lives, any more than we can tell why one group of the hepaticas we
gather in the April woods has the gift of fragrance, while those
of a sister group in the same vicinity are scentless. A caprice of
fate, surely, that "mate and mate beget such different issues."

"Hiram was with me at Slabsides," said Mr. Burroughs, "much of the
time when I was writing the Whitman book, but never referred to it
in any way. When it came from the press, I said to him, 'Hiram,
here is the book you have heard me speak about as having cost me
nearly four years' work, and which I rewrote four times.'"

"'That's the book, is it?' he replied, showing no curiosity about it,
or desire to look into it, but kept drumming on the table--a habit
of his that was very annoying to me at times, but of which he was
not aware. When 'A Year in the Fields' came out, he looked at some
of the pictures, but that was all."

There is something very pathetic in all this--these two brothers
living in that isolated cabin in the woods, knit together by the
ties of kinship, having in common a deep and yearning love for
each other, and for the Old Home in the Catskills,--their daily
down-sittings and up-risings outwardly the same, yet so alienated
in what makes up one's real existence. The one, the elder, intent
on his bees, his thoughts by day revolving about his hives, or
concerned with the weather and the daily happenings; at night, as
he idly drums with his fingers, dreaming of the old days on the
farm--of how he used to dig out rocks to build the fences, of the
sugar-making, of cradling the oats in July; while the other--ah!
the other, of what was he not thinking!--of the little world of the
hives (his thoughts yielding the exquisite "Idyl of the Honey-Bee"),