sentences glance off and fail to reach the quick.


[In August, 1902, Mr. Burroughs wrote me of a visit to Cooperstown,
after all these years: "I found Cooperstown not much changed. The
lake and the hills were, of course, the same as I had known them
forty-six years ago, and the main street seemed but little altered.
Of the old seminary only the foundations were standing, and the
trees had so grown about it that I hardly knew the place. I again
dipped my oar in the lake, again stood beside Cooper's grave, and
threaded some of the streets I had known so well. I wished I could
have been alone there. . . . I wanted to muse and dream, and invoke
the spirit of other days, but the spirits would not rise in the
presence of strangers. I could not quite get a glimpse of the
world as it appeared to me in those callow days. It was here that
I saw my first live author (spoken of in my 'Egotistical Chapter')
and first dipped into Emerson."

After leaving the Seminary at Cooperstown in July of 1856, the
young student worked on the home farm in the Catskills until fall,
when he began teaching school at Buffalo Grove, Illinois, where he
taught until the following spring, returning East to marry, as he
says, "the girl I left behind me."

He then taught in various schools in New York and New Jersey, until
the fall of 1863. As a rule, in the summer he worked on the home
farm.

During this period he was reading much, and trying his hand at
writing. There was a short intermission in his teaching, when he