WILD WOODS AND MOUNTAIN PASSES.
Oh, give me a home on the mountains high,
Where the wind sweeps wild and free,
Where the pine-tops wave 'gainst a crimson sky,--
Oh, a mountain home for me!
A travelling carriage, drawn by four grey horses, toiled up an ascent
of the mountains some twenty miles back of Catskill. It was a warm day
in September, and though the load which those fine animals drew was by
no means a heavy one, they had been ascending the mountains for more
than two hours, and now their sleek coats were dripping with sweat,
and drops of foam fell like snow-flakes along the dusty road as they
passed upward. This carriage contained Judge Sharp, the two orphans,
and Mrs. Farnham, looking very slender, very fair, but faded, and with
a sort of restless self-complacency in her countenance, which seemed
ever on the alert to make itself recognized by those about her.
The gentleman had been reading, or rather holding a book before his
face, but it would seem rather as an excuse for not keeping up the
incessant talk, for conversation it could not be called, which the
lady had kept in constant flow all the morning, than from any
particular desire to read.
True, he did now and then glance at the book, but much oftener his
fine deep eyes were looking out of the carriage window and wandering
over the broad expanse of scenery that began to unfold beneath them,
as the carriage mounted higher and higher up the mountains. Sometimes,
when he appeared most intent on the volume, those eyes were glancing
over it towards a little wan face opposite, that began to blush and
half smile whenever the thoughtful but kindly look of those eyes fell
upon it.
The carriage at last reached a platform on the spur of a mountain
ridge where the road made a bold curve, commanding one of the finest
views, perhaps--nay, we will not have perhaps, but certainly, in the
civilized world.
You should have seen that little pale face then, how it sparkled and
glowed with intelligence, nay, with something more than intelligence.
The deep, grey eyes lighted up like lamps suddenly kindled, the wide
but shapely mouth broke into a smile that spread and brightened over
every feature of her face. She started forward, grasped the
window-frame, and looked out with an expression of such eager joy that
the judge who was gazing upon her, glanced down at his book with a
well-pleased smile. "I thought so--I was sure of it. She feels all the
grandeur, all the beauty," he said to himself, inly, but to all
appearance intent on his book. "Now let us see how the others take
it."
"Isabel, Isabel, look out--look look," whispered the excited child,
turning with that sort of wild earnestness peculiar to persons of
vivid imaginations, when once set on fire with some beautiful thing
that God has created. "Look out, Isabel, I do believe that the sky you
see yonder is heaven."
"Heaven!" cried Isabel, starting forward and struggling to reach the
door, "Heaven! oh, Mary, it makes me think of mamma"--
Mary fell back in her chair, frightened by the effect of her
enthusiasm.
"There is nothing, I can see nothing but hills, corn, lots, and sky,"
said the beautiful child, drawing back and looking at Mary with her
great, reproachful eyes half full of tears.
"Oh, Isabel, I did not mean that, not the real heaven, where
your--where our mother is, where they all are--but it was so beautiful
over yonder, the sky and all, I could not help saying what I did."
Isabel drew back to her seat half petulant, half sorrowful; she was
not really child enough to think that Mary could have spoken of heaven
as a place actually within view; still it was not wonderful that the
thought had for a moment flashed across her brain. Heaven itself could
not have seemed more strange to those children than the magnificent
mountain scenery through which they were passing. Born in the city,
they were thrown for the first time among the most beautiful scenery
that man ever dreamed of, with all their wild, young ideas afloat. Is
it wonderful, then, that an imaginative child like Mary should have
cried out the name of heaven in her admiration, or that Isabel, so
lately made an orphan, should have sent forth the cry of mother,
mother, from the depths of her poor little heart when she heard the
heaven mentioned, where she believed her mother was still longing for
her child?
She sat down cowering close in a corner of the seat, and in order to
conceal her tears turned her face to the cushions.
