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Updated: June 9, 2025
When disciples seek out the hermit in hiding behind the vines at Slabsides, they find a genial welcome, a simple, homely hospitality; find that the author merits the Indian name given him by a clever friend "Man-not-afraid-of-company."
Now, at this distance, and sitting beside my open fire at Slabsides, I look upon the whole trip with unmixed pleasure. The two sides of our great sprawling continent, the East and West, differ from each other almost as much as day differs from night. On the coast of southern California the dominant impression made upon one is of a world made up of three elements sun, sea, and sky.
The interior of Slabsides was finished in birch and beech poles, with the bark on them, and much of the furniture he made of natural crooks and crotches. He always had his "eye peeled," as he said, for some natural piece of wood that he could use.
I am here surrounded by the peace and sweetness of Slabsides. I came here Saturday morning in the rain. It is a soft, hazy morning, the sun looking red through a thin layer of seamless clouds. Amasa is hoeing in the celery, which looks good, and the birds are singing and calling all about. I have got to go to N. Y. this afternoon to a dinner.
Burroughs in one of his early essays, "so one's spirit must shed itself upon its environment before it can brood and be at all content." Here at Slabsides one feels that its master does brood and is content. It is an ideal location for a man of his temperament; it affords him the peace and seclusion he desires, yet is not so remote that he is shut off from human fellowship.
But he did no writing here, for a few years later he built the bark-covered study down on the edge of the bank, then a few years later yet he built Slabsides, two miles over the low mountain. It was there, especially in the study, that he did the bulk of all his literary work.
Read Ruskin's "Modern Painters" when you get a chance. Read Emerson's "English Traits" and his "Representative Men." Send me some of the pictures you took at Slabsides of the Suter girls and any others that would interest me. I go to-day to the Harrimans at Arden for two or three days. On Saturday last I had 25 Vassar girls at SS and expect more this Saturday.
The black duck referred to was one I had winged and brought home; it was excessively wild until we put it with the tame ducks, whereupon, as Father expressed it, "He took his cue from them and became tamer than the tame ones." Slabsides, July 13, '97. I enclose a circular from Amherst College that came to you yesterday.
And it is "Everybody's dear John Burroughs" who stands in the wide doorway at Slabsides and gives his callers a quiet, cordial welcome. And when the day is ended, and the visitor goes his way down the hill, he carries in his heart a new treasure the surety that he has found a comrade. Having had the privilege for the past twelve years of helping Mr.
Although he left the old scenes in his youth, his heart has always been there. Most of his readers have heard much of Slabsides, the cabin in the wooded hills back of the Hudson, and of his conventional home, Riverby, at West Park, New York; but as yet the public has heard little of his more remote retreat on his native heath. In the summer of 1908, Mr.
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