The population of a district can never be classified. Once again, "folks
are folks," and the smallest hamlet shows infinite variety. Yet here and
there the individual quality of a neighborhood seems as marked as that
of the different belts and communities of trees which clothe the land
about it.
Watson's Hill, Ridgefield, and Weir's Mills are fine up-standing
neighborhoods, with good houses, big barns, fresh paint, and bright milk
cans catching the sun; but in near-by folds of the hills, where the
ridges slope up into higher country, there are poor and scattered farms
and farmhouses which are no more than shanties. A neighborhood six miles
from a big town may be more rustic than another twice as far. It is
partly the soil, partly inheritance, and surely it is a third part
influence. The land of our Silvester's Mills Quakers is not specially
good, but the impulse imparted by three or four industrious good
families is the foundation of its marked prosperity.
A Swede and an Italian have lately taken up two farms which were
considered quite run out, one in North Ridgefield, six miles from us,
and the other at the top of a long hill on the Tresumpscott Road.
The Swede asked William Pender, a thin, vague, grumbling man, of whom he
hired the land,
"How long time to clear these fields of stones?"
"Ninety-nine years!" said William solemnly. But the Swede, a fair,
strong-built man named Jansen, went to work, with his wife and his three
children. They put on leather aprons, and worked early and late, in
every spare minute that could be taken from planting and cultivating.
(William looked on, from his brother's farm, whither he had retreated,
in a mixture of incredulity, disapprobation and envy.) _They worked in
the rain_; and now, after three years, the farm is clear of stones, and
Jansen owns it clear. He has a thousand hens, and sells his eggs and
broilers at fancy prices in New York; and Mrs. Jansen's lawn and
flower-beds are as gay as those of a neat farm in Holland.
The Italian farmer is a larger pattern of man. He came here as a young
fellow with no better start than a push-cart, but he came of good
intelligent Tuscan people, and has not only endless industry, but wits
to see, and enterprise to take, all sorts of chances. He did not take
any chances, though, when he married Alice Farrell, the daughter of one
of our best farmers, a strong pretty girl, as industrious as her
husband, and even more intelligent, with a free sort of outlook, and
something kindling about her. Her husband is now the big man of his
neighborhood. The district goes by his name, and he has represented it
in the Legislature. He owns a fine herd of registered Guernseys, and his
apples bring fancy prices.
A friend of mine, a farmer, once asked one of the great Connecticut
nurserymen to what he attributed the success of the Italians in nursery
work and truck farming. The older man's eyes twinkled.
"I'll tell you," he said. "They're willing to work in the rain!"
Our farm conditions are improving, almost while you watch them. The
Agricultural Department of the State University is doing yeoman service.
People are beginning to realize what science is bringing to agriculture,
and the young men are fired by it. They are especially beginning to
realize what ignorance it was to leave so many farms deserted, and to
condemn so much of the land as hopeless and used up. The friend who
asked the question about the Italians said of our own farmers:
"They stick to their grandfathers' ways, and not to their grandfathers'
enterprise and ambition for improvement." But this statement is fast
coming to be untrue.
Interspersed, however, among the prosperous districts there are curious,
backward hamlets, where the woods seem to encroach. Their hills shut
them about too closely. Some set of the tide of human affairs, some
change of transportation or of market, cuts off the wholesome currents
of life from them, and they stagnate like cut-off water and become
degenerate.
There is a sad combination of receding prosperity and a run-out
population in a town a long day's drive from us. Poor place, it has
become bankrupt. Its timber was cut off, and the cooperages, on which
its tiny livelihood depended, moved away. Its farms straggle up the
flanks of a round-topped mountain. Apple-raising might perhaps have
saved it, but either such of its people as had the enterprise for this
moved away, or it possessed none such. The people I saw there looked as
different as possible from our hearty sun-and-air neighbors. Unkempt
faces thronged the dirty windows of farms that were mere shacks. They
looked at once ambitionless and sinister. "Merricktown folks," people of
the neighboring districts say, when tools disappear or robes are stolen
from the sleighs at a Grange supper.
