Chapter 6

Then with a smile that made no more allowances necessary he assured me,--

"Oh, no, sir! I am quite at home in the hills of Hingham. I have been out at Concord for a few days, and am now on the main road from Concord to Dubuque. I am Mr. Kinnier, Dr. Kinnier, of Dubuque, Iowa, and"--releasing my hand--"let me see"--pausing as we reached the top of the hill, and looking about in search of something--"Ah, yes [to himself], there on the horizon they stand, those two village spires, 'those tapering steeples where they look up to worship toward the sky, and look down to scowl across the street'"--quoting again, word for word, from another of my essays. Then to me: "They are a little farther away and a little closer together than I expected to see them--too close [to himself again] for God to tell from which side of the street the prayers and praises come, mingling as they must in the air."

He said it with such thought-out conviction, such sweet sorrow, and with such relief that I began now to fear for what he might quote next and _miss_ from the landscape. The spires were indeed there (may neither one of them now be struck by lightning!); but what a terrible memory the man has! Had he come from Dubuque to prove me--

The spires, however, seemed to satisfy him; he could steer by them; and to my great relief, he did not demand a chart to each of the wonders of Mullein Hill--my thirty-six woodchuck holes, etc., etc., nor ask, as John Burroughs did, for a sight of the fox that performed in one of my books somewhat after the manner of modern _literary_ foxes. Literary foxes! One or another of us watches this Hilltop day and night with a gun for literary foxes! I want no pilgrims from Dubuque, no naturalists from Woodchuck Lodge, poking into the landscape or under the stumps for spires and foxes and boa constrictors and things that they cannot find outside the book. I had often wondered what I would do if such visitors ever came. Details, I must confess, might on many pages be difficult to verify; but for some years now I have faithfully kept my four boys here in the woods to prove the reality of my main theme.

This morning, with heaps of gravel in the yard, the hilltop looked anything but like the green and fruitful mountain of the book, still less like a way station between anywhere and _Concord_! And as for myself--it was no wonder he said to me,--

"Now, sir, please go on with your teaming. I ken the lay of the land about Mullein Hill

"'Whether the simmer kindly warms Wi' life and light, Or winter howls in gusty storms The lang, dark night.'"

But I did not go on with the teaming. Gravel is a thing that will wait. Here it lies where it was dumped by the glaciers of the Ice Age. There was no hurry about it; whereas pilgrims and poets from Dubuque must be stopped as they pass. So we sat down and talked--of books and men, of poems and places, but mostly of books,--books I had written, and other books--great books "whose dwelling is the light of setting suns." Then we walked--over the ridges, down to the meadow and the stream, and up through the orchard, still talking of books, my strange visitor, whether the books were prose or poetry, catching up the volume somewhere with a favorite passage, and going on--reading on--from memory, line after line, pausing only to repeat some exquisite turn, or to comment upon some happy thought.

Not one book was he giving me, but many. The tiny leather-bound copy of Burns that he drew from his coat pocket he did not give me, however, but fondly holding it in his hands said:--

"It was my mother's. She always read to us out of it. She knew every line of it by heart as I do.

"'Some books are lies frae end to end'--

but this is no one of them. I have carried it these many years."

Our walk brought us back to the house and into the cool living-room where a few sticks were burning on the hearth. Taking one of the rocking-chairs before the fireplace, the Pilgrim sat for a time looking into the blaze. Then he began to rock gently back and forth, his eyes fixed upon the fire, quite forgetful evidently of my presence, and while he rocked his lips moved as, half audibly, he began to speak with some one--not with me--with some one invisible to me who had come to him out of the flame. I listened as he spoke, but it was a language that I could not understand.

Then remembering where he was he turned to me and said, his eyes going back again beyond the fire,--

"She often comes to me like this; but I am very lonely since she left me,--lonely--lonely--and so I came on to Concord to visit Thoreau's grave."

And this too was language I could not understand. I watched him in silence, wondering what was behind his visit to me.

