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EVERYDAY BIRDS. Elementary Studies.
With twelve colored Illustrations repro-
duced from Audubon, Square i2mo, $i.oo.

BIRDS IN THE BUSH. i6mo, $1.25.

A RAMBLER'S LEASE. i6mo, $1.25.

THE FOOT-PATH WAY. i6mo, gilt top,

$1.25-

A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK. i6mo, $1.25.
SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE.

i6mo, $1.25.
A WORLD OF GREEN HILLS. i6mo, $1.25.
FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA. i6mo,

^i.io, net ; postpaid, $1.20.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
Boston and New York.

FOOTING IT IN
FRANCONIA

BY

BRADFORD TORREY

" And now each man bestride his hobby, and

dust away his bells to what tune he pleases."

Chakles Lamb.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

1902

COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY BRADFORD TORREY
ALL. RIGHTS RESERVED

Published October^ igoi

CONTENTS.

PAOB

Autumn 2

Spring ^jg

A Day in June 120

Berry-Time Felicities I47

Red Leaf Days I77

American Skylarks I95

A Quiet Morning 208

In the Landaff Valley 217

A Visit to Mount Agassiz 228

W^\
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FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

AUTUMN

" There did they dwell,
As happy spirits as were ever seen ;
If but a bird, to keep them company,
Or butterfly sate down, they were, I ween,
As pleased as if the same had been a Maiden-queen."

Wordsworth.

Five or six hours of pleasant railway
travel, up the course of one river valley after
another, — the Merrimac, the Pemigewasset,
the Baker, the Connecticut, and finally the
Ammonoosuc, — not to forget the best hour
of all, on the shores of Lake Winnipisaukee,
the spacious blue water now lying full in the
sun, now half concealed by a fringe of
woods, with mountains and hills, Chocorua,
Paugus, and the rest, sliifting their places
beyond it, appearing and disappearing as
the train follows the winding track, — five

2 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

or six Lours of this delightful panoramic
journey, and we leave the cars at Littleton.
Then a few miles in a carriage up a long,
steep hill through a glorious autumn-scented
forest, the horses pausing for breath as one
water-bar after another is surmounted, and
we are at the height of land, where two or
three highland farmers have cleared some
rocky acres, built houses and painted them,
and planted gardens and orchards. As we
reach this happy clearing all the mountains
stand facing us on the horizon, and below,
between us and Lafayette, lies the valley
of Franconia, toward which, again through
stretches of forest, we rapidly descend. At
the bottom of the way Gale River comes
dancing to meet us, babbling among its
boulders, — more boulders than water at
this end of the summer heats, — in its cheer-
ful uphill progress. Its uphill progress, I
say, and repeat it; and if any reader dis-
putes the word, then he has never been there
and seen the water for himself, or else he is
an unfortunate who has lost his child's heart
(without which there is no kingdom of heaven
for a man), and no longer lives by faith in

AUTUMN 3

his own senses. On the spot I have called
the attention of many to it, and they have
every one agreed with me. Mountain rivers
have attributes of their own ; or, possibly,
the mountains themselves lay some spell
upon the running water or upon the behold-
er's eyesight. Be that as it may, Lafayette
all the while draws nearer and nearer, we
going one way and Gale Eiver the other, un-
til, after leaving the village houses behind
us, we alight almost at its base. Solemn and
magnificent, it is yet most companionable,
standing thus in front of one's door, the first
thing to be looked at in the morning, and
the last at night.

The last thing to be thouglit of at nigbt
is the weather, — the weather and what goes
with it and depends upon it, the question of
the next day's programme. In a hill country
meteorological prognostications are prover-
bially difficidt ; but we have learned to " hit
it right " once in a while ; and, right or
wrong, we never omit our evening forecast.
" It looks like a fair day to-morrow," says
one. " Well," answers the other, with no
thought of discourtesy in the use of the sub-

4 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

junctive particle, " if it is, what say you to
walking to Betlileliem by the way of Wal-
lace Hill, and taking in Mount Agassiz on
our return after dinner?" Or the prophet
speaks more doubtfully, and the other says,
*' Oh well, if it is cloudy and threatening,
we will go the Landaff Valley round, and
see what birds are in the larch swamp. If
it seems to have set in for a steady rain,
we can try the Butter Hill road."

And so it goes. In Franconia it must be
a very bad half day indeed when we fail to
stretch our legs with a five or six mile jaunt.
I speak of those of us who foot it. The
more ease-loving, or less uneasy members of
the party, who keep their carriage, are nat-
urally less independent of outside conditions.
When it rains they amuse themselves in-
doors ; a pitch of sensibleness which the rest
of us may sometimes regard with a shade of
envy, perhaps, though we have never admit-
ted as much to each other, much less to any
one else. To plod through the mud is more
exhilarating than to sit before a fire ; and
we leave the question of reasonableness and
animal comfort on one side. Time is short,

AUTUMN 5

and we decline to waste it on theoretical con-
siderations.

Our company, as I say, is divided : car-
riage people and pedestrians, we may call
tliem ; or, if you like, drivers and footmen.
The walkers are now no more than the
others. Formerly — till this present autumn
— they were three. Now, alas, one of them
walks no longer on earth. The hills that
knew him so well know him no more. The
asters and goldenrods bloom, but he comes
not to gather them. The maples redden, but
he comes not to see them. Yet in a better
and truer sense he is with us still ; for we re-
member him, and continually talk of him.
If we pass a sphagnum bog, we think how
at this point he used to turn aside and put
a few mosses into his box. Some professor
in Germany, or a scholar in New Haven, had
asked him to collect additional specimens.
In those days of his sphagnum absorption
we called him sometimes the " sphagnostic."

If we come down a certain steep pitch in
the road from Garnet Hill, we remind each
other that here he always stopped to look for
Aster Lindleyanus, telling us meanwhile

6 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

how problematical the identity of the plant
really was. Professor So-and-So had pro-
nounced it Lindleyanus, but Doctor Some-
body-Else believed it to be only an odd form
of a commoner species. In the Yf allace Hill
woods, I remember how we spent an after-
noon there, he and I, only two years ago,
searching for an orchid which just then had
come newly under discussion among botan-
ists, and how pleased he was when for once
my eyes were luckier than his. If we are
on the LandafP road, my companion asks,
" Do you remember the Sunday noon when

we went home and told E that this wood

was full of his rare willow? And how he
posted over here by himself, directly after
dinner, to see it ? And how he said, in a tone
of whimsical entreaty, ' Please don't find it
anywhere else ; we must n't let it become too
common ' ? " Oh yes, I remember ; and my
companion knows he has no need to remind
me of it ; but he loves to talk of the absent,
— and he knows I love to hear him.

That willow I can never see anywhere
without thinking of the man who first told
me about it. Whether I pass the single

AUTUMN 7

small specimen between Franconia and the
Profile House, so close upon the highway
that the road-menders are continually cut-
ting it back, or the one on the Bethlehem
road, or the great cluster of stems on Wal-
lace Hill, it will always be Ms willow.

And indeed this whole beautiful hill coun-
try is his. How happy he was in it ! I used
sometimes to talk to him about the glories
of our Southern mountains, — Tennessee,
North Carolina, Virginia ; but he was never
to be enticed away even in thought. "I
think I shall never go out of New England
again," he would answer, with a smile ; and
he never did, though in his youth he had
traveled more widely than I am ever likely
to do. The very roadsides here must miss
him, and wonder why he no longer passes,
with his botanical box slung over his shoul-
der and an opera-glass in his hand, — equally
ready for a plant or a bird. He was always
looking for something, and always finding it.
"With his happiness, his goodness, his gentle
dignity, his philosophic temper, his know-
ledge of his own mind, his love of all things
beautiful, he has made Franconia a dear
place for all of us who knew him here.

8 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

To me, as to all of us, it is dear also for
its own sake. This season I returned to it
alone, — with no walking mate, I mean to
say. He was to join me later, but for eight
or ten days I was to follow the road by my-
self. At night I must make my own forecast
of the weather and lay out my own morrow.

The first day was one of the good ones,
fair and still. As I came out upon the
piazza before breakfast and looked up at
Lafayette, a solitary vireo was phrasing
sweetly from the bushes on one side of the
house, and two or three vesper sparrows
were remembering the summer from the open
fields on the other side. It was the 2 2d of
September, and by this time the birds knew
how to appreciate a day of brightness and
warmth.

Seeing them in such a mood, I determined
to spend the forenoon in their society. I
would take the road to Sinclair's MiUs, — a
woodsy jaunt, yet not too much in the forest,
always birdy from one end to the other.

" This is living ! " I found myself repeat-
ing aloud, as I went up the longish hill to
the plateau above Gale Eiver, on the Beth-

AUTUMN 9

lehem road. "This is living!" No more
books, no more manuscripts, — my own or
other people's, — no more errands to the
city. How good the air was ! How glori-
ous the mountains, unclouded, but hazy !
How fragrant the ripening herbage in the
shelter of the woods ! — an odor caught for
an instant, and then gone again ; something
that came of itself, not to be detected, much
less traced to its source, by any effort or
waiting. The forests were still green, — I
had to look closely to find here and there
the first touch of red or yellow ; but the
flowering season was mostly over, a few
ragged asters and goldenrods being the chief
brighteners of the wayside. About the sun-
nier patches of them, about the asters espe-
cially, insects were hovering, still drinking
honey before it should be too late : yellow
butterflies, bumble-bees (of some northern
kind, apparently, marked with orange, and
not so large as our common Massachusetts
fellow), with swarms of smaller creatures of
many sorts. If I stopped to attend to it,
each aster bunch was a world by itself. And
more than once I did stop. There was no

10 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

haste ; I had chosen my route partly with a
view to just such idling ; and the birds were,
and were likely to be, nothing but old favor-
ites. And they proved to be not many,
after aU. The best of them were the winter
wrens, which I thought I had never seen
more numerous ; every one fretting, tut^ tut^
in their characteristic manner, without a note
of song.

On my way back, the sun being higher,
there were many butterflies in the road, flat
on the sand, with wings outspread. If ever
there is comfort in the world, the butterfly
feels it at such times. Here and there half
a dozen or more of yellow ones would be hud-
dled about a damp spot. There were mourn-
ing-cloaks, also, and many small angle-wings,
some species of Grapta^ I knew not which,
of a peculiarly bright red. Once or twice,
wishing a name for them, I essayed to catch
a specimen under my hat ; but it seemed a
small business, at which I was only half
ashamed to find myself grown inexpert.

The forenoon was not without its tragedy,
nevertheless. As I came out into the open,
on my return from the river woods toward

AUTUMN 11

the Bethlehem road, a carriage stopped
across the field ; a man jumped out, gun in
hand, ran up to an unoccupied house stand-
ing there by itself, with a tract of low mea-
dow behind it, peeped cautiously round the
corner, lifted his gun, leveled it upon some-
thing with the quickness of a practiced
marksman, and fired. Then down the grassy
slope he went on the run out of sight, and
in a minute reappeared, holding a crow by
its claw. He took the trophy into the car-
riage with him, — two ladies and a second
man occupying the other seats, — and as I
emerged from the pine wood, fifteen minutes
afterward, I found it lying in the middle of
the road. Its shining feathers would fly no
more ; but its death had brightened the day
of some of the lords and ladies of creation.
What happier fate could a crow ask for ?

One of my first desires, this time (there
is always something in particular on my
mind when I go to Franconia), was to re-
visit Lonesome Lake, a romantic sheet of
water lying deep in the wilderness on the
back side of Mount Cannon, at an elevation
of perhaps twenty-eight hundred feet, or

12 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

something less than a thousand feet above
the level of Profile Notch. One of its two
owners, fortunately, is of our Franconia
company ; and when I spoke of my intention
of visiting it again, he bade me drive up
with his man, who would be going that way
within a day or two. Late as the season
was getting, he still went up to the lake once
or twice a week, it appeared, keeping watch
over the cabin, boat-house, and so forth. The
plan suited my convenience perfectly. We
drove to the foot of the bridle path, off the
Notch road ; the man put a saddle on the
horse and rode up, and I followed on foot.

The climb is longer or shorter, as the
climber may elect. A pedestrian would do
it in thirty minutes, or a little less, I sup-
pose ; a nature-loving stroller may profitably
be two hours about it. There must be at
least a hundred trees along the path, which
a sensitive man might be glad to stop and
commune with : ancient birches, beeches,
and spruces, any one of which, if it could
talk, or rather if we had ears to hear it,
would tell us things not to be read in
any book. Hundreds of years many of the

AUTUMN 13

spruces must have stood there. Some of
them, in all likeliliood, were of a good height
long before any white man set foot on tliis
continent. Many of them were already old
before they ever saw a paleface. What
dwarfs and weaklings these restless creatures
are, that once in a while come puffing up the
hillside, halting every few minutes to get
their breath and stare foolishly about !
What murderer's curse is on them, that they
have no home, no abiding-place, where they
can stay and get their growth?

It is a precious and solemn stillness that
falls upon a man in these lofty woods.
Across the narrow pass, as he looks through
the branches, are the long, rugged upper
slopes of Lafayette, torn with slides and
gashed into deep ravines. Far over his head
soar the trees, tall, branchless trunks push-
ing upward and upward, seeking the sun.
In their leafy tops the wind murmurs, and
here and there a bird is stirring. Now a
chickadee lisps, or a nuthatch calls to his
fellow. Out of the tangled, round-leaved
hobble-bushes underneath an occasional robin
may start with a quick note of surprise, or a

14 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

flock of white-tliroats or snowbirds will fly
up one by one to gaze at the intruder. In
one place I hear the faint smooth-voiced
signals of a group of Swainson thrushes and
the chuck of a hermit. A few siskins (rarer
than usual this year, it seems to me) pass
overhead, sounding their curious, long-drawn
whistle, as if they were blowing through a
fine-toothed comb. Further up, I stand still
at the tapping of a woodpecker just before
me. Yes, there he is, on a dead spruce. A
sapsucker, I caU him at the first glance. But
I raise my glass. No, it is not a sapsucker,
but a bird of one of the three-toed species ;
a male, for I see his yeUow crown-patch.
His back is black. And now, of a sudden,
a second one joins him. I am in great luck.
This is a bird I have never seen before ex-
cept once, and that many years ago on Mount
Washington, in Tuckerman's Eavine. The
pair are gone too soon, and, patiently as I
linger about the spot, I see no more of them.
A pity they could not have broken silence.
It is little we know of a bird or of a man tiU
we hear him speak.

At the lake there are certain to be num-

AUTUMN 15

bers of birds ; not water birds, for the most
part, — thougli I steal forward quietly at tbe
last, hoping to surprise a duck or two, or a
few sandpipers, as sometimes I have done, —
but birds of the woods. The water makes a
break in the wilderness, — a natural rendez-
vous, as we may say ; it lets in the sun, also,
and attracts insects ; and birds of many
kinds seem to enjoy its neighborhood. I do
not wonder. To-day I notice first a large
flock of white-throats, and a smaller flock of
cedar-birds. The latter, when I first dis-
cover them, are in the conical tops of the
tall spruces, whence they rise into the air
one after another, with a peculiar motion, as
if a hand had tossed them aloft. They are
catching insects, a business at which no bird
can be more graceful, I think, though some
may have been at it longer and more exclu-
sively. Their behavior is suggestive of play
rather than of a serious occupation. Near
the white-throats are snowbirds, and in the
firs by the lakeside chickadees are stirring,
among which, to my great satisfaction, I
presently hear a few Hudsonian voices. Sich-
a-day-day^ they call, and soon a little brown-

16 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

headed fellow is directly at my elbow. I
stretcli out my hand, and chirp encourag-
ingly. He comes within three or four feet
of it, and looks and looks at me, but is not
to be coaxed nearer. Sich-a-day-day-day,
he calls again (" I don't like strangers," he
means to tell me), and away he flits. He is
almost always here, and right glad I am to
see him on my annual visit. I have never
been favored with a sight of him further
south.

The lake is like a mirror, and I sit in the
boat with the sun on my back (as comfort-
able as a butterfly), listening and looking.
What else can I do ? I have puUed out
far enough to bring the top of Lafayette
into view above the trees, and have put
down the oars. The birds are mostly in-
visible. Chickadees can be heard talking
among themselves, a flicker calls wicker,
wicker, whatever that means, and once a
kingfisher springs his rattle. Ked squirrels
seem to be ubiquitous, full of sauciness and
chatter. How very often their clocks need
winding ! A few big dragon-flies are stiU
shooting over the water. But the best thing

AUTUMN 17

of all is tlie place itself : the solitude, the
brooding sky (the lake's own, it seems to be),
the solemn momitain top, the encircling for-
est, the musical woodsy stillness. The rowan
trees were never so bright with berries.
Here and there one still holds full of green
leaves, with the ripe red clusters shining
everywhere among them.

After luncheon I must sit for a while in
the forest itself. Every breath in the tree-
tops, unfelt at my level, brings down a
sprinkling of yellow birch leaves, each with
a faint rustle, like a whispered good-by, as
it strikes against the twigs in its fall.
Every one preaches its sermon, and I know
the text,— "We aU do fade." May the
rest of us be as happy as the leaves, and
fade only when the time is ripe. A nut-
hatch, busy with his day's work, passes near
me. Small as he is, I hear his wing-beats.
A squirrel jumps upon the very log on which
I am seated, but is off in a jiffy on catching
sight of so unexpected a neighbor. So short
a log is not big enough for two of us, he
thinks. By and by I hear a bird stirring
on a branch overhead, and look up to find

18 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

Mm a red-eyed vireo. One of the belated,
he must be, according to my almanac. He
peers down at me with inquisitive, sidelong
glances. A man ! — in such a j)lace ! —
and sitting still ! I like to believe that he,
as well as I, feels a pleasurable surprise at
the unlooked-for encounter. We call him
the preacher, but he is not sermonizing to-
day, perhaps because the falling leaves have
taken the words out of his mouth.

It is one of the best things about a place
like this that it gives a man a most unusual
feeling of remoteness and isolation. To be
here is not the same as to be in some equally
wild and silent spot nearer to human habita-
tions. The sense of the climb we have
made, of the wilderness we have traversed,
still folds us about. The fever and the fret,
so constant with us as to be mostly unreal-
ized or taken for the normal state of man,
are for the moment gone, and peace settles
upon the heart. For myself, at least, there
is an unspeakable sweetness in such an hour.
I could stay here, forever, I think, till I be-
came a tree. That feeling I have often had,
— a state of ravishment, a kind of absorp-

AUTUMN 19

tion into the life of things about me. It
will not last, and I know it wiU not ; but it
is like heaven, for the time it is on me, — a
foretaste, perhaps, of the true Nirvana.

Yet to-day — so self -contradictory a crea-
ture is man — there were some things I
missed. The dreamer was stiU a hobbyist,
and the hobbyist had been in the Lonesome
Lake woods before ; and he wondered what
had become of the crossbills. The common
red ones were always here, I should have
said, and on more than one visit I had found
the rarer and loveher white-winged species.
Now, in all the forest chorus, not a cross-
bill's note was audible.

One day, bright like this, I was sitting at
luncheon on the sunny stoop of the cabin,
facing the water, when I caught a sudden
glimpse of a white-wing, as I felt sure, about
some small decaying gray logs on the edge
of the lake just before me, the remains of a
disused landing. The next moment the bird
dropped out of sight between two of them.
I sat motionless, glass in hand, and eyes
fixed (so I could almost have made oath)
upon the spot where he had disappeared. I

20 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

fancied lie was at his batli. Minute after
minute elapsed. There was no sign of him,
and at last I left my seat and made my way
stealthily down to the shore. Nothing rose.
I tramped over the logs, with no result. It
was like magic, — the work of some evil
spirit. I began almost to believe that my
eyes had been made the fools of the other
senses. If I had seen a bird there, where
in the name of reason could it have gone ?
It could not have dropped into the water,
seeking winter quarters in the mud at the
bottom, according to the notions of our old-
time ornithologists !

Half an hour afterward, having finished
my limcheon, I went into the woods along
the path ; and there, presently, I discovered
a mixed flock of crossbills, — red ones and
white- wings, — feeding so quietly that till
now I had not suspected their presence.
My waterside bird was doubtless among
them ; and doubtless my eyes had not been
fixed upon the place of his disappearance
quite so uninterruptedly as I had imagined.
It was not the first time that such a thing
had happened to me. How frequently have

AUTUMN 21

we all seen a bird dart into a bit of cover,
and never come out ! If we are watchful
and clever, we are not tlie only ones.

Luck lias no little to do with a bird-lover's
success or failure in any particular walk.
If we go and go, patience wiU have its
wages ; but if we can go but once or twice,
we must take what Fortune sends, be it little
or much. So it had been with me and the
three-toed woodpeckers, that morning. I
had chanced to arrive at that precise point
in the path just at the moment when they
chanced to alight upon that dead spruce, —
one tree among a million. What had been
there ten minutes before, and what came ten
minutes after, I shaU never know. So it
was again on the descent, which I protracted
as much as possible, for love of the woods
and for the ho23e of what I might find in
them. I was perhaps halfway down when I
heard tln^ush calls near by : the whistle of
an olive-back and the chuck of a hermit,
both strongly characteristic, slight as they
seem. I halted, of course, and on the in-
stant some large bird flew past me and
perched in full sight, only a few rods away.

22 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

There he sat facing me, a barred owl, his
black eyes staring straight into mine. How
big and solemn they looked ! Never tell me
that the barred owl cannot see by dayhght.

The thrushes had followed him. It was
he, and not a human intruder, to whom they
had been addressing themselves. Soon the
owl flew a little further away (it was won-
derful how large he looked in the air), the
thrushes still after him ; and in a few min-
utes more he took wing again. This time
several robins joined the hermit and the
olive-back, and all hands disappeared up the
mountain side. Probably the pursuers were
largely reinforced as the chase proceeded,
and I imagined the big fellow pretty thor-
oughly mobbed before he got safely away.
Every small bird has his opinion of an owl.

What interested me as much as anything
connected with the whole affair was the fact
that the olive-back, even in his excitement,
made use of nothing but his mellow staccato
whistle, such as he employs against the most
inoffensive of chance human disturbers.
Like the chickadee, and perhaps some other
birds, he is musical, and not over-emphatic,
even in his anger.

AUTUMN 23

Again and again I rested to admire the
glory of Mount Lafayette, which loomed
more grandly than ever, I was ready to de-
clare, seen thus partially and from this point
of vantage. Twice, at least, I had been on
its summit in such a fall day, — once on the
1st of October, and again, the year after-
ward, on a date two days earlier. That
October day was one of the fairest I ever
knew, both in itself (and perfect weather is
a rare thing, try as we ma^y to speak notliing
but good of the doings of Providence) and
in the pleasure it brought me.

For the next year's ascent, which I re-
member more in detail, we chose — a bro-
ther Franconian and myself — a morning
when the tops of the mountains, as seen from
the valley lands, were white with frost or
snow. We wished to find out for ourselves
which it was, and just how the mountain
looked under such wintry conditions.

The spectacle would have repaid us for a
harder climb. A cold northwest wind (it
was still blowing) had swept over the sum-
mit and coated everything it struck, foliage
and rocks alike, with a thick frost (half an

24 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

incli or more in clepth, if my memory is to be
trusted), white as snow, but almost as bard
as ice. The effect was strangely beautiful.
A dwarf fir tree, for instance, would be snow
white on one side and bright green on the
other. As we looked along the sharp ridge
running to the South Peak, so called (the
very ridge at the face of which I was now
gazing from the Lonesome Lake path), one
slope was white, the other green. Summer
and winter were divided by an inch.

We nestled in the shelter of the rocks, on
the south side of the summit, courting the
sun and avoiding the wind, and lay there
for two hours, exulting in the prospect, and
between times nibbling our luncheon, which
latter we " toj)ped off " with a famous dessert
of berries, gathered on the spot : three sorts
of blueberries, and, for a sour, the moun-
tain cranberry. The blueberries were Vac-
cinium iiliginosum^ V. ccesjntosum^ and V.
Pennsylvanicum (there is no doing without
the Latin names), their comparative abun-
dance being in the order given. The first
two were really plentiful. All of them, of
course, grew on dwarf bushes, matting the

Tmm-^' ■ •'"■'"■^

AUTUMN 25

ground between the boulders. At that ex-
posed heigbt not even a blueberry bush ven-
tures to stand upright. One of them, V.
csespitosum, was both a surprise and a lux-
ury, the small berries having a most deli-
ciously rich fruity flavor, like the choicest
of bananas ! Probably no botanical writer
has ever mentioned the point, and I have
great satisfaction in supplying the deficiency,
apprehending no rush of epicures to the place
in consequence. About the fact itself there
can be no manner of doubt. My companion
fully agreed with me, and he is not only a
botanist of international repute, but a most
capable gastronomer. Much the poorest
berry of the three was the Pennsylvanian,
the common low blueberry of Massachusetts.
" Strawberry huckleberry " it used to be
called in my day by Old Colony children,
with a double disregard of scientific proprie-
ties. Even thus late in the season the Green-
land sandwort was in perfectly fresh bloom ;
but the high cold wind made it a poor " bird
day," though I remember a white-throated
sparrow singing cheerily near Eagle Lake,
and a large hawk or eagle floating high over

26 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

tlie summit. At the sight my f eUow travele.r

broke out, —

*' My heart leaps up when I behold
An eagle in the sky."

On that point, as concerning the fine quali-
ties of the cespitose blueberry, we were fuUy
agreed.

Even in Franconia, however, most of our
days are spent, not in mountain paths, but
in the valley and lower hiU roads. We keep
out of the mountains partly because we love
to look at them (" I pitch my walk low, but
my prospects high," says an old poet), and
partly, perhaps, because the paths to their
summits have seemed to faU out of repair,
and even to become steeper, with the lapse
of years. One of my good trips, this au-
tumn, was over the road toward Littleton,
and then back in the direction of Betlilehem
as far as the end of the Indian Brook road.
That, as I planned it, would be no more than
six or seven miles, at the most, and there I
was to be met by the driving members of the
club, who would bring me home for the mid-
day meal, — an altogether comfortable ar-
rangement. It is good to have time to spare,

AUTUMN 27

so that one can dally along, fearful only of
arriving at the end of the way too soon.
Such was now my favored condition, and I
made the most of it. If I crossed a brook,
I stayed awhile to listen to it and moralize
its song. If a flock of bluebirds and spar-
rows were twittering about a farmer's barn,
I lingered a little to watch their doings.
When a wliite-crowned sparrow or a par-
tridge showed itself in the road in advance
of me, that was reason enough for another
halt. It is a pretty picture : a partridge
caught unexpectedly in the open, its ruff
erect, and its tail, fully spread, snapping
nervously with every quick, furtive step.
And the fine old trees in the Littleton hiU
woods were of themselves sufficient, on a
warm day like this, to detain any one who
was neither a worldling nor a man sent for
the doctor. They detained me, at all events ;
and very glad I was to sit down more than
once for a good season vdth them.

And so the hours passed. At the top of
the road, in the clearing by the farms, I
met a pale, straight-backed young feUow
under a military hat. " You look like a man

28 FOOTING IT IN FKANCONIA

from Cuba or from Chickamauga," I ventured
to say. " Chickamauga," he answered lacon-
ically, and marched on. Whether it was
typhoid fever or simple " malaria " that had
whitened his face there was no chance to in-
quire. He was munching an apple, which
at that moment was also my own occupation.
I had just stopped under a promising-look-
ing tree, whose generous branches spilled
their crop over the roadside wall, — excellent
" common fruit," as Franconians say, mel-
low, but with a lively, ungrafted tang. Here
in this sunny stretch of road were more of
my small Grapta butterflies, and presently I
came upon a splendid tortoise-shell (^Va-
nessa Mlherti). That I would certainly
have captured had I been armed with a net.
I had seen two like it the day before, to the
surprise of my friends the carriage people,
ardent entomological collectors, both of them.
They had found not a single specimen the
whole season through. " There are some
advantages in beating out the miles on
foot," I said to myself. I have never seen
this strikingly handsome butterfly in Mas-
sachusetts, as I once did its rival in beauty,

AUTUMN 29

the banded purple (Arthemis) ; and even
here in the hill country it is never so com-
mon as to lose that precious bloom which
rarity puts upon whatever it touches.

As I turned down the Betlilehem road,
the valley and hill prospects on the left be-
came increasingly beautiful. Here I passed
hermit thrushes (it was good to see them
already so numerous again, after the de-
struction that had wasted them a few win-
ters ago), a catbird or two, and a few ruby-
crowned kinglets, — some of them singing,
— and before long found myself within the
limits of a rich man's red farm ; fences,
houses, barns, poultry coops, and the rest,
all painted of the same deep color, as if to
say, " All this is mine." I remembered the
estate well, and have never grudged the
owner of it his lordly possessions. I enjoy
them, also, in my own way. He keeps his
roads in apple-pie order, without meddling
with their natural beauty (I wish our Mas-
sachusetts " highway surveyors " all worked
under his orders, or were endowed with his
taste), and is at pains to save his woods from
the hands of the spoiler. " Please do not

30 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

peel bark from the bircli trees," — so the
signs read ; and I say Amen. He has splen-
did flower gardens, too, and plants them
well out upon the wayside for all men to
enjoy. Long may it be before his soul is
required of him.

By this time I was in the very prettiest
of the red-farm woods. Hermit thrushes
were there, also, standing upright in the
middle of the road, and in the forest hylas
were peeping, one of them a real champion
for the loudness of his tone. How full of
glory the place was, with the sunhght sifting
through the bright leaves and flickering
upon the shining birch trunks ! If I were
an artist, I think I would paint wood inte-
riors.

