Part 4

I should like to know how common it is for blackpolls to sing on their southward migration. Eleven years ago, in September, 1889, they came very early,--or I had the good fortune to see them very early,--and on the 4th and 5th of the month a few were “in full song,” so my notes record, “quite as long and full as in May.” I had never heard them sing before in autumn, nor have I ever had that pleasure since. Neither have I ever again seen them so early. Probably the two things--the song and the exceptional date--were somehow connected. At the time, I took the circumstance as an indication that the adult males migrate in advance of the great body of the species; and I fancied that, having detected them once thus early and thus musical, I should be likely to repeat the experience. If I am ever to do so, however, I must be about it. Eleven years is a large slice out of an adult man’s remaining allowance.

On the 18th I found a single olive-backed thrush, silent, in company with a flock of robins, or in the same grove with them--a White Mountain bird, thrice welcome; and this morning a few white-throated sparrows appeared. The first one that I saw--the only one, in fact--was a young fellow, and as I caught sight of him facing me, with his clear white throat, and his breast prettily streaked, with a wash of color across it, I was half in doubt what to call him. While I was taking observations upon his plumage, trying to make him look like himself, he began to _chip_, as if to help me out, and a second one unseen fell to singing near by; a very feeble and imperfect rendering of the dear old tune, but well marked by the “Peabody” triplets. It was a true touch of autumn, a voice from the hills.

Shortly before this I had spent a long time in watching the actions of a Lincoln finch. He was feeding upon Roman worm-wood seeds by the roadside, in company with two or three chipping sparrows; very meek and quiet in his demeanor, and happily not disposed to resent my inquisitiveness, which I took pains to render as little offensive as possible. I had not seen the like of him since May, and have seen so few of his race at any time that every new one still makes for me an hour of agreeable excitement.

In the same neighborhood an indigo-bird surprised me with a song. He was as badly out of voice as the white-throat, but his spirit was good, and he sang several times over. One would never have expected music from him, to look at his plumage. The indigo color was largely moulted away--only the rags of it left. It was really pitiful to see him; so handsome a coat, now nothing but shreds and patches. Most likely he was not a traveler from farther north, but a lingering summer resident of our own, as I remember to have seen three birds of his name in the same spot fifteen days ago. It would be interesting to know whether bright creatures of this kind do not feel humiliated and generally unhappy when they find their beauty dropping away from them, like leaves from the branch, as the summer wanes.

The best bird of the month, so far,--better even than the Lincoln finch,--was a Philadelphia vireo, happened upon all unexpectedly on the 17th. I had stopped, as I always do in passing, to look down into a certain dense thicket of shrubbery, through which a brook runs, a favorite resort for birds of many kinds. At first the place seemed to be empty, but in answer to some curiosity-provoking noises on my part a water thrush started up to balance himself on a branch directly under my nose, and the next moment a vireo hopped into full sight just beyond him; a vireo with plain back and wings, with no dark lines bordering the crown, and having the under parts of a bright yellow. He was most obliging; indeed, he could hardly have been more so, unless he had sung for me, and that was something not fairly to be expected. For a good while he kept silence. Then, in response to a jay’s scream, he began snarling, or complaining, after the family manner. I enjoyed the sight of him as long as I could stay (he was the second one I had ever seen with anything like certainty), and when I returned, an hour later, he was still there, and still willing to be looked at.

And then, to heighten my pleasure, a rose-breasted grosbeak, invisible, but not far away, broke into a strain of most entrancing music; with no more than half his spring voice, to be sure, but with all his May sweetness of tone and inflection. Again and again he sang, as if he were too happy to stop. I had heard nothing of the kind for weeks, and shall probably hear nothing more for months. It was singing to be remembered, like Sembrich’s “Casta Diva,” or Nilsson’s “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”

Scarlet tanagers are still heard and seen occasionally,--one was calling to-day,--but none of them in tune, or wearing so much as a single scarlet feather. Here and there, too, as we wander about the woods, we meet--once in two or three days, perhaps--a lonesome-acting, silent red-eyed vireo. A great contrast there is between such solitary lingerers and the groups of gossiping chickadees that one falls in with in the same places; so merry-hearted, so bubbling over with high spirits, so ready to be neighborly. When I whistle to them, and they whistle back, I feel myself befriended.

