Books by Mr. Torrey.
=EVERYDAY BIRDS.= Elementary Studies. With twelve colored
Illustrations reproduced from Audubon. Square 12mo, $1.00.
=BIRDS IN THE BUSH.= 16mo, $1.25.
=A RAMBLER’S LEASE.= 16mo, $1.25.
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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
FOOTING IT IN
FRANCONIA
BY
BRADFORD TORREY
“And now each man bestride his hobby, and
dust away his bells to what tune he pleases.”
CHARLES LAMB.
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1901
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY BRADFORD TORREY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October, 1901_
CONTENTS.
PAGE
AUTUMN 1
SPRING 79
A DAY IN JUNE 120
BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 147
RED LEAF DAYS 177
AMERICAN SKYLARKS 195
A QUIET MORNING 208
IN THE LANDAFF VALLEY 217
A VISIT TO MOUNT AGASSIZ 228
FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA
AUTUMN
“There did they dwell,
As happy spirits as were ever seen;
If but a bird, to keep them company,
Or butterfly sate down, they were, I ween,
As pleased as if the same had been a Maiden-queen.”
WORDSWORTH.
Five or six hours of pleasant railway travel, up the course of one
river valley after another,--the Merrimac, the Pemigewasset, the
Baker, the Connecticut, and finally the Ammonoosuc,--not to forget the
best hour of all, on the shores of Lake Winnipisaukee, the spacious
blue water now lying full in the sun, now half concealed by a fringe
of woods, with mountains and hills, Chocorua, Paugus, and the rest,
shifting their places beyond it, appearing and disappearing as the
train follows the winding track,--five or six hours of this delightful
panoramic journey, and we leave the cars at Littleton. Then a few miles
in a carriage up a long, steep hill through a glorious autumn-scented
forest, the horses pausing for breath as one water-bar after another
is surmounted, and we are at the height of land, where two or three
highland farmers have cleared some rocky acres, built houses and
painted them, and planted gardens and orchards. As we reach this
happy clearing all the mountains stand facing us on the horizon, and
below, between us and Lafayette, lies the valley of Franconia, toward
which, again through stretches of forest, we rapidly descend. At the
bottom of the way Gale River comes dancing to meet us, babbling among
its boulders,--more boulders than water at this end of the summer
heats,--in its cheerful uphill progress. Its uphill progress, I say,
and repeat it; and if any reader disputes the word, then he has never
been there and seen the water for himself, or else he is an unfortunate
who has lost his child’s heart (without which there is no kingdom of
heaven for a man), and no longer lives by faith in his own senses.
On the spot I have called the attention of many to it, and they have
every one agreed with me. Mountain rivers have attributes of their own;
or, possibly, the mountains themselves lay some spell upon the running
water or upon the beholder’s eyesight. Be that as it may, Lafayette
all the while draws nearer and nearer, we going one way and Gale
River the other, until, after leaving the village houses behind us,
we alight almost at its base. Solemn and magnificent, it is yet most
companionable, standing thus in front of one’s door, the first thing to
be looked at in the morning, and the last at night.
The last thing to be _thought_ of at night is the weather,--the weather
and what goes with it and depends upon it, the question of the next
day’s programme. In a hill country meteorological prognostications are
proverbially difficult; but we have learned to “hit it right” once in
a while; and, right or wrong, we never omit our evening forecast. “It
looks like a fair day to-morrow,” says one. “Well,” answers the other,
with no thought of discourtesy in the use of the subjunctive particle,
“if it is, what say you to walking to Bethlehem by the way of Wallace
Hill, and taking in Mount Agassiz on our return after dinner?” Or the
prophet speaks more doubtfully, and the other says, “Oh well, if it is
cloudy and threatening, we will go the Landaff Valley round, and see
what birds are in the larch swamp. If it seems to have set in for a
steady rain, we can try the Butter Hill road.”
And so it goes. In Franconia it must be a very bad half day indeed when
we fail to stretch our legs with a five or six mile jaunt. I speak of
those of us who foot it. The more ease-loving, or less uneasy members
of the party, who keep their carriage, are naturally less independent
of outside conditions. When it rains they amuse themselves indoors; a
pitch of sensibleness which the rest of us may sometimes regard with
a shade of envy, perhaps, though we have never admitted as much to
each other, much less to any one else. To plod through the mud is more
exhilarating than to sit before a fire; and we leave the question of
reasonableness and animal comfort on one side. Time is short, and we
decline to waste it on theoretical considerations.
Our company, as I say, is divided: carriage people and pedestrians, we
may call them; or, if you like, drivers and footmen. The walkers are
now no more than the others. Formerly--till this present autumn--they
were three. Now, alas, one of them walks no longer on earth. The hills
that knew him so well know him no more. The asters and goldenrods
bloom, but he comes not to gather them. The maples redden, but he comes
not to see them. Yet in a better and truer sense he is with us still;
for we remember him, and continually talk of him. If we pass a sphagnum
bog, we think how at this point he used to turn aside and put a few
mosses into his box. Some professor in Germany, or a scholar in New
Haven, had asked him to collect additional specimens. In those days of
his sphagnum absorption we called him sometimes the “sphagnostic.”
