Chapter II: Part 2

Hometown, owing to some early local faction, is divided into two sections, forming two distinct towns. One, Newborough, a hill-top hamlet, with its picturesque long street, a hundred feet in width, and shaded with great weeping elms that almost meet overhead; and the other, Hometown proper, a picturesque little village in the valley, cuddling close around the foot of a precipitous bluff, known as Mount Pisgah. A mile’s distance separates the two centres. The old homestead is situated in the heart of Hometown, fronting on the main street. The house itself is a series of after-thoughts, wing after wing and gable after gable having clustered around the old nucleus, as the growth of new generations necessitated increased accommodation. Its outward aspect is rather modern, but the interior, with its broad open fireplaces, and accessaries in the shape of cranes and fire-dogs, is rich with all the features of typical New England; and the two gables of the main roof enclose the dearest old garret imaginable--at present an asylum for the quaint possessions of antique furniture and bric-à-brac, removed from their accustomed quarters on the advent of the new host. It is to this sanctuary that my footsteps first lead me, and, with a longing that will not be withstood, I find myself in front of the great white door. I lift the latch; a cool pungent odor of oak wood greets me as I ascend the steep stairs--an odor that awakens, like magic, a hundred fancies, and recalls a host of memories long forgotten. Every stair seems to creak a welcome, as when, on the rainy days of long ago, we sought the cosy refuge to hear the patter on the roof, or to nestle in the dark, obscure corners in our childish games. At the head of the stairs rises the ancient chimney, cleft in twain at the foot, with the quaint little cuddy between. Above me stretch the great beams of oak, like iron in their hardness. Yonder is the queer old diamond window looking out upon the village church, its panes half obscured by the dusty maze of webs. To the left, in a shadowy corner, stands the antiquated wheel--a relic of past generations. Long gray cobwebs festoon the rafters overhead, and the low buzzing of a wasp betrays its mud nest in the gable above. A sense of sadness steals over me as I sit gazing into this still chamber. On every side are mementos of a happy past, and all, though mute, speaking to me in a language whose power stirs the depths of my soul. Wherever the eye may turn, it meets with a silent greeting from an old friend, and the whole shrouded in a weird gloom that lends to the most common object an air of melancholy mystery. And yet it is only a garret. There are some, no doubt, for whom this word finds its fitting synonyme in the dictionary, but there are others to whom it sings a poem of infinite sweetness.

Looking through the dingy window between the maple boughs, my eye extends over lawn and shrubberies, three acres in extent--a little park, overrun with paths in every direction, through ancient orchard and embowered dells, while far beyond are glimpses of the wooded knolls, the winding brook, and meadows dotted with waving willows, and farther still the ample undulating farm.

It is in such a place as this that I have sought recreation and change of scene. My wife and I have run away from the city for a month or so. A vacation we call it; but to an artist such a thing is rarely known in its ordinary sense, and often, indeed, it means an increase of labor rather than a respite. My first week, however, I had consecrated to luxurious idleness. Together we wandered through the old familiar rambles where as boy and girl in earlier days we had been so oft together. Day after day found us in some new retreat. There were dark cool nooks by sheltered streams, spicy groves of pine and spruce, wooded slopes and rocky dells, and meadows rich with summer bloom, where idle butterflies flitted lazily on the wing; where meadow lilies nodded in billowing fields, and the daisies and red clover waved about our knees half screened in feathery purple grasses that spread their cloudy mist all through the blossoming maze. We heard the music of the scythe, and, sitting in the deep cool grass beneath the maple shade, we watched the circling motion of the mowers in the field--saw the forkfuls of the hay tossed in the drying sun, and breathed the perfumed air that floated from the windrows. We sauntered by the meadow brook where willows gleamed along the bank, and overhanging alders threw their sombre shadows in the quiet pools: where the ground-nut, and the meadow-rue, and the creeping madder fringed the tangled brink, and every footstep started up some agile frog that plunged into the unseen water. We stood where rippling shallows gurgled under festooned canopies of fox-grape, and the leaning linden-trees shut out the sky o’erhead and intertwined their drooping branches above the gliding current. Here, too, the weather-beaten crossing-pole makes its tottering span across the stream, and deep down beneath the bank the rainbow-tinted sunfish floats on filmy fins above his yellow bed of gravel, and we catch a flashing gleam of a silvery dace or shiner turning in the water.

Now we confront a rude slab fence, an ancient landmark, that terminates its length at the edge of the stream, where its gray and crumbling boards are secured with rusty nails against the trunk of a tall buttonwood-tree. A loosened slab is easily found, and we are soon upon the other side; and after picking our way through a forest of bush-elders, we emerge upon an open lot of low flat pasture-land, known always as the “old swamp meadow.” No other five acres on the face of the earth are so dear to me as this neglected field. I know its every rise and fall of ground, its every bog, and its lush greenness is refreshing even to the thought.

It is a luxuriant garden of all manner of succulent and juicy vegetation; an outbursting extravagance of plant life of almost tropical exuberance. All New England’s most majestic and ornamental flora seem congregated in its congenial soil; and even when a boy I learned to know and love them all, and even call them by their names.

Here are towering stems of iron-weed lifting high their scattered purple crowns, and in their midst the woolly clumps of boneset, its white flowered cushions intermingling with the dense pink tufts of thorough-wort.

