Chapter II: Part 2

At another time an older boy came along, also on a bicycle, and stopped for a minute’s chat. He, too, was in the secret, and had been for a good while. “Pretty nice birds,” his verdict was. And at a later visit a man with his dog suddenly appeared. “Handsome, aren’t they?” he began, by way of good-morning. He had seen one of them as long ago as when snow was on the ground, but he didn’t discover the nest. He was looking in the wrong place. Since then he had spent hours in watching the birds, and believed that he could tell the female’s voice from the male’s. “There!” said he; “that’s the mother’s call.” He was acquainted with all the birds, and could name them all, he said, simply by their notes; and he told me many things about them. There were grosbeaks here. Did I know them? And tanagers, also. Did I know them? And another bird that he was especially fond of; a beautiful singer, though it never sang after the early part of the season; the indigo-bird, its name was. Did I know that?

As will readily be imagined, we had a good session (one doesn’t fall in with so congenial a spirit every day in the week), though it ran a little too exclusively to questions and answers, perhaps; for I, too, am a Yankee. He was the man who told me about the throngs of sightseers that came here. The very publicity of the thing had been the birds’ salvation, he was inclined to believe. The entire community had taken them under its protection, and with so many windows overlooking the place, and the police on the alert (I had noticed a placard near by, signed by the chief, laying down the law and calling upon all good citizens to help him enforce it), it would have been hard for anybody to meddle with the nest without coming to grief. At all events, the birds had so far escaped molestation, and the young, as I have said, would soon be on the wing. One of them was thrusting its full-grown, wide-awake, eager-looking, mouse-colored head out of the aperture as we talked.

“But why so much excitement over a family of woodpeckers?” some reader may be asking. Rarity, my friend; rarity and brilliant feathers. So far as appears from the latest catalogue of Massachusetts birds, this Newton nest is one of a very small number ever found in the State, and the very first one ever recorded from the eastern half of it.[2] Put that fact with the further one that the birds are among the showiest in North America, real marvels of beauty,--splendid colors, splendidly laid on,--and it is plain to see why a city full of nature lovers should have welcomed this pair with open arms and watched over their welfare as one watches over the most honored of guests. For my part, I should not think it inappropriate if the mayor were to order the firing of a salute and the ringing of bells on the happy morning when the young birds take wing. Tons of gunpowder have been burnt, before now, with less reason.

LATE SUMMER NOTES

On this bright morning I am passing fields and kitchen gardens that I have not seen since a month ago. Then the fields were newly mown stubble-fields, such as all men who knew anything of the luxury of a bare-footed boyhood must have in vivid remembrance. (How gingerly, with what a sudden slackening of the pace, we walked over them, if circumstances made such a venture necessary,--in pursuit of a lost ball, or on our way to the swimming-hole,--setting the foot down softly and stepping high! I can see the action at this minute, as plainly as I see yonder fence-post.) Now the first thing that strikes the eye is the lively green of the aftermath. It looks as soft as a velvet carpet. I remember what I used to hear in haying time, that cattle like the second crop best. I should think they would.

Grass is man’s patient friend. Directly or indirectly, we may say, he subsists upon it. Nay, the Scripture itself declares as much, in one of its most familiar texts. It is good to see it so quick to recover from the cruel work of the scythe, so responsive to the midsummer rains, its color so deep, its leaves so full of sap. It is this spirit of hopefulness, this patience under injury, that makes shaven lawns possible.

As to the beauty of grass, no man appreciates it, I suppose, unless he has lived where grass does not grow. “When I go back to New England,” said an exile in Florida, “I will ask for no garden. Let me have grass about the house, and I can do without roses.”

The century ends with an apple year; and every tree is in the fashion. The old, the decrepit, the solitary, not one of them all but got the word in season; as there is no woman in Christendom but learns somehow, before it is too late, whether sleeves are to be worn loose or tight. Along the roadside, in the swamp, in the orchard, everywhere the story is the same. Apple trees are all freemasons. This hollow shell of a trunk, with one last battered limb keeping it alive, received its cue with the rest.

In the orchard, where the trees are younger and more pliable, a man would hardly know them for the same he saw there in May and June; so altered are they in shape, so smoothly rounded at the top, so like Babylonian willows in the droop of the branches. Baldwins are turning red--greenish red--and russets are already rusty. “Yes,” says the owner of the orchard, “and much good will it do me.” Apples are an “aggravating crop,” he declares. “First there are none; and then there are so many that you cannot sell them.” Human nature is never satisfied; and, for one, I think it seldom has reason to be.

A bobolink, which seems to be somewhere overhead, drops a few notes in passing. “I am off,” he says. “Sorry to go, but I know where there is a rice-field.” From the orchard come the voices of bluebirds and kingbirds. Not a bird is in song; and what is more melancholy, the road and the fields are thick with English sparrows.

