trail, nor was my scent keener, though all about were signs. The maple
twigs were decorated with rosettes of red and yellow in honor of her
coming. Birch twigs reddened with them, and the woodland that had been
gray was fairly blushing with tell-tale color. Over on an open, sandy
hillside the cinquefoil buds were beginning to curl upward, and in the
heart of violet leaves faint hints of blue made you think of sleepy
children just opening a little of one eye at promise of morning.
Here, too, I was conscious of a faint, ethereally fine perfume that
seemed to float suddenly to my senses as if it had come over the
treetops from the south. From up stream came the babble of the brook
like dainty laughter. If I had heard the swish of silken garments
floating away in the direction from which these came I had not been
surprised. Eagerly I turned and followed where they led me.
Soon I heard Bose again, a half-mile behind; he, too, had caught the
trail. Baying eagerly, he galloped by a few minutes later, interjecting
into his uproar by some strange method of dog elocution a whine of
recognition and an invitation to follow.
So he went on down the pasture. No leaf bud had opened, though many were
agape, ready to burst with the pulse of new life that throbbed through
the twigs and heightened their colors. The swamp blueberry bushes and
the wild smilax were the greener for it, just as the maples and birches
were the redder. With your ear to the bark you might hear the thrumming
of the sap in the cambium layers, practicing a second to the drone of
bees to come a little later. And still the fairy fine scent lured me,
and I could hear Bose’s voice, eager to incoherence, just ahead. If you
did not know about his visions you would surely think he had a fox in
his jaw and was shaking him.
Down a sunny slope, robed in the diaphanous gray-green of bursting
birch-buds, the fairy odor led me to a little bower on the bank, where
for a moment I saw the nymph herself stand, rosy pink, slender and
sweet, gowned in the birch-bud color all shimmered with the yellow of
alder pollen drawn in filmy gauze about her. Strange goblins in silvery
brown danced in grotesque gambols at her feet, while behind the bank I
heard the splashing of Bose in shallow water, frenzied howls of
excitement and ecstasy followed each time by another of the clumsy
goblins somersaulting up from below to join the dance. Fairy-land and
goblin town had indeed come together in celebration of the arrival of
the spring!
On the threshold of this realm I trod a moment bewildered, and then,
stumbling, broke the spell with a hasty exclamation. The enchantment
vanished like a dream. Standing by the brookside I saw only the homely
world again. Yet it was a strange enough sight. Up at the dam the gate
had suddenly been closed, and a dozen three-pound fish, on their way up
to spawn, had been marooned in the shallow water. These Bose was
shaking up in wild delight and tossing up on the bank, where they danced
in clumsy, fish-out-of-water dismay. These were the dancing goblins; nor
had I been very far wrong about Daphne. There she stood still, slender
and dainty, only, just as when pursued by Apollo of old, she had turned
into a shrub. There she stood, the Daphne mezereum of the elder
botanists, the clustering blooms of pink sending forth their faint,
sweet odor that had come so far down the pasture to Bose and me and sent
us hunting visions.
To be sure, it was the first of April! But the joke was not all on us,
for Bose had for once found real game, albeit such as foxhound never
hunted before, and I had found the spring. Two bluebirds, house-hunting
among the willows, caroled in confirmation of it, and Apollo himself,
shining through the gray mist of birch twigs, kissed Daphne rapturously.
She was so sweet that I did not blame him. As for Bose, he actually came
up and licked the blushing twigs, then in sudden confusion at being
caught in such sentimental actions, tore off on the make-believe trail
of more visions, leaving me to rescue his gamboling goblins and put them
back into their native water.
EXPLORATIONS
To-day I remind myself forcibly of Samuel Pickwick, Esq., G. C., M. P.
C., whose paper entitled “Speculations on the Sources of the Hampstead
Ponds” was received with such enthusiasm on the part of the Pickwick
Club, for I have made new discoveries of the sources of Ponkapog Pond.
These are quite as astounding to me as were the Hampstead revelations to
the Pickwick Club, and just as those sent Mr. Pickwick and his friends
forth on new voyages, so these led me to a hitherto undiscovered
country.