On every side we overlook whole patches of these splendid blossoms, with their crests closely crowded in a mosaic of pink and white. And here’s a bed of peppermint and spearmint, interspersed with flaming spikes of cardinal lobelia; and here a lusty plant of Indian mallow, entangled in a maze of gold-thread and smart-weed. Here are massive burdocks six feet high, and great trees of jimson-weed, with their large spiral flowers and thorny pods.

High fronds of chain-fern rise up on every side from a jungle of bur-marigolds and clotburs, and tear-thumbs, with their saw-toothed stems and tiny bunches of pink blossoms.

No inch of ground in the old swamp lot but which does its tenfold duty; and what it lacks in quality of produce it amply makes up in quantity. Even a neighboring bed of clean-washed gravel is overrun with creeping mallow, with its rounded leaves and little “cheeses” down among their shadows.

Farther on we see the lily-pond, with its surrounding swamp and its legion of crowded water-plants. Here are rank, massive beds of swamp-cabbage, and lofty cat-tails by the thousand among the bristling bogs of tussock-sedge and bulrush. Here are calamus patches, and alder thickets, and sedges without number; and the prickly carex and blue-flag abound on every side. There are galingales and reeds, and tall and graceful rushes, turtle-head and jointed scouring grass, and horse-tail, besides a host of other old acquaintances, whose faces are familiar, but whose names I never knew. But they were all my friends in boyhood. I knew them in the bud and in the blossom, and even in their winter skeletons, brown and broken in the snow. Near by there is a ditch: you never would know it, for it is completely hidden from view beneath an interlacing growth of jewel-weed. But see that gorgeous mass of deep scarlet that floods the farther bank! Nowhere within a circuit of miles around is there such a regal display of cardinal flowers as this: skirting the borders of the ditch for rods and rods, clustering about a ruined, tumbling fence, whose moss-grown pickets are almost hidden in the dense profusion of bloom.

Then there is its airy companion, the “touch-me-not,” with its translucent, juicy stem, and its queer little golden flowers with spotted throats--the “jewel-weed” we used to call it. I know not why, unless from the magic of its leaf, which, when held beneath the water, was transformed to iridescent frosted silver. We all remember its sensitive, jumping seed-pods, that burst even at our approach for fear that we should touch them; but no one can fully appreciate the beauty of the plant who has not seen its silvery leaf beneath the water. Here it justifies its name, for it is indeed a jewel.

How often in those olden times have I lain down among these bulrushes and sedges near the lily pond, and listened to the buzzing songs of the crickets and the tiny katydids that swarmed the growth about me, and filled the air with their incessant din. I remember the little colony of ants that picked their way among the rushes; that gauzy dragon-fly too, that circled and dodged about the water’s edge, now skimming close upon the surface, now darting out of sight, or perhaps alighting on an overhanging sedge, as motionless as a mounted specimen, with wings aslant and fully spread. “Devil’s darning-needles” they were called. The devil may well be proud of them; for darning-needles of such precious metals and such exquisite design are rare indeed. They were of several sizes too. Some were large, and flashed the azure of the sapphire; others fluttered by with smoky, pearly wings, and slender bodies glittering in the light like animated emeralds: and another I well remember, a little airy thing, with a glistening sunbeam for a body, and wings of tiny rainbows.

I remember how I watched the disturbed motion of the arrow-heads out in the water, as the cautious turtles worked their way among them, and crawled out upon the stump close by.

Here they huddled together, a dozen or more, with heads erect, and turning from side to side as they surveyed the surrounding carpet of lily-pads, or listened to the bass-drum chorus of the great green bull-frogs among the pickerel-weed; and when I jumped and yelled at them, what a rolling, sprawling, splashing in the mud! It fairly makes me laugh to think of it. But there is hardly a leaf or wisp of grass in this old swamp lot but what brings back some old association or pleasant reminiscence.

For a week thus we idled, now on the mountain, now in the meadow, while I, with my sketch-book and collecting-box, either whiled away the hours with my pencil, or left the unfinished work to pursue the tantalizing butterfly, or search for unsuspecting caterpillars among the weeds and bushes.

On a sprig of black alder I found one--the same little fellow as of old, afflicted with the peculiarities of all his progenitors. We used to call him “Professor Wiggler,” owing to an hereditary nervous habit of wiggling his head from side to side when not otherwise employed. To this little humpbacked creature I am indebted for a great deal of past amusement. Distinctly I remember the whack-whack-whack on the inside of the old pasteboard box as the captive pets threatened to dash out their brains in their demonstrations at my approach. Professor Wiggler is really a most remarkable insect, as one might readily imagine from his scientific name, for in learned circles this individual is known as Mr. Gramatophora Trisignata. He has many strange eccentricities. At each moult of the skin he retains the shell of his former head on a long vertical filament. Two or three thus accumulate, and, as a consequence, in his maturer years he looks up to the head he wore when he was a youngster, and ponders on the flight of time and the hollowness of earthly things, or perhaps congratulates himself on the increased contents of his present shell. When fully grown, he stops eating, and goes into a new business. Selecting a suitable twig, he gnaws a cylindrical hole to its centre and follows the pith, now and then backing out of the tunnel, and dropping the excavated material in the form of little balls of sawdust. At length he emerges from the hollow, and again drawing himself in backward, spins a silken disk across the opening, and tints it with the color of the surrounding bark. Here he spends the winter, and comes out in a new spring suit in the following May. Only recently I had in my possession several of these twigs with their enclosed caterpillars, and in every one the color of the silken lid so closely matched the tint of the adjacent bark, although different in each, that several of my friends, even with the most careful scrutiny, failed to detect the deceptive spot. Whether the result of chance or of the instincts of the insect, I do not know; but certain it is that he paints with different colors under varying circumstances.