No Indians are left in our part of the world; but here and there a
family shows marked traces of Indian blood, as old Sile Taylor, beyond
Watson's Hill, a frowsy and hospitable patriarch, whose little black
eyes twinkle with a kind of foxy kindliness. Though none dwell here,
Indians come two or three times a year from the State Reservation, with
snow-shoes, moccasins, and sweet-grass baskets to sell. They make a
yearly pilgrimage to the seashore for the sweet-grass, which grows in
the salt meadows at the mouths of a few rivers. They cut and dry it, and
carry home many hundred pounds for the winter's weaving. The Gabriel
brothers, Joe and Bill, are regular visitors among us, enormous dark
men, with that Indian habit of silence which implies not so much
taciturnity, as a certain tranquil quality. Tranquillity and kindness
seem to flow from the big brothers. They seem untroubled by any need of
speech.
Then beyond Rattlesnake Hill there are the "Jingroes." They are credited
with being pure-blooded gipsies, and they certainly look it. I do not
know whether they started with a definite Mr. and Mrs. Jingroe or not.
The name is applied to the whole tribe. They live "over back," in
clearings in a wide belt of forest. They are perfectly indolent, but
cheerful, and content with the most primitive farming.
Once in a while, when things go hard with them, they all set to work,
and weave very good baskets, which they bring in town to sell. You are
met at every street corner by handsome, dark-eyed Mrs. Jingroes, in
kerchief and bright earrings, importuning every passer-by to buy a
basket.
About once a year a gipsy caravan drives through our town, and stops in
the street on its way. The slim, handsome barefooted children and their
dark square-built mothers are all about. The women bustle from shop to
shop, making small purchases, and pick up a little money by telling
fortunes.
Once, when the gipsies camped in a rough pasture near town, one of the
children died, and a touching deputation came, to ask permission (which
was of course given) to bury it in the town cemetery.
Another time, as a caravan drove through the town, I noticed a girl
lying at the back of one of the flimsy, covered wagons, so ill she
seemed to be unconscious. She was a lovely creature, dark and pale, and
her slim body swayed and shook with the shaking of the wheels. I wanted
to call out to the drivers to stop, but the crazy caravan rattled away
at a half-canter, and paid no attention.
Tresumpscott Pond lies in the midst of our most heavily forested
district. There is no village or hamlet near it, but a handful of little
farms, on tiny clearings or no clearings at all, are scattered through
the woods.
The dwellers in these forest farms are not people of substance, like the
farmers of the open country near them, but they are intelligent folk,
and are rich in the treasure of a varied and interesting life. The men
of the family are sure to have hunting coats and gaiters,--leather or
canvas; good guns, which they keep well oiled and bright; and most of
them keep a good fox hound or two, whose jubilant music may be heard as
they range through the winter woods with their masters, or on
independent hunting excursions. The boys begin by seven years old to
have trapping enterprises of their own up the little quick forest
brooks, and what looks to the ordinary person like the merest mossy
runnel, hardly a brook at all, may be well known as a drinking-place of
coons, or a haunt where sharp eyes may see a mink. They are sent out to
gather thoroughwort, dill, dock, and other simples, and mosses and roots
for the farm dyeing. (_Cruttles_, or _crottles_, the farm name for the
dark moss growing on ash-trees, makes a fine yellow dye.) They know
where to lie hidden at half past three in the morning on the chance of
seeing a deer, and under which stretch of lily-pads is the best chance
for a pickerel. And not only the boys: I know a girl on a farm, whose
grown-up brother has such confidence in her marksmanship, that he will
shake an apple-tree, while she nicks the falling apples with her rifle.
They make use of a far greater number of wild plants than are known to
the farmers of the more open country, as "greens," cooking and eating
young milk-weed stalks, shepherd's purse, and the uncurling fronds of
the _Osmundas_ and other great ferns, which they call "fiddle-heads."
They grow up sinewy and alert, under this eager life, and the best of
them attain, beside their farm knowledge, to the undefinable huntsman's
knowledge, which sets its mark on a man. Their bearing is confident and
fearless, and with it they have a certain forest quality on which it is
hard to lay a finger. It is noticeable that the greater part of the
families who cleave to this forest way of life are apt to be of dark
complexion. It is a great pity that most of them can get so little
schooling, but they have all been educated, since they were little, in a
training which certainly develops and intensifies some of man's best
powers.
[Illustration: THE TRANQUIL WOODS COVER THE RISE AND FALL OF THE RIDGES]
The deep tranquil woods cover the rise and fall of the ridges for a good
stretch of miles, and a good deal of hunting and trapping is to be had
in them. Last month we came on fresh raccoon tracks, like prints of
little hands, in the leaf mould of the wood road, and coons are often
shot here. One day, as we were walking, there was a great growling and
barking from our dogs, and we found that they had treed a porcupine.
