Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

The hill itself is worth noting. Here the glaciers which some thousands of years ago planed off the rougher surface of eastern New England dropped their chips in a vast terminal moraine of sand and gravel, whose northern declivity is so steep that you may throw a stone from its rim to the top of a pine growing on the level, eighty or ninety feet below. I know many terminal moraines in New England; but I know no other at once so high and so abrupt in its declivity. A few rods back from its summit the trolley car clangs incessantly, and the speed-mad automobilist tears hooting through.

Along the crest, in spite of this, sleep peacefully the forefathers of the hamlet. I like to feel that they neither note nor heed the uproar of the highway; that they now and then cock a pleased ear to the rumble of a passing hay-cart or the jog of a farmer’s horse, but that the bedlam of modern hurry whangs by them unperceived. Rather they turn their faces to the sough of the summer winds in the century-old pines which shade the steep and sleep on, happy in the benediction that descends from the spreading branches. Wonderful pines, these, so shading the whole declivity that not more than a dapple of sunlight has touched the ground beneath them for a century.

Here the hepatica finds the cool, dry seclusion that it loves and lifts shy blue eyes to you while yet the winter ice nestles beside it among the pine roots. Here while the July sun distills pitchy aroma from the great trees the partridge berry carpets favored spots with the rich green of its little round leaves,--leaves no bigger than the pink nail of your sweetheart’s little finger, a green figured with the scarlet of last year’s berries and the white of its wee starry twin flowers. Here, too, in July the pyrola lifts its spike of bells like a woodland lily-of-the-valley and the pipsissewa shows its waxy flowers to the questing bee.

A butterfly, especially a large butterfly, rarely bothers with these low-growing herbs, though each has its own delicious fragrance--and a butterfly’s scent is keen. So my black white admiral alternately danced and soared on down through the richly perfumed areas of the wood while I plunged eagerly after, glissading the needle-carpeted slope, making station from trunk to trunk lest a too headlong flight plunge me to oblivion in what I knew was at the foot of the hill.

Without, the perfervid July sun beat upon the landscape till the dust of its concussion rose in a blue haze that loomed the nearby hills into misty mountain tops and glamoured the whole world with tropical illusion. To our hard-cornered, clear-cut New England it is the midsummer which brings the atmosphere of romance. The swoon of Arabian Nights is upon the landscape, and it is through such heat and through such misty evasion that the Caliph of Bagdad was accustomed to set forth incognito to meet strange adventures.

At the foot of the hill, almost at the borderland which separates this under-pine world from another far different, the resinous air is shut in like the genie in the bottle. You feel the oppression of its restraint and wonder, if like the fisherman you might uncork it, if it would loom aloft in a dense cloud that would speak to you in a mighty voice. Here my butterfly paused for the first time and lighted upon the trunk of a pine, head high.

Quietly I drew near. His wings were rising and falling in rhythmic unconscious motion that was tremulous with what seemed eagerness. One of them, I noted, had a little triangular bit snipped out of it with a clean cut. Some insect-eating bird had snapped at him not long before, and he had come within a half-inch of death. Yet this did not trouble him; very likely he never knew it. It was something else which absorbed him so that he took no notice of my close approach. And now I could see that his proboscis was uncoiled and apparently he was eating rapidly. Now the proboscis of any butterfly is simply a double-barrelled tube through which he sucks honey or other moist nutriment. That a _Basilarchia astyanax_, or any other butterfly for that matter, should be able to draw nourishment from the dry, rough bark of a pine-tree was sufficient cause for astonishment, and I drew eagerly nearer to see what he was getting.

It was a humid day and I was thirsty myself. What woodland brew could be on tap here? In Ireland it used to be true that the Leprechauns, the little men of the hedge, could make good beer of heath, and if you could only catch and hold one he would tell you how. Here might be a similar chance. My nose was within six inches of the white admiral’s now and my eyes were bulging out with surprise as much as his do naturally, for behold he had what butterfly never had before,--a little red tongue on the tip of his proboscis, and with it he was nervously licking the bark in its roughest places as hard as he could.

I might have seen more had not my foot slipped on the glossy pine needles, and while I clutched the trunk of the pine to save myself the butterfly danced away, thinking, I dare say, that I was an abnormally developed wood peewee and had just missed getting him for luncheon. Evidently the south wind had blown up from the gulf more than an Arabian Night’s atmosphere; it had sent along portions of the fauna as well. A butterfly with a tongue on the end of his proboscis belongs in the land where rocs pick up elephants in their talons and soar away with them!

Eagerly I sought to follow my _Basilarchia astyanax_ and learn more, but it was not so easy. To follow his flight without care as to the setting of my feet might well be to reach a country undiscovered indeed, for from the very bottom of the northern declivity of the terminal moraine well the springs of the fountain head, and out across these he lightly floated, toward the sphagnum-bottom pasture swamp beyond.

