On a still evening in October, Frank Forester and Harry Archer were
sitting at the open window of a neat country tavern, in a sequestered
nook of Rockland County, looking out upon as beautiful a view as ever
gladdened the eyes of wandering amateur or artist.
The house was a large old-fashioned stone mansion, certainly not of
later date than the commencement of the revolution; and probably had
been, in its better days, the manor-house of some considerable
proprietor--the windows were of a form very unusual in the States,
opening like doors, with heavy wooden mullions and small lattices, while
the walls were so thick as to form a deep embrasure, provided with a
cushioned windowseat; the parlor, in which the friends had taken up
their temporary domicile, contained two of these pleasant lounges, the
larger looking out due south upon the little garden, with the road
before it, and, beyond the road, a prospect, of which more anon--the
other commanding a space of smooth green turf in front of the stables,
whereon our old acquaintance, Timothy, was leading to and fro a pair of
smoking horses. The dark green drag, with all its winter furniture of
gaily decorated bearskins, stood half-seen beneath the low-arched
wagon-shed.
The walls of the room--the best room of the tavern--were paneled with
the dark glossy wood of the black cherry, and a huge mantel-piece of the
same material, took up at least one-half of the side opposite the larger
window, while on the hearth below reposed a glowing bed of red-hot
hickory ashes, a foot at least in depth, a huge log of that glorious
fuel blazing upon the massive andirons. Two large, deep gun-cases, a
leathern magazine of shot, and sundry canisters of diamond gunpowder,
Brough's, were displayed on a long table under the end window--a
four-horse whip, and two fly-rods in India-rubber cases, stood in the
chimney-corner; while reveling in the luxurious warmth of the piled
hearth lay basking on the rug, three exquisitely formed Blenheim
spaniels of the large breed--short-legged and bony, with ears that
almost swept the ground as they stood upright, and coats as soft and
lustrous as floss silk.
On a round table, which should have occupied the centre of the parlor,
now pulled up to the window-seat, whereon reclined the worthies, stood a
large pitcher of iced water; a square case-bottle of cut crystal filled,
as the flavor which pervaded the whole room sufficiently demonstrated,
with superb old Antigua Shrub; several large rummers corresponding to
the fashion of the bottle; a twisted taper of green wax, and a small
silver plate with six or eight cheroots, real manillas.
Supper was evidently over, and the friends, amply feasted, were now
luxuriating in the delicious indolence, half-dozing, half-daydreaming,
of a calm sleepy smoke, modestly lubricated by an occasional sip of the
cool beverage before them. If we except a pile of box-coats, capes, and
mackintoshes of every cut and color--a traveling liquor-case which,
standing open, displayed the tops of three more bottles similar to that
on the table, and spaces lined with velvet for all the glass in use--and
another little leathern box, which, like the liquor-case, showed its
contents of several silver plates, knives, forks, spoons, flasks of
sauce, and condiments of different kinds--the whole interior, as a
painter would have called it, has been depicted with all accuracy.
Without, the view on which the windows opened was indeed most lovely.
The day had been very bright and calm; there was not a single cloud in
the pale transparent heaven, and the sun, which had shone cheerfully all
day from his first rising in the east, till now when he was hanging like
a ball of bloody fire in the thin filmy haze which curtained the
horizon, was still shooting his long rays, and casting many a shadow
over the slopes and hollows which diversified the scene.
Immediately across the road lay a rich velvet meadow, luxuriant still
and green--for the preceding month had been rather wet, and frost had
not set in to nip its verdure--sloping down southerly to a broad shallow
trout-stream, which rippled all glittering and bright over a pebbly bed,
although the margin on the hither side was somewhat swampy, with tufts
of willows and bushes of dark alder fringing it here and there, and
dipping their branches in its waters--the farther bank was skirted by a
tall grove of maple, hickory, and oak, with a thick undergrowth of sumac
arrayed in all the gorgeous garniture of autumn, purples and brilliant
scarlets and chrome yellows, mixed up and harmonized with the dark
copper foliage of a few sere beeches, and the gray trunks apparent here
and there through the thin screen of the fast falling leaves.
Beyond this grove, the bank rose bold and rich in swelling curves, with
a fine corn-field, topped already to admit every sunbeam to the ripening
ears. A buckwheat stubble, conspicuous by its deep ruddy hue, and two or
three brown pastures divided by high fences, along the lines of which
flourished a copious growth of cat-briers and sumacs, with here and
there a goodly tree waving above them, made up the centre of the
picture. Beyond this cultured knoll there seemed to be a deep pitch of
the land clothed with a hanging wood of heavy timber; and, above this
again, the soil surged upward into a huge and round-topped hill, with
several golden stubbles, shining out from the frame-work of primeval
forest, which, dark with many a mighty pine, covered the mountain to the
top, except where at its western edge it showed a huge and rifted
precipice of rock.
