off." Sometimes this used to be done in the evening, and it was made
the excuse for a frolic in the camp. The neighbors were invited;
sometimes even the pretty girls from the village, who filled all
the woods with their sweet voices and merry laughter and little
affectations of fright. The white snow still lies on all the ground
except the warm spot about the camp. The tree branches all show
distinctly in the light of the fire, which sends its ruddy glare far
into the darkness, and lights up the bough shanty, the hogsheads, the
buckets on the trees, and the group about the boiling kettles, until
the scene is like something taken out of a fairy play. If Rembrandt
could have seen a sugar party in a New England wood, he would have
made out of its strong contrasts of light and shade one of the finest
pictures in the world. But Rembrandt was not born in Massachusetts;
people hardly ever do know where to be born until it is too late. Being
born in the right place is a thing that has been very much neglected.
[Illustration: WATCHING THE KETTLES]
At these sugar parties every one was expected to eat as much sugar as
possible; and those who are practiced in it can eat a great deal. It
is a peculiarity about eating warm maple-sugar that, though you may
eat so much of it one day as to be sick and loathe the thought of it,
you will want it the next day more than ever. At the "sugaring off"
they used to pour the hot sugar upon the snow, where it congealed,
without crystallizing, into a sort of wax, which I do suppose is the
most delicious substance that was ever invented. And it takes a great
while to eat it. If one should close his teeth firmly on a ball of it,
he would be unable to open his mouth until it dissolved. The sensation
while it is melting is very pleasant, but one cannot converse.
The boy used to make a big lump of it and give it to the dog, who
seized it with great avidity, and closed his jaws on it, as dogs will
on anything. It was funny the next moment to see the expression of
perfect surprise on the dog's face when he found that he could not open
his jaws. He shook his head; he sat down in despair; he ran round in
a circle; he dashed into the woods and back again. He did everything
except climb a tree and howl. It would have been such a relief to him
if he could have howled! But that was the one thing he could not do.
XV
THE HEART OF NEW ENGLAND
It is a wonder that every New England boy does not turn out a poet, or
a missionary, or a peddler. Most of them used to. There is everything
in the heart of the New England hills to feed the imagination of the
boy, and excite his longing for strange countries. I scarcely know what
the subtle influence is that forms him and attracts him in the most
fascinating and aromatic of all lands, and yet urges him away from
all the sweet delights of his home to become a roamer in literature
and in the world,—a poet and a wanderer. There is something in the
soil and the pure air, I suspect, that promises more romance than is
forthcoming, that excites the imagination without satisfying it, and
begets the desire of adventure. And the prosaic life of the sweet
home does not at all correspond to the boy's dreams of the world.
In the good old days, I am told, the boys on the coast ran away and
became sailors; the country boys waited till they grew big enough to
be missionaries, and then they sailed away, and met the coast boys in
foreign ports.
John used to spend hours in the top of a slender hickory-tree that
a little detached itself from the forest which crowned the brow of
the steep and lofty pasture behind his house. He was sent to make
war on the bushes that constantly encroached upon the pasture land;
but John had no hostility to any growing thing, and a very little
bushwhacking satisfied him. When he had grubbed up a few laurels and
young treesprouts, he was wont to retire into his favorite post of
observation and meditation. Perhaps he fancied that the wide-swaying
stem to which he clung was the mast of a ship; that the tossing forest
behind him was the heaving waves of the sea; and that the wind which
moaned over the woods and murmured in the leaves, and now and then
sent him a wide circuit in the air, as if he had been a blackbird on
the tiptop of a spruce, was an ocean gale. What life and action and
heroism there was to him in the multitudinous roar of the forest, and
what an eternity of existence in the monologue of the river which
brawled far, far below him over its wide stony bed! How the river
sparkled and danced and went on—now in a smooth amber current, now
fretted by the pebbles, but always with that continuous busy song! John
never knew that noise to cease, and he doubted not if he stayed here a
thousand years that same loud murmur would fill the air.
