Part 10

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In the course of my five days I walked twice over the road newly cut through the mountain forest from the foot of Echo Lake to the golf grounds: first upward, in an afternoon, returning to Franconia by the old highway; then downward, in a forenoon, after reaching the lake by way of the Butter Hill road and the sleepers, that is to say, the railroad. Forenoon and afternoon the impression was the same,--silence, as if the birds’ year were over, though everything was still green and the season not so late but that tardy wood-sorrel blossoms still showed, here and there one, among the clover-like leaves; old favorites, that I had not seen for perhaps a dozen years.

On the railroad--a place which I have always found literally alive with song and wings, not only in May and June, but in September and October--I walked for forty-five minutes, by the watch, without hearing so much as a bird’s note. Almost the only living creature that I saw (three berry-pickers and a dog excepted) was a red squirrel which sat on end at the top of a tall stump, with his tail over his back, and ate a raspberry, as if to show me how. “You think you are an epicure,” he said; “and you stuff yourself so full in half an hour that you have to fast for half a day afterward. What sort of epicurean philosophy is that? Look at me.” And I looked. He held the berry--which must have been something less than ripe--between his fore paws, just as he would have held a nut, and after looking at me to make sure I was paying attention twirled it round and round against his teeth till it grew smaller and smaller before my eyes, and then was gone. “There!” said the saucy chap, as he held up his empty fingers. The operation had consumed a full minute, at the very least. At that rate, no doubt, a man could swallow raspberries from morning till night. But what good would it do him? He might as well be swallowing the wind. No human mouth could tell raspberry juice from warm water, in doses so infinitesimal.

The sight, nevertheless, gave me a new conception of the pitch of delicacy to which the sense of taste might be cultivated. It was evident that our human faculty, comfortably as we get on with it in the main, is only a coarse and bungling tool, never more than half made, perhaps, or quite as likely blunted and spoiled by millenniums of abuse. I could really have envied the chickadee, if such a feeling had not seemed unworthy of a man’s dignity. Besides, a palate so supersusceptible might prove an awkward possession, it occurred to me on second thought, for one who must live as one of the “civilized,” and take his chances with cooks. All things considered, I was better off, perhaps, with the old equipment and the old method,--a duller taste and larger mouthfuls.

At the end of the forty-five minutes I came to the burning, a tract of forest over which a fire had run some two years before. Here, in this dead place, there was more of life; more sunshine, and therefore more insects, and therefore more birds. Even here, however, there was nothing to be called birdiness: a few olive-sided flycatchers and wood pewees, both with musical whistles, one like a challenge, the other an elegy; a family group of chestnut-sided warblers, parents and young, conversing softly among themselves about the events of the day, mostly gastronomic; a robin and a white-throated sparrow in song; three or four chickadees, lisping and deeing; a siskin or two, a song sparrow, and a red-eyed vireo. The whole tract was purple with willow herb--which follows fire as surely as boys follow a fire engine--and white with pearly immortelles.

Once out of this open space--this forest cemetery, one might say, though the dead were not buried, but stood upright like bleached skeletons, with arms outstretched--I was again immersed in leafy silence, which lasted till I approached the lake. Here I heard before me the tweeting of sandpipers, and presently came in sight of two solitaries (migrants already, though it was only the 4th of August), each bobbing nervously upon its boulder a little off shore. The eye of the ornithologist took them in: dark green legs; dark, slender bills; bobbing, not teetering--Totanus, not Actitis. Then the eyes of the man turned to rest upon that enchanting prospect: Eagle Cliff in shadow, Profile Mountain in full sun, and the lake between them. The spirit of all the hours I had ever spent here was communing with me. I blessed the place and bade it good-by. “I will come again if I can,” I said, “and many times; but if not, good-by.” I believe I am like the birds; no matter how far south they may wander, when the winter is gone they say one to another, “Let us go back to the north country, to the place where we were so happy a year ago.”

The last day of my visit, the only warm one, fell on Sunday; and on Sunday, by all our Franconia traditions, I must make the round of Landaff Valley. I had been into the valley once, to be sure, but that did not matter; it was not on Sunday, and besides, I did not really go “round the square,” as we are accustomed to say, with a fine disregard of mathematical precision.

After all, there is little to tell of, though there was plenty to see and enjoy. The first thing was to get out of the village; away from the churches and the academy, and beyond the last house (the last village house, I mean), into the company of the river, the long green meadow and the larch swamp,--a goodly fellowship. A swamp sparrow trilled me a welcome at the very entrance to the valley, as he had done before, and musical goldfinches accompanied me for the whole round, till I thought the day should be named in their honor, Goldfinch Sunday.