Now I stop at the smell of growing corn, which is only another kind of grass, though the farmer may not suspect the fact, and perhaps would not believe you if you told him of it; more than he would believe you if you told him that clover is _not_ grass. He and his cow know better. A queer set these botanists, who get their notions from books! Corn or grass, here grow some acres of it, well tasseled (“all tosselled out”), with the wind stirring the leaves to make them shine. Does the odor, with which the breeze is loaded, come from the blossoms, or from the substance of the plant itself? A new question for me. I climb the fence and put my nose to one of the tassels. No, it is not in them, I think. It must be in the stalk and leaves; and I adopt this opinion the more readily because the odor itself--the memory of which is part of every country boy’s inheritance--is like that of a vegetable rather than of a flower, a smell rather than a perfume. I seem to recall that the stalk smelled just so when we cut it into lengths for cornstalk fiddles; and the nose, as everyone must have remarked, has a good memory, for the reason, probably, that it is so near the brain.

I turn the corner, and go from the garden to the wild. First, however, I rest for a few minutes under a wide-branching oak opposite the site of a vanished house. You would know there had been a house here at some time, even if you did not see the cellar-hole, by the old-maid’s pinks along the fence. How fresh they look! And how becomingly they blush! They are worthy of their name. Age cannot wither them. Less handsome than carnations, if you will, but faithful, home-loving souls; not requiring to be waited upon, but given rather to waiting upon others. Like mayweed and catnip, they are what I have heard called “folksy plants;” though on second thought I should rather say “homey.” There is something of the cat about them; a kind of local constancy; they stay by the old place, let the people go where they will. Probably they would grow in front of a new house,--even a Queen Anne cottage, so-called,--if necessity were laid upon them, but who could imagine it? It would be shameful to subject them to such indignity. They are survivals, livers in the past, lovers of things as they were, charter members, I should say, of the Society of Colonial Dames.

As I come to the edge of the swamp I see a leaf move, and by squeaking draw into sight a redstart. The pretty creature peeps at me furtively, wondering what new sort of man it can be that makes noises of that kind. To all appearance she is very desirous not to be seen; yet she spreads her tail every few seconds so as to display its bright markings. Probably the action has grown to be habitual and, as it were, automatic. A bird may be unconsciously coquettish, I suppose, as well as a woman or a man. It is a handsome tail, anyhow.

Somewhere just behind me a red-eyed vireo is singing in a peculiar manner; repeating his hackneyed measure with all his customary speed,--forty or fifty times a minute,--but with no more than half his customary voice, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. I wish he would sing so always. It would be an easy way of increasing his popularity.

Not far down the road are three roughly dressed men,--of the genus tramp, if I read the signs aright,--coming toward me; and I notice with pleasure that when they reach the narrow wooden bridge over the brook they turn aside, as by a common impulse, to lean over the rail and look down into the water. When I get there I shall do the same thing. So will every man that comes along, unless he happens to be on “business.”

Running water is one of the universal parables, appealing to something primitive and ineradicable in human nature. Day and night it preaches--sermons without words. It is every man’s friend. The most stolid find it good company. For that reason, largely, men love to fish. They are poets without knowing it. They have never read a line of verse since they outgrew Mother Goose; they never consciously admire a landscape; they care nothing for a picture, unless it is a caricature, or tells a story; but they cannot cross moving water without feeling its charm.

Well, in that sense of the word, I too am a poet. The tramps and I have met and passed each other, and I am on the bridge. The current is almost imperceptible (like the passage of time), and the black water is all a tangle of cresses and other plants. Lucky bugs dart hither and thither upon its surface, quick to start and quick to stop (quick to quarrel, also,--like butterflies,--so that two of them can hardly meet without a momentary set-to), full of life, and, for anything that I know, full of thought; true poets, perhaps, in ways of their own; for why should man be so narrow-minded as to assume that his way is of necessity the only one?

On either side of the brook, as it winds through the swamp, are acres of the stately Joe Pye weed, or purple boneset, one of the tallest of herbs. I am beginning to think well of its color,--which is something like what ladies know as “crushed strawberry,” if I mistake not,--though I used to look upon it rather disdainfully and call it faded. The plant would be better esteemed in that regard, I dare say, if it did not so often invite comparison with the cardinal flower. I note it as one of the favorites of the milk-weed butterfly.

Here on the very edge of the brook is the swamp loosestrife, its curving stems all reaching for the water, set with rosy bloom. My attention is drawn to it by the humming of bees, a busy, contented, content-producing sound. How different from the hum of the factory that I passed an hour ago, through the open windows of which I saw men hurrying over “piece-work,” every stroke like every other, every man a machine, or part of a machine, rather, for doing one thing. I wonder whether the dreariness of the modern “factory system” may not have had something to do with the origin and rapid development of our nineteenth-century breed of peripatetic thieves and beggars.

Above the music of the bees I hear, of a sudden, a louder hum. “A hummingbird,” I say, and turn to look at a jewel-weed. Yes, the bird is there, trying the blossoms one after another. Then she drops to rest upon an alder twig (always a dead one) directly under my nose, where I see her darting out her long tongue, which flashes in the sunlight. I say “she.” She has a whitish throat, and is either a female or a male of the present season. Did any one ever see a hummingbird without a thrill of pleasure? Not I.

