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By STANTON DAVIS HIRHHAM

East anp WEST
Comparative Studies of Nature in Eastern and

Western States. Illustrated.
New York: G. P. PuTNAm’s SONs. ; ‘ .

RESOURCES
An Interpretation of the Well-rounded Life.
New York: G. P. PuTNam’s Sons, ‘ - . $1.25

Mexican TRAILS

A Record of Travel in Mexico 1904-1907, and a
Glimpse at the Life of the Mexican Indian. Illus.

New York: G. P. PuTNnAm’s Sons, 3 . . $1.75

Tue Puitosopuy oF SELF-HELP

An Application of Practical Psychology to Daily Life.
New York: G. P. PuTnAm’s Sons. ‘ - 9 $1.25

Tue MInistry OF BEAUTY

Philosophical Essays.
New York and San Francisco: PAUL ELDER & Co, $1.50

Wuere DweLis THE SouL SERENE

Philosophical Essays.
New York and San Francisco: PAUL ELDER & Co. $1.50

In THE OPEN
Intimate Studies and Appreciation of Nature.
Frontispiece in Color after Painting by Fuertes.
Illustrated with Original Nature Photographs.
New York and San Francisco: PAUL ELDER & Co, $1.75

, [e1ojsed st ise ayy Jo wey sy] ,,

EAST AND WEST

COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF NATURE
IN EASTERN AND WESTERN
STATES

BY

STANTON DAVIS KIRKHAM

AUTHOR OF
“IN THE OPEN,’ “MEXICAN TRAILS,” ETC,

Illustrated

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

The Rntckerbocker Press
IgII

PREFACE

|? this book is inspired by love of that beau-

tiful estate which has descended to us by
inheritance, it is inspired even more by love
of the open, which is in a still deeper sense our
native land. While these woods and streams,
these mountains and deserts, are the legacy of
the American people, the chief beauty and
interest of this country is the inheritance of
such of them alone as are qualified by under-
standing and by sympathy to receive it—
they who having eyes, see, and having ears,
hear. There are many, however, who, en-
grossed in affairs, have sold their birthright,
this finer, more beautiful inheritance, for a
mess of pottage. To them, above all, this
book is addressed in the hope that it may call
them back to their own—to their native land.

m. DL K.

CONTENTS

THE INHERITANCE .
Cape ANN

THE WILDERNESS
STILL-PADDLING
ONTEORA NOTES

THE Lone IsLanD Woops
CYPRESS SWAMPS

IN THE LAKE COUNTRY
CHAPARRAL

LIvE Oaks

ELYSIAN FIELDS

Dutcu FLat—A RETROSPECT .

IN THE GIANT Cactus BELT

IMPRESSIONS OF THE DESERT

vii

105
119
133
147
157
173

192

Vili

CHAPTER

XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.

Contents

TRAILS .
ARIZONA GARDENS .
Goop FAMILIES

OLD FRIENDS AND NEW

PAGE
204

216

237
256

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE
“Tae CHARM OF THE EAST Is PASTORAL”’
Frontispiece

“THE PEACEFUL CHARM OF MEADOWS AND
PASTURES” . : : , ‘ : 2

“THe Hissinc Foam BUBBLES UP OVER THE
GRANITE”. : ‘ : : - 30

“In THE DEPTHS WHERE THRUSHES FLIT, A
REGION OF TWILIGHT AND SHADOWS”’ . 48

“BIRDS ARE DRAWN TO THESE SUMMITS BE-
CAUSE OF THE LONGER DAY WHICH THEY
Enjoy’’. ‘ ‘ : ‘ : . 82

“Toe LAKE Is THE VERY EYE OF THE LAND-
SCAPE”’ : : . ' ‘i . 12

“Tae TRELLISED VINEYARDS ON THE SLOPES
OF CANANDAIGUA” 3 ; - . I16

“LIKE A GARMENT THE CHAPARRAL COVERED
THE TREELESS SPURS” . : . . 128

**A COLUMNAR VEGETABLE ERECT UPON THE
HILLSIDE”. 3 : : : . 174

x Illustrations

“My WINTER STUDY UNDER THE SKY”

“THe WONDERFUL Horizon WITH ITs ETHE-
REAL MounrtTAINsS”

“In THIS CocoNINO Forest Is THE BREATH
OF THE NorTH”

“In THE SOMBRE Lava GorGES OF ARIZONA”

PAGE
180

214

234

270

EAST AND WEST

EAST AND WEST

CHAPTER I
THE INHERITANCE

ps an annual migration from East to West I
have become increasingly aware of the
immensity of that inheritance in Nature which
has descended to us Americans. Here we
have room under the stars. Here we have
the most beautiful playground in the world.
Such has been my own enjoyment in it; so
great a resource has it been that, as a natural-
ist and one of the inheritors, it appeals to
me as an agreeable duty, a slight return for
benefits received, that I should say some
word—inadequate as it must be—in ‘appre-
ciation of that vast estate which we happily
share in common, we who have eyes and
ears. In this wonderful garden which lacks
neither mountains, deserts nor forests, which
includes all zones from the alpine to the
I I

2 East and West

tropical, and whose flora and avifauna are
unrivalled in extent, naturalists and poets,
hunters and fishermen, and all lovers of the
open, may claim their inheritance, each ac-
cording to his capacity. While corners of
this estate are charming and pastoral, others
are savage and austere. So diversified is the
flora and so considerable the avifauna that no
one will ever have more than a passing ac-
quaintance with either in the field. To fully
know the birds and flowers of your own State
may well occupy you all the days of your
life. But to know those of another region,
a corner remote from your own, greatly
enlarges both the interest and the understand-
ing. As to whether we call ourselves Eastern-
ers or Westerners, we are primarily Americans,
and our inheritance is the length and breadth
of this land—the immense beauty of the
Western deserts and snow-covered ranges as
well as the peaceful charm of the meadows
and pastures, the woods and fields of New
York and New England. It would seem but
fitting that we should now and then look over
this estate and not content ourselves with
some little corner, and that we should culti-
vate an appreciation of its varied aspects.
Perhaps it is not given to any one man to

‘‘ The peaceful charm of meadows and pastures.”

The Inheritance 3

voice both the East and the West, but he at
least who spends half his life in one and half
in the other, may feel in sympathy with both,
as he owes something to the charm of each,
and may interpret some phases, if nothing
more, of these two sides of his continental
garden. So I hope to present the character
—to reflect the very atmosphere it may be—
of certain corners selected because of indi-
viduality, or for no better reason than that
I am familiar with them and like them; to
outline, as it were, little pictures of these
chosen places with their more common birds
and flowers—pictures based on subtle im-
pressions of the true personal charm and
character of each. Thus I shall bring them
together—the East and the West—so that
their natural characters may be tacitly com-
pared. I would reveal in short what a fair
estate is ours, rather by intimations than by
any careful description—for that is the pro-
vince of botanies and ornithologies; yet offer-
ing, perhaps, a stimulus to the study, not of
these books, but rather of the garden itself.
For this purpose I have chosen New York and
the Massachusetts shore in the East, Cali-
fornia and Arizona in the West, and while I
would have included some pictures of the

4 East and West

Rocky Mountain country, the area already
considered is more than ample, and, on the
whole, better answers the purpose in view.
Surely in no part of the world has spring a
more subtle attraction than in the North-
Eastern States and this is enhanced by the
rigour which precedes it. April and May
have here some peculiar quality—spiritual it
would seem, and certainly psychic—which
appeals to those emotions responsive to mu-
sic and poetry. Spring is a resurrection and
its significance cannot be other than solemn
and beautiful to the thoughtful mind. The
blossoming of red maple, alder, and birch, the
appearance of bloodroot, hepatica, and ar-
butus, of coltsfoot, dicentra, and saxifrage,
mark in the sensitive observer certain phases
of spring in himself, as if the flowers were his
thoughts made manifest. The peeping of
the hyla, the arrival of redwings, bluebirds,
and meadow-larks, the migration of warblers,
are never without some inner response in him.
In the West, spring makes no such poetic
and intimate appeal to us, for there spring is
not intrinsically a season as it is in the East.
Instead of our seasons the year is marked by a
dry and a rainy period. In Southern Cali-
fornia after the first autumn rains, one sees

. The Inheritance 5

signs of spring in the blossoming gooseberry
in the cafions and the wild currant on the
mountains. The season of quiescence—the
sleeptime—is marked, not by a mantle of
snow, but by a golden cloak of dried grasses
over all the hills. It is not to‘be supposed,
however, that in California one has no feel-
ing of spring. The majority of wild flowers
do not appear, in any abundance at least,
till April, when they have begun to blossom
with us in the East. But the significance
of the season is less marked, takes accordingly
less hold upon the imagination and is pro-
ductive of less feeling. Undoubtedly in the
East the contrast of winter and spring does
much to heighten the effect—a stage trick by
which we are readily duped and which some-
how we are never weary of observing.
Autumn, too, in the East, is a season in-
comparable—a mood in Nature, an emotion
in us, and nowhere else does one have pre-
cisely the same feeling. On the Pacific slope
and in the South-West, not only the difference
in climatic conditions but the relative scarcity
of deciduous trees conspire to deprive one of
the full import of that mysterious mood of
Nature, the haunting sadness so beautiful in
that expression which we name autumn. In

6 East and West

December,, the Arizona cottonwoods are
shedding their leaves, but early in January,
before they are all off, the trees are in bloom
and the hum of bees resounds in the dry creek
beds. That gorgeous colouring, that splen-
dour of maple and sumac, of scarlet oak and
Virginia creeper has no counterpart in the
West. The year must seem to be born and
seem to die to yield us the esthetic and
spiritual consciousness, the true sense of
spring and of autumn.

When we go West we must put aside the
old feeling for Nature which we have cherished
on the Atlantic side of our estate, prepared to
be solaced by other joys. The charm of the
Western winter, aside from the mildness of
the climate and the greater amount of sun-
shine, is in the continued evidence of life.
Always some birds are singing, some flowers
are blooming. Winter in the East is a re-
cession to the glacial period and life is at a
standstill. Its beauty is the cold beauty of
marble. But on the Pacific Slope, Nature is
awakening from a summer nap; winter is a
growing time, and in the more arid regions at
least, a sunny season as well.

North of Mexico, the most delightful cli-
mate is that of the high Sierra Nevada in

The Inheritance 4

summer and of central and southern Arizona
in winter—delightful that is to those who
esteem dry air and sunshine, rather than to
those lovers of mist and dampness in whom
some subconscious longing for a semi-aquatic
life still obtains.

Climatic conditions of Southern California
are essentially different from those of Arizona,
New Mexico, or Mexico, all of which differ
from each other. Winter is here the rainy
season. Farther south on the west coast
of Mexico, and everywhere on the plateau of
Mexico, it is the dry season. On the east
coast of Mexico, every month is the rainy
season. In New Mexico, generally speaking,
the winter is dry but cold with snow in the
mountains; in central and southern Arizona,
dry and warmer but with light rain; in north-
ern Arizona, dry and cold with some snow.
Conditions vary so greatly with altitude and
proximity to the sea that it is difficult to gen-
eralise, though this is usually attempted.

In California, the climate of the Sierra
Nevada in summer is very similar to the win-
ter climate of the Sierra Madre in the States
of Michoacan, Morelos, and Guerrero. But,
the winter climate of Santa Barbara—and
of the entire coast country—is not perpetual

8 East and West

sunshine nor is it dry. There is none of the
magic in the air which constitutes the charm of
Western Mexico, foritis damp air. Anadobe
brick in Morelos will dry in a short time; how
the old Spaniards ever dried adobe bricks in
Santa Barbara, I do not know, but the fact
remains that they did. It is certainly rain-
less in summer but there is fog—and adobe
needs sunshine and abundance of it.

Plants respond to their environment so
closely that by a mere glance at the flora a
naturalist can tell something of the climatic
conditions. Lichens, ferns, and mosses are
as certain evidence of humidity as cacti of
dryness, and wherever they abound you may
know, all assertions to the contrary, that a
damp climate prevails. It is usually as-
sumed that the air of the mountains is dry.
It is true the air is purer and that on mountain
slopes at a slight elevation, as along the foot-
hills of the Santa Inez in what is called the
lemon belt, the air is drier and warmer than
at the seashore; but on mountain summits,
except in dry climates, the air is moisture
laden, and on the summits of the Catskills
and Adirondacks are always found water-
loving plants.

With some of the heirs of this estate, climate

The Inheritance 9

is not the only thing that lures westward each
winter. There is a spirit of the West, a
something in the Western country capable of
satisfying that in us which the East for-
ever leaves unsatisfied. Broadly speaking the
charm of the East is pastoral, of the West,
heroic. We need the distance, the great
silent spaces, sometime in the year; we need
its colour—its savage reds and yellows, its
opal desert tints. The aboriginal self in us
comes to the fore, that primitive untram-
melled man who must have room and broad
vistas and silence; who is not content with
hills and brooks but demands mountain chains,
the forest, and the desert for his portion;
who is at home in the splendid, untamed,
savage West.

Equally, I think, we need our green little
world of the East, its meadows and pastures,
its old orchards and bees and wrens. We do
not always wish to sit in vast baronial halls
but take comfort in snug little rooms, and
perhaps, as we grow older, find them more
to our liking. These little mountains, these
quiet fields, these village elms and pastoral
scenes appeal to some cultivated and finished
part of us and inspire gentle and cultured
thoughts. Nature has here so many moods.

10 East and West

She is~as subtle and mysterious as she is
changeful and elusive. She is glad, she is sad
in the sky; she whispers, she storms in the
wind, and all the trees whisper and sigh with
her. She is a child and anemones and bluets
are her child-thoughts; she is voluptuous and
flaunts herself for an hour in ironweed and
milkweed, in goldenrod and asters. The
birds are more intimately related to us than
in the West—everything is nearer, the world
is smaller. Somehow the Western birds do
not come into one’s thought-life quite as do
the Eastern; the robin is not so much a part of
the lawn, the oriole of the orchard, or the
thrush of the wood-lot. Perhaps it is because
we have in the West a more distant horizon
and thus hold everything farther from us.
An Eastern bird lover, for the first time in
California or Arizona, will rejoice to find so
many relatives of his old friends, for it will
make him feel at home; and yet at the same
time he will recognise that in some subtle
distinctions they are different from their
Eastern congeners. Thus there are Western
bluebirds, Western robins, Western hermits
—meadow larks, mocking-birds, vesper, song,
and chipping sparrows, gnatcatchers, and
kinglets. Juncos, chicadees, goldfinches,

The Inheritance II

flickers, jays, swifts, swallows, vireos, orioles,
humming-birds, cardinals, and purple finches
will all appear familiar and yet all are differ-
ent species from those to which he is accus-
tomed. He will quickly recognise kingbirds
and phcebes but not those he has known of
old. The spurred towhee will suggest the
chewink; Parkman’s wren the wren of the
apple orchard; Audubon’s warbler the myrtle
bird; the pileolated warbler the blackcap;
and any one of several thrashers, though
different in dress from the Eastern bird, will
plainly declare itself a thrasher. Cafion
wren and rock wren will instantly proclaim
themselves of the delightful family of wrens;
but the cactus wren will appear a strange off-
shoot and the greentailed, California, and
cafion towhees very distant connections of the
Eastern chewink. One may thus feel some-
what at home in this new bird world before
cultivating the acquaintance of such dis-
tinctly Western birds as the wren-tits and
bush-tits, the phainopeplas, solitaires, and
ouzels.

There is a rare pleasure in recognising mem-
bers of particular families of birds and plants,
even if one does not know the name of the
individual. Peculiarities of the family are

12 East and West

recalled with a thrill of satisfaction at one’s
own discernment and the consciousness of a
varied acquaintance. It is presumably with
much the same feeling that your worldly dame,
observing through her lorgnette some new-
comer, recognises him from his nose and man-
ner and recalls and recapitulates his family
traits and family connections. Birds have so
many little traits that reveal relationship.
Their manner of flight, of feeding and sing-
ing; their bills, their feet, their tails, speak of
this and that family or genus, so that you
know that your strange bird is a cousin at
least of some old friend. But to know nota
bird or a flower, nor even to recognise a mem-
ber of a familiar family, is to be a stranger
indeed in a strange land, and to miss the de-
light which we owe to the companionship of
friends and the recognition of celebrities in
Nature.

When it comes to a comparison of the songs
of Eastern and Western birds, I am not yet
prepared to commit myself. Certainly the
Western meadow lark is far superior to the
Eastern as a songster. Its song is, in fact, a
heavenly strain always to be cherished. The
blackheaded grosbeak is a splendid song-
bird and a better vocalist than the rose-

The Inheritance 13

breasted; several of the thrashers are equal or
superior to our bird; the greentailed towhee
is of course a much better singer than our
chewink; the plain titmouse has a beautiful
call note, superior to that of the Eastern
tufted titmouse; Say’s phoebe has a softer
note than our pewee, and the vermilion fly-
catcher might almost be called a songster;
the song of the water ouzel is one of the wild-
est and most sylvan in Nature; and finally,
the solitaire ranks high among American
songbirds. As for the others, the Western
robin is a shy silent bird and neither he nor
the Western song sparrows seem to play the
same familiar and lovable part in the out-
door world that our Eastern birds do. While
the thrushes are well represented in the
West, their songs have seemed to me, at least,
less in evidence than with us. I have heard
nothing equal to our hermits and veeries in the
Catskills or the wood thrush in the Long
Island woods; nor have I ever heard in the
West such splendid daybreak choruses as one
hears in favoured localities in the East. To-
ward the Pacific, one misses the bobolink,
which however is moving westward; while the
Baltimore oriole is replaced by three handsome
birds—the Arizona, Bullock’s, and Scott’s.

14 East and West

We must accord, I believe, the Eastern
hermit and wood thrush the first place among
North American songsters. Theirs and the
veery’s are certainly the most spiritual voices
in Nature, as the song of the bobolink is the
most blithesome and gay. Of all bird utter-
ances, one of the most significant is the
O-ka-lee of the redwing, but this is due
largely to association and can never obtain
with the same force and beauty on the Pacific
Slope that it does in the East when, on some
misty morning, we hear that voice of prophecy
in the grey swamp and the face of the world
seems changed in an instant. To me, the
most truly sylvan voice is that of the ruby-
crowned kinglet, while the wildest note that
Nature utters through the throat of a bird is
the song of the water ouzel. Our Eastern
water thrushes also give expression to the
wild and primeval in Nature. Both the
Eastern and the Western cardinals have
splendid rollicking voices and all the thrash-
ers, like the mocking birds, are dramatic and
finished singers, albeit too self-conscious.
Some of the Western species are more voluble,
and, if anything, better songsters than the
Eastern. Of the wrens no more hopeful,
ringing, divinely cheering voice is to be heard

The Inheritance 15

from Atlantic to Pacific than the song of the
Carolina; and it is equally true that no Ameri-
can bird has a more touching and beautiful
quality of voice than is revealed in those
descending notes of the cafion wren, heard in
the wild rocky gorges of the South-West.

As with the birds, so with the flowers; the
botanist newly arrived in California will
recognise quickly many well-known families
and will be pleasantly aware of family traits:
Crowfoot, Mustard, Pink, Mallow, Pea,
Spurge, Buckthorn, Saxifrage, Stonecrop,
Composite, Heath, Lily, Rose, Mint, Milk-
weed, Waterleaf, Borage, Convolvulus,
Nightshade, Figwort, and others. But he will
soon discover that these orders are largely
represented by other genera than those to
which he is accustomed. Thus Ceanothus,
Arctostaphylos or Manzanita, Lupine, Gilia,
Phacelia, Pentstemon, Calochortus, Castilleia,
and Audibertia are in the ascendant, and
throughout the arid parts of the South-West,
the various genera of the Cacti, the Yucca,
the genus Acacia, Prosopis the mesquite, and
Astragalus the locoweed are plants as typical
as mullein, bayberry, and sweetfern of a New
England pasture. In our winter migration
not only do we meet Western members of the

16 East and West

families we know best, but we come to know
and feel an attachment for families essentially
Western, like the Cacti, the Phlox, and the
Waterleaf.

Trees even more than flowers help to form
that environment with which our thought-
life and associations are so involved, and here
the change is very radical in going from the
Atlantic to the Pacific Slope. While hem-
lock, spruce, and white pine play some part
with us, our associations are in far greater
degree with hardwoods, with red, scarlet, and
white oaks, with shellbark, pignut, and chest-
nut, with black, white, and yellow birch, with
red, white, and sugar maples, and with beech
andelm. It is these trees, so exquisitely ver-
nal in May, so radiant in October, so sombre
and austere in winter, which are chiefly re-
sponsible for our tree-thoughts, our sylvan
impressions. They, with here and there a
pine or hemlock, constitute our Eastern
tree-world. The splendid sugar maples of
the Catskills, the great yellow birches of the
Adirondacks, the beautiful domes which the
elms make in the fields of Western New York,
and the feminine white birch of Eastern
woods, are the decided features of this corner
of our estate.

The Inheritance 17

While in the cafions of Southern California
there is a beautiful sycamore and an alder
which, unlike the Eastern, becomes a large tree,
and in some localities there is a white oak,
it is, above all, the live oak along the coast
and in the valleys which will give you your
tree-impressions and which will be to you
the tree of trees. In the high Sierra, on the
other hand, one has little or no association
with hardwoods and it is the great coniferous
forest of cedar, fir, and pine, and of Sequoia
in restricted areas, a forest having no counter-
part east of the Cascade,—vast, open, and
majestic,—which is the essential character-
istic of our wild garden. In the arid South-
West, except at high elevations adapted to
conifers, the cottonwood of the dry creek beds
is the all-important tree; unless indeed we
consider the giant cactus of Arizona a tree—
which it properly is—but a tree so peculiar
and so remote from one’s idea of trees, that it
accords us impressions of a wholly different
character.

Differences in mammalian fauna of East
and West, while equally great, are much less
striking for the simple reason that we see as a
tule very little of wild animals. They live

by concealment or by their wits; they are
2

18 East and West

largely crepuscular or nocturnal in their
habits and keep out of man’s way. Various
rats and mice are peculiar to the South-West
but as they are all nocturnal one is seldom
aware of their existence, unless it is by their
depredations. In Arizona the large, clumsily
built nests of the trade or pack rats are every-
where in evidence, heaps of sticks and rubbish
covered often with joints of the cholla cactus
by way of armour. Squirrels, chipmunks, and
skunks abound but all are different species
from ourown. The various zones from desert
to snowline have each their characteristic
kinds and it is one of the remarkable features
of both Arizona and California that one may
traverse all the zones by climbing a mountain;
—that is to say, one travels from Mexico to
the Arctic circle within these few miles of
ascent.

If one encounters a deer, it will very likely
be the blacktail which largely replaces our
whitetail. Formerly in riding in the Coco-
nino forest I often started antelope and these
encounters were the chief pleasure of any
excursion. The sight of a wild animal alert
and free in its native haunts is still to me
one of the rarely stimulating influences.
Bears or panthers are now seldom to be met

The Inheritance 19

with unless systematically hunted, and this
is also true of wildcats, though these are still
abundant. There are two animals, however,
that one sees frequently—the coyote and the
jackrabbit, both very characteristic of the
West, and one’s impressions of any South-
Western landscape are apt to be coloured by
the sudden leaping of a jackrabbit over a
ridge, his great ears showing for an instant
over the skyline, or the swift, silent skulking
in the distance of a coyote; and if one is a
student of animal life, the wonderful ease and
freedom of motion, the implied potential
energy will always hold the eye.

One other feature of the fauna, particularly
of Southern California, which will make an
impression on the Eastern mind is the abun-
dance of lizards. This radical difference in the
reptilian fauna of East and West is apparent
when we consider that in his Reptiles of the
Pacific Coast and Great Basin, Van Den-
burgh enumerates forty species of lizards and
only three species of turtles. All, with the
one exception of the Gila monster, are harm-
less, while the rattlesnake is the only poison-
ous serpent. Some of these lizards are
graceful and rather pretty, albeit cursed
with reptilian features. Wherever one goes,

20 East and West

whether under the live oaks or on bare rocky
desert places, they dart hither and thither.
The whiptail scurries from under the feet
with such lightning speed as to appear like a
streak across the road; fence lizards raise and
lower themselves in their strange automatic
fashion upon boulders and tree trunks as they
observe the intruder; the alligator lizard,
which resembles a small alligator, hangs by
his tail and feet in the lower branches of the
live oaks, waiting for insects; the blue-tail
gleams on the banks amidst the coffee ferns;
or a horned toad crawls sluggishly out of
the way over the rocks and sand. True,
they are reptiles, but fortunately, with few
exceptions, they rarely give one that uncanny
sensation, that subconscious racial repulsion,
which appears to be inseparable from the
sight of a serpent.

It is a beautiful estate that has descended
to us—this continental garden bordering two
oceans; a wild garden to cherish and enjoy—
and to preserve. Our grandchildren will not
thank us for cutting off the forests, drying up
the streams, killing all the big game, and de-
facing the charming pastoral landscapes of
New England and New York with the evi-
dences of a commercial depravity. They

The Inheritance 21

will go to the museums we have bequeathed
them as their portion, and looking at draw-
ings and sections of forest trees, and at stuffed
bison, wapiti, antelope, mountain sheep, and
egrets—all designated as extinct—will reflect
upon the uses we made of our patrimony.
And they will turn to the herbaria for many
flowers of our wild garden that shall have
ceased to exist—uprooted by the thoughtless.

But they shall not say we have failed to
protect our songbirds. Nor shall they say
we have made no effort to save the forest—
even though too late. They will merely
wonder why we did not begin in time; that
anything so obvious could for so long have
escaped our attention. They will feel that
some of us loved our great wild garden; that
some of the old heirs cherished their beautiful
estate and strove to preserve, or at least
not to mar it, that in so far as we could
further it, the children we loved and their
children’s children should come into their
inheritance. And more than this, they shall
truly feel that at least we taught them to know
their estate—its birds and flowers and trees
—in a way and to an extent that we our-
selves had not been taught.

Among these future heirs will doubtless

22 East and West

be—as with us—some difference of opinion
as to who has inherited the chief portion.
Some will aver they are the principal heirs be-
cause of certain deeds relative to a few acres
here or there—even so. Others will lament
and deem themselves defrauded of their
heritage—having no deeds at all. A goodly
number will sell their birthright for a mess
of pottage and will go through life with-
out ever really seeing the splendid estate
which was rightfully theirs. Lastly a few—
a chosen few—shall know that the true in-
heritance, which is of God and not of man, is
the love of the open,—the eye and the ear
and the heart; the feeling for birds and for
flowers, the companionship of the woods and
fields, of the primeval forest, the everlasting
hills and the mysterious opal deserts. And
these shall not be concerned as to who owns
most or least—seeing that their portion is the
beauty of this estate, that to them, and to
them alone, Nature yields herself as to the
true inheritors of the land.

CHAPTER II
CAPE ANN

Er ever a land bore the impress of the sea,

that land is Cape Ann. It is dominated
by the sea as by a vast and mysterious pre-
sence. Its hemlock swamps, its pine woods,
its boulder-strewn pastures are all under this
spell of the ocean gods. The storm and pas-
sion of the sea have left their indelible mark
upon the granite shore. Here two forces
forever contend; the sea restless, passionate,
feline; the granite, grim, ponderous, inert.
This ceaseless contest, this ever-present neces-
sity of confronting the sea, shows itself as
well in the faces of the fisherfolk which have
become like granite. The bewitching sea
lures them all their days; it croons their cradle
song; it chants their requiem. The sea is
their life and the sea is their death.

So if you go down to Cape Ann you shall
come under the mighty spell of the sea and
you shall feel it not alone on the weathered

23

24 East and West

rocks of Halibut Point and the dunes of
Squam, but on the Dogtown pastures and in
the depths of Coltsfoot swamp. ‘You shall
have a sense of the sea by day and by night;
it shall be in your nostrils, in your ears, in
your thoughts—the wonderful sea which was
never young and never grows old. For you
must know, however matter of fact you may
be, that where the sea is, there is mystery and
there is poetry. A man may look at it and
think of the price of fish, but the sea, like
music, shall compel him to think also of
other things.

Now Cape Ann bears the impress of an-
other force, long since dissipated, but once as
dominant as the sea, which for untold ages
wrapped the land in silence and cold. Every-
where the boulders and ledges, planed and
scratched, speak of the touch of a vanished
hand—a rude and terrible hand indeed.
The ghost of the ice still haunts the lonely
Dogtown Commons and the imaginative
mind will not fail to conjure up the ancient
glacier in sauntering over the rugged pastures:
the vast snowy mantle, the bluegreen caverns
of ice, the hummocks and crevasses, the
silence of Arctic winter broken by the boreal
song of glacial torrents. In no locality in

Cape Ann 25

this latitude is one more constantly reminded
of that far-off day, that long desolate glacial
winter which preceded the present spring-
time of the temperate zone.

In every direction ledges are planed in the
characteristic fashion with gentle northerly
and north-westerly slopes and abrupt south-
erly ones, polished as by intention, so that
now and again one is inclined to rub the hand
approvingly over some particularly smooth
surface, as if tacitly to imply admiration for
such excellent workmanship. But it is on
Dogtown Commons that the spell of the
departed ice is most keenly felt, for on this
historic ground the glacier made its final
stand and here beat its slow retreat, dissolving
into vapour and leaving the terminal moraine
as evidence of that great conflict of the ele-
ments. Here an endless array of mammoth
boulders, like some heroic legion, turned to
stone where it lay encamped upon the plain,
stretches far in all directions, so imposing
that it awes the saunterer who for the first
time picks his way among these silent cohorts
of granite. That silence is eloquent of a day
that was—of the dusk of the gods.

Thus one has not only the sense of the liv-
ing sea, but is haunted by the ghost of the

26 East and West

vanished ice. Between them, they carved and
fashioned a rugged land. Scoured by the
winds and lost in the fogs, it is only during the
short summer and the mellow autumn that
it is habitable for any but the robust, and
these—fisherfolk and quarrymen, rugged as
the land itself,—cling to the Cape like rock-
weed on the ledge or lichens on the boulders.
To these weather-beaten seadogs in oil-
skins and sou’westers, the dapper summer
visitors in tennis clothes must appear like
some species of mayfly—ephemera, blown
away by the first autumn gale.

It is for the most part, the rocky shore, not
the beach, with which one comes to form a
lasting friendship on the Cape. Bold masses
of granite advance abruptly into the sea; long
shelving reaches of granite dip beneath the
waters, and upon these the restless surf for-
ever dissolves in thunder. Here it foams and
froths, hissing in anger as it gnaws at the
wall of rock. Here again it purrs in content-
ment as it fawns at the feet of the imper-
turbableledge. As the tide ebbs there emerges
from the waters that strange region which is
both of the land and of the ocean, whose
fauna are molluscs and crustaceans, its flora,
rockweed, sea-lettuce, red alge, and kelp,

Cape Ann i

About this oozy strip of rocks whose uncouth
and monstrous forms are clothed with dank
seaweed, there is a fascination which no
beach possesses, due partly to its strange in-
habitants but still more to that intimate
sense of the sea which it yields.

Dykes of diabase intersect the country rock
and where these dykes advance into the water,
the softer rock has been eaten out by the
waves, leaving deep chasms which the rising
tide invades with moan and swish and cavern-
ous.thunder. Their perpendicular walls are
lined in places with delicate sea-anemones,
revealing those marvellous hues which only
the creatures of the sea possess. Scattered
over this olive-brown zone of rockweed, the
receding tide leaves innumerable pools.
Limpid and sparkling as mountain springs,
these pools are the natural aquaria over which ,
you will spend many a pleasant hour, the
smell of the sea in your nostrils and the sound
of the sea in your ears.

Here are limpets, barnacles, and whelk, the
latter rose colour, lemon yellow, orange, or
pure white. Sea-urchins cling to the rocks
and their mauve and heliotrope tints con-
trast with the rose and crimson and yellow of
starfish, bright green sea-lettuce in clear

28 East and West

depths of the pool, and the olive-brown air sacs
of rockweed floating on its surface. These
pools are veritable gems in a rough setting
and one is never tired of peering into them
while the sea, fluid sapphire to the horizon
line, croons at the ebb. For the sea is a kind
of enchantment. There are days when an
azure sky and a sapphire sea conspire to hold
one spellbound upon these rocks. Not only
is the somnolent murmur of the surf in the
ears, the sea pervades the whole being, so
that one is literally ‘‘possessed’”’ by it; not
as by a devil surely, but by an enchantress—
a being all motion and music and light.

But there comes a day when you may
think the sea a devil indeed, when all the
wiles of the enchantress have vanished, her
sapphire hues, her dancing waves, her gentle
lullabies. Darkness lies over the face of the
deep, and like the hiss of serpents is the sound
of the fretful spray. The summer resident
has departed with the summer birds and the
fisherman in oilskins and sou’wester is left
with the crow and the chickadee to face the
winter gales. A sullen sea beats upon a deso-
late shore. Grey! grey! grey! The Cape,
its leafless oaks and hickories chattering in
the wind, lies like a gaunt skeleton of rock, its

Cape Ann 29

extremities prone in the leaden sea. Recall
now, if you can, the June roses which covered
the rocks, the love song of the catbird in the
briers. Like a sand blast the sleet cuts the
face as you crawl out upon the rocks to see
the schooner pounding on the ledge. With
impetuous fury the great grey green combers
curl and break and hurl themselves upon the
land. The sea is boiling as in some vast
cauldron and the hissing foam bubbles up
over the granite to the very edge of the fringe
of huckleberry and wild rose, while the swish
and boom of the surf drowns all sounds in the
world—your very thoughts as well. Like
a barnacle, you cling to a slender shore
besieged by an infinite sea of frenzy and
passion.

Winter on the Cape will teach you how
grey the world can be; it will reveal the power
and vitality of the primeval sea, so that often
you shall reflect—What is man indeed! Your
grim companions the storms and fogs, you
will have the shriek of the winds and the
boom of the surf for music—Spartan music,
calling to arms,—and you shall need some
granite in your backbone. When the solitary
Dogtown pastures lie under their covering of
snow on clear crisp days, they are haunted

30 East and West

as at no other time by the ghost of the
vanished ice, and only the cheery flock of
chickadees reminds you that the land has
been redeemed.

Approaching Dogtown Commons from the
shore, one must first traverse a fringe of wood,
now growing thin in places, which screens
from the ocean the ancient pastures and the
cellars marking the site of the deserted vil-
lage. As one emerges from the woods and
the thick coppice which replaces the primeval
hemlock, pine, and oak of a generation ago,
these pastures have the stern and sombre
aspect of Scottish moorland. The vast array
of boulders with which they are strewn in all
directions invests them with added character
and a certain austere charm. If one may
speak of the heart of Cape Ann, it is here—a
New England heart of stone, which exerts
nevertheless a mysterious attraction. The
very austerity of the landscape has some
power to hold the attention: all the more that
this severe personality reveals upon acquaint-
ance certain little graces which, like the oc-
casional softening of a cold nature, are the
more acceptable. And, as with distant and
forceful personalities, one feels always that
he has not yet sounded their depths nor

‘“‘ The hissing foam bubbles up over the granite.”

Cape Ann 31

fully explored them. It is thus I have been a
long time sauntering on these pastures and
have never yet come to the end of them.

On this moorland, intersected by swamps
and skirted in places by woods of white
pine, the sombre red cedar standing solitary
amidst the boulders is the only tree, while the
swamps themselves are thickly grown with
red maples, black birch, and an occasional
clump of hemlocks. It is these Dogtown
pastures which contribute, as much as the sea,
to the rugged individuality of Cape Ann.
They are the dominant element in its person-
ality, and this is due not only to the austerity
of the landscape but quite as much to the
boulders and to the red cedar. Indeed the
cedar is transmuted granite, a sombre tree as
befits a stern environment, pointing a rigid
finger to the skies where it stands unbending
beside the great boulders, many of which
like dolmens or druidical stones also point
heavenward, as if both would admonish the
saunterer of some inexorable destiny. Rigid
tree and unyielding granite, these might well
have been the insignia of the Puritan.

The same stern affinity exists between the
boulder and the juniper, a shrub which is the
spirit of hardihood incarnate in a plant. It

32 East and West

is to New England pastures what the yucca is
tothedesert. Equally self-reliant, aggressive,
uncompromising, it maintains itself in spite
of everything. How it flattens itself over
the ground, clinging by root and branch to
that thin layer of soil, as indeed it must in
north-west gales which threaten to blow, not
only the juniper, but the soil itself off the
ledge and leave the Cape shivering in its
bones.

But this austere land has softer moods
which find expression in the barberry. In
autumn, you shall go to Dogtown for no
other purpose than for a particular set of im-
pressions which it accords. Its foliage has
brightened, its splendid racemes of brilliant
drupes hang luxuriantly. Full of grace and
charm, glowing with colour, it is a pasture
shrine for pilgrimages. As you stand and
gaze, it is as if some subtle emanation pro-
ceeded from this beautiful thing and was
absorbed into your mental constitution;—
the irradiance of a charming personality.

Now there are barberry impressions and
bayberry impressions as well, and the two
are wholly distinct. The rugged little bay-
berry allures by no such outward and visible
charms. It is a prim homespun sort of a

Cape Ann Ke

plant, but as you roll the grey greasy pill-
like berries between the finger and thumb
there arises an aroma which works magic.
*T is the lotus plant of the northern pastures,
for as one inhales that perfume, an exhilarat-
ing sense of the wild takes possession of him
to the exclusion of all else so that even the
memory of the town and the limitations and
commonplaces for which it stands suddenly
fade. To crush the leaves is to awake the
genii of the open who whirl us away on wings
of freedom. A wonderful plant is the bay-
berry; yet there are those who will be loath to
admit it. Ah, well, if it does not affect them,
it is because they have not been called by the
gods to be walkers and lotus-eaters, and it
will be of little use for them to go to Dog-
town at all. They will see a few cellars of
the ancient inhabitants and plenty of stones,
but the Dogtown of the saunterer shall re-
main for ever invisible.

