Agassiz, of the great book, of my great luck,--luck,--luck,--until the
multitudinous tongues of the thundering train were all chiming ‘luck!
luck! luck!’ They knew! they understood! This beast of fire and
tireless wheels was doing its best to get the eggs to Agassiz!
“We swung out past the Blue Hills, and yonder flashed the morning sun
from the towering dome of the State House. I might have leaped from
the cab and run the rest of the way on foot, had I not caught the eye
of the engineer watching me narrowly. I was not in Boston yet, nor in
Cambridge either. I was an escaped lunatic, who had held up a train,
and forced it to carry me to Boston.
“Perhaps I had overdone the lunacy business. Suppose these two men
should take it into their heads to turn me over to the police, whether
I would or no? I could never explain the case in time to get the eggs
to Agassiz. I looked at my watch. There were still a few minutes left,
in which I might explain to these men, who, all at once, had become my
captors. But it was too late. Nothing could avail against my actions,
my appearance, and my little pail of sand.
“I had not thought of my appearance before. Here I was, face and
clothes caked with yellow mud, my hair wild and matted, my hat gone,
and in my full-grown hands a tiny tin pail of sand, as if I had been
digging all night with a tiny tin shovel on the shore! And thus to
appear in the decent streets of Boston of a Sunday morning!
“I began to feel like a lunatic. The situation was serious, or might
be, and rather desperately funny at its best. I must in some way have
shown my new fears, for both men watched me more sharply.
“Suddenly, as we were nearing the outer freight-yard, the train slowed
down and came to a stop. I was ready to jump, but I had no chance.
They had nothing to do, apparently, but to guard me. I looked at my
watch again. What time we had made! It was only six o’clock, with a
whole hour to get to Cambridge.
“But I didn’t like this delay. Five minutes--ten--went by.
“‘Gentlemen,’ I began, but was cut short by an express train coming
past. We were moving again, on--into a siding; on--on to the main
track; and on with a bump and a crash and a succession of crashes,
running the length of the train; on at a turtle’s pace, but on,--when
the fireman, quickly jumping for the bell-rope, left the way to the
step free, and--the chance had come!
“I never touched the step, but landed in the soft sand at the side of
the track, and made a line for the yard fence.
“There was no hue or cry. I glanced over my shoulder to see if they
were after me. Evidently their hands were full, and they didn’t know I
had gone.
“But I had gone; and was ready to drop over the high board-fence, when
it occurred to me that I might drop into a policeman’s arms. Hanging
my pail in a splint on top of a post, I peered cautiously over--a very
wise thing to do before you jump a high board-fence. There, crossing
the open square toward the station, was a big burly fellow with a
club--looking for me.
“I flattened for a moment, when some one in the yard yelled at me. I
preferred the policeman, and grabbing my pail I slid over to the
street. The policeman moved on past the corner of the station out of
sight. The square was free, and yonder stood a cab!
“Time was flying now. Here was the last lap. The cabman saw me coming,
and squared away. I waved a paper dollar at him, but he only stared
the more. A dollar can cover a good deal, but I was too much for one
dollar. I pulled out another, thrust them both at him, and dodged into
the cab, calling, ‘Cambridge!’
“He would have taken me straight to the police station, had I not
said, ‘Harvard College. Professor Agassiz’s house! I’ve got eggs for
Agassiz’; and pushed another dollar up at him through the hole.
“It was nearly half-past six.
“‘Let him go!’ I ordered. ‘Here’s another dollar if you make Agassiz’s
house in twenty minutes. Let him out. Never mind the police!’
“He evidently knew the police, or there were few around at that time
on a Sunday morning. We went down the sleeping streets, as I had gone
down the wood-roads from the pond two hours before, but with the
rattle and crash now of a fire brigade. Whirling a corner into
Cambridge Street, we took the bridge at a gallop, the driver shouting
out something in Hibernian to a pair of waving arms and a belt and
brass buttons.
“Across the bridge with a rattle and jolt that put the eggs in
jeopardy, and on over the cobble-stones, we went. Half-standing, to
lessen the jar, I held the pail in one hand and held myself in the
other, not daring to let go even to look at my watch.
“But I was afraid to look at the watch. I was afraid to see how near
to seven o’clock it might be. The sweat was dropping from my nose, so
close was I running to the limit of my time.