If we come down a certain steep pitch in the road from Garnet Hill,
we remind each other that here he always stopped to look for _Aster
Lindleyanus_, telling us meanwhile how problematical the identity
of the plant really was. Professor So-and-So had pronounced it
Lindleyanus, but Doctor Somebody-Else believed it to be only an odd
form of a commoner species. In the Wallace Hill woods, I remember how
we spent an afternoon there, he and I, only two years ago, searching
for an orchid which just then had come newly under discussion among
botanists, and how pleased he was when for once my eyes were luckier
than his. If we are on the Landaff road, my companion asks, “Do you
remember the Sunday noon when we went home and told E---- that this
wood was full of his rare willow? And how he posted over here by
himself, directly after dinner, to see it? And how he said, in a tone
of whimsical entreaty, ‘Please don’t find it anywhere else; we mustn’t
let it become too common’?” Oh yes, I remember; and my companion
knows he has no need to remind me of it; but he loves to talk of the
absent,--and he knows I love to hear him.
That willow I can never see anywhere without thinking of the man who
first told me about it. Whether I pass the single small specimen
between Franconia and the Profile House, so close upon the highway that
the road-menders are continually cutting it back, or the one on the
Bethlehem road, or the great cluster of stems on Wallace Hill, it will
always be _his_ willow.
And indeed this whole beautiful hill country is his. How happy he
was in it! I used sometimes to talk to him about the glories of our
Southern mountains,--Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia; but he was
never to be enticed away even in thought. “I think I shall never go
out of New England again,” he would answer, with a smile; and he never
did, though in his youth he had traveled more widely than I am ever
likely to do. The very roadsides here must miss him, and wonder why
he no longer passes, with his botanical box slung over his shoulder
and an opera-glass in his hand,--equally ready for a plant or a bird.
He was always looking for something, and always finding it. With his
happiness, his goodness, his gentle dignity, his philosophic temper,
his knowledge of his own mind, his love of all things beautiful, he has
made Franconia a dear place for all of us who knew him here.
To me, as to all of us, it is dear also for its own sake. This season I
returned to it alone,--with no walking mate, I mean to say. He was to
join me later, but for eight or ten days I was to follow the road by
myself. At night I must make my own forecast of the weather and lay out
my own morrow.
The first day was one of the good ones, fair and still. As I came out
upon the piazza before breakfast and looked up at Lafayette, a solitary
vireo was phrasing sweetly from the bushes on one side of the house,
and two or three vesper sparrows were remembering the summer from the
open fields on the other side. It was the 22d of September, and by this
time the birds knew how to appreciate a day of brightness and warmth.
Seeing them in such a mood, I determined to spend the forenoon in their
society. I would take the road to Sinclair’s Mills,--a woodsy jaunt,
yet not too much in the forest, always birdy from one end to the other.
“This is living!” I found myself repeating aloud, as I went up the
longish hill to the plateau above Gale River, on the Bethlehem road.
“This is living!” No more books, no more manuscripts,--my own or other
people’s,--no more errands to the city. How good the air was! How
glorious the mountains, unclouded, but hazy! How fragrant the ripening
herbage in the shelter of the woods!--an odor caught for an instant,
and then gone again; something that came of itself, not to be detected,
much less traced to its source, by any effort or waiting. The forests
were still green,--I had to look closely to find here and there the
first touch of red or yellow; but the flowering season was mostly
over, a few ragged asters and goldenrods being the chief brighteners
of the wayside. About the sunnier patches of them, about the asters
especially, insects were hovering, still drinking honey before it
should be too late: yellow butterflies, bumble-bees (of some northern
kind, apparently, marked with orange, and not so large as our common
Massachusetts fellow), with swarms of smaller creatures of many sorts.
If I stopped to attend to it, each aster bunch was a world by itself.
And more than once I did stop. There was no haste; I had chosen my
route partly with a view to just such idling; and the birds were, and
were likely to be, nothing but old favorites. And they proved to be
not many, after all. The best of them were the winter wrens, which I
thought I had never seen more numerous; every one fretting, _tut, tut_,
in their characteristic manner, without a note of song.
On my way back, the sun being higher, there were many butterflies in
the road, flat on the sand, with wings outspread. If ever there is
comfort in the world, the butterfly feels it at such times. Here and
there half a dozen or more of yellow ones would be huddled about a damp
spot. There were mourning-cloaks, also, and many small angle-wings,
some species of _Grapta_, I knew not which, of a peculiarly bright red.
Once or twice, wishing a name for them, I essayed to catch a specimen
under my hat; but it seemed a small business, at which I was only half
ashamed to find myself grown inexpert.
The forenoon was not without its tragedy, nevertheless. As I came out
into the open, on my return from the river woods toward the Bethlehem
road, a carriage stopped across the field; a man jumped out, gun in
hand, ran up to an unoccupied house standing there by itself, with a
tract of low meadow behind it, peeped cautiously round the corner,
lifted his gun, leveled it upon something with the quickness of a
practiced marksman, and fired. Then down the grassy slope he went on
the run out of sight, and in a minute reappeared, holding a crow by
its claw. He took the trophy into the carriage with him,--two ladies
and a second man occupying the other seats,--and as I emerged from the
pine wood, fifteen minutes afterward, I found it lying in the middle
of the road. Its shining feathers would fly no more; but its death had
brightened the day of some of the lords and ladies of creation. What
happier fate could a crow ask for?
