Chapter IV: Part 4

It is easy to see him striding home from a session with the Plum Island waves and pausing to see the snow settle on and blot out the outlines of the peaceful marshes, drawing from the sight his best-remembered, most-quoted verse:

“A weapon that comes down as still
As snowflakes fall upon the sod,
But executes the freeman’s will
As lightnings do the will of God;
And from its force nor doors nor locks
Can shield you; ’tis the ballot box.”

I do not know if he wrote these lines here or later when he had become one of Boston’s famous preachers, but I do know that he saw these things in the years that he lived in the fine old town and carried the memory of them long with him, just as all of us who visit the place carry away lasting impressions of its quaintness, dignity and wholesome quiet, and the beauty of its surrounding country.

X

PLYMOUTH MAYFLOWERS

_Adventures of a Spring Day in Pilgrim Land_

The first day on which one might hope for mayflowers came smilingly to Plymouth in late April. The day before a bitter northeaster had swept through the town, a gale like the December one in which the Pilgrim’s shallop first weathered Manomet head and with broken mast limped in under the lee of Clark’s Island. No promise of May had been in this wild storm that keened the dead on Burial Hill, yet this day that followed was to be better than a promise. It was May itself, come a few days ahead of the calendar, so changeful is April in Pilgrim land. The gale, ashamed of itself, ceased its outcry in the darkness of full night and the chill of a white frost followed on all the land.

In the darkest hour of this night I saw a thin point of light rise out of the mystery of the sea far to the eastward, the tiny sail of the shallop of the old moon, blown landward by little winds of dawn, making port on the shore of “hither Manomet.” In the velvety blackness of this ultimate hour of night the slender sail curved sweetly backward toward the sea, and the shallop seemed drawn to the land by a lodestone, as was the ship of Sinbad the Sailor, and when it magically climbed the dark headland and sailed away into the sky above it drew out of the sea behind it the first light of glorious morning. From Manomet head to the Gurnet the horizon showed a level sea line of palest garnet that deepened, moment by moment, till the coming sun arched it with rose and bounded from it, a flattened globule of ruby fire. I like to think that the path of gold with which the sun glorified the stippled steel of the sea was the very one by which the first Mayflower came in from Provincetown, the sails nobly set and the ship pressing onward to that memorable anchorage within the protecting white arm of the sandspit.

I like to think that the sweet curve of the old moon’s slender sail sways in by Manomet each month in loving remembrance of that other shallop that so magically won by the roar of the breakers on the dark point and brought the simple record of faith and courage for our loving remembrance. But whether these things are so or not I know that the very first rays of the morning sun pass in level neglect over the bay and the town to lay a wreath of light on the brow of Burial Hill and touch with celestial gold the simple granite shaft that stands over the grave of William Bradford, historian of Plymouth Colony and writer of the first American book. Such is the unfailing ceremony of sunrise in Plymouth, and such it has been since the first Pilgrim was laid to rest on the hill which lifts its head above the roofs and spires to the free winds of the world.

Plymouth is fortunate in this hill. It bears the very presence of its founders above the enterprise and ferment of a modern town which grows rapidly toward city conditions, a hill which is set upon a city and cannot be hid. Factories and city blocks and all the wonders of steam and electrical contrivance which would have astounded and amazed Bradford and his fellows are common in Plymouth to-day as they are common to all cities and towns of a vast country, yet the graves of the simple pioneers rise above them as the story of their lives transcends in interest that of all others that have come after them. The book that Bradford wrote, as the tales that Homer told, will last as long as books are read. Plymouth may pass, as Troy did, but the story of its heroes will remain. Bradford’s book, which was our first, may well, at the end of time, be rated our greatest.

The trailing arbutus is peculiarly the flower of Plymouth. Not that it grows there alone, indeed within easy reach of the landing place of the Pilgrims it is not easy now to find it. Once, no doubt, it blossomed about the feet of the pioneers, sending up its fragrance to them as they trod sturdily along their first street and through their new-found fields that first spring after their arrival. My, but their hearts must have been homesick for the English May they had left behind! and in memory of the pink and white of the hawthorn hedges they called this pink and white flower which peered from the oval-leaved vines trailed about their feet, mayflower. It surely must have grown on the slopes of Burial Hill, down toward Town Brook, but now one will look in vain for it there. I found my first blossom of the year by following the brook up to its headwaters in Billington Sea. The brook itself is greatly changed since Bradford’s day. Its waters are now held back by dams where it winds through the sand hills, and one mill after another sits by the side of the ponds thus formed. Yet the “sea” itself must be much the same in itself and its surroundings as it was in Billington’s time. Nor do I wholly believe the legend which has it that Billington thought it was a sea in very truth. It is too obviously a pond to have deceived even this unsophisticated wanderer. It covers but a little over three hundred acres including its islands and winding coves.