“Suddenly there was a lurch, and I dove forward, ramming my head into
the front of the cab, coming up with a rebound that landed me across
the small of my back on the seat, and sent half of my pail of eggs
helter-skelter over the floor.
“We had stopped. Here was Agassiz’s house; and not taking time to pick
up the scattered eggs, I tumbled out, and pounded at the door.
“No one was astir in the house. But I would stir them. And I did.
Right in the midst of the racket the door opened. It was the maid.
“‘Agassiz,’ I gasped, ‘I want Professor Agassiz, quick!’ And I pushed
by her into the hall.
“‘Go ’way, sir. I’ll call the police. Professor Agassiz is in bed. Go
’way, sir.’
“‘Call him--Agassiz--instantly, or I’ll call him myself!’
“But I didn’t; for just then a door overhead was flung open, a
white-robed figure appeared on the dim landing above, and a quick loud
voice called excitedly,--
“‘Let him in! Let him in! I know him. He has my turtle eggs!’
“And the apparition, slipperless, and clad in anything but an academic
gown, came sailing down the stairs.
“The maid fled. The great man, his arms extended, laid hold of me with
both hands, and dragging me and my precious pail into his study, with
a swift, clean stroke laid open one of the eggs, as the watch in my
trembling hands ticked its way to seven--as if nothing unusual were
happening to the history of the world.”
* * * * *
“You were in time then?” I said.
“To the tick. There stands my copy of the great book. I am proud of
the humble part I had in it.”
III
THE EDGE OF NIGHT
THE EDGE OF NIGHT
Beyond the meadow, nearly half a mile away, yet in sight from my
window, stands an apple tree, the last of an ancient line that once
marked the boundary between the upper and lower pastures. For an apple
tree it is unspeakably woeful, and bent, and hoary, and grizzled, with
suckers from feet to crown. Unkempt and unesteemed, it attracts only
the cattle for its shade, and gives to them alone its gnarly, bitter
fruit.
But that old tree is hollow, trunk and limb; and if its apples are of
Sodom, there is still no tree in the Garden of the Hesperides, none
even in my own private Eden, carefully kept as they are, that is half
as interesting--I had almost said, as useful. Among the trees of the
Lord, an apple tree that bears good Baldwins or greenings or rambos
comes first for usefulness; but when one has thirty-five of such
trees, which the town has compelled one to trim and scrape and
plaster-up and petticoat against the grewsome gypsy moth, then those
thirty-five are dull indeed, compared with the untrimmed, unscraped,
unplastered, undressed old tramp yonder on the knoll, whose heart is
still wide open to the birds and beasts--to every small traveler
passing by who needs, perforce, a home, a hiding, or a harbor.
When I was a small boy everybody used to put up overnight at
grandfather’s--for grandmother’s wit and buckwheat cakes, I think,
which were known away down into Cape May County. It was so, too, with
grandfather’s wisdom and brooms. The old house sat in behind a grove
of pin-oak and pine, a sheltered, sheltering spot, with a peddler’s
stall in the barn, a peddler’s place at the table, a peddler’s bed in
the herby garret, a boundless, fathomless feather-bed, of a piece with
the house and the hospitality. There were larger houses and newer, in
the neighborhood; but no other house in all the region, not even the
tavern, two miles farther down the Pike, was half as central, or as
homelike, or as full of sweet and juicy gossip.
The old apple tree yonder between the woods and the meadow is as
central, as hospitable, and, if animals communicate with one another,
just as full of neighborhood news as was grandfather’s roof-tree.
Did I say none but the cattle seek its shade? Go over and watch. That
old tree is no decrepit, deserted shack of a house. There is no
door-plate, there is no christened letter-box outside the front fence,
because the birds and beasts do not advertise their houses that way.
But go over, say, toward evening, and sit quietly down outside. You
will not wait long, for the doors will open that you may enter--enter
into a home of the fields, and, a little way at least, into a life of
the fields, for this old tree has a small dweller of some sort the
year round.
If it is February or March you will be admitted by my owls. They take
possession late in winter and occupy the tree, with some curious
fellow tenants, until early summer. I can count upon these small
screech-owls by February,--the forlorn month, the seasonless,
hopeless, lifeless stretch of the year, but for its owls, its thaws,
its lengthening days, its cackling pullets, its possibility of
swallows, and its being the year’s end. At least the ancients called
February the year’s end, maintaining, with fine poetic sense, that the
world was begun in March; and they were nearer the beginnings of
things than we are.
