, provided my farm work was kept up, to buy me a higher arithmetic. Beginning at the beginning in one summer, I easily finished it without a start.

assistance in the short intervals between the end of dinner and the afternoon start for the harvest and hayfields, accomplishing more without a teacher in a few scraps of time than in years in school before my mind was ready for such work. Then in succession, I took up algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, and made some little progress in each, and reviewed grammar. I was fond of reading, but father had brought only a few religious books from Scotland. Fortunately, several of our neighbors had brought a dozen or two of all sorts of books, which I borrowed and read, keeping all of them except the religious ones carefully hidden from Father's Eye. Among these were Scott's novels, which, like all other novels, were strictly forbidden, but devoured with glorious pleasure in secret. Father was easily

persuaded to buy Josephus' Wars of the Jews and Di Obigny's history of the Reformation, and I tried hard to get him to buy Plutarch's lives, which, as I told him, everybody, even religious people, praised as a grand good book. But he would have nothing to do with the old pagan until the Graham, bread, and anti-flesh doctrines came suddenly into our backwoods neighborhood, making a stir something like phrenology. and spirit wrappings, which were as mysterious in their attacks as influenza. He then thought it possible that Plutarch might be turned to account on the food question by revealing what those old Greeks and Romans ate to make them strong,

and so at last we gained our glorious Plutarch. Dick's Christian philosopher, which I borrowed from a neighbor, I thought I might venture to read in the open, trusting that the word Christian would be proof against its cause. cautionation, but Father balked at the word philosopher and quoted from the Bible a verse which spoke of philosophy falsely so-called. I then ventured to speak in defense of the book, arguing that we could not do without at least a little of the most useful kinds of philosophy. Yes, we can, he said with enthusiasm. The Bible is the only book human beings can possibly

require throughout all the journey from earth to heaven. But how, I contended, can we find the way to heaven without the Bible? And how, after we grow old, can we read the Bible without a little helpful science? Just think, Father, you cannot read your Bible without spectacles, and millions of others are in the same fix, and spectacles cannot be made without some knowledge of the science of optics. Oh, he replied, perceiving the drift of the argument, there will always be plenty of worldly people to make spectacles. To this, I stubbornly replied with a quotation from the Bible,

with reference to the time coming when, all shall know the Lord from the least, even to the greatest, and then who will make the spectacles? But he still objected to my reading that book, calling me a contumacious quibbler too fond of dissoning, and ordered me to return it to the accommodating owner. I managed, however, to read it later. On the food question, father insisted that those who argued for a vegetable diet were in the

right, because our teeth showed plainly that they were made with reference to fruit and grain and not for flesh like those of dogs and wolves and tigers. He therefore promptly adopted a vegetable diet and requested mother to make the bread from graham flour instead of bolted flour. Mother put both kinds on the table and meat also to let all the family take their choice. And while Father was insisting on the foolishness of eating flesh, I came to her help by calling Father's attention to the passage in the Bible

which told the story of Elijah the prophet, who, when he was pursued by enemies who wanted to take his life, was hidden by the Lord by the book Cherath, and fed by ravens. And surely the Lord knew what was good to eat, whether bread or meat. And on what I asked, did the Lord feed Elijah? On vegetables or graham bread? No, he directed the ravens to feed his prophet on flesh.

The Bible being the sole rule, Father at once acknowledged that he was mistaken. The Lord never would have sent flesh to Elijah by the ravens if Graham bread. were better. I remember as a great and sudden discovery that the poetry of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton was a source of inspiring, exhilarating, uplifting pleasure, and I became anxious to know all the poets and saved up small sums to buy as many of their books as possible. Within three or four years, I was the proud possessor of parts of Shakespeare's, Milton's, Cowper's, Henry Kirkie Whites, Campbell's, and Atkinside's works, and quite a number of others seldom read nowadays. I think it was in my 15th year that I began to relish good literature with enthusiasm and smack my

lips over favorite lines. But there was desperately little time for reading, even in the winter evenings, only a few stolen minutes now and then. Father's strict rule was, straight to bed immediately after family worship, which in winter was usually over by eight o'clock. I was in the habit of lingering in the kitchen with a book and candle after the rest of the family had retired, and considered myself fortunate if I got five minutes reading before Father noticed the light and ordered me to bed, and ordered that, of course, I immediately obeyed. But night after night I tried to steal minutes in the same lingering way, and how keenly precious those minutes were few nowadays can know father failed perhaps two or three times in a whole winter to notice my light for nearly ten minutes magnificent golden blocks of time long to be remembered like holidays or geological periods

