embarrassment of riches,--of a mid-winter table balanced between such a
choice, or, better, balanced by the adoption of both, one at each end!
Nor would this be near telling the whole story. Excluding fur and
sticking to feather, we have a wide range beyond. The larger birds we
may begin on, very moderately, with crane-steak, a transverse section
of our stately but distant friend the sand-hill. That is the form in
which he is thought to appear to best advantage. By the time you have
circumvented him by circumscribing him in the gradually narrowing
circuit of a buggy,--for stalking him, unless in higher grass than is
common at this season, is but vexation of spirit,--you will feel vicious
enough to eat him in any shape. His brother, the beautiful white bugler,
you will hardly meet at dinner, he being the shyest of his kind. A
Canada goose--not the tough and fishy bird of the Northern coast, but
grain- and grass-fed from fledging-time--is tender, delicate, and
everyway presentable. From the back upper gallery that looks upon the
prairie you are likely to see a company or battalion of his brethren,
their long black necks and white ties "dressing" capitally in line, and
their invisible legs doing the goose-step as the inventors of that
classic manoeuvre ought to do it. This bird seems to affect the
_militaire_ in all his movements. What can be more regular than the
wedge, like that so common in tactical history, in which he begins his
march, moving in "a column of attack upon the pole"? Even when startled
and put to flight, he goes off smoothly and quietly, company-front. In
foraging he is strictly systematic, and never forgets to set sentinels.
We cannot fail to respect him while doing him the last honors. Of not
inferior claim is his prairie chum and remote cousin the mallard. They
are not often in close companionship, though I have seen a dozen and a
half of each rise from the border and the bosom of a pond forty yards
across,--one loving the open, and the other taking repose, if not food,
upon the water. That there should be ponds upon these prairies is as
striking to one accustomed to hill and dale as that so unpromising a
surface should so teem with life. The prairie is as flat as if cast like
plate-glass and rolled out,--only the table is slightly tilted toward
the Gulf at the rate of two or three hundred feet in a hundred miles. At
night you may see the head-light of an engine fifteen miles away, like
a low star that you wonder does not rise. It grows slowly in size, a
Sirius, a Venus, a moon, as though the earth had stopped rotating and
adopted a direct motion toward the heavenly bodies. Early on fine
mornings the horizon gets tired, as it were, of being suppressed, and
looms up in a mirage, with an outfit of imaged trees and hills reflected
in an imaginary lake,--a pictured protest of Nature against monotony.
There are local depressions, nevertheless, which you would not believe
in but for the shallow little ponds which fill them and which are
indicated from a distance at this season by the lead-colored grass that
veils them and conceals their glitter. And there are longer swells,
begotten of drainage, sometimes of eight or ten feet in a mile, which
deceive you, as you advance, into the expectation of a grand prospect
when once you shall have got to the top of them. That, practically, you
never do. Arrived at what seems to be the crest of a ridge, you see
nothing but more flat. The eye, in despair, gives, when you come in
sight of it, an inclination to the water. The pond-surface ceases to be
horizontal. The principle of gravitation stands contradicted
point-blank.