As I go on I note, half sadly, half gladly, some tokens of waning summer; especially a few first blossoms of two of the handsomest of our blue asters, _lævis_ and _patens_. Soon the dusty goldenrod will be out, and then, whatever the almanac-makers may say, autumn will have come. Every dry roadside will publish the fact.

WOOD SILENCE

The scarcity of birds and bird music, of which I spoke a week ago, still continues. The ear begins to feel starved. A tanager’s _chip-cherr_, or the prattle of a company of chickadees, is listened to more eagerly than the wood thrush’s most brilliant measures were in June and July. Since September came in (it is now the 8th) I have heard the following birds in song: robins, half a dozen times, perhaps, in snatches only; a Maryland yellow-throat, once; warbling vireos, occasionally, in village elms; yellow-throated vireos, rarely, but more frequently than the last; a song sparrow (only one!), amusing himself with a low-voiced, inarticulate warble, rather humming than singing; an oriole, blowing a few whistles, on the 4th; a phœbe, on a single occasion; wood pewees, almost daily, oftener than all the foregoing species together.

Except a single water thrush, on the first day of the month, I have seen no land bird that could be set down with certainty as a migrant, and in the eight days I have listed but thirty-seven species. And of this number twelve are represented in my notes by a single individual only. My walks have been short, it is fair to say, but they have taken me into good places. I could spin a long chapter on the birds I have not seen; but perhaps the best thing I could do, writing merely as an ornithologist, would be to make the week’s record in two words: “No quorum.”

My last hummingbird (but I hope for others before the month ends) was seen on the 2d. He was about a bed of tall cannas in a neighbor’s dooryard, thrusting his tongue into the flowers, one after another, and I went near and focused my opera-glass upon him, taking my fill of his pretty feathers and prettier movements. It was really the best music of the week. The sun was on his emerald back and wings, making them shine.

One thing that pleased me, as it always does, was his address in flying backwards. Into the flower he would dart, stay a longer or shorter time, as he found occasion, and then like a flash draw out and back away, his wings all the while beating themselves to a film of light. I wonder if any other of our common hovering birds--the kingbird, for example, or the kingfisher--can match the hummer in this regard.

A second thing that interested me was his choice of blossoms. My neighbor’s canna bed is made up in about equal parts of two kinds of plants, one with red blossoms, the other with yellow. The hummer went to the red flowers only. He must have probed a hundred, I should say. As for the yellow ones, he seemed not to know they were there. Now, was not this a plain case of color preference? It looked so, surely; but I remembered that hummingbirds are persistent haunters of the yellow blossoms of the jewel-weed, and concluded that something besides a difference of color must account for what appeared to be this fellow’s well-considered line of conduct. It is hard work, but as far as possible, let us abstain from hasty generalizations.

There is no music sweeter than wood silence. I am enjoying it now. It is not strictly silence, though it is what we call by that name. There is no song. No one speaks. The wind is not heard in the branches. But there is a nameless something in the air, an inaudible noise, or an audible stillness, of which you become conscious if you listen for it; a union of fine sounds, some of which, as you grow inwardly quiet, you can separate from the rest--beats of distant crickets, few and faint, and a hum as of tiny wings. Now an insect passes near, leaving a buzz behind him, but for a second only. Then, before you can hear it, almost, a frog out in the swamp yonder has let slip a quick, gulping, or string-snapping syllable. Once a small bird’s wings are heard, just heard and no more. Far overhead a goldfinch passes, with rhythmic calls, smooth and soft, not so much sounds as a more musical kind of silence.

The morning sun strikes aslant through the wood, illuminating the trunks of the trees, especially a cluster of white birches. A lovely sisterhood! I can hardly take my eyes from them. In general all the leaves are motionless, but now and then a tree, or it may be a group of two or three at once, is jostled for an instant by a touch too soft for my coarser human apprehension. “_Dee-dee_,” says a titmouse; “Here,” answers a flicker. But both speak under their breath, as if they felt the spell of the hour. Listen! was that a hyla or a bird? There is no telling, so elusive and so distant-seeming was the sound. And anon it has ceased altogether.

Now, for the smallest fraction of a second, I see the flash of a moving shadow. The flicker’s, perhaps. Yes, for presently he calls as in spring, but only for four or five notes. If it were April, with the vernal inspiration in his throat, there would be four or five times as many, and all the woods would be ringing. And now the breeze freshens, and the leaves make a chorus. No thrush’s song could be sweeter. It is not a rustle. There is no word for it, unless we call it a murmur, a rumor. Even while we are trying to name it, it is gone. Leaves are true Friends, they speak only as the spirit moves. “_Wicker, wicker_,” says the woodpecker, and his voice is in perfect tune with the silence.

