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THE CLERK OF THE WOODS

THE CLERK
OF THE WOODS

BY
BRADFORD TORREY

“News of birds and blossoming.”
Shelley.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1904

COPYRIGHT 1903 BY BRADFORD TORREY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published September, 1903

PREFATORY NOTE

The chapters of this book were written week by week for simultaneous publication in the “Evening Transcript” of Boston and the “Mail and Express” of New York, and were intended to be a kind of weekly chronicle of the course of events out-of-doors, as witnessed by a natural-historical observer. The title of the volume is the running title under which the articles were printed in the “Evening Transcript.” It was chosen as expressive of the modest purpose of the writer, whose business was not to be witty or wise, but simply to “keep the records.”

CONTENTS

THE CLERK OF THE WOODS

THE CLERK OF THE WOODS

A SHORT MONTH

May is the shortest month in the year. February is at least twice as long. For a month is like a movement of a symphony; and when we speak of the length of a piece of music we are not thinking of the number of notes in it, but of the time it takes to play them. May is a scherzo, and goes like the wind. Yesterday it was just beginning, and to-day it is almost done. “If we could only hold it back!” an outdoor friend of mine used to say. And I say so, too. At the most generous calculation I cannot have more than a hundred more of such months to hope for, and I wish the Master’s baton would not hurry the tempo. But who knows? Perhaps there will be another series of concerts, in a better music hall.

The world hereabout will never be more beautiful than it was eight or ten days ago, with the sugar maples and the Norway maples in bloom and the tall valley willows in young yellow-green leaf. And now forsythia is having its turn. How thick it is! I should not have believed it half so common. Every dooryard is bright with its sunny splendor. “Sunshine bush,” it deserves to be called, with no thought of disrespect for Mr. Forsyth, whoever he may have been. I look at the show while it lasts. In a week or two the bushes will all have gone out of commission, so to speak, till the year comes round again. Shrubs are much in the case of men and women; the amount of attention they receive depends mainly on the dress they happen to have on at the moment. In my next-door neighbor’s yard there is a forsythia bush, not exceptionally large or handsome, that gives me as much pleasure as one of those wonderful tulip beds of which the Boston city gardeners make so much account. Are a million tulips, all of one color, crowded tightly together and bordered by a row of other tulips, all of another color, really so much more beautiful than a hundred or two, of various tints, loosely and naturally disposed? I ask the question without answering it, though I could answer it easily enough, so far as my own taste is concerned.

Already there is much to admire in the wild garden. Spice-bush blossoms have come and gone, and now the misty shad-blow is beginning to whiten all the hedges and the borders of the wood, while sassafras trees have put forth pretty clusters of yellowish flowers for the few that will come out to see them. Sun-bright, cold-footed cowslips still hold their color along shaded brooks. “Marsh marigolds,” some critical people tell us we must call them. That is a good name, too; but the flowers are no more marigolds than cowslips, and with or without reason (partly, it may be, because my unregenerate nature resents the “must”), I like the word I was brought up with. Anemones and violets are becoming plentiful, and the first columbines already swing from the clefts of outcropping ledges. With them one is almost certain to find the saxifrage. The two are fast friends, though very unlike; the columbine drooping and swaying so gracefully, its honey-jars upside down, the saxifrage holding upright its cluster of tiny white cups, like so many wine-glasses on a tray. Both are children’s flowers,—an honorable class,—and have in themselves, to my apprehension, a kind of childish innocence and sweetness. If we picked no other blossoms, down in the Old Colony, we always picked these two—these and the nodding anemone and the pink lady’s-slipper.

This showy orchid, by the way, I was pleased a year ago to see in bloom side by side with the trailing arbutus. One was near the end of its flowering season, the other just at the beginning, but there they stood, within a few yards of each other. This was in the Franconia Notch, at the foot of Echo Lake, where plants bloom when they can, rather than according to any calendar known to down-country people; where within the space of a dozen yards you may see the dwarf cornel, for example, in all stages of growth; here, where a snowbank stayed late, just peeping out of the ground, and there, in a sunnier spot, already in full bloom.

In May the birds come home. This is really what makes the month so short. There is no time to see half that is going on. In this town alone it would take a score of good walkers, good lookers, and good listeners to welcome all the pretty creatures that will this month return from their winter’s exile. Some came in March, of course, and more in April; but now they are coming in troops. It is great fun to see them; a pleasure inexpressible to wake in the morning, as I did this morning (May 8), and still lying in bed, to hear the first breezy fifing of a Baltimore oriole, just back over night after an eight months’ absence. Birds must be lovers of home to continue living in a climate where life is possible to them only four months of the year.

Six days ago (May 2) a rose-breasted grosbeak gladdened the morning in a similar manner, though he was a little farther away, so that I did not hear him until I stepped out upon the piazza. I stood still a minute or two, listening to the sweet “rolling” warble, and then crossed the street to have a look at the rose color. It was just as bright as I remembered it.

Golden warblers (summer yellow-birds) made their appearance on the last day of April. The next morning one had dropped into an ideal summering place, a bit of thicket beside a pond and a lively brook,—good shelter, good bathing, and plenty of insects,—and from the first moment seemed to have no thought of looking farther. I see and hear him every time I pass the spot. The same leafless thicket (but it will be leafy enough by and by) is now inhabited by a catbird. I found him on the 6th, already much at home, feeding, singing, and mewing. Between him and his small, high-colored neighbor there is no sign of rivalry or ill-feeling; but if another catbird or a second warbler should propose settlement in that clump of shrubbery, I have no doubt there would be trouble.

May-day brought me the yellow-throated vireo, the parula warbler, the white-throated sparrow, and the least flycatcher, the last two pretty late, by my reckoning. On the 2d came the warbling vireo, the veery,—a single silent bird, the only one I have yet seen,—the kingbird, the Maryland yellow-throat, the oven-bird, and the chestnut-sided warbler, in addition to the grosbeak before mentioned. Then followed a spell of cold, unfavorable weather, and nothing more was listed until the 6th. That day I saw a Nashville warbler,—several days tardy,—a catbird, and a Swainson thrush. On May 7, I heard my first prairie warbler, and to-day has brought the oriole, the wood thrush, one silent red-eyed vireo (it is good to know that this voluble “preacher” can be silent), and the redstart. It never happened to me before, I think, to see the Swainson thrush earlier than the wood. That I have done so this season is doubtless the result of some accident, on one side or the other. The Swainson was a little ahead of his regular schedule, I feel sure; but on the other hand, it may almost be taken for granted that a few wood thrushes have been in the neighborhood for several days. The probability that any single observer will light upon the very first silent bird of a given species that drops into a township must be slight indeed. What we see, we tell of; but that is only the smallest part of what happens.

Some of our winter birds still go about in flocks, notably the waxwings, the goldfinches, and the purple finches. Two days ago I noticed a goldfinch that was almost in full nuptial dress; as bright as he ever would be, I should say, but with the black and the yellow still running together a little here and there. Purple finches are living high—in two senses—just at present; feeding on the pendent flower-buds of tall beech trees. A bunch of six or eight that I watched the other day were literally stuffing themselves, till I thought of turkeys stuffed with chestnuts. Their capacity was marvelous, and I left them still feasting. All the while one of them kept up a happy musical chatter. There is no reason, I suppose, why a poet should not be a good feeder.

A FULL MIGRATION

One of my friends, a bird lover like myself, used to complain that by the end of May he was worn out with much walking. His days were consumed at a desk,—“the cruel wood,” as Charles Lamb called it,—but so long as migrants were passing his door he could not help trying to see them. Morning and night, therefore, he was on foot, now in the woods, now in the fields, now in shaded by-roads, now in bogs and swamps. To see all kinds of birds, a man must go to all kinds of places. Sometimes he trudged miles to visit a particular spot, in which he hoped to find a particular species. Before the end of the month he must have one hundred and twenty or one hundred and twenty-five names in his “monthly list;” and to accomplish this, much leg-work was necessary.

I knew how to sympathize with him. Short as May is,—too short by half,—I have before now felt something like relief at its conclusion. Now, then, I have said, the birds that are here will stay for at least a month or two, and life may be lived a little more at leisure.

This year,[1] by all the accounts that reach me, the migration has been of extraordinary fullness. Only last night a man took a seat by me in an electric car and said, what for substance I have heard from many others, that he and his family, who live in a desirably secluded, woody spot, had never before seen so many birds, especially so many warblers.

How wiser men than myself explain this unusual state of things I do not know. To me it seems likely that the unseasonable cold weather caught the first large influx of May birds in our latitude, and held them here while succeeding waves came falling in behind them. The current was dammed, so to speak, and of course the waters rose.

Some persons, I hear, had strange experiences. I am told of one man who picked a black-throated blue warbler from a bush, as he might have picked a berry. I myself noted in New Hampshire, what many noted hereabouts, the continual presence of warblers on the ground. ’Tis an ill wind that blows nobody good, and our multitude of young bird students—for, thank Heaven, they are a multitude—had the opportunity of many years to make new acquaintances. A warbler in the grass is a comparatively easy subject.

After all, the beginners have the best of it. No knowledge is so interesting as new knowledge. It may be plentifully mixed with ignorance and error. Much of it may need to be unlearned. Young people living about me began to find scarlet tanagers early in April; one boy or girl has seen a scissor-tailed flycatcher, and orchard orioles seem to be fairly common; but at least new knowledge has the charm of freshness. And what a charm that is!—a morning rose, with the dew on it. The old hand may almost envy the raw recruit—the young woman or the boy, to whom the sight of a rose-breasted grosbeak, for instance, is like the sight of an angel from heaven, so strange, so new-created, so incredibly bright and handsome.

