Assimasqua Mountain rises abruptly to the west of the four ponds, a
noble hill or range, five miles in length.
The west shore of the Assimasqua lakes sweeps abruptly up to the high
crest of the ridge, which is very irregular. It is partly wooded, partly
half-grown-up pasture, partly ledge, and along the high grassy summit
small chasms open and lead away into deep woods of hemlock. The steep
east side is covered for most of its length with an amazing growth of
juniper, hundreds and hundreds of close-massed bushes of great size and
thickness. The ridge holds a number of little dark mountain tarns, and
half a dozen good brooks tumble down its sides in small cascades. The
folds of its forest skirts broaden out to the west into the bottom lands
at its feet. To the east, the valleys of the brooks deepen and sharpen
into ravines through the woods, as they draw near the lakes.
The shores all about the four lakes, as I said, are heavily wooded, and
there are but one or two farms, and these only small clearings. A
singular person lived in one of them, who worked for years over a great
invention, a boat which was to utilize the wind by means of a windmill,
which in turn worked a small paddle-wheel. No one now knows whether he
had never heard of such a thing as a sail, or merely thought sails
dangerous. He was absorbed in his project; and he did get his boat to
go, in time, and at least a few times she trundled a clumsy course
around the lake.
Near the south end of the Mountain is the old Hale place. Mr. Hale was a
gentle-looking man, very neat, with a quiet voice and ways. He kept his
wide fields finely cultivated, and had a large orchard, and twelve
Jersey cows. The lane through which they filed home at night is enclosed
between the two mightiest stump fences I have ever seen, fully ten feet
high, and a perfect wilderness to climb over. They look like the
brandished arms of witches, or like enormous antlers, against the sky,
and are thickly fringed all along their base with delicate Dicksonia
fern. Stump fences are fast becoming rare with us, and these must be the
over-turned stumps of first-growth pine.
After Mr. and Mrs. Hale died, the farm passed to a sister, Mrs. Wrenn,
and when her husband, too, died--he had been a slack man, with no hold on
anything--she made the fatal mistake, too common among old people on the
farms, of making over the property to a kinsman (in this case, a married
step-niece and her husband) on condition of support. I never knew Mrs.
Wrenn, but a young farmer's wife, a friend of mine, was anxious about
her troubles, and through her there came to our notice an incident which
seemed to light up the whole gray region of the farm.
The neighbors began to hear rumors of neglect and abuse. Mrs. Wrenn was
never seen, and those who knew the skinflint ways of her entertainers
suspected trouble and presently confided their fears to the young doctor
of the neighborhood. He came at once, and found the poor soul in a fatal
illness, left alone in unspeakable dirt and squalor in a sort of
out-house, with unwashed bed-clothes, no one to feed or tend her, and
food which she could not touch put roughly beside her once a day. There
were signs too of actual rough handling.
"Don't try to make me live!" the old lady whispered, with command and
entreaty. "Don't ye dare to keep me living," and he assured her solemnly
that he would not, except in reason, and would only make her more
comfortable. He rated the bad woman in charge till he had her well
frightened, and then, though it was not only dark already, but raining
fast (and though he was poor himself, with his way to make and no
financial backing) he drove five miles to town and brought back and
installed a nurse at his own expense.
"The tears were running down his cheeks," the nurse herself told me,
"when he assured that poor old creature that either he or I would be
with her day and night, that we would never leave her, and she would be
safe with us. He paid my charges, and all supplies and food, out of his
own pocket. He saw her every day, and when her release came, he was
close beside her, and had her hand in his. He couldn't have been more
tender to his own mother. And he gave that bad woman a part of what she
deserved."
I should like to say something more of this young physician. He started
as a farm boy, with no capital beyond insight and purpose, and skilled
hands, and was led to his career, or rather could not keep himself from
his career, because of the fire of pity and tenderness that possessed
him. He has come to honor and recognition now, but at the time of which
I write, and for years, he was known only to a thirty-mile circle of
farm people, a good part of them too poor to pay for any services. He
gave himself to them, without knowing that he was giving anything. He
was a born citizen, too, served as overseer of the poor, and as
selectman, and people consulted him about their quarrels and troubles.
I spoke of the incident about Mrs. Wrenn, which the nurse had told me a
year or more after it happened, to the doctor's wife, some weeks since.
He had never told her of it. Her eyes filled with tears.
"That is just like him," she said.
The Ridge slopes down to the west, to the rich plains through which the
Marston communities are scattered--Marston Centre, North and West
Marston, Marston Plains. The "Four Marstons" are a notable district, for
Marston Academy had the luck to be founded, nearly a hundred years ago,
by persons of liberal education, and the dwellers in the comfortable
four-square brick houses of the neighborhood have more than kept up its
intellectual traditions; though the town has no railroad communication,
and only one mill, the shovel factory, since the old saw-mill which cut
the first-growth pines on the slopes of Assimasqua has been given up.
The Marston saw-mill is chiefly remembered because of Hiram Andros, who
worked there as sawyer for forty-five years, and had the name of the
best judge of timber in the State. The _sawyer's_ is a notable position.
