Pepacton

P6PACTON

JOHN- BURROUGHS

z

c^
O

P-c

SANTA CRUZ

Gift ot

Robert D. Farquhar

H
X
tn

SANTA CRUZ

OH

21

Ms

c-RESH FIELDS. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25.
BIRDS AND POETS, WITH OTHER PAPERS. i6mo,
gilt top, $1.25.

LOCUSTS AND WILD HONEY. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25.

PEPACTON, AND OTHER SKETCHES. i6mo, gilt top,
$1.25.

WAKE ROBIN. Illustrated. Revised and enlarged edi-
tion. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25 ; Riverside A Idine Edition,
161110, $>r.oo.

WINTER SUNSHINE New edition, revised and en-
larged. With Frontispiece. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25

SIGNS AND SEASONS. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25. .

INDOOR STUDIES. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25.
The set, 8 vols., uniform, $10.00.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Publishers,
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.

PEPACTON

BY

JOHN BURROUGHS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

1893

Copyright, 1881,
BY JOHN BURROUGHS.

All rights reserved.

PREFACE.

I HAVE all the more pleasure in calling my book
after the title of the first chapter, " Pepacton," be-
cause this is the Indian name of my native stream.
In its water-shed I was born and passed my youth,
and here on its banks my kindred sleep. Here, also,
I have gathered much of the harvest, poor though it
be, that I have put in this and in previous volumes
of my writings.

The term " Pepacton " is said to mean " marriage
of the waters ; " and with this significance it suits my
purpose well, as this book is also a union of many
currents.

The Pepacton rises in a deep cleft or gorge in the
mountains, the scenery of which is of the wildest and
ruggedest character. For a mile or more there is
barely room for the road and the creek at the bottom
of the chasm. On either hand the mountains, inter-
rupted by shelving, overhanging precipices, rise ab-
ruptly to a great height. About half a century ago
a pious Scotch family, just arrived in this country,
came through this gorge. One of the little boys,
gazing upon the terrible desolation of the scene, so

IV PREFACE.

unlike in its savage and inhuman aspects anything he
had ever seen at home, nestled close to his mother,
and asked with bated breath, "Mither, is there a
God here?"

Yet the Pepacton is a placid current, especially in
its upper portions where my youth fell ; but all its
tributaries are swift mountain brooks fed by springs
the best in the world. It drains a high pastoral
country lifted into long, round-backed hills and rug-
ged, wooded ranges by the subsiding impulse of the
Catskill range of mountains, and famous for its supe
rior dairy and other farm products. It is many long
years since, with the restlessness of youth, I broke
away from the old ties amid those hills ; but my
heart has always been there ; and why should I not
come back and name one of my books for the old
stream?

CONTENTS.

PAW
PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOTAOB ...... 7

SPRINGS 43

AN IDYL OP THE HONEY-BEE 63

NATURE AND THE POETS 91

NOTES BY THE WAY 131

FOOT-PATHS 195

A. BUNCH OF HERBS • . . 207

WINTER PICTURES ,...., • §37

PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

WHEN one summer day I bethought me of a voy-
age down the east or Pepacton branch of the Dela-
ware, I seemed to want some excuse for the start,
some send-off, some preparation, to give the enterprise
genesis and head. This I found in building my own
boat. It was a happy thought. How else should I
have got under way, how else should I have raised the
breeze? The boat-building warmed the blood; it
made the germ take, it whetted my appetite for the
voyage. There is nothing like serving an apprentice-
ship to fortune, like earning the right to your tools.
In most enterprises the temptation is always to begin
too far along ; we want to start where somebody else
leaves off. Go back to the stump, and see what an
impetus you get. Those fishermen who wind their
own flies before they go a-fishing, — how they bring
in the trout ; and those hunters who run their own
bullets or make their own cartridges, — the game is
already mortgaged to them.

When my boat was finished — and it was a very
simple affair — I was eager as a boy to be off; I

10 PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

feared the river would all run by before I could we*
her bottom in it. This enthusiasm begat great
expectations of the trip. I should surely surprise
nature and win some new secrets from her. I should
glide down noiselessly upon her and see what all
those willow screens and baffling curves concealed.
As a fisherman and pedestrian I had been able to
come at the stream only at certain points ; now the
most private and secluded retreats of the nymph
would be opened to me ; every bend and eddy, every
cove hedged in by swamps or passage walled in by
high alders, would be at the beck of my paddle.

Whom shall one take with him when he goes
a-courting nature ? This is always a vital question.
There are persons who will stand between you and
that which you seek : they obtrude themselves ; they
monopolize your attention ; they blunt your sense of
the shy, half-revealed intelligences about you. I
want for companion a dog or a boy, or a person
who has the virtues of dogs and boys, — transparency,
good nature, curiosity, open sense, and a nameless
quality that is akin to trees and growths and the in-
articulate forces of nature. With him you are alone,
and yet have company ; you are free ; you feel no
disturbing element; the influences of nature stream
ih rough him and around him ; he is a good conductor
of the subtle fluid. The quality or qualification J
refer to belongs to most persons who spend their lives
in the open air, — to soldiers, hunters, fishers, labor
era, and to artists and poets of the right sort. How

PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE. 11

full of it, to choose an illustrious example, was such a
man as Walter Scott 1

But no such person came in answer to my prayer,
BO I set out alone.

It was fit that I put my boat into the water at
Arkville, but it may seem a little incongruous that I
should launch her into Dry Brook ; yet Dry Brook
is here a fine large trout stream, arid I soon found its
waters were wet enough for all practical purposes.
The Delaware is only one mile distant, and I chose
this as the easiest road from the station to it. A
young .farmer helped me carry the boat to the water,
but did not stay to see me off ; only some calves feed-
ing along shore witnessed my embarkation. It would
have been a godsend to boys but there were no boys
about. I stuck on a rift before I had gone ten yards,
and saw with misgiving the paint transferred from
the bottom of my little scow to the tops of the stones
thus early in the journey. But I was soon making
fair headway, and taking trout for my dinner as I
floated along. My first mishap was when I broke
the second joint of my rod on a bass, and the first
serious impediment to my progress was when I en-
countered the trunk of a prostrate elm bridging the
stream, within a few inches of the surface. My rod
mended and the elm cleared, I anticipated better sail-
ing when I should reach the Delaware itself ; but I
found on this day and on subsequent days that the
Delaware has a way of dividing up that is very em-
barrassing to the navigator. It is a stream of many

12 PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

minds : its waters cannot long agree to go all in the
game channel, and whichever branch I took I was
pretty sure to wish I had taken one of the others. I
was constantly sticking on rifts, where I would have
to dismount, or running full tilt into willow banks,
where I would lose my hat or endanger my fishing
tackle. On the whole, the result of my first day's
voyaging was not encouraging. I made barely eight
miles, and my ardor was a good deal dampened, to
say nothing about my clothing. In mid-afternoon
I went to a well-to-do-looking farm-house and got
gome milk, which I am certain the thrifty housewife
skimmed, for its blueness infected my spirits, and I
went into camp that night more than half persuaded
to abandon the enterprise in the morning. The lone-
liness of the river, too, unlike that of the fields and
woods, to which I was more accustomed, oppressed
me. In the woods things are close to you, and you
touch them and seem to interchange something with
them ; but upon the river, even though it be a nar-
row and shallow one like this, you are more isolated,
farther removed from the soil and its attractions, and
an easier prey to the unsocial demons. The long,
unpeopled vistas ahead ; the still, dark eddies ; the
endless monotone and soliloquy of the stream ; the
unheeding rocks basking like monsters along the
shore, half out of the water, half in ; a solitary heron
starting up here and there, as you rounded some
jioint, and flapping disconsolately ahead till lost to
view, or standing like a gaunt spectre on the um

PEPACTON: A SUMMEB VOYAGE. 13

brageous side of the mountain, his motionless form
revealed against the dark green as you passed ; the
trees and willows and alders that hemmed you in on
either side, and hid the fields and the farm-houses
and the road that ran near by, — these things and
others aided the skimmed milk to cast a gloom over
my spirits that argued ill for the success of my un-
dertaking. Those rubber boots, too, that parboiled
my feet and were clogs of lead about them, — whose
spirits are elastic enough to endure them ? A male-
diction upon the head of him who invented them!
Take your old shoes that will let the water in and
let it out again, rather than stand knee deep all day
in these extinguishers.

I escaped from the river, that first night, and took
to the woods, and profited by the change. In the
woods I was at home again, and the bed of hemlock
boughs salved my spirits. A cold spring run came
down off the mountain, and beside it, underneath
birches and hemlocks, I improvised my hearth-stone.
In sleeping on the ground it is a great advantage to
have a back-log ; it braces and supports you, and it
is a bedfellow that will not grumble when, in the
middle of the night, you crowd sharply up against
it. It serves to keep in the warmth, also. A heavy
stone or other point de resistance at your feet is also
a help. Or, better still, scoop out a little place in
the earth, a few inches deep, so as to admit your
body from your hips to your shoulders ; you thus get
in equal bearing the whole length of ^ou. I am told

14 PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

the Western hunters and guides do this. On the
same principle, the sand makes a good bed, and the
snow. You make a mold in which you fit nicely.
My berth that night was between two logs that the
bark-peelers had stripped ten or more years before.
As they had left the bark there, and as hemlock bark
makes excellent fuel, I had more reasons than one to
be grateful to them.

In the morning I felt much refreshed, and as if
/he night had tided me over the bar that threatened
to stay my progress. If I can steer clear of skimmed
milk, I said, I shall now finish the voyage of fifty
miles to Hancock with increasing pleasure.

When one breaks camp in the morning, he turns
back again and again to see what he has left. Surely
he feels he has forgotten something ; what is it ? But
it is only his own sad thoughts and musings he has
left, the fragment of his life he has lived there.
Where he hung his coat on the tree, where he slept
on the boughs, where he made his coffee or broiled
his trout over the coals, where he drank again and
again at the little brown pool in the spring run,
where he looked long and long up into the whisper-
ing branches overhead, he has left what he cannot
bring away with him, — the flame and the ashes of
himself.

Of certain game birds it is thought that at times
they have the power of withholding their scent ; no
hint or particle of themselves goes out upon the air.
t think there are persons whose spiritual pores are

PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE. 15

always sealed up, arid I presume they have the best
time of it. Their hearts never radiate into the void ;
they do not yearn and sympathize without return.;
they do not leave themselves by the wayside as the
sheep leaves her wool upon the brambles and thorns.
This branch of the Delaware, so far as I could
learn, had never before been descended by a white
man in a boat. Rafts of pine and hemlock timber
are run down on the spring and fall freshets, but of
pleasure seekers in boats I appeared to be the first.
Hence my advent was a surprise to most creatures in
the water and out. I surprised the cattle in the field,
and those ruminating leg-deep in the water turned
their heads at my approach, swallowed their unfin-
ished cuds, and scampered off as if they had seen a
spectre. I surprised the fish on their spawning beds
and feeding grounds ; they scattered, as my shadow
glided down upon them, like chickens when a hawk
appears. I surprised an ancient fisherman seated on
a spit of gravelly beach, with his back up stream, and
leisurely angling in a deep, still eddy, and mumbling
to himself. As I slid into the circle of his vision his
grip on his pole relaxed, his jaw dropped, and he was
too bewildered to reply to my salutation for some
moments. As I turned a bend in the river I looked
back, and saw him hastening away with great precip-
itation. I presume he had angled there for forty
years without having his privacy thus intruded upon.
I surprised hawks and herons and kingfishers. I
came suddenly upon inusk-rats, and raced with them

16 PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

down the rifts, they having no time to take to the.
holes. At one point, as I rounded an elbow in the
stream, a black eagle sprang from the top of a dead
tree, and flapped hurriedly away. A kingbird gave
chase, and disappeared for some moments in the gulf
between the great wings of the eagle, and I imagined
him seated upon his back delivering his puny blows
upon the royal bird. I interrupted two or three
minks fishing and hunting along shore. They would
dart under the bank when they saw me, then pres-
ently thrust out their sharp, weasel-like noses, to see
if the danger was imminent. At one point, in a little
cove behind the willows, I surprised some school-
girls, with skirts amazingly abbreviated, wading and
playing in the water. And as much surprised as
any, I aci sure, was that hard-worked looking house-
wife, when I came up from under the bank in front
of her house, and with pail in hand appeared at her
door and asked for milk, taking the precaution to in
timate that I had no objection to the yellow scum
that is supposed to rise on a fresh article of that kind.

" What kind of milk do you watit? "

" The best you have. Give me two quarts of it,"
I replied.

" What do you want to do with it ? " with an anx-
ious tone, as if I might want to blow up something
or burn her barns with it.

" Oh, drink it," I answered, as if I frequently put
milk to that use.

" Well, I suppose I can get you some ; " and she

PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE. 17

presently reappeared with swimming pail, with those
little yellow flakes floating about upon it that one
likes to see.

I passed several low dams the second day, but had
no trouble. I dismounted and stood upon the apron,
and the boat, with plenty of line, came over as
lightly as a chip, and swung around in the eddy be-
low like a steed that knows its master. In the after-
noon, while slowly drifting down a long eddy, the
moist southwest wind brought me the welcome odor
of strawberries, and running ashore by a meadow, a
short distance below, I was soon parting the daisies
and filling my cup with the dead-ripe fruit. Berries,
be they red, blue, or black, seem like a special provi-
dence to the camper-out ; they are luxuries he has
not counted on, and I prized these accordingly.
Later in the day it threatened rain, and I drew up to
shore under the shelter of some thick overhanging
hemlocks, and proceeded to eat my berries and milk,
glad of an excuse not to delay my lunch longer.
While tarrying here I heard young voices up stream,
and looking in that direction saw two boys coming
down the rapids on rude floats. They were racing
along at a lively pace, each with a pole in his hand,
dexterously avoiding the rocks and the breakers, and
schooling themselves thus early in the duties and
perils of the raftsmen. As they saw me one observed
to the other, —

" There is the man we saw go by when we were
Building our floats. If we had known he was coming
2

18 PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

go far, may be we could have got him to give us a
ride."

They drew near, guided their crafts to shore beside
me, and tied up, their poles answering for hawsers.
They proved to be Johnny and Denny Dwire, aged
ten and twelve. They were friendlv boys, and
though not a bit bashful were not a bit impertinent.
And Johnny, who did the most of the talking, had
such a sweet, musical voice ; it was like a bird's. It
seems Denny had run away, a day or two before, to
his uncle's, five miles above, and Johnny had been
after him, and was bringing his prisoner home on a
float ; and it was hard to tell which was enjoying the
fun most, the captor or the captured.

" Why did you run away ? " said I to Denny.

" Oh, 'cause," replied he, with an air which said
plainly, "The reasons are too numerous to mention."

" Boys, you know, will do so, sometimes," said
Johnny, and he smiled upon his brother in a way
that made me think they had a very good under-
standing upon the subject.

They could both swim, yet their floats looked very
perilous : three pieces of old plank or slabs, with two
cross-pieces and a fragment of a board for a rider,
and made without nails or withes.

"In some places, said Johnny, "one plank was
here and another off there, but we managed, some-
how, to keep atop of them."

" Let 's leave our floats here, and ride with hiu
tlie rest of the way," said one to the other.

PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE. 19

" All right ; may we, Mister ? "

I assented, and we were soon afloat again. How
they enjoyed the passage ; how smooth it was ; how
the boat glided along ; how quickly she felt the pad-
dle ! They admired her much ; they praised my
steers man ship ; they praised my fish-pole and all my
fixings down to my hateful rubber boots. When we
stuck on the rifts, as we did several times, they leaped
out quickly with their bare feet and legs, and pushed
as off.

" I think," said Johnny, " if you keep her straight
and let her have her own way, she will find the
deepest water. Don't you, Denny ? "

" I think she will," .replied Denny ; and I found
the boys were pretty nearly right.

I tried them on a point of natural history. I had
observed, coming along, a great many dead eels lying
on the bottom of the river, that I supposed had died
from spear wounds. " No," said Johnny, " they are
lamper-eels. They die as soon as they have built
their nests and laid their eggs."

" Are you sure ? "

" That's what they all say, and I know they are
lampers."

So I fished one up out of the deep water with my
paddle-blade, and examined it ; and sure enough it
was a lamprey. There was the row of holes along
its head, and its ugly suction mouth. I had noticed
their nests, too, all along, where the water in the
pools shallowed to a few feet and began to hurry to-

20 PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

ward the rifts : they were low mounds of small stones,
us if a bushel or more of large pebbles had been
dumped upon the river bottom ; occasionally they
were so near the surface as to make a big ripple.
The eel attaches itself to the stones by its mouth,
and thus moves them at will. An old fisherman told
me that a strong man could not pull a large lamprey
loose from a rock to which it had attached itself. It
fastens to its prey in this way, and sucks the life out.
A friend of mine says he once saw in the St. Law-
rence a pike as long as his arm with a lamprey eel
attached to him. The fish was nearly dead and was
quite white, the eel had so sucked out his blood and
substance. The fish, when seized, darts against rocks
and stones, and tries in vain to rub the eel off", then
succumbs to the sucker.

"The lampers do not all die," said Denny, "be-
cause they do not all spawn ; " and I observed that
vhe dead ones were all of one size and doubtless of
the same age.

The lamprey is the octopus, the devil-fish of these
waters, and there is, perhaps, no tragedy enacted
here that equals that of one of these vampires slowly
sucking the life out of a bass or a trout.

o

My boys went to school part of the time. Did they
have a good teacher ?

u Good enough for me," said Johnny.

" Good enough for me," echoed Denny.

Just below Bark-a-boom — the name is worth keep
jag _ they left me. I was loath to part with them

PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE. 21

jheir musical voices and their thorough good-fellow-
«hip had been very acceptable. With a little persua-
sion, I think they would have left their home and
humble fortunes, and gone a-roving with me.

About four o'clock the warm, vapor-laden south-
west wind brought forth the expected thunder-shower.
I saw the storm rapidly developing behind the mount-
ains in my front. Presently I came in sight of a
long, covered wooden bridge that spanned the river
about a mile ahead, and I put my paddle into the
water with all my force to reach this cover before the
storm. It was neck and neck most of the way. The
storm had the wind, and I had it — in my teeth.
The bridge was at Shavertown, and it was by a close
shave that I got under it before the rain was upon
me. How it poured and rattled and whipped in around
the abutment of the bridge to reach me ! I looked
out well satisfied upon the foaming water, upon the
wet, unpainted houses and barns of the Shavertown-
ers, and upon the trees,

" Caught and cuffed by the gale.'*

A little hawk — the spotted-winged night-hawk —
wart also roughly used by the storm. He faced it
bravely, and beat and beat, but was unable to stem it,
or even hold his own ; gradually he drifted back, till
be was lost to sight in the wet obscurity. The water
ji the river rose an inch while I waited, about three
quarters of an hour. Only one man, I reckon, saw
jae in Shavertowu, and be came and gossiped with
lie from the bank above when the srorm had abated.

22 PEPACTON. A SUMMER VOYAGE.

The second niglit I stopped at the sign of the elm
tree. The woods were too wet, and I concluded to
make my boat my bed. A superb elm, on a smooth
grassy plain a few feet from the water's edge, looked
hospitable in the twilight, and I drew my boat up be-
neath it. I hung my clothes on the jagged edges oi
its rough bark, and went to bed with the moon, " in
her third quarter," peeping under the branches upon
me. I had been reading Stevenson's amusing " Trav-
els with a Donkey," and the lines he quotes from an
old play kept running in my head : —

" The bed was made, the room was fit,
By punctual eve the stars were lit ;
The air was sweet, the water ran ;
No need was there for maid or :nan,
When we put up, my ass and I,
At God's green caravanserai."

But the stately elm played me a trick : it slyly and
at long intervals let great drops of water down upon
me ; now with a sharp smack upon my rubber coat ;
then with a heavy thud upon the seat in the bow or
4tern of my boat ; then plump into my upturned ear,
or upon my uncovered arm, or with a ring into my
tin cup, or with a splash into my coffee pail that stood
at my side full of water from a spring I had just
passed. After two hours' trial I found dropping off
to sleep, under such circumstances, was out of the
question ; so I sprang up, in no very amiable mood
toward my host, and drew my boat clean from under
the elm. I had refreshing slumber thenceforth, and
the birds were astir in the morning long before I
was.

PEP ACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE. 23

There is one way, at least, in which the denuding
the country of its forests has lessened the rain-fall : in
certain conditions of the atmosphere every tree is a
great condenser of moisture, as I had just observed in
the case of the old elm ; little showers are generated
in their branches, and in the aggregate the amount of
water precipitated in this way is considerable. Of a
foggy summer morning one may see little puddles of
water standing on the stones beneath maple-trees,
along the street, and in winter, when there is a sud-
den change from cold to warm, with fog, the water
fairly runs down the trunks of the trees and streams
from their naked branches. The temperature of the
tree is so much below that of the atmosphere in such
cases that the condensation is very rapid. In lieu of
these arboreal rains we have the dew upon the grass ;
but it is doubtful if the grass ever drips as does a
tree.

The birds, I say, were astir in the morning before
I was, and some of them were more wakeful through
the night, unless they sing in their dreams. At this
season one may hear at intervals numerous bird voices
during the night. The wLip-poor-will was piping
when I lay down, and I still heard one when I woke
ip after midnight. I heard the song-sparrow and the
kingbird also, like watchers calling the hour, and sev-
eral times I heard the cuckoo. Indeed, I am con-
rinced that our cuckoo is to a considerable extent a
uight bird, and that he moves about freely from tree
to 'ree. His peculiar gutturai note, now here, now

24 PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

there, may be heard almost any summer night, in any
part of the country, and occasionally his better known
cuckoo call. He is a great recluse by day, but seems
to wander abroad freely by night.

The birds do indeed begin with the day. The far«
mer who is in the field at work while he can yet see
stars catches their first matin hymns. In the longest
June days the robin strikes up about half-past three
o'clock, and is quickly followed by the sparrow, the
oriole, the cat-bird, the wren, the wood-thrush, and all
the rest of the tuneful choir. Along the Potomac I
have heard the Virginia cardinal whistle so loudly and
persistently in the tree-tops above that sleeping after
four o'clock was out of the question. Just before the
sun is up there is a marked lull, during which I im-
agine the birds are at breakfast. While building
their nest it is very early in the morning that they
put in their big strokes ; the back of their day's work
is broken before you have begun yours.

A lady once asked me if there was any individual
*ty among the birds, or if those of the same kind were
as near alike as two peas. I was obliged to answei
that to the eye those of the same species were as neai
alike as two peas, but that in their songs there were
often marks of originality. Caged or domesticated
birds develop notes and traits of their own, and among
the more familiar orchard and garden birds one may
notice the same tendency. I observe a great variety
of songs, and even qualities of voice, among the or
oles and among the song-sparrows. On this trip mj

PEPACTON : A SUMMER VOYAGE. 25

ear was especially attracted to some striking and orig-
inal sparrow songs. At one point I was half afraid
I had let pass an opportunity to identify a new war-
bler, but finally concluded it was a song-sparrow.
On another occasion I used to hear day after day a
sparrow that appeared to have some organic defect
in its voice : part of its song was scarcely above a
whisper, as if the bird was suffering from a very bad
cold. I have heard a bobolink and a hermit thrush
with similar defects of voice. I have heard a robin
with a part of the whistle of the quail in his song.
It was out of time and out of tune, but the robin
seemed insensible of the incongruity, and sang as
loudly and as joyously as any of his mates. A cat-
bird will sometimes show a special genius for mim-
icry, and I have known one to suggest very plainly
some notes of the bobolink.

There are numerous long covered bridges spanning
the Delaware, and under some of these I saw the
cliff-swallow at home, the nests being fastened to the
under sides of the timbers, — as it were, suspended
from the ceiling instead of being planted upon the
shelving or perpendicular side, as is usual with them.
To have laid the foundation, indeed, to have sprung
the vault downward and finished it successfully, must
have acquired special engineering skill. I had never
before seen or heard of these nests being so placed.
But birds are quick to adjust their needs to the exi-
gencies of any case. Not long before I had seen in
4 deserted house, on the head of the Rondout, tin

26 PEP ACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

chimney-swallows entering the chamber through a
Btove-pipe hole in the roof, and gluing their nests tc
the sides of the rafters, like the barn-swallows.

I was now, on the third day, well down in the
wilds of Colchester, with a current that made between
two and three miles an hour, — just a summer idler's
pace. The atmosphere of the river had improved
much since the first day — was, indeed, without
taint, — and the water was sweet and good. There
were farm-houses at intervals of a mile or so ; but
the amount of tillable land in the river valley or on
the adjacent mountains was very small. Occasionally
there would be forty or fifty acres of flat, usually in
grass or corn, with a thrifty-looking farm-house. One
could see how surely the land made the house and its
surroundings ; good land bearing good buildings, and
poor land poor.

In mid-forenoon I reached the long placid eddy at
Downsville, and here again fell in with two boys.
They were out paddling about in a boat when I drew
near, and they evidently regarded me in the light of
a rare prize which fortune had wafted them.

" Ain't you glad we come, Benny ? " I heard one
of them observe to the other, as they were conduct-
ing me to the best place to land. They were bright,
good boys, off the same piece as my acquaintance of
the day before, and about the same ages, — differing
only in being village boys. With what curiosity
tliey looked me over! Where had I come from
where was I going ; how long had I been on tht

PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE. 27

fray ; who built my boat ; was I a carpenter, to
build such a neat craft, etc. They never had seen
such a traveler before. Had I had no mishaps ? And
then they bethought them of the dangerous passes
that awaited me, and in good faith began to warn
and advise me. They had heard the tales of rafts-
men, and had conceived a vivid idea of the perils oi
the river below, gauging their notions of it from the
spring and fall freshets tossing about the heavy and
cumbrous rafts. There was a whirlpool, a rock eddy,
and a binocle within a mile. I might be caught in
the biuocle, or engulfed in the whirlpool, or smashed
up in the eddy. But I felt much reassured when
they told me I had already passed several whirlpools
and rock eddies ; but that terrible binocle, — what
was that? I had never heard of such a monster.
Oh, it was a still, miry place at the head of a big
eddy. The current might carry me up there, but I
could easily get out again ; the rafts did. But there
was another place I must beware of, where two ed-
dies faced each other ; raftsmen were sometimes
swept off there by the oars, and drowned. And
when I came to rock eddy, which I would know, be-
cause the river divided there (a part of the water be-
ing afraid to risk the eddy, I suppose), I must go
ashore and survey the pass ; but in any case it would
&e pru-lent to keep to the left. I might stick on the
rift, but that was nothing to being wrecked upon
those rocks. The boys were quite in earnest, and I
*)ld them I would walK cp to the village and post

28 PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

Borne letters to my friends before I braved all these
dangers. So they marched me up the street, pointing
out to their chums what they had found.

" Going way to Phil — What place is that near
where the river goes into the sea ? "

"Philadelphia?"

" Yes ; thinks he may go way there. Won't he
have fun ? "

The boys escorted me about the town, then back
to the river, and got in their boat and came down to
the bend, where they could see me go through the
whirlpool and pass the binocle (I am not sure about
the orthography of the word, but I suppose it means
a double, or a sort of mock eddy). I looked back as
I shot over the rough current beside a gentle vortex,
and saw them watching me with great interest. Rock
eddy, also, was quite harmless, and I passed it with-
out any preliminary survey.

I nooned at Sodom, and found good milk in a
humble cottage. In the afternoon I was amused by
a great blue heron that kept flying up in advance of
me. Every mile or so, as I rounded some point, I
would come unexpectedly upon him, till finally he
grew disgusted with my silent pursuit, and took a
ong turn to the left up along the side of the mount-
fdn, and passed back up the river, uttering a hoarse,
low note.

The wind still boded rain, and about four o'clock
announced by deep-toned thunder and portentous
slouds, it began to charge down the mountain side ii

PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE. 29

front of me. I ran ashore, covered my traps, and
took my way up through an orchard to a quaint little
farm-house. But there was not a soul about, outsicla
or in, that I could find, though the door was unfast-
ened ; so I went into an open shed with the hens
and lounged upon some straw, while the unloosed
floods came down. It was better than boating or
fishing. Indeed, there are few summer pleasures to
be placed before that of reclining at ease directly un-
der a sloping roof, after toil or travel in the hot sun,
and looking out into the rain-drenched air and fields.
It is such a vital, yet soothing spectacle. We sym-
pathize with the earth. We know how good a bath
is, and the unspeakable deliciousness of water to a
parched tongue. The office of the sunshine is slow,
subtle, occult, unsuspected ; but when the clouds do
their work the benefaction is so palpable and copious,
so direct and wholesale, that all creatures take note
of it, and for the most part rejoice in it. It is a com
pletion, a consummation, a paying of a debt with a
royal hand ; the measure is heaped and overflowing.
It was the simple vapor of water that the clouds bor-
rowed of the earth ; now they pay back more than
water; the drops are charged with electricity and
with the gases of the air, and have new solvent pow-
ers. Then, how the slate is sponged off, and left all
rlean and new again !

In the shed where I was sheltered were many
relics and odds and ends of the farm. In juxtaposi-
tion with two of the most stalwart wagon or truck

80 PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

wheels I ever looked upon was a cradle of ancient
and peculiar make, an aristocratic cradle, with high-
turned posts and an elaborately carved and molded
body, that was suspended upon rods and swung from
the top. How I should have liked to hear its history
and the story of the lives it had rocked, as the raiu
sang and the boughs tossed without. Above it was
the cradle of a phoebe-bird saddled upon a stick that
ran behind the rafter ; its occupants had not flown,
and its story was easy to read.

Soon after the first shock of the storm was over,
and before I could see breaking sky, the birds tuned
up with new ardor, — the robin, the indigo bird, the
purple finch, the sparrow, and in the meadow below
the bobolink. The cockerel near me followed suit,
and repeated his refrain till my meditations were so
disturbed that I was compelled to eject him from the
cover, albeit he had the best right there. But he
crowed his defiance with drooping tail from the yard
in front. I, too, had mentally crowed over the good
fortune of the shower, but before I closed my eyes
that night my crest was a good deal fallen, and I
could have wished the friendly elements had not
squared their accounts quite so readily and uproari-
ously.

The one shower did not exhaust the supply a bit ;
Nature's hand was full of trumps yet, — yea, and her
sleeve too. I stopped at a trout-brook, which came
down out of the mountains on the right, and took a
few trout for my supper ; but its current wag too

PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE. 31

roily from the shower for fly-fishing. Another farm-
house attracted me, but there was no one at home ;
BO I picked a quart of strawberries in the meadow
in front, not minding the wet grass, and about
six o'clock, thinking another storm that had been
threatening on my right had miscarried, I pushed off,
and went floating down into the deepening gloom of
the river valley. The mountains, densely wooded
from base to summit, shut in the view on every
hand. They cut in from the right and from the left,
one ahead of the other, matching like the teeth of
an enormous trap ; the river was caught and bent,
but not long detained by them. Presently I saw the
rain creeping slowly over them in my rear, for the
wind had changed ; but I apprehended nothing but
a moderate sundown drizzle, such as we often get
from the tail end of a shower, and drew up in the
eddy of a big rock under an overhanging tree till it
should have passed. But it did not pass ; it thick-
ened and deepened, and reached a steady pour by the
time I had calculated the sun would be gilding the
mountain tops. I had wrapped my rubber coat
about my blankets and groceries, and bared my back
to the storm. In sullen silence I saw the night set-
tling down and the rain increasing ; my roof tree
gave way, and every leaf poured its accumulated
lirops upon me. There were streams and splashes
where before there had been little more than a mist.
[ was getting well soaked and uncomplimentary in
ny remarks ou the weather. A saucy cat-bird, near

82 PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

by, flirted and squealed very plainly, " There ! there I
What did I tell you I what did I tell you ! Pretty
pickle ! pretty pickle ! pretty piokle to be in ! " But
I had been in worse pickles, though if the water had
been salt my pickling had been pretty thorough.
Seeing the wind was in the northeast, and that the
weather had fairly stolen a march on me, I let go my
hold of the tree, and paddled rapidly to the opposite
shore, which was low and pebbly, drew my boat up
on a little peninsula, turned her over upon a spot
which I cleared of its coarser stone, propped up one
end with the seat, and crept beneath. I would now
test the virtues of my craft as a roof, and I found she
was without flaw, though she was pretty narrow.
The tension of her timber was such that the rain
upon her bottom made a low, musical hum.

Crouched on my blankets and boughs, — for I had
gathered a good supply of the latter before the rain
overtook me, — and dry only about my middle, I
placidly took life as it came. A great blue heron
flew by, and let off something like ironical horse
laughter. Before it became dark I proceeded to eat
my supper, — my berries, but not my trout. What
n fuss we make about the "hulls" upon strawber-
ries ! We are hypercritical ; we may yet be glad to
dine off the hulls alone. Some people see something
lo pick and carp at in every good that comes to
them ; I was thankful that I had the berries, and re?
olutely ignored their little scalloped ruffles, which I
found pleased the eye and did not disturb the palata

PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE. 33

When bed-time arrived I found undressing a little
awkward, my berth was so low ; there was plenty of
room in the aisle, and the other passengers were
nowhere to be seen, but I did not venture out. It
rained nearly all night, but the train made good
<peed, and reached the land of daybreak nearly on
time. The water in the river had crept up during
the night to within a few inches of my boat, but I
rolled over and took another nap, all the same. Then
I arose, had a delicious bath in the sweet, swift^run-
ning current, and turned my thoughts toward break-
fast. The making of the coffee was the only serious
problem. With everything soaked and a fine rain
still falling, how shall one build a fire ? I made my
way to a little island above in quest of drift-wood.
Before I had found the wood I chanced upon an-
other patch of delicious wild strawberries, and took
an appetizer of them out of hand. Presently I picked
up a yellow birch stick the size of my arm. The
wood was decayed, but the bark was perfect. I
broke it in two, punched out the rotten wood, and
had the bark intact. The fatty or resinous substance
in this bark preserves it, and makes it excellent kind-
ling. With some seasoned twigs and a scrap of paper
I soon had a fire going that answered my every pur-
pose. More berries were picked while the coffee was
brewing, and the breakfast was a success.

The camper-out often finds nimself in what seems
a distressing predicament to people seated in their
»nug, well-ordered houses , but there is often a real

3

34 PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

satisfaction when things come to their wovst, — a
satisfaction in seeing what a small matter it is, after
all ; that one is really neither sugar nor salt, to bf
afraid of the wet; and that life is just as well worth
living beneath a scow or a dug-out as beneath the
highest and broadest roof in Christendom.

By ten o'clock it became necessary to move, on
account of the rise of the water, arid as the rain had
abated I picked up and continued my journey. Be-
fore long, however, the rain increased again, and I
took refuge in a barn. The snug, tree-embowered
farm-house looked very inviting, just across the roa^
from the barn; but as no one was about, and no
faces appeared at the window that I might judge of
the inmates, I contented myself with the hospitality
the barn offered, filling my pockets with some dry
birch shavings I found there where the farmer had
made an ox yoke, against the needs of the next kind-
ling.

After an hour's detention I was off again. I
stopped at Baxter's Brook, which flows hard by the
classic hamlet of Harvard, and tried for trout, but
with poor success, as I did not think it worth while
to go far up stream.