I suppose it is well settled, geologically, that a river of pure water flows from some distant northern point, Labrador perhaps, under the eastern portion of Massachusetts. Driven wells find this water almost everywhere. In places it rises to the surface in clear ponds which have no apparent inlet, and from which little water flows, but which are clear and sparkling at a good level the year round. Houghton’s Pond, in the Blue Hill Reservation, is one of these nearest Boston. Walden Pond is another, and there are plenty more.

In other places still the water boils out of springs through quicksands of unknown depths, flowing in clear streams through surrounding swamps where trees have made firm ground alternating with bits of quaking bog and open pools, where a misstep will drop you over your head in a clinging mud that never gives up what it once gets.

Such is the fountain head, and you would know you were coming to it of a hot day even were your eyes shut, for the ice-cold water makes its own atmosphere. We read of bodies of ice that have lasted since the glacial age buried under these terminal moraines whence well such cooling springs; I do not know about the ice, but I can testify to the cold, sparkling water and the grateful atmosphere which it disseminates on these our Arabian days. Yet you must mark well your going. Just under the slope the water boils up through fine sand that dances in the up current. A few feet farther down it wells more silently, and the decayed vegetation of centuries has made a mud bank over the quicksand. You may sink to the knee here and find bottom. A few steps farther on you may drive a twenty-foot pole down through mud and sand and find nothing to obstruct it.

Yet Nature always provides the remedy. Mosses and swamp grass have grown on the surface of this liquid mud and alders and swamp maple have rooted in these and encouraged wild rose and elder and many another shrub, till their intertwined roots have formed a surface which is in part safe to the foot. And here is a world of itself in this hidden pasture corner, for here linger the trout and the water-cress, and many another shy woodland thing, driven to bay by the encroachments of surrounding civilization.

In early July you will find the water-cress in bloom in the open pools, surrounded by quaking bog and alder shade. Toward this my butterfly had gone, and I followed, balancing warily from clump to clump in the grateful coolness, testing each foothold lest it drop me into the clinging depths below whence nothing but a derrick might lift me. The arethusa, daintiest of orchids, nodded its pink head at me from the quaking sphagnum, daintily bowing me on, but I paused a moment.

In the water right between my feet was a spotted turtle that had just captured an appetizing, but by no means dainty morsel. This was a terrapin-like bug that was more than a mouthful. His body, indeed, was already out of sight, but claw-like legs protruded from both sides of that isosceles triangle which a turtle’s mouth makes when it is closed, and waved a frantic farewell to the passing under-water world. The turtle was a long time in masticating his terrapin, but it was a happy time. His whole body blinked contentedly, and he waved his forelegs with a caressing out-push, a motion exactly like that of a child at the breast. Then he wagged his head solemnly from side to side as a wise turtle might who feels that such good lunches are put up by fate only for the knowing ones of this watery world, and pushed himself half way under the roots of a tussock for a nap. Soon the nether half circle of his shell was motionless, with his hind legs drawn up within. Only his little spike tail protruded, waving to a wee passing trout the news that the millennium was at hand, and the turtle and the bug-terrapin had lain down together in peace and prosperity, with the bug-terrapin inside.

I looked up for the butterfly. He was nowhere to be seen. Yet my trip was to be worth while, for right in front of me was an open pool surrounded by a quaking bog, a pool twenty feet across packed almost solid with the white panicled heads of water-cress blooms in which swarmed a myriad of bees. Their drone was like that at the front door of a hive on a hot July day, yet it was not a monotone as that is. It was rather like a grand chorus singing many parts, for these were all wildwood bees of a dozen varieties. There was not a hive tender among them.

Lifting my admiring gaze from the pool with its white panicles and swarming bees I saw further beauty beyond. On firmer ground nestling lovingly against an old chestnut post was a great, glorious spike of habenaria, the purple-fringed orchis. It is not uncommon, the habenaria, in peaty meadows, but no man sees it for the first time in the season without a great glow of delight, and I hastened over to give it nearer greeting. Just as I reached it the butterfly came dancing up, but not to sip the sweets of the wonderful great orchid. Instead he lighted, right under my nose, on the roughest part of the old fence post and began to lick this as he had the pine trunk.

I watched him again, hearing subconsciously the voice of a great crested flycatcher over on a nearby tree, crying “Grief,” “Grief.” A moment and the little red tongue which I had noted before seemed to catch on the roughest part of the old fence post, and with a sudden scrape the Basilarchia scraped it off. I looked in amaze, for now I saw what it was. From the honey heart of some flower a little red worm had become attached to the tip of the butterfly’s proboscis, and all this licking of rough surfaces had been merely to get rid of him.

Up into the bright sunshine danced my black white admiral. There was the swish of wings, the snip-snip of a bird’s beak, and it was all over. The cry of the great crested flycatcher had been a prophecy indeed, and the white admiral had danced blithely out of existence.

