finch,--was a Philadelphia vireo, happened upon all unexpectedly on
the 17th. I had stopped, as I always do in passing, to look down into
a certain dense thicket of shrubbery, through which a brook runs, a
favorite resort for birds of many kinds. At first the place seemed to
be empty, but in answer to some curiosity-provoking noises on my part a
water thrush started up to balance himself on a branch directly under
my nose, and the next moment a vireo hopped into full sight just beyond
him; a vireo with plain back and wings, with no dark lines bordering
the crown, and having the under parts of a bright yellow. He was most
obliging; indeed, he could hardly have been more so, unless he had
sung for me, and that was something not fairly to be expected. For a
good while he kept silence. Then, in response to a jay’s scream, he
began snarling, or complaining, after the family manner. I enjoyed the
sight of him as long as I could stay (he was the second one I had ever
seen with anything like certainty), and when I returned, an hour later,
he was still there, and still willing to be looked at.
And then, to heighten my pleasure, a rose-breasted grosbeak, invisible,
but not far away, broke into a strain of most entrancing music; with
no more than half his spring voice, to be sure, but with all his May
sweetness of tone and inflection. Again and again he sang, as if he
were too happy to stop. I had heard nothing of the kind for weeks,
and shall probably hear nothing more for months. It was singing to be
remembered, like Sembrich’s “Casta Diva,” or Nilsson’s “I know that my
Redeemer liveth.”
Scarlet tanagers are still heard and seen occasionally,--one was
calling to-day,--but none of them in tune, or wearing so much as a
single scarlet feather. Here and there, too, as we wander about the
woods, we meet--once in two or three days, perhaps--a lonesome-acting,
silent red-eyed vireo. A great contrast there is between such solitary
lingerers and the groups of gossiping chickadees that one falls in
with in the same places; so merry-hearted, so bubbling over with high
spirits, so ready to be neighborly. When I whistle to them, and they
whistle back, I feel myself befriended.
Within a few days we must have the grand September influx of
warblers--crowds of blackpolls, myrtles, black-throated greens, and
many more. For two months yet the procession will be passing.
FOUR DREAMERS
I remember the first man I ever saw sitting still by himself
out-of-doors. What his name was I do not know. I never knew. He was a
stranger, who came to visit in our village when I was perhaps ten
years old. I had crossed a field, and gone over a low hill (not so low
then as now), and there, in the shade of an apple tree, I beheld this
stranger, not fishing, nor digging, nor eating an apple, nor picking
berries, nor setting snares, but sitting still. It was almost like
seeing a ghost. I doubt if I was ever the same boy afterward. Here was
a new kind of man. I wondered if he was a poet! Even then I think I had
heard that poets sometimes acted strangely, and saw things invisible to
others’ ken.
I should not have been surprised, I suppose, to have found a man
looking at a picture, some “nice,” high-colored “chromo,” such as was
a fashionable parlor ornament in our rural neighborhood, where there
was more theology to the square foot (and no preacher then extant with
orthodoxy strait enough to satisfy it, though some could still make
the blood curdle) than there was of art or poetry to the square acre;
but to be looking at Nat Shaw’s hayfield and the old unpainted house
beyond--that marked the stranger at once as not belonging in the ranks
of common men. If he was not a poet, he must be at least a scholar.
Perhaps he was going to be a minister, for he seemed too young to be
one already. A minister had to think, of course (so I thought then),
else how could he preach? and perhaps this man was meditating a sermon.
I fancied I should like to hear a sermon that had been studied
out-of-doors.
Times have changed with me. Now I sit out-of-doors myself, and by
myself, and look for half an hour together at a tree, or a bunch of
trees, or a lazy brook, or a stretch of green meadow. And I know that
such things can be enjoyed by one who is neither a poet nor a preacher,
but just a quite ordinary, uneducated mortal, who happens, by the
grace of God, to have had his eyes opened to natural beauty and his
heart made sensitive to the delights of solitude. I have learned that
it is possible to enjoy scenery at home as well as abroad,--scenery
without mountains or waterfalls; scenery that no tourist would call
“fine;” a bit of green valley, an ancient apple orchard, a woodland
vista, an acre of marsh, a cattle pasture. In fact, I have observed
that painters choose quiet subjects like these oftener than any of the
more exceptional and stupendous manifestations of nature. Perhaps it is
because such subjects are easier; but I suspect not. I suspect, indeed,
that they are harder, and are preferred because, to the painter’s eye,
they are more permanently beautiful.