I love to come upon a group or a pair of such enthusiasts at work in the field, as I not seldom do; all eyes fastened upon a bush or a branch, one eager, low voice trying to make the rest of the company see some wonderful object of which the lucky speaker has caught sight. “There, it has moved to that lower limb! Right through there! Don’t you see it? Oh, what a beauty!”

I was down by the river the other afternoon. Many canoes were out, and presently I came to an empty one drawn up against the bank. A few steps more and I saw, kneeling behind a clump of shrubbery, a young man and a young woman, each with an opera-glass, and the lady with an open notebook. “It’s a redstart, isn’t it?” I heard one of them say.

It was too bad to disturb them, but I hope they forgave a sympathetic elderly stranger, who, after starting toward them and then sidling off, finally approached near enough to suggest, with a word of apology, that perhaps they would like to see a pretty bunch of water thrushes just across the way, about the edges of the pool under yonder big willow. They seemed grateful, however they may have felt. “Water thrushes!” the young lady exclaimed, and with hasty “Thank you’s,” very politely expressed, they started in the direction indicated. It is to be hoped that they found also the furtive swamp sparrow, of whose presence the bashful intruder, in the perturbation of his spirits, forgot to inform them. If they did find it, however, they were sharp-eyed, or were playing in good luck.

I went on down the river a little way, and soon met three Irish-American boys coming out of a thicket at the water’s edge. One of them lifted his cap. “Seen any good birds to-day?” he inquired. I answered in the affirmative, and turned the question upon its asker. Yes, he said, he had just seen a catbird and an oriole. I remarked that there were other people out on the same errand. “Yes,” said he, pointing toward the brier thicket, “there’s a couple down there now looking at ’em.” Then I noticed a second empty canoe with its nose against the bank.

This was on a Saturday. Saturday afternoon and Sunday are busy people’s days in the woods. For their sakes I am always glad to meet them there—bird students, flower pickers, or simple strollers; yet I have learned to look upon those times as my poorest, and to choose others so far as I can. One does not enjoy nature to great advantage at a picnic. There are woods and swamps of which on all ordinary occasions I almost feel myself the owner, but of which on Saturday and Sunday I have scarcely so much as a rambler’s lease. This I have learned, however,—and I pass the secret on,—that the Sunday picnic does not usually begin till after nine o’clock in the forenoon.

When bird study becomes more general than it is now, as it ought to do, the community will perhaps find means—or, to speak more correctly, will use means, since there is no need of finding them—to restrain the present enormous overproduction of English sparrows, and so to give certain of our American beauties a chance to live.

Two days ago I was walking through a tract of woodland, following the highway, when I noticed, to my surprise, a white-breasted martin (tree swallow) just over my head. The next moment he fluttered before a hole in one of the big telegraph poles. His mate came out, and he alighted in the entrance, facing outward. And there he sat, while I in my turn took a seat upon the opposite bank and fell to watching him. The light struck him squarely, and it was good to see his blue-purple crown and his bright black eye shining in the sun. He had nothing to do inside, it appeared, but was simply on guard in his mate’s absence. Once he yawned. “She’s gone a good while,” he seemed to say. But he kept his post till she returned. Then, with a chirrup, he was off, and she dropped into the cavity out of sight.

All this was nothing of itself. But why should a pair of white-breasted martins, farm-loving, village-loving, house-haunting birds, a delight to the eye, and as innocent as they are beautiful—why should such birds be driven to seek a home in a telegraph pole in the woods? The answer was ready. I walked on, and by and by came to a village, young and I dare say thriving, but overrun from end to end with English sparrows, whose incessant clatter—

Soul-desolating strains—alas! too many—

filled my ears. Not a bluebird, not a tree swallow, nor, to all appearance, any place for one.

And so it is generally. One of my fellow townsmen, however, has an estate which forms a bright exception. There one sees bluebirds and martins. Year after year, punctual as the spring itself, they are back in their old places. And why? Because the owner of the estate, by a little shooting, mercifully persistent and therefore seldom necessary, keeps the English sparrows out. My thanks to him. His is the only colony of martins anywhere in my neighborhood.

A FAVORITE ROUND

After three days of heat, a cool morning. I take an electric car, leave it at a point five miles away, and in a semicircular course come round to the track again a mile or two nearer home. This is one of my favorite walks, such as every stroller finds for himself, affording a pleasant variety within comfortable distance.

First I come to a plain on which are hay-fields, gardens, and apple orchards; an open, sunny place where, in the season, one may hope to find the first bluebird, the first vesper sparrow, or the first bobolink. A spot where things like these have happened to one has henceforth a charm of its own. Memory walks beside us, as it were, and makes good all present deficiencies.

I am hardly here this morning before the tiny, rough voice of a yellow-winged sparrow reaches me from a field in which the new-mown grass lies in windrows. Grass or stubble, he can still be happy, it appears. The grasshopper sparrow—to give him his better name—is one of the quaintest of songsters, his musical effort being more like an insect’s than a bird’s; yet he is as fully inspired, as completely absorbed in his work, to look at him, as any mockingbird or thrush. I watched one a few days ago as he sat at the top of a dwarf pear tree. How seriously he took himself! No “minor poet” of a human sort ever surpassed him in that respect; head thrown back, and bill most amazingly wide open, all for that ragged thread of a tune, which nevertheless was decidedly emphatic and could be heard a surprisingly long distance. I smiled at him, but he did not mind. When minor poets cease writing, then, we may guess, the grasshopper sparrow will quit singing. Far be the day. To be a poet is to be a poet, and distinctions of major and minor are of trifling consequence. The yellow-wing counts with the savanna, but is smaller and has even less of a voice. Impoverished grass fields are his favorite breeding-places, and he is generally a colonist.

This morning (it is July 10) the vesper sparrow is singing here also, with the song sparrow and the chipper. And while I am listening to them—but mainly to the vesper—the sickle stroke (as I believe Mr. Burroughs calls it) of a meadow lark cuts the air. It is a good concert, vesper sparrow and lark going most harmoniously together; and to make it better still, a bobolink pours out one copious strain. Him I am especially glad to hear. After the grass is cut one feels as if bobolink days were over.

However, the grass is not all cut yet. I hear the rattle of a distant mowing-machine as I walk, and by and by come in sight of a man swinging a scythe. That is the poetry of farming—from the spectator’s point of view; and I think from the mower’s also, when he is cutting his own grass and is his own master. I like to watch him, at all events. Every motion he makes is as familiar to me as the swaying of branches in the wind. How long will it be, I wonder, before young people will be asking their seniors what a scythe was like, and how a man used it? Pictures of it will look odd enough, we may be sure, after the thing itself is forgotten.

While I am watching the mower (now he pauses a moment, and with the blade of his scythe tosses a troublesome tangle of grass out of his way, with exactly the motion that I have seen other mowers use a thousand times; but I look in vain for him to put the end of the snathe to the ground, pick up a handful of grass, and wipe down the blade)—while I am watching him a bluebird breaks into song, and a kingbird flutters away from his perch on a fence-wire. After all, the glory of a bird is his wings; and the kingbird knows it. In another field men are spreading hay—with pitchforks, I mean; and that, too, is poetry. In truth, by the old processes, hay could not be made except with graceful motions, unless it were by a novice, some man from the city or out of a shop. A green hand with a rake, it must be confessed, is a subject for laughter rather than for rhymes. The secret of graceful raking is like the secret of graceful writing,—a light touch.

Raspberries and thimbleberries are getting ripe (they do not need to be “dead ripe,” thimbleberries especially, for an old country boy), and meadow-sweet and mullein are in bloom. Hardback, standing near them, has not begun to show the pink.

Now I turn the corner, leaving the farms behind, and as I do so I bethink myself of a bed of yellow galium just beyond. It ought to be in blossom. And so it is—the prettiest sight of the morning, and of many mornings. I stand beside it, admiring its beauty and inhaling its faint, wholesomely sweet odor. Bedstraw, it is called. If it will keep that fragrance, why should mattresses ever be filled with anything else? This is the only patch of the kind that I know, and I felicitate myself upon having happened along at just the right minute to see it in all its sweetness and beauty. Year after year it blooms here on this roadside, and nowhere else; millions of tiny flowers of a really exquisite color, yellow with much of green in it, a shade for which in my ignorance I have no name.

The road soon runs into a swamp, and I stop on the bridge. Swamp sparrows are trilling on either side of me—a spontaneous, effortless kind of music, like water running down-hill. A phœbe chides me gently; passengers are expected to use the bridge to cross the brook upon, she intimates, not as a lounging-place, especially as her nest is underneath. Yellow bladderworts lift their pretty hoods above the slimy, black water, and among them lies a turtle, thrusting his head out to enjoy the sun. Once I see him raise a foreclaw and scratch the underside of his neck. The most sluggish and cold-blooded animal that ever lived must now and then be taken with an itching, I suppose.

Beyond the bridge the woods are full of white azalea (they are full of it now, that is to say, so long as the bushes are in blossom), but I listen in vain for the song of a Canadian warbler, whom I know to be living somewhere in its shadow. A chickadee, looking as if she had been through the wars, her plumage all blackened and bedraggled, makes remarks to me as I pass. The cares of maternity have spoiled her beauty, and perhaps ruffled her temper, for the time being. A veery snarls, and a thrasher’s resonant kiss makes me smile. If he knew it, he would smile in his turn, perhaps, at my “pathetic fallacy.” The absence of music here, just where I expected it most confidently, is disappointing, but I do not stay to grieve over the loss. As the road climbs to dry ground again, I remark how close to its edge the rabbit-foot clover is growing. It is at its prettiest now, the grayish green heads tipped with pink. If it were as uncommon as the yellow bedstraw, perhaps I should think it quite as beautiful. I have known it since I have known anything (“pussies,” we called it), but I never dreamed of its being a clover till I began to use a botany book. All the way along I notice how it cleaves to the very edge of the track. “Let me have the poorest place,” it says. And it thrives there. Such is the inheritance of the meek.