"Sit up," the lady interposed, "my beauty, sit up; don't you see how
your pretty marabouts are being crushed against the side of the
carriage? Nonsense, child, what can you be crying about?"
"My mother, oh, she made me think of my mother. I thought--it seemed
as if she must be there."
The lady frowned and looked toward the Judge with a pettish movement
of the head.
"Be quiet, child, I am your mother, now; remember that, I am your
mother."
Isabel looked up and gazed through her tears at the pale, characterless
face, bent in weak displeasure upon her.
"I am your mother," repeated the lady, in a tone that she intended to
be impressive, but it was only snappish; "your benefactress, your more
than mamma; forget that you ever had any but me."
"I can't, oh, dear, I never can," cried the child, bursting into a
passion of tears, and casting her face back upon the cushion.
Mrs. Farnham seized the child by the shoulder, and placed her, with a
slight shake, upright.
"Stop crying; I never could endure crying children," she said. "See
how you have crushed the pretty Leghorn, you ungrateful thing! Better
be thanking heaven that I took you from that miserable poor-house,
than fly in the face of Providence in this manner, crushing Leghorn
flats and marabout feathers that cost me mints of money, as if they
were city property."
"She did not mean to spoil the feathers, ma'am, it was all my fault,"
said Mary Fuller; "Isabel loved her poor mother so much."
"And am not I her mother? Can't you children let the poor woman rest
in her pine coffin at Potter's Field, without tormenting me with all
this sobbing and crying? Remember my little lady, it is not too late
yet; a few more scenes like this and it will be an easy matter to send
you back where I took you from. Then, perhaps, you will find it worth
while to cry after your new mother a little."
The two little girls looked at each other through their tears. Perhaps
at the moment they thought of the Infants' Hospital, where Mrs.
Farnham had found them, with something of regret. The contrast of a
carriage cushioned with velvet and four superb horses, had not
impressed them as it might have done older persons. Shut up with
strangers, while their hearts were full of regret, they had not found
the change for which they were expected to be grateful, quite so happy
as she fancied.
Up to the hour we mention they had kept their places demurely, and in
silence, drawing their little feet up close to the seats, fearful of
being found in the way, and stealing their hands together now and then
with a silent clasp, which spoke a world of feeling to the noble man
who sat regarding them over his book.
He had watched the scene we have described in silence, and with a sort
of philosophical thoughtfulness, using it as a means of studying the
souls of those two little girls. When Mrs. Farnham ceased speaking and
turned to him for concurrence in her mode of drawing out the
affections and settling the preliminaries of a life-time for that
little soul, he only answered by leaning from the window and calling
out.
"Ralph, draw up and let the horses have a rest under the shadow of
this high rock. Come, children, get out, and let's take a look around
us; your little limbs will be all the better for a good run among the
underbrush."
Suiting the action to his words, Judge Sharp sprang from the carriage,
took Isabel in his arms, set her carefully down, then more gently, and
with a touch of tenderness, drew Mary Fuller forward, and folded her
little form to his bosom.
"We will leave you to rest in the carriage, Mrs. Farnham," he said,
with off-hand politeness, as if studying that lady's comfort more than
anything on earth. "We will see what wild flowers can be found among
the rocks. Take care of yourself; that's right, Ralph, let the horses
wet their mouths at this little brook--not too much though, it is a
warm day. Now, Isabel, let's see which will climb this rock
first--you, or little Mary and I."
Isabel's eyes brightened through her tears. There was something in the
cordial goodness of Judge Sharp that no grief could have resisted.
"Please, sir," said Mary, struggling faintly in the arms of her noble
friend--"please, sir, I can walk very well."
"And I can carry you very well--why not? Come, now for a climb."
And away strode the great-hearted man, holding her up that she might
gaze on the scenery over his shoulder.
Isabel followed close, helping herself up the steep rocks, now by
catching hold of a spice-bush and shaking off all its ripe golden
blossoms; now drawing down the loops of a grape-vine and swinging
forward on it, encouraged in each new effort by the hearty
commendations of her new friend.