My forenoon's walk was ended. Another
turn in the road, and I saw the carriage be-
fore me, the driver minding the horses, and
the passengers' seat vacant. The entomolo-
gists had gone into the woods looking for
specimens, and there I joined them. They
were in search of beetles, they said, and had
no objection to my assistance ; I had better
look for decaying toadstools. This was easy

AUTUMN 31

work, I thought ; but, as is always the way
with my efforts at iusect collecting, I could
fiiicl nothing to the purpose. The best I
could do was to bring mushrooms full of
maggots (larvae, the carrier of the cyanide
and alcohol bottles called them), and what
was desired was the beetles which the larvae
turned into. Once I announced a small spi-
der, but the bottle-holder said. No, it was
not a spider, but a mite ; and there was no
disputing an expert, who had published a
list of Franconia spiders, — one hundred
and forty-nine species ! (She had wished
very much for one more name, she told me,
but her friend and assistant had remarked
that the odd number would look more hon-
est !) However, it is a poor sort of man
who cannot enjoy the sight of another's
learning, and the exposure of his own ig-
norance. It was worth something to see
a first-rate, thoroughly equipped " insecta-
rian " at work and to hear her talk. I should
have been proud even to hold one of her
smaller phials, but they were all adjusted
beyond the need, or even the comfortable
possibility, of such assistance. There was

32 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

nothing for it but to play the looker-on and
listener. In that part I hope I was less of
a failure.

The enthusiastic pursuit of special know-
ledge, persisted in year after year, is a phe-
nomenon as well worth study as the song
and nesting habits of a thrush or a sparrow;
and I gladly put myself to school, not only
this forenoon, but as often as I found the
opportunity. One day my mentor told me
that she hoped she had discoverd a new
flea ! She kept, as I knew, a couple of pet
deer-mice, and it seemed that some almost
microscopic fleas had left them for a bunch
of cotton wherein the mice were accustomed
to roU themselves up in the daytime. These
minute creatures the entomologist had
pounced upon, clapped into a bottle, and
sent off straightway to the American flea
specialist, who lived somewhere in Alabama.
In a few days she should hear from him,
and perhaps, if the species were undescribed,
there would be a flea named in her honor.^

^ The species was not new. A Maine collector had an-
ticipated her, I believe. Whether his name was given to
the flea I did not learn or have forgotten.

AUTUMN 33

Distinctions of that nature are almost
every-day matters with her. How many
species already bear her name she has never
told me. I suspect they are so numerous
and so frequent that she herself can hardly
keep track of them. Think of the pleasure
of walking about the earth and being able
to say, as an insect chirps, " Listen ! that
is one of my species, — named after me,
you know." Such specific honors, I say,
are common in her case, — common almost
to satiety. But to have a genus named for
her, — that was glory of a different rank,
glory that can never fall to the same person
but once ; for generic names are unique.
Once given, they are patented, as it were.
They can never be used again — for genera,
that is — in any branch of natural science.
To our Franconia entomologist this honor
came, by what seemed a poetic justice, in
the Lepidoptera, the order in which she be-
gan her researches. Hers is a genus of
moths. I trust they are not of the kind that
*' corrupt."

Thinking how above measure I should be
exalted in such circumstances, I am surprised

34 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

that she wears her laurels so meekly. Not
that she affects to conceal her gratification ;
she is as happy over her genus, perhaps, as
over the new edition de luxe of her most
famous story; for an entomologist may be
also a novelist, if she has a mind to be, as
Charles Lamb would have said ; but she
knows how to carry it off lightly. She and
the botanist of the party, my "walking
mate," who, I am proud to say, is similarly
distinguished, often laugh together about
their generic namesakes (his is of the large
and noble Compositse family) ; and then,
sometimes, the lady will turn to me.

"It is too bad you can never have a
genus," she will say in her bantering tone ;
" the name is already taken up, you know."

" Yes, indeed, I know it," I answer her.
An older member of the family, a — th cou-
sin, carried off the prize many years ago,
and the rest of us are left to get on as best
we can, without the hope of such dignities.
When I was in Florida I took pains to see
the tree, — the family evergreen, we may
call it. Though it is said to have an ill
smell, it is handsome, and we count it an
honor.

AUTUMN 35

" But then, perhaps you would never have
had a genus named for you, anyhow," the
entomologist continues, still bent upon mis-
chief.

And there we leave the matter. Let the
shoemaker stick to his last. Some of us
were not born to shine at badinage, or as
collectors of beetles. For myself, in this
bright September weather I have no ambi-
tions. It is enough, I think, to be a follower
of the road, breathing the breath of life and
seeing the beauty of the world.

In the afternoon I took the Landaff Val-
ley round, down the village street nearly to
the junction of Gale Kiver and Ham Branch,
then up the Ham Branch (or Landaif) Val-
ley to a crossroad on the left, and so back
to the road from the Profile Notch, and by
that home again. The jaunt, which is one
of our Franconia favorites, is peculiar for
being substantially level ; with no more up-
hill and downhill than would be included in
a walk of the same distance — perhaps six
miles — almost anywhere in southern New
England.

36 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

The first thing a man is likely to notice
as he passes the last of the village houses,
and finds himself skirting the bank of Ham
Branch (which looks to be nearly or quite
as full as the river into which it empties it-
self), is the color of the water. Gale River
is fresh from the hills, and ripples over its
stony bed as clear as crystal. The branch,
on the contrary, has been flowing for some
time through a flat meadowy valley, where
it has taken on a rich earthy hue, to which
it might be natural to apply a less honorable
sounding word, perhaps, if it were a question
of some neutral stream, in whose character
and reputation I felt no personal, friendly
interest.

Just as I came to it, that afternoon, I saw
to my surprise a white admiral butterfly sun-
ning itself upon an alder leaf. I hope the
reader knows the species, — Limenitis Ar-
themis, sometimes called the banded purple,
— one of the prettiest and showiest of New
England insects, four black or blackish
wings crossed by a broad white band. It
was much out of season now, I felt sure,
both from what my entomological friends

AUTUMN 37

had told me, and from my own recollections
of previous years, and I was seized with a
foolish desire to capture it as a sort of tro-
phy. It lay just beyond my reach, and I
disturbed it, m hopes it would settle nearer
the ground. Twice it disappointed me.
Then I threw a stick toward it, aiming not
wisely but too well, and this time startled it
so badly that it rose straight into the air,
sailed across the stream, and came to rest far
up in a tall elm. " You were never cut out
for a collector of insects," I said to myseK,
recalling my experience of the forenoon ;
but I was glad to have seen the creature, —
the first one for several years, — and went
on my way as happy as a child in thinking
of it. In the second half of a man's century
he may be thankful for almost anything
that, for the time being, lifts twoscore of
years off his back. The best part of most
of us, I think, is the boy that was born with
us. So far I am a Wordsworthian ; —

" And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety."

A little way up the vaUey we come to an
ancient miU and a bridge ; a new bridge it

38 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

is now, but I remember an old one, and a
friglit that I once bad upon it. Witb a fel-
low itinerant — a learned man, wbose life
was valuable — I stopped here to rest of a
summer noon, and my companion, with an
eye to shady comfort, clambered over the
edge of the bridge and out upon a joist
which projected over the stream. There he
sat down with his back against a pillar and
his legs stretched before him on the joist.
He has a theory, concerning which I have
heard him discourse more than once, —
something in his own attitude suggesting
the theme, — that when a man, after walk-
ing, " puts his feet up," he is acting not
merely upon a natural impulse, but in ac-
cordance with a sound physiological princi-
ple ; and in accordance with that principle
he was acting now, as well as the circum-
stances of the case would permit. We
chatted awhile ; then he fell silent ; and
after a time I turned my head, and saw him
clean gone in a doze. The seat was barely
wide enough to hold him. What if he
should move in his sleep, or start up sud-
denly on being awakened? I looked at the

AUTUMN 39

rocks below, and shivered. I dared not dis-
turb him, and could only sit in a kind of
stupid terror and wait for him to open his
eyes. Happily his nap did not last long,
and came to a quiet termination; so that
the cause of science suffered no loss that
day ; but I can never go by the place with-
out thinking of what might have happened.
Here, likewise, on an autumnal forenoon,
two or three years ago, I had another mem-
orable experience ; nothing less (nothing
more, the reader may say) than the song of
a hermit thrush. It was in the season after
bluebirds and hermits had been killed in
such dreadful numbers (almost exterminated,
we thought then) by cold and snow at the
South. I had scarcely seen a hermit all the
year, and was approaching the bridge, of a
pleasant late September morning, when I
heard a thrush's voice. I stopped instantly.
The note was repeated ; and there the bird
stood in a low roadside tree ; the next min-
ute he began singing in a kind of reminis-
cential half -voice, — the soul of a year's
music distilled in a few drops of sound, —
such as birds of many kinds so frequently

40 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

drop into in the fall. That, too, I am sure
to remember as often as I pass this way.

In truth, all my Franconia rambles (I am
tempted to write the name in three syllables,
as I sometimes speak it, following the exam-
ple of Fishin' Jimmy and other local worth-
ies), — all my " Francony " rambles, I say,
are by this time full of these miserly delights.
It is really a gain, perhaps, that I make the
round of them but once a year. Some things
are wisely kept choice.

" Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare."

To get aU the goodness out of a piece of
country, return to it again and again, till
every corner of it is alive with memories ;
but do not see it too often, nor make your
stay in it too long. The hermit thrush's
voice is all the sweeter because he iS a her-
mit.

This afternoon I do not cross the bridge,
but keep to the valley road, which soon runs
for some distance along the edge of a hack-
matack swamp ; full of graceful, pencil-
tipped, feathery trees, with here and there a
dead one, on purpose for woodpeckers and

AUTUMN 41

hawks. A hairy woodpecker is on one of
them at this moment, now hammering the
trunk with his powerful beak (hammer and
chisel in one), now lifting up his voice in a
way to be heard for half a mile. To judge
from his ordinary tone and manner, Dryo-
hates villosus has no need to cultivate deci-
sion of character. Every word is peremp-
tory, and every action speaks of energy and
a mind made up.

In this larch swamp, though I have never
really explored it, I have seen, first and last,
a good many things. Here grows much of
the pear-leaved wiUow (^Salix halsamiferd),
I notice a few bushes even now as I pass,
the reddish twigs each with a tuft of yellow-
ing, red-stemmed leaves at the tip. Here,
one June, a Tennessee warbler sang to me ;
and there are only two other places in the
world in which I have been thus favored.
Here, — a little farther up the valley, — on
a rainy September forenoon, I once sat for
an hour in the midst of as pretty a flock of
birds as a man could wish to see : south-go-
ing travelers of many sorts, whom the for-
tunes of the road had throv/n together.

42 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

Here they were, lying by for a day's rest in
this favorable spot ; flitting to and fro,
chirping, singing, feeding, playfully quarrel-
ing, as if life, even in rainy weather and in
migration time, were all a pleasure trip. It
was a sight to cure low spirits. I sat on the
hay just within the open side of a barn
which stands here in the woods, quite by it-
self, and watched them till I almost felt my-
seK of their company. I have forgotten
their names, though I listed them carefully
enough, beyond a doubt ; but it will be long
before I forget my delight in the birds them-
selves. Ours may be an evil world, as the
pessimists and the preachers find so much
comfort in maintaining, but there is one
thing to be said in its favor : its happy days
are the longest remembered. The pain I
suffered years ago 1 cannot any longer make
real to myself, even if I would, but the joys
of that time are still almost as good as new,
when occasion calls them up. Some of them,
indeed, seem to have sweetened with age.
This is especially the case, I think, with sim-
ple and natural pleasures ; which may be
considered as a good reason why every man

AUTUMN 43

should be, if he can, a lover of nature, — a
sympathizer, that is to say, with the Hfe of
the world about him. The less artificial our
joys, the more likelihood of their staying by
us.

Not to blink at the truth, nevertheless,
I must add a circumstance which, till this
moment, I had clean forgotten. I was still
watching the birds, with perhaps a dozen
species in sight close at hand, when suddenly
I observed a something come over them, and
on the instant a large hawk skimmed the
tops of the trees. In one second every bird
was gone, — vanished, as if at the touch of
a necromancer's wand. I did not see them
fly ; there was no rush of wings ; but the
place was empty ; and though I waited for
them, they did not reappear. Two or three,
indeed, I may have seen afterward, but the
flock was gone. My holiday, at all events,
or that part of it, was done, — shadowed by
a hawk's wing. Undoubtedly a few minutes
of safety put the birds all in comfortable
spirits again, however ; and anyhow, it bears
out my theory of remembered happiness, that
this less cheerful part of the story had so

44 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

completely passed out of mind. Memory,
like a sundial, Lad marked only the bright
hour.

Beyond this lonely barn the soil of the
valley becomes drier and sandier. Here are
two or three houses, with broad hayfields
about them, in which Hve many vesper spar-
rows. No doubt they have lived here longer
than any of their present human neighbors.
Even now they flit along the wayside in ad-
vance of the foot-passenger, running a space,
after their manner, and anon taking wing to
alight upon a fence rail. Their year is done,
but they linger still a few days, out of love
for the ancestral fields, or, it may be, in
dread of the long journey, from which some
of them will pretty certainly never come
back.

All the way up the road, though no men-
tion has been made of it, my eyes have been
upon the low, bright-colored hills beyond the
river, — sugar-maple orchards all in yellow
and red, a gorgeous display, — or upon the
mountains in front. Kinsman and the more
distant Moosilauke. The green meadow is
a good place in which to look for marsh

AUTUMN 45

hawks, — as well as of great use as a fore-
ground, — and the hill woods beyond are
the resort of pileated woodpeckers. I have
often seen and heard them here, but there is
no sign of them to-day.

Though these fine birds are generally de-
scribed — one book following another, after
the usual fashion — as frequenters of the
wilderness, and though it is true that they
have forsaken the more thickly settled parts
of the country, I think I have never once
seen them in the depths of the forest. To
the best of my recollection none of our
Franconia men have ever reported them
from Mount Lafayette or from the Lonesome
Lake region. On the other hand, we meet
them with greater or less regularity in the
more open valley woods, often directly upon
the roadside ; not only in the Landaff Val-
ley, but on the outskirts of the village toward
Littleton and on the Bethlehem road. In
this latter place I remember seeing a fellow
prancing about the trunk of a small orchard
tree within twenty rods of a house ; and not
so very infrequently, especially in the rum-
cherry season, they make their appearance

46 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

in tlie immediate vicinity of tlie hotel ; foi
they, like some of their relatives, notably the
sapsucker, are true cherry-birds. In Ver-
mont, too, I have found their freslily cut
" peck-holes " on the very skirts of the vil-
lage. And at the South, so far as I have
been able to observe, the story is the same.
About Natural Bridge, Virginia, for exam-
ple, a loosely settled country, with plenty of
woodland but no extensive forests, the birds
were constantly in evidence. In short, un-
tamable as they look, and little as they may
like a town, they seem to find themselves
best off, as birds in general do, on the bor-
ders of civilization. They have something
of Thoreau's mind, we may say : lovers of
the wild, they are yet not quite at home in
the wilderness, and prefer the woodman's
path to the logger's.

Not far ahead, on the other side of the
way, — to return to the Landaff Valley, —
is a red maple grove, more briUiant even
than the sugar orchards. It ripens its leaves
earlier than they, as we have always noticed,
and is already past the acme of its annual
splendor ; so that some of the trees have a

AUTUMN 47

peculiarly delicate and lovely purplish tint,
a real bloom, never seen, 1 think, except on
the red maple, and there only after the
leaves have begun to curl and fade. Oppo-
site it (after whistling in vain for a dog with
whom in years past, I have been accustomed
to be friendly at one of the houses — he
must be dead, or gone, or grown reserved
with age), I take the crossroad before men-
tioned ; and now, face to face with Lafayette,
I stop under a favorite pine tree to enjoy the
prospect and the stillness : no sound but the
chirping of crickets, the peeping of hylas,
and the hardly less musical hammering of a
distant carpenter.

Along the wayside are many gray birches
(of the kind called white birches in Massa-
chusetts, the kind from which Yankee school-
boys snatch a fearful joy by " swinging off "
their tops), the only ones I remember about
Franconia ; for which reason I sometimes
call the road Gray Birch Road; and just
beyond them I stop again. Here is a bit for
a painter : a lovely vista, such as makes a
man wish for a brush and the skill to use it.
The road dips into a little hollow, turns

48 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

gently, and passes out of sight witliin tlie
shadow of a wood. And above the over-
arching trees rises the pyramidal mass of
Mount Cannon, its middle part set with dark
evergreens, which are flanked on either side
with broad patches of light yellow, — poplars
or birches. The sun is getting down, and
its level rays flood the whole mountain forest
with hght.

Into the shadow I go, following the road,
and after a turn or two come out at a small
clearing and a house. " Rocky Farm," we
might name it ; for the land is sprinkled
over with huge boulders, as if giants had
been at play here. Whoever settled the
place first must have chosen the site for its
outlook rather than for any hope of its fer-
tility. I sit down on one of the stones and
take my fill of the mountain glory : Garfield,
Lafayette, Cannon, Kinsman, Moosilauke, —
a grand horizonf ul. Cannon is almost within
reach of the hand, as it looks ; but the arm
might need to be two miles long.

Just here the road mkkes a sudden bend,
passes again into light woods, and presently
emerges upon a little knoll overlooking the

AUTUMN 49

upper Franconia meadows. This is the
noblest prospect of the afternoon, and late
as the hour is growing I must lean against
the fence rail — for there is a house at this
point also — and gaze upon it. The green
meadow is spread at my feet, flaming maple
woods range themselves beyond it, and be-
hind them, close at hand, loom the sombre
mountains, I had forgotten that this part
of the road was so "viewly," to borrow a
local word, and am thankful to have reached
it at so favorable a moment. Now the
shadow of the low hills at my back over-
spreads the valley, while the upper world
beyond is aglow with light and color.

It is five o'clock, and I must be getting
homeward. Down at the valley level the
evening chill strikes me, after the excep-
tional warmth of the day, and by the time
Tucker Brook is crossed the bare summit of
Lafayette is of a deep rosy purple, — the
rest of the world sunless. The day is over,
and the remaining miles are taken somewhat
hurriedly, although I stop below the Profile
House farm to look for a fresh bunch of
dumb foxglove, — not easy to find in the

50 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

open at this late date, many as the plants
are, — and at one or two other places to
pluck a tempting maple twig. Sated with
the magnificence of autumnal forests, hill
after hill splashed with color, the eye loves
to withdraw itself now and then to rest upon
the perfection of a blossom or a leaf. Wag-
onloads of tourists come down the Notch
road, the usual nightly procession, some si-
lent, some boisterously .singing. Among the
most distressing of all the noises that human
beings make is this vulgar shouting of " sa-
cred music " along the public highway. This
time the hymn is Jerusalem the Golden,
after the upper notes of which an unhappy
female voice is vainly reaching, like a boy
who has lost his wind in shinning up a tree,
and with his last gasping effort still finds
the lowest branch just beyond the clutch of
his fingers.

"I know not, oh, I know not,"

I hear her shriek, and then a lucky turn in
the road takes her out of hearing, and I lis-
ten again to the still small voice of the brook,
which, whether it " knows " or not, has the
grace to make no fuss about it.

AUTUMN 51

Let that one human discord be forgotten.
It had been a glorious day ; few lovelier
were ever made : a day without a cloud (lit-
erally), and almost without a breath ; a day
to walk, and a day to sit still ; a long feast
of beauty ; and withal, it had for me a per-
fect conclusion, as if Nature herself were set-
ting a benediction upon the hours. As I
neared the end of my jaunt, the hotel already
in sight, Venus in all her splendor hung low
in the west, the full moon was showing its
rim above the trees in the east, and at the
same moment a vesper sparrow somewhere
in the darkening fields broke out with its
evening song. Five or six times it sang,
and then fell silent. It was enough. The
beauty of the day was complete.

The next day, October 1, was no less de-
lightful : mild, stiU, and cloudless ; so that
it was pleasant to lounge upon the piazza in
the early morning, looking at Lafayette, —
good business of itself, — and listening to
the warble of a bluebird, the soft chips of
myrtle warblers, or the distant gobbling of a
turkey down at one of the river farms ; while
now and then a farmer drove past from his

52 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

morning errand at tlie creamery, with one
or two tall milk-cans standing behind him in
the open, one-seated carriage. If you see a
man on foot as far from the village as this,
you may set him down, in ornithological lan-
guage, as a summer resident or a transient
visitor. Franconians, to the manner born,
are otherwise minded, and wiU " hitch up "
for a quarter of a mile. As good John Bun-
yan said, " This is a valley that nobody walks
in, but those that love a pilgrim's life."

As I take the Notch road after breakfast
the temperature is summer-like, and the foli-
age, I think, must have reached its brightest.
Above the Profile House farm, on the edge
of the golf links, where the whole Franconia
Valley lies exposed, I seat myself on the
wall, inside a natural hedge that borders
the highway, to admire the scene : a long
verdant meadow, flanked by low hills covered,
mile after mile, with vivid reds and yellows ;
splendor beyond words ; a pageant glorious
to behold, but happily of brief duration.
Human senses would weary of it, though the
eye loves color as the palate loves spices and
sweets, or, by force of looking at it, would
lose all delicacy of perception and taste.

^ AUTUMN 63

Even yet the world, viewed in broad spaces,
wears a clean, fresh aspect ; but near at hand
the herbage and shrubbery are all in the sere
and yellow leaf. So I am saying to myseK
when I start at the sound of a Hudsonian
chickadee's nasal voice speaking straight into
my ear. The saucy chit has dropped into
the low poplar sapling over my head, and
surprised at what he discovers underneath,
lets fall a hasty Sick-a-day-day. His dress,
like his voice, compares unfavorably with
that of his cousin, our familiar blackcap. In
fact, I might say of him, with his dirty brown
headdress, what I was thinking of the road-
side vegetation : he looks dingy, out of con-
dition, frayed, discolored, belated, frost-bit-
ten. But I am delighted to see him, — for
the first time at any such level as this, —
and thank my stars that I sat down to rest
and cool off on this hard but convenient
boulder.

A chipmunk thinks I have sat here long
enough, and feels no bashfulness about tell-
ing me so. Why should he ? Frankness is
esteemed a point of good manners in all nat-
ural society. A man shoots down the hill

54 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

behind me on a bicycle, coasting like the
wind, and another, driving up, salutes him
by name, and then turns to cry after him in
a ringing voice, "How he ye?" The em-
phatic verb bespeaks a real solicitude on the
questioner's part ; but he is half a mile too
late ; he might as well have shouted to the
man in the moon. Presently two men in a
buggy come up the road, talking in breezy
up-country fashion about some one whose
name they use freely, — a name well known
hereabout, — and with whom they appear
to have business relations. " He got up

this morning like a thousand of

brick," one of them says. A disagreeable
person to work for, I should suppose. And
all the while a child behind the hedge is tak-
ing notes. Queer things we could print, if
it were allowable to report verbatim.

When this free-spoken pair is far enough
in the lead I go back to the road again,
traveling slowly and keeping to the shady
side, with my coat on my arm. As the climb
grows steeper the weather grows more and
more like August ; and hark I a cicada is
shrilling in one of the forest trees, — a long-

AUTUMN 65

drawn, heat-laden, midsummer cry. I will
tell the entomologist about it, I promise my-
self. The circumstance must be very miu-
sual, and cannot fail to interest her. (But
she takes it as a matter of course. It is
hard to bring news to a specialist.)

So I go on, up Hardscrabble and Little
Hardscrabble, stopping like a short-winded
horse at every water-bar, and thanldul for
every bird-note that calls me to a halt be-
tween times. An ornithological preoccupa-
tion is a capital resource when the road is
getting the better of you. The brook like-
wise must be minded, and some of the more
memorable of the wayside trees. A moun-
tain road has one decided and inalienable ad-
vantage, I remark inwardly: the most per-
versely opinionated highway surveyor in the
world cannot straighten it. How fast the
leaves are falling, though the air scarcely
stirs among them ! In some places I walk
through a real shower of gold. Theirs is an
easy death. And how many times I have
been up and down this road ! Summer and
autumn I have traveled it. And in what
pleasant company ! Now I am alone ; but

56 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

then, the solitude itself is an excellent com-
panionship. We are having a pretty good
time of it, I think, — the trees, the brook,
the winding road, the yellow birch leaves,
and the human pilgrim, who feels himself
one with them all. 1 hope they would not
disown a poor relation.

It is ten o'clock. Slowly as I have come,
not a wagonload of tourists has caught up
with me ; and at the Bald Mountain path I
leave the highway, having a sudden notion
to go to Echo Lake by the way of Artist's
Bluff, so called, a rocky cliff that rises
abruptly from the lower end of the lake.
The trail conducts me through a veritable
fernery, one long slope being thickly set
with perfectly fresh shield-ferns, — Aspi-
dium sijinulosum and perhaps A. clilatatum,
though I do not concern myseK to be sure of
it. From the bluff the lake is at my feet,
but what mostly fills my eye is the woods on
the lower side of Mount Cannon. There is
no language to express the kind of pleasure
I take in them : so soft, so bright, so various
in their hues, — dark green, light green,
russet, yellow, red, — all drowned in sun-

AUTUMN 57

shine, yet veiled perceptibly with haze even
at this slight distance. If there is anything
in nature more exquisitely, ravisliingly beauti-
ful than an old mountainside forest looked at
from above, I do not know where to find it.

Down at the lakeside there is beauty of
another kind : the level blue water, the clean
gray shallows about its margin, the reflec-
tions of bright mountains — Eagle Cliff and
Mount Cannon — in its face, and soaring
into the sky, on either side and in front, the
mountains themselves. And how softly the
ground is matted under the shrubbery and
trees : twin-flower, partridge berry, creeping
snowberry, gold-thread, oxalis, dwarf cornel,
checkerberry, trailing arbutus ! The very
names ought to be a means of grace to the
pen that writes them.

White-throats and a single winter wren
scold at me behind my back as I sit on a
spruce log, but for some reason there are
few birds here to-day. The fact is excep-
tional. As a rule, I have found the bushes
populous, and once, I remember, not many
days later than this, there were fox sparrows
with the rest. I am hoping some tune to

58 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

find a stray phalarope swimming in the lake.
That would be a sight worth seeing. The
lake itself is always here, at any rate, espe-
cially now that the summer people are gone ;
and if the wind is right and the sun out, so
that a man can sit still with comfort (to-day
my coat is superfluous), the absence of other
things does not greatly matter.

This clean waterside must have many
four-footed visitors, particularly in the twi-
light and after dark. Deer and bears are
common inhabitants of the mountain woods ;
but for my eyes there is nothing but squir-
rels, with once in a long while a piece of
wilder game. Twice only, in Franconia,
have I come within sight of a fox. Once I
was alone, in the wood-road to Sinclair's
Mills. I rounded a curve, and there the
fellow stood in the middle of the way, smell-
ing at something in the rut. After a bit
(my glass had covered him instantly) he
raised his head and looked down the road
in a direction opposite to mine. Then he
turned, saw me, started slightly, stood quite
still for a fraction of a minute (I wondered
why), and vanished in the woods, his white

AUTUMN 59

brush waving me farewell. He was gone so
instantaneously that it was hard to believe
he had really been there.

That was a pretty good look (at a fox),
but far less satisfying than the other of my
Franconia experiences. With two friends
I had come down through the forest from
the Notch railroad by a rather blind loggers'
trail, heading for a pair of abandoned farms,
grassy fields in which it is needful to give
heed to one's steps for fear of bear-traps.
As we emerged into the first clearing a fox
was not more than five or six rods before us,
feeding in the grass. Her eyes were on her
work, the wind was in our favor, and not-
withstanding two of us were almost wholly
exposed, we stood there on the edge of the
forest for the better part of half an hour,
glasses up, passing comments upon her be-
havior. Evidently she was lunching upon
insects, — grasshoppers or crickets, I sup-
pose, — and so taken up was she with this
agreeable employment that she walked di-
rectly toward us and passed within ten yards
of our position, stopping every few steps for
a fresh capture. The sunlight, which shone

60 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

squarely in lier face, seemed to affect her
unpleasantly ; at all events she bhnked a
good deal. Her manner of stepping about,
her motions in catching her prey, — driving
her nose deep into the grass and pushing it
home, — and in short her whole behavior,
were more catlike than doglike, or so we all
thought. Plainly she had no idea of ab-
breviating her repast, nor did she betray
the slightest grain of suspiciousness or wari-
ness, never once casting an eye about in
search of possible enemies. A dog in his
own dooryard could not have seemed less
apprehensive of danger. As often as she ap-
proached the surrounding wood she turned
and hunted back across the field. We
might have played the spy upon her inde-
finitely ; but it was always the same thing
over again, and by and by, when she passed
for a little out of sight behind a tuft of
bushes, we followed, careless of the result,
and, as it seemed, got into her wind. She
started on the instant, ran gracefully up a
little incline, still in the grass land, turned
for the first time to look at us, and disap-
peared in the forest. A pretty creature she

AUTUMN 61

surely was, and from all we saw of lier she
might have been accounted a very useful
farm-hand; but perhaps, as farmers some-
times say of unprofitable cattle, she would
soon have " eaten her head off" in the poul-
try yard. She was not fearless, — like a
woodchuck that once walked up to me and
smelled of my boot, as I stood still in the
road near the Crawford House, — but simply
off her guard ; and our finding her in such
a mood was simply a bit of good luck.
Some day, possibly, we shall catch a weasel
asleep.

In a vacation season, like our annual fort-
night in New Hampshire, there is no pre-
dicting which jaunt, if any, will turn out
superior to all the rest. It may be a longer
and comparatively newer one (although in
Franconia we find few new ones now, partly
because we no longer seek them — the old is
better, we are apt to say when any innovation
is suggested) ; or, thanks to something in
the day or something in the mood, it may
be one of the shortest and most familiar.
And when it is over, there may be a sweet-
ness in the memory, but little to talk about ;

62 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

little " incident," as editors say, little that
goes naturally into a notebook. In other
words, the best walk, for us, is the one in
which we are happiest, the one in which we
fed the most, not of necessity the one in
which we see the most ; or, to put it differ-
ently still, the one in which we do see the
most, but with

" that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude."

