can only live till strawberries come!” The old scholar imagined that,
if he could weather it till then, the berries would carry him through.
No doubt he had turned from the drugs and the nostrums, or from the
hateful food, to the memory of the pungent, penetrating, and
unspeakably fresh quality of the strawberry with the deepest longing.
The very thought of these crimson lobes, embodying as it were the first
glow and ardor of the young summer, and with their power to unsheathe
the taste and spur the nagging appetite, made life seem possible and
desirable to him.
The strawberry is always the hope of the invalid, and sometimes, no
doubt, his salvation. It is the first and finest relish among fruits,
and well merits Dr. Boteler’s memorable saying, that “doubtless God
could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.”
On the threshold of summer, Nature proffers us this her virgin fruit;
more rich and sumptuous are to follow, but the wild delicacy and fillip
of the strawberry are never repeated,—that keen feathered edge greets
the tongue in nothing else.
Let me not be afraid of overpraising it, but probe and probe for words
to hint its surprising virtues. We may well celebrate it with festivals
and music. It has that indescribable quality of all first things,—that
shy, uncloying, provoking barbed sweetness. It is eager and sanguine as
youth. It is born of the copious dews, the fragrant nights, the tender
skies, the plentiful rains of the early season. The singing of birds is
in it, and the health and frolic of lusty Nature. It is the product of
liquid May touched by the June sun. It has the tartness, the briskness,
the unruliness of spring, and the aroma and intensity of summer.
Oh, the strawberry days! how vividly they come back to one! The smell
of clover in the fields, of blooming rye on the hills, of the wild
grape beside the woods, and of the sweet honeysuckle and the spiræa
about the house. The first hot, moist days. The daisies and the
buttercups; the songs of the birds, their first reckless jollity and
love-making over; the full tender foliage of the trees; the bees
swarming, and the air strung with resonant musical chords. The time of
the sweetest and most, succulent grass, when the cows come home with
aching udders. Indeed, the strawberry belongs to the juiciest time of
the year.
What a challenge it is to the taste! how it bites back again! and is
there any other sound like the snap and crackle with which it salutes
the ear on being plucked from the stems? It is a threat to one sense
that the other is soon to verify. It snaps to the ear as it smacks to
the tongue. All other berries are tame beside it.
The plant is almost an evergreen; it loves the coverlid of the snow,
and will keep fresh through the severest winters with a slight
protection. The frost leaves its virtues in it. The berry is a kind of
vegetable snow. How cool, how tonic, how melting, and how perishable!
It is almost as easy to keep frost. Heat kills it, and sugar quickly
breaks up its cells.
Is there anything like the odor of strawberries? The next best thing to
tasting them is to smell them; one may put his nose to the dish while
the fruit is yet too rare and choice for his fingers. Touch not and
taste not, but take a good smell and go mad! Last fall I potted some of
the Downer, and in the winter grew them in the house. In March the
berries were ripe, only four or five on a plant, just enough, all told,
to make one consider whether it were not worth while to kill off the
rest of the household, so that the berries need not be divided. But if
every tongue could not have a feast, every nose banqueted daily upon
them. They filled the house with perfume. The Downer is remarkable in
this respect. Grown in the open field, it surpasses in its odor any
strawberry of my acquaintance. And it is scarcely less agreeable to the
taste. It is a very beautiful berry to look upon, round, light pink,
with a delicate, fine-grained expression. Some berries shine, the
Downer glows as if there were a red bloom upon it. Its core is firm and
white, its skin thick and easily bruised, which makes it a poor market
berry, but, with its high flavor and productiveness, an admirable one
for home use. It seems to be as easily grown as the Wilson, while it is
much more palatable. The great trouble with the Wilson, as everybody
knows, is its rank acidity. When it first comes, it is difficult to eat
it without making faces. It is crabbed and acrimonious. Like some
persons, the Wilson will not ripen and sweeten till its old age. Its
largest and finest crop, if allowed to remain on the vines, will soften
and fail unregenerated, or with all its sins upon it. But wait till
toward the end of the season, after the plant gets over its hurry and
takes time to ripen its fruit. The berry will then face the sun for
days, and, if the weather is not too wet, instead of softening will
turn dark and grow rich. Out of its crabbedness and spitefulness come
the finest, choicest flavors. It is an astonishing berry. It lays hold
of the taste in a way that the aristocratic berries, like the Jocunda
or the Triumph, cannot approximate to. Its quality is as penetrating as
that of ants and wasps, but sweet. It is, indeed, a wild bee turned
into a berry, with the sting mollified and the honey disguised. A quart
of these rare-ripes I venture to say contains more of the peculiar
virtue and excellence of the strawberry kind than can be had in twice
the same quantity of any other cultivated variety. Take these berries
in a bowl of rich milk with some bread,—ah, what a dish!—too good to
set before a king! I suspect this was the food of Adam in Paradise,
only Adam did not have the Wilson strawberry; he had the wild
strawberry that Eve plucked in their hill-meadow and “hulled” with her
own hands, and that, take it all in all, even surpasses the
late-ripened Wilson.
Adam is still extant in the taste and the appetite of most country
boys; lives there a country boy who does not like wild strawberries and
milk,—yea, prefer it to any other known dish? I am not thinking of a
dessert of strawberries and cream; this the city boy may have, too,
after a sort; but bread-and-milk, with the addition of wild
strawberries, is peculiarly a country dish, and is to the taste what a
wild bird’s song is to the ear. When I was a lad, and went afield with
my hoe or with the cows, during the strawberry season, I was sure to
return at meal-time with a lining of berries in the top of my straw
hat. They were my daily food, and I could taste the liquid and gurgling
notes of the bobolink in every spoonful of them; and to this day, to
make a dinner or supper off a bowl of milk with bread and
strawberries,—plenty of strawberries,—well, is as near to being a boy
again as I ever expect to come. The golden age draws sensibly near.
Appetite becomes a kind of delicious thirst,—a gentle and subtle
craving of all parts of the mouth and throat,—and those nerves of taste
that occupy, as it were, a back seat, and take little cognizance of
grosser foods, come forth, and are played upon and set vibrating.
Indeed, I think, if there is ever rejoicing throughout one’s alimentary
household,—if ever that much-abused servant, the stomach, says Amen, or
those faithful handmaidens, the liver and spleen, nudge each other
delightedly, it must be when one on a torrid summer day passes by the
solid and carnal dinner for this simple Arcadian dish.
The wild strawberry, like the wild apple, is spicy and high-flavored,
but, unlike the apple, it is also mild and delicious. It has the true
rustic sweetness and piquancy. What it lacks in size, when compared
with the garden berry, it makes up in intensity. It is never dropsical
or overgrown, but firm-fleshed and hardy. Its great enemies are the
plow, gypsum, and the horse-rake. It dislikes a limestone soil, but
seems to prefer the detritus of the stratified rock. Where the sugar
maple abounds, I have always found plenty of wild strawberries. We have
two kinds,—the wood berry and the field berry. The former is as wild as
a partridge. It is found in open places in the woods and along the
borders, growing beside stumps and rocks, never in abundance, but very
sparsely. It is small, cone-shaped, dark red, shiny, and pimply. It
looks woody, and tastes so. It has never reached the table, nor made
the acquaintance of cream. A quart of them, at a fair price for human
labor, would be worth their weight in silver at least. (Yet a careful
observer writes me that in certain sections in the western part of New
York they are very plentiful.)
