Chapter 4

One of the groundsels (_Senecio viscosus_) is a recent immigrant from Europe, but has been thoroughly established in the Back Bay lands of Boston--where I now found it, in perfect condition, December 4th--for at least half a dozen years. In Gray's "Flora of North America" it is said to grow there and in the vicinity of Providence; but since that account was written it has made its appearance in Lowell, and probably in other places. It is a coarse-looking little plant, delighting to grow in pure gravel; but its blossoms are pretty, and now, with not another flower of any sort near it, it looked, as the homely phrase is, "as handsome as a picture." Its more generally distributed congener, _Senecio vulgaris_,--also a foreigner--is, next to the common chickweed, I should say, our very hardiest bloomer. At the beginning of the month it was in flower in an old garden in Melrose; and at Marblehead Neck a considerable patch of it was fairly yellow with blossoms all through December and January, and I know not how much longer. I saw no shepherd's purse after December 27th, but knawel was in flower as late as January 18th. The golden-rods, it will be observed, are absent altogether from my list; and the same would have been true of the asters, but for a single plant. This, curiously enough, still bore five heads of tolerably fresh blossoms, after all its numberless companions, growing upon the same hillside, had succumbed to the frost.

Of my sixteen plants, exactly one half are species that have been introduced from Europe; six are members of the composite family; and if we omit the cone-flower, all but three of the entire number are simple whites and yellows. Two red flowers, the clover and the pimpernel, disappointed my search; but the blue hepatica would almost certainly have been found, had it come in my way to look for it.

Prettier even than the flowers, however, was the December greenness, especially of the humbler sorts: St. John's-wort, five-finger, the creeping blackberries,--whose modest winter loveliness was never half appreciated,--herb-robert, corydalis, partridge-berry, checkerberry, wintergreen, rattlesnake-plantain, veronica, and linnaea, to say nothing of the ferns and mosses. Most refreshing of all, perhaps, was an occasional patch of bright green grass, like the one already spoken of, at Marblehead, or like one even brighter and prettier, which I visited more than once in Swampscott.

As I review what I have written, I am tempted to exclaim with Tennyson:--

"And was the day of my delight As pure and perfect as I say?"

But I answer, in all good conscience, yes. The motto with which I began states the truth somewhat strongly, perhaps (it must be remembered where I got it), but aside from that one bit of harmless borrowed hyperbole, I have delivered a plain, unvarnished tale. For all that, however, I do not expect my industrious fellow-citizens to fall in at once with my opinion that winter is a pleasant season at the seashore (it would be too bad they should, as far as my own enjoyment is concerned), and December a month propitious for leisurely all-day rambles. How foreign such notions are to people in general I have lately had several forcible reminders. On one of my jaunts from Marblehead to Swampscott, for example, I had finally taken to the railway, and was in the narrow, tortuous cut through the ledges, when, looking back, I saw a young gentleman coming along after me. He was in full skating rig, fur cap and all, with a green bag in one hand and a big hockey stick in the other. I stopped every few minutes to listen for any bird that might chance to be in the woods on either hand, and he could not well avoid overtaking me, though he seemed little desirous of doing so. The spot was lonesome, and as he went by, and until he was some rods in advance, he kept his head partly turned. There was no mistaking the significance of that furtive, sidelong glance; he had read the newspapers, and didn't intend to be attacked from behind unawares! If he should ever cast his eye over these pages (and whatever he may have thought of my appearance, I am bound to say of him that he looked like a man who might appreciate good literature), he will doubtless remember the incident, especially if I mention the field-glass which I carried slung over one shoulder. Evidently the world sees no reason why a man with anything better to do should be wandering aimlessly about the country in midwinter. Nor do I quarrel with the world's opinion. The majority is wiser than the minority, of course; otherwise, what becomes of its divine and inalienable right to lay down the law? The truth with me was that I _had_ nothing better to do. I confess it without shame. Surely there is no lack of shoemakers. Why, then, should not here and there a man take up the business of walking, of wearing out shoes? Everything is related to everything else, and the self-same power that brought the killdeers to Marblehead sent me there to see them and do them honor. Should it please the gods to order it so, I shall gladly be kept running on such errands for a score or two of winters.

DYER'S HOLLOW.

"Quiet hours Pass'd among these heaths of ours By the grey Atlantic sea." MATTHEW ARNOLD.

I lived for three weeks at the "Castle," though, unhappily, I did not become aware of my romantic good fortune till near the close of my stay. There was no trace of battlement or turret, nothing in the least suggestive of Warwick or Windsor, or of Sir Walter Scott. In fact, the Castle was not a building of any kind, but a hamlet; a small collection of houses--a somewhat scattered collection, it must be owned,--such as, on the bleaker and sandier parts of Cape Cod, is distinguished by the name of village. On one side flowed the river, doubling its course through green meadows with almost imperceptible motion. As I watched the tide come in, I found myself saying,--

"Here twice a day the Pamet fills, The salt sea-water passes by."