How still and happy the boulders look, with friendly bushes and ferns gathered about them, and parti-colored lichens giving them tones of beauty! Men call them dead. “Dead as a stone,” has even passed into a proverb. “Stone dead,” we say. But I doubt. They would smile, inwardly, I think to hear us. We have small idea, the wisest of us, what we mean by life and death. Men who hurry to and fro, scraping money together or chasing a ball, consider themselves alive. The trees, and even the stones, know better.

Yes, that is a crow, cawing; but far, far off. Distance softens sound as it softens the landscape, and as time, which is only another kind of distance, softens grief. A cricket at my elbow plays his tune, irregularly and slowly. The low temperature slackens his _tempo_. Now he is done. There is only the stirring of leaves. Some of the birch leaves, I see, are already turning yellow, and once in a while, as the wind whispers to one of them, it lets go its hold and drops. “Good-by,” I seem to hear it say; “my summer is done.” How tenderly the air lets it down, as loving arms lower a child to its burial. Yet the trees are still happy. And so am I. The wood has blessed me. I have sensations, but no thoughts. It is for this that I have been sitting here at this silent concert. I wish for nothing. The best that such an hour can do for us is to put us into a mood of desirelessness, of complete passivity; such a mood as mystics covet for a permanent possession; a state of surrender, selflessness, absorption in the infinite. I love the feeling. All the trees have it, I think.

So I sit in their shadow, my eyes returning again and again to those dazzling white birch boles, where loose shreds of filmy bark twinkle as the breeze and the sunlight play upon them. Once two or three chickadees come into the branches over my head and whisper things to each other. Very simple their utterances sound, but perhaps if I could understand them I should know more than all the mystics.

SOUTHWARD BOUND

Although it is the 20th of September, the autumnal migration of birds, as seen in this neighborhood, is still very light. Robins are scattered throughout the woods in loose flocks--a state of things not to be witnessed in summer or winter; the birds rising singly from the ground as the walker disturbs them, sometimes all silent, at other times all cackling noisily. Chickadees, too, are in flocks, cheerful companies, good to meet in any weather; behaving just as they will continue to do until the nesting season again breaks the happy assembly up into happier pairs.

My wood pewee--a particular bird in a grove near by--whistled pretty constantly till the 17th, and a warbling vireo was still true to his name on the 19th. I have heard no yellow-throated vireos since the 6th, and conclude that they must have taken their departure. May joy go with them. This morning, for the first time in several weeks, a pine warbler was trilling. Song sparrows have grown numerous within a few days, but are almost entirely silent. One fellow sang his regular song--not his confused autumnal warble--on the 19th. I had not heard it before since the month opened.

No blackpoll warblers showed themselves with me till the 18th, though I had word of their presence elsewhere a few days earlier. On that day I saw three; yesterday and to-day have shown but one bird each. The movement is barely begun.

I should like to know how common it is for blackpolls to sing on their southward migration. Eleven years ago, in September, 1889, they came very early,--or I had the good fortune to see them very early,--and on the 4th and 5th of the month a few were “in full song,” so my notes record, “quite as long and full as in May.” I had never heard them sing before in autumn, nor have I ever had that pleasure since. Neither have I ever again seen them so early. Probably the two things--the song and the exceptional date--were somehow connected. At the time, I took the circumstance as an indication that the adult males migrate in advance of the great body of the species; and I fancied that, having detected them once thus early and thus musical, I should be likely to repeat the experience. If I am ever to do so, however, I must be about it. Eleven years is a large slice out of an adult man’s remaining allowance.

On the 18th I found a single olive-backed thrush, silent, in company with a flock of robins, or in the same grove with them--a White Mountain bird, thrice welcome; and this morning a few white-throated sparrows appeared. The first one that I saw--the only one, in fact--was a young fellow, and as I caught sight of him facing me, with his clear white throat, and his breast prettily streaked, with a wash of color across it, I was half in doubt what to call him. While I was taking observations upon his plumage, trying to make him look like himself, he began to _chip_, as if to help me out, and a second one unseen fell to singing near by; a very feeble and imperfect rendering of the dear old tune, but well marked by the “Peabody” triplets. It was a true touch of autumn, a voice from the hills.

Shortly before this I had spent a long time in watching the actions of a Lincoln finch. He was feeding upon Roman worm-wood seeds by the roadside, in company with two or three chipping sparrows; very meek and quiet in his demeanor, and happily not disposed to resent my inquisitiveness, which I took pains to render as little offensive as possible. I had not seen the like of him since May, and have seen so few of his race at any time that every new one still makes for me an hour of agreeable excitement.

In the same neighborhood an indigo-bird surprised me with a song. He was as badly out of voice as the white-throat, but his spirit was good, and he sang several times over. One would never have expected music from him, to look at his plumage. The indigo color was largely moulted away--only the rags of it left. It was really pitiful to see him; so handsome a coat, now nothing but shreds and patches. Most likely he was not a traveler from farther north, but a lingering summer resident of our own, as I remember to have seen three birds of his name in the same spot fifteen days ago. It would be interesting to know whether bright creatures of this kind do not feel humiliated and generally unhappy when they find their beauty dropping away from them, like leaves from the branch, as the summer wanes.

