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BURNHAM FUND Cornell University Libra “Tin Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924024543948 IN GODS OUT-OF DOORS THE WORKS OF WILLIAM A. QUAYLE “THE. POET'S POET AND OTHER ESSAYS” “A HERO AND SOME OTHER FOLK' “A TUDY IN CURRENT SOCIAL THEORIES” “THE, BLESSED: LIFE?” “IN GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS” AUTUMN LEAVES DOORS CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND GRAHAM | NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY JENNINGS & PYE PRELUDE YRANKLY, little is to be anticipated from the Author of this book. He is far from being a specialist. He is not entomologist nor botanist nor ornitholo- gist. He confesses to knowing which end of a flower the root grows on and but little more. He purposes writing because he loves God's Out-of-Doors. The blue sky touches him to sadness, like reading a letter from one much loved and long dead; and the shadows in quiet water affect him like a ¢ prayer. The author's wish is to people other ( A hearts with love of flower and woodland path es and drifting cloud and dimming light and moonlit distance and_ starlight and voices of bird and wind and cadence of the rainfall and the storm, and to make men and women more the lovers of this bewildering world fashioned in loveliness by the artist hand of God. And beyond all this, he would be glad to bring them into fellowship and love with God, which is the poesy and eloquence of life. WILLIAM A. QUAYLE The photographs interpretive of Nature in this book are by Mr. George N. Jennings, Mrs. Jacoby, Mr. J.F. Earhart, Mr. Wm. Simpkinson, Mr. Roy Holtz, Mr. Charles C. Woods, Mr. Charles Schurman, and Mr. Lare: but the great majority are by Dr. Charles S. Parmenter; while the drawings are by Margaret Robbins. PLACES AND THINGS IN GOD'S: OUT-OF DOORS HERE MADE MENTION OF In God's Out-of-Doors, - - = 3 2 On Seeing, - “ 7 = a fs - f When Spring Comes Home, - - S = 7 Winter Trees, - 2 = = = z ‘ Golden Rod, - = a 2 x ; 3 ! Go A-Fishing, — - = e : 5 P é The Goings of the Winds, ~ “ Z : = The Falls of St. Croix, - - = _ = . When Autumn Fades, - 7 3 = x ws A Walk Along a Railroad in June, - = = = The Windings of a Stream, - - - a Four Seasons=One Year, = - s : = On Winter Panes, = z 4 m S ie Walking to My Farm, - - - - My Farm, - - s - ee = s Gloaming, - = = = a es : 2 Good-Night, = 2 “ 2 4 : 5 4 FLAGS, - LILACS, - - - PEACH BLOSSOMS, - APPLE BLOSSOMS, GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS, SUNSET, - - WHERE WIND FLOWERS BLOOM, POND LILIES, - - - THE HAWTHORN WITH ITS BLOOM OF SNOW, EMPTY, - - - - A SPRIG OF WILD CRAB APPLE, A BLACKBERRY BOW OF PROMISE, A WOODLAND POOL OF DOGTOOTH VIOLETS, ON AUTUMN HILLSIDES, WHERE MEADOW LARKS SING, A TOUCH OF SPRING, - WHEN SPRING COMES HOME, WINTER TREES, - - THE OAK, - - - DESOLATE, - - - BIRCH-TREES, - - BEECH-TREES, - - A HACKBERRY PILLAR, A WALNUT, - - - THE MAPLE, - - THE SPREADING ELM, - A WINTER COTTONWOOD, AUTUMN LEAVES (Frontispiece), SPRING IS WAKING (Title Page), ' A ROBIN REDBREAST IN HIS FAVORITE HAUNT, Lidl OF ILLUSTRATIONS Page THE SHELL-BARK HICKORY, - - - - - - - 58 MY WILLOW, ele gs ES I IY De SE FNP 3) THESCOCUSI ee) ee ee ee ee 60 SVGAMORES® cas sch ach ah ok Ge a ees THROUGH THE PINE WOODS, - - - 2 = = _ 67 GOLDEN-ROD, = : - a 2 = a = Z 2 = 69 WHERE GOLDEN-RODS BLOOM, - - - - - = = 7 WINTER GOLDEN-ROD, - - So), SNS THE OPEN ROAD, - = = 2 a = = = = & 77 LAYS SNARES LIKE AN ASSASSIN, - - - - - - = 79 THE SPOG. a CS CROSSING THE STREAM, - - - - - 2 S - S484 REEDS ALONG THE BANKS, - - - = = es = 85 ALONG THE STREAM, - - - - 2 Z = a = “87 TOP ROLE ING. = sk om = «, = oe oe See WHERE THE POLE WAS LOST, - - - - = 2 - 90 THE GOING OF THE WIND, - - - - 3 a = 2 93 WHERE ZEPHYRS TOUCH THE WILLOWS, - - = - - 95 THE WIND PUFFS THE SAIL, - = a - 2 = 2 98 THUNDERHEAD, - - - 2 s 7 5 = J w = 99 TeeURRS on «ee es eS 100 IN-BATTUE MOOD; << = o& <5 6 & © <4 -= 4:46] A PATCH OF CLOVER, G .« & & =» & & & = 4 ACSINGING BROOK. = © = «& & 2 & & «& ts THE CLD MIE. os 2s: =: e 4o & & & & = Tite WHENCE THE SPRINGS FLOW, - - 2 = 7 2 = 109: ATHEGRADLS ORNSTSGROIX: 3 ose, 4, = oe te 7 ana PINE TOPS EDGE THE SKY: =: 4 = 4 2 4 4 = 7 THE WALLED ROCKS. 2 2: 4 2 ££ 2 & 2 4 PINES RAGGED AS SPANISH SOLDIERS, - - 2 a = ad SUNRISE ON THE RIVER, : - - ¢ 7 = = = 116 THE OTMER SHORE, = -S,-2 <2 €6 2 & & & kaye THE MOANING TREES, = = © § & & & a & “Re WHEN AUTUMN FADES, - - - : E = s 2 120 THE SLEEPY-EYED CATTLE, = - - - - - s - 123 QUAIL, - - - - E 2 = = 2 Z = e 125 SWAMP GRASSES, - es = = = . 2 = > - 128 WHERE THE WATER LILIES GROW, - - - - 2 = 129 THE LEANING WILLOW, - - - - a é = = = 131 THE BRIDGE, - - = = 7 = = = = - Z 134 BLUE FLAGS, = = = = = z = 5 & z 2135} A SILVER STREAM, - - - 2 7 2 = = 5 137 BETWEEN HIGH BANKS, - - z = Es a 7 = = 189 IN WINDING WAYS, - - - - = = = Ss = 142 THROUGH LONG GRASSES, - “ = = = 2 5 = [43 LOITERING, - _ = = 7 S = & é = 2 144 THE BIRTHDAY OF THE YEAR, - = e - 7 2 - 145 SPRING, - - = E = = ‘ = e = E : 147 AN IVY PILLAR, - - - - = = 2 z & 5 150 SUMMER, - - - - 3 - 2 2 = = e 2 151 A SUMMER HARVEST, - - - - = = 2 2 = 153 AUTUMN, - - - - - - - = = a . 