I n Cod

AN. 0

IN GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS

THE WORKS OF WILLIAM A. QUAYLE

"THE POET'S POET AND OTHER ESSAYS

"A HERO AND SOME OTHER FOLK"

A STUDY IN CURRENT SOCIAL THEORIES

"THE BLESSED LIFE"

IN GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS

IN GOD'S OUT-OF
DOORS

WILLIAM A. QUAYLE

CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND GRAHAM
NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS

a-

COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY
JENNINGS & PYE

PRELUDE

RANKLY, little is to be anticipated from the Author
of this book. He is far from being a specialist.
He is not entomologist nor botanist nor ornitholo-
gist. He confesses to knowing which end of a
flower the root grows on and but little more.

He purposes writing because he loves God's
Out-of-Doors. The blue sky touches him to ji
sadness, like reading a letter from one much
loved and long dead; and the
shadows in quiet water affect him like a A
prayer. The author's wish is to people other <
hearts with love of flower and woodland path
and drifting cloud and dimming light and
moonlit distance and starlight and voices
of bird and wind and cadence of the rainfall and the
storm, and to make men and women more the lovers of
this bewildering world fashioned in loveliness by the
artist hand of God. And beyond all this, he would be
glad to bring them into fellowship and love with God,
which is the poesy and eloquence of life.

WILLIAM A. QUAYLE

4977,39

The photographs interpretive of Nature in this book
are by Mr. George N. Jennings, Mrs. Jacoby, Mr.
J. F. Earhart, Mr. Wm. Simpkinson, Mr. Roy Holtz,
Mr. Charles C. Woods, Mr. Charles Schurman, and
Mr. Lare; but the great majority are by Dr. Charles
S. Parmenter; while the drawings are by Margaret
Robbins. :::::::

PLACES AND THINGS
IN GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS

HERE MADE MENTION OF

/. In God's Out-of-Doors,

II. On Seeing, -

III. When Spring Comes Home,

IV. Winter Trees,
V. Golden-rod,

VI. I Go A- Fishing, -

VII. The Goings of the Winds,
VIII. The Falls of St. Croix,

IX. When Autumn Fades,

X. A Walk Along a Railroad in June,

XI. The Windings of a Stream,

XII. Four Seasons^One Year,

XIII. On Winter Panes, -

XIV. Walking to My Farm,
XV. My Farm,

XVI. Gloaming, -

XVII. Good-Night,

15
23
33
37
69
77
93
107
119
123
137
145
161
165
177
225
232

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Page

AUTUMN LEAVES (Frontispiece), - 4

SPRING IS WAKING (Title Page), 5
FLAGS, --------

'A BLACKBERRY BOW OF PROMISE, - 9

LILACS, H

A SPRIG OF WILD CRAB APPLE, ...... \2

PEACH BLOSSOMS, - 13

APPLE BLOSSOMS, - - 14

GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS, - 15

SUNSET, ----------- 17

A ROBIN REDBREAST IN HIS FAVORITE HAUNT, - - 20

WHERE WIND FLOWERS BLOOM, ------- 21

POND LILIES, 23

THE HAWTHORN WITH ITS BLOOM OF SNOW, - 25

EMPTY, -------- 27

A WOODLAND POOL OF DOGTOOTH VIOLETS,

ON AUTUMN HILLSIDES, 29

WHERE MEADOW LARKS SING, - 31

A TOUCH OF SPRING, - 33

WHEN SPRING COMES HOME, ------- 34, 35

WINTER TREES, 37

THE OAK, --------- - - 39

DESOLATE, 43

BIRCH-TREES, - 45

BEECH-TREES, 47

A HACKBERRY PILLAR, --------- 49

A WALNUT, _---.- 50

THE MAPLE, - 51

THE SPREADING ELM, 53

A WINTER COTTONWOOD, -------- 56

11

THE SHELL-BARK HICKORY,

MY WILLOW, ______

THE LOCUST, -------

SYCAMORES,

THROUGH THE PINE WOODS,

GOLDEN-ROD, - - -

WHERE GOLDEN-RODS BLOOM, -

WINTER GOLDEN-ROD, -

THE OPEN ROAD, -----

LAYS SNARES LIKE AN ASSASSIN, -
THE SPOILS, ------

CROSSING THE STREAM, -
REEDS ALONG THE BANKS,
ALONG THE STREAM, -

THE SOLE PINE, - - - - -

WHERE THE POLE WAS LOST,

THE GOING OF THE WIND, -

WHERE ZEPHYRS TOUCH THE WILLOWS,

THE WIND PUFFS THE SAIL,

THUNDERHEAD,

THE SURF,

IN BATTLE MOOD, -
A PATCH OF CLOVER, -
A SINGING BROOK, -
THE OLD MILL,

WHENCE THE SPRINGS FLOW,
THE FALLS OF ST. CROIX, -
PINE TOPS EDGE THE SKY,
THE WALLED ROCKS, - - - . -
PINES RAGGED AS SPANISH SOLDIERS,
SUNRISE ON THE RIVER,
THE OTHER SHORE, -
THE MOANING TREES, - _ - -

12

Pag*
58

- 59
60

- 63
67

- 69
71

74, 75
77

- 79
83

- 84
85

- 87
88

- 90
93

- 95
98

- 99
100

- 101
103

- 105
107

- 109
111

- 112
113

- 114
116

- 117
119

Page

WHEN AUTUMN FADES, 120

THE SLEEPY-EYED CATTLE, -------- 123

QUAIL, ------ 125

SWAMP GRASSES, ---------- 128

WHERE THE WATER LILIES GROW, ------ 129

THE LEANING WILLOW, --------- 131

THE BRIDGE, ------ 134

BLUE FLAGS, ----------- 135

A SILVER STREAM, - - 137

BETWEEN HIGH BANKS, - 139

IN WINDING WAYS, --------- 142

THROUGH LONG GRASSES, - - - 143

LOITERING, ----------- 144

THE BIRTHDAY OF THE YEAR, ------- 145

SPRING, _____ _ 147

AN IVY PILLAR, ----------- 150

SUMMER, ------------ 151

A SUMMER HARVEST, - - - - - - - - - 153

AUTUMN, ------------ 155

MY AUTUMN HILLSIDE, --------- 156

WINTER, ----- _______ 157

ON WINTER PANES, ---------- 161

VIOLETS AND FLEUR-DE-LIS, --_--_- 162

13

THE CREEPING VINE,

IN THE COUNTRY QUIET,

THE ROAD TO MY FARM, -

THE LOWING CATTLE, -

THE CLOUDS ARE BONNIE,

SHADOWS, ._.__.

THE CROW'S NEST, -

THE BIRDS' WINTER BED, -

THE COMING HORSE,

THE TENANT PLOWS THE FIELD,

CORN SHOCKS PITCH THEIR TENTS,

THE OWL, ----._

FARM FRIENDS, -----

THE CROWS, ------

CRACKS NUTS AND SQUIRREL JOKES,

THE GOLDEN DAYS OF HARVEST,

THE PLUM THICKET, -

A SPRAY OF APPLE BLOSSOMS, -

THE RAVINE, -

THE SPRING, ------

THE VILLAIN AND HIS FRIENDS, -

JACK IN THE PULPIT, -

THE TENANT'S COW, -

TALL TREES RIM THE CREST,

LEAFLESS TREES,

MY WILD ROSE THICKET,

EVENING SHADOWS, -

GLOAMING, ---___

THE POOL IN THE MEADOW, -

THE DAY IS DONE,

14

Page

163

165

167

170

172

•73

174

175

177

179

185

188

189

191

193

195

197

200

202

205

209

213

215

217

218

221

225

227

231

232

IN GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS

SUNSET

r

IN GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS

OME people do not well know that God is out-of-doors.
I marvel at them. He is everywhere — "though I take
the wings of the morning" — but so God is in dusks
and dawns and twilights and noons, in doors and out,
at toil and on holidays, where deserts keep tryst with
the moonlight, and where the wide sea can behold no
shore — God is always wherever I have gone. He is
in the little room where a baby learns its prayer
from mother lips, kneeling, and with fingers inter-
laced (God loves a sight like this), and in the
church where congregations meet to wait on the
Lord, and "worship in the beauty of holiness," and where in God's acre
we bury our beloved out of the sight of our eyes dimmed with weeping
— God is there; but he is also out where he has planted the wind
flowers, and where the hawthorn stoops beneath its drifted snows fresh
fallen, and where sweet eglantine blooms and the fringed gentian, and
where the Indian pipe grows in the dusk of quiet woods, and where the
maple flushes a little in the early spring and sows the ground beneath,
where its shadows will soon shut sunlight out, with its own pink blos-
soms, and where the sycamore stands in winter with its yellow apples
like a jest of harvest for a tree so bulky, or where dodder plant, yellow
as gold, steals saps from other plants to feed its splendors on, and where
the sea-fowls float like a ghost of voices through the night skies, heard
but unseen, — God is out-of-doors also God is everywhere.

He made the Out-of-doors and loves it, and haunts it, as Jesus did
the mountain and the sea. "Behold the lilies how they grow," He
said whose name is sweet; and so I will heed them; and, He said,
"Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?" True, sparrows are very
plentiful and bickering, but I will look at them, for He made them and

19

:-•*•: V _
W'i ^&4t

pointed them out to me The
trees where the birds nest and
the birds that nest there, the
shadows where the herds lie
and the herds panting in the
shadows with luminant eyes,
buds that swell toward blossom-
ing and blossoms in haste
toward fruitage, white sea gull
and robin redbreast with his
song like the gurgle of laughter
in a baby's throat, high sea
clifts leaning seaward and sea
marshes through which the salt
tides flood their crystal rivers,
fern and oak and sweet sur-
prise of mosses, rivulet and
broad river, plunge of waterfall
and placid stream where the

A ROBIN REDBREAST IN HIS FAVORITE HAUNT-AN APPLE-TREE

current is asleep, russet grove of scrub oak on winter hills, and the vivid
greens of willows in fresh leaf in early springtime, — I will behold "them
all." They belong in God's Out-of-doors; and God is out there looking
his premises over. And if he will let me I will go with him. And as I
look his way to ask him if I may go, he looking my way, before I say a
word, says, "Come, let us go into my Out-of-doors;" and I am going
with HIM into God's Out-of-doors.

WHERE WIND FLOWERS BLOOM

21

ON SEEING

THE HAWTHORN WITH ITS BLOOM OF SNOW

ON SEEING

WOULD reverently add to the list of the
beatitudes this, "Blessed are those who help us
to see." From my heart I bless such men and
women. All the good must pray to God,
"Help us to see." The pity of this world is
not its limitations, but ours. Into the earth as
into a king's golden goblet, God has poured all
things which minister to an immortal and growing
life. He has made a world pregnant with ideas. Vistas
open as through a sunrise world to wide meadow lands beyond, where
are sunshine and flowers and birds swaying in the tall grasses and sing-
ing as they sway and flute notes of singing waters and odors of damp
sod and blooming flowers, and a meadow lark s dulcet note and swaying
shadows of the woods when rocked by south winds and
billowy motion of the grass like some emerald sea with
tide setting to shore. We are always on the way to
God's open as we are always on our way to God if we
would have it so. Nothing of God's perishes, but
endures. We have not gotten to the end, seeing
God is forever holding something back. We
can not bankrupt his opportunities nor provi-
dences nor knowledge nor joy; and how good
that is! Life is as a book whose best pages
are as yet uncut, and a growing interest holds
us, filling the mind as a flood tide the sinuous
shore line

Who knows what is hid under the open
sky? Some birds build their nest in plain

27

sight, and so hide their summer's house. The very openness was a
hiding process. And under the wide, high sky, where hang bird and star
and flower, and tree-twig with its bursting green, — under that open these
beatitudes are hidden as ferns are hid under a sandstone ledge, deep in
a wood and wet with a perpetual shower of dripping from the stony roof.
So much to see, so little seen; that is our grief. How we have let sum-
mers waste! Sparrows are not less provident. Nature's bounty runs
to waste, or, what is worse, runs to weed. And a poet thought of this

A WOODLAND POOL OF DOGTOOTH VIOLETS

(and, as for that, what have not the poets thought of ? Some one of
them has left a caress on every flower of the field as the winds do):

"There are flowerets down in the valley low
And over the mountain side,
That were never praised by a human voice
Nor by human eye descried;
But sweet as the breath of the royal rose
Is the perfume they exhale;
And where they bloom and why they bloom
The good Lord knoweth well.'"
28

ON AUTUMN HILLSIDES

How this waste shames us since men and women have eyes for
seeing! They are not blind. It were a mercy if one did not see that
he were blind, because the blind are not blameworthy for their lack of
sight. Deserts are flowerless; but this habitable world is a tangle of
beauties, like the interlacing of the sunshine and the shadows in a sum-
mer wood when sunlight rules the sky. A world full of loveliness, and
we see it not! That sounds a requiem. "Having eyes, see not," is our
pathos. That word haunts me as mourners haunt the grave of their
dear dead. May not a prophet's prayer for his servant be a prayer
uttered in our behalf as well? "I pray thee, open the young man's eyes
that he may see." So many dusks and dawns nobody watches. I
resent people running mad over carnivals and slighting the pageants of
the morning and the
night, worth a pil-
grimage about our
world to catch sight
of once. One sunset
in a decade; how
thronged the way
would be that led to
its mountain ! One in
a week; who watches?
Pity the blind who, having eyes, see not. Edward Rowland Sill tells a
benignant angel standing near,

"This is our earth — most friendly earth and fair;"

and he was right. His praise was scant, not profuse.

A mercy to the heart is the ubiquity of this loveliness. Some beauty
abides everywhere. Deserts are 'flowerless; but night and moonlight on
the far-stretching sands are so beautiful as fairly to stoop beneath their
load. Beauty blooms unseen in shaded woodlands; in corn-rows; in field
corners; on barbed wires, where wild vines tangle and blur the green of
leaves with the surprise of flowers; on garbage heaps; among cinders;
on rocky ledges; in quiet pools as lilies; in quiet skies as stars; purpling
the hollows in remote mountains, and making the far hills blue as the far
sea; voyaging as clouds; stationary as trees; wandering as a child with
tangled hair and laughing face; vines visible, drooping over tumbling
sheds or modest cottage or on stake-and-rider fences, shading windows
of poverty; thrilling mornings with singing and soaring larks, and in

31

twilight with the vespers of the whip-poor-will; the plover's cry; a
child's laughter and a child's face; a fair woman with her lovelit eyes;
a boy with dirty and gleeful face ; a leafless tree in a bare pasture ; the
distilled odors of night and dews, — so beauty blooms and such things are
daily companionships; and we scarcely know that they are fair. What a
world Ruskin found in "The Stones of Venice!" and what rarer world
would God show every one of us if we would let him! Health to body
and soul is in this out-of-doors. A walk through dewy fields is to pass
into an enchanted land. Sometimes a friend says, "See, a falling star."
We look and see no passing light, and he replies, "It has fallen." No
brief flight of falling star is comparable for loveliness, though I love its
light, with what we wade knee-deep in as grasses growing in ravines, and
we have no thought for it. Nature as God left it is so much, has such a
pensive delight, and serves as evangel of a gospel of contentment and
peace. They are not poor who see. Riches unspeakable are theirs. I
would for myself and for others pray, "Teach me to see lest I be poor
beyond the depths of poverty." If I had might, as I would guide travelers
to a mountain which swept eyes over a visionary scene, so would I
guide to the vision of every day's delight.

To go abroad is not our need. To stay at home and have a variant
world report to us as if we were emperors, that is traveledness. God will
leave nothing wholly commonplace. He is against common things in
that he exalts them into uncommon loveliness. A dead tree-trunk is
overgrown with moss and vines; and tawny deserts have haunting dis-
tances and solitudes enthralling to imagination; the homeliest face has
a radiant light upon it when love goes by its door with loitering steps;
winter has hospitalities genial as those of summer. All the year is
hospitable if we are neighborly.

1 •Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies, "

and hold you with a sense of joy not to be lightly told. Writing poetry is
not our classic achievement after all. Seeing and feeling and being
poetry is life's best work.
Come, for

"The swan on still St. Mary's lake
Floats double, swan and shadow.'"

Lord, teach me to see!

32

WHEN SPRING COMES HOME

hen Spring comes home
<^l^Qw fer /o^ gttjrimage,
~ Unwearied, and unmarked by
When Spring comes home!—

How wild with glee
The laughing children and the
And singing birds and golden hours,
And streams will be
When Spring comes home!

dull bank

Shall wake to smile with
Forgetting Winter's sad regrets,

And joys, to thank

Sweet Spring come.

down long hills
There babble like a happy child,
And swirl and leap with Springtime wild

The crystal rills,

Sweet Spring come home!

When Spring comes home!
How passing sweet it is to know
Our spirits like God's violets grow, . -4^*

When Spring comes home!

And Spring comes home !
When life's long Winter faints and dies,
There dawns upon our watching eyes

Heaven's Spring come home.

WINTER TREES

WINTER TREES

; EAFLESS trees are, in ordinary thinking, a synonym
* J of desolation. They are nude, forlorn, forsaken,
mjti and are shivering through the winter as a beggar
* if* who thinks winter the necessary tribulation that
preludes spring. I have not so learned the trees.
Sympathy extended to them is, as I confidently
believe, misapplied. Winter trees are not mendi-
cants. The last thing they do is to ask alms. In
them, as I have become acquainted with them, is
a sturdy independence worthy of a Puritan colonist.
These words of Marianne Farningham are part true,
not wholly, though more nearly than the average
estimate :

"Poverty-stricken and gaunt they stand,
Dotted about o'er the hard brown land;
Stripped of their beauty they moan and sigh
To the pitiless breeze as it rushes by:
Leafless, forsaken, of song bereft,

They are like a life with no pleasure left :

\

Beautiful even though stripped and bare,
Are the trees that are planted everywhere;
Winter' s best beauty belongs to them,
To their giant trunks and feathery stem,
And they bravely stand in the silent wood,
Like a patient life that is nobly good;''1

though I feel certain the trees will love her scarcely more because she
wrote of them, unless they are touched, as all good lives should be, by
thought given by the true hearts of women. Winter trees stand and
endure — but they battle and enjoy and are beautiful as well. If I were

41

to choose between leafless trees and leafy trees, I confess not to be
certain as to my choice, though I am sure the winter trees enjoy them-
selves not less than trees of summer time. To think that winter trees
are forlorn and beautyless is common. They are to my belief warlike,
strenuous, conquering, magnificent. Summer is the trees' furlough:
winter is their campaign — one long battle both by night and day.
Winter rules them and gives them a hundred giants' thews. They are
as strong as Cassar's soldiers and heroic as Mark Antony's veterans.

In winter the individuality of trees comes out. In summer their
leaves are their chief circumstance and obscure their individuality. We
can not get at a tree's shape in summer. It is shut in of its own leaves
and shadow; but when winter, with icy sword blade, hacks away the last
tatter of summer finery, and leaves the tree to stand, naked as an
Indian warrior, then does it proclaim itself. To see the shadow cast
upon the snow or brown leaves (snow is better for taking a tree's
silhouette, and moonlight is better than sunlight), is to get acquainted
with the tree. But by moonlight, on the snow, stand long and see the
black and white picture of an elm-tree, or oak, or willow, or walnut, or
sycamore. Pine and cedar take poor pictures so, because their foliage
is perennial. To take a picture of a pine-tree always take it at noon
against a sky of intense blue (than such sight there is no lovelier in
heaven, especially if one could in the picture take the music winds and
pines, twin minstrels, make). I love trees all the year through — in
spring when their coy green is hinted at rather than come ; in summer
when they make dense shadow and one might sleep from sunrise until
the night, nor have an intruding sunbeam peer into his face and make
him turn like a sleeper in pain; in autumn, when summer greens are
forgotten and trees are a sunset's splendor. I love this procession of
changing charm and meaning, but confess to the heterodoxy of believing
that winter trees are more beautiful to my eyes than those of spring,
summer, or autumn.

Tree branches are works of God's art than which even that Chief
Artist has done nothing lovelier, save only the face in child or woman.
All this beauty is lost in summer, like a woman's face hid under a
mourning veil. Than the tracery of elm twigs at the ends of curved
branches nothing could be more poetical. Think it not strange that
Turner and Ruskin should love trees to rapture; for in all the woods is
not one positively ungraceful tree The snarly gnarliness of certain
oaks minds a man of how true might grows when whipped with furious

42

DESOLATE

tempest; but they are far from
being unlovely. They mind me
of "Bob, Son of Battle." They
are in battle gusto and temper,
and love to fisticuff with storm
winds.

I do not well know the com-
mercial uses of trees, nor care
to. I know their character
product, which is more to my
purpose, for I am not commer-
cial; but with character I have
good need for forming comrade-
ship. Winter trees mean legiti-
mate strife Not the conten-
tion of the snarly and truculent,
not the tit-for-tat of the ruffian
who whips out sword and plies
it at a word, but the battle
method, which character never I
ceases to need; the battle that ?»

BIRCH-TREES
45

makes men and trees. War is an ingredient of souls, if souls are to
come to manhood. Every winter tree is like a man on guard at a
dangerous post No wind goes by, however sedate and conciliatory, that
the tree does not fling out naked arms of angry might before his face
and cry surlily, "Halt, who goes there?" and then the battle is fierce as
a Scotch clansman's onset. Winter trees make me proud of their grave
and reasonable pugnacity.

In winter is the time when most people get acquainted, I think.
The long evenings, and the shut-in firelight are conciliatory to friend-
ship and made for confidences. So it is natural in winter to grow
confidential with the trees. They then reveal their secret. Surly as
they look, you will not find them so if you will be companionable. Then
go out of town (trees stay in town because they are galley slaves
chained there). Go into the empty forest where a river runs (if Provi-
dence favor you so highly), and spend a day there, building a fire on
the sheltered side of some bank where the smoke curls on you, and the
delicious odors of the wood exhale, and the flame dances in the twist-
ing winds Let the day be gray. Cloudy days are the appropriate days
for making friendship with the trees. On open days the sky is too high,
too illuminated, there is no background for the trees; and besides the
sunlight makes shadow and gives wrong impression of twig, bark, and
limb The artists in their studios shut sunlight out. We who love the
trees must be as wise as they. When the gray clouds are just above
the tree tops, it is as if you looked at every tree against a background
of gray granite. A tree has its chance to declare itself as in a confes-
sional. There is no shadow ; and no light flames with its torch to make
wrong proportion, but it is as if twilight lit your lamp for you. On such
a day, wander, lover-like, among the trees, and they will be confidential
with you like women talking of their lovers. Give me a gray day with
its all-day twilight, and the naked might of forest, and I will not envy
kings their coronation.

A beech-tree is a picture. In the winter its sagging branches with
their gray-brown leaves hanging shiveringly, so wizen and little, like a
withered old man, and making their pitiful appeal as winds shiver by;
and its trunk like a pillar of dusk to hold the porch of the evening up.
Friend, if you do not know the beech-trees, you. have one acquaintance-
ship to contract wnich will do your life good. In autumn there is a
harvest sunlight on the beech leaves very fair to see, but after all the
beech trunk is the tree's treasure. I never pass a beech without a

46

BEECH-TREES

caress, for it is carven into
hundreds of hundreds of
cameos so lovely as that
they might each be a seal
for an artist's ring and
carven by Nassaro in the
days when his eyesight and
artist's instinct were perfec
tion This picture as you
see it is a hint only, for
every beech trunk has its
own wealth of cameos.
And you may use many a
daylight looking over their
patterns, just as you look
over the precious stones

in a cabinet, without any sense of weariness or
repetition.

A hackberry is a beautiful trunk This one is
a picture taken from my farm, though truth to say
it is the most beautiful hackberry bole I have ever
seen. Deep corrugations, as if sculptured by some
genius And indeed, so it was; for this genius
sculptor was God He is painter, poet, landscape-
gardener, botanist, lover of flowers, keeper of birds,

architect of mountains and stars, and sculptor
who fashions rocks, river beds, and sea cliffs, and
tree branches and cloud landscapes into artistic
and unfathomable loveliness. Each thing I see
him make seems his masterpiece, though I know
it is not that he has done above the ordinary for
him, but that I am filled with his glory of doing,
until 1 can contain no more, even as the sea's
channels can contain no more oceans.

A walnut-tree is very beautiful. Its corruga-
tions of bark, dark almost to blackness, are always
possessed of witchery to my eyes. I see through
the tree as if it were dusky amber, the black
tawniness of walnut wood. No wonder that
through centuries walnut has been favored wood;
for who that has eyes to see but must love it?
But walnut is never beautiful by the skill of man,
be that skill however great, as when it stands
solitary on the green woodland background of a
hillside, and I seem to see through the graven
rind its wine- dregs of wood, and feel its beauty as
I do the beauty of the dawn.

