remember only its stillness and tranquillity, its innocent inhabitants,
its gray hills, its sandy road, and the ocean at the end of the way.
Even at the western extremity, near the railway and the busy harbor, the
valley was the very abode of quietness. Here, on one of my earlier
excursions, I came unexpectedly to a bridge, and on the farther side of
the bridge to a tidy house and garden; and in the garden were several
pear-trees, with fruit on them! Still more to my surprise, here was a
little shop. The keeper of it had also the agency of some insurance
company,--so a signboard informed the passer-by. As for his stock in
trade,--sole leather, dry goods, etc.,--that spoke for itself. I stepped
inside the door, but he was occupied with an account book, and when at
last he looked up there was no speculation in his eyes. Possibly he had
sold something the day before, and knew that no second customer could be
expected so soon. We exchanged the time of day,--not a very valuable
commodity hereabout,--and I asked him a question or two touching the
hollow, and especially "the village," of which I had heard a rumor that
it lay somewhere in this neighborhood. He looked bewildered at the
word,--he hardly knew what I could mean, he said; but with a little
prompting he recollected that a few houses between this point and North
Truro (there used to be more houses than now, but they had been removed
to other towns,--some of them to Boston!) were formerly called "the
village." I left him to his ledger, and on passing his house I saw that
he was a dealer in grain as well as in sole leather and calico, and had
telephonic communication with somebody; an enterprising merchant, after
all, up with the times, in spite of appearances.
The shop was like the valley, a careless tourist might have said,--a
sleepy shop in Sleepy Hollow. To me it seemed not so. Peaceful, remote,
sequestered,--these and all similar epithets suited well with Longnook;
but for myself, in all my loitering there I was never otherwise than
wide awake. The close-lying, barren, mountainous-looking hills did not
oppress the mind, but rather lifted and dilated it, and although I could
not hear the surf, I felt all the while the neighborhood of the sea; not
the harbor, but the ocean, with nothing between me and Spain except that
stretch of water. Blessed forever be Dyer's Hollow, I say, and blessed
be its inhabitants! Whether Western Islanders or "regular Cape Cod men,"
may they live and die in peace.
FIVE DAYS ON MOUNT MANSFIELD.
"Lead him through the lovely mountain-paths,
And talk to him of things at hand and common."
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
I went up the mountain from the village of Stowe in very ignoble
fashion,--in a wagon,--and was three hours on the passage. One of the
"hands" at the Summit House occupied the front seat with the driver, and
we were hardly out of the village before a seasonable toothache put him
in mind of his pipe. Would smoking be offensive to me? he inquired. What
could I say, having had an aching tooth before now myself? It was a
pleasure almost beyond the luxury of breathing mountain air to see the
misery of a fellow-mortal so quickly assuaged. The driver, a sturdy
young Vermonter, was a man of different spirit. He had never used
tobacco nor drunk a glass of "liquor," I heard him saying. Somebody had
once offered him fifty cents to smoke a cigar.
"Why didn't you take it?" asked his companion in a tone of wonder.
"Well, I'm not that kind of a fellow, to be bought for fifty cents."
As we approached the base of the mountain, a white-throated sparrow was
piping by the roadside.
"I love to hear that bird sing," said the driver.
It was now my turn to be surprised. Our man of principle was also a man
of sentiment.
"What do you call him?" I inquired, as soon as I could recover myself.
"Whistling Jack," he answered; a new name to me, and a good one; it
would take a nicer ear than mine to discriminate with certainty between
a white-throat's voice and a school-boy's whistle.
The morning had promised well, but before we emerged from the forest as
we neared the summit we drove into a cloud, and, shortly afterward, into
a pouring rain. In the office of the hotel I found a company of eight
persons, four men and four women, drying themselves about the stove.
They had left a village twenty miles away at two o'clock that morning
in an open wagon for an excursion to the summit. Like myself, they had
driven into a cloud, and up to this time had seen nothing more distant
than the stable just across the road, within a stone's toss of the
window, and even that only by glimpses. One of the party was a doctor,
who must be at home that night. Hour after hour they watched the clouds,
or rather the rain (we were so beclouded that the clouds could not be
seen), and debated the situation. Finally, at three o'clock, they got
into their open wagon, the rain pelting them fiercely, and started for
the base. Doubtless they soon descended into clear weather, but not till
they were well drenched. Verily the clouds are no respecters of persons.