One may go to, the pastures, however, for
such uninspired motive as berry-picking and
it may be to him as to the cattle—merely a
place to browse. But if perchance while
watching the flocks of Admetus you
browse upon diviner food than blueberries,
then, looking upon high bush and low bush

3

34 East and West

with uncommercial eye, you shall find these
humble plants yield more than berries—even
certain evanescent and charming impressions.

This austere personality with its heart of
stone has thus a mellow hour in its boreal
year, a vernal mood and a short summer
languor. Spring here is so delicate and
ethereal, so unsubstantial that it seems as if a
change of the wind and a blast from the icy
sea might dissolve her into nothingness, as it
scatters the pale petals of the shadbush. The
spirit of that fleeting spring is too ethereal
indeed ever to be held captive in words. It is
a momentary vision as of another world, and
any description is a pressed anemone com-
pared with that fragile blossom in the leafless
woods. The granite heart softens, the stern
features relax, and there steals over the pas-
ture that expression of exquisite gentleness we
name houstonia, that mildly beaming aspect
we call dandelions.

Many swamps border the interior pastures,
bearing away towards the sea, and in these,
spring lingers and is more in evidence. In
certain open places in the swamps, well away
from the woods, I have found poison sumac
and mountain holly, both rare hereabouts.
Various other little open swamps, fringed with

Cape Ann 35

hardhack, clethra, alder, and meadowsweet,
are filled with cotton grass and sedges, and in
these you may look for the Venus flytrap
and the white-fringed orchis, growing side
by side with cranberries. Here the common
shrubs are the Cassandra and the winterberry.
As the swamps diverge from the pastures
and become deeper and more extensive, they
are filled with red maples. In these pleas-
ant shades—and what more alluring to the
botanist than a bog—look for the pitcher-
plant, for Bryum, Mnium, Hypnum, Sphag-
num, and Bartramia among the mosses, and
for Osmunda, Onoclea, Dryopteris, and As-
plenium among the ferns. Boulders and
ledges are thickly covered with polypods,
while there are many parmileaceous lichens
upon trunks and rocks and various filiform
species in the branches. Tree trunks adorned
with tree-mosses and lichens are peculiarly
rich and effective in these swamps, so intricate
are the designs, so subdued and harmonious
the tones, placed upon backgrounds of maple
and birchbark, beautiful in themselves.
Where a swamp supports a growth of hem-
locks, its general appearance corresponds, as
if this were an architectural form with which
all details must accord. Here in the twilight

36 East and West

of a cathedral is the haunt of clintonia, gold-
thread, and bunchberry, while the mitchella,
creeping humbly over the rich humus, is dis-
covered none the less by the wandering bum-
blebee. In little bogs scattered through the
hemlocks and filled with sphagnum the rose
pogonia conceals itself, a rare and beautiful
spirit imprisoned in the mud of the swamp.
Even to a somewhat matter-of-fact mood,
such as is habitual with most of us in our
uninspired lives, a hemlock wood has a certain
remoteness from the busy world. It has an
atmosphere of its own; is peopled by a shy and
less assertive race who attend to their own
affairs and do not intrude upon our privacy. In
the tree tops I hear the woodsy speech of
blackthroated and green warblers and the
little trumpet of the redbreasted nuthatch,
eminently self-contained and peaceful voices
which have no suggestion of human mo-
tives. Here are diminutive beings living
their lives quite as if mankind did not
exist. They show none of the vexations of
the civilised life and their conversation is
peculiarly refreshing. It is agreeable to en-
counter a race who live from so different a
standpoint from ours and who appear so con-
tented withal. Other pleasant little beings—

Cape Ann 37

brown creepers and black and white warblers
—sidle down the hemlock columns which
lead from the upper world to the nether one,
poking and prying into the crevices and intent
upon their quest. Occasionally a redstart
makes an aérial dive, his orange wing and tail
patches showing as he performs some grace-
ful evolutions. Or a pewee darts after a
miller flitting in the twilight, capturing it
with a plainly audible snap of the bill, and
returning to a twig to melt into its environ-
ment as it utters a plaintive pewee note.
Suddenly the whole wood rings with the
penetrating voice of the ovenbird, and be-
comes as suddenly silent again.

One misses on Cape Ann the bloodroot,
hepatica and spring beauty, and among the
birds, the house wren, chat, tufted titmouse,
martin, yellowthroated vireo, and I may say
all of the thrushes. For though the hermit,
veery, and olivebacked pass through as
migrants I have not found any thrush other
than robin and bluebird nesting on the Cape,
nor do I remember to have seen a wood
thrush. The chewink and the catbird are
perhaps as characteristic as any of the sum-
mer birds. Of the warblers, the black and
white, blackthroated green, yellow, chest-

38 East and West

nut-sided, Canadian, redstart, and ovenbird
certainly nest here. The thrasher is an abun-
dant summer resident and the crested fly-
catcher a conspicuous bird. Of the small
mammals the mink is perhaps the most
typical.

Saxifrage, columbine, and houstonia are
the early flowers one will most associate with
Cape Ann; and not in a summer day’s journey
will one see more wild roses than on some
rocky points and headlands. With the sweet-
fern and the bayberry, the rose clings to
the granite ledge at the edge of the sea, the
rock so grim, so wintry, the rose so winsome,
the sweet spirit of the month of June. In
these wild-rose thickets the song sparrow
builds by the sea and in the autumn I have
seen the angry spray fall hissing upon the
very spot where I recalled a nest embowered
in roses the preceding June.

In early autumn the dainty purple gerardia
spreads itself over the Cape around the
cranberry bogs and seems in very truth
native to this granite soil. There are mellow
hours in October, a softening of that cold
heart which so soon is to succumb to the re-
turning ghost of the ice and to become frigid
and immobile again; hours when the waters

Cape Ann 39

are opalescent, and passing sails in a roseate
light appear to float in mid-air, so vague and
dreamlike is the sea; when the shadbush
lights, as by a soft glow, the pine woods;
when the osmunda flares in the swamps and
the Virginia creeper runs aloft a scarlet flag
from the pignut and the pitchpine. Then
the huckleberry and the dwarf sumac redden
the sombre hills of Dogtown, the red maple
fills those sinuous swamps with a tide of
colour, and the staghorn—the most brilliant
of all—paints itself savage vermilion and
flaunts its barbaric beauty.

Now you shall feel the lure of the opal sea
as never before, dominating and pervading
all. It compels you to the shore; it assails
the sense from every avenue—the pungent
sea smell, the haunting sea song, the un-
dulating sapphire field, unlock the fancy and
the unfettered mind escapes for an hour into
a larger consciousness, as a drop might return
to the sea. This spell is most potent in
autumn, which is itself an enchantment. In
a double bewitchment, the sea and the air are
in league to steal away the sense, like opium.
Colour, too, massed as it is in autumn, has a
certain intoxicating effect, a little more divine
perhaps than that of any wine we know.

40 East and West

How cheap are your emotions? Can they be
bought with gin or beer, or must they have a
fine wine; will they yield something to cheap
music or do they require the involved themes
and subtle harmonies of nocturnes; do they
respond only to spectacular sunsets or do
they withhold themselves for that planetary or
cosmic mood we name autumn? If this is
their price, then the goldenrod and asters by
the glittering sea shall play upon you like
music, shall resolve themselves in you into
feeling which no human language can ever
clothe with words, and the dream song of the
crickets shall seem to sing itself in you.

Soon the enchanted hour passes—like an
emotion—and once more Cape Ann lies, a
skeleton prostrate at the edge of the sea, and
the surf beats upon its bleaching bones.
Flocks of red polls arrive and feed upon the
alders about the ponds. Tree sparrows re-
turn and whitewinged and red crossbills in-
habit now and again the secluded world of the
hemlock wood, while vociferous companies of
chicadees and golden-crowned kinglets flit
around the edge of Dogtown. Rarely a pine
grosbeak is seen, or a flock of snow buntings
whirl over the snow-covered pastures in the
pale yellow light, to lose themselves in the

Cape Ann 41

violet shadows beyond. The wind whistles
and shrieks in bare branches, the sleet stings
and lashes the face as you creep over the
granite ribs of the shore; while the ominous
thunder of the sea overwhelms the petty

sounds of Earth,—its laughter and its sobs
alike.

CHAPTER III
THE WILDERNESS

URELY the prevailing spirits of the
North Woods are water-loving nymphs,

its chief flora, aquatic. A wilderness it
is, not alone of trees, but of lakes, ponds, and
streams, whose highroads are waterways and
whose byroads, swamps and carries. In a
sense Adirondack Wilderness is a more fitting
appellation than Adirondack Mountains, for
the impression upon the mind, of wilderness
par excellence, far outweighs any impression
of hill country as such. Forest, it is not,
for to those who know the Pacific Slope—
where flourish, or rather decline, the most
splendid forests in the world—the word sug-
gests the idea of amplitude, of majesty, with
which there is nothing commensurate in the
Eastern States and which only the giant
conifers, the vast perspective, the rugged
topography of the West can satisfy. The
same is true of mountains, for to a Western

42

The Wilderness 43

mountaineer, the Adirondacks and Catskills,
though not insignificant in altitude, are not
mountains at all as he knows them, corre-
sponding to his idea of foothills. But a
wilderness—yes; the Adirondacks are the
wilderness.

I went into the North Woods in May, the
last month of winter, and came out late in
October, which again is the beginning of win-
ter. There were flurries of snow until the
first of June and the aspect was wintry save
for the appearance towards the end of May
of the warblers who, arriving somewhat later
than at lower levels, found the woods still
inhospitable. But how they enlivened that
boreal region! Roving bands of chestnut,
Blackburnian, Magnolia, black-throated
green, black-throated blue, black-and-white,
mourning, and bay-breasted warblers darted
in and out the budding trees, affording little
gleams of colour—of lemon yellow, orange,
chestnut, olive, and blue-black against the
silver grey and reddish purple setting of hem-
lock trunks and maple twigs. Their faint
tseeps were the first shy utterance of a still
uncommunicative earth awakening from its
strange lethargy of winter. Now and again
a high-pitched trill, woodsy and aloof, gave

44 East and West

faint promise of an approaching spring, and
was as instantly lost in the pervading silence
of the wilderness as the bird itself in the in-
terlacing twigs of a swamp or the dark foliage
of the spruce.

In all the mystery and charm of Nature,
nothing else is quite comparable with the ad-
vent of the warblers. Out of a grey world
they appear as mysteriously as flowers on the
red maple and the shadbush. It is a blossom-
ing in feathers in place of petals, and this an-
nual appearance of life and colour ever affects
the beholder as one of the most subtle im-
pressions of Nature, as it is one of the most
fugitive. For to-day they come and to-
morrow, it may be, they are gone, and as
with the wind, who can tell whence or
whither?

Not that the woods were wholly austere, as
before the advent of the warblers there
appeared the most beautiful nymph of early
spring, the shadbush, standing all alone
by solitary ponds in the cold May driz-
zle, the embodiment—or shall I say the
spirit—of all that is exquisite and vernal.
The wilderness has other charms, but not
again throughout the seasons does it evince
such loveliness as when, in the prevailing

The Wilderness 45

sombreness, the pale wraith of the shadbush
haunts for an enchanted hour the river’s
edge.

Meanwhile the hobblebush spreads white
patches of bloom under hemlocks and a faint
red haze lies over the swamps, a mist of
green over alders and birch, subtly blending
with the purplish sheen of bare branches.
The sky is grey and sombre, the air, heavy and
chill. Raquette Lake lies dull and unre-
sponsive amidst dark hills, as if still under
the hypnosis of winter. In the length and
breadth of the North Woods there is not a
dry spot. It is the recession of the floods,
the Champlain epoch, which is every year
re-enacted in miniature, and man, adapting
himself as best he may, in oilskins and boots
flounders laboriously in a semi-aquatic en-
vironment.

Before the aspens about the camp were in
full leaf, they were taken possession of by a
band of purple finches in the heydey of love-
making. And though it drizzled and the grey
skies spat snow, the perfervid finches in fierc-
est rivalry pursued the somewhat prim look-
ing females, sidling along the branches with
fluttering wings and ruffled feathers to pour
out their love songs in prolonged ecstasy.

46 East and West

Later appeared a little company of rose-
breasted grosbeaks, and while they sang
constantly and appeared to be at home around
the clearing, when we left Raquette the first
week in June and took another camp on Long
Lake, we saw no more grosbeaks through-
out the season. This was strange, inasmuch
as by the side of Long Lake is a con-
siderable clearing, the work of ancient settlers
in what is popularly known as the heart of the
Adirondacks.

Songbirds, for the most part, like men, do
not belong to the wilderness proper, but to the
outskirts—the clearings. Perhaps only wild
animals ever penetrate to the real heart of it,
for wherever civilised man is, there it is the
border merely. No matter how far within he
may go, he is still without. The Heart of
the Wilderness is a mythical region wherein
the foot of man has never trod and upon
which he has never set eyes. When he thinks
he has reached it, like the drumming of the
grouse, it is still beyond. In the dim ages of
faun and satyr his ancestors lost for him the
key, and ever since, that mysterious place
has been invisible to the eye of civilisation.
When the lumbermen have traversed every
foot of ground, and cut down the last tree,

The Wilderness 47

they shall find, not the heart of the ancient
wood, but—desolation.

One fascination of the wilderness then, to
the lover of the woods, lies in the effort to
reach that mystical region of which he re-
ceives intimations, but which ever eludes
him. If any of the birds are familiar with
that interior world it is surely the wood-
peckers and the birds of prey, for unlike sing-
ing birds they seem seldom aware of man,
and their habits are modified little, if any, by
his presence. Savage and untamed, they
remain part of the wilderness. I had not
been long in the woods before discovering
the log-cock, but his nest I never found.
Perhaps it is within that inner circle which
may not be entered and where also the
grouse drums.

A few songbirds, however, such as the win-
ter wren, do not seek the settlements of man
and they, it may be, are the gentler spirits of
the mysterious heart of the woods. When
we hear them sing, we are perhaps as near it
as we ever shall be. An untamable sprite,
secretive, shy, and sylvan, the winter wren is
a characteristic bird of the wilderness. How
far from the clearings he penetrates, who can
say? Perchance he does not go i at all

48 East and West

but merely comes out to the edge where we
see him. The queer gnome-like little creature
may in truth be a gnome for aught we can
say. He lives by concealment, darting about
as surreptitiously as a wood-mouse, and this
self-obliteration is the very law of the wilder-
ness. So it is that his song is a disembodied
voice escaping for a moment into the silence,
as wild a woodland ditty as ever fell upon
listening ear.

While the song of the hermit is the most
beautiful of all, that of the veery is more
mysterious. Mr. Burroughs aptly describes
its note as spheral! spheral! spheral! and
surely it is an impersonal and spheral music.
He sings not of our world, but it may be of
that enchanted sphere, the heart of the wilder-
ness. It is sombre in the depths where these
thrushes flit, a region not of sunshine but
of twilight and shadows. Nothing in the
whole range of bird music—of any music—
could better express its peculiar atmosphere,
its solemnity, its cathedral character. Un-
consciously these birds voice their environ-
ment as truly and appropriately as Wagner,
with his psychological subtlety and insight,
adapted his motifs to his characters and
their emotions. The song of the hermit

SMOPEYS puv YS IA] Jo uolSar v YB saysnayy asaya syydap ay} uy ,,

The Wilderness 49

thrush is a true wilderness motif—its great-
est and most exalted one; others are the lonely
and terrible hoot of the horned owl, the mys-
terious drumming of the ruffed grouse, the
wildest of wild cries, that of the loon, and the
wildest of songs—those of the winter wren and
the water thrush.

To those who have been much in the
mountains and the woods—to true naturalists
and sportsmen that is—the impression which
a certain sensational reporting of Nature aims
to give to the ignorant, that the woods are
quite populous with wild creatures, ready to
be observed, is as false as itis absurd. If
there is a Law of the Woods—it is conceal-
ment. To be precise, it is a tendency under
which all wild animals with the exception
of skunks, porcupines, and friendly squirrels
act, and as normal to them as the instinct of
self-preservation to which it is due. They
avoid being seen as naturally as man seeks
to be observed. The impression one really

-receives in the wilderness is, thus, not of its
being populated with animals, but rather of
its being depopulated or uninhabited. How
many eyes are watching him, the novice would
never suspect. They see him but he does not

see them and, unless there is snow on the
4

50 East and West

ground, he may stay in the woods for months
and find that wild animals contribute but
little to his impressions.

The four-footed animals of the woods are
crepuscular: creatures of the dawn and the
dusk and not of the daylight, as the wilder-
ness itself is a region of twilight, rather than
of sunshine. If the skunk and porcupine do
not observe the strict etiquette of the woods
it is because they are emboldened by their
peculiar means of self-protection. Deer are
almost as plentiful in some parts of the woods
as woodpeckers, and like fairies they come
and go while we sleep. In the morning their
clean-cut tracks are visible around the pond’s
edge but the deer have become invisible.
Perhaps in that mythical heart of the woods
it is perpetual dawn, and there the deer have
their true abode, and could we ever find
it, would be seen frisking at all times, stray-
ing into our world only when it is dawn and
dusk with us.

In spite of our inability to reach this heart
of the wilderness, which, like the inner life
of an alien people, will always remain inac-
cessible to us, the wilderness—superficially
as we are permitted to know it—is a world
apart, a region of twilight and of silence in

The Wilderness 51

which we are speedily lost. It shuts out
our world as it shuts out sunlight and we
vanish in it as in a crypt whose roof is sup-
ported by columnar trunks of yellow birch
and hemlock. Once entered, it closes around
us, absorbs and impresses its mood upon us.
We find ourselves without apparent cause
walking stealthily. There is good reason for
this, however, in the mere power of suggestion
exerted by a vast and encompassing silence.
Moreover, there exist in civilised man, sub-
conscious memories of the life of his savage
ancestors. From his wild progenitors, to
whom some wilderness was home, an inher-
itance has come down to him, both of mind
and body. In the wilderness, then, we re-
turn to our ancestral home—the earliest home
of man—the memory of which was lost long
before the beginning of history, but’ which
inheres still in the cryptic depths of the sub-
conscious mind of the race and, like an ances-
tral ghost, arises and flits before us in the
depths of the forest.

Early in June we left our camp on Raquette
Lake and pursuing the devious waterways
which are the arteries of the North Woods,
arrived at Long Lake, where another camp
awaited us. Crossing Raquette and thence

52 East and West

over a short carry into Forkéd Lake, we
paddled the length of the latter, only to find
the mouth of Raquette River so choked with
logs that further progress was impossible.
Returning therefore to Raquette, we went
up Marion River and traversing Ottawana,
Eagle, and Blue Mountain Lakes, crossed over
a spur of Blue Mountain and descended to
Long Lake.

The larches, which had not yet put forth
their leaves, gave to the banks of the meander-
ing Marion River an aspect of wintry desola-
tion. But at the water’s edge appeared here
and there the rose-pink buds of the Andromeda
and when the eye fell upon these, it was no
longer winter but the fulness of the spring-
time. In that Stygian region of grey sky
and dull purple swamp, the lovely Andromeda
dwelt like a fair spirit in a nether world.
When Charon ferries us over the stream, it
will be through no deeper outward gloom than
encompassed us on the Marion River that
day—unless perchance there be no Androm-
eda to grace the shores of the Styx.

Raquette River and Long Lake constitute
one of the wilderness highways for the lum-
bermen, and the rafts of logs which had barred
our entrance to the river at Forkéd Lake

The Wilderness 53

were now pouring out the other end into
Long Lake. Being at its height, the stream
was torrential, lashing itself into fury as if in
an effort to be rid of the logs which, crunch-
ing and booming, now submerged and again
tossed on end, made their mad voyage to the
lake. The lower part of this short river is one
continuous rapid, and here the speeding logs
were flung upon jutting rocks and jammed in
unutterable confusion, while the swift water
swirling over and around them foamed and
frothed and roared sullenly in apparent fury.
It was a satisfaction to note how soon this
tremendous din and uproar, which drowned
your very thoughts as you stood at the river’s
edge, grew feeble and impotent, becoming a
mere murmur as you turned your steps away
from the river, until it was itself drowned in
the mighty silence of the wilderness.

Day after day the spruce logs appeared at
the quiet mouth of the river as they completed
the tumultuous stage of their journey. Re-
strained by booms they silently formed them-
selves into a queer tongue-shaped raft which,
from a distance, appeared to flow like some
viscous purplish substance over the still
water, until inflated to a sufficient size, it de-
tached itself and moved slowly down the lake.

54 East and West

There was no tumult now and the silent hosts
gathered through the hours of the day and
night and one by one the detachments drifted
by. But that endless array, like an army
on the retreat, spoke of the conquest of the
wilderness—the conquest and the death.

Beavers are perhaps exterminated in the
North Woods, but the human beavers are at
work and nothing will ever exterminate them
save the extinction of the woods in which they
live. It has been computed that, at the pre-
sent rate, in twenty-five years they will have
gnawed down the last tree. Future gener-
ations of Americans will rise up and call us
foolish that we allowed our lands to be de-
spoiled and our water supplies to be jeo-
pardised in this way. For our extravagance
they will pay with an enforced thrift. But
man is by nature destructive and surely the
lumberman is by far the most dangerous
animal in the wilderness.

As the last of the huge rafts drifts out of
sight, the human beavers disappear with it,
their destructive work over for the season.
With true beaver instinct they have dammed
the stream and every spring raise the level
of Forkéd Lake some four or five feet in order
to facilitate the passage of the rafts. But

The Wilderness 55

now the river, having rid itself of the logs, be-
comes quiet and the lake slowly sinks to its
normal level. Looking across Long Lake
from the summit of a ridge, it is astonishing
how little impression has been made upon the
virgin woods. In spite of a continuous on-
slaught of an army of woodchoppers, the
wilderness seems vast and interminable and
you realise that the distant horizon does not
bound, but is bounded by it.

White pine, being valuable, has been largely
culled out, leaving only here and there some
splendid old tree, towering above the hard-
woods, which doubtless owes its escape to the
fact that it is unsound. Like some invalids,
it is left, while the robust are taken in their
prime. So have the cherry, the ash, and
the black birch been called and have gone to
their long home. But the yellow birch, being
inferior wood, is left, and in this section of the
wilderness grows to an immense size and is one
of the most splendid trees, though doubtless
the poorest lumber. Its beauty is wholly of
the trunk and bark, the top being somewhat
straggly and restricted. Usually straight and
columnar, sometimes leaning and ponderous,
these massive trunks resemble pillars of dull
gold lacquer. The larch, which so lately

56 East and West

looked dead and forbidding, is now enveloped
in pale green, diaphanous as a veil resting
lightly upon the swamps. A water-loving
tree, its true home is in this wilderness whose
countless swamps are all more or less veiled in
its pale verdure.

Scattered throughout the Adirondacks and
lost in the trackless waste are innumerable
ponds, which lie as if dropped here or there,
wholly unsuspected by one who has not
studied the topographical map. These are
not lacking in this vicinity and serve as ob-
jective points for excursions from camp. For
in the wilderness it is impossible merely to
wander at random with any great satisfaction.
It would be much like wandering in one’s
mind. You do not stroll, asin a bit of woods,
or through the pastures. The wilderness is
too solemn a country for that. You must
go somewhere and return. Trails are few and
lead either to these ponds or to some point
overlooking the woods, in one case as in the
other, a breathing place, without which a
long tramp would be like reading a page with
no punctuation.

These lonely little ponds give expression
to the grave face of the wilderness. How
solitary they are, wrapped for ever in the si-

The Wilderness a7

lence of the mountains; and yet how com-
panionable, as you emerge from the sombre
shades upon some sandy beach, the clear
water gently undulating over the clean sand,
the pickerel-weed growing near by, the un-
ruffled surface of the pond reflecting the sky
and suffused with sunlight. It is as win-
some and responsive as the great wilderness
itself is austere and wuncommunicative—
laughter and light and perennial youth ap-
pearing in the midst of primeval savagery.

| Strangely enough the object of a walk is
thus always to get out of the woods again,
that is, upon a summit, or the shore of a pond.
Whatever we were originally, and whatever
our inheritance, we have become light-loving
creatures and in the dusk of the wilderness
will evermore find ourselves pushing towards
the light. We have come up from darkness;
we can no more go back than the partridge
chick can re-enter its shell.

CHAPTER IV
STILL-PADDLING

ie the wilderness the highways are the

ponds and lakes themselves. Here the
canoe is man’s best friend. He paddles to
market; he paddles to church. To speak pre-
cisely, he rows, for the guide boat, which
weighs little more than a canoe and can be
both rowed or paddled, is used far more than
the canoe by the wilderness folk. A guide
boat weighs from forty-five to fifty-five
pounds and by one man alone is always
rowed, except in narrow waterways or where
there is occasion to move silently, when the
paddle is used. If there are two in the boat,
one rows and the other paddles, steering at
the same time. In this manner rapid pro-
gress can be made, for the craft is so light it
skims through the water in a way astonish-
ing to one accustomed toa heavy boat. With
a strong head wind, however, the boat is
blown backward nearly as fast as it can be

58

Still-Paddling 59

propelled forward. Let the wind be with
you and you have only to open an umbrella to
travel at a fair speed by this means alone.

By the Adirondack guides, this boat is used
altogether and they easily carry it on their
shoulders by means of a brace which is part
of their outfit—almost part of themselves.
Like the guides, the boat is a product of the
wilderness, and it came into being because of
its peculiar fitness for this sort of country—
where every now and again you must pull
your craft out of the water, put it on your
head, and tramp over a carry with it to the
next pond or lake. But it is a cranky boat
—this hybrid—and needs to be handled as
carefully as a canoe.

As one gradually becomes domiciled in the
wilderness, the native tendency to walk gives
way to an acquired tendency to row and pad-
dle, until this largely supplants the natural
method of locomotion; just as in the South-
West one becomes so habituated to riding that
he no longer feels at home on foot. Of the
three, walking is the slower and more diffi-
cult process. It is surprising how the arms
become toughened by this constant paddling
and the energy flows into them rather than
into the legs, so that in course of time, five

60 East and West

miles seem far by land, but no distance at
all by water. This is the peculiar influence
of the wilderness: one becomes amphibious,
whereas in most mountain regions the tend-
ency is quite the reverse and the energy all
goes to climbing.

The result of this constant association with
water is not alone a modification of habit, but
an increased sense of companionship with the
lakes. With its inlet and outlet and con-
tiguous swamps, a pond is an unexplored sea
upon which to make many a voyage of dis-
covery. There is, perhaps, nothing more
companionable in Nature. It is alive and has
moods, changing day by day and hour by
hour: an eye in the wilderness, expressive
when all else is uncommunicative. It is so
different from different points of view, at
different seasons and times of the day, that
you may be years exploring it and then not
feel you have come to the end. A pond whose
shores are unindented, all parts of which can
be seen at any one point, is like a common-
place personality not difficult to read, though
even such a one borrows divine moods from
the sky. But a lake dotted with islands and
with a diversified shore, with bays and straits,
smiling beaches and grim cliffs descending to

Still-Paddling 61

dark silent pools, is a very complex person-
ality, full of surprises and delights. Perhaps
we cannot fully explore such a lake in the
course of alifetime. It has not one, but many
shores, remote from each other. More than
once I have seen some faint outline in the
distance, entirely new and unknown to me,
destined for ever to remain a true terra in-
cognita; for though I paddled all day, as I
advanced it receded, and disappeared at
length. These are the lands of Morning, seen
only by early light, which gradually fade as
the day wanes. We set out for them in the
dawn—in the morning of life—but when by
afternoon we arrive where they appeared to
be, they have vanished.

Chief charm of a mountain lake is this
changefulness, this show of feeling. In
rounding a cape or rocky headland, the im-
aginative explorer comes not only upon a new
bay, but, it may be, upon a new mood of
the lake. Always there is a subjective as
well as an objective stimulus to exploration.
Mystery dwells in the wilderness and haunts
its thousand lakes. If you do not feel its
spell you are not made of the stuff of ex-
plorers, for no adventurer ever set out to dis-
cover new lands upon the Polar seas—or an

62 East and West

Adirondack pond—who was not drawn by a
love of mystery. A pond is ocean enough for
one summer, and he is indeed an explorer
who has found all it has to give. For many
there be who drift down the lake and make
no discovery at all, but stare the marvellous
facts in the face day after day without see-
ing them.

Long Lake, remote from railroads, is still
a highway through the wilderness from
Raquette to Saranac, and now and again,
lone canoes appear at the river’s mouth,
having carried around the falls and rapids, to
silently slip down the lake, laden to the
water’s edge with the weight of two men,
their packs amidships. But all summer long,
never a sail passes; always the graceful canoes,
the silent paddles, the guide boats like water
bugs. The canoists are in khaki and flannel
shirts; hatless and tanned or burned scarlet.
As a canoe holds only what is absolutely
necessary, the canoists have divested them-
selves of superfluous things—of most of their
belongings in fact. In this little journey
they perhaps come nearer to being free than
at any other time in the longer journey of
life. These slender canoes bear them in
sight of that enchanted shore of Liberty

Still-Paddling 63

which, alas, none ever reach, that land of
Morning—beyond, and ever beyond!

At Saranac they will come to that old
world of slavish customs and of unnecessary
baggage they left behind them when they
embarked on the blue waters of Raquette
Lake, and one and all will slip into the ruts
again as if they had had no glimpse of freedom.
To some, the accustomed slavery will seem
more irksome for this temporary escape.
Others will find the day’s work lightened by
the memory of a canoe and the soft swish of a
paddle in the silent dawn.

If a canoe will hold no unnecessary baggage,
neither will it hold all of one’s every-day
thoughts. Some mental adjustment must be
made in order to balance this slender craft,
which is a piece of the wilderness and was
not made to convey superfluities or artificiali-
ties. An ill-balanced mind is apt to up-
set it. An overburdened mind may sink
it. ’T is the boat of the free and only a free
mind and a free arm can paddle it to advan-
tage so that it shall cleave the still water with
the swiftness and balance of a fish.

While these voyagers in the wilderness
pass and disappear in the mists, I am ex-
ploring nearer home. There are delightful

64 East and West

little beaches, some bold glaciated cliffs, a
lone isle, the river, and the creeks. No one
would have suspected, early in June, the crop
of water plants which was germinating in the
mud of the lake. Day by day, myriad stems
uncurled and pushed themselves upward,
until now in July the entire surface of the
water in shallow places is covered with water
target, floating heart, pond weed, and water
lilies,—a thick jungle of leaves and stems in
which the canoe is enmeshed and held cap-
tive. These patches of floating lilies are the
Sargasso Seas of this expanse and the canoe,
left to itself, drifts lazily from one to another
through acres of blossoms. ‘Trolling has be-
come unprofitable because of submerged eel
grass and lily pads, and the pickerel and
what few bass there are go their own ways,
though the ardent angler may still be repaid
for abundant patience. For one has just
now hooked from the depths of the channel
a ten pound pickerel—a monster—which
hangs from a cross-bar between two pines
yonder. A pickerel is a long slim fish and
a ten-pound pickerel is consequently a very
long fish indeed, so that to see him thus
strung up in air gives even the old fisher-
man, reduced to pickerel fishing, a pleasant

Still-Paddling 65

thrill at sight of the very magnitude of his
victim.

This lake being long and narrow like a
pickerel, a mere trough in the hills cut by an
ancient glacier, the heavy rainfalls may easily
raise the level several feet in a protracted
storm. Lilies must keep afloat, and to do
this their stems must elongate inch by inch
as the lake rises. The water falling quite
as rapidly as it rises, the stems must be short-
ened again, which is done by curling them.
When at length the flowers have been fer-
tilised and their mission is performed, the
stems then curl for the last time and slowly
draw them under the water. Aquatic plants
lay down every season upon the floor of the
lake a considerable amount of vegetable mat-
ter, while at the same time their stems
serve to check and to deposit the silt brought
down by the current. Shallow places are
thus yearly growing shallower and slowly
resolving themselves into swamps. As it
was in the beginning, the land is emerging
from the waters. Of the thousand and one
lakes in the wilderness, all the shallow ponds
are destined to become mountain meadows,
as a thousand have done before them. Let
the precipitation decrease and the evapora-

5

66 East and West

tion increase, which will naturally follow the
denuding of the forest, and all the sooner will
dry land appear.

Many little meadows and swamps border
the lake and these are but the forerunners
of the end. During freshets they are sub-
merged, but as the waters subside in the com-
paratively dry season of July and August, the
dank spongy humus is sprinkled with water
lobelia, sagittarius, and water parsnip, one of
the most graceful of aquatic plants. Some
day when the waters have subsided never to
rise again, these will give way to corn and
potatoes. The denuding of the wilderness
—the march of progress, in other words—is
thus indirectly bringing this about. At dawn
the deer come down upon these little flats to
drink and get into the water, disappearing
at daylight into the wilderness, leaving the
muddy banks thickly besprinkled with their
clean-cut tracks. So doubtless have they
been at home in many a corn-field.

Time will change more slowly the granite
cliffs whose polished slopes rise abruptly from
the west shore of the lake. Yet these record
more changes than any other feature of the
wilderness, though not in the lifetime of man,
nor in the lifetime of trees. In such records,

Still-Paddling 67

centuries are merely seconds of time, and
the whole period of human history would not
constitute a geological minute. The massive
glacial carving on these ancient monuments of
the wilderness, however, required whole days
of geological time. Stone carving of this
kind was well done here for the ice sheet lin-
gered in the mountains and there was time
to complete the work. It was a giant’s task
to scoop out the bowl of a lake and to cut
and polish such great bosses of granite—
equal to all the labours of Hercules. While
this tremendous work was going on, streams
from the melting ice, using boulders for
chisels, cut a series of pot-holes at the base of
the cliffs as if to finish the massive work
with this lighter design.

Exploration of this sort partakes of the
nature of archeology and as I paddle softly
around the cliffs over black pools at their
base, some of them perhaps submerged pot-
holes, it is as if one were to examine the noble
ruins of a prehistoric race of giants. To
paddle day after day in and out the high-
ways and byways is to make excursions in
ancient history while exploring the present
shore of the lake.

The deer season has opened, but fortunately

68 East and West

there are few amateur sportsmen here to
disturb the true woodsmen. Elsewhere and
nearer the railroad the crack of their mis-
directed rifles may be heard and more than
one victim goes to his long home, a sacrifice
to Diana. ‘This is the season of danger in the
wilderness and the guides must needs be
bold men, for none know when their hour
will come. When your city hunter, intent on
game, sees something moving, he shoots first
and investigates afterwards. Science has
provided him with a terrible weapon but has’
given him neither judgment nor common-
sense to go with it.

Having been fertilised by bumble-bees, the
lilies were at length drawn into the mud, and
the seed is now planted as by an automatic
device. Gentians have appeared, and with
them, the beautiful berries of the withe-rod
and mountain holly, which form a fringe for a
good part of the lake shore. In these days,
to drift lazily, keeping the canoe almost be-
neath this overhanging fringe of withe-rod
by a stroke of the paddle now and again, is
the most natural and delightful thing to do.
The berries which hang in luxurious clusters,
varying from ivory white through delicate
shades of pink to a brilliant cherry, turning

Still-Paddling 69

blue in maturity, are without doubt one of the
finest products of the Adirondacks, and no-
where else can they be seen in such profu-
sion and such beauty. Following the family
tradition, the berries of the mountain holly
are solitary in the axils of the leaves, but the
shrub has a certain thoroughbred aspect,
while the cherry red of these berries is un-
surpassed in the woods. On the cliffs and
at the very border of the pot-holes, closed
gentians bloom in profusion; under the hem-
locks is the splendid blue of clintonia berries;
while in dark and cool places the cardinal-
flower stands at the water’s edge—a rare and
solitary spirit.

Such is the vision—a trailing line of beauty
—which regales the eye as you paddle silently
along the shore; silently, for if you are a
woodsman, the spirit of the wilderness im-
pels to silence, and the canoe is affected by
the same spell. To splash with the paddle
offends the ear like a false note and alarms
the returning warblers, now flitting in the
birches whose yellow leaves drift like fleets of
diminutive canoes upon the still water.

Autumn, that inexplicable charm which
every year steals into the wilderness, is in
the air. Outwardly it is colour; inwardly, a

70 East and West

haunting sadness. Perhaps in some dim
past we migrated with the birds at the ap-
proach of winter and it is that ancestral
call which after untold centuries still stirs
the blood in autumn. As the canoe drifts
among floating leaves, we feel this strange
hypnosis impelling us to paddle toward the
horizon, ever on and on, to some undiscov-
ered shore.

CHAPTER V
ONTEORA NOTES

HILE Onteora itself is far better known
by its pleasant traditions than by its
natural history, it is surely worthy of recogni-
tion that a charming society of birds is also
to be found there, and many of the best
families of plants have long followed the
peaceful tenor of their lives in its quiet
woods. Not so much has been written of the
natural history of the Catskills but another
word may be said. Nor do I expect to say
anything new: in fact I would greatly prefer
to confine myself to the familiar aspects of
the woods, the familiar and well-beloved birds
and flowers.

Some families of plants and birds do not
arrive at the heights of Onteora, while others,
not found at lower elevations in this latitude,
are at home on Parnassus alone. In ascend-
ing the Catskills directly, as ina walk up the

Kaaterskill from Palenville, it is thus ap-
71

wa East and West

parent to the casual view that the oak, as
well as the butternut, hickory, and chestnut,
are gradually left behind, as if the lower levels
were more congenial to ‘‘Jove’s own tree,”
which indeed they are. Birch, maple, and
beech continue, while spruce and balsam only
make their appearance when we are well up in
the hills. In this ascent, the northern hare
replaces the cottontail, and the box turtle
disappears. Among the birds, too, some are
left behind with the hickory and chestnut,
and one is not long in discovering the ab-
sence of the thrasher, the chewink, the chat,
and certain vireos, such as the white-eyed,
warbling, and yellow-throated. At the same
time an inexpressibly wild and fitful burst of
melody from an invisible singer among the
moss-covered boulders and fallen tree trunks
advises us that we have reached the abode of
the winter wren, while a serene and exalted
voice chanting afar off on the mountain-side
is a further sign that we are indeed on Par-
nassus, on the sacred heights where alone in
the solemn twilight of the hemlocks, the her-
mit-thrush intones the most beautiful bird
song to be heard on the American continent.