But the equatorial haze had more tropical enchantment in store, for the midday sun was suddenly wiped out by an ominous figure. Some one had uncorked that bottle which held the heat genie confined, and he was looming from a black nimbus below into white piles of cumulus at the zenith. His eyes flashed red lightnings and he spoke in thunder tones. Somewhere over yonder I heard the great crested flycatcher crying “Grief,” “Grief,” again. It might be my turn next, and I patted the great orchid good-by and tiptoed through the sphagnum and climbed the hill again. It had been a brief but pleasant trip. A butterfly that found a tongue and a turtle that ate terrapin with a happy smile may belong with the genie in the Arabian Nights, or with Alice in Wonderland, or both. I know that I found them at the fountain head, under the grove of immemorial pines, below the brow of the terminal moraine where sleep the fathers of the hamlet.

DOWN STREAM

DOWN STREAM

If you have ever known fishing, real fishing, not the guide-book kind, where you “whip” streams for fancy fish that bite mainly in fancy--there will come a day in late July when it will be necessary for you to go down stream. The excessive heat and humidity which has been killing you off by inches and other people by wholesale for weeks will suddenly vanish before a cool, dry northwester, a gladsome reminder to the New Englander that there is such a thing as winter after all; thank Heaven!

You know that the drought diminished waters still fizz out from under the dam and purl into the pool below the roadside where the sunfish congregate under the water weeds. Beyond this they prattle down the meadow under banks where the hard-hack stands pink and prim, where the meadow-sweet loves the stream so much that it bends toward it and half caresses, and where the meadow grasses in complete abandonment whisper of it in every wind and bend down and surreptitiously kiss it as it dimples by. Farther down where the woodland maples troop up to meet it and the willows sit and bathe pink toes in the current is the big rock, under which the current has dug a sandy cave in which linger big yellow perch, ready to rush out and snatch the worm that comes floating down stream. Here you will hesitate but finally pass on, for there is a lure which you cannot withstand in the deep pool farther down.

Because you are wise with the remembered wisdom of boyhood, you have left at home the expensive rod and reel. Just back from the swamp edge is a birch jungle where young trees stand as thick as canes in a Cuban brake. Here you find your pole; as large as your thumb at the butt, tapering, straight, clean and strong, fifteen feet to the tip. Cut it and trim the limbs from it and bend to it your ten feet of stout line at the end of which is a hook whose curve is as big as that of your little finger nail. A cork that would fit a quart bottle will fit your line if you gash it with your pocket-knife and slip the line in the gash. It will hold wherever you put it, yet you may slide it up and down at will. For the pool you should put it three feet from your hook, for you will wish to “sink” that deep. Wind a wee bit of lead about your line an inch above the hook, then pull out your bait box and select a fat angle-worm. Break him in two in the middle and string him on the hook so that the point is just inside the tip of his nose. Now you are ready for what adventure may lurk under the bubbly foam of the surface.

A willow and a maple lean together in loving embrace over the entrance to the deep pool. Above, their arms stretch toward one another and intertwine; below, their roots meet under water and sway down stream, forming a slippery steep down which the amber yellow water, singing a happy little song to itself, coasts into the amber black depths of the pool. Black alders stand cooling their feet all about the edge. Crowding them into the water are the great oaks and maples whose limbs yearn above the pool till they shut out the sun. Along one side the current has cut deep to the rough rocks and the water flows black and swift. On the other the back-wash circles leisurely and the bottom shallows to a bank of sand where the sunfish build their nests and the fresh-water clams burrow and put up suppliant mouths to the food-bearing current. Inshore it lifts to a sand bar, where you may stand and swing your pole without interference from the surrounding trees.

All day long the brook sings itself to sleep as it slips down the slide into the slumberous depths of the pool. All day long the vivid green dragon-flies flutter by with vivid black wings to bring luck to your fishing, and the red-eyed vireo pipes his sleepy note in the trees above. And all day long you shall catch fish if you will but bait your hook and drop it in. First you will thin out the sunfish, for they are the most alert and gamy of all. Talk about trout! You should try landing a half-pound sunfish on a gossamer tackle and a very slender pole. The sunfish is the _Lepomis gibbosus_ of the ichthyologists and is a close relative of the rock bass, and just as game. He has been irreverently dubbed “pumpkin seed” in some places, from his shape, which is that of a pumpkin seed set up on edge. Here in eastern Massachusetts he is just plain “kiver,” which is the old-time uneducated New Englander’s pronunciation of the word “cover,” given him, no doubt, because he is round and flat. He is as freckled as a street urchin and as lively. He has business with your bait the moment it drops near him, and the bobbing cork will show that it is he by the jaunty vigor of its bobs.