one evening when i was reading church history father was particularly irritable and called out with hope-killing emphasis john Go to bed. Must I give you a separate order every night to get you to go to bed? Now, I will have no irregularity in the family. You must go when the rest go, and without my having to tell you. Then, as an afterthought, as if judging that his words and tone of voice were too severe for so pardonable an offense as reading a religious book, he unwarily added, if you will read, get up in the morning and read. You may get up in the morning as early as you like. That night I went to bed wishing with all my heart and soul that somebody or something might call me out of sleep to avail myself of this wonderful indulgence. And next morning to my joyful surprise, I awoke before Father called me.

A boy sleeps soundly after working all day in the snowy woods, but that frosty morning I sprang out of bed as if called by a trumpet blast, rushed downstairs, scarce feeling my chill blames, enormously eager to see how much time I had won. And when I held up my candle to a little clock that stood on a bracket in the kitchen, I found that it was only one o'clock. I had gained five hours, almost half a day. Five hours to myself. I said five huge, solid hours. I can hardly think of any other event in my life, any discovery I ever made that gave birth to joy so transportingly glorious

as the possession of these five frosty hours. In the glad tumultuous excitement, of so much suddenly acquired time wealth, I hardly knew what to do with it. I first thought of going on with my reading, but the zero weather would make it fire necessary, and it occurred to me that father might object to the cost of firewood that took time to chop.

Therefore, I prudently decided to go down-cellar and begin work on a model of a self-setting sawmill I had invented. Next morning I managed to get up at the same, gloriously early hour. And though the temperature of the cellar was a little below the freezing point, and my light was only a tallow candle, the millwork went joyfully on. There were a few tools in a corner of the cellar, a vise, files, a hammer, chisels, etc., that father had brought from Scotland, but no saw excepting a coarse, crooked one that was unfit for sawing dry hickory or oak. So I made a fine-tooth saw suitable for my work out of a strip of steel that had formed part of an old-fashioned corset that cut the hardest wood smoothly.

I also made my own braw dolls, punches, and a pair of compasses out of wire and old files. My workshop was immediately under father's bed, and the filing and tapping in making cogwheels, journals, cams, etc., must no doubt have annoyed him. but with the permission he had granted in his mind and doubtless hoping that I would soon tire of getting up at one o'clock, he impatiently waited about two weeks before saying a word. I did not vary more than five minutes from one o'clock all winter, nor did I feel any bad effects whatever, nor did I think at all about the subject as to whether so little sleep might be in any way injurious. It was a grand triumph of willpower over cold, in common comfort and work-weariness in abruptly cutting down my ten hours allowance of sleep to five.

I simply felt that I was rich beyond anything I could have dreamed of or hoped for. I was far more than happy. Like Tamashanter, I was glorious over all the ills of life, victorious. Father, as was customary in Scotland, gave thanks and asked a blessing before meals, not merely as a matter of form and decent Christian manners, for he regarded food as a gift derived directly from the hands of the Father in heaven. Therefore, every meal to him was a sacrament requiring conduct and attitude of mind, not unlike that befitting the Lord's Supper. No idle word was allowed to be spoken at our table,

much less any laughing or fun or storytelling. When we were at the breakfast table about two, two weeks after the great golden time discovery, father cleared his throat preliminary, as we all knew, to saying something considered important. I feared that it was to be on the subject of my early rising, and dreaded the withdrawal of the permission he had granted

on account of the noise I made. But still hoping that, as he had given his word, that I might get up as early as I wished, he would, as a Scotchman, stand to it, even though it was given in an unguarded moment and taken, in a sense, unreasonably far-reaching. The solemn, sacramental silence was broken by the dreaded question. John, what time is it when you get up in the morning? About one o'clock, I replied, in a low, meek, guilty tone of voice. And what kind of a time is that? getting up in the middle of the night and disturbing the whole family i simply reminded him of the permission he had freely granted me to get up as early as i wished i know it he said in an almost agonized tone of voice i know i gave you that miserable permission but i never imagined that you would get up in the middle of the night to this i cautiously made no reply but continued to live in the middle of the night to this i cautiously made no reply but continued to live listen for the heavenly one o'clock call, and it never failed. After completing myself setting

