noiselessly among the upper branches, my attention is taken by clusters
of the ghostly, colorless plant which men know as the Indian pipe (its
real name, of necessity, is quite beyond human ken); the flowers, every
head bowed, just breaking through a bed of last year’s needles, while
a bumblebee, a capable economic botanist, visits them one by one.
Then, as I emerge from the grove on its sunny edge, I catch a sudden
pungent odor of balsam. It rises from the dry leaves, the sunlight
having somehow set it free. In the shade of the wood nothing of the
kind was perceptible. The fact strikes me curiously as one that I have
often been half consciously aware of, but now for the first time really
notice. On the instant I am taken far back. It is a July noon; I am
trudging homeward, and in my proud boyish hand is a basket of shining
black huckleberries carefully rounded over. The sense of smell is
naturally a sentimentalist; or perhaps the olfactory nerves have some
occult connection with the seat of memory.
Here is one of my favorite spots: a level grassy field, with a ruined
house and barn behind me, between the road and a swampy patch, and in
front “all the mountains,” from Moosilauke to Adams. How many times I
have stopped here to admire them! I look at them now, and then fall to
watching the bluebirds and the barn swallows, that are here at home.
A Boston lady holds the legal title to the property (be it said in
her honor that she bought it to save the pine wood from destruction),
but the birds are its actual owners. Six bluebirds sit in a row on
the wire, while the swallows go twittering over the field. Once I
fancy that I hear the sharp call of a horned lark; but the note is not
repeated, and though I beat the grass over I discover nothing.[12]
Beyond this level clearing the road winds to the left and begins its
climb to the height of land, whence it pitches down into Bethlehem
village. Every stage of the course is familiar. Here a pileated
woodpecker once came out of the woods and disported himself about the
trunk of an apple tree for my delectation--mine and a friend’s who
walked with me; here a hare sat quiet till I was close upon him, and
then scampered across the field with flying jumps; here is a backward
valley prospect that I never can have enough of; and here, just
over the wall, I once surprised myself by finding a bunch of yellow
lady’s-slippers. All this, and much else, I now live over again. So
advantageous is it to walk in one’s own steps. Many times as I have
come this way, I have never come in fairer weather.
And what is this? It looks like a haying-bee. Eight horses and two
yokes of oxen, with several empty “hay-riggings” and as many buggies,
stand in confused order beside the road, and over the wall men are
mowing, spreading, and turning. It is some widow’s grass field, I
imagine, and her loyal neighbors have assembled to harvest the crop.
Human nature is not so bad, after all. So I am saying, with the
inexpensive charity natural to a sentimental traveler, when I find
myself near a group of younger men who are bantering one of their
number (I am behind a bushy screen), mixing their talk plentifully
with oaths; such a vulgar, stupid, witless repetition of sacred
names--without one saving touch of originality or picturesqueness--as
our honest, thoroughbred, rustic New Englander may challenge the world
to equal. These can be no workers for charity, I conclude; and when
I inquire of a man who overtakes me on the road (with an invitation
to ride), he says: “Oh, no, that is Mr. Blank’s farm, and those are
all his hired men. He is about the richest man in Bethlehem.” So my
pretty idyl vanishes in smoke; the smoke, I am tempted to say, of
burning brimstone. I have one consolation, such as it is: the men are
Bethlehemites, not Franconians, though I am not so certain that a
swearing match between the two towns would prove altogether one-sided.
It is nothing new, of course, that beautiful scenery does not always
refine those who live near it. It works to that end, within its
measure, I am bound to believe, for those who see it; but “there’s the
rub.”
Whether men see it or not, the landscape takes no heed. There it
stretches as I turn to look, spaces of level green valley, with
mountains and hills round about--mountains and valleys each made
perfect by the other. I sit down once more in a favorable spot,
where every line of the picture falls true, and drink my fill of its
loveliness, while a hermit thrush out of the hill woods yonder blesses
my ears with music. I have Emerson’s wish--“health and a day.”
