tumbling down as long ago as you can remember. Beyond it, in your
day, stood a dense pine wood, a darksome, solemn place, where you
went quietly. Now, not a pine is left. A mere wilderness of hardwood
scrub. The old “cart-path,” which at this point swerved to the left,
has grown over till there is no following it. But the loss does not
matter. You take a trail among the boulders, a trail familiar to you
of old; the same that you took in winter, skates in hand, bound for
Jason Halfbrook’s meadow. Many a merry hour you spent there, heedless
of the cold. You could skate then, or thought you could. The backward
circle, the “Dutch roll,” the “spread-eagle,” these and other wonders
were in your repertory. They were feats to be proud of, and you made
the most of them. Nor need you feel ashamed now at the recollection.
When the Preacher said, “There is nothing better than that a man should
rejoice in his own works,” he was not thinking exclusively of an author
and his books. You did well to be proud while you were able. It was
pride, in part, that kept you warm. Now, if you stand beside a city
skating-resort, you see young fellows performing feats that throw all
your old-fashioned, countrified accomplishments into the shade. You
look on, open-mouthed. Boys of to-day have better skates than you had.
Perhaps they have better legs. One thing they do not have,--a better
time.
This morning, however, you are not going to the Halfbrook meadow. There
is no ice, or none that will bear a man’s weight; and perhaps you
would not skate if there were. Do I take you to be too old? No, not
that; but you are out of practice. I should hate to see you risking
yourself well over on the outer edge, or attempting a sudden turnabout.
And you agree with me, I imagine, for you quit the trail at the Town
Path (the compositor will please allow the capitals--the path deserves
them) and turn your steps northward. The path, I say, deserves a proper
name. It is not strictly a highway, I am aware; if you were to stumble
into a hole here, the town could not be held liable for damages;
but it is a pretty ancient thoroughfare, nevertheless, a reasonably
straight course through the woods by the long way of them. Generation
after generation has traveled it. You are walking not only in your own
footsteps, but in those of your ancestors, who must have gone this
way many a time to speak and vote at town meeting. Some of the oldest
of them are buried in this very wood, less than half a mile back; a
resting-place such as you would like pretty well for yourself when the
time comes.
You follow the path till it brings you near to a cliff. This is one of
the places you had in your eye on setting out. This land is yours, and
you have come to look at it.
A strange thing it is, an astonishing impertinence, that a man should
assume to own a piece of the earth; himself no better than a wayfarer
upon it; alighting for a moment only; coming he knows not whence, going
he knows not whither. Yet convention allows the claim. Men have agreed
to foster one another’s illusions in this regard, as in so many others.
They knew, blindly, before any one had the wit to say it in so many
words, that “life is the art of being well deceived.” And so they have
made you owner of this acre or two of woodland. All the power of the
State would be at your service, if necessary, in maintaining the title.
These tall pine trees are yours. You have sovereignty over them, to
use a word that is just now sweet in the American mouth. You may do
anything you like with them. They are older than you, I should guess,
and in the order of nature they will long outlive you; for aught I
know, also, it may be true, what Thoreau said (profanely, as some
thought), that they will go to as high a heaven; but for the time
being they have no rights that you are under the slightest obligation
to consider. You may kill them to-morrow, and nobody will accuse you of
murder. You may turn all their beauty to ashes, and it will be nobody’s
business to remonstrate. The trees are yours.
I hope, notwithstanding, that you do not quite think so. I would rather
believe that you look upon your so-called proprietorship as little
more than a convenient legal fiction; of use, possibly, against human
trespassers, but having no force as against the right of the trees to
live a tree’s life and fulfill a tree’s end.
One of them, I perceive, is dead already. Like many a human being we
have known, it had a poor start; no more than “half a chance,” as
the saying goes. It struck root on a ledge, in a cleft of rock, and
after a struggle of twenty or thirty years has found the conditions
too hard for it. Its neighbors all appear to be doing well, with the
exception of one that had its upper half blown away a few years ago by
a disrespectful wind. The wind is an anarchist; it bloweth where it
listeth, with small regard for human sovereignty.
