turned to look about me at the summit. It was only half past two, the
day was gloriously fair, the breeze not too strong, yet ample for
creature comforts,--coolness and freedom,--and the place all my own.
If I had missed Selkirk’s violet, I had found his solitude. The joists
of the little open summer-house were scrawled thickly with names and
initials, but the scribblers and carvers had gone with last year’s
birds. I might sing or shout, and there would be none to hear me. But I
did neither. I was glad to be still and look.
There lay Echo Lake, shimmering in the sun. Beyond was the hotel, its
windows still boarded for winter, and on either side of it rose the
mountain walls. The White Cross still kept something of its shape on
Lafayette, the only snow left in sight, though almost the whole peak
had been white ten days before. The cross itself must be fast going.
With my glass I could see the water pouring from it in a flood. And how
plainly I could follow the trail up the rocky cone of the mountain!
Those were good days when I climbed it, lifting myself step by step
up that long, steep, boulder-covered slope. I should love to be there
now. I wonder what flowers are already in bloom. It must be too early
for the diapensia and the Greenland sandwort, I imagine. Yet I am not
sure. Mountain flowers are quick to answer when the sun speaks to them.
Thousands of years they have been learning to make the most of a brief
season. Plants of the same species bloom earlier here than in level
Massachusetts. After all, alpine plants, hurried and harried as they
are, true children of poverty, have perhaps the best of it. “Blessed
are ye poor” may have been spoken to them also. Hardy mountaineers,
blossoming in the very face of heaven, with no earthly admirers except
the butterflies. I remember the splendors of the Lapland azalea in
middle June, with rocks and snow for neighbors. So it will be this
year, for Wisdom never faileth. I look and look, till almost I am there
on the heights, my feet standing on a carpet of blooming willows and
birches, and the world, like another carpet, outspread below.
But there is much else to delight me. Even here, so far below the
crest of Lafayette, I am above the world. Yonder is one of my pair of
deserted farms. Good hours I have had in them. Beyond is the Chase
clearing, and still beyond, over another tract of woods, are the
pasture lands along the road to “Mears’s.” Then comes the line of the
Bethlehem road, marked by a house at long intervals--and thankful am
I for the length of them. There I see _my_ house; one of several that
I have picked out for purchase, at one time and another, but have
never come to the point of paying for, still less of occupying. When
my friends and I have wandered irresponsibly about this country it has
pleased us to be like children, and play the old game of make-believe.
Some of the farmers would be astonished to know how many times their
houses have been sold over their heads, and they never the wiser.
Further away, a little to the right, I see the pretty farms--romantic
farms, I mean, attractive to outsiders--of which I have so often taken
my share of the crop from Mount Agassiz, at the base of which they
nestle. To the left of all this are the village of Franconia and the
group of Sugar Hill hotels, with the Landaff Valley (how green it
is!) below them in the middle distance. Nearer still is the Franconia
Valley, with the Tucker Brook alders, and far down toward Littleton
bright reaches of Gale River.
All this fills me with exquisite pleasure. But longer than at anything
else I look at the mountain forest just below me. So soft and bright
this world of treetops all newly green! I have no thoughts about it;
there is nothing to say; but the feeling it gives me is like what I
imagine of heaven itself. I can only look and be happy.
About me are stunted, faded spruces, with here and there among them a
balsam-fir, wonderfully vivid and fresh in the comparison; and after a
time I discover that the short upper branches of the spruces have put
forth new cones, soft to the touch as yet, and of a delicate, purplish
color, the tint varying greatly, whether from difference of age or for
other reasons I cannot presume to say. In this low wood, somewhere near
by, a blackpoll warbler, not long from South America, I suppose, is
lisping softly to himself. A myrtle warbler, less recently come, and
from a less distance, has taken possession of a dead treetop, hardly
higher than a man’s head, from which he makes an occasional sally after
a passing insect. Between whiles he sings. Once I heard a snowbird, as
I thought; but it was only the myrtle warbler when I came to look. An
oven-bird shoots into the air out of the forest below for a burst of
aerial afternoon music. I heard the preluding strain, and, glancing up,
caught him at once, the sunlight happening to strike him perfectly. All
the morning he has been speaking prose; now he is a poet; a division
of the day from which the rest of us might take a lesson. But for his
afternoon rôle he needs a name. “Oven-bird” goes somewhat heavily in a
lyric:--
“Hark! hark! the _oven-bird_ at heaven’s gate sings”--
you would hardly recognize that for Shakespeare.