But the rising flood could make no "silence in the hills;" for the Pamet, as I saw it, is far too sedate a stream ever to be caught "babbling." It has only some three miles to run, and seems to know perfectly well that it need not run fast.

My room would have made an ideal study for a lazy man, I thought, the two windows facing straight into a sand-bank, above which rose a steep hill, or perhaps I should rather say the steep wall of a plateau, on whose treeless top, all by themselves, or with only a graveyard for company, stood the Town Hall and the two village churches. Perched thus upon the roof of the Cape, as it were, and surmounted by cupola and belfry, the hall and the "orthodox" church made invaluable beacons, visible from far and near in every direction. For three weeks I steered my hungry course by them twice a day, having all the while a pleasing consciousness that, however I might skip the Sunday sermon, I was by no means neglecting my religious privileges. The second and smaller meeting-house belonged to a Methodist society. On its front were the scars of several small holes which had been stopped and covered with tin. A resident of the Castle assured me that the mischief had been done by pigeon woodpeckers,--flickers,--a statement at which I inwardly rejoiced. Long ago I had announced my belief that these enthusiastic shouters must be of the Wesleyan persuasion, and here was the proof! Otherwise, why had they never sought admission to the more imposing and, as I take it, more fashionable orthodox sanctuary? Yes, the case was clear. I could understand now how Darwin and men like him must have felt when some great hypothesis of theirs received sudden confirmation from an unexpected quarter. At the same time I was pained to see that the flickers' attempts at church-going had met with such indifferent encouragement. Probably the minister and the class leaders would have justified their exclusiveness by an appeal to that saying about those who enter "not by the door into the sheepfold;" while the woodpeckers, on their part, might have retorted that just when they had most need to go in the door was shut.

One of my favorite jaunts was to climb this hill, or plateau, the "Hill of Storms" (I am still ignorant whether the storms in question were political, ecclesiastical, or atmospheric, but I approve the name), and go down on the other side into a narrow valley whose meanderings led me to the ocean beach. This valley, or, to speak in the local dialect, this hollow, like the parallel one in which I lived,--the valley of the Pamet,--runs quite across the Cape, from ocean to bay, a distance of two miles and a half, more or less.

At my very first sight of Dyer's Hollow I fell in love with it, and now that I have left it behind me, perhaps forever, I foresee that my memories of it are likely to be even fairer and brighter than was the place itself. I call it Dyer's Hollow upon the authority of the town historian, who told me, if I understood him correctly, that this was its name among sailors, to whom it is a landmark. By the residents of the town I commonly heard it spoken of as Longnook or Pike's Hollow, but for reasons of my own I choose to remember it by its nautical designation, though myself as far as possible from being a nautical man.

To see Dyer's Hollow at its best, the visitor should enter it at the western end, and follow its windings till he stands upon the bluff looking out upon the Atlantic. If his sensations at all resemble mine, he will feel, long before the last curve is rounded, as if he were ascending a mountain; and an odd feeling it is, the road being level, or substantially so, for the whole distance. At the outset he is in a green, well-watered valley on the banks of what was formerly Little Harbor. The building of the railway embankment has shut out the tide, and what used to be an arm of the bay is now a body of fresh water. Luxuriant cat-tail flags fringe its banks, and cattle are feeding near by. Up from the reeds a bittern will now and then start. I should like to be here once in May, to hear the blows of his stake-driver's mallet echoing and re-echoing among the close hills. At that season, too, all the uplands would be green. So we were told, at any rate, though the pleasing story was almost impossible of belief. In August, as soon as we left the immediate vicinity of Little Harbor, the very bottom of the valley itself was parched and brown; and the look of barrenness and drought increased as we advanced, till toward the end, as the last houses were passed, the total appearance of things became subalpine: stunted, weather-beaten trees, and broad patches of bearberry showing at a little distance like beds of mountain cranberry.

