Chapter IV: Part 4

I please myself with imagining the venerable pasture stones to have been observant of events and to have retained the memory of it all, as the Colosseum might have memories of Rome, or the Sphinx of Egypt and the desert. Such have seen races live out their lives and disappear. That every dog has his day might well be a maxim among these ancient ones of the earth who saw a tropic jungle resolve itself into an Arctic solitude and as slowly give way to a temperate zone. I salute the pasture stone as having witnessed the advent of man upon the earth. It is difficult to associate the tertiary animals with anything but the museum, or to realize that those preposterous Paleozoic reptiles were ever other than fossils. But here is a weather-beaten observer that was actually contemporary with that life, to us so intangible and shadowy; that knew the ancestor of the horse, and ages before the separation from the mother ledge, it may be, was wont to see the sky darkened by flying reptiles.

They were fashioned roughly, these boulders, cast in a rude mould, as if they had emerged from chaos itself before form had become defined. The sea would have all the pebbles on its shore of a size and shape. It takes a block from the cliff and turns it in its lathe that it may become a polished sphere, as in that larger and cosmic lathe the planets are turned. On the beach are innumerable stones that look as much alike as so many eggs. But no two pasture stones are the same. They were turned in no such precise lathe as the sea's, but by a rough-handed force, which here planed a surface and there gouged a depression. Pasture stones are thus almost as individual in appearance as men. Here is one squat like a toad, one humpbacked as a dromedary, another flat as a cake--a mere slab of granite. They are wrinkled and deformed, as so many gnomes, and covered with excrescences--razor-backed or round-shouldered, lopsided or with protruding paunch, while the great solitary boulders rise from the pasture, massive domes and pinnacles of granite.

But none are polished, none are symmetrical; nowhere is there an ellipsoid, such as the sea loves to turn, but rough outlines always. Frequently one surface is rounded; the work of making a sphere was begun but progressed only thus far. Again, two surfaces may be approximately parallel and the remainder rough and angular. Commonly it is an affair of many angles, all unequal, and of a multitude of curves of different radii. It is cast in a mould it would be difficult to classify. With the multiform aspects of crystals, they are still not so varied as these pasture stones. For crystals, for leaves, for snowflakes, there are definite patterns. But the boulder is a thing by itself, subject to other laws and formed under a different order of architecture--or under no order--but the will of the glacier, which has left here and there the marks of its icy fingers.

There is a suggestion of friendliness in the way the lichens clothe these stones, as though Nature aimed to cover the scars she could not heal, or to hang them with such rich medallions as the parmelia in token of that ancient service. Here are colors such as only Time can mix,--shades which are the work of centuries, unspeakably softened and mellowed, like ivory and meerschaum and bronze. In its day the Acropolis may have been glaring and crude in tone; the raw marble, fresh from the quarry, needed these centuries to subdue and mellow it. It has acquired a tender beauty unknown to that classic day which saw it in its splendor. Some such service has been rendered to the pasture stone and the ledge. When the Archæan granite was poured out from the depths it must have worn a new and crude look, albeit so fresh and clean. Then it was but so much raw feldspar and quartz and mica. But it has long been wooed by the air and the water, by moss and lichen; the years have lent it beauty, softened its curves, rounded its angles and brought it the richness of age.

Boulders are sometimes clothed with a larger growth. I have in mind one, from whose apex springs a maple at least half a century old. It lies at the head of a swamp, and in autumn this tree is always one of the first to turn. In August when the tupelos show signs of change, the maple is already glowing with color. The tree springs from the very summit of the rock while its main root reaches through a split some fifteen feet to the earth. Looking across the swamp, it appears to crown the boulder with a noble dignity--a landmark in the country round--as if reflecting those elementary forces which conspired to bring about this unusual condition,--the glacier which brought the boulder, the winds which carried the maple seed, the frost which split the rock.

After their many vicissitudes, the boulders have settled down upon the bosom of the pasture and come to be a fixture in the landscape. This present age is to them the serene and mellow autumn of their troubled life. Their day is a thousand years. But they are melting into soil--as icicles dissolve in the sun--in that measureless and yet imperceptible thaw which melts granite. The pasture land is perhaps the dust of a still more primitive race whose life has been transmuted into the dandelion and the thistle.

NEIGHBORS

All wild animals are wary and suspicious, even when they do not prey upon one another. What friend has the rabbit, the chipmunk or the weasel? They lead friendless lives and die tragic deaths. Why should not a rabbit gossip with a woodchuck, for instance? One would think their common danger might draw them together, and that they might perhaps learn a little woodcraft one of the other. But caste is nowhere stronger than in the woods. They do not sit at meat together unless, indeed, one is himself the repast.

Like a subtle atmosphere the spirit of the wild pervades the forest. Whoever enters comes under its spell. In the woods the dog tends to revert to the wolf, and savage instincts come to light. On the street he may pay no heed to people, will move in and out among them, himself a bit of civilization; but let him leave the village and go into the woods, and he is suspicious and on his guard.

