Within Sound of the Shouting Waters.
If I relied upon my memory, I could not tell when the French war ended. It
had practically terminated, so far as our Valley was concerned, with the
episode already related. Sir William Johnson was away much of the time
with the army, and several of the boys older than myself--John Johnson,
John Frey, and Adam Fonda among them--went with him. We heard vague news
of battles at distant places, at Niagara, at Quebec, and elsewhere. Once,
indeed, a band of Roman Catholic Indians appeared at Fort Herkimer and did
bloody work before they were driven off, but this time there was no panic
in the lower settlements.
Large troops of soldiers continually passed up and down on the river in
the open seasons, some of them in very handsome clothes.
I remember one body of Highlanders in particular whose dress and mien
impressed me greatly. Mr. Stewart, too, was much excited by the memories
this noble uniform evoked, and had the officers into the house to eat and
drink with him. I watched and listened to these tall, fierce, bare-kneed
warriors in awe, from a distance. He brought out bottles from his rare
stock of Madeira, and they drank it amid exclamations which, if I mistake
not, were highly treasonable. This was almost the last occasion on which I
heard references made to his descent, and he did his best to discourage
them then. Most of these fine red-haired men, I learned afterward laid
their bones on the bloody plateau overlooking Quebec.
Far fresher in my recollection than these rumors of war is the fact that
my Tulp caught the small-pox, in the spring of '60, the malady having been
spread by a Yankee who came up the Valley selling sap-spouts that were
turned with a lathe instead of being whittled. The poor little chap was
carried off to a sheep-shed on the meadow clearing, a long walk from our
house, and he had to remain there by himself for six weeks. At my urgent
request, I was allowed to take his food to him daily, leaving it on a
stone outside and then discreetly retiring. He would come out and get it,
and then we would shout to each other across the creek. I took up some of
our dolls to him, but he did not get much comfort out of them, being
unable to remember any of the stories which I illustrated with them, or to
invent any for himself. At his suggestion I brought him instead a piece of
tanned calf-skin, with a sailor's needle and some twine, and the little
fellow made out of this a lot of wallets for his friends, which had to be
buried a long time before they could be safely used. I have one of these
yet--mildewed with age, and most rudely stitched, but still a very
precious possession.
Tulp came out finally, scarred and twisted so that he was ever afterward
repellent to the eye, and as crooked as Richard the Third. I fear that
Daisy never altogether liked him after this. To me he was dearer than
ever, not because my heart was tenderer than hers, of course, but because
women are more delicately made, and must perforce shudder at ugliness.
How happily the years went by! The pictures in my memory, save those of
the snug winter rooms already referred to, are all of a beautiful Valley,
embowered in green, radiant with sunshine--each day live-long
with delight.
There was first of all in the spring, when the chorus of returning
song-birds began, the gathering of maple-sap, still sacred to boyhood. The
sheep were to be washed and sheared, too, and the awkward, weak-kneed
calves to be fed. While the spring floods ran high, ducks and geese
covered the water, and muskrats came out, driven from their holes. Then
appeared great flocks of pigeons, well fattened from their winter's
sojourn in the South, and everybody, young and old, gave himself up to
their slaughter; while this lasted, the crack! crack! of guns was heard
all the forenoon long, particularly if the day was cloudy and the birds
were flying low--and ah! the buttered pigeon pies my aunt made, too.
As the floods went down, and the snow-water disappeared, the fishing
began, first with the big, silly suckers, then with wiser and more valued
fish. The woods became dry, and then in long, joyous rambles we set traps
and snares, hunted for nests among the low branches and in the
marsh-grass, smoked woodchucks out of their holes, gathered wild flowers,
winter-green, and dye-plants, or built great fires of the dead leaves and
pithless, scattered branches, as boys to the end of time will delight
to do.
When autumn came, there were mushrooms, and beech-nuts, butter-nuts,
hickory-nuts, wild grapes, pucker-berries, not to speak of loads of
elder-berries for making wine. And the pigeons, flying southward, darkened
the sky once more; and then the horses were unshod for treading out the
wheat, and we children fanned away the chaff with big palm-leaves; and the
combs of honey were gathered and shelved; and the October husking began by
our having the first kettleful of white corn, swollen and hulled by being
boiled in lye of wood ashes, spooned steaming into our porringers of milk
by my aunt.