In spite of our increasing population and our progressive business
activity, there are portions of eastern Massachusetts towns that are
forgotten. Often these are large tracts where the foot of man rarely
treads and the creatures of the wilderness roam and prey, breed and die
undisturbed by civilization. They may hear the hoot of the factory
whistle morning, noon, and evening, or the faint echoes of the distant
roar of trains, but they give no heed.
Their world is the wilderness and their problem that of living with
their forest neighbors. Man hardly enters into their arrangements. Now
and then one of these tracts has a past that is related to humanity,
though the casual passer would never suspect it. The wilderness sweeps
over the trail of man gleefully and his monuments must be built high and
strong or they will be swept away with a rapidity that is startling.
It is only by perpetual efforts that we hold on to our landmarks. The
rain will come in between the shingles and, beginning with the roof,
sweep your house into the cellar just a mass of brown mold before you
know it. Then the frost and sun tumble the cellar wall in upon it, and
where once your proud dwelling stood is a grass-grown hollow. To-day’s
generation trips on the capstone of what was the tower of its ancestors
and thinks it merely a projection of the earth’s rib, which it is and to
which it has returned.
I fancy every old Massachusetts town has these woodland places that were
once the hopeful clearings of early settlers. Now and then, roaming the
deep wood where only the creatures of the primal forest seem to have
freehold tenure, I find an alien has strayed from the elder years, a
hermit of the wood and of our own time. I know a purple lilac that
dwells thus serenely, miles from present-day habitations, in a scrub
forest that was fifty years ago a stretch of cathedral pines. Only long
search showed me the faint hollow in the brown earth which was once the
narrow cellar of a wee house. No record of an early householder here
remains other than that planted by the hopeful housewife’s hand,--the
lilac shrub.
For more than a century it has held the ground where its fellow-pioneers
planted it, holding close within its pinky heart-wood memories of
English lanes white with hawthorne and, far beyond these, indistinct
recollections of rose-perfumed Persian gardens, the home of its race.
Perhaps upon its ancestral root rested the feet of Omar Khayyam when he
wrote:
And when like her, O Saki, you shall pass
Among the guests star-scattered on the grass,
And in your blissful errand reach the spot
Where I made one--turn down an empty glass.
Perhaps within the fragrance of a blossom that sprang from the same
stock old Cromwell and his Ironsides paused some May morning and
breathed deep and sang a surly hymn. We propagate the lilac from the
root, not the seed, and the same sap has flowed through the veins of the
present strain for a thousand years. A whiff of lilac perfume in a
woodland tangle next month, and out of the wilderness we step, from one
ancient garden to another, back by centuries into the pleasant places of
a world long gone.
To many a New England child the smell of lilacs brings homesickness, and
he does not know why. It is because it is the May odor of the vanished
home garden, not only of Myles and Priscilla of Plymouth, but of a
thousand generations of his own stock before them.
The woodland of to-day’s discoveries is not such. I do not believe
pioneer ever stoned a cellar in its depths, and if the Indian set his
teepee here it was only in passing. Now and then the harrying hand of
man has cut off its greater growth and let the sunlight in on its roots,
that the adventitious buds may have a chance, and newer and stronger
trunks tower upward eventually, but the shadows that dapple its
brown-leaf mold carry no dreams of human domination.
The vexation of axe and gun, and even the searing scar of flame, are
only minor incidents in the great work of the wood, whose ultimate
purpose no man knows. We see the rocks disintegrated and the hollows
filled with richer soil, that the forest may grow taller and more surely
shelter the gentler things of earth. We find it holding back the waters
in its cunningly contrived bogs, and hiding medicinal plants in its
hollows, waiting always with benediction in its leaves for the
comforting of weary men; but we feel when we know the woods best that
these, too, are but its casual benefits; its great purpose lies deeper,
and the more we seek it the better we know we are.
Great men come out of the forests of the earth. If they are not born
there they seek the place before coming to their greatness. Lincoln hews
rails, Washington surveys and scouts, and Roosevelt ranches in the
Western wilderness. Perhaps it is for these and their kin that the woods
exist. It is always Peter the Hermit that leads the crusade, and without
crusades the world were a poor place. It seems as if all our prophets
must wrestle at least forty days in the wilderness before coming forth
with brows white with the mark of immortality.
