It is a wonder that every New England boy does not turn out a poet, or
a missionary, or a peddler. Most of them used to. There is everything in
the heart of the New England hills to feed the imagination of the boy,
and excite his longing for strange countries. I scarcely know what
the subtle influence is that forms him and attracts him in the most
fascinating and aromatic of all lands, and yet urges him away from all
the sweet delights of his home to become a roamer in literature and in
the world, a poet and a wanderer. There is something in the soil and
the pure air, I suspect, that promises more romance than is forthcoming,
that excites the imagination without satisfying it, and begets the
desire of adventure. And the prosaic life of the sweet home does not at
all correspond to the boy's dreams of the world. In the good old days,
I am told, the boys on the coast ran away and became sailors; the
countryboys waited till they grew big enough to be missionaries, and
then they sailed away, and met the coast boys in foreign ports. John
used to spend hours in the top of a slender hickory-tree that a little
detached itself from the forest which crowned the brow of the steep and
lofty pasture behind his house. He was sent to make war on the bushes
that constantly encroached upon the pastureland; but John had no
hostility to any growing thing, and a very little bushwhacking satisfied
him. When he had grubbed up a few laurels and young tree-sprouts, he
was wont to retire into his favorite post of observation and meditation.
Perhaps he fancied that the wide-swaying stem to which he clung was the
mast of a ship; that the tossing forest behind him was the heaving waves
of the sea; and that the wind which moaned over the woods and murmured
in the leaves, and now and then sent him a wide circuit in the air,
as if he had been a blackbird on the tip-top of a spruce, was an
ocean gale. What life, and action, and heroism there was to him in the
multitudinous roar of the forest, and what an eternity of existence in
the monologue of the river, which brawled far, far below him over its
wide stony bed! How the river sparkled and danced and went on, now in a
smooth amber current, now fretted by the pebbles, but always with
that continuous busy song! John never knew that noise to cease, and he
doubted not, if he stayed here a thousand years, that same loud murmur
would fill the air.
On it went, under the wide spans of the old wooden, covered bridge,
swirling around the great rocks on which the piers stood, spreading away
below in shallows, and taking the shadows of a row of maples that lined
the green shore. Save this roar, no sound reached him, except now and
then the rumble of a wagon on the bridge, or the muffled far-off voices
of some chance passers on the road. Seen from this high perch, the
familiar village, sending its brown roofs and white spires up through
the green foliage, had a strange aspect, and was like some town in a
book, say a village nestled in the Swiss mountains, or something in
Bohemia. And there, beyond the purple hills of Bozrah, and not so far as
the stony pastures of Zoah, whither John had helped drive the colts and
young stock in the spring, might be, perhaps, Jerusalem itself. John had
himself once been to the land of Canaan with his grandfather, when he
was a very small boy; and he had once seen an actual, no-mistake Jew,
a mysterious person, with uncut beard and long hair, who sold
scythe-snaths in that region, and about whom there was a rumor that he
was once caught and shaved by the indignant farmers, who apprehended in
his long locks a contempt of the Christian religion. Oh, the world
had vast possibilities for John. Away to the south, up a vast basin of
forest, there was a notch in the horizon and an opening in the line of
woods, where the road ran. Through this opening John imagined an army
might appear, perhaps British, perhaps Turks, and banners of red and of
yellow advance, and a cannon wheel about and point its long nose, and
open on the valley. He fancied the army, after this salute, winding down
the mountain road, deploying in the meadows, and giving the valley to
pillage and to flame. In which event his position would be an excellent
one for observation and for safety. While he was in the height of
this engagement, perhaps the horn would be blown from the back porch,
reminding him that it was time to quit cutting brush and go for the
cows. As if there were no better use for a warrior and a poet in New
England than to send him for the cows!
John knew a boy--a bad enough boy I daresay--who afterwards became a
general in the war, and went to Congress, and got to be a real governor,
who also used to be sent to cut brush in the back pastures, and hated it
in his very soul; and by his wrong conduct forecast what kind of a man
he would be. This boy, as soon as he had cut about one brush, would
seek for one of several holes in the ground (and he was familiar with
several), in which lived a white-and-black animal that must always be
nameless in a book, but an animal quite capable of the most pungent
defense of himself. This young aspirant to Congress would cut a long
stick, with a little crotch in the end of it, and run it into the hole;
and when the crotch was punched into the fur and skin of the animal,
he would twist the stick round till it got a good grip on the skin, and
then he would pull the beast out; and when he got the white-and-black
just out of the hole so that his dog could seize him, the boy would take
to his heels, and leave the two to fight it out, content to scent the
battle afar off. And this boy, who was in training for public life,
would do this sort of thing all the afternoon, and when the sun told him
that he had spent long enough time cutting brush, he would industriously
go home as innocent as anybody. There are few such boys as this
nowadays; and that is the reason why the New England pastures are so
much overgrown with brush.
