only others (a few undoubted migrants--Wilson’s black-cap warbler, the
white-crowned sparrow, and the solitary sandpiper--being omitted)
were a single meadow lark and a single yellow-throated vireo. The lark
seemed to be unknown to Franconia people, and my specimen may have
been only a straggler. He sang again and again on May 22, but I heard
nothing from him afterward, though I passed the place often. The vireo
was singing in a sugar grove on the 3d of June,--a date on which,
accidents apart, he should certainly have been at home for the summer.
Because I have had so much to say about the Cape May warbler and
the wood thrush, it is not to be assumed that I mean to set them in
the first place, nor even that I had in them the highest pleasure.
They surprised me, and surprise is always more talkative than simple
appreciation; but the birds that ministered most to my enjoyment were
the hermit and the veery. The veery is not an every-day singer with me
at home, and the hermit, for some years past, has made himself almost
a stranger. I hardly know which of the two put me under the greater
obligation. The veery sang almost continually, and a good veery is a
singer almost out of competition. His voice lacks the ring of the wood
thrush’s and the hermit’s; it never dominates the choir; but with the
coppice to itself and the listener close by, it has sometimes a quality
irresistible; I do not hesitate to characterize it as angelic. Of this
kind was the voice of a bird that used to sing under my Franconia
window at half past three o’clock, in the silence of the morning.
The surpassing glory of the veery’s song, as all lovers of American
bird music may be presumed by this time to know, lies in its harmonic,
double-stopping effect,--an effect, or quality, as beautiful as it is
peculiar. One day, while I stood listening to it under the best of
conditions, admiring the wonderful arpeggio (I know no less technical
word for it), my pencil suddenly grew poetic. “The veery’s fingers are
quick on the harp-strings,” it wrote. His is perfect Sunday music,--and
the hermit’s no less so. And in the same class I should put the simple
chants of the field sparrow and the vesper. The so-called “preaching”
of the red-eyed vireo is utter worldliness in the comparison.
Happy Franconia! This year, if never before, it had all five of
our New England Hylocichlæ singing in its woods: the veery and the
hermit everywhere in the lower country, the wood thrush in the maple
forest before mentioned, the olive-back throughout the Notch and its
neighborhood, and the gray-cheek on Lafayette; a quintette hard to
match, I venture to think, anywhere on the footstool. And after them--I
do not say with them--were winter wrens, bobolinks, rose-breasted
grosbeaks, purple finches, solitary vireos, vesper sparrows, field
sparrows, white-throated sparrows, song sparrows, catbirds, robins,
orioles, tanagers, and a score or two beside.
One other bright circumstance I am bound in honor to speak of,--the
abundance of swallows; a state of affairs greatly unlike anything to be
met with in my part of Massachusetts: cliff swallows and barn swallows
in crowds, and sand martins and tree swallows by no means uncommon.
But for the absence of black martins,--a famous colony of which the
tourist may see at Concord, while the train waits,--here would have
been a second quintette worthy to rank with the thrushes; the flight of
one set being as beautiful, not to say as musical, as the songs of the
other. As it was, the universal presence of these aerial birds was a
continual delight to any man with eyes to notice it. They glorified the
open valley as the thrushes glorified the woods.
We shall never again see the like of this, I fear, in our prosier
Boston neighborhood. Within my time--within twenty years, indeed--barn
swallows summered freely on Beacon Hill, plastering their nests against
the walls of the State House and the Athenæum, and even under the busy
portico of the Tremont House. I have remembrance, too, of a pair that
dwelt, for one season at least, above the door of the old Ticknor
mansion, at the head of Park Street. Those days are gone. Now, alas,
even in the suburban districts, we may almost say that one swallow
makes a summer. An evil change it is, for which not even the warblings
of English sparrows will ever quite console me. Yet the present state
of things, the reoccupation of Boston by the British, if you please
to call it so, is not without its grain of compensation. It makes
me fonder of “old Francony.” Skeptic or man of faith, naturalist or
supernaturalist, who does not like to feel that there is somewhere a
“better country” than the one he lives in?
A DAY IN JUNE
THE FORENOON
“The air that floated by me seem’d to say,
‘Write! thou wilt never have a better day,’
And so I did.”
KEATS.