Ovid mentions the wood strawberry, which would lead one to infer that
they were more abundant in his time and country than in ours.
This is, perhaps, the same as the alpine strawberry, which is said to
grow in the mountains of Greece, and thence northward. This was
probably the first variety cultivated, though our native species would
seem as unpromising a subject for the garden as club-moss or
wintergreens.
Of the field strawberry there are a great many varieties,—some growing
in meadows, some in pastures, and some upon mountain-tops. Some are
round, and stick close to the calyx or hull; some are long and pointed,
with long, tapering necks. These usually grow upon tall stems. They
are, indeed, of the slim, linear kind. Your corpulent berry keeps close
to the ground; its stem and foot-stalk are short, and neck it has none.
Its color is deeper than that of its tall brother, and of course it has
more juice. You are more apt to find the tall varieties upon knolls in
low, wet meadows, and again upon mountain-tops, growing in tussocks of
wild grass about the open summits. These latter ripen in July, and give
one his last taste of strawberries for the season.
But the favorite haunt of the wild strawberry is an uplying meadow that
has been exempt from the plow for five or six years, and that has
little timothy and much daisy. When you go a-berrying, turn your steps
toward the milk-white meadows. The slightly bitter odor of the daisies
is very agreeable to the smell, and affords a good background for the
perfume of the fruit. The strawberry cannot cope with the rank and
deep-rooted clover, and seldom appears in a field till the clover has
had its day. But the daisy with its slender stalk does not crowd or
obstruct the plant, while its broad white flower is like a light
parasol that tempers and softens the too strong sunlight. Indeed,
daisies and strawberries are generally associated. Nature fills her
dish with the berries, then covers them with the white and yellow of
milk and cream, thus suggesting a combination we are quick to follow.
Milk alone, after it loses its animal heat, is a clod, and begets
torpidity of the brain; the berries lighten it, give wings to it, and
one is fed as by the air he breathes or the water he drinks.
Then the delight of “picking” the wild berries! It is one of the
fragrant memories of boyhood. Indeed, for boy or man to go a-berrying
in a certain pastoral country I know of, where a passer-by along the
highway is often regaled by a breeze loaded with a perfume of the
o’er-ripe fruit, is to get nearer to June than by almost any course I
know of. Your errand is so private and confidential! You stoop low. You
part away the grass and the daisies, and would lay bare the inmost
secrets of the meadow. Everything is yet tender and succulent; the very
air is bright and new; the warm breath of the meadow comes up in your
face; to your knees you are in a sea of daisies and clover; from your
knees up, you are in a sea of solar light and warmth. Now you are
prostrate like a swimmer, or like a surf-bather reaching for pebbles or
shells, the white and green spray breaks above you; then, like a
devotee before a shrine or naming his beads, your rosary strung with
luscious berries; anon you are a grazing Nebuchadnezzar, or an artist
taking an inverted view of the landscape.
The birds are alarmed by your close scrutiny of their domain. They
hardly know whether to sing or to cry, and do a little of both. The
bobolink follows you and circles above and in advance of you, and is
ready to give you a triumphal exit from the field, if you will only
depart.
“Ye boys that gather flowers and strawberries,
Lo, hid within the grass, an adder lies,”
Warton makes Virgil sing; and Montaigne, in his “Journey to Italy,”
says: “The children very often are afraid, on account of the snakes, to
go and pick the strawberries that grow in quantities on the mountains
and among bushes.” But there is no serpent here,—at worst, only a
bumblebee’s or yellow-jacket’s nest. You soon find out the spring in
the corner of the field under the beechen tree. While you wipe your
brow and thank the Lord for spring water, you glance at the initials in
the bark, some of them so old that they seem runic and legendary. You
find out, also, how gregarious the strawberry is,—that the different
varieties exist in little colonies about the field. When you strike the
outskirts of one of these plantations, how quickly you work toward the
centre of it, and then from the centre out, then circumnavigate it, and
follow up all its branchings and windings!
Then the delight in the abstract and in the concrete of strolling and
lounging about the June meadows; of lying in pickle for half a day or
more in this pastoral sea, laved by the great tide, shone upon by the
virile sun, drenched to the very marrow of your being with the warm and
wooing influences of the young summer!
I was a famous berry-picker when a boy. It was near enough to hunting
and fishing to enlist me. Mother would always send me in preference to
any of the rest of the boys. I got the biggest berries and the most of
them. There was something of the excitement of the chase in the
occupation, and something of the charm and preciousness of game about
the trophies. The pursuit had its surprises, its expectancies, its
sudden disclosures,—in fact, its uncertainties. I went forth
adventurously. I could wander free as the wind. Then there were moments
of inspiration, for it always seemed a felicitous stroke to light upon
a particularly fine spot, as it does when one takes an old and wary
trout. You discovered the game where it was hidden. Your genius
prompted you. Another had passed that way and had missed the prize.
Indeed, the successful berry-picker, like Walton’s angler, is born, not
made. It is only another kind of angling. In the same field one boy
gets big berries and plenty of them; another wanders up and down, and
finds only a few little ones. He cannot see them; he does not know how
to divine them where they lurk under the leaves and vines. The
berry-grower knows that in the cultivated patch his pickers are very
unequal, the baskets of one boy or girl having so inferior a look that
it does not seem possible they could have been filled from the same
vines with certain others. But neither blunt fingers nor blunt eyes are
hard to find; and as there are those who can see nothing clearly, so
there are those who can touch nothing deftly or gently.
The cultivation of the strawberry is thought to be comparatively
modern. The ancients appear to have been a carnivorous race: they
gorged themselves with meat; while the modern man makes larger and
larger use of fruits and vegetables, until this generation is doubtless
better fed than any that has preceded it. The strawberry and the apple,
and such vegetables as celery, ought to lengthen human life,—at least
to correct its biliousness and make it more sweet and sanguine.
The first impetus to strawberry culture seems to have been given by the
introduction of our field berry (_Fragaria Virginiana_) into England in
the seventeenth century, though not much progress was made till the
eighteenth. This variety is much more fragrant and aromatic than the
native berry of Europe, though less so in that climate than when grown
here. Many new seedlings sprang from it, and it was the prevailing
berry in English and French gardens, says Fuller, until the South
American species, _grandiflora,_ was introduced and supplanted it. This
berry is naturally much larger and sweeter, and better adapted to the
English climate, than our _Virginiana._ Hence the English strawberries
of to-day surpass ours in these respects, but are wanting in that
aromatic pungency that characterizes most of our berries.
The Jocunda, Triumph, Victoria, are foreign varieties of the
Grandiflora species; while the Hovey, the Boston Pine, the Downer, are
natives of this country.
The strawberry, in the main, repeats the form of the human heart, and
perhaps, of all the small fruits known to man, none other is so deeply
and fondly cherished, or hailed with such universal delight, as this
lowly but youth-renewing berry.