In fact, if you have learned the ways of the down-stream country you will know every fish that takes your bait long before you have brought him to the surface from the amber depths, just by the way in which he bobs that floating cork. The way of the “kiver” is this. There is a single, snappy, business-like bob, then another, then three in quick succession in which he drags the cork half under. If you strike just at the right time during the succession of three, when the line below is taut with the strain of the float against the pull of the fish, you shall have him. Otherwise your cork will lift from the water with a humorous snort and you will hear little trills of derisive laughter in the song of the stream cascading down the willow root chute. It will be safer not to try him on the three bobs, but wait till the cork begins to bore into the water and glide off across stream, showing that the sunfish has made up his mind that it is a worm, a good one, and one that he really wants.

The mother sunfish just at this time of year has her nest in the sand at the upper end of the bar, in shallow water. It is a circular depression which she has scooped out and from which she has carefully removed all pebbles and sticks. Here she has laid her eggs, and here, day and night, she stands guard over them. If any other fish comes along, even of her own kind, she will chase it away with a brustling courage which is like that of a mother hen defending her chicks. So, after you have caught the freelance sunfish of the pool, those which have no family cares, do not drop your bait near her nest, for if you do she will dart out and take it, and it is a pity to have the brook lose her. She has made her nest in the one shallow spot where the bright sunlight plays, and you may see every dapple of her lovely sides as the light glances on them. Her every fin quivers as she floats there, slowly turning from side to side, her bright eyes roving in search of enemies to her offspring. She is a whole torpedo boat of mother love and pent-up energy, and so let us leave her, for she makes the whole pool seem homelike and hospitable.

The yellow perch will come next to your hook, his tawny yellow sides marked by bands of dark green, his back a darker green yet, and his fins a rich red. He is the aristocrat of the pool, his family being one of the very oldest in the fish domesday book. He lies in deeper water than the sunfish, and his bite varies from a gentle nibble to a good strong succession of pulls which finally end in the cork going down out of sight altogether. Yet when he is at the bait you shall not mistake any motion of that bob for the ones made by the sunfish. The perch has a daintier, more gentlemanly touch. It is sure and strong, but it lacks the roistering vitality of the sunfish. It is an aristocratic bite, and you will recognize it as such without clearly knowing why,--which is proof of his aristocracy. You will recognize it, too, from the elegance of his figure and the chaste beauty of his attire. He gleams in the sunlight. His yellow and green markings are as vivid as those of the sunfish, yet arranged in exquisite taste, and he is dapper where the other is bourgeois.

Sink a little deeper now, for it is time you caught horn-pouts. The horn-pout is also “bull-head,” and, irreverently I fear, “minister,” because of the severity of his black attire, which is relieved only by a white vest. But horn-pout is the best name, for his horns stick out fierce and straight from either side of his gills like the waxed mustachios of a stage Frenchman. They are sharp as needles and set as firm as daggers in their sockets. When you outrage the dignity of a horn-pout by pulling him out of the water he waggles these fins of dagger-bone and makes a peculiar grumbling sound with them. It is as if he said, “What! what! What’s all this? Who dares disturb my comfort?” Then when you reach to take him off the hook he flips that nimble black tail of his and jabs his dagger into your hand. It makes an ugly wound, and the boys claim that it conceals venom; a sort of poisoned dagger. The horn-pout bobs your floating cork usually twice or three times, a very different bob from either that of the sunfish or the yellow perch. It is a steady, solid down pull each time, taking the cork half under water. Then he takes hold in earnest, and the float goes steadily down and out, as if this were a matter of no child’s play, but meaning something that is solid and substantial on the other end of the line. Oftentimes this is true indeed, for the black-coated one may weigh a pound or two and double your birch rod into a good half-circle before he lets go his grip on the water.

When you get down to the horn-pouts you have fishing indeed, but all the time the climax of your day’s career is lurking down in the cavernous depths where the stream has gullied far beneath the ledge, for there, as thick as your wrist and three feet long, weighing a pound to the foot of solid white flesh and muscle, is an eel.

The eel is the strange misanthrope of the brooks and fresh-water ponds. You may peer into the sunlit shallows and see the other fishes at their work or play. They are companionable. If you will live on the pond edge you may train the minnows, the sunfish, the yellow perch even, to come up and eat out of your hand. I have watched a big horn-pout lumbering about in the shady depths for an hour and seen him carefully inspect a hookless worm which I had dropped to him, before he ate it, noting with glee the gravity and self-importance with which he finally decided that it was all right and that he would confer a favor upon it by swallowing it whole. Yet never once have I seen or laid hands on an eel in fresh water. There he goes his own mysterious way among the rock crevices and along the mud of the ultimate depths. The other fishes of the brook travel in schools; he goes alone. They were spawned up stream; he was born on the sands of the fishing banks, a hundred miles off shore. He came up stream as a young eel squirming through dams that shut out other fishes. When the time comes for him to go back he will go back the same way, waxed fat indeed, but still unseen, devious, self-possessed, and uncannily shrewd.