One of my first desires, this time (there is always something in
particular on my mind when I go to Franconia), was to revisit Lonesome
Lake, a romantic sheet of water lying deep in the wilderness on the
back side of Mount Cannon, at an elevation of perhaps twenty-eight
hundred feet, or something less than a thousand feet above the level
of Profile Notch. One of its two owners, fortunately, is of our
Franconia company; and when I spoke of my intention of visiting it
again, he bade me drive up with his man, who would be going that way
within a day or two. Late as the season was getting, he still went
up to the lake once or twice a week, it appeared, keeping watch over
the cabin, boat-house, and so forth. The plan suited my convenience
perfectly. We drove to the foot of the bridle path, off the Notch road;
the man put a saddle on the horse and rode up, and I followed on foot.
The climb is longer or shorter, as the climber may elect. A pedestrian
would do it in thirty minutes, or a little less, I suppose; a
nature-loving stroller may profitably be two hours about it. There
must be at least a hundred trees along the path, which a sensitive man
might be glad to stop and commune with: ancient birches, beeches, and
spruces, any one of which, if it could talk, or rather if we had ears
to hear it, would tell us things not to be read in any book. Hundreds
of years many of the spruces must have stood there. Some of them, in
all likelihood, were of a good height long before any white man set
foot on this continent. Many of them were already old before they ever
saw a paleface. What dwarfs and weaklings these restless creatures are,
that once in a while come puffing up the hillside, halting every few
minutes to get their breath and stare foolishly about! What murderer’s
curse is on them, that they have no home, no abiding-place, where they
can stay and get their growth?
It is a precious and solemn stillness that falls upon a man in these
lofty woods. Across the narrow pass, as he looks through the branches,
are the long, rugged upper slopes of Lafayette, torn with slides and
gashed into deep ravines. Far over his head soar the trees, tall,
branchless trunks pushing upward and upward, seeking the sun. In their
leafy tops the wind murmurs, and here and there a bird is stirring.
Now a chickadee lisps, or a nuthatch calls to his fellow. Out of the
tangled, round-leaved hobble-bushes underneath an occasional robin
may start with a quick note of surprise, or a flock of white-throats
or snowbirds will fly up one by one to gaze at the intruder. In one
place I hear the faint smooth-voiced signals of a group of Swainson
thrushes and the chuck of a hermit. A few siskins (rarer than usual
this year, it seems to me) pass overhead, sounding their curious,
long-drawn whistle, as if they were blowing through a fine-toothed
comb. Further up, I stand still at the tapping of a woodpecker just
before me. Yes, there he is, on a dead spruce. A sapsucker, I call him
at the first glance. But I raise my glass. No, it is not a sapsucker,
but a bird of one of the three-toed species; a male, for I see his
yellow crown-patch. His back is black. And now, of a sudden, a second
one joins him. I am in great luck. This is a bird I have never seen
before except once, and that many years ago on Mount Washington, in
Tuckerman’s Ravine. The pair are gone too soon, and, patiently as I
linger about the spot, I see no more of them. A pity they could not
have broken silence. It is little we know of a bird or of a man till we
hear him speak.
At the lake there are certain to be numbers of birds; not water
birds, for the most part,--though I steal forward quietly at the last,
hoping to surprise a duck or two, or a few sandpipers, as sometimes
I have done,--but birds of the woods. The water makes a break in the
wilderness,--a natural rendezvous, as we may say; it lets in the sun,
also, and attracts insects; and birds of many kinds seem to enjoy its
neighborhood. I do not wonder. To-day I notice first a large flock of
white-throats, and a smaller flock of cedar-birds. The latter, when
I first discover them, are in the conical tops of the tall spruces,
whence they rise into the air, one after another, with a peculiar
motion, as if a hand had tossed them aloft. They are catching insects,
a business at which no bird can be more graceful, I think, though
some may have been at it longer and more exclusively. Their behavior
is suggestive of play rather than of a serious occupation. Near the
white-throats are snowbirds, and in the firs by the lakeside chickadees
are stirring, among which, to my great satisfaction, I presently
hear a few Hudsonian voices. _Sick-a-day-day_, they call, and soon a
little brown-headed fellow is directly at my elbow. I stretch out
my hand, and chirp encouragingly. He comes within three or four feet
of it, and looks and looks at me, but is not to be coaxed nearer.
_Sick-a-day-day-day_, he calls again (“I don’t like strangers,” he
means to tell me), and away he flits. He is almost always here, and
right glad I am to see him on my annual visit. I have never been
favored with a sight of him further south.