The most frequent vedette of these miniature lakes is the
heron,--usually the blue, sometimes the larger white, the latter a most
beautiful bird. Yet neither is common. Still rarer in such situations is
the bittern, the Timon of birds, the rushes being seldom high enough to
afford him the strict concealment he likes. The mallard has to be his
own sentinel, as a rule. He does not depend on these ponds for food,
and, like other wild creatures, he reserves his chief vigilance for
feeding-time. They are places of repose, at mid-day and at night, for
the ducks of this and two or three other species, notably the blue- and
green-winged teal, which at other times haunt the clumps of oak and
pecan that skirt the sparse streams and their summer-dry affluents,
where nuts and acorns in great variety, those of the live-oak being very
sweet, supply unfailing winter provision. The thickets of ilex that
shade off these wooded reaches into the treeless prairie are the resort
of many partridges. You are led back into the open ground by another
game-bird, the pinnated grouse, the widest ranger of its genus, but at
the North disappearing only less rapidly than the buffalo. As yet his
most destructive foe in this region is perhaps the hawk, although he is
raided from the timber by the opossum, raccoon, and three species of
cat, while on the open his nest has marked attractions for the skunk and
probably the coyote. He has survived these dumb discouragers so long,
and the heat at his proper season is so trying to his human foe, that he
may long find a refuge here and proudly lead forth his young Texans for
scores of Augusts. He and his family will often quietly walk off while
the panting pointer seeks the shade of the wagon and the gunner cools
off under the heavy felt sombrero that is here found to be the best
headgear for summer. A very moderate game-law, well executed, would
sustain this fine bird indefinitely in the struggle for existence. But
law of any kind seems a foreign idea on these sea-like primeval plains.
It is like thinking of a parliament in the Pleiocene, or of a
court-house on the Grand Banks.
Any transcendentalist who wishes to furbish up his philosophic furniture
will find this a good workshop for the purpose. There is ample room for
any school, positive or negative,--plenty of cloud-land for all
conceits. Kant could have picked up pure reason among the crowds of
simply reasoning creatures who have possessed the scene since long
before the brain of man was created. Covies of immemorial Thoreaus
bivouac under those hazy woods, and pre-glacial Emersons are circling
overhead. The problem of successfully living they have all solved. What
more have any of us done? The greatest good of the greatest number they
unpresumingly display as a practically triumphant principle; and the
greatest number is not by any means with them, any more than with us,
number one. Had it been, they would all have been extinct long ago.
Nature may be "red with tooth and claw," but not suicidally so. It is to
quite a peaceable, if not wholly loving, world that she invites us. And
just here we can see so much of it; we can study it so broadly and so
freely. Concord and Walden dwindle into the microscopic. It was under
precisely such a sun as this, in a warm, dry atmosphere, on a nearly
treeless soil, that the Stagyrite did all the thinking of sixty
generations. Could he have done it in an overcoat and muffler, with a
chronic catarrh?
If, impatient of a host of inarticulate instructors, we prefer communing
with our kind and falling back on human story, some of that, too, is at
hand. Half a century ago, to a year, a short string of forlorn and
forlorn-looking people crossed the prairie close by, from west to east,
from the Colorado to the Brazos. The head of it was Sam Houston's
"army," three or four hundred strong, with all its _matériel_ in one
wagon. The rest consisted of the débris of all the Anglo-American
settlements, women, children, cows, and what poor household stuff could
be moved. Slowly ferrying the Brazos, and as slowly making its way down
the left bank, picking up as it went the rest of the homesteads and some
more fighting-men, it turned to the right at the head of the estuary.
Then the little column, strengthened with some sea-borne supplies and
relieved of its wards, turned to face its pursuers. These were twice its
numbers, with four or five thousand reserves some days behind.
Generalship was given the go-by on both sides, the _cul-de-sac_ of San
Jacinto being closed at both ends. Thirty minutes of noise and smoke,
and the empire of Cortez and Montezuma was split in two. Clio nibbed
another quill, steel pens not having then been invented. The gray geese
who might have supplied it recomposed themselves on the prairie, and all
the rest of their feathered friends followed their example, as the
military interlude melted away and left them their ancient solitary
reign.
Of the feathered spectators of the scene we have episodically glanced
at, the most interested were those constant supervisors, the vultures.