The best bird of the month, so far,--better even than the Lincoln finch,--was a Philadelphia vireo, happened upon all unexpectedly on the 17th. I had stopped, as I always do in passing, to look down into a certain dense thicket of shrubbery, through which a brook runs, a favorite resort for birds of many kinds. At first the place seemed to be empty, but in answer to some curiosity-provoking noises on my part a water thrush started up to balance himself on a branch directly under my nose, and the next moment a vireo hopped into full sight just beyond him; a vireo with plain back and wings, with no dark lines bordering the crown, and having the under parts of a bright yellow. He was most obliging; indeed, he could hardly have been more so, unless he had sung for me, and that was something not fairly to be expected. For a good while he kept silence. Then, in response to a jay’s scream, he began snarling, or complaining, after the family manner. I enjoyed the sight of him as long as I could stay (he was the second one I had ever seen with anything like certainty), and when I returned, an hour later, he was still there, and still willing to be looked at.

And then, to heighten my pleasure, a rose-breasted grosbeak, invisible, but not far away, broke into a strain of most entrancing music; with no more than half his spring voice, to be sure, but with all his May sweetness of tone and inflection. Again and again he sang, as if he were too happy to stop. I had heard nothing of the kind for weeks, and shall probably hear nothing more for months. It was singing to be remembered, like Sembrich’s “Casta Diva,” or Nilsson’s “I know that my Redeemer liveth.”

Scarlet tanagers are still heard and seen occasionally,--one was calling to-day,--but none of them in tune, or wearing so much as a single scarlet feather. Here and there, too, as we wander about the woods, we meet--once in two or three days, perhaps--a lonesome-acting, silent red-eyed vireo. A great contrast there is between such solitary lingerers and the groups of gossiping chickadees that one falls in with in the same places; so merry-hearted, so bubbling over with high spirits, so ready to be neighborly. When I whistle to them, and they whistle back, I feel myself befriended.

Within a few days we must have the grand September influx of warblers--crowds of blackpolls, myrtles, black-throated greens, and many more. For two months yet the procession will be passing.

FOUR DREAMERS

I remember the first man I ever saw sitting still by himself out-of-doors. What his name was I do not know. I never knew. He was a stranger, who came to visit in our village when I was perhaps ten years old. I had crossed a field, and gone over a low hill (not so low then as now), and there, in the shade of an apple tree, I beheld this stranger, not fishing, nor digging, nor eating an apple, nor picking berries, nor setting snares, but sitting still. It was almost like seeing a ghost. I doubt if I was ever the same boy afterward. Here was a new kind of man. I wondered if he was a poet! Even then I think I had heard that poets sometimes acted strangely, and saw things invisible to others’ ken.

I should not have been surprised, I suppose, to have found a man looking at a picture, some “nice,” high-colored “chromo,” such as was a fashionable parlor ornament in our rural neighborhood, where there was more theology to the square foot (and no preacher then extant with orthodoxy strait enough to satisfy it, though some could still make the blood curdle) than there was of art or poetry to the square acre; but to be looking at Nat Shaw’s hayfield and the old unpainted house beyond--that marked the stranger at once as not belonging in the ranks of common men. If he was not a poet, he must be at least a scholar. Perhaps he was going to be a minister, for he seemed too young to be one already. A minister had to think, of course (so I thought then), else how could he preach? and perhaps this man was meditating a sermon. I fancied I should like to hear a sermon that had been studied out-of-doors.

Times have changed with me. Now I sit out-of-doors myself, and by myself, and look for half an hour together at a tree, or a bunch of trees, or a lazy brook, or a stretch of green meadow. And I know that such things can be enjoyed by one who is neither a poet nor a preacher, but just a quite ordinary, uneducated mortal, who happens, by the grace of God, to have had his eyes opened to natural beauty and his heart made sensitive to the delights of solitude. I have learned that it is possible to enjoy scenery at home as well as abroad,--scenery without mountains or waterfalls; scenery that no tourist would call “fine;” a bit of green valley, an ancient apple orchard, a woodland vista, an acre of marsh, a cattle pasture. In fact, I have observed that painters choose quiet subjects like these oftener than any of the more exceptional and stupendous manifestations of nature. Perhaps it is because such subjects are easier; but I suspect not. I suspect, indeed, that they are harder, and are preferred because, to the painter’s eye, they are more permanently beautiful.

At this very moment I am looking at a patch of meadow inclosing a shallow pool of standing water, over the surface of which a high wind is chasing little waves. A few low alders are near it, and the grass is green all about. That of itself is a sight to make a man happy. For the world just now is consumed with drought. All the uplands are sere, and every roadside bush is begrimed with dust. I have come through the woods to this convenient knoll on purpose to find relief from the prevailing desolation--to rest my eyes upon green grass. For the eye loves green grass as well, almost, as the throat loves cold water.

