Part 3

What interested me as much as anything connected with the whole affair was the fact that the olive-back, even in his excitement, made use of nothing but his mellow staccato whistle, such as he employs against the most inoffensive of chance human disturbers. Like the chickadee, and perhaps some other birds, he is musical, and not over-emphatic, even in his anger.

Again and again I rested to admire the glory of Mount Lafayette, which loomed more grandly than ever, I was ready to declare, seen thus partially and from this point of vantage. Twice, at least, I had been on its summit in such a fall day,--once on the 1st of October, and again, the year afterward, on a date two days earlier. That October day was one of the fairest I ever knew, both in itself (and perfect weather is a rare thing, try as we may to speak nothing but good of the doings of Providence) and in the pleasure it brought me.

For the next year’s ascent, which I remember more in detail, we chose--a brother Franconian and myself--a morning when the tops of the mountains, as seen from the valley lands, were white with frost or snow. We wished to find out for ourselves which it was, and just how the mountain looked under such wintry conditions.

The spectacle would have repaid us for a harder climb. A cold northwest wind (it was still blowing) had swept over the summit and coated everything it struck, foliage and rocks alike, with a thick frost (half an inch or more in depth, if my memory is to be trusted), white as snow, but almost as hard as ice. The effect was strangely beautiful. A dwarf fir tree, for instance, would be snow white on one side and bright green on the other. As we looked along the sharp ridge running to the South Peak, so called (the very ridge at the face of which I was now gazing from the Lonesome Lake path), one slope was white, the other green. Summer and winter were divided by an inch.

We nestled in the shelter of the rocks, on the south side of the summit, courting the sun and avoiding the wind, and lay there for two hours, exulting in the prospect, and between times nibbling our luncheon, which latter we “topped off” with a famous dessert of berries, gathered on the spot: three sorts of blueberries, and, for a sour, the mountain cranberry. The blueberries were Vaccinium uliginosum, V. cæspitosum, and V. Pennsylvanicum (there is no doing without the Latin names), their comparative abundance being in the order given. The first two were really plentiful. All of them, of course, grew on dwarf bushes, matting the ground between the boulders. At that exposed height not even a blueberry bush ventures to stand upright. One of them, V. cæspitosum, was both a surprise and a luxury, the small berries having a most deliciously rich fruity flavor, like the choicest of bananas! Probably no botanical writer has ever mentioned the point, and I have great satisfaction in supplying the deficiency, apprehending no rush of epicures to the place in consequence. About the fact itself there can be no manner of doubt. My companion fully agreed with me, and he is not only a botanist of international repute, but a most capable gastronomer. Much the poorest berry of the three was the Pennsylvanian, the common low blueberry of Massachusetts. “Strawberry huckleberry” it used to be called in my day by Old Colony children, with a double disregard of scientific proprieties. Even thus late in the season the Greenland sandwort was in perfectly fresh bloom; but the high cold wind made it a poor “bird day,” though I remember a white-throated sparrow singing cheerily near Eagle Lake, and a large hawk or eagle floating high over the summit. At the sight my fellow traveler broke out,--

“My heart leaps up when I behold An eagle in the sky.”

On that point, as concerning the fine qualities of the cespitose blueberry, we were fully agreed.

Even in Franconia, however, most of our days are spent, not in mountain paths, but in the valley and lower hill roads. We keep out of the mountains partly because we love to look at them (“I pitch my walk low, but my prospects high,” says an old poet), and partly, perhaps, because the paths to their summits have seemed to fall out of repair, and even to become steeper, with the lapse of years. One of my good trips, this autumn, was over the road toward Littleton, and then back in the direction of Bethlehem as far as the end of the Indian Brook road. That, as I planned it, would be no more than six or seven miles, at the most, and there I was to be met by the driving members of the club, who would bring me home for the mid-day meal,--an altogether comfortable arrangement. It is good to have time to spare, so that one can dally along, fearful only of arriving at the end of the way too soon. Such was now my favored condition, and I made the most of it. If I crossed a brook, I stayed awhile to listen to it and moralize its song. If a flock of bluebirds and sparrows were twittering about a farmer’s barn, I lingered a little to watch their doings. When a white-crowned sparrow or a partridge showed itself in the road in advance of me, that was reason enough for another halt. It is a pretty picture: a partridge caught unexpectedly in the open, its ruff erect, and its tail, fully spread, snapping nervously with every quick, furtive step. And the fine old trees in the Littleton hill woods were of themselves sufficient, on a warm day like this, to detain any one who was neither a worldling nor a man sent for the doctor. They detained me, at all events; and very glad I was to sit down more than once for a good season with them.