Whatever we may call ourselves at home,
among the mountains we are lovers of plea-
sure. Our day's work is to be happy. We
take our text from the good Longfellow as
theologians take theirs from Scripture : —

" Enjoyment, and not sorrow, is our destined end."

We are not anxious to learn anything ; our
thoughts run not upon wisdom ; if we take
note of a plant or a bird, it is rather for the
fun of it than for any scholarly purpose. We
are boys out of school. I speak of myself
and of the man I have called my walking
mate. The two collectors of insects, of
course, are more serious-minded. " No day
without a beetle," is their motto, and their
absorption, even in Franconia, is in adding

AUTUMN 63

to the world's stock of knowledge. Let
them be respected accordingly. Our creed
is more frankly hedonistic ; and their virtue

— I am free to confess it — shines the
brighter for the contrast.

This year, nevertheless, old Franconia
had for us, also, one most welcome novelty,
the story of which I have kept, like the good
wine, — a pretty small glassful, I am aware,

— for the end of the feast. I had never
enjoyed the old things better. Eight or
nine years ago, writing — in this magazine ^

— of June in Franconia, I expressed a fear
that our dehght in the beauty of nature
might grow to be less keenly felt with ad-
vancing age; that we might ultimately be
driven to a more scientific use of the out-
ward world, putting the exercise of curiosity,
what we call somewhat loftily the acquisition
of knowledge, in the place of rapturous con-
templation. So it may yet fall out, to be
sure, since age is still advancing, but as far
as present indications go, nothing of the sort
seems at all imminent. I begin to believe,
in fact, that things will turn the other way ;

1 The Atlantic Monthly,

64 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

that curiosity will rather lose its edge, and
the power of beauty strike deeper and
deeper home. So may it be ! Then we shall
not be dead while we live. Sure I am that
the glory of mountains, the splendor of au-
tumnal forests, the sweetness of valley pro-
spects, were never more rapturously felt by
me than during the season just ended. And
still, as I started just now to say, I had spe-
cial joy this year in a new specimen, an addi-
tional bird for my memory and notebook.

The forenoon of September 26, my fourth
day, I spent on Garnet Hill. The grand
circuit of that hill is one of the best esteemed
of our longer expeditions. Formerly we did
it always between breakfast and dinner, hav-
ing to speed the pace a little uncomfortably
for the last four or five miles ; but times
have begun to alter with us, or perhaps we
have profited by experience ; for the last few
years, at any rate, we have made the trip an
aU-day affair, dining on Sunset HiU, and loi-
tering down through the Landaff VaUey —
with a side excursion, it may be, to fill up
the hours — in the afternoon. This trip,
being, as I say, one of those we most set by.

AUTUMN 65

I was determined to hold in reserve against
the arrival of my fellow foot-traveler ; but
there is also a pleasant shorter course, not
round the hill, but, so to speak, over one
side of it : out by the way of what I call
High Bridge Road (never having heard any
name for it), and back by the road — hardly
more than a lane for much of its length —
which traverses the hill diagonally on its
noi*theastern slope, and joins the regular Su-
gar Hill highway a little below the Franconia
Inn.

I left the Littleton road for the road
to the Streeter neighborhood, crossed Gale
River by a bridge pitched with much labor
at a great height above it (a good indication
of the swelhng to which moimtain streams
are subject), passed two or three retired val-
ley farms (where were eight or ten sleek
young calves, one of which, rather to my sur-
prise, ate from my hand a sprig of mint as
if she liked the savor of it), and then began
a long, steep climb. For much of the dis-
tance the road — narrow and very little trav-
eled — is lined with dense alder and willow
thickets, excellent cover for birds. It was

66 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

partly witli this place in my eye that I Lad
chosen my route, remembering an hour of
much interest here some years ago with a
large flock of migrants. To-day, as it hap-
pened, the bushes were comparatively bird-
less. White-throats and snowbirds were
present, of course, and ruby-crowned king-
lets, with a solitary vireo or two, but nothing
out of the ordinary. The prospect, however,
without being magnificent or — for Franco-
nia — extensive, was full of attractiveness.
Gale River hastening through a gorge over-
hung with forest, directly on my right,
Streeter Pond farther away (two deer had
been shot beside it that morning, as I learned
before night, — news of that degree of im-
portance travels fast), and the gay-colored
hills toward Littleton and Bethlehem, —
maple grove on maple grove, with all their
banners flymg, — these made a delightsome
panorama, shifting with every twist in the
road and with every rod of the ascent ; so
that 1 had excuse more than sufficient for
continually stopping to breathe and face
about. In one place I remarked a goodly
bed of coltsfoot leaves, noticeable for their

AUTUMN 67

angular shape as well as for their peculiar
shade of green. I wished for a blossom.
If the dandelion sometimes anticipates the
season, why not the coltsfoot ? But I found
no sign of flower or bud. Probably the
plant is of a less impatient habit ; but I have
seen it so seldom that all my ideas about it
are no better than guesswork. Along the
wayside was maiden-hair fern, also, which I
do not come upon any too often in this
mountain country.

Midway of the hill stands a solitary house,
where I found my approach spied upon
through a crack between the curtain and the
sash of what seemed to be a parlor window ;
a flattering attention which, after the man-
ner of high public functionaries, I took as a
tribute not to myself, but to the role I was
playing. No doubt travelers on foot are
rare on that difficult, out-of-the-way road,
and the walker rather than the man was
what filled my lady's eye ; unless, as may
easily have been true, she was expecting to
see a peddler's pack. At this point the
road crooks a sharp elbow, and henceforth
passes through cultivated country, — or-

68 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

chard s and ploughed land, grass fields and
pasturage; stiU without houses, however,
and having a pleasant natural hedgerow of
trees and shrubbery. In one of the orchards
was a great congregation of sparrows and
myrtle warblers, with sapsuckers, flickers,
downy woodpeckers, solitary vireos, and I
forget what else, though I sat on the wall
for some time refreshing myseK with their
cheerful society. I agreed with them that
life was stiU a good thing.

Then came my novelty. I was but a lit-
tle way past this aviary of an apple orchard
when I approached a pile of brush, — dry
branches which had been heaped against the
roadside bank some years ago, and up
through which bushes and weeds were grow-
ing. My eyes sought it instinctively, and
at the same moment a bird moved inside.
A sparrow, alone ; a sparrow, and a new
one ! " A Lincoln finch ! " I thought ; and
just then the creature turned, and I saw his
forward parts : a streaked breast with a
bright, well-defined buff band across it, as if
the streaks had been marked in first and
then a wash of yellowish had been laid on

AUTUMN 69

over them. Yes, a Lincoln finch ! He was
out of sight almost before I saw him, how-
ever, and after a bit of feverish waiting I
squeaked. He did not come up to look at
me, as I hoped he would do, but the sudden
noise startled him, and he moved slightly,
enough so that my eye again found him.
This time, also, I saw his head and his
breast, and then he was lost again. Again
I waited. Then I squeaked, waited, and
squeaked again, louder and longer than be-
fore. No answer, and no sign of movement.
You mio:ht have sworn there was no bird
there ; and perhaps you would not have per-
jured yourself ; for presently I stepped up
to the brush-heap and trampled it over, and
still there was no sign of life. Above the
brush was a low stone wall, and beyond that
a bare ploughed field. How the fellow had
slipped away there was no telling. And
that was the end of the story. But I had
seen him, and he was a Lincoln finch. It
was a shabby interview he had granted me,
after keeping me waiting for almost twenty
years ; but then, I repeated for my comfort,
I had seen him.

70 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

He was less confusingly like a song sjjar-
row tlian I had been prepared to find liim.
His general color (one of a bird's best marks
in life, bard as it may be to derive an exact
idea of it from printed descriptions), gray
with a greenish tinge, — a little suggestive
of Henslow's bunting, as it struck me, —
this, I thought, supposing it to be constant,
ought to catch the eye at a glance. Hence-
forth I should know what to look for, and
might expect better luck ; although, if this
particular bird's behavior was to be taken as
a criterion, the books had been quite within
the mark in emphasizing the sly and elusive
habit of the species, and the consequent diffi-
culty of prolonged and satisfactory observa-
tion of it.

The Lincoln finch, or Lincoln sparrow,
the reader should know, is a congener of the
song sparrow and the swamp sparrow, a na-
tive mostly of the far north, and while com-
mon enough as a migrant in many parts of
the United States, is, or is generally sup-
posed to be, something of a rarity in the
Eastern States.

Meanwhile, having beaten the brush over,

AUTUMN 71

and looked up the roadside and down the
roadside and over the wall, I went on my
way, stopping once for a feast of blackber-
ries, — as many and as good as a man could
ask for, long, slender, sweet, and dead ripe ;
and at the top of the road I cut across a
hayfield to the lane before mentioned, that
should take me back to the Sugar Hill high-
way. Now the prospects were in front of
me, there was no more steepness of grade, I
had seen Tom Lincoln's finch,i and the day
was brighter than ever. Every sparrow that
stirred I must put my glass on ; but not one
was of the right complexion.

Then, in a sugar grove not far from the
Franconia Inn, I found myself all at once
in the midst of one of those traveling flocks
that make so delightful a break in a bird-
lover's day. I was in the midst of it, I say ;
but the real fact was that the birds were
passing through the grove between me and
the sky. For the time being the branches
were astir with wings. Such minutes are
exciting. " Now or never," a man says to

1 " I named it Tom's Finch," says Audubon, " in honor
of our friend Lincoln, who was a great favorite among us."

72 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

himself. Every second is precious. At this
precise moment a warbler is above your
head, far up in the topmost bough perhaps,
half hidden by a leaf. If you miss him, he
is gone forever. If you make him out, well
and good ; he may be a rarity, a prize long
waited for ; or, quite as likely, while busy
with him you may let a ten times rarer one
pass unnoticed. In this game, as in any
other, a man must rim his chances ; though
there is skill as well as luck in it, without
doubt, and one player will take a trick or
two more than another, with the same hand.
In the present instance, so far as my
canvass showed, the " wave " was made up
of myrtle warblers, blackpoUs, baybreasts,
black-throated greens, a chestnut-side, a
Maryland yeUow-throat, red-eyed vireos,
solitary vireos, one or more scarlet tanagers
(in undress, of course, and pretty late
by my reckoning), ruby-crowned kinglets,
chickadees, winter wrens, goldfinches, song
sparrows, and flickers. The last three or
four species, it is probable enough, were in
the grove only by accident, and are hardly
to be counted as part of the south-bound

AUTUMN 73

caravan. Several of the species were in
good force, and doubtless some species
eluded me altogether. No man can look all
ways at once ; and in autumn the eyes must
do not only their own work, but that of the
ears as well.

All the while the birds hastened on, flit-
ting from tree to tree, feeding a minute and
then away, following the stream. I was es-
pecially glad of the baybreasts, of which
there were two at least, both very distinctly
marked, though in nothing like their spring
plumage. I saw only one other specimen
this fall, but the name is usually in my au-
tumnal Franconia list. The chestnut-side,
on the other hand, was the first one I had
ever found here at this season, and was cor-
respondingly welcome.

After all, a catalogue of names gives but
a meagre idea of such a flock, except to
those who have seen similar ones, and
amused themselves with them in a similar
manner. But I had had the fun, whether
I can make any one else appreciate it or
not, and between it and my joy over the
Lincoln finch I went home in high feather.

74 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

Five days longer I followed the road
alone. Every time a sparrow darted into
the bushes too quickly for me to name him,
I thought of Melospiza lincolni. Once, in-
deed, on the Bethlehem road, I believed that
I reaUy saw a bird of that species ; but it
was in the act of disappearing, and no
amount of pains or patience — or no amount
that I had to spare — could procure me a
second glimpse.

On the sixth day came my friend, the
second foot-passenger, and was told of my
good fortune ; and together we began forth-
with to walk — and look at sparrows. This,
also, was vain, until the morning of October
4. I was out first. A robin was cackling
from a tall treetop, as I stepped upon the
piazza, and a song sparrow sang from a
cluster of bushes across the way. Other
birds were there, and I went over to have a
look at them : two or three white-throats, as
many song sparrows, and a white-crown.
Then by squeaking I called into sight two
swamp sparrows (migrants newly come, they
must be, to be found in such a place), and
directly afterward up hopped a small gray-

AUTUMN 75

isli sparrow, seen at a glance to be like my
bird of nine days before, — like him in
looks, but not in behavior. He conducted
himself in the most accommodating manner,
was full of curiosity, not in the least shy,
and afforded me every opportunity to look
him over to my heart's content.

In the midst of it all I heard my com-
rade's footfall on the piazza, and gave him
a whistle. He came at once, wading through
the wet grass in his slippers. He knew from
my attitude — so he firmly declared after-
ward— that it was a Lincoln finch I was
gazing at ! And just as he drew near, the
sparrow, sitting in full view and facing us,
in a way to show off his peculiar marks
to the best advantage, uttered a single
cheep, thoroughly distinctive, or at least
quite unlike any sparrow's note with which
I am famihar ; as characteristic, I should
say, as the song sparrow's tut. Then he
dropped to the ground. " Yes, I saw him,
and heard the note," my companion said;
and he hastened into the house for his boots
and his opera-glass. In a few minutes he
was back again, fully equipped, and we set

76 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

ourselves to coax the fellow into making an-
other display of himself. Sure enough, he
responded almost immediately, and we had
another satisfying observation of him, though
this time he kept silence. I was espec-
ially interested to find, what I had on gen-
eral considerations suspected, that Lincoln
finches were like other members of their
family. Take them right (by themselves,
and without startling them to begin with),
and they could be as complaisant as one
could desire, no matter how timid and elu-
sive they might be under different condi-
tions. Our bird was certainly a jewel. For
a while he pleased us by perching side by
side with a song sparrow. " You see how
much smaller I am," he might have been say-
ing ; " you may know me partly by that."

And we fancied we should know him
thereafter ; but a novice's knowledge is
only a novice's, as we were to be freshly
reminded that very day. Our jaunt was
round Garnet Hill, the all-day expedition
before referred to. I will not rehearse the
story of it ; but while we were on the farther
side of the hill, somewhere in Lisbon, we

AUTUMN 77

found the roadsides swarming with sparrows,

— a mixed flock, song sparrows, field spar-
rows, chippers, and white-crowns. Among
them one of us by and by detected a gray-
ish, smallish bird, and we began hunting
him, from bush to bush and from one side
of the road to the other, carrying on all
the while an eager debate as to his identity.
Now we were sure of him, and now every-
thing was unsettled. His breast was streaked
and had a yellow band across it. His color
and size were right, as well as we could say,

— so decidedly so that there was no diffi-
culty whatever in picking him out at a
glance after losing him in a flying bunch ;
but some of his motions were pretty song-
sparrow-like, and what my fellow observer
was most staggered by, he showed a blotch,
a running together of the dark streaks, in
the middle of the breast, — a point very
characteristic of the song sparrow, but not
mentioned in book descriptions of Melospiza
lincolni. So we chased him and discussed
him (that was the time for a gun, the pro-
fessional wiU say), tiU he got away from us
for good.

78 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

Was lie a Lincoln fincli ? Who knows ?
We left the question open. But I believe
he was. The main reason, not to say the
only one, for our uncertainty was the pec-
toral blotch ; and that, I have since learned,
is often seen in specimens of Melospiza lin-
colni. Why the manuals make no reference
to it I cannot tell ; as I cannot tell why they
omit the same point in describing the sa-
vanna sparrow. In scientific books, as in
"popular" magazine articles, many things
must no doubt be passed over for lack of
room. In any case, it is not the worst mis-
fortune that could befall us to have some
things left for our own finding out.

And after all, the question was not of
supreme importance. Though I was de-
lighted to have seen a new bird, and doubly
delighted to have seen it in Franconia, the
great joy of my visit was not in any such
fragment of knowledge, but in that bright
and glorious world ; mountains and valleys
beautiful in themselves, and endeared by the
memory of happy days among them. Some-
times I wonder whether the pleasures of
memory may not be worth the price of grow-
ing old.

SPKING

" He would now be up every morning' by break of day,
walking to and fro in the valley.' ' — Bunyan.

It was a white day, tlie day of tlie red
cherry, — by the almanac the 20th of May.
Once in the hill country, the train ran hour
after hour through a world of shrubs and
small trees, loaded every one with blossoms.
Their number was amazing. I should not
have believed there were so many in all New
Hampshire. The snowy branches fairly
whitened the woods ; as if all the red-cherry
trees of the country round about were as-
sembled along the track to celebrate a festi-
val. The spectacle — for it was nothing less
— made me think of the annual dogwood
display as I had witnessed it in the Alle-
ghanies and further south. I remembered,
too, a similar New England pageant of some
years ago ; a thing of annual occurrence,
of course, but never seen by me before or

80 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

since. Then it happened that I came clown
from Vermont (this also was in May) just
at the time when the shaclbushes were in
their glory. Like the wild red-cherry trees,
as I saw them now, they seemed to fill the
world. Such miles on miles of a floral
panorama are among the memorable delights
of spring travel.

For the cherry's sake I was glad that my
leaving home had been delayed a week or
two beyond my first intention ; though I
thought then, as I do still, that an earlier
start would have shown me something more
of real spring among the mountains, which,
after all, was what I had come out to see.

The light showers through which I drove
over the hills from Littleton were gone be-
fore sunset, and as the twilight deepened I
strolled up the Butter Hill road as far as
the grove of red pines, just to feel the ground
under my feet and to hear the hermit
thrushes. How divinely they sang, one on
either side of the way, voice answering to
voice, the very soul of music, out of the
darkening woods ! I agree with a friendly
correspondent who wrote me, the other day,

SPRING 81

fresh from a summer in France, that the
nightingale is no such singer. I have never
heard the nightingale, but that does not alter
my opinion. Formerly I wished that the
hermit, and all the rest of our woodland
thrushes, would practice a longer and more
continuous strain. Now I think differently ;
for I see now that what I looked upon as a
blemish is really the perfection of art. Those
brief, deliberate phrases, breaking one by
one out of the silence, lift the soul higher
than any smooth-flowing warble could possibly
do. Worship has no gift of long-breathed
fluency. If she speaks at all, it is in the
way of ejaculation : " Therefore let thy words
be few," said the Preacher, — a text which
is only a modern Hebrew version of what
the hermit thrush has been saying here in the
White Mountains for ten thousand years.

One of the principal glories of Franconia
is the same in spring as in autumn, — the
colors of the forest. There is no describing
them: greens and reds of all tender and
lovely shades ; not to speak of the exquisite
haze-blue, or blue-purple, which mantles the
still budded woods on the higher slopes. For

82 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

the reds I was quite unprepared. They
have never been written about, so far as I
know, doubtless because they have never been
seen. The scribbling tourist is never here
till long after they are gone. In fact, I
stayed late enough, on my present visit, to
see the end of them. I knew, of course,
that young maple leaves, like old ones, are
of a ruddy complexion ; ^ but somehow I
had never considered that the massing of
the trees on hillsides would work the same
gorgeous, spectacular effect in spring as in
autumn, — broad patches of splendor hung
aloft, a natural tapestry, for the eye to feast
upon. Not that May is as gaudy as Sep-
tember. There are no brilliant yellows, and
the reds are many shades less fiery than au-
tumn furnishes ; but what is lacking in in-
tensity is more than made up in delicacy, as
the bloom of youth is fairer than any hectic
flush. The glory passed, as I have said.
Before the 1st of June it had deepened, and
then disappeared ; but the sight of it was of
itself enough to reward my journey.

^ But the brightness of red-maple groves at this season
is mostly not in the leaves, but in the fruit.

SPRING 83

The clouds returned after the rain, and
my first forenoon was spent under an um-
brella on the Bethlehem plateau, not so much
walking as standing about ; now in the woods,
now in the sandy road, now in the dooryard
of an empty house. It was Sunday; the
rain, quiet and intermittent, rather favored
music ; and all in all, things were pretty
much to my mind, — plenty to see and hear,
yet all of a sweetly familiar sort, such as one
hardly thinks of putting into a notebook.
Why record, as if it could be forgotten or
needed to be remembered, the lisping of
happy chickadees or the whistle of white-
throated sparrows ? Or why speak of shad-
blow and goldthread, or even of the lovely
painted trilliums, with their three daintily
crinkled petals, streaked with rose-purple?
The trilliums, indeed, well deserved to be
spoken of : so bright and bold they were ;
every blossom looking the sun squarely in
the face, — in great contrast with the pale
and bashful wake-robin, which I find (by
searching for it) in my own woods. One
after another I gathered them (pulled them,
to speak with poetic literalness), each fresher

84 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

and handsomer than the one before it, till
the white stems made a handful.

" Oh," said a man on the piazza, as I re-
turned to the hotel, " I see you have nose-
bleed." I was putting my hand to my
pocket, wondering why I should have been
taken so childishly, when it came over me
what he meant. He was looking at the
trilliums, and explained, in answer to a ques-
tion, that he had always heard them called
" nosebleed." Somewhere, then, — I omitted
to inquire where, — this is their " vulgar "
name. In Franconia the people call them
" Benjamins," which has a pleasant Biblical
sound, — better than " nosebleed," at all
events, — though to my thinking " triUium "
is preferable to either of them, both for
sound and for sense. People cry out against
" Latin names." But why is Latin worse
than Hebrew ? And who could ask anything
prettier or easier than trillium, geranium,
anemone, and hepatica?

The next morning I set out for Echo Lake.
At that height, in that hollow among the
mountains, the season must still be young.
There, if anywhere, I should find the early

SPRING 86

violet and the trailing mayflower. And
whatever I found, or did not find, at the end
of the way, I should have made another as-
cent of the dear old Notch road, every rod
of it the pleasanter for happy memories. I
had never traveled it in May, with the
glossy-leaved clintonia yet in the bud, and
the broad, grassy golf links above the Pro-
file House farm all frosty with houstonia
bloom. And many times as I had been
over it, I had never known till now that
rhodora stood along its very edge. To-day,
with the pink blossoms brightening the
crooked, leafless, knee-high stems, not even
my eyes could miss it. Our one small pear-
leaved willow, near the foot of Hardscrabble,
was in flower, its maroon leaves partly grown.
Well I remembered the June morning when
I lighted upon it, and the interest shown by
the senior botanist of our little company when
J reported the discovery, at the dinner table.
He went up that very afternoon to see it for
himself ; and year after year, while he lived,
he watched over it, more than once caution-
ing the road-menders against its destruction.
How many times he and I have stopped be-

86 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

side it, on our way up and down ! The
" Torrey willow " lie always called it, strok-
ing my vanity ; and I liked the word.

Now a chipmunk speaks to me, as I pass ;
it is not his fault, nor mine either, perhaps,
that I do not understand him ; and now,
hearing a twig snap, I glance up in time to
see a woodchuck scuttling out of sight un-
der the high, overhanging bank. So he is a
dweller in these upper mountain woods ! ^ I
should have thought him too nice an epicure
to feel himself at home in such diggings.
But who knows ? Perhaps he finds some-
thing hereabout — wood-sorrel or what not
— that is more savory even than young
clover leaves and early garden sauce. From
somewhere on my right comes the sweet —
honey-sweet — warble of a rose-breasted gros-
beak ; and almost over my head, at the top-
most point of a tall spruce, sits a Blackburn-
ian warbler, doing his little utmost to express
himself. His pitch is as high as his perch,
and his tone, pure s, is like the finest of
wire. Another water bar surmounted, and

^ Yes, he has even been seen (and "taken"), so I am
told, at the summit of Mount Washmgton.

SPRING 87

a baybreast sings, and lets me see him, — a
bird I always love to look at, and a song tliat
I always have to learn anew, partly because
I hear it so seldom, partly because of its
want of individuality: a single hurried
phrase, pure z like the Blackburnian's, and
of the same wire-drawn tenuity. These
warblers are poor hands at warbling, but
they are musical to the eye. By this rule,
— if throats were made to be looked at, and
judged by the feathers on them, — the Black-
burnian might challenge comparison with
any singer under the sun.

As the road ascends, the aspect of things
grows more and more springlike, — or less
and less summerlike. Black-birch catkins
are just beginning to fall, and a little higher,
not far from the Bald Mountain path, I no-
tice a sugar maple still hanging full of pale
straw-colored tassels, — encouraging signs to
a man who was becoming apprehensive lest
he had arrived too late.

Then, as I pass the height of land and be-
gin the gentle descent into the Notch, front-
ing the white peak of Lafayette and the
black face of Eagle Cliif , I am aware of a

88 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

strange sensation, as if I had stepped into
another world : hare, leafless woods and sud-
den hlank silence. All the way hitherto
birds have been singing on either hand, my
ear picking out the voices one by one, while
flies and mosquitoes have buzzed continually
about my head ; here, all in a moment, not
a bird, not an insect, — a stillness like that
of winter. Minute after minute, rod after
rod, and not a breath of sound, — not so
much as the stirring of a leaf. I could not
have believed such a transformation possible.
It is uncanny. I walk as in a dream. The
silence lasts for at least a quarter of a mile.
Then a warbler breaks it for an instant, and
leaves it, if possible, more absolute than be-
fore. I am going southward, and downhill ;
but I am going into the Notch, into the very
shadow of the mountains, where Winter
makes his last rally against the inevitable.

And yes, here are some of the early flow-
ers I have come in search of : the dear little
yellow violets, whose glossy, round leaves, no
more than haK-grown as yet, seem to love
the very border of a snowbank. Here, too,
is a most flourishing patch of spring-beauties,

SPRING 89

and anotlier of adder's-tongue, — dog-tooth
violet, so called. Of the latter there must
be hundreds of acres in Franconia. I have
seen the freckled leaves everywhere, and now
and then a few belated blossoms. Here I
have it at its best, the whole bed thick with
buds and freshly blown flowers. But the
round-leaved violet is what I am chiefly
taken with. The very type and pattern of
modesty, I am ready to say. The spring-
beauty masses itself ; and though every blos-
som, if you look at it, is a miracle of deli-
cacy, — lustrous pink satin, with veinings
of a deeper shade, — it may fairly be said
to make a show. But the violets, scattered,
and barely out of the ground, must be sought
after one by one. So meek, and yet so bold !
— part of the beautiful vernal paradox, that
the lowly and the frail are the first to ven-
ture.

As I come down to the lakeside, — mak-
ing toward the lower end, whither I always
go, because there the railroad is least obtru-
sively in sight and the mountains are faced
to the best advantage, — two or three soli-
tary sandpipers flit before me, tw^eeting and

90 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

bobbing, and a winter wren (invisible, of
course) sings from a thicket at my elbow.
A jolly songster he is, with the clearest and
finest of tones — a true fife — and an irre-
sistible accent and rhythm. A bird by him-
self. This fellow hurries and hurries (am I
wrong in half remembering a line by some
poet about a bird that " hurries and precipi-
tates "?), ^ till the tempo becomes too much
for him ; the notes can no longer be taken,
and, like a boy running down too steep a
hill, he finishes with a slide. I think of
those pianoforte passages which the most
lightning-like of performers — Paderewski
himself — are reduced to playing ignomini-
ously with the back of one finger. I know
not their technical name, if they have one, —
finger-nail runs, perhaps. I remember, also,
Thoreau's description of a song heard in
Tuckerman's Ravine and here in the Fran-
conia Notch. He could never discover the
author of it, but pretty certainly it was the
winter wren. " Most peculiar and memo-

1 No, the line is Coleridge's : —

" the merry nightingale
That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates
With fast thick warble his delicious notes."

SPRING 91

rable," he pronounces it, like a " fine cork-
screw stream issuing with incessant tinkle
from a cork." " Tinkle " is exactly the word.
Trust Thoreau to find that^ though he could
not find the singer. If the thrushes are left
out of the account, there is no voice in the
mountains that I am gladder to hear.

Near the outlet of the lake, in a shaded
hollow, lies a deep snowbank, and not far
away the ground is matted with trailing ar-
butus, still in plentiful bloom. One of the
most attractive things here is the few-flow-
ered shadbush (^Amelanchier oligocaTpci),
The common A, Canadensis grows near by ;
and it is astonishing how unlike the two spe-
cies look, although the difference (the visi-
ble difference, I mean) is mostly in the ar-
rangement of the flowers, — clustered in one
case, separately disposed in the other. To-
day the " average observer " would look
twice before suspecting any close relation-
ship between them ; a week or two hence he
would look a dozen times before remarking
any distinction. With them, as with the
red cherry, it is the blossom that makes the
bush.

92 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

So much for my first May morning on the
Notch road and by the lake : a few particu-
lars caught in passing, to be taken for what
they are, —

" Samples and sorts, not for themselves alone, but for
their atmosphere."

In the afternoon I went over into the
Landaff Valley, having in mind a restful,
level-country stroll, with a view especially to
the probable presence of Tennessee warblers
in that quarter. One or two had been sing-
ing constantly near the hotel for two days
(ever since my arrival, that is), and Sunday
I had heard another beside the Bethlehem
road. Whether they were migrants only, or
had settled in Franconia for the season, they
ought, it seemed to me, to be found also in.
the big Landaff larch swamp, where we had
seen them so often in June, ten or twelve
years ago. As I had heard the song but
once since that time, I was naturally dis-
posed to make the most of the present oppor-
tunity.

I turned in at the old hay barn, — one of
my favorite resorts, where I have seen many
a pretty bunch of autumnal transients, —

SPKING 93

and sure enough, a Tennessee's voice was
one of the first to greet me. Tliis fellow
sang as a Tennessee ought to sing, I said to
myself. By which I meant that his song
was clearly made up of three parts, just as I
had kept it in memory ; whereas the birds
near the hotel, as well as the one on the
Bethlehem road, divided theirs but once.
No great matter, somebody will say ; but a
self-respecting man likes to have his recollec-
tions justified, even about trifles, particularly
when he has confided them to print.^

The swamp had begun well with its old
eulogist ; but better things were in store. I
passed an hour or more in the w^oods, for the

1 So I was relieved to find all the Franconia white-
throated sparrows introducing- their sets of triplets with
two — not three — longer single notes. That was how I
had always whistled the tune ; and I had been astonished
and grieved to see it printed in musical notation by Mr.
Cheney, and again by Mr. Chapman, with an introductory
measure of three notes : as if it were to go, " Old Sam,
Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody," instead of, as I re-
membered it, and as reason dictated, " Old Sam Pea-
body, Peabody, Peabody." I am not intimating that Mr.
Cheney and Mr. Chapman are wrong, but that my own
recollection was right, — a very different matter, as my
present experience with Tennessee warblers was sufficient
to show.