sawmill, I dammed one of the streams in the meadow and put the mill in operation. This invention was speedily followed by a lot of others, water wheels, curious door locks and latches, thermometers, hygrometers, pyromators, clocks, a barometer, and automatic contrivance for feeding the horses at any required hour, a lamp-lighting. and firelighter, an early or late rising machine, and so forth. After the sawmill was proved and discharged from my mind, I happened to think it would be a fine thing to make a timekeeper, which would tell the day of the week and the day of the month,

as well as strike like a common clock and point out the hours, also to have an attachment whereby it could be connected with a bedstead to set me on my feet at my hour in the morning, also to start fires, light lamps, etc. I had learned the time laws of the pendulum from a book, but with this exception I knew nothing of timekeepers, for I had never seen the insight of any sort of clock or watch. After long brooding, the novel clock was at length completed in my mind

and was tried and found to be durable and to work well and look well, before I had begun to build it in wood. I carried small parts of it in my pocket to whittle at when I was out at work on the farm, using every spare or stolen moment within reach without fathers knowing anything about it. In the middle of summer, when harvesting was in progress, the novel time machine was nearly completed. It was hidden upstairs in a spare bedroom where some tools were kept. I did the making and mending on the farm, but one day at noon when I happened to be away,

father went upstairs for a hammer or something and discovered the mysterious machine back of the bedstead. My sister Margaret saw him on his knees examining it, and at the first opportunity whispered in my ear, John, father saw that thing you're making upstairs. None of the family knew what I was doing, but they knew very well that all such work was frowned on by father and kindly warned me of any danger that threatened my plans.

The fine invention seemed doomed to destruction before its time ticking commenced, though I thought it handsome, had so long carrying it in my mind, and, like the nest of Burns wee mousey, it had cost me many a weary whittling nibble. When we were at dinner several days after the sad discovery, father began to clear his throat to speak, and I feared the doom of martyrdom was about to be pronounced on my grand clock. John, he inquired, what is that thing you are making upstairs? I replied in desperation that I didn't know what to call it.

What? You mean to say you don't know what you are trying to do? Oh, yes, I said, I know very well what I am doing. What then is the thing for? it's for a lot of things i replied but getting people up early in the morning is one of the main things it is intended for therefore it might perhaps be called an early rising machine after getting up so extravagantly early all the last memorable winter to make a machine for getting up perhaps still earlier seemed so ridiculous that he very nearly laughed but after controlling himself and getting command of a sufficiently solemn face and voice, he said severely, Do you not think it is very wrong to waste your time on such nonsense?

No, I said meekly, I don't think I'm doing any wrong. Well, he replied, I assure you, I do, and if you were only half as zealous in the study of religion as you are in contriving and whittling these useless nonsensical things, it would be infinitely better for you. I want you to be like Paul, who said that he desired to know nothing among men but Christ and him crucified.

To this I made no reply, gloomily believing my fine machine was to be burned, but still taking what comfort I could in realizing that, anyhow, I had enjoyed inventing and making it. After a few days, finding that nothing more was to be said, and that Father, after all, had not had the heart to destroy it, all necessity for secrecy being ended. I finished it in the half-hours that we had at noon, and set it in the parlor between two chairs,

hung moraine boulders that had come from the direction of Lake Superior on it for weights, and set it running. We were then hauling grain into the barn. Father at this period devoted himself entirely to the Bible and did no farmwork whatever. The clock had a good loud tick, and when he heard it strike, one of my sisters told me that he left his study, went to the parlor, got down on his knees, and carefully examined the machinery, which was all in plain sight, not being enclosed in a case. This he did repeatedly and evidently seemed a little proud of my ability to invent and whittled such a thing, though careful to give no encouragement for anything more of the kind in future. But somehow it seemed impossible to stop. Inventing and whittling, faster than ever,

I made another hickory clock, shaped like a scythe, to symbolize the scythe of father time. The pendulum is a bunch of arrows symbolizing the flight of time. It hangs on a leafless mossy oak snag showing the effect of time, and on the snath is written, all flesh is grass. This, especially the inscription, rather pleased father, and of course mother and all my sisters and brothers admired it.

Like the first, it indicates the days of the week and month, starts fires and beds at any given hour and minute, and, though made more than 50 years ago, is still a good timekeeper. My mind's still running on clocks. I invented a big one like a town clock with four dials, with the time figures so large they could be read by all our immediate neighbors as well as ourselves when at work in the fields.