At high noon, as I had planned, I came to the top of the mountain. The
observatory was full of chattering tourists, while three individuals
of the same genus stood on the rocks below, two men and a woman, the
men taking turns in the use--or abuse--of a horn, with which they
were trying to rouse the echo (a really good one, as I could testify)
from Mount Cleveland and the higher peaks beyond. Their attempts were
mostly failures. Either the breath wandered about uneasily inside the
brazen tube, moaning like a soul in pain--abortive mutterings, but no
“toot”--or, if a blast now and then came forth, it was of so low a
pitch that the mountains, whose vocal register, it appears, is rather
tenor than bass, were unable to return it effectively. “I can’t get
it high enough,” one of the men said. But they had large endowments
of perseverance--a virtue that runs often to pernicious excess--and
seemingly would never have given over their efforts, only that a
gentleman’s voice from the observatory finally called out, in a tone of
long-suffering politeness, “Won’t you please let up on that horn, just
for a little while?” The horn-blowers, not to be outdone in civility,
answered at once with a good-natured affirmative, and a heavenly
silence, a silence that might be felt, descended upon our ears. Neither
blower nor pleader will ever know how heartily he was thanked by a man
who lay upon the rocks a little distance below the summit, looking down
into the Franconia Valley.
The scene is of exquisite beauty; beauty, moreover, of a kind that I
especially love; but for the first half-hour I looked without seeing.
It is always so with me in such places, I cannot tell why. Formerly
I laid my disability to the fact that the eye had first to satisfy
its natural curiosity concerning the details of a strange landscape;
its instinctive desire to orient itself by attention to topographical
particulars; and no doubt considerations of this nature may be
supposed to enter more or less into the problem. But Mount Agassiz
offered me nothing to be puzzled over; I felt no need of orientation
nor any stirrings of inquisitiveness. On my left was the Mount
Washington range, in front were Lafayette and Moosilauke, with the
valley intervening, and on the right, haze-covered to-day, rose peak
after peak of the Green Mountains. These things I knew beforehand. I
had not come to this Pisgah-top to study a lesson in geography, but to
enjoy the sight of my eyes.
Still I must practice patience. Time--indispensable Time--is a servant
that cannot be hurried, nor can his share of any work be done by the
cleverest substitute. “Beautiful!” I said, and felt the word; but the
beauty did not come home to the spirit, filling and satisfying it. I
wonder at people who scramble to such a peak, stare about them for a
quarter of an hour, and run down again contented. Either the plate is
preternaturally sensitive, or the picture cannot have been taken.
For myself, I have learned to wait; and so I did now. A few birds
flitted about the summit: two or three snowbirds, to whom the unusual
presence of a man was plainly a trouble (“Why can’t he stay up in the
observatory, like the rest of his kind?”); a myrtle warbler, chirping
softly as he passed; a white-throat, whistling now and then from
somewhere down the cliffs; an alder flycatcher, calling _quay-queer_
(a surprising place this dry mountain-top seemed for a lover of swampy
thickets); an occasional barn swallow or chimney swift, shooting to and
fro under the sky; and once a sparrow hawk, welcome for his rarity,
sailing away from me down the valley, showing a rusty tail.
By and by, seeing that the crowd had gone, I clambered up the
rocks, eating blueberries by the way, and mounted the stairs to the
observatory, where the keeper of the place was talking with two men (a
musician and a commercial traveler, if my practice as an “observer”
counted for anything), who had lingered to survey the panorama. The
conversation turned upon the usual topics, especially the Mount
Washington Railway. Four or five trains were descending the track, one
close behind the other, and it became a matter of absorbing interest
to make them out through the small telescope and a field glass. Why
be at the trouble to climb so high, at the cost of so much wind,
unless you do your best to take in whatever is visible? “Yes, I can
see one--two--three-- Oh, yes, there’s the fourth, just leaving the
summit.” So the talk ran on, with minor variations which may easily be
imagined. One important question related to the name of a certain small
sheet of water; another to a road that curved invitingly over a grassy
hilltop; another to the exact whereabouts of a rich man’s fine estate
(questions about rich men are always pertinent), the red roofs of which
could be found by searching for them.
I took my full share of the discussion, but half an hour of it
sufficed, and I went back again to commune with myself upon the rocks.
The sunshine was warm, but the breeze tempered it till I found it good.