In winter, wild crab-trees are strong as
strength. Their trunks are usually twisted as if
some storm had wrenched them with violent and
outrageous hands, but the virile tree refused to be
twisted down, and wears its signs of struggle and
survival on its front like scars on a soldier's fore-
head. Why, a Greek wrestler's sinewy arm and
leg carved in bronze are not to my eyes so hercu-
lean and fascinating as a crab-apple trunk seen
under a winter's gray sky. When spring comes
and this bronze statue flashes into flower and
perfume such as even spring with her bewildering
riches of such, has only few of, — I do not thrill
to that exotic loveliness of bloom as I do to the
sheer bronze of the sinewy trunk, standing knee-
deep in winter's snows.

A soft maple is more beautiful in bark than
50

I \

mSjIm

A WALNUT

the sugar-tree, though its autumn
foliage lacks the wealth of glory of
the sugar-maple; but the bark,
specially of the branches, of a soft
maple is something fine as an
etching, and to use the exquisite,
exact, and poetical eyesight of
MAPLE "Gert Jan Ridd" (than whom,

none, not even Ruskin, sees nature with surer fidelity), is "like the bottom
of a red doe's foot." I can not speak of the maple bark to effect, nor can
it be photographed, nor painted, but I love to look on its finished beauty
by the hour, and hold my hand on its faint flame-color as if I were
warmed thereby. I make mention of this delicate bark, if haply I may
make more than myself lovers of this dainty doing of Nature's leisure

And the elm-tree is always bewitching. In summer, when you can
tell this tree far as you can catch the contour across the fields by the
grace of its pose, and its rhythmic swaying of branches as keeping time
to music we do not hear,— in winter the tree has its winter array No
tree in our woods has the beautiful network of branches the elm has.
Flung on the snow or seen against the blue sky or gray, it is as graceful
as any tree that spreads under the sky. Every branch has its own
household of tracery and delicacies of invention, for you shall find the
unexpected in the elm-tree's goings. No palm branch waved at temple
or at triumph, is fair as an elm branch. You can feast your eyes on it
as on the traceries of a frosty window-pane. To try to wrestle an elm-
tree down (despite its beauty, for beauty and virility do not often coin-
cide), seems something the storm-winds of summer or winter do not
have audacity to attempt. Elms have a firmer hold on the earth than
an oak. They dig for rootage deep and far. They pre-empt the land
where they sink their anchorage of roots. I do not recall to have seen
an elm-tree uprooted by tempests, though I have seen tall pine-trees
fallen like dead soldiers, and oaks lying, half-fallen or wholly, like a man
sorely wounded; but elms have a tenacity of fiber and a sagacity in
ramification of roots which all but defy storm-winds. Those who
would kill an elm, girdle it, though I resent their cowardly practice. It
seems so dastardly to open the veins of a man you have not the courage
to face nor the force to kill. The Cambridge elm, with its glory of
history seen through its leaves and sitting beneath its shadow, is scarcely
so engaging as the elms of the ordinary forest; for they are so beautiful
as to need no wealth of historical association to make them fair.

The bark of elms, in corrugation and in tint, is enough like the ruts
of dry country roads to be accused of plagiarism. Who knows but the
elm has wrapped about him a cloak worn by dusty summer? There is
in any case a dusty-road look to his garments, for which he must be
held to account. I like the fit and tone of his garment.

The oak-tree has the allegiancy of the centuries; for beneath its
shadows the Druids worshiped and built altars, as if it were half-deity,
or more. Words are weak as tears when they essay to tell an oak-
tree's epic. Bashan was land of oaks as Lebanon was land of cedars
but oaks are freesoilers. They live across the world They voyage to
all shores, and stand ready to greet the colonist when he sets foot upon
the strand. They met the Puritans, and DeSoto and Coronado, and
gave them welcome. Great ships have been debtors to them for hulls,

52

huge to withstand tempests; kings have wainscoated their palace walls
with these exquisitely striated woods ; and pictures that were priceless
have been framed in their tawny loveliness. Why, no picture can be
more beautiful than the graining of oak. To place it on a floor is a
sin; for it is like walking on a picture: but to wainscoat stately rooms
with it, and swing its perpetual beauty in doors to halls of festival, and
to build mantels and line ceilings, — that is just and legitimate In
seeing a winter oak you see all of the fine lines drawn by the graver's
tool of the great God, who has time off to spend in making the oak as
beautiful as inlaid work of pearl and onyx. And the great limbs billow
out shaggy and fierce, and their photogravure is something to dream of
by night. I know a nook near Cawker City, Kansas, a peninsula which
is almost an island by the tortuous winding of what used to be a stream
in those days when the rains drained them into stream-beds rather than
sinking into tilled fields; and here in a country almost devoid of trees,
is a bur-oak forest where great oaks grow, some of which fling shadows
seventy feet in diameter, and under whose shade a caravan might rest
under shadows so dense no ray of sunlight could peer through. This
oak-grove is worth making a pilgrimage to see; for I have not often
seen its equal anywhere across this continent. When winter winds
of might charge down on the forest, then an oak-tree laughs like a
lover, and shoots out his hundred furious fists until the storm-winds
are abashed. None must think to commiserate this battling giant.
Ulysses loved the battle of warring Trojans and stormy seas, but not
more than the oak-tree loves its conflict. These winter onsets are
better to him than dew, or rain, or gentle spring zephyrs. Through all
his huge trunk, fury runs. He drinks wine pressed from the grapes of
wrath ; and his huge arms hammer at the wind , and like the sound of
winds from the seas in the rigging of the ships, so shrills the wind
through the branches of this oaken harp. There is joy to the oak-trees
•when storm-winds blow.

Cottonwoods have a fan-top spread out in bare wantonness as if to
catch every wind that passed that way. Not summer is in winter
cottonwoods; for their summer minstrelsy is as rainfall in the dusk of
evenings; but exposing wide expanse of branches to the winds, winter
cottonwoods make grave and noble music. I think it strange how
.seldom these winter trees have broken branches lying beneath them ; in
other words, with what uniformity they conquer the winds. You would
not think those long, slender branches, seemingly so disqualified to

55

ff

il

*zr

withstand long months of sleep-
less conflict, are in fact quite
admirably qualified. These
wrestlings do them good. Brown-
ing was right when he lets old
rabbi Ben Ezra say,

" Then, welcome each rebuff

That turns earth's smoothness rough
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand.

but go '

Be our joys three-parts pain !
Strive, and hold cheap the strain:
Leam, nor account the pang: dare,
never grudge the throe !"

The hue of the hacked, horny
rind of the cottonwood trunk
near its base is all but black.
Some I have seen which were
nothing less, while their branches
are light to whiteness, a green-
ish silver, in fact; but a lamp
light with gentle glow to the eyes
that love to linger on them, so
that as seen in winter across a
field they stand white as wearing
light as a garment, and make all
trees about them to appear as

A WINTER COTTONWOOD
56

under a cloud, while only the cottonwoods stood in the sunlight. They
make the dawn and summer to rise upon me whenever I cast my eyes
their way, which is so often as to preclude enumerations. Cottonwoods
under cloud or light refuse to forget the sunlight. I think they remem-
ber the sunny Kansas plains where they are often the sole tree occu-
pants of wide wildernesses of grass. I can not be quit of the radiancy
of these trees, standing tall, and with what seems a promise of sun-
shine for all the woods. They are the true light-bearers. Because of
this peculiarity cottonwoods in winter days have a surprise about them
as though they had recently hailed from some land of delight, and kept
glad memories always smiling in their looks. I would it lay in me to
get people to watch the cottonwoods in winter as to listen to them in
summer. I know not which mood entices my spirit the more. In
summer when all is laughter the cottonwoods weep; in winter when all
things else are sad or angry, cottonwoods are laughing like a holiday.
They are the contradictions of the year; and may their beauty never
know a twilight !

Willows always interest me. They are a fragile wood, but who
would think so to see them travel along all shores ? They are like frail
men, who with a body as weak as that of William the Third do such
herculean labor as would incline you to think old Samson hugged at the
temple's pillars. Weakness hath its own puissance. Their sweet pen-
siveness, their graceful droop along every ravine, saying as plainly as
speech can say, "Where I throw my shadow you shall find a living
well;" their dainty lance-leaves, among the earliest greenery of spring,
and sometimes among the latest greenery of autumn, and in whose
shadows summer winds seem prone to fall asleep or loiter idly; their
dainty yellow of foliage of the autumntime, and their struggle with the
winter's wind without complaint, and with strange career of victory, are
things which should forever endear the willow to the lover of God's
Out-of-Doors.

A willow never stands erect. Either it can not or will not. I incline
to the belief that the latter is the correct view. As in the picture,
willows lean at an easy angle as in pensive mood. They dream, may-
hap, upon the da>s that are no more.

' ' 0, those old days ! Those near yet far off days !
Paged with dear legends, winsome with sweet ways!
When spendthrift hearts all went a-gypsying:
Cared naught for form or statute laws or king,
But lived in melodies.'"
57

Mayhap, it Is Of these days the willows
dream, but dream they do, summer or
winter They have a touch of pathos
in them evermore. The bark is like to
an elm so as to be easily mistaken for
it, and ashy- red in hue. These of the
picture are taken from "my farm" in
the ravine I set such store by, and
where in springtime the waters will pour
about them to their knees; and they
know it! They love that knee -deep
wading like little boys. In spring, with
their flash of early green, or in sum-
mer, with half slumber, and their
pensive droop of leaf and branch and
trunk — well, God did certainly deal ten-
derly with the willows, and made them
very fair !

The shell-bark hickory is the sur-
liest seeming tree in the wood, save
only the honey-locust, which is vindic-
tive and humanity-hating as Timon of
Athens, though when the fair summer
is blooming this misanthropic tree
flashes out in throngs of tiny leaves
almost as exquisite as ferns, and much
after their likeness. Not any tree has
any more beautiful leaves than a thorny
locust, so man-hating and beast-hating,
that even the merry squirrel can not
climb it, but in which birds build nests,
as in a citadel; for there the larger
birds can not come seeking prey, nor
the wise serpent. This evil, angry
tree so comes to serve good uses,
building with angry skill a fortress

where the gentle bh'ds may dwell in
quiet, far from enemies In the
winter season, however, nothing can
be less propitiating The thorn -spines
jag out in clusters on every angry bole
and branch.

But as I have said, next to the
locust is the shell-bark hickory Sum-
mer or winter it curls up its lips like a
bull-cur. As a child I used to be
insulted by them, though like crusty
people I have known, they would snarl
at you and make you merry at the
same minute; for when fall frosts whiten
the house-tops a little, I was wont to
go to the woods of the Marais Des
Cygnes and find a hail of hickory nuts
slanting to earth; and I would make
merry beneath the branches, getting
oftentimes a sound rap on the head
by a friendly nut on its way to the
autumn leaves lying thick upon the
ground. But surly the shell-bark
hickory is. Great flakes of its bark
curling inevitably from the trunk, as
you have seen old shingles curl from
an ancient roof, dyed black as darkness
in long years of rain and drench of
summer sun. Surly the shell-barks are,
but beautiful. I have loved to love
them more than I will here set down,
lest some who read should think me
foolish; I pass no one of them in my
wanderings without stopping to watch
its ill-fit of garments and truculence of
demeanor. A baby shell-bark is

smooth as any other hickory,
but grows not long till it
begins to snarl at passers
by, at which time it is ridic-
ulous to me and makes me
giggle. This snappishness is
like a pretty woman's pout-
ing, attractive as laughter.
And when a shell-bark sap-
ling is, say, twenty feet high, I have seen a bark which would suit the
glad fancies of an artist. Lichens of select sort gather on their curl-
ing rinds, yellowish and greenish lichens being favorites, and when
these are on the bark and out under winter rains, they become beauti-
ful as photogravures. If you suppose that, one shell-bark seen, all are

60

LOCUST

seen, you were never more mistaken. Each has its charm like man
and woman. There is no duplicating. God makes his creations to be
like the marked copies of de luxe editions. Shell-barks are among
the treasures of my woods, and among the richest riches of winter
forests.

Not lightly to estimate these winter riches, I would profess that of
all winter trees the sycamore is most beautiful. In Indiana, on the
Wabash, they are at their kingliest I have not seen their equals.
There they grow stately with few limbs, and the sycamores stand pillars
of carven marble. The sycamore is to me a fascinating tree for two
special reasons. First, where he lives, and second, how he does.
Oaks and elms and walnuts are like God's common people — plenty of
them and everywhere. They grow down in broad valleys, on the edge
of the stream; they are on the hillsides climbing the bluffs; they are on
bluff edges; they are in ravines far back from any stream where they
can find an unpre-empted field for woodland; there they dig into the
earth, loam or clay, rock or woodland. Not so a sycamore, which will
not of its own accord grow on hills or run up a bank from a stream.
The sycamore hugs the water courses. Not, be it observed, as the
willow which grows in ravines, where waters sometimes run down in
marshy ground, and always knee-deep in ravines or streams, being very
ducks for loving water; for sycamores rarely or never stand in either
streams or swamp places. They are coy, and stand a few feet up and
back from the river's bank. They grow where water stays. You will
not find them in ravines whose custom is to go dry in summer. Where
waters stay, there sycamores stay. These waterways of the sycamore
are of singular interest, as I think any one who studies them will agree.
A wide valley on river-levels you will find thick sown to sycamores
across its entire breadth, for here they reach water. A stream-edge will
be sentineled with sycamores rooting above the stream, but very often
leaning over the water so as to see their own faces. Infrequently I have
seen them on so-called second bottoms, but as a very general rule
where a bluff begins to climb, a sycamore refuses to follow. Only the
other day, happening to be on the railroad that ran along the beautiful
Gasconade, I watched this fine power of selection of sycamores — know-
ing what they want and getting it. And I saw their white pillars flash
snowy against the gray skyline, or the rocky cliffs, or the dim black
woodlands as they trooped along the river, never letting on they had a
purpose, but always having one, huddling together; for in this they are

61

cliqueish folk (a thing I can not praise since it is quite un-American).
They are, moreover, lovers of ease, and scarcely working folk; but brave
aristocrats they are, stately as Colonial dames, and as unbending as
royal etiquette. But they held to the river and its valley. Only once
did I see a dwarf on a hillside not many feet above the level of the water,
and it was ashamed and seedy like a poor relation and expatriated.
Sycamores can not rough it, and unless planted there will not grow on
uplands, but when planted thrive admirably. Of their own liking they
will not attempt unaccustomed fields. I have, at rare intervals, seen
them climb up a bluff, but it was as if they had walked there in their
sleep. The second strange thing about sycamores is their habits of
dress. The habit of putting on thick garments, as other folks do in the
cold season when winds are keen, and all agree with Hamlet, "It is a
nipping and an eager air," sycamores will have nothing of They don
their heavy garments in summer, and strip them to the skin in winter.
I think that one of the strangest freaks of freakish nature Even Indians
are not so outrageous of the rights of winter. What evolutionist (allwise
as they are and omniscient beyond their Maker), can explain such a
performance on the theory of the survival of the fittest? Summer is
the time for sycamores and other people to strip for bathing in the
streams, but winter bathing — why, my friends, the sycamores, you shock
me and you make me shiver. I feel cold with my clothes on, and you
are naked as Greek wrestlers. What a talent for individuality of pro-
cedure these sycamores have! We must allow that they have inde-
pendency in their character. In autumn, when winter throws out a
premonitory hoar frost to signify he is in the neighborhood, then the
sycamores begin to disrobe. They take off their garments by stealth,
as a maniac does. You can not, unless you are a close observer and
look very narrowly, find a shred of their bark under the trees, and when
they are done with their denudation you will probably not find one scrap
of their garments. Watch them and see. They are strange folks. I
watch them as if they were in politics. Then when they are as nude as
nakedness, they are as beautiful as morning. Not the pilaster of a
temple, snow-white under radiant skies of Italy is so white as these
sycamore pillars. They stand tall as if they were hewn from ice-drifts,
or snow-drifts, or marble-quarries. Sometimes, however, they are not
snow-white, but a sort of shaded green, a flesh green, as I may say, for
they look for all the world like flesh, and stand faint emerald against the
sky like a forecast of spring. But whether flesh green or marble white,

62

SYCAMORES

they are bewitching and satisfying. Who knows not the sycamore is to
be pitied? He has missed so much

"The pillared dusk of sounding sycamores,"

of which the laureate sings, is not so beauty-burdened as the stately
temple-pillars, lifting taper marble up as worthy for some Phidias to
plant upon their Doric trunks some stately frieze wrought into pana-
thenaic processions. Who would have thought of such a thing as a
sycamore, save God only?

"The birds and beasties " of winter woods are accessories not to be

forgotten "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,"
are visible in plenty. In summer these nests were hid from the eyes "of
the wise and prudent," but now are open to everybody's gaze. There
is no secrecy. In the leafless hedgerow is the thrush's nest, and down
by the stream is the bluebird's house, and the crow's log-house of knotty
and unworkmanlike construction is seen from the treetops. Crows are
bold builders. They haunt treetops as swallows the eaves. These nests
seem so ill-built that one would tumble down if a flapping wing of its
own builder were to cuff it unwarily, but, as experience shows, are so
sturdily constructed that all the winter's tempests leave them in good
repair. These crows are deceiving folks. We thought they tumbled
their houses together in an unworkmanlike fashion, when lo, we found
they built against seasons and naked winters, and storm-wind's brow-
beating. And the crow is in the- winter woods. His Satanic blackness
glares through the naked woods, and makes a sort of plaintive picture.
He flies low over the trees of winter and settles often for caucus or
religious meeting, — I really never have been able to tell which. But I
am not his chaplain ; so it makes not much matter.

And the redbird flings himself through the network of branches,
like a firebrand borne by daylight; and his whistle is always as from a
cheery heart. The cardinal is warming to the eyes, and his carelessness
of weather makes him to me fraternal. I defy weather, only asking
that there be weather. The kind is not for rne to say, seeing I am not
the weather bureau; but some kind of weather, fair, foul, wintry, windy,
quiet; snow, rain, sleet, are little odds to me; I enjoy them all, and go
out in one with the same delight as in the other. Each has its impact
with my spirit. The cardinal cheers himself not with the hope of spring
coming, but with the delight of winter here. All seasons make love to
him and he to all seasons ; and when he flings his torch across the gray-

65

black winter branches, and flies like an arrow of fire, shot by a hidden
bowman, all the gray woods are lit up and radiant

And the junco (I call him so by sort of conventionality as a tribute
of social order, but call him by sweet familiarity, the snow-bird), so
I love him. The snows and he blow in the same wind. The fiercer
the wind the more rollicking his demeanor. Storms are fiddle-music
to his jigging feet Some birds shun winter and love summer. A
snowbird shuns summer and loves winter. He seeks winter in sum-
mer. He is a hard-weather bird, like a stormy petrel. Sparrows in
winter cling to hedges and to sheltered places, if there be any; but snow-
birds get out where the winds sweep wildest, and the snow curls like
white soot, sicked on by furious blasts. Then the snowbird revels and
is glad. How often I have watched him and rejoiced in his pluck!
Such a little laddie, but such a laughing courage, like a drummer lad in
the battle's front.

Squirrels, rabbits, coons, and sometimes the barking wolf, with its
wild-dog waggishness, cross and recross these wintry, snowy woods, their
tracks returning on each other as in frantic glee. A rabbit is a timid
jester, but loves a joke, and in moonlight forgets his fear and keeps
tryst, and pounds the ground with his heels in a sort of bellicose
hilarity. 0, there are good times in winter woods — just as good times
were had in the old pioneer days, with sleigh rides, and bussing-bees,
and spellings-down. With trees in battle, birds and beasts making
merry in the storm, you will do well to call winter a summer of
delight.

When slow mists make tree trunk and branch a sheet of ice, and
when rain comes after mists and thickens the ice into a sword-sheath
thickness, and trees stand against the light armed in silver, then might
a dumb man sing for joy. Watch this glow against the sun, and hear
this crash of battle-hour when their naked sword-blades smite together
in indignant warfare, see them clad in "light as in a garment," and you
wonder what God does not think of. What God does not think of none
need desire to invent. These icy armors are brilliant as any old-time
armorer could make of silver, and this is a world lit with silver, green,
and blood, and crossed with march of winds, and the tangle of branches,
and the silver bird's nests, and cornfields standing erect as soldiers on
duty with silver plumes, and the wide-armed oak harnessed in silver, but
nothing daunted. When sleets are on, the world is transfigured and the
heart rejoices above the spring. Or when snows stream over the skies

66

and smoke through the tree tops and make all the weeds and bushes
stoop under their weight of whiteness, and the boughs of the forest droop
under their weights of snow as under weights of superabundant fruitage,
and the lanes of the woods are dusk at noon when the snows come in
silence, but with the dim lights of sunsets and after, and earth seems a
memory, so far off it feels, then the woods are bewilderments. They
are not kin to what we had known them. We could not recognize these
as the woodland ways our fond feet had trodden so often All is new
and strange, and we wander as those who have set foot on shores undis-
covered till now. When snows dim all the sky and hide far and near in
fogbanks of white wonder, then, friend, go into the woods and see them
keep tryst with the snows and keep thy lips closed as in inaudible prayer,
and walk quietly (for you can do no other when snows carpet the dead
leaves), and have a hush of spirit before God as if you walked cathedral
solitudes. And when bitter-sweet

"Hangs its tufts of crimson berries"

and buckberries wear their surly reds, and the red-oaks hold their leaves
and shiver night and day as with perpetual ague ; and when the storms
roar and are angry, and the trees rush out with ecstasy of gladness to
give battle to the winds; then winter trees are glorious, and I watch them,
and fellowship with them, and bless my God I live where winter comes,
and where deciduous trees are plentiful, and where simple beauty gives
way betimes to massive, yet beautiful might Then commend me to
the battle and fury and anthems of the winter trees.

THROUGH THE PINE WOODS
67

GOLDEN-ROD

GOLDEN-ROD

'OBODY has been considerate enough of a
wise curiosity to tell us why in autumn the
purples and yellows are the lavish colors. I
would thank some of the knowing for such
item of information. But certain I am that
the autumn flowers riot in yellow hues. They
have caught the sun in their heart through
all the golden summer, — have caught every
beam coming their way and held each as the
naiads held fair Hylas what time he bathed
him in Scamander, while his
purple chlamys lay upon the
shore. The autumn flowers
seem never to forget a syllable
of sunlight any more than love
forgets a syllable of wooing; and in the
Fall in blooming they rehearse all
they have heard, as lovers tell

each other all the sweet words the other had written

or said, while each listening says, "Did I say that?

and when? and you remembered?" — and then they

kiss each other on the lips. So the sunflowers and

black- eyed susans and the golden-rods save up and

rehearse the sunshine of the year. Bless them for *

their tenacious memories.

Golden-rod may be deleterious to hay fever

votaries, but is sympathetic and friendly to those

of us who indulge in no such lachrymose luxury.

Well people have some rights, though they are

73

stem

seldom considered. Some slight consideration
should be shown the healthy, and their wishes con-
sulted at far-removed nows and thens. The golden-
rod is one of my delights. From the time the first
slender spike flashes its light upon the eyes to the
last burnt-out splendor drooping shamed upon its
, I keep them in my study. I love their warm
light — their laughter in bloom (for so their
glow impresses me). I do not feel obligated
to tell why I love what I love, and if pressed
by some purist, I will not, but if let alone will
probably disclose the secret of my passion.

