Part 7

The meadow was flowed intermittently for a century; then the pond grew out of it. Not only might no seedlings find roothold there, but the very black muck in which they might grow was washed away from the roots of the great stumps. These, in the main, have endured, losing their bark and sap-wood, but with the heart-wood still firm after the lapse of two centuries.

Here at this ebb tide I read the record of growth of trees that had their beginnings more than three centuries ago. These roots so twine and intertwine that the original sap, drawn from the tender tips, must have nourished any one of several trees indifferently, for heart-wood joins heart-wood in scores of places near the stump and far from it, showing that each tree stood not only on its own roots, but on those of its neighbors all about it; not only was it nourished by its own rootlets, but by those of trees near by. No gale could uproot these swamp cedars. United they stood and divided they might not fall. It is a curious method of growth, and I dare say it obtains in many swamps where the white cedars stand close, but under no other circumstances could it have been revealed to me, casually strolling that way three centuries after it happened.

At high water all these curious roots are submerged and you see only the butts of the trees, numerous miniature islands on which many an alien growth has made port. Here in June the dour and melancholy cassandra disputes the footing of the wild rose, and the huckleberry and sweet-fern twine in loving companionship, afloat as ashore. Here intertwine the sheep laurel and the hard-hack, the meadow-sweet and the marsh St. John’s-wort, garlanding the white skeletons of the ancient trees and making them young again with the odorous promises of spring.

In midsummer, among patches of green and gray moss, you will find tiny, diamond-like globules glistening. These are the clear, dew-like drops of glutinous liquid which gem the leaves of the _Drosera_, northern representative of the Venus’s fly-trap. This, the _Dionaea_, catches flies by means of a steel-trap leaf which closes on them when they light on it. This other, the _Drosera_, is not so active. It attracts insects with its honey dew, holds them with sticky glands, and grips them, little by little, with bristles. It is a curious and beautiful little plant, and one would hardly think it carnivorous to see it adding its diamond ornaments to the floral decorations which beautify the ancient stumps all summer long.

Yet of all the life histories revealed by the pond at low tide I still think that of the _Unionidæ_ the most interesting. You find them all along above and below the margin of the shallow water, their shells most wonderfully streaked with olive-green and pale-yellow in alternate bands, till one might think he had found nodules of malachite which the long-ago glacier had culled from some Labrador ledge and ground to unsymmetrical ovoids before it dropped them on the old-time meadow marge. In certain individuals and certain lights the shells of these obscure creatures send out gleams of green and gold, like gems that have soft fires within them. It is as if an opalescent soul dwelt within, and the thin shell which a crow with his bill may puncture with a blow was so constructed as to hold in the reds and blues of the opalescence, but transmit the greens and gold.

You find many with only the backs of their shells sticking out of the mud. This may be the creature’s natural position, but I find far more of them lying quietly on their sides in the shallow water, rocking gently to and fro in the placid undulations as if they were there but to show me their shining colors. But if you watch one intently for a time you will see him open his shell cautiously and put out one foot. This is his best, for it is all he has and he puts it foremost. It is very white and clean, and it might as well be called his tongue, for with it he licks his food. It is half as long as he is, and when he has put it out as far as he can, or as far as he dares, a fine white fringe grows on its outer margin. Thus he gathers in minute animalculæ or refuse matter from the surface of the mud, for his stomach’s sake.

It is a rather interesting thing to stand by and watch a _Unio margaritifera_ daintily putting away his own particular brand of little necks and mock turtle. At the least untoward sign of interest in the affair, however, he shuts up like a clam, and you will need your pocket-knife if you wish to see more of him.

Where the water is only an inch deep or so over the soft ooze of the bottom you will see where the unio has used this so-called foot as a foot should be used, for he not only stands on it, but walks with its help. These signs are curiously erratic marks drawn as with a sharpened stick for a distance sometimes of yards. If you will inspect the seaward end of this trail you will find a unio in it, generally a young one, for it is he that has left the mark behind him in his travels. For the unio at a certain age is a great traveller; that is, when he is very young. The adults foot it, but the young before they reach their full growth ride, some of them by what you might call the lightning expresses of the pond world.

