another, after the usual fashion--as frequenters of the wilderness,
and though it is true that they have forsaken the more thickly settled
parts of the country, I think I have never once seen them in the depths
of the forest. To the best of my recollection none of our Franconia men
have ever reported them from Mount Lafayette or from the Lonesome Lake
region. On the other hand, we meet them with greater or less regularity
in the more open valley woods, often directly upon the roadside; not
only in the Landaff Valley, but on the outskirts of the village toward
Littleton and on the Bethlehem road. In this latter place I remember
seeing a fellow prancing about the trunk of a small orchard tree within
twenty rods of a house; and not so very infrequently, especially in
the rum-cherry season, they make their appearance in the immediate
vicinity of the hotel; for they, like some of their relatives, notably
the sapsucker, are true cherry-birds. In Vermont, too, I have found
their freshly cut “peck-holes” on the very skirts of the village. And
at the South, so far as I have been able to observe, the story is the
same. About Natural Bridge, Virginia, for example, a loosely settled
country, with plenty of woodland but no extensive forests, the birds
were constantly in evidence. In short, untamable as they look, and
little as they may like a town, they seem to find themselves best off,
as birds in general do, on the borders of civilization. They have
something of Thoreau’s mind, we may say: lovers of the wild, they are
yet not quite at home in the wilderness, and prefer the woodman’s path
to the logger’s.
Not far ahead, on the other side of the way,--to return to the Landaff
Valley,--is a _red_ maple grove, more brilliant even than the sugar
orchards. It ripens its leaves earlier than they, as we have always
noticed, and is already past the acme of its annual splendor; so that
some of the trees have a peculiarly delicate and lovely purplish
tint, a real bloom, never seen, I think, except on the red maple, and
there only after the leaves have begun to curl and fade. Opposite it
(after whistling in vain for a dog with whom in years past, I have
been accustomed to be friendly at one of the houses--he must be dead,
or gone, or grown reserved with age), I take the crossroad before
mentioned; and now, face to face with Lafayette, I stop under a
favorite pine tree to enjoy the prospect and the stillness: no sound
but the chirping of crickets, the peeping of hylas, and the hardly less
musical hammering of a distant carpenter.
Along the wayside are many gray birches (of the kind called white
birches in Massachusetts, the kind from which Yankee schoolboys snatch
a fearful joy by “swinging off” their tops), the only ones I remember
about Franconia; for which reason I sometimes call the road Gray Birch
Road; and just beyond them I stop again. Here is a bit for a painter: a
lovely vista, such as makes a man wish for a brush and the skill to use
it. The road dips into a little hollow, turns gently, and passes out
of sight within the shadow of a wood. And above the over-arching trees
rises the pyramidal mass of Mount Cannon, its middle part set with
dark evergreens, which are flanked on either side with broad patches
of light yellow,--poplars or birches. The sun is getting down, and its
level rays flood the whole mountain forest with light.
Into the shadow I go, following the road, and after a turn or two come
out at a small clearing and a house. “Rocky Farm,” we might name it;
for the land is sprinkled over with huge boulders, as if giants had
been at play here. Whoever settled the place first must have chosen
the site for its outlook rather than for any hope of its fertility. I
sit down on one of the stones and take my fill of the mountain glory:
Garfield, Lafayette, Cannon, Kinsman, Moosilauke,--a grand horizonful.
Cannon is almost within reach of the hand, as it looks; but the arm
might need to be two miles long.
Just here the road makes a sudden bend, passes again into light woods,
and presently emerges upon a little knoll overlooking the upper
Franconia meadows. This is the noblest prospect of the afternoon, and
late as the hour is growing I must lean against the fence rail--for
there is a house at this point also--and gaze upon it. The green meadow
is spread at my feet, flaming maple woods range themselves beyond
it, and behind them, close at hand, loom the sombre mountains. I had
forgotten that this part of the road was so “viewly,” to borrow a local
word, and am thankful to have reached it at so favorable a moment. Now
the shadow of the low hills at my back overspreads the valley, while
the upper world beyond is aglow with light and color.
