Chapter IV: Part 4

Here the path goes through an opening in a rude stone wall, which was tumbling down as long ago as you can remember. Beyond it, in your day, stood a dense pine wood, a darksome, solemn place, where you went quietly. Now, not a pine is left. A mere wilderness of hardwood scrub. The old “cart-path,” which at this point swerved to the left, has grown over till there is no following it. But the loss does not matter. You take a trail among the boulders, a trail familiar to you of old; the same that you took in winter, skates in hand, bound for Jason Halfbrook’s meadow. Many a merry hour you spent there, heedless of the cold. You could skate then, or thought you could. The backward circle, the “Dutch roll,” the “spread-eagle,” these and other wonders were in your repertory. They were feats to be proud of, and you made the most of them. Nor need you feel ashamed now at the recollection. When the Preacher said, “There is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his own works,” he was not thinking exclusively of an author and his books. You did well to be proud while you were able. It was pride, in part, that kept you warm. Now, if you stand beside a city skating-resort, you see young fellows performing feats that throw all your old-fashioned, countrified accomplishments into the shade. You look on, open-mouthed. Boys of to-day have better skates than you had. Perhaps they have better legs. One thing they do not have,--a better time.

This morning, however, you are not going to the Halfbrook meadow. There is no ice, or none that will bear a man’s weight; and perhaps you would not skate if there were. Do I take you to be too old? No, not that; but you are out of practice. I should hate to see you risking yourself well over on the outer edge, or attempting a sudden turnabout. And you agree with me, I imagine, for you quit the trail at the Town Path (the compositor will please allow the capitals--the path deserves them) and turn your steps northward. The path, I say, deserves a proper name. It is not strictly a highway, I am aware; if you were to stumble into a hole here, the town could not be held liable for damages; but it is a pretty ancient thoroughfare, nevertheless, a reasonably straight course through the woods by the long way of them. Generation after generation has traveled it. You are walking not only in your own footsteps, but in those of your ancestors, who must have gone this way many a time to speak and vote at town meeting. Some of the oldest of them are buried in this very wood, less than half a mile back; a resting-place such as you would like pretty well for yourself when the time comes.

You follow the path till it brings you near to a cliff. This is one of the places you had in your eye on setting out. This land is yours, and you have come to look at it.

A strange thing it is, an astonishing impertinence, that a man should assume to own a piece of the earth; himself no better than a wayfarer upon it; alighting for a moment only; coming he knows not whence, going he knows not whither. Yet convention allows the claim. Men have agreed to foster one another’s illusions in this regard, as in so many others. They knew, blindly, before any one had the wit to say it in so many words, that “life is the art of being well deceived.” And so they have made you owner of this acre or two of woodland. All the power of the State would be at your service, if necessary, in maintaining the title.

These tall pine trees are yours. You have sovereignty over them, to use a word that is just now sweet in the American mouth. You may do anything you like with them. They are older than you, I should guess, and in the order of nature they will long outlive you; for aught I know, also, it may be true, what Thoreau said (profanely, as some thought), that they will go to as high a heaven; but for the time being they have no rights that you are under the slightest obligation to consider. You may kill them to-morrow, and nobody will accuse you of murder. You may turn all their beauty to ashes, and it will be nobody’s business to remonstrate. The trees are yours.

I hope, notwithstanding, that you do not quite think so. I would rather believe that you look upon your so-called proprietorship as little more than a convenient legal fiction; of use, possibly, against human trespassers, but having no force as against the right of the trees to live a tree’s life and fulfill a tree’s end.

One of them, I perceive, is dead already. Like many a human being we have known, it had a poor start; no more than “half a chance,” as the saying goes. It struck root on a ledge, in a cleft of rock, and after a struggle of twenty or thirty years has found the conditions too hard for it. Its neighbors all appear to be doing well, with the exception of one that had its upper half blown away a few years ago by a disrespectful wind. The wind is an anarchist; it bloweth where it listeth, with small regard for human sovereignty.

Your land, to my eye, is of a piece with all the land round about; or it would be, only for its tall gray cliff. That is indeed a beauty, a true distinction; not so tall as it was forty or fifty years ago, of course, but still a brave and picturesque sight. I should like the illusion of owning a thing like that myself. And the brook just beyond, so narrow and so lively,--that, too, you may reasonably be proud of, though it is nothing but a wet-weather stream, coming from the hill and tumbling musically downward into Dyer’s Run, past one boulder and another, from late autumn till late spring, and then going dry. You have only pleasant memories of it, for you were oftenest here in the wet season. It has always been one of your singularities, I remember, to be less in the woods in summer than at other times.

Now you have crossed your own boundary; but who would know it? You yourself seem not to feel the transition. The wood is one; and really it is all yours, as it is any man’s who has eyes to enjoy it. Appreciation is ownership.

