NOVEMBER’S moon is said to be the Indian’s Moon of Magic, but here the
June moon is the wonder moon and “the moon of my delight.” It sails
resplendent in a luminous sky, pouring its brightness down on a lake that
gleams like a silver shield. Its beams rain down through the leaves in a
drenching flood of light, to lie in shining pools on the mossy ground.
It illuminates the hidden nooks of the forest, it makes the stems of the
birches look like slender columns of white marble, and the woods are so
bright that half the flowers forget to shut their eyes, and stay wide
open through the night. Slender, tall irises stand like ghost flowers in
the swamps; the thousand little bells of the false lily of the valley—the
Canada May Flower—swing in the breezes that run along the ground, and on
the low, south point of the island the rushes rattle stiffly and bow
their heads as the wind passes over them. They are the Equisetum, the
Horsetail rush, known to the Pilgrim housewives as scouring rushes, with
which they used to clean their pots and pans.
Mary Blake tells me that she has used them and that the flinty, hollow
stems are excellent kettle cleaners. They do not suggest anything so
prosaic here in the white moonlight—rather they make me think of small
silver spears held upright in the hands of a fairy troop, the small,
green yeomen of the forest, on guard through the white night.
There is great rushing and scurrying in the underbrush, for the deer
mice, the rabbits, and other small folk of the forest are awake and
active. The birds too are wakeful and chirp answers chirp from one nest
to another all through the night.
This is going to be a good bird year judging from the number of broken
egg shells—blue, cream, speckled—that are cast from the nests to the
ground. There is a continuous sound of faint, wheezing cries, the voices
of nestlings, begging for food.
A pair of robins have plastered their mud nest on a beam of the porch
roof, a red-eyed vireo has hung her birch bark cradle in a low bush under
the kitchen window, some phœbes have built on the lintel of the house
door. It seems impossible that so small a nest can hold so many
squirming little bodies as must belong to all those upstretched, gaping
yellow bills. The parent phœbes do not hesitate about telling me in good
round terms just what they think of me when I go too near their home, but
the robins do not scold me, they only go off to a bush and mourn. The
vireo cares not at all for anybody, but sits tranquil on her eggs and
eyes me fearlessly.
I have seen a whippoorwill’s nest, a thing, I am told, that few people
ever find. It lies on the ground under the shelter of cedar poles that
serves John Beaulac for a wagon shed, and is so directly in the path of
the horses’ hoofs that I wonder it has not been trampled into the mold.
John’s small daughter, Sallie May, led me to it, and, as we approached, a
dark, slenderly trailing bird slid away through the underbrush, leaving
her two furry balls of nestlings rolling helplessly on the dry leaves of
their bed. They were about half the size of young chickens and were
covered with thick down of a red clay color that had so fiery and vital a
glow that it made me think of live coals showing through the ashes. We
took one look and hurried away lest the whippoorwill mother should become
frightened and forsake her nest, and two sweet and plaintive bird voices
be lost from the evening chorus.
At Beaulac’s, where I stopped on the homeward way, a lively discussion
was going forward. The Bishop of Ontario was coming to Sark, for the
first time in many years, to hold service and to confirm, and there was
much speculation about who would join the English Church.
“I’m a goin’ to be a Catholic,” announced poor Ishmael, the half-wit,
peering out from a dim nook behind the stove.
“They tells me the priest kin cure the fits,” he went on, hopefully, “but
he won’t do it fer you lessen you bees a Catholic, so I’m a goin’ to jine
his church.”
“I favors the Baptists, ef I favors any,” observed Bill Shelly, the
frogger.
Whereupon John Beaulac retorted cruelly, that “We’d ought to send fer the
preacher quick and have Bill dipped right off the dock, clothes and all,”
further explaining that the suggestion was made in view of Bill’s general
appearance and his boast that he had not touched water since early in the
previous summer, and then only because he had “fell in.”
Bill, so far from being offended, took this witticism in excellent part,
joining uproariously in the laugh that followed it.
For the rest of that week, telephones were busy calling a congregation.
I was invited to drive to church in Mrs. Swanson’s spring wagon, and
reached her farm by a devious route on the great day. I rowed across the
half mile that lies between the island and the nearest point of mainland
and walked the wood trail from Drapeau’s to Foret’s. There William’s
motor boat was waiting to ferry me across the lake and up Blue Bay to the
Swan-sons’ landing.
