sandpiper. He would be there, I felt certain. And he was; as pretty
as before, and no more alarmed at my presence, though as he balanced
himself on one leg his body shook with a constant rhythmical pulsation,
as if his heart were beating more violently than a bird’s heart should.
He did not look happy, I thought. And why should he, far from home,
with a wounded foot, no company, and an unknown number of guns yet to
face before reaching the end of his long journey? He was hardly bigger
than a sparrow, but he was one of the creatures which lordly man,
endowed with “godlike reason,” a being of “large discourse,” so wise
and good that he naturally thinks of the Creator of all things as a
person very like himself, finds it amusing to kill.
And when I came to the few rods of beach, there stood my seven
sandpipers, exactly as before. They stirred uneasily under my gaze,
whispering a few words to one another (“Will he shoot, do you think?”),
but they kept their places, bunched closely together for safety. Did
they know anything about their lonely brother--or sister--up yonder on
the hillside? If they noticed her absence, they probably supposed her
dead. Death is so common and so sudden, especially in migration time.
Now I am back again on a grassy mound by the muddy flats, and the big
plover is still here. How alert he looks as he sees me approach! Yet
now, as an hour ago, he shows no inclination to fly. The tide is coming
in fast. He steps about in the deepening water with evident discomfort,
and whether he will or not, he must soon take to wing or wade ashore.
And while I am eyeing his motions my glass falls unexpectedly on two
sandpipers near him in the grass; pectoral sandpipers--grass-birds--I
soon say to myself, with acute satisfaction. It is many years
since I saw one. How small their heads look,--in contrast with the
plover’s,--and how thickly and finely their breasts are streaked! I
remember the portrait in Nelson’s “Birds of Alaska,” with its inflated
throat, a monstrous vocal sac, half as large as the bird itself. A
graceful wooer!
They, too, are finding the tide a trouble, and no doubt are wishing the
human intruder would take himself off. Now, in spite of my presence,
one of them follows the other toward the land, scurrying from one bit
of tussock to another, half wading, half swimming. Time and tide wait
for no bird. Both they and the plover have given up all thoughts of
eating. They have enough to do to keep their eyes upon me and the water.
The sandpipers, being smaller, make their retreat first. One, as he
finds himself so near a stranger, is smitten with sudden fright, and
runs by at full speed on his pretty dark-green legs. Yet both presently
become reassured, and fall to feeding with all composure almost about
my feet. I have been still so long that I must be harmless. And now the
plover himself takes wing (I am glad to find he can), but only for a
rod or two, alighting on a conical bit of island. There is nothing for
him to eat there, apparently, but at least the place will keep his feet
dry. He stands quiet, waiting. And so he continues to do for the hour
and more that I still remain.
My own stay, I should mention, is by this time compulsory. I, too,
am on an island (I have just discovered the fact), and not choosing
to turn wader on my own account, must wait till the tide goes down.
It is no hardship. Every five minutes brings me something new. I
have only now noticed (a slight cry having drawn my attention) that
there are sandpipers of another kind here--a little flock of dunlins,
or redbacks. They are bunched on the pebbly edge of a second island
(which was not an island a quarter of an hour ago), nearer to me even
than the plover’s, and are making the best of the high tide, which
has driven them from their feeding-grounds, by taking a siesta. Once,
when I look that way,--which I can do only now and then, there are so
many distractions,--I find the whole eight with their bills tucked
under their wings. Now, isn’t that a pretty sight! Their name, as I
say, is the red-backed sandpiper; but at this season their upper parts
are of a uniform mouse color, or soft, dark gray--I hardly know how
to characterize it. It is very distinctive, whatever word we use, and
equally so is the shape of the bill, long and stout, with a downward
inflection at the tip. Eight birds, did I say? No, there are nine, for
I have just discovered another, not on the island, but under the very
edge of the grassy bank on which I am standing. He has a broken leg,
poor fellow, and seems to prefer being by himself; but by and by, with
a sudden cry of alarm, for which I can see no occasion, he flies to
rejoin his mates.
Meanwhile, seven white-rumps have come and settled near them; the same
flock that I saw yonder on the roadside beach, I have little question.