Insect-hunting had always been a passion with me. Large collections of moths and butterflies had many times accumulated under my hands, only to meet destruction through boyish inexperience; and even in childhood the love for the insect and the passion for the pencil strove hard for the ascendency, and were only reconciled by a combination which filled my sketch-book with studies of insect life.

There was one inhabitant of our fields which had always been to me a never-failing source of entertainment. There he is, the gilded tyrant. I see him now swinging to and fro on his glistening nest of silken threads, his golden yellow form glowing in bold relief against the dark recess in the brambles. My sketch is left in the grass, and I am soon seated in front of the gossamer maze. A festive grasshopper jumps up into my face, and makes a carom on the web. With a spasmodic snap of one hind leg he extricates it from its entanglement, and in another instant would fall from the meshes; but the agile spider is too quick for him. With a movement so swift as almost to elude the eye, he draws from his body a silver cloud of floss, and with his long hind legs throws it over his captive. The head and tail of the grasshopper are now further secured, after which the spider carefully straddles around the struggling insect, and bites off the other radiating webs in close proximity. The unlucky prey now hangs suspended across the opening. With business-like coolness his tormentor dangles himself from the edge of the torn web, and another cataract of glistening floss is thrown up and attached to the under side of the prisoner, after which he is turned round and round, as if on a spit. The stream of floss is carried from head to foot, and in less time than it takes to describe it the victim is wrapped in a silken winding-sheet, and soon meets his death from the poisoned fangs of his captor. Here is but one of the thousands of tragedies that are taking place every hour of the day in our fields. While deeply interested in the closing scenes of this one, I suddenly become aware of a shadow passing over the bushes. I turn my head, and meet the puzzled and pleasant gaze of Amos Shoopegg, as he stands there, hands in pockets, and milk-pail swinging from his wrist.

“Wa’al, thar,” he exclaims, banging down one brawny fist on his uplifted knee. “Buggin’ agin, I swaow! Hain’t yeu got over thet yit? What yeu kin find so mighty fine in them ’ere bugs beats me.”

“Amos,” I replied, “there’s a great deal more in these bugs than you imagine.”

“A pleggy sight, I suppose,” he resumed. “What specie o’ critter ye got hold on naow?” and he stretched forward his fringed and weather-beaten neck, and peered over the brambles. “What is’t ye got thar--straddle-bug?” He came still nearer, and looked at the spider. “Wa’al, darn my pictur ef ’tain’t an old yeller-belly! P’r’aps you don’t know that them critters is pizen. Why, Eben Sanford’s gal got all chawed up by one on ’em. Great Sneezer!” he exclaimed, taking three or four strides backward, with both hands uplifted. I had merely raised my hand and gently smoothed the spider.

“Wa’al,” he continued, “yen kin rub ’em daown ef yeu pleze; but fer _my_ part, I’d ruther keep off abaout a good spittin’ distance”--which was the Shoopegg way of expressing a length of about fifteen feet. Amos was crossing lots for his “caow,” he said; but in spite of his plea that the “old heiffer” was “bellerin’” like “Sam Hill,” and was “gittin’ ’tarnal on-easy,” I made him tarry sufficiently long to enable me to send him off a wiser man.

Amos Shoopegg is a type of a large class of the native element of Hometown. Of course, “Shoopegg” is not his actual name. In the long line of his prided Puritan ancestry no one ever bore it before him. This is only an affectionate epithet given him by the village boys full twenty years ago, and it has stuck to him closer than a brother ever since, as those festive surnames always do. Nominally, Amos was a farmer. In summer he was one in fact, and could swing off as pretty a swath in haying as any man in town. But in the winter he changed his vocation, and became a disciple of the “waxed-end.” All day long he could be seen, closeted with a little red-hot stove, plying his trade in his small, square shop, up near the old red school-house. Here he pounded on the big lapstone on his knees, or, with strap and foot-stick in position, punched and tugged around the edge of those marvellous brogans. He made slings and leather “suckers” for the boys, and furnished them with all the black-wax they could chew--or stow-away, to stick between the lining of their pockets. And the huge wooden shoe-pegs that he drove beneath his hammer were a sight to behold. The man who used his “cheap line of goods” might verily say he walked upon a wood-pile.

So they dubbed him “Shoe-peg,” or “Shoop” for brevity. There are others among his neighbors who would furnish an inexhaustible source of study to the student of character. There’s old Rufus Fairchild, known as “Roof,” a rotund specimen of rural jollity, his round face set in dishevelled locks of gray, with a twinkle in his eye and a good word for everybody. And there’s Father Tomlinson, who keeps the post-office down by the dam, as genial an old fellow as ever wrapped up his throat in a white stock. And I might almost continue the list indefinitely. But there is one I must especially mention; and, now that I think of it, he really should have headed the list, for he stands alone--or at least he does _sometimes_. If you are in search of the embodiment of typical Erin, you need go no farther; here he is. This individual represents another nationality which swells the population of Hometown--the hard-working laborers who toil in the great factory down in the glen, called “Satan’s Misery.” The above personage is one of the best-hearted creatures in the town; but it is the old story, and the world to him is enclosed in the compass of a barrel-hoop. When last I saw him he was in an evident decline, but as I put my finger on his wrist I could still feel the pulsations of the whiskey coursing through his veins.