I love golden-rod because there is plenty of
it, and 1 like plentiful things; hence, children,
men, women, trees, stars, common-place things
and people are dear to me. Golden-rod
blooms mainly in flocks, as pigeons fly, and in
many flocks, along fences, in pastures, by
woods, in the woods, along highways (thank
them for that courtesy). They are as the
poet who pipes as the hedge sparrow does,

"/ build my house by the side of the road."
Where the dust clouds and chokes you on
the long sun-burnt road, golden-rod will toss out
its yellow light like some one you love looking
at you through an open window.
Golden-rod grows all across our
America, in the north and south, in
Maine and California. It is a hardy
traveler. It dogs man's steps.
Trailing arbutus grows in
New England and the north-

- ---

•Jff:

east, but comes not out west (shame on
the aristocracy of this sweet prisoner of
humility); and the dumb fox-glove is a resident
only in limited quarters; but golden-rod is a beautiful
democrat, and comes wherever we are, and makes
glad at our door, and kindles its wonderment of color
to the whole continent's delight. Golden-rod is the
common folk's flower, like the hollyhock and old-
fashioned roses and almost forgotten four o 'clocks.
There is rare grace in a frond of the golden-rod.
Did you ever notice that? Did you ever see a
gawky golden-rod? I never have. Its spike of
flowers leaning a little in half bashfulness, though
standing so tall and stately, — this pose is itself a
picture. I do wonder if these smiling lovelinesses
are sitting for their pictures? I will not believe
so, for I think them too frank by odds to be
dramatic. But if you care to sketch the golden- 41
rod, hit or miss, you will be impressed by the /
continuity of gracefulness. What glorious * ;
golden-rod I have gathered in Connecticut, near
beautiful Canaan, where the hills are sponges which
squeeze out springs and rivulets and rushing streams,
and where at night you can • hear the dim calling of
the waterfalls through the cloudy darkness where
the stream tumbles down a bank in its hurry to reach
the Housatonic; and what torches have I seen and
gathered in the White Mountains in sight of Mount
Washington! I do believe that had I carried them
in the dark for a torch they would have lit the way
like a flaming pine knot; but they have lit my

\

heart on many a dark night in winter, when the wind whistled and
shivered, and the shutters slammed against the house in dismal din.
And 1 have gathered golden-rod on the heights of Quebec, hard by
where brave Wolfe fell, and down the St. Lawrence toward the northern
sea, and on Mt. Desert Island, neighboring the rocky cliffs and melan-
choly pines, and beside beautiful Champlain and back in the Adiron-
dacks where the world seemed removed across some wide,. wide sea, and
in the Rockies where the continent billowed toward the skies, and the
crest forgot to sink, and along the Great Lakes where the billows call
like a sea, and on the fringe of the great desert with its parched lips and
cheeks where fever burns forever, and along the Wabash with its stately
tulip-trees and sycamores, beautiful as the pillars of the Parthenon, and
along the Sacramento as it widens seaward, beside the Potomac as it
stops a moment tenderly to lave the bank on whose sloping side Wash-
ington lies buried, and on the Hudson when the Palisades were all in
conflagration in autumn days, and on my own beloved prairies stretching
mile on mile through Indian summer haze — so widely have I gathered
the golden-rod, and reverently hope I may be commissioned to gather
its golden sprays in heaven ; so shall I feel quite at home.

I GO A-FISHING

I GO A- FISHING

0 tell the truth, scarcely a fisherman's bent as
you will suggest, I am an ill fisherman. I would
not decoy some ardent lover of rod and line to
read these inconsequent lines, thinking I was
piscatorial artist, or that I had fast friendship
* with our good friend, quaint and gentle, Ike
Walton. We are bare acquaintances. I met
him once, once only, along the river Dove tak-
'"***"" ing a grayling from his hook, and so not seeing

me, for so true a fisherman was always more
engrossed with fish than men (nor do I blame

him); and I was only wandering along the stream watching the shadows
on the quiet water and the pools where sunlight came and staid as taking
a whole day of holiday. No, I know as little about fishing as about
botany. I know not what sort of bait catches what sort of fish. I
seldom get a nibble, and much more rarely get a fish, though Provi-
dence knows I wish the fish knew how safe it is to intrust themselves to
my hook, for I throw back into the stream, with scant reluctance, the
fish I catch. I am much more pious and tender-hearted than your piety-
professing fisherman, who, while he talks gently of the "gentle art," kills
whom he surprises, like any other bandit, and lays snares like an assas-
sin, and fresh in iniquity says his prayers like a murderer making the
sign of the cross above the corpse he has made. No, I never knew
•enough, or so little, I know not which, as to succeed in catching fish,
yet I say boldly, though as I hope with modesty, that I can throw a line
into the water and let it stay there with a degree of resolution worthy of
a French cavalier of the reign of Louis the Saint. To state the facts
irankly, as becometh a Christian, I, having had many friends who were

81

valorous fishermen, am persuaded that it is next door to an impossibility
to be a chronic fisherman and not become a chronic hyperbolist (I use
this term out of my love for my fishermen friends, and my disinclina-
tion to use the more ordinary and direct word which differs in no slight-
est shade of meaning. I refer to the little radical among the words
which is pronounced liar). There must be some men of unimpaired
virtue (1 do not speak this in any haughty spirit). Truthfulness, like
persecuted goodness, must have some fortress to which to retreat ; and
in claiming to be an unsuccessful fisherman it occurs to me that it has
become apparent that I am this rocky fortress of incorrupted truth.
Fish and men, specially the fish, may depend on me, I absolutely re-
fuse to prevaricate unless it be entirely convenient.

If I have been digging for morals when I should have been digging
bait and baiting my hook, I beg to suggest I have been decoyed to it
by the moralizing moods of the professional fisherman. He always acts
as if he fished from the same motive as he says his prayers, namely,
piety ; though I for my part think it a slimy trick to hide play under the
cloud of devotion. If men will fish let them not preach and attempt to
persuade others they are doing it as an act of religion. To be Shake-
spearean (a manner quite foreign to me), " Methinks they do profess too
much." I knew a truthful fisherman once (he is dead); and I feel
honor bound to prepare him an epitaph, though not at this time. But a
truthful fisherman has a right to pass into the list of heroes who over-
bore environment and gave the lie to centuries of precedent.

I have some friends, good men and true at home and in business,
but who seem to cast from them all their fine ethical distinctions so
soon as they get a fish pole in their hands ; and when they have donned
fisherman's boots and have hold on a reel, then farewell, beautiful truth.
As soon as they smell fish their truthfulness evaporates, or at all events
disappears, and I think the most scientific explanation of its disappear-
ance is to ascribe it to evaporation which goes on so systematically on
the water, as is known to all students of meteorology. These friends of
mine fish in remote waters, where, because of the remote distances and
the lack of shipping facilities, the spoils can not be sent to admiring
friends. The fisherman is thought to be by nature a sociable biped, and
generous in delivering up his ill-gotten gains to those who sunburned
not neither baited a hook. But these good men and true must smother
their generous impulses. They are perforce reduced to the necessity of
eating their own catch, or giving most of it to aborigines who inhabit the

82

distant lands neighboring on the great water where this whaling expedi-
tion does business in ships. Do not think me skeptical. I am no
Montaigne ; but 1 state plainly, I mislike this manner. It looks theat-
rical. Out of this remote water, as I have suggested, they bring no fish.
We can all testify that when they fish in streams near at hand they
bring no fish ; and without desiring to call in question their veracity,
when they tell thrilling experiences with monster pickerel and musca-
longes and other finny gentry, "I doubt and fear" (perverted from
Burns). They dazzle me with their fine powers of romance. They would
have charmed our friend Sir Walter Scott with their powers of inven-
tion. However, they lack variety. There are evi-
dently about the same size and temper and fight-
ing quality of fish in all these distant fish •
ing grounds. The same struggle besets
all these doughty spirits who fight with
rod and line. They find no new dragons,
but are satisfied with the old ones. Why,
Monsieur Athos could have told them a
thing The Three Guardsmen were fertile
liars, which is a thing I delight in if one
attempts that style of art (though I do not praise
it. Let us have truth is my motto, which I
commend with all heartiness to my many
friends after having practiced it for forty to
sixty days each year for a year or so). They
tell the same story, these truthful fishermen.
Besides this, they suborn witnesses (yet I like not the THE SPOILS
sound of that word, it seems harsh, though indeed I mean it only in
gentle courtesy as a method of expressing the facts); but they return
to their neglected home fishless, sunburnt, truculent lest you believe not
their fishing reminiscences, and on one occasion brought letters of refer-
ence for proof of their valiant exploits from the proprietor of the boats
used, from the postmaster, from the hostelkeeper, from the guide, from
the cook, and from sundry other functionaries ; but when on discreet
investigation (for I am of a stern and unyielding virtue in these mat-
ters), it was found that boat owner, postmaster, hostelkeeper, and the
remaining witnesses were one and the same man; and on being con-
fronted with this stern truth these men thrust each other in the ribs
and laughed to tears at the wickedness of their conceits. Such things

83

grieve me. I fear there will be no fishermen In heaven except our
elderly friend Peter, who. being himself a fisherman, may in fellow
feeling let them slip through his fingers after the manner of fish.

But not to continue this secular pursuit of discovering such depravi-
ties (of which there would be no end), save so as to show why my virtue
is always at white heat — however cold the thermometer may be — and
that I will not be decoyed irito a sport which serves, if indulged in with
sufficient persistency, to eradicate the last faint vestige of truthfulness
from the heart of the votary. Truth must still have an ad-
vocate. I will not lie except at intervals and under severe
provocation ; and so I will not fish

1 start in a leisurely fashion ; for haste is foe to good
fishing. To have a deliberate air is impressive to fish.
1 make haste slowly therefore. I am not eager to be
known as starting on a voyage of fishing ; for such
enterprise engenders hallucinations of imagination as
to the results of your expedition (in the minds of
the populace). I move out calmly, like a ship
starting from its harbor toward high seas. A
sweet lady I know smiles at me going, with a touch
of irony in her face, and a boy picking up chips
on the beach pauses (much to his content, for he
does not admire work) in his efforts, to give me a
quizzical look, and a girl smiles at me with a wave
of hand good to look upon; and I go past the board
walk where the beech- trees grow and cast gentle
shadows, and down the lane of sand hills peaked with
pines, and loiter along with scant precipitancy as befits
a man going on such solemn business as fishing; for as
Ike Walton has shown, fishing is the soul of solemnity, and
is after all no sport, but life's real and serious business. We
must not therefore approach such vocation with the least spirit of levity.
I sight the river with reeds growing solid green along far banks where
the stream bends in gentle curves like a boat's prow, and rest my heart
in taking a long breathing view of the lake whose waters tilt against the
sky green as bulk glass, and let the cool wind from its bosom lave me
as if it were a wave washing some point of shore; and then I bethink
me that I have no bait nor any line nor any rod, and turn back in medi-
tative mood so as not to appear disconcerted. I reach home, take these

84

inconsequential items as a conventional matter wholly ; and now having
rod and line and bait I slip out at the rear of my house and slink around
out of sight that no one see my implements of the chase (the aqueous
chase), and sidle toward the river.

I consider myself adroit to the point of genius in the matter of bait.
I think I ought to say that. Brains will tell even in the matter of going
fishing. While supposedly adroit fishermen keep every sort of fly and
deception for beguiling wary fish, I, believing that I have not been
weighted down with intellectuality for naught, sagaciously (I have under-
scored that word, not through conceit, but through honest speaking),
take for my bait mutton. This I do because mutton is so ambiguous,
so versatile. When I have mutton (in my pocket tied up daintily as a
man will tie things up, in a piece of newspaper, believing that even
dead sheep should have culture opportunities), I can boldly cast for all
sorts of fish inhabiting lake or stream. For certain sturdy, aged, self-
reliant fish, male fish,
I bait with mutton and *
can call it ram. This
bait brings experience
and pugilistic propen-
sionstothehook. When
I wish to catch young
and tender fish I retain the same bait on my hook ( I never change bait
while it can remain on the hook. I think changing bait a breach of
etiquette to the bait). While bait lasts it stays on my hook. I am
courteous in all details of life. So here, I retain the bait, but speak in
bleating tones and call it lamb. When I wish to approach bachelor fish
with years of conquest and satiety on them I call the bait ewe. When
I appeal to the gentler sex among the fish I call the bait wether. When
I angle for plebeian fish I state with democratic candor, "This is mut-
ton." The result is practical all the same. I have equal success with
the varied fish and varied ages, and I think you must see that I am not
nagged by the occult study of what bait to use. And I am successful
as success goes with me in a heterogenous fashion, and I have the
feeling that in so doing I have exhibited a manly individuality even in
baiting my hook.

So with my versatile bait I set out. One rod and line suffice. I
always have a cork because I like to see it bob. Things seen are
mightier than things felt (quoted in part from some poet), and I enjoy

85

seeing the energetic twitching of the cork (red and green duly mixed
preferred), for it reminds me of the motion of a fish's fins. I put the
hook in the water, which is the stereotyped way of doing when one fishes,
though I have very often had the same degree of success when I have
left the hook on land. I thrust the pole into the shore with a jab which
insures the pole staying, whatever the cork does. Having done this, a
glow of virtue suffuses my frame as it does with a man who has gone to
church with his wife. 1 have done my duty. What need I do more ?
The line is in the water ; the pole is in the bank ; and I am on the bank
near the pole. Now let the fish do his duty. Let him make the cork
bob; let him, 1 say, for I shall exert myself no more. I am fishing.
Here I sit. Except for nettles, I am complaisant and self-righteous.
If the fish do their duty and measure up to their responsibility, why then
the cork bobs, whereat my fisherman luck is satisfed, and my passion
of sportsmanship is in a manner allayed. I consider the desire ex-
hibited among many fishermen to catch fish to be a rabid species of
militarism which I can not approve. Seeing the fish had expressed
neither viva voce nor aqua voce, a desire for the mild rule of my flag or
frying pan, I can not think of thrusting my sovereignty on them by im-
paling them on a hook, for this would be a glaring instance of militarism
and expansion ; and I am too true a mugwump (?) to be a friend to
either. No, fishermen have missed the point of the argument. Catch-
ing fish is not the end of fishing, Seeing the cork bob is the end of
fishing, and is the whole duty of the fisherman. Here is an advanced
idea which I hope may revolutionize the piscatorial art. New ideas I
know are frequently received with hostility. Great ideas often are. I
anticipate antagonism. I do not care. I may be a martyr, but no
matter. I reaffirm I do not care. I have the martyr's spirit. My an-
cestors were buccaneers and their valor survives in me, and if a sort of
fishy martyrdom awaits me for the bold, unflinching, intrepid, deter-
mined presentation of this grand and revolutionary thought, I will sit by
my bobbing cork and wait my death calmly. So strong is virtue.
When the cork bobs I feel a sense of relief as of a duty per-
formed in a satisfactory and even in a praiseworthy manner. I
shall now feel free to go on with my fishing. If the cork does not
bob I feel free from responsibility. I have done my duty. My business
is to bait the hook, not to bite at the bait. Let every fish bear his own
burden. Nor am I a monopolist. My soul spurns that thought. I have
done my part: I will not monopolize functions. Let the fish have room

86

for the play of his powers. The hook is in the water. I have done my
part and done it well. I will leave results to the fish ; so that I (with
that sagacity which marks my proceedings) take my book from my
pocket — I have brought it for such occasion. If the fish are idle I must
not emulate their example. I will read my friend Stephen Phillips.
His pastorals shall be my chore. Now when I have a book which, to
change my friend Milton's phrase, in harmony with my environment (I
use that word not as knowing its meaning, but because I have seen it in
print and once heard it mentioned by a speaker, now sick with the
grippe — a book is the solace of those tardy hours in which a fisherman
awaits the desultory humors of the fish); "Having a book" (quoted
from my preceding remarks), I am well pleased and go on with my

ALONG THE STREAM

fishing. We shall get on well to-day. However inattentive to their
duty the fish are, I will not be inattentive to mine. I will read a spell.
My friend William Wadsworth was a fisher of my sort — he walked
along the streams, loved them and dreamed of them ; and I will in defer-
ence to his good taste read him betimes. Now fishing seems a levity.
I leave the fish to their own devices. The cork may bob or sink for
all of me. I do not care. Virtue is its own reward. I have baited the
hook and have placed it in the watery element (whatever that is). Can
any ethical code demand more ? To do more would be a work of
supererogation, and I always hold that works of supererogation are void.
I will now rest until the sun gets in my eyes and the perspiration (peri-
phrasis for sweat), starts from my face, whereupon with a fine courtesy
worthy of Chesterfield I will move out of the sun's way. If I am not a
gentleman I am nothing, though I desire to make no boast.

87

Sometimes for the sake of cultivating versatility in location though
not in result, I take up my traps and find a new bank to sit upon and
listen to the whine of the wind in the pine-trees (O the infinite sadness
of it!), or walk on and see the stream edge its way to the base of a
sand dune where not a grass tussock roots in the shifting sands, which
climbing, 1 see some friends I love, fishing at long distance, and out-
ward the sweep of the wondrous lake with sand dunes sowing the shore
with melancholy, or half inland again see the river moving meditatively
toward the lake with its quiet meadows edging its quiet goings. Here
the swallows skim and the birds build and rejoice, and the white clover
and the full-sapped milkweed vie with each other in their donative of
odors. There the pine-trees clump together in neighborly fashion and

whisper (sweet, sweet, their whis-
per is) together concerning sor-
row they have shared together,
and a crow flaps lazily along the
sky to some lonely pines across
the river But I must not dally.
I am a fisherman. I must to my

vocation , and I go down to where my boat is anchored in lush grasses
and unmoor it, and trail my line in the water what time I row leisurely
where the fishes ought to be. If they come not to me I go to them.
And the lap of the water against the prow is delicious, and the wind
from the lake drifts up stream like a wind taking holiday, and the waters
are clear and dainty, and heaven leans and looks full-face into the
stream. Do you own a boat, friend? Then you are rich. I feel poor
no longer since this boat swung at the end of my rusty chain, and the
oars across its breast were mine. And I forget to fish, but remember
to dream, and the landscape is fair enough to be part of heaven, and the
sky is utter blue and utter high, and the lake can be seen at a distance
leaning over to look at me, and the sole pine-tree stands a sentinel of

88

sorrow. I am glad in my heart I came a-fishing. This is sport. But
I am fishless — though that is a trifle not worth mentioning.

There is another affable way of fishing I have often practiced and
which I can commend. The modus operand! is as follows : Take your
pole across your shoulder, let the line dangle so the hook is free to catch
in the limbs of the trees and bushes as you walk along. The extracting
of the hook will occupy your hands; for "Satan finds some work for
idle hands to do:" and so I always think it wise to leave the line dangle
and keep my hands employed. This has saved me from many a snare.
Thus fortified for the fishing voyage, I go boldly near a stream. I walk
along its banks. I watch the shimmer on the stream, and the shadows
flung in the waters by the banks. A bunch of white flags sometimes
(and what lily-white blosoms these water-loving flags wear!) and some-
times a bank of sand touches the water, and is covered with bluebells
which cast their lovely shadows in the stream. God is the first of the
photographers. The smell of damp earth is in my nostrils, and the odor
of the mints on which I walk. A bird flings across my face so that his
wings almost touch me as he whirs by, and a redbird whistles as if he
were joking with you. And the swallows circle with an almost musical
motion, and the fair clouds lie listless as if absent on a day of quiet, and
the hill climbs up from the stream's edge into a tangle of thicket and
brier and moss, and the leap of some brave tree going toward the light
with ragged branches, or a meadow smiles across the stream, and a
woodland clouds with its green against the sky across the field. And I
throw the rod down and forget it and wander smiling along as a pair of
lovers, and gather flowers and find a red clover alone and gather it out
of sheer courtesy, or surprise, or love (what matters which?). Or a
bird's nest decoys me through the dark deeps of woods. And the
stream laughs along. And you, looking at the sky, step unwittingly into
its waters and like the souse of the water in your shoes. Fishermen of
high grade are careless of wet feet ; and besides, dew is in the thicket
and on the grass, and drops from the trees, and how can you help hav-
ing wet feet ? And not to have them is to play at fishing. Let us be
in earnest whatever we do. Let us not act at fishing ; let us fish. I
always do. Wade across the stream often if you can without total im-
mersion. That will bring you into contact with the native element of fish,
and may give you the smell of their scales ; but you can get wet, and
that is desirable, for you feel fishy and the feeling is the main thing in
fishing. I follow the winding of the stream. I go and caress the

89

beech-tree as if it were a child, arid the walnut-trees with their corru-
gated barks, and the silver bark of the birch. I talk to the birds that
eye me slyly, calling them by name. I scramble up banks, and fall down
hills — that is rare exercise. If I tear my trousers it gives me a positive
feeling of self-respect, for so the acrobats do, and boys and fishermen ;
and to be of this company is honor enough to be sung by troubadours ;
but where are the fishing pole and the line with its pith and point? I
laid them down, bless me I know not where Forgetfulness is a sign of
genius. Is it not glory enough to be born under the zodiacal sign of the
fishes? But where is that pole? To go home fishless and poleless is
like going to one's grave unwept. I will hunt that pole, but will now
pause to eat a sandwich. A good man who fishes should always take a
snack. It is sociable. You eat it yourself, and that has a radiant look
of hospitality. If you go fishing alone (which is the real etiquette of
fishing), it may seem selfish. But when you sit eating your lunch, that
is sociable. Your self-respect and spirit of genuine generosity are now
restored. There is a feeling of hospitableness when a lone fisherman
fishes out of his pocket a lunch which he has filched (not to say fished)
from his wife's cupboard. Besides, you feel self-sacrificing, for you are
eating for two to keep up the idea of friendliness And a lunch tastes
good under such circumstances. I make my appeal to all candid men,
if I am not speaking the truth when I say so. One combines business
and pleasure and philosophy in a solitary lunch; and the better the lunch
is the more business, philosophy, and pleasure there are. But where is
the pole? That is a thing to consider; but deep thought is not con-
ducive to good digestion, hence banish thought of the pole. Away,
base care ! On with the lunch ! Let hospitality
be encouraged ! There is yet a sliver of bread
or a piece of chicken to be dealt with.
On with the lunch ! And a chipmunk
standing inquiringly, and I may say
impertinently on end (and I may say
on the right end), looks inquiringly
at my book and at my lunch and at
me. I really have never settled the
literary preierences of the chipmunk,
though I think I could if I tried. A
kingfisher dashes down to the river
from a stump where he has been

sitting so sedately. I really suppose that seeing
me eat has made him hungry. He will have his
lunch too. But the light on the water is sweet to
see, and the ripples run like laughter over the
river's face, and the cattails not yet tailed stand
sedately like folks at a funeral, and the blue of the
sky is clouding for rain, and a drop from the cloud
is on my face, and the gray sky is beautiful as a
Vision of the twilight — and where is the pole? I
will leave a crust of bread and a chicken bone on the
bank. The chipmunk has been neighborly, maybe
he will like it; and I will throw some shreds of my
lunch into the water as an offering to the fish.
They have given me a rare morning. The line is
not wet, but I am, and the fish have not been be-
guiled, for I have not grown vicious yet and baited
my hook. But I'll be blessed if I know where the
pole and the line and the hook are ; and I will go and
hunt them. And after a series of meanderings in
mind I conclude they may be in one of seventeen
places, which is a serious gain in the question of
discovery and conclude them practically found
now. I may be leisurely and gather wild roses
and dainty ferns; and I sit down beside a wild
flower devoutly as beside a woman, and wonder
about its loneliness and loveliness, and if God
knows it is there; and I walk in ripples of undulat-
ing grasses that hem the edge of the stream, and
a phcebe plaints near me, and far across the river where the milk
weeds grow and hang their ball blossoms, a hawk flies and flings his
eager shadow on the water or on the meadow; for the sky has cleared
and the rain cloud has forgotten its business and has gone a-gypsying
with the wind. And here I go hunting for the fishing line. Strangely
enough I was mistaken. It was not in any of the seventeen places,
but is in the nineteenth. There it was sprawling indolently like a hobo
in the shade with his dinner fragments beside him, with the flies upon
him, and the blue bottles buzzing luxuriously around. But I stand with
a sense of triumph. I have found the pole and line. Some people
have poor memories. I pity them. There is no excuse for forgetting

91

f

L

where you left your things! And I have had great luck in fishing, arid
a great day of sport. "What luck?" say the people leeringly as I
pass. "Fine," I answer bravely. "Where are the fish?" they insinu-
atingly ask. "I threw them back," I reply. So brave is truth. To
refrain from catching the fish is the most delicate and generous way
of throwing them back. The fish are there and truth is vindicated;
and I go home with my heels on the ground, but my head in the sky
and hang my day's fishing up with my fishing pole. And the rose is
fragrant yet, and the trees cast their shadows across my face, and the
river ripples and flashes brightly a perpetual pleasure. I am glad I
went fishing, and had good luck.

Sweet was the meadow scent,

And blue the sky,
When we a- fishing went,

My rod and I.

Cares staid at home in bed

While we went free;
And scurvy care is dead

To such as we.

Green was the summer land,

The air was balm;
Fair the bleak pine-trees stand;

My heart was calm.

Out on the river 's rim,

My spirit sings
Roundels of praise to Him

Who summer brings.

So while fair morning drifts,

Fishing I go.
Down through the green wood's rifts

Warm sunlights glow.

Glad laughter takes my hcnd

And holds it tight,
As through this summer land.
92 / stray till night.