He himself does no actual work, but stands near the saw, and in the
brief moment when each log is run on to the carriage, holds up the
requisite number of fingers to show whether it is to be a three, a four,
or five-inch timber, or cut into boards or planks; which cut will make
the best use of the log, with the least waste. The sawyer gets high pay,
six to ten dollars a day, and earns it, for on his single judgment,
delivered in that fraction of a minute, the mill's prosperity hangs.
What is it that gives a town so distinct a color and fibre? Marston
people have kept, generation after generation, a fine flavor and
distinction. They are in touch with the world, in the best sense, and
men of science and leaders of thought in university life, as well as
business magnates, have gone out from Marston, yet still feel they
belong there.
Eliphalet Marston, who built and owned the shovel factory, made it his
study to produce the best shovel that could be made, the best wearing,
the soundest. In later life his son tried to induce him to go about
through the country, and look up his customers, to increase trade. The
son was very emphatic; it was what everyone did, the only way to keep
up-to-date and advertise the business, and Eliphalet must not become
moss-grown. He shook his head, but after much hammering started off,
though not really persuaded. He went to a big wholesale dealer in
Chicago, but did not mention his name, merely said he was there to talk
shovels.
"Don't mention shovels to me," said the dealer. "There's just one shovel
that's worth having, just one that's honest, and that's the one that I'm
handling. There it is," he said, producing it. "Look at it; that's the
only _shovel_ that's made in this country; made by a man named Marston,
at Marston Plains, State of ----"
Eliphalet chuckled, and went home.
The Barnards were Marston people, a brilliant but strange family; and
next door to the Barnards lived a remarkable woman, Miss Persis Wayland.
She was a tall handsome person, of a large frame. She lived to a great
age, passing all her later life alone, save for one attendant, in her
father's large house, with its gardens and hedges around it. She was
well-to-do, and dressed with old-fashioned stateliness in heavy black
silk.
She was a woman of fine understanding, and a trained scholar. She read
four languages easily, and at forty took up the study of Hebrew, that
she might have her Bible free from the perversions of translation. She
was about thirty when the religious temperament which was later to
dominate her first manifested itself. She has told me herself of her
experience.
She had been conscious for years of a vague dissatisfaction, and of
life's seeming empty and purposeless. She threw herself, first into
study, then into works of charity, in her effort to find peace. She rose
early, and worked till she was utterly worn out and exhausted, at her
Sunday School class, at missionary work, and till late hours at her
Spanish and Latin, all to no purpose.
Then one day she found herself at a meeting at which a Methodist
evangelist (she herself was a strict Episcopalian) was to speak. She
went in without thought, from a chance impulse as she passed the door.
After the speaking, those who felt moved to do so were asked to come
forward and kneel; and as she knelt, she felt the breath of the Spirit
upon her forehead.
"It was as plain as the touch of your hand and mine," she said, as she
laid her handsome old hand on my fingers; and from that moment, all her
life, the light never left her, she felt "held round by an unspeakable
peace and sunshine."
She always held to her own church, but became more and more of a
Spiritualist, till she saw her rooms constantly thronged with the faces
of her childhood, father and mother, and the brothers and sisters and
playmates who had passed on.
She gradually withdrew from active life, and for the last ten years, I
think, never stepped outside her door. She had a fine presence always,
rapt and stately. She was distantly glad to see friends who called upon
her, but never showed much human warmth. She lived till her
ninety-eighth year.
[Illustration: THE WIND CARVES OUT WAVE-LIKE SHAPES OF DRIFT]
In the farming country near Marston began the ministry of Clarissa Gray,
the beloved evangelist. An unusual experience in illness led this grave,
charming girl to thought apart upon the things of God, and as she grew
up, persons vexed in spirit began to turn to her for comfort. Her
personality was so tranquil and at rest that she seemed to diffuse a
sense of musing peace about her; yet she was not dreamy; her nature was
rather so limpidly clear that she was never pre-occupied, and she had
clear practical good-sense. Hard-drinking, violent men would yield to
her direct and fearless influence. Presently she was asked more and more
widely to lead in meeting, and to her unquestioning nature this came as
a clear call. Her voice, fervent and pure, led in prayer, her crystal
judgement solved problems, till without her ever knowing it the
community lay in the hollow of her small hands.
I was last at Marston on a day of deep winter. We were to make a visit
in the town, and then explore the fields and woods of the west slopes of
Assimasqua.
A marked change comes to us by the middle of January. We emerge from the
softened twilight world of earlier winter into a brilliancy of white,
with bright blue shadows. The deep snow is changed by the action of the
wind and its own weight, to a wonderful smooth firmness. It takes on
carved and graven shapes, and might be a sublimated building material, a
fairy alabaster or marble, fit to built the palaces in the clouds. After
each storm the snow-plough piles it, often above one's head, on both
sides of the roads and sidewalks; we walk between high walls built of
blocks and masses of blue-shadowed white.
The brightness is almost too great, through the middle of the day; it is
dazzling; but about sunset a curious opaque look falls on the landscape;
a flattening, till they are like the hues of old pastels, of all the
delicate colors. The country has an appearance of almost infinite space,
under the snow, and the wind carves out pure sharp wave-like curves of
drift about the fields and hills.