But the owls come in February, and if they are not swallows with the
spring, they, nevertheless, help winter with most seemly haste into an
early grave. Yet across the faded February meadow the old apple tree
stands empty and drear enough--until the shadows of the night begin to
fall.
As the dusk comes down, I go to my window and watch. I cannot see him,
the grim-beaked baron with his hooked talons, his ghostly wings, his
night-seeing eyes; but I know that he has come to his window in the
turret yonder on the darkening sky, and that he watches with me. I
cannot see him swoop downward over the ditches, nor see him quarter
the meadow, beating, dangling, dropping between the flattened
tussocks; nor hear him, back on the silent shadows, slant upward again
to his turret. Mine are human eyes, human ears. Even the quick-eared
meadow-mouse did not hear.
But I have been belated and forced to cross this wild night-land of
his; and I have _felt_ him pass--so near at times that he has stirred
my hair, by the wind, dare I say, of his mysterious wings? At other
times I have heard him. Often on the edge of night I have listened to
his quavering, querulous cry from the elm-tops below me by the meadow.
But oftener I have watched at the casement here in my castle wall.
Away yonder on the borders of night, dim and gloomy, looms his ancient
keep. I wait. Soon on the deepened dusk spread his soft wings, out
over the meadow he sails, up over my wooded height, over my moat, to
my turret tall, as silent and unseen as the soul of a shadow, except
he drift across the face of the full round moon, or with his weird cry
cause the dreaming quiet to stir in its sleep and moan.
Yes, yes, but one must be pretty much of a child, with most of his
childish things not yet put away, to get any such romance out of a
rotten apple tree, plus a bunch of feathers no bigger than one’s two
fists. One must be pretty far removed from the real world, the live
world that swings, no longer through the heavens, but at the
distributing end of a news wire--pretty far removed to spend one’s
precious time watching screech-owls.
And so one is, indeed,--sixteen miles removed by space, one whole day
by post, one whole hour by engine and horse, one whole half-minute by
the telephone in the back hall. Lost! cut off completely! hopelessly
marooned!
I fear so. Perhaps I must admit that the watching of owls is for babes
and sucklings, not for men with great work to do, that is, with money
to make, news to get, office to hold, and clubs to address. For babes
and sucklings, and, possibly, for those with a soul to save, yet I
hasten to avow that the watching of owls is not religion; for I
entirely agree with our Shelburne essayist when he finds, “in all this
worship of nature,”--by Traherne, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Thoreau, and
those who seek the transfigured world of the woods,--“there is a
strain of illusion which melts away at the touch of the greater
realities ... and there are evils against which its seduction is of no
avail.”
But let the illusion melt. Other worships have shown a strain of
illusion at times, and against certain evils been of small avail. And
let it be admitted that calling regularly at an old apple tree is far
short of a full man’s work in the world, even when such calling falls
outside of his shop or office-hours. For there are no such hours. The
business of life allows no spare time any more. One cannot get rich
nowadays in office-hours, nor become great, nor keep telegraphically
informed, nor do his share of talking and listening. Everybody but the
plumber and paper-hanger works overtime. How the earth keeps up a
necessary amount of whirling in the old twenty-four-hour limit is more
than we can understand. But she can’t keep up the pace much longer.
She must have an extra hour. And how to snatch it from the tail-end of
eternity is the burning cosmological question.
And this is the burning question with regard to our individual
whirling--How to add time, or, what amounts to exactly the same, How
to increase the whirling.
There have been many hopeful answers. The whirl has been vastly
accelerated. The fly-wheel of the old horse treadmill is now geared to
an electric dynamo. But it is not enough; it is not the answer. And I
despair of the answer--of the perfect whirl, the perpetual,
invisible, untimable.
Hence the apple tree, the owls, the illusions, the lost hours--the
neglect of fortune and of soul! But then you may worship nature and
still find your way to church; you may be intensely interested in the
life of an old apple tree and still cultivate your next-door neighbor,
still earn all the fresh air and bread and books that your children
need.
The knoll yonder may be a kind of High Place, and its old apple tree a
kind of altar for you when you had better not go to church, when your
neighbor needs to be let alone, when your children are in danger of
too much bread and of too many books--for the time when you are in
need of that something which comes only out of the quiet of the fields
at the close of day.