Probably the encroaching tide has disturbed them also. At the same
time I hear distant voices of yellow-legs, and presently six birds are
seen flying in this direction. They wheel doubtfully at the unexpected
sight of a man, and drop to the ground beyond range; but I can see them
well enough. How tall they are, and how wide-awake they look, with
their necks stretched out; and how silly they are,--“telltales” and
“tattlers” indeed,--to publish their movements and whereabouts to every
gunner within a mile! While my head is turned they disappear, and I
hear them whistling again across the marsh. They are all gone, I think;
but as I look again toward my sandpipers’ island, behold! there stands
a tall fellow, his yellow legs shining, and his eye fastened upon me.
Either he has lost his reason, if he ever had any, or he knows I have
no gun. Perfectly still he keeps (he is not an absolute fool, I rejoice
to see) as long as I am looking at him. Then I look elsewhere, and
when my eye returns to his place, he is not there. He has only moved
behind the corner of the islet, however, as I find when I shift my own
position by a rod or two. He seems to be dazed, and for a wonder he
holds his tongue.
Titlarks are about me in crowds. One is actually wading along the
shore, with the water up to his belly. Yes, he is doing it again. I
look twice to be sure of him. A flock of dusky ducks fly just above my
head, showing me the lining of their wings. Truly this is a birdy spot;
and luckily, though there are two or three “blinds” near, and guns
are firing every few minutes up and down the marshes, there is no one
here to disturb me and my friends. I could stay with them till night;
but what is that? A buggy is coming down the road out of the hills
with only one passenger. This is my opportunity. I pack up my glass,
betake myself to the roadside, and when the man responds to my question
politely, I take a seat beside him. As he gets out to unlatch the gate,
a minute afterward, a light-colored--dry-sand-colored--bird flies up
and perches on a low fence-rail. This is no wader, but is none the less
welcome. It is an Ipswich sparrow, I explain to my benefactor, who
waits for me to take an observation. The species was discovered here,
I tell him, and was named in the town’s honor. He seems interested. “I
shouldn’t have known it,” he says. So I have done some good to-day,
though I have thought only of enjoying myself.
ON THE NORTH SHORE AGAIN
If you have once seen a picture, says Emerson somewhere, never look at
it again. He means that hours of insight are so rare that a really high
and satisfying experience with a book, picture, landscape, or other
object of beauty is to be accepted as final, a favor of Providence
which we have no warrant to expect repeated. If you have seen a thing,
therefore, really seen it and communed with the soul of it, let that
suffice you. Attempts to live the hour over a second time will only
result in failure, or, worse yet, will cast a shadow over what ought to
have been a permanently luminous recollection.
There is a modicum of sound philosophy in the advice. We must take
it as the counsel of an idealist, and follow it or not as occasion
bids. The words of such men, as one of them was given to saying, are
only for those who have ears to hear. We may be sure of one thing:
poems, landscapes, pictures, and all other works of art (art human or
superhuman) are never to be exhausted by one look, or by a hundred. If
a man is good for anything, and the poem or the landscape is good for
anything, he will find new meanings with new perusals. In other words,
we may turn upon Emerson and say: “Yes, but then, you know, we never
_do_ see a picture--a picture that _is_ a picture.”
As was related a week ago, I spent the 12th of October on the North
Shore. I brought back the remembrance of a glorious piece of the
world’s beauty. In outline, I had it in my mind. But I knew perfectly,
both at the time and afterward, that I had not really made it my own.
I had been too much taken up with other things. The eye does not see
the landscape; nor does the mind see it. The eye is the lens, the
mind is the plate. The landscape prints itself upon the mind, through
the eye. But the mind must be sensitive and still, and--what is
oftener forgotten--the exposure must be sufficiently prolonged. The
clearest-eyed genius ever born never saw a landscape in ten minutes.
On all grounds, then, I was entitled to another look. And this time,
perhaps, the Lapland longspurs would be there to be enjoyed with the
rest. I would go again, therefore; and on the morning of the 18th, long
before daylight, judging by the quietness of the trees outside that the
wind had gone down (for wind is a serious hindrance to quiet pleasure
at the seashore in autumn, and visits must be timed accordingly), I
determined to set out in good season and secure a longish day. Venus
and the old moon were growing pale in the east when I started forth,
and three hours afterward I was footing it through Ipswich village
toward East Street and the sea.