We have so fostered this attitude of fear and distrust that our wild neighbors are at best but casual acquaintances, if not complete strangers to us. We are like sharpshooters ambushed around the outposts of an encampment. A stray inmate pokes his head out of the trenches and essays to go to the spring for water. Perhaps we let him drink and make a note of that, then--whiz! we let fly at him. We discover what he has had for dinner and a few other trifling matters--and we get his skin. His ways remain strange to us and his language no more familiar than Choctaw. Sometimes we catch him and put him in a cage. But what can be learned of a poor, sullen prisoner fretting away his life with terrible thoughts of distant sunlight and running streams and friendly woods?

The acquaintance of a wild animal is not to be made with a gun. Practically nothing is learned in this way; it is difficult enough to know them without this barrier. But never to have loved the wild things is to have lost much--to have lived less. Any dolt can shoot an animal and have a bag of bones for his pains, but to win over such a creature in the smallest degree implies a victory, and is evidence of the redeeming power of the heart. There is a rare pleasure in encountering deer when you have no designs upon them. Such furtive meetings are in themselves adequate. They have the fascination of lovely faces seen for a fleeting moment in a crowd, instantly to be lost sight of. How little we really know about the lives of animals. We can surmise a few things and imagine a great many, but we _know_ next to nothing. Perhaps there is not so very much to know. Their emotions are not complex but simple; their lives run in narrow grooves. That they suffer, much as we suffer, is certain, and the main thing is to be kind. It is impossible to come upon a wild animal and watch it unobserved without deriving a subtle impression foreign to our usual life. There is something in the free, savage existence which is a shock to the thought-burdened, educated mind, and breaks for a moment its prison of glass.

A glen to which I often go is, like most others in the sequestered woods, really populous, while being to all appearances quite deserted. Its inhabitants are closely associated with the brook; they drink at it and all their lives hear its song. This glen is _their_ world, and yet they possess it and live in it in virtue of persistent self-effacement.

There are mice and shrews, chipmunks, red and gray squirrels, a woodchuck or two, a skunk, a little gray rabbit, a weasel and a mink. Far from being alone, you are watched by numerous unblinking eyes. From the grass, the rocks, the trees, motionless and in silence these creatures are observing you.

The squirrels have overcome somewhat their hereditary fear, doubtless because we are more kindly disposed to them. As I take my lunch from my pocket, thinking to eat it alone, a chipmunk approaches and sniffs at the package as I put it down. The aroma of bread and butter tickles his nostrils, suggesting some unaccustomed variety of fare, and presently he loses all fear and begins tearing the paper. After a little coaxing he takes a piece of bread from my hand, licking the butter off first with his small pink tongue. He has no sooner eaten it than another chipmunk appears and sniffs the whiskers of the first one. He, too, is overcome by the seductive aroma, and apparently receives some assurances, for he cautiously approaches and takes a morsel of bread. The package is returned to my pocket, and both chipmunks climb in without hesitation, tear off the paper and help themselves. Meanwhile a third arrives, having somehow learned of the good cheer, and it is not long before all three are scrambling over me.

One cold February day, when no gray squirrels were to be seen, and the snow lay deep in the glen, a solitary red squirrel appeared and looked long in my direction. Then by as direct a course as the ground would permit, he came toward me, over the intervening boulders, until he reached the one on which I sat, whereupon he immediately ate the bits of apple I gave him. He had been with me some little time when I chanced to look over my shoulder, and there at my elbow was the mink. The squirrel saw him at once and made off toward the trees. The mink appeared to take no notice of him, but his presence had evidently disturbed the harmony of the occasion.

The red squirrel stands in no awe of man, but he is as untamable as anything in the woods, none the less. Sit quietly under the hemlocks and the chances are that before long he will be scolding at you from somewhere in the tree tops. Presently he will come down the trunk, head foremost, moving mechanically with little jerks, as though pulled by a string, his hind legs stretched straight out above him. Down almost to the ground he comes, holding himself well out from the tree and eyeing you inquisitively. Suddenly he turns and scurries up the tree, chippering volubly meanwhile, to rush out on a limb and continue the denunciation, adding emphasis with his tail with which he seems to gesticulate.

There is no merrier sight in the woods than a pair of gray squirrels in a frisky mood; it is unmistakable fun. The gray is averse to the coniferous woods and the red prefers them; thus each has its territory. Apparently the red is more self-contained and readily amuses himself. He is of a more caustic mood; his fun is not so childlike and guileless. Nor is he himself, for there is a dark streak in his make-up, a certain taint in his disposition and always a satirical note in his laughter among the tree tops.

Eight inches or more of snow, and a hard crust, and it becomes poor pickings for the wild things. Here and there are holes where the gray squirrel has been prospecting. Near by, in most cases, lies the cup of an acorn and strips of shell, showing the squirrel went directly to the right place. It is to be observed how many of these excavations are under pines, sometimes several under a single tree. As late as the 1st of April I have noticed a gray squirrel busy under a pignut, burying the nuts which had lain on the ground through the winter. He would first rapidly shuck them, then dig a small hole, force them well into the earth with a vigorous push with his jaws, and as rapidly cover them again. In this way he would bury a dozen in as many minutes, and then make off through the woods.