At this very moment I am looking at a patch of meadow inclosing a
shallow pool of standing water, over the surface of which a high wind
is chasing little waves. A few low alders are near it, and the grass
is green all about. That of itself is a sight to make a man happy. For
the world just now is consumed with drought. All the uplands are sere,
and every roadside bush is begrimed with dust. I have come through
the woods to this convenient knoll on purpose to find relief from the
prevailing desolation--to rest my eyes upon green grass. For the eye
loves green grass as well, almost, as the throat loves cold water.
Even in my boyish country neighborhood, though nobody, or nobody that I
knew (which may have been a very different matter), did what I am now
doing, there were some, I think (one or two, at least), who in their
own way indulged much the same tastes that I have come to felicitate
myself upon possessing. I remember one man, dead long since, who was
continually walking the fields and woods, always with a spaniel at
his heels, alone except for that company. He often carried a gun, and
in autumn he snared partridges (how I envied him his skill!); but I
believe, as I look back, that best and first of all he must have loved
the woods and the silence. He was supposed to have his faults. No
doubt he had. I have since discovered that most men are in the same
category. I believe he used to “drink,” as our word was then. But I
think now that I should have liked to know him, and should have found
him congenial, if I had been mature enough, and could have got below
the protective crust which naturally grows over a man whose ways of
life and thought are different from those of all the people about him.
I have little question that when he was out of the sight of the world
he was accustomed to sit as I do to-day, and look and look and dream.
One thing he did not dream of,--that a boy to whom he had never spoken
would be thinking of him forty years after he had taken his last ramble
and snared his last grouse.
“An idler,” said his busier neighbors, though he earned his own living
and paid his own scot.
“A misspent life,” said the clergy, though he harmed no one.
But who can tell? “Who knoweth the interpretation of a thing?” Perhaps
his, also, was--for him--a good philosophy. As one of the ancients
said, “A man’s mind is wont to tell him more than seven men that sit
upon a tower.” If we are not born alike, why should we be bound to live
alike? “A handful with quietness” is not so bad a portion.
Yes, but time is precious. Time once past never returns.
True.
We must make the best of it, therefore.
True.
By making more shoes.
Nay, that is not so certain.
The sun is getting low. Longer and longer tree-shadows come creeping
over the grass, making the light beyond them so much the brighter and
lovelier. The oak leaves shimmer as the wind twists the branches. The
green aftermath is of all exquisite shades. A beautiful bit of the
world. The meadow is like a cup. For an hour I have been drinking life
out of it.
Now I will return home by a narrow path, well-worn, but barely wide
enough for a man’s steps; a path that nobody uses, so far as I know,
except myself. Till within a year or two it belonged to a hermit,
who kept it in the neatest possible condition. That was his chief
employment. His path was the apple of his eye. He was as jealous
over it as the most fastidious of village householders is over his
front-yard lawn. Not a pebble, nor so much as an acorn, must disfigure
it. Fallen twigs were his special abhorrence, though he treated them
handsomely. Little piles or stacks of them were scattered at short
intervals along the way, neatly corded up, every stick in line. I
noticed these mysterious accumulations before I had ever seen the maker
of them, and wondered not a little who could have been to so much
seemingly aimless trouble. At first I imagined that some one must have
laid the wood together with a view to carrying it home for the kitchen
stove. But the bits were too small, no bigger round, many of them, than
a man’s little finger; not even Goody Blake could have thought such
things worth pilfering for firewood; and besides, it was plain that
many of them had lain where they were over at least one winter.
The affair remained a riddle until I saw the man himself. This I did
but a few times, a long way apart, and always at a little distance.
Generally his eyes were fastened on the ground. Sometimes he had a
stick in his hand, and was brushing leaves and other litter out of the
path. Perhaps he had married a model housekeeper in his youth, and had
gone mad over the spring cleaning. He always saw me before I could
get within easy speaking range; and he had the true woodman’s knack
of making himself suddenly invisible. Sometimes I was almost ready to
believe that he had dropped into the ground. Evidently he did not mean
to be talked with. Perhaps he feared that I should ask impertinent
questions. More likely he thought me crazy. If not, why should I be
wandering alone about the woods to no purpose? I had no path to keep in
order.
