Part 10

Even in this lane, at the foot of the knoll below us, see the brilliant luxuriance of clustered bitter-sweet draping the side of that clump of cedars! It is only an indication of the beauty that envelops this lane for a full half mile beyond. Every angle of its rude rail fence encloses a lovely pastoral, each a surprise and a contrast to its neighbor.

Right here before us, what a beginning! Hold up your hands on either side, and shut out the surroundings. Such is the glimpse I always long to paint from nature, and yet how almost maddening is the result! Rather would I drink it all in and fix its every feature in my mind, and paint it from its memory, when the presence of the living thing before me shall not mock my efforts and put to shame the crude creations of oil and pigment.

See how the cool gray rails are relieved against that rich dark background of dense olive juniper, how they hide among the prickly foliage! Look at that low-hanging branch which so exquisitely conceals the lowest rail as it emerges from its other side, and spreads out among the creeping briers that wreathe the ground with their shining leaves of crimson and deep bronze! Could any art more daringly concentrate a rhapsody of color than nature has here done in bringing up that gorgeous spray of scarlet sumach, whose fern-like pinnate leaves are so richly massed against that background of dark evergreens? And even in that single branch see the wondrous gradation of color, from purest green to purplish olive, and olive melting into crimson, and then to scarlet, and through orange into yellow, and all sustaining in its midst the clustered cone of berries of rich maroon! Verily, it were almost an affront to sit down before such a shrine and attempt to match it in material pigment. A passing sketch, perhaps, that shall serve to aid the memory in the retirement of the studio, but a careful copy, never! until we can have a tenfold lease of life, and paint with sunbeams. But there is more still in this tantalizing ideal, for a luxuriant wild grape-vine, that shuts in the fence near by, sends toward us an adventurous branch that climbs the upright rail, and festoons itself from fence to tree, and hangs its luminous canopy over the crest of the yielding juniper. Even from where we stand we can see the pendant clusters of tiny grapes clearly shadowed against the translucent golden screen. Add to all this the charm of life and motion, with trembling leaves and branches bending in the breeze, with here and there a flitting shadow playing across the half hidden rails, and where can you find another such picture, its counterpart in beauty--where? perhaps its very neighbor, for all roadside pictures are “hung upon the line,” they are all by the same great Master, and it is often difficult to choose.

Here we have a contrast. A dappled rock has taken possession of this little corner, or the corner has been built around it, if you choose--a “gray” rock we would call it in common parlance, but it is a gray composed of a checkered multitude of tints, colors which upon a rock, it would seem, were hardly worth an appreciative glance; but only let them be exhibited upon a fold of Lyons silk or Jouvin kid glove, and dignify them by the compliments of “ashes of roses,” or “London smoke,” and how eagerly they are sought, how exquisite they become. I speak in moderation when I say that I have often sat and counted as many as thirty just such tints upon the surface of a small “gray” rock, each distinct, and all so refined and exquisite in shade. This rounded bowlder is no exception; and with its tufted spots of jetty moss, and outcroppings of glistening quartz, its rounded, spreading blots of greenish lichens, and mottled groundwork, it may well defy the craft of the most skilled palette. And when these grays are contrasted with tender yellow greens and browns of fading ferns, such as fringe the borders of the one before me, with a background of scarlet whortleberry bushes and deep-green sprays of blackberry clustering about the loosening bark of a crumbling stump, with its shelving growth of fungus hiding among its brown debris, one may well pause and wonder which to choose, or where a single touch is wanting in the perfect unity and harmony of either.

Another jutting corner, and we confront a swaying mass of gold and purple--that magnificent regal combination of graceful golden-rod and asters that glorifies our autumn from September to the falling leaf. There are a number of species of golden-rod, varying as much in their intensity of color as in their time of bloom. The earliest appear in the heart of summer, in wood and meadow; while others, larger and more stately, lift up in their midst their plumy, undeveloped tips, and wait until their predecessors are old and gray ere they roll out their wreaths of gold. For weeks the roads and by-ways have been lit up with their brilliant glow, that parting sunset gleam that lingers with the closing year. This splendid cluster is full six feet in height, and towers above the highest rail, or rather where the rail ought to be, for it is lost from sight beneath a dense fret-work of prickly smilax--and such brilliant, polished leaves! how they glitter in the sun! almost as though wet with dew.

