John Burley

“ Burley shook his head. "No brandy, Mrs. Goodyer; only fresh milk. I will see whether I can yet coax Nature."
Mrs. Goodyer did not know what was meant by coaxing Nature, but she said, "Pray do, Master John," and vanished.
That day Burley went out with his rod, and he fished hard for the one-eyed perch; but in vain. Then he roved along the stream with his hands in his pockets, whistling. He returned to the cottage at sunset, partook of the fare provided for him, abstained from the brandy, and felt dreadfully low. ”

“ WARING, JOHN BURLEY (1823–1875) , architect, was born at Lyme Regis, Dorset, on 29 June 1823, and owed his early love for literature to the perusal of the ‘Penny Magazine.’ From 1836 he was educated at a branch of University College, London, then existing at Bristol, where he was also taught watercolour-drawing by Samuel Jackson [q. v.] ”

“ John Burley remained to explain and interpret the American mule to these perplexed troopers.
Morning, noon, and night he went clanking down to the corral, his cartridge belt and holster swinging at his hip. But sometimes he had a little leisure.
Sainte Lesse knew him as a mighty eater and as a lusty drinker of good red wine; as a mighty and garrulous talker, too, he be [pg 183] came known, ready to accost anybody in the quiet and subdued old town and explode into French at the slightest encouragement. ”

“ While driving with his daughter he was set upon by a party of nine men and put to death with the most atrocious cruelty.
The real leader in this murder was John Balfour of Burley, one of the fiercest and most fanatical of the proscribed sect. Though he professed the utmost religious fervour, Burley was more noted for the violence and zeal with which he undertook the most desperate enterprises and for his courage and skill with the sword. The murder of Sharp aroused the Government to new activities and no less stimulated the zeal of the Covenanters. ”

“ Your servant, sir—young man, come and talk."
Burley hooked his arm within Leonard's, and led the boy passively away.
"That is a clever man," said Harley L'Estrange. "But I am sorry to see yon young student, with his bright, earnest eyes, and his lip that has the quiver of passion and enthusiasm, leaning on the arm of a guide who seems disenchanted of all that gives purpose to learning, and links philosophy with use to the world. Who, and what is this clever man whom you call Burley?"
"A man who might have been famous, if he had condescended to be respectable! ”

“ Seeing him become tractable, Robert contemptuously flung off the arm he held and walked away towards Janet. Burley followed his receding steps with a malevolent glare, and then turned savagely on the tall quiet stranger who was still holding his other arm in a grip of steel.
"Leggo my arm," he bellowed.
"A word in your ear, Mr. Burley," said the quiet one, relaxing his grip. "Plain clothes men are in the crowd. If you kick up a shindy, you'll be giving them what they're looking for."
"And who the devil are you?" sputtered Burley, with the air of a man who is not to be easily frightened. ”

“ But Burley had only women and children and old men on whom to practice his earnest and voluble French, for everybody else was at the front.
Children adored him—adored his big, silver spurs, his cartridge belt and pistol, the metal mule decorating his tunic collar, his six feet two of height, his quick smile, the even white teeth and grayish eyes of this American muleteer, who always had a stick of barley sugar to give them or an amazing trick to perform for them with a handkerchief or coin that vanished under their very noses at the magic snap of his finger.
Old men gossiped willingly with him ”

“ Poor, erring, glorious Burley. Take me to him. Did you say there was no hope?”
“I did not say that,” replied the Doctor. “But art can only assist nature; and, though nature is ever at work to repair the injuries we do to her, yet, when the coats of a stomach are all gone, she gets puzzled, and so do I. You must tell me another time how you came to know Burley, for here we are at the house, and I see him at the window looking out for me.”
The Doctor opened the garden gate to the quiet cottage to which poor Burley had fled from the pure presence of Leonard’s child-angel. ”

“ Nature has made many fine fellows in her time, and she meant Jonathan Burley for one of them. He had a grand physique, good mental abilities, and a spiritual nature of quick and lofty sympathies. But when the passion of fortune-making gets hold of a man, it robs, in greater or less degree, all his faculties. So, though the hymn touched some sentiment far nobler than wool, it was wool that was in all his thoughts as his eyes wandered down the long room. ”

