APPLE-LAND
It was a spacious morning of windswept sunshine, with a wintry bite in
the keen air. Meadow-larks and song-sparrows kept up a faint warbling
about us, but the crickets, which yesterday had here and there made a
thin music, as of straggling bands of survivors of the Summer, were
numbed into silence again. Once or twice we caught sight of the dainty
snipe in the meadows, and high over the woods a bird-hawk floated, as by
some invisible anchorage, in the sky. It was an austere landscape, grave
with elm and ash and pine. For a space, a field of buckwheat standing in
ricks struck a smudged negroid note, but there was warmth in the apple
orchards which clustered about the scattered houses, with piles of golden
pumpkins and red apples under the trees. And is there any form of
piled-up wealth, bins of specie at the bank, or mountains of precious
stones, rubies and sapphires and carbuncles, as we picture them in the
subterranean treasuries of kings, that thrills the imagination with so
dream-like a sense of uncounted riches, untold gold, as such natural
bullion of the earth; pyramids of apples lighting up dark orchards, great
plums lying in heaps of careless purple, corridors hung with fabulous
bunches of grapes, or billowy mounds of yellow grain--the treasuries of
Pomona and Vertumnus? Such treasuries, in the markets of this world, are
worth only a modest so-much-a-bushel, yet I think I should actually feel
myself richer with a barrel of apples than with a barrel of money.
From a corn-growing country, we were evidently passing into a country
whose beautiful business was apples. Orchards began more or less to line
the road, and wagons with those same apple-barrels became a feature of
the highway.
Another of its features was the number of old ruined farmhouses we came
on, standing side by side with the new, more ambitious homesteads. We
seldom came on a prosperous-looking house but a few yards away was to be
seen its aged and abandoned parent, smothered up with bushes, roof fallen
in, timbers ready to collapse, the deserted hearth choked with débris and
overgrown with weeds--the very picture of a haunted house. Here had been
the original home, always small, seldom more than four rooms, and when
things had begun to prosper, a more spacious, and often, to our eyes, a
less attractive, structure had been built, and the old home left to the
bats and owls, with a complete abandonment that seemed to us--sentimental
travellers as we were--as cynical as it was curiously wasteful.
Putting sentiment out of the question, we had to leave unexplained why
the American farmer should thus allow so much good building material to
go to waste. Besides, as we also noted much farm machinery rusting
unhoused in the grass, we wondered why he did not make use of these old
buildings for storage purposes. But the American farmer has puzzled wiser
heads than ours, so we gave it up and turned our attention once more to
our own fanciful business, one highly useful branch of which was the
observation of the names on the tin letter-boxes thrusting themselves out
at intervals along the road.
The history of American settlement could, I suppose, be read in those
wayside letter-boxes, in such names, for instance, as "Theo. Leveque" and
"Paul Fugle," which, like wind-blown exotics from other lands, we found
within a few yards of each other. One name, that of "Silvernail," we
decided could only lawfully belong to a princess in a fairy tale. Such
childishness as this, I may say, is of the essence of a walking trip, in
which, from moment to moment, you take quite infantile interest in all
manner of idle observation and quite useless lore. That is a part of the
game you are playing, and the main thing is that you are out in the open
air, on the open road, with a simple heart and a romantic appetite.
Here is a little picture of a wayfaring day which I made while Colin was
sketching one of those ruined farms:
_Apples along the highway strewn,
And morning opening all her doors;
The cawing rook, the distant train,
The valley with its misty floors;
The hillside hung with woods and dreams,
Soft gleams of gossamer and dew;
From cockcrow to the rising moon
The rainbowed road for me and you.
Along the highroad all the day
The wagons filled with apples go,
And golden pumpkins and ripe corn,
And all the ruddy overflow
From Autumn's apron, as she goes
About her orchards and her fields,
And gathers into stack and barn
The treasure that the Summer yield.
A singing heart, a laughing road,
With salutations all the way,--
The gossip dog, the hidden bird,
The pig that grunts a gruff good-day;
The apple-ladder in the trees,
A friendly voice amid the boughs,
The farmer driving home his team,
The ducks, the geese, the uddered cows;
The silver babble of the creek,
The willow-whisper--the day's end,
With murmur of the village street,
A called good-night, an unseen friend_.