CHAPTER I_The Fall of the Year

[Illustration: “ONE OF THE EAGLES STRUCK ME A STINGING BLOW ON

THE HEAD” _Chapter V_.]

The Dallas Lore Sharp Nature Series

THE FALL OF THE YEAR

DALLAS LORE SHARP

AUTHOR OF “THE LAY OF THE LAND,” “THE FACE OF THE FIELDS,” ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY

ROBERT BRUCE HORSFALL

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

DOCTOR AND MRS. TRASK

OF THE

SOUTH JERSEY INSTITUTE

BEST OF TEACHERS, DEAREST OF FRIENDS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION xi

I. THE CLOCK STRIKES ONE 1

II. ALONG THE HIGHWAY OF THE FOX 9

III. IN THE TOADFISH’S SHOE 21

IV. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO SEE THIS FALL 29

V. WHIPPED BY EAGLES 36

VI. THANKSGIVING AT GRANDFATHER’S FARM 46

VII. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO DO THIS FALL 52

VIII. THE MUSKRATS ARE BUILDING 61

IX. THE NORTH WIND DOTH BLOW 67

X. AN OUTDOOR LESSON 76

XI. LEAFING 80

XII. A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS FALL 88

XIII. HONK, HONK, HONK! 96

NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS 105

ILLUSTRATIONS

“ONE OF THE EAGLES STRUCK ME A STINGING BLOW

ON THE HEAD” _Frontispiece_

THE FALL OF THE YEAR 1

INITIAL, CHAPTER I 1

INITIAL, CHAPTER II 9

“OVER THE HILL IN A WHIRLWIND OF DUST AND HOWLS” 18

INITIAL, CHAPTER III 21

“HERE I FOUND HIM KEEPING HOUSE” 24

INITIAL, CHAPTER IV 29

A SILKY SKEIN OF COBWEB 30

“A WILD CREATURE, THAT WON’T GET OUT OF YOUR WAY” 32

THE PYXIE 32

THE FIELD OF CORN IN THE SHOCK 33

THE WINGED, AND PLUMED, AND BALLOONED SEEDS 34, 35

INITIAL, CHAPTER V 36

INITIAL, CHAPTER VI 46

“THE LANTERN FLICKERS, THE MILK FOAMS, THE STORIES FLOW” 48

INITIAL, CHAPTER VII 52

A COON 54

QUAILS 55

SHAGBARKS 56

WILD SEA FOWL 57

BLACK HAWTHORN BERRIES 58

INITIAL, CHAPTER VIII 61

“TO-NIGHT THERE IS NO LOAFING ABOUT THE LODGE” 62

TAILPIECE 66

INITIAL, CHAPTER IX 67

A WHITEFOOT 68

A CHIPMUNK 70

A WOODCHUCK 72

FIVE DAYS OF LIFE AND PLENTY FOR THE BIRDS 74

INITIAL, CHAPTER X 76

INITIAL, CHAPTER XI 80

“BUT COME, BOYS, GET AFTER THOSE BAGS!” 84

INITIAL, CHAPTER XII 88

A LOON 89

WHEN NIGHT COMES 90

A BLUE JAY 91

A RED SQUIRREL 92

A KINGLET 93

INITIAL, CHAPTER XIII 96

WILD GEESE 102

TAILPIECE 103

NOTE

It is interesting to observe that the subject of the initial for

chapter IV is witch-hazel; that for chapter VII, the cocoons of the

cecropia, the promethea, and the basket worm; and that for chapter

VIII, a sprig of alder, with the old fruit and a budded catkin. The

subjects of the other initials require no identification.

INTRODUCTION

There are three serious charges brought against nature books of the

present time, namely, that they are either so dull as to be

unreadable, or so fanciful as to be misleading, or so insincere as to

be positively harmful. There is a real bottom to each of these

charges.

Dull nature-writing is the circumstantial, the detailed, the

cataloguing, the semi-scientific sort, dried up like old Rameses and

cured for all time with the fine-ground spice of measurements, dates,

conditions--observations, so called. For literary purposes, one

observation of this kind is better than two. Rarely does the watcher

in the woods see anything so new that for itself it is worth

recording. It is not what one sees, so much as the manner of the

seeing, not the observation but its suggestions that count for

interest to the reader. Science wants the exact observation;

nature-writing wants the observation exact and the heart of the

observer along with it. We want plenty of facts in our nature books,

but they have all been set down in order before; what has not been set

down before are the author’s thoughts and emotions. These should be

new, personal, and are pretty sure therefore to be interesting.