The lake is like a mirror, and I sit in the boat with the sun on my
back (as comfortable as a butterfly), listening and looking. What else
can I do? I have pulled out far enough to bring the top of Lafayette
into view above the trees, and have put down the oars. The birds are
mostly invisible. Chickadees can be heard talking among themselves,
a flicker calls _wicker, wicker_, whatever that means, and once a
kingfisher springs his rattle. Red squirrels seem to be ubiquitous,
full of sauciness and chatter. How very often their clocks need
winding! A few big dragon-flies are still shooting over the water. But
the best thing of all is the place itself: the solitude, the brooding
sky (the lake’s own, it seems to be), the solemn mountain-top, the
encircling forest, the musical woodsy stillness. The rowan trees were
never so bright with berries. Here and there one still holds full of
green leaves, with the ripe red clusters shining everywhere among them.
After luncheon I must sit for a while in the forest itself. Every
breath in the treetops, unfelt at my level, brings down a sprinkling
of yellow birch leaves, each with a faint rustle, like a whispered
good-by, as it strikes against the twigs in its fall. Every one
preaches its sermon, and I know the text,--“We all do fade.” May the
rest of us be as happy as the leaves, and fade only when the time is
ripe. A nuthatch, busy with his day’s work, passes near me. Small as he
is, I hear his wing-beats. A squirrel jumps upon the very log on which
I am seated, but is off in a jiffy on catching sight of so unexpected
a neighbor. So short a log is not big enough for two of us, he thinks.
By and by I hear a bird stirring on a branch overhead, and look up to
find him a red-eyed vireo. One of the belated, he must be, according
to my almanac. He peers down at me with inquisitive, sidelong glances.
A man!--in such a place!--and sitting still! I like to believe that
he, as well as I, feels a pleasurable surprise at the unlooked-for
encounter. We call him the preacher, but he is not sermonizing to-day,
perhaps because the falling leaves have taken the words out of his
mouth.
It is one of the best things about a place like this that it gives a
man a most unusual feeling of remoteness and isolation. To be here
is not the same as to be in some equally wild and silent spot nearer
to human habitations. The sense of the climb we have made, of the
wilderness we have traversed, still folds us about. The fever and the
fret, so constant with us as to be mostly unrealized or taken for the
normal state of man, are for the moment gone, and peace settles upon
the heart. For myself, at least, there is an unspeakable sweetness in
such an hour. I could stay here, forever, I think, till I became a
tree. That feeling I have often had,--a state of ravishment, a kind of
absorption into the life of things about me. It will not last, and I
know it will not; but it is like heaven, for the time it is on me,--a
foretaste, perhaps, of the true Nirvana.
Yet to-day--so self-contradictory a creature is man--there were some
things I missed. The dreamer was still a hobbyist, and the hobbyist had
been in the Lonesome Lake woods before; and he wondered what had become
of the crossbills. The common red ones were always here, I should have
said, and on more than one visit I had found the rarer and lovelier
white-winged species. Now, in all the forest chorus, not a crossbill’s
note was audible.
One day, bright like this, I was sitting at luncheon on the sunny stoop
of the cabin, facing the water, when I caught a sudden glimpse of a
white-wing, as I felt sure, about some small decaying gray logs on the
edge of the lake just before me, the remains of a disused landing. The
next moment the bird dropped out of sight between two of them. I sat
motionless, glass in hand, and eyes fixed (so I could almost have made
oath) upon the spot where he had disappeared. I fancied he was at
his bath. Minute after minute elapsed. There was no sign of him, and
at last I left my seat and made my way stealthily down to the shore.
Nothing rose. I tramped over the logs, with no result. It was like
magic,--the work of some evil spirit. I began almost to believe that my
eyes had been made the fools of the other senses. If I had seen a bird
there, where in the name of reason could it have gone? It could not
have dropped into the water, seeking winter quarters in the mud at the
bottom, according to the notions of our old-time ornithologists!
Half an hour afterward, having finished my luncheon, I went into the
woods along the path; and there, presently, I discovered a mixed flock
of crossbills,--red ones and white-wings,--feeding so quietly that till
now I had not suspected their presence. My waterside bird was doubtless
among them; and doubtless my eyes had not been fixed upon the place of
his disappearance quite so uninterruptedly as I had imagined. It was
not the first time that such a thing had happened to me. How frequently
have we all seen a bird dart into a bit of cover, and never come out!
If we are watchful and clever, we are not the only ones.
Luck has no little to do with a bird-lover’s success or failure in any
particular walk. If we go and go, patience will have its wages; but if
we can go but once or twice, we must take what Fortune sends, be it
little or much. So it had been with me and the three-toed woodpeckers,
that morning. I had chanced to arrive at that precise point in the
path just at the moment when they chanced to alight upon that dead
spruce,--one tree among a million. What had been there ten minutes
before, and what came ten minutes after, I shall never know. So it
was again on the descent, which I protracted as much as possible, for
love of the woods and for the hope of what I might find in them. I was
perhaps halfway down when I heard thrush calls near by: the whistle of
an olive-back and the chuck of a hermit, both strongly characteristic,
slight as they seem. I halted, of course, and on the instant some large
bird flew past me and perched in full sight, only a few rods away.
There he sat facing me, a barred owl, his black eyes staring straight
into mine. How big and solemn they looked! Never tell me that the
barred owl cannot see by daylight.
