Wild he surely was, and irritating too, because of a certain strain and
self-consciousness. A "counter-irritant" he called himself. Was this
not true?
As if in answer to my question, as if to explain his coming out to
Mullein Hill, the Pilgrim drew forth a folded sheet of paper from his
pocket and without opening it or looking at it, said:--
"I wrote it the other day beside Thoreau's grave. You love your
Thoreau--you will understand."
And then in a low, thrilling voice, timed as to some solemn chant, he
began, the paper still folded in his hands:--
"A lonely wand'rer stands beside the stone
That marks the grave where Thoreau's ashes lie;
An object more revered than monarch's throne,
Or pyramids beneath Egyptian sky.
"He turned his feet from common ways of men,
And forward went, nor backward looked around;
Sought truth and beauty in the forest glen,
And in each opening flower glory found.
"He paced the woodland paths in rain and sun;
With joyous thrill he viewed the season's sign;
And in the murmur of the meadow run
With raptured ear he heard a voice divine.
"Truth was the beacon ray that lured him on.
It lit his path on plain and mountain height,
In wooded glade and on the flow'ry lawn--
Where'er he strayed, it was his guiding light.
"Close by the hoary birch and swaying pine
To Nature's voice he bent a willing ear;
And there remote from men he made his shrine,
Her face to see, her many tongues to hear.
"The robin piped his morning song for him;
The wild crab there exhaled its rathe perfume;
The loon laughed loud and by the river's brim
The water willow waved its verdant plume.
"For him the squirrels gamboled in the pines,
And through the pane the morning sunbeams glanced;
The zephyrs gently stirred his climbing vines
And on his floor the evening shadows danced.
"To him the earth was all a fruitful field.
He saw no barren waste, no fallow land;
The swamps and mountain tops would harvests yield;
And Nature's stores he garnered on the strand.
"There the essential facts of life he found.
The full ripe grain he winnowed from the chaff;
And in the pine tree,--rent by lightning round,
He saw God's hand and read his autograph.
"Against the fixed and complex ways of life
His earnest, transcendental soul rebelled;
And chose the path that shunned the wasted strife,
Ignored the sham, and simple life upheld.
"Men met him, looked and passed, but knew him not,
And critics scoffed and deemed him not a seer.
He lives, and scoff and critic are forgot;
We feel his presence and his words we hear.
"He passed without regret,--oft had his breath
Bequeathed again to earth his mortal clay,
Believing that the darkened night of death
Is but the dawning of eternal day."
The chanting voice died away and--the woods were still. The deep
waters of Walden darkened in the long shadows of the trees that were
reaching out across the pond. Evening was close at hand. Would the
veery sing again? Or was it the faint, sweet music of the bells of
Lincoln, Acton, and Concord that I heard, humming in the pine needles
outside the window, as if they were the strings of a harp?
The chanting voice died away and--the room was still; but I seem to
hear that voice every time I open the pages of "The Week" or "Walden."
And the other day, as I stood on the shores of the pond, adding my
stone to the cairn where the cabin used to stand, a woodthrush off in
the trees (trees that have grown great since Thoreau last looked upon
them), began to chant--or was it the Pilgrim from Dubuque?--
"Truth was the beacon ray that lured him on.
It lit his path on plain and mountain height,
In wooded glade and on the flow'ry lawn--
Where'er he strayed, it was his guiding light."
[Illustration: The Honey Flow]
IX
THE HONEY FLOW
And this our life, exempt from public haunt and those swift currents
that carry the city-dweller resistlessly into the movie show, leaves us
caught in the quiet eddy of little unimportant things,--digging among
the rutabagas, playing the hose at night, casting the broody hens into
the "dungeon," or watching the bees.
Many hours of my short life I have spent watching the bees,--blissful,
idle hours, saved from the wreck of time, hours fragrant of white
clover and buckwheat and filled with the honey of nothing-to-do; every
minute of them capped, like the comb within the hive, against the
coming winter of my discontent. If, for the good of mankind, I could
write a new Commandment to the Decalogue, it would read: Thou shalt
keep a hive of bees.
Let one begin early, and there is more health in a hive of bees than in
a hospital; more honey, too, more recreation and joy for the
philosophic mind, though no one will deny that very many persons
prepare themselves both in body and mind for the comforting rest and
change of the hospital with an almost solemn joy.
