John Muir. 
 
Houghton Mifflin: 1913. Hardcover. Octavo. First edition. Green boards with gilt lettering and top stain. Chipping on the corners of the boards. A few dark soiling marks on the back board. Bit of sunning and foxing on the other edges. Spine ever so slightly leaning. Pencil markings on the first free end paper. Slight soiling on the last few endpapers and on the tops of the preliminary leaves. Some tearing on the gutter between the last end paper and the text block. Very good. 293 pages. 
 
A straightforward title but Muir's prose ceaselessly surprises. The autobiography moves from the early childhood in Scotland to his undergraduate years at the University of Madison-Wisconsin. Sketched farms he lived in and scenes that struck him are throughout the text, plus very pretty designs of Muir's schoolboy inventions, such as a combined thermometer/ hygrometer/ barometer/ pyrometer. 
 
"None of the bird people of Wisconsin welcomed us more heartily than the common robin. Far from showing alarm at the coming of settlers into their native woods, they reared their young around our gardens as if they liked us, and how heartily we admired the beauty and fine manners of these graceful birds and their loud cheery song of Fear not, fear not, cheer up, cheer up. It was easy to love them for that reminded us of the robin redbreast of Scotland."