“Look here, my good fellow,” I said to him one day, “why don’t you taper off a little? If you keep on in this way, you’ll be in your grave in less than a month. How would you like that?”

“Arrah, begorra,” he replied, with a look of hopeful resignation, “if I cud awnly be shure o’ me gude skvare dthrink in the other wurrld, oi wudn’t moind.”

The record of a single evening spent in the village store, with its rural jargon and homespun yarns, its odd vernacular and rustic gossip, would make a volume as rare and unique as the characters it would depict.

The store itself is a matchless picture in its way, and for variety in accessory is as rich as could be wished for. The low, murky ceiling, hung with all manner of earthly goods--scythes and rakes, boots and pails, in pendulous array; bottles and boxes, brooms and breast-pins, are here--in short, everything that heart could wish or thought suggest, from speckled calicoes to seven-cent sugar, or from a three-tined fork to a goose-yoke. Evening after evening, for an hour or so, I was tempted thither, until I found the week had gone. Sunday came again--Sunday in New England. The old bell swung on its wheel in the belfry, ringing out its call to devotion, and ere the echo had died in the recesses of the mountain beyond the still atmosphere reverberated with an answering peal from the little sister church in the valley below, as the scattered groups with strolling steps wend their way to “meeting,” and the gay loads from Newborough go flitting by on the accustomed Sunday drive.

Monday dawned on Hometown. It found me up and doing. I had enjoyed one week of glorious loafing, but work was the programme for the next. I went to Draper’s Inn and engaged a horse and buggy “until further notice.” “A spang-up team” he called it, and it would be up “in half a jiffy.” We were waiting for it when it came, and what with our variety of luggage in the shape of canvases, color-boxes, hammocks, camp-seats, and easels, every bit of available space in that buggy was well utilized. Before the clock has struck nine, we are spinning along down through the village, now past the store, now over the bridge, and turning to the right, we glide by the little post-office, as the kind face of Father Tomlinson nods a “good-bye” from the door-way.

A little farther, and we have left the little slope-roofed school-house in our path, and are soon ascending the long hill of Zoar, from which we look back four miles to the cliff and nestling town. In ten minutes more we approach the brow of a steep declivity, and the broad Housatonic opens up to view, winding off into the misty mountains in the distance. There is now a drive of half a mile along the side of a wild mountain-slope, where mountain-laurels grow in wild profusion, and the rooty, overhanging banks are tufted with rich green moss, overgrown with checker-berries and arbutus. The river roars far down below us, and for a few minutes our eyes feast on as lovely an extent of varied New England landscape as is easily found. And yet this is only a short section of one of the many matchless drives that follow the course of this beautiful river around the borders of Hometown.

Suddenly we leave the stream as it glides away on an abrupt turn beneath the crescent of a rocky precipice, and before we have fairly lost the sound of the ripples we have arrived at our journey’s end. A pair of bars under an old butternut-tree mark the place. The carriage is backed to the side of the road, and the horse turned loose in the rocky meadow. This is Joab Nichols’s “pasture lot,” with fodder consisting principally of huge boulders, hardhack, and spleenwort; to be sure, with a stray relish of “butter-and-eggs” here and there, and a thousand white saucers of wild carrot handy to go with them. One or two trips across the field bring all our luggage, and we are soon enjoying cool comfort in the hemlock shade of a fairy grotto. Above us the babbling brook bounds and splashes over mossy rocks, disappearing in a mass of creamy foam, from under which it eddies toward us only to plunge twenty feet into a miniature cañon below. Again, yonder it bubbles into a whirling pool, where the bordering ferns bend and nod above its buoyant surface; and now gliding from view beneath the tangle of drooping boughs, it disappears only to burst forth once more in its merry song as it rushes over the rapids.

“I chatter, chatter as I go,
To join the brimming river;
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.”

Here in this wild retreat I have found my sylvan studio--shut in by fringed and fragrant evergreens, enlivened by the undergrowth of feathery fronds, and the shimmer of the beech, as the tracery of overhanging boughs trembles in the gentle breeze. Day after day finds us in this little paradise, and as one in luxurious hammock swings away the hours, now lost in fiction, now in short repose, or perhaps with busy needle fashions graceful figures in Kensington design, the canvas on the easel shows a fortnight’s constant care, and the palette changes to a keepsake of a sunny memory--a tinted souvenir.

For two weeks the gurgling brook sang to us in this wild retreat. As evening after evening closed in upon us, the unfinished pictures were stowed away in horizontal crevices between the rocks, and, with hammock still swinging in the trees, we left the gloom to the hooting owl, that evening after evening, with tremulous cry, proclaimed the twilight hour from the tall hemlock overhead. Ere long the murmuring Housatonic shimmers below us in the moonlight as we hurry on our homeward way, and the distant lights of Hometown are soon seen glimmering; through the evening mist. The old bridge now rumbles through the darkness its signal of our return, and the host of Draper’s Inn is seen awaiting us at the illumined door-way. A quiet, cosy supper, and in the rays of a gleaming lantern, held aloft to light our path, we follow our lengthening shadows to the old front gate. Repeat this day’s record fourteen times, and you have the sum of a happy experience, with but one drawback: it had an end--an end that would have left its reaction, were it not for the store of increased pleasure that awaited us for the few closing days of our pilgrimage--for me, at least, although in other scenes, its climax.

