spied upon through a crack between the curtain and the sash of what
seemed to be a parlor window; a flattering attention which, after the
manner of high public functionaries, I took as a tribute not to myself,
but to the rôle I was playing. No doubt travelers on foot are rare on
that difficult, out-of-the-way road, and the walker rather than the
man was what filled my lady’s eye; unless, as may easily have been
true, she was expecting to see a peddler’s pack. At this point the
road crooks a sharp elbow, and henceforth passes through cultivated
country,--orchards and ploughed land, grass fields and pasturage;
still without houses, however, and having a pleasant natural hedgerow
of trees and shrubbery. In one of the orchards was a great congregation
of sparrows and myrtle warblers, with sapsuckers, flickers, downy
woodpeckers, solitary vireos, and I forget what else, though I sat on
the wall for some time refreshing myself with their cheerful society. I
agreed with them that life was still a good thing.
Then came my novelty. I was but a little way past this aviary of
an apple orchard when I approached a pile of brush,--dry branches
which had been heaped against the roadside bank some years ago, and
up through which bushes and weeds were growing. My eyes sought it
instinctively, and at the same moment a bird moved inside. A sparrow,
alone; a sparrow, and a new one! “A Lincoln finch!” I thought; and
just then the creature turned, and I saw his forward parts: a streaked
breast with a bright, well-defined buff band across it, as if the
streaks had been marked in first and then a wash of yellowish had
been laid on over them. Yes, a Lincoln finch! He was out of sight
almost before I saw him, however, and after a bit of feverish waiting
I squeaked. He did not come up to look at me, as I hoped he would do,
but the sudden noise startled him, and he moved slightly, enough so
that my eye again found him. This time, also, I saw his head and his
breast, and then he was lost again. Again I waited. Then I squeaked,
waited, and squeaked again, louder and longer than before. No answer,
and no sign of movement. You might have sworn there was no bird there;
and perhaps you would not have perjured yourself; for presently I
stepped up to the brush-heap and trampled it over, and still there was
no sign of life. Above the brush was a low stone wall, and beyond that
a bare ploughed field. How the fellow had slipped away there was no
telling. And that was the end of the story. But I had seen him, and he
was a Lincoln finch. It was a shabby interview he had granted me, after
keeping me waiting for almost twenty years; but then, I repeated for my
comfort, I had seen him.
He was less confusingly like a song sparrow than I had been prepared to
find him. His general color (one of a bird’s best marks in life, hard
as it may be to derive an exact idea of it from printed descriptions),
gray with a greenish tinge,--a little suggestive of Henslow’s bunting,
as it struck me,--this, I thought, supposing it to be constant,
ought to catch the eye at a glance. Henceforth I should know what to
look for, and might expect better luck; although, if this particular
bird’s behavior was to be taken as a criterion, the books had been
quite within the mark in emphasizing the sly and elusive habit of the
species, and the consequent difficulty of prolonged and satisfactory
observation of it.
The Lincoln finch, or Lincoln sparrow, the reader should know, is a
congener of the song sparrow and the swamp sparrow, a native mostly of
the far north, and while common enough as a migrant in many parts of
the United States, is, or is generally supposed to be, something of a
rarity in the Eastern States.
Meanwhile, having beaten the brush over, and looked up the roadside
and down the roadside and over the wall, I went on my way, stopping
once for a feast of blackberries,--as many and as good as a man could
ask for, long, slender, sweet, and dead ripe; and at the top of the
road I cut across a hayfield to the lane before mentioned, that should
take me back to the Sugar Hill highway. Now the prospects were in front
of me, there was no more steepness of grade, I had seen Tom Lincoln’s
finch,[3] and the day was brighter than ever. Every sparrow that
stirred I must put my glass on; but not one was of the right complexion.
Then, in a sugar grove not far from the Franconia Inn, I found myself
all at once in the midst of one of those traveling flocks that make so
delightful a break in a bird-lover’s day. I was in the midst of it,
I say; but the real fact was that the birds were passing through the
grove between me and the sky. For the time being the branches were
astir with wings. Such minutes are exciting. “Now or never,” a man says
to himself. Every second is precious. At this precise moment a warbler
is above your head, far up in the topmost bough perhaps, half hidden
by a leaf. If you miss him, he is gone forever. If you make him out,
well and good; he may be a rarity, a prize long waited for; or, quite
as likely, while busy with him you may let a ten times rarer one pass
unnoticed. In this game, as in any other, a man must run his chances;
though there is skill as well as luck in it, without doubt, and one
player will take a trick or two more than another, with the same hand.