94 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

most part sitting still (which is pretty good
after-dinner ornithology), and had just taken
the road again when a bevy of talkative
chickadees came straggling down the rim of
the swamp, flitting from one tree to another,
— a morsel here and a morsel there, — after
their usual manner while on the march.
Now, then, for a few migratory warblers,
which always may be looked for in such com-
pany.

True to the word, my glass was hardly in
play before a bay-breast showed himself, in
magnificent plumage ; then came a Black-
burnian, also in high feather, handsomer
even than the bay-breast, but less of a rar-
ity; and then, all in a flash, I caught a
glimpse of some bright-colored, black-and-
yellow bird that, almost certainly, from an
indefinable something half seen about the
head, could not be a magnolia. " That
should be a Cape May ! " I said aloud to
myself. Even as I spoke, however, he was
out of sight. Down the road I went, trying
to keep abreast of the flock, which moved
much too rapidly for my comfort. Again I
saw what might have been the Cape May, but

SPRING 95

again there was nothing like certainty. And
again I lost him. With the trees so thick,
and the birds so small and so active, it was
impossible to do better. I had missed my
chance, I thought ; but just then something
stirred among the leaves of a fir tree close
by me, on the very edge of the swamp, and
the next moment a bird stepped upon the
outermost twig, as near me as he could get,
and stood there fully displayed : a splendid
Cape May, in superb color, my first New
England specimen. "■ Look at me," he said ;
"this is for your benefit." And I looked
with both eyes. Who would not be an or-
nithologist, with sights like this to reward
him?

The procession moved on, by the air line,
impossible for me to follow. The Cape
May, of course, had departed with the rest.
So I assumed, — without warrant, as will
presently appear. But I had no quarrel
with Fate. For a plodding, wingless crea-
ture, long accustomed to his disabilities, I
was being handsomely used. The soid is
always seeking new things, says a celebrated
French philosopher, and is always pleased

96 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

wlien it is shown more than it had hoped
for. This is preeminently true of rare war-
blers. Now I would cross the bridge, walk
once more under the arch of willows, —
happy that I could w^alk, being a man only,
— and back to the village again by the up-
per road. For a half mile on that road the
prospect is such that no mortal need desire
a better one.

First, however, I must train my glass upon
a certain dark object out in the meadow, to
see whether it was a stump (it was motion-
less enough for one, but I did n't remember
it there) or a woodchuck. It turned out to
be a woodchuck, erect upon his haunches,
his fore paws lifted in an attitude of devo-
tion. The sight was common just now in
all Franconia grassland, no matter in what
direction my jaunts took me. And always
the attitude was the same, as if now were
the ground-hog's Lent. " Watch and pray "
is his motto ; and he thrives upon it like a
monk. Though the legislature sets a price
on his head, he keeps in better flesh than
the average legislator. Well done, say I.
May his shadow never grow less! I like

SPRING 97

him, as I like tlie crow. Health and long
life to both of them, — wildings that will
not be put down nor driven into the outer
wilderness, be the hand of civilization never
so hostile. They were here before man
came, and wiU be here, it is most likely,
after he is gone ; unless, as the old planet's
fires go out, man himself becomes a hiberna-
tor. I have heard a hunted woodchuck, at
bay in a stone wall, gnasliing liis teeth
against a dog; and I have seen a mother
woodchuck with a litter of young ones play-
ing about her as she lay at full length sun-
ning herself, the very picture of maternal
satisfaction : and my belief is that wood-
chucks have as honest a right as most of us
to life, hberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
As I walked under the willows, — empty
to-day, though I remembered more than one
happy occasion when, in better company,
I had found them alive with wings, — I
paused to look through the branches at a
large hawk and a few glossy-backed barn
swallows quartermg over the meadow.
Then, all at once, there fell on my ears a
shower of bobolink notes, and the birds,

98 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

twenty or more together, dropped into the
short grass before me. Every one of them
was a male.

A strange custom it is, this Quakerish
separation of the sexes. It must be the fe-
males' work, I imagine. Modesty and bash-
fulness are feminine traits, — modesty, bash-
fulness, and maidenly discretion. The wise
virgin shunneth even the appearance of
evil. Let the males flock by themselves,
and travel in advance. And the males
practice obedience, not for virtue's sake, I
guess, but of necessity ; encouraged, no
doubt, by an unquestioning belief that the
wise virgins will come trooping after, and
be found scattered conveniently over the
meadows, each by herself, when the mar-
riage bell strikes. That blissful hour was
now close at hand, and my twenty gay bach-
elors knew it. Every bird of them had
on his wedding garment. No wonder they
sang.

It took me a long time to make that haK
mile on the u]3per road, with the narrow,
freshly green valley outspread just below,
the river running through it, and beyond

SPRING 99

a royal horizonf ul of mountains ; some near
and green, some farther away and blue, and
some — tlie highest — still with the snow on
them; Moosilauke, Kinsman, Cannon, La-
fayette, Garfield, the Twins, Washington,
Clay, Jefferson, and Adams ; all perfectly
clear, the sky covered with high clouds. A
sober day it was, sober and still, though the
bobolinks seemed not so to regard it. While
I looked at the landscape, seating myself
now and then to enjoy it quietly, I kept an
ear open for the shout of a pileated wood-
pecker, a wildly musical sound often to be
heard on this hillside ; but to-day there was
nothing nearer to it than a crested fly-
catcher's scream, out of the big sugar or-
chard.

On my way down the hill toward the red
bridge, I met a man riding in some kind of
rude contrivance, not to be called a wagon
or a cart, between two pairs of wheels. He
lay flat on his back, as in a hammock, and,
to judge by his tools and the mortar on his
clothing, must have been a mason returning
from his work. He was " taking it easy,"
at all events. We saluted each other, and

100 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

he stopped his horse and sat up. "You
used to be round here, did n't you ? " he
asked. Yes, I said, I had been here a good
deal, off and on. He thought he remem-
bered me. He had noticed me getting out of
Mr. Prime's carriage at the corner. " Let 's
see," he said : " you used to be looking after
the birds a good deal, didn't you?" I
pleaded guilty, and he seemed glad. " You
are well?" he added, and drove on. Neither
of us had said anything in particular, but
there are few events of the road more to my
taste than such chance bits of neighborly
intercourse. The man's tone and manner
gave me the feeling of real friendliness. If
I had fallen among thieves, I confide that
he would have been neither a priest nor a
Levite. May his trowel find plenty of work
and fair wages.

This was on May 22. The next three
days were occupied with all-day excursions
to Mount Agassiz, to Streeter Pond, and to
Lonesome Lake path. With so many hands
beckoning to me, the Cape May warbler
was well-nigh forgotten. On the morning
of the 26th, however, the weather being du-

SPRING 101

bions, I betook myself again to the Landaff
swamp, entering it, as usual, by the wood
road at the barn. Many birds were there :
a tanager (uncommon hereabout), olive-
sided flycatchers, alder flycatchers (fii-st
seen on the 23d, and already abundant), a
yellow-bellied flycatcher (the recluse of the
family), magnolia warblers, Canada war-
blers, parula warblers (three beautiful spe-
cies), a Tennessee warbler, a Swainson
thrush (whistling), a veery (snarling), and
many more. The Swainson thrush, by the
way, although present, in small numbers
apparently, from May 22, was not heard to
sing a note until June 1, — ten days of si-
lence ! Yet it sings freely on its migration,
even as far south as Georgia. Close at hand
was a grouse, who performed again and
again in what seemed to me a highly origi-
nal manner. First he delivered three or
four quick beats. Then he rested for a
second or two, after which he proceeded to
drum in the ordinary way, beginning with
deliberation, and gradually accelerating the
beats, till the ear could no longer follow
them, and they became a whir. That pre-

102 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

lude of four quick, decisive strokes was a
novelty to my ears, so far as I could re-
member.

I had taken my fill of this pleasant chorus,
and was on my way back to the road, wlien
suddenly I heard something that was better
than "pleasant," — a peculiarly faint and
listless four-syllabled warbler song, which
mio:ht be described as a monotonous zee-zee-
zee-zee. The singer was not a blackpoll : of
that I felt certain on the instant. What
could it be, then, but a Cape May? That
was a shrewd guess (I had heard the Cape
May once, in Virginia, some years before) ;
for presently the fellow moved into sight,
and I had a feast of admiring him, as he
flitted about among the fir trees, feeding and
singing. If he was the one I had seen in
the same wood on the 2 2d, he was making
a long stay. StiU I did not venture to think
of him as anything but a migrant. The
Tennessee had sung incessantly for five days
in the Gale River larches near the hotel, as
already mentioned, and then had taken
flight.

The next morning, nevertheless, there was

SPRING 103

nothing for it — few as my days were grow-
ing— but 1 must visit the place again, on
the chance of finding the Cape May still
there. And he was] there ; sitting, for part
of the time, at the very tip (on the terminal
bud, to speak exactly) of a pointed fir.
There, as elsewhere, he sang persistently,
sometimes with three sees, sometimes with
four, but always in an unhurried monotone.
It was the simplest and most primitive kind
of music, to say the best of it, — many an
insect would perhaps have done as well ; but
somehow, with the author of it before me, I
pronounced it good. A Tennessee was close
by, and (what I particularly enjoyed) a tan-
ager sat in the sun on the topmost spray
of a tall white pine, blazing and singing.
" This is the sixth day of the Cape May here,
yet I cannot think he means to summer."
So my pencil finished the day's entry.

AYhatever his intentions, I could not af-
ford to spend my whole vacation in learning
them, and it was not until the afternoon of
the 31st that I went again in search of
him. Then he gave me an exciting chase ;
for, thank Fortune, a chase may be exciting

104 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

thougli the bird is not a " game bird," and
tbe man is not a gunner. At first, to be
sure, tlie question seemed in a fair way to be
quickly settled. I was hardly in the swamp
before I heard the expected zee-zee. The
bird was still here ! But after haH a dozen
repetitions of the strain he fell silent ; and
he had not shown himself. For a full hour
I paced up and down the path, within a space
of forty rods, fighting mosquitoes and awake
to every sound. If the bird was here, I
meant to make sure of him. This was the
tenth day since I had first seen him, and to
find him still present woidd make it practi-
cally certam that he was here for the season.
As for what I had already heard, — well, the
notes were the Cape May's, fast enough;
but if that were all, I should go away and
straightway begin to question whether my
ears had not deceived me. In matters of
this kind, an ornithologist walks by sight.

Once, from farther up the path, I heard a
voice that might be the one I was listening
for ; but as I hastened toward it, it developed
into the homely, twisting song of a black-and-
white creeper. Heard at a suSicient dis-

SPRING 105

tance, this too familiar ditty loses every other
one of its notes, and is easily mistaken for
something else, — especially if something
else happens to be on a man's mind, — as I
had found to my chagrin on more than one
occasion. Eye and ear both are never more
liable to momentary deception than when
they are most tensely alert.

Meanwhile, nothing had been heard of the
Tennessee, and it became evident that he
had moved on. The customary water thrush
was singing at short intervals ; gayly di^essed
warblers darted in and out of the low ever-
greens, almost brushing my elbows, much to
their surprise ; and an olive-sided flycatcher
kept up a persistent pip-pijj. Something
was troubling his equanimity ; I had no idea
what. It had been one of my special enjoy-
ments, on tliis vacation trip, to renew my
acquaintance with him and his humbler rela-
tive, the alder flycatcher, — the latter a com-
monplace body, whose emphatic quay-queer
had now become one of the commonest of
sounds. The olive-side, by the bye, for all
his apparent wildness, did not disdain to visit
the shade trees about the hotel ; and once a

106 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

catbird, not far off, amused me by whistling
a most exact reproduction of his breezy qidt^
quee-quee-o. If the voice had come from a
treetop instead of from the depths of a low
thicket, the illusion would have been com-
plete. It is the weakness of imitators, al-
ways and everywhere, to forget one thing or
another.

Still the bird I was waiting for made no
sign, and finally I left the swamp and started
up the road. Possibly he had gone in that
direction, where I first saw him. No, he was
not there, and, giving over the hunt, I turned
back toward the village. Then, as I came
opposite the barn again, I heard the notes in
the old place, and hastened up the path.
This time I was lucky, for there the bird sat
on the outermost spray of a fir-tree branch.
It was his most characteristic attitude. I
can see him there now.

As I quitted the swamp for good, a man
in a buggy was coming down the road. I
put on my coat, and as he overtook me I said,
" I was putting on my coat because I felt
sure you would invite me to ride." He
smiled, and bade me get in ; and though he

SPRING 107

had been going only to the post office, he
insisted upon carrying me to the hotel, a mile
beyond. Better still, we had a pleasant, hu-
manizing talk of a kind to be serviceable to
a narrow specialist, such as I seemed just
now in danger of becoming. The use of
tobacco was one of our topics, I remember,
and the mutual duties of husbands and wives
another. My host had seen a good deal of
the world, it appeared, and withal was no
little of a philosopher. I hope it will not
sound egotistical if I say that he gave every
sign of finding me a capable listener.

Once more only I saw the Cape May. His
claim to be accounted a summer resident of
Franconia was by this time moderately well
established ; but on my last spare afternoon
(June 3) I could not do less than pay him a
farewell visit. After looking for him in vain
for twenty years (I speak as a New Eng-
lander), it seemed the part of prudence to
cultivate his acquaintance while I could. At
the entrance to the swamp, therefore, I put
on my gloves, tied a handkerchief about my
neck, and broke a stem of meadow-sweet for
use as a mosquito switch. The season was

108 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

advancing, and field ornithology was becom-
ing more and more a battle. I walked up
the path for the usual distance (passing a
few lady's-slippers, one of them pure white)
without hearing the voice for which I was lis-
tening. On the return, however, I caught
it, or something like it. Then, as I went in
pursuit (a slow process, for caution's sake),
the song turned, or seemed to turn, into
something different, — louder, longer, and
faster. Is that the same bird, I thought, or
another? Whatever it was, it eluded my
eye, and after a little the voice ceased. I
retreated to the path, where I could look
about me more readily and use my switch to
better advantage, and anon the faint, lazy
zee-zee-zee was heard again. This was the
Cape May, at aU events. I was sure of it.
Still I wanted a look. Carefully I edged
toward the sound, bending aside the branches,
and all at once a bird flew into the spruce
over my head. Then began again the
quicker, four-syUabled zip-zi}^. I craned my
neck and fanned away mosquitoes, all the
while keeping my glass in position. A twig
stirred. Still the bird sang unseen, — the

SPRING 109

same hurried phrase, not quite monotonous,
since the pitch rose a little on the last coup-
let. That was a suspicious circumstance,
and by this time I should not have been
mightily astonished if a Blackburnian had
disclosed himself. Another twig stirred.
Still I could see nothing ; and still I fought
mosquitoes (a plague on them !) and kept
my eye steady. Then the fellow did again
what he had done so often, — stepped out
upon a flat, horizontal branch, pretty well
up, and posed there, singing and preening
his feathers. I could see his yellow breast
streaked with jet, his black crown, his red-
dish cheeks, with the yellow patch behind
the rufous, and finally the big white blotch
on the wing. We have lovelier birds, no
doubt (the Cape May's colors are a trifle
" splashy " for a nice taste, — for my own
taste, I mean to say), but few, if any, whose
costume is more strikingly original.

I stayed by him till my patience failed,
the mosquitoes helping to wear it out ; and
all the while he reiterated that comparatively
lively zip-zip, so very different from the list-
less zee-zee, which I had seen him use on pre-

110 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

vious occasions, and had heard him use to-
day. He was singing now, I said to myself,
more like the bird at Natural Bridge, the
only other one I had ever heard. It was
pleasant to find that even this tenth-rate per-
former, one of the poorest of a poor family,
had more than one tune in his music box.

My spring vacation was planned to be
botanical rather than ornithological ; but we
are not the masters of our own fate, though
we sometimes try to think so, and my sketch
is turning out a bird piece, after all. The
truth is, I was in the birds' country, and it
was the birds' hour. They waked me every
morning, — veeries, bobolinks, vireos, spar-
rows, and what not ; ^ and as the day began,

1 I made the following list of fifty odd species heard
and seen either from my windows or from the piazza :
bluebird, robin, veery, hermit thrush, olive-backed thrush,
chickadee, Canadian nuthatch, catbird, oven-bird, water
thrush, chestnut-sided warbler, myrtle warbler, redstart,
Nashville warbler, blue yellow-backed warbler, Maryland
yellow-throat, warbling vireo, red-eyed vireo, cedar-bird,
barn swallow, cliff swallow, sand swallow, tree swallow,
goldfinch, purple finch, pine finch, red crossbill, indigo-
bird, snowbird, song sparrow, field sparrow, chipping
sparrow, vesper sparrow, white-throated sparrow, Balti-
more oriole, bobolink, red-winged blackbird, crow, blue
jay, kingbird, phcebe, least flycatcher, olive-sided fly-

SPRING 111

so it continued. I hope I was not blind to
other things. I remember at this moment
how rejoiced I was at coming all unexpect-
edly upon a little bunch of yellow lady's-
slippers, — nine blossoms, I believe ; rare
enough and pretty enough to excite the dull-
est man's enthusiasm. But the fact remains,
if comparisons are to be insisted upon, that
a creature like the Cape May warbler has
all the beauty of a flower, with the added
charm of voice and motion and elusiveness.
The lady's-slippers would wait for me, — un-
less somebody else picked them, — but the
warbler could be trusted to lead me a chase,
and give me, as the saying is, a run for my
money. In other words, he was more inter-
esting, and goes better into a story.

My delight in him was the greater for a
consideration yet to be specified. Twelve or
thirteen years ago, when a party of us were
in Franconia in June, we undertook a list of
the birds of the township, — a list which the
scientific ornithologist of the company after-
catcher, alder flycatcher, great-crested flycatcher, wood
pewee, hummingbird, chimney swift, whip-poor-will,
flicker, kingfisher, black-billed cuckoo.

112 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

ward printed.^ Now, returning to the place
by myself, it became a point of honor with
me to improve our work by the addition of
at least a name or two. And the first candi-
date was the Cape May.

The second was of a widely different sort ;
one of my most familiar friends, though more
surprising as a bird of the White Mountains
than even the Cape May. I speak of the
wood thrush, the most southern member of
the noble group of singers to which it be-
longs,— the Hylocichloe^ so called. It is to
be regretted that we have no collective Eng-
lish name for them, especially as their vocal
quality — by which I mean something not
quite the same as musical ability — is such
as to set them beyond comparison above all
other birds of North America, if not of the
world.

My first knowledge of this piece of good
fortune was on the 29 th of May. I stood
on the Notch railway, intent upon a mourn-
ing warbler, noting how fond of red-cherry
trees he and his fellows seemingly were,
when I was startled out of measure by a

1 The Auk, vol. v. p. 151.

SPRING 113

wood thrush's voice from the dense maple
woods above me. There was no time to look
for him; and happily there was no need.
He was one of the consummate artists of his
race (among the members of which there is
great unevenness in this regard), possessing
all those unmistakable peculiarities which at
once distinguish the wood thrush's song from
the hermit's, with which alone a careless lis-
tener might confound it: the sudden drop
to a deep contralto (the most glorious bit of
vocalism to be heard in our woods), and the
tinkle or spray of bell-like tones at the other
extreme of the gamut. As with the Cape
May, so with him, the question was, Will he
stay?

Two days later I came down the track
again. A hermit was in tune, and presently
a wood thrush joined him. " His tone is
fuller and louder than the hermit's," says
my pencil, — flattered, no doubt, at finding
itself in a position to speak a word of mo-
mentary positiveness touching a question of
superiority long in dispute, and likely to re-
main in dispute while birds sing and men
listen to them. A quarter of a mile farther.

114 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

and I came to the sugar grove. Here a sec-
ond bird was singing, just where I had heard
him two days before. Him I sat down to
enjoy ; and at that moment, probably because
he had seen me (and had seen me stop), he
broke out with a volley of those quick, stac-
cato, inimitably emphatic, whip-snapping
calls, — pijo-pip^ — which are more charac-
teristic of the species than even the song it-
self. So there were two male wood thrushes,
and presumably two pairs, in this mountain-
side forest !

On the 1st of June I heard the song there
again, though I was forced to wait for it ;
and three days afterward the story was the
same. I ought to have looked for nests, but
time failed me. To the best of my know-
ledge, the bird has never been reported
before from the White Mountain region,
though it is well known to breed in some
parts of Canada, where I have myself seen
it.

Here, then, were two notable accessions to
our local catalogue. The only others (a few
undoubted migrants — Wilson's black-cap
warbler, the white-crowned sparrow, and the

SPRING 115

solitary sandpiper — being omitted) were a
single meadow lark and a single yellow-
throated vireo. The lark seemed to be un-
known to Franconia people, and my speci-
men may have been only a straggler. He
sang again and again on May 22, but I
heard nothing from him afterward, though I
passed the place often. The vireo was sing-
ing in a sugar grove on the 3d of June, —
a date on which, accidents apart, he should
certainly have been at home for the summer.
Because I have had so much to say about
the Cape May warbler and the wood thrush,
it is not to be assumed that I mean to set
them in the first place, nor even that I had
in them the highest pleasure. They sur-
prised me, and surprise is always more talk-
ative than simple appreciation ; but the birds
that ministered most to my enjoyment were
the hermit and the veery. The veery is not
an every-day singer with me at home, and
the hermit, for some years past, has made
himself almost a stranger. I hardly know
which of the two put me under the greater
obligation. The veery sang almost continu-
ally, and a good veery is a singer almost out

116 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

of competition. His voice lacks the ring of
the wood thrush's and the hermit's ; it never
dominates the choir; but with the coppice
to itself and the listener close by, it has
sometimes a quality irresistible ; I do not
hesitate to characterize it as angelic. Of
this kind was the voice of a bird that used
to sing under my Franconia window at half
past three o'clock, in the silence of the
morning.

The surpassing glory of the veery's song,
as all lovers of American bird music may be
presumed by this time to know, Kes in its
harmonic, double-stopping effect, — an ef-
fect, or quality, as beautiful as it is peculiar.
One day, while I stood listening to it under
the best of conditions, admiring the wonder-
ful arpeggio (I know no less technical word
for it), my pencil suddenly grew poetic.
" The veery's fingers are quick on the harp-
strings," it wrote. His is perfect Sunday
music, — and the hermit's no less so. And
in the same class I should put the simple
chants of the field sparrow and the vesper.
The so-called " preaching " of the red-eyed
vireo is utter worldliness in the comparison.

SPRING 117

Happy Franconia! This year, if never
before, it had all five of our New England
Hylocichlae singing in its woods : the veery
and the hermit everywhere in the lower
country, the wood thrush in the maple for-
est before mentioned, the olive-back through-
out the Notch and its neighborhood, and the
gray-cheek on Lafayette ; a quintette hard
to match, I venture to think, anjrwhere
on the footstool. And after them — I do
not say with them — were winter wrens,
bobolinks, rose-breasted grosbeaks, purple
finches, solitary vireos, vesper sparrows, field
sparrows, white-throated sparrows, song spar-
rows, catbirds, robins, orioles, tanagers, and
a score or two beside.

One other bright circumstance I am
bound in honor to speak of, — the abun-
dance of swallows ; a state of affairs greatly
unlike anything to be met with in my part
of Massachusetts: cliff swallows and bam
swallows in crowds, and sand martins and
tree swallows by no means uncommon. But
for the absence of black martins, — a fa-
mous colony of which the tourist may see at
Concord, while the train waits, — here would

118 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

have been a second quintette worthy to rank
with the thrushes ; the flight of one set be-
ing as beautiful, not to say as musical, as
the songs of the other. As it was, the uni-
versal presence of these aerial birds was a
continual delight to any man with eyes to
notice it. They glorified the open valley as
the thrushes glorified the woods.

We shall never again see the like of this,
I fear, in our prosier Boston neighborhood.
"Within my time — within twenty years, in-
deed — barn swallows summered freely on
Beacon Hill, plastering their nests against
the walls of the State House and the Athe-
naeum, and even under the busy portico of
the Tremont House. I have remembrance,
too, of a pair that dwelt, for one season at
least, above the door of the old Ticknor
mansion, at the head of Park Street. Those
days are gone. Now, alas, even in the sub-
urban districts, we may almost say that
one swallow makes a summer. An evil
change it is, for which not even the war-
blings of English sparrows will ever quite
console me. Yet the present state of things,
the reoccupation of Boston by the British,

SPRING 119

if you please to call it so, is not without its
grain of compensation. It makes me fonder
of " old Francony." Skeptic or man of
faith, naturalist or supernaturalist, who does
not like to feel that there is somewhere a
" better country " than the one he lives in ?

A DAY IN JUNE

THE FORENOON

" The air that floated by me seem'd to say,
* Write ! thou wilt never have a better day.'
And so I did."

Kbats.

All signs threatened a day of midsum-
mer heat, though it was only the 2d of
June. Before breakfast, even, the news
seemed to have got abroad ; so that there
was something hke a dearth of music under
my windows, where heretofore there had
been almost a surfeit. The warbling vii;^o
in the poplar, which had teased my ear
morning after morning, getting shamelessly
in the way of his betters, had for once fallen
silent ; unless, indeed, he had sung his stint
before I woke, or had gone elsewhere to
practice. The comparative stillness enabled
me to hear voices from the hillside across

A DAY IN JUNE 121

the meadow, while I turned over in my
mind a thought concerning the nature of
those sounds — a class by themselves, some
of them by no means unmusical — which
are particularly enjoyable when borne to us
from a distance: crow voices, the baying of
hounds, cowbell tinkles, and the like. The
nasal, high-pitched, penetrating call of the
little Canadian nuthatch is one of the best
examples of what I mean. Anh^ ank : the
sounds issue from the depths of tracldess
woods, miles and miles away as it seems, just
reaching us, without a breath to spare ; dy-
ing upon the very tympanum, like a spent
rimner who drops exhausted at the goal,
touching it only with his finger tips. Yet
the ear is not fretted. It makes no attempt
to hear more. Ank, ank : that is the whole
story, and we see the bird as plainly as if he
hung from a cone at the top of the next fir
tree.

"No tramping to-day," said my friends
from the cottage as we met at table. They
had been reading the thermometer, which is
the modern equivalent for observing the
wind and regarding the clouds. But my

122 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

vacation, unlike theirs, was not an all-sum-
mer affair. It was fast running out, and
there were stiU many things to be seen and
done. Immediately after breakfast, there-
fore, with an umbrella and a luncheon, I
started for the Notch. I would reverse the
usual route, going by way of the railroad

— reached by a woodland trail above
" Chase's " — and returning by the highway.
Of itself this is only a forenoon's jaunt, but
I meant to piece it out by numerous waits

— for coolness and listening — and sundry
by-excursions, especially by a search for
Selkirk's violet and an hour or two on Bald
Mountain. If the black flies and the mos-
quitoes would let me choose my own gait,
I would risk the danger of sunstroke.

As I come out upon the grassy plain,
after the first bit of sharp ascent, a pleasant
breeze is stirring, and with the umbrella
over my head, and a halt as often as the
shade of a tree, the sight of a flower, or the
sound of music invites me, I go on with
great comfort. Now I am detained by a
close bed of dwarf cornel, every face looking
straight upward, the waxen white "flowers "

A DAY m JUNE 123

inclosing each a bunch of dark pin-points.
Now a lovely clear-winged moth hovers over
a dandelion head ; and a pleasing sight it is,
to see his transparent wings beating them-
selves into a haze about his brown body.
And now, by way of contrast, one of our
tiny sky-blue butterflies rises from the
ground and with a pretty unsteadiness flits
carelessly before me, twinkling over the
sand.

A bluebird drops into the white birch
under which I am standing, and lets fall a
few notes of his contralto warble. A deli-
cious voice. For purity and a certain affec-
tionateness it would be hard to name its
superior. A vesper sparrow sings from the
grass land ; and from the woods beyond a
jay is screaming. His, by the bye, is an-
other of the voices that are bettered by dis-
tance, although, for my own part, I like the
ring of it, near or far. Now a song sparrow
breaks out in his breezy, characteristically
abrupt manner. He is a bird with fine gifts
of cheeriness and versatility ; but when he
sets himseK against the vesper, as now, it is
like prose against poetry, plain talk against

124 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

music. So it seems to me at tliis moment,
I mean to say. At another time, in another
mood, I might tone down the comparison,
though I could never say less than that the
vesper is my favorite. His gifts are sweet-
ness and perfection.

So I cross the level fields to Chase's, where
I stand a few minutes before the little front-
yard flower-garden, always with many pretty
things in it. One of those natural garden-
ers, the good woman must be, who have a
knack of making plants blossom. And just
beyond, in the shelter of the first tree, I stop
again to take off my hat, put down my um-
brella, and speak coaxingly to a suspicious
pointer (being a friend of all dogs except
surly ones), which after much backing and
filling gets his cool nose into my palm. We
are on excellent terms, I flatter myself, but
at that moment some notion strikes me and
I take out my notebook and pencil. In-
stantly he starts away and sets up a furious
bark, looking first at me, then toward the
house, circling about me all the while, at a
rod's distance, in a quiver of excitement.
" Help ! help ! " he cries. " Here 's a villain

A DAY IN JUNE 125

of some sort. I 've never seen tlie like. A
spy at the very least." And though he quiets
down when I put up the book, there is no more
friendliness for this time. Man writing, as
Carlyle would have said, is a doubtful char-
acter.