And the familiar scene was lovelier than ever, I began to think. Here
at my feet stood the little house, down upon which I had looked with
such rememberable pleasure on my first visit to Agassiz, I know not
how many years ago. Then a man was cutting wood before the door. Now
there is nobody to be seen; but the place must still be inhabited, for
I hear the tinkle of a cowbell somewhere in the woods, and a horse is
pasturing nearer by. Only three or four other houses are in sight--not
reckoning the big hotel and a few far-away roofs in Franconia--and
very inviting they look, neatly painted, with smooth, level fields
about them. It is my own elevation that levels the fields, I am quite
aware (when I stop to think of it), as it is distance that softens
the contours of the mountains, and the lapse of time that smooths the
rough places out of past years; but for the hour I take things as the
eye sees them. We come to these visionary altitudes, not to look at
realities but at pictures. Distance is a famous hand with the brush.
To omit details and to fill the canvas with atmosphere, these are the
secrets of his art. A comfortable thing it is to lie here at my ease
and yield myself to the great painter’s enchantments.
My eye wanders over the landscape, but not uneasily; nay, it can hardly
be said to wander at all; it rests here and there, not trying to see,
but seeing. Now it is upon the road, spaces of which show at intervals,
while I imagine the rest--a sentimental journey; now upon a far-off
grassy clearing among woods (Mears’s or Chase’s), homely enough, and
lonely enough--and familiar enough--to fit the mood of the hour; now
upon the distant level reaches of the Landaff Valley. But the beauty
of the scene is not so much in this or that as in all together. I say
now, as I said twenty years ago, “This is the kind of prospect for
me:” a broken valley, fields and woods intermingled, with mountains
circumscribing it all; a splendid panorama seen from above, but not
from too far above; from a hill, that is to say, rather than from a
mountain.
An hour of this luxury and I return to the tower, where the musician
and the keeper are still in conference. The keeper, especially, is a
man much after my own mind. He knows the people who live in the three
houses below us, and speaks of them racily, yet in a tone of brotherly
kindness. I call his attention to two women whom I have descried in
the nearest pasture, a bushy place, yellow with goldenrod and pointed
with young larches and firs. They wear men’s wide-brimmed straw hats (a
black-and-tan collie is with them), and one carries a broad tin dish,
which she holds in one hand, while she picks berries with the other.
Pretty awkward business, an old berry-picker thinks.
Yes, the keeper of the tower says, they are Mrs. ---- and Miss ----;
one lives in the first house, the other in the second. Now they are
leaving the pasture, stopping once in a while to strip an uncommonly
inviting bush (so I interpret their movements), and we follow them
with our eyes. The older one, a portly body, walks halfway across
a broad field with her companion, seeing her so far homeward,--and
perhaps finishing a savory dish of gossip,--and then returns to her own
house, still accompanied by the dog. Scarcity of neighbors conduces to
neighborliness.
The men who live in such houses, the keeper tells me, are very
wide-awake and well informed, reading their weekly newspaper with
thoroughness, and always ready for rational talk on current topics.
They are not rich, of course, in the down-country sense of the
word, and see very little money, subsisting mainly upon the produce
of the farm; a matter of twenty-five dollars a year may cover all
their expenditures; but they are better fed, and really live in more
comfort, than a great part of the folks who live in cities. I am glad
to believe it; and I like the man’s way of standing by his neighbors.
In fact, I think highly of him as a person of a good heart and no
small discrimination; and therefore I am all the gladder when, having
left the summit and stopped for a minute in the shade of a tree,
I overhear him say to the musician, “That old man enjoys himself;
he’s a _nice_ old man.” “Thank you,” say I, not aloud, but with deep
inward sincerity; “that’s one of the best compliments I’ve had for
many a day.” Blessings on this mountain air, that makes human speech
unintentionally audible. An old man that enjoys himself is pretty near
to my ideal of respectable senility. “Thank you,” I repeat; “that’s
praise, and faith, I’ll print it.” And so I will, pleasing myself, let
the ungentle reader--if I have one--think what he may. A good name is
more to brag of than a million of money.
Yes, I am enjoying myself (why not?), and I loiter down the road with
a light heart (an old man should be used to going downhill), pausing
by the way to notice a little group--a family party, it is reasonable
to guess--of golden-crowned kinglets. One of them, the only one I see
fully, has a plain crown, showing neither black stripes nor central
orange patch. But for his unmistakable _zee-zee-zee_, which he is
considerate enough to utter while I am looking at him, he might be
taken for a ruby-crown. So the lover of beauty and the hobbyist descend
the hill together, keeping step like inseparable friends. And so may it
be to the end of the chapter.
INDEX
INDEX
Adder’s-mouth, 149.
Arbutus, trailing, 57, 91, 133.
Aster Lindleyanus, 5, 181.