That he may live to go back he inspects carefully the worms which may drop into the cool shadows where he lurks. When he is about to take your bait you need to be keen to know what is going on, for he suspects you, and your least untoward motion of rod or line will cause him to slip back like a shadow into his cavern, and there will be no bite from him on that hook after that. You will say that it cannot possibly be a bite; the bob simply stops and the hook has no doubt caught on a snag on bottom. If you are not wise enough to know better you will pull up here lest you lose your hook, and in so doing you will lose your eel, for he is simply testing you. He has hold of the very bottom of that hook, below point and barb, and if you pull you pull it out of his mouth without hooking him. Then in cynical glee he’ll wag himself deeper into his cavern beneath the stones, and that is the last of him. You may fish the pool for a week before he will forget his caution and try another angle-worm. If, however, nothing rouses his suspicions the bob will gradually sink lower till it is more than half submerged, hang there for a little, give another sag downward, and so by degrees be drawn cautiously under. Your eel is cannily carrying the hook down into his cavern, where he may finish his meal at leisure. Now is the crucial moment. He must not be allowed to get in among the stones, for even if your strike hooks him he will twist himself desperately around them and then twist the hook out. A steady quick pull and you feel him on. Then indeed you “give him the butt,” as the fly fishermen say gloryingly. Your lithe birch rod bends in your hands till the tip is near your wrist as you lean desperately back with all your strength. The hold of a three-foot eel on the water is tremendous. Until he tires a bit it is almost as good as yours on the birch pole, but steadily, inch by inch, you draw him away out into the pool, where the fight is a fair one. Now his head is above water and his great lithe body whirls like a propeller beneath. Again look out; for when he leaves the water it will be as if he shot out, and you are liable to go with him, backward into the bushes, where he will tie your line into ten thousand knots, break out the hook, and run for the brook as a snake might.

At the moment he leaves the surface you slow up. Up into the air he shoots and drops till his tail welts the ground at your feet. Here let him wriggle at the end of the taut line while you break a stout alder switch with one hand, and as you drop him to earth belabor him with it. This will stun him quicker than anything else, and you may then deal with him as you will, only be quick about it, for he is very tenacious of life.

Then, if you are a true fisherman, you will wind up what line is left you and go your way, for the pool has no more foemen worthy of your steel. There will be but one eel to a pool, and to go on catching sunfish would be insipid indeed.

BROOK MAGIC

BROOK MAGIC

Brook magic does not begin until you have passed the deep fishing-pool and traversed the reedy meadow where the flagroot loves to go swimming and the muskrats come to spice their midnight lunches with its pungent root and pile the broad flags for winter nests. You may, if you are alert, feel a touch of its witchery as you wind among the rocks and black alders of the level swamp beyond, for here the ostrich-feather fern lifts its regal plumes as high as your head, and if by any chance you duck under these you have been near the portals of a world where sorcery is rife, for fern seed has a mysterious power of its own, and the ferns of the alder swamp are decorations on the road to the realm of the witch-hazel, where all sorts of strange things may come to pass.

The ferns and the witch-hazel are themselves mysterious and promoters of mystery, and it is hard to tell which leads in waywardness and subornation of sorcery. The ferns are the lingering representatives of an elder world,--a world that was old before the first pine dropped its cones or the leaves of the first deciduous tree fell on the first greensward. Their ways are not the ways of modern plant life.

Take the cinnamon fern, for instance, one of the commonest of our woods. It grows up each spring like a tender and succulent herb, to wither and die down in the fall as the grass does. But take a spade into the woods with you and try to transplant a good-sized cinnamon fern. You will fail, unless you have brought an axe along too, for the seemingly herbaceous plant has an underground trunk, sometimes two or three feet in diameter, almost as solid and firm in texture as that of a tree.

The fern shows no blossom to the world of butterfly or moth, no fruit for the delectation of fox or field mouse. The curious little dots growing along the margins of the leaves, which we call “fern seed” by courtesy, grow no fern when planted. They simply grow a little primitive leaf form which curiously imitates a blossom in its functions and produces a new fern.

But the witch-hazel is stranger yet in its ways. In the spring, when it should by all tokens of the plant world be putting out blossoms, it is busy growing nuts which are the product of last year’s blossoms. Then in the late autumn, even November, you will find it in bloom, twisting yellow petal fingers in mourning at the fall of its own leaves.

Pluck one of the nuts of a midsummer evening and look it intently in the face. Note the little shrewd pig eyes of the witch far ingrown in it, the funny shrewish tip-tilted nose, the puffy cheeks and eyelids. See that slender horn in the forehead, the sure mark of the witch. No wonder that it has the name witch-hazel with such ways and such faces growing all over it at a time when most other trees and shrubs have but finished blossoming. But if you want further proof that this shrub harbors witches you need but to examine its oval, wavy-toothed leaves just at this time of the year and see the little conical red witch-caps hung on them. There need be but little doubt that, sitting under it at midnight of a full moon, you may see the witch faces detach themselves from the limbs, put on these red caps and sail off across the great yellow disk. That such things are not seen oftener is simply because people are dull and go to bed instead of sitting out under the witch-hazel at midnight of a full moon.