And to think how those prickly canes, denuded of their leaves, are sold upon our city thoroughfares as “Spanish rose-trees” to the unsuspecting passer-by! Those guileless venders, too! I remember one that sought to enrich my store of botanical knowledge by telling me they “bloomed in winter!” and had a flower as “big as a saucer,” and “kinder like a holy hawk!!!?” I looked him straight in the eye, but he was the picture of innocence. “Can you tell me the botanical name,” I asked. “Oh yes,” he glibly replied, “I think they call it the Rubus epistaxis.” Eheu! but this was too much, and he saw it, and with a wink of his foxy eye and a shrewd grin, he whispered along the palm of his hand, “Got to git a livin’ somehow, boss; now don’t give me away.” “Here you are, lady, Spanish roses, lady, fresh from the steamer.” I never see a thicket of green-brier without thinking of its “winter blossom;” and, by-the-way, did you ever notice a thicket of this shrub, what a defiant, arbitrary tyrant it is--shutting out the very life-breath and light of day from its encumbered victims, monopolizing everything within its power, and even reaching out for more with searching tips in mid-air, and a couple of greedy tendrils at every leaf? And did you ever notice along the road that delicious whiff that comes to you every now and then, that pungent breath of the sweet-fern? We get it now; the air is laden with it from the dark-green beds across the road. The sweet-fern, as I remember it, was the simpler’s panacea and the small boy’s joy--an aromatic shrub, whose inhaled fumes, together with its corn-silk rival, seem destined by an all-wise Providence as a preparatory tonic to the more ambitious fumigation of after-years. Many a time have I sat upon this bank and tried to imagine in my domestic product the racy flavor of the famed Havana!

Between old Aunt Huldy, with her mania for the simples, and the demand of the village boys, I wonder there is any of it left. But Aunt Huldy has long since died; all her “yarbs,” and “yarrer tea,” and “paowerful gud stimmilants” could not give her the lease of eternal earthly life which she said lurked in the “everlastin’ flaowers;” and after she had reached the age of one hundred and three, her tansy decoctions and boneset potions ceased in their efficacy--the feeble pulse grew feebler, and one winter’s eve, sitting in her rocker by her kettle and andirons, she fell into a deep sleep, from which she never awoke. Aunt Huldy was as strange and eccentric a character as one rarely meets in the walks of life. Some said she was crazy; others said she was a witch; but whatever she may have been, this aged dame was picturesque with her bent figure, her long white hair and scarlet hood. And who shall describe the ancient withered face that looked out from the shadow of that hood, the small gray eyes and heavy white eyebrows, the toothless jaws and receding lips, and massive chin that made its appalling ascent across the face? But I cannot describe that face: think of how a witch should look, and old Huldy’s features will rise up before you. She knew every herb that grew, but her great stand-by was “sweet-fern:” she smoked it, she chewed it, she drank it, and even wore a little bag of it around her neck, “to charm away the rheumatiz.”

Since her time, however, the sweet-fern has had a chance to recuperate, and, as far as we can see along the road, the banks are covered with it; and there’s a clump of teazles in its midst! I wonder if that old carding-mill still stands. You also, perhaps, will wonder what relation can exist between the two, that should make my thoughts jump half a mile at the sight of a roadside weed. But that old woollen-mill offered a premium on the extermination of one weed at least, for all the teasels of the neighborhood were required to keep its cloth brushes in thorough repair; but I fear its buzzing wheels are silent, for in olden times no such splendid clump as this could have remained to go to seed upon the highway. This old mill lies right upon our path, only a short walk down the road beyond. It nestles among a bower of willows in a picturesque ravine known as the “Devil’s Hollow”--an umbrageous, rocky glen, by far too cool and comfortable a place to justify the name it bears.

Following the road, we now descend into a long, low stretch, hedged in between two tall banks of alder, overtopped with interwoven tangles of clematis, with its cloudy autumn clusters--that graceful vine which, like the dandelion, is even more beautiful in death than in the fulness of its bloom. And so, indeed, are nearly all those plants whose final state is thus endowed by nature with feathery wings to lift them from the earth.

When has this swamp milk-weed by the roadside looked so fair as now, with its bursting pods and silky seeds--those little waifs thrown out upon the world with every passing breeze. How tenderly they seem to cling to the little cosy home where they have been so snugly cradled and protected; and see how they sail away, two or three together, loth to part, until some rude gust shall separate them forever.

And here’s the great spiny thistle, too, that armed highwayman with florid face and pompon in his cap. But he has had his day, and now we see him old and seedy; his spears are broken, and his silvery gray hairs are floating everywhere and glistening in the sun.

Now we leave the alders, and another roadside mosaic of rich color opens up before us, where the old half-wall fence, with its overtopping rails, is luminous with a crimson glow of ampelopsis. It covers all the stones for yards and yards; it swings from every jutting rail; it clambers up the tree trunks and envelops them in fire, and hangs its waving fringe from all the branches.

