life; but Turney was prepared and ready for the emergency, and, raising
a huge old shot-gun, he levelled it, and yelled, “Don’t any on ye stir
ner move, or by Christopher I’ll blow the heels clean off’n the hull
_pile_ on ye. I’d _shoot_ ye quicker’n _lightni’_.”
And we believed him, for his aim was true, and his whole expression was
not that of a man who was trifling. I never shall forget the
uncomfortable sensation that I experienced as I looked into the muzzle
of that double-barrelled shot-gun, and saw both hammers fully raised
too. And I can clearly see now the squint and the glaring eye that
glanced along those barrels. There was a wonderfully persuasive power
lurking in those horizontal tubes; so I at once hastened to inform the
deacon that we were “not going to run.”
“Wa’al,” he drawled, “it looked a leetle thet _way_, I thort, a spell
_ago_;” and he still kept us in the field of his weapon, till at length
I exclaimed, in desperation.
“For gracious sake! point that gun in some other _way_, will you?”
“Wa’al, _no_! I’m not fer pintin’ it ennywhar else jest _yit_--not until
you’ve sot them ar _bags_ daown agin, jist whar ye _got_ ’em, every
_one_ on ye.” The bags were speedily replaced, and he slowly lowered his
gun.
[Illustration: AFTER THE SHELL-BARKS]
“Wa’al, naow,” he continued, as he came up in our midst, “this is putty
bizniss, _ain’t_ it? Bin havin’ a putty likely sort o’ time teu, I sh’d
jedge from the looks o’ these ’ere _bags_. One--two--_six_ on ’em; an’ I
vaow they must be nigh on teu a half bushel in every pleggy _one_ on
’em. Wa’al, naow”--with his peculiar drawl--“look eeah: you’re a putty
ondustrious lot o’ _thieves_, I’m _blest_ if ye ain’t.” But the deacon
did all the talking, for his manœuvres were such as to render us
speechless. “Putty likely place teu cum a-nuttin’, ain’t it?” Pause.
“Putty nice mess o’ shell-barks ye got thar, I tell ye naow.--Quite a
sight o’ _chestnuts_ in _yourn_, ain’t they?”
There was only one spoken side to this dialogue, but the pauses were
eloquent on both sides, and we boys kept up a deal of tall thinking as
we watched the deacon alternate his glib remarks by the gradual removal
of the bags to the foot of a neighboring tree. This done, he seated
himself upon a rock beside them.
“_Thar!_” he exclaimed, removing his tall hat and wiping his
white-fringed forehead with a red bandanna handkerchief. “I’m much
_obleeged_. I’ve been a-watchin’ on ye gittin’ these ’ere nuts the hull
arternoon. I thort ez haow yeu might like to know on’t.” And then, as
though a happy thought had struck him, what should he do but
deliberately spit on his hands and grasp his gun. “Look _ee_ah”--a
pause, in which he cocked both barrels--“yeu boys wuz paowerful anxyis
teu git _away_ from _ee_ah a spell ago. Naow yeu kin _git_ ez lively ez
yeu pleze; your chores is done fer to-day.” And bang! went one of the
gun-barrels directly over our heads.
We _got_, and when once out of gun-range we paid the deacon a wealth of
those rare compliments for both eye and ear that always swell the boys’
vocabulary.
“All right,” he yelled back in answer, as he transported the bags across
the field. “Cum agin next year--cum agin. Alluz welcome! alluz welcome!”
As I have already said, the deacon gathered all his nut
harvest--sometimes by a very novel method.
Who does not remember some such episode of the old jolly days? If it was
not a Deacon Turney, it was some one else. I am sure his counterpart
exists in every country town, and in the memory of every boyhood
experience.
We remember, perhaps, the sweet hazel-nuts which we gathered in their
brown husks and spread to dry upon the garret floor, and how those
mischievous mice avenged the deacon’s wrongs as they invaded our
treasured store, and transported it to the nooks and kinks among the
rafters and beneath the floor. Then there were those rambles after
“fox-grapes,” and the “gunning” tramps, when we stole with cautious step
upon the unseen “Bob White” whistling for us among the brush near by,
when the startling _whirr_ of the ruffed grouse from almost under our
feet sent an electric thrill up our backs and along our arms, even
touching off the powder in our barrels unawares. There were box-traps in
the woods, and snares among the copses, and lots of other mischief of
which we would not care to tell.