From the valley of the Hudson, the abrupt
mass of the Catskills, hovering like an azure

Onteora Notes 73

cloud on the horizon, seems indeed ‘‘ Moun-
tains of the Sky.”” They were perhaps better
named Hills of the Sky, and yet they are
high enough to such as have mountain
thoughts; and if one has not, no amount of
climbing will bring him any nearer the
heavens. The voyager upon the Hudson,
looking at that ethereal cloud mass in the dis-
tance, may little suspect that upon its summit
is virtually another zone with other inhab-
itants from that through which he sails,
and he may even betake himself to that hill
country with no great recognition of the fact.
Yet to go from the Hudson to the summits
of the Catskills is not only to ascend some
few thousand feet in the air, but virtually to
ascend—by the shortest route—to Canada,
which reaches its long faunal tentacles south
over the mountain tops, while the Carolinian
zone creeps northward along the rivers. The
sylvan and aboriginal dwellers upon High
Peak and Round Top are of Boreal affini-
ties, adventurous Northmen content only
with the roof of our world and scorning all
lower levels. Meanwhile, plodding up the
Hudson and following the railway around
and into the mountains—straight from
Castle Garden—come plant immigrants of

74 East and West

Europe, loving the commonplace precincts
of Tannersville and of the railroad but find-
ing no lodgment on the cloistered slopes of
Parnassus.

On these ranges the woods are as dense, if
not so extensive, as in the Adirondacks, but
are essentially different from the latter in
lacking the innumerable lakes, ponds, water-
ways, and swamps. It is not an aqueous
wilderness, though as in the Adirondacks the
mountain summits present swamp conditions
and attract swamp plants, a curious fact due
entirely to the presence of clouds and the in-
creased precipitation. Thus on the summit
of High Peak you may see false hellebore and
poison sumac, gold thread and an abundance
of sphagnum, while the stunted balsams are
further evidence of humid conditions.

The higher regions are clothed with spruce
and with some hemlock. Birch is the pre-
vailing genus and beech is common, but
the glory of these woods is in the splendid
sugar maples scattered over the slopes and
looming large in their twilight haunts. Ven-
erable trees, their massive columnar trunks
gnarled and shaggy with age, they seem to
preside with that dignity inseparable from a
great tree over the lesser growth of beech

Onteora Notes 75

and birch and the little jungles of moun-
tain maple. Here amidst recumbent slabs
of sandstone, massive chunks from the over-
lying conglomerate, long detached from the
ledge, and hemlock logs slowly merging into
leaf mould from whence they came, their out-
lines indistinct, their rich seal-brown panels
embossed with haircap and fern-moss and with
scarlet-cupped cladonias, the maples plant
their feet, their noble heads overlooking all
and showing in autumn like beacon fires upon
the mountains.

This sandstone, long ago deposited in the
Devonian Sea, has given its name to a par-
ticular formation—the Catskill. It was once
the bottom of the sea, its flora, seaweed, its
fauna, mollusks. After long and careful pre-
paration beneath the waves it was at length
elevated to its present position, to receive

-a higher flora and fauna. So perished those
ancient seaweeds and that dull silent com-
pany of bivalves. The rock still shows rip-
ple marks of that early sea where once the
surf beat upon the shore, and the observant
saunterer may surely take counsel with him-
self and ponder the days of man when, resting
in the woods upon such a ripple-marked slab
of sandstone and listening to the hermit’s

76 East and West

hymn, he finds himself upon the very shore of
the Devonian Sea—that shore which was old
when the Coal Age began.

My camp—to return to the present and to
Onteora—is so hidden among the beeches
and maples on the slopes of Onteora Moun-
tain that one might ascend the road and little
more suspect its presence than that of a
squirrel’s nest in a tree. Surrounded by a
thick copse of beech which touch the hem-
lock slabs and birch railings of the high
veranda, the house is virtually in the tree
tops, so that, in looking abroad from the
windows, one looks down as from a nest,
upon a world of interlacing branches and
dancing leaves where magnolia, Black-
burnian, chestnut and black -throated blue
warblers peep and pry and flit about, uttering
their fine lisping notes.

A chestnut warbler has her nest in the
underbrush, two feet from the ground and
entirely concealed by a thick canopy of
leaves. In a hemlock is the nest of a black-
throated green and the voice of the male
cheers me from the tree tops—one of the
most attractive warbler songs, a quaint,
woodsy, self-contained little voice, to be as-
sociated only with hemlock boughs and tree

Onteora Notes 77

tops. Not far from the doorstep a junco has
built, and these little birds are constantly
hopping about upon the veranda and doorsill
so that they have become a part of the family.
Members of the household too—but shy and
distant ones—are the oven-birds who dwell
under beech leaves amidst the shield ferns
of the hillside in a little house more cunningly
devised and more carefully concealed than
any camp in the woods. Here they propose
to bring up a family after the excellent tradi-
tions, not of Onteora but of oven-birds—
ancient traditions not disparaged however
by those who lead here a pleasant wood life.
Somewhat demure and retiring, the oven-
bird overcomes his reticence now and again
to fairly explode with—I say/ I say! Isay!
I SAY! each syllable more fortissimo than the
last, and then, as if embarrassed by his own
temerity, instantly relapses into silence. To
those who have merely a bowing acquaint-
ance with him this is his one utterance, but
the shy minstrel has a love-song which he
sings on the wing for his mate and for his
true friends only. John Burroughs, writing
twenty-five years ago, alludes to there being
little or no reference to this song of the oven-
bird, and it is little known to this day, for it

78 East and West

is seldom heard and then recognised by those
only who know the bird well or actually see it
in the act of singing. It is a rapturous,
jubilant, tumultuous utterance which would
seem to emanate from a temperament more
like that of the bobolink than the shy and
retiring oven-bird. It is, in fact, a song to be
associated with a field bird rather than with a
bird of the woods. This song is usually de-
livered on the wing, in the same manner as
that of our Maryland yellowthroat and the
vermilion flycatcher of the South-West, but I
have seen the bird thus singing from a branch
high in a tree.

Another bird friend always to be heard
about my camp and surely nesting near by is
the pewee. A true wood bird, its plaintive,
somewhat melancholy voice accords well
with the spirit of the woods, where all is
subdued and even the flowers reflect their
environment and are more shy and retiring—
more delicate also—than those of the fields.
What a nest this bird builds! No more in-
viting camp is to be seen anywhere. One of
the gems of bird architecture, adorned so
exquisitely with lichens, olive and grey and
grey-green—rare and beautiful parmeliaceous
designs,—it delights the eye like an objet

Onteora Notes 79

de virtu, as indeed it is. A pair of sap-
suckers who live high in a dead birch on the
hillside are my savage friends, belonging to an
untamable tribe and clinging fondly to its
primeval traditions,—loving not man but the
wilderness ever. They are often to be heard
calling in their rude language and their
speech is wild and good to my ear. Itisa
satisfaction to know there exists aught so
untamed in proximity to our cultivation,
which is a taming quite as much as it is a
refining process. These birds are true abo-
rigines living in the heart of a tree, woods-
men, who know naught of lumber but much of
trees, making the tree serve them in the matter
of both food and shelter, with feet made to
walk upon bark, with tails made for a sup-
port, and bills that are axe and saw to them.
We, who come into the woods to live for a
season, drawn by some longing for freedom
and simplicity, come never as near the woods
as they and our wood-life is only a pretence,
judged by the standards of these primitive
tree-men.

The inspired dweller about my camp is the
veery and it might seem that he has erected
some temple rather than such a nest as other
birds construct. It has been observed by

80 East and West

both Mr. Burroughs and Mr. Bicknell that
the wood thrush in the mountains is less
domesticated than elsewhere, and that while
heard, is less often seen. This is very true,
and here the veery is the familiar one and
takes the place of the wood thrush in this
regard. It is the privilege of dwellers upon
the slopes of Parnassus to hear the veery
singing his chant at their doorsteps, con-
secrating their dwelling as if some woodland
god gave his benediction. The wild cry of the
sapsucker emphasises to me my remoteness.
from a wood-life, but the unworldly voice of
the veery brings me nearer and makes me
feel I am indeed the participant in some inner
and higher life.

One has here an intimate relation with
trees, for we do not merely walk under them,
we dwell among them; and while we do not
actually live in them like wild men, the camps
are often built around their trunks, so that
they grow familiarly through the verandas
and spread their branches over the house.
This leafy and sylvan prospect inspires tree-
thoughts in those who enjoy the companion-
ship of trees. One does not know how
companionabletrees are until he has thus lived
among them and heard them day after day

Onteora Notes 81

sighing in the rain, whispering in the breeze,
and singing in the wind; until he accustoms
himself to look through their dim aisles and
out of their oriel windows. A strong and
gentle race, they live and have their being in a
world of their own. In the silent watches of
the night I hear faint music in the tree tops—
maples softly singing among themselves. It
is a pleasant thing thus to commune with
these rooted primeval men in their sane and
musical life—a society which commends itself
for many reasons to poets and such as have
an inner life, encouraging, not interrupting
their cherished thoughts.

So also is the wood-life congenial to certain
birds and flowers and these show the impress
of solitude and an exclusiveness which would
be as uncongenial to other types of birds and
flowers as to wholly gregarious people. Cer-
tainly it was no more chance the thrush family
came to the woods than certain other folk
drawn by subtle affinity and fine sympathies.
These cloistered shades are as uncongenial
to rollicking birds as to rollicking people.
Neither do weeds and the sturdier aggressive
plants take to the woods, but to the fields and
roadsides. In the twilight grow the most
delicate and exquisite flowers always.

6

82 East and West

Medeola blooms about my door, its shy
and retiring blossom hid for a time beneath
its whirls. Indian pipes erect their fragile
stems of alabaster underneath the hemlocks,
half buried by old drifts of leaves from
neighbouring beeches, never presenting them-
selves to notice but requiring to be sought for.
Here come wandering bumble-bees and do not
fail to find them, yet how they should know
where to look no one can tell, since they
were not here to look the year before, nor
will ever be again. But year after year
Medeolas will come shyly forth, and Indian
pipes, waiting for bumble-bees. Clintonia
is, perhaps, the most thoroughly woodsy
flower of the North and well named borealis.
It affects the same haunts as the hermit, a
delectable region of moss-covered boulders
and logs where stone and wood alike are
dissolving into moss and fern. To have it
growing by your door is,—better than any
tropic flora under glass,—to see a Borean
flora under the sky; and when in autumn its
berries wear their celestial blue ’t is as if the
mountain reflected a bit of the heavens.

The elevation of my camp is perhaps twen-
ty-four hundred feet, and of the summit of
Onteora Mountain, a little over twenty-eight

, folua sayy yorym Aep 19duol ayy Jo asnvoaq s}luuins asay} OJ UIP a1v Spl ,,

Onteora Notes 83

hundred, yet spring, like the light, rests
longer on the summit than on this lower level.
Birds are more abundant on the top than on
the slopes, and the summit being swampy,
other plants are found there. From its
mire springs the purple-fringed orchis, fash-
ioned from the mud, as was man from the
dust, but a fairer and lovelier product. The
cherry and the painted trillium are still in
bloom upon the summit, some little time
after they have blossomed at two thousand
feet. Onteora Mountain is not high enough
to illustrate this condition as does High Peak,
for instance. It has been observed that birds
are drawn to these summits probably because
of the longer day which they enjoy. Again,
birds of a distinctly Canadian fauna only
nest here above a given elevation. The her-
mit does not nest or sing immediately about
my camp, but is to be heard higher up and
upon the top. I think the tanager is nesting
very near my level, for the male is often seen
and heard in a sugar maple not far away.
Like the birds I find myself drawn to the
summit, for a longer day perhaps. In these
peregrinations upwards one is impressed with
the different aspects of the mountain; it
wears, as it were, two faces. Its south and

84 East and West

east face is different from its north and west
face. One is boreal, the other, vernal or
austral. While this difference is not readily
definable, the ground hemlock and the her-
mit thrush confine themselves largely, if not
altogether, to its boreal face. Birds are
aware of more subtle distinctions than we,
and the summer residents among them will
linger in the autumn upon the austral or
gracious side of the mountain, while the
winter visitors will come first to its boreal
face as being more agreeable to their wintry
temperaments.

That is a pleasant sanctuary upon the
mountain top, where, under spruce and hem-
locks, rocks and logs are so thickly carpeted
with moss that the foot sinks noiselessly.
On the leafy slopes below, protrude chimneys
not unknown to the world but whose fame
has not yet reached the top of the mountain,
and not the faintest harmony or discord pene-
trates to this peaceful hilltop. Consecrated
to winter wren and hermit thrush, he who
would enter must for the time be hermit too,
and must approach silently to instantly slip
into the background and lose himself in the
shadows, there to listen, not to speak, to
observe, not to be observed. One descends

Onteora Notes 85

quickly again, but not so readily does he
bring down his mountain thoughts with him.

Moosewood and mountain maple, true
northern plants, thrive near the summit, and
in a clump there appeared lately a family of
rose-breasted grosbeaks just out of the nest.
These young birds resembled their mother,
vaguely suggesting a nutmeg, in dress, but
their call note showed the rich and beautiful
quality of the voice of themale. Tosomeone
who remarked that there were not many
birds in Onteora, I said, ‘‘Then you have not
birds in your eye.’’ A good observer could
name about sixty summer residents among
the birds here on the mountain and in the
fields and swamps and pastures between here
and Tannersville, and by including a few
from the top of High Peak and Hunter
Mountain, which do not nest at lower eleva-
tions, and the kingfisher from the Eastkill,
could perhaps make the number seventy
species, to say nothing of the many spring
migrants and a few winter visitors. Of ferns,
there are within reach, either around the
mountain or in the swamps and meadows
below, some twenty or more species, while
several other spleenworts are to be found in
the Kaaterskill Clove.

86 East and West

Surely Onteora might be known for the
society of its birds. Keeping tuneful homes
in dim ancestral halls of spruce and hem-
lock, or in fields and pastures open to the sky,
like other summer residents they descend
the mountains in autumn to flit southward,
leaving a few permanent residents like the
ruffed grouse, and a few winter visitors, the
crossbills and snowbirds, in sole possession
of the woods until another spring.

CHAPTER VI
THE LONG ISLAND WOODS

LACES are like people: none are without
peculiarities; few without some redeem-
ing trait. Rambling about with an eye for
all outdoors, peering incessantly at the face
of the country, studying its character, and
searching out its secrets, I have come insensi-
bly to endow each locality with a personality
of its own and to find that each has something
peculiar to itself, some charm as of manner
and feature which commends it, distinguishes
it from others, and causes it tolive in memory
for that, and often for that alone. It may
appeal by its very grimness and austerity as
do the bleak Dogtown pastures of Cape Ann,
quite as readily as by that mellow and pas-
toral charm of the vineyards on the shores
of Canandaigua, where through the classic
vines with their drooping clusters, one has
vistas of the serene blue surface stretching
away to the hazy outlines of purple hills.
87

88 East and West

In every locality there are features that
are commonplace and these are usually
accentuated by the efforts of man. But
what is its native charm; what is it that com-
mends it in spite of this? For it is that
which is worth attending to. There are
still considerable tracts of woods on Long
Island—tracts from which the white oak
and chestnut have been culled year after
year for the shipyards: destined in the old
days for the staunch hulls of whaling vessels,
and in these effeminate times to assume the
trim forms of steam yachts and other pleasure
craft, until almost the last primeval white oak
or chestnut has been set adrift on the high
seas. But the best of the Long Island woods,
‘that feature which, by the grace of the gods,
possesses not a commercial but a poetic
value, has remained; and if—by the grace of
the gods again—Long Island has not become
to you Real Estate merely, but is still part of
your divine estate in the open, you may go
into these woods in the appointed season and
solace yourself with that charm which is
theirs in so great measure—your eye with
the pure vision of the dogwood, and your ear
with that wonderful hymn of the wood thrush.
Then shall you know that you have possessed

The Long Island Woods 89

yourself of the true value of these woods,
and better still, that you have drawn only
the ample interest on that splendid trust,
leaving the principal untouched.

Along the north shore of Long Island ex-
tends a low range of hills. While there is
underneath these hills of sand the core of an
ancient range, what one sees is, in reality,
the heaped up sand, gravel, and boulders of the
great terminal moraine which extends from
the eastern end of Long Island, westward
across the continent, and its topography here
is distinctly moraine topography,—hillocks
and mounds and sudden depressions of all
shapes and sizes. These moraine hills, ris-
ing abruptly from the Sound, have been
eaten away on their outer edge by the tides,
so that they show a long line of sand cliffs at
whose feet the little waves sing their soft
lament, and a sandy and pebbly beach where
countless king crabs lay their eggs. The
numerous bays and coves which penetrate
the great moraine are, in fact, much like
miniature fjords and, together with the
varied moraine topography, lend to this shore
a peculiar charm which is entirely lacking on
the south shore of the island.

Over these knolls and hillocks and in the

90 East and West

countless intervening depressions and Lillipu-
tian valleys, winding and twisting in all
directions as the glacier fashioned them, the
Long Island woods spread themselves, de-
riving a pleasantly varied and even more
sylvan aspect than is the case where woods
lie monotonously ona flat plain. Unwittingly
the old glacier did much for Long Island, for
it took a relatively flat and commonplace
shore and fashioned it upon attractive lines.
The timber is composed of the common hard-
woods, largely second growth, with here
and there a primeval tree of some magnitude
and dignity standing like a patriarch among
the younger generation. Chief among these,
though rare enough, are some fine old tulip
trees, straight trunked, and distinct in leaf
from all other trees.

It is not far to go from the city into these
pleasant woods at one point or another—an
hour from Wall Street—but it is far in spirit
indeed, as far as the East is from the West.
You may go in March for no other reason
than to hear the meadow. larks in the fields
and later the redwings in the swamps, more
inspiring, because more hopeful and more
cheering, than the splendid tragedies of the
opera. You may go forth to see the ground-

The Long Island Woods gI

nut and the Canada violets in the swamp, to
find the little white violets, or the beautiful
pedata growing by sandy roads, yielding their
delicate vernal impressions so foreign to all
florist displays, and making those poor by-
paths admirable and beautiful above all high-
roads; again to see the sand-pinks and the
celandine, or to watch the carpenter bees
stealing nectar from the pinxter flower by
puncturing the corolla tube. Or you may
visit certain chosen spots where the laurel
displays its myriad blossoms under chestnut
oaks, their pale rose-tinted buds like miniature
floral urns. And the price you must pay is
that on your return from sauntering in your
wild garden, the tawdriness and artificiality
of the city will be emphasised. It shall
affect you like a brilliant personality—not
sincere; while the pure and spotless beauty of
those blossoms in the woods seem as the charm
of a little child to whose mood you have sur-
rendered for an afternoon.

Above all you shall go to see the dogwood
which, like the rhododendrons in the South,
the shadbush in the North Woods, or the
ceanothus in the Coast Range, is the chief
charm of these woods, the floral expression of
that which is most winning in their person-

g2 East and West

ality. While the Japanese character may not
have so much that is worthy of emulation,
there is one trait which commends itself in
this connection—it is the love of their coun-
try, their estate, that is, their wild garden
itself; the love which draws a whole people
into the fields to see the plum, the cherry,
the iris, the lotus, in blossom. As a people
they. cherish their ancestral garden, enter-
taining a national feeling and appreciation
for its finer effects, its more spiritual signifi-
cance as manifested in beauty. Here is an
exquisite and refined perception which makes
its possessors the masters of their estate in a
sense that less highly endowed people can
never be, and yields them the most evanescent
and charming influences. Consider this—
aye, and consider the dogwood!

Around the edges of the clearings and the
fields and orchards—fields which belong to
the bobolinks, orchards, the estate of the
house wren,—there appears at the appointed
time, as by some beautiful magic, the lovely
vision of the dogwood, a charm, a personality,
not like any other. It is a vision to contem-
plate with such gentle reverence for beauty
itself as the wise Japanese show for their
cherry blossom; a vision to call one forth into

The Long Island Woods 93

the fields for the love of beauty—and for
love of one’s couniry. How can one afford to
miss those evanescent impressions which
cannot be had again throughout the year;
how can one fail to heed this finer call of his
country? To leave the sooty and noisome
city behind, to escape from this hideous and
terrible human pen, and find oneself in green
pastures amidst tender signs of spring: dan-
delions and violets and delicate greens of un-
folding leaves, and like some lovely drapery
around the edges and trailing through the
woods, the pink and white and cupreous
splashes of the dogwood, so exquisite, so
radiant—this is the revelation of a better
world the gods permit each year to break
upon our troubled sleep.

And consider the wood thrush! The dog-
woods have unfolded their leaves and through-
out the length of those moraine hills the
wonderful hymn of the wood thrush rises from
the cloistered woods. After the winter si-
lence it is as if intoning priests had re-entered
a deserted cathedral. Perhaps no music has
been written so eminently sacred in its im-
port, so suggestive of religious feeling, so un-
wordly and beautiful withal as this bird hymn.
And this hypethral temple, sacred not less to

94 East and West

Flora than to Apollo, sacred above all to the
god of the Open—the beautiful god—is the
only temple on earth where there is no cant,
no twaddle, no hypocrisy, and no croaking
about our sins. Yet it has the fewest wor-
shippers of any.

' As the fields belong to the bobolinks and
meadow larks and the old orchards to the
house wren, so are these woods pre-eminently
the private estate of the wood thrush. Around
the clearings where the dogwood grows, the
white-eyed vireo builds, and the yellow-
throated overlays her nest with spider web;
and I have known the Carolina wren to nest
in the swamps—surely one of the most im-
portant facts in the history of Long Island.
But it is the wood thrush who dominates the
sylvan hollows and little winding valleys and
hillocks of the terminal moraine where wake-
robin, jack-in-the-pulpit, and geraniums bloom
in these peaceful shades, and the home tree
is the dogwood. Often you may encounter
the mild-eyed bird upon her bulky nest in the
fork of some little dogwood just within the
twilight of the woods, peering anxiously over
the rim, and as she flits silently away, you
may peep at the eggs and receive the most
charming impression of innocence and of

The Long Island Woods 95

beauty the woods have to offer. Long Island
will never produce anything else comparable
with those blue-green eggs, presently to be
transmuted into that noble hymn of the
woods—that hymn which, falling upon the
ear in the stillness and the twilight, has power
to change the spirit of our dreams.

CHAPTER VII
CYPRESS SWAMPS

PASSING interest in sawmills once led
me into the swamps of the Roanoke
River, and while my mind was ostensibly on
logs and their transportation, it was speedily
evident that that interminable morass was
a region different from any farther north—
the lovely hemlock swamps where the rose
pogonia grows: a new personality whose note
was a profounder gloom than any other aspect
of Nature had shown me. Yet it exerted a
certain force of attraction, perhaps owing to
its very gloominess, or it may be, to its
strangeness and solitude. In all events it
was strong enough to easily divert the at-
tention, from considerations of commerce, to
the contemplation of the vast dismal swamp
and of certain aspects of bird life connected
with it. These swamps form an integral
part of the South-eastern States and are
characteristic of them. The impressions they
96

Cypress Swamps 97

yield are not those of the Adirondack swamps,
and it is precisely for this reason that I have
ventured to include a picture of a region
which, even to the casual view, offers so de-
cided a contrast to other corners of our estate.

My business kept me in the swamp during
February and part of March and, while wait-
ing now and then the arrival of rafts from up
the river, there was much leisure to paddle in
a lumberman’s dugout through the devious
and interminable waterways of the swamps or
to saunter in the pine woods which cover the
high ground back from the river.

At this season, the leafless trees standing
like skeletons in the shallow waters and hold-
ing their long bony arms aloft, present doubt-
less a much more desolate picture than they
do later in the year. The tall tapering col-
umns of the white ash, the massive bulging
trunk of the gum, and the cypress with its
queer ‘‘knees”’ protruding from the water,
extend along both banks in endless array.
On these gaunt trees by the silent yellow river
perch the vultures, as they perch on the Tow-
ers of Silence on Malabar Hill—waiting.
Black, muffled figures, crouching immovable,
they seem to say that the world will be theirs
in the end—they have only to wait. Yet

vi

98 East and West

over the river and above the cotton fields,
others soar on easy wing, ever up and up,
climbing the sky like free spirits of the air.
Nothing could present a greater contrast than
these buzzards circling aloft in the blue, and
the same birds huddled below in the dismal
swamp. It is as though the bird had a
double personality and were now possessed of
a soaring spirit—free and pure—and again,
dropping to earth, assumed its sordid and
gruesome aspect, becoming a dismal carica-
ture of its former self. When at length the
free spirit moves it to rise out of the swamp, it
soars once more in the realms of light with
that beautiful flight, effortless, tireless, all
grace and freedom, which sets the observer to
soaring also.

For several weeks logging was at a stand-
still, the river being in flood, and hour by
hour the yellow water crept up the banks and
submerged the shore—formidable in its silent,
sinister display of power. One could see it
rise as the flood weltered up over cypress
knees and the trunks of gum and ash with
softly murmured swish. Far away in the
mountains, it roared and fretted and foamed,
highstrung, irritable, and impatient—the
youthful impetuous river. But here in the

Cypress Swamps 99

low swamps near its mouth, between level
walls of tree trunks, it blustered no more,
neither vaunted itself, but swiftly, sullenly,
irresistibly rose from its bed in silent exulta-
tion.

In my dugout, daily I slipped into the
gloom of the swamp, a world more aqueous
than terrestrial, where bony arms met over-
head and trunks loomed in Tartarean gloom
in the rain; following meandering and devious
ways in the canes with an eye on certain
landmarks, or watermarks, in order to find my
way out of the labyrinth.

Thus I would paddle around one bend and
another, turning and twisting, never see-
ing far ahead in that interminable jungle,
until far from the yellow river and the signs
of human life which the high ground along
the stream afforded; far in time, rather than
in distance, for there, it was as if man had
not yet appeared upon the earth, as if the
earth was not yet prepared for his advent.
In the remote and densest part of the jungle
the silence was unbroken save by the calls of
the red-bellied wood peckers who inhabited
that solitude and with whom the nesting
season had already begun. This handsome
woodpecker is a veritable swamp spirit, a

100 East and West

ladder-backed, rosy-fronted fellow, barbarous
in manner with the uncouth speech of his
race—the untamed aboriginal race of wood-
peckers. Occasionally there was heard the
sibilant note of the tufted titmouse in the tree
tops, and then again the liquid plunk of a
dead branch or a chunk of bark falling into
the water, and no sound better accorded with
the swamp than this. Moccasins and water
snakes, of which there were several species
were awakening from the winter sleep and still
in a semi-torpid state, so that with the paddle
I picked them off the bank where they lay in
the sun and tossed them into the water. Oc-
casionally they hibernate in hollow logs.
At the mill they told me that sometimes in
winter the saw will rip open a log literally
full of dormant moccasins.

Gradually the impression arose that this
was the appearance the earth presented be-
fore man came upon it—the world, fitted as
yet only for the reptile; that I was looking
back to that formative period when the land
was emerging from the waters; drifting in a
primitive saurian age—slimy, reptilian, with
no hint of man who was eventually to dom-
inate it. Over a great part of the world man
has become too dominant and saddens by

Cypress Swamps 101

his desolating influence. In that swamp it
was forbidding because he was not there—
could not be there—because it was adapted
alone to the reptilian mind. Of course, the
Earth of the Carboniferous Age was in reality
far different and would be more nearly re-
presented by conditions in southern Florida.
Yet, if a thinking man could have had a
glimpse of it then, it would have given him
some such impressions as does this now and
would have seemed only more alien and in-
hospitable to his needs and less adapted to
anything so highly organised as himself,
a place for cold-blooded, small-brained, few-
nerved creatures whose life should be a dull
sleep. The reptile which inhabits this gloomy
region is in fact a survivor of a bygone age.
He no more belongs to this period than do we
to that primitive past which he has somehow
survived. Serpent, alligator, and turtle are
aliens to this biological day and the swamps
and jungles are the reservations to which
they are now confined. It is with them as
it is with the American Indian, as it is with all
primitive races: they have had their day and
slowly but surely are passing from view.
Deciduous, like the tamarack, the cypress
was putting out its leaves and was arrayed in

102 East and West

the most delicate garment of green imaginable.
No tree could renew itself more completely
than this which had looked so old, squatting
dismally on the yellow water with its knees
drawn up—a gnarled, deformed, aged body.

On the borders of the great swamp, a
later and happier day in the evolution of
the earth has dawned. Here the land has
emerged from the waters and cypress and gum
give way to the pines of the high ground, and
to minor and less gloomy swamps which edge
the clearing and the cotton fields. In these
swampy places lives the Carolina wren, a
bright and joyous spirit, whose ringing melodi-
ous voice would lighten the gloom of the
nether world. Tea Kettle! Tea Ketile! Tea
Kettle! he calls and then his song rings in the
swamp like the cry of a valkyrie. Here too is
heard the fine spring song of the redwings,
and sometimes the saunterer may detect a
wierd and mysterious sound gurgling in the
air and shall know it for the jacksnipe.
Creeks meander among the hummocks and
these were at this season literally choked with
herring which, with the shad, come up from
the sea to spawn.

In this neutral zone, where cotton fields
touch the edge of the swamps, where jasmine

Cypress Swamps 103

blooms on the rail fences, and peach trees by
every cabin, the cardinal lifts up that voice
of the troubadour, so gay, so debonair. As
one emerges from the dismal shades, his song
greets the ear from that brighter region
where he is at home. It was here that I
found the nest of the blue-grey gnatcatcher
early in March—one of the most beautiful of
all bird-nests, cupshaped and decorated with
lichens. And it was here that the hooded
warbler first presented himself to view: a
memorable encounter, for if the swamp had
yielded nothing else, this in itself was payment
enough. Never before or since have I seen
as many pine warblers as trilled an the pine-
covered knolls. They dominated the woods
as did the red-bellied woodpecker the swamp.
Nowhere else could one go dry shod, for even
the country roads were under water and it
was necessary to proceed along the little single
plank walks elevated on posts which are pro-
vided for the wayfarer where the ground is
low, or lacking this, to wade. On these high
knolls, the American holly becomes a tree two
feet and more in diameter.

The silent river was long in flood, and morn-
ing and evening I paddled upon its muddy
waters, sometimes slipping into the grey

104 East and West ©

depths of the swamp and as often following the
shore of the river, where one could at least
see the sky and the passing clouds and hear
the hopeful voice of the wren and the red-
wing. Floating idly among the great leaves
of the American lotus, which here borders the
Roanoke, I reflected how little the lotus
meant to those who dwelt on the banks of
that yellow stream, how deeply it was in-
volved in the thought of dwellers on the
banks of other yellow streams. What cen-
turies of tradition, of veneration and mysti-
cism envelop it in Asia, whereas here—how
many even know that the lotus grows upon
our soil and is as native here as is the Indian
lotus there? But it is not indigenous to our
American thought—this mystic plant—and
will never be domesticated there, no matter
how it may thrive by the Roanoke.
Towards evening the buzzards would drop
from the sky and fold their wings in the
swamp, while on the lotus-fringed banks of
the yellow river arose the tremulous chorus
of frogs. In the all-pervading stillness this
seemed the very voice of the cypress swamp—
of the primordial world itself, still sounding
its rhythmical chant as though man had not
yet appeared to disturb its ancient seclusion.

CHAPTER VIII
IN THE LAKE COUNTRY

HE charm of this Lake Country of West-
ern New York is pre-eminently pastoral,
and, unlike New England pastoral country, it
does not give the impression of having been
wrested from Nature, for it has none of
that austerity which belongs to the boulders
and junipers and is naturally hospitable and
adapted for man. It smiles upon him first in
the peach blossoms and the pear and in the
flowering apple orchards; again in the golden
wheat and later in the mellow cornfields where
the pumpkins glisten in the sun, and it smiles
upon him in the vineyards with their purple
and amber clusters.

One is prone here to assume a bucolic and
pastoral view of life. It is not the wild, but a
hospitable, generous, and admirably tamed
Nature to which we are kin. We know the
flavour of grapes on the vine; we have an eye
for apple trees and rye-fields, and some of our

105

106 East and West

most cherished impressions are from the bloom
on the grape, the tassel on the corn, and the
sunshine on the wheat. These impressions, so
cultivated and developed in comparison with
those yielded by the desert and the wilder-
ness, reach quite as far back in that ancestral
mind in us; for some aboriginal men were
instinctively sowers and reapers, as others
were nomads and hunters, and the two have
always existed together—one in spite of the
other—like the Pueblo Indians and the no-
madic Apaches of the South-West. There is
in most men something of the nomad, some-
thing of the peaceful husbandman, but here
amid these quiet fields and ripening orchards,
it is the sower and the reaper who live in us
and to whom the pastoral landscape makes
its appeal. In the West an Indian, solacing
myself with savage and desolate ranges of
lava and with the mystery of the desert, liking
no road so well as the solitary trail, I find my-
self here no longer an aboriginal nomad in
feeling, but a pueblo man, pleased above all
with the ripening corn, the waving barley,
and the bloom on my peaches, and asking
nothing better of the gods than leisure to
watch the yellow warbler build her nest, the
leafcutter bee carrying rose leaves for her

In the Lake Country 107

cells, or the pastoral ants herding their aphid
flocks on the maples upon the lawn; leisure to
watch the opening bud, the expanding petal,
the maturing fruit, and to gather at last—
leisurely enough in morning hours—the ap-
ples and pears and grapes and to receive in
turn those charming and fleeting impressions,
more exquisite even than perfume or bloom,
which are the best part of the flower and
the fruit.

A lawn with spreading elms and maples, and
foxgloves blooming in the shade, a garden
patch and orchard—here is a mellow little
summer world congenial to the Arcadian man.
Every apple tree has its robin’s nest and in
little pear trees the yellow warbler builds.
Orioles never fail to nest in the elms; cat-
birds and songsparrows in the hedge; meadow
larks, vesper sparrows, and bobolinks in the
hayfield. The mining bees have their bur-
rows by the side of the gravelly paths; ma-
son bees appropriate nail holes and chinks;
squirrels nest in the tops of the maples, and
grackles in the pines—all seem domesticated
together, leading not nomadic but pastoral
lives. The hum of bees about old-fashioned
flowers and the peaceful voice of the red-
eye in the tree tops are the natural and fit-

108 East and West

ting accompaniment of these summer idylls.
They voice that quiet content, that simple
gladness that Nature now inspires by her gra-
cious mood. Rustling corn and domestic
apple trees are themselves not less com-
panionable than the bees and birds, and all
seem to lend themselves charmingly to our life
and to be a part of it. The keynote of that
life is a recognition of the beauty of common
things, a sympathy for every-day scenes, a
being at home in Nature.

In such a country the fields naturally form
the major part of our landscape. From the
first appearance of the wheat, they are
saturated with the life of the earth and the
light of the sky. On some misty day, over
the sodden ground appears a tinge of green,
the prelude—so ethereal as hardly to be re-
cognised by our grosser vision—to that epic
we are thenceforth to read as we saunter.
Day by day, there is a deepening green, later
a deepening yellow, and the beauty of the
wheat is one and of the oats another, and so
again of the barley and of the rye-fields.
As one stands upon some knoll—a drumlin
very likely—the rolling fields stretch far away
on every hand, broken here and there only by
patches of deep green woods or by grey-green

In the Lake Country 109

orchards, and far apart in the midst of the
waving grain, solitary and majestic, rise the
splendid domes and towering vase-like forms
of the elms. Over these fields, white cumuli
mass themselves in April skies, and the im-
palpable fleece and diaphanous cyrrhus clouds
of the brooding skies of autumn drift and
change and vanish.

How many pictures they present, one after
another marking the progress of the season,
which are dear to our pastoral selves: the
reapers, the sheaves of wheat, the hayricks,
the grazing sheep and cattle resting in the
shade of elms, the shocks of corn and glisten-
ing pumpkins. From the harvesting of the
wheat to the husking of the corn, these
fields yield other harvests than those that
are gathered into barns—harvests for the
quiet eye and the mind at peace with the
world.

Not the least of these is the association
with field birds which a wheat growing and
farming region affords. As one jogs along the
country roads day after day, the insect-like
voices of grasshopper sparrows, the song of
the vesper and occasionally the horned lark,
the long-drawn, high-pitched soprano of the
meadow lark, the bubbling irresistible medley

110 East and West

of the bobolink, the raucous clatter of the
ring-necked pheasant, and the wonderfully
mysterious utterance of the upland plover, are
the familiar bird notes. One and all seem the
peculiar and fitting expression of the fields,
as the Carolina wren is the very voice of a
Southern cypress swamp, or a cafion wren of
the sombre gorges of Arizona. Above all,
the bobolink expresses the gladness and
brightness of the fields: a voice inspired by
sun and sky and the waving grain. Like the
bobolink, the upland plover sings on the wing
and his song is perhaps not so much of the
fields as of the sky. As you watch him sus-
pended high in air above the wheat, there
descends to your ear, as if from a remote dis-
tance, a mysterious, gurgling, melodious sound,
half sigh, half whistle;—Way up in the air—!
it seems to say, beginning with a rising and
ending with a falling inflection long drawn
out. And when the bird drops out of the
sky it is to alight with wings held gracefully
aloft as butterflies alight on a flower, or
Bonaparte gulls on the water.