THE GOINGS OF THE WINDS

THE GOINGS OF THE WINDS

IKE many another word freighted with
beauty, this word "goings" comes from
the Bible. Those old King James trans-
lators were poets to a man, which accounts
for our Bible being both the classic of
Hebrew literature and English literature.
One translator gets the sense in a cold
; literality like a dead tree trunk; another
suffuses his translation with poetry, as a
tree is shaded by its own leaves. "When
thou hearest the goings in the tops of
the mulberry-trees" is a poet's way of
telling a wind is blowing through tree
tops. "Goings" are sound mixed with
movement, the marching of the wind's

feet along the pathways of the tree tops; and what is or can be sweeter!
I have often wondered if God could forget; whether he ever had
obliviscent moods; whether any syllable ever fell out of his words as
they do from ours; whether he ever could forget anything belonging
to the calendar of beauty. I think he does not. Else how is every
beautiful possibility present? In making the world God thought of
everything ministrant to a blessed life. Can we think of any omitted
mercy? Did he not put beauty in the green sward and in the blue
sky? What colors could have been devised to rest the eyes and com-
fort the heart like this bewildering green upon the earth and this
bewildering blue in the sky? Did he forget grace when he was
making the cypress or pine, or the larch, or the quivering aspen, or
the doughty oak, or the leaning willow? He could have made all

97

plants flowerless, as he did the ferns, or he could have dyed all flow-
ers with one pigment, or he might have left odors out in compounding
his flowers and leaves and grasses and earths; but thanks to his good
Providence, he forgot not the sandalwood's clinging fragrance, nor the
scents of roses and wheat stubble nor new-mown hay nor green wal-
nuts, nor forgot to make dews at night, to distill odors from woodlands
and plains, nor neglected that sweet inrush of earth and air smells
which puffs in the face some unexpected morning and sings to the
soul — Springtime! God ransacked his treasuries when he made this
world; nor was it in spirit of haste or obliviousness, when, on the day
he finished the building of his world he said, "I have found all things
good." If the wind fans a hot cheek to blow its fever out, or fills the
flapping sails of innumerable ships, I count that to be a lesser blessing
than its gift of touch and music. The wind's touch can be as tender
as a loving woman's caress and its music as gentle and sweet as mem-
ories fetched from a happy past. To miss the blowing of the trumpets
of the winds is to suffer loss. The wind's voices are inexpressible
music. I love their laughter and their weeping, their wailing of autumn
and their leaf-patter, like the sound of spring showers. I was reared in
Kansas, where winds have what some esteem a vicious supremacy, but
to me their trumpetings and stormy chargings to and fro, their shrill
falsettos through leafless trees; their summer sweep, which wrecks
the fleets of clouds as if they, were ships blown on ragged ocean rocks;
their whine at the casement, like a patient dog pleading for its master,
and their wholly tender touch of a June evening wind — I love them all.
Not one will I willingly leave out of my memory or deny room at the
fireside of my life. They are part of me. It may be because my
father's folk for unknown generations were sea captains and lovers of
the raging waters, tempest-swirled and were all drowned at sea, that
tempests are mixed with my blood and are part of my soul's dear
possessions. But certain I am that winds do not vex me and that I
am lonely apart from them as missing one of my home folks. Their
ardor warms my spirit and their gentle quiet is like a call to prayer.
Jesus loved the winds, and, as I think, tore a scrap
from the book of his boyhood when he said (he
was thinking of Nazareth when he spoke), "The
wind bloweth where it listeth" — those un-
certain, unmannerly, brusque winds, which

^ betimes whipped up Esdraelon's loitering

98

valley from the Great Sea, or on occasion springing with sudden pas-
sion out of the Jordan Valley over the Nazareth cliffs toward the far
and fair blue waters. Could Jesus forget them? On many a solemn
night, alone but not lonely, he had sat with chin upon his hands and
listened to his hill winds
blow. The winds — and he
made them! Think of that,
my heart. H is winds — now
thine. And when the sea
was whipped with tempests
by the lashings of the winds
the wild and boisterous
waves disturbed him not
only in dreams, he thought
he heard the heavenly bu-
gles blow, and wakened
from his happy sleep when
the scared disciples wailed
above the wind's wild
"goings," "Carest thou not
if we perish?" Then he
awoke and spake lovingly
to the winds (no harshness
in his voice nor threat upon
his face) saying only, "Keep
still for a little while, your
fury frightens them, keep
still. Peace, be still," and
the winds threw their brazen
trumpets in the sea and
were still. He loved the
winds; and all their sobbing
lutes and viols and 'cellos THUNDERHEAD

were dear to him.

How I have rejoiced in God's winds! Under Niagara, when the
winds have blown fury blasts, and on the mountains, when the snows
had loosened their garments at the throat for freer wrestling and where
down some long canon winds swept like vernal freshets, and up among
melancholy pines, where every pine was as a chief musician, like Asaph

99

in his ancient choir, and on bare plains, where only the surly sage brush
leaned prone before the gale, and on lakes, where water tumbled like
romping children when the winds frisked with them in gay moods of
laughter and romping, or when the winds were in outrageous anger and
plowed the fair waters with the share of the hurricane, and in forests,
where the paths are narrow and very dim and shadows are many and
sunshine rare — O the goings of the winds in such a wood when leaves
flutter, as half in dream, and the sound sobs like remote surf, and winds

pass still,

"Fainter onward, like wild birds that change
Their season in the nigh* and wail their way
From cloud to cloud,"

, and on headlands of the

old sad ocean, where
Mount Desert rocks, ban-
nered with pine-trees
fronted by the sea (rocks
naked as the strength of
death) or on headlands of
the Golden Gate fronting
burning sunsets and the
far and barren reaches of
the affable Pacific, and
on cliffs of the Isle of
Mona, where heather
mixes honey with ocean winds and rocks lean darkly over Spanish
Head, fruitful of shipwrecks, and against whose sword edges Philip's
fleet proved but a feeble jest — on such headlands have I heard the
winds and gloried in their tumults as in the coming of a friend; and
many a night have I walked steamer decks to watch the marching
stars and hear the regurgitations of multitudinous waves a-sobbing; or
in winter in the city, when cold winds keyed their voices to distress
like beggars gaunt and cold, and shrieked like despair which had for-
gotten laughter, when the thin-clad and well-clad hurried home as
half afraid, and children play indoors, and snows whip up alley-ways and
down crowded half-quieted streets (seeing a storm makes its own
calm), and down chimneys with singing like a last minstrel, or spits in
your face like an indignant beggar to whom you have refused charity,
or tender summer winds which stray down where long marsh grasses
grow in hearing of the sea.

100

THE SURF

How I love the dim wind on the wide water; but as for that, what
wind do I not love, and for what one do I not listen, whether singing a
quiet song or trumpeting in Titan anger; whether it is gentle touch, like
a beloved hand upon our sleeping cheek, or cruel and vindictive, like a
Scythian — nay, I can not deny that I love them all.

What musicians winds are! They are, in truth, the only musicians.
All voices, whether human or blown from instruments, or shocked from

jjMifa w tfi

1h>cli

A PATCH OF CLOVER WHERE SPRING WINDS LINGER

wild waves that hammer on the rocks, what are they save the blowing
of the winds? Lowell says

"The organ blows its dream of storm,"

and no more accurate word has ever been spoken regarding organ
music, which is the wind blowing across the reeds. I have sat in
cathedrals in the lowering dusk and felt the organ blow its gathering gale
about my spirit. The organ was the wind of God. The Devas play:

"We are the voices of the wandering wind

Which moan for rest and rest can never find,"
and they are sad

"As sunset in a land of reeds,"
103

and very full of meaning. In an elect moment, Whittier made music
for the winds to make their meaning clear:

"Yet on my cheek I feel the western wind,

And hear it telling to the orchard trees,

And to the faint and flower-forsaken bees,

Tales of fair meadows green with constant streams,
And mountains rising blue and cold behind

Where in moist dells the purple orchis gleams,
And starred with white the virgin's bower is twined.

So the overwearied pilgrim as he fares
Along life's summer waste, at times is fanned

Even at noontide by the cool, sweet airs
Of a serener and a holier land."

And winds laded with odors — you can not escape their sweet com-
radeship. And winds blowing across a field where haycocks exhale fra-
grance, who can escape their witchery? Such winds know how to spoil
waters and fields and forests of spikenards and balsams. I have in-
haled fragrance from winds blown fresh from the sea through moors of
purple heather, and can I forget the poetry of it even in heaven? I
pray I may not.

Winds of spring, apple-scented and with earth-smell in them ! And
walking through woods at night when dew drips from the leaves and
the score or more of odors saturate the air, and the frog's song sings
up from marshes and ravines as if that were audible odor, and star-
light plays hide-and-seek with you through the foliage, when there puffs
in your face the musk of many odors mixed, then you could catch the
Wind and kiss her on the cheek like a girl, for sheer delight. Then
when lilacs blow, and spring hastens on to June and white clover chokes
the air with heavy perfumes, and roses tell in the dark where they are
blooming by the fragrance they lent the breeze as it strayed indolently
through their dear delights, or later, when harvests spill their essences to
the languorous winds, and later still, when winds bear their sad freightage
of autumn leaves falling, or fallen, and faded. 0 the wind is the poet
laureate of autumn; and the lonely, tearful music and autumnal fra-
grance of leaf-distilled perfumes fairly drug the senses of the spirit till
perforce the winds make us poets against our will and reason.

In one of Hosea Biglow's pastoral preludes (bless him who wrote
them and gave us Hosea!) is a touch of genius in discriminating
odors. "Mr. Wilbur sez to Hosea, 'Wut's the sweetest smell on

104

airth?' 'Noomone hay,' sez I, pooty bresk, for he was allus hank-
erin' 'round in hayin'. 'Nawthin' of the kine,' sez he. 'My leetle
Huldy's breath,' sez I ag'in.' 'You're a good lad,' sez he, his eyes
sort of riplin' like, for he lost a babe onc't about her age — 'the best of
perfooms is just fresh air, fresh air,' sez he, emphysizin', 'athout no
mixture.' " And that is worth thinking of. All odors the winds bear
are defective as compared v/ith the utter freshness of the moving airs
themselves. "Jest fresh air," — what an exhilarant that is. Drinking
water spouting fresh from mountain snow
drifts, and the blowing of clean air in the
race, and the making your piayer to God
when life grows hard or glad — are not these
apart from all things else and allow of no
comparisons. Similes are lifeless here. And
the breath of a wind after a rain! Wind is
unspeakable for music and odors. What a
happy fate to be associated with such recollec-
tions. If man or woman might hope in com-
ing years, when far beyond the sight of
eyes or hearing of the ears, to stay sweet
memories in hearts which could not forget
them, what could human heart ask more?
And I have known such folks. The mention
of their names makes me think of sunlit fields.
All sweet things lie adjacent to their person-
alities, just as trees and shade and gurgling
brooks and trailing clouds and sublime soli-
tudes and what seems the ragged frontiers of the world lie adjacent to
huge mountains.

Winds are fortunate to be the carriers of aromas and music; to
come freighted with the lilac's breath and the happy voices of happy
women s laughter. But I do not hesitate to confess that the rarest
wind I have ever experienced is blown from Kansas prairies on summer
twilights. About midway in Kansas, east and west, is this wind in
perfection. Nothing equals it. I have loved winds blown from briny
seas and from the emerald deserts of great lakes and the St. Lawrence
dreaming northward like a drifting ship, and from Alp and Sierra, and
my belief still holds that for unutterable tenderness, part wind, part
spirit, for poetry whose threads can never be unbraided, these Kansas

105

A SINGING BROOK

June prairie winds have not any competitor. This may be the love of
my lifetime veering my judgment, though I incline to believe this is the
judgment of a balanced and an equal mind. The prairie wind, as I tell
you, has a witchery quite beyond the telling of any man. There have
I walked along the shores of summer twilight as on the shores of blue
and beautiful Galilee, and caressing, like an angel's hand, went the dear
wind, and in it a voice, half whisper and half dream, its touch, like the
shadow-touch of a fond hand passing across you, yet scarcely touching
you; the hush, and after that the slow streaming wind, like a breath
from heaven upon a pilgrimage across the spaces, so remote its origin
appeared; and journeying not any whither, yet everywhere and in no
haste, loverlike loving to linger for another kiss — such a wind withal
as one might love to have kiss him on the face that evening, when,
after a long journey, with bleeding feet, he walked in through some
postern gate out on the fields of heaven sown to asphodels, and dim
lights and violets and immortelles. Such is the twilight summer wind
in Kansas when the prairie grasses stoop a little to let the zephyrs by.
To feel this necromancy once is worth a pilgrimage; seeing it will
endure among the luculent recollections of a happy life.

" The wind to-night is cool and free,
The wind to-night is westerly,
Sweeping in from the plains afar,
Sweet and faint.

My thoughts to-night are far and free,
My thoughts to-night are westerly;
Sweeping out on the plains afar,
Where roses grow and grasses are.
My heart to-night is wild and free,
My heart to-night is westerly,"

-JOHN NORTHERN HILLIARD.

George Macdonald has felt the heavenly hill-
winds blow:

"0 wind of God that bio west in the mind,
Blow, blow and wake the gentle spring in me ;
Blow, swifter blow, a strong, warm summer wind,
Till all the flowers with eyes come out to see,
Blow till the fruit hangs red on every tree."

Blow, wind of God!

106

THE FALLS OF ST. CROIX

THE FALLS OF ST. CROIX

[HOUGH not an artist, I sit down in hearing
of the laughter of running water to paint a
picture. The commonest artists may at-
tempt the fairest landscape, which may
seem to justify this present attempt. The
place is the falls of the St. Croix; though I
would have you forget the village and re-
member the place. Yet, scarcely that, for
in the air last night swung the sweet ca-
dences of a church bell, a music not to be
heard lightly or without reverence, whether
in crowded city or in solitary hamlet, or on
far mountain side; for what minds of God,
in an instant, without effort, reaches the
sublime. However, forget the village, save

its swinging church bell, and remember only the place where the river
falls and runs away.

I am attracted by the river's name. There was a touch of the poet
in those old French voyageurs. And if they were Jesuits, as was so
often the fact, religion mixed with their poetry; and discovery was their
poetry as hymns were the poetry of George Herbert and Keble; and
they starred the way they discovered by their "saints" and a quaint and
touching festival of names, making their discoveries one long pilgrimage
to Jerusalem. This river, some forgotten lover of the cross named St.
Croix, and the name puts me to prayer. For which cause, seeking
some solitude where I might "knit up the raveled sleave of care," 1
chose this; and the name did not deceive me. I am glad I came. The
river is not what it once was, for rivers miss their youth as age does,

ill

and their stature abates with the passage of years. The tilled lands
grow thirsty and drink like a sweaty harvester, and so exhaust the foun-
tains which used to flow into the rivers. The gains of our largest civili-
zation are touched with loss. Many of the pines have been taken, only
a few are left to tell survivors of another era, what sort of day was
theirs. At this point on the St. Croix, the banks are tall so as to leap
to the dignity of hills. There is no room for tillage near the river's bed,
and so the dusty road and the cottage, where love leans above its cradle,
and the woods with their hidden tinkle of cow bell and a mill, where
crystal waters of a boisterous brook turn the wheel, as if such labor were
a jest, — these are my fellow-citizens at the falls of St. Croix.

Here the river runs from north to south, with barely a quiver of the
compass, only curving a little, as streams must. The valley dims upon
the eye, at either extreme hid in a cloud of trees, southward, northward.
The backlands stand somberly in the distance. Knobs of hills are sen-
tineled by pine-trees ragged as Spanish soldiers. The crests of the
ridges against the west are one uninterrupted forest, in whose shadow
insects drone in undisturbed quiet and violets blow with no one to pick
them. To the east is a zigzag line of hills, indented here and there by
an intruding valley or a road with its smoke of dust. On a sudden, a
point of green hills shoots up like the tangled leap of some emerald
fountain, and this hill catches and holds sunlight when the valley thinks
the sun has set. A dusty road ambles along the river's brink like some
loitering lad ; and along this a wagon rattles or a carriage clatters, or a
workman stoops with a lunch pail empty in his hand, or the woman and
her lover linger in the dusk, or a little child with bare feet patters in the
dust or wades in the clear stream edging the road with its indescribable
loveliness, and the wind "shakes from the trees the dust of day," as
Victor Hugo has it.

This retreat reminds me of New England hills, which always appeal
to me as a loveliness almost unapproachable. In New England hills is
a redundancy of moss and ferns and grasses and deep oozy earth, and
deep chalices in which the waters rest from motion, obscured from

112

sight, and hidden alleys down which the waters pass with a stealthy step,
so that you may pass and repass and not know that you and the brook
are neighbors, — such a confederation of beauty, entrancing as autumn
when it frequents the hills, is all but without competitor. This St. Croix
region more nearly reaches this faroff beauty than Rocky Mountain or
Sierra or any place I have lit on in my Western wanderings. Here the
St. Croix falls down a gorge with multitudinous music. What in old
times was perchance a falls is now a turbulent rapids, but is spend-
thrift in music; and what more could we require? and I love, sleeping
lightly with head at the window so as to miss no music when I wake, if

THE WALLED ROCKS

but for a moment (and the waters seem scarcely disquieted, the rapids
being not turbulent now nor precipitous) to hear the voices as if an
angel shook music from his mantle. The bed and banks of the river
are a red granite worn by the polishing of the waters smooth as the pol-
ished shaft which tells where lies some blessed sleeper dead, but not
forgotten. So polished are these rocks you must step with watchfulness
or lame you for your carelessness. Knots of rocks stand in the current
of the stream like some sturdy spirit in turbulent wars when others have
forgotten to be brave. Some of the wall rocks on the bank are yellow
as ocher; and against these dash crests of spray as the stream foams

113

down the rapids betimes and flashes up as a spirit in prayer, or as
touching the old rock out of compassion for its eternal quiet or out
of sport and raillery, I know not which.

I lie under a ragged cedar on the eastern bank. Its shadows and
odors are a tent, and its leaning branches brush my face when the
wind stirs, and its odors house me in their sacred balsam. The winds
sing lazily through the trees and touch the quiet cedars into indolent
motion, and the aspen near by dances its every leaf as with some
apocalypse of joy; and the locust sends his strident call through the
woods and across the stream; and a solitary killdee shrills his plaintive
call as he races from pool to pool on the river's brink; and the wren
chatters in wren dialect, screened from inquisitive eyes, or the bluejay
calls hoarsely, "I am — I am here — here — here," as if everybody was
interested in that information, and the wind blows in my face with a
breath as of early winter, refreshing as it comes from mountain streams;
and I lie and read Lowell, and am pensive and yet glad. I am reading
the search for the singing leaf,

"And deep through the green- wood rode he

And asked of every tree,
0 if you have ever a singing leaf

I pray you give it me.
And the trees all kept their counsel,

And never a word said they
Only, there sighed from the tree-tops

A music of seas far away. ' '

And with such an afternoon in such a place the world draws off like
a defeated army, — far off, where it seems not so much as be. The sun

PINES, RAGGED AS SPANISH SOLDIERS
114

changes the position of shadows of rock and cedar and flings handf uls of
sunshine in my face out of sheer joy and sportiveness. The insects
whine drowsily (though they mean no music), and the voice of St. Croix
Falls sings on like a minstrel whose voice never grows husky nor weary,
nor his hands tired of the harp he holds and thrums.

And when the day snuffs out his light and falls asleep, the river
sings on. In the day there were other voices; now the river sings
alone. The voice of the waters is full of sorrow, like the story of a
broken heart. Sometimes the note seems to me like a dying man
who makes signs, beckoning you near with a world of intention in his
eyes, draws your ear close to his lips, tries to frame lips to the words
his heart would speak, but at the best his words are incoherent and he
dies with his secret unrevealed or half revealed. So these waters.
Their voices are, as says Longfellow:

"Full of hope and yet of heart-break;"

but seem to cry, "Hear my story, hear, hear my story!" And at night,
when other voices hush their jargon, then the waters have their way.
Their day is night; and they catch stars in their tangle of waters
and blur their light and seem to say, "This hour is mine," and send
up their mournful voices like incense through the darkness. How
sweet it is to hear the music of waters come through the lattices of
your sleep and dreams 1 I leave my window open and draw the bed-head
close to the window-ledge, so that in my score of wakings in the night
each tone of the singing waters may tell its story of lament; and I
whisper, "I thank you for your melody," and fall into slumber again.
Nor is this all the St. Croix can offer, though this is much, and
enough to change summer into a holiday. The stream's voice suffices
to change turmoil into quietness, and make room for the ineffable pres-
ence of the Christ of God. Along the eastern acclivities running south-
ward from the falls, spring after spring gushes out. You can not make
an inventory of them. They baffle you. Every bank has its fountain,
and I sit thus and write of them with the voices of these waters on
every side. One bubbles with a boyish self-assurance; another sounds
like a harp heard afar; another has haunting notes, quiet and tender as
a melody half-forgotten, so that I am compassed about with music.
Every mossy bank is a cluster from which nature is squeezing crystal
wines. Here are moss, and fern, and shrub, and violet leaves, flower-
less now, but reminiscent, all huddled here in quiet and hidden neighbor-

115

liness. Some places, the silver of the stream gushes a fountain which
glasses the hillside and the far-off sky. How it clatters like a busy
street, or laughs cheerily like some sunshiny heart, and runs over
pebbles, saying, "I go — but I tell not whither," and stays not a moment;
for the hill is steep, but running like one who hears a friend calling, fills
its woodland path with merry voices leaving sweet echoes when itself
is gone, and a memory in my heart more lasting than these echoes in
this shady wood. Other rivulets hide themselves as in modesty. You

SUNRISE ON THE RIVER

can not see whence they come; but they are come. Invisible threads of
silver are braided to make this rivulet, and it whispers along its way,
and if you will hear its voices you must lean down on the mossy bank it
loves, lean and grow glad; for sweet as a child's kiss in the sleepy night
is the voice of this silver thread of waters. Such dainty minstrelsy I
have not heard since I lay in New England hills. One thing only is
lacking here, just one; these brooks do not lose themselves in a tangle
of roots and grasses, and then dash out suddenly a sweet surprise; but
covetous would he be who would demand more than is here. The

116

morning walks across the sky, and all these sunlit hours, these limpid
rivers saturate the woods with their music. All about you is the voice
of the lute of the rivulet ; and each voice seems sweetest. This is
God's glade, and these rivulets are a troop of his minstrels, and this
long day, too brief by many hours (for it is noon — for it is afternoon —
why it is evening) ! I have been heart to heart with God ; for these are
God's woods, and streams, and ferns, and sturdy rocks, and river banks,
and drowsy winds caught in the thickets, and dainty waterfalls trem-
bling on eminences or precipices of pebble or root, and laughter of
eddies — and all are parts of God's thoughtfulness for us whose weari-
ness slips away in the heaven of his solitudes.

THE OTHER SHORE

117

WHEN AUTUMN FADES

WHEN AUTUMN FADES

WHEN AUTUMN FADES

When autumn fades, and from the windy hill
And forest glades beside the quiet rill
The splendors waste,- and all the happy trees
Are quite defaced of beauty, and the breeze

Makes deep lament with laughter quite forgot,
As it were meant for threnody and not
For merry mood: and when the blackbirds fling
Their dusky brood across the sky on wing

Toward fields remote, and wild ducks flying high
With muffled note make speed across the sky,
And redbirds blaze through naked loneliness
Of woodland ways : and full of deep distress

The moaning trees where beat tumultuous tides
Of angry seas whose stormy music chides:
And all the ways are sown with withered leaves
And all the days are dim with haze, and grieves
The wintry wind, and the year's evening shades
Grow dusk, and blind the storms.; when autumn fades.

121

A WALK ALONG A RAIL-
ROAD IN JUNE

A WALK ALONG A RAILROAD
IN JUNE

SHE season was mid-June. The region was a
I prairie. The place was a five-mile stretch of
railroad running eastward, undeviatingly as the
flight of an arrow. Landing at a village in the
early morning, with three hours to wait for my
train, the out-of-doors challenged me to walk to
the next hamlet ; and, my custom being never
to take a dare from nature if my employment
will allow me leisure, I swung out right gayly
to answer the challenge. The day was dustless,
rains having sprinkled field and road and gardens
quite recently; the skies were dimmed with a
veil of cloud not dense enough to obscure the
sun nor to dim the blue completely, but enough to calm the sunlight into
entire pleasantness for a walk like mine. A pleasant wind blew from
the east and kept the track unhesitatingly as a locomotive, while I, with
the butterflies and wild bees, drifted from side to side as flowers and
grasses and tangle of vines invited me.

Now, a railroad is what our friend Ruskin railed at with his delight-
ful spleen ; and the logic of his complaint was that the railroad stood
for utility and John Ruskin stood for nature, and what John Ruskin
stood for was what should be. Ruskin had all the sweet dogmatism
and self-confidence of a little child. I like his love of field and flood ;
more still, I love it, but scarcely enjoy his vituperation, though put into
English sweet enough to make even scolding charming, nor enjoy it at
all when he raves against those modern appliances which have changed
the economic world and us, from provincials into cosmopolites. And

127

- ..s

beyond this, use is needful as beauty, and
more needful, if all the truth be told. Use
and beauty must not be thought of as enemies,
but friends. The cooking stove is quite as
essential as clematis. They cherish no
antipathy. Use is lacking in the picturesque ;
but drudgery must needs be for the world's
bettering. A railroad, while anything but
« beautiful, is the chore-boy of civilization, the
stevedore that carries our burdens from
wharf to wharf and from hold to dock, and
with prospect of neither emolument nor de-
light serves all save itself. Such service,
free-handed and free-hearted, always compels
my regard. I half venerate it, as I do a
mother of many children, whose hands are
worn to scars and hardness by much toiling
for the ones she loves. Who serves, God
loves. The road gives its wealth of labor as
uncomplainingly as a mother to her daughter.
Let no jest nor sneer be directed toward
those whose sweaty shoulders bend to the
burden of world's work ; let us rather requite
such sturdy toil with appreciation which is
better far than gold. The railroad track is
to me the embodiment of uncomplaining,
unacknowledged toil whose praises are in no-
body's mouth.