Even in my boyish country neighborhood, though nobody, or nobody that I knew (which may have been a very different matter), did what I am now doing, there were some, I think (one or two, at least), who in their own way indulged much the same tastes that I have come to felicitate myself upon possessing. I remember one man, dead long since, who was continually walking the fields and woods, always with a spaniel at his heels, alone except for that company. He often carried a gun, and in autumn he snared partridges (how I envied him his skill!); but I believe, as I look back, that best and first of all he must have loved the woods and the silence. He was supposed to have his faults. No doubt he had. I have since discovered that most men are in the same category. I believe he used to “drink,” as our word was then. But I think now that I should have liked to know him, and should have found him congenial, if I had been mature enough, and could have got below the protective crust which naturally grows over a man whose ways of life and thought are different from those of all the people about him. I have little question that when he was out of the sight of the world he was accustomed to sit as I do to-day, and look and look and dream.

One thing he did not dream of,--that a boy to whom he had never spoken would be thinking of him forty years after he had taken his last ramble and snared his last grouse.

“An idler,” said his busier neighbors, though he earned his own living and paid his own scot.

“A misspent life,” said the clergy, though he harmed no one.

But who can tell? “Who knoweth the interpretation of a thing?” Perhaps his, also, was--for him--a good philosophy. As one of the ancients said, “A man’s mind is wont to tell him more than seven men that sit upon a tower.” If we are not born alike, why should we be bound to live alike? “A handful with quietness” is not so bad a portion.

Yes, but time is precious. Time once past never returns.

True.

We must make the best of it, therefore.

True.

By making more shoes.

Nay, that is not so certain.

The sun is getting low. Longer and longer tree-shadows come creeping over the grass, making the light beyond them so much the brighter and lovelier. The oak leaves shimmer as the wind twists the branches. The green aftermath is of all exquisite shades. A beautiful bit of the world. The meadow is like a cup. For an hour I have been drinking life out of it.

Now I will return home by a narrow path, well-worn, but barely wide enough for a man’s steps; a path that nobody uses, so far as I know, except myself. Till within a year or two it belonged to a hermit, who kept it in the neatest possible condition. That was his chief employment. His path was the apple of his eye. He was as jealous over it as the most fastidious of village householders is over his front-yard lawn. Not a pebble, nor so much as an acorn, must disfigure it. Fallen twigs were his special abhorrence, though he treated them handsomely. Little piles or stacks of them were scattered at short intervals along the way, neatly corded up, every stick in line. I noticed these mysterious accumulations before I had ever seen the maker of them, and wondered not a little who could have been to so much seemingly aimless trouble. At first I imagined that some one must have laid the wood together with a view to carrying it home for the kitchen stove. But the bits were too small, no bigger round, many of them, than a man’s little finger; not even Goody Blake could have thought such things worth pilfering for firewood; and besides, it was plain that many of them had lain where they were over at least one winter.

The affair remained a riddle until I saw the man himself. This I did but a few times, a long way apart, and always at a little distance. Generally his eyes were fastened on the ground. Sometimes he had a stick in his hand, and was brushing leaves and other litter out of the path. Perhaps he had married a model housekeeper in his youth, and had gone mad over the spring cleaning. He always saw me before I could get within easy speaking range; and he had the true woodman’s knack of making himself suddenly invisible. Sometimes I was almost ready to believe that he had dropped into the ground. Evidently he did not mean to be talked with. Perhaps he feared that I should ask impertinent questions. More likely he thought me crazy. If not, why should I be wandering alone about the woods to no purpose? I had no path to keep in order.

And perhaps I am a little crazy. Medical men insist upon it that the milder forms of insanity are much more nearly universal than is commonly supposed. Perfectly sound minds, I understand them to intimate, are quite as rare as perfectly sound bodies. At that rate there cannot be more than two or three truly sane men in this small town; and the probabilities are that I am not one of them.

A DAY IN FRANCONIA

It is the most delightful of autumn days, too delightful, it seemed to me this morning, to have been designed for anything like work. Even a walking vacationer, on pedestrian pleasures bent, would accept the weather’s suggestion, if he were wise. Long hours and short distances would be his programme; a sparing use of the legs, with a frequent resort to convenient fence-rails and other seasonable invitations. There are times, said I, when idleness itself should be taken on its softer side; and to-day is one of them.

Thus minded, I turned into the Landaff Valley shortly after breakfast, and at the old grist-mill crossed the river and took my favorite road along the hillside. As I passed the sugar grove I remembered that it was almost exactly four months since I had spent a delicious Sunday forenoon there, seated upon a prostrate maple trunk. Then it was spring, the trees in fresh leaf, the grass newly sprung, the world full of music. Bobolinks were rollicking in the meadow below, and swallows twittered overhead. Then I sat in the shade. Now there was neither bobolink nor swallow, and when I looked about for a seat I chose the sunny side of the wall.