It lies at the southeast corner of the pond, beginning at the little
bogs, from which it springs abruptly. Along the water’s edge of these
bogs picknickers row their boats all summer long, and catch fish and eat
sandwiches. Inland, a foot or two, the duck hunter in the autumn treads
precariously along the quaking surface with his eyes on the margin, or
perhaps on the ducks that swim in the open pond, but rarely does any one
penetrate the bog-carpeted swamp of great cedars just back of this
quaking margin.
And this is strange. The passion for exploration is born in all hearts.
We are prompted to go to Tibet, or seek the sources of the Nile, or
penetrate the jungles that lie between the Amazon and the Orinoco. I
have felt this impulse strongly myself, and longing for distant lands
have passed unnoticed this opportunity right at hand for penetrating an
untrodden wilderness. With most of us the undiscovered country lies just
a step off the beaten track. So across the rolling bog and into the
twilight greenness beneath the cedars I sailed to-day, venturing as
Columbus did over a known sea to an unknown, and thence to a new
world,--one where straight, limbless cedar trunks stand close like
temple columns under a gray-green roof of twigs and leaves.
All the upper tones are gray and green, for this is the world of the
mosses and lichens. The ground is built of them, and the temple columns
are so covered with their arabesques and bas-reliefs, so daintily
frescoed and carved, that it seems as if here were a museum of all
designs for the beautifying of interiors that ever occurred. And as all
the tree trunks are gray and green till the texture and color of bark
is hardly to be discerned, so the carpeting of the floor of this temple
and the upholstering of its furniture is brown and green. The thin rays
of the sun that filter through here and there are greenish gold, till
the whole gives an under-water atmosphere to the place, and you walk
about as a diver might on the sea-bottom, with things new and strange
floating at every hand.
Mosses in the ordinary woodland we are apt to pass with unseeing eye.
They decorate rocks and trees, dead stumps and earth with such
unobtrusive good taste that we come back feeling the beauty of the
woodland, and not at all knowing what made it. Some fence corner or
group of trees or shrubs or a stump has touched us with its beauty, and
so well dressed it is in its moss clothes that we have not seen them at
all, but have come away only with the recollection of how well the rock
or the stump looked, and we cannot say whether it wore a plaid or a
check or just plain goods.
In this swamp, however, it is as if the whole woodland wardrobe were
hung up for inspection, an Easter opening of all kinds of wood wear.
Here the _Usnea barbata_ trails its old man’s beard from the cedar limbs
well up in the arches above the pillars, its drooping softness having
the effect of delicate tapestry. Clinging lichens, those delicate unions
of algal cells and fond fungi, paint the northerly sides of the tree
trunks all the way down, while the freer-growing fringe or fleck the
southern exposures. _Parmelias_ to north, _cetrarias_ and _stictas_ to
the south might well guide the wanderer, giving him the points of the
compass and leading him thus to his path again.
Under foot the _sphagnums_ build the bog and hold chief sway, but other
common varieties dispute the footing with them. Here is the _acutifolia_
with its pointed leaves giving the tufts the appearance of a bunch of
pointed petaled chrysanthemums, the greens and purples softly shading
into one another and showing a fine contrast with the drier, yellower
portions of the plant. Here, too, is the edelweiss-like _squarrosum_ in
its loosely-crowded clusters of bluish green, and the robust
_cymbifolium_.
All these grow from their own débris in the wettest portions of the
footing. Wherever there is, in this many-colored and lovely carpet, a
dead cedar trunk the dainty cedar moss, creeping everywhere, has
occupied the space with its delicate fern-like leaves, making of all
ugly rotten wood the loveliest furnishing imaginable for these solemn,
twilight spaces. Cushion mosses pad with their bluish-green velvet
hassocks here and there, and, sitting on one of them that I might put
all my wit into seeing, I noted for the first time, though growing all
about me, in fact, a moss that I had never seen before,--the _mnium_.