As I crossed the marsh and approached the gate, a stranger overtook me.
We managed the business together, one pulling the gate to, the other
tending the hook and staple, and we spoke of the unusual greenness of
the hills before us, on which flocks and herds were grazing. “There’s
better feed now than there’s been all summer,” the stranger said. It
was easy to believe it. Those broad-backed, grassy hills are one of the
glories of the North Shore.
I followed the road as it led me among them. A savanna sparrow had been
dodging along the edge of a ditch near the gate; titlark voices at once
became common, and after a turn or two I saw before me a bunch of shore
larks dusting themselves in the sandy middle of the track. They were
making thorough work of it, crowding their breasts and necks, and even
the sides of their heads into the soil, with much shaking of feathers
afterward.
The road brought me to a beach, where were two or three houses, and,
across the way, a pond stocked with wooden geese and ducks, with an
underground blind for gunners in the side of the hill. Some delights
are so keen that it is worth elaborate preparations to enjoy them. Here
the titlarks were in extraordinary force, and I lingered about the
spot for half an hour, awaiting the longspurs that might be hoped for
in their company. Hoped for, but nothing more. I was still too early,
perhaps.
Well, their absence, the fact of it once accepted, left me free-minded
for the main object of my trip. I would go up the hill, over the
grass, and take the prospect northward. A narrow depression, down
which a brook trickled with a pleasant, companionable noise, as if
it were talking to itself, afforded me shelter from the wind, and at
the same time bounded my outlook on either side, as a frame bounds a
picture. The hill fell away sharply to the water just beyond my feet,
and up and down the inlet gulls were flying. Once, to my pleasure,
two black-backed “coffin-bearers” passed, the only ones I was able to
discover among the thousands of herring gulls that filled the air and
the water, and crowded the sand-bars, the whole day long. Across the
blue water were miles of brown marsh, and beyond the marsh rose wooded
hills veiled with haze, the bright autumnal colors shining through.
Crickets were still musical, buttercups and dandelions starred the
turf, and once a yellow butterfly (Philodice) flitted near. The summer
was gone, but here were some of its children to keep it remembered.
Titlarks walked daintily about the grass, or balanced themselves upon
the boulders, and once I turned my head just in time to see a marsh
hawk sailing over the hill at my back, his white rump showing.
When I had left the hills behind me, and was again skirting the muddy
flats, I found myself all at once near a few sandpipers,--a dozen, more
or less, of white-rumps,--one with a foot dragging, one with a leg held
up, and beside them a single red-back, or dunlin, staggering on one
leg, the same bird, it seemed likely, that I had pitied a week ago. I
pitied him still. Ornithology, studied under such conditions, was no
longer the cheerful, exhilarating science to which I am accustomed. It
was more like sociology.
Perhaps I am sentimental. If so, may I be forgiven. There is no man but
has his weakness. The dunlin was nothing, I knew; one among thousands;
a few ounces of flesh with feathers on it; what if he did suffer? It
was none of my business. Why should I take other men’s amusements
sadly? The bird was greatly inferior to the being who shot him; at
least that is the commonly accepted theory; and the superior, as every
one but an anarchist must admit, has the rights of superiority. And
for all that, the dunlin seemed a pretty innocent, and I wished that
he had two good legs. As for his being only one of thousands, so am
I--and no very fine one either; but I shouldn’t like to be shot at from
behind a wall; and when I have a toothache, the sense of my personal
insignificance is of small use in dulling the pain. Poor dunlin!
I allowed myself two hours from the gate back to the railroad station,
though it is less than an hour’s walk. Some of the fairest views are
to be obtained from the road; and there, I told myself, I should be
sheltered from the wind and could sit still at my ease. The first half
of the distance, too, would take me between pleasant hedgerows, in
which are many things worthy of a stroller’s notice.
For some time, indeed, I did little but stop and look behind. The
marshes pulled me about: so level, so expansive, so richly brown,
so pointed with haycocks (once, the notion taking me, I counted far
enough to see that there were more than two hundred in sight), and so
beautifully backed by the golden autumnal hills. I can see them yet,
though I have nothing to say about them.