So you go on, pausing here and there to admire a lichen-covered boulder or stump (there is nothing prettier, look where you will), a cluster of ferns, a few sprouts of holly, a sprinkling of pyrola leaves (green with the greenness of all the summers of the world), or a bed of fruit-bespangled partridge-berry vine, till by and by you begin to feel the overshadowing, illusion-dispelling, soul-absorbing presence of the wood itself. The voice of eternity is speaking in the pine leaves. Your own identity slips away from you as you listen. You are part of the whole; nay, you are not so much a part of it as lost in it. The raindrop has fallen into the sea. For a moment you seem almost to divine a meaning in that bold, pantheistical, much neglected scripture, “That God may be all in all.”

For a moment only. Then a cord snaps, and you come back to your puny self and its limitations. You are looking at this and that, just as before. A chickadee chirps, and you answer him. You are you again, a man who used to be a boy. These are the old paths, and you are still in the body. You will prove it an hour hence at the dinner-table.

THE PROSPERITY OF A WALK

A bird lover’s daily rations during a New England winter are somewhat like Robinson Crusoe’s on his island in the wet season. “I eat a bunch of raisins for my breakfast,” he says, “a piece of goat’s flesh or of the turtle for my dinner, and two or three of the turtle’s eggs for my supper.” Such a fare was ample for health, perhaps; and probably every item of it was sufficiently appetizing, in itself considered; but after the first week or two it must have begun to smack of monotony. The castaway might have complained with some of old, “My soul loatheth this light bread.” He might have complained, I say; I do not remember that he did. What I do remember is that when, moved by pious feeling, he was on the point of thanking God for having brought him to that place, he suddenly restrained himself, or an influence from without restrained him. “I know not what it was,” he says, “but something shocked my mind at that thought, and I durst not speak the words. ‘How canst thou be such a hypocrite?’ said I.”

So I imagine that most bird-gazing men would hesitate to thank the Divine Providence for a northern winter, with its rigors, its inordinate length, and its destitution. They put up with it, make the best of it, grumble over it as politely as may be; but they are not so piously false-tongued as to profess that they like it.

By the last of December they have begun, not exactly to tire of chickadees and blue jays, but to sigh for something else, something to go with these, something by way of variety. “Where are the crossbills,” they ask, “and the redpoll linnets, and the pine grosbeaks?” All these circumpolar species are too uncertain by half, or, better say, by two thirds. Summering at the apex of the globe, so to speak, with Europe, Asia, and America equally at their elbow, they seem to flit southward along whatever meridian happens to take their fancy. Once in a while chance brings them our way, but only once in a while. Last winter we had redpolls and both kinds of crossbills, the white-wings for the first time in many years. They made a bright season. This winter, to the best of my knowledge, not one of these hyperborean species has sent so much as a deputation for our enlivenment.

And to make matters worse, even our regular local stand-bys seem to be less numerous than usual. Tree sparrows and snowbirds are both abnormally scarce, by my reckoning. As for the Canadian nuthatches, which helped us out so nobly a year ago, they are not only absent now, but were so throughout the fall. I have not seen nor heard one in Massachusetts since the middle of May, a most unusual--to the best of my recollection a quite unprecedented--state of things. I should like very much to know the explanation of the mystery.

The daily birds at present, as I find them, are the chickadee (which deserves to head all lists), the Carolina nuthatch, the downy woodpecker, the crow, and the jay. Less regularly, but pretty frequently (every day, if the walk is long enough), one meets with tree sparrows, goldfinches, snowbirds, brown creepers, flickers, and golden-crowned kinglets. Twice since December came in I have seen a shrike. Once I heard a single pine finch passing, invisible, far overhead. On the same day (December 2) I caught the fine staccato calls of a purple finch, without seeing the author of them. On the 2d and 3d three or four rusty blackbirds were unexpectedly in the neighborhood. Quail and grouse are never absent, of course, but I happen to have seen neither of them of late, though one day I heard the breezy quoiting of a quail, greatly to my pleasure. On the 14th I came upon a single robin in the woods, the first since November 21. He was perched in a leafless treetop, and was calling at the top of his voice, as if he had friends, or hoped that he had, somewhere within hearing. The sight was rather dispiriting than otherwise. He looked unhappy, in a cold wind, with the sky clouded. He had better have gone south before this time, I thought. Half an hour afterward I heard the quick, emphatic, answer-demanding challenge of a hairy woodpecker (as much louder and sharper than the downy’s as the bird is bigger), and on starting in his direction saw him take wing. Him I should never think of commiserating. He can look out for himself. These, with English sparrows (“the poor ye have always with you”), Old Squaws, herring gulls, and loons, make up my December list of twenty-two species. It might be worse, I suppose. I remember the remark of a friend of mine on a similar occasion. “Well,” said he, “the month is only half gone. You ought to see as many more before the end of it.” He was strong in arithmetic, but weak in ornithology. If bird lists could be made on his plan, we should have our hands full in the dullest season. Even in January, I would engage to find more than three hundred species within a mile of my doorstep.