To be sure there are scientific men, gray-bearded entomologists, who will tell us that these little red caps are galls, the rearing-place of plant aphids, caused by the laying of the mother insect’s egg within the tissue of the leaf, but one might as well believe that the witches hang their hats on the witch-hazel over night as to believe that the laying of a minute egg in the tissue of a leaf could cause the plant to grow a witch hat.

No doubt these same wise men would explain to you that it is not possible to become invisible by sprinkling fern seed on your head during the dark of the moon and saying the right words, but did one of them ever try it?

It is appropriate that the witch-hazel should shade the portals through which the brook enters the glen at the foot of the pasture, for the path here enters you into a world of witchery where the glamour of the place will hold you long of a summer afternoon.

At the foot of the glen an ancient mill-dam once blocked the free passage of the water and a mill-wheel vexed its current. Now only the rude embankment remains with half-century old hickories and maples growing on it, arching in and shading the glen with their imbricated branches. No rust of mill-wheel, no trace of building remains, and the very tradition of the mill and its owners is gone. No one to-day knows whether it ground corn or sawed boards for the pioneer who built it, who laid the sill of its dam so firm and level that the wear of two centuries of swift water has not entirely obliterated it. At the very bottom of the glen it forms a shallow pool where brook magic and witch-hazel glamour shall show you many midsummer fantasies if you will but look for them.

It was in the glen that I found the first real relief from the heat of midday. The grasses of the sun-parched pasture had crisped under foot and broken off, so dry were they, all the way down to the sweet-flag meadow. Here the brook water keeps all growing things lush and green, but the glare of the sun is only the more intense. It follows you into the alder swamp, and you may sit under the arching fronds of the ostrich-plume ferns in vain.

But after you have scrambled through them and ducked under the mock benediction of the witch-hazel limbs that stretch above your head while the witch-hazel faces grin a cynical “Bless you, my child,” you feel that you are willing to take your chances with swamp witchery and brook magic. For in the glen cool waters crisp over cold stones and the breeze sighs up stream and fans you as you sit on the brink of the pool and lean your head against the ledge from whose crannies drip the fairy fronds of the rock fern.

These are but little fellows of our fern world, and the magic which distills from their fern seed is no doubt less potent than that from greater ferns, but added to the witch-hazel glamour it makes brook magic which will initiate you into many mysteries of the pasture world if you are but patient. Sitting there with the tiny brown spores of the rock fern dripping upon your shoulders with infinitesimal rattle, you seem to see more clearly the glen life and to know the meaning of many sounds hitherto only half understood.

Always there is the sleepy song which the brook sings to itself in summer,--a song to which the warble of the vireo in the overhead leafage adds but a dreamy staccato. But if you listen through this you shall presently hear the water goblins grumbling to themselves in their abodes under flat stones. They are old and grumpy, these water goblins, and they never cease to mumble to themselves about their troubles.

Very likely they complain incessantly because they are hungry and the supply of demoiselle nymphs is running short. There are plenty of demoiselles, flitting back and forth across the pools on glittering black wings, which they fold closely to their iridescent green bodies when they light. They are such ladylike dragon-flies that it is no wonder that the name “demoiselle,” which French scientists with admirable gallantry have given them, has stuck. With all their ladylike short and modest flights and the saintly way in which they fold their wings when they light on some leaf beside the pool, a folding as of hands in prayer, the demoiselles are dragon-flies, and each prayer may well be for the soul of some midge or other wee insect captured in the short flight.

The true dragon-fly--the one which rests with wings widespread--hunts like a hawk, but the demoiselles seem to take their prey with a gentle grace and charm of manner which ought to make the midge’s last moments his happiest ones. I always suspect them of folding him in a perfumed napkin and eating him with salad dressing and a spoon after they get back to their boudoir, but I cannot prove this any more than I can that it is really a water goblin that grumbles under the flat stone.

Many a time I have turned the stones over suddenly, but I never yet was quick enough to surprise the goblin. I have found him there, mind you, but never in his true shape. Always he has managed to transform himself into something different,--perhaps into a spotted turtle or a grouchy horn-pout. I have even known him to turn into an ugly, many-legged helgramite worm, not having time to make the more reputable transformation. It is hard to catch a grumbling goblin asleep, especially in a pool below the witch-hazels, where the brook magic is strong.

It is easier to see the demoiselle nymphs. They are not very beautiful or seemingly very savory, and if the water goblins do eat them it is no wonder they grumble. You may have seen a hawk-like dragon-fly skimming about over an open pool dip in swallow fashion to the surface. These sudden and repeated dips are not for a bath nor yet for a drink. What you see is a female dragon-fly laying eggs which shall later hatch and become under-water nymphs, the larvæ of the dragon-fly. But the demoiselles, still rightly named, do nothing so brazen as that. Instead, they pick out some nodding water weed, fold their wings a little more tightly to their iridescent bodies and crawl down it into the water. Here, in proper seclusion beneath the surface, they pierce the reed’s stem with keen ovipositor and lay their eggs. Then they saunter forth again and discreetly eat more midges with salad dressing and a spoon.