[Illustration: A CORNER OF THE FARM.]
There was another little three-cornered nut that fell among the
beech-trees where we held our October picnics, and the autumn beech
forest I remember as a lovely woodland parlor. We sit upon a painted
rock, in the shadow of a drooping hemlock, perhaps. Beyond, we look
across among the smooth gray tree-trunks, where sidelong shadows softly
stripe the matted leaves, with here and there a shining shaft of sunbeam
lighting up the carpet, or a glinting spray of sun-tipped leaves that
flicker above their shadows. The woods are filled with a luminous glow
such as no summer forest ever knew--an all-pervading light which seems
almost independent of the sunshine, as though living in the leaf itself.
It floods the mottled bark, and transforms its ashy tints to softened
autumn grays. It searches out the shadows of the evergreens, and throws
its mellow glow upon the rocks among their recesses. It permeates the
whole interior as though it were transfigured through a golden-colored
glass.
A quick, sharp whistle surprises you from the herbage near by, and a
striped chickaree skips across the leaves and dives into his burrow at
the foot of an old stump not far away. There are various other sounds
that come to you if you sit quietly in a beech wood. Now it is a tiny
footfall, a pat-pat upon the leaves, and a little brown bird is seen,
hopping in and out among the undergrowth, scratching and pecking like a
little hen among the leaf mould. Then comes a galloping sound, and you
know there is a scampering hare somewhere about. And at last a peeping
frog gains confidence, and starts up a trill somewhere behind you. He is
soon joined by another, and still others, until a chorus of the shrill
voices echoes among the trees, some from the around, some from the limbs
overhead; and if you only sit perfectly still, you may hear a
venturesome voice, perhaps, at your very elbow; for these little peepers
are capricious songsters, and only sing before a quiet, attentive
audience. Now a silly green katydid flits by, like an animated gauzy
leaf; and quick as thought a kingbird darts out from the leaves
overhead, hovers in mid-air for a second, and is away again; and
luckless katydid wishes she _hadn’t_.
See the variety of beeches, too! Here are slender, dappled stems, clean
and trim; and others, great giants with fluted trunks and gnarled roots,
and with eccentric limbs reaching out in most fantastic angles; but all
spreading above in a graceful, airy screen of intermingled tracery and
sunlight, where slender branches bend and sway beneath the agile
squirrel as he leaps from tree to tree, and the leaves clatter with the
falling nuts. Behind us a soft fluttering of many wings betrays a
slender mountain-ash, with its drooping clusters of berries, growing in
an open, rocky space near by--where a flock of cedar birds assemble
among the fruit, or scatter away amid the evergreens at your slightest
movement. Turning your head in another direction, you can follow the
course of an old farm-road that leads out upon a bright clearing,
thick-set with light-green, feathery ferns. A few rods beyond, it makes
a sudden downward turn through a dense grove of lofty pines and
hemlocks. Here are “dim aisles” where dwell perpetual twilight--where no
ray of sun has entered for well-nigh a century--only, perhaps, as it is
brought down in a glistening sunbeam within the crystal bead of balsam
upon some dropping cone. There is a solemn stillness in these stately
halls, in which your very footfall is proscribed and hushed in the
depths of the brown and silent carpet. There are old, venerable
gray-beards here, and fallen monarchs lying prostrate among the rugged
rocks; and here and there among the brown debris a fungus lifts its
head, to tell of other generations that lie crumbling beneath the mould.
Now among the lofty columns, like a magnificent illuminated window in
some vast cathedral, comes a glimpse of the outer world with its autumn
colors; and here the vaulted aisle soon leads us. We find a dazzling
contrast; for in the sombre shadows of the pine-forest one readily
forgets the month, or even the season. Here we approach a rippling
trout-stream, and as we stop to rest upon its tottering bridge we look
across a long brook meadow, where the asters screen the ground in
mid-air in a purple sea--one of the rarest spectacles of autumn. But in
this swamp lot there are presented a continual series of just such rich
displays from spring-time till the winter.
I know of no other place in which the progress of the year is so readily
traced as in these swampy fallow lands. They are a living calendar, not
merely of the seasons alone, but of every month successively; and its
record is almost unmistakably disclosed. It is whispered in the fragrant
breath of flowers, and of the aromatic herbage you crush beneath your
feet. It floats about on filmy wings of dragon-fly and butterfly, or
glistens in the air on silky seeds. It skips upon the surface of the
water, or swims among the weeds beneath; and is noised about in myriads
of tell-tale songs among the reeds and sedges. The swallows and the
starlings proclaim it in their flight, and the very absence of these
living features is as eloquent as life itself. Even in the simple story
of the leaf, the bud, the blossom, and the downy seed, it is told as
plainly as though written in prosaic words and strewn among the herbage.