As matters are, we must come back (we cannot do so too often, in winter especially) to the good and wholesome doctrine that pleasure is not in proportion to numbers or rarity. It depends upon the kind and degree of sympathy excited. One day, in one mood, you will derive more inspiration from a five-minute chat with a chickadee than on another day, in some mood of dryness, you would get from the sight of nightingales and birds of paradise. Worldlings and matter-of-fact men do not know it, but what quiet nature lovers (not scenery hunting tourists) go to nature in search of is not the excitement of novelty, but a refreshment of the sensibilities. You may call it comfort, consolation, tranquillity, peace of mind, a vision of truth, an uplifting of the heart, a stillness of the soul, a quickening of the imagination, what you will. It is of different shades, and so may be named in different words. It is theirs who have the secret, and the rest would not divine your meaning though your speech were transparency itself.

To my thinking, no one, not even Thoreau, or Jefferies, or Wordsworth, ever said a truer word about it than Keats dropped in one of his letters. Nothing in his poems is more deeply poetical. “The setting sun will always set me to rights,” he says, “or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in his existence and pick about the gravel.” There you have the soul of the matter. “I take part in his existence.” When you do that, the bird or the flower may be never so common or so humble. Your walk has prospered.

SIGNS OF SPRING

They are not imaginary, but visible and tangible. I have brought them home from the woods in my hands, and here they lie before me. I call them my books of the Minor Prophets.

This one is an alder branch. Along its whole length, spirally disposed at intervals of an inch or two, are fat, purplish leaf-buds, each on its stalk. As I look at them I can see, only four months away, the tender, richly green, newly unfolded, partly grown leaves. How daintily they are crinkled! And how prettily the edges are cut! It is like the work of fairy fingers. And what perfection of veining and texture! I have never heard any one praise them; but half the things that bring a price in florists’ shops are many degrees less beautiful.

Still more to the purpose, perhaps, more conspicuous, at all events, as well as nearer to maturity, and so more distinctly prophetic of spring, are the two kinds of flower-buds that adorn the ends of the twigs. These also are of a deep purplish tint, which in the case of the larger (staminate) catkins turns to a lovely green on the shaded under side. Flower-buds, I call them; but they are rather packages of bud-stuff wrapped tightly against the weather, cover overlapping cover. The best shingling of the most expert carpenter could not be more absolutely rain-proof. “Now do your worst,” says the alder. The mud freezes about its roots and the water about the base of its stem, but it keeps its banners flying. Why it should be at such pains to anticipate the season is more than I can tell. Perhaps it is none of my business. Enough that it is the alder’s way. There is no swamp in New England but has a shorter and brighter winter because of it.

This smooth, freckled, reddish-barked twig is black birch (or sweet birch), taken from a sapling, and therefore bearing no aments, which on adult trees are already things of grace and promise. I broke it (it invites breaking by its extreme fragility) for its leaf-buds, pointed, parti-colored,--brown and yellowish green,--tender-looking, but hardy enough to withstand all the rigors of New England frost. The broken end of the branch, where I get the spicy fragrance of the inner bark, brings back a sense of half-forgotten boyish pleasures. I used to nibble the bark in spring. A little dry it was, as I remember it, but it had the spicy taste of wintergreen (checkerberry), without the latter’s almost excessive pungency, or bite. Some of my country-bred readers must have been accustomed to eat the tender reddish young checkerberry leaves, and will understand perfectly what I mean by that word “bite.” I wonder if they had our curious Old Colony name for those vernal dainties. It sounds like cannibalism, but we gathered them and ate them in all innocence (the taste is on my tongue now) as “youngsters.” No doubt the tree gets its name, “sweet birch,” from this savoriness of its green inner bark, rather than from the pedagogic employment of its branches in schoolrooms as a means of promoting the sweet uses of adversity.

Now I take up another freckled, easily broken twig, with noticeably short branchlets, some of them less than an inch in length. Every one, even the shortest, is set with brown globular buds of the size of pin-heads. Toward the tip the main stem also bears clusters of such tiny spheres. If you do not know the branch by sight, I must ask you to smell or taste the bark. “Sassafras?” No, though the guess is not surprising. It is spice-bush. The buds are flower-buds. The shrub is one of our very early bloomers, and makes its preparations accordingly. While flowers are still scarce enough to attract universal attention, it is thickly covered with sessile or almost sessile yellow rosettes, till it looks for all the world like the early-flowering cornel (_Cornus Mas_), which blossoms about the same time in gardens. Seeing these spice-bush buds, though January is still young, I can almost see May-day; and when I snap the brittle stem and sniff the fresh wood, I can almost believe that I have snapped off half a century from my life. What a good and wholesome smell it is! Among the best of nature’s own.

Here is a poplar twig, with well-developed, shapely buds. I pull off the outer coverings and lay bare a mass of woolly fibres, fine and soft, within which the tender blossoms lie in germ. And next is a willow stem. Already, though winter is no more than a fortnight old, the “pussy” has begun to push off its dark coverlid, as if it were in haste to be up and feel the sun. Yes, spring will soon be here, and the willow proposes not to be caught napping.

