Friday, October 21, was observed by Harvard University as a
holiday,—Columbus, while hunting for something else, having on that day,
four hundred years ago, rediscovered America for the Europeans. On the
same day, four hundred years ago, the Americans discovered Columbus, a
weary and worn mariner, nearing the shore in a small and feebly-rigged
ship. At that time America was much more of a boon to the explorer than
he seemed likely to be to the continent.
I left Cambridge about the time the sun reached it, and gained the
valley of the Bearcamp at 1 P. M. There are some days in the year which
seem to have happened upon the wrong calendar day. They are too cold or
too warm to keep company with the days which go before and after. This
was not one of them. It was a model late October day, with clear air, a
rushing wind, dark blue-gray clouds moving fast across a pale blue sky,
leaves flying before the wind, and with ruffled water full of cold
lights, though in spots increasing in its reflections the blue of the
sky. Marvelous colors were spread upon the face of the meadows, and
crept up the sides of the hills. The world was in gay attire, gayer even
than the towns this day decked out in honor of the Genoese.
Gazing out of the train window, I have seen the Sandwich range from afar
over the melting greens of spring, the rich verdure of summer, and the
cold, still snow of winter. To-day I saw it framed in russet and
carmine,—the colors of the oak-clad hills of Wakefield. The peak of
Chocorua was capped by a dark slate-colored cloud from which rain seemed
to be falling. Behind or above the other mountains of the range the same
threatening vapors hung. As the train sped onward, past Ossipee Lake,
over the Bearcamp, and up to the West Ossipee station, the clouds rolled
away and a flood of clear sunlight poured its revealing rays into the
hidden colors of the distant forests. From cold, dark masses in which
black rocks were no darker than gloomy groves, the mountains’ sides
suddenly became aglow with warm tones. The far-reaching view suggested a
painter’s palette, upon which he had been daubing his colors from the
tubes. Here he laid on a mass of dark green, there crimson, and next to
it pale yellow. Then buff and orange, scarlet and blood-red pleased him,
and he rubbed them upon spare areas. Cobalt and ultramarine added here
and there, with now and then a dash of silvery white or a broad band of
burnt sienna, served to make the scarlets more intense and the yellows
more aggressive.
Driving in an open wagon from West Ossipee to the Chocorua House, I
found a heavy overcoat, warm gloves, and a fur robe essential to
comfort, especially on coming from the steam-heated cars into the racing
northwest wind. As we sped through groves and across meadows, my eyes
devoured the wonderful coloring of all that had once been green. I could
see nothing else, think of nothing else. The contrast to our summer
coloring could not have been much sharper if I had been transported to
the sanguinary groves and pastures of the red planet Mars. Even the
birds which rose from the roadside and whirled away before the wind
seemed less interesting, so absorbing were the marvels of coloring in
foliage from ancient oak to tender grasses. A flock of birds seemed to
dance through the sunlight across the road, yet when I looked after them
they were only beech leaves hurried along by the wind. A cloud of
leaves, picked up by an eddy of the air and tossed high above the trees,
suddenly became bluebirds and sparrows speeding away from the wagon
across the pasture. Crows, few in number, and unusually wary, were not
so easily mistaken for leaves, nor were the robins, which occasionally
rose in flocks from the grass and sought the branches of leafless maples
or butternuts.