Here in the pine woods a black-throated green warbler is dreaming audibly, and, better still, a solitary vireo, the only one I have heard for a month or more, sings a few strains, with that sweet, falling cadence of which he alone has the secret. From a bushy tract, where fire has blackened everything, a chewink speaks his name, and then falls to repeating a peculiarly jaunty variation of the family tune. Dignity is hardly the chewink’s strong point. Now a field sparrow gives out a measure. There is an artist! Few can excel him, though many can make more show. Like the vesper sparrow, he has a gift of sweet and holy simplicity. And what can be better than that? Overhead, hurrying with might and main toward the woods, flies a crow, with four kingbirds after him. Perhaps he suffers for his own misdeeds; perhaps for those of his race. All crows look alike to kingbirds, I suspect.

This, and much beside, while I rest in the shade of a pine, taking the beauty of the clouds and listening to the wind in the treetops. The best part of every ramble is the part that escapes the notebook.

IN THE CAMBRIDGE SWAMP

Once a year, at least, I must visit the great swamp in Cambridge, one of the institutions of the city, as distinctive, not to say as famous, as the university itself. It is sure to show me something out of the ordinary run (its courses in ornithology are said to be better than any the university offers); and even if I were disappointed on that score, I should still find the visit worth while for the sake of old times, and old friends, and the good things I remember. At the present minute I am thinking especially of that enthusiastic, wise-hearted, finely gifted, greatly lamented nature lover, Frank Bolles, whom I met here for the first time one evening when it was too dark to see his face. We had come on the same errand, to watch the strange aerial evolutions of the April snipe. Who could have supposed then that he would be dead so soon, and the world so much the poorer?

Now it is July. The tall swamp rosebushes are in full flower, here and there a clump, the morning sun heightening their beauty, though for the most part there is no getting near them without wading to the knees. More accessible, as well as more numerous, are the trailing morning-glory vines (Convolvulus sepium), with showy, trumpet-shaped, pink-and-white blossoms; and in one place I stop to notice a watery-stemmed touch-me-not, or jewel-weed, from which a solitary frail-looking, orange-colored flower is hanging—the first of the year. What thousands on thousands will follow it; no meadow’s edge or boggy spot will be without them. The pendent jewel makes me think of hummingbirds, which is another reason for liking to look at it. Years ago I used to plant some of its red and white congeners (balsams, we called them) in a child’s garden. I wish I were a botanist; I am always wishing so; but I am thankful to know enough of the science to be able to recognize a few such relationships between native “weeds” and cultivated exotics. Somehow the weeds look less weedy for that knowledge; as the most commonplace of mortals becomes interesting to average humanity if it is whispered about that he is fourth cousin to the king. The world is not yet so democratic that anything, even a plant, can be rated altogether by itself.

The gravelly banks of the railroad, on which I go dry-shod through the swamp, are covered with a forest of chicory; a thrifty immigrant, tall, coarse, scraggy, awkward, homely, anything you will, but a great brightener of our American waysides on sunny midsummer forenoons. It attracts much notice, and presumably gives much pleasure, to judge by the number of persons who ask me its name. May the town fathers spare it! The bees and the goldfinches will thank them, if nobody else. Here I am interested to see that a goodly number of the plants—but not more than one in fifty, perhaps—bear full crops of pure white flowers; a rarity to me, though I am well used to pink ones. Gray’s Manual by the by, a Cambridge book, makes no mention of white flowers, while Britton and Brown’s Illustrated Flora says nothing about a pink variety. In a multitude of books there is safety, or, if not quite that, something less of danger. The pink and the white flowers are reversions to former less highly developed states, I suppose, if certain modern theories are to be trusted. I have read somewhere that the acid of ants turns the blue of chicory blossoms to a bright red, and that European children are accustomed to throw the flowers into ant hills to watch the transformation. Perhaps some young American reader will be moved to try the experiment.

The best plants, however, those that I enjoy most for to-day, at all events, are the cat-tails. How they flourish!—“like a tree planted by the rivers of water.” And how straight they grow! They must be among the righteous. We may almost say that they make the swamp. Certainly, when they are gone the swamp will be gone. Both kinds are here, the broad-leaved and the narrow-leaved, equally rank, though angustifolia has perhaps a little the better of the other in point of height. The two can be distinguished at a glance, and afar off, by a difference in color, if by nothing else. “Cat-tails” and “cat-tail flags,” the Manual and the Illustrated Flora call them; but I was brought up to say “cat-o’-nine-tails,” with strong emphasis on the numeral, and am glad to find that more romantic-sounding name recognized by the latest big dictionary. Not that the name has any particular appropriateness; but like my fellows, I have been trained to venerate a dictionary, especially an “unabridged,” as hardly less sacred than the Bible, and am still much relieved whenever my own usage, past or present, happens to be supported by such authority.

Rankness is the swamp’s note, we may say. Look at the spatter-dock leaves and the pickerel-weed! The tropics themselves could hardly do better. And what a maze and tangle of vegetation!—as if the earth could produce more than the air could find room for. So much for plenty of water and a wholesome depth of black mud. One thinks of the scriptural phrase about paths that “drop fatness.”

Ever since I arrived, the short, hurried, gurgling trill of the long-billed marsh wren has been in my ears. If I have been here an hour, I must have heard that sound five hundred times. Once only, and only for an instant, I saw one of the singers. I have not been on the watch for them, to be sure; but if it had been earlier in the season I should have seen them whether I tried to do so or not. It must be that the little aerial song-flights, then so common and so cheerful to look at, are now mostly over.

In such a place, however, populous as it is, one does not expect to see many birds—blackbirds being left out of the reckoning—at any time. Swamp ornithology is mainly a matter of “earsight.” Birds that live in cat-tail beds and button-bush thickets are very little on the wing. Here a least bittern may coo day after day, and season after season, and it will be half a lifetime before you see him do it. I have made inquiries far and near in the likeliest quarters, and have yet to learn, even at second hand, of any man who has ever had that good fortune. Once, for five minutes, I entertained a lively hope of accomplishing the feat myself, but the bird was too wary for me; and a miss is as good as a mile. No doubt I shall die without the sight.

So the Carolina rail will whistle and the Virginia rail call the pigs, but it will be a memorable hour when you detect either of them in the act. You will hear the sounds often enough; I hear them to-day; and much less frequently you will see the birds stepping with dainty caution along a favorite runway, or feeding about the edges of their cover. But to see them utter the familiar notes, that is another story.

This morning I see on the wing a night heron (so I call him, without professing absolute certainty), a bittern (flying from one side of the railroad tracks to the other), and a little green heron, but no rail of either species, although I sit still in favorable places—where at other times I have seen them—with exemplary patience. In hunting of this kind, patience must be mixed with luck. It pleases my imagination to think what numbers of birds there are all about me, each busy with its day’s work, and not one of them visible for an instant, even by chance.

I go to the top of a grassy mound, and seat myself where I have a lengthwise view of a ditch. Here, ten years ago, more or less, I saw my first gallinule. We had heard his outcries for some days (I speak of myself and two better men), and a visiting New York ornithologist had told us that they were probably the work of a gallinule. They came always from the most inaccessible parts of the swamp, where it seemed hopeless to wade in pursuit of the bird, since we wished to see him alive; but turning the question over in my mind, I bethought myself of this low hilltop, with its command of an open stretch of water between a broad expanse of cat-tails and a wood. Hither I came, therefore. If there was any virtue in waiting, the thing should be done. And sure enough, in no very long time out paddled the bird, with those queer bobbing motions which I was to grow familiar with afterward—a Florida gallinule, with a red plate on his forehead. Again and again I saw him (patience was easy now), and when I had seen enough—for that time—and was on my way back to the railway station, I met the foremost of New England, ornithologists coming down the track. He was on the same hunt, and together we returned to the place I had left; and together we saw the bird. A week or two later he found the nest, and a Massachusetts record was established.

This, I say, was ten years ago. To-day there is no gallinule, or none for me. The best thing I hear, the most characteristically swampy, is the odd diminuendo whistle of a Carolina rail. “We are all here,” he says; “you ought to come oftener.” And I think I will.

A QUIET AFTERNOON

After running hither and thither in search of beauty or novelty, try a turn in the nearest wood. So my good genius whispered to me just now; and here I am. I believe it was good advice.

This venerable chestnut tree, with its deeply furrowed, shadow-haunted, lichen-covered bark of soft, lovely grays and grayish greens, is as stately and handsome as ever. How often I have stopped to admire it, summer and winter, especially in late afternoon, when the level sunlight gives it a beauty beyond the reach of words. Many a time I have gone out of my way to see it, as I would have gone to see some remembered landscape by a great painter.

There is no feeling proud in such company. Anything that can stand still and grow, filling its allotted place and contented to fill it, is enough to put our futile human restlessness to the blush. The wind has long ago blown away some of its branches, but it does not mind. It is busy with its year’s work. I see the young burrs, no bigger than the end of my little finger. When the nuts are ripe the tree will let them fall and think no more about them. How different from a man! When he does a good thing, if by chance he ever does, he must put his hands behind his ears in hopes to hear somebody praising him. Mountains and trees make me humble. I feel like a poor relation.

The pitch-pines are no longer at their best estate. They are brightest when we need their brightness most, in late winter and early spring. This year, at least, the summer sun has faded them badly; but their fragrance is like an elixir. It is one of the glories of pine needles, one of the things in which they excel the rest of us, that they smell sweet, not “in the dust” exactly, but after they are dead.