It is nothing to them how far you have come, nor how worthy your errand.
So I reflected, having nothing better to do, when my wagonful of
pilgrims had dropped out of sight in the fog--as a pebble drops into the
lake--leaving me with the house to myself; and presently, as I sat at
the window, I heard a white-throated sparrow singing outside. Here was
one, at least, whom the rain could not discourage. A wild and yet a
sweet and home-felt strain is this of "Whistling Jack,"--a mountain
bird, well used to mountain weather, and just now too happy to forego
his music, no matter how the storm might rage. I myself had been in a
cloud often enough to feel no great degree of discomfort or lowness of
spirits. I had not decided to spend the precious hours of a brief
vacation upon a mountain-top without taking into account the additional
risk of unfavorable weather in such a place. Let the clouds do their
worst; I could be patient and wait for the sun. But this whistling
philosopher outside spoke of something better than patience, and I
thanked him for the timely word.
Toward noon of the next day the rain ceased, the cloud vanished, and I
made haste to clamber up the rocky peak--the Nose, so called--at the
base of which the hotel is situated. Yes, there stretched Lake
Champlain, visible for almost its entire length, and beyond it loomed
the Adirondacks. I was glad I had come. _I_ could sing now. It does a
man good to look afar off.
Even before the fog lifted I had discovered, to my no small
gratification, that the evergreens immediately about the house were
full of gray-cheeked thrushes, a close colony, strictly confined to the
low trees at the top of the mountain. They were calling at all hours,
_yeep, yeep_, somewhat in the manner of young chickens; and after
supper, as it grew dark, I stood on the piazza while they sang in full
chorus. At least six of them were in tune at once. _Wee-o, wee-o, tit-ti
wee-o_, something like this the music ran, with many variations; a most
ethereal sound, at the very top of the scale, but faint and sweet; quite
in tune also with my mood, for I had just come in from gazing long at
the sunset, with Lake Champlain like a sea of gold for perhaps a hundred
miles, and a stretch of the St. Lawrence showing far away in the north.
During the afternoon, too, I had been over the long crest of the
mountain to the northern peak, the highest point, belittled in local
phraseology as the Chin; a delightful jaunt of two miles, with
magnificent prospects all the way. It was like walking on the ridge-pole
of Vermont, a truly exhilarating experience.
All in all, though the forenoon had been so rainy, I had lived a long
day, and now, if ever, could appreciate the singing of this
characteristic northern songster, himself such a lover of mountains as
never to be heard, here in New England, at least, and in summer-time,
except amid the dwindling spruce forests of the upper slopes. I have
never before seen him so familiar. On the Mount Washington range and on
Mount Lafayette it is easy enough to hear his music, but one rarely gets
more than a flying glimpse of the bird. Here, as I say, he was never out
of hearing, and seldom long out of sight, even from the door-step. The
young were already leaving the nest, and undoubtedly the birds had
disposed themselves for the season before the unpainted,
inoffensive-looking little hotel showed any signs of occupancy. The very
next year a friend of mine visited the place and could discover no trace
of them. They had found their human neighbors a vexation, perhaps, and
on returning from their winter's sojourn in Costa Rica, or where not,
had sought summer quarters on some less trodden peak.
Not so was it with the myrtle warblers, I venture to assert, though on
this point I have never taken my friend's testimony. Perfectly at home
as they are in the wildest and most desolate places, they manifest a
particular fondness for the immediate vicinity of houses, delighting
especially to fly about the gutters of the roof and against the window
panes. Here, at the Summit House, they were constantly to be seen
hawking back and forth against the side of the building, as barn
swallows are given to doing in the streets of cities. The rude structure
was doubly serviceable,--to me a shelter, and to the birds a fly-trap. I
have never observed any other warbler thus making free with human
habitations.
