on a farm, cradling four acres of grain a day, then sitting up till midnight to analyze and classify plants native to the region. At the end of four years the embryo naturalist, geologist, explorer, philosopher and protector of Nature left his Alma Mater. In his own words, he was "only leaving one university for another, the Wisconsin University for the University of the Wilderness."

As a young man Muir traveled to the Pacific Coast. There he met Dr. John Strenzel, a Polish revolutionist who had escaped from Siberia, and had gained fame as "the first experimental horticulturist in California after the Mission Fathers." The young Scotch scientist was taken to a hill-top opposite San Francisco to see the Strenzel orchards. On this hill he wooed the darkly beautiful Benicia Strenzel, and here he made her his wife, and lived with her and their children and grandchildren; and here above Suisun Bay, lie John and Benicia Muir in a corner of the orchard where the trees shed their blooms in the springtime.

Dr. Strenzel gave his ranch to his daughter and her husband when they were married. Muir cultivated the fruit trees, the grape vines and grain fields with such skill and diligence that he reaped a goodly fortune. He drove hard Scotch bargains with marketmen—this great-hearted lover of Mother Nature. But the money he earned was for his family, not himself. Says one who knew him well, "He wanted little that money can buy." Of his friend Edward H. Harriman Muir once remarked, "He's not as rich as I am. He has a hundred millions. I have all I want."

While his crops were ripening, this dramatist of the out-of-doors would take himself to the mountains, abide on the flowery uplands, study the ways of birds and squirrels, of Big Trees and cataracts and glaciers. In 1879 he went to Alaska. During his explorations he discovered Glacier Bay and the immense ice field now known to the world as Muir Glacier. For several years he made his summer home in the Yosemite Valley, acquainting himself with its botanical and geological features and making notes for future books. An appeal issued in his name in 1890 led to the creation of the Yosemite Valley and surrounding forests as a national reserve. Muir has been called the pioneer of our system of national parks. In the cause of science he traveled to Siberia, South America, Africa and India. "Tall, lean, craggy,"—a great tree of a man himself, he knew the forests of the world.

John Muir, "grandest character in Nature literature," died at the age of seventy-six on the day before Christmas, 1914. He was the author of several rare volumes of essays and reminiscences, most of which were published after he had reached the age of seventy. "To read Muir," says a critic of American literature, "is to be with a tempestuous soul whose units are storms and mountain ranges and mighty glacial moraines, who cries 'Come with me along the glaciers and see God making landscapes!'" Yet, "Look at that little muggins of a fir cone!" the interpreter of titanic symbols would exclaim, lovingly stroking a brown trophy of his beloved woods. Said a companion of Muir's during a scientific expedition, "Flakes of snow and crumbs of granite were to him real life." His study of the Water Ouzel is called the "finest bird biography in existence." He loved also to tell of the Douglas squirrel, "whose musical, piney gossip," wrote he, "is savory to the ear as balsam to the palate."

FROM A BUST BY C.S. PIETRO
IN THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, NEW YORK
JOHN BURROUGHS
BY COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM

From his maternal grandfather, who was American-born but of Irish ancestry, John Burroughs avers he gets his "dreamy, lazy, shirking ways." That Burroughs, the poet of bee and bird, of flower and tree, has dreamed to good account, all who read and love him know. He got his first taste for out-door diversions in the company of his aged grandparent, as together they fished the streams of Delaware County, New York,—the old man mingling tales of soldier days at Valley Forge with stories about snakes and birds.

Burroughs was born in Roxbury, New York, April 3, 1837. In after years he wrote, "April is my natal month, and I am born again into new-delight at each return of it." His father was a school teacher turned farmer. Burroughs' mother had little schooling, but, he says, "I owe to my mother my temperament, my love of Nature, my brooding, introspective habit of mind—all those things which in a literary man help to give atmosphere to his work. The Celtic element, which I get mostly from her side, has no doubt played an important part in my life. My idealism, my romantic tendencies, are largely her gift."

Young John was usually engaged outside of school hours doing chores in field and garden, but he was never too busy to raise his head at the note of a "brown thrasher," or stop to inquire into the ways of a wild flower nodding in his path. He went hunting, but he used to come back with little game. He was too intent on watching the behavior of fox and pigeon to aim his gun. He says in Dr. Barrus' intimate biography, "Our Friend John Burroughs," "I knew pretty well the ways of wild bees and hornets when I was only a small lad. What, or who, as I grew up, gave my mind its final push in this direction would not be easy to name. It is quite certain that I got it through literature, and more especially through the works of Audubon." He acknowledges, also, the influence of Thoreau, and of Emerson, "who kindled the love of Nature in me."

By doing farm work and by teaching Burroughs saved enough money to enter an institute not far from his home. He returned from his first visit to New York "with an empty pocket and an empty stomach, but with a bagful of books." All his money had been spent at second-hand book-stalls. For several years he taught school, marrying a pupil, Ursula North, in the meantime. He was twenty-six when, engaged in teaching near West Point, he "chanced upon the works of Audubon" in the library of the Military Academy. He relates, "It was like bringing together fire and powder. I was ripe for the adventure; I had leisure, I was in a good bird country, and I had Audubon to stimulate me. How eagerly and joyously I took up the study! It gave to my walks a new delight; it made me look upon every grove and wood as a new storehouse of possible treasures." His earliest contribution to Nature literature, a paper entitled "The Return of the Birds," was completed when he was a clerk in the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, in Washington. He held this position for ten years. In his spare moments he studied birds and wrote about them, finding that "he had only to unpack the memories of the farm boy to get at the main things about the common ones." The love of the great Nature essayist for his native countryside pervades much that he has given us. "Take the farm boy out of my books, and you have robbed them of something that is vital and fundamental," he avows. From the beginning he liked to write about rustic things—"sugar-making, cows, haying, stone walls."

Journeys to England, to the West Indies, to Alaska with the Harriman Expedition, to the Grand Canyon and the Yosemite, which he explored with his friend John Muir, to the Yellowstone (he visited the National Park in 1903 as the chosen companion of President Theodore Roosevelt), widened the sphere of John Burroughs' happy bird and flower hunting-grounds. But he still loves best the scenes of his boyhood, and he often returns in summer to the Catskills to revive memories, and write, and muse on the beauties of the Delaware County hills and vales. His home