And so the hours passed. At the top of the road, in the clearing by the farms, I met a pale, straight-backed young fellow under a military hat. “You look like a man from Cuba or from Chickamauga,” I ventured to say. “Chickamauga,” he answered laconically, and marched on. Whether it was typhoid fever or simple “malaria” that had whitened his face there was no chance to inquire. He was munching an apple, which at that moment was also my own occupation. I had just stopped under a promising-looking tree, whose generous branches spilled their crop over the roadside wall,--excellent “common fruit,” as Franconians say, mellow, but with a lively, ungrafted tang. Here in this sunny stretch of road were more of my small Grapta butterflies, and presently I came upon a splendid tortoise-shell (Vanessa Milberti). That I would certainly have captured had I been armed with a net. I had seen two like it the day before, to the surprise of my friends the carriage people, ardent entomological collectors, both of them. They had found not a single specimen the whole season through. “There are some advantages in beating out the miles on foot,” I said to myself. I have never seen this strikingly handsome butterfly in Massachusetts, as I once did its rival in beauty, the banded purple (Arthemis); and even here in the hill country it is never so common as to lose that precious bloom which rarity puts upon whatever it touches.

As I turned down the Bethlehem road, the valley and hill prospects on the left became increasingly beautiful. Here I passed hermit thrushes (it was good to see them already so numerous again, after the destruction that had wasted them a few winters ago), a catbird or two, and a few ruby-crowned kinglets,--some of them singing,--and before long found myself within the limits of a rich man’s red farm; fences, houses, barns, poultry coops, and the rest, all painted of the same deep color, as if to say, “All this is mine.” I remembered the estate well, and have never grudged the owner of it his lordly possessions. I enjoy them, also, in my own way. He keeps his roads in apple-pie order, without meddling with their natural beauty (I wish our Massachusetts “highway surveyors” all worked under his orders, or were endowed with his taste), and is at pains to save his woods from the hands of the spoiler. “Please do not peel bark from the birch trees,”--so the signs read; and I say Amen. He has splendid flower gardens, too, and plants them well out upon the wayside for all men to enjoy. Long may it be before his soul is required of him.

By this time I was in the very prettiest of the red-farm woods. Hermit thrushes were there, also, standing upright in the middle of the road, and in the forest hylas were peeping, one of them a real champion for the loudness of his tone. How full of glory the place was, with the sunlight sifting through the bright leaves and flickering upon the shining birch trunks! If I were an artist, I think I would paint wood interiors.

My forenoon’s walk was ended. Another turn in the road, and I saw the carriage before me, the driver minding the horses, and the passengers’ seat vacant. The entomologists had gone into the woods looking for specimens, and there I joined them. They were in search of beetles, they said, and had no objection to my assistance; I had better look for decaying toadstools. This was easy work, I thought; but, as is always the way with my efforts at insect collecting, I could find nothing to the purpose. The best I could do was to bring mushrooms full of maggots (larvæ, the carrier of the cyanide and alcohol bottles called them), and what was desired was the beetles which the larvæ turned into. Once I announced a small spider, but the bottle-holder said, No, it was not a spider, but a mite; and there was no disputing an expert, who had published a list of Franconia spiders,--one hundred and forty-nine species! (She had wished very much for one more name, she told me, but her friend and assistant had remarked that the odd number would look more honest!) However, it is a poor sort of man who cannot enjoy the sight of another’s learning, and the exposure of his own ignorance. It was worth something to see a first-rate, thoroughly equipped “insectarian” at work and to hear her talk. I should have been proud even to hold one of her smaller phials, but they were all adjusted beyond the need, or even the comfortable possibility, of such assistance. There was nothing for it but to play the looker-on and listener. In that part I hope I was less of a failure.

The enthusiastic pursuit of special knowledge, persisted in year after year, is a phenomenon as well worth study as the song and nesting habits of a thrush or a sparrow; and I gladly put myself to school, not only this forenoon, but as often as I found the opportunity. One day my mentor told me that she hoped she had discovered a new flea! She kept, as I knew, a couple of pet deer-mice, and it seemed that some almost microscopic fleas had left them for a bunch of cotton wherein the mice were accustomed to roll themselves up in the daytime. These minute creatures the entomologist had pounced upon, clapped into a bottle, and sent off straightway to the American flea specialist, who lived somewhere in Alabama. In a few days she should hear from him, and perhaps, if the species were undescribed, there would be a flea named in her honor.

Distinctions of that nature are almost every-day matters with her. How many species already bear her name she has never told me. I suspect they are so numerous and so frequent that she herself can hardly keep track of them. Think of the pleasure of walking about the earth and being able to say, as an insect chirps, “Listen! that is one of my species,--named after me, you know.” Such specific honors, I say, are common in her case,--common almost to satiety. But to have a genus named for her,--that was glory of a different rank, glory that can never fall to the same person but once; for generic names are unique. Once given, they are patented, as it were. They can never be used again--for genera, that is--in any branch of natural science. To our Franconia entomologist this honor came, by what seemed a poetic justice, in the Lepidoptera, the order in which she began her researches. Hers is a genus of moths. I trust they are not of the kind that “corrupt.”

Thinking how above measure I should be exalted in such circumstances, I am surprised that she wears her laurels so meekly. Not that she affects to conceal her gratification; she is as happy over her genus, perhaps, as over the new édition de luxe of her most famous story; for an entomologist may be also a novelist, if she has a mind to be, as Charles Lamb would have said; but she knows how to carry it off lightly. She and the botanist of the party, my “walking mate,” who, I am proud to say, is similarly distinguished, often laugh together about their generic namesakes (his is of the large and noble Compositæ family); and then, sometimes, the lady will turn to me.