This yellow-rump, or myrtle bird, is one of the thrifty members of his
great family, and next to the black-poll is the most numerous
representative of his tribe in Massachusetts during the spring and fall
migrations; a beautiful little creature, with a characteristic flight
and call, and for a song a pretty trill suggestive of the snow-bird's.
Within two or three years he has been added to the summer fauna of
Massachusetts, and as a son of the Bay State I rejoice in his presence
and heartily bid him welcome. We shall never have too many of such
citizens. I esteem him, also, as the only one of his delicate,
insectivorous race who has the hardihood to spend the winter--sparingly,
but with something like regularity--within the limits of New England. He
has a genius for adapting himself to circumstances; picking up his daily
food in the depths of a mountain forest or off the panes of a
dwelling-house, and wintering, as may suit his fancy or convenience, in
the West Indies or along the sea-coast of Massachusetts.
One advantage of a sojourn at the summit of any of our wooded New
England mountains is the easy access thus afforded to the upper forest.
While I was here upon Mount Mansfield I spent some happy hours almost
every day in sauntering down the road for a mile or two, looking and
listening. Just after leaving the house it was possible to hear three
kinds of thrushes singing at once,--gray-cheeks, olive-backs, and
hermits. Of the three the hermit is beyond comparison the finest singer,
both as to voice and tune. His song, given always in three detached
measures, each higher than the one before it, is distinguished by an
exquisite liquidity, the presence of _d_ and _l_, I should say, as
contrasted with the inferior _t_ sound of the gray-cheek. If it has
less variety, and perhaps less rapture, than the song of the
wood-thrush, it is marked by greater simplicity and ease; and if it does
not breathe the ineffable tranquillity of the veery's strain, it comes
to my ear, at least, with a still nobler message. The hermit's note is
aspiration rather than repose. "Peace, peace!" says the veery, but the
hermit's word is, "Higher, higher!" "Spiritual songs," I call them both,
with no thought of profaning the apostolic phrase.
I had been listening to thrush music (I think I could listen to it
forever), and at a bend of the road had turned to admire the wooded side
of the mountain, just here spread out before me, miles and miles of
magnificent hanging forest, when I was attracted by a noise as of
something gnawing--a borer under the bark of a fallen spruce lying at my
feet. Such an industrious and contented sound! No doubt the grub would
have said, "Yes, I could do _this_ forever." What knew he of the
beauties of the picture at which I was gazing? The very light with which
to see it would have been a torture to him. Heaven itself was under the
close bark of that decaying log. So peradventure, may we ourselves be
living in darkness without knowing it, while spiritual intelligences
look on with wondering pity to see us so in love with our prison-house.
Well, yonder panorama was beautiful to _me_, at all events, however it
might look to more exalted beings, and, like my brother under the
spruce-tree bark, I would make the best of life as I found it.
This way my thoughts were running when all at once two birds dashed by
me--a black-poll warbler in hot pursuit of an olive-backed thrush. The
thrush alighted in a tree and commenced singing, and the warbler sat by
and waited, following the universal rule that a larger bird is never to
be attacked except when on the wing. The thrush repeated his strain once
or twice, and then flew to another tree, the little fellow after him
with all speed. Again the olive-back perched and sang, and again the
black-poll waited. Three times these manoeuvres were repeated, before
the birds passed out of my range. Some wrong-doing, real or fancied, on
the part of the larger bird, had excited the ire of the warbler. Why
should he be imposed upon, simply because he was small? The thrush,
meantime, disdaining to defend himself, would only stop now and then to
sing, as if to show to the world (every creature is the centre of a
world) that such an insect persecution could never ruffle his spirit.
Birds are to be commiserated, perhaps, on having such an excess of what
we call human nature; but the misfortune certainly renders them the more
interesting to us, who see our more amiable weaknesses so often
reflected in their behavior.
For the sympathetic observer every kind of bird has its own temperament.