"Thoreau was a lonely man," he went on, "as most writers are, I think, but Thoreau was very lonely."

"Wild," Burroughs had called him; "irritating," I had called him; and on the table beside the Pilgrim lay even then a letter from Mr. Burroughs, in which he had taken me to task on behalf of Thoreau.

"I feel like scolding you a little," ran the letter, "for disparaging Thoreau for my benefit. Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am. I may be more human, but he is certainly more divine. His moral and ethical value I think is much greater, and he has a heroic quality that I cannot approach."

There was something queer in this. Why had I not understood Thoreau? Wild he surely was, and irritating too, because of a certain strain and self-consciousness. A "counter-irritant" he called himself. Was this not true?

As if in answer to my question, as if to explain his coming out to Mullein Hill, the Pilgrim drew forth a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and without opening it or looking at it, said:--

"I wrote it the other day beside Thoreau's grave. You love your Thoreau--you will understand."

And then in a low, thrilling voice, timed as to some solemn chant, he began, the paper still folded in his hands:--

"A lonely wand'rer stands beside the stone That marks the grave where Thoreau's ashes lie; An object more revered than monarch's throne, Or pyramids beneath Egyptian sky.

"He turned his feet from common ways of men, And forward went, nor backward looked around; Sought truth and beauty in the forest glen, And in each opening flower glory found.

"He paced the woodland paths in rain and sun; With joyous thrill he viewed the season's sign; And in the murmur of the meadow run With raptured ear he heard a voice divine.

"Truth was the beacon ray that lured him on. It lit his path on plain and mountain height, In wooded glade and on the flow'ry lawn-- Where'er he strayed, it was his guiding light.

"Close by the hoary birch and swaying pine To Nature's voice he bent a willing ear; And there remote from men he made his shrine, Her face to see, her many tongues to hear.

"The robin piped his morning song for him; The wild crab there exhaled its rathe perfume; The loon laughed loud and by the river's brim The water willow waved its verdant plume.

"For him the squirrels gamboled in the pines, And through the pane the morning sunbeams glanced; The zephyrs gently stirred his climbing vines And on his floor the evening shadows danced.

"To him the earth was all a fruitful field. He saw no barren waste, no fallow land; The swamps and mountain tops would harvests yield; And Nature's stores he garnered on the strand.

"There the essential facts of life he found. The full ripe grain he winnowed from the chaff; And in the pine tree,--rent by lightning round, He saw God's hand and read his autograph.

"Against the fixed and complex ways of life His earnest, transcendental soul rebelled; And chose the path that shunned the wasted strife, Ignored the sham, and simple life upheld.

"Men met him, looked and passed, but knew him not, And critics scoffed and deemed him not a seer. He lives, and scoff and critic are forgot; We feel his presence and his words we hear.

"He passed without regret,--oft had his breath Bequeathed again to earth his mortal clay, Believing that the darkened night of death Is but the dawning of eternal day."

The chanting voice died away and--the woods were still. The deep waters of Walden darkened in the long shadows of the trees that were reaching out across the pond. Evening was close at hand. Would the veery sing again? Or was it the faint, sweet music of the bells of Lincoln, Acton, and Concord that I heard, humming in the pine needles outside the window, as if they were the strings of a harp?

The chanting voice died away and--the room was still; but I seem to hear that voice every time I open the pages of "The Week" or "Walden." And the other day, as I stood on the shores of the pond, adding my stone to the cairn where the cabin used to stand, a woodthrush off in the trees (trees that have grown great since Thoreau last looked upon them), began to chant--or was it the Pilgrim from Dubuque?--

"Truth was the beacon ray that lured him on. It lit his path on plain and mountain height, In wooded glade and on the flow'ry lawn-- Where'er he strayed, it was his guiding light."

IX

THE HONEY FLOW

And this our life, exempt from public haunt and those swift currents that carry the city-dweller resistlessly into the movie show, leaves us caught in the quiet eddy of little unimportant things,--digging among the rutabagas, playing the hose at night, casting the broody hens into the "dungeon," or watching the bees.