2 155 MY AUTUMN HILLSIDE, - 2 = = = = = s 2456 WINTER, - = = s - = : z . Si & 5 157 ON WINTER PANES, - - - 2 é x = 2 = S61 VIOLETS AND FLEUR-DE-LIS, - - - - = = = 162 THE CREEPING VINE, - - - IN THE COUNTRY QUIET, - - - THE ROAD TO MY FARM, - - - THE LOWING CATTLE, - - - = THE CLOUDS ARE BONNIE, - - SHADOWS, - - - - = - THE CROW'S NEST, - - - - THE BIRDS’ WINTER BED, - 2 z THE COMING HORSE, - - - THE TENANT PLOWS THE FIELD, - CORN SHOCKS PITCH THEIR TENTS, THE OWL, - - - = - FARM FRIENDS, - - - - - THE CROWS, - - - - - CRACKS NUTS AND SQUIRREL JOKES, THE GOLDEN DAYS OF HARVEST, - THE PLUM THICKET, - - - - A SPRAY OF APPLE BLOSSOMS, - - THE RAVINE, - - - - - THE SPRING, - - - = = - THE VILLAIN AND HIS FRIENDS, - JACK IN THE PULPIT, - - - - THE TENANT'S COW, - - - ” TALL TREES RIM THE CREST, - - LEAPLESS “TREES, - = - = MY WILD ROSE THICKET, = = = EVENING SHADOWS, - e = S GLOAMING, - - - = a THE POOL IN THE MEADOW, - - THE DAY IS DONE, - - 2 = IN GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS SUNSET / IN: GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS Oy hig OME people do not well know that God is out-of-doors. hy} Ys a | marvel at them. He is everywhere—‘‘though I take (, the wings of the morning'’—but so God is in dusks ; /% and dawns and twilights and noons, in doors and out, SY. at toil and on holidays, where deserts keep tryst with the moonlight, and where the wide sea can behold no shore —God is always wherever I have gone. He is in the little room where a baby learns its prayer from mother lips, kneeling, and with fingers inter- laced (God loves a sight like this), and in the church where congregations meet to wait on the Lord, and ‘‘worship in the beauty of holiness," and where in God's acre we bury our beloved out of the sight of our eyes dimmed with weeping —God is there; but he is also out where he has planted the wind flowers, and where the hawthorn stoops beneath its drifted snows fresh fallen, and where sweet eglantine blooms and the fringed gentian, and where the Indian pipe grows in the dusk of quiet woods, and where the maple flushes a little in the early spring and sows the ground beneath, where its shadows will soon shut sunlight out, with its own pink blos- soms, and where the sycamore stands in winter with its yellow apples like a jest of harvest for a tree so bulky, or where dodder plant, yellow as gold, steals saps from other plants to feed its splendors on, and where the sea-fowls float like a ghost of voices through the night skies, heard but unseen,—God is out-of-doors also God is everywhere. He made the Out-of-doors and loves it, and haunts it. as Jesus did the mountain and the sea. ‘Behold the lilies how they grow,” He said whose name is sweet; and so | will heed them; and, He said, “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?” True, sparrows are very plentiful and bickering, but I will look at them, for He made them and 19 pointed them out tome The trees where the birds nest and the birds that nest there. the shadows where the herds lie and the herds panting in the shadows with luminant eyes, buds that swell toward blossom- ing and blossoms in haste toward fruitage, white sea gull and robin redbreast with his song like the gurgle of laughter in a baby’s throat, high sea clifts leaning seaward and sea marshes through which the salt tides flood their crystal rivers, fern and oak and sweet sur- prise of mosses, rivulet and broad river, plunge of waterfall and placid stream where the A ROBIN REDBREAST IN HIS FAVORITE HAUNT—AN APPLE-TREE current is asleep, russet grove of scrub oak on winter hills, and the vivid greens of willows in fresh leaf in early springtime,—I will behold “them all." They belong in God's Out-of-doors; and God is out there looking his premises over. And if he will let me I will go with him. And as I look his way to ask him if I may go, he looking my way, before I say a word, says, ‘‘Come, let us go into my Out-of-doors;”’ and I am going with HIM into God's Out-of-doors. WHERE WIND FLOWERS BLOOM 21 ao) == Ne THE HAWTHORN WITH ITS BLOOM OF SNOW ON SEEING ” WOULD teverently add to the list of the on , to see.”” From my heart I bless such men and “7 women. All the good must pray to God, 7 «Help us to see.” The pity of this world is | : y not its limitations, but ours. Into the earth as into a king's golden goblet, God has poured all ' things which minister to an immortal and growing life. He has made a world pregnant with ideas. Vistas open as through a sunrise world to wide meadow lands beyond, where are sunshine and flowers and birds swaying in the tall grasses and sing- ing as they sway and flute notes of singing waters and odors of damp sod and blooming flowers, and a meadow lark's dulcet note and swaying shadows of the woods when rocked by south winds and billowy motion of the grass like some emerald sea with \ tide setting to shore. We are always on the way to God's open as we are always on our way to God if we , would have it so. Nothing of God's perishes, but endures. We have not gotten to the end, seeing God is forever holding something back. We can not bankrupt his opportunities nor provi- dences nor knowledge nor joy; and how good that is! Life is as a book whose best pages are as yet uncut, and a growing interest holds us, filling the mind as a flood tide the sinuous shore line Who knows what is hid under the open sky? Some birds build their nest in plain 27 i sight, and so hide their summer's house. The very