On one of my jaunts down this Mount Mansfield road I happened to espy a
Canada jay in a thick spruce. He was on one of the lower branches, but
pretty soon began mounting the tree, keeping near the bole and going up
limb by limb in absolute silence, exactly in the manner of our common
blue jay. I was glad to see him, but more desirous to hear his voice,
the loud, harsh scream with which the books credit him, and which, _a
priori_, I should have little hesitation in ascribing to any member of
his tribe. I waited till I grew impatient. Then I started hastily
toward him, making as much commotion as possible in pushing through the
undergrowth. It was a clever scheme, but the bird was not to be
surprised into uttering so much as an exclamation. He dropped out of his
tree, flew a little distance to a lower and less conspicuous perch, and
there I finally left him. Once before, on Mount Clinton, I had seen him,
and had been treated with the same studied silence. And later, I fell in
with a little family party on the side of Mount Washington, and they,
too, refused me so much as a note. Probably I was too near the birds in
every case, though in the third instance there was no attempt at
skulking, nor any symptom of nervousness. I have often been impressed
and amused by the blue jay's habit in this respect. No bird could well
be noisier than he when the noisy mood takes him; but come upon him
suddenly at close quarters, and he will be as still as the grave itself.
He has a double gift, of eloquence and silence,--silver and gold--and no
doubt his Canadian cousin is equally well endowed.
The reader may complain, perhaps, that I speak only of trifles. Why go
to a mountain-top to look at warblers and thrushes? I am not careful to
justify myself. I love a mountain-top, and go there because I love to be
there. It is good, I think, to be lifted above the every-day level, and
to enjoy the society--and the absence of society--which the heights
afford. Looking over my notes of this excursion, I come upon the
following sentence: "To sit on a stone beside a mountain road, with
olive-backed thrushes piping on every side, the ear catching now and
then the distant tinkle of a winter wren's tune, or the nearer _zee,
zee, zee_ of black-poll warblers, while white-throated sparrows call
cheerily out of the spruce forest--this is to be in another world."
This sense of distance and strangeness is not to be obtained, in my case
at all events, by a few hours' stay in such a spot. I must pitch my tent
there, for at least a night or two. I cannot even see the prospect at
first, much less feel the spirit of the place. There must be time for
the old life to drop off, as it were, while eye and ear grow wonted to
novel sights and sounds. Doubtless I did take note of trivial
things,--the call of a bird and the fragrance of a flower. It was a
pleasing relief after living so long with men whose minds were all the
time full of those serious and absorbing questions, "What shall we eat,
and what shall we drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed?"
I remember with special pleasure a profusion of white orchids
(_Habenaria dilatata_) which bordered the roadside not far from the top,
their spikes of waxy snow-white flowers giving out a rich, spicy odor
hardly to be distinguished from the scent of carnation pinks. I
remember, too, how the whole summit, from the Nose to the Chin, was
sprinkled with the modest and beautiful Greenland sandwort, springing up
in every little patch of thin soil, where nothing else would flourish,
and blossoming even under the door-step of the hotel. Unpretending as it
is, this little alpine adventurer makes the most of its beauty. The
blossoms are not crowded into close heads, so as to lose their
individual attractiveness, like the florets of the golden-rod, for
example; nor are they set in a stiff spike, after the manner of the
orchid just now mentioned. At the same time the plant does not trust to
the single flower to bring it into notice. It grows in a pretty tuft,
and throws out its blossoms in a graceful, loose cluster. The eye is
caught by the cluster, and yet each flower shows by itself, and its own
proper loveliness is in no way sacrificed to the general effect. How
wise, too, is the sandwort in its choice of a dwelling-place! In the
valley it would be lost amid the crowd. On the bare, brown mountain-top
its scattered tufts of green and white appeal to all comers.