If you look closely among the water weeds in the transparent water at the pool margin you may see the demoiselle nymphs crawling about, breathing through feathers in their tails, and scooping up food with a big shovel which sticks out under their chins. They show little traces of their coming beauty. It is the awkward age of the demoiselle, and I fancy each is right glad to do up the hair, get into long black skirts with iridescent green bodices, and join the afternoon tea flitters.

What the magic is in the brook, whereby these strange, awkward, crawling creatures, living beneath the water, some day crawl up the stem of a water weed, burst, stretch their wings and fly away the saintly and demure demoiselles of the pool, I do not know--whether it be distilled from the witch-hazel by the summer sun, or whether it slips more mysteriously from beneath the breast-plate of the spore of the polypody growing just above my head in the rock crevice. It must be the same magic whereby the many-legged, crawling helgramite worm, after living that sort of life sometimes for several years, one day crawls ashore, goes to sleep beneath a stone, and in another month wakes up and finds himself a _Corydalus cornutus_, a three-inch-long bug with extraordinary wings and great horns,--a bug that might well make one of those witches, met face to face on the moon’s disk, shriek and fall off her broomstick. If he can be that thing, changed from a helgramite worm, why can he not be a helgramite worm, changed from the water goblin which you can hear grumbling beneath the flat stone at the entrance to the pool beneath the witch-hazels?

The answer is to be found neither in the rhyme of the poet nor in the reason of the scientific man.

Musing on these things I suddenly sat up from my quiet seat beneath the rock ferns, for more magic yet was being displayed before my eyes. Over on the further side, in the shallow eddy, the pool was troubled a second, then there rose from it a wee sunfish, not more than three inches long, rose from it tail first and began balancing across the pool surface toward me, on his head. His tail quivered in the air, and I could see his freckles growing in the yellow transparency of his skin, yet, though I watched with wide eyes, he was two-thirds the way across the pool toward me before I noticed beneath him the tip of the nose and the wicked little dark eye of a water snake. At sight of him the demoiselles should have shrieked and flown away, but they made no move. I, however, indignant, arose, and seizing broken fragments of rock was about to lacerate him and loose his prey when I quite suddenly thought better of it. Had not I a few days before come down stream to the deep pool above and carried off a string of perch, sunfish, pouts, and an eel? Had not the water snake also a right to his dinner?

I dropped my rock fragments, but there was no longer pleasure in waiting to woo the demure coquetry of the demoiselles. The serpent had entered Eden and the man was driven forth. I lingered only long enough to see the grace and strength of the snake as he glided over the sill of the old dam, now black and sinuous, now giving me a glimpse of the vivid red of the under parts of his body, but always keeping his grip secure on the little sunfish whom he was taking away to luncheon with him.

I climbed out of the glen, glad to go for once, but at the top of the rock where the sunburnt pasture path begins again I was in for another shudder, for here the dragon had entered fairy land. He came, writhing his horrid length along the path, his scales shining in the sun, his great mouth gaping, and up near his abnormally great head two little impotent forelegs wriggling. Who wouldn’t turn and run before such a creature as this? To be sure he was scarce three feet long, and his curiously mottled-brown back was that of the common adder, one of our harmless snakes, though he looks ugly enough to be stuffed with venom. But this great gaping head and the wriggling forelegs; never did flat-head adder have such a front as this!

My compassion for snakes that had a right to their dinner vanished before this creature. It is different when it seems as if you might be the dinner. Those forelegs beckoned, and how could I tell but, in this land of witch-hazel, fern seed, and brook magic, I might not shrink sufficiently to be taken in by that huge mouth in that misapplied head? Death were better,--that is, death for the dragon,--and I caught up a jagged piece of the top of the glen and hurled it at him. It struck the beast fair amidships. The dragon whirled and writhed for a second or two and lay motionless, and behold! the head separated from the body and began to limp away. Then first was the spell broken and I saw clearly. It was simply a flat-head adder that had taken a good-sized garden toad for his dinner, had swallowed him whole as far as the forelegs, but failed to engulf these. It was the combination which made the dragon.

Somehow I haven’t cared for the glen since. The early glamour of brook magic is pleasant, but I fear that, like the hasheesh of the Orient, its end is very bad dreams.

IN THE PONKAPOAG BOGS

IN THE PONKAPOAG BOGS

I do not find in all my wanderings, afield or afloat, a more quaintly delightful plant than the floating-heart. In my pasture world it grows in one place only,--along the shallow edges of the bogs of Ponkapoag Pond. I think no other pond or stream in this immediate region has it, and so sweetly shy is it that you may pass it year after year without noting its existence. It waits until the summer has marked its meridian before it ventures to send up its dainty little _crêpe de chine_ petals, each fairy-like bloom appearing for one day only in the very throb of the mottled olive and bronze heart, which is a leaf. The leaf itself is barely an inch across, the exquisite bloom less than half that; yet once you know it you love it beyond all other bog plants as being the most fairy-like of water-lilies, though it is not a water-lily at all when it comes to botanical classification, being of the gentian family.