I think, rather, its name was given in good-natured derision of Billington and his idea of the importance of his discovery, a form of quaint humor not unknown in the descendants of the Pilgrims to this day. Yet the waters of the little winding pond are as clear as those of the sea which breaks on the rocks of Manomet or the Gurnet, and the hilly shores, close set with deciduous growth, are almost as wild as they were then. The robins that greeted the dawn on Burial Hill sang here at mid-day, blackbirds chorused, and song sparrows sent forth their tinkling songs from the shrubby growths. Plymouth woods, here at least, are a monotony of oaks. Yet here and there in the low places a maple has become a burning bush of ruby flame, and along the bog edges the willows are in the full glory of their yellow plumes. The richest massed coloring one can see in the region to-day, though, is that of the cranberry bogs. Looking away from the sun the thick-set vines are a level floor of rich maroon, not a level color but a background showing the brush marks of a master painter’s hand. Toward the sun this color lightens and silvers to tiny jewel points where the light glances from glossy leaf tips. The later spring growth will fleck the bogs with green, but the maroon background will still be there.

The arbutus does not trail in all spots beneath the oaks, even in this secluded wilderness. Sometimes one thinks he sees broad stretches green with its rounded leaves only to find last year’s checkerberries grinning coral red at him, instead of the soft pink tints and spicy odor of the Epigæa blooms. Sometimes the pyrola simulates it and cracks the gloss on its leaves with a wan wintergreen smile at the success of the deception. But after a little the eye learns to discriminate in winter greens and to know the outline of the arbutus leaf and its grouping from that of the others. Then success in the hunt should come rapidly. After all Epigæa and Gaultheria are vines closely allied, and it is no wonder that there is a family resemblance. The checkerberry’s spicy flavor permeates leaves, stem and fruit. That of the arbutus seems more volatile and ethereal. It concentrates in the blossom and rises from that to course the air invisibly, an aromatic fragrance that the little winds of the woods sometimes carry far to those who love it, over hill and dale. Given a day of bright sun and slow-moving soft air and one may easily hunt the Plymouth mayflowers by scent. Even after the grouped leaves are surely sighted the flowers are still to be found. The winds of winter have strewn the ground deep with oak leaves and half buried the vines in them for safety from the cold. Out from among these the blossoms seem to peer shyly, like sweet little Pilgrim children, ready to draw back behind their mother’s aprons if they do not like the appearance of the coming stranger. Perhaps they do withdraw at discretion, and this is very likely why some people who come from far to hunt find many mayflowers, while others get few or none.

Just as the Mayflower in which the Pilgrims sailed to Plymouth seems to have been but one of many English ships of that name, so the trailing arbutus is not the only flower to be called mayflower in New England. The mayflower of the English fields and hedgerows was pre-eminently the hawthorn, known often just as “the may.” But there is a species of bitter cress in England with showy flowers, Cardamine pratensis, which is also called mayflower, and the name is given to the yellow bloom of the marsh marigold, Caltha palustris, often known, less lovingly, as “blobs.” The Caltha is common to both Europe and America, and, though it is often hereabout known by the nickname of “cowslip” which the early English settlers seem to have given it, I do not hear it called mayflower. In localities where the arbutus is not common the name mayflower is here most commonly given to the pink and white Anemone nemorosa, the wind flower of the meadow margins and low woods, and to the rock saxifrage, Saxifraga virginiensis, both of which are among the earliest blossoms of the month.

None can visit Plymouth without wishing to climb the bold promontory of “hither Manomet.” The legend has it that Eric the Red, the Viking who explored the New England shores centuries before the first Englishman heard of them, made this his burial hill and that somewhere beneath its forests his bones lie to this day. I sought long for mayflowers on the seaward slopes and in the rough gullies of these “highlands of Plymouth.” I did not find them there.

On the landward slopes, gentler and less wind-swept, down toward the “sweet waters” that flow from inland to the sea, you may with patient search find many. But the heights shall reward you, if not with mayflowers with greater and more lasting joys. The woods of Manomet were full of butterflies. Splendid specimens of Vanessa antiopa danced together by twos and threes in every sunny glade, the gold edging of bright raiment showing beneath their “mourning cloaks” of rich seal brown. Here in the rich sunshine Launcelot might well have said:

“Myself beheld three spirits, mad with joy,
Come dashing down on a tall wayside flower.”

Here Grapta interrogationis carried his ever-present question mark from one dry leaf to another, asking always that unanswerable “why?” Here Pyrameis huntera, well named the hunter’s butterfly, flashed red through the woodland, scouting silently and becoming invisible in ambush as a hunter should. Here a tiny fleck of sky, the spirit bluebird of the spring which the entomologists have woefully named Lycæna pseudargiolus, fluttered along the ground as if a new-born flower tried quivering flight, and brown Hesperiidæ, “bedouins of the pathless air,” buzzed in vanishing eccentricity. But it was not for these that I lingered long on the seaward crest. There below me lay the bay that the exploring Pilgrims entered at such hazard, that but the day before had been blotted out with a freezing storm and gray with snow, now smiling in unforgettable beauty at my feet, bringing irresistibly to mind the one who sang,

“My soul to-day is far away,
Sailing the blue Vesuvian bay.”

