My Boyhood | Page 3

me the seventh child. Mother was twenty-nine
and father thirty-five, a medium-sized, freckled, red-haired man,
showing very plainly the Celtic or Welsh strain in his blood, as did
mother, who was a Kelly and of Irish extraction on the paternal side. I
had come into a family of neither wealth nor poverty as those things
were looked upon in those days, but a family dedicated to hard work
winter and summer in paying for and improving a large farm, in a
country of wide open valleys and long, broad-backed hills and gentle
flowing mountain lines; very old geologically, but only one generation
from the stump in the history of the settlement. Indeed, the stumps
lingered in many of the fields late into my boyhood, and one of my
tasks in the dry mid- spring weather was to burn these stumps--an
occupation I always enjoyed because the adventure of it made play of
the work. The climate was severe in winter, the mercury often dropping
to 30° below, though we then had no thermometer to measure it, and
the summers, at an altitude of two thousand feet, cool and salubrious.
The soil was fairly good, though encumbered with the laminated rock

and stones of the Catskill formation, which the old ice sheet had broken
and shouldered and transported about. About every five or six acres had
loose stones and rock enough to put a rock-bottomed wall around it and
still leave enough in and on the soil to worry the ploughman and the
mower. All the farms in that section reposing in the valleys and
bending up and over the broad-backed hills are checker-boards of stone
walls, and the right- angled fields, in their many colours of green and
brown and yellow and red, give a striking map-like appearance to the
landscape. Good crops of grain, such as rye, oats, buckwheat, and
yellow corn, are grown, but grass is the most natural product. It is a
grazing country and the dairy cow thrives there, and her products are
the chief source of the incomes of the farms.
I had come into a home where all the elements were sweet; the water
and the air as good as there is in the world, and where the conditions of
life were of a temper to discipline both mind and body. The settlers of
my part of the Catskills were largely from Connecticut and Long Island,
coming in after or near the close of the Revolution, and with a good
mixture of Scotch emigrants.
My great-grandfather, Ephraim Burroughs, came, with his family of
eight or ten children, from near Danbury, Conn., and settled in the town
of Stamford shortly after the Revolution. He died there in 1818. My
grandfather, Eden, came into the town of Roxbury, then a part of Ulster
County.
I had come into a land flowing with milk, if not with honey. The maple
syrup may very well take the place of the honey. The sugar maple was
the dominant tree in the woods and the maple sugar the principal
sweetening used in the family. Maple, beech, and birch wood kept us
warm in winter, and pine and hemlock timber made from trees that
grew in the deeper valleys formed the roofs and the walls of the houses.
The breath of kine early mingled with my own breath. From my earliest
memory the cow was the chief factor on the farm and her products the
main source of the family income; around her revolved the haying and
the harvesting. It was for her that we toiled from early July until late
August, gathering the hay into the barns or into the stacks, mowing and
raking it by hand. That was the day of the scythe and the good mower,
of the cradle and the good cradler, of the pitchfork and the good pitcher.
With the modern agricultural machinery the same crops are gathered

now with less than half the outlay of human energy, but the type of
farmer seems to have deteriorated in about the same proportion. The
third generation of farmers in my native town are much like the third
steeping of tea, or the third crop of corn where no fertilizers have been
used. The large, picturesque, and original characters who improved the
farms and paid for them are about all gone, and their descendants have
deserted the farms or are distinctly of an inferior type. The farms keep
more stock and yield better crops, owing to the amount of imported
grain consumed upon them, but the families have dwindled or gone out
entirely, and the social and the neighbourhood spirit is not the same. No
more huskings or quiltings, or apple cuts, or raisings or "bees" of any
sort. The telephone and the rural free delivery have come and the