These long, slender, cinnamon-colored, silky buds, like shoemakers’ awls for shape, are from a beech tree. The package is done up so tightly and skillfully that my clumsy human fingers cannot undo it without tearing it in pieces. Layer after layer I remove, taking all pains, and here at the heart is the softest of vegetable silk. How did the wood learn to secrete such delicacies, and to wrap them with such miraculous security? Why could it not wait till spring, and save the need of all this caution? I do not know. How should I? But I am glad of every such vernal prophecy, as well as of every such proof of vegetable intelligence. It would be strange if a beech tree could not do some things better than you and I can. Every dog knows his own trick.

Next comes a dry, homely, crooked, blackish, dead-looking twig, the slender divisions of which are tipped with short clusters of very fine purplish buds, rich in color, but so small as readily to escape notice. This I broke from a bush in a swampy place. It is _Leucothoë_, a plant of special interest to me for personal reasons. Year after year, as I turned the leaves of Gray’s Manual on one errand and another, I read this romantic-sounding Greek name, and wondered what kind of plant it stood for. Then, during a May visit to the mountains of North Carolina, I came upon a shrub growing mile after mile along roadsides and brooksides, loaded down, literally, with enormous crops of sickishly sweet, white flower-clusters. At first I took it for some species of _Andromeda_, but on bringing it to book found it to be Leucothoë. I was delighted to see it. It is a satisfaction to have a familiar name begin to mean something. Finally, a year or two later, passing in winter through a bit of swamp where I had been accustomed to wander as a child, with no thought of finding anything new (as if there were not something new everywhere), I stopped before a bush bearing purple buds and clusters of dry capsules. The capsules might have been those of Andromeda, for aught I should have noticed, but the buds had a novel appearance and told a different story. Again I betook myself to the Manual, and lo! this bush, growing in the swamp that I should have thought I knew better than any other in the world, turned out to be another species--our only northern one--of Leucothoë. So I might have fitted name and thing together long ago, if I had kept my eyes open. As Hamlet said, “There’s the rub.” Keeping one’s eyes open isn’t half so easy as it sounds. Really, the bush is one that nobody except a botanist ever sees (which is the reason, doubtless, why it has no vernacular name); or if here and there a man does see it, it is sure to be in flowering time (in middle June), when he passes it by without a second glance as “high-bush blueberry.” I am pleased to have it growing on my present beat, and to give it a place here in my collection of Minor Prophets.

How little the two (Leucothoë and blueberry) resemble each other at this time of the year may be seen by comparing the stem I have been talking about with the one lying next to it--a short twig, every branchlet of which ends in a very bright, extremely handsome (if one stops to regard it) pinkish globe. This is the high-bush blueberry in its best winter estate. Every bud is like a jewel.

Only one branch remains to be spoken of, for I took but a small handful: a dark-green--blackish-green--tarnished stem, the two branches of which bear each a terminal bud of the size of a pea. This specimen you will know at once by its odor, if you were ever happy enough to dig sassafras roots, or to eat sassafras lozenges, such as used to come--perhaps they do still--rolled up in paper, as bankers roll up coins. “Sassafras lossengers,” we called them, and the shopkeeper (who is living yet, and still “tending store” at ninety-odd) seemed never in doubt as to what we meant. Each kind of lozenge, peppermint, cayenne, checkerberry, and the rest, came always in paper of a certain color. Can I be wrong in my recollection of the sassafras tint? I would soon find out if I could go into the old store. I would lay five cents upon the counter (the price used to be less than that, but it may have gone up since my last purchase), and say, “A roll of sassafras lossengers.” And I miss my guess, or the wrapper would be yellow.[3]

OLD COLONY BERRY PASTURES

The last holiday of the century found me in the place where I was born, with weather made on purpose for out-of-door pleasures--warm, bright, and still. A sudden inspiration took me. I would go to see the old berry pastures--not all of them (the forenoon would hardly be long enough for that), but two or three of the nearest, on opposite sides of the same back road. It would be a kind of second boyhood.

As I traveled the road itself, past two or three houses that were not there in the old time, two at least of the older wayside trees greeted me with the season’s compliments. Or possibly it was I that greeted them. In this kind of intercourse, it is hard to tell speaker from hearer. We greeted each other, let us say, though they are the older, and by good rights should have spoken first. They have held their own exceedingly well, far better than the clerk who is writing about them, and for anything that appears, bid fair to be hale and hearty at the next century-mark.

One is a pear tree; none of your modern, high-bred, superfine, French-named dwarfs, rather shrubs than trees, twenty of which may grow, without crowding, in a scanty back garden, but a burly, black-barked, stubby-branched, round-topped giant. It looks to-day exactly as it did when my boyish legs first took me by it. In these many years it has borne thousands of bushels of pears, all of which must have served some use, I suppose, in the grand economy of things, though I have no idea what. No man, woman, or child, I am reasonably sure, ever had the hardihood to eat one. And still the tree holds up its head and wears a brave, unashamed, undiscourageable look. Long may it stand in its corner, a relic and remembrancer of Puritanic times.