At Naples indeed could be no softer, fairer skies than this June day of late April brought to Plymouth Bay and spread over the waters that nestled within the curve of that splendid young moon of white sand that sweeps from Manomet to the tip of the sandspit, with the Gurnet far to the right and Plymouth’s white houses rising in the middle distance. It lacked only the cone of Vesuvius smoking beyond to make the memory complete.

Nor has the Bay of Naples bluer waters than those that danced below me. Some stray current of the Gulf Stream must have curled about the tip of Cape Cod and spread its wonder bloom over them. Here were the same exquisite soft blues, shoaling into tender green, that I have seen among the Florida keys. Surely it was like a transformation scene. The day before the torn sea wild with wind and the dun clouds of a northeast gale hiding the distance with a mystery of dread, a wind that beat the forest with snow and chilled to the marrow; and this day the warmth of an Italian spring and the blue Vesuvian Bay.

The Pilgrims had their seasons of storm and stress, but there came to them too halcyon days like this when the mayflower bloomed in all the woodland about them, the mourning cloak butterflies danced with joy down the sunny glades, and the bay spread its wonderful blue beneath their feet in the delicious promise of June. Nor is it any wonder that in spite of hardships and disasters manifold they yet found heart to write home that it was a “fayere lande and bountiful.”

But for all the lure of Plymouth woods with their fragrance of trailing arbutus, from all the grandeur of the wide outlook from Manomet Heights, the hearts of all who come to Plymouth must lead them back to the resting place of the fathers on the brow of the little hill in the midst of the town. There where the grass was not yet green and the buttercups that will later shine in gold have put forth but the tiniest beginnings of their fuzzy, three-parted leaves, I watched the sun sink, big and red in a golden mist, over a land of whose coming material greatness Bradford and his fellow Pilgrims could have had no inkling. Seaward the tropic bloom of the water was all gone, and there as the sun passed I saw the cool steel of the bay catch the last rays in little dimples of silver light. Manomet withdrew, blue and mysterious in the haze of nightfall. Out over the Gurnet, and beyond, the sky caught purples from the colors in the west, and there, dropping below the horizon line, east northeast toward England, I saw a sail vanish in the soft haze as if it might be the first Mayflower, sailing away from the heavy-hearted Pilgrims, toward England and home. The sun’s last ray touched it with a fleck of rose as it passed, a rose like that which tipped the petals of the mayflowers that I held in my hand, mayflowers that sent up to me in the coolness of the gathering April night a fragrance as aromatic and beloved as is the memory of the lives of the Pilgrims that slept all about me on the brow of Burial Hill. Bradford wrote gravely and simply the chronicles of these, and no more, yet the fervent faith and sturdy love for fair play, unquenchable in the hearts of these men, breathes from every page, a fragrance that shall go forth on the winds of the world for all time.

XI

OLD SALEM TOWN

_A Scarlet Letter Day in the Witch City_

Over all the hum of business activity that rises from Salem town sleeps the glamour of old-time memories. Factories drone, traffic roars or clatters, and the multiple message of modern civilization goes forth to eye and ear, but among all these sits the ancient city dreaming long dreams and careless of the children of to-day.

Along Charter Street and down Derby the once stately mansions of the great merchants of another century droop in senile decay, knee deep in the dust and debris that immigrant, alien races scatter, and note it and them no more than they do the rats in the wainscoting. The thoughts of the old houses are busy still with ships in the China Sea, battling round the Cape of Good Hope with the Flying Dutchman, or running down the trades from Senegambia, Surinam or Ceylon, and their upper window eyes stare unwinkingly across rotten wharves and out to the island gaps in the horizon of the bay, watching for the sails that come no more. So the world thinks of Salem to-day as the city of romantic memories. It may weave cotton cloth and tan hides and make shoes and carry on a thousand other inventions of modern business, yet we who dwell away from it, far or near, will always know it best for its romance of elder days, the dread delusion of its witch finding, the astounding deeds of its merchant sailors, and in the end most of all perhaps, for its man of dreams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who dreamed there the grim story of “The Scarlet Letter” and made it live for all men for all time.

More and more, as the years slip by, Hawthorne comes to be the presiding genius of Salem, and reverent pilgrims in increasing numbers come to seek the few abiding traces of his life there; and though they go to Gallows Hill and also view the relics of the old merchants and their portraits and the pictures of their ships, they go first to the house where Hawthorne was born, to the other houses where he lived and worked, and to the sleepy, dignified old Custom House from whose drab duties grew the strange flower of weird romance. It may be that out of the Ghettos and Warsaws which now surround the old Custom House will come again as great merchants as once dwelt there, or as great a writer of romance as he who worked on its scarred old wooden desk now preserved with such care in the Essex Institute, but one may be pardoned for having his doubts. The world matures rapidly, and the heritage of primitive environment and primitive opportunity is smoothed out by the steel roller of modern invention. New ports no longer wait the seaman adventurer. Steam makes all ports common, and the knowledge of them common, to all the world. We shall look long for the successors to Derby and Peabody and their ilk, and we may well doubt if ships like The Grand Turk, Rajah and Astræa will sail again from any future Salem.