Western New York is presumably indebted
to the continental glacier for its lakes, as
Long Island for its hills, and in one case as in
the other, the topography was greatly varied

In the Lake Country III

and enriched by that Arctic ice sheet which
scooped out lake basins and scattered hills
in the form of terminal moraines and drumlins
over the land. Here is a charming pastoral
country—a lake country as essentially and as
poetically as the English Lake Country, and
doubtless quite as worthy to be sung. But
as yet no genius has cast a glamour over it
as did Wordsworth over the English lakes;
hence we must see it for ourselves unaided,
and, alas, our vision is painfully matter of fact
in these days. This country is not so mellow
as the English country, nor as cultivated,
cultivated though it be. It lacks the hedge
and the thatch, but to one who has any
poetic spectacles of his own, it is full of charm.
There is nothing remarkable surely about
Walden. It has no particular or unusual
beauty—a little New England pond, nothing
more. But we see it through Thoreau’s
eyes. This habit of seeing places through
other minds, while it may easily invest with
a new interest, may also deprive us of our
own clearer and purer vision. We look at
Nature usually in the most commonplace
way, and when we wish to see it in a differ-
ent light we ask the poet to see for us. We
looked at Nature so long through the eyes

112 East and West

of the English poets that until lately our
heads were full of skylarks, nightingales and
primroses. A Western poet has sung of
these things—as if the Sierras and the desert,
the live-oaks and the flower-covered fields
offered nothing better. Surely we have a
Lake Country in New York awaiting the
bard who shall sing the wheat-fields and the
upland plover, who shall sing these vine-
covered slopes above the deep cold lakes,
these secluded glens where fringed polygala
and cypripedium bloom; awaiting the poet
in every beholder who sainters in the fields
or paddles on these blue waters and delights
his eye with the woods and vineyards, the
waving grain and the purple hills in the hazy
distance.

If we have not the advantage of investing
our landscape with that seductive glamour of
association which poetry and history give to
many places in the Old World, we have the
compensation of seeing it for ourselves if
only we can throw over it some rich and poetic
association of our own minds. Instead of
endeavouring to feel what Wordsworth or
Shelley or Keats felt, we may aim to have a
reaction all our own and to allow the lakes
and the hills to stimulate us directly and

‘The lake is the very eye of the landscape.”

In the Lake Country 113

give rise to original impressions—the reaction
upon American birds, American skies, and
American fields and vineyards.

They are blessed who, possessed of seeing
eyes—painter’s, poet’s, naturalist’s eyes,—
have a charming landscape and a varied
topography with which to stimulate their
inner vision and refresh themselves. A see-
ing eye in a commonplace country is in an
unhappy plight and must seek to solace
itself in the sky. On the other hand a
commercial eye ruins the most delightful
landscape for the mind that uses it and it
would be fitting enough if the commonplace
regions of the earth could be reserved for dull
and commercial minds. Consider what a range
of hills means—how much more the land-
scape is our friend by reason of that mound of
earth to relieve the monotony, to cast shad-
ows, to reflect colour, and to hold the clouds.
Rigid as stone, the hills none the less yield
to the tender and mysterious lights of dawn,
of sunset and moonrise, as the human face is
softened by an emotion.

How much more, then, does a lake reflect
the moods of Nature, for the lake is the very
eye of the landscape, where one may always
detect some play of emotion. No matter

8

114 East and West

how grim and unfeeling the setting, water is
ever alive, ever the medium of expression.
No matter how dull the day, the lake is re-
sponsive and tells us through our eyes that
which were otherwise incommunicable. By
reason of this responsiveness we are drawn
to it for companionship, for that silent
interchange of thought. They who dwell
among the lakes and hills have this more
perfect society in Nature; and if Nature is to
us gracious and hospitable in the fields and
vineyards, she is even more our friend where-
in she appeals to that less easily satisfied
part of us which is solaced only with those
subtle and fleeting moods communicated by
the changeful light on the hills and on the
sensitive face of the waters.

They are not high hills which here befriend
us on the shores of Canandaigua—not so
much imposing as lovable. Gannett’s Hill,
the highest point, is twenty-two hundred
feet above the sea, but fifteen hundred feet
gives a bold sweep down to the water.
The topography is simple and of few lines:
rounded summits and fairly steep slopes
lacking all angularity—a shale formation.
Nor is the lake so very large, but of that size
rather which, more than any vast expanse

In the Lake Country 115

of water, conduces to companionship. It is
large enough, that is, to afford perspective and
to differentiate the tones of purple and blue.
Its eighteen miles are broken by a turn and by
jutting points. Thus it has that greatest
charm in a lake—variety. It is not seen ata
glance nor exhausted by a sweep of the eye,
for mystery ever lurks in the blue distance.
Lake and hills are wedded in the impression
they yield: for a lake is only at its best when
surrounded by hills, and the hills in turn are
vastly more imposing when they surround a
lake. So entirely complementary are they,
that it would seem mythology should afford
some antecedent in a primordial affinity and
union.

As the fields have encroached, the flowers
have made their last stand in the glens about
the lake, and these fortunately have been left
undisturbed,—little winding ravines in the
midst of the corn and the vineyards. The
fields come to the very edge of the shaly
banks, which fall away almost perpendicu-
larly in places, while the level floor in the
larger glens may be several hundred feet
below. In May, I repair to these glens,
leaving the pastoral landscape behind and
dropping out of the fields into the depths

116 East and West

below, to find myself instantly in a sylvan
retreat where a stream meanders over its
shaly bed under maples and birch and bass-
wood, with white pines on the steep slopes
above; where turns in the ravine yield vistas
woodsy and enticing and where the flowers are
left to themselves. Here they remain as ina
reservation of their own and may it be long
before the white settler encroaches. Here
coltsfoot and wild ginger, trilliums and ery-
thronium, spring-beauty and hepatica bloom
together at the water’s edge: a lovable race
peopling the ravine—so delicate, so silent, so
humble, yet exerting such subtle power to
quell the rude and turbulent thoughts of
man, which presently slink away, vanquished
without a blow. You shall find here the
yellow cypripedium and the fringed polygala,
and I adjure you by all the gods of the glen
that you leave them where you find them,
that their days may be long in the land.

Of the Finger Lakes which give to the region
its name, none perhaps have more variety
and charm than Canandaigua—perhaps, for
to the seeing eye all lakes are beautiful,
while to the commercial eye the more ethereal
graces are never revealed. Throughout the
region there are the wheat-fields, the bobo-

‘© The trellised vineyards on the slopes of Canandaigua,”

In the Lake Country 117

links, the elms—some domes, some slender
vases; everywhere the same hospitality in
Nature, the pumpkins glistening in the au-
tumn sunshine, the red apples under the
trees, and here and there upon the shores, the
grape—and it is the vine above all cultivated
things that is instinct with poetic suggestion.
The trellised vineyards on the slopes of
Canandaigua, the blue water of the lake—
what a picture is there in which to steep the
fancy and to yield that intoxication of which
the grape itself can offer only a counterfeit.
For the tendril, the cluster, and the classic
leaf, the flaming maples and the mellow
golden elms, the tender blue stretching away
to the purple hills, together do work enchant-
ment and cast a spell over the mind of man;
and not the wine when it is red can thus
elate as does that nectar which the senses
sip from the purple and amber clusters upon
the hills.

Alas for the pueblo man, who languishes
day by day as the fields grow bare and silent,
subsiding at last under the drifting leaves for
his winter sleep, not to reappear until an-
other year when the pear and the peach are
in flower. It is not he who hears the parting
warble of the bluebirds and that brief autumn

118 East and West

measure of the ruby kinglet’s song falling on
the frosty air, that last reverie of the song-
sparrow; who sees the silent hermit lurking
in the spice-bush and the wahoo and later
looks for him in vain; not he—but that nomad,
that aboriginal man, who now wakes and
renews himself and hears in the winds the
irresistible call to depart. He it is who sees
in his mind’s eye the open spaces, the lava
peaks, the sunlit opal desert—ever beckoning;
to whom the wild geese far above the lake
in the chill grey sky seem to cry—Away!
Away! Till one day he finds himself on
that old trail where the mountains are red
and yellow and the shimmering desert—the
great free desert—waits for him.

CHAPTER IX
CHAPARRAL

EAVING the East in November when it
was already winter and snow was fall-

ing, while juncos and white-throated spar-
rows were abundant, I arrived in Santa
Barbara to find the Western congeners of
these birds already domiciled, while the warm
mellow days were autumn-like and the first
spring flowers were appearing—a strange
mixture of the seasons, characteristic of
California. Violet nightshade, laurel, and
wild currant as well as the white ceanothus
were in bloom. Soon the blue ceanothus
appeared and the toothwort, the most delicate
of all crucifere. These are all spring blos-
soms, and it may be said, therefore, that spring
begins inthe Santa Inez Mountains in Novem-
ber, notwithstanding winter birds have just
arrived. Rain had fallen, however, in Octo-
ber and it was due to this that spring was
thus early. It would perhaps be more ac-

11g

120 East and West

curate to say that the first rain is the
beginning of spring, though the season I am
describing is midwinter by the calendar.

As with the Adirondacks, one charm of the
Santa Inez hill-country certainly lies in its
shrubs, and these in California and the West
generally are known collectively as chaparral,
though the term properly applies, according
to Rothrock, to scrub oak only. Appar-
ently the first flower to appear hereabouts
is the wild currant, whose clusters of pink
blossoms and light green foliage are ex-
tremely delicate and vernal. White ceano-
thus is early in bloom and is followed in
December by the blue species known as
California lilac. A good part of the chaparral
on the lower slopes of the range is com-
posed of this blue ceanothus, growing to a
height of fifteen and even twenty feet, and
covered as by a garment with its dense-
flowered racemes which in places lend a
billowy and smoke-like appearance to a
mountain spur or shoulder. Two goose-
berries are now in bloom, both charming, and
one—the fuschia-flowered—surely among the
handsomest shrubs in North America. It is
evergreen and from its spreading branches,
which droop gracefully, depend in long

Chaparral 121

thickly clustered rows the large scarlet blos-
soms, somewhat fuschia-like in appearance.
The other, the wild gooseberry, so called,—
though both are wild and untamed in their
sylvan graces and woodland affinities,—is a
water-loving species, growing near streams
in moist soil, a large and robust plant, com-
pletely covered with its myriads of white
blossoms with red calices, whose sepals re-
curve like the gables of Chinese pagodas.
Both are superior to any of the Ribes of the
Eastern States in size and in beauty.
Surprises in the way of shrubs are the bush
figwort and the tree poppy—true figworts
and poppies but appearing in a new and
strange personality to the astonished East-
erner. The former are common and suggest
flame-coloured azaleas. Tree poppies confine
themselves to higher levels and are of a brill-
iant canary yellow. Another anomaly is a
holly-leaved cherry—a cherry plainly enough
but with a borrowed leaf. While these are
beginning to bloom the berries of the Cali-
fornia holly are in their prime—holly berries
in appearance but without a holly leaf. By
combining the leaf of the cherry with the
berry of the pseudo-holly, one can improvise
a very fair holly—and this is actually done.

122 East and West

An evergreen huckleberry flourishes in
rocky places at slight elevations, a vigorous
shrub, and from thence upward to the sum-
mit of the range, ceanothus, greasewood, sages,
and manzanita predominate. The black sage
and the white first open their flowers in
December and bloom through a long spring.
These “‘sages,”’ in reality audibertias, are the
bee plants of Southern California and as
characteristic of the hills as sagebrush of the
desert. ‘‘Sagebrush’’ again is an artemisia;
true sages or salvias are much less abundant.
Of the audibertias, the humming-bird sage
is perhaps the most striking, an herbaceous
plant bearing large crimson flowers in whirls,
surrounded by bronze-coloured bracts, with
sage-green crinkly leaves. One and all—
salvias, artemisias, and audibertias—have the
odour of sage, so that sometimes the air is
redolent.

The most characteristic shrub of the Coast
Range—of California indeed—is the man-
zanita. Rarely attaining the dimensions of a
tree, its branches, tortuous, twisted, and gro-
tesque as those of an ancient live-oak, are
clothed with a smooth bark of a deep ma-
hogany tone, as richly coloured as any bark
you may see. Like all heaths, its berries

Chaparral 123

are pretty waxen bells, but with the excep-
tion of its relative the madrofia, more waxy
and more bell-like than those of other heaths.
| Associated with this chaparral in the
cafions and on the slopes of the Santa Inez are
two vines. One, a Western species of clema-
tis (C. lasiantha), is remarkable for its very
large and cream-coloured blossoms; the other,
plebeian in name, is yet an aristocrat among
vines—distinctive in leaf, in flower, and in
fruit. This lowly cucumber vine, embody-
ing the immemorial grace of a graceful
ancestry, intrudes itself everywhere under
the oaks and through the chaparral, reaching
its long and greedy tendrils in all directions
and clinging like the tentacles of a green and
vegetable octopus to everything with which
it comes in contact. Touch these tendrils and
presently they become sinuous and curve at .
their tips. As if actuated by some motive,
once one has seized a twig it coils about it
neatly and compactly while the unwound
portion of the tendril assumes a corkscrew
form, thus exerting a tension by which it pulls
the vine. In this manner myriad tendrils, like
diminutive arms, constantly work, ever lift-
ing the plant onward and upward. Stray-
ing hither and yon, it everywhere unfolds its

124 East and West

racemes of delicate white star-like blossoms
which in an incredibly short time are replaced
by spiny green fruit expanding before one’s
very eyes until, the size of an orange, they
hang over the trail.

In open spots in the chaparral and along
the roads, the wild peony flourishes in early
winter, a vigorous and rather attractive
plant with coarse red flowers, and the Cali-
fornia four-o’clock opens its magenta blos-
soms in the late afternoon, while, bordering
hillside pastures, the tall lupine lifts its
purple racemes above a foliage distinguished
for its beauty. It is said that there are no
rare flowers in Southern California. Cer-
tainly, flowers for the most part grow in
greater profusion than in the East, or as only
our fall composites do. They appear in
masses, colouring the fields and hillsides with
their bloom. Lupines, poppies, and brodizas
thrive with the abundance of daisies, golden-
rod, and asters with us. In January certain
little hilltops and sunny slopes are blue with
the brodiza, a delicate lily, while every-
where in the shade are dense patches of hedge
nettle, a mint with rose-purple flowers. Both
are exquisite blossoms though as common as
the black mustard and wild radish in the

Chaparral 125

fields. Here and there are little colonies of
zygadene, a graceful white lily remotely
suggesting a jonquil. Brilliant scarlet paint-
brushes gleam amid the sages, while whole
fields are reddened by the countless blos-
soms of the pink paint-brush, called ‘‘es-
cobita’”’ by the Mexicans, which, being
translated, means a little whisk-broom.

The Santa Inez—an offshoot of the Coast
Range—attains an altitude of about four thou-
sand feet and presents from the Montecito
valley the appearance of a wall or rampart,
far more imposing than the altitude would
indicate. They are big little mountains, bold
and individual, and their topography is pe-
culiar by reason of the innumerable cafions
and lesser barrancas at right angles to the
axis of the range, which are not passes but
merely lead into other cafions, parallel to the
axis and presenting an appearance of im-
mense cirques. The barrancas in every case
end in a blank wall. Fairly good-sized
streams flow through these blind cafions,
having their origin in the interior parallel
cafions where they are fed by springs; that
is, they all rise in the range itself on its outer
slope.

After a cold rainstorm early in February,

126 East and West

I crossed the range for the first time. Up
from the fields of the Montecito valley came
the melodious and mysteriously beautiful
song of Western meadow larks. Seemingly
distant because of some ventriloqual quality,
the birds were in reality singing nearby in the
tops of lemon trees. There is a certain serious
import in this song, a something mystical
and cosmic yet lyrical, as if they chanted
some epithalamium. They who aver the
birds of California do not sing, cannot know
the Western meadow lark. Entering the
cafion I began to hear the call of the spurred
towhee and the dramatic song of the Cali-
fornia thrasher and these continued to near
the summit.

Growing in rocky places, was the prickly
phlox, one of the beautiful Western gilias.
A shrubby, sage-green, prickly leaved plant—
unpromising in itself—it is surmounted in
spring with rose-purple stars which glorify
the stony hillsides. It is a noteworthy
fact in plant lore that some of the most
ethereal and lovely flowers blossom in bar-
ren and unsightly places. Higher up grew
yellow lupine and patches of delicate moun-
tain forget-me-not bloomed among the spiny
yuccas. The trail, badly washed out in

Chaparral 127

places, wound around the precipitous moun-
tainside, appearing at times to be directly
over the stream whose course was indicated
far below by alders and sycamores now put-
ting out their leaves. If a part of the trail
was missing, as sometimes happened, my
cow pony scrambled over the shaly bank
above and slid into the path again as a matter
of course.

This upper region is a jungle of grease-
wood, punctuated here and there by the
paler dome-shaped masses of the large-berried
manzanita. Between the base and summit of
the mountains there is not so marked a dif-
ference in the flora as in the East—in the
Catskills and Adirondacks for instance; or
perhaps it were more exact to say that the
difference is not so perceptible at a given
altitude. Four thousand feet involves far
less change than on the Atlantic coast.

The summit reached, there opened at my
feet a panorama of innumerable ranges and
cafions—the Santa Inez, Mono, and Blue
Cafions and countless barrancas—the low
spurs blending in the distance like strata and
culminating in the San Rafael range, snow-cov-
ered from end to end. Impressions afforded
by a mountain chain, thus seen for the first

128 East and West

time and suddenly breaking upon the vision,
are inspiring beyond anything else in Nature;
but they are all too evanescent and though
you should gaze for ever, never again will
you receive them as in that first moment. I
had long wondered what lay on the other side
of that solid wall of the Santa Inez, which
affording nowhere a vista or loophole seemed
to suggest some mystery, and like all moun-
tains, exerted its spell upon the beholder
till he should ascend and look over for him-
self. It gives no sign that the interior world
it conceals is of such magnitude and grandeur.
The desire at once seized me to cross the in-
tervening cafions and barrancas to the distant
San Rafael and see what lay on the other
side of that. In the mountains one never
comes to the end.

Like a garment the chaparral covered the
treeless spurs and peaks of the Santa Inez—
a jungle inhabited by road-runners and coyotes
and only interrupted by outcropping ledges
and stray boulders. Watered by the winter
rains and dews and the summer fogs, it is tall
and luxuriant and almost impenetrable in
places without a machete or axe. Afoot you
are lost in it; on horseback youcannot possibly
get through without a trail. The chaparral

_sinds ssa]9aI} ay] pataaod [esredeyo ay} JUDUIeS & ONTT ,,

Chaparral 129

embodies the personality of this land and
as much as any feature differentiates it from
other Western country. It might seem, to
one unfamiliar with it, that this could only be
monotonous, but such is not the case. It is
true, perhaps, that to one accustomed to the
woods only—a tenderfoot, that is—the love
of the desert and the chaparral country is an
acquired taste. It is equally true that having
once acquired that taste there is ever af-
terwards a certain insipidness about such
densely timbered hills as the Adirondacks.
We miss the gaunt structure of the moun-
tains. Chaparral is not sufficient in itself
to conceal their outlines and in the distance
is no more than a green mantle without
thickness through which protrude the rocky
ribs. That mantle is made up of many
different shrubs and here and there in the
interstices and along roads and trails are
many delightful plants.

Surely this mysterious barrier of the Santa
Inez does conceal another and different
country, for on the spurs and ranges beyond
was no such thick covering of chaparral, but
the sparse, stunted, and interrupted growth
of the arid region. The immediate slope of

course was like the summit, but lower down
9

130 East and West

and everywhere in the distance the difference
was apparent. It seemed indeed as if one had
left California behind and was looking down
upon a bit of New Mexico. Like a miniature
Andes, the Santa Inez cuts off the moisture-
bearing wind and literally divides two worlds.
Behind me to the south, the infinite cor-
rugations of the range resembled the folds of
some dark green cloth—not velvet for it was
dull and rough. To the north, the San Rafael
with its innumerable spurs was clothed in
umber and sepia with suggestions of purple—
desert colours more refreshing than any ver-
dure. True, there was a mottling of green,
fading in the distance, however, into the
royal colours of the desert and indicating a
radically different climate. The air, too, was
more brilliant ; no sea-mist, no smoke of towns,
no dust—for nowhere was there any sign
of man. Not only, then, does the Santa Inez
defend a little desert world from the sea, but
from the towns and villages with their noise
and smoke, a world of silence and solitude.
Still less like California did it seem, when,
two hours later, I arrived far below at the
Santa Inez River and found a broad shallow
stream flowing over a shaly bottom through a
flat, covered with large cottonwoods and hav-

Chaparral 131

ing little underbrush. On the hillsides were
isolated clumps of the large-berried manzanita
and scattered yuccas, and opposite, a bold
cliff of deep red puddingstone. It was a
transition as radical as one could find in
so short a distance, from one zone to another,
and illustrated, more than volumes of mete-
orology, the effect of the sea and of mountain
ranges upon climate.

In its steep descent, the trail wound through
thickets of California holly resplendent with
great masses of scarlet berries. Following
the course of a little stream, it passed through
delightful groves of laurel, all in bloom, where
the air was scented with the perfume of these
California bay trees. But more beautiful
than either was a grove of madrofia presently
encountered, which I had not seen growing
anywhere on the other side. The most
charming member of the heath family, in the
length and breadth of the land there is not
a more patrician shrub or tree. Its bark,
a pure Malay colour and as smooth as a Malay
skin, fairly shines under its large and glossy
leaves and the impression one receives in a
clump of these trees is quite indescribable,
suggesting an exquisite and highly-bred
feminine personality.

132 East and West

When, towards sunset the summit was
again reached, heavy clouds drifting up from
the Pacific lay over the south slope of the
range, like a blanket of fog, giving the illusion
of mystery to the trail and making the cafions
abysmal. Along the edge, I slid and scram-
bled, dropping through the clouds, until pre-
sently upon a spur I came into the clear
sunlight again and gazed into the greater
abyss of the sea.

CHAPTER X
LIVE OAKS

A® there are agreeable distinctions that

are New England or Southern or West-
ern, so there is a charm local, and almost
personal, in the topography, the geology, and
the flora of these sections. Especially is this
true of trees, which so materially lend in-
dividuality to the landscape and are so in-
timately identified with it. The cypress of
Southern swamps, the spruce of the North
Woods, the ahuehuetls of Mexico, and the cot-
tonwoods of the Plains are as fundamental to
Nature as are any peculiarities of idiom or of
custom to the people. It may please the
fancy of the naturalist, if he have no better
ground for the assumption, to detect at least
a superficial relation between these natural
characteristics and the peculiarities of the
inhabitants. Such an assumption is, it must
be admitted, more consonant with an earlier
and mythologic period, when man’s relation

133

134 East and West

to Nature was less practical and more poetic,
than with the present age when it is so com-
pletely utilitarian.

We have lost the ancient and poetic rela-
tion to trees, as we have lost some of the
gods. The Period of the Gods was also the
Age of Trees, and it is as if the spirits which
once inhabited trees had departed, unable,
like the gods themselves, to withstand such
change and progress in the world, and leav-
ing us only so much lumber. But if per-
chance you have a mythologic vein in you, a
certain feeling for Nature, as of something
personal—an inheritance from the gods it
may be—you may still feel that reverence for
trees, for the plane, the tulip, and the walnut,
which so distinguished the ancients, and be-
cause of this ancestral superstition, derive
more from communion with your tree friends
than can one less poetically endowed or more
completely hypnotised by the modern spirit.

Now the personality of California—of the
coast country in particular—is expressed as
much in the live oak as in any natural fea-
ture. The Western live oak is a charm as
essentially Californian as the soft voice is
Southern. More native to the soil than the
inhabitants, it is a tangible expression of this

Live Oaks 135

land. Pepper, olive, and eucalyptus are
aliens—acquired graces—but the live oak is
the inheritor of the soil. Beneath it rested
the wandering Padres of Old New Spain; in its
shade dwelt those Indian peoples who were
before New Spain; and in its woodland
sanctity dwell still those gentle floral races
who were before either, and which are as indi-
genous as the sheltering tree—blue-eyes, hedge
nettle, brodiea and toothwort—exquisite
blossoms of the early season, possessing all
the delicacy and innocence of woodland
flowers.

Flourishing in the cafions and the rich al-
luvial valleys, the live oak forms delightful
groves whose significance and charm is not
that of the forest, nor yet of the woods as
we know them in the East, but is more com-
pletely sylvan and woodland, and whose
affinity, all the more because of a mild and
delectable climate, is with the classic and
antique world rather than with the present.
While essentially a gregarious tree, it is as
original and whimsical in its development as
the spruce is conventional and the result
of this arboreal whimsicality is delightful.
Branches wander hither and yon, sometimes
starting bravely upward but eventually turn-

136 East and West

ing earthward again in sinuous irregularity;
others, tempted earthward in their youth,
later take a turn to the south, while age finds
them westward bent. Plainly it is not a
soaring but an earth-loving tree, drooping its
branches ever nearer and nearer the ground as
age creeps on apace; and thus a grove fes-
tooned with lichen and mistletoe wears the
venerable and softened look so agreeable to
the artist eye.

If perchance a road meanders through a
live-oak wood, branches meet overhead and
long arboreal arms reach across, holding in
their drooping extremities shadowy masses of
grey lichen, itself pendulous and beautiful,
while turns in the road admit one to new vistas
and new sympathy with this sylvan world.
Well might such a spot be sacred to something
better than druidical rites and congenial to
musing philosophers.

One easily understands here the profound
impression a grove made upon the mind of
Antiquity, unsophisticated by Realism and by
Science. About it there is a singular sug-
gestion of an abode. The great branches
reaching far out and often parallel with the
ground are massive rafters, the thick canopy
of leaves, a roof, the sturdy trunks, sustain-

Live Oaks 137

ing pillars: but who abides therein? Natur-
ally to the ancestral mind—credulous and
poetic—nymphs, fauns, and satyrs, since there
was no visible presence; if not tangible beings,
then woodland divinities and free spirits of
the air, for how should such an abode be
untenanted?

Though the dryads have long since van-
ished, the groves are by no means forsaken
but are inhabited by lively and musical com-
panies of birds, who in the dense foliage easily
become as invisible as any spirits of the elder
woods. Chief among the present-day nymphs
are the bush-tits, diminutive sprites with the
manners and customs of chickadees but differ-
ently attired. The live oak is their home tree.
It is here they seek their food and here they
build their pendulous nests of grey lichens.
Then there is the wren-tit, a bird of unmis-
takable wren affinities—a wren manner and
a wren tail—and yet not altogether a wren.
He confines himself to the shrubbery—lilacs
and greasewood,—while the bush-tits flit in the
branches above, ever and anon giving voice to
his feelings in a sweet but peculiarly metallic
trill whose quality of tone is not exactly like
that of any other bird. Visiting spirits of the
grove are the titmouse, less grey and more

138 East and West

sooty than the Eastern congener, and the
spurred towhee, resembling our chewink and
of equally cheerful disposition. There are
also a Western gnatcatcher, a Western ruby-
crowned kinglet, a Western blackcap—the
pileolated,—and Audubon’s warbler, which is
merely a westernised myrtle bird. These
four migrate down the Pacific Slope to Mex-
ico and are as abundant in the tulipans
and guavas of the State of Morelos as in the
live oaks here. From Alaska comes the
golden-crowned sparrow—like all of his race
a sad-voiced bird—to winter round about
Eden, while the redshafted flicker, the West-
ern counterpart of the highhole, is as native
to the live-oak belt as to the aspen-covered
slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

Some birds are cosmopolites; others, fa-
miliar spirits of the grove. Among the lat-
ter are the California towhee, California
jay, California woodpecker, and California
thrasher. This towhee is a demure and
domestic-looking bird, attired more like the
green-tailed towhee than like the tribe of
chewinks, but possessing none of the green-
tail’s power of song. The jay is an un-
crested bird, less pert than our bluejay, but
every whit a jay, none the less. His voice is

Live Oaks 139

less vociferous but quite as unmusical. De-
mure in plumage and with an astonishing
bill, which serves him as a pickaxe, the Cali-
fornia thrasher is one of the lords of song.
His voice is stronger, and his powers of mimi-
cry more varied than with either the Eastern
thrasher or the mockingbird. As with them,
his delivery is stagey and his song dramatic
rather than lyrical—a trait shared by the
entire family. In January they sing from
the oaks by the hour, pouring out a volume of
trills and roulades, interspersed with mim-
icking cries and imitations of barnyard
fowls. No other bird sings as much at this
season unless it be the house finches—more
given to song than their Eastern relative,
the purple finch. They, however, avoiding
the oaks, seem to prefer deciduous trees, such
as the sycamore, keeping up a continuous
musical chatter from its bare twigs.

Perhaps the most typically Western bird
found in and around the groves is the road-
runner, a long-tailed, short-winged, black-
crested, grotesque bird, fleet-footed and of
preposterous habits. In the cafion above the
ranch in the particular grove which serves me
as a type, not only because it contains some
fine oaks but because it is conveniently near,

140 East and West

a pair of road-runners are either nesting or
seriously considering it, and the male disports
himself upon a large boulder. Strutting to
and fro upon his rock platform, he stops
ever and anon and, bowing ceremoniously as
to an audience below, proceeds to pump
forth, his crested head on a level with his
claws, a series of melancholy whining notes,
which suggest the whine of a dog more than
the hoot of an owl and might, at a distance, be
mistaken for either. Day after day he ap-
pears in the same place, sometimes silent and
as often orating, intoning, or chanting, which-
ever it may be, his audience a solitary female
runner skulking somewhere in the chaparral
and shyly taking note of these powers, to
whom this particular bird-personality and
these astonishing bird-manners represent the
norm of conduct and appearance. Some-
times he interrupts himself to descend the
almost perpendicular side of the boulder
with the agility of a lizard, presently reap-
pearing to resume his antics. His diet is
largely reptilian and he is popularly supposed
to attack and kill the rattlesnake.

Another bird of unconventional ways is the
California woodpecker, who frequents the
grove for acorns which he deposits one by one

Live Oaks 141

in separate holes he has prepared in the
bark of trees. You may see tree trunks
completely peppered by his industry. This
thrift—if such it be—he shares with no other
member of his family.

From all this it will be seen that the groves
are far from being unpeopled; so that one
has not to rely upon the imagination for
society, though it is certainly a useful ad-
junct. Unimaginative persons derive so
little from what they see; over-imaginative
ones make much of what they do not see.
Nature, far from being fixed, is plastic, con-
forming to every mould of temperament.
How some would sentimentalise here—gushy
people whose springs are all on the surface
and quicklyrun off; while others compute, with
cold and calculating eye, the cords of wood,
the cost of cutting, and the profit. Interest
more than anything else, sharpens the eye;
temperament is a glass, rose-coloured or blue
as the case may be. What do children see
here and what do old people see?—not the
same grove surely. A psychologist would
give much to know what the Indian perceives
—so slender is the savage’s stock of associa-
tions, so relatively insignificant the inherent
mass of ideas upon which his impressions fall.

142 East and West

Imagination is a soft light suffusing Nature,
which while it renders outlines less distinct,
clothes them with a fringe of association and
mystery. Some charm is due to this and is
never revealed to unimaginative and prosaic
eyes. Thus the grove is fairest to those who
have more inheritance from the gods, to
faun-like natures endowed with bird con-
sciousness and arboreal moods. They hear
pipes and timbrels and woodland ditties
still; as long ago it was they who heard them
in classic groves. To them, these over-
arching branches, these columnar trunks, are
gateways of dreams to some divine country to
which lead these winding wood-paths through
the greensward. Here they listen, not only to
the wren-tit’s trill and the golden-crowned’s
plaintive note, but to incommunicable music
heard out of doors alone.

Perhaps these woodpaths lead to no more
mysterious world than solitude itself, cer-
tainly to none of more illusive charm:—the
society of one’s best thoughts, of sylvan
fancies and shy wood creatures in place of
one’s kind. While nymphs have fled and
fauns no longer dance upon the green, the
familiar spirit of all groves is still the same:
that spirit is the angel of Solitude. Observe

Live Oaks 143

now your true lover of the woods, how he
abstracts himself from the company of his
fellows, ostensibly to go a-botanising or to
look for birds, but in reality to walk in dim
groves with the good angel who awaits him
there. Does he seem solitary and unsocial?
Mark you, he but seeks diviner company
than the town affords.

There are minds so wholly subjective that
they are disqualified as good observers of
Nature; others so nearly objective that though
their vision be keen and reliable they see
nothing to advantage, their facts are all
unrelated. The good naturalist is a blend of
these. He sees as a scientist, he associates
his facts as a philosopher. It is ridiculous to
assume that any one ever sees Nature as it is;
we see it with what mind we have—and the
richer the mind, the richer the Nature we
know. There are days when the grove is
full of life—objective days; others when it is
at a standstill, when little or nothing at-
tracts the attention—and these are sub-
jective days, when we must see with an inner
eye.

In California, such periods are fewer than
in the East, for there is never a time when
some birds and flowers are not in evidence.

144 East and West

All about the grove, ceanothus, wild currant,
gooseberry, and purple nightshade are bloom-
ing as early as the middle of November—
not fall flowers but the first spring blossoms
—while California fuchias and some golden-
rods are left over from the summer. Winter,
in the Coast Range and the valleys of Cali-
fornia, is the growing time, for it is the rainy
season.

While in New England, red and scarlet oaks
are bared to the wintry blasts and white oaks
are clothed in the few shrivelled leaves which
cling dishevelled and forlorn like the tatters of
a garment, the gentle goddess is tripping
through the live oaks and the ancient groves
have begun to renew themselves. But this
renewal is inconspicuous. There is no mar-
vellous transformation as with the decidu-
ous oaks—a bursting of grey winter buds and
a simultaneous unfolding of myriads of green
and red and pink flags—but one by one
an old leaf falls, a new leaf appears, and the
visible change is slight. Beneath the oaks,
however, blue-eyes, toothworts, and white
forget-me-nots have the ethereal charm pe-
culiar to the most delicate and exquisite
spring blossoms and wherever they appear,
their presence makes it spring.

Live Oaks 145

A brook from the cafion flows sinuously
through this grove, bordered with alders,
which in California are large trees, and with
sycamores everywhere bending gracefully
over the water, their trunks a mottled grey
and white and their branches as tortuous and
as drooping as those of the live oak itself.
Ascending one of these sycamores, an army of
red ants crosses the stream by interlacing
twigs and descends a tree on the opposite
bank. All through the winter I find them
using this natural bridge. The oaks, unlike
the sycamores, avoid the water’s edge. Scat-
tered beneath them are boulders, large and
small and of all conceivable shapes, which
have seen many oaks—many groves—come
and go; veritable antiques, mottled with
lichens, and slowly sinking beneath the surface
of the soil. Time and the elements have per-
forated the boulders and hollowed grotesque
miniature caverns within their rotund and
massive bodies, revealing their yellow hearts.

When it rains, and there are protracted
rains and many cloudy days, the oaks droop
nearer and nearer the earth and the groves
become cavernous as grottoes of the sea,
Birds hide and the army of ants no longer
crosses to and fro upon the slender bridge.

10

146 East and West

Water oozes from the ground and drips from
theleaves. Petals of the toothwort droop and
fall and not even a flicker is to be heard.
The south-west wind, rolling up its dense
moisture-filled clouds, puts a quietus upon all
but the stream, which, swollen and turbid,
changes its key and sings in a higher, more
vociferous tone.

When of a sudden the wind veers to the
north, the masses of cloud are blown far out
to sea and sunshine prevails again. Soon the
ants are traversing the stream as before,
flocks of bush-tits flit merrily through the
leaves, and the thrasher resumes his song.
From the chaparral comes the faint flute-like
trill of the wren-tit, and from the oaks the
familiar and cheery call of the flicker; while
far above the grove the Western redtail
circles in stately and rhythmical flight, ap-
pearing through the skylights in the oaks as
a diminutive speck in the blue.

CHAPTER XI
ELYSIAN FIELDS

HEN, early in April, I came to take a
more extended jaunt into the region
beyond the mountain ramparts, the entire
range was covered with the bloom of the
white ceanothus which near at hand suggested
a light fall of snow. Everything that earlier
in the season had been rare was now abundant.
There were no longer solitary flowers of any
kind but legions of blossoms; no longer indi-
viduals but masses, fields of bloom—Elysian
fields surely.

The first night was spent at Snyder’s on
the range and here cyclamen was encountered
in abundance. All around the orchard and
field, all through the straggling grain, were
these lovely shooting stars,—

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Waving their heads in sprightly dance,—
some tall, some short, some rose purple,
others pale lilac or of a crimson hue. No

147

148 East and West

cultivated crop on the mountains thrived like
this which cost no labour at all.

Early next day in the fresh morning air, I
descended the trail to the San Marcos road,
seeing the brilliant flowers of the crimson
warrior, a handsome cousin of our plain wood
betony, growing in rocky places under the
chaparral. A vast fog lay over the sea obscur-
ing it as if by an immense ice floe, for from
that height the fog below, extending from
the base of the mountain to the horizon line,
resembled a frozen sea. But in the direction
of my journey, not the smallest cloud could
be seen and the sunlight was the clear sun-
light of the desert.

In shady spots, banks above the road were
fringed with saxifrage and the delicate white
blossoms of the Romanzoffia. Here too were
the shade-loving phacelias, not tens, but
thousands—tangles and thickets of them.
Little excursions of this sort through the
country make one sensible of the peculiarities
of plants, their whims and preferences. They
are as particular and as peculiar as human
beings in their vay and, as with us, there is
sometimes less“affinity between members of
the same family than between those of wholly
different families. Thus the large purple

Elysian Fields 149

phacelias and the tall sturdy white species seek
dry and rocky places, and in such localities
were encountered in serried ranks: but this
smaller blue phacelia would have soon per-
ished in such a spot. Some flowers have
a preference for roadsides, others for trails;
some for cliffs and others, again, for meadows
or swamps. There are preferences for north
or south slopes, for different soils, for the
proximity of hardwoods or for coniferous
trees, for damp or for dry atmospheres.
Illustrations of this whimsicality in plants
presented themselves now and again on the
steep descent of the San Marcos, until finally
I came to one of the delightful little oak flats
which distinguish the topography of the
Santa Inez country.