At several points I saw rafts of hemlock lumber
tied to the shore, ready to take advantage of the first
freshet. Rafting is an important industry for a hun-
dred miles or more along the Delaware. The lum-
bermen sometimes take their families or friends, and
have a jollification all the way to Trenton or to Phtt

PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE. 35

udelphia. In some places the speed is very great,
almost equaling thai of an express train. The pas-
sage of such places as Cochecton Falls and " Foul
Rift" is attended with no little danger. The raft
is guided by two immense oars, one before and one
behind. I frequently saw these huge implements in
the drift-wood along shore, suggesting some colossal
race of men. The raftsmen have names of their
own. From the upper Delaware, where I had set
in, small rafts are run down which they call " colts."
They come frisking down at a lively pace. At Han-
cock they usually couple two rafts together, when I
suppose they have a span of colts ; or do two colts
make one horse ? Some parts of the framework of
the raft they call "grubs;" much depends upon
these grubs. The lumbermen were and are a hardy,
virile race. The Hon. Charles Knapp, of Deposit,
now eighty-three years of age, but with the look and
step of a man of sixty, told me he had stood nearly
all one December day in the water to his waist, re-
constructing his raft, which had gone to pieces on
the head of an island. Mr. Knapp had passed the
first half of his life in Colchester and Hancock, and,
although no sportsman, had once taken part in a
great bear hunt there. The bear was an enormous
one, and was hard pressed by a gang of men and
dogs. Their muskets and assaults upon the beast
with clubs had made no impression. Mr. Knapp
saw where the bear was coming, and he thought he
would show them how easy it was to dispatch a bear

86 PEPACTON : A SUMMER VOYAGE.

with a club, if you only knew where to strike. He
had seen how quickly the largest hog would wilt be-
neath a slight blow across the " small of the back."
So, armed with an immense handspike, he took up a
position by a large rock that the bear must pass.
On she came, panting and nearly exhausted, and at
the right moment down came the club with great
force upon the small of her back. " If a fly had
Alighted upon her," said Mr. Knapp, "I think she
would have paid just as much attention to it as she
did to me."

Early in the afternoon I encountered another boy,
Henry Ingersoll, who was so surprised by my sudden
and unwonted appearance that he did not know east
from west. " Which way is west ? " I inquired, to
see if my own head was straight on the subject.

" That way," he said, indicating east within a few
degrees.

"You are wrong," I replied. "Where does the
gun rise ? "

" There," he said, pointing almost in the direction
he had pointed before.

" But does not the sun rise in the east here as well
&s elsewhere ? " I rejoined.

u Well, they call that west, anyhow."

But Henry's needle was subjected to a disturbing
influence just then. His house was near the river,
a-nd he was its sole guardian and keeper for the time
his father had gone up to the next neighbor's (it war
Sunday), and his sister had gone with the school

PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE. 37

mistress down the road to get black birch. lie came
out in the road, with wide eyes, to view me as I
passed, when I drew rein, and demanded the points
of the compass, as above. Then I shook my sooty
pail at him and asked for milk. Yes, I could have
Borne milk, but I would have to wait till his sister
came back ; after he had recovered a little, he con-
cluded he could get it. lie came for my pail, and
then his boyish curiosity appeared. My story inter-
ested him immensely. He had seen twelve summers,
but he had only been four miles from home up
and down the river : he had been down to the East
Branch, and he had been up to Trout Brook. He
took a pecuniary interest in me. What did my pole
cost ? What my rubber coat, and what my revolver ?
The latter he must take in his hand ; he had never
ceen such a thing to shoot with before in his life, etc.

O 7

He thought I might make the trip cheaper and easier
by stage and by the cars. He went to school : there
were six scholars in summer, one or two more in
winter. The population is not crowded in the town
of Hancock, certainly, and never will be. The peo-
ple live close to the bone, as Thoreau would say, or
rather close to the stump. Many years ago the young
men there resolved upon having a ball. They con-
cluded not to go to a hotel, on account of the ex-
en se, and so chose a private house. There was a
man in the neighborhood who could play the fife; he
offered to furnish the music for seventy-five cents.
But this was deemed too much, so one of the party

38 PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

agreed to whistle. History does not tell how many
beaux there were bent upon this reckless enterprise,
but there were three girls. For refreshments they
bought a couple of gallons of whiskey and a few
pounds of sugar. When the spree was over, and the
expenses were reckoned up, there was a shilling —
a York shilling — apiece to pay. Some of the rev-
elers were dissatisfied with this charge, and intimated
^lat the managers had not counted themselves in, but
taxed the whole expense upon the rest of the party.

As I moved on I saw Henry's sister and the school-
mistress picking their way along the muddy road
near the river's bank. One of them saw me, and,
dropping her skirts, said to the other (I could read
the motions), " See that man! " The other lowered
her flounces, and looked up and down the road, then
glanced over into the field, and lastly out upon the
river. They paused and had a good look at me,
though I could see that their impulse to run away,
like that of a frightened deer, was strong.

At the East Branch the Big Beaver Kill joins the
.Delaware, almost doubling its volume. Here I struck
the railroad, the forlorn Midland, and here another
set of men and manners cropped out, — what may
oe called the railroad conglomerate overlying this
mountain freestone.

" Where did you steal that boat ? " and, " Wha*
you running away for ? " greeted me from a hand
car that went by.

I paused for some time and watched the fish

PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE. 39

hawks, or ospreys, of which there were nearly a
dozeii sailing about above the junction of the two
streams, squealing and diving, and occasionally strik-
ing a fish on the rifts. I am convinced that the fish
hawk sometimes feeds on the wing. I saw him dc
it on this and on another occasion. He raises him-
self by a peculiar motion, and brings his head and
his talons together, and apparently takes a bite of a
fish. While doing this his flight presents a sharply
undulating line ; at the crest of each rise the morsel
is taken.

In a long, deep eddy under the west shore I came
upon a brood of wild ducks, the hooded merganser.
The young were about half grown, but of course
entirely destitute of plumage. They started off at
great speed, kicking the water into foam behind
them, the mother duck keeping upon their flank and
rear. Near the outlet of the pool I saw them go
ashore, and I expected they would conceal them-
selves in the woods; but as I drew near the place
they came out, and I saw by their motions they were
going to make a rush by me up stream. At a signal
from the old one, on they came, and passed within a
few feet of me. It was almost incredible, the speed
they made. Their pink feet were like swiftly revolv-
ing wheels placed a little to the rear; their breasts
just skimmed the surface, and the water was beaten
into spray behind them. They had no need of wings ;
even the mother bird did not use hers ; a steamboat
sould hardly have kept up with them. I dropped my

40 PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE.

paddle, and cheered. They kept the race up for a
long distance, and I saw them making a fresh spirt
as I entered upon the rift and dropped quickly out
of sight. I next disturbed an eagle in his medita-
tions upon a dead tree-top, and a cat sprang out oi
some weeds near the foot of the tree. Was he watch-
ing for puss, while she was watching for some smaller
prey?

I passed Partridge Island — which is or used to
be the name of a post-office — unwittingly, and en-
camped for the night on an island near Hawk's
Point. I slept in my boat on the beach, and in the
morning my locks were literally wet with the dews
of the night, and my blankets too ; so I waited for
the sun to dry them. As I was gathering drift-wood
for a fire, a voice came over from the shadows of the
east shore : " Seems to me you lay abed pretty late ! "

" I call this early," I rejoined, glancing at the sun.

" Wall, it may be airly in the forenoon, but it
ain't very airly in the mornin' ; " a distinction I was
forced to admit. Before I had reembarked some
cows came down to the shore, and I watched them
ford the river to the island. They did it with great
ease and precision. I was told they will sometimes,
during high water, swim over to the islands, striking
m well up stream, and swimming diagonally across.
At one point some cattle had crossed the river, and
evidently got into mischief, for a large dog rushed
them down the bank into the current, and worried
them all the way over, part of the time swimming

PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE. 41

and part of the time leaping very high, as a dog
will in deep snow, coming down with a great splash.
The cattle were shrouded with spray as they ran,
and altogether it was a novel picture.

My voyage ended that forenoon at Hancock, and
was crowned by a few idyllic days with some friends
in their cottage in the woods by Lake Oquaga, a
body of crystal water on the hills near Deposit, and
a haven as peaceful and perfect as voyager ever came
to port in.

SPRINGS.

SPRINGS.

I '11 show thee the best springs. —TEMPEST.

A MAN who came back to the place of his birth in
the East, after an absence of a quarter of a century
in the West, said the one thing he most desired to
see about the old homestead was the spring. This,
at least, he would find unchanged. Here his lost
youth would come back to him. The faces of his
father and mother he might not look upon ; but the
face of the spring that had mirrored theirs and his
own so oft, he fondly imagined would beam on him
as of old. I can well believe that in that all but
springless country in which he had cast his lot, the
vision, the remembrance of the fountain that flowed
by his father's doorway, so prodigal of its precious
gifts, has awakened in him the keenest longings and
regrets.

Did he not remember the path, also ; for next to
the spring itself is the path that leads to it. Indeed,
of all foot-paths, the spring-path is the most suggest
ve.

This is a path with something at the end of it,

46 SPRINGS

and the best of good fortune awaits iiim who walks
therein. It is a well-worn path, and, though gener-
ally up or down a hill, it is the easiest of all paths to
travel : we forget our fatigue when going to the
spring, and we have lost it when we turn to come
away. See with what alacrity the laborer hastens
along it, all sweaty from the fields ; see the boy or
girl running with pitcher or pail; see the welcome
shade of the spreading tree that presides over its
marvelous birth !

In the woods or on the mountain-side follow the
path, and you are pretty sure to find a spring; all
creatures are going that way night and day, and they
make a path.

A spring is always a vital point in the landscape ;
it is indeed the eye of the fields, and how often, too,
it has a noble eyebrow in the shape of an overhang-
ing bank or ledge. Or else its site is marked by
some tree which the pioneer has wisely left standing,
and which sheds a coolness and freshness that make
the water more sweet. In the shade of this tree the
harvesters sit and eat their lunch and look out upon
the quivering air of the fields. Here the Sunday
saunterer stops and lounges with his book, and
bathes his hands and face in the cool fountain.
Hither the strawberry-girl comes with her basket
and pauses a moment in the green shade. The
plowman leaves his plow and in long strides ap-
proaches the life-renewing spot, while his team, that
cannot follow, look wistfully after him. Here thf

SPRINGS. 47

cattle love to pass the beat of the day, and hither
come the birds to wash themselves and make their
toilets.

Indeed, a spring is always an oasis in the desert of
-he fields. It is a creative and generative centre. It
attracts all things to itself, — the grasses, the mosses,
the flowers, the wild plants, the great trees. The
walker finds it out, the camping party seek it, the
pioneer builds his hut or his house near it. When
the settler or squatter has found a good spring, he
has found a good place to begin life ; he has found
the fountain-head of much that he is seeking in this
world. The chances are that he has found a south-
ern and eastern exposure ; for it is a fact that water
does not readily flow north ; the valleys mostly open
the other way ; and it is quite certain he has found a
measure of salubrity ; for where water flows fever
abideth not. The spring, too, keeps him to the right
belt, out of the low valley, and off the top of the hill.

When John Winthrop decided upon the site where
now stands the city of Boston, as a proper place for
a settlement, he was chiefly attracted by a l^irge and
excellent spring of water that flowed there. The in-
fant city was born of this fountain.

There seems a kind of perpetual spring-time about
the place where water issues from the ground — a
freshness and a greenness that are ever renewed. The
tjrass never fades, the ground is never parched or
fro/^n. There is warmth there in winter and cool-
uess in summer. The temperature is equalized. ID

48 SPRINGS.

March or April the spring runs are a bright emerald,
while the surrounding fields are yet brown and sere,
and in fall they are yet green when the first snow
covers them. Thus every fountain by the road-side
is a fountain of youth and of life. This is what the
old fables finally mean.

An intermittent spring is shallow ; it has no deep
root and is like an inconstant friend. But a peren-
nial spring, one whose ways are appointed, whose
foundation is established, what a profound and beau-
tiful symbol! In fact, there is no more large and
universal symbol in nature than the spring, if there
is any other capable of such wide and various appli-
cations.

What preparation seems to have been made for it
in the conformation of the ground, even in the deep
underlying geological strata ! Vast rocks and ledges
are piled for it, or cleft asunder that it may find a
way. Sometimes it is a trickling thread of silver
down the sides of a seamed and scarred precipice.
Then again the stratified rock is like a just-lifted lid,
from beneath which the water issues. Or it slips
noiselessly out of a deep dimple in the fields. Occa-
sionally it bubbles up in the valley as if forced up by
che surrounding hills. Many springs, no doubt, find
an outlet in the beds of the large rivers and lakes, and
are unknown to all but the fishes. They probably
find them out and make much of rhem. The trout
certainly do. Find a place in the creek where a
spring issues, or where it flows into it from a nea.

SPRINGS. 49

bank, and you have' found a most likely place for
trout. They deposit their spawn there in the fall,
warm their noses there in winter, and cool themselves
there in summer. I have seen the patriarchs of the
tribe of an old and much-fished stream, seven or eight
enormous fellows, congregated in such a place. The
boys found • it out and went with a bag and bagged
them all. In another place a trio of large trout, that
knew and despised all the arts of the fishermen, took
up their abode in a deep, dark hole in the edge of
the wood, that had a spring flowing into a shallow
part of it. In midsummer they were wont to come
out from their safe retreat and bask in the spring,
their immense bodies but a few inches under water.
A youth, who had many times vainly sounded their
dark hiding-place with his hook, happening to come
along with his rifle one day, shot the three, one after
another, killing them b.y the concussion of the bullet
on the water immediately over them.

The ocean itself is known to possess springs, copi-
ous ones, in many places the fresh water rising up
through the heavier salt as through a rock, and afford-
ing supplies to vessels at the surface. Off the coast
of Florida many of these submarine springs have
oeen discovered, the outlet, probably, of the streams
and rivers that disappear in the "sinks" of that State.

It is a pleasant conception, that of the unscien-
;ific folk, that the springs are fed directly by the sea,
w that the earth is full of veins or arteries that con-
nect with the great reservoir of waters. But wheP
4

50 SPRINGS.

science turns the conception over and makes the con
nection in the air — disclosing the great water-main
in the clouds, and that the mighty engine of the hy-
draulic system of nature is the sun, the fact becomes
even more poetical, does it not ? This is one of the
many cases where science, instead of curtailing the
imagination, makes new and large demands upon it.

The hills are great sponges that do not and can-
not hold the water that is precipitated upon them,
but that let it filter through at the bottom. This is
the way the sea has robbed the eartB of its various
salts, its potash, its lime, its magnesia, and many other
mineral elements. It is found that the oldest up-
heavals, those sections of the country that have been
longest exposed to the leeching and washing of the
rains, are poorest in those substances that go to the
making of the osseous frame-work of man and of the
animals. Wheat does not grow well there, and the
men born and reared there are apt to have brittle
bones. An important part of those men went down
stream, ages before they were born. The water of
such sections is now soft and free from mineral sub-
Btances, but not more wholesome on that account.

The gigantic springs of the country that have not
been caught in any of the great natural basins, are
mostly confined to the limestone region of the Mid-
dle and Southern States, — the valley of Virginia
and its continuation and deflections into Kentucky
Tennessee, Northern Alabama, Georgia, and Flor-
da. Through this belt are found the great cave*

SPRINGS. 51

jmd the subterranean rivers. The waters have here
worked like enormous moles, and have honey-combed
the foundations of the earth. They have great high-
ways beneath the hills. Water charged with car-
bonic acid gas has a very sharp tooth and a power-
ful digestion, and no limestone rock can long resist
it. Sherman's soldiers tell of a monster spring in
Northern Alabama, — a river leaping full-grown
from the bosom of the earth ; and of another at the
bottom of a large, deep pit in the rocks, that con-
tinues its way under ground.

There are many springs in Florida of this char-
acter, large under-ground streams that have breath-
ing holes, as it were, here and there. In some places
the water rises and fills the bottoms of deep bowl-
shaped depressions ; in other localities it is reached
through round natural well-holes ; a bucket is let
down by a rope, and if it becomes detached is quickly
swept away by the current. Some of the Florida
springs are perhaps the largest in the world, afford-
ng room and depth enough for steamboats to move
and turn in them. Green Cove Spring is said to be
like a waterfall reversed ; a cataract rushing upward
through a transparent liquid instead of leaping down-
ward through the air. There are one or two of these
enormous springs also in Northern Mississippi, —
springs so large that it seems as if the whole conti-
nent must nurse them.

The Valley of the Shenaudoah is remarkable for
!ts large springs. The town of Winchester, a town of

52 SPRINGS.

neveral thousand inhabitants, is abundantly supplied
with water from a single spring that issues on higher
ground near by. Several other springs in the vi-
cinity afford rare mill-power. At Harrisonburg, a
county town farther up the valley, I was attracted
by a low ornamental dome resting upon a circle of
columns, on the edge of the square that contained the
court-house, and was surprised to find that it gave
shelter to an immense spring. This spring was also
capable of watering the town or several towns ; stone
steps lead down to it at the bottom of a large stone
basin. There was a pretty constant string of pails
to and from it. Aristotle called certain springs of
his country " cements of society," because the young
people so frequently met there and sang and con-
versed ; and I have little doubt this spring is of like
social importance.

There is a famous spring at San Antonio, Texas,
which is described by that excellent traveler, Fred-
erick Law Olmsted. " The whole river," he says,
* gushes up in one sparkling burst from the earth,
with all the accessories of smaller springs, moss, peb-
bles, foliage, seclusion, etc. Its effect is overpower-
ing. It is beyond your possible conception of a
spring."

Of like copiousness and splendor is the Caledonia
spring, or springs, in Western New York. They
give birth to a white-pebbled, transparent strean:
several rods wide and two or three feet deep, thai
flows eighty barrels of water per second, and is alire

SPRINGS. 58

ttitli trout. The trout are fat and gamy even in
winter.

The largest spring in England, called the Well of
St. Winifred, at Holywell, flows less than three bar-
rels per second. I recently went many miles out of
my way to see the famous trout spring in Warren
County, New Jersey. This spring flows about one
thousand gallons of water per minute, which has a
uniform temperature of fifty degrees winter and sum-
mer. It is near the Musconetcong Creek, which looks
as if it were made up of similar springs. On the
parched and sultry summer day upon which my visit
fell, it was well worth walking many miles just to see
such a volume of water issue from the ground. I
felt with the boy Petrarch, when he first beheld a
famous spring, that " Were I master of such a foun-
tain I would prefer it to the finest of cities." A large
oak leans down over the spring and affords an abun
dance of shade. The water does not bubble up, bu
comes straight out with great speed like a courier
with important news, and as if its course under-
ground had been a direct and an easy one for a long
distance. Springs that issue in this way have a sort
of vertebra, a ridgy and spine-like centre that sug-
gests the gripe and push there is in this element.

What would one not give for such a spring in his
back-yard, or front-yard, or anywhere near his house,
or in any of his fields ? One would be tempted to
move his house to it, if the spring could not be
brought to the house. Its mere poetic value and

54 SPRINGS.

suggestion would be worth all the art and ornament
to be had. It would irrigate one's heart and char-
acter as well as his acres. Then one might have a
Naiad Queen to do his churning and to saw hia
wood ; then one might " see his chore done by the
gods themselves," as Emerson says, or by the nymphs,
which is just as well.

I know a homestead situated on one of the pict-
uresque branch valleys of the Housatonic, that has
Buch a spring flowing by the foundation walls of the
house, and not a little of the strong overmastering
local attachment that holds the owner there is born
of that — his native spring. He could not, if he
would, break from it. He says that when he looks
down into it he has a feeling that he is an amphibi-
ous animal that has somehow got stranded. A long,
gentle flight of stone steps leads from the back porch
down to it under the branches of a lofty elm. It
wells up through the white sand and gravel as through
a sieve, and fills the broad space that has been ar-
ranged for it so gently and imperceptibly that one
does not suspect its copiousness until he has seen the
overflow. It turns no wheel, yet it lends a pliant
hand to many of the affairs of that "household. It \s
a refrigerator in summer anji a frost-proof envelope
in winter, and a fountain of delights the year round.
Trout come up from the Weebutook River and dwell
there and become domesticated, and take lumps oi
butter from your hand, or rake the ends of you!
fingers if you tempt them. is a kind of sparkling

SPRINGS. 55

and ever-washed larder. Where are the berries ?
where is the butter, the milk, the steak, the melon ?
In the spring. It preserves, it ventilates, it cleanses.
It is a board of health and general purveyor. It is
equally for use and for pleasure. Nothing degrades
it, and nothing can enhance its beauty. It is picture
and parable, and an instrument of music. It is serv-
ant and divinity in one. The milk of forty cows is
cooled in it, and never a drop gets into the cans,
though they are plunged to the brim. It is as in-
sensible to drought and rain as to heat and cold. It
is planted upon the sand and yet it abideth like a
house upon a rock. It evidently has some relation to
a little brook that flows down through a deep notch
in the hills half a mile distant, because on one occa-
sion, when the brook was being ditched or dammed,
the spring showed great perturbation. Every nymph
in it was filled with sudden alarm and kicked up a
commotion.

In some sections of the country, when there is no
spring near the house, the farmer, with much labor
and pains, brings one from some up-lying field or
wood. Pine and poplar logs are bored and laid in a
trench, and the spring practically moved to the de-
sired spot. The ancient Persians had a law, that
whoever thus conveyed the water of a spring to a spot
not watered before should enjoy many immunities
under the state not granted to others.

Hilly and mountainous countries do not always
Abound in good springs. When the stratum is verti

56 SPRINGS.

cal, or has too great a dip, the water is not collected
in large veins, but is rather held as it falls and oozes
out slowly at the surface over the top of the rock.
On this account one of the most famous grass and
dairy sections of New York is poorly supplied with
springs. Every creek starts in a bog or marsh, and
good water can be had only by excavating.

What a charm lurks about those springs that are
found near the tops of mountains, so small that they
get lost amid the rocks and debris and never reach
the valley, and so cold that they make the throat
ache ! Every hunter and mountain-climber can tell
you of such — usually on the last rise before the sum-
mit is cleared. It is eminently the hunter's spring.
I do not know whether or not the foxes and other
wild creatures lap at it, but their pursuers are quite
apt to pause there and take breath or eat their lunch.
The mountain-climbers in summer hail it with a
shout. It is always a surprise, and raises the spirits
of the dullest. Then it seems to be born of wildness
and remoteness, and to savor of some special benefit
or good fortune. A spring in the valley is an idyl,
but a spring on the mountain is a genuine lyrical
touch. It imparts a mild thrill ; and if one were to
call any springs u miracles," as the natives of Cash-
nere are said to regard their fountains, it would be
fcuch as these.

What secret attraction draws one in his summei
walk to touch at all the springs on his route, and to
pauce a moment at each, as if what he was in ques

SPRINGS. 57

Df would be likely to turn up there? I can seldom
pass a spring without doing homage to it. It is the
shrine at which I oftenest worship. If I find one
fouled with leaves or trodden full by cattle, I take as
much pleasure in cleaning it out as a devotee in set-
ting up the broken image of his Saint. Though I
chance not to want to drink there, I like to behold a
clear fountain, and I may want to drink next time
I pass, or some traveler, or heifer, or milch cow may.
Leaves have a strange fatality for the spring. They
come from afar to get into it. In a grove or in the
woods they drift into it and cover it up like snow.
Late in November, in clearing one out, I brought
forth a frog from his hibernacle in the leaves at the
bottom. He was very black and he rushed about in
a bewildered manner like one suddenly aroused from
his sleep.

There is no place more suitable for statuary than
about a spring or fountain, especially in parks or im-
proved fields. Here one seems to expect to see fig-
ures and bending forms. " Where a spring rises or
a river flows," says Seneca, " there should we build
altars, and offer sacrifices."

I have spoken of the hunter's spring. The travel-
er's spring is a little cup or saucer-shaped fountain
Bet in the bank by the roadside. The harvester's
spring is beneath a wide-spreading tree in the fields.
The lover's spring is down a lane under a hill. There
is a good screen of rocks and bushes. The hermit's
ipring is on the margin of a lake in the woods. The

58 SPRINGS.

fisherman's spring is by the river. The miner finds hia
spring in the bowels of the mountain. The soldier's
spring is wherever he can fill his canteen. The spring
where school-boys go to fill the pail is a long way up
or down a hill, and has just been roiled by a frog or
musk-rat, and the boys have to wait till it settles.
There is yet the milkman's spring that never dries,
the water of which is milky and opaque. Sometimes
it flows out of a chalk cliff. This latter is a hard
spring : all the others are soft.

There is another side to this subject, — the marvel-
ous, not to say the miraculous ; and if I were to
advert to all the curious or infernal springs that
are described by travelers or others, — the sulphur
springs, the mud springs, the sour springs, the soap
springs, the soda springs, the blowing springs, the
spouting springs, the boiling springs not one mile
from Tophet, the springs that rise and fall with the
tide, the spring spoken of by Vitruvius, that gave un-
wonted loudness to the voice ; the spring that Plu-
tarch tells about, that had something of the flavor of
wine, because it was supposed that Bacchus had been
washed in it immediately after his birth ; the spring
that Herodotus describes, — wise man and credulous
boy that he was, — called the " Fountain of the
Sun," which was warm at dawn, cold at noon, and
hot at midnight ; the springs at San Filippo, Italy,
that have built up a calcareous wall over a mile long
and several hundred feet thick ; the renowned springs
if Cashmere, that are believed by the people to b«

SPRINGS. 69

the source of the comeliness of their women, etc., —
if I were to follow up my subject in this direction, I
say, it would lead me into deeper and more troubled
waters than I am in quest of at present.

Pliny, in a letter to one of his friends, giv-es the fol-
lowing account of a spring that flowed near his Lau-
ren tine villa: —

" There is a spring which rises in a neighboring mount-
ain, and running among the rocks is received into a little
banqueting-room, artificially formed for that purpose,
from whence, after being detained a short time, it falls
into the Larian Lake. The nature of this spring is ex-
tremely curious: it ebbs and flows regularly three times
a day. The increase and decrease are plainly visible,
and exceedingly interesting to observe. You sit down
by the side of the fountain, and while you are taking a re-
past and drinking its water, which is exceedingly cool, you
see it gradually rise and fall. If you place a ring or any-
thing else at the bottom, when it is dry, the water creeps
gradually up, first gently washing, finally covering it en-
tirely, and then, little by little, subsides again. If you
wait long enough, you may see it thus alternately advance
and recede three successive times."

Pliny suggests four or five explanations of this
phenomenon, but is probably wide of the mark in all
but the fourth one : —

" Or is there rather a certain reservoir that contains
these waters in the bowels of the earth, and while it ii
recruiting its discharges, the stream in consequence flows
more slowly and ;- l^«s quantity, but, when it has col-

80 SPRINGS.

lected its due measure, runs on again in its usual strength
and fullness."

There are several of these intermitting springs in
different parts of the world, and they are perhaps all
to be explained on the principle of the siphon.

In the Idyls of Theocritus there are frequent allu-
sions to springs. It was at a spring — and a mount-
ain spring at that — that Castor and Pollux encoun-
tered the plug-ugly Amycus : —

" And spying on a mountain a wild wood of vast size,
they found under a smooth cliff an ever-flowing spring,
filled with pure water, and the pebbles beneath seemed
like crystal or silver from the depths ; and near there had
grown tall pines, and poplars, and plane-trees, and cy-
presses with leafy tops, and fragrant flowers, pleasant
work for hairy bees," etc.

Or the story of Hylas, the auburn-haired boy, who
went to the spring to fetch water for supper for Her-
cules and stanch Telamon, and was seized by the
enamored nymphs and drawn in. The spring was evi-
dently a marsh or meadow spring : it was in a " low-ly-
ing spot, and around it grew many rushes, and the pale
blue swallow-wort, and green maiden hair, and bloom-
ing parsley, and conch grass stretching through the
marshes." As Hercules was tramping through the
bog, club in hand, and shouting " Hylas ! " to the full
depth of his throat, he heard a thin voice come from
the water, — it was Hylas responding, and Hylas, in
the shape of the little frog, has been calling from oui
tnaish springs ever since.

SPRINGS. 61

The characteristic flavor and suggestion of these
Idyls is like pure spring water. This is, perhaps,
why the modern reader is apt to be disappointed in
them when he takes them up for the first time. They
appear minor and literal and tasteless, as does most
ancient poetry ; but it is mainly because we have got
to the fountain head, and have come in contact with
a mind that has been but little shaped by artificial
indoor influences. The stream of literature is now
much fuller and broader than it was in ancient times,
with currents and counter-currents, and diverse and
curious phases ; but the primitive sources seem far
behind us, and for the refreshment of simple spring
water in art we must still go back to Greek poetry.

IN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

THERE is no creature with which man has sur-
rounded himself that seems so much like a prod-
uct of civilization, so much like the result of de-
velopment on special lines and in special fields, aa
the honey-bee. Indeed, a colony of bees, with their
neatness and love of order, their division of labor,
their public spiritedness, their thrift, their complex
economies and their inordinate love of gain, seems as
far removed from a condition of rude nature as does
a walled city or a cathedral town. Our native bee, on
the other hand, " the burly, dozing bumble-bee," af-
fects one more like the rude, untutored savage. He
has learned nothing from experience. He lives from
hand to mouth. He luxuriates in time of plenty,
and he starves in times of scarcity. He lives in a
rude nest or in a hole in the ground, and in small
communities ; he builds a few deep cells or sacks in
which he stores a little honey and bee-bread for his
young, but as a worker in wax he is of the most
primitive and awkward. The Indian regarded the
honey-bee as an ill-omen. She was the white man's

66 AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

fly. In fact she was the epitome of the white man
himself. She has the white man's craftiness, his in-
dustry, his architectural skill, his neatness and love
of system, his foresight; and above all, his eager,
miserly habits. The honey-bee's great ambition is to
be rich, to lay up great stores, to possess the sweet
of every flower that blooms. She is more than prov-
ident. Enough will not satisfy her ; she must have
all she can get by hook or by crook. She comes
from the oldest country, Asia, and thrives best in
the most fertile and long-settled lands.

Yet the fact remains that the honey-bee is essen-
tially a wild creature, and never has been and can-
not be thoroughly domesticated. Its proper home is
the woods, and thither every new swarm counts on
going ; and thither many do go in spite of the care
and watchfulness of the bee-keeper. If the woods
in any given locality are deficient in trees with suit-
able cavities the bees resort to all sorts of make-
shifts ; they go into chimneys, into barns and out-
houses, under stones, into rocks, and so forth. Sev-
eral chimneys in my locality with disused flues are
taken possession of by colonies of bees nearly every
Reason. One day while bee-hunting I developed a
line that went toward a farm-house where I had rea-
son to believe no bees were kept. I followed it up
and questioned the farmer about his bees. He said
he kept no bees, but that a swarm had taken pos-
session of his chimney, and another had gone under
the clapboards in the gable end of his house. He

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE. 67

had taken a large lot of honey out of both places
the year before. Another farmer told me that one
day his family had seen a number of bees examining
a knot-hole in the side of his house ; the next day as
they were sitting down to dinner their attention was
attracted by a loud humming noise, when they dis-
covered a swarm of bees settling upon the side of the
bouse and pouring into the knot-hole. In subse-
quent years other swarms came to the same place,

Apparently every swarm of bees before it leaves
the parent hive sends out exploring parties to look
up the future home. The woods and groves are
searched through and through, and no doubt the pri-
vacy of many a squirrel and many a wood mouse is
intruded upon. What cozy nooks and retreats they
do spy out, so much more attractive than the painted
hive in the garden, so much cooler in summer and so
much warmer in winter !

The bee is in the main an honest citizen ; she pre-
fers legitimate to illegitimate business ; she is never
an outlaw until her proper sources of supply fail ;
she will not touch honey as long as honey-yielding
flowers can be found ; she always prefers to go to
the fountain-head, and dislikes to take her sweets at
second hand. But in the fall after the flowers have
failed she can be tempted. The bee-hunter takes
advantage of this fact ; he betrays her with a little
honey. He wants to steal her stores, and he first
encourages her to steal his, then follows the thief

O '

home with her booty. This is the whole trick of the

68 AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

bee-hunter. The bees never suspect his game, else
by taking a circuitous route they could easily baffle
him. But the honey-bee has absolutely no wit or
cunning outside of her special gifts as a gatherer and
Btorer of honey. She is a simple-minded creature
and can be imposed upon by any novice. Yet it is
not every novice that can find a bee-tree. The
sportsman may track bis game to its retreat by the
aid of his dog, but in hunting the honey-bee one must
be his own dog, and track his game through an ele-
ment in which it leaves no trail. It is a task for a
sharp, quick eye, and may test the resources of the
best wood-craft. One autumn when I devoted much
time to this pursuit, as the best means of getting
at nature and the open-air exhilaration, my eye be-
came so trained that bees were nearly as easy to
it as birds. I saw and heard bees wherever I went.
One day, standing on a street corner in a great city,
I saw above the trucks and the traffic a line of bees
carrying off sweets from some grocery or confection-
ery shop.

One looks upon the woods with a new interest
when he suspects they hold a colony of bees. What
a pleasing secret it is ; a tree with a heart of comb
honey, a decayed oak or maple with a bit of Sicily
or Mount Ilymettus stowed away in its trunk or
branches ; secret chambers where lies hidden the
wealth of ten thousand little freebooters, great nug-
gets and wedges of precious ore gathered with risk
and labor from every field and wood about.

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE. 69

But if you would know the delights of bee-hunt-
ing, and how many sweets such a trip yields beside
honey, come with me some bright, warm, Jate Sep-
tember or early October day. It is the golden season
of the year, and any errand or pursuit that takes us
abroad upon the hills or by the painted woods and
along the amber colored streams at such a time is
enough. So, with haversacks filled with grapes and
peaches and apples and a bottle of milk, — for we shall
not be home to dinner, — and armed with a compass,
a hatchet, a pail and a box with a piece of comb
honey neatly fitted into it — any box the size of your
hand with a lid will do nearly as well as the elaborate
and ingenious contrivance of the regular bee-hunter
— we sally forth. Our course at first lies along the
highway under great chestnut-trees whose nuts are
just dropping, then through an orchard and across a
little creek, thence gently rising through a long series
of cultivated fields toward some high uplying land
behind which rises a rugged wooded ridge or mount-
ain, the most sightly point in all this section. Be-
hind this ridge for several miles the country is wild,
wooded, and rocky, and is no doubt the home of
qany wild swarms of bees. What a gleeful uproar
the robins, cedar-birds, high-holes and cow black-
b.rds make amid the black cherry trees as we pass
along. The raccoons, too, have been here after black
cherries, and we see their marks at various points.
Several crows are walking about a newly sowed
irheat field we pass through, and we pause to note

70 AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

their graceful movements and glossy coats. I have
seen no bird walk the ground with just the same air
the crow does. It is not exactly pride ; there is no
strut or swagger in it, though perhaps just a little
condescension ; it is the contented, complaisant, and
self-possessed gait of a lord over his domains. All
these acres are mine, he says, and all these crops ;
men plow and sow for me, and I stay here or go
there, and find life sweet and good wherever I am.
The hawk looks awkward and out of place on the
ground ; the game birds hurry and skulk, but the
crow is at home and treads the earth as if there were
none to molest or make him afraid.

The crows we have always with us, but it is not
every day or every season that one sees an eagle.
Hence I must preserve the memory of one I saw the
last day I went bee-hunting. As I was laboring up
the side of a mountain at the head of a valley, the
noble bird sprang from the top of a dry tree above
me and came sailing directly over my head. I saw
him bend his eye down upon me, and I could hear
the low hum of his plumage as if the web of every
quill in his great wings vibrated in his strong, level
light. I watched him as long as my eye could hold
.iim. When he was fairly clear of the mountain he
began that sweeping spiral movement in which he
climbs the sky. Up and up he went without once
breaking his majestic poise till he appeared to sight
some far-off alien geography, when he bent his course
thitherward and gradually vanished in the blue depth*

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE. 71

fhe eagle is a bird of large ideas, he embraces long
distances ; the continent is his home. I never look
upon one without emotion ; I follow him with my eye
as long as I can. I think of Canada, of the Great
Lakes, of the Rocky Mountains, of the wild and
sounding sea-coast. The waters are his, and the
woods and the inaccessible cliffs. He pierces behind
the veil of the storm, and his joy is height and depth
and vast spaces.

We go out of our way to touch at a spring run in
the edge of the woods, and are lucky to find a single
scarlet lobelia lingering there. It seems almost to
light up the gloom with its intense bit of color. Be-
side a ditch in a field beyond we find the great blue
lobelia (Lobelia syphilitica), and near it amid the
weeds and wild grasses and y purple asters the most
beautiful of our fall flowers, the fringed gentian.
What a rare and delicate, almost aristocratic look the
gentian has amid its coarse, unkempt surroundings.
It does not lure the bee but it lures and holds every
passing human eye. If we strike through the corner
of yonder woods, where the ground is moistened by
hidden springs and where there is a little opening
amid the trees, we shall find the closed gentian, a
rare flower in this locality. I had walked this way
many times before I chanced upon its retreat ; and
then I was following a line of bees. I lost the bees
but I got the gentians. How curious.1 y this flower
looks with its deep blue petals foiled together so
*ightly — a bud and yet a bloasom. It is ^he nun

72 AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

among our wild flowers — a form closely veiled and
cloaked. The buccaneer bumble-bee sometimes tries
to rifle it of its sweets. I have seen the blossom
with the bee entombed in it. He had forced his way
into the virgin corolla as if determined to* know its
secret, but he had never returned with the knowl-
edge he had gained.