The thrushes had followed him. It was he, and not a human intruder, to
whom they had been addressing themselves. Soon the owl flew a little
further away (it was wonderful how large he looked in the air), the
thrushes still after him; and in a few minutes more he took wing
again. This time several robins joined the hermit and the olive-back,
and all hands disappeared up the mountain side. Probably the pursuers
were largely reinforced as the chase proceeded, and I imagined the big
fellow pretty thoroughly mobbed before he got safely away. Every small
bird has his opinion of an owl.
What interested me as much as anything connected with the whole affair
was the fact that the olive-back, even in his excitement, made use of
nothing but his mellow staccato whistle, such as he employs against the
most inoffensive of chance human disturbers. Like the chickadee, and
perhaps some other birds, he is musical, and not over-emphatic, even in
his anger.
Again and again I rested to admire the glory of Mount Lafayette, which
loomed more grandly than ever, I was ready to declare, seen thus
partially and from this point of vantage. Twice, at least, I had been
on its summit in such a fall day,--once on the 1st of October, and
again, the year afterward, on a date two days earlier. That October day
was one of the fairest I ever knew, both in itself (and perfect weather
is a rare thing, try as we may to speak nothing but good of the doings
of Providence) and in the pleasure it brought me.
For the next year’s ascent, which I remember more in detail, we
chose--a brother Franconian and myself--a morning when the tops of the
mountains, as seen from the valley lands, were white with frost or
snow. We wished to find out for ourselves which it was, and just how
the mountain looked under such wintry conditions.
The spectacle would have repaid us for a harder climb. A cold northwest
wind (it was still blowing) had swept over the summit and coated
everything it struck, foliage and rocks alike, with a thick frost (half
an inch or more in depth, if my memory is to be trusted), white as
snow, but almost as hard as ice. The effect was strangely beautiful.
A dwarf fir tree, for instance, would be snow white on one side and
bright green on the other. As we looked along the sharp ridge running
to the South Peak, so called (the very ridge at the face of which I was
now gazing from the Lonesome Lake path), one slope was white, the other
green. Summer and winter were divided by an inch.
We nestled in the shelter of the rocks, on the south side of the
summit, courting the sun and avoiding the wind, and lay there for
two hours, exulting in the prospect, and between times nibbling
our luncheon, which latter we “topped off” with a famous dessert
of berries, gathered on the spot: three sorts of blueberries, and,
for a sour, the mountain cranberry. The blueberries were _Vaccinium
uliginosum_, _V. cæspitosum_, and _V. Pennsylvanicum_ (there is no
doing without the Latin names), their comparative abundance being in
the order given. The first two were really plentiful. All of them,
of course, grew on dwarf bushes, matting the ground between the
boulders. At that exposed height not even a blueberry bush ventures
to stand upright. One of them, _V. cæspitosum_, was both a surprise
and a luxury, the small berries having a most deliciously rich fruity
flavor, like the choicest of bananas! Probably no botanical writer has
ever mentioned the point, and I have great satisfaction in supplying
the deficiency, apprehending no rush of epicures to the place in
consequence. About the fact itself there can be no manner of doubt.
My companion fully agreed with me, and he is not only a botanist of
international repute, but a most capable gastronomer. Much the poorest
berry of the three was the Pennsylvanian, the common low blueberry
of Massachusetts. “Strawberry huckleberry” it used to be called in
my day by Old Colony children, with a double disregard of scientific
proprieties. Even thus late in the season the Greenland sandwort was
in perfectly fresh bloom; but the high cold wind made it a poor “bird
day,” though I remember a white-throated sparrow singing cheerily near
Eagle Lake, and a large hawk or eagle floating high over the summit.
At the sight my fellow traveler broke out,--
“My heart leaps up when I behold
An eagle in the sky.”
On that point, as concerning the fine qualities of the cespitose
blueberry, we were fully agreed.
Even in Franconia, however, most of our days are spent, not in mountain
paths, but in the valley and lower hill roads. We keep out of the
mountains partly because we love to look at them (“I pitch my walk low,
but my prospects high,” says an old poet), and partly, perhaps, because
the paths to their summits have seemed to fall out of repair, and even
to become steeper, with the lapse of years. One of my good trips,
this autumn, was over the road toward Littleton, and then back in the
direction of Bethlehem as far as the end of the Indian Brook road.
That, as I planned it, would be no more than six or seven miles, at the
most, and there I was to be met by the driving members of the club, who
would bring me home for the mid-day meal,--an altogether comfortable
arrangement. It is good to have time to spare, so that one can dally
along, fearful only of arriving at the end of the way too soon. Such
was now my favored condition, and I made the most of it. If I crossed
a brook, I stayed awhile to listen to it and moralize its song. If a
flock of bluebirds and sparrows were twittering about a farmer’s barn,
I lingered a little to watch their doings. When a white-crowned sparrow
or a partridge showed itself in the road in advance of me, that was
reason enough for another halt. It is a pretty picture: a partridge
caught unexpectedly in the open, its ruff erect, and its tail, fully
spread, snapping nervously with every quick, furtive step. And the fine
old trees in the Littleton hill woods were of themselves sufficient, on
a warm day like this, to detain any one who was neither a worldling nor
a man sent for the doctor. They detained me, at all events; and very
glad I was to sit down more than once for a good season with them.