On it went, under the wide spans of the old wooden, covered bridge,
swirling around the great rocks on which the piers stood, spreading
away below in shallows, and taking the shadows of a row of maples that
lined the green shore. Save this roar, no sound reached him, except
now and then the rumble of a wagon on the bridge, or the muffled,
far-off voices of some chance passers on the road. Seen from this high
perch, the familiar village, sending its brown roofs and white spires
up through the green foliage, had a strange aspect, and was like
some town in a book, say a village nestled in the Swiss mountains, or
something in Bohemia. And there, beyond the purple hills of Bozrah, and
not so far as the stony pastures of Zoar, whither John had helped drive
the colts and young stock in the spring, might be perhaps Jerusalem
itself. John had himself once been to the land of Canaan with his
grandfather, when he was a very small boy; and he had once seen an
actual, no-mistake Jew, a mysterious person, with uncut beard and long
hair, who sold scythe-snaths in that region, and about whom there was a
rumor that he was once caught and shaved by the indignant farmers, who
apprehended in his long locks a contempt of the Christian religion. Oh,
the world had vast possibilities for John. Away to the south, up a vast
basin of forest, there was a notch in the horizon and an opening in the
line of woods, where the road ran. Through this opening John imagined
an army might appear, perhaps British, perhaps Turks, and banners of
red and of yellow advance, and a cannon wheel about and point its long
nose and open on the valley. He fancied the army, after this salute,
winding down the mountain road, deploying in the meadows, and giving
the valley to pillage and to flame. In which event his position would
be an excellent one for observation and for safety. While he was in the
height of this engagement, perhaps the horn would be blown from the
back porch, reminding him that it was time to quit cutting brush and go
for the cows. As if there were no better use for a warrior and a poet
in New England than to send him for the cows!
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE FROM THE HILL]
John knew a boy—a bad enough boy, I dare say—who afterwards became a
general in the war, and went to Congress and got to be a real governor,
who used also to be sent to cut brush in the back pastures, and hated
it in his very soul; and by his wrong conduct forecast what kind of a
man he would be. This boy, as soon as he had cut about one brush, would
seek for one of several holes in the ground (and he was familiar with
several), in which lived a white-and-black animal that must always be
nameless in a book, but an animal quite capable of the most pungent
defense of himself. This young aspirant to Congress would cut a long
stick, with a little crotch in the end of it, and run it into the hole;
and when the crotch was punched into the fur and skin of the animal, he
would twist the stick round till it got a good grip on the skin, and
then he would pull the beast out; and when he got the white-and-black
just out of the hole so that his dog could seize him, the boy would
take to his heels, and leave the two to fight it out, content to scent
the battle afar off. And this boy, who was in training for public
life, would do this sort of thing all the afternoon; and when the sun
told him that he had spent long enough time cutting brush, he would
industriously go home as innocent as anybody. There are few such boys
as this nowadays; and that is the reason why the New England pastures
are so much overgrown with brush.
John himself preferred to hunt the pugnacious woodchuck. He bore a
special grudge against this clover-eater, beyond the usual hostility
that boys feel for any wild animal. One day on his way to school
a woodchuck crossed the road before him, and John gave chase. The
woodchuck scrambled into an orchard and climbed a small apple-tree.
John thought this a most cowardly and unfair retreat, and stood under
the tree and taunted the animal and stoned it. Thereupon the woodchuck
dropped down on John and seized him by the leg of his trousers. John
was both enraged and scared by this dastardly attack; the teeth of the
enemy went through the cloth and met; and there he hung. John then made
a pivot of one leg and whirled himself around, swinging the woodchuck
in the air, until he shook him off; but in his departure the woodchuck
carried away a large piece of John's summer trousers leg. The boy never
forgot it. And whenever he had a holiday he used to expend an amount
of labor and ingenuity in the pursuit of woodchucks that would have
made his fortune in any useful pursuit. There was a hill-pasture, down
on one side of which ran a small brook, and this pasture was full of
woodchuck-holes. It required the assistance of several boys to capture
a woodchuck. It was first necessary by patient watching to ascertain
that the woodchuck was at home. When one was seen to enter his burrow,
then all the entries to it except one—there are usually three—were
plugged up with stones. A boy and a dog were then left to watch the
open hole, while John and his comrades went to the brook and began to
dig a canal, to turn the water into the residence of the woodchuck.