But personally I prefer a hive of bees. They are a sure cure, it is
said, for rheumatism, the patient making bare the afflicted part, then
with it stirring up the bees. But it is saner and happier to get the
bees before you get the rheumatism and prevent its coming. No one can
keep bees without being impressed with the wisdom of the ounce of
prevention.
I cannot think of a better habit to contract than keeping bees. What a
quieting, pastoral turn it gives to life! You can keep them in the
city--on the roof or in the attic--just as you can actually live in the
city, if you have to; but bees, even more than cows, suggest a rural
prospect, old-fashioned gardens, pastures, idyls,--things out of
Virgil, and Theocritus--and out of Spenser too,--
"And more, to lulle him in his slumber soft,
A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe,
And ever drizling raine upon the loft,
Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne:
No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes,
As still are wont t' annoy the walled towne
Might there be heard: but carelesse Quiet lyes,
Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enimyes"
that is not the land of the lotus, but of the _melli-lotus_, of lilacs,
red clover, mint, and goldenrod--a land of honey-bee. Show me the
bee-keeper and I will show you a poet; a lover of waters that go softly
like Siloa; with the breath of sage and pennyroyal about him; an
observer of nature, who can handle his bees without veil or gloves.
Only a few men keep bees,--only philosophers, I have found. They are a
different order utterly from hen-men, bee-keeping and chicken-raising
being respectively the poetry and prose of country life, though there
are some things to be said for the hen, deficient as the henyard is in
euphony, rhythm, and tune.
In fact there is not much to be said for the bee, not much that the
public can understand; for it is neither the bee nor the eagle that is
the true American bird, but the rooster. In one of my neighboring
towns five thousand petitioners recently prayed the mayor that they be
allowed to let their roosters crow. The petition was granted. In all
that town, peradventure, not five bee-keepers could be found, and for
the same reason that so few righteous men were found in Sodom.
Bee-keeping, like keeping righteous, is exceedingly difficult; it is
one of the fine arts, and no dry-mash-and-green-bone affair as of hens.
Queens are a peculiar people, and their royal households, sometimes an
hundred thousand strong, are as individual as royal houses are liable
to be.
I have never had two queens alike, never two colonies that behaved the
same, never two seasons that made a repetition of a particular handling
possible. A colony of bees is a perpetual problem; the strain of the
bees, the age and disposition of the queen, the condition of the
colony, the state of the weather, the time of the season, the
little-understood laws of the honey-flow,--these singly, and often all
in combination, make the wisest handling of a colony of bees a question
fresh every summer morning and new every evening.
For bees should be "handled," that is, bees left to their own devices
may make you a little honey--ten to thirty pounds in the best of
seasons; whereas rightly handled they will as easily make you three
hundred pounds of pure comb honey--food of prophets, and with saleratus
biscuit instead of locusts, a favorite dish with the sons of prophets
here on Mullein Hill.
Did you ever eat apple-blossom honey? Not often, for it is only rarely
that the colony can be built up to a strength sufficient to store this
earliest flow. But I have sometimes caught it; and then as the season
advances, and flow after flow comes on with the breaking of the great
floral waves, I get other flavors,--pure white clover, wild raspberry,
golden sumac, pearly white clethra, buckwheat, black as axle grease,
and last of all, the heavy, rich yellow of the goldenrod. These, by
careful watching, I get pure and true to flavor like so many fruit
extracts at the soda fountains.
Then sometimes the honey for a whole season will be adulterated, not by
anything that I have done, but by the season's peculiar conditions, or
by purely local conditions,--conditions that may not prevail in the
next town at all.
One year it began in the end of July. The white clover flow was over
and the bees were beginning to work upon the earliest blossoms of the
dwarf sumac. Sitting in front of the hives soon after the renewed
activity commenced, I noticed a peculiarly rank odor on the air, and
saw that the bees in vast numbers were rising and making for a pasture
somewhere over the sprout-land that lay to the north of the hives. Yet
I felt sure there was nothing in blossom in that direction within range
of my bees (they will fly off two miles for food); nothing but dense
hardwood undergrowth from stumps cut some few years before.