In my Grandfather's time, sheep had to be driven at night to the tops of
the hills, because of the bears in the Tresumpscott woods; and only two
years ago there was an outcry among the farmers because sheep were being
killed. Everybody watched his neighbor's dog, but Oliver Newcomb, who
lives on a little farm in the heart of the forest tract, coming home at
dusk up the wood road, heard a growling and snarling, and came on a
great Bay Lynx, the only one seen in this part of the country for many
years. Oliver is a man who is almost never seen without his gun, and he
shot the marauder, and got twenty-five dollars for the skin, a real
windfall for a young man on a small forest farm, with wife to keep and
five children. The skin was mounted, and set up in the library of the
Soldiers' Home.
The Bay Lynx is a much longer, more panther-like creature than our
common Canada Lynx (the _Loup Cervier_ or Bob-cat), and is of a general
bay color, not unlike that of the Mountain Lion of the West. I have
wondered if this might not be the panther or "painter" which was the
terror of our Northern woods to early settlers.
"Big Game" has increased greatly in our State of late years, partly from
the enforcement of strict game laws, partly because the wolves have
nearly all been killed off. Deer are so common as to be a menace to
crops in some places, and there are at least three thriving beaver
colonies in our part of the State.
In 1868 my father, driving on a fishing trip through a town sixty-five
miles north of us, was shown a pair of blanched moose antlers, set up
over the sign-post at the cross-roads.
"Look at that well," the stage driver said. "That's a sight you'll never
see again, not in this State!"
To-day, as every hunter knows, moose are plentiful, all through the
two-thirds of the State that lies under forest; and not only there, for
this very autumn three have been seen in the Tresumpscott woods, while
both last year and this, a black bear has spent several weeks in our
neighborhood.
Muskrat are found in Tresumpscott Pond and its small tributary streams,
hares and partridges and foxes all through its woods. Black duck, and
sometimes wood duck, breed about the Pond, and Carolina rails; and where
the brooks that feed the Pond spread out into broad estuaries of alder
covert, you may see the marked flight of snipe or woodcock.
It was in these woods that Jerome Mitchell, our local authority on game
and fur (a very fair naturalist, also), grew up. He is a slender,
well-knit fellow, whose mother had great ambitions for him. He walked
into town, five miles and back, every day, to get one year in the High
School, after his country schooling. He could not afford any more, but
when he was seventeen, having picked up a knowledge of taxidermy and
simple mechanics, he moved into town. He worked early and late with
dogged patience, taking every smallest job that offered, till at last he
realized his ambition, and opened a small, but good sportsmen's and
general repair shop. Gradually he picked up the fur trade of the
neighborhood. He is anxiously fair, and boys from the farms soon began
to bring in skunk, squirrel, and muskrat skins, and every little while a
fox or a coon.
Last year Jerome ran into hard luck. A stranger, a good-looking man,
brought in an extra fine looking lot of muskrat skins. There were $600
worth, and this was a low figure for them. It was a serious venture,
still Jerome took them; they turned out, however, to be stolen goods,
and he had to pay the rightful owner, as the stranger was nowhere to be
found. Poor Jerome! he was near tears when he told my father about it.
Then, when he just had his store new painted and set in order for the
summer's trade, someone dropped a lighted match among the shavings, and
the whole stock and fixtures were in a blaze.
This loss turned out to be not so serious. Jerome worked nearly all
night for a week, and made better fittings than he had had before. The
wholesale dealers were generous, and the shop re-opened with the best
outfit of goods that it has had at all.
Now a good windfall has come to him. A rural mail-carrier brought word
of a silver fox which had been trapped on a farm fifteen miles out in
the country. Jerome only waited to telegraph to a big fur dealer for
whom he works, who has lately established a fox farm, and started off at
once. He found even better than he had hoped. The fox was a perfect
young male, coal black, and hardly scratched by the trap.
In the recent craze over fox-raising, as much as ten thousand dollars
has been paid, in our State, for a first-rate black fox. Of course
Jerome would only get a commission, but this was the first big chance
that had come to him and he was beside himself with anxiety lest it
miscarry. It was a sharp February night, but he slept in the barn beside
his prize, and the next morning drove home, dreading every drift and
thank-you-ma'am, for fear they might upset, and the slight crate that
held the fox might break.