Within a few days we must have the grand September influx of warblers--crowds of blackpolls, myrtles, black-throated greens, and many more. For two months yet the procession will be passing.

FOUR DREAMERS

I remember the first man I ever saw sitting still by himself out-of-doors. What his name was I do not know. I never knew. He was a stranger, who came to visit in our village when I was perhaps ten years old. I had crossed a field, and gone over a low hill (not so low then as now), and there, in the shade of an apple tree, I beheld this stranger, not fishing, nor digging, nor eating an apple, nor picking berries, nor setting snares, but sitting still. It was almost like seeing a ghost. I doubt if I was ever the same boy afterward. Here was a new kind of man. I wondered if he was a poet! Even then I think I had heard that poets sometimes acted strangely, and saw things invisible to others’ ken.

I should not have been surprised, I suppose, to have found a man looking at a picture, some “nice,” high-colored “chromo,” such as was a fashionable parlor ornament in our rural neighborhood, where there was more theology to the square foot (and no preacher then extant with orthodoxy strait enough to satisfy it, though some could still make the blood curdle) than there was of art or poetry to the square acre; but to be looking at Nat Shaw’s hayfield and the old unpainted house beyond--that marked the stranger at once as not belonging in the ranks of common men. If he was not a poet, he must be at least a scholar. Perhaps he was going to be a minister, for he seemed too young to be one already. A minister had to think, of course (so I thought then), else how could he preach? and perhaps this man was meditating a sermon. I fancied I should like to hear a sermon that had been studied out-of-doors.

Times have changed with me. Now I sit out-of-doors myself, and by myself, and look for half an hour together at a tree, or a bunch of trees, or a lazy brook, or a stretch of green meadow. And I know that such things can be enjoyed by one who is neither a poet nor a preacher, but just a quite ordinary, uneducated mortal, who happens, by the grace of God, to have had his eyes opened to natural beauty and his heart made sensitive to the delights of solitude. I have learned that it is possible to enjoy scenery at home as well as abroad,--scenery without mountains or waterfalls; scenery that no tourist would call “fine;” a bit of green valley, an ancient apple orchard, a woodland vista, an acre of marsh, a cattle pasture. In fact, I have observed that painters choose quiet subjects like these oftener than any of the more exceptional and stupendous manifestations of nature. Perhaps it is because such subjects are easier; but I suspect not. I suspect, indeed, that they are harder, and are preferred because, to the painter’s eye, they are more permanently beautiful.

At this very moment I am looking at a patch of meadow inclosing a shallow pool of standing water, over the surface of which a high wind is chasing little waves. A few low alders are near it, and the grass is green all about. That of itself is a sight to make a man happy. For the world just now is consumed with drought. All the uplands are sere, and every roadside bush is begrimed with dust. I have come through the woods to this convenient knoll on purpose to find relief from the prevailing desolation--to rest my eyes upon green grass. For the eye loves green grass as well, almost, as the throat loves cold water.

Even in my boyish country neighborhood, though nobody, or nobody that I knew (which may have been a very different matter), did what I am now doing, there were some, I think (one or two, at least), who in their own way indulged much the same tastes that I have come to felicitate myself upon possessing. I remember one man, dead long since, who was continually walking the fields and woods, always with a spaniel at his heels, alone except for that company. He often carried a gun, and in autumn he snared partridges (how I envied him his skill!); but I believe, as I look back, that best and first of all he must have loved the woods and the silence. He was supposed to have his faults. No doubt he had. I have since discovered that most men are in the same category. I believe he used to “drink,” as our word was then. But I think now that I should have liked to know him, and should have found him congenial, if I had been mature enough, and could have got below the protective crust which naturally grows over a man whose ways of life and thought are different from those of all the people about him. I have little question that when he was out of the sight of the world he was accustomed to sit as I do to-day, and look and look and dream.