“It is too bad you can never have a genus,” she will say in her bantering tone; “the name is already taken up, you know.”

“Yes, indeed, I know it,” I answer her. An older member of the family, a --th cousin, carried off the prize many years ago, and the rest of us are left to get on as best we can, without the hope of such dignities. When I was in Florida I took pains to see the tree,--the family evergreen, we may call it. Though it is said to have an ill smell, it is handsome, and we count it an honor.

“But then, perhaps you would never have had a genus named for you, anyhow,” the entomologist continues, still bent upon mischief.

And there we leave the matter. Let the shoemaker stick to his last. Some of us were not born to shine at badinage, or as collectors of beetles. For myself, in this bright September weather I have no ambitions. It is enough, I think, to be a follower of the road, breathing the breath of life and seeing the beauty of the world.

* * * * *

In the afternoon I took the Landaff Valley round, down the village street nearly to the junction of Gale River and Ham Branch, then up the Ham Branch (or Landaff) Valley to a crossroad on the left, and so back to the road from the Profile Notch, and by that home again. The jaunt, which is one of our Franconia favorites, is peculiar for being substantially level; with no more uphill and downhill than would be included in a walk of the same distance--perhaps six miles--almost anywhere in southern New England.

The first thing a man is likely to notice as he passes the last of the village houses, and finds himself skirting the bank of Ham Branch (which looks to be nearly or quite as full as the river into which it empties itself), is the color of the water. Gale River is fresh from the hills, and ripples over its stony bed as clear as crystal. The branch, on the contrary, has been flowing for some time through a flat meadowy valley, where it has taken on a rich earthy hue, to which it might be natural to apply a less honorable sounding word, perhaps, if it were a question of some neutral stream, in whose character and reputation I felt no personal, friendly interest.

Just as I came to it, that afternoon, I saw to my surprise a white admiral butterfly sunning itself upon an alder leaf. I hope the reader knows the species,--Limenitis Arthemis, sometimes called the banded purple,--one of the prettiest and showiest of New England insects, four black or blackish wings crossed by a broad white band. It was much out of season now, I felt sure, both from what my entomological friends had told me, and from my own recollections of previous years, and I was seized with a foolish desire to capture it as a sort of trophy. It lay just beyond my reach, and I disturbed it, in hopes it would settle nearer the ground. Twice it disappointed me. Then I threw a stick toward it, aiming not wisely but too well, and this time startled it so badly that it rose straight into the air, sailed across the stream, and came to rest far up in a tall elm. “You were never cut out for a collector of insects,” I said to myself, recalling my experience of the forenoon; but I was glad to have seen the creature,--the first one for several years,--and went on my way as happy as a child in thinking of it. In the second half of a man’s century he may be thankful for almost anything that, for the time being, lifts twoscore of years off his back. The best part of most of us, I think, is the boy that was born with us. So far I am a Wordsworthian;--

“And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.”

A little way up the valley we come to an ancient mill and a bridge; a new bridge it is now, but I remember an old one, and a fright that I once had upon it. With a fellow itinerant--a learned man, whose life was valuable--I stopped here to rest of a summer noon, and my companion, with an eye to shady comfort, clambered over the edge of the bridge and out upon a joist which projected over the stream. There he sat down with his back against a pillar and his legs stretched before him on the joist. He has a theory, concerning which I have heard him discourse more than once,--something in his own attitude suggesting the theme,--that when a man, after walking, “puts his feet up,” he is acting not merely upon a natural impulse, but in accordance with a sound physiological principle; and in accordance with that principle he was acting now, as well as the circumstances of the case would permit. We chatted awhile; then he fell silent; and after a time I turned my head, and saw him clean gone in a doze. The seat was barely wide enough to hold him. What if he should move in his sleep, or start up suddenly on being awakened? I looked at the rocks below, and shivered. I dared not disturb him, and could only sit in a kind of stupid terror and wait for him to open his eyes. Happily his nap did not last long, and came to a quiet termination; so that the cause of science suffered no loss that day; but I can never go by the place without thinking of what might have happened.

Here, likewise, on an autumnal forenoon, two or three years ago, I had another memorable experience; nothing less (nothing more, the reader may say) than the song of a hermit thrush. It was in the season after bluebirds and hermits had been killed in such dreadful numbers (almost exterminated, we thought then) by cold and snow at the South. I had scarcely seen a hermit all the year, and was approaching the bridge, of a pleasant late September morning, when I heard a thrush’s voice. I stopped instantly. The note was repeated; and there the bird stood in a low roadside tree; the next minute he began singing in a kind of reminiscential half-voice,--the soul of a year’s music distilled in a few drops of sound,--such as birds of many kinds so frequently drop into in the fall. That, too, I am sure to remember as often as I pass this way.

In truth, all my Franconia rambles (I am tempted to write the name in three syllables, as I sometimes speak it, following the example of Fishin’ Jimmy and other local worthies),--all my “Francony” rambles, I say, are by this time full of these miserly delights. It is really a gain, perhaps, that I make the round of them but once a year. Some things are wisely kept choice.

“Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare.”