If you will split a big one at this time of year you will be likely to find within an astonishing number of eggs. These are carried in brood pouches that seem to occupy pretty nearly all the space between the shells. In seeing them you wonder vaguely where there was room for the bearer of this amazing progeny. Just where they are these young unios grow to maturity of a certain sort, forming minute shells which have hooks, forming also peculiar organs of sense. The hooks and the sense organs are provided that they may not miss that free ride which is the privilege of every young unio if he is to reach the period of adolescence.

At the moment of being sent forth from the home shell the golchidium, for that is what the scientific men call the unio at this stage of the affair, begins to hunt, aided by his sense organs, for a thoroughfare. Here he takes the first conveyance, whether the slow coach of the sluggish horn-pout, the bream automobile, or the pickerel flying-machine. To the first fish that comes by he attaches himself, oftentimes to the gills, and there he rides and, like most travelers, continues to develop.

By and by, being “finished” by travel, he gets off his vehicle at some convenient station, drops into the mud, and is ready to lecture, or so I fancy it, before any of the unio women’s clubs on the world as he has seen it. Not until then does the unio, and then only if he is a margaritifera, begin to accumulate pearls.

By what mystery of sunlight and shallow water the unio has acquired the lucent green and gold of the epidermis of his outer shell I do not know, any more than I know what pigments paint or what naiad fingers hold the brush that paints the gold in the heart or the pinky green in the outer sepals of the water-lily. The two find their sustenance in the same mud.

But even if I could tell this I might well pause in wonder over the beauty of the inner shell of this pulseless creature of the ooze. Perhaps the golchidium, darting back and forth beneath the ripples of the surface during its days of travel, catches the radiant blue of the sky, the rosy flush of dawn, and the glory of the rainbow all shivered together in exultant light to make the nacre of the inner surface of its growing shell. For nowhere else in nature may we find such softness of coloring holding such gleams of azure and of fire. The opal beside it is garish and crude. Mother-of-pearl we call it, for out of the same source is born the gem which may be worth the price of a king’s ransom.

The unio is the good girl of the fairy tale, for from its lips fall pearls that confound the divers of the Orient. Not from Ceylon nor Sulu nor the Straits of Sunda nor the Gulf of California have come such pearls of bewildering color and fascinating shapes as have been taken from the river mussels of our American streams. For all I know the shallows of my pond may hold a necklace of such value that its fellow has never yet circled the throat of a queen. If so I hope no one will ever find it out, for an ebb tide such as this comes only once in a score or so of years, and when the next one is here I want still to find the beach beautiful with the green and gold and mother-of-pearl of the unios.

HOW THE RAIN CAME

HOW THE RAIN CAME

The _Spiranthes gracilis_ is commonly called ladies’ tresses, which is a very polite name for it, for nothing can be more beautiful than the tresses of ladies. It is like its name in that it is beautiful, but not otherwise, for it is a flower not of tresses, but of fine eyelashes of pearl set in a spiral on jade. The rain this morning dropped transparent, colorless pearl tears on the tips of these eyelashes, and as they twinkled toward shy smiles the tears ran down the spiral to be eagerly kissed away by the small grasses that always cling about the feet of the spiranthes in mute adoration.

Near by slender varieties of gerardia held up rosy cups to drink these clear pearls, finding in them a medicine that shall cure all ills. In the rain the fountain of youth wells up in the cup of every flower that waits in the soft pasture grasses and the grasses themselves drink eagerly. The cedars deck themselves in these clear pearls, wearing garments fringed with them and ropes and necklaces without number, and letting their prim propriety be so softened that they are no longer firm and erect but take on curves of soft roundness that should go with pearl-embroidered garments.

Yesterday there was in all the pasture people a certain puritanical sternness of demeanor, a set holding fast to the narrowing good of life, a tightening of the muscles that are weary with a long strain but may not for the good of the soul loose their firm grip, for yesterday the pasture was dry and hard with the leanness of the long summer drought.