However, I have found that if the railroad
is itself lacking in beauty, it affords shelter
for the beautiful. Any one who has been
much out of door? in our later days, knows

how beauty of tangled thicket and room for
gathering of bloom and bird are growing rarer ;
for are not the straggling fences rotting down
and giving place to fences of wire, which leave
no least protection from grazing herd or flock,
or tramping foot, for brier, or clump of grasses
or blackberry, with its arch of vine and sweet,
blinding surprise of snow-white blossoms? But
all this shelter the railroad supplies, and calls to
the homeless garden of nature, " I will give you
room," and makes good this cordial invitation.
On either side of the track is a goodly breadth
given over to nature. A ditch dug in build-
ing the road-bed gives place for water to stand,
and where water stands there is invitation for
flag and cat-tail and swamp-grasses ; and the
embankment gives privilege for the wild rose to
hold tryst with the wild bee, and makes banks
leaning south, where in the new springtime
violets may stand in pools of blue, and grasses
may grow, unafraid of the lowing herd. If you,
friend, have never known how dear a shelter the
barren railroad affords nature's refugees, pray
you give the matter heed.

Five miles of invitation of perfumed June
lie before me. The last robin of my journey
calls with its flute-note from the fringes of the
village. He hugs the town, I fear me, over-
much, and I tremble lest his morals become
corrupted ; ,but he eyes me from his barn-roof
with a curious look, as if commiserating the
moneyless traveler who must plod along the
track instead of riding on the train or going on
a robin's speeding wings. If men are not small
folks in the bird's eyes, I miss my guess. They
have a right to feel aristocrats, who have wings
and know how to fly. The skies are fair high-
ways for treading; and I piously envy all winged
things. Sometimes, I fear I love the country

129

more than is comely, and then I recall I do not love it so much as God
does and am content. My march this fair morning was as a king's
triumph, all royal things coming to meet me. The soft winds sweet
with rose perfumes welcomed me with a kiss full on the mouth ; vines
reached out their graceful tendrils my way ; a meadow-lark called to me
from a nodding red clover head ; a quail invisible, hid somewhere in
meadow or hedgerow, piped in his cheerful voice across a cornfield as if
to intimate he was where he had full right to be ; the talkative sparrows
chatted along the way, having their say about the traveler going past
with his arms full of flowers ; a single blackbird with his hot crimson
epaulets flung by me as in high dudgeon, though I had done him no
earthly harm. This way is poor in birds, much to my regret, and I
know not why. Blackbirds should have been here in garrulous multi-
tudes. Plovers I looked for and found none. I think perhaps this is a
bird's holiday and they are gone from home, for certainly they are not
here, and the day is fair and belongs to them. But vegetation there
was a fortune of. The spring had latter rains, and all things had the
brilliancy of perpetuated youth upon them. Leaves fairly flashed in the
light, as if sparks were smitten from them. Long miles of grasses,
rank and lush, grew nodding to the wind. On either side were fields
planted to corn, with the farmers plowing the long rows of emerald ; or
pastures of prairie grass, than which few sights are fairer to the eyes ;
or red clover fields lent modest perfume to the air, for few odors can
compare in delicacy with those wafted from the red clover meadow, so
delicate that unless the flowers are in masses of acres in breadth, you
will not get the fragrance at all. Fields of oats with their quick green
answered to the wind, and a wheatfield with a faint haze of harvest on
it felt the goings of the spring wind. Woods, there were none. Only
a willow stooped across a ravine showing where was hidden water, or a
planted elm waved its graceful curved plumes, or a cottonwood, which
tree I profess to love and have some times talked, some times written
my affection, not being content with a single declaration. One cotton-
wood I stop to listen to — and indeed what one of them do I not stop to
listen to? — for the rain upon their roof is very sweet to me, and their
tearful commotion is something my heart always remembers. This
tree stood along a field edge lifting its deep green into the air in a manly
fashion, as unashamed to front the sky, and through its branches ran the
drift of autumn rain, and I closed my eyes and listened, as loath to pass ;
and farther off, half across a field, a group stood together where I could

130

THE LEANING WILLOW

hear, as they half whispered their rainy colloquies. Spring it was, or
early summer, but they, as I gathered, were speaking about autumn and
the sere leaf and the last late rose and the departure of the swallows —
and who could blame them for having tears in their voices ?

I made my leisure journey. Naught troubled me nor hasted me.
The time was God's and summer's and mine. I stopped at every
pastoral and grew inquisitive at every stop. Something enticed me
everywhere. Three hours I had, though I could use three days. One
can not have too much leisure with Nature. She is coy like a hermit
thrush, so that those who hasten may not know her; but I sped leisurely.
Most plants along the road I knew, some I had not seen, or, speaking
exactly, one, and that made me glad, because it is so good to make a
new friend among the flowers. One's life is infinitely enriched thereby.
To meet old friends in flowers or folk is delightful, and meeting new folk
and flowers has a tang of gladness also. One new friend among birds
or flowers, or gentle green among the leaves — what think you of that,
my heart ? One white flower I met this day I had not met aforetime,
and the memory of its dainty beauty lingers caressingly. Five-petaled,
pure white as a blackberry blosom, growing low on the earth, beckoning
the wind, sheltered by the grasses, sometimes a few feet of ground
would be star-white with them, sometimes one bloomed solitary like a
forgotten life some one had died and left, but whether single or in
groups, the flower was dainty, fair, and left a gentle memory to my
heart. I see it yet. Along the track were no rose bushes with their
frowsy archings and interarchings, and had there been, the time of
roses was not yet. That sweetness was to be an anticipation. Not all
flowers bloom at once. God is too good for that. He sows his flowers
through all the lanes of spring, summer, autumn ; and I love him for it.
But, rose bushes being absent, rose blooms were present and burned
along the banks or flamed in the grasses like sparks from a hurrying
engine. They were inexpressibly beautiful. My eyes caressed them,
and I would linger over every flushed face I saw, as if it were the last
I was to set eyes upon. Seldom more than six to nine inches high,
they took you by surprise — by a sweet surprise ; and they were always
fair, running in color from pure white to deep crimson, each seeming,
as I saw it, fairer than its sister, as each child in a family circle. Here
a single flame shot like a firefly's lamp, there a bank blushed into sud-
den flame with them. One was white sprinkled daintily with pink,
another was bronzed as with some chaste enamel, another pink as a

133

seashell, so delicate you feared to look straight at it lest the blush die
away to be seen no more. I wished I were painter so as to paint them
all; but could I? And the buds, ready for flowering, were fairer than
the flower, and had moss upon them, so that I thought I had found a
colony of God's moss roses growing wild. When spring comes round
and the dwarf roses bloom, go you, good friend, and watch for them as
for the coming of a longed-for comrade ; and bring some of the love-
liest away with you and and press them in a book, and write in the book
where you found them, their color, when you gathered them, and their

sweet capricious ways,
and confess you love
them, whereat, mayhap,
they may learn to love
you in retur n — w h o
knows? For a mile
and more along the
banks the wild parsnip
was swaying to the touch
of every wind — whorls of
gold was what they were
— and looking across a
mile of them was look-
ing at a pathway of
wrought gold, and who
was I, to walk on gold-
| paved streets before my
time, or to stand, as
sometimes I did, when
the flowers stood tall, in golden corridors? Once, just once, a rivulet
crossed the path. I saw it glint among the grasses and come slyly
closer, like some living thing filled with curiosity, and then it ran under
our bridge as one affrightened, but the water was clear and intent on
its journey. If I spoke to it in passing, it either heard not, or, if hear-
ing, made no reply, nor even gave a backward look. Perhaps its ret-
icence was to hide ignorance, for perchance it knew not whither it was
going, only knowing it was time to haste like a truant child overtaken
by the dark; and I cried, "You are going to the sea," but no word did
it reply, only there was audible laughter such as I loved to listen to ;
and I seemed to be bent on talking to the rivulet, for I said, "You are

134

THE BRIDGE

journeying, but I too am journeying, and to the sea, only my
sea is shoreless and remote, and toward it I make haste,
though oftener I fear with tears than
with laughter. Yours is the better way,
laughing onward toward the sea " I
crossed a group of shrubs unknown
to me, whose leaves were of such
redness as to stand like a dull flame
in the midst of the gay greenery of
the grasses that hedged them in.
And the slough grasses are always
beautiful to my eyes. I never yet
have tired of them, and here they
grew in eager luxuriance, and in some
parts were of such brilliant green as if
they had barely wakened from
a refreshing winter sleep, and
with all freshness on them, like a
newly awakened child, locked at you
in sweet surprise. The grasses, grown
taller, had a sedateness and sense of dig-
nity such as I have sometimes seen in
women. Stately they were and drooping
— all bowed as soldiers who had stood
guard all night and were sleeping in the
day. The wind came and caressed
them, but they woke not or barely
nodded as if saying, " Let me sleep,
let me — " and the sleepy voice fell
asleep. They were secret-keeping like
marsh grasses by the sea. I love this
waving green when winds drowse or
flurry by, and the grass, somnolent yet
fluent, answered in a dream to this
fond caress, and I feared the winds might
disturb their rest; and the slumber was on
them when the wind was gone. The
crowning glory of the walk was the blue flags

135

BLUE FLAGS

(spiderwort). They and I were old friends, though I had never known
them in such profusion, for they stood for two miles and more in solid
ranks on both sides the track. You do not know how beautiful the blue
flag is till you have seen it in such long procession. Standing alone,
this flower has a gawky appearance, and when seen in small groups this
awkwardness is not materially lessened ; but when seen in their armies,
where on looking back they drift like blue smoke lying low along the
ground and for miles — then they are a pageant of beauty and color. I
gathered them till I could carry no more, but gathered them all in my
heart. Not a blue flag nodded on its stem when my love had passed
by. I see the mass of color and delight as I write, as I did the day I
walked in the midst as if I were crowned king of all that excellence;
and 1 mistake, if for all the days of my life I shall not feel as if on a
day in June I had walked in a royal procession. To see that blue
muster in the early summer was worth going mile on mile to see. The
violets had put their lights out weeks ago, and here is a flower that
holds its bloom aloft like clustered stars of blue, as if violets clustered
on the umbels. You must keep close to the ground to see a violet;
but these flowers hang their blue aloft like a light and there, shines blue
as the midoceans. There they stand, sometimes like soldiers in ranks
ready for war, sometimes they spring suddenly out of the dense green
of the swamp grass I have told you of, and you see no stalk of flower
at all, only a green sea waking from sleep into amethyst with downy
centers blue as the petals are and each pistil dipped in a pot of gold dust.

One thing I found this day I had never found before, and that was a
pure white flag with snow-white center and the pistil tipped with gold.
The beauty of it fairly took my breath. That day I had seen flags of
every hue of blue, from light sky blue to the black blue of ocean, and
some with only a haze of blue, faint, delicate, remote as if the color
were an afterthought; but this blue flag blooming cloud- white was quite
beyond me. So is God always and still always surprising us.

But down the track behind me I see a cloud of smoke. My holi-
day I plainly see is ended. My train is coming and is no laggard. I
must leave this long journey of gladness, though loath as ever sailor to
quit the sea. I have had a journey in the land of dreams, so fair they
were. I had walked down a five-mile stretch of railroad, and it had
been as if I had wandered inland across the hills of God.

136

THE WINDINGS OF A STREAM

THE WINDINGS OF A STREAM

TREAMS are poor geometers and are in ill repute
with rigid mathematicians. The mathematician
has engaged himself to and married the straight
line; and a straight line the
stream knows nothing of, or
knowing of, absolutely refuses to
recognize. I am proud of the
stream. It may not be mathe-
matical, but is poetical, which,
with all deference to mathema-
ticians, is much better. Mathe-
matics are necessary; poetry is
more necessary. God is both

mathematician and poet; but- such combination exists only in him. Men
must be mathematician or poet; and, as for me, I will join hands with
the poet if he will let me.

Every water course refuses (absolutely and without reason, like a
little man) to go on section lines. I have watched them through
many years and have never found a stream which would of its own
accord go as the crow flies. Water is a sad gad-about. It has no
more notion of sticking to a road than a dog has when he goes .driving
with you. In short, the stream has a mind of its own, like a little
woman; and there is the end of it. You can not argue with water.
Like a woman, it goes by intuition; but its ways, like a woman's
ways, are very sweet and self-justificatory.

Every stream is a poet. Poets are born so. How many streams
I have followed toward or to their source ! What wild rollics I have
had, with the streams laughing at me with wild rollicking laughter,

141

like a man from Kansas, and slapping me on the shoulder like a man
from Nevada I In the mountains (was it yesterday or this forenoon?)
what boyish delight I have taken in going uphill in August with a
water-brook, till, with spent strength, but with wild, hilarious spirits, 1
have laid me down on my stomach to drink waters just squeezed from
the snow drift. Who would drink wine after such elixir? How could
he? And the laughter of the water — God tuned its singing as he did the
singing of the winds; and there is no complaint of flatting or sharping,
no defective tones, only music, music, music!

I have followed streams on mountains and on prairie and through
thickets of Minnesota and through Wisconsin pines, and through the
dreary foot-hills, and through lonely sage-grown desert, and through the
high meadows of Colorado, standing above the summits of Tennessee
mountains, and in meadows in New England hills, where the streams

beguiled me back into the woodlands and through them to where be-
yond still other meadows lay, through grasses and out of sight under
grasses till you could only tell the water was not lost or was not asleep
by leaning ear on the grass, and hearing the chimes of it sweet as
vesper bells in the days gone by; and in the Berkshire Hills of Massa-
chusetts and the Derbyshire district in England, and where in an island
a runnel hurried to the sea as it were to keep tryst with her he loved,
and many a rivulet near the seashore where the waters lingered, as if
now that the great sea was so near it feared to take the last step of the
journey and have not any home on land forever, and the salt tides of
sea ran up and took the rivulet on its breast and bore it back far up
where the marsh grasses floated upstream with the tides, — I have seen
water courses everywhere, but not one have I seen not sinuous as a
swallow's flight.

Streams flow to the point of least resistance (really, I feel proud of
that sentence. It has a weighty sound. I feel scientific. If I am not

142

on guard I will speak of "environment" next — lest I do, let me hasten
on, tightening my belt for speed); and in consequence their goings are
a series of sweet lawlessnesses. A bright stream in Syria was named
Meander, and from its multitudinous wanderings we keep the word
"meander" to mean a journey in winding ways. The reason why every
stream is beautiful is because every stream is bent on meandering.
Lovers can not keep to
a sidewalk. They give
scant attention to direc-
tion. A stream is the
same. I think it has no
compass and does not
know it can steer by the
pole star. I rejoice in
its ignorance. I am right
glad it has no theodolite
and chain, but has a
sweet unreasonableness
and pouting self-will and
strict inattention to rules
and advices — the stream
" doeth whatsoever it
will." Who but God
taught the waters this

quaint unreasonableness? Every step the stream takes is a deviation.
Being in no hurry it may be as leisurely as a summer afternoon.
Streams are in no sweaty haste, but with blunt Walt Whitman, may
loaf and invite their soul ; and so it happens that they will spend a half
day in your field when they might get beyond it in a jiffy. I love their
loitering. The streams go nosing around, digging under banks, stop-
ping to demolish a sandbar, then waiting to build a sandbar, putting a
curve on everything as a rainbow does, building little peninsulas where
a wild flower may root, laving the roots a sycamore has inadvertently
thrust too near the stream, dawdling around in pools, chasing its own
bubbles as a kitten runs after its own tail (poor silly), making froth at
the edge of some root which has with temerity walked out across the
stream, pouring down its little world of waters from a play-ledge of rocks,
and so has dug a little hollow where the waters stay when the stream
runs dry, running around and building an island so they may study

143

THROUGH LONG GRASSES

geography without going to school, making a bold maneuver, like a
skillful general, and swinging back so far as to construct a huge penin-
sula, and within a three-feet of flowing back into itself, when in strange
willfulness turning off in a new direction to go clean to the back of the
hill, where the rocks jut out, laughs at them for being naked, and
chasing sunlight along its way and then drowsing within the shadows
(for the heat is too intense to enjoy long at a time), thus loitering, then
running off in great speed as if to do an errand forgotten, then off into
another direction out into the open where grass is growing and willows
dream; then down where the banks are high and steep, and where no
sunlight is, and then dodges like children when they play blindman's
buff: and the upshot of all this is — the stream has written a poem of
journeys.

Never walk across lots when a stream is in your neighborhood
(unless you are going on an errand for your wife. Then stay not on
the ordering of your going), but follow the stream as the sycamores
do. You shall find enchantment such as Merlin the mage knew not;
and you will be led afield where the voices will make you glad and
where every new step will be new delight, as with Merlin following
"The Gleam."

144

FOUR SEASONS=ONE YEAR

FOUR SEASONS=ONE YEAR

HAT the good God of the Out-of- Doors could
have made five seasons or six is quite among
his possibles, though not of ours ; yet am I , for
one, content that he made us four. That is
enough. Four is his sacred number ; and
sacred the quaternion of the seasons surely is.
Think through the four seasons as if your
thought were an arrow-flight speeding from
spring through summer, autumn, winter into
spring again, and feel how adequate the journey
|p I was. Spring was birthday, summer love-
_v |j? I making, fall the glow and glory of the day of

If Jr I life, winter the battle mood and madness.

mm Fa : »' " fay

*'- I Beginning, wooing, enjoying, fighting with a

world of foes, what besides is there in life?
Four seasons are enough. They engulf the year in their glorious ocean
as reefs are swallowed in the high tides that caress and kiss and make
tiger springs of furious passion. Four seasons — I will thank God for
that mercy also. They are none too many, not two nor one, but just
enough; like the number of children at anybody's house, never one
too many.

I want no climate where the seasons are reduced to two or one. A
year-long winter does not suit my thought nor me, nor does a year-long
summer. One season to fill the year is too sedate. I like not its
narcotic ; for it makes the faculties drowse like lotus-eating, whereas
Nature, if we are to make much of it, must be watched with undi-
minished interest and appetite. A drowsy man might as well be asleep
for all the good he gets from company or landscape. Did you ever try
to carry your part of a conversation when you were nodding and napped

149

£l&

between your own fragments of dialogue ? It is a grief
to me to think of my lapses of this sort, when, though
in goodly company, a too long journey in the wind had
blown awakement from my eyes and spirits and I
drowsed like an August afternoon. O, it was griev-
ous! And to wake with an intellectual summersault
and join blithely in the conversation, as if my silence
had arisen from cogitation well-nigh lost in the morass
of that fen — too profound thought ! As I think of my
stealth of reapproach to convivial conversation and of
my vivid remorse over the outraged rites of hospital-
ity, I blush while setting these sad confessions down,
but rejoice that these sleepy moods of mine were ab-
normal, fitful, isolated. I am usually awake, my blinds
up and my doors open. The plover will not call and
I not hear, nor the veery cry nor the crickets chirr,
nor the dirty-faced, ragged lad sit astride an impossi-
ble landscape of toppling habitation and I not see his
ragged glee and rejoice. No, I am not customarily
asleep ; I am usually awake and have been known to
be wide awake. I will make my prayer to be pre-
served from the drowsy spirit ; and that my prayer
may be the surer of answer, I would wish to live in a
four-seasoned year. Give me the seasons' cycle to
keep my life awake. "When will the birds come?"
that is springtime's question. "When will the birds
cease their singing?" that is summer's query. "When
will the birds tire of us and be gone?" that is autumn's
sad question. "When will the dull clouds shake their
mantles and fleck the world with snow?" that is
winter's surly interrogative. Thought has little room
for sleep if the four seasons be kept pace with, seeing
they are so swift of foot, and outrun the speed of
mourning doves in autumn flights. Though he said
little enough about his subject, goodness knows,
Thomson wrote about the four seasons. But in the
mere writing about them was a virtue, specially in
days when men cared so little for any season as
Thomson's contemporaries did. We must never
forget that he "took his pen in hand" to celebrate
150

the journeys of the year. Some people are virulently insistent on tell-
ing which season they like best. Such people vex me. I hope I may
be forgiven for my seeming ill-nature, but honestly, what is the need of
choosing? They are all ours. "All are yours." The round of the
seasons, glad, sunlit, sweaty, shivering, all are mine. I own the sum-
mer's sultry noon and winter's surly storm winds, so why choose? Who
owns mountain and valley need not vex himself to select between land-
scapes where he owns the whole. These "choosy" folks are like those

who persist in asking which fair woman in Shakespeare is loveliest.
They miss the mark. Each one of Shakespeare's women is loveliest
in what she is and for what she is. We do not always need to select.
Take what comes. What call for anybody to choose one star of the
firmament? I love them every one. Not one can be spared from the
wide pasture-lands of heaven. Let each star trim his lamp and burn
on, and may no single light blow out, that is all we ask. We must not
select, but embrace (I am speaking not of women, but of stars). Or
why should we be driven to the wall by "Which is your favorite flower?"
I will not answer that question, although I know, because the asking is
an impertinence. Woods and meadows, both are mme, and all the
flowers that haunt springtime woodlands and ravines or flaunt their gold

153

on autumn hills, if there is one I do not love, I wonder which it is.
Homely flowers, half weed and more, and scant in color, or lacking in
form, impress me as homely women — I am sorry for them ; but their
attempt at beauty pleases me. And the flowers, there are Maud Mul-
lers, barefoot and tanned, but they are dear to me. I like their rustic
simplicity. I will not choose so much as I will gather and enjoy all the
flowers which tangle in Nature's garden through the bewildering year.

I am so with the seasons. No one shall decoy me into expressing
preference now. What I may do later is immaterial. To-morrow I
may, but it is not to-morrow now. This is to-day . To-day is to-mor-
row in bud, and buds bloom if the frosts do not scar their immature
loveliness. But this I hold to as to the dirty, chubby hands of my little
children ; by and by I shall hold their hands as youths, and still further
on, if God shall loan me so many days, I shall hold their hands as man
and woman. Which shall I love the more ? the baby hands or the
lad's hands or the scarred hands of manhood? I will not answer;
whether I could is inconsequent. I will hold their hands all these

154

AUTUMN

days, and in that land where daylight lasts a long, glad while I shall
hold them still. I need not choose and will not. The hands are mine ;
say that, my heart, and hold thy peace.

So the four seasons, I would sing a madrigal for each. Let The-
ocritus or some good woodsman, who loves to brush the dew from the
stooping grasses of the early morning, let him sing a roundel for each
season as it comes ; and mind you, singer, spare no pains, sing sweetly
and shame the mockingbird when he sings his "dropping song," what
time he wooes and tosses wildly like a jet of salt sea spray to the rapture
of his own music.

"Sing me the song again!

The wild, sweet notes that thrill my heart with bliss :
Quick throbbing now with passionate disdain,
Now falling soft as evening breeze s kiss.
Sing me the song again !

Repeat the wondrous tune !
The full broad glory of the perfect moon,
The pearly glimmer of the clustering leaves,
The ghostly shadows of the night's high noon,

My listening soul perceives.

Repeat the wondrous tune!

-KATE MILLIARD.

ON WINTER PANES

'

ON WINTER PANES

In winter days on window panes

Fair summers dream their gladness o'er,
And grow dim, shadowy, restful lanes

Of elm-tree and of sycamore.

/ watch the glass, and watching see
Dear summers flushed with radiant June

And hear the song bird wild with glee,
And insects drone their drowsy tune.

I see far mountains wrappea in blue
And clouds that drift along the sky,

And valleys where with variant hue

The wild flowers bloom and blooming die

/ see the shaggy mountains throw
On high their plumes of oak and pine,

And roses in hid gardens grow
Their garlands ruddy as old wine.

On winter panes! There summer springs
Like Lark into deep skies of blue,

And lifts itself on singing wings

From meadow nest begemmed with dew.

Without, the winter blast sings loud
And trumpets like an angry bard;

Within, spring with its wind and cloud
Drifts incense sweet as precious nard.