Many hours of my short life I have spent watching the bees,--blissful, idle hours, saved from the wreck of time, hours fragrant of white clover and buckwheat and filled with the honey of nothing-to-do; every minute of them capped, like the comb within the hive, against the coming winter of my discontent. If, for the good of mankind, I could write a new Commandment to the Decalogue, it would read: Thou shalt keep a hive of bees.

Let one begin early, and there is more health in a hive of bees than in a hospital; more honey, too, more recreation and joy for the philosophic mind, though no one will deny that very many persons prepare themselves both in body and mind for the comforting rest and change of the hospital with an almost solemn joy.

But personally I prefer a hive of bees. They are a sure cure, it is said, for rheumatism, the patient making bare the afflicted part, then with it stirring up the bees. But it is saner and happier to get the bees before you get the rheumatism and prevent its coming. No one can keep bees without being impressed with the wisdom of the ounce of prevention.

I cannot think of a better habit to contract than keeping bees. What a quieting, pastoral turn it gives to life! You can keep them in the city--on the roof or in the attic--just as you can actually live in the city, if you have to; but bees, even more than cows, suggest a rural prospect, old-fashioned gardens, pastures, idyls,--things out of Virgil, and Theocritus--and out of Spenser too,--

"And more, to lulle him in his slumber soft, A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe, And ever drizling raine upon the loft, Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne: No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes, As still are wont t' annoy the walled towne Might there be heard: but carelesse Quiet lyes, Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enimyes"

that is not the land of the lotus, but of the _melli-lotus_, of lilacs, red clover, mint, and goldenrod--a land of honey-bee. Show me the bee-keeper and I will show you a poet; a lover of waters that go softly like Siloa; with the breath of sage and pennyroyal about him; an observer of nature, who can handle his bees without veil or gloves. Only a few men keep bees,--only philosophers, I have found. They are a different order utterly from hen-men, bee-keeping and chicken-raising being respectively the poetry and prose of country life, though there are some things to be said for the hen, deficient as the henyard is in euphony, rhythm, and tune.

In fact there is not much to be said for the bee, not much that the public can understand; for it is neither the bee nor the eagle that is the true American bird, but the rooster. In one of my neighboring towns five thousand petitioners recently prayed the mayor that they be allowed to let their roosters crow. The petition was granted. In all that town, peradventure, not five bee-keepers could be found, and for the same reason that so few righteous men were found in Sodom.

Bee-keeping, like keeping righteous, is exceedingly difficult; it is one of the fine arts, and no dry-mash-and-green-bone affair as of hens. Queens are a peculiar people, and their royal households, sometimes an hundred thousand strong, are as individual as royal houses are liable to be.

I have never had two queens alike, never two colonies that behaved the same, never two seasons that made a repetition of a particular handling possible. A colony of bees is a perpetual problem; the strain of the bees, the age and disposition of the queen, the condition of the colony, the state of the weather, the time of the season, the little-understood laws of the honey-flow,--these singly, and often all in combination, make the wisest handling of a colony of bees a question fresh every summer morning and new every evening.

For bees should be "handled," that is, bees left to their own devices may make you a little honey--ten to thirty pounds in the best of seasons; whereas rightly handled they will as easily make you three hundred pounds of pure comb honey--food of prophets, and with saleratus biscuit instead of locusts, a favorite dish with the sons of prophets here on Mullein Hill.

Did you ever eat apple-blossom honey? Not often, for it is only rarely that the colony can be built up to a strength sufficient to store this earliest flow. But I have sometimes caught it; and then as the season advances, and flow after flow comes on with the breaking of the great floral waves, I get other flavors,--pure white clover, wild raspberry, golden sumac, pearly white clethra, buckwheat, black as axle grease, and last of all, the heavy, rich yellow of the goldenrod. These, by careful watching, I get pure and true to flavor like so many fruit extracts at the soda fountains.