Many like me are happy in the possession of a dear old homestead; but there are few, I ween, who enjoy the blessing of a double inheritance such as has been my lot--two homes which share my equal devotion, two homes without a choice; the one this beloved heirloom in Hometown, and the other--But you shall see. We shall be there soon, for the little satchel is packed, and the carriage awaits us at the gate. A drive of eighteen miles is before us--a beautiful series of pictures. Down through the village, past the old red mill and smithy, with its ringing anvil, and we are soon winding our way through a sombre glen. Presently we catch glimpses of the great rumbling factory, with its clouds of smoke and steam melting into the wooded mountain above. The old yellow bridge now creaks under our approach, and ere we are aware a sudden turn leads us out of a wilderness on to the shore of the beautiful Housatonic. For a few minutes the rushing water trickles through the wheels as over jolting stones our pony leads us through the ford, and, refreshed by the cool bath, makes a lively sally up the eastern bank. For ten miles the Housatonic guides us around its winding curves through a path of ever-changing beauty, now shut in by the dense, dark evergreens, and again emerging into a bower of silvery beeches, where the roadway is carpeted with mottled shadows, and the dappled trunks flicker with the softened glints of sunlight. Here we come upon a sandy stretch where the road is sunken between two sloping banks thick-set with mulleins and sweet-fern, and overrun with creeping brambles. The stone-wall above is wreathed in trailing woodbine, and along its crest we see the swaying tips of wheat from the edge of the field just beyond; and here we pass a border of whortleberry bushes, laden with their fruit. Now it is a hazel thicket crowding close upon our wheels, and among the leaves we see the brown, tanned husks of the ripening nuts, almost ready for that troop of boys and girls that you may be sure are watching and waiting for them.

The old gray toll-bridge soon nears to view, with its two long spans and fantastic beams. Farther on, peering from its willows, stands the ruined cider-mill, with its long moss-grown lever jutting through the trees--an old-time haunt, now crumbling in decay. But we only catch a glimpse of it, for in a moment more we are shut in beneath another bower of beeches and white birches, where the road takes a steep ascent, and the rippling river sends up its sunny reflections among the leaves and tree-trunks. When once more upon a level, it is to look ahead through a long avenue of shade--a leafy canopy two miles in length--with only an occasional break to open up some charming bit of landscape across the water. In these two miles of umbrage you may see types of almost every tree that grows within the boundaries of New England. Old veteran beeches are here, their trunks disfigured with scars that once were names cut in the bark. Here are spots that look like half obliterated figures; and here are spreading hieroglyphs that tell, perhaps, of old-time vows plighted at the trysting-tree; and here’s a semblance of a heart, a broken heart indeed, if its present form be taken as a prophetic symbol.

There are magnificent rock-maples too, and silver-maples that shake down their little swarms of winged seeds. Tulip-trees and spotted buttonwoods grow side by side, and quivering aspens and white poplars are seen at every clearing. There are yellow birch-trunks frayed out with the wind, and great snake-like stems of grape-vine, that twist and writhe among the branches of the trees. There are hop hornbeams, and chestnuts, and--But there is no need to enumerate them all. Just think of every New England tree you ever knew, and add a score besides, and you will form a slight idea of the varied verdure that hems in this charming Housatonic drive, with its rocky roadside embroidered in trickling moss and fumitory; and rose-flowered mountain-raspberry growing so close upon the road that your pony takes a wayward nip, and plucks its blossomed tip as he passes.

Now comes an open level, with wide, expansive views, where every turn upon the road brings its fresh surprise, as some new combination of hazy mountain landscape towers above the distant river bend; and the flitting cloud shadows lead their capricious, undulating chase across the wooded slopes. The roadsides here are full of everchanging beauties too, with their trimmings of ornamental sunflowers, their picturesque old fences, and their clumps of purple-berried poke-weed, with here and there a yellow patch of toad-flax, and aromatic tufts of tansy hugging close against the fence. Even that clambering screen of clematis that trails over the shrubbery yonder cannot hide the scattered tips of crimson that already have appeared among the sumach leaves.

There are a thousand things one meets upon a country ride or ramble which at the time are allowed to pass with but a glance. The eye is surfeited and the mind confused with the continual pageantry. But months afterward, in the reveries about our winter fires, they all come back to us, with the added charm of reminiscence; and whether it be a crystal spring among a bank of ferns, or a thistle-top with its fluttering butterfly and inevitable bumblebee rolling in the tufted blossom, or a squirrel running along a rail, or perhaps a rattling grasshopper hovering in mid-air above the dusty road--no matter what, they all are welcome memories at our fireside, and draw our hearts still closer to the loveliness of nature.

This Housatonic road is rich in just such pastoral pictures. Two hours on such a course soon pass, when our pony whinnies at the welcome sight of the old log water-trough beyond--a landmark old and green when I was yet a boy, still nestling in its rocky bed, shadowed by the drooping hemlocks, still lavish with its overflowing bounty.