IV
IS IT GOING TO RAIN?
I suspect that, like most countrymen, I was born with a chronic anxiety
about the weather. Is it going to rain or snow, be hot or cold, wet or
dry?—are inquiries upon which I would fain get the views of every man I
meet, and I find that most men are fired with the same desire to get my
views upon the same set of subjects. To a countryman the weather means
something,—to a farmer especially. The farmer has sowed and planted and
reaped and vended nothing but weather all his life. The weather must
lift the mortgage on his farm, and pay his taxes, and feed and clothe
his family. Of what use is his labor unless seconded by the weather?
Hence there is speculation in his eye whenever he looks at the clouds,
or the moon, or the sunset, or the stars; for even the Milky Way, in
his view, may point the direction of the wind to-morrow, and hence is
closely related to the price of butter. He may not take the sage’s
advice to “hitch his wagon to a star,” but he pins his hopes to the
moon, and plants and sows by its phases.
Then the weather is that phase of Nature in which she appears not the
immutable fate we are so wont to regard her, but on the contrary
something quite human and changeable, not to say womanish,—a creature
of moods, of caprices, of cross purposes; gloomy and downcast to-day,
and all light and joy to-morrow; caressing and tender one moment, and
severe and frigid the next; one day iron, the next day vapor;
inconsistent, inconstant, incalculable; full of genius, full of folly,
full of extremes; to be read and understood, not by rule, but by subtle
signs and indirections,—by a look, a glance, a presence, as we read and
understand a man or a woman. Some days are like a rare poetic mood.
There is a felicity and an exhilaration about them from morning till
night. They are positive and fill one with celestial fire. Other days
are negative and drain one of his electricity.
Sometimes the elements show a marked genius for fair weather, as in the
fall and early winter of 1877, when October, grown only a little stern,
lasted till January. Every shuffle of the cards brought these mild,
brilliant days uppermost. There was not enough frost to stop the plow,
save once perhaps, till the new year set in. Occasionally a fruit-tree
put out a blossom and developed young fruit. The warring of the
elements was chiefly done on the other side of the globe, where it
formed an accompaniment to the human war raging there. In our usually
merciless skies was written only peace and good-will to men, for
months.
What a creature of habit, too, Nature is as she appears in the weather!
If she miscarry once she will twice and thrice, and a dozen times. In a
wet time it rains to-day because it rained yesterday, and will rain
to-morrow because it rained to-day. Are the crops in any part of the
country drowning? They shall continue to drown. Are they burning up?
They shall continue to burn. The elements get in a rut and can’t get
out without a shock. I know a farmer who, in a dry time, when the
clouds gather and look threatening, gets out his watering-pot at once,
because, he says, “it won’t rain, and ’tis an excellent time to apply
the water.” Of course, there comes a time when the farmer is wrong, but
he is right four times out of five.
But I am not going to abuse the weather; rather to praise it, and make
some amends for the many ill-natured things I have said, within hearing
of the clouds, when I have been caught in the rain or been parched and
withered by the drought.
When Mr. Fields’s “Village Dogmatist” was asked what caused the rain,
or the fog, he leaned upon his cane and answered, with an air of
profound wisdom, that “when the atmosphere and hemisphere come together
it causes the earth to sweat, and thereby produces the rain,”—or the
fog, as the case may be. The explanation is a little vague, as his
biographer suggests, but it is picturesque, and there can be little
doubt that two somethings do come in contact that produce a sweating
when it rains or is foggy. More than that, the philosophy is simple and
comprehensive, which Goethe said was the main matter in such things.
Goethe’s explanation is still more picturesque, but I doubt if it is a
bit better philosophy. “I compare the earth and her atmosphere,” he
said to Eckermann, “to a great living being perpetually inhaling and
exhaling. If she inhale she draws the atmosphere to her, so that,
coming near her surface, it is condensed to clouds and rain. This state
I call water-affirmative.” The opposite state, when the earth exhales
and sends the watery vapors upward so that they are dissipated through
the whole space of the higher atmosphere, he called “water-negative.”
This is good literature, and worthy the great poet; the science of it I
would not be so willing to vouch for.
The poets, more perhaps than the scientists, have illustrated and held
by the great law of alternation, of ebb and flow, of turn and return,
in nature. An equilibrium, or, what is the same thing, a straight line,
Nature abhors more than she does a vacuum. If the moisture of the air
were uniform, or the heat uniform, that is, _in equilibrio,_ how could
it rain? what would turn the scale? But these things are heaped up, are
in waves. There is always a preponderance one way or the other; always
“a steep inequality.” Down this incline the rain comes, and up the
other side it goes. The high barometer travels like the crest of a sea,
and the low barometer like the trough. When the scale kicks the beam in
one place, it is correspondingly depressed in some other. When the east
is burning up, the west is generally drowning out. The weather, we say,
is always in extremes; it never rains but it pours: but this is only
the abuse of a law on the part of the elements which is at the bottom
of all the life and motion on the globe.
The rain itself comes in shorter or longer waves,—now fast, now
slow—and sometimes in regular throbs or pulse-beats. The fall and
winter rains are, as a rule, the most deliberate and general, but the
spring and summer rains are always more or less impulsive and
capricious. One may see the rain stalking across the hills or coming up
the valley in single file, as it were. Another time it moves in vast
masses or solid columns, with broad open spaces between. I have seen a
spring snowstorm lasting nearly all day that swept down in rapid
intermittent sheets or gusts. The waves or pulsations of the storm were
nearly vertical and were very marked. But the great fact about the rain
is that it is the most beneficent of all the operations of nature; more
immediately than sunlight even, it means life and growth. Moisture is
the Eve of the physical world, the soft teeming principle given to wife
to Adam or heat, and the mother of all that lives. Sunshine abounds
everywhere, but only where the rain or dew follows is there life. The
earth had the sun long before it had the humid cloud, and will
doubtless continue to have it after the last drop of moisture has
perished or been dissipated. The moon has sunshine enough, but no rain;
hence it is a dead world—a lifeless cinder. It is doubtless true that
certain of the planets, as Saturn and Jupiter, have not yet reached the
condition of the cooling and ameliorating rains, while in Mars vapor
appears to be precipitated only in the form of snow; he is probably
past the period of the summer shower. There are clouds and vapors in
the sun itself,—clouds of flaming hydrogen and metallic vapors, and a
rain every drop of which is a burning or molten meteor. Our earth
itself has doubtless passed through the period of the fiery and
consuming rains. Mr. Proctor thinks there may have been a time when its
showers were downpourings of “muriatic, nitric, and sulphuric acid, not
only intensely hot, but fiercely burning through their chemical
activity.” Think of a dew that would blister and destroy like the oil
of vitriol! but that period is far behind us now. When this fearful
fever was past and the earth began to “sweat;” when these soft,
delicious drops began to come down, or this impalpable rain of the
cloudless nights to fall,—the period of organic life was inaugurated.
Then there was hope and a promise of the future. The first rain was the
turning-point, the spell was broken, relief was at hand. Then the
blazing furies of the fore world began to give place to the gentler
divinities of later times.