Between the squirrels and the mink family the difference is as much a matter of disposition as of structure. The mink is the evil genius of the place. His character has written itself in his physiognomy, glitters in his eye and shows itself in the serpentine motion of his head. His silence speaks. But his presence is agreeable in a way, for it is a touch of that savage nature we do not otherwise get without going back into the wilderness. A squirrel reveals his candor in his inquisitiveness and in his noisy ways; curiosity gets the better of his fears. These psychologic differences are as marked with animals as with men.

I once surprised the weasel in this glen, with a young robin in her mouth which she had just taken from the nest and was carrying home for her family. She dropped the bird when I threw a stone, whereupon I stood by the dead robin and waited, anticipating her return, for I knew the weasel's boldness of old. Almost immediately the sinister-looking creature poked her head from the bushes and, without hesitation, approached and seized the bird where it lay between my feet. Another stone caused her to drop it again before she had gone far. This time I moved the robin some little distance away and stood beside it as before. Soon the weasel reappeared, and going to the spot where she had last dropped it, became visibly excited on finding it gone. She then began rapidly following the scent, like a hound, and at length by a circuitous course, approached, and again took the bird from under my feet.

Almost every fine day in autumn the woodchuck is to be met. He emerges from the bushes with deliberation and ambles out into the open where there is a little clover to tempt him, his tawny legs showing in strong contrast with his grayish back and scraggly black tail. His enjoyment is evident; the sun feels good to him. He is a chilly body, and, like the snakes, cannot get any too much warmth. Now he sits upon his haunches and takes a deliberate survey, then pokes some greens into his mouth with his forepaws. If his sharp ears bring him no suspicious sound, he drops upon all fours and goes to browsing again.

No one has explained why the woodchuck holes up so early in the autumn and comes out at such an unseasonable time in the spring. He goes in while there is still plenty to eat, and reappears when there is scarcely anything to be had. Possibly the habit was acquired in some remote past when the winter may have come earlier in the year, and the woodchucks, being a conservative race and loath to change their ways, have never adapted themselves, but go to bed now as it were in the middle of the afternoon and get up before daybreak, impelled to this early rising by hunger. Soon we shall be walking over his head, but it will not disturb his nap. He will have rolled himself up in a ball for a four or five months' snooze in company with all the little frogs and snakes--a sleepy crowd. The chipmunk is likewise a chilly body, but he is not going to fast--not he--so he lays in a good store of chestnuts and makes all snug for the cold weather.

While the moral of the ant and the grasshopper will doubtless always hold good, there is little incentive for the grasshopper to become thrifty as few would live to enjoy the results. But the woodchuck might well profit by the example of the chipmunk, who loves his comfort and a well-stocked larder in which to snooze away the winter months, a round of dinners and after-dinner naps. Besides his hordes of beech and chestnuts, he is credited with gathering the seeds of the buttercup as well as buckwheat and grass seed. I have seen him on the tips of witch-hazel twigs biting off the nutlets of the preceding year. He has some variety at his table then. The buttercups must be in the nature of a delicacy--his sweetcakes perhaps.

As the weather grows colder the vegetation seems to droop hourly, the bare earth becoming visible, except where the dry leaves have roofed themselves over the huckleberry bushes or in the thick tangle of briers. The rabbit must feel himself rather too much in evidence as the ground is thus exposed, and perforce relies more on his protective coloration to escape notice. An adept at dissimulation, he turns into a stump and remains so indefinitely. Yet looking at him recently, as he sat motionless on some dry leaves among the bare stems of the blackcap raspberries, I was struck with how poor a refuge his colors really do afford when once your eye is upon him. At the first glance, and before he had come into the mental vision as a rabbit, he appeared as a small grayish stump covered with buff-tinted shelf fungi. But the moment I looked sharply at him, he was a rabbit in every detail. His colors did not greatly harmonize with the oak leaves on which he sat, yet he allowed me to approach and walk around him. It is all a matter of the attention; by remaining quiet the animal does not arrest the eye readily, but once this is directed upon him the disguise is seen to be very thin.

Save for his nose, which wobbled slightly, he was motionless as a stone. After some time his ear moved gently, much as a leaf is turned over by the wind, but his eye never winked and its expression was one of extreme alertness. On too near an approach he made off in haste. Noting his direction, I followed to see if I could again locate him. For some time no rabbit was visible, when I chanced again upon a little gray stump covered with buff-tinted fungi, which appeared this time on the pine-needles and just within the charmed precincts of the briers.

I produced an apple as a peace offering and in token of my good-will and desire to be of service to the tribe of gray rabbits. He remained like a stone while the bits of apple descended about him and lay at a tempting distance. At last there was a more vigorous wobbling of the nose, the long ears moved--as a leaf turns--and with two little hops he approached and accepted the token, and we were brought together in amity in the silent woods. A humble offering, indeed, but it served for the moment to bring me in touch with the wild and to strike a common chord. The seemingly impassable barrier of caste, which lies between man and the wild things, was crossed, and we broke bread together.