After a hasty dinner I left the hotel and crossed field and copse to the
outlet of the Chocorua lakes. The third lake, with its deep, dark water
and its grove of lofty white pines shutting it in from distant views, is
one of the most daintily lovely nooks in this region of beauty and
grandeur. Crows love the dark pines, wild ducks float in their shadows,
and many a mink has been trapped at the end of the dam. I found no life
stirring in woods or water, so stepping cautiously along the mouldering
logs of the dam, I gained the farther shore and crossed a broad,
rock-strewn pasture, once covered by a growth of lofty pines. I know not
how many years ago they fell or were felled, but this I do know, that
scores of pitch-soaked knots are hidden in their ruins and among the
ferns and bushes which have sprung from the decaying stumps. Many is the
winter evening in town that I have sat by the fireside and gazed into
the red flame of the blazing “light-wood” gathered in happy October days
from this old pasture. As the pitch grew hot and burst through the dry
wood, whining and whistling, blowing out long jets of white smoke and
slender tongues of flame, its voice and warmth have carried me back in
spirit to the brown beds of fern, the busy chipmunks under the old oak
in the wall, or to the mayflowers gathered in spring from the edges of
the lingering snow-banks. I passed a ledge of rocks on which I had seen
a woodchuck sunning himself last August, and I recalled how he had
squeezed himself into a little cave in the ledge only to find me peering
in after him, and quite able to reach him with a stick. His method of
escape from me was characteristic. Grunting and snarling, he spent half
his time in threatening to come out and attack me, and the other half in
undermining himself and poking the earth with his nose into the hole
through which I was looking. In five minutes he had completely covered
the opening and sunk his plump body out of reach of my probe. Later in
the season I had a young woodchuck which had been partly tamed escape
from captivity by gnawing his way through a thick pine board. The same
individual repeatedly climbed up six feet from the floor on the coarse
wire netting which formed the front of his cage, so that in future I
shall not think it strange if I see a woodchuck climb a tree. His
eccentricity also carried him to the point of devouring nearly a third
of the carcass of a freshly-killed red squirrel, although an abundance
of clover and young vegetables were close at hand ready for his dinner.
My walk took me up the western side of the lake to my own land and
cottage. Robins rose from the ground in small flocks, a few tree
sparrows and juncos flew from a plowed field by the wall, and two crows
were feeding on swampy ground by a brook. It was to them that the land
really belonged, not to me,—a waif from the city. So a flock of
white-throats thought, as I disturbed them feeding upon the chaff at the
back door of my barn. They flew into a bush on which a few dry leaves
swung. While still watching them, as I supposed, I discovered that they
had vanished, the wagging leaves alone remaining. In the orchard a few
red apples hung, and gleamed like polished stones. One which grew upon a
wild tree in the edge of the wood swung near the ground, and sharp
little teeth had bitten out pieces from its side. Some of the fruit
which lay upon the ground had been gnawed away until its seeds could be
reached. Man eats the pulp and throws away the seeds, the mice and
squirrels waste the pericarp solely to gain the seeds. Perhaps in this
case man would have thrown away both apple and seeds had he tasted the
bitter, wild fruit.
The lake was lower by a foot than I had ever before seen it in the
autumn. In August it had washed the bushes on its dikes; now a yard or
more of sand tempted a stroller to follow its fair rim past wood and
meadow. Along my shore of the lake the natural dike is in places fully
seven feet high. It has been made during the centuries by the “thrust”
of the ice which results from the expansion of the ice-field by day
following its contraction by night. On a sandy shore the expanding ice
pushes up a little ridge of silt, and works it higher and higher as the
ice mass rises during the winter. If the edge of the ice meets an
obstacle, it is apt to break at a foot or more from the shore, and the
pieces, still carrying their load of gravel, are shoved up the bank to
its top, until, as years roll by, the dike is made too high to receive
further additions.
[Illustration: TWILIGHT ON THE LAKE]
The lake in summer is certain to be stirring with life. Insects upon and
over the water, fish, frogs, birds, muskrats, and often large animals
are in sight and moving both by day and by night. Now, as the waning sun
grew pale behind the birches, no living creature moved. The yellow
leaves drifted out upon the breeze, and kept on drifting across the
ruffled water. Nothing cared where they drifted. They were dead, and
just then all the world seemed full of falling, drifting leaves, with no
one to notice them or care for them. Were they to blame for the feeling
of sadness which crept over me as the sun went down and the first chill
of night came into the air? Or was it the absence of those who might,
had they been by the lake, have enjoyed the placid twilight with me? No
lights gleamed behind the closed blinds of my home, no fire crackled
upon the hearth. Those whom I loved were far away in the city. Leaves
were falling in the city, birds had fled from it as well as from the
mountains. Chilly night had fallen there too, and with it came, not the
sweetness of clear streams and pine groves, but the foul breath of the
Charles and of Alewife Brook, open sewers of filthy towns. No, it was
not the sadness of the season or the influence of drifting leaves which
cast a little shadow over my enjoyment of the exquisite scene before me.
