BEARD, 82, RECALLS HIS ARTIST DAYS
'Uncle Dan' in City for a Boy Scout Meeting, Tells of His Work With Mark Twain.
JUST BACK FROM KENTUCKY
Says He Keeps Pretty Busy Revising Book on Bugs and Looking After the Wild Life
at Suffern Home.
Daniel Carter Beard, National Commissioner of the Boy Scouts of America and father of the Scouting movement in America, celebrated his eighty-second birthday yesterday while congratulations and friendly messages poured in upon him from all over the United States.
"Uncle Dan," as he is known to thousands of youngsters in all parts of the world, spent the earlier part of the day as he spends nearly all the others - attending to the quiet routine at his home, Brooklands, at the foot of the Ramapos, near Lake Antrim, in Suffern, N.Y. In the afternoon he motored to New York to be present at a meeting of the executive committee at the Boy Scout headquarters at 2 Park Avenue.
"I don't have much time to think of birthdays any more," he said as he stepped into the office. "They come too rapidly. They roll around so fast that some one usually has to tell me about them. Today they say I'm 82. Well," he mused, as his eyes twinkled, "I guess that's right."
Busy Looking After Animals.
Much of his time recently, Mr. Beard said, had been spent revising his book, "Bugs, Butterflies and Beetles," and the new edition is to appear in a short time. But he has not neglected his love of the outdoors, wild fowl, fish and animals "On my place at Suffern there are beaver, deer, raccoons, 'possum, rabbits, woodchucks and all kinds of birds and animals. They keep me pretty busy looking after them."
Mr. Beard referred to his work as an illustrator, for which he won acclaim forty years and more ago. For his long life has given him the friendship not only of such frontiersmen as "Wild Bill" Hickok, "Buffalo Bill and "Billy the Kid," but of such equally colorful figures as Mark Twain and James Gordon Bennett.
"I met Mark Twain in 1889," Mr. Beard said. "The first thing I knew I was doing the illustrations for 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.' I did them all in seven working days. That was quite a job. If you look them up I think you will find there were more than 200 of them."
A short time afterward Dan Beard's work began to appear regularly in such periodicals as Harper's Weekly, Harper's Bazar, St. Nicholas and others.
Liked to Work With Twain.
"Mark Twain was the nicest man I ever worked with. You couldn't imagine a more congenial fellow. He never made any suggestions about the drawings - just left the whole thing up to me. I read the books and did the drawings as I envisioned them. Mr. Clemens always worked on that principle. He used to say, 'If a man comes to me and asks me to do a story or an article, I generally get about it without delay. But if he comes to me and tells me what to write---!' "
Here Mr. Beard threw both arms into the air as a gesture of futility and chuckled loudly.
"Uncle Dan" has just returned from Frankfort, Ky., where he went to attend the annual State-wide Boy Scout camparall, held there last week.
After the meeting yesterday he returned to his home in Suffern, erect and alert and seemingly untired by a vigorous day in the city. "But I always go back home," he said on departing. "I like the country
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