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Then the delight in the abstract and in the concrete of strolling and lounging about the June meadows; of lying in pickle for half a day or more in this pastoral sea, laved by the great tide, shone upon by the virile sun, drenched to the very marrow of your being with the warm and wooing influences of the young summer! I was a famous berry-picker when a boy.
The lone fisherman of the Isaak Walton type had become, in the New World, the wood-walker, the flower-hunter, the bird-fancier, the berry-picker, and many another variety of the modern ruralist.
Zeke, Sam, Cynthia and Amelia who formed the quartet, had all fine voices and no social function for miles around Wakefield was complete without their music. The Squire said no more about the berry-pickers. Dave handed him a paper on which the time of each berry-picker and the amount of his or her wage was marked opposite.
The texture of his nature was much less fine than that of Mother's, and he was a much easier problem to read; he was as transparent as glass. Mother had more of the stuff of poetry in her soul, and a deeper, if more obscure, background to her nature. That which makes a man a hunter or a fisherman simply sent her forth in quest of wild berries. What a berry-picker she was!
Your genius prompted you. Another had passed that way and had missed the prize. Indeed, the successful berry-picker, like Walton's angler, is born, not made. It is only another kind of angling. In the same field one boy gets big berries and plenty of them; another wanders up and down, and finds only a few little ones.
Burroughs has told us, in that June idyl of his, "Strawberries," that he was a famous berry-picker when a boy. It was with a peculiar pleasure that I wandered with him one midsummer day over the same meadows where he used to gather strawberries. My first introduction to him as a writer, many years before, had been in hearing this essay read.
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