More serious than dullness (and that is serious enough) is the charge

that nature books are untrustworthy, that they falsify the facts, and

give a wrong impression of nature. Some nature books do, as some

novels do with the facts of human life. A nature book all full of

extraordinary, better-class animals who do extraordinary stunts

because of their superior powers has little of real nature in it.

There are no such extraordinary animals, they do no such extraordinary

things. Nature is full of marvels--Niagara Falls, a flying swallow, a

star, a ragweed, a pebble; but nature is not full of dragons and

centaurs and foxes that reason like men and take their tea with lemon,

if you please.

I have never seen one of these extraordinary animals, never saw

anything extraordinary out of doors, because the ordinary is so

surprisingly marvelous. And I have lived in the woods practically all

of my life. And you will never see one of them--a very good argument

against anybody’s having seen them.

The world out of doors is not a circus of performing prodigies, nor

are nature-writers strange half-human creatures who know wood-magic,

who talk with trees, and call the birds and beasts about them as did

one of the saints of old. No, they are plain people, who have seen

nothing more wonderful in the woods than you have, if they would tell

the truth.

When I protested with a popular nature-writer some time ago at one of

his exciting but utterly impossible fox stories, he wrote back,--

“The publishers demanded that chapter to make the book sell.”

Now the publishers of this book make no such demands. Indeed they have

had an expert naturalist and woodsman hunting up and down every line

of this book for errors of fact, false suggestions, wrong sentiments,

and extraordinaries of every sort. If this book is not exciting it is

the publishers’ fault. It may not be exciting, but I believe, and

hope, that it is _true_ to all of my out of doors, and not untrue to

any of yours.

The charge of insincerity, the last in the list, concerns the author’s

style and sentiments. It does not belong in the same category with the

other two, for it really includes them. Insincerity is the mother of

all the literary sins. If the writer cannot be true to himself, he

cannot be true to anything. Children are the particular victims of the

evil. How often are children spoken to in baby-talk, gush, hollow

questions, and a condescension as irritating as coming teeth! They are

written to, also, in the same spirit.

The temptation to sentimentalize in writing of the “beauties of

nature” is very strong. Raptures run through nature books as regularly

as barbs the length of wire fences. The world according to such books

is like the Garden of Eden according to Ridinger, all peace, in spite

of the monstrous open-jawed alligator in the foreground of the

picture, who must be smiling, I take it, in an alligatorish way at a

fat swan near by.

Just as strong to the story-writer is the temptation to blacken the

shadows of the picture--to make all life a tragedy. Here on my table

lies a child’s nature-book every chapter of which ends in

death--nothing but struggle to escape for a brief time the bloody jaws

of the bigger beast--or of the superior beast, man.

Neither extreme is true of nature. Struggle and death go on, but,

except where man interferes, a very even balance is maintained, peace

prevails over fear, joy lasts longer than pain, and life continues to

multiply and replenish the earth. “The level of wild life,” to quote

my words from “The Face of the Fields,” “of the soul of all nature is

a great serenity. It is seldom lowered, but often raised to a higher

level, intenser, faster, more exultant.”

This is a divinely beautiful world, a marvelously interesting world,

the best conceivable sort of a world to live in, notwithstanding its

gypsy moths, tornadoes, and germs, its laws of gravity, and of cause

and effect; and my purpose in this series of nature books is to help

my readers to come by this belief. A clear understanding of the laws

of the Universe will be necessary for such a belief in the end, and

with the understanding a profound faith in their perfect working

together. But for the present, in these books of the Seasons, if I can

describe the out of doors, its living creatures and their doings, its

winds and skies with their suggestions--all of the out of doors, as it

surrounds and supports me here in my home on Mullein Hill, Hingham, so

that you can see how your out of doors surrounds and supports you,

with all its manifold life and beauty, then I have done enough. If

only I can accomplish a fraction of this I have done enough.

DALLAS LORE SHARP.

MULLEIN HILL, September, 1911.

THE FALL OF THE YEAR

CHAPTER I

THE CLOCK STRIKES ONE

“The clock strikes one,

And all is still around the house!