And on the side next the house the days of the week and month were indicated. It was to be placed on the peak of the barn roof, but just as it was all but finished, Father stopped me, saying that it would bring too many people around the barn. I then asked permission to put it on the table. top of a black oak tree near the house. Studying the large main branches, I thought I could secure a sufficiently rigid foundation for it, while the trimmed sprays and leaves would conceal the angles of the cabin required to shelter the works from the weather, and the two-second pendulum,

14 feet long, could be snugly encased on the side of the trunk. Nothing about the grand, useful timekeeper, I argued, would disfigure the tree, for it would look something like a big hoxnest. But that, he objected, would draw still bigger, bothersome, trampling crowds about the place, for whoever heard of anything so queer as a big clock on the top of a tree. So I had to lay aside its big wheels and cams, and rest content with the pleasure of inventing it, and looking at it in my mind, and listening to the deep solemn throbbing of its long two-second pendulum with its two old axes back to back for the bob. One of my inventions was a large thermometer made of an iron rod

about three feet long and five-eighths of an inch in diameter that had formed part of a wagon box. The expansion and contraction of this rod was multiplied by a series of levers made of strips of hoop iron. The pressure of the rod against the levers was kept constant by a small counterweight so that the slightest change in the length of the rod was instantly shown on a dial

about three feet wide multiplied about 32,000 times. The zero point was gained by packing the rod in wet snow. The scale was so large that the big black hand on the white-painted dial could be seen distinctly and the temperature red while we were plowing in the field below the house. The extremes of heat and cold caused the hand to make several revolutions. The number of these revolutions was indicated on a small dial marked on the larger one.

The thermometer was fastened on the side of the house and was so sensitive that when anyone approached it within four or five feet, the heat radiated from the observer's body caused the hand of the dial to move so fast that the motion was plainly visible. And when he stepped back, the hand moved slowly back to its normal position. It was regarded as a great wonder by the neighbors, and even by my own all-biblical father. Boys are fond of the books of travelers, and I remember that one day, after I had been reading Mungal Park's travels in Africa, mother said, well John maybe you will travel like Park and Humboldt some day father overheard her and cried out in solemn deprecation oh anne don't have put such notions in the laddie's head but at this time there was precious little need of such prayers my brothers left the farm when they came of age but i stayed a year longer loath to leave home mother hoped i might be a minister some day my sisters that I would be a great inventor.

I often thought I should like to be a physician, but I saw no way of making money and getting the necessary education, excepting as an inventor. So, as a beginning, I decided to try to get into a big shop or factory and live a while among machines, but I was naturally extremely shy and had been taught to have a poor opinion of myself, as of no account.

though all our neighbors encouragingly called me a genius, sure to rise in the world. When I was talking over plans one day with a friendly neighbor, he said, Now, John, if you wish to get into a machine shop, just take some of your inventions to the state fair, and you may be sure that as soon as they are seen, they will open the door of any shop in the country for you. You will be welcomed everywhere. and when I doubtingly asked if people would care to look at things made of wood, he said, made of wood, made of wood, what does it matter what they're made of when they are so out and out original? There's nothing else like them in the world. That is what will attract

attention, and besides their mighty handsome things anyway to come from the backwoods. So I was encouraged to leave home and go at his direction to the state-fetched. when it was being held in Madison. End of Chapter 7. Chapter 8 of the story of my boyhood and youth. This is a Librevox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org.

Recording by Sue Anderson. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth by John Muir, Chapter 8 The World and the University Leaving Home Creating a sensation in Pardiville A ride on a locomotive At the State Fair in Madison

Employment in a Machine Shop at Prairie Dachine Back to Madison Entering the University Teaching School First lesson in botany More Inventions The University of the wilderness. When I told father that I was about to leave home and inquired whether if I should

happen to be in need of money, he would send me a little. He said, no, depend entirely on yourself. Good advice, I suppose, but surely needlessly severe for a bashful, home-loving boy who had worked so hard. I had the gold sovereign that my grandfather had given me when I left Scotland, and a few dollars, perhaps ten, that I had made by raising a few bushels of grain on a little patch of sandy abandoned ground. So when I left home to try the world, I had only about $15 in my pocket. Strange to say, Father carefully taught us to consider ourselves very poor worms of the dust, conceived in sin, etc., and devoutly believed that quenching every spark of pride and self-confidence was a sacred duty, without realizing that in so doing he might at the

same time be quenching everything else. Praise, he considered most venomous, and tried to assure me that when I was fairly out in the wicked world, making my own way, I would soon learn that, although I might have thought him a hard taskmaster at times, strangers were far harder. On the contrary, I found no lack of kindness and sympathy. All the baggage I carried was a package made up of the two clocks and a small thermometer made of a piece of old washboard, all three tied together with no covering or case of any sort,

the whole looking like one very complicated machine. The aching parting from mother and my sisters was, of course, hard to bear. Father let David drive me down to Partyville, a place I had never before seen, though it was only nine miles south of the Hickory Hill home. When we arrived at the village tavern, it seemed deserted. Not a single person was in sight. I set my clock baggage on the rickety platform. David said goodbye and started for home.

