those days the real country came up to the very edges of the city.
His Spring at the Capital, Winter Sunshine, A March Chronicle, and
other papers bear the fruit of his life on the Potomac. He went to
England in 1871 on business for the Treasury Department, and again on
his own account a dozen years later. The record of the two visits is
to be found mainly in his chapters on An October Abroad, contained in
the volume Winter Sunshine, and in the papers gathered into the volume
Fresh Fields.

He resigned his place in the Treasury in 1873, and was appointed
receiver of a broken national bank. Later, until 1885, his business
occupation was that of a National Bank Examiner. An article
contributed by him to The Century Magazine for March, 1881, on Broken
Banks and Lax Directors, is perhaps the only literary outcome of this
occupation, but the keen powers of observation, trained in the field of
nature, could not fail to disclose themselves in analyzing columns of
figures. After leaving Washington Mr. Burroughs bought a fruit farm at
West Park, near Esopus, on the Hudson, and there building his house
from the stones found in his fields, has given himself the best
conditions for that humanizing of nature which constitutes the charm
of his books. He was married in 1857 to a lady living in the New York
village where he was at the time teaching. He keeps his country home
the year round, only occasionally visiting New York. The cultivation
of grapes absorbs the greater part of his time; but he has by no means
given over letters. His work, which has long found ready acceptance
both at home and abroad, is now passing into that security of fame
which comes from its entrance into the school-life of American
children.

Besides his outdoor sketches and the other papers already mentioned,