Of these there are three species, one of which--the Mexican vulture--is
but an occasional visitor. The other two--the black vulture and the
turkey-buzzard--are monopolists in their peculiar line. They constitute
here, as generally throughout the warmer parts of the continent and its
islands, the recognized sanitary police. No law protects them, but they
do not need it. They are too useful not to command that popular sympathy
which is the higher law. The flocks and herds upon a thousand plains are
theirs. Every norther that freezes and every drought that starves some
of the wandering cattle and sheep brings to them provision. The
railroads also, not less than the winds of heaven, are their friends,
the fatal cow-catcher being an ever-busy caterer. The buzzards are, of
course, under such circumstances, warm advocates of internal improvement
and welcome the opening of every new railway. Their ardor in this
respect, however, has of late years been damped by the building of wire
fences along the track, an interference with vested rights and an
assault upon the hoary claims of infant industries against which in
their solemn assemblies they doubtless often condole with each other.
Unfortunately for their cause, they cannot lobby.
Somehow, there seems to be always a wag or clown among each group of
animals,--some one species in which the amusing or the grotesque is
prominent. Among these clownish fellows I should class the black
vulture, or john-crow. He is not a crow at all, but gets that name
probably because so historic a tribe as Corvus must have some
representative, and the real crow, so common at the North, is one of the
few birds that are not much seen in this quarter. John unites in his
ways at once fuss and business. He alternates oddly between bustle and
gravity. Seated stately and motionless for hours on a leafless tree, he
will suddenly, as if struck by a new idea, start off on a tour that
might have been dictated by telegram. He does not sail and circle like
his friend and comrade, never being distracted by soaring pretensions,
but goes straight to his object. His flight is a regular succession of
short flaps, with quiescent intervals between the series. The flaps are
usually four, sometimes five or six. I am sure he counts them. You have
seen a pursy gentleman in black hurrying along the street and tapping
his boot with a cane, as though keeping time. Fancy this gentleman in
the air, dressed in feathers, his coat-skirt sheared off alarmingly
short and square, and looking like a cherub in jet, all head and
wings,--although John is not exactly a cherub in his habits. A white
spot on each wing adds a bit of the harlequin to his style.
Were I to seek a "funny man" among the quadrupeds, I should name another
dweller of the Southwestern prairies, the jack-rabbit,--John II. let us
call him. Nobody ever gets quite accustomed to the preternatural ears of
this hare. In proportion they are to those of others of the Leporidæ
nearly what the ears of the mule are to those of the horse. When this
bit of bad drawing, as big as a fawn and weighing ten pounds or so,
jumps up before you and bounds away at railroad speed, he makes you rub
your eyes. You expect the apparition to disappear like other
apparitions, especially as it moves off with vast rapidity. But it does
not. As suddenly as it started it is transformed into a prong like an
immense letter V, projecting in perfect stillness from the grass a
hundred yards off. You advance, and the same proceeding is repeated.
Jack is obviously deep in guns, and knows the difference in power
between a muzzle- and a breech-loader, if he has not ascertained, indeed,
what number shot you have in your cartridge. He varies his distance
according to these contingencies. Only, he has not as yet learned to
gauge the greyhound: that dog is frequently kept for his benefit.
A special endowment of this immediate locality is a large and permanent
sheet of water, three or four miles by one, which bears, and deserves,
the name of Eagle Lake. For, though overhung by no cliffs or lofty
pines, it is far more the haunt of eagles, of both the bald and the gray
species, than most tarns possessing those appendages of the romantic.
Its dense fringe of fine trees, among them live-oaks a single one of
which would make the fortune of an average city park, can well spare the
Conifers. They are all hung with Spanish moss, a feature which conflicts
with the impression of lack of moisture conveyed by the light ashen
color of the bark and short annual growth of many of the smaller trees.
Here and there tiny inlets are overhung with undergrowth which supplies
a safe nesting-place to a multitude of birds of many kinds. The surface
of the lake I have never seen free from ducks of one species or another,
and generally of half a dozen. Almost the whole family, if we except the
canvas-back and the red-head, visit it at one or another period. One
item in their bill of fare is the nut of the water-lily, the receptacles
of which, resembling the rose of a watering-pot, dot the shallows in
great quantity. The green, cable-like roots of this plant are afloat,
forming at some points heavy windrows. Some say they are torn up from
the bottom by the alligators; but it is more probable that they are
loosened and broken by the continual tugging of the divers. The
alligators are not vegetarians, and they are not using their snouts much
at this season. The young shoots of the Nymphæa are doubtless tempting
food, as those of the Vallisneria are on the Chesapeake and the North
Carolina sounds. Sustenance may be drawn also from the roots of the
rushes and reeds which cover with their yellow stems and leaves many
acres of the lake, and are thronged now by several species of small
birds.