This benefactor by the way-side marks a turning-point in our journey, as we leave the grandeur of the Housatonic to pursue our way by the nooks and dingles of the wild Shepaug--a bubbling tributary whose happy waters sing of a varied experience. Now placid through the blossoming fields, now plunging down the precipice to ripple through a verdant valley, where, hemmed in at every turn, it seeks its only liberty beneath the rumbling of the old mill-wheels; and at last, ere it loses its identity in the swelling tide, leaving a mischievous and tumultuous record as it pours through the rocky cañon, and with surging, whirling volume carves huge caverns and fantastic statues in its massive bed of stone. Even now through the dark forest beyond we can hear the muffled roar, and for nearly a league farther as we ascend the long hill it comes to us in fitful whispers wafted on the changing breeze. Reaching the summit of this incline, we find ourselves on a hill-top wide and far-reaching, on right and left losing itself in wooded wold, while in front the level road diminishes to a point, surmounted by blue hills in the distance. Two miles on a pastoral hill-top, where golden-rod and tall spiræas cluster along the lichen-covered walls, where orange-lilies gleam among the alders, with now and then a blazing group of butterfly-plant or a dusty clump of milk-weed. The air is laden with the nut-like odor of the everlasting flowers all around us. The buzzing drum of the harvest-fly vibrates from every tree, and we hear the tinkling bell and lowing of the cattle in some neighboring field. Farther on, we look down from the edge of the plateau through the length of Happy Valley, with its winding stream, its barns and busy mills, its sunny homes glinting through the summer haze. On the left the lofty shadowed cliff known as “Steep-rock” towers against the evening sky, and again we catch the murmuring whiffs of the rushing stream in its sweeping bend beneath the overhanging precipice. A sharp turn round a jutting hill-side, and I meet a prospect that quickens the heart and makes the eye grow dim. There beyond, three miles “as flies the laden bee,” I linger on the welcome sight, as on its hill-top fair two steeples side by side betray the hidden town, my second home.

How lightly did I appreciate the fortunate journey when, twenty summers ago, I followed this road for the first time, when a boy of ten years, on my way to an unknown village, I looked across the landscape to the little spires on that distant hill! Little did I dream of the six years of unmixed happiness and precious experience that awaited me in that little Judea! I only knew that I was sadly quitting a happy home on my way to “boarding-school”--a school called the Snuggery, taught by a Mr. Snug, in a little village named Snug Hamlet, about twenty miles from Hometown.

There are some experiences in the life of every one which, however truthful, cannot be told but to elicit the doubtful nod or the warning finger of incredulity. They were such experiences as these, however, that made up the sum of my early life in that happy refuge called in modern parlance a “boarding-school”--a name as empty, a word as weak and tame in its significance, as poverty itself; no doubt abundantly expressive in its ordinary application, but here it is a mockery and a satire. This is not a “boarding-school;” it is a _household_, whose memories moisten the eye and stir the soul; to which its scattered members through the fleeting years look back as to a neglected home, with father and mother dear, whom they long once more to meet as in the tenderness of boyhood days; a cherished remembrance which, like the “house upon a hill, cannot be hid,” but sends abroad its light unto many hearts who in those early days sought the loving shelter; a bright star in the horizon of the past, a glow that ne’er grows dim, but only kindles and brightens with the flood of years. Yes, yes; I know it sounds like a dash of sentiment, but words of mine are feeble and impotent indeed when sought for the expression of an attachment so fond, of a love so deep.

Fifteen years ago, with a parting full of sorrow, I rode away from Snug Hamlet yonder in the village stage--a day that brought a depression that lingered long, and lingers still. Glowing, sunset-tinted fields glide by unnoticed now, as, with eyes intent on the distant hill, I look back through the lapse of time. A mile has gone without my knowing it, when a joyous laugh awakens me from my day-dreams. Two boys approach us on the road ahead, and, what might seem very strange to you, one wears a wooden boot-jack strung around his neck and dangling on his breast; but he carries his burden lightly and cheerfully. As they near the carriage I draw the rein, and they both pause by the roadside.

“Well, boys,” I ask, “where do _you_ hail from?”

“We’re from the Snuggery, sir.”

“I thought so,” said I, with a laugh, in which they both joined. “But what are you doing with that boot-jack?”

“Oh, you see,” said one, with a roguish smile, “Charlie and I were having a little tussle in the sitting-room, and he picked up Mr. Snug’s boot-jack in the corner and began to pummel me with it; and jest as we were having it the worst, and were rollin’ on the floor, Mr. Snug came in and caught us in the job, and now we’re _payin’_ for it.”

“How so?” I inquired, well knowing what would be the response.

“Oh, you see, Mr. Snug held a diagnosis over our remains, and said he thought we were suffering, for the want of a little exercise, and ordered us on a trip to Judd’s Bridge.”

“And the boot-jack?”

“Oh, he said that Charlie might want to play with that some more on the way, and that he’d better fetch it along;” and with a mischievous snicker at his encumbered companion, he led him along the road in an hilarious race, while we enjoyed a hearty laugh at their expense.

And this a _punishment_! Yes, here is an introduction to one phase of a system of correction as unique as the matchless institution in which it had its birth--a system without a parallel in the annals of chastisement or school government, and which for thirty years has proved its wisdom in the household management of the Snuggery.