After a refreshing walk of a couple of miles we
reach a point where we will make our first trial — a
high stone wall that runs parallel with the wooded
ridge referred to, and separated from it by a broad
field. There are bees at work there on that golden-
rod and it requires but little manoeuvring to sweep
one into our box. Almost any other creature rudely
and suddenly arrested in its career and clapped into
a cage, in this way would show great confusion and
alarm. The bee is alarmed for a moment, but the bee
has a passion stronger than its love of life or fear of
death, namely, desire for Honey, not simply to eat,
but to carry home as booty. " Such rage of honey in
their bosom beats," says Virgil. It is quick to catch
the scent of honey in the box, and as quick to fall
to filling itself. We now set the box down upon the
wall and gently remove the cover. The bee is head
and shoulders in one of the half-filled cells, and is
oblivious to everything else about it. Come rack,
come ruin, it will die at work. We step back a few
paces, and sit down upon the ground so as to bring
Ihe box against the blue sky as a background. lu
two or three minutes the bee is seen rising slowh

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE. 73

ind heavily from the box. It seems loath to leave so
much honey behind and it marks the place well. It
mounts aloft in a rapidly increasing spiral, surveying
the near and minute objects first, then the larger and
more distant, till having circled above the spot five
or six times and taken all its bearings it darts away
for home. It is a good eye that holds fast to the bee
till it is fairly off. Sometimes one's head will swim
following it, and often one's eyes are put out by the
sun. This bee gradually drifts down the hill, then
strikes away toward a farm-house half a mile away
where I know bees are kept. Then we try another
and another, and the third bee, much to our satisfac-
tion, goes straight toward the woods. We could see
the brown speck against the darker background for
many yards. The regular bee-hunter professes to be
able to tell a wild bee from a tame one by the color,
the former, he says, being lighter. But there is no
difference; they are both 'alike in color and in man-
ner. Young bees are lighter than old, and that is all
there is of it. If a bee lived many years in the
woods it would doubtless come to have some distin-
guishing marks, but the life of a bee is only a few
months at the farthest, and no change is wrought in
this brief time.

Our bees are all soon back, and more with them,
for we have touched the box here and there with the
~ork of a bottle of anise oil, and this fragrant and
pungent oil will attract bees half a mile or more.
When no flowers can be found this is the quickest
way to obtain a be»

74 AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

It is a singular fact that when the bee first finds
the hunter's box its first feeling is one of anger ; it
is as mad as a hornet ; its tone changes, it sounds its
shrill war trumpet and darts to and fro, and gives
vent to its rage and indignation in no uncertain man-
ner. It seems to scent foul play at once. It says,
" Here is robbery ; here is the spoil of some hive,
may be my own," and its blood is up. But its ruling
passion soon comes to the surface, its avarice gets
the better of its indignation, and it seems to say,
" Well, I had better take possession of this and carry
it home." So after many feints and approaches and
dartings off with a loud angry hum as if it would
none of it, the bee settles down and fills itself.

It does not entirely cool off and get soberly to
work till it has made two or three trips home with
its booty. When other bees come, even if all from
the same swarm, they quarrel and dispute over the
box, and clip and dart at each other like bantam
cocks. Apparently the ill feeling which the sight of
the honey awakens is not one of jealousy or rivalry,
but wrath.

A bee will usually make three or four trips frorr
the hunter's box before it brings back a companion,
T suspect the bee does not tell its fellows what it ha?
tound, but that they smell out the secret ; it doubt-
less bears some evidence with it upon its feet or pro-
boBcis that it has been upon honey-comb and not upon
tlowers, and its companions take the hint and follow
arriving always many seconds behind. Then thi

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE. 75

quantity and quality of the booty would also betray
it. No doubt, also, there are plenty of gossips about
a hive that note and tell everything. " Oh, did you
see that ? Peggy Mel came in a few moments ago
in great haste, and one of the up-stairs packers says
she was loaded till she groaned with apple-blossom
honey which she deposited, and then rushed off again
like mad. Apple-blossom honey in October! Fee,
fi, fo, fum ! I smell something ! Let 's after."

In about half an hour we have three well-defined
lines of bees established — two to farm-houses and
one to the woods, and our box is being rapidly de-
pleted of its honey. About every fourth bee goes to
the woods, and now that they have learned the way
thoroughly they do not make the long preliminary
whirl above the box, but start directly from it. The
woods are rough and dense and the hill steep, and we
do not like to follow the line of bees until we have
tried at least to settle the problem as to the distance
they go into the woods — whether the tree is on this
side of the ridge or into the depth of the forest on
the other side. So we shut up the box when it is
full of bees and carry it about three hundred yards
along the wall from which we are operating. When
liberated, the bees, as they always will in such cases,
go off in the same directions they have been going ;
Jiey do not seem to know that they have been moved.
But other bees have followed our scent, and it is not
many minutes before a second line to the woods is
established. This is called cross-lining the bees. The

76 AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

new line makes a sharp angle with the other line,
and we know at once that the tree is only a few
rods into the woods. The two lines we have estab-
lished form two sides of a triangle of which the wall
is the base ; at the apex of the triangle, or where the
two lines meet in the woods, we are sure to find the
tree. We quickly follow up these lines, and where
they pross each other on the side of the hill we scan
every tree closely. I pause at the foot of an oak
and examine a hole near the root ; now the bees are
in this tree and their entrance is on the upper side
near the ground not two feet from the hole I peer
into, and yet so quiet and secret is their going and
coming that I fail to discover them and pass on up
the hill. Failing in this direction I return to the
oak again, and then perceive the bees going out in a
small crack in the tree. The bees do not know they
are found out and that the game is in our hands, and
are as oblivious of our presence as if we were ants
or crickets. The indications are that the swarm is a
email one, and the store of honey trifling. In " tak-
ing up " a bee-tree it is usual first to kill or stupefy
the bees with the fumes of burning sulphur or with
tobacco smoke. But this course is impracticable on
the present occasion, so we boldly and ruthlessly as-
sault the tree with an ax we have procured. At the
first blow the bees set up a loud buzzing, but we
have no mercy, and the side of the cavity is soon cut
Hway and the interior with its white-yellow mass oJ
comb-honey is exposed, and not a bee strikes a blow

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE. 77

in defense of its all. This may seem singular, but
it has nearly always been my experience. When a
iwarm of bees are thus rudely assaulted with an ax
they evidently think the end of the world has come,
and, like true misers as they are, each one seizes as
much of the treasure as it can hold ; in other words,
they all fall to and gorge themselves with honey, and
calmly await the issue. While in this condition they
make no defense and will not sting unless taken hold
of. In fact they are as harmless as flies. Bees are
always to be managed with boldness and decision.
Any half-way measures, any timid poking about, any
feeble attempts to reach their honey, are sure to be
quickly resented. The popular notion that bees have
a special antipathy toward certain persons and a lik-
ing for certain others has only this fact at the bottom
of it : they will sting a person who is afraid of them
and goes skulking and dodging about, and they will
not sting a person who faces them boldly and has no
dread of them. They are like dogs. The way to
disarm a vicious dog is to show him you do not fear
him ; it is his turn to be afraid then. I never had
any dread of bees and am seldom stung by them. I
have climbed up into a large chestnut that contained
a swarm in one of its cavities and chopped them out
with an ax, being obliged at times to pause and brush
the bewildered bees from my hands and face, and not
been stung once. I have chopped a swarm out of
an apple-tree in June and taken out the cards of
and arranged them in a hive, and then dipped

78 AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

out the bees with a dipper, and taken the
home with me in pretty good condition, with scarcely
any opposition on the part of the bees. In reach-
ing your hand into the cavity to detach and remove
the comb you are pretty sure to get stung, for when
you touch the " business end " of a bee, it will sting
even though its head be off. But the bee carries the
antidote to its own poison. The best remedy for bee
sting is honey, and when your hands are besmeared
with honey, as they are sure to be on such occasions,
the wound is scarcely more painful than the prick of
a pin. Assault your bee-tree, then, boldly with your
ax, and you will find that when the honey is exposed
every bee has surrendered and the whole swarm is
cowering in helpless bewilderment and terror. Our
tree yields only a few pounds of honey, not enough
to have lasted the swarm till January, but no matter :
we have the less burden to carry.

In the afternoon we go nearly half a mile farther
along the ridge to a corn-field that lies immediately
in front of the highest point of the mountain. The
view is superb ; the ripe autumn landscape rolls away
to the east, cut through by the great placid river; in
the extreme north the wall of the Catskills stands out
clear and strong, while in the south the mountains
of the Highlands bound the view. The day is warm
and the bees are very busy there in that neglected
corner of the field, rich in asters, flea-bane, am)
golden-rod. The corn has been cut, and upon a stout
hut a few rods from the woods, which here droy

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE. 79

quickly down from the precipitous heights, we set up
our bee-box, touched again with the pungent oil. In
a few moments a bee has found it ; she comes up to
leeward, following the scent. On leaving the box she
goes straight toward the woods. More bees quickly
come and it is not long before the line is well estab-
lished. Now we have recourse to the same tactics
we employed before, and move along the ridge to
another field to get our cross line. But the bees still
go in almost the same direction they did from the
corn stout. The tree is then either on the top of the
mountain, or on the other or west side of it. We
hesitate to make the plunge into the woods and seek
to scale those precipices, for the eye can plainly see
what is before us. As the afternoon sun gets lower
the bees are seen with wonderful distinctness. They
fly toward and under the sun and are in a strong
light, while the near woods which form the back-
ground are in deep shadow. They look like large
luminous motes. Their swiftly vibrating, transparent
wings surround their bodies with a shining nimbus
that makes them visible for a long distance. They
seem magnified many times. We see them bridge
the little gulf between us and the woods, then rise
up over the tree-tops with their burdens, swerving
neither to the right hand nor to the left. It is al-

o

most pathetic to see them labor so, climbing the
mountain and unwittingly guiding us to their treas-
yres. When the sun gets down so that his direction
«orresponds exactly with the course of the bees, we

80 AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

make the plunge. It proves even harder climbing
than we had anticipated ; the mountain is faced by
a broken and irregular wall of rock up which we pull
ourselves slowly and cautiously by main strength.
In half an hour, the perspiration streaming from
every pore, we reach the summit. The trees here
are all small, a second growth, and we are soon con-
vinced the bees are not here. Then down we go on
the other side, clambering down the rocky stair-ways
till we reach quite a broad plateau that forms some-
thing like the shoulder of the mountain. On the
brink of this there are many large hemlocks, and we
scan them closely and rap upon them with our ax.
But not a bee is seen or heard ; we do not seem as
near the tree as we were in the fields below ; yet if
some divinity would only whisper the fact to us we
are within a few rods of the coveted prize, which is
not in one of the large hemlocks or oaks that absorb
our attention, but in an old stub or stump not six feet
high, and which we have seen and passed several
times without giving it a thought. We go farther
down the mountain and beat about to the right and
left and get entangled in brush and arrested by prec-
pices, and finally, as the day is nearly spent, give up
the search and leave the woods quite baffled, but re-
solved to return on the morrow. The next day we
come back and commence operations in an opening
in the woods well down on the side of the mountain,
where we gave up the search. Our box is soon
swarming with the eager bees, and they go back to

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE. 81

*rard the summit we have passed. We follow back
and establish a new line where the ground will per-
mit ; then another and still another, and yet the rid-
dle is not solved. One time we are south of them,
then north, then the bees get up through the trees
and we cannot tell where they go. But after much
searching and after the mystery seems rather to
deepen than to clear up, we chance to pause beside
the old stump. A bee comes out of a small open-
ing like that made by ants in decayed wood, rubs its
eyes and examines its antenna as bees always do be-
fore leaving their hive, then takes flight. At the
same instant several bees come by us loaded with our
honey and settle home with that peculiar low com-
placent buzz of the well-filled insect. Here then is
our idyl, our bit of Virgil and Theocritus, in a de-
cayed stump of a hemlock tree. We could tear it
open with our hands and a bear would find it an easy
prize, and a rich one too, for we take from it fifty
pounds of excellent honey. The bees have been
here many years and have of course sent out swarm
after swarm into the wilds. They have protected
themselves against the weather and strengthened
their shaky habitation by a copious use of wax.

When a bee-tree is thus " taken up " in the middle
of the day, of course a good many bees are away
5rom home and have not heard the news. When
they return and find the ground flowing with honey,*
mid piles of bleeding combs lying about, they appar-
ently do not recognize the place, and their first iu-
6

82 AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

Btinct is to fall to and fill themselves ; this done, their
next thought is to carry it home, so they rise up
slowly through the branches of the trees till they
have attained an altitude that enables them to survey
the scene, when they seem to say, " Why, this is
home," and down they come again; beholding the
wreck and ruins once more they still think there is
some mistake, and get up a second or a third time
and then drop back pitifully as before. It is the
most pathetic sight of all, the surviving and bewil-
dered bees struggling to save a few drops of their
wasted treasures.

Presently if there is another swarm in the woods
robber-bees appear. You may know them by their
saucy, chiding, devil-may-care hum. It is an ill wind
that blows nobody good, and they make the most of
the misfortune of their neighbors ; and thereby pave
the way for their own ruin. The hunter marks their
course and the next day looks them up. On this oc-
casion the day was hot and the honey very fragrant,
and a line of bees was soon established S. S. W.
Though there was much refuse honey in the old
stub, and though little golden rills trickled down the
hill from it, and the near branches and saplings were
besmeared with it where we wiped our murderous
hands, yet not a drop was wasted. It was a feast to
which not only honey-bees came, but bumble-bees,
•wasps, hornets, flies, ants. The bumble-bees, which
at this season are hungry vagrants with no fixed
place of abode, would gorge themselves, then creep

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE. 83

oeneath the bits of empty comb or fragments of bark
and pass the night, and renew the feast next day
The bumble-bee is an insect of which the bee-huntei
sees much. There are all sorts and sizes of them
They are dull and clumsy compared with the honey-
bee. Attracted in the fields by the bee -hunter's box,
they will come up the wind on the scent and bkdder
into it in the most stupid, lubberly fashion.

The honey-bees that licked up our leavings on the
old stub belonged to a swarm, as it proved, about
half a mile farther down the ridge, and a few days
afterward fate overtook them, and their stores in
turn became the prey of another swarm in the vi
cinity, which also tempted Providence and were over
whelmed. The first mentioned swarm I had lineA
from several points, and was following up- the clew
over rocks and through gulleys, when I came to where
a large hemlock had been felled a few years before
and a swarm taken from a cavity near the top of it;
fragments of the old comb were yet to be 3een. A
few yards away stood another short, squatty hemlock,
and I said my bees ought to be there. As I paused
near it I noticed where tli« tree had been wounded
vith an ax a couple of feet from the ground man/
years before. The wound had partially grown over,
but there was an opening there that I did not see at
the first glance. I was about to pass on when a bee
passed me making that peculiar shrill, discordant
hum that a bee makes when besmeared with honey
I saw it alight in the partially closed wound and

84 AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

crawl home ; then came others and others, little
bands and squads t)f them heavily freighted with
honey from the box. The tree was about twenty
inches through and hollow at the butt, or from the
ax mark down. This space the bees had completely
filled with honey. With an ax we cut away the
outer ring of live wood and exposed the treasure.
Despite the utmost care, we wounded the comb so
that little rills of the golden liquid issued from the
root of the tree and trickled down the hill.

The other bee-tree in the vicinity to which I have
referred we found one warm November day in less
than half an hour after entering the woods. It also
was a hemlock that stood in a niche in a wall of
hoary, moss-covered rocks thirty feet high. The tree
hardly reached to the top of the precipice. The
bees entered a small hole at the root, which was
ueven or eight feet from the ground. The position
was a striking one. Never did apiary have a finer
outlook or more rugged surroundings. A black,
wood-embraced lake lay at our feet ; the long pano-
rama of the Catskills filled the far distance, and the
more broken outlines of the Shawangunk range filled
the rear. On every hand were precipices and a
wild confusion of rocks and trees.

The cavity occupied by the bees was about three
feet and a half long and eight or ten inches in dia-
meter. With an ax we cut away one side of the tree
and laid bare its curiously wrought heart of honey. I/
was a most pleasing sight. What winding and dev*

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE. 85

•us wa) * .he bees had through their palace ! What
great masses and blocks of snow-white comb there
were ! Where it was sealed up, presenting that slightly
dented, uneven surface, it looked like some precious
ore. When we carried a large pail full of it out of
the woods it seemed still more like ore.

Your native bee-hunter predicates the distance of
the tree by the time the bee occupies in making its
first trip. But this is no certain guide. You are al-
ways safe in calculating that the tree is inside of a
mile, and you need not as a rule look for your bee's
return under ten minutes. One day I picked up a
bee in an opening in the woods and gave it honey,
and it made three trips to my box with an interval
ol about twelve minutes between them ; it returned
alone each time; the tree, which I afterward found,
was about half a mile distant.

In lining bees through the woods the tactics of the
hunter are to pause every twenty or thirty rods, lop
away the branches or cut down the trees, and set the
bees to work again. If they still go forward, he goes
forward also and repeats his observations till the
tree is found or till the bees turn and come back
jpon the trail. Then he knows he has passed the
tree, and he retraces his steps to a convenient dis-
tance and tries again, and thus quickly reduces the
space to be looked over till the swarm is traced
home. On one occasion m a wild rocky wood,
where the surface alternated between deep gulfs and
chasms filled with thick, heavy growths of timber

86 Ati IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

md sharp, precipitous, rocky ridges like a tempest
tossed sea, I carried my bees directly under their
tree, and set them to work from a high, exposed
ledge of rocks not thirty feet distant. One would
have expected them under such circumstances to
have gone straight home, as there were but few
branches intervening, but they did not ; they labored
up through the trees and attained an altitude above
the woods as if they had miles to travel, and thus
baffled me for hours. Bees will always do this.
They are acquainted with the woods only from the
top side, and from the air above ; they recognize
home only by land-marks here, and in every instance
they rise aloft to take their bearings. Think how
familiar to them the topography of the forest sum-
mits must be — an umbrageous sea or plain where
every mark and point is known.

Another curious fact is that generally you will get
track of a bee-tree sooner when you are half a mile
from it than when you are only a few yards. Bees,
like us human insects, have little faith in the near at
hand ; they expect to make their fortune in a distant
field, they are lured by the remote and the difficult,
jind hence overlook the flower and the sweet at their
rery door. On several occasions I have unwittingly
set my box within a few paces of a bee-tree and
wa'ted long for bees without getting them, when, OB
removing to a distant field or opening in the woods
I have got a clew at once.

I have a theory that when bees leave the

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE. 87

unless there is some special attraction in some other
direction, they generally go against the wind. They
would thus have the wind with them when they
returned home heavily laden, and with these little
navigators the difference is an important one. With
a full cargo, a stiff head-wind is a great hindrance,
but fresh and empty-handed they can face it with
more ease. Virgil says bees bear gravel stones as
ballast, but their only ballast is their honey bag.
Hence, when I go bee-hunting, I prefer to get to
windward of the woods in which the swarm is sup-
posed to have taken refuge.

Bees, like the milkman, like to be near a spring.
They do water their honey, especially in a dry time.
The liquid is then of course thicker and sweeter, and
will bear diluting. Hence, old bee-hunters look for
bee-trees along creeks and near spring runs in the
woods. I once found a tree a long distance from
any water, and the honey had a peculiar bitter flavor
imparted to it, I was convinced, by rain water sucked
from the decayed and spongy hemlock tree, in which
fie swarm was found. In cutting into the tree, the
\crth side of it was found to be saturated with water
ike a spring, which ran out in big drops, and had a
jitter flavor. The bees had thus found a spring or
a cistern in their own house.

Bees are exposed to many hardships and many
dangers. Winds and storms prove as disastrous to
them as to other navigators. Black spiders lie ifc
tfait for thpm as do brigands for travelers. One day

8^ AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE.

AS I was looking for a bee amid some golden-rod, 1
spied one partly concealed under a leaf. Its baskets
were full of pollen, and it did not move. On lifting
up the leaf I discovered that a hairy spider was am-
bushed there and had the bee by the throat. The
vampire was evidently afraid of the bee's sting, and
was holding it by the throat till quite sure of its death.
Virgil speaks of the painted lizard, perhaps a species
of salamander, as an enemy of the honey-bee. We
have no lizard that destroys the bee ; but our tree*
toad, ambushed among the apple and cherry blossoms,
snaps them up wholesale. Quick as lightning that
subtle but clammy tongue darts forth, and the unsus-
pecting bee is gone. Virgil also accuses the titmouse
and the Woodpecker of preying upon the bees, and
our kingbird has been charged with the like crime,
but the latter devours only the drones. The workers
are either too small and quick for it or else it dreads
their sting.

Virgil, by the way, had little more than a child's
knowledge of the honey-bee. There is little fact
and much fable in his fourth Georgic. If he had
ever kept bees himself, or even visited an apiary, it is
hard to see how he could have believed that the bee
in its flight abroad carried a gravel stone for ballast

*' And as when empty barks on billows float,
With sandy ballast sailors trim the boat;
So bees bear gravel stones, whose poising weight
Steers through the whistling winds their steady flight ; "

or that when two colonies made war upon each othei

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE. 89

they issued forth from their hives led by their kings
and fought in the air, strewing the ground with the
dead and dying : —

" Hard hailstones lie not thicker on the plain,
Nor shaken oaks such show'rs of acorns rain."

It is quite certain he had never been bee-hunting.
If he had we should have had a fifth Georgic. Yet
he seems to have known that bees sometimes escaped
to the woods : —

" Nor bees are lodged in hives alone, but found
In chambers of their own beneath the ground :
Their vaulted roofs are hung in pumices,
And in the rotten trunks of hollow trees."

Wild honey is as near like tame as wild bees are
like their brothers in tlje hive. The only difference
is that wild honey is flavored with your adventure,
which makes it a little more delectable than the do-
mestic article.

NATURE AND THE POET&

NATURE AND THE POETS.

I HAVE said on a former occasion that " the true
poet knows more about Nature than the naturalist,
because he carries her open secrets in his heart.
Eckermann could instruct Goethe in ornithology, but
could not Goethe instruct Eckermann in the mean-
ing and mystery of the bird ? " But the poets some-
times rely too confidently upon their supposed intui-
tive knowledge of nature and grow careless about
the accuracy of the details of their pictures. I am
not aware that this was ever the case with Goethe ;
I think it was not, for as a rule the greater the poet,
the more correct and truthful will be his specifica-
tions. It is the lesser poets who trip most upon their
facts. Thus a New England poet speaks of " pluck-
ing the apple from the pine," .as if the pine-apple grew
upon the pine-tree. A Western poet sings of the
bluebird in a strain in which every feature and char-
acteristic of the bird is lost ; not one trait of the bird
is faithfully set down. When the robin and the swal-
low come, he says, the bluebird hies him to some
mossy old wood, where, amid the deep seclusion he
pours out his song.

94 NATURE AND THE POETS.

In a poem by a well-known author in one of the
popular journals, a humming-bird's nest is shown the
reader, and it has blue eggs in it. A more cautious
poet would have turned to Audubon or Wilson before
venturing upon such a statement. But then it was
necessary to have a word to rhyme with " view,"
and what could be easier than to make a white egg
" blue " ? Again, one of our later poets has evidently
confounded the humming-bird with that curious par-
ody upon it, the hawk or sphynx moth, as in his
poem upon the subject he has hit off exactly the
habits of the moth, or, rather, his creature seems a
cross between the moth and the bird, as it has the
habits of the one and the plumage of the other. The
time to see the humming-bird, he says, is after sunset
in the summer gloaming ; then it steals forth and
hovers over the flowers, etc. Now, the humming-bird
is eminently a creature of the sun and of the broad
open day, and I have never seen it after sundown,
while the moth is rarely seen except at twilight. It
is much smaller and less brilliant than the humming-
bird ; but its flight and motions are so nearly the
same that a poet with his eye in a fine frenzy rolling
might easily mistake one for the other. It is but a
small slip in such a poet as poor George Arnold,
when he makes the sweet-scented honeysuckle bloom
for the bee, for surely the name suggests the bee,
though in fact she does not work upon it ; but what
shall we say of the Kansas poet, who, in his published
rolume, claims both the yew and the nightingale foi

NATURE AND THE POETS. 95

his native state ? Or of a Massachusetts poet, who
finds the snow-drop and the early primrose bloom-
ing along his native streams, with the orchis and the
yellow violet, and makes the blackbird conspicuous
among New England songsters ? Our ordinary yew
is not a tree at all, but a low spreading evergreen
shrub that one may step over, and as for the nightin-
gale, if they have the mocking-bird in Kansas, they
can very well do without him. We have several va-
rieties of blackbirds, it is true ; but when an Amer-
ican poet speaks in a general way of the blackbird
piping or singing in a tree, as he would speak of a
robin or a sparrow, the suggestion or reminiscence
awakened is always that of the blackbird of English
poetry.

" In days when daisies deck the ground,

And blackbirds whistle clear,
With honest joy our hearts will bound
To see the coming year " —

sings Burns. I suspect that the English reader of
even some of Emerson's and Lowell's poems would
infer that our blackbird was identical with the British
species. I refer to these lines of Emerson : —

" Where arches green the livelong day
Echo the blackbirds' roundelay;"

and to these lines from Lowell's " Rosaline " : —

" A blackbird whistling overhead
Thrilled through mv brain;"

*nd again these from " The Fountain of Youth " : — .

96 NATURE AND THE POETS.

'"T is a woodland enchanted ;
By no sadder spirit
Than blackbirds and thrushes
That whistle to cheer it,
All day in the brushes."

The blackbird of the English poets is like om
robin in everything except color. He is familiar
hardy, abundant, thievish, and his habits, manners,
and song recall our bird to the life. Our own na-
tive blackbirds, the crow blackbird, the rusty grackle,
the cow-bird, and the red-shouldered starling, are not
songsters, even in the latitude allowable to poets;
neither are they whistlers, unless we credit them with
a " split-whistle," as Thoreau does. The two first
named have a sort of musical cackle and gurgle in
spring (as at times both our crow and jay have),
which is very pleasing, and to which Emerson aptly
" ef ers in these lines from " May-Day " : —

" The blackbirds make the maples ring
With social cheer and jubilee " —

but it is not a song. The note of the starling in the
trees and alders along the creeks and marshes is bet-
ter calculated to arrest the attention of the casual
observer ; but it is far from being a song or a whistle
like that of the European blackbird, or our robin.
Its most familiar call is like the word "bazique?
* bazique" but it has a wild musical note which
Emerson has embalmed in this line : —
" The red-wing flutes his oJca-he."
Here Emerson discriminates ; there is no mistaking

NATURE AND THE POETS. 97

his blackbird this time for the European species,
though it is true there is nothing fluty or flute-like
in the red-wing's voice. The flute is mellow, while
the " o-Jca-lee" of the starling is strong and shavply
accented. The voice of the thrushes (and our robin
and the European blackbird are thrushes) is flute-
like. Hence the aptness of this line of Tennyson : —

" The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm," —

the blackbird being the ouzel, or ouzel-c(5ck, as
Shakespeare calls him.

In the line which precedes this, Tennyson has
stamped the cuckoo : —

uTo left and right,
The cuckoo told his name to all the hills."

The cuckoo is a bird that figures largely in English
poetry, but he always has an equivocal look in Amer-
ican verse, unless sharply discriminated. We have a
cuckoo, but he is a great recluse, and I am sure the
poets do not know when he comes or goes, while to
make him sing familiarly like the British species, as
I have known at least one of our poets to do, is to
come very wide of the mark. Our bird is as solitary
and joyless as the mosf veritable anchorite. He con-
tributes nothing to the melody or gayety of the sea-
son. He is indeed known in some sections as the
" rain-crow " ; but I presume that not one person in
ten of those who spend their lives in the country has
ever seen or heard him. He is like the showy orchis,
or the ladies'-slipper, or the shooting-star among

98 NATURE AND THE POETS.

plants, — a stranger to all but the few, — and when
an American poet says cuckoo, he must say it with
such specifications as to leave no doubt what cuckoo
he means, as Lowell does, in his " Nightingale in the
Study " : —

"And, hark, the cuckoo, weatherwise,
Still hiding, farther onward wooes you."

In like manner the primrose is an exotic in Amer-
ican poetry, to say nothing of the snow-drop and the
daisy. * Its prominence in English poetry can be
understood when we remember that the plant is so
abundant in England as to be almost a weed, and
that it comes early and is very pretty. Cowslip and
oxlip are familiar names of varieties of the same
plant, and they bear so close a resemblance that it
is hard to tell them apart. Hence Tennyson, in
" The Talking Oak": —

" As cowslip unto oxlip is,
So seems she to the boy."

Our familiar primrose is the evening primrose, — a
rank, tall weed that blooms with the mullein in late
summer. Its small, yellow, slightly fragrant blos-
soms open only at night, but remain open during the
next day. By cowslip, our poets and writers gener-
ally mean the yellow marsh marigold, which belongs
to a different family of plants, but which, as a spring
token and a pretty flower, is a very good substitute
for the cowslip. Our real cowslip, the shooting-star
(Dodecatheon meadia), is very rare, and is one of the
most beautiful of native flowers. I believe it is nof

NATURE AND THE POETS. 99

found north of Pennsylvania. I have found it in a
single locality in the District of Columbia, and the
day is memorable upon which I first saw its cluster
of pink flowers, with their recurved petals cleaving
the air. I do not know that it has ever been men-
tioned in poetry.

Another flower which I suspect our poets see
largely through the medium of English literature
and invest with borrowed charms, is the violet. The
violet is a much more winsome and poetic flower in
England than it is in this country, for the reason
that it comes very early and is sweet-scented ; our
common violet is not among the earliest flowers, and
it is odorless. It affects sunny slopes, like the English
flower ; yet Shakespeare never could have made the
allusion to it which he makes to his own species in
these lines : —

" That strain again ! it had a dying fall :
Oh ! it came o'er my ear like the sweet south
That breathes upon a bank of violets.
Stealing and giving odor,"

9r lauded it as

" Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
Or Cytherea's breath."

Our best known sweet-scented violet is a small,
white, lilac-veined species (not yellow, as Bryant has
it in his poem), that is common in wet out-of-the-way
places. Our common blue violet — the only species
that is found abundantly everywhere in the North —
Slooms in May, and makes bright many a grass}

100 NATURE AND THE POETS.

meadow slope and sunny nook. Yet, for all that, it
does not awaken the emotion in one that the earlier
and more delicate spring flowers do ; the hepatica,
say, with its shy wood habits, its pure, infantile ex-
pression, and at times its delicate perfume ; or the
houstonia, — " innocence," — flecking or streaking the
cold spring earth with a milky way of minute stars ;
or the trailing arbutus, sweeter scented than the Eng-
lish violet, and outvying in tints Cytherea's or any
other blooming goddess's cheek. Yet these flowers
have no classical associations, and are, consequently,
far less often upon the lips of our poets than the
violet.

To return to birds, another dangerous one for the
American poet is the lark, and our singers generally
are very shy of him. The term has been applied
very loosely in this country to both the meadow-lark
and the bobolink, yet it is pretty generally under-
stood now that we have no genuine skylark east of
the Mississippi. Hence, I am curious to know what
bird Bayard Taylor refers to, when he speaks in hir
" Spring Pastoral " of

" Larks responding aloft to the mellow flute of the bluebird."

Our so-called meadow-lark is no lark at all, but 9
starling, and the tit-lark and shore-lark breed and
pass the summer far to the north, and are never
heard in song in the United States.

The poets are entitled to a pretty free range, but
they must be accurate when they particularize. W«

NATURE AND THE POETS. 101

expect them to see the fact through their imagination,
but it must still remain a fact ; the medium must not
distort it into a lie. When they name a flower or
a tree or a bird, whatever halo of the ideal they
throw around it, it must not be made to belie the
botany or the natural history. I doubt if you can
catch Shakespeare transgressing the law in this
respect, except where he followed the. superstition,
and the imperfect knowledge of his time, as in his
treatment of the honey-bee. His allusions to nature
are always incidental to his main purpose, but they
reveal a careful and loving observer. For instance,
how are fact and poetry wedded in this passage,
put into the mouth of Banquo !

" This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his loved rnansionry, that the heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here; no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle ;
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
The air is delicate.'*

Nature is of course universal, but in the sanw
sense is she local and particular — cuts every suit to
fit the wearer, gives every land an earth and sky of
its own, and a flora and fauna to match. The poets
and their readers delight in local touches. We have

o

both the hare and the rabbit in America, but this
line from Thomson's description of a summer morn
l«g> —
And from the bladed field th*5 fearful har* Mmps awkward," -

102 NATURE AND THE POETS.

or this from Beattie, —

" Through rustling corn the hare astonished sprang " —
would not apply with the same force in New Eng
land, because our hare is never found in the fields
but in dense, remote woods. In England both hares
and rabbits abound to such an extent that in places
the fields and meadows swarm with them, and the
ground is undermined by their burrows, till they be-
come a serious pest to the farmer, and are trapped in
vast numbers. The same remark applies to this from
Tennyson : —

" From the woods
Came voices of the well-con tented doves."

Doves and wood-pigeons are almost as abundant in
England as hares and rabbits, and are also a seri-
ous annoyance to the farmer, while in this country
the dove and pigeon are much less marked and per-
manent features in our rural scenery, — less perma-
nent, except in the case of the mourning dove, which
is found here and there the season through ; and less
marked, except when the hordes of the passenger-
pigeon once in a decade or two invade the land,
rarely tarrying longer than the bands of a foraging
army. I hardly know what Trowbridge means by the
" wood-pigeon " in his midsummer poem, for, strictly
speaking, the wood-pigeon is a European bird, and a
very common one in England. But let me say here,
however, that Trowbridge? as a rule, keeps very close
to the natural history of his own country when he
bas occasion to draw material from this source, and

NATURE AND THE POETS. 103

to American nature generally. You will find in his
poems the pewee, the bluebird, the oriole, the robin,
the grouse, the king-fisher, the chipmunk, the mink,
the bobolink, the wood-thrush, etc., all in their proper
places. There are few bird-poems that combine so
much good poetry and. good natural history as his
" Pewee." Here we have a glimpse of the cat-
bird:— •

" In the alders, dank with noon-day dews,
The restless cat-bird darts and mews ; "

here, of the cliff-swallow : —

"In the autumn, when the hollows
All are filled with flying leaves
And the colonies of swallows

Quit the quaintly stuccoed eaves."

Only the dates are not quite right. The swallows
leave their nests in August, which is nearly two
months before the leaves fall. The poet is also a
little unfaithful to the lore of his boyhood when he
says

" The partridge beats his throbbing drum "

in midsummer. As a rule, the partridge does not
drum later than June, except fitfully during the In-
dian summer, while April and May are his favorite
months. And let me say here for the benefit of the
toets who do not go to the woods, that the partridge
does not always drum upon a log; he frequently
drums upon a rock or a stone wall, if a suitable log
he not hpndy, and no ear can detect the difference.
Ris drum is really his own proud breas^ and beneath

104 NATURE AND THE POETS.

his small hollow wings gives forth the same low, mel-
low thunder from a rock as from a log. Bryant haa
recognized this fact in one of his poems.

Our poets are quite apt to get ahead or behind the
season with their flowers and birds. It is not often
that we catch such a poet as. Emerson napping. Ho
knows nature, and he knows the New England fields
and woods as few poets do. One may study our flora
and fauna in his pages. He puts in the moose and
the " surly bear," and makes the latter rhyme with
" wood-pecker " : —

" He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,

** He heard, when in the grove, at intervals,
With sudden roar the aged pine-tree falls, —
One crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree,
Declares the close of its green century."

" They led me through the thicket damp,

Through brake and fern, the beavers' camp."