In the early, blustering days of March, there is a stir beneath the
thawing ground, and the swamp cabbage-root sends up a well protected
scout to explore among the bogs; but so dismal are the tidings which he
brings, that for weeks no other venturing sprout dares lift its head. He
braves alone the stormy month--the solitary sign of spring, save,
perhaps, the lengthening of the alder catkins that loosen in the wind.
April woos the yellow cowslips into bloom along the water’s edge, and
the golden willow twigs shake out their perfumed tassels. In May the
prickly carex blossoms among the tussocks, and the calamus buds burst
forth among their flat, green blades. June is heralded on right and left
by the unfurling of blue-flags, and the eyebright blue winks and blinks
as it awakens in the dazzling July sun.
[Illustration: BEECH-NUTTING.]
Then follows brimful August, with the summer’s consummation of
luxuriance and bloom; with flowers in dense profusion in bouquets of
iron-weed and thoroughworts, of cardinal flowers and fragrant clethra,
with their host of blossoming companions. The milk-weed pods fray out
their early floss upon September breezes, and the blue petals of the
gentian first unfold their fringes. October overwhelms us with the
friendly tokens of burr marigolds and bidens; while its thickets of
black-alder lose their autumn verdure, and leave November with a
“burning bush” of scarlet berries hitherto half-hidden in the leafage.
Now, too, the copses of witch-hazel bedeck themselves, and are yellow
with their tiny ribbons. December’s name is written in wreaths of snow
upon the withered stalks of slender weeds and rushes, which soon lie
bent and broken in the lap of January, crushed beneath their winter
weight. And in fulfilment of the cycle, February sees the swelling buds
of willow, with their restless pussies eager for the spring, half
creeping from their winter cells.
The October day is a dream, bright and beautiful as the rainbow, and as
brief and fugitive. The same clouds and the same sun may be with us on
the morrow, but the rainbow will have gone. There is a destroyer that
goes abroad by night; he fastens upon every leaf, and freezes out its
last drop of life, and leaves it on the parent stem, pale, withered, and
dying.
Then come those closing days of dissolution, the saddest of the year,
when all nature is filled with phantoms, and the gaunt and naked trees
moan in the wind--every leaf a mockery, every breeze a sigh. The air
seems weighed with a premonition of the dreariness to come. The
landscape is darkened in a melancholy monotone, and death is written
everywhere. You may walk the woods and fields for hours without a gleam
of comfort or a cheering sound. We hear, perhaps, the hollow roll of the
woodpecker upon some neighboring tree; but even he is clad in mourning:
it is a muffled drum, and the resounding limb is dead. You sit beneath
the old oak-tree, but it is a lifeless rustle that grates upon your ear,
while you listen half beseechingly for some cheering note from the
robins in the thicket near; but they are coy and silent now, and their
flight is toward the southern hills. A villanous shrike must needs come
upon the scene: he alights upon a limb near by, with blood upon his
beak. Murder is in his eye, and his mission here is death. And now we
hear a noisy crow o’erhead: he perches upon a neighboring tree in hungry
scrutiny. And what is he but carrion’s bird, that revels in decay and
death, with raiment black as a funeral pall? In the cold gray sky we see
their scattered flocks blowing in the wind with sidelong flight, and in
the field below that mocking cadaver, the man of straw, shaking his
flimsy arms at them in wild contortions.
[Illustration: THE NORTH WIND.]
There is a hopeless despondency abroad in all the air, in which the
summer medleys of the birds taunt us with their memories. We yearn for
one such joyful sound to break the gloomy reverie. But what bird could
swell his throat in song amidst such cheerlessness? No, Nature does not
thus defeat her purpose. The hopefulness of Spring, the joyful
consummation of Summer, have fled; their mission is fulfilled, and these
are days for meditation on the past and future. All nature speaks of
death; and there are voices of despair, and others eloquent with hope
and trust. There are dead leaves that crumble into dust beneath our
feet; but, if we look higher, there are others that conceal the promise
of eternal life, where the undeveloped being, that perfect symbol,
weaves his silken shroud, and awaits the coming of his day of full
perfection. In the ground beneath he seeks his sepulchre, and he knows
that at the appointed time he will burst his cerements and fly away.