And perhaps I am a little crazy. Medical men insist upon it that
the milder forms of insanity are much more nearly universal than
is commonly supposed. Perfectly sound minds, I understand them to
intimate, are quite as rare as perfectly sound bodies. At that rate
there cannot be more than two or three truly sane men in this small
town; and the probabilities are that I am not one of them.
A DAY IN FRANCONIA
It is the most delightful of autumn days, too delightful, it seemed to
me this morning, to have been designed for anything like work. Even
a walking vacationer, on pedestrian pleasures bent, would accept the
weather’s suggestion, if he were wise. Long hours and short distances
would be his programme; a sparing use of the legs, with a frequent
resort to convenient fence-rails and other seasonable invitations.
There are times, said I, when idleness itself should be taken on its
softer side; and to-day is one of them.
Thus minded, I turned into the Landaff Valley shortly after breakfast,
and at the old grist-mill crossed the river and took my favorite road
along the hillside. As I passed the sugar grove I remembered that it
was almost exactly four months since I had spent a delicious Sunday
forenoon there, seated upon a prostrate maple trunk. Then it was
spring, the trees in fresh leaf, the grass newly sprung, the world full
of music. Bobolinks were rollicking in the meadow below, and swallows
twittered overhead. Then I sat in the shade. Now there was neither
bobolink nor swallow, and when I looked about for a seat I chose the
sunny side of the wall.
Only four months, and the year was already old. But the mountains
seemed not to know it. Washington, Jefferson, and Adams; Lafayette,
Haystack, and Moosilauke;--not a cloud was upon one of them. And
between me and them lay the greenest of valleys.
So for the forenoon hours I sat and walked by turns; stopping beside
a house to enjoy a flock of farm-loving birds,--bluebirds especially,
with voices as sweet in autumn as in spring,--loitering under the
long arch of willows, taking a turn in the valley woods, where a
drumming grouse was almost the only musician, and thence by easy stages
sauntering homeward for dinner.
For the afternoon I have chosen a road that might have been made on
purpose for the man and the day. It is short (two miles, or a little
more, will bring me to the end of it), it starts directly from the
door, with no preliminary plodding through dusty village streets,
and it is not a thoroughfare, so that I am sure to meet nobody, or
next to nobody, the whole afternoon long. At any rate, no wagon
loads of staring “excursionists” will disturb my meditations. It is
substantially level, also; and once more (for a man cannot think of
everything at once) it is wooded on one side and open to the afternoon
sun on the other. For the present occasion, furthermore, it is perhaps
a point in its favor that it does not distract me with mountain
prospects. Mountains are not for all moods; there are many other
things worth looking at. Here, at this minute, as I come up a slope, I
face halfway about to admire a stretch of Gale River, a hundred feet
below, flowing straight toward me, the water of a steely blue, so far
away that it appears to be motionless, and so little in volume that
even the smaller boulders are no more than half covered. Beyond it
the hillside woods are gorgeously arrayed--pale green, with reds and
yellows of all degrees of brilliancy. The glory of autumn is nearly at
the full, and at every step the panorama shifts. As for the day, it
continues perfect, deliciously cool in the shade, deliciously warm in
the sun, with the wind northwesterly and light. Many yellow butterflies
are flitting about, and once a bright red angle-wing alights in the
road and spreads itself carefully to the sun. While I am looking at
it, sympathizing with its comfort, I notice also a shining dark blue
beetle--an oil-beetle, I believe it is called--as handsome as a jewel,
traveling slowly over the sand.
I have been up this way so frequently of late that the individual trees
are beginning to seem like old friends. It would not take much to make
me believe that the acquaintance is mutual. “Here he is again,” I fancy
them saying one to another as I round a turn. Some of them are true
philosophers, or their looks belie them. Just now they are all silent.
Even the poplars cannot talk, it appears (a most worthy example),
without a breath of inspiration to set them going. The stillness is
eloquent. A day like this is the crown of the year. It is worth a
year’s life to enjoy it. There is much to see, but best of all is the
comfort that wraps us round and the peace that seems to brood over the
world. If the first day was of this quality, we need not wonder that
the maker of it took an artist’s pride in his work and pronounced it
good.