The first water,—how much it means! Seven tenths of man himself is
water. Seven tenths of the human race rained down but yesterday! It is
much more probable that Alexander will flow out of a bung-hole than
that any part of his remains will ever stop one. Our life is indeed a
vapor, a breath, a little moisture condensed upon the pane. We carry
ourselves as in a phial. Cleave the flesh, and how quickly we spill
out! Man begins as a fish, and he swims in a sea of vital fluids as
long as his life lasts. His first food is milk; so is his last and all
between. He can taste and assimilate and absorb nothing but liquids.
The same is true throughout all organic nature. ’Tis water-power that
makes every wheel move. Without this great solvent, there is no life. I
admire immensely this line of Walt Whitman’s:—
“The slumbering and liquid trees.”
The tree and its fruit are like a sponge which the rains have filled.
Through them and through all living bodies there goes on the commerce
of vital growth, tiny vessels, fleets and succession of fleets, laden
with material bound for distant shores, to build up, and repair, and
restore the waste of the physical frame.
Then the rain means relaxation; the tension in Nature and in all her
creatures is lessened. The trees drop their leaves, or let go their
ripened fruit. The tree itself will fall in a still, damp day, when but
yesterday it withstood a gale of wind. A moist south wind penetrates
even the mind and makes its grasp less tenacious. It ought to take less
to kill a man on a rainy day than on a clear. The direct support of the
sun is withdrawn; life is under a cloud; a masculine mood gives place
to something like a feminine. In this sense, rain is the grief, the
weeping of Nature, the relief of a burdened or agonized heart. But
tears from Nature’s eyelids are always remedial and prepare the way for
brighter, purer skies.
I think rain is as necessary to the mind as to vegetation. Who does not
suffer in his spirit in a drought and feel restless and unsatisfied? My
very thoughts become thirsty and crave the moisture. It is hard work to
be generous, or neighborly, or patriotic in a dry time, and as for
growing in any of the finer graces or virtues, who can do it? One’s
very manhood shrinks, and, if he is ever capable of a mean act or of
narrow views, it is then.
Oh, the terrible drought! When the sky turns to brass; when the clouds
are like withered leaves; when the sun sucks the earth’s blood like a
vampire; when rivers shrink, streams fail, springs perish; when the
grass whitens and crackles under your feet; when the turf turns to
dust; when the fields are like tinder; when the air is the breath of an
oven; when even the merciful dews are withheld, and the morning is no
fresher than the evening; when the friendly road is a desert, and the
green woods like a sick-chamber; when the sky becomes tarnished and
opaque with dust and smoke; when the shingles on the houses curl up,
the clapboards warp, the paint blisters, the joints open; when the
cattle rove disconsolate and the hive-bee comes home empty; when the
earth gapes and all nature looks widowed, and deserted, and
heart-broken,—in such a time, what thing that has life does not
sympathize and suffer with the general distress?
The drought of the summer and early fall of 1876 was one of those
severe stresses of weather that make the oldest inhabitant search his
memory for a parallel. For nearly three months there was no rain to wet
the ground. Large forest trees withered and cast their leaves. In
spots, the mountains looked as if they had been scorched by fire. The
salt sea-water came up the Hudson ninety miles, when ordinarily it
scarcely comes forty. Toward the last, the capacity of the atmosphere
to absorb and dissipate the smoke was exhausted, and innumerable fires
in forests and peat-swamps made the days and the weeks—not blue, but a
dirty yellowish white. There was not enough moisture in the air to take
the sting out of the smoke, and it smarted the nose. The sun was red
and dim even at midday, and at his rising and setting he was as
harmless to the eye as a crimson shield or a painted moon. The
meteorological conditions seemed the farthest possible remove from
those that produce rain, or even dew. Every sign was negatived. Some
malevolent spirit seemed abroad in the air, that rendered abortive
every effort of the gentler divinities to send succor. The clouds would
gather back in the mountains, the thunder would growl, the tall masses
would rise up and advance threateningly, then suddenly cower, their
strength and purpose ooze away; they flattened out; the hot, parched
breath of the earth smote them; the dark, heavy masses were re-resolved
into thin vapor, and the sky came through where but a few moments
before there had appeared to be deep behind deep of water-logged
clouds. Sometimes a cloud would pass by, and one could see trailing
beneath and behind it a sheet of rain, like something let down that did
not quite touch the earth, the hot air vaporizing the drops before they
reached the ground.
Two or three times the wind got in the south, and those low,
dun-colored clouds that are nothing but harmless fog came hurrying up
and covered the sky, and city folk and women folk said the rain was at
last near. But the wise ones knew better. The clouds had no backing,
the clear sky was just behind them; they were only the nightcap of the
south wind, which the sun burnt up before ten o’clock.
Every storm has a foundation that is deeply and surely laid, and those
shallow surface-clouds that have no root in the depths of the sky
deceive none but the unwary.
At other times, when the clouds were not reabsorbed by the sky and rain
seemed imminent, they would suddenly undergo a change that looked like
curdling, and when clouds do that no rain need be expected. Time and
again I saw their continuity broken up, saw them separate into small
masses,—in fact saw a process of disintegration and disorganization
going on, and my hope of rain was over for that day. Vast spaces would
be affected suddenly; it was like a stroke of paralysis: motion was
retarded, the breeze died down, the thunder ceased, and the storm was
blighted on the very threshold of success.
I suppose there is some compensation in a drought; Nature doubtless
profits by it in some way. It is a good time to thin out her garden,
and give the law of the survival of the fittest a chance to come into
play. How the big trees and big plants do rob the little ones! there is
not drink enough to go around, and the strongest will have what there
is. It is a rest to vegetation, too, a kind of torrid winter that is
followed by a fresh awakening. Every tree and plant learns a lesson
from it, learns to shoot its roots down deep into the perennial
supplies of moisture and life.
But when the rain does come, the warm, sun-distilled rain; the
far-traveling, vapor-born rain; the impartial, undiscriminating,
unstinted rain; equable, bounteous, myriad-eyed, searching out every
plant and every spear of grass, finding every hidden thing that needs
water, falling upon the just and upon the unjust, sponging off every
leaf of every tree in the forest and every growth in the fields; music
to the ear, a perfume to the smell, an enchantment to the eye; healing
the earth, cleansing the air, renewing the fountains; honey to the bee,
manna to the herds, and life to all creatures,—what spectacle so fills
the heart? “Rain, rain, O dear Zeus, down on the plowed fields of the
Athenians, and on the plains.”
There is a fine sibilant chorus audible in the sod, and in the dust of
the road, and in the porous plowed fields. Every grain of soil and
every root and rootlet purrs in satisfaction, Because something more
than water comes down when it rains; you cannot produce this effect by
simple water; the good-will of the elements, the consent and
approbation of all the skyey influences, come down; the harmony, the
adjustment, the perfect understanding of the soil beneath and the air
that swims above, are implied in the marvelous benefaction of the rain.
