scientific, I did devote one forenoon to what might be called an
ornithological errand: I went up to the worn-out fields at the end
of the Coal Hill road, to see whether by any chance a pair of horned
larks might be summering there, as I had heard of a pair’s doing
eight or ten years ago. Even this jaunt, however, ran into--I will
not say degenerated into--something like a berry-picking excursion.
Raspberries and blueberries so thick as to color the roadside, mile
after mile, are a delightful temptation to a natural man whose home is
in a closely settled district where every edible berry that turns red
(actual ripeness being out of the question) finds a small boy beside
the bush ready to pick it. I succumbed at once. In fact, I succumbed
too soon. The road was long, and the berries grew fatter and riper, or
so I thought, as I proceeded. It was a real tragedy. Does anything in
my reader’s experience tell him what I mean? If so, I am sure of his
sympathy. If not,--well, in that case he has my sympathy. Perhaps he
has once in his life seen a small boy who, at table, not suspecting
what was in store for him, ate so much of an ordinary dinner that out
of sheer physical necessity he was compelled to forego his favorite
dessert. Alas, and alas! A wasted appetite is like wasted time, a loss
irreparable. You may have another, no doubt, on another day, but never
the one you sated upon inferior fruit.
Why should berries be so many, and a man’s digestive capacity so near
to nothing? The very bushes reproached me; like a jealous housewife who
finds her choicest dainties discarded on the plate. “We have piped unto
you and ye have not danced,” they seemed to mutter. I grew shame-faced
and looked the other way: at the splendid rosettes of red bunchberries;
at a bush full of red (another red) mountain-holly berries, red with a
most exquisite purplish bloom, the handsomest berries in the world, I
am ready to believe. Or I stopped to consider a cluster of varnished
baneberries, or a few modest, drooping, leaf-hidden jewels of the
twisted stalk. In truth, and in short, it was berry-time in Franconia.
What a strait a man would have been in if all kinds had been humanly
edible!
With all the rest there was no passing the strangely blue bear-plums,
as Northern people call the fruit of clintonia. A strange blue, I
say. Left to myself I should never have found a word for it; but by
good luck I raised the question with a man who, as I now suppose, is
probably the only person in the world who could have told me what I
needed to know. He is an authority upon pottery and porcelain, and he
answered on the instant, though I cannot hope to quote him exactly,
that the color was that of the Ming dynasty. Every Chinese dynasty, I
think he said, has a color of its own for its pottery. When the founder
of the Ming dynasty was asked of what shade he would have the royal
dinner set, he replied: “Let it be that of the sky after rain.” And
so it was the color of Franconia bear-plums. Which strikes me as a
circumstance very much to the Ming dynasty’s credit.
In a lonely stretch of the road, with a cattle pasture on one side and
a wood on the other, where tall grass in full flower stood between the
horse track and the wheel rut (this was a good berrying place, also,
had I been equal to my opportunity), I stood still to enjoy the music
of a hermit thrush, which happened to be at just the right distance.
A holy voice it was, singing a psalm, measure responding to measure
out of the same golden throat. I tried to fit words to it. “Oh,” it
began, but for the remainder of the strophe there were no syllables
in our heavy, consonant-weighted English tongue. It might be Spanish,
I thought--musical vowels with _l_’s and _d_’s holding them together.
I remembered the reputed saying of Charles V., that Spanish is the
language of the gods, and was ready to add, “and of hermit thrushes.”
But perhaps this was only a fancy. One thing was certain: the bird sang
in Spanish or in something better. If a man could eat raspberries as
long as he can listen to sweet sounds!
Before the last house there was a brilliant show of poppies, and
beyond, at the limit of the clearing, an enormous beanfield. Poppies
and beans! Poetry and prose! Something to look at and something to
eat. Such is the texture of human life. For my part, I call it a
felicitous combination. Here, only a little while ago, the man of
the house--and of the beanfield--had come face to face with a most
handsome, long-antlered deer, which stamped at him till the two, man
and deer, were at close quarters, and then made off into the woods.
Somewhere here, also, the entomological collector had within a week or
two found a beetle of a kind that had never been “taken” before except
in Arizona! But though I beat the grass over from end to end, there was
no sign of horned larks. Ornithology was out of date, as was more and
more apparent.