leaving me alone in the world the grinding noise made by the wagon in turning short brought out the landlord and the first thing that caught his eye was my strange bundle then he looked at me and said hello young man what's this machines i said for keeping time and getting up in the morning and so forth well well that's a mighty queer get-up you must be a down-east yankee where did you get-the-pher Where did you get the pattern for such a thing? In my head, I said. Someone down the street happened to notice the landlord looking intently at something and came up to see what it was.

Three or four people in that little village formed an attractive crowd, and in fifteen or twenty minutes the greater part of the population of Pardyville stood gazing in a circle around my strange hickory belongings. I kept outside of the circle to avoid being seen, and had the advantage of hearing the remarks without being embarrassed. Almost everyone, as he came up, would say, What's that? What's it for? Who made it? The landlord would answer them all alike.

Why, a young man that lives out in the country somewhere made it, and he says it's a thing for keeping time, getting up in the morning, and something that I didn't understand. I don't know what he meant. Oh, no, one of the crowd would say that can't be. It's for something else, something mysterious. Mark my words, you'll see all about it in the newspaper some of these days. A curious little fellow came running up the street, joined the crowd, stood on tiptoe to get sight of the wonder, quickly made up his mind, and shouted in a crisp, confident, cockcrowing style,

I know what that contraptions for. It's a machine for taking the bones out of fish. This was in the time of the great popular phrenology craze when the fences and barns along the roads throughout the country were plastered with big skull bump posters. Headed, know thyself, and advising everybody to attend schoolhouse lectures to have their heads explained and be told what they were good for and whom they ought to marry. my mechanical bundle seemed to bring a good deal of this phrenology to mind for many of the onlookers would say I wish I could see that boy's head he must have a tremendous bump of invention others complimented me by saying I wish I had that fellow's head I'd rather have it than the best farm in the state I stayed overnight at this little tavern waiting for a train

in the morning I went to the station and set my bundle on the platform form. Along came the thundering train, a glorious sight, the first train I had ever waited for. When the conductor saw my queer baggage, he cried, Hello, what have we here? Inventions for keeping time, early rising, and so forth. May I take them into the car with me? You can take them where you like, he replied, but you had better give them to the baggage master. If you take them into the car, they will draw a crowd, and might get broken. So I gave them to the baggage master and made haste to ask the conductor whether I might ride on the engine. He good-naturedly said, yes, it's the right place for you.

Run ahead and tell the engineer what I say. But the engineer bluntly refused to let me on, saying, It don't matter what the conductor told you. I say you can't ride on my engine. By this time, the conductor, standing ready to start his train, was watching to see what luck I had. and when he saw me returning came ahead to meet me the engineer won't let me on i reported won't he said the kind conductor oh i guess he will you come down with me and so he actually took the time and patience to walk the length of that long train to get me on to the engine charlie said he addressing the engineer don't you ever take a passenger very seldom he replied anyhow I wish you would take this young man on. He has the strangest machines in the baggage car I ever saw in my life. I believe he could make a locomotive. He wants to see the engine running. Let him on. Then in a low whisper he told me to jump on, which I did gladly, the engineer offering neither

encouragement nor objection. As soon as the train was started, the engineer asked, what the strange thing the conductor spoke of really was. Only inventions for keeping time, getting folk up in the morning, and so forth, I hastily replied, and before he could ask any more questions, I asked permission to go outside of the cab to see the machinery. This he kindly granted, adding,

Be careful not to fall off, and when you hear me whistling for a station, you come back, because if it is reported against me to the superintendent that I allow boys to run all over my engine, I might lose my job. Assuring him that I would come back promptly, I went out and walked along the footboard on the side of the boiler, watching the magnificent machine rushing through the landscapes as if glorying in its strength like a living creature.

