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Gornell University Library
Sthara, Nem York

]
E

FROM THE

BENNO LOEWY LIBRARY

COLLECTED BY

BENNO LOEWY

1854-1919

BEQUEATHED TO CORNELL UNIVERSITY

The writings of John Burroughs.

Cornell University

Library

The original of this book is in
the Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.

http:/Awww.archive.org/details/cu31924022149946

THE WRITINGS OF
JOHN BURROUGHS

Riversive Cnition

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

FAR AND NEAR

BY

JOHN BURROUGHS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
Che Hivergive Press, Cambridge

1904 -

= a)
A 76/334
’ Copyright, 1901,
By EDWARD H. HARRIMAN.
Copyright, 1904,
By JOHN BURROUGHS.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

PREFACE

In the preface to “ Riverby” I told my readers
that that was probably my last out-door book. But
my life has gone on, my love of nature has con-
tinued, my habit of observation has been kept up,
and the combined result is another collection of
papers dealing with the old, inexhaustible, open-
air themes. There may even be another volume in
the course of the following year.

The only part of the present collection that has
not been in print before is the chapter on Jamaica.
The account of the trip to Alaska originally ap-
peared in the first volume of the “ Harriman Alaska
Expedition,” published by Messrs. Doubleday, Page
& Co. in 1901, where it was profusely illustrated
by text cuts, full-page photogravures, and colored
plates. Iam indebted to Mr. Harriman and to the
publishers named for permission to use it in this
collection.

August 1, 1904.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. In Green ALASKA:
CROSSING THE CONTINENT - : ‘ é . 1

SHOSHONE FALLS AND CANYON . ° .

MULTNOMAH FALLS . : $ a cd . 18
THE INLAND PASSAGE . 2 . . 5 20
METLAKAHTLA . : . : . é - 29
WRANGELL AND JUNEAU 3 . * 7 32
LYNN CANAL AND SKAGWAY ‘ 7 . 35
WHITE PASS. : ; ‘ . : 7 36
SITKA . : A 5 é ‘ - : . 53
IN YAKUTAT BAY . 3 . ‘ ‘ 56
PRINCE WILLIAM SOUND . 3 . P . 66
HARRIMAN FIORD . . 5 . ; 3 15
KADIAK F : ‘ 3 ‘ 3 fs . 82

TO THE OREGON ROBIN IN ALASKA (verse) 89

TO THE LAPLAND LONGSPUR (verse) . - 99
THE SEAL ISLANDS . é ‘ . 3 5 103
SIBERIA : ‘j F : . . - . 107
PORT CLARENCE e ‘ ‘ . . . 112
ST. LAWRENCE ISLAND 5 ‘ 5 . - 117
HALL AND ST. MATTHEW ISLANDS a F 118
THE RETURN TRIP. : zi 5 i . 124
ST. ELIAS AND THE FAIRWEATHER RANGE . 125

vu

CONTENTS

II. Witp Lire apour my CaBIN. . é 3 131
III. New Gieanines in OLp Fietps . js . 157
IV. Brrp Lire 1n WINTER ‘ ‘ 3 F 173

V. A Brrps’ Free Lunce . P : ‘ . 183
VI. Two Brrps’-NEsts. . c ‘ 191
VII. August Days. ‘ ‘i ‘ . . . 201

VIII. Bases 1n THE Woops : . : , 215

IX. A Lost Fesruary . ‘ - 7 ; . 223

INDEX . : . 5 ‘ ‘ . ‘ 279

The frontispiece representing Mr. Burroughs in his study at
Slabsides, and the vignette showing Mr. Burroughs in his summer
house overlooking the Hudson, are from photographs by Clifton
Johnson.

FAR AND NEAR

FAR AND NEAR

I
IN GREEN ALASKA
CROSSING THE CONTINENT

T was my good fortune during the summer of
1899 to be one of a party of upwards of forty
persons whom E. H. Harriman of New York invited
to be his guests on a trip to Alaska. The expedition
was known as the Harriman Alaska Expedition,
and its object was to combine pleasure with scien-
tific research and exploration. The party embraced
a number of college professors, several specialists
from the biological and geological surveys of the
Government at Washington, two or three well-
known artists, as many literary men, a mining
expert, and several friends and relatives of Mr.
Harriman.

We left New York on the afternoon of May 23,
in a special train of palace cars, and took ship at
Seattle the last day of the month. All west of the
Mississippi was new land to me, and there was a
good deal of it. Throughout the prairie region, as

1

FAR AND NEAR

a farmer, I rejoiced in the endless vistas of beauti-
ful fertile farms, all busy with the spring planting,
and reaching from horizon to horizon of our flying
train. As a home-body and lover of the cosy and
picturesque, I recoiled from the bald native farm-
houses with their unkempt surroundings, their rude
sheds and black muddy barnyards. As one goes
West, nature is more and more, and man less and
less. In New England one is surprised to see
such busy, thriving towns and such inviting coun-
try homes amid a landscape so bleak and barren.
In the West, on the contrary, his surprise is that such
opulence of nature should be attended by such
squalor and makeshift in the farm buildings and
rural villages. Of course the picturesque is not an
element of the Western landscape as it is of the East-
em. The predominant impression is that of utility.
Its beauty is the beauty of utility. One does not
say, what a beautiful view, but, what beautiful
farms; not, what an attractive home, but, what
a superb field of corn, or wheat, or oats, or barley.
The crops and the herds suggest a bounty and a
fertility that are marvelous, but the habitations
for the most part look starved and impoverished.
The country roads are either merely dusty or black
muddy bands, stretching across the open land with-
out variety and without interest. As one’s eye grows
fatigued with the monotony, the thought comes to
him of what terrible homesickness the first settlers
2

IN GREEN ALASKA

on the prairies from New England, New York, or
Pennsylvania must have suffered. Their hearts did
not take root here. They did not build them-
selves homes, they built themselves shelters. Their
descendants are trying here and there to build
homes, trying by tree planting and other devices
to give an air of seclusion and domesticity to their
dwellings. But the problem is a hard one. Nature
here seems to covet the utmost publicity. The farm-
ers must build lower and more rambling houses,
cultivate more grassy lanes, plant longer avenues of
trees, and not let the disheveled straw-stacks dom-
inate the scene. As children we loved to sit on the
laps of our fathers and mothers, and as children of
a larger and older growth we love the lap of mother
earth, some secluded nook, some cosy corner, where
we can nestle and feel the sheltering arm of the near
horizon about us.

After one reaches the more arid regions beyond
the Rockies, what pitiful farm homes he sees here
and there,—a low one-room building made of
hewn logs, the joints plastered with mud, a flat
mud roof, a forlorn-looking woman with children
about her standing in the doorway, a rude canopy
of brush or cornstalks upheld by poles for shed and ,
outbuildings ; not a tree, not a shrub near; a few
acres of green irrigated land not far off, but the hills
and mountains around bare, brown, and forbid-
ding. We saw hundreds of such homes in Utah,

3

FAR AND NEAR

Idaho, and Oregon, and they affected me like a
nightmare.

A night’s run west of Omaha a change comes
over the spirit of nature’s dream. We have entered
upon that sea of vast rolling plains; agriculture is
left behind; these gentle slopes and dimpled valleys
are innocent of the plow; herds of grazing cattle
and horses are seen here and there; now and then a
coyote trots away with feigned indifference from the
train, looking like a gray, homeless, sheep-killing
shepherd dog ; at long intervals a low hut or cabin,
looking very forlorn; sometimes a wagon-track leads
away and disappears over the treeless hills. How
I wanted to stop the train and run out over those
vast grassy billows and touch and taste this un-
familiar nature! Here in the early morning I heard
my first western meadowlark. The liquid, gurgling
song filtered in through the roar of the rushing train.
It was very sweet and novel, and made me wish
more than ever to call a halt and gain the wild still-
ness of the hills and plains, but it contained no sug-
gestion of the meadowlark I knew. I saw also the
horned lark and the black and white lark bunting
from the car window.

Presently another change comes over the scene:
we see the Rockies faint and shadowy in the far
distance, their snow-clad summits ghostly and dim;
the traveler crosses them on the Union Pacific al-
most before he is aware of it. He expects a nearer

4

IN GREEN ALASKA

view, but does not get it. Their distant snow-capped
peaks rise up, or bow down, or ride slowly along the
horizon afar off. They seem to elude him; he can-
not get near them; they flee away or cautiously
work around him. At one point we seemed for hours
approaching the Elk Mountains, which stood up
sharp and white against the horizon; but a spell
was upon us, or upon them, for we circled and
circled till we left them behind. A vast treeless
country is a strange spectacle to Eastern eyes. This
absence of trees seems in some way to add to the
youthfulness of the landscape; it is like the face
of a beardless boy. ‘Trees and forests make the
earth look as if it had attained its majority; they
give a touch like that of the mane to the lion or
the beard to the man.

In crossing the continent this youthfulness of the
land, or even its femininity, is at times a marked
feature. The face of the plains in Wyoming sug-
gests our Eastern meadows in early spring, — the
light gray of the stubble, with a tinge of green be-
neath. All the lines are gentle, all the tints are soft.
The land looks as if it must have fattened innu-
merable herds. Probably the myriads of buffaloes
grazing here for centuries have left their mark upon
it. The hills are almost as plump and muttony in
places as the South Downs of England.

I recall a fine spectacle on the Laramie plains: a
vast green area, miles and miles in extent, dotted

5

FAR AND NEAR

with thousands of cattle, one of the finest rural pic-
tures I ever saw. It looked like an olive green velvet
carpet, so soft and pleasing was it to the eye, and
the cattle were disposed singly or in groups as an
artist would have placed them. Rising up behind it
and finishing the picture was a jagged line of snow-
covered mountains. Presently the sagebrush took
the place of grass and another change occurred; still
the lines of the landscape were flowing and the tints
soft. The sagebrush is like the sage of the garden
grown woody and aspiring to be a bush three or
four feet high. It is the nearest that nature comes
to the arboreal beard on these great elevated plains.
Shave it away, and the earth beneath is as smooth
as a boy’s cheek.

Before we get out of Wyoming this youthfulness
of nature gives place to mere newness, — raw, tur-
bulent, forbidding, almost chaotic. The landscape
suggests the dumping-ground of creation, where all
the refuse has been gathered. What one sees at
home in a clay-bank by the roadside on a scale of
a few feet, he sees here on a scale of hundreds and
thousands of feet, —the erosions and the sculptur-
ing of a continent, vast, titanic ; mountain ranges,
like newly piled earth from some globe-piercing
mine shaft, all furrowed and carved by the elements,
as if in yesterday’s rainfall. It all has a new, transi-
tory look. Buttes or table mountains stand up here
and there like huge earth stumps.

6

IN GREEN ALASKA

Along Green River one sees where Nature begins
to dream of the great canyon of the Colorado.
Throughout a vast stretch of country here her one
thought seems to be of canyons. You see them
on every hand, little and big, — deep, rectangular
grooves sunk in the plain, sides perpendicular,
bottom level, all the lines sharp and abrupt. All
the little dry water-courses are canyons, the depth
and breadth being about equal; the streams have
no banks, only perpendicular walls. Southward
these features become more and more pronounced
till the stupendous canyon of the Colorado in Ari-
zona is reached.

On our return in August we struck this formation
in the Bad Lands of Utah, where our train was
stalled a day and a half by a washout. In the Bad
Lands the earth seems to have been flayed alive,
—no skin or turf of verdure or vegetable mould any-
where, — all raw and quivering. The country looks
as if it might have been the site of enormous brick-
yards ; over hundreds of square miles the clay seems
to have been used up to the depth of fifty or a hun-
dred feet, leaving a floor much worn and grooved by
the elements. The mountains have been carved
and sliced but yesterday, showing enormous trans-
verse sections. Indeed, never before have I seen
the earth so vivisected, anatomized, gashed, — the
cuts all fresh, the hills looking as new and red as
butcher’s meat, the strata almost bleeding. The

7

FAR AND NEAR

red and angry torrent of Price River, a mountain
brook of liquid mud near which we lay, was quite
in keeping with the scene. How staid and settled
and old Nature looks in the Atlantic States, with
her clear streams, her rounded hills, her forests, her
lichen-covered rocks, her neutral tints, in contrast
with large sections of the Rocky Mountain region.
In the East the great god Erosion has almost done
his work, — the grading and shaping of the land-
scape has long since been finished, the seeding and
planting are things of the remote past, — but in this
part of the West it is still the heat of the day with
him; we surprise his forces with shovels and picks
yet in hand, as it were, and the spectacle is strange
indeed and in many ways repellent. In places, the
country looks as if all the railroad forces of the
world might have been turned loose to delve and
rend and pile in some mad, insane carnival and
debauch.

In crossing the Rockies I had my first ride upon
the cowcatcher, or rather upon the bench of the
engine immediately above it. In this position one
gets a much more vivid sense of the perils that en-
compass the flying train than he does from the car
window. The book of fate is rapidly laid bare be-
fore him and he can scan every line, while from
his comfortable seat in the car he sees little more
than the margin of the page. From the engine he
reads the future and the immediate. From the car

8

IN GREEN ALASKA

window he is more occupied with the distant and
the past. How rapidly those two slender steel rails
do spin beneath us, and how inadequate they
seem to sustain and guide this enormous throbbing
and roaring monster which we feel laboring and
panting at our backs. The rails seem ridiculously
small and slender for such a task; surely, they
will bend and crumple up or be torn from the ties.
The peril seems imminent, and it is some time be-
fore one gets over the feeling. During this ride of
twenty-five miles we struck two birds — horned
larks — and barely missed several mourning doves.
A big hawk sat on the ground near the track eating
some small animal, probably a ground squirrel.
He was startled by our sudden approach, and in
flying across the track came so near being hit by
the engine that he was frightened into dropping his
quarry. Later in the day others of the party rode
upon the front of the engine, and each saw birds
struck and killed by it. The one ever-present bird
across the continent, even in the most desolate places,
is the mourning dove. From Indiana to Oregon,
at almost any moment, these doves may be seen fly-
ing away from the train.

SHOSHONE FALLS AND CANYON

The fourth day from home we reached the great
plains of the Snake River in southern Idaho, and
stopped at Shoshone to visit the Shoshone Falls.

9

FAR AND NEAR

Mr. Harriman had telegraphed ahead to have
means of transportation in readiness to take us to
the falls, twenty-five miles to the south across the
sagebrush plains. Hence when we awoke at Sho-
shone in the early morning, we found a nondescript
collection of horses and vehicles awaiting us, —
buggies, buckboards, market wagons, and one old
Concord four-horse stage, besides a group of saddle-
horses for those who were equal to this mode of
travel. The day was clear and cool, and the spirits
of the party ran high. That ride over the vast sage-
brush plain in the exhilarating air, under the novel
conditions and in the early honeymoon of our
journey, — who of us can ever forget it? My seat
happened to be beside the driver on top of the old
stage-coach, and we went swinging and rocking over
the plain in the style in which I made my first
journey amid the Catskills in my youth. But how
tame were the Catskills of memory in comparison
with the snow-capped ranges that bounded our hori-
zon fifty or a hundred miles away: to the north
the Saw Tooth Range and “ Old Soldier,” white as
a snow-bank ; to the southeast the Goose Creek
Range; and to the south the Humboldts, far away
in Nevada. Our course lay across what was once a
sea of molten lava. Our geologists said that some
time in the remote past the crust of the earth here
had probably cracked over a wide area, allowing
the molten lava to flow up through it, like water

10

IN GREEN ALASKA

through rents in the ice, and inundate thousands of
square miles of surface, extending even to the Co-
lumbia, three hundred miles distant. This old lava
bed is now an undulating sagebrush plain, appear-
ing here and there in broken, jagged outcroppings,
or in broad, flat plates like a.dark, cracked pave-
ment still in place, though partly hidden under a
yellowish brown soil. The road was a crooked one,
but fairly good. Its course far ahead was often
marked to us by a red line visible here and there
upon the dull green plain. Flowers, flowers every-
where under the sagebrush, covered the ground.
The effect was as of a rough garment with a thin,
many-colored silk lining. Great patches of lupine,
then the delicate fresh bloom of a species of phlox,
then larkspur, then areas of white, yellow, and
purple flowers of many kinds. It is a surprise to
Eastern eyes to see a land without turf, yet so dotted
with vegetation. It is as if all these things grew in a
plowed field, or in the open road; the bare soil is
everywhere visible around them. The bunch grass
does not make a turf, but grows in scattered tufts
like bunches of green bristles. Nothing is crowded.
Every shrub and flower has a free space about it.
The horsemen and horsewomen careered gayly
ahead, or lingered behind, resting and botanizing
amid the brush. The dust from the leading vehicles
was seen rising up miles in advance. We saw an
occasional coyote slink away amid the sagebrush.
11

FAR AND NEAR

Dark-eared and dark-tailed gray hares bounded
away or eyed us from cover. Horned larks were
common, and the sage sparrow, the meadowlark,
and other birds were seen and heard.

Shoshone Falls are in Snake River, which later on
becomes the Columbia. The river does not flow in
a valley like our Eastern rivers, but in walled can-
yons which it has cut into the lava plain to the depth
of nearly a thousand feet. The only sign we could
see of it, when ten miles away, was a dark heavy
line here and there on the green purple plain, the
opposite rim of the great gorge.

Near noon we reached a break, a huge gateway,
in the basaltic rocks, and were upon the brink of the
canyon itself. It was a sudden vision of elemental
grandeur and power opening up at our feet. Our
eyes had been reveling in purple distances, in the
soft tints of the sagebrush plain, and in the flowers
and long, gentle, flowing hills, when suddenly the
earth opened and we looked into a rocky chasm
nearly a thousand feet deep, with the river and the
falls roaring at the bottom of it. The grand, the
terrible, the sublime were sprung upon us in a twin-
kling. The chasm is probably a mile or more broad,
with perpendicular sides of toppling columnar lava
eight hundred feet high. A roadway, carved out of
the avalanches of loose rocks that hang upon the
sides of the awful gulf, winds down to the river and
to the cable ferry above the falls. Our party, in

12

IN GREEN ALASKA

detached groups, made slow progress down to this
ferry, there was so much to arrest and fascinate the
attention. The new, strange birds, such as the
white-throated swift, the violet-backed swallow ;
the strange and beautiful wild flowers in the rocks ;
the rocks themselves in towering six-sided col-
umns, the spray from the falls below us rising up
over the chasm, — these and other features made
us tarry long by the way.

In order to get to the front of the falls and pluck
out the heart of the sublimity, the traveler must
cross to the south side of the river, at this point less
than half a mile wide. Here the shore recedes in
broad, irregular terraces, upon one of which stands
a comfortable summer hotel. Scaling slippery. and
perilous rocky points near it, we stood on the very
brink of the chasm and took our fill of the awful
and the sublime as born of cliff and cataract. We
clung to stretched ropes and wires and peered down
into the abyss. Elemental displays on such a scale
crowd all trivial and personal thoughts out of the
mind of the beholder. It is salutary to look upon
them occasionally, if only to winnow out of our minds
the dust and chaff of the petty affairs of the day, and
feel the awe and hush that come over the spirit in
the presence of such sublimity.

Shoshone Falls are probably second only to Ni-
agara, — less in volume, but of greater height and
far more striking and picturesque in setting. In-

13

FAR AND NEAR

deed, they are a sort of double Niagara, one of rocks
and one of water, and the beholder hardly knows
which is the more impressive. The river above the
main fall is split up into several strands by isolated
masses of towering rocks; each of these strands
ends in a beautiful fall, forty or fifty feet in height;
then the several currents unite for the final plunge
down a precipice of two hundred and fifty feet.
To get a different, and if possible a closer view of
the falls, we climbed down the side of the chasm,
by means of ladders and footsteps cut in the rock
and soil, to the margin of the river below. Here we
did homage at the foot of the grand spectacle and
gazed upward into its awful face. The canyon
below the falls is so broad that the river has an easy
egress, hence there is nothing of that terrible agony
upon the face of the waters that we see in the gorge
below Niagara. Niagara is much the more impos-
ing spectacle. Shoshone is the more ideal and
poetic. It is a fall from an abyss into a deeper abyss.

A few miles below the falls are still other wonders
in the shape of underground rivers which leap out
of huge openings in the side of the canyon, — a
subterranean water system cut across by a larger
river. The streams that emerge in this dramatic
manner are doubtless the same that suddenly take
to earth far to the northward. Why they also did
not cut canyons in the plain is an interesting prob-
lem.

14

IN GREEN ALASKA

In the trees about the hamlet of Shoshone I first
made acquaintance with the house finch, a bird
with quivering flight and bright, cheery song. It
suggests our purple finch, and seems to be as much
of a house and home bird as is the ugly English
sparrow. The Arkansas flycatcher also was com-
mon here, taking the place of our kingbird.

In Idaho we reach a land presided over by the
goddess Irrigation. Here she has made the desert
bloom as the rose. We see her servitors even in the
streets of large towns, in the shape of great water-
wheels turned by the current, out of which they
lift water up into troughs that distribute it right
and left into orchards and gardens. Here may the
dwellers well say with the Psalmist, “I will lift up
mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my
help.”

The Oregon Short Line Railroad takes the gen-
eral direction of the old Oregon trail along Snake
River through Idaho and Oregon. It is a treeless
country, save for the hand of man and the water
from the hills. Vast patches of the original sage-
brush alternate with vineyards and orchards, —
orchards of peaches, prunes, and apricots, — or
with meadows and grain-fields. Where the irrigat-
ing-ditch can be carried, there the earth is clothed
with grass or grain or verdure. Baptize the savage
sagebrush plain with water and it becomes a Chris-
tian orchard and wheatfield. Now we begin to

15

FAR AND NEAR

see magpies from the car windows, — twinkling
black and white wings and a long-tailed body.
Lombardy poplars stand like rows of sentinels
around the lonely farmhouses. ‘These trees appear
to be the only ones planted in this section. The
near-by foothills are of a yellowish earth color,
speckled as a thrush’s breast with sagebrush. In
other places lupine and wild sunflowers cover the
land for miles, the latter giving a touch of gold to
the hills.

After Snake River escapes from the deep lava
canyon of Shoshone Falls, it flows for many miles
between level banks, with here and there a slowly
turning irrigating-wheel lifting the water up to be
emptied into troughs or ditches. Near the boundary
between Oregon and Idaho the Snake plunges into
the mountains ; plump, full-breasted, tan-colored
heights close about it on all sides, now dotted
with sagebrush, then lightly touched by the most
delicate green, the first tender caress of May. All
the lines are feminine and flowing, only here and
there a touch of ruggedness as the brown rock
crops out. Cover these mountains with turf, and
they are almost a copy of the sheep fells and green
ranges of northern England. They are marked by
the same fullness and softness of outline. For many
miles the Snake flows north, through these treeless,
rounded, flower-painted, green-veiled mountains,
until it enters the terrible canyon between the Seven

16

IN GREEN ALASKA

Devils and. the Wallowas. Reappearing at the
mouth of the Clearwater, it bends westerly and cuts
another long canyon across the high plateau of
eastern Oregon and Washington. It does not trav-
erse any flat country until it finally emerges on the
sand plains near its junction with the Columbia.
Our train made a long détour through Oregon
and Washington, and put us down at Lewiston in
Idaho, that we might have a steamboat ride down
Snake River to its mouth in the Columbia. I had
somehow got the impression that we should see great
forests in Washington and Oregon, but we missed
them. They are on the moist Pacific slope west of
the Cascade Range. We sailed 150 miles that after-
noon down the Snake, amid mountains two thou-
sand or more feet high, as smooth and as treeless
as the South Downs of England; very novel, very
beautiful, their lower slopes pink in places with a
delicate flower called Clarkia, in others blue-purple
like the cheek of a plum. I say mountains, but they
are only the sides of the huge canyon through which
the Snake flows. How the afternoon sun brought
out their folds and dimples and clinging, delicate
tints! The green of the higher slopes was often like
a veil of thin green gauze, dropped upon them. The
effects were all new to me, and pleasing beyond
words, — wild, aboriginal, yet with such beauty
and winsome gentleness and delicacy. The river
is nearly half the width of the Hudson, and much
47

FAR AND NEAR

more winding. The geologists speculated upon the
formation as it was laid bare in places; the bota-
nists upon the wild flowers that painted the shore ;
the ornithologists upon the birds seen and heard.
Swarms of cliff swallows were observed about the
basaltic rocks near the water.

There were not many signs of rural life, — here
and there low, rude farmhouses on the deltas of
land at the mouths of the side gorges, and at least
one very large fruit farm on a low, level area on our
right. A novel sight was the long wooden and wire
wheat chutes for running the wheat down from
the farms back on the high mountain tablelands to
the river, where the boats could pick it up. They
were tokens of a life and fertility quite unseen and
unsuspected.

MULTNOMAH FALLS

The ride in the train along the south bank of the
Columbia toward Portland, past The Dalles, past
the Cascades, past Oneonta Gorge and the Mult-
nomah and Latourelle Falls, is a feast of the beau-
tiful and the sublime, — the most delicate tints and
colors of moss and wild flowers setting off the most
tugged alpine scenery. In places the railroad em-
bankment is decked with brilliant patches of red
and purple flowers, as if garlanded for a festival.
Presently the moss-covered rocks are white-aproned
with the clear mountain brooks that cascade down

18

IN GREEN ALASKA

their sides from the dark, mantling pines and cedars
above. They are the prelude of what we are pre-
sently to see, — the gem of all this region, and per-
haps the most thrillingly beautiful bit of natural
scenery we beheld on the whole trip, — the Mult-
nomah Falls.

The train gave us only five minutes to look at it,
but those five minutes were of the most exquisite
delight. There, close at hand, but withdrawn into
a deep recess in the face of the mountain wall, like a
statue in an alcove, stood this vision of beauty and
sublimity. How the siren mocked us, and made
the few minutes in which we were allowed to view
her so tantalizingly brief! Not water, but the spirit
of water, of a snow-born mountain torrent, playing
and dallying there with wind and gravity, on the
face of a vertical, moss-covered, rocky wall six hun-
dred feet high. So ethereal, yet so massive; a com-
bination of a certain coyness and unapproachable-
ness with such elemental grandeur and power. It
left nothing to be desired but a day in which to picnic
upon the flower-covered carpet of moss at its feet.
The brief view warmed me up like a great sym-
phony. It was indeed to the eye what the sweetest
and most stirring music is to the ear, — harmony,
delicacy, and power. Such an air of repose and
completeness about it all; yes, and of the private
and secluded. The nymph was withdrawn into
her bower, but had left the door open. This ele-

19

FAR AND NEAR

ment of mystery and shyness was afforded by the
well-hidden rocky basin into which the water fell,
and by the curtain of rock which shut it off from
our view. Out of this basin the current emerged
near at hand and more familiar in a fall of fifty feet
or more, whence it took its way to the river in a
clear, rapid stream. It was as if the goddess had re-
clothed herself in this hidden rock-screened pool
and come forth again in more palpable every-day
guise. I hardly expected to see anything in Alaska
or anywhere else that would blur or lessen the
impression made by those falls, and I did not,
and probably never shall.

We had hoped that at Portland and Seattle we
should get glimpses of the great mountains —
Hood, Baker, Rainier — but we did not ; fog and
cloud prevented. A lady living upon the heights at
Seattle told me that when a dweller there was out
of humor, her neighbors usually excused her by
saying, “ Well, she has not seen the Olympics this
morning.” I fancy they are rarely on exhibition
to strangers or visitors.

THE INLAND PASSAGE

The chapters of our sea voyage and Alaskan ex-
periences properly opened on the afternoon of May
31, when we found our state-rooms in our steamer,
the George W. Elder, received our California con-
tingent, which included John Muir, and made our

20

IN GREEN ALASKA

final preparations for the trip. The steamer was
a large iron ship, specially fitted up for our party.
Her coal bunkers were full, and she was provisioned
for a two months’ cruise. We had hunting parties
among us that expected to supply us with venison
and bear meat, but to be on the safe side we took
aboard eleven fat steers, a flock of sheep, chickens
and turkeys, a milch cow, and a span of horses. The
horses were to be used to transport the hunters and
their traps inland and to pack out the big game.
The hold of our ship looked like a farmer’s barn-
yard. We heard the mellow low of the red steer even
in the wilds of Bering Sea, but the morning crow
of our cockerels was hushed long before that time.
And I may here anticipate events so far as to say
that the horses proved a superfluity, their only asso-
ciation with game being the two foxskins for which
Mr. Harriman traded them at Kadiak. But this
was no ignoble ending, as they were choice pelts of
the rare and coveted black fox. Besides the live
stock just mentioned, an inventory of our equipment
would include one steam and two naphtha launches,
boats and folding canvas canoes, tents, sleeping-
bags, camp outfits, and in fact everything such an
expedition could possibly need. Our completed
party now numbered over forty persons besides
the crew and the officers of the ship (126 persons in
all), and embraced college professors from both the
Atlantic and Pacific coasts — botanists, zodlogists,
Q1

FAR AND NEAR

geologists, and other specialists, besides artists,
photographers, two physicians, one trained nurse,
one doctor of divinity, and at least one dreamer.

Dr. Dall was our Alaska specialist, having pre-
viously visited the territory thirteen times, and hav-
ing spent many years there. In John Muir we had
an authority on glaciers, and a thorough one; he
looked upon them with the affection and the air of
proprietorship with which a shepherd looks upon his
flock. The Indians used to call him the Great Ice
Chief. Dr. Fernow was our professor of forestry and
might be called the Great Tree Chief. Then what
Professors Emerson, Palache, and Gilbert could not
tell us about the geology of the country, or Brewer
and Gannett about the climate and physical geo-
graphy, or Coville and Trelease about the plants,
or Ritter and Saunders about the life in the sea, or
Merriam about the mammals, or Ridgway and Fisher
about the birds, or Elliot about the game-birds, or
Devereux about mines, or Grinnell and Dellenbaugh
about Indians, it could hardly be worth our while
to try to find out.

We were in British waters on June Ist and set
foot on British soil at Victoria on the Island of Van-
couver. Even the climate is British — mist and a
warm slow rain — with dense verdure and thick
green turf dotted with the English daisy. Indeed,
nature here seems quite as English as does the sober,
solidly built town with its fine and imposing Parlia-

22

IN GREEN ALASKA

ment building — all but the birds. I heard the west-
ern highhole calling like ours at home; and the
russet-backed thrush, the yellow warbler, and the
white-crowned sparrow were in song along the woods
and brushy fields.

On June Ist, after touching at Victoria, we were
fairly launched upon our voyage. Before us was a
cruise of several thousand miles, one thousand of
which was through probably the finest scenery of
the kind in the world that. can be viewed from the
deck of a ship — the scenery of fiords and mountain-
locked bays and arms of the sea. Day after day
a panorama unrolls before us with features that
might have been gathered from the Highlands of
the Hudson, from Lake George, from the Thou-
sand Islands, the Saguenay, and the Rangeley Lakes
in Maine, with the addition of towering snow-
capped peaks thrown in for a background. The
edge of this part of the continent for a thousand
miles has been broken into fragments, small and
great, as by the stroke of some earth-cracking
hammer, and into the openings and channels thus
formed the sea flows freely, often at a depth of from
one to two thousand feet. It is along these inland
ocean highways, through tortuous narrows, up
smooth, placid inlets, across broad island-studded
gulfs and bays, with now and then the mighty throb
of the Pacific felt for an hour or two through some
open door in the wall of islands, that our course lay.

23

FAR AND NEAR

For two days Vancouver Island is on our left
with hardly a break in its dark spruce forests, cov-
ering mountain and vale. On our right is British
Columbia, presenting the same endless spruce
forests, with peaks of the Coast Range, eight or ten
thousand feet high, in the background, and only
an occasional sign of human life on shore. I recall
a lone farmhouse in a stumpy clearing that drew
our eyes. How remote and secluded it looked! The
dark forests, with a fringe of dead trees where the
pioneer’s fire had raged, encompassed it. The grass
and grain looked green among the stumps, and near
the house, which was a well-built, painted struc-
ture, we could see fruit-trees and a garden. There
was not much wild life about us; now and then a
duck or two, an occasional bald eagle, a small
flock of phalaropes, which the sailors call “sea
geese,” as they sit on the water like miniature
geese.

Our first dangerous passage was Seymour Nar-
rows, which we reached at the right stage of the tide.
Cautiously the ship felt her way through the con-
torted currents that surged above the sunken rocks.
Fog clouds clung to the white peaks that rose above
the dark forests about us and partly veiled them.
At times we were so near them that with a glass one
could see where little snow-balls had detached them-
selves and made straight lines down the smooth
white surface. It was the 2d of June, but the wind

24

IN GREEN ALASKA

that swept down the channel was as cold as that of
an October morning at home. The event of this
day was the sunset at half-past eight o’clock. I had
often seen as much color and brilliancy in the sky,
but never before such depth and richness of blue
and purple upon the mountains and upon the water.
Where the sun went down the horizon was low, and
but a slender black line of forest separated the sky
from the water. All above was crimson and orange
and gold, and all below, to the right and left, purple
laid upon purple until the whole body of the air be-
tween us and the mountains in the distance seemed
turned to color.

As we go north the scenery becomes more and
more like that of the fiords on the coast of Nor-
way, except that the mountains there are mostly
deforested. Deep sea-blue water about us, dark
spruce and cedar clad and torrent-furrowed moun-
tains rising above us, touched with snow on their
summits. Now and then a bald eagle flaps heavily
along the mountain-side, or a line of black oyster-
catchers skim swiftly over the surface. We see
Mount Palmerston on our left, five thousand feet
high, covered with a heavy snow mantle in which
his rocky bones have worn many holes. The bril-
liant sun brings out every line and angle.

At noon we stop in a deep cove with a rapid
stream coming into the head of it, to give some of
our party an hour on shore. While we are waiting

25

FAR AND NEAR

for them, two deer appear upon the beach, about a
mile distant. They browse around awhile, then
disappear in the woods. To the west of us is a
striking picture. In the foreground is the sea with
a line of low, rounded, dark rocky islands; behind
them, far off, a range of blue mountains with a
broad band of dun-colored clouds resting upon
them; rising above the band of clouds a series of
snow-covered peaks, with the sun shining full
upon them, probably the highest peaks we have yet
seen. The cloud belt cuts off and isolates the peaks
and gives them a buoyant airy character. From
the dark near-by tree-tufted chain of islands to
the white-illuminated peaks, what a wealth of blue
and gray tints and tones!

Near nightfall on this second day we begin to
feel the great pulse of the Pacific around the head
of Vancouver Island, through the broad open door
called Queen Charlotte Sound. For three hours
the ship rolls as upon the open sea, and to several
of us the “ subsequent proceedings” that night were
void of interest.

In the early morning we pass another open door,
Milbank Sound, but are soon in Graham Reach,
which is like a larger, wilder Hudson. When we
look out of our windows the sun is upon the moun-
tain tops, and the snow much farther down their
sides than we have yet seen it.

As we progress, many deep ravines are noted in

26

IN GREEN ALASKA

vast recesses in the mountains, scooped out by the
old glaciers. They are enormous rocky bowls
which we imagine hold crystal lakes; foaming
streams pour out of them into the channel. Far up,
silver threads of water, born of the melting snows,
are seen upon the vast faces of the rocks. Some
of them course down the tracks of old landslides ;
others are seen only as they emerge from dark
spruces.

The snow upon the mountain tops looks new
fallen; our glasses bring out the sharp curling edges
of the drifts. Here and there along the shore below
are seen the rude huts of trappers and hunters.
The eternal spruce and hemlock forests grow
monotonous. The many dry, white trunks of dead
trees, scattered evenly through the forest, make
the mountains look as if a shower of gigantic arrows
had fallen upon them from the sky. Gulls, loons,
and scoters are seen at long intervals.

Snow avalanches have swept innumerable paths,
broad and narrow, down through the spruce forest.
Those great glacier basins on our left invite inspec-
tion, so we send a party ashore to examine one of
them. They do not find the expected lake, but in
its stead a sphagnum bog, through which the creek
winds its way. Fresh tracks and other signs of deer
are seen.

In mid-afternoon we turn into Lowe Inlet, a
deep, narrow, mountain-locked arm of the sea on

Q7

FAR AND NEAR

our right, with a salmon cannery at the head of it,
and a large, rapid trout stream making a fine water-
fall. Here, among the employees of the cannery, we
see our first Alaskan Indians and note their large,
round, stolid, innocent faces. Here also some of us
get our first taste of Alaska woods. In trying to
make our way to the falls we are soon up to our
necks amid moss, fallen timber, and -devil’s club.
Progress is all but impossible, and those who finally
reach the falls do so by withdrawing from the woods
and taking to boats. Traversing Alaskan forests
must be a trying task even to deer and bears. They
have apparently never been purged or thinned by
fire—too damp for that — and they are choked
with the accumulation of ages. Two or three gen-
erations of fallen trees cross one another in all
directions amid the rocks, with moss over all like a
deep fall of snow, and worse still, thickly planted
with devil’s club. This is a shrub as high as your
head, covered with long sharp spines and with
large thorny leaves. It is like a blackberry bush
with thorns ten times multiplied. It hedges about
these mossy cushions as with the fangs of serpents.
One can hardly touch it without being stung. The
falls are the outlet of a deep, hidden, enticing valley,
with a chain of beautiful lakes, we were told, but
our time was too brief to explore it. The winter
wren was found here, and the raven, and a species
of woodpecker.
28

IN GREEN ALASKA

METLAKAHTLA

We were not really in Alaskan waters until the next
day, June4th. This was Sunday, and we spent most
of the day visiting Metlakahtla, the Indian Mission
settlement on Annette Island, where we saw one of
the best object lessons to be found on the coast,
showing what can be done with the Alaska Indians.
Here were a hundred or more comfortable frame
houses, some of them of two stories, many of them
painted, all of them substantial and in good taste,
a large and imposing wooden church, a large school-
house, a town hall, and extensive canning estab-
lishments, all owned and occupied by seven or
eight hundred Tlinkit Indians, who, under the won-
derful tutelage of William Duncan, a Scotch mis-
sionary, had been brought from a low state of
savagery to a really fair state of industrial civiliza-
tion. The town is only twelve years old, and is
situated on a broad expanse of nearly level land
at the foot of the mountains. The large stumps
and logs on the surface between the houses show
how recently the land has been cleared. The earth
was covered with a coat of peat, the accumulation
of ages of a thick growth of moss. Beneath this
the soil was red and friable. We strolled about
the numerous streets on broad plank walks that
reached from side to side above the rocks and
stumps. Many of the houses had gardens where were

29

FAR AND NEAR

grown potatoes, turnips, onions, strawberries, rasp-
berries, and currants. The people were clad as well
and in much the same way as those of rural villages
in New York and New England. A large number
of them were gathered upon the wharf when we
landed, their big round faces and black eyes showing
only a quiet, respectful curiosity. We called upon
Mr. Duncan at his house and listened to his racy
and entertaining conversation. His story was full of
interest. At eleven o’clock the church bell was ring-
ing, and the people—men, women, and children, all
neatly and tastefully clad — began to assemble for
their Sunday devotions. Some of the hats of the
younger women looked as if fresh from the hands of
a fashionable city milliner. Many of the older ma-
trons wore silk handkerchiefs of various colors on
their heads. Mr. Duncan preached to his people in
their native tongue, a vague, guttural, featureless
sort of language, it seemed. The organ music and
the singing were quite equal to what one would hear
in any rural church at home. The church was built
by native carpenters out of native woods, and its
large audience room, capable of seating eight or
nine hundred people, was truly rich and beautiful.
Mr. Duncan is really the father of his people. He
stands to them not only for the gospel, but for the
civil law as well. He supervises their business enter-
prises and composes their family quarrels.

The Alaskan Indian is of quite a different race

30

IN GREEN ALASKA

from the red man as we know him. He is smaller
in stature and lighter in color, and has none of that
look as of rocks and mountains, austere and relent-
less, that our Indians have. He also takes more
kindly to our ways and customs and to our various
manual industries.

In reaching the land of the Indian we had reached
the land of the raven also — few crows, but many
ravens. We saw them upon the beach and around
the wharf long before we landed. In the village they
were everywhere —on the roofs of the houses,
and on the stumps and dooryard fences. Six were
perched upon one of the towers of the church as I
approached. Their calls and croakings and jabber-
ings were in the ear at all times. The raven is a
much more loquacious bird than the crow. His
tongue is seldom still. When he has no fellow to talk
to he talks to himself, and his soliloquy is often full
of really musical notes. In these Alaskan settlements
they appear to act as scavengers, like the buzzards
in the South. Other birds that attracted my atten-
tion were the song sparrow, a nest of which with
young I found amid some bushes near one of the
houses, and the russet-backed thrush, which was
flitting about the streets and gardens.

In the afternoon we were steaming over a vast
irregular-shaped body of water — Clarence Straits.
On one side the sky and water met in a long hori-

31

FAR AND NEAR

zontal line. The sun was shining brightly, andthe far-
off snow-capped mountains rolled up against the sky
like thunder-heads. Nearer by were small spruce-
tufted islands, and low dark shores. Etolin Island
was ahead of us, and Prince of Wales Island on the
west. In the evening we saw the most striking sun-
set of the voyage. We were in just the right place at
just the right time. All the conditions and relations
of sun, air, water, and mountain were as we would
have had them —a scene such as artists try in vain
to paint and travelers to describe: towering snow-
clad peaks far ahead of us, rising behind dark blue
and purple ranges, fold on fold, and all aflame with
thesetting sun. We looked upon thespectacle through
a huge gateway in our front which formed a dark
rugged frame to the picture. The solid earth be-
came spiritual and transcendent. Presently another
dark gateway opened in the mountains on our right
and other transfigured summits — Black Crag, Mt.
Whipple, the Pinnacles — came into view, riding
slowly along above and behind other blue purple
ranges — such depth and softness of tint and shadow
below, such glory of flame and gold above! The
ship crept along in the deepening twilight and slowly
the flaming peaks turned to neutral gray.

WRANGELL AND JUNEAU

The morning of the 5th dawned clear and cold,
like a winter morning in Florida. It found us at Fort
32

IN GREEN ALASKA

Wrangell, where we spent a few hours on shore
looking at totem poles and viewing the shabby old
town, while we kept an eye open to the botany and
natural history of the place. Our collectors brought
in a Steller’s jay, a russet-backed thrush, an Ore-
gon junco, a gray fox sparrow, a lutescent warbler,
a rufous-backed chickadee with nest and eggs, and
a Harris’s woodpecker.

At eight o’clock we were off again toward Wrangell
Narrows, across the superb Wrangell Bay. At noon
we saw Devil’s Thumb on our right, a naked shaft
over sixteen hundred feet high, rising from a moun-
tain which is over seven thousand feet. It is a thumb
of goodly dimensions.

The next day we saw our first glacier, the Patter-
son, a small affair compared with those we were soon
to behold; indeed about the smallest lamb of the flock
of Muir’s mountain sheep, but interesting to novice
eyes. It lies there low in the lap or apron of the
mountain, and suggests the fragment of an arrested
or congealed river. All the afternoon we sailed
under cloudless skies along Frederick Sound, feasting
our eyes upon the vast panorama of the encircling
mountains. When we tired of this there were the low
curving shores and nearer-by heights and the numer-
ous tree-capped islands that seemed floating upon the
blue expanse of water. Many whales were seen blow-
ing, their glistening backs emerging from the water,
turning slowly like the periphery of a huge wheel.

33

FAR AND NEAR

We had reached the land of eagles as well as of
ravens. On a low rocky point seven eagles sat in
a row on the rocks near the water’s edge and re-
garded us with the indifference of Indian chiefs.

We stopped a day at Juneau, from which point
we visited the famous Treadwell mines on Douglas
Island. Nearly two thousand tons of quartz rock
are crushed daily at these mills, and the roar made
by the eight hundred or more stamps, all under one
roof, in pulverizing this rock, dwarfs all other rackets
Tever heard. Niagara is a soft hum beside it. Never
before have I been where the air was torn to tatters
and the ear so stunned and overwhelmed as in this
mill. If the heavens ever should fall and one were
under a roof strong enough to stand the shock, I
think the uproar might be something like what we
experienced that day. It was not a grand reverber-
ating sound like the sounds of nature, it was simply
the most ear-paralyzing noise ever heard within four
walls. Heard, I say, though in truth we did not hear
it. To hear a thing, there must be some silence; this
hubbub was so great and all-pervasive that the audi-
tory nerve was simply bruised into insensibility. The
remarkable thing about this mine is the enormous
extent of the gold-bearing quartz and its low grade
— three or four dollars a ton of rock. And yet the
process of extracting the gold has been so cheap-
ened by improved methods and machinery that the
investment yields a good profit.