It is five o’clock, and I must be getting homeward. Down at the valley
level the evening chill strikes me, after the exceptional warmth of
the day, and by the time Tucker Brook is crossed the bare summit of
Lafayette is of a deep rosy purple,--the rest of the world sunless.
The day is over, and the remaining miles are taken somewhat hurriedly,
although I stop below the Profile House farm to look for a fresh bunch
of dumb foxglove,--not easy to find in the open at this late date,
many as the plants are,--and at one or two other places to pluck a
tempting maple twig. Sated with the magnificence of autumnal forests,
hill after hill splashed with color, the eye loves to withdraw itself
now and then to rest upon the perfection of a blossom or a leaf.
Wagonloads of tourists come down the Notch road, the usual nightly
procession, some silent, some boisterously singing. Among the most
distressing of all the noises that human beings make is this vulgar
shouting of “sacred music” along the public highway. This time the hymn
is Jerusalem the Golden, after the upper notes of which an unhappy
female voice is vainly reaching, like a boy who has lost his wind in
shinning up a tree, and with his last gasping effort still finds the
lowest branch just beyond the clutch of his fingers.
“I know not, oh, I know not,”
I hear her shriek, and then a lucky turn in the road takes her out of
hearing, and I listen again to the still small voice of the brook,
which, whether it “knows” or not, has the grace to make no fuss about
it.
Let that one human discord be forgotten. It had been a glorious day;
few lovelier were ever made: a day without a cloud (literally), and
almost without a breath; a day to walk, and a day to sit still; a
long feast of beauty; and withal, it had for me a perfect conclusion,
as if Nature herself were setting a benediction upon the hours. As I
neared the end of my jaunt, the hotel already in sight, Venus in all
her splendor hung low in the west, the full moon was showing its rim
above the trees in the east, and at the same moment a vesper sparrow
somewhere in the darkening fields broke out with its evening song. Five
or six times it sang, and then fell silent. It was enough. The beauty
of the day was complete.
The next day, October 1, was no less delightful: mild, still, and
cloudless; so that it was pleasant to lounge upon the piazza in the
early morning, looking at Lafayette,--good business of itself,--and
listening to the warble of a bluebird, the soft chirps of myrtle
warblers, or the distant gobbling of a turkey down at one of the river
farms; while now and then a farmer drove past from his morning errand
at the creamery, with one or two tall milk-cans standing behind him in
the open, one-seated carriage. If you see a man on foot as far from the
village as this, you may set him down, in ornithological language, as
a summer resident or a transient visitor. Franconians, to the manner
born, are otherwise minded, and will “hitch up” for a quarter of a
mile. As good John Bunyan said, “This is a valley that nobody walks in,
but those that love a pilgrim’s life.”
As I take the Notch road after breakfast the temperature is
summer-like, and the foliage, I think, must have reached its brightest.
Above the Profile House farm, on the edge of the golf links, where the
whole Franconia Valley lies exposed, I seat myself on the wall, inside
a natural hedge that borders the highway, to admire the scene: a long
verdant meadow, flanked by low hills covered, mile after mile, with
vivid reds and yellows; splendor beyond words; a pageant glorious to
behold, but happily of brief duration. Human senses would weary of it,
though the eye loves color as the palate loves spices and sweets, or,
by force of looking at it, would lose all delicacy of perception and
taste.
Even yet the world, viewed in broad spaces, wears a clean, fresh
aspect; but near at hand the herbage and shrubbery are all in the
sere and yellow leaf. So I am saying to myself when I start at the
sound of a Hudsonian chickadee’s nasal voice speaking straight into
my ear. The saucy chit has dropped into the low poplar sapling over
my head, and surprised at what he discovers underneath, lets fall a
hasty _Sick-a-day-day_. His dress, like his voice, compares unfavorably
with that of his cousin, our familiar black-cap. In fact, I might
say of him, with his dirty brown headdress, what I was thinking of
the roadside vegetation: he looks dingy, out of condition, frayed,
discolored, belated, frost-bitten. But I am delighted to see him,--for
the first time at any such level as this,--and thank my stars that I
sat down to rest and cool off on this hard but convenient boulder.