Your land, to my eye, is of a piece with all the land round about; or
it would be, only for its tall gray cliff. That is indeed a beauty,
a true distinction; not so tall as it was forty or fifty years ago,
of course, but still a brave and picturesque sight. I should like the
illusion of owning a thing like that myself. And the brook just beyond,
so narrow and so lively,--that, too, you may reasonably be proud of,
though it is nothing but a wet-weather stream, coming from the hill
and tumbling musically downward into Dyer’s Run, past one boulder and
another, from late autumn till late spring, and then going dry. You
have only pleasant memories of it, for you were oftenest here in the
wet season. It has always been one of your singularities, I remember,
to be less in the woods in summer than at other times.
Now you have crossed your own boundary; but who would know it? You
yourself seem not to feel the transition. The wood is one; and really
it is all yours, as it is any man’s who has eyes to enjoy it.
Appreciation is ownership.
So you go on, pausing here and there to admire a lichen-covered boulder
or stump (there is nothing prettier, look where you will), a cluster
of ferns, a few sprouts of holly, a sprinkling of pyrola leaves (green
with the greenness of all the summers of the world), or a bed of
fruit-bespangled partridge-berry vine, till by and by you begin to
feel the overshadowing, illusion-dispelling, soul-absorbing presence
of the wood itself. The voice of eternity is speaking in the pine
leaves. Your own identity slips away from you as you listen. You are
part of the whole; nay, you are not so much a part of it as lost in it.
The raindrop has fallen into the sea. For a moment you seem almost to
divine a meaning in that bold, pantheistical, much neglected scripture,
“That God may be all in all.”
For a moment only. Then a cord snaps, and you come back to your puny
self and its limitations. You are looking at this and that, just as
before. A chickadee chirps, and you answer him. You are you again, a
man who used to be a boy. These are the old paths, and you are still
in the body. You will prove it an hour hence at the dinner-table.
THE PROSPERITY OF A WALK
A bird lover’s daily rations during a New England winter are somewhat
like Robinson Crusoe’s on his island in the wet season. “I eat a bunch
of raisins for my breakfast,” he says, “a piece of goat’s flesh or of
the turtle for my dinner, and two or three of the turtle’s eggs for my
supper.” Such a fare was ample for health, perhaps; and probably every
item of it was sufficiently appetizing, in itself considered; but after
the first week or two it must have begun to smack of monotony. The
castaway might have complained with some of old, “My soul loatheth this
light bread.” He might have complained, I say; I do not remember that
he did. What I do remember is that when, moved by pious feeling, he was
on the point of thanking God for having brought him to that place, he
suddenly restrained himself, or an influence from without restrained
him. “I know not what it was,” he says, “but something shocked my mind
at that thought, and I durst not speak the words. ‘How canst thou be
such a hypocrite?’ said I.”
So I imagine that most bird-gazing men would hesitate to thank
the Divine Providence for a northern winter, with its rigors, its
inordinate length, and its destitution. They put up with it, make the
best of it, grumble over it as politely as may be; but they are not so
piously false-tongued as to profess that they like it.
By the last of December they have begun, not exactly to tire of
chickadees and blue jays, but to sigh for something else, something to
go with these, something by way of variety. “Where are the crossbills,”
they ask, “and the redpoll linnets, and the pine grosbeaks?” All these
circumpolar species are too uncertain by half, or, better say, by two
thirds. Summering at the apex of the globe, so to speak, with Europe,
Asia, and America equally at their elbow, they seem to flit southward
along whatever meridian happens to take their fancy. Once in a while
chance brings them our way, but only once in a while. Last winter we
had redpolls and both kinds of crossbills, the white-wings for the
first time in many years. They made a bright season. This winter, to
the best of my knowledge, not one of these hyperborean species has sent
so much as a deputation for our enlivenment.
And to make matters worse, even our regular local stand-bys seem to
be less numerous than usual. Tree sparrows and snowbirds are both
abnormally scarce, by my reckoning. As for the Canadian nuthatches,
which helped us out so nobly a year ago, they are not only absent now,
but were so throughout the fall. I have not seen nor heard one in
Massachusetts since the middle of May, a most unusual--to the best of
my recollection a quite unprecedented--state of things. I should like
very much to know the explanation of the mystery.
The daily birds at present, as I find them, are the chickadee
(which deserves to head all lists), the Carolina nuthatch, the
downy woodpecker, the crow, and the jay. Less regularly, but pretty
frequently (every day, if the walk is long enough), one meets with
tree sparrows, goldfinches, snowbirds, brown creepers, flickers, and
golden-crowned kinglets. Twice since December came in I have seen
a shrike. Once I heard a single pine finch passing, invisible, far
overhead. On the same day (December 2) I caught the fine staccato calls
of a purple finch, without seeing the author of them. On the 2d and 3d
three or four rusty blackbirds were unexpectedly in the neighborhood.