To the right, looking down the stream, the hills closed in quite to the
water's brink on the far side, rough and uncultivated, with many a blue
and misty peak discovered through the gaps in their bold, broken
outline, and a broad, lake-like sheet, as calm and brightly pictured as
a mirror, reflecting their inverted beauties so wondrously distinct and
vivid, that the amazed eye might not recognize the parting between
reality and shadow. An old gray mill, deeply embosomed in a clump of
weeping willows, still verdant, though the woods were sere and waxing
leafless, explained the nature of that tranquil pool, while, beyond
that, the hills swept down from the rear of the building, which
contained the parlor whence the two sportsmen gazed, and seemed entirely
to bar the valley, so suddenly, and in so short a curve, did it wind
round their western shoulder. To the left hand, the view was closed by a
thick belt of second growth, through which the sandy road and glittering
stream wandered away together on their mazy path, and over which the
summits of yet loftier and more rugged steeps towered heavenward.
Over this valley they had for some time gazed in silence, till now the
broad sun sank behind the mountains, and the shrill whistle of the
quail, which had been momently audible during the whole afternoon,
ceased suddenly; four or five night-hawks might be seen wheeling high in
pursuit of their insect prey through the thin atmosphere, and the sharp
chirrup of a solitary katydid, the last of its summer tribe, was the
only sound that interrupted the faint rush of the rapid stream, which
came more clearly on the ear now that the louder noises of busy babbling
daylight had yielded to the stillness of approaching night. Before long
a bright gleam shot through the tufted outline of a dark wooded hill,
and shortly after, just when a gray and misty shadow had settled down
upon the half-seen landscape, the broad full moon came soaring up above
the tree-tops, pouring her soft and silver radiance over the lovely
valley, and investing its rare beauties with something of romance--a
sentiment which belongs not to the gay, gaudy sunshine.
Just at this moment, while neither of the friends felt much inclined to
talk, the door opened suddenly, and Timothy's black head was thrust in,
with a query if "they didn't need t' waax candles?"
"Not yet, Tim," answered Archer, "not yet for an hour or so--but hold a
minute--how have the horses fed?"
"T' ould gray drayed off directly, and he's gane tull t' loike bricks--
but t' bay's no but sillyish--he keeps a breaking oot again for iver--
and sae Ay'se give him a hot maash enow!"
"That's right. I saw he wasn't quite up to the mark the last ten miles
or so. If he don't dry off now, give him a cordial ball out of the
tool-chest--one of the number 3--camphire and cardamums and ginger; a
clove of garlic, and treacle quantum sic, hey, Frank, that will set him
to rights, I warrant it. Now have you dined yourself, or supped, as the
good people here insist on calling it?"
"Weel Ay wot, have I, sur," responded Timothy; "an hour agone and
better."
"Exactly; then step out yourself into the kitchen, and make us a good
cup of our own coffee, strong and hot, do you see? and when that's done,
bring it in with the candles; and, hark you, run up to the bed-room and
bring my netting needles down, and the ball of silk twist, and the front
of that new game-bag, I began the other night. If you were not as lazy
as possible, friend Frank, you would bring your fly-book out, when the
light comes, and tie some hackles."
"Perhaps I may, when the light comes," Forester answered; "but I'm in no
hurry for it; I like of all things to look out, and watch the changes of
the night over a landscape even less beautiful than this. One-half the
pleasures of field sports to me, is other than the mere excitement. If
there were nothing but the eagerness of the pursuit, and the
gratification of successful vanity, fond as I am of shooting, I should,
I believe, have long since wearied of it; but there are so many other
things connected with it--the wandering among the loveliest scenery--the
full enjoyment of the sweetest weather--the learning the innumerable and
all-wondrous attributes and instincts of animated nature--all these are
what make up to me the rapture I derive from woodcraft! Why, such a
scene as this--a scene which how few, save the vagrant sportsman, or the
countryman who but rarely appreciates the picturesque, have ever
witnessed--is enough, with the pure and tranquil thoughts it calls up in
the heart, to plead a trumpet-tongued apology, for all the vanity, and
uselessness, and cruelty, and what not, so constantly alleged against
our field sports."
"Oh! yes," cried Harry; "yes, indeed, Frank, I perfectly agree with you.