As I shift my position, trying one after another of the seats which
the rocks offer for my convenience, I notice that the three-toothed
five-finger--a mountain lover, if there ever was one--is in bud, and
the blueberry in blossom. The myrtle warbler sings by the hour, a soft,
dreamy trill, a sound of pure contentment; and two red-eyed vireos, one
here, one there, preach with equal persistency. They have taken the
same text, I think, and it might have been made for them: “Precept upon
precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a
little and there a little.” Right or wrong, the warbler’s lullaby is
more to my taste than the vireos’ exhortation. A magnolia warbler, out
of sight among the evergreens, is making an afternoon of it likewise.
His song is a mere nothing; hardly to be called a “line;” but if all
the people who have nothing extraordinary to say were to hold their
peace, what would ears be good for? The race might become deaf, as
races of fish have gone blind through living in caverns.
These are exactly such birds as one might have expected to find here.
And the same may be said of a Swainson thrush and a pine siskin. A
black-billed cuckoo and a Maryland yellow-throat, on the other hand,
the yellow-throat especially, seem less in place. What can have brought
the latter to this dry, rocky hilltop is more than I can imagine. A big
black-and-yellow butterfly (Turnus) goes sailing high overhead, borne
on the wind. For so unsteady a steersman he is a bold mariner. A second
look at him, and he is out of sight. Common as he is, he is one of my
perennial admirations. The peak of Lafayette is no more a miracle. All
the flowers up there know him.
Now it is time to go. I have been here an hour and a half, and am
determined to have no hurrying on the way homeward, over the old Notch
road. Let the day be all alike, a day of leisure and of dreams. A last
look about me, a few rods of picking my steep course downward over the
rocks at the very top, and I am in the woods. Here, “my distance and
horizon gone,” I please myself with looking at bits of the world’s
beauty; especially at sprays of young leaves, breaking a twig here and
a twig there to carry in my hand; a spray of budded mountain maple or
of yellow birch. Texture, color, shape, veining and folding--all is a
piece of Nature’s perfect work. No less beautiful--I stop again and
again before a bed of them--are the dainty branching beech-ferns. There
is no telling how pretty they are on their slender shining stems. And
all the way I am taking leave of the road. I may never see it again.
“Good-by, old friend,” I say; and the trees and the brook seem to
answer me, “Good-by.”
BERRY-TIME FELICITIES
“A nice and subtle happiness, I see,
Thou to thyself proposest.”
MILTON.
Once more I am in old Franconia, and in a new season. With all my
visits to the New Hampshire mountains, I have never seen them before
in August. I came on the last day of July,--a sweltering journey. That
night it rained a little, hardly enough to lay the dust, which is deep
in all these valley roads, and the next morning at breakfast time the
mercury marked fifty-seven degrees. All day it was cool, and at night
we sat before a fire of logs in the big chimney. The day was really a
wonder of clearness, as well as of pleasant autumnal temperature; an
exceptional mercy, calling for exceptional acknowledgment.
After breakfast I took the Bethlehem road at the slowest pace. The last
time I had traveled it was in May. Then every tree had its bird, and
every bird a voice. Now it was August--the year no longer young, and
the birds no longer a choir. And when birds are neither in tune nor
in flocks, it is almost as if they were absent altogether. It seemed
to me, when I had walked a mile, that I had never seen Franconia so
deserted.
An alder flycatcher was calling from a larch swamp; a white-throated
sparrow whistled now and then in the distance; and from still farther
away came the leisurely, widely spaced measures of a hermit thrush.