These oak flats constitute the chief charm
of the Santa Inez Valley, contrasting as they
do with the semi-arid ranges among which
they are hidden. The best of them lie to the
east of the San Marcos, scattered along Blue
cafion, Mono, and the Santa Inez itself, where
never a road has been known and the trail,
zigzagging up some rough chaparral-covered
ridge, reveals from the summit a wondrous
little park lying below on the other side,
untouched by the hand of man—a gem set in

150 East and West

the lonely hills. These parks are, in most
instances, as level and smooth as a floor,
always surrounded by spreading live oaks and
in spring carpeted with flowers. There are
many of these, scattered over a large area and
hidden in unexpected places, but never so
concealed as to elude the flowers which by
some prescience of their own have found them
out; as if indeed, they travel through the
land like pioneers looking for a good camping
ground, and wherever they come upon a likely
place establish themselves forthwith. The
good lands are thus thickly settled with these
floral colonies and wherever they are, there
come the bees, quite ‘as the ministers and the
doctors find their way to the frontier posts
of civilisation, rendering their service to the
community and extracting their living from
di

How old these settlements are, who can
say. What countless generations of flowers
have come and gone. Yet there was a time
when the pioneer seeds drifted or were carried
over the ranges, or floated down the creeks,
and by some means lodged themselves. With-
out the winds and the birds to carry the seed
and the bees to fertilise the flowers, they could
never have accomplished it. This migratory

Elysian Fields I51

instinct in plants is one of the most aston-
ishing things in Nature: that being quite in-
sufficient in themselves they should thus
manage to get things done for them and to
travel about the country, crossing rivers and
mountain chains. Some are mountaineers
and some plainsmen; others, river people or
desert tribes, but all follow their fancies and
settle according to their liking.

This oak flat at the foot of the San Marcos
was settled by a flourishing colony of cream-
cups, which in place of having come over the
pass, were perhaps bent in that direction.
Myriads of them nodded together on the green,
a dainty host indeed with whom even one who
abhorred crowds might find it a rare pleas-
ure to mingle. The road here runs through
pleasant woods and presently leads into the
enchanted country. Here is the land of the
yellow pansy. Not in thousands, but in mil-
lions and in trillions they spread over the fields
and along the road. Splendid flowers they
are—the rich yellow petals spotted with purple
and brown—peopling the grass with upturned
faces. Delicate blue larkspurs, phacelias, and
pale gilias bordered the road, and with such
select and beautiful company by the way,
I came at length to the pleasant valley upon

152 East and West

whose outer edge flows the shallow Santa
Inez—nominally a succession of cattle ranches
but in reality Elysian Fields.

White oaks here intermingled with the
live oaks—stately trees of majestic propor-
tions and standing at a distance apart which
enhanced their dignity. California wood-
peckers were chattering and flying from trunk
to trunk, describing beautiful parabolas in the
air. The trunks of some trees were peppered
with acorns placed there by these birds.
Magpies were also abundant and from time to
time was heard the sweet note of the plain
titmouse, resembling the ringing call of the
Carolina wren of Southern swamps. Above
the river rose cliffs of redand yellow sandstone,
and beyond them, arid hills dotted with sage-
brush and yucca, fading in the distance into
the colours of the desert—pale opaline tints
melting into the horizon.

Such is the fair setting of this noble park
whose smooth floor was dotted with oaks
and was literally carpeted with yellow tidytips
and golden baeria, while the roadside was
often a bank of lavender collinsias, blue
lark spurs, and white forget-me-nots. With
the exception of daisy fields and possibly the
Devil’s paint-brush in limited areas in the

Elysian Fielas 153

Catskills, we do not have in the East such
masses of bloom as are common in California.
This abundance, this riot of blossoms, is as
characteristic of the flora here as is a certain
rarity, shyness, and individuality of many of
our Eastern flowers. Perhaps nowhere else
in the world may wild flowers be found in such
superabundance as in California. Fields thus
appear blue, yellow, purple, or white—the
landscape is virtually painted by the myriads
of blossoms. One may see hillsides blue with
the lupine or yellow with the eschscholtzia;
pastures reddened with the little pink paint-
brush, and whole ranges blue or white with the
ceanothus. Yet according to John Muir this
is rapidly passing and is no longer comparable
with what it was.

Throughout two days, ever and anon resting
under an oak while the horse browsed, I
leisurely followed a winding road, with no
thought of the cattle ranch this land was to
its owner and much thought of the Elysium
it was in fact. It seemed as if it might be
ever morning in these flowery fields; that they
were made for happiness only. Houses there
were none, and with the exception of the road,
few if any signs of civilisation. The world,
wherever it might be, was far away; the land

154 East and West

seemed to belong to the woodpeckers, the
magpies, and the flowers. Occasionally a
brook tempted me to loiter, sitting upon my
horse in its midst, hypnotised by its murmur-
ous song no doubt, while the horse plunged
his sensitive nostrils in the cool water or
cropped the grass on the bank. Doves cooing
in the distance, the calling of valley quail, the
didactic voices of vireos, and the impetuous
little song of Parkman’s wren were the only
sounds to break the silence. While the sun
was warm, the California air readily surrenders
its heat, so that to step into the shade of an
oak is to find a refreshing coolness. In that
enchanted country appeared no element of
discord. ‘Tidytips nodded to the passing
breeze; the golden baeria glistened in the sun.
Over the land rested the spirit of peace as
over few places in this distracted world—the
spirit of the gentle race of flowers.

On the fourth day I rode back across
the painted fields, through the lupines and the
larkspurs, through the golden splendour of
the baeria,—up and out of Elysium.

It was late in the season, perhaps too late for
flowers, when I crossed the range over the
Cashitas Pass into the Ojai Valley—once an
Elysium also, it is averred, but now, alas,

Elysian Fields 155
sadly cultivated and no more than grain fields.
Along the base of the hills were azure and
purple pentstemons, and far up the Matilija
Cafion extended patches of red buglers, but
the great Matilija poppy was not to be seen.
It has retreated into the wilderness before the
advance of the botanising tourist.

One intimation of a past glory there was, for
the black mustard was in its prime. Over
Rincon Mountain and the low hills of the
Cashitas, it lay like rifts of sunlight. A fine
mist filled the air, yet one would constantly
look across to some slope or hillock and fancy
that the sun was shining there—so complete
was the illusion—until a second glance re-
vealed merely vast fields of mustard. Where
the road lies through such a field the air is
heavily perfumed, while one is surrounded by
a veritable golden glory. The infinite hosts
of blossoms seem fairly to twinkle and almost
to be self-effulgent. Whether the mustard
is the least of all seeds or not, it certainly
becomes almost a tree here and the fowls
of the air—the blackbirds—alight in its
branches.

As one rides along, the black mustard is as
high as the horse’s head and often much
higher. Its tall single stem puts out many

156 East and West

branches, all illumined by the cheerful ra-
diance of countless blossoms, so that in
the encompassing fog, the mustard is still

sunshine.

CHAPTER XII
DUTCH FLAT—A RETROSPECT

N my way East from San Francisco late
in this pleasant month of June, my
route takes me for the first time in many
years over what was once the ‘Central
Pacific.” It has suggested itself that for the
sake of old times a stop should be made at
one station or another in the Sierra. Having
once counted the ties on this very road, fished
many a stream, and tramped over manya trail,
I am prepared to defend a proprietary interest
in these mountains against any tenderfoot
who has a passing acquaintance with the
Sierra camps only in their senile decrepitude
—I who as a small lad already desirous of
escaping from the trammels of civilisation
and the rigour of the schoolroom, was duly
presented to the mountains by my elders
about the year 1874.
In an annual escape thenceforth into the
Sierra, that delectable region came to mean,
157

158 East and West

not only a place where school did not keep,
but where there were no fences,—a region
ample and wild and satisfying where the eye
was not offended by petty bounds. It is not
so easy to-day to find a place where there are
no fences, but it still seems a good and pleasant
thing.

So, because of this lure of the Sierra, I find
myself in the neighbourhood of Dutch Flat,
proprietor for a brief season of a wickiup,—
a cot-bed under the stars, surrounded by a
circle of brush to keep off small animals—and
free to roam and to reminisce under the pines.
The days are warm and dry—dry as only they
can be in the Sierra in summer—and the air
smells of pine needles. The roads, or rather
the road, is a foot deep in dust—the red Sierra
dust. Some little distance away runs a flume
and there are trout in the wide swift-flowing
ditch above. The pines are very black at
night, the night air fresh and cool, and it is
good to light the fire in front of the wickiup.

As I sit on a log watching the blaze and the
firelight on nearby trunks and on the drooping
branches which fringe the intense blackness
above, the roar of the flume comes to my
ears and arouses the memory of other days,
associated with roaring flumes and gold

Dutch Flat—A Retrospect 159

diggings and with the silent forests of the
Sierra.

This morning, a tramp into Dutch Flat
through the deep red dust inspired feelings
that no tenderfoot can ever share; for that
cloudless sky, that limpid air, even that red
dust aroused a certain dormant spirit of
nomadism, a tramp instinct, which was wont
long ago to lead like a will-o’-the-wisp over
the mountains. A few small dwellings at the
edge of the village, though apparently inhab-
ited, gave no sign of their occupants. No
dog barked, no horse neighed. Some low
brick houses whose windows had once pos-
sessed heavy iron shutters were deserted,
the shutters prone upon the ground. Turning
a corner, the village street appeared, and surely
no enchanted castle was ever plunged in pro-
founder lethargy. Here and there a chair
of the kind to be met with in Western bar-
rooms—worn and shiny with age—stood at
the edge of the sidewalk and in two of these,
doubtless in the same spot and tilted at the
same angle as a quarter of a century ago,
sat two old men, the only sign of life in the
apparently deserted village. Their legs were
encased in blue overalls tucked into cowhide
boots, their flannel shirts open at the throat,

160 East and West

their ancient felt hats were tipped over those
grizzled faces, hawk-like beaks, and keen eyes
which seem to characterise all old prospectors
and miners. In silence they sat and spat
gloomily into the dust, reminiscing perhaps,
like myself, on a day that was gone.

A peep into the barroom revealed the
venerable stove with its accommodating iron
railing for the feet of those who took their
ease in the barroom chairs; the box of sand
so essential to the indulgence of their favourite
pastime. Instinctively I glanced behind the
bar. Yes, clustered about the tops of the
vials of bitters were the red ants as of yore.
Who would suppose that a dusty road under
a brilliant summer sky, and the sight of red
ants on a bottle in a barroom would have any
particular association? But if in such a bar-
room, in one camp or another, in your adven-
turous youth when the spirit was high and
you were more easily amused than now, you
had shaken those large yellow dice out of that
old leathern box for hours at a time with
gentlemen whose very appearance would have
caused your elders a painful shock of surprise;
if at such a table in such an interior, you
had shown enthusiasm, aye, even excitement,
over blue and white chips, uttering their dry

Dutch Flat—A Retrospect 161

cynical note as they were stacked by big
bony hands; if, I say, in such a barroom in the
heyday of your youth, you had once fought
some ten rounds, Marquis of Queensbury rules,
and a gentleman in overalls, a flannel shirt,
and spurs had acted as your second, because
it suited your peculiar fancy and your youthful
spirit so to do; and if in such a street where
the murmurous din of a card game could be
heard, you had once stood and emptied your
revolver in the air, out of pure delight and
joy in life—why then you would understand
how the red dust and the red ants on the
barroom bottles should have some association
to middle age, spectacled, sedate, regenerate,
and no longer easily amused.

As I sit by the camp-fire in the little sphere
of cheerful light it creates in the midst of
darkness, the hoarse murmur of the flume is
the only sound to break the stillness of the
night. With the velocity of a millrace the
water rushes down the mountain, confined
in its wooden sluice-box, and enters the ditch
below to do service in orchards and fields which
have taken the place of the old diggings.
Once it led to a pipe and that to a nozzle
which was a very engine of destruction. It
is many years since hydraulic mining was

Ir

162 East and West

done away with, but the sound of the flume
brings up the picture as last I saw it.

Out of a nozzlecalled a‘‘ giant’’—and.a giant
it was, compared with which the fireman’s
nozzle is but a toy—rushed a stream of water
which ate into the hearts of the hills and
carried them off as in a flood, while the reced-
ing waters were diverted into sluice-boxes
where they deposited the gold washed from
the soil. Round about this region you may
see the ruined foundations of those ancient
hills which the ‘‘giants” of old laid low. The
camps had not entered upon their sleep then;
flumes roared and nozzles played by day,
faro and poker were played by night, and
the valiant spirits of that time were induced
not only by the freedom of the life, but by
the most execrable whiskey that has ever
helped to destroy the morals and the stomach
of man.

One summer, long ago, the droning bees
without did sadly distract my thoughts from
the droning Latin within, and day by day
the desire to be away from both books and
fences grew apace until at length I escaped—
with scant courtesy to Learning—and set
out to see the world. At Auburn, a village
on the western edge of the Sierra, began my

Dutch Flat—A Retrospect 163

tramp over the mountains. This very day the
red dust underfoot and the dazzling blue over-
head have evoked a faint memory of that exag-
gerated sense of unresponsibility with which
I started upon my travels, my sole tangible
possessions a knapsack, a little money, and a
large cheap pistol of the “Bulldog” type
which occasioned thrills of satisfaction as it
was surreptitiously fingered from time to
time; but possessed of, or by, a state of mind
that made one monarch of all one surveyed
and as free as the wind in the pines of the
Sierra. It seems now that the mountains are
not so high as then, nor the world so large,
nor anywhere in it one sofree, Yet perhaps
there are adventurous stripplings setting forth
to see the world, with ‘‘Bulldog”’ pistols in
their hip pockets, to whom the mountains
are as wonderful and life as free as it was to
me in that day.

Then followed days in the open, wandering
at will throughout the summer, ever the
dazzling blue overhead, ever the red dust or
the ties underfoot; a mind possessed by rest-
less gypsy thoughts and life an intoxication,
the road beckoning onward through the silent
forest and the everlasting hills. For it isnot
the part of Youth to reveal to us that at the

164 East and West

end of every road we shall find only ourselves,
from whom there is noescape. Auburn, Colfax,
Cape Horn—then vast and abysmal, now
dwindled astonishingly,—Dutch Flat, Gold
Run, Alta, Blue Cafion and the mysteri-
ous snowsheds, Emigrant’s Gap, Summit,
Truckee, Tahoe, Reno, Carson, Virginia City
at last,—roaring flumes, lean-to’s, ‘‘guns,’’
street fights, poker games, miners, gamblers,
cowpunchers, red ants on the barroom bottles,
—it all comes back like the memory of some
curious dream and only the present roar of
the flume and the sombre pines in the fire-
light lend it reality.

In the early morning as I cast a fly on the
swift stream above the flume and feel now
and again the pleasurable nibble of a trout
or the sudden pull which, communicated by
means of the rod, translates itself into an
agreeable emotion, I am reminded of very
different scenes. Once upon a time there was
fishing to be had in the headwaters of the
Sacramento and in the McCloud and thither
we were wont to go with high hopes and a good
supply of hooks. In those days Redding was
the terminus of the railroad. Arriving in the
evening the passengers, in long linen dusters,
immediately climbed aboard the Concord

Dutch Flat—A Retrospect 165

stage and started for Soda Springs or Sissons
at the base of Shasta—round about Eden,
that is—a journey of seventy or eighty miles.
Now the great difference between fishing as
it was then in California and as it is now in the
East, is that in the East there is much fishing,
and few fish, while in California there were
few anglers, but ah, what an abundance, what
a plethora of trout. What fisherman would
not cherish the memory of that sport to his
dying day and keep it so green that the
very fish would grow in size and their
number increase in his fancy, as the actual
trout diminish and their numbers dwindle?
He shall recall too, the peculiar creak and
rumble—the voice as it were—of the Con-
cord stage, and the soft swish of water gur-
gling about the flatboat as the stage was
ferried over the river in the night, sounds ever
after associated in his mind with fishing—
real fishing. Nor will he ever forget those
eating stations on the road where, as fresh
horses were being put in, the passengers
descended stiffly from the stage, stamped
upon the ground to recover the use of
their legs, while they slapped the red dust
from their hats, and single file marched
up to the bench in front of the shanty, upon

166 East and West

which stood a tin wash-basin and a bucket of
water.

A Digger Indian with whom I used to go a-
fishing always began his day’s work by putting
some worms into his mouth, whereupon he bit
them in pieces and spat them upon the waters,
crying,—‘‘Come fish! come fish!’ and the
fish surely came. Early in the season the
trout fly appeared in great abundance on
the banks of the Sacramento and at these the
fish bit voraciously. Again salmon eggs—the
pools were black with salmon—were excellent
bait. Rattlesnakes were almost as abundant
as fish and one had to keep a wary lookout
by the rapids which drowned the sound of the
rattle. It was no rare occurrence for the
fisherman as he crept around a difficult ledge,
rod in hand, to find the only safe and level
space already occupied by a snake.

Tiger lilies are blooming in the clearing
and the swallowtail butterflies hovering about
them have bright red spots on the wings.
Indian pinks, pussies’-paws, and mariposa
lilies revive memories of the splendid Sierra
flora. Where is there a more delectable
blossom than the mariposa, associated with
rocky open places among the manzanitas; or
the beautiful lavender mountain daisy, grow-

Dutch Flat—A Retrospect 167

ing in glacial meadows; the castilleia, too,
that flower of the West, that bit of barbaric
colour gleaming in the chaparral? Certain
flowers, like certain people, one never forgets.
Something about the plant, a personal trait
as it were, makes a lasting impression. Of
those recalled, I associate above all, the mari-
posa, the lavender daisy, pussies’-paws, and
the Indian pink with the Sierra—above all,
save one, the snow plant which is to the Sierra
what the edelweiss is to the Alps. Here isa
plant as distinctive, as completely individual,
as any in the mountains, a splendid creature
glowing scarlet on the edge of snowdrifts at
the foot of granite domes or among the silver
firs, and that plant will ever be linked in my
mind with the beautiful region where there
are no fences.

Red-backed juncos are nesting here and
lazuli finches, but birds do not seem abun-
dant. ‘Towards sundown, the doves call and
the mountains re-echo with their melancholy
notes. Throughout the Sierras and down the
whole length of the Sierra Madre in Mexico,
the sad-voiced doves are cooing, the insistent
minor note of the Western mountains, as of
some primeval sorrow to which this gentle
race for ever gives expression. A Western

168 East and West

hermit is singing in the pines, rapt and un-
worldly as are all his race. What has he to
do with the sorrows of Earth, who sings ever
of some more heavenly world? While riding
along the mountainside, a mountain partridge
suddenly appeared with her brood of a dozen
chicks. One glimpse was all I had of the
chicks for almost instantly they seemed to
become invisible, while the mother exerted
herself in the usual way to attract and hold
the attention, not knowing, poor thing, how
friendly indeed was my feeling for her, my
admiration, not only for the beauty of her
feathers, but for her Christian character as
well.

Another week finds me at Tahoe, still on
familiar ground. Twenty-three years ago,
tramping over the trail from Soda Springs to
Truckee, I descended one evening out of the
silent mountains into that crude and flaring
frontier town, which, on the edge of the Sierra,
sat like a blemish on a beautiful face. From
there a stage road led through the forest beside
the Truckee River to the lake. Truckee
does not appear to have changed much for
the better, but the Truckee River, is still
beautiful. Itis an ideal trout stream in which
to cast a fly and the sight of it has stirred the

Dutch Flat—A Retrospect 169

fisherman’s blood inme. Inimagination one
could see the trout lurking in those glassy
green pools and eddies. In that day, the fish
here were peculiarly coy and difficult to take
and such, it is said, is still the case.
Stretching along the shore of the lake is a
remnant of what was the most majestic forest
onearth. It was to any other what the gorge
of the Colorado is to cafions. The cafion
remains, but the forest dwindles. Well, it is
something to have known such a forest, to
have spent some small part of your life in
such vast halls of the world. Yet there were
those living there, perhaps, upon whom it
made as little impression as upon the ants,
who cannot see the trees for their very size.
No longer are the mountains so high, but
the trees appear as tall and as stately as of old.
A splendid fringe of cedar, fir and pine skirts
the lake, and here I pass, as in some garden
of the gods, the brief time at my disposal.
The lake is very lovely—one of the beautiful
lakes of America,—the water is marvellously
clear, the mountains rugged and snow-covered.
Through the great columnar trunks one has
charming vistas, all the more ethereal because
of the altitude. The poetaster might rhap-
sodise and call it the lake of the sky; for one

170 East and West

is a little nearer the heavens here—an inch
or so. But the trees, the beautiful trees!
They do not accord one the same set of im-
pressions as do Eastern conifers. Vast and
unapproachable, they are no more companion-
able than are Egyptian temples or Gothic
spires. It is difficult to speak simply enough
ofthem. If you know them, you find super-
latives offensive. If you know them, you can
think of them in visual images and thus escape
the inadequateness of the adjective. This is
the most satisfactory way of thinking of the
mountains, the forest and the sea. Let them
speak for themselves. The towering gaunt
sugar pine with its drooping crown—so
remote and yet so benign—there aloft in the
dazzling blue; the massive cedar with its
buttressed trunk, its aspect of immense solid-
ity; the tapering, graceful, feminine fir, so
imposing in its height, so light and airy, as if
it were more of the sky than of the earth;
these and many more, standing singly and in
little groups, never crowded, the embodiment
of dignity and grandeur, as if these qualities
had assumed the forms of trees—what adjec-
tives would they use if they were to describe
themselves?

They are for visual, not for verbal images.

Dutch Flat—A Retrospect 171

As I stroll amidst these mighty columns
by the lake with their rich red brown and
saffron red bark, cracked and fluted and
rugged, little pictures frame themselves there
in the sunshine and the silence. The forest
yields me tree thoughts and forest moods
which may be imperfectly translated by the
words strength, amplitude, calm, and by
self-reliance and freedom. How serene they
are—the great pines! What grand old age
is this! Not ruin at last, but strength and
dominion written in vast rude characters.
If it were possible to write adequately of the
forest, it would be in characters equally rude
and large.

One who has known the spell of the forest
will carry the memory of it to the grave. He
shall come upon it now and again in life,
stretching away from the confines of his
every-day thoughts into some mysterious
background of his mind and shall escape for a
moment from the din and tumult into its si-
lence. More than twenty years have elapsed
since I last saw it, while on an all-summer’s
tramp south of here through Tuolumne and
Calaveras Counties and into the Yosemite,
sauntering day after day through the pines,
tramping along dusty stage roads, or dreaming

172 East and West

dreams under the sequoias. ‘That was a free
and heroic world in which to wander with the
gift of youth. How open it was; how resinous;
how wild and fenceless and untrammelled!
Western pines have more sap in them than the
Eastern; they exude pitch and scent the air.
They are more vigorous and rude and savage,
as the landscape itself is more virile. Morning
in the forest was fair and shining and wonder-
ful—and life was like the morning. Great
sugar pines beckoned with their long arms
outstretched in the blue, and Youth could not
but follow. Day by day new giants loomed
ahead and beckoned—into the sunshine and
the shadow, into the silence of the forest.

Not only the pines allured, but every stream
cried “Follow me’”’; the wild doves calling
in the twilight said, ‘Over here’; and every
purple ridge whispered, ‘“Come up! Come
up!’’ Ah, well! they were illusive voices, but
Youth feeds on illusion and is happy for an
hour; and doubtless I shall never find any
other will-o’-the-wisp it pays so well to follow.

CHAPTER XIII
IN THE GIANT CACTUS BELT

URNING southward from the Santa
Fé trail at Ash Fork, which lies just
beyond Bill William’s old camp, there is a
descent of 4500 feet before one reaches the
little desert station, the point of departure
by stage or bronco, or even by automobile if
one has no sense of the fitness of things, for
the Wickenburg region of Central Arizona, a
region commending itself because of a pecu-
liarly forceful personality and as good a
winter climate as any north of southern
Mexico. The Wickenburg is a sort of adjunct
to the loftier Bradshaw range—a great wedge
of granite—from which it stretches away like
a turbulent sea turned to stone. Largely of
lava, its topography is sculptured in all the
fantastic and delightful forms which ande-
site cliffs and peaks and basalt mesas afford,
offset by beautiful ranges of schist, like folded
velvet.
173

174 East and West

That descent from 6500 feet to 2000, to-
gether with the slight approach to the equator
of an eight hours’ railway journey, produces a
decided change in the climate and conse-
quently in the flora, which may be casually
noted from the car window; that is to say,
such obvious differences as the change from
pine timber and areas of low juniper, to mes-
quite and chaparral. It is while you are
leisurely observing this that there suddenly
dawns upon the vision a columnar vegetable,
erect upon the hillside like a monolith of pale
green jade, and you discover with a certain
thrill of satisfaction that you have entered the
Giant Cactus Belt.

Native to Arizona and Sonora, as the
sequoia is native to California, the giant
cactus or saguaro is the largest of its race and
no other vegetable has a more decided and
unique personality. In its simplest form it is
a monolith, but it has many forms. Indeed
it is protean, putting out arms from its colum-
nar trunk, sometimes one, sometimes ten,
some erect, some shaped like the tusks of the
mammoth. It reaches a height of fifty or
sixty feet and a diameter of two and even two
and a half feet, its maximum girth being not
at the base but some distance from the ground.

”

‘*A columnar vegetable erect upon the hillside.

In the Giant Cactus Belt | 175

These pale green columns are fluted and the
long transverse ridges are studded with spines
arranged in clusters.

Growing side by side with the saguaro,
though having a vastly more extensive range,
is the ocotilla (Fouquiera splendens), a plant
almost as individual and as characteristic of
the desert areaof theSouth-West as the cactus.
Now, in November, it is leafless and its long
whiplike branches, rising from a common base
as do the arms from the head of an octopus,
and covered with spines, are Medusa-like
and uncanny. In spring’ we shall see it in
leaf and bearing brilliant red blossoms at the
ends of the branches, transformed—trans-
figured one might almost say—into one of the
most graceful and beautiful plants of the
desert.

The descent from the high plateau of
northern Arizona brings one to a desert valley,
an arm as it were of the Salt River valley.
Of these ‘‘valleys’’ a government report has
this to say: ‘‘The so-called valleys of Salt and
Gila rivers are but parts of a broad plain occu-
pying a large portion of south-western Arizona.
The valleys are in part surrounded by moun-
tainous areas, and they themselves in turn
surround isolated peaks and groups of moun-

176 East and West

tains which rise abruptly from their surface.”
In other words the desert of Arizona is
broken up by numerous short ranges of moun-
tains—their name is legion—and these for the
most part rise from the desert plain like
rocky islands. Doubtless they once were
islands in the sea—that ancient sea of which
the desert is the present reminder.

It may convey some idea of their number
that from the elevated point which is my out-
door study, one may see, for instance, the
Wickenburg, the Bradshaws beyond, and the
New River Mountains a little farther away;
while in the west are the Weaver, Date Creek,
Vulture, Rawhide, the Harcuvar, and Harqua
Hala; and to the south, south-west, and south-
east, the Phoenix Mountains, the Gila Bend,
Estrella, Sacaton, and the MacDowell peaks
and other ranges, ghostly in the distance,
which may possibly include the Superstition
Mountains and the Mazatal. All this at one
coup d’eil as it were; while beyond the Brad-
shaws are the Verde and other ranges, and
these are but a fraction of the whole. Verily
there are a thousand and one of these island-
like mountains scattered over the great desert
plain of Arizona, and down through Mexico
are ten thousand more.

In the Giant Cactus Belt 177

Narrow desert areas lying between these
isolated ranges, which are merely parts of the
larger plain surrounding the mountains, are
the valleys of Arizona, their level floors com-
posed of the detritus or “‘wash” of those
mountains themselves, swept down the arroyos
after heavy rains and gradually distributed
more or less evenly over the surface. The
numerous creeks are “‘dry creeks’’—arroyos,
that is—through which water rushes after a
heavy shower, only to sink into the sands and
to be speedily lost to view. On the map of
the Bradshaw quadrangle, an area of only
about twenty-five by thirty miles, are given
some seventy or more creeks and streams, yet
of this number only one, the Agua Fria—
such is the report of the Geological Survey,—
contains water all the year. They are dry
creeks—and the arroyo, like the isolated
mountains rising abruptly from the plain, is
one of the very distinctive features of this
country. Equally characteristic are the names
onthismap. Here are, for instance: Humbug
Creek, Dead Cow Gulch, Chaparral Gulch,
Blind Indian Creek, Horsethief Cafion, Little
Squaw Creek, Crazy Basin, Bigbug Mesa, and
Battle Flat,—names which bespeak rudely
and vividly the life of the pioneer and the

12

178 East and West

reaction of his mind upon this savage
region.

Castle Creek, lying in the cafion below my
open-air study, is typical of these dry creeks,
which are much alike. In places it is a narrow
chasm between imposing cliffs of andesite and
volcanic agglomerate on whose walls the bees
nest as they do in Syria; in others a broad
sandy reach between cactus-dotted hills. Its
dry bed is composed of sand and loose
boulders but slightly waterworn in comparison
with those of an Eastern brook. Along its
banks grow the groundsel and here and there
willows, cottonwoods, ironwood, mesquite,
palo verde and the desert willow—allied to the
catalpa. As you ride down this creek bed,
your horse now galloping heavily through the
sands, now picking his way laboriously over
the piles of stones, you are on one of the
highways of this region: for the dry creek
beds are utilised wherever possible, not only
as trails but as roads.

Now and again you will encounter water,
suddenly appearing from somewhere and
flowing a few hundred yards, to as suddenly
disappear. There is abundant evidence of
torrential flows but as one rides day after day
over this dry bed it is hard to accept the evi-

In the Giant Cactus Belt 179

dence, unless he has himself witnessed the
phenomenon. Thus recently there was a
continuous downpour for forty-eight hours.
At this time there fell upon the ear, accus-
tomed to the silence of the cafions and the
mesas, a sound which here seemed strange and
portentous—a deep sullen roar. Hurrying
to the creek bed I saw a rapid torrent of dark
red fluid, some twenty-five yards in width and
a foot or so in depth, where had been only
dry sands, while the grim cafion beyond re-
sounded with the tumult of the waters. Yet
in forty-eight hours more it had dwindled to a
small stream and soon had sunk into the
sands, leaving the cafion silent as before. The
thirsty sands forever drink up the streams.
| But not from any array of facts do you get
the true impression of this, or of any desert
country, for the desert yields itself only to the
mysticimagination. It must be born in mind,
however, that alarge part of southern Arizona
is mountainous, a series of desert plains, and
that these plains are arboreal and very unlike
the saffron deserts of Africa and of Western
Asia.

Imagine now the scene before me in my
mountain workshop, open to the heavens and
well ventilated, rest assured. It is twenty-

180 East and West

five miles to the railroad and as the eye makes
the sweep of the horizon there is not one sign
of man or his works—not a fence to be seen.
Hence there is air to breathe—not what passes
for air in the cities, with millions of particles
of dirt to the cubic inch, but air with only a
thousand or two to the inch, unpolluted by
smoke or gases and with little moisture. One
who has never breathed such air does not
know what air is—nor what breathing is.
It is as unlike the atmosphere of Fifth Avenue
as a pineapple picked and eaten in Vera Cruz
or in Ceylon is unlike the little rubber ring
that comes out of a cheap and nasty can.
Spread before me are ten thousand square
miles as wild to all appearances as in the be-
ginning. That in itself is a solace to the heart
of the ungregarious: room enough under the
sun; air for the robust lungs and colour for
the seeing eye. Yonder are red purple combs
of andesite and beyond, a cream-coloured
butte, while below me are massive cliffs of
dull ochre; in the east a wide basalt mesa,
rectangular in outline with a great parallel
stripe along the face of the escarpment which
in certain lights appears yellow, in others
salmon-pink, like the lateral stripe on a rain-
bow trout. Buff-tinted buttes appear like

‘My winter study under the sky.”

In the Giant Cactus Belt 181

Egyptian temples and beyond the mesa are
the New River Mountains, softer in outline
and washed with rose-madder. There is
more light—more sky—than we know in the
East and one sees much farther. At the same
time it is greener here than one would expect
and all this is but a suggestion of the vivid
and marvellous colouring of the Grand Cafion,
which indeed has no equal in the world.

Beyond the desert, to the west and south-
west, the ranges are purple and ethereal blue
and in the remote distance pale phantoms
against the sky. Some fifty miles from here
as the crow flies, rises a short range higher than
the rest, consisting of four rugged saw-toothed
peaks of about the same height, sprinkled
with snow and with something of the look of
the Dolomites of the southern Tyrol. These
are the MacDowell Peaks, or the Four Peaks
as they are usually called, and thereby hangs
a tale:

When I climbed up here and established my
winter study under the sky, I looked across
at MacDowell for the first time in forty years.
For it happened that in September of the
year 1869—an early day in the history of
Arizona—a troop of the Eighth Cavalry, my
father in command, arrived at old Camp

182 East and West

MacDowell which lay at the foot of the Four
Peaks. With the travel-worn troops was an
army waggon drawn by four mustangs—at
the beginning of their journey across the
desert, unbroken, though doubtless by this
time sufficiently subdued—which had come
from San Pedro, six weeks over the desert in
August and September, while the Apaches were
on the warpath. On the floor of that rough
army waggon which lumbered over the broken
lava as the troopers lashed the horses up
MacDowell cafion, sat a slender girlish woman
of nineteen with a small boy. That girl was
my mother—and that was my introduction
to Arizona and to the desert.

In a brief record of that journey, as the
girl of nineteen saw it from her jolting waggon
under the brazen skies of summer she says:

The sun came up, fierce and unclouded, into the
dazzling sky and burned over our heads and grew
hotter and hotter and the alkali sand scorched our
eyes and choked us until we gasped for breath while
the heat from the ground seemed greater even than the
heat from the sun. Thirst! Ah, one does not know
what thirst means until one has toiled on under such
a sun and without water for hours together. There
were very few springs or creeks from one station to
another, generally none where the water was drink-
able; and you can fancy what it is to come on a

In the Giant Cactus Belt 183

stream beautifully clear in appearance and find it so
bitter that even the horses turned from it in disgust.

How the soldiers suffered, poor men. They
would start from the station, each with his canteen
full and rolled up in a wet blanket to keep it cool as
long as possible, but often long before we reached
another supply every drop would be gone and they
had to toil on as they could. Then the heat grew
too great to move by day at all and we only marched
by night. Those delicious nights! As the sun went
down and the longed for coolness of evening came‘to
refresh us, I would sometimes have the waggon cover
removed, and then lying on the mattress, slowly
travelling on, I watched the stars rise and pass
across the sky until they went out in the morning
light.

Speaking of the Apaches, she says:

We had an alarm every now and then, but the
body of troops was so large there was no great danger
so long as ordinary precautions were taken. We had
scouts and sentinels and no straggling was allowed.
It would not have been safe even for a small party.
We knew the Indians were watching us and we never
knew when they might attack. After passing Fort
Yuma we were in the Indian country and had left
civilisation behind. Though we had no stragglers,
our line was very long and the heavy baggage waggons
would fall into the rear, so that it not infrequently
happened that we arrived at the station where we
were to halt while they were far behind and we had
to wait hours before we could get food or anything
we needed. That was weary work.

184 East and West

Then the most tantalising thing of all was the
mirage. I used to see it constantly before us, the
most exquisite landscapes, lakes and green islands and
scenes of beauty perfectly heavenly in the distance,
flying before us. I could not believe them false at
first. One reads of the mirage, but it is quite another
thing to see those heavenly scenes and be tantalised
by such delusions. They made the heat hotter and
the desert drier and the sand more choking.

At length, one day, my husband told me our
journey was drawing to a close and that next morn-
ing would bring us tocamp. That night I could not
sleep from excitement and picturing to myself what
my future home would be.

That home for the next year proved to be—~

‘‘A two roomed adobe hut with mud floor,
open to the thatch of brush and without an
article of furniture. This was our refuge.”

Furniture was evidently acquired, for—

“Packing cases made everything—seats,
bookcase, sofa, wardrobe,’ and again:
“Chintz and muslin” from the sutler’s
store “did wonders.”’

Of the Indians she says again:

Now and then I did ride out with my husband,
but it was risky, even with a large escort and hardly
any pleasure. Oh, those dreadful Indians. They
were always lying in wait and our party might be cut
off and have to fight and their arrows are poisoned, so

In the Giant Cactus Belt 185

if they do not kill, they wound mortally in most
cases. They. used to come into camp sometimes to
have a ‘‘pow-pow’’—great parties of them, and we
_had always to be on our guard lest they should break
out and attack us suddenly. Horrible great men, all
but naked and painted to look uglier than Nature
made them, with their dreadful sheaves of arrows and
their cruel faces. One could never trust them and I
used to be in agonies of terror when there were many
about. We never were attacked though we had
more than one alarm: we were too cautious for them.

But the worst was when my husband had to go out
scouting. Then I confess I was in terror. It seemed
to me I never should see him come back, and each
time it grew worse—at least my fear did—for every
now and then they would bring back wounded men,
sometimes they brought dead ones—they never left
any to be scalped. But oh, it was sad to see the poor
fellows coming back to die slowly and painfully so far
away from home. I knew most of my husband’s
men and would visit and try to comfort them, but
there was little to be done except by kind words.
We had no comforts for the sick, no fresh meat, no
milk or eggs, only canned provisions on which chiefly
we lived. I have hated canned food ever since.
It was very sad, and sadder still to make them ready
for their graves when they died. The poisoned
arrows were almost always fatal and caused great
suffering.