To-day has come the first of the fall rains and these puritans are stern and set no longer, but relax into swaying curves of lissome beauty that entrance you. It is as if, after coming as you thought to a Sunday service of the old Calvinists, you found it transformed into a grange picnic of wood nymphs.

The pines indeed, which always stretch out their arms in Sabbath-like benediction, seem asking a pious blessing on all these, their pasture children; and they fold their slim leaves together like hands in a soft prayer of thankfulness. But the soft rain cuddles them as well, and before they know it they are decked with the clear pearls as for a bridal and their plumes nod in reverence, yet are so beautiful in gems and there is such a soft grace in their curves--they that stood so grim and sombre before--that each tree seems like some bounteous and beautiful woman, arrayed for wedding festivities, who yet bows a moment at a sanctuary in prayer, even as she joins the guests.

The rain had been long coming. A solitary quail predicted it; the first I have heard since the severe cold and deep snows of three winters in succession not long ago. I had thought every quail smothered in the white depths or frozen by the bitter cold. Three years is a long time not to hear a quail whistle, and this I believe to be no survivor of the old stock, but one that has worked up from Southern fields where the snows were less deadly during those rigid winters.

It is pretty hard to tell whether a quail is simply announcing his own name for all who care to hear, or making a weather prediction. Jotham, one of the farmer’s men who knows all, says it is simple enough. In an announcement he says, “Bob, Bob White.” The weather prediction is different. Then he says, “Wet, more wet.” All you have to do is listen.

This is like Jotham’s grandmother’s recipe for making soap. You collected potash from the hearth, added water in an iron kettle, and boiled till a certain thickness was reached. You would know this point by placing an egg on the surface, and if the concoction was right the egg would either sink or swim, the old lady was blessed if she could remember which. This is a way that successful oracles have. That one at Delphos did it.

So, when my lone quail sat on a rock in the pasture, tipped his head back a little, swelled his white throat and whistled, round and clear, I went out to meet him, scanning the sky meanwhile for a change of weather. The sky of the day before had been like a brass bowl shut down over the gasping land. Shrubs of the upland hung their leaves piteously, the tougher herbs wilted, and the tenderer ones dried up and died.

On such days when the long summer drought has wreaked its worst, when the parched pasture lies on its back, open-mouthed, gasping for water, when even the pond which has given so freely for the refreshment of the pasture people has shrunk back upon itself till a rod-wide rim of gravel and rough stones forbids them to come down and drink, I love to go down to the water’s edge and marvel at the hedge hyssop. All along the shore the summer drought forbids the water weeds to grow. This rod-wide space is not for them. The flood of the winter and spring denies other land plants a roothold; yet, just when you think the shore is to be bare and barren for always, troops forth the hedge hyssop and clothes it with verdure, lighted with a golden smile.

The common name of the plant seems to me to express ingenuity rather than purpose. It has nothing to do with hedges and is not a hyssop, which is a garden plant belonging with thyme and lavender and other sweet herbs beloved of old ladies in kerchief caps and figured gowns. The hedge hyssop is none of these. Nine months of the twelve it bides its time under water. During the other three it glows in golden contentment on the sandy stretches left bare by this yearly receding tide, climbing along the rocky shore and filling every crevice, lifting its yellow cups to the glare of the brazen sky and distilling subtle perfume to the antennæ of the little low-flying insects that are its friends. Yet if its common name means little, that given it by the botanists fits. _Gratiola aurea_ may well mean a plant that is golden grace or a golden benediction, as you choose to take the Latin.

The day before, then, I had no heart for the upland pasture, but Jotham’s reading of the quail had been the right one, for yesterday the brazen look was all blown out of the sky by the south wind. It did not leave it clear blue, for that would have meant cooler and still dry, but put into it a pallor that seemed to well up from all the horizon round. It was not the pallor of clouds, for there was not even a cumulus thunder head in sight, but the pallor that comes with the wind that has a storm behind it, yet is to blow itself out before the storm arrives.

