I sucked it dry. I haven't done much about it these later years."
So we are not to gather wild honey, I find; but what of that?--am I
not actually walking in the woods with John Burroughs?

Up, up we climb, an ascent of about a mile and a quarter from the
railway station. Emerging from the woods, we come rather suddenly
upon a reclaimed rock-girt swamp, the most of which is marked off in
long green lines of celery. This swamp was formerly a lake-bottom;
its rich black soil and three perennial springs near by decided Mr.
Burroughs to drain and reclaim the soil and compel it to yield
celery and other garden produce.

Nestling under gray rocks, on the edge of the celery garden,
embowered in forest trees, is the vine-covered cabin, Slabsides.
What a feeling of peace and aloofness comes over one in looking up
at the encircling hills! The few houses scattered about on other
rocks are at a just comfortable distance to be neighborly, but not
too neighborly. Would one be lonesome here? Aye, lonesome, but--

"Not melancholy,--no, for it is green
And bright and fertile, furnished in itself
With the few needful things that life requires;
In rugged arms how soft it seems to lie,
How tenderly protected!"

Mr. Burroughs has given to those who contemplate building a house
some sound advice in his essay "Roof-Tree." There he has said that
a man makes public proclamation of what are his tastes and his
manners, or his want of them, when he builds his house; that if
we can only keep our pride and vanity in abeyance and forget that