However, not to be a water-lily is not so bad if one may be classed with the fringed and closed gentians which are to bloom later on the landward edges of the bog. As the little blossom fades at nightfall, its short stalk curls back beneath the water to ripen the seeds there, hung just beneath the leaf from a peculiar bulb-like nodule just an inch or so down on the petiole. The next morning another wee white bud shoots up in the heart angle of the leaf and opens fragile petals in the sun.

I recall no other plant that sends up blooms from the leaf stalk in this way. When the seeds have ripened I suspect the plant of setting this bulb-like nodule free to float away to another shore, take root as a real corm or tuber might, and produce more floating-hearts.

This bog on the westerly shore of Ponkapoag Pond was not long ago made a part of Boston’s park system, which thus moves ever sedately toward the Berkshire hills, yet it is a bit of nature as wild and untrammeled as it was in the days when Myles Standish may have looked down upon it from the top of great Blue Hill, as it had stood unchanged in his day for many and many a long century. So I fancy it will remain for centuries to come, for Nature holds her own here well. Indeed, she encroaches, for a bog grows wherever it has free water to grow into. So, after many centuries, frequenters of the Blue Hill Reservation will note a broad expanse of swamp land where once sparkled the waters of this hundred-acre pond. For the way of the bog is this.

All along its under-water front the obscure under-water weeds grow up and die year after year, generation after generation, forming fertile banks of beautiful soft mud, into whose lower depths the great thick rootstocks of the pond-lilies push, and in which the fibrous roots of the tape grass, the fresh-water eel grass, find a hold. The growth and decay of these, with the water shield, with its jelly-protected foliage, the yellow dog-lily, and in lesser depths the bulrush, add to the growing bank as coral insects grow and die in tropic seas, until it is near enough to the surface for the pickerel weed to find roothold. Then indeed the bog steps forward with vigor, for the pickerel weed is its firing line. All summer you shall see its blue banners flaunting gayly in the southern breezes, tempting the land-loving bumble-bee to sea, calling the honey-bee from the mile-distant hive, and offering rest and luncheon to a myriad lesser insects, all with genial hospitality. Its serried millions in close ranks breast the waves in a broad blue line from one end of the bog to the other, a half-mile or so.

Behind these are shallow pools, where again you find the white water-lilies. Here they bloom in enormous profusion from late June until early September, reaching their grand climax during late July. On such a day, standing in the boat at the southerly end of the bog, counting those within a given space and multiplying, I estimated that there were ten thousand of the fragrant white blooms in sight. Twice as many more were hidden by bulrush and pickerel weed. On Sundays and holidays boatloads of trolley trippers paddle and push among them and carry them off by the hundred, yet they make no mark on the visible supply. The decay of the leaves and stems of these add to the under-water foothold of the bog, but after all it must be the reedy stems, sagittate leaves, and interwoven roots of the pickerel weed that are its main foundation.

Steadily seaward over the foundation thus laid progresses the long, definite front of the saw-edged marsh grass. Once it interlocks its roots along the mud surface formed for it, it leaves no room for the freer-growing denizens of the shallows. In among the marsh grass grows no flaunting flag of pickerel weed, no pure white nymphæa sends forth its rich odor.

Only the bog cranberry may hold its own in any quantity against the throttling squeeze of those grass roots. Where these grow is the high sea of the bog, its waves rising and falling in the free winds. Yet, just as pickerel weed and water-lily give way before the advance of the marsh grass, so it in turn falls on the landward side before the advancing hosts of the swamp.

A steady phalanx of swamp cedars pushes its foothold farther and farther out upon it, year by year, scouting with button bush and black alder and holding every inch that they obtain for it. Now and then something happens to a brief area of marsh grass and cranberries so that their dense packed minions faint and release their root grip on the quaking mud. Every such opening is seized by the alder or the button bush, and the cedars follow them; indeed, sometimes the cedars, favored by the right wind or the right bird carriers at seeding time, slip in first, and little island clumps of their dark bronze green stand here and there over against the cadet blue of Blue Hill which hangs like a beautiful drop-curtain always on the westerly sky.

Once, a half-century ago or more, a farmer and his men came down from the pastures, and for purposes of their own cut a ditch straight through the middle of the bog to the open water. The hundreds of scrawny night herons, sitting on pale blue eggs in scraggly nests in the cedar swamp must have heard the cedars laugh as this went on. It was the swamp’s opportunity. Where the farmer and his men with incredible labor cut and tore away the marsh-grass roots the cedars planted their seeds, and called upon the alders and the swamp maples and the thoroughwort, the Joe Pye weed, and a host of other good citizens of the swamp, to help them.