They knew, however, they would have a soldier’s
funeral, even in that distant desert, and although
I had not a flower to lay on their coffin, they knew I
would do what I could and it pleased them. Yet I

186 East and West

could only make them shabby little crosses of the
sombre manzanita [probably creosote bush]. Still,
the living felt the dead were cared for and the dying
knew it would be so. But oh, the sadness of a
soldier’s funeral in that dreary desert as they sounded
the three taps over the grave, and it seemed to say
they were called home for the last time, so far away
from their native land.

They gave those three taps softly, so softly, as a
farewell and left him there under the broad blue sky.

Such was travelling in Arizona in the sum-
mer of 1869 and such the life of an army
woman in those days. Old Camp MacDowell
has long been abandoned and the Apache—
the human scorpion of the desert—has lost
his sting. Now the deserts are called valleys
and not far from old MacDowell—once so far
from everywhere—is the site of Roosevelt
Dam which is to make the orange and the
alfalfa thrive where grew only the cholla and
the creosote bush. The men who made this
possible—the true pioneers of this region—
were the old cavalry troops who scouted the
mountains from Whipple down to the bor-
der and across the desert from Yuma to the
Mogollons.

We are free to dream and botanise, or play
at roughing it with our aluminum coffee-pot
and fry-pan as we cook our bacon on the

In the Giant Cactus Belt 187

hills, with no concern for the poisoned arrow
which once might have whistled from behind
some red purple comb of andesite to take the
white man unaware, like the sting of the
scorpion. But looking abroad over the lava
peaks, the wildness and savagery of the
country is still unredeemed. Long may it be
so. Long may we be left some wild spot in
which to solace and recreate ourselves in the
silence of the desert under the broad blue sky.

There is much pleasant company in my
study on the mountains with its columnar
saguaros—like monoliths of jade,—its queer
garden of cacti and other thorny plants, its
splendid blue dome, and its ten thousand
square miles of lava peaks and desert fading
into a phantom distance. The Arizona cot-
tontail scurries away from the trail and the
jackrabbit comes leaping upon the mountains
with those marvellous jumps which no other
animal save the kangaroo can equal. Now
and again a coyote slinks out of sight on a
ridge, moving like some noiseless mechanism.
Panthers and wildcats live among these
mountains but the former are practically
invisible. Nearly always the Western redtail
is to be seen overhead and lately I en-
countered one rising with a packrat in his

188 East and West

‘talons. Desert sparrow-hawks are abundant
and rarely a golden eagle crosses the blue
dome with superb flight and disappears,
leaving one with the sense of having witnessed
something admirable and perfect in its way—
a flight symbolic of freedom and power.
Sometimes the little diurnal owl is seen peering
from its hole in a saguaro, and once it flung
itself upon the trail in front of me, barely
missing a scurrying mouse. Of reptiles there
are none in winter: their time is not yet, and
both the Gila monster and the rattlesnake
are safely underground.

It is the birds which are the friends of my
leisure and my solitude, here as elsewhere.
The sociable and garrulous Gila woodpeckers
call from the Doric columns of the saguaro in
which they nest early in February. One
large cactus contains twenty-one woodpecker
holes, though apparently but one pair are
nesting in it, so that these holes show it to
be an ancestral tree in which many genera-
tions have dwelt. Both the red-shafted and
gilded flickers occur here and their call is to
the mesas what the Eastern flicker’s is to the
pasture—a contented, self-reliant, cheery note
that is good to hear.

Gambel’s partridge appears to be the only

In the Giant Cactus Belt 189

quail—a handsome bird with black crest,
chestnut crown, and buff and black under-
parts. As I sit here writing, their solicitous
call may be heard—a harsher note than that
of the valley quail—and a covey steals up a
bank under the encelia and creosote bushes
and across an open bit of lava, on which
stands a solitary barrel cactus rooted in solid
rock. The meat of this bird is peculiarly
dry—as one might expect of a desert bird—
and not very good eating.

Western gnatcatchers scold and sputter
among the palo verdes and mesquites, and now
and again I hear the sweet warbler-like note
of the verdin. In the cafion below, the black
phoebe, one of my old Mexican friends, is
always to be found gleaning its food and
exhibiting all the mannerisms and traits of
that family of which it is one of the most
delightful members. Say’s phoebe, which is
also a peculiarly agreeable little bird—gentle,
soft-voiced, and unafraid,—prefers the more
open spaces along the creek, and these are
the only flycatchers to winter here.

In almost any locality ofthe South-West, the
common birds are the wrens, thrashers, and
towhees. Here the cactus wren is the most
abundant; of the thrashers, Palmer’s and the

190 East and West

Crissal take the place of the California:
while the cafion towhee supplants the Cali-
fornia and the spurred towhee, so common in
Southern California. The cactus wren is a
noisy rollicking fellow without vocal power and
little like a wren in appearance. A smaller
bird, the rock wren, keeps more to the ground
and his metallic call-note greets one from
the rockiest places, but not as a rule from the
sheer cliffs, which appear to belong by all
traditions of the race to the cafion wren—
whose liquid melting notes fall on my ear asI
descend from my mountain garret to the
creek bed. Of sparrows, there are those boreal
sojourners the golden-crowned and the white-
crowned, and with them is to be seen that
austral species, the black-chinned desert spar-
row, so that birds of the glacial peaks and the
deserts thus hobnob together during the
winter months. Strangely enough the desert
sparrow has a glacial voice—a faint glassy
tinkle that suggests icicles dropping upon
ice in a thaw.

Perhaps the most beautiful birds are the
Arizona cardinal and the phainopepla; the
former resembling the Eastern cardinal,
the latter, a jet black, crested bird with a grey
lining to his wings, of extremely graceful

In the Giant Cactus Belt 191

appearance and bearing—a thoroughbred
among birds. Cardinals are abundant, and a
brilliant red bird on a fresh green branch of
the ocotilla, with the deep blue sky for back-
ground, is a memorable sight indeed.

It may appear from this that a region where
the saguaros stand erect upon the red-brown
slopes of the lava peaks; where the ranges
rise from the opal desert like enchanted islands
from the sea—has a distinguished and beau-
tiful personality: and there is room—ten
thousand miles stretching around you, under
the broad blue sky._

CHAPTER XIV
IMPRESSIONS OF THE DESERT

AB ae after day from my workshop on the
lava peaks with its Doric columns and
its blue dome, I have looked out over the
desert fading into the distance. Isolated
ranges, rising abruptly, divide the plain as by
so many great stone walls, which are however
nowhere continuous, affording countless vistas
through rocky gateways from one desert plain
or valley into the next and to a remote and
enchanting horizon beyond. These vistas
change with the condition of the atmosphere
so that sometimes a new and beautiful island
may seem suddenly to have emerged on the
confines of the opal desert, and again, some
familiar landmark as suddenly disappears.
Distances are far greater than those we are
accustomed to in the East; the perspective is
marvellous and alluring. Light is more brill-
iant, more charged with colour, more abund-
ant than with us. Except on two absolutely
192

Impressions of the Desert 193

clear and windless days at the same season, the
desert never appears twice alike, for it is
exceedingly sensitive to the gradations of light
due to subtle changes in the atmosphere—
its humidity, temperature, and proportion of
dust particles, as well as to the effect of clouds;
so that at times certain ranges, buttes, mesas,
or desert plains are emphasised and at times
almost obliterated from the picture by the
play of light. A range that yesterday ap-
peared washed in rose-madder may to-day
appear a deep purple because of a grey sky.
So also is the difference very great as one looks
towards the sun or away from it. It thus
happens that a gateway in the ragged moun-
tains at times appears unusually prominent,
while beyond it lies a wonderful desert shim-
mering in the sunlight, which before had not
attracted the attention. It may happen, too,
when you look again for that gate of pearl and
that region of light, they have vanished.
Day after day, looking between the green
columns of the saguaro, afar off towards the
MacDowell Peaks, I have felt the spell of the
desert. It has seemed to draw me like some
entrancing mirage—a beautiful region, ethe-
real and opalescent and changeful. Thereisa
sense of the desert as there is a sense of the

13

194 East and West

sea: a spell, a witchery, which is like music,
like poetry, is perhaps itself music and poetry
in another form. But this is not the saffron
desert of Africa and Asia; these desert plains
are rocky or gravelly and covered with ver-
dure, so that not saffron, orange, or yellow, but
green, purple, and lilac predominate. From
the plain, these mountains, rising like rocky
islands from the sea, have at twenty miles one
tone, at forty miles another, and at seventy-
five and a hundred miles, still others. They
grow more and more ethereal in the distance
until they become mere wraiths on the horizon,
appearing only in certain lights; and these
pale phantoms seem to beckon you to come
out over the desert into the unknown. Should
you go, others would rise day by day, ever
beckoning, ever promising, like the mirage,
that which they can never fulfil. This is the
spell of the desert. The secret of that spell
is not in any realisation but in a continual
anticipation of something which lies beyond,
and in this it is much like life itself.

At length, one morning before daybreak, I
set out to ride over the desert. That particu-
lar morning is impressed on my mind, for no
subsequent impressions are ever quite so
sharply outlined as are the first, when the

Impressions of the Desert 195

mind is more sensitive, and like fresh wax,
takes a clearer imprint. My route lay down
Castle Creek and thence along the Agua
Fria River, a considerable stream, which had
to be forded at some half-dozen points. By
that early morning light, half starlight, half
daylight, earth appears less earthy and is
invested with a transcendent quality, while
we see it again for a fleeting moment with the
eyes of youth—the undimmed, unwearied,
untramelled eyes of youth. The mind is
rejuvenated, refreshed, renewed, only to grow
old again, it may be, before the day is done.
But life is good in those early hours and yields
to the solitary horseman in the mountains
a sense of freedom not readily experienced in
this world.

It was some time before the light of the
stars was replaced by daylight. The first
bird-note was the call of Gambel’s partridge.
On the edge of a cliff a Western horned owl
sat facing the east and saluted the advent of
day with weird savage notes. Presently the
thrasher and the cardinal began to sing and
it was some time before the rising sun gilded
the tops of the lava peaks. How soft is that
early light which conveys no impression of
heat whatever, as if those first sunbeams were

196 East and West

destitute of heat rays. Looking southward,
how unutterably cold was the landscape;
while to the north and west it was gently warm
in tone, a beautiful mauve tinged with green.
One was a pale image of death, the other an
auroral glow symbolic of life. Inthe east the
earth was neutral, a series of outlines in grey,
and one was conscious, not of the desert, but
of the light which illumined the desert, pro-
ducing an eminently impressionistic picture—
a vision rather than an actual landscape.

By ten o’clock I had ridden twenty miles
or more and was far out on the plain. But
what a disenchantment! Where now was the
opal desert which had so lured with its ethereal
colour, its subtle charm? Creosote and arte-
misia bushes, all of about the same size and
appearance, were scattered more or less regu-
larly over the hard gravelly plain. Among
these were stunted palo verdes and occasional
saguaros, while barrel cacti, tree chollas, and
other opuntias formed a large part of the
flora. The immediate environment was harsh
and the endless little bushes monotonous.
These were the factors then which produced
such beauty in the distance. This near view
was much as if one should look at a painting
with a magnifying-glass: it resolves itself into

Impressions of the Desert | 197

rough blotches of pigment. To get the har-
mony of colour and the play of light one must
have distance. To that, the desert owes its
spell; it is distance, perhaps, and not the
desert itself, which is enchanting. Like the
surface of the moon it is beautiful to those
alone who are far off.

For several hours I wandered about in the
fierce sunshine, pausing in the meagre shade
of a palo verde to eat my lunch and empty
my canteen, intent upon hearing what the
desert had to say for itself. After a time the
result was a baffled and purposeless feeling:
there was no goal in view, nothing to ride to.
It affected one in this respect like mid-ocean,
and the tendency would be to move in a circle.
That was one thing the desert told me. More
and more it was evident how much it owes to
perspective. If one could have climbed a
mountain and seen another desert afar off
shimmering in the sun, that would have lured
as this had done before. All beauty was in
the distance: and that was another thing the
desert had to say—that which it emphasised
above all.

It was now the mountains I had left that
lured me; they that were soft and entrancing.
From the plain the solitary ranges seemed

198 East and West

more than ever like islands. Unutterably
beautiful, they redeemed the commonplace-
ness, the terrible sameness of my surroundings.
The Bradshaws appeared against the horizon
like some vast wave arrested in its course and
instantly and for ever fixed. It is above all
the sublime repose of these arid mountains
which appeals. In the whole world there is
nothing else so suggestive of infinite repose:
as if a vast symbol were carved there in the
sky that all men should see and take heed.
There in the burning sun, in the ineffable si-
lence, one is hushed as by the face of the dead.
On that open cactus plain one feels detached
and cut off and I found myself looking to the
distant mountains for solace, realising as
never before what good company they are,
how much they yield us the essence of com-
panionship.

In every way the desert proves deceptive
and to ride over it isa good study in appear-
ances. A range in the distance may seem to
run north and south, but after a half-day’s
ride toward it, is found to be a number of
spurs, before unnoticed, whose axis lies east
and west. Then again what appears to be
a butte or a mesa is often, in reality, two,
widely separated perhaps, but the eye, entirely

Impressions of the Desert 199

deceived, superimposes one upon the other as
if it were but a stratum, and makes them
appear to be the same. So astonishing is the
difference in the appearance of desert ranges
from various points of view that it cannot
fail to suggest acertain train of thought to the
reflective mind and cause one to wonder if it
is not precisely the same in regard to the facts
of life. Two persons approach a mountain
from different directions and to them it is not
the same mountain but two very different
ones, so absolutely unlike does it appear from
opposite sides, and from a hundred points of
view, and from one and another elevation.
In riding all day around these isolated moun-
tains, this fact, which seems so trite, is brought
home in so vital a sense that, for the first time,
perhaps, it ceases to be a truism and becomes
atruth. It is one of the most striking object-
lessons of the desert.

This changing aspect of things in a day’s
ride affects one as a sort of enchantment.
Not only do the mountains appear to change,
but it may happen that a range will disappear
entirely from view as if by some magic it had
become invisible. From my mountain work-
shop I had closely observed the topography of
the desert, and in particular several peculiarly

200 East and West

shaped and isolated hills which might serve
as an objective point for a day’s ride. But
when subsequently I came where apparently
they should have been, not only were they not
there, but they were nowhere in view, nor
were they again seen until I returned to my
starting point and climbed the hills. To
begin with, they were much farther away than
they appeared to be, and then again the plain
is not as flat as it looks from a distance, but
has sufficient curvature to shut out certain
hills at close range.

On the other hand, far off to the east,
appeared at noon a rather high range which
I did not remember having seen before, and
have not been able to find since. On returning
to the same spot—there it is; but from my
workshop there appears to be no such range,
though there are others which could not be
seen from the plain. There is thus no telling
when a range may appearor another disappear,
as if they rose from the desert or subsided into
it like some volcanic isles in the sea. It is all
enchantment and on the map the ranges should
be marked as indefinite or uncertain. They
may be there or they may not, according to
the point of view and the direction of ap-
proach—or the whim of the mountains them-

Impressions of the Desert 201

selves. In all probability no one knows where
they are and they are merely located on the
map where they are supposed to be or where
they were last seen.

One is surprised here at the greenness of the
desert, which has been well named arboreal,
in distinction from the sandy desert of the
Colorado which conforms to the conventional
idea. As a fact, however, the larger part of
the desert country of Arizona is of this arbo-
real character—it is a plateau or a desert plain,
its floor constructed of the detritus washed
down from the mountains which rise from its
surface. These arboreal deserts necessarily
produce a very different impression than such
a desert as the Sahara, and as a day’s ride will
convince one, their charm is due largely to the
mountains. That peculiar fascination which
the great Sahara waste exerts by the play of
light on the burning sands is not known on
these verdant plains where millions of green
bushes are distributed in unending monotony.
In the distance this plain is lilac and blue,
while out of it rise islands, purple in some
directions, mauve and yellow and red in
others, according to the hour—and it is ever
the distance which is beautiful.

While resting in the quasi shade of a small

202 East and West

palo verde at mid-day, looking over the
varnished green tops of the creosote bushes
towards the distant Bradshaws, which seemed
somehow to have turned themselves around,
I heard behind me what appeared to be the
barking of a puppy and peering cautiously
around a rock was surprised to find it was not
a quadruped at all but aroad-runner. As the
strange uncouth bird hunted for his favourite
diet of scorpions and snakes, he paused now
and again and gave vent to his feelings in this
fashion. Presently something whizzed over
my head in the hot sunshine with a ting like
a rifle bullet. This was repeated at intervals
and if I had not already learned that it was
an antic of the black-chinned humming-bird,
who thus disports himself before the female,
it might have caused me as much surprise as
the barking of the road-runner. So rapid is
the flight in these manceuvres that the bird is
virtually invisible and one is aware of him
merely by the sound he makes, as of a passing
bullet. My only other encounter was with a
horned toad, a patient, inoffensive little lizard
of a mauve hue, like the desert ranges, and
with a crown of tubercles upon his head which
in outline suggest the lava peaks of these same
mountains. He looks like the country he

Impressions of the Desert 203

inhabits and is as appropriately designed for
his environment as a rainbow trout for a
brook.

After a solitary vigil from starlight to
starlight, I returned that night, impressed
above all with the deceptiveness of the desert:
I had discovered what a delusion it is. Yet,
looking at it next day from my lava peak—
lying so soft and opalescent in the distance
—it beckoned as before, as beautiful and allur-
ing and as full of enchantment as ever; and
though arguing to myself that it was only
distance lent it beauty, I felt its spell was not
broken—would never be broken. Day after
day it lures with its beautiful wiles, wrapped
in mystery as profound as ever, in spite of
my erstwhile disillusionment and a critical
analysis of the facts. The desert ever refuses
to be weighed in the balance of fact and
of logic. While you reason and ponder, it
weaves its spell around and around you,
weaves it into the very fibre of your thought,
until the sense is enmeshed and your little
logic is forgotten—lost in that feeling for
mystery and for beauty which the wonderful
desert inspires.

CHAPTER XV
TRAILS

N the dense chaparral of the humid Transi-
tion zone of California or in the rough
lava formation of the arid mountains of
Arizona, one is as dependent upon trails as a
ship is dependent on a channel in a shallow
river. These slender paths admit one to wild
and solitary recesses otherwise almost inac-
cessible. The trail is a thread by which to
find the way. Rough, tortuous, steep, often
hazardous, it comes closer to the mountains
than could any road, brings one in closer con-
tact with the wild and gives a more intimate
view and understanding. Leading across
mesas and cafions, around buttes and cliffs,
and over saddles, spurs, and ranges, it may
afford the key to a mountain formation,
to topographical features, to structural and
dynamic geology. Metamorphism, mechani-
cal strain, volcanic action, subsequent erosion
or glacial action are all revealed. Your
204

Trails 205

mountain trail is now over sedimentary rock,
now over lavas, again through crumbling
shale or over a glacial moraine, and borrows
character from each in turn, according a
practical view of these things.

The effect of much following of trails is to
imbue one with a sense of topography. An
old prospector can judge what kind of travel-
ling it will be on a distant range from its
topography, which also reveals some features
of its geology. In this Giant Cactus country,
the mountains are largely granite, schist, or
andesite, while the mesas are basalt, and each
has its characteristic outlines, so that far in
the distance it is possible to make a good
guess as to what a mountain is made of. An
eye that has had long training scans a range
or bit of rough country, much as a general
looks over a battle-field, and decides where are
the best approaches and the point of attack.
When the trail is lost, or vanishes now and
then, as it does hereabouts, to reappear farther
on, the practised eye knows where it ought
to be and so one manages to pick it up again
like a broken thread. Now the possessor of
such an eye bears in mind whenever he follows
a new trail that he will very likely wish to
return and that landmarks are of the greatest

206 East and West

service to that end in a difficult country. He
does not fail to observe the watercourses and
striking features of the landscape, such as
buttes, mesas, or cliffs, and their direction from
his starting point. This is done, however,
almost unconsciously and as a matter of habit.
Hemakes a mental note also of the forks in the
trail and of any features that serve to identify
the trail itself such as peculiar outcrops of
rock. A good trail horse may be trusted to
some extent to return over a trail: for he has
a personal interest in going home, but none
whatever in going away. It is easy to lose
oneself in the wilderness and it is easy to lose
one’s bearings in the arid mountain regions
where the broken ridges are as the waves of a
choppy sea. Here landmarks must serve in
place of blazed trees.

What the canoe is to the Adirondack wilder-
ness, the trail horse is to the Western moun-
tains. Your horse becomes an indispensable
part of yourself, as the boat is in the North
Woods, and like the guide boat, he is peculiarly
fitted for his environment and for no other.
The usual old trail horse is at home on the
trail only and often confused when, at rare
intervals, he finds himself ona road. Steady,
patient, and reliable on the trail, he will come

Trails 207

down out of the mountain into a stage road or
village street and appear as distracted as a
country bumpkin on his first visit to the city.
The narrow path seems to concentrate his
attention and put him at ease, but a road is
too wide a world for him and disturbs his
balance.

There are three points to look for in a trail
horse: he should be surefooted, sensitive-
mouthed, and a fast walker. Most Western
ponies are surefooted, unless their knees are
sprung, and tender-mouthed. They guide
by the neck and stop abruptly—excellent
qualities, though the latter is somewhat dis-
concerting to the tenderfoot. A tender-
mouthed animal is like a boat that obeys her
helm well. You can manage both readily and
with small leeway. When at the same time
you have a horse that is a fast walker, you
have a prize indeed. A good trail horse,
furthermore, should not be tall but should be
well-knit and fairly heavy, for the stocky horse
has the better chance of keeping his foothold
on difficult ground with the weight of his
rider; he has a broader beam so to speak.

Mules are credited with being surer footed
and with having more sense than horses. I
have ridden plenty of horses, however, that

208 East and West

were as surefooted as any mule could possibly
be, but I have observed that it is not always
safe to trust their judgment in a dangerous
bit of trail through loose gravel or shale which
is likely to give way, and I have known ex-
perienced horses when ridden by inexperi-
enced riders to step on such places and go
over the bank. It is said that a mule will not
do this. If the ground looks firm, the horse
certainly does not reason as to whether appear-
ances may be deceptive. A horse may be
extremely cautious about entering a muddy
stream because of uncertainty as to the depth
and the nature of the bottom, yet I have had
a horse go unsuspectingly into dangerous
quicksand with me which appeared safe
enough, but from which he was with the
greatest difficulty extricated. The tendency
of all trail horses, especially if they have
ever been pack animals, is to keep to the
outer edge of the trail, doubtless for fear of
being pushed over by striking some projec-
tion from the bank, and also to be in posi-
tion to throw themselves in if they find they
are going over. In crossing landslides on
narrow trails it is expedient to keep a horse
in; otherwise he may generally be left to pick
his way for himself.

Trails 209

In the South-West, the most difficult travel-
ling is over ‘‘malpais’? country in Arizona
and the “‘pedragal”” in Mexico. ‘‘Malpais’”’
is land covered with small basalt boulders or
with rough fragments of andesite. It is
possible to cross such country only with
extreme slowness and the trail is in reality
only a direction and not a path. ‘‘Pedragal”’
is a lava flow just as it cooled and present-
ing a cracked ragged surface as broken and
rough as a vast mass of scrapiron. Of well-
known trails there are none steeper than those
of the Grand Cafion. The old Colima trail
from Tuxpan to Colima has some grades
perhaps as considerable for a short distance,
and up these hundreds of mules and burros
daily plod with salt and cocoanuts and barrels
of spirits. Of course there are innumerable
little local trails in the mountains, badly con-
structed and out of repair, on which you will
find a place now and then where the angle is
perhaps fifty degrees and it is barely possible
for a horse to get up with you, and where, if
you were to come down on an English saddle,
you would find yourself astride of the animal’s
neck and holding on by his ears. The stock
saddle certainly gives a better seat for trail
riding than any other, and I believe a more

14

210 East and West

comfortable seat for all-day jaunts than even
the cavalry saddle. An English saddle is
altogether unadapted to the mountains, and
while some of the best horsemanship is shown
in cross-country riding on English saddles, it
is a totally different sort of riding from the
cowboy’s and the two can hardly be compared.

Undoubtedly the worst trails are in Mexico,
for there they have been made, not by pick
and shovel, but by the unshod hoofs of burros
and the bare and sandalled feet of peons, carry-
ing their wares to market, or travelling over
the mountains on pilgrimages and to village
fiestas. In four years’ riding in that country
I did not encounter a single instance of any-
one repairing atrail. The ascent of the steep
slopes of a barranca is thus often like going up
a pair of stairs with very high and narrow
steps. It is quite an acrobatic feat to get up
and down these barrancas and it sometimes
has tobe done many timesinaday. Butsuch
trails are in reality not as dangerous as some
in a gravel formation: neglected paths where
the gravel has fallen down from the inside and
dropped away from the outside until only a
few inches of trail remains, while beneath is
an almost perpendicular drop of five hundred
or a thousand feet to the bottom of the cafion.

Trails 211

They may be encountered in Colorado and
there are some in the Santa Inez in California.
When following them in the dark I have
always felt I relied as much upon faith as upon
anything substantial underfoot.

One is far from being wholly absorbed
with these practical considerations in follow-
ing the trail. There is something mysterious
about all trails. They seem matter of fact
enough as the pony plods laboriously upward,
panting and straining from the shoulders or
floundering over the loose stones, but as you
start briskly at a fox trot over the mesa or
along the ridge in the fresh morning air, the
world at your feet, you may feel you have
somehow left yourself behind and acquired,
for the time being, a new self. Somewhere on
every trail another and freer self waits for us,
and as we come up, silently and mysteriously
steps into the body and inhabits it while we
are on his domain. When we come to go
down again, he steps out at the edge of his
province and the old self slips into his accus-
tomed place and jogs along quite as if it were
he who had been in the saddle all the time.
Ever since I discovered this I take to the trail
with a peculiarly pleasant anticipation of
somewhere in the wild country being met

212 East and West

by this large and free self of me, whose views
of life are broad and serene and genial; who
knows nothing of either money or time but
who looks abroad over the landscape as if
indeed he were the owner of this great South-
West, and the silent mountains and the
shimmering deserts were his private estate.

Every mountain trail ascends to a region
as remote from the gossipy world of the hotel
or the ‘‘resort’’ as are the Pleiades or the Pole
Star. With every foot of ascent that little
world grows smaller, until finally it dwindles
to nothing and vanishes as we cross some
saddle or shoulder and continue the ascent on
another slope of the mountain. There below
they have mountain air but up here we have
mountain thoughts as well: another point of
view, that can never be enjoyed from a hotel
veranda. For the ideas that go with rocking
chairs and afternoon tea are not the ideas
that go with the saddle and the spur. Here
we abide by the traditions of the trail. I do
not know whether we have become more
spiritual or more healthily animal; whichever
it is, it is far removed from that with which
they are concerned in the hotel and which now
plays no more part with us than it does with
the horse.

Trails 213

A little ascent, a change in relative position,
makes an astonishing difference in the appear-
ance of a range. A mountain landscape, in
fact, is not one but myriad. It is a hundred
landscapes from a hundred points of view.
Hence the delights and surprises of the trail.
I own all I see, riding over the mountains;
but every now and again it appears in a
different light or from a new point of view.
By early morning light the range has one as-
pect; by the glare of noon another; at sunset
a different world again. In a day’s ride the
trail leads insensibly from one to the next and
the sensitive eye receives from each its pecu-
liar set of impressions.

To ascend is to be continually enlarging
the world. Each hundred or thousand feet
permits you to see over some ridge that inter-
rupted the vision below. The horizon con-
tinues to recede. It is bounded first by a
range in yellow and red, hard in outline, sav-
age in colour, and perhaps ten miles away;
presently by one softer and more radiant,
which reflects rather than absorbs light—
a twenty-mile limit; again by the fine deep
blue and purple of more distant ranges; then
by the ethereal azure hills of the fifty- to
seventy-mile circle; lastly by those pallid

214 East and West

ghosts of mountain ranges, one to two hund-
red miles away, which appear to float in the
ambient atmosphere and are no more sub-
stantial than visions.

To receive all that the trail has to give,
the full import of its message, so to speak,
one must go on day after day—for a week, at
least, which will answer perhaps as well as a
month. It only yields itself fully to this
persistent association and this complete de-
tachment from the starting point, which is
very likely to be a hotel, itself one of the
uninspiring influences of life. You may make
your own camp, or to avoid the encumbrance
of pack animal, blankets, food, and guide, you
may arrange to reach some village or camp
each night. The charm is in the going—
moving on into the unknown, the world before
you, like a true nomad. And such a world!
A sphere of light and colour and distance.
In the East we do not know that enchant-
ment which lies in distance. In the clear
atmosphere of the South-West you come
to love that wonderful horizon with its
ethereal mountains, which ever lures and
ever recedes as you advance. This is to be in
the open. This is to know the flavour of life.
Surrounded by ranges and peaks fading into

‘“ That wonderful horizon with its ethereal mountains.”

Trails 215

the distant blue, and beyond the desert, other
ranges, fainter and fainter, mere serrated
outlines; surrounded by this limitless beauty—
room enough, silence enough, time enough;
up there following trails to the stars, one
might forget time and live in eternity, one
might forget to ever come down again. Up
there in the silence and the light, your free
and immortal self shall surely meet you some-
where on the trail.

CHAPTER XVI
ARIZONA GARDENS

T is difficult to imagine, in looking at this
rough mountain country in December,
what a garden it will become in March and
April, for many flowers exhale their sweetness
on the desert air for the bee and the moth.
Early in January the cottonwoods bloom and
the first leaves appear on the ocotilla. By
February the white spirea is in flower while
perhaps a castilleia glows here and there like
a coal on the rock. Thenceforth the lava
peaks and the basalt mesas daily soften their
mood and yield themselves more and more
to the gentle influence of the flowers. Ina
land so rude and savage, where the mountains
were vomited from the fiery throats of vol-
canoes, the contrast of the flowers with their
stern setting enhances their delicacy a hund-
red fold.
In February the sensitive brier puts out its
feathery old-rose coloured blossoms and little
216

Arizona Gardens 217

patches cover the lava as with a bit of rich
brocade. Soon brodizas appear and the small
red pentstemon with its pale green leaves,
a plant so exquisite, so chaste, that when you
come upon it for the first time it is as if you
had discovered a rare old jewel lying upon
the rock. Larger red pentstemons bloom later
in the season which, though handsome, are
coarse compared with this. Now comes a
salmon-pink mallow drooping gracefully over
andesite cliffs, and by the end of the month
the first eschscholtzias, blue phacelias, sal-
vias, yellow mentzelias, and pink gilias have
appeared.

March brings lupines, white phlox, ane-
mones, and castilleias in profusion, saxifrage,
verbena—one of the most delightful wild
flowers of Arizona,—yellow baeria, white les-
' singia, and magenta escobitas, dainty cream-
cups, white daisies, lavender flea-bane, purple
asters, evening primroses large and small,
purple phacelias, blue gilias, portulaca, and
whispering bells, while the encelia blossoms
here and there on the slopes and the ground
is starred with the low growing white and
lavender townsendia. Not until April is
there a profusion of flowers, for here as in
California, all appear rare at first and nearly

218 East and West

all are common in the end. Then the various
composite shrubs, of which the encelia is the
handsomest, are covered with their yellow
flowers, so that the hills in places are coloured
by them as by the black mustard in California
and the ground is thickly sprinkled with the
golden baeria, the little townsendia, and the
escobita. Eschscholtzias and gilias are abun-
dant in the river bottom, and red and yellow
monkey flowers in the rocky gorges. The
mariposas bloom on the mesas and the lark-
spurs on the hillsides: among them the pale
sky-blue larkspur (D. azureum), one of the
most exquisite flowers in the West, and the
brilliant orange-red mariposa—one pale and
ethereal, the other, a hot flame. By the time
the cacti have begun to bloom, members of
the composite family have become very
numerous, and being exceedingly difficult of
identification are apt to be designated, by
any but very painstaking botanists, merely
as yellow or white composites, especially as
no systematic botany of Arizona has ever been
published. After all why should they have
individual names? Like the units of an army,
it is enough perhaps to know that they belong
to such a regiment and such a company.

It is the shrubs and trees, and particularly

Arizona Gardens 219

the cacti, which give to an Arizona garden
its peculiar character and distinguish it from
all otherwild gardens. Foremost among these
is, of course, the saguaro, which would in
itself sufficiently distinguish any region. It
ascends the slopes, it stands on the ridge, it
guards the cliffs—erect and rigid as stone;
sometimes forming a cross against the sky,
sometimes presenting queer shapes suggesting
the trunks of elephants or the tusks of mam-
moths. The ocotilla is quite as pronounced
and individual, and now in April is very
striking with its whiplike branches, arrayed
in leaves growing close to the stem, and bear-
ing terminal racemes of scarlet blossoms.
Barrel cacti are disposed here and there:
large squat vegetables, several feet in height
and half as much in diameter, resembling a
young saguaro but armed with an entirely
different sort of spines of a reddish hue. The
pulp contains considerable moisture which
may be obtained by cutting a hole in the
top and pounding the pulp until the water is
squeezed out.

Of chollas there are several common species:
a spiny irascible race of the genus Opuntia.
One species is commonly known as ‘‘buckhorn
cactus’ and this you may approach with

220 East and West

reasonable care. But Bigelow’s cholla can
only be circumvented with the utmost pre-
caution. One of the most accursed of plants,
its barbed spine is against man and beast.
Most cacti appear to be defensive merely
but this cholla gives the impression of being
actually offensive. You have but to touch
the plant and it has fastened itself upon you;
it seems literally to attack. Its barbed spines
penetrate leather as easily as paper and there
is no pulling them out. In the bright sunlight
the plant looks as if it were made of grey-green
glass and it is quite as brittle as if such were
the case, for the joints are thrown to the
ground by a slight jar, attaching themselves
by their spines to whatever may touch them.
This would certainly appear to be a provision
of Nature for the perpetuation and distribu-
tion of the species, which propagates to some
extent—I am inclined to believe, very largely
—by means of these joints, which, when
detached from the plant, eventually put forth
a root from a point near the fracture.

This cholla is the favourite nesting-place of
the cactus wren, who apparently avails himself
of its protection, but how he himself escapes
being impaled it is difficult to see. The wren
has an understanding of the cholla and a

Arizona Gardens 221

“sympathy for it, or it for him, which thus
permits them to live in accord. And he is
about the only friend the plant has. One
sometimes sees the nest of the thrasher in this
species, but with this exception, the cactus
wren appears to be the only bird to seek so
dangerous a nesting-place; and though this
bird builds in the saguaro, the prickly pear,
the canotia, and the palo verde, the majority
of nests in this region are placed in Bigelow’s
cholla, the most irritable and unapproachable
plant in North America.

No concealment is possible. The nest is as
plainly in view as the plant itself and the bird
would seem to be aware of the nature of the
protection the cactus offers and to rely upon
that, instead of upon concealment as do most
birds; though the fact that the nest is also
placed in the parkinsonia, where it is almost
as much exposed and where it receives practi-
cally no protection, does not support this view.
The defence that this cactus affords the nest
is admirably illustrated by a cholla in plain
view asI write. An old nest lies in the thorny
embrace of the cactus joints, a bulky flask-
shaped affair, a foot and a half in length, with
a small opening which leads as it were by the
neck of the flask to the nest proper. Within

222 East and West

a foot of this opening is the head of a serpent,
the fixed eyes staring in death at the nest it
was destined never to reach, while the slender
brown-ringed body rests in sinuous curves
among the terrible cholla joints which hold
it as rigidly as steel. Hundreds of barbed
points entered deeper and deeper with every
writhe of the serpent, until it was transfixed
and left to perish miserably, while the little
wrens were hatched from the coveted eggs and
on the first venture from the nest received an
object-lesson in the value of the cholla to the
race of cactus wrens.

The plant does not serve the thrasher so
well, for in a recently completed nest I found
a cholla joint which had fallen in and driven
the bird out. She had built a new one, how-
ever, just above the first, in which were four
eggs. The peculiar flask-shaped nest of the
wren is far better adapted to this nesting-site
than is the large open structure of the thrasher.

In addition to the various cacti of the genera
Cereus, Opuntia, and Echinocactus, some of
which are now in flower, their brilliant scarlet
or magenta blossoms as large as teacups and
supplying the most vivid note in the desert
landscape, there is the fishhook cactus of
the genus Mamillaria, one of the prettiest of

Arizona Gardens 223

all, a grey little plant whose black spines
resemble trout hooks and whose edible berries
are brilliant scarlet. A glance over this gar-
den reveals the fact that the cactus family,
formidable by reason of its armour, is every-
where the protecting genius not only of birds,
but much more of plants. This seems to
apply less to Bigelow’s cholla than to other
species of Opuntia among whose spiny lobes
one will usually see a host of blossoms: now
a beautiful white phlox, again a blue phacelia
and white daisies, or the yellow blossom of
the hosackia. It appears exactly as if the
plants had crowded within the protecting
arms of the cacti with as good a show of reason
as in the case of the cactus wren. The simple
fact is that cattle and sheep devour them
elsewhere, but within the precincts of the
cactus plants their noses are pricked by the
needle-like spines and the flowers within are
perforce unmolested.

In this garden the creosote bush is one of
the few shrubs which is not armed, and its
varnished evergreen leaves are far more in
evidence than the artemisias. Yucca is a
rare genus hereabouts, while the agave grows
sparingly on the lava cliffs. The dalea is a
shrub quite as prickly as the ocotilla—a true

224 East and West

desert plant bristling at all points. Perhaps
the typical tree is the palo verde or green-
barked acacia (Cercidium torreyanum) with
its minute leaves and its conspicuous pale
green bark. Parkinsonia microphylla re-
sembles it and is also called palo verde but
its bark is of a yellower green and its leaves
even more minute. Both trees appear leaf-
less at a little distance. Unlike the palo verde
the parkinsonia has no thorns, but as if to
atone for this, its twigs end in spines.