“But what is it?” you ask. “Give me its formula.” I cannot. Yet you
need it and will get it--something that cannot be had of the day,
something that Matthew Arnold comes very near suggesting in his
lines:--
The evening comes, the fields are still.
The tinkle of the thirsty rill,
Unheard all day, ascends again;
Deserted is the half-mown plain,
Silent the swaths! the ringing wain,
The mower’s cry, the dog’s alarms
All housed within the sleeping farms!
The business of the day is done,
The last-left haymaker is gone.
And from the thyme upon the height
And from the elder-blossom white
And pale dog-roses in the hedge,
And from the mint-plant in the sedge,
In puffs of balm the night-air blows
The perfume which the day foregoes.
I would call it poetry, if it were poetry. And it is poetry, yet it is
a great deal more. It is poetry and owls and sour apples and toads;
for in this particular old apple dwells also a tree-toad.
It is curious enough, as the summer dusk comes on, to see the round
face of the owl in one hole, and out of another in the broken limb
above, the flat weazened face of the tree-toad. Philosophic
countenances they are, masked with wisdom, both of them: shrewd and
penetrating that of the slit-eyed owl; contemplative and soaring in
its serene composure the countenance of the transcendental toad. Both
creatures love the dusk; both have come forth to their open doors in
order to watch the darkening; both will make off under the cover--one
for mice and frogs over the meadow, the other for slugs and insects
over the crooked, tangled limbs of the tree.
It is strange enough to see them together, but it is stranger still to
think of them together, for it is just such prey as this little toad
that the owl has gone over the meadow to catch.
Why does he not take the supper ready here on the shelf? There may be
reasons that we, who do not eat tree-toad, know nothing of; but I am
inclined to believe that the owl has never seen his fellow lodger in
the doorway above, though he must often have heard him piping his
gentle melancholy in the gloaming, when his skin cries for rain!
Small wonder if they have never met! for this gray, squat, disc-toed
little monster in the hole, or flattened on the bark of the tree like
a patch of lichen, may well be one of those things which are hidden
from the sharp-eyed owl. Whatever purpose be attributed to his
peculiar shape and color,--protective, obliterative, mimicking,--it
is always a source of fresh amazement, the way this largest of our
hylas, on the moss-marked rind of an old tree, can utterly blot
himself out before your staring eyes.
The common toads and all the frogs have enemies enough, and it would
seem from the comparative scarcity of the tree-toads that they must
have enemies, too, but I do not know who they are. The scarcity of the
tree-toads is something of a puzzle, and all the more to me, that, to
my certain knowledge, this toad has lived in the old Baldwin tree,
now, for five years. Perhaps he has been several, and not one; for who
can tell one tree-toad from another? Nobody; and for that reason I
made, some time ago, a simple experiment, in order to see how long a
tree-toad might live, unprotected, in his own natural environment.
Upon moving into this house, about seven years ago, we found a
tree-toad living in the big hickory by the porch. For the next three
springs he reappeared, and all summer long we would find him, now on
the tree, now on the porch, often on the railing and backed tight up
against a post. Was he one or many? we asked. Then we marked him; and
for the next four years we knew that he was himself alone. How many
more years he might have lived in the hickory for us all to pet, I
should like to know; but last summer, to our great sorrow, the
gypsy-moth killers, poking in the hole, did our little friend to
death.
He was worth many worms.
It was interesting, it was very wonderful to me, the instinct for
home--the love for home I should like to call it--that this humble
little creature showed. A toad is an amphibian to the zoölogist; an
ugly gnome with a jeweled eye to the poet; but to the naturalist, the
lover of life for its own sake, who lives next door to his toad, who
feeds him a fly or a fat grub now and then, who tickles him to sleep
with a rose leaf, who waits as thirstily as the hilltop for him to
call the summer rain, who knows his going to sleep for the winter, his
waking up for the spring--to such an one the jeweled eye and the
amphibious habits are but the forewords of a long, marvelous
life-history.
This small tree-toad had a home, had it in his soul, I believe,
precisely where John Howard Payne had it, and where many another of
us has it. He had it in a tree, too,--in a hickory tree, this one that
dwelt by my house; he had it in an apple tree, that one yonder across
the meadow.