Never again, the world surely hopes, can come upon a pioneer people so mysterious a madness as the Salem witchcraft delusion, yet in it were set the roots of temperament which made Hawthorne what he was. Its grewsome mystery seems to brood in all he wrote, and one cannot visit his haunts and the scenes of its terror to-day without feeling some atmosphere of it still hovering over the place. Hawthorne’s ancestor sat in judgment over the witches, and Judge Hathorne, invisible indeed but grimly onlooking, seems to me to preside over many a tale which he wrote. As relentless fate mocked the witches while it gripped them and killed them with trivialities, so it does the characters in Hawthorne’s stories, nor in the progress of events is there room in the tale, in the one case or the other, for the saving grace of humor. From Hathorne to Hawthorne came the somber impress of the days of witch finding.

The spring sun and the spring rain fall alike gently on Gallows Hill, yet it stands bare and wind-swept to-day as it did when the witches met their fate there, as it has stood since the glaciers ground over it, no one knows how many hundred thousand years ago. The tough rock of which it was built shows everywhere the traces of the fires which melted and reset it in its present form, its twist and coloration burnt into it as the story of the deeds wrought on its summit is seared into the annals of old Salem town. Here and there on its fantastic ledges one sees zigzag marks struck pale as if lightning had welted the tormented stone and left the impress of its sudden anger there. The softening years can do little with this rock. A curse far older than that of the witch finding has set its seal upon the height, and though the gentle things of earth strive patiently to ameliorate the evidence they do little to wipe out the bleakness of the place. The green of spring grasses climbs patiently toward the topmost ledges, indeed, and draws with it the gold of potentilla and the white of wild strawberry blooms. Dandelions set the round image of the sun in sheltered places, and little lilac constellations of bluets star the moister spots adown the slope, but the barren soil is too shallow and the summer turns all these to a brown garment of sorrowful sackcloth and sprinkles it with the gray ashes of drought.

A few houses have boldly climbed the hill from the street below, but none has yet dared the very spot on the bare, red-gray summit where the irons that once helped support the gibbet rust, still firmly bedded in their holes in the rock. Over the ledges and down the hill to the southeast lies a little pond of sweet water that sparkles in the spring winds, cosily sheltered in the hollow and surrounded by the vivid green of smooth turf. But even this the long scorn of summer heat dries to a brown bog where sedges fight for the life remaining in the stagnant pool in its center. About this pond the barberry bushes have found a foothold in straggling clumps to bear little crosses of witch-pin thorns, and steeples of hard-hack blooms spire solemnly near it in summer. Potentilla and cudweed dare the slope toward the summit of Gallows Hill when the rain and sun are kind, and fragaria and violets and bulbous buttercup trail after, but even in the soft days of May the height where the witches were hung is desolate and forbidding. Yet it dominates the outlook upon the town as the story of the witchcraft delusion dominates the annals of it, as both will for all time.

Yet, for all its bareness, the country about Gallows Hill has its golden days. These come in late June, when it seems as if the sun had wrought a miracle among the bleak ledges and along the treeless slopes. Everywhere then in the seemingly barren pastures springs up the shrubby, lanceolate-leaved genista, clothing them in a rolling sea of its golden bloom. For weeks then the hills are glad with a wonder of papilionaceous yellow blossoms that any other pastures, however prolific of beauty, find it hard to match. The same Puritans that cherished the witchcraft delusion brought this plant with them from England, the dyer’s greenweed, woadwaxen or whin, and as they passed on into history left it behind them. It has wandered far in the waste places in New England, but nowhere does it so clothe the hills and rough slopes with beauty as it does in the region about Salem. The thought of this, already pushing up through the sod, is best to take back to the city with one. As the good in the Puritans was far greater than their grim misdeeds, so this goes far to hide the bleakness of the ledges, as it seems striving to. Perhaps some day it will even overgrow and hide the iron in the summit of the hill where children play to-day, and make them forget the story of its tragedies which now they are so eager to tell to the visiting stranger.