WALKING TO MY FARM

WALKING TO MY FARM

>HE date is October four and the place
Kansas, when I, a city man (0 the pity
of it!) land at a siding on a hilltop to
take a day apart from the city calendar
and rest my heart in the country quiet,
away from the huckster, with his strident
vociferations ; away from the ragman,
with his highly-developed theories of eco-
nomics and his equally highly-developed
lungs; away from the jangle of street
cars and the ceaseless grind of wagon-
wheels in their industrious pursuits ; away
from the blue-coated policeman, with his
vigilant " Move on, there!" enforced with
his uplifted billy; away from the train-
caller, with his nasal "Nail aboard for —
thu Santa — Fe — for Topeka. Santa Fe,
San Francisco and the Philippines train on — the third track: Nail
aboard;" and then, in a lower and confidential voice adds, "The Santa
Fe is now ready." Away from this jargon without the courtesy of a
good-bye ; for I slipped off as if trying to avoid an officer ; and here I am
on the siding, with the day before me and no wagon grinding along the
pavement, nor any street car clanging at me with its virago bell ; here,
with autumn's quietness about me and the day before me, My heart,
carpe diem. Enjoy, enjoy this day.

And I will. I shall walk to my farm. Those who always ride miss
a good share of delight if their way leads through the country. Flowers
and leaves and pastorals must be seen close at hand. Nature says

169

"Come nearer." Bike riders do not see the country, nor do buggj
and horseback riders. Be leisurely and walk. Dally, loiter, poke along,
putter, or, if you like not these words get a word you do like, only let
the word express delayed and loving motion, the sort of leisureliness a
brook knows, running when it feels like running, drowsing when it has
a drowsy mood, in silvern basins where sun and shadows meet, shadows
to woo to slumber, sun to stoop and kiss the waters awake. So the
brook loiters. Do you, friend, when and if you would see an autumn
landscape do the like. Choose your word to fit that motion and fit
your goings to the word.

The autumn wind slows to a saunter coming up the long ravine.
Purple asters (and I have seldom if ever seen them so royal as this
fall) cluster in flocks of loveliness. Black-eyed Susans had in coyness
shaded their faces till they looked like buttercups long delayed in
blooming, months past due, but keeping faith at last. Now and then
morning-glories, with beauty of leaf and tendril and bell-shaped flower,
stray and bloom, many of them being so deep a pink as to approach
the glow of flame. Iron weed stands on its dignity (as usual) unbend-
ing, as people I have known, with its surly purple. Sumacs were dying,
but this autumn have the fresh green of spring, so that here is a vivid
green good for eyes to look upon. Wild grapes hang in purple bunches,
sometimes in the shadow of their own leaves, rare as arabesques, but
the grape leaves are turning brown as tired of this long daylight of
summer and will soon be quit of it. For days past now they

"Have been half in love with easeful Death,
Caird him soft names in many a mused rhyme."''

Oaks have, somo of them, the dull browns of winter save those glossy
greens that so well become the:n, fairly flashing in the sun when the
wind tosses them into momentary perturbation like play shields used in
fairy tournaments. A distance in the background against a hill, sumacs
stand in clumps, crimson as flushed sunsets. I am a good lover of the
sumac. In the summer its leaves are so glossy and its fronds so beau-
tiful, and in late summer its bunches of crimson berries are held on

high with such loyal pride
as if they were a lady's
favor to be worn on
a knight's helmet, and
those berries covered

thicker with frost than barn roof in October, and when the berries ripen
to hang for the winter with their dull, coal-glow red and these frosts
still unmelted by this glowing heat, I watch the wonder and the beauty
of it with joy unconcealed. What is the sumac that God should lavish so
much glory on it? And at the last, before the fronds fall, sumacs build
their bonfires on the hills and keep them burning through many nights
and days, for with them as with good lives "at eventide it shall be
light;" for sumacs, which, as you watch them at sunset on a night, will
the next morning be naked as dull death, only beneath them is a bed of
living coals which shall soon be ashes. How the sumacs burn on this
hillside! In a pasture beside my path as I saunter down the ravine a
herd of calves lie under the shadow of a courteous elm (and has any
tree more courtesy of shade than the elm?) ruminating in their care-
free leisureliness which no creatures save the kine know. A crow
(quite alone) goes soaring aloft (crows seldom soar — they fly, nor often
fly high; this crow is soaring, and far up) and I accost him (country
style, without introduction) with a hoarse "Ha, kha, caw," to which he
pays scant heed, though I think he deflects his course just a trifle to
see what manner of crow this free-mannered bird may be, and a little
later calls in his catarrhal voice (he should consult a specialist) "Ha,
ha, ha, kha! " and I am well repaid for my pertness. Here are no

"Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves."

Would there were. But violets are one with the spring that brought
them.

I am come to where a clump of trees — willow, hickory, walnut, elm,
oak — with their fast-falling leaves carpet the grass, and hazels with gold
purses full of nuts lean tantalizingly near, and a runnel builds a toy bank
for a divan. Here I take mine ease at mine inn and break bread with
myself and watch the cattle going with their ample leisure down to the
spring to drink, and eying me with a quizzical "You are lost, and
who will find you?" and going on with never an offer of bovine help.
Meantime I sit and listen to leaf fall and catch the autumn-leaf per-
fumes and hear the moan of the winds passing through the tree tops
or curling the brown leaves in miniature fury, and while the wind makes
its music I read Keats's "Ode to the Nightingale." Maurice Thompson
was right in saying this ode should be read out of doors, and I shall
add, as my contribution to his advice, it should be read Out-of-Doors
and in autumn. To-day is the day. The poem has the odors of leaf

171

fall. T is as lonely as an autumn night, when you hear only the falling
of the leaves to disturb the hush of darkness. Keats was stableboy,
but deserted the stable for the blue sky and the Out-
of-Doors, which was where he belonged, for all who
are familiar with our poets must know that
Keats is one of our chief pastoral poets. He
loves and sees nature, and, without stammer-
ing, tells what he saw. Theories of beauty
may limp, but beauty's self is as sure of foot
as daylight, and as fleet of foot as morning.
Those who frequent Out-of- Doors may have
beauty for ashes — an exchange worth mak-
ing. And Keats had made this exchange.
He had often been

' 7w some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,"

and had in " sun-burnt mirth " longed

"For a beaker full of the warm South,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple- stained mouth,"

and heard the nightingale a-singing

• 'Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn and wept.

Thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill- side; and now 'tis buried deep

In the next valley glades"

So Keats sings, and so, under the trees,
with heart set to leaf -fall, I read.

And here, while the light sifts down drowsily
through the gorgeous leaves, as if loath to leave
their glad glow, and leaves fall in leisurely fash-
ion, as doing it for their own delight, while birds
come, and with head leaning pertly on one side,
twitter "Who are you and what are you doing here ?"
The leaves rustle. The wind takes occasional gusts and then sits down
for rest, as I do. The clouds are bonnie, bonnie. When did I learn to

172

love the clouds, and did I teach myself or did John Ruskin teach me?
No matter. I think it was bom with me, like loving my mother, or
being hungry for sight and hearing of the sea. But anyway I love the
clouds and to-day they would make a dullard love them. They are so
high, gauzy, tenuous. Those high cirrus clouds nobody ever painted so
well as Turner, because nobody ever saw them so well. Seeing comes
before painting. There is a chronology in production. These clouds
this day are diaphanous, remote, leisurely, out a-strolling like myself.
I wonder if they have a farm they are walking to? No one need giggle

SHADOWS

as if I were not walking to my farm. Because I am sitting around
and reading Keats and watching clouds and herds of cattle and leaves
is no sign I am not walking to my farm. To rest is to get ready for
walking. This business is all of a piece. I am on my way to my farm.
But where the clouds are going, with their slow step, I do not now say,
not knowing, only they are taking their time. But nobody could paint
them. Each one in all the fleecy multitudes has a new, fleeting loveli-
ness. God loans them one divine form, and that only for a moment,
and then changes it to another. How rich God is in patterns, which

173

THE CROWS NEST

neither tapestries nor lace can ever hope
to emulate ! And this sunlight, dimmed
but not gray, half wakes, half sleeps, and
gives a light as of sunlight turned down
as some study-lamp, and so gives a mild,
sweet glow to gladden the eyes. I must
go now. I put my book in my pocket.
So, I feel a scholar; and down the ra-
vine with desultory steps I go. The wind
begins to walk with me and laughs sadly
amidst a glow of leaves. The crickets
are fiddling, though I do not quite know
the tune; but I am not musical, which
is no fault of theirs. A rabbit slouches
through a thicket and eyes me shyly and
ducks into the briers; and a redbird calls
with a voice of flame from his ruby
throat. A cooing dove (just one) moans
for a minute and is still. The corn-
fields stand half gray, half-golden-green,
resting against the coming rain and tem-
pests. Apple-trees stand with flashes of
red fruit through their branches and
leaves, for apple-trees are brave folk to
retain their leaves till the last minute.
Only the suckers of oak-trees hold them
longer with flame of anger because the
winter comes. A little child is gather-
174

ing walnuts under my trees with his hands dyed with walnut juice, as
mine were when I was a boy; and a bluejay is stealing my acorns and
hiding them (he is a merry thief who steals for the love of stealing, for
he forgets where he has hid his plunder) ; and blackbirds are making
tumult in the tree-tops, talking all at once, and though I do not profess
familiarity with their dialect I catch enough to know they are planning
to leave my woods, for which I am sorry enough. Now they take long
gyrations and swift, framing a black cloud like gathering tempest, and
then settle down with a choppy kind of laughter. To-night they will go

to sleep in the tree-tops, but in the morning they will be gone ; for in the
night, down some long stream's windings, they will have haled to a sunlit
land where, instead of fallen leaves, flowers perfume the air. Than
these night migrations of the birds nature has no stranger doing and no
sadder.

And I trudge along the highway like a tramp; but the moment I set
foot on my farm I strut like a turkey en route to thanksgiving. I am
here. I walked here. I knew I was walking when I was sitting in the
leaf-fall and dreaming awhile. I am here. Let turnips and corn-shocks,
planted trees and those God planted, bushes frowsy as an unkempt head,

175

and trees dyed with blood, all know that the proprietor of this manor is
come.

I climb the hill. I see the cattle browsing on the meadow. I hear
the musings of winds in the trees, and look at Quaylecroft, and flush with
pride, and stand at the gash in the woods at the hilltop and see the blue,
far, partly surly dimness of distance that clothes valley and hill and corn-
field and wandering of stream in beauty of dimness; and see how the
hills are great bonfires, and seared grasses and burning sumacs make
one hillside a regal purple. And I go down the hill and walk along my
wood road (you ought to see it) paved with leaves multicolored and
odorous, where shade and sunlight meet like old cronies; there I sit
and dream, sometimes of yesterday, sometimes of to-morrow, some-
times of that far, glad to-morrow where burdens never tire us nor any
tears wear ruts on the face nor dim the eyes from seeing, but where
beloved meet the BELOVED, and holy laughter fills the heart forever.

' 'Lightly he blows, and at his breath they fall,

The perishing kindreds of the leaves; 'they drift,
Spent flames of scarlet, gold aerial,

Across the hollow year, noiseless and swift.
Lightly he blows, and countless as the falling

Of snow by night upon a solemn sea,
The ages circle down beyond recalling.

To strew the hollows of eternity.
He sees them drifting through the spaces dim,
And leaves and ages are as one to him.'"

—CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS.

MY FARM

MY FARM

[OWN a farm. This is stated in a
spirit of pardonable vanity. I am
of those who are "purse proud,"
| having a farm which some friends
of mine affect to make light of as
if the possession of a demesne of
eighty acres was a matter of small
consequence. However, none of
these things move me. I am im-
pervious to such intimations, know-
ing as I do, though I regret to say
it, that they all spring from envy.
One friend — though I have cut his
acquaintance since the remark — being asked where my farm lay, re-
plied with a Machiavelian look, "It does not lie, it stands on end,"
referring to the fact, in which I take great and legitimate pride, that this
estate of mine lies on a very steep hill. I think it strange that envy can
so seize one who is otherwise pleasant and companionable and virtuous.
After careful and disinterested observation, I am prone to believe
that owning a farm tends to catholicity and magnanimity. In any case,
since having the estate alluded to, I am totally disinterested. Mansions
tempt me not. No roomy ranch with herds and harvests stings me to
covetousness. I too am a landholder. Some of Mother Earth is mine.
I own a tree, and a ravine, and a spring of running water, and a red
clover pasture, and a whip-poor-will, and much moonlight, and a small bil
of sky, and now and then a cloud. What hinders me being a landed
proprietor? Do I not pay taxes and own tax receipts, and work road

tax? Do not neighboring landed gentry complain of the ill-repair of

181

my fences so that their cattle come into my field and eat of my corn,
which they lay as a grievance against me, instead of complaining at
their cattle as culprits? Are not these things credentials of proprietor-
ship of such magnitude as that no holders of a principality can do better
save in the quantity of taxes and complaints?

I consider landholding gives a man an independence of spirit not
obtainable in any other way. He has a spot whereon to live, and — if
need be — whereon to die and wherein to be buried. Wherever he is,
though he own not the land on which he walks, he yet retains the feel-
ing that there is a bit of earth whereon he walks with the step of a lord,
not to say a conqueror. A landholder loses that apologetic air so detri-
mental to manhood. His proprietary instinct precipitates (to speak in
chemical phrase in deference to the soil of my farm) in his attitude
and conduct. He can not be browbeaten by the vulgar or the elite.
Truly some have larger holdings than mine ; but the depth of their land
is not greater than mine, nor the height of their sky. They may grow
a little more crop ; but if they grow a little more, I grow a little less, so
that I too have my idiosyncrasy of genius.

As appears, I am not a Henry Georgeite. He vexes my soul. I
am for ownership of soil, and albeit the owning is rather expensive, I do
not retract a sentiment, nor regret a penny planted in my soil (though
it has never had the courtesy to so much as sprout). No, with all
deference to the ghost of Henry George, I must say that so far from
land ownership being against nature, it is strictly in harmony with
nature, especially with my nature. I am of opinion that land, like a
child, likes to belong to somebody.

I am a son of the soil. Emerson says (and his words are golden),
that contact with the earth is medicinal; and I doubt not he is right.
Confident I am that contact with my earth is medicinal. The moment
I set foot on my farm I seem to have stepped under my meridian. But
Christian humility is so developed in me that I walk not haughtily nor
yet obsequiously, though I confess to a certain erectness of shoulders
not native to me, for I am a large trifle stooped (much learning is
presumed to be the cause) ; but Emerson did not say all the truth.
Contact with the earth is medicinal, but we do not need medicine much
of the time. I will advance on my friend Emerson's dictum, affirming
that contact with the earth is dietary. We must all eat, not as a matter
of luxury, but necessity. Now, contact with the ground is one way a
man "can live without dining." (Apology to Owen Meredith's ghost),

182

[ have long since been persuaded that I breathe through my feet (not
to the exclusion of my lungs, to be sure), and I am now, since becom-
ing a landholder, prone to believe that eyes, hands, and feet, are sorts
of receptive and assimilative organs, and that on the earth one can eat
without the usual routine. I feel a satisfied hunger when I get on my
farm (not denying that a lunch helps to the entire satisfaction of
hunger). A look about me as corn shocks stand yellow as rusty brass
in the slant light of autumn, or on the growing corn, standing tall and
straight as regulars on duty, with the utter grace of the blades as they
swing indolently as doing it out of courtesy and not of necessity; or
when I see tangles of weeds down along the runnels or hedge corners
(for I confess to a frank delight in weeds, even if they grow in a spirit
of impertinence in my field; for tangles of weeds are never inartistic.
They are like women, always of beautiful pose) — and when I see weeds
on my farm and know that they are mine, I feel as if I had been at
Thanksgiving dinner (at another man's house). Contact with earth,
friend Emerson, is not only medicinal, but dietary. Set that down for
certain. When on my farm a spirit of courtesy controls me. I feel a
rising hospitality. I wish to invite the farmless to come in and sit
under my shade, and walk in my sunshine ; for I have both. People
may have their chance when on my premises. I feel a resident spirit
of pity for learned men, and lawyers, and merchants, and all such as
have no farm. I find myself looking at them with commiserative eyes,
though themselves look at my farm and me with ill-concealed pity,
while I hold on tight to my overalls — one suspender being "busted;" —
these landless men, I repeat, look at me with a smile ill concealed;
and I am not so blind as not to see that they have their jest at my
expense the minute they pass me by, turning to look back at me as if I
were a joke. To be patient with such superficiality and frivolity is hard,
but I am. If they pity me, I pity them; and I have the farm. And
this farm of mine is much more than people suppose. They think I
was buncoed when I bought the place; but I was not. They think so
because the descent of the farm is swift and the ascent slow. These
.are facts; but it does not follow that I was beaten in my bargain — far
from it. This is my shrewdness. There is more land on a farm with
steep hills on it than on a level plot. One would think people would
know that, but people are not profound as I have discovered since
becoming a landholder; they see neither deep nor far. Now, as I have
intimated in plain statement, my farm taxes at eighty acres but after

183

climbing up the thing and sliding down the thing a good many times, 1
am firmly convinced that I own in the neighborhood of one hundred and
sixty acres; and this increase in my estate is wholly attributable to the
steep incline. To own a hill seems to me the acme of desire. Aspira-
tion blooms out on hills, and besides so situated, I need not migrate
with the birds to get the seasons, or summer or winter residence. All
I need do is to toil up the hill, or slide down it. At one extremity, viz.,
the hill, I call the habitation there erected Quaylecliff, and the residence
erected at the base of the hill I call Quaylecroft. Now, could a man
owning a level farm, every foot of which is tillable, have so economical,
and yet so delightful arrangement, or coin such names for his vernacu-
lar? Evidently he could not. The flat farm owner may have larger
crops and may in consequence get some rent, and moreover, his land
may stay where it was put with more tenacity ; but these are inconse-
quential matters when compared with the legitimate aristocracy of
possessing such names as "cliff" and "croft." Now these localities
are on my farm and have been for several years. They go with the
place. I own one hundred and sixty acres (or close to that), of spring,
summer, autumn, winter. I do not wish to boast. Vanity is not natural
to me. I have not been accused of a predisposition to braggadocio, but
do confess that when I consider how sections of the four seasons are
mine to rent, loan, or sell, I am with difficulty restrained from a little
Falstaffian swagger, not to say lying. Sometime, I fear, when off
guard, I shall be guilty of both ; but the provocation will, to my thought,
justify.

This farm has had a fine diversity of tenants since I have been
paying taxes on it. Variety is the spice (allspice, also pepper), of
farming. I detest the humdrum of changelessness, and have suffered
nothing from ennui from this cause since becoming proud possessor of
this estate. My first tenant was an Ethiopian. He was a good man,
and religious, and his wife raised turkeys, and he had a family great for
multitude, but his wife had — in some calamity prior to coming to my
farm — lost one of her bodily supports, and so chased her family over
my farm on one leg. Now this condition irritated my sense of female
grace. Woman is a biped. This woman was a uniped. Such a con-
dition was contrary to nature ; and a farmer must not go in the face of
nature any more than in the face of Providence. I say no more. The
next renter was, in the vernacular, a Dutchman. He was a brave
horse trader, and set posts for my vineyard, and possessed much suavity

184

of manner (though not much suavity of farming) ; but when he met me
he had a habit of saying in a loud voice fitted for calling cattle, "Hello,
Doc., how ish de old vooman?" This considerate attention coming to
Mrs. Mugwump's ears, the man moved from the farm before his lease
expired. The next gentleman to do me the courtesy to reside on my
farm gratis, was an American. He was a devotee of business, but not
of my business. He took the medal, however, for raising sunflowers.
When he was on horseback (and he rode a tall and angular nag), he
could ride through his sunflower grove and not be detected. He was
as practically concealed as if he had been riding through the forests of
the Amazon. Now I was gratified to see the excessive fertility of my
soil ; but the neighbors smiled at the harvest, and I think one's neigh-
bors are to be considered (no man liveth to himself). This tenant
went away leaving the spring in the old spot, for which I was duly
grateful. The barb wire fence he wrapped up in reels. I hope he used
it for settees. The next tenant was an Irishman and was a choice
spirit, kindly, but not facetious ; courageous, but not a man of levity ; a
Sir Walter Raleigh in the use of the pipe, and as honest as Aristides.
He encourages the apples to grow, but discourages the cockle burs, and
the reverse had been the uniform custom of his predecessors — my ten-
ants (I speak with pride in my pencil), and the change was to me pleas-
ant because it had the virtue of absolute novelty. My only fault with
this tenant is that he is so overworked keeping my farm in order (this
according to him) that he has no time to go to church. This intensity
of application, while it speaks well for his industry, does not commend
itself to me as first rate piety; however under his vigilant administra-
tion, the sunflowers are not a good crop, but the corn can be seen even
by the casual observer, and in the winter, corn shocks pitch their teiits
on the place like some army in winter quarters. While lauding with
all intensity the industry of this tenant and studying the corn he raised
with admiration, since I have not seen its like before, I still confess
missing the sunflowers that grew with such enthusiasm and made such
fine shade, and even in the winter under their kind auspices, the rabbits
ate my apple-trees with delightful avidity and friendliness which always
challenged my admiration. I always like to have my neighbors feel at
home with me. The rabbits used (and used-up) my apple-trees ; but
the apple-trees are generally understood to have nourished the rabbits,
and apple-trees and myself are in this world to do other people good.
Strange things happen on my farm. Any night of clear skies the

187

Pleiades take a stroll over my farm looking at it intently ; but what they
see justifies a long journey. The sun walks on the south line of my
farm in winter, and straight across my farm in summer. A public high-
way goes along the east and just the same on the west of said real estate,
and on the north I run a domestic highway, which is, I may say, how-
ever, "eloquent with beauty." Nothing keeps away from this farm.
This, I think, creditable to the place — for instance, the road on the west
crowds rather rudely on my ground, ostensibly because the hill is so
steep, the road must make the ascent by angles; actually because I
have such inviting shade that the road panting hot in long summer
days urges its tired way under my spreading trees to rest like a school-
boy tired with climbing.

More things than I, love my farm, so that I conclude good taste is
really prevalent. The sportsmen come to my wooded hill, though I like
not the art of killing. But my neighbors do have the courtesy to come
and send a cloud of powder smoke along my fields or in my
woods, and a flock of quails whirrs by on startled wing, and
— more 's the pity — sometimes one flutters out of his com-
pany and falls dying in the grass, or on the leaves. The
rabbit frequents my cornfield, which I take as a compli-
^ment, though he is a costly visitor, because he persists in
dining off the bark of my apple orchard, and I have a scuffle
all winter long with him and his to teach them manners;
but any way, all hospitality is costly, and the hospitable man must not sulk
if his bills are heavy when his friends are many. Friends are cheap
whatever they cost. I would not have my farm deserted of these neigh-
borly folk, squirrel and jay and quail and rabbit and crow. Burns
was right, I think. The mouse is worth his board. From such a
tenant we lose a little and gain a great deal. What were a hundred
fields in their loss of grain matched with Burns's poem on the
"Mousie," which fairly aches with sympathy for the beasties of the field?
I confess to a love for the hawk with his swift shadow and his bold flight
rich in the ecstasy of motion ; and when I hear the owl call piteously
through the dark in the back lands, along the fringes of the hills in the
dark woods, I like him too. He is not mannerly, nor cordial. He is
not even commonly sociable. I have found him a sort of morose, sullen
creature, but he has a touch of sadness in his voice, and doubtless may
have his own family troubles, which may account for his behavior
("Judge not, lest ye be judged"). These folks are all my neighbors and

188

are welcome. They have rights as well as I; and after these years of
farming wherein losses have much outranked my gains, so much so that
long since I have ceased to keep accounts because I felt so sad and dis-
appointed when I looked at my balance sheet. After these years, I say,
I like these marauders. Were they absent, I might raise more (I can
not say), but I would enjoy less. I am a hedonist when on my farm.
I love to hear the quail's call on a summer afternoon when evening is not
far away. His note is so clear, so liquid clear, and his cheer is like peren-
nial joy, and when you can give him a playground and house and garden
patch in your field for so little cost, and for such cheerful piping, I, for one,
love him for a tenant. And the rabbits, with their strange timorous-
ness, that seem to dwell in perpetual fear, yet have delight through all
their troubles, I love them. To
see a rabbit sprawling like a
pickaninny in the sun, is to see
a life-size picture of content-
ment and grace ; and in the
summer, when the dogs seem
to have their teeth pulled, the
rabbit will calm his fear for a
moment to look at your com-
ing, and the rabbit child — no
bigger than a country biscuit —
is so cute as to make me always
call him by some pet diminu-
tive as 1 do my baby. And

when they hie them to the thicket where the briers are rabbit barri-
cades, their scurry away is like dim laughter, and I like them for
tenants too. They may stay without gruff talk from me. I am for the
rights of the world. The crow — nothing would induce me to part from
him. Frankly, I love him, though to the best of my belief, he does not
return my affection. I love him and am glad I have woods where he
nests in summer, and where he spends his nights in winter with his
dusky wings close against his dusky sides and his sagacious eyes asleep.
He may do harm, but 1 doubt it ; he does more good than harm. He
is friend to the farmer, but we farmers do not always know our friends ;
but, friend or foe, I like him. His dudish and impertinent walk, his dis-
inclination to have anything to do with me, his stay with us all winter
when other birds are mostly gone leaving us alone, his remarks which

189

some think dull, but I think droll, his fondness for his own kind and
apparent ability to get along with his wife's folks, his choppy, short
flights, like an inexpert rower rowing hard over tumbling waters, his
higher flights, sometimes graceful as the soaring hawk, and all but as
swift, his sure home comLig at the night, sometimes with wild
speed and sometimes slowly as if in his long journey of the day he had
grown wing-weary, his steadfast love for home ; for wherever he may
have been by daylight, home he comes by twilight; and if you have ever
heard him calling across the evening sky glorious with sunset, and wing-
ing his way as if he might cross a continent, and then all of a sudden
he gyrates like a cyclone funnel — for he has gotten home, — if you have
seen this, your heart must have been touched as well as your eye grati-
fied, for if everybody knew enough to come home at night wherever they
may have been by day, the world would have more laughter, and sweeter
mirth, and more heaven before heaven were journeyed to. No, I like
the crow and his independence of me and my liking (for he ignores me
as he struts along my field as if he paid taxes instead of myself). When
I speak to him, he deigns no reply, but walks on with his proprietary
air; he does not know me and apparently does not want to. Who has
set his black mind against me, I can not tell, but certain it is he will
not be friends with me (some people think he is wise in that, but my
judgment is he makes a mistake). I do not like to be ignored, even by
a crow; however, I like him so well he is welcome to his impertinent
mien. He survives, no thanks to others. Nobody seems to love him ;
but he is indifferent. He does not sulk nor hide, he never runs to
shelter like the rabbits, nor hides in the hedge rows like the quail, but
affects the open, flies low over your head, talks to himself sometimes
while he swaggers across the sky, lights among your corn shocks, grows
pnggish before your very eyes, snubs you, neither laughs nor giggles, but
is always solemn as a hired mourner, propitiates nobody except himself.
He is brave as a soldier and sometimes as truculent ; but winter, spring,
summer, autumn, here he is, sometimes by himself walking along like a
preacher concocting his sermon, sometimes with a few intimate friends
like a bevy of girls after a party, and like the girls all talking at once,
sometimes, especially in autumn or winter, in great conventions noisy
as stump orators and as indefinite in destination, — here he stays, and
here he lives despite his foes; and to be brief, I like him, and I fee*
proud with what I hope is Scriptural pride, that so stately a gentleman
condescends to help me farm. I like that part immensely.