When he sings there is no great need of a chorus; the forest has found
a tongue; but I could have wished him nearer. A solitary vireo, close
at hand, regaled me with a sweet, low chatter, more musical twice over
than much that goes by the name of singing,--the solitary being one of
the comparatively few birds that do not know how to be unmusical,--and
a sapsucker, a noisy fellow gone silent, flew past my head and alighted
against a telegraph pole.
Wild red cherries (_Prunus Pennsylvanica_) were ripe, or nearly so;
very bright and handsome on their long, slender stems, as I stood under
the tree and looked up. With the sun above them they became fairly
translucent, the shape of the stone showing. They were pretty small,
I thought, and would never take a prize at any horticultural fair; I
needed more than one in the mouth at once when I tested their quality;
but a robin, who had been doing the same thing, seemed reluctant to
finish, and surely robins are competent judges in matters of this
kind. My own want of appreciation was probably due to some pampered
coarseness of taste.
An orchid, with one leaf and a spike of minute greenish flowers,
attracted notice, not for any showy attributes, but as a plant I did
not know. Adder’s-mouth, it proved to be; or, to give it all the
Grecian Latinity that belongs to it, _Microstylis ophioglossoides_.
How astonished it would be to hear that mouth-confounding name applied
to its modest little self; as much astonished, perhaps, as we should
be, who are not modest, though we may be greenish, if we heard some
of the more interesting titles that are applied to us, all in honest
vernacular, behind our backs. This year’s goldthread leaves gave me
more pleasure than most blossoms could have done; lustrous, elegantly
shaped, and in threes. Threes are prettier than fours, I said to
myself, as I looked at some four-leaved specimens of dwarf cornel
growing on the same bank. The comparison was hardly decisive, it is
true, since the cornus leaves lacked the goldthread’s shapeliness and
brilliancy; but I believe in the grace of the odd number.
With trifles like these I was entertaining the time when a man on a
buckboard reined in his horse and invited me to ride. He was going down
the Gale River road a piece, he said, and as this was my course also I
thankfully accepted the lift. I would go farther than I had intended,
and would spend the forenoon in loitering back. My host had two or
three tin pails between his feet, and I was not surprised when he told
me that he was “going berrying.” What did surprise me was to find,
fifteen minutes later, when I got on my legs again, that with no such
conscious purpose, and with no tin pail, I had myself come out on the
same errand. “It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.”
The simple truth was that the raspberries would not take no for
an answer. If I passed one clump of bushes, another waylaid me.
“Raspberries, all ripe,” they said. It was not quite true: that would
have been a misfortune unspeakable; but the ripe ones were enough.
Softly they dropped into the fingers--softly in spite of their asperous
name--and sweetly, three or four together for goodness’ sake, they
melted upon the tongue. They were so many that a man could have his
pick, taking only those of a deep color (ten minutes of experience
would teach him the precise shade) and a worthy plumpness, passing a
bushel to select a gill.
No raspberry should be pulled upon ever so little; it should fall
at the touch; and the teeth should have nothing to do with it, more
than with honey or cream. So I meditated, and so with all daintiness
I practiced, finishing my banquet again and again as a fresh cluster
beguiled me; for raspberry-eating, like woman’s work, is never done.
If the apple in Eden was as pleasant to the eyes and half as good
to eat, then I have no reflections to cast upon the mistress of the
garden. In fact, it seems to me not unlikely that the Edenic apple may
have been nothing more nor less than a Franconian raspberry. Small
wonder, say I, that one taste of its “sciential sap” “gave elocution to
the mute.”
So I came up out of the Gale River woods into the bushy lane--a step or
two and a mouthful of berries--and thence into the level grassy field
by the grove of pines; a favorite place, with a world of mountains in
sight--Moosilauke, Kinsman, Cannon, Lafayette, Haystack, the Twins, and
the whole Mount Washington range. A pile of timbers, the bones of an
old barn, offered me a seat, and there I rested, facing the mountains,
while a company of merry barn swallows, loquacious as ever, went
skimming over the grass. Moving clouds dappled the mountain-sides with
shadows, the sun was good, a rare thing in August, and I was happy.