In the present instance, so far as my canvass showed, the “wave” was
made up of myrtle warblers, blackpolls, baybreasts, black-throated
greens, a chestnut-side, a Maryland yellow-throat, red-eyed vireos,
solitary vireos, one or more scarlet tanagers (in undress, of course,
and pretty late by my reckoning), ruby-crowned kinglets, chickadees,
winter wrens, goldfinches, song sparrows, and flickers. The last three
or four species, it is probable enough, were in the grove only by
accident, and are hardly to be counted as part of the south-bound
caravan. Several of the species were in good force, and doubtless some
species eluded me altogether. No man can look all ways at once; and in
autumn the eyes must do not only their own work, but that of the ears
as well.
All the while the birds hastened on, flitting from tree to tree,
feeding a minute and then away, following the stream. I was especially
glad of the baybreasts, of which there were two at least, both very
distinctly marked, though in nothing like their spring plumage. I
saw only one other specimen this fall, but the name is usually in my
autumnal Franconia list. The chestnut-side, on the other hand, was the
first one I had ever found here at this season, and was correspondingly
welcome.
After all, a catalogue of names gives but a meagre idea of such
a flock, except to those who have seen similar ones, and amused
themselves with them in a similar manner. But I had had the fun,
whether I can make any one else appreciate it or not, and between it
and my joy over the Lincoln finch I went home in high feather.
Five days longer I followed the road alone. Every time a sparrow
darted into the bushes too quickly for me to name him, I thought of
_Melospiza lincolni_. Once, indeed, on the Bethlehem road, I believed
that I really saw a bird of that species; but it was in the act of
disappearing, and no amount of pains or patience--or no amount that I
had to spare--could procure me a second glimpse.
On the sixth day came my friend, the second foot-passenger, and was
told of my good fortune; and together we began forthwith to walk--and
look at sparrows. This, also, was vain, until the morning of October
4. I was out first. A robin was cackling from a tall treetop, as I
stepped upon the piazza, and a song sparrow sang from a cluster of
bushes across the way. Other birds were there, and I went over to have
a look at them: two or three white-throats, as many song sparrows, and
a white-crown. Then by squeaking I called into sight two swamp sparrows
(migrants newly come, they must be, to be found in such a place), and
directly afterward up hopped a small grayish sparrow, seen at a glance
to be like my bird of nine days before,--like him in looks, but not
in behavior. He conducted himself in the most accommodating manner,
was full of curiosity, not in the least shy, and afforded me every
opportunity to look him over to my heart’s content.
In the midst of it all I heard my comrade’s footfall on the piazza,
and gave him a whistle. He came at once, wading through the wet grass
in his slippers. He knew from my attitude--so he firmly declared
afterward--that it was a Lincoln finch I was gazing at! And just as he
drew near, the sparrow, sitting in full view and facing us, in a way
to show off his peculiar marks to the best advantage, uttered a single
_cheep_, thoroughly distinctive, or at least quite unlike any sparrow’s
note with which I am familiar; as characteristic, I should say, as
the song sparrow’s _tut_. Then he dropped to the ground. “Yes, I saw
him, and heard the note,” my companion said; and he hastened into the
house for his boots and his opera-glass. In a few minutes he was back
again, fully equipped, and we set ourselves to coax the fellow into
making another display of himself. Sure enough, he responded almost
immediately, and we had another satisfying observation of him, though
this time he kept silence. I was especially interested to find, what
I had on general considerations suspected, that Lincoln finches were
like other members of their family. Take them right (by themselves, and
without startling them to begin with), and they could be as complaisant
as one could desire, no matter how timid and elusive they might be
under different conditions. Our bird was certainly a jewel. For a while
he pleased us by perching side by side with a song sparrow. “You see
how much smaller I am,” he might have been saying; “you may know me
partly by that.”
And we fancied we should know him thereafter; but a novice’s knowledge
is only a novice’s, as we were to be freshly reminded that very day.