Quail and grouse are never absent, of course, but I happen to have seen
neither of them of late, though one day I heard the breezy quoiting of
a quail, greatly to my pleasure. On the 14th I came upon a single robin
in the woods, the first since November 21. He was perched in a leafless
treetop, and was calling at the top of his voice, as if he had friends,
or hoped that he had, somewhere within hearing. The sight was rather
dispiriting than otherwise. He looked unhappy, in a cold wind, with the
sky clouded. He had better have gone south before this time, I thought.
Half an hour afterward I heard the quick, emphatic, answer-demanding
challenge of a hairy woodpecker (as much louder and sharper than the
downy’s as the bird is bigger), and on starting in his direction saw
him take wing. Him I should never think of commiserating. He can look
out for himself. These, with English sparrows (“the poor ye have always
with you”), Old Squaws, herring gulls, and loons, make up my December
list of twenty-two species. It might be worse, I suppose. I remember
the remark of a friend of mine on a similar occasion. “Well,” said he,
“the month is only half gone. You ought to see as many more before the
end of it.” He was strong in arithmetic, but weak in ornithology. If
bird lists could be made on his plan, we should have our hands full in
the dullest season. Even in January, I would engage to find more than
three hundred species within a mile of my doorstep.
As matters are, we must come back (we cannot do so too often, in
winter especially) to the good and wholesome doctrine that pleasure
is not in proportion to numbers or rarity. It depends upon the kind
and degree of sympathy excited. One day, in one mood, you will derive
more inspiration from a five-minute chat with a chickadee than on
another day, in some mood of dryness, you would get from the sight
of nightingales and birds of paradise. Worldlings and matter-of-fact
men do not know it, but what quiet nature lovers (not scenery hunting
tourists) go to nature in search of is not the excitement of novelty,
but a refreshment of the sensibilities. You may call it comfort,
consolation, tranquillity, peace of mind, a vision of truth, an
uplifting of the heart, a stillness of the soul, a quickening of the
imagination, what you will. It is of different shades, and so may be
named in different words. It is theirs who have the secret, and the
rest would not divine your meaning though your speech were transparency
itself.
To my thinking, no one, not even Thoreau, or Jefferies, or Wordsworth,
ever said a truer word about it than Keats dropped in one of his
letters. Nothing in his poems is more deeply poetical. “The setting sun
will always set me to rights,” he says, “or if a sparrow come before
my window, I take part in his existence and pick about the gravel.”
There you have the soul of the matter. “I take part in his existence.”
When you do that, the bird or the flower may be never so common or so
humble. Your walk has prospered.
SIGNS OF SPRING
They are not imaginary, but visible and tangible. I have brought them
home from the woods in my hands, and here they lie before me. I call
them my books of the Minor Prophets.
This one is an alder branch. Along its whole length, spirally disposed
at intervals of an inch or two, are fat, purplish leaf-buds, each on
its stalk. As I look at them I can see, only four months away, the
tender, richly green, newly unfolded, partly grown leaves. How daintily
they are crinkled! And how prettily the edges are cut! It is like the
work of fairy fingers. And what perfection of veining and texture! I
have never heard any one praise them; but half the things that bring a
price in florists’ shops are many degrees less beautiful.
Still more to the purpose, perhaps, more conspicuous, at all events,
as well as nearer to maturity, and so more distinctly prophetic of
spring, are the two kinds of flower-buds that adorn the ends of the
twigs. These also are of a deep purplish tint, which in the case of
the larger (staminate) catkins turns to a lovely green on the shaded
under side. Flower-buds, I call them; but they are rather packages
of bud-stuff wrapped tightly against the weather, cover overlapping
cover. The best shingling of the most expert carpenter could not be
more absolutely rain-proof. “Now do your worst,” says the alder. The
mud freezes about its roots and the water about the base of its stem,
but it keeps its banners flying. Why it should be at such pains to
anticipate the season is more than I can tell. Perhaps it is none of my
business. Enough that it is the alder’s way. There is no swamp in New
England but has a shorter and brighter winter because of it.