As for the road, there is still another thing to be said in its praise:
While it follows a straight course, it is never straight itself for
more than a few rods together. If you look ahead a little space you are
sure to see it running out of sight round a corner, beckoning you after
it. A man would be a poor stick who would not follow. Every rod brings
a new picture. How splendid the maple leaves are, red and yellow, with
the white boles of the birches, as white as milk, or, truer still,
as white as chalk, to set off their brightness. I could walk to the
world’s end on such an invitation.
But the road, as I said, is a short one. Its errand is only to three
farms, and I am now on the edge of the first of them. Here the wood
moves farther away, and mountains come into view,--Lafayette, Haystack,
and the Twins, with the tips of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams.
Then, when the second of the houses is passed, the prospect narrows
again. An extremely pretty wood of tall, straight trees, many fine
poplars among them (and now they are all talking), is close at my side.
The sunlight favors me, falling squarely on the shapely, light-colored
trunks (some of the poplars are almost as white as the birches), and
filling the whole place with splendor. I go on, absorbed in the lovely
spectacle, and behold, it is as if a veil were suddenly removed. The
wood is gone, and the horizon is full of mountain-tops. I have come to
the last of the farms, and in another minute or two am at the door.
There is nobody at home, to my regret, and I sit down upon the
doorstep. Moosilauke, Kinsman, Cannon, Lafayette, Haystack, the Twins,
Washington, Clay, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison--these are enough,
though there are others, too, if a man were trying to make a story. All
are clear of clouds, and, like the trees of the wood, have the western
light full on them. Even without the help of a glass I see a train
ascending Mt. Washington. Happy passengers, say I. Would that I were
one of them! The season is ending in glory at the summit, for this is
almost or quite its last day, and there cannot have been many to match
it, the whole summer through.
I loiter about the fields for an hour or more, looking at the blue
mountains and the nearer, gayer-colored hills, but the occupant of
the house is nowhere to be found. I was hoping for a chat with him.
A seeing man, who lives by himself in such a place as this, is sure
to have something to talk about. The last time I was here he told me
a pretty story of a hummingbird. He was in the house, as I remember
it, when he heard the familiar, squeaking notes of a hummer, and
thinking that their persistency must be occasioned by some unusual
trouble, went out to investigate. Sure enough, there hung the bird in
a spider’s web attached to a rosebush, while the owner of the web, a
big yellow-and-brown, pot-bellied, bloodthirsty rascal, was turning
its victim over and over, winding the web about it. Wings and legs
were already fast, so that all the bird could do was to cry for help.
And help had come. The man at once killed the spider, and then, little
by little, for it was an operation of no small delicacy, unwound the
mesh in which the bird was entangled. The lovely creature lay still in
his open hand till it had recovered its breath, and then flew away.
Who would not be glad to play the good Samaritan in such guise? As
I intimated just now, you may talk with a hundred smartly dressed,
smoothly spoken city men without hearing a piece of news half so
important or interesting.
It is five o’clock when I leave the farms and am again skirting the
woods. Now I face the sun, the level rays of which transfigure the
road before me till its beauty is beyond all attempt at description.
I look at it as for a very few times in my life I have looked at a
painted landscape, with unspeakable enjoyment. The subject is of the
simplest: a few rods of common grassy road, arched with bright leaves
and drenched in sunshine; but the suggestion is infinite. After this
the way brings me into sight of the fairest of level green meadows,
with pools of smooth water--“water stilled at even”--and scattered
farmhouses. The day is ending right; and when I reach the hotel piazza
and look back, there in the east is the full moon rising in all her
splendor, attended by rosy clouds.
WITH THE WADERS
The 12th of October was a day. There are few like it in our
Massachusetts calendar. And by a stroke of good fortune I had chosen
it for a trip to Eagle Hill, on the North Shore. All things were near
perfection; the only drawbacks to my enjoyment being a slight excess of
warmth and an unseasonable plague of mosquitoes.
“Yes, it is _too_ fine,” said the stable-keeper, who drove me down
from the railroad station. “It won’t last. It’s what we call a weather
breeder.”
“So be it,” thought I. Just then I was not concerned with to-morrow.