The cuckoo, flitting jerkily from one thicket to the next, noted this pallor from the corner of his eye and thenceforth through the day croaked to himself as he went his caterpillar-hunting rounds. “Clackity clack; tut, tut; cow, cow, cow,” he clucked musically, which is his way of saying, “Oh dear, it is going to rain and the caterpillars will be all soggy.” Jotham says the early settlers out here in the Dorchester backwoods taught the cuckoo to work for them, but that he was so lazy that their descendants, getting better help, gave it up, and that the cuckoo soon forgot all he knew about farm work except calling the cows.

Every bluejay is a born tease, and in the late August drought goes about crying “Rain, rain,” because he knows there will be no rain. He does it merely to fool the pasture people and then chuckle in his phonograph twang over their misery when no rain comes.

Yesterday when he smelt the south wind and saw that sky pallor he stopped calling “Rain, rain,” for he knew it was coming. Instead he fluttered round and round the pasture, ducking in among the boughs of the pines and ejaculating, as if he were surprised to find it so, “Clear, clear.” I fancy all the wild creatures of wood and pasture know the signs better than I do and could announce the rain if they would long before I know that it is coming. All the outdoor world was sure of it yesterday. With the very first show of that paleness in the sky--or was it something in the touch of the wind?--the drooping plants lifted their leaves to be ready for it. I could smell it in the falling of the wind at sunset; they seemed to smell it in mid-forenoon while yet the wind was rising.

On such days looking across the pond toward wind and sun there is a peculiar blink in the light reflected from the surface of the waves which you do not see if fair weather is ahead of you. The pale sky seems to reflect blackly in the water. Down to leeward the shore poplars stand silvery white, a quivering, flashing silver under the lash of the wind. The swamp maples lose their green and turn pale and the willows lighten up in color.

It is the turning of the leaves in the wind. You may say that they would turn in any wind and show their lighter under sides, and this is true, yet there is a difference in the appearance when it is a rain-bringing wind. I cannot tell you why this should be, but the difference is there. It may be that a moist wind relaxes the tension of the petioles more than a dry one and thus lets the leaf lie flatter, giving a little different look to the tree as a whole. The weather-wise older people grew up on the land instead of within walls and they were wont to say, “The leaves are turning in the wind and it is going to rain.” Like the pasture people they knew.

By nightfall the weather bureau suspected something but was not quite sure what. They hung out the “possible rain” flag, and all the crows in the pinewood, congregating now in bigger and bigger flocks, practising, I take it, for their labor-day parade, went into fits of laughter. “Haw, haw, haw!” they shouted, and whirled up into the sky and took a look about and dashed down again, convulsed. “Haw, haw, haw! Possible rain; here’s the sky just ready to spill out a twenty-four hour soaker!”

The wind went down with the sun, and the willow and maple leaves were green again for a little before they faded into the growing purple of the dusk, but with every faint sigh of the failing breeze the poplars loomed white again with a radiant ghostliness which seemed to people the rustling dusk with softly phosphorescent spooks. You will see these other-world visitors to the pond shore only on such a night when the wind is right.

There was no glow of rich color in the sky at sunset. Instead the dusk hung violet gray draperies all about the horizon,--curtains that veiled but did not hide the evening stars, shutting them almost out near the horizon and leaving them comparatively clear at the zenith. In such dusk stars do not twinkle, they blink, and that is a sign of rain which all the pasture people that have eyes know well.

Those that have ears and no eyes may know what sort of a night it is as well, for there is some quality in such an atmosphere which makes sounds carry far. The rap of a paddle on a canoe seat a mile away up the pond sounds right in your ear. A train roaring through the wood three miles distant seems so near that you involuntarily look around lest it be coming behind and run over you. On such nights speak low if you do not wish the whole world to hear, for the air all about you is a wireless telephone receiver tuned to your pitch. Those gray rain curtains which the dusk has hung all about the horizon have made the whole world a whispering gallery.

Sometime in the night the wind dies. It passes away so peacefully that no mirror held to its lips would note that last sigh. But the stars have known it all the evening, and that is why their eyes blinked so. It was to keep back the tears. Then the stars vanish and the night is dark indeed.

