keep him out of mischief. He grew up with work for his chief companion, but he did not exactly appreciate the companionship. John was a bit queer. He preferred the woods to the corn-field. To lie in the shade of a tree was more to his liking than pitching hay. That's very queer! It is a good thing for literature to have its writers born and brought up on the farm, though it is likely to be pretty hard on the farm. However there were Hiram and Curtis and Wilson and Eden (Eden was younger than John), and father Chauncey, besides all of the women-folk, to run the farm. There was just one John in the dozen, just one dreamer and shirk. And if he did shirk (and I am sure from personal experience that he did), why, as Old Chaucer cries, to the east and south. John's father had taken it from his pioneer father who had cleared the land and built him and his young wife a rude log cabin in the stark wilderness. Stumps of that primeval forest still showed in some of the pasture fields where John drove out the cows. It is a good dairy farm, in a good dairy country, and in John's boyhood, as now, the day began with the cow, and the cow closed it. Hay was the greatest crop, and haying was the greatest event in the whole farm cycle of the year. The work was all done by hand. Mr. Burroughs, looking back says, "The farm-work to which I was early called revolved around the cow." It really revolved around the big churning-machine which was attached to the milk-house and which was propelled by a "churner," either Let Austin (Chauncey) have his swink "old Cuff," the dog, or an old wether (work) to him reserved. sheep, or by John himself, butter being the chief thing the Burroughs farm had for sale. How shall the world be served? Didn't John write, or at least dream of it? Farming is hard work, but writing is a great deal harder. The farm lies well up on the side of Old Clump (now Burroughs Mountain), at an altitude of about two thousand feet, and sloping generally along the distant horizon lay a guard of hazy giants, as if to keep the boy within his native hills, while still reminding him of other lands beyond. Directly below the tilted hay-fields and the stone walls of the farm, but quite out of sight in the valley, nestled the town of Roxbury. Here were people. Here was the moving, mixing, pushing world of human life, very near, yet far enough away to leave the boy of the mountain-side in an undisturbed world of his own, single and elemental and wild. Books were few about the Burroughs farm. But what a lot of things there were! Books are necessary for a boy who is going to write. So are things necessary just as necessary as books. And early in the young writer's life, if he cannot have both books and things, he had The Burbetter have the things. roughs library consisted of a Bible and a Baptist hymn-book. That is not a very large library, but it is mighty The scene which lay about the boy good as far as it goes. The best was purely rural, not rugged. It was library in the world contains nothing a large, kindly, home-like land, full better than the old King James of motion, full of color, full of distance, version of the Bible, and every great full of freedom for the mind, and close English writer has gone to school to up against the sky. Slumbering that book. And every one who wishes to become a great English writer must go to school to that book. Besides these important volumes there was monthly reading-matter in the shape of a religious paper called "The Signs of the Times," and a weekly newspaper. John's father was a strict Baptist and church-goer, and he read devotedly every word in "The Signs of the Times"; but there is no record of young John's devotion to it. Outside of the house, however, its pages open to the boy, lay another bookthe great Book of Nature. Lacking things to read inside, the boy turned to the fields and woods, and "leafing" these sunlit, starlit, rain-blurred pages as the seasons came and went, found many an interesting story written there. so full, and free, and exciting, as on a three hundred and twenty acre farm up on a glorious mountain-side. A cow? Why, there was a herd of them, and enough other animals to sink Noah's Ark! Perhaps there once was a boy who didn't like to water the horses, take off their harness, feed and bed them down in the stalls; and in the morning didn't like to hear them whinny as he opened the barn to get them their oats and hay; who didn't like to curry and sleek their withers, and comb out their manes, and then shake up the litter, and clean the stables for the day! Pigs! Little pigs especially! There couldn't be a farm without a penfull of pigs. And I wonder if there could be a normal, natural man who didn't hanker to keep pigs, to scratch them, and fatten them, and go out and watch them, and make them into bacon and scraple and ham and sausage and souse and pork and lard How dreadful to be brought up without pigs! So little reading went forward in the Burroughs household that we can honestly say the boy John was born and brought up in an illiterate home. A bad beginning that for a writer. Bad, yes; but not the worst begin--and fry doughnuts in the lard! ning by