The other is an apple tree, one of those beneficent creations, good Samaritans among fruit trees, that bear a toothsome, early-ripening crop, and spill a generous portion of it on the roadward side of the wall. I remember it perfectly--the fruit, I mean--color, shape, and flavor. Every year I see apples of the same name in the market, but somehow I can never buy any that look or taste half so good as those that I used in lucky moments to find here, waiting for me, in the roadside grass.

Those were Old Testament times in New England. Gleanings belonged to “the poor and the stranger.” Who could dispute our title? We believed in special providences; and edible windfalls on the nigh side of the fence were among the chiefest of them. Schoolboys of the present day, I take for granted, are brought up under a different code. They would go past such temptations with their hands in their pockets and without a squint sideways. They apprehend no difference between “picking up” an apple and stealing one. Such is the evolution of morality. The day of the gleaner is past. Naomi and Ruth have become mythical personages, as much so as Romulus and Remus.

I was going first to Harvey White’s pasture (not to dwell unsafely upon confessions that begin to seem like thin ice), and by and by came to the wood-path leading to it. How perfectly I remembered the place: this speedy, uphill curve to the left, rounding the hill; this dense bunch of low-branched evergreens a little farther on, under which, with our pails full (or half full--we could not work miracles, though we lived under the Mosaic economy), we used to creep for rest and shade while trudging homeward on blazing summer noons. But the path was surprisingly overgrown. At short intervals thorny smilax vines (cat-briers) were sprawling over the very middle of it, and had to be edged through cautiously. The appearance of things grew less and less familiar. I must be on the right track, but surely I had gone far enough. The broad clearing should be close at hand. I went on and on. Yes, here was the old stone wall between Harvey White’s pasture and Pine-tree pasture. But the pastures themselves? They were not here. Then it came over me, with all the force and suddenness of a direct revelation, that forty years is a long time. In less time than that a pasture may become a forest. I pushed about a little, in one direction and another, and finding nothing but woods, returned to the path and retraced my steps. I might as well try to find my own lost youth as those well-remembered huckleberry patches.

Even in that far-away time--so the recollection comes to me now--the place was not strictly a pasture. It had been such, no doubt, and Harvey White, whoever he was, had owned it. Probably his cattle had once been pastured there. Now he owned no land, being nothing but a clod himself, and this broad clearing would not have kept a single cow from starvation. The wilderness was claiming its own again. Instead of the grass had come up the huckleberry bushes, the New England heather. These, with a sprinkling of blackberry vines, barberry bushes, and savins, filled the place from end to end. We knew them all. In the season we gathered huckleberries, blackberries, and barberries (the last made what some gastronomic cobbler called felicitously “shoe-peg sauce”), while the young cone-shaped cedars were of use as landmarks. We could leave a pail or basket in the shelter of one, and with good luck have no great difficulty in finding it again.

That was forty years ago. Now, the huckleberry bushes have followed the grass. Massachusetts land belongs to the woods. Clear it never so thoroughly, and with half a chance the trees will have it back again. If you will climb any Massachusetts hill, not directly upon the seashore,--and I am not certain that even that exception need be made,--you will see the truth of this at once. Something like it, I remember, was the first thing I thought of when I stood first on Mount Wachusett. There lay the whole State, so to speak, outspread below; and it was all a forest.

In this very Old Colony town many acres that were once excellent pasturage are now so perfectly reconverted to woodland that no ordinary walker over them would suspect that they had ever been anything else. If this has happened within twenty miles of Boston, within half the lifetime of a man, there seems to be no great danger that the State will ever be deforested; and those of us who love wild things, and look upon civilization as a mixed good, may be cheered accordingly.

For to-day, however, I had something else in my eye; and once back in the road I started for the entrance to what we children knew familiarly as “Millstone”--that is to say, Millstone Pasture; a large, irregular clearing, or half clearing, distinguished by the presence of two broad flat boulders, lying one upon the other. This was among the best of our foraging grounds; a boy’s wild orchard--orchard and garden in one. Here we gathered all the berries before named, and besides them checkerberries (boxberries), dangleberries, and grapes.

The path leading into it was still open, but there was no need to go far to discover that here, as in Harvey White’s, the wood had got the upper hand of everything else. “I should starve here,” I said to myself, “at the very height of the berry season.” Nothing looked natural--nothing but the superimposed boulders. They had suffered no change, or none except an inevitable “subjective” dwindling. As for the old apple orchard near them (in which I shot my last bird upwards of twenty years ago), it was more like a cedar grove, although by searching for them one could still discover a few stumps and ruins of what had once been apple trees. “Perish your civilization!” Mother Nature seemed to be saying. “Give me a few years, and I will undo the whole of it.” I was half glad to hear her. The planter of the orchard was dead long ago, and his work had followed him.