While seated on the cow-catcher platform, I seemed to be fairly flying, and the wonderful display of power and motion was enchanting. this was the first time i had ever been on a train much less a locomotive since i had left scotland when i got to madison i thanked the kind conductor and engineer for my glorious bride inquired the way to the fair shouldered my inventions and walked to the fairground when i applied for an admission ticket at the window by the gate i told the agent that i had something to exhibit what is it he inquired well here it is look at it when he craned his neck through the window and got a glimpse of my bundle he cried excitedly oh you don't need a ticket come right in when i inquired of the agent where such things as mine should be exhibited he said you see that building up on the hill with a big flag on it that's the fine arts hall and it's just the place for your wonderful invention so i went up to the fine arts hall and looked in wondering if they would allow one wooden things in so fine a place. I was met at the door by a dignified gentleman who greeted me

kindly and said, Young man, what have we got here? Two clocks and a thermometer, I replied. Did you make these? They look wonderfully beautiful and novel, and must, I think, prove the most interesting feature of the fair. Where shall I place them, I inquired? Just look around, young man, and choose the place you like best, whether it is occupied or or not. You can have your pick of all the building and a carpenter to make the necessary shelving and assist you in every way possible. So I quickly had a shelf made large enough for all of them, went out on the hill and picked up some glacier boulders of the right size for weights, and in 15 or 20 minutes the clocks were running. They seemed to attract more attention

than anything else in the hall. I got lots of praise from the crowd and the newspaper reporters. the local press reports were copied into the eastern papers it was considered wonderful that a boy on a farm had been able to invent and make such things and almost every spectator foretold good fortune but i had been so lectured by my father above all things to avoid praise that i was afraid to read those kind newspaper notices and never clipped out or preserved any of them just glanced at them and turned away my eyes from beholding vanity. They gave me a prize of ten or fifteen dollars and a diploma for wonderful things, not down in the list of exhibits. Many years later, after I had written articles and books, I received a letter from the gentleman who had charge of the fine arts hall. He proved to be the professor of English literature in the University of Wisconsin at this fair time, and long

afterward he sent me clippings of reports of his lectures. He had a lecture on me, discussing style, etc., and telling how well he remembered my arrival at the hall in my shirt sleeves with those mechanical wonders on my shoulder

and so forth and so forth. These inventions, though of little importance, opened all doors for me, and made marks that have lasted many years. Simply, I suppose, because they were original and promising. I was looking around in the meantime to find out where I should go to seek my fortune.

An inventor at the fair by the name of Weard was exhibiting an iceboat he had invented to run on the Upper Mississippi from Prairie Duchyne to St. Paul during the winter months, explaining how useful it would be thus to make a highway of the river while it was closed to ordinary navigation by ice. After he saw my inventions, he offered me a place in his foundry and machine shop in Prairie Duchin and promised to assist me all he could. So I made up my mind to accept his offer and rode with him to Prairie Duchin in his iceboat, which was mounted on a flat car. I soon found, however, that he was seldom at home, and that I was not likely to learn much at his small shop. I found a place where I could work for my board and devote my spare hours to mechanical

drawing, geometry, and physics, making but little headway, however, although the Pelton family for whom I worked were very kind. I made up my mind after a few months stay in Perry-Duchin to return to Madison, hoping that in some way I might be able to gain an education. At Madison, I raised a few dollars by making and selling a few of those bedsteads that set the sleepers on their feet in the morning, inserting in the footboard the works of an ordinary clock that could be bought for a dollar. I also made a few dollars addressing circulars in an insurance office, while at the same time I was paying my board by taking care of a pair of horses and going errands. This is of no great interest except that I was thus winning my bread while hoping that something

would turn up that might enable me to make money enough to. entered the state university. This was my ambition, and it never wavered no matter what I was doing. No university, it seemed to me, could be more admirably situated, and as I sauntered about it, charmed with its fine lawns and trees and beautiful lakes, and saw the students going and coming with their books, and occasionally practicing with the theodalite in measuring distances. I thought that if I could only join them, it would be the greatest joy of life. I was desperately hungry and thirsty for knowledge and willing to endure anything to get it. One day I chanced to meet a student who had noticed my inventions at the fair and now recognized me.