a good deal. For here was the farm with all its work and things. Books you can buy at the book-store, or borrow from the public library. It is harder to buy a farm and all that goes with it; and especially hard, when you are old and in need of the experiences to write about, to buy a boyhood on a farm. Better be without books than experience of life, if you are going to write. All over England there appeared a poster recently on one side of which was a bouncing baby, and on the other side a can of Somebody's condensed milk. Underneath was the legend "The Baby's Birthright." A baby's birthright used to be the warm, full breast of his mother, and, after he was weaned, the cow. Instead of mother and cow the modern baby inherits a can of condensed milk. Poor baby! If he lives, he will be a chronic sufferer, like most modern life and literature, from tincanitis. Life on the Burroughs farm was not condensed and canned. It actually flowed with full-cream milk and honey. Books were scarce, but not the stuff out of which books are made. It seems to me that every child's birthright is not only his mother and a cow, but a whole farm besides. I cannot think of child life anywhere And chickens! And geese! And turkeys! And-but it is no use to continue this animal- and thingcatalogue of a three hundred and twenty acre Catskill farm. Every domestic animal, and as many wild ones, were there; every activity, every problem, every kind of crop, every piece of kit, every sort of field possible to such a farm was on the Burroughs farm, and in the daily round of young John's busy life. One of the peculiar crops, with its own peculiar season, its own peculiar implements and methods, was the maple-syrup crop in March, out of the "Sugar Bush," a grove of ancient maple-trees on a steep slope above the barns. Name me, if you can, anything more strangely stirring, or half so sticky sweet, as boiling down the maple sap and "sugaring off." The woods are knee-deep with snow, but a sudden warm-spell has started the sap up the tree trunks, and the flow is on. John yokes up the oxen to the heavy farm-sled; piles on the sappans,- -a hundred and fifty of them for the hundred and fifty mapletrees, an ax for tapping the trees, a gouge for opening the hole for the spiles; throws on the bundles of spiles, the yokes and buckets; rolls on the hogsheads; and with plenty of food, starts for the sugar bush. It was his part to carry pans and spiles for one of the tappers, and to arrange the pans on level foundations beneath the dripping trees. Up through the thawing drifts he pushes the floundering cattle crows and highholes calling, "Downy" beating for him from a dead limb a resounding "charge," just like some crazy drummer, who had drummed his hands off and was now beating out the charge with his head. "Downy" is really drumming to wake the dead. And the dead are waking. Everything is waking. Spring is rising from the grave. Bluebirds have returned, song-sparrows are singing, and nuthatches are "anking" among the maple-trees. John gees "THE DROPPING SAP IS MAKING MUSIC ON THE MILK-PAIL BOTTOMS" and haws to the plodding oxen, and brings them to a stop before the "boiling place" with its great black kettle and its stone arch. The boys pile off into the snow. Father and Hiram begin the tapping, and by ten o'clock the tinkle, tinkle, tinkle of the dropping sap is making tiny music on a hundred milk-pan bottoms, music such as orchestras of string- and wind-instruments never made. Then back to the "boiling place" troop the boys and start the fire under the big evaporating-kettle. While the fire is getting under way, and snow is being melted for cleaning things up, the hogsheads are put into place to receive the sap, fire-wood heaped up, (Continued on page 150) HEN a young man comes of first birthday and goes on apparently much as he did before. But as time passes he finds he has new responsibilities and new duties. He is entitled to vote for officers of the city, the state, and the nation; he has new rights in regard to property; and, if he is fortunate enough to acquire any substantial amount of it, he finds he has taxes to pay. The freedom from restraint which comes with his manhood thus has its qualifying disadvantages. In the case of nations, maturity is apt to come with decades rather than with years, and there is not the same exactness as to the date when new responsibilities have to be assumed and new duties discharged. But except for this lack of exactness, a nation just as truly comes of age as a man. We saw last month how Uncle Sam in his youth had conducted himself toward his neighbors. It was suggested that his coming of age was coincident with the end of the World War. The maturity of a nation, instead of being measured merely by years, is measured by its interests, its wealth, and its power in the world. In this respect the United States stands to-day among the first, if not first, of the nations of the world. Figures are usually considered dull things, but some of them are vastly interesting. No man can see with his eyes all of our foreign trade, or our foreign investments, or our fleets on the seas, our American banks scattered