Hawks, of course, are always in sight, and that in astonishing variety,
from the osprey down to two or three varieties of the sparrow-hawk. A
monograph on the Raptores of Eagle Lake would be a most comprehensive
work. The osprey, notwithstanding the abundance of his scaly prey, is
not common: probably the field is too limited for him. Ducks are the
attraction of the other large species. In summer, ducks are rather
secondary among the water-birds, the ibis, water-turkey, and flamingo
imparting a tropical character to the scene that somewhat obscures the
more familiar forms. There is even a survival here of birds that have
nearly disappeared from the American fauna,--the paroquet, once so
common in the Mississippi Valley as far north as the Ohio, being
sometimes seen, and, if I mistake not, a second species of humming-bird
straying north by way of Mexico.
From where we stand, under a canopy of rich green leaves, looking out
upon the sunny water through a banian-like colonnade of mighty trunks
and hanging vines, the pearly moss tempering the light like jalousies,
summer seems but a relative idea. Fly-catchers flit back and forth,
barn-swallows and sand-martins skim the lake, and an occasional splash
or ripple at our feet shows that humbler life is getting astir. The
highest life, or what modest man calls such, we have all to ourselves.
Yet not quite; for there is visible yonder, beneath the outer tip of a
live-oak which we have found to stretch and droop twenty-four paces from
the seven-foot trunk, a little fleet of canoes. They belong to the
professional fisherman whose too tarry nets are quite an encumbrance
for some yards of the sandy beach, and whose well may be noticed about a
rifle-shot out from the shore. More than that, though Piscator is
absent, some one is inspecting his boats. In fact,--and it _is simple
fact_, and I am not smuggling in a bit of padding in the shape of
sentiment,--two persons become perceptible, both with their backs
towards us, now and studiedly all the time. One, a man, chooses a boat
after trying several, and, with similar show of unavoidable delay, is
cushioning the seats with carefully-arranged moss in four times the
necessary quantity. During this absorbing process he rips one of his
cuffs, or tears off a button from it, or smears it with the tar that
besets the boat and its oars. This calamity supplies the lady, a neat
young person, with a pretext for occupation, and she uses it to the
fullest and most affectionate extent. It is growing late, and unless we
relieve the couple of our obviously detected presence we shall deprive
them of their Sunday-afternoon row. That it is a row with the stream we
find ten days later, when their wedding becomes the sensation of the
little village.
The old, old story! how pat it comes in! How could it have failed to
come in, when the talk is of birds?
EDWARD C. BRUCE.
THE FERRYMAN'S FEE.
I.
"I am going," said the professor to his friend Miss Eldridge, "to marry
a young woman whose mind I can mould."
Somebody was uncharitable enough to say that he couldn't possibly make
it any mouldier than his own. This was a slander. In the high dry Greek
atmosphere which surrounded and enclosed his mind, mould, which requires
dampness before it can exist, was an impossibility.
When an engagement is announced, it is almost invariably followed by one
question, with a variable termination. The dear five hundred friends
exclaim, with uplifted hands,--
"What could have possessed him," or "her"?
In the present case the latter termination was adopted, with but one
dissenting voice: Miss Christina Eldridge said, in low, shocked tones,
"Alas that a man of his simply colossal mind should have been ensnared
by a pretty face, whose soulless beauty will depart in a few short
years!"