Then sometimes the honey for a whole season will be adulterated, not by anything that I have done, but by the season's peculiar conditions, or by purely local conditions,--conditions that may not prevail in the next town at all.

One year it began in the end of July. The white clover flow was over and the bees were beginning to work upon the earliest blossoms of the dwarf sumac. Sitting in front of the hives soon after the renewed activity commenced, I noticed a peculiarly rank odor on the air, and saw that the bees in vast numbers were rising and making for a pasture somewhere over the sprout-land that lay to the north of the hives. Yet I felt sure there was nothing in blossom in that direction within range of my bees (they will fly off two miles for food); nothing but dense hardwood undergrowth from stumps cut some few years before.

Marking their line of flight I started into the low jungle to find them. I was half a mile in when I caught the busy hum of wings. I looked but could see nothing,--not a flower of any sort, nothing but oak, maple, birch, and young pine saplings just a little higher than my head. But the air was full of bees; yet not of swarming bees, for that is a different and unmistakable hum. Then I found myself in the thick of a copse of witch-hazel up and down the stems of which the bees were wildly buzzing. There was no dew left on the bushes, so it was not that they were after; on looking more closely I saw that they were crawling down the stems to the little burrs containing the seed of last fall's flowering. Holding to the top of the burr with their hind legs they seemed to drink head down from out of the base of the burr.

Picking one of these, I found a hole at its base, and inside, instead of seeds, a hollow filled with plant lice or aphides, that the bees were milking. Here were big black ants, too, and yellow wasps drinking from the same pail.

But a bee's tongue, delicate as it is, would crush a fragile plant louse. I picked another burr, squeezing it gently, when there issued from the hole at the base a drop of crystal-clear liquid, held in the thinnest of envelopes, which I tasted and found sweet. In burr after burr I found these sacks or cysts of sweets secreted by the aphides for the bees to puncture and drain. The largest of them would fill a bee at a draught. Some of the burrs contained big fat grubs of a beetle unknown to me,--the creature that had eaten the seeds, bored the hole at the base, and left the burr cleaned and garnished for the aphides. These in turn invited the bees, and the bees, carrying this "honey-dew" home, mixed it with the pure nectar of the flowers and spoiled the crop.

Can you put stoppers into these millions of honey-dew jugs? Can you command your bees to avoid these dire bushes and drink only of the wells at the bottoms of the white-clover tubes? Hardly that, but you can clip the wing of your queen and make her obedient; you can command the colony not to swarm, not to waste its strength in drones, and you can tell it where and how to put this affected honey so that the pure crop is not spoiled; you can order the going out and coming in of those many thousands so that every one is a faithful, wise, and efficient servant, gathering the fragrance and sweet of the summer from every bank whereon the clover and the wild mints blow.

Small things these for a man with anything to do? Small indeed, but demanding large love and insight, patience, foresight, and knowledge. It does not follow that a man who can handle a colony of bees can rule his spirit or take a city, but the virtues absolutely necessary to the bee-keeper are those required for the guiding of nations; and there should be a bee-plank incorporated into every party platform, promising that president, cabinet, and every member of congress along with the philosophers shall keep bees.

X

A PAIR OF PIGS

I dropped down beside Her on the back steps and took a handful of her peas to pod. She set the colander between us, emptied half of her task into my hat, and said:--

"It is ten o'clock. I thought you had to be at your desk at eight this morning? And you are hot and tired. What is it you have been doing?"

"Getting ready for the _pigs_," I replied, laying marked and steady emphasis on the plural.

"You are putting the pods among the peas and the peas with the pods"--and so I was. "Then we are going to have another pig," she went on.

"No, not _a_ pig this time; I think I 'll get a pair. You see while you are feeding one you can just as well be feeding--"

"A lot of them," she said with calm conviction.

"You 're right!" I exclaimed, a little eagerly. "Besides two pigs do better than--"

"Well, then," very gravely and never pausing for an instant in her shelling, "let's fence in the fourteen acres and have a nice little piggery of Mullein Hill."

