“My life has always been more or less detached from the life about me. I have not been a hermit, but my temperament and love of solitude, and a certain constitutional timidity and shrinking from all kinds of strife, have kept me in the by-paths rather than on the great highways of life. My talent, such as it is, is distinctly a by-path talent, or at most, a talent for green lanes and sequestered roadsides; but that which has most interested me in life, nature, can be seen from lanes and by-paths better even than from the turnpike, where the dust and noise and the fast driving obscure the view or distract the attention.”
John Burroughs. “The Summit of the Years.” The Writings of John Burroughs. 15 vols. The Riverby Edition. (Boston and NY: Houghton Mifflin Co., The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1904-1913) Vol. 15, pages 1-2.
Pathology: the Study of a Path 
I like that quote. I’ve never come across that author before! Hope all is well with you and Ann!
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Burroughs was a natural historian, and looked a little like Walt Whitman. Most of his essays are more along the lines of “I was watching this pair of bluebirds doing this thing in a spruce tree beside my cabin all week….” or “I’ve been surveying the abandoned barns in this county and noticed that….”
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