Only four months, and the year was already old. But the mountains seemed not to know it. Washington, Jefferson, and Adams; Lafayette, Haystack, and Moosilauke;--not a cloud was upon one of them. And between me and them lay the greenest of valleys.

So for the forenoon hours I sat and walked by turns; stopping beside a house to enjoy a flock of farm-loving birds,--bluebirds especially, with voices as sweet in autumn as in spring,--loitering under the long arch of willows, taking a turn in the valley woods, where a drumming grouse was almost the only musician, and thence by easy stages sauntering homeward for dinner.

For the afternoon I have chosen a road that might have been made on purpose for the man and the day. It is short (two miles, or a little more, will bring me to the end of it), it starts directly from the door, with no preliminary plodding through dusty village streets, and it is not a thoroughfare, so that I am sure to meet nobody, or next to nobody, the whole afternoon long. At any rate, no wagon loads of staring “excursionists” will disturb my meditations. It is substantially level, also; and once more (for a man cannot think of everything at once) it is wooded on one side and open to the afternoon sun on the other. For the present occasion, furthermore, it is perhaps a point in its favor that it does not distract me with mountain prospects. Mountains are not for all moods; there are many other things worth looking at. Here, at this minute, as I come up a slope, I face halfway about to admire a stretch of Gale River, a hundred feet below, flowing straight toward me, the water of a steely blue, so far away that it appears to be motionless, and so little in volume that even the smaller boulders are no more than half covered. Beyond it the hillside woods are gorgeously arrayed--pale green, with reds and yellows of all degrees of brilliancy. The glory of autumn is nearly at the full, and at every step the panorama shifts. As for the day, it continues perfect, deliciously cool in the shade, deliciously warm in the sun, with the wind northwesterly and light. Many yellow butterflies are flitting about, and once a bright red angle-wing alights in the road and spreads itself carefully to the sun. While I am looking at it, sympathizing with its comfort, I notice also a shining dark blue beetle--an oil-beetle, I believe it is called--as handsome as a jewel, traveling slowly over the sand.

I have been up this way so frequently of late that the individual trees are beginning to seem like old friends. It would not take much to make me believe that the acquaintance is mutual. “Here he is again,” I fancy them saying one to another as I round a turn. Some of them are true philosophers, or their looks belie them. Just now they are all silent. Even the poplars cannot talk, it appears (a most worthy example), without a breath of inspiration to set them going. The stillness is eloquent. A day like this is the crown of the year. It is worth a year’s life to enjoy it. There is much to see, but best of all is the comfort that wraps us round and the peace that seems to brood over the world. If the first day was of this quality, we need not wonder that the maker of it took an artist’s pride in his work and pronounced it good.

As for the road, there is still another thing to be said in its praise: While it follows a straight course, it is never straight itself for more than a few rods together. If you look ahead a little space you are sure to see it running out of sight round a corner, beckoning you after it. A man would be a poor stick who would not follow. Every rod brings a new picture. How splendid the maple leaves are, red and yellow, with the white boles of the birches, as white as milk, or, truer still, as white as chalk, to set off their brightness. I could walk to the world’s end on such an invitation.

But the road, as I said, is a short one. Its errand is only to three farms, and I am now on the edge of the first of them. Here the wood moves farther away, and mountains come into view,--Lafayette, Haystack, and the Twins, with the tips of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams. Then, when the second of the houses is passed, the prospect narrows again. An extremely pretty wood of tall, straight trees, many fine poplars among them (and now they are all talking), is close at my side. The sunlight favors me, falling squarely on the shapely, light-colored trunks (some of the poplars are almost as white as the birches), and filling the whole place with splendor. I go on, absorbed in the lovely spectacle, and behold, it is as if a veil were suddenly removed. The wood is gone, and the horizon is full of mountain-tops. I have come to the last of the farms, and in another minute or two am at the door.

There is nobody at home, to my regret, and I sit down upon the doorstep. Moosilauke, Kinsman, Cannon, Lafayette, Haystack, the Twins, Washington, Clay, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison--these are enough, though there are others, too, if a man were trying to make a story. All are clear of clouds, and, like the trees of the wood, have the western light full on them. Even without the help of a glass I see a train ascending Mt. Washington. Happy passengers, say I. Would that I were one of them! The season is ending in glory at the summit, for this is almost or quite its last day, and there cannot have been many to match it, the whole summer through.

I loiter about the fields for an hour or more, looking at the blue mountains and the nearer, gayer-colored hills, but the occupant of the house is nowhere to be found. I was hoping for a chat with him. A seeing man, who lives by himself in such a place as this, is sure to have something to talk about. The last time I was here he told me a pretty story of a hummingbird. He was in the house, as I remember it, when he heard the familiar, squeaking notes of a hummer, and thinking that their persistency must be occasioned by some unusual trouble, went out to investigate. Sure enough, there hung the bird in a spider’s web attached to a rosebush, while the owner of the web, a big yellow-and-brown, pot-bellied, bloodthirsty rascal, was turning its victim over and over, winding the web about it. Wings and legs were already fast, so that all the bird could do was to cry for help. And help had come. The man at once killed the spider, and then, little by little, for it was an operation of no small delicacy, unwound the mesh in which the bird was entangled. The lovely creature lay still in his open hand till it had recovered its breath, and then flew away. Who would not be glad to play the good Samaritan in such guise? As I intimated just now, you may talk with a hundred smartly dressed, smoothly spoken city men without hearing a piece of news half so important or interesting.