This was often a difficult feat of engineering and a long job. Often
it took more than half a day of hard labor with shovel and hoe to dig
the canal. But when the canal was finished, and the water began to pour
into the hole, the excitement began. How long would it take to fill
the hole and drown out the woodchuck? Sometimes it seemed as if the
hole were a bottomless pit. But sooner or later the water would rise
in it, and then there was sure to be seen the nose of the woodchuck,
keeping itself on a level with the rising flood. It was piteous to see
the anxious look of the hunted, half-drowned creature as it came to
the surface and caught sight of the dog. There the dog stood, at the
mouth of the hole, quivering with excitement from his nose to the tip
of his tail, and behind him were the cruel boys dancing with joy and
setting the dog on. The poor creature would disappear in the water in
terror; but he must breathe, and out would come his nose again, nearer
the dog each time. At last the water ran out of the hole as well as in,
and the soaked beast came with it, and made a desperate rush. But in a
trice the dog had him, and the boys stood off in a circle, with stones
in their hands, to see what they called "fair play." They maintained
perfect "neutrality" so long as the dog was getting the best of the
woodchuck; but if the latter was likely to escape, they "interfered"
in the interest of peace and the "balance of power," and killed the
woodchuck. This is a boy's notion of justice; of course he'd no
business to be a woodchuck,—an "unspeakable woodchuck."
[Illustration: TREEING A WOODCHUCK]
I used the word "aromatic" in relation to the New England soil. John
knew very well all its sweet, aromatic, pungent, and medicinal
products, and liked to search for the scented herbs and the wild fruits
and exquisite flowers; but he did not then know, and few do know,
that there is no part of the globe where the subtle chemistry of the
earth produces more that is agreeable to the senses than a New England
hill-pasture and the green meadow at its foot. The poets have succeeded
in turning our attention from it to the comparatively barren Orient as
the land of sweet-smelling spices and odorous gums. And it is indeed a
constant surprise that this poor and stony soil elaborates and grows so
many delicate and aromatic products.
John, it is true, did not care much for anything that did not appeal
to his taste and smell and delight in brilliant color; and he trod
down the exquisite ferns and the wonderful mosses without compunction.
But he gathered from the crevices of the rocks the columbine and the
eglantine and the blue harebell; he picked the high-flavored alpine
strawberry, the blueberry, the boxberry, wild currants and gooseberries
and fox-grapes; he brought home armfuls of the pink-and-white laurel
and the wild honeysuckle; he dug the roots of the fragrant sassafras
and of the sweet-flag; he ate the tender leaves of the wintergreen
and its red berries; he gathered the peppermint and the spearmint;
he gnawed the twigs of the black birch; there was a stout fern which
he called "brake," which he pulled up, and found that the soft end
"tasted good;" he dug the amber gum from the spruce-tree, and liked to
smell, though he could not chew, the gum of the wild cherry; it was
his melancholy duty to bring home such medicinal herbs for the garret
as the goldthread, the tansy, and the loathsome "boneset;" and he laid
in for the winter, like a squirrel, stores of beech-nuts, hazel-nuts,
hickory-nuts, chestnuts, and butternuts. But that which lives most
vividly in his memory and most strongly draws him back to the New
England hills is the aromatic sweet-fern: he likes to eat its spicy
seeds, and to crush in his hands its fragrant leaves; their odor is the
unique essence of New England.
XVI
JOHN'S REVIVAL
The New England country boy of the last generation never heard of
Christmas.
There was no such day in his calendar. If John ever came across it in
his reading, he attached no meaning to the word.
If his curiosity had been aroused, and he had asked his elders
about it, he might have got the dim impression that it was a kind
of Popish holiday, the celebration of which was about as wicked
as "card-playing," or being a "democrat." John knew a couple of
desperately bad boys who were reported to play "seven-up" in a barn,
on the hay-mow, and the enormity of this practice made him shudder.