The professor would have been very indignant had any one ventured to
suggest to him that the pretty face had anything to do with it. He
imagined himself entirely above and beyond such flimsy considerations.
Yet it is sadly doubtful whether an example in long division, on a
smeared slate, brought to him with tears and faltering accents by Miss
Christina, would have produced the effect which followed when Miss
Rosamond May betrayed her shameful ignorance by handing him the slate
and saying forlornly, "I've done it seven times, and it comes out
differently wrong every time. Can _you_ see what's the matter?" and two
wet blue eyes looked into his through his spectacles, with an expression
which said plainly, "You are my last and only hope."
She was standing by the massive marble-topped table which was the
central feature of the parlor of their boarding-house. One plump
hand--with dimples where the knuckles should have been--rested upon the
unresponsive marble, in the other she held the slate. She was a teacher
of some of the lowest classes in Miss Christina Eldridge's academy for
young ladies, and only Miss Christina knew the almost fathomless depths
of her ignorance.
But her father had been a professor, and a widower; and shortly before
he died he had manifested an appreciation of the stately principal
which, but for his untimely death,--he was only seventy,--might have
expanded into "that perfect union of souls" for which her disciplined
heart secretly pined.
So when it was first whispered, and then exclaimed, that Professor May
had left nothing, absolutely nothing, for his daughter but a very small
life-insurance premium and the furniture of their rented house, with a
little old-fashioned jewelry and silverware of the smallest possible
intrinsic value, Miss Christina called upon Miss May and told her that,
if she would accept it, there was a vacancy in the academy, with a
salary of two hundred dollars a year and board, but not lodging.
"And if you remain with me, my dear, as I hope you will, I can give you
a room next year, after the new wing is added; and, meanwhile, I know of
a vacant room, at two dollars a week, in a highly-respectable
lodging-house."
"You are very kind," replied Rosamond, in a quivering voice. "But indeed
I am afraid I don't know enough to teach even the very little girls. So
I'm afraid you'd better get somebody else. Don't you think you had?"
"No," said Miss Christina, patting the useless little hand which lay on
her lap. "You will only be obliged to hear spelling- and reading-lessons,
and teach the class of little girls who have not gone beyond the first
four rules of arithmetic, and perhaps you will help them to play on
their holidays: you could impart an element of refinement to their
recreations more readily than an older teacher could."
"Is _that_ all?" exclaimed Rosamond, almost cheerfully. "Oh, I can
easily do that much. I love little girls. I will be so good to all the
homesick ones. When shall I come?"
"As soon as you can, my dear," replied Miss Christina.
In a few weeks Rosamond had settled into the routine of her new
life,--going every morning to the academy, where she spent the day in
hearing lessons, binding up broken hearts, playing heartily with her
scholars in the intermissions, and being idolized by them in each of her
various capacities. She did not forget her father, but it was impossible
for her sweet and childlike nature to remain in mourning long.
Professor Silex had felt a profound pity for his old friend's daughter,
and had come down out of the clouds long enough to express it in
scholarly terms and to offer any assistance in his power. They met
sometimes on the stairs and in the dreary parlor, and his eyes beamed
with such a friendly light upon her over the top of his spectacles that
she began to tell him her small troubles and to ask his advice in a
manner which sometimes completely took his breath away. He had never had
a sister, his mother died before his remembrance, and he had been
brought up by two elderly aunts. Fancy, then, his consternation when he
was suddenly and beseechingly asked, "Oh, Professor Silex, _would_ you
get a little felt bonnet, if you were me, or one of those lovely
wide-brimmed beaver hats? The hats are a dollar more; but they _are_ so
lovely and so becoming!"
"My dear child," stammered the professor, "have you no female friend
with whom you can consult? I am profoundly ignorant. Miss Eldridge--"
"She says to get the felt," pouted the dear child; "just because it's
cheaper. And papa used always to advise me, when I asked him, to get
what I liked best." The blue eyes filled, as they still did at the
mention of her father.