34

IN GREEN ALASKA

LYNN CANAL AND SKAGWAY

All the afternoon we steamed up Lynn Canal over
broad, placid waters, shut in by dark smooth-based
mountains that end in bare serrated peaks. Glaciers
became more and more numerous; one on our right
hung high on the brink of a sheer, naked precipice,
as if drawing back from the fearful plunge. But
plunge it did not and probably never will.

We were soon in sight of a much larger glacier, the
Davidson, on our left. It flows out of a deep gorge
and almost reaches the inlet. Seen from afar it sug-
gests the side view of a huge white foot with its toe
pressing a dark line of forest into the sea.

Before sunset we reached Skagway and landed at
the long, high pier (the tides here are sixteen or eigh-
teen feet). The pier was swarming with people. Such
a gathering and such curiosity and alertness we had
not before seen. Hotel runners flourished their cards
and called out the names of their various hostelries
before we had touched the dock. Boys greeted us
with shouts and comments; women and girls, some
of them in bicycle suits, pushed to the front and
gazed intently at the strangers. All seemed to be ex-
pecting something, friends or news, or some sensa-
tional occurrence. No sooner had we touched than
the boys swarmed in upon us like ants and began to
explore the ship, and were as promptly swept ashore
again. Skagway is barely two years old. Born of the

35

FAR AND NEAR

gold fever, it is still feverish and excitable. It is on
a broad delta of land made by the Skagway River
between the mountains, and, it seems to me, is likely
at any time by a great flood in the river to be swept
into the sea. It began at the stump and probably is
still the stumpiest town in the country. Many of the
houses stand upon stumps; there are stumps in
nearly every dooryard, but the people already speak
of the “‘ early times,” three years ago.

On the steep, bushy mountain-side near the wharf
I heard the melodious note of my first Alaska her-
mit thrush. It was sweet and pleasing, but not so
prolonged and powerful as the song of our hermit.

WHITE PASS

The next day the officials of the Yukon and White
Pass Railroad took our party on an excursion to the
top of the famous White Pass, twenty-one miles dis-
tant. The grade up the mountain is in places over
two hundred feet to the mile, and in making the
ascent the train climbs about twenty-nine hundred
feet. After the road leaves Skagway River its course
is along the face of precipitous granite peaks and
domes, with long loops around the heads of gorges
and chasms; occasionally on trestles over yawning
gulfs, but for the most part on a shelf of rock blasted
out of the side of the mountain. The train stopped
from time to time and allowed us to walk ahead and
come face to face with the scene. The terrible and

36

IN GREEN ALASKA

the sublime were on every hand. It was as appalling
to look up as to look down; chaos and death below
us, impending avalanches of hanging rocks above
us. How elemental and cataclysmal it all looked! I
felt as if I were seeing for the first time the real
granite ribs of the earth; they had been cut into and
slivered, and there was no mistake about them. All
Thad seen before were but scales and warts on the
surface by comparison; here were the primal rocks
that held the planet together, sweeping up into the
clouds and plunging down into the abyss. Over
against us on the other side of the chasm we caught
glimpses here and there of the “ Dead Horse Trail.”
Among the spruces and along the rocky terraces are
said to have perished several thousand horses on this
terrible trail. The poor beasts became so weak from
lack of food that they slipped on the steep places
and plunged over the precipices in sheer despera-
tion, and thus ended their misery.

On the summit we found typical March weather:
snow, ice, water, mud, slush, fog, and chill. The fog
prevented us from getting a view down toward the
Klondike country, six hundred miles away. The
British flag and the Stars and Stripes were floating
side by side on the provisional boundary line be-
tween Alaska and British Columbia, and several
Canadian police were on duty there. Even in this
bleak spot we found birds nesting or preparing to
nest: the pipit, the golden-crowned sparrow, and the

37

FAR AND NEAR

rosy finch. The vegetation was mostly moss and
lichens and low stunted spruce, the latter so flat-
tened by the snow that one could walk over them.

In keeping with the snow and desolation and
general dissolution was the group of hasty, ragged
canvas buildings and tents at the railroad ter-
minus, the larger ones belonging to the company,
the others for the accommodation of traveling gold-
seekers. In one of the larger tents a really good
dinner was served our party, through the courtesy
of the railroad officials. We saw on the trail a few
gold-seekers with their heavy packs; they paused
and looked up wistfully at our train.

In ascending the Pass we met a small party of
naturalists from the U. S. Biological Survey on their
way to the Yukon, the entire length of which they
intended traversing in a small boat. We stopped
long enough to visit their tent and take a hasty look
at the interesting collection of birds and mammals
they had already secured here. They have since
returned and published a report on the results of
their labors.

At the time of our visit the railroad terminus was
at the summit of the pass, from which point pas-
sengers bound for the Klondike were transported to
Lake Bennett by sleighs. The deep snow was
melting so rapidly and slumping so badly that the
sled-loads of people and grain we saw depart for the
Upper Yukon were, we were told, the last to go

38

IN GREEN ALASKA

through before the completion of the railroad to
Bennett.

The next day found us in Glacier Bay on our way
to the Muir Glacier. Our course was up an arm of the
sea, dotted with masses of floating ice, till in the dis-
tance we saw the great glacier itself. Its front looked
gray and dim there twenty miles away, but in the
background the mountains that feed it lifted up vast
masses of snow in the afternoon sun. At five o’clock
we dropped anchor about two miles from its front, in
eighty fathoms of water, abreast of the little cabin on
the east shore built by John Muir some years ago.
Not till after repeated soundings did we find bottom
within reach of our anchor cables. Could the inlet
have been emptied of its water for a moment, we
should have seen before us a palisade of ice nearly
one thousand feet higher and over two miles long,
with a turbid river, possibly half a mile wide, boiling
up from beneath it. Could we have been here many
centuries ago, we should have seen, much farther
down the valley, a palisade of ice two or three thou-
sand feet high. Many of these Alaskan glaciers are
rapidly melting and are now but the fragments of
their former selves. From observations made here
twenty years ago by John Muir, it is known that the
position of the front of the Muir Glacier at that time
was about two miles below its present position, which
would indicate a rate of recession of about one mile
in ten years.

39

FAR AND NEAR

What we saw on that June afternoon was a broken
and crumbling wall of ice two hundred and fifty
feet high in our front, stretching across the inlet
and running down to a low, dirty, crumbling line
where it ended on the shore on our left, and where
it disappeared behind high gray gravelly banks on
our right. The inlet near the glacier was choked
with icebergs.

What is that roar or explosion that salutes our ears
before our anchor has found bottom? It is the down-
pour of an enormous mass of ice from the gla-
cier’s front, making it for the moment as active as
Niagara. Other and still other downpours follow
at intervals of a few minutes, with deep explosive
sounds and the rising up of great clouds of spray,
and we quickly realize that here is indeed a new
kind of Niagara, a cataract the like of which we
have not before seen, a mighty congealed river that
discharges into the bay intermittently in ice ava-
lanches that shoot down its own precipitous front.
The mass of ice below the water line is vastly
greater than that above, and when the upper por-
tions fall away, enormous bergs are liberated and
rise up from the bottom. They rise slowly and
majestically, like huge monsters of the deep, lifting
themselves up to a height of fifty or a hundred feet,
the water pouring off them in white sheets. Then
they subside again and float away with a huge wave
in front. Nothing we had read or heard had pre-

40

IN GREEN ALASKA

pared us for the color of the ice, especially of the
newly exposed parts and of the bergs that rose from
beneath the water —its deep, almost indigo blue.
Huge bergs were floating about that suggested
masses of blue vitriol.

As soon as practicable, many of us went ashore in
the naphtha launches, and were soon hurrying over
the great plateau of sand, gravel, and boulders
which the retreating glacier had left, and which
forms its vast terminal moraine.

Many of the rocks and stones on the surface were
sharp and angular, others were smooth and rounded.
These latter had evidently passed as it were through
the gizzard of the huge monster, while the others
had been carried on its back. A walk of a mile or
more brought us much nearer the glacier’s front,
and standing high on the bank of the moraine we
could observe it at our leisure. The roar that fol-
lowed the discharge of ice from its front constantly
suggested the blasting in mines or in railroad cuts.
The spray often rose nearly to the top of the glacier.
Night and day, summer and winter, this intermit-
tent and explosive discharge of the ice into the inlet
goes on and has gone on for centuries. When we
awoke in the night we heard its muffled thunder,
sometimes so loud as to jar the windows in our state-
rooms, while the swells caused by the falling and
rising masses rocked the ship. Probably few more
strange and impressive spectacles than this glacier

41

FAR AND NEAR

affords can be found on the continent. It has a cu-
rious fascination. Impending cataclysms are in its
look. In a moment or two one knows some part of
it will topple or slide into the sea. One afternoon
during our stay about half a mile of the front fell at
once. The swell which it caused brought grief to our
photographers who had ventured too near it. Their
boat was filled and their plates were destroyed. The
downfall from the front is usually a torrent of shat-
tered ice which pours down, simulating water, but
at longer intervals enormous solid masses like rocks,
topple and plunge. It is then that the great blue
bergs rise up from below — born of the depths.
The enormous pressure to which their particles
have been subjected for many centuries seems to
have intensified their color. They have a pristine,
elemental look. Their crystals have not seen the
light since they fell in snowflakes back amid the
mountains generations ago. All this time impris-
oned, traveling in darkness, carving the valleys,
polishing the rocks, under a weight as of mountains,
till at last their deliverance comes with crash and
roar, and they are once more free to career in the air
and light as dew or rain or cloud, and then again
to be drawn into that cycle of transformation and
caught and bound once more in glacier chains for
another century.

We lingered by the Muir and in adjacent waters
five or six days, sending out botanical, zodlogical,

42

IN GREEN ALASKA

and glacial expeditions in various directions; yes,
and one hunting party to stir up the bears in Howl-
ing Valley. Howling Valley, so named by Muir, is a
sort of coat-tail pocket of the great glacier. It lies
twenty or more miles from the front, behind the
mountains. The hunters started off eagerly on the
first afternoon of our arrival, with packers and glis-
tening Winchesters and boxes of ammunition, and
we had little doubt that the genius loci of Howling
Valley would soon change its tune.

While some of us the next afternoon were explor-
ing the eastern half of the glacier, which is a vast
prairie-like plain of ice, we saw far off across the
dim surface to the north two black specks, then two
other black specks, and in due time still other black
specks, and the conjecture passed that the hunters
were returning, and that the heart of the mystery
of Howling Valley had not been plucked out. Our
reluctant conjectures proved too true. Just at night-
fall the hunters came straggling in, footsore and
weary and innocent of blood — soberer if not sad-
der, hardier if not wiser men. The undertaking
involved more than they had bargained for. Their
outward course that afternoon lay for a dozen miles
or more across the glacier. They had traveled till
near midnight and then rested a few hours in their
sleeping-bags upon the ice. One may sleep upon the
snow in a sleeping-bag, but ice soon makes itself felt
in more ways than one. When the cold began to

43

FAR AND NEAR

strike up through, the party resumed its march.
Very soon they got into snow, which became deeper
and deeper as they proceeded. Hidden crevasses
made it necessary to rope themselves together, the
new hunting-shoes pinched and rubbed, the packs
grew heavy, the snow grew deeper, the miles grew
longer, and there might not be any bears in Howling
Valley after all, — Muir’s imagination may have
done all the howling, — so, after due deliberation by
all hands, it was voted to turn back.

It is much easier in Alaska to bag a glacier than
a bear; hence our glacial party, made up of John
Muir, Gilbert, and Palache, who set out to explore
the head of Glacier Bay, was more successful than
the hunters. They found more glaciers than they
were looking for. One large glacier of twenty years
ago had now become two, not by increasing but
by diminishing; the main trunk had disappeared,
leaving the two branches in separate valleys. All the
glaciers of this bay, four or five in number, were
found to have retreated many hundred feet since
Muir’s first:visit, two decades earlier. The explorers
were absent from the ship three days on a cruise
attended with no little peril.

During the same time an ornithological and bo-
tanical party of six or eight men was in camp on
Gustavus Peninsula, a long, low, wooded stretch of
land twenty miles below Muir Glacier. Here over
forty species of birds, including sea birds, were

44

IN GREEN ALASKA

observed and collected. The varied thrush or Ore-
gon robin was common, and its peculiar song or
plaint, a long, tapering whistle with a sort of burr
in it, led Ridgway a long chase through the woods
before he could identify the singer. Other song-birds
found were the western robin, the two kinglets, a
song sparrow, the Alaska hermit and russet-backed
thrushes, the lutescent warbler, the redstart, the
Oregon junco, and a western form of the savanna
sparrow.

Gustavus Peninsula seems to be a recent deposit
of the glaciers, and our experts thought it not much
over a century old. The botanists here found a good
illustration of the successive steps Nature takes in
foresting or reforesting the land, — how she creeps
before she walks. The first shrub is a small creeping
willow that looks like a kind of “pusley.” Then
comes a larger willow, less creeping; then two or
more other species that become quite large upright
bushes; then follow the alders, and with them vari-
ous herbaceous plants and grasses, till finally the
spruce comes in and takes possession of the land.
Our collectors found the first generation of trees,
none of them over forty years old. Far up the moun-
tain-side, at a height of about two thousand feet, they
came to the limit of the younger growth, and
found a well-defined line of much older trees, show-
ing that within probably a hundred years an ice
sheet two thousand or more feet thick, an older and

45

FAR AND NEAR

larger Muir, had swept down the valley and de-
stroyed the forests.

In the mean time the rest of us spent the days on
the glacier and in the vicinity, walking, sketching,
painting, photographing, dredging, mountain climb-
ing, as our several tastes prompted.

We were in the midst of strange scenes, hard to
render in words : the miles upon miles of moraines
upon either hand, gray, loosely piled, scooped,
plowed, channeled, sifted, from fifty to two hundred
feet high; the sparkling sea water dotted with blue
bergs and loose drift ice; the towering masses of
almost naked rock, smoothed, carved, rounded,
granite-ribbed, and snow-crowned, that looked down
upon us from both sides of the inlet ; and the cleft,
toppling, staggering front of the great glacier in its
terrible labor-throes stretching before us from shore
to shore.

We saw the world-shaping forces at work; we
scrambled over plains they had built but yesterday.
We saw them transport enormous rocks and tons
on tons of soil and débris from the distant moun-
tains; we saw the remains of extensive forests they
had engulfed probably within the century, and were
now uncovering again; we saw their turbid rushing
streams loaded with newly ground rocks and soil-
making material; we saw the beginnings of vegeta-
tion in the tracks of the retreating glacier; our
dredgers brought up the first forms of sea life along

46

IN GREEN ALASKA

the shore; we witnessed the formation of the low
mounds and ridges and bowl-shaped depressions
that so often diversify our landscapes, —all the
while with the muffled thunder of the falling bergs
in our ears.

We were really in one of the workshops and
laboratories of the elder gods, but only in the gla-
cier’s front was there present evidence that they were
still at work. I wanted to see them opening crevasses
in the ice, dropping the soil and rocks they had
transported, polishing the mountains, or blocking
the streams, but I could not. They seemed to knock
off work when we were watching them. One day I
climbed up to the shoulder of a huge granite ridge
on the west, against which the glacier pressed and
over which it broke. Huge masses of ice had re-
cently toppled over, a great fragment of rock hung
on the very edge, ready to be deposited upon the
ridge, windrows of soil and gravel and boulders
were clinging to the margin of the ice, but while I
stayed not a pebble moved, all was silence and
inertia. And I could look down between the glacier
and the polished mountain-side; they were not in
contact; the hand of the sculptor was raised, as it
were, but he did not strike while I was around. In
front of me upon the glacier for many miles was a
perfect wilderness of crevasses, the ice was ridged
and contorted like an angry sea, but not a sound,
not a movement anywhere.

47

FAR AND NEAR

Go out on the eastern rim of the glacier, where
for a dozen miles or more one walks upon a nearly
level plain of ice, and if one did not know to the con-
trary, he would be sure he saw the agency of man all
about him. It is so rare to find Nature working with
such measure and precision. Here, for instance, is a
railroad embankment stretching off across this ice
prairie, —a line of soil, gravel, and boulders, as uni-
form in width and thickness as if every inch of it had
been carefully measured, — straight, level, three
feet high, and about the width of a single-track road.
The eye follows it till it fades away in the distance.
Parallel with it a few yards away is another line of
soil and gravel more suggestive of a wagon-road,
but with what marvelous evenness is the material
distributed ; it could not have been dumped there
from carts; it must have been sifted out from some
moving vehicle.

Then one comes upon a broad band of rocks and
boulders, several rods in width, the margins per-
fectly straight and even, pointing away to the dis-
tant mountains. All these are medial moraines, —
material gathered from the mountains against which
the ice has ground as it slowly passed, and brought
hither by its resistless onward flow. Some time it
will all be dumped at the end of the glacier, adding
to those vast terminal moraines which form the
gravel plains that flank each side of the inlet. In
looking at these plains and ridges and catching

48

IN GREEN ALASKA

glimpses of the engulfed forests beneath them, one
feels as if the mountains must all have been ground
down and used up in supplying this world of ma-
terial. But they have not. Peak after peak many
thousand feet high still notches the sky there in the
north.

The western part of the Muir Glacier is dead, that
is, it is apparently motionless, and no longer dis-
charges bergs from its end. This end, covered with
soil and boulders, tapers down to the ground and
is easily accessible. Only the larger, more central
portion flows and drops bergs into the sea, present-
ing the phenomenon of a current flowing through
a pond, while on each side the water is all but mo-
tionless. :

Not very long ago the Muir had a large tribu-
tary on the west, but owing to its retreating front
this limb appears to be cut off and separated from
the main ice sheet by a boulder and gravel-strewn
ice plain a mile wide. One day three of us spent
several hours upon the detached portion which is
called the Morse. It is a mighty ice sheet in itself,
nearly or quite a mile wide. It is dead or motionless,
and is therefore free from crevasses. Its rim comes
down to the gravel like a huge turtle shell, and we
stepped on it without difficulty. At first it was vety
steep, but a few minutes’ climbing brought us upon
its broad, smooth, gently sloping back. The exposed
ice weathers rough, and traveling over it is easy.

49

FAR AND NEAR

We found a few old crevasses, many deep depres-
sions or valleys, and several little creeks singing along
deep down between blue, vitreous walls; also wells
of unknown depth and of strange and wonderful
beauty. We came upon a moraine that suggested a
tumble-down stone wall, quite as straight and uni-
form. It soon disappeared beneath the ice, show-
ing what a depth of snow had fallen“upon it since
it started upon its slow journey from the distant
mountains. We pushed up the gentle slope for sev-
eral miles until the snow began to be over our shoes,
when we turned back. I had climbed hills all my
life, but never before had I walked upon a hill of
ice and stopped to drink at springs that were deep
crystal goblets.

The waste of the Morse Glacier is carried off by
two large, turbid streams that rush from beneath it,
and on their way to the inlet uncover a portion of a
buried forest. About this buried forest our doctors
did not agree. The timber, mostly spruce, was yet
hard and sound, a fact that might almost bring the
event within the century. A sheet of gravel nearly
two hundred feet thick seems to have been depos-
ited upon it suddenly. The trees, so far as exposed,
had all been broken off ten or twelve feet from the
ground, by some force coming from the west. In
some places the original forest floor was laid bare by
the water ; the black vegetable mould and decayed
moss had a fresh, undisturbed look. Evidently no

50

IN GREEN ALASKA

force had plowed or rubbed over the surface of this
ground.

While at the Muir we had some cloud and fog, but
no storms, and we had one ideal day. That was
Sunday, the 11th of June, a day all sun and sky, —
not a cloud or film to dim the vast blue vault, —
and warm, even hot, on shore; a day memorable to
all of us for its wonderful beauty, and especially so
to two of us who spent it on the top of Mt. Wright,
nearly three thousand feet above the glacier. It was
indeed a day with the gods ; strange gods, the gods
of the foreworld, but they had great power over us.
The scene we looked upon was for the most part
one of desolation, — snow, ice, jagged peaks, naked
granite, gray moraines, —but the bright sun and
sky over all, the genial warmth and the novelty of
the situation, were ample to invest it with a fasci-
nating interest. There was fatigue in crossing the
miles of moraine; there was difficulty in making
our way along the sharp crests of high gravel-banks;
there was peril in climbing the steep boulder-strewn
side of the mountain, but there was exhilaration in
every step, and there was glory and inspiration at the
top. Under a summer sun, with birds singing and
flowers blooming, we looked into the face of winter
and set our feet upon the edge of his skirts. But the
largeness of the view, the elemental ruggedness, and
the solitude as of interstellar space were perhaps
what took the deepest hold. It seemed as if the old

51

FAR AND NEAR

glacier had been there but yesterday. Granite
boulders, round and smooth like enormous eggs, sat
poised on the rocks or lay scattered about. A child’s
hand could have started some of them thundering
down the awful precipices. When the Muir Glacier
rose to that height, which of course it did in no very
remote past, what an engine for carving and polish-
ing the mountains it must have been! Its moraines
of that period —where are they ? Probably along the
Pacific coast under hundreds of fathoms of water.
Back upon the summit the snow lay deep, and
swept up in a wide sheet to a sharp, inaccessible
peak far beyond and above us. The sweet bird
voices in this primal solitude were such a surprise
and so welcome. There was the piercing plaint
of the golden-crowned sparrow, the rich warble of
Townsend’s fox sparrow, and the sweet strain of
the small hermit thrush. The rosy finch was there
also, hopping upon the snow, and the pipit or titlark
soared and sang in the warm, lucid air above us.
This last song was not much for music, but the
hovering flight of the bird above these dizzy heights
drew the eye strongly. It circled about joyously,
calling chip, chip, chip, chip, without change of
time or tune. Below it a white ptarmigan rose up
and wheeled about, uttering a curious hoarse, croak-
ing sound, and dropped back to his mate on the
rocks. In keeping with these delicate signs of bird
life were the little pink flowers, a species of moss
52

IN GREEN ALASKA

campion, blooming here and there just below the
snow-line, and looking to unbotanical eyes like
blossoming moss. From the height, Muir Glacier
stretched away to the north and soon became a sheet
of snow, which swept up to the tops of the chain of
mountains that hemmed it in. The eastern half of
it, with its earth tinge, looked like a prairie newly
plowed and sown and rolled. The seed had been
drilled in, and the regular, uniform, straight lines
were distinctly visible. Along the western horizon,
looking down on the Pacific, the Fairweather Range
of mountains stood up clear and sharp, Fairweather
itself over fifteen thousand feet high. The snow
upon these mountains doubtless in places lay over
one hundred feet deep.

Glaciers are formed wherever more snow falls
in winter than can melt in summer, and this seems
to be the case on all these Alaskan mountains on
the Pacific coast. If by a change of climate more
snow should fall in the Hudson River valley than
could melt in summer, our landscapes would soon
be invaded by glaciers from the Catskills. Farther
north in Alaska, beyond the reach of the moisture-
loaded Pacific air currents, the precipitation is less
and there are no glaciers.

SITKA

On the 13th of June we weighed anchor, and after
picking up our camping and exploring parties,
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FAR AND NEAR

steamed away toward Sitka, where we arrived
under dripping skies the next morning. We had
come from air and water streaked with icy currents,
to much warmer and to much moister conditions.
Sitka is said to be one of the rainiest spots on the
coast, but the four days we passed there were not
so bad: sun and cloud and spurts of rain each day,
but no considerable downpour. We came into the
island-studded and mountain-locked harbor from
the north, and saw the town, with its quaint old
government buildings and its line of Indian houses
close to the beach, outlined against a near-by back-
ground of steep, high, spruce-covered and snow-
capped mountains, with the white volcanic cone of
Edgecumbe three thousand feet high toward the
open ocean on our right.

People actually live in Sitka from choice, and
seem to find life sweet. There are homes of culture
and refinement there. Governor Brady is a Yale
graduate, and his accomplished wife would shine
in any society. At a reception given us by the
governor, we met teachers from New England and
people who keep in touch with current literature.
A retired naval officer told us he liked the Sitka
climate and life the best of any he had found. He
and his family throve the best there. We spent
the time after the usual manner of tourists: walk-
ing about the town, visiting the Indian village,
the museum, the Greek church, going to the Hot

54

IN GREEN ALASKA

Springs, a few hours’ sail to the south, exploring
Indian River, a large, ideal trout stream in appear-
ance, making a trip to some near-by mines, and
climbing the mountains. It was not a good place
for our collectors; there were but few birds, and
they were very wild. Our mammal collectors put
out one hundred small traps and caught only two
mice. I was fortunate enough to see and hear the
water ouzel along Indian River, a bird like a big
water-colored pebble, with a liquid, bubbling song,
caught from the currents about it. Here also I
saw the golden-crowned kinglet, the varied thrush,
the russet-backed thrush, and the rufous chickadee.
Ravens were very common everywhere in the town
and about it, and were talking and croaking all
the time. Often a solitary bird seemed to be so-
liloquizing and repeating over to himself every
note he knew. One day a hunting party, with In-
dian guides and dogs, visited one of the islands in
quest of deer; the only deer that fell to their rifles
was killed by Mr. Harriman’s eldest daughter,
Mary.

It was a surprise to see the vast spruce forests
about Sitka almost untouched by the axe, except on
a small area behind the town. In the forest near the
mouth of Indian River I noticed a few huge stumps
twelve feet high, asif the axe that felled the trees had
been wielded by giants. The cutting had probably
been done from raised platforms. Some of the stumps

55

FAR AND NEAR

were very old, doubtless the work of the Russians.
Sitka is very prettily situated; a ring of high, dark,
snow-topped mountains just behind it, and a spar-
Kling bay, dotted with islands, rock-based and tree-
crowned, in its front, with white volcanic cones in
the distance. About the only bit of smooth dirt-road
we saw in Alaska, we walked on here for the distance
of a mile, in going from the town to the park.

IN YAKUTAT BAY

After four warm, humid days at Sitka we turned
our faces for the first time toward the open ocean,
our objective point being Yakutat Bay, a day’s run
farther north. The usual Alaska excursion ends at
Sitka, but ours was now only fairly begun. The
Pacific was very good to us, and used us as gently as
an inland lake, there being only a long, low, sleepy
swell that did not disturb the most sensitive. The
next day, Sunday the 18th, was mild and placid.
Far at sea on our left we looked into a world of sun-
shine, but above us and on our right lay a heavy
blanket of clouds, enveloping and blotting out all
the upper portions of the great Fairweather Range.
We steamed all day a few miles offshore, hoping
that the great peaks, some of them fifteen thousand
to sixteen thousand feet high, would reveal them-
selves, but they did not. We saw them only from
the waist down, as it were, with their glaciers like
vast white aprons flanked by skirts of spruce forests.

56

IN GREEN ALASKA

One of these glaciers, La Perouse, came quite down
to the sea, with a front a mile or more long and two
hundred feet high. At one point it had cut into the
edge of the forest, and shoved and piled up the trees
and soil as a heavy vehicle shoves and folds up the
turf. This, of course, showed that quite recently
the glacier had had a period of advance or augmen-
tation, and had encroached upon its banks. We
stopped an hour in front of it and put a party ashore,
but they learned little that could not be divined
from the ship. They found a heavy surf running,
and did not get through it on their return without an
acquaintance with the Pacific more intimate than
agreeable. All day long we were in sight of glaciers,
usually two or three at a time, some of them im-
mense, all the offspring of the great Fairweather
Range. Now and then the back of one some miles
inland would show above a low wooded ridge, a line
of white above an expanse of black, like the crest of
a river about to overflow its banks. One broad ice
slope I recall which, with its dark, straight lines of
moraine dividing it into three equal portions, sug-
gested a side-hill farm in winter with the tops of the
stone walls showing above the snow. It had a
friendly, home look to me.

On the morning of the 19th we were at anchor
in front of the Indian village in Yakutat Bay. This
bay is literally like an arm, a huge arm of the sea,
very broad and heavy at the shoulder, much flexed

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FAR AND NEAR

at the elbow, where it breaks into the St. Elias
Range, and long and slender in the forearm, which
is thrust through the mountains till it nearly reaches
the sea again. Eight or ten comfortable frame
houses, with a store and post-office, made up the
Indian village known on the map as Yakutat. It sat
low on a wooded point just to one side of the broad
entrance to the bay. There were upwards of a hun-
dred people there, looked after by a Swedish mis-
sionary. We soon proceeded up the bay, with the
great Malaspina Glacier on our left, and put off
three hunting and collecting parties, to be absent
from the ship till Thursday. The event of this day
was the view of Mt. St. Elias that was vouchsafed
us for half an hour in the afternoon. The base and
lower ranges had been visible for some time, bathed
in clear sunshine, but a heavy canopy of dun-colored
clouds hung above us, and stretched away toward
the mountain, dropping down there in many cur-
tain-like folds, hiding the peak. But the scene-
shifters were at work; slowly the heavy folds of
clouds that limited our view yielded and were spun
off by the air currents, till at last the veil was com-
pletely rent, and there, in the depths of clear air and
sunshine, the huge mass soared to heaven. :

There is sublimity in the sight of a summer
thunder-head with its great white and dun convolu-
tions rising up for miles against the sky, but there is
more in the vision of a jagged mountain crest pier-

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IN GREEN ALASKA

cing the blue at even a lesser height. This is partly
because it is a much rarer spectacle, but mainly
because it is a display of power that takes greater
hold of the imagination. That lift heavenward of
the solid crust of the earth, that aspiration of the
insensate rocks, that effort of the whole range, as it
were, to carry one peak into heights where all may
not go,—every lower summit seeming to second
it and shoulder it forward till it stands there in a
kind of serene astronomic solitude and remote-
ness, — is a vision that always shakes the heart of
the beholder.

Later in the day we continued our course up the
bay through much drift ice, and were soon in sight
of two large glaciers, the Turner and the Hubbard.
Both presented long, high palisades of ice to the
water, like the Muir, but were far less active and
explosive. The Hubbard Glacier is just at the sharp
bend of the elbow, a regular “fiddler’s” elbow,
where the bay, much narrowed, turns abruptly from
northeast to south. Here, with a Yakutat Indian for
pilot, we entered upon the strange and weird scen-
ery of Russell Fiord, and into waters that no ship as
large as ours had before navigated. This part of the
bay is in size like the Hudson and about sixty miles
in length, but how wild and savage! A succession of
mountains of almost naked rock, now scored and
scalloped and polished by the old glaciers, now with
vast moraines upon their sides or heaped at their

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FAR AND NEAR

feet, which the rains and melting snows have plowed
and ribbed and carved into many fantastic forms.
There was an air of seclusion and remoteness about
it all, as if this had been a special playground of the
early ice gods, a nook or alley set apart for them in
which to indulge every whim and fancy. And what
could be more whimsical or fantastic than yonder
glacier playing the mountain goat, clinging to the
steep sides of the mountain or breaking over its
cliffs and yet falling not, hanging there like a con-
gealed torrent, a silent and motionless shadow. The
eye seems baffled. Surely the ice is plunging or will
plunge the next second: but no, there it is fixed; it
bends over the brink, it foams below, but no sound
is heard and no movement is apparent. You see the
corrugated surface where it emerges from its great
snow reservoir on the mountain summit; it shows
deep crevasses where it sweeps down a steep incline,
then curves across a terrace, then leaps in solid,
fixed foam down the face of the cliff, to which it
seems bound as by some magic.

These precipice glaciers apparently move no faster
than those in the valley. It is in all cases a subtle,
invisible movement, like that of the astronomic
bodies. It would seem as if gravity had little to do
with it. They do not gain momentum like an ava-
lanche of snow or earth, but creep so slowly that to
the lookers-on they are as motionless as the rocks
themselves. The grade, the obstacles in the way,

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IN GREEN ALASKA

seem to make no difference. One would think that
if a mass of ice, weighing many thousand tons,
hanging upon the face of a mountain-wall steeper
than a house roof, detached itself from the rest at all
and began to move, it would gain momentum and
presently shoot down, as the loosened ice and snow
do from our slate roofs. But it does not. If the tem-
perature of the rocks were suddenly raised as in the
case of the roof, no doubt the glacier would shoot,
but it is not. The under surface of the ice is prob-
ably perpetually congealed and perpetually loos-
ened, and the crystallization is constantly broken
and constantly reformed, so that the glacier’s motion
is more a creeping than a sliding. The carving and
sculpturing of the rocks is of course done by the
pebbles and boulders beneath the ice, and these
must slide or roll.

We followed the bay or inlet to its head, and
anchored for the night in the large oval that marks
its termination. We were about fifteen miles from
the Pacific, being separated from it by a low, level
moraine of the old glaciers. We were now sur-
rounded by low wooded shores, from which in the
long twilight came the sweet vespers of the little
hermit thrush.

On the 20th another hunting party went out
from the ship, and with an Indian guide climbed
and threaded the snow-covered mountains nearly
all day in quest of bears, but came back as empty

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handed as it had set out. The ship in the mean
time steamed back ten miles toa side arm of the bay,
at the head of which is Hidden Glacier, so called
because hidden from view behind a shoulder of the
mountain. A broad gravel-bed with a stream wind-
ing through it, which the retreating glacier had
uncovered, was alone visible from the ship. While
Gannett and Gilbert proceeded to survey and map
the glacier, many of us wandered on shore amid
a world of moraines and gravel-banks. In the after-
noon we moved to the vicinity of the Hubbard Gla-
cier, where the ship took a fresh supply of water
from a mountain torrent, while the glacier hunters
viewed the Nunatak Glacier, and the mineralogists
with their hammers prowled upon the shore. My
own diversion that afternoon was to climb one of
the near mountains to an altitude of about twenty-
five hundred feet, where I looked down at a fearful
angle into the sea, and where I found my first tit-
lark’s nest. The bird with her shining eyes looked
out upon me, and upon the sublime scene, from a
little cavity in a mossy bank near the snow-line. Her
nest held six dark-brown eggs. Some pussy willows
near by were just starting. I thought to reach the
peak of the mountain up a broad and very steep
band of snow, but I looked back once too often. The
descent to the sea was too easy and too fearful for
my imagination, so I cautiously turned back. In a
large patch of alders at the foot of the mountain four
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IN GREEN ALASKA

or five species of birds were nesting and in song.
The most welcome sight to me was a solitary barn
swallow skimming along as one might have seen it
at home, —no barns within hundreds of miles, yet
the little swallow seemed quite at her ease.

While we were anchored here, we had another
brief vision of surpassing mountain grandeur. The
fair weather divinities brushed aside the veil of
clouds, and one of the lofty peaks to the north,
probably Vancouver, stood revealed to us. We
yielded to its mighty spell for a few moments, and
then the cloud curtain again dropped.

The next day we left Russell Fiord, and anchored
before an Indian encampment below Haenke Is-
land, on the south side of the head of Yakutat Bay.
The Indians had come up from their village below,
—some of them, we were told, from as far away
as Sitka. They were living here in tents and bark
huts, and hunting the hair seal amid the drifting ice-
bergs that the Turner and the Hubbard cast off.
This was their summer camp; they were laying in
a supply of skins and oil against their winter needs.
In July they go to the salmon streams and secure
their stores of salmon. During these excursions
their village at Yakutat is nearly deserted. The
encampment we visited was upon the beach of a
broad, gravelly delta flanked by high mountains. It
was redolent of seal oil. The dead carcasses of the
seals lay in rows upon the pebbles in front of the

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FAR AND NEAR

tents and huts. The women and girls were skin-
ning them, and cutting out the blubber and trying
it out in pots over smouldering fires, while the crack
of the men’s shotguns could be heard out amid the
ice. Apparently their only food at such times is seal
meat, with parts of the leaf or stalk of a kind of cow-
parsnip, a coarse, rank plant that grows all about.
The Indian women frowned upon our photogra-
phers, and were very averse to having the cameras
pointed at them. It took a good deal of watching
and waiting and manoeuvring to get a good shot.
The artists, with their brushes and canvases, were
regarded with less suspicion.

The state of vegetation in Yakutat Bay was like
that of early May in New York, though the temper-
ature was lower. Far up the mountain-side near the
line of snow the willows were just pushing out. At
their base the columbine, rock-loving as at home,
but larger and coarser-flowered, was in bloom,
and blue violets could be gathered by the handful.
Back of the encampment were acres of lupine just
bursting into flower. It gave a gay, festive look to
the place. Red-vested bumble-bees were working
eagerly upon it. The yellow warbler was nesting in
the alders near by. New birds added to our list from
these shores were the pine grosbeak, the Arctic tern,
and the robber jaeger. No large game was secured
by our hunters in Yakutat Bay, though Captain
Kelly declared he was at one time so near a bear

64

IN GREEN ALASKA

that he could smell him. The bear undoubtedly got
a smell of the captain first.

Our party had now been a month together, and
had assumed the features of a large and happy
family on a summer holiday cruise. We were of
diverse interests and types of character, yet one in
the spirit of true comradeship. This fortunate con-
dition was due largely to the truly democratic and
manly character of the head of the expedition, Mr.
Harriman, and to the cheerful and obliging temper
of Captain Doran. The pleasure of the party was
the pleasure of our host and of the captain. The
ship was equally at the service of men who wanted
to catch mice or collect a new bird, and of those
who wanted to survey a glacier or inlet or to shoot
a bear. One day it made a voyage of sixty miles
to enable our collectors to take up some traps, the
total catch of which proved to be nine mice. The
next day it was as likely to go as far to enable Ritter
and Saunders to dredge for new forms of sea life,
or Devereux to inspect some outcropping of copper
ore. Early in the voyage our committee on enter-
tainment arranged a course of lectures. Nearly
every night at eight o’clock, on the upper deck or
in the Social Hall, some one of our college professors
or government specialists held forth. One night it
was Dall upon the history or geography of Alaska;
then Gilbert upon the agency of glaciers in shaping
the valleys and mountains, or upon the glaciers we

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FAR AND NEAR

had recently visited; then Brewer upon climate and
ocean currents, or Coville upon some botanical fea-
tures of the regions about us, or Ritter upon the
shore forms of sea life, or Emerson upon volcanoes
and lava beds, or John Muir on his experiences
upon the glaciers and his adventure with his dog
Stikeen in crossing a huge crevasse on a sliver of ice,
or Charles Keeler on the coloration of birds, or
Fuertes on bird-songs, or Grinnell on Indian tribes
and Indian characteristics, and so on. On Sunday
evenings Dr. Nelson conducted the Episcopal ser-
vice and preached a sermon, while at other times

books and music and games added to the attraction
of the Social Hall.

PRINCE WILLIAM SOUND

After several days in Yakutat Bay we steamed
northward again, bound for Prince William Sound.
The fog and cloud hid the St. Elias Range, but the
great Malaspina Glacier was visible on our right.
This is the largest of the Alaskan glaciers, covering
fifteen hundred square miles. It has a front of fifty
miles on the sea, and runs back thirty miles to the
St. Elias Range, from which it is fed. It is a vast
plain of ice, with lakes and rivers, and with hills of
rocks and gravel that have trees and alders growing
upon them. One of our hunting parties touched the
skirts of it, and saw where the earth and alders had
slid off over quite an area, exposing the ice. Its

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IN GREEN ALASKA

Yakutat side seems stagnant; it no longer dis-
charges bergs into the sea, and will in time probably
drop its vast burden of medial moraine upon the
ground beneath. We caught glimpses of its nu-
merous feeders below the clouds along the base
of St. Elias, but of the glacier itself we saw only the
earth-covered margin it presents to the sea. The
discharge of roily water from beneath it is so great
that it colors the sea over an area equal to its own;
“olacier milk,” some one called it, and it gives the
Pacific a milky tinge for thirty miles offshore.

I must not forget the albatross that found us out
and followed our ship when we had been but a few
hours at sea, wheeling around us close to the water,
coming and going, now on one side, now on the
other, slanting and curving, and all on straight,
unbending wing. Its apparently toilless, effortless
flight and its air of absolute leisure were very curi-
ous and striking, — it seemed like the spirit of the
deep taking visible form and seeking to weave some
spell upon us or lure us away to destruction. Never
before had I seen flying so easy and spontaneous, —
not an action, not a thought, not an effort, but a
dream. What a contrast to the flight of the Arctic
tern which we first saw in Yakutat Bay, a bird with
long, sickle-shaped wings, with which it fairly reaped
the air. The flight of the albatross was a series of
long, graceful strokes, unlike that of any other bird
I have ever seen.

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FAR AND NEAR

About noon on the 24th, amid fog and light rain,
we sighted Middleton Island on our starboard,
when the ship turned her head sharply northward
toward the entrance to the sound. In a few hours
we ran out of the fog into clear skies, and were soon
steaming across the great sound in warm sunshine.
Our route was a devious one: past islands and
headlands, then over the immense expanse of the
open water with a circle of towering, snow-capped
mountains far off along the horizon, then wind-
ing through arms and straits, close to tree-tufted
islands and steep, spruce-clad mountains, now
looking between near-by dark forested hills upon
a group of distant peaks white as midwinter, then
upon broad, low, wooded shores with glimpses of
open, meadow-like glades among the trees, suggest-
ing tender grass and grazing herds, till in the early
evening we sighted a little cluster of buildings peep-
ing out of the forest at the base of a lofty moun-
tain. This was Orca, where there is a large salmon
cannery and a post-office. Here we anchored for the
night. In the long twilight some of our party climbed
to the top of the mountain, twenty-five hundred feet
in height, and brought back a native heather, — bry-
anthus, —in bloom. Others of us wandered upon
the beach, and engaged in conversation with some
gold-seekers just out from Copper River. They were
encamped here, waiting for a steamer to take them
away and for funds from friends at home to enable

68

IN GREEN ALASKA

them to get away. It was a story of hardships and
disappointment that they had to tell us, —yes, and
of scurvy and death. Over three thousand men had
gone into the Copper River region a year or more
before on the wildest, vaguest rumor of gold. They
had gone in hurriedly and slyly, as it were, so as to
be ahead of the crowd. Each man had taken sup-
plies to last him a year, at least. Now they were
coming out destitute and without one cent’s worth
of gold; many of them had died. Scurvy had broken
out among them, had swept away scores of them,
and had lamed and disabled others. Their toils and
privations had been terrible; snow, glaciers, moun-
tains, swollen rivers, had blocked their way. Most
of them had abandoned their unconsumed supplies
and extra blankets, content to get out with their
lives. They were from the East and from the West,
lumbermen from Maine and Pennsylvania and old
miners from California and Colorado, They were a
sturdy, sober-looking set of men that we saw, no
nonsense about them. Such hardships and disap-
pointments seem to sweep away everything affected
and meretricious in a man, and uncover and bring
out the bedrock of character, if there is any in him.
In this crowd two large, powerful men, father and
son, were especially noticeable. The father, a man
probably of sixty-five years, had nearly died with
scurvy and was still very lame, and the tenderness
and solicitude of the son toward him warmed my
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FAR AND NEAR

heart, — homely, slow, deliberate men, but evidently
made of the real stuff. These stranded men were
penniless, and were depending upon the charity, or
the willingness to trust, of the steamboat company
to take them home to San Francisco. I was glad
when I saw them depart on the steamer the next day.
Alaska is full of such adventurers ransacking the
land. We heard of them at several other points: men
looking for new Klondikes, exploring remote corners,
going eagerly and quietly into the wilderness, cross-
ing glaciers, rivers, and mountains, hoping to be the
first in new and rich fields.

Sunday the 25th was another day of great beauty.
We spent the main part of it steaming across the
sound toward some of the more remote inlets. It
was an ideal day, an ideal sail ; a day to bask in the
sunshine upon the upper deck and leisurely contem-
plate the vast shifting panorama of sea and islands
and wooded shores and towering peaks spread be-
fore us on every hand; a day that gave us another
feast of beauty and sublimity, and that stands out in
the memory unforgettable! We were afloat in an
enchanted circle; we sailed over magic seas under
magic skies ; we played hide and seek with winter
in lucid sunshine over blue and emerald waters, —
all the conditions, around, above, below us were
most fortunate.