The earth is ready; the moist winds have wooed it and prepared it, the
electrical conditions are as they should be, and there are love and
passion in the surrender of the summer clouds. How the drops are
absorbed into the ground! You cannot, I say, succeed like this with
your hose or sprinkling-pot. There is no ardor or electricity in the
drops, no ammonia, or ozone, or other nameless properties borrowed from
the air.
Then one has not the gentleness and patience of Nature; we puddle the
ground in our hurry, we seal it up and exclude the air, and the plants
are worse off than before. When the sky is overcast and it is getting
ready to rain, the moisture rises in the ground, the earth opens her
pores and seconds the desire of the clouds.
Indeed, I have found there is but little virtue in a sprinkling-pot
after the drought has reached a certain pitch. The soil will not absorb
the water. ’Tis like throwing it on a hot stove. I once concentrated my
efforts upon a single hill of corn and deluged it with water night and
morning for several days, yet its leaves curled up and the ears failed
the same as the rest. Something may be done, without doubt, if one
begins in time, but the relief seems strangely inadequate to the means
often used. In rainless countries good crops are produced by
irrigation, but here man can imitate in a measure the patience and
bounty of Nature, and, with night to aid him, can make his thirsty
fields drink, or rather can pour the water down their throats.
I have said the rain is as necessary to man as to vegetation. You
cannot have a rank, sappy race, like the English or the German, without
plenty of moisture in the air and in the soil. Good viscera and an
abundance of blood are closely related to meteorological conditions,
unction of character, and a flow of animal spirits, too; and I suspect
that much of the dry and rarefied humor of New England, as well as the
thin and sharp physiognomies, are climatic results. We have rain
enough, but not equability of temperature or moisture,—no steady,
abundant supply of humidity in the air. In places in Great Britain it
is said to rain on an average three days out of four the year through;
yet the depth of rainfall is no greater than in this country, where it
rains but the one day out of four. John Bull shows those three rainy
days both in his temper and in his bodily habit; he is better for them
in many ways, and perhaps not quite so good in a few others: they make
him juicy and vascular, and maybe a little opaque; but we in this
country could well afford a few of his negative qualities for the sake
of his stomach and full-bloodedness.
We have such faith in the virtue of the rain, and in the capacity of
the clouds to harbor and transport material good, that we more than
half believe the stories of the strange and anomalous things that have
fallen in showers. There is no credible report that it has ever yet
rained pitchforks, but many other curious things have fallen. Fish,
flesh, and fowl, and substances that were neither, have been picked up
by veracious people after a storm. Manna, blood, and honey, frogs,
newts, and fish-worms, are among the curious things the clouds are
supposed to yield. If the clouds scooped up their water as the flying
express train does, these phenomena could be easier explained. I myself
have seen curious things. Riding along the road one day on the heels of
a violent summer tempest, I saw the ground swarming with minute hopping
creatures. I got out and captured my hands full. They proved to be
tree-toads, many of them no larger than crickets, and none of them
larger than a bumblebee. There seemed to be thousands of them. The mark
of the tree-toad was the round, flattened ends of their toes. I took
some of them home, but they died the next day. Where did they come
from? I imagined the violent wind swept them off the trees in the woods
to windward of the road. But this is only a guess; maybe they crept out
of the ground, or from under the wall near by, and were out to wet
their jackets.
I have never yet heard of a frog coming down chimney in a shower. Some
circumstantial evidence may be pretty conclusive, Thoreau says, as when
you find a trout in the milk; and if you find a frog or toad behind the
fire-board immediately after a shower, you may well ask him to explain
himself.
When I was a boy I used to wonder if the clouds were hollow and carried
their water as in a cask, because had we not often heard of clouds
bursting and producing havoc and ruin beneath them? The hoops gave way,
perhaps, or the head was pressed out. Goethe says that when the
barometer rises, the clouds are spun off from the top downward like a
distaff of flax; but this is more truly the process when it rains. When
fair weather is in the ascendant, the clouds are simply reabsorbed by
the air; but when it rains, they are spun off into something more
compact: ’tis like the threads that issue from the mass of flax or roll
of wool, only here there are innumerable threads, and the fingers that
hold them never tire. The great spinning-wheel, too, what a humming it
makes at times, and how the footsteps of the invisible spinner resound
through the cloud-pillared chambers!
The clouds are thus literally spun up into water; and were they not
constantly recruited from the atmosphere as the storm-centre travels
along,—was new wool not forthcoming from the white sheep and the black
sheep that the winds herd at every point,—all rains would be brief and
local; the storm would quickly exhaust itself, as we sometimes see a
thunder-cloud do in summer. A storm will originate in the far West or
Southwest—those hatching-places of all our storms—and travel across the
continent, and across the Atlantic to Europe, pouring down incalculable
quantities of rain as it progresses and recruiting as it wastes. It is
a moving vortex, into which the outlying moisture of the atmosphere is
being constantly drawn and precipitated. It is not properly the storm
that travels, but the low pressure, the storm impulse, the
meteorological magnet that makes the storm wherever its presence may
be. The clouds are not watering-carts, that are driven all the way from
Arizona or Colorado to Europe, but growths, developments that spring up
as the Storm-deity moves his wand across the land. In advance of the
storm, you may often see the clouds grow; the condensation of the
moisture into vapor is a visible process; slender, spiculæ-like clouds
expand, deepen, and lengthen; in the rear of the low pressure, the
reverse process, or the wasting of the clouds, may be witnessed. In
summer, the recruiting of a thunder-storm is often very marked. I have
seen the clouds file as straight across the sky toward a growing storm
or thunder-head in the horizon as soldiers hastening to the point of
attack or defense. They would grow more and more black and threatening
as they advanced, and actually seemed to be driven by more urgent winds
than certain other clouds. They were, no doubt, more in the line of the
storm influence. All our general storms are cyclonic in their
character, that is, rotary and progressive. Their type may be seen in
every little whirlpool that goes down the swollen current of the river;
and in our hemisphere they revolve in the same direction, namely, from
right to left, or in opposition to the hands of a watch. When the water
finds an outlet through the bottom of a dam, a suction or whirling
vortex is developed that generally goes round in the same direction. A
morning-glory or a hop-vine or a pole-bean winds around its support in
the same course, and cannot be made to wind in any other. I am aware
there are some perverse climbers among the plants that persist in going
around the pole in the other direction. In the southern hemisphere the
cyclone revolves in the other direction, or from left to right. How do
they revolve at the equator, then? They do not revolve at all. This is
the point of zero, and cyclones are never formed nearer than the third
parallel of latitude. Whether hop-vines also refuse to wind about the
pole there I am unable to say.
All our cyclones originate in the far Southwest and travel northeast.
Why did we wait for the Weather Bureau to tell us this fact? Do not all
the filmy, hazy, cirrus and cirro-stratus clouds first appear from the
general direction of the sunset? Who ever saw them pushing their opaque
filaments over the sky from the east or north? Yet do we not have
“northeasters” both winter and summer? True, but the storm does not
come from that direction. In such a case we get that segment of the
cyclonic whirl. A northeaster in one place may be an easter, a norther,
or a souther in some other locality. See through those drifting,
drenching clouds that come hurrying out of the northeast, and there are
the boss-clouds above them, the great captains themselves, moving
serenely on in the opposite direction.