190

CROWS

And the squirrel, I like him. I love his russet hilarity. I enjoy his
impudence, for at sight of me he orders me off the place. I have
the tax receipts. I have by the sweat of my face secured them ; but
no difference, he has the rights of squatter sovereignity, and bids me in
an unseemly and bossy fashion to quit the premises and leave the woods
to him. He is delicious in his effrontery as the nip of a winter wind.
He scurries across my winter leaves, zigzags up the trees, pauses not to
get breath, but to give me a piece of his mind, tosses himself from tree-
top to treetop, crows over me because I can not do it, sits and giggles
at me, " I dare you to do it ;" eats a nut he has stolen from me in my
presence, and eats it with the method of an epicure, tosses off squirrel
jokes at me, which I being only a man and a trifle slow do not see the fun
in until the next day, and throws them at me in a catarrhal voice (for
a squirrel always has a cold which affects his bronchial tubes), and
while taking another one of my walnuts from his pocket, he sails off
without the courtesy of an " Excuse me, please;" notwithstanding I like
him, and had 1 my way, no squirrel should ever be shot in my woods.
I would pension him to stay.

But come, friend, and I will take you through my farm, or to speak
with greater accuracy in deference to my neighbors and critics, I will
take you up and down my farm, and you shall see for yourself what
riches I am master of. Come to the hilltop. This hill, to use the
phrase of our sweet friend, Alfred Tennyson, is " tiptilted like the petal
of a flower," which is poetry for the prose of pug-nosed. This hill has
considerable individuality, for which I praise it. There is no hill just like
it hereabouts, nor for that matter thereabouts — wherever that is. I
want you to notice this view, actually it beats all. I have traveled —
well, I will not boast, I simply say I have traveled — let your imagina-
tion fill in the rest, lest I seem to be like those vain boasters who com-
pare everything they see with what they profess to have seen. How-
ever, resuggesting, "I have traveled" —
and this hill just beats all and this view
is like the hill. This view is worth a gold x

mine. Have you traveled far and seen
much ? Then, friend, look and tell me
in candor, have you seen more beauty
than here ? From this cliff you can see
many unhindered miles, where beauty
blooms profuse as lilacs in the spring.

193

If you look southward, and I want you to, note that delicious blue
beyond the blue. See how it tilts against the sky like the dear sea!
Really, friend, my farm is cheap whatever it cost me, to have the
sea on its south horizon. Here I am, geographically stated, fifteen
hundred miles from the ocean, and, in all honor, as I look over and over
again, I feel looking at the sea as I have seen it from the inlands of the
Isle of Mona, as I have seen it from the shores of Maine, back in the
r meadows with the pines for background, or in Cali-
fornia, where scorched deserts smoked at my back
in the furious sun; but this sea we are looking on
now has all the ravishment of those, and did I not
know (for I am a knowing man, notwithstanding
many intimations to the contrary) that the sea was
not there, 1 could take oath that there its waters
lashed shoreward with multitudinous music and
gentle laughter. Often from this hill have - 1 re-
freshed my tired spirit by watching this bewilder-
ment of sea, and have been fain to believe that a
sea breeze went lingering by my cheek. Here I
entertain dreams of the sea, and the murmur of
soft music comes to me as when in long blessed
nights, I have half slumbered and half wakened on
a seabeach listening to the hoarse calls from the
tremendous deep when it "moans round with many
voices." This is my seashore, and these cliffs a/e
my sea cliffs, and I could stand and watch this blue,
unhindered ocean, all the glad day as in a happy
dream. Here I may with Friend Whittier — pitch
my tent upon the beach, and hear the night wind
surging through the tree tops with unquenchable
music, and think I hear the music of the sea.
And then this sea is not a dream of the sea, but
a dreamless sea, and do you wonder I love my farm when it borders on
what sweet Blackmore calls "the great unvintaged ocean?"

Now, friend, look northward, Once I tried to experiment on my
Dutchman (mine then, but mine no longer; he has changed pasture,
much to the benefit of my pasture) saying, "That is a beautiful view,
is n't it?" To which, while he tamped the posts down and spat copious
tobacco on my grass, he replied, "Bully." That was praise and I was

194

rfrVjLjiiF^yyy^
* ^" '%*-."

elated, for not every farm has
"bully" views. This farm has;
but, in honor, know you any
blues like Kansas blues, if there
be sufficient distance? I have
seen the blues in the Alleghanies
and in the Adirondacks, and the
White Mountains and Green
Mountains, in the San Francisco
Mountains and the Sierras, and
the high roof ridges of the
Rockies, but am bound to say
I know not any blue distance so
dreamy, quieting, and satisfying
as a Kansas distance. This
valley seen from my hill is
scarred with figures of green
trees where the scant brooks
run, and the delight of green
hills where fields and orchards

cling in sheer fertility, and valleys where deep green of cornfields is
islanded in seas of amethyst, and in June, harvests are billowy with gold
whose stately waves toss and break on a green strand of the field edge
with never a white crest of billow, nor a sound of waters breaking on the
shore, and when the grain is harvested and stands in tents of gold as if
an army of angels were camped there upon a holiday — ah ! but the valley
is sweet to look upon ; and in such golden days of harvests, I have some-
times dreamed I was looking upon the city (where my hopes and my
loves build a little house eternal in the heavens), whose streets are pure
gold. And if angels would come flying homeward on a summer after-
noon and look, they would think that they were nearer than they dreamed.
And, besides, this view is a surprise, for the road that comes from the
south leading straight up to it must take a sharp turn when it passes my
hedge and jog into my land — when through the lattice of the trees and
through the gateway in my woods— this fair vision breaks on you like
the vision poets see. This crop never fails me (the other crops never
succeed). Drouth, hot winds, too late spring, or too early spring, insects
of divers names but all with ravenous instincts, poor plowing or no
plowing, late sowing, or too early sowing, or no sowing whatsoever (I
have had considerable of this kind of crops last mentioned), whatever
the condition and whatever happens to the crops I put in, nothing
tampers with this harvest of beauty and this blessed vintage. God
always gives me this crop. 0! it is good to own this farm!

Rest your eyes now, friend (pardon me, your name slips my mem-
ory) , from that long vision and look behind you. This is my red clover-
field. If I am proud of this bit of landscape gardening, do not blame
me. This red clover pasture here on this hilltop has a dreamy sway as
if a wind blew from very far off. But when that leaf of the clover
(have you noticed its perfect shape, and the inroads the varying lines of
green make on the leaf?) flushes out a smile to spring, so like a plain
face illuminated with a great love, it is well worth a pilgrimage to see,
and I think nothing could be lovelier. But when June comes with her
sweet beauty, and kisses the green clover fronds and they blaze out
blossoming, then I know God made nothing lovelier (save children and
women only) ; and when the soft south wind dreams over the field and
comes away with faint odors clinging to its garments, then I wonder God
could think on so many sweet things to do. I wonder he has any beauty
left to give to any field or flower; but he needs not to study parsimony
as the poets do. He hath, and to him hath been given and he giveth

198

to the morning its light, and to the violet its blue, and to the golden-rod
its gold, and to the whip-poor-will his dolorous cry, and to the rose its
blushes, and to the stars their light; and after he has given to all he
h23 not yet begun. He is the affluent God and his resources are past
all possibility of exhaustion.

There is a patch of plum-trees fringing the edges of the cloverfield,
thick-sown they are — God sowed them — and when spring is new, they
are a tall pile of snow fresh fallen, only there blows from them an odor
not of snowdrifts or winter, since snowdrifts are odorless ; plum-sown
drifts are odor-full. Sweet it is after long winter months, when woods
and fields have all their odors sealed — for frozen fields are odorless — to
walk over my hillfield and on a sudden have wafted in my face odors
that might have been distilled for kings to use on coronation days, and
feel myself in the path of the winds a-blowing from my drift of plum
blossoms, My heart sings, "Spring is here! Spring is here!" And
the meadowlark singing to the sun makes not more music than my
heart, with its bird-call, "Spring is come, is come!"

Friend, I can see you want my farm ; but I remind you of the com-
mandment, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's" farm. Let us go
down through the woods slowly. Make no haste, for woods are not made
to pass through lightly. God has been a good while growing these trees
and is not through yet. Walk down from the crest of the hill through
the thickets where vines and briers tangle (get some nettles on your
clothes — so — you look better), and pass that big elm, off with your hat,
man ; and now lift up your eyes — that is my orchard. Do you see long
rows of apple trees? Why, I have come up through great tribulation to
get them. Every one represents courage on my part, besides some
trifling expense, and no end of forbearance. Those of mine own house-
hold have flouted me as a visionary and have looked knowingly at each
other, as to say, "Poor dear, his reason was once as balanced as ours."
Genius is not understood, Columbus found it so; I have found it so.
Great dreamers are.alwa>s derided (see Palissy the potter, and Morse
and Goodyear). Because I profess to see the day when, from those
boughs apples shall hang their crimson spheres, even that person related
to me, as Job's wife was to him, has snubbed me publicly and held me
up domestically to the ridicule of mine own children; but I persevered.
Genius does. I have. Each year I planted a new installment of apples
till now I have some thirty acres or over sown to them. I have sown
the wind, but to this writing I have not reaped the whirlwind, nor even

199

a good Kansas breeze of apples.
I do not despair. "They also serve
who only stand and wait," says my
special friend, Milton. This being so,
I am a high-grade servant of the
apple crop. I stand and wait.
This fall I went through the
orchard, and (say it with
no haste, nor yet "trip-
pingly on the
tongue, "but with

ruddy;
luscious
scions
of the
house of apple.
What a day that
was ! I can not for-
get it; and, to be plain
I have not tried to.
That was my day of
vindication. I was like
Job when his trouble
was over — I felt good. I felt
very good. "Apples! apples! "
I cried, instead of calling out
that ancient word (so archaic),
"Eureka!" That same day I picked
pears (not from the apple-trees), and
some late peaches (hard as biscuits new
wives bake). But providence has vindi-
cated me. Those who thought me mad (and
what is worse, told me and others what they
thought) are now humiliated, and I, to use the
psalmist's phrase, may stand by and say, "Aha!

200

studied delibera-

ll t

tion, as a man

E5&
&*

**<*. ^ , ^

would kiss his
sweetheart),
I found
apples, big

and

•

aha!" This being the Scriptural method, I have done so. But I can
advise an apple orchard. It is better than investing in mines. You
never know what you will get by what you plant. A quartet of things
or a double quartet of things may happen to the tree. It may freeze
to death, or borers may probe it, or rabbits may girdle it, or your tenant
may drive plow or wagon over it, or hot winds may bake it, or your
neighbor's cattle may come uninvited into your field and eat it, or —
out I desist. Enough has been said to show how delicious the uncer-
tainty, such as is attendant on either fishing or mining. If the tree
escapes all these snares of appleyouth it may come to applehood. This
also is uncertain. This process is as thrilling as reading a serial story
written by Mrs. Southworth. Aye, but it is bonnie! In winter, to look
across the tops of apple-trees is to warm both eyes and hands ; for the
branches have a half-crimson, half-purple glow, so that after looking at
them I feel as if I had warmed my hands and heart at a ruddy wood-
blaze. And some morning you will walk into your field, and suddenly
your spirit will sing, like happy music beside the conquering sea, when
long rows of apple-trees are in early spring bloom — and the grass has
had courage to grow green, and the brown fields in which the trees
grow have hint of spring's coming; for the field will be pink as a
winter-evening sky, and the apple-blossoms, with their dainty fragrance,
and their exquisite form and delicacy of coloring make it so that resur-
rection seems not myth, but truth. An apple orchard is a success, you
know, when the apple-trees bloom. They may not come to crop, what
odds? They have done enough for one season. Let them bloom this
year and bear next year. A man must not be covetous. When apple-
branches flush with bloom heaven is no remote province, but nearer
than " Down to old Aunt Mary's."

The pear-trees are beautiful specimens of arboreal life. The bark
is shiny and dainty, and in color like unto dregs of wine, and smooth as
polished hardwoods. God has taken pains with pear-trees. They grow
tall and graceful as a woman, and, like a woman, are winsome. The
blossoms are snow-white — why, the almond is not whiter, nor may-apple
blossoms (than these, what could be more snow-white) ? And the cherry-
trees, their bark is smooth and polished, and blackberry and raspberry
vines have rare crimsons to cross their tangle of branch and color over
the little plot where they are sown. They are the ruddiest colors of the
winter, save those which glow in the skies when daylight shames into
the dusk. Peach-trees I love more in summer than in winter, for they

201

are a rotund tree, chunky, like a little body, and the peach leaf is a lance
with which fairy warriors might wage war. So delicate in green and
veining, and with such a tang to the taste as distinct as an olive's,
the peach leaf is itself alone, and has no relations. The peach blooms
early and has a roseate tint, and not many fruits are so beautiful as the
peach, with its perfection of shade and many hues, varying from dim
green to deep crimson. I am glad I planted peaches on this farm. My
sagacity is something to wonder at. I knew my business, that is clear.

THE RAVINE

When apple branches stoop low beneath their burdens of delicious fruit
(how sweet the odor of apples when you wander slowly through a laden
orchard!), and when peach-trees, flush from their thicket of deep green
leaves, their surprise of crimson fruit, and when, from their delicate
stems leaning gracefully, the yellow pears, flushed with reds, hang in
clusters, what farmer but must be proud of himself and be mindful of
the sweet Providence that keeps orchard trees, unforgetful of what
fruits each tree ought to bring to harvest; for I recall that every tree

202

remembers what fruit is expected of it, and that, though customary, is
very, very strange. God made it so. How else?

Sauntering across the gentle slopes of my farm down in the croft
(for I have gentle slopes sedate as middle age — not all the farm is
a jump up and fall down) is a ravine, which spring rains have digged
deep, until it is deep enough to hide a man on horseback, even if horse
and man were Kentucky bred. A ravine, with trees growing in it and
on its edge, is poetry if one knows enough to know poetry when it is
written in prose form. This ravine lacks only one thing to make me
love it to excess. As it is I love it quite enough to satisfy an exacting
affection. The ravine lacks water, that is its omission which alone pre-
vents it from perfection of beauty. But not to dwell on lacks, which
would be a breach of courtesy, notice how knowingly the ravine jogs
and zigzags, as if possessed of all the field; how it beats back on itself,
as having forgotten something; how it makes spaces shut from winter
winds, where birds find covert; here saplings and trees of sweet sixteen
climb up the bank, or lean over the edges, or stand on the bank, as
guarding a secret, or stand in the bottom of the ravine, like lads knee
deep in summer streams. How the wild grapevine trails with its inde-
scribable grace from tree to tree, and tosses out long tendrils to float to
and fro with the incoming and outgoing tides of air! You shall see this
ravine in the picture, and I take pride (albeit a religious pride) in call-
ing attention to the fact that this ravine grows on my farm. If I can
ever get money (the time seems strangely remote at this writing) I will
dig a well and erect a windmill, and build a waterfall in this ravine, and
plant cress along the watercourse, and have a lily pond at the far side
where my ravine steps off my farm with hesitant step, as disinclined
to go. In one thing I am inflexible with my hale friend, the renter,
namely, that no limb be cut or broken from the trees, nor any briers
be cut, nor any golden-rod dug from the banks of this ravine. And,
withal, how the ravine thrives under my ownership* I am proud of its
delight in my partiality. Each year the place grows in beauty and
tangle of growth, as if eager to please me. Whether or not I am a
success at raising corn and potatoes I can raise a fine ravine, which,
to my mind, requires much more ability than the production of potatoes
and com.

Have you, my friend, have you the topography of my farm clearly in
your mind ? The hill-top where we saw the sea on the far south and the
bewildering beauty of hills and orchard and harvest field and woods

203

and blue to the north, and on this hill the red clover pasture and the
plum-trees and some gnarly oaks, then down hill through a fringe of
woodland on the steep hill incline and then the cornfield and the
orchard, and after that the rich soil through which the ravine digs its
deep trench and grows its many pastorals and on the north-east corner
some noble walnuts which shake their odorous fruits on the ground after
the first keen frost bites into them, and under their shadows my house
of two rooms is built. In the front room is the organ and in the back
room the coffee pot ; though I have scarcely stated the case with the
accuracy such as marks my usual observations. Accurately stated there
is no back room. Both are front rooms. I think highly of this architec-
tural plan. The family lives in the front of the house, which gives an
air of gentility and breeding not secured in the old architecture. The
house is built lengthwise with the road, which plan does not necessitate
the housewife leaving the meat to burn or the coffee to boil over while
she runs to the front room to see who is going past in a buggy and what
beau that Smith girl (the one who was sixteen ten years ago) has now
— but she can keep on with the cooking and look out at the front window
at the same time. It saves shoes and time and nerve force and
muscles, and biscuits from burning. A grasping man would have
patented this revolutionary idea in architecture and vended it as they
do proprietary medicines. Not so I. In this open way I give my dis-
covery to the world as physicians their remedies. The design oi the
house is as follows :

This is the public road

These are the
walnut-trees

D D D °

cp

n

n

This is the house

204

Note (1) that the c p is an abbreviation for coffee pot and o is con-
traction for organ, and note (2) that both c p and o are located at front
windows. Now that may not be genius, but I am inclined to think it is.
Whether you are playing on the coffee pot or the organ, you can glance
out and see the Smith girl with her city beau (sometimes beaux) pass
and neither interrupt the aroma of the coffee nor the hilarity of the
organ. With this lucid, brief, and yet comprehensive plan of my
country house presented, I pass to other parts of my farm.

You will do well to come and take a drink out of my spring. I am
always glad to get thirsty so as to take a drink at this fountain. It
never has run dry. I keep the thicket growing here above the spring,
with neither weed, nor vine, nor sapling, nor any tree cut; all the under-
growth and uppergrowth untouched, because I want dense shade for the
spring to enjoy. This soggy damp is fitted for the growth of ferns (I
have brought sandstone, and fern, and moss, and planted here), and the
spring wells up quietly, no sputtering, as of a hen announcing that she
has just laid an egg; but the water comes, not cold like mountain
springs, to be sure, but cold enough to need no iceman, and requires no
paying of ice bills. It is cold enough ; and there, in plain sight, with
the foliage reflected, leaf for leaf and spray for spray; and drinking
water from a chalice like this is thirst-producing as well as thirst-sat-
isfying; and I will come here to drink, whether I am thirsty or not.
The birds drink here in welcome as the water drowses from the spring
down a little ravine and into my neighbor's woods. I let it. I am not
stingy. What I can't keep I give away, which is the true art of gener-
osity. Come and drink from this spring. What a farm this is!

In every play there is a villain. There is one on my farm. In ye
olden tyme a villain was a man who belonged to the soil — a digger in
the ground — a vocation very honorable to this day and to all days. But
this is not the sort of a villain I allude to. This is a live and vicious
villain — a bold, bad man, who carries a gun and a kodak. When these
two peculiarities combine in a man I set him down as the consumma-
tion of villainies. Which wickedness — the kodak wickedness or the
gun wickedness — is the wickeder, I am not prepared to say. I do not
here give my mind though I have settled opinions on the subject. This
man has never shot me with his gun, but has often done so with his
kodak, which is a breech-loader and always full of shells. This instru-
ment of death has been turned on me when I have been playing base-
ball, when I made a base-hit, when I was making a home run, when I

207

sat down ii the center-field and made my mark, to the great delight of
the college boys, whose taskmaster I was; when I have been walking
through the college campus with my Horace Greeley hat set jauntily on
my intellectual forehead ; when my shoulders have been stooped under
life's onerous loads; when I have been going to the train with coat-tail
horizontal and legs vainly beating the air ; when I have been on this
farm with my overalls on and hay-seed in my hair; when I have been
talking to a lady with whom the head of our house had forbidden me to
hold dialogue ; and this villain has moreover sent the head of our house
the picture (villain! villain!). In short, there is no time when he should
not have kodaked me when he did not do it, and no time when he
should have done so that he did so. The kodak microbe is a demor-
alizing microbe, in my observation, and makes for total depravity. The
last wickedness this man was guilty of was putting the sun up to take
my picture when I was in the mild act of appeasing my hunger at noon
in the woods. This is the picture he took. When we (the other man
and I ) suggested that if a picture was to be thought of the villain should
be in it, he said that much as he desired to be taken with us nothing
could induce him to because he had to pull the trigger. He was the
sportsman, we the game. This seemed candid. We (the victim and
myself, both good men, he a banker and I a minister) suspected no
lurking animosity. The villain looked pious (he always does ; that is,
he looks as if he was either at his devotions or going to them) and took
the picture, but when the proofs were forthcoming gloated over us like
Mr. Poe's raven on the pallid bust of Pallas, saying, "I would not be in
the picture. Nothing would induce me. I am a temperance man;"
and then, with Mephistophelian finger pointed to the water-cruse in the
ioreground, which, through his viciousness (the jug was his), was in our
midst. "A Sunday-school superintendent," he said — for my friend the
banker is a pious man on Sunday— "and a preacher and a jug — ha! ha!
ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! " Some people think there is no
.sin, and that wickedness is a piece of imagination. They do not know
the villain or they would believe in sin and the father of it. I would not
exonerate him from any evil design. Nothing will tempt me to put
confidence in him. He is well connected, and is a man of brains, but
neither ancestry nor culture avails in his behalf. He is undeniably wicked
.and refuses a work of grace, and will not attend a revival. He is a
biologist, an ornithologist, an entomologist, and I would not put it past
him to practice vivisection on me. I would not feel surprised if he

208

were to charge his kodak with chloroform and put me in a state of
coma, so as to photograph my freckles. "Vigilance, eternal vigilance,
is the price of liberty," said some old orator. That may be so, but I
know that eternal vigilance is insufficient to guard me against this
villain's depredations. Every gun is likely to kick its owner. Some

cameras are so. This camera kicked
the villain. Here is the villain himself.
He has been on my farm among my
cornshocks killing my rabbits and quail.
He is caught red-handed. Though he
wears after his name a learned title and
browbeats students with threats of poor
grades, that will avail him nothing now.
He has paid no heed to my signs on my
farm. One is "Do not watter stalk
here." Another is
"No shoting on this

has found farm." He has paid

him with my M K no attention to either

birds and ffl |^P« I sign. His kodak has

beasts slung • ^ m. JpB m caught him "watter-

at his belt. IB %ftr " i , mT in£ nis stalk," and

My word for
it but it shall
go hard with

him ere he gets out of the grip
of the law. He will rue having
sided with Mrs. Mugwump
against me, and having joined
blithely in the witticisms at my
expense. I will not be revenge-
ful, but just. A neighbor has the
sign, "This farm for sail." I do
not have that because this farm
is not in the market, but the signs I do have mean business, and the
villain must find out signs mean what they say. "No lickin', no larn-
in';" but I mean he shall not grow old (he is already grown up) igno-
rant. I will see that he " larns."