At last they reached the summit of a detached ridge of rocks that rose
like a fortification back of the highway. Judge Sharp sat down upon a
shelf cushioned like an easy-chair with the greenest moss and placed
the children at his feet.
A true lover of nature himself, he did not speak, or insist upon
forcing exclamations of delight from the children who shared the
glorious view with him. But he looked now and then into Mary Fuller's
face, and was satisfied with all that he saw there.
He turned and glanced also into the beautiful eyes of little Isabel.
They were wandering dreamily from object to object, searching, as it
were, along the misty horizon for some sign of her dead mother. It was
her heart rather than her intellect that wandered over that
magnificent scenery for something to dwell upon.
"Are you sure, sir?" said Mary Fuller, timidly, looking up; "are you
quite sure that this is the same world that Isabel and I were in
yesterday?"
"Why not? Doesn't it seem like the same?"
"No," answered Mary, kindling up and looking eagerly around; "it is a
thousand times larger, so vast, so grand, so--. Pray help me out, I
wish to say so much and can't. Something chokes me here when I try to
say how beautiful all this seems."
Mary folded her hands over her bosom, and began to waver to and fro on
the moss seat, struck with a pang of that exquisite pleasure which so
closely approaches pain when we fully appreciate the beautiful.
"You like this?" said the Judge, watching her face more than the
landscape, that had been familiar to him when almost a wilderness.
"I should like to stay here for ever. It seems as if every one that we
have loved so much, is resting near the sky away off yonder falling
close down upon the mountains."
"It is a noble view," said the Judge, standing up, and pointing to the
right. "Have you ever learned anything of geography, children?"
"A little," they both answered, glancing at each other as if ashamed
of confessing so much knowledge.
"Then you have heard of the Green Mountains yonder; they are like
thunder-clouds under the horizon?"
The children shaded their eyes, and looked searchingly at what seemed
to them a dark embankment of clouds, and then Mary turned, holding her
breath almost with awe, and gathered in with one long glance the broad
horizon, sweeping its circle of a hundred miles from right to left,
closed by the mountain spur on which they stood.
Where distance levelled small inequalities of surface, and made great
ones indistinct and cloudy, the whole aspect of the scenery took an
air of high cultivation and abundant richness. Thousands and thousands
of farms, cut up and colored with their ripened crops, lay before
them--golden rye stubbles; hills white with buckwheat and rich with
snowy blossoms; meadows, orchards, and groves of primeval timber, all
brightened those luxuriant valleys and plains that open upon the
Hudson. Deep into New York State, and far, far away among the
mountains of New England the eye ranged, charmed and satisfied with a
fullness of beauty.
Mary saw it, and all the deep feelings as fervent, but less understood
in the child than in the woman, swelled and grew rich in her bosom.
Not a tint of those luxuriously colored hills ever left her
memory--not a shadow upon the distant mountains ever died from her
brain. It is such memories, vivid as painting, and burnt upon the mind
like enamel, from childhood to maturity, that feed and invigorate the
soul of genius.
Enoch Sharp had been a man of enterprise. Action had ever followed
quick upon his thought. Placed by accident in certain avenues of life,
he had exerted strong energies, and a will firm as it was kindly, in
doing all things thoroughly that he undertook; in no circumstances
would he have been an ordinary man. Had destiny placed his field of
action among scientific or military men, he would have proven himself
first among the foremost; as it was, much of the talent that would
have distinguished him there, grew and throve upon those domestic
affections which were to him the poetry of life.
Thrown into constant communion with nature in her most noble aspects,
he became her devotee, and was more learned in all the beautiful
things which God has created, than many a celebrated savant who
studies with his brain only.
True to the unearthed poetry lying in rich veins throughout his whole
nature, Enoch Sharp sat keenly regarding the effect this grand
panorama of scenery produced on the two children.