But the holly trees! They are Nature’s own children. I would have a look at them, remembering perfectly, I thought, the exact spot where a pretty bunch used to grow. And I found them, after a protracted search--but no longer a pretty clump. One tree was perhaps fifteen feet high--a beanpole, which still put forth at the very top a few branchlets, one or two feet in length, just to prove itself alive. The rest of the bunch had been cut down to the ground. All that remained was a few suckers, each with a spray of green leaves. The sight was pitiful. Poor trees! They were surrounded by a dense wood, instead of standing in the open, as they had done in my day. And between the competition of the pines and the knives and axes of collectors of Christmas greenery, they were nigh to extermination. By and by, however, before many years, the pines will fall under the axe. Then, I dare say, the old holly roots will have their turn again. Then, too, the checkerberry vines will enjoy a few years of fruitfulness. So the wheel of fortune goes round, all the world over, in the wood no less than in the city. There is no scotching it. As well try to scotch the earth itself. All things are at seesaw.

“They say the lion and the lizard keep
The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep;
And Bahrám, that great hunter--the wild ass
Stamps o’er his head, but cannot break his sleep.”

If such things have happened, if Nineveh and Babylon flourished and came to naught, why wonder at the decline and fall of Old Colony berry pastures?

SQUIRRELS, FOXES, AND OTHERS

“Do you know where there are any flying squirrels?” I asked a friend, two or three weeks ago. My friend, I should mention, is a farmer, living a mile or two away from the village, and, being much out-of-doors with his eyes open, has sometimes good things to show me. With all the rest, he has more than once taken me to a flying squirrel’s tree and given me a chance to see the creature “fly.”

This peculiar member of the squirrel family, as all readers may be presumed to know, is nocturnal in its habits, and for that reason is seldom seen by ordinary strollers. Once my friend, who was just then at work in the woods, found a hollow tree in which one was living, and we visited the spot together. I posted myself conveniently, and he went up to the tree and hammered upon it with his axe. Out peeped the squirrel at a height of perhaps twenty feet, and as the blows continued it “took wing” and came to the ground safely, and more or less gracefully, alighting at the foot of another tree some distance away. At all other times I have seen the flight from outside nests, as they may be called--bulky aggregations of leaves and twigs placed in the bare tops of moderately tall, slender trees, preferably gray-birches, and mostly in swampy woods.

On the present occasion my friend told me that he knew of no nests now in use, but that if I would come to his house the next morning he would go with me in search of some. I called for him at the hour appointed. Squirrels or no squirrels, it is always worth while to take a walk in good company.

He led me along the highway for a quarter of a mile, and then struck into a wood-road, which presently brought us into a swampy forest, with here and there a bit of pond, which we must go out of our way to cross on the ice (a light snow had covered it within twenty-four hours), on the lookout for fox tracks and what not. We were headed for the “city-house lot,” he told me.

“The city-house lot,” said I; “what is that?”

“Why, there used to be two or three houses over in this direction. The largest of them, the one that stood the longest, was known as the city-house. More than fifty years ago, before my father came here to live, it was moved to a place on the main road. You must remember it. It was pulled down, or fell to pieces, within six or eight years.”

I did remember it, but had never known its name or its history. The surprising thing about the story was the fact that there was no indication of a road hereabout, nor any sign that there had ever been one; and all the while we were plunging deeper and deeper into the woods, now following a foot-path, now leaving it for a short cut among the trees. By and by we came to a drier spot, and an old cellar-hole. This was not the city-house cellar, however, but that of some smaller house. About it were evidences of a former clearing, though a casual observer would scarcely have noticed them. Tufts of beard-grass stood above the snow,--“Indian grass,” my guide called it,--and the remains of an ancient stone wall still marked the line, if one might guess, where the grazing-land had been divided from the tillage. It was a farm in ruins.

Soon we came to a larger cellar-hole, of which, as of the smaller one, bushes and trees had long ago taken possession. Here had stood the city house, a “frame” structure (whence its name, probably), a famous affair in its day, the pride of its owner’s heart. It was one of five or six houses, if I understood my informant correctly, that had once been scattered over this part of the town of Weston (or what is at present the town of Weston) within a radius of a mile or so. Of them all not a trace remains now but so many half-filled cellars.

I thought of something I had been saying lately about the manner in which the forest reclaims Massachusetts land as soon as its human possessors let go their hold upon it. Now it was suggested to me that if a man is ambitious to do something that will last, he had better not set up a house or a monument, but dig a hole in the ground. Humility helps to permanence. The lower you get, the less danger of falling. Nature is slower to fill up than to pull down, though she will do either with all thoroughness, give her time enough. To her a man’s life is but a clock’s tick, and all his constructions are but child’s play in the sand. A trite bit of moralizing? Well, perhaps it is; but it sounded anything but trite, as the old cellar-hole spoke it to me. A word is like a bullet: its force is in the power behind it.