Pretty Atlantis butterflies were always in sight, as they had been even in the coolest weather, with now and then an Atalanta and, more rarely, a Cybele. I had looked for Aphrodite, also, being desirous to see these three fritillaries (Cybele, Aphrodite, and Atlantis) together, till the entomologist told me that we were out of its latitude. Commoner even than Atlantis, perhaps, was the dusky wood-nymph, Alope (strange notions the old Greeks must have had of the volatility of their goddesses and heroines, to name so many of them after butterflies!), she of the big yellow blotch on each fore wing; a wavering, timid creature, always seeking to hide herself, and never holding a steady course for so much as an inch--as if she were afflicted with the shaking palsy. “Don’t look at me! Pray don’t look at me!” she is forever saying as she dodges behind a leaf. Shyness is a grace--in the feminine; but Alope is too shy. If her complexion were fairer, possibly she would be less retiring.

From the first the warmth of the sun was sufficient to render shady halts a luxury, and on the crossroad--“Gray Birch Road,” to quote my own name for it--where a walker was somewhat shut away from the wind, I began to spell “warm” with fewer letters. Here, too, the dust was excessively deep, so that passing carriages--few, but too many--put a foot-passenger under a cloud. Still I was glad to be there, turning the old corners, seeing the old beauty, thinking the old thoughts. How green Tucker Brook meadow looked, and how grandly Lafayette loomed into the sky just beyond!

Most peculiar is the feeling I have for that sharp crest; I know not how to express it; a feeling of something like spiritual possession. If I do not love it, at least I love the sight of it. Nay, I will say what I mean: I love the mountain itself. I take pleasure in its stones, and favor the dust thereof. The loftiest snow-covered peak in the world would never carry my thoughts higher, or detain them longer. It was good to see it once more from this point of special vantage. And when I reached the corner of the Notch road and started homeward, how refreshing was the breeze that met me! Coolness after heat, ease after pain, these are near the acme of physical comfort.

Best of all was a half-hour’s rest under a pine tree, facing a stretch of green meadow, with low hills beyond it westward; a perfect picture, perfectly “composed.” In the foreground, just across the way, stood a thicket of chokecherry shrubs shining with fruit, and over them, on one side, trailed a clematis vine full of creamy white blossoms. Both cherry and clematis were common everywhere, often in each other’s company, but I had seen none quite so gracefully disposed. No gardener’s art could have managed the combination so well.

Here I sat and dreamed. I was near home, with time to spare; the wind was perfection, and the day also; I had walked far enough to make a seat welcome, yet not so far as to bring on sluggish fatigue; and everything in sight was pure beauty. Life will be sweet as long as it has such half hours to offer us. Yet somehow, human nature having a perverse trick of letting good suggest its opposite, I found myself, all at once,

“In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind.”

I looked at the garden patch and the mowed field, and thought what a strange world it is--ill-made, half-made, or unmade--in which man has to live, or, in our pregnant every-day phrase, to get his living; a world that goes whirling on its axis and revolving round its heat-and-light-giving body,--like a top which a boy has set spinning,--now roasted and parched, now drenched and sodden, now frozen dead; a world wherein, as our good American stoic complained, a man must burn a candle half the time in order to see to live; a world to which its inhabitants are so poorly adapted that a day of comfortable temperature is matter for surprise and thankfulness; a world which cannot turn round but that men die of heat and by freezing, of thirst and by drowning; a world where all things, appetite and passion, as well as heat and cold, run continually to murderous extremes. A strange world, surely, which men have agreed to justify and condemn in the same breath as the work of supreme wisdom, ruined by original sin. Children will have an explanation. The philosopher says: “My son, we must know how to be ignorant.”

So my thoughts ran away with me till the clematis vine and the cherry bushes brought me back to myself. The present hour was good; the birds and the plants were happy; and so was I, though for the moment I had almost forgotten it. The mountain had its old inscrutable, beckoning, admonishing, benignant look. The wise make no complaint. If the world is not the best we could imagine, it is the best we have; and such as it is, it is a pretty comfortable place in vacation time and fair weather. Let me not be among the fools who waste a bright to-day in forecasting dull to-morrows.

RED LEAF DAYS

“Woods over woods in gay theatric pride.”

GOLDSMITH.

White Mountain woods are generally at their brightest in the last few days of September. This year I had but a week or so to stay among them, and timed my visit accordingly, arriving on the 22d. As I drove over the hills from Littleton to Franconia there were only scattered bits of high color in sight--a single tree here and there, which for some reason had hung out its autumnal flag in advance of its fellows. It seemed almost impossible that all the world would be aglow within a week; but I had no real misgivings. Seed time and harvest would not fail. The leaves would ripen in their time. And so the event proved. Day by day the change went visibly forward (visibly yet invisibly, as the hands go round the face of a clock), till by the 30th the colors were as brilliant as one could wish, though with less than the usual proportion of yellow.