Prince William Sound is shaped like a great spi-
der: an open, irregular body of water eighty miles

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IN GREEN ALASKA

or more across, fringed with numerous arms and
inlets that reach far in amid the mountains. Across
the head of most of these arms are huge glaciers;
others hang upon the mountain-sides or cascade
down them. It was toward the head of one of these
inlets that we were now bound. In the afternoon we
reached its end, and saw another palisade of shat-
tered ice, about two hundred feet high and four
miles long, barring our way. We named this the
Columbia Glacier. Its front was quite as imposing
as that of the Muir, but it was less active; appar-
ently no large blue bergs are born out of its depth,
for the reason, doubtless, that its depth is not great.
On a wooded island near its front we left two of our
geologists to survey and report upon it. At eight
o’clock that Sunday evening we were at anchor in
Virgin Bay, with low, partly wooded islands on the
one hand, and sloping open shores at the foot of tall
mountains on the other. Two or three small houses
were seen scattered along the shore on the margin of
these broad, natural, grassy clearings. Copper ore
had been found here and there near the cabins of the
prospectors. On two of the islands near us were fox
farms. One of the farmers came off in his boat to
see us, and talked intelligently about his enterprise.
His foxes would swim to an adjoining island a few
hundred yards away, so his brother had established
a fox farm there. Blue foxes are the species cul-
tivated ; their main food in winter is dried fish
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FAR AND NEAR

caught during the summer out of the surrounding
waters. Each island contained several hundred
acres, mostly covered with spruce. Upon the subject
of profits he could not yet speak, as the enterprise
was new. We here saw our first Eskimo. He came
paddling toward our ship in a double kyak, and as
our naphtha launch circled about him, he had an
amused, childish look.

We put a party ashore to spend a couple of days
hunting and collecting. After the Sunday evening
service, the sun was still glowing upon the distant
white peaks, and a dozen or more of us seized the
occasion to go ashore and walk in the long twilight
upon the strange land. How novel and bewitching it
all was! The open meadow-like expanse near the
beach proved to be tundra,—wet, spongy, mossy,
grassy, and full of wild flowers, the most conspicu-
ously beautiful of which was the shooting-star or
dodecatheon. Our collectors had pitched their tents
near the log cabin of two prospectors, on a point of
land at the mouth of a clear, rapid stream. The her-
mit thrush sang in the forest close by ; the stream
sang, and the air under the shadow of the mountain
was pervaded with a strange peace and charm. The
only singing that was not so agreeable was that of the
mosquitoes, but amid such scenes petty annoyances
are soon forgotten. One of the prospectors, a brisk
little man, whose clean, snug cabin we visited, was
born near North Cape in Norway. He had been

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IN. GREEN ALASKA

here over a year, and as our ladies were the first who
had ever visited his camp, he took off his hat and,
with his hand upon his heart, made a gallant bow to
them in acknowledgment. He was planning to go
to the Paris Exposition next year, and life seemed
to offer him many bright outlooks.

The next day, Monday the 26th, we spent in Port
Wells, the extreme northeast arm of the sound,
taking in water from a foaming mountain torrent
and again coquetting with glaciers. The weather
was fair, but the sea air was cold. Indeed, we were
in another great ice chest, — glaciers to right of us,
glaciers to left of us, glaciers in front of us, volleyed
and thundered ; the mountains were ribbed with
them, and the head of the bay was walled with
them. At one time we could see five, separated by
intervals of a few miles, cascading down from the
heights, while the chief of the flock was booming in-
cessantly at the head of the valley. The two large
glaciers at the head of the fiord were named by our
party Harvard and Yale; the cascading glaciers on
the west side, Radcliffe, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Vassar,
and Wellesley; and the main glacier on the east side
of Port Wells, Amherst. On going ashore we had a
chance to view, in profile, those pouring down from
the heights, and the effect was novel and strange.
We looked along the green, tender enfoliaged side of
the mountain and saw one of these torrents of shat-
tered ice rising up fifty or more feet above its banks,

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FAR AND NEAR

and as if about to topple over upon them; but it did
not. To the eye it was as fixed as the rocks; appar-
ently one could have leaned his back against the ice
with his feet upon the foliage. The channel of Port
Wells was so blocked with ice from the incessant
discharges of the glaciers that the ship made her
way with great difficulty, and was finally compelled
to anchor more than twenty miles from the head.
In the launches we managed to get about ten miles
nearer. This was the most active glacier we had
seen. The thundering of the great ice Niagara there
in the distance was in our ears every moment, but
we could not get near it; it beat us off with its ice
avalanches. Such piles of gravel and broken rocks
as I climbed and tried to cross that day at the foot
of one of the lesser side glaciers dwarfed anything
Thad yet seen. They suggested the crush of moun-
tains and the wreck of continents.

Two things constantly baffle and mislead the eye
in all these Alaskan waters — size and distance.
Things are on a new scale. The standard one brings
with him will not hold. The eye says it is three
miles to such a point, it turns out to be six; or that
the front of yonder glacier is a hundred feet high,
and it is two hundred or more. For my part, I
never succeeded in bringing my eye up to the
Alaskan scale. Many a point, many a height, which
I marked for my own from the deck of the ship,
seemed to recede from me when I turned my steps

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IN GREEN ALASKA

toward it. The wonderfully clear air probably
had something to do with the illusion. Forms were
so distinct that one fancied them near at hand when
they were not.

On shore we found gulls and Arctic terns nesting
on little sandy hillocks, and saw oyster-catchers, a
ptarmigan, and the wandering tattler. In the water
the marbled murrelets were common; with their
short wings and plump, round bodies they looked
like sea quail. Our first and only mishap to the ship
in these waters befell us here, — the breaking of one
of the blades of the propeller upon a cake of ice,
an accident that had the effect of making our craft
limp a little.

HARRIMAN FIORD

Later in the afternoon we ascended an arm of
Port Wells more to the westward and entered upon
a voyage of discovery. We steamed up to a glacier
of prodigious size that reared its front across the
head of the inlet and barred further progress in that
direction, —the Barry Glacier. According to the
U. 8. Coast Survey map we were at the end of navi-
gation in these waters, but Mr. Harriman suggested
to the captain that he take the ship a little nearer the
glacier, when a way seemed open to the left. As we
progressed, the mountains fell apart and a passage
opened there around the corner, like a street coming
in at right angles to a main thoroughfare.

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FAR AND NEAR

The captain naturally hesitated to enter it; it
was unmapped and unsounded water.

“Go ahead, Captain,” said Mr. Harriman, “I
will take the risk.”

We went on under a good head of steam up
this new inlet, where no ship had ever before passed.
It was one of the most exciting moments of our voy-
age. We could see another huge glacier about ten
miles ahead of us, with its front on the water barring
the way. Glaciers hung on the steep mountain-sides
all about us. Some of them, as Mr. Elliot said,
looked like the stretched skins of huge polar bears.
The scene was wild and rugged in the extreme. One
of the glaciers was self-named the Serpentine by
reason of its winding course down from its hidden
sources in the mountains, a great white serpent
with its jaws set with glittering fangs at the sea. An-
other was self-named the Stairway, as it came down
in regular terraces or benches. A Colossus of Rhodes
with seven-league boots would have been an appro-
priate figure upon it. As we neared the front of this
last glacier, the mountains to the left again parted
and opened up another new arm of the sea, with
more glaciers tumbling in mute sublimity from the
heights, or rearing colossal palisades across our
front. A ten-mile course brought us to the head
of this inlet, which was indeed the end of naviga-
tion in this direction. Here we left Gannett and
Muir to survey and bring to map our new bit of

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IN GREEN ALASKA

geography. Subsequently this inlet was fitly named
Harriman Fiord, and the glacier at the head of it,
Harriman Glacier.

In no very distant past, the various ice sheets,
united in one body, had filled the inlet to the moun-
tain’s brim — a vast ice monster. Now, the body
of the monster is gone and his limbs lie upon the
mountains on either side, while his tail and rump
are at the head of the main valley.

Our vessel, on coming out of the inlet and turn-
ing almost at right angles into Port Wells, was
caught by the very strong ebb tide, which for a mo-
ment held her in its grasp. She hesitated to respond
to her helm, and was making direct for the face
of the great glacier on our port side; but presently
she came about, as if aware of her danger, and went
on her way in less agitated waters.

This great glacier,—the Barry,—which guards
the entrance to Harriman Inlet, presented some
novel features; among others, huge archways above
the water-line, suggesting entrances to some walled
city. When masses of ice fell, I fancied I could hear
the reverberation in these arched caverns.

The next day, which was thick and rainy, we
picked up our party at Virgin Bay, and steamed
back to Orca to mend our broken propeller. I won-
dered how it could be done, as there is no dry dock
there, but the problem proved an easy one. The tide
is so great in these waters that every shelving beach

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becomes a dry dock at low tide. In the morning our
steamer lay in shallow water on the beach at Orca.
A low scaffolding was built around her propeller,
and very soon the broken blade was replaced by a
new one. While this was being done, many of us
viewed the process of salmon canning. Some of the
fish lay piled up on the dock, and were being loaded
into wheelbarrows with a one-tined pitchfork and
wheeled in to the cleaners. Most of the work was
done by Chinamen from San Francisco. It was posi-
tively fascinating to see the skill and swiftness with
which some of these men worked ; only two used
knives, — long, thin blades, which they kept very
sharp. They cut off the fins, severed the head and
tail, and did the disemboweling with lightning-like
rapidity. It was like the tricks of jugglers. There
was a gleam of steel about the fish half a moment
and the work was done. One had to be very intent
to follow the movements. The fish were then washed
and scraped and passed on to workmen inside,
where they were cut and packed by machinery.
Every second all day long a pound can, snugly
packed, drops from the ingenious mechanism. For
some reason the looker-on soon loses his taste for
salmon, there is such a world of it. It is as com-
mon as chips; it is kicked about under foot; it lies
in great sweltering heaps; many of the fish, while
lying upon the beach before they are brought in, are
pecked and bruised by gulls and ravens ; the air is
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IN GREEN ALASKA

redolent of an odor far different from that of roses
or new-mown hay, and very shortly one turns away
to the woods or to the unpolluted beach.

The first tide was not high enough to lift our
steamer, so we passed another day at Orca, and all
hands went in the naphtha launches on a picnic to a
wild place eight or ten miles distant with the sugges-
tive name of Bomb Point. It was a lovely secluded
spot, a crescent-shaped beach half a mile long at the
head of a shallow bay, flanked by low, wooded points
and looked down upon by lofty mountains. Here we
were quickly roaming over one of those large natural
clearings or hyperborean meadows that we had so
often seen from the ship, and that had looked so
friendly and enticing. This one, on a nearer view,
proved especially alluring and delightful; a strange
air of privacy and seclusion was over it all. It was
not merely carpeted to the foot, it was cushioned.
Walking over it was like walking over a feather-bed,
— moss and grass a foot deep or more upon a foun-
dation of soft peat. Wild flowers — yellow, white,
pink, purple — were everywhere.

Little pools or basins of brown water, their brims
neatly faced and rounded with moss and grass, were
sunk here and there into the surface. Stunted mossy
hemlocks and spruces dotted the landscape, and the
near-by woods threw out irregular lines of gray,
moss-draped trees, — novel, interesting. Such a look
of age, and yet the bloom and dimples of youth!

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Bearded, decrepit, dwarfed spruces above a turf
like a pillow decked with flowers! I walked along a
margin of open woods that had a singularly genial,
sheltered, home look, and listened to the hermit
thrush. The nearer we get to the region of perpet-
ual snow, the more does vegetable life seem to simu-
late snow and cover the ground with softness, —soft-
ness to the foot, and dimpled surface to the eye.
Such handfuls of wild flowers as we all gathered!
The thought in every one’s mind was, Oh, if we
could only place these flowers in the hands of friends
at home! The colors were all deep and intense.

In the afternoon the steamer picked us up. A
little after midnight we took aboard the party we
had left at Columbia Glacier, and then returned to
Harriman Fiord for Gannett and Muir. When they
were on board, we once more turned our faces to the
open sea, bound for Cook Inlet, the largest of the
Alaskan bays. It penetrates the land one hundred
and fifty miles, and is more than fifty miles broad at
its mouth.

We entered it on the 30th, under bright skies, and
dropped anchor behind a low sandspit in Kachemac
Bay, on the end of which is a group of four or five
buildings making up the hamlet of Homer. There
was nothing Homeric in the look of the place, but
grandeur looked down upon it from the mountains
around, especially from the great volcanic peaks,
Iliamna and Redoubt, sixty miles across the inlet to

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IN GREEN ALASKA

the west. The former rises over twelve thousand feet
from the sea and, bathed in sunshine, was an impres-
sive spectacle. It was wrapped in a mantle of snow,
but it evidently was warm at heart, for we could see
steam issuing from two points near its summit.
Our stay in Cook Inlet was brief. Our hunters had
hoped to kill some big game here, but after inter-
viewing an experienced hunter who had a camp on
shore, they concluded that on our return in July the
prospects would be better. On the afternoon of June
30, therefore, we left the inlet and were off for the
island of Kadiak, a hundred miles to the southwest.

KADIAK

We were now about to turn over a new leaf, or
indeed to open a new book, and to enter upon an
entirely different type of scenery, — the treeless type.
Up to this point, or for nearly two thousand miles,
we had seen the mountains and valleys covered with
unbroken spruce forests. Now we were to have two
thousand miles without a tree, the valleys and moun-
tains green as a lawn, and to the eye as smooth, —
all of voleanic origin; many of the cones ideally per-
fect; the valleys deepened and carved by the old gla-
ciers, and heights and lowlands alike covered with a
carpet of grass, ferns, and flowers.

The forests begin to fail at the mouth of Cook
Inlet. As we came out, my eye was drawn to rolling
heights, where were groups and lines of trees amid

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broad, green expanses. The suggestion of hill farms
at home with orchards and groves, and trees along
the fences, was very strong, but one looked in vain
for the houses and barns of the farmers. We were
going into a milder climate, too. During nearly all
the month of June, despite my extra winter clothing,
I had suffered with cold. In Prince William Sound
and in Yakutat Bay we were in vast refrigerating
chests. The air had all been on ice, and the sunshine
seemed only to make us feel its tooth the more
keenly. With benumbed fingers I wrote to a friend
in this strain: “Amid your summer weather, do
remember us in our wanderings, a-chill on these
northern seas, beleaguered by icebergs, frowned upon
by glaciers, and held as by some enchantment in a
vast circle of snow-capped mountain peaks. Are
your hands and feet really warm? Is it true that
there is no snow upon the mountains ?”

But balmier skies awaited us; the warmer cur-
rents of the Pacific flowing up from Japan and the
southern seas were soon to breathe upon us; that
pastoral paradise, Kadiak, was soon to greet us.

All the afternoon we steamed along the coast in
smooth seas, in full view of lofty, snow-covered moun-
tains with huge glaciers issuing from out their loins.
Late at night, off against Kukak Bay, we put off a
party of five or six men who wished to spend a week
collecting and botanizing on the mainland. It looked
like a perilous piece of business, the debarkation of

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IN GREEN ALASKA

these men in the darkness, in an open boat on an un-
known coast many miles from shore. Might they not
miss the bay? Might they not find the surf running
too high to land, or might not some other mishap
befall them? But after a hard pull of several hours,
they made the shore at a suitable landing-place, and
their days spent there were in every way satisfactory.

On the morning of July 1, we woke up in Uyak
Bay on the north side of the Island of Kadiak. The
sky was clear and the prospect most inviting.
Smooth, treeless, green hills and mountains ‘sur-
rounded us, pleasing to the eye and alluring to the
feet. Two large salmon canneries were visible on
shore, and presently a boat came off to us with fresh
salmon. Here we left a naphtha launch with a party
of six men, heavily armed, bent on finding and kill-
ing the great Kadiak bear, the largest species of
bear in the world, as big as an ox. They had been
making up their mouths for this monster bear all the
way, and now they were at last close to his haunts.
In two or three days we were to return and pick
them up and hoist their game aboard with the great
derrick. In the delicious sunshine we steamed out of
Uyak, bound for Kadiak village on the east end of
the island, one hundred miles away. Kadiak Island
lies nearly south from Cook Inlet, about fifty miles
from the mainland. It is one hundred and fifty
miles long and one third as broad. It would just
about fill up Cook Inlet, out of which it may have

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slipped some time for aught I know. It is treeless
except upon the east end, which faces toward the
great Alaskan forests, from which the tree infection
may have come.

How beautiful and interesting the shores we
passed that day ! Smooth, rounded hills, as green
and tender to the eye as well-kept lawns, recalling
the hills we saw in May upon Snake River ; natural
sheep ranges, such as one sees in the north of Eng-
land, but not a sign of life upon them.

I warn my reader here, that henceforth I shall
babble continually of green fields. There was no
end to them. We had come from an arboreal wilder-
ness to a grassy wilderness, from a world of spruce
forests to a world of emerald heights and verdant
slopes. Look at the map of Alaska, and think of all
the peninsulas from Cook Inlet and all the adjacent
islands, and the long chain of the Aleutians sweep-
ing nearly across to Asia, as being covered with an
unbroken carpet of verdure,—it must needs be the
main feature in my descriptions. Never had I seen
such beauty of greenness, because never before had
I seen it from such a vantage-ground of blue sea.

We had not been many hours out of Uyak that
afternoon when we began to see a few scattered
spruce-trees, then patches of forest in the valley bot-
toms. At one point we passed near a large natural
park. It looked as if a landscape gardener might have
been employed to grade and shape the ground, and

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IN GREEN ALASKA

plant it with grass and trees in just the right propor-
tion. Here were cattle, too, and how good they looked,
grazing or reposing on those long, smooth vistas be-
tween the trees! To eyes sated with the wild, aus-
tere grandeur of Prince William Sound the change
was most delightful. Our course lay through narrow
channels and over open bays sprinkled with green
islands, past bold cliffs and headlands, till at three
o’clock we entered the narrow strait, no more than
twice the ship’s length in width, upon which is situ-
ated the village of Kadiak, called by the Russians
St. Paul. We could see the wild flowers upon the
shore as we passed along, barn swallows twittered
by, a magpie crossed the strait from one green bank
to the other, and as we touched the wharf a song
sparrow was singing from the weather-vane of a
large warehouse, —a song sparrow in voice, man-
ners, and color, but in form twice as large as our
home bird. The type of song sparrow changes all
the way from Yakutat Bay to the Aleutian Islands,
till at the latter place it is nearly as large as the cat-
bird; but the song and general habits of the bird
change but very little. How welcome the warmth,
too! We had stepped from April into June, with the
mercury near the seventies, and our spirits rose
accordingly. How we swarmed out of the ship, like
boys out of school, longing for a taste of grass and of
the rural seclusion and sweetness! That great green
orb or half orb of a mountain that shone down upon
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FAR AND NEAR

us from just back of the town, the highest point in
its rim at an altitude of twenty-three hundred feet,
— how our legs tingled to climb it! and the green
vale below, where the birds were singing and many
rare wild flowers blooming; and the broad, gentle
height to the north, threaded by a grassy lane, where
groves of low, fragrant spruces promised a taste
of the blended sylvan and pastoral; or the smooth,
rounded island opposite, over which the sea threw
blue glances; or the curving line of water sweeping
away to the south toward a rugged mountain-
wall, streaked with snow; or the peaceful, quaint
old village itself, strung upon paths and grassy lanes,
with its chickens and geese and children, and two or
three cows cropping the grass or ruminating by the
wayside, — surely, here was a tempting field to ship-
bound voyagers from the chilly and savage north.
The town itself had a population of seven or eight
hundred people, Indians, half-breeds, and Russians,
with a sprinkling of Americans, living in comfort-
able frame cottages, generally with a bit of garden
attached. The people fish, hunt the sea-otter, and
work for the Alaska Commercial Company. We
met here an old Vermonter, a refined, scholarly
looking man, with a patriarchal beard, who had
married a native woman and had a family of young
children growing up around him. He liked the cli-
mate better than that of New England. The winters
were not very cold, never below zero, and the sum-
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IN GREEN ALASKA

mers were not hot, rarely up to 80° Fahrenheit.
There were no horses or wheeled vehicles in town,
and the streets were grassy lanes. Such a rural,
Arcadian air I had never before seen pervading a
town upon American soil. There is a Greek church
near the wharf, and its chime of bells was in our
ears for hours at a time. The only incongruous
thing I saw was a building with a big sign on its
ridge-board: “ Chicago Store.”’ I went in and asked
for some fresh eggs; they had none, but directed
me to a cottage near the beach.

I found here a large Russian woman, who had the
eggs, for which, after consulting with a younger
woman, she wanted “four bits.” The potatoes in
her garden had tops a foot high, but her currant-
bushes were just in bloom. Our stay of five days in
this charming place was a dream of rural beauty and
repose: warm summer skies above us, green, flower-
strewn hills and slopes around us, — our paths were
indeed in green pastures and beside still waters.
One enticing trail left the old Russian road half a
tile north of the village, and led off northwest across
little mossy and flowery glens, through spruce
groves, over little runs, up a shoulder of the moun-
tain, and then down a few miles into a broad,
green, silent valley that held a fine trout brook.
The path was probably made by the village anglers.
In looking into such a peaceful, verdant sweep of
country, one almost instinctively looked for farm-

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FAR AND NEAR

houses, or for flocks and herds and other signs of
human occupancy; but they were not there. One
high mountain that cut into the valley at right angles
had a long, easy ridge, apparently as sharp as the
ridge-board of a building. I marked it for my own
and thought to set my feet upon it, but the way was
too beguiling, and I did not get there. The moun-
tain looked as though it had just had a priming-
coat of delicate green paint.

But the mighty emerald billow that rose from the
rear of the village, — we all climbed that, some of us
repeatedly. From the ship it looked as smooth as a
meadow, but the climber soon found himself knee
deep in ferns, grasses, and a score of flowering
plants, and now and then was forced to push through
a patch of alders as high as his head. He could not
go far before his hands would be full of flowers, blue
predominating. The wild geranium here is light
blue, and tinges the slopes as daisies and buttercups
doat home. Near the summit were patches of a most
exquisite forget-me-not of a pure, delicate blue with
yellow centre. It grew to the height of a foot, and a
handful of it looked like something just caught out
of the sky above. Here, too, was a small, delicate
lady’s-slipper, pale yellow striped with maroon ;
also a dwarf rhododendron, its large purple flowers
sitting upon the moss and lichen. The climber
also waded through patches of lupine, and put his
feet upon bluebells, Jacob’s ladder, iris, saxifrage,

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IN GREEN ALASKA

cassiope, and’ many others. The song-birds that
attracted our notice were the golden-crowned spar-
row and the little hermit thrush. The golden-crown
has a strangely piercing, plaintive song, very simple,
but very appealing. It consists of only three notes,
but they come from out the depths of the bird’s soul.
In them is all the burden of the mystery and the
pathos of life.

In the spruce groves to the north opened up by
the old grassy road, besides the birds named, one
heard the pine grosbeak, the gray-cheeked thrush,
and the weird strain of the Oregon robin. This last
bird was very shy and hard to get a view of. I reclined
for two hours one day upon the deep dry moss under
the spruces, waiting for the singer to reveal himself.
When seen he looks like our robin in a holiday suit.
His song is a long, tapering note or whistle, at times
with a peculiar tolling effect.

TO THE OREGON ROBIN IN ALASKA

O Varied Thrush! O Robin strange!
Behold my mute surprise.

Thy form and flight I long have known,
But not this new disguise.

I do not know thy slaty coat,
Nor vest with darker zone ;
I’m puzzled by thy recluse ways
And song in monotone.

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I left thee ’mid my orchard’s bloom,
When May had crowned the year ;

Thy nest was on the apple bough,
Where rose thy carol clear.

Thou lurest now through fragrant shades,
Where hoary spruces grow ;

Where floor of moss infolds the foot,
Like depths of fallen snow.

Loquacious ravens clack and croak
Nor hold me in my quest ;

The purple grosbeaks perch and sing
Upon the cedar’s crest.

But thou art doomed to shun the day,
A captive of the shade ;

I only catch thy stealthy flight
Athwart the forest glade.

Thy voice is like a hermit’s reed
That solitude beguiles ;

Again ’t is like a silver bell
Adrift in forest aisles.

Throw off, throw off this masquerade
And don thy ruddy vest,

And let me find thee, as of old,
Beside thy orchard nest.

While here Mr. Harriman had the luck to kill the
long-expected Kadiak bear; he shot a mother and
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IN GREEN ALASKA

cub. He and his guide, an old Russian named
Stepan Kondakoff, found her grazing near the
snow-line on the mountain-side about ten miles
to the south. She was eating grass like a cow, Mr.
Harriman said. She was a large animal, but below
the size of the traditional Kadiak bear. Her color
was a faded brown. A much larger one was seen
far across a difficult valley.

On July 3, which was bright and warm, a num-
ber of us visited Wood Island, a few miles to the
east, where the North American Commercial Com-
pany has its headquarters, and where are large old
spruce woods and lakes of fresh water. Charles
Keeler and I heard, or fancied we heard, voices
calling us from out the depths of the woods; so we
left the party and took ourselves thither, and lounged
for hours in the mossy, fragrant solitudes, eating our
lunch by a little rill of cold water, listening to the
song-birds and ravens, and noting the wood flowers
and moss-draped trees. Here we heard the winter
wren at our leisure, a bubbling, trilling, prolonged
strain like that of our eastern bird, but falling far
short of it in melody and in wild lyrical penetra-
tion. In other words, it was the same song sung by
a far inferior voice. The elusive note of the Ore-
gon robin, as though the dark, motionless spruces
had found a voice, was also heard here and there.
These woods were not merely carpeted with moss,
they were upholstered ; the ground was padded

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ankle-deep, and under every tree was a couch of the
most luxurious kind.

The 4th of July found us, as it usually finds
Americans, wherever they are, overflowing with
patriotism, bunting, and gunpowder hilarity. Our
huge graphophone played very well the part of a
brass band; Professor Brewer, upon the hurricane
deck, discharged admirably the duties of the orator
of the day; he was followed by Mr. Keeler, who
shaded the picture the speaker had drawn by a stir-
ring poem, touching upon some of the nation’s short-
comings ; songs and music, followed by a boat race
and general merriment, finished the programme.

Kadiak, I think, won a place in the hearts of all of
us. Our spirits probably touched the highest point
here. If we had other days that were epic, these days
were lyric. To me they were certainly more exqui-
site and thrilling than any before or after. I feel as
if I wanted to go back to Kadiak, almost as if I
could return there to live, —so secluded, so remote,
so peaceful; such a mingling of the domestic, the
pastoral, the sylvan, with the wild and the rugged;
such emerald heights, such flowery vales, such blue
arms and recesses of the sea, and such a vast green
solitude stretching away to the west and to the
north and to the south. Bewitching Kadiak! the
spell of thy summer freshness and placidity is still
upon me.

On the 5th, still under clear, warm skies, we left this

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IN GREEN ALASKA

rural paradise and steamed away to Kukak Bay on
the mainland, to pick up the party we had left there
on the night of June 30. It was a relief to find they
had had no misadventure and were well pleased
with their expedition. They described one view that
made the listener wish he had been with them: they
had climbed to the top of a long green slope behind
their camp, and had suddenly found themselves on
the brink of an almost perpendicular mountain-wall.
Through a deep notch in this wall they had looked
down two thousand feet into a valley beneath them
invaded by a great glacier that swept down from the
snow-white peaks beyond. The spectacle was so
unexpected and so tremendous that it fairly took
their breaths away. From the deck of the ship the
slope up which their course lay looked like a piece of
stretched green baize cloth.

An event of this day’s cruising which I must
not forget was the strange effects wrought for us
by that magician Mirage : islands and headlands in
the air, long, low capes doubled, one above another,
with a lucid space between them; a level snowy
range standing up slightly above a nearer rocky
one, drawn out and manipulated till it suggested a
vast Grecian temple crowning a rocky escarpment, —
fantasy, illusion, enchantment, — trick played with
sea and shore on every hand that afternoon.

From this point we turned to the island again, and -
in the middle of the night gathered in the bear hunt-

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ers we had left at Uyak Bay. They were bearless, but
they had the comfort of having seen many signs of
bears, of having had many enjoyable tramps over
hill and across dale in a green, treeless country, of
having found a superb waterfall, and of having sur-
vived the hordes of mosquitoes.

We steamed all day southwestward along the
Alaska Peninsula, under clear skies and over smooth
waters, past the Semides and on to the Shuma-
gin Islands, where we dropped anchor about mid-
night.

When we put our heads out of our windows on
the morning of the 7th, we were at anchor off Sand
Point, in a bay in Popof Island, one of the Shumagin
group, about halfway down the Alaska Peninsula.
On the one hand we saw a low, green, treeless slope,
almost within a stone’s throw, from which came
many musical bird voices. The lesser hermit
thrush, the golden-crowned sparrow, the fox spar-
row, the large song sparrow, the yellow warbler, the
rosy finch, all were distinguishable from the ship’s
deck. It is a novel experience to wake up in the
morning on an ocean steamer and hear bird-songs
through one’s open window, but this was often our
experience on this trip. On this grassy hill are
some curious volcanic warts or excrescences that
give a strange effect to the scene. On the other hand,
the blue waters of the harbor stretch away to low,
alder-clad shores, from which rise a range of bare

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IN GREEN ALASKA

volcanic mountains, among them one perfect cone,
probably three thousand feet high.

In the Shumagins three men elected to leave the
ship to dredge the sea and study the volcanic forma-
tion of the land. We promised to pick them up on
our return ten days hence. At ten o’clock our anchor
was up and we were off for Unalaska. The event of
this day was the view we had of the twin volcanic
peaks of Pavlof, rising from the shore to an altitude
of seven or eight thousand feet. One of them was
a symmetrical cone, with black converging lines of
rock cutting through the snow like the ribs of an
umbrella; the other was more rugged and irregu-
lar, with many rents upon its sides and near its sum-
mit, from which vapors issued, staining the snow
like smoke from a chimney. Sheets of vapor were
also seen issuing from cracks at its foot near the sea
level. We were specially fortunate in viewing these
grand mountains under such favorable weather
conditions.

On this day also, just after passing Pavlof, we
were for hours in sight of the Aghileen Pinnacles,
which have such a strange architectural effect amid
the wilder and ruder forms that surround them, as
if some vast, many-spired cathedral of dark gray ©
stone were going to decay there in the mountain soli-
tude. Both in form and color they seemed alien to
everything about them. Now we saw them athwart
the crests of smooth green hills, then rising behind

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naked, rocky ridges, or fretting the sky above lines
of snow. Their walls are so steep that no snow lies
upon them, while the pinnacles are like church
spires.

The whole of the Alaska Peninsula, all the islands
off it, the islands in Bering Sea, and the Aleutian
group are of volcanic origin, and some of the em-
bers of the old fires are still alive in our day, as we
had proof. Since our visit there has been other proof
in the shape of a severe earthquake shock felt all
along the Alaskan coast, in some places disastrously.

Continuing to the westward, we sailed along ver-
dant shores and mountains without sign of human
habitation till we saw a cluster of buildings called
Belkofski, — two or three dozen brown roofs grouped
around a large white, green-topped building, prob-
ably a Greek church. The settlement seemed care-
fully set down there in the green solitude like a toy
village on a shelf. The turf had not been anywhere
broken; not a mark or stain upon the treeless land-
scape. Above it ran a smooth, barren mountain,
which swept down in green slopes to a broad emer-
ald plain upon which the hamlet sat. Now a long
headland comes down to the water’s edge with its
green carpet; then again it is cut off sharply by the
sea, or cut in twain, showing sheer pyramidal walls
two hundred feet high. Then a succession of vast,
smooth, emerald slopes running up into high, gray,
desolate mountains, pointed, conical, curved; now

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IN GREEN ALASKA

presenting a mighty bowl, fluted and scalloped and
opening on one side through a sweep of valley to the
sea, then a creased and wrinkled lawn at an angle of
forty-five degrees and miles in extent. The motion-
less ice sheets we had seen farther north flowing
down out of the mountains were here simulated by
grassy billows flowing down out of the hills. Green,
white, and blue are the three prevailing tints all the
way from Cook Inlet to Unalaska ; blue of the sea
and sky, green of the shores and lower slopes, and
white of the lofty peaks and volcanic cones, — they
are mingled and contrasted all the way.

Was it on this day also that my eye dwelt so long
and so fondly upon what appeared to be another
architectural ruin, abutting on the sea and bathed in
the soft light of the late afternoon sun? Was it some
old abbey, or was it some unfinished temple to the
gods of the mountain ? Two spires, one at either end,
stood up many hundred feet, one slender and taper-
ing to a blunt point, with the suggestion of a recess
for a bell, the other heavy and massive, and evidently
only a stump of what it had been; the roof vast and
sloping, the upper story with its windows rudely
outlined, and the lower merged in a mass of gray,
uncarved rock.

Before nightfall we passed two more notable vol-
canic peaks, Isanotski and Shishaldin, both of which
penetrate the clouds at an altitude of nearly nine
thousand feet. These are on Unimak Island at the

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end of the peninsula. Our first glimpse was of a
black cone ending in a point far above a heavy mass
of cloud. It seemed buoyed up there by the clouds.
There was nothing visible beneath it to indicate the
presence of a mountain. Then the clouds blotted it
out; but presently the veil was brushed aside again,
and before long we saw both mountains from base
to summit and noted the vast concave lines of Shi-
shaldin that sweep down to the sea, and mark the
typical volcanic form.

The long, graceful curves, so attractive to the eye,
repeat on this far-off island the profile of Fuji- Yama,
the sacred peak of Japan. Those of our party who
had seen Shishaldin in previous years described it as
snow white from base to summit. But when we saw
it, the upper part, for several thousand feet, was dark,
— doubtless the result of heat, for it is smoking this
year.

On the morning of the 8th we were tied up at the
pier in Dutch Harbor, Unalaska, amid a world of
green hills and meadows like those at Kadiak. It
was warm and cloudy, with light rain. We tarried
here half a day, taking in coal and water, visiting the
old Russian town of Iiuliuk a couple of miles away
at the head of another indentation in the harbor,
strolling through the wild meadows, or climbing the
emerald heights.

One new bird, the Lapland longspur, which in
color, flight, and song suggested our bobolink, at-

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tracted our attention here. As we came “ cross lots”
over the flower-besprinkled, undulating plain from
the old town to the new, this bird was in song all
about us, hovering in the air, pouring out its liquid,
bubbling song, and dropping down in the grass
again in a way very suggestive of the home bird, —
so much so that it may be fitly called the northland
bobolink.

TO THE LAPLAND LONGSPUR

Oh! thou northland bobolink,
Looking over summer’s brink,
Up to winter, worn and dim,
Peering down from mountain rim,
Peering out on Bering Sea,
To higher lands where he may flee, —
Something takes me in thy note,
Quivering wing and bubbling throat,
Something moves me in thy ways, —
Bird, rejoicing in thy days,
In thy upward hovering flight,
In thy suit of black and white,
Chestnut cape and circled crown,
In thy mate of speckled brown ;
Surely I may pause and think
Of my boyhood’s bobolink.

Soaring over meadows wild, —
(Greener pastures never smiled)
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FAR AND NEAR

Raining music from above, —
Full of rapture, full of love ;
Frolic, gay, and debonair,
Yet not all exempt from care,
For thy nest is in the grass,
And thou worriest as I pass ;
But no hand nor foot of mine
Shall do harm to thee or thine ;
I, musing, only pause to think
Of my boyhood’s bobolink.

But no bobolink of mine

Ever sang o’er mead so fine, —
Starred with flowers of every hue,

Gold and purple, white and blue.
Painted cup, anemone,

Jacob’s ladder, fleur-de-lis,
Orchid, harebell, shooting-star,

Crane’s bill, lupine, seen afar,
Primrose, rubus, saxifrage,

Pictured type on Nature’s page, —
These and others, here unnamed,

In northland gardens, yet untamed,
Deck the fields where thou dost sing,
Mounting up on trembling wing ;

Yet in wistful mood I think
Of my boyhood’s bobolink.

On Unalaska’s emerald lea,
On lonely isles in Bering Sea,
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IN GREEN ALASKA

On far Siberia’s barren shore,

On north Alaska’s tundra floor ;
At morn, at noon, in pallid night,

We heard thy song and saw thy flight,
While I, sighing, could but think

Of my boyhood’s bobolink.

On the higher peaks, amid lingering snow-banks,
Mr. Ridgway found the snow bunting and the tit-
lark nesting. Unalaska looked quite as interesting as
Kadiak, and I longed to spend some days there in
the privacy of its green solitudes, following its limpid
torrent streams, climbing its lofty peaks, and listen-
ing to the music of the longspur. I had seen much,
but had been intimate with little; now if I could
only have a few days of that kind of intimacy with
this new nature which the saunterer, the camper-
out, the stroller through fields in the summer twi-
light has, I should be more content; but in the after-
noon the ship was off into Bering Sea, headed for
the Seal Islands, and I was aboard her, but with
wistful and reverted eyes.

The first hour or two out from Dutch Harbor we
sailed past high, rolling, green hills, cut squarely off
by the sea, presenting cliffs seven or eight hundred
feet high of soft, reddish, crumbling rock, a kind of
clay porphyry of volcanic origin, touched here and
there on the face with the tenderest green. It was as
if some green fluid had been poured upon the tops of

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FAR AND NEAR

the hills, and had run down and dripped off the rock
eaves and been caught upon every shelf and projec-
tion. The color was deepest in all the wrinkles and
folds of the slopes and in the valley bottoms. At one
point we looked into a deep, smooth valley or trough
opening upon the sea, its shore-line a complete half-
circle. Its bottom was nearly at the water level, and
was as fresh and vivid as a lawn in spring. Some one
suggested that it looked like a huge dry dock, if dry
docks are ever carpeted with grass. The effect was
extremely strange and beautiful. The clouds rested
low across the hills, and formed a dense canopy over
the vast verdant cradle; under this canopy we
looked along a soft green vista for miles back into
the hills, where patches of snow were visible. At
another point a similar trough or cradle had been
carved down to within a hundred or more feet of the
sea, and upon its rocky face hung a beautiful water-
fall. Then followed other lesser valleys that did
not show the same glacial cross-section; they were
V-shaped instead of U-shaped, each marked by a
waterfall into the sea. There were three of these in
succession cutting the rocky sea front into pyramidal
forms. Often the talus at the foot of the cliffs was
touched by the same magic green. Then opened
up larger valleys, into which we looked under an up-
rolled drop-curtain of cloud. One of them, lighted up
by the sun, showed us an irregularly carved valley
landscape, suggesting endless possibilities of flocks
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IN GREEN ALASKA

and herds and rural homes. Here again the green
fluid seemed to have found its way down the creases
and runnels and was deepest there. Everywhere
such a sweep of green skirts as these Alaskan hills
and mountains present, often trailing to the sea!
I never tired of them, and if I dwell upon them
unduly long, let the reader remember that a thou-
sand miles of this kind of scenery, passing slowly
before one on a succession of summer days, make
an impression not easily thrown off.

THE SEAL ISLANDS

Before many hours we ran into lowering, misty
weather in Bering Sea, and about seven o’clock were
off the Bogoslof Islands, two abrupt volcanic
mounds, one of them thrown up in recent years. The
other is the breeding-ground of innumerable sea-
lions, yes, and of myriads of murres, a species of
diver. With our glasses, when we were several miles
away, we could see the murres making the air almost
thick about the rocks as with clouds of black specks.
We could see the sea-lions, too, great windrows of
them, upon the beach. We dropped anchor about
two miles away, and a party of seven or eight went
ashore in a boat, —a hazardous proceeding, our cap-
tain thought, as the fog seemed likely to drop at any
moment and obliterate island and ship alike; but it
did not drop, only the top of the island was oblit-
erated. We could see the sea-lions lift themselves up

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and gather in groups as the boat approached their
rookery.

Then, after the landing was effected, they disap-
peared, and we could see the spray rise up as the
monsters plunged into the water. Hundreds of them
were in a small lake a few rods back from the shore,
and the spectacle which the procession of the huge
creatures made rushing across the beach to the sea
was described as something most extraordinary.
Those who were so fortunate as to witness it placed
it among the three or four most memorable events
of their lives.

On the afternoon of Sunday, July 9, we dropped
anchor off St. Paul Island, one of the Pribilofs, the
famous resort of the fur seals. A special permit
from the Secretary of the Treasury gave us the
privilege. There is no harbor here, and the landing,
even in calm weather, requires to be carefully man-
aged. The island is low, with a fringe of loose boul-
ders around it, which in places looked almost like an
artificial wall. The government agent conducted us
a mile or more through wild meadows starred with
flowers and covered with grass nearly knee-high, to
the boulder-paved shore where the seals were con-
gregated. Those of our party who had been there
before, not many years back, were astonished at the
diminished numbers of the animals, — hardly one
tenth of the earlier myriads. We visited eight or ten
“harems,” as they are called, groups of a dozen or

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IN GREEN ALASKA

more females, each presided over by a male or bull
seal, whose position was usually upon a kind of
throne or higher boulder in the midst of his wives.
Every few minutes this male, which was much larger
and darker in color than the females, would lift him-
self up and glance around over his circle as if count-
ing his flock, then snarl at some rival a few yards
away, or turn and threaten us. We gazed upon
them and trained our cameras at leisure. Often a
young male, wifeless and crowded back by older
bulls, threatened us near the edge of the grass with
continued demonstrations of anger. These un-
mated males were in bad humor anyway, and our
appearance seemed to furnish them a good excuse
to give vent to their feelings. In this market the
females belong to the strong. We saw several for-
lorn old males hovering around, who had played the
game and lost. They looked like bankrupt gamblers
at a watering-place.

The females are much smaller and lighter in color
than their lords and masters. They lay very quietly
among the rocks, now and then casting uneasy
glances at us. Their heads are small and their jaws
slender; their growls and threats are not very terri-
fying.

Lying there in masses or wriggling about upon
the rocks, all their lines soft and flowing, all their
motions hampered, the fur seals suggest huge larve,
or something between the grub and the mature

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FAR AND NEAR

insect. They appear to be yet in a kind of sac or
envelope. The males wriggle about like a man in a
bag; but once in the water, they are a part of the
wave, as fleet and nimble as a fish, or as a bird in the
air. In the sounds which they continually emitted
they did not remind me of bulls or cows, but of
sheep. The hoarse staccato bleating of the males
was like that of old rams, while the shriller calls of
the females and the fine treble of the pups were
equally like those of ewes and lambs. Some be-
lated females were still arriving while we looked on.
They came in timidly, lifted themselves upon the
edge of the rocks, and looked about as if to find a
vacant place, or to receive a welcome. Much spar-
ring and threatening were going on among the males,
but I saw none actually come to blows. By careful
movements and low tones we went about without
much exciting them.

On this island we first saw the yellow poppy. It
was scattered everywhere amid the grass, like the
scarlet poppy of Europe. A wonderful display of
other wild flowers was about our feet as we walked.
Here also the Lapland longspur was in song, and a
few snow buntings in white plumage drifted about
over the flowery meads. On a big windrow of boul-
ders along the beach near where we landed were
swarms of noisy water-birds, mainly least auklets,
called “ choochkies” by the natives.

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IN GREEN ALASKA

SIBERIA

According to our original programme our outward
journey should have ended at the Seal Islands, but
Mrs. Harriman expressed a wish to see Siberia, and,
if all went well, the midnight sun. “Very well,”
replied Mr. Harriman, “we will go to Siberia,” and
toward that barren shore our prow was turned. It
was about eight o’clock in the evening when we left
St. Paul; a dense fog prevailed, hiding the shore.
We had not been an hour under way when a horrible
raking blow from some source made the ship tremble
from stem to stern; then another and another, still
more severe. The shock came from beneath: our
keel was upon the rocks. Many of the company
were at dinner; all sprang to their feet, and looked
the surprise and alarm they did not speak. The
engines were quickly reversed, a sail was hoisted,;
in a few moments the ship’s prow swung off to
the right, and the danger was passed, — we were
afloat again. The stern of the ship, which was two
feet deeper in the water than the bow, had raked
across the rocks. No damage was done, and we had
had a novel sensation, something analogous, I fancy,
to the feeling one has upon land during an earth-
quake.