Salem’s golden days began a century or more after the witchcraft delusion had burnt to ashes in the fury of its own fire. Certainly the descendants of the men who feared the devil and his emissaries feared little else. He might be formidable dancing at night with withered crones on the weird hills of Salem pastures, but they laughed in his face when he came on the high seas with shotted guns and foreign sailors outnumbering their own guns and crews two to one. They beat the devil and they outgeneraled him, those Salem sailors of the seventeen hundreds, whether he came in English privateer or French man-o’-war or a score of feluccas or piratical junks, and they brought great treasures home to Salem town. They explored uncharted seas, visited ports unheard of before and carried the name and fame of their home town the world over. The world has made a great hero of Paul Jones, but there were half-a-dozen young sea captains out of Salem in Revolutionary times who did all that he did, and more, yet did it so unostentatiously and so much as a part of the day’s work that the records of it are hard to trace and for the most part have been lost. During the Revolution Salem sent out 158 armed vessels carrying more than 2000 guns. They took 445 prizes, losing in return fifty-one of their own fleet. Jonathan Harraden, for instance, sailed from Salem in the privateer General Pickering, 180 tons, carrying fourteen 6-pounders and a crew of less than fifty men. Thus manned and equipped they captured a British privateer of twenty-two guns. Harraden put a part of his crew on the captured vessel and the two sailed on. Off the coast of Spain they sighted a vessel bearing down upon them, and the captive British captain laughed as he told Harraden that this was the British frigate Achilles of forty-two guns.

“Well, I shall not run from her,” said Harraden, stoutly; and he did not. The big frigate soon recaptured the prize with its short crew, but the little Pickering laid up alongside of her at nightfall when the battle ceased for want of light. Harraden went to bed and got a good night’s sleep. In the morning the battle began again so near the coast that a hundred thousand Spaniards made the hills black with spectators. The disparity in size of the two vessels was such that an eyewitness said it was like a ship’s long boat attacking a man-o’-war. But the little boat won the battle, and not only the big frigate but the recaptured prize struck to the indomitable Salem captain and his fearless Salem crew. The battle was no sooner over than the sea was black with the boats of admiring Spaniards who came out in great numbers and later took Captain Harraden ashore and carried him about the city on their shoulders. Report does not state whether the captain enjoyed the ride, but at least he must have been proud of the admiration which called it forth. Sailing again after the battle with the Achilles, Harraden met three British ships of the size of his and captured the three of them, one after another. In all during the Revolution this one Salem captain took from the British more than a thousand guns and sent home great wealth in prizes taken from the far stronger sailor nation with which his country, one might almost have said his town, was at war.

Joseph Peabody was another Salem sailor whose fame was to outlast the Revolution and grow greater in the succeeding days of hard-won peace. In those following days of peaceful, or at least semi-peaceful trading adventure, Peabody owned, first and last, 83 ships which he freighted himself. In his time he shipped 7000 seamen and promoted 45 men from cabin boys to captains. In Salem ships these cabin-boy captains, often striplings of nineteen or twenty, sailed the seven seas, opened new ports to commerce, conquering the prejudice of potentates, matched their wits and wisdom against those of skilled merchants of the Orient and brought back princely profit to the ship owners of Salem and in part to themselves, for often captain and crew alike shared in the profits they helped to make. In those days the Chinese called the Yankees “the new people,” for they first heard of them when Salem ships visited their ports, and the list of new lands first visited by American ships from Salem is a long one.

It was in November, 1785, that the Grand Turk, belonging to Elias Derby and commanded by Ebenezer West, cleared for Canton, China, the first American ship to seek this round-the-world port. Seventeen months after she returned, the result of her voyage, for one thing, being a cargo that brought her owners twice more capital than she had carried out. The Salem merchants often sold not only the cargo but the ship itself in these far distant ports, and later the Grand Turk was thus disposed of in India, Derby building another and a larger vessel of the same name. In 1794 Salem owned 160 vessels of a tonnage totaling 16,788 tons. In 1805 this number had increased to 54 ships, 18 barques, 72 brigs and 86 schooners, of which 48 were employed in trade around the Cape of Good Hope. In 1806 there were 73 ships, 11 barques and 48 brigs, all engaged in this foreign trade, which gave such splendid opportunity for adventure and such princely returns. Cargoes have been brought into Salem port that realized 800 per cent on the capital invested, and from 1800 to 1807 inclusive 1542 vessels in the foreign trade arrived, paying an annual average duty of $755,157.90, and this at the 10 or 12 per cent ad valorem which was the reasonable rate of those days.

In the story of this Salem shipping from 1775 to 1875 is an Odyssey that some latter-day Homer may yet make ring down the future ages. The captains and crews of these ships needed all the courage and wisdom of Ulysses, nor had sea-worn Odysseus so wide wanderings or so strange adventures as they.

In Hawthorne’s time this age of Homeric adventure had indeed passed from the port, yet Salem ships still sailed the seas, for in 1847, when he was dreaming of Hester Prynne, her preacher lover and her weird and satanic husband, as he bent over that old desk in the custom-house, 78 vessels cleared from Salem for foreign ports. So true it is that one’s eyes see only what they are fitted to see. All about the dreamer were the records of these mighty adventures told for the most part indeed in invoices and clearance papers, but also, one must believe, echoing in the traditions which his snug-harbored mariner confrères must have known, yet no story came from his pen that shows he felt the call of the sea to those keen, daring sea rovers on whose trail he camped. This was no loss to us, doubtless. We would not swap the “Scarlet Letter” for any tale that Stevenson told. Yet think what fancies would have taken shape in Stevenson’s brain out of the dusty ghosts that still linger in the nooks of the old custom-house!