A nuthatch in one of the trees calls “Tut, tut, tut,” and is so near me that I hear his claws scratching over the dry bark. A busy and cheerful body. Just beyond him a scarlet tanager is posed on a low, leafless twig. Like the pine leaves, he looks out of condition. I am sure I have seen brighter ones. He is silent, but his mate, somewhere in the oak branches over my head, keeps up an emphatic chip-cherr, chip-cherr. Yes, I see her now, and the red one has gone up to perch at her side. She cocks her head, looking at me first out of one eye and then out of the other, and repeats the operation two or three times, like a puzzled microscopist squinting at a doubtful specimen; and all the while she continues to call, though I know nothing of what she means. Once her mate approaches too near, and she opens her bill at him in silence. He understands the sign and keeps his distance. I admire his spirit. It is better than taking a city.

The earliest of the yellow gerardias is in bloom, and a pretty desmodium, also (D. nudiflorum), with a loose raceme of small pink flowers, like miniature sweet-pea blossoms, on a slender leafless stalk. These are in the wood, amidst the underbrush. As I come out into a dry, grassy field I find the meadow-beauty; an odd creature, with a tangle of long stamens; bright-colored, showy in its intention, so to speak, but rather curious than beautiful, in spite of its name; especially because the petals have not the grace to fall when they are done, but hang, withered and discolored, to spoil the grace of later comers. The prettiest thing about it all, after the freshly opened first flower, is the urn-shaped capsule. That, to me, is of really classic elegance.

Now I have crossed the road and am seated on a chestnut stump, with my back against a tree, on the edge of a broad, rolling, closely cropped cattle pasture, a piece of genuine New England. Scattered loosely over it are young, straight, slender-waisted, shoulder-high cedars, and on my right hand is a big patch of hardhack, growing in tufts of a dozen stalks each, every one tipped with an arrow-head of pink blossoms. The whole pasture is full of sunshine. Down at the lower end is a long, narrow, irregular-shaped pond. I cannot see it because of a natural hedge against the fence-row on my left; but somehow the landscape takes an added beauty from the water’s presence. The truth is, perhaps, that I do see it.

High overhead a few barn swallows and chimney swifts are scaling, each with happy-sounding twitters after its kind. A jay screams, but so far off as merely to emphasize the stillness. Once in a while a song sparrow pipes; a cheerful, honest voice. When there is nothing better to do I look at the hardhack. The spiræas are a fine set; many of them are honored in gardens; but few are more to my liking, after all, than this old friend (and enemy) of my boyhood. Whether it is really useful as an herb out of which to make medicinal “tea” I feel no competency to say, though I have drunk my share of the decoction. It is not a virulent poison: so much I feel reasonably sure of. Hardhack, thoroughwort, and pennyroyal,—with the o left out,—these were the family herbalist’s trinity in my day. Now, in these better times of pellets and homœopathic allopathy, children hardly know what medicine-taking means. We remember, we of an older generation. “Pinch your nose and swallow it, and I will give you a cent.” Does that sound vulgar in the nice ears of modern readers? Well, we earned our money.

Now an oriole’s clear August fife is heard. A short month, and he will be gone. And hark! A most exquisite strain by one of the best of field sparrows. I have never found an adjective quite good enough for that bit of common music. I believe there is none. Nor can I think of any at this moment with which to express the beauty of this summer afternoon. Fairer weather was never seen in any corner of the world. Four crows fly over the field in company. The hindmost of them has a hard time with a redwing, which strikes again and again. “Give it to him!” say I. Between crow and man I am for the crow; but between the crow and the smaller bird I am always for the smaller bird. Whether I am right or wrong is not the question here. This is not my day for arguing, but for feeling.

How pretty the hardhack is! Though it stands up rather stiff, it feels every breath of wind. Its beauty grows on me as I look, which is enough of itself to make this a profitable afternoon. There is no beauty so welcome as new beauty in an old friend.

A kingbird, one of two or three hereabout, comes to sit on a branch over my head. He is full of twitters, which sound as if they might be full of meaning; but there is no interpreter. He, too, like the oriole, is on his last month. I have great respect for kingbirds. A phœbe shows herself in the hedge, flirting her tail airily as she alights. “Pretty well, I thank you,” she might be saying. Every kind of bird has motions of its own, no doubt, if we look sharply enough. The phœbe’s may be seen of all men.

I had meant to go out and sit awhile under the spreading white oak yonder, on the upper side of the pasture, near the huckleberry patches; but why should I? Well enough is well enough, I say to myself; and it sounds like good philosophy, in weather like this. It may never set the millpond on fire; but then, I don’t wish to set it on fire.

And although I go on mentioning particulars, a flower, a bird, a bird’s note, it is none of these that I am really enjoying. It is the day—the brightness and the quiet, and the comfort of a perfect temperature. Great is weather. No man is to blame for talking about it, unless his talk is twaddle. Out-of-door people know that few things are more important. A quail’s whistle, a thought too strenuous, perhaps, for such an hour,—a breezy quoit,—breaks my disquisition none too soon; else I might have been brought in guilty under my own ruling.

As I get over the fence, on my start homeward, I notice a thrifty clump of chokecherry shrubs on the other side of the way, hung with ripening clusters, every cherry a jewel as the sun strikes it. They may hang “for all me,” as schoolboys say. My country-bred taste is pretty catholic in matters of this kind, but it extends not to chokecherries. They should be eaten by campaign orators as a check upon fluency.

POPULAR WOODPECKERS

There are two birds in Newton, the present summer, that have perhaps attracted more attention than any pair of Massachusetts birds ever attracted before; more, by a good deal, I imagine, than was paid to a pair of crows that, for some inexplicable reason, built a nest and reared a brood of young a year ago in a back yard on Beacon Hill, in Boston. I refer to a pair of red-headed woodpeckers that have a nest (at this moment containing young birds nearly ready to fly) in a tall dead stump standing on the very edge of the sidewalk, like a lamp-post. The road, it should be said, is technically unfinished; one of those “private ways,” not yet “accepted” by the city and therefore legally “dangerous,” though in excellent condition and freely traveled. If the birds had intended to hold public receptions daily,—as they have done without intending it,—they could hardly have chosen a more convenient spot. The stump, which is about twenty-five feet in height, stands quite by itself in the middle of a small open space, with a wooded amphitheatrical knoll at its back, while on the other side it is overlooked by the windows of several houses, the nearest almost within stone’s throw. So conspicuous is it, indeed, that whenever I go there, as I do once in two or three days, to see how matters are coming on, I am almost sure to see the birds far in advance of my arrival.

They are always there. I heard of them through the kindness of a stranger, on the 26th of June. His letter reached me (in Boston) at two o’clock in the afternoon, and at half-past three I was admiring the birds. It cannot be said that they welcomed my attentions. From that day to this they have treated me as an intruder. “You have stayed long enough.” “We are not at home to-day.” “Come now, old inquisitive, go about your business.” Things like these they repeat to me by the half hour. Then, in audible asides, they confide to each other what they think of me. “Watch him,” says one at last. “I must be off now after a few grubs.” And away she goes, while her mate continues to inform me that I am a busybody, a meddler in other birds’ matters, a common nuisance, a duffer, and everything else that is disreputable. All this is unpleasant. I feel as I imagine a baseball umpire feels when the players call him a “gump” and the crowd yells “robber;” but like the umpire, I bear it meekly and hold my ground. A good conscience is a strong support.

In sober truth I have been scrupulously careful of the birds’ feelings; or, if not of their feelings, at least of their safety. I began, indeed, by being almost ludicrously careful. The nest was a precious secret, I thought. I must guard it as a miser guards his treasure. So, whenever a foot-passenger happened along the highway at my back, I made pretense of being concerned with anything in the world rather than with that lamp-post of a stump. What was Hecuba to me, or I to Hecuba? I pretty soon learned, however, that such precautions were unnecessary. The whole town, or at least the whole neighborhood, was aware of the birds’ presence. Every school-teacher in the city, one man told me, had been there with his or her pupils to see them. So popular is ornithology in these modern days. He had seen thirty or forty persons about the place at once, he said, all on the same errand. “Look at the bank there,” he added. “They have worn it smooth by sitting on it.”

I have not been fortunate enough to assist at any such interesting “function,” but I have had plenty of evidence to prove the truth of what I said just now—that the birds and their nest have become matters of common knowledge. On my third visit, just as I was ready to come away, a boy turned the corner on a bicycle, holding his younger sister in front of him.

“Are they here?” he inquired as he dismounted.

“Who?” said I.

“The red-headed woodpeckers,” he answered.

He had known about the nest for some weeks. Oh, yes, everybody knew it. So-and-so found it (I forget the name), and pretty soon it was all over Newtonville. A certain boy, whose wretched name also I have forgotten, had talked about shooting one of the birds; he could get a dollar and a half for it, he professed; but policeman Blank had said that a dollar and a half wouldn’t do a boy much good if he got hold of him. He—my informant, a bright-faced, manly fellow of eleven or twelve—had brought his younger sister down to see the birds. He thought they were very handsome. “There!” said he, as one of them perched on a dead tree near by, “look!” and he knelt behind the little girl and pointed over her shoulder till she got the direction. After all, I thought, a boy is almost as pretty as a woodpecker. His father and mother were Canadians, and had told him that birds of this kind were common where they used to live. Then he lifted his sister upon the wheel, jumped up behind her, and away they trundled.

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

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

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

LATE SUMMER NOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WOOD SILENCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOUTHWARD BOUND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOUR DREAMERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

True.

We must make the best of it, therefore.

True.

By making more shoes.

Nay, that is not so certain.

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

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

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

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

A DAY IN FRANCONIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WITH THE WADERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hilltop offered beauty of another kind: the blue ocean, the broad, brown marshes, dotted with haycocks innumerable, the hills landward, a distant town, with its spires showing, the inlet yonder, whitened with swimming gulls. Crickets chirped in the grass, herds of cattle and sheep grazed peacefully on all sides, and when I turned my head, there behind me, a mile away, perhaps, were the shining Ipswich dunes, wave on wave of dazzling white sand. I ought to have stayed with the picture, perhaps; but there were no longspurs, and somehow this was a day for birds rather than for a landscape. I would return to the muddy flats, and spend my time with the sandpipers and the plover. The telltale yellow-legs were whistling, and who could guess what I might see?