It was regret at being alone in its presence and of having to leave it
so soon in favor of desk and drudgery.
At ten minutes past five, planets sparkled in the silvery sky, yet a
mile away the colors of oaks and poplars still burned their way to me
through the clear air. As I walked back to the hotel, I noticed more
clearly the number of trees which had lost their leaves. By daylight
they were inconspicuous, flanked and backed as they had been by
evergreens and trees full of showy color. Now they reared their skeleton
arms against the sky, making some parts of the way seem as desolate as
in winter. Many of the goldenrods, asters, and immortelles contributed
to the wintriness of the scene, for only dry white phantoms of their
once cheerful flowers remained upon their stalks. The soft air with only
a trace of cold in it belied these signs of winter, and so did the
occasional note of a locust. From the little rustic bridge between the
large and second lakes, the evening view of the mountains was
bewitching. If a hermit thrush could have sung even one phrase of his
holy music, I might have felt satisfied; but no bird was there to sing,
and only the waves lapping upon the pebbles and the breeze sighing in
the pines broke the silence of the starlit night. A leaf came sailing
down the lake and passed under the bridge. Its little life as a green
leaf was over. It had served the tree which bore it, and now its parched
body was given to the stream to be borne away wherever wind and current
decided. Was it, then, dead for all time? Ask this of the coal which
glows in the grate, the oil which burns in the lamp, or the mayflower
whose roots spread through the leaf mould in the forest. Where was this
leaf a year ago, or a century ago? As certainly as the parts of this
leaf have endured thus far, so certainly will they continue to endure in
ages to come. It seems equally sure that if there is a something in me
which will not and cannot in time be made into leaves to wither and go
down-stream with the wind, then that something will necessarily have as
good a chance as the leaf to go down a stream of its own and bring up
safely where it can be used again in endless cycles.
The voices of young chickens awoke me next morning, and mingling with
their melancholy peeping came the wailing of a northeast wind as it
struggled through a window crack. Bed was warm and my watch said it was
only six o’clock. I peeped through my blinds and saw that the piazza
roof seemed to be shining with rain. Nothing but the momentum of a
previous determination to open my shutters led my finger to press the
snap and let the wind swing the blind from me; for by the dismal shining
of the rain my mind had been completely robbed of any wish to see the
sky. The blind slammed against the clapboards and a bewildering sea of
color surged across my vision. Instead of a waste of gray mist and dull
wet field, I saw six mountains set against a silver sky; and rolling
from them towards me, line after line of wave-like wooded ridges and
pasture slopes, each more brilliant in coloring than the last. The
sunlight was just touching a solitary cloud which floated feather-like
above Paugus, and a delicate sea-shell pink suffused it. Some of the
same radiance fell upon the granite peak of Chocorua, floated over the
highest ridges of spruce-hung Paugus and Passaconaway, warmed the naked
shoulder of Whiteface, and touched even the dark head of the Sandwich
Dome rising from the Pemigewasset forests. The flanks of these mountains
and the whole of Mount Whittier, which rose in the southwest, were
violet. A moment before they might have been dark purple, but now the
rosy rays of dawn were stealing down them swiftly. I had scarcely time
to note the wealth of suppressed color which lay upon the wave-like
hills between me and the mountains, or to spring to my north window,
fling its blinds wide open, and see the lake so ruffled by the wind and
so hidden from the coming dawn as to be only the quicksilver side of the
mirror, before the sunlight began creeping down the mountain-sides.