More things than these are hidden away in Salem. The homing instinct of the old sailors brought back from the seas of all the earth thousands of strange relics which are still to be seen in the magnificent Peabody Academy of Science and in the Essex Institute, institutions free to all the world of which the city is justly proud. Yet the home-keeping instinct of those who remained behind was as strong, and the Salem homes of the days of the merchant princes still remain, in some cases much as they were a century and more ago. Now and then, within the uproar of a busy street one gets a glimpse over a high board fence of gardens of quaint beauty, the gravel walks bordered with prim box, the sward of a century green and smooth, and the hardy perennials that the old-time home-keepers loved and tended growing and blossoming there still, as beautiful and deep-rooted as were the lives of the Salem mothers that sent their sons forth to adventure on the seven seas while they waited and wove love and longing into the beds of garden bloom. The modern city has crowded these for long, yet the atmosphere of their brave beauty remains still and belongs with the square, patrician dignity of the houses.

In one of these gardens I glimpsed an oriole, flashing his tropic colors along the branches of a magnolia, now just in its wonder of white bloom. It was as if white patience of mother love had waited him there, a gay young wanderer from Surinam, where, very likely, he had spent the winter on an annual voyage. Gay and restless he was, and his mellow voice prattled no doubt of all the strange sights he had seen and the adventures he had met, while the fair tree enfolded him in her arms and worshiped him with the tender home perfume of mother love. It made me wonder a little, too, why Hawthorne missed the orioles in the Salem gardens which he must have seen each spring, and only birds of such somber colors flitted through the flowers of his fancy. But after all it was only one more proof that out of the inner eye come the colors of our thoughts, and that the inherited shadows of the witch-finding days must have dwelt deep in the soul of the Salem-born, Puritan-descended dreamer of weird and somber romances.

XII

VERMONT MAPLE SUGAR

_Sap-Boiling Time in the Green Mountain State_

At ten o’clock the sap began to tinkle all through the grove. In nearly eight hundred buckets it fell, drop by drop, and the sugar season had begun. It was late March, but from the snow to the sky the day had all the warmth and glow of June. The sun had been up since before six. By seven it was shining bright into the Southern Vermont valley which the Deerfield River has carved out of the everlasting hills that roll and rise till the cone of Haystack tips them, nearly four thousand feet above the sea level. Yet till ten o’clock the maples sulked.

More sap is boiled in this beautiful bowl-shaped valley of which Wilmington is the metropolis than in any other part of the State. Vermont makes four-fifths of the maple sugar that is made in New England, nearly half of what is made in the United States, and here if anywhere you may see the art practised in its perfection. There may be better sugar makers than C. S. Grimes, who has been at it for sixty years, but if so I do not know them. He began with the old-time black iron kettle, boiled in the open over a green wood fire. He has seen the business grow in the sugar house to the use of scientifically accurate evaporating pans where sap flows in a steady stream into one end and comes out syrup of a law-required density of eleven pounds to the gallon at the other, the whole working automatically; and in that time he has learned something of the whims of the maples themselves, though not all of them.

Much of the lore of the great gray trees he told me as we sat together on the broad doorstone of the little white farmhouse, steeping in the sun and looking down upon the peaceful valley and across to Haystack, hazed in the blue smoke of spring. Everything was ready. The spiles were driven and the white, pent-roofed pails hung. The wood-house end of the sugar house was full to the top of four-foot sticks ready for the boiling. Even the pan was full of sap, for there had been a slight run a week before. But the cold had shut down and the trees had quit. The morning before the thermometer had stood at zero and the sap in the pan was ice. So, no doubt, it was in the trees, and would be until the warmth had reached the heart of them. I learned more in the grove as the patient old horse drew the sled through a foot or two of old snow, and we gathered the crystal-clear sap from the buckets and poured it into the barrel, plodding from tree to tree. More still I got in the sugar house while the veteran fed the roaring fire and skimmed the scum from the boiling liquid as it flowed, an inch deep or so, along the winding channels, back and forth, sap at one end, syrup at the other.

The white men learned from the Indians the art of making maple sugar. In the “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,” published in 1684, we find the following: “The savages of Canada in the time that the sap rises in the maple make an incision in the tree by which it runs out. After they have evaporated eight pounds of the liquor there remains one pound as sweet and as much sugar as that which is got out of the canes. The savages here have practised this art longer than any now living among them remember.”

The white man has since brought the practice to a science. The art remains the same. How far back into the dim ages of the past it goes no man may tell.