It is five o’clock when I leave the farms and am again skirting the woods. Now I face the sun, the level rays of which transfigure the road before me till its beauty is beyond all attempt at description. I look at it as for a very few times in my life I have looked at a painted landscape, with unspeakable enjoyment. The subject is of the simplest: a few rods of common grassy road, arched with bright leaves and drenched in sunshine; but the suggestion is infinite. After this the way brings me into sight of the fairest of level green meadows, with pools of smooth water--“water stilled at even”--and scattered farmhouses. The day is ending right; and when I reach the hotel piazza and look back, there in the east is the full moon rising in all her splendor, attended by rosy clouds.

WITH THE WADERS

The 12th of October was a day. There are few like it in our Massachusetts calendar. And by a stroke of good fortune I had chosen it for a trip to Eagle Hill, on the North Shore. All things were near perfection; the only drawbacks to my enjoyment being a slight excess of warmth and an unseasonable plague of mosquitoes.

“Yes, it is _too_ fine,” said the stable-keeper, who drove me down from the railroad station. “It won’t last. It’s what we call a weather breeder.”

“So be it,” thought I. Just then I was not concerned with to-morrow. Happy men seldom are. The stable-keeper spoke more to the purpose when he told me that during the recent storm a most exceptional number of birds had been driven in. A certain gunner, Cy Somebody, had shot twenty-odd dollars’ worth in one day. “There he is now,” he remarked after a while, as a man and a dog crossed the road just before us. “Any birds to-day, Cy?” he inquired. The man nodded a silent affirmative--a very unusual admission for a Yankee sportsman to make, according to my experience.

I was hardly on foot before I began to find traces of this good man’s work. The first bird I saw was a sandpiper with one wing dragging on the ground. Near it was an unharmed companion which, even when I crowded it a little hard, showed no disposition to consult its own safety. “Well done,” said I. “‘There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.’”

A few steps more, and a larger bird stirred amid the short marsh herbage beyond the muddy flat--a black-bellied plover, or “beetle-head.” He also must be disabled, I thought, to be staying in such a place; and perhaps he was. At all events he would not fly, but edged about me in a half circle, with the wariest kind of motions (there was no sign of cover for him, the grass coming no more than to his knees), always with his big black eye fastened upon me, while my field-glass brought him near enough to show all the beauty of his spots.

He was well worth looking at (“What short work a gunner would make of him!” I kept repeating to myself), but I could not stay. Titlark voices were in the air. The birds must be plentiful on the grassy hills beyond; with them there might be Lapland longspurs; and I followed the road. This presently brought me to a bit of pebbly beach, along which I was carelessly walking when a lisping sound caused me to glance down at my feet. There on the edge of the water was a bunch of seven sandpipers; white-rumps, as I soon made out, though my first thought had been of something else. One of them hobbled upon one leg, but the others seemed thus far to have escaped injury. There they stood, huddled together as if on purpose for some pot-shooter’s convenience, while I drew them within arm’s length; pretty creatures, lovely in their foolish innocence; more or less nervous under my inspection, but holding their ground, each with its long black bill pointed against the breeze. “We who are about to die salute you,” they might have been saying.

Having admired them sufficiently, I passed on. Titlarks were beginning to abound, but where were the longspurs? A shot was fired some distance away, and as I looked in that direction two great blue herons went flying across the marsh, each with his legs behind him. It was good to see them still able to fly.

Then something--I have no idea what; no sight or sound that I was sensible of--told me to look at a bird beside the little pool of water I had just passed. It was another white-rumped sandpiper, all by himself, nearer to me even than those I had left a little way back. What a beauty he was!--his dark eye (which I could see winking), the lovely cinnamon-brown shading of his back and wings, setting off the marbled black and white, and his shyly confiding demeanor. I had scarcely stopped before he flew to my side of the pool and stood as near me as he could get--too near to be shot at. He too had been hit, or so it seemed. One foot was painful, though he could put it down, if necessary, and even take a limping step upon it. Happy bird! He had fared well!

Up the steep, grassy hill I started out of the road; but I soon halted again, this time to gaze into the sky. Straight above me were numbers of herring gulls, some far, far up under the fleecy cirrus clouds, others much lower. All were resting upon the air, sailing in broad circles. Round and round they went,--a kind of stationary motion, a spectator might have called it; but in a minute or two they had disappeared. They were progressing in circles, circle cutting circle. It is the sea-gull’s way of taking a long flight. I remember it of old, and have never seen anything to surpass it for gracefulness. If there were only words to describe such things! But language is a clumsy tool.