Some of us hoped this incident would cause Mr.
Harriman to turn back. Bering Sea is a treacherous
sea; itis shallow; it has many islands; and in sum-

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mer it is nearly always draped in fog. Our host was
a man not easy to turn back, and in five minutes he
was romping with his children again as if nothing
had happened. The ship’s course was changed to
southeast, around Walrus Island ; and it did, indeed,
look for a while as if we had more than half a mind
to turn back; but in a couple of hours we were
headed toward Siberia again, and went plunging
through the fog and obscurity with our “ferocious
whistle,’ as Professor Emerson characterized it,
tearing the silence and our sleep alike to tatters.
The next day, the 10th, we hoped to touch at the
Island of St. Matthew, but we missed it in the thick
obscurity and searching for it was hazardous, so we
went again northward. F

The fog continued on the 11th till nearly noon,
when we ran into clear air and finally into sunshine,
and in the early afternoon the coast of Siberia lay
before us like a cloud upon the horizon, — Asia at
last, crushed down there on the rim of the world as
though with the weight of her centuries and her cruel
Czar’s iniquities. As we drew near, her gray, crum-
bling, decrepit granite bluffs and mountains, streaked
with snow, helped the illusion. This was the Old
World indeed. Our destination was Plover Bay,
where at six in the afternoon we dropped anchor
behind a long, crescent-shaped sandspit that put
out from the eastern shore. On this sandspit was an
Eskimo encampment of skin-covered huts, which

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IN GREEN ALASKA

was soon astir with moving forms. Presently eight
of the figures were seen moving down to the beach.
A boat was launched and filled, and came rapidly to
the ship’s side. It was made of walrus skin stretched
over a wooden frame, and wasastrong, shapely craft.
Its occupants also were clad in skins. There were
three women and nine men in the boat, but one had
to look very closely to tell which was which. The
men’s crowns were shaved, leaving a heavy fringe of
coarse black hair around their heads. One of them,
probably thirty or thirty-five years of age, stood up
in the bow of the boat, and with his cloak of reddish-
gray fur was really a handsome man. He had a thin
black beard and regular, clear-cut features, and
looked as one fancies an old Roman of his age might
have looked. They were evidently drawn to us
partly by curiosity and partly by the hope of gifts
of tobacco and whiskey. The tobacco was freely
showered upon them by Mr. Harriman, and was
eagerly seized, but the whiskey was not forthcom-
ing.

Our own boats were rapidly lowered, and we were
soon upon Asiatic soil, gathering flowers, observing
the birds, and strolling about among the tents and
huts of the natives. We bought skins and curios of
them, or bartered knives and cloth for such things as
they had to dispose of. They would take our silver
dollars, but much preferred skinning-knives or other
useful articles. They were not shy of our cameras,

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FAR AND NEAR

and freely admitted us to the greasy and smoky
interiors of their dwellings. As the Eskimos stood
regarding us, they would draw their hands into their
sleeves, after the manner of children on a cold morn-
ing. Their skin costumes gave them a singular
stuffed appearance. One was reminded of grotesque
dolls filled with bran or sawdust. This effect was
due in part to the awkward cut of their garments
and to the fact that the skins were made up hair side
in. Some of the natives showed a strain of Euro-
pean blood; whalers bound for the Arctic Ocean
sometimes stop here, and corrupt them with bad
morals and villainous whiskey.

Throughout the village seals and seal oil, reindeer
skins, walrus hides, and blubber were most notice-
able. Behind the tent I saw a deep, partly covered
pit in the ground, nearly filled with oil, and a few
rods farther off others were seen. The bones of
whales served instead of timbers in most of the rude
structures. The winter houses were built by stand-
ing up whale ribs about two feet apart in a circle,
and filling up the interstices with turf, making a wall
two feet thick. For a roof they used walrus hides,
resting upon poles. In my walk over this crescent of
land I came here and there upon the huge vertebrze
of whales, scattered about, and looking like the gray,
weather-worn granite boulders on a New England
farm.

Beyond the present site of the encampment I saw

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IN GREEN ALASKA

the ruins of an older or earlier village, the foun-
dations of whale bones partly overgrown by the
turf.

As we came in at one end of the encampment
most of the dogs went out at the other end. They
had never before seen such looking creatures, and
they fled off toward the mountain, where they sat
down and howled their mournful protest. Some of
the children were frightened too; one youngster of
five or six years, stuffed like a small scarecrow, riding
astride his mother’s neck, cried and yelled vigorously
as we approached. The sun was bright, but the air
was very chilly, the mercury standing at about 38°
Fahrenheit. We were within one hundred and twenty
miles of the Arctic circle. The slender peninsula we
were on was a few hundred feet wide; it was marshy
in some places, but for the most part dry and covered
with herbage. Here were yellow poppies bloom-
ing, and two species of saxifrage. In my walk I
came upon a large patch of ground covered with a
small, low, pink primrose. The ground was painted
with it. But the prettiest flower we found was a
forget-me-not, scarcely an inch high, of deep ultra-
moarine blue,—the deepest, most intense blue I
ever saw in a wild flower. Here also we saw and
heard the Lapland longspur and the yellow wag-
tail. A flock of male eider ducks was seen in the
bay.

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FAR AND NEAR

PORT CLARENCE

We traveled two hours in Asia. I am tempted to
write a book on the country, but forbear. At eight
o'clock we steamed away along the coast toward
Indian Point, in an unending twilight. We arrived
there at midnight, but the surf was running so high
that no landing was attempted. Then we stood off
across Bering Strait for Port Clarence in Alaska,
where we hoped to take water, passing in sight of
King Island and the Diomedes, and about noon
again dropped anchor behind a long, sickle-shaped
sandspit, which curves out from the southern head-
land, ten or twelve miles away. In the great basin
behind this sand-bar a dozen vessels of the whaling
fleet were anchored and making ready to enter the
Arctic Ocean, where some of them expected to spend
the winter. The presence of the fleet had drawn to-
gether upon the sand-bar over two hundred Eskimos
for trade and barter with the whalers. Their shapely
skin boats, filled with people, — men, women, chil-
dren, often to the number of twenty, to say nothing
of the dogs, —soon swarmed about our ship. They
had all manner of furs, garments, baskets, ornaments,
and curios for sale or for barter. An animated and
picturesque scene they presented, and dozens of
cameras were leveled at them. In dress they pre-
sented a much more trim and shapely appearance
than did the people we had just left in Siberia, though

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IN GREEN ALASKA

much the same in other respects. Some of the
younger women were fairly good-looking, and their
fur hoods and fur cloaks became them well. I no-
ticed that the babies cried very much as babies do
at home. Most of the women were dressed in hair
seal or reindeer skins, but some wore an outer gar-
ment of colored cotton cloth, hanging loosely to the
knees. It was interesting to see them tuck their
babies under this garment from the rear. The
mother would bend forward very low, thrust the
child under the garment at her hips, and by a dexter-
ous wriggling movement of her body propel it for-
ward till its head protruded above her shoulder.
One marked its course along her back as he does
that of a big morsel down a chicken’s gullet.

Some of the captains of the whalers came aboard
our ship to advise us about taking water. They were
large, powerful, resolute-looking men, quite equal,
one would say, to the task before them. Water was
to be procured from a stream that ran in from the
tundra on the southern shore of the bay about a
dozen miles distant. Leaving part of our company
to visit the whalers and the Eskimos, the ship steamed
away with the rest of us for water, and in due course
anchored near the mouth of the little stream. This
gave us an opportunity to spend several hours upon
the real tundra. Cape Nome was on the other side of
the peninsula, fifty miles away, but the fame of the
gold fields had not then reached us. We may have

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FAR AND NEAR

walked over ground rich in gold, but our mining
expert failed to call our attention to the fact. As we
approached the land, it looked as smooth as if it had
just been gone over with a mowing-machine. My
first thought was, “ Well, the people are done haying
here.” The tundra was of a greenish brown color,
and rose from a long, crescent-shaped beach in a very
gentle ascent to low cones and bare volcanic peaks
many miles away. It had the appearance of a vast
meadow tilted up but a few degrees from the level.
This, then, was the tundra that covers so much of
North America, where the ground remains per-
petually frozen to an unknown depth, thawing out
only a foot or so on the surface during the summer.
How eagerly we stepped upon it; how quickly we
dispersed in all directions, lured on by the strange-
ness ! In a few moments our hands were full of wild
flowers, which we kept dropping to gather others
more attractive, these, in turn, to be discarded as still
more novel ones appeared. I found myself very
soon treading upon a large pink claytonia or spring
beauty, many times the size of our delicate April
flower of the same name. Soon I came upon a bank
by the little creek covered with a low, nodding purple
primrose; then masses of the shooting-star attracted
me ; then several species of pedicularis, a yellow
anemone, and many saxifrages. A complete list of
flowers blooming here within sixty miles of the Arctic
circle, in a thin layer of soil resting upon perpetual
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IN GREEN ALASKA

frost, would be a long one. There were wild bees
here too, to cross-fertilize the flowers, and bumble-
bees boomed by very much as at home. And mosqui-
toes, how they swarmed up out of the grass upon me
when, in my vain effort to reach a little volcanic cone
that rose up there before me like a haystack in a
meadow, I sat down to rest! I could not seem to get
nearer the haystack, though I sometimes ran to get
away from the mosquitoes. The tundra proved far
less smooth to the feet than the eye had promised.
It was wet and boggy. A tundra is always wet in
summer, as the frost prevents any underground
drainage. But it was very uniform and the walking
not difficult; moss, bogs, grass, and flowering plants
covered it everywhere. The savanna sparrow and
the longspur started up before me as I walked, and
as I descended toward a branch of the little creek
after an hour’s tramp, a new note caught my ear.
Presently I saw some plovers skimming over the
ground in advance of me, or alighting upon tussocks
of moss and uttering a soft, warbling call. They
proved to be golden plovers; I had evidently in-
vaded their breeding-grounds, and they were making
their musical protest. At times the males, as they
circled about me, warbled in the most delightful
manner. There was in it, underneath its bright joy-
ousness, a tone of soft pleading and entreaty that
was very moving,—the voice of the tundra, soft,
alluring, plaintive, beautiful. The golden plover is
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FAR AND NEAR

mottled black and white with a rich golden tinge
on its back. It is a wonderful flyer. We found it
near the Arctic circle; six months later, probably the
same birds might have been found in Patagonia.

In a patch of willows along the creek the gray-
cheeked thrush was in song, and the fox sparrow and
the western tree sparrow were found. I saw one of
the thrushes do what I never saw any of the thrush
kind do before: it ‘hovered in the air fifty feet or
more above the moor and repeated its song three
times very rapidly. As there were no trees to afford
it a lofty perch, it perched upon the air.

It was a very novel experience, this walking over
the tundra; its vastness, its uniformity, its solitude,
its gentleness, its softness of contour, its truly bo-
real character, — the truncated hills and peaks on
the near horizon suggesting huge earthworks, the
rounded and curved elevations like the backs of pros-
trate giants turned up to the sun, and farther off the
high, serrated, snow-streaked ranges on the remote
horizon to the north, —all made up a curious and
unfamiliar picture.

We were fortunate in having clear, bright skies
during our stay in these high latitudes. But the
nights were starless; the sun was so near, there
was so much light in the sky,.that the stars were
put out. The sun set about ten and rose about
two, dipping down but a little way below the hori-
zon.

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IN GREEN ALASKA

ST. LAWRENCE ISLAND

Port Clarence was the northernmost point we
reached. A little farther north the ice pack closed
the gateway to the Arctic Ocean. An excursion into
the ice to see the midnight sun did not hold out in-
ducements enough to offset the dangers. So in the
early morning of July 13 we steamed away on the
return trip. Before noon we were again in the thick
veil of fog with which Bering Sea always seems to
cover her face. Near nightfall, with a stiff wind
blowing, we anchored off St. Lawrence Island, and
two boat-loads of our people went ashore. St. Law-
rence is a large island at the gateway of the Arctic
Ocean, and in spring the ice floes from the north
often strand polar bears upon it. Our hunters still
dreamed of bears. The shore was low and marshy,
and the high land miles away was hidden by the
canopy of fog resting upon it. In his walk one of
our doctors saw the backs of two large white ob-
jects, showing above a little swell in the land. Here
evidently were the polar bears they were in quest of.

The doctor begins to stalk them, replacing the
shells in his gun with heavier ones as he creeps along.
Now he has another glimpse of the white backs; they
are moving and can be nothing but bears. A few
moments more and he will be within close range,
when lo! the heads and long necks of two white
swans come up above the bank! The doctor said he

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FAR AND NEAR

never felt so much like a goose before in his life. The
birds and flowers found were about the same as
those we had already seen.

Not many years ago there were on St. Lawrence
Island many encampments of Eskimos, embracing
several hundred people. Late one autumn some
whalers turned up there with the worst kind of whis-
key, with which they wrought the ruin of the na-
tives, persuading them to exchange most of their
furs and other valuables for it, and leaving them so
debauched and demoralized that nearly all perished
of cold and hunger the following winter. Village
after village was found quite depopulated, the people
lying dead in their houses.

HALL AND ST. MATTHEW ISLANDS

From St. Lawrence Island our course was again
through fog to St. Matthew Island, which we missed
on our way up, and which we now found late in the
afternoon of the next day. Our first stop was at Hall
Island, which once probably formed a part of St.
Matthew, but is now separated from it only by a nar-
row strait. This was our first visit to uninhabited
land, and to a land of such unique grace and beauty
that the impression it made cannot soon be forgotten,
—a thick carpet of moss and many-colored flowers
covering an open, smooth, undulating country that
faced the sea in dark basaltic cliffs, some of them a
thousand feet high. The first thing that attracted

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IN GREEN ALASKA

our attention was the murres—“ arries,”’ the Aleuts
call them — about their rookeries on the cliffs. Their
numbers darkened the air. As we approached, the
faces of the rocks seemed paved with them, with a
sprinkling of gulls, puffins, black cormorants, and
auklets. On landing at a break in the cliffs where a
little creek came down to the sea, our first impulse
was to walk along the brink and look down upon the
murres and see them swarm out beneath our feet.
On the discharge of a gun the air became black
with them, while the cliffs apparently remained as
populous as ever. They sat on little shelves or niches
with their black backs to the sea, each bird covering
one egg with its tail feathers. In places one could
have reached down and seized them by the neck,
they were so tame and so near the top of the rocks. I
believe one of our party did actually thus procure a
specimen. It was a strange spectacle, and we lingered
long looking upon it. To behold sea fow] like flies
in uncounted millions was a new experience. Every-
where in Bering Sea the murres swarm like vermin.
It seems as if there was a murre to every square yard
of surface. They were flying about over the ship or
flapping over the water away from her front at all
times. I noticed that they could not get up from the
water except against the wind; the wind lifted them
as it does a kite. With the wind or in a calm they
skimmed along on the surface, their heads bent for-
ward, their wings beating the water impatiently.
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Unable to rise, they would glance behind them in a
frightened manner, then plunge beneath the waves
until they thought the danger had passed. At all
hours of the night and day one could hear this impa-
tient flapping of the frightened murres. The bird
is a species of diver, nearly as large as a black
duck. Its tail is so short that in flying the two
webbed feet stretched behind do the duty of a tail.
It is amusing to see it spread or contract them
in turning or changing its course, as the case re-
quires. After we had taken our fill of gazing upon
the murres came the ramble away from the cliffs, in
the long twilight, through that mossy and flowery
solitude. Such patterns and suggestions for rugs and
carpets as we walked over for hours; such a blend-
ing of grays, drabs, browns, greens, and other delicate
neutral tints, all dashed with masses of many-colored
flowers, it had never before been my fortune to be-
hold, much less to walk upon. Drifting over this
marvelous carpet, or dropping down upon it from
the air above, was the hyperborean snowbird, white
as a snowflake.and with a song of great sweetness
and power. With lifted wings the bird would drop
through the air to the earth, pouring out its joyous,
ecstatic strain. Out of the deep twilight came also
the song of the longspur, delivered on the wing, and
touching the wild solitude like the voices of children
at play. Then there was the large Aleutian sand-
piper, that ran before me and uttered its curious wild
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IN GREEN ALASKA

plaint. The robber jaeger was there too, —a very
beautiful bird, a sort of cross between a hawk and a
gull, — sitting quietly upon the moss and eying our
movements. On the top of the grassy bank near the
sea some of the party found the nest and young of
the snowy owl. Fragments of the bodies of murres
and ducks lay upon the ground beside it.

The most novel and striking of the wild flowers
was a species of large white claytonia growing in
rings of the size of a tea plate, floral rings dropped
here and there upon the carpet of moss. In the centre
was a rosette of pointed green leaves pressed close to
the ground; around this grew the ring of flowers,
made up of thirty or forty individuals, all springing
from the same root, their faces turned out in all direc-
tions from the parent centre. In places they were so
near together that one could easily step from one
circle to another.

The forenoon of the next day, the 15th, we spent
upon St. Matthew Island, and repeated our experi-
ence of walking over ground covered with na-
ture’s matchless tapestry. Here, too, a thick, heavy
carpet of variegated mosses and lichens had been
stretched to the very edge of the cliffs, with rugs and
mats of many-colored flowers — pink, yellow, violet,
white; saxifrage, chickweed, astragalus, claytonia —
dropped here and there upon it. Sometimes the
flowers seemed worked into the carpet itself, and a
species of creeping willow spread its leaves out as if

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stitched upon it. Scattered about were the yellow
poppies, a yellow and a red pedicularis, and a rare
and curious blue flower in heads, the name of which
Ihave forgotten. On the highest point the blue and
purple astragalus covered large areas, but the most
novel of all the flowers was a species of little silene
with a bluish ribbed flower precisely like a minia-
ture Chinese lantern.

The highest point of the island was enveloped
most of the time in fog and cloud. While groping
my way upon one of these cloud summits, probably
a thousand feet above the sea which flowed at its
base, I came suddenly upon a deep cleft or chasm,
which opened in the moss and flowers at my feet and
led down between crumbling rocky walls at a fear-
ful incline to the beach. It gave one a sense of peril
that made him pause quickly. The wraiths of fog
and mist whirling through and over it enhanced its
dreadful mystery and depth. Yet I hovered about it,
retreating and returning, quite fascinated by the con-
trast between the smooth flowery carpet upon which
I stood and the terrible yawning chasm. When the
fog lifted a little and the sun gleamed out, I looked
down this groove into the ocean, and Tennyson’s
line came to mind as accurately descriptive of the
scene: —

“The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.”

Another curious effect was the appearance of the
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IN GREEN ALASKA

bottom of the sea, visible a long way out from shore.
The water seemed suddenly to become shallow or
else to take on a strange transparency; the color and
configuration of the rocky floor were surprisingly
distinct.

A new species of small blue fox was found and
killed upon the island, and a sorry apology for a fox
it was. It looked as though it might have been
singed or else skinned once, and as though this was
the second growth of fur. The polar bears which our
sportsmen had hoped for were not found, though
the deep, broad, unused trails leading back from the
cliffs had doubtless some time been made by them.
Nothing is plainer than that one cannot go to Alaska,
or probably to any other country, and say, “Come,
now, we will kill a bear,” and kill it, except as a rare
streak of luck. It is a game at which two can play,
and the bear plays his part extremely well. All
large game has its beat or range. The first thing to
be done is to find this beat, which may take days
or weeks, then the trial of strategy begins. If you
outgeneral the bear, you may carry off his pelt.

We found the hyperborean snow bunting nesting
in crevices of the rocks. It was probably compelled
to this course to escape the foxes. This was the type
locality for this bird, and it was very abundant. The
rosy finch also was seen along the cliffs. There were

1 This was the Hall Island Arctic fox (Vulpes hallensis Merriam)
in worn summer dress; in winter it is snow white.

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snow-banks on the beach by the sea, and piles of
driftwood, most of the large tree trunks doubtless
brought down by the Yukon, and many hewn and
sawed timbers from wrecked vessels.

THE RETURN TRIP

Returning to Unalaska, we tarried a few hours at
Dutch Harbor to take in water and coal, and then,
for the first time, our good ship pointed eastward
and toward home. A steamer from the Yukon
was also in Dutch Harbor with several hundred
returning gold-seekers on board. As we steamed
away I saw several of them far up on the green
mountain-side on our left looking down upon us.
They were barely distinguishable on that broad,
high, emerald slope. Just out of the harbor we saw
myriads of fulmars, a kind of petrel. The sea for
miles was black with them. We touched again at
the Shumagin Islands to pick up the party we had
left there on the 7th; and on the 20th were again
at sweet pastoral Kadiak. The wild roses were in
bloom, very large and fine, and armfuls of them were
brought in to deck the table in celebration of the
birthday of one of Mr. Harriman’s daughters.
While here we took an afternoon to visit Long
Island, ten or twelve miles away, where there was
another fox farm. It was a low, wooded island of
several hundred acres stocked with about a thousand
blue foxes. Some of the animals peeped shyly at us

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IN GREEN ALASKA

from around the corner of an old barn, others
growled at us from beneath it, while others still lifted
up their voices in protest from the woods. A great
many fish, trout and salmon, were drying in the sun
from poles on the beach in front. ‘These were for the
foxes in winter. Magpies were common here and
very tame. The farmer had a comfortable home and
a pleasant situation, and life there must have many
attractions. The experiment of growing silver-black
foxes had been tried, but had not succeeded. The
animals were so wild, and proved to be such dainty
feeders, that the undertaking was abandoned. They
require live game for food.

On leaving Kadiak we again ran into Cook Inlet,
and put ashore two parties. But there was a sudden
change of plan, the parties were recalled, and we
were soon again at sea, homeward bound.

ST. ELIAS AND THE FAIRWEATHER RANGE

On the 23d we had such a view of St. Elias and all
that grand range as is seldom granted to voyagers.
One of our artists, Mr. Gifford, was up at two
o’clock in the morning, and finding the summit just
smitten with the rising sun, painted till his hands
were too cold to hold the brush.

We again ran into Yakutat Bay, but all I have to
record is our feast of Yakutat strawberries. The In-
dians brought them to us in baskets. The berries
looked pale and uninviting, but their flavor was really

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excellent. They grow in great abundance in the sand
onthe beach. On the 24th we steamed all day off the
Fairweather Range, which lay there before us with-
out a cloud or film to dim its naked majesty. We
were two or three hours in passing the great peak
itself. Piled with snow and beaten upon by a cloud-
less sun, its reflected light shone in my stateroom
like that of an enormous full moon. This was a day
in blue and white, — blue of the sea and sky and
white of the mountains, —long to be remembered
but not to be described. The peak of St. Elias,
standing above a band of cloud, kept us in its eye
till we were one hundred and fifty miles down the
coast.

On the 25th we were at Juneau again, taking coal
and water. The only toad I saw in Alaska I saw this
day, as it was fumbling along in the weeds by the
roadside, just out of Juneau. Here also I gathered
my first salmon-berries,—a kind of raspberry, an
inch in diameter, with a slightly bitterish flavor,
but very good.

The lovely weather still favored us on our return
trip down the inland passage. Under date of the 26th
I find this entry in my note-book: —

“Bright and warm and still; all day down the
inside passage. At one point in Tongass Narrows,
fishermen taking salmon: a large seine gathered in
between two rowboats, one of them bright red, and
men in each with forks picking the fish out of the net

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IN GREEN ALASKA

and throwing them into the boat. The salmon
glance and wriggle in the sun like bars of silver.
Bristling forests, tufted islands, snow-striped peaks
onevery side. A soft, placid day, when nature broods
and dreams, both sea and shore wrapped in a pro-
found midsummer tranquillity.”

In the afternoon we anchored off a deserted In-
dian village north of Cape Fox. There was a row of
a dozen houses on the beach of a little bay, with
nineteen totem poles standing along their fronts.
These totem poles were the attraction. There was a
rumor that the Indians had nearly all died of small-
pox a few years before, and that the few survivors
had left under a superstitious fear, never to return.
It was evident that the village had not been occu-
pied for seven or eight years. Why not, therefore,
secure some of these totem poles for the museums of
the various colleges represented by members of the
expedition? This was finally agreed upon, and all
hands, including the ship’s crew, fell to digging up
and floating to the ship five or six of the more striking
poles. This occupied us till the night of the 27th.

Under this date I find this entry in my note-book:
* All day on shore by the deserted Indian village.
Clear and hot. I sit in the shade of the spruces amid
huge logs of driftwood on the upper edge of the
beach, with several Indian graves at my back, under
the trees, and write up my notes,—the ship at
anchor out in the bay a mile away. Aided by the

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sailors the men are taking down totem poles and
towing them to the ship with the naphtha launches.
As I write there are many birds in the trees and
bushes near me,—the rufous hummer, the rufous-
backed chickadee, the golden-crowned kinglet, the
pine siskin. Back in the woods I hear the russet-
backed thrush and Steller’s jay. With my lunch I
have some salmon-berries gathered near by.”

“July 28. Woke up this morning hearing the
birds sing through my open window. I looked out
into the dusky wooded side of a mountain nearly
within a stone’s throw. We were in Grenville Chan-
nel, the skies clear, the sun shining full upon the op-
posite shore. Presently we were passing one of those
bewitching alcoves or recesses in the shore where the
mountains form a loop miles deep around an inlet
of blue sea, with snow-crowned peaks above great
curves of naked rock at the head of it. Then we cut
one of those curious tide-lines, where two currents
of water of different colors meet. The dividing line
is sharp and clear for a long distance.”

The next day, which was still bright and warm,
there was a film of smoke in the air in the morning,
which increased as we went south. We were nearing
the region of forest fires. When we reached Seattle
on July 30, this smoke had so increased that all the
great mountains were hidden by it as effectually as
they had been by the clouds when we entered upon
the voyage.

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We had three tons of coal left in our bunkers, but
of our little stock farm down below only the milch
cow remained. She had been to Siberia and back,
and had given milk all the way.

No voyagers were ever more fortunate than we.
No storms, no winds, no delays nor accidents to
speak of, no illness. We had gone far and fared
well.

II
WILD LIFE ABOUT MY CABIN

IRIENDS have often asked me why I turned

my back upon the Hudson and retreated into
the wilderness. Well, I do not call it a retreat; I call
it a withdrawal, a retirement, the taking up of a new
position to renew the attack, it may be, more vigor-
ously than ever. It is not always easy to give rea-
sons. ‘There are reasons within reasons, and often
no reasons at all that we are aware of.

To a countryman like myself, not born to a great
river or an extensive water-view, these things, I think,
grow wearisome after a time. He becomes surfeited
with a beauty that is alien to him. He longs forsome-
thing more homely, private, and secluded. Scenery
may be too fine or too grand and imposing for one’s
daily and hourly view. It tires after a while. It de-
mands a mood that comes to you only at intervals.
Hence it is never wise to build your house on the
most ambitious spot in the landscape. Rather seek
out a more humble and secluded nook or corner,
which you can fill and warm with your domestic and
home instincts and affections. In some things the
half is often more satisfying than the whole. A

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glimpse of the Hudson River between hills or
through openings in the trees wears better with me
than a long expanse of it constantly spread out be-
fore me. One day I had an errand to a farmhouse
nestled in a little valley or basin at the foot of a moun-
tain. The earth put out protecting arms all about it,
— a low hill with an orchard on one side, a sloping
pasture on another, and the mountain, with the
skirts of its mantling forests, close at hand in the
rear. How my heart warmed toward it! I had been
so long perched high upon the banks of a great river,
in sight of all the world, exposed to every wind that
blows, with a horizon-line that sweeps over half a
county, that, quite unconsciously to myself, I was
pining for a nook to sit down in. I was hungry for
the private and the circumscribed; I knew it when
I saw this sheltered farmstead. I had long been rest-
less and dissatisfied, —a vague kind of homesick-
ness; now I knew the remedy. Hence when, not
long afterward, I was offered a tract of wild land,
barely a mile from home, that contained a secluded
nook and a few acres of level, fertile land shut off
from the vain and noisy world of railroads, steam-
boats, and yachts by a wooded, precipitous moun-
tain, I quickly closed the bargain, and built me a
rustic house there, which I call “ Slabsides,”’ because
its outer walls are covered with slabs. I might have
given it a prettier name, but not one more fit, or more
in keeping with the mood that brought me thither.
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WILD LIFE ABOUT MY CABIN

A slab is the first cut from the log, and the bark goes
with it. Itis like the first cut from the loaf, which
we call the crust, and which the children reject, but
which we older ones often prefer. I wanted to take a
fresh cut of life, —something that had the bark on,
or, if you please, that was like a well-browned and
hardened crust. After three years I am satisfied with
the experiment. Life has a different flavor here. It
is reduced to simpler terms; its complex equations
all disappear. The exact value of x may still elude
me, but I can press it hard; I have shorn it of
many of its disguises and entanglements.

When I went into the woods the robins went with
me, or rather they followed close. As soon as a space
of ground was cleared and the garden planted, they
were on hand to pick up the worms and insects, and
to superintend the planting of the cherry-trees: three
pairs the first summer, and more than double that
number the second. In the third, their early morn-
ing chorus was almost as marked a feature as it is
about the old farm homesteads. The robin is no her-
mit: he likes company; he likes the busy scenes of
the farm and the village; he likes to carol to listen-
ing ears, and to build his nest as near your dwelling
as he can. Only at rare intervals do I find a real
sylvan robin, one that nests in the woods, usually by
still waters, remote from human habitation. In such
places his morning and evening carol is a welcome
surprise to the fisherman or camper-out. It is like a

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dooryard flower found blooming in the wilderness.
With the robins came the song sparrows and social
sparrows, or chippies, also. The latter nested in the
bushes near my cabin, and the song sparrows in the
bank above the ditch that drains my land. I notice
that Chippy finds just as many horsehairs to weave
into her nest here in my horseless domain as she does
when she builds in the open country. Her partiality
for the long hairs from the manes and tails of horses
and cattle is so great that she is often known as the
hair-bird. What would she do in a country where
there were neither cows nor horses? Yet these hairs
are not good nesting-material. They are slippery,
refractory things, and occasionally cause a tragedy in
the nest by getting looped around the legs or the
neck of the young or of the parent bird. They prob-
ably give a smooth finish to the interior, dear to the
heart of Chippy.

The first year of my cabin life a pair of robins at-
tempted to build a nest upon the round timber that
forms the plate under my porch roof. But it was a
poor place to build in. It took nearly a week’s time
and caused the birds a great waste of labor to find
this out. The coarse material they brought for the
foundation would not bed well upon the rounded
surface of the timber, and every vagrant breeze that
came along swept it off. My porch was kept littered
with twigs and weed-stalks for days, till finally the
birds abandoned the undertaking. The next season

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WILD LIFE ABOUT MY CABIN

a wiser or more experienced pair made the attempt
again, and succeeded. They placed the nest against
the rafter where it joins the plate; they used mud
from the start to level up with and to hold the first
twigs and straws, and had soon completed a firm,
shapely structure. When the young were about
ready to fly, it was interesting to note that there
was apparently an older and a younger, as in most
families. One bird was more advanced than any of
the others. Had the parent birds intentionally stim-
ulated it with extra quantities of food, so as to be
able to launch their,offspring into the world one
atatime? At any rate, one of the birds was ready
to leave the nest a day and a half before any of the
others. I happened to be looking at it when the first
impulse to get outside the nest seemed to seize it. Its
parents were encouraging it with calls and assur-
ances from some rocks a few yards away. It an-
swered their calls in vigorous, strident tones. Then
it climbed over the edge of the nest upon the plate,
took a few steps forward, then a few more, till it was
a yard from the nest and near the end of the tim-
ber, and could look off into free space. Its parents
apparently shouted, “Come on!” But its courage
was not quite equal to the leap; it looked around,
and seeing how far it was from home, scampered
back to the nest, and climbed into it like a fright-
ened child. It had made its first journey into the
world, but the home tie had brought it quickly back.
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FAR AND NEAR

A few hours afterward it journeyed to the end of the
plate again, and then turned and rushed back. The
third time its heart was braver, its wings stronger,
and leaping into the air with a shout, it flew easily
to some rocks a dozen or more yards away. Each of
the young in succession, at intervals of nearly a day,
left the nest in this manner. There would be the
first journey of a few feet along the plate, the first
sudden panic at being so far from home, the rush
back, a second and perhaps a third attempt, and
then the irrevocable leap into the air, and a clamor-
ous flight to a near-by bush or rock. Young birds
never go back when they have once taken flight.
The first free flap of the wing severs forever the ties
that bind them to home.

The chickadees we have always with us. They
are like the evergreens among the trees and plants.
Winter has no terrors for them. They are properly
wood-birds, but the groves and orchards know
them also. Did they come near my cabin for better
protection, or did they chance to find a little cavity
in a tree there that suited them? Branch-builders
and ground-builders are easily accommodated, but
the chickadee must find a cavity, and a small one at
that. The woodpeckers make a cavity when a suit-
able trunk or branch is found, but the chickadee,
with its small, sharp beak, rarely does so; it usually
smooths and deepens one already formed. This a
pair did a few yards from my cabin. The opening

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WILD LIFE ABOUT MY CABIN

was into the heart of a little sassafras, about four
feet from the ground. Day after day the birds
took turns in deepening and enlarging the cavity:
a soft, gentle hammering for a few moments in the
heart of the little tree, and then the appearance of
the worker at the opening, with the chips in his,
or her, beak. They changed off every little while,
one working while the other gathered food. Abso-
lute equality of the sexes, both in plumage and
in duties, seems to prevail among these birds, as
among a few other species. During the preparations
for housekeeping the birds were hourly seen and
heard, but as soon as the first egg was laid, all this
was changed. They suddenly became very shy and
quiet. Had it not been for the new egg that was
added each day, one would have concluded that
they had abandoned the place. There was a pre-
cious secret now that must be well kept. After incu-
bation began, it was only by watching that I could
get a glimpse of one of the birds as it came quickly
to feed or to relieve the other.

One day a lot of Vassar girls came to visit me, and
I led them out to the little sassafras to see the chick-
adees’ nest. The sitting bird kept her place as head
after head, with its nodding plumes and millinery,
appeared above the opening to her chamber, and a
pair of inquisitive eyes peered down upon her. But I
saw that she was getting ready to play her little trick
to frighten them away. Presently I heard a faint

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FAR AND NEAR

explosion at the bottom of the cavity, when the peep-
ing girl jerked her head quickly back, with the ex-
clamation, “Why, it spit at me!” The trick of the
bird on such occasions is apparently to draw in its
breath till its form perceptibly swells, and then give
forth a quick, explosive sound like an escaping jet of
steam. One involuntarily closes his eyes and jerks
back his head. The girls, to their great amusement,
provoked the bird into this pretty outburst of her
impatience two or three times. But as the ruse failed
of its effect, the bird did not keep it up, but let the
laughing faces gaze till they were satisfied.

There is only one other bird known to me that
resorts to the same trick to scare away intruders,
and that is the great crested flycatcher. As your
head appears before the entrance to the cavity in
which the mother bird is sitting, a sudden burst of
escaping steam seems directed at your face, and
your backward movement leaves the way open for
the bird to escape, which she quickly does.

The chickadee is a prolific bird, laying from six
to eight eggs, and it seems to have few natural
enemies. I think it is seldom molested by squirrels
or black snakes or weasels or crows or owls. The
entrance to the nest is usually so small that none of
these creatures can come at them. Yet the number
of chickadees in any given territory seems small.
What keeps them in check? Probably the rigors of
winter and a limited food-supply. The ant-eaters,

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WILD LIFE ABOUT MY CABIN

fruit-eaters, and seed-eaters mostly migrate. Our
all-the-year-round birds, like the chickadees, wood-
peckers, jays, and nuthatches, live mostly on nuts
and the eggs and larvee of tree-insects, and hence
their larder is a restricted one; hence, also, these
birds rear only one brood in a season. A hairy wood-
pecker passed the winter in the woods near me by
subsisting on a certain small white grub which he
found in the bark of some dead hemlock-trees. He
“worked” these trees, — four of them, — as the
slang is, “for all they were worth.” The grub was
under the outer shell of bark, and the bird literally
skinned the trees in getting at his favorite morsel.
He worked from the top downward, hammering or
prying off this shell, and leaving the trunk of the tree
with a red, denuded look. Bushels of the frag-
ments of the bark covered the ground at the foot of
the tree in spring, and the trunk looked as if it had
been flayed, —as it had.

The big chimney of my cabin of course attracted
the chimney swifts, and as it was not used in sum-
mer, two pairs built their nests in it, and we had
the muffled thunder of their wings at all hours
of the day and night. One night, when one of the
broods was nearly fledged, the nest that held them
fell down into the fireplace. Such a din of screeching
and chattering as they instantly set up! Neither my
dog nor I could sleep. They yelled in chorus, stop-
ping at the end of every half-minute as if upon sig-

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nal. Now they were all screeching at the top of their
voices, then a sudden, dead silence ensued. Then the
din began again, to terminate at the instant as be-
fore. If they had been long practicing together, they
could not have succeeded better. I never before
heard the cry of birds so accurately timed. After a
while I got up and put them back up the chimney,
and stopped up the throat of the flue with news-
papers. The next day one of the parent birds, in
bringing food to them, came down the chimney with
such force that it passed through the papers and
brought up in the fireplace. On capturing it I saw
that its throat was distended with food as a chip-
munk’s cheek with corn, or a boy’s pocket with
chestnuts. I opened its mandibles, when it ejected a
wad of insects as large as a bean, Most of them were
much macerated, but there were two house-flies yet
alive and but little the worse for their close confine-
ment. They stretched themselves, and walked about
upon my hand, enjoying a breath of fresh air once
more. It was nearly two hours before the swift again
ventured into the chimney with food.

These birds do not perch, nor alight upon buildings
or the ground. They are apparently upon the wing
all day. They outride the storms. I have in my
mind a cheering picture of three of them I saw facing
a heavy thunder-shower one afternoon. The wind
was blowing a gale, the clouds were rolling in black,
portentous billows out of the west, the peals of thun-

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WILD LIFE ABOUT MY CABIN

der were shaking the heavens, and the big drops
were just beginning to come down, when, on looking
up, I saw three swifts high in air, working their way
slowly, straight into the teeth of the storm. They
were not hurried or disturbed; they held themselves
firmly and steadily; indeed, they were fairly at
anchor in the air till the rage of the elements should
have subsided. I do not know that any other of our
land birds outride the storms in this way.

The pheebe-birds also soon found me out in my
retreat, and a pair of them deliberated a long while
about building on a little shelf in one of my gables.
But, much to my regret, they finally decided in favor
of a niche in the face of a ledge of rocks not far
from my spring. The place was well screened by
bushes and well guarded against the approach of
snakes or four-footed prowlers, and the birds pros-
pered well and reared two broods. They have now
occupied the same nest three years in succession.
This is unusual: Phcebe prefers a new nest each sea-
son, but in this case there is no room for another,
and, the site being a choice one, she slightly repairs
and refurnishes her nest each spring, leaving the
new houses for her more ambitious neighbors.

Of wood-warblers my territory affords many
specimens. One spring a solitary Nashville warbler
lingered near my cabin for a week. I heard his
bright, ringing song at all hours of the day. The
next spring there were two or more, and they nested

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in my pea-bushes. The black and white creeping
warblers are perhaps the most abundant. A pair of
them built a nest in a steep moss and lichen cov-
ered hillside, beside a high gray rock. Our path
to Julian’s Rock led just above it. It was an ideal
spot and an ideal nest, but it came to grief. Some
small creature sucked the eggs. On removing the
nest I found an earth-stained egg beneath it. Evi-
dently the egg had ripened before its receptacle was
ready, and the mother, for good luck, had placed
it in the foundation.

One day, as I sat at my table writing, I had a
call from the worm-eating warbler. It came into the
open door, flitted about inquisitively, and then,
startled by the apparition at the table, dashed
against the window-pane and fell down stunned. I
picked it up, and it lay with closed eyes panting in
my hand. I carried it into the open air. In a mo-
ment or two it opened its eyes, looked about, and
then closed them and fell to panting again. Soon it
looked up at me once more and about the room, and
seemed to say: ‘‘ Wheream I? What has happened
to me?” Presently the panting ceased, the bird’s
breathing became more normal, it gradually got its
bearings, and, at a motion of my hand, darted away.
This is an abundant warbler in my vicinity, and
nested this year near by. I have discovered that it
has an air-song — the song of ecstasy — like that
of the oven-bird. I had long suspected it, as I fre-

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quently heard a fine burst of melody that was new
to me. One June day I was fortunate enough to
see the bird delivering its song in the air above the
low trees. As with the oven-bird, its favorite hour
is the early twilight, though I hear the song occa-
sionally at other hours. The bird darts upward fifty
feet or more, about half the height that the oven-
bird attains, and gives forth a series of rapid, ring-
ing musical notes, which quickly glide into the long,
sparrow-like trill that forms its ordinary workaday
song. While this part is being uttered, the singer is
on its downward flight into the woods. The flight-
song of the oven-bird is louder and more striking,
and is not so shy and furtive a performance. The
latter I hear many times every June twilight, and I
frequently see the singer reach his climax a hundred
feet or more in the air, and then mark his arrow-like
flight downward. I have heard this song also in the
middle of the night near my cabin. At such times it
stands out on the stillness like a bursting rocket on
the background of the night.

One or two mornings in April, at a very early
hour, I am quite sure to hear the hermit thrush
singing in the bushes near my window. How
quickly I am transported to the Delectable Moun-
tains and to the mossy solitudes of the northern
woods! The winter wren also pauses briefly in his
northern journey, and surprises and delights my
ear with his sudden lyrical burst of melody. Such

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a dapper, fidgety, gesticulating, bobbing-up-and-
down-and-out-and-in little bird, and yet full of such
sweet, wild melody! To get him at his best, one
needs to hear him in a dim, northern hemlock
wood, where his voice reverberates as in a great hall;
just as one should hear the veery in a beech and
birch wood, beside a purling trout brook, when the
evening shades are falling. It then becomes to you
the voice of some particular spirit of the place and
the hour. The veery does not inhabit the woods im-
mediately about my cabin, but in the summer twi-
light he frequently comes up from the valley below
and sings along the borders of my territory. How
welcome his simple flute-like strain! The wood
thrush is the leading chorister in the woods about me.
He does not voice the wildness, but seems to give a
touch of something half rural, half urban, —such is
the power of association in bird-songs. In the even-
ing twilight I often sit on the highest point of the
rocky rim of the great granite bowl that holds my
three acres of prairie soil, and see the shadows
deepen, and listen to the bird voices that rise up
from the forest below me. The songs of many wood
thrushes make a sort of golden warp in the texture of
sounds that is being woven about me. Now the
flight-song of the oven-bird holds the ear, then the
fainter one of the worm-eating warbler lures it. The
carol of the robin, the vesper hymn of the tanager,
the flute of the veery, are all on the air. Finally, as
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WILD LIFE ABOUT MY CABIN

the shadows deepen and the stars begin to come out,
the whip-poor-will suddenly strikes up. What a rude
intrusion upon the serenity and harmony of the
hour! A cry without music, insistent, reiterated,
loud, penetrating, and yet the ear welcomes it also;
the night and the solitude are so vast that they can
stand it; and when, an hour later, as the night enters
into full possession, the bird comes and serenades
me under my window or upon my doorstep, my
heart warms toward it. Its cry is a love-call, and
there is something of the ardor and persistence
of love in it, and when the female responds, and
comes and hovers near, there is an interchange of
subdued, caressing tones between the two birds that
it is a delight to hear. During my first summer here
one bird used to strike up every night from a high
ledge of rocks in front of my door. At just such a
moment in the twilight he would begin, the first to
break the stillness. Then the others would follow,
till the solitude was vocal with their calls. They are
rarely heard later than ten o’clock. Then at day-
break they take up the tale again, whipping poor
Will till one pities him. One April morning between
three and four o’clock, hearing one strike up near
my window, I began counting its calls. My neigh-
bor had told me he had heard one call over two hun-
dred times without a break, which seemed to me a
big story. But I have a much bigger one to tell.
This bird actually laid upon the back of poor Will
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FAR AND NEAR

one thousand and eighty-eight blows, with only a
barely perceptible pause here and there, as if to
catch its breath. Then it stopped about half a min-
ute and began again, uttering this time three hun-
dred and ninety calls, when it paused, flew a little
farther away, took up the tale once more, and con-
tinued till I fell asleep.