And so the hours passed. At the top of the road, in the clearing by
the farms, I met a pale, straight-backed young fellow under a military
hat. “You look like a man from Cuba or from Chickamauga,” I ventured
to say. “Chickamauga,” he answered laconically, and marched on. Whether
it was typhoid fever or simple “malaria” that had whitened his face
there was no chance to inquire. He was munching an apple, which at
that moment was also my own occupation. I had just stopped under a
promising-looking tree, whose generous branches spilled their crop
over the roadside wall,--excellent “common fruit,” as Franconians say,
mellow, but with a lively, ungrafted tang. Here in this sunny stretch
of road were more of my small Grapta butterflies, and presently I came
upon a splendid tortoise-shell (_Vanessa Milberti_). That I would
certainly have captured had I been armed with a net. I had seen two
like it the day before, to the surprise of my friends the carriage
people, ardent entomological collectors, both of them. They had found
not a single specimen the whole season through. “There are some
advantages in beating out the miles on foot,” I said to myself. I have
never seen this strikingly handsome butterfly in Massachusetts, as I
once did its rival in beauty, the banded purple (Arthemis); and even
here in the hill country it is never so common as to lose that precious
bloom which rarity puts upon whatever it touches.
As I turned down the Bethlehem road, the valley and hill prospects
on the left became increasingly beautiful. Here I passed hermit
thrushes (it was good to see them already so numerous again, after the
destruction that had wasted them a few winters ago), a catbird or two,
and a few ruby-crowned kinglets,--some of them singing,--and before
long found myself within the limits of a rich man’s red farm; fences,
houses, barns, poultry coops, and the rest, all painted of the same
deep color, as if to say, “All this is mine.” I remembered the estate
well, and have never grudged the owner of it his lordly possessions. I
enjoy them, also, in my own way. He keeps his roads in apple-pie order,
without meddling with their natural beauty (I wish our Massachusetts
“highway surveyors” all worked under his orders, or were endowed with
his taste), and is at pains to save his woods from the hands of the
spoiler. “Please do not peel bark from the birch trees,”--so the signs
read; and I say Amen. He has splendid flower gardens, too, and plants
them well out upon the wayside for all men to enjoy. Long may it be
before his soul is required of him.
By this time I was in the very prettiest of the red-farm woods. Hermit
thrushes were there, also, standing upright in the middle of the road,
and in the forest hylas were peeping, one of them a real champion for
the loudness of his tone. How full of glory the place was, with the
sunlight sifting through the bright leaves and flickering upon the
shining birch trunks! If I were an artist, I think I would paint wood
interiors.
My forenoon’s walk was ended. Another turn in the road, and I saw the
carriage before me, the driver minding the horses, and the passengers’
seat vacant. The entomologists had gone into the woods looking for
specimens, and there I joined them. They were in search of beetles,
they said, and had no objection to my assistance; I had better look
for decaying toadstools. This was easy work, I thought; but, as is
always the way with my efforts at insect collecting, I could find
nothing to the purpose. The best I could do was to bring mushrooms
full of maggots (larvæ, the carrier of the cyanide and alcohol bottles
called them), and what was desired was the beetles which the larvæ
turned into. Once I announced a small spider, but the bottle-holder
said, No, it was not a spider, but a mite; and there was no disputing
an expert, who had published a list of Franconia spiders,--one hundred
and forty-nine species! (She had wished very much for one more name,
she told me, but her friend and assistant had remarked that the odd
number would look more honest!) However, it is a poor sort of man who
cannot enjoy the sight of another’s learning, and the exposure of his
own ignorance. It was worth something to see a first-rate, thoroughly
equipped “insectarian” at work and to hear her talk. I should have
been proud even to hold one of her smaller phials, but they were all
adjusted beyond the need, or even the comfortable possibility, of such
assistance. There was nothing for it but to play the looker-on and
listener. In that part I hope I was less of a failure.
The enthusiastic pursuit of special knowledge, persisted in year after
year, is a phenomenon as well worth study as the song and nesting
habits of a thrush or a sparrow; and I gladly put myself to school, not
only this forenoon, but as often as I found the opportunity. One day
my mentor told me that she hoped she had discovered a new flea! She
kept, as I knew, a couple of pet deer-mice, and it seemed that some
almost microscopic fleas had left them for a bunch of cotton wherein
the mice were accustomed to roll themselves up in the daytime. These
minute creatures the entomologist had pounced upon, clapped into a
bottle, and sent off straightway to the American flea specialist, who
lived somewhere in Alabama. In a few days she should hear from him, and
perhaps, if the species were undescribed, there would be a flea named
in her honor.[1]
Distinctions of that nature are almost every-day matters with her. How
many species already bear her name she has never told me. I suspect
they are so numerous and so frequent that she herself can hardly
keep track of them. Think of the pleasure of walking about the earth
and being able to say, as an insect chirps, “Listen! that is one of
my species,--named after me, you know.” Such _specific_ honors, I
say, are common in her case,--common almost to satiety. But to have
a _genus_ named for her,--that was glory of a different rank, glory
that can never fall to the same person but once; for generic names
are unique. Once given, they are patented, as it were. They can never
be used again--for genera, that is--in any branch of natural science.