Electricity is, of course, an important agent in storms. It is the
great organizer and ring-master. How a clap of thunder will shake down
the rain! It gives the clouds a smart rap; it jostles the vapor so that
the particles fall together more quickly; it makes the drops let go in
double and treble ranks. Nature likes to be helped in that way,—likes
to have the water agitated when she is freezing it or heating it, and
the clouds smitten when she is compressing them into rain. So does a
shock of surprise quicken the pulse in man, and in the crisis of action
help him to a decision.
What a spur and impulse the summer shower is! How its coming quickens
and hurries up the slow, jogging country life! The traveler along the
dusty road arouses from his reverie at the warning rumble behind the
hills; the children hasten from the field or from the school; the
farmer steps lively and thinks fast. In the hay-field, at the first
signal-gun of the elements, what a commotion! How the horserake
rattles, how the pitchforks fly, how the white sleeves play and twinkle
in the sun or against the dark background of the coming storm! One man
does the work of two or three. It is a race with the elements, and the
hay-makers do not like to be beaten. The rain that is life to the grass
when growing is poison to it after it becomes cured hay, and it must be
got under shelter, or put up into snug cocks, if possible, before the
storm overtakes it.
The rains of winter are cold and odorless. One prefers the snow, which
warms and covers; but can there be anything more delicious than the
first warm April rain,—the first offering of the softened and pacified
clouds of spring? The weather has been dry, perhaps, for two or three
weeks; we have had a touch of the dreaded drought thus early; the roads
are dusty, the streams again shrunken, and forest fires send up columns
of smoke on every hand; the frost has all been out of the ground many
days; the snow has all disappeared from the mountains; the sun is warm,
but the grass does not grow, nor the early seeds come up. The
quickening spirit of the rain is needed. Presently the wind gets in the
southwest, and, late in the day, we have our first vernal shower,
gentle and leisurely, but every drop condensed from warm tropic vapors
and charged with the very essence of spring. Then what a perfume fills
the air! One’s nostrils are not half large enough to take it in. The
smoke, washed by the rain, becomes the breath of woods, and the soil
and the newly plowed fields give out an odor that dilates the sense.
How the buds of the trees swell, how the grass greens, how the birds
rejoice! Hear the robins laugh! This will bring out the worms and the
insects, and start the foliage of the trees. A summer shower has more
copiousness and power, but this has the charm of freshness and of all
first things.
The laws of storms, up to a certain point, have come to be pretty well
understood, but there is yet no science of the weather, any more than
there is of human nature. There is about as much room for speculation
in the one case as in the other. The causes and agencies are subtle and
obscure, and we shall, perhaps, have the metaphysics of the subject
before we have the physics.
But as there are persons who can read human nature pretty well, so
there are those who can read the weather.
It is a masculine subject, and quite beyond the province of woman. Ask
those who spend their time in the open air,—the farmer, the sailor, the
soldier, the walker; ask the birds, the beasts, the tree-toads: they
know, if they will only tell. The farmer diagnoses the weather daily,
as the doctor a patient: he feels the pulse of the wind; he knows when
the clouds have a scurfy tongue, or when the cuticle of the day is
feverish and dry, or soft and moist. Certain days he calls
“weather-breeders,” and they are usually the fairest days in the
calendar,—all sun and sky. They are too fair; they are suspiciously so.
They come in the fall and spring, and always mean mischief. When a day
of almost unnatural brightness and clearness in either of these seasons
follows immediately after a storm, it is a sure indication that another
storm follows close,—follows to-morrow. In keeping with this fact is
the rule of the barometer, that, if the mercury suddenly rises very
high, the fair weather will not last. It is a high peak that indicates
a corresponding depression close at hand. I observed one of these
angelic mischief-makers during the past October. The second day after a
heavy fall of rain was the fairest of the fair,—not a speck or film in
all the round of the sky. Where have all the clouds and vapors gone to
so suddenly? was my mute inquiry, but I suspected they were plotting
together somewhere behind the horizon. The sky was a deep ultramarine
blue; the air so transparent that distant objects seemed near, and the
afternoon shadows were sharp and clear. At night the stars were
unusually numerous and bright (a sure sign of an approaching storm).
The sky was laid bare, as the tidal wave empties the shore of its water
before it heaps it up upon it. A violent storm of wind and rain the
next day followed this delusive brightness. So the weather, like human
nature, may be suspiciously transparent. A saintly day may undo you. A
few clouds do not mean rain; but when there are absolutely none, when
even the haze and filmy vapors are suppressed or held back, then
beware.
Then the weather-wise know there are two kinds of clouds, rain-clouds
and wind-clouds, and that the latter are always the most portentous. In
summer they are black as night; they look as if they would blot out the
very earth. They raise a great dust, and set things flying and slamming
for a moment, and that is all. They are the veritable wind-bags of
Æolus. There is something in the look of rain-clouds that is
unmistakable,—a firm, gray, tightly woven look that makes you remember
your umbrella. Not too high nor too low, not black nor blue, but the
form and hue of wet, unbleached linen. You see the river water in them;
they are heavy-laden, and move slow. Sometimes they develop what are
called “mares’ tails,”—small cloud-forms here and there against a heavy
background, that look like the stroke of a brush, or the streaming tail
of a charger. Sometimes a few under-clouds will be combed and groomed
by the winds or other meteoric agencies at work, as if for a race. I
have seen coming storms develop well-defined vertebræ,—a long backbone
of cloud, with the articulations and processes clearly marked. Any of
these forms, changing, growing, denote rain, because they show unusual
agencies at work. The storm is brewing and fermenting. “See those
cowlicks,” said an old farmer, pointing to certain patches on the
clouds; “they mean rain.” Another time, he said the clouds were “making
bag,” had growing udders, and that it would rain before night, as it
did. This reminded me that the Orientals speak of the clouds as cows
which the winds herd and milk.
In the winter, we see the sun wading in snow. The morning has perhaps
been clear, but in the afternoon a bank of gray filmy or cirrus cloud
meets him in the west, and he sinks deeper and deeper into it, till, at
his going down, his muffled beams are entirely hidden. Then, on the
morrow, _not_
“Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,”
but silent as night, the white legions are here.
The old signs seldom fail,—a red and angry sunrise, or flushed clouds
at evening. Many a hope of rain have I seen dashed by a painted sky at
sunset. There is truth in the old couplet, too:—
“If it rains before seven,
It will clear before eleven.”
An old Indian had a sign for winter: “If the wind blows the snow off
the trees, the next storm will be snow; if it rains off, the next storm
will be rain.”
Morning rains are usually short-lived. Better wait till ten o’clock.
When the clouds are chilled, they turn blue and rise up.
When the fog leaves the mountains, reaching upward, as if afraid of
being left behind, the fair weather is near.
Shoddy clouds are of little account, and soon fall to pieces. Have your
clouds show a good strong fibre, and have them lined,—not with silver,
but with other clouds of a finer texture,—and have them wadded. It
wants two or three thicknesses to get up a good rain. Especially,
unless you have that cloud-mother, that dim, filmy, nebulous mass that
has its root in the higher regions of the air, and is the source and
backing of all storms, your rain will be light indeed.