One thing he did not dream of,--that a boy to whom he had never spoken would be thinking of him forty years after he had taken his last ramble and snared his last grouse.

“An idler,” said his busier neighbors, though he earned his own living and paid his own scot.

“A misspent life,” said the clergy, though he harmed no one.

But who can tell? “Who knoweth the interpretation of a thing?” Perhaps his, also, was--for him--a good philosophy. As one of the ancients said, “A man’s mind is wont to tell him more than seven men that sit upon a tower.” If we are not born alike, why should we be bound to live alike? “A handful with quietness” is not so bad a portion.

Yes, but time is precious. Time once past never returns.

True.

We must make the best of it, therefore.

True.

By making more shoes.

Nay, that is not so certain.

The sun is getting low. Longer and longer tree-shadows come creeping over the grass, making the light beyond them so much the brighter and lovelier. The oak leaves shimmer as the wind twists the branches. The green aftermath is of all exquisite shades. A beautiful bit of the world. The meadow is like a cup. For an hour I have been drinking life out of it.

Now I will return home by a narrow path, well-worn, but barely wide enough for a man’s steps; a path that nobody uses, so far as I know, except myself. Till within a year or two it belonged to a hermit, who kept it in the neatest possible condition. That was his chief employment. His path was the apple of his eye. He was as jealous over it as the most fastidious of village householders is over his front-yard lawn. Not a pebble, nor so much as an acorn, must disfigure it. Fallen twigs were his special abhorrence, though he treated them handsomely. Little piles or stacks of them were scattered at short intervals along the way, neatly corded up, every stick in line. I noticed these mysterious accumulations before I had ever seen the maker of them, and wondered not a little who could have been to so much seemingly aimless trouble. At first I imagined that some one must have laid the wood together with a view to carrying it home for the kitchen stove. But the bits were too small, no bigger round, many of them, than a man’s little finger; not even Goody Blake could have thought such things worth pilfering for firewood; and besides, it was plain that many of them had lain where they were over at least one winter.

The affair remained a riddle until I saw the man himself. This I did but a few times, a long way apart, and always at a little distance. Generally his eyes were fastened on the ground. Sometimes he had a stick in his hand, and was brushing leaves and other litter out of the path. Perhaps he had married a model housekeeper in his youth, and had gone mad over the spring cleaning. He always saw me before I could get within easy speaking range; and he had the true woodman’s knack of making himself suddenly invisible. Sometimes I was almost ready to believe that he had dropped into the ground. Evidently he did not mean to be talked with. Perhaps he feared that I should ask impertinent questions. More likely he thought me crazy. If not, why should I be wandering alone about the woods to no purpose? I had no path to keep in order.

And perhaps I am a little crazy. Medical men insist upon it that the milder forms of insanity are much more nearly universal than is commonly supposed. Perfectly sound minds, I understand them to intimate, are quite as rare as perfectly sound bodies. At that rate there cannot be more than two or three truly sane men in this small town; and the probabilities are that I am not one of them.

A DAY IN FRANCONIA

It is the most delightful of autumn days, too delightful, it seemed to me this morning, to have been designed for anything like work. Even a walking vacationer, on pedestrian pleasures bent, would accept the weather’s suggestion, if he were wise. Long hours and short distances would be his programme; a sparing use of the legs, with a frequent resort to convenient fence-rails and other seasonable invitations. There are times, said I, when idleness itself should be taken on its softer side; and to-day is one of them.