After a light fall of snow it is instructive to read what the rabbit has written in his diary. Such scattered notes as he leaves are wholly personal and do not seem to imply interest in anything but himself. You may see where he has hopped through his runways and stopped now and then when the necessity appealed to him of removing certain briers to keep the passageway clear. Sometimes it is a stem of the catbrier; again a rose or blackberry. In every case it is cut obliquely and as sharply and neatly as with a knife. Frequently stems are severed thickly set with thorns and prickers, and the wonder is how he closed his teeth upon them without getting an unpleasant mouthful. Hundreds of cuts reveal never a slip or break, but each is sharply defined as if done by one stroke of a razor. His track shows places where he sat upon his haunches, and where he stood up to reach the buds of a stunted wild apple; again he followed the shore of the pond and nibbled the small willows and clethra. Occasionally he appears to have cut a large brier merely for practice in using his teeth.

Rabbit and fox are outlaws and without rights. They are hunted to death; hence they live by their wits if they live at all. It has become second nature to them to proceed indirectly, to break the scent and double on their tracks whenever occasion offers. The fox knows few foes besides men and dogs, but the rabbit must circumvent owls, weasels, minks and foxes as well. Hence I bow to the rabbit as to a superior intelligence: one deeply versed in the ancient lore of woodcraft and possessing knowledge as yet unrevealed to us. Does he carry some charm whereby the earth opens and receives him in need, some tarn hut in which he becomes invisible, or does the fabled St.-John's-wort exercise for his race a special protection? What shall fill the place of the wild things when they are swept from the earth? Why not tolerate an occasional fox if only to hear him yap, and to have the assurance that there is still this much untamed?

In such a timid world, where fear of man is so large a factor, one is struck by the least evidence of self-assurance. In view of this I entertain a covert admiration for the skunk. Fear rests lightly on his shoulders. Meet him in the woods, teetering along, and he is the less concerned of the two. His imperturbability is his leading characteristic. In this he is the very opposite of the coon. But he knows how terrible is the weapon he carries, how vulnerable the nose of man. The nose is the point of attack; he would slay you through your olfactories. It is seldom any one says a good word for the skunk. He must needs be a villain and a chicken thief who smells thus to heaven. Yet in fact there are bolder thieves in town than he, with more sinister designs on the hen-roost. It is impolite to mention him, as though his name were as unsavory as his odor. Men deal more kindly with his memory, for he is permitted to undergo a commercial transfiguration, to rise triumphant from the vat, henceforth to be taken to our bosoms as Alaska sable.

The skunk receives no credit for the countless beetles he grubs from the earth. No more does the mole who suffers for the sins of the meadow-mouse. They are victims of prejudice. When I see a mole emerge from the earth, I feel I am looking upon an inhabitant of another sphere--the underworld; one as strange to me as I am to him. What use has he for the sun? He cares not for celestial light, but for subterranean fires only.

In the pond above the glen is a colony of muskrats. It antedates the memory of the oldest inhabitants, and the muskrats were in all probability the first settlers themselves. The huts, which lie scattered through the sedge and cattails, are some of them flat while others are high and dome-shaped. Their number does not seem to vary much from year to year, whereas muskrats are said to be very prolific. What, then, becomes of all the young? I have never known of any one trapping or killing them in this pond. It may be the old mink in the glen, and many another, make this their hunting-ground and thus keep down the number.

These queer neighbors pique our curiosity. What manner of life do they lead indoors? They take some rude pleasure and have dull animal thoughts perhaps. As you stamp upon the ice and slap your hands to keep from freezing, the muskrat sits serenely below enjoying the comforts of the pond, and quite unaware the mercury has dropped to zero. He has built him a house and stocked his cellar, and what cares he. As snug as a mouse in a cheese, he has taken the precaution to make his home of his favorite dish. Let the world freeze, then, if it will, he nibbles the walls of his room till it thaws again. Consider the interior of that dwelling, what a murky house is there, its front door under water and never a window.

Muskrats repair and enlarge their huts in the fall, and perhaps subsequently gnaw out as much from the inside as they add to the exterior. The walls are made of grass and sedge roots, together with spatter-docks and bur-reeds. During the summer you might not suspect the presence of one, hidden as they are in the cattails and rank growth of sedge. As the vegetation dies down in autumn, the huts loom proportionately, so that they come prominently into view by November; and then, on some fine cold morning, in place of the reedy pond, appears a sheet of ice with isolated domes rising here and there. From these, the muskrat and his family travel to their feeding-grounds. They have chosen their estate at the bottom of the pond--rich lands for which none contend with them.

In fact our wild neighbors all live in a dim world of shadows, in which they lurk like phantoms. They have retreated into the night, and for days together you may not meet one. But the new fallen snow reveals their presence.

THE WINTER WOODS

The first snow-storm of the season never becomes an old story. It retains its charm indefinitely, to all original minds at least, and to such as have cherished any degree of simplicity. Here is a mimic invasion of an elemental beauty which conquers us by reason of its very gentleness. We are soothed and beguiled into submission. Tempestuous winds call forth our resistance; we front them with set teeth. But who can resist the silent snow descending as if to lay the world under a soft enchantment? The woods are renewed and reclothed in virgin purity. It is as if old scores were wiped out and the world were again a spotless thing.