Above the wall, like an encampment of thatched wigwams, the corn-shocks lift their heads; a prospecting colony encamped among a field rich with outcroppings of gold--a wealth of great round nuggets all in sight. And were we to tear away that thatch, we might see where they have stowed away their accumulated grains of wealth. We hear their rustling whispers: “Hush! hush!” they seem to say to each other as we approach; but their wariness is gratuitous, for a tell-tale vine is creeping away upon the fence near-by, and has stopped to rest its golden burden on the summit of the wall, half hiding among the scarlet creepers.

Here yellow brakes abound, spreading their broad, triangular fronds on every side amid the brilliant berries of wild-rose, and pink leaves of blueberry. And here are thickets of black-alder, where every twig is studded with scarlet beads, that cling so close that even winter’s bluster cannot shake them off. No matter where we look in these October days, nature is burning itself away in a blaze of color that dazzles the eyes; and now we approach its very crowning touch.

I wish every one might see this gorgeous combination of oak and maples; see it and go no farther, for a further search were fruitless in finding its equal. It is the pride of the entire community; towns-people and visitors ride from miles around to see its final flush--a magnificent climax in the way of concentration of vivid color, in which nature seems to have grouped with distinct purpose and design, producing a piece of natural landscape-gardening such as no art could have approached. The background is a massive precipice of rock towering to the height of eighty feet, itself a perfect medley of tone.

The group is composed of eight maples, each a distinct contrast of pure color. In their midst a superb large oak presents one massive breadth of deep purple green; and spreading up one side like a flood of yellow light, a rock-maple lifts its splendid array of foliage. These two trees concentrate the effect, and the others are arranged around them like colors on a palette: one is a flaming scarlet, another beside it is always a rich green, even to the falling leaf--with only a single branch, that every year, even as early as August, persists in turning to a peculiar salmon pink; another, a red-maple, is so deep a red as to appear almost maroon, and its branches intermingle with the pale-pink verdure of another growing by its side. There is one that combines every intermediate color, from deep crimson to the palest saffron; while its neighbor flutters in the wind with every leaf a brilliant butterfly of pure green, with spots and splashes of deep carmine.

This whole assemblage of color fairly blazes in the landscape, and even from the top of Mount Pisgah, a half a mile away, it looks like a glowing coal dropped down upon a bed of smouldering ashes in the valley; for the surrounding meadow is thick-set with great gray rocks and crimson viburnum, as though it had caught fire from the flaming trees. What other country can boast the glory of a tree which, taken all in all, can hold its own beside our lovely maple? From the time when first it hangs its silken tassels to the awakening spring breeze until its autumn fire has burned away its leaves, it presents an everchanging phase that lends a distinct expression to American landscape. It affords us grateful shade in summer; and with its trickling bounty in the spring we can all unite in a hearty toast, “A health to the glorious maple.”

But there is another tree which should not be forgotten, and if once seen in a New England autumn landscape there is little danger of its escaping from the memory. Of course, I refer to the pepperidge, or tupelo, that nondescript among trees; for who ever saw two pepperidge-trees alike? They seem to scorn a reputation for symmetry, or even the idea of establishing among themselves the recognition of a type of character. Novelty or grotesqueness is their only aim, and they hit the bull’s-eye every time. There is one I have in mind that has always been a perfect curiosity. Its height is fully seventy feet, and its crown is as flat as though cut off with a mammoth pair of pruning-shears. The central trunk runs straight up to the summit, from which it squirms off into six or seven snake-like branches, that dip downward and writhe among the other limbs, all falling in the same direction. One gets the impression, on looking at it, that originally it might have been a respectable-looking tree, but that in some rude storm in its early days it had been struck by lightning, torn up by the roots, and afterward had taken root at the top. The tupelo, whenever seen, is always one of our most picturesque trees, and a never-failing source of surprise, twisting and turning into some unheard-of shape, and seeming always to say, “There! beat that if you can!” Near the coast it assumes the form of a crazy Italian pine, with spindling trunk and massive head of foliage. Sometimes it divides in the middle, like an hour-glass, and again mimics a fir-tree in caricature; but he who would keep track of the acrobatic capers of the tupelo would have his hands full. Whatever its shape, however, its brilliant, glossy crimson foliage forms one of the most striking features of our October landscape.