Another stage, to the edge of the woods,
and I rest again, the breeze encouraging me.
A second bluebird is caroling. Every addi-
tional one is cause for thanlifulness. Ima-
gine a place where bluebirds should be as
thick as English sparrows are in our Ameri-
can cities ! Imagine heaven ! A crested fly-
catcher screams, an olive-side caUs jyip^ pip,
a robin cackles, an oven-bird recites his piece
with schoolboy emphasis, an alder flycatcher
qiteeps, and a vesper sparrow sings. And at
the end, as if for good measure, a Maryland
yeUow-throat adds his witchery, witchery.
The breeze comes to me over broad beds of
hay-scented fern, and at my feet are bunch-
berry blossoms and the white star-flower.
At this moment, nevertheless, the cooling,
insect-dispersing wind is better than all
things else. Such is one effect of hot wea-
ther, setting comfort above poetry.

126 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

I leave tlie wind beliind, and take my way
into the wood, where there is nothing in par-
ticular to delay me except an occasional wind-
fall, which must be clambered over or beaten
about. Half an hour, more or less, of lazy
traveling, and I come out upon the railroad
at the big sugar-maple grove. This is one
of the sights of the country in the bright-
leaf season, say the first week of October ;
something, I have never concluded what,
giving to its colors a most remarkable depth
and richness. Putting times together, I
must have spent hours in admiring it, now
from different points on the Butter Hill
round, now from Bald Mountain. At pre-
sent every leaf of it is freshly green, and
somewhere within it dwells a wood thrush,
for whose golden voice I sit down in the
shade to listen. He is in no haste, and no
more am I. Let him take his time. Other
birds also are a little under the weather, as
it appears ; but the silence cannot last. A
scarlet tanager's voice is the first to break it.
High as the temperature is, he is stiU hoarse.
And so is the black-throated blue warbler
that foUov/s him. A pine siskin passes over-

A DAY IN JUNE 127

liead on some errand, announcing himself as
lie goes. There is no need for him to speak
twice. Then come three warblers, — a Nash-
ville, a magnolia, and a blue yellow-back ;
and after them a piece of larger game, a
smallish hawk. He breaks out of the dense
wood behind me, perches for half a minute
in an open maple, where I can see that he
has prey of some kind in his talons, and
then, taking wing, ascends in circles into the
sky, and so disappears. That is locomo-
tion of a sort to make a man and his um-
brella envious.

A rose-breasted grosbeak, invisible (but
I can see him), is warbling not far off.
He has taken the tanager's tune — which is
the robin's as well — and smoothed it and
smoothed it, and sweetened it and sweetened
it, till it is smoother than oil and sweeter
than honey. I admire it for what it is, a
miracle of mellifluency ; if you call it per-
fect, I can only acquiesce ; but I cannot say
that it stirs or kindles me. Perhaps I have n't
a sweet ear. And hark ! the wood thrush
gives voice : only a few strains, but enough
to show him still present. Now I am free

128 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

to trudge along up the railroad track, pon-
dering as I go upon tlie old question why-
railway sleepers are always too far apart for
one step and not far enough for two. At
short intervals I pause at the sound of a
mourning warbler's brief song, pretty in it-
seK, and noticeable for its trick of a rolled
r. Some of the birds add a concluding mea-
sure of quick notes, like wit^ wit^ wit. It is
long since I have seen so many at once. In
truth, I have never seen so many except on
one occasion, on the side of Mount Washing-
ton. That was ten years ago. One a year,
on the average, shows itself to me during the
spring passage — none in autmnn. Well I
remember my first one. Twenty years have
elapsed since that late May morning, but I
could go to the very spot, I think, though I
have not been near it for more than half
that time. A good thing it is that we can
stiU enjoy the good things of past years, or
of what we call past years.

And a good thing is a railroad, though
the sleepers be spaced on purpose for a foot
passenger's discomfort. Without this one,
over which at this early date no trains are

A DAY IN JUNE 129

running, I should liardly be traversing these
miles of rough mountain country on a day of
tropical sultriness. The clear line of the
track gives me not only passage and a breeze,
but an opening into the sky, and at least
twice as many bird sights and bird sounds
as the unbroken forest would furnish.^ I
drink at the section men's well — an ice-cold
spring inclosed in a bottomless barrel —
cross the brook which, gloriously alive and
beautiful, comes dashing over its boulders
down the White-cross Eavine, fifty feet be-
low me as I guess, and stop in the burning
on the other side to listen for woodpeckers
and brown creepers. The latter are strangely
rare hereabout, and this seems an ideal spot
in which to look for them. So I cannot help
thinking as I see from how many of the
trunks — burned to death and left standing

1 I was once walking over these same miles of sleepers
with a bird-loving' man, when he recalled a reminiscence
of his boyhood. One of his teachers was remarking upon
the need of seeking things in their appropriate places.
" Now if you wanted to see birds," he said, by way of il-
lustration, "you wouldn't go to a railroad track."
" Which is the very place we do go to," my companion
added.

130 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

— the bark lias warped in long, loose flakes,
as if to provide nesting sites for a whole col-
ony of creepers. But the birds are not here ;
or, if they are, they do not mean that an in-
quisitive stranger shall know it. An olive-
sided flycatcher calls, rather far off, making
me suspicious for an instant of a red cross-
bill, and a white- throated sparrow whistles
out of the gulch below me ; but I listen in
vain for the quick tseep which would put an
eighty-seventh name into my vacation cata-
logue.

Here is the round-leaved violet, one pale-
bright, shy blossom. How pleased I am to
see it ! Hobble-bush and wild red cherry
are still in bloom. White Moimtain dog-
wood, we might almost call the hobble-bush ;
so well it fills the place, in flowermg time,
of Cornus florida in the AUeghanies. In
the twilight of the woods, as in the darkness
of evening, no color shows so far as white ;
which, for aught I know, may be one of the
reasons why, relatively speaking, white flow-
ers are so much more common in the forest
than in the open country. In my eyes,
nevertheless, the leaves of the hobble-bush

A DAY IN JUNE 131

— leaves and leaf-buds — are, if anything,
prettier than the blossoms. Such beauty of
shape, such expansiveness, such elegance of
crimpling, and such exceeding richness of
hue, whether in youth or age ! If the bush
refuses transplantation, as I have read that
it does, I am glad of it. My sympathies are
with all things, plants, animals, and men,
that insist upon their native freedom, in
their native country, with a touch, or more
than a touch, of native Savagery. Civiliza-
tion is well enough, within limits ; but why
be in haste to have all the world a garden ?
It will be some time yet, I hope, before every
valley is exalted.

With progress of this industriously indo-
lent sort it is nearly noon by the time I turn
into the footpath that leads down to Echo
Lake. Here the air is full of toad voices ;
a chorus of long-drawn trills in the shrillest
of musical tones. If the creatures (the
sandy shore and its immediate shallov/s are
thick with them) are attempting to set up an
echo, they meet with no success. At all
events I hear no response, though the fault
may easily be in my hearing, insusceptible as

132 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

it is to vibrations above a certain pitch of
fineness. Wliat ethereal music it would be,
an echo of toad trills from the grand sound-
ing-board of Eagle Cliff ! In the density
of my ignorance I am surprised to find such
numbers of these humble, half-domesticated,
garden-loving batrachians congregated here
in the wilderness. If the day were less mid-
summery, and were not already mortgaged
to other plans, I would go down to Profile
Lake to see whether the same thing is going
on there. I should have looked upon these
lovely sheets of mountain water as spawning-
places for trout. But toads ! — that seems
another matter. If I am surprised at their
presence, however, they seem equally so at
mine. And who knows ? They were here
first. Perhaps I am the intruder. I wish
them no harm in any case. If black flies
form any considerable part of their diet,
they could not multiply too rapidly, though
every note of every triU were good for a pol-
liwog, and every polliwog should grow into
the portliest of toads.

A DAY IN JUNE 133

THE AFTERNOON

I spoke a little warmly, perhaps, at tlie
end of tlie forenoon chapter. Echo Lake,
at the foot of it, is one of the places where I
love best to linger, and to-day it was more
attractive even than usual ; the air of the
clearest, the sim bright, the mountain woods
all in young leaf, the water shining. But
the black flies, which had left me undisturbed
on the raib(5ad, though I sat still by the half
hour, once I reached the lake would allow
me no rest.

It was twelve days since my first visit.
The snow was gone, and the trailing arbutus
had dropped its last blossoms ; but both
kinds of shadbush, standing in the hollow
where a snow-bank had lain ten days ago,
were still in fresh bloom. Pink lady's-slip-
pers were common (more buds than blossoms
as yet), and the pink rhodora also ; with
gold-thread, star-flower, dwarf cornel, hous-
onia, and the painted trillium. Chokeberry
bushes were topped with handsome clusters
of round, purplish buds.

The brightest and prettiest thing here,

134 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

however, was not a flovv^er, but a bird ; a
Blackburnian warbler fluttering along before
me in the low bushes — an extraordinary
act of grace on the part of this haunter of
treetops — as if on purpose to show hunself .
He was worth showing. His throat was like
a jewel. A bay-breast, always deserving of
notice, was singing among the evergreens
near by. So I believed, but the flies were
so hot after me that I made no attempt to
assure myseK. I was fairly chased away
from the water-side. One place after
another I fled to, seeking one where the
breeze should rid me of my tormentors, till
at last, in desperation, I took to the piazza
of the little shop — now unoccupied — at
which the summer tourist buys birch-bark
souvenirs, with ginger-beer, perhaps, and
other potables. There I finished my lunch-
eon, still having a skirmish with the enemy's
scouts now and then, but thankful to be out
of the thick of the battle. The ri23pling lake
shone before me, a few swifts were shooting
to and fro above it, but for the time my en-
joyment of all such things was gone. That
half hour of black-fly persecution had dissi-

A DAY IN JUNE 135

pated tlie liappy mood in which the forenoon
had been passed, and there was no recover-
ing it by force of will. A mihtary man
would have said, perhaps, that I had lost my
morale. Something had happened to me,
call it what you will. But if one string was
broken, my bow had another. Quiet medi-
tation being impossible, I was all the readier
to go in search of Selkirk's violet, the possi-
ble finding of which was one of the motives
that had brought me into the mountains thus
early. To look for flowers is not a question
of mood, but of patience. To look at them,
so as to feel their beauty and meaning, is
another business, not to be conducted suc-
cessfully while poisonous insects are fretting
one's temper to madness.

If I went about this botanical errand
doubtingly, let the reader hold me excused.
He has heard of a needle in a haystack.
The case of my violets was similar. The
one man who had seen them was now dead.
Years before, he had pointed out to me casu-
ally (or like a dunce I had heard him casu-
ally) the place where he was accustomed to
leave the road in going after them — which

136 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

was always long before my arrival. This
place I believed that I remembered within
perhaps half a mile. My only resource,
therefore, was to plunge into the forest,
practically endless on its further side, and
as well as I could, in an hour or so, look the
land over for that distance. Success would
be a piece of almost incredible luck, no
doubt ; but what then ? I was here, the
hour was to spare, and the woods were worth
a visit, violets or no violets. So I plunged
in, and, following the general course of the
road, swept the ground right and left with
my eye, turning this way and that as boul-
ders and tangles impeded my steps, or as the
sight of something like violet leaves attracted
me.

Well, for good or ill, it is a short story.
There were plenty of violets, but all of
the common white sort, and when I emerged
into the road again my hands were empty.
"Small," "rare," says the Manual. My
failure was not ignominious, — or I would
keep it to myself, — and I count upon trying
again another season. And one thing I had
found : my peace of mind. Subjectively, as

A DAY IN JUNE 137

we say, my hunt had prospered. Now I
could climb Bald Mountain with good hope
of an hour or two of serene enjoyment at the
summit.

The climb is short, though the upper half
of it is steep enough to merit the name, and
the " mountain " (it will pardon me the quo-
tation marks) is no more than a point of
rocks, an outlying spur of Lafayette. Its
attractiveness is due not to its altitude, but
to the exceptional fehcity of its situation ;
commanding the lake and the Notch, and
the broad Franconia Valley, together with a
splendid panorama of broken country and
mountain forest ; and over all, close at hand,
the solemn, bare peak of Lafayette.

I took my time for the ascent (blessed be
all-day jaunts, say I), minding the mossy
boulders, the fern-beds, and the trees (many
of them old friends of mine — it is more
than twenty years since I began going up
and down here), and especially the violets.
It was surprising, not to say amusing, now
that I had violets in my eye, how ubiquitous
the little hlanda had suddenly become. Al-
most it might be said that there was nothing

138 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

else in tlie whole forest. So true it is that
seeino- or not seeing is mostly a matter of
prepossession. As for the birds, this was
their hour of after-dinner silence. I recall
only a golden-crowned kinglet zeeing among
the low evergreens about the cone. He was
the first one of my whole vacation trip, and
slipped at once into the eighty-seventh place
in my catalogue, the place I had tried so
hard to induce the brown creeper to take
possession of two hours before. Creeper or
kinglet, it was all one to me, though the king-
let is the handsomer of the two, and much the
less prosaic in his dietary methods. In fact,
now that the subject suggests itself, the two
birds present a really striking contrast : one
so preternaturaUy quick and so continually
in motion, the other so comparatively le-
thargic. Every one to his trade. Let the
creeper stick to his bark. Quick or slow,
he should still have been Number 88, and
thrice welcome, if he would have given me
half an excuse for counting him. As things
were, he kept out of my reckoning to the
end.

" This is the best thing I have had yet."

A DAY IN JUNE 139

So I said to myself as I turned to look about
me at the summit. It was only half past
two, the day was gloriously fair, the breeze
not too strong, yet ample for creature com-
forts, — coolness and freedom, — and the
place all my own. If I had missed Selkirk's
violet, I had found his solitude. The joists
of the little open summer-house were scrawled
thickly with names and initials, but the scrib-
blers and carvers had gone with last year's
birds. I might sing or shout, and there
would be none to hear me. But I did
neither. I was glad to be still and look.

There lay Echo Lake, shimmering in the
sun. Beyond was the hotel, its windows still
boarded for winter, and on either side of it
rose the mountain waUs. The White Cross
stiU kept something of its shape on Lafay-
ette, the only snow left in sight, though al-
most the whole peak had been white ten
days before. The cross itself must be fast
going. With my glass I could see the water
pouring from it in a flood. And how plainly
I coidd foUow the trail up the rocky cone of
the mountain ! Those were good days when
I climbed it, lifting myseH step by step up

140 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

that long, steep, boulder-covered slope. I
should love to be there now. I wonder what
flowers are already in bloom. It must be
too early for the diapensia and the Green-
land sandwort, I imagine. Yet I am not
sure. Mountain flowers are quick to an-
swer when the sun speaks to them. Thou-
sands of years they have been learning to
make the most of a brief season. Plants of
the same species bloom earlier here than in
level Massachusetts. After all, alpine plants,
hurried and harried as they are, true chil-
dren of poverty, have perhaps the best of it.
" Blessed are ye poor " may have been spoken
to them also. Hardy mountaineers, blossom-
ing in the very face of heaven, with no
earthly admirers except the butterflies. I
remember the splendors of the Lapland aza-
lea in middle June, with rocks and snow for
neighbors. So it will be this year, for Wis-
dom never faileth. I look and look, till
almost I am there on the heights, my feet
standing on a carpet of blooming willows
and birches, and the world, like another car-
pet, outspread below.

But there is much else to delight me.

A DAY IN JUNE 141

Even here, so far below the crest of Lafay-
ette, I am above the world. Yonder is one
of my pair of deserted farms. Good hours
I have had in them. Beyond is the Chase
clearing, and still beyond, over another tract
of woods, are the pasture lands along the
road to " Mears's." Then comes the line of
the Bethlehem road, marked by a house at
long intervals — and thankful am I for the
length of them. There I see my house ; one
of several that I have picked out for pur-
chase, at one time and another, but have
never come to the point of paying for, still
less of occupying. When my friends and
I have wandered irresponsibly about this
country it has pleased us to be like children,
and play the old game of make-believe.
Some of the farmers would be astonished to
know how many times their houses have been
sold over their heads, and they never the
wiser. Further away, a little to the right,
I see the pretty farms — romantic farms, I
mean, attractive to outsiders — of which I
have so often taken my share of the crop
from Mount Agassiz, at the base of which
they nestle. To the left of all this are the

142 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

village of Franconia and the group of Sugar
Hill hotels, with the Landaff Valley (how
green it is ! ) below them in the middle dis-
tance. Nearer stiU is the Franconia Valley,
with the Tucker Brook alders, and far down
toward Littleton bright reaches of Gale
River.

All this fills me with exquisite pleasure.
But longer than at anything else I look at
the mountain forest just below me. So soft
and bright this world of treetops all newly
green ! I have no thoughts about it ; there
is nothing to say ; but the feeling it gives
me is like what I imagine of heaven itself.
I can only look and be happy.

About me are stunted, faded spruces,
with here and there among them a balsam-
fir, wonderfully vivid and fresh in the com-
parison ; and after a time I discover that
the short upper branches of the spruces
have put forth new cones, soft to the touch
as yet, and of a delicate, purplish color, the
tint varying greatly, whether from differ-
ence of asfe or for other reasons I cannot
presume to say. In this low wood, some-
where near by, a blackpoll warbler, not long

A DAY IN JUNE 143

from South America, I suppose, is lisping
softly to himself. A myrtle warbler, less
recently come, and from a less distance, has
taken possession of a dead treetop, hardly
higher than a man's head, from which he
makes an occasional sally after a passing
insect. Between whiles he sings. Once I
heard a snowbird, as I thought ; but it was
only the myrtle warbler when I came to
look. An oven-bird shoots into the air out
of the forest below for a burst of aerial
afternoon music. I heard the preluding
strain, and, glancing up, caught him at
once, the sunlight happening to strike him
perfectly. All the morning he has been
speaking prose ; now he is a poet ; a division
of the day from which the rest of us might
take a lesson. But for his afternoon role
he needs a name. " Oven-bird " goes some-
what heavily in a lyric : —

" Hark ! hark ! the oven-bird at heaven's gate sings " —

you would hardly recognize that for Shake-
speare.

As I shift my position, trying one after
another of the seats which the rocks offer

144 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

for my convenience, I notice that the three-
toothed five-finger — a mountain lover, if
there ever was one — is in bud, and the
blueberry in blossom. The myrtle warbler
sings by the hour, a soft, dreamy trill, a
sound of pure contentment ; and two red-
eyed vireos, one here, one there, preach with
equal persistency. They have taken the
same text, I think, and it might have been
made for them : " Precept upon precept,
precept upon precept ; line upon line, line
upon line ; here a little and there a little."
Right or wrong, the warbler's lullaby is
more to my taste than the vireos' exhortar
tion. A magnolia warbler, out of sight
among the evergreens, is making an after-
noon of it likewise. His song is a mere no-
thing ; hardly to be called a " line ; " but if
all the people who have nothing extraordi-
nary to say were to hold their peace, what
would ears be good for? The race might
become deaf, as races of fish have gone
blind through living in caverns.

These are exactly such birds as one might
have expected to find here. And the same
may be said of a Swainson thrush and a

A DAY IN JUNE 145

pine siskin. A black-billed cuckoo and a
Maryland yellow-throat, on the other hand,
the yellow-throat especially, seem less in
place. What can have brought the latter
to this dry, rocky hilltop is more than I can
imagine. A big black-and-yellow butterfly
(Turnus) goes sailing high overhead, borne
on the wind. For so unsteady a steersman
he is a bold mariner. A second look at
him, and he is out of sight. Common as he
is, he is one of my perennial admirations.
The peak of Lafayette is no more a miracle.
All the flowers up there know him.

Now it is time to go. I have been here
an hour and a half, and am determined to
have no hurrying on the way homeward,
over the old Notch road. Let the day be
all alike, a day of leisure and of dreams.
A last look about me, a few rods of picking
my steep course downward over the rocks
at the very top, and I am in the woods.
Here, "my distance and horizon gone," I
please myself with looking at bits of the
world's beauty; especially at sprays of
young leaves, breaking a twig here and a
twig there to carry in my hand ; a spray of

146 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

budded mountain maple or of yellow birch.
Texture, color, shape, veining and folding
— all is a piece of Nature's perfect work.
No less beautiful — I stop again and again
before a bed of them — are the dainty
brandling beech-ferns. There is no telling
how pretty they are on their slender shining
stems. And all the way I am taking leave
of the road. I may never see it again.
" Good-by, old friend," I say ; and the trees
and the brook seem to answer me, " Good-
by."

BERRY-TIME FELICITIES

A nice and subtle happiness, I see,
Thou to thyseK proposest."

Milton.

Once more I am in old Franconia, and in
a new season. With aU my visits to tlie
New Hampshire mountains, I have never
seen them before in August. I came on the
last day of July, — a sweltering journey.
That night it rained a little, hardly enough
to lay the dust, which is deep in all these
valley roads, and the next morning at break-
fast time the mercury marked fifty-seven
degrees. All day it was cool, and at night
we sat before a fire of logs in the big chim-
ney. The day was really a wonder of clear-
ness, as well as of pleasant autumnal tem-
perature ; an exceptional mercy, caUing for
exceptional acknowledgment.

After breakfast I took the Bethlehem
road at the slowest pace. The last time I

148 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

had traveled it was in May. Then every
tree had its bird, and every bird a voice.
Now it was August — the year no longer
young, and the birds no longer a choir.
And when birds are neither in tune nor
in flocks, it is almost as if they were absent
altogether. It seemed to me, when I had
walked a mile, that I had never seen Fran-
conia so deserted.

An alder flycatcher was calling from a
larch swamp ; a white-throated sparrow
whistled now and then in the distance ; and
from still farther away came the leisurely,
widely spaced measures of a hermit thrush.
When he sings there is no great need of a
chorus ; the forest has found a tongue ; but
I could have wished him nearer. A solitary
vireo, close at hand, regaled me with a sweet,
low chatter, more musical twice over than
much that goes by the name of singing, —
the solitary being one of the comparatively
few birds that do not know how to be un-
musical, — and a sapsucker, a noisy fellow
gone silent, flew past my head and alighted
against a telegTaph pole.

Wild red cherries QPrunus Pennsylvch

BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 149

nicd) were ripe, or nearly so; very bright
and handsome on their long, slender stems,
as I stood under the tree and looked up.
With the sun above them they became
fairly translucent, the shape of the stone
showing. They were pretty small, I thought,
and would never take a prize at any horti-
cultural fair ; I needed more than one in the
mouth at once when I tested their quaHty ;
but a robin, who had been doing the same
thing, seemed reluctant to finish, and surely
robins are competent judges in matters of
this kind. My own want of appreciation
was probably due to some pampered coarse-
ness of taste.

An orchid, with one leaf and a spike of
minute greenish flowers, attracted notice,
not for any showy attributes, but as a plant
I did not know. Adder's mouth, it proved
to be ; or, to give it all the Grecian Latinity
that belongs to it, llicrostylis ophioglos-
soides. How astonished it would be to hear
that mouth-confounding name applied to its
modest little self ; as much astonished, per-
haps, as we should be, who are not modest,
though we may be greenish, if we heard

150 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

some of the more interesting titles that are
applied to us, all in honest vernacular, be-
hind our backs. This year's goldthread
leaves gave me more pleasure than most
blossoms could have done; lustrous, ele-
gantly shaped, and in threes. Threes are
prettier than fours, I said to myseK, as I
looked at some four-leaved specimens of
dwarf cornel growing on the same bank.
The comparison was hardly decisive, it is
true, since the cornus leaves lacked the
goldthread's shapeliness and brilliancy ; but
I believe in the grace of the odd number.
With trifles like these I was entertaining
the time when a man on a buckboard reined
in his horse and invited me to ride. He
was going down the Gale River road a
piece, he said, and as this was my course
also I thankfully accepted the lift. I would
go farther than I had intended, and would
spend the forenoon in loitering back. My
host had two or three tin pails between his
feet, and I was not surprised when he told
me that he was " going berrying." What
did surprise me was to find, fifteen minutes
later, when I got on my legs again, that

BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 151

with no sucli conscious purpose, and with no
tin pail, I had myself come out on the same
errand. "It is not in man that walketh to
direct his steps."

The simple truth was that the raspber-
ries would not take no for an answer. If I
passed one clump of bushes, another way-
laid me. " Raspberries, all ripe," they said.
It was not quite true : that would have been
a misfortune unspeakable ; but the ripe ones
were enough. Softly they dropped into the
fingers — softly in spite of their asperous
name — and sweetly, three or four together
for goodness' sake, they melted upon the
tongue. They were so many that a man
could have his pick, taking only those of a
deep color (ten minutes of experience would
teach him the precise shade) and a worthy
plumpness, passing a bushel to select a gill.

No raspberry should be pulled upon ever
so little ; it should fall at the touch ; and the
teeth should have nothing to do with it,
more than with honey or cream. So I med-
itated, and so with aU daintiness I practiced,
finishing my banquet again and again as a
fresh cluster beguiled me ; for raspberry-eat-

152 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

ing, like woman's work, is never done. If
the apple in Eden was as pleasant to the
eyes and half as good to eat, then I have no
reflections to cast upon the mistress of the
garden. In fact, it seems to me not unlikely
that the Edenic apple may have been no-
thing more nor less than a Franconian rasp-
berry. Small wonder, say I, that one taste
of its "sciential sap" "gave elocution to
the mute."

So I came up out of the Gale River
woods into the bushy lane — a step or two
and a mouthful of berries — and thence into
the level grassy field by the grove of pines ;
a favorite place, with a world of mountains
in sight — Moosilauke, Kinsman, Cannon,
Lafayette, Haystack, the Twins, and the
whole Mount Washington range. A pile
of timbers, the bones of an old barn, offered
me a seat, and there I rested, facing the
mountains, while a company of merry barn
swallows, loquacious as ever, went skimming-
over the grass. Moving clouds dappled the
mountain-sides with shadows, the sun was
good, a rare thing in August, and I was
happy.

BERRY-TIIVIE FELICITIES 153

This lasted for a matter of half an hour.
Then a sound of wheels caused me to turn
my head. Yes, a pair of gray horses and a
covered carriage, with a white net protrud-
ing behind, — an entomological flag weU
known to all Franconia dwellers in summer
time, one of the institutions of the valley.
A hand was waved, and in another minute I
was being carried toward Bethlehem, all my
pedestrian plans forgotten. I was becom-
ing that disreputable thing, an opportunist.
But what then ! As I remarked just now,
"It is not in man that walketh to direct his
steps." In vacation days the wisest of us
may go with the wind.

A pile of decaying logs by the roadside
soon tempted the insect collector to order a
halt. She was brought up, as I have heard
her say regretfully, on the stern New Eng-
land doctrine that time once past never re-
turns, and she is still true to her training.
We stripped the bark from log after log,
but uncovered nothing worth while (such
beetles as the unprofessional assistant turned
up being damned without hesitation as
"common") except two little mouse-col-

154 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

ored, red-bellied snakes, each with two or
three spots on the back of its head. One of
these pretty creatures the collector proceeded
to mesmerize by rubbing its crown gently
with a stick. " See ! he enjoys it," she said ;
and if thrusting out the tongue is a sign of
enjoyment, no doubt he was in something
like an ecstasy. Storeria occiintomaculata^
the books caU him. Short snakes, Hke smaU
orchids, are well pieced out with Latinity.
I would not disturb the savor of raspberries
by trying just then to put my tongue round
that specific designation, though it goes trip-
pingly enough with a little practice, and is
plain enough in its meaning. One did not
need to be a scholar, or to look twice at the
snake, to see that its occiput was maculated.
At the top of the hill — for we took the
first turn to the left — " creation widened,"
and we had before us a magnificent prospect
westward, with many peaks of the Green
Mountains beyond the valley. Atmosphere
so transparent as to-day's was not made for
nothing. Insects and even raspberries were
for the moment out of mind. There was
glory everywhere. We looked at it, but

BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 155

when we talked it was mostly of trifles : the
bindweed, tlie goldenrod, a passing butterfly,
a sparrow. Those who are really happy are
often pleased to speak of matters indifferent.
Sometimes I think it is those who only icish
to be happy who deal in superlatives and
exclamations.

One thing I was especially glad to see :
the big pastures on the Wallace Hill road
full of hardback bloom. Many times, in
September and October, I had stopped to
gaze upon those acres on acres of brown
spires ; now I beheld them pink. It was
really a sight, a sea of color. If cattle
would eat /SjnrcEa tomentosa, the fields
would be as good as gold mines. So I
thought. I thought, too, what an ocean of
" herb tea " might be concocted from those
millions and millions of leafy stalks. The
idea was too much for me ; imagination was
near to being drowned in a sea of its own
creating ; and I was relieved when we left
the rosy wilderness behind us, and came to
the famous clump of pear-leaved willow (^Sa-
lix halsamiferd) near the edge of the wood.
This I must get over the fence and put my

156 FOOTING IT IN FKANCONIA

hand on, just for old times' sake. A man
may take it as one of tke less uncomfortable
indications of increasing age when lie loves
to do things simply because he used to do
them, or has done them in remembered com-
pany. In that respect I humor myself. If
there is anything good in the multiplying of
years, by all means let me have it. And so
I wore the willow.

On the way down the steep hill through
the forest my friends pointed out a maple
tree which a pileated woodpecker had rid-
dled at a tremendous rate. The trunk con-
tained the pupse of wasps (they were not
strictly wasps, the entomologist was careful
to explain, but were always caUed so by
"common people"), and no doubt it was
these that the woodpecker had been after.
He had gone clean to the heart of the trunk,
now on this side, now on that. Chips by the
shovelful covered the ground. The big, red-
crested fellow must love wasp pupse almost
as well as some people love raspberries.
Green leaves, a scanty covering, were still
on the tree, but its days were numbered.
Who could have foreseen that the stings of

BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 157

insects would bring such destruction ? Mis-
fortunes never come singly. After the wasps
the woodpecker. "Which things are an
allegory."

