and a rather obscure man of letters, lived in eventful times indeed, but
largely lived apart from the men and events that have given character to
the last three quarters of a century. Like tens of thousands of others,
I have been a spectator of, rather than a participator in, the
activities--political, commercial, sociological, scientific--of the
times in which I have lived. My life, like your own, has been along the
by-paths rather than along the great public highways. I have known but
few great men and have played no part in any great public events--not
even in the Civil War which I lived through and in which my duty plainly
called me to take part. I am a man who recoils from noise and strife,
even from fair competition, and who likes to see his days "linked each
to each" by some quiet, congenial occupation.

The first seventeen years of my life were spent on the farm where I was
born (1837-1854); the next ten years I was a teacher in rural district
schools (1854-1864); then I was for ten years a government clerk in
Washington (1864-1873); then in the summer of 1873, while a national
bank examiner and bank receiver, I purchased the small fruit farm on the
Hudson where you were brought up and where I have since lived,
cultivating the land for marketable fruit and the fields and woods for
nature literature, as you well know. I have gotten out of my footpaths a
few times and traversed some of the great highways of travel--have been
twice to Europe, going only as far as Paris (1871 and 1882)--the first
time sent to London by the Government with three other men to convey
$50,000,000 of bonds to be refunded; the second time going with my
family on my own account. I was a member of the Harriman expedition to
Alaska in the summer of 1899, going as far as Plover Bay on the extreme
N. E. part of Siberia. I was the companion of President Roosevelt on a
trip to Yellowstone Park in the spring of 1903. In the winter and spring
of 1909 I went to California with two women friends and extended the