He had once seen a pack of greasy "playing-cards," and it seemed to
him to contain the quintessence of sin. If he had desired to defy all
Divine law and outrage all human society, he felt that he could do it
by shuffling them. And he was quite right. The two bad boys enjoyed
in stealth their scandalous pastime, because they knew it was the
most wicked thing they could do. If it had been as sinless as playing
marbles, they wouldn't have cared for it. John sometimes drove past
a brown, tumble-down farm-house, whose shiftless inhabitants, it was
said, were card-playing people; and it is impossible to describe how
wicked that house appeared to John. He almost expected to see its
shingles stand on end. In the old New England, one could not in any
other way so express his contempt of all holy and orderly life as by
playing cards for amusement.
There was no element of Christmas in John's life, any more than there
was of Easter, and probably nobody about him could have explained
Easter; and he escaped all the demoralization attending Christmas
gifts. Indeed, he never had any presents of any kind, either on his
birthday or any other day. He expected nothing that he did not earn,
or make in the way of "trade" with another boy. He was taught to work
for what he received. He even earned, as I said, the extra holidays
of the day after the "Fourth" and the day after Thanksgiving. Of the
free grace and gifts of Christmas he had no conception. The single and
melancholy association he had with it was the quaking hymn which his
grandfather used to sing in a cracked and quavering voice,—
"While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground."
The "glory" that "shone around" at the end of it—the doleful voice
always repeating, "and glory shone around"—made John as miserable as
"Hark! from the tombs." It was all one dreary expectation of something
uncomfortable. It was, in short, "religion." You'd got to have it
some time; that John believed. But it lay in his unthinking mind to
put off the "Hark! from the tombs" enjoyment as long as possible. He
experienced a kind of delightful wickedness in indulging his dislike of
hymns and of Sunday.
[Illustration: LOOKING FOR FROGS]
John was not a model boy, but I cannot exactly define in what his
wickedness consisted. He had no inclination to steal, nor much to lie;
and he despised "meanness" and stinginess, and had a chivalrous feeling
toward little girls. Probably it never occurred to him that there was
any virtue in not stealing and lying, for honesty and veracity were
in the atmosphere about him. He hated work, and he "got mad" easily;
but he did work, and he was always ashamed when he was over his fit of
passion. In short, you couldn't find a much better wicked boy than John.
When the "revival" came, therefore, one summer, John was in a quandary.
Sunday meeting and Sunday school he didn't mind; they were a part of
regular life, and only temporarily interrupted a boy's pleasures. But
when there began to be evening meetings at the different houses, a
new element came into affairs. There was a kind of solemnity over the
community, and a seriousness in all faces. At first these twilight
assemblies offered a little relief to the monotony of farm-life; and
John liked to meet the boys and girls, and to watch the older people
coming in, dressed in their second best. I think John's imagination
was worked upon by the sweet and mournful hymns that were discordantly
sung in the stiff old parlors. There was a suggestion of Sunday, and
sanctity too, in the odor of caraway-seed that pervaded the room. The
windows were wide open also, and the scent of June roses came in with
all the languishing sounds of a summer night. All the little boys had a
scared look, but the little girls were never so pretty and demure as in
this their susceptible seriousness. If John saw a boy who did not come
to the evening meeting, but was wandering off with his sling down the
meadow, looking for frogs, maybe, that boy seemed to him a monster of
wickedness.
After a time, as the meetings continued, John fell also under the
general impression of fright and seriousness. All the talk was
of "getting religion," and he heard over and over again that the
probability was, if he did not get it now he never would. The chance
did not come often, and, if this offer was not improved, John would
be given over to hardness of heart. His obstinacy would show that he
was not one of the elect. John fancied that he could feel his heart
hardening, and he began to look with a wistful anxiety into the faces
of the Christians to see what were the visible signs of being one of
the elect. John put on a good deal of a manner that he "didn't care,"
and he never admitted his disquiet by asking any questions or standing
up in meeting to be prayed for. But he did care. He heard all the time
that all he had to do was to repent and believe. But there was nothing
that he doubted, and he was perfectly willing to repent if he could
think of anything to repent of.