To our Franconia entomologist this honor came, by what seemed a
poetic justice, in the Lepidoptera, the order in which she began her
researches. Hers is a genus of moths. I trust they are not of the kind
that “corrupt.”
Thinking how above measure I should be exalted in such circumstances,
I am surprised that she wears her laurels so meekly. Not that she
affects to conceal her gratification; she is as happy over her genus,
perhaps, as over the new _édition de luxe_ of her most famous story;
for an entomologist may be also a novelist, if she has a _mind_ to be,
as Charles Lamb would have said; but she knows how to carry it off
lightly. She and the botanist of the party, my “walking mate,” who,
I am proud to say, is similarly distinguished, often laugh together
about their generic namesakes (his is of the large and noble Compositæ
family); and then, sometimes, the lady will turn to me.
“It is too bad _you_ can never have a genus,” she will say in her
bantering tone; “the name is already taken up, you know.”
“Yes, indeed, I know it,” I answer her. An older member of the family,
a --th cousin, carried off the prize many years ago, and the rest of us
are left to get on as best we can, without the hope of such dignities.
When I was in Florida I took pains to see the tree,--the family
evergreen, we may call it. Though it is said to have an ill smell, it
is handsome, and we count it an honor.
“But then, perhaps you would never have had a genus named for you,
anyhow,” the entomologist continues, still bent upon mischief.
And there we leave the matter. Let the shoemaker stick to his last.
Some of us were not born to shine at badinage, or as collectors of
beetles. For myself, in this bright September weather I have no
ambitions. It is enough, I think, to be a follower of the road,
breathing the breath of life and seeing the beauty of the world.
* * * * *
In the afternoon I took the Landaff Valley round, down the village
street nearly to the junction of Gale River and Ham Branch, then up
the Ham Branch (or Landaff) Valley to a crossroad on the left, and so
back to the road from the Profile Notch, and by that home again. The
jaunt, which is one of our Franconia favorites, is peculiar for being
substantially level; with no more uphill and downhill than would be
included in a walk of the same distance--perhaps six miles--almost
anywhere in southern New England.
The first thing a man is likely to notice as he passes the last of
the village houses, and finds himself skirting the bank of Ham Branch
(which looks to be nearly or quite as full as the river into which it
empties itself), is the color of the water. Gale River is fresh from
the hills, and ripples over its stony bed as clear as crystal. The
branch, on the contrary, has been flowing for some time through a flat
meadowy valley, where it has taken on a rich earthy hue, to which it
might be natural to apply a less honorable sounding word, perhaps,
if it were a question of some neutral stream, in whose character and
reputation I felt no personal, friendly interest.
Just as I came to it, that afternoon, I saw to my surprise a white
admiral butterfly sunning itself upon an alder leaf. I hope the reader
knows the species,--_Limenitis Arthemis_, sometimes called the banded
purple,--one of the prettiest and showiest of New England insects, four
black or blackish wings crossed by a broad white band. It was much out
of season now, I felt sure, both from what my entomological friends
had told me, and from my own recollections of previous years, and I
was seized with a foolish desire to capture it as a sort of trophy. It
lay just beyond my reach, and I disturbed it, in hopes it would settle
nearer the ground. Twice it disappointed me. Then I threw a stick
toward it, aiming not wisely but too well, and this time startled it
so badly that it rose straight into the air, sailed across the stream,
and came to rest far up in a tall elm. “You were never cut out for a
collector of insects,” I said to myself, recalling my experience of the
forenoon; but I was glad to have seen the creature,--the first one for
several years,--and went on my way as happy as a child in thinking of
it. In the second half of a man’s century he may be thankful for almost
anything that, for the time being, lifts twoscore of years off his
back. The best part of most of us, I think, is the boy that was born
with us. So far I am a Wordsworthian;--
“And I could wish _my_ days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.”
A little way up the valley we come to an ancient mill and a bridge; a
new bridge it is now, but I remember an old one, and a fright that
I once had upon it. With a fellow itinerant--a learned man, whose
life was valuable--I stopped here to rest of a summer noon, and my
companion, with an eye to shady comfort, clambered over the edge of the
bridge and out upon a joist which projected over the stream. There he
sat down with his back against a pillar and his legs stretched before
him on the joist. He has a theory, concerning which I have heard him
discourse more than once,--something in his own attitude suggesting
the theme,--that when a man, after walking, “puts his feet up,” he is
acting not merely upon a natural impulse, but in accordance with a
sound physiological principle; and in accordance with that principle he
was acting now, as well as the circumstances of the case would permit.
We chatted awhile; then he fell silent; and after a time I turned my
head, and saw him clean gone in a doze. The seat was barely wide enough
to hold him. What if he should move in his sleep, or start up suddenly
on being awakened? I looked at the rocks below, and shivered. I dared
not disturb him, and could only sit in a kind of stupid terror and wait
for him to open his eyes. Happily his nap did not last long, and came
to a quiet termination; so that the cause of science suffered no loss
that day; but I can never go by the place without thinking of what
might have happened.