John himself preferred to hunt the pugnacious woodchuck. He bore a
special grudge against this clover-eater, beyond the usual hostility
that boys feel for any wild animal. One day on his way to school
a woodchuck crossed the road before him, and John gave chase. The
woodchuck scrambled into an orchard and climbed a small apple-tree. John
thought this a most cowardly and unfair retreat, and stood under the
tree and taunted the animal and stoned it. Thereupon the woodchuck
dropped down on John and seized him by the leg of his trousers. John was
both enraged and scared by this dastardly attack; the teeth of the enemy
went through the cloth and met; and there he hung. John then made a
pivot of one leg and whirled himself around, swinging the woodchuck
in the air, until he shook him off; but in his departure the woodchuck
carried away a large piece of John's summer trousers-leg. The boy never
forgot it. And whenever he had a holiday, he used to expend an amount
of labor and ingenuity in the pursuit of woodchucks that would have made
his fortune in any useful pursuit. There was a hill pasture, down
on one side of which ran a small brook, and this pasture was full of
woodchuck-holes. It required the assistance of several boys to capture a
woodchuck. It was first necessary by patient watching to ascertain that
the woodchuck was at home. When one was seen to enter his burrow, then
all the entries to it except one--there are usually three--were plugged
up with stones. A boy and a dog were then left to watch the open hole,
while John and his comrades went to the brook and began to dig a canal,
to turn the water into the residence of the woodchuck. This was often a
difficult feat of engineering, and a long job. Often it took more than
half a day of hard labor with shovel and hoe to dig the canal. But when
the canal was finished and the water began to pour into the hole, the
excitement began. How long would it take to fill the hole and drown out
the woodchuck? Sometimes it seemed as if the hole was a bottomless pit.
But sooner or later the water would rise in it, and then there was sure
to be seen the nose of the woodchuck, keeping itself on a level with
the rising flood. It was piteous to see the anxious look of the hunted,
half-drowned creature as it came to the surface and caught sight of
the dog. There the dog stood, at the mouth of the hole, quivering with
excitement from his nose to the tip of his tail, and behind him were the
cruel boys dancing with joy and setting the dog on. The poor creature
would disappear in the water in terror; but he must breathe, and out
would come his nose again, nearer the dog each time. At last the water
ran out of the hole as well as in, and the soaked beast came with it,
and made a desperate rush. But in a trice the dog had him, and the boys
stood off in a circle, with stones in their hands, to see what they
called “fair play.” They maintained perfect “neutrality” so long as the
dog was getting the best of the woodchuck; but if the latter was likely
to escape, they “interfered” in the interest of peace and the “balance
of power,” and killed the woodchuck. This is a boy's notion of justice;
of course, he'd no business to be a woodchuck,--an unspeakable
woodchuck.
I used the word “aromatic” in relation to the New England soil. John
knew very well all its sweet, aromatic, pungent, and medicinal products,
and liked to search for the scented herbs and the wild fruits and
exquisite flowers; but he did not then know, and few do know, that there
is no part of the globe where the subtle chemistry of the earth produces
more that is agreeable to the senses than a New England hill-pasture and
the green meadow at its foot. The poets have succeeded in turning our
attention from it to the comparatively barren Orient as the land of
sweet-smelling spices and odorous gums. And it is indeed a constant
surprise that this poor and stony soil elaborates and grows so many
delicate and aromatic products.
John, it is true, did not care much for anything that did not appeal to
his taste and smell and delight in brilliant color; and he trod down the
exquisite ferns and the wonderful mosses--without compunction. But he
gathered from the crevices of the rocks the columbine and the eglantine
and the blue harebell; he picked the high-flavored alpine strawberry,
the blueberry, the boxberry, wild currants and gooseberries, and
fox-grapes; he brought home armfuls of the pink-and-white laurel and the
wild honeysuckle; he dug the roots of the fragrant sassafras and of
the sweet-flag; he ate the tender leaves of the wintergreen and its red
berries; he gathered the peppermint and the spearmint; he gnawed
the twigs of the black birch; there was a stout fern which he called
“brake,” which he pulled up, and found that the soft end “tasted good;”
he dug the amber gum from the spruce-tree, and liked to smell, though he
could not chew, the gum of the wild cherry; it was his melancholy duty
to bring home such medicinal herbs for the garret as the gold-thread,
the tansy, and the loathsome “boneset;” and he laid in for the winter,
like a squirrel, stores of beechnuts, hazel-nuts, hickory-nuts,
chestnuts, and butternuts. But that which lives most vividly in his
memory and most strongly draws him back to the New England hills is the
aromatic sweet-fern; he likes to eat its spicy seeds, and to crush in
his hands its fragrant leaves; their odor is the unique essence of New
England.