But in the gloom

A little mouse

Goes creepy-creep from room to room.”

The clock of the year strikes one!--not in the dark silent night of

winter, but in the hot light of midsummer.

It is a burning July day,--one o’clock in the afternoon of the

year,--and all is still around the fields and woods. All is still. All

is hushed. But yet, as I listen, I hear things in the dried grass, and

in the leaves overhead, going “creepy-creep,” as you have heard the

little mouse in the silent night.

I am lying on a bed of grass in the shade of a great oak tree, as the

clock of the year strikes one. I am all alone in the quiet of the hot,

hushed day. Alone? Are you alone in the big upstairs at midnight, when

you hear the little mouse going “creepy-creep” from room to room? No;

and I am not alone.

High overhead the clouds are drifting past; and between them, far

away, is the blue of the sky--and how blue, how cool, how far, far

away! But how near and warm seems the earth!

I lie outstretched upon it, feeling the burnt crisp grass beneath me,

a beetle creeping under my shoulder, the heat of a big stone against

my side. I throw out my hands, push my fingers into the hot soil, and

try to take hold of the big earth as if I were a child clinging to my

mother.

And so I am. But I am not frightened, as I used to be, when the little

mouse went “creepy-creep,” and my real mother brought a candle to

scare the mouse away. It is because I am growing old? But I cannot

grow old to my mother. And the earth is my mother, my second mother.

The beetle moving under my shoulder is one of my brothers; the hot

stone by my side is another of my brothers; the big oak tree over me

is another of my brothers; and so are the clouds, the white clouds

drifting, drifting, drifting, so far away yonder, through the blue,

blue sky.

The clock of the year strikes one. The summer sun is overhead. The

flood-tide of summer life has come. It is the noon hour of the year.

The drowsy silence of the full, hot noon lies deep across the field.

Stream and cattle and pasture-slope are quiet in repose. The eyes of

the earth are heavy. The air is asleep. Yet the round shadow of my oak

begins to shift. The cattle do not move; the pasture still sleeps

under the wide, white glare.

But already the noon is passing--to-day I see the signs of coming

autumn everywhere.

Of the four seasons of the year summer is the shortest, and the one we

are least acquainted with. Summer is hardly a pause between spring and

autumn, simply the hour of the year’s noon.

We can be glad with the spring, sad with the autumn, eager with the

winter; but it is hard for us to go softly, to pause and to be still

with the summer; to rest on our wings a little like the broad-winged

hawk yonder, far up in the wide sky.

But now the hawk is not still. The shadow of my oak begins to

lengthen. The hour is gone; and, wavering softly down the languid air,

falls a yellow leaf from a slender birch near by. I remember, too,

that on my way through the woodlot I frightened a small flock of

robins from a pine; and more than a week ago the swallows were

gathering upon the telegraph wires. So quickly summer passes. It was

springtime but yesterday, it seems; to-day the autumn is here.

It is a July day. At dawn the birds were singing, fresh and

full-throated almost as in spring. Then the sun burned through the

mist, and the chorus ceased. Now I do not hear even the chewink and

the talkative vireo. Only the fiery notes of the scarlet tanager come

to me through the dry white heat of the noon, and the resonant song of

the indigo bunting--a hot, metallic, quivering song, as out of a “hot

and copper sky.”

There are nestlings still in the woods. This indigo bunting has eggs

or young in the bushes of the hillside; the scarlet tanager by some

accident has but lately finished his nest in the tall oaks. I looked

in upon some half-fledged cuckoos along the fence. But all of these

are late. Most of the year’s young are upon the wing.

A few of the spring’s flowers are still opening. I noticed the bees

upon some tardy raspberry blossoms; here and there is a stray

dandelion. But these are late. The season’s fruit has already set, is

already ripening. Spring is gone; the sun is overhead; the red

wood-lily is open. To-day is the noon of the year.

High noon! and the red wood-lily is aflame in the old fields, and in

the low tangles of sweet-fern and blackberry that border the upland

woods.

The wood-lily is the flower of fire. How impossible it would be to

kindle a wood-lily on the cold, damp soil of April! It can be lighted

only on this kiln-dried soil of July. This old hilly pasture is baking

in the sun; the low mouldy moss that creeps over its thin breast

crackles and crumbles under my feet; the patches of sweet-fern that

blotch it here and there crisp in the heat and fill the smothered air

with their spicy breath; while the wood-lily opens wide and full,

lifting its spotted lips to the sun for his scorching kiss. See it

glow! Should the withered thicket burst suddenly into a blaze, it

would be no wonder, so hot and fiery seem the petals of this flower of

the sun.