“ Sainte Lesse as yet knew nothing personally of the American mule or of Burley. Sainte Lesse heard both before it beheld either—Burley's loud, careless, swaggering voice above the hee-haw of his trampling herds:
"All I ask for is human food, Smith—not luxuries—just food!—and that of the commonest kind."
And now an immense volume of noise and [pg 161] dust enveloped the main street of Sainte Lesse, stilling the quiet noon gossip of the town, silencing the birds, awing the town dogs so that their impending barking died to amazed gurgles drowned in the din of the mules. ”

“ Burley,—"Unless he can raise three hundred thousand dollars by to-morrow noon, he is a dishonored man. Do you hear me, my dear? Dishonored!"
"Dishonored!" groaned my father burying his head in his hands.
"And more than this," continued Burley, "Your father, among his many mercantile speculations, has dabbled a little,—yes more than a little,—in the African slave-trade. He has relations with certain gentlemen at Havana, which once known to our government, would consign him to the convict's cell." ”

“ Christopher Burley said, thoughtfully. “And here your father, Bertrand Carew, lived from the time he left England until his death?”
“Until a treacherous Indian killed him, sir,” I said. “And the murderer was never discovered. It is too late to go any further, men,” I added, wishing to turn the subject. “We will put up here for the night, and enjoy resting between walls and beside a fireplace.”
We crossed the clearing, and entered the stockade by the open gateway, which was half filled in with drifted snow. We went on, past crumbling outbuildings, to what had been the factor’s residence. ”

“ To the eye of a wearied dweller in a dense city all villages appear beautiful in summer, but Burlington is eminently so when compared with others.
We left the metropolis of the lake for Plattsburgh about noon. On our left, as we emerged from the harbor, were the Four Brothers, small islands swarming with water-fowl, and the bald point of Rock Dunder, a solitary spike rising, shrubless and bare, about twenty feet above the water. Before us spread out the two Heros (North and South) , green islands, which belonged to the Allen family during the Revolution. ”

“ Burly is a man of great presence; he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser mass of character than most men. It has been said of him that his presence could be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been said of other powerful constitutions condemned to much physical inaction. There is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt and agony ”

“ But Burley's aspirations have met more than one jolt to-night. When he made a dead set at Janet—that was another rebuff."
Robert described the riotous scene outside the gypsy tent.
"Then, as I've already told you, Mazie gave him the slip; with the result that I've never seen Burley more completely divested of his first-prize bumptiousness. However, he soon pulled himself together."
"Goodness knows there must have been plenty of Outlaw girls ready to lay balm on the big scamp's wounds." ”

“ Mrs. Burrell drew nearer Helen. “She’s in love,” she whispered.
Helen smiled. “There isn’t any great harm in that.”
“There wouldn’t be,” Mrs. Burrell agreed, “if the young man belonged to her station in life. But he don’t. He ain’t got a cent to his name.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. But isn’t there anything else against him?—besides his being poor, I mean.”
“Oh, I guess he’s good enough,” Mrs. Burrell acknowledged, grudgingly. “I never heard anything against him. His name is Rufus James,” she added, as if this fact in some way explained his condition. “He’s here in Washington now.” ”

“ As a man, and as a writer, Mr. Burroughs has been in the public eye for many years. At the age of twenty-three he had an article printed in the "Atlantic Monthly," and in 1910 that journal celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his contributions to its columns. Early in his career he received marked recognition from able critics, and gratifying responses from readers. It is rare in the history of an author that his books after fifty years of writing have the freshness, lucidity, and charm that Mr. Burroughs's later books have. ”

“ On my first visit he led me to a hilltop and pointed off toward a deep gorge where the Pepacton, although it is a placid stream near Roxbury, rises amid scenery wild and rugged. It drains this high pastoral country, where the farms hang upon the mountainsides or lie across the long, sloping hills. The look of those farms impressed me as the fields of England impressed Mr. Burroughs—"as though upon them had settled an atmosphere of ripe and loving husbandry." I was often reminded in looking upon them of that line of Emerson's: "The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the wide, warm fields." ”