The still air, dry and fiery, is like champagne. It almost _burns_, it
is so cold and pure. A great feeling of lightness comes to moccasined
feet, in walking in this rarefied air through powdery snow; but fingers
and toes quickly become numb without even feeling the cold.
Starting early out of Marston Plains village, we passed a tall rounded
hill which had a grove of maples near its top, the countless fine lines
of their stems like the strings of some harp-like instrument. The light
breeze, hardly more than a stirring, made music through them. The
sunrise was hidden behind this hill, but the delicate bare trees were
lighted up as with a gold mist.
As we entered the forest on the skirts of Assimasqua, the wind rose
outside. A fresh fall of snow the day before had weighted every branch
of the evergreens with piled-up whiteness, which now came down in bright
showers, the snow crystals glinting around us where stray sunbeams stole
down among the trees: but in the shelter of the great pines and hemlocks
not a breath of wind reached us, and the woods were held fast in the
snow hush, against which any chance sound rings out sharply.
The bark of the different trees was like a set of fine etchings, the
yellow birches shining as if burnished; the patches of handsome dark
mosses on the ash-trees, and the fine-grained bark of lindens, ashes,
and hop-hornbeams stood out brightly.
As we followed a wood road we heard chirruping and tweeting, and saw a
flock of pine siskins among the pine-tops, and later we heard the
vigorous tapping of a great pileated woodpecker.
All the northern woodpeckers winter with us; as do bluejays, and
chickadees, (the "friendly birds" of the Indians); juncos and
nuthatches; and partridges, which burrow under the snow for roots and
berries, and are sometimes caught, poor things, by the foxes, when the
crust freezes over them. Crows stay with us through a very mild winter,
but more often are off to the sea, thirty miles distant, to grow fat on
periwinkles; and very rarely indeed a winter wren or a song-sparrow
remains with us. The beautiful cream-white snow-buntings, cross-bills,
fat handsome pine-grosbeaks, golden-crowned kinglets, brown-creepers,
and those pirates, the butcher birds, come for short winter visits.
Evening grosbeaks, and Bohemian wax-wings, we see more rarely. By the
end of February, when the cold may be deepest, the great owls are
already building, deep in the woods.
Ever so many small sharp valleys and ravines were revealed among the
woods, some winding deep into the darkness of the pines and hemlocks.
Their perfect curves were made more perfect by the unbroken snow, and
they were flecked all over with the feathery blue shadows of their
trees. At the bottom of one we heard a musical tinkling, and found a
brook partly open. We scrambled down to it, and knelt there, watching
it, till we were half frozen. The ice was frosted deep with delicate
lace-work, and looking up underneath we saw a perfect wonderland of
organ-pipes and colonnades of crystal, through which the water tinkled
melodiously.
We came out high on the north side of Assimasqua, in the sugaring grove
that spreads up the steep slope to the crest. The tall maples were very
beautiful in their winter bareness, and the slope about their feet was
massed with a close feathery growth of young balsam firs and hemlocks,
with openings between. The snow lay even with the eaves of the small
bark sugaring-shanty. The sight of a roof made the silence seem almost
palpable, but in March the hillside will have plenty of sound and stir,
for fires will be lighted and the big kettles swung, while the men come
and go on sledges. Sugaring goes on all through the countryside, and
even in the town boys are out with "spiles," drilling the maple
"shade-trees," as soon as the sap begins running. The bright drops fall
slowly, one by one, into the pail hung to the end of the spile, and the
sap is like the clearest spring water, with a refreshing woodsy
sweetness.
The high rough crest of Assimasqua dominates a wide stretch of country.
The long sweep of the fields, and the lakes, lying asleep, showed
perfect, featureless white, as we stood looking down; but all about, and
in among them, the low broken hills, the knolls and ridges, bore scarfs
or mantles of smoke-colored bare woods, mixed with evergreens.
All day the sky had been of an aquamarine color, of the liquid and
luminous clearness which comes only in mid-winter, and deep afternoon
shadows were falling as we came down the hillside. We were on
snow-shoes, and had brought a toboggan, as the last part of our way lay
down hill. The country was open below the sugaring grove, and the
unbroken snow masked all the contours and mouldings of the fields, so
that we found ourselves suddenly dropping into totally unrealized
hollows and skimming up unrealized hillocks.
When we reached the small dome-like hill where we were to take the
cross-country trolley, the blue-green sky had changed to a pure
primrose, and in this, as the marvelous dusk of the snow fields deepened
about us, the thin golden sickle of the new moon, and then Venus, came
out slowly till they blazed above the horizon; the primrose hue changed
to a low band of burning orange beneath the fast-striding darkness, then
to a blue-green color, a robin's egg blue, which showed liquid-clear
behind the pines; but long before we reached home the colors had
deepened into the peacock blue darkness of the winter night.
Just before the distant whistle of the trolley broke the stillness, we
had a tiny adventure; we strayed over the brow of the hill, and came on
two baby foxes playing in the soft snow like kittens.