Here also there was a flutter of excitement, for Susie Dove was going to
be confirmed.
Clarence Nutting too had wished to be of the class, but at the last
moment it had been remembered that he had never been baptized. As
baptism must precede confirmation the Rector, amid the hurry and work of
entertaining the Bishop and conveying him to and from the several
churches where there were to be services, had been diligently striving to
come up with Clarence to baptize him.
But each time he searched for him Clarence was away, either in a distant
field or over in the next township, and so the Rector never caught him,
and when the service commenced poor Clarence sat humbly at the side of
the church with the men, and could not come forward.
There was no trouble about little Susie. Her case was entirely clear.
Her new dress and white veil were spread forth on the spare room bed for
display and admiration; her hair was plaited in innumerable tight
pigtails as a prelude to subsequent frizzes.
Susie looked quiet and subdued. There was a frightened expression in her
china-blue eyes. She could eat no dinner, she could not even taste her
pie, and soon she and Mrs. Swanson retired to dress. On the way to
church Susie sat silent, clutching her new Prayer Book in a moist and
trembling hand. On the homeward drive she confided to me that she had
been very afraid of the Bishop.
“I knew my Commandments,” she assured me, “but I was not so certain about
the creed, and I was afeared lest the Bishop should ask me some hard
questions.”
Her face then was radiant. The Bishop had been kind and had asked no one
any hard questions, and so this little one had not been put to confusion.
The church at Sark is old and falling to pieces but it looked lovely that
day. Each window sill held a plant in bloom, its tin can covered with
gay, flowered wall paper—geraniums, fuchsias, patience plants—the
ornaments of many a parlor. Each window framed a picture of soft,
rolling meadows, fruit trees in bloom, homesteads nestled in the hollows,
and, over all, stretches of blue sky, flecked with wisps of floating
vapor. In the center of the church sat the group of ten or a dozen
candidates for confirmation. Through the misty veils their young faces
looked out, awed and grave and very sweet. There had been a great
disappointment for little Mary Spellman, for her veil had not come from
town with the rest. She looked like a gentle little nun, with a square
of plain white muslin laid over her flaxen head. Most of these girls
will not wear bridal dress at their weddings, so confirmation is the one
great occasion in their lives when they can put on the dignity and the
mystery of the veil.
“Defend, O Lord, this thy child with thy heavenly grace”—The words seemed
to reach me from a great way off, repeated each time the Bishop laid his
hands on a bowed head. The Bishop’s voice was kind, his tone gentle
when, his sermon finished, he turned from the congregation to deliver his
charge to the class. I do not remember much of what he said, but I have
not forgotten his manner. It seemed to me, listening, that he must feel
a peculiar tenderness for these little cut-off country parishes.
After service I was led forward to be presented to his Lordship. He said
that he had heard of “the lady from the Southern States who was living
alone at Many Islands.” I could not help feeling that the Episcopal eye
regarded me with a certain suspicion, as one not quite right in her
mind—which supposition was, I fear, confirmed by my own behavior, for
when Mrs. Rector said: “My Lord, I wish to present Miss X. to you,” the
unaccustomed sound of the title, and my own total ignorance of the proper
mode of addressing one called “My Lord,” gave me a foolish, flustered
manner that must have betrayed me.
We locked the silent church, stripped of its flowers and white-robed
girls, and drove along the tree-shaded roads to the shore, where the
motor boat was waiting. The water was so still and so clear that we
could see every rock and pebble lying a dozen feet below. We passed over
schools of big fish, bass and pickerel, hanging suspended in a crystal
medium. Between the sheer walls of the Loon Lake Portage the sun was
going down in a lake of gold and the rocks were purple and red in its
glow.
I walked the home trail slowly, lingering in the falling dusk. The odors
of the cedars, hemlocks, and basswoods came to me mingled with the wet
smell from the bogs and the perfume of the tiny twin trumpets of the
partridge vine, twining the damp moss. I came out of the dimness of the
woods to the path worn along the grass of meadows starred all over with
myriads of misty little globes, the seed heads of the dandelions. I
pushed the row boat off on the quiet water, and drifted while “the moth
hour went from the fields.” The sky was bright with the rising moon as I
climbed the island path. There was great scurrying of rabbits in the
underbrush and away in the misty thickets the whippoorwills were calling.