openness was a hiding process. And under the wide, high sky, where hang bird and star and flower, and tree-twig with its bursting green,—under that open these beatitudes are hidden as ferns are hid under a sandstone ledge, deep in a wood and wet with a perpetual shower of dripping from the stony roof. So much to see, so little seen; that is our grief. How we have let sum- mers waste! Sparrows are not less provident. Nature's bounty runs to waste, or, what is worse, runs to weed. And a poet thought of this A WOODLAND POOL OF DOGTOOTH VIOLETS (and, as for that, what have not the poets thought of ? Some one of them has left a caress on every flower of the field as the winds do): “There are flowerets down in the valley low And over the mountain side, That were never praised by a human voice Nor by human eye descried; But sweet as the breath of the royal rose Is the perfume they exhale; And where they bloom and why they bloom The good Lord knoweth well."’ 28 ON AUTUMN HILLSIDES How this waste shames us since men and women have eyes for seeing! They are not blind. It were a mercy if one did not see that he were blind, because the blind are not blameworthy for their lack of sight. Deserts are flowerless; but this habitable world is a tangle of beauties, like the interlacing of the sunshine and the shadows in a sum- mer wood when sunlight rules the sky. A world full of loveliness, and we see it not! That sounds a requiem. ‘Having eyes, see not,”’ is our pathos. That word haunts me as mourners haunt the grave of their dear dead. May not a prophet’s prayer for his servant be a prayer uttered in our behalf as well? ‘I pray thee, open the young man’s eyes that he may see.’’ So many dusks and dawns nobody watches. | resent people running mad over carnivals and slighting the pageants of the morning and the night, worth a pil- grimage about our world to catch sight of once. One sunset in a decade; how thronged the way would be that led to its mountain! One in ff a week; who watches? Pity the blind who, having eyes, see not. Edward Rowland Sill tells a benignant angel standing near, “This is our earth—most friendly earth and fair,” and he was right. His praise was scant, not profuse. A mercy to the heart is the ubiquity of this loveliness. Some beauty abides everywhere. Deserts are flowerless; but night and moonlight on the far-stretching sands are so beautiful as fairly to stoop beneath their load. Beauty blooms unseen in shaded woodlands, in corn-rows; in field corners; on barbed wires, where wild vines tangle and blur the green of leaves with the surprise of flowers; on garbage heaps; among cinders; on rocky ledges; in quiet pools as lilies; in quiet skies as stars; purpling the hollows in remote mountains, and making the far hills blue as the far sea; voyaging as clouds; stationary as trees; wandering as a child with tangled hair and laughing face; vines visible, drooping over tumbling sheds or modest cottage or on stake-and-rider fences, shading windows of poverty; thrilling mornings with singing and soaring larks, and in 31 twilight with the vespers of the whip-poor-will; the plover's cry; a child's laughter and a child's face; a tair woman with her lovelit eyes; a boy with dirty and gleeful face; a leafless tree in a bare pasture; the distilled odors of night and dews,—so beauty blooms and such things are daily companionships; and we scarcely know that they are fair. Whata world Ruskin found in ‘The Stones of Venice!’’ and what rarer world would God show every one of us if we would let him! Health to body and soul is in this out-of-doors. A walk through dewy fields is to pass into an enchanted land. Sometimes a friend says, ‘‘See, a falling star.”’ We look and see no passing light, and he replies, ‘It has fallen.’’ No brief flight of falling star is comparable for loveliness, though I love its light, with what we wade knee-deep in as grasses growing in ravines, and we have no thought for it. Nature as God left it is so much, has such a pensive delight, and serves as evangel of a gospel of contentment and peace. They are not poor who see. Riches unspeakable are theirs. | would for myself and for others pray, ‘‘Teach me to see lest | be poor beyond the depths of poverty.”’ If | had might, as I would guide travelers to a mountain which swept eyes over a visionary scene, so would | guide to the vision of every day's delight. To go abroad is not our need. To stay at home and have a variant world report to us as if we were emperors, that is traveledness. God will leave nothing wholly commonplace He is against common things in that he exalts them into uncommon loveliness. A dead tree-trunk is overgrown with moss and vines; and tawny deserts have haunting dis- tances and solitudes enthralling to imagination; the homeliest face has a radiant light upon it when love goes by its door with loitering steps; winter has hospitalities genial as those of summer. All the year is _ hospitable if we are neighborly. “Flower in the crannied wall. I pluck you out of the crannies,” and hold you with a sense of joy not to be lightly told. Writing poetry is not our classic achievement after all. Seeing and feeling and being poetry is life's best work. Come, for “The swan on sitll St. Mary's lake Floats double, swan and shadow."