The white birches, which should have supplied that hue, were practically leafless. A small caterpillar (the larva of a tiny moth, one of the Microlepidoptera) had eaten the greenness from every white-birch leaf in the whole country round about. One side of Mount Cleveland, for example, looked from a distance as if a fire had swept over it. It was a real devastation; yet, to my surprise, as the maple groves turned red the total effect was little, if at all, less beautiful than in ordinary seasons. The leafless purplish patches gave a certain indefinable openness to the woods, and the eye felt the duller spaces as almost a relief. I could never have believed that destruction so widespread and lamentable could work so little damage to the appearance of the landscape. As the old Hebrew said, everything is beautiful in its time.

We were four at table, and in front of the evening fireplace, but in footing it we were only two. Sometimes we walked side by side; sometimes we were rods apart. When we felt like it we talked; then we went on a piece in silence, as Christians should. Let me never have a traveling companion who cannot now and then keep himself company. The ideal man for such a rôle is one who is wiser than yourself, yet not too wise, lest there be lack of reciprocity, and you find yourself no better than a boy rusticating with a tutor. He should be even-tempered, also, well furnished with philosophy, loving fair weather and good living, but taking things as they come; and withal, while not unwilling to intimate his own preference as to the day’s route and other matters, he should be always ready to defer with all cheerfulness to his partner’s wish. “The ideal man,” I say; but I am thinking of a real one.

We have become well known in the valley, after many years; so that, although we are almost the only walkers there, our ambulatory eccentricity has mostly ceased to provoke comment. At all events, the people no longer look upon us as men broken out of Bedlam. Time, we may say, has established our innocence. If a recent comer expresses concern as we go past, some older resident reassures him. “They are harmless,” he says. “There used to be three of them. They pull weeds, as you see; the older one has his hands full of them now. Yes, they are branches of thorn-bushes. They always carry opera-glasses, too. We used to think they were looking for land to buy. Old ----, up on the hill in Lisbon, tried to sell them his farm at a fancy figure, but they didn’t bite. I reckon they know a thing or two, for all their queer ways. One of ’em knows how to write, anyhow; he is always taking out pencil and paper. There! you see how he does. He sets down a word or two, and away he goes again.”

It is all true. We looked at plants, and sometimes gathered them. The botanist had thorn-bushes on his mind, the genus Cratægus being a hard one, and, as I judged, newly under revision. I professed no knowledge upon so recondite a subject, but was proud to serve the cause of science by pointing out a bush here and there. One hot afternoon, too, after a pretty long forenoon jaunt, I nearly walked my legs off, as the strong old saying is, following my leader far up the Landaff Valley (“down Easton way”) to visit a bush of which some one had brought him word. It was an excellent specimen, the best we had yet seen; but it was nothing new, and by no means so handsome or so interesting as one found afterward by accident on our way to Bethlehem. That was indeed a beauty, and its abundant fruit a miracle of color.

Once I detected an aster which the botanist had passed by and yet, upon a second look, thought worth taking home; it was probably Lindleyanus, he said, and the event proved it; and at another time my eye caught by the wayside a bunch of chokecherry shrubs hung with yellow clusters. We were in a carriage at the time, four old Franconians, and not one of us had ever seen such a thing here before. Three of us had never seen such a thing anywhere; for my own part, I was in a state of something like excitement; but the Cratægus collector, who knows American trees if anybody does, said: “Yes, the yellow variety is growing in the Arnold Arboretum, and is mentioned in the latest edition of Gray’s Manual.” Bushes have been found at Dedham, Massachusetts, it appears. The maker of the Manual seems not to have been aware of their having been noticed anywhere else; but since my return home I have been informed that they are not uncommon in the neighborhood of Montreal, where yellow chokecherries are “found with the ordinary form in the markets”!

That last statement is bewildering. Is there anything that somebody, somewhere, does not find edible? I have heard of eaters of arsenic and of slate pencils; but chokecherries for sale in a market! If the reader’s mouth does not pucker at the words he must be wanting in imagination.

In Franconia even the birds seemed to refuse such a tongue-tying diet. The shrubs loaded with fruit, some of it red (wine color), some of it black,--the latter color predominating, I think,--stood along the roadside mile upon mile. Sooner or later, I dare say, the birds must have recourse to them; how else do the bushes get planted so universally? But at the time of our visit there was a sufficiency of better fare. Rum cherries were still plentiful, and birds, like boys in an apple orchard, and like sensible people anywhere, take the best first.

It surprised me, while I was here some years ago, to discover how fond woodpeckers of all kinds are of rum cherries. Even the pileated could not keep away from the trees, but came close about the house to frequent them. One unfortunate fellow, I regret to say, came once too often. The sapsuckers, it was noticed, went about the business after a method of their own. Each cherry was carried to the trunk of a tree or to a telegraph pole, where it was wedged into a crevice, and eaten with all the regular woodpeckerish attitudes and motions. Doubtless it tasted better so. And the bird might well enough have said that he was behaving no differently from human beings, who for the most part do not swallow fruit under the branches, but take it indoors and feast upon it at leisure, and with something like ceremony. The trunk of a tree is a woodpecker’s table.