I fear my reader’s jacket is not thoroughly soaked yet. I must give him
a final dash, a “clear-up” shower.
We were encamping in the primitive woods, by a little trout lake which
the mountain carried high on his hip, like a soldier’s canteen. There
were wives in the party, curious to know what the lure was that
annually drew their husbands to the woods. That magical writing on a
trout’s back they would fain decipher, little heeding the warning that
what is written here is not given to woman to know.
Our only tent or roof was the sheltering arms of the great birches and
maples. What was sauce for the gander should be sauce for the goose,
too, so the goose insisted. A luxurious couch of boughs upon springing
poles was prepared, and the night should be not less welcome than the
day, which had indeed been idyllic. (A trout dinner had been served by
a little spring brook, upon an improvised table covered with moss and
decked with ferns, with strawberries from a near clearing.)
At twilight there was an ominous rumble behind the mountains. I was on
the lake, and could see what was brewing there in the west.
As darkness came on, the rumbling increased, and the mountains and the
woods and the still air were such good conductors of sound that the ear
was vividly impressed. One seemed to feel the enormous convolutions of
the clouds in the deep and jarring tones of the thunder. The coming of
night in the woods is alone peculiarly impressive, and it is doubly so
when out of the darkness comes such a voice as this. But we fed the
fire the more industriously, and piled the logs high, and kept the
gathering gloom at bay by as large a circle of light as we could
command. The lake was a pool of ink and as still as if congealed; not a
movement or a sound, save now and then a terrific volley from the cloud
batteries now fast approaching. By nine o’clock little puffs of wind
began to steal through the woods and tease and toy with our fire.
Shortly after, an enormous electric bombshell exploded in the treetops
over our heads, and the ball was fairly opened. Then followed three
hours, with only two brief intermissions, of as lively elemental music
and as copious an outpouring of rain as it was ever my lot to witness.
It was a regular meteorological carnival, and the revelers were drunk
with the wild sport. The apparent nearness of the clouds and the
electric explosions was something remarkable. Every discharge seemed to
be in the branches immediately overhead and made us involuntarily
cower, as if the next moment the great limbs of the trees, or the trees
themselves, would come crashing down. The mountain upon which we were
encamped appeared to be the focus of three distinct but converging
storms. The last two seemed to come into collision immediately over our
camp-fire, and to contend for the right of way, until the heavens were
ready to fall and both antagonists were literally spent. We stood in
groups about the struggling fire, and when the cannonade became too
terrible would withdraw into the cover of the darkness, as if to be a
less conspicuous mark for the bolts; or did we fear that the fire, with
its currents, might attract the lightning? At any rate, some other spot
than the one where we happened to be standing seemed desirable when
those onsets of the contending elements were the most furious.
Something that one could not catch in his hat was liable to drop almost
anywhere any minute. The alarm and consternation of the wives
communicated itself to the husbands, and they looked solemn and
concerned. The air was filled with falling water. The sound upon the
myriad leaves and branches was like the roar of a cataract. We put our
backs up against the great trees, only to catch a brook on our
shoulders or in the backs of our necks. Still the storm waxed. The fire
was beaten down lower and lower. It surrendered one post after another,
like a besieged city, and finally made only a feeble resistance from
beneath a pile of charred logs and branches in the centre. Our garments
yielded to the encroachments of the rain in about the same manner. I
believe my necktie held out the longest, and carried a few dry threads
safely through. Our cunningly devised and bedecked table, which the
housekeepers had so doted on and which was ready spread for breakfast,
was washed as by the hose of a fire-engine,—only the bare poles
remained,—and the couch of springing boughs, that was to make Sleep
jealous and o’er-fond, became a bed fit only for amphibians. Still the
loosened floods came down; still the great cloud-mortars bellowed and
exploded their missiles in the treetops above us. But all nervousness
finally passed away, and we became dogged and resigned. Our minds
became water-soaked; our thoughts were heavy and bedraggled. We were
past the point of joking at one another’s expense. The witticisms
failed to kindle,—indeed, failed to go, like the matches in our
pockets. About midnight the rain slackened, and by one o’clock ceased
entirely. How the rest of the night was passed beneath the dripping
trees and upon the saturated ground, I have only the dimmest
remembrance. All is watery and opaque; the fog settles down and
obscures the scene. But I suspect I tried the “wet pack” without being
a convert to hydropathy. When the morning dawned, the wives begged to
be taken home, convinced that the charms of camping-out were greatly
overrated. We, who had tasted this cup before, knew they had read at
least a part of the legend of the wary trout without knowing it.
V
SPECKLED TROUT
I
The legend of the wary trout, hinted at in the last sketch, is to be
further illustrated in this and some following chapters. We shall get
at more of the meaning of those dark water-lines, and I hope, also, not
entirely miss the significance of the gold and silver spots and the
glancing iridescent hues. The trout is dark and obscure above, but
behind this foil there are wondrous tints that reward the believing
eye. Those who seek him in his wild remote haunts are quite sure to get
the full force of the sombre and uninviting aspects,—the wet, the cold,
the toil, the broken rest, and the huge, savage, uncompromising
nature,—but the true angler sees farther than these, and is never
thwarted of his legitimate reward by them.
I have been a seeker of trout from my boyhood, and on all the
expeditions in which this fish has been the ostensible purpose I have
brought home more game than my creel showed. In fact, in my mature
years I find I got more of nature into me, more of the woods, the wild,
nearer to bird and beast, while threading my native streams for trout,
than in almost any other way. It furnished a good excuse to go forth;
it pitched one in the right key; it sent one through the fat and
marrowy places of field and wood. Then the fisherman has a harmless,
preoccupied look; he is a kind of vagrant that nothing fears. He blends
himself with the trees and the shadows. All his approaches are gentle
and indirect. He times himself to the meandering, soliloquizing stream;
its impulse bears him along. At the foot of the waterfall he sits
sequestered and hidden in its volume of sound. The birds know he has no
designs upon them, and the animals see that his mind is in the creek.
His enthusiasm anneals him, and makes him pliable to the scenes and
influences he moves among.
Then what acquaintance he makes with the stream! He addresses himself
to it as a lover to his mistress; he wooes it and stays with it till he
knows its most hidden secrets. It runs through his thoughts not less
than through its banks there; he feels the fret and thrust of every bar
and boulder. Where it deepens, his purpose deepens; where it is
shallow, he is indifferent. He knows how to interpret its every glance
and dimple; its beauty haunts him for days.
[Illustration: trout stream]
I am sure I run no risk of overpraising the charm and attractiveness of
a well-fed trout stream, every drop of water in it as bright and pure
as if the nymphs had brought it all the way from its source in crystal
goblets, and as cool as if it had been hatched beneath a glacier. When
the heated and soiled and jaded refugee from the city first sees one,
he feels as if he would like to turn it into his bosom and let it flow
through him a few hours, it suggests such healing freshness and
newness. How his roily thoughts would run clear; how the sediment would
go downstream! Could he ever have an impure or an unwholesome wish
afterward? The next best thing he can do is to tramp along its banks
and surrender himself to its influence. If he reads it intently enough,
he will, in a measure, be taking it into his mind and heart, and
experiencing its salutary ministrations.