"He saw the partridge drum in the woods ;
He heard the woodcock's evening hymn;
He found the tawny thrush's broods;
And the shy hawk did wait for him."

His " Titmouse " is studied in our winter woods, and
his " Humble-Bee " in our summer fields. He has
seen farther into the pine-tree than any other poet
his " May-Day " is full of our spring sounds and
tokens; he knows the "punctual birds," an«l th*
'* herbs and simples of the wood " - -

NATURE AND THE POETS. 105

"Kue, cinque-foil, gill, vervain, and agrimony,
Blue-vetch, and trillium, hawk- weed, sassafras,
Milk-weeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sun-dew."

Here is a characteristic touch : —

" A woodland walk,

A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush,
A wild rose, a rock-loving columbine,
Salve my worst wounds."

That " rock-loving columbine " is better than Bry-
ant's " columbines, in purple dressed," as our flower
is not purple, but yellow and scarlet. Yet Bryant
set the example to the poets that have succeeded
him, of closely studying Nature as she appears under
our own skies.

I yield to none in my admiration of the sweet-
ness and simplicity of his poems of nature, and in
general of their correctness of observation. They
are tender and heartfelt, and they touch chords that
no other poet since Wordsworth has touched with
so firm a hand. Yet he was not always an infallible
observer ; he sometimes tripped upon his facts, and
at other times he deliberately moulded them, adding
to, or cutting off, to suit the purposes of his verse.
J will cite here two instances in which his natural
history is at fault. In his poem on the bobolink he
makes the parent birds feed their young with " seeds,"
whereas, in fact, the young are fed exclusively upon
insects and worms. The bobolink is an insectivo*
<*ous bird in the North, or until its brood has flown<
ind a granivorous bird in the South.

106 NATURE AND THE POETS.

In his " Evening Revery " occur these lines : —

" The mother-bird hath broken for her brood
Their prison shells, or shovred them from the nest,
Plumed for their earliest flight."

It is not a fact that the mother-bird aids her off-
spring in escaping from the shell. The young oi
all birds are armed with a small temporary horn or
protuberance upon the upper mandible, and they are
so placed in the shell that this point is in immediate
contact with its inner surface; as soon as they are
fully developed and begin to struggle to free them-
selves, the horny growth "pips" the shell. Their
efforts then continue till their prison walls are com-
pletely sundered, and the bird is free. This process
is rendered the more easy by the fact that toward
the last the shell becomes very rotten ; the acids that
are generated by the growing chick eat it and make
it brittle, so that one can hardly touch a fully incu-
bated bird's egg without breaking it. To help the
young bird forth would insure its speedy death. It
is not true, either, that the parent shoves its young
from the nest when they are fully fledged, except,
possibly, in the case of some of the swallows and of
the eagle. The young of all our more common birds
leave the nest of their own motion, stimulated, prob-
ably, by the calls of the parents, and in some cases
by the withholding of food for a longer period than
usual.

As an instance where Bryant warps the facts to
»uit his purpose, take his poems of the " Yellow Vi

NATURE AND THE POETS. 107

•

olet" and "The Fringed Gentian." Of this last

flower he says : —

" Thou waitest late and com'st alone,
When woods are bare and birds are flown,
And frosts and shortening days portend
The aged year is near his end."

The fringed gentian belongs to September, and, when
the severer frosts keep away, it runs over into Octo-
ber. But it does not come alone and the woods are
not bare. The closed gentian comes at the same
time, and the blue and purple asters are , in all their
glory. Golden-rod, turtle-head (Chelone), and other
fall flowers also abound. When the woods are bare,
which does not occur in New England till in or near
November, the fringed gentian has long been dead.
It is in fact killed by the first considerable frost. No,
if one were to go botanizing and take Bryant's poem
for a guide he would not bring home any fringed
gentians with him. The only flower he would find
would be the witch-hazel. Yet I never see this gen-
tian without thinking of Bryant's poem, and feeling
that he has brought it immensely nearer to us.

Bryant's poem of the " Yellow Violet " has all his
accustomed simplicity and pensiveness, but his love
for the flower carries him a little beyond the facts ;
he makes it sweet scented, —

44 Thy faint perfume
Alone is in the virgin air: "

and he makes it the first flower of spring. I have
a ever been able to detect any perfume in the yel-
cow species ( Viola rotundifolid). This honor be-

108 NATURE AND THE POETS.

longs alone to our two white violets, Viola blanda
and Viola Oanadensis.

Neither is it quite true that

" Of all her train, the hands of Spring
First plant thee in the watery mould."

Now it is an interesting point, which really is our
first spring flower. Which comes second or third is
of less consequence, but which everywhere and in all
seasons comes first ; and in such a case the poet must
not place the honor where it does not belong. I have
no hesitation in saying that throughout the Middle
and New England States, the hepatica is the first
spring flower.1 It is some days ahead of all others.
The yellow violet belongs only to the more northern
sections, to high, cold, beechen woods, where the poet
rightly places it, but in these localities if you go
to the spring woods every day you will gather the
hepatica first. I have also found the claytonia and
the colt's-foot first. In a poem called " The Twenty-
Seventh of March " Bryant places both the hepatica
and the arbutus before it : —

" Within the woods

Tufts of ground-laurel, creeping underneath
The leaves of the last summer, send their sweets
Upon the chilly air, and by the oak,
The squirrel cups, a graceful company,
Hide in their bells, a soft aerial blue " - -

ground-laurel being a local name for trailing arbutus,
called also May-flower, and squirrel-cups for hepatica*
or liver-leaf. But the yellow violet may rightly di»
oute for the second place.

1 Excepting, of course, the skunk-cabbage.

NATURE AND THE POETS. 109

In " The Song of the Sower " our poet covers up
part of the truth with the grain. The point and
moral of the song he puts in the statement, that the
wheat sown in the fall lies in the ground till spring
before it germinates ; when, in fact, it sprouts and
grows and covers the ground with " emerald blades "
in the fall : —

" Fling wide the generous grain ; we fling
O'er the dark mould the green of spring.
For thick the emerald blades shall grow,
When first the March winds melt the snow,
And to the sleeping flowers, below,
The early bluebirds sing.

Brethren, the sower's task is done.

The seed is in its winter bed.

Now let the dark-brown mould be spread,

To hide it from the sun,
And leave it to the kindly care
Of the still earth and brooding air,
As when the mother, from her breast,
Lays the hushed babe apart to rest,
And shades its eyes and waits to see
How sweet its waking smile will be.
The tempest now may smite, the sleet
All night on the drowned furrow beat,
And winds that, from the cloudy hold
Of winter, breathe the bitter cold,
Stiffen to stone the mellow mould,

Yet safe shall lie the wheat ;
Till, out of heaven's unmeasured blue,

Shall walk agair the genial year,
To wake with warmth and nurse with dew

The germs we lar to slumber here."

Of course the poet was not writing an agricultural

110 NATURE AND THE POETS.

essay, yet one does not like to feel that he was
obliged to ignore or sacrifice any part of the truth to
build up his verse. One likes to see him keep within
the fact without being conscious of it or hampered
by it, as he does in " The Planting of the Apple-
tree," or in the "Lines to a Water-fowl."

But there are glimpses of American scenery and
climate in Bryant that are unmistakable, as in these
lines from " Midsummer " : —

"Look forth upon the earth — her thousand plants
Are smitten ; even the dark, sun-loving maize
Faints in the field beneath the torrid blaze ;
The herd beside the shaded fountain pants ;
For life is driven from all the landscape brown ;
The bird has sought his tree, the snake his den,
The trout floats dead in the hot stream, and men
Drop by the sunstroke in the populous town."

Here is a touch of our " heated term " when the dog-
star is abroad and the weather runs mad. I regret
the " trout floating dead in the hot stream," because,
if such a thing ever has occurred it is entirely excep-
tional. The trout in such weather seek the deep
water and the spring holes, and hide beneath rocks
dnd willow banks. The following lines would be
impossible in an English poem : —

" The snow-bird twittered on the beechen bough,
And 'neath the hemlock, whose thick branches bent
Beneath its bright, cold burden, and kept dry
A circle, on the earth, of withered leaves,
The partridge found a shelter."

Both Bryant and Longfellow put their spring blue*
bird in the elm, which is a much better place for th«

NATURE AND THE POETS. Ill

oriole — the elm-loving oriole. The bluebird pre-
fers a humbler perch. Lowell puts him upon a post
in the fence, which is a characteristic attitude : —

" The bluebird, shifting his light load of song,
From post to post along the cheerless fence."

Emerson calls him "April's bird," and makes him
" fly before from tree to tree," which is also good.
But the bluebird is not strictly a songster in the
sense in which the sparrow or the indigo-bird, or the
English robin-red-breast, is; nor do Bryant's lines
hit the mark : —

" The bluebird chants, from the elm's long branches,
A hymn to welcome the budding year."

Lowell again is nearer the truth when he speaks of
his " whiff of song." All his notes are call-notes,
and are addressed directly to his mate. The song-
birds take up a position and lift up their voices and
sing. It is a deliberate musical performance, as much
BO as that of Nilsson or Patti. The bluebird, how-
ever, never strikes an attitude and sings for the mere
song's sake. But the poets are perhaps to be allowed
this latitude, only their pages lose rather than gain by
it. Nothing is so welcome in this field as characteris-
tic touches, a word or a phrase that fits this case and
no other. If the bluebird chants a hymn, what doea
ihe wood-thrush do ? Yet the bluebird's note is more
pleasing than most bird-songs ; if it could be repro*
duced in color, it would be the hue of the purest sky
Longfellow makes the swallow sing : —
" The darting- swallows soar and sing ; " —

112 NATUEE AND THE POETS.

which would leave him no room to describe the lark,
if the lark had been about. Bryant comes nearer the
mark this time : —

" There are notes of joy from the hang-bird and wren,
And the gossip of swallows through all the sky ; "

no does Tennyson when he makes his swallow
" Cheep and twitter twenty million loves ; "

alsc Lowell again in this line : —

" The thin-winged swallow skating on the air."

and Virgil : —

" Swallows twitter on the chimney tops."

Longfellow is perhaps less close and exact in his
dealings with nature than any of his compeers, al-
though he has written some fine naturalistic poems,
as his " Rain in Summer," and others. When his
fancy is taken, he does not always stop to ask, Is this
BO? Is this true? as when he applies the Spanish
proverb, " There are no birds in last year's nests,"
to the nests beneath the eaves ; for these are just the
last year's nests that do contain birds in May. The
cliff-swallow and the barn-swallow always reoccupy
their old nests, when they are found intact ; so do
some other birds. Again, the. hawthorn, or white-
thorn, field-fares, belong to English poetry more than
to American. The ash in autumn is not deep crim-
toned, but a purplish brown. " The ash her purple
drops forgivingly," says Lowell in his " Indian-Sum-
mer Reverie." Flax is not golden, lilacs are purpl<*
or white and not flame-colored, and it is against the

NATURE AND THE POETS. 113

law to go trouting in November. The pelican is not
a wader any more than a goose or a duck is, and the
golden robin or oriole is not a bird of autumn. This
Btanza from " The Skeleton in Armor " is a strik-
ing one : —

" As with his wings aslant,
Sails the fierce cormorant,
Seeking some rocky haunt,

With his prey laden,
So toward the open main,
Beating to sea again,
Through the wild hurricane,
Bore I the maiden."

But unfortunately the cormorant never does anything
of the kind ; it is not a bird of prey : it is web-
footed, a rapid swimmer and diver, and lives upon
fish, which it usually swallows as it catches them.
Virgil is nearer to fact when he says : —

" When crying cormorants forsake the sea
And, stretching to the covert, wing their way."

But cormorant with Longfellow may stand for any
of the large rapacious birds, as the eagle or the con-
dor. True, and yet the picture is purely a fanciful
one, as no bird of prey sails with his burden ; on the
contrary he flaps heavily and laboriously, because he
is always obliged to mount. The stress of the rhyme
and metre are of course in this case very great, and it
is they, doubtless, that drove the poet into this false
picture of a bird of prey laden with his quarry. It
'»s an ungracious task, however, to cross-question the
gentle Muse of Longfellow in this manner. He is a
8

114 NATURE AND THE POETS.

true poet if there ever was one, and the slips I point
out are only like an obscure feather or two in the
dove carelessly preened. The burnished plumage and
the bright hues hide them unless we look sharply.

Whittier gets closer to the bone of the New Eng-
land nature. He comes from the farm, and his mem-
ory is stored with boyhood's wild and curious lore*
with

"Knowledge never learned of schools,

Of the wild bee's morning chase,

Of the wild flower's time and place,

Flight of fowl and habitude

Of the tenants of the wood;

How the tortoise bears his shell,

How the woodchuck digs his cell

And the ground-mole sinks his well;

How the robin feeds her young;

How the oriole's nest is hung;

Where the whitest lilies blow,

Where the freshest berries grow,

Where the ground-nut trails its vine,

Where the wood-grape's clusters shine;

Of the black wasp's cunning way,

Mason of his walls of clay,

And the architectural plans

Of gray hornet artisans ! "

The poet is not as exact as usual when he applies
the epithet " painted " to the autumn beeches, as the
foliage of the beech is the least painty of all our
trees ; nor when he speaks of

"Wind flower and violet, amber and white,"

fts neither of the flowers named is amber colored
From " A Dream of Summer " the reader might in

NATURE AND THE POETS. 115

fer that the fox shut up house in the winter like the
musk-rat : —

*' The fox his hill-side cell forsakes,

The musk-rat leaves his nook,
The bluebird in the meadow brakes
Is singing with the brook."

The only one of these incidents that :s characteristic
of a January thaw in the latitude of New England,
is the appearance of the musk rat. The fox is never
in his cell in winter, except he is driven there by the
hou»d, or by soft or wet weather, and the bluebird
does not sing in the brakes at any time of the year.
A severe stress of weather will drive the foxes off
the mountains, into the low, sheltered woods and
fields, and a thaw will send them back again. In the
winter the fox sleeps during the day upon a rock or
stone wall, or upon a snow bank, where he can com-
mand all the approaches, or else prowls stealthily
through the woods.

But there is seldom a false note in any of Whit-
tier's descriptions of rural sights and sounds. What
a characteristic touch is that in one of his "Mount-
ain Pictures " : —

" The pasture bars that clattered as they fell."

It is the only strictly native, original, and typical
sound he reports on that occasion. The bleating of
sheep, the barking of dogs, the lowing of cattle, the
splash of the bucket in the well, " the pastoral Cur-
few of the cow-bell," etc., are sounds we have heard
Before in poetry, but that clatter of the pasture-bars

116 NATURE AND THE POETS.

is American ; one can almost see the waiting, ru-
minating cows slowly stir at the signal, and start for
home in anticipation of the summons. Every sum-
mer day, as the sun is shading the hills, the clatter
of those pasture-bars is heard throughout the length
and breadth of the land.

" Snow-Bound " is the most faithful picture of our
Northern winter that has yet been put into poetry.
What an exact description is this of the morning
after the storm : —

** We looked upon a world unknown,
On nothing we could call our own.
Around the glistening wonder bent
The blue walls of the firmament,
No cloud above, no earth below, —
A universe of sky and snow."

In his little poem on the May-flower, Mr. Sted-
man catches and puts in a single line a feature of our
landscape in spring that I have never before seen
alluded to in poetry. I refer to the second line of
this stanza : —

" Fresh blows the breeze through hemlock trees,

The fields are edged with green below,
And naught but youth, and hope, and love
We know or care to know.'*

It is characteristic of our Northern and New Eng-
land fields that they are " edged with green " in
spring long before the emerald tint has entirely over-
epre%d them. Along the fences, especially along the
Btorie walls, the grass starts early ; the land is fattei
there from the deeper snows and from other causes

NATURE AND THE POETS. 117

.he fence absorbs the heat, and shelters the ground
from the winds, and the sward quickly responds to
the touch of the spring sun.

Stedman's poem is worthy of his theme, and is the
only one I recall by any of our well-known poets
upon the much loved May-flower or arbutus. There
is a little poem upon this subject by an unknown au-
thor that also has the right flavor. I recall but one
stanza : —

" Oft have I walked these woodland ways,
Without the blest foreknowing,
That underneath the withered leaves
The fairest flowers were blowing/1

Nature's strong and striking effects are best rendered
by closest fidelity to her. Listen and look intently,
and catch the exact effect as nearly as you can. It
seems as if Lowell had done this more than most of
his brother poets. In reading his poems, one wishes
for a little more of the poetic unction (I refer, of
course, to his serious poems ; his humorous ones are
just what they should be), yet the student of nature
will find many close-fitting phrases' and keen obser-
vations in his pages, and lines that are exactly, and
at the same time poetically, descriptive. He is the
jnly writer I know of who has noticed the fact that
the roots of trees do not look supple and muscular
like their boughs, but have a stiffened, congealed
ook, as of a liquid hardened.

" Their roots, like molten-metal cooled in flowing,
Stiffened in coiU and runnels down he bank."

118 NATURE AND THE POETS.

This is exactly the appearance the roots of most
trees, when uncovered, present ; they flow out from
the trunk like diminishing streams of liquid metal,
taking the form of whatever they come in contact
with, parting around a stone and uniting again be-
yond it, and pushing their way along with many a
pause and devious turn. One principal office of the
roots of a tree is to gripe, to hold fast the earth ;
hence they feel for and lay hold of every inequality
of surface ; they will fit themselves to the top of a
comparatively smooth rock, so as to adhere amaz-
ingly, and flow into the seams and crevices like metal
into a mould.

Lowell is singularly true to the natural history of
nis own county. In his " Indian-Summer Reverie "
we catch a glimpse of the hen-hawk, silently sailing
overhead

" With watchful, measuring eye,"
the robin feeding on cedar berries, and

"The squirrel, on the shingly shag-bark's bough. "

I do not remember to have met the " shag-bark " in
poetry before, or that gray lichen-covered stone wall
which occurs farther along in the same poem, and
which is so characteristic of the older farms of New
York and New England. I hardly know what th«
poet means by

:t The wide-ranked mowers wading to the knee,"

as the mowers do not wade in the grass they are cut
tiug, though they might appear to do so when viewed

NATURE AND THE POETS. 119

Athwart the standing grass ; perhaps this is the ex-
planation of the line.

But this is just what the bobolink does, when the
care of his young begins to weigh upon him : —

"Meanwhile that devil-may-care, the bobolink,
Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops
Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's tremulous brink,
And 'twixt the windrows most demurely drops."

1 dc not vouch for that dropping between the win-
drows, as in my part of the country the bobolinks flee
before the hay-makers, but that sudden stopping on
the brink of rapture, as if thoughts of his helpless
young had extinguished his joy, is characteristic.

Another carefully studied description of Lowell's
is this : —

". The robin sings, as of old from the limb !
The cat-bird croons in the lilac-bush !
Through the dim arbor, himself more dim,
Silently hops the hermit thrush."

Among trees Lowell has celebrated the oak, the
pine, the birch ; and among flowers, the violet and
the dandelion. The last, 1 think, is the most pleas-
ing of. these poems : —

** Dear common flower, that growest beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,
First pledge of blithesome May."

Tn3 dandelion is indeed, in our latitude, the pledge of
May. It comes when the grass is short, and the
fresh turf sets off its " ring of gold " with admirable
eifect ; hence, we know the poet is a manth or more

120 NATURE AND THE POETS.

out of the season when, in " Al Fresco," he makes it
bloom with the buttercup and the clover : —

" The dandelions and buttercups
Gild all the lawn ; the drowsy be«
Stumbles among the clover-tops,
And summer sweetens all but me."

Of course the dandelion blooms occasionally
throughout the whole summer, especially where the
grass is kept short, but its proper season, when it
" gilds all the lawn," is, in every part of the country,
some weeks earlier than the tall buttercup (J%. acris)
and the clover. These bloom in June in New Eng-
land and New York, and are contemporaries of the
daisy. In the meadows and lawns, the dandelion
drops its flower and holds aloft its sphere of down,
touching the green surface as with a light frost, long
before the clover and the buttercup have formed
their buds. In " Al Fresco " our poet is literally ia
clover, he is reveling in the height of the season, the
full tide of summer is sweeping around him, and ha
has riches enough without robbing May of her dan-
delions. Let him say, —
j *

" The daisies and the buttercups
Gild all the lawn."

I smile as I note that the woodpecker proves a re
fractory bird to Lowell, as well as to Emerson : — •

Emerson rhymes it with bear,
Lowell rhymes it with hear,
One makes it woodpeckair,
The other, woodpeckear.

NATURE AND THE POETS. 121

But its hammer is a musical one, and the poets do
well to note it. An Illinois poet, I observe, ascribes
the " rat- tat- tat " of the downy or hairy woodpecker,
heard so often in early spring upon the resonant
limbs, and again in the Indian summer, to the yellow-
hammer, or high-hole. The high-hole is almost en-
tirely a ground pecker, and his beak is seldom heard
upon limb or tree, except when he is excavating a
test. Our most musical drummer upon dry limbs
among the woodpeckers is the yellow-bellied. His
measured, deliberate tap, heard in the stillness of the
primitive woods, produces an effect that no bird-song
is capable of.

Tennyson is said to have very poor eyes, but there
seems to be no defect in the vision with which he
sees Nature, while he often hits the nail on the head
in a way that would indicate the surest sight. True,
he makes the swallow hunt the bee, which, for aught
I know, the swallow may do in England. Our purple
martin has been accused of catching the honey-bee,
but I doubt his guilt. But those of our swallows
;hat correspond to the British species, the barn-swal-
low, the cliff-swallow, and the bank-swallow subsist
upon very small insects. But what a clear-cut picture
is that in the same poem (" The Poet's Song ") : —

" The wild hawk stood, with the down on his beak,
And stared, with his foot on the prey."

It takes a sure eye, too, to see

" The landscape winking thro' the heat" —

122 NATURE AND THE POETS.

or to gather this image : —

" He has a solid base of temperament;
But as the water-lily starts and slides
Upon *the level in little puffs of wind,
Though anchored to the bottom, such is he; *'
or this : —

"Arms on which the standing muscle sloped^
As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone,
Running too vehemently to break upon it," —

and many other gems that abound in his poems. He

does not cut and cover in a sin or] e line, so far as I

o *

have observed. Great caution and exact knowledge
underlie his most rapid and daring flights. A lady told
me that she was once walking with him in the fields
when they came to a spring that bubbled up through
shifting sands in a very pretty manner, and Tenny-
son, in order to see exactly how the spring behaved,
got down on his hands and knees and peered a long
time into the water. The incident is worth repeating
as showing how intently a great poet studies nature.

Walt Whitman says he has been trying for years
to find a word that would express or suggest that
evening call of the robin. How absorbingly this poet
must have studied the moonlight to hit upon this de-
.-.'Criptive phrase : —

"The vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue;"

how long have looked upon the carpenter at his bench
to have made this poem : —

" The tongue of his fore-plane whistles its wild ascending lisp; '*
$rr how lovingly listened to the nocturne of the mock

NATURE AND THE POETS. 123

jig-bird to have turned it into words in "A Word
out of the Sea." Indeed, no poet has studied Ameri-
can nature more closely than Whitman has — or ia
more cautious in his uses of it. How easy are his
descriptions !

" Behold the day-break !

The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows ! "

" The comet that came unannounced

Out of the north, flaring in heaven."

The fan-shaped explosion."

liThe slender and jagged threads of lightning, as sudden and fast
amid the din they chased each other across the sky."

** Where the heifers browse — where geese nip their food with
short jerks ;

Where sundown shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome
prairie ;

Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles
far and near ;

Where the humming-bird shimmers — where the neck of the long-
lived swan is curving and winding;

Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore when she laughs her
near human laugh;

Where band-neck' d partridges roost in a ring on the ground with
their heads out."

Whitman is less local than the New England poets
and faces more to the West. But he makes himself
at home everywhere, and puts in characteristic scenes
and incidents, generally compressed into a single line,
from all trades and doings and occupations, North,
East, South, West, and identifies himself with man in
Cl straits and conditions on the continent. Like the

124 NATURE AND THE POETS.

old poets, he does not dwell upon nature, except oc-
casionally through the vistas opened up by the great
sciences, as astronomy and geology, but upon life and
movement and personality, and puts in a shred of
natural history here and there, the u twittering red-
start," the spotted-hawk swooping by, the oscillating
sea-gulls, the yellow-crowned heron, the razor-billed
auk, the lone wood-duck, the migrating geese, the
sharp-hoofed moose, the mocking-bird, " the thrush,
the hermit," etc., to help locate and define his posi-
tion. Everywhere in nature Whitman finds human
relations, human responsions. In entire consistence
with botany, geology, science, or what not, he endues
his very seas and woods with passion, more than the
old hamadryads or tritons. His fields, his rocks, his
trees, are not dead material, but living companions.
This is doubtless one reason why Addington Symonds,
the young Hellenic scholar of England, finds him
more thoroughly Greek than any other man of mod-
ern times.

Our natural history, and indeed all phases of life in
this country, are rich in materials for the poet that
have yet hardly been touched. Many of our most
camiliar birds, which are inseparably associated with
one's walks and recreations in the open air, and with
the changes of the seasons, are yet awaiting their
»->oet, — as the high -hole, with his golden-shafted
quills and loud continued spring call ; the meadow
lark, with her crescent-marked breast and long
Irawn, piercing, yet tender April and May summons

NATURE AND THE POETS. 125

forming, with that of the high-hole, one of the three
or four most characteristic field sounds of our spring ;
the happy gold-finch, circling round and round in
midsummer with that peculiar undulating flight and
calling per-chickj -o-pee, per-chiclcf-o-pee, at each open-
ing and shutting of the wings, or later leading her
plaintive brood among the thistle-heads by the road-
side ; the little indigo-bird, facing the torrid sun of
August and singing through all the livelong summer
day ; the contented musical soliloquy of the vireo,
like the whistle of a boy at his work, heard through
all our woods from May to September : —

" Pretty green worm, where are you?
Dusky-winged moth, how fare you,
When wind and rain are in the tree?
Cheeryo, cheerehly, chee,
Shadow and sun one are to me.
Mosquito and gnat, beware you,
Saucy chipmunk, how dare you
Climb to my nest in the maple-tree,
And dig up the corn
At noon and at morn ?
Cheeryo, cheerebly, chee."

Or the phcebe-bird, with her sweet April call and
mossy nest under the bridge or woodshed, or under
the shelving rocks ; or the brown thrasher — mock-
ing thrush — calling half furtively, half archly from
the tree-top, back in the bushy pastures : " Croquet,
rroquet, hit it, hit it, oome to me, come to me, tight
a., tight it, you 're out, you 're out," with many musi-
cal interludes ; or the cheewink, rustling the leaves
Mid peering under the bushes at you : or the pretty

126 NATURE AND THE POETS.

little oven-bird, walking round and round you in the
woods, or suddenly soaring above the tree-tops, and
ottering its wild lyrical strain ; or, farther south, the
whistling red-bird, with his crest and military bearing,
— these and many others should be full of sugges-
tion and inspiration to our poets. It is only lately
that the robin's song has been put into poetry. Noth-
ing could be happier than this rendering of it by a
nameless singer in " A Masque of Poets " : —

" When the willows gleam along the brooks,
And the grass grows green in sunny nooks,
In the sunshine and the rain
I hear the robin in the lane
Singing 'Cheerily
Cheer up, cheer up ;
Cheerily, cheerily,
Cheer up.'

'But the snow is still

Along the walls and on the hill.
The days are cold, the nights forlorn,
For one is here and one is gone.
* Tut, tut. Cheerily,
Cheer up, cheer up;
Cheerily, cheerily,
Cheer up.'

" When spring hopes seem to wane,
I hear the joyful strain —
A song at night, a song at morn,
A lesson deep to me is borne,
Hearing, ' Cheerily,
Cheer up, cheer up ;
Cheerily, cheerily,
Cheer up.' "

The poetic interpretation of nature, which hju

NATURE AND THE POETS. 127

tome to be a convenient phrase, and about which the
Oxford professor of poetry has written a book, is, of
course, a myth, or is to be read the other way. It
is the soul the poet interprets, not nature. There is
nothing in nature but what the beholder supplies.
Does the sculptor interpret the marble or his own
ideal ? Is the music in the instrument, or in the
soul of the performer ? Nature is a dead clod un
til you have breathed upon it with your genius. You
commune with your own soul, not with woods or wa-
ters ; they furnish the conditions, and are what you
make them. Did Shelley interpret the song oi the
skylark, or Keats that of the nightingale ? They in-
terpreted their own wild, yearning hearts. The trick
of the poet is always to idealize nature — to see it
subjectively. You cannot find what the poets find
in the woods until you take the poet's heart to the
woods. He sees Nature through a colored glass, sees
it truthfully, but with an indescribable charm added,
the aureole of the spirit. A tree, a cloud, a bird, a
sunset, have no hidden meaning that the art of the
poet is to unlock for us. Every poet shall interpret
them differently, and interpret them rightly, because
the soul is infinite. Milton's nightingale is not Cole-
ridge's ; Burns's daisy is not Wordsworth's ; Emer-
son's humble-bee is not Lowell's ; nor does Turner
see in nature what Tintoretto does, nor Veronese what
Correggio does. Nature is all things to all men.
" We carry within us," says Sir Thomas Browne,
'* the wonders we find without." The same idea ii

128 NATURE AND THE POETS.

daintily expressed in these tripping verses of Bry
ant's: —

44 Yet these sweet sounds of the early season

And these fair sights of its early days,
Are only sweet when we fondly listen,
And only fair when we fondly gaze.

" There is no glory in star or blossom,
Till looked upon by a loring eye;
There is no fragrance in April breezes,
Till breathed with joy as they wander by ; "

and in these lines of Lowell : —

" What we call Nature, all outside ourselves,
Is but our own conceit of what we see,
Our own reaction upon what we feel."

" I find my own complexion everywhere."
Before either, Coleridge had said : —

" We receive but what we give,
And in our life alone doth Nature live ;
Ours is the wedding-garment, ours the shroud ; "

and Wordsworth had spoken of

" The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream."

That light that never was on sea or land is what the
poet gives us, and is what we mean by the poetic in-
terpretation of nature. The Oxford professor strug-
gles against this view. " It is not true," he says,
•* that nature is a blank, or an unintelligible scroll
with no meaning of its own but that which we put
into it from the light of our own transient feelings."
Not a blank, certainly, to the scientist, but full of

NATURE AND THE POETS. 129

definite meanings and laws, and a storehouse of
powers and economies ; but to the poet the meaning
is what he pleases to make it, what it provokes in his
own soul. To the man of science it is thus and so,
and not otherwise ; but the poet touches and goes,
and uses nature as a garment which he puts off and
on. Hence, the scientific reading or interpretation of
nature is the only real one. Says the Soothsayer to
" Antony and Cleopatra " : —

" In Nature's infinite book of secresy a little do I read."

This is science bowed and reverent, and speaking
through a great poet. The poet himself does not so
much read in Nature's book — though he does this,
too — as write his own thoughts there ; Nature reads
him, she is the page and he the type, and she takes
the impression he gives. Of course the poet uses the
truths of nature also, and he establishes his right to
them by bringing them home to us with a new and
peculiar force — a quickening or kindling force.
What science gives is melted in the fervent heat of
the poet's passion, and comes back to us supple
tnented by his quality and genius. He gives mort
fchan he takes, always.
I

NOTES BY THE WAY.

NOTES BY THE WAY.

A NEW NOTE IN THE WOODS.

THERE is always a new page to be turned in nat-
nral history, if one is sufficiently on the alert. I did
not know that the eagle celebrated his nuptials in the
air till one early spring day I saw a pair of them fall
from the sky with talons hooked together. They
dropped a hundred feet or more, in a wild embrace,
their great wings fanning the air, then separated and
mounted aloft, tracing their great circles against the
clouds. " Watch and wait " is the naturalist's sign.
For years I have been trying to ascertain for a cer-
tainty the author of that fine plaintive piping, to be
heard more or less frequently, according to the
weather, in our summer and autumn woods. It is a
note that much resembles that of our small marsh
frogs in spring < — the hylodes ; it is not quite so .clear
and assured, but otherwise much the same. Of a
very warm October day I have heard the wood vocal
with it ; it seemed to proceed from every stump and
tree about one. Ordinarily, it is heard only at inter,
vals throughout the woods. Approach never so cau-
tiously the spot from which the sound proceeds, and

134 NOTES BY THE WAY.

it instantly ceases, and you may watch for an hour
without again hearing it. Is it a frog, I said, the
small tree-frog, the piper of the marshes repeating
his spring note but little changed amid the trees ?
Doubtless it is, yet I must see him in the very act.
So I watched and waited, but to no purpose, till one
day, while bee-hunting in the woods, I heard the
sound proceed from beneath the leaves at my feet.
Keeping entirely quiet, the little musician presently
emerged, and lifting himself up on a small stick, his
throat palpitated and the plaintive note again came
forth. " The queerest frog ever I saw," said a youth
who accompanied me, and whom I had enlisted to
help solve the mystery. No ; it was no frog or toad
at all, but the small red salamander, commonly called
lizard. The color is not strictly red, but a dull or-
ange, variegated with minute specks or spots. This
was the mysterious piper, then, heard from May till
November through all our woods, sometimes on trees,
but usually on or near the ground. It makes more
music in the woods in autumn than any bird. It is a
pretty, inoffensive creature, walks as awkwardly as a
baby, and may often be found beneath stones and old
logs ;n the woods, where, buried in the mould, it
passes the winter. (I suspect there is a species of lit-
tle frog — Pickering's hylodes — that also pipes occa-
sionally in the woods.) I have discovered, also, that
we have a musicaJ spader. One sunny April day,
tthile seated on the borders of *he woods, my atten-
tion was attracted by a soft, uncertain purring sound

NOTES BY THE WAY. 135

that proceeded from the dry leaves at my feet. On
investigating the matter, I found that it was made by
a busy little spider. Several of them were traveling
about over the leaves as if in quest of some lost cue
or secret. Every moment or two they would pause,
and by some invisible means make the low purring
sound referred to. Prof. J. C. Allen says the com-
mon turtle or land tortoise also has a note, — a loud,
shrill, piping sound. It may yet be discovered that
there is no silent creature in nature.

THE SAND HOENET.