A chipmunk thinks I have sat here long enough, and feels no bashfulness
about telling me so. Why should he? Frankness is esteemed a point
of good manners in all natural society. A man shoots down the hill
behind me on a bicycle, coasting like the wind, and another, driving
up, salutes him by name, and then turns to cry after him in a ringing
voice, “How _be_ ye?” The emphatic verb bespeaks a real solicitude on
the questioner’s part; but he is half a mile too late; he might as well
have shouted to the man in the moon. Presently two men in a buggy come
up the road, talking in breezy up-country fashion about some one whose
name they use freely,--a name well known hereabout,--and with whom they
appear to have business relations. “He got up this morning like a ----
---- thousand of brick,” one of them says. A disagreeable person to
work for, I should suppose. And all the while a child behind the hedge
is taking notes. Queer things we could print, if it were allowable to
report verbatim.
When this free-spoken pair is far enough in the lead, I go back to the
road again, traveling slowly and keeping to the shady side, with my
coat on my arm. As the climb grows steeper the weather grows more and
more like August; and hark! a cicada is shrilling in one of the forest
trees,--a long-drawn, heat-laden, midsummer cry. I will tell the
entomologist about it, I promise myself. The circumstance must be very
unusual, and cannot fail to interest her. (But she takes it as a matter
of course. It is hard to bring news to a specialist.)
So I go on, up Hardscrabble and Little Hardscrabble, stopping like a
short-winded horse at every water-bar, and thankful for every bird-note
that calls me to a halt between times. An ornithological preoccupation
is a capital resource when the road is getting the better of you.
The brook likewise must be minded, and some of the more memorable of
the wayside trees. A mountain road has one decided and inalienable
advantage, I remark inwardly: the most perversely opinionated highway
surveyor in the world cannot straighten it. How fast the leaves are
falling, though the air scarcely stirs among them! In some places I
walk through a real shower of gold. Theirs is an easy death. And how
many times I have been up and down this road! Summer and autumn I have
traveled it. And in what pleasant company! Now I am alone; but then,
the solitude itself is an excellent companionship. We are having a
pretty good time of it, I think,--the trees, the brook, the winding
road, the yellow birch leaves, and the human pilgrim, who feels himself
one with them all. I hope they would not disown a poor relation.
It is ten o’clock. Slowly as I have come, not a wagonload of tourists
has caught up with me; and at the Bald Mountain path I leave the
highway, having a sudden notion to go to Echo Lake by the way of
Artist’s Bluff, so called, a rocky cliff that rises abruptly from
the lower end of the lake. The trail conducts me through a veritable
fernery, one long slope being thickly set with perfectly fresh
shield-ferns,--_Aspidium spinulosum_ and perhaps _A. dilatatum_, though
I do not concern myself to be sure of it. From the bluff the lake is at
my feet, but what mostly fills my eye is the woods on the lower side
of Mount Cannon. There is no language to express the kind of pleasure
I take in them: so soft, so bright, so various in their hues,--dark
green, light green, russet, yellow, red,--all drowned in sunshine, yet
veiled perceptibly with haze even at this slight distance. If there is
anything in nature more exquisitely, ravishingly beautiful than an old
mountainside forest looked at from above, I do not know where to find
it.
Down at the lakeside there is beauty of another kind: the level blue
water, the clean gray shallows about its margin, the reflections of
bright mountains--Eagle Cliff and Mount Cannon--in its face, and
soaring into the sky, on either side and in front, the mountains
themselves. And how softly the ground is matted under the shrubbery and
trees: twin-flower, partridge berry, creeping snowberry, goldthread,
oxalis, dwarf cornel, checkerberry, trailing arbutus! The very names
ought to be a means of grace to the pen that writes them.
White-throats and a single winter wren scold at me behind my back as
I sit on a spruce log, but for some reason there are few birds here
to-day. The fact is exceptional. As a rule, I have found the bushes
populous, and once, I remember, not many days later than this, there
were fox sparrows with the rest. I am hoping some time to find a stray
phalarope swimming in the lake. That would be a sight worth seeing. The
lake itself is always here, at any rate, especially now that the summer
people are gone; and if the wind is right and the sun out, so that a
man can sit still with comfort (to-day my coat is superfluous), the
absence of other things does not greatly matter.