But all that last is mere humbug--humbug, too, of the lowest and most
foolish order--I never hear a man droning about the cruelty of field
sports, but I set him down, on the spot, either as a hypocrite or a
fool, and probably a glorious union of the two. When man can exist
without killing myriads of animals with every breath of vital air he
draws, with every draught of water he imbibes, with every footstep he
prints upon the turf or gravel of his garden--when he abstains from
every sort of animal food--and, above all, when he abstains from his
great pursuit of torturing his fellow men--then let him prate, if he
will, of sportsmen's cruelty.
"For show me one trade, one profession, wherein one man's success is not
based upon another's failure; all rivalry, all competition, triumph and
rapture to the winner, disgrace and anguish to the loser! And then these
fellows, fattened on widows' tears and orphans' misery, preach you pure
homilies about the cruelty of taking life. But you are quite right about
the combination of pleasures--the excitement, too, of quick motion
through the fresh air--the sense of liberty amid wide plains, or tangled
woods, or on the wild hill tops--this, surely, to the reflective
sportsman--and who can be a true sportsman, and not reflective--is the
great charm of his pursuit."
"And do you not think that this pleasure exists in a higher degree here
in America than in our own England?"
"As how, Frank?--I don't take."
"Why, in the greater, I will not say beauty--for I don't think there is
greater natural beauty in the general landscape of the States--but
novelty and wildness of the scenery! Even the richest and most
cultivated tracts of America, that I have seen, except the Western part
of New York, which is unquestionably the ugliest, and dullest, and most
unpoetical region on earth, have a young untamed freshness about them,
which you do not find in England.
"In the middle of the high-tilled and fertile cornfield you come upon
some sudden hollow, tangled with brake and bush, which hedge in some
small pool where float the brilliant cups and smooth leaves of the water
lily, and whence, on your approach, up springs the blue-winged teal or
gorgeous wood-duck. Then the long sweeping woodlands, embracing in
themselves every variety of ground, deep marshy swamp, and fertile level
thick-set with giant timber, and sandy barrens with their scrubby
undergrowth, and difficult rocky steeps; and, above all, the seeming and
comparative solitude--the dinner carried along with you and eaten under
the shady tree, beside the bubbling basin of some spring--all this is
vastly more exciting, than walking through trim stubbles and rich turnip
fields, and lunching on bread and cheese and home-brewed, in a snug
farmhouse. In short, field sports here have a richer range, are much
more various, wilder--"
"Hold there, Frank; hold hard there; I cannot concede the wilder, not
the really wilder--seemingly they are wilder; for, as you say, the
scenery is wilder--and all the game, with the exception of the English
snipe, being wood-haunters, you are led into rougher districts. But oh!
no, no!--the field sports are not really wilder--in the Atlantic States
at least--nor half so wild as those of England!"
"I should like to hear you prove that, Archer," answered Frank, "for I
am constantly beset with the superiority of American field sports to
tame English preserve shooting!"
"Pooh! pooh! that is only by people who know nothing about either; by
people who fancy that a preserve means a park full of tame birds,
instead of a range, perhaps, of many thousand acres, of the very
wildest, barest moorland, stocked with the wariest and shyest of the
feathered race, the red grouse. But what I mean to say, is this, that
every English game-bird--to use an American phrase--is warier and wilder
than its compeer in the United States. Who, for instance, ever saw in
England, Ireland, or Scotland, eighteen or twenty snipe or woodcock,
lying within a space of twelve yards square, two or three dogs pointing
in the midst of them, and the birds rising one by one, the gunshots
rattling over them, till ten or twelve are on the ground before there is
time to bag one.
"English partridge will, I grant, do this sometimes, on very warm days
in September; but let a man go out with his heavy gun and steady dog
late in December, or the month preceding it, let him see thirty or more
covies--as on good ground he may--let him see every covey rise at a
hundred yards, and fly a mile; let him be proud and glad to bag his
three or four brace; and then tell me that there is any sport in these
Atlantic States so wild as English winter field-shooting.
"Of grouse shooting on the bare hills, which, by the way, are wilder,
more solitary far, and more aloof from the abodes of men, than any thing
between Boston and the Green Bay, I do not of course speak; as it
confessedly is the most wild and difficult kind of shooting.
"Still less of deer stalking--for Scrope's book has been read largely
even here; and no man, how prejudiced soever, can compare with the
standing at a deer-path all day long waiting till a great timid beast is
driven up within ten yards of your muzzle, with that extraordinary sport
on bald and barren mountains, where nothing but vast and muscular
exertion, the eye of the eagle, and the cunning of the serpent, can
bring you within range of the wild cattle of the hills.
