MOSSES, ODORS AND FLOWERS.—A DINNER-PARTY.
FRIDAY, _July 8, 1859_. A bright, cool morning. After breakfast at the
parsonage, we went rambling again up and down the moss-covered fields of
Battle Island, smelling the fine perfume, gathering flowers, and
counting the icebergs. There are more than forty in the neighborhood,
and some of them grand and imposing at a distance. Have you thought, as
I did, that there are no flowers, or next to none, in Labrador? You
might as well have thought that all, or nearly all the flowers were in
Florida. Along the brook-banks under the Catskills—to me about the
loveliest banks on earth, in the late spring and early summer days—I
have never seen such fairy loveliness as I find here upon this bleak
islet, where nature seems to have been playing at Switzerland. Green and
yellow mosses, ankle-deep and spotted with blood-red stains, carpet the
crags and little vales and cradle-like hollows. Wonderful to behold!
flowers pink and white, yellow, red and blue, are countless as
dew-drops, and breathe out upon the pure air that odor, so spirit-like.
Such surely was the perfume of Eden around the footsteps of the Lord,
walking among the trees of the garden in the cool of the day. What
grounds these, for such souls as write, “The moss supplicateth for the
poet,” and the closing lines of the “Ode, Intimations of Immortality
from recollections of early Childhood.” The Painter, passionately in
love with the flowers of the tropics, lay down and rolled upon these
soft, sweet beds of beauty with delight. Little gorges and chasms,
overhung with miniature precipices, wind gracefully from the summits
down to meet the waves, and are filled, where the sun can warm them,
with all bloom and sweetness, a kind of wild greenhouse. We run up them,
and we run down them, fall upon the cushioned stones, tumble upon their
banks of softness as children tumble upon deep feather-beds, and dive
into the yielding cradles embroidered with silken blossoms. Willows with
a silvery down upon the leaves, willow-trees no larger than fresh
lettuce, and the mountain laurel of the size of knitting-needles, with
pink flowers to correspond, cluster here and there in patches of a
breadth to suit a sleeping child.
After our ramble, we returned on board, arranged the cabin, now become
quite roomy from the departure of our friends, and prepared for dinner,
to which a small company is invited. Our cook, a young Sandy, excelling
in good nature, but failing in all the essentials of his art, was
suspended, for the time, from the exercise of all duties about the
caboose, except those of the mere lackey, and two more important
personages self-inducted into his place. Some pounds of fresh salmon
bagged in linen, a measure of peeled potatoes, a pudding of rice well
shotted with raisins, one after another, found their way to the oven and
the boilers; from which, in due time and order, they emerged in a
satisfactory condition, and, with appropriate sauce and gravy, descended
in savory procession to the cabin, to which they were unexpectedly
welcomed by a whole dress circle of fashionable dishes seated in the
surrounding berths, jelly-cake, sponge-cake, raspberry-jam, nuts, figs,
almonds and raisins, and a corpulent pitcher, sweating in his naked
white, filled with iceberg water. It is not necessary to dwell upon the
fact, that the cooks subsided into the more quiet character of hosts,
and made themselves, and endeavored to make their guests, merry at their
own expense. Whether the Queen of England, or the President of the
United States will be pleased, it never occurred to us at the time,
when, without thinking of either, we drank to their health in the
transparent vintage of Greenland.