All signs threatened a day of midsummer heat, though it was only the 2d
of June. Before breakfast, even, the news seemed to have got abroad;
so that there was something like a dearth of music under my windows,
where heretofore there had been almost a surfeit. The warbling vireo
in the poplar, which had teased my ear morning after morning, getting
shamelessly in the way of his betters, had for once fallen silent;
unless, indeed, he had sung his stint before I woke, or had gone
elsewhere to practice. The comparative stillness enabled me to hear
voices from the hillside across the meadow, while I turned over in
my mind a thought concerning the nature of those sounds--a class by
themselves, some of them by no means unmusical--which are particularly
enjoyable when borne to us from a distance: crow voices, the baying
of hounds, cowbell tinkles, and the like. The nasal, high-pitched,
penetrating call of the little Canadian nuthatch is one of the best
examples of what I mean. _Ank, ank_: the sounds issue from the depths
of trackless woods, miles and miles away as it seems, just reaching
us, without a breath to spare; dying upon the very tympanum, like a
spent runner who drops exhausted at the goal, touching it only with
his finger tips. Yet the ear is not fretted. It makes no attempt to
hear more. _Ank, ank_: that is the whole story, and we see the bird as
plainly as if he hung from a cone at the top of the next fir tree.
“No tramping to-day,” said my friends from the cottage as we met at
table. They had been reading the thermometer, which is the modern
equivalent for observing the wind and regarding the clouds. But
my vacation, unlike theirs, was not an all-summer affair. It was
fast running out, and there were still many things to be seen and
done. Immediately after breakfast, therefore, with an umbrella and a
luncheon, I started for the Notch. I would reverse the usual route,
going by way of the railroad--reached by a woodland trail above
“Chase’s”--and returning by the highway. Of itself this is only a
forenoon’s jaunt, but I meant to piece it out by numerous waits--for
coolness and listening--and sundry by-excursions, especially by a
search for Selkirk’s violet and an hour or two on Bald Mountain. If the
black flies and the mosquitoes would let me choose my own gait, I would
risk the danger of sunstroke.
As I come out upon the grassy plain, after the first bit of sharp
ascent, a pleasant breeze is stirring, and with the umbrella over
my head, and a halt as often as the shade of a tree, the sight of a
flower, or the sound of music invites me, I go on with great comfort.
Now I am detained by a close bed of dwarf cornel, every face looking
straight upward, the waxen white “flowers” inclosing each a bunch of
dark pin-points. Now a lovely clear-winged moth hovers over a dandelion
head; and a pleasing sight it is, to see his transparent wings beating
themselves into a haze about his brown body. And now, by way of
contrast, one of our tiny sky-blue butterflies rises from the ground
and with a pretty unsteadiness flits carelessly before me, twinkling
over the sand.
A bluebird drops into the white birch under which I am standing, and
lets fall a few notes of his contralto warble. A delicious voice. For
purity and a certain affectionateness it would be hard to name its
superior. A vesper sparrow sings from the grass land; and from the
woods beyond a jay is screaming. His, by the bye, is another of the
voices that are bettered by distance, although, for my own part, I
like the ring of it, near or far. Now a song sparrow breaks out in his
breezy, characteristically abrupt manner. He is a bird with fine gifts
of cheeriness and versatility; but when he sets himself against the
vesper, as now, it is like prose against poetry, plain talk against
music. So it seems to me at this moment, I mean to say. At another
time, in another mood, I might tone down the comparison, though I could
never say less than that the vesper is my favorite. His gifts are
sweetness and perfection.
So I cross the level fields to Chase’s, where I stand a few minutes
before the little front-yard flower-garden, always with many pretty
things in it. One of those natural gardeners, the good woman must be,
who have a knack of making plants blossom. And just beyond, in the
shelter of the first tree, I stop again to take off my hat, put down my
umbrella, and speak coaxingly to a suspicious pointer (being a friend
of all dogs except surly ones), which after much backing and filling
gets his cool nose into my palm. We are on excellent terms, I flatter
myself, but at that moment some notion strikes me and I take out my
notebook and pencil. Instantly he starts away and sets up a furious
bark, looking first at me, then toward the house, circling about me
all the while, at a rod’s distance, in a quiver of excitement. “Help!
help!” he cries. “Here’s a villain of some sort. I’ve never seen the
like. A spy at the very least.” And though he quiets down when I put up
the book, there is no more friendliness for this time. Man writing, as
Carlyle would have said, is a doubtful character.