Marking their line of flight I started into the low jungle to find
them. I was half a mile in when I caught the busy hum of wings. I
looked but could see nothing,--not a flower of any sort, nothing but
oak, maple, birch, and young pine saplings just a little higher than my
head. But the air was full of bees; yet not of swarming bees, for that
is a different and unmistakable hum. Then I found myself in the thick
of a copse of witch-hazel up and down the stems of which the bees were
wildly buzzing. There was no dew left on the bushes, so it was not
that they were after; on looking more closely I saw that they were
crawling down the stems to the little burrs containing the seed of last
fall's flowering. Holding to the top of the burr with their hind legs
they seemed to drink head down from out of the base of the burr.
Picking one of these, I found a hole at its base, and inside, instead
of seeds, a hollow filled with plant lice or aphides, that the bees
were milking. Here were big black ants, too, and yellow wasps drinking
from the same pail.
But a bee's tongue, delicate as it is, would crush a fragile plant
louse. I picked another burr, squeezing it gently, when there issued
from the hole at the base a drop of crystal-clear liquid, held in the
thinnest of envelopes, which I tasted and found sweet. In burr after
burr I found these sacks or cysts of sweets secreted by the aphides for
the bees to puncture and drain. The largest of them would fill a bee
at a draught. Some of the burrs contained big fat grubs of a beetle
unknown to me,--the creature that had eaten the seeds, bored the hole
at the base, and left the burr cleaned and garnished for the aphides.
These in turn invited the bees, and the bees, carrying this "honey-dew"
home, mixed it with the pure nectar of the flowers and spoiled the crop.
Can you put stoppers into these millions of honey-dew jugs? Can you
command your bees to avoid these dire bushes and drink only of the
wells at the bottoms of the white-clover tubes? Hardly that, but you
can clip the wing of your queen and make her obedient; you can command
the colony not to swarm, not to waste its strength in drones, and you
can tell it where and how to put this affected honey so that the pure
crop is not spoiled; you can order the going out and coming in of those
many thousands so that every one is a faithful, wise, and efficient
servant, gathering the fragrance and sweet of the summer from every
bank whereon the clover and the wild mints blow.
Small things these for a man with anything to do? Small indeed, but
demanding large love and insight, patience, foresight, and knowledge.
It does not follow that a man who can handle a colony of bees can rule
his spirit or take a city, but the virtues absolutely necessary to the
bee-keeper are those required for the guiding of nations; and there
should be a bee-plank incorporated into every party platform, promising
that president, cabinet, and every member of congress along with the
philosophers shall keep bees.
[Illustration: A pair of pigs]
X
A PAIR OF PIGS
I dropped down beside Her on the back steps and took a handful of her
peas to pod. She set the colander between us, emptied half of her task
into my hat, and said:--
"It is ten o'clock. I thought you had to be at your desk at eight this
morning? And you are hot and tired. What is it you have been doing?"
"Getting ready for the _pigs_," I replied, laying marked and steady
emphasis on the plural.
"You are putting the pods among the peas and the peas with the
pods"--and so I was. "Then we are going to have another pig," she went
on.
"No, not _a_ pig this time; I think I 'll get a pair. You see while
you are feeding one you can just as well be feeding--"
"A lot of them," she said with calm conviction.
"You 're right!" I exclaimed, a little eagerly. "Besides two pigs do
better than--"
"Well, then," very gravely and never pausing for an instant in her
shelling, "let's fence in the fourteen acres and have a nice little
piggery of Mullein Hill."
The pods popped and split in her nimble fingers as if she knew a secret
spring in their backs. I can beat her picking peas, but in shelling
peas she seems to have more fingers than I have; they quite confuse me
at times as they twinkle at their task.
So they did now. I had spent several weeks working up my brief for two
pigs; but was utterly unprepared for a whole piggery. The suddenness
of it, the sweep and compass of it, left me powerless to pod the peas
for a moment.
I ought to have been at my writing, but it was too late to mention that
now; besides here was my hat still full of peas. I could not
ungallantly dump them back into her empty pan and quit. There was
nothing for it but to pod on and stop with one pig. But my heart was
set on a pair of pigs. College had just closed (we were having our
17th of June peas) and the joy of the farm was upon me. I had a cow
and a heifer, eighty-six hens, three kinds of bantams, ten hives of
bees, and two ducks. I was planning to build a pigeon coop, and had
long talked of turning the nine-acre ridge of sprout land joining my
farm into a milch goat pasture, selling the milk at one dollar a quart
to Boston babies; I had thought somewhat of Belgian hares and black
foxes as a side-line; and in addition to these my heart was set on a
pair of pigs.