Our jaunt was round Garnet Hill, the all-day expedition before referred
to. I will not rehearse the story of it; but while we were on the
farther side of the hill, somewhere in Lisbon, we found the roadsides
swarming with sparrows,--a mixed flock, song sparrows, field sparrows,
chippers, and white-crowns. Among them one of us by and by detected a
grayish, smallish bird, and we began hunting him, from bush to bush
and from one side of the road to the other, carrying on all the while
an eager debate as to his identity. Now we were sure of him, and now
everything was unsettled. His breast was streaked and had a yellow
band across it. His color and size were right, as well as we could
say,--so decidedly so that there was no difficulty whatever in picking
him out at a glance after losing him in a flying bunch; but some of his
motions were pretty song-sparrow-like, and what my fellow observer was
most staggered by, he showed a blotch, a running together of the dark
streaks, in the middle of the breast,--a point very characteristic of
the song sparrow, but not mentioned in book descriptions of Melospiza
lincolni. So we chased him and discussed him (that was the time for a
gun, the professional will say), till he got away from us for good.
Was he a Lincoln finch? Who knows? We left the question open. But I
believe he was. The main reason, not to say the only one, for our
uncertainty was the pectoral blotch; and that, I have since learned,
is often seen in specimens of Melospiza lincolni. Why the manuals make
no reference to it I cannot tell; as I cannot tell why they omit the
same point in describing the savanna sparrow. In scientific books, as
in “popular” magazine articles, many things must no doubt be passed
over for lack of room. In any case, it is not the worst misfortune that
could befall us to have some things left for our own finding out.
And after all, the question was not of supreme importance. Though I was
delighted to have seen a new bird, and doubly delighted to have seen it
in Franconia, the great joy of my visit was not in any such fragment of
knowledge, but in that bright and glorious world; mountains and valleys
beautiful in themselves, and endeared by the memory of happy days among
them. Sometimes I wonder whether the pleasures of memory may not be
worth the price of growing old.
SPRING
“He would now be up every morning by break of day, walking to and fro
in the valley.”--BUNYAN.
It was a white day, the day of the red cherry,--by the almanac the 20th
of May. Once in the hill country, the train ran hour after hour through
a world of shrubs and small trees, loaded every one with blossoms.
Their number was amazing. I should not have believed there were so
many in all New Hampshire. The snowy branches fairly whitened the
woods; as if all the red-cherry trees of the country round about were
assembled along the track to celebrate a festival. The spectacle--for
it was nothing less--made me think of the annual dogwood display as I
had witnessed it in the Alleghanies and further south. I remembered,
too, a similar New England pageant of some years ago; a thing of annual
occurrence, of course, but never seen by me before or since. Then it
happened that I came down from Vermont (this also was in May) just
at the time when the shadbushes were in their glory. Like the wild
red-cherry trees, as I saw them now, they seemed to fill the world.
Such miles on miles of a floral panorama are among the memorable
delights of spring travel.
For the cherry’s sake I was glad that my leaving home had been delayed
a week or two beyond my first intention; though I thought then, as I do
still, that an earlier start would have shown me something more of real
spring among the mountains, which, after all, was what I had come out
to see.
The light showers through which I drove over the hills from Littleton
were gone before sunset, and as the twilight deepened I strolled up
the Butter Hill road as far as the grove of red pines, just to feel
the ground under my feet and to hear the hermit thrushes. How divinely
they sang, one on either side of the way, voice answering to voice, the
very soul of music, out of the darkening woods! I agree with a friendly
correspondent who wrote me, the other day, fresh from a summer in
France, that the nightingale is no such singer. I have never heard the
nightingale, but that does not alter my opinion. Formerly I wished that
the hermit, and all the rest of our woodland thrushes, would practice
a longer and more continuous strain. Now I think differently; for I
see now that what I looked upon as a blemish is really the perfection
of art. Those brief, deliberate phrases, breaking one by one out of
the silence, lift the soul higher than any smooth-flowing warble could
possibly do. Worship has no gift of long-breathed fluency. If she
speaks at all, it is in the way of ejaculation: “Therefore let thy
words be few,” said the Preacher,--a text which is only a modern Hebrew
version of what the hermit thrush has been saying here in the White
Mountains for ten thousand years.
