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[Illustration: ON THE EASTMAN HILL CROSS-ROAD.]
A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE
By
ROSALIND RICHARDS
Illustrated from photographs
by
BERTRAND H. WENTWORTH
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1916
Copyright, 1916
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Published April, 1916
THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
RAHWAY, N. J.
To
J. R., L. E. W., and L. T. S.,
without whose help this small record
could not have been written.
PREFACE
No one person can fitly describe a neighborhood, no matter how long
known, how well loved. Yet records of what is lovely and of good report
in a district should be treasured and preserved, however imperfectly.
My father's name, not mine, should rightly be signed to these pages, for
it is his intimate knowledge of our countryside, loved and explored with
a boy's ardor and a naturalist's insight since childhood, which they
strive to set down.
I have taken care to write almost wholly of two or more generations ago,
and of persons who, with few exceptions, have now passed out of this
life; and I have in all cases altered names, and shifted families from
one part of the county to another, to avoid possible annoyance to
surviving connections. It has even seemed best in some cases--though I
have done so with reluctance--to change the names of villages, of hills
and streams, as well.
Beyond this, I have striven only to record faithfully the anecdotes and
memories that have come down to me. But no record, however faithful, can
be in any way adequate. The rays will be refracted by the medium of the
writer's personality; and the best that can be done will be but a small
mirrored fragment, before the daily repeated miracle of the living
reality.
CONTENTS
- PREFACE
- CHAPTER I--A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE
- CHAPTER II--THE RIVER
- CHAPTER III--THE BANKS OF THE RIVER
- CHAPTER IV--THE CAPTAINS
- CHAPTER V--BY THE ACUSHTICOOK
- CHAPTER VI--SPRING
- CHAPTER VII--THE EASTMAN HILL CROSS-ROAD
- CHAPTER VIII--RIDGEFIELD, AND WEIR'S MILLS
- CHAPTER IX--MARY GUILFOYLE
- CHAPTER X--TRESUMPSCOTT POND
- CHAPTER XI--IN THE TRESUMPSCOTT WOODS
- CHAPTER XII--HARVEST
- CHAPTER XIII--WATSON'S HILL
- CHAPTER XIV--EARLY WINTER.
- CHAPTER XV--ASSIMASQUA, AND MARSTON
- CHAPTER XVI--OUR TOWN
Thanks are due Mr. Bertrand H. Wentworth of Gardiner, Maine, for his
very kind permission to illustrate this book with reproductions of his
photographs.
ILLUSTRATIONS
ON THE EASTMAN HILL CROSS-ROAD
THE WOODS JUT OUT IN ISLANDS ROUND AN OUTCROPPING LEDGE
INTERVALE ALONG THE RIVER'S COURSE
THE SOUTH WIND IN MARCH
THE PEACEFUL, PRETTY HAMLET OF UPPER BRIDGE
PLOUGHING MARY'S FIELD
ON TRESUMPSCOTT POND
THE TRANQUIL WOODS COVER THE RISE AND FALL OF THE RIDGES
THE CORN WAS STANDING AMONG THE GOLDEN PUMPKINS IN STACKS
THAT LOOKED LIKE HUDDLED WITCHES
LONGFELLOW POND LIES IN THE HOLLOW OF THE WOODS
ICE-CUTTING ON THE RIVER BEGINS IN JANUARY
THE WIND CARVES OUT WAVE-LIKE SHAPES OF DRIFT
A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE
CHAPTER I--A NORTHERN COUNTRYSIDE
Our county lies in a northern State, in the midst of one of those
districts known geographically as "regions of innumerable lakes." It is
in good part wooded--hilly, irregular country, not mountainous, but often
bold and marked in outline. Save for its lakes, strangers might pass
through it without especial notice; but its broken hills have a peculiar
intimacy and lovableness, and to us it is so beautiful that new wonder
falls on us year after year as we dwell in it.