By day the whip-poor-will apparently sits motion-
less upon the ground. A few times in my walks
through the woods I have started one up from
almost under my feet. On such occasions the bird’s
movements suggest those of a bat; its wings make
no noise, and it wavers about in an uncertain
manner, and quickly drops to the ground again.
One June day we flushed an old one with her two
young, but there was no indecision or hesitation in
the manner of the mother bird this time. The young
were more than half fledged, and they scampered
away a few yards and suddenly squatted upon the
ground, where their protective coloring rendered
them almost invisible. Then the anxious parent put
forth all her arts to absorb our attention and lure
us away from her offspring. She flitted before us
from side to side, with spread wings and tail, now
falling upon the ground, where she would remain a
moment as if quite disabled, then perching upon an
old stump or low branch with drooping, quivering
wings, and imploring us by every gesture to take her
and spare her young. My companion had his camera

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WILD LIFE ABOUT MY CABIN

with him, but the bird would not remain long
enough in one position for him to get her picture.
The whip-poor-will builds no nest, but lays her two
blunt, speckled eggs upon the dry leaves, where the
plumage of the sitting bird blends perfectly with her
surroundings. The eye, only a few feet away, has to
search long and carefully to make her out. Every
gray and brown and black tint of dry leaf and lichen,
and bit of bark or broken twig, is copied in her plum-
age. In a day or two, after the young are hatched,
the mother begins to move about with them through
the woods.

When I want the wild of a little different flavor
and quality from that immediately about my cabin,
I go a mile through the woods to Black Creek, here
called the Shattega, and put my canoe into a long,
smooth, silent stretch of water that winds through a
heavily timbered marsh till it leads into Black Pond,
an oval sheet of water half a mile or more across.
Here I get the moist, spongy, tranquil, luxurious
side of Nature. Here she stands or sits knee-deep in
water, and wreathes herself with pond-lilies in sum-
mer, and bedecks herself with scarlet maples in
autumn. She is an Indian maiden, dark, subtle,
dreaming, with glances now and then that thrill
the wild blood in one’s veins. The Shattega here is a
stream without banks and with a just perceptible
current. It is a waterway through a timbered marsh.
The level floor of the woods ends in an irregular line

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where the level surface of the water begins. As one
glides along in his boat, he sees various rank aqua-
tic growths slowly waving in the shadowy depths
beneath him. The larger trees on each side unite
their branches above his head, so that at times he
seems to be entering an arboreal cave out of which
glides the stream. In the more open places the
woods mirror themselves in the glassy surface till
one seems floating between two worlds, clouds and
sky and trees below him matching those around and '
above him. A bird flits from shore to shore, and one
sees it duplicated against the sky in the under-world.
What vistas open! What banks of drooping foliage,
what grain and arch of gnarled branches, lure the
eye as one drifts or silently paddles along! The
stream has absorbed the shadows so long that it is
itself like a liquid shadow. Its bed is lined with vari-
ous dark vegetable growths, as with the skin of
some huge, shaggy animal, the fur of which slowly
stirs in the languid current. I go here in early spring,
after the ice has broken up, to get a glimpse of the
first wild ducks and to play the sportsman without a
gun. I am sure I would not exchange the quiet sur-
prise and pleasure I feel, as, on rounding some point
or curve in the stream, two or more ducks spring
suddenly out from some little cove or indentation in
the shore, and with an alarum quack, quack, launch
into the air and quickly gain the free spaces above
the treetops, for the satisfaction of the gunner who
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WILD LIFE ABOUT MY CABIN

sees their dead bodies fall before his murderous fire.
He has only a dead duck, which, the chances are, he
will not find very toothsome at this season, while I
have a live duck with whistling wings cleaving the
air northward, where, in some lake or river of Maine
or Canada, in late summer, I may meet him again
with his brood. It is so easy, too, to bag the game
with your eye, while your gun may leave you only a
feather or two floating upon the water. The duck
has wit, and its wit is as quick as, or quicker than, the
sportsman’s gun. One day in spring I saw a gunner
cut down a duck when it had gained an altitude of
thirty or forty feet above the stream. At the report
it stopped suddenly, turned a somersault, and fell
with a splash into the water. It fell like a brick, and
disappeared like one; only a feather and a few bub-
bles marked the spot where it struck. Had it sunk ?
No; it had dived. It was probably winged, and in
the moment it occupied in falling to the water it had
decided what to do. It would go beneath the hunter,
since it could not escape above him; it could fly in
the water with only one wing, with its feet to aid it.
The gunner instantly set up a diligent search in all
directions, up and down along the shores, peering
long and intently into the depths, thrusting his oar
into the weeds and driftwood at the edge of the wa-
ter, but no duck or sign of duck could he find. It
was as if the wounded bird had taken to the mimic
heaven that looked so sunny and real down there,
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and gone on to Canada by that route. What aston-
ished me was that the duck should have kept its pre-
sence of mind under such trying circumstances, and
not have lost a fraction of a second of time in decid-
ing on a course of action. The duck, I am convinced,
has more sagacity than any other of our commoner
fowl.

The day I see the first ducks I am pretty sure to
come upon the first flock of blackbirds, — rusty
grackles, — resting awhile on their northward jour-
ney amid the reeds, alders, and spice-bush beside
the stream. They allow me to approach till I can see
their yellow eyes and the brilliant iris on the necks
and heads of the males. Many of them are vocal, and
their united voices make a volume of sound that is
analogous toa bundle of slivers. Sputtering, splinter-
ing, rasping, rending, their notes chafe and excite the
ear. They suggest thorns and briers of sound, and
yet aremost welcome. What voice that rises from our
woods or beside our waters in April is not tempered
or attuned to the ear? Just as I like to chew the
crinkleroot and the twigs of the spice-bush at this
time, or at any time, for that matter, so I like to treat
my ear to these more aspirated and astringent bird
voices. Is it Thoreau who says they are like pepper
and salt to this sense? In all the blackbirds we hear
the voice of April not yet quite articulate; there is a
suggestion of catarrh and influenza still in the air-
passages. I should, perhaps, except the red-shoul-

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WILD LIFE ABOUT MY CABIN

dered starling, whose clear and liquid gur-ga-lee or
o-ka-lee, above the full water-courses, makes a differ-
ent impression. The cowbird also has a clear note,
but it seems to be wrenched or pumped up with
much effort.

In May I go to Black Creek to hear the warblers
and the water-thrushes. It is the only locality where
I have ever heard the two water-thrushes, or accen-
tors, singing at the same time, —the New York and
the large-billed. The latter is much more abundant
and much the finer songster. How he does make
these watery solitudes ring with his sudden, brilliant
burst of song! But the more northern species pleases
the ear also with his quieter and less hurried strain.
I drift in my boat and let the ear attend to the one,
then to the other, while the eye takes note of their
quick, nervous movements and darting flight. The
smaller species probably does not nest along this
stream, but the large-billed breeds here abundantly.
The last nest I found was in the roots of an up-
turned tree, with the water immediately beneath it.
I had asked a neighboring farm-boy if he knew of
any birds’ nests.

“Yes,” he said ; and he named over the nests of
robins, highholes, sparrows, and others, and then
that of a “tip-up.”

At this last I pricked up my ears, so to speak.
I had not seen a tip-up’s nest in many a day.
“Where ?”’ I inquired.

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“In the roots of a tree in the woods,” said Charley.

“Not the nest of the ‘tip-up,’ or sandpiper,” said
I. “It builds on the ground in the open country near
streams.”

“ Anyhow, it tipped,” replied the boy.

He directed me to the spot, and J found, as I ex-
pected to find, the nest of the water-thrush. When
the Vassar girls came again, I conducted them to the
spot, and they took turns in walking a small tree
trunk above the water, and gazing upon a nest brim-
ming with the downy backs of young birds.

When I am listening to the water-thrushes, I
am also noting with both eye and ear the warblers
and vireos. There comes a week in May when the
speckled Canada warblers are in the ascendant.
They feed in the low bushes near the water’s edge,
and are very brisk and animated in voice and move-
ment. The eye easily notes their slate-blue backs
and yellow breasts with their broad band of black
spots, and the ear quickly discriminates their not
less marked and emphatic song.

In late summer I go to the Shattega, and to the
lake out of which it flows, for white pond-lilies, and
to feast my eye on the masses of purple loosestrife
and the more brilliant but more hidden and retired
cardinal-flower that bloom upon its banks. One can-
not praise the pond-lily; his best words mar it, like
the insects that eat its petals: but he can contem-
plate it as it opens in the morning sun and distills

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WILD LIFE ABOUT MY CABIN

such perfume, such purity, such snow of petal and
such gold of anther, from the dark water and still
darker ooze. How feminine it seems beside its
coarser and more robust congeners ; how shy, how
pliant, how fine in texture and star-like in form!

The loosestrife is a foreign plant, but it has made
itself thoroughly at home here, and its masses of
royal purple make the woods look civil and festive.
The cardinal burns with a more intense fire, and
fairly lights up the little dark nooks where it glasses
itself in the still water. One must pause and look
at it. Its intensity, its pure scarlet, the dark back-
ground upon which it is projected, its image in the
still darker water, and its general air of retirement
and seclusion, all arrest and delight the eye. It is a
heart-throb of color on the bosom of the dark soli-
tude.

The rarest and wildest animal that my neighbor-
hood boasts of is the otter. Every winter we see the
tracks of one or more of them upon the snow along
Black Creek. But the eye that has seen the animal
itself in recent years I cannot find. It probably
makes its excursions along the creek by night. Fol-
low its track — as large as that of a fair-sized dog —
over the ice, and you will find that it ends at every
open pool and rapid, and begins again upon the ice
beyond. Sometimes it makes little excursions up the
bank, its body often dragging in the snow like a log.
My son followed the track one day far up the moun-

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tain-side, where the absence of the snow caused him
to lose it. I like to think of so wild and shy a crea-
ture holding its own within sound of the locomo-
tive’s whistle.

The fox passes my door in winter, and probably
in summer too, as do also the possum and the coon.
The latter tears down my sweet corn in the garden,
and the rabbit eats off my raspberry-bushes and nib-
bles my first strawberries, while the woodchucks eat
my celery and beans and peas. Chipmunks carry
off the corn I put out for the chickens, and weasels
eat the chickens themselves.

Many times during the season I have in my soli-
tude a visit from a bald eagle. There is a dead tree
near the summit, where he often perches, and which
we call the “old eagle-tree.”’ It is a pine, killed years
ago by a thunderbolt, — the bolt of Jove, — and
now the bird of Jove hovers about it or sits upon it.
I have little doubt that what attracted me to this
spot attracts him,—the seclusion, the savageness,
the elemental grandeur. Sometimes, as I look out of
my window early in the morning, I see the eagle
upon his perch, preening his plumage, or waiting for
the rising sun to gild the mountain-tops. When the
smoke begins to rise from my chimney, or he sees
me going to the spring for water, he concludes it is
time for him to be off. But he need not fear the
crack of the rifle here; nothing more deadly than
field-glasses shall be pointed at him while I am

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WILD LIFE ABOUT MY CABIN

about. Often in the course of the day I see him
circling above my domain, or winging his way
toward the mountains. His home is apparently in
the Shawangunk Range, twenty or more miles dis-
tant, and I fancy he stops or lingers above me on his
way to the river. The days on which I see him are
not quite the same as the other days. I think my
thoughts soar a little higher all the rest of the morn-
ing: I have had a visit from a messenger of Jove.
The lift or range of those great wings has passed into
my thought. I once heard a collector get up in a
scientific body and tell how many eggs of the bald
eagle he had clutched that season, how many from
this nest, how many from that, and how one of
the eagles had deported itself after he had killed
its mate. I felt ashamed for him. He had only
proved himself a superior human weasel. The man
with the rifle and the man with the collector’s
craze are fast reducing the number of eagles in the
country. Twenty years ago I used to see a dozen or
more along the river in the spring when the ice was
breaking up, where I now see only one or two, or
none at all. In the present case, what would it
profit me could I find and plunder my eagle’s nest,
or strip his skin from his dead carcass? Should I
know him better? I do not want to know him that
way. I want rather to feel the inspiration of his
presence and noble bearing. I want my interest and
sympathy to go with him in his continental voyaging
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up and down, and in his long, elevated flights to and
from his eyrie upon the remote, solitary cliffs. He
draws great lines across the sky ; he sees the forests
like a carpet beneath him, he sees the hills and val-
leys as folds and wrinkles in a many-colored tapes-
try ; he sees the river as a silver belt connecting re-
mote horizons. We climb mountain-peaks to get a
glimpse of the spectacle that is hourly spread out
beneath him. Dignity, elevation, repose, are his. I
would have my thoughts take as wide a sweep. I
would be as far removed from the petty cares and
turmoils of this noisy and blustering world.

II
NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

I

NE of the good signs of the times is the inter-
est our young people are taking in the birds,
and the numerous clubs and societies that are be-
ing formed throughout the country for bird pro-
tection and bird study. In my youth but little was
heard about the birds. They were looked upon as
of small account. Many of them were treated as
the farmer’s natural enemies. Crows and all kinds
of hawks and owls were destroyed whenever chance
offered. I knew a farmer who every summer caught
and killed all the red-tailed hawks he could. He
Stood up poles in his meadows, upon the tops of
which he would set steel traps. The hawks, looking
for meadow-mice, would alight upon them and be
caught. The farmer was thus slaying some of his
best friends, as these large hawks live almost en-
tirely upon mice and other vermin. The redtail, or
hen-hawk, is very wary of a man with a gun, but
he has not yet learned of the danger that lurks in a
steel trap on the top of a pole.
If a strict account could be kept with our crows
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and hawks for a year, it would be found at the end
of that time that most of them had a balance to their
credit. They do us more good than injury. A few
of them, such as the fish crow, the sharp-shinned
hawk, Cooper’s hawk, and the duck hawk, are de-
structive to song-birds and wild fowl; but the others
subsist mainly upon insects and vermin.

One August, when I was a boy, I remember a
great flight of sparrow hawks, — so called, I sup-
pose, because they rarely if ever catch sparrows.
They were seen by the dozen, hovering above and
flitting about the meadows. On carefully observing
them, I found they were catching grasshoppers, —
the large, fat ones found in the meadows in late
summer. They would poise on the wing twenty
or thirty feet above the ground, after the manner
of the larger hawks watching for mice, then sud-
denly drop down and seize their prey, which they
devoured on the limb of a tree or a stake in the fence.
They lingered about for several days and then drifted
away.

Nearly every season a pair of broad-winged
hawks — about a size smaller than the hen-hawk —
build their nest in the woods not far from my cabin.
You may know this hawk by its shrill, piercing cry,
the smoothest, most ear-piercing note I know of
in the woods. They utter this cry when you approach
their nest, and continue to utter it as long as you
linger about. One season they built in a large pine-

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NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

tree near which I frequently passed in my walk.
Always, as I came near, I would hear this wild, shrill
plaint, made, I think, by the mother bird. Often
she would sit upon a branch in full view and utter
her ear-dividing protest. There were never any
signs about the nest that birds or poultry formed
part of the food of the young. It is said that this
hawk subsists principally upon insects and frogs.
When the young —two of them— were about two
thirds grown, they used to perch upon the edge of
the nest and upon one of the branches that held it
in place.

One day I took a couple of bird enthusiasts there
to hear the cry of the mother hawk. We lingered
about for nearly an hour, and not a sound was heard
nor a parent hawk seen. Then I tried to stir up
the young, but without effect. They regarded us
intently, but made no move and uttered nocry. A
smaller tree grew beside the pine that held the nest.
Up this I climbed till within probably twenty-five
feet of the suspicious young; then I reached out my
foot and planted it upon a limb of the larger tree.
Instantly, as if the tree were a vital part of them-
selves, the young hawks took the alarm and launched
into the air. But the wings of one of them could not
long sustain him, and he came to the ground within
twenty yards of the foot of the tree. As we ap-
proached him his attitude of defense was striking, —
wings half spread, beak open, one foot raised, and

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a look of defiance in his eye. But we soon reassured
him, and presently left him perched upon a branch
in a much more composed state of mind. The parent
hawks did not appear upon the scene during our stay.

II

I do not share the alarm expressed in some quar-
ters over the seeming decrease in the numbers of our
birds. We are always more or less pessimistic in
regard to the present time and present things. As we
grow older, the number of beautiful things in the
world seems to diminish. 'The Indian summer is not
what it used to be; the winters are not so bracing;
the spring is more uncertain; and honest men are
fewer. But there is not much change, after all. The
change is mainly in us. I find no decrease in the great
body of our common field, orchard, and wood birds,
though I do not see the cliff swallows I used to see in
my youth; they go farther north, to northern New
England and Canada. Our smart new farm build-
ings with their dressed and painted clapboards do not
attract them. At Rangeley Lake, in Maine, I saw the
eaves of barns as crowded with their mud nests as I
used to see the eaves of my father’s barns amid the
Catskills. In the cliffs along the Yukon in Alaska
they are said to swarm in great numbers. The cliffs
along the upper Columbia show thousands of their
nests. Nearly all our game-birds are decreasing in
numbers, because sportsmen are more and more

160

4
NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

numerous and skillful, and their guns more and more
deadly. The bobolinks are fewer than they were a
decade or two ago, because they are slaughtered
more and more in the marshes and rice-fields of the
South. The bluebirds and hermit thrushes were
threatened with extinction by a cold wave and a
severe storm in the Southern States, a few years ago.
These birds appear to have perished by the hundred
thousand. But they have slowly recovered lost
ground, and seem now to be as numerous as ever.
I see fewer eagles along the Hudson River than I
used to see fifteen years ago. The collectors and the
riflemen are no doubt responsible for this decrease.
But the robins, thrushes, finches, warblers, black-
birds, orioles, flycatchers, vireos, and woodpeckers
are quite as abundant as they were a quarter of a
century ago, if not more so.

The English sparrows, no doubt, tend to run out
our native birds in towns and smaller cities, but in
the country this effect is not noticeable. They are
town birds anyhow, and naturally take their place
with a thousand other town abominations. A friend
of mine who lives in the heart of a city of twenty
thousand people amused me by recounting his obser-
vation upon a downy woodpecker that had made up
its mind to pass the winter in town. In November it
began to excavate a chamber for its winter quarters in
the dead branch of a maple that stood on the curb in
front of my friend’s window. The English sparrows

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sat about upon the branches, regarding the proceed-
ing with evident interest, but showing no inclination
to interfere. “Let him work,” they seemed to say;
“something interesting may come of it.” For two
weeks or more Downy was busy carving out his
retreat. At last it was finished ; but when he re-
turned one night he found it occupied, and the occu-
pant refused to vacate it. This seemed to puzzle the
woodpecker a good deal. Every night he was barred
out of his own house. Then he took it into his head
to come home earlier in the day. This scheme
worked at first, but soon the sparrows clubbed to-
gether, assaulted his castle, and literally dragged
him out by sheer force. Then he gave up the fight,
and no doubt returned to the country a sadder and
a wiser bird. A new retreat had to be drilled out,
an undertaking which must have caused him no little
solicitude. It would be interesting to know where,
in the mean time, he passed the night. Probably in
some old retreat of his or his friends’.

How to get rid of the English sparrows, or to keep
them in check, is a question that is agitating many
of our communities. A sporadic effort here and there
will not have much effect; there must be concerted
action over a wide area. The blow must be struck
in their breeding-haunts. In every town that has a
police force, let it be one of the duties of the police
to spy out their nesting-places and report to head-
quarters, as they would any other nuisance or misde-

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NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

meanor. Then let men be detailed to break them up.
As long as the nest is untouched, killing the birds is .
of little avail. A friend of mine, a well-known orni-
thologist, told me that one summer he and his wife
took for the season a house in a small town not far
from Boston. There were two sparrows’ nests in
the cavities of two fruit trees in the garden. At once
he opened war upon the parent birds. He shot one
of them. In two hours the male or female, whichever
it was, had another mate. He continued the shoot-
ing. Whenever a bird showed itself about either nest
it was shot. In consequence the birds became very
wild and shrewd, till he was compelled to fire from
a crack in the door. But he kept up the warfare
till he had killed sixty-two birds about those nests,
and yet from each cavity a brood of young birds
came forth. I suppose there were eggs or young in
the nest when my friend appeared upon the scene,
and that he did not in any one day kill both the par-
ent birds. Had he done so, it is still a question
whether the young would have been allowed to per-
ish. Their cries would probably have attracted other
birds.

The parental instinct is strong in most creatures.
Birds as well as animals will sometimes adopt the
young of others. I have been told of a bluebird that
took it upon himself to help feed some young vireos
in a nest near his own, and of a house wren that
carried food to some young robins.

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FAR AND NEAR

Last summer I witnessed a similar occurrence, and
made this record in my note-book: “A nest of young
robins in the maple in front of the house being fed
by a chipping sparrow. The little sparrow is very
attentive; seems decidedly fond of her adopted
babies. The old robins resent her services, and
hustle her out of the tree whenever they find her near
the nest. (It was this hurried departure of Chippy
from the tree that first attracted my attention.) She
watches her chances, and comes with food in their
absence. The young birds are about ready to fly,
and when the chippy feeds them her head fairly
disappears in their capacious mouths. She jerks
it back as if she were afraid of being swallowed.
Then she lingers near them on the edge of the nest,
and seems to admire them. When she sees the old
robin coming, she spreads her wings in an attitude
of defense, and then flies away. I wonder if she
has had the experience of rearing a cow-bunting ?”
(A day later.) “The robins are out of the nest, and
the little sparrow continues to feed them. She ap-
proaches them rather timidly and hesitatingly, as if
she feared they might swallow her, then thrusts her
titbit quickly into the distended mouth and jerks
back.”

Whether the chippy had lost her own brood,
whether she was an unmated bird, or whether the
case was simply the overflowing of the maternal in-
stinct, it would be interesting to know.

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NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

Tit

I am glad to see that this growing interest in bird
life has reached our schools and is being promoted
there. I often receive letters from teachers touching
these matters. A teacher in the State of Delaware
wrote me that he and his pupils were trying to know
all the birds within a mile of their schoolhouse.
One species of bird had puzzled them much. The
teacher frequently saw the birds feeding in the road
in the evening as he walked home from school. Then,
when the blizzard came, they approached the school-
house for crumbs, sometimes in loose flocks of a
dozen or more.

This is the teacher’s description of the bird: —

“The upper half of its bill is dark, and about one
third on the tips of the lower. The rest is light. The
feathers are a greenish yellow below the bill, and the
throat feathers are black with white tips. The belly
is white, but the feathers are black underneath. In
size it is a little smaller than the robin. It has a chirp,
when flying, something like the cedar-bird. The
back toe is certainly very long for so small a bird.”

Had not this description been accompanied by a
wing, leg, and tail of the bird in question, I should
have been at a loss to name it. One of the birds was
found dead in the snow beneath the telegraph wires,
and this afforded the samples. It proved to be the
prairie horned lark, one of our migrants, which passes

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FAR AND NEAR

the winter near the snow-line in the Southern States,
and the summer in the hilly parts of New York,
New England, and Canada.

The above description makes the bird much too
large, as its size is nearer that of the bobolink and
the bluebird. All the larks have the hind toe very
prominent. This species, like the true skylark, is
entirely a terrestrial bird, and never alights upon
trees. When singing it soars and hovers high in air
like the skylark, but its song is a very crude, feeble
affair in comparison with that of the latter. Its
winter plumage is far less marked than its summer
dress. One day I took note of one singing above my
native hills, when it repeated its feeble, lisping song
one hundred and three times before it closed its wings
and dropped to the earth precisely as does the Euro-
pean skylark.

Another teacher writes me asking if the blue jay
eats acorns. She is sure she has seen them flying
away from oak-trees with acorns in their beaks, and
yet some authority to whom she had appealed was
doubtful about their eating them. It is quite certain
that jays eat acorns, but they carry away and hide
a great many more than they eat. The thieving pro-
pensity of the jay, which is a trait of his family,
the Corvide, leads him to carry away chestnuts and
acorns and hide them in the grass and under leaves,
and thus makes him an unsuspecting instrument
in the planting of forests. This is the reason why,

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NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

when a pine or hemlock forest is cut away, oaks and
chestnuts are so likely to spring up. These nuts
can be disseminated only by the aid of birds and
squirrels.

A clergyman writes me from a New England
town of something he found in his winter walks that
puzzled him very much. It was an old cocoon of the
cecropia moth, in which he found two kernels of
corn. What creature could have put them there, and
for what purpose? Of course it was the blue jay; he
had hidden the corn in the same blind way that he
hides the acorns. I have seen jays in winter carry
away corn and put it into an old worm’s nest in a
wild-cherry tree, and drop it into knot-holes in the
tree trunk. It is doubtful if the jay can digest corn
swallowed whole. It is too hard a grist for his mill.
He will peck out the chit or softer germinal part, as
will the chickadee, and devour that.

Another teacher wrote me that two pretty birds,
strangers to her, had built their nest in a pear-tree
near the kitchen door of her house.

They were small and slender, the male of a ruddy
brown, his head, tail, and wings black, and the fe-
male yellowish green, with darker wings. The male
brought worms and fed his mate while she was sit-
ting, and seemed the happiest bird alive, save when
the kittens romped about the door ; and then, even
in the midst of his cries of alarm like a blackbird’s,
he would burst out with glad notes of rejoicing, a

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FAR AND NEAR

song to her ear like a sparrow’s. Soon there were
young in the nest, and the air was filled with the con-
stant fluttering of wings and the rapturous song of
the father. But alas! one morning found the nest
rifled of its treasures, and only the silent, miserable
male flitting in and about the home in the most
heartbroken fashion. A red squirrel or a cat or an
owl had done the mischief. The nest was woven of
hemp and grasses, and was suspended from the fork
of a limb. The teacher guessed rightly that the bird
was a near relative of the Baltimore oriole; it was
the orchard oriole, a much rarer bird and a much
finer songster. The song is not like a sparrow’s,
but much louder, stronger, and more ecstatic. The
male does not get his full uniform of black and bay
till the fourth summer.

A college boy once wrote me that he had seen a mo-
ther oriole fall down dead when her nest was being
robbed. The nest was in a large sycamore about
twenty-five feet from the ground. An old French-
man living near wanted one of the eggs for his col-
lection. He procured a long pole, armed with some
sharp nails on the end, and from the top of a small
building under the tree tried to cut off the nest from
the branch. The mother bird kept her place within
till it began to yield before the assault. Instead of
eggs, the nest held young birds. When one of them
fell out, the mother bird flew down and screamed

around it in great excitement. Before the man could
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NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

loosen his pole from the nest, all the young birds
had fallen to the ground. The mother was darting
and screaming about them, when suddenly she fell
to the ground dead, a victim, no doubt, to her exces-
sive emotion of grief. Birds are very delicate, high-
strung creatures, and probably die of apoplexy or
heart failure as frequently as human beings.

IV

Love the wood-rose, but leave it on its stalk, hints
the poet. So, I say, find a bird’s nest, but touch not
the eggs. It seems to profane the nest even to touch
its contents with the utmost care. One June day, I
found the nest of the yellow-winged sparrow, — the
Sparrow one often hears in our fields and mead-
ows, that has a song that suggests a grasshopper. I
was sitting on the fence that bounded a hill meadow,
watching the horned larks, and hoping that one of
them would disclose the locality of its nest. A few
yards from me was a small bush, from the top of
which a yellow-winged sparrow was sending out its
feeble, stridulous song. Presently a little brown bird
came out of the meadow and alighted in the grass
but a few yards from the singer. Instantly he flew to
the spot, and I knew it was his mate. They seemed
to have some conversation together there in the grass,
when, in a moment or two, they separated, the male
flitting to his perch on the bush and continuing his
song, while the female disappeared quickly into the

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FAR AND NEAR

grass ten or more yards away. “The nest is there,”
I said, “and I must find it.” So I walked straight
to the spot where the bird had vanished and scru-
tinized the ground closely. Not seeing the object
of my search, I dropped my handkerchief upon
the grass, and began walking cautiously about it
in circles, covering more and more ground, and
scanning closely every foot of the meadow-bottom.
Suddenly, when I was four or five yards from my
handkerchief, a little dark-brown bird fluttered out
almost from under my feet, and the pretty secret
was mine.

The nest, made of dry grass and a few hairs, was
sunk into the ground, — into the great, brownish-
gray, undistinguished meadow surface, — and held
four speckled eggs. The mother bird fluttered
through the grass, and tried, by feigning disable-
ment, to lure me away from the spot. I had noticed
that the male had ceased singing as soon as I be-
gan my search, and had showed much uneasiness.
He now joined the female, and two more agitated
birds I had never seen. The actions of this bird
are quick and nervous at all times; now they be-
came almost frenzied. But I quickly withdrew, and
concealed myself behind the fence. After a brief
consultation the birds withdrew also, and it was
nearly a half-hour before they returned. Then the
mother bird, after much feigning and flitting ner-
vously about, dropped into the grass several yards

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NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

from the nest. I fancied her approaching it in a
cautious, circuitous, indirect way.

In the afternoon I came again; also the next day;
but at no time did I find the male in song on his old
perch. He seemed to take the blame of the accident
upon himself; he had betrayed the locality of the
nest ; and now I found him upon the fence or upon
an apple-tree far off, where his presence or his song
would not give away the precious secret.

The male bird of almost every species is careful
about being much in evidence very near the nest.
You will generally find him in song along the rim
of a large circle of which the nest is the centre. I
have known poets to represent the bird singing upon
its nest, but if this ever happens, it is a very rare
occurrence.

IV
BIRD LIFE IN WINTER

HE distribution of our birds over the country in
summer is like that of the people, quite uni-
form. Every wood and field has its quota, and no
place so barren but it has some bird to visit it. One
knows where to look for sparrows and thrushes and
bobolinks and warblers and flycatchers. But the
occupation of the country by our winter residents
is like the Indian occupation of the land. They are
found in little bands, a few here and there, with
large tracts quite untenanted.

One may walk for hours through the winter woods
and not see or hear a bird. Then he may come
upon a troop of chickadees, with a nuthatch or two
in their wake, and maybe a downy woodpecker.
Birds not of a feather flock together at this inclement
season. The question of food is always an urgent
one. Evidently the nuthatch thinks there must be
food where the chickadees flit and call so cheerily,
and the woodpecker is probably drawn to the nut-
hatch for a similar reason.

Together they make a pretty thorough search, —
fine, finer, finest. The chickadee explores the twigs

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and smaller branches; what he gets is on the surface,
and so fine as to be almost microscopic. The nut-
hatch explores the trunks and larger branches of the
trees; he goes a little deeper, into crevices of the bark
and under lichens. Then comes Downy, who goes
deeper still. He bores for larger game through the
bark, and into the trunks and branches themselves.

In late fall this band is often joined by the golden-
crowned kinglet and the brown creeper. The kinglet
is finer-eyed and finer-billed than even the chick-
adee, and no doubt gathers what the latter over-
looks, while the brown creeper, with his long, slender,
curved bill, takes what both the nuthatch and the
woodpecker miss. Working together, it seems as if
they must make a pretty clean sweep. But the trees
are numerous and large, and the birds are few. Only
a mere fraction of tree surface is searched over at
any onetime. In large forests probably only a mere
fraction of the trees are visited at all.

One cold day in midwinter, when I was walking
through the snowless woods, I saw chickadees, nut-
hatches, and woodpeckers upon the ground, and
upon roots and fallen branches. They were look-
ing for the game that had fallen, as a boy looks for
apples under the tree.

The winter wren is so called because he sometimes
braves our northern winters, but it is rarely that one
sees him at this season. I think I have seen him only
two or three times in winter in my life. The event

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BIRD LIFE IN WINTER

of one long walk, recently, in February, was seeing
one of these birds. As I followed a byroad, beside
a little creek in the edge of a wood, my eye caught a
glimpse of a small brown bird darting under a stone
bridge. I thought to myself no bird but a wren
would take refuge under so small a bridge as that.
T stepped down upon it and expected to see the bird
dart out at the upper end. As it did not appear, I
scrutinized the bank of the little run, covered with
logs and brush, a few rods farther up.

Presently I saw the wren curtsying and gesticu-
lating beneath an old log. As I approached he disap-
peared beneath some loose stones in the bank, then
came out again and took another peep at me, then
fidgeted about for a moment and disappeared again,
running in and out of the holes and recesses and be-
neath the rubbish like a mouse or a chipmunk. The
winter wren may always be known by these squat-
ting, bobbing-out-and-in habits.

As I sought a still closer view of him, he flitted
stealthily a few yards up the run and disappeared
beneath a small plank bridge near a house.

I wondered what he could feed upon at such a
time. There was a light skim of snow upon the
ground, and the weather was cold. The wren, so far
as I know, is entirely an insect-feeder, and where can
he find insects in midwinter in our climate ? Probably
by searching under bridges, under brush heaps, in
holes and cavities in banks where the sun falls warm.

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FAR AND NEAR

In such places he may find dormant spiders and flies
and other hibernating insects or their larve. We
have a tiny, mosquito-like creature that comes forth
in March or in midwinter, as soon as the temper-
ature is a little above freezing. One may see them
performing their fantastic air-dances when the air
is so chilly that one buttons his overcoat about him
in his walk. They are darker than the mosquito, —
a sort of dark water-color,— and are very frail to
the touch. Maybe the wren knows the hiding-place
of these insects.

With food in abundance, no doubt many more of
our birds would brave the rigors of our winters. I
have known a pair of bluebirds to brave them on
such poor rations as are afforded by the hardhack
or sugarberry, —a drupe the size of a small pea, with
a thin, sweet skin. Probably hardly one per cent. of
the drupe is digestible food. Bluebirds in December
will also eat the berries of the poison ivy, as will the
downy woodpecker.

Robins will pass the winter with us when the cover
of a pine or hemlock forest can be had near a supply
of red cedar berries. The cedar-bird probably finds
little other food in the valley of the Hudson and in
New England, yet I see occasional flocks of them
every winter month.

Sometimes the chickadees and nuthatches, hunt-
ing through the winter woods, make a discovery that
brings every bird within hearing to the spot, — they

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BIRD LIFE IN WINTER

spy out the screech owl hiding in the thick of a hem-
lock-tree. What an event it is in the day’s experience!
It sets the whole clan agog.

While I was walking in the December woods, one
day, my attention was attracted by a great hue and
cry among these birds. I found them in and about
a hemlock-tree, — eight or ten chickadees and four
or five red-bellied nuthatches. Such a chiding chorus
of tiny voices Ihad not heard fora long time. The
tone was not that of alarm so much as it was that
of trouble and displeasure.

I gazed long and long up into the dark, dense
green mass of the tree to make out the cause of all
this excitement. The chickadees were clinging to the
ends of the sprays, as usual, apparently very busy
looking for food, and all the time uttering their shrill
plaint. The nuthatches perched about upon the
branches or ran up and down the tree trunks, inces-
santly piping their displeasure. At last I made out
the cause of the disturbance, —a little owl on a limb,
looking down in wide-eyed intentness upon me.
How annoyed he must have felt at all this hullabaloo,
this lover of privacy and quiet, to have his name
cried from the treetops, and his retreat advertised
to every passer-by!

I have never known woodpeckers to show any
excitement at the presence of hawk or owl, probably
because they are rarely preyed upon by these ma-
rauders. In their nests and in their winter quarters,

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FAR AND NEAR

deeply excavated in trunk or branch of tree, wood-
peckers are beyond the reach of both beak and claw.

The day I saw the winter wren I saw two golden-
crowned kinglets fly from one sycamore to another
in an open field, uttering their fine call-notes. That
so small a body can brave the giant cold of our win-
ters seems remarkable enough. These are mainly
birds of the evergreens, although at times they fre-
quent the groves and the orchards.

How does the ruby-crowned kinglet know he has
a brilliant bit of color on his crown which he can
uncover at will, and that this has great charms for
the female? During the rivalries of the males in
the mating season, and in the autumn also, they
flash this brilliant ruby at each other. I witnessed
what seemed to be a competitive display of this
kind one evening in November. I was walking along
the road, when my ear was attracted by the fine,
shrill lisping and piping of a small band of these
birds in an apple-tree. I paused to see what was the
occasion of so much noise and bluster among these
tiny bodies. There were four or five of them, all
more or less excited, and two of them especially so.
I think the excitement of the others was only a
reflection of that of these two. These were hopping
around each other, apparently peering down upon
something beneath them. I suspected a cat con-
cealed behind the wall, and so looked over, but
there was nothing there. Observing them more

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BIRD LIFE IN WINTER

closely, I saw that the two birds were entirely occu-
pied with each other.

They behaved exactly as if they were comparing
crowns, and each extolling his own. Their heads
were bent forward, the red crown patch uncovered
and showing as a large, brilliant cap, their tails
were spread, and the side feathers below the wings
were fluffed out. They did not come to blows, but
followed each other about amid the branches, ut-
tering their thin, shrill notes and displaying their
ruby crowns to the utmost. Evidently it was some
sort of strife or dispute or rivalry that centred about
this brilliant patch.

Few persons seem aware that the goldfinch is also
a winter bird, — it is so brilliant and familiar in sum-
mer and so neutral and withdrawn in winter. The
call-note and manner of flight do not change, but the
color of the males and their habits are very different
from their color and habits in summer. In winter
they congregate in small, loose flocks, both sexes of
a dusky yellowish brown, and feed upon the seeds
of grasses and weeds that stand above the snow in
fields and along fences.

Day after day I have observed a band of five
or six of them feeding amid the dry stalks of the
evening primrose by the roadside. They are adepts
in extracting the seed from the pods. How pretty
their call to each other at such times, — paisley or
peasely, with the rising inflection!

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FAR AND NEAR

The only one of our winter birds that really seems
a part of the winter, that seems to be born of the
whirling snow, and to be happiest when storms drive
thickest and coldest, is the snow bunting, the real
snowbird, with plumage copied from the fields where
the drifts hide all but the tops of the tallest weeds, —
large spaces of pure white touched here and there
with black and gray and brown. Its twittering call
and chirrup coming out of the white obscurity is the
sweetest and happiest of all winter bird sounds. It
is like the laughter of children. The fox-hunter
hears it on the snowy hills, the farmer hears it when
he goes to fodder his cattle from the distant stack,
the country schoolboy hears it as he breaks his way
through the drifts toward the school. It is ever a
voice of good cheer and contentment.

One March, during a deep snow, a large flock of
buntings stayed about my vineyards for several days,
feeding upon the seeds of redroot and other weeds
that stood above the snow. What boyhood associa-
tions their soft and cheery calls brought up! How
plump and well-fed and hardy they looked, and how
alert and suspicious they were! They evidently had
had experiences with hawks and shrikes. Every
minute or two they would all spring into the air as
one bird, circle about for a moment, then alight upon
the snow again. Occasionally one would perch upon
a wire or grapevine, as if to keep watch and ward.

Presently, while I stood in front of my study look-

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BIRD LIFE IN WINTER

ing at them, a larger and darker bird came swiftly
by me, flying low and straight toward the buntings.
He shot beneath the trellises, and evidently hoped
to surprise the birds. It was a shrike, thirsting for
blood or brains. But the buntings were on the alert,
and were up in the air before the feathered assassin
reached them. As the flock wheeled about, he joined
them and flew along with them for some distance,
but made no attempt to strike that I could see.

Presently he left them and perched upon the top of
a near maple. The birds did not seem to fear him
now, but swept past the treetop where he sat as if
to challenge him to a race, and then went their way.
I have seen it stated that these birds, when suddenly
surprised by a hawk, will dive beneath the snow to
escape him. They doubtless roost upon the ground,
as do most ground-builders, and hence must often be
covered by the falling snow.

Vv
A BIRDS’ FREE LUNCH

NE winter, during four or five weeks of severe

weather, several of our winter birds were
pensioners upon my bounty,— three blue jays,
two downy woodpeckers, three chickadees, and
one kinglet, — and later a snowbird — junco— ap-
peared.

I fastened pieces of suet and marrow-bones upon
the tree in front of my window, then, as I sat at my
desk, watched the birds at their free lunch. The jays
bossed the woodpeckers, the woodpeckers bossed the
chickadees, and the chickadees bossed the kinglet.

Sometimes in my absence a crow would swoop
down and boss the whole crew and carry off the
meat. The kinglet was the least of all, —a sort of
“hop-o’-my-thumb” bird. He became quite tame,
and one day alighted upon my arm as I stood lean-
ing against the tree. I could have put my hand
upon him several times. I wonder where the midget
roosted. He was all alone. He liked the fare so well
that he seemed disposed to stop till spring. Dur-
ing one terrible night of wind and snow and zero
temperature I feared he would be swept away. I

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FAR AND NEAR

thought of him in the middle of the night, when the
violence of the storm kept me from sleep. Imagine
this solitary atom in feathers drifting about in the
great arctic out-of-doors and managing to survive.
I fancied him in one of my thick spruces, his head
under his tiny wing, buffeted by wind and snow, his
little black feet clinging to the perch, and wishing
that morning would come.

The fat meat is fuel for him; it keeps up the
supply of animal heat. None of the birds will eat
lean meat; they want the clear fat. The jays alight
upon it and peck away with great vigor, almost
standing on tiptoe to get the proper sweep. The
woodpecker uses his head alone in pecking, but
the jay’s action involves the whole body. Yet his
blows are softer, not so sharp and abrupt as those
of the woodpecker. Pecking is not exactly his busi-
ness.

He swallows the morsel eagerly, watching all
the time lest some enemy surprise him in the act.
Indeed, one noticeable thing about all the birds
is their nervousness while eating. The chickadee
turns that bead-like eye of his in all directions inces-
santly, lest something seize him while he is not look-
ing. He is not off his guard for a moment. It is
almost painful to observe the state of fear in which
he lives. He will not keep his place upon the bone
longer than a few seconds at a time lest he become
a mark for some enemy, — a hawk, a shrike, or a cat.

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One would not think the food would digest when
taken in such haste and trepidation.

While the jays are feeding, swallowing morsel
after morsel very rapidly, the chickadees flit about in
an anxious, peevish manner, lest there be none left
for themselves.

I suspect the jays carry the food off and hide it,
as they certainly do corn when I put it out for the
hens. The jay has a capacious throat; he will lodge
half a dozen or more kernels of corn in it, stretching
his neck up as he takes them, to give them room, and
then fly away to an old bird’s-nest or a caterpillar’s
nest and deposit them in it. But in this respect the
little kettle cannot call the big pot black. The chick-
adee also will carry away what it cannot eat. One
day I dug a dozen or more white grubs — the larvee
of some beetle — out of a decayed maple on my
woodpile and placed them upon my window- sill.
The chickadees soon discovered them, and fell to
carrying them off as fast as ever they could, dis-
tributing them among the branches of the Norway
spruces. Among the grubs was one large white
one half the size of one’s little finger. One of the
chickadees seized this; it was all he could carry,
but he made off with it. The mate to this grub
I found rolled up in a smooth cell in a mass of
decayed wood at the heart of the old maple re-
ferred to; it was full of frost. I carried it in by the
fire, and the next day it was alive and apparently

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wanted to know what had brought spring so sud-
denly.

How rapidly birds live! Their demand for food is
almost incessant. This colony of mine appear to
feed every eight or ten minutes. Their little mills
grind their grist very rapidly. Once in my walk upon
the sea beach I encountered two small beach birds
running up and down in the edge of the surf, keep-
ing just in the thin, lace-like edging of the waves,
and feeding upon the white, cricket-like hoppers
that quickly buried themselves in the sand as the
waters retreated. I kept company with the birds
till they ceased to be afraid of me. They would feed
eagerly for a few minutes and then stop, stand on
one leg and put their heads under their wings for
two or three minutes, and then resume their feeding,
so rapidly did they digest their food. But all birds
digest very rapidly.

My two woodpeckers seldom leave the tree upon
which the food is placed. One is a male, as is shown
by his red plume, and the other a female. There is
not a bit of kindness or amity between them. Indeed,
there is open hostility. The male will not allow the
female even to look at the meat while he is feeding.
She will sidle around toward it, edging nearer and
nearer, when he will suddenly dart at her, and
often pursue her till she leaves the tree. Every hour
in the day I see him trying to drive her from the
neighborhood. She stands in perpetual dread of him,

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A BIRDS’ FREE LUNCH

and gives way the instant he approaches. He is
a tyrant and a bully. They both pass the night
in snug chambers which they have excavated in
the decayed branch of an old apple-tree, but not
together.