Trout streams coursed through every valley my boyhood knew. I crossed
them, and was often lured and detained by them, on my way to and from
school. We bathed in them during the long summer noons, and felt for
the trout under their banks. A holiday was a holiday indeed that
brought permission to go fishing over on Rose’s Brook, or up
Hardscrabble, or in Meeker’s Hollow; all-day trips, from morning till
night, through meadows and pastures and beechen woods, wherever the
shy, limpid stream led. What an appetite it developed! a hunger that
was fierce and aboriginal, and that the wild strawberries we plucked as
we crossed the hill teased rather than allayed. When but a few hours
could be had, gained perhaps by doing some piece of work about the farm
or garden in half the allotted time, the little creek that headed in
the paternal domain was handy; when half a day was at one’s disposal,
there were the hemlocks, less than a mile distant, with their
loitering, meditative, log-impeded stream and their dusky, fragrant
depths. Alert and wide-eyed, one picked his way along, startled now and
then by the sudden bursting-up of the partridge, or by the whistling
wings of the “dropping snipe,” pressing through the brush and the
briers, or finding an easy passage over the trunk of a prostrate tree,
carefully letting his hook down through some tangle into a still pool,
or standing in some high, sombre avenue and watching his line float in
and out amid the moss-covered boulders. In my first essayings I used to
go to the edge of these hemlocks, seldom dipping into them beyond the
first pool where the stream swept under the roots of two large trees.
From this point I could look back into the sunlit fields where the
cattle were grazing; beyond, all was gloom and mystery; the trout were
black, and to my young imagination the silence and the shadows were
blacker. But gradually I yielded to the fascination and penetrated the
woods farther and farther on each expedition, till the heart of the
mystery was fairly plucked out. During the second or third year of my
piscatorial experience I went through them, and through the pasture and
meadow beyond, and through another strip of hemlocks, to where the
little stream joined the main creek of the valley.
In June, when my trout fever ran pretty high, and an auspicious day
arrived, I would make a trip to a stream a couple of miles distant,
that came down out of a comparatively new settlement. It was a rapid
mountain brook presenting many difficult problems to the young angler,
but a very enticing stream for all that, with its two saw-mill dams,
its pretty cascades, its high, shelving rocks sheltering the mossy
nests of the phœbe-bird, and its general wild and forbidding aspects.
But a meadow brook was always a favorite. The trout like meadows;
doubtless their food is more abundant there, and, usually, the good
hiding-places are more numerous. As soon as you strike a meadow the
character of the creek changes: it goes slower and lies deeper; it
tarries to enjoy the high, cool banks and to half hide beneath them; it
loves the willows, or rather the willows love it and shelter it from
the sun; its spring runs are kept cool by the overhanging grass, and
the heavy turf that faces its open banks is not cut away by the sharp
hoofs of the grazing cattle. Then there are the bobolinks and the
starlings and the meadowlarks, always interested spectators of the
angler; there are also the marsh marigolds, the buttercups, or the
spotted lilies, and the good angler is always an interested spectator
of them. In fact, the patches of meadow land that lie in the angler’s
course are like the happy experiences in his own life, or like the fine
passages in the poem he is reading; the pasture oftener contains the
shallow and monotonous places. In the small streams the cattle scare
the fish, and soil their element and break down their retreats under
the banks. Woodland alternates the best with meadow: the creek loves to
burrow under the roots of a great tree, to scoop out a pool after
leaping over the prostrate trunk of one, and to pause at the foot of a
ledge of moss-covered rocks, with ice-cold water dripping down. How
straight the current goes for the rock! Note its corrugated, muscular
appearance; it strikes and glances off, but accumulates, deepens with
well-defined eddies above and to one side; on the edge of these the
trout lurk and spring upon their prey.
The angler learns that it is generally some obstacle or hindrance that
makes a deep place in the creek, as in a brave life; and his ideal
brook is one that lies in deep, well-defined banks, yet makes many a
shift from right to left, meets with many rebuffs and adventures,
hurled back upon itself by rocks, waylaid by snags and trees, tripped
up by precipices, but sooner or later reposing under meadow banks,
deepening and eddying beneath bridges, or prosperous and strong in some
level stretch of cultivated land with great elms shading it here and
there.
But I early learned that from almost any stream in a trout country the
true angler could take trout, and that the great secret was this, that,
whatever bait you used, worm, grasshopper, grub, or fly, there was one
thing you must always put upon your hook, namely, your heart: when you
bait your hook with your heart the fish always bite; they will jump
clear from the water after it; they will dispute with each other over
it; it is a morsel they love above everything else. With such bait I
have seen the born angler (my grandfather was one) take a noble string
of trout from the most unpromising waters, and on the most unpromising
day. He used his hook so coyly and tenderly, he approached the fish
with such address and insinuation, he divined the exact spot where they
lay: if they were not eager, he humored them and seemed to steal by
them; if they were playful and coquettish, he would suit his mood to
theirs; if they were frank and sincere, he met them halfway; he was so
patient and considerate, so entirely devoted to pleasing the critical
trout, and so successful in his efforts,—surely his heart was upon his
hook, and it was a tender, unctuous heart, too, as that of every angler
is. How nicely he would measure the distance! how dexterously he would
avoid an overhanging limb or bush and drop the line exactly in the
right spot! Of course there was a pulse of feeling and sympathy to the
extremity of that line. If your heart is a stone, however, or an empty
husk, there is no use to put it upon your hook; it will not tempt the
fish; the bait must be quick and fresh. Indeed, a certain quality of
youth is indispensable to the successful angler, a certain
unworldliness and readiness to invest yourself in an enterprise that
doesn’t pay in the current coin. Not only is the angler, like the poet,
born and not made, as Walton says, but there is a deal of the poet in
him, and he is to be judged no more harshly; he is the victim of his
genius: those wild streams, how they haunt him! he will play truant to
dull care, and flee to them; their waters impart somewhat of their own
perpetual youth to him. My grandfather when he was eighty years old
would take down his pole as eagerly as any boy, and step off with
wonderful elasticity toward the beloved streams; it used to try my
young legs a good deal to follow him, specially on the return trip. And
no poet was ever more innocent of worldly success or ambition. For, to
paraphrase Tennyson,—
“Lusty trout to him were scrip and share,
And babbling waters more than cent for cent.”
He laid up treasures, but they were not in this world. In fact, though
the kindest of husbands, I fear he was not what the country people call
a “good provider,” except in providing trout in their season, though it
is doubtful if there was always fat in the house to fry them in. But he
could tell you they were worse off than that at Valley Forge, and that
trout, or any other fish, were good roasted in the ashes under the
coals. He had the Walton requisite of loving quietness and
contemplation, and was devout withal. Indeed, in many ways he was akin
to those Galilee fishermen who were called to be fishers of men. How he
read the Book and pored over it, even at times, I suspect, nodding over
it, and laying it down only to take up his rod, over which, unless the
trout were very dilatory and the journey very fatiguing, he never
nodded!