It is a pretty sight in the twilight or darkness to see a rosy edge of
flame play along the margin of a sheet of burning paper, slowly
devouring it. Some parts of the paper burn more brightly than others,
but the whole line of advancing fire is beautiful and animating. So it
was with the line of sunlight slowly passing from the rosy crests of the
high mountains, downward, with even march across their flanks, their
projecting spurs, then the nearer hills, the lake, and river hollow, and
finally over the great reach of woods and field nearest to me. In summer
nearly the whole of this wide landscape is green or grayish green. In
winter it is white, grayish brown, and dark green. Early autumn dots the
woods with vivid points of scarlet and gold which stand out sharply from
the mass of green; but as the sunlight crept downward over this late
October foliage the prevailing color, which glowed forth full of
strength, warmth, and meaning, was red,—the red of dregs of wine, of
iron rust, of sleek kine, of blood. Intermingled with it were bits of
golden or of sulphur yellow, marking birches and poplars, and in the
pastures a few maples late in turning blazed with fiery scarlet as their
fellows had weeks earlier.
The warmest of the color came from the oaks, but the beeches supported
them with generous pigments, and so did the masses of blackberry vines,
choke-cherry and huckleberry bushes, and other small shrubs which had
turned crimson, red, or madder-brown under the October sun. Sweet-fern
bushes, brakes, ferns, pine needles, many of the grasses, and most of
the fallen leaves constituting the greater part of the earth’s carpet,
answered the sun’s greeting by showing broad expanses of brown, ranging
from burnt umber to dark straw color.
Near the lake were many pines, and as the light reached them they seemed
to grow higher, broader, nearer, and to shed into the surrounding air
something of their steadfastness and strength. They change not, falter
not, fail not, come what may to their deciduous neighbors. In this
northern land they are a symbol of constancy and faith. No one can look
at a pine-tree in winter without knowing that spring will come again in
due time. The lake itself soon shared in the flood of color brought out
by the sun. Most of its surface was ruffled by the breeze, but at points
where the high pines sheltered the water and left it rippleless, the
mountain-sides mirrored themselves, and the reflection was red like
wine.
As the sun rose higher above the hill behind me, and cast its rays
against the west, more and more from above, and less from a level, the
colors in the landscape became less vivid, and leafless trees, birch
trunks, and softer tints in general, blended with the maroons and
browns, toning them down and flattening them, until the prevailing
coloring on the mountain slopes became like the bloom on the cheek of a
plum; and even the brighter, stronger tints in the nearer view grew
softer and dimmer.
After breakfast I climbed the ridge behind the Chocorua House and sought
a small beech grove on its crest. In the pasture one of the hawkweeds,
two goldenrods, autumn buttercups, yarrow, the red and the white clover
were still in bloom, sparingly, of course, and only in warm corners, but
still clinging bravely to sunlight and life. Crickets and small green
locusts were active and noisy. They frequented hollows in the pasture
surface, where beech leaves had blown and lodged among the dry and
matted fern fronds. Lying in one of these hollows, which made a warm dry
cradle, I watched the locusts hopping from leaf to leaf, crawling along
the warm faces of lichen-crusted boulders, and now and then working
their bent legs up and down, while their fine, strident music fretted
upon my ear. Some were green, some brown, both large and small, some
almost buff, tiny, and very agile. They were not the only insects
enjoying the sunlight, for spiders, house-flies, now and then a bee,
small, gauzy-winged flies, and many a queer and, to me, nameless thing,
with nervous antennæ, passed that way by wing or foot. At a spring in
the woods where I drank of icy water, countless hosts of springtails or
bristletails skipped, in sprightly humor, over the leaves and the
surface of the pool. About noon I saw a dragonfly dart past, and later a
solitary ant crawl slowly across a patch of sand. No butterflies came to
me, yet they were still abundant in Cambridge.