Its delicate, translucent green leaves are little like those of a moss
at first sight. One thinks it rather some rare and delicate flowering
plant of the wet bog, now but thrusting up its delicate leaves, to bloom
later. I dare say the _mnium punctatum_ is a common bog moss. Very
likely I have trampled it ruthlessly under foot before this in following
some more showy denizen of the deep woods; but to find it thus,
exploring a new swamp for the first time, it gave me as great pleasure
as I might have had in finding a new orchid hiding about the sources of
the Orinoco.
It was the _sphagnums_ that led me to the brookside and caused me to
recall that lusty scientist, Mr. Pickwick, and his discovery of the
sources of the Hampstead ponds. And while I stood and wondered I saw a
second brook, only a little further on, also flowing downward into the
_sphagnum_ and losing itself in the bog, to pass beneath the cedar roots
and moss débris and enter the pond.
Some ancient traveler, perhaps Marco Polo, passing from Babylon to
Bagdad, coming first upon the Euphrates and then the Tigris, may have
felt some of the amazement and delight which I had in this discovery.
Never before had I known of a brook entering the pond. It had always
been a sheet of water self-contained and sufficient in itself, fed, I
thought, by springs beneath its own surface. I had paddled by and
tramped over the mouths of these two brooks a hundred times and never
knew before why the pond always smiled and dimpled as I went by. No
wonder it laughs; it has kept that same joke on ninety-nine of a hundred
of the people who frequent it, and I am not sure there is another
hundredth.
It seemed as if all the woodland burst into guffaws of laughter, now
that the joke was out and there was no further need of keeping quiet
about it. The cedars rocked in the west wind with suppressed merriment
and a couple of red squirrels snickered like school children and tore up
and down the lichen-covered trunks and fell off into a swamp birch and
had hardly strength to hold on, so breathless were they. A pair of
crows, looking up nesting material, haw-hawed right out over my head
till they had to stop flapping and sail, they were so weak from it, and
a whole flock of chickadees tittered all along behind my back for a
quarter of a mile as I went on up the swamp on the left bank of the
Euphrates.
It was amusing, and after a little I could see the joke and laugh
myself. The Tigris was on my right, and by-and-by the two began to
prattle down over a hard bottom from higher ground. Only for a little
way, though, for here we came to another wide swamp which the two
traversed under low sprouts of swamp maple and birch, the ground having
been cut over within a few years.
And right here I ran into a full chorus, a raucous cacophony, an Homeric
din that sounded as if all the rough-voiced goblins between Blue Hill
and the Berkshires were assembled in convention up stream and had just
heard the story, particularly well told. I knew them. They were the wood
frogs, holding their annual convention, indeed, in the water all along
the marshy margin of the swamp. Once a year they come down, as people go
to the seashore, disporting themselves in the waves and making very
merry about it. They were not laughing at me. They were simply shouting
their happiness at being thawed out and finding it springtime once more.
Their voices, pitched about an octave below middle C, and all on one
note, sound not unlike a great flock of ducks gabbling wildly, but they
are really more nearly musical than that. After the convention is over
they go back to the woods, where you will find them sitting among the
leaves, though you will never see them till they see you. And when you
do see them they are in the air. They have surprisingly long legs and
can jump tremendously, turning in the air as they go, so that, having
landed, their next leap will take them in a new direction. The earth
seems to swallow them as they touch it, for their coloration is that of
the brown leaves, and they leap from one invisibility to the next.
Beyond the frog chorus I found my stream again, dancing daintily along
hemlock shaded shallows and rippling over slate ledges in the latticed
shade of oak and maple twigs, and here another voice called me, a
staccato whistle with a suspicion of a trill in it now and then, the
voice of the very spirit of the spring woodland,--the _hyla_. I have
called it a whistle, yet it is hardly that; it is rather the soft rich
tone of a pipe, such as Pan might have imitated when he first blew into
the hollow reed on the brook margin.
He is a shy fellow, this inch-long brown frog that swells his throat
till it is like a balloon and pipes forth this mellow note, and he is
even more invisible than the wood-frog. You may seek him diligently for
years and not find him, for his voice is that of a ventriloquist and he
seems to send it hither and thither. It is as if this were a trick of
some frisky Ariel of the wood that danced about and whistled, now before
and now behind you. When the trill comes in it you may well think the
tricksy spirit is laughing at you so that his voice shakes. It would be
no surprise if some trilling note ended in a giggle and Ariel himself
should float by you on the mocking air.