What can be more companionable than the falling snow? Its touch is so caressing, its advent so silent in the open, its voice so pleasing as it sifts through the pine-needles. The first solitary flakes approach with the gentle effect of preparing one for the miracle to ensue. A calm settles over all, as though these were indeed the messengers of peace.

Recently there fell such a clinging and abundant snow as comes perhaps only once in a season, and some years not at all. The woods were literally buried and saplings everywhere bent to the ground beneath its weight. It enveloped the pines until they became miniature Alps in the landscape, while among the oaks were gleaming corridors and marble halls. The open, barren aspect common to winter was gone, and the dense walls had shut in again as in summer, but now crystalline and dazzling.

This is perhaps Nature's greatest transformation. In a single night have been erected such palaces as were never seen in Persia. What a bold, free hand wrought here! In the thousand domes and arches is a massive architecture, relieved by the utmost delicacy, as though Nature said, "Behold, I show you a miracle." A miracle indeed! Here have wrought the genii of the air while mortals slept, and all that was to be heard was the rustling of their wings. At such times the woods grow suddenly strange and unfamiliar. They so lend themselves to the enchantment we are lost in our own wood-lot. Familiar paths are obliterated by pendulous boughs drooping to the earth, while in the pasture tree-sparrows hop upon the snow among the protruding tops of the tallest ragweeds.

Realize if you can in your walk, over how many sleepers you step all unknown; how many woodchucks in their burrows, and frogs in the mud under the ice; how many torpid snakes and dozing chipmunks. Here is an enchanted household--underground. They are at peace and their timid hearts know no fear. The dreaming toad has no terror of writhing blacksnakes, and the snoozing woodchuck has forgotten the dog. Presently they will awake to hunger and fear again. Woodchucks will be up long before breakfast, to go shivering in the cold dawn of the year waiting for the table to be spread. Snakes do not come out till the sun is well up, to lie basking in the noonday heat, catching the first unwary grasshoppers.

Every fresh snowfall makes some revelation of its own, recording crepuscular journeys and prowlings in the night. The broad track of the skunk meanders in and out among the bushes. That he had no definite direction, took never a straight course, nor apparently did he hurry, is in itself evidence of his phlegmatic temperament and leisurely habit of mind. Footprints of the ruffed grouse show that he has on his snow-shoes, inasmuch as they are feathered, broad and lobed rather than angular. The squirrel leaves evidence of his impetuous ways, moving always impulsively, and the snow makes plain record of the fact. Tracks of deer seem to bespeak their innocence, as that of the fox might be said to have a sinister purport, doubtless because the hoof prints have a gentle suggestion and imply the herbivorous diet.

In the winter walk the eye finds relatively so little to hold it, that it rivets itself upon minute details, dissecting that which might pass unnoticed at other seasons. Form and outline come into prominence while color is in abeyance. We must now perforce judge the trees by this standard. Who shall describe the winter beauty of the beech as it stands stripped and naked to the winds like an athlete, every muscle and sinew in evidence, every outline expressive of reserve power and self-assurance--a clean-limbed, stout-hearted tree, dauntless before all gales? Its trunk is a superb torso, and with its roots it reaches down to the heart of the earth, draws sustenance therefrom and derives heat from that deep-lying warmth below all frost lines. No parasite this, no surface weed, but the sturdy child of Earth herself, suckled by a Spartan mother. Look upon an ancient beech, bared thus to the storm, and the chest involuntarily expands, as though we too should take firmer hold somewhere and stand more erect. The shellbark is as shaggy, raw-boned and loose-jointed as the beech is trim and closely knit. Its bare branches are not clean-cut against the sky but swollen and distorted like knotted hands of toil--horny, crooked fingers upraised to the heavens. What rude strength is their portion who stand thus alone and derive from the earth as befits the stalwart--buffeting, solitary and unyielding, the winter gales.

As the trees are leafless, the bark is now more in evidence. Moosewood looks slender and striped as a ribbon-snake, and limbs of the hop-hornbeam have the appearance of sinews. Where a black and a white oak stand near together, the difference in color is as evident as between a negro and a white man. The white birch is to the winter woods what the dogwood is in spring, the maple in autumn. How is it the ancients did not metamorphose the fairest of all nymphs into this tree, so distinctly feminine is its beauty? Portions of bark outlast the wood, and are to be found standing erect and empty. The tree has departed, bequeathing its fair skin in token of a vanished loveliness. Now and then the yellow birch is seen in all its beauty, the golden inner bark shining through a silver filigree. To look at this tree is like looking at a picture or reading a poem: one feels somehow refreshed. Nor is the black birch without charm; its bark has a dusky beauty, and again shows fine wood colors and metallic tints similar to the black cherry. This fine luster the birch has in an eminent degree while most trees show it only on their small branches, if at all.

Club-mosses appear to be a lesser growth of pines, a pygmy folk dwelling at the feet of the elder race. Here are miniature trunks and branches bearing miniature cones, perfect little conifers no higher than a chickadee. Ground-pine and trailing Christmas green thrive together on the bank, the latter with stems a yard long, which, while they grow at one end, die at the other. These little plants are crisp and green and refresh the eye on winter days, as does the Christmas fern, which affords a pleasant encounter at a time when one meets few acquaintances. It has, moreover, a certain charm of its own which doubtless lies in the crispness of the fronds and clear-cut outlines of the pinnæ. The marginal shield-fern is another acquaintance to be looked for on the winter walk, and everywhere the hardy polypody, which is as much a child of winter as the little spiny cladonia that clusters about its roots and clings to the same granite ledge.