How unlike the tender, delicate fragrant flowers of spring are these

strong flowers of the coming fall! They make a high bank along the

stream--milkweed, boneset, peppermint, turtle-head, joe-pye-weed,

jewel-weed, smartweed, and budding goldenrod! Life has grown lusty and

lazy and rank.

But life has to grow lusty and rank, for the winter is coming; and as

the woodchucks are eating and eating, enough to last them until spring

comes again, so the plants are storing fat in their tap-roots, and

ripening millions of seeds, to carry them safely through the long dead

months of winter.

The autumn is the great planting time out of doors. Every autumn wind

is a sower going forth to sow. And he must have seeds and to

spare--seeds for the waysides for the winter birds to eat, seeds for

the stony places where there is no depth of soil for them, seeds for

the ploughed fields where they are not allowed to grow, seeds for

every nook and corner, in order that somewhere each plant may find a

place to live, and so continue its kind from year to year.

Look at the seeds of the boneset, joe-pye-weed, milkweed, and

goldenrod! Seeds with wings and plumes and parachutes that go

floating and flying and ballooning.

“Over the fields where the daisies grow,

Over the flushing clover,

A host of the tiniest fairies go--

Dancing, balancing to and fro,

Rolling and tumbling over.

“Quivering, balancing, drifting by,

Floating in sun and shadow--

Maybe the souls of the flowers that die

Wander, like this, to the summer sky

Over a happy meadow.”

So they do. They wander away to the sky, but they come down again to

the meadow to make it happy next summer with new flowers; for these

are the seed-souls of thistles and daisies and fall dandelions seeking

new bodies for themselves in the warm soil of Mother Earth.

Mother Earth! How tender and warm and abundant she is! As I lie here

under the oak, a child in her arms, I see the thistle-down go floating

by, and on the same laggard breeze comes up from the maple swamp the

odor of the sweet pepper-bush. A little flock of chickadees stop in

the white birches and quiz me. “Who are you?” “Who are you-you-you?”

they ask, dropping down closer and closer to get a peek into my face.

Perhaps they don’t know who I am. Perhaps I don’t know who they are.

They are not fish hawks, of course; but neither am I an alligator or a

pumpkin, as the chickadees surely know. This much I am quite sure of,

however: that this little flock is a family--a family of young

chickadees and their two parents, it may be, who are out seeing the

world together, and who will stay together far into the cold coming

winter.

They are one of the first signs of the autumn to me, and one of my

surest, sweetest comforts as the bleak cold winds come down from the

north. For the winds will not drive my chickadees away, no matter how

cold and how hard they blow, no matter how dark and how dead the

winter woods when, in the night of the year, the clock strikes twelve.

The clock to-day strikes one, and all is still with drowsy sleep out

of doors. The big yellow butterflies, like falling leaves, are

flitting through the woods; the thistledown is floating, floating

past; and in the sleepy air I see the shimmering of the spiders’ silky

balloons, as the tiny aeronauts sail over on their strange voyages

through the sky.

How easy to climb into one of their baskets, and in the fairy craft

drift far, far away! How pleasant, too, if only the noon of the year

would last and last; if only the warm sun would shine and shine; if

only the soft sleepy winds would sleep and sleep; if only we had

nothing to do but drift and drift and drift!

But we have a great deal to do, and we can’t get any of it done by

drifting. Nor can we get it done by lying, as I am lying, outstretched

upon the warm earth this July day. Already the sun has passed

overhead; already the cattle are up and grazing; already the round

shadow of the oak tree begins to lie long across the slope. The noon

hour is spent. I hear the quivering click-clack of a mowing-machine in

a distant hay field. The work of the day goes on. My hour of rest is

almost over, my summer vacation is nearly done. Work begins again

to-morrow.

But I am ready for it. I have rested outstretched upon the warm earth.

I have breathed the sweet air of the woods. I have felt the warm

life-giving sun upon my face. I have been a child of the earth. I have

been a brother to the stone and the bird and the beetle. And now I am

strong to do my work, no matter what it is.