“To Judd’s Bridge!” How natural the sound of those words! How many times have I myself been on that same pilgrimage of penance! The destination of these boys is a rickety but picturesque structure which spans the Shepaug five miles below Snug Hamlet. Through three decades it looks back to its host of acquaintances of those romping lads who, in the superfluity of exuberant spirits, made havoc and din in the household. The dose is administered with wise discrimination both as to the symptoms and the needs and strength of the patient. It always proves a sterling remedy, and sometimes, indeed, a sugar-coated one, as in the case of these two ruddy, rollicking examples.

Judd’s Bridge is but one of a score of places which serve in the administration of Snuggery discipline. It is, however, the one most remote, and its ten-mile journey is reserved as an heroic dose for extraordinary cases, after other prescriptions have been tried without avail. Next on the list comes Moody Barn, with “open doors” every day in the week to its frequent callers. This old settler, gray and weather-beaten, marks a point one mile from the Snuggery, where the still waters of the Shepaug run slow and deep--the favorite “swimming-hole” of the Snuggery.

And then there’s Kirby Corners, a mere stroll of a few minutes round the square of a rock-bound pasture--just enough to give yourself time to think a bit and congratulate yourself on what you have escaped. All these, and several more, are vivid in my memory; friends, old and intimate. And here’s another, right before us by the roadside. For several minutes through the tantalizing trees we have heard its rumbling wheel, its reiterating clank, and busy saw; and now, as its familiar outline looms up against the evening sky, the vision seems to darken, as on that night of long ago, when through the shadowy mystery of the moonlit gloom I stole my way among the sheltering golden-rod; when the lofty flume, like a huge horned creature, seemed to stride athwart me in the darkness, and the fitful boyish fancy saw strange phantoms in the floating, melting mist. This ancient structure reposes in a verdant dell at the foot of Snug Hamlet Hill. A choice of two roads lies before us--one short and direct, the other a roundabout approach. A sudden impulse leads me into the latter. On right and left I see the same old rocks and trees. There stands the aged beech to whose gnarled and hollow trunk I traced the agile flying-squirrel, and with suffocating flame and smoke drove him from his hiding-place. Here between large rocks and stones the trout-stream runs its course, now pouring in small cataracts, now eddying into still, dark nooks, where in those by-gone times I dropped the line of expectancy, but showed the clumsiness of adversity. A few minutes later, and we are gliding again by the dark Shepaug, now flowing calm and silent beneath a rugged bank, wild and umbrageous, where the swarm of katydids, with grating discord, maintain their old dispute, that never-ending feud. The wheels turn noiselessly in the shifting sand as we pursue our way. The low gray fog steals lightly over the lily-pads, floating into seclusion beneath the sheltering boughs, or, like an evanescent spirit, borne upon the evening breath, is lifted from the gloom, and slowly melts into the twilight sky. The solitary whippoorwill from his mysterious haunt, perhaps in yonder tree, perhaps in the mountain loneliness beyond, proclaims with dismal cry his oft-repeated wail. And as we ascend the darkening path, through the still night air, in measured cadence long and sad, we hear the toll of the distant knell. Threescore-and-ten its numbers tell of the earthly years--a curfew requiem for the dead. Even as we pass the little chapel at the summit of the hill, and the bell has scarcely ceased its melancholy tidings, we hear the shouts and merry laughs of the boys on the village green. Presently its broad expanse, shut in by twinkling windows and massive trees, spreads out before us, as a clear and ringing voice, like that of old, echoes through the growing darkness, “One hundred! Nothing said, coming ahead!” and a dim figure steals cautiously from the steps of the old white church to seek in the sequestered hiding-places. With a heart that fairly thumps, I urge my pony onward across the green, and ere he slackens his pace I am at my journey’s end. The dear old Snuggery, with its gables manifold and quaint, its fantastic wings and towers, stands there before me, the glowing windows beaming through the maples. Leaving our pony in willing hands, we enter the gate, and are soon upon the wide porch.

It is eight o’clock, and the Snuggery is hushed in the quiet of the study hour, and as we look through the windows we see the little groups of studious lads bending over their books. Turning a corner on the piazza, we are confronted with a tall hexagonal structure at its farther end. This is the Tower, the lower room of which is consecrated to the cosy retirement of Mr. and Mrs. Snug. The door leading to the porch is open, and, as if awakening from a nap in which the past fifteen years have been a dream, I listen to the same dear voice. I approach nearer. Under the glow of a student’s lamp I look upon the beloved face, the flowing hair and beard now silvered with the lapse of years--a face of unusual firmness, but whose every line marks the expression of a tender, loving nature, and of a large and noble heart. Near him another sits--a helpmeet kind and true, cherished companion in a happy, useful life. Into her lap a nestling lad has climbed; and as she strokes the curly head and looks into the chubby face, I see the same expression as of old, the same motherly tenderness and love beaming from the large gray eyes.

Mr. Snug is leaning back in his easy-chair, and two boys are standing up before him; one of them is speaking, evidently in answer to a question.

“I called him a galoot, sir.”

“You called George a galoot, and then he threw the base-ball club at you--is that it?”

“Yes, sir,” interrupted George; “but I was only playing, sir.”