Not far beyond this point we found ourselves in a gray-birch swamp. Here, if anywhere, should be the nests we were in search of. And soon we began to see them, one here, another there. We followed the same course with them all; my companion shook or jarred the tree, while I stood off and watched for the squirrels. And the result was alike in all cases. Every nest was empty. We tried at least a score, and had our labor for our pains. “There _are_ no flying squirrels this year,” my companion kept saying. Perhaps they had migrated. With one or two exceptions, indeed, the nests could be set down in advance--from their color and evident dilapidation--as being at least a year old.

Once we started a rabbit, and here and there a few chickadees accosted us. Once, I think, we heard the voice of a golden-crowned kinglet. For the rest, the woods seemed to be deserted, and at the end of our long détour we came back to the road half a mile above the point at which we had left it.

And still the world is not depopulated, even in winter, nor are all the pretty wild animals asleep. The snakes are, to be sure, and the frogs (though hylas were peeping late in December), and the chipmunks and the woodchucks; but there is abundant life stirring, nevertheless.

Yesterday I called on my friend again, and together we walked up the road--a back-country thoroughfare. This time, also, a light snow had just fallen, and my companion, better informed than I in such matters, began to discuss footprints with me.

“You know this one?” he asked.

“Oh, yes; a rabbit.”

“And this one?”

“A fox,” said I, doubtfully.

“Yes, indeed. See the shape and size of the foot. Yes, that’s a fox.”

“And this one?”

“Oh, that’s a kitty.” (A cat, he meant to say.) “Strange how many cats are prowling about this country at night,” he continued. “I have caught two this season, and C---- has caught two.”

“Do you skin them?”

“Yes,” with a laugh.

Here were red-squirrel tracks, and here a big dog’s, and here again a fox’s. At another point a bevy of quail had crossed the road. “One, two, three,” my farmer began to count. “Yes; there were twelve.” I had remarked, just before, that I hadn’t seen a quail for I didn’t know how long. “And look here,” he said, as we approached the farm on our return. He led the way to a diminutive chicken-coop sitting by itself in the orchard. A single hen, which had been ailing, was confined in it, he said. A fox had gone round and round it in the night, and once had stopped to scratch at the back side of it.

“He knew what was in there,” said I. The farmer laughed.

“Oh, he is an old fellow,” he answered. “I have a trap set for him just where he used to pass. Now he crosses the field, but he goes round that spot! I see his tracks. They say it is easy to trap foxes. Perhaps it is; but it isn’t for me.”

Yet he has shown me--not this year--more than one handsome skin.

Once, too, he showed me the fox himself. Hounds were baying in the distance as I came to the house on my Sunday morning walk, and we spoke of their probable course. He thought it likely that they would cross a certain field, and taking a by-road that would carry us within sight of it, we kept our eyes out till the dogs seemed to have diverged in the wrong direction. Then I was walking carelessly along, talking as usual (a bad habit of mine), when my companion seized me by both shoulders and swung me sharply about. “Look at that!” he said. And there stood the fox, five or ten rods away, facing us squarely. He had come up a little rise of ground, and had stopped as he saw us. But for my friend’s muscular assistance, I should have missed him, near as he was, for in one second he was gone; and though we scaled the wall instantly and ran up the slope, we got no further sight of him.

Yes, if you are a discouraged, winter-killed nature lover, who has begun to think that Massachusetts woods--woods within sight of the State House dome--are pretty much devoid of wild life, go out after a light snowfall and read the natural history record of a single night. We shall not be without woods, nor will the woods be without inhabitants, for a good while yet.

WINTER AS IT WAS

With the wind howling from the northwest, and the mercury crouching below the zero mark, it seems a good time to sit in the house and think of winter as it used to be. What is the advantage of growing old, if one cannot find an hour now and then for the pleasures of memory?

The year’s end is for the young. Such is the order of the world, the universal paradox. Opposite seeks opposite. And _we_ were young once,--a good while ago,--and for us, also, winter was a bright and busy season, its days all too short and too few. I speak of “week-days,” be it understood. As for winter Sundays, in an unwarmed meeting-house (though the sermon might be like the breath of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace), we should have been paragons of early piety, beings too good to live, if we had wished the hours longer. Let their miseries be forgotten.

On week-days, once out of school, we wasted no time. We knew where we were going, and we went on the run. We were boys, not men. Some of us, at least, were not yet infected with the idea that we ever should be men. We aspired neither to men’s work nor to men’s pleasures. We aimed not at self-improvement. We thought not of getting rich. We might recite “Excelsior” in the schoolroom, but it did us no harm; our innocence was incorruptible. Two things we did: we skated, and we slid down-hill. There was always either snow or ice. The present demoralization of the seasons had not yet begun. Winter was winter. Snowdrifts were over your head, and ice was three feet thick. And zero--for boys who slept in attics to which no particle of artificial heat ever penetrated, zero was something like summer. Young America was tough in those days.

I recall at this moment the bitterly cold day when one of our number skated into an airhole on Whitman’s Pond. It was during the noon recess. His home was a mile or more east of the pond, and the schoolhouse was at least a mile west of the pond. He sank into the water up to his chin, and saved himself with difficulty, the airhole luckily being small and the ice firm about the edges. What would a twentieth-century boy do under such circumstances? I can only guess. But I know what Charles H. did. He came back to the schoolhouse first, to make his apologies to the master; I can see him now, as he came in smiling, looking just a little foolish; then he ran home--three miles, perhaps--to change his clothing. And he is living still. Oh, yes, we were tough,--or we died young.