One of my pleasures of the milder sort
was to sit on the piazza before breakfast
(the lateness of the White Mountain break-
fast hour being one of a walking man's clis-
pleasures) and watch the two morning pro-
cessions : one of tall milk cans to and from
the creamery, — an institution which any
countrj^-'born New Englander may be glad
to think of, for the comfort it has brought
to New England farmers' wives ; the other
of boys, each with a tin pail, on their way
to serve as caddies at the new Profile House
golf links. This latter procession I had
never seen till the present year. Half the
boys of the village, from seven or eight to
fifteen or sixteen years old, seemed to have
joined it ; some on bicycles, some in buggies,
some on foot, none on horseback — a strik-
ing omission in the eyes of any one who has
ever lived or visited at the South.

Franconia boys, I have noticed, have a

158 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

clieerf ul, businesslike, independent way with
them, neither bashful nor overbold, and it
was gratifying to see them so quick to im-
prove a new and not unamusing method of
turning a penny. Work that has to do with
a game is no more than half work, though
the game be played by somebody else ; and
some of the boys, it was to be remarked,
carried golf sticks of their own. Trust a
Yankee lad to combine business and pleas-
ure. One such I heard of, who was already
planning how to invest his prospective capi-
tal.

" Mamma," he said, " can't I spend part
of my money for a fishing-rod ? "

" But, my dear," said his mother, " you
know it was agreed that the first of it should
go for clothes."

" Yes, mamma, but a boy can get along
without clothes ; and I 've never had any
fishing-rod but a peeled stick."

It sounds like a fairy tale, but it is strictly
true, that a famous angler, just then disabled
from practicing his art, overheard — or was
told of, I am not certain which — this heart-
warming confession of faith, and at once

BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 159

said, " My boy, I will give you a fishing-rod."
And so lie did, and a silk line with it. A
boy who could get on without clothes, but
must have the wherewithal to go a-fishing,
was a boy with a sense of values, a philoso-
pher in the bud, and merited encourage-
ment.

While I watched these industrial proces-
sions (" Gidap, Charlie ! Gidap ! " says a
cheery voice down the road), I listened to
the few singers whose morning music could
still be counted upon : one or two song-
sparrows, a field sparrow, an indigo-bird (as
true a lover of August as of feathery larch
tops), a red-eyed vireo, and a distant hermit
thrush. Almost always a score or two of
social barn swallows were near by, dotting
the telegraph wires, or, if the morning was
cold, di'opping in bunches of twos and tlu-ees
into the thick foliage of young elms. In the
trees, on the wires, or in the air, they were
sure to keep up a comfortable-sounding cho-
rus of squeaky twitters. The barn swallow
is born a gossip ; or perhaps we should say
a talking sage — a Socrates, if you will, or
a Samuel Johnson. Now and then — too

160 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

i^arely — a vesper sparrow sang a single
strain, or a far-away white-throat gave voice
across the meadow ; and once a passing hum-
ming-bird, a good singer with his wings,
stopped to probe the monk's-hood blossoms
in the garden patch. The best that can
be said of the matter is that for birds the
season was neither one thing nor another.
Lovers of field ornithology should come to
the mountains earlier or later, leaving Au-
gust to the crowd of common tourists, who
love nature, of course (who does n't in these
days ?), but only in the general ; who believe
with Walt Whitman — since it is not neces-
sary to read a poet in order to share his
opinions — that " you must not know too
much or be too precise or scientific about
birds and trees and flowers and water-craft ;
a certain free margin, and even vagueness —
even ignorance, credulity — helping your
enjoyment of these things."

Such a credulous enjoyer of beauty I
knew of, a few years ago, a summer dweller
at a mountain hotel closely shut in by the
forest on all sides, with no grass near it ex-
cept a scanty plot of shaven lawn. Well,

BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 161

this good lady, an honest appreciator of
things wild, after the Whitman manner, be-
ing in the company of a man known to be
interested in matters ornithological, broke
out upon him, —

" Oh, Mr. , I do so enjoy the birds ! I

sit at my window and listen to the meadow
larks by the hour."

The gentleman was not adroit (I am not
speaking of myself, let me say). Perhaps
lie was more ornithologist than man of the
world. Such a thing may happen. At any
rate he failed to command himself.

" Meadow larks ! " he answered, knowing
there was no bird of that kind within ten
miles of the spot in question.

" Well," said his fair interlocutor, " they
are either meadow larks or song sparrows."

Such nature lovers, I say, may properly
enough come to the mountains in August.
As for bird students, who, not being poets,
are in no danger of knowing " too much," if
they can come but once a year, let them by
all means choose a birdier season.

For myself, though my present mood was
rather Whitmanian than scientific, I did de-

162 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

vote one forenoon to what might bs called
an ornithological errand : I went np to the
worn-out fields at the end of the Coal Hill
road, to see whether by any chance a pair
of horned larks might be summering there,
as I had heard of a pair's doing eight or ten
years ago. Even this jaunt, however, ran
into — I will not say degenerated into —
something like a berry-picking excursion.
Kaspberries and blueberries so thick as to
color the roadside, mile after mile, are a de-
lightful temptation to a natural man whose
home is in a closely settled district where
every edible berry that turns red (actual
ripeness being out of the question) finds a
small boy beside the bush ready to pick it.
I succumbed at once. In fact, I succumbed
too soon. The road was long, and the ber-
ries grew fatter and rij)er, or so I thought,
as I proceeded. It was a real tragedy.
Does anything in my reader's experience
tell him what I mean ? If so, I am sure of
his sympathy. If not, — weU, in that case
he has my symj)athy. Perhaps he has once
in his life seen a small boy who, at table,
not suspecting what was in store for him,

BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 163

ate so much of an ordinary dinner that out
of sheer physical necessity he was compelled
to forego his favorite dessert. Alas, and
alas ! A wasted appetite is like wasted time,
a loss irreparable. You may have another,
no doubt, on another day, but never the one
you sated upon inferior fruit.

Why should berries be so many, and a
man's digestive capacity so near to nothing?
The very bushes reproached me ; like a jeal-
ous housewife who finds her choicest dainties
discarded on the plate. "We have piped
unto you and ye have not danced," they
seemed to mutter. I grew shame-faced and
looked the other way : at the splendid ro-
settes of red bunchberries ; at a bush full of
red (another red) mountain-holly berries,
red with a most exquisite purplish bloom, the
handsomest berries in the world, I am ready
to believe. Or I stopped to consider a clus-
ter of varnished baneberries, or a few mod-
est, drooping, leaf -hidden jewels of tlie
twisted stalk. In truth, and in short, it was
berry-time in Franconia. What a strait a
man would have been in if all kinds had
been humanly edible !

164 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

With all tlie rest there was no passing the
strangely blue bear-plums, as Northern peo-
ple call the fruit of clintonia. A strange
blue, I say. Left to myself I should never
have found a word for it ; but by good luck
I raised the question with a man who, as I
now suppose, is probably the only person in
the world who could have told me what I
needed to know. He is an authority upon
pottery and porcelain, and he answered on
the instant, though I cannot hope to quote
him exactly, that the color was that of the
Ming dynasty. Every Chinese dynasty, I
think he said, has a color of its own for its
pottery. When the founder of the Ming
dynasty was asked of what shade he would
have the royal dinner set, he replied : " Let
it be that of the sky after rain." And so
it was the color of Franconia bear-plums.
Which strikes me as a circumstance very
much to the Ming dynasty's credit.

In a lonely stretch of the road, with a cat-
tle pasture on one side and a wood on the
other, where tall grass in fuU flower stood
between the horse track and the wheel rut
(this was a good berrying place, also, had I

BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 165

been equal to my opportunity), I stood still
to enjoy tlie music of a liermit thrush, winch
happened to be at just the right distance.
A holy voice it was, singing a psalm, mea-
sure responding to measure out of the same
golden throat. I tried to fit words to it.
" Oh," it began, but for the remainder of
the strophe there were no syllables in our
heavy, consonant-weighted English tongue.
It might be Spanish, I thought — musical
vowels with Z's and d's holding them together.
I remembered the reputed saying of Charles
v., that Spanish is the language of the gods,
and was ready to add, " and of hermit
thrushes." But perhaps this was only a
fancy. One thing was certain : the bird sang
in Spanish or in sometliing better. If a man
could eat raspberries as long as he can listen
to sweet sounds !

Before the last house there was a briUiant
show of poppies, and beyond, at the limit of
the clearing, an enormous bean-field. Pop-
pies and beans ! Poetry and prose ! Some-
thing to look at and something to eat. Such
is the texture of human life. For my part,
I caU it a felicitous combination. Here, only

166 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

a little while ago, the man of the house —
and of the beanfiekl — had come face to face
with a most handsome, long-antlered deer,
which stamped at him till the two, man and
deer, were at close quarters, and then made
off into the woods. Somewhere here, also,
the entomological collector had within a week
or two found a beetle of a kind that had
never been "taken" before except in Ari-
zona ! But though I beat the grass over
from end to end, there was no sign of horned
larks. Ornithology was out of date, as was
more and more apparent.

My homeward walk, with the cold wind
cutting my face, took on the complexion of
a retreat. I could hardly walk fast enough,
though here and there a clump of virginal
raspberry vines stiU. detained me briefly. It
is amazing how frigid August can be when
the mood takes it. A farmer was mowing
with his winter coat buttoned to the chin. I
looked at him with envy. For my owa part
I should have been glad of an overcoat ; and
that afternoon, when I went out to drive, I
wore one, and a borrowed ulster over it.
Such feats are pleasant to think of a few

BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 167

days afterward, wlien the weather has changed
its mind again, and the mercury is once more
reaching for the century mark.

In the course of my five days I walked
twice over the road newly cut through the
mountain forest from the foot of Echo Lake
to the golf grounds : first upward, in an af-
ternoon, returning to Franconia by the old
highway; then downward, in a forenoon,
after reaching the lake by way of the Butter
Hill road and the sleepers, that is to say, the
railroad. Forenoon and afternoon the im-
pression was the same, — silence, as if the
birds' year were over, though everything was
still green and the season not so late but that
tardy wood-sorrel blossoms stiU showed, here
and there one, among the clover-like leaves ;
old favorites, that I had not seen for perhaps
a dozen years.

On the railroad — a place which I have
always found literally alive with song and
wings, not only in May and June, but in
September and October — I walked for for-
ty-five minutes, by the watch, without hear-
ing so much as a bird's note. Almost the

168 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

only living creature that I saw (three berry-
pickers and a dog excepted) was a red squir-
rel which sat on end at the top of a tall
stump, with his tail over his back, and ate
a raspberry, as if to show me how. " You
think you are an epicure," he said ; " and
you stuff yourself so f uU in half an hour that
you have to fast for half a day afterward.
What sort of epicurean philosophy is that ?
Look at me." And I looked. He held the
berry — which must have been something
less than ripe — between his fore paws, just
as he would have held a nut, and after look-
ing at me to make sure I was paying atten-
tion twirled it round and round against his
teeth tiU it grew smaller and smaller before
my eyes, and then was gone. " There ! "
said the saucy chap, as he held up his empty
fingers. The operation had consumed a full
minute, at the very least. At that rate, no
doubt, a man could swaUow raspberries from
morning till night. But what good would it
do him ? He might as well be swallowing
the wind. No human mouth could tell rasp-
berry juice from warm water, in doses so in-
finitesimal.

BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 169

The sight, nevertheless, gave me a new
conception of the pitch of delicacy to which
the sense of taste might be cultivated. It
was evident that our human faculty, com-
fortably as we get on with it in the main, is
only a coarse and bungling tool, never more
than half made, perhaps, or quite as likely
blunted and spoiled by millenniums of abuse.
I could really have envied the chickaree, if
such a feeling had not seemed unworthy of a
man's dignity. Besides, a palate so supersus-
ceptible might prove an awkward possession,
it occurred to me on second thought, for one
who must live as one of the " civilized," and
take his chances with cooks. All things con-
sidered, I was better off, perhaps, with the
old equipment and the old method, — a duller
taste and larger mouthfuls.

At the end of the forty-five minutes I came
to the burning, a tract of forest over which a
fire had run some two years before. Here,
in this dead place, there was more of life ;
more sunshine, and therefore more insects,
and therefore more birds. Even here, how-
ever, there was nothing to be called birdi-
ness : a few olive-sided flycatchers and wood

170 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

pewees, both with musical whistles, one like
a challenge, the other an elegy; a family
group of chestnut-sided warblers, parents
and young, conversing softly among them-
selves about the events of the day, mostly
gastronomic ; a robin and a white-throated
sparrow in song ; three or four chickadees,
lisping and deeing ; a siskin or two, a song
sparrow, and a red-eyed vireo. The whole
tract was purple with willow herb — which
foUows fire as surely as boys follow a fire en-
gme — and white with pearly immortelles.

Once out of this open space — this forest
cemetery, one might say, though the dead
were not buried, but stood upright hke
bleached skeletons, with arms outstretched
— I was again immersed in leafy silence,
which lasted till I approached the lake.
Here I heard before me the tweeting of sand-
pipers, and presently came in sight of two
solitaries (migrants already, though it was
only the 4th of August), each bobbing ner-
vously upon its boulder a little off shore.
The eye of the ornithologist took them in :
dark green legs ; dark, slender bills ; bob-
bing, not teetering — Totanus, not Actitis*

BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 171

Then tlie eyes of the man turned to rest upon
that enchanting prospect; Eagle Cliff in
shadow, Profile Mountain in full sun, and
the lake between them. The spirit of aU the
hours I had ever spent here was communing
with me. I blessed the place and bade
it good-by. '' I wiU come again if I can," I
said, " and many times ; but if not, good-by."
I believe I am like the birds ; no matter how
far south they may wander, when the winter
is gone they say one to another, " Let us go
back to the north country, to the place where
we were so happy a year ago."

The last day of my visit, the only warm
one, fell on Sunday ; and on Sunday, by all
our Franconia traditions, I must make the
round of Landaff Valley. I had been into
the valley once, to be sure, but that did not
matter ; it was not on Sunday, and besides,
I did not really go " round the square," as
we are accustomed to say, with a fine disre-
gard of mathematical precision.

After all, there is little to tell of, though
there was plenty to see and enjoy. The first
thing was to get out of the village ; away
from the churches and the academy, and be-

172 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

yond the last house (the last village house,
I mean), into the company of the river, the
long green meadow and the larch swamp, —
a goodly fellowship. A swamp sparrow
trilled me a welcome at the very entrance to
the valley, as he had done before, and musi-
cal goldluiches accompanied me for the whole
round, tiU I thought the day should be
named in their honor, Goldfinch Sunday.

Pretty Atlantis butterflies were always in
sight, as they had been even in the coolest
weather, with now and then an Atalanta and,
more rarely, a Cybele. I had looked for
Aphrodite, also, being desirous to see these
three fritillaries (Cybele, Aphrodite, and At-
lantis) together, till the entomologist told
me that we were out of its latitude. Com-
moner even than Atlantis, perhaps, was the
dusky wood-nymph, Alope (strange notions
the old Greeks must have had of the vola-
tihty of their goddesses and heroines, to
name so many of them after butterflies !),
she of the big yellow blotch on each fore
wing; a wavering, timid creature, always
seeking to hide herself, and never holding a
steady course for so much as an inch — as if

BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 173

she were afflicted with the shaking palsy.
" Don't look at me ! Pray don't look at me ! "
she is forever saying as she dodges behind a
leaf. Shyness is a grace — in the feminine ;
but Alope is too shy. If her complexion
were fairer, possibly she would be less re-
tiring.

From the first the warmth of the sun was
sufficient to render shady halts a luxury, and
on the crossroad — " Gray Birch Road," to
quote my own name for it — where a walker
was somewhat shut away from the wind, I
began to spell " warm " with fewer letters.
Here, too, the dust was excessively deep, so
that passing carriages — few, but too many
— put a foot-passenger under a cloud. Still
I was glad to be there, turning the old cor-
ners, seeing the old beauty, thinking the old
thoughts. How green Tucker Brook mea-
dow looked, and how grandly Lafayette
loomed into the sky just beyond !

Most pecuhar is the feeling I have for
that sharp crest ; I know not how to express
it ; a feeling of something like spiritual pos-
session. If I do not love it, at least I love
the sight of it. Nay, I will say what I

174 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

mean : I love tlie mountain itself. I take
pleasure in its stones, and favor the dust
thereof. The loftiest snow-covered peak in
the world would never carry my thoughts
higher, or detain them longer. It was good
to see it once more from this point of S23ecial
vantage. And when I reached the corner of
the Notch road and started homeward, how
refreshing was the breeze that met me !
Coolness after heat, ease after pain, these are
near the acme of physical comfort.

Best of all was a half-hour's rest under a
pine tree, facing a stretch of green meadow,
with low hills beyond it westward ; a perfect
picture, perfectly " composed." In the fore-
ground, just across the way, stood a thicket
of chokecherry shrubs shining with fruit,
and over them, on one side, trailed a clema-
tis vine full of creamy white blossoms.
Both cherry and clematis were common
everywhere, often in each other's company,
but I had seen none quite so gracefully
disposed. No gardener's art could have
managed the combination so well.

Here I sat and dreamed. I was near
home, with time to spare ; the wind was per-

BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 175

fection, and the day also ; I had walked far
enough to make a seat welcome, yet not so
far as to bring on sluggish fatigue ; and
everything in sight was pure beauty. Life
will be sweet as long as it has such half-
hours to offer us. Yet somehow, human
nature having a perverse trick of letting
good suggest its opposite, I found myself,
all at once,

" In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind."

I looked at the garden patch and the
mowed field, and thought what a strange
world it is — ill-made, half -made, or unmade

— in which man has to live, or, in our preg-
nant every-day phrase, to get his living ; a
world that goes whirling on its axis and re-
volving round its heat-and-light-giving body,

— like a top which a boy has set spinning,

— now roasted and parched, now drenched
and sodden, now frozen dead; a world
wherein, as our good American stoic com-
plained, a man must burn a candle half the
time in order to see to live ; a world to which
its inhabitants are so poorly adapted that
a day of comfortable temperature is matter

176 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

for surprise and thankfulness; a world
which cannot turn round but that men die
of heat and by freezing, of thirst and by
drowning; a world where all things, appe-
tite and passion, as well as heat and cold,
run continually to murderous extremes. A
strange world, surely, which men have
agreed to justify and condemn in the same
breath' as the work of supreme wisdom,
ruined by original sin. Children wiU have
an explanation. The philosopher says : " My
son, we must know how to be ignorant."

So my thoughts ran away with me till the
clematis vine and the cherry bushes brought
me back to myself. The present hour was
good ; the birds and the plants were happy ;
and so was I, though for the moment I had
almost forgotten it. The mountain had its
old inscrutable, beckoning, admonishing, be-
nignant look. The wise make no complaint.
If the world is not the best we could imagine,
it is the best we have ; and such as it is, it is
a pretty comfortable place in vacation time
and fair weather. Let me not be among
the fools who waste a bright to-day in fore-
casting dull to-morrows.

EED LEAF DAYS

" Woods over woods in gay theatric pride."

Goldsmith.

White Mountain woods are generally
at their brightest in the last few days of
September. This year I had but a week or
so to stay among them, and timed my visit
accordingly, arriving on the 22d. As I
drove over the hills from Littleton to Fran-
conia there were only scattered bits of high
color in sight — a single tree here and there,
which for some reason had hung out its au-
tumnal flag in advance of its fellows. It
seemed almost impossible that all the world
would be aglow within a week ; but I had
no real misgivings. Seed time and harvest
would not fail. The leaves would ripen in
their time. And so the event proved. Day
by day the change went visibly forward
(visibly yet invisibly, as the hands go round

178 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

the face of a clock), till by the 30th the
colors were as brilliant as one could wish,
though with less than the usual proportion
of yellow.

The white birches, which should have
supplied that hue, were practically leafless.
A smaU caterpillar (the larva of a tiny
moth, one of the llicroleindopterd) had
eaten the greenness from every white-birch
leaf in the whole country roundabout. One
side of Mount Cleveland, for example,
looked from a distance as if a fire had swept
over it. It was a real devastation ; yet, to
my surprise, as the maple groves turned red
the total effect was little, if at all, less beau-
tiful than in ordinary seasons. The leafless
purplish patches gave a certain indefinable
openness to the woods, and the eye felt the
duller spaces as almost a relief. I could
never have believed that destruction so
widespread and lamentable could work so
little damage to the appearance of the land-
scape. As the old Hebrew said, everjrthing
is beautiful in its time.

We were four at table, and in front of
the evening fireplace, but in footing it we

RED LEAF DAYS 179

were only two. Sometimes we walked side
by side ; sometimes we were rods apart.
When we felt like it we talked; then we
went on a piece in silence, as Christians
should. Let me never have a traveling
companion who cannot now and then keep
himself company. The ideal man for such
a role is one who is wiser than yourself, yet
not too wise, lest there be lack of recipro-
city, and you find yourself no better than a
boy rusticating with a tutor. He should be
even-tempered, also, well furnished with
philosophy, loving fair weather and good
living, but taking things as they come ; and
withal, while not unwilling to intimate his
own preference as to the day's route and
other matters, he should be always ready to
defer with all cheerfulness to his partner's
wish. " The ideal man," I say ; but I am
thinking of a real one.

We have become well known in the valley,
after many years ; so that, although we are
almost the only walkers there, our ambu-
latory eccentricity has mostly ceased to pro-
voke comment. At all events, the people
no longer look upon us as men broken out

180 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

of Bedlam. Time, we may say, has estab-
lislied our innocence. If a recent comer
expresses concern as we go past, some older
resident reassures him. "They are harm-
less," he says. " There used to be three of
them. They puU weeds, as you see ; the
older one has his hands full of them now.
Yes, they are branches of thorn bushes.
They always carry opera glasses, too. We
used to think they were looking for land to

buy. Old , up on the hill in Lisbon,

tried to sell them his farm at a fancy figure,
but they did n't bite. I reckon they know
a thing or two, for all their queer ways.
One of 'em knows how to write, anyhow;
he is always taking out pencil and paper.
There ! you see how he does. He sets down
a word or two, and away he goes again."

It is aU true. We looked at plants, and
sometimes gathered them. The botanist
had thorn bushes on his mind, the genus
Cratcegiis being a hard one, and, as I
judged, newly under revision. I professed
no knowledge upon so recondite a subject,
but was proud to serve the cause of science
by pointing out a bush here and there. One

RED LEAF DAYS 181

hot afternoon, too, after a pretty long fore-
noon jaunt, 1 nearly walked my legs off, as
the strong old saying is, following my leader
far up the Landaff Valley (" down Easton
way ") to visit a bush of which some one
had brought him word. It was an excellent
specimen, the best we had yet seen ; but it
was nothing new, and by no means so hand-
some or so interesting as one found after-
ward by accident on our way to Bethlehem.
That was indeed a beauty, and its abundant
fruit a miracle of color.

Once I detected an aster which the bota-
nist had passed by and yet, upon a second
look, thought worth taking home; it was
probably Lindleyaims^ he said, and the
event proved it; and at another time my
eye caught by the wayside a bunch of
chokecherry shrubs hung with yellow clus-
ters. We were in a carriage at the time,
four old Franconians, and not one of us had
ever seen such a thing here before. Three
of us had never seen such a thmg anywhere ;
for my own part, I was in a state of some-
thing like excitement; but the Cratcegus
collector, who knows American trees if any-

182 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

body does, said : " Yes, the yellow variety is
growing in the Arnold Arboretum, and is
mentioned in the latest edition of Gray's
Manual." Bushes have been found at Ded-
ham, Massachusetts, it appears. The maker
of the Manual seems not to have been aware
of their having been noticed anywhere else ;
but since my return home I have been in-
formed that they are not uncommon in the
neighborhood of Montreal, where yellow
chokecherries are " found with the ordinary
form in the markets " !

That last statement is bewilderinof. Is
there anything that somebody, somewhere,
does not find edible ? I have heard of eat-
ers of arsenic and of slate pencils ; but
chokecherries for sale in a market ! If the
reader's mouth does not pucker at the words
he must be wanting in imagination.

In Franconia even the birds seemed to
refuse such a tongue-tying diet. The shrubs
loaded with fruit, some of it red (wine
color), some of it black, — the latter color
predominating, I think, — stood along the
roadside mile upon mile. Sooner or later,
I dare say, the birds must have recourse to

RED LEAF DAYS 183

them ; how else do the bushes get planted so
universally? But at the time of our visit
there was a sufficiency of better fare. Rum
cherries were still plentiful, and birds, like
boys in an apple orchard, and like sensible
people anywhere, take the best first.

It surprised me, while I was here some
years ago, to discover how fond woodpeckers
of all kinds are of rum cherries. Even the
pileated could not keep away from the trees,
but came close about the house to frequent
them. One unfortunate fellow, I regret to
say, came once too often. The sapsuckers,
it was noticed, went about the business after
a method of their own. Each cherry was
carried to the trunk of a tree or to a tele-
graph pole, where it was wedged into a
crevice, and eaten with all the regular wood-
peckerish attitudes and motions. Doubtless
it tasted better so. And the bird might
well enough have said that he was behaving
no differently from human beings, who for
the most part do not swallow fruit under
the branches, but take it indoors and feast
upon it at leisure, and with something hke
ceremony. The trunk of a tree is a wood-
pecker's table.

184 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

And for aU that, Franconia woodpeckers
are not so conservative as not to be able
to take up with substantial improvements.
They know a good thing when they see it.
These same sapsuckers, or one of them, was
not slow to discover that one of our crew,
an entomological collector, had set up here
and there pieces of board besmeared with a
mixture of rum and sugar. And having
made the discovery, he was not backward
about improving it. He went the round of
the boards with as much regularity as the
moth collector himseK, and with even greater
frequency. And no wonder. Here was a
feast indeed ; victuals and drink together ;
insects preserved in rum. Happy bird ! As
the most famous of sentimental travelers
said on a very different occasion, " How I
envied him his feelings ! " For there seems
to be no doubt that sapsuckers love a liquid
sweetness, and take means of their own to
secure it.

On our present trip my walliing mate and
I stopped to examine a hemlock trunk, the
bark of which a woodpecker of some kind,
almost certainly a sapsucker, had riddled

RED LEAF DAYS 185

with holes till it looked hke a nutmeg
grater ; and the most noticeable thing about
it was that the punctures — past counting
— were all on the south side of the tree,
where the sap may be presumed to run earh-
est and most freely. Why this particular
tree was chosen and the others left is a dif-
ferent question, to which I attempt no an-
swer, though I have little doubt that the
maker of the holes could have given one.
To vary a half -true Bible text, "All the
labor of a woodpecker is for his mouth ; "
and labor so prolonged as that which had
been expended upon this hemlock was very
unlikely to have been laid out without a
reason. Every judge of rum cherries knows
that some trees bear incomparably better
fruit than others growing close beside them ;
and why should a woodpecker, a specialist
of specialists, be less intelligent touching
hemlock trees and the varying quality of
their juices ? A creature who is beholden to
nobody from the time he is three weeks old
is not to be looked down upon by beings
who live, half of them, in danger of starva-
tion or the poorhouse.

186 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

Tlie end of summer is tlie top of the
year with the birds. Their numbers are
then at the full. After that, for six months
and more, the tide ebbs. Winter and the
long migi'atory journeys waste them like the
plagues of Egypt. Not more than half of
aU that start southward ever live to come
back again.

Of this every bird-lover takes sorrowful
account. It is part of his autumnal feeling.
If he sees a flock of bobolinks or of red-
winged blackbirds, he thinks of the South-
ern rice fields, where myriads of both species
— " rice-birds," one as much as the other —
will be shot without mercy. A sky fidl of
swallows calls up a picture of thousands
lying dead at once, in Florida or elsewhere,
after a winter storm. A September hum-
ming-bird leaves him wondering over its
approaching flight to Central America or to
Cuba. Will the tiny thing ever accomphsh
that amazing passage and find its way home
again to New England? Perhaps it will;
but more likely not.

For the present, nevertheless, the birds
are all in high spirits, warbling, twittering,

RED LEAF DAYS 187

feeding, chasing each other playfully about,
as if life were nothing but holiday. Little
they know of the future. And almost as
little know we. Blessed ignorance ! It
gives us all, birds and men alike, many a
good hour. If my playmate of long ago had
foreseen that he was to die at twenty, he
would never have been the happy boy that I
remember. Those few bright years he had,
though he had no more. So much was saved
from the wreck.

Thoughts of this kind come to me as I re-
call an exhilarating half hour of our recent
stay in Franconia. It was on the first morn-
ing, immediately after breakfast. We were
barely out of the hotel yard before we turned
into a bit of larch and alder swamp by the
shore of Gale Kiver. We could do nothing
else. The air was full of chirps and twit-
ters, while the swaying, feathery tops of the
larches were alive with flocks of whispering
waxwings, the greater part of them birds
of the present year, still wearing the stripes
which in the case of so many species are
marks of juvenility. If individual animals
still pass through a development answering

188 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

to that which the race as a whole has under-
gone — if young animals, in other words, re-
semble their remote ancestors — then the
evolution of birds' plumage must have gone
pretty steadily in the direction of plainness.
Robins, we must believe, once had spotted
breasts, as most of their more immediate rel-
atives have to this day, and chipping spar-
rows and white-throats were streaked like
our present song sparrows and baywings.
If the world lasts long enough (who knows ?)
all birds may become monochromatic. Wing-
bars and all such convenient marks of dis-
tinction will have vanished. Then, surely,
amateurish ornithologists will have their
hands full to name all the birds without a
gun. Then if, by any miraculous chance, a
copy of some nineteenth century manual of
ornithology shall be discovered, and some
great linguist shall succeed in translating it,
what a book of riddles it wdll prove ! Sa-
vants will form theories without number con-
cerning it, settling down, perhaps, after a
thousand years of controversy, upon the be-
lief that the author of the ancient work was
a man afflicted with color blindness. If not,

RED LEAF DAYS 189

how came lie to describe the scarlet tanager
as having black wings and tail, and the
brown thrasher a streaked breast ?