My homeward walk, with the cold wind cutting my face, took on the
complexion of a retreat. I could hardly walk fast enough, though
here and there a clump of virginal raspberry vines still detained me
briefly. It is amazing how frigid August can be when the mood takes
it. A farmer was mowing with his winter coat buttoned to the chin. I
looked at him with envy. For my own part I should have been glad of an
overcoat; and that afternoon, when I went out to drive, I wore one, and
a borrowed ulster over it. Such feats are pleasant to think of a few
days afterward, when the weather has changed its mind again, and the
mercury is once more reaching for the century mark.
* * * * *
In the course of my five days I walked twice over the road newly cut
through the mountain forest from the foot of Echo Lake to the golf
grounds: first upward, in an afternoon, returning to Franconia by the
old highway; then downward, in a forenoon, after reaching the lake
by way of the Butter Hill road and the sleepers, that is to say, the
railroad. Forenoon and afternoon the impression was the same,--silence,
as if the birds’ year were over, though everything was still green
and the season not so late but that tardy wood-sorrel blossoms
still showed, here and there one, among the clover-like leaves; old
favorites, that I had not seen for perhaps a dozen years.
On the railroad--a place which I have always found literally alive
with song and wings, not only in May and June, but in September and
October--I walked for forty-five minutes, by the watch, without hearing
so much as a bird’s note. Almost the only living creature that I saw
(three berry-pickers and a dog excepted) was a red squirrel which sat
on end at the top of a tall stump, with his tail over his back, and
ate a raspberry, as if to show me how. “You think you are an epicure,”
he said; “and you stuff yourself so full in half an hour that you have
to fast for half a day afterward. What sort of epicurean philosophy
is that? Look at me.” And I looked. He held the berry--which must
have been something less than ripe--between his fore paws, just as
he would have held a nut, and after looking at me to make sure I was
paying attention twirled it round and round against his teeth till it
grew smaller and smaller before my eyes, and then was gone. “There!”
said the saucy chap, as he held up his empty fingers. The operation
had consumed a full minute, at the very least. At that rate, no doubt,
a man could swallow raspberries from morning till night. But what
good would it do him? He might as well be swallowing the wind. No
human mouth could tell raspberry juice from warm water, in doses so
infinitesimal.
The sight, nevertheless, gave me a new conception of the pitch of
delicacy to which the sense of taste might be cultivated. It was
evident that our human faculty, comfortably as we get on with it in
the main, is only a coarse and bungling tool, never more than half
made, perhaps, or quite as likely blunted and spoiled by millenniums
of abuse. I could really have envied the chickadee, if such a feeling
had not seemed unworthy of a man’s dignity. Besides, a palate so
supersusceptible might prove an awkward possession, it occurred to me
on second thought, for one who must live as one of the “civilized,” and
take his chances with cooks. All things considered, I was better off,
perhaps, with the old equipment and the old method,--a duller taste and
larger mouthfuls.
At the end of the forty-five minutes I came to the burning, a tract
of forest over which a fire had run some two years before. Here, in
this dead place, there was more of life; more sunshine, and therefore
more insects, and therefore more birds. Even here, however, there was
nothing to be called birdiness: a few olive-sided flycatchers and
wood pewees, both with musical whistles, one like a challenge, the
other an elegy; a family group of chestnut-sided warblers, parents
and young, conversing softly among themselves about the events of the
day, mostly gastronomic; a robin and a white-throated sparrow in song;
three or four chickadees, lisping and _deeing_; a siskin or two, a song
sparrow, and a red-eyed vireo. The whole tract was purple with willow
herb--which follows fire as surely as boys follow a fire engine--and
white with pearly immortelles.