At the little pool I must stop for another visit with my single sandpiper. He would be there, I felt certain. And he was; as pretty as before, and no more alarmed at my presence, though as he balanced himself on one leg his body shook with a constant rhythmical pulsation, as if his heart were beating more violently than a bird’s heart should. He did not look happy, I thought. And why should he, far from home, with a wounded foot, no company, and an unknown number of guns yet to face before reaching the end of his long journey? He was hardly bigger than a sparrow, but he was one of the creatures which lordly man, endowed with “godlike reason,” a being of “large discourse,” so wise and good that he naturally thinks of the Creator of all things as a person very like himself, finds it amusing to kill.

And when I came to the few rods of beach, there stood my seven sandpipers, exactly as before. They stirred uneasily under my gaze, whispering a few words to one another (“Will he shoot, do you think?”), but they kept their places, bunched closely together for safety. Did they know anything about their lonely brother—or sister—up yonder on the hillside? If they noticed her absence, they probably supposed her dead. Death is so common and so sudden, especially in migration time.

Now I am back again on a grassy mound by the muddy flats, and the big plover is still here. How alert he looks as he sees me approach! Yet now, as an hour ago, he shows no inclination to fly. The tide is coming in fast. He steps about in the deepening water with evident discomfort, and whether he will or not, he must soon take to wing or wade ashore. And while I am eyeing his motions my glass falls unexpectedly on two sandpipers near him in the grass; pectoral sandpipers—grass-birds—I soon say to myself, with acute satisfaction. It is many years since I saw one. How small their heads look,—in contrast with the plover’s,—and how thickly and finely their breasts are streaked! I remember the portrait in Nelson’s “Birds of Alaska,” with its inflated throat, a monstrous vocal sac, half as large as the bird itself. A graceful wooer!

They, too, are finding the tide a trouble, and no doubt are wishing the human intruder would take himself off. Now, in spite of my presence, one of them follows the other toward the land, scurrying from one bit of tussock to another, half wading, half swimming. Time and tide wait for no bird. Both they and the plover have given up all thoughts of eating. They have enough to do to keep their eyes upon me and the water.

The sandpipers, being smaller, make their retreat first. One, as he finds himself so near a stranger, is smitten with sudden fright, and runs by at full speed on his pretty dark-green legs. Yet both presently become reassured, and fall to feeding with all composure almost about my feet. I have been still so long that I must be harmless. And now the plover himself takes wing (I am glad to find he can), but only for a rod or two, alighting on a conical bit of island. There is nothing for him to eat there, apparently, but at least the place will keep his feet dry. He stands quiet, waiting. And so he continues to do for the hour and more that I still remain.

My own stay, I should mention, is by this time compulsory. I, too, am on an island (I have just discovered the fact), and not choosing to turn wader on my own account, must wait till the tide goes down. It is no hardship. Every five minutes brings me something new. I have only now noticed (a slight cry having drawn my attention) that there are sandpipers of another kind here—a little flock of dunlins, or redbacks. They are bunched on the pebbly edge of a second island (which was not an island a quarter of an hour ago), nearer to me even than the plover’s, and are making the best of the high tide, which has driven them from their feeding-grounds, by taking a siesta. Once, when I look that way,—which I can do only now and then, there are so many distractions,—I find the whole eight with their bills tucked under their wings. Now, isn’t that a pretty sight! Their name, as I say, is the red-backed sandpiper; but at this season their upper parts are of a uniform mouse color, or soft, dark gray—I hardly know how to characterize it. It is very distinctive, whatever word we use, and equally so is the shape of the bill, long and stout, with a downward inflection at the tip. Eight birds, did I say? No, there are nine, for I have just discovered another, not on the island, but under the very edge of the grassy bank on which I am standing. He has a broken leg, poor fellow, and seems to prefer being by himself; but by and by, with a sudden cry of alarm, for which I can see no occasion, he flies to rejoin his mates.

Meanwhile, seven white-rumps have come and settled near them; the same flock that I saw yonder on the roadside beach, I have little question. Probably the encroaching tide has disturbed them also. At the same time I hear distant voices of yellow-legs, and presently six birds are seen flying in this direction. They wheel doubtfully at the unexpected sight of a man, and drop to the ground beyond range; but I can see them well enough. How tall they are, and how wide-awake they look, with their necks stretched out; and how silly they are,—“telltales” and “tattlers” indeed,—to publish their movements and whereabouts to every gunner within a mile! While my head is turned they disappear, and I hear them whistling again across the marsh. They are all gone, I think; but as I look again toward my sandpipers’ island, behold! there stands a tall fellow, his yellow legs shining, and his eye fastened upon me. Either he has lost his reason, if he ever had any, or he knows I have no gun. Perfectly still he keeps (he is not an absolute fool, I rejoice to see) as long as I am looking at him. Then I look elsewhere, and when my eye returns to his place, he is not there. He has only moved behind the corner of the islet, however, as I find when I shift my own position by a rod or two. He seems to be dazed, and for a wonder he holds his tongue.

Titlarks are about me in crowds. One is actually wading along the shore, with the water up to his belly. Yes, he is doing it again. I look twice to be sure of him. A flock of dusky ducks fly just above my head, showing me the lining of their wings. Truly this is a birdy spot; and luckily, though there are two or three “blinds” near, and guns are firing every few minutes up and down the marshes, there is no one here to disturb me and my friends. I could stay with them till night; but what is that? A buggy is coming down the road out of the hills with only one passenger. This is my opportunity. I pack up my glass, betake myself to the roadside, and when the man responds to my question politely, I take a seat beside him. As he gets out to unlatch the gate, a minute afterward, a light-colored—dry-sand-colored—bird flies up and perches on a low fence-rail. This is no wader, but is none the less welcome. It is an Ipswich sparrow, I explain to my benefactor, who waits for me to take an observation. The species was discovered here, I tell him, and was named in the town’s honor. He seems interested. “I shouldn’t have known it,” he says. So I have done some good to-day, though I have thought only of enjoying myself.

ON THE NORTH SHORE AGAIN

If you have once seen a picture, says Emerson somewhere, never look at it again. He means that hours of insight are so rare that a really high and satisfying experience with a book, picture, landscape, or other object of beauty is to be accepted as final, a favor of Providence which we have no warrant to expect repeated. If you have seen a thing, therefore, really seen it and communed with the soul of it, let that suffice you. Attempts to live the hour over a second time will only result in failure, or, worse yet, will cast a shadow over what ought to have been a permanently luminous recollection.

There is a modicum of sound philosophy in the advice. We must take it as the counsel of an idealist, and follow it or not as occasion bids. The words of such men, as one of them was given to saying, are only for those who have ears to hear. We may be sure of one thing: poems, landscapes, pictures, and all other works of art (art human or superhuman) are never to be exhausted by one look, or by a hundred. If a man is good for anything, and the poem or the landscape is good for anything, he will find new meanings with new perusals. In other words, we may turn upon Emerson and say: “Yes, but then, you know, we never do see a picture—a picture that is a picture.”

As was related a week ago, I spent the 12th of October on the North Shore. I brought back the remembrance of a glorious piece of the world’s beauty. In outline, I had it in my mind. But I knew perfectly, both at the time and afterward, that I had not really made it my own. I had been too much taken up with other things. The eye does not see the landscape; nor does the mind see it. The eye is the lens, the mind is the plate. The landscape prints itself upon the mind, through the eye. But the mind must be sensitive and still, and—what is oftener forgotten—the exposure must be sufficiently prolonged. The clearest-eyed genius ever born never saw a landscape in ten minutes.

On all grounds, then, I was entitled to another look. And this time, perhaps, the Lapland longspurs would be there to be enjoyed with the rest. I would go again, therefore; and on the morning of the 18th, long before daylight, judging by the quietness of the trees outside that the wind had gone down (for wind is a serious hindrance to quiet pleasure at the seashore in autumn, and visits must be timed accordingly), I determined to set out in good season and secure a longish day. Venus and the old moon were growing pale in the east when I started forth, and three hours afterward I was footing it through Ipswich village toward East Street and the sea.

As I crossed the marsh and approached the gate, a stranger overtook me. We managed the business together, one pulling the gate to, the other tending the hook and staple, and we spoke of the unusual greenness of the hills before us, on which flocks and herds were grazing. “There’s better feed now than there’s been all summer,” the stranger said. It was easy to believe it. Those broad-backed, grassy hills are one of the glories of the North Shore.

I followed the road as it led me among them. A savanna sparrow had been dodging along the edge of a ditch near the gate; titlark voices at once became common, and after a turn or two I saw before me a bunch of shore larks dusting themselves in the sandy middle of the track. They were making thorough work of it, crowding their breasts and necks, and even the sides of their heads into the soil, with much shaking of feathers afterward.

The road brought me to a beach, where were two or three houses, and, across the way, a pond stocked with wooden geese and ducks, with an underground blind for gunners in the side of the hill. Some delights are so keen that it is worth elaborate preparations to enjoy them. Here the titlarks were in extraordinary force, and I lingered about the spot for half an hour, awaiting the longspurs that might be hoped for in their company. Hoped for, but nothing more. I was still too early, perhaps.