To what extent, if at all, the sandwort depends upon the service of
insects for its fertilization, I do not know, but it certainly has no
scarcity of such visitors. "Bees will soar for bloom high as the highest
peak of Mansfield;" so runs an entry in my notebook, with a pardonable
adaptation of Wordsworth's line; and I was glad to notice that even the
splendid black-and-yellow butterfly (_Turnus_), which was often to be
seen sucking honey from the fragrant orchids, did not disdain to sip
also from the sandwort's cup. This large and elegant butterfly--our
largest--is thoroughly at home on our New England mountains, sailing
over the very loftiest peaks, and making its way through the forests
with a strong and steady flight. Many a time have I taken a second look
at one, as it has threaded the treetops over my head, thinking to see a
bird. Besides the _Turnus_, I noted here the nettle tortoise-shell
butterfly (_Vanessa Milberti_--a showy insect, and the more attractive
to me as being comparatively a stranger); the common cabbage butterfly;
the yellow _Philodice_; the copper; and, much more abundant than any of
these, a large orange-red fritillary (_Aphrodite_, I suppose),
gorgeously bedecked with spots of silver on the under surface of the
wings. All these evidently knew that plenty of flowers were to be found
along this seemingly barren, rocky crest. Whether they have any less
sensuous motive for loving to wander over such heights, who will presume
to determine? It may very well be that their almost ethereal
structure--such spread of wing with such lightness of body--is only the
outward sign of gracious thoughts and feelings, of a sensitiveness to
beauty far surpassing anything of which we ourselves are capable. What a
contrast between them and the grub gnawing ceaselessly under the
spruce-tree bark! Can the highest angel be as far above the lowest man?
And yet (how mysteriously suggestive would the fact be, if only it were
new to us!) this same light-winged Aphrodite, flitting from blossom to
blossom in the mountain breeze, was but a few days ago an ugly, crawling
thing, close cousin to the borer. Since then it has fallen asleep and
been changed,--a parable, past all doubt, though as yet we lack eyes to
read it.
I have spoken hitherto as if I were the only sojourner at the summit,
but there was another man, though I seldom saw him; a kind of hermit,
living in a little shanty under the lee of the Nose. Almost as a matter
of course he was reputed to be of good family and to read Greek, and the
fact that he now and then received a bank draft evidently gave him a
respectable standing in the eye of the hotel clerk. Something--something
of a very romantic nature, we may be sure--had driven him away from the
companionship of his fellows, but he still found it convenient to be
within reach of human society. Like all such solitaries, he had some
half-insane notions. He could not sleep indoors, not for a night; it
would ruin his health, if I understood him correctly; and because of
wild animals--bears and what not--he made his bed on the roof of his
hermitage. I had often dreamed of the enjoyment of a life in the woods
all by one's self, but such a mode of existence did not gain in
attractiveness as I saw it here in the concrete example. On the whole I
was well satisfied to sleep in the hotel and eat at the hotel table.
Liberty is good, but I thought it might be undesirable to be a slave to
my own freedom.
Two or three times a wagon-load of tourists appeared at the hotel. They
strolled about the summit, admired the prospect, picked a bunch of
sandwort, perhaps, but especially they went to see the snow. They had
been at much trouble to stand upon the highest land in Vermont, and now
that they were here, they wished to do or see something unique,
something that should mark the day as eventful. So they were piloted to
a cave midway between the Nose and the Chin, into which the sun never
peeped, and wherein a snow-bank still lingered. The mountain was grand,
the landscape was magnificent, but to eat a handful of snow and throw a
snow-ball in the middle of July--this was almost like being at the North
Pole; it would be something to talk about after getting home.
One visitor I rejoiced to see, though a stranger. I was on the Nose in
the afternoon, enjoying once more the view of Lake Champlain and the
Adirondacks, when I descried two men far off toward the Chin. They had
come up the mountain, not by the carriage road, but by a trail on the
opposite side, and plainly were in no haste, though the afternoon was
wearing away. As I watched their movements, a mile or two in the
distance, I said to myself, "Good! they are botanists." So it proved; or
rather one of them was a botanist,--a college professor on a pedestrian
collecting-excursion. We compared notes after supper and walked together
the next morning, enjoying that peculiar good fellowship which nothing
but a kindred interest and an unexpected meeting in a lonesome place can
make possible. Then he started down the carriage road with the design of
exploring Smugglers' Notch, and I have never seen or heard from him
since. I hope he is still botanizing on the shores of time, and finding
many a precious rarity; and should he ever read this reference to
himself, may it be with a feeling as kindly as that with which the lines
are written.