“The world lies east: how ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky!”
Trains of gulls went flying up the inlet as the tide went out. They
live by the sea’s almanac as truly as the clam-diggers, two of whom I
had watched, an hour before, sailing across the inlet in a rude boat
(more picturesque by half than a gentleman’s yacht), and setting about
their day’s work on a shoal newly uncovered. Thank Heaven, there are
still some occupations that cannot be carried on in a factory.
The roadsides were bright with gay-colored fruits: barberries, thorn
apples, Roxbury waxwork, and rose-hips. Of thorn bushes there were at
least two kinds; one already bare-branched, with scattered small fruit;
the other still in leaf, and loaded with gorgeous clusters of large
red apples. More interesting to me than any of these were the frost
grapes; familiar acquaintances of an Old Colony boyhood, but now grown
to be strangers. They were shining black, ripe and juicy (of the size
of peas), and if their sweetness failed to tempt the palate, that, for
aught I know, may have been the eater’s fault rather than theirs. Why
might not their quality be of a too excellent sort, beyond his too
effeminate powers of appreciation? Is there any certainty that man’s
taste is final in such matters? Was my own criticism of them anything
more than a piece of unscientific, inconclusive impressionism?
Surely they were not without a tang. The most exacting mouth could not
deny them individuality. I tried them, and retried them; but after all,
they seemed most in place on the vines. To me, in the old days, they
were known only as frost grapes. Others, it appears, have called them
chicken grapes, possum grapes, and winter grapes. No doubt they find
customers before the season is over. Thoreau should have liked them
and praised them, but I do not recall them in his books. Probably they
do not grow in Concord. They are of his kin, at all events, wildings
of the wild. I wish I had brought a bunch or two home with me. In my
present mood I believe they would “go to the spot.”
But if I was glad to see the frost grapes, I was gladder still to see
a certain hickory tree. I was scarcely off the marsh before I came to
it, and had hardly put my eye upon it before I said to myself (although
so far as I could have specified, it looked like any other hickory;
but there is a kind of knowledge, or half knowledge, that does not
rest upon specifications), “There! That should be a bitternut tree.”
Now the bitternut is not to be called a rarity, I am assured; but
somehow I had never found it, notwithstanding I was a nut-gatherer in
my youth, and have continued to be one to this day, an early taste
for wild forage being one of the virtues that are seldom outgrown.
Well, something distracted my attention just then, and I contented
myself with putting a leaf and a handful of nuts into my pocket. Only
on getting home did I crack one and find it bitter. Now, several days
afterward, I have cracked another, and tested it more fully. The shell
is extremely thin,--like a pecan nut’s for fragility,--and the meat,
which is large and full, is both bitter and puckery, suggesting the
brown inner partitions of a pecan shell, which the eater learns so
carefully to avoid. In outward appearance the nut is a pig-nut pure and
simple, the reader being supposed to be enough of a countryman to know
that pig-nuts, like wild fruits in general, vary interminably in size,
shape, and goodness.
Pretty butter-and-eggs still bloomed beside the stone wall, and the
“folksy mayweed” was plentiful about a barnyard. Out from the midst
of it scampered a rabbit as I approached the fence to look over. He
disappeared in the cornfield, his white tailtip showing last, and I
wondered where he belonged, as there seemed to be neither wood nor
shrubbery within convenient distance.
Just beyond this point (after noticing a downy woodpecker in a
Balm-o’-Gilead tree, if the careful compositor will allow me that
euphonious Old Colony contraction), I had stopped to pick up a shagbark
when five children, the oldest a girl of nine or ten, came down the
road together.
“Out of school, so early?” said I.
“No,” was the instantaneous response; “we’ve got the whooping cough.”
“Ah, that’s better than going to school, isn’t it?” said I, not so
careful of my moral influence as a descendant of the Puritans ought to
have been, perhaps; but I spoke from impulse, remembering myself how I
also was tempted.
“Yes,” said one of the children; “No,” said another; and the reader may
believe which he will, looking into his own childish heart, if he can
still find it, as I hope he can.