Well, their absence, the fact of it once accepted, left me free-minded for the main object of my trip. I would go up the hill, over the grass, and take the prospect northward. A narrow depression, down which a brook trickled with a pleasant, companionable noise, as if it were talking to itself, afforded me shelter from the wind, and at the same time bounded my outlook on either side, as a frame bounds a picture. The hill fell away sharply to the water just beyond my feet, and up and down the inlet gulls were flying. Once, to my pleasure, two black-backed “coffin-bearers” passed, the only ones I was able to discover among the thousands of herring gulls that filled the air and the water, and crowded the sand-bars, the whole day long. Across the blue water were miles of brown marsh, and beyond the marsh rose wooded hills veiled with haze, the bright autumnal colors shining through. Crickets were still musical, buttercups and dandelions starred the turf, and once a yellow butterfly (Philodice) flitted near. The summer was gone, but here were some of its children to keep it remembered. Titlarks walked daintily about the grass, or balanced themselves upon the boulders, and once I turned my head just in time to see a marsh hawk sailing over the hill at my back, his white rump showing.

When I had left the hills behind me, and was again skirting the muddy flats, I found myself all at once near a few sandpipers,—a dozen, more or less, of white-rumps,—one with a foot dragging, one with a leg held up, and beside them a single red-back, or dunlin, staggering on one leg, the same bird, it seemed likely, that I had pitied a week ago. I pitied him still. Ornithology, studied under such conditions, was no longer the cheerful, exhilarating science to which I am accustomed. It was more like sociology.

Perhaps I am sentimental. If so, may I be forgiven. There is no man but has his weakness. The dunlin was nothing, I knew; one among thousands; a few ounces of flesh with feathers on it; what if he did suffer? It was none of my business. Why should I take other men’s amusements sadly? The bird was greatly inferior to the being who shot him; at least that is the commonly accepted theory; and the superior, as every one but an anarchist must admit, has the rights of superiority. And for all that, the dunlin seemed a pretty innocent, and I wished that he had two good legs. As for his being only one of thousands, so am I—and no very fine one either; but I shouldn’t like to be shot at from behind a wall; and when I have a toothache, the sense of my personal insignificance is of small use in dulling the pain. Poor dunlin!

I allowed myself two hours from the gate back to the railroad station, though it is less than an hour’s walk. Some of the fairest views are to be obtained from the road; and there, I told myself, I should be sheltered from the wind and could sit still at my ease. The first half of the distance, too, would take me between pleasant hedgerows, in which are many things worthy of a stroller’s notice.

For some time, indeed, I did little but stop and look behind. The marshes pulled me about: so level, so expansive, so richly brown, so pointed with haycocks (once, the notion taking me, I counted far enough to see that there were more than two hundred in sight), and so beautifully backed by the golden autumnal hills. I can see them yet, though I have nothing to say about them.

“The world lies east: how ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky!”

Trains of gulls went flying up the inlet as the tide went out. They live by the sea’s almanac as truly as the clam-diggers, two of whom I had watched, an hour before, sailing across the inlet in a rude boat (more picturesque by half than a gentleman’s yacht), and setting about their day’s work on a shoal newly uncovered. Thank Heaven, there are still some occupations that cannot be carried on in a factory.

The roadsides were bright with gay-colored fruits: barberries, thorn apples, Roxbury waxwork, and rose-hips. Of thorn bushes there were at least two kinds; one already bare-branched, with scattered small fruit; the other still in leaf, and loaded with gorgeous clusters of large red apples. More interesting to me than any of these were the frost grapes; familiar acquaintances of an Old Colony boyhood, but now grown to be strangers. They were shining black, ripe and juicy (of the size of peas), and if their sweetness failed to tempt the palate, that, for aught I know, may have been the eater’s fault rather than theirs. Why might not their quality be of a too excellent sort, beyond his too effeminate powers of appreciation? Is there any certainty that man’s taste is final in such matters? Was my own criticism of them anything more than a piece of unscientific, inconclusive impressionism?

Surely they were not without a tang. The most exacting mouth could not deny them individuality. I tried them, and retried them; but after all, they seemed most in place on the vines. To me, in the old days, they were known only as frost grapes. Others, it appears, have called them chicken grapes, possum grapes, and winter grapes. No doubt they find customers before the season is over. Thoreau should have liked them and praised them, but I do not recall them in his books. Probably they do not grow in Concord. They are of his kin, at all events, wildings of the wild. I wish I had brought a bunch or two home with me. In my present mood I believe they would “go to the spot.”

But if I was glad to see the frost grapes, I was gladder still to see a certain hickory tree. I was scarcely off the marsh before I came to it, and had hardly put my eye upon it before I said to myself (although so far as I could have specified, it looked like any other hickory; but there is a kind of knowledge, or half knowledge, that does not rest upon specifications), “There! That should be a bitternut tree.” Now the bitternut is not to be called a rarity, I am assured; but somehow I had never found it, notwithstanding I was a nut-gatherer in my youth, and have continued to be one to this day, an early taste for wild forage being one of the virtues that are seldom outgrown. Well, something distracted my attention just then, and I contented myself with putting a leaf and a handful of nuts into my pocket. Only on getting home did I crack one and find it bitter. Now, several days afterward, I have cracked another, and tested it more fully. The shell is extremely thin,—like a pecan nut’s for fragility,—and the meat, which is large and full, is both bitter and puckery, suggesting the brown inner partitions of a pecan shell, which the eater learns so carefully to avoid. In outward appearance the nut is a pig-nut pure and simple, the reader being supposed to be enough of a countryman to know that pig-nuts, like wild fruits in general, vary interminably in size, shape, and goodness.

Pretty butter-and-eggs still bloomed beside the stone wall, and the “folksy mayweed” was plentiful about a barnyard. Out from the midst of it scampered a rabbit as I approached the fence to look over. He disappeared in the cornfield, his white tailtip showing last, and I wondered where he belonged, as there seemed to be neither wood nor shrubbery within convenient distance.

Just beyond this point (after noticing a downy woodpecker in a Balm-o’-Gilead tree, if the careful compositor will allow me that euphonious Old Colony contraction), I had stopped to pick up a shagbark when five children, the oldest a girl of nine or ten, came down the road together.

“Out of school, so early?” said I.

“No,” was the instantaneous response; “we’ve got the whooping cough.”

“Ah, that’s better than going to school, isn’t it?” said I, not so careful of my moral influence as a descendant of the Puritans ought to have been, perhaps; but I spoke from impulse, remembering myself how I also was tempted.

“Yes,” said one of the children; “No,” said another; and the reader may believe which he will, looking into his own childish heart, if he can still find it, as I hope he can.

Apple trees were loaded; hollyhocks, marigolds, and even tender cannas and dahlias, still brightened the gardens (so much for being near the sea, even on the North Shore), but what I most admired were the handsome yellow quinces in many of the dooryards. Quince preserve must be a favorite dish in Ipswich. I thought I should like to live here. I could smell the golden fruit—in my mind’s nose—clean across the way. And when I reached the village square I stopped (no, I walked slowly) to watch a real Old Colony game that I had not seen played for many a day. Two young men had stuck a jackknife into the hard earthen sidewalk and were “pitching cents.” It was like an old daguerreotype. One of the gamesters was having hard luck, but was taking it merrily. “I owe you six,” I heard him say, as his coin stood on edge and rolled perversely away from the knife-blade.

This was very near to “Meeting-house Green.” I hope I am doing no harm to speak of it.

AUTUMNAL MORALITIES

For the month past my weekly talk has been more or less a traveler’s tale—of things among the mountains and at the seaside. Now, on this bright afternoon in the last week of October, a month that every outdoor man saddens to see coming to an end (like May, it is never half long enough), let me note a little of what is passing in the lanes and by-roads nearer home.

Leaves are rustling below and above. As is true sometimes in higher circles, they seem to grow loquacious with age; the slightest occasion, the merest nudge of suggestion, the faintest puff of the spirit sets them off. For me they will never talk too much. I love their preaching seven days in the week. The driest of them never teased my ears with a dry sermon. I scuff along the path on purpose to stir them up. “Your turn will come next,” I hear them saying; but the message does not sound like bad news. I listen to it with a kind of pleasure, as to solemn music. If the doctor or the clergyman had brought me the same word, my spirit might have risen in rebellion; but the falling leaf may say what it likes. It has poet’s leave.

How gracefully they come to the ground, here one and there another; slowly, slowly, with leisurely dips and turns, as if the breeze loved them and would buoy them up till the last inevitable moment. Children of air and sunshine, they must return to the dust. So all things move in circles,—life and death, death and life. Happy leaves! they depart without formalities, with no funereal trappings. The wind whispers to them, and they follow.

As I watch them falling, a gray squirrel startles me. I rejoice to see him. He, too, is a falling leaf. In truth, his living presence takes me by surprise. So many gunners have been in this wood of late, all so murderously equipped, that I had thought every squirrel must before this time have gone into the game-bag. Be careful, young fellow; you will need all your spryness and cunning, all your knack of keeping on the invisible side of the trunk, or your frolic will end in sudden blackness. This is autumn, the sickly season for squirrels and birds. “The law is off,” and the gun is loaded to kill you. Take a friend’s advice, and fight shy of everything that walks upright “in the image of God.”

Yonder round-topped sweet birch tree is one of October’s masterpieces; a sheaf of yellow leaves with the sun on them. How they shine! Yet it is not so much they as the sunlight. Nay, it is both. Let the leaves have the honor that belongs to them. In a week they will all be under foot. To-day they are bright as the sun, and airy and frolicsome as so many butterflies. Blessed are my eyes that see them. And look! how the light (what a painter it is!) glorifies the lower trunk of the white oak just beyond. The furrowed gray bark is so perfect a piece of absolute beauty that, if it were framed and set up in a gallery, the crowd—or the few that are better than a crowd—would be always before it. So cheap and universal are visual delights, so little dependent upon place or season—sunlight and the bark of a tree!