Scents carry far on such a night, not only those of the pasture world, which are pleasant, but those of the more distant town, which sometimes are not. The air is not only telephonic but telefumic. The distant leather factory sends out a faint but characteristic odor by which you might hunt it across country for a lustrum of miles. The sooty emanation from my neighbors’ chimneys is pungent in my nostrils, though their houses are a mile away. I think I can tell which is which, for the fireplace smell differs from that of the furnace, as does that of the parlor stove from the range. Agreeably these are forgotten, for something has crushed sassafras leaves over on the pasture knoll and the fine fragrance comes to drive away thoughts of the others.

As the night was gray, which foretells rain, so the morning breaks crimson, which announces it. No bird heralds this dawn, no chirping insect sends its voice questing through its shades. The sky hardly lightens up; it is rather that the darkness turns red. Nor does the light come from the sky when it does come. It wells up from the earth instead, for when the crimson is gone the sky is still black with shadows, while the pasture grows distinct in a gray outline wherein is no color.

A stillness of expectation broods all things,--a stillness so intense that the first rain-drop sounds like a pistol-shot as it strikes a leaf near you. Then there is a volley and further silence for a brief space, followed by a crepitation all about you. Those first heavy drops have been followed by lighter ones, and this crepitation merges into a steady drumming, which becomes a low roar to your ears made sensitive by silence and faint sounds. The first of the fall rains has come, and the summer suffering of the pasture people is at an end.

INDEX

INDEX

A

Adder, flat-head, 128, 129

Admiral, white, 71, 72, 75, 78, 81

Alder, 5, 15, 40, 52, 82, 94, 108, 111, 112, 118, 140, 141, 158 black, 139 white, 35

Alice-in-Wonderland, 88

Ambergris, 40

Angle-worm, 94, 105, 106, 186

Ant, 158

Antiopa vanessa, 166

Aphids, 115

Arabian days, 81

Arabian Nights, 61, 79, 88

Arethusa, 83

Azalia, 4, 6, 33

B

Bagdad, Caliph of, 76

Baptist, 53

Barberry, 32

Basilarchia astyanax, 71, 77, 79, 87

Basilarchia disippus, 161

Bass, rock, 96

Bayberry, 8, 33, 45

Bee, 85, 86, 137, 155, 156, 157, 158 bumble, 137

Beetles, 161

Berkshire hills, 135

Birch, 5, 8, 28, 29, 30, 93

Bittern, 142, 143

Blackberry, 56 high-bush, 33

Blackbird, 143

Bladderwort, 64

Blueberry, high-bush, 50, 51

Bluebird, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 192

Blue Hill, 135, 140, 202, 203

Blue Hill Reservation, 80, 136

Bluejay, 226

Bobolink, 189

Brake, 43

Bream, 211

Bullhead, 101

Bulrush, 136, 138

Bunting, indigo, 189

Butterfly, angle-wing, 158 Anosia plexippus, 160, 165 Antiopa vanessa, 166 fritillaries, 159 meadow-brown, 158 monarch, 160, 161, 162, 171 mourning-cloak, 166 pearl crescent, 158 white admiral, 71, 72, 75, 78, 81

Button bush, 41, 140

C

California, Gulf of, 213

Calvinists, 219

Camberwell beauty, 166

Carnations, 156

Cassandra, 52, 205

Cassius, 155

Catbird, 10, 14, 20, 21, 22, 23, 190, 191, 192

Caterpillar, 43

Cedar, 4, 5, 6, 15, 27, 29, 139, 140, 141, 202, 204, 205, 218

Ceylon, 213

Chewink, 14

Clams, fresh-water, 95, 196

Clethra, 4, 35, 153, 155, 156

Compositæ, 41

Coot, 183

Corydalus cornutus, 125

Cranberries, 139

Crow, 14, 18, 19, 20, 185, 187, 196, 197, 228

Cuckoo, 27, 225

D

Daisy, 41

Delphos, 221

Demoiselles, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 127

Dionaea, 206

Dorchester backwoods, 225

Dragon, 128, 129

Dragon-flies, 56, 95, 120, 121, 122, 123

Drosera, 206

Duck, wood, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150

E

Eel, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 127

Eden, 127

Elm, 51

F