Once out of this open space--this forest cemetery, one might say,
though the dead were not buried, but stood upright like bleached
skeletons, with arms outstretched--I was again immersed in leafy
silence, which lasted till I approached the lake. Here I heard before
me the tweeting of sandpipers, and presently came in sight of two
solitaries (migrants already, though it was only the 4th of August),
each bobbing nervously upon its boulder a little off shore. The eye of
the ornithologist took them in: dark green legs; dark, slender bills;
bobbing, not teetering--_Totanus_, not _Actitis_. Then the eyes of
the man turned to rest upon that enchanting prospect: Eagle Cliff in
shadow, Profile Mountain in full sun, and the lake between them. The
spirit of all the hours I had ever spent here was communing with me. I
blessed the place and bade it good-by. “I will come again if I can,” I
said, “and many times; but if not, good-by.” I believe I am like the
birds; no matter how far south they may wander, when the winter is gone
they say one to another, “Let us go back to the north country, to the
place where we were so happy a year ago.”
The last day of my visit, the only warm one, fell on Sunday; and on
Sunday, by all our Franconia traditions, I must make the round of
Landaff Valley. I had been into the valley once, to be sure, but that
did not matter; it was not on Sunday, and besides, I did not really go
“round the square,” as we are accustomed to say, with a fine disregard
of mathematical precision.
After all, there is little to tell of, though there was plenty to see
and enjoy. The first thing was to get out of the village; away from the
churches and the academy, and beyond the last house (the last village
house, I mean), into the company of the river, the long green meadow
and the larch swamp,--a goodly fellowship. A swamp sparrow trilled me a
welcome at the very entrance to the valley, as he had done before, and
musical goldfinches accompanied me for the whole round, till I thought
the day should be named in their honor, Goldfinch Sunday.
Pretty Atlantis butterflies were always in sight, as they had been even
in the coolest weather, with now and then an Atalanta and, more rarely,
a Cybele. I had looked for Aphrodite, also, being desirous to see these
three fritillaries (Cybele, Aphrodite, and Atlantis) together, till
the entomologist told me that we were out of its latitude. Commoner
even than Atlantis, perhaps, was the dusky wood-nymph, Alope (strange
notions the old Greeks must have had of the volatility of their
goddesses and heroines, to name so many of them after butterflies!),
she of the big yellow blotch on each fore wing; a wavering, timid
creature, always seeking to hide herself, and never holding a steady
course for so much as an inch--as if she were afflicted with the
shaking palsy. “Don’t look at me! Pray don’t look at me!” she is
forever saying as she dodges behind a leaf. Shyness is a grace--in
the feminine; but Alope is _too_ shy. If her complexion were fairer,
possibly she would be less retiring.
From the first the warmth of the sun was sufficient to render shady
halts a luxury, and on the crossroad--“Gray Birch Road,” to quote my
own name for it--where a walker was somewhat shut away from the wind,
I began to spell “warm” with fewer letters. Here, too, the dust was
excessively deep, so that passing carriages--few, but too many--put a
foot-passenger under a cloud. Still I was glad to be there, turning
the old corners, seeing the old beauty, thinking the old thoughts. How
green Tucker Brook meadow looked, and how grandly Lafayette loomed into
the sky just beyond!
Most peculiar is the feeling I have for that sharp crest; I know not
how to express it; a feeling of something like spiritual possession.
If I do not love it, at least I love the sight of it. Nay, I will
say what I mean: I love the mountain itself. I take pleasure in its
stones, and favor the dust thereof. The loftiest snow-covered peak in
the world would never carry my thoughts higher, or detain them longer.
It was good to see it once more from this point of special vantage. And
when I reached the corner of the Notch road and started homeward, how
refreshing was the breeze that met me! Coolness after heat, ease after
pain, these are near the acme of physical comfort.
Best of all was a half-hour’s rest under a pine tree, facing a stretch
of green meadow, with low hills beyond it westward; a perfect picture,
perfectly “composed.” In the foreground, just across the way, stood
a thicket of chokecherry shrubs shining with fruit, and over them,
on one side, trailed a clematis vine full of creamy white blossoms.
Both cherry and clematis were common everywhere, often in each
other’s company, but I had seen none quite so gracefully disposed. No
gardener’s art could have managed the combination so well.
Here I sat and dreamed. I was near home, with time to spare; the wind
was perfection, and the day also; I had walked far enough to make
a seat welcome, yet not so far as to bring on sluggish fatigue; and
everything in sight was pure beauty. Life will be sweet as long as it
has such half hours to offer us. Yet somehow, human nature having a
perverse trick of letting good suggest its opposite, I found myself,
all at once,
“In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.”
