Chapter I

Granpap accrued to me along with a farm in the Unakas. When I learned that my inheritance lay, or rather rose, in the Unakas, it at once passed from prose to poetry. My hundred hills became tipped with song, bloom calling to bloom from Three Pine Point to Sunrise Spur, and Blackcap answering from his hemlock shroud with a melodious shake that did no harm to his hidden acres of anemone and trillium. The laurel, polished as by the glance of a god, drew a richer green from its storehouse across a paltry breadth of sky, in the sun. The great chestnuts leafily defied the blight that was creeping to their hearts. And where the gray rocks pushed through the living emerald of the mountain walls, they too seemed listeningly alive, as if in wait for the key-word that would swing them open on Persia magnificent; though they needed to borrow no glamour of age from any part of the world. Unakas! Spenser, under English beeches, rustled his threefold coverlet of centuries, and began another dream--dream of a region that was old to God before Helvellyn rose or the Himalayas shone as the planet’s crest.

In the wake of a Muse so sure of foot, I entered my forest a little stumblingly. The first cabin was Granpap Merlin’s. His welcoming “Howdy” only slightly interrupted his dinner of corn-pone and pickled beans. But Poesy kept at my ear, swiftly picturing me fields like blowing seas; gallant stalks with waving green arms, and tassels flowing, silver, gold, and rose, in the breath of July dawns. With a thrust into memory, she brought up a rock maize-mill of my childhood, left by the Indians in an abandoned cave; and chanted the one magic line of Lanier’s poem. As for beans, I had seen them in blossom, hiding their pinkness under round, hugging leaves, and not even their passage through a brine barrel could convert them into mere pabulum. It was a fitting meal for a mountain seer.

“Did you grow the corn that made the meal that made that pone?” I asked, building Jack’s house in the excitement of getting back to the land.

“It growed itself. I planted it.”

“And you ploughed the field that grew the corn, and so forth?”

“My mule, Tim, ploughed it. I ploughed Tim.”

His face, like the broken corner of a boulder, did not tell me whether he was simply, or contemptuously, laconical.

“This seems rather high for corn land,” I said, in the tone of ownership. He must at least know that I had read the Farmers’ Bulletins.

“Wait till you see it growin’. The corn gets so onhandy big and shady in Hawk Wing Cove, you can see the lightnin’-bugs in thar by daylight. But ’tain’t easy ploughin’. Twenty-five acres of straight up and down.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of that cove. From the head of it one can see seven curves of the river.”

“If you look from the door thar, you can see the top of the ridge ’tween them two peaks.”

I looked.

“It must be glorious to make one’s bread up there.”

“I never made bread up thar but once. I baked hoecakes on a rock one day when Cyn sent me meal and water for my dinner. I hadn’t left her any stove-wood, an’ she had proper spirit, Cyn had,” he added, as if his wife’s memory must be kept clear of blemish. “But thar wa’n’t no glory in it, as I see.”

“I must go there the first thing. I don’t suppose there are any snakes.”

“No, I don’t see more’n two or three rattlers a year now. Not much killin’.”

His voice, like a retired general’s, was bored but tolerant.

“Rattlesnakes? In those pastures of heaven? Did you ever kill one there?”

“One? If they’d been fence-rails I could ’a’ put a mule-proof fence around that field with all I’ve killed in it.”

I looked again at the line of pallid gold just showing between two pointed barriers. It ebbed away, more like a bridge to faith, or some such unsubstantiality, than the trampled ground where man had battled for his overlordship. I would go there, come to-morrow. And I did. But what happens in aerial gardens must have its own chapter and aureole.