The sugar maple reaches maturity at about a hundred years. Then in the forest the trees are seventy to eighty feet tall and have a diameter of two to four feet. Trees grown from seed produce the sweetest sap, second growth not being so good. The seedling under favorable conditions may reach a diameter of sixteen inches in fifteen years, though such growth is exceptional. It is not profitable to tap them before the age of twenty. After that they may be drawn from yearly, a tap to a tree at first. On the largest trees two or more buckets may be hung, never one above the other, as the sap flows up or down, never sidewise. The sweetest and best sap comes from the outermost ring of growth, the wood of the previous year. It is sweetest at the height of the run. It flows better by day than by night; the brighter, lighter and sunnier the day the faster it flows, the trees resting more or less at night. As the sun declines, so does the flow, even when the temperature remains the same. On warm nights, however, there is likely to be some flow. Daytime sap is sweetest, and the nearer the occurrence of a freeze or a snowstorm the sweeter the sap. Light seems to be a powerful agent in the mystery, but a certain balance of heat and cold is more powerful still. Freezing nights with alternating warm days bring the ideal conditions, frozen roots and warm twigs setting the alchemy at work.

Yet with all this and much more general knowledge to draw from each grove is a study. The maples are strongly individualistic, and every tree is a law unto itself. Some have a much higher percentage of sugar to the same amount of sap than others. Indeed, it is confidently predicted by experts that a race of superior trees could be easily developed by taking seed from those of highest sugar percentage, just as superior fruit trees are thus bred. The profit to the sugar-maker from this is obvious. The future may see it done. As conditions exist the average yield of sugar per tree is from two to three pounds, though in favorable seasons this is increased in some groves to five or six pounds. On the other hand there are records of large trees which have yielded as much as forty pounds of sugar in a season, and many have been known to give twenty pounds. Sometimes a certain tree on a farm gets to be known as “the sweet tree,” because of the large amount of sugar it yields yearly.

The sky held a faint violet haze which deepened to royal purple in all distances, a violet which seemed to materialize into innumerable bluebirds which caroled coaxingly as they flew toward the grove. Over on the edge of it song sparrows sang invitingly, but the sugar makers did not move from the cosy doorstep until nearly noon. Then we went toward the grove somewhat warily, as a man tends his traps in the wilderness, rather hoping for luck but doubtful. The sap moves when it gets ready, and no man can surely say when. But a look into a bucket or two told us that the time was at hand for quick action. From every tree a clear, colorless liquid was oozing with rapid drip into the buckets, some of which were a third full already. It looked like water, this new-born sap, as clear as that from the finest spring, yet to my eye it seemed to have a certain radiance, not a sparkle like an effervescent liquid, but something purer and more effulgent, as if the nascent life in it touched something in you by nerves dormant to ordinary sensations. The sugar cane gives up its juice only to force. It must be crushed and pressed. But here is a sweetness which the tree almost bursts to deliver, which will not only drip from every wound, but will force its way with overmastering prodigality. If instead of putting a hollow oaken tap into the three-eighths inch auger hole bored through the bark you drive in a solid plug, the sap will push through the very pores of the oak wood. No wonder when it reaches the twig tips the buds are driven into action and the blossoms burst with astonishing vigor that nothing can delay. There is little sweetness of taste to this wine of the wood gods, but a cool, delectable refreshment that is born of the free winds and mountain air. It tempts you to drink deep and often, and I suspect that Vermonters do and have since the State was first settled. No State has given to the nation more sturdy, dependable, keenly vitalized, strong-souled men and women than this, from the days of Ethan Allen down, and it may be that deep draughts from the potent purity distilled by the rough-barked, rock-rooted maples has more to do with it than we know. Maple syrup ought to be recommended to the schools. I believe it would increase scholarship and promote ethics.

The gray grove was like a temple of white stillness as we went from tree to tree. The only sound was the crunch of soft snow and the splash of sap within the barrel, a cool sound like that of sea waves curling on the rocks. A pair of white-breasted nuthatches ran deftly among the branches and seemed to respect the hush of the place, calling to one another in tiny tones that only emphasized the quiet. Here was the gray column of a beech, its smooth trunk looking as if carved out of mottled marble. There stood a yellow birch with a fringe of flaxen curls. But for the most part the growth was of maples alone and with little underbrush, so that we looked between the trees down to the valley below and up its further side till the gaze touched the sky on the distant blue summit of Haystack. It was easy to note with what feathers and fur the earth keeps herself warm in the fierce cold of Vermont winters. In the distance the black growth of evergreen spruce and hemlock would hardly let the roughest gale pass within. Where these do not stand interwoven the misty mingling of the twigs of deciduous trees made a cloak that was softly beautiful to the eye yet hardly less penetrable, and over all the cleared spaces and under all other protection was the white ermine of the snow. The March sun and the thawing rains of approaching spring had settled this snow ermine closer to the ground, indeed, but had only compacted it more firmly. A foot or more of it was everywhere and you could plunge to the shoulders in the drifts.