That was while we were in the high school, when I was perhaps eleven or twelve years old. But my liveliest recollections of winter antedate that period by several years. Then sliding down-hill was our dearest excitement. Ours was “no great of a hill,” to use a form of speech common among us; I smile now as I go past it; but it could not have suited us better if it had been made on purpose; and no half holiday or moonlight evening was long enough to exhaust our enjoyment of the exercise--walking up and sliding down, walking up and sliding down. “Monotonous,” do I hear some one say? It was monotony such as would have ended too soon though it had lasted forever. If I had a thousand dollars to spend in an afternoon’s sport now, I should not know how to get half as much exhilaration out of it as two hours on that snow-covered slope afforded. There is something in a boy’s spirits that a man’s money can never buy, nor a man’s will bring back to him.

As years passed, we ventured farther from home to a steeper and longer declivity. Glorious hours we spent there, every boy riding his own sled after his own fashion. Boys who _were_ boys rode “side-saddle” or “belly-bump;” but here and there a timid soul, or one who considered the toes of his boots, condescended to an upright position, feet foremost, like a girl--in the language of the polite people, _sur son séant_.

Later still came the day of the double-runner, when we slid down-hill gregariously, as it were, or, if you will, in chorus (the word is justified), every boy’s arms clinging to the boy in front of him. Older fellows now took a hand with us, and we resorted to the highway. With the icy track at its smoothest, we went the longer half of a mile, and had a mile and a half to walk back, the “going” being slippery enough to double the return distance.

At this time it was that there came a passing rage (such as communities are suddenly taken with, now and then, for a certain amusement--golf, croquet, or what not) for coasting in a huge pung. Grown people, men and women, filled it, while one man sat on a hand-sled between the thills and guided its course. Near the foot of the hill the road took a pretty sharp turn, with a stone wall on the awkward side of the way; but the excitement more than paid for the risk, and by sheer good luck a thaw intervened before anybody was killed.

There was quiet amusement in the neighborhood, I remember, because Mrs. C., who was distressingly timid about riding behind a horse (she could never be induced to get into a carriage unless the animal were “old as Time and slow as cold molasses”), saw no danger in this automobile on runners, which traveled at the rate of a mile a minute, more or less, with nothing between its occupants and sudden death except the strength and skill of the amateur steersman, who must keep his own seat and steer the heavy load behind him. So it is. A man goes into battle with a cheer, but turns pale at finding himself number thirteen at the dinner-table.

Sliding down-hill was such sport as no language can begin to describe; but skating was unspeakably better. Those first skates! I wish I had them still, though I would show them with caution, lest the irreverent should laugh. They would be a spectacle. How voluminously the irons curled up in front! And how gracefully as well! A piece of true artistry. And how comfortably they were cut off short behind, so that you could stop “in short metre,” no matter what speed you had on, by digging your heels into the ice. And what a complicated harness of straps was required to keep them in place. Those straps had much to answer for in the way of cold feet, to say nothing of the passion we were thrown into when one of them broke; and we a mile or two from home, with the ice perfection--“a perfect glare”--and the fun at its height. This was before the day of “rockers,” of which I had a pair later,--and a proud boy I was. Pretty treacherous we found them to start with, or rather to stop with; but for better or worse we got the hang of their peculiarities before our skulls were irreparably broken.

Skating then was like whist-playing now,--an endless study. You thought you were fairly good at it till a new boy came along and showed you tricks such as you had never dreamed of; just as you thought, perhaps, that you could play whist till you sat opposite a man who asked, in a tone between bewilderment and asperity, why on earth you led him a heart at a certain critical stage, or why in the name of common sense you didn’t know that the ten of clubs was on your left. Art is long. It was true then, as it is now. But what matter? We skated for fun, as we did everything else (out of school), except to shovel paths and saw wood. Those things were work. And work was longer even than art. Work was never done. So it seemed. And how bleak and comfortless the weather was while we were doing it! A cruel world, and no mistake. But half an hour afterward, on the hillside or the pond, the breeze was just balmy, and life--there was no time to think how good we found it. No doubt it is true, as the poet said,--

“There’s something in a flying horse,
There’s something in a huge balloon;”

but there’s more, a thousand times over, in being a boy.

“DOWN AT THE STORE”

I talked, a week ago, as if, in my time as a boy, we lived out-of-doors every day, and all day long, regardless of everything that winter could do to hinder us. That was an exaggeration. Now and then there came a time when the weather shook itself loose, as it were, and bore down upon us with banners flying. Then the strong man bowed himself, and even the playful boy took to his burrow. The pond might be smooth as glass, but he did not skate; the hill-track might be in prime condition, but he did not slide. He sang low, and waited for a change.