Ah, they were happy times indeed!
Every other Sunday, granted tolerable weather, I crossed the river early
in the morning to attend church with my mother and sisters. It is no
reflection upon my filial respect, I hope, to confess that these are
wearisome memories. We went in solemn procession, the family being
invariably ready and waiting when I arrived. We sat in a long row in a pew
quite in front of the slate-colored pulpit--my mother sitting sternly
upright at the outer end, my tallest sister next, and so on, in regular
progression, down to wretched baby Gertrude and me. The very color of the
pew, a dull Spanish brown, was enough to send one to sleep, and its high,
uncompromising back made all my bones ache.
Yet I was forced to keep awake, and more, to look deeply interested. I was
a clergyman's son, and the ward of an important man; I was the
best-dressed youngster in the congregation, and brought a slave of my own
to church with me. So Dominie Romeyn always fixed his lack-lustre eye on
me, and seemed to develop all his long, prosy arguments one by one to me
personally. Even when he turned the hour-glass in front of him, he seemed
to indicate that it was quite as much my affair as his. I dared not twist
clear around, to see Tulp sitting among the negroes and Indians, on one of
the backless benches under the end gallery; it was scarcely possible even
to steal glances up to the side galleries, where the boys of lower degree
were at their mischief, and where fits of giggling and horse-play rose and
spread from time to time until the tithing-man, old Conrad to wit, burst
in and laid his hickory gad over their irreverent heads.
When at last I could escape without discredit, and get across the river
again, it was with the consoling thought that the next Sunday would be Mr.
Stewart's Sunday.
This meant a good long walk with my patron. Sometimes we would go down to
Mount Johnson, if Sir William was at home, or to Mr. Butler's, or some
other English-speaking house, where I would hear much profitable
conversation, and then be encouraged to talk about it during our leisurely
homeward stroll. But more often, if the day were fine, we would leave
roads and civilization behind us, and climb the gradual elevation to the
north of the house, through the woodland to an old Indian trail which led
to our favorite haunt--a wonderful ravine.
The place has still a local fame, and picnic parties go there to play at
forestry, but it gives scarcely a suggestion now of its ancient wildness.
As my boyish eyes saw it, it was nothing short of awe-inspiring. The
creek, then a powerful stream, had cut a deep gorge in its exultant leap
over the limestone barrier. On the cliffs above, giant hemlocks seemed to
brush the very sky with their black, tufted boughs. Away below, on the
shadowed bottomland, which could be reached only by feet trained to
difficult descents, strange plants grew rank in the moisture of the
waterfall, and misshapen rocks wrapped their nakedness in heavy folds of
unknown mosses and nameless fern-growths. Above all was the ceaseless
shout of the tumbling waters, which had in my ears ever a barbaric message
from the Spirit of the Wilderness.
The older Mohawks told Mr. Stewart that in their childhood this weird spot
was held to be sacred to the Great Wolf, the totem of their tribe. Here,
for more generations than any could count, their wise men had gathered
about the mystic birch flame, in grave council of war. Here the tribe had
assembled to seek strength of arm, hardness of heart, cunning of brain,
for its warriors, in solemn incantations and offerings to the Unknown.
Here hostile prisoners had been tortured and burned. Some mishap or omen
or shift of superstitious feeling had led to the abandonment of this
council place. Even the trail, winding its tortuous way from the Valley
over the hills toward the Adirondack fastnesses, had been deserted for
another long before--so long, in fact, that the young brave who chanced to
follow the lounging tracks of the black bear down the creek to the gorge,
or who turned aside from the stealthy pursuit of the eagle's flight to
learn what this muffled roar might signify, looked upon the remains of the
council fire's circle of stone seats above the cataract, and down into the
chasm of mist and foam underneath, with no knowledge that they were a part
of his ancestral history.
Mr. Stewart told me that when he first settled in the Valley, a
disappointed and angry man, this gulf had much the satisfaction for him
that men in great grief or wrath find in breasting a sharp storm. There
was something congenial to his ugly unrest in this place, with its violent
clamor, its swift dashing of waters, its dismal shadows, and damp
chilliness of depths.