There is a marked trend of the land. I suppose the first landmark a bird
would distinguish in its flight would be our long, round-shouldered
ridges, running north and south. Driving across country, either eastward
or westward, you go up and up in leisurely rises, with plenty of fairly
level resting places between, up long calm shoulder after shoulder, to
the Height of Land. And there you take breath of wonder, for lo, before
you and below you, behold a whole new countryside framed by new hills.
Sometimes the lower country thus revealed is in its turn broken into
lesser hills, or moulded into noble rounding valleys. Sometimes there
are stretches of intervale or old lake bottom, of real flat-land, a rare
beauty with us, on which the eyes rest with delight. More often than not
there is shining water, lake or pond or stream. Sometimes this lower
valley country extends for miles before the next range rises, so that
your glance travels restfully out over the wide spaces. Sometimes it is
little, like a cup.
As you get up towards the Height of Land you come to what makes the
returning New Englander draw breath quickly, the pleasure is so
poignant: upland pastures dotted with juniper and boulders, and broken
by clumps of balsam fir and spruce. Most fragrant, most beloved places.
Dicksonia fern grows thick about the boulders. The pasturage is thin
June-grass, the color of beach sand, as it ripens, and in August this is
transformed to a queen's garden by the blossoming of blue asters and the
little _nemoralis_ golden-rod, which grew unnoticed all the earlier
summer. Often whole stretches of the slope are carpeted with mayflowers
and checkerberries, and as you climb higher, and meet the wind from the
other side of the ridge, your foot crunches on gray reindeer-moss.
Last week, before climbing a small bare-peaked mountain, I turned aside
to explore a path which led through a field of scattered balsam firs,
with lady-fern growing thick about their feet. A little further on, the
firs were assembled in groups and clumps, and then group was joined to
group. The valley grew deeper and darker, and still the same small path
led on, till I found myself in the tallest and most solemn wood of firs
that I have ever seen. They were sixty feet high, needle-pointed, black,
and they filled the long hollow between the hills, like a dark river.
The woods alternate with fields to clothe the hills and intervales and
valleys, and make a constant and lovely variety over the landscape.
Sometimes they seem a shore instead of a river. They jut out into the
meadowland, in capes and promontories, and stand in little islands,
clustered round an outcropping ledge or a boulder too big to be removed.
You are confronted everywhere with this meeting of the natural and
indented shore of the woods, close, feathery, impenetrable, with the
bays and inlets of field and pasture and meadow. The jutting portions
are apt to be made more sharp and marked by the most striking part of
our growth, the evergreens. There they grow, white pine and red pine,
black spruce, hemlock, and balsam fir, in lovely sisterhood. Their
needles shine in the sun. They taper perfectly, finished at every point,
clean, dry, and resinous; and the fragrance distilled from them by our
crystal air is as surely the very breath of New England as that of the
Spice Islands is the breath of the East.
Our soil is often spoken of as barren, but this is only where it has
been neglected. Hay and apples give us abundant crops; indeed our apples
have made a name at home and abroad. Potatoes also give us a very fine
yield, and a great part of the State is rich in lumber. When it is left
to itself, the land reverts to wave after wave of luxuriant pine forest.
Forty miles east of us they are cutting out masts again where the
_Constitution's_ masts were cut.
[Illustration: THE WOODS JUT OUT IN ISLANDS ROUND AN OUTCROPPING LEDGE]
The apple orchards are scattered over the slopes. In the more upland
places, sheep are kept, and the sheep-pastures are often hillside
orchards of tall sugar maples. We have neat fields of oats and barley,
more or less scattered, and once in a while a buckwheat patch, while
every farm has a good cornfield, beans, pumpkins, and potatoes, besides
"the woman's" little patch of "garden truck." A good many bees are kept,
in colonies of gray hives under the apple trees.