I TURNED another (to me) new page in natural
history, when, during the past season, I made the
acquaintance of the sand wasp or hornet. From
boyhood I had known the black hornet, with his
large paper nest, and the spiteful yellow-jacket, with
his lesser domicile, and had cherished proper con-
tempt for the various indolent wasps. But the sand
hornet was a new bird, in fact, the harpy eagle among
insects, and he made an impression. While walking
along the road about midsummer, I noticed working
in the tow-path, where the ground was rather inclined
to be dry and sandy, a large yellow hornet-like insect.
It made a hole the size of one's little finger in the
hard, gravelly path beside the road-bed. When dis-
urbed, it alighted on the dirt and sand in the middU

136 NOTES BY THE WAY.

of the road. I had noticed in my walks some small
bullet-like holes in the field that had piqued my curi-
osity, and I determined to keep an eye on these in-
sects of the road-side. I explored their holes, and
found them quite shallow, and no mystery at the bot-
tom of them. One morning in the latter part of July,
walking that way, I was quickly attracted by the sight
of a row of little mounds of fine freshly dug earth rest-
ing upon the grass beside the road, a foot or more be-
neath the path. " What is this ? " I said. " Mice, or
squirrels, or snakes," said my neighbor. But I con-
nected it at once with the strange insect I had seen.
Neither mice nor squirrels work like that, and snakes
do not dig. Above each mound of earth was a hole
the size of one's largest finger, leading into the bank.
While speculating about the phenomenon, I saw one
of the large yellow hornets I had observed, quickly
enter one of the holes. That settled the query.
While spade and hoe were being brought to dig him
out, another hornet appeared, heavy-laden with some
prey, and flew humming up and down and around the
place where I was standing. I withdrew a little,
when he quickly alighted upon one of the mounds of
earth, and I saw him carrying into his den no less an
insect than the cicada or harvest-fly. Then another
came, and after coursing up and down a few times,
disturbed by my presence, alighted upon a tree, with
his quarry, to rest. The black hornet will capture a
tfy, or a small butterfly, arid after creaking and dis-
membering it, will take it to his nest ; but here waa

NOTES BY THE WAY. 137

khis hornet carrying an insect much larger than him-
self, and flying with ease and swiftness. It was as ii
a hawk should carry a hen, or an eagle a turkey. I
at once proceeded to dig for one of the hornets, and
after following his hole about three feet under the
foot-path and to the edge of the road-bed, succeeded
in capturing him, and recovering the cicada. The
hornet weighed fifteen grains, and the cicada nine-
teen ; but in bulk the cicada exceeded the hornet by
more than half. In color, the wings and thorax, or
waist, of the hornet, were a rich bronze ; the abdo-
men was black, with three irregular yellow bands;
the legs were large and powerful, especially the third,
or hindmost pair, which were much larger than the
others, and armed with many spurs and hooks. In
digging its hole the hornet has been seen at work
very early in the morning. It backed out with the
loosened material like any other animal under the
same circumstances, holding and scraping back the dirt
with its legs. The preliminary prospecting upon the
foot-path, which I had observed, seems to have been
Ihe work of the males, as it was certainly of the
smaller hornets, and the object was doubtless to ex-
amine the ground, and ascertain if the place was
suitable for nesting. By digging two or three inches
through the hard, gravelly surface of the road, a fine
?sandy loam was discovered, which seemed to suit ex
actly, for in a few days the main shafts were aL
Started in the greensward, evidently upon the strength
»f the favorable report which the surveyors had

138 NOTES BY THE WAY.

made. These were dug by the larger hornets or fe*
males. There was but one inhabitant in each hole,
and the holes were two to three feet apart. One that
we examined had nine chambers or galleries at the end
of it, in each of which were two locusts, or eighteen
in all. The locusts of the locality had suffered great
slaughter. Some of them in the hole or den had been
eaten to a mere shell by the larvae of the hornet.
Under the wing of each insect an egg is attached;
the egg soon hatches, and the grub at once proceeds
to devour the food its thoughtful parent has provided.
As it grows it weaves itself a sort of shell or cocoon,
into which, after a time, it undergoes its metamor-
phosis, and comes out, I think, a perfect insect to-
ward the end of summer.

I understood now the meaning of that sudden cry
of alarm I had so often heard proceed from the locust
or cicada, followed by some object falling and rust-
ling amid the leaves ; the poor insect was doubtless
in the clutches of this arch enemy. A number of
locusts usually passed the night on the under side of
a large limb of a mulberry tree near by ; early one
morning a hornet was seen to pounce suddenly upon
one and drag it over on the top of the limb ; a strug-
gle ensued, but the locust was soon quieted and car-
ried off. It is said that the hornet does not sting the
insect, — for that would kill it, and it would not keep
fresh for its young, — but stupefies it, or chloroforms
t, or does something of the sort, so that life remain!
for some days.

NOTES BY THE WAY. 139

My friend Van, who watched the hornets in my
absence, saw a fierce battle one day over the right of
possession of one of the dens. An angry, humming
Bound was heard to proceed from one of the holes ;
gradually it approached the surface, until the hornets
emerged locked in each other's embrace, and rolled
down the little embankment, where the combat was
continued. Finally, one released his hold and took
up his position in the mouth of his den (of course I
should say she and her, as these were the queen hor-
nets), where she seemed to challenge her antagonist
to come on. The other one manoeuvred about a
while, but could not draw her enemy out of her
stronghold ; then she clambered up the bank and be-
gan to bite and tear off bits of grass and to loosen
gravel-stones and earth, and roll them down into the
mouth of the disputed passage. This caused the be-
sieged hornet to withdraw farther into her hole,
when the other came down and thrust in her head,
but hesitated to enter. After more manoeuvring,
the aggressor withdrew, and began to bore a hole
about a foot from the one she had tried to possess
herself of by force.

Besides the cicada, the sand hornet captures grass-
hoppers and other large insects. I have never met
with it before the present summer (1879), but this
year I have heard of its appearance at several point*
tlong the Hudson.

140 NOTES BY THE WAY.

THE SOLITARY BEE.

IF you " leave no stone unturned " in your walks
through the fields, you may perchance discover the
abode of one of our solitary bees. Indeed, I have
often thought what a chapter of natural history might
be written on " Life under a Stone," so many of our
smaller creatures take refuge there, — ants, crickets,
spiders, wasps, bumble-bees, the solitary bee, mice,
toads, snakes, newts, etc. What do these things do
in a country where there are no stones ? A stone
makes a good roof, a good shield ; it is water-proof
and fire-proof, and, until the season becomes too rig-
orous, frost-proof, too. The field-mouse wants no
better place to nest than beneath a large, flat stone,
and the bumble-bee is entirely satisfied if she can get
possession of his old or abandoned quarters. I have
even heard of a swarm of hive bees going under a
stone that was elevated a little from the ground.
After that, I did not marvel at Samson's bees going
into the carcass or skeleton of the lion.

In the woods one day (it was in November) I
turned over a stone that had a very strange-looking
creature under it, — a species of salamander I had
never before seen, the S. Fasciata. It was five or
six inches long, and was black and white in alternate
bands. It looked like a creature of the night, — •
darkness dappled with moonlight, — and so it proved.
I wrapped it up in some leaves and took it home in

NOTES BY THE WAY. 141

my pocket. By day it would barely move, and could
not be stimulated or frightened into any degree of
activity ; but at night it was alert and wide awake.
Of its habits I know little, but it is a pretty and
harmless creature. Under another stone was still
another species, the S. Subviolacea, larger, of a dark
plum-color, with two rows of bright yellow spots
down its back. It evinced more activity than its fel-
low of the moon-bespattered garb. I have also found
the little musical red newt under stones, and several
Email, dark species.

But to return to the solitary bee. When you go
a-hunting of the honey-bee, and are in quest of a spec-
imen among the asters or golden-rod in some remote
field to start a line with, you shall see how much this
little native bee resembles her cousin of the social
hive. There appear to be several varieties, but the
one I have in mind is just the size of the honey-bee,
and of the same general form and color, and its man-
ner among the flowers is nearly the same. On close
inspection, its color proves to be lighter, while the
under side of its abdomen is of a rich bronze. The
body is also flatter and less tapering, and the curve
inclines upward, rather than downward. You per-
ceive it would be the easiest thing in the world for
fhe bee to sting an enemy perched upon its back.
One variety, with a bright buff abdomen, is called
< sweat-bee" by the laborers in the field, because it
^lights upon their hands and bare arms when they
*re sweaty, — doubtless in quest of salt. It buildi

142 NOTES BY THE WAY.

its nest in little cavities in rails and posts. But the
one with the bronze, or copper, bottom builds under
a stone. I discovered its nest one day in this wise :
I was lying upon the ground in a field, watching a
line of honey-bees to the woods, when my attention
was arrested by one of these native bees flying about
me in a curious, inquiring way. When it returned
the third time, I said, " That bee wants something of
me," which proved to be the case, for I was lying
upon the entrance to its nest. On my getting up, it
alighted and crawled quickly home. I turned over
the stone, which was less than a foot across, when
the nest was partially exposed. It> consisted of four
cells, built in succession in a little tunnel that had
been excavated in the ground. The cells, which
were about three quarters of an inch long and half as
far through, were made of sections cut from the leaf
of the maple — cut with the mandibles of the bee,
which work precisely like shears. I have seen the
bee at work cutting out these pieces. She moves
through the leaf like the hand of the tailor through a
piece of cloth. When the pattern is detached she
rolls it up, and, embracing it with her legs, flies home
with it, often appearing to have a bundle dispropor-
tionately large. Each cell is made up of a dozen or
more pieces ; the larger ones, those that form its
walls, like the walls of a paper bag, are oblong, and
we turned down at one end, so as to form the bot-
tom : not one thickness of leaf merely, but thre*
or four thicknesses, each fragment of leaf lapping

NOTES BY THE WAY. 143

aver another. When the cell is completed it is filled
about two thirds full of bee-bread — the color of that
in the comb in the hive, but not so dry, and having a
sourish smell. Upon this the egg is laid, and upon
this the young feed when hatched. Is the paper bag
now tied up ? No, it is headed up ; circular bits of
leaves are nicely fitted into it to the number of six or
seven. They are cut without pattern or compass,
and yet they are all alike, and all exactly fit. In-
deed, the construction of this cell or receptacle shows
great ingenuity and skill. The bee was, of course,
unable to manage a single section of a leaf large
enough, when rolled up to form it, and so was obliged
to construct it of smaller pieces, such as she could
carry, lapping them one over another.

A few days later I saw a smaller species carrying
fragments of a yellow autumn leaf under a stone
in a corn-field. On examining the place about sun-
down to see if the bee lodged there, I found her
snugly ensconced in a little rude cell that adhered to
the under side of the stone. There was no pollen in
it, and I half suspected it was merely a berth in which
to pass the night.

These bees do not live even in pairs, but absolutely
alone. They have large baskets on their legs in which
to carry pollen, an article they are very industrious
11 collecting.

Why the larger species above described should
bave waited till October to build its nest is a mystery
•o me. Perhaps this was the second brood of th«

144 NOTES BY THE WAY.

season, or can it be that the young were not to hatch
till the following spring ?

THE WEATHER-WISE MUSKRAT.

I AM more than half persuaded that the muskrat
is a wise little animal, and that on the subject of the
weather, especially, he possesses some secret that I
should be glad to know. In the fall of 1878 I noticed
that he built unusually high and massive nests. I
noticed them in several different localities. In a shal-
low, sluggish pond by the roadside, which I used to
pass daily in my walk, two nests were in process of
construction throughout the month of November.
The builders worked only at night, and I could see
each day that the work had visibly advanced. When
there was a slight skim of ice over the pond, this was
broken up about the nests, with trails through it in
different directions where the material had been
brought. The houses were placed a little to one
side of the main channel, and were constructed en-
tirely of a species of coarse wild grass that grew all
about. So far as I could see, from first to last they
were solid masses of grass, as if the interior cavity or
nest was to be excavated afterward, as doubtless it
was. As they emerged from the pond they gradually
assumed the shape of a miniature mountain, very bold
*nd steep on the south side, and running down a long

NOTES BY THE WAY. 145

gentle grade to the surface of the water on the north.
One could see that the little architect hauled all his
material up this easy slope, and thrust it out boldly
around the other side. Every mouthful was distinctly
defined. After they were two feet or more above the
water, I expected each day to see that the finishing
stroke had been given and the work brought to a
close. But higher yet, said the builder. December
drew near, the cold became threatening, and I was
apprehensive that winter would suddenly shut down
upon those unfinished nests. But the wise rats knew
better than I did ; they had received private advices
from headquarters, that I knew not of. Finally,
about the 6th of December, the nests assumed com-
pletion ; the northern incline was absorbed or carried
up, and each structure became a strong massive cone,
three or four feet high, the largest nest of the kind I
had ever seen. Does it mean a severe winter? I
inquired. An old farmer said it meant " high water,"
and he was right once, at least, for in a few days
afterward we had the heaviest rain-fall known in
this section for half a century. The creeks rose to
ui almost unprecedented height. The sluggish pond
became a seething, turbulent water-course ; gradually
the angry element crept up the sides of these lake
dwellings, till, when the rain ceased, about four
o'clock, they showed above the flood no larger than
a man's hat. During the night the channel shifted
till the main current swept over them, and next day
tot a vestige of the nests was to be seen ; they had
10

146 NOTES BY THE WAY.

gone down-stream, as had many other dwellings of a
less temporary character. The rats had built wisely,
and would have been perfectly secure against any
ordinary high water, but who can foresee a flood ?
The oldest traditions of their race did not run back
to the time of such a visitation.

Nearly a week afterward another dwelling was
begun, well away from the treacherous channel, but
the architects did not work at it with much heart ;
the material was very scarce, the ice hindered, and
before the basement-story was fairly finished, winter
had the pond under his lock and key. *

In other localities I noticed that where the nests
were placed on the banks of streams, they were made
secure against the floods by being built amid a small
clump of bushes. When the fall of 1879 came, the
muskrats were very tardy about beginning their house,
laying the corner-stone — or the corner-sod — about
December 1st, and continuing the work slowly and
indifferently. On the 15th of the month the nest
was not yet finished. This, I said, indicates a mild
winter ; and, sure enough, the season was one of the
mildest known for many years. The rats had little
use for their house.

Again, in the fall of 1880, while the weather-wise
were wagging their heads, some forecasting a mild,
some a severe, winter, I watched with interest for a
sign from my muskrats. About November 1st, a
month earlier than the previous year, they began
iheir nest, and worked at it with a will. They ap

NOTES BY THE WAY. 147

peared to have just got tidings of what was coming,
If I had taken the hint so palpably given, my celery
would not have been frozen up in the ground, and
my apples caught in unprotected places. When the
cold wave struck us, about November 20th, my four-
legged " I-told-you-so's " had nearly completed their
dwelling ; it lacked only the ridge-board, so to speak ;
it needed a little " topping out," to give it a finished
look. But this it never got. The winter had come
to stay, and it waxed more and more severe, till the
unprecedented cold of the last days of December must
have astonished even the wise muskrats in their snug
retreat. I approached their nest at this time, a white
mound upon the white, deeply frozen surface of the
pond, and wondered if there was any life in that ap-
parent sepulchre. I thrust my walking-stick sharply
into it, when there was a rustle and a splash into the
water, as the occupant made his escape. What a
damp basement that house has, I thought, and what
a pity to rout a peaceful neighbor out of his bed in
this weather, and into such a state of things as this !
But water does not wet the muskrat ; his fur is
charmed, and not a drop penetrates it.

Where the ground is favorable, the muskrats do
not build these mound-like nests, but burrow into the
bank a long distance, and establish their winter quar-
ters there.

Shall we not say, then, in view of the above facts,
that this little creature is weather-wise ? The hitting
of the mark twice might be mere good luck; but

148 NOTES BY THE WAY.

three bull's-eyes in succession is not a mere coinci-
dence ; it is a proof of skill. The muskrat is not
found in the Old World, which is a little singular, as
other rats so abound there, and as those slow-going
English streams especially, with their grassy banks.,
are so well suited to him. The water-rat of Europe is
smaller, but of similar nature and habits. The musk
rat does not hibernate like some rodents, but is pretty
active all winter. In December I noticed in my walk
where they had made excursions of a few yards to an
orchard for frozen apples. One day, along a little
stream, I saw a mink track amid those of the musk-
rat ; following it up, I presently came to blood and
other marks of strife upon the snow beside a stone
wall. Looking in between the stones, I found the
carcass of the luckless rat, with its head and neck
eaten away. The mink had made a meal of him.

CHEATING THE SQUIRRELS.

FOR the largest and finest chestnuts I had last
fall I was indebted to the gray squirrels. Walking
through the early October woods one day, I came
Upon a place where the ground was thickly strewn
w th very large unopened chestnut burs. On exam-
ination I found that every bur had been cut square
off with about an inch of the stem adhering, and no*
one had been left on the tree. It was not accident

NOTES BY THE WAY. 149

then, but design. Whose design ? The squirrels'.
The fruit was the finest I had ever seen in the woods,
and some wise squirrel had marked it for his own.
The burs were ripe, and had just begun to divide,
not " threefold," but fourfold, " to show the fruit
within." The squirrel that had taken all this pains
had evidently reasoned with himself thus : " Now,
these are extremely fine chestnuts, and I want them ;
if I wait till the burs open on the tree the crows and
jays will be sure to carry off a great many of the
nuts before they fall ; then, after the wind has rat-
tled out what remain, there are the mice, the chip-
munks, the red squirrels, the raccoons, the grouse, to
say nothing of the boys and the pigs, to come in for
their share ; so I will forestall events a little ; I will
cut off the burs when they have matured, and a few
days of this dry October weather will cause every
one of them to open on the ground ; I shall be on
hand in the nick of time to gather up my nuts."
The squirrel, of course, had to take the chances of a
prowler like myself coming along, but he had fairly
stolen a march on his neighbors. As I proceeded to
collect and open the burs, I was half prepared to
hear an audible protest from the trees about, for I
Constantly fancied myself watched by shy but jealous
eyes. It is an interesting inquiry how the squirrel
knew the burs would open if left to lie on the ground
•A few days. Perhaps he did not know, but thought
;he experiment worth trying.

The gray squirrel is peculiarly an American prod-

150 NOTES BY THE WAY.

act, and might serve very well as a national emblem.
The Old World can beat us on rats and mice, but we
are far ahead on squirrels, having five or six speciea
to Europe's one.

THE SKYLARK ON THE HUDSON.

MY note-book of the past season is enriched with
the unusual incident of an English skylark in full
song above an Esopus meadow. [ was poking
about a marshy place in a low field one morning in
early May, when through the maze of bird-voices:
laughter of robins, call of meadow-larks, song of bob-
olinks, ditty of sparrows, whistle of orioles, twitter of
swallows, etc., with which the air was filled, my ear
suddenly caught an unfamiliar strain. I paused to
listen : can it be possible, I thought, that I hear a
lark, or am I dreaming. The song came from the
air, above a wide, low meadow many hundred yards
away. Withdrawing a few paces to a more elevated
position, I bent my eye and ear eagerly in that direc-
tion. Yes, that unstinted, jubilant, skyward, multi-
tudinous song can be none other than the lark's !
Any of our native songsters would have ceased while
I was listening. Presently I was fortunate enough to
catch sight of the bird. He had reached his climax
»n the sky and was hanging with quivering wings
beneath a small white cloud, against which his fore

NOTES BY THE WAY. 151

was clearly revealed. I had seen and heard the lark
fn England, else I should still have been in doubt
about the identity of this singer. While I was climb-
ing a fence I was obliged to take my eye from the
bird, and when I looked again the song had ceased
and the lark had gone. I was soon jn the meadow
aj)ove which I had heard him, and the first bird I
flushed was the lark.

How strange he looked to my eye (I use the
masculine gender because it was a male bird, but an
Irishman laboring in the field, to whom I related my
discovery, spoke touchingly of the bird as " she,"
and I notice that the old poets do the same), — his
long, sharp wings and something in his manner of
flight that suggested a shore bird. I followed him
about the meadow and got several snatches of song
out of him, but not again the soaring, skyward flight
and copious musical shower. By appearing to pass
by I several times got within a few yards of him ; as
I drew near he would squat in the stubble, and /hen
suddenly start up, and, when fairly launched, sing
briefly till he alighted again fifteen or twenty rods
away. I came twice the next day and twice the next,
and each time found the lark in the meadow or heard
\iis song from the air or the sky. What was espe-
cially interesting was that the lark had " singled out
with affection " one of our native bi; ds, and the one
that most resembled its kind, namel} the vesper-spar-
row, or grass-finch. To this bird I saw him paying
bis addresses with the greatest assiduity. He would

152 NOTES BY THE WAY.

follow it about and hover above it, and by manj
gentle indirections seek to approach it. But the
sparrow was shy, and evidently did not know what tc
make of her distinguished foreign lover. It would
sometimes take refuge in a bush, when the lark, not
being a percher, would alight upon the ground be-
neath it. This sparrow looks enough like the lark to
be a near relation. Its color is precisely the same,
and it has the distinguishing mark of the two lateral
white quills in its tail. It has the same habit of
skulking in the stubble or the grass as you approach ;
it is exclusively a field-bird, and certain of its notes
might have been copied from the lark's song. In size
it is about a third smaller, and this is the most marked
difference between them. With the nobler bipeds,
this would not have been any obstacle to the union,
and in this case the lark was evidently quite ready to
ignore the difference, but the sparrow persisted in
saving him nay. It was doubtless this obstinacy on
her part that drove the lark away, for, on the fifth
day, I could not find him and have never seen nor
heard him since. I hope he found a mate some-
where, but it is quite improbable. The bird had,
most likely, escaped from a cage, or, may be, it was
a survivor of a number liberated some years ago on
Long Island. There is no reason why the lark should
not thrive in th s country as well as in Europe, and,
if a few hundred were liberated in any of our fields
in Apnl or May, I have little doubt they would soon
become established. And what an acquisition it

NOTES BY THE WAY. 153

be ! As a songster, the lark is deserving of all
the praise that has been bestowed upon him. He
would not add so much to the harmony or melody of
our bird-choir, as he would add to its blithesomeness,
joyousness, and power. His voice is the jocund and
inspiring voice of a spring morning. It is like a
ceaseless and hilarious clapping of hands. I was much
interested in an account a friend gave me of the first
skylark he heard while abroad. He had been so
full of the sights and wonders of the Old World that
he had quite forgotten the larks, when one day, as he
was walking somewhere near the sea, a brown bird
started up in front of him and mounting upward be-
gan to sing. It drew his attention, and as the bird
went skyward, pouring out his rapid and jubilant
notes, like bees from a hive in s warming-time, the
truth suddenly flashed upon the observer.

" Good heavens ! " he exclaimed, " that is a sky-
lark ; there is no mistaking that bird."

It is this unique and unmistakable character of the
lark's song, and its fountain-like sparkle and copious-
ness, that are the main sources of its charm.

NOCTURNAL INSECTS.

How the nocturnal insects, the tree-crickets and
katydids, fail as the heat fails ! They are musicians
that play fast or slow, strong or feeble, just as the

154 NOTES BY THE WAY.

heat of the season waxes or wanes ; and they play as
long as life lasts ; when their music ceases they arc
dead. The katydids begin in August, and cry with
great vigor and spirit " Katy-did," " Katy-did," or
" Katy-did n't." Toward the last of September they
have taken in sail a good deal, and cry simply,
" Katy," " Katy.," with frequent pauses and restiug-
gpells. In October they languidly gasp or rasp,
" Kate," « Kate," " Kate," and before the end of
the month they become entirely inaudible, though I
suspect that if one's ear was sharp enough he might
still hear a dying whisper, " Kate," " Kate." Those
cousins of Katy, the little green purring tree-crick-
ets, fail in the same way and at the same time.
When their chorus is fullest, the warm autumn night
fairly throbs with the soft lulling undertone. I no-
tice that the sound is in waves or has a kind of
rhythmic beat. What a gentle, unobtrusive back
ground it forms for the sharp, reedy notes of the
katydids ! As the season advances, their life ebbs
and ebbs : you hear one here and one there, but the
air is no longer filled with that regular pulse-beat
of sound. One by one the musicians cease, till, per
haps on some mild night late in October, you hear —
} ast hear and that is all — the last feeble note ol
the last of these little harpers.

NOTES BY THE WAY. 155

LOVE AND WAR AMONG THE BIRDS.

IN the spring movements of the fishes up the
stream, toward their spawning beds, the females are
the pioneers, appearing some days in advance of the
males. With the birds the reverse is the case, the
males coming a week or ten days before the females.
The female fish is usually the larger and stronger,
and perhaps better able to take the lead ; among
most reptiles the same fact holds, and throughout the
insect world there is to my knowledge no exception
to the rule. Among the birds the only exception I
am aware of is in the case of the birds of prey.
Here the female is the larger and stronger. If you
see an exceptionally large and powerful eagle, rest
assured the sex is feminine. But higher in the scale
the male comes to the front and leads in size and
strength.

But the first familiar spring birds are cocks ; hence
the songs and tilts and rivalries. Hence also the fact
that they are slightly in excess of the other sex, to
make up for this greater exposure ; apparently no
courting is done in the South, and no matches are
pre-arranged. The males leave irregularly without
,iny hint, I suspect, to the females as to when and
where they will meet them. In the case of the pas-
senger pigeon, however, the two sexes travel to-
gether, as they do among the migrating water-fowls.

With the song-birds, love-making begins as soon a»

156 NOTES BY THE WAY.

the hens are here. So far as I have observed, th
robin and the bluebird win their mates by gentle and
fond approaches ; but certain of the' sparrows, nota-
bly the little social sparrow or " chippie," appear to
carry the case by storm. The same proceeding may
be observed among the English sparrows, now fairly
established on our soil. Two or three males beset a
female and a regular scuffle ensues. The poor bird
is pulled and jostled and cajoled amid what appears
to be the greatest mirth and hilarity of her auda-
cious suitors. Her plumage is plucked and ruffled,
the rivals roll over each other and over her, she ex-
tricates herself as best she can, and seems to say or
scream " no," " no," to every one of them with great
emphasis. What finally determines her choice would
be hard to say. Our own sparrows are far less
noisy and obstreperous, but the same little comedy in
a milder form is often enacted among them. When
two males have a tilt they rise several feet in the
air, beak to beak, and seek to deal each other blows
as they mount. I have seen two male chewinks fac-
ing each other and wrathfully impelled upward in
the same manner, while the female that was the
boon of contention between them regarded them un-
concernedly from the near bushes.

The bobolink is also a precipitate and impetuous
tt ooer. It is a trial of speed, as if the female were
to say, " Catch me and I am yours," and she scur
ries away with all her might and main, often wit!
three or four dusky knights in hot pursuit. WheB

NOTES BY THE WAY. 157

she takes to cover in the grass there is generally a
squabble " down among the tickle-tops," or under
the buttercups, and " Wintersable " or " Conquedel "
is the winner.

In marked contrast to this violent love-making are
the social and festive reunions of the goldfinches
about mating time. All the birds of a neighborhood
gather in a tree-top, and the trial apparently becomes
one of voice and song. The contest is a most friendly
and happy one ; all is harmony and gayety. The fe-
males chirrup and twitter and utter their confiding
"paUeyf "paisley" while the more gayly dressed
males squeak and warble in the most delightful strain.
The matches are apparently all made and published
during these gatherings; everybody is iu a happy
frame of mind ; there is no jealousy, and no rivalry
but to see who shall be gayest.

It often happens among the birds that the male
has a rival after the nuptials have been celebrated
and the work of housekeeping fairly begun. Every
season a pair of phoebe-birds have built their nest on
an elbow in the spouting beneath the eaves of my
house. The past spring a belated male made des
perate efforts to supplant the lawful mate and gain
possession of the unfinished nest, There was a battle
fought about the premises every hour in the day for
sit least a week. The antagonists would frequently
grapple and fall to the ground and keep their hold
like two dogs. On one surh occasion I came neai
Covering them with my hat. I believe the intruder

158 NOTES BY THE WAY.

mis finally worsted and withdrew from the place.
One noticeable feature of the affair was the apparent
utter indifference of the female, who went on with
her nest-building as if all was peace and harmony.
There can be little doubt that she would have ap-
plauded and accepted the other bird had he finally
been the victor.

One of the most graceful of warriors is the robin.
I know few prettier sights than two males challeng-
ing and curveting about each other upon the grass in
early spring. Their attentions to each other are sc
courteous and restrained. In alternate curves and
graceful sallies, they pursue and circumvent each
other. First one hops a few feet, then the other,
each one standing erect in true military style while
his fellow passes him and describes the segment of
an ellipse about him, both uttering the while a fine
complacent warble in a high but suppressed key.
Are they lovers or enemies ? the beholder wonders,
until they make a spring and are beak to beak in the
twinkling of an eye, and perhaps mount a few feet
into the air, but rarely actually delivering blows upon
each other. Every thrust is parried, every move-
ment met. They follow each other with dignified
composure about the fields or lawn, into trees and
upon the ground, with plumage slightly spread,
breasts glowing, their lisping, shrill war-song just
audible. It forms on the whole the most civil and
high-bred tilt to be witnessed during the season.

When the cock-robin makes love he is the sami

NOTES BY THE WAY. 159

considerate, deferential, but insinuating, galla 't. The
warble he makes use of on that occasion is the same,
BO far as my ear can tell, as the one he pipes when
fading his rival.

FOX AND HOUND.

I STOOD on a high hill or ridge one autumn day
and saw a hound run a fox through the fields far
beneath me. What odors that fox must have shaken
out of himself, I thought, to be traced thus easily,
and how great their specific gravity not to have been
blown away like smoke by the breeze ! The fox ran
a long distance down the hill, keeping within a few
feet of a stone wall ; then turned a right angle and
led off for the mountain, across a plowed field and a
succession of pasture lands. In about fifteen minutes
the hound came in full blast with her nose in the air,
and never once did she put it to the ground while in
my sight. When she came to the stone wall she took
the other side from that taken by the fox, and kept
about the same distance from it, being thus separated
several yards from his track, with the fence between
her and it. At the point where the fox turned
.iharply to the left, the hound overshot a few yards,
then wheeled, and feeling the air a moment with her
nose, took up the scent again and was off on his trail
as unerringly as Fate. It seemed as if the fox must
have sowed himself broadcast as he went along, and

160 NOTES BY THE WAY.

that h? , seen t was so rank and heavy that it settled
in the hollows and clung tenaciously to the bushes
and crevices in the fence. I thought I ought to have
caught a remnant of it as I passed that way some
minutes later, but I did not. But I suppose it was
not that the light-footed fox so impressed himself
upon the ground he ran over, but that the sense of
the hound was so keen. To her sensitive nose these
tracks steamed like hot cakes, and they would not
have cooled off so as to be undistinguishable for sev-
eral hours. For the time being she had but one
sense : her whole soul was concentrated in her nose.

It is amusing when the hunter starts out of a win-
ter morning to see his hound probe the old tracks to
determine how recent they are. He sinks his nose
down deep in the snow so as to exclude the air from
above, then draws a long full breath, giving some-
times an audible snort. If there remains the least
effluvium of the fox the hound will detect it. If it
be very slight it only sets his tail wagging ; if it be
strong it unloosens his tongue.

Such things remind one of the waste, the friction
that is going on all about us, even when the wheels
of life run the most smoothly. A fox cannot trip
along the top of a stone wall so lightly but that he
will leave enough of himself to betray his course to
Jie hound for hours afterward. When the boys play
" hare and hounds " the hare scatters bits of paper to
give a clew to the pursuers, but he scatters himself
much more freely if only our sight and scent wert

NOTES BY THE WAY. 161

sharp enough to detect the fragments. Even the fish
leave a trail in the water, and it is said the otter will
pursue them by it. The birds make a track in the
air, only their enemies hunt by sight rather than by
scent. The fox baffles the hound most upon a hard
crust of frozen snow ; the scent will not hold to the
smooth, bead-like granules.

Judged by the eye alone, the fox is the lightest
and most buoyant creature that runs. His soft
wrapping of fur conceals the muscular play and
effort that is so obvious in the hound that pursues
him, and he comes bounding along precisely as if
blown by a gentle wind. His massive tail is carried
as if it floated upon the air by its own lightness.

The hound is not remarkable for his fleetness, but
how he will hang ! — often running late into the
night and sometimes till morning, from ridge to
ridge, from peak to peak ; now on the mountain, now
crossing the valley, now playing about a large slope
of uplying pasture fields. At times the fox has a
pretty well-defined orbit, and the hunter knows
where to intercept him. Again he leads off like a
comet, quite beyond the system of hills and ridges
upon which he was started, and his return is entirely
a matter of conjecture, but if the day be not more
than half spent, the chances are that the fox will be
back before night, though the sportsman s patience
seldom holds out that long.

The hound is a most interesting dog. How solemn
and long-visaged he is — how peaceful and well-dis-
11

162 NOTES BY THE WAY.

posed ! He is the Quaker among dogs. All the
viciousness and currishness seem to have been weeded
out of him ; he seldom quarrels, or fights, or plays,
like other dogs. Two strange hounds, meeting for
Jie first time, behave as civilly toward each other as
two men. I know a hound that has an ancient,
wrinkled, human, far-away look that reminds one of
the bust of Homer among the Elgin marbles. He
looks like the mountains toward which his heart
yearns so much.

The hound is a great puzzle to the farm dog ; the
latter, attracted by his baying, comes barking and
snarling up through the fields bent on picking a
quarrel ; he intercepts the hound, snubs and insult?
and annoys him in every way possible, but the hound
heeds him not ; if the dog attacks him he gets away as
best he can, and goes on with the trail; the cur bris-
tles and barks and struts about for a while, then goes
back to the house, evidently thinking the hound a
lunatic, which he is for the time being — a mono-
maniac, the slave and victim of one idea. I saw the
master of a hound one day arrest him in full course,
to give one of the hunters time to get to a certain
runway ; the dog cried and struggled to free himself
und would listen neither to threats nor caresses.
Knowing he must be hungry, I offered him my
lunch, but he would not touch it. I put it in his
mouth, but he threw it contemptuously from him
We coaxed and petted and reassured him, but he
was under a spell ; he was bereft of all thought 01
desire but the one passion to pursue that trail.

NOTES BY THE WAY. 163

THE TREE-TOAD.

WE can boast a greater assortment of toads and
frogs in this country than can any other land. What
a chorus goes up from our ponds and marshes in
spring ! The like of it cannot be heard anywhere
else under the sun. In Europe it would certain!}
have made an impression upon the literature. An
attentive ear will detect first one variety, then an-
other, each occupying the stage from three or four
days to a week. The latter part of April, when the
little peeping frogs — hylodes — are in full chorus,
one comes upon places in his drives or walks late in
the day, where the air fairly palpitates with sound ;
from every little marshy hollow and spring run there
rises an impenetrable maze or cloud of shrill musical
voices. After the peepers, the next frog to appear
is the clucking frog, a rather small, dark-brown frog,
with a harsh, clucking note. Their chorus is heard
for a few days only, while their spawn is being de-
posited. In less than a week they disappear, and 1
never see or hear them again till the next April.
As the weather gets warmer, the toads take to the
water, and set up that long-drawn musical tr-r-r-r-r-r-r-
ing note. The voice of the bull-frog, who calls, ac-
cording 10 the boys, "jug o' rum," "jug o'rum," "pull
the plug," " pull the plug," is not heard much before
June. The peepers, the clucking frog, and the bull-
frog, are the only ones that call in chorus. The

164 NOTES BY THE WAY.

most interesting and the most shy and withdrawn of
all our frogs and toads is the tree-toad, — the creat-
ure that, from the old apple or cherry-tree, or red
cedar, announces the approach of rain, and baffles
your every effort to see or discover him. It has not
(as some people imagine) exactly the power of the
chameleon to render itself invisible by assuming the
color of the object it perches upon, but it sits very
close and still, and its mottled back, of different shades
of ashen gray, blends it perfectly with the bark of
nearly every tree. The only change in its color I
have ever noticed, is that it is lighter on a light-col-
ored tree, like the beech or soft maple, and darker
on the apple, or cedar, or pine. Then it is usually
hidden in some cavity or hollow of the tree, when
its voice appears to come from the outside.

Most of my observations upon the habits of this
creature run counter to the authorities I have been
able to consult on the subject.

In the first place, the tree-toad is nocturnal in its
habits, like the common toad. By day it remains
motionless and concealed, by night it is as alert and
active as an owl, feeding and moving about from
tree to tree. I have never known one to change its
position by day, and never knew one to fail to do so
by night. Last summer one was discovered sitting
against a window upon a climbing rose-bush. The
house had not been occupied for some days, and when
the curtain was drawn, the toad was discovered and
flosely observed. His light gray color harmonized

NOTES BY THE WAY. 165

perfectly with the unpainted wood-work of the house.
During the day he never moved a muscle, but next
morning he was gone. A friend of mine caught one,
and placed it under a tumbler on his table at night,
eaving the edge of the glass raised about the eighth
of an inch to admit the air. During the night he
was awakened by a strange sound in his room. Pat,
pat, pat, went some object, now here, now there,
among the furniture, or upon the walls and doors.
On investigating the matter, he found that by some
means his tree-toad had escaped from under the glass,
and was leaping in a very lively manner about the
room, producing the sound he had heard when it
alighted upon the door, or wall, or other perpendicu-
lar surface.

The home of the tree-toad, I am convinced, is usu-
ally a hollow limb or other cavity in the tree ; here
he makes his headquarters, and passes most of the
day. For two years a pair of them frequented an
old apple-tree near my house, occasionally sitting at
the mouth of a cavity that led into a large branch,
but usually their voices were heard from within the
cavity itself. On one occasion, while walking in the
woods in early May, I heard the voice of a tree-toad
but a few yards from me. Cautiously following up
the sound, I decided, after some delay, that it pro-
ceeded from the trunk of a small soft maple; the
tree was hollow, the entrance tc the interior being a
few feet from the ground. I could not discover the
«oad, but was so convinced that it was concealed ID

166 NOTES BY THE WAY.

the tree, that I stopped up the hole, determined to re-
turn with an ax, when I had time, and cut the trunk
open. A week elapsed before I again went to the
woods, when, on cutting into the cavity of the tree, I
found a pair of tree-toads, male and female, and a
large, shelless snail. Whether the presence of the
snail was accidental, or whether these creatures asso-
ciated together for some purpose, I do not know.
The male toad was easily distinguished from the fe-
male by its large head, and more thin, slender, and
angular body. The female was much the more beau-
tiful, both in form and color. The cavity, which was
long and irregular, was evidently their home ; it had
been nicely cleaned out, and was a snug, safe apart-
ment.