* Lord, teach me to see! 32 WHEN SPRING COMES HOME WHEN * ) = M COS When Spri ms Comes home A ram her long pilgrimage, {| ~ Unwearied, and unmarked by When Spring comes home!— How wild with glee The laughing children and the flow€xs- 3 And singing birds and golden hours, And streams will be When Spring comes home! C | ~~ A ( 3} Howtee dull bank WD Shall Wake to smile with violets me) Forgetting Winter's sad regrets, And joys, to thank 5 gee t Spring sa aa ae And down long hills There babble like a happy child, And swirl and leap with Springtime wild The crystal rills, Sweet Spring come home! When Spring comes home! How passing sweet it is to know Our spirits like God's violets grow, When Spring comes home! And Spring comes home ! When life's long Winter faints and dies, There dawns upon our watching eyes zaven's Spring come home. WINTER TREES WINTER TREES ‘ .EAFLESS trees are, in ordinary thinking, a synonym } of desolation. They are nude, forlorn, forsaken, ' and are shivering through the winter as a beggar who thinks winter the necessary tribulation that preludes spring. | have not so learned the trees. Sympathy extended to them is, as | confidently believe, misapplied. Winter trees are not mendi- cants. The last thing they do is to ask alms. In them, as | have become acquainted with them, is a sturdy independence worthy of a Puritan colonist. # These words of Marianne Farningham.are part true, not wholly, though more nearly than the average estimate : “ Poverty-stricken and gaunt they stand, Dotted about o'er the hard brown land; Stripped of their beauty they moan and sigh To the pitiless breeze as it rushes by; Leafless, forsaken, of song bereft, They are like a life with no pleasure left : Beautiful even though stripped and bare, Are the trees that are planted everywhere; Winter's best beauty belongs to them, To their giant trunks and feathery stem, And they bravely stand in the silent wood, Like a patient life that is nobly good;”’ though I feel certain the trees will love her scarcely more because she wrote of them, unless they are touched, as all good lives should be, by thought given by the true hearts of women. Winter trees stand and endure—but they battle and enjoy and are beautiful as well. If I were 41 io choose between leatless trees and leafy trees, I confess not to be certain as to my clioice, though | am sure the winter trees enjoy them- selves not less than trees of summer time. To think that winter trees are forlorn and beautyless is common. They are to my belief warlike, strenuous, conquering, magnificent. Summer is the trees’ furlough: winter is their campaign—one long battle both by night and day. Winter rules them and gives them a hundred giants’ thews. They are as strong as Cezsar’s soldiers and heroic as Mark Antony's veterans In winter the individuality of trees comes out. In summer their leaves are their chief circumstance and obscure their individuality. We can not get at a tree's shape in summer. It is shut in of its own leaves and shadow; but when winter, with icy sword blade, hacks away the last tatter of summer finery, and leaves the tree to stand, naked as an Indian warrior, then does it proclaim itself. To see the shadow cast upon the snow or brown leaves (snow is better for taking a tree's silhouette, and moonlight is better than sunlight), is to get acquainted with the tree. But by moonlight, on the snow, stand long and see the black and white picture of an elm-tree, or oak, or willow, or walnut, or sycamore. Pine and cedar take poor pictures so, because their foliage is perennial. To take a picture of a pine-tree always take it at noon against a sky of intense blue (than such sight there is no lovelier in heaven, especially if one could in the picture take the music winds and pines, twin minstrels, make). | love trees all the year through—in spring when their coy green is hinted at rather than come; in summer when they make dense siadow and one might sleep from sunrise until the night, nor have an intruding sunbeam peer into his face and make him turn like a sleeper in pain; in autumn, when summer greens are forgotten and trees are a sunset’s splendor. I love this procession of changing charm and meaning, but confess to the heterodoxy of believing that winter trees are more beautiful to my eyes than those of spring, summer, or autumn. Tree branches are works of God's art than which even that Chief Artist has done nothing lovelier, save only the face in child or woman. All this beauty is lost in summer, like a woman's face hid under a mourning veil. Than the tracery of elm twigs at the ends of curved branches nothing could be more poetical. Think it not strange that Turner and Ruskin should love trees to rapture; for in all the woods is not one positively ungraceful tree The snarly gnarliness of certain oaks minds a man of how true might grows when whipped with furious 42 DESOLATE =a not the tit-for-tat of the ruffian tempest; but they are far from being unlovely. They mind me of «Bob, Son of Battle.’ They and love to fisticuff with storm ; winds. I do not well know the com- mercial uses of trees, nor care to. I know their character product, which is more to my | purpose, for | am not commer- cial; but with character I have good need for forming comrade- ship. Winter trees mean legiti- mate strife Not the conten- tion of the snarly and truculent, ‘| who whips out sword and plies it at a word, but the battle method, which character never ceases to need; the battle that are in battle gusto and temper, | AY BIRCH-TREES 45 makes men and trees. War is an ingredient of souls, if souls are to come to manhood. Every winter tree is like a man on guard at a dangerous post No wind goes by, however sedate and conciliatory, that the tree does not fling out naked arms of angry might before his face and cry surlily, ‘Halt, who goes there?” and then the battle is fierce as a Scotch clansman’s onset. Winter trees make me proud of their grave and reasonable pugnacity. In winter is the time when most people get acquainted, | think. The long evenings, and the shut-in firelight are conciliatory to friend- ship and made for confidences So it is natural in winter to grow confidential with the trees. They then reveal their secret. Surly as they look, you will not find them so if you will be companionable. Then go out of town (trees stay in town because they are galiey slaves chained there). Go into the empty forest where a river runs (if Provi- dence favor you so highly), and spend a day there, building a fire on the sheltered side of some bank where the smoke curls on you, and the delicious odors of the wood exhale, and the flame dances in the twist- ing winds Let the day be gray. Cloudy days are the appropriate days for making friendship with the trees. On open days the sky is too high, too illuminated, there is no background for the trees; and besides the sunlight makes shadow and gives wrong impression of twig, bark, and limb ‘The artists in their studios shut sunlight out. We who love the trees must be as wise as they. When the gray clouds are just above the tree tops, it is as if you looked at every tree against a background of gray granite. A tree has its chance to declare itself as in a confes- sional. There is no shadow; and no light flames with its torch to make wrong proportion, but it is as if twilight lit your lamp for you. On such a day, wander, lover-like, among the trees, and they will be confidential with you like women talking of their lovers. Give me a gray day with its all-day twilight, and the naked might of forest, and I will not envy kings their coronation. A beech-tree is a picture. In the winter its sagging branches with their gray-brown leaves hanging shiveringly, so wizen and little. like a withered old man, and making their pitiful appeal as winds shiver by; and its trunk like a pillar of dusk to hold the porch of the evening up. Friend, if you do not know the beech-trees, you have one acquaintance- ship to contract which will do your life good. In autumn there is a harvest sunlight on the beech leaves very fair to see, but after all the oeech trunk is the tree's treasure. | never pass a beech without a 46 BEECH-TREES caress, for it is carven into hundreds of hundreds of cameos so lovely as that they might each be a seal B for an artist's ring and ™ carven by Nassaro in the days when his eyesight and artist's instinct were perfec tion This picture as you see it is a hint only, for every beech trunk has its own wealth of cameos. And you may use many a daylight looking over their patterns, just as you look over the precious stones in a cabinet, without any sense of weariness or repetition. A hackberry is a beautiful trunk This one is a picture taken from my farm, though truth to say it is the most beautiful hackberry bole I have ever seen. Deep corrugations, as if sculptured by some genius And indeed, so it was; for this genius sculptor was God He is painter, poet, landscape- gardener, botanist, lover of flowers, keeper of birds, A HACKBERRY 49 architect of mountains and stars, and sculptor who fashions rocks, river beds, and sea cliffs, and tree branches and cloud landscapes into artistic and unfathomable loveliness. Each thing I see him make seems his masterpiece, though I know it is not that he has done above the ordinary for him, but that | am filled with his glory of doing, until | can contain no more, even as the sea’s channels can contain no more oceans. A walnut-tree is very beautiful. Its corruga- tions of bark, dark almost to blackness, are always possessed of witchery to my eyes. I see through the tree as if it were dusky amber, the black tawniness of walnut wood. No wonder that through centuries walnut has been favored wood; for who that has eyes to see but must love it? But walnut is never beautiful by the skill of man, be that skill however great, as when it stands solitary on the green woodland background of a hillside, and | seem to see through the graven tind its wine-dregs of wood, and feel its beauty as I do the beauty of the dawn. In winter, wild crab-trees are strong as strength. Their trunks are usually twisted as if some storm had wrenched them with violent and outrageous hands, but the virile tree refused to be twisted down, and wears its signs of struggle and survival on its front like scars on a soldier’s fore- head. Why, a Greek wrestler’s sinewy arm and leg carved in bronze are not to my eyes so hercu- lean and fascinating as a crab-apple trunk seen under a winter's gray sky. When spring comes and this bronze statue flashes into flower and perfume such as even spring with her bewildering riches of such, has only few of,—I do not thrill to that exotic loveliness of bloom as I do to the sheer bronze of the sinewy trunk, standing knee- deep in winter's snows. A soft maple is more beautiful in bark than 50 A WALNUT , the sugar-tree, though its autumn ’ foliage lacks the wealth of glory of ; the sugar-maple; but the bark, specially of the branches, of a soft maple is something fine as an etching, and t> use the exquisite, exact, and poetical eyesight of MAPLE “Gert Jan Ridd’’ (than whom, none, not even Ruskin, sees nature with surer fidelity), is “like the bottom of a red doe’s foot.’ I can not speak of the maple bark to effect, nor can it be photographed, nor painted, but I love to look on its finished beauty by the hour, and hold my hand on its faint flame-color as if I were warmed thereby. I make mention of this delicate bark, if haply I may make more than myself lovers of this dainty doing of Nature’s leisure Al And the elm-tree is always bewitching. In summer, when you can tell this tree far as you can catch the contour across the fields by the grace of its pose, and its rhythmic swaying of branches as keeping time to music we do not hear,—in winter the tree has its winter array No tree in our woods has the beautiful network of branches the elm has. Flung on the snow or seen against the blue sky or gray, it is as graceful as any tree that spreads under the sky. Every branch has its own household of tracery and delicacies of invention, for you shall find the unexpected in the elm-tree’s goings. No palm branch waved at temple or at triumph, is fair as an elm branch. You can feast your eyes on it as on the traceries of a frosty window-pane. To try to wrestle an elm- tree down (despite its beauty, for beauty and virility do not often coin- cide), seems something the storm-winds of summer or winter do not have audacity to attempt. Elms have a firmer hold on the earth than an oak. They dig for rootage deep and far. They pre-empt the land where they sink their anchorage of roots. I do not recall to have seen an elm-tree uprooted by tempests, though I have seen tall pine-trees fallen like dead soldiers, and oaks lying, half-fallen or wholly, like a man sorely wounded; but elms have a tenacity of fiber and a sagacity in ramification of roots which all but defy storm-winds. Those who would kill an elm, girdle it, though I resent their cowardly practice. It seems so dastardly to open the veins of a man you have not the courage to face nor the force to kill) The Cambridge elm, with its glory of history seen through its leaves and sitting beneath its shadow, is scarcely so engaging as the elms of the ordinary forest; for they are so beautiful as to need no wealth of historical association to make them fair. The bark of elms, in corrugation and in tint, is enough like the ruts of dry country roads to be accused of plagiarism. Who knows but the elm has wrapped about him a cloak worn by dusty summer? There is in any case a dusty-road look to his garments, for which he must be held to account. I like the fit and tone of his garment. The oak-tree has the allegiancy of the centuries; for beneath its shadows the Druids worshiped and built altars, as if it were half-deity, or more. Words are weak as tears when they essay to tell an oak- tree's epic. Bashan was land of oaks as Lebanon was land of cedars but oaks are freesoilers. They live across the world. They voyage to all shores, and stand ready to greet the colonist when he sets foot upon the strand. They met the Puritans, and DeSoto and Coronado, and gave them welcome. Great ships have been debtors to them for hulls, 52 WTa FHL huge to withstand tempests; kings have wainscoated their palace walls with these exquisitely striated woods; and pictures that were priceless have been framed in their tawny loveliness. Why, no picture can be more beautiful than the graining of oak. To place it on a floor is a sin; for it is like walking on a picture: but to wainscoat stately rooms with it, and swing its perpetual beauty in doors to halls of festival, and to build mantels and line ceilings,—that is just and legitimate In seeing a winter oak you see all of the fine lines drawn by the graver's tool of the great God, who has time off to spend in making the oak as beautiful as inlaid work of pearl and onyx. And the great limbs billow out shaggy and fierce, and their photogravure is something to dream of by night. I know a nook near Cawker City, Kansas, a peninsula which is almost an island by the tortuous winding of what used to be a stream in those days when the rains drained them into stream-beds rather than sinking into tilled fields; and here in a country almost devoid of trees, is a bur-oak forest where great oaks grow, some of which fling shadows seventy feet in diameter, and under whose shade a caravan might rest under shadows so dense no ray of sunlight could peer through. This oak-grove is worth making a pilgrimage to see; for | have not often seen its equal anywhere across this continent. When winter winds of might charge down on the forest, then an oak-tree laughs like a lover, and shoots out his hundred furious fists until the storm-winds are abashed. None must think to commiserate this battling giant. Ulysses loved the battle of warring Trojans and stormy seas, but not more than the oak-tree loves its conflict. These winter onsets are better to him than dew, or