Thus minded, I turned into the Landaff Valley shortly after breakfast, and at the old grist-mill crossed the river and took my favorite road along the hillside. As I passed the sugar grove I remembered that it was almost exactly four months since I had spent a delicious Sunday forenoon there, seated upon a prostrate maple trunk. Then it was spring, the trees in fresh leaf, the grass newly sprung, the world full of music. Bobolinks were rollicking in the meadow below, and swallows twittered overhead. Then I sat in the shade. Now there was neither bobolink nor swallow, and when I looked about for a seat I chose the sunny side of the wall.

Only four months, and the year was already old. But the mountains seemed not to know it. Washington, Jefferson, and Adams; Lafayette, Haystack, and Moosilauke;--not a cloud was upon one of them. And between me and them lay the greenest of valleys.

So for the forenoon hours I sat and walked by turns; stopping beside a house to enjoy a flock of farm-loving birds,--bluebirds especially, with voices as sweet in autumn as in spring,--loitering under the long arch of willows, taking a turn in the valley woods, where a drumming grouse was almost the only musician, and thence by easy stages sauntering homeward for dinner.

For the afternoon I have chosen a road that might have been made on purpose for the man and the day. It is short (two miles, or a little more, will bring me to the end of it), it starts directly from the door, with no preliminary plodding through dusty village streets, and it is not a thoroughfare, so that I am sure to meet nobody, or next to nobody, the whole afternoon long. At any rate, no wagon loads of staring “excursionists” will disturb my meditations. It is substantially level, also; and once more (for a man cannot think of everything at once) it is wooded on one side and open to the afternoon sun on the other. For the present occasion, furthermore, it is perhaps a point in its favor that it does not distract me with mountain prospects. Mountains are not for all moods; there are many other things worth looking at. Here, at this minute, as I come up a slope, I face halfway about to admire a stretch of Gale River, a hundred feet below, flowing straight toward me, the water of a steely blue, so far away that it appears to be motionless, and so little in volume that even the smaller boulders are no more than half covered. Beyond it the hillside woods are gorgeously arrayed--pale green, with reds and yellows of all degrees of brilliancy. The glory of autumn is nearly at the full, and at every step the panorama shifts. As for the day, it continues perfect, deliciously cool in the shade, deliciously warm in the sun, with the wind northwesterly and light. Many yellow butterflies are flitting about, and once a bright red angle-wing alights in the road and spreads itself carefully to the sun. While I am looking at it, sympathizing with its comfort, I notice also a shining dark blue beetle--an oil-beetle, I believe it is called--as handsome as a jewel, traveling slowly over the sand.

I have been up this way so frequently of late that the individual trees are beginning to seem like old friends. It would not take much to make me believe that the acquaintance is mutual. “Here he is again,” I fancy them saying one to another as I round a turn. Some of them are true philosophers, or their looks belie them. Just now they are all silent. Even the poplars cannot talk, it appears (a most worthy example), without a breath of inspiration to set them going. The stillness is eloquent. A day like this is the crown of the year. It is worth a year’s life to enjoy it. There is much to see, but best of all is the comfort that wraps us round and the peace that seems to brood over the world. If the first day was of this quality, we need not wonder that the maker of it took an artist’s pride in his work and pronounced it good.

As for the road, there is still another thing to be said in its praise: While it follows a straight course, it is never straight itself for more than a few rods together. If you look ahead a little space you are sure to see it running out of sight round a corner, beckoning you after it. A man would be a poor stick who would not follow. Every rod brings a new picture. How splendid the maple leaves are, red and yellow, with the white boles of the birches, as white as milk, or, truer still, as white as chalk, to set off their brightness. I could walk to the world’s end on such an invitation.