The finding of the two sexes together under such
circumstances and at that time of the year, suggests
the inquiry whether they do not breed away from
the water, as others of our toads are known at times
to do, and thus skip the tadpole state. I have sev-
eral times seen the ground, after a June shower,
swarming with minute toads, out to wet their jackets.
Some of them were no larger than crickets. They
were a long distance from the water, and had evi-
dently been hatched on the land, and had never been
poll i wigs. Whether the tree-toad breeds in trees o»
on the land, yet remains to be determined.

Another fact in the natural history of this creafc
are, not set down in the books, is that they pass the
winter in a torpid state in the ground, or in stumpi

NOTES BY THE WAY. 167

and hollow trees, instead of in the mud of ponds and
marshes, like true frogs, as we have been taught.
The pair in the old apple-tree above referred to, I
heard on a warm, moist day late in November, and
again early in April. On the latter occasion, I
reached my hand down into the cavity of the tree
and took out one of the toads. It was the first T
had heard, and I am convinced it had passed the
winter in the moist, mud-like mass of rotten wood
that partially filled the cavity. It had a fresh, deli-
cate tint, as if it had not before seen the light that
spring. The president of a Western college writes
in u Science News," that two of his students found
one in the winter in an old stump which they demol-
ished ; and a person whose veracity I have no reason
to doubt sends me a specimen that he dug out of the
ground in December while hunting for Indian relics.
The place was on the top of a hill, under a pine-tree.
The ground was frozen on the surface, and the toad
was, of course, torpid.

During the present season, I obtained additional
proof of the fact that the tree-toad hibernates on dry
land. The 12th of November was a warm, spring-
like day ; wind southwest, with slight rain in the
afternoon, — just the day to bring things out of their
winter retreats. As I was about to enter my door at
lusk, my eye fell upon what proved to be the large
tree-toad in question, sitting on some low stone-work
At the foot of a terrace a few feet from the house. I
paused to observe his movements, Presently ha

168 NOTES BY THE WAY.

started on his travels across the yard toward the lawn
in front. He leaped about three feet at a time, \uth
long pauses between each leap. For fear of losing
him as it grew darker, I captured him, and kept him
under the coal sieve till morning. He was very act-
ive at night trying to escape. In the morning, I
amused myself with him for some time in the kitchen.
I found he could adhere to a window-pane, but could
not ascend it; gradually his hold yielded, till he
sprang off on the casing. I observed that in sitting
upon the floor or upon the ground, he avoided bring-
ing his toes in contact with the surface, as if they
were too tender or delicate for such coarse uses, but
sat upon the hind part of his feet. Said toes had a
very bungling, awkward appearance at such times ;
they looked like hands, encased in gray, woolen
gloves much too large for them. Their round, flat-
tened ends, especially when not in use, have a com-
ically helpless look.

After a while I let my prisoner escape into the
open air. The weather had grown much colder, and
there was a hint of coming frost. The toad took the
hint at once, and after hopping a few yards from the
door to the edge of a grassy bank, began to prepare
for winter. It was a curious proceeding. He went
into the ground backward, elbowing himself through
the turf with the sharp joints of his hind legs, and
going down in a spiral manner. His progress way
*ery slow ; at night I could still see him by lifting
lie grass ; and as the weather changed again to warns

NOTES BY THE WAY. 169

with southerly winds before morning, he stopped
digging entirely. The next day I took him out, and
put him into a bottomless tub sunk into the ground
and filled with soft earth, leaves, and leaf mould,
where he passed the winter safely, and came out fresh
and bright in the spring.

The little hylodes or peeping frogs lead a sort 01
arboreal life, too, a part of the season, but they are
quite different from the true tree-toads, the Hyla ver-
gicolor, above described. They appear to leave the
marshes in May, and to take to the woods or bushes.
I have never seen them on trees, but upon low shrubs.
They do not seem to be climbers, but perchers. I
caught one in May, in some low bushes a few rods
from the swamp. It perched upon the small twigs
like a bird, and would leap about among them, sure
of its hold every time. I was first attracted by its
piping. I brought it borne, and it piped for one twi-
light in a bush in my yard and then was gone. I do
not think they pipe much after leaving the water. I
have found them early in April upon the ground in
the woods, and again late in the fall.

In November, 1879, the warm, moist weather
brought them out in numbers. They were hopping
about everywhere, upon the fallen leaves. Within a
Email space I captured six. Some of them were the
hue of the tan-colored leaves, probably Pickering's
hylodes, and some were darker, according to the local-
ity. Of course they do not go to the marshes to
winter, else they would not wait so late in the season

170 NOTES BY THE WAY.

I examined the ponds and marshes, and found bull
frogs buried in the mud, but no peepers.

THE SPRING BIRDS.

WE never know the precise time the birds leave
us in the fall ; they do not go suddenly ; their de-
parture is like that of an army of occupation in no
hurry to be off ; they keep going and going, and we
hardly know when the last straggler is gone. Not
so their return in the spring ; then it is like an army
of invasion, and we know the very day when the first
scouts appear. It is a memorable event. Indeed,
it is always a surprise to me, and one of the com-
pensations of our abrupt and changeable climate, this
suddenness with which the birds come in spring, in
fact, with which Spring itself comes, alighting, may
be, to tarry only a day or two, but real and genuine,
for all that. When March arrives, we do not know
what a day may bring forth. It is like turning over
a leaf, a new chapter of startling incidents lying jusL
on the other side. A few days ago, winter had
not perceptibly relaxed his hold ; then suddenly he
began to soften a little, and a warm haze to creep
np from the south, but not a solitary bird, save the
winter residents, was to be seen or heard. Next day
the sun seemed to have drawn immensely nearer ; hi*
yearns were full of power ; and we said, " Behold

NOTES BY THE WAY. 171

the first spring morning ! And, as if to make the
prophecy complete, there is the note of a bluebird,
and it is not yet nine o'clock." Then others, and
still others, were heard. How did they know it was
going to be a suitable day for them to put in an ap-
pearance ? It seemed as if they must have been
waiting somewhere close by for the first warm day,
like actors behind the scenes, ; — the moment the cur-
tain was lifted, they were ready and rushed upon the
stage. The third warm day, and behold, all the prin-
cipal performers come rushing in. Song-sparrows,
cow-blackbirds, grackles, the meadow-lark, cedar-birds,
the phcebe-bird,' and hark ! what bird laughter was
that ? the robins, hurrah ! the robins ! Not two or
three, but a score or two of them ; they are following
the river valley north, and they stop in the trees from
time to time, and give vent to their gladness. It is
like a summer picnic of school children suddenly let
loose in a wood ; they sing, shout, whistle, squeal,
call, etc., in the most blithesome strains. The warm
wave has brought the birds upon its crest ; or some
barrier has given way, the levee of winter has broken,
and spring comes like an inundation. No doubt, the
snow and the frost will stop the crevasse again, but
only for a brief season.

Between the 10th and the 15th of March, in the
Middle and Eastern States, we are pretty sure to have
one or more of these spring days. Bright days, clear
Says, may have been plenty all winte^ ; but the air
was a desert, the sky transparent :ce ; now the sky

172 NOTES BY THE WAY.

is full of radiant warmth, and the air of a half articu-
late murmur and awakening. How still the morning
is ! It is at such times that we discover what music
there is in the souls of the little slate-colored snow-
birds. How they squeal, and chatter, and chirp, and
trill, always in scattered troops of fifty or a hundred,
filling the air with a fine sibilant chorus ! That joy-
ous and childlike " chew," " chew," " chew," is very
expressive. Through this medley of finer songs and
calls, there is shot, from time to time, the clear, strong
note of the meadow-lark. It comes from some field
or tree farther away, and cleaves the air like an ar-
row. The reason why the birds always appear first
in the morning, and not in the afternoon, is that in
migrating they travel by night, and stop, and feed
and disport themselves by day. They come by the
owl train, and are here before we are up in the
morning.

A LONE QUEEN.

ONCE, while walking in the woods, I saw quite
large nest in the top of a pine-tree. On climbing up
to it, I found that it had originally been a crow's
nest. Then a red squirrel had appropriated it ; he
had filled up the cavity with the fine inner bark of
the red cedar, and made himself a dome-shaped nest,
^pon the crow's foundation of coarse twigs. It ii
probable that the flying squirrel, or the white-footed

NOTES BY THE WAY. 173

mouse, had been the next tenants, for the finish of
the interior suggested their dainty taste. But when
I found it, its sole occupant was a bumble-bee — the
mother or queen-bee, just planting her colony. She
buzzed very loud and complainingly, and stuck up
her legs in protest against my rude inquisitiveness,
but refused to vacate the premises. She had only
one sack or cell constructed, in which she had depos-
ited her first egg, and beside that a large loaf of
bread, probably to feed the young brood with, as
they should be hatched. It looked like Boston
brown bread, but I examined it, and found it to be
a mass of dark-brown pollen, quite soft and pasty.
In fact, it was unleavened bread, and had not been
got at the baker's. A few weeks later, if no accident
befell her, she had a good working colony of a dozen
or more bees.

This was not an unusual incident. Our bumble-
bee, so far as I have observed, invariably appropri-
ates a mouse-nest for the site of its colony, never
excavating a place in the ground, nor conveying ma-
terials fora nest, to be lined with wax, like the Eu-
ropean species. Many other of our wild creatures
take up with the leavings of their betters or strong-
ers. Neither the skunk nor the rabbit digs his own
hole, but takes up with that of a woodchuck, or else
hunts out a natural den among the rocks. In Eng-
land the rabbit burrows in the ground to such an ex-
tent that in places the earth is honey-combed by
hem, and the walker steps through the surface into

174 NOTES BY THE WAY.

their galleries. Our white-footed mouse has been
known to take up his abode in a hornet's nest, fur-
nishing the interior to suit his taste. A few of our
birds also avail themselves of the work of others, as
the titmouse, the brown creeper, the bluebird, and
the house wren. But in every case they refurnish
the tenement: the wren carries feathers into the cav-
ity excavated by the woodpeckers, the bluebird car
ries in fine straws, and the chickadee lays down a
fine wool mat upon the floors. When the high-hole
occupies the same cavity another year, he deepens
and enlarges it ; the phoebe-bird in taking up her old
nest puts in a new lining ; so does the robin ; but
cases of reoccupancy of an old nest by the last named
birds are rare.

A BOLD LEAPER.

ONE reason, doubtless, why squirrels are so bold
and reckless in leaping through the trees is, that if
they miss their hold and fall they sustain no injury.
Every species of tree-squirrel seems to be capable of
a sort of rudimentary flying, — at least of making
itself into a parachute, so as to ease or break a fall
or a leap from a great height. The so-called flying-
squirrel does this the most perfectly. It opens its
furry vestments, leaps into the air, and sails down
the steep incline from the top of one tree to the foot
•)f the next as lightly as a bird. But other squirreli

NOTES BY THE WAY. 175

know the same trick, only their coat-skirts are not
BO broad. One day my dog treed a red squirrel, in a
tall hickory that stood in a meadow on the side of a
steep hill. To see what the squirrel would do when
closely pressed, I climbed the tree. As I drew near
he took refuge in the topmost branch, and then, as I
came on, he boldly leaped into the air, spread himself
out upon it, and, with a quick, tremulous motion oi
his tail and legs, descended quite slowly and landed
upon the ground thirty feet below me, apparently
none the worse for the leap, for he ran with great
speed and escaped the dog in another tree.

A recent American traveler in Mexico gives a still
more striking instance of this power of squirrels par-
tially to neutralize the force of gravity when leaping
or falling through the air. Some boys had caught
a Mexican black squirrel, nearly as large as a cat.
It had escaped from them once, and, when pursued,
had taken a leap of sixty feet, from the top of a pine-
tree down upon the roof of a house, without injury.
This feat had led the grandmother of one of the
boys to declare that the squirrel was bewitched, and
the boys proposed to put the matter to further test
by throwing the squirrel down a precipice six hun-
dred feet high. Our traveler interfered, to see that
the squirrel had fair play. The prisoner was con-
veyed in a pillow-slip to the edge of the cliff, and
the slip opened, so that he might have his choice,
whether to remain a captive or to take the leap. He
tooked down the awful abj'ss, and then back and

176 NOTES BY THE WAY.

sidewise, — his eyes glistening, his form crouching
Seeing no escape in any other direction, " he took a
flying leap into space, and fluttered rather than fell
into the abyss below. His legs began to work like
those of a swimming poodle-dog, but quicker and
quicker, while his tail, slightly elevated, spread out
like a feather fan. A rabbit of the same weight
would have made the trip in about twelve seconds ;
the squirrel protracted it for more than half a min-
ute/' and " landed on a ledge of limestone, where
we could see him plainly squat on his hind legs and
smooth his ruffled fur, after which he made for the
creek with a flourish of his tail, took a good drink,
and scampered away into the willow thicket."

The story at first blush seems incredible, but I
have no doubt our red squirrel would have made the
leap safely ; then why not the great black squirrel,
since its parachute would be proportionately large ?

The tails of the squirrels are broad and long and
flat, not short and small like those of gophers, chip-
munks, woodchucks, and other ground rodents, and
when they leap or fall through the air the tail is
arched and rapidly vibrates. A squirrel's tail, there-
fore, is something more than ornament, something
•nore than a flag ; it not only aids him in flying, but
it serves as a cloak, which he wraps about him when
he sleeps. Thus, some animals put their tails to
various uses, while others seem to have no use for
them whatever. What use for a tail has a wood-
chuck, or a weasel, or a mouse? Has not the mouse

NOTES BY THE WAY. 177

yet learned that it could get in its hole sooner if it
had no tail ? The mole and the meadow mouse
have very short tails. Rats, no doubt, put their
tails to various uses. The rabbit has no use for
a tail — it would be in its way ; while its manner
of sleeping is such that it does not need a tail to tuck
itself up with, as do the 'coon and the fox. The dog
talks with his tail ; the tail of the 'possum is pre-
hensile; the porcupine uses his tail in climbing and
for defense ; the beaver as a tool or trowel ; while
the tail of the skunk serves as a screen behind which
it masks its terrible battery.

THE WOODCHUCK.

WRITERS upon rural England and her familiar
natural history make no mention of the marmot or
woodchuck. In Europe this animal seems to be con-
fined to the high mountainous districts, as on our
Pacific slope, burrowing near the snow line. It is
more social or gregarious than the American spe-
cies, living in large families like our prairie dog. In
the Middle and Eastern States our woodchuck takes
the place, in some respects, of the English rabbit,
burrowing in every hill-side and under every stone
wall and jutting ledge and large bowlder, from whence
it makes raids upon the grass and clover and some-
times upon the garden vegetables. It is quite soli
12

178 NOTES BY THE WAY.

tary in its habits, seldom more than one inhabiting
the same den, unless it be a mother and her young
It is not now so much a wood chuck as & field chuck.
Occasionally, however, one seems to prefer the woods,
and is not seduced by the sunny slopes and the suc-
culent grass, but feeds, as did his fathers before him,
upon roots and twigs, the bark of young trees, and
upon various wood plants.

One summer day, as I was swimming across a
broad, deep pool in the creek in a secluded place in
the woods, I saw one of these sylvan chucks amid the
rocks but a few feet from the edge of the water
where I proposed to touch. He saw my approach,
but doubtless took me for some water-fowl, or for
some cousin of his of the musk-rat tribe ; for he went
on with his feeding, and regarded me not till I paused
within -ten feet of him and lifted myself up. Then
he did not know me, having, perhaps, never seen
Adam in his simplicity, but he twisted his nose
around to catch my scent ; and the moment he had
clone so he sprang like a jumping-jack and rushed
into his den with the utmost precipitation.

The woodchuck is the true serf among our animals
he belongs to the soil, and savors of it. He is of the
earth, earthy. There is generally a decided odor
about his dens and lurking places, but it is not at all
disagreeable in the clover-scented air, and his shrill
whistle, as he takes to his hole or defies the farm dog
from the interior of the stone wall, is a pleasant sum-
mer sound. In form and movement the woodchuck

NOTES BY THE WAY. 179

t« not captivating. His body is heavy and flabby.
Indeed, such a flaccid, fluid, pouchy carcass, I have
never before seen. It has absolutely no muscular
tension or rigidity, but is as baggy and shaky as a
skin filled with water. Let the rifleman shoot one
while it lies basking on a sideling rock, and its body
slumps off, and rolls and spills down the hill, as if it
were a mass of bowels only. The legs of the wood-
chuck are short and stout, and made for digging
rather than running. The latter operation he per-
forms by short leaps, his belly scarcely clearing the
ground. For a short distance he can make very good
time, but he seldom trusts himself far from his hole,
and, when surprised in that predicament, makes little
effort to escape, but, grating his teeth, looks the dan-
ger squarely in the face.

I knew a farmer in New York who had a very
large bob-tailed churn-dog by the name of Cuff. The
farmer kept a large dairy and made a great deal of
butter, and it was the business of Cuff to spend
nearly the half of each summer day treading the end-
less round of the churning-machine. During the re-

o o

mainder of the da^he had plenty of time to sleep,
and rest, and sit on his hips and survey the landscape.
One day, sitting thus, he discovered a woodchuck
about forty rods from the house, on a steep side-hill,
feeding about near his hole, which was beneath a
large rock. The old dog, forgetting his stiffness, and
"emembering the fun he had had with woodchucks in
his earlier days, started off at his highest speed

180 NOTES BY THE WAY.

vainly hop! rig to catch this one before he could get to
his hole. But the woodchuck, seeing the dog come
laboring up the hill, sprang to the mouth of his den,
and, when his pursuer was only a few rods off, whis-
tled tauntingly and went in. This occurred several
times, the old dog marching up the hill, and then
marching down again, having had his labor for his
pains. I suspect that he revolved the subject in his
mind while he revolved the great wheel of the churn-
ing-machine, and that some turn or other brought
him a happy thought, for next time he showed him-
self a strategist. Instead of giving chase to the wood-
chuck, when first discovered, he crouched down to the
ground, and, resting his head on his paws, watched
him. The woodchuck kept working away from his
hole, lured by the tender clover, but, not unmindful
of his safety, lifted himself up on his haunches every
few moments and surveyed the approaches. Pres
ently, after the woodchuck had let himself down from
one of these attitudes of observation, and resumed his
feeding, Cuff started swiftly but stealthily up the hill,
precisely in the attitude of a cat when she is stalking
a bird. When the woodchuck |j)se up again Cuff
was perfectly motionless and half hid by the grass.
When he again resumed his clover, Cuff sped up the
hill as before, this time crossing a fence, but in a
low place, and so nimbly that he was not discovered.
Again the woodchuck was on the outlook, again Cuff
was motionless and hugging the ground. As the dog
bears his victim he is partially hidden by a swell ir

NOTES BY THE WAY. 181

fche earth, but still the woodchuck from his outlook
reports " all right," when Cuff, having not twice as
far to run as the 'chuck, throws all stealthiness aside
and rushes directly for the hole. At that moment
the woodchuck discovers his danger, and, seeing that
it is a race for life, leaps as I never saw marmot leap
before. But he is two seconds too late, his retreat is
cut off, and the powerful jaws of the old dog close
upon him.

The next season Cuff tried the same tactics again
with like success, but, when the third woodchuck had
taken up his abode at the fatal hole, the old churner's
wits and strength had begun to fail him, and he was
baffled in each attempt to capture the animal.

The woodchuck always burrows on a side-hill
This enables him to guard against being drowned
out, by making the termination of the hole higher
than the entrance. He digs in slantingly for about
two or three feet, then makes a sharp upward tun)
and keeps nearly parallel with the surface of the
ground for a distance of eight or ten feet farther, ac-
cording to the grade. Here he makes his nest and
passes the winter, holing up in October or November
and coming out again in April.- This is a long sleep,
and is rendered possible only by the amount of fat
with which the system has become stored during the
summer. The fire of life still burns, but very faintly
tnd slowly, as with the draughts all closed and the
\shes heaped up. Respiration is continued, out at
'onger intervals, and all the vital processes are nearly

182 NOTES BY THE WAY.

at a stand-still. Dig one out during hibernation
(Audubon did so), and you find it a mere inanimate
ball, that suffers itself to be moved and rolled about
without showing signs of awakening. But bring it
in by the fire, and it presently unrolls and opens its
eyes, and crawls feebly about, and if left to itself will
Beek some dark hole or corner, roll itself up again,
and resume its former condition.

A GOOD . SEASON FOR THE BIRDS.

THE season of 1880 seems to have been excep-
tionally favorable to the birds. The warm early
spring, the absence of April snows and of long, cold
rains in May and June, — indeed, the exceptional
heat and dryness of these months, and the freedom
from violent storms and tempests throughout the
summer, — all worked together for the good of the
birds. Their nests were not broken up or torn from
the trees, nor their young chilled and destroyed by
the. wet and the cold. The drenching, protracted
•ains that make the farmer's seed rot or lie dormant
in the ground in May or June, and the summer
tempests that uproot the trees or cause them to lash
and bruise their foliage, always bring disaster to the
birds. As a result of our immunity from these
things the past season, the small birds in the fai
were perhaps never more abundant. Indeed, I iievet

NOTES BY THE WAY. 183

remember to have seen so many of certain kinds
notably the social and the bush sparrows. The latter
literally swarmed in the fields and vineyards, and as
it happened that for the first time a large number of
grapes were destroyed by birds, the little sparrow, in
some localities, was accused of being the depredator.
But he is innocent. He never touches fruit of any
kind, but lives upon seeds and insects. What at-
tracted this sparrow to the vineyards in such num-
bers was mainly the covert they afforded from small
hawks, and probably also the seeds of various weeds
that had been allowed to ripen there. The grape-
destroyer was a bird of another color, namely, the
Baltimore oriole. One fruit-grower on the Hudson
told me he lost at least a ton of grapes by the birds,
and in the western part of New York and in Ohio
and in Canada, I hear the vineyards suffered se-
verely from the depredations of the oriole. The
oriole has a sharp, dagger-like bill, and he seems
to be learning rapidly how easily he can puncture
iruit with it. He has come to be about the worst
cherry bird we have. He takes the worm first, and
then he takes the cherry the worm was after, or
pather he bleeds it ; as with the grapes, he carries
none away with him, but wounds them all. He is
welcome to all the fruit he can eat, but why should
he murder every cherry on the tree, or every grape
n the cluster ? He is as wanton as a sheep-killing
£og, that will not stop with enough, but slaughters
•tvery ewe in the flock. The oriole is peculiarly ex

184 NOTES BY THE WAY.

erapt from the dangers that beset most of our birds
its nest is all but impervious to the rain, and the squir
rel or the jay or the crow cannot rob it without great
difficulty. It is a pocket which it would not be
prudent for either jay or squirrel to attempt to ex-
plore, when the owner, with his dagger-like beak,
was about; and the crow cannot alight upon the
slender, swaying branch from which it is usually
pendent. Hence the orioles are doubtless greatly on
the increase.

There has been an unusual number of shrikes the
past fall and winter ; like the hawks, they follow in
the wake of the little birds and prey upon them. Some
seasons pass and I never see a shrike. This year I
have seen at least a dozen while passing along the
road. One day I saw one carrying its prey in its
feet — a performance which I supposed it incapable
of, as it is not equipped for this business like a rapa-
cious bird, but has feet like a robin. One wintry
evening, near sunset, I saw one alight on the top of
a tree by the road-side, with some small object in it?
beak. I paused to observe it. Presently it flew
iown into a scrubby old apple-tree, and attempted to
kmpale the object upon a thorn or twig. It was oc-
cupied in this way some moments, no twig or knob
proving quite satisfactory. A little screech-owl was
Evidently watching the proceedings from his door-
vay, in the trunk of a decayed apple-tree ten or a
dozen rods distant. Twilight was just falling, and
the owl had come up from his snug retreat in th«

NOTES BY THE WAY. 185

hollow trunk and was waiting for the darkness to
deepen before venturing forth. I was first advised
of his presence by seeing him approaching swiftly on
silent, level wing. The shrike did not see him till

' O

the owl was almost within the branches. He then
dropped his game, which proved to be a part of a
shrew-mouse, and darted back into the thick cover,
uttering a loud, discordant squawk, as one would sayy
" Scat ! scat ! scat ! " The owl alighted, and was,
perhaps, looking about him for the shrike's impaled
game, when I drew near. On seeing me he reversed
his movement precipitately, flew straight back to the
old tree, and alighted in the entrance to the cavity.
As I approached, he did not so much seem to move
as to diminish in size, like an object dwindling in the
distance; he depressed his plumage, and, with his eye
fixed upon me, began slowly to back and sidle into
his retreat till he faded from my sight. The shrike
wiped his beak upon the branches, cast an eye down
at me and at his lost mouse, and then flew away. He
was a remarkably fine specimen, — his breast and un-
der parts as white as snow, and his coat of black
and ashen gray appearing very bright and fresh. A
few nights afterward, as I passed that way, I saw
rhe little owl again sitting in his door-way, waiting
*or the twilight to deepen, and undisturbed by the
passers-by ; but when I paused to observe him, he
law that he was discovered and he slunk back into
ois den as on the former occasion.

186 NOTES BY THE WAY.

SHAKESPEARE'S NATURAL HISTORY.

IT is surprising that so profuse and prodigal a poet
as Shakespeare, and one so bold in his dealings with
human nature, should seldom or never make a mis-
take in his dealings with physical nature, or take an
unwarranted liberty with her. True it is that his al-
lusions to nature are always incidental — never his
main purpose or theme, as with many later poets ;
yet his accuracy and closeness to fact, and his wide
and various knowledge of unbookish things, are seen
in his light "touch and go" phrases and compari-
sons as clearly as in his more deliberate and central
work.

In " Much Ado about Nothing," Benedick says to
Margaret : —

" Thy wit is as quick as the greyhound's mouth — it catches."

One marked difference between the greyhound and
all other hounds and dogs is, that it can pick up its
game while running at full speed, a feat that no other
dog can do. The fox-hound, or farm-dog, will run
over a fox or a rabbit many times without being able
to seize it.

In " Twelfth Night," the clown tells Viola that

" Fools are as like husbands as pilchards are to herrings — th|
husband 's the bigger."

The pilchard closely resembles the herring, but if
thicker and heavier, with larger scales.

NOTES BY THE WAT. 187

In the 'same play, Maria, seeing Malvolio coming,
lays : —

"Here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling."

Shakespeare, then, knew that fact so well known to
poachers, and known also to many an American
school-boy, namely, that a trout likes to be tickled,
or behaves as if he did, arid that by gently tickling
his sides and belly you can so mesmerize him, as it
were, that he will allow you to get your hands in
position to clasp him firmly. The British poacher
takes the jack by the same tactics ; he tickles the
jack on the belly ; the fish slowly rises in the water
till it comes near the surface, when the poacher hav-
ing insinuated both hands under him, he is suddenly
scooped out and thrown upon the land.

Indeed, Shakespeare seems to have known inti-
mately the ways and habits of most of the wild creat-
ures of Britain. He had the kind of knowledge of
them that only the countryman has. In "As You
Like It," Jaques tells Amiens : —

" I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs."
Eveiy gamekeeper, and every farmer, for that matter,
knows how destructive the weasel and its kind are to
birds' eggs, and to the eggs of game birds and of do-
mestic fowls.

In " Love's Labor Js Lost," Biron says of Boyet :—

" This fellow picks up wit as pigeons peas."
Pigeons do not pick up peas in this country, but they
io in England, and are often very damaging to the

188 NOTES BY THE WAY.

farmer on that account. Shakespeare knew also the
peculiar mariner in which they fed their young — a
manner that has perhaps given rise to the expression
" sucking dove." In " As You Like It " is this pas-

" Celia. Here comes Monsieur Le Bean.

" Rosalind. With his mouth full of news.

" Celia. Which he will put on us as pigeons feed their young.

"Rosalind. Then shall we be news-crammed."

When the mother pigeon feeds her young she brings
the food, not in her beak like other birds, but in her
crop ; she places her beak between the open mandi-
bles of her young, and fairly crams the food, which
is delivered by a peculiar pumping movement, down
its throat. She furnishes a capital illustration of the
eager, persistent news-monger.

" Out of their burrows like rabbits after rain " is
a comparison that occurs in " Coriolanus." In our
Northern or New England States we should have to
substitute woodchucks for rabbits, as our rabbits do
not burrow but sit all day in their forms under a
kjush or amid the weeds, and as they are not seen
moving about after a rain, or at all by day ; but in
England Shakespeare's line is exactly descriptive.

Says Bottom to the fairy Cobweb, in " Midsummei
Night's Dream " : —

"Monsieur Cobweb; good monsieur, get your weapons in you,
:and, and kill me a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle
ind, good monsieur, bring me the honey-bagr."

This command might be executed in this country, foi

NOTES BY THE WAY. 189

we have the " red-hipped humble-bee," and we have
the thistle, and there is no more likely place to look
for the humble-bee in midsummer than on a thistle-
blossom.

But the following picture of a "wet spell" is more
English than American : —

" The ox hath therefore stretch' d his yoke in vain,
The plowman lost his sweat ; and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrain flock."

Shakespeare knew the birds and wild fowl, and
knew them perhaps as a hunter, as well as a poet.
At least this passage would indicate as much : —

" As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye,
Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort,
Rising and cawing at the gun's report,
Sever themselves and madly sweep the sky."

IL illing the choughs " russet-pated," he makes the
bill inge the whole head, or perhaps gives the effect
of the birds' markings when seen at a distance ; the
bill is red, the head is black. The chough is a spe-
uies of crow.

A poet must know the birds well to make one of
Lis characters say, when he had underestimated a
man, " I took this lark for a bunting," as Lafeu says
of Parolles in " All 'a Well that Ends Well." The
English bunting (JEJmberiza miliaria) is a field bird
ike the lark, and much resembles the latter in form
»nd color, but is far inferior as a songster. Indeed,

190 NOTES BY THE WAY.

Shakespeare shows his familiarity with nearly all the
British birds.

" The ousel-cock, so black of hue,

With orange-tawny bill,
The throstle with his note so true,
The wren with little quill."

" The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,

The plain-song cuckoo gray,
Whose note full many a man doth mark,
And dares not answer nay."

In " Much Ado about Nothing " we get a glimpse
of the lapwing : —

*' For look where Beatrice, like a lapwing, runs
Close by the ground, to hear our conference."

The lapwing is a kind of plover, and is very swift of
foot. When trying to avoid being seen they run rap-
idly with depressed heads, or "close by the ground,"
as the poet puts it. In the same scene, Hero says of
Ursula : —

" I know her spirits are as coy and wild
As haggards of the rock.'*

The haggard falcon (Falco peregrinus) is a species of
hawk found in North Wales and in Scotland. It
breeds on high shelving cliffs and precipitous rocks.
Had Shakespeare been an " amateur poacher " in his
youth ? He had a poacher's knowledge of the wild
creatures. He knew how fresh the snake appeared
after it had cast its skin ; how the hedgehog makes
himself up into a ball and leaves his " prickles " in
whatever touches him ; how the butterflv came front

NOTES BY THE WAY. 191

ihe grub ; how the fox carries the goose ; where the
squirrel hides his store ; where the* martlet builds its
nest, etc.

"Now is the woodcock near the gin,"
Bays Fabian, in « Twelfth Night," and

" Stalk on, stalk on ; the fowl sits,"
says Olaudio to Leonato, in " Much Ado."

" Instruct thee how
To snare the nimble marmozet,"

says Caliban, in " The Tempest." Sings the fool in
"Lear": —

"The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long
That it had its head bit off by its young.'*

The hedge-sparrow is one of the favorite birds upon
which the European cuckoo imposes the rearing of
its young. If Shakespeare had made the house-spar-
row, or the blackbird, or the bunting, or any of the
graniferous, hard-billed birds, the foster-parent of the
cuckoo, his natural history would have been at fault.
Shakespeare knew the flowers, too, and knew their
times and seasons : —

"When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,
Do paint the meadows with delight."

They have, in England, the cuckoo-flower, which
comes in April and is lilac in color, and the cuckoo-
pint, which is much .ike our " Jack in the pulpit " •
but the poet does not refer to either of these (if h%.

NOTES BY THE WAY.

did we would catch him tripping), but to butter-cups,
tvhich are called By rural folk in Britain " cuckoo-
buds."

In England the daffodil blooms in February and
March ; the swallow comes in April usually ; hence
the truth of Shakespeare's lines : —

"Daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty."

The only flaw I notice in Shakespeare's natural
history is in his treatment of the honey-bee, but this
was a flaw in the knowledge of the times as well.
The history of this insect was not rightly read till
long after Shakespeare wrote. He pictures a colony
of bees as a kingdom, with

" A king and officers of sorts,"

(see " Henry V."), whereas a colony of bees is an
absolute democracy ; the rulers and governors and
" officers of sorts " are the workers, the masses, the
common people. A strict regard to fact also would
spoil those fairy tapers in " Midsummer Night's
Dream," —

"The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees,
And, for night-tapers, crop their waxen thighs,
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes," —

since it is not wax that bees bear upon their thighs,
but pollen, the dust of the flowers, with which beef
make their bread. Wax is made from honey.

NOTES BY THE WAY. 193

The science or the meaning is also a little obscure
in this phrase, which occurs in one of the plays : —

" One heat another heat expels " —

as one nail drives out another, or as one love cures
another.

In a passage in " The Tempest," he speaks of the
ivy as if it were parasitical, like the mistletoe : —

"Now, he was

The ivy which had hid my princely trunk,
And sucked my verdure out on't."

I believe it is not a fact that the ivy sucks the juice
out of the trees it climbs upon, though it may much
jiterfere with their growth. Its aerial rootlets are
for support alone, as in the case with all climbers
that are not twiners. But this may perhaps be re-
garded as only a poetic license on the part of Shakes-
peare ; the human ivy he was picturing no doubt fed
upon the tree that supported it, whether the real ivy
does or not.

It is also probably untrue that

. " The poor beetle that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies/'

though it has suited the purpose of other poets be-
sides Shakespeare to say so. The higher and more
complex the organization the more acute the pleasure
and the pain. A toad has been known to live for
^ays with the upper part of its head cut away by a
scythe, and a beetle will survive for hours upon the

13

194 NOTES BY THE WAY.

fisherman's hook. It, perhaps, causes a grasshopper
less pain to detach one of its legs than it does a
man to remove a single hair from his beard. Nerves
alone feel pain, and the nervous system of a beetle is
a very rudimentary affair.

In " Coriolanus " there is a comparison which im-
plies that a man can tread upon his own shadow —
a dift*cult feat in northern countries at all times ex-
cept ,*»t midday ; Shakespeare is particular to mention

the t <ue of day : —

u Such a nature,

Tickled with good success, disdains the shadow
Which he treads on at noon "

FOOT-PATH&

FOOT-PATHS.

AN intelligent English woman, spending a few
years in this country with her family, says that one
of her serious disappointments is that she finds it
utterly impossible to enjoy nature here as she can
at home ; so much nature as we have and yet no
way of getting at it ; no paths, or by-ways, or stiles,
or foot-bridges, no provision for the pedestrian out-
side of the public road. One would think the peo-
ple had no feet and legs in this country, or else did
not know how to use them. Last summer she spent
the season near a small rural village in the valley
of the Connecticut, but it seemed as if she had not
been in the country ; she could not come at the
landscape, she could not reach a wood or a hill or a
oretty nook anywhere without being a trespasser, or
getting entangled in swamps or in fields of grass and
grain, or having her course blocked by a high and
difficult fence ; no private ways, no grassy lanes, no-
jody walking in the fields or woods, nobody walking
anywhere for pleasure, but everybody in carriages or
wagons.

She was stopping a mile from the village and
every day used to wa/k down to the post-office fo

198 FOOT-PATHS.

her mail ; but instead of a short and pleasant cut
across the fields, as there would have been in Eng-
land, she was obliged to take the highway and face
the dust and the mud and the staring people in their
carriages.