But in the spring what a change will come over
the male. He will protest to the female that he was
only in fun, that she took him far too seriously,
that he had always cherished a liking for her. Last
April I saw a male trying his blandishments upon a
female in this way. It may have been the same pair
I am now observing. The female was extremely shy
and reluctant; evidently she was skeptical of the sin-
cerity of so sudden a change on the part of the male.
I saw him pursue her from tree to tree with the most
flattering attention. The flight of the woodpecker
is at all times undulating, but on such occasions
this feature is so enhanced and the whole action so
affected and studied on the part of the male that
the scene becomes highly amusing. The female flew
down upon a low stump in the currant-patch and was
very busy about her own affairs; the male followed
alighted on something several rods distant, and ap-
peared to be equally busy about his affairs. Presently
the female made quite a long flight to a tree by the
roadside. I could not tell how the male knew she had
flown and what course she had taken, as he was hid-
den from her amid the thick currant-bushes; but
he did know, and soon followed after in his curious

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exaggerated undulatory manner of flight. I have
little doubt that his suit was finally successful.

I watch these woodpeckers daily to see if I can
solve the mystery as to how they hop up and down
the trunks and branches without falling away from
them when they let go their hold. They come down
a limb or trunk backward by a series of little hops,
moving both feet together. If the limb is at an angle
to the tree and they are on the under side of it, they
do not fall away from it to get a new hold an inch or
half inch farther down. They are held to it as steel
to a magnet. Both tail and head are involved in
the feat. At the instant of making the hop the head
is thrown in and the tail thrown out, but the exact
mechanics of it I cannot penetrate. Philosophers
do not yet know how a backward-falling cat turns
in the air, but turn she does. It may be that the
wood-pecker never quite relaxes his hold, though to
my eye he appears to do so.

Birds nearly always pass the night in such places
as they select for their nests, — ground-builders upon
the ground, tree-builders upon trees. I have seen
an oriole ensconce himself for the night amid the
thick cluster of leaves on the end of a maple branch,
where soon after his mate built her nest.

My chickadees, true to this rule, pass the arctic
winter nights in little cavities in the trunks of trees
like the woodpeckers. One cold day, about four
o’clock, while it was snowing and blowing, I heard,

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\

A BIRDS’ FREE LUNCH

as I was unharnessing my horse near the old apple-
tree, the sharp, chiding note of a chickadee. On look-
ing for the bird I failed to see him. Suspecting the
true cause of his sudden disappearance, I took a pole
and touched a limb that had an opening in its end
where the wrens had the past season had a nest. As
I didso, out came the chickadee and scolded sharply.
The storm and the cold had driven him early to his
chamber. The snow buntings are said to plunge
into the snow-banks and pass the night there. We
know the ruffed grouse does this.

VI
TWO BIRDS’-NESTS

CONSIDER myself lucky if, in the course of a

season, I can pick up two or three facts in nat-
ural history that are new to me. To have a new
delight in an old or familiar fact is not always easy,
and is perhaps quite as much to be desired. The
familiar we always have with us; to see it with fresh
eyes so as to find a new pleasure in it, —that is a
great point.

I think one never sees a bird’s-nest of any kind
without fresh pleasure. It is such a charming secret,
and is usually so well kept by the tree, or bank, or
bit of ground that holds it; and then it is such a
dainty and exquisite cradle or nursery amid its rough
and wild surroundings, —a point so cherished and
cared for in the apparently heedless economy of
the fields or woods!

When it is a new nest and one long searched for,
the pleasure is of course proportionally greater.
Such a pleasure came to me one day last summer in
early July, when I discovered the nest of the water-
thrush or water-wagtail.

The nest of its cousin the oven-bird, called by the

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FAR AND NEAR

old ornithologists the golden-crowned thrush, was
familiar to me, as it probably is to most country
boys, — a nest partly thrust under the dry leaves
upon the ground in the woods, and holding four or
five whitish eggs covered with reddish-brown spots.
The mother bird is in size less than the sparrow,
and in color is a light olive with a speckled breast,
and she is the prettiest walker to be seen in the
woods. -

The water-accentor or wagtail is a much rarer
bird, and of a darker olive green. As the color of the
oven-bird harmonizes with the dry leaves over which
it walks, so the color of the wagtail is in keeping with
the dark-veined brooks and forest pools along which
it flits and near which it nests.

With me it is an April bird. When the spice-bush
is in bloom along the fringes of the creeks, and
the leaves of the adder’s-tongue or fawn lily have
pierced the mould, I expect to hear the water-thrush.
Its song is abrupt, bright, and ringing. It contrasts
with its surroundings as does the flower of the blood-
root which you may have seen that day.

It is the large-billed or Louisiana water-thrush of
which I am speaking. The other species, the New
York water-accentor, is rarer with me, and goes
farther into the mountains.

The large-billed is a quick, shy, emphatic bird in
its manner. Some birds, such as the true thrushes,
impress one as being of a serene, contemplative dis-

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TWO BIRDS-NESTS

position; there is a kind of harmony and tranquil-
lity in all their movements; but the bird I am
speaking of is sharp, restless, hurried. Its song is
brilliant, its movements quick and decisive. You
hear its emphatic chirp, and see it dart swiftly be-
neath or through the branches that reach out over
the creek.

It nests upon the ground, or amid the roots of an
upturned tree in the woods near the water that it
haunts. Every season for many years I have looked
for the nest, but failed to find it till last summer.

My son and I were camping in the Catskills, when
one day, as I was slowly making my way down one of
those limpid trout streams, I saw a water-thrush dart
from out a pile of logs and driftwood that the floods
had left on the margin of the stream. The bird at
once betrayed much anxiety, and I knew the nest
was near.

I proceeded carefully to explore the pile of drift-
wood, and especially the roots of an upturned tree
which it held. I went over the mass almost inch by
inch several times. There was a little cavern in it,
a yard or more deep, where the light was dim; a
translucent pool of water formed the floor of it, and
kept me from passing its threshold. I suspected the
nest was in there amid the roots or broken branches,
but my eye failed to detect it. ;

“T will go on with my fishing,” I said, “and res
turn to-morrow and lay siege to this secret.”

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FAR AND NEAR

So on the morrow I returned, and carefully se-
creted myself on a mossy bank a few yards from the
pile of driftwood. Presently the parent bird came
with food in its beak, but instantly spying me, though
I fancied that in my recumbent position and faded
gray clothes I simulated well an old log, she grew
alarmed and refused to approach the nest.

She flitted nervously about from point to point,
her attention directed to me, and uttering a sharp,
chiding note. Soon her mate came, and thetwo birds
flitted about me, peering, attitudinizing, scolding.
The mother bird is always the bolder and more
demonstrative on such occasions. I was amused at
her arts and feints and her sudden fits of alarm.
Sometimes she would quickly become silent, and
stealthily approach the entrance of the little cavern
in the pile of driftwood; then, her fears and sus-
picions reviving, with emphatic chirps she would try
again to penetrate the mystery of that motionless,
prostrate form on the bank.

The dead branch of a tree that slanted down to
the bed of the stream near me was her favorite perch.
Inch by inch she would hop up it, her body mov-
ing like a bandmaster’s baton, her notes sharp and
emphatic, her wings slightly drooping, meanwhile
bringing first one eye and then the other to bear
upon the supposed danger.

While she was thus engaging my attention, I
saw the male quickly slip into the little cavern with

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TWO BIRDS-NESTS

loaded beak, and in a moment reappear. He ran
swiftly along the dry pebbles a few yards, and then
took to wing, and joined in the cry against me. In
a few moments he disappeared, presumably in quest
of more food.

The mother, after many feints and passes and
false moves, half-fearful of her own rashness, darted
into the little cavern also. She soon shot out from
it on nimble foot, as had her mate, then took to
wing, and to fresh peering and abuse of the strange
object on the bank.

The male was soon on the scene again, and after a
little flourishing, entered the shadow of the cavern
as before. Pausing a moment, the female did the
same.

Evidently their suspicions were beginning to be
lulled. They had seen fishermen many, a few every
day for weeks, and had grown used to them; these
had gone on about their business ; but this one
that tarried and seemed bent on finding out other
people’s business, — here was cause for alarm!

In less than half an hour I felt sure I had the
birds’ secret, — I had seen in the recesses of the
cavern the exact spot where they seemed to pause
a moment and then turn back. So I approached
the spot confidently ; I got down on my knees and
charged my eyes to find the nest.

I am surprised that they seem baffled. At the
particular niche or shelf in the mass of roots they

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FAR AND NEAR

report only moss or moist stones, — no nest there.
I peer long and long. The little pool of limpid water
keeps me five or six feet away.

Well, there must be some unseen hole or cavity
in there which leads to the nest beyond the reach of
the eye. But I will watch again and be sure. So I
retreat to the bank, and the same little comedy or
drama is played as before.

At last I am positive I can put my hand upon the
nest. I procure a fragment of a board, bridge over
the little pool, thrust my head into the dim light of
the cavity, and closely scan every inch of the surface.
No nest, says the eye. Then I will try another sense;
I will feel with my hand.

Slowly my hand explores the place; presently it
touches something soft and warm at the very spot
where I had seen the birds pause. It is the backs
of the young birds; they have flattened themselves
down until their beaks are on a level with the top of
the nest. They have baffled the eye because, in the
scant light, they blend perfectly with their surround-
ings and just fill the depression of the nest. The
hand, going behind form and color, finds them out.
I felt that I had penetrated one of the prettiest
secrets in all the woods, and got a new glimpse of
the art and cunning of a bird.

The young were between down and feather, of a
grayish slate color, and they played their part well.
At my approach they would settle down in the nest

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TWO BIRDS-NESTS

till, instead of five, they became one, and that one a
circular mass of dark bluish stone or fragment of
bark. When I withdrew or concealed myself, they
would rise up and their individual forms become
outlined.

Another new nest which it was my luck to find the
past summer was that of the worm-eating warbler, a
bird of the Carolinian fauna, that heretofore has not
been known to breed in our State— New York. It
was a new find, then, in a double sense, new to me
and new to the ornithology of the State.

One day in early June, as I was walking along a
path on the side of a bushy hill, near dense woods,
Thad a glimpse of a small brown bird that dashed
away from the bank but a few feet from me. I took
it to be the oven-bird.

Looking to the spot from whence it started, I saw
a bird with a striped head standing on the edge of a
nest in the side of the shelving bank, with something
white in its beak. I saw the heads of the young birds
beneath, and took in the situation instantly; I had
surprised the mother bird while she was waiting
upon her young. She stood motionless, half-turned
toward me, still keeping the white mass in her beak.

Neither of us stirred for a minute or two, and the
other parent made no sound, though he lingered but
a few yards away.

Presently I slowly withdrew, and sat down a few
paces away. The male bird now became quite un-

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FAR AND NEAR

easy, and flitted from bush to bush and uttered his
alarm chirp. The mother bird never stirred. I could
see her loaded beak from where I sat. In two or
three minutes she dropped or otherwise disposed of
her morsel, but kept her place above her young.
Then her mate, taking his cue from her, quieted
down and soon disappeared from view.

After long waiting I approached the nest, and
pausing ten feet away, regarded it some moments.
The bird never stirred. Then I came nearer, and
when I sat down within four or five feet of the nest,
the bird flew out upon the ground before me, and
sought to lure me away by practicing the old confi-
dence game that birds so often resort to on such
occasions.

She was seized with incipient paralysis in her
members; she dragged herself about upon the
ground; she quivered and tottered and panted with
open beak, and seemed on the point of going all to
pieces. Seeing this game did not work and that I
remained unmoved, she suddenly changed her tac-
tics; she flew up to a limb and gave me a piece of her
mind in no equivocal terms. This brought the male,
and true to his name, he had a worm in his beak.

Both now joined in the scolding, and the rumpus
attracted a vireo to the spot, who came to see what
the danger really was. But evidently the warblers
regarded his presence as an intrusion.

The nest was in the edge of the bank where the

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TWO BIRDS’-NESTS

soil was broken away a little, and was mainly com-
posed of dry leaves and pine needles. The young,
five in number, were probably a week old.

I came again the next day, and found the bird sit-
ting on the edge of the nest as before, and ready,
when I disturbed her, with the same arts to lure me
away. I paid frequent visits to the place thereafter
till the young had flown.

The song of the male — a little shuffling chant
much like that of Chippy — was frequently heard.
This warbler may be instantly known by its oliva-
ceous color and the four sharp black stripes on its
buff-colored head. It is one of the prettiest and most
interesting of the warblers.

VII
AUGUST DAYS

NE of our well-known poets, in personifying

August, represents her as coming with daisies
in her hair. But an August daisy is a sorry affair;
it is little more than an empty, or partly empty,
seed-vessel. In the Northern States the daisy is
in her girlhood and maidenhood in June; she be-
comes very matronly early in July, — fat, faded,
prosaic, — and by or before August she is practi-
cally defunct. T recall no flower whose career is more
typical of the life, say, of the average European
peasant woman, or of the women of barbarous
tribes, its grace and youthfulness pass so quickly
into stoutness, obesity, and withered old age. How
positively girlish and taking is the daisy during the
first few days of its blooming, while its snow-
white rays yet stand straight up and shield its ten-
der centre somewhat as a hood shields a girl’s face!
Presently it becomes a perfect disk and bares its
face to the sun; this is the stage of its young
womanhood. Then its yellow centre — its body —
begins to swell and become gross, the rays slowly
turn brown, and finally wither up and drop. It isa

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flower no longer, but a receptacle packed with
ripening seeds.

A relative of the daisy, the orange-colored hawk-
weed (Hieracitum aurantiacum), which within the
past twenty years has spread far and wide over
New York and New England, is often at the height
of its beauty in August, when its deep vivid orange
is a delight to the eye. It repeats in our meadows
and upon our hilltops the flame of the columbine of
May, intensified. The personified August with these
flowers in her hair would challenge our admiration
and not our criticism. Unlike the daisy, it quickly
sprouts again when cut down with the grass in the
meadows, and renews its bloom. Parts of New Eng-
land, at least, have a native August flower quite as
brilliant as the hawkweed just described, and far
less a usurper; I refer to meadow-beauty, or rhexia,
found near the coast, which suggests a purple
evening primrose.

Nature has, for the most part, lost her delicate
tints in August. She is tanned, hirsute, freckled, like
one long exposed to the sun. Her touch is strong
and vivid. The coarser, commoner wayside flowers
now appear, — vervain, eupatorium, mimulus, the
various mints, asters, golden-rod, thistles, fireweed,
mulleins, motherwort, catnip, blueweed, turtle-
head, sunflowers, clematis, evening primrose, lobe-
lia, gerardia, and, in the marshes of the lower Hud-
son, marshmallows, and vast masses of the purple

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AUGUST DAYS

loosestrife. Mass and intensity take the place of
delicacy and furtiveness. The spirit of Nature has
grown bold and aggressive; it is rank and coarse;
she flaunts her weeds in our faces. She wears a
thistle on her bosom. But I must not forget the deli-
cate rose gerardia, which she also wears upon her
bosom, and which suggests that, before the season
closes, Nature is getting her hand ready for her deli-
cate spring flora. With me this gerardia lines open
paths over dry knolls in the woods, and its little
purple bells and smooth, slender leaves form one of
the most exquisite tangles of flowers and foliage of
the whole summer. It is August matching the color
and delicacy of form of the fringed polygala of May.
I know a half-wild field bordering a wood, which is
red with strawberries in June and pink with gerar-
dia in August.

One may still gather the matchless white pond-
lily in this month, though this flower is in the height
of its glory earlier in the season, except in the north-
ern lakes.

A very delicate and beautiful marsh flower that
may be found on the borders of lakes in northern
New York and New England is the horned bladder-
wort, — yellow, fragrant, and striking in form, like a
miniature old-fashioned bonnet, when bonnets cov-
ered the head and projected beyond the face, instead
of hovering doubtfully above the scalp. The horn
curves down and out like a long chin from a face hid-

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den within the bonnet. I have found this rare flower
in the Adirondacks and in Maine. It may doubtless
be found in Canada, and in Michigan and Wis-
consin. Britton and Brown say “south to Florida
and Texas.” Itis the most fragrant August flower
known to me. This month has not many fragrant
flowers to boast of. Besides the above and the pond-
lily I recall two others, — the small purple fringed-
orchis and a species of lady’s-tresses (Spiranthes
cernua).

The characteristic odors of August are from fruit
— grapes, peaches, apples, pears, melons — and the
ripening grain; yes, and the blooming buckwheat.
Of all the crop and farm odors this last is the most
pronounced and honeyed, rivaling that of the flower-
ing locust of May and of the linden in July.

The mistakes of our lesser poets in dealing with
nature themes might furnish me with many a text in
this connection. Thus one of them makes the call of
the phcebe-bird prominent in August. One would
infer from the poem that the phoebe was not heard
during any other month. Now it is possible that
the poet heard the pheebe in August, but if so, the
occurrence was exceptional, and it is more proba-
ble that it was the wood pewee that he heard. The
pheebe is most noticeable in April and early May,
and its characteristic call is not often heard till the
sun is well up in the sky. Most of our song-birds
are silent in August, or sing only fitfully, as do the

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AUGUST DAYS

song sparrow and the oriole. The real August song-
ster, and the bird that one comes to associate with
the slow, drowsy days, is the indigo-bird. After
midsummer its song, delivered from the top of some
small tree in the pasture or a bushy field, falls upon
the ear with a peculiar languid, midsummery effect.
The boys and girls gathering raspberries and black-
berries hear it; the stroller through the upland fields,
or lounger in the shade of maple or linden, probably
hears no bird-song but this, if he even distinguishes
this from the more strident insect voices. The plum-
age of the bird is more or less faded by this time,
the vivid indigo of early June is lightly brushed with
a dull sooty shade, but the song is nearly as full as
the earlier strain, and in the dearth of bird voices is
even more noticeable. I do not now recall that any
of our poets have embalmed this little cerulean song-
ster in their verse.

One may also occasionally hear the red-eyed vireo
in August, but it is low tide with him too. His song
has a reminiscent air, like that of the indigo. The
whip-poor-will calls fitfully in this month, and may
be heard even in September; but he quickly checks
himself, as if he knew it was out of season. In the
Adirondacks I have heard the speckled Canada
warbler in August, and the white-throated sparrow.
But nearly all the migratory birds begin to get rest-
less during this month. They cut loose from their
nesting-haunts and drift through the woods in pro-

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miscuous bands, and many of them start on their
southern journey. From my woods along the Hud-
son the warblers all disappear before the middle of
the month. Some of them are probably in hiding
during the moulting season. The orioles begin to
move south about the middle of the month, and by
the first of September the last of them have passed.
They occasionally sing in a suppressed tone during
this migration, probably the young males trying their
instruments. It is at this time, when full of frolic
and mischief, like any other emigrants with faces
set to new lands, that they make such havoc in the
Hudson River vineyards. They seem to puncture
the grapes in the spirit of pure wantonness, or as if
on a wager as to who can puncture the most. The
swallows — the cliff and the barn —all leave in
August, usually by the 20th, though the swift may
be seen as late as October. I notice that our poets
often detain the swallows much beyond the proper
date. One makesthem perch upon the barn in Oc-
tober. Another makes them noisy about the eaves
in Indian summer. An English poet makes the swal-
low go at November’s bidding. The tree swallow may
often be seen migrating in countless numbers along
the coast in early October, but long ere this date the
barn and the cliff swallows are in tropical climes.
They begin to flock, and apparently rehearse the
migrating programme, in July.

The bobolinks go in early August with the red-

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AUGUST DAYS

shouldered starlings, and along the Potomac and
Chesapeake Bay become the reed-birds of sports-
men. One often hears them in this month calling
from high in the air as they journey southward from
more northern latitudes.

About the most noticeable bird of August in New
York and New England is the yellowbird, or gold-
finch. This is one of the last birds to nest, seldom
hatching its eggs till late in July. It seems as if a
particular kind of food were required to rear its
brood, which cannot be had at an earlier date. The
seed of the common thistle is apparently its main-
stay. ‘There is no prettier sight at this season than
a troop of young goldfinches, led by their parents,
going from thistle to thistle along the roadside and
pecking the ripe heads to pieces for the seed. The
plaintive call of the young is one of the charac-
teristic August sounds. Their nests are frequently
destroyed, or the eggs thrown from them, by the
terrific July thunder-showers. Last season a pair
had a nest on the slender branch of a maple in front
of the door of the house where I was staying. The
eggs were being deposited, and the happy pair had
many a loving conversation about them many times
each day, when one afternoon a very violent storm
arose which made the branches of the trees stream
out like wildly disheveled hair, quite turning over
those on the windward side, and emptying the pretty
nest of its eggs. In such cases the birds build anew,

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—a delay that may bring the incubation into
August. Such an accident had probably befallen a
pair of which I one season made this note in my
note-book, under date of August 6: —

“A goldfinches’ nest in the maple-tree near the
window where I write, the female sitting on four pale
bluish-white eggs ; the male feeds her on the nest ;
whenever she hears his voice she calls incessantly,
much after the manner of the young birds, —the
only case I recall of the sitting bird calling while in
the act of incubation. The male evidently brings the
food in his crop, or at least well back in his beak or
throat, as it takes him several moments to deliver it
to his mate, which he does by separate morsels. The
male, when disturbed by a rival, utters the same
note as he pursues his enemy from point to point
that the female does when calling to him. It does
not sound like a note of anger, but of love and con-
fidence.”

As the bird-songs fail, the insect harpers and fid-
dlers begin. August is the heyday of these musi-
cians. The katydid begins to “work her chromatic
reed” early in the month, and with her comes that
pulsing, purring monotone of the little pale tree-
crickets. These last fill the August twilight with a
soft, rhythmic undertone of sound, which forms a
sort of background for the loud, strident notes of the
katydids.

August, too, is the month of the screaming, high-

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AUGUST DAYS

sailing hawks. The young are now fully fledged,
and they love to circle and scream far above the
mountain’s crest all the tranquil afternoon. Some-
times one sees them against the slowly changing
and swelling thunder-heads that so often burden
the horizon at this season.

It is on the dewy August mornings that one notices
the webs of the little spiders in the newly mown
meadows. They look like gossamer napkins spread
out upon the grass, — thousands of napkins far
and near. The farmer looks upon it as a sign of
rain; but the napkins are there every day; only a
heavier dew makes them more pronounced one
morning than another.

Along the paths where my walks oftenest lead me
in August, in rather low, bushy, wet grounds, the
banner flower is a species of purple boneset, or trum-
pet-weed, so called, I suppose, because its stem is
hollow. It often stands up seven or eight feet high,
crowned with a great mass of dull purple bloom, and
leads the ranks of lesser weeds and plants like a
great chieftain. Its humbler servitors are white
boneset and swamp milkweed, while climbing bone-
set trails its wreaths over the brookside bushes not
far away. A much more choice and brilliant purple,
like some invasion of metropolitan fashion into a
rural congregation, is given to a near-by marsh by the
purple loosestrife. During‘the latter half of August
the bog is all aflame with it. There is a wonderful

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FAR AND NEAR

style about this plant, either singly or in masses. Its
suggestion is as distinctly feminine as that of the
trumpet-weed is masculine.

When the poet personifies August, let him fill her
arms with some of these flowers, or place upon her
brows a spray of wild clematis, which during this
month throws its bridal wreaths so freely over our
bushy, unkempt waysides and fence corners. After
you have crowned and adored your personified
August in this way, then give the finishing touch
with the scarlet raceme of the cardinal flower,
flaming from the sheaf of ranker growths in her
arms. How this brilliant bit of color, glassing
itself in a dark, still pool, lights up and affects the
vague, shadowy background upon which it is pro-
jected!

In August the “waters blossom.” This is the
term the country people in my section apply to a
phenomenon which appears in the more sluggish
streams and ponds during this month. When ex-
amined closely, the water appears to be filled with
particles of very fine meal. I suspect, though I do
not know, that these floating particles are the spores
of some species of fresh-water alga; or they may
be what are called zoéspores. The alge are at their
rankest during August. Great masses of some
species commonly called “ frogs’ spawn” rise to the
surface of the Hudson and float up and down with
the tide, — green unclean-looking masses, many

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AUGUST DAYS

yards in extent. The dog-star seems to invoke these
fermenting masses from the deep. They suggest
decay, but they are only the riot of the lower forms
of vegetable life.

August, too, is the month of the mushrooms, —
those curious abnormal flowers of a hidden or sub-
terranean vegetation, invoked by heat and moisture
from darkness and decay as the summer wanes. Do
they not suggest something sickly and uncanny in
Nature? her unwholesome dreams and night fan-
cies, her pale superstitions ; her myths and legends
and occult lore taking shape in them, spectral and
fantastic, at times hinting something libidinous and
unseemly: vegetables with gills, fibreless, bloodless;
earth-flesh, often offensive, unclean, immodest, often
of rare beauty and delicacy, of many shades and
colors — creamy white, red, yellow, brown, — now
the hue of an orange, now of a tomato, now of a
potato, some edible, some poisonous, some shaped
like spread umbrellas, some like umbrellas reversed
by the wind, —the sickly whims and fancies of
Nature, some imp of the earth mocking and tra-
vestying the things of the day. Under my evergreens
I saw a large white disk struggling up through the
leaves and the débris like the full moon through
clouds and vapors. This simile is doubtless sug-
gested to my mind by a line of a Southern poet,
Madison Cawein, which J look upon as one of the
best descriptive lines in recent nature poetry: —

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“ The slow toadstool comes bulging, moony white,
Through loosening loam.’’

Sometimes this moon of the loam is red, or golden,
or bronzed; or it is so small that it suggests only a
star. The shy wood folk seem to know the edible
mushrooms, and I notice often eat away the stalk
and nibble at the top or pileus.

One day two friends came to see me with some-
thing wrapped up in their handkerchiefs. They said
they had brought their dinner with them, — they
had gathered it in the woods as they came along,
—beefsteak mushrooms. The beefsteak was duly
cooked and my friends ate of it with a relish. A por-
tion was left, which my dog attacked rather doubt-
ingly, and then turned away from, with the look of
one who has been cheated. Mock-meat, that is what
it was, — a curious parody upon a steak, as the dog
soon found out. I know a man who boasts of hav-
ing identified and eaten seventy-five different spe-
cies. When the season is a good one for mushrooms,
he snaps his fingers at the meat trust, even going to
the extent of drying certain kinds to be used for
soup in the winter.

The decay of a mushroom parodies that of real
flesh, —a kind of unholy rotting ending in black-
ness and stench. Some species imitate jelly, — mock
calves’-foot jelly, which soon melts down and be-
comes an uncanny mass. Occasionally I see a blue-

212

AUGUST DAYS

gilled mushroom, —an infusion of indigo in its cells.
How forbidding it looks! Yesterday in the August
woods I saw a tiny mushroom like a fairy parasol of
a Japanese type, — its top delicately fluted.

During the steaming, dripping, murky, and
muggy dog-days that sometimes come the latter
half of August, how this fungus growth runs riot in
the woods and in the fields too, —a kind of sacri-
legious vegetation mocking Nature’s saner and more
wholesome handiwork,—the flowers of death,
vegetable spectres. :

August days are for the most part tranquil days;
the fret and hurry of the season are over. We are on
the threshold of autumn. Nature dreams and med-
itates; her veins no longer thrill with the eager,
frenzied sap; she ripens and hardens her growths;
she concentrates; she begins to make ready for
winter. The buds for next year are formed during
this month, and her nuts and seeds and bulbs finish
storing up food for the future plant.

From my outlook upon the Hudson the days are
placid, the river is placid, the boughs of the trees
gently wag, the bees make vanishing-lines through
the air. The passing boats create a great commotion
in the water, converting it from a cool, smooth,
shadowy surface to one pulsing and agitated. The
pulsations go shoreward in long, dark, rolling, glassy
swells. The grapes are purpling in the vineyard ;
the apples and pears are coloring in the orchard ;

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FAR AND NEAR

the corn is glazing in the field; the oats are ripe
for the cradle; grasshoppers poise and shuffle above
the dry road; yellow butterflies mount upward face
to face; thistledown drifts by on the breeze; a
sparrow sings fitfully now and then; dusty wheelmen
go by on their summer vacation tours ; boats ap-
pear upon the river loaded with gay excursionists,
and on every hand the stress and urge of life have
abated.

Vil
BABES IN THE WOODS

NE day in early May, Ted and I made an expe-
dition to the Shattega, astill, dark, deep stream
that loiters silently through the woods not far from
my cabin. As we paddled along, we were on the alert
for any bit of wild life of bird or beast that might
tum up. Ted was especially on the lookout for
birds’-nests, and many times I pushed the boat up
close to the bank that he might explore with his slen-
der arm the cavities the woodpeckers had made in
the dead tree trunks that bordered or overhung the
stream. Only once did he bring out a handful of ma-
terial that suggested a bird’s-nest, and on examining
it, sure enough, there was a bird’s egg, the egg of the
chickadee. The boy had clutched the nest, egg and
all, and had made such a wreck of the former that
we concluded it was useless to try to restore it and
return it to the cavity. So Ted added the egg to his
collection, and, I suspect, regretted the result of his
eager dive into the hollow stub less than I did.
There were so many of these abandoned wood-
pecker chambers in the small dead trees as we went
along that I determined to secure the section of a tree
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FAR AND NEAR

containing a good one to take home and put up for
thebluebirds. “ Why don’t the bluebirds occupy them
here?” inquired Ted. “Oh,” I replied, “bluebirds
do not come so far into the woods as this. They
prefer nesting-places in the open, and near human
habitations.” After carefully scrutinizing several of
the trees, we at last saw one that seemed to fill the bill.
It was a small dead tree trunk seven or eight inches
in diameter, that leaned out over the water, and
from which the top had been broken. The hole,
round and firm, was ten or twelve feet above us.
After considerable effort I succeeded in breaking the
stub off near the ground, and brought it down into
the boat. “ Just the thing,” I said ; “surely the blue-
birds will prefer this to an artificial box.” But, lo
and behold, it already had bluebirds in it! We
had not heard a sound or seen a feather till the
trunk was in our hands, when, on peering into the
cavity, we discovered two young bluebirds about
half grown. This was a predicament indeed! My
venture had proved to be more rash and regretta-
ble than Ted’s.

Well, the only thing we could do was to stand the
tree trunk up again as well as we could, and as near
as we could to where it had stood before. This was
no easy thing. But after a time we had it fairly
well replaced, one end standing in the mud of the
shallow water and the other resting against a tree.
This left the hole to the nest about ten feet below and

216

BABES IN THE WOODS

to one side of its former position. Just then we heard
the voice of one of the parent birds, and we quickly
paddled to the other side of the stream, fifty feet
away, to watch her proceedings, saying to each other,
“Too bad,” “Too bad.” The mother bird had a
large beetle in her beak. She alighted upon a limb a
few feet above the former site of her nest, looked
down upon us, uttered a note or two, and then
dropped down confidently to the point in the vacant
air where the entrance to her nest had been but a few
moments before. Here she hovered on the wing a
second or two, looking for something that was not
there, and then returned to the perch she had just
left, apparently not a little disturbed. She hammered
the beetle rather excitedly upon the limb a few times,
as if it were in some way at fault, then dropped
down to try for her nest again. Only vacant air
there! She hovers and hovers, her blue wings flicker-
ing in the checkered light; surely that precious hole
must be there; but no, again she is bafiled, and again
she returns to her perch, and mauls the poor beetle
till it must be reduced to a pulp. Then she makes
a third attempt, then a fourth, and a fifth, and a
sixth, till she becomes very much excited. “What
could have happened? am I dreaming? has that
beetle hoodooed me?” she seems to say, and in
her dismay she lets the bug drop, and looks bewil-
deredly about her. Then she flies away through the
woods, calling. “Going for her mate,” I said to
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FAR AND NEAR

Ted. “She is in deep trouble, and she wants sym-
pathy and help.”

In a few minutes we heard her mate answer, and
presently the two birds came hurrying to the spot,
both with loaded beaks. They perched upon the
familiar limb above the site of the nest, and the mate
seemed to say, “My dear, what has happened to
you? I can find that nest.”” And he dived down, and
brought up in the empty air just as the mother had
done. How he winnowed it with his eager wings!
how he seemed to bear on to that blank space! His
mate sat regarding him intently, confident, I think,
that he would find the clew. But he did not. Baffled
and excited, he returned to the perch beside her.
Then she tried again, then he rushed down once
more, then they both assaulted the place, but it
would not give up its secret. They talked, they en-
couraged each other, and they kept up the search,
now one, now the other, now both together. Some-
times they dropped down to within a few feet of the
entrance to the nest, and we thought they would
surely find it. No, their minds and eyes were in-
tent only upon that square foot of space where the
nest had been. Soon they withdrew to a large limb
many feet higher up, and seemed to say to them-
selves, “Well, it is not there, but it must be here
somewhere ; let us look about.” A few minutes
elapsed, when we saw the mother bird spring from
her perch and go straight as an arrow to the nest.

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BABES IN THE WOODS

Her maternal eye had proved the quicker. She had
found her young. Something like reason and com-
mon-sense had come to her rescue; she had taken
time to look about, and behold! there was that
precious doorway. She thrust her head into it, then
sent back a call to her mate, then went farther in,
then withdrew. “Yes, it is true, they are here, they
are here!” Then she went in again, gave them the
food in her beak, and then gave place to her mate,
who, after similar demonstrations of joy, also gave
them his morsel.

Ted and I breathed freer. A burden had been
taken from our minds and hearts, and we went cheer-
fully on our way. We had learned something, too;
we had learned that when in the deep woods you
think of bluebirds, bluebirds may be nearer you
than you think.

The young rabbits I saw one day in early May
on the edge of a clearing in the woods suggested
babies quite as much as the bluebirds did. The
mother had come out of the cover of the rocks and
bushes and made her nest on a dry knoll in the
edge of a muck swamp where the ground had been
cleared only a week or two before. The man at
work with the grubbing-hoe came near striking into
the nest, when the young sprang out. He caught
them and put them back under their cover and
resumed his work in another place. In the after-

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FAR AND NEAR

noon I happened that way. He told me what he had
found, and pointed to the spot afew yards off. I ap-
proached the place cautiously and began to scan
the ground at my feet. There was no bush or stump
or weed or stone to distract my eye, — only the back
of a small knoll, brown with fern stubble and dry
fern leaves.

“T can see no nest or rabbits here,” I said to
George. “Where are they?” So he came up, and
stooping over, lifted up a tiny coverlid of dry fern
stalks, in which were mingled tufts of gray hair, and
disclosed a small depression in the ground, where
sat three little rabbits that one might almost have
held in the palm of his hand. Their ears were de-
pressed, their eyes shone, and their hearts beat fast.
In a moment they sprang out; we covered them with
our hats and hands, and restored them to the nest
as gently as we could, pulling their blanket over
them. But they pushed their heads up through it and
between our fingers in their efforts to escape. We
held them down and finally quieted them, and then
carefully withdrew. I do not know how long they
remained in the nest, but when I came the next day
with some friends, we found the nest empty. One
of my friends, who was a, naturalist, picked up the
cover of ferns and hair and examined it, and let it
fall in pieces to the ground. The weather was very
warm; we fancied the mother had taken her fam-
ily into the bush. A night or two after was very

220

BABES IN THE WOODS

cold, with heavy frost. The day following I again
passed the nest, and was surprised to see two little
rabbits sitting side by side in it. As they did not
move, I touched them, and found them dead and
cold. The mother, on the approach of the cold wave,
had evidently brought her young back to the nest,
and having no cover over them, they had perished
of the frost. One would have thought she would
stay by them to keep them warm, or else cover them
with the fragments of the old blanket. Though of
course it is possible that she herself had fallen a
victim to some enemy, and that the young had died
of hunger, seeking in their last extremity the cradle
in which they were born. The fate of the third one
I do not know. I left the two babies in the nest as I
had found them.

On the third day I came that way again with Ted.
To my surprise, the two baby rabbits had disap-
peared. But what was that sticking up through the
soil in the bottom of the cavity? It was the end
of one tiny ear, and beneath it we found the two
young rabbits carefully buried. We exhumed them
and brought them forth. They had been literally
buried. What or who had performed these last sad
rites? The mother? I know not. Not a hair of
them had been injured, as far as we could see, but
the little bodies had been carefully put from sight,
not by the use of leaves, as the robins covered the
children in the nursery tale, but by soil. We re-

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FAR AND NEAR

placed them in their double grave and went on our
way.

It has since occurred to me that this burying was
probably the work of a species of beetle, which re-
moved the ground beneath them, letting the bodies
settle into the earth.

IX
A LOST FEBRUARY

E lost February and found August, for
Jamaica is a country cursed with perpetual
summer. In four days we steamed straight through
two seasons. When we left Philadelphia on the 30th
of January, 1902, the rigors of midwinter were
upon us, a typical northeast snowstorm was settling
down to its best work, the mercury was low in the
teens, the ship’s decks were piled with snow, and the
friends that came to see us off shivered in their
warmest wraps. The steamer made her way slowly
through the drifting ice and sodden snow sheets that
covered the Delaware, and did not reach the clear
waters of the bay till night had fallen.

The next day winter seemed far behind us. We
were in May; the day after we ran into June, and
the shade of the awnings began to be acceptable; the
third day we were in July; the captain blossomed
out in his white duck suit; we sought the shade of
the ship eagerly ; on the fourth day it was August,
and August it continued all the while that we were
in Jamaica.

On the third day, in the July weather, as I came

223

>

FAR AND NEAR

up on deck in the morning, I caught my first sight
of tropic seas, — emerald, indigo, violet, blending
and shifting there over the surface of the placid
water, and suggesting some realm of fable and
romance.

What are those white birds that go in loose flocks,
skimming the surface of the water, then suddenly
disappearing ? a snowbird where snow never falls?
Then, as more appear, it suddenly dawns upon me
that I am seeing my first flying-fish. No bird has
such a strenuous, machine-like flight as that. I am
on the shady side of the ship, and the afternoon sun,
falling upon the winged fishes, makes them, against
the deep blue of the sea, appear almost snow white.
Every few minutes, one or two, or a dozen, would
suddenly break from the water and go spinning away
from the ship as straight as arrows, striking the water
again several hundred feet away. It is not the flight
of a bird but of a toy machine, something wound up
and, if rightly launched, calculated to go fifty or one
hundred yards in a right line. It is a tour de force.
There is no freedom or mastery in it as in a bird’s
flight. It reminds one of the excursions of certain
persons into poetry, — my own, for instance. How
determined it is! but how restricted and mechanical!
Sometimes the flyer would suddenly collapse after a
few feet, as if it had not launched itself at just the
right angle. Often it would cut through the crests
of the small waves, never ‘swerving from a right

224

A LOST FEBRUARY

line. No power to swoop, or ‘soar, or ride the air;
scales instead of feathers; fins in lieu of quills; a
creature out of its element, making surprising head-
way there for a brief moment; very pretty and
novel, but, I fancy, showing none of the grace and
mastery that it does beneath the wave. At night one
fell upon the deck of the ship, caught up and car-
ried there, the officer said, by a gust of wind. Ithink
an ingenious person might construct a tin fish with
wings that would spin through the air in much the
same way.

The flight of the fish is evidently its play, and not
its serious business in life, though it is suggested
that it is also a means of enabling it to escape its
enemies. These fish seemed on this occasion to be
racing with one another, like the dolphins, or as if
on a wager as to which could stay in the air the
longest and cover the greatest distance.

If, in the evolution of animal life upon the globe,
the birds emerged from the fishes and reptiles, as
the biologists teach, is this sport of the flying-fish all
that now remains of the grand impulse that brought
about that transformation? An upward striving of
the creative energy that changed scales into feathers,
and fins into wings, and peopled the air with the
thousand forms of bird life, now surviving only in
this pretty and odd freak of the flying-fish ?

On the fourth day, in the midsummer tempera-
ture, we began to thread our way amid the tropic or

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FAR AND NEAR

semi-tropic islands, the Bahamas, —San Salvador
there dimly seen on our right, and, later, Crooked
Island in fuller view upon our left. Soon the moun-
tains of Cuba were dim shadows there to the west
of us, and on the morning of the fifth day, the Blue
Mountains of Jamaica were dimly seen on the
southern horizon. A few hours later they stood up
like larger Catskills, presenting, in their higher
peaks, much the same outlines.

The harbor of Port Antonio, which we entered in
mid-afternoon, is like a pocket in a woman’s dress;
you would never suspect its presence. Tucked away
in one of the folds of the mountainous coast, it
makes no sign till the bow of the ship begins to poke
its way in. Small and cozy and picturesque, as I
looked down at the water against the steamer’s
side, it seemed as blue and opaque as blue paint.
The dense, stiff, shining foliage of the vegetation
upon the slopes about us and the rows of cocoanut
palms upon the beach were novel sights to northern
eyes.

How absurd seemed the woolen blankets and over-
coats we were obliged to carry to our lodging-house.
We spent but one night in Port Antonio, in a clean
lodging-house kept by a Canadian family lately
from New Brunswick. I shall not soon forget a slen-
der, solemn-faced little girl of five or six years, who
followed me about, eying me very seriously and in-
tently, till she finally said: “I know you are Santa

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A LOST FEBRUARY

Claus, aren’t you? I know you are, and I’m going
to tell you what I want. I want a cradle for my dolly
and a new hat and a little gold watch,” — all this
said very slowly and solemnly, and with a sort of
hushed, awed air, closely watching my face the while.
I saw the child was in dead earnest, so I told her I
was not Santa Claus. “Yes, you are, I know you
are,” she replied. “Will you bring me these things ?
I should like them now. Is your pack here?” I
could not shake her off, and finally had to tell her
that my pack was on the steamer, and that I would
see her in the morning if it contained the things
she wanted. Poor child! her faith in Santa Claus,
and her belief that she had at last caught him, was
pathetic.

The next morning we took the train to Kingston,
going second class as weshould have done in Eng-
land. A colored conductor, colored brakemen, and
colored station agents were novelties to us.

Here is a glimpse of a winter day, February 5,
in Kingston : “I am sitting on a veranda, shut off
from the street by a high brick wall pierced by a
tall gate, and flanked by a parched flower garden
where a few roses only are in bloom. No rain to
speak of since last fall. An atmosphere like that
of our August. Mercury 82°; soft, familiar clouds
slowly drifting over a blue midsummer sky. Tur-
key buzzards sailing, forever sailing, far and near ;
their shadows sweep across the low roofs of the

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FAR AND NEAR

houses. Many swifts — the palm swift — diving in
the air, — smaller and more nimble of wing than
our swift. The low gray shingle roofs of the houses
visible on all hands; women constantly passing in
the streets with trays or baskets on their heads
loaded with fruit, or yams, or cooked food, or other
wares, and sounding their shrill, wild street cries.
Can’t understand one of them. Now a yellow man
with a push-cart with some cooling drink goes by.
It seems as if a large percentage of the population
roust be on the street peddling, — all negroes. Then
comes the familiar hum and grind of the trolley
cars. Fleet-footed lizards dart here and there in the
shrubbery, or on the garden wall. A large green
one with a purple tail. The Blue Mountains back
of New Castle stand up against the sky, their tops
muffled in clouds. Occasionally a mass of cloud
drifts out toward the plain below and lets down thin
sheets of rain, but does not come far. The arid plain
seems to dissipate it or drive it back.”

To escape from the tourist-infested portion of the
island and to get a taste of its wilder interior, we
engaged a carriage and driver, and set out early one
morning along the superb road that leads to Spanish
Town and thence on to Bog Walk and Ewarton.

The road was smooth and hard but dusty, and
the vegetation on either side — vines, bushes, trees,
often forming a solid impenetrable wall — was pow-
dered with dust as in midsummer at home. The

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A LOST FEBRUARY

most common vine by the roadside everywhere in
Jamaica is a wild morning-glory of many colors,
similar to our own, but growing far more luxuri-
antly, and the crimson bougainvillea.