Here, likewise, on an autumnal forenoon, two or three years ago, I had
another memorable experience; nothing less (nothing more, the reader
may say) than the song of a hermit thrush. It was in the season after
bluebirds and hermits had been killed in such dreadful numbers (almost
exterminated, we thought then) by cold and snow at the South. I had
scarcely seen a hermit all the year, and was approaching the bridge,
of a pleasant late September morning, when I heard a thrush’s voice.
I stopped instantly. The note was repeated; and there the bird stood
in a low roadside tree; the next minute he began singing in a kind of
reminiscential half-voice,--the soul of a year’s music distilled in a
few drops of sound,--such as birds of many kinds so frequently drop
into in the fall. That, too, I am sure to remember as often as I pass
this way.
In truth, all my Franconia rambles (I am tempted to write the name in
three syllables, as I sometimes speak it, following the example of
Fishin’ Jimmy and other local worthies),--all my “Francony” rambles,
I say, are by this time full of these miserly delights. It is really
a gain, perhaps, that I make the round of them but once a year. Some
things are wisely kept choice.
“Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare.”
To get all the goodness out of a piece of country, return to it again
and again, till every corner of it is alive with memories; but do
not see it too often, nor make your stay in it too long. The hermit
thrush’s voice is all the sweeter because he _is_ a hermit.
This afternoon I do not cross the bridge, but keep to the valley road,
which soon runs for some distance along the edge of a hackmatack swamp;
full of graceful, pencil-tipped, feathery trees, with here and there
a dead one, on purpose for woodpeckers and hawks. A hairy woodpecker
is on one of them at this moment, now hammering the trunk with his
powerful beak (hammer and chisel in one), now lifting up his voice in
a way to be heard for half a mile. To judge from his ordinary tone
and manner, _Dryobates villosus_ has no need to cultivate decision of
character. Every word is peremptory, and every action speaks of energy
and a mind made up.
In this larch swamp, though I have never really explored it, I have
seen, first and last, a good many things. Here grows much of the
pear-leaved willow (_Salix balsamifera_). I notice a few bushes even
now as I pass, the reddish twigs each with a tuft of yellowing,
red-stemmed leaves at the tip. Here, one June, a Tennessee warbler sang
to me; and there are only two other places in the world in which I have
been thus favored. Here,--a little farther up the valley,--on a rainy
September forenoon, I once sat for an hour in the midst of as pretty
a flock of birds as a man could wish to see: south-going travelers of
many sorts, whom the fortunes of the road had thrown together. Here
they were, lying by for a day’s rest in this favorable spot; flitting
to and fro, chirping, singing, feeding, playfully quarreling, as if
life, even in rainy weather and in migration time, were all a pleasure
trip. It was a sight to cure low spirits. I sat on the hay just within
the open side of a barn which stands here in the woods, quite by
itself, and watched them till I almost felt myself of their company.
I have forgotten their names, though I listed them carefully enough,
beyond a doubt; but it will be long before I forget my delight in the
birds themselves. Ours may be an evil world, as the pessimists and the
preachers find so much comfort in maintaining, but there is one thing
to be said in its favor: its happy days are the longest remembered.
The pain I suffered years ago I cannot any longer make real to myself,
even if I would, but the joys of that time are still almost as good as
new, when occasion calls them up. Some of them, indeed, seem to have
sweetened with age. This is especially the case, I think, with simple
and natural pleasures; which may be considered as a good reason why
every man should be, if he can, a lover of nature,--a sympathizer,
that is to say, with the life of the world about him. The less
artificial our joys, the more likelihood of their staying by us.
Not to blink at the truth, nevertheless, I must add a circumstance
which, till this moment, I had clean forgotten. I was still watching
the birds, with perhaps a dozen species in sight close at hand, when
suddenly I observed a something come over them, and on the instant a
large hawk skimmed the tops of the trees. In one second every bird
was gone,--vanished, as if at the touch of a necromancer’s wand. I
did not see them fly; there was no rush of wings; but the place was
empty; and though I waited for them, they did not reappear. Two or
three, indeed, I may have seen afterward, but the flock was gone. _My_
holiday, at all events, or that part of it, was done,--shadowed by a
hawk’s wing. Undoubtedly a few minutes of safety put the birds all in
comfortable spirits again, however; and anyhow, it bears out my theory
of remembered happiness, that this less cheerful part of the story had
so completely passed out of mind. Memory, like a sundial, had marked
only the bright hour.
Beyond this lonely barn the soil of the valley becomes drier and
sandier. Here are two or three houses, with broad hayfields about them,
in which live many vesper sparrows. No doubt they have lived here
longer than any of their present human neighbors. Even now they flit
along the wayside in advance of the foot-passenger, running a space,
after their manner, and anon taking wing to alight upon a fence rail.
Their year is done, but they linger still a few days, out of love for
the ancestral fields, or, it may be, in dread of the long journey, from
which some of them will pretty certainly never come back.
All the way up the road, though no mention has been made of it,
my eyes have been upon the low, bright-colored hills beyond the
river,--sugar-maple orchards all in yellow and red, a gorgeous
display,--or upon the mountains in front, Kinsman and the more distant
Moosilauke. The green meadow is a good place in which to look for
marsh hawks,--as well as of great use as a foreground,--and the hill
woods beyond are the resort of pileated woodpeckers. I have often seen
and heard them here, but there is no sign of them to-day.