The Alaska daily empire., 1921-03-29

:hc more sociabfe. writer.
 Books Bugbear in Youth.
 l e learned to love nature when he drove cows at his birthplace farm, Roxhury, among the Catskills, in New York State, but anything like a literary composition was a bugbear to him as youth.
 He wes born in 1887. In 1863 he went to Washington with something of an inclination to enli"t in the Union Army, but he decided to eek "a government office. It is re- lated that with only a flew of his poems as credentials he walked into the Treasury Department and asked for a job. It was agreed that his vernal verses really smelt of the woods, and smacked of sincerity He would be a safe man to watch the treasury vaults. He agreed to take the place. At little desk, facing the huge iron vault where he kept tabs on those who went to handle the $50,OO0,000 stored -there he began writing of the birds, to relieve his homesickness. The re- suit was his first book, Wake Robin"
 Quits U. s. Treasury.
 Some years later, after work as a treasury clerk and national bank examiner had netted him some savings, he bought few acres at West Park on the Hudson, where among the loaded trellises of a vine yard he found "more pleasure than in the closets of greenbacks." There he renewed his emotional inter course with Nature. building a real house overlooking the rivcr-just above Poughkeepsie. When rural civ ilization pressed a little close about him, he built his "slabsides" cabin a mile or two back in the woods.
 He did not go at his studies with the set determination of an herba- list, but took life easily, and wrote breezily when the spirit moved him of the secrets of nature. He never made much of the discovery of new 1 species, and nothing of cataloguing them, but delighted in finding for himself and revealing to others the charms of close contact with the birds, bees and flowers. The es- sence of his philosophy was al ways bright, in agreement with Browning, that AIS well with the world"
 Roosevelt's Friend.
 The title of his books included Winter Sunshine" 'Locusts and Wild Honey" Fresh Fields" "In- door Studies" Birds and Poets,' Signs and Seasons" "The Light of ] Day-Religious Discussions from the Standpoint of the Naturalist" Lit erary Values," and Ways of Ma ture." He was 2 friend of Walt 1 Whitman and one of his books was an appreciation of him. He was l also boon companion of Theodore 1 Roosevelt in nature studies. During l COi. Roosevelt's occasional clashes with nature fakers" and those who charged him with brutal instincts in his hunting trips, the venerable Burroughs always came to the Col onel's defense. With John Muir, the naturalist of the West, Bur roughs once toured the canyons and collaborated with Muir in a Study of Our National Parks"
 "Riverby" and "Slabsides,' Bur roughs' retreats on the Hudson, be- came shrines for his many admir- CTS, and those who made pilrimages there were invariably received in the most democratic fashion by the celebrated naturalist.
 On his 18th birthday he said, Growing old is a kind of letting go. The morning has its delight and it's enticements, the noon has its triumphs and satisfactions, but there are a charm and a tranquility and a spiritual uplift about the close of the day that belopg to neither"
 WEST ORANGE, N J., March % Thomas Edison, lifelong friend of John Burroughs, this afternoon OK. pressed profound sorrow over Bur rough's death.
 He always appeared to be one of the higher types evolved in ad- vance of man to the higher stage" the famous inventor said