This clean waterside must have many four-footed visitors, particularly
in the twilight and after dark. Deer and bears are common inhabitants
of the mountain woods; but for my eyes there is nothing but squirrels,
with once in a long while a piece of wilder game. Twice only, in
Franconia, have I come within sight of a fox. Once I was alone, in the
wood-road to Sinclair’s Mills. I rounded a curve, and there the fellow
stood in the middle of the way, smelling at something in the rut. After
a bit (my glass had covered him instantly) he raised his head and
looked down the road in a direction opposite to mine. Then he turned,
saw me, started slightly, stood quite still for a fraction of a minute
(I wondered why), and vanished in the woods, his white brush waving me
farewell. He was gone so instantaneously that it was hard to believe he
had really been there.
That was a pretty good look (at a fox), but far less satisfying than
the other of my Franconia experiences. With two friends I had come down
through the forest from the Notch railroad by a rather blind loggers’
trail, heading for a pair of abandoned farms, grassy fields in which
it is needful to give heed to one’s steps for fear of bear-traps. As
we emerged into the first clearing a fox was not more than five or
six rods before us, feeding in the grass. Her eyes were on her work,
the wind was in our favor, and notwithstanding two of us were almost
wholly exposed, we stood there on the edge of the forest for the better
part of half an hour, glasses up, passing comments upon her behavior.
Evidently she was lunching upon insects,--grasshoppers or crickets,
I suppose,--and so taken up was she with this agreeable employment
that she walked directly toward us and passed within ten yards of our
position, stopping every few steps for a fresh capture. The sunlight,
which shone squarely in her face, seemed to affect her unpleasantly;
at all events she blinked a good deal. Her manner of stepping about,
her motions in catching her prey,--driving her nose deep into the
grass and pushing it home,--and in short her whole behavior, were more
catlike than doglike, or so we all thought. Plainly she had no idea
of abbreviating her repast, nor did she betray the slightest grain of
suspiciousness or wariness, never once casting an eye about in search
of possible enemies. A dog in his own dooryard could not have seemed
less apprehensive of danger. As often as she approached the surrounding
wood she turned and hunted back across the field. We might have played
the spy upon her indefinitely; but it was always the same thing over
again, and by and by, when she passed for a little out of sight behind
a tuft of bushes, we followed, careless of the result, and, as it
seemed, got into her wind. She started on the instant, ran gracefully
up a little incline, still in the grass land, turned for the first time
to look at us, and disappeared in the forest. A pretty creature she
surely was, and from all we saw of her she might have been accounted
a very useful farm-hand; but perhaps, as farmers sometimes say of
unprofitable cattle, she would soon have “eaten her head off” in the
poultry yard. She was not fearless,--like a woodchuck that once walked
up to me and smelled of my boot, as I stood still in the road near the
Crawford House,--but simply off her guard; and our finding her in such
a mood was simply a bit of good luck. Some day, possibly, we shall
catch a weasel asleep.
In a vacation season, like our annual fortnight in New Hampshire, there
is no predicting which jaunt, if any, will turn out superior to all
the rest. It may be a longer and comparatively newer one (although
in Franconia we find few new ones now, partly because we no longer
seek them--the old is better, we are apt to say when any innovation
is suggested); or, thanks to something in the day or something in the
mood, it may be one of the shortest and most familiar. And when it
is over, there may be a sweetness in the memory, but little to talk
about; little “incident,” as editors say, little that goes naturally
into a notebook. In other words, the best walk, for us, is the one in
which we are happiest, the one in which we _feel_ the most, not of
necessity the one in which we _see_ the most; or, to put it differently
still, the one in which we _do_ see the most, but with
“that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.”
Whatever we may call ourselves at home, among the mountains we are
lovers of pleasure. Our day’s work is to be happy. We take our text
from the good Longfellow as theologians take theirs from Scripture:--
“Enjoyment, and not sorrow, is our destined end.”
We are not anxious to learn anything; our thoughts run not upon wisdom;
if we take note of a plant or a bird, it is rather for the fun of it
than for any scholarly purpose. We are boys out of school. I speak of
myself and of the man I have called my walking mate. The two collectors
of insects, of course, are more serious-minded. “No day without a
beetle,” is their motto, and their absorption, even in Franconia, is
in adding to the world’s stock of knowledge. Let them be respected
accordingly. Our creed is more frankly hedonistic; and their virtue--I
am free to confess it--shines the brighter for the contrast.