"Why won't one pig do?" she would ask. And I tried to explain; but
there are things that cannot be explained to the feminine mind, things
perfectly clear to a man that you cannot make a woman see.
Pigs, I told her, naturally go by pairs, like twins and scissors and
tongs. They do better together, as scissors do. Nobody ever bought a
_scissor_. Certainly not. Pigs need the comfort of one another's
society, and the diversion of one another to take up their minds in the
pen; hens I explained were not the only broody creatures, for all
animals show the tendency, and does not the Preacher say, "Two are
better than one: if two lie together then have they heat: but how can
one be warm alone"?
I was sure, I told her, that the Preacher had pigs in mind, for judging
by the number of pig-prohibitions throughout Hebrew literature, they
must have had pigs _constantly_ in mind. This observation of the early
Hebrew poet and preacher is confirmed, I added, by all the modern
agricultural journals, as well as by all our knowing neighbors. Even
the Flannigans (an Irish family down the road),--even the Flannigans, I
pointed out, always have two pigs, for all their eight children and his
job tending gate at the railroad crossing. They have a goat, too. If
a man with that sort of job can have eight children and a goat and two
pigs, why can't a college professor have a few of the essential,
elementary things, I 'd like to know?
"Do you call your four boys a few?" she asked.
"I don't call my four Flannigan's eight," I replied, "nor my one pig
his two. Flannigan has the finest pigs on the road. He has a
wonderful way with a pair of pigs--something he inherited, I suppose,
for I imagine there have been pigs in the Flannigan family ever since--"
"They were kings in Ireland," she put in sweetly.
"Flannigan says," I continued, "that I ought to have two pigs: 'For
shure, a pair o' pags is double wan pag,' says Flannigan--good clear
logic it strikes me, and quite convincing."
She picked up the colander of shelled peas with a sigh. "We shall want
the new potatoes and fresh salmon to go with these," her mind not on
pigs at all, but on the dinner. "Can't you dig me a few?"
"I might dig up a few fresh salmon," I replied, "but not any new
potatoes, for they have just got through the ground."
"But if I wanted you to, could n't you?"
"I don't see how I could if there are n't any to dig."
"But won't you go look--dig up a few hills--you can't tell until you
look. You said you did n't leave the key outside in the door yesterday
when we went to town, but you did. And as for a lot of pigs--"
"I don't want a lot of pigs," I protested.
"But you do, though. You want a lot of everything. Here you 've
planted five hundred cabbages for winter just as if we were a
sauerkraut factory--and the probabilities are we shall go to town this
winter--"
"Go where!" I cried.
"And as for pigs, your head is as full of pigs as Deerfoot Farm or the
Chicago stockyards--
_Mullein Hill Sausages
Made of Little Pigs_
that's really your dream"--spelling out the advertisement with pea-pods
on the porch floor.
"Now, don't you think it best to save some things for your
children,--this sausage business, say,--and you go on with your humble
themes and books?"
She looked up at me patiently, sweetly inscrutable as she added:--
"You need a pig, Dallas, one pig, I am quite sure; but two pigs are
nothing short of the pig business, and that is not what we are living
here on Mullein Hill for."
She went in with her peas and left me with my pigs--or perhaps they
were her thoughts; leaving thoughts around being a habit of hers.
What did she mean by my needing a pig? She was quite sure I needed
_one_ pig. Is it my own peculiar, personal need? That can hardly be,
for I am not different from other men. There may be in all men, deep
down and unperceived, except by their wives, perhaps, traits and
tendencies that call for the keeping of a pig. I think this must be
so, for while she has always said we need the cow or the chickens or
the parsley, she has never spoken so of the pig, it being referred to
invariably as mine, until put into the cellar in a barrel.
The pig as my property, or rather as my peculiar privilege, is utterly
unrelated in her mind to _salt_ pork. And she is right about that. No
man needs a pig to put in a barrel. Everybody knows that it costs less
to buy your pig in the barrel. And there is little that is edifying
about a barrel of salt pork. I always try to fill my mind with
cheerful thoughts before descending into the dark of the cellar to fish
a cold, white lump of the late pig out of the pickle.