I looked at the garden patch and the mowed field, and thought what
a strange world it is--ill-made, half-made, or unmade--in which
man has to live, or, in our pregnant every-day phrase, to get his
living; a world that goes whirling on its axis and revolving round
its heat-and-light-giving body,--like a top which a boy has set
spinning,--now roasted and parched, now drenched and sodden, now frozen
dead; a world wherein, as our good American stoic complained, a man
must burn a candle half the time in order to see to live; a world to
which its inhabitants are so poorly adapted that a day of comfortable
temperature is matter for surprise and thankfulness; a world which
cannot turn round but that men die of heat and by freezing, of thirst
and by drowning; a world where all things, appetite and passion, as
well as heat and cold, run continually to murderous extremes. A strange
world, surely, which men have agreed to justify and condemn in the same
breath as the work of supreme wisdom, ruined by original sin. Children
will have an explanation. The philosopher says: “My son, we must know
how to be ignorant.”
So my thoughts ran away with me till the clematis vine and the cherry
bushes brought me back to myself. The present hour was good; the birds
and the plants were happy; and so was I, though for the moment I had
almost forgotten it. The mountain had its old inscrutable, beckoning,
admonishing, benignant look. The wise make no complaint. If the world
is not the best we could imagine, it is the best we have; and such
as it is, it is a pretty comfortable place in vacation time and fair
weather. Let me not be among the fools who waste a bright to-day in
forecasting dull to-morrows.
RED LEAF DAYS
“Woods over woods in gay theatric pride.”
GOLDSMITH.
White Mountain woods are generally at their brightest in the last few
days of September. This year I had but a week or so to stay among them,
and timed my visit accordingly, arriving on the 22d. As I drove over
the hills from Littleton to Franconia there were only scattered bits
of high color in sight--a single tree here and there, which for some
reason had hung out its autumnal flag in advance of its fellows. It
seemed almost impossible that all the world would be aglow within a
week; but I had no real misgivings. Seed time and harvest would not
fail. The leaves would ripen in their time. And so the event proved.
Day by day the change went visibly forward (visibly yet invisibly, as
the hands go round the face of a clock), till by the 30th the colors
were as brilliant as one could wish, though with less than the usual
proportion of yellow.
The white birches, which should have supplied that hue, were
practically leafless. A small caterpillar (the larva of a tiny moth,
one of the _Microlepidoptera_) had eaten the greenness from every
white-birch leaf in the whole country round about. One side of Mount
Cleveland, for example, looked from a distance as if a fire had swept
over it. It was a real devastation; yet, to my surprise, as the
maple groves turned red the total effect was little, if at all, less
beautiful than in ordinary seasons. The leafless purplish patches gave
a certain indefinable openness to the woods, and the eye felt the
duller spaces as almost a relief. I could never have believed that
destruction so widespread and lamentable could work so little damage to
the appearance of the landscape. As the old Hebrew said, everything is
beautiful in its time.
We were four at table, and in front of the evening fireplace, but
in footing it we were only two. Sometimes we walked side by side;
sometimes we were rods apart. When we felt like it we talked; then we
went on a piece in silence, as Christians should. Let me never have a
traveling companion who cannot now and then keep himself company. The
ideal man for such a rôle is one who is wiser than yourself, yet not
too wise, lest there be lack of reciprocity, and you find yourself no
better than a boy rusticating with a tutor. He should be even-tempered,
also, well furnished with philosophy, loving fair weather and good
living, but taking things as they come; and withal, while not unwilling
to intimate his own preference as to the day’s route and other matters,
he should be always ready to defer with all cheerfulness to his
partner’s wish. “The ideal man,” I say; but I am thinking of a real one.
We have become well known in the valley, after many years; so that,
although we are almost the only walkers there, our ambulatory
eccentricity has mostly ceased to provoke comment. At all events, the
people no longer look upon us as men broken out of Bedlam. Time, we
may say, has established our innocence. If a recent comer expresses
concern as we go past, some older resident reassures him. “They are
harmless,” he says. “There used to be three of them. They pull weeds,
as you see; the older one has his hands full of them now. Yes, they are
branches of thorn-bushes. They always carry opera-glasses, too. We used
to think they were looking for land to buy. Old ----, up on the hill in
Lisbon, tried to sell them his farm at a fancy figure, but they didn’t
bite. I reckon they know a thing or two, for all their queer ways. One
of ’em knows how to write, anyhow; he is always taking out pencil and
paper. There! you see how he does. He sets down a word or two, and away
he goes again.”