As the leaves diminish, the spines or thorns
appear to increase, and the canotia is abso-
lutely leafless while its twigs are merely very
long spines. It is this species (Canotia hola-
cantha) which is called the ‘‘Thorn of Pales-
tine.’”’ Probably the name was given it by
the early Spanish settlers and the tradition
of its identity with the Syrian tree was per-
petuated by the unbotanical; for Sargent gives
the tree a purely American habitat. Such
a tradition might very naturally have arisen
among the Spaniards and readily have been
handed down. Of the genus Acacia there is
the cat’s-claw, a scraggly shrub, whose thorns
cause one more trouble than the barbs of the
cholla, for the simple reason that the cholla
is habitually avoided as if by instinct, whereas

Arizona Gardens . 225

the slender twigs of the cat’s-claw are over-
looked until the small sharp recurved thorns
scratch one like the claws of an enraged cat.
Mesquite (Prosopis juliflora velutina) and
ironwood (Olneya tesota) are the common
trees of the river bottoms—scraggly, thorny
trees growing in the thickets of sarcobatus.
In April, however, the mesquite is a very fresh
and delightful shade of green and, with its yel-
low blossoms, gives one impressions of spring
worthy of our Eastern hardwoods. Itis,more-
over, the home tree of the phainopepla and
in a day’s ride down a creek bed you may
come upon several of their beautiful saucer-
shaped nests saddled in the forks of the mes-
quite. These trees are all adapted by their
small leaves to more sun and less water than
are Eastern trees, and by their thorns, to
repel the depredations of animals. The
mesquite, however, often succumbs to the
mistletoe by which it is grievously infested.

Aside from the owls, the first bird to nest
in the garden is the Gila woodpecker who
may be seen flying to her hole in the saguaro
late in January,where she dwells at the top of
acolumn, if not actually upon it like Simeon-
Stylites. Her nesting-site affords an excel-
lent lookout from which to survey the country

15

226 East and West

round about. The saguaro is also used by
the gilded flickers, by some small owls, and
by the desert sparrow-hawk, it is said, all of
whom have chosen to live in Doric columns.
The cactus wren may be found nesting by the
middle of February and the cafion wren soon
after; Say’s pheebe, the black phoebe, thrasher,
and cafion towhee, the last of March or first
part of April.

For arrivals I have the red flycatcher down
for February 24th, hooded oriole and painted
redstart March 25th, ash-throated flycatcher
April 6th, Arkansas kingbird, April 9th, Scott’s
oriole April 12th, the mockingbird April 13th,
and the lazuli bunting April 18th. But these
dates are variable, the present being gen-
erally regarded as a late season. I found two
nests of the phainopepla on April 13th with
three eggs in each and on the same day the
nests of the housefinch and the Arkansas
goldfinch, each with four eggs; while one
bird was hatched in a thrasher’s nest con-
taining four eggs. One takes no count of the
nests of the cactus wren, as a dozen may be
encountered during a ride of a few hours.

Young coyotes and jackrabbits are abroad
the latter part of March, guileless children
shifting for themselves in a hard and cruel

Arizona Gardens 224

world. I encounter them now and again in
one part or another of the garden and it may
happen that in their innocence, instead of
fleeing as would their skeptical progenitors,
they tarry and afford me no little amusement
by their antics. I came one day upon a young
coyote—and the young coyote is a very pretty
animal—who had a chipmunk in a thorny
bush, and for some time the two tore round
and round the bush, first one way, then the
other, as two children might play, though of
course the chipmunk was running for his life
and the coyote for his dinner. Meanwhile
I approached on tiptoe until within a few
yards and stood motionless watching the
game. So intent was the little coyote that he
apparently did not see me until the chipmunk
finally escaped, whereupon he dropped the
game as does a child on losing interest, and,
discovering my presence, examined me criti-
cally for a few moments, moving his head from
side to side with a curious sinuous motion.
Deciding in my favour, he deliberately sat
down on his haunches and yawned in my face.
A thrasher came and perched in a palo verde,
scolding vociferously, and the coyote, still
sitting in front of me, threw back his head
and looked longingly at him. His motions

228 East and West

were so like those of a playful puppy that he
hardly seemed a wild creature. Finally he
arose and went his way while I went mine.

Again as I was resting on a level grassy
stretch by the creek bed while my horse
cropped the grass, a lank little jackrabbit
appeared, ambling along and intent upon his
thoughts, for he did not stop until he had
come very near. Paying no attention to me
whatever, he began to hop leisurely around in
a circle with that peculiarly loose-jointed mo-
tion, head down and feet kicked out behind,
which characterises certain Indian dances.
He had not been at this long before a second
lank little jackrabbit approached, and follow-
ing behind the first, the two performed a veri-
table dance as if for my benefit. Occasionally
they would pause to nibble a leaf and then
resume their hop-step. These two quaint
figures, all legs and ears, solemnly capering
on the green at the foot of a great yellow
cliff, made a picture ever to be associated
with an Arizona garden.

Strange as it may appear, no other animal
is feared in Arizona as the skunk, one or more
species of which have the habit of approach-
ing and biting the ranchman or prospector
asleep upon the ground. As the animal is

Arizona Gardens 229

sometimes afflicted with rabies, the belief has
arisen in a ‘“‘hydrophobia skunk.’’ Of course
no such peculiar species exists. As the habits
of the Eastern skunk afford no analogy, I was
naturally skeptical that the animal had any
such remarkable trait in Arizona, but Dr.
Hornaday writes in this connection:

The fact is now established beyond question that at
least one species of skunk in Arizona (just which one
I am unable to say) does bite human beings, quite
without provocation. ... Of course there can be
no such thing as a “‘hydrophobia skunk’’—that is to
say, a particular species to which the disease is con-
fined. It is also equally certain that very many
skunks are not afflicted with hydrophobia, and that
the occurrences are due to accidental circumstances,
which necessarily are quite beyond human knowledge.

Rattlesnakes are not wanting but while one
may be heard of in March, very little is seen
of them until the middle of April, and you
may ride for days without encountering a
snake until the heat of summer brings them
out. The “corral” snake is a large and formid-
able-looking serpent, conspicuously marked,
but though he has the reputation of killing
the rattlesnake, he has no poison glands and
his bite is harmless. A most bizarre-looking
personage is the Gila monster, who crawls into

230 East and West

the sunshine in April on the lava over whose
burning surface he creeps with the awkward
motions of a seal, using his forelegs somewhat
as if they were fins. His bright pinkish
yellow or flesh-coloured skin, mottled or
marbled with brown, renders his thick clumsy
body very conspicuous, and on seeing this
grotesque figure, one is inclined to reflect—as
did a certain lama on meeting a cobra—upon
how great must have been his sins who is
now imprisoned in such a body. ‘There is no
agreement of opinion among the unscientific
as to the nature of this reptile, but Van
Denburgh states positively in his Reptiles of the
Pacific Coast and Great Basin that the Gila
monster has poison glands in the lower jaw
and that the poison is about as deadly as
that of the rattlesnake. He says furthermore
that the creature is slow to attack but when
sufficiently angered strikes very quickly and
holds on with the tenacity of a bulldog.

The rains are over, the sun burns in the
broad blue sky, and the garden is brilliant
with its millions of acres of encelia—burning
bushes everywhere—its yellow-flowered creo-
sote and mesquite and the vivid magenta
blossoms of the cacti. I recall how at this
season the spurs of the Santa Inez are blue

Arizona Gardens 231

with the ceanothus, but here the colour scheme
is warmer and yellow is the dominant note.
It is very different from that California garden
by the Pacific with its chaparral and its live-
oaks—wilder, more savage and untamed, and
yet strangely beautiful and infinitely alluring;
for it is the desert that speaks to one here—
the mysterious desert from which the isolated
flower-covered mountains rise like islands
from the sea.

In northern Arizona is a gash in the earth,
some miles in width, many miles in length,
and some thousands of feet in depth. This
abyss, flooded with colour—with lilac and
purple and rose and Indian red,—was cut
through various rock formations, from the
limestone at the top to the black granite at
the bottom, during some thousands of years
by the ColoradoRiver, acting in the usual way
and by a perfectly natural process. Its
dimensions exceed those of all other cafions
and yet are not of great consequence, for few
are able to see it—large as it is—only an artist
or poet or geologist now and again.

Its beauty is immense; it passeth words and
is not to be described but allowed to impress

pies East and West

itself directly without the intermediation of
words, which are but a veil. In a transcen-
dent degree and with overpowering persuasion
it appeals to the eye with colour and with form
—cyclopean form painted in ethereal colour.

Here have come many, notebook in hand,
and as if so many reporters had essayed to
interview the Sphinx, one and all have been
baffled and in that mighty silence have sought
to cover their defeat in superlatives. A
glowing description of that gorge of the Colo-
rado is like a handful of firecrackers thrown
into the abyss. Let it suffice, then, that here
is colour such as is not found elsewhere on
this little earth; and here, if you please, you
may match yourself against the titan forms
of the Cafion, primordial and august, wrapped
in infinite repose, in eternal silence. And if
you would paint it, you must have a ‘‘ten-
league canvas” and ‘brushes of comet’s
hair.”

Along the southern rim of this pit of colour,
on the elevated plateau, is the Coconino forest,
where the juniper and pifion belt which skirts
the desert, mingles with the yellow pine of a
higher latitude. But so great is the spell of
the pit—all lilac and purple! and rose—that
none stop to see the pines. Yet here come a

Arizona Gardens 233

few birds and here are some flowers withal,
and here one may saunter awhile and compare
this garden in the yellow pine belt at seven
thousand feet with the cactus garden of the
desert.

On the first of May the palo verde was
blooming on the desert and the thistle poppy
in the dry bed of Castle Creek, but with the
exception of the saguaros and the chollas, most
of the flowers had come and gone and the
ground looked parched, singed one might say.
A week later in the Coconino forest the snow
is but melted from the ground and there is still
snow in the air. All the way from the little
desert station it has been a gradual change
from a Lower Sonoran to an Upper Sonoran
and Transition Zone, and it is no surprise
therefore to find the few flowers in bloom on
the rim of the cafion of a distinctly mountain
type with all the charm of low-growing alpine
plants.

Thick mats of alpine phlox, prone upon the
ground, suggest patches of snow. There is a
white cress no higher than a chickadee, a tufted
pink that hugs the earth, and a yellow and
purple pedicularis of similar habit, a dwarf
forget-me-not, a small castilleia, and the
modest woodland star. Near the rim of the

234 East and West

Cafion blooms the pretty Western wallflower
and a dwarf larkspur, while below the rim in
the talus of the limestone under the Douglas
spruce, the yellow dicentra is in blossom. As
one descends, the alpine phlox continues for
some distance but is noticeably larger than on
the plateau. Flea-banes, larkspurs, and two
species of red pentstemons appear as the trail
drops into the red sandstone, and on the
plateau below is the mariposa. Continuing
to the river the trail takes one to the Lower
Sonoran Zone in a descent of five thousand
feet. It is northern and southern Arizona
compassed in a few miles.

While free agents compared with plants,
birds correspond to their environment very
closely, and a glance at the common birds
on the Coconino plateau would give some
idea of the elevation had one no aneroid in
his pocket. Red-backed juncos, mountain
chickadees, and slender-billed nuthatches are
soon discovered and these three in themselves
are a key to the position. Then there are
the long-crested and pifion jays, Western
evening grosbeaks and cabanis woodpeckers,
while violet-green swallows and white-throated
swifts skim over the rim of the Cafion. For
some reason these birds do not remain in the

=

oo

‘In this Coconino forest is the breath of the North.”

Arizona Gardens 235

abyss itself, but as far as I have observed,
content themselves with darting over the
edge and returning, very much as a man dives
into a lake and swims to shore again. Blue-
birds flit among the pines and though they
make that mystical appeal inseparable from
their race, the ear accustomed to the note of
the Eastern bird detects instantly a slightly
harsher quality in the voice of the Western
species. On the very rim of the vast abyss of
colour, the Western robin sings his evening
song. While his notes are like those of our
own robin the habits of the bird suggest our
shyer thrushes. Here he is a bird, not of the
garden but of the forest, and it is not without
surprise that one first observes this curious
difference of temperament and finds our most
familiar bird apparently assuming the guise of
ashy wild creature. Of warblers, Audubon’s,
Grace’s, and the black-throated grey appear
to be the common species of the plateau.

In this Coconino forest is the breath of the
North—the magic of the North. The air
is fragrant with the resinous odour of yellow
pine and pifion. In the tree tops the wind
sighs its world-old song. Yet from under
the pines at Grand View one looks across the
Cafion to the Painted Desert beyond—the

236 East and West

wonderful desert—and the thoughts fly away
to the South, where the arid mountains rise
abruptly like islands from the sea and the
saguaros stand erect and unbending upon the
lava cliffs.

It is strange to feel the force of two attrac-
tions, so unlike, yet each so individual, so
compelling. In the distance, the mysterious
desert—itself as alluring as the mirage, a
wraith, a phantom beauty on the horizon—
beckons as of old; while round about, the
yellow pine forest, so different, so remotely
different, soothes and beguiles the sense with
resinous odours and softly whispered songs,
the enchantment, the very spirit of the North.
In the presence of two such magicians prac-
tising their wiles, that which is but mortal
and susceptible to divine beauty must fain
surrender.

CHAPTER XVII
GOOD FAMILIES

AVING now, with all the airs of the
literary showman, thrown upon the
screen these little pictures of our American
estate, I may perhaps be allowed to dwell upon
the qualities of a few at least of the good
families of plants whose ancestral manor it is,
and who have so long lent it the charm of
their presence. There are many of these
excellent families, with unbroken line of
descent, and not a blot upon the escutcheon
nor anywhere a symptom of degeneracy.
With many branches and numerous de-
scendants they are tribal and clannish in the
way they reveal family traits and adhere to
family traditions. Between one clan and
another there are all shades of difference, but
they have this in common, that they are good
neighbours, they wear well, and they seem in
their rooted silent existence to lend them-
selves with a gentle sympathy to the com-
237

238 East and West

plex emotions of our own restless life and to
exert a wonderful influence upon it. As with
the birds, the recognition of these family
traits and resemblances greatly contributes to
the pleasure we have in their society.

What an excellent family the Heath, for
instance, and how it endears one to them as to
life-long friends to have pleasant associa-
tions of years, not only with the blueberries
and huckleberries of New England pastures,
but with the manzanita of the Sierras and the
madrofias of the Coast Range and the Sierra
Madre. It puts you on intimate terms with
the family and you will many times gossip
with the blueberry about the lovely ma-
drofia of the Western ranges, and when again
you are riding through the chaparral, the
blossom of the manzanita shall call up some
well-beloved blueberry pasture by the sea.
Again, the barberry of Cape Ann on the lonely
Dogtown pastures reminds you of the Arizona
barberry on the desert mountains; the fra-
gile anemones in the early woods, of the
pasque-flower on the velvet mesas; and any
lily may suggest its connection with that
superb lily of the South-West, the yucca, and
with the lovely mariposa.

While plants are characteristic of their en-

Good Families 239

vironment, that, in turn, owes to them much
of its individuality. This fact again serves to
enrich the association they have in our minds.
A flower is part of its setting and can never
appear the same when taken from it. Bare
mention of the clintonia brings to my mind
the spruce woods, the ground hemlock and
hobblebush, and the mysterious song of
the veery on the mountainside. Pentstemons
have as strong an association: the blue with
the misty ranges of the Rockies where the
green towhee is singing; the red with the lava
gorges of Arizona and the metallic call of the
rock wren.

In the instant that a wild flower is plucked,
something goes from it—the spirit as it were
—and though what is left is beautiful it is
but a tithe of the whole. It is impossible
to take a wild flower from its setting: we
carry away only that obvious part which we
can gather in the hand. Yet how many stop
to look at a blossom—to really see it as it is—
before they pick it? Pouncing upon the
flower, they see only that fraction they are
able to carry off. A truer appreciation would
have spared us many plants of our wild
garden that are becoming extinct.

Even so, we owe much to that environ-

240 East and West

ment for which the flora of any region is
partly responsible, that particular effect due
to the personality of plants, which accords us
our impressions of Nature. Take the family
of Conifers—what a pronounced personality
they have. How distinctly boreal they are.
A pine cone might well be the rugged sym-
bol of the hardy North—of the land of
Winter. It speaks of the silent snow-covered
woods, as the palm leaf speaks of the tropics.
It arouses associations peculiarly its own
—coniferous associations. The Adirondack
wilderness owes its individuality largely to
the spruce, and to the tamarack in the swamps
—they are the dominant personalities. In
New England woods it is the white pine; in
Southern swamps the bald cypress; and in the
forests of the Sierra, the sugar pine and the
silver fir, save in those small groves where
the sequoia dominates all. In the South-
West we are ordinarily removed by many
miles from all that association which the
Conifers have for us, but by going up in the
air—which is equivalent to going north—
we come again under their spell.

Among Eastern Conifers, the tamarack of
the Adirondack swamps and the red cedars of
New England pastures are as strongly in-

Good Families 241

dividual as any trees, while the white pine
has the most distinguished personality. An
old white pine, like a venerable oak or sugar
maple, is something in the landscape. The
rough bark coated with blue-green parmelias,
the peculiarities of needle and cone, play
the same part as the features and lines of a
face. Impressions derived from hemlock and
from spruce are from masses rather than
from individuals—twilight impressions of dim
interiors in temples not made with hands.
How fair and charming is the tamarack, ar-
rayed in the pale green verdure of early
spring, as it stands in the mist at the edge
of the ponds. How exquisitely vernal it is,
and how marvellously it accords with its
setting, as if designed by an artist for that
very end. Equally well the sombre red
cedar accords with dts environment— with
the bare ledges, the massive and antique
boulders blotched with lichens, the juniper
and the blueberry bushes, and the clumps of
bayberry,—an integral part of the whole.
Of the Western members of the family the
sugar pine of the Sierras has the most pro-
nounced personality—expressive of amplitude
and majesty: not symmetrical, not conven-
tional like the firs, but a rugged individualist,
16

242 East and West

a veteran nonconformist to the traditions of
its race, standing alone, extending its gaunt
arms in the blue, a picture of rude and prime-
val strength, of lonely and desolate grandeur.
Sequoias owe much of the impression they
create to the immense bulk of the trunk and
to the distance to the lowest limbs. It is an
impression of columns—vast, Egyptian, mas-
sive. This columnar beauty which over-
comes by the sense of mass, they share with
no other tree, unless it be the smaller crypto-
meria of Japan. For that peculiarly lofty and
splendid environment, that magnificent ar-
boreal person of the sequoia, you must go to
California, for nowhere else is it known.

How different are the impressions accorded
by hardwoods and what a beautiful thing is
the tree—that to so many means only lumber
and firewood. Maples and birch and elm
reflect the spirit of the North and of the
seasons. They contain in themselves spring
and autumn and seem to express subtle
moods that never come to the Conifers. That
matchless colour which transfigures the scarlet
oak and the sugar maple is unknown to West-
ern trees. The live oak slips from one season
to another with but little apparent change.
It puts out its leaves as do the pines with no

Good Families 243

show of spring or autumn moods. What
winter trees are hickory and beech; what have
they to do with mild climates and balmy
air! They are children of cold, waving their
bony arms in the winter gales in exultation,
while the shriek of the wind in their bare
branches is like the cry of the Valkyrie. The
range of the white birch extends far into the
bleak North and it grows in the poorest,
rockiest soil, maintaining itself where others
would perish. Yet it gives little evidence of
this hardihood and is more feminine and win-
some than any other tree. It is nurtured in
cold and sterility, as some gentle characters
are evolved amid harsh surroundings.

In the arid regions of the South-West the
Pea family is dominant among trees and this
very fact of the supremacy of certain families
in different regions is itself of peculiar inter-
est. A slight analogy is presented between
the history of plant and of human races. It
would seem that the Conifers and the Cacti
are as well adapted, and as essentially in-
digenous, to their respective areas as were the
Goths to Northern Europe and the Bedouin
to the desert. We might ask where did the
Composites originate and when did they,
like Rome, overrun the world? What birch

244 East and West

and maple are to the East, the mesquite,
acacia, palo verde, and ironwood are to the
desert plateaus of Arizona—leguminous trees
with small leaves, as befits an arid region
where evaporation from leaf surface must be
restricted to a minimum. These trees are
not without some charm but it is small com-
pared with our Eastern hardwoods or North-
ern Conifers. They are a lean and scraggly
race, fitted to cope with hot sun and little
water, and armed with thorns that they may
defend themselves against animals. This
armed defence is the keynote to the character
of all typical desert vegetation. It with-
stands the elements by no such gentle per-
suasion as do the lithe and feminine birches
in the far North. Instead it bristles with
weapons and one cannot pass the ironwood or
the cat’s-claw acacia but they make known
their pugnacious and uncompromising atti-
tude. The mesquite is a little more suave, a
little less openly hostile, simply because its
thorns are not recurved as are those of the
cat’s-claw.

These small trees of the desert plains do not
affect us in the manner of our beautiful oaks,
maples, and elms: they are deficient in per-
sonality. In the arid region there is but

Good Families 245

one tree under which you can sit at noonday
as under a spreading oak and find it compan-
ionable and that is the cottonwood, which in
the dry creek beds of Arizona becomes an
ample and dignified, a really beautiful tree.
Surely our Northern trees ave companionable,
not only because of a certain personal quality,
masculine in some, feminine in others, but
of that staunchness and sincerity which are
the traits a tree would seem to typify, and
moreover, because of the apparent communi-
cativeness which whispering leaves imply.
They have their winter songs and their spring
-songs; they sigh and whisper in the summer
breeze; they moan and shriek in the winter
gale. How characteristic the voice of the
pines—a murmurous, mysterious woodsy
speech! What a marked family mannerism
in the leafy whisper of the aspens! These
voices have their message for the sensitive
ear: tranquil communications from the woods
and gossip of the sylvan world.

That which we may name personality in
plants is something that may appeal to all of
the senses or to one only. Sweet-fern is a
fragrance—nothing more; sassafras and win-
tergreen, flavours; orange milkweed a classic
form and a splash of flaming colour; bayberry,

246 East and West

a robust suggestion of the open, a perfume
that invigorates; balsam, a boreal impression,
a whiff of the North. The fragrance of berries
and the bloom on the fruit, the marvellous
gradations of colour, serve as so many handles
by which we may grasp with our senses this
fleeting beauty of Nature, ephemeral but for-
ever renewing itself. I drink the blue of
gentians and the red of cardinal lobelias and
scarlet buglers; I plunge into the golden fields
of baeria and bathe in the yellow flood of
poppies. The flavour of sassafras takes me
far afield and the odour of balsam stirs the old
Norse blood in me; whispering pines tell me
many things and invoke those ghostly selves
which once had sylvan form and dwelt amidst
these forests. A garden—a continental gar-
den—means much, is a part of oneself, so
intimately is it related through eyes and ears
and nose to that interior world where thought
arises and moods and feelings come and go
like clouds across the sky.

In this wild garden it is interesting to
observe how plants correspond to their par-
ticular nook or corner and seem to fit into it,
as if they had been set out in those places
peculiarly adapted to their needs. Take,
for example, the shrubs: how congenial are

Good Families 247

the staghorns and the dwarf sumachs to New
England pastures, the witherod and the
hobblebush to the Adirondack wilderness,
Andromeda and Cassandra to the swamps.
In the West we find audibertia, manzanita,
ceanothus with an equally good setting in the
California mountains; encelia, creosote bush,
and ocotilla in the arid ranges of Arizona; sage-
brush on the alkali plains. Not only are the
cacti adapted above all other plants to their
part of the garden, but how admirably they
preserve the unity of that garden. Nothing
could have been better designed for that
peculiar region. They are the typical family
of the desert, as the palms of the tropics,
the pines of the North. Yucca and ocotilla
are plants as well selected for the desert
plains with backgrounds of arid mountains, as
are crategus, viburnum, and azalea for green
and pastoral country delightful to the sub-
dued and cultivated eye. How lovely are
the blossoms of the viburnums and the shad-
bush in the early woods; what Northern charm
they have, typifying that irresistible unbend-
ing of a cold and austere nature. Again,
where is there a more stately garden in May
than that section of the San Bernardino Valley
where the incomparable racemes of the yucca,

248 East and West

marshalled upon the plain in thousands like an
encamping host, stretch away in the distance
as far as the eye can see?

While a few families may be emphatically
of one side or the other of the continent,
the majority are transcontinental but are
represented by different branches—different
species, that is, and often by different genera,
—in one or another part of the country. None
are more cosmopolitan than the mints, known
to us in the East largely by the spearmints,
peppermints, self-heal, and other common
plants but in California far more dominant, for
the shrubby audibertias, called sages, cover
the hills,—the black sage, the handsome lilac-
flowered sages, and the white sage which is the
favourite bee plant of the Coast Range. The
genus Salvia is conspicuous in Southern
California and Arizona and the chia with its
blue flowers and wine-coloured bracts is as
common there as is self-heal with us. These
sages are not to be confused with the sage-
brush, which is an artemisia; and while the
white sage is sometimes called ‘‘ greasewood,”’
that term is more generally applied to a mem-
ber of the rose family and really belongs to the
sarcobatus of the river bottoms.

Figwort, too, is a cosmopolitan family, but

Good Families 249

our common toad-flax and our pretty purple
gerardia give little idea of those splendid per-
sonages the pentstemons, so famous a genus
in the West. In Arizona the red pent-
stemons are among the handsomest flowers,
while no one who has ever been a-botanising
in the valleys of Southern California will for-
get the azure species. The genus appears still
more abundant in the Rocky Mountains.
Collinsia is a charming Figwort and mimulus
another. With us the monkey-flower is blue
while in Arizona and California there is a
brilliant red species and several yellow ones,
and in the Sierras a species that is pink;
but all speedily declare themselves monkey-
flowers by their common resemblance. Per-
haps the castilleia is the most brilliant member
of the family with the most extended range.
Through all the Western mountains and in
Mexico it may be seen, glowing like a live
coal on granite domes or lava peaks—many
species, but one form.

Crowfoot again is a good American family,
with its buttercups, anemones, and colum-
bines reaching from Atlantic to Pacific; Violet,
one of the most dainty and charming of all,
and everywhere clannish; Lily, a family of
beautiful species all about the garden and of

250 East and West

marked resemblances; Pink as much at home
where the bouncing-bet grows by the road-
side as where the Indian pink blooms in the
cafions of the Sierra; Rose, Saxifrage, Milk-
weed, and Lobelia, strong clans every one
and no more Eastern than Western; Mustard,
carrying the sign of the cross over the con-
tinent like the Padres of New Spain; Parsley
and Composites, immense orders numbering
thousands of species, to which belong the
‘““masses’” among the flowers.

While cosmopolitan, the Pea family is far
better represented in the West, which has even
been called the Lupine region. Not only the
lupines, but the mesquites, acacias, and loco-
weeds, which belong to suborders, are dom-
inant in the South-West, and in Mexico the
number and variety of leguminous trees is far
more noticeable. Of the Waterleaf we know
very little in the East while in California and
Arizona its phacelias and nemophilas are
among the most abundant flowers. The same
is true of the Phlox family, and the gilias
which are its important genus might be
called typical Western flowers. Mallow,
Buckthorn, Poppy, and Borage one comes to
associate with the West; the Evening Prim-
rose has many more representatives there;

Good Families 251

while the Cactus is almost exclusively West-
ern and American and may be said to be
native in a stricter sense than even the Ameri-
can Indian. Orchids are better represented
in the East and far better still on the Gulf
Coast of Mexico.

There are many more of these good families,
for this estate has many floral tenants and
among the various species there is a surprising
difference in what I have called personality.
Some are distinguished in appearance with
the bearing of aristocrats; others are the
lowliest of the lowly. Some are modest and
retiring, others bold in their flaming' beauty;
and then there is the great hoi polloi of weeds
to which some families contribute nothing
while others belong to it altogether—com-
monplace by nature and tradition. Neither
are there wanting parasites in this floral
society.

Certain plants more than others have en-
deared themselves to me, doubtless because
of association not less than personal charm.
Of the early flowers, bloodroot and hepatica
have seemed to embody the spirit of spring
more fully or more delicately than others.
Among violets—a family so admirable in
all its members—the pedata and the white

252 East and West

violet commend themselves above the rest.
Purple and white fringed orchids have seemed
perhaps the loveliest creations of the floral
world; while the yellow cypripedium has
more of the enchantment of the woods than
any other flower, not excepting wild ginger—
a woodsy plant—and clintonia, fraught with
sylvan associations. Fringed gentians and
cardinal lobelias are two Eastern flowers one
can no more describe than one can carry
them away from their native haunts. There
is a loss in describing as there is a loss in
picking them. Each has an atmosphere—
an aura—of its own; each exerts its own
peculiar influence upon the sensitive eye.
Goldenrod and asters are flowers whose effect
depends more upon mass, yet when associated
with the seashore, as upon the weathered
granite of Cape Ann, they are among the
most potent influences in the floral world.
Near the Pacific my association is with
plants quite different, yet so subtle is the
difference and so subtle the reasons for it,
that I can by no means explain it. They
yield different impressions, in short, as do
our various acquaintances and friends, and
it is not always easy to say why. Among the
first is the mariposa, of which there are

Good Families 253

many species, but how much my feeling for
this lily is due to the beauty of the mariposa
itself, and how much to an association with
the flower begun in childhood, it would be
difficult to say. Of the genus Calochortus
none are more beautiful than the yellow
globe tulip and the orange-red mariposa.
The cyclamen is a flower with which I have
less association and which therefore may stand
more on its own merits with me, and truly
it is a plant of great individual charm.
Eschscholtzias, wonderful in mass, are no
less beautiful in the individual, for this poppy
is a distinctive plant and few flowers are of
richer, more glowing hue. To me the cas-
tilleia is more than a splash of splendid colour
—it is the spirit of the West, of the mesas
and the arid ranges, rising from the desert
like phantom islands in an opal sea, of the
uninhabited miles, of the Wild. In Cali-
fornia and Arizona grows a little plant of the
poppy family called cream-cups which is one
of the daintiest of American wild flowers.
Its buds droop in graceful curves while the
expanded blossom raises its cream-coloured
petals to the sky, but it would be impossible
to say why the plant is more attractive than
a hundred others; it is simply that it has a

254 East and West

certain air about it, as have some women,
which distinguishes it from the rest. This
air of distinction, one of the pentstemons of
Arizona has in an eminent degree and every
part of the plant contributes—the form of
stem and leaf and their pale and rare shade
of green, quite as much as the flower itself.
Something in the whole make-up of the plant
sets it apart and distinguishes it, as a thorough-
bred animal proclaims itself different from
the common stock. You may find it, a single
stalk with its drooping raceme of scarlet
trumpets, standing alone upon a rough face
of lava, and so striking is the contrast of the
fragile and exquisite plant with the grim
rock, that you will pause and pronounce it
one of the most beautiful things in the garden.
In Arizona, no plant has impressed me as
having a more rare and lovely personality
than that pale sky-blue larkspur (D. azureum),
which is to the handsome but more com-
mon dark-blue delphiniums as a queen to her
subjects.

It is a gentle company the great garden
affords, with none of the vexations of human
society. We may sit us down in a clump
of violets or in a field of golden baeria and
find we have a host of little friends, all so

Good Families 255

beautiful, all so silent yet so strangely sym-
pathetic with our mood. We may rest be-
side a spring where the yellow mimulus
grows and that exquisitely delicate perfume
shall convey some corresponding impressions
by an ethereal medium. They are good
families who dwell in this garden; such
charms of colour and perfume; so lovable in
their unpretentiousness, their serenity, their
gentleness. What a solace is their society to
him who flees for an hour the mean little
world men make for themselves and finds
here at his feet one so tranquil, so full of
harmony, so wholly beautiful, where he
may rest and recreate himself. It is strange
to speak of ownership in connection with such
a garden, for they who most fully possess
it do so by such intangible means. They
possess it much as we possess our friends—
in this sense only. It is the heritage of the
American people, but by an unwritten law—
a law of the gods—it descends from generation
to generation to those alone who are able to
enjoy their inheritance; as a book belongs
not to him who owns, nor to him who reads
it merely, but rather to him who understands
and who loves it. =

CHAPTER XVIII
OLD FRIENDS AND NEW

» these glimpses of one corner and another
of our wild garden, it appears that not
the least part of our inheritance is in the
birds, and the enjoyment of birds, like the
enjoyment of people,is a matter of cultivation,
of sympathy and understanding. The study
of the bird in the open is comparable to con-
genial society; in the museum or the labora-
tory, to the dissecting-room. But we are
speaking of friends, and the word “study”
is an ill-advised, even abhorent term in this
connection. It will answer well enough for
rocks or for the lower orders, but if you are
“studying’’ birds, it is to be inferred that you
have no friends among them. ‘They are still

aborigines, or aliens or curiosities to you.
Birds become our friends by a process de-
pending almost wholly upon ourselves and
little if at all upon the bird, beyond the
part its personality—its family personality—
256 *

Old Friends and New 257

plays once for all in attracting us. We are
drawn to certain birds as to some people by
peculiarities of voice, manner, and appearance,
which appeal to us and which in the bird are,
of course, racial rather than individual. No
doubt our regard for our human friends is
less personal than we assume it to be. We
are largely attracted to men because they
are representatives of some spiritual, intellec-
tual, and physical type—a certain species of
mankind—which appeals to us as more admir-
able than others. However that may be, in
our relation to the birds there is an enormous
advantage, considering the instability of all
things, in this impersonal, this racial attrac-
tion. Every spring we greet the warblers
with that same thrill of pleasure and of sym-
pathetic interest, and we do not once stop
to consider that they may not be the same
individuals of ayearago. For it is the species
to whom we have given our friendship: not
certain individuals, but magnolias, parulas,
black-throated green, and blackburnians in
general. Once I have acquired a liking for
the species, every individual of that species
is my friend thenceforth, whether encoun-
tered in the Adirondacks or in the cypress
swamps of the South. The entire race of
17

258 East and West

magnolias, in short, is to me one magnolia,
and it is this one I meet wherever I may be;
this one I look for year after year and greet
with the same affection felt for his ancestor
twenty years ago.

Human friendships, alas, are fraught with
vicissitude and with change—one of the
saddest things of this life, which finds its
justification only in the stern necessities of
our spiritual evolution. We outgrow our
friends or they outgrow us. Those misun-
derstandings and disappointments which
make some cynical, some insincere, and fill
others with despair, do not disturb our sylvan
friendships. For the best part of my life—
assuredly the best—I have loved the song-
sparrow in his numerous embodiments, his
various reincarnations. He has been to me
the same song sparrow through all these
years, though my sympathy and understand-
ing have enlarged. So have I loved the
bluebird and the robin, the oriole and the
catbird. They have not changed but I have.
Just here, perhaps, is the greatest charm of
our companionship with birds; they hold us by
some subtle power to impressions and feelings
which they first aroused. They never grow
old; though all else slips into the sere and

Old Friends and New 259

yellow, they are ever young and sing the same
songs. Thus they keep alight the fire of
youth in us and bring back our poetic moods,
our early visions. When I come under the
spell of the bird’s song I am again that self
that listened last year—twenty years ago—
that self which has associated some vision of
spring with the bluebird’s warble descending
from the bleak sky, and felt the answering
thrill of a perennial quality in myself; which
has responded to the simple charm of the song
sparrow’s trill from the bare hedgerows, by
an exquisite consciousness of purity and sim-
plicity of its own; and has felt itself to be a
wandering minstrel with the oriole and with
the rose-breasted grosbeak, when each year
their song was heard again, recognising that
fugitive spirit of poesy and of song which
they embodied, to be its very own.

The personality of birds has always im-
pressed me: the fact that they have such
powers of expression and that there is so re-
markable a difference in their songs, in the
quality of tone, the manner of delivery, and
the significance of their voices. Some have so
much to express, somuch temperament in com-
parison with others. Some like the thrushes
are spiritual; others like the orioles and gros-

260 East and West

beaks, lyrical; others again, the thrashers and
mockingbirds, dramatic. What a vibrant
quality in some wren voices and in the song
of the cardinal. What wonderful quality in
the voices of certain warblers—poor little
songs—yet having the power to convey one
instantly out of the world of man, as upon a
magic carpet, into that sylvan and enchanted
world so different—thanks to Pan. What
sadness in the autumn note of the bluebird;
what sanity in the cheery call of the chickadee
in the winter woods; what untamed beauty
in the song of the ouzel! All have the gift
of expression; and expression implies some-
thing to express—feeling that is. As tohow
much they are conscious, if at all, we shall
never know. Some people will argue one
way and some another, to the end of time.
The fact remains that these birds are capa-
ble of arousing feeling in us by this show of
feeling in themselves, and this makes them
companionable.

That birds reveal family traits and are full
of little mannerisms, racial or tribal, increases
greatly the interest one feels in their society.
I look for evidences of bird nature in them, as
I look for that which betokens human nature
in men. As an indication of what I call per-

Old Friends and New 261

sonality in birds, see how the manner of
the wood thrush or the hermit accords with the
character of their songs, and how plainly the
voice of the kingbird agrees with his character.
Catbirds and chickadees express themselves
to me—their bird personality that is—quite
as plainly as some people do. They sing—or
say—just what I would expect them to.
But what they say is what all catbirds and all
chickadees sing, or say; it isa family look, a
family manner, a family speech.