"My dear," said the professor hurriedly,--they were standing on the
first landing, and he heard the feet of students coming down the
stairs,--"I should advise you, by all means, to get the--the one you
like best. Excuse my haste, but I--I have a class."
She was wearing the beaver when she next met him, and she beamed with
smiles as she called his attention to it. He looked at her more seeingly
than he had yet done, and a feeling like a very slight electric shock
penetrated his brain.
"See!" she cried gayly. "It _is_ becoming, isn't it?"
"It is, indeed," he answered cordially. "And I should think it would be
quite--quite warm,--there is so much of it, and it looks so soft."
"I told Miss Eldridge you advised me to get it," continued she
triumphantly, "and she didn't say another word."
The professor was aghast. He felt a warm wave stealing over his face.
This must be stopped, and at once. Fancy his class, his brother
professors, getting hold of such a rare bit of gossip! But he would not
hurt her feelings. She was so young, so innocent, and her frank blue
eyes were so like those of his dead friend.
"My child," he said softly, "you honor me by your confidence; but may
I--might I ask you, when you seek my advice upon subjects--ah--not
congruous to my age and profession, not to repeat the result of our
conferences? With thoughtless people it might in some slight measure be
considered derogatory to my professional dignity. Not that I think it
so," he hastily added. "All that concerns you is of great, of heartfelt
interest to me."
"I didn't tell anybody but Miss Eldridge," said the culprit penitently;
"and I know she won't repeat it; and I'll never do so any more, if
you'll let me come to you with my foolish little troubles. It seems
something like having papa again."
Now, why this touching tribute should have irritated the professor who
can say? He was startled, shocked, at the irritation, and he strove to
banish all trace of it from his voice and manner as he said, gravely and
kindly, "Continue to come to me with your troubles, my dear, if I can
afford you either help or comfort."
A few days passed, and she waylaid him again. Her pretty face was pale,
and her soft yellow hair was pushed back from her forehead, showing the
blue veins in her temples.
"I don't know what I shall do," she said, in a troubled voice. "Those
children have caught up with me in arithmetic, and by next week they'll
be ahead of me; and I feel as if I oughtn't to take Miss Eldridge's
money if I can't do all she engaged me for. What would _you_ do if you
were me?"
"Could you not prepare yourself by study, and so keep in advance of your
little pupils?" he inquired kindly.
"I don't believe I could," she replied despondently. "I tried to do the
sums that came next, last night, and they wouldn't come right, all I
could do; and I got a headache besides."
"I have an hour to spare," said the professor, pulling out his watch:
"perhaps, if you will bring me your book and slate, I can elucidate the
rule which is perplexing you."
"Oh, will you _really_?" she exclaimed, a radiant smile lighting up her
troubled face. "I'll bring them right away. How kind, how _very_ kind
you are, to bother with my sums, when you have so much Greek in your
head!" And, obeying an impulse, as she so often did, she caught his hand
in both her own and kissed it heartily. Then she skimmed across the
parlor, and he heard her child's voice "lilting lightly up the" stairs
as he stood--in a position suggestive of Mrs. Jarley's wax-works--gazing
fixedly at the hand which she had kissed.
"She regards me as a father," he said to himself severely. "Am I going
mad? Or becoming childish? No; I am only sixty. But, even if it were
possible, it would be base, unmanly, to take advantage of her
loneliness, her gratitude. No, I will be firm."
So, when the offending "example" was handed to him, with the
above-quoted touching statement as to its total depravity, he looked
only at the slate. Gently and patiently, as if to a little child, he
pointed out the errors and expounded the rule, amply rewarded by her
joyful exclamation, "Oh, I see _exactly_ how it's done, now! You do
explain things beautifully. I really think I could have learned a good
deal if I'd had a teacher like you when I went to school."
"Come to me whenever your lessons perplex you, my dear," he answered,
still looking at the slate; "come freely, as if--as if I were your
father."