It is all true. We looked at plants, and sometimes gathered them. The
botanist had thorn-bushes on his mind, the genus _Cratægus_ being
a hard one, and, as I judged, newly under revision. I professed no
knowledge upon so recondite a subject, but was proud to serve the
cause of science by pointing out a bush here and there. One hot
afternoon, too, after a pretty long forenoon jaunt, I nearly walked my
legs off, as the strong old saying is, following my leader far up the
Landaff Valley (“down Easton way”) to visit a bush of which some one
had brought him word. It was an excellent specimen, the best we had
yet seen; but it was nothing new, and by no means so handsome or so
interesting as one found afterward by accident on our way to Bethlehem.
That was indeed a beauty, and its abundant fruit a miracle of color.
Once I detected an aster which the botanist had passed by and yet,
upon a second look, thought worth taking home; it was probably
_Lindleyanus_, he said, and the event proved it; and at another time
my eye caught by the wayside a bunch of chokecherry shrubs hung
with yellow clusters. We were in a carriage at the time, four old
Franconians, and not one of us had ever seen such a thing here before.
Three of us had never seen such a thing anywhere; for my own part,
I was in a state of something like excitement; but the _Cratægus_
collector, who knows American trees if anybody does, said: “Yes, the
yellow variety is growing in the Arnold Arboretum, and is mentioned
in the latest edition of Gray’s Manual.” Bushes have been found at
Dedham, Massachusetts, it appears. The maker of the Manual seems not to
have been aware of their having been noticed anywhere else; but since
my return home I have been informed that they are not uncommon in the
neighborhood of Montreal, where yellow chokecherries are “found with
the ordinary form in the markets”!
That last statement is bewildering. Is there anything that somebody,
somewhere, does not find edible? I have heard of eaters of arsenic
and of slate pencils; but chokecherries for sale in a market! If the
reader’s mouth does not pucker at the words he must be wanting in
imagination.
In Franconia even the birds seemed to refuse such a tongue-tying
diet. The shrubs loaded with fruit, some of it red (wine color), some
of it black,--the latter color predominating, I think,--stood along
the roadside mile upon mile. Sooner or later, I dare say, the birds
must have recourse to them; how else do the bushes get planted so
universally? But at the time of our visit there was a sufficiency of
better fare. Rum cherries were still plentiful, and birds, like boys
in an apple orchard, and like sensible people anywhere, take the best
first.
It surprised me, while I was here some years ago, to discover how
fond woodpeckers of all kinds are of rum cherries. Even the pileated
could not keep away from the trees, but came close about the house to
frequent them. One unfortunate fellow, I regret to say, came once too
often. The sapsuckers, it was noticed, went about the business after
a method of their own. Each cherry was carried to the trunk of a tree
or to a telegraph pole, where it was wedged into a crevice, and eaten
with all the regular woodpeckerish attitudes and motions. Doubtless it
tasted better so. And the bird might well enough have said that he was
behaving no differently from human beings, who for the most part do not
swallow fruit under the branches, but take it indoors and feast upon it
at leisure, and with something like ceremony. The trunk of a tree is a
woodpecker’s table.
And for all that, Franconia woodpeckers are not so conservative as not
to be able to take up with substantial improvements. They know a good
thing when they see it. These same sapsuckers, or one of them, was not
slow to discover that one of our crew, an entomological collector, had
set up here and there pieces of board besmeared with a mixture of rum
and sugar. And having made the discovery, he was not backward about
improving it. He went the round of the boards with as much regularity
as the moth collector himself, and with even greater frequency. And
no wonder. Here was a feast indeed; victuals and drink together;
insects preserved in rum. Happy bird! As the most famous of sentimental
travelers said on a very different occasion, “How I envied him his
feelings!” For there seems to be no doubt that sapsuckers love a liquid
sweetness, and take means of their own to secure it.