Another stage, to the edge of the woods, and I rest again, the breeze
encouraging me. A second bluebird is caroling. Every additional one is
cause for thankfulness. Imagine a place where bluebirds should be as
thick as English sparrows are in our American cities! Imagine heaven!
A crested flycatcher screams, an olive-side calls _pip, pip_, a robin
cackles, an oven-bird recites his piece with schoolboy emphasis, an
alder flycatcher _queeps_, and a vesper sparrow sings. And at the end,
as if for good measure, a Maryland yellow-throat adds his _witchery,
witchery_. The breeze comes to me over broad beds of hay-scented fern,
and at my feet are bunchberry blossoms and the white star-flower. At
this moment, nevertheless, the cooling, insect-dispersing wind is
better than all things else. Such is one effect of hot weather, setting
comfort above poetry.
I leave the wind behind, and take my way into the wood, where there
is nothing in particular to delay me except an occasional windfall,
which must be clambered over or beaten about. Half an hour, more or
less, of lazy traveling, and I come out upon the railroad at the big
sugar-maple grove. This is one of the sights of the country in the
bright-leaf season, say the first week of October; something, I have
never concluded what, giving to its colors a most remarkable depth and
richness. Putting times together, I must have spent hours in admiring
it, now from different points on the Butter Hill round, now from Bald
Mountain. At present every leaf of it is freshly green, and somewhere
within it dwells a wood thrush, for whose golden voice I sit down in
the shade to listen. He is in no haste, and no more am I. Let him
take his time. Other birds also are a little under the weather, as it
appears; but the silence cannot last. A scarlet tanager’s voice is the
first to break it. High as the temperature is, he is still hoarse.
And so is the black-throated blue warbler that follows him. A pine
siskin passes overhead on some errand, announcing himself as he goes.
There is no need for him to speak twice. Then come three warblers,--a
Nashville, a magnolia, and a blue yellow-back; and after them a piece
of larger game, a smallish hawk. He breaks out of the dense wood behind
me, perches for half a minute in an open maple, where I can see that he
has prey of some kind in his talons, and then, taking wing, ascends in
circles into the sky, and so disappears. That is locomotion of a sort
to make a man and his umbrella envious.
A rose-breasted grosbeak, invisible (but I can see him), is warbling
not far off. He has taken the tanager’s tune--which is the robin’s as
well--and smoothed it and smoothed it, and sweetened it and sweetened
it, till it is smoother than oil and sweeter than honey. I admire it
for what it is, a miracle of mellifluency; if you call it perfect,
I can only acquiesce; but I cannot say that it stirs or kindles me.
Perhaps I haven’t a sweet ear. And hark! the wood thrush gives voice:
only a few strains, but enough to show him still present. Now I am
free to trudge along up the railroad track, pondering as I go upon the
old question why railway sleepers are always too far apart for one step
and not far enough for two. At short intervals I pause at the sound
of a mourning warbler’s brief song, pretty in itself, and noticeable
for its trick of a rolled _r_. Some of the birds add a concluding
measure of quick notes, like _wit, wit, wit_. It is long since I have
seen so many at once. In truth, I have never seen so many except on
one occasion, on the side of Mount Washington. That was ten years
ago. One a year, on the average, shows itself to me during the spring
passage--none in autumn. Well I remember my first one. Twenty years
have elapsed since that late May morning, but I could go to the very
spot, I think, though I have not been near it for more than half that
time. A good thing it is that we can still enjoy the good things of
past years, or of what we call past years.
