My Boyhood

FOREWORD

In the beginning, at least, Father wrote these sketches of his boyhood and early farm life as a matter of self-defense: I had made a determined attempt to write them and when I did this I was treading on what was to him more or less sacred ground, for as he once said in a letter to me, "You will be homesick; I know just how I felt when I left home forty-three years ago. And I have been more or less homesick ever since. The love of the old hills and of Father and Mother is deep in the very foundations of my being." He had an intense love of his birthplace and cherished every memory of his boyhood and of his family and of the old farm high up on the side of Old Clump—"the mountain out of whose loins I sprang"—so that when I tried to write of him he felt it was time he took the matter in hand. The following pages are the result.

JULIAN BURROUGHS.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

MY BOYHOOD, BY JOHN BURROUGHS

MY FATHER, BY JULIAN BURROUGHS

  WAITING

  Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
  Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
  I rave no more 'gainst Time or Fate,
  For lo! my own shall come to me.

  I stay my haste, I make delays,
  For what avails this eager pace?
  I stand amid the eternal ways,
  And what is mine shall know my face.

  Asleep, awake, by night or day,
  The friends I seek are seeking me;
  No wind can drive my bark astray,
  Nor change the tide of destiny.

  What matter if I stand alone?
  I wait with joy the coming years;
  My heart shall reap where it hath sown,
  And garner up its fruit of tears.

  The waters know their own, and draw
  The brook that springs in yonder heights;
  So flows the good with equal law
  Unto the soul of pure delights.

  The stars come nightly to the sky;
  The tidal wave comes to the sea;

  Can keep my own away from me.