When I go West and find the spurred towhee
scratching like his cousin the chewink, the
recognition of this family trait puts me on
easy footing with him at once. So the
mountain chickadee, the plumbeous gnat-
catcher, and the red-backed junco remind me
by their family peculiarities that I have seen
their Eastern cousins act or look the same
way a thousand times; and Palmer’s or the
crissal thrasher cause me to reflect when I
observe their mannerisms in singing and their
apparent affectations, what true thrasher
characteristics these are. Western gold-
finches and grosbeaks have not only the
family bill but the family idiosyncracies as
well, and how quickly the flycatchers, where-
ever you meet them, announce by their

262 East and West

table manners their family connection. Again,
how distinct from all others are the wren
personality and wren manners.

To go up and down the continent recog-
nising, comparing and enjoying birds in this
way is a resource which belongs, not to those
who merely study birds, but rather to those
who have the companionship of birds, and this
pleasant intercourse comes not from read-
ing human nature into their ways but—bird
nature: acquiring a sympathy for bird traits
and bird manners, a somewhat bird-like
nature perhaps. You must feel yourself on
the wing with the wild geese, or teetering on
the shore with the sandpiper; diving with the
grebe, or skulking through the marsh grass
with the rail. You must peer among the
leaves with the vireos, dart with the agile
redstart, and with the finches know the pecu-
liar satisfaction of scraping the bill on a twig.

In going from the eastern to the western
border of our estate we meet birds whose
family connections we may not readily recog-
nise, interesting personalities that impress
us at first as foreigners: the solitaires, ouzels,
phainopeplas, road-runners, bush-tits, and
wren-tits. A Western ornithologist, on the
other hand, going East for the first time would

Old Friends and New 263

hardly find any species which seemed alien
to him. This encounter with birds less
known to us in their connections is a cosmo-
politan element in our bird society, and one
which is greatly increased of course if we go
into Mexico, where we soon meet the parrots,
motmots, clarins, the anis, the xantus becards,
and a number of other strange birds.

It is certainly delightful to the outdoor
man of social mood to have friends both in
the East and in the West. Perhaps the old
friends are the best—indeed I think none
wholly supplant them in our affections, but
there is much to be said for new friends as
well, and we cannot take the old with us.
The possibility, too, of a new friend appearing
on the horizon is one of the jewels of this
life. When I return to the East in the spring,
it is with the assurance that I shall find the
hermit and the veery still my friends—my
very spiritual friends; the redeye and the
warbling vireos still the faithful companions
of the summer days; the oriole and the rose-
breasted grosbeak the minstrels who will
not let music and poetry die in me; the bob-
olink my merry comrade of the fields. Again,
when the bluebirds have sung their parting
warble, when the wild geese have sounded

264 East and West

their irresistible clarion, I go West to find the
thrashers singing on the mountains and to
hear in the ravines and from the temple-like
buttes that melting voice of the cafion wren
—to find myself among friends again.

Some birds like some people are destined
to be our friends, others, acquaintances
merely, lacking those qualities that fit them
to be companionable to us. What shy friend-
ship this is; how charmingly sylvan these
clandestine meetings with little birds. Much
of the charm of this society, of course, lies in
the fact that it 7s so shy and sylvan, but much
is due to the birds’ gift of expression. They
are a lovable race. Dwellers in an Eden
which has never been closed to them, in
their company we are permitted to enjoy
some of its pristine charm, if we can keep
ourselves and our self-assertiveness in the
background and become for the time merged
in the atmosphere of the bird world.

Fairies, you will remember, were fond of
children—perhaps because they were accepted
by them on their own terms. It is one of the
chief qualifications in virtue of which we re-
ceive the entrée to the society of the woods
that we should be little if at all aggressive,
assertive, important: that we should, be very

Old Friends and New 265

well-bred according to bird standards. Any
show of pomposity shuts the gate of Eden in
our faces—that magic door, imponderable,
yet stronger than adamant. We must learn
to slip into the bird world noiselessly as an
owl, leaving behind us all that is conspicuous
and man-like, assuming all that is shy and
bird-like. Then, and then only, are the lisp-
ing notes of the warblers flitting in the leafless
woods not an alien speech. In place of
stupid tourists we become like wise and ac-
complished travellers, speaking the idiom
of the country—even the dialect of the pro-
vince. They reveal themselves to us now
in the light of our understanding of bird
nature, and let it not be forgotten that this
bird world is a musical world, a fact which
must ever elevate it above any other sphere
of Nature that appeals to our interest and
sympathy.

Another element of bird life which lends it
a peculiar fascination is the migration, for
this dependence of the birds upon the seasons
serves to further link their lives with our .
own and to intimately relate them with those
states of mind and outward changes we
know as spring and summer and autumn.
To me, it would not be spring without the

266 East and West

appearance of the warblers—an event always
attended with some mystic significance as if
it were the expression of a feeling in Nature.
When suddenly the brooding silence is broken
by the trill of a pine warbler or by that quaint
woodsy speech of the black-throated green,
it is as if the oracle had spoken. The oracle
has spoken to some of us. That long-drawn
note of the meadowlark—if the fields could
speak at that season, what else would they
say? or how better could the swamp express
itself than in the on-ke-lee of the redwing?
Nor would it be autumn without that flit-
ting of soberly dressed birds, those furtive
snatches of song in which the ruby kinglet,
the solitary vireo, the parula warbler in-
dulge, which if they do not express any sad-
ness in the bird, seem at least to voice, as
if by intent, a vague sadness in us. The
gathering of the blackbird clans, the warble
of fugitive bluebirds, the rustling of leaves,
all speak of one event; and the arrival of
crossbills and siskins, of redpolls and snow-
buntings is as much an expression of winter as
were the former of autumn—a robust, wintry,
self-contained mood with no lament, no sad-
ness, no suggestion of parting.

In the West this migration is vertical as

Old Friends and New 267

well as continental and, strangely enough,
mankind in the South-West, particularly in
Mexico, has acquired the same habit and
migrates up and down the mountain slopes,
changing the climate with the altitude in a few
hours’ travel. The birds discovered this
long before it was known to man, even before
man himself was known. Flocks of birds
come down out of the mountains as the cold
weather appears and find a winter home in the
valleys, while spring takes them up into the
hills again to breed and to rear their young.

It is only natural that we should have our
particular friends among the birds; a matter
of the personal equation—of the bird’s and
ourown. It is unnatural, though quite usual,
to have no friends among them. This friend-
less state of some forlorn folk is one which
arouses in us a certain commiseration that
they should remain strangers in the land and
depart from it having missed so much that was
admirable. One who has enjoyed the society
of the best birds must feel some delicacy in
speaking of his friends, for the friendless or
unsocial, or those who have been denied the
entrée to bird society, might take umbrage at
this seeming boastfulness, this vaunting of
social advantage, and when he speaks of his

268 East and West

dear friends, the Thrushes, the Wrens, the
Orioles, the Grosbeaks, the Warblers, the
Sparrows, and the rest, look askance and be
inclined to wonder whether he really does
know all these fine birds or not. One newly
arrived in society may have misgivings—or
may not—when he refers to his friends among
the ‘‘best families”; but one who has long
moved in this atmosphere—who was born
in it—can hardly mistrust his right to speak
without restraint of his charming friends and
their life. If the birds—exclusive and re-
served as they are—admit one into their shy
society with all its traditions, it is not for
others to cavil.

My warbler friends are largely Eastern.
In the West, I have as yet only acquaintances
among the family, with the exception of
Audubon’s, the pileolated, and the painted
redstart which became my friends in Mexico.
In fact if I except the Western robin, the
spurred towhee, the golden-crowned sparrow,
the California jay, and the valley quail—birds
associated in my mind with a child’s world—
my old friends are all Eastern birds. My
Western friends have taken their place be-
side the Eastern and many have become in-
deed like old friends. Some, like the solitaire,

Old Friends and New 269

have sufficiently gained my admiration and
piqued my interest to inspire a hope that
they may become friends in time, while
other distinguished personages I have yet
to meet; and this anticipation will greatly
increase the pleasure when they are encoun-
tered. In the first enthusiasm for birds when
all are new, the relish of unexpected en-
counters is often enjoyed, but as the years
go on it becomes all too rare. Yet when the
ornithologist at last hears a bird song for
which he has waited for years, he feels young
again and knows it for one of the delectable
moments of life.

Among the birds nearest to me I count the
cafion wren, the Western meadowlark, the
Arizona cardinal, and those companionable
little birds the black phoebe and the vermil-
ion flycatcher. In the cafions of the Santa
Inez, in the rocky gorges and dry gulches of
Arizona, and the barrancas of western Mex-
ico down to the Isthmus, the cafion wren
and the black phoebe have been my constant
companions. True they change their sub-
specific name in the books, but they are the
same birds to me as I know them out of
doors—and that is the only way one ever
does know them. This phoebe is a quiet-

270 East and West

voiced, friendly, approachable little bird with
charming ways and an attractive personal-
ity, and though found in the wildest places,
seems not to reflect its environment but to be
a domestic creature. Often I have sat under
the great ahuehuetls in some lonely barranca
of southern Mexico, or in the sombre lava
gorges of Arizona, and this pretty bird has
played about me by the hour, pirouetting
in the air, if one may use the expression,
alighting on boulders, and uttering its gentle
note. Under the ahuehuetls I have found its
nest attached to the rock in phoebe fashion.
The cafion wren is a gnome—full of wren
conceits and whimsicalities—but with the
manners and the instincts of a gnome. His
tail is of burnished copper, his throat is
white, and as he bobs about on the edge of a
cliff you have a gleam of copper-red, a gleam of
white, and then he throws back his head,
opens his bill, and there falls as it were a little
cascade of exquisite pearls—each one perfect
—tricochetting from ledge to ledge, down,
down, down. The falling pearls—the voice
that would melt a heart of stone—that is the
cafion wren.

In the deep blue sky of the desert the red
flycatcher gleams like a marvellous ruby.

‘‘ In the sombre lava gorges of Arizona.”

Old Friends and New 271

Dressed much like our scarlet tanager, the
bird is even more conspicuous because of his
flycatcher habits—his aerial sorties and ma-
noeuvres. The male has a charming way also
of remaining poised on fluttering wings like
the Maryland yellowthroat and the upland
plover, mounting higher and higher and
delivering his silvery bubbling phrase again
and again above the cornfields or the desert.
This song is a sweet jingling performance un-
usual for a flycatcher, which commends itself
largely by reason of the free and spontaneous
manner in which it is sung. There is some-
thing peculiarly appealing about a bird sing-
ing on the wing, appearing as it does an
embodiment of freedom and of melody, a
lovely symbol in the air, that inspires and
lifts up the heavy heart chained to earth and
to dull care.

Resembling his Eastern congener, the
Arizona cardinal is a splendid personality,
with a ringing melodious voice. Cardinal
and phainopepla have both a distinguished
appearance and bearing, like exceedingly
well-born and well-bred people. In central
Arizona the cardinal is a- familiar bird,
singing about the cottonwoods and the palo
verdes and always impressing one with his

272 East and West

thoroughbred look and the beauty of his
person. My friend the Western meadowlark
is a bird apart—a voice—mysterious and
beautiful, rising from the ground but speak-
ing ever of the sky: not a song so much as a
voice—one not to be described, but once
heard, never to be forgotten.

It is good to have friends among the birds.
They redeem the dreariest waste. Where-
ever they are, there are we at home. When
I stroll in Central Park and encounter a car-
dinal, I see again the cotton fields and cy-
press swamp. The junco hopping under the
bushes on the lawn transports me to the
clearings in the dim spruce woods where I
have often looked for its nest; and when the
little winter wren comes creeping mouselike,
the spirit of the wild descends upon me then
and there as if I had had a whiff of balsam,
and I am whisked away on the wings of fancy
into the mountain solitudes where we have
so long been kindred spirits.

The society of American birds, as I have
said, is a part of our inheritance; how large a
part, depends upon our own companionable
qualities, our capacity for making sylvan
friends. Every pond shore, meadow, and
pasture in our continental garden holds de-

Old Friends and New 273

lightful possibilities. We need not walk in
dull company unless we so elect. It gives
one a comfortable homelike feeling, a kinship
with the open, to go west to the Rocky Moun-
tains and find the trees and flowers familiar
and friendly and the birds old cronies, and to
move on to Arizona or California and still
be in an outdoor company among whom we
may count some friends. ‘To know these good
American families of plants, too, gives one a
pervading sense of satisfaction as of a certain
social well-being. Overhead and underfoot
are those whose history, whose connections,
and whose charms are known to us. We
ourselves become of more account in virtue
of the number and distinction of our friends—
our wild friends.

‘A garden is a lovesome thing—God wot,”
—and what a garden is this that has de-
scended to us. How many nooks and corners
it has; what streams to go a-fishing in; what
deserts to go a-dreaming in; and what dim
silent forests in which to walk with the Owner
of the garden.

18

INDEX

A

Acacia, 15

Adirondacks, 8, 16, 42, 43, 55
Agave, 223

Ahuehuetls of Mexico, 133
Alder, 4, 17, 35, 40, 145
Alligator, 100

Alpine, 1

Andromeda, 52
Anemones, 10, 34
Antelope, 21

Ants, red, 145, 146
Arbutus, 4
Arctostaphylos, 15
Arizona, 3, 6, 7, 10

Ash, 55

Ash, white, 97, 98
Asplenium, 35

Aster, 10, 40

Astragalus, 15

Atlantic, 15, 16
Audibertia, 15, 122, 124, 127
Autumn, 4, 5

Avifauna, 3

B
Baeria, golden, 218
Balsam, 72
Barberry, 32

Barnacles, 27

Bartrami , 35
Bayberry, 15, 32, 33, 38
Beavets, 54
Beech, 16, 72, 74, 244
Bees, 6, 9, 107

Bees, leaf cutter, 106

Birch, 4, 72, 74, 75
Birchbark, 35

Birch, black, 16, 31, 55

Birch, white, 16, 242

Birch, yellow, 16, 51, 55

Bison, 21

Blackburnian warbler, 43, 76

Blacktail, 18

Bloodroot, 4, 37

Blueberry, 33

Bluebirds, 4, 10, 37, 117

Bluetail, 20

Bluets, 10

Bobolink, 13, 14, 91, 94, 107,
110

Borage, 15, 250

Boulders, 25, 30, 31

Box turtle, 72

Brodiza, 124, 217

Bryum, 35

Buckthorn, 15, 250

Bunchberry, 36

Bush-tits, 11, 137, 146

Butternut, 72

Buzzards, 104

Cc

Cacti, 8, 15, 16, 17, 242,247

Cacti, barrel, 219

Calochortus, 15

Canada, 73

Canandaigua, 87, 114

Cajfions, 5

Cape Ann, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29,
30, 31, 37, 38, 40

Carboniferous Age, 101

Cardinal flower, 69

Cardinals, 11, 14

Cardinals, Arizona, 190, 271

Cassandra, 35

Castilleia, 15

275

276

Catbird, 37, 107
Catskills, 8, 13, 16, 43, 71, 72,

73
Catsclaw, 225
Ceanothus, 15, 91, 144, 147 153
Ceanothus, blue, 119, 120
Ceanothus, white, 119
Celandine, 91
Chollos, 219
Champlain, 45
Chaparral, 120
Chat, 37, 72
Cherry, 55
Cherry, holly leaved, 120
Chestnut, 12, 16, 43, 88
Chewink, 11, 13, 37, 72, 201
Chickadees, 10, 30, 40
Cladonias, 75
Clematis, 123
Clethra, 35
Clintonia, 36, 69, 98
Coal Age, 76
Colinsia, 249, 252
Coltsfoot, 4, 116
Columbine, 38 |
Composite, 15
Conifers, 240, 242
Convolvulus, 15
Cottontail, 72
Cottonwoods, 6, 17
Coyote, 19, 226
Cranberry, 35
Cream-cups, 253
Creosote bush, 223, 247
Crossbills, 40, 86
Crowfoot, 15, 249
Crustaceans, 26
Cucumber vine, 123
Currant, 5, 119
Cyclamen, 147
Cypress, 101, 102
Cypress, bald, 241
Cypress knees, 97, 98
Cypress Swamp, 110
Cypripedium, yellow, 116

D

Dalea, 223

Index

Dandelions, 34

Deer, 50

Deserts, 1, 2,9

Devonian Sea, 75

Diabase, 27

Dicentra, 4

Dogtown, 24, 25, 29, 30, 33,

39
Dogwood, 88, 91
Doves, 167
Dry creek beds, 6
Dryopteris, 35
Dry season, 7

E

East, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6,9, 13, 14
Egret, 21

Elms, 9, 16

Encelia, 218, 247
Escobita, 218

F

Fauna, 19, 26

Ferns, 8, 77, 85

Fields, 2, 9, 107

Figwort, 15, 120

Finches, purple, 11

Fisher folk, 23, 26

Flickers, 11.

Flickers, redshafted, 138, 146
Floating heart, 64

Flora, 2, 8, 26

Flowers, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 15, 16
Flycatcher, ash-throated, 226
Flycatcher, crested, 38
Flycatcher, red, 226, 270
Flycatcher, vermilion, 13
Forests, I, 9, 21

G

Gambrel’s partridge, 188
Gannett’s, Hill, 114
Gentians, 68, 69

Gerardia, 38

Gilia, 15

Gila Monster, 19, 229, 230

Index

Ginger, wild, 116, 252
Glacial period, 6

Glacier, 24, 25
Gnatcatcher, 10, 103
Gnatcatcher, Western, 138
Goldenrod, ro, 40
Goldfinches, 10
Goldfinches, Western, 261
Gooseberry, 5, 120, 121, 144
Grosbeak, 45, 46

Grosbeak, black-headed, 12
Grosbeak, pine, 40
Grosbeak, rose-breasted, 12
Ground nut, 91

Grouse, 49

Grouse, ruffed, 86
Guerrero, 7

Guide boat, 58, 59

Guides, 59

Gum, 97, 98, 102

H

Halibut Point, 24

Hardhack, 34

Hardwoods, 16

Hare, 72

Heath, 15, 238

Hellebore, 74

Hemlock, 16, 51

Hepatica, 4, 37, 116

Herbaria, 21

Hermit, Hermit thrush, 10, 13,
14, 37) 49) 72

Herring, 102

Hickory, 72, 242

High Peak, 73, 85

Holly, 34, 103

Holly Mountain, 68, 69

Houstonia, 34, 38

Huckleberry, 39

Hudson, 72, 73

Humming-birds, 11

Humming-birds,black-chinned,

202
Hunter’s Peak, 85
Hyla, 4
Hypnum, 35

277

I

Indian pipes, 82
Tronweed, 10

J

Jackrabbit, 19, 187, 226
Jays, 16

Jays, California, 138
Juncos, 10, 77

Juniper, 31

K

Kaaterskill, 71

Kelp, 26

Kingbirds, 138

Kingbirds, Arkansas, 226
Kingfisher, 85

Kinglet, pine, 40

Kinglet, ruby-crowned, 10, 14
Kinglet, Western, 138

L

Larch, 55

Lark, horned, 109

Lark, meadow, 107, 109
Larkspur, 151, 218, 254
Laurel, 91, 119

Lazuli bunting, 226
Lichens, 8, 35

Lily, 15, 65, 68

Limpets, 27

Live oak, 17, 134, 135, 246
Lizards, 19

Lizards, alligator, 20
Lobelia, 65

Locoweed, 15

Long Island, 13, 88
Long Lake, 46, 51, 52, 62
Loon, 49

Lotus, 33, 104

Lupine, 15

Lupine region, 249

278

M

Madrofias, 131

Magnolia, 43, 76

Malabar Hill, 97

Mallow, 13, 250

Manzanita, 15, 122, 127, 247
Maple, 6, 12

Maple, mountain, 85

Maple, red, 4, 16, 31, 35, 39
Maple, sugar, 16, 74
Massachusetts, 3
Meadow-lark, 4, 10, 12, 107,

109
Meadow-lark, Western, 272
Meadowsweet, 35
Medeola, 82
Mesquite, 15, 225
Mexico, 6, 7, 8, 18
Migration, 1, 4, 15, 265
Migratory instinct, 151
Milkweed, 10, 15
Mink, 38
Mint, 15
Mitchella, 36
Mnium, 35
Moccasins, 100
Mocking-bird, 10, 14, 226
Molluscs, 26
Monkey-flower, 249
Moosewood, 85
Morelos, 7
Mosses, 8

N

Nature, 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 14
Nemophilas, 250

New England, 2, 15, 20
New Mexico, 7

New York, 2, 3, 16, 20
Nightshade, 15, 144
North Woods, 42, 43
Nuthatch, 36

Oo

Oak, 6, 72
Oak, red, 16

Index

Oak, scarlet, 16

Oak, white 16, 88
Ocotilla, 175, 219, 247
Onoclea, 35

Onteora, 71

Onteora Mountain, 82
Orchards, 9, 10, 11
Orchids, 251

Orchis, 35, 83

Oriole, 10, 11, 137
Oriole, Arizona, 13
Oriole, Baltimore, 13
Oriole, Bullock's, 13
Oriole, hooded, 226
Oriole, Scott's, 13, 226
Osmunda, 35, 39
Ouzel, 11, 13, 14

_ Ovenbird, 37, 38, 77

Owl, 49
P

Pacific, 13, 15
Pacific Slope, 5, 6, 14, 42

. Palo verde, 224

Pansy, yellow, 151
Parkinsonia, 224
Parnassus, 71
Parsnips, 65
Pastures, 2, 9, 15
Pea, 15

Pea family, 242
Pedata, 91
Pentstemon, 15, 249, 254
Pentstemon, red, 217
Peony, 124

Pewee, 13, 37, 77

Phacelia, 15, 149, 151, 250

Phainopepla, 11, 170
Pheasant, 110

Phlox, 16, 250
Phoebes, 11, 269, 270
Pheebes, black, 226
Phoebes, Say’s, 13, 226
Pickerel, 64

Pignut, 16

Pine, sugar, 241

Pine, Western, 17
Pine, white, 16, 55, 241

Index

Pink, 15

Pinxter, 91
Pitcher-plant, 35
Plants, aquatic, 65
Plover, 110
Pogonia, 36

Pond weed, 64
Poppy, 120, 250
Porcupine, 49
Prosopis, 15

R

Rainy season, 7
Ranges, 2

Raquette Lake, 44, 51
Raquette River, 52
Rattlesnakes, 19, 166
Red algz, 26

Red cedar, 31
Redstart, 37, 38, 226
Redwings, 4,14
Reptiles, 19
Rhododendrons, 91
Road-runners, 202
Robin, 10, 13, 37
Robin, Western, 235
Rockweed, 26, 27, 28
Rock wren, II
Romanzoffia, 148
Rose, 15

Roses, wild, 38
Roundtop, 73
Ruby-crowned kinglet, 10, 14

S

Sage, black, 122

Sage, white, 122
Sagittarius, 65
Saguaro, 174, 219
Salt River Valley, 175
Sandpinks, 91

Santa Barbara, 7, 8
Santa Inez, 8, 130
Sapsucker, 79, 80
Sargasso Seas, 64
Saxifrage, 4, 15, 38, 145

279

Scarlet oak, 6

Scrub oak, 120

Sea, 7, 23, 25, 28, 29
Sea-anemone, 27
Sea-lettuce, 26, 27
Sea-urchins, 27
Seaweed, 27

Sequoia, 17

Serpent, 101

Shad, 102

Shadbush 34, 39, 45, 91
Shellbark, 16

Sierra Madre, 7

Sierra Nevada, 6, 7
Sierras, 241

Skunk, 49, 228, 229
Snakes, corral, 228
Snakes, water, 100
Snowbirds, 86
Snowplant, 167
Solitaire, 11, 13

Song, 12, 13, 14

Song birds, 21
South-Eastern States, 96
Southern California, 4, 7, 17,

19
South-West, 15, 59
Spaniards, 8
Sparrows, 10, 13, 107, 190
Sparrows, chipping, 10
Sparrows, golden-crowned, 138
Sparrows, grasshopper, 109
Sparrows, song, 10, 13, 38
Sparrows, vesper, 10, 107
Sphagnum, 35, 36, 74
Spring, 4, 5
Spring beauty, 37, 116
Spruce, 16, 72, 133, 240
Spurge, 15
Squam, 24
Squirrel, 49
Staghorn, 39
Starfish, 27
Stonecrop, 15
Sumac, 6, 34, 39, 74
Summer, 6, 7
Swallows, 11
Swamp, 14, 23, 24
Sweetfern, 15, 38

280

Swifts, 11
Sycamore, 17, 145

T

Tamarack, 101, 240

Tanager, 83

Tannersville, 74, 85

Thrasher, 11, 13, 14, 38, 72,

246
Thrasher, California, 138
Thrush, 10, 13, 37
Thrush, hermit, 49, 72
Thrush, water, 14, 49
Thrush, wood, 13, 14, 88, 93
Titmouse, 100, 152
Titmouse, plain, 13
Titmouse, tufted, 13, 37
Toad, horned, 20, 202
Torrential flows, 178
Towers of Silence, 97
Towhee, California, 138, 261
Towhee, cafion, 240
Towhee, greentailed, 11, 13
Towhee, spurred, II, 261, 268
Trail horse, 207
Trees, 16
Trees, leguminous, 250
Trillium, 83, 116
Truckee, 168
Turtle, 101

Vv

Veeries, 13, 14, 37, 49, 79, 80
Venus flytrap, 35:

Vermilion flycatcher, 13
Violets, Canada, 91

Violets, nightshade, 119
Vireos, II

Vireos, warbling, 72

Vireos, white-eyed, 72, 94
Vireos, yellow-throated, 37, 72
Vultures, 97

WwW

Wapiti, 21
Warbler, Audubon, 11, 138

Index

Warbler, bay-breasted, 43
Warbler, black and white, 37,

43
Warbler, blackcap, 11
Warbler, black-throated blue,

43, 76
Warbler, black-throated green,
36, 37,43
Warbler, canadian, 37
Warbler, chestnut, 76
Warbler, mourning, 43
Warbler, myrtle, 11
Warbler, pileolated, 11
Warbler, yellow, 37, 106
Warblers, 4, 43, 44, 69, 265
Waterleaf 15, 16, 250
Water lilies, 64
Water target, 64
West, 1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 13
Western Mexico, 8
Whelk, 27
Whiptail, 20
Wickenburg, 173
Wilderness, 46, 59, 60, 61
Winterberry, 35
Withe-rod, 68
Woodpeckers, 50, 138
Woodpeckers, California, 38,
140, 152
Wren, cactus, 11, 190, 220, 226
Wren, cafion, II, 226, 270
Wren, Carolina, 15, 94, 102,
104, 110, 152
Wren, house, 37, 91, 94
Wren, Parkman’s, 11
Wren, rock, 11
Wrens, 9, II, 14, 47, 49, 72
Wren-tits, 11, 137, 146

Y

Yellowthroat, 78
Yucca, 15, 32, 223

Z
Zones, I

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An Interpretation of the Well
Rounded Life

“A collection of exceedingly delightful essays by an author
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Mexican Trails

A Record of Travel in Mexico, 1904-=
1907, and a Glimpse at the Life of
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Mr. Kirkham is gifted with descriptive powers of a high
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literature dealing with a fascinating land.— Brooklyn Eagle.

He did not view the country from the car window, but as
a wanderer over its mountains and plateaus, from the Texan
border to the Isthmus, and from one ocean to the other.—
New York Times.

He has seen with his own eyes; he has felt the witchery
of the place through his own senses: he here reports what he
has seen and heard and felt.—Mew York Herald.

There are passages in Mexican Trails so irresistibly
funny that only the hopeless misanthrope will be able to
refrain from a hearty laugh; and there are other passages in
which the author has described scenes characteristic or charm-
ing with a deftness of word-painting and a grace of diction
worthy of enthusiastic praise.—Providence Fournal,

The author is not only an excellent observer, but is also
a poet in his descriptions, The book is quite as entertaining

as literature as for the great fund of information it contains,—
St. Louis Post Despatch,

He writes pleasantly and with a distinct gift for rendering
vivid pictorial effects with a genuine touch of poetic feeling
and sentiment. . . . In brief Mr. Kirkham’s book may
be read with much pleasure and profit.— Boston Herald,

If one may not go to Mexico himself, the next best thing
is to sit down with Mr. Kirkham’s book and give orders for
no disturbance till one has strolled to heart’s content among
picturesque places whither the author can so delightfully
lead.—Louisville Courier Journal,

A pleasant departure from the ordinary book of travels;
Mexican Trails carries the reader into all sorts of by-paths
and out-of-the-way places.—San Francisco Chronicle,

The pictures drawn are not snapshots from a car window.
They show the sympathetic touch of an artist, There is
much of the dreamy style of Lafcadio Hearn.—Chicago Even-
ing Post.

No traveller in Mexico can consider the preparations for
the trip quite complete unless they include a reading of
Mexican Trails.—Evening News, Newark,

He is a charming companion. Hesees all that is beauti-
ful, and that he is invited to look at, with an artist’s appreci-
ation.— Hartford Courant.

Mr. Kirkham, already an author of experience in other
fields, now gives a charming picture of Mexico. He does not
attempt to instruct ; the book is an impressionistic painting,
full of the atmosphere and color of the real Mexico—the
Mexico of the Indian trails. . . . Mr. Kirkham has
traversed many miles of territory still untouched by modern
civilization, and his pictures of Indian life are full of feeling
and pathos, relieved by touches of humor. . . . The
narrative is refreshingly free from statistics and chapters on
the financial resources of the country and the political situa-
tion. As an artist is said to catch the expression of his model,
so Mr. Kirkham has succeeded in portraying the individuality,
the elusive spirit of Mexico.—Mew York Evening Post,

The Philosophy of Self-Help

An Application of Practical Psychology
to Daily Life

Unlike some books on Psychology, this keeps to the line
of thought marked out for it in the introduction, The author
quite surprises you by revealing yourself to yourself so clearly.

- Before you have finished the book you have lost
sight of all except yourself and your kinship with your author.
. » . And the charm and fascination does not die with the
last chapter. For again and again you turn back to this
chapter or that and read it once more.— Boston Transcript.

‘*New Thought” has suffered so much from the bad
English and philosophic obtuseness of its exponents that one
is glad at last to find a book written not only in good English
but also with a precision of thought, a sequence of ideas that
are understandable and answerable. Mr. Kirkham expounds
a practical philosophy, a popular philosophy. Let us know
the truth, because it will keep us well and sane.—Mew York
Times.

Mr. Kirkham’s work is distinguished by its sanity, its
vigorous logic, and its directness and clarity of thought.—
Chicago Inter-Ocean.

‘*The Philosophy of Self-Help ” is the most uplifting and
helpful book of its kind which we have had this season.—
Baltimore News,

The book will make its appeal especially to such as feel
the need of a clear and concise practical presentation of a true
mental science, —Louisville Times,

The ‘‘sweet reasonableness” and ‘‘ sanctified common-
sense" of the author’s view-point, added to his high aim,
abundant knowledge, and admirable vigor and lucidity of
style, should give his book a wide field of influence.—Chicago
Record-Herald,

Certainly any sincere seeker after aid in living a happier
and more effective life may find it here. The simplicity of his
statements and the nature of the ideals presented make direct
appeal to the inquirer.— Detroit Free Press,

Mr. Kirkham has succeeded admirably in incorporating
in his book the theories of the best psychologists and the
latest discoveries of the powers of the mind, arranging his
facts logically and clearly so that they appear with a new
force. —Columbus Fournal,

The book occupies the middle ground between the fad-
dists, who go to all extremes in their advocacy of mental
culture to secure physical health, and those who care nothing
for these things, The doctrine that he teaches is mainly that
of self-reliance, and that is the most important doctrine that
can be taught to the weaklings and faddists of our time.— The
Christian Register.

Mr. Kirkham has applied philosophy to life in a helpful
and delightful way. He has a good philosophy and a good
view of life, and they come together most satisfactorily in
this book, which any one can read and enjoy.— Yournal of
Education, Boston.

A work of its soundness and simplicity is certain to find
its audience everywhere —Chicago Tribune.

His discussion has the merit of presenting practical truth
in a fashion that interests the reader while it appeals to the
common-sense. The book is an unusually clear and con-
vincing study of an interesting subject.— Brooklyn Eagle,

Stanton Davis Kirkham, hitherto known only as an
apostle of the beautiful, has written a book which should
place him high among the world’s best philosophers.— San
Francisco Chronicle,

His doctrine may be too Spartan for the weakling and
the milksop, but it is the kind that makes the man. It is a
doctrine of self-reliance as opposed to the theological dogma
of relying upon another to save us from the effects of sin, and
the medical dogma of relying upon a prescription to free us
from the effects of self-indulgence, wrong-thinking, or defects
of character, There is much common sense in Mr, Kirkham’s
theories and he has written a healthy and helpful book.—
Edinsurgh Scotsman,

Scientific, though free from technicalities. —Spring field
Republican,

The Ministry of Beauty

Treated in a bold and confident way, yet with clearness
of vision and vigor of expression,

His essays are notable for a fearless optimism that is not
only stimulating but convincing.—Boston Transcript.

It is a book that will give health and comfort to many
people.—Boston Times.

Mr. Kirkham has stated old truths in a singularly attrac-
tive and winsome form, and it would be hard to speak too
much in praise of his gentle insistence on the pursuit of the
beautiful as the royal road to individual evolution and the
peace that it brings.—Sax Francisco Argonaut,

An exceedingly helpful volume.— Boston Globe.

The author writes very well; he has evidently thought
and read seriously. He reveals a sincere sympathy for the
ideals he prescribes for others and an ardent response to the
loveliness of nature which he maintains will lead to the higher
beauty of the things of the spirit.—LZouisuille Courier
Journal,

The author says many true and inspiring things and says
them with a brilliancy that reminds one strongly of Emerson,
—Chicago Record-Herald,

Some people are going to get a deal of enjoyment out of
this book: others there be who will look and wonder why it
was ever written. Those who dip into it and get the habit
will find it possessing the power to hold.— Denver Republican,

The literature of reflection has an addition of considera-
ble merit in the ‘‘ Ministry of Beauty.”— Rochester Herald,

It is a book that you can carelessly place on your parlor
table with the comforting conviction that any one turning its
pages will find it serviceable, and sure to teach good to our
kind.—Portland Oregonian.

The style is brilliant as well as poetical, and has the touch
of delicate humor which so refreshingly removes all sense of
morbidity when one is thinking seriously and feeling deeply,
—Portland Press,

Where Dwells the Soul Serene

The book is full of quotable passages and it is worth
careful reading by those who look on life as something better
than the pursuit of money or pleasure. — Sax Francisco
Chronicle.

The volume is full of hope and strength for those who
accept its teachings. It ought to carry inspiration to many
world—weary people.— Zoledo Blade.

Very much of inspiration is to be gotten from pages like
these. The author has evidently read widely, pondered
deeply, and that he is able to think somewhat originally and
write exceedingly well his readers will readily grant.—Zoston
Budget,

The style in which this unpretending book is written has
a touch of Emerson about it—sometimes a glimpse of Ruskin.
—Minneapolis Times.

His thoughts issue from him with much imaginative
freshness and frequent strength. Add to this a considerable
gift of simplicity and management of language, and it is not
too much to say that written sixty years earlier this work
might have made its author renowned.— Baltimore Sun.

The book is written with all the winning persuasion of
knowledge; and its perusal is a charm and an inspiration.—
San Francisco Argonaut,

The world will certainly be better for the uplifting, cour-
ageous prose-songs of this master optimist. —Over land Monthly.

It is pleasantly written, abounds in evidences'of intelligent
travel and of earnest reflection, and is rich in human sym-
pathy.—Pacifie Unitarian,

Says many wise and true things in a lucid style.—Hartford
Courant,

A thoughtful, useful volume.—Boston Times,

A book that gladdens the heart with its wealth of good
tidings—tidings that tell how glorious is the universe, how
grand a destiny has man, how really is his consciousness be~
ginning to ripen so that the goodness of it all entirely banishes
the host of small evils that have seemed so pervasive and so
real for so long. And these tidings are told in a way that re-
veals the philosopher, the poet whose nature has opened to
Nature’s God and to whom experience has been a rare mel-
lower of faculty and sharpener of sense.—Boston Ideas,

In the Open

Intimate Studies and Appreciations
of Nature

A nature book of such unusual literary charm that it
deserves to be ranked well above most of the more homely
out-of-door studies of recent years.— Mew York Times.

Mr. Kirkham evidently knows his ornithology, and with
no uncertain pen writes of birds with the sympathy of a poet
and a bird-lover.—F rank Chapman in Bird Lore,

No other American naturalist, unless it be Thoreau, has
ever quite surpassed this writer in sensitive register of nature’s
myriad moods.—Chicago Illustrated Review.

He loves nature as much as Thoreau, and he studies her
ways as closely as W. H. Gibson did. The essaysare delight-
ful.— Buffalo Express.

Through intimate companionship he reaches a power of
delicate characterization unique even among trained nature-
lovers. His readers will often pay him the subtle compli-
ment of exclaiming, ‘‘ That is just what I have thought.”—
The Dial.

To read these essays is to wish yourself in the open.—
New York Herald.

This is not only a very beautiful book, but one of fasci-
nating interest as well.— Rochester Herald,

He will care for Jn The Open to whose ears the cry of
the wild goose is no alien sound.—Baltimore News.

Few more attractive books of nature observations have
appeared.—Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Interesting not only from its contents but as a fine
example of the printer’s art.— Springfield Republican,

In The Open is a continuous delight. To the reader who
has lived in the country it isa revelation. It makes him see
things in a new way,—San Francisco Examiner,

He is a very shrewd observer of animals and birds and he
has the literary faculty in high degree, so that he is able to
make the reader feel the charm of the pictures of mountain
and forest and sea that he presents. — San Francisco Chronicle,

He knows bird ways and bee ways, the democratic code
of the ant, poetry of weeds, the philosophy of stones and the
song of laughing waters. All seasons are known to him and
all latitudes, as well as a style Emersonian in its elusive
ie In The Open is a rare book.— Pittsburg Gazette-

ines.