Azalea, Lapland, 140.
Beech-fern, 146.
Blueberries, alpine, 24.
Bluebird, 123, 125, 209, 210, 234.
Bobolink, 97, 110, 117, 213.
Butterflies, 10, 28, 36, 123, 145, 172.
Catbird, 29, 106, 117, 189, 191.
Cedar-bird, 15, 187.
Cherry, wild red, 79, 130, 148, 211;
rum, 183.
Chickadee, black-capped, 13, 15, 16, 22, 72, 83, 94, 170, 191;
Hudsonian, 15, 53.
Chokeberry, 133.
Chokecherry, yellow, 181.
Cicada, 54.
Clintonia, 164, 231.
Coltsfoot, 67.
Cornel, dwarf, 57, 122, 133, 150, 163, 231.
Creeper, brown, 129, 138.
Crossbill, red, 19, 194, 228;
white-winged, 19.
Crow, 11, 97, 210.
Cuckoo, black-billed, 145.
Finch, pine, 126, 144, 170, 228;
purple, 117.
Fleas, 32.
Flowers, alpine, 140.
Flycatcher, alder, 105, 125, 148, 214, 230, 240;
crested, 99, 125, 210, 214;
least, 212, 213, 214;
olive-sided, 101, 105, 130, 169, 212, 214;
yellow-bellied, 101, 215.
Fox, 58.
Goldfinch, 72, 172, 189, 191, 211.
Goldthread, 57, 83, 133, 150, 231.
Grosbeak, rose-breasted, 86, 117, 127.
Grouse, 27, 101, 192, 205, 210, 211.
Hardhack, 155.
Hawk, sparrow, 240.
Hobble-bush, 13, 130.
Houstonia, 133.
Humming-bird, 160, 205.
Hyla, 192.
Indigo-bird, 159.
Kinglet, golden-crowned, 138, 192, 246;
ruby-crowned, 29, 66, 72, 192.
Kingfisher, 16.
Lady’s-slipper, pink, 108, 133;
yellow, 111, 235.
Lark, meadow, 115;
prairie horned, 162, 166, 195, 217, 234.
Lonesome Lake, 11.
Martin, purple, 117.
Maryland yellow-throat, 72, 125, 145, 189.
Merganser, 221.
Mountain ash, 17.
Mountain holly, 163, 231.
Nuthatch, red-breasted, 17, 121, 194;
white-breasted, 189, 213, 216.
Oriole, 117.
Oven-bird, 125, 143, 216.
Owl, barred, 22.
Phœbe, 191, 209.
Raspberry, 151, 162.
Rhodora, 85, 133.
Robin, 13, 22, 74, 117, 170, 189, 191.
Salix balsamifera, 6, 41, 85, 155.
Sandpiper, solitary, 89, 115, 170.
Sandwort, Greenland, 25.
Sapsucker, 68, 148, 183, 184, 189, 215, 230.
Shadbush, 80, 83, 91, 133, 211.
Shadbush, few-flowered, 91, 133.
Siskin, pine, 126, 144, 170, 228.
Snowbird, 14, 15, 63, 240.
Sparrow, chipping, 77;
English, 118;
field, 77, 116, 117, 159, 189;
fox, 57;
Lincoln’s, 68, 74, 77;
savanna, 78;
song, 72, 74, 77, 117, 123, 159, 170, 189, 191, 210;
swamp, 74, 172;
vesper, 8, 44, 51, 116, 117, 123, 160, 191;
white-crowned, 74, 77, 114, 194;
white-throated, 13, 15, 25, 57, 66, 74, 83, 93, 130, 148, 160, 170,
189, 191.
Spiders, 31.
Spring-beauty, 88, 89.
Swallow, bank, 117;
barn, 97, 117, 118, 152, 159, 234, 240;
cliff, 117;
tree, 117.
Swift, 134, 240.
Tanager, 72, 101, 117, 126.
Thorn-bush, 180.
Thrush, gray-cheeked, 117;
hermit, 14, 21, 29, 30, 39, 80, 113, 115, 117, 148, 159, 165, 191,
237;
olive-backed (Swainson’s), 14, 21, 22, 101, 117, 144, 189, 193;
water, 105;
Wilson’s (veery), 101, 110, 115, 117;
wood, 112, 117, 126, 127.
Toad, 131.
Trillium, painted, 83, 133.