There was no chill in the air which surged over the hilltop. It was soft
and caressing, yet so cool that thick clothing or constant exercise was
needed to keep warm. Its perfect dryness made it seem less cool than it
really was. The sky was wonderfully blue, and it lent its marvelous
color to the lake. I have a friend who says that March water is bluer
than any other. It certainly carries its blueness straighter into the
heart than any other, but as I looked at Chocorua Lake from the hilltop
it seemed to me that it could not be any bluer than it was, framed in
glossy pines on the one hand, and in golden brown and wine color on the
other. The wind was rough with the lake this morning. Striking it
suddenly at the far north end, near where my well-loved home stands
silent and deserted in the old orchard, it darkened the clear blue into
angry flaw-lines and hurried them down the long mile towards the bridge,
against which it hurled them in white-capped waves. I laughed as I
watched one of the white-edged squalls pass down the length of the lake,
for it reminded me of a day in mid-winter when I attempted to cross the
lake near its middle, carrying my pet owl “Puffy” perched upon my
gun-barrel. A squall came over the white ice, bearing stinging snow-dust
in its van; it caught Puffy from his perch and set him down upon the ice
with feet helplessly spread, and then as he opened his wings and tail
and struggled in the breeze, it spun him southward, sliding and rolling,
poor wisp of feathers that he was, until he was landed, more dead than
alive, in the woods on the southern shore.
The pines below my breezy hilltop tempted me by their music into their
aisles. Under them was spread the new carpet of their needles, dry,
warm, and tempting as a couch of eiderdown. The wind sang in their tops,
oh so sweetly, and it took me back to the moment in my earliest
childhood when I was first conscious of that soft, soothing music. I do
not know when it was, nor where it was, nor how young I may have been,
but I can recall as from an almost infinite distance the memory of a
sudden feeling of happiness at hearing the voice of the pines, and
knowing that it was something kind and soothing. If we are in tune with
Nature, all her music can find a way into the heart and satisfy
something there which yearns for it, and never can be wholly happy
without it. The man who trembles at thunder is more to be pitied than
the poor Esquimau who was frightened the other day by the crash of
orchestral music at a Boston theatre.
While I listened to the pines a chickadee sang his phœbe-note. It was
but once, but it told of his happiness as he bustled about in the dark
pine wood from which warbler and vireo had departed, and upon which
before many days the first snows of winter are to fall. Brave little
titmice! they are among the sturdiest of New England’s sons.
In the heart of the pines stands a house. I well remember the gray
autumn morning when three of us, on a Thanksgiving holiday, staked out
its foundation lines in the thin snow and drifted leaves. We tramped
back and forth among the trees, now higher, now lower, then a little to
the left, then more to the right. The peak of Chocorua must clear those
monster pines; that bunch of low pines must be left low enough to give a
free view of the large lake, and finally the young trees rising on the
left must not on any account cover the charming glimpse of the third
lake with its grove. At last we settled the spot, and drove our first
stakes, fingered the long brass tape and drove more stakes. Our hands,
ears, and noses were cold, but it was rare sport settling just where
that new home should be planted among the singing pines.
[Illustration: CHOCORUA AND DR. CHADWICK’S PINES]
To this house, deserted like my own sunny cottage, I took my way.
Ascending its steps, I stood within its lofty, granite-walled piazza, as
romantic a spot, with its three arched openings facing westward, as a
screened loggia overlooking fair Maggiore’s azure waves. High above and
out of sight of the road, embowered in the forest, and with the very
essence of the exquisite Chocorua landscape framed in its arches, this
house might well attract me and draw me, even from the singing pines, to
linger the rest of the forenoon above its terraces. Bees and locusts
made music in the sunlight, flaming geraniums bloomed at the foot of the
castle wall, the perfume of sweet peas still in full flower hung lightly
in the air, and upon one of the stone columns of the arches,
morning-glories, unharmed by the several frosts which had wrought havoc
with other tender plants, turned their filmy blossoms towards the sun.
Society with its present habits is to blame for the desertion of such a
home as this on such a day as this, when Nature is at her loveliest. Why
is it that all New England which has brains, money, or philanthropy
thinks the city the one proper sphere for life in all save a few weeks
given grudgingly to rest? The cities are too large, too rich in human
forces. They are debasing our New England stock, draining away the best
of our vitality in their too nervous life. If a third of their
population could be sown into the fallow places in the hill country,
their own competition would become a less fatal flame, and the country
districts, instead of steadily degenerating in physical, moral, and
intellectual tone, would again become prolific in healthy men and women.
So far as I know, the word “moor” is not applied to any part of our New
England scenery; yet there are dry, comparatively treeless uplands,
wind-swept and dotted with bogs which closely resemble English moorland.