Not in the uncertain hope of his becoming pork, but for the certain
present joy of his _being_ pork, does a man need a pig. In all his
other possessions man is always to be blest. In the pig he has a
constant, present reward: because the pig _is_ and there is no question
as to what he shall be. He is pork and shall be salt pork, not spirit,
to our deep relief.
Instead of spirit the pig is clothed upon with lard, a fatty, opaque,
snow-white substance, that boils and grows limpid clear and flames with
heat; and while not so volatile and spirit-like as butter, nevertheless
it is one of earth's pure essences, perfected, sublimated, not after
the soul with suffering, but after the flesh with corn and solid
comfort--the most abundant of one's possessions, yet except to the pig
the most difficult of all one's goods to bestow.
The pig has no soul. I am not so sure of the flower in the crannied
wall, not so sure of the very stones in the wall, so long have they
been, so long shall be; but the pig--no one ever plucked up a pig from
his sty to say,--
"I hold you here squeal and all, in my hand,
Little pig--but _if_ I could understand
What you are, squeal and all, and all in all"--
No poet or philosopher ever did that. But they have kept pigs. Here
is Matthew Arnold writing to his mother about _Literature and Dogma_
and poems and--"The two pigs are grown very large and handsome, and
Peter Wood advises us to fatten them and kill our own bacon. We
consume a great deal of bacon, and Flu complains that it is dear and
not good, so there is much to be said for killing our own; but she does
not seem to like the idea."
"Very large and handsome "--this from the author of
"The evening comes, the fields are still!"
And here is his wife, again, not caring to have them killed, finding,
doubtless, a better use for them in the pen, seeing that Matthew often
went out there to scratch them.
Poets, I say, have kept pigs, for a change, I think, from their poetry.
For a big snoring pig is not a poem, whatever may be said of a little
roast pig; and what an escape from books and people and parlors (in
this country) is the feeding and littering and scratching of him! You
put on your old clothes for him. He takes you out behind the barn;
there shut away from the prying gaze of the world, and the stern eye,
conscience, you deliberately fill him, stuff him, fatten him, till he
grunts, then you scratch him to keep him grunting, yourself reveling in
the sight of the flesh indulged, as you dare not indulge any other
flesh. You would love to feed the whole family that way; only it would
not be good for them. You cannot feed even the dog or the horse or the
hens so. One meal a day for the dog; a limited ration of timothy for
the horse, and _scratch_-feed, for the hens--feed to compel them to
scratch for fear they will run to flesh instead of eggs; and the
children's wedge of pie you sharpen though the point of it pierces your
soul; and the potato you leave off of her plate; and you forgo
your--you get _you_ a medicine ball, I should say, in order to keep
down the fat lest it overlie and smother the soul.
Compelled to deny and subject the body, what do I then but get me a pig
and feed _it_, and scratch it, and bed it in order to see it fatten and
to hear it snore? The flesh cries out for indulgence; but the spirit
demands virtue; and a pig, being the virtue of indulgence, satisfies
the flesh and is winked at by the soul.
If a pig is the spirit's concession to the flesh, no less is he at
times a gift to the spirit. There are times in life when one needs
just such companionship as the pig's, and just such shelter as one
finds within his pen. After a day in the classroom discoursing on the
fourth dimension of things in general, I am prone to feel somewhat
removed, at sea somewhat.
Then I go down and spread my arms along the fence and come to anchor
with the pig.
[Illustration: Leafing]
XI
LEAFING
Poets, I said, have kept pigs for an escape from their poetry. But
keeping pigs is not all prose. I put my old clothes on to feed him, it
is true; he takes me out behind the barn; but he also takes me one day
in the year out into the woods--a whole day in the woods--with rake and
sacks and hay-rig, and the four boys, to gather him leaves for bedding.
Leafing Day is one of the days in red on the Mullein Hill Calendar; and
of all our days in the woods surely none of them is fresher, more
fragrant, more joyous, and fuller of poetry than the day we go to rake
and sack and bring home the leaves for the pig.
You never went after leaves for the pigs? Perhaps you never even had a
pig. But a pig is worth having, if only to see the comfort he takes in
the big bed of dry leaves you give him in the sunny corner of his pen.
And, if leafing had no other reward, the thought of the snoozing,
snoring pig buried to his winking snout in the bed, would give joy and
zest enough to the labor.
But leafing like every other humble labor of our life here in the Hills
of Hingham has its own reward,--and when you can say that of any labor
you are speaking of its poetry.