But we were fallen now upon calmer, brighter days. He was no longer the
discouraged, sullen misanthropist, but had come to be instead a pacific,
contented, even happy, gentleman. And lo! the meaning of the wild gorge
changed to reflect his mood. There was no stain of savagery upon the
delight we had in coming to this spot. As he said, once listened rightly
to, the music of the falling waters gave suggestions which, if they were
sobering, were still not sad.
This place was all our own, and hither we most frequently bent our steps
on Sundays, after the snow-water had left the creek, and the danger of
lurking colds had been coaxed from the earth by the May sun. Here he would
sit for hours on one of the stones in the great Druid-like circle which
some dead generation of savages had toiled to construct. Sometimes I
would scour the steep sides of the ravine and the moist bottom for curious
plants to fetch to him, and he would tell me of their structure and
design. More often I would sit at his feet, and he, between whiffs at his
pipe, would discourse to me of the differences between his Old World and
this new one, into which I providentially had been born. He talked of his
past, of my future, and together with this was put forth an indescribable
wealth of reminiscence, reflection, and helpful anecdote.
On this spot, with the gaunt outlines of mammoth primeval trunks and
twisted boughs above us, with the sacred memorials of extinct rites about
us, and with the waters crashing down through the solitude beneath us on
their way to turn Sir William's mill-wheel, one could get broad,
comprehensive ideas of what things really meant. One could see wherein the
age of Pitt differed from and advanced upon the age of Colbert, on this
new continent, and could as in prophecy dream of the age of Jefferson yet
to come. Did I as a lad feel these things? Truly it seems to me that
I did.
Half a century before, the medicine-man's fire had blazed in this circle,
its smoky incense crackling upward in offering to the gods of the pagan
tribe. Here, too, upon this charred, barren spot, had been heaped the
blazing fagots about the limbs of the captive brave, and the victim bound
to the stake had nerved himself to show the encircling brutes that not
even the horrors of this death could shake his will, or wring a groan
from his heaving breast. Here, too, above the unending din of the
waterfall and the whisper of these hemlocks overhead, had often risen some
such shrill-voiced, defiant deathsong, from the smoke and anguish of the
stake, as that chant of the Algonquin son of Alknomuk which my
grandchildren still sing at their school. This dead and horrible past of
heathendom I saw as in a mirror, looking upon these council-stones.
The children's children of these savages were still in the Valley. Their
council fires were still lighted, no further distant than the Salt
Springs. In their hearts burned all the old lust for torture and massacre,
and the awful joys of rending enemies limb by limb. But the spell of
Europe was upon them, and, in good part or otherwise, they bowed under it.
So much had been gained, and two peaceful white people could come and talk
in perfect safety on the ancient site of their sacrifices and cruelties.
Yet this spell of Europe, accomplishing so much, left much to be desired.
It was still possible to burn a slave to death by legal process, here in
our Valley; and it was still within the power of careless, greedy noblemen
in London, who did not know the Mohawk from the Mississippi, to sign away
great patents of our land, robbing honest settlers of their all. There was
to come the spell of America, which should remedy these things. I cannot
get it out of my head that I learned to foresee this, to feel and to look
for its coming, there in the gorge as a boy.
But there are other reasons why I should remember the place--to be told
later on.
The part little Daisy played in all these childhood enjoyments of mine is
hardly to be described in words, much less portrayed in incidents. I can
recall next to nothing to relate. Her presence as my sister, my comrade,
and my pupil seems only an indefinable part of the sunshine which gilds
these old memories. We were happy together--that is all.
I taught her to read and write and cipher, and to tell mushrooms from
toadstools, to eschew poisonous berries, and to know the weather signs.
For her part, she taught me so much more that it seems effrontery to call
her my pupil. It was from her gentle, softening companionship that I
learned in turn to be merciful to helpless creatures, and to be honest and
cleanly in my thoughts and talk. She would help me to seek for birds'
nests with genuine enthusiasm, but it was her pity which prevented their
being plundered afterward. Her pretty love for all living things, her
delight in innocent, simple amusements, her innate repugnance to coarse
and cruel actions--all served to make me different from the rough
boys about me.
Thus we grew up together, glad in each other's constant company, and
holding our common benefactor, Mr. Stewart, in the greatest love and
veneration.