She complained, also, of the absence of bird voices
— so silent the fields and groves and orchards wero
compared with what she had been used to at home
The most noticeable midsummer sound everywhere
was the shrill, brassy crescendo of the locust.

All this is unquestionably true. There is far less
bird music here than in England, except possibly in
May and June, though if the first impressions of the
Duke of Argyle are to be trusted, there is much less
even then. The duke says : " Although I was in
the woods and fields of Canada and of the States in
the richest moments of the spring, I heard little
of that burst of song which in England comes from
the blackcap and the garden warbler, and the white-
throat, and the reed warbler, and the common wren,
and (locally) from the nightingale." Our birds are
more withdrawn than the English, and their notes
more plaintive and intermittent. Yet there are a
few days here early in May, when the house-wren,
the oriole, the orchard starling, the kingbird, the
oobolink, and the wood-thrush, first arrive, that are
BO full of music, especially in the morning, that one
is loath to believe there is anything fuller or finer
even in England. As walkers and lovers of rural
scenes and pastimes we do not approach our British

FOOT-PATHS. 199

cousins. It is a seven days' wonder to see anybody
walking in this country except on a wager or in a
public hall or skating-rink, as an exhibition and trial
of endurance.

Countrymen do not walk except from necessity
and country women walk far less than their city sis-
ters. When city people come to the country they do
not walk, because that would be conceding too much
to the country; beside, they would soil their shoes
and would lose the awe and respect which their im-
posing turn-outs inspire. Then they find the country
dull ; it is like water or milk after champagne ; they
miss the accustomed stimulus, both mind and body
relax, and walking is too great an effort.

There are several obvious reasons why the English
should be better or more habitual walkers than we
are. Taken the year round, their climate is much
more favorable to exercise in the open air. Their
^oads are better, harder, and smoother, and there is a
place for the man and a place for the horse. There
country-houses and churches and villages are not
strung upon the highway as they are with us, but are
nestled here and there with reference to other things
than convenience in " getting out." Hence the grassy
lanes and paths through the fields.

Distances are not so great in that country; the
population occupies less space. Again, the land has
been longer occupied and is more thoroughly sub-
dued; it is easier to get about the fields; life haj
dowed in the same channels for centuries. The Eng

200 FOOT-PATHS.

lish landscape is like a park, and is so thoroughly ru-
ral and mellow and bosky that the temptation to walk
amid its scenes is ever present to one. In compari-
son, nature here is rude, raw, and forbidding; has no:
that maternal and beneficent look, is less mindful of
man, runs to briers and weeds or to naked sterility.

Then, as a people the English are a private, do-
mestic, homely folk, they dislike publicity, dislike the
highway, dislike noise, and love to feel the grass
under their feet. They have a genius for lanes and
foot-paths ; one might almost say they invented them.
The charm of them is in their books ; their rural
poetry is modeled upon them. How much of Words-
worth's poetry is the poetry of pedestrianism ! A
foot-path is sacred in England ; the king himself can-
not close one ; the courts recognize them as some-
thing quite as important and inviolable as the high-
way.

A foot-path is of slow growth, and it is a wild flhy
thing that is easily scared away. The plow must re-
spect it, and the fence or hedge make way for it. It
requires a settled state of things, unchanging habits
among the people, and long tenure of the land ; the
rill of life that finds its way there must have a peren-
nial source and flow there to-morrow and the next
day and the next century.

When I was a youth and went to school with my
brothers we had a foot-path a mile long. On going
from home after leaving the highway there was a de-
scent through a meadow, then through a large mapla

FOOT-PATHS. 201

and beech wood, then through a long stretch of rather
barren pasture land which brought us to the creek in
the valley, which we crossed on a slab or a couple of
rails from the near fence ; then more meadow land
with a neglected orchard, and then the little gray
school-house itself toeing the highway. In winter
our course was a hard, beaten path in the snow vis-
ible from afar, and in summer a well-defined trail.
In the woods it wore the roots of the trees. It
steered for the gaps or low places in the fences, and
avoided the bogs and swamps in the meadow. I
can recall yet the very look, the very physiognomy
of a large birch-tree that stood beside it in the midst
of the woods; it sometimes tripped me up with a
large root it sent out like a foot. Neither do I for-
get the little spring run near by where we frequently
paused to drink, and gathered " crinkle " root (Den-
tana) in the early summer, nor the dilapidated log
fence that was the highway of the squirrels, nor the
ledges to one side from whence in early spring the
skunk and 'coon sallied forth and crossed our path,
nor the gray, scabby rocks in the pasture, nor the
solitary tree, nor the old weather-worn stump ; no,
nor the creek in which I plunged one winter morning
,n attempting to leap its swollen current. But the
path served only one generation of school children ;
it faded out more than thirty years ago, and the feet
that made it are widely scattered, while some of them
have found the path that leads through the Valley
of the Shadow. Almost the last words of one of thesi

202 FOOT-PATHS.

school-boys, then a man grown, seemed as if he might
have had this very path in mind and thought him-
self again returning to his father's house : " I must
hurry," he said, " I have a long way to go up a hill
and through a dark wood, and it will soon be night."

We are a famous people to go " cross lots," but we
do not make a path, or, if we do, it does not last ; the
scene changes, the currents set in other directions, or
cease entirely, and the path vanishes. In the South
one would find plenty of bridle paths, for there
everybody goes horseback, and there are few pass-
able roads ; and the hunters and lumbermen of the
North have their trails through the forest following %
line of blazed trees ; but in all my acquaintance with
the country, — the rural and agricultural sections, —
I do not know a pleasant, inviting path leading from
house to house, or from settlement to settlement, by
which the pedestrian could shorten or enliven a jour-
ney or add the charm of the seclusion of the fields
to his walk.

What a contrast England presents in this respect,
according to Mr. Jennings's pleasant book, " Field
Paths and Green Lanes." The pedestrian may go
about quite independent of the highway. Here is a
glimpse from his pages : " A path across the field,
seen irom the station, leads into a road close by the
Todge gate of Mr. Cubett's house. A little beyond
.his gate is another and smaller one, from which a
narrow path ascends straight to the top of the hill
and comes out just opposite the post-office on Ran

FOOT-PATHS. 203

more Common. The Common at another point may
be reached by a shorter cut. After entering a path
close by the lodge, open the first gate you come to
on the right hand. Cross the road, go through the
gate opposite and either follow the road right out
upon Ranmore Common, past the beautiful deep dell
or ravine, or take a path which you will see on your
left, a few yards from the gate. This winds through
a very pretty wood, with glimpses of the valley here
and there on the way, and eventually brings you out
upon the carriage-drive to the house. Turn to the
right and you will soon find yourself upon the Com-
mon. A road or path opens out in front of the up-
per lodge gate. Follow that and it will take you to
a small piece of water from whence a green path
strikes off to the right, and this will lead you all
across the Common in a northerly direction," etc.
Thus we may see how the country is threaded with
paths. A later writer, the author of " The Game-
keeper at Home " and other books, says : " Those
only know a country who are acquainted with itp
foot-paths. By the roads, indeed, the outside r^ay
oe seen ; but the foot-paths go through the heart of
the land. There are routes by which mile after mile
may be traveled without leaving the sward. So you
may pass from village to village ; now crossing green
meadows, now corn-fields, over brooks, past woods,
through farm-yard and rick < barken.' "

The conditions of life in this country have not
been favorable to the development of by-ways. W*

204 TOOT-PATHS.

do not take to lanes and to the seclusion of the fields,
We love to be upon the road, and to plant our
houses there, and to appear there mounted upon a
horse or seated in a wagon. It is to be distinctly
stated, however, that our public highways, with their
breadth and amplitude, their wide grassy margins,
their picturesque stone or rail fences, their outlooks,
and their general free and easy character, are far
more inviting to the pedestrian than the narrow lanes
and trenches that English highways for the most
part are. The road in England is always well kept,
the road-bed is often like a rock, but the traveler's
view is shut in by high hedges, and very frequently
he seems to be passing along a deep, nicely-graded
ditch. The open, broad landscape character of our
highways is quite unknown in that country.

The absence of the paths and lanes is not so great
a matter, but the decay of the simplicity of manners
and of the habits of pedestriauism which this absence
implies is what I lament. The devil is in the horse
to make men proud and fast and ill-mannered ; only
when you go afoot do you grow in the grace of gen-
tleness and humility. But no good can come out of
this walking mania that is now sweeping over the
country, simply because it is a mania and not a nat-
ural and wholesome impulse. It is a prostitution of
'.he noble pastime.

It is not the walking merely, it is keeping yourself
ui tune for a walk, in the spiritual and bodily condi-
tion in which you can find entertainment and exhila-

FOOT-PATHS. 205

ration in so simple and natural a pastime. You are
eligible to any good fortune when you are in the
condition to enjoy a walk. When the air and water
tastes sweet to you, how much else will taste sweet !
When the exercise of your limbs affords you pleasure^
and the play of your senses upon the various objects
and shows of nature quickens and stimulates your
spirit, your relation to the world and to yourself is
what it should be — simple and direct and whole-
some. The mood in which you set out on a spring
or autumn ramble or a sturdy winter walk, and your
greedy feet have to be restrained from devouring
the distances too fast, is the mood in which your best
thoughts and impulses come to you, or in which you
might embark upon any noble and heroic enterprise.
Life is sweet in such moods, the universe is complete,
and there is no failure or imperfection anywhere.

A BUNCH OF HERBS

A BUNCH OF HERBS.

FRAGRANT WILD FLOWERS

THE charge that was long ago made against OUT
wild flowers by English travelers in this country,
namely, that they were odorless, doubtless had its
origin in the fact, that, whereas in England the
sweet-scented flowers are among the most common
and conspicuous, in this country they are rather shy
and withdrawn, and consequently not such as trav-
elers would be likely to encounter. Moreover, the
British traveler, remembering, the deliciously fragrant
blue violets he left at home, covering every grassy
slope and meadow-bank in spring, and the wild clem-
atis, or traveler's joy, overrunning hedges and old
walls with its white, sweet-scented blossoms ; and
finding the corresponding species here, equally abun-
dant, but entirely scentless, very naturally inferred
that our wild flowers were all deficient in this respect
He would be confirmed in this opinion, when, on
turning to some of our most beautiful and striking
native flowers, like the laurel, the rhododendron, the
columbine, the inimitable fringed gentian, the burn-
ing cardinal -flower, or our asters and golden-rod,
14

210 A BUNCH OF HERBS.

dashing the road-sides with tints of purple and gold,
he found them scentless also. " Where are your fra-
grant flowers ? " he might well say. " I can find none."
Let him look closer and penetrate our forests, and
visit our ponds and lakes. Let him compare our
matchless, rosy-lipped, honey-hearted trailing arbutus
with his own ugly ground-ivy (Nepeta Glechoma) ; let
him compare our sumptuous fragrant pond-lily with
his own odorless N. alba. In our Northern woods
he shall find the floors carpeted with the delicate
Linnaea, its twin rose-colored, nodding flowers filling
the air with fragrance. (I am aware that the Linnaea
is found in some parts of Northern Europe.) The
fact is, we perhaps have as many sweet-scented wild
flowers as Europe has, only they are not quite so
prominent in our flora, and so well known to our
people or to our poets.

Think of Wordsworth's " Golden Daffodils " : —

"I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When, all at once, I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

" Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay.
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance."

No such sight could greet the poet's eye here

A BUNCH OF HERBS. 211

He might see ten thousand marsh marigolds, or ten
times ten thousand Houstonias, but they would not
toss in the breeze, and they would not be sweet-
scented like the daffodils.

It is to be remembered, too, that in the moister
atmosphere of England the same amount of fragrance
would be much more noticeable than with us. Think
how our sweet bay (Magnolia glaucd), or our pink
azalea, or our white alder (Cflethra), to which they
have nothing that corresponds, would perfume that
heavy, vapor-laden air.

In the woods and groves in England, the wild
hyacinth grows very abundantly in spring, and, in
places, the air is loaded with its fragrance. In our
woods, a species of dicentra, commonly called squirrel
corn, has nearly the same perfume, and its racemes
Df nodding whitish flowers, tinged with red, are quite
as pleasing to the eye, but it is a shyer, less abundant
plant. When our children go to the fields in April
and May, they can bring home no wild flowers as
pleasing as the sweet English violet, and cowslip, and
yellow daffodil, and wall-flower ; and, when British
children go to the woods at the same season, they can
load their hands and baskets with nothing that com-
pares with our trailing arbutus, or, later in the season,
with our azaleas ; and, when their boys go fishing or
boating in summer, they can wreathe themselves with
nothing that approaches our pond-lily.

There are upward of thirty species of fragrant
Dative wild flowers and flowering shrubs and trees Ji

212 A BUNCH OF HERBS.

New England and New York, and, no doubt, many
more in the South and West. My list is as fol
lows —

White violet ( Viola blanda).
Canada violet ( Viola Canadensis).
Hepatica (occasionally fragrant).
Trailing arbutus (Epiycea repens).
Mandrake (Podophyllum).
Yellow lady's -slipper (C. parviflorum).
Purple lady' s-slipper (C. acaule).
Squirrel corn (Dicentra Canadensii).
Showy orchis (0. spectabilis.)
Purple-fringed orchis (P. psycodes).
Arethusa (A. bulbora).
Calopogon ( C. pulchellus).
Lady's-tresses (Spiranthes Cernum).
Pond-lily (N. odorata).
Honeysuckle (Lonicera grata}.
Twin-flower (Linnaa borealis).
Sugar-maple (Acer saccharinum)
Linden (Tilia Americana).
Locust-tree (R. pseudacacia).
White alder (Clethra).
Smooth azalea (A. arborescent).
White azalea (^4. viscosa).
Pinxter-flower (A. nudiflora).
Yellow azalea (A. calendulacea).
Sweet bay (Magnolia glauca).
Mitchell a-vine (M. repens).
Sweet colt's-foot (Nardosamiapalmata).
Pasture thistle ( C. pumilum).
False wintergreen (Pyrola rotundifolia).
Spotted wintergreen ( C. maculata).
Prince's pine (C. umbellata).
Evening primrose ((Enothera biennit).
Hairy loosestrife ( Lysimachia ciliafa).
Dogbane \Apocynum).

A BUNCH OF HERBS. 213

Ground nut (Apios tuberosa).
Adder's-tongue Pogonia (P. ophioglossoides).
Horned bladderwort ( Utricularia cornuta).

The last-named, horned bladderwort, is peihaps
/he most fragrant flower we have. In a warm, moist
atmosphere, its odor is almost too strong. It is a
plant with a slender, leafless stalk or scape less than
a foot high, with two or more large yellow hood or
helmet-shaped flowers. It is not common, and be-
longs pretty well north, growing in sandy swamps
and along the marshy margins of lakes and ponds.
Its perfume is sweet and spicy in an eminent degree.
I have placed in the above list several flowers that
are intermittently fragrant, like the hepatica, or liver-
leaf. This flower is the earliest, as it is certainly one
of the most beautiful, to be found in our woods, and
occasionally it is fragrant. Group after group may
be inspected, ranging through all shades of purple
and blue, with some perfectly white, and no odor be
detected, when presently you will happen upon a lit-
tle brood of them that have a most delicate and deli-
cious fragrance. The same is true of a species of
oosestrife growing along streams and on other wet
places, with tall bushy stalks, dark-green leaves, and
pale axillary yellow flowers (probably European).
A handful of these flowers will sometimes exhale a
Bweet fragrance ; at other times, or from another lo-
cality, they are scentless. Our evening primrose is
thought to be uniformly sweet-scented, but the past
season I examined many specimens, and failed to fine

214 A BUNCH OF HERBS.

one that was so. Some seasons the sugar-maple
yields much sweeter sap than at others ; and even in
dividual trees, owing to the soil, moisture, etc., where
they stand, show a great difference in this respect.
The same is doubtless true of the sweet-scented flow-
ers. I had always supposed that our Canada violet
— the tall, leafy-stemmed white violet of our North-
ern woods — was odorless, till a correspondent called
my attention to the contrary fact. On examination,
I found that while the first ones that bloomed about
May 25th had very sweet-scented foliage, especially
when crushed in the hand, the flowers were practi-
cally without fragrance. But as the season advanced
the fragrance developed, till a single flower had a
well-marked perfume, and a handful of them was
sweet indeed. A single specimen, plucked about
August 1st, was quite as fragrant as the English vio-
let, though the perfume is not what is known as
violet, but, like that of the hepatica, comes nearer
to the odor of certain fruit-trees.

It is only for a brief period that the blossoms of
our sugar-maple are sweet - scented ; the perfume
seems to become stale after a few days ; but pass un°
der this tree just at the right moment, say at night-
fall on the first or second day of its perfect inflores-
cence, and the air is loaded with its sweetness ; its
perfumed breath falls upon you as its cool shadow
does a few weeks later.

After the Linnaea and the arbutus, the pretties*
iweet-scented flowering-vine our woods hold is the

A BUNCH OF HERBS. 215

common Mitchella vine, called squaw-berry and par-
tridge-berry. It blooms in June, and its twin flowers,
light cream color, velvety, tubular, exhale a most
agreeable fragrance.

Our flora is much more rich in orchids than the
European, and many of ours are fragrant. The first
to bloom in the spring is the showy orchis ( 0. specta-
lilis), though it is far less showy than several others.
I find it in May, not on hills where Gray says it
grows, but in low, damp places in the woods. Ifc has
two oblong shining leaves, with a scape four or five
inches high strung with sweet-scented, pink-purple
flowsrs. I usually find it and the fringed polygala in
bloom at the same time ; the lady's slipper is a little
later. The purple-fringed orchis, one of the most
showy and striking of all our orchids, blooms in mid-
summer in swampy meadows and in marshy, grassy
openings in the woods, shooting up a tapering column
or cylinder of pink-purple-fringed flowers, that one
may see at quite a distance, and the perfume of
which is too rank for a close room. This flower is,
perhaps, like the English fragrant orchis, found in
pastures. ^

No fragrant flowers in the shape of weeds have
come to us from the Old World, and this leads me to
remark that plants with sweet-scented flowers are, for
the most part, more intensely local, more fastidious
and idiosyncratic than those without perfume. Our
native thistle — the pasture thistle — has a marked
fragrance, and it is much more shy and limj^ad in iti

216 A BUNCH OF HERBS.

range than the common Old World thistle that grows
everywhere. Our little, sweet, white violet (blanda)
grows only in wet places, and the Canada violet oni^
in high, cool woods, while the common blue violet it
much more general in its distribution. How fastidi-
ous and exclusive is the cypripedium ! You will find
it in one locality in the woods, usually on high, dry
ground, and will look in vain for it elsewhere. It
does not go in herds like the commoner plants, but
affects privacy and solitude. When I come upon it
in my walks, I seem to be intruding upon some very
private and exclusive company. The large yellow
cypripedium has a peculiar, heavy, oily odor.

In like manner one learns where to look for ar-
butus, for pipsissewa, for the early orchis ; they have
their particular haunts, and their surroundings are
nearly always the same. The yellow pond-lily is
found in every sluggish stream and pond, but Nym-
phcea odorata requires a nicer adjustment of condi-
tions, and consequently is more restricted in its
range. If the mullein was fragrant, or toad-flax, or
the daisy, or blue weed (Echium), or golden-rod, they
wctild doubtless be far less troublesome to the agri-
culturist. There are, of course, exceptions to the
rule I have here indicated, but it holds in most cases.
Genius is a specialty ; it does not grow in every soil ;
it skips the many and touches the few ; and the gift
jf perfume to a flower is a special grace like genius
w like beauty, and never becomes common or cheap

* Do honey and fragrance always go together ii

A BUNCH OF HERBS. 217

Jie flowers ? " Not uniformly. Of the list of fra-
grant wild flowers I have given, the only ones that the
bees procure honey from, so far as I have observed,
a-re arbutus, dicentra, sugar-maple, locust, and linden.
Non-fragrant flowers that yield honey are those of
the raspberry, clematis, sumac, white oak, bugloss,
ailanthus, golden-rod, aster, fleabane. A large num-
ber of odorless plants yield pollen to the bee. There
is honey in the columbine, but the bees do not get it.
I wonder they have not learned to pierce its spura
from the outside, as they do with dicentra. There
ought to be honey in the honeysuckle, but if there
is the hive-bees make no attempt to get it.

WEEDS.

ONE is tempted to say that the most human
plants, after all, are the weeds. How they cling to
man and follow him around the world, and spring up
wherever he sets his foot. How they crowd around
his barns and dwellings, and throng his garden and
jostle and override each other in their strife to be
uear him. Some of them are so domestic and fa-
miliar, and so harmless withal, that one comes to
regard them with positive affection. Motherwort,
catnip, plantain, tansy, wild-mustard, what a homely
human look they have ; they are an integral part
of every old homestead. Your smart new place

218 A BUNCH OF HERBS.

will wait long before they draw near it. Or kiiot
grass that carpets every old door-yard, and fringes
every walk and softens every path that knows the
feet of children, or that leads to the spring, or to
the garden, or to the barn, how kindly one comes to
look upon it. Examine it with a pocket glass and
see how wonderfully beautiful and exquisite are its
tiny blossoms. It loves the human foot, and when
the path or the place is long disused other plants
usurp the ground.

The gardener and the farmer are ostensibly the
greatest enemies of the weeds, but they are in reality
their best friends. Weeds, like rats and mice, in
crease and spread enormously in a cultivated country.
They have better food, more sunshine, and more aids
in getting themselves disseminated. They are sent
from one end of the land to the other in seed grain
of various kinds, and they take their share, and
more too, if they can get it, of the phosphates and
stable manures. How sure, also, they are to survive
any war of extermination that is waged against them,
In yonder field is ten thousand and one Canada
thistles. The farmer goes resolutely to work and
destroys ten thousand and thinks the work is finished,
but he has done nothing till he has destroyed the ten
thousand and one. This one will keep up the stock
and again cover his fields with thistles.

Weeds are Nature's makeshift. She rejoices in the
grass and the grain, but when these fail to cover hei
Qftkedness, she resorts to weeds. It is in her plan 01

A BUNCH OF HERBS. 219

a part of her economy to keep the ground constantly
covered with vegetation of some sort, and she has
layer upon layer of seeds in the soil for this purpose,
and the wonder is that each kind lies dormant until
it is wanted. If I uncover the earth in any of my
fields, ragweed and pigweed (Amaranth) spring up j
if these are destroyed, harvest grass, or quack grass,
or purslane, appears. The spade or plow that turns
these under it is sure to turn up some other variety,
as chickweed, sheep-sorrel, or goose-foot. The soil
is a store-house of seeds.

The old farmers say that wood-ashes will bring in
the white clover, and it will ; the germs are in the
soil wrapped in a profound slumber, but this stimulus
tickles them until they awake. Stramonium has
been known to start up on the site of an old farm
building, when it had not been seen in that locality
for thirty years. I have been told that a farmer
somewhere in New England, in digging a well came
at a great depth upon sand like that of the sea-shore ;
it was thrown out, and in due time there sprang from
it a marine plant. I have never seen earth taken
from so great a depth that it would not before the
end of the season be clothed with a crop of weeds.
Weeds are so full of expedients, and the one engross-
ing purpose with them is to multiply. The wild
onion multiplies at both ends, at the top by seed, and
.it the bottom by offshoots. Toad-flax travels under
ground and above ground. Never allow a seed to
ripen and yet it will cover your field. Cut off th€

220 A BUNCH OF HERBS.

head of the wild carrot, and in a week or two there
are five heads in room of this one ; cut off these and
by fall there are ten looking defiance at you from the
same root. Plant corn in August, and it will go for-
ward with its preparations as if it had the whole
season before it. Not so with the weeds ; they have
learned better. If amaranth, or abutilon, or bur-
dock, gets a late start it makes great haste to develop
its seed ; it foregoes its tall stalk and wide flaunting
growth, and turns all its energies into keeping up the
succession of the species. Certain fields under the
plow are always infested with " blind nettles " ( Gali-
opsis), others with wild buckwheat, black-bindweed,
or cockle. The seed lies dormant under the sward,
the warmth and the moisture affect it not until other
conditions are fulfilled.

The way in which one plant thus keeps another
down is a great mystery. Germs lie there in the
soil and resist the stimulating effect of the sun and
the rains for years, and show no sign. Presently
something whispers to them, "Arise, your chance
lias come ; the coast is clear ; " and they are up and
doing in a twinkling.

Weeds are great travelers; they are, indeed, the
tramps of the vegetable world. They are going east,
west, north, south ; they walk ; they fly ; they swim ;
ihey steal a ride ; they travel by rail, by flood, by
wind ; they go under ground, and they go above,
across lots, and by the highway. But, like othei
tramps, they find it safest by the highway ; in th«

A BUNCH OF HERBS. 221

fields they are intercepted and cut off ; but on the
public road, every boy, every passing herd of sheep
or cows, gives them a lift. Hence the incursion of a
uew weed is generally first noticed along the high-
way or the railroad. In Orange County I saw from
the car window a field overrun with what I took to
be the branching white mullein (V. lychnitis). Gray
says it is found in Pennsylvania and at the head of
Oneida Lake. Doubtless it had come by rail from
one place or the other. Our botanist says of the
bladder campion (Silene inflata), a species of pink,
that it has been naturalized around Boston ; but it is
now much farther west, and I know fields along the
Hudson overrun with it. Streams and water-courses
are the natural highway of the weeds. Some years
ago, and by some means or other, the viper bugloss,
or blue weed (Echiuvri), which is said to be a trouble-
some weed in Virginia, effected a lodgment near the
head of the Esopus Creek, a tributary of the Hudson.
From this point it has made its way down the stream,
overrunning its banks and invading meadows and cul-
tivated fields, and proving a serious obstacle to the
farmer. All the gravelly, sandy margins and islands
of the Esopus, sometimes acres in extent, are in June
-ind July blue with it, and rye and oats and grass in
the near fields find it a serious competitor for posses-
sion of the soil. It has gone down the Hudson, and
s appearing in the fields along its shores. The tides
carry it up the mouths of the streams where it takes
root ; the winds, or the birds, or other agencies, in

222 A BUNCH OF HERBS.

time give it another lift, so that it is slowly but surely
making its way inland. The bugloss belongs tc
what may be called beautiful weeds, despite its rough
and bristly stalk. Its flowers are deep violet-blue,
the stamens exserted, as the botanists say, that is,
projected beyond the mouth of the corolla, with
showy red anthers. This bit of red, mingling with
the blue of the corolla, gives a very rich, warm pur-
ple hue to the flower, that is especially pleasing at a
little distance. The best thing I know about this
weed besides its good looks is that it yields honey or
pollen to the bee.

Another foreign plant that the Esopus Creek has
distributed along its shores and carried to the Hudson
is saponaria, known as " Bouncing Bet." It is a
common, and, in places, a troublesome weed in this
valley. Bouncing Bet is. perhaps, its English name,
as the pink -white complexion of its flowers with
their perfume and the coarse, robust character of the
plant really give it a kind of English feminine come-
liness and bounce. It looks like a Yorkshire house-
maid. Still another plant in my section, which I no-
tice has been widely distributed by the agency of
Tater, is the spiked loosestrife (L. salicaria). It first
appeared many years ago along the Wallkill ; now it
may be seen upon many of its tributaries, and all
along its banks, and in many of the marshy bays and
coves along the Hudson, its great masses of purple-
red bloom in middle and late summer affording a
welcome relief to the traveler's eye. It also belong*

A BUNCH OF HERBS. 223

to the class of beautiful weeds. It grows rank and
tall, in dense communities, and always presents the
eye with a generous mass of color. In places, the
marshes and creek banks are all aglow with it, its
wand-like spikes of flowers shooting up and uniting
in volumes or pyramids of still flame. Its petals,
when examined closely, present a curious wrinkled or
or crumpled appearance, like newly-washed linen ;
but when massed the effect is eminently pleasing.
It also came from abroad, probably first brought to
this country as a garden or ornamental plant.

As a curious illustration of how weeds are carried
from one end of the earth to the other, Sir Joseph
Hooker relates this circumstance : " On one occa-
sion," he says, " landing on a small uninhabited isl-
and, nearly at the Antipodes, the first evidence I met
with of its having been previously visited by man
was the English chick weed ; and this I traced to a
mound that marked the grave of a British sailor, and
that was covered with the plant, doubtless the off-
spring of seed that had adhered to the spade or mat-
tock with which the grave had been dug."

Ours is a weedy country because it is a roomy
country. Weeds love a wide margin, and they find
t here. You shall see more weeds in one day's travel
n this country than in a week's journey in Europe.
V>ur culture of the soil is not so close and thorough,
Dur occupancy not so entire and exclusive. The
weeds take up with the farmers' leavings, and find
good fare. One may see a large slice taken frcm a

224 A BUNCH OF HERBS.

field by elecampane, or by teasle, or milkweed
whole acres given up to whiteweed, golden-rod, wil'd
carrots, or the ox-eye daisy; meadows overrun with
bear-weed ( V. viride), and sheep pastures nearly
ruined by St. John's- wort or the Canada thistle. Our
farms are so large and our husbandry so loose that
we do not mind these things. By and by we shall
clean them out. When Sir Joseph Hooker landed
in New England a few years ago, he was surprised
to find how the European plants flourished there. He
found the wild chiccory growing far more luxuriantly
than he had ever seen it elsewhere, " forming a tan-
gled mass of stems and branches, studded with tor-
quoise-blue blossoms, and covering acres of ground."
This is one of the many weeds that Emerson binds
into a bouquet, in his " Humble- Bee " : —

" Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn of honey,
Scented fern and agrimony,
Clover, catchfly, adder's-tongue,
And brier-roses, dwelt among."

A less accurate poet than Emerson would probably
have let his reader infer that the bumble-bee gathered
honey from all these plants, but Emerson is careful
"o say only that she dwelt among them. Succory is
i ne of Virgil's weeds also, —

*' And spreading succ'ry chokes the rising field."

Is there not something in our soil and climate
exceptionally favorable to weeds — something harsh,
nngenial, sharp-toothed, that is akin to them ? How

A BUNCH OF HERBS. 225

woody and rank and fibrous many varieties become,
lasting the whole season, and standing up stark and
stiff through the deep winter snows, — desiccated,
preserved by our dry air ! Do nettles and thistles
bite so sharply in any other country ? Let the farmer
tell you how they bite of a dry midsummer day when
he encounters them in his wheat or oat harvest.

Yet it is a fact that all our more pernicious weeds,
like our vermin, are of Old World origin. They
hold up their heads and assert themselves here, and
take* their fill of riot and license ; they are avenged
for their long years of repression by the stern hand
of European agriculture. We have hardly a weed
we can call our own ; I recall but three that are at
all noxious or troublesome, namely, milkweed, rag-
weed, and golden-rod ; but who would miss the latter
from our fields and highways ?

"Along the road-side, like the flowers of gold
That tawny Incas for their gardens wrought,
Heavy with sunshine droops the golden-rod,"

sings Whittier. In Europe our golden-rod is culti-
vated in the flower-gardens, as well it might be. The
native species is found mainly in woods, and is mucb
ess showy than ours.

Our milkweed is tenacious of life ; its roots lie
deep, as if to get away from the plow, but it seldom
infests cultivated crops. Then its stalk is so full of
milk and its pod so full of silk that one cannot but
ascribe good intentions to iX if it does sometimes over-
run the meadow.
15

226 A BUNCH OF HERBS.

"In dusty pods the milkweed
Its hidden silk has spun,"

sings " H H.," in her " September."

Of our ragweed not much can be set down that is
complimentary, except that its name in the botany ia
Ambrosia, food of the gods. It must be the food of
the gods if of anything, for, so far as I have observed,
nothing terrestrial eats it, not even billy-goats. (Yet>
a correspondent writes me that in Kentucky the cat-
tle eat it when hard pressed, and that a certain old
farmer there, one season when the hay crop failed,
cut and harvested tons of it for his stock in winter.
It is said that the milk and butter made from such
hay is not at all suggestive of the traditional Am-
brosia !) It is the bane of asthmatic patients, but the
gardener makes short work of it. It is about the
only one of our weeds that follows the plow and the
harrow, and, except that it is easily destroyed, I
would suspect it to be an immigrant from the Old
World. Our fleabane is a troublesome weed at times,
but good husbandry has little to dread from it.

But all the other outlaws of the farm and garden
come to us from over seas ; and what a long list it is

The common thistle, Gill,

The Canada thistle, Nightshade,

Burdock, Buttercup,

Yellow dock, Dandelion, *

Wild carrot, Wild mustard,

Ox-eye daisy, Shepherd's purse,

Chamomile, St. John's-wort,

The mullein, Chickweed,

A BUHCH OF HERBS. 227

Dead nettle (Lamium\ Purslane,

Hemp nettle ( Galiopsis), Mallow,

Elecampane, Darnel,

Plantain, Poison hemlock,

Motherwort, Hop-clover,

Stramonium, Yarrow,

Catnip, Wild radish,

Blue-weed, Wild parsnip,

Stick-seed, Chiccory,

Hound' s-tongue, Live-forever,

Henbane, Toad-flax,

Pigweed, Sheep-sorrel,

Quitch grass, May-weed.

mid others less noxious. To offset this list we hava
given Europe the vilest of all weeds, a parasite that
sucks up human blood, tobacco. Now if they catch
the Colorado beetle of us, it will go far toward pay-
ing them off for the rats and the mice, and for other
pests in our houses.

The more attractive and pretty of the British
weeds, as the common daisy, of which the poets havj
made so much, the larkspur, which is a pretty corn-
field weed, and the scarlet field-poppy which flowers
all summer, and is so taking amid the ripening grain,
have not immigrated to our shores. Like a certain
Bweet rusticity and charm of European rural life,
they do not thrive readily under our skies. Our flea-
bane (Erigenon Canadensis) has become a common
road-side weed in England, and a few other of our
native less known plants have gained a foothold in
the Old World. Our beautiful jewel-weed (Impa-
'.iens) has recently appeared along certain of the Eng-
lish rivers.

228 A BUNCH OF HERBS.

Poke-weed is a native American, and what a lusty
royal plant it is ! It never invades cultivated fields
but hovers about the borders and looks over the
fences like a painted Indian sachem. Thoreau cov-
eted its strong purple stalk for a cane, and the robins
eat its dark crimson-juiced berries.

It is commonly believed that the mullein is indig-
enous to this country, for have we not heard that i
is cultivated in European gardens, and christened the
American velvet plant? Yet it, too, seems to have
come over with the pilgrims, and is most abundant in
the older parts of the country. It abounds through-
out Europe and Asia, and had its economic uses with
the ancients. The Greeks made lamp wicks of its
dried leaves, and the Romans dipped its dried stalk
in tallow for funeral torches. It affects dry uplands
in this country, and, as it takes two years to mature,
it is not a troublesome weed in cultivated crops.
The first year it sits low upon the ground in its
coarse flannel leaves, and makes ready ; if the plow
romes along now its career is ended. The second
season it starts upward its tall stalk, which in late
summer is thickly set with small yellow flowers, and
in fall is charged with myriads of fine black seeds.
" As full as a dry mullein stalk of seeds " is almost
equivalent to saying, " as numerous as the sands upon
die sea-shore."

Perhaps the most notable thing about the weeds that
have come to us from the Old World, when compared
with our native species, is their persistence, not to saj

A BUNCH OF HERBS. 229

pugnacity. They fight for the soil ; they plant colo-
nies here and there and will not be rooted out. Our
aative weeds are for the most part shy and harmless,
and retreat before cultivation, but the European out-
laws follow man like vermin ; they hang to his coat-
skirts, his sheep transport them in their wool, his cow
and horse in tail and mane. As I have before said,
it is as with the rats and mice. The American rat
is in the woods and is rarely seen even by woodmen,
and the native mouse barely hovers upon the out-
skirts of civilization ; while the Old World species
defy our traps and our poison, and have usurped the
land. So with the weeds. Take the thistles, for in-
stance ; the common and abundant one everywhere,
in fields and along highways, is the European spe-
cies, while the native thistles, swamp thistle, pasture
thistle, etc., are much more shy, and are not at all
iroublesome. The Canada thistle, too, which came
to us by way of Canada, what a pest, what a usurper,
what a defier of the plow and the harrow ! I know
of but one effectual way to treat it ; put on a pair of
buckskin gloves, and pull up every plant that shows
itself ; this will effect a radical cure in two summers.
3f course the plow or the scythe, if not allowed to
rest more than a month at a time, will finally con-
quer it.