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Soon the gathering barrel was full and the horse plodded back to the sugar house, where from the hillside the sap ran into the sapholder, a twenty-one barrel cask propped up within, thence to go by gravity through a tube to the pan. Here the elder Grimes was busy, feeding the roaring fire with four-foot sticks, skimming the scum from the boiling sap and drawing the syrup into gallon cans at the other end. Sugar making is no job for a lazy man, even though the pan regulates the flow of the sap automatically, nor is it nowadays to be conducted without some capital. The plant is a small one, yet here, counting house, tools, tanks, pan, buckets, etc., was an investment which easily figured up a thousand dollars. The clear liquid from the trees ran in a steady stream, and the boiling sap bubbled and frothed in one end and collected in palest amber shallows in the other. Now that the run is started from eight to thirty barrels of sap a day will come to the sugar house, taxing the powers of the sugar maker to the uttermost to keep ahead of the flow. It does not do for the sap to wait. The best syrup is made from it when first collected and it will spoil if the delay before boiling is too long. Often the fires roar and the sap boils for the greater part of the twenty-four hours. It may be one or even three o’clock in the morning during a good run before the man at the pan can let his fire go out and snatch a few hours’ sleep. If the night has been warm gathering may begin again soon after sunrise and again he must be at his fires.

It is at the sugar house that the business of making maple sugar has lost much of the romance of old days. The big black kettle in the little shed or the open woods with its sugaring-off frolics by the boys and girls is a thing of the past. In its place you have a small factory equipment running overtime, with much of the regularity of factory drudgery, while the short season lasts. Yet it is a godsend to the farmer. His winter’s work in the woods is done. His farm work has not yet begun, and the sugar brings in many hundred dollars in ready cash, readier cash than he gets on any other farm product. Good syrup brings from $1 to $1.25 a gallon, and on a recent year it was estimated the returns from maple sugar averaged over $3 each for every man, woman and child in the State. That of course is gross returns, not profits. These vary so greatly in individual cases and in various years that it is impossible to get at the net result. Some Vermont farmers do not think that sugar pays, and many have even gone to the extent of cutting off their groves for wood, preferring the cash from the trees once for all. This, of course, is killing the goose, for it greatly depreciates the value of the farm. Indeed it is an axiom in the Green Mountain State that a farm without a sugar orchard is an unmarketable commodity. For all that it is safe to say that for one reason or another not half the available trees in the State are tapped yearly.

Even about Wilmington this is true. I should say that there not one grove in three is being worked this year. To begin with, there is the investment in “sugar tools,” no light expense for the man of small capital. Good sugar workers are not so common as they once were, and require good wages when they are to be obtained at all. It is customary to pay a man fifty dollars a month and his board, and his wages run whether the sap does or not. A start may be made and then adverse weather or the idiosyncrasies of the trees may keep the gang waiting a week, or even three. Even the men hired by the day get two dollars to two and a half. In some years the snow is not deep and the run of sap steady and prolonged. Then the farmer makes money. During other years the snow may be so deep that it is necessary to shovel out the roadways in the grove and go from tree to tree on snow shoes. Last year, owing to peculiar weather conditions, there was but a light run of sap, and it was soon over, lasting hardly three weeks. In consequence the crop was light. Yet maple sugar is distinctly a luxury for which the demand is greater than the present supply, and is likely to steadily increase. It is probable that the planting of large areas to especially productive trees on which the most scientific business methods were used would result in large profits. The trouble is that the season of production is short and all trees must be worked at the same time. Moreover, it takes twenty years for a seedling maple to grow to producing size, and the average investor does not care to wait that long for the first of his returns. In any case, it is a matter for the capitalist rather than the farmer, who does not usually look so far ahead for returns on his money.

Along with the improvements in the sugar house have come many in the methods of getting the sap from the trees. The pioneer method was to “box” them. This meant cutting a receptacle in the tree itself large enough to hold a pint or so of the liquid which ran into it. Boxing, year after year, was destructive to the trees which, nevertheless, survived a vast amount of it. It is probable that boxing has not been carried on in the Vermont groves for more than fifty years, yet there are trees standing to-day which show marks of the old-time method. On what was known once as the Kathan farm, just west of the Connecticut River in Dummerston, still stand a few trees of what is believed to be the first grove in the State from which white men made maple sugar in any quantity. Thirty-three of these veterans were there in 1874, but now only nine remain. They are gigantic trees, free of limbs to a great height and one at least sixteen feet in circumference. At the base can be seen the knotted, uneven growth covering the scars of nearly seventy years of “boxing.” After the boxing method came the tapping iron, almost as hard on the trees. A slanting kerf, an inch deep and four inches long, was first made. Then the iron with a half-circle cutting edge was driven in deep at the bottom of this to make a place for the spout of hard wood, grooved with a gouge and finished with draw-shave and pocket-knife. Troughs of white maple or basswood, split in halves, dug out with the axe and smoothed with the gouge, were used to catch the sap, which was gathered in hand-made pails hung from a “sap-yoke” which rested on the bearer’s shoulders and took the weight.

The boiling was in the big black iron kettle which the elder Grimes remembers so well. It was hung by chains from a pole set up on two crotched sticks. Beneath it were two big green logs between which the fire was kept. Sugar houses were unknown and dry wood was rare, yet with care a respectably clean sugar was made.