And when I said, you are fortunate fellows to be allowed to study in this beautiful place, I wish I could join you. Well, why don't you, he said. I haven't money enough, I said. Oh, as to money, he reassuringly explained, very little is required. i presume you're able to enter the freshman class and you can board yourself as quite a number of us do at a cost of about a dollar a week the baker and milkman come every day you can live on bread and milk well i thought maybe i have money enough for at least one beginning term anyhow i couldn't help trying with fear and trembling overladen with ignorance i called on professor sterling the dean of the faculty who was then acting president, presented my case, and told him how far I had got on with my studies at home,

and that I hadn't been to school since leaving Scotland at the age of 11 years, accepting one short term of a couple of months at a district school, because I could not be spared from the farm work. After hearing my story, the kind professor welcomed me to the glorious university. Next, it seemed to me, to the kingdom of heaven. After a few weeks, in the preparatory department I entered the freshman class. In Latin, I found that one of the books in use I had already studied in Scotland, so after an interruption of a dozen years, I began my Latin over again where I had left off. And, strange to say, most of it came back to me,

especially the grammar which I had committed to memory at the Dunbar Grammar School. During the four years that I was at the university, I earned enough in the harvest fields during the long summer vacations to carry me through the balance of each year, working very hard, cutting with a cradle four acres of wheat a day, and helping to put it in the shock. But having to buy books and paying, I think, $32 a year for instruction, and occasionally buying acids and retorts, glass tubing, bell glasses, flasks, etc. I had to cut down expenses for board now and then to half a dollar a week. One winter I taught school 10 miles north of Madison, earning much-needed money at the rate of $20 a month, boarding round and keeping up my university work by studying at night. As I was not then well enough off to own a watch, I used one of my hickory clocks, not only for keeping time, but for starting the school fire in the cold mornings and regulating class times.

I carried it out on my shoulder to the old log schoolhouse and set it to work on a little shelf nailed to one of the naughty, bulging logs. The winter was very cold, and I had to go to the schoolhouse and start the fire about eight o'clock to warm it before the arrival of the scholars. This was a rather trying job, and one that my clock might easily. be made to do. Therefore, after supper one evening, I told the head of the family with whom I was boarding that if he would give me a candle, I would go back to the schoolhouse and make arrangements for lighting the fire at eight o'clock without my having to be present until time to open the school at nine. He said, Oh, young man, you have some curious things in the schoolroom, but I don't think you

can do that. I said, oh, yes, it's easy. And in hardly more than that. I said, oh, yes, it's easy. And in hardly more an hour, the simple job was completed. I had only to place a teaspoonful of powdered chloride of potash and sugar on the stove hearth near a few shavings and kindling, and at the required time make the clock, through a simple arrangement, touched the inflammable mixture with a drop of sulfuric acid. Every evening after school was dismissed, I shoveled out what was left of the fire into the snow, put in a little kindling, filled up the big box stove with heavy oak wood, placed the lighting arrangement on the hearth, and set the clock to drop the acid at the hour of eight, all this requiring only a few minutes. The first morning, after I had made

this simple arrangement, I invited the doubting farmer to watch the old squat schoolhouse from a window that overlooked it to see if a good smoke did not arise from the stovepipe. Sure enough, on the minute he saw a tall column curling gracefully up through the frosty air, but instead of congratulating me on my success, he solemnly shook his head and said in a hollow, lugubrious voice, Young man, you'll be setting fire to the schoolhouse. All winter long that faithful clock fire never failed, and by the time I got to the schoolhouse, the stove was usually red-hot.

At the beginning of the long summer vacation, I returned to the Hickory Hill farm to earn the means in the harvest fields to continue my university course, walking all the way to save railroad fares. And though I cradled four acres of wheat a day, I made the long, hard, sweaty days work still longer and harder by keeping up my study of plants. At the noon hour, I collected a large handful, put them in water to keep them fresh, and after supper got to work on them and sat up till after midnight, analyzing and classifying, thus leaving only four hours for sleep. And by the end of the first year, after taking up botany,

I knew the principal flowering plants of the region. I received my first lesson in botany from a student by the name of Griswold, who is now county judge of the county of Waukesha, Wisconsin. In the university he was often laughed at, on account of his anxiety to instruct others, and his frequently saying with fine emphasis, imparting instruction is my greatest enjoyment. One memorable day in June,

when I was standing on the stone steps of the North Dormitory, Mr. Griswold joined me, and at once began to teach. He reached up, plucked a flower from an overspreading branch of a locust tree, and handing it to me, said, Muir, do you know what family this tree belongs to? No, I said I don't know anything about botany. Well, no matter, said he, what is it like? It's like a pea flower, I replied.