But the road, as I said, is a short one. Its errand is only to three farms, and I am now on the edge of the first of them. Here the wood moves farther away, and mountains come into view,--Lafayette, Haystack, and the Twins, with the tips of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams. Then, when the second of the houses is passed, the prospect narrows again. An extremely pretty wood of tall, straight trees, many fine poplars among them (and now they are all talking), is close at my side. The sunlight favors me, falling squarely on the shapely, light-colored trunks (some of the poplars are almost as white as the birches), and filling the whole place with splendor. I go on, absorbed in the lovely spectacle, and behold, it is as if a veil were suddenly removed. The wood is gone, and the horizon is full of mountain-tops. I have come to the last of the farms, and in another minute or two am at the door.

There is nobody at home, to my regret, and I sit down upon the doorstep. Moosilauke, Kinsman, Cannon, Lafayette, Haystack, the Twins, Washington, Clay, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison--these are enough, though there are others, too, if a man were trying to make a story. All are clear of clouds, and, like the trees of the wood, have the western light full on them. Even without the help of a glass I see a train ascending Mt. Washington. Happy passengers, say I. Would that I were one of them! The season is ending in glory at the summit, for this is almost or quite its last day, and there cannot have been many to match it, the whole summer through.

I loiter about the fields for an hour or more, looking at the blue mountains and the nearer, gayer-colored hills, but the occupant of the house is nowhere to be found. I was hoping for a chat with him. A seeing man, who lives by himself in such a place as this, is sure to have something to talk about. The last time I was here he told me a pretty story of a hummingbird. He was in the house, as I remember it, when he heard the familiar, squeaking notes of a hummer, and thinking that their persistency must be occasioned by some unusual trouble, went out to investigate. Sure enough, there hung the bird in a spider’s web attached to a rosebush, while the owner of the web, a big yellow-and-brown, pot-bellied, bloodthirsty rascal, was turning its victim over and over, winding the web about it. Wings and legs were already fast, so that all the bird could do was to cry for help. And help had come. The man at once killed the spider, and then, little by little, for it was an operation of no small delicacy, unwound the mesh in which the bird was entangled. The lovely creature lay still in his open hand till it had recovered its breath, and then flew away. Who would not be glad to play the good Samaritan in such guise? As I intimated just now, you may talk with a hundred smartly dressed, smoothly spoken city men without hearing a piece of news half so important or interesting.

It is five o’clock when I leave the farms and am again skirting the woods. Now I face the sun, the level rays of which transfigure the road before me till its beauty is beyond all attempt at description. I look at it as for a very few times in my life I have looked at a painted landscape, with unspeakable enjoyment. The subject is of the simplest: a few rods of common grassy road, arched with bright leaves and drenched in sunshine; but the suggestion is infinite. After this the way brings me into sight of the fairest of level green meadows, with pools of smooth water--“water stilled at even”--and scattered farmhouses. The day is ending right; and when I reach the hotel piazza and look back, there in the east is the full moon rising in all her splendor, attended by rosy clouds.

WITH THE WADERS

The 12th of October was a day. There are few like it in our Massachusetts calendar. And by a stroke of good fortune I had chosen it for a trip to Eagle Hill, on the North Shore. All things were near perfection; the only drawbacks to my enjoyment being a slight excess of warmth and an unseasonable plague of mosquitoes.

“Yes, it is _too_ fine,” said the stable-keeper, who drove me down from the railroad station. “It won’t last. It’s what we call a weather breeder.”

“So be it,” thought I. Just then I was not concerned with to-morrow. Happy men seldom are. The stable-keeper spoke more to the purpose when he told me that during the recent storm a most exceptional number of birds had been driven in. A certain gunner, Cy Somebody, had shot twenty-odd dollars’ worth in one day. “There he is now,” he remarked after a while, as a man and a dog crossed the road just before us. “Any birds to-day, Cy?” he inquired. The man nodded a silent affirmative--a very unusual admission for a Yankee sportsman to make, according to my experience.

I was hardly on foot before I began to find traces of this good man’s work. The first bird I saw was a sandpiper with one wing dragging on the ground. Near it was an unharmed companion which, even when I crowded it a little hard, showed no disposition to consult its own safety. “Well done,” said I. “‘There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.’”