Then the villain is a hunter. He has no conscience. I have seen

209

THE VILLAIN AND HIS FRIENDS

him shoot a jack-rabbit, and a hawk, and a squirrel, and when in the
presence of these vicious capers have heard him laugh and say, "A good
shot!" Will a man laugh at a funeral? This man will. He does.
Hunting and kodaking demoralize the moral nature of man. The
villain is old and bold. His conscience (allowing, as a matter of pure
courtesy to him, that originally he had one) is atrophied. There is not
even a vermiform appendage left. I have known him to shoot quails
out of season. He thinks nothing of breaking the law. Once he in-
veigled me into carrying the game he had slain unlawfully as well as
murderously. This I did as a matter of courtesy (for I am a Chester-
field in etiquette), for I was his guest (he driving me out after his red
horses, two beasties about as big as two-year-old jack- rabbits), and I
could not, with my code of manners, refuse mine host's request to
skirmish around and pick up his game ; but afterward it leaked out that
he did this because the law holds that man guilty who has the ill-gotten
game. Such perfidy I had read of, but scarcely believed. I thought
lago was an imaginary creation; now I know he is a photograph, and
I could find Shakespeare a subject for a sitting.

Beyond this, the villain professes to like me, writes me postal
cards, takes me riding, invites me to his home, drives me out when the
purple aster is in bloom, comes to my hospitable board, drives me to my
farm and says he enjoys it, praises my. view, says it is "bully," caresses
my trees (he is an lago) loans me his red horses and red dog, glows
over my ravine, says nice things about my hackberry and shell-bark
hickory-trees, speaks in hopeful terms of my apple orchard, is sympathetic
in my fondest aspirations of getting ten or fifteen dollars rent in the
remote future, and even suggests I may some time get enough to pay a
year's taxes ; and I being of a confiding turn (interpreting others by
myself) think him well-meaning and virtuous. But this man "who
hath broken bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me" (quoted
from the Psalter). When with Mrs. Mugwump, who holds my farm in
slight esteem, he joins her hilarity at my expense; echoes her wickedest
snigger; constructs poor jests about my farm and its achievements;
joins in crude and unusual remarks about "chiggers;" laughs loudly at
jests at my expense, refuses to look at me, being so engrossed with Mrs.
Mugwump's humor and hospitality; thanks her for his dinner, whereas I
paid for it and the black girl cooked it,— well he is a villain. That is all
I can say now. Had I my way in my house (do I need to say I do
not?) he would jest no more at me over my fried chicken.

210

The seasons all come to this farm. It is astonishing how far they
come to enjoy this view. Birds from far-off woodlands bordering on
the gulf come here and nest. I think highly of their taste. They know
where to come. Thank goodness there are some creatures which,
whatever the lack of the aesthetic on the part of the many, retain a fine
Greek taste for the beautiful. The seasons all come here annually. I
have never known them to miss. They are as regular as I am, and
enjoy this farm with a gusto which is warming to my heart. Sometimes
one season comes first, sometimes another. That depends entirely on
what season you begin with. I begin with winter. Winter on this
estate is a rare season. The land lies brown and beautiful. The many
colors of a winter landscape are things not sufficently attended to in
popular thinking. People talk as if winter fields were uneventful and
monotonous. Nothing is less true. Winter browns are quite as varied as
summer greens. My woods stand black in winter, especially when the
skies are gray with no hint of sunlight, the trees standing against such a
sky look black as stormy water. Nature indulges in no black colors
in vegetation save this. And I have seen my woods gloom against a
winter evening sky like a rising storm-cloud. They are prodigal in this
tempestuous quality. I love to look at it so, and can all but hear the
mutter of the thunder which in summer booms intermittently from black
thunder heads. And if you walk into the fields, the grasses are of
varied hues. Some are light-toned, almost gray, some a deep russet,
some species of slough grass are like browns touched with flame full of
surprise and delight, and the wheat stubble keeps its old gold all the
winter through, and corn stalks have the richness of color which minds
the eye of a lion's skin brown as the desert he goes fleetly across ;
and golden-rod stands in the hedge-corners grouped in its miniature
forests graceful in form as when they lean plumes of gold in autumn
noons, but now the plumes are white like those which nod in a knight's
helmet. This golden-rod flames out gold in autumn and snow in winter,
and whether to love the more its gold or snow I know not. They belong
to the two seasons and in either are radiant to my eyes. Weeds are brave
winter folk. Flowers die in autumn, and even in the woods the bunches
of violet leaves are pressed flat against the earth and have lost their
green, or it is almost altogether blotted out, but weeds stand self-reliant
nodding to the shivering winds. Winter weeds are prepared foods for
the birds. They are their winter pasture fields. God is so thoughtful in
leaving for his birds a spread table, standing high above the snow fall

211

and drift, so that the birds shall breakfast at every hazard. The sun-
flower stands through the winter storms unintimidated and is gray in
color like a winter's dusk when clouds are over all the sky, and the
leaves in the woods are rusty as iron, and the red oak-trees keep their
leaves, a kindly shelter for the houseless birds; and what a brave winter
themselves made ! I have been beneath them on winter days when the
sun was bright and genial and when I walked without a shiver, but step-
ping beneath the oak-trees and closing my eyes and listening to the
whetting of leaf against leaf, I began to shiver as with nipping cold.
Winter leaves in the wind sound so wintery. Winter stays on this farm.
Then spring comes laughing like happy lovers. The earth smell is.
in the air, the frogs sing every night and very early in the spring from
the ravines, the tenant plows the brown fields and turns them into black
and the crow follows in the furrows, so do the blackbirds with their
garrulous conversation ; and the meadow lark, before a sprig of green is
anywhere, tunes his voice to sing a spring poem, and I wonder if there is
anything sweeter than a meadow lark's music floating over brown fields
which have been mute in bird voices these months past. On my farm
the meadow lark is the courier of the spring. Nobody is as welcome as
he, with the splotches of yellow flecking his breast and his springy step
as if he owns this meadow, and his constant tryst with the open field
(he will have none of the forest) there he spills out his music, thence
he whirrs his springy flight. Sometimes he will tilt a minute on a
fence-post, but I do not recall seeing him on this farm in a hedge-row.
There the golden thrush loves to live, but the meadow lark lives on the
ground where we men and women walk. I would be pouting all the
spring if he did not come. Contact with the earth gives him his gift of
singing. He is a sweet son of the soil and dear to the heart as love.
The blue jay is belligerent and garrulous, but he stays with me through
the winter sometimes and comes very early in the spring, and I love. his
untuned voice as it cuts through the air like a sword swish. I give him
warm welcome and am glad he is come. His morals I can not control;
I have trouble enough with my own ; but if he did not come to my woods
I would be out of humor. The red bud gets the earliest color from the
skies and wears it a trifle haughtily, being as I take it, a sort of vege-
table aristocrat. The red buds have no beautiful curve like the elm,
but stand angular as soldiers on guard. Though they think themselves
aristocrats I will not quarrel with their self opinionation. They are
here and they like my farm and are the earliest colors the woods wear.

212

Therefore are they welcome. The elms have the earliest cloud of green
bloom visiting my woods except the willow. Willows are first comers
with their leaves. They come first, the elms follow, and later the
buckeye and hickory and walnut and sycamore. Gooseberries leaf
early and have a vivid green. The oak-trees are tardier than anybody.
They are late sleepers. Even the blue jay's voice does not wake this
drowsy sleeper, although it clings in his branches. Nobody but the
sun can wake the oak. He is thick-skinned and impervious to hints.
The sun must come and spill flame on his face or ever the oak-tree
wakes, and long after all other trees are green the oak's brown leaves
with a dogged tenacity hang to their year-long home till the new buds
thrust them from their hold. Only new life will loose the grip of death;
and when peach and cherry and apple and pear and blackberry take
their turn at blooming, O ! we have royal mornings
on my farm. And then comes the late snowfall of
falling petals of blooms from apple-trees, and the
bees drone and take my honey paying no royalty
(like a foreign publisher), and the cooing dove
makes lamentation without cause, and the bluebirds
chatter so as to warm the heart, and the blue violets
make a man wonder at the dainty doings of the
fingers of the God of beauty, and the Mayapples
hold their parasols to keep the sun from their faces

white as fresh snows, and the Sweet Williams hold
their blue flowers up like a rustic lad presenting a
nosegay to a woman, and the wild crabapple pours
its delicious odors on the springtime wind and spring
is come to my farm, and April rain drips from the
eaves of the glowing leaves, and clouds and sun-
light play hide-and-seek over my plowed fields, and
young lovers hunt four-leaf clover in my cloverfield,
and the birds woo
and get married
with never the in-
tervention of justice
or minister, and the
frogs sing with
melodious voices
through the sweet * *

215

*

springtime night, and a hundred perfumes mix in the fields and woods
by night — then my farm is an Eden meet for angels' visits.

Here summer comes and sweats with toil of growing cabbages, and
peas, and lettuce, and pears, and onions (that perfumery for the humble),
and cherries, and strawberries. Now stop. Strawberries? Why didn't
you come, friend, when my strawberries were ripe? I had tame and
wild ones, though for me I like wild ones better. But any will do.
And when the tenant's cow gives cream instead of skimmed milk, and
the strawberries are ripe and luscious — well, all I say is you had better
happen around. And when summer gets down to hard work, and ripens
the oats, and makes the corn grow so fast you can fairly see it grow if
you stay half an hour, and turns wheatfields from green to gold, and
makes my clover bloom, and has the sun work long hours and keep the
stars out late o' nights if they want to shine a spell — then summer is
bewildering.

And in autumn my vineyard is worth a voyage across the ocean to
get to see. The beautiful leaf delicately contrived of Him who invented
beauty, throws its shadow on purple clusters with an earlier frost on
them than gathers on the housetops in October. Then I forget
whether grapes are utilitarian or artistic, whether they should be eaten
or looked at and wondered at. I love to see their abundance of cluster
arid loveliness, and am glad to own this farm ; and when the leaves
begin to weary of fluttering to the winds and fall through sheer idleness,
and the elms grow yellow, and willow leaves have a jaundice look, and
the ivies are glorious as skies of sunset, and every tree trunk they
engirdle is ruby, as if it were not tree, but gem, and the maples blush
and hang out scarlet banners, and oaks are gorgeous, and when the
leaves rustle under your feet, — then I wish fall lasted twelve months.
To kick around over your own leaves is to taste bliss ; and I am
haughty to own a farm. Winter, spring, summer and fall come here
to enjoy themselves, and they are very welcome.

In summer, when I lie, surcharged with indolence, down by my
spring in the shadows, with the water standing in pools, and catching
leaf and sky and cloud in its mirror, and holding them up like signals
to the clouds sailing over my farm, life grows glad. We are a hos-
pitable lot, the farm and the spring and I, and, like Abraham at his
tent door, hail all who go along our way to stop and be sociable (all
except the assessor. Not the farm, nor the spring, nor the ravine,
nor the corn growing in rows or standing in shock, none of us nor all of

216

TALL TREES RIM THE CREST

us like the assessor. He invades our quiet and disturbs our receipts,
and reminds us we are not in Arcadia, which, prior to his coming, was
our settled belief). And while I lie in the shade beside my spring on
the north line of my estate and on the lowest levels my farm reaches,
it is sweet to half drowse, half wake in the quiet while the wooded
hills high above shut out all boisterousness of wind, so that here truly
summer quiet lies. The day dreams. It is noon. A crow intermit-
tently and lazily calls his " caw, caw," but the birds seem tired out, and a
quiet and languid breeze is all that puffs summer perfumes in my face.
And the slow clouds float by like icebergs seen afar, but by and by
even the clouds fall wholly asleep. Watching them through the leaves
they affect me as having forgotten action long ago, or push lazily for-
ward, like a drifting boat, and then sink back into slumber again. But
the oatfield on the farm running up the hill's slope to the woods, nods
its thousands heads so sagaciously, as if to say, "No doubt, no doubt,
that is the truth of it." And upon the hill, where the tall trees rim
the crest, how solemnly the trees toss to the wind! If one were under
their shadows there would be laughter in the leaves and the sunlight
sifting through, but thus far removed there is neither sunlight nor
music, only the solemn waving to and fro of plumes, looking strangely
dark against the sky of utter blue. In this accord of motion seen afar
is something exceeding remote, as if from some far headland jutting
out into the spiritual sea, dim companies were signaling us in stately
and rhythmic fashion. In the far off elm-trees is the wind that does
not blow on me, nor draw near my green hollow lying in the shadow;
and looking from afar thus seeming like a boat with oars that dip and
lift, out on water against the sky when you hear no drip of water
from the lifted oar, nor dip of oar touching the water again, nor any
lap of water against the keel. Thus I love the quiet of this croft, where
the spring is better than wine for my thirsty lips ; but I leave it and

217

i

saunter up toward the woods which climb the hill and
stand strong and manfully upon the brow, coquetting
with the south wind in the summer and defying the
north winds in winter. And just this side the hill-
top I stop and lie down in the shadows and listen
— and hear the sea. On the hilltop I can sight
the sea ; below the hilltop I can hear the sea. How
the branches toss here ; not sedately, as when I saw
them from far below by the spring, but wildly, and
each tree after its own fashion! And how sad the
voices of the wind are! One could weep for sorrow
hearing the lonely winds washed through the tree-
tops. In Kansas winds are hardly ever quiet, and
often blow like a triumph, so that there is much
singing of summer songs through the woods.
Always, by daylight in particular, you may climb
from the wooded valley to this wooded crest, and
walk through the quiet of calm, where scarcely a
leaf will nod, or a note of music be struck by the
winds from the forest, till, as you approach the hill-
top, the beat of distant waves on distant rocks is
audible, and when at the top you are in a very fury
of fighting surf, dashing white spray up the long
rocks. I love this music and I can not tell how
dear it is, but hearing it I can dream and see
visions, and climb God's highest hills while this
surf-music is in my ears and in my heart.

But when trees are leafless in autumn and

winter, and the wind rages and snarls like a hungry

lion, and tears at the branches, as a lion at the

bars which make his prison, then is the music

218

frightful, but sublime. Then, when the woeful surges rush through the
trees, as I have seen ocean surges rush at high tides, with stormwinds
behind them over snags of teeth of ocean rocks, where bravest ships
of knit steel would have been laughingstocks to those furious waters —
when such winds blow their tiger lungs 1 cease dreaming and leap
to battle. I come to be imperious, as if I were Napoleon. My
courage defies impossibility. I could climb Alps or break pyramids
down, or leap from sea cliffs down into the boiling ocean in sheer
luxury. Nothing daunts me. My spirit clamors with the storm. The
giant branches twist and combat, like a cyclops caught in battle in
the clammy arms of an octopus, and the wind blows battle charges,
and all the storm drives like cavalrymen going into the fight. Then
the music is something to be remembered for a century. Give me
not always calm, with its hushed quiet, but the clamor of the riotous
winds, when nature is fighting nature in frightful combat, and when
neither combatant will yield.

Friend, most things are on this farm. To own a winter tempest
in the treetops and its tremendous music, what think you of that? I
call that riches. I own acres of soil and sunshine, and winter and
spring and October, but besides I own acres of angry wind, and furious
onset, and a Niagara of organ music. How rich I am owning this farm!

A wild crab stands on the hill where years ago they . quarried stanes
for a college hard by. The quarry is now overgrown, a reminiscence. I
am glad it is so, for I like its dishevelment, feeling its way back to
nature. A huge thorn-tree stands on the quarry's edge, and in the
quarry are thickets of roses where birds nest in the sweet summer; and
leaves in autumn gather in the disused quarry as in a pool where waters
had drifted them, and in the quarry stands the wild crab. There it
stands quite alone, but never lonely. In winter, its brawn of brazen
muscle sneers at the tempests and looks rigid as death. No hint at
smiling. I would as lief think a brazen pillar would bloom as to think
this wild crab would flash into flower. Howbeit, when spring is come
and sets up housekeeping, this crab lights a lamp like the pleasant
flame of an evening sky, not crimson, but a gentle flame a man might
warm him by, but would never burn his hands. This is a spring fire — this
crab in bloom. How I love its tender twilight of crimson! I warm my
eyes here and my heart; for hearts need warming as hands do on a
chilly morning. And then, saturating the air like the perfume of a fair
woman's garments as she comes to meet her lover, is a whiff of this

219

aromatic flame. I did not know when I bought this farm that it grew
spices, but it does. This is my spice grove which I will not exchange
for sandalwood. Who could have thought in the bare winter that this
crab-tree was an alabaster box holding precious ointment? I never
dreamed it. How could I ? But now, when spring has come like fair
Mary, lover of the Christ, and has broken the alabaster box, lo! the air
is faint with fragrance as if Christ were here and the sacred odors laved
his sacred feet. And were he here, he would say in gentle voice,
" Whence brought you this ointment, very precious ? I have not known
its like for fragrance." Friend, come to my farm when my spice grove
of one wild crab-tree is in bloom and you will grow glad as a happy child.
And then I have a whip-poor-will in my woods in the moonlight. A
nightingale is not an American singer. He certainly is not a Kansas
singer. He is not on my farm; but I am not regretful. I have the
meadow lark on my brown fields, and his note is sweet enough to make
a heart long for springtime just to hear his lute voice once. Yonder
where the woods stand black against the hill and moonlight makes all the
sky radiant, and dim distances are enchanting, and heaven seems to have
settled down about my farm for the night, and the owl hoots with a leer
in his voice, and the screech owl makes his pitiful complaint, then all of
a sudden my whip-poor-will sets a-singing. A flute is not clearer. He
is not a player of wide range of theme or tune, but has one he seems to
love, and as I take it, having listened to him often (how often ? no
matter, not often enough), a song his beloved is fond of, for when once
he blows its sweet staccatos and all of them, not one note omitted, and
stops, I think I have heard his lady for whom he made the music say,
" Sing it once more, beloved, I love that love song so ;" and so like any
lover, obedient to his beloved, he tunes the instrument and sings his love
song once again. If his lady is as I am, he will sing it night by night,
nor ever grow weary. The whip-poor-will's voice fits the moonlight
and the starlight and the dusk and the dense darkness. O, but the
notes are " rainy sweet." I will ask my friend Harry D. Cornwell to say
his say about our common friend the whip-poor-will. Friend Cornwell,

have your say :

" When apple-branches, flushed with bloom.
Load June 's warm evenings with perfume,
And balmier grows each perfect day,
And fields are sweet with new-mown hay,
Then, minstrel lone, I hear thy note,
Up from the pasture-thickets float —
Whip-poor-will!
220

Thine are the hours to love endeared,
And summoned by thy accents weird,
What wild regrets — what tender pain,
Recall my youthful dreams again,
As floating down the shadowy years,
That old refrain fond memory hears-~
Whip-poor-will !

The garish day inspires thee not ;
But hid in some deep-shaded grot,
Thou like a sad recluse dost wait
The silver hours inviolate.
When every harsher sound is flown,
And groves and glen are thine alone.
Whip-poor-will.

Then, when the rapt, voluptuous night
Pants in the young moon's tender light,
And wood, and cliffs, and shimmering streams
Are splendid in her argent beams —
How thrills the lover's heart to hear
Thy loud staccato, liquid-clear,
Whip- poor- will.

Whence comes the iterated phrase,
That to the wondering ear conveys
Half-human sounds, yet cheats the sense
With vagueness of intelligence,
And, like a wandering voice of air,
Haunts the dim fields, we know not where?
Whip-poor-will.

Now while the white moonlight fills all the void 'twixt me and heaven,
and all the trees are flung upon the grass in lifelike silhouettes, and a
gentle wind mixes with the starlight and moonlight going through the
trees caressingly like a lover's whisper, and the whip-poor-will flutes his
tearful note so that the valley hears him from the hilltops, while the
birds in their nests are so asleep they hear not these notes of his wooing,
while this radiant mood lies on my spirit like heaven's exceeding calm, I
think I will say, "Good-night, God keep you, good-night ;" and I will pull
my cloak about me and lie down on this mosaic of moonlight and shadow,
and with my prayer haling toward God through the long moonlit
reaches (for no prayer misses its way, not one, thank God for that, my
heart) , I will lie down and go to sleep ; and so I will say good-night

223

GLOAMING

0

GLOAMING

HILD, go and pray — for see! the night is here!
Through cloudy rifts the golden lights appear;
The hills faint outline trembles in the mist ;
Scarce is heard a distant chariot — list!
The world 's at rest ; the tree beside the way
Gives to the evening wind the dust of day.

Twilight unlocks the hiding-place of stars;
They gleam and glow behind night's shadowy bars.
The fringe of carmine narrows in the west,
The moonlight water lies in shining rest;
Furrow and foot path melt and disappear;
The anxious traveler doubts the far and near.

—VICTOR HUGO.

Gloaming is day's aftermath. When the labor of the light is ended,
when our work lies behind us like a plain crossed in journeying toward
high hills, there is a borderland sweet as dreams lying dim between
day and dark. This is the gloaming. It is day's respite from itself,
when what we are is merging into what we are to be; when the world
seems far removed, as waves beating on a distant shore; when, as in
a neutral territory, we belong neither to to-day nor to to-morrow, but
in a certain high regard belong to ourselves alone, and thus sit solitary.

Gloaming is the time of glooming, gloam and gloom being forms
of one word; and so understood, how full is the descriptive energy of
the name for what it pictures! Not day nor night, nor light nor black-
ness, but this, light gloaming into lampless darkness. Gloom sifting
through the skies like powdered smoke, until the world is changed, and
the one word on the gloaming's lips is, "Toil, take rest."

And this gray gloaming is a time of rest for the spirit. The glory
of the sunset fades. Light retreats like a vanquished army. Gray
quiet falls on land and sky. An unseen angel whispers, "Peace."

229

Now is the time for folding the hands — time to rest — and rest is sweet
when rest is needed. Now is the time to watch the day dim and the
night darken, until, at the end, you, who began your dreamings in the
day, find you end them in the night.

For years I have planned to spend this too-brief gloaming alone,
not thinking, but letting thoughts drift over me like summer clouds,
which drop their passing shadows on the field and stream. This is
mv hour to banish care; to leave the hush of prayer on the spirit and
let God walk silent in the heart, as in a garden.

"To wander lonely as a cloud,"

as Wordsworth phrases it. If I may, in the open, with the neighborly
sky and the companionable stars, and hear the moan of winter winds
through naked trees, or feel the touch of summer's lips; or, if I may
not be Out-of-Doors, to be Out-of-Doors in spirit and watch, as I sit
in my study before the lights are lit, the droop of ashen hues into the
sky, and the shadow these ashen tints cast across our spirit.

Floating, floating, from dawn to dusk,

Till the pearly twilight dies,
And the mists float up from the sapphire sea

And cloud all the sapphire skies.
Hooting, floating, while golden stars

Seem to float in a sea overhead,
And starry lights from a sea below

Glow orange, and purple, and red :
Till we seem floating out from the sea of life,
The tempests of passion, the storm winds of strife,
Out into a strange, mysterious space,
Till God shall find us a landing-place.

Drifting, drifting, to lands unknown,

From a world of love and care.
Drifting away to a home untried

And a heart that is waiting there.
0 ship! sail swiftly — 0 waters deep!

Bear me safe to that haven unknown —
Safe to that tender love that waits

To be forever my own;
Till we drift away from the sea of life,
The tempests of passion, the storm winds of strife,
Out to a haven, out to a shore

Where life is love for evermore.

-GOOD WORDS.

230

The day dies slowly in the western sky,
The sunset splendor fades, and wan and cold

The far peaks wait the sunrise; cheerily

The goatherd calls his wanderers to their fold;

My weary soul, that fain would cease to roam,

Take comfort ; evening bringeth all things home.

Homeward the swift-winged seagull takes its flight ;

The ebbing tide breaks softly on the sand;
The red-sailed boats draw shoreward for the night ;

The shadows deepen over sea and land;
Be still, my soul; thine hc'ir shall also come;

Behold, one evening God shall lead thee home.

—LIVING AGE.

Ah me, heart! thank God for the gloaming; and may there be a
gloaming somewhere in heaven for those who want it!

GOOD-NIGHT

The day is done; and in the morning's east
The shadows lie, dim dreams of night.

The time is past for labor; and released,
Like galley slaves let loose in fight

On seas that rock with battle shock, spent strength

Turns face and step with love, homeward at length.

The night has come ; and with the evening, star
Day's pain drifts back like ebbing tide;

And blessed moonlight ripples o'er the bar
Of twilight. Then, Love glorified,

Our God's good angel, sings, voice sweet and deep;

And with the ebbing music cometh sleep.

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