My Boyhood | Page 2

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 journey to the Hawaiian Islands, returning home in
June. In 1911 I again crossed the continent to California. I have camped
and tramped in Maine and in Canada, and have spent part of a winter in
Bermuda and in Jamaica. This is an outline of my travels. I have known
but few great men. I met Carlyle in the company of Moncure Conway
in London in November, 1871. I met Emerson three times--in 1863 at
West Point; in 1871 in Baltimore and Washington, where I heard him
lecture; and at the Holmes birthday breakfast in Boston in 1879. I knew
Walt Whitman intimately from 1863 until his death in 1892. I have met
Lowell and Whittier, but not Longfellow or Bryant; I have seen Lincoln,
Grant, Sherman, Early, Sumner, Garfield, Cleveland, and other notable
men of those days. I heard Tyndall deliver his course of lectures on
Light in Washington in 1870 or '71, but missed seeing Huxley during
his visit here. I dined with the Rossettis in London in 1871, but was not
impressed by them nor they by me. I met Matthew Arnold in New York
and heard his lecture on Emerson. My books are, in a way, a record of
my life--that part of it that came to flower and fruit in my mind. You
could reconstruct my days pretty well from those volumes. A writer
who gleans his literary harvest in the fields and woods reaps mainly
where he has sown himself. He is a husbandman whose crop springs
from the seed of his own heart.
My life has been a fortunate one; I was born under a lucky star. It
seems as if both wind and tide had favoured me. I have suffered no
great losses, or defeats, or illness, or accidents, and have undergone no
great struggles or privations; I have had no grouch, I have not wanted

the earth. I am pessimistic by night, but by day I am a confirmed
optimist, and it is the days that have stamped my life. I have found this
planet a good corner of the universe to live in and I am not in a hurry to
exchange it for any other. I hope the joy of living may be as keen with
you, my dear boy, as it has been with me and that you may have life on
as easy terms as I have. With this foreword I will begin the record in
more detail.
I have spoken of my good luck. It began in my being born on a farm, of
parents in the prime of their days, and in humble circumstances. I deem
it good luck, too, that my birth fell in April, a month in which so many
other things find it good to begin life. Father probably tapped the sugar
bush about this time or a little earlier; the bluebird and the robin and
song sparrow may have arrived that very day. New calves were
bleating in the barn and young lambs under the shed. There were earth-
stained snow drifts on the hillside, and along the stone walls and
through the forests that covered the mountains the coat of snow showed
unbroken. The fields were generally bare and the frost was leaving the
ground. The stress of winter was over and the warmth of spring began
to be felt in the air. I had come into a household of five children, two
girls and three boys, the oldest ten years and the youngest two. One had
died in infancy, making