of boyhood days upon the farm, of the wild life around his cabin, of
the universe, and of the soul of the poet Whitman, that then much
misunderstood man, than whom no one so much as he has helped us to
appreciate. Going out and in, attending to his homely tasks (for
these brothers did their own housework), the younger brother was
all the time thinking of that great soul, of all that association
with him had meant to him, and of all that Whitman would mean to
America, to the world, as poet, prophet, seer--thinking how out of
his knowledge of Whitman as poet and person he could cull and sift
and gather together an adequate and worthy estimate of one whom his
soul loved as Jonathan loved David!

The mystery of personality--how shall one fathom it? I asked myself
this one rainy afternoon, as I sat in the Burroughs homestead and
looked from one brother to another, the two so alike and yet so
unlike. The one a simple farmer whose interests are circumscribed
by the hills which surround the farm on which as children they were
reared; the other, whose interests in the early years were seemingly
just as circumscribed, but who felt that nameless something--that
push from within--which first found its outlet in a deeper interest
in the life about him than his brothers ever knew; and who later
felt the magic of the world of books; and, still later, the need of
expression, an expression which finally showed itself in a masterly
interpretation of country life and experiences. The same heredity
here, the same environment, the same opportunities--yet how different
the result! The farmer has tended and gathered many a crop from the
old place since they were boys, but has been blind and deaf to all
that has there yielded such a harvest to the other. That other,
a plain, unassuming man, "standing at ease in nature," has become
a household word because of all that he has contributed to our