“East, west,
Hame’s best,”
croaked our tree-toad in a tremulous, plaintive minor that wakened
memories in the vague twilight of more old, unhappy, far-off things
than any other voice I ever knew.
These two tree-toads could not have been induced to trade houses, the
hickory for the apple, because a house to a toad means home, and a
home is never in the market. There are many more houses in the land
than homes. Most of us are only real-estate dealers. Many of us have
never had a home; and none of us has ever had more than one. There can
be but one--mine--and that has always been, must always be, as
imperishable as memory, and as far beyond all barter as the gates of
the sunset are beyond my horizon’s picket fence of pines.
The toad seems to feel it all, but feels it whole, not analyzed and
itemized as a memory. Here in the hickory for four years (for seven, I
am quite sure) he lived, single and alone. He would go down to the
meadow when the toads gathered there to lay their eggs, but back he
would come, without mate or companion, to his tree. Stronger than love
of kind, than love of mate, constant and dominant in his slow cold
heart is his instinct for home.
If I go down to the orchard and bring up from the apple tree another
toad to dwell in the hole of the hickory, I shall fail. He might
remain for the day, but not throughout the night, for with the
gathering twilight there steals upon him an irresistible longing, the
_Heimweh_ which he shares with me; and guided by it, as the bee and
the pigeon and the dog are guided, he makes his sure way back to the
orchard home.
Would he go back beyond the orchard, over the road, over the wide
meadow, over to the Baldwin tree, half a mile away, if I brought him
from there? We shall see. During the coming summer I shall mark him in
some manner, and bringing him here to the hickory, I shall then watch
the old apple tree yonder. It will be a hard, perilous journey. But
his longing will not let him rest; and guided by his mysterious sense
of direction--for this _one_ place--he will arrive, I am sure, or he
will die on the way.
Yet I could wish there were another tree here, besides the apple, and
another toad. Suppose he never gets back? Only one toad less? A great
deal more than that. Here in the old Baldwin he has made his home for
I don’t know how long, hunting over its world of branches in the
summer, sleeping down in its deep holes during the winter--down under
the chips and punk and castings, beneath the nest of the owls, it may
be; for my toad in the hickory always buried himself so, down in the
débris at the bottom of the hole, where, in a kind of cold storage, he
preserved himself until thawed out by the spring. I never pass the old
apple in the summer but that I stop to pay my respects to the toad;
nor in the winter that I do not pause and think of him asleep in
there. He is no mere toad any more. He has passed into a _genius
loci_, the Guardian Spirit of the tree, warring in the green leaf
against worm and grub and slug, and in the dry leaf hiding himself, a
heart of life, within the tree’s thin ribs, as if to save the old
shell to another summer.
A toad is a toad, and if he never got back to the tree there would be
one toad less, nothing more. If anything more, then it is on paper,
and it is cant, not toad at all. And so, I suppose, stones are stones,
trees trees, brooks brooks--not books and tongues and sermons at
all--except on paper and as cant. Surely there are many things in
writing that never had any other, any real existence, especially in
writing that deals with the out-of-doors. One should write carefully
about one’s toad; fearfully, indeed, when that toad becomes one’s
teacher; for teacher my toad in the old Baldwin has many a time been.
Often in the summer dusk I have gone over to sit at his feet and learn
some of the things my college professors could not teach me. I have
not yet taken my higher degrees. I was graduated A. B. from college.
It is A. B. C. that I am working toward here at the old apple tree
with the toad.
Seating myself comfortably at the foot of the tree, I wait; the toad
comes forth to the edge of his hole above me, settles himself
comfortably, and waits. And the lesson begins. The quiet of the summer
evening steals out with the wood-shadows and softly covers the
fields. We do not stir. An hour passes. We do not stir. Not to stir is
the lesson--one of the majors in this graduate course with the toad.
The dusk thickens. The grasshoppers begin to strum; the owl slips out
and drifts away; a whippoorwill drops on the bare knoll near me,
clucks and shouts and shouts again, his rapid repetition a thousand
times repeated by the voices that call to one another down the long
empty aisles of the swamp; a big moth whirs about my head and is gone;
a bat flits squeaking past; a firefly blazes, but is blotted out by
the darkness, only to blaze again, and again be blotted, and so
passes, his tiny lantern flashing into a night that seems the darker
for the quick, unsteady glow.