And a good thing is a railroad, though the sleepers be spaced on
purpose for a foot-passenger’s discomfort. Without this one, over
which at this early date no trains are running, I should hardly be
traversing these miles of rough mountain country on a day of tropical
sultriness. The clear line of the track gives me not only passage and
a breeze, but an opening into the sky, and at least twice as many
bird sights and bird sounds as the unbroken forest would furnish.[10]
I drink at the section men’s well--an ice-cold spring inclosed in
a bottomless barrel--cross the brook which, gloriously alive and
beautiful, comes dashing over its boulders down the White-cross Ravine,
fifty feet below me as I guess, and stop in the burning on the other
side to listen for woodpeckers and brown creepers. The latter are
strangely rare hereabout, and this seems an ideal spot in which to
look for them. So I cannot help thinking as I see from how many of the
trunks--burned to death and left standing--the bark has warped in
long, loose flakes, as if to provide nesting sites for a whole colony
of creepers. But the birds are not here; or, if they are, they do
not mean that an inquisitive stranger shall know it. An olive-sided
flycatcher calls, rather far off, making me suspicious for an instant
of a red crossbill, and a white-throated sparrow whistles out of the
gulch below me; but I listen in vain for the quick _tseep_ which would
put an eighty-seventh name into my vacation catalogue.
Here is the round-leaved violet, one pale-bright, shy blossom. How
pleased I am to see it! Hobble-bush and wild red cherry are still in
bloom. White Mountain dogwood, we might almost call the hobble-bush;
so well it fills the place, in flowering time, of _Cornus florida_
in the Alleghanies. In the twilight of the woods, as in the darkness
of evening, no color shows so far as white; which, for aught I know,
may be one of the reasons why, relatively speaking, white flowers
are so much more common in the forest than in the open country. In
my eyes, nevertheless, the leaves of the hobble-bush--leaves and
leaf-buds--are, if anything, prettier than the blossoms. Such beauty
of shape, such expansiveness, such elegance of crimpling, and such
exceeding richness of hue, whether in youth or age! If the bush refuses
transplantation, as I have read that it does, I am glad of it. My
sympathies are with all things, plants, animals, and men, that insist
upon their native freedom, in their native country, with a touch, or
more than a touch, of native savagery. Civilization is well enough,
within limits; but why be in haste to have all the world a garden? It
will be some time yet, I hope, before every valley is exalted.
With progress of this industriously indolent sort it is nearly noon
by the time I turn into the footpath that leads down to Echo Lake.
Here the air is full of toad voices; a chorus of long-drawn trills in
the shrillest of musical tones. If the creatures (the sandy shore and
its immediate shallows are thick with them) are attempting to set up
an echo, they meet with no success. At all events I hear no response,
though the fault may easily be in my hearing, insusceptible as it is
to vibrations above a certain pitch of fineness. What ethereal music
it would be, an echo of toad trills from the grand sounding-board
of Eagle Cliff! In the density of my ignorance I am surprised to
find such numbers of these humble, half-domesticated, garden-loving
batrachians congregated here in the wilderness. If the day were less
midsummery, and were not already mortgaged to other plans, I would go
down to Profile Lake to see whether the same thing is going on there.
I should have looked upon these lovely sheets of mountain water as
spawning-places for trout. But toads!--that seems another matter. If I
am surprised at their presence, however, they seem equally so at mine.
And who knows? They were here first. Perhaps I am the intruder. I wish
them no harm in any case. If black flies form any considerable part of
their diet, they could not multiply too rapidly, though every note of
every trill were good for a polliwog, and every polliwog should grow
into the portliest of toads.
THE AFTERNOON
I spoke a little warmly, perhaps, at the end of the forenoon chapter.
Echo Lake, at the foot of it, is one of the places where I love best to
linger, and to-day it was more attractive even than usual; the air of
the clearest, the sun bright, the mountain woods all in young leaf, the
water shining. But the black flies, which had left me undisturbed on
the railroad, though I sat still by the half-hour, once I reached the
lake would allow me no rest.
It was twelve days since my first visit. The snow was gone, and the
trailing arbutus had dropped its last blossoms; but both kinds of
shadbush, standing in the hollow where a snowbank had lain ten days
ago, were still in fresh bloom. Pink lady’s-slippers were common (more
buds than blossoms as yet), and the pink rhodora also; with goldthread,
star-flower, dwarf cornel, housonia, and the painted trillium.
Chokeberry bushes were topped with handsome clusters of round, purplish
buds.
The brightest and prettiest thing here, however, was not a flower,
but a bird; a Blackburnian warbler fluttering along before me in the
low bushes--an extraordinary act of grace on the part of this haunter
of treetops--as if on purpose to show himself. He was worth showing.