One of the principal glories of Franconia is the same in spring as in
autumn,--the colors of the forest. There is no describing them: greens
and reds of all tender and lovely shades; not to speak of the exquisite
haze-blue, or blue-purple, which mantles the still budded woods on the
higher slopes. For the reds I was quite unprepared. They have never
been written about, so far as I know, doubtless because they have never
been seen. The scribbling tourist is never here till long after they
are gone. In fact, I stayed late enough, on my present visit, to see
the end of them. I knew, of course, that young maple leaves, like old
ones, are of a ruddy complexion;[4] but somehow I had never considered
that the massing of the trees on hillsides would work the same
gorgeous, spectacular effect in spring as in autumn,--broad patches of
splendor hung aloft, a natural tapestry, for the eye to feast upon. Not
that May is as gaudy as September. There are no brilliant yellows, and
the reds are many shades less fiery than autumn furnishes; but what is
lacking in intensity is more than made up in delicacy, as the bloom
of youth is fairer than any hectic flush. The glory passed, as I have
said. Before the 1st of June it had deepened, and then disappeared; but
the sight of it was of itself enough to reward my journey.
The clouds returned after the rain, and my first forenoon was spent
under an umbrella on the Bethlehem plateau, not so much walking as
standing about; now in the woods, now in the sandy road, now in
the dooryard of an empty house. It was Sunday; the rain, quiet and
intermittent, rather favored music; and all in all, things were pretty
much to my mind,--plenty to see and hear, yet all of a sweetly familiar
sort, such as one hardly thinks of putting into a notebook. Why record,
as if it could be forgotten or needed to be remembered, the lisping
of happy chickadees or the whistle of white-throated sparrows? Or
why speak of shadblow and goldthread, or even of the lovely painted
trilliums, with their three daintily crinkled petals, streaked with
rose-purple? The trilliums, indeed, well deserved to be spoken of: so
bright and bold they were; every blossom looking the sun squarely in
the face,--in great contrast with the pale and bashful wake-robin,
which I find (by searching for it) in my own woods. One after another
I gathered them (pulled them, to speak with poetic literalness), each
fresher and handsomer than the one before it, till the white stems
made a handful.
“Oh,” said a man on the piazza, as I returned to the hotel, “I see you
have nosebleed.” I was putting my hand to my pocket, wondering why I
should have been taken so childishly, when it came over me what he
meant. He was looking at the trilliums, and explained, in answer to a
question, that he had always heard them called “nosebleed.” Somewhere,
then,--I omitted to inquire where,--this is their “vulgar” name. In
Franconia the people call them “Benjamins,” which has a pleasant
Biblical sound,--better than “nosebleed,” at all events,--though to my
thinking “trillium” is preferable to either of them, both for sound
and for sense. People cry out against “Latin names.” But why is Latin
worse than Hebrew? And who could ask anything prettier or easier than
trillium, geranium, anemone, and hepatica?
The next morning I set out for Echo Lake. At that height, in that
hollow among the mountains, the season must still be young. There, if
anywhere, I should find the early violet and the trailing mayflower.
And whatever I found, or did not find, at the end of the way, I should
have made another ascent of the dear old Notch road, every rod of it
the pleasanter for happy memories. I had never traveled it in May, with
the glossy-leaved clintonia yet in the bud, and the broad, grassy golf
links above the Profile House farm all frosty with houstonia bloom.
And many times as I had been over it, I had never known till now that
rhodora stood along its very edge. To-day, with the pink blossoms
brightening the crooked, leafless, knee-high stems, not even my eyes
could miss it. Our one small pear-leaved willow, near the foot of
Hardscrabble, was in flower, its maroon leaves partly grown. Well I
remembered the June morning when I lighted upon it, and the interest
shown by the senior botanist of our little company when I reported the
discovery, at the dinner table. He went up that very afternoon to see
it for himself; and year after year, while he lived, he watched over
it, more than once cautioning the road-menders against its destruction.
How many times he and I have stopped beside it, on our way up and
down! The “Torrey willow” he always called it, stroking my vanity; and
I liked the word.
Now a chipmunk speaks to me, as I pass; it is not his fault, nor mine
either, perhaps, that I do not understand him; and now, hearing a twig
snap, I glance up in time to see a woodchuck scuttling out of sight
under the high, overhanging bank. So _he_ is a dweller in these upper
mountain woods![5] I should have thought him too nice an epicure to
feel himself at home in such diggings. But who knows? Perhaps he finds
something hereabout--wood-sorrel or what not--that is more savory even
than young clover leaves and early garden sauce. From somewhere on my
right comes the sweet--honey-sweet--warble of a rose-breasted grosbeak;
and almost over my head, at the topmost point of a tall spruce, sits
a Blackburnian warbler, doing his little utmost to express himself.