“Yes,” resumed the voice of Mr. Snug, “but that club went with considerable force, and landed over the fence, and made havoc in Deacon Farish’s onion-bed; and that reminds me that the deacon’s onion-bed is overrun with weeds. Now, Willie,” continued Mr. Snug, after a moment’s hesitation, with eyes closed, and head thrown back against the chair, “Saturday morning--to-morrow, that is--directly after breakfast, you go out into the grove and call names to the big rock for half an hour. Don’t stop to take breath; and don’t call the same name twice. Your vocabulary will easily stand the drain. You understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And, George,” continued Mr. Snug, with deliberate, easy intonation, “to-morrow morning, at the same time, you present yourself politely to Deacon Farish, tell him that I sent you, and ask him to escort you to his onion-bed. After which you will go carefully to work and pull out all the weeds. You understand, sir?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And then you will both report to me as usual.” And with a pleasant smile, which was reflected in both their faces, the erring youngsters were dismissed. Before the door has closed behind them we are standing in the door-way. Here I draw the curtain; for who but one of its own household could understand a welcome at the Snuggery?

Those of my old school-mates who read this meagre sketch will know the happiness of such a meeting; but others less fortunate in the recollections of school-life can only look for its counterpart in an affectionate welcome in their own homes, for the Snuggery _is_ a home to all who ever dwelt within its gates. Seated in the familiar cosiness, and surrounded by the friends of my school-days, the hours fly fast and pleasantly. There is plenty to talk about. Here is a village full of good people of whom I wish to learn, and there are many far-off chums of whom I carry tidings. A bell rings in the cupola as one by one, from the buzz in the outer rooms, boys large and small seek our seclusion for the accustomed good-night adieu; and ere another hour has passed forty sleepy urchins are packed away in their snug quarters. The evening runs on into midnight, as with stories of the past, its pains and penalties, its remembrances, now humorous now sad by turns, we recall the good old times; and the “wee sma’ hours” are already upon us as we reluctantly retire from the goodly company to our rooms across the way.

The next morning finds us in the midst of a merry load, with Mr. Snug as a driver; and many and varied were the beauties that opened up before us on that charming ride! Snug Hamlet, once called Judea, in the qualities of its landscape as well as in everything else, is unique. Stripped of all its old associations, it presents to the artistic eye a combination of attractions scarcely to be equalled in the boundaries of New England. Situated itself on the brow of an abrupt hill, where its picturesque homes cluster about a broad open green, a few minutes’ drive in any direction reveals a surrounding panorama of the rarest loveliness. Five hundred feet below us, winding in and out, now beneath leafy tangles, now under quaint little bridges, and again reposing placidly in broad mill-ponds, the happy Shepaug lends to a lovely valley its usefulness and beauty. Turning in another direction, we pass the Snuggery ball-ground, animated with the shouts of victory; and descending into a vale of almost primeval wildness, we continue our way up the ascent of “Artist’s Hill,” from whose summit on every side, as far as the eye can reach, the landscape softens into the hazy horizon. Returning, we pass through a ruined waste, where, three months before, the fierce tornado swooped down in its fiendish fury. On every side we see its awful evidences. Huge oaks, like brittle pipe-stems, snapped from their moorings; sturdy hickories, mere play-things in the gale, twisted into shreds.

Every morning saw me on some new drive, either with a wagon full of merry company, or as alone with Mr. Snug we held our quiet _tête-à-tête_ on wheels, living over the olden times. In the afternoon I strolled by myself through the old and eloquent scenes. A volume could not hold the memories they revived--no, not even those of yonder barn alone. Even as I sit making my pencil-sketch, its reminiscences seem to float across the vision. Distinctly it recalls the events of one evening years ago. It was at about the sunset hour one Friday. I was quietly sitting on a lounge in the parlor talking to Cuthbert Harding, who was standing in front of me. Presently the door opens, and the tall figure of Dick Shin enters. Dick and I were antipodes in every sense of the word. Physically we were as a match and a billiard ball, he being the lucifer. He was also my _bête noire_, and he never missed an opportunity to vent his spite. Accordingly he stalked toward us, and with a violent push sent Cuthbert pell-mell on to me. In falling, he stepped heavily on my foot, and hurt me severely, which accounted for my excited expression as I threw him from me.

Of course Mr. Snug had to come in just at this time, and seeing us in what looked to him very like a fight, he took us firmly by the ears and stood us side by side, while I ventured to explain.

“Not a word!” exclaimed he, in a tone there was no mistaking. “You two boys may cool off on a trip to Moody Barn, after which you will report to me in the Tower. Now go.”

Whatever may have been the state of my mind a few moments before, I was now mad in earnest, and with every bit of my latent obstinacy aroused, I sauntered out on to the porch.

“Cool off, old boy,” whispered a grating voice at my side, as I turned and met the gaze of Dick Shin, motioning with his thumb in the direction of Moody Barn--“cool off; you need it;” and his ample mouth stretched into a sneering grin.

I had already formed an intention, but now it was a resolve.

“Cuthbert,” said I to my quiet and less choleric companion, when some distance down the road, “I am not going on that trip.”

“Not going!” replied he, with surprise; “why, you’ll _have_ to go.”

“But I _won’t_ go, and that settles it. It’s confounded unjust that we’re sent, anyhow, and I don’t propose to stand it.”

“I think so too,” answered Cuthbert, with hesitating emphasis; “but what’ll we do? We’ll have to report to Mr. Snug, you know; that’s the _worst_ of it.”

“Well, I’ll be spokesman, and I’ll _lie_ before I’ll go on that trip.”