This smooth, freckled, reddish-barked twig is black birch (or sweet
birch), taken from a sapling, and therefore bearing no aments, which
on adult trees are already things of grace and promise. I broke it
(it invites breaking by its extreme fragility) for its leaf-buds,
pointed, parti-colored,--brown and yellowish green,--tender-looking,
but hardy enough to withstand all the rigors of New England frost. The
broken end of the branch, where I get the spicy fragrance of the inner
bark, brings back a sense of half-forgotten boyish pleasures. I used
to nibble the bark in spring. A little dry it was, as I remember it,
but it had the spicy taste of wintergreen (checkerberry), without the
latter’s almost excessive pungency, or bite. Some of my country-bred
readers must have been accustomed to eat the tender reddish young
checkerberry leaves, and will understand perfectly what I mean by that
word “bite.” I wonder if they had our curious Old Colony name for
those vernal dainties. It sounds like cannibalism, but we gathered
them and ate them in all innocence (the taste is on my tongue now) as
“youngsters.” No doubt the tree gets its name, “sweet birch,” from this
savoriness of its green inner bark, rather than from the pedagogic
employment of its branches in schoolrooms as a means of promoting the
sweet uses of adversity.
Now I take up another freckled, easily broken twig, with noticeably
short branchlets, some of them less than an inch in length. Every one,
even the shortest, is set with brown globular buds of the size of
pin-heads. Toward the tip the main stem also bears clusters of such
tiny spheres. If you do not know the branch by sight, I must ask you
to smell or taste the bark. “Sassafras?” No, though the guess is not
surprising. It is spice-bush. The buds are flower-buds. The shrub is
one of our very early bloomers, and makes its preparations accordingly.
While flowers are still scarce enough to attract universal attention,
it is thickly covered with sessile or almost sessile yellow rosettes,
till it looks for all the world like the early-flowering cornel
(_Cornus Mas_), which blossoms about the same time in gardens. Seeing
these spice-bush buds, though January is still young, I can almost see
May-day; and when I snap the brittle stem and sniff the fresh wood, I
can almost believe that I have snapped off half a century from my life.
What a good and wholesome smell it is! Among the best of nature’s own.
Here is a poplar twig, with well-developed, shapely buds. I pull off
the outer coverings and lay bare a mass of woolly fibres, fine and
soft, within which the tender blossoms lie in germ. And next is a
willow stem. Already, though winter is no more than a fortnight old,
the “pussy” has begun to push off its dark coverlid, as if it were in
haste to be up and feel the sun. Yes, spring will soon be here, and the
willow proposes not to be caught napping.
These long, slender, cinnamon-colored, silky buds, like shoemakers’
awls for shape, are from a beech tree. The package is done up so
tightly and skillfully that my clumsy human fingers cannot undo it
without tearing it in pieces. Layer after layer I remove, taking all
pains, and here at the heart is the softest of vegetable silk. How did
the wood learn to secrete such delicacies, and to wrap them with such
miraculous security? Why could it not wait till spring, and save the
need of all this caution? I do not know. How should I? But I am glad of
every such vernal prophecy, as well as of every such proof of vegetable
intelligence. It would be strange if a beech tree could not do some
things better than you and I can. Every dog knows his own trick.
Next comes a dry, homely, crooked, blackish, dead-looking twig, the
slender divisions of which are tipped with short clusters of very
fine purplish buds, rich in color, but so small as readily to escape
notice. This I broke from a bush in a swampy place. It is _Leucothoë_,
a plant of special interest to me for personal reasons. Year after
year, as I turned the leaves of Gray’s Manual on one errand and
another, I read this romantic-sounding Greek name, and wondered what
kind of plant it stood for. Then, during a May visit to the mountains
of North Carolina, I came upon a shrub growing mile after mile along
roadsides and brooksides, loaded down, literally, with enormous crops
of sickishly sweet, white flower-clusters. At first I took it for some
species of _Andromeda_, but on bringing it to book found it to be
Leucothoë. I was delighted to see it. It is a satisfaction to have a
familiar name begin to mean something. Finally, a year or two later,
passing in winter through a bit of swamp where I had been accustomed
to wander as a child, with no thought of finding anything new (as if
there were not something new everywhere), I stopped before a bush
bearing purple buds and clusters of dry capsules. The capsules might
have been those of Andromeda, for aught I should have noticed, but the
buds had a novel appearance and told a different story. Again I betook
myself to the Manual, and lo! this bush, growing in the swamp that I
should have thought I knew better than any other in the world, turned
out to be another species--our only northern one--of Leucothoë. So I
might have fitted name and thing together long ago, if I had kept my
eyes open. As Hamlet said, “There’s the rub.” Keeping one’s eyes open
isn’t half so easy as it sounds. Really, the bush is one that nobody
except a botanist ever sees (which is the reason, doubtless, why it
has no vernacular name); or if here and there a man does see it, it
is sure to be in flowering time (in middle June), when he passes it
by without a second glance as “high-bush blueberry.” I am pleased to
have it growing on my present beat, and to give it a place here in my
collection of Minor Prophets.