As you pass along the country highways, you
come to have a half-defined feeling that some time
in the past there must have been a huge greenhouse
here that has gone to decay, and that the plants and
shrubs and vines have all escaped and gone wild,
invading the fields and woods, and running over
the banks and fences. Tender exotics that one sees
at home carefully nursed in the windows by our
women are here the common weeds by the road-
side.

This trip into the interior lasted five days, tak-
ing us through the wilder, ruggeder portions of the
island for about eighty miles, ending on the railroad
at Balaclava. It brought us pretty close to the real
life of the people, and, a few times, a little closer to
wild nature than was conducive to our comfort.
Touch Nature too familiarly here, — sit down by
the roadside, or recline under a tree, — and she pep-
pers you with a kind of live pepper in the shape
of minute ticks, called also grass lice, that pene-
trate your clothing and make you burn and itch,
until by the aid of your companions you have re-
moved the last adhesive speck from your skin.
These living germs take root very quickly, and if
left, grow to the size of a small bean. They prey

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upon the cattle and other live-stock. One could see
them on the under, less hairy parts of the cows,
looking like large warts. We often saw a large black
bird, the kling-kling, perched on the backs of the
cattle, making a meal off these gorged ticks. One
day one of our party made an excursion of a few rods
into the bush, and returned with his coat skirts brown
with these dust-like torments. Some colored girls
who chanced to be passing came to our aid, and
helped whip the ticks off with a certain leafy shrub
that they said was death to them. No, you can-
not make love to Nature in the tropics as you can in
our zone. Beware how you embrace her. She is a
lousy beggar, a stinging reptile, a brazen wanton, or
a barbaric princess, — just as you happen to find her.
Ah, me! even at her best she has not the constancy,
the tenderness, the self-forgetfulness, of the Nature
of more temperate climes. I must make one excep-
tion: these Jamaican streams and rivers, beautiful
with the beauty of the purest mountain brooks, have
nothing suggestive of the tropics about them; one’s
heart goes out to them at once. Theirs are the
clear, shining faces of old friends, of many a trout
camp in the Catskills and Adirondack woods.
Limpid and pure as melted snow, no sediment, no
earth stain, the pebbles and boulders with which they
are paved are washed and scoured as if yesterday
had been a day of purification with them; they lack
only the coolness of our very best mountain streams.
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One would stoop in his thirst to drink from a copious
limpid spring gushing out of the mountain-side, but
experience a feeling of surprise, if not of repugnance,
to find the water as warm as in a bathing-pool. This
cannot be the true source, you half think; the water
must have been flowing a long way in the sun some-
where. One is apt to forget that the temperature of
a spring represents, pretty nearly, the average yearly
temperature of a locality. They have a way in Ja-
maica of reducing the temperature of the drinking-
water many degrees by letting it drip slowly through
a porous earthen vessel into a pitcher beneath it.
Treated thus, one soon comes to regard it as very
satisfactory.

Our course that first day soon brought us to the
Rio Cobre, along the rocky banks of which the road
leisurely took its way to Bog Walk. All the most
pleasing features of a clear, rapid, boulder-strewn
mountain river, the Rio Cobre presents. The rocks
are of limestone, old, worm-eaten, and very pictur-
esque, and the great lucid pools suggested trout and
salmon, though they held nothing finer than mullets.
On this stream we passed the plant that turns the
force of its falls and rapids into electricity, and so
furnishes the power that runs the trolley lines in
Kingston, twenty miles away.

We passed the night at a lodging-house (no hotels
in the country in Jamaica) in Ewarton, and were
fairly well cared for by the yellow landlady and her

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son. The most novel scene I witnessed at Ewarton
was that of two old negroes next morning pounding
coffee in big mortar-like vessels made out of the
trunks of trees. They used a heavy club, and punched
and punched and stirred the green coffee to loosen
the chaff or skins from the berry, keeping up in the
mean time a wild, plaintive chant to which their
pounding was timed. They were grizzled and old,
and the scene was curious and interesting. Yes, and I
recall a famishing dog, scarcely more than a walking
skeleton, going about the street licking the ground
where a. little flour had been spilt.

From Ewarton our course took us over wooded
hills and mountains, with here and there a rude
clearing, to Chapelton in the valley of the Rio
Minho, a distance of about twenty-five miles. My
son and Mr. Kellogg, to work off some of their super-
fluous American energy, walked the whole distance,
fording the Rio Minho a half-dozen or more times in
the course of the afternoon. I stuck to the carriage,
walking only when I got tired of riding. Bridges are
few over these rapid J. amaican streams, but fording
them at this season was a trifling matter. On many
of the smaller streams, in lieu of a bridge, a wall is
built across and the space above it filled in with
gravel, resulting in a wide, shallow sheet of water
through which carts and pedestrians pass easily, —
a new device in road-making to our eyes.

I walked several hours up the valley of the Rio

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Minho, a very beautiful stream. A colored boy of
twelve, with a singularly sweet face, joined us, and
clung closely to me, — a real little comrade. Finally
he said: “I like you, it does not tire me to walk
with you. When we likes a man, it is fun ;” again,
“ When we has pleasant company, it makes the way
seem short.” Later he confessed: “I do love you,
and your son, too. When I love a man, I cannot
always tell him, but I can tell you.” He said he
would write me a letter, so I wrote my name and
address on a dry bamboo leaf for him. He was a
winsome lad, and I shall not soon forget him.
What does one see as he passes along the road in
the interior of Jamaica? He sees a superb highway,
round and smooth and winding, leading on in front
of him, and on either hand bushes and trees and
woods; never an open, smooth, cleared field as at
home; at best, open glades and long vistas through
the groves of logwood and cottonwood. The log-
wood groves suggest orchards, — low, branching
trees, with curious fluted or beaded trunks and
smooth, yellowish, mottled bark,— each tree sug-
gesting a bundle of small columns welded together.
The effect was very novel and pretty. The cotton-
woods are wide-branching, sturdy-looking trees,
like our oaks. Few signs of agriculture as we know
it at home are visible; the wattled bamboo huts of
the negroes here and there in the bush are sur-
rounded by a few banana or breadfruit or orange
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trees, with a little patch of half-cultivated yams ;
there are few cattle, more donkeys, and many black,
lean pigs ; colored people on the road everywhere,
men, women, and children, — mostly women and
children, — with small or large burdens upon their
heads, going to their work in the bush or going to
and returning from market. The smallest bundle
is here carried upon the head.

I think it was this day that I first made the
acquaintance of the sensitive plant, — “shame lady,”
the natives call it. I saw a ball of delicate pink
bloom, the size of a boy’s marble, amid a mass
of small, fine, pinnate leaves by the roadside. I
plucked the flower and a branch of the plant with it,
when lo! as I turned my eyes from the flower to the
leaves, the latter were not the ones I thought I had
gathered. I plucked more, and then saw the sudden
change in the appearance of the leaves: the moment
they were touched they shut up like a book, the
two halves hinging on the midrib. You stoop and
gather a spray of many-divided small leaves, — you
rise up with something in your hand that has an
entirely different aspect, the closed leaves present-
ing only sharp edges to you. Touch the plant with
your foot, or stick, ever so gently, and its aspect
changes in a twinkling. It is its way of hiding like
a sentient thing; the stems drop, the leaves close,
but the pretty flower is unchanged. Why so fear-
ful? what is it hiding from? of what advantage is

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this extreme sensitiveness to it? I could not find out.
I noticed that the falling rain did not cause it to
shut up. It took it about seven or eight minutes to
open its leaves again, which it did very slowly. The
plant belongs to the leguminous family. Indeed,
Jamaica is a wonderful country for pods and beans.
You see pod-bearing trees and bushes everywhere,
and pick up on the seacoast huge black beans that
look like some rare polished stones. One day we
passed dense masses of low trees in bloom by the
roadside ; they looked like our honey-locust, except
that the blossoms were yellow.

On this day we passed through a dry section of
the country, where water was scarce; and nearly
every colored boy or woman that we met carried a
long stick of sugar-cane. This was for drink. We
persuaded one boy to part with his six or eight feet
of cane, and thereafter for many miles three trav-
elers might have been seen eagerly gnawing at the
end of a section of the sweet, succulent stalk, and
chewing it with an air of placid content. The juice
slaked the thirst and was pleasant to the taste. By
attending closely to business, one could extract the
moisture just about fast enough to meet the hourly
wants of the system; so that the gnawing and suck-
ing could go on indefinitely, or as long as the cane
held out.

By the roadside my son made an excursion into
a grove of wild oranges, and brought back a branch

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of one of the trees with the nest of the little blue
quit upon it. The nest was made of dry grasses, and
was shaped like a small crook-necked gourd; the
neck hooked over the limb so that the entrance to
it was on one side of the branch and the body of it
below the other side. It was very pretty, and I
carried it in the carriage for two days hoping to
bring it home with me, but it finally got hopelessly
crushed.

We saw no cultivation of the soil to speak of till
we reached a large sugar plantation in Judas Vale,
— one of the few large sugar estates that are still
worked in the island, — called Worthy Park, cover-
ing a large, oval, sunken valley several miles across.
Here were rich level bottoms covered with the green,
corn-like sugar-cane, and here sugar-making and
rum-making were being carried on by swarms of
negroes, in a large old mill with a huge overshot
water-wheel. It all smacked of the picturesque,
patriarchal, wasteful times. Things were done on
a large scale, but awkwardly, cumbrously: a vast
herd of oxen and mules to do the hauling, — six or
eight yoke of the former hitched to a huge, heavy
dray or wagon hauling sugar-cane and driven wildly
by as many men, with much running and yelling;
bushers and overseers of high and low degree; the
planter himself, a typical colonial Englishman,
born on the island, — florid, burly, positive, out-
spoken, authoritative, dissatisfied, but hospitable

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to us strangers. The planter showed us through
his works from the rollers where the cane was be-
ing crushed and pressed to the cribs where the rum
was being distilled, and then invited us to his house
for luncheon. His men were paid mostly by piece
work. He said they were worth little at a stated
wage by the day or week.

From Worthy Park we took our way over the
mountain toward Chapelton, going down the long,
steep, peculiar “Old Woman’s Hill” into the valley
of the beautiful Rio Minho. We saw flocks of green
parrots flying across the hill,—my first sight of a
wild bright green bird. When we reached the ford
of the Rio Minho, there stood our little green heron,
looking very homelike to me.

“ How far is it to Chapelton ?” we asked of a col-
ored man.

“Far enough, sah.”

Several miles farther on we put the question to
another man.

“Not too far, sah.”

The probable distance in miles to any given place
we could never get from a native in Jamaica.

Darkness came on, the team lagged, the road grew
hilly, and Chapelton seemed to recede before us.
Presently, long after dark, we saw far ahead of us,
in what seemed a bend in the road, brilliant lights
flashing out. Surely, we said, here is Chapelton,
and these are the lamps in the streets or in the win-

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dows of the houses. But when we reached the place,
how bitter was our disappointment to find that the
lights came from huge fireflies! There seemed to be
a firefly carnival in that particular spot. When one
of these insects passed through or over a tree and
sent forth his ray, one could see the foliage distinctly.
Photographers say that the light is sufficient to “fog”
a plate. It was yet a long, tiresome ride to Chapel-
ton, which we found on a hill above the river—a
straggling street of poor, dilapidated houses— about
ten o’clock. We succeeded in procuring lodging in
a house where, J am sure, some of the odors had
kept over from the times of the Spanish occupation,
and where the beds were as hard as the middle of
the road. I sat in the little stuffy sitting-room, tired
and sulky, while my companions higgled with the
black landlady about charges. No grass could be
had in town for the horses, and these had finally
to be taken three miles out to pasture by our driver,
Andrew.

In the morning we drew the carriage up in front
of the lodging-house on the broad, grassy side of
the street to load on our traps. Before the luggage
was half on, a colored police officer appeared; with
great dignity and solemnity he ordered us to remove
the carriage, and asked for our names that he might
report us at Kingston for violating a village ordi-
nance. We had technically blockaded the street
(though ours seemed the only four-wheeled vehicle

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in town, and a whole circus caravan could have
marched past over the free space), and the law
must take cognizance of our offense. How stern
and unbending the colored corporal was! No mat-
ter if we were Americans and ignorant of the law,
the offense was the same, and we must answer at
the police court in Kingston. Andrew, the driver,
“sassed back,” and would not give his name or resi-
dence, but I gave our names and the corporal wrote
them in his note-book. We hustled the wagon back
into the yard, gazed upon curiously by a crowd
of men, women, and boys that had gathered, put
on the rest of our things, and were off. Before we
were out of the village, we met the chief magistrate,
a hearty young Englishman, who had heard of
our arrival and wished to show Mr. Kellogg some
attention. He waved aside the complaint of the
police corporal who came up just then, asked us
into his office, discussed our proposed route with
us, and gave us points, and letters of introduction
to police sergeants and others on the road. I saw
Andrew offer the police corporal, who had given us
a glimpse of the inviolability of village ordinances
in Jamaica, some copper coins to drink our health
with, but he refused them, and we were off in better
humor for Frankfield, distant another day’s drive.
It was market day in Chapelton, and the road was
lined with women and children and donkeys on their
way to dispose of the produce of their little farms.
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My son and Mr. Kellogg had gone on ahead of the
carriage, and we found them with their cameras set
up on the farther side of the Rio Minho, waiting to
photograph the women and donkeys as they forded
the stream. The women divined their purpose; a
large squad had collected in front of them, refusing
to be the subjects of a picture till they were paid.
“Give us money; give us money, bucra massa.”
One old woman, between sixty and seventy, I should
say, had upon her head a burden that weighed
about as many pounds. I tossed her a penny to
placate her a bit, for she protested the most loudly
of any, and she tried to pick up the coin without
removing her burden, but could not quite do it, so
I got down from the wagon and handed it to her,
and got a graceful curtsy for my pains. Bowing
the head is out of the question with such burdens
as they carry. We bought tangerines and oranges
of the women; still they refused to move on, and
their numbers increased. One old woman had eggs
to sell. I handed one of them to Kellogg, and asked
him if he thought it was fresh. Now Kellogg has a
way of imitating the yeap of a young chicken that
deceives the mother hen herself. He shook the egg
and placed it to his ear. Faint but clear came the
distressed yeap of the imprisoned chick. I heard
it, and others heard; the old woman heard it,
and, as the cry continued, a curious, surprised, in-
credulous look came over her face. “I fear they are
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not fresh,” said Kellogg, and placed the egg to his
ear again with the same result. This was too much
for the old woman; with a half-angry, half-alarmed
look, she reached forth her hand and said, “ Gi’ me
dat egg,” and hurrying it into her basket, hastened
into the ford. The others followed, and the boys
got the exposure they wanted.

About mid-forenoon we overtook a colored man
with the inevitable machete, going to his work. We
walked with him a mile or more. He was a cheery,
bright, companionable sort of aman. His name was
John Good. He was going to grub out and clean
off a bit of land which he had near the river.

“Are you married, John Good?” I asked.

“No, sah, not yet.”

“Have you any children, John?”

“Yes, sah, two.”

John was living with the mother of his children,
but as yet he had neglected the ceremony of mar-
riage.

We wanted a bath, so John conducted us to a
large, beautiful, blue pool in the river, shaded by
bamboo, where we had our first Jamaican swim.
How delicious the water was, like that of our mid-
summer trout streams far from their source. John
said he would catch us a fish, a mullet, with his
hands. The feat seemed impossible in such a large,
deep pool, but our black comrade came near doing
it. We could see his dark form darting about at the

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bottom of the pool, like that of a huge muskrat,
feeling under rocks and roots of trees, and staying
down so long that our lungs ached in sympathy.
Only a few days before, he said, he had caught fish
there with his hands, but this time he could not
bring one to the surface.

We overtook girls and boys who had been to
market at Chapelton and were on their way home
with lightened burdens, some of them making a
journey of fifteen miles each way. How lithe and
supple some of the young women were, running and
dodging and playing games with the boys as they
went along, and never losing the burdens from their
heads! A squad of four or five kept with us for
many miles. I shall not soon forget their happy faces
and bright, playful ways.

At Frankfield we passed the night in a police
station, — the first experience of the kind any of us
had ever had. There was no lodging-house in the
place. We had a letter to the police sergeant, and
he took us into their snug, clean quarters, and made
us comfortable.

The most interesting sight we saw here was the
ruins of an old sugar-mill, — fragments of walls and
arches overgrown with vines and trees, and the iron
skeleton of a large water-wheel. The date in the
wall was 1773. At that time all the slopes and hills
about were covered with sugar-cane.

The next day, which was Sunday, we pushed on

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up the Rio Minho, often fording the shallow and
pellucid stream, falling in with colored men with
whom we walked and talked, crossing hills and
mountains on an easy grade, on to the home of
Colonel Hix, near Kendal. We had a letter to
Colonel Hix, and were received by him and his wife
with true Jamaican hospitality. The colonel is
superintendent of schools for a large section of the
island. He had served in our Civil War, and had
come to Jamaica from Illinois more than thirty
years before, in a very bad way from pulmonary
trouble. The climate had healed him, and he was
now as well as a man over seventy can reasonably
hope to be. He expected to finish his days in
Jamaica. His house was aptly named “Cozy,” and
the hours we spent there are very pleasant to recall.
Colored people everywhere in their starched Sunday
clothes swarmed in the roads and lanes, going to
and from their huts amid the trees and bushes,
chatting, laughing, and supplying the human ele-
ment that this rather rude and broken landscape
needed.

The next day we continued our journey westward
toward the Cock Pit country and the valley of the
Black River, passing through a section where the
chief product was ginger. The boys and girls all
seemed occupied in peeling ginger roots, and before
every hut were little platforms where the roots were
drying. We passed a family moving, and appar-

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ently carrying all their goods and chattels upon
their heads, the women, as usual, having the biggest
bundles. Indeed, the number of people everywhere
in Jamaica upon the highway was a perpetual sur-
prise to us; at least ten times as many as one would
see at home in our most populous country districts.
Market day comes several times a week, and every-
body seems to go to market with something to sell, —
a few shillings’ worth of yams and oranges, or ba-
nanas, or eggs, or other farm produce. How familiar
became the sight of a woman, — dusty, sweating,
lean-shanked, but determined, — with her donkey
being led by a boy or girl, while she urged it from
behind, its huge panniers stuffed with grass and
a variety of country products, sometimes pigs and
poultry being visible.

This day, for the first time in the island, I saw two
smooth, nicely plowed fields on a side-hill, such as
one sees at home, — many acres free from bushes
and weeds, and apparently under thorough cultiva-
tion. I wondered at them much till I learned that
they were the property of two of my own country-
men, who were going into ginger farming.

We passed the night at Coleyville with the Rev.
Mr. Turner, to whom we had a letter, — a forlorn,
ramshackle place, but a hospitable host. Here
was this man, a Baptist clergyman in middle life,
spending his days in this wilderness amid these
rude, ignorant people, ministering to their souls and

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to their sick bodies as best he could, living in an
old musty house with two or three slatternly ser-
vants, his wife in Scotland, and his two sons being
educated at Cambridge. Another year and a half
was to elapse before he could take a vacation to
visit them and his native land. His seemed to me
a bitter cup, but he was not making wry faces over
it. Let me again draw upon my. note-book: “At
Dr. Turner’s, Monday, February 10, 4 Pp. M., 1902.
A world of wooded knolls, very primitive. Allti-
tude three thousand feet, mercury 70°, a slow rain
falling ; wraiths of fog rising from the woods as at
home. Small thatched cabins of the natives here
and there visible through the trees. Like our back-
woods places, except the curious dumpling-shaped
hills scattered on all hands,—no long, sweeping
lines and curves.

“The note of the solitaire comes up from the wet
woods below us, almost identical with that of the
Oregon robin in Alaska, — very pleasing to me.
Now a mockingbird alights on a stake a few yards
from the house and sings for a moment, — the most
abundant songster about here, — not at all a fine
songster to me.”

In the evening we sat about the table with much
talk, while the rain came steadily down. That
night we slept three in a bed, —a hard bed and
harder pillows. Sleep would not come to me; I
charged it to the altitude of three thousand feet; at

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midnight I crept out, and, wrapped in my blanket,
lay upon the floor, —to reduce the altitude, my
son said: but no, it was to reduce the problem to
simpler terms.

It was foggy and misty when we left Coleyville
in the morning, and continued so until we had
reduced the altitude by over a thousand feet, and
had got below the cloud-line, when at noon, in the
valley of Hector’s River, we ran into sunshine.

Tn the afternoon we skirted for two or three hours
that curious Cock Pit country, — a vast area cov-
ered with huge rough-hewn rocky bowls, several
hundred feet deep, and many hundred or even
thousand feet across the top, their rims craggy,
wooded, their sides and bottoms green and verdur-
ous, usually with a stream or river coming out of
the earth on one side, and plunging into it again on
the other, — a land of pits and caves and subter-
ranean water-courses. The road, hard and smooth,
wound round the rims of these huge pits or bowls,
giving us views into the deep, sunken valleys, now
on the right hand, now on the left. Now we see a
sparkling current, now the hill has swallowed it.
The streams come from the earth quietly, gently,
and as quietly and gently they return to it. This
region is full of caves, one of which, Oxford Cave,
near Balaclava, we explored. It was like our own
caves, a series of huge irregular chambers, with
the inevitable stalactites and stalagmites, and —

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what our caves do not have in such numbers —
swarms of bats. The bats came out of the crevices
of the rocks over our heads like bees out of a hive
in swarming time, making a curious soft hum with
their myriad wings. What acute senses of some
kind these creatures must have! In that primal
darkness, when our torches were extinguished, they
would pass and repass us, and thread their way
through those narrow, crooked alleys, without touch-
ing a wing to rock or man. The sense which in
the darkness makes us aware of our near approach
to any object, the bat doubtless has in a very acute
and highly developed form.

We found Balaclava one of the most attractive
places we had yet reached. There was a clean, well-
kept lodging-house, where good meals and good
beds could be had at a reasonable charge. We had
contemplated a canoe voyage from near this place
down Black River to the sea, but abandoned the
project. Canoeing or camping out in a tropical
country can have little of the attraction it has amid
our more simple, wholesome, and companionable
nature. From this point we returned to Kingston
by rail, leaving the team to come by the road.

From Kingston one sees the rows of white build-
ings of New Castle clinging to the shoulders of
the mountain like some new kind of cliff swal-
low’s nests. They have an enticing, adventurous
look. New Castle is the rendezvous of the British

Q47

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FAR AND NEAR

soldiers in Jamaica during the summer. The
military authorities kindly consented to our occupy-
ing a furnished cottage there called “The Refuge,”
which at that season was not in use, —a small,
low, rambling cottage perched upon a shelf of the
mountain, its little flower garden in front full of
blooming roses, geraniums, and heliotrope, and sur-
rounded by a fringe of the ever graceful bamboo.
A thousand feet above us towered Katherine’s
Peak; below us we saw the world as a soaring
hawk sees it, the mountains dropping down to the
hills, and the hills to the plain, and the plain, upon
which stands the city of Kingston, tilting to the
sea, twelve or fifteen miles distant, where we saw
the ships sail away into the sky, to the moon, or
to the evening or the morning star. How the sea
rises up into the horizon when viewed from a great
altitude ! We could not tell where the water ended
and the sky began.

We had a colored man, Joseph, whom we had
picked up in Gordonsville, and who served us as
both man and maid, — quiet, willing, modest, relia-
ble Joseph, with broad, naked feet, greatly spread
at the toes, and sturdy neck capable of sustaining
the head, in a climb up the long, steep mountain-
side, with a burden of forty or fifty pounds. We
did not permit Joseph to do the cooking, we liked
that service ourselves, but he gathered the wood, —
mostly dry bamboo, — washed the dishes, and did

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errands, one day going to Kingston and back with
great ease.

The climate at this elevation was much like
that of the Catskills in August, or even cooler; the
nights so cool that we could not sit out on the
veranda later than eight o’clock. A double woolen
blanket was not too much covering on the bed.
The whole scenery of the heavens is shifted a little
when you get so far south. The moon passes far-
ther north, Orion and the Pleiades seem right
over head, and the Big Dipper is quite hidden
behind the ridge of Katherine’s Peak. Twice
we climbed to the top of the peak along one of the
narrow graded roads called “bridle-paths,” that
thread all the valleys and mountain passes in
this island, and find their way, always an easy, lei-
surely way, to all the mountain summits. In many
places the path was carved out of the soft, crum-
bling rock. It was lined and draped and cushioned
with mosses and ferns and vines and various trop-
ical growths. Near the top of the mountain two
colored men were clearing it of its various wild
growths with the ubiquitous machete. This tool,
which is carried by nearly every countryman in
Jamaica, is the one universal tool. It serves as a
scythe with which to mow grass, and as an axe to
cut wood and fell trees. It is the tool for tropical
jungles and tangles. With this in his hand, how one
can slash his way through the dense, spiny, vine-

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choked thickets! These men were clearing the
roads of weeds with it. We saw the light blue
wreath of smoke from their fire going up through
the dark, glistening green of the forest that clothed
the mountain, when we were far below them. Their
dog lay curled up by the fire, where something for
their dinner was simmering, and barked at us as
any other self-respecting dog would have done.

This is the region of the tree ferns, — the only
place where we found them, — straight, rough, hairy
shafts, five or six inches through, and twelve or fif-
teen feet high, with a circle of delicate, wide-spread-
ing fronds at the top, —broad, tapering sheets or
plumes of green lace crowning a crabbed, touch-
me-not-looking column.

On the vertical bank of the roadside, what a
wealth of mosses and small ferns and plants! with
now and then in the more sunny places a just
ripening wild strawberry. We had often to pause
and feast our eyes upon this marvelous veil behind
which Nature hides her cleft rocks in the trop-
ics. How dark and dense and bearded and choked
the forest sweeping down the mountain-side below
us, shaggy, glistening, almost scaly, fanged; with
touches of rare and delicate beauty, but with an as-
pect, on the whole, strange, forbidding, treacherous!

When a turn in the path gave us unexpected
views across the deep valley upon the huge flank of
Blue Mountain Peak, and of its great sweeping sky-

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lines, we would pause with delight, and let our eyes
go, like falcons loosed for the quarry. From these
altitudes we often saw hawks wheeling and heard
them screaming far below or above us, just as in
summer we are wont to see them from our native
mountains, and apparently they were the same
species, the red-tailed.

On the summit, which was free of trees, we
found our white clover in bloom and the butter-
cup and wild strawberries. I was more surprised,
however, to find the Scotch gorse blooming here.
It can hardly be a native of the island. It was
probably brought and planted there by British sol-
diers whose summer camp we had just left. It told
the story of Tommy Atkins longing for his native
hills. He had tried with fair success to create a bit
of Scotland there on Katherine’s Peak.

From this vantage-ground we could look down
upon the coffee plantations tilted up against the
mountain-side beneath us. To our eyes they looked
like bushy, neglected fields. Here and there we
could see what is called a barbecue, —a broad
cement platform where the coffee is dried. The
superb military road wound leisurely up from
the deep valley, — how plainly we could see it, — a
yellow ribbon amid the green, looping and loop-
ing endlessly. Towards Kingston, vivid emerald
squares of sugar-cane held the eye, and suggested
fields of Indian corn. They grow our corn in Ja-

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maica, but only to a very limited extent. We saw
ripe corn, and by its side corn just coming up.

On one occasion, my son and I, getting tired
of the heat and noises of Kingston, went seeking
discomfort, and we found it, the genuine article;
but it was the discomfort of campers-out under
adverse conditions, — discomfort that time and
distance always soften, and, in a measure, trans-
form. Indeed, the woes of campers-out are always
better to look back upon than the pleasures of the
stay-at-homes. My son, with our traveling compan-
ion, Mr. Kellogg, had spent a night at Great Salt
Pond, a little side pocket of the Caribbean, beyond
Port Henderson, twelve miles distant, where, as
the fishermen hauled their nets, he had seen the
most wonderful phosphorescent fireworks in the
water, and where crocodiles promenaded the shores
at midnight. Hither we would go and get a taste of
the salty and, no doubt, seamy side of Jamaican
nature. But the ten-mile row across the harbor
from Kingston to Port Henderson, over that iri-
descent sea, under a soft (to us) midsummer sun,
the grand Blue Mountain scenery rising up into
the clouds on our right, the long, low arm of Port
Royal on our left, the wooded heights of Port Hen-
derson in front, great pelicans soaring and diving
obliquely into the water, all along the route, were
not without their charm to me, especially as my
companion did most of the pulling.

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What made the old Scotch rhyme constantly
hum itself in my mind, I do not know: —

“Little did my mither think the day she cradled me,
The lands I was to travel in, the death I was to dee.’’

Here we were in strange lands, indeed, but we
had no fear of leaving our bones upon the sands
of Great Salt Pond.

And surely the reception we met with at Port
Henderson, at the hands of a family whose ac-
quaintance we had previously made, does not be-
long to the tale of our woes, but of our joys. Such
hospitality, — food, cheer, rest, —all so freely, gladly
given, one would rarely find at home; but in Ja-
maica we found it everywhere. The generous
human affections and impulses seem to grow as
luxuriantly there as the vegetation. A pail of drink-
ing-water was provided us here, as we should find
none at Salt Pond, and in the early evening, the full
moon flooding the sea and the land with its light, we
set out for the pond, an hour’s row distant, keeping
under the abrupt, high, rocky shore, over a glassy
sea, in the soft, luminous tropical night. Leisurely
we rounded point after point, till the mountain
ended and a low bushy shore was before us. In this,
somewhere, was the narrow, almost hidden open-
ing into Great Salt Pond. But the boy has a keen
sense of topography ; he had been there once before
by daylight ; so, with an instinct as unerring as

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that of some wild creature, the boat felt its way
into the little gut or channel that connects the pond
with the sea. In less than a hundred yards we
emerged from the shadows of the verdure upon
the still, moon-drenched, circular bit of land-locked
sea. How weird and mystical it looked! a wild
range of rocky, bushy hills upon one side, and low,
wooded shores upon the other.

At the far side, a mile or more distant, standing
upon the sand, was a small, dilapidated building
used mainly by fishermen. To this point we directed
our course, and in due time drew our boat up on
the low, sandy beach.

The scene was wild and lonely in the extreme, but
this was a part of what we had come for. We ex-
perienced our first disappointment when we found
that the moonlight killed the phosphorescent dis-
play that we had hoped to see. Only a very pale
blue flame could now be evoked from the water.
My son’s second disappointment came when his
long and cautious promenade upon the shore, re-
volver in hand, and his long vigil by the inlet into
a second salt pond revealed no crocodiles. In his
absence I had scooped out a place in the sand,
spread our blankets, and, with a couple of old doors
raised over the spot to keep off the dews of the
night, stretched myself out, a lodger for the first
time with tropical nature. But sleep did not come
easily ; in fact, did not come atall. The ants from

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below and the mosquitoes from above soon found
me out. The Jamaican sand ant is a subtle, per-
sistent creature, and the mosquitois persistent with-
out being subtle. Roll myself in my blanket and
cover my face and head as I would, I could not
shake off or discourage either. About midnight
my son returned from his fruitless crocodile hunt,
and joined me in the couch of sand. Youth can
sleep, no matter what the conditions. Presently
some strange water-fowl, whose hoarse honking
and calling we had been hearing all the evening,
spied us out there on the sand, and gathered about
us; they stretched their necks, or, as the boys say,
“rubbered” and “rubbered,”’ and let off their weird
notes of astonishment or alarm. In the moonlight
Isawthem standing at the water’s edge and cran-
ing their necks, all alive with curiosity. Not till my
son whipped out his revolver and fired at one of
them did the disturbing, long-necked commenting
upon our presence cease.

There in the stillness of the night we heard the
wild cattle low in the woods beyond the marshes.
(We had been told of a wild herd in this neighbor-
hood.) Then mockingbirds, the Antillean species,
sang in some near-by bushes, and the mosquitoes
and ants still persisted. About two o’clock, finding
sleep impossible, and that my body no longer fitted
the mould in the sand, I shook myself out of my
blanket and stepped forth, and instantly thanked

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my stars for my wakefulness, for there low in the
southern horizon hung the Southern Cross, — four
large, bright stars, one in each arm of the imaginary
cross. I aroused my companion that he, too, might
see this splendid spectacle of the southern heavens.
It was the first and only view that we got during
our stay on the island. This bit of new astronomy
made me forget the pests of the sand. It was not
long now till daylight, and something like an hour’s
sleep was snatched at the last moment. Before the
sun was up I was washed and combed and listening
to the vocal performances of the mockingbirds. It
was not engaging music to me. I do not know how
much this West Indian species falls short in musical
ability of that of our own mockingbird of the South-
ern States, if any. But it was not a songster that I
wished to take home with me as I did the solitaire.
It was not equal to our catbird’s song, and the
morning carol of the robin would have made it seem
cheap and trivial. It was bantering, hilarious, fes-
tive, butit had no sweetness, seriousness, or feeling.

We had our Primus stove with us sans alcohol,
and my patience, even my temper, was sorely tried,
and many matches were wasted, in trying to evoke
with kerosene oil alone the intense blue flame that
crowns success with this stove. But despite the
wind, this feat was at last accomplished, and our
breakfast of bacon, eggs, tea, and toast was achieved.

Then we rowed round the pond, and found the

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narrow channel that joins it to the second pond.
Into this we made our way, and discovered that
it was semi-stagnant. It was a likely place for
crocodiles, but we saw none, — only a large, heron-
like water-fow] that was suspicious of our approach.

The most striking scene here was a kind of vege-
table Hades where we landed and tarried a short
time. If the bad spirits in the vegetable world go
to a bad place, this is probably where they bring up;
or, as I said to my son, if the human imps — mean-
ness, spitefulness, jealousy, uncharitableness, and
backbiting — were to take vegetable form, here we
doubtless see what they would be like, —a thick,
rank growth of several forms of cacti, intermingled
with various thorned and fanged bushes standing
upon a jagged, crabbed, deeply seamed rocky floor.
Under the hot sun the place exhaled a peculiarly
disagreeable odor. With great difficulty I pushed
my way into it a few yards. If there had only been
a few writhing, hissing serpents there and a horned
toad or two, the scene would have been complete.
Some of the fluted, cylindrical growths of cacti
towered up twenty feet, and were so thickly set with
rows of long, sharp, vicious needles that it fairly
made the eyes water to look at them. This was the
fanged side of tropical nature, and we soon had
enough of it. These huge growths of cacti were
fleshy and tender like fruit; one could hack into
them with his knife as into a melon or an apple, but

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what eats them? Why all this terrible panoply
of spines? The spine and the thorn everywhere, I
suppose, is simply a sign of savage, unregenerate
nature. We saw in Jamaica some species of palm,
so bristling with long, awl-like thorns that one could
not look at them without a positive feeling of dis-
comfort. Think of the amount of original sin there
must be in such a tree! And no fruit to guard,
either, — just a spontaneous overflow of the hatred
and spitefulness of the old fire-eating, all-devouring,
seismic earth!

Great Salt Pond is shallow, of a uniform depth
of about three and a half feet, so that the fisher-
men wade in, hauling their nets. The evaporation
is so great that the water seems to be always flowing
in from the sea.

On our way out we found a boat at the inlet with
our friends the Davises, — a father and three sons,
—from Port Henderson. Their hospitality and soli-
citude for our well-being had brought them the four
miles with a pail of fresh water. In the inlet, which
was running like a mill race, we all went in bathing,
partly for a bath, but chiefly of necessity to haul and
push our boats out against the current. How de-
licious that bath was, except that the savage current
hurled both my son and me against the banks with
such force that our skins were gashed in several
places.

Here we saw that large, beautiful tropical fish, the

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« calipeever,” darting about or poising in the swiftly
running, transparent water, as large as a salmon trout.

Then came the quiet afternoon row back to
Kingston, with more refreshment and cheer at the
house of our Port Henderson friends, the superb
Blue Mountain scenery on the one hand, and Port
Royal and the open sea on the other.

The birds in Jamaican waters that amused us
most were the great, ill-shaped, lubberly pelicans.
Everywhere in the bays and harbors we would see
them poising and diving. From a hundred feet or
so above the water, they hurl themselves down reck-
lessly, striking the surface with a great splash. But
they usually get the fish. My son aptly described
their flight as that of a bird sitting down to fly.
Most water-fowl fly with head and neck stretched
straight out, but the pelican draws his head back,
curves his neck, and seems to sit down upon his
great hulk of a body and row himself along with his
huge wings.

Kingston we found a dull, hot, uninviting place,
—low houses, dirty streets, with a colored popula-
tion, for the most part ragged and lazy. It is a city
of crowing roosters. They begin at nine o'clock
promptly, and crow every hour, if not oftener, the
night through. When one gives the signal, you hear
the challenge taken up all about, the chorus swelling
and spreading till a wave of shrill-voiced sound
sweeps over the city. ‘Then another wave, and

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another, three or four times repeated, till they
finally die down, to remain so till the hour strikes
again. The traveler tarrying in Kingston soon
comes to wish that the mongoose had made poultry-
raising still more difficult than it is.

And the dogs were not far behind the roosters.
But the flea and the tick do not leave much spirit in
the Jamaican dog. Poor cur, how wretched and
forlorn he looks ! That he can bark at all is a won-
der. And it is only in town that he does bark, and
in the cool of the night. In the country he looks at
you wistfully, or languidly searches his own body
for the pests that make his life miserable.

Everywhere the cocoanut-trees are upon the
beach or near it. There seems to be a fringe of
them around the whole island. They lean toward
the sea as if they loved it; or does this attitude
enable them the better to withstand the gales from
the sea? We saw them upon small islands, — in one
case a solitary tree upon a little coral reef a few
yards in extent, still yearning seaward. The wind
blows back their long leaves so that they suggest
runners with their hair streaming behind them.

The palms of all sorts seem less like trees than
like gigantic woody plants. They have no branches,
— only a stalk with a tuft of leaves at the top. The
wood is not wood, but bundles of tough fibres like
cords and ropes ; and the leaves are not leaves, but
more fibres welded together in tin-like sheets and

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spears that rattle in the wind. They curve and
sway gracefully, but it is rather the grace and neat-
ness of geometric figures than of wild free growths.
‘The roots, too, are not roots like those of other trees,
but mops of cords of a uniform size. The cocoanut-
tree lays hold of the ground by ten thousand of
these cords about the size of a pipe-stem, which in
the stem are gathered together and welded into a
huge cable, eight or ten inches through. The growth
of the cocoanut is in but one direction, — upward.
The stem does not increase in size as it shoots
heavenward. A tree sixty feet high has a trunk
no larger than one ten feet high. Up, up it goes,
like some extension arrangement or appliance, per-
petually pushing out new leaves and new fruit
blossoms at the top, and dropping the old ones;
always with a circle of ripened fruit surmounted
by other circles of half-grown and just formed nuts,
crowned by a ring of new, cream-colored bloom.
Its young leaves emerge from the parent stem
swathed in coarse burlap. Their swaddling-clothes
would make a shirt in which the most austere and
fanatical of the old monks might have done pen-
ance. Probably nothing else is born in the world
wrapped up in such a harsh, forbidding integument;
a product of the tree’s interior juices and vital
functions, it is nevertheless as dry and stiff and
apparently as lifeless as the product of a weaver’s
loom. Its office seems to be to hold up and to
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protect the young leaf till it can stand and wave
alone. Then it begins to let go and peel away.
From one young tree I cut enough of this natural
hemp cloth to make me a shirt, should I be seized
with the penitential fit. It possesses regular warp
and woof, and the fibres are crossed over and under
as in real cloth. The cocoanut is strongly expres-
sive of one side of tropical nature, — its hard, harsh,
glittering, barbaric side.

To our northern eyes, Nature in the tropics has
little tenderness or winsomeness. She is barbaric;
she is painty and stiff; she has no sentiment; she
does not touch the heart; she flouts and revels and
goes her own way like a wanton. She has never
known adversity; she has no memory and no long-
ing; there is no autumn behind her and no spring
before ; she is a prodigal, she lives in the present,
she runs to spikes and spines; perpetual summer
has given her the hue and tone of August, — dark,
strident, cloying. She is rank, she is wicked; she
stings and stabs and bites you, or she heeds you
not. No turf in the fields, no carpet of moss and
lichens in the woods. Indeed, the woods are barred
against you. It is impossible to make your way
into them without cutting a path. The tangle of
vines, the spiny growths, the interlocked branches,
the close and fierce and unending struggle for ex-
istence of all manner of plants, bushes, and trees,
make walking in the woods out of the question.

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Only where the superb roads and bridle-paths lay
them open, can you thread their interiors. And there
you walk between walls of rank vegetation, — no
glimpses along forest aisles and corridors, no long,
cool perspectives, no leaf-strewn floors of checkered
sunlight and shadow, no interior housed and
cloistered effects at all. Apparently the woods in
Jamaica are never swept by fire any more than
they are in Alaska; the dense ground vegetation
and the humidity secure them against the besom of
the flames. The trees cast their leaves one by one,
apparently, the year through, like the human tree:
always falling leaves, always new buds and blos-
soms. We saw wild blackberries (poor things), with
ripe fruit and green, and just opened blossoms.
The word sylvan belongs to higher latitudes. There
are lairs and jungles and smothering dungeons in
tropical forests, but no clean, restful sylvan solitude.

How much the beauty of our northern land-
scape owes to grass, — this green nap or pile of the
fields and hills, so tender, so uniform, so human-
izing, softening the outlines, tempering the light,
loving the snow and the moisture, bringing out
the folds and dimples of plain and slope, and cloth-
ing the northern mountains as with veils of green
gauze! The tropical grasses are coarse, broad-
leafed, — crab grass, Bahama grass, Guinea grass,
— good forage, but not pleasing to look upon, and
the landscape is but slightly affected by them.

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I cannot conceive of any poetry ever being
produced in the tropics. Nature and life there do
not make the poetic appeal. There is little that is
heroic, or plaintive, or pathetic, or that stimulates
the imagination or fosters sentiment. The beak and
claw and spine and thorn side of nature is more
pronounced than in our zone; forms are more
savage, disease is more deadly. Man cannot take
Nature to himself and dominate and tame and hu-
manize her, as he can where snow falls and spring
comes. Nature moulds and stamps him, and devel-
ops his fangs of passion.

How much our civilization owes to the winter
and to the spring! to the tender, to the heroic, to
the prophetic moods of Nature. How are our lives
enriched and deepened and stimulated by the
changes of the seasons : the spring with its yearn-
ing and allurements, the summer with its victories
and defeats, the autumn with its repose and plenty,
the winter with its spur and tonic, — what would
our lives be without these things ?

The leaves of the trees in Jamaica are for the
most part thick and stiff and shining, — var-
nished by the sun and the heat. The foliage rarely
presents the airy, feathery, graceful character of
the foliage of our trees. The landscape is rarely
impressive. It is deficient in the elements of sim-
plicity and dignity. It is too often a jumble of
broken and insignificant lines. It was not moulded

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and sculptured by the old ice gods in late geologic
times as ours was. It looks crude and unfinished
to northern eyes, like certain of our Rocky Mountain
views. In the Blue Mountains, however, one gets
glimpses of the long, sweeping, masterful lines that
are characteristic of our mountain scenery. The
higher parts of the mountains are in the grand
style. They suggest the Catskills, but are steeper
and loftier by several hundred feet, Blue Mountain

. Peak reaching an altitude of seventy-three hun-
dred feet. Their backs are not so broad as those
of the Catskills; they have not been worn down in
the same way. They are wooded to their summits.
One of our most delightful experiences was the
week we spent upon them at New Castle, four
thousand feet above the sea.

Jamaica is poor in animal life. No squirrels, nor
foxes, nor rabbits, nor marmots, nor bears, nor deer
in the woods, — no four-footed game at all, and
only a short list of native birds. We met a few of
our own summer residents there spending the win-
ter,—the Maryland yellow-throat, the black and
white creeping warbler, the redstart. In one place
on the edge of some woods I saw the oven-bird
walking about in its pretty, contented way as at
home, and along the mountain streams I heard the
sharp chip of the water-wagtail, as along my own
streams. None of these birds were in song, and
probably in early March they turned their faces

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northward, no doubt making their first flight of
ninety miles to Cuba, then continuing by way of
the Bahamas to the Florida coast.