throughout the world, and many other things which indicate the extent of our foreign interests. Yet these are among the properties belonging to Uncle Sam, to the care and direction of which he must devote his attention as a citizen of the world. It is only through figures that we can get some idea of the extent of these national interests. Foreign trade is the process by which we sell to our neighbors the things of which we have more than we can use, such as cotton, wheat, oil, machinery, and other products. If we could not sell these things to other countries, we should have a surplus at home which would lower prices and throw many of our workers out of employment. By sending the surplus abroad we can secure in exchange many things from other countries which we cannot or do not produce Author of "China and the Powers," etc. here at home. Among these things of undeveloped territory and few sisal from which is made the twine for binding our grain crops, coffee, tea, and various other things necessary for our comfort and well-being. A young nation such as the United States before the Civil War, or such as Australia or the Argentine Republic to-day, does not need to devote much attention to, its foreign trade. Its surplus products are largely wheat or metals or other raw materials which the older nations must have in order to live. And these older nations send in return the manufactured goods clothing, machinery, hardware, and other things that the younger nation needs and is not yet able to manufacture for itself. When a nation comes of age economically, however, it has become sufficiently industrialized so that its factories can supply most of its wants, and its increasing population uses more and more of the food-stuffs and raw materials which it produces at home. Yet if its people are awake and productive it has a surplus both of food and manufactured goods, which it is anxious to exchange with other countries for the products which it does not find within its own borders. Trade of this kind is much more complicated and requires greater skill for its development than the earlier simple exchange of raw materials for manufactured goods. Other nations are bending their energies to dispose of their own surplus products and to secure from each other the same things that we want them to send to us. Modern foreign trade is a highly competitive affair, on which governments keep a close watch to protect the interests of their people. In 1914 the foreign trade of the United States was $3,900,000,000. Last year it was $9,250,000,000— nearly two and a half times as much. In 1914 we had three American chambers of commerce in foreign countries. Now we have thirty. One might almost say that Uncle Sam, after running a summer lemonade stand had suddenly opened a grocery store. He will find that the grocery store requires vastly more care and attention than the lemonade stand. Another matter to which Uncle Sam, must now give much more attention than in the past is that of money. A young nation with great stretches for development. This money it borrows from the people of other countries. As the development proceeds and the earning power of the country is increased, it begins to pay back these loans. Finally it begins to accumulate surplus capital, which it in turn is ready to loan to newer countries, and even to some of the older ones which may have been visited by misfortune. Before the war Uncle Sam was already able to lend money abroad. He had foreign investments then amounting to $2,250,000,000. The war greatly increased his capital, and the other nations were eager to borrow from him. They owe him now close to $20,000,000,000-nearly ten times as much as they owed him in 1914. When he was borrowing money, he knew little and cared less about the political or economic conditions of the countries from which he borrowed it. As the world's banker, however, he will have to know a great deal about the conditions in every country to which he is asked to lend money. And as these conditions will in turn depend to a great extent upon their relations with neighboring countries, Uncle Sam will have to do a deal of studying to acquaint himself with political and economic trends over the world. Already he has established over 100 branches of American banks in different countries, when before the war he got along very well without any. One of the great factors in international trade and finance is shipping. In the days of wooden sailing-ships Uncle Sam was a keen sailor. He had ships on every ocean, and his fast clippers sailed circles around the ships of other nations. They made marvelous records between Boston and China, and China and London. But when the steel steamship succeeded the sailing-ship as the great ocean carrier, Uncle Sam lost the advantage which his virgin forests had given him, and his industries were not sufficiently developed to keep up the pace. England was able to secure a long lead and had many more ships than any other nation. She still has the greatest number of ships, but Uncle Sam since the war has gone back into the game and is now building steamers of his own. Our tonnage between 1914 and 1926 prac |