All in all, Dyer's Hollow did not impress me as a promising farming country. Acres and acres of horseweed, pinweed, stone clover, poverty grass,[8] reindeer moss, mouse-ear everlasting, and bearberry! No wonder such fields do not pay for fencing-stuff. No wonder, either, that the dwellers here should be mariculturalists rather than agriculturalists. And still, although their best garden is the bay, they have their gardens on land also,--the bottoms of the deepest hollows being selected for the purpose,--and by hook or by crook manage to coax a kind of return out of the poverty-stricken soil. Even on Cape Cod there must be some potatoes to go with the fish. Vegetables raised under such difficulties are naturally sweet to the taste, and I was not so much surprised, therefore, on a certain state occasion at the Castle, to see a mighty dish of string beans ladled into soup-plates and exalted to the dignity of a separate course. Here, too,--but this was in Dyer's Hollow,--I found in successful operation one of the latest, and, if I may venture an unprofessional opinion, one of the most valuable, improvements in the art of husbandry. An old man, an ancient mariner, no doubt, was seated on a camp-stool and plying a hoe among his cabbages. He was bent nearly double with age ("triple" is the word in my notebook, but that may have been an exaggeration), and had learned wisdom with years. I regretted afterward that I had not got over the fence and accosted him. I could hardly have missed hearing something rememberable. Yet I may have done wisely to keep the road. Industry like his ought never to be intruded upon lightly. Some, I dare say, would have called the sight pathetic. To me it was rather inspiring. Only a day or two before, in another part of the township, I had seen a man sitting in a chair among his bean-poles picking beans. Those heavy, sandy roads and steep hills must be hard upon the legs, and probably the dwellers thereabout (unlike the Lombardy poplars, which there, as elsewhere, were decaying at the top) begin to die at the lower extremities. It was not many miles from Dyer's Hollow that Thoreau fell in with the old wrecker, "a regular Cape Cod man," of whom he says that "he looked as if he sometimes saw a doughnut, but never descended to comfort." Quite otherwise was it with my wise-hearted agricultural economists; and quite otherwise shall it be with me, also, who mean to profit by their example. If I am compelled to dig when I get old (to beg may I ever be ashamed!), I am determined not to forget the camp-stool. The Cape Cod motto shall be mine,--He that hoeth cabbages, let him do it with assiduity.

[8] In looking over the town history, I was pleased to come upon a note in defense of this lowly plant, on the score not only of its beauty, but of its usefulness in holding the sand in place; but, alas, "all men have not faith," and where the historian wrote _Hudsonia tomentosa_ the antipathetic compositor set up _Hudsonia tormentosa_. That compositor was a Cape Cod man,--I would wager a dinner upon it. "Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges," I hear him mutter, as he slips the superfluous consonant into its place.

This aged cultivator, not so much "on his last legs" as beyond them, was evidently a native of the soil, but several of the few houses standing along the valley road were occupied by Western Islanders. I was crossing a field belonging to one of them when the owner greeted me; a milkman, as it turned out, proud of his cows and of his boy, his only child. "How old do you think he is?" he asked, pointing to the young fellow. It would have been inexcusable to disappoint his fatherly expectations, and I guessed accordingly: "Seventeen or eighteen." "Sixteen," he rejoined,--"sixteen!" and his face shone till I wished I had set the figure a little higher. The additional years would have cost me nothing, and there is no telling how much happiness they might have conferred. "Who lives there?" I inquired, turning to a large and well-kept house in the direction of the bay. "My nephew." "Did he come over when you did?" "No, I sent for him." He himself left the Azores as a cabin boy, landed here on Cape Cod, and settled down. Since then he had been to California, where he worked in the mines. "Ah! that was where you got rich, was it?" said I. "Rich!"--this in a tone of sarcasm. But he added, "Well, I made something." His praise of his nearest neighbor--whose name proclaimed his Cape Cod nativity--made me think well not only of his neighbor, but of him. There were forty-two Portuguese families in Truro, he said. "There are more than that in Provincetown?" I suggested. He shrugged his shoulders. "Yes, about half the people." And pretty good people they are, if such as I saw were fair representatives. One boy of fourteen (unlike the milkman's heir, he was very small for his years, as he told me with engaging simplicity) walked by my side for a mile or two, and quite won my heart. A true Nathanael he seemed, in whom was no guile. He should never go to sea, he said; nor was he ever going to get married so long as his father lived. He loved his father so much, and he was the only boy, and his father couldn't spare him. "But didn't your father go to sea?" "Oh, yes; both my fathers went to sea." That was a puzzle; but presently it came out that his two fathers were his father and his grandfather. He looked troubled for a moment when I inquired the whereabouts of the poorhouse, in the direction of which we happened to be going. He entertained a very decided opinion that he shouldn't like to live there; a wholesome aversion, I am bound to maintain, dear Uncle Venner to the contrary notwithstanding.