“ Briggs exclaimed, patting Burrell on the back. “No harm done, Mrs. Burrell. This husband of yours overrates me, that’s all. There are hundreds of men right here [Pg 250] in New York who could handle that case better than I could.” He took the old man affectionately by the arm. “Look here, Burrell,” he said, confidentially, “don’t you think we’re in the way of these ladies? They probably have a lot to talk about that they don’t want us to hear.” ”

“ Burroughs is less an alien in cities than is Mr. Muir, yet, on the whole, he is more of a solitaire, more of a recluse. He avoids men where the other seeks them. He cannot deal or dicker with men, but the canny Scot can do this, if need be, and even enjoy it. Circumstances seem to have made Mr. Muir spend most of his years apart from his fellows, although by nature he is decidedly gregarious; circumstances seem to have decreed that Mr. Burroughs spend the greater part of his life among his fellow-men, though there is much of the hermit in his make-up. ”

“ Jonathan was greatly impressed with all he saw. Aske's was evidently the eye of the diligent and kind master. In the gardens, the hot-houses, the park, the most beautiful profusion and the most beautiful order reigned. The great court, surrounded by the stables and barns and granaries, was a place for men to linger delightedly in. Aske was fond of horses, and he knew a great deal about them, but that day Jonathan Burley amazed him. He looked at the cotton-spinner with admiration, and the cotton-spinner keenly enjoyed his little triumph. ”

“ The description of Balfour of Burley in his cave, with his Bible in one hand and his sword in the other, contending with the imaginary enemy of mankind, gasping for breath, and with the cold moisture running down his face, gives a lively idea of Dr. Chalmers's prophetic fury in the pulpit. If we could have looked in to have seen Burley hard-beset "by the coinage of his heat-oppressed brain," who would have asked whether he was a handsome man or not? It would be enough to see a man haunted by a spirit, under the strong and entire dominion of a wilful hallucination. ”

“ At first, this only amuses Miss Wardour; then it annoys her; then, when she finds her walks in the grounds so often overlooked by the slowly passing Burrill, she begins to mark his maneuvers with a growing vexation.
But Burrill perseveres, and the more nearly he approaches the fourth stage of his intoxication, the more open becomes his stare, the more patent his growing admiration.
CHAPTER XVIII. JOHN BURRILL, PLEBEIAN.
It is night, late and lowering; especially gloomy in that quarter of W—— where loom the great ugly rows of tenements that are inhabited by the factory toilers ”

“ Burroughs daily amid these scenes; to realize how they are a part of him, and how inimitably he has transferred them to his books; to roam over the pastures, follow the spring paths, linger by the stone walls he helped to build, sit with him on the big rock in the meadow where as a boy he sat and dreamed; to see him in the everyday life—hoeing in the garden, tiptoeing about the house preparing breakfast while his guests are lazily dozing on the veranda ”

“ Burroughs we feel how preeminently sane and healthy he is. His essays have the perennial charm of the mountain brooks that flow down the hills and through the fertile valleys of his Catskill home. They are redolent of the soil, of leaf mould, of the good brown earth. His art pierces through our habitual indifference to Nature and kindles our interest in, not her beauty alone, but in her rugged, uncouth, and democratic qualities.
Like the true walker that he describes, he himself "is not merely a spectator of the panorama of nature, but is a participator in it. ”

“ It is a warning, messieurs, that we are all to be served the same way.”
“My poor voyageurs!” groaned Christopher Burley. “That they should come to such an end! Oh, this barbarous country!”
He suddenly turned sick and faint, and dropping into a chair, he sat there trembling, his face buried in his hands. Father Cleary was crossing himself and muttering piously.
“A thing like this,” cried Captain Rudstone, “is enough to turn a man into a fiend. By Heaven! Hawke, if you say the word, I’ll lead a party out against the savages!”
100But the factor did not seem to hear him. ”