But I believe we were on the road to that carding-mill. We had almost forgotten it; and now, as we look ahead, we see the old lumber-shed that marks the upper ledge of Devil’s Hollow. From this old shed a trout-brook plunges through a series of rocky terraces, now winding among prostrate moss-grown trunks, now gurgling through the bare roots of great white birches, or spreading in a swift, glassy sheet as it pours across some broad shelving rock, and plunges from its edge in a filmy water-fall. It roars pent up in narrow cañons, and out again it swirls in a smooth basin worn in the solid rock. At almost every rod or two along its precipitous course there is a mill somewhere hid among the trees--queer, quaint little mills, some built up on high stone walls, others fed with trickling flumes which span from rock to rock, supporting on every beam a rounded cushion of velvety green moss, and hanging a fringe of ferns from almost every crevice. And one there is in ruins, fallen from its lofty perch, and piled in chaos in the stream. There are saw-mills, and shook-mills, and carding-mills, seven altogether in this one descent of about three hundred feet. The water enters the ravine as pure as crystal; but in its wild booming through race-ways, dams, and water-wheels, it gradually assumes a rich sienna hue from the débris of sawdust everywhere along its course. The interior of the ravine is musical with the trebles of the falling water and the accompaniment of the rumbling mills. Tiny rainbows gleam beneath the water-falls, and swarms of glistening bubbles and little islands of saffron-colored foam float away upon the dark-brown eddies.

At last we reach the carding-mill, which is the lowest of them all--in every sense, it seems, for it is as I had feared: the flume is but a pile of brown and mouldy timbers in the bed of the stream, and the old box-wheel has rotted and fallen from its spokes, almost obscured beneath a rank growth of weeds. No sound of buzzing teasels, no rumbling of the water-wheel, no happy carder singing at his work: nothing--but a couple of boys, kneeling in a corner, sucking cider through a straw. Yes, the old mill has fallen from grace; but what else might one expect from a mill in “Devil’s Hollow,” where all its neighbors are engaged in making hogshead staves, and the very water has turned to ruddy wine?

The carding-machine is gone, and has given place to a rustic cider-press. A temporary undershot-wheel has been rigged beneath the floor, and a rude trough, patched up with sods, conducts the water from the stream.

It is the same old cider-press we all remember, and with the same accessories. Here are casks of all sizes waiting to be filled, and the piles of party-colored apples spilled upon the floor from the farmers’ wagons that every now and then back up to the open door. There is the same rustic harangue on leading agricultural topics, among which we hear a variety of opinions about that imaginary “line storm.”

“Seems to gi’n the slip this year,” remarks one old long-limbed settler with a slope-roofed straw hat, “’n’ I don’t know zactly what to make on’t; but I ain’t so sartin nuther”--he now takes a wise observation of a small patch of blue sky through the trees overhead. “I cal’late we’ll git a leetle tetch on’t yit.”

“Likenuff, likenuff,” responds another, with a squeaky voice; “the ar’s gittin’ ruther dampish, ’n’ my woman hez got the rheumatiz ag’in. She kin alluz tell when we’re goin’ to git a spell o’ weather; it’s sure to fetch her all along her spine. But I lay most store on them ar pesky tree-tuds. I heern um singin’ like all possessed ez I wuz comin’ through the woods yender; ’n’ it’s a sartin sign o’ rain when them ar critters gits agoin’, you kin depend on’t.”

And now we hear all about the pumpkin and the corn crop, the potato yield, and the regular list of other subjects so dear to the rural heart.

In a corner by themselves we see the pile of “vinegar nubbins”--a tanned and soft variety of apple--in all stages of variegation. The “hopper” receives the shovelfuls of fruit for the crushing “smasher,” which again supplies the straw-laid press. We hear the creaking turn of the lever screw, the yielding of the timbers, and a fresh burst of the trickling beverage flowing from the surrounding trough into the great wooden tub below. Here, too, is the swarm of eager urchins, with heads together, like a troop of flies around a grain of sugar. Ah! what unalloyed bliss is reflected from their countenances as they absorb the amber nectar through the intermediate straw--that golden link that I have missed for many a year!

Outside upon the logs the refuse “pumice-cheese” has brought together all the yellow-jackets and late butterflies of the neighborhood--butterflies so tipsy that you can pick them up between your fingers. I never went so far with the yellow-jackets, for they have a hotter temper, and don’t like to be fooled with. Black hornets, too, are here, and they find a feast spread at their very door; for overhead, upon the beech, they have hung their paper house, like a gray balloon caught among the branches.

Now we hear a chatter and a scratching on the roof, where a pair of lively squirrels hold a game of tag; and ascending the rickety stairs into the loft above, we find the floor strewn with hickory-nuts, with neat round holes cut through on either side, and numberless shaggy butternuts, too, with daylight let into their recesses also. The boards and beams are covered with cobweb trimmings, laden with wool-dust; and as we approach a pile of rusty iron near the murky window, we hear a scraping of sharp claws, the dropping of a nut between the rafters, and now a wild scampering on the roof overhead. Before we have fairly recovered from our surprise, we notice a sudden darkening of a hole in the shingles close by, where, still and motionless, two inquisitive black eyes look down at us. We have intruded upon private property, for this is the home of the squirrels. No one can dispute their title, for these little squatters have occupied the premises and held the fort for nearly twenty years.