These are inobtrusive, silent testimonies; but they are here, and need
only to be sought to unfold their prophecies.
But there comes a respite even in these late gloomy days. There is a
lull in the work of devastation, in which the sunny skies and magic haze
of October come back to us in the charming dreaminess of the Indian
summer. A brief farewell--perhaps a day, perhaps a week; but however
long, it is a parting smile that we love to recall in the dreariness
that follows. The sky is luminous with soft sun-lit clouds, and the hazy
air is laden with spring-like breezes, with now and then a welcome
cricket-song or light-hearted bird-note, for, although long upon their
way, the birds have not yet all departed. They twitter cheerily among
the trees and thickets, and should you listen quietly you perhaps might
hear an echo of spring again in the warble of the robin upon the
dog-wood-tree. Here they have loitered by the way among the scarlet
berries. Not only robins, but cedar-birds and thrushes are here, in
successive flocks, from morn till night.
The fields are dull with faded golden-rods and asters, among whose downy
seeds the frolicking chickadees and snow-birds hold a jubilee. The maze
of twigs and branches in the distant hills has enveloped them in a smoky
gray, and the sound of rustling leaves follows your footsteps in your
woodland rambles. The fringe of yellow petals is unfolding on the
witch-hazel boughs, and if you only knew the place, you might discover
in some forsaken nook a solitary pale-blue lamp of fringed gentian still
flickering among the withered leaves. Now a lively twittering and a hum
of wings surprises you, and before you can turn your head a happy little
troop of birds sweep across your path, and are away among the
evergreens. They are white buntings, and their presence here is like a
chill, for they come from the icy regions of the North, and they bring
the snow upon their wings. The Indian summer is soon a thing of the
past. Perhaps before another daybreak it will have flown. There is no
dawn upon that morning. The night runs into a day of dismal, cheerless
twilight, and the sky is overcast with ominous darkness. That angry
cloud that left us, driven away before the conquering Spring, now lowers
above the northward mountain; we see its livid face and feel its
blighting breath--“a hard, dull bitterness of cold,” that sweeps along
the moor in noisy triumph, that howls and tears among the trembling
trees, and smothers out the last smouldering flame of faded Autumn.
The final leaf is torn from the tree. The lingering birds depart the
desolation for scenes more tranquil, and I too with them, for nothing
here invites my tarrying. The Autumn days are gone, grim Winter is at
our door, and the covering snow will soon enshroud the earth, subdued
and silent in its winter sleep.
[Illustration]
WINTER.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: THE SLEEP]
[Illustration: A WINTER IDYL
Prologue
A chill sad ending of a dreary day.
The waning light in stillness dies away.
Bequeaths no ray of hope the void to fill
But lends to gloomy thoughts more sadness still.
All nature hushed beneath a snowy shroud
Darkness and death their sovereign rule decree
O, reign of dread, of cruel blasts that kill
Thy cycle brings a heavy heart to me.
How many thus their Winter’s advent view
Whose darkened faith no daylight ever knew.
Alas for him who thinks the grave his doom
Or sees the sun go down behind the tomb.
“Seek and ye shall find”. On every hand
Mute prophecies their mission tell.
Yield but a listening ear and they shall say
‘The dead but sleep, they do not pass away’
Else why mid earth and heaven on yonder tree
That type of life in death, the living tomb?
Why the imago from dark cerements free
Winging its upward flight from earthly gloom?
Why this device supreme unless a prophecy
Of resurrected life and immortality.
Oh thou whose downcast eyes refuse to seek
See! even at the grave the sign is given.
The snow-clad evergreen, eternal life
Clothed in celestial purity from heaven.
Even thus life’s Winter should be blest
Not dark and dead but full of peace and rest.
]
Silently, like thoughts that come and go, the snow-flakes fall, each one
a gem. The whitened air conceals all earthly trace, and leaves to
memory the space to fill. I look upon a blank, whereon my fancy paints,
as could no hand of mine, the pictures and the poems of a boyhood life;
and even as the undertone of a painting, be it warm or cool, shall
modify or change the color laid upon it, so this cold and frosty
background through the window transfigures all my thoughts, and forms
them into winter memories legion like the snow. Oh that I could
translate for other eyes the winter idyl painted there! I see a living
past whose counterpart I well could wish might be a common fortune. I
see in all its joyous phases the gladsome winter in New England, the
snow-clad hills with bare and shivering trees, the homestead dear, the
old gray barn hemmed in with peaked drifts. I see the skating-pond, and
hear the ringing, intermingled shouts of the noisy, shuffling game, the
black ice written full with testimony of the winter’s brisk hilarity.