How little the two (Leucothoë and blueberry) resemble each other at
this time of the year may be seen by comparing the stem I have been
talking about with the one lying next to it--a short twig, every
branchlet of which ends in a very bright, extremely handsome (if one
stops to regard it) pinkish globe. This is the high-bush blueberry in
its best winter estate. Every bud is like a jewel.
Only one branch remains to be spoken of, for I took but a small
handful: a dark-green--blackish-green--tarnished stem, the two branches
of which bear each a terminal bud of the size of a pea. This specimen
you will know at once by its odor, if you were ever happy enough to
dig sassafras roots, or to eat sassafras lozenges, such as used to
come--perhaps they do still--rolled up in paper, as bankers roll up
coins. “Sassafras lossengers,” we called them, and the shopkeeper (who
is living yet, and still “tending store” at ninety-odd) seemed never in
doubt as to what we meant. Each kind of lozenge, peppermint, cayenne,
checkerberry, and the rest, came always in paper of a certain color.
Can I be wrong in my recollection of the sassafras tint? I would soon
find out if I could go into the old store. I would lay five cents upon
the counter (the price used to be less than that, but it may have gone
up since my last purchase), and say, “A roll of sassafras lossengers.”
And I miss my guess, or the wrapper would be yellow.[3]
OLD COLONY BERRY PASTURES
The last holiday of the century found me in the place where I was born,
with weather made on purpose for out-of-door pleasures--warm, bright,
and still. A sudden inspiration took me. I would go to see the old
berry pastures--not all of them (the forenoon would hardly be long
enough for that), but two or three of the nearest, on opposite sides of
the same back road. It would be a kind of second boyhood.
As I traveled the road itself, past two or three houses that were not
there in the old time, two at least of the older wayside trees greeted
me with the season’s compliments. Or possibly it was I that greeted
them. In this kind of intercourse, it is hard to tell speaker from
hearer. We greeted each other, let us say, though they are the older,
and by good rights should have spoken first. They have held their own
exceedingly well, far better than the clerk who is writing about them,
and for anything that appears, bid fair to be hale and hearty at the
next century-mark.
One is a pear tree; none of your modern, high-bred, superfine,
French-named dwarfs, rather shrubs than trees, twenty of which
may grow, without crowding, in a scanty back garden, but a burly,
black-barked, stubby-branched, round-topped giant. It looks to-day
exactly as it did when my boyish legs first took me by it. In these
many years it has borne thousands of bushels of pears, all of which
must have served some use, I suppose, in the grand economy of things,
though I have no idea what. No man, woman, or child, I am reasonably
sure, ever had the hardihood to eat one. And still the tree holds up
its head and wears a brave, unashamed, undiscourageable look. Long may
it stand in its corner, a relic and remembrancer of Puritanic times.
The other is an apple tree, one of those beneficent creations, good
Samaritans among fruit trees, that bear a toothsome, early-ripening
crop, and spill a generous portion of it on the roadward side of the
wall. I remember it perfectly--the fruit, I mean--color, shape, and
flavor. Every year I see apples of the same name in the market, but
somehow I can never buy any that look or taste half so good as those
that I used in lucky moments to find here, waiting for me, in the
roadside grass.
Those were Old Testament times in New England. Gleanings belonged to
“the poor and the stranger.” Who could dispute our title? We believed
in special providences; and edible windfalls on the nigh side of the
fence were among the chiefest of them. Schoolboys of the present day, I
take for granted, are brought up under a different code. They would go
past such temptations with their hands in their pockets and without a
squint sideways. They apprehend no difference between “picking up” an
apple and stealing one. Such is the evolution of morality. The day of
the gleaner is past. Naomi and Ruth have become mythical personages, as
much so as Romulus and Remus.