In the branches overhead are chestnut-loving blackbirds, every one with a crack in his voice. Far away a crow is cawing, and from another direction a jay screams. These speak to the world at large. Half the township may hear what they have to offer. I like them; may their speech never be a whit softer or more musical; but if comparisons are in order, I give my first vote for less public—more intimate—birds, such as speak only to the grove or the copse. And even as I confess my preference, a bluebird’s note confirms it: a voice that caresses the ear; such a tone as no human mouth or humanly invented instrument can ever produce the like of. He has no need to sing. His simplest talk is music.

Here, by the wayside, a few asters have sprung up after the scythe, and are freshly in flower. How blue they are! And how much handsomer a few stalks of them look now than a full acre did two months ago. So acceptable is scarcity. There is nothing to equal it for the heightening of values. It is only the poor who know what money is worth. It is only in October and November that we feel all the charm of Aster lævis. I think of Bridget Elia’s lament over the “good old times” when she and her cousin were “not quite so rich.” Then the spending of a few shillings had a zest about it. A purchase was an event, a kind of festival. I believe in Bridget’s philosophy; for the asters teach the same; yes, and the goldenrods also. They, too, have come up in the wake of the scythe, and still dwarfed, having no time to attain their natural growth, as if they knew that winter was upon them, are already topped with yellow. I carry home a scanty half handful of the two, asters and goldenrods, as treasure-trove. They are sure to be welcome. When all the fields were bright with such things, they seemed hardly worth house-room. This late harvest of blossoms is one small compensation for all the ugliness inflicted upon the landscape by the habit—inveterate with highway “commissioners”—of mowing back-country roadsides. As if stubble were prettier than a hedge!

Now I pass two long-armed white oaks, which I never come near without thinking of a friend of mine and of theirs who used to walk hereabouts with me; a real tree lover, who loves not species, not white oaks and red oaks, but individual trees, and goes to see them as one goes to see a man or a woman. This pair he always called the twins. They have summered and wintered each other for a hundred years. Who knows—putting the matter on grounds of pure science—whether they do not enjoy each other’s companionship? Who knows that trees have no kind of sentience? Not I. We take a world of things for granted; and if all our neighbors chance to do the same, we let the general assumption pass for certainty. If trees do know anything, I would wager that it is something worth knowing, something quite as good as is to be found in any newspaper.

Here are red maples as bare as December, and yonder is one that is almost in full leaf; and by some freak of originality every leaf is bright yellow. Three days more and it will be naked also. Under it are white-alder bushes (Clethra) clothed in dark purple, and tall blueberry bushes all in red, with yellow shadings by way of contrast. This is in a swampy spot, where a lonesome hyla is peeping. Just beyond, the drier ground is reddened—under the trees—with huckleberry and dangleberry. Nobody who has not attended to the matter would imagine how much of the brightness of our New England autumn—one of the pageants of the world—is due to these lowly bushes, which most people think of solely as useful in the production of pies and puddings. Without being mown, the huckleberry bears a second crop—a crop of color. It is twice blest; it blesses him that eats and him that looks. In many parts of New England, at least, the autumnal landscape could better spare the maples than the blueberries and the huckleberries. Rum-cherry trees and shrubs—more shrubs than trees—are dressed in lovely shades of yellow and salmon. Spicebushes wear plain yellow of a peculiarly delicate cast. I roll a leaf in my hand and find it still spicy. A bush looks handsomer, I believe, if it is known to smell good. The same thought came to me a week ago while I was admiring the sassafras leaves. They were then just at the point of ripeness. Now they have turned to a dead brown. The maple’s way is in better taste—to shed its leaves while they are still bright and fresh. They are under my feet now, a carpet of red and yellow.

One of the oddest bits of fall coloration (I cannot profess greatly to like it) is the ghostly white—greenish white—of Roxbury waxwork leaves. It is unique in these parts, so far as I can recall, but is almost identical with the pallor of striped maple foliage (Acer Pennsylvanicum) as one sees it in the White Mountains. Waxwork pigments all go to the berries, it appears. These are showy enough to suit the most barbaric taste, and are among the things that speak to me strongest of far-away times, when my childish feet were just beginning to wander in nature’s garden. The sight of them reminds me of what a long time I have lived.

A gust of wind strikes a tall willow just as I approach it. See the leaves tumble! Thick and fast they come, a leafy shower, with none of those pretty, hesitating, parachute-like reluctances which we noticed the rounder and lighter birch leaves practicing half an hour ago. The willow leaves, narrow and pointed, fall more like arrows. I am put in mind, I cannot tell why, of an early morning hour, years ago, when I happened to cross a city garden after the first killing frost, and stopped near a Kentucky coffee-tree. Its foliage had been struck with death. Not a breath was stirring, but the leaves, already blackened and curled, dropped in one continuous rain. The tree was out of its latitude, and had been caught with its year’s work half done. The frost was a tragedy. This breeze among the willow branches is nothing so bad as that. Its errand is all in the order of nature. It calls those who are ready.

My meditations are still running with the season, still playing with mortality, when a blue jay quits a branch near by (I had not seen him) and flies off in silence. The jay is a knowing bird. No need to tell him that there is a time for everything under the sun. He has proverbial philosophy to spare. Hark! he has found his voice; like a saucy schoolboy, who waits till he is at a safe distance and then puts his thumb to his nose, and cries “Yaah, yaah!”

Well, the reader may thank him for one thing. He has made an end of my autumnal sermon, the text of which, if any one cares to look for it, may be found in the sixty-fourth chapter of Isaiah, at the sixth verse.

A TEXT FROM THOREAU

“There is no more tempting novelty than this new November. No going to Europe or to another world is to be named with it. Give me the old familiar walk, post-office and all, with this ever new self, with this infinite expectation and faith which does not know when it is beaten. We’ll go nutting once more. We’ll pluck the nut of the world and crack it in the winter evenings. Theatres and all other sight-seeing are puppet shows in comparison. I will take another walk to the cliff, another row on the river, another skate on the meadow, be out in the first snow, and associate with the winter birds. Here I am at home. In the bare and bleached crust of the earth, I recognize my friend.”

Thus bravely did Thoreau enter upon the gray month. It was in 1858, when he was forty-one years old. He wants nothing new, he assures himself. He will “take the shortest way round and stay at home.” “Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here,” he says, underscoring the final word. As if whatever place a man might move to would not be “here” to him! As if he could run away from his own shadow! So I interpret the italics.

His protestations, characteristically unqualified and emphatic, imply that thoughts of travel have beset him. Probably they beset every outdoor philosopher at this short-day season. They are part of the autumnal crop. Our northern world begins to look—in cloudy moods—like a place to escape from. The birds have gone, the leaves have fallen, the year is done. “Let us arise and go also,” an inward voice seems to whisper. Not unlikely there is in us all the dormant remainder of an outworn migratory instinct. Civilization has caged us and tamed us; “hungry generations” have trodden us down; but below consciousness and memory there still persists the blind stirring of ancestral impulse. The fathers were nomads, and the children’s feet are still not quite content with day’s work in a treadmill.

Let our preferences be what they may, however, the greater number of us must stay where we are put, and play the hand that is dealt to us, happy if we can face the dark side of the year with a measure of philosophy. If there is a new self, as Thoreau says, there will be a new world and a new season. If we carry the tropics within us, we need not dream of Florida. And even if there is no constraint upon our going and coming, we need not be in haste to run away. We may safely wait a week or two, at least. November is often not half so bad as it is painted—not half so bad, indeed, as Thoreau himself sometimes painted it. For the eleventh month was not one of his favorites. “November Eat-Heart,” he is more than once moved to call it. The experience of it puts his equanimity to the proof. Even his bravest words about it sound rather like a defiance than a welcome,—a little as if he were whistling to keep up his courage. With the month at its worst, he confesses, he has almost to drive himself afield. He can hardly decide upon any route; “all seem so unpromising, mere surface-walking and fronting the cold wind.” “Surface-walking.” How excellent that is! Every contemplative outdoor man knows what is meant, but only Thoreau could have hit it off to such perfection in a word.

I must admit that I am not sorry to find the Walden stoic once in a long while overtaken by such a comparatively unheroic mood. He boasted so often and so well (with all the rest he boasted of his boasting) that it pleases me to hear him complain. So the weather could be too much even for him, I say to myself, with something like a chuckle. He was mortal, after all; and the day was sometimes dark, even in Concord.

Not that he ever whimpered. And had he done so, in any moment of weakness, it should never have been for me to lay a public finger upon the fact. Nobody shall be more loyal to Thoreau than I am, though others may understand him better and praise him more adequately. If he complained, he did it “man-fashion,” and was within a man’s right. To say that the worst of Massachusetts weather is never to be spoken against is to say too much; it is stretching the doctrine of non-resistance to the point of absurdity. As well forbid us to carry umbrellas, or to put up lightning-rods. There is plenty of weather that deserves to be spoken against.

Only let it be done, as I say, “man-fashion;” and having said our say, let us go about our business again, making the best of things as they are—as Thoreau did. For, having owned his disrelish for what the gods provided, he quickly recovered himself, and proceeded to finish his entry in a cheerier strain. Matters are not so desperate with him, after all. He has to force himself out-of-doors, it is true, but once in the woods he often finds himself “unexpectedly compensated.” “The thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of.” He meets with something that interests him, and immediately the day is as warm as July—as if the wind had shifted from northwest to south. There is the secret, in November as in May—to be interested. Then there is no longer a question of “surface-walking.” The soul is concerned, and life has begun anew.

Thus far, the present November (I write on the 4th) has been unusually mild; some days have been really summer-like, too warm for comfort; but the sun has shone only by minutes—now and then an hour, at the most. Deciduous trees are nearly bare, the oaks excepted; flowers are few and mostly out of condition, though it would be easy to make a pretty high-sounding list of names; and birds are getting to be almost as scarce as in winter. There is no longer any quiet strolling in the woods. If you wish to listen for small sounds you must stand still. The ground is so thick with crackling leaves that it is impossible to go silently. Everything prophesies of the death of the year. It is almost time for the snow to fall and bury what remains of it.