It was essential, he learned, that he should have a "conviction of
sin." This he earnestly tried to have. Other people, no better than
he, had it, and he wondered why he couldn't have it. Boys and girls
whom he knew were "under conviction," and John began to feel not only
panicky but lonesome. Cynthia Rudd had been anxious for days and days,
and not able to sleep at night, but now she had given herself up and
found peace. There was a kind of radiance in her face that struck John
with awe, and he felt that now there was a great gulf between him and
Cynthia. Everybody was going away from him, and his heart was getting
harder than ever. He couldn't feel wicked, all he could do. And there
was Ed Bates, his intimate friend, though older than he, a "whaling,"
noisy kind of boy, who was under conviction and sure he was going to be
lost. How John envied him! And, pretty soon, Ed "experienced religion."
John anxiously watched the change in Ed's face when he became one of
the elect. And a change there was. And John wondered about another
thing. Ed Bates used to go trout-fishing, with a tremendously long
pole, in a meadow-brook near the river; and when the trout didn't bite
right off Ed would "get mad," and as soon as one took hold he would
give an awful jerk, sending the fish more than three hundred feet into
the air and landing it in the bushes the other side of the meadow,
crying out, "Gul darn ye, I'll learn ye." And John wondered if Ed
would take the little trout out any more gently now.
[Illustration: TROUT FISHING]
John felt more and more lonesome as one after another of his playmates
came out and made a profession. Cynthia (she too was older than John)
sat on Sunday in the singers' seat; her voice, which was going to be a
contralto, had a wonderful pathos in it for him, and he heard it with
a heartache. "There she is," thought John, "singing away like an angel
in heaven, and I am left out." During all his after life a contralto
voice was to John one of his most bitter and heart-wringing pleasures.
It suggested the immaculate scornful, the melancholy unattainable.
If ever a boy honestly tried to work himself into a conviction of sin,
John tried. And what made him miserable was that he couldn't feel
miserable when everybody else was miserable. He even began to pretend
to be so. He put on a serious and anxious look like the others. He
pretended he didn't care for play; he refrained from chasing chipmunks
and snaring suckers; the songs of birds and the bright vivacity of
the summer time that used to make him turn hand-springs smote him as a
discordant levity. He was not a hypocrite at all, and he was getting
to be alarmed that he was not alarmed at himself. Every day and night
he heard that the spirit of the Lord would probably soon quit striving
with him, and leave him out. The phrase was that he would "grieve
away the Holy Spirit." John wondered if he was not doing it. He did
everything to put himself in the way of conviction, was constant at the
evening meetings, wore a grave face, refrained from play, and tried to
feel anxious. At length he concluded that he must do something.
One night as he walked home from a solemn meeting, at which several of
his little playmates had "come forward," he felt that he could force
the crisis. He was alone on the sandy road: it was an enchanting summer
night; the stars danced overhead, and by his side the broad and shallow
river ran over its stony bed with a loud but soothing murmur that
filled all the air with entreaty, John did not then know that it sang,
"But I go on forever," yet there was in it for him something of the
solemn flow of the eternal world. When he came in sight of the house,
he knelt down in the dust by a pile of rails and prayed. He prayed
that he might feel bad, and be distressed about himself. As he prayed
he heard distinctly, and yet not as a disturbance, the multitudinous
croaking of the frogs by the meadow-spring. It was not discordant with
his thoughts; it had in it a melancholy pathos, as if it were a kind of
call to the unconverted. What is there in this sound that suggests the
tenderness of spring, the despair of a summer night, the desolateness
of young love? Years after it happened to John to be at twilight at
a railway station on the edge of the Ravenna marshes. A little way
over the purple plain he saw the darkening towers and heard "the
sweet bells of Imola." The Holy Pontiff Pius IX. was born at Imola,
and passed his boyhood in that serene and moist region. As the train
waited, John heard from miles of marshes round about the evening song
of millions of frogs, louder and more melancholy and entreating than
the vesper call of the bells. And instantly his mind went back—for the
association of sound is as subtle as that of odor—to the prayer, years
ago, by the roadside and the plaintive appeal of the unheeded frogs,
and he wondered if the little Pope had not heard the like importunity,
and perhaps, when he thought of himself as a little Pope, associated
his conversion with this plaintive sound.