This lasted for a matter of half an hour. Then a sound of wheels caused
me to turn my head. Yes, a pair of gray horses and a covered carriage,
with a white net protruding behind,--an entomological flag well known
to all Franconia dwellers in summer time, one of the institutions of
the valley. A hand was waved, and in another minute I was being carried
toward Bethlehem, all my pedestrian plans forgotten. I was becoming
that disreputable thing, an opportunist. But what then! As I remarked
just now, “It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.” In
vacation days the wisest of us may go with the wind.
A pile of decaying logs by the roadside soon tempted the insect
collector to order a halt. She was brought up, as I have heard her say
regretfully, on the stern New England doctrine that time once past
never returns, and she is still true to her training. We stripped
the bark from log after log, but uncovered nothing worth while (such
beetles as the unprofessional assistant turned up being damned without
hesitation as “common”) except two little mouse-colored, red-bellied
snakes, each with two or three spots on the back of its head. One of
these pretty creatures the collector proceeded to mesmerize by rubbing
its crown gently with a stick. “See! he enjoys it,” she said; and if
thrusting out the tongue is a sign of enjoyment, no doubt he was in
something like an ecstasy. _Storeria occipitomaculata_, the books
call him. Short snakes, like small orchids, are well pieced out with
Latinity. I would not disturb the savor of raspberries by trying just
then to put my tongue round that specific designation, though it goes
trippingly enough with a little practice, and is plain enough in its
meaning. One did not need to be a scholar, or to look twice at the
snake, to see that its occiput was maculated.
At the top of the hill--for we took the first turn to the
left--“creation widened,” and we had before us a magnificent prospect
westward, with many peaks of the Green Mountains beyond the valley.
Atmosphere so transparent as to-day’s was not made for nothing. Insects
and even raspberries were for the moment out of mind. There was glory
everywhere. We looked at it, but when we talked it was mostly of
trifles: the bindweed, the goldenrod, a passing butterfly, a sparrow.
Those who are really happy are often pleased to speak of matters
indifferent. Sometimes I think it is those who only _wish_ to be happy
who deal in superlatives and exclamations.
One thing I was especially glad to see: the big pastures on the Wallace
Hill road full of hardhack bloom. Many times, in September and October,
I had stopped to gaze upon those acres on acres of brown spires; now
I beheld them pink. It was really a sight, a sea of color. If cattle
would eat _Spiræa tomentosa_, the fields would be as good as gold
mines. So I thought. I thought, too, what an ocean of “herb tea” might
be concocted from those millions and millions of leafy stalks. The idea
was too much for me; imagination was near to being drowned in a sea of
its own creating; and I was relieved when we left the rosy wilderness
behind us, and came to the famous clump of pear-leaved willow (_Salix
balsamifera_) near the edge of the wood. This I must get over the fence
and put my hand on, just for old times’ sake. A man may take it as
one of the less uncomfortable indications of increasing age when he
loves to do things simply because he used to do them, or has done them
in remembered company. In that respect I humor myself. If there is
anything good in the multiplying of years, by all means let me have it.
And so I wore the willow.
On the way down the steep hill through the forest my friends pointed
out a maple tree which a pileated woodpecker had riddled at a
tremendous rate. The trunk contained the pupæ of wasps (they were not
strictly wasps, the entomologist was careful to explain, but were
always called so by “common people”), and no doubt it was these that
the woodpecker had been after. He had gone clean to the heart of the
trunk, now on this side, now on that. Chips by the shovelful covered
the ground. The big, red-crested fellow must love wasp pupæ almost as
well as some people love raspberries. Green leaves, a scanty covering,
were still on the tree, but its days were numbered. Who could have
foreseen that the stings of insects would bring such destruction?
Misfortunes never come singly. After the wasps the woodpecker. “Which
things are an allegory.”
