CHAPTER XIV.. Hiding Places

HIDING PLACES

Childhood remembers a secret place--refuge, confessional, and couch of dreams--where through the years that bring the first bewildering hints of creation's loneliness he goes to hide and to rebuild the joyous world that every now and then is laid in flowery ruins beneath the trampling necessities of growing up. These little nooks where we confronted so many puzzles, wondered over incomprehension, and looked into the hard eyes of derision, abide caressingly for memory, who flies to them still from cities of dreadful light. The need for those small havens is lifelong. They are rarely at hand in later days, but no locked door and no walled chamber of the mind can take their place.

The suns of midsummer, tempered by spruce boughs, flicker and play upon a broad-backed rock where fairy pools made by the late rain in its crannies are frequented by waxwing and woodpecker, even though an intruder sleeps upon that dryad's couch. Brakes and sweet fern crowd around it. Tasseled alders are its curtains. Here one might be forever at rest. It is to such a place that rebel wishes turn when the early grass and clover thicken in the pastures or when the summer birds begin their slow recessional. The longing to lie upon a sun-warmed rock in the woods comes back desperately in April and October to them who once have known that place of healing and stillness.

Yellow bells from the wands of circling forsythia bushes drop into a deep hollow lined with velvet grass. Pale butterflies of new-come May flutter among the dandelions that bejewel this emerald cup of Gæa, and sometimes drowsy wings are folded sleepily upon a gold rosette. Light beams pass and repass in jubilance over the grass blades. The sun is enchanted in the clear yellow of the flowers. Glints, movement, gayety, and withal peace and silence were in that place of exultant color and radiant life. It was a rare spot, and unvisited save by birds in quest of screening branches for their nests and perhaps by some one who hid there and always had to laugh before he left.

A round space of soft sward is guarded by strawberry shrub and by the bridal-wreath spiræa that droops white branches lowly to the ground. Here you could lie on a moonlit summer night, with arms outstretched and face pressed into the soft grass, and beneath your fingers you could feel the world turn on and on, immensely, soothingly, and everlastingly, the only sound the bats' wings above, or a baby robin protesting musically at the slowness of the night's divine pace. Here the smell of the sod is keen and sweet. Here dew would cool a throbbing brow. Here the undertones of earth vibrate through the body, and all its nerves, strung to intense perception, yet would be wrapped in persuasive peace.

An old balm-o'-Gilead tree, growing on a hillside, kindly lets down one mighty limb as pathway to a leafy hiding place incomparably remote and dimly lighted even at noon. The branches make an armchair far back against the trunk, and that glossy foliage, always cool, swishes like waves at low tide. The tree has much to tell, but never an intrusive word. You may sit there with a book or in the distracting company of secret happiness or tears, and it will ignore you courteously, going on about its daylong task of gathering greenness from the sun, and only from time to time touching your hand with an inquiring leaf. Sometimes a red squirrel looks in and departs in shocked fashion through the air. Sometimes the sheep pass far below on their way home. But the refuge is secure, and the balm-o'-Gilead's cradling arms wait peacefully to hold an asking child.

A foamy brown brook that flashes and dallies, is captured and breaks free again, down along the mountain has been coaxed by some wood nymph to furnish sparkling water for her round rock bath. Dutifully it pours in every moment its curveting freshness, bringing now and then the tribute of a laurel leaf or a petal from some flower that bent too close. This bath is gemmed with glittering quartz and floored with red and white pebbles. Gray mosses broider it where the sun lies, and dark green where the water drips. The nymph has been at some pains to train the five-finger ivy and nightshade heavily all about, and the great brakes carpet the path her gleaming feet must tread at sunrise. Now at noon you may come there, troubling no living drapery, and dangle your feet over the moss into the dimpling coolness of that mountain pool. A trout might dart in, a red lizard appear upon a ledge, but nothing else. The wild-cherry clusters hang within reach.

In the corner of a meadow where dispassionate cows graze and snort scornfully at the collie who comes to get them in the late afternoon stands a great red oak that has somehow inspired the grass underneath it to grow to tropic heights. But between two of its wandering ancient roots is short grass, woven with canary-flowered cinquefoil vines, and into this nook you may creep, screened by wind-ruffled blades beyond, and taste of the white wild strawberries that reach their eerie ripeness in the shade. A woodchuck may sit up and gaze at you across the barrier, or a bright-eyed chipmunk scuttle out on a limb for a better view. They leave you alone soon, and at twilight even the cow bell is quiet.

A balsam fir that grows on a bowlder leaning out halfway down a ravine hospitably spreads its aromatic boughs flat upon the rock, after the inviting manner of this slumber-giving Northern tree. The very breath of the hills is shed here. It is almost dark by day, and at night the stars show yellow above the upper firs. The wind goes murmuring between gray walls, and the sound of the stream, far down, comes vaguely save in the freshet month. This is the farthest hiding place of all. Only the daring would find the perilous way to its solitude.