A stranger was not an every-day sight in Dyer's Hollow, I imagine, and as I went up and down the road a good many times in the course of my visit, I came to be pretty well known. So it happened that a Western Islands woman came to her front door once, broom in hand and the sweetest of smiles on her face, and said, "Thank you for that five cents you gave my little boy the other day." "Put that in your pocket," I had said, and the obedient little man did as he was bidden, without so much as a side glance at the denomination of the coin. But he forgot one thing, and when his mother asked him, as of course she did, for mothers are all alike, "Did you thank the gentleman?" he could do nothing but hang his head. Hence the woman's smile and "thank you," which made me so ashamed of the paltriness of the gift (Thackeray never saw a boy without wanting to give him a _sovereign_!) that my mention of the matter here, so far from indicating an ostentatious spirit, ought rather to be taken as a mark of humility.

All things considered, I should hardly choose to settle for life in Dyer's Hollow; but with every recollection of the place I somehow feel as if its score or two of inhabitants were favored above other men. Why is it that people living thus by themselves, and known thus transiently and from the outside as it were, always seem in memory like dwellers in some land of romance? I cannot tell, but so it is; and whoever has such a picture on the wall of his mind will do well, perhaps, never to put the original beside it. Yet I do not mean to speak quite thus of Dyer's Hollow. Once more, at least, I hope to walk the length of that straggling road. As I think of it now, I behold again those beds of shining bearberry ("resplendent" would be none too fine a word; there is no plant for which the sunlight does more), loaded with a wealth of handsome red fruit. The beach-plum crop was a failure; plum wine, of the goodness of which I heard enthusiastic reports, would be scarce; but one needed only to look at the bearberry patches to perceive that Cape Cod sand was not wanting in fertility after a manner of its own. If its energies in the present instance happened to be devoted to ornament rather than utility, it was not for an untaxed and disinterested outsider to make complaint; least of all a man who was never a wine-bibber, and who believes, or thinks he believes, in "art for art's sake." Within the woods the ground was carpeted with trailing arbutus and a profusion of checkerberry vines, the latter yielding a few fat berries, almost or quite a year old, but still sound and spicy, still tasting "like tooth-powder," as the benighted city boy expressed it. It was an especial pleasure to eat them here in Dyer's Hollow, I had so many times done the same in another place, on the banks of Dyer's Run. Lady's-slippers likewise (nothing but leaves) looked homelike and friendly, and the wild lily of the valley, too, and the pipsissewa. Across the road from the old house nearest the ocean stood a still more ancient-seeming barn, long disused, to all appearance, but with old maid's pinks, catnip, and tall, stout pokeberry weeds yet flourishing beside it. Old maid's pinks and catnip! Could that combination have been fortuitous?

No botanist, nor even a semi-scientific lover of growing things, like myself, can ever walk in new fields without an eye for new plants. While coming down the Cape in the train I had seen, at short intervals, clusters of some strange flower,--like yellow asters, I thought. At every station I jumped off the car and looked hurriedly for specimens, till, after three or four attempts, I found what I was seeking,--the golden aster, _Chrysopsis falcata_. Here in Truro it was growing everywhere, and of course in Dyer's Hollow. Another novelty was the pale greenbrier, _Smilax glauca_, which I saw first on the hill at Provincetown, and afterward discovered in Longnook. It was not abundant in either place, and in my eyes had less of beauty than its familiar relatives, the common greenbrier (cat-brier, horse-brier, Indian-brier) of my boyhood, and the carrion flower. This glaucous smilax was one of the plants that attracted Thoreau's attention, if I remember right, though I cannot now put my finger upon his reference to it. Equally new to me, and much more beautiful, as well as more characteristic of the place, were the broom-crowberry and the greener kind of poverty grass (_Hudsonia ericoides_), inviting pillows or cushions of which, looking very much alike at a little distance, were scattered freely over the grayish hills. These huddling, low-lying plants were among the things which bestowed upon Longnook its pleasing and remarkable mountain-top aspect. The rest of the vegetation was more or less familiar, I believe: the obtuse-leaved milkweed, of which I had never seen so much before; three sorts of goldenrod, including abundance of the fragrant _odora_; two kinds of yellow gerardia, and, in the lower lands at the western end of the valley, the dainty rose gerardia, just now coming into bloom; the pretty _Polygala polygama_,--pretty, but not in the same class with the rose gerardia; ladies' tresses; bayberry; sweet fern; crisp-leaved tansy; beach grass; huckleberry bushes, for whose liberality I had frequent occasion to be thankful; bear oak; chinquapin; chokeberry; a single vine of the Virginia creeper; wild carrot; wild cherry; the common brake,--these and doubtless many more were there, for I made no attempt at a full catalogue. There must have been wild roses along the roadside and on the edge of the thickets, I should think, yet I cannot recollect them, nor does the name appear in my penciled memoranda. Had the month been June instead of August, notebook and memory would record a very different story, I can hardly doubt; but out of flower is out of mind.