The great chorus of spring peepers is to come later; now, but an
occasional one has waked from his frosty nest beneath the woodland
leaves and come down to the water margin to sing. Nor do I know whether
it was the ventriloquial call of one that sounded now ahead and now
behind, now above and now below, or whether relays of jovial invisible
sprites passed me on from pool to pool. What I do know is that, a mile
or more beyond its outlet under the ooze of the little bog, I found the
source of my Euphrates in springs that boil clear through the sand and
send forth the cool, pure water for the delectation of all who will come
to drink.
Here upon the margin I heard another chorus that repaid me for all the
rough laughter of the wood-goblin frogs,--the plaintive melodies of a
little flock of vesper sparrows, newly arrived and very happy about it.
These come later than the song sparrows, and bring a quality of
wistfulness in their song which in this differs from the bluff
heartiness of the earlier bird. It is as if their joy in the strong sun
and the awakening of creation was tempered and softened to a touch of
tears at some gentle remembrance. The vesper sparrows recall the
vanished happiness of past summers in their greeting to that which
comes.
After that my way led me home through the purpling woodland toward the
golden greeting of the sunset. I had tasted to the full the joy of
exploration and discovery. I doubt if Humboldt felt any better coming
back from his exploration of the sources of the Caspian. My Euphrates I
know; my Tigris I have reserved for future, perhaps even greater joy of
tracing to its source in the mystic depths of, to me, untrodden
woodland.
EARLIEST BUTTERFLIES
Just as in midsummer the people of the little pasture and woodland
hollows must envy those of the hilltop their cool, breezy outlook, so in
mid-April the thought must be reversed. For still the warfare between
the north wind and the sun which began in February skirmishes and
reached its Gettysburg in late March, goes fitfully on, with Appomattox
hardly in sight.
The South is to win in this fratricidal struggle though, and in the
summer millennium of peace and prosperity the two forces will join hands
and work for the good of the whole land. Already the warriors of the
North are driven to the hilltops, where they still shout defiance, and
whence they rush in determined raids on the valleys below. It is a
losing fight, for all day long the golden forces of the sun roll up the
land and fill all the hollows and hold them in serene warmth and peace.
However hard last night’s frost, however stiff the gale overhead, I can
always find bowl-shaped depressions where summer already coaxes the
winter-worn woodland.
The very first squatters in this land, whose presence antedates those
people of record who held land by deeds and grants, seem to have found
and loved these little sun-warmed hollows too, for in them I find the
only traces of this pioneer occupation. Records in ink or on parchment
of these pioneers are few, indeed, and these which they left on the land
itself are but slight. Here a depression may show where a tiny cellar
was dug, though no trace of stone work will be found. It was easier for
the pioneer to frame his cellar wall of logs, just as he built those of
the house above it.
You may find by careful search the worn path to the spring nearby, for
that which is written on the earth itself remains visible long after
inscriptions on stone are gone. The wind and the sun, the frost and the
rain, will erase the carving from your marble tablet. But the path
across a plain, once worn deep and firm by many passing feet, will
always show its tracing to the discerning eye. Perhaps a huge old
apple-tree stump may have lasted till now, even showing faint signs of
life, and round about what was the immediate dooryard the trees of the
wood may cluster; but they will hold back and leave some open space, as
if they still respected invisible bounds set by the long departed human
occupant.
There seem to be many such sleepy hollows in my town, spots where
dreams dwell and the once trodden earth clings tenaciously to the
prints of long-vanished feet. Over their tops to-day the north wind
sings his war song, but his failing arrows fall to earth harmless, for
golden troops of sunshine roll over the southern rim and fill the space
below with quivering delight.
Just to walk about in this sunshine is a pleasure, and to sit in the
pioneer’s hollow land and let it flood your marrow is to be thrilled
with a primal joy that is the first the race has to remember. It
antedates the first man by unknown millions of years. The same sun
touched with the same joy the first primordial cell. With the thrill the
one quivered into two and thus came the origin of species.