Happy men seldom are. The stable-keeper spoke more to the purpose when
he told me that during the recent storm a most exceptional number of
birds had been driven in. A certain gunner, Cy Somebody, had shot
twenty-odd dollars’ worth in one day. “There he is now,” he remarked
after a while, as a man and a dog crossed the road just before us. “Any
birds to-day, Cy?” he inquired. The man nodded a silent affirmative--a
very unusual admission for a Yankee sportsman to make, according to my
experience.
I was hardly on foot before I began to find traces of this good man’s
work. The first bird I saw was a sandpiper with one wing dragging
on the ground. Near it was an unharmed companion which, even when I
crowded it a little hard, showed no disposition to consult its own
safety. “Well done,” said I. “‘There is a friend that sticketh closer
than a brother.’”
A few steps more, and a larger bird stirred amid the short
marsh herbage beyond the muddy flat--a black-bellied plover, or
“beetle-head.” He also must be disabled, I thought, to be staying in
such a place; and perhaps he was. At all events he would not fly, but
edged about me in a half circle, with the wariest kind of motions
(there was no sign of cover for him, the grass coming no more than to
his knees), always with his big black eye fastened upon me, while my
field-glass brought him near enough to show all the beauty of his spots.
He was well worth looking at (“What short work a gunner would make
of him!” I kept repeating to myself), but I could not stay. Titlark
voices were in the air. The birds must be plentiful on the grassy hills
beyond; with them there might be Lapland longspurs; and I followed the
road. This presently brought me to a bit of pebbly beach, along which
I was carelessly walking when a lisping sound caused me to glance
down at my feet. There on the edge of the water was a bunch of seven
sandpipers; white-rumps, as I soon made out, though my first thought
had been of something else. One of them hobbled upon one leg, but
the others seemed thus far to have escaped injury. There they stood,
huddled together as if on purpose for some pot-shooter’s convenience,
while I drew them within arm’s length; pretty creatures, lovely in
their foolish innocence; more or less nervous under my inspection, but
holding their ground, each with its long black bill pointed against
the breeze. “We who are about to die salute you,” they might have been
saying.
Having admired them sufficiently, I passed on. Titlarks were beginning
to abound, but where were the longspurs? A shot was fired some distance
away, and as I looked in that direction two great blue herons went
flying across the marsh, each with his legs behind him. It was good to
see them still able to fly.
Then something--I have no idea what; no sight or sound that I was
sensible of--told me to look at a bird beside the little pool of water
I had just passed. It was another white-rumped sandpiper, all by
himself, nearer to me even than those I had left a little way back.
What a beauty he was!--his dark eye (which I could see winking), the
lovely cinnamon-brown shading of his back and wings, setting off the
marbled black and white, and his shyly confiding demeanor. I had
scarcely stopped before he flew to my side of the pool and stood as
near me as he could get--too near to be shot at. He too had been hit,
or so it seemed. One foot was painful, though he could put it down, if
necessary, and even take a limping step upon it. Happy bird! He had
fared well!
Up the steep, grassy hill I started out of the road; but I soon halted
again, this time to gaze into the sky. Straight above me were numbers
of herring gulls, some far, far up under the fleecy cirrus clouds,
others much lower. All were resting upon the air, sailing in broad
circles. Round and round they went,--a kind of stationary motion,
a spectator might have called it; but in a minute or two they had
disappeared. They were progressing in circles, circle cutting circle.
It is the sea-gull’s way of taking a long flight. I remember it of old,
and have never seen anything to surpass it for gracefulness. If there
were only words to describe such things! But language is a clumsy tool.
The hilltop offered beauty of another kind: the blue ocean, the broad,
brown marshes, dotted with haycocks innumerable, the hills landward,
a distant town, with its spires showing, the inlet yonder, whitened
with swimming gulls. Crickets chirped in the grass, herds of cattle
and sheep grazed peacefully on all sides, and when I turned my head,
there behind me, a mile away, perhaps, were the shining Ipswich dunes,
wave on wave of dazzling white sand. I ought to have stayed with the
picture, perhaps; but there were no longspurs, and somehow this was
a day for birds rather than for a landscape. I would return to the
muddy flats, and spend my time with the sandpipers and the plover. The
telltale yellow-legs were whistling, and who could guess what I might
see?