That night he slept on the floor of his shop, wrapping himself in the
sleigh robes. The fox ate the meat given him with a good appetite, and
curled up contentedly enough to sleep; but as the first grayness began
to show before dawn, he stood up, bristling a little, and barked, a
far-away, lonely sound, Jerome said. The next day he was forwarded to
the dealer in safety.
My father has shot and hunted all about this region, going on snow-shoes
after foxes and hares in winter, with one of the forest
farmers--generally one of the Huntingtons--as guide or companion; coming
into the warm dark farm kitchen for a warm-up before the long ride or
drive home. The Huntingtons always had good dogs. Bugle, a fox-hound
famous through the countryside, belonged to them.
John Huntington is the man whom neither bee nor wasp will sting. He is
sent for all about to take away troublesome hornets' nests, which he
simply tears down and pulls to pieces with his bare hands. Some hornets
built a huge nest over the door of the stable at the Homestead not long
ago, just where the men come and go for milking. One of the farm men
wanted to take a torch and smoke it out, but Thomas Burnham, the farmer
in charge, sent all the way over to Tresumpscott for John Huntington. He
came, a silent, dark, shambling man; looked at the nest, nodded, asked
for a ladder, climbed up, and unconcernedly pulled the whole thing down,
while the furious hornets swarmed over his uncovered face and hands. He
reached a finger down his neck, first on one side, then the other, and
took out handfuls of them, and scraped them off where they had crawled
up his sleeves. He tore the nest up, threw it on the ground, and stamped
on it, and with few words went back to his farm.
I have never heard any adequate explanation of this phenomenon. Some
people say that persons having this power have a distinctive odor about
them, which wasps and bees dislike, and others ascribe it only to an
entire fearlessness and unconcern.
Sam Huntington, John's younger brother, is a handsome, strong,
slender-built fellow, taller than John and even darker. It was Sam who
showed my father, one day out snipe shooting, what a _bee line_ really
means, and how to take one, and find the bee-tree. You catch two wild
bees, and attach a bit of cotton wool, big enough to mark the bee's
flight, to each; let the first bee go, getting the line of his flight
well, then walk on two or three hundred yards, and let the second go,
taking note equally carefully. Where the two lines intersect is the
bee-tree and the hidden treasure of wild honey.
Sitting in Jacob Damren's clover field one day, my father showed me how
to find bumble-bee honey. We sat still, and watched the fat bee go his
buzzing way from head to head of red clover. At last he had honey
enough, and off he started on a swifter, straighter flight, but he was
heavy with honey, and we could easily follow. He did not go far, but
swung on a long slant to his hole in the ground. We dug where he entered
(he emerged, part way through the process, very angry and buzzing) and
about six inches down we found the honey cells. There was a lump or
cluster of them, perhaps half as big as your hand. They were longer than
the cells of honey bees; not hexagonal like these, but roughly
cylindrical, dark brown, and full of very good, clear, dark brown honey.
Tresumpscott Pond is a great haunt of whippoorwills. As dusk begins to
fringe the coverts of the wood, they begin their strange, almost ghostly
chorus, like the swift whistling of a rod through the air, powerful and
regular, "whip," and "whip," and "whip" again, answering each other all
night. I noticed the time of their first notes, one night in early July.
The voices of the veeries fell away, and then stopped, at quarter past
eight, and at quarter of nine the first whippoorwill struck up, and was
instantly answered. (I have known them to begin sharp at eight o'clock,
or even earlier.)
It is extremely hard to see the birds themselves, for they lie hid all
day in the deep woods, sleeping. Like owls, they seem unable to see well
if roused by daylight. At night they gather close about the farms, one
perhaps on the roof of the barn, and one or two on a fence (sitting
always _lengthwise_ to their perch, never across), and sometimes you can
see their shape silhouetted against the sky. Last May, a whippoorwill
was bewildered in a sudden gale, and did not get back to the woods, but
spent the day sound asleep in broad sunlight on the railing of a
balcony, right in the midst of our town. I stood within four feet of
him. He is a strange-shaped bird, with whiskers like a cat's, and a flat
head; about the size of a small hawk, and mottled, like his cousin the
night-hawk, with gray and white markings like those of rocks and
lichens, or of some of the larger moths.