The pods popped and split in her nimble fingers as if she knew a secret spring in their backs. I can beat her picking peas, but in shelling peas she seems to have more fingers than I have; they quite confuse me at times as they twinkle at their task.

So they did now. I had spent several weeks working up my brief for two pigs; but was utterly unprepared for a whole piggery. The suddenness of it, the sweep and compass of it, left me powerless to pod the peas for a moment.

I ought to have been at my writing, but it was too late to mention that now; besides here was my hat still full of peas. I could not ungallantly dump them back into her empty pan and quit. There was nothing for it but to pod on and stop with one pig. But my heart was set on a pair of pigs. College had just closed (we were having our 17th of June peas) and the joy of the farm was upon me. I had a cow and a heifer, eighty-six hens, three kinds of bantams, ten hives of bees, and two ducks. I was planning to build a pigeon coop, and had long talked of turning the nine-acre ridge of sprout land joining my farm into a milch goat pasture, selling the milk at one dollar a quart to Boston babies; I had thought somewhat of Belgian hares and black foxes as a side-line; and in addition to these my heart was set on a pair of pigs.

"Why won't one pig do?" she would ask. And I tried to explain; but there are things that cannot be explained to the feminine mind, things perfectly clear to a man that you cannot make a woman see.

Pigs, I told her, naturally go by pairs, like twins and scissors and tongs. They do better together, as scissors do. Nobody ever bought a _scissor_. Certainly not. Pigs need the comfort of one another's society, and the diversion of one another to take up their minds in the pen; hens I explained were not the only broody creatures, for all animals show the tendency, and does not the Preacher say, "Two are better than one: if two lie together then have they heat: but how can one be warm alone"?

I was sure, I told her, that the Preacher had pigs in mind, for judging by the number of pig-prohibitions throughout Hebrew literature, they must have had pigs _constantly_ in mind. This observation of the early Hebrew poet and preacher is confirmed, I added, by all the modern agricultural journals, as well as by all our knowing neighbors. Even the Flannigans (an Irish family down the road),--even the Flannigans, I pointed out, always have two pigs, for all their eight children and his job tending gate at the railroad crossing. They have a goat, too. If a man with that sort of job can have eight children and a goat and two pigs, why can't a college professor have a few of the essential, elementary things, I 'd like to know?

"Do you call your four boys a few?" she asked.

"I don't call my four Flannigan's eight," I replied, "nor my one pig his two. Flannigan has the finest pigs on the road. He has a wonderful way with a pair of pigs--something he inherited, I suppose, for I imagine there have been pigs in the Flannigan family ever since--"

"They were kings in Ireland," she put in sweetly.

"Flannigan says," I continued, "that I ought to have two pigs: 'For shure, a pair o' pags is double wan pag,' says Flannigan--good clear logic it strikes me, and quite convincing."

She picked up the colander of shelled peas with a sigh. "We shall want the new potatoes and fresh salmon to go with these," her mind not on pigs at all, but on the dinner. "Can't you dig me a few?"

"I might dig up a few fresh salmon," I replied, "but not any new potatoes, for they have just got through the ground."

"But if I wanted you to, could n't you?"

"I don't see how I could if there are n't any to dig."

"But won't you go look--dig up a few hills--you can't tell until you look. You said you did n't leave the key outside in the door yesterday when we went to town, but you did. And as for a lot of pigs--"

"I don't want a lot of pigs," I protested.

"But you do, though. You want a lot of everything. Here you 've planted five hundred cabbages for winter just as if we were a sauerkraut factory--and the probabilities are we shall go to town this winter--"

"Go where!" I cried.

"And as for pigs, your head is as full of pigs as Deerfoot Farm or the Chicago stockyards--

_Mullein Hill Sausages Made of Little Pigs_

that's really your dream"--spelling out the advertisement with pea-pods on the porch floor.

"Now, don't you think it best to save some things for your children,--this sausage business, say,--and you go on with your humble themes and books?"