His pitch is as high as his perch, and his tone, pure _z_, is like the
finest of wire. Another water-bar surmounted, and a bay-breast sings,
and lets me see him,--a bird I always love to look at, and a song that
I always have to learn anew, partly because I hear it so seldom, partly
because of its want of individuality: a single hurried phrase, pure
_z_ like the Blackburnian’s, and of the same wire-drawn tenuity. These
warblers are poor hands at warbling, but they are musical to the eye.
By this rule,--if throats were made to be looked at, and judged by the
feathers on them,--the Blackburnian might challenge comparison with any
singer under the sun.
As the road ascends, the aspect of things grows more and more
springlike,--or less and less summer-like. Black-birch catkins are just
beginning to fall, and a little higher, not far from the Bald Mountain
path, I notice a sugar maple still hanging full of pale straw-colored
tassels,--encouraging signs to a man who was becoming apprehensive lest
he had arrived too late.
Then, as I pass the height of land and begin the gentle descent into
the Notch, fronting the white peak of Lafayette and the black face of
Eagle Cliff, I am aware of a strange sensation, as if I had stepped
into another world: bare, leafless woods and sudden blank silence.
All the way hitherto birds have been singing on either hand, my ear
picking out the voices one by one, while flies and mosquitoes have
buzzed continually about my head; here, all in a moment, not a bird,
not an insect,--a stillness like that of winter. Minute after minute,
rod after rod, and not a breath of sound,--not so much as the stirring
of a leaf. I could not have believed such a transformation possible.
It is uncanny. I walk as in a dream. The silence lasts for at least a
quarter of a mile. Then a warbler breaks it for an instant, and leaves
it, if possible, more absolute than before. I am going southward, and
downhill; but I am going into the Notch, into the very shadow of the
mountains, where Winter makes his last rally against the inevitable.
And yes, here are some of the early flowers I have come in search of:
the dear little yellow violets, whose glossy, round leaves, no more
than half-grown as yet, seem to love the very border of a snowbank.
Here, too, is a most flourishing patch of spring-beauties, and another
of adder’s-tongue,--dog-tooth violet, so called. Of the latter there
must be hundreds of acres in Franconia. I have seen the freckled leaves
everywhere, and now and then a few belated blossoms. Here I have it at
its best, the whole bed thick with buds and freshly blown flowers. But
the round-leaved violet is what I am chiefly taken with. The very type
and pattern of modesty, I am ready to say. The spring-beauty masses
itself; and though every blossom, if you look at it, is a miracle of
delicacy,--lustrous pink satin, with veinings of a deeper shade,--it
may fairly be said to make a show. But the violets, scattered, and
barely out of the ground, must be sought after one by one. So meek, and
yet so bold!--part of the beautiful vernal paradox, that the lowly and
the frail are the first to venture.
As I come down to the lakeside,--making toward the lower end, whither
I always go, because there the railroad is least obtrusively in sight
and the mountains are faced to the best advantage,--two or three
solitary sandpipers flit before me, tweeting and bobbing, and a
winter wren (invisible, of course) sings from a thicket at my elbow.
A jolly songster he is, with the clearest and finest of tones--a true
fife--and an irresistible accent and rhythm. A bird by himself. This
fellow hurries and hurries (am I wrong in half remembering a line by
some poet about a bird that “hurries and precipitates”?),[6] till the
tempo becomes too much for him; the notes can no longer be taken, and,
like a boy running down too steep a hill, he finishes with a slide.
I think of those pianoforte passages which the most lightninglike of
performers--Paderewski himself--are reduced to playing ignominiously
with the back of one finger. I know not their technical name, if they
have one,--finger-nail runs, perhaps. I remember, also, Thoreau’s
description of a song heard in Tuckerman’s Ravine and here in the
Franconia Notch. He could never discover the author of it, but pretty
certainly it was the winter wren. “Most peculiar and memorable,” he
pronounces it, like a “fine corkscrew stream issuing with incessant
tinkle from a cork.” “Tinkle” is exactly the word. Trust Thoreau to
find _that_, though he could not find the singer. If the thrushes are
left out of the account, there is no voice in the mountains that I am
gladder to hear.