The people who live on the farms are, I suppose, much like farm people
everywhere. "Folks are folks"; yet, after being much with them, certain
qualities impress themselves upon one's notice as characteristic; they
have a dry sense of humor, and quaint and whimsical ways of expressing
it, and with this, a refinement of thought and speech that is almost
fastidious; a fine reticence about the physical aspects of life such as
is only found, I believe, in a strong race, a people drawing their vigor
from deep and untainted springs. I often wonder whether there is another
place in the world where women are sheltered from any possible
coarseness of expression with such considerate delicacy as they find
among the rough men on a New England farm.
The life is so hard, the hours so necessarily long, in our harsh
climate, that small-natured persons too often become little more than
machines. They get through their work, and they save every penny they
can; and that is all. The Granges, however, are increasing a pleasant
and wholesome social element which is beyond price, and all winter you
meet sleighs full of rosy-cheeked families, driving to the Hall for
Grange Meeting, or Sunday Meeting, or for the weekly dance.
Many of the farm people are large-minded enough to do their work well,
and still keep above and on top of it; and some of these stand up in a
sort of splendor. Their fibres have been seasoned in a life that calls
for all a man's powers. Their grave kind faces show that, living all
their lives in one place, they have taken the longest of all journeys,
and traveled deep into the un-map-able country of Life. I do not know
how to write fittingly of some of these older farm people; wise enough
to be simple, and deep-rooted as the trees that grow round them; so
strong and attuned to their work that the burdens of others grow light
in their presence, and life takes on its right and happier proportions
when one is with them.
If the first impression of our country is its uniformity, the second and
amazing one is its surprises, its secret places. The long ridges
accentuate themselves suddenly into sharp slopes and steep cup-shaped
valleys, covered with sweet-fern and juniper. The wooded hills are often
full of hidden cliffs (rich gardens in themselves, they are so deep in
ferns and moss), and quick brooks run through them, so that you are
never long without the talk of one to keep you company. There are rocky
glens, where you meet cold, sweet air, the ceaseless comforting of a
waterfall, and moss on moss, to velvet depths of green.
The ridges rise and slope and rise again with general likeness, but two
of them open amazingly to disclose the wide blue surface of our great
River. We are rich in rivers, and never have to journey far to reach
one, but I never can get quite used to the surprise of coming among the
hills on this broad strong full-running stream, with gulls circling over
it.
One thing sets us apart from other regions: our wonderful lakes. They
lie all around us, so that from every hill-top you see their shining and
gleaming. It is as if the worn mirror of the glacier had been splintered
into a thousand shining fragments, and the common saying is that our
State is more than half water. They are so many that we call them
_ponds_, not lakes, whether they are two miles long, or ten, or
twenty.[1] I have counted over nine hundred on the State map, and then
given up counting. No one person could ever know them all; there still
would be new "Lost Ponds" and "New Found Lakes."
The greater part of them lie in the unbroken woods, but countless
numbers are in open farming country. They run from great sunlit sheets
with many islands to the most perfect tiny hidden forest jewels, places
utterly lonely and apart, mirroring only the depths of the green woods.
Each "pond," large or little, is a world in itself. You can almost
believe that the moon looks down on each with different radiance, that
the south wind has a special fragrance as it blows across each; and each
one has some peculiar, intimate beauty; deep bays, lovely and secluded
channels between wooded islands, or small curved beaches which shine
between dark headlands, lit up now and then by a camp fire.
Hill after hill, round-shouldered ridge after ridge; low nearer the salt
water, increasing very gradually in height till they form the wild
amphitheatre of blue peaks in the northern part of the State; partly
farming country, and greater part wooded; this is our countryside, and
across it and in and out of the forests its countless lovely lakes shine
and its great rivers thread their tranquil way to the sea.
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[1] The legal distinction in our State is not between ponds and lakes,
but between ponds and "Great Ponds." All land-locked waters over ten
acres in area are Great Ponds; in which the public have rights of
fishing, ice-cutting, etc.