These are afterthoughts. At the moment
we were busy, eyes and ears, taking a census
of the swamp. Besides the waxwings, which
were much the most numerous, as well as the
most in sight — " tree-toppers," one of my
word-making friends calls them — there were
robins, song sparrows, white-tlrroats, field
sparrows, goldfinches, myrtle warblers, a
Maryland yellow-throat, a black-throated
green, a Nashville warbler, a Philadelphia
vireo, two or three solitary vireos, one or
more catbirds, as many olive-backed thrushes,
a white-breasted nuthatch, and a sapsucker.
Others, in all likelihood, escaped us.

In and out among the bushes we made
our way, one calling to the other softly at
each new development.

" What was that ? " said I. " Was n't
that a bobolink ? "

" It sounded like it," answered the other
listener.

" But it can't be. Hark ! "

The quick, musical drop of sound — a

190 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

*' stillicidious " note, my friend called it —
was heard again. No ; it was not from the
sky, as we had thought at first, but from a
thicket of alders just behind us. Then we
recognized it, and laughed at ourselves. It
was the staccato whistle of an olive-backed
thrush, a sweet familiarity, over which I
should have supposed it impossible for either
of us to be puzzled.

The star of the flock, as some readers will
not need to be told, having marked the un-
expected name in the foregoing list, was the
Philadelphia vireo. What a bright minute
it is in a man's vacation when such a stranger
suddenly hops upon a branch before his eyes !
He feels almost like quoting Keats. " Then
felt I," he might say, not with full serious-
ness, perhaps, —

" Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken."

Yet how unconcerned the bird seems ! To
him it is all one. He knows nothing of
his spectator's emotions. Rarity ? What is
that ? He has been among birds of his own
kind ever since he came out of the egg.
Sedately he moves from twig to twig, think-

RED LEAF DAYS 191

ing only of another insect. This minute is
to him no better than any other. And the
man's nerves are tingling with excitement.

"You will hardly believe me," said my
companion, who had hastened forward to
look at the stranger, " but this is the second
one I have ever seen."

But why should I not believe him ? It
was only my third one. Philadelphia vireos
do not feed in every bush. Be it added,
however, that I saw another before the week
was out.

There were many more birds here now
than I had found six or seven weeks before ;
but there was much less music. In early
August hermit thrushes sang in sundry
places and at all hours ; now a faint clinch
was the most that we heard from them, and
that but once. And stiU our September va-
cation was far from being a silent one.
Song sparrows, vesper sparrows, white-
throats, goldfinches, robins, solitary vireos,
chickadees (whose whistle is among the
sweetest of wild music, I being judge),
phcebes, and a catbird, aU these sang more
or less frequently, and more or less well,

192 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

though all except the goldfinches and the
chickadees were noticeably out of voice.
Once a grouse drummed, and once a flicker
called hi, hi, just as in springtime ; and
every warm day set the hylas peeping.
Once, too, a ruby-crowned kinglet sang for
us with all freedom, and once a gold-crest.
The latter's song is a very indifferent per-
formance, hardly to be called musical in any
proper sense of the word ; nothing but his
ordinary zeer-zee-zee, with a hurried, jumbled,
ineffective coda ; yet it suggests, and indeed
is much like, a certain few notes of the ruby-
crown's universally admired tune. The two
songs are evidently of a common origin,
though the ruby-crown's is so immeasurably
superior that one of my friends seemed al-
most offended with me, not long ago, when
I asked him to notice the resemblance be-
tween the two. None the less, the resem-
blance is real. The homeliest man may
bear a family likeness to his handsome
brother, though it may show itself only at
times, and chance acquaintances may easily
be unaware of its existence.

The breeziest voice of the week was a

RED LEAF DAYS 193

plleated woodpecker's — a flicker's resonant
/ii, hi^ in a fuller and clearer tone ; and one
of the most welcome voices was that of an
ohve-backed thrush. We were strolling past
a roadside tangle of shrubbery when some
unseen bird close by us began to warble con-
fusedly (I was going to say autumnally, this
kind of formless improvisation being so char-
acteristic of the autumnal season), in a
barely audible voice. My first thought was
of a song sparrow ; but that could hardly be,
and I looked at my companion to see what
he would suggest. He was in doubt also.
Then, all at once, in the midst of the vocal
jumble, our ears caught a familiar strain.
" Yes, yes," said I, " a Swainson thrush,"
and I fell to whistling the time softly for the
benefit of the performer, whom I fancied,
rightly or wrongly, to be a youngster at his
practice. Young or old, the echo seemed
not to put him out, and we stood still again
to enjoy the lesson ; disconnected, unrelated
notes, and then, of a sudden, the regular
Swainson measure. I had not heard it be-
fore since the May migration.

Every bird season has pecuharities of its

194 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

own, in Franconia as elsewhere. This fall,
for example, there were no crossbills, even
at Lonesome Lake, where we have commonly-
found both species. White-crowned spar-
rows were rare ; perhaps we were a little too
early for the main flight. We saw one bird
on September 23, and two on the 26th.
Another noticeable thing was a surprising
scarcity of red-beUied nuthatches. We spoke
often of the great contrast in this respect
between the present season and that of three
years ago. Then all the woods, both here
and at Moosilauke, fairly swarmed with these
birds, till it seemed as if aU the Canadian
nuthatches of North America were holding
a White Mountain congress. The air was
full of their nasal calls. Now we could travel
all day without hearing so much as a sylla-
ble. The tide, for some reason, had set in
another direction, and Franconia was so much
the poorer.

AMEKICAN SKYLAKKS

" Right hard it was for wight which did it heare,
To read what manner musicke that mote bee."

Spenser.

On the second day after our arrival in
Franconia ^ we were following a dry, sandy
stretch of valley road — on one of our far
vorite rounds — when a bird flew across it,
just before us, and dropped into the barren,
closely cropped cattle pasture on our left.
Something indefinable in its manner or ap-
pearance excited my suspicions, and I stole
up to the fence and looked over. The bird
was a horned lark, the first one that I had
ever set eyes on in the nesting season. He
seemed to be very hungry, snapping up in-
sects with the greatest avidity, and was not
in the least disturbed by our somewhat eager
attentions. It was plain at the first glance

1 This and the two succeeding chapters are records of
a vacation visit in May, 1901.

196 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

that he was of the Western variety, — a
prairie horned lark, in other words, — for
even in the best of lights the throat and sides
of the head were white, or whitish, with no
perceptible tinge of yellow.

The prairie lark is one of the birds that
appear to be shifting or extending their
breeding range. It was first described as a
sub-species in 1884, and has since been
found to be a summer resident of northern
Vermont and New Hampshire, and, in
smaller numbers, of western Massachusetts.
It is not impossible, expansion being the or-
der of the day, that some of us may live long
enough to see it take up its abode within
sight of the gilded State House dome.

My own previous acquaintance with it had
been confined to the sight of a few migrants
along the seashore in the autumn, although
my companion on the present trip had seen
it once about a certain upland farm here in
Franconia. That was ten years ago, and we
have again: and again sought it there since,
without avail.

Our bird of to-day interested me by dis-
playing his " horns," — curious adornments

AMERICAN SKYLARKS 197

which I had never been able to make out be-
fore, except in pictures. They were not car-
ried erect, — like an owl's " ears," let us
say, — but projected backwards, and with
the head at a certain angle showed with per-
fect distinctness. The bird would do no-
thing but eat, and as our own dinner awaited
us we continued our tramp. We would try
to see more of him and his mate at another
time, we promised ourselves.

First, however, we paid a visit (that very
afternoon) to the upland farm just now
spoken of. " Mears's," we always call it.
Perhaps the larks would be there also. But
we found no sign of them, and the bachelor
occupant of the house, who left his plough
in the beanfield to offer greeting to a pair of
strangers, assured us that nothing answering
to our description had ever been seen there
within his time; an assertion that might
mean little or much, of course, though he
seemed to be a man who had his eyes open.

This happened on May 17. Six days af-
terward, in company with an entomological
collector, we were again in the dusty valley.
I went into the larch swamp in search of a

198 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

Cape May warbler — found here two years
before — one of the very best of our Fran-
conia birds ; and the entomologist stayed
near by with her net and bottles, w^hile the
second man kept on a mile farther up the
vaUey to look for thorn-bush specimens. So
we drove the sciences abreast, as it were.
My own hunt was immediately rewarded,
and when the botanist returned I thousfht to
stir his envy by announcing my good for-
tune ; but he answered with a smile that he
too had seen something ; he had seen the
prairie lark soaring and singing. " Well
done I " said I ; " now you may look for the
Cape May, and incidentally feed the mos-
quitoes, and the lady and I will get into the
carriage and take our turn with Otocorisy
So said, so done. We drove to the spot, the
driver stopped the horses opposite a strip of
ploughed land, and behold, there was the
bird at that very moment high in the air,
hovering and singing. It was not much of
a song, I thought, though the entomologist,
hearing partly with the eye, no doubt, pro-
nounced it beautiful. It was most interest-
ing, whatever might be said of its musical

AMERICAN SKYLARKS 199

quality, and as we drove homeward my com-
panion and I agreed that we would take up
our quarters for a day or two at the nearest
house, and study it more at our leisure. Pos-
sibly we should happen upon a nest.

In the forenoon of May 25, therefore, we
found ourselves comfortably settled in the
very midst of a lark colony. The birds, of
which there were at least five (besides two
pairs found haK a mile farther up the val-
ley), were to be seen or heard at almost any
minute ; now in the road before the house,
now in the ploughed land close by it, now
in one of the cattle pastures, and now on
the roofs of the buildings. One fellow spent
a great part of his time upon the ridgepole
of the barn (a pretty high structure), com-
monly standing not on the very angle or
ridge, but an inch or two below it, so that
very often only his head and shoulders would
be visible. Once I saw one dusting liimseK
in the rut of the road. He went about the
work with great thoroughness and unmis-
takable enjoyment, cocking his head and
rubbing first one cheek and then the other
into the sand. " Cleanliness is next to god-
liness," I thought I heard him saying.

200 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

So far as we could judge from our two
days' observation, the birds were most mu-
sical in the latter half of the afternoon, say
from four o'clock to six. Contrary to what
we should have expected, we saw absolutely
no ascensions in the early morning or after
sunset, although we did see more than one
at high noon. It is most likely, I think,
that the birds sing at all hours, as the spirit
moves them, just as the nightingale does,
and the hermit thrush and the vesper spar-
row.

As for the quality and manner of the song,
with all my listening and studying I could
never hit upon a word with which to char-
acterize it. The tone is dry, guttural, inex-
pressive ; not exactly to be called harsh, per-
haps, but certainly not in any true sense of
the word musical. When we first heard it,
in the distance (let the qualification be
noted), the same thought came to both of
us, — a kingbird's formless, hurrying twit-
ters. There is no rhythm, no melody, no-
thing to be called phrasing or modulation, —
a mere jumble of " splutterings and chipper-
ings." Every note is by itself, having to my

AMERICAN SKYLARKS 201

ear no relation to anything before or after.
The most striking and distinguishing char-
acteristic of it all is the manner in which it
commonly hurries to a conclusion — as if
the clock were running down. " The hand
has shpped from the lever," I more than once
found myself saying. I was thinking of a
motorman who tightens his brake, and tight-
ens it again, and then all at once lets go his
grip. At this point, this sudden accelera-
tion and conclusion, my companion and I
always laughed. The humor of it was irre-
sistible. It stood in such ludicrous contrast
with all that had gone before, — so halting
and labored ; like a man who stammers and
stutters, and then, finding his tongue unex-
pectedly loosened, makes all speed to finish.
Sometimes — most frequently, perhaps — the
strain was very brief ; but at other times a
bird would sit on a stone, or a fence-post, or
a ridgepole, and chatter almost continuously
by the quarter-hour. Even then, however,
this comical hurried phrase would come in
at more or less regular intervals. I ima-
gined that the larks looked upon it as the
highest reach of their art and delivered it

202 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

with special satisfaction. If they did, I
could not blame them ; to us it was by aU
odds the most interesting part of their very
limited repertory.

The most interesting part, I mean, of that
which appealed to the ear ; for, as will read-
ily be imagined, the ear's part was reaUy
much the smaller half of the performance.
The wonder of it aU was not the music by
itself (that was hardly better than an odd-
ity, a thing of which one might soon have
enough), but the music combined with the
manner of its delivery, while the singer was
climbing heavenward. For the bird is a true
skylark. Like his more famous cousin, he
does not disdain the humblest perch — a
mere clod of earth answers his purpose ; but
his glory is to sing at heaven's gate.

His method at such times was a surprise
to me. He starts from the ground silently,
with no appearance of lyrical excitement, and
his flight at first is low, precisely as if he were
going only to the next field. Soon, however,
he begins to mount, beating the air with
quick strokes and then shutting his wings
against his sides and forcing himself upward.

AMERICAN SKYLARKS 203

"Diving upward," was the word 1 found
myself using. Up he goes, — up, up, up,
" higher still, and higher," — till after a
while he breaks into voice. While singing
he holds his wings motionless, stiffly out-
stretched, and his tail widely spread, as if he
were doing his utmost to transform himself
into a parachute — as no doubt he is. Then,
the brief, hurried strain delivered, he beats
the air again and makes another shoot hea-
venward. The whole display consists of an
alternation of rests accompanied by song (you
can always see the music, though it is often
inaudible), and renewed upward pushes.

In the course of his flight the bird covers
a considerable field, since as a matter of
course he cannot ascend vertically. He rises,
perhaps, directly at your feet, but before he
comes down, which may be in one minute or
in ten, he will have gone completely round
you in a broad circle ; so that, to follow him
continuously (sometimes no easy matter, his
altitude being so great and the light so daz-
zling), you wiU be compelled almost to put
your neck out of joint. In our own case,
we generally did not see him start, but were

204 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

made aware of what was going on by hear-
ing the notes overhead.

One grand flight I did see from begin-
ning to end, and it was wonderful, amazing,
astounding. So I thought, at all events.
There was no telUng, of course, what altitude
the bird reached, but it might have been
miles, so far as the effect upon the beholder's
emotions was concerned. It seemed as if
the fellow never would be done. " Higher
still, and higher." Again and again this
line of Shelley came to my lips, as, after
every bar of music, the bird pushed nearer
and nearer to the sky. At last he came
down ; and this, my friend and I always
agreed, was the most exciting moment of all.
He closed his wings and literally shot to the
ground head first, like an arrow. " Wonder-
ful ! " said I, " wonderful ! " And the other
man said : " If I could do that I would
never do anything else."

Here my story might properly enough end.
The nest of which we had talked was not
discovered. My own beating over of the
fields came to nothing, and my companion,
as if unwilling to deprive me of a possible

AMERICAN SKYLARKS 205

honor, contented himself with telling me
that I was looking in the wrong place.
Perhaps I was. It is easy to criticise. For
a minute, indeed, one of the farm-hands ex-
cited our hopes. He had found a nest
which might be the lark's, he tliought ; it
was on the ground, at any rate ; but his de-
scription of the eggs put an end to any such
possibility, and when he led us to the nest
it turned out to be occupied by a hermit
thrush. Near it he showed us a grouse sit-
ting upon her eggs under a roadside fence.
It was while repairing the fence that he had
made his discoveries. He had an eye for
birds. '' Those little humming-birds," he
remarked, " they 're quite an animal." And
he was an observer of hiunan nature as well.
" That fellow," he said, speaking of a young
man who was perhaps rather good-natured
than enterprising, " that fellow don't do
enouo:h to break the Sabbath."

And this suggests a bit of confession.
We were sitting upon the piazza, on Sunday
afternoon, when a lark sang pretty far off.
" Well," said the botanist, " he sings as well
as a savanna sparrow, anyhow." " A sa-

206 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

vanna sparrow ! " said I ; and at the word
we looked at each other. The same thought
had come to both of us. Several days be-
fore, in another part of the township, we had
heard in the distance — in a field inhabited
by savanna and vesper sparrows — an ut-
terly strange set of bird-notes. " What is
that ? " we both asked. The strain was re-
peated. " Oh, well," said I, " that must be
the work of a crazy savanna. Birds are
given to such freaks, you know." The grass
was wet, we had a long forenoon's jaunt be-
fore us, and although my companion, as he
said, " took no stock " in my explanation,
we passed on. Now it flashed upon us both
that what we had heard was the song of a
prairie lark. " I believe it was," said the
botanist. '' I know it was," said I ; " I
would wager anjiihing upon it." And it
was ; for after returning to the hotel our
first concern was to go to the place — only
half a mile away — and find the bird. And
not only so, but twenty-four hours later we
saw one soaring in his most ecstatic manner
over another field, a mile or so beyond, be-
side the same road.

AMERICAN SKYLARKS 207

The present was a good season for horned
larks in Franconia, we told ourselves. Two
years ago, at this same time of the year, I
had gone more than once past all these
places. If the birds were here then I over-
looked them. The thing is not impossible,
of course ; there is no limit to human dull-
ness ; but I prefer to think otherwise. A
man, even an amateur ornithologist, should
believe himself innocent until he is proved
guilty.

A QUIET MOENING

" Such was the bright world on the first seventh day."

Henry Vaughan.

It is Sunday, May 26, the brightest, pleas-
antest, most comfortable of forenoons. I am
seated in the sun at the base of an ancient
stone wall, near the road that runs along the
hillside above the Landaff Valley. Behind
me is a little farmhouse, long since gone to
ruin. At my feet, rather steeply inclined,
is an old cattle pasture thickly strewn with
massive boulders. The prospect is one of
those that I love best. In the foreground,
directly below, is the valley, freshly green,
and, as it looks from this height, as level as
a floor. Alder rows mark the winding
course of the river, and on the farther side,
close against the forest, runs a road, though
the eye, of itself, would hardly know it.

Across the valley are the glorious newly

A QUIET MORNING 209

clad woods, more beautiful than words can
begin to tell ; and beyond them rise the
mountains : Moosilauke, far enough away to
be blue ; the shapely Kinsman range, at
whose long green slopes no man need tire of
looking; rocky Lafayette, directly in front
of me ; Haystack, with its leaning knob ;
the sombre Twins and the more Alpine-
looking Washington, Jefferson, and Adams.
Farther to the north are the low hills of
Cleveland and Agassiz. A magnificent
horizon. Lafayette, Washington, Jefferson,
and Adams are still flecked with snow.
And over the mountains is the sky, with
high white clouds, cirrus and cumulus. 1
look first at the mountains, then at the val-
ley, which is filled with sunlight as a cup
is fiUed with wine. The level foreground is
the essential thing. Without it the gi-and-
est of mountain prospects is never quite
complete.

Swallows circle about me continually, a
phoebe caUs at short intervals, and less often
I hear the sweet voice of a bluebird. Both
phoebe and bluebird are most delightfully
plentiful in all this fair mountain country.

210 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

They are of my own mind : they like old
farms within sight of hiUs. Crows caw, a
jay screams, and now and then the hurrying
drumbeats of a grouse come to my ears.
Somewhere in the big sugar grove behind
me a great-crested flycatcher has been shout-
ing almost ever since I sat down. The
" great screaming flycatcher," he should be
called. His voice is more to the point than
his crest. He loves the sound of it.

How radiantly beautiful the red maple
groves are just now ! I can see two, one
near, the other far off, both in varying
shades of red, yellow, and green. The earth
wears them as ornaments, and is as proud of
them, I dare believe, as of the Parthenon.
They are bright, but not too bright. They
speak of youth — and the eye hears them.
A red-eye preaches as if he knew the day
of the week. What a gift of reiteration !
" Buy the truth," he says. " Going, going ! "
But it is never gone. Down the valley road
goes an open carriage. In it are a man and
a woman, the woman with a parasol over her
head. A song sparrow sings his Httle tune,
and the bluebird gives himself up to war-

A QUIET MORNING 211

bling. Few voices can surpass liis for sweet-
ness and expressiveness. The grouse drums
again (let every bird be bappy in bis own
way), a myrtle warbler trills (a talker to
himself), and a passing goldfinch drops a
melodious measure. All the chokecherry
bushes are now in white. The day may be
Whitsunday for aU that my unchurclily
mind can say. Red cherries, which whit-
ened the world a few days ago, are fast fol-
lowing the shadbushes, which have been
out of flower for a week. Apple trees, too,
have passed the height of their splendor.
The vernal procession moves like a man in
haste.

The sun grows warm. I will betake my-
self to the maple grove and sit in the
shadow ; but first I notice in the grass by
the waU an abundance of tiny veronica
flowers (speedwell) — white, streaked with
purple, as I perceive when I pluck one.
Not a line but runs true. Everything is
beautiful in its time ; the little speedwell no
less than the valley and the mountain. A
red squirrel, far out on a tilting elm spray,
is eating his fill of the green fruit. Mother

212 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

Earth takes care of her children. She
raises ehn seeds as man raises wheat. And
foolish man wonders sometimes at what he
thinks her waste of vital energy.

I have found a seat upon a prostrate
maple trunk, one of the fathers of the grove,
so huge of girth that it was almost a gym-
nastic feat to climb into my position. Here
I can see the valley and the mountains only
in parts, between the leafy intervening
branches. Which way of seeing is the bet-
ter I will not seek to determine. Both are
good — both are better than either. A fly-
catcher near me is saying chehec with such
emphasis that though I cannot see him I
can imagine that he is almost snapping his
head off at every utterance. Much farther
away is a relative of his ; we call him
the olive-side. (I wonder what name the
birds have for us.) Que-quee-o, he whistles
in the clearest of tones. He is one of the
good ones. And how well his voice " car-
ries " — as if one grove were speaking to
another !

About my feet are creamy white tiarella
spires and pretty blue violets. The air is

A QUIET MORNING 213

full of the hum of insects, but they are all
innocent. I sit under my own beech and
maple tree, with none to molest or make me
afraid. How many times I have heard
something like that on a Sunday forenoon !
Year in and out, our dear old preacher could
never get through his " long prayer " with-
out it. He would not be sorry to know that
I think of him now in this natural temple.

An unseen Nashville warbler suddenly
announces himself. " If you must scribble,"
he says, " my name is as good as anybody's."
The little flycatcher has not yet dislocated
his neck. Chehec^ chehec, he vociferates.
The swallows no longer come about me.
They care not for groves. They are for the
open sky, the grass fields, and the sun ; but
I hear them twittering overhead. If I could
be a bird, I think I would be a swallow.
Hark! Yes, there is the syllabled whistle
of a white-breasted nuthatch. He must go
into my vacation bird-list — No. 79, Sitta
carolinensis. If he would have shown him-
self sooner he should have had a higher
place. And now, to my surprise, 1 hear the
rollicking voice of a bobohnk. The meadow

214 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

below contains many of liis happy kind, and
one of tliem has come up within hearing to
brighten my page.

All the time I have sat here I have been
hoping to hear the hearty, " full-throated "
note of a yellow-throated vireo. This is the
only place in Franconia where I have ever
heard it — two years ago this month. But
the bird seems not to be here now, and I
must not stay longer. My companion, who
has gone higher up the hill to visit a thorn
bush, wiU be expecting me on the bridge
by the old grist-mill.

Before I can get away, however, I add
another name to my bird-list, — a welcome
name, the wood pewee's. He has just ar-
rived from the South, I suppose. What a
sweetly modulated, plaintive-sounding whis-
tle ! How different from the bobolink's
" jest and youthful joUity ! " And now the
crested breaks out again all at once, after
a long silence. There is a still stronger
contrast. Four flycatchers are in voice to-
gether : the crested, the olive-sided, the least,
and the wood pewee. I have heard them all
within the space of a minute. As soon as I

A QUIET MORNING 215

am in the valley I shall hear the alder fly-
catcher, and when, braving the mosquitoes,
I venture into the tamarack swamp a little
way to look at the Cape May warbler (I
know the very spot) I shall doubtless hear
the yellow-belly. These, with the kingbird
and the phcebe, which are about all the
farms, make the full New Hampshire con-
tingent. No doubt there are flies enough
for aU of them.

As I start to leave the grove, stepping
over beds of round-leaved violets and spring
beauties, both out of flower already, I start
at the sound of an unmusical note, which I
do not immediately recognize, but which in
another instant I settle upon as a sapsucker's.
This is a bird at whose absence my compan-
ion and I have frequently expressed sur-
prise, remembering how common we have
found him in previous visits. I go in pur-
suit at once, and presently come upon him.
He is in extremely bright plmnage, his
crown and his throat blood red. He goes
down straightway as No. 81. I am having
a prosperous day. Three new names within
half an hour ! Idling in a sugar orchard

216 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

is good for a man's bird-list as well as for
his sold.

An oven-bird is declaiming, a blue yel-
low-back is practicing scales, and a field
sparrow is chanting. And even as I pencil
their names a nuthatch (the very one I have
been hearing) flies to a maple trunk and
alights for a moment at the door of his nest.
Without question he passed a morsel to
his brooding mate, though I was not quick
enough to see him. Yes, within a minute
or two he is there again ; but the sitting
bird does not appear at the entrance ; her
mate thrusts his bill into the door instead.
The happy pair! There is much family
life of the best sort in a wood hke this.
No doubt there are husbands and wives,
so called, in Franconia as well as in other
places, who might profitably heed the old
injunction, " Behold the fowls of the air."

m THE LANDAFF VALLEY

The greatest ornithological novelty of our
present visit to Franconia was the prairie
horned larks, whose lyrical raptures, falling
"from heaven or near it," I have already
done my best to describe. The rarest bird
(for there is a difference between novelty
and rarity) was a Cape May warbler ; the
most surprisingly spectacular was a duck.
Let me speak first of the warbler.

Two years ago I found a Cape May set-
tled in a certain spot in an extensive tract of
valley woods. The manner of the discovery
— which was purely accidental, the bird's
voice being so faint as to be inaudible be-
yond the distance of a few rods — and the
pains I took to keep him under surveillance
for the remainder of my stay, so as to make
practically sure of his intention to pass the
summer here, have been fully recounted in a
previous chapter. The experience was one

218 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

of those which fill an enthusiast with such
delight as he can never hope to communi-
cate, or even to make seem reasonable, ex-
cept to men of his own kind.

We had never met with Dendroica tigrina
before anywhere about the mountains, and
I had no serious expectation of ever finding
it here a second time. Still " hope springs
immortal ; " " the thing that hath been, it is
that which shall be ; " and one of my earli-
est concerns, on arriving in Franconia again
at the right season of the year, was to re-
visit the well-remembered spot and listen for
the equally well-remembered sibilant notes.

Our first call was on May 17. Perhaps
we were ahead of time ; at any rate, we found
nothing. On the 23d we passed the place
again, and heard, somewhat too far away,
what I believed with something like certainty
to be the zee-zee-zee-zee of the bird we were
seeking; but the dense underbrush was
drenched with rain, we had other business in
hand, and we left the question unsettled. If
the voice really was the Cape May's we
should doubtless have another chance with
him. So I told my companion ; and the re-

IN THE LANDAFF VALLEY 219

suit justified the prophecy, which was based
upou the bird's behavior of two years before,
when all his activities seemed to be very nar-
rowly confined — say within a radius of four
or five rods.

We had hardly reached the place, two days
afterward, before we heard him singing close
by us, — in the very clump of firs where he
had so many times shown himself, — and after
a minute or two of patience we had him un-
der our opera-glasses. The sight gave me,
I am not ashamed to confess, a thriU of ex-
quisite pleasure. It was something to think
of — the return of so rare a bird to so pre-
cise a spot. With all the White Mountain
region, not to say all of northern New Eng-
land and of British America, before him, he
had come back from the tropics (for who
could doubt that he was indeed the bird of
two years ago, or one of that bird's pro-
geny ?) to spend another summer in this par-
ticular bunch of Franconia evergreens. He
had kept them in mind, wherever he had
wandered, and, behold, here he was again,
singing in their branches, as if he had known
that I should be coming hither to find him.

220 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

The next day our course took us again
past his quarters, and he was still there, and
still singing. I knew he would be. He
could be depended on. He was doing ex-
actly as he had done two years before. You
had only to stand stiU in a certain place (I
could almost find it in the dark, I think),
and you would hear his voice. He was as
sure to be there as the trees.

That afternoon some ladies wished to see
him, and my companion volunteered his es-
cort. Their experience was like our own;
or rather it was better than ours. The
warbler was not only at home, but behaved
like the most courteous of hosts ; coming
into a peculiarly favorable light, upon an
uncommonly low perch, and showing himself
off to his visitors' perfect satisfaction. It
was bravely done. He knew what was due
to " the sex."

On the morning of the 27th I took my
farewell of him. He had been there for at
least five days, and would doubtless stay for
the season. May joy stay with him. I think
I have not betrayed his whereabouts too
nearly. If I have, and harm comes of it,

IN THE LANDAFF VALLEY 221

may my curse follow the man that shoots
him.

The " si^ectacular duck," of which I have
spoken, was one of several (three or more)
that seemed to be settled in the valley of the
Landaff River. Our first sight of them was
on the 20th; two birds, flying low and call-
ing, but in so bewildering a light, and so
quick in passing, that we ventured no guess
as to their identity. Three days later, on
the morning of the 23 d, we had hardly
turned into the valley before we heard the
same low, short-breathed, grimting, grating,
croaking sounds, and, glancing upward, saw
three ducks steaming up the course of the
river. This time, as before, the sun was
against us, but my companion, luckier than
I with his glass, saw distinctly that they
carried a white speculum or wing-spot.