His throat was like a jewel. A bay-breast, always deserving of notice,
was singing among the evergreens near by. So I believed, but the flies
were so hot after me that I made no attempt to assure myself. I was
fairly chased away from the waterside. One place after another I fled
to, seeking one where the breeze should rid me of my tormentors, till
at last, in desperation, I took to the piazza of the little shop--now
unoccupied--at which the summer tourist buys birch-bark souvenirs,
with ginger-beer, perhaps, and other potables. There I finished my
luncheon, still having a skirmish with the enemy’s scouts now and
then, but thankful to be out of the thick of the battle. The rippling
lake shone before me, a few swifts were shooting to and fro above it,
but for the time my enjoyment of all such things was gone. That half
hour of black-fly persecution had dissipated the happy mood in which
the forenoon had been passed, and there was no recovering it by force
of will. A military man would have said, perhaps, that I had lost my
_morale_. Something had happened to me, call it what you will. But
if one string was broken, my bow had another. Quiet meditation being
impossible, I was all the readier to go in search of Selkirk’s violet,
the possible finding of which was one of the motives that had brought
me into the mountains thus early. To look for flowers is not a question
of mood, but of patience. To look _at_ them, so as to feel their beauty
and meaning, is another business, not to be conducted successfully
while poisonous insects are fretting one’s temper to madness.
If I went about this botanical errand doubtingly, let the reader
hold me excused. He has heard of a needle in a haystack. The case of
my violets was similar. The one man who had seen them was now dead.
Years before, he had pointed out to me casually (or like a dunce I had
_heard_ him casually) the place where he was accustomed to leave the
road in going after them--which was always long before my arrival.
This place I believed that I remembered within perhaps half a mile. My
only resource, therefore, was to plunge into the forest, practically
endless on its further side, and as well as I could, in an hour or
so, look the land over for that distance. Success would be a piece of
almost incredible luck, no doubt; but what then? I was here, the hour
was to spare, and the woods were worth a visit, violets or no violets.
So I plunged in, and, following the general course of the road, swept
the ground right and left with my eye, turning this way and that as
boulders and tangles impeded my steps, or as the sight of something
like violet leaves attracted me.
Well, for good or ill, it is a short story. There were plenty of
violets, but all of the common white sort, and when I emerged into
the road again my hands were empty. “Small,” “rare,” says the Manual.
My failure was not ignominious,--or I would keep it to myself,--and I
count upon trying again another season. And one thing I _had_ found:
my peace of mind. Subjectively, as we say, my hunt had prospered. Now
I could climb Bald Mountain with good hope of an hour or two of serene
enjoyment at the summit.
The climb is short, though the upper half of it is steep enough to
merit the name, and the “mountain” (it will pardon me the quotation
marks) is no more than a point of rocks, an outlying spur of Lafayette.
Its attractiveness is due not to its altitude, but to the exceptional
felicity of its situation; commanding the lake and the Notch, and the
broad Franconia Valley, together with a splendid panorama of broken
country and mountain forest; and over all, close at hand, the solemn,
bare peak of Lafayette.
I took my time for the ascent (blessed be all-day jaunts, say I),
minding the mossy boulders, the fern-beds, and the trees (many of them
old friends of mine--it is more than twenty years since I began going
up and down here), and especially the violets. It was surprising, not
to say amusing, now that I had violets in my eye, how ubiquitous the
little _blanda_ had suddenly become. Almost it might be said that there
was nothing else in the whole forest. So true it is that seeing or
not seeing is mostly a matter of prepossession. As for the birds, this
was their hour of after-dinner silence. I recall only a golden-crowned
kinglet _zeeing_ among the low evergreens about the cone. He was the
first one of my whole vacation trip, and slipped at once into the
eighty-seventh place in my catalogue, the place I had tried so hard
to induce the brown creeper to take possession of two hours before.
Creeper or kinglet, it was all one to me, though the kinglet is
the handsomer of the two, and much the less prosaic in his dietary
methods. In fact, now that the subject suggests itself, the two birds
present a really striking contrast: one so preternaturally quick and
so continually in motion, the other so comparatively lethargic. Every
one to his trade. Let the creeper stick to his bark. Quick or slow, he
should still have been Number 88, and thrice welcome, if he would have
given me half an excuse for counting him. As things were, he kept out
of my reckoning to the end.