I climbed to the level of one early in the afternoon and strolled along
its rough surface. At the first bit of bog that I struck a wood-frog
jumped across the path. He was listless, and made but short leaps. When
I followed him he plunged beneath a log which lay in the cold mud.
Beyond, on dry ground, a grouse rose noisily from low cover and flew far
before going out of sight. As I crossed some stony ground a mouse ran
from me and hid between two boulders. Blocking both entrances to his
hiding-place with my feet, I tilted one rock away from the other. The
mouse darted first towards one of my feet and then towards the other. He
dared not cross either, for I kept them moving. So he remained trembling
in the middle. He was _Hesperomys_, the deer mouse, big-eyed and
white-footed. I left him unharmed.
Following the edge of my moor, I came to a little glen which cut deeply
into its side. A few acres of bog fed a little brook that passed through
the glen on its way to the river. The ravine was heavily wooded, mainly
with tall and unusually slender beeches. Descending into this grove was
like entering the halo which the sunlight of Paris, shining through
golden-tinted glass, casts around the tomb of Napoleon in the chapel of
the Hôtel des Invalides. The rushing of the wind in the dry leaves
filled the glen with sweet, soothing sounds; the sun warmed it and
suffused it with radiance; and a deep bed of beech leaves gathered in a
hollow offered a couch too tempting to be passed by. Every sense was
gratified in this abode of music and color, for a faint perfume came
from the leaves, telling of ripening and the fulfillment of nature’s
purposes. At ease in the drifted leaves, I watched the tree-tops bending
before the gusts. One moment the golden roof of foliage concealed the
sky; the next, as every lofty head inclined, wide areas of distant ether
appeared, only to vanish again under the rhythmic movement of the trees.
The gusts kept the air well filled with falling, fluttering fragments of
the golden roof. Hundreds of leaves were often in the air at once,
parting company from hundreds of thousands still upon the branches, but
going to join legions already on the ground, waiting there the soft
tyranny of the snow.
In the midst of the beeches stood a lofty hemlock. The owner of this
wood had chosen it for his castle. About thirty feet from the ground at
a point where several limbs diverged from the main trunk a nest was
securely fixed. Perhaps an inexperienced eye would have taken it for a
bird’s nest. It may have been a bird’s nest originally. Now the mass of
dead beech leaves heaped upon it and woven into its fabric, making it a
conspicuous object from every point of view, proclaimed it to be the
home of a gray squirrel. Winds may blow, and rain, hail, and snow fall,
but that nest will rest secure against the hemlock’s trunk, under the
thatched roof of hemlock branches. Early in September I found a new nest
of this kind in a large beech-tree, and upon opening it made a
discovery. The compressed green beech leaves gave out a strong, aromatic
odor which I at once recognized as one of which I had often obtained
whiffs in walking through the beech woods, but which I never had been
able to assign to any flower or shrub.
In the lulls between the wind’s gusts I could hear the tinkling of a
brook at the bottom of the glen. Peering into the gloom below, where
hemlock bushes overshadowed the stream’s bed, I sought for a gleam of
water. Not a drop was to be seen. I descended, following the sound of
the falling drops, and came to a perpendicular ledge at the upper end of
the ravine. There was no mistaking the direction of the music; it came
from the face of the rocks and the pile of débris at its bottom. Still
not a drop of water could be seen. The falling beech leaves had
completely covered brook and fall, pool and rock, but behind their veil
the water went on with its singing. It will do the same, brave little
rill! when snow covers the leaves and ice forms above and below the
snow. The sweet jingling notes will be muffled, but they will be sung
all the same.
Of course I drank from the brook, sweeping away the encumbering leaves
from the top of the fall to get the water just where it rushed most
swiftly. Not to drink from a New Hampshire brook is almost as much of a
slight as not to bow to a friend, or not to kiss a little child when she
lifts her face for the good-night caress which she thinks all the world
is ready and worthy to give to little children. Refreshed, I clambered
up the other side of the glen and regained the open moorland, and the
glorious, rushing wind. Across the valley the old river terraces stood
out as sharply as steps cut in the face of the hill. To have cut those
fair outlines there must have been more water flowing out of Chocorua
lakes in the olden time than flows from them now. Perhaps in those days
Ossipee Lake washed these very terraces.