He looked on Isabel in her bright, half-restless beauty, with a smile
of affectionate forbearance. There was everything in her face to love,
but it had to answer to the glow and enthusiasm of his own nature.
But it was far otherwise with little Mary. His own deep grey eye
kindled as it perused her sharp features, lighted up, as it were, with
some inward flame. His heart warmed toward the little creature, and
without uttering a word he stooped down and patted her head in silent
approbation.
The child had given him pleasure, for there is nothing more annoying
to the true lover of nature than want of sympathy, when the heart is
in a glow of fervent admiration; alive with a feeling which is so near
akin to religion itself, that we sometimes doubt where the dividing
line exists which separates love of God from love of the beautiful
objects He has created.
Thus it was that Mary with her plain face and small person found her
way to the great, warm heart of Enoch Sharp; and as he sat upon the
rock a faint struggle arose in his bosom regarding her destination.
An impulse to take her into his own house and cultivate the latent
talent so visible in every gesture and look, took possession of him,
but his natural strong sense prevailed over this impulse. Many reasons
which we will not pause to mention here, arose in contest with his
heart, and he muttered thoughtfully,
"Neither men nor women become what they were intended to be by
carpeting their progress with velvet; real strength is tested by
difficulties. Still I must keep an eye upon the girl."
Isabel soon became weary of gazing on the landscape. Impatient of the
stillness, she arose softly and moved to a ledge close by, under which
a wild gooseberry bush drooped beneath a harvest of thorny fruit.
"That is right," said Enoch Sharp, starting up; "let me break off a
handful of the branches, they will make peace with Mrs. Farnham for
leaving her in the carriage so long."
Directly a heap of thorny branches purple with fruit lay at Isabel's
feet, and Enoch Sharp was clambering up the rocks after some tufts of
tall blue flowers that shed an azure tinge down one of the clefts;
then a cluster of brake leaves mottled with brown spots tempted him
on, while Mary Fuller stood eagerly watching his progress.
"Oh, see, see how beautiful--do look, Isabel, if he could only get up
so high?"
She broke off with an exclamation of delight. Enoch Sharp had glanced
downward at the sound of her voice, and directed by the eager look
which accompanied it, made a spring higher up the rock.
A mountain ash, perfectly red with great clusters of berries, shot out
from a little hollow between two ledges, and overhung the place where
Mr. Sharp had found foothold. As if its own wealth of berries were not
enough, a bitter-sweet vine had sprung up in the same hollow, and
coiling itself around the tree, deluged it with a shower of golden
clusters that mingled upon the same branch with the bright red fruit
of the ash.
"Oh, was there ever on earth anything so beautiful?" cried Mary,
disentangling the delicate ends of the vines flung down by her
benefactor. "Oh, look, Isabel, look!"
She held up a natural wreath, to which three or four clusters hung
like drops of burnt gold.
"Only see!"
With this exclamation she wove a handful of the blue autumn flowers in
with the berries and long slender leaves.
"Let me put it around your hat, Isabel. Oh, Mr. Sharp, may I wind this
around Isabel's hat; it is so pretty, I'm sure Mrs. Farnham will not
mind?"
"Put it anywhere you like," cried the kind man, holding on to a branch
of the bitter-sweet, and swinging himself downward till the ash bent
almost double. It rushed back to its place, casting off a shower of
loose berries and leaves that rattled around the girls in red and
golden rain. Directly Mr. Sharp was by them once more, gathering up a
handful of gooseberry branches, bitter-sweet and ash, admiring Mary's
wreath at the same time.
"Come, now for a scramble down the hill," he cried. "Here, let me go
first, for we may all expect a precious blessing, and I fancy my
shoulders are the broadest."
The children looked at each other and the smiles left their lips. The
"blessing," with which he so carelessly threatened them was enough to
quench all their gay spirits, and they crept on after their benefactor
with clouded faces.