Or take the common St. John's-wort (Hypericum
perforatum), how has it established itself in our
Gelds and become a most pernicious weed, very diffi-
'ult to extirpate, while the native species are quite

230 A BUNCH OF HERBS.

rare, and seldom or never invade cultivated fields,
being found mostly in wet and rocky waste places
Of Old World origin, too, is the curled leaf -dock (Ru~
mex crispus) that is so annoying about one's garden
and home meadows, its long tapering root clinging to
the soil with such tenacity that I have pulled upon it
till I could see stars without budging it ; it has more
lives than a cat, making a shift to live when pulled
up and laid on top of the ground in the burning
summer sun. Our native docks are mostly found in
swamps, or near them, and are harmless.

Purslane, commonly called " pusley," and which
has given rise to the saying " as mean as pusley " —
of course is not American. A good sample of our
native purslane is the Claytonia, or spring beauty, a
shy, delicate plant that opens its rose-colored flowers
in the moist sunny places in the woods or along their
borders so early in the season.

There are few more obnoxious weeds in cultivated
ground than sheep-sorrel, also an Old World plant,
while our native wood-sorrel, with its white, deli-
cately veined flowers, or the variety with yellpw
liowers, is quite harmless. The same is true of the
mallow, the vetch, or tare, and other plants. We
have no native plant so indestructible as garden or-
pine, or live-forever, which our grandmothers nursed
and for which they are cursed by many a farmer.
The fat, tender succulent door-yard stripling turned
out to be a monster that would devour the earth. ]
have seen acres of meadow land destroyed by it

A BUNCH OF HERBS. 231

The way to di DWD an amphibious animal is to nevei
allow it to come to the surface to breathe, and this is
the way to kill live-forever. It lives by its stalk
and leaf, more than by its root, and if cropped or
bruised as soon as it comes to the surface it will in
time perish. It laughs the plow, the hoe, the cultiva-
tor to scorn, but grazing herds will eventually scotch
it. Oar two species of native orpine, S. ternatum
and S. telephioides are never troublesome as weeds.

The European weeds are sophisticated, domesti-
cated, civilized ; they have been to school to man
for many hundred years and they have learned to
thrive upon him; their struggle for existence has
been sharp and protracted ; it has made them hardy
and prolific ; they wi.ll thrive in a lean soil, or they
will wax strong in a rich one ; in all cases they fol-
low man and profit by him. Our native weeds, on
the other hand, are furtive and retiring; they flee
before the plow and the scythe, and hide in corners
and remote waste places. Will they, too, in time,
change their habits in this respect ?

" Idle weeds are fast in growth," says Shakespeare,
»iit that depends whether the competition is sharp
%nd close. If the weed finds itself distanced, or
•litted against great odds, it grows more slowly and
i s of diminished stature, but let it once get the upper
hand and what strides it makes ! Red-root will grow
four or five feet high, if it has a chance, or it will
extent itself with a few inches and mature its seed
almost upon the ground*

232 A BUNCH OF HERBS.

Many of our worst weeds are plants that have
escaped from cultivation, as tbe wild radish, which
is troublesome in parts of New England, the wild
carrot, which infests the fields in eastern New York,
and live-forever, which thrives and multiplies under
the plow and harrow. In my section an annoying
weed is abutilon, or velvet-leaf, also called " old
maid," which has fallen from the grace of the gar-

7 O O

den and followed the plow afield. It will manage to
mature its seeds if not allowed to start till midsum-
mer.

Of beautiful weeds quite a long list might be
made without including any of the so-called wild
flowers. A favorite of mine is the little moth mul-
lein ( Verbascum llatard) that blooms along the high-
way, and about the fields, and may be upon the edge
of the lawn, from midsummer till frost comes. In
winter its slender stalk rises above the snow, bearing
its Found seed-pods on its pin-like stems, and is pleas-
ing even then. Its flowers are yellow or white, large,
wheel-shaped, and are borne vertically with filaments
loaded with little tufts of violet wool. The plant
has none of the coarse, hairy character of the common
mullein. Our cone-flower, which one of our poets
has called the " brown-eyed daisy," has a pleasing
effect when in vast numbers they invade a meadow
(if it is not your meadow), their dark brown centres
or disks and their golden rays showing conspicu
ausly.

Bidens, two-teeth, or "pitch-forks," as the boy

A BUNCH 01 HERBS. 233

joill them, are welcomed by the eye when in late
summer they make the swamps and wet, waste places
yellow with their blossoms.

Vervain is a beautiful weed, especially the blue or
purple variety. Its drooping knotted threads also
make a pretty etching upon the winter snow.

Iron- weed ( Vernonia), which looks like an over-
grown aster, has the same intense purple-blue color,
and a royal profusion of flowers. There are giants
among the weeds, as well as dwarfs and pigmies.
One of the giants is purple eupatorium, which some-
times carries its corymbs of flesh-colored flowers ten
and twelve feet high. A pretty and curious little
weed, sometimes found growing in the edge of the
garden, is the clasping specularia, a relative of the
harebell and of the European Venus's looking-glass.
Its leaves are shell-shaped, and clasp the stalk so as
to form little shallow cups. In the bottom of each
cup three buds appear that never expand into flowers ;
but when the top of the stalk is reached, one and
sometimes two buds open a large, delicate purple-
blue corolla. All the first-born of this plant are still-
born, as it were ; only the latest, which spring from
*ts summit, attain to perfect bloom. A weed which
one ruthlessly demolishes when he finds it hiding
from the plow amid the strawberries, or under the
2urrant-bushes and grape-vines, is the dandelion ; yet
who would banish it from the meadows or the lawns,
where it copies in gold upon the green expanse tha
: \tars of the midnight sky ? After its first blooming

234 A BUNCH OF HERBS.

comes its second, and finer and more spiritual inflo
rescence, when its stalk, dropping its more earthly
and carnal flower, shoots upward, and is presently
crowned by a globe of the most delicate and aerial
texture. It is like the poet's dream, which succeeds
his rank and golden youth. This globe is a fleet oi
a hundred fairy balloons, each one of which bears a
seed which it is destined to drop far from the parent
source.

Most weeds have their uses ; they are not wholly
malevolent. Emerson says a weed is a plant whose
virtues we have not yet discovered ; but the wild
creatures discover their virtues, if we do not. The
bumble-bee has discovered that the hateful toad-flax,
which nothing will eat, and which in some soils will
run out the grass, has honey at its heart. Narrow-
leaved plantain is readily eaten by cattle, and the
honey-bee gathers much pollen from it. The ox-
eye daisy makes a fair quality of hay, if cut before
it gets ripe. The cows will eat the leaves of the
burdock and the stinging nettles of the woods. But
what cannot a cow's tongue stand ? She will crop
the poison ivy with impunity, and I think would eat
thistles, if she found them growing in the garden.
Leeks and garlics are readily eaten by cattle in the
spring, and are said to be medicinal to them. Weeds
that yield neither pasturage for bee nor herd, yet
afford seeds to the fall' and winter birds. This is
tri Q of most of the obnoxious weeds of the garden
and )f thistles. The wild lettuce yields down for tht

A BUNCH OF HERBS. 235

humming-bird's nest, and the flowers of whiteweed
are used by the kingbird and cedar-bird.

Yet it is pleasant to remember that, in our climate,
there are no weeds so persistent and lasting and uni-
versal as grass. Grass is the natural covering of the
fields. There are but four weeds that I know of —
milkweed, live-forever, Canada thistle, and toad-flax
— that it will not run out in a good soil. We crop it
and mow it year after year ; and yet, if the season
favors, it is sure to come again. Fields that have
never known the plow, and never been seeded by
man, are yet covered with grass. And in human
nature, too, weeds are by no means in the ascendant,
troublesome as they are. The good green grass of
love and truthfulness and common sense are more
universal, and crowd the idle weeds to the wall.

But weeds have this virtue : they are not easily
discouraged ; they never lose heart entirely ; they
die game. If they cannot have the best, they will
take up with the poorest; if fortune is unkind to
them to-day, they hope for better luck to-morrow ; if
they cannot lord it over a corn-hill, they will sit hum-
bly at its foot and accept what comes ; in all cases
they make th% most of their opportunities.

WINTER PICTURES.

WINTER PICTURES.

A WHITE DAY AND A BED FOX.

THE day was indeed white, as white as three feet
of snow and a cloudless St. Valentine's sun could
make it. The eye could not look forth without
blinking, or veiling itself with tears. The patch of
plowed ground on the top of the hill where the wind
had blown the snow away was as welcome to it as
water to a parched tongue. It was the one refresh-
ing oasis in this desert of dazzling light. I sat down
upon it to let the eye bathe and revel in it. It took
away the smart like a poultice. For so gentle and,
on the whole, so beneficent an element, the snow as-
serts itself very loudly. It takes the world quickly
und entirely to itself. It makes no concessions or
compromises, but rules despotically. It baffles and
bewilders the eye, and it returns the sun glare for
glare. Its coming in our winter climate is the hand
of mercy to the earth and to everything in its bosom,
but it is a barrier and an embargo to everything that
moves above.

We toiled up the long steep hill where only an oc-
casional mullein-stalk or other tall weed stood abova

240 WINTER PICTURES.

the snow. Near the top the hill was girded with a
bank of snow that blotted out the stone wall and
every vestige of the earth beneath. These hills
wear this belt till May, and sometimes the plow
pauses beside them. From the top of the ridge an
immense landscape in immaculate white stretches be-
fore us. Miles upon miles of farms, smoothed and
padded by the stainless element, hang upon the sides
of the mountains, or repose across the long sloping
hills. The fences of stone walls show like half ob-
literated black lines. I turn my back to the sun, or
shade my eyes with my hand. Every object or
movement in the landscape is sharply revealed ; one
could see a fox half a league. The farmer foddering
his cattle, or drawing manure afield, or leading his
horse to water, the pedestrian crossing the hill below
the children wending their way toward the distant
school-house, — the eye cannot help but note them ;
they are black specks upon square miles of luminous
white. What a multitude of sins this unstinted char-
ity of the snow covers ! How it flatters the ground !
Yonder sterile field might be a garden, and you would
never suspect that that gentle slope with its pretty
dimples and curves was not the smoothest of mead-
ows, yet it is paved with rocks and stone.

But what is that black speck creeping across that
cleared field near the top of the mountain at the head
of the valley, three quarters of a mile away ? It ia
like a fly moving across an illuminated surface. A
listant mellow bay floats to us and we know it is tha

WINTER PICTURES. 241

hound. He picked up the trail of the fox half an
hour since, where he had crossed the ridge early in
the morning, and now he has routed him and Rey-
nard is steering for the Big Mountain. We press on,
attain the shoulder of the range, where we strike a
trail two or three days old, of some former hunters,
which leads us into the woods along the side of the
mountain. We are on the first plateau before the
summit ; the snow partly supports us, but when it
gives way and we sound it with our legs we find it
up to our hips. Here we enter a white world indeed.
It is like some conjuror's trick. The very trees have
turned to snow. The smallest branch is like a clus-
ter of great white antlers. The eye is bewildered
by the soft fleecy labyrinth before it. On the lower
ranges the forests were entirely bare, but now we
perceive the summit of every mountain about us runs
up into a kind of arctic region where the trees are
loaded with snow. The beginning of this* colder
zone is sharply marked all around the horizon ; the
line runs as level as the shore line of a lake or sea ;
indeed a warmer aerial sea fills all the valleys, sub-
merging the lower peaks, and making white islands
of all the higher ones. The branches bend with the
rime. The winds have not shaken it down. It ad-
heres to them like a growth. On examination I find
the branches coated with ice from which shoot slen-
der spikes and needles that penetrate and hold the
cord of snow. It is a new kind of foliage wrought
by the frost and the cbuds, and it obscures the sky
16

242 WINTER PICTURES.

and fills the vistas of the woods nearly as much as
the myriad leaves of summer. The sun blazes, the
Bky is without a cloud or a film, yet we walk in a
soft white shade. A gentle breeze was blowing on
the open crest of the mountain, but one could carry

a lighted candle through the&e snow-curtained and

.

snow-canopied chambers. How shall we see the fox
if the hound drives him through this white obscurity ?
But we listen in vain for the voice of the dog and
press on. Hares' tracks were numerous. Their
great soft pads had left their imprint everywhere,
sometimes showing a clear leap of ten feet. They
had regular circuits which we crossed at intervals.
The woods were well suited to them, low and dense,
and, as we saw, liable at times to wear a livery whiter
than their own.

The mice, too, how thick their tracks were, that
of the white-footed mouse (H. lucopus) being most
abundant ; but occasionally there was a much finer
track, with strides or leaps scarcely more than an
inch apart. This is perhaps the little shrew-mouse
of the woods (S. persanatus?), the body not more
than an inch and a half long, the smallest mole or
mouse kind known to me. Once while encamping
in the woods one of these tiny shrews got into an
empty pail standing in camp, and died before morn-
ing, either from the cold, or in despair of ever get-
ting out the pail.

At one point, around a small sugar-maple, the
mice-tracks are unusually thick. It is doubtless their

WINTER PICTURES. 243

granary ; they have beech-nuts stored there, I'll war-
rant. There are two entrances to the cavity of the
tree, — one at the base, and one seven or eight feet
up. At the upper one, which is only just the size of
a mouse, a squirrel has been trying to break in. He
has cut and chiseled the solid wood to the depth of
nearly an inch, and his chips strew the snow all
about. He knows what is in there, and the mice
know that he knows ; hence their apparent conster-
nation. They have rushed wildly about over the
snow, and, I doubt not, have given the piratical red
squirrel a piece of their minds. A few yards away
the mice have a hole down into the snow, which
perhaps leads to some snug den under the ground.
Hither they may have been slyly removing their
stores, while the squirrel was at work with his back
turned. One more night, and he will effect an en-
trance : what a good joke upon him if he finds the
cavity empty ! These native mice are very provident,
and, I imagine, have to take many precautions to
prevent their winter stores being plundered by the
jquirrels, who live, as it were, from hand to mouth.

We see several fresh fox-tracks, and wish for the
hound ; but there are no tidings of him. After half
an hour's floundering and cautiously picking our way
through the woods, we emerge into a cleared field
that stretches up from the valley below, and just laps
over the back of the mountain It is a broad belt of
white, that drops down, and down, till it joins other
fields that sweep along the base of the mountain, a

244 WINTER PICTURES.

mile away. To the east, through a deep defile in the
mountains, a landscape in an adjoining county lifts
itself up, like a bank of white and gray clouds.

When the experienced fox hunter comes out upon
such an eminence as this, he always scrutinizes the
fields closely that lie beneath him, and it many times
happens that his sharp eye detects Reynard asleep
upon a rock or a stone wall, in which case, if he be
armed with a rifle and his dog be not near, the poor
creature never wakens from his slumber. The fox
nearly always takes his nap in the open fields, along
the sides of the ridges, or under the mountain, where
he can look down upon the busy farms beneath and
hear their many sounds, the barking of dogs, the low-
ing of cattle, the cackling of hens, the voices of men
and boys, or the sound of travel upon the highway.
It is on that side, too, that he keeps the sharpest look-
out, and the appearance of the hunter above and be-
hind him is always a surprise.

We pause here, and with alert ears turned toward
the Big Mountain in front of us, listen for the dog.
But not a sound is heard. A flock of snow-buntings
pass high above us, uttering their contented twitter,
and their white forms seen against the intense blue
give the impression of large snow-flakes drifting
Across the sky. I hear a purple finch, too, and the
feeble lisp of the red-pol. A shrike (the first I have
peen this season) finds occasion to come this waj
ulso. He alights on the tip of a dry limb, and frouc
els perch can see into the valley on both sides of tht

WINTER PICTURES. 246

mountain He is prowling about for chickadees, no
doubt, a troop of which I saw coming through the
wood. When pursued by the shrike, the chickadee
has been seen to take refuge in a squirrel-hole in a
tree. Hark ! Is that the hound, or doth expectation
mock the eager ear ? With open mouths and bated
breaths, we listen. Yes, it is old " Singer ; " he is
bringing the fox over the top of the range toward
Butt End, the Ultima Thule of the hunters' tramps
in this section. In a moment or two the dog is lost
to hearing again. We wait for his second turn ; then
for his third/

" He is playing about the summit," says my com-
panion.

" Let us go there," say I, and we were off.

More dense snow-hung woods beyond the clearing
where we begin our ascent of the Big Mountain, —
a chief that carries the range up several hundred feet
higher than the part we have thus far traversed.
We are occasionally to our hips in the snow, but for
the most part the older stratum, °a foot or so down,
bears us ; up and up we go into the dim, muffled soli-
tudes, our hats and coats powdered like millers. A
half hour's heavy tramping brings us to the broad,
level summit, and to where the fox and hound have
crossed and recrossed many times. As we are walk-
og along discussing the matter, we suddenly hear
tie dog coming straight on to us. The woods are
§o choked with snow that we do not hear him till he
breaks up from under the mojD^ain within a hundred
rards of us

246 WINTER PICTURES.

" We have turned the fox ! " we both exclaim,
much put out.

Sure enough, we have. The dog appears in sight,
is puzzled a moment, then turns sharply to the left,
and is lost to eye and to ear as quickly as if he had
plunged into a cave. The woods are, indeed, a kind
of cave, — a cave of alabaster, with the sun shining
upon it. We take up positions and wait. These old
hunters know exactly where to stand.

" If the fox comes back," said my companion, " he
will cross up there or down here," indicating two
points not twenty rods asunder. • *

We stood so that each commanded one of the run-
ways indicated. How light it was, though the sun
was hidden ! Every branch and twig beamed in the
Bun like a lamp. A downy woodpecker below me
kept up a great fuss and clatter, — all for my benefit,
I suspected. All about me were great, soft mounds,
where the rocks lay buried. It was a cemetery of
drift bowlders. There ! that is the hound. Does his
voice come across the valley from the spur off against
us, or is it on our side down under the mountain ?
After an interval, just as I am thinking the dog is
going away from us along the opposite range, his
voite comes up astonishingly near. A mass of snow
falls from a branch, and makes one start ; but it is
Dot the fox. Then through the white vista below me
I catch a glimpse of something red or yellow, yel
lowish-red or reddish-yellow ; it emerges from th«
lower ground and, with an easy, jaunty air, draw*

WINTER PICTURES. 247

near. I am ready and just in the mood to make
a good shot. The fox stops just out of range and
listens for the hound. He looks as bright as an au-
tumn leaf upon the spotless surface. Then he starU
on, but he is not coming to me, he is going to the
other man. Oh, foolish fox, you are going straight
into the jaws of death ! My comrade stands just
there beside that tree. I would gladly have given
Reynard the wink, or signaled to him if I could.
It did seem a pity to shoot him, now he was out of
my reach. I cringe for him, when, crack goes the
gun ! The fox squalls, picks himself up, and plunges
over the brink of the mountain. The hunter has not
missed his aim, but the oil in his gun, he says, has
weakened the strength of his powder. The hound,
hearing the report, came like a whirlwind and was
off in hot pursuit. Both fox and dog now bleed, —
the dog at his heels, the fox from his wounds.

O '

In a few minutes there came up from under the
mountain that long, peculiar bark, which the hound
always makes when he has run the fox in, or when
something new and extraordinary has happened. In
this instance, he said plainly enough, " the race is up,
ihe coward has taken to his hole, ho-o-o-le." Plung-
ing down in the direction of the sound, the snow lit-
erally to our waists, we were soon at the spot, a great
ledge thatched over with three or four feet of snow.
The dog was alternately licking his heels, and whining
and berating the fox. The opening into which the
atter had fled was partially closed, and, as I scraped

248 WINTER PICTURES.

out and cleared away the snow, I thought of the fa-
miliar saying, that so far as the sun shines in, the
snow will blow in. The fox, I suspect, has always
his house of refuge, or knows at once where to flee to
if hard pressed. This place proved to be a large ver-
tical seam in the rock, into which the dog, on a little
encouragement from his master, made his way. I
thrust my head into the ledge's mouth, and in the dins
light watched the dog. He progressed slowly and
cautiously till only his bleeding heels were visible.
Here some obstacle impeded him a few moments
when he entirely disappeared and was presently face
to face with the fox and engaged in mortal combat
with him. It was a fierce encounter there beneath
the rocks, t^e fox silent, the dog very vociferous.
But after a time the superior weight and strength of
the latter prevails and the fox is brought to light
nearly dead. Reynard winks and eyes me suspi-
ciously, as I stroke his head and praise his heroic
defense; but the hunter quickly and mercifully puts
an end to his fast ebbing life. His canine teeth seem
unusually large and formidable, and the dog bears the
marks of them in many deep gashes upon his face
and nose. His pelt was quickly stripped off, reveal-
ing his lean, sinewy form.

The fox was not as poor in flesh as I expected to
gee him, though I '11 warrant he had tasted very little
food for days, perhaps for weeks. How his great
activity and endurance can be kept up on the spare
iiet he must of necessity be confined to, is a mystery

WINTER PICTURES. 249

Snow, snow, everywhere, for weeks and for months,
and intense cold, and no hen-roost accessible, and no
carcass of sheep or pig in the neighborhood. The
hunter , tramping miles and leagues through his
haunts, rarely sees any sign of his having caught
anything. Earely, though, in the course of many
winters he may have seen evidence of his having
surprised a rabbit or a partridge, in the woods. He
no doubt at this season lives largely upon the mem-
ory (or the fat) of the many good dinners he had in
the plentiful summer and fall.

As we crossed the mountain on our return, we saw
at one point blood-stains upon the snow, and as the
fox-tracks were very thick on and about it, we con-
cluded that a couple of males had had an encounter
there, and a pretty sharp one. Reynard goes a-woo-
ing in February, and it is to be presumed that, like
other dogs, he is a jealous lover. A crow had alighted
and examined the blood-stains, and now if he will
look a little farther along, upon a flat rock he will
find the flesh he was looking for. Our hound's nose
was so blunted now, speaking without metaphor, that
he would not look at another trail, but harried home
to rest upon his laurels.

250 WINTER PICTURES.

A POTOMAC SKETCH.

WHILE on a visit to Washington in January, 1878
I went on an expedition down the Potomac with t
couple of friends to shoot ducks. We left on th(
morning boat that makes daily trips to and from
Mount Vernon. The weather was chilly and th*
sky threatening. The clouds had a singular appear
ance ; they were boat-shaped, with well-defined keels
I have seldom known such clouds to bring rain ; the^
are simply the fleet of ^Eolus, and so it proved on
this occasion, for they gradually dispersed or faded
out, and before noon the sun was shining.

We saw numerous flocks of ducks on the passage
down, and saw a gun (the man was concealed) shoot
some from a u blind " near Fort Washington. Op-
posite Mount Vernon, on the flats, there was a large
"bed " of ducks. I thought the word a good one to
describe a long strip of water thickly planted with
them. One of my friends was a member of the
Washington and Mount Vernon Ducking Club, which
has its camp and fixtures just below the Mount Ver-
non landing ; he was an old ducker. For my part
I had never killed a duck, — except with an ax, —
nor have I yet.

We made our way along the beach from the land
tog, over piles of drift-wood, and soon reached the
quarters, a substantial building, fitted up with a stove

WINTER FIGURES. 251

bunks, chairs, a table, culinary utensils, crockery, etc.,
with one corner piled full of decoys. There were
boats to row in and boxes to shoot from, and I felt
sure we should have a pleasant time, whether we got
any ducks or not. The weather improved hourly,
till in the afternoon a well-defined installment of the
Indian summer that had been delayed somewhere
settled down upon the scene ; this lasted during our
stay of two days. The river was placid, even glassy,
the air richly and deeply toned with haze, and the
sun that of the mellowest October. " The fairer the
weather the fewer the ducks," said one of my com-
panions. " But this is better than ducks/' I thought,
and prayed that it might last.

Then there was something pleasing to the fancy in
being so near to Mount Veruon. It formed a sort
of rich, historic background to our flitting and trivial
experiences. Just where the eye of the great Cap-
tain would perhaps first strike the water as he came
out in the morning to take a turn up and down his
long piazza, the Club had formerly had a " blind,"
but the ice of a few weeks before our visit had car-
ried it away. A little lower down, and in full view
from his bedroom window, was the place where the
shooting from the boxes was usually done.

The duck is an early bird, and not much given to
wandering about in the afternoon ; hence it was
thought not worth while to put out the decoys till
the ne*t morning. We would spend the afternoon
Coaming inland in quest of quail, or rabbits, or tur

252 WINTER PICTURES.

keys (for a brood of the last were known to lurk
about the woods back there). It was a delightful
afternoon's tramp through oak woods, pine barrens,
and half-wild fields. We flushed several quail that
the dog should have pointed, and put a rabbit to rout
by a well-directed broadside, but brought no game to
camp. We kicked about an old bushy clearing, where
my friends had shot a wild turkey Thanksgiving Day,
but the turkey could not be started again. One shoot-
ing had sufficed for it. We crossed or penetrated
extensive pine woods that had once (perhaps in
Washington's time) been cultivated fields ; the mark
of the plow was still clearly visible. The land had
been thrown into ridges, after the manner of English
fields, eight or ten feet wide, with a deep dead furrow
between them for purposes of drainage. The pines
were scrubby, — what are known as the loblolly pines,
— and from ten to twelve inches through at the butt.
In a low bottom among some red cedars, I saw rob-
ins and several hermit thrushes, besides the yellow-
rumped warbler.

That night, as the sun went down on the one hand,
the full moon rose up on the other, like the opposite
side of an enormous scale. The river, too, was pres-
ently brimming with the flood tide. It was so still
one could have carried a lighted candle from shore
to shore. In a little skiff, we floated and paddled up
under the shadow of Mount Vernon and into the
mouth of a large creek that flanks it on the left. In
the profound hush of things, every sound on either

WINTER PICTURES. 253

shore was distinctly heard. A large bed of ducka
were feeding over on the Maryland side, a mile or
more away, and the multitudinous sputtering and
shuffling of their bills in the water sounded decep-
tively near. Silently we paddled in that direction.
When about half a mile from them, all sound of feed-
ing suddenly ceased ; then, after a time, as we kept
on, there was a great clamor of wings, and the whole
bed appeared to take flight. We paused and listened,
and presently heard them take to the water again,
far below and beyond us.

We loaded a boat with the decoys that night, and
in the morning, on the first sign of day, towed a box
out in position, and anchored it, and disposed the de-
coys about it. Two hundred painted wooden ducks,
each anchored by a small weight that was attached
by a cord to the breast, bowed and sidled and rode
the water, and did everything but feed, in a bed many
yards long. The shooting-box is a kind of coffin, in
which the gunner is interred amid the decoys, —
buried below the surface of the water, and invisible,
except from a point above him. The box has broad
canvas wings, that unfold and spread out upon the
surface of the water, four or five feet each way.
These steady it, and keep the ripples from running in
when there is a breeze. IroE. decoys sit upon these
wings and upon the edge of the box, and sink it to
the required level, so that when everything is com-
pleted and the gunner is in position, from a distance
or from the shore one sees only a large bed of ducks,

254 WINTER PICTURES.

with the line a little more pronounced in the centre,
where the sportsman lies entombed, to be quickly
resurrected when the game appears. He lies there
stark and stiff upon his back, like a marble effigy
upon a tomb, his gun by his side, with barely room
to straighten himself in, and nothing to look at but
the sky above him. His companions on shore keep
a lookout, and, when ducks are seen on the wing, cry
out, "Mark, coming up," or " Mark, coming down,"
or, "Mark, coming in,", as the case may be. If they
decoy, the gunner presently hears the whistle of their
wings, or may be he catches a glimpse of them over
the rim of the box, as they circle about. Just as they
let down their feet to alight, he is expected to spring
up and pour his broadside into them. A boat from
shore comes and picks up the game, if there is any
to pick up.

The club-man, by common consent, was the first
in the box that morning ; but only a few ducks were
moving, and he had lain there an hour before we
marked a solitary bird approaching, and, after cir-
cling over the decoys, alighting a little beyond them.
The sportsman sprang up as from the bed of the
river, and the duck sprang up at the same time, and
got away, under fire. After a while my other com-
panion went out; but the ducks passed by on the
• other side, and he had no shots. In the afternoon,
remembering the robins, and that robins are game
when one's larder is low, I set out alone for the pine
bottoms, a mile or more distant. When one is loaded

WINTER PICTURES. 255

for robins, he may expect to see turkeys, and vie*
versa. As I was walking carelessly on the borders
of an old brambly field that stretched a long distance
beside the pine-woods, I heard a noise in front of me,
and, on looking in that direction, saw a veritable tur-
key, with a spread tail, leaping along at a rapid rate.
She was so completely the image of the barn-yard
fowl that I was slow to realize that here was the
most notable game of that part of Virginia, for the
sight of which sportsmen's eyes do water. As she
was fairly on the wing, I sent my robin-shot after
her ; but they made no impression, and I stood and
watched with great interest her long, level flight.
As she neared the end of the clearing, she set her
wings and sailed straight into the corner of the
woods. I found no robins, but went back satisfied
with having seen the turkey, and having had an ex-
perience that I knew would stir up the envy and the
disgust of my companions. They listened with ill-
concealed impatience, stamped the ground a few
times, uttered a vehement protest against the caprice
of fortune that always puts the game in the wrong
place or the gun in the wrong hands, and rushed off
in quest of that turkey. She was not where they
looked, of course ; and, on their return about sun-
down, when they had ceased to think about their
game she flew out of the top of a pine-tree not thirty
rods from camp, and in full view; of them, but too
!ar off for a shot.

In my wanderings that afternoon, I came upon

256 WINTER PICTURES.

two negro shanties in a small triangular clearing in
the woods ; no road but only a foot-path led to them.
Three or four children, the eldest a girl of twelve,
were about the door of one of them. I approached
and asked for a drink of water. The girl got a glass
and showed me to the spring near by.

" We's grandmover's daughter's chilern," she said,
in reply to my inquiry. Their mother worked in
Washington for " eighteen cents a month/' and their
grandmother took care of them.

Then I thought I would pump her about the nat-
ural history of the place.

" What was there in these woods, — what kind of
animals, — any ? "

" Oh yes, sah, when we first come here to live in
dese bottoms de 'possums and foxes and things were
so thick you could hardly go out-o'-doors." A fox
had come along one day right where her mother was
washing, and they used to catch the chickens " dread-
ful."

" Were there any snakes ? "

" Yes, sah ; black snakes, mocassins, and doctors."

The doctor, she said, was a powerful ugly cus-
tomer ; it would get right hold of your leg as you
were passing along, and whip and sting you to death*
I hoped I should not meet any " doctors."

T asked her if they caught any rabbits.

" Oh yes, we catches dem in ' gums '."

" What are gums ? " I asked.

" See dat down dare ? Dat 's a < gum '"

WINTER PICTURES. 257

I saw a rude box-trap made of rough boards. It
aeems these traps, and many other things, such as
bee-hives, and tubs, etc., are frequently made in the
South from a hollow gum-tree ; hence the name gum
has come to have a wide application.

The ducks flew quite briskly that night ; I could
hear the whistle of their wings as I stood upon the
shore indulging myself in listening. The ear loves
a good field as well as the eye, and the night is the
best time to listen, to put your ear to nature's key-
hole and see what the whisperings and the prepara-
tions mean.

"Dark night, that from the eye his function takes,
The ear more quick of apprehension makes,"

says Shakespeare. I overheard some muskrats en-
gage in a very gentle and affectionate jabber beneath
a rude pier of brush and earth, upon which I was
standing. The old, old story was evidently being re-
hearsed under there, but the occasional splashing of
the ice-cold water made it seem like very chilling
business ; still we all know it is not. Our decoys
had not been brought in, and I distinctly heard some
ducks splash in among them. The sound of oar-locks
in the distance next caught my ears. They were so
far away that it took some time to decide whether
or not they were approaching. But they finally
grew more distinct, the steady, measured beat of an
oar in a wooden lock, a very pleasing sound coming
over still, moonlit waters. It was an hour before the
boat emerged into view and passed my post A
17

258 WINTER PICTURES.

white, misty obscurity began to gather over the
waters, and in the morning this had grown to be a
dense fog. By early dawn one of my friends was
again in the box, and presently his gun went bang!
bang ! then bang ! came again from the second gun he
had taken with him, and we imagined the water strewn
with ducks. But he reported only one. It floated
to him and was picked up, so we need not go out.
In the dimness and silence we rowed up and down
the shore in hopes of starting up a stray duck that
might possibly decoy. We saw many objects that
simulated ducks pretty well through the obscurity,
but they failed to take wing on our approach. The
most pleasing thing we saw was a large, rude boat,
propelled by four colored oarsmen. It looked as if
it might have come out of some old picture. Two
oarsmen were seated in the bows, pulling, and two
stood up in the stern, facing their companions, each
working a long oar, bending and recovering and ut-
tering a low, wild chant. The spectacle emerged
from the fog on the one hand and plunged into it
on the other.

Later in the morning, we were attracted by an
other craft. We heard it coming down upon us long
before it emerged into view. It made a sound as
of some unwieldy creature slowly pawing the water
and when it became visible through the fog the sight
did not belie the ear. We beheld an awkward black
hulk that looked as if it might have been made out o/
the bones of the first steamboat, or was it some Vir

WINTER PICTURES. 259

giuia colored man's study of that craft ? Its wheels
consisted each of two timbers crossing each other at
right angles. As the shaft slowly turned, these tim-
bers pawed and pa^ed the water. It hove to on the
flats near our quarters, and a colored man came off
in a boat. To our inquiry, he said with a grin that
his craft was a " floating saw-mill."

After a while I took my turn in the box, and, with
a life-preserver for a pillow, lay there on my back,
pressed down between the narrow sides, the muzzle
of my gun resting upon my toe and its stock upon
my stomach, waiting for the silly ducks to come. I
was rather in hopes they would not come, for I felt
pretty certain that I could not get up promptly in
such narrow quarters and deliver my shot with any
precision. As nothing could be seen, and as it was
very still, it was a good time to listen again. I was
virtually under water, and in a good medium for the
transmission of sounds. The barking of dogs on the
Maryland shore was quite audible, and I heard with
great distinctness a Maryland lass call some one to
breakfast. They were astir up at Mount Vernon,
too, though the fog hid them from view. I heard
the mocking or Carolina wren along shore calling
quite plainly the words a Georgetown poet has put
in his mouth, " Sweet-heart, sweet-heart, sweet ! "
Presently I heard the whistle of approaching wings,
and a solitary duck alighted back of me over my right
shoulder — just the most awkward position forme
she could have assumed. I raised my head a little,

260 WINTER PICTURES.

and skimmed the water, with my eye. The duck was
swimming about just beyond the decoys, apparently
apprehensive that she was intruding upon the society
of her betters. She would approach a little, and
then, as the stiff, aristocratic decoys made no sign of
welcome or recognition, she would sidle off again.
u Who are they, that they should hold themselves so
loftily and never condescend to notice a forlorn
duck ? " I imagined her saying. Should I spring up
and show my hand and demand her surrender ? It
was clearly my duty to do so. I wondered if the
boys were looking from shore, for the fog had lifted
a little. But I must act, or the duck would be off.
I began to turn slowly in my sepulchre and to gather
up my benumbed limbs ; 1 then made a rush and got
up, and had a fairly good shot as the duck flew across
my bows, but I failed to stop her. A man in the
woods in the line of my shot cried out, angrily, " Stop
shooting this way ! "

I laid down again and faced the sun, that had now
burnt its way through the fog, till I was nearly blind,
but no more ducks decoyed, and I called out to be
relieved.

With our one duck, but with many pleasant re-
membrances, we returned to Washington that after*
noon.

THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ

SCIENCE LIBRARY

This book is due on the last DATE stamped below.

To renew by phone, call 459-2050.

Books not returned or renewed within 14 days

after due date are subject to billing.

Series 2477

100m-8,'65(F6282s8)2373

QH81 .895 Sci

3 2106 00250 4857