[Mr. Burroughs's last walk with his father was to the crumbling
foundations of this house. I have heard him tell how his father
stood and pointed out the location of the various rooms--the room
where they slept the first night they went there; the one where
the eldest child was born; that in which his mother died. I stood
(one August day in 1902) with Mr. Burroughs on the still remaining
joists of his grandfather's house--grass-grown, and with the debris
of stones and beams mingling with weeds and bushes. He pointed out
to me, as his father had done for him, the location of the various
rooms, and mused upon the scenes enacted there; he showed where
the paths led to the barn and to the spring, and seemed to take
a melancholy interest in picturing the lives of his parents and
grandparents. A sudden burst of gladness from a song sparrow, and
his musings gave way to attentive pleasure, and the sunlit Present
claimed him instead of the shadowy Past. He was soon rejoicing
in the discovery of a junco's nest near the foundations of the
old house.--C.B.]


My father, Chauncey Burroughs, was born December 20, 1803. He
received a fair schooling for those times--the three R's--and
taught school one or two winters. His reading was the Bible and
hymn-book, his weekly secular paper, and a monthly religious paper.

He used to say that as a boy he was a very mean one, saucy,
quarrelsome, and wicked, liked horse-racing and card-playing--both
alike disreputable in those times. In early manhood he "experienced
religion" and joined the Old-School Baptist Church, of which his
parents were members, and then all his bad habits seem to have
been discarded. He stopped swearing and Sabbath-breaking, and