Down the hard-packed road with glancing sled I speed, past frightened
team and startled way-side groups; o’er “thank you, marms,” I fly in
clear mid-air, and crouching low, with sidelong spurts of snowy spray, I
sweep the sliding curve. Now past the village church and cosy parsonage.
Now scudding close beneath the hemlocks, hanging low with their piled
and tufted weight of snow. The way-side bits like dizzy streaks whiz by,
the old rail fence becomes a quivering tint of gray. The road-side weeds
bow after me, and in the swirling eddy chasing close upon my feet, sway
to and fro. Soon, like an arrow from the bow, I shoot across the “Town
Brook” bridge, and, jumping out beyond, skip the sinking ground, and
with an anxious eye and careful poise I “trim the ship,” and, hoping,
leave the rest to fate.
Perhaps I land on both runners, perhaps I don’t; that depends. I’ve
tried both ways I know, and if I remember rightly, I always found it
royal jolly fun; for what cared I at a bruise, or a pint of snow down my
back, when I got it there myself?
The average New England boy is hard to kill, and I was one of that kind.
Any boy who could brave the hidden mysteries and capricious favoritism
of those fifteen dislocating “thank you, marms,” and _hang together_
through it all, and, having so done, finish that experience with a
plunging double somersault into a crusted snow-bank, or, perchance, into
a stone wall--if he can do this, I say, and survive the fun, then there
is no reason why he should not live to tell of it in old age, for never
in the flesh will he go through a rougher ordeal. I’ve known a boy who
“_hated_ the old district school because the hard benches hurt him so,”
and who would rest his aching limbs for hours together in this gentle
sort of exercise. “The fine print made his eyes ache, and he couldn’t
study;” and yet when one day he comes home with one eye all colors of
the rainbow, “it’s _nothing_.” “Consistency is a jewel.” Boys don’t
generally wear jewels. But they are all alike. Boys will be boys, and if
they only live through it, they will some day look back and wonder at
their good fortune.
At the foot of that long hill the “Town Brook” gurgles on its winding
way, and passing beneath the weather-beaten bridge, it makes a sudden
turn, and spreads into a glassy pond behind the bulwarks of the saw-mill
dam. In summer, were we as near as this, we would hear the intermittent
ring of the whizzing saw, the clanking cogs, and the tuneful sounds of
the falling bark-bound slabs; but now, like its bare willows that were
wont to wave their leafy boughs with caressing touch upon the mossy
roof, the old mill shows no sign of life. Its pulse is frozen, and the
silent wheel is resting from its labors beneath a coverlet of snow. Who
is there who has not in some recess of the memory a dear old haunt like
this, some such sleeping pond radiant with reflections of the scenes of
early life? Thither in those winter days we came, our numbers swelled
from right and left with eager volunteers for the game, till at last,
almost a hundred strong, we rally on the smooth black ice.
[Illustration: SNOW-FLAKES OF MEMORY.]
The opposing leaders choose their sides, and with loud hurrahs we
penetrate the thickets at the water’s edge, each to cut his special
choice of stick--that festive cudgel, with curved and club-shaped end,
known to the boy as a “shinney-stick,” but to the calm recollection of
after-life principally as an instrument of torture, indiscriminately
promiscuous in its playful moments. Were I to swing one of those dainty
little clubs again, I would rather that the end were tied up in
something soft, and that this should be the universal rule; otherwise I
don’t think I would play. I would prefer to sit on the bank and watch
the sport, or make myself useful in looking after the dead and wounded.
But to the “average New England boy” it makes a great deal of difference
who swings the club, and what it is swung for. If it is whirled in
_play_, and takes him with a blow that _ought_ to kill him, and _would_
if he were not a boy, why then he laughs, and thinks it’s good fun, and
goes in and gets another. But if the parental guardian has any reason to
swing a stick even one-tenth the size, the whole neighborhood thinks
there is a boy being murdered. So much depends upon a name sometimes.
[Illustration: THE OLD MILL-POND.]