Yet in warm days one may still see dragon-flies on the wing. Yesterday meadow larks were singing with the greatest abandon and in something like a chorus. I must have seen a dozen, and most if not all of them were in tune. On the 1st of the month a grouse drummed again and again; an unseasonable piece of lyrical enthusiasm, one might think; but I doubt if it was anything so very exceptional. Once, indeed, a few years ago, I heard a grouse drum repeatedly in January, on a cloudy day, when the ground in the woods was deep under snow. That, I believe, was an event much out of the common, though by no means without precedent. I wish Thoreau could have been there; he would have improved the occasion so admirably. So long as the partridge can keep his spirits up to the drumming point, why should the rest of us outdoor people pull a long face over hard times and short rations? Shall we be less manly than a bird?

The partridge will neither migrate nor hibernate, but looks winter in the eye and bids the wind whistle. It is too bad if we who command the services of coal dealers and plumbers, tailors and butchers, doctors and clergymen, cannot stand our ground with a creature that knows neither house nor fuel, and has nothing for it, summer and winter, but to live by his wits. To the partridge man must look like a weak brother, a coddler of himself, ruined by civilization and “modern improvements;” a lubber who would freeze to death where a chickadee bubbles over with the very joy of living.

With weather-braving souls like these Thoreau would associate; and so will I. It is true, what all the moralists have told us, that it is good for a man to keep company with his superiors. Not that in my own case I look for their example and tuition to make me inherently better; it is getting late for that; “nothing that happens after we are twelve counts for very much;” I shall be content if they make me happier. And so much I surely depend upon. Good spirits are contagious. It is the great advantage of keeping a dog, that he has happiness to spare, and gives to his master. So a flock of chickadees, or snowbirds, or kinglets, or tree sparrows, or goldfinches brighten a man’s day. He comes away smiling. I will go out now and prove it.

THE PLEASURES OF MELANCHOLY

This wintry November forenoon I was on a sea beach; the sky clouded, the wind high and cold, cutting to the marrow; a bleak and comfortless place. A boy, dragging a child’s cart, was gathering chips of driftwood along the upper edge of the sand,—one human figure, such as painters use to make a lonesome scene more lonesome. A loon, well offshore, sat rocking upon the water, now lifted into sight for an instant, now lost behind a wave. Distant sails and a steamship were barely visible through the fog. So much for the world on its seaward side. There was little to cheer a man’s soul in that quarter.

On the landward side were thickets of leafless rosebushes covered with scarlet hips; groves of tall, tree-like, smooth-barked alders; swampy tracts, wherein were ilex bushes bright with red Christmas berries, and blueberry bushes scarcely less bright with red leaves. Sometimes it was necessary to put up an opera-glass before I could tell one from the other. Here was a marshy spot; dry, shivering sedges standing above the ice, and among them four or five mud-built domes of muskrat houses. Shrewd muskrats! They knew better than to be stirring abroad on a day like this. “If you haven’t a house, why don’t you build one?” they might have said to the man hurrying past, with his neck drawn down into his coat collar. Here I skirted a purple cranberry bog, having tufts of dwarfed, stubby bayberry bushes scattered over it, each with its winter crop of pale-blue, densely packed, tightly held berry clusters.

Not a flower; not a bird. Not so much as a crow or a robin in one of the stunted savin trees. I remembered winter days here, a dozen years ago, when the alder clumps were lively with tree sparrows, myrtle warblers, and goldfinches. Now the whole peninsula was a place forsaken. I had better have stayed away myself. Here, as so often elsewhere, memory was the better sight.

By a summer cottage upon the rocks was a ledge matted over with the Japanese trailing white rose. There were no blossoms, of course, but what with the leaves, still of a glossy green, and the bunches of handsome, high-colored hips, the vine could hardly have been more beautiful, I was ready to say, even when the roses were thickest upon it. Beside another house a pink poppy still looked fresh. Frail, belated child of summer! I could hardly believe my eyes. All its human admirers were gone long since. Every cottage stood vacant. Nobody would live here in this icy wind, if he could find another place to flee to. I remembered Florida beaches, summery abodes, where every breath from the sea brought a welcome coolness. Why should I not take the next train southward? Shall a man be less sensible than a bird?

That was five or six hours ago. Now I am a dozen miles inland. The air is so still that the sifting snowflakes fall straight downward. Even the finest twigs of the gray-birches, so sensitive to the faintest breath, can hardly be seen to stir. A narrow foot-path under the window is a line of white running through the green grass. Beyond that is the brown hillside, brightened with a few pitch-pines; and then a veil shuts down upon the world, with a spray of bare treetops breaking through. It is the gray month in its grayest mood.

Be it so. I will sit at my window and enjoy the world as it is. This sombre day has a beauty and charm of its own—the charm of melancholy. The wise course is to tune our thought to nature’s mood of soberness, rather than to force a different note, profaning the hour, and cheating ourselves with shallow talk and laughter. There is a time for everything under the sun—L’ Allegro and Il Penseroso, each in its turn.

Now is a time to think of what has been and of what will be. Only the other day the year was young; grass was greening, violets were budding, birds were mating and singing. Now the birds are gone, the flowers are dead, the year is ending as all the years have ended before it.

And as the year is, so are we. A few days ago we were children, just venturing to run alone. We knew nothing, had seen nothing, looked forward to nothing. Life for us was only a day in a house and a dooryard, a span of playtime between two sleeps.

A few days ago, I say. Yet what a weary distance we have traveled since then, and what an infinity of things we have seen and dealt with. How many thoughts we have had, coming we know not whence, how many hopes, one making way for the other, how many dreams. We have made friends; friends that were to be friends forever; and long, long ago, with no fault on either side, the currents of the world carrying us, they and we have drifted apart. It is all we can do now to recall their names and their manner of being. Some of them we should pass for strangers if we met them face to face.

What a long procession of things and events have gone by us and been forgotten. Almost we have forgotten our own childish names, it is so many years since any one called us by them. Should we know ourselves, even, if we met in the street the boy or girl of thirty or forty or fifty years ago? Was it indeed we who lived then? who believed such things, enjoyed such things, concerned ourselves with such things, trembled with such fears, were lifted up by such hopes, felt ourselves enriched by such havings? How shadowy and unreal they look now; and once they were as substantial as life and death. Nay, it is some one else whose past we are remembering. The boy and the man cannot be the same.

Shall we rejoice or be sad that we have outgrown ourselves thus completely? Something of both, perhaps. It matters not. The year is ending, the night is falling. The past is as if it had never been; the future is nothing; and the present is less than either of them. Life is a vapor; nothing, and less than nothing, and vanity.

So we say to ourselves, not sadly, but with a kind of satisfaction to have it so. Yet we love to live over the past, and, with less assurance, to dream of the future.

“The flower that once has blown forever dies.”

Yes, we have heard that, and we will not dispute; this is not an hour for disputing; but the flowers that bloomed forty years ago—the iris and the four-o’clocks in a child’s garden—we can still see in recollection’s magic glass. And they are brighter than any rose that opened this morning. We have forgotten things without number; but other things—we shall never forget them. A friend or two that died when they and we were young; “the loveliest and the best;” we can see them more plainly than most of those whose empty, conventionalized faces, each like the other, each wearing its mask, we meet day by day in the common round of business and pleasure. Death, which seemed to destroy them, has but set them beyond the risk of alteration and forgetfulness.

After all, the past is our one sure possession. There is our miser’s chest. With that, while memory holds for us the key, we shall still be rich. There we will spend our gray hours, with friends that have kept their youth; one of the best of them our own true self, not as we were, nor as we are, but as we meant to be.

“These pleasures, Melancholy, give;

And I with thee will choose to live.”

IN THE OLD PATHS

For men who know how to bear themselves company there are few better ways of improving a holiday, especially a home-keeping, home-coming, family feast, like our autumnal Thanksgiving, than to walk in one’s own childish steps—up through the old cattle pasture behind the old homestead, into the old woods. Every jutting stone in the path—and there are many—is just where it was. Your feet remember them perfectly (as your hand remembers which way the door-knob turns, though you yourself might be puzzled to tell), and of their own accord take a zigzag course among them, coming down without fail in the clear intermediary spaces. Or if, by chance, in some peculiarly awkward spot, the toe of your boot forgets itself, the jar only helps you to feel the more at home. You say with the poet, “I have been here before.” Some things are unaltered, you are glad to find. The largest of the trees have been felled, but nobody has dug out the protruding boulders or blasted away the outcropping ledges. One good word we may say for death. It lasts well. It is nothing like a vapor.

Not a rod of the way but talks to you of something. Here, on the left, down in the hollow by the swamp, you used to set snares. Once—fateful day!—you found a partridge in the noose. Then what a fury possessed you! If you had shot your first elephant you could hardly have been more completely beside yourself. It was a cruel sight; you felt it so; but you had caught a partridge! With all your boyish unskillfulness you had lured the unhappy bird to his death. A spray of red barberries had been too bright for his resistance. He discovered his mistake when the cord began to pull. “Oh, why was I such a fool!” he thought; just as you have thought more than once since then, when you have run your own neck into some snare of the fowler.

Yonder, on the right, grew little scattered patches of trailing arbutus. Every spring you gathered a few blossoms, going thither day after day, watching for them to open. And the patches are there still. Some of them are no broader than a dinner plate, and the largest of them would not cover the top of a bushel basket. For more than fifty years—perhaps for more than five hundred—they have looked as they do now; a few score of leaves and an annual crop of a dozen or two of flowers. Their endurance, with so many greedy hands after them, is one of the miracles. Probably they are older than any tree in the township. It isn’t the tall things that live longest.

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.