Coming to another deep cleft in the side of the moor, I hesitated
whether to run down one grassy slope, a hundred feet and more, and then
up the other slope, or to go round. Precedent decided me to go round.
About six feet below the edge of the bank a narrow well-trodden path
skirted the ravine, going to its head, crossing at the same level and
following along just below the edge of the opposite bank. Sometimes a
well-turfed bank in a pasture where food is not abundant will be scored
by many paths of this kind, one below another. They are made by the
cattle, for a cow never will go down a steep incline if, without too
great exertion, she can keep her four feet approximately on a level.
When I gained the southern end of the moor-like ridge, two villages lay
before me, one on the left, the other on the right. One was the home of
the dead, the other the toiling-ground of the living. They can see each
other, and year by year the village on the hill grows larger, and that
in the valley grows smaller. When the venerable village postmaster was
suddenly turned out of office a few years ago against the public wishes,
but in obedience to the infamous “spoils” policy, he was commiserated
with for his hard fortune. “Yes,” he said, “it is hard, but I knew it
was coming, and bless your soul, the time is near when I shall be turned
out of this house too, and told to let some other fellow rotate in and
get warm. But, my friend, there is a house of mine up yonder on the hill
where politics and money don’t count, and when this world seems unkind I
look up there and say to myself, ‘Pretty soon, pretty soon.’”
While waiting for the mail wagon to come down the Ossipee road, over the
red bridge and up the hill to the store, I plucked individual leaves
from trees and bushes, and marveled over their many ways of changing
from pliant green to crackling brown. One of the most brilliant shrubs
near the road was a blueberry. Its leaves were crimson, tending towards
scarlet, and their surface was as brilliant as satin. The blackberry,
which in some lights seemed as bright as the blueberry, was more of a
wine color, and it had a duller surface. Some of the viburnum leaves
were rich red on their upper faces, but pale below, their mid-vein being
pink, and a greenish tone pervading their under surface. Others, shaped
like maple leaves, were of a singular color,—a kind of pinkish purple.
An oak leaf, plucked from a young bush not many years out of the acorn,
was the color of newly-shed blood in its centre, but many small detached
areas upon it remained green. From a sucker shoot of a poplar I gathered
several strangely effective leaves. One was of sulphur yellow coarsely
spotted with black dots; another was blackish brown with crimson
veinings above, and clear yellowish white veinings below,—a most unique
combination. From an adjoining poplar I picked one uniformly black over
three quarters of its area, but blotched with vivid green near its apex.
Its veins were yellowish white both above and below. The clusters of
lambkill leaves were very pretty. While the upper surfaces of the leaves
were faded vermilion or pinkish salmon color, the under sides were buff,
or very pale sage green. The willow leaves were queer, damaged looking
things, a good deal nibbled by insects and much splashed with dark brown
upon a yellowish olive groundwork. A bunch of violet leaves were clear
golden yellow, while some of the more delicate ferns were nearly white.
Truly the botanists have many pleasant problems before them if they are
ever to ascertain why some green leaves turn black, and others brown,
orange, yellow, red, purple, or white.
An inspection of the mail led me to walk rapidly back to the Chocorua
House and pack my bag for a return journey to the city. As I drove
southward the mountains, seen across the pine barrens, were veiled in
haze. The wind seemed chiding me for going away so abruptly from this
paradise of color. Again and again I looked back at my favorite peaks
and forests, printing more and more deeply in my mind the recollection
of their noble outlines and remarkable coloring. Finally from the
platform of the rear car I saw them over the Bearcamp meadows, and above
and beyond them, with its cloud-cap just drifting away to the eastward,
Mount Washington, benignantly presiding over the northern sky. Then the
train rumbled across the Bearcamp trestle and the shadow of the Ossipee
hills fell upon us and deepened into night.