rain, or gentle spring zephyrs. Through all his huge trunk, fury runs. He drinks wine pressed from the grapes of wrath; and his huge arms hammer at the wind, and like the sound of winds from the seas in the rigging of the ships, so shrills the wind through the branches of this oaken harp. There is joy to the oak-trees when storm-winds blow. Cottonwoods have a fan-top spread out in bare wantonness as if to catch every wind that passed that way. Not summer is in winter cottonwoods; for their summer minstrelsy is as rainfall in the dusk of evenings; but exposing wide expanse of branches to the winds, winter cottonwoods make grave and noble music. | think it strange how seldom these winter trees have broken branches lying beneath them; in other words, with what uniformity they conquer the winds. You would not think those long, slender branches, seemingly so disqualified to 55 : \ M on withstand long months of sleep- less conflict, are in fact quite admirably qualified. These wrestlings do them good. Brown- ing was right when he lets old rabbi Ben Ezra say, “ Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! Be our joys three-parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain: Learn, nor account the pang: dare, never grudge the throe!” The hue of the hacked, horny rind of the cottonwood trunk near its base is all but black. Some | have seen which were nothing less, while their branches are light to whiteness, a green- ish silver, in fact; but a lamp light with gentle glow to the eyes that love to linger on them, so that as seen in winter across a field they stand white as wearing light as a garment, and make all trees about them to appear as A WINTER COTTONWOOD 56 under a cloud, while only the cottonwoods stood in the sunlight. They make the dawn and summer to rise upon me whenever | cast my eyes their way, which is so often as to preclude enumerations. Cottonwoods under cloud or light refuse to forget the sunlight. I think they remem- ber the sunny Kansas plains where they are often the sole tree occu- pants of wide wildernesses of grass. | can not be quit of the radiancy of these trees, standing tall, and with what seems a promise of sun- shine for all the woods. They are the true light-bearers. Because of this peculiarity cottonwoods in winter days have a surprise about them as though they had recently hailed from some land of delight, and kept glad memories always smiling in their looks. 1 would it lay in me to get people to watch the cottonwoods in winter as to listen to them in summer. | know not which mood entices my spirit the more. In summer when all is laughter the cottonwoods weep; in winter when all things else are sad or angry, cottonwoods are laughing like a holiday. They are the contradictions of the year; and may their beauty never know a twilight ! Willows always interest me. They are a fragile wood, but who would think so to see them travel along all shores? They are like frail men, who with a body as weak as that of William the Third do such herculean labor as would incline you to think old Samson hugged at the temple's pillars. Weakness hath its own puissance. Their sweet pen- siveness, their graceful droop along every ravine, saying as plainly as speech can say, ‘‘Where I throw my shadow you shall find a living well;"’ their dainty lance-leaves, among the earliest greenery of spring, and sometimes among the latest greenery of autumn, and in whose shadows summer winds seem prone to fall asleep or loiter idly; their dainty yellow of foliage of the autumntime, and their struggle with the winter's wind without complaint, and with strange career of victory, are things which should forever endear the willow to the lover of God's Out-of-Doors. A willow never stands erect. Either it can not or will not. I incline to the belief that the latter is the correct view. As in the picture, willows lean at an easy angle as in pensive mood. They dream, may- hap, upon the days that are no more. “0, those old days! Those near yet far off days ! Paged with dear legends, winsome with sweet ways! When spendthrift hearts all went a-gypsying: Cared naught for form or statute laws or king, But lived in melodies.” 57 Mayhap, it is ot tnese days the willows dream. but dream they do, summer or winter They have a touch of pathos in them evermore. The bark is like to an elm so as to be easily mistaken for it, and ashy-red in hue. These of the picture are taken from “my farm” in the ravine I set such store by, and where in springtime the waters will pour about them to their knees; and they know it! They love that knee-deep wading like little boys. In spring, with their flash of early green, or in sum- mer, with half slumber, and their pensive droop of leaf and branch and trunk—-well, God did certainly deal ten- derly with the willows, and made them very fair! The shell-bark hickory is the sur- liest seeming tree in the wood, save only the honey-locust, which is vindic- tive and humanity-hating as Timon of Athens, though when the fair summer ts blooming this misanthropic tree flashes out in throngs of tiny leaves almost as exquisite as ferns, and much after their likeness. Not any tree has any more beautiful leaves than a thorny locust, so man-hating and beast-hating, that even the merry squirrel can not climb it, but in which birds build