This year, nevertheless, old Franconia had for us, also, one most
welcome novelty, the story of which I have kept, like the good
wine,--a pretty small glassful, I am aware,--for the end of the feast.
I had never enjoyed the old things better. Eight or nine years ago,
writing--in this magazine[2]--of June in Franconia, I expressed a fear
that our delight in the beauty of nature might grow to be less keenly
felt with advancing age; that we might ultimately be driven to a more
scientific use of the outward world, putting the exercise of curiosity,
what we call somewhat loftily the acquisition of knowledge, in the
place of rapturous contemplation. So it may yet fall out, to be sure,
since age is still advancing, but as far as present indications go,
nothing of the sort seems at all imminent. I begin to believe, in fact,
that things will turn the other way; that curiosity will rather lose
its edge, and the power of beauty strike deeper and deeper home. So
may it be! Then we shall not be dead while we live. Sure I am that the
glory of mountains, the splendor of autumnal forests, the sweetness of
valley prospects, were never more rapturously felt by me than during
the season just ended. And still, as I started just now to say, I had
special joy this year in a new specimen, an additional bird for my
memory and notebook.
The forenoon of September 26, my fourth day, I spent on Garnet Hill.
The grand circuit of that hill is one of the best esteemed of our
longer expeditions. Formerly we did it always between breakfast and
dinner, having to speed the pace a little uncomfortably for the last
four or five miles; but times have begun to alter with us, or perhaps
we have profited by experience; for the last few years, at any rate,
we have made the trip an all-day affair, dining on Sunset Hill, and
loitering down through the Landaff Valley--with a side excursion, it
may be, to fill up the hours--in the afternoon. This trip, being, as I
say, one of those we most set by, I was determined to hold in reserve
against the arrival of my fellow foot-traveler; but there is also a
pleasant shorter course, not round the hill, but, so to speak, over
one side of it: out by the way of what I call High Bridge Road (never
having heard any name for it), and back by the road--hardly more than a
lane for much of its length--which traverses the hill diagonally on its
northeastern slope, and joins the regular Sugar Hill highway a little
below the Franconia Inn.
I left the Littleton road for the road to the Streeter neighborhood,
crossed Gale River by a bridge pitched with much labor at a great
height above it (a good indication of the swelling to which mountain
streams are subject), passed two or three retired valley farms (where
were eight or ten sleek young calves, one of which, rather to my
surprise, ate from my hand a sprig of mint as if she liked the savor of
it), and then began a long, steep climb. For much of the distance the
road--narrow and very little traveled--is lined with dense alder and
willow thickets, excellent cover for birds. It was partly with this
place in my eye that I had chosen my route, remembering an hour of much
interest here some years ago with a large flock of migrants. To-day, as
it happened, the bushes were comparatively birdless. White-throats and
snowbirds were present, of course, and ruby-crowned kinglets, with a
solitary vireo or two, but nothing out of the ordinary. The prospect,
however, without being magnificent or--for Franconia--extensive, was
full of attractiveness. Gale River hastening through a gorge overhung
with forest, directly on my right, Streeter Pond farther away (two deer
had been shot beside it that morning, as I learned before night,--news
of that degree of importance travels fast), and the gay-colored hills
toward Littleton and Bethlehem,--maple grove on maple grove, with all
their banners flying,--these made a delightsome panorama, shifting with
every twist in the road and with every rod of the ascent; so that I had
excuse more than sufficient for continually stopping to breathe and
face about. In one place I remarked a goodly bed of coltsfoot leaves,
noticeable for their angular shape as well as for their peculiar
shade of green. I wished for a blossom. If the dandelion sometimes
anticipates the season, why not the coltsfoot? But I found no sign of
flower or bud. Probably the plant is of a less impatient habit; but I
have seen it so seldom that all my ideas about it are no better than
guesswork. Along the wayside was maiden-hair fern, also, which I do not
come upon any too often in this mountain country.