* * * * *
One of my pleasures of the milder sort was to sit on the piazza before
breakfast (the lateness of the White Mountain breakfast hour being
one of a walking man’s _dis_pleasures) and watch the two morning
processions: one of tall milk-cans to and from the creamery,--an
institution which any country-born New Englander may be glad to think
of, for the comfort it has brought to New England farmers’ wives; the
other of boys, each with a tin pail, on their way to serve as caddies
at the new Profile House golf links. This latter procession I had never
seen till the present year. Half the boys of the village, from seven
or eight to fifteen or sixteen years old, seemed to have joined it;
some on bicycles, some in buggies, some on foot, none on horseback--a
striking omission in the eyes of any one who has ever lived or visited
at the South.
Franconia boys, I have noticed, have a cheerful, businesslike,
independent way with them, neither bashful nor overbold, and it was
gratifying to see them so quick to improve a new and not unamusing
method of turning a penny. Work that has to do with a game is no more
than half work, though the game be played by somebody else; and some
of the boys, it was to be remarked, carried golf sticks of their own.
Trust a Yankee lad to combine business and pleasure. One such I heard
of, who was already planning how to invest his prospective capital.
“Mamma,” he said, “can’t I spend part of my money for a fishing-rod?”
“But, my dear,” said his mother, “you know it was agreed that the first
of it should go for clothes.”
“Yes, mamma, but a boy can get along without clothes; and I’ve never
had any fishing-rod but a peeled stick.”
It sounds like a fairy tale, but it is strictly true, that a famous
angler, just then disabled from practicing his art, overheard--or was
told of, I am not certain which--this heart-warming confession of
faith, and at once said, “My boy, I will give you a fishing-rod.” And
so he did, and a silk line with it. A boy who could get on without
clothes, but must have the wherewithal to go a-fishing, was a boy with
a sense of values, a philosopher in the bud, and merited encouragement.
While I watched these industrial processions (“Gidap, Charlie! Gidap!”
says a cheery voice down the road), I listened to the few singers whose
morning music could still be counted upon: one or two song sparrows,
a field sparrow, an indigo-bird (as true a lover of August as of
feathery larch tops), a red-eyed vireo, and a distant hermit thrush.
Almost always a score or two of social barn swallows were near by,
dotting the telegraph wires, or, if the morning was cold, dropping in
bunches of twos and threes into the thick foliage of young elms. In
the trees, on the wires, or in the air, they were sure to keep up a
comfortable-sounding chorus of squeaky twitters. The barn swallow is
born a gossip; or perhaps we should say a talking sage--a Socrates,
if you will, or a Samuel Johnson. Now and then--too rarely--a vesper
sparrow sang a single strain, or a far-away white-throat gave voice
across the meadow; and once a passing humming-bird, a good singer with
his wings, stopped to probe the monk’s-hood blossoms in the garden
patch. The best that can be said of the matter is that for birds the
season was neither one thing nor another. Lovers of field ornithology
should come to the mountains earlier or later, leaving August to the
crowd of common tourists, who love nature, of course (who doesn’t
in these days?), but only in the general; who believe with Walt
Whitman--since it is not necessary to read a poet in order to share
his opinions--that “you must not know too much or be too precise or
scientific about birds and trees and flowers and water-craft; a certain
free margin, and even vagueness--even ignorance, credulity--helping
your enjoyment of these things.”
Such a credulous enjoyer of beauty I knew of, a few years ago, a summer
dweller at a mountain hotel closely shut in by the forest on all sides,
with no grass near it except a scanty plot of shaven lawn. Well, this
good lady, an honest appreciator of things wild, after the Whitman
manner, being in the company of a man known to be interested in matters
ornithological, broke out upon him,--
“Oh, Mr. ----, I do so enjoy the birds! I sit at my window and listen
to the meadow larks by the hour.”
The gentleman was not adroit (I am not speaking of myself, let me say).
Perhaps he was more ornithologist than man of the world. Such a thing
may happen. At any rate he failed to command himself.
“Meadow larks!” he answered, knowing there was no bird of that kind
within ten miles of the spot in question.
“Well,” said his fair interlocutor, “they are either meadow larks or
song sparrows.”
Such nature lovers, I say, may properly enough come to the mountains in
August. As for bird students, who, not being poets, are in no danger of
knowing “too much,” if they can come but once a year, let them by all
means choose a birdier season.