Violet, dog-tooth, 89;
round-leaved, 88, 89, 130;
Selkirk’s, 122, 135.
Vireo, Philadelphia, 189, 190;
red-eyed, 18, 72, 116, 144, 159, 170, 210;
solitary, 8, 66, 68, 72, 117, 148, 189, 191;
warbling, 120;
yellow-throated, 115, 214.
Warbler, bay-breasted, 72, 73, 87, 94;
Blackburnian, 86, 87, 94, 135;
black-and-white, 104;
blackpoll, 72, 142;
black-throated blue, 126;
black-throated green, 72, 189;
blue yellow-backed, 127, 216;
Canada, 101, 230;
Cape May, 94, 102, 103, 106, 107, 111, 198, 217;
chestnut-sided, 72, 73, 170;
magnolia, 101, 127, 144;
mourning, 112, 128;
myrtle, 68, 72, 143, 144, 189, 211, 240;
Nashville, 127, 189, 213;
Tennessee, 41, 92, 101, 102, 103, 105;
Wilson’s black-cap, 114.
Woodchuck, 61, 86, 96.
Wood pewee, 169, 214.
Woodpecker, arctic three-toed, 14;
downy, 68;
golden-winged, 16, 68, 72;
hairy, 41;
pileated, 45, 99, 156, 183, 193, 234.
Wood-sorrel, 167.
Wren, winter, 10, 57, 72, 90, 117.
The Riverside Press
_Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The species was not new. A Maine collector had anticipated her, I
believe. Whether _his_ name was given to the flea I did not learn or
have forgotten.
[2] The _Atlantic Monthly_.
[3] “I named it Tom’s Finch,” says Audubon, “in honor of our friend
Lincoln, who was a great favorite among us.”
[4] But the brightness of red-maple groves at this season is mostly not
in the leaves, but in the fruit.
[5] Yes, he has even been seen (and “taken”), so I am told, at the
summit of Mount Washington.
[6] No, the line is Coleridge’s:--
“the merry nightingale
That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates With
fast thick warble his delicious notes.”
[7] So I was relieved to find all the Franconia white-throated sparrows
introducing their sets of triplets with two--not three--longer single
notes. That was how I had always whistled the tune; and I had been
astonished and grieved to see it printed in musical notation by Mr.
Cheney, and again by Mr. Chapman, with an introductory measure of three
notes: as if it were to go, “Old Sam, Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody,”
instead of, as I remembered it, and as reason dictated, “Old Sam
Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.” I am not intimating that Mr. Cheney and
Mr. Chapman are wrong, but that my own recollection was right,--a very
different matter, as my present experience with Tennessee warblers was
sufficient to show.
[8] I made the following list of fifty odd species heard and seen
either from my windows or from the piazza: bluebird, robin, veery,
hermit thrush, olive-backed thrush, chickadee, Canadian nuthatch,
catbird, oven-bird, water thrush, chestnut-sided warbler, myrtle
warbler, redstart, Nashville warbler, blue yellow-backed warbler,
Maryland yellow-throat, warbling vireo, red-eyed vireo, cedar-bird,
barn swallow, cliff swallow, sand swallow, tree swallow, goldfinch,
purple finch, pine finch, red crossbill, indigo-bird, snowbird,
song sparrow, field sparrow, chipping sparrow, vesper sparrow,
white-throated sparrow, Baltimore oriole, bobolink, red-winged
blackbird, crow, blue jay, kingbird, phœbe, least flycatcher,
olive-sided flycatcher, alder flycatcher, great-crested flycatcher,
wood pewee, humming-bird, chimney swift, whip-poor-will, flicker,
kingfisher, black-billed cuckoo.
[9] _The Auk_, vol. v. p. 151.
[10] I was once walking over these same miles of sleepers with a
bird-loving man, when he recalled a reminiscence of his boyhood. One
of his teachers was remarking upon the need of seeking things in their
appropriate places. “Now if you wanted to see birds,” he said, by way
of illustration, “you wouldn’t go to a railroad track.” “Which is the
very place we do go to,” my companion added.
[11] This and the two succeeding chapters are records of a vacation
visit in May, 1901.
[12] Four days afterward (August 9) I found larks of the present season
in the Landaff Valley, where I had watched their parents with so much
pleasure in May, as I have described in a previous chapter. These
August birds were feeding upon oats in the road, like so many English
sparrows.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.