"Battue shooting, I grant, is tame work; but partridge shooting, after
the middle of October, is infinitely wilder, requiring more exertion and
more toil than quail shooting. Even the pheasant--the tamest of our
English game--is infinitely bolder on the wing than the ruffed grouse,
or New York partridge; while about snipe and woodcock there exists no
comparison--since by my own observation, confirmed by the opinion of old
sportsmen, I am convinced that nine-tenths of the snipe and cock bagged
in the States, are killed between fifteen and twenty paces; while I can
safely say, I never saw a full snipe rise in England within that average
distance. Quail even, the hardest bird to kill, the swiftest and the
boldest on the wing, are very rarely killed further than twenty-five to
thirty, whereas you may shoot from daylight to sunset in England, after
October, and not pick up a single partridge within the farthest, as a
minimum distance."
"Well! that's all true, I grant," said Forester, "yet even you allow
that it is harder to kill game here than at home; and if I do not err, I
have heard you admit that the best shot in all England could be beat
easily by the crack shots on this side; how does all this agree!"
"Why very easily, I think," Harry replied, "though to the last remark, I
added in his first season here! Now that American field sports are
wilder in one sense, I grant readily; with the exception of
snipe-shooting here, and grouse-shooting in Scotland, the former being
tamer, in all senses, than any English--the latter wilder in all senses
than any American--field-sport.
"American sporting, however, is certainly wilder, in so much as it is
pursued on much wilder ground; in so much as we have a greater variety
of game--and in so much as we have many more snap shots, and fewer fair
dead points.
"Harder it is, I grant; for it is all, with scarcely an exception,
followed in very thick and heavy covert--covert to which the thickest
woods I ever saw in England are but as open ground. Moreover, the woods
are so very large that the gun must be close up with the dog; and
consequently the shots must, half of them, be fired in attitudes most
awkward, and in ground which would, I think, at home, be generally
styled impracticable; thirdly, all the summer shooting here is made with
the leaf on--with these thick tangled matted swamps clad in the thickest
foliage.
"Your dogs must beat within twenty yards at farthest, and when they
stand you are aware of the fact rather by ceasing to hear their motion,
than by seeing them at point; I am satisfied that of six pointed shots
in summer shooting, three at the least must be treated as snap shots!
Many birds must be shot at--and many are killed--which are never seen
at all, till they are bagged; and many men here will kill three out of
four summer woodcock, day in and day out, where an English sportsman,
however crack a shot he might be, would give the thing up in despair in
half an hour.
"Practice, however, soon brings this all to rights. The first season I
shot here--I was a very fair, indeed a good, young shot, when I came out
hither--not at all crack, but decidedly better than the common run!--the
first day I shot was on 4th of July, 1832, the place Seer's swamp, the
open end of it; the witness old Tom Draw--and there I missed, in what we
now call open covert, fourteen birds running; and left the place in
despair--I could not, though I missed at home by shooting too quick--I
could not, for the life of me, shoot quick enough. Even you, Frank,
shoot three times as well as you did, when you began here; yet you began
in autumn, which is decidedly a great advantage, and came on by degrees,
so that the following summer you were not so much nonplussed, though I
remember the first day or two, you bitched it badly."
"Well, I believe I must knock under, Harry," Forester answered; "and
here comes Timothy with the coffee, and so we will to bed, that taken,
though I do want to argufy with you, on some of your other notions about
dogs, scent, and so forth. But do you think the Commodore will join us
here to-morrow?"
"No! I don't think so," Harry said, "I know it! Did not he arrive in New
York last first of July, from a yachting tour at four o'clock in the
afternoon; receive my note saying that I was off to Tom's that morning;
and start by the Highlander at five that evening? Did he not get a team
at Whited's and travel all night through, and find me just sitting down
to breakfast, and change his toggery, and out, and walk all day--like a
trump as he is? And did not we, by the same token, bag--besides
twenty-five more killed that we could not find--one hundred and fifteen
cock between ten o'clock and sunset; while you, you false deceiver, were
kicking up your heels in Buffalo? Is not all this a true bill, and have
you now the impudence to ask me whether I think the Commodore will come?
I only wish I was as sure of a day's sport tomorrow, as I am of his
being to the fore at luncheon time!"
"At luncheon time, hey? I did not know that you looked for him so early!
Will he be in time, then, for the afternoon's shooting?"
"Why, certainly he will," returned Archer. "The wind has been fair up
the river all day long, though it has been but light; and the Ianthe
will run up before it like a race-horse. I should not be much surprised
if he were here to breakfast." "And that we may be up in time for him,
if perchance he should let us to bed forthwith," said Frank with a heavy
yawn.
"I am content," answered Harry, finishing his cup of coffee, and
flinging the stump of his cheroot into the fire. "Good-night! Timothy
will call you in the morning."
"Goodnight, old fellow."
And the friends parted merrily, in prospect of a pleasant day's sport on
the morrow.