That's right, you're right, he said. It belongs to the pea family. But how can that be, I objected, when the pea is a weak clinging, straggling herb, and the locust a big thorny hardwood tree. Yes, that's true, he replied, as to the difference in size, but it is also true that in all their essential characters they are alike

and therefore they must belong to one and the same family. Just look at the peculiar form of the locust flower. You see that the upper pedal, called the banner, is broad and erect, and so is the upper pedal of the pea flower. The two lower petals called the wings are outspread and wing-shaped, so are those of the pea, and the two petals below the wings,

are united on their edges, curve upward, and form what is called the keel. And so you see are the corresponding petals of the pea flower. And now look at the stamens and pistols. You see that nine of the ten stamens have their filaments united into a sheath around the pistol, but the tenth stamen has its filament free. These are very marked characters, are they not? And strange to say you will find them the same in the same. in the tree and in the vine. Now, look at the ovules or seeds of the locust, and you will see that they are arranged in a pod or legume,

like those of the pea. And look at the leaves. You see, the leaf of the locust is made up of several leaflets, and so also is the leaf of the pea. Now, taste the locust leaf. I did so and found that it tasted like the leaf of the pea. Nature has used the same seasoning for both, though one is a straggling vine the other a big tree now surely you cannot imagine that all these similar characters are mere coincidences

do they not rather go to show that the creator in making the pea vine and locust tree had the same idea in mind and that plants are not classified arbitrarily man has nothing to do with their classification nature has attended to all that giving essential unity with boundless variety, so that the botanist has only to examine plants to learn the harmony of their relations. This fine lesson charmed me, and sent me flying to the woods and meadows in wild enthusiasm. Like everybody else, I was always found of flowers, attracted by their external beauty and purity. Now my eyes were open to their inner beauty, all alike revealing glorious traces of the thoughts of God, and leading on and on into the infinite cosmos. I wandered away at every opportunity, making long excursions round the lakes, gathering specimens and keeping them fresh in a bucket in my room to study at night

after my regular class tasks were learned, for my eyes never closed on the plant glory I had seen. Nevertheless, I still indulged my love of mechanical inventions. I invented a desk in which the books I had to study were arranged in order at the beginning of each term. I also made a bed which set me on my feet every morning at the hour determined on, and in dark winter mornings just as the bed set me on the floor it lighted a lamp. Then, after the minutes allowed for dressing had elapsed, a click was heard, and the first book to be studied was pushed up from a rack below the top of the desk. thrown open and allowed to remain there the number of minutes required then the machinery closed the book and allowed it to drop back into its stall then moved the rack forward and threw up the next in order and so on

all the day being divided into times of recitation and time required and allotted to each study besides this i thought it would be a fine thing in the summer time when the sun rose early to dispense with the clock-controlled bed machinery and make use of sunbeams instead. This I did simply by taking a lens out of my small spyglass, fixing it on a frame on the sill of my bedroom window, and pointing it to the sunrise. The sunbeams focused on a thread,

burned it through, allowing the bed machinery to put me on my feet. When I wished to arise at any given time after sunrise, I had only to turn the pivoted frame that held the lens, requisite number of degrees or minutes. Thus, I took Emerson's advice and hitched my dumping wagon bed to a star. I also invented a machine to make visible the growth of plants and the action of the sunlight, a very delicate contrivance enclosed in glass. Besides this, I invented a barometer

and a lot of novel scientific apparatus. My room was regarded as a sort of show-place by the professors, who oftentimes brought visitors to it on Saturdays and holidays. And when, some 18 years after I had left the university, I was sauntering over the campus in time of vacation and spoke to a man who seemed to be taking some charge of the grounds, he informed me that he was the janitor, and when I inquired what had become of Pat, the janitor in my time, and a favorite with the students,

he replied that Pat was still alive and well, but now too old to do much work. And when I pointed to the dormitory room that I long ago occupied, he said, Oh, then I know who you are and mentioned my name. How comes it that you know my name, I inquired? He explained that Pat always pointed out that room to newcomers and told long stories about the wonders that used to be in it.

So long had the memory of my little invention survived. Although I was four years at the university, I did not take the regular course of studies, but instead picked out what I thought would be most useful to me, particularly chemistry, which opened a new world and mathematics and physics, a little Greek and Latin, botany, and geology. I was far from satisfied with what I had learned and should have stayed longer. anyhow I wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted nearly 50 years and is not yet completed, always happy and free, poor and rich,

without thought of a diploma or of making a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring, godful beauty. From the top of a hill on the north side of Lake Mendota, I gained a last wistful lingering view of the beautiful university grounds and buildings where I had spent so many hungry and happy and hopeful days. There, with streaming eyes, I bade my blessed alma mater farewell, but I was only leaving one university for another, the Wisconsin University for the University for the University of the Wilderness. End of chapter 8.

End of the story of my boyhood and youth by John Muir.