"See, Mrs. Farnham, see what a world of beautiful things we have found
for you up the mountain," cried Mr. Sharp, throwing two or three
branches through the carriage window. "The little folks have
discovered wonders among the bush--don't you think so?"
Mrs. Farnham drew back and gathered her ample skirts nervously about
her.
"What on earth have the creatures brought? Bitter-sweet, gooseberries,
with thorns like darning needles! Why, Mr. Sharp, what can you mean by
bringing such things here to stain the cushions with?"
"Oh, never mind the cushions," answered the gentleman, lifting Isabel
up with a toss, and landing her on the front seat, while Mary stood
trembling by his side, with her eyes fixed ruefully on the wreath
which surrounded the crown of her companion's Leghorn flat.
"Oh, what will become of us when she sees that?" thought the child in
dismay.
But she was allowed no time to ask unpleasant questions, even of
herself, for Enoch Sharp took her in his arms and set her carefully
down opposite Mrs. Farnham, whose glance had just taken in the unlucky
wreath.
"My goodness, if the little wretches have not destroyed that love of a
hat with their trash! Oh, dear, put a beggar on horseback and only see
how he will ride! Mr. Sharp, I did hope that the child could
appreciate an article of millinery like that; but you see how it is,
no just medium can be expected with this pauper taste; a long course
of refinement is, I fear necessary to a just comprehension of the
beautiful. Only think! two of Jarvis' most expensive marabouts crushed
into nothingness by a good-for-nothing heap of, I don't know what,
tangled about them! Really, it is enough to discourage one from ever
doing a benevolent act again."
Judge Sharp strove to look decorously concerned, but spite of himself
a quiet smile would tremble at the corners of the mouth, as he looked
at the two marabout feathers flattened and crushed beneath the
impromptu wreath.
"Whose work is it? Which of you twisted that thing over those
feathers?" cried the lady angrily.
Isabel looked at Mary, but did not speak.
"It was me; I did it," said Mary, meekly. "The berries were so pretty,
we never saw any before. Please, ma'am, look again, and see if the
blue flowers there against the yellow don't look beautiful."
"Beautiful, indeed! What should you know of beauty, I wonder?" was the
scornful answer, for Mrs. Farnham was by no means pleased that Mary
had been forced into her company even for a single day's travel. "What
on earth possesses a child like you, brought up, no matter where, to
speak of this or that thing as pretty? What beautiful thing can you
ever have seen?"
"I have seen the sky, ma'am, when it was full of bright stars. God
lets poor people as well as rich ones look on the sky, you know; and
isn't that beautiful?"
"Indeed! You think so, then?" said the lady.
"And we have seen many, many beautiful things besides that, haven't
we, Isabel? One night, when it had been raining, in the winter--I
remember it, oh, how well--while the great trees were dripping wet,
out came the moon and stars bright, with a sharp frost, and then all
the branches were hung with ice, in the moonshine, glittering and
bending low toward the ground, just as if the starlight had all
settled on the limbs and was loading them down with brightness. Oh,
ma'am, I wish you could have seen it. I remember the ground was all
one glare of ice; but I didn't mind that."
"I'm afraid your ward will find his protege rather forward, Judge,"
said the lady, as Mary Fuller drew back, blushing at her own eager
description.
"I really don't know," answered the gentleman; "she seems to have made
pretty good use of the few privileges awarded to her, and, really,
there is some philosophy in it. When one finds nothing but God's sky
unmonopolized, it is something for a child to make so much of that.
She has a pretty knack of sorting flowers, too, as you may see by the
fashion in which that is twisted. After all, madam, let us each make
the most of our favorites. Yours is pretty enough, in all conscience
Fred's will give satisfaction where she goes, I dare say."
Judge Sharp was becoming rather weary of his companion again, and so
leaned out of the window, as was his usual habit, amusing himself by
searching for the first red leaves among the maple foliage, and
watching the shadows as they fell softly down the hemlock hollows.