its haying, its cool, fragrant woods; the fall with its nuts, its
game, its apple-gathering, its holidays; the winter with its
school, its sport on ice and snow, its apple-bins in the cellar,
its long nights by the fireside, its voice of fox-bounds on the
mountains, its sound of flails in the barn--how much I still dream
about these things!

But I am slow in keeping my promise to try to account for myself.
Yet all these things are a part of my antecedents; they entered
into my very blood--father and mother and brothers and sisters,
and the homely life of the farm, all entered into and became a
part of that which I am.

I am certain, as I have told you before, that I derived more from
my mother than from my father. I have more of her disposition--her
yearning, breeding nature, her subdued and neutral tones, her
curiosity, her love of animals, and of wild nature generally.
Father was neither a hunter nor a fisherman, and, I think, was
rarely conscious of the beauty of nature around him. The texture
of his nature was much less fine than that of Mother's, and he was
a much easier problem to read; he was as transparent as glass.
Mother had more of the stuff of poetry in her soul, and a deeper,
if more obscure, background to her nature. That which makes a
man a hunter or a fisherman simply sent her forth in quest of
wild berries. What a berry-picker she was! How she would work
to get the churning out of the way so she could go out to the
berry lot! It seemed to heal and refresh her to go forth in the
hill meadows for strawberries, or in the old bushy bark-peelings
for raspberries. The last work she did in the world was to gather
a pail of blackberries as she returned one September afternoon from