I heard but one bird in the island that touched
my heart, and that was the solitaire, a thrush-like
bird that belongs to the genus Myadestes. It is
colored like our catbird, and of about the same
size. It has a white mark near the eye ; hence the
natives call it “shine eye.” It is very shy and se-
cluded in its habits, and is often known as the
invisible bird. I heard it hundreds of times, but
saw it only twice. It is found only in the moun-
tains after an altitude of two or three thousand feet
is attained. I have never heard a bird-note more
expressive of seclusion and wild solitude, — melo-
dious, plaintive, far-heard, it sounds through the
twilight forests like a call to some holy rite or fes-
tival. It made me think of Keats’s “Ode to a
Nightingale;” it has the same magic quality, the
power of pure music to call up visions of “faery
lands forlorn.”

“Forlorn; the very word is like a bell,”’

and there was something bell-like in the “ plaintive

anthem ” of this bird. It usually began with a series

of tinkling, bell-like notes, — from a golden bell, if

that were possible. These were followed by two

long, tapering, flute-like strains in different keys,

exquisitely melodious and appealing. It was a voice
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from out the heart of sacred solitude, and made
me want to follow

“ And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

“ Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.”

When I first heard a single bar of the song, I was
strongly reminded of the plaint of the Oregon robin
as I had heard it in the wilds of Alaska. It was the
same tapering, soulful monotone. This may be the
reason that the full song seemed to me more expres-
sive of Alaskan solitudes, with so much in them that
was to the eye what pure melody is to the ear, than
of tropical forests.

There is another bird in Jamaica (called by the
natives the Spanish quail, because there is a look
about the head that suggests the quail), that I heard
briefly on one occasion utter notes much like those
of the solitaire. The native oriole has a whistle that
recalls that of our oriole, and the native kingbird
is almost a copy of ours. A species of grackle or
crow blackbird, with his white eye, had avery famil-
iar look. A queer, clownish-looking bird is the little
tody, with its green suit and large, golden beak. It
looked as if made up for some carnival. I did not
hear it sing or rehearse its part. There are several

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small birds called “quits,”’ as the blue quit, the
grass quit, the orange quit. We found a nest of
the last-named bird on the limb of an orange-tree,
acurious structure woven of fine grasses, and shaped
like a gourd with the neck bent over the limb, so
that the entrance was upon one side of the branch
and the body of the nest upon the other. The latter
part of February the grass quit was building a nest
in aclimbing vine over the door of the house where
we were staying. The male seemed more industri-
ous in carrying sticks and straws than the female,
— praise I had never before known a male bird to
deserve. The song was fine and insect-like.

Three species of hummingbirds were noticeable.
One large one, called the “doctor,” nearly black,
with two long plumes in its tail, drew our attention
frequently. When it flew, these long, narrow plumes
trailed or undulated behind it, producing a curious
rocket-like effect, or the effect of some ingenious
toy. In the mountains I saw the black mango hum-
mingbird gathering spiders’ webs from the rocks,
no doubt to be used in sticking the lichens upon the
nest, after the manner of our ruby-throat.

Mockingbirds were common throughout the is-
land,—the Antillean form appearing almost iden-
tical with our southern mockingbird. The mating
season was at hand, and the birds were full of action
and of song; the latter quite unmusical, never as
pleasing as that of our catbird.

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The only wild animal that we saw in Jamaica
was the mongoose, and this was not often seen. We
had glimpses of three or four, during our month’s
stay on the island, hurriedly crossing the road in
front of us, or darting into the bushes. They sug-
gested a large weasel or a light-colored mink. They
are very destructive to everything that lives and
nests upon the ground. They have even driven the
rats into the trees ; we saw several rats’ nests amid
the branches. They make eggs and poultry expen-
sive on account of their depredations upon the hen-
coops.

Our last week in Jamaica was spent at Bowden
on Port Morant, near the extreme eastern end of the
island. Bowden proved to be the most restful and
enjoyable place we had found — a most delightful
change from the heat, dust, and squalor of Kings-
ton. The hotel, called Peak View Cottages, owned
by the United Fruit Company, is situated on a ridge
three hundred feet above the harbor, with the sea on
one hand and the huge pile of the Blue Mountains
on the other. A fresh breeze was always blowing,
the Caribbean Sea was always full of delicate, shift-
ing rainbow tints, the ten thousand cocoanut palms
that covered hill and valley about us were always
rustling and swaying, and the Blue Mountains and
the John Crow range, with a vast stretch of wooded
country between us and them, with plantation
houses at intervals gleaming out of the dank green,

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were there to draw and delight the eye with the
rugged and the sublime. We could see the steam-
ers far at sea, coming round the point of the island
and making for our harbor. Late one afternoon
I watched a steamer leaving for South Africa, slant-
ing slowly away from the island into the Caribbean
and fading from view, — going down behind the
rim of the great ocean-girdled world. What a speck,
creeping slowly down and around, over the shining
surface of the great sphere toward that far-off land!

Here, where we only expected to stop over night
on our way to Manchioneal, we tarried for a week,
and gave ourselves up to the mood or the whim
of the moment, sitting for hours on the cottage
porches, gazing upon the strange scenes, drinking
in tropical nature through all our senses, our
eyes following the calmly, majestically sailing tur-
key buzzards that were everywhere in evidence,
then resting on the long line of cocoanut palms
where the surf was breaking upon the coral reefs
two miles away. Glancing over the broad sweep of
palms near at hand, rustling and glinting in the sun,
our eyes plunged down into the green waters of the
bay below us on the west, then darted away to the
mountains where Cuna Cuna Pass invited us to
continue our journey to Manchioneal, or alighted on
the changing cloud drapery that hid Blue Moun-
tain Peak.

One day we took a leisurely drive to the Hot

270

A LOST FEBRUARY

Springs at Bath and gathered our first nutmegs
and Otahitu apples. Day after day we made our
way down through palm groves, past trees and
bushes, to the beach, where we bathed in the warm
surf, cut our feet upon the coral rocks, sat upon or
examined the rusty, time-eaten cannon that had
lain exposed or half buried in the ruined fortifica-
tions for more than a hundred years, contemplated
the strange and curious forms of vegetable life, or
watched the pelicans diving, and the fiddler crabs
“scrapping” upon the shore. We talked with the
people at their cabin doors and watched the men
taking the husks from the cocoanuts as the wo-
men gathered them; we loitered upon the dock
and watched the girls and women loading the fruit
steamers with bananas — an endless chain of wo-
men and girls going from the little cars to the
steamer’s side, all bearing bunches of bananas on
their heads, often continuing the work till past mid-
night, and toward the last, when tired and sleepy,
timing their movements to a wild musical chant.
They were all barefoot and rather ragged and
soiled, the dripping of the juice from the freshly
cut banana stems soon besmearing their clothes.
Thirty thousand bunches of the fruit were thus
often put on the steamer in a single night. The
women earned about eighteen pence each.

One day we made an excursion on the little toy-
like railway out to Golden Grove, six or eight miles

271

FAR AND NEAR

distant, in the last century a large sugar plantation,
now a banana and cocoanut plantation owned by
the United Fruit Company. The little railway con-
nected the plantation with the steamer. Train-loads
of bananas and cocoanuts were brought in to the
steamers daily. Golden Grove is a large, oval, fertile
plain, threaded by the limpid Gardner River and
surrounded by an amphitheatre of hills and moun-
tains. Most of the large, solid, whitewashed build-
ings of the old sugar plantation were still standing;
some of them with the high-arched bridge were very
picturesque. Here we saw many East Indian coolies,
—aslight, slender, sooty-faced race, the women often
in rags, with silver bands on their ankles and wrists.
Here, too, we saw a large herd of East Indian oxen,
— wide-horned, high-shouldered, dewlapped crea-
tures, with a wonderful look of dignity and repose.
A coolie woman, stripped to the waist, was washing
her clothes in the river near the ruins of the old
mill, while her little girl of ten or twelve was bathing
in the pool near by. It was a pretty picture, and my
son determined to get a photograph of it. When
the woman saw what he was about she was very
indignant and voluble, but she was too late; the
camera winks quickly. A few pennies would have
made her a willing subject.

For some reason, before I went to Jamaica I had
thought of the banana as growing upon a tree, but
here it was growing upon a kind of huge cornstalk,

272

A LOST FEBRUARY

— a stalk the size of one’s leg and fifteen or twenty
feet high, — one bunch of fruit from each stalk or
plant. When the fruit is gathered the old stalk is
cut away, and a new sprout from the root takes its
place. The stalk is composed of the stems of the
big long leaves. The bunch of bananas springs di-
rectly out of the heart of the plant. There is nothing
superficial or fortuitious about it as there is with
most fruit. It is the whole show; it is a serious
matter; it sums up the whole plant. One can see
where the bud is before it emerges, by the swelling
of the stalk, — like the bird or frog in the snake’s
body.

I doubt if there is any future for Jamaica. It
seems to me it is bound to remain pretty much as it
now is. Its black population have not the seeds of
progress. The resources of the island are not great
except in the production of fruit, and for this there
is no free market near at hand. There is no mineral
wealth, and no tempting field for capital. For the
past ten years its imports have exceeded its exports
by a million dollars annually. This difference is
probably made good by tourists from this country
and from England. American capital and American
enterprise are doing more for the island than are
British. Banana culture, already on a large scale,
is increasing, and is mainly the work of the United
Fruit Company.

The burden of taxation in the island is excessive,

273

FAR AND NEAR

and kills all native enterprise. If a new industry
starts, it is taxed out of existence. I was told of
several that had been thus killed. They literally
tax the wheels off the wagons, the tax being about
five dollars a wheel. A man is afraid to make any
improvement about his house, —to add another
window, or to put on a piazza or a new roof, — lest
his taxes be increased. I heard of an American who
took an automobile there to make a tour of the
island, but the sum demanded by the authorities
before they would allow him to land it — something
over a hundred dollars — was so great that he went
back home with it on the steamer’s return trip.

Hence I say that the tax-gatherer is the incubus
that weighs down Jamaica. The people are exces-
sively taxed, largely to pay big salaries to the tax-
gatherers. The governor, quite a useless personage,
it seems to me, is paid five thousand pounds a year,
and there is a long string of office-holders below
him, grading down to the police commissioners, that
all draw big pay. Imports are taxed. Every fam-
ily that buys a barrel of flour pays two dollars to
the government.

The roads and bridle-paths in Jamaica symbolize
England; they are England clasping the island as
with a many-fingered hand. You walk or ride along
these superb imperial highways and look out upon
a land semi-savage; civilization under foot, and
barbarism just across the fence, — little or no agri-

QTA

A LOST FEBRUARY

culture or fruit culture, or culture of any kind as we
understand the word, except where the great Fruit
Companies have possession; the landscape marred
and torn, but not subdued; no open fields, no
smooth hill-slopes, rarely a well-kept garden or a bit
of lawn; rude fertile nature everywhere, struggling
to shake off the lazy grasp of these black children.
Lazy they no doubt are. During the three or four
months of the mango season, we were told, it is very
difficult to get man or woman to’ work. As the
mangoes grow everywhere, the people subsist upon
them, and life becomes a holiday. Hence the fruit
companies and sugar planters have to import coolie
labor, East Indiamen,— a feeble race, but faithful
and reliable. We saw a great gathering of these
people in Kingston living in a large warehouse on
one of the docks. They had worked out their ten
years, and were awaiting a steamer to take them
back to India. How homesick many of them were,
poor souls, and how tedious the waiting was to
them! They were a quiet, picturesque crowd, but
very wary of the camera, unless we first sprinkled
them with a little copper. When we were sauntering
through the market, the Indian women, crouched
by their baskets filled with stuff on sale, would
spring up and turn their backs the moment they
saw the camera in my son’s. hand. They seem a
much prouder and more exclusive race than the
African.
275

FAR AND NEAR

Just now I called the negro lazy, though that
is probably not strictly the right word. The negro
in Jamaica is childish, immature, void of any
serious purpose in life, rather than lazy. He is
haunted by no ideals: sufficient for the day are
the mangoes thereof, and why should he fret and
struggle? Those women forever upon the road,
making long marches with their burdens, were not
lazy; they were children that took life lightly and
carelessly.

The price of labor is low in Jamaica, yet any-
thing is dear that costs more than it is worth, and
rouch of the low-priced labor is expensive. On one
of the plantations of the United Fruit Company I
saw a coolie cleaning the ground of grass and weeds
in an orange orchard with a big long-handled hoe
at a rate for a given area that was more than four
times the price I could have done it for with a horse
and cultivator. A vast deal of hand-work is done
where we use horses and machinery.

Most of the road-making and road-mending
seems done by women and girls. They are the
real beasts of burden. They break up the stone and
carry it in bags upon their heads and dump it down
where it is wanted. One day I sat half an hour upon
the bank by the roadside, and got myself covered
with ticks, watching a woman raking the broken
stone in place, while my companion was photo-
graphing a big cottonwood-tree.

276

A LOST FEBRUARY

We left Jamaica on the return trip the 3d of
March, just about the time I fancy that the birds
from our woods that we had met there were also
turning their faces northward. We reached home
on the 9th, and at sundown the caroling of the robins
from the treetops was far more welcome than any
bird voice we heard in Jamaica, not even excepting
that of the solitaire.

INDEX

AGHILEEN PINNAOLES, 95.

Alaska, journey to, 1-129; forests
and treeless regions of, 81; cli-
mates of, 82, 86.

Alaska Peninsula, voyage along,
94-98,

Albatross, 67.

Algee, 210, 211.

Amherst Glacier, 73.

Anemone, a yellow, 114.

Annette Island, 29-31.

Ants, Jamaican sand, 254, 255.

Astragalus, 121, 122.

August, characteristics of, 201-
214,

Auklet, least (Simorhynchus pu-
sillus), 106.

Auklets, 119.

Bad Lands of Utah, the, 7.

Bahamas, 226.

Balaclava, Jamaica, 247.

Bananas, loading, 271; manner of
growth of, 272, 273; culture of,
273.

Barry Glacier, 75, 77.

Bath, Jamaica, 271.

Bats, 247.

Bear, Kadiak, 83, 90, 91.

Bear, polar, 117, 123.

Belkofski, 96.

Bering Sea, voyage on, 101-123,

Biological Survey, U.S., a party
of naturalists from, 38.

Birds, seen from the train, 4;
killed by the locomotive, 9; at
Victoria, B. C., 23; at Metlakah-
tla, 31; at Fort Wrangell, 33; on
the White Pass, 37; on Gustavus
Peninsula, 44, 45; on Mt. Wright,
52; at Sitka, 55; at Kadiak, 85,

88, 89; on Popof Island, 94; of
the tundra, 115, 116; on Hall Is-
land, 119-121; near Cape Fox,
128; about ‘“ Slabsides,”’ 133-152,
154-156; present interest in, 157;
the seeming decrease in the
numbers of, 160, 161; parental
instinct in, 163; bird-study in
the schools, 165-168 ; dying of
apoplexy and heart failure, 169;
profanation of nests, 169; male
singing near and on nest, 171;
distribution in summer and
winter, 173; life in winter, 173-
181; feeding the, 183-186; rapid-
ity of lives of, 186; roosting-
places of, 188; of August, 204-
209; some strange water-fowl in
Jamaica, 255; of Jamaica, 265-
268.

Blackberry, in Jamaica, 263.

Blackbird, red-winged. See Star-

ling, red-shouldered.
Blackbird, rusty. See Grackle,
rusty.

Black Crag, 32.

Black Creek. See Shattega Creek.

Black River, Jamaica, 243, 247.

Bladderwort, horned, 203, 204.

Bluebell, 88.

Bluebird (Sialia sialis), 161, 163 ;
its food in winter, 176; a nest in
the woods, 216-219.

Blue Mountain Peak, 250.

Blue Mountains, Jamaica, 226, 228;
a week among, 247-252, 265; beau-
ties of, 265; 269.

Bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivo-
rus), 160, 206, 207.

Bogoslof Islands, 103, 104.

Bog Walk, Jamaica, 231.

279

INDEX

Bomb Point, 79.

Boneset, climbing, 209.

Boneset, purple, 209.

Boneset, white, 209.

Bougainvillea, 229.

Bowden, Jamaica, 269-271.

Boy, a winsome colored, 233.

Brady, John Green, Governor of
Alaska, 54.

Brewer, Prof. William H., 22, 65,
92.

Bryanthus, 68.

Bryn Mawr Glacier, 73.

Bunting, hyperborean snow, or
McKay’s snowflake (Passerina
nivalis hyperborea), 120; song
of, 120; nest of, 123.

Bunting, indigo. See Indigo-bird.

Bunting, lark (Calamospiza me-
lanocorys), 4.

Bunting, snow, or snowflake (Pas-
serina nivalis), a part of the
winter, 180; a flock of, 180, 181;
attacked by hawks and shrikes,
180, 181; 189; notes of, 180.

Bunting, snow, or Pribilof snow-
flake (Passerina nivalis town-
sendi), 101, 106.

Buttercup, 251.

Buzzard, turkey, or turkey vul-
ture (Cathartes aura), 227, 270.

Cacti, 257.

Calipeever, 259. _

Camping-out, in Jamaica, 252-
259.

Campion, moss, 62, 53.

Canyons, 7, 12-14, 17.

Cape Fox, 127.

Cape Nome, 113.

Cardinal-flower, 152, 153, 214.

Cassiope, 88.

Cattle, wild, 255.

Caves, in Jamaica, 246, 247.

Cawein, Madison J., quotation
from, 211, 212.

Cedar-bird, or cedar waxwing
(Ampelis cedrorum), 176.

Chapelton, Jamaica, 232, 237-239.

Chasm, a, 122.

Chickadee (Parus atricapillus), a

sitting bird, 137, 138; checks to
the increase of, 138, 139; 167,173,
174, 176, 177, 183-185; sleeping-
places of, 188, 189; nest of, 136,
137, 215.

Chickadee, rufous-backed, or
chestnut-backed chickadee (Pa-
rus rufescens), 33, 55, 128.

Chickweed, 121.

Chipmunk, 154.

Chippy. See Sparrow, social.

Clarence Straits, 31, 32.

Clarkia, 17.

Claytonia, 114, 121.

Clematis, wild, 210.

Clover, white, 251.

Cobwebs, 209.

Cock Pit country, Jamaica, 243,
246, 247.

Cocoanuts, 271.

Cocoanut-trees, 260-262.

Coffee, pounding, 232.

Coleyville, Jamaica, 244-246,

Collector, a human weasel, 155.

Columbia Glacier, 71.

Columbia River, journey along,
18-20.

Columbine, in Alaska, 64.

Cook Inlet, 80, 81, 125.

Coolies, East Indian, in Jamaica,
272, 275.

Coon, 154.

Cormorant (Phalacrocorax sp.),
119.

Cottonwood, 233.

Coville, Frederick V., 22, 65.

Cowbird (Molothrus ater), notes
of, 151.

Cowcatcher, riding on the, 8, 9.

Coyote, 4, 11.

Creeper, brown (Certhia famili-
aris americana), 174.

Cricket. See Tree-cricket.

Crocodile, 252.

Crow, American (Corvus brachy-
rhynchos), 157.

Crow, fish (Corvus ossifragus), 158.

Daisy, ox-eye, 201.
Dall, Dr. William H., 22, 65.
Davidson Glacier, 35.

280

INDEX

Dead Horse Trail, 37.

Deer, 25-27.

Dellenbaugh, Fred S., 22.

Devereux, W. B., 22, 65.

Devil’s club, 28.

Devil’s Thumb, 33.

Dipper, American. See Ouzel,
water.

Dogs, in Jamaica, 232, 260.

Doran, Capt. Peter, 65, 75.

Douglas Island, 34.

Dove, mourning (Zenaidura ma-
eroura), 9.

Duck, eider (Somateria sp.), 111.

Ducks, wild, and gunners, 148-
150.

Duncan, Rev. William, 29, 30.

Dutch Harbor, 98-101, 124.

Eagle, bald (Haliwetus leucoce-
phalus), 24, 25; inspiration of
the presence of, 154-156; and
the collector, 155; 161.

Eagles, 34.

Eider. See Duck, eider.

Elk Mountains, the, 5.

Elliot, Daniel G., 22, 76.

Emerson, Prof. Benjamin K., 22,
66, 108.

Eskimos, 72; an encampment in
Siberia, 108-111; at Port Clar-
ence, 112, 113; villages ruined by
whiskey, 118.

Etolin Island, 32.

Ewarton, Jamaica, 231, 232.

Fairweather Range, 63, 56, 67,
126.

Farms, in the East and in the
West, 2, 3.

Fernow, Dr. B. E., 22.

Ferns, tree, 250.

Finch, house (Carpodacus mexi-
canus frontalis), 15.

Finch, rosy, or Hepburn’s leuco-
Sticte (Leucosticte tephrocotis
littoralis), 38, 52, 94, 123.

Fireflies, Jamaican, 238.

Fish, flying-fish, 224, 225; mullet,
241; calipeever, 259.

Fisher, Dr. A. K., 22.

Flicker, northwestern. See High-
hole, western.

Flowers, on the plains, 11; on
Kadiak Island, 88; at Plover
Bay, 111; of the tundra at Port
Ciarence, 114; on Hall and St.
Matthew Islands, 121, 122; on
Black Creek, 152, 153; of August,
202-204, 209, 210; on Katherine’s
Peak, Jamaica, 251.

Flycatcher, Arkansas, or Arkan-
sas kingbird (Tyrannus verti-
calis), 15.

Flycatcher, great crested (Myi-
archus crinitus), 138.

Flying-fish, 224, 225.

Forest, a buried, 50.

Foresting, Nature’s manner of,
45.

Forget-me-not, 88, 111.

Fort Wrangell, 32, 33.

Fox, blue, 71, 124, 125.

Fox, Hall Island arctic, 123.

Fox, red, 154.

Fox, silver-black, 125.

Fox farms, 71, 72, 124, 125.

Frankfield, Jamaica, 239, 242,

Frederick Sound, 33.

Fringed-orchis, small purple, 204.

Fuertes, Louis Agassiz, 66.

Fulmar, Pacific (Fulmarusglaci-
alis glupischa), 124.

Fungi. See Mushrooms.

Gannett, Henry, 22, 62, 76, 80.

Gardner River, 272.

George W. Elder, the steamer,
20, 21; breaks propeller, 75 ;
caught in a strong tide, 77;
mending her propeller, 77, 78;
strikes a rock, 107.

Geranium, wild, at Kadiak, 88.

Gerardia, rose, 203.

Gifford, R. Swain, 125.

Gilbert, G. K., 22, 44, 62, 65.

Ginger farming, 243, 244.

Girl, a little, mistakes the author
for Santa Claus, 226, 227.

Glacier Bay, 39, 44.

Glaciers, 35,53, 57, 82; Patterson,
33; Davidson, 35; Muir, 39-53;

281

INDEX

Morse, 49, 59; Malaspina, 58, 66,
67; Turner, 59; Hubbard, 59, 62;
on mountain precipices, 60, 61,
73; Hidden, 62; Nunatak, 62;
Columbia, 71; on Port Wells, 73,
74; Barry, 75, 77; on Harriman
Fiord, 76, 77; Serpentine, 76;
Stairway, 76 ; Harriman, 77.

Golden Grove, Jamaica, 271, 272.

Goldfinch, American (Astraga-
linus tristis), in winter, 179; the
bird of August, 207; notes of,
179; nest and eggs of, 207, 208.

Gold-seekers, privations of, 68-70;
returning, 124.

Good, John, 241, 242.

Gorse, in Jamaica, 251.

Grackle (Quiscalus crassirostris),
of Jamaica, 267.

Grackle, rusty, or rusty blackbird
(Euphagus carolinus), notes of,
150.

Graham Reach, 26.

Grass, in the northern landscape
and in the tropics, 263.

Great Salt Pond, 252-258.

Green River, 7.

Grenville Channel, 128.

Grinnell, Dr. George Bird, 22,
66.

Grosbeak, Kadiak pine (Pinicola
enucleator flammula), 64, 89.
Grouse, ruffed (Bonasa umbel-

tus), 189.

Gulls, 75, 119.

Gunning for ducks, 148-150.

Gustavus Peninsula, 44, 45.

Haenke Island, 63.

Hall Island, 118-121.

Hares, 12.

Harriman, Edward H., 1, 10, 21,
65, 75, 76; kills a Kadiak bear,
90, 91; 107-109.

Harriman Alaska Expedition,
1-129; its composition, 1; its
outfit and personnel, 21, 22 ; so-
cial life and entertainments of,
65, 66; celebrates the Fourth of
July, 92.

Harriman Fiord, 75-77, 80.

Harriman Glacier 77.

Harvard Glacier, 73.

Hawk, broad-winged (Buteo pla-
typterus), cry of, 158, 159; nest
and young of, 158, 159.

Hawk, Cooper’s (decipiter coo-
perii), 158.

Hawk, duck (Falco peregrinus
anatum), 158.

Hawk, red-tailed (Buteo borea-
lis), 157, 251.

Hawk, sharp-shinned (Accipiter
velox), 158.

Hawk, sparrow (Falco sparve-
rius), 158.

Hawks, 9, 157, 158; in August, 208,
209.

Hawkweed, orange-colored, 202.

Hector’s River, 246.

Heron, green (Butorides vires-
cens), 237.

Hidden Glacier, 62.

Highhole, western, or northwest-
ern flicker (Colaptes cafer satu-
ratior), 23.

Hix, Colonel, 243.

Howling Valley, 43, 44.

Hubbard Glacier, 59, 62.

Hudson River, a house by, 131,
132; alge in, 210, 211; August
on, 213, 214.

Hummingbird, long-tailed, or
‘“‘ doctor ” (Aithurus polytnuus),
268.

Hummingbird, mango (Lampor-
nis mango), 268.

Hummingbird, rufous (Selaspho-
rus rufus), 128.

Tliuliuk, 98.

Indian Point, 112.

Indian River, 55.

Indians, Alaskan, 28; at Metlakah-
tla, 29, 30; characteristics of, 30,
31; an encampment of, 63, 64;
summer life of, 63, 64; a deserted
village of, 127.

Indigo-bird, or indigo bunting
(Cyanospiza cyanea), song of,
205.

Tris, 88.

282

INDEX

Irrigation, 15.
Isanotski Volcano, 97, 98.

Jacob’s ladder, 88.

Jaeger (Stercorarius sp.), 64, 121.

Jamaica, Visit to, 223-277 ; a coun-
try cursed with perpetual sum-
mer, 223; arrival at, 226; road-
sides in, 228, 229; streams in,
230-232; roads in, 233, 274; stars
in, 249, 256 ; hospitality in, 253 ;
woods in, 262, 263; grasses in,
263; leaves of the trees in, 264;
the landscape in, 264, 265; mam-
mals of, 265, 269; birds of, 265-
268; future of, 273 ; taxation in,
273, 274; agriculture in, 274, 275;
labor in, 275, 276; road-making
in, 276; return from, 277. See
also Negroes, Jamaican.

Jay, blue (Cyanocitta cristata),
thieving propensity of, 166, 167;
183-185.

Jay, Steller’s (Cyanocitta stel-
levi), 33, 128.

John Crow Mountains, 269.

Joseph, a colored servant, 248.

Judas Vale, Jamaica, 236, 237.

Junco, Oregon (Junco hyematis
oreganus), 33, 45.

Juneau, 34, 126.

Kachemac Bay, 80.

Kadiak, the village, 85-87, 124.

Kadiak Island, 81-92, 124.

Katherine’s Peak, 248-251.

Katydid, 208.

Keeler, Charles A., 66, 91, 92.

Kelly, Captain, 64.

Kendal, Jamaica, 243.

Kingbird, gray (Tyrannus domi-
nicensis), 267.

Kinglet, golden-crowned (Regulus
satrapa), 174, 178, 183, 184.

Kinglet, golden-crowned (Regulus
satrapa subsp.), 45, 55, 128.

Kinglet, ruby-crowned (Regulus
calendula), rivalries of the
males, 178, 179.

Kinglet, ruby-crowned (Regulus
calendula subsp.), 45.

\ >

4k

Kingston, a winter day in, 227, 228;
231, 247; seen from Katherine’s
Peak, 248; 252; a dull, hot, unin-
viting place, 259; the roosters
of, 259, 260; the dogs of, 260;
275.

Kling-kling, 230.

Kondakoff, Stepan, 91.

Kukak Bay, 82, 93.

Lady’s-slipper, at Kadiak, 88.

Lady’s-tresses (Spiranthes cer-
nua), 204.

Laramie plains, the, 5.

Lark, horned (Otocoris alpestris
subsp.), 4, 9, 12.

Lark, prairie horned (Otocoris
alpestris praticola), 165, 166.

Larkspur, 11.

Leucosticte,
Finch, rosy.

Lice, grass, 229, 230.

Lizards, in Jamaica, 228.

Locomotive, riding on, 8, 9.

Logwood, 233.

Long Island, near Kadiak, 12,
125.

Longspur, Lapland, or Alaska
longspur (Calcarius lapponicus
alascensis), 98, 99; verses ad-
dressed to, 99; 106, 111, 115; song
of, 98, 99, 120.

Loosestrife, purple, 152, 153, 209,
210.

Lowe Inlet, 27.

Lupine, 11, 16, 64, 88.

Lynn Canal, 35.

Hepburn’s. See

Machete, the ubiquitous, 249, 250.

Magpie, black-billed (Pica pica
hudsonia), 16, 85, 125.

Malaspina Glacier, 58, 66, 67.

Meadow-beauty, or rhexia, 202.

Meadowlark, western (Sturnella
magna neglecta), 12; song of, 4.

Merriam, Dr. C. Hart, 22.

Metlakahtla, 29-31.

Middleton Island, 67.

Milbank Sound, 26.

Milkweed, swamp, 209.

Mill, an old sugar, 242,

283,

INDEX

Mines, the Treadwell, 34.

Mirage, a, 93.

Mockingbird, Antillean (Mimus
polyglottos orpheus), song of,
245, 255, 256, 268.

Mongoose, 269.

Morning-glory, wild, in Jamaica,
229.

Morse Glacier, 49, 50.

Mosquitoes, of the tundra, 115; in
Jamaica, 255.

Mountain-climbing in Jamaica,
248-251.

Mountain peak, sublimity of a,
58, 59.

Mt. Fairweather, 53.

Mt. Diamna, 80, 81.

Mt. Palmerston, 25.

Mt. Redoubt, 80.

Mt. St. Elias, 58, 125, 126.

Mt. Vancouver, 63.

Mt. Whipple, 32.

Mt. Wright, 51.

Muir, John, 20, 22, 39, 43, 44, 66, 76,
80.

Muir Glacier, 39-53.

Multnomah Falls, 18-20.

Murre, Pallas’s (Uria lomvia
arra), 103, 119, 120.

Murrelet, marbled (Brachyram-
phus marmoratus), 75.

Mushrooms, 211-213.

Nature, in the tropics, 230, 262,
264; the fanged side of tropical,
257.

Negroes, Jamaican, homes of, 233,
234; on the road, 234, 244; 237;
going to market, 239-241, 244;
photographing, 240, 241; John
Good and his family, 241, 242;
returning from market, 242; on
Sunday, 243; Joseph, a servant,
248; at work, 271; laziness of,
275; childishness of, 276 ; women
and girls the real beasts of bur-
den, 276.

Nelson, Rev. Dr. George F., 66.

New Castle, Jamaica, stay at, 247-
252, 265.

Nunatak Glacier, 62.

Nuthatch (Sitta sp.), 173, 174.
Nuthatch, red-bellied (Sitta cana-
densis), 177.

Opossum, 154.

Orca, 68, 77-79.

Orchis. See Fringed-orchis.

Oregon, journey through, 17.

Oriole (Icterus leucopteryx) of
Jamaica, 267.

Oriole, Baltimore (Icterus gal-
bula), dying of grief, 169; 206;
nest and young of, 168, 169.

Oriole, orchard (Icterus spurius),
markings of, 167, 168 ; notes of,
167, 168; nest of, 167, 168.

Otter, 153, 154,

Ouzel, water, or American dipper
(Cinclus mexicanus), song of,
65.

Oven-bird (Seiurus aurocapillus),
appearance of, 192; 265; flight-
song of, 143, 144, nest of, 191,
192.

Owl, screech (Megascops asio),
mobbed by small birds, 177.

Owl, snowy (Nyctea nyctea), nest
of, 121.

Oxen, East Indian, in Jamaica,
272,

Oxford Cave, 246, 247.

Oyster-catcher, black (Hemato-
pus bachmani), 25, 75.

Palache, Dr. Charles, 22, 44.

Palms, 258; cocoanut, 260-262;
characteristics of, 260, 261.

Parrots, green, 237.

Patterson Glacier, 33

Pavlof Volcano, 95.

Pedicularis, 114, 122.

Pelican, brown (Pelecanus occi-
dentalis), 252, 259, 271.

Phalaropes, 24.

Phlox, 11.

Pheebe-bird or phebe (Sayornis
pheebe), 204; nest of, 141.

Photographing in Jamaica, 240,
241, 272, 275.

Pinnacles, the, Alaska, 32.

Pipit, American, or titlark (An-

284

INDEX

thus pensilvanicus),
song of, 52; nest of, 62.

Plover, golden (Charadrius do-
minicus), 116; notes of, 115.

Plover Bay, 108-111.

Poets, mistakes of, 204, 206.

Police officer, a Jamaican, 238,
239.

Pond-lily, 152, 153, 203.

Poplar, Lombardy, 16.

Popof Island, 94.

Poppy, yellow, 106, 111, 122.

Port Antonio, 226, 227.

Port Clarence, 112-117.

Port Henderson, Jamaica, 252,
253.

Port Morant, Jamaica, 269.

Port Royal, Jamaica, 252.

Port Wells, 73-77.

*Possum. See Opossum.

Pribilof Islands, 104-106.

Price River, 8.

Primrose, 111, 114.

Prince of Wales Island, 32.

Prince William Sound, 66, 68-80,
82.

Prospector, a, in Alaska, 72, 73.

Ptarmigan (Lagopus sp.), 75.

Ptarmigan, white-tailed (Lagopus
leucurus), 52.

Puffin, 119.

37, 101;

Quail, Spanish, of Jamaica, a tan-
ager (Spindalis nigricephala),
267.

Queen Charlotte Sound, 26.

Quit, blue, 268; nest of, 236.

Quit, grass, song of, 268; nest of,
268.

Quit, orange, nest of, 268.

Rabbit, gray, 154; nest and young
of, 219-222.

Raccoon. See Coon.

Radcliffe Glacier, 73.

Raven, northern (Corvus corax
principalis), 28; abundance in
Alaska, 31; 91;- notes of, 31, 55.

Redstart, American (Setophaga
ruticilla), 45, 265.

Rhexia. See Meadow-beauty.

Rhododendron, a dwarf, 88.

Ridgway, Robert, 22, 45, 101.

Rio Cobre, 231.

Rio Minho, 232, 233, 237, 240-243.

Ritter, Prof. William E., 22, 65,
66.

River, living on the bank of a
great, 131, 132.

Robin, American (Merula migra-
toria), at Slabsides, 133-136, 144;
young fed by a chipping spar-
row, 163, 164; 176; nest and young
of, 134-136.

Robin, Oregon.
ried.

Robin, western (Merula migra-
toria propingua), 45.

Rocky Mountains, the, crossing,
4,5.

Roses, wild, 124.

Russell Fiord, 59-63.

See Thrush, va-

Sagebrush, 6, 11, 12, 15, 16.

St. Elias Range, 57, 58, 66, 125.

St. Lawrence Island, 117, 118,

St. Matthew Island, 118, 121-123,

St. Paul, Kadiak, 85.

St. Paul Island, 104-106.

a a canning, 78; seining, 126,
127.

Salmon-berries, 128, 128.

Sand Point, 94.

Sandpiper, Aleutian (4rquatella
couest), call of, 120.

San Salvador, 226.

Saunders, De Alton, 22, 65.

Saxifrage, 88, 111, 114, 121.

Seal, fur, 104-106.

Sea-lion, 103, 104.

Seasons, changes of the, 264.

Seattle, 20, 128.

Sensitive plant, 234, 235.

Serpentine Glacier, 76.

Seymour Narrows, 24.

Shattega Creek, the stream and
its wild neighbors, 147-153; a
bluebird’s nest on, 215-219.

Ship. See George W. Elder.

Shishaldin Volcano, 97, 98.

Shooting-star, 114.

Shoshone, 9, 15.

285

INDEX

Shoshone Falls, visit to, 9-14.

Shrike (Lanius sp.), attacking a
flock of snow buntings, 181.

Shumagin Islands, 94, 95, 124.

Siberia, visit to, 107-112.

Silene, 122.

Siskin, pine (Spinus pinus), 128.

Sitka, 54-56.

Skagway, 35, 36.

Skagway River, 36.

“Slabsides,”’ the location and
building of, 131, 182; life at, 133-
156.

Smith Glacier, 73.

Snake River, 9-17.

Snowbird, hyperborean. See Bun-
ting, hyperborean snow.

Snowflake. See Bunting, snow.

Snowflake, McKay’s. See Bun-
ting, hyperborean snow.

Snowflake, Pribilof. See Bunting,
snow.

Solitaire (Myadestes solitarius),
appearance of, 266; notes of, 245,
266, 267.

Southern Cross, the, 256.

Sparrow, English (Passer domes-
ticus), its effect on the abun-
dance of native birds, 161; im-
posing on a downy woodpecker,
161, 162; getting rid of, 162; an
instance of persistence, 163.

Sparrow, fox (Passerella iliaca),
116.

Sparrow, golden-crowned (Zono-
trichia coronata), 37, 94; song
of, 52, 89.

Sparrow, sage (Amphispisa belli
nevadensis), 12.

Sparrow, social, or chipping spar-
row (Spizella socialis), feeding
young robins, 163, 164; nest of,
134.

Sparrow, song (Melospiza cinerea
melodia), 134.

Sparrow, song (Melospiza cinerea
subsp.), 45; varying types of,
in Alaska, 85; 94; song of, 85;
nest of, 31.

Sparrow, Townsend’s fox, or
Townsend’s sparrow (Passerella

iliaca unalaschcensis), 33, 94;
song of, 52.

Sparrow, western savanna (Pas-
serculus sandwichensis alaudi-
nus), 45, 115.

Sparrow, western tree (Spizella
monticola ochracea), 116.

Sparrow, white-crowned (Zono-
trichia leucophrys subsp.), 23.

Sparrow, white-throated (Zono-
trichia albicollis), 205.

Sparrow, yellow-winged, or grass-
hopper sparrow (Coturniculus
savannarum passerinus), song
of, 169-171; nest and eggs of, 169-
171.

Spider-webs, 209.

Spruce, forests about Sitka, 55.

Stairway Glacier, 76.

Starling, red-shouldered, or red-
winged blackbird (Agelaius
pheeniceus), song of, 150, 151.

Strawberries, wild, in Jamaica,
251.

Strawberries, Yakutat, 125, 126.

Sugar-cane, a substitute for water,
235.

Sugar plantation, a, 236, 237.

Sunflower, wild, 16.

Sunsets, 25, 32.

Swallow, barn (Hirundo erythro-
gastra), 62, 63, 85, 206.

Swallow, cliff (Petrochelidon lu-
nifrons), 18, 160, 206.

Swallow, tree (Iridoprocne bico-
tor), 206.

Swallow, violet-backed (Tachyci-
neta thalassina lepida), 13.

Swallows, poets and, 206.

Swan (Olor sp.), 117.

Swift, chimney (Chetura pela-
gica), a captured bird, 140; out-
riding storms, 140, 141; nest and
young of, 139, 140.

Swift, palm (Cypselus phoenico-
bius), 228.

Swift, white-throated (4éronautes
melanoleucus), 13.

Swimming, in Jamaica, 241, 258.

Tanager. See Quail, Spanish. .

286

INDEX

Tanager, scarlet (Piranga ery-
thromelas), 144.

Tattler, wandering (Heteractitis
ineanus), 75.

Tern, Arctic (Sterna paradisea),
64, 67, 75.

Thrush, Alaska hermit (Hyloci-
chia guttata), 45, 72, 80, 89, 94;
song of, 36, 52, 61.

Thrush, gray-cheeked (Hylocichla
alicice), 89, 116,

Thrush, hermit (Hylocichia gut-
tata pallasti), 143, 161,

Thrush, russet-backed (Hylocichla
ustulata), 23, 31, 33, 45, 55, 128.
Thrush, varied, or Oregon robin
(Txoreus nevius), 55; verses ad-
dressed to, 89; song of, 45, 89, 91.

Thrush, wood (Hylocichla muste-
lina), song of, 144,

Ticks, in Jamaica, 229, 230.

Titlark. See Pipit, American.

Tlinkit Indians, 29-31.

Toad, 126,

Tody, green (Todus viridis), 267.

Tongass Narrows, 126,

Totem poles, 127, 128.

Tree-cricket, 208.

Trelease, Dr. William, 22.

Tropics, nature in the, 230, 262-
264; no chance for poetry in the,
264.

Trumpet-weed, 209.

Tundra, 72, 113-116.

Turner, Rev. Mr., a Baptist cler-
gyman, 244, 245.

Turner Glacier, 59.

Unalaska Island, 98-103, 124.

Unimak Island, 97, 98.

United Fruit Company, the, 272,
273, 275, 276.

Uyak Bay, 83, 94.

Vancouver Island, 22-26.

Vassar Glacier, 73.

Veery, or Wilson’s thrush (Hylo-
cichla fuscescens), song of, 144.

Vegetable Hades, a, 257, 258.

Vegetation in the far north, 79,
80.

Vermonter, a, at Kadiak, 86.

Victoria, B. C., 22, 23.

Violets, in Alaska, 64.

Vireo, red-eyed (Vireo olivaceus),
song of, 205.

Virgin Bay, 71, 77.

Volcanoes, Alaskan, 95-98.

Vulture, turkey. See Buzzard,
turkey.

Wagtail, Siberian yellow (Budytes
flavus leucostriatus), 111.

Walrus Island, 108.

Warbler, black and white creep-
ing (Mniotilta varia), 265; nest
of, 142,

Warbler, Canada (Wilsonia cana-
densis), 152, 205.

Warbler, lutescent (Helmintho-
phila celata lutescens), 33, 45.

Warbler, Nashville (Helmintho-
phila rubricapilla), 141.

Warbler, worm-eating (Helmin-
therus vermivorus), in the cabin,
142; song-flight of, 142, 143; ap-
pearance of, 199 ; songs of, 142-
144, 199; nest of, 197-199.

Warbler, yellow (Dendroica
estiva subsp.), 23, 64, 94.

Washington (the State), journey
through, 17.

Water-lily. See Pond-lily.

Waters, “ blossoming ” of, 210.

Water-thrush, large-billed, or
Louisiana water-thrash (Seiu-
rus motacilla), appearance and
habits of, 192, 193 ; notes of, 161,
192, 193; nest of, 151, 152, 191-
197,

Water-thrush, New York (Seiurus
noveboracensis), 192; song of,
151.

Waxwing, cedar. See Cedar-bird.

Weasel, 154.

Wellesley Glacier, 73.

West, the, farms and farmhouses
in, 2,3; geology of, 8.

Whales, 33.

Whaling fleet, a, 112, 113,

Whip-poor-will (Antrostomus vo-~
ciferus), a mother and young,

287

INDEX

146; song of, 145, 146, 205; eggs
and young of, 147.

White Pass, 36-38.

Woman, an old, and her eggs, 240,
241.

Woodchuck, 154,

Wood Island, 91.

Woodpecker, downy (Dryobates
pubescens medianus), 173, 174,
183; relations of male and fe-
male in winter, 186, 187; court-
ship of, 187; mystery of hopping
up and down trunks, 188.

Woodpecker, hairy (Dryobates
villosus), 139.

‘Woodpecker, Harris’s (Dryobates
villosus harrisii), 33.

Worthy Park, 236, 237.

Wrangell Bay, 33.

Wren, house (Troglodytes aédon),
163.

Wren, western winter (Olbiorcht-
lus hiemalis pacificus), 28; song
of, 91.

Wren, winter (Olbiorchilus hie-
malis), in winter, 174-176; song
of, 143, 144.

Wyoming, the plains in, 5, 6.

Yakutat, 58.

Yakutat Bay, 57-66, 82, 125, 126.

Yale Glacier, 73.

Yellow-throat, Maryland (Gea
thlypis trichas subsp.), 265.

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