Let there come a warm rain, the high blueberries redden their twigs and the lichens renew their tints--quite as though Nature had softened her heart. These lichens suddenly become conspicuous with a sort of gentle prominence, and mildly compel attention; on the oaks the yellow cetraria, on the white pines, olive, slate-colored and blue-green parmelias. Had faun and satyr thus carved upon the forest trees the name of some fair Rosalind among the nymphs, they could not have wrought in more fitting and altogether sylvan characters.

A common necessity and hardship hold the birds together in closer bonds so that they are impelled to consort in little roving bands--chickadees, creepers, kinglets and nuthatches, with often a single downy woodpecker accompanying them. If one chance to drop a morsel he will descend to the ground in search of it. He will not waste a spider's egg, so severe has been the lesson in economy. In zero weather the jay forgets to be saucy, and if there is a glaze on the snow, his native impertinence seems to ooze from him, and he becomes meek enough. Taking a weazened acorn from the tree, he holds the nut with one claw, and with vigorous taps of his bill tears it open. After extracting the frozen kernel, he drops the shell with a trace of his customary impertinence, as though feeling in somewhat better spirits for even this poor repast. A bone nailed to a tree is inducement for him to stay near the house, but not when he can get acorns readily.

The board may fairly creak with its weight of partridgeberries, beechnuts and acorns, many of the latter crushed and available, and then in a night this plentiful feast is put out of sight under a six-inch layer of snow, to which the next day adds a glaze as if to seal irrevocably the doom of all bob-whites. A fast has been declared in effect, as peremptorily as by any medieval pope, to be broken only with an occasional leaf bud or the poor seeds of the ragweed. But the good sun is a trusty friend, and snow is only so much water. Presently berries and acorns again come into view.

There is no more touching note in nature than the bob-white's at this season, as wandering together in the snow in search of their scanty fare they utter from time to time those low but distinct calls in which they seemingly express their solicitude. June itself has no sweeter song than this note of the winter woods, albeit it is such a plaintive one: mother-notes these, and child-voices of the hunted, full of a wild pathos,--tender voices which to us have been but the inarticulate cries of the dumb. The birds feed frequently on the crushed acorns lying in the path, and the jay at times participates to the extent of taking an acorn from the feast and eating it in the branches above, where he is a good sentinel, though prone to imitate the quailing of the red-shouldered hawk when the feast is at its height, to the general discomfiture and alarm of the diners below.

Birds become less suspicious as the mercury falls, and they are hard pressed for food. The snow around the ragweeds is thickly covered with the tracks of bob-whites, like those of chickens, broad and firm, but with hardly any hind toe mark at all, as though they walked about on tiptoe. Very different from these are the long, triangular tracks of the jays, showing where they have hopped upon the snow. It is thus fairly tramped down and strewn with leaves and chaff where the bob-whites have fed, leaving these husks in token of their frugal meal. Such seed must be very small provender for these birds--much like a diet of crumbs for a hungry man. Goldfinches, juncos and tree-sparrows seek the same meager repast. The musical flocks of redpolls fare better in the alders around the pond. These are not to be seen every day, any more than the pine-siskins--perhaps not at all during several years. But occasionally an enormous flock will arrive and settle in the alders with all the chattering and commotion of a social and hungry company. As the seeds are shaken down upon the ice, the birds soon leave the bushes, and are under the table, so to speak.

Crossbills have the easier time, feeding as they do on the seeds of the pine, for these are always available. No sound seems better to accord with the spirit of a still cold winter day than this faint crackling of opening cones, forced asunder by the shearing motion of the peculiar bills of these birds. Surely here is an adaptation to definite ends. Nature produces a cone that cannot readily be opened, and, as if relenting, produces a bird to open it. The wings of the seeds come zigzagging to the ground as the feast continues overhead--all that is destined to be planted.

The lumbermen come into the woods with the crossbills, and everywhere is heard the winter music of the ax. It is good music enough, but it has a sinister purport, and the swish and boom of falling trees is a sad refrain. Ancient pines are laid low, singing to the last their brave and beautiful song, which seems to come, not directly from overhead, but remotely from the empyrean, as though it issued from the distant Court of the Winds. Of the pantheon of trees the village elm is the last to hold our homage; we have dethroned our idols. As the sound of the ax breaks the stillness, I find myself instinctively turning in the opposite direction, to escape that which is soon to follow--the swan-song of the forest primeval.

LAUGHING WATERS

There are days when the sea is austere and unapproachable, when its mood is too lofty and severe. But the pond, fringed with alders and button-bushes, smiles in the sunshine and is friendly and inviting. It is more on the level of our every-day thought. Not always are we consoled by the vast and sublime, and we crave even more the companionable and social aspects of Nature. Grim though the surroundings of granite ledge and somber pines, the nestling pond is winsome, notwithstanding. Never forbidding, never altogether distant in its mood, even though frozen, it is a cheerful and alluring personality to which we are drawn from afar.