Apple trees were loaded; hollyhocks, marigolds, and even tender cannas
and dahlias, still brightened the gardens (so much for being near
the sea, even on the North Shore), but what I most admired were the
handsome yellow quinces in many of the dooryards. Quince preserve must
be a favorite dish in Ipswich. I thought I should like to live here.
I could smell the golden fruit--in my mind’s nose--clean across the
way. And when I reached the village square I stopped (no, I walked
slowly) to watch a real Old Colony game that I had not seen played for
many a day. Two young men had stuck a jackknife into the hard earthen
sidewalk and were “pitching cents.” It was like an old daguerreotype.
One of the gamesters was having hard luck, but was taking it merrily.
“I owe you six,” I heard him say, as his coin stood on edge and rolled
perversely away from the knife-blade.
This was very near to “Meeting-house Green.” I hope I am doing no harm
to speak of it.
AUTUMNAL MORALITIES
For the month past my weekly talk has been more or less a traveler’s
tale--of things among the mountains and at the seaside. Now, on this
bright afternoon in the last week of October, a month that every
outdoor man saddens to see coming to an end (like May, it is never half
long enough), let me note a little of what is passing in the lanes and
by-roads nearer home.
Leaves are rustling below and above. As is true sometimes in higher
circles, they seem to grow loquacious with age; the slightest occasion,
the merest nudge of suggestion, the faintest puff of the spirit sets
them off. For me they will never talk too much. I love their preaching
seven days in the week. The driest of them never teased my ears with a
dry sermon. I scuff along the path on purpose to stir them up. “Your
turn will come next,” I hear them saying; but the message does not
sound like bad news. I listen to it with a kind of pleasure, as to
solemn music. If the doctor or the clergyman had brought me the same
word, my spirit might have risen in rebellion; but the falling leaf may
say what it likes. It has poet’s leave.
How gracefully they come to the ground, here one and there another;
slowly, slowly, with leisurely dips and turns, as if the breeze loved
them and would buoy them up till the last inevitable moment. Children
of air and sunshine, they must return to the dust. So all things move
in circles,--life and death, death and life. Happy leaves! they depart
without formalities, with no funereal trappings. The wind whispers to
them, and they follow.
As I watch them falling, a gray squirrel startles me. I rejoice to see
him. He, too, is a falling leaf. In truth, his living presence takes
me by surprise. So many gunners have been in this wood of late, all so
murderously equipped, that I had thought every squirrel must before
this time have gone into the game-bag. Be careful, young fellow; you
will need all your spryness and cunning, all your knack of keeping
on the invisible side of the trunk, or your frolic will end in sudden
blackness. This is autumn, the sickly season for squirrels and birds.
“The law is off,” and the gun is loaded to kill you. Take a friend’s
advice, and fight shy of everything that walks upright “in the image of
God.”
Yonder round-topped sweet birch tree is one of October’s masterpieces;
a sheaf of yellow leaves with the sun on them. How they shine! Yet it
is not so much they as the sunlight. Nay, it is both. Let the leaves
have the honor that belongs to them. In a week they will all be under
foot. To-day they are bright as the sun, and airy and frolicsome as
so many butterflies. Blessed are my eyes that see them. And look! how
the light (what a painter it is!) glorifies the lower trunk of the
white oak just beyond. The furrowed gray bark is so perfect a piece of
absolute beauty that, if it were framed and set up in a gallery, the
crowd--or the few that are better than a crowd--would be always before
it. So cheap and universal are visual delights, so little dependent
upon place or season--sunlight and the bark of a tree!
In the branches overhead are chestnut-loving blackbirds, every one
with a crack in his voice. Far away a crow is cawing, and from another
direction a jay screams. These speak to the world at large. Half the
township may hear what they have to offer. I like them; may their
speech never be a whit softer or more musical; but if comparisons are
in order, I give my first vote for less public--more intimate--birds,
such as speak only to the grove or the copse. And even as I confess my
preference, a bluebird’s note confirms it: a voice that caresses the
ear; such a tone as no human mouth or humanly invented instrument can
ever produce the like of. He has no need to sing. His simplest talk is
music.