nests, as in a citadel; for there the larger birds can not come seeking prey, nor the wise serpent. This evil, angry tree sc comes to serve good uses, building with angry skill a fortress where the gentle birds may dwell in quiet, far from enemies In the winter season, however, nothing can be less propitiating The thorn-spines jag out in clusters on every angry bole and branch. But as | have said, next to the locust is the shell-bark hickory Sum- mer or winter it curls up its lips like a bull-cur. As a child I used to be insulted by them, though like crusty people I have known, they would snar! at you and make you merry at the same minute; for when fall frosts whiten the house-tops a little, | was wont to go to the woods of the Marais Des Cygnes and find a hail of hickory nuts slanting to earth; and I would make merry beneath the branches, getting oftentimes a sound rap on the head by a friendly nut on its way to the autumn leaves lying thick upon the ground. But surly the shell-bark hickory is. Great flakes of its bark curling inevitably from the trunk, as you have seen old shingles curl from an ancient roof, dyed black as darkness in long years of rain and drench of summer sun. Surly the shell-barks are, but beautiful. I have loved to love them more than I will here set down, lest some who read should think me foolish; I pass no one of them in my wanderings without stopping to watch its ill-fit of garments and truculence of demeanor. A ~baby shell-bark is Vy | 4 \ RBG sus ik! smooth as any other hickory, but grows not long till it begins to snarl at passers by, at which time it is ridic- ulous to me and makes me giggle This snappishness is like a pretty woman's pout- ing, attractive as laughter. And when a shell-bark sap- ling is, say, twenty feet hign, | have seen a bark which would suit the glad fancies of an artist. Lichens of select sort gather on their curl- ing rinds, yellowish and greenish lichens being favorites, and when these are on the bark and out under winter rains, they become beauti- ful as photogravures. If you suppose that, one shell-bark seen, all are 60 LOCUST seen, you were never more mistaken. Each has its charm like man and woman. There is no duplicating. God makes his creations to be like the marked copies of de luxe editions. Shell-barks are among the treasures of my woods, and among the richest riches of winter forests. Not lightly to estimate these winter riches, | would profess that of all winter trees the sycamore is most beautiful. In Indiana, on the Wabash, they are at their kingliest [ have not seen their equals. There they grow stately with few limbs, and the sycamores stand pillars of carven marble. The sycamore is to me a fascinating tree for two special reasons. First, where he lives, and second, how he does. Oaks and elms and walnuts are like God’s common people—plenty of them and everywhere. They grow down in broad valleys, on the edge of the stream; they are on the hillsides climbing the bluffs; they are on bluff edges; they are in ravines far back from any stream where they can find an unpre-empted field for woodland; there they dig into the earth, loam or clay, rock or woodland. Not so a sycamore, which wili not of its own accord grow on hills or run up a bank from a stream. The sycamore hugs the water courses. Not, be it observed, as the willow which grows in ravines, where waters sometimes run down in marshy ground, and always knee-deep in ravines or streams, being very ducks for loving water; for sycamores rarely or never stand in either streams or swamp places. They are coy, and stand a few feet up and back from the river’s bank. They grow where water stays. You will not find them in ravines whose custom is to go dry in summer. Where waters stay, there sycamores stay. These waterways of the sycamore are of singular interest, as | think any one who studies them will agree. A wide valley on river-levels you will find thick sown to sycamores across its entire breadth, for here they reach water. A stream-edge will be sentineled with sycamores rooting above the stream, but very often leaning over the water so as to see their own faces. Infrequently I have seen them on so-called second bottoms, but as a very general rule where a bluff begins to climb, a sycamore refuses to follow. Only the other day, happening to be on the railroad that ran along the beautiful Gasconade, I watched this fine power of selection of sycamores—know- ing what they want and getting it. And I saw their white pillars flash snowy against the gray skyline, or the rocky cliffs, or the dim black woodlands as they trooped along the river, never letting on they had a purpose, but always having one, huddling together; for in this they are 6l cliqueish folk (a thing | can not praise since it is quite un-American). They are, moreover, lovers of ease, and scarcely working folk; but brave aristocrats they are, stately as Colonial dames, and as unbending as royal etiquette. But they held to the river and its valley. Only once did | see adwarf on a hillside not many feet above the level of the water, and it was ashamed and seedy like a poor relation and expatriated. Sycamores can not rough it, and unless planted there will not grow on uplands, but when planted thrive admirably. Of their own liking they will not attempt unaccustomed fields. 