About a pond as about a mountain there is a kind of magnetism. A new field of discovery, there is ever the hope that from a new scene we shall gain a fresh impression. Every pond holds out this possibility and invites exploration of its shores, as if _there_ were the promised land. But over and above this is that element of personality, a charm purely feminine, and eluding any attempt to hold it.

Peculiarly sensitive to light and air, a pond is susceptible of little moods that do not come to the sea. It is the eye of the landscape. Dawn, high noon and dusk are each reflected there. Its afternoon mood is not like that of the morning any more than is our own. The more passive it is, the more perfectly it reflects the heavens. At all time it draws to itself light from the sky, and when the surrounding woods are swallowed in the advancing darkness, still gleams with a faint opalescence. These pale glimmers illumine the bogs, where a pool has caught and retained the daylight, or rather the spectral light of dawn. One appears to look through this serene and reflecting surface into the heart of some other wood, darkly mysterious and impenetrable, which vanishes when the wind blows, as if the curtain were drawn.

Gently as snowflakes, the leaves detach themselves and settle on the ponds, to sail away like diminutive barks upon those friendly seas. Numberless sails of scarlet and gold softly scud before the breeze, threading the inlets between the button-bushes and crowding the miniature bays; oriental craft these, of rich aspect; caciques and royal barges upon some Golden Horn. Here and there, one more venturesome steers boldly out into the open, carried by favoring winds, and makes some foreign port among the lily-pads. You may become enamored of a winsome pond on October days, a mystical beauty veiled in autumn haze, only to find her mood changed for the reserve and uncommunicativeness of winter.

When the pond freezes over we experience something of that feeling which comes with the first snow, a delightful sense of novelty, briefly entertained each season. The water has suddenly lost its mobility and become passive and expressionless, as one in a hypnotic state. A great calm has settled upon the earth; the winter sleep is in the air and the ponds have succumbed with the woodchuck. Only the chickadees, scolding and gossiping in the pitch-pines, seem to be awake and unaffected by the change. A cold bluish light pervades the leafless woods, reflected from the snow and appearing to emanate from the ground rather than the sky. The earth is wrapped in silence, yet it is not austere nor repellent. One _feels_ this stillness, which appeals to some sixth sense, and is more acceptable at times than any music,--is itself the most heavenly music.

Far across the valley the steam of a passing locomotive rises slowly, and then, like the opening of a flower, unfolds in snow-white voluptuous petals and remains as if carved in the still air. A shaft of light reaches the eye from a distant pool of molten silver at the base of purple hills. All around are little sparkling lights of icicles, flashing their pure rays in the sun. It is the magic water, the protean thing so full of light, laughter and music. Once it was laughter; now in the silence it is light.

All at once the pond is alive with skaters, its solitary aspect transformed by this merry invasion. Boys cutting figure eights suggest whirligigs. Myriad black figures, clear cut in the pale light, move in and out with undulating rhythm, as on a surface of polished steel. The pond, now more companionable than ever, becomes a playground, and we never so much as reflect upon the strangeness of it. Something there is in this unbending on the part of Nature which puts us in a good humor, for certainly people are never more good-natured than on the ice. Their habitual stiffness melts away as readily as ice melts in the sun. They experience a thaw and become democratic.

To skate over meadows and into inaccessible bogs gives one a taste for exploration. It is a new freedom and perhaps the next thing to flying. Seen through the clear "black" ice, familiar objects have an added interest; the pebbles on the bottom, the spagnum, the lily-pads, all give the impression of being severed from our world, though so plainly in view. The skater glides in and out amongst cassandra and andromeda, clethra and black alders--wintry jungles, enlivened only by red winterberries--where in summer is the haunt of the rose pogonia and the white-fringed orchis. Who would imagine now that the swamp was capable of producing anything so exquisite, that it held beneath the ice the seeds of such beauty?

The most friendly voice in Nature is the song of the brook. Not the wind in the pines, not the voice of the sea, can compare with this for true sociability. These are always somewhat remote, somewhat mystical in our ears, but the song of the brook is cheerfulness itself. Its _bonhomie_ is irresistible. It gradually prevails over any whim and wins us to a sociable and contented mood. Though the world may seem discordant enough, there is always this wholesome note.

No two brooks are alike. As the result of the character of the country through which they flow, they impress one as having strongly defined personalities. A creek flowing sluggishly through the alluvial districts of the South is insipid compared to a mountain stream in New England. Your mountain brook is a strong, salient personality which dominates the landscape. It sweeps in bold curves about the base of cliffs, and contracts into a mere mill race cut in the distorted schist and gneiss. Its suggestion is wholly of savage strength, a rude, forceful thing of the wilderness; its song a masterful strain, a triumphant chant of power. Again, there are merry little streams tinkling in the sunlight.

In cutting down its channel, the brook may reach a stratum seemingly richer than any above, so that in April its banks become a garden. While scarcely a flower is to be seen on the hillsides, the fertile floor of the ravine is carpeted with spurred violets, groundnut and spring beauties.