We were still discussing possibilities, sup-
posing that the birds themselves were clean
gone, when suddenly (we could never tell
how it happened) we saw one of them — still
on the wing — not far before us ; and even
as we were looking at it, wondering where it
had come from, it flew toward the old grist-

222 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

mill by tlie bridge and came to rest on tbe
top of the chimney ! Here was queerness.
We leveled our glasses upon the creature
and saw that it was plainly a merganser
(shelldrake), with its crest feathers project-
ing backward from the crown, and its wing
well marked with white. Its head, unless
the light deceived me, was brown. The
main thing, however, for the time being, was
none of these details, but the spectacle of the
bird itself, in so strange and sightly a posi-
tion. " It looks like the storks of Europe,"
said my companion. Certainly it looked
like something other than an every-day
American duck, with its outstretched neck
and its long, slender, rakish biU showing in
silhouette against the sky.

Meanwhile, it had put its head partly out
of sight in the top of the chimney, as if it
had a nest there and were feeding its young.
Then of a sudden it took wing, but in a
minute or two was back again, to our in-
creasing wonderment ; and again it dropped
the end of its bill out of sight below the level
of the topmost bricks. Now, however, I
could see the mandibles in motion, as if it

IN THE LANDAFF VALLEY 223

were eating. Probably it had brought a fish
up from the river. The chimney was simply
its table. Again, for no reason that was
apparent to us, it flew away, and again, after
the briefest absence, it returned. A third
time it vanished, and this time for good.
We kept on our way up the valley, talking
of what we had seen, but after every few
rods I turned about to put my glass upon
the chimney. Evidently that was the duck's
favorite perch, I said ; we shoidd find it there
often. But whether my reasoning was faulty
or we were simply unfortunate, the fact is
that we saw it there no more. On the 25th,
at a place two miles or more above this
point, we saw a duck of the same kind — at
least it was uttering the same grating, croak-
ing sounds as it flew ; and a resident of the
neighborhood, whom we questioned about the
matter, told us that he had noticed such
birds (" ducks with white on their wings ")
flying up and down the valley, and had no
doubt that they summered there. As to
their fondness for chimney-tops he knew no-
thing ; nor do I know anything beyond the
simple facts as I have here set them down.

224 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

But I am glad of the picture of the bird that
I have in my mind.

Enthusiasm is a good painter ; it is not
afraid of high lights, and it deals in fast
colors. And to us old Franconians, enthu-
siasm seems to be one of the institutions,
one of the native growths, one of the special
delectabilities, if you please, of that delect-
able valley. The valley of cinnamon roses,
we have before now called it ; the valley of
strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries ;
the valley of bobolinks and swallows; but
best of all, perhaps, it is the valley of hob-
byists. Its atmosphere is heady. We all
feel it. The world is far away. Worldly
successes, yea, dollars and cents themselves,
are nothing, and less than nothing, and van-
ity. A new flower, a new bird, the hundred
and fiftieth spider, these are the things that
count. We are like members of a conven-
ticle, or like the logs on the hearth. Our
inward fires are mutually communicative and
sustaining. We laugh now and then, it may
be, at one another's peculiarities. Each of
us can see, at certain moments, that the
other is " a little off," to use a " Francony "

IN THE LANDAFF VALLEY 225

phrase ; not quite " all there," perhaps ; a
kind of eighth dreamer, " moving about in
worlds not reahzed ; " but at bottom we are
sympathetic and appreciative. We would
not have each other different, unless, indeed,
it were a little younger. A grain of oddity
is a good spice. If we are not deeply inter-
ested in the newest discovery, at least we par-
ticipate in the exultation of the discoverer.

" That 's a good fly," said the entomolo-
gist. We were driving, tlu-ee of us, talking
of something or nothing (we are never care-
ful which it is), when the happy dipteran
blundered into the carriage, and into the
very lap of its admirer. Ten seconds more,
and it was under the anaesthetic sj)ell of cy-
anide of potassium, which (so we are told)
puts its victims to sleep as painlessly, per-
haps as blissfully, as chloroform. It was
an inspiration to see how instantly the lady
recognized a "good" one (it was one of a
thousand, literally, for the day was summer-
like), and how readily, and with no waste
of motions, she made it her own. I was re-
minded of a story.

A friend of mine, a truly devout woman,

226 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

of New England birth, and churcUy withal
(her books have all a savor of piety, though
all the world reads them), is also an enthu-
siastic and widely famous entomological col-
lector. One Sunday she had gone to church
and was on her knees reciting the service (or
saying her prayers — I am not sure that I
remember her language verbatim), when she
noticed on the back of the pew immediately
in front of her a diminutive moth of some
rare and desirable species. Instinctively her
hand sought her pocket, and somehow, with-
out disturbing the congregation or even her
nearest fellow-worshiper (my helpless mas-
culine mind cannot imagine how the thing
was done) she found it and took from it a
"poison bottle," always in readiness for such
emergencies. Still on her knees (whether
her lips still moved is another point that es-
capes positive recollection), she removed the
stopple, placed the mouth of the vial over
the moth (which had probably imagined it-
self safe in such ecclesiastical surroundings),
replaced the stopple above it, slipped the bot-
tle back into her pocket, and resumed (or
kept on with) her prayers. All this had

IN THE LANDAFF VALLEY 227

taken but a minute. And who says that
she had done anything wrong ? Who hints
at a disagreement between science and faith ?
Nay, let us rather believe with Coleridge —

" He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things, both great and small," —

especially small church-going lepidoptera of
the rarer sorts.

"With zealots like this about you, as I have
intimated, you may safely speak out. If
you have seen an unexpected, long-expected
warbler, or a chimney-top duck, or a slvyward
soaring lark, you may talk of it without fear,
with no restraint upon your feelings or your
phrases. Here things are seen as they are ;
truth is cleared of false lights, and Wisdom
is justified of her children. Happy Fran-
conia !

"Has she not shown us all ?
From the clear space of ether, to the small
Breath of new buds unfolding ? From the meaning
Of Jove's large eyebrow, to the tender greening
Of April meadows ? "

Happy Franconia! "Nested and quiet in
a valley mild ! " I think of her June straw-
berries and her perennial enthusiasms, and
I wish I were there now.

A VISIT TO MOUNT AGASSIZ

Mount Agassiz is rather a hiU than a
mountain ; there is no glory to be won in
climbing it, unless, perhaps, by very small
children and elderly ladies ; but if a man is
in search of a soul-filling prospect he may
climb higher and see less. The road to
it, furthermore (I speak as a Franconian),
is one of those that pay the walker as he
goes along. Every rod of the five miles is
worth traveling for its own sake, especially
on a bright and comfortable August morning
such as the Fates had this time sent me. It
was eight o'clock when I set out, and with a
sandwich in my pocket I meant to be in no
haste. If invitations to linger by the way
were as many and as pressing as I hoped
for, a mile and a quarter to the hour would
be excellent speed.

Eed crossbills and pine siskins were call-
ing in the larch trees near the house as

A VISIT TO MOUNT AGASSIZ 229

I left the piazza. Tlie siskins have never
been a frequent sight with me in the sum-
mer season, and finding almost at once a
flock in the grass by the roadside, feeding
upon seeds, as well as I could make out, and
delightfidly fearless, I stopped for a few
minutes to look them over. Some of the
number showed much more yellow than
others, but none of them could have been
dressed more strictly in the fashion if their
costumes had come straight from Paris.
Every bird was in stripes.

Both they and the crossbills are what
writers upon such themes agree to pro-
nounce " erratic " and " irregular." Of
most birds it can be foretold that they wiU
be in certain places at certain times ; their
orbits are known ; but crossbills and siskins
wander through space as the wliim takes
them. If they have any schedule of times
and seasons, men have yet to discover it.
When I come to Franconia, for example, I
never can tell whether or not I shall find
them ; a piece of ignorance to be thankfid
for, like many another. The less knowledge,
within limits, the more surprise ; and the

230 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

more surprise — also witllin limits — the
more pleasure. At present I can hardly
put my head out of the door without hearing
the wheezy calls of siskins and the importu-
nate cackles of crossbills. They are among
the commonest and most voluble inhabitants
of the valley, and seem even commoner and
more talkative than they really are because
they are so incessantly on the move.

An alder flycatcher is calling as I go up
the first hill (he, too, is very common and
very free with his voice, although, unlike
siskin and crossbill, he knows where he be-
longs, and is to be found there, and nowhere
else), and when I reach the plateau a sap-
sucker alights near the foot of a telegraph
post just before me ; a bird in Quakerish
drab, with no trace of red upon either crown
or throat. He (or she) is only two or three
months old, I suppose, like more than half
of all the birds now about us. Not far be-
yond, as the road runs into light woods, with
a swampy tract by a brook on the lower side,
I hear a chickadee's voice and look up to
see also two Canadian warblers, bits of pure
loveliness, the first ones of my present visit.

A VISIT TO MOUNT AGASSIZ 231

I talk to them, and one, his curiosity respon-
sive to mine, comes near to listen. The
Canadian warbler, I have long noticed, has
the bump of inquisitiveness exceptionally
well developed.

So I go on — a few rods of progress and
a few minutes' halt. If there are no birds
to look at, there are always flowers, leaves,
and berries : goldthread leaves, the prettiest
of the pretty — it is a joy to praise them ;
and dwarf cornel berries, gorgeous rosettes ;
and long-stemmed mountain-hoUy berries,
of a color indescribable, fairly beyond prais-
ing ; and bear-plums, the deep-blue berries
of the clintonia. And while the eye feasts
upon color the ear feasts upon music : a dis-
tant brook babbling downhill among stones,
and a breath of air whispering in a thousand
treetops ; noises that are really a superior
kind of silence, speaking of deeper and
better things than our human speech has
words for. Quietness, peace, contentment,
we say; but such vocables, good as they
are, are but poor renderings of this natu-
ral chorus of barely audible sounds. If you
are still enough to hear it — inwardly still

232 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

enough — as may once in a long while
happen, you feel things that tongue of man
never uttered. Life itself is less sweet.
Now and then, as I listen, I seem to hear a
voice saying, " Blessed are the dead." I
foretaste a something better than this sepa-
rate, contracted, individual state of being
which we call life, and to which in ordinary
moods we cling so fondly. To drop back
into the Universal, to lose life in order to
find it, this would be heaven ; and for the
moment, with tliis musical woodsy silence in
my ears, I am almost there. Yet it must
be that I express myself awkwardly, for I
am never so much a lover of earth as at such
a moment. Life is good. I feel it so now.
Fair are the white birch stems ; fair are the
gray-green poplars. This is my third day,
and my spirit is getting in tune.

In the white-pine grove, where a few
small birds are stirring noiselessly among
the upper branches, my attention is taken
by clusters of the ghostly, colorless plant
which men know as the Indian pipe (its
real name, of necessity, is quite beyond hu-
man ken) ; the flowers, every head bowed,

A VISIT TO MOUNT AGASSIZ 233

just breaking through a bed of last year's
needles, while a bumblebee, a capable eco-
nomic botanist, visits them one by one.
Then, as I emerge from the grove on its
sunny edge, I catch a sudden pungent odor
of balsam. It rises from the dry leaves,
the sunlight having somehow set it free. In
the shade of the wood nothing of the kind
was perceptible. The fact strikes me curi-
ously as one that I have often been half
consciously aware of, but now for the first
time really notice. On the instant I am
taken far back. It is a July noon ; I am
trudging homeward, and in my proud boyish
hand is a basket of shining black huckle-
berries carefully rounded over. The sense
of smell is naturally a sentimentalist; or
perhaps the olfactory nerves have some oc-
cult connection with the seat of memory.

Here is one of my favorite spots : a level
grassy field, with a ruined house and barn
behind me, between the road and a swampy
patch, and in front " all the mountains,"
from Moosilauke to Adams. How many
times I have stopped here to admire them !
I look at them now, and then fall to watch-

234 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

ing the bluebirds and tbe barn swallows,
that are here at borne. A Boston lady
holds the legal title to the property (be it
said in her honor that she bought it to save
the pine wood from destruction), but the
birds are its actual owners. Six bluebirds
sit in a row on the wire, while the swallows
go twittering over the field. Once I fancy
that I hear the sharp call of a horned lark ;
but the note is not repeated, and though I
beat the grass over I discover nothing.^

Beyond this level clearing the road winds
to the left and begins its cHmb to the height
of land, whence it pitches down into Bethle-
hem village. Every stage of the course is
familiar. Here a pileated woodpecker once
came out of the woods and disported himself
about the trunk of an apple tree for my de-
lectation — mine and a friend's who walked
with me ; here a hare sat quiet till I was
close upon him, and then scampered across

1 Four days afterward (August 9) I found larks of
the present season in the Landaff Valley, where I had
watched their parents with so much pleasure in May, as
I have described in a previous chapter. These August
birds were feeding upon oats in the road, like so many
English sparrows.

A VISIT TO MOUNT AGASSIZ 235

the field with flying jumps ; here is a back-
ward valley prospect that I never can have
enough of ; and here, just over the wall, I
once surprised myself by finding a bunch of
yellow lady's-slippers. All this, and much
else, I now live over again. So advanta-
geous is it to walk in one's own steps. Many
times as I have come this way, I have never
come in fairer weather.

And what is this ? It looks like a hay-
ing-bee. Eight horses and two yokes of
oxen, with several empty " hay-riggings "
and as many buggies, stand in confused
order beside the road, and over the wall
men are mowing, spreading, and turning.
It is some widow's grass field, I imagine,
and her loyal neighbors have assembled to
harvest the crop. Human nature is not so
bad, after all. So I am saying, with the
inexpensive charity natural to a sentimental
traveler, when I find myseK near a group
of younger men who are bantering one of
their number (I am behind a bushy screen),
mixing their talk plentifully with oaths ;
such a vulgar, stupid, witless repetition of
sacred names — without one saving touch

236 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

of originality or picturesqueness — as our
honest, thoroughbred, rustic New Englander
may challenge the world to equal. These
can be no workers for charity, I conclude ;
and when I inquire of a man who overtakes
me on the road (with an invitation to ride),
he says : " Oh, no, that is Mr. Blank's farm,
and those are all his hired men. He is
about the richest man in Bethlehem." So
my pretty idyl vanishes in smoke ; the
smoke, I am tempted to say, of burning
brimstone. I have one consolation, such as
it is : the men are Bethlehemites, not Fran-
conians, though I am not so certain that
a swearing match between the two towns
would prove altogether one-sided. It is no-
thing new, of course, that beautiful scenery
does not always refine those who live near
it. It works to that end, within its measure,
I am bound to believe, for those who see it ;
but " there 's the rub."

Whether men see it or not, the landscape
takes no heed. There it stretches as I turn
to look, spaces of level green vaUey, with
mountains and hills round about — moun-
tains and valleys each made perfect by the

A VISIT TO MOUNT AGASSIZ 237

other. I sit down once more in a favoraWe
spot, where every line of the picture falls
true, and drink my fill of its loveliness,
while a hermit thrush out of the hill woods
yonder blesses my ears with music. I have
Emerson's wish — " health and a day."

At liigh noon, as I had planned, I came
to the top of the mountain. The ol)serva-
tory was full of chattering tourists, wliile
three individuals of the same genus stood on
the rocks below, two men and a woman, the
men taking turns in the use — or abuse —
of a horn, with which they were trying to
rouse the echo (a really good one, as I could
testify) from Mount Cleveland and the
higher peaks beyond. Their attempts were
mostly failures. Either the breath wan-
dered about uneasily inside the brazen tube,
moaning like a soul in pain — abortive mut-
ter ings, but no " toot " — or, if a blast now
and then came forth, it was of so low a pitch
that the mountains, whose vocal register, it
appears, is rather tenor than bass, were un-
able to return it effectively. " I can't get
it high enough," one of the men said. But
they had large endowments of perseverance

238 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

— a virtue tliat runs often to pernicious
excess — and seemingly would never have
given over their efforts, only that a gentle-
man's voice from the observatory finally
called out, in a tone of long-suffering polite-
ness, "Won't you please let up on that
horn, just for a little while ? " The horn-
blowers, not to be outdone in civility, an-
swered at once with a good-natured affirma-
tive, and a heavenly silence, a silence that
might be felt, descended upon our ears.
Neither blower nor pleader wiU ever know
how heartily he was thanked by a man who
lay upon the rocks a little distance below
the summit, looking down into the Franconia
VaUey.

The scene is of exquisite beauty ; beauty,
moreover, of a kind that I especially love;
but for the first half-hour I looked without
seeing. It is always so with me in such
places, I cannot tell why. Formerly I laid
my disability to the fact that the eye had
first to satisfy its natural curiosity concern-
ing the details of a strange landscape ; its
instinctive desire to orient itself by attention
to topographical particulars ; and no doubt

A VISIT TO MOUNT AGASSIZ 239

considerations of tliis nature may be sup-
posed to enter more or less into the problem.
But Mount Agassiz offered me nothing to
be puzzled over ; I felt no need of orienta-
tion nor any stirrings of inquisitiveness.
On my left was the Mount Washington
range, in front were Lafayette and Moosi-
lauke, with the valley intervening, and on
the right, haze-covered to-day, rose peak
after peak of the Green Mountains. These
things I knew beforehand. I had not come
to this Pisgah-top to study a lesson in geo-
graphy, but to enjoy the sight of my eyes.

Still I must practice patience. Time —
indispensable Time — is a servant that can-
not be hurried, nor can his share of any
work be done by the cleverest substitute.
" Beautiful ! " I said, and felt the word ;
but the beauty did not come home to the
spirit, filling and satisfying it. I wonder at
people who scramble to such a peak, stare
about them for a quarter of an hour, and
run down again contented. Either the plate
is preternaturally sensitive, or the picture
cannot have been taken.

For myself, I have learned to wait; and

240 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

so I did now. A few birds flitted about the
summit : two or three snowbirds, to whom
the unusual presence of a man was plainly
a trouble (" Why can't he stay up in the
observatory, like the rest of his kind? ") ; a
myrtle warbler, chirping softly as he passed ;
a white-throat, whistling now and then from
somewhere down the cliffs ; an alder fly-
catcher, caUing quay-queer (a surprising
place this dry mountain-top seemed for a
lover of swampy thickets) ; an occasional
barn swallow or chimney swift, shooting to
and fro under the sky ; and once a sparrow
hawk, welcome for his rarity, sailing away
from me down the valley, showing a rusty
tail.

By and by, seeing that the crowd had
gone, 1 clambered up the rocks, eating blue-
berries by the way, and mounted the stairs
to the observatory, where the keeper of the
place was talking with two men (a musician
and a commercial traveler, if my practice
as an " observer " counted for anything),
who had lingered to survey the panorama.
The conversation turned upon the usual
topics, especially the Mount Washington

A VISIT TO MOUNT AGASSIZ 241

Eailway. Four or five trains were descend-
ing the track, one close behind the other,
and it became a matter of absorbing interest
to make them out through the small tele-
scope and a field glass. Why be at the
trouble to climb so high, at the cost of so
much wind, unless you do your best to take
in whatever is visible? "Yes, I can see
one — two — three — Oh, yes, there 's the
fourth, just leaving the summit." So the
talk ran on, with minor variations which
may easily be imagined. One important
question related to the name of a certain
small sheet of water ; another to a road that
curved invitingly over a grassy hilltop ; an-
other to the exact whereabouts of a rich
man's fine estate (questions about rich men
are always pertinent), the red roofs of which
could be found by searching for them.

I took my full share of the discussion,
but half an hour of it sufficed, and I went
back again to commune with myself upon
the rocks. The sunshine was warm, but the
breeze tempered it till I found it good.
And the familiar scene was lovelier than
ever, I began to think. Here at my feet

242 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

stood the little house, down upon which I
had looked with such rememberable pleasure
on my first visit to Agassiz, I know not how
many years ago. Then a man was cutting
wood before the door. Now there is nobody
to be seen ; but the place must still be in-
habited, for I hear the tinkle of a cowbell
somewhere in the woods, and a horse is
pasturing nearer by. Only three or four
other houses are in sight — not reckoning
the big hotel and a few far-away roofs in
Franconia — and very inviting they look,
neatly painted, with smooth, level fields
about them. It is my own elevation that
levels the fields, I am quite aware (when I
stop to think of it), as it is distance that
softens the contours of the mountains, and
the lapse of time that smooths the rough
places out of past years ; but for the hour
I take things as the eye sees them. We
come to these visionary altitudes, not to look
at realities but at pictures. Distance is a
famous hand with the brush. To omit de-
tails and to fill the canvas with atmosphere,
these are the secrets of his art. A comfort-
able thing it is to lie here at my ease and

A VISIT TO MOUNT AGASSIZ 243

yield myself to the great painter's enchant-
ments.

My eye wanders over the landscape, but
not uneasily ; nay, it can hardly be said to
wander at aU ; it rests here and there, not
trying to see, but seeing. Now it is upon
the road, spaces of which show at intervals,
while I imagine the rest — a sentimental
journey ; now upon a far-off grassy clearing
among woods (Mears's or Chase's), homely
enough, and lonely enough — and familiar
enough — to fit the mood of the hour ; now
upon the distant level reaches of the Landaff
Valley. But the beauty of the scene is not
so much in this or that as in aU together.
I say now, as I said twenty years ago,
" This is the kind of prospect for me :" a
broken vaUey, fields and woods intermin-
gled, with mountains circumscribing it all ;
a splendid panorama seen from above, but
not from too far above ; from a hill, that is
to say, rather than from a mountain.

An hour of this luxury and I return to
the tower, where the musician and the
keeper are stiU. in conference. The keeper,
especially, is a man much after my own

244 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

mind. He knows the people wlio live in
tlie three houses below us, and speaks of
them racily, yet in a tone of brotherly kind-
ness. I call his attention to two women
whom I have descried in the nearest pasture,
a bushy place, yellow with goldenrod and
pointed with young larches and firs. They
wear men's wide-brimmed straw hats (a
black-and-tan coUie is with them), and one
carries a broad tin dish, which she holds in
one hand, while she picks berries with the
other. Pretty awkward business, an old
berry-picker thinks.

Yes, the keeper of the tower says, they

are Mrs. and Miss ; one lives in

the first house, the other in the second.
Now they are leaving the pasture, stopping
once in a while to strip an uncommonly in-
viting bush (so I interpret their move-
ments), and we follow them with our eyes.
The older one, a portly body, walks halfway
across a broad field with her companion,
seeing her so far homeward, — and perhaps
finishing a savory dish of gossip, — and then
returns to her own house, still accompanied
by the dog. Scarcity of neighbors conduces
to neighborliness.

A VISIT TO MOUNT AGASSIZ 245

The men who live in such houses, the
keeper teUs me, are very wide-awake and
well informed, reading their weekly news-
paper with thoroughness, and always ready
for rational talk on current topics. They
are not rich, of course, in the down-country
sense of the word, and see very little money,
subsisting mainly upon the produce of the
farm ; a matter of twenty-five dollars a year
may cover all their expenditures ; but they
are better fed, and really live in more com-
fort, than a great part of the folks who live
in cities. I am glad to believe it ; and I
like the man's way of standing by his neigh-
bors. In fact, I think higlily of him as a
person of a good heart and no small dis-
crimination ; and therefore I am all the
gladder when, having left the summit and
stopped for a minute in the shade of a tree,
I overhear him say to the musician, " That
old man enjoys himself ; he 's a nice old
man." "Thank you," say I, not aloud,
but with deep inward sincerity ; " that 's
one of the best compliments I've had for
many a day." Blessings on this mountain
air, that makes human speech unintention-

246 FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

ally audible. An old man that enjoys him-
self is pretty near to my ideal of respectable
senility. " Thank you," I repeat ; " that 's
praise, and faith, I 'U print it." And so I
will, pleasing myself, let the ungentle reader
— if I have one — think what he may. A
good name is more to brag of than a million
of money.

Yes, I am enjojring myself (why not ?),
and I loiter down the road with a light
heart (an old man should be used to going
downhiU), pausing by the way to notice a
little group — a family party, it is reason-
able to guess — of golden-crowned kinglets.
One of them, the only one I see fully, has a
plain crown, showing neither black stripes
nor central orange patch. But for his un-
mistakable zee-zee-zee^ which he is consider-
ate enough to utter while I am looking at
him, he might be taken for a ruby-crown.
So the lover of beauty and the hobbyist
descend the hill together, keeping step
like inseparable friends. And so may it be
to the end of the chapter.

INDEX

INDEX

Adder's-mofth, 149.
Arbutus, trailing, 57, 91,

lo3.
Aster Lindleyanus, 5, 181.
Azalea, Lapland, 140.

Beech-fern, 146.
Blueberries, alpine, 24.
Bluebird, 123, 125, 209, 210,

234.
Bobolink, 97, 110, 117,

213.
Butterflies, 10, 28, 36, 123,

145, 172.

Catbird, 29, 106, 117, 189,

191.
Cedar-bird, 15, 187.
Cherry, wild red, 79, 130,

148, 211 ; rum, 183.
Chickadee, black - capped,

13, 15, 16, 22, 72, 83, 94,

170, 191 ; Hudsonian, 15,

53.
Chokeberry, 133.
Chokecherry, yellow, 181.
Cicada, 54.
Clintonia, 164, 231.
Coltsfoot, 67.
Cornel, dwarf, 57, 122, 133,

150, 163, 231.
Creeper, brown, 129, 138.
Crossbill, red, 19, 194, 228 ;

white-winged, 19.
Crow, 11, 97, 210.
Cuckoo, black-billed, 145.

Finch, pine, 126, 144, 170,228;
purple, 117.

Fleas, 32.

Flowers, alpine, 140.

Flycatcher, alder, 105, 125,
148, 214, 230, 240 ; crested,
99, 125, 210, 214; least,
212, 213, 214 ; olive-sided,
101, 105, 130, 169, 212, 214 ;
yeUow-bellied, 101, 215.

Fox, 58.

Goldfinch, 72, 172, 189, 191,

211.
Goldthread, 57, 83, 133, 150,

231.
Grosbeak, rose-breasted, 86,

117, 127.
Grouse, 27, 101, 192, 205, 210,

211.

Hardback, 155.
Hawk, sparrow, 240.
Hobble-bush, 13, 130.
Houstonia, 133.
Humming-bird, 160, 205.
Hyla, 192.

Indigo-bird, 159.

Kinglet, golden - crowned,
138, 192, 246; ruby-
crowned, 29, 66, 72, 192.

Kingfisher, 16.

Lady's - slipper, pink, 108,
133; yellow, 111, 235. _ _

Lark, meadow, 115 ; prairie
horned, 162, 166, 195, 217,
234.

Lonesome Lake, 11.

250

INDEX

Martin, purple, 117.
Maryland yellow-throat, 72,

125, 145, 189.
Merganser, 221.
Mountain ash, 17.
Mountain hoUy, 163, 231.

Nuthatch, red-breasted, 17,
121, 194; white-breasted,
189, 213, 216.

Oriole, 117.

Oven-bird, 125, 143, 216.

Owl, barred, 22.

Phoebe, 191, 209.

Raspberry, 151, 162
Rhodora, 85, 133.
Robin, 13, 22, 74, 117, 170,
189, 191.

Salix balsamifera, 6, 41, 85,

155.
Sandpiper, solitary, 89, 115,

170.
Sandwort, Greenland, 25.
Sapsucker, 68, 148, 183, 184,

189, 215, 230.
Shadbush, 80, 83, 91, 133,

211.
Shadbush, few-flowered, 91,

133.
SiskiA, pine, 126, 144, 170,

29g

Snowbird, 14, 15, 63, 240.

Sparrow, chipping, 77 ; Eng-
lish, 118; field, 77, 116,
117, 159, 189; fox, 57;
Lincohi's, 68, 74, 77; sa-
vanna, 78 ; song, 72, 74,
77, 117, 123, 159, 170, 189,
191, 210 ; swamp, 74, 172 ;
vesper, 8, 44, 51, 116,
117, 123, 160, 191 ; white-
crowned, 74, 77, 114, 194 ;
white-throated, 13, 15, 25,
57, 66, 74, 83, 93, 130, 148,
160, 170, 189, 191.

Spiders, 31.

Spring-beauty, 88, 89.

Swallow, bank, 117, bam,
97, 117, 118, 152, 159, 234,
240 ; cliff, 117 ; tree, 117.

Swift, 134, 240.

Tanager, 72, 101, 117, 126.

Thorn-bush, 180.

Thrush, gray-cheeked, 117 ;
hermit, 14, 21, 29, 30, 39,
80, 113, 115, 117, 148, 159,
165, 191, 237 ; olive-backed
(Swainson's), 14, 21, 22,
101, 117, 144, 189, 193;
water, 105 ; Wilson's
(veery), 101, 110, 115, 117 ;
wood, 112, 117, 126, 127.

Toad, 131.

Trillium, painted, 83, 133.

Violet, dog - tooth, 89 ;
round-leaved, 88, 89, 130 ;
Selkirk's, 122, 135.

Vireo, Philadelphia, 189,
190 ; red-eyed, 18, 72, 116,
144, 159, 170, 210; soli-
tary, 8, 66, 68, 72, 117, 148,
189, 191; warbling, 120;
yellow-throated, 115, 214.

Warbler, bay-breasted, 72,
73, 87, 94 ; Blackburnian,
86, 87, 94, 135 ; black-and-
white, 104 ; blackpoll, 72,
142 ; black-throated blue,
126 ; black-throated green,

72, 189; blue yellow-
backed, 127, 216 ; Canada,

101, 230; Cape May, 94,

102, 103, 106, 107, 111, 198,
217; chestnut-sided, 72,

73, 170; magnolia, 101,
127, 144 ; mourning, 112,
128 ; myrtle, 68, 72, 143,
144, 189, 211, 240; Nash-
viUe, 127, 189, 213; Ten-
nessee, 41, 92, 101, 102,

INDEX

251

103, 105 ; Wilson's black-
cap, 114.

Woodchuck, 61, 86, 96.

Wood pewee, 169, 214.

Woodpecker, arctic three-
toed, 14 ; downy, 68 ;

golden-winged, 16, 68, 72 ;

hairy, 41 ; pileated, 45, 99,

156, 1S3, 193, 234.
Wood sorrel, 167.
Wren, winter, 10, 57, 72, 90,

117.

Mc

£^

Electrotyped attd prmted by H. O. Houghton (5^^ Co.
Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.

I

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4,