One such as this falls into a glen over a little precipice, spreading itself out like a fine veil which ceaselessly undulates in the breeze, and now and again floats away in mist ere it can reach the pool below. Under the overhanging rock, Alpine woodsia and cliff-brake thickly cluster, while on narrow shelves are hanging gardens of dicentra, and in the crannies, little patches of mountain saxifrage.

Below is a golden sheen where the spicebush is in flower, and a shimmer of pale green about the early willows. From the glen comes the song of the ruby kinglet, bubbling up and dying away. Incomparably wild, it seems to express the abandon of a spirit ever free. All the while the companionable brook gurgles and tinkles its reposeful melody, and the white veil of the waterfall undulates softly in its dark cavern. The air is full of that indescribable suggestion of spring, which is like hashish, and casts a glamor over the world. Gradually one is imbued with a sylvan consciousness and attains to a rapt and intimate point of view.

It is curious, as one follows down the ravine, to hear the different voices. The brook seems as if inhabited by a number of spirits throughout its length, some whispering, some laughing, others singing. Not only are the voices pitched in various keys, but the quality of tone differs essentially. Some are loud and portentous; others, melodious, liquid gurgles. In one place the voice implies an intimate and confidential mood, so gentle, so exquisite, that the full import of the musical conversation is felt only in midstream,--whispers and murmurs which have almost a ventriloquial effect.

Countless bubbles glide down the current and vanish one by one. Sunbeams dance over the rapids and out upon the pool, and then, as the sun goes under a cloud, the stream as quickly takes on a somber mood. Presently comes the melodious patter of rain-drops on the ground, an even, sustained note, very different from any voice of the brook as it dimples and answers the rain, one soft voice replying to the other. Already little pools form in hollows of the rock and reflect light, so that the face of Nature is perceptibly brighter.

Considering this aspect of the streams, it is easy to see how the primitive mind came to personify them, since the brooks have motion, voice and expression, ripple and laugh in the sunshine and are responsive to the wind and the sky. They are still divinities to the fisherman with whom he comes into an ever closer affiliation, as gentle and poetic as he may be qualified to enjoy. The murmuring waters, the whispering trees, the silver and cupreous gleams of trout are the facts with which he becomes enamored, while he loses affinity with the world, which slips into the background.

THE MOUNTAINS

He knew the mountains, who said, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help"; knew them in some intimate, spiritual way, for his words imply a noble association and companionship. Wordsworth understood them in this way, but not as the mountaineer knows them. They are ethereal dream-mountains the poet sees, rather than actual rock and soil.

On the horizon the mountains wrap themselves in mysterious light and color and seem invested with certain qualities which they lose near at hand,--as a cloud, so beautiful an object floating in the heavens, is but a fog bank once we are enveloped in it. Distance does actually lend enchantment. The range beyond has always some attraction this one lacks. In truth, mountains are illusory objects, and, to the most matter-of-fact point of view, are something more than rock. That marvelous purple of the distant hills, assumed as an imperial robe, slips away as we approach, and we find them dressed in plain brown homespun. Never do we as much as touch the hem of that royal mantle.

A symbol of the unchangeable, they are none the less marvelously sensitive to the play of light, and thus appear to vary with the conditions of the atmosphere. There are days when they seem to approach, and times again when they recede and become distant and nebulous. This magic-play of light proceeded from their birth, and goes on forever, the unceasing illusion, the beautiful witchery.

From the violet shadows of their bases they rise through a stratum of ethereal blue to emerge glistening white. Now they are savage and defiant in their somber shadows, ramparts and battlements; again, opalescent, lying like cumulous clouds on the horizon. What a vast bulk is yonder spur, massy and ponderous in this light, but tomorrow it may appear immaterial as thistle-down and to hang suspended in the ambient air. In the morning the crags and cliffs stand out naked and dazzling on the great rock mass of the peak; yet before night every detail may be obliterated and the mountain appear a lowering mass, dull and grim.

It is with mountains somewhat as it is with people--there must be perspective if they are to appear all serene and beautiful. In the distant chain the details are lost, and we receive a single distinct impression of serenity, as though they stood there a type of the fixed and eternal. But in among them there are everywhere signs of convulsion, everywhere evidence of change and decay. It is in the distance, then, that the poet loves them best, as a beautiful vision, which lures and beckons him. It is to these he lifts his eyes, from these he receives his inspiration, for they are ethereal and opalescent and play upon his fancy, provoking him to subtle thoughts of the Ideal, rose-colored as themselves.

They who do not live where they can see the mountains miss somewhat in their lives, as do they who never hear the sea. It would seem as though one or the other were essential to a normal human environment, providing that changeful beauty which forever stimulates the imagination. We necessarily lift up our eyes to the mountains with some corresponding elevation of thought. Again, from those desolate heaps of granite we receive the suggestion of something immutable and permanent--delusion though it may be. Whatever convulsions they may have known were birth throes and growing pains. Venerable beyond human conception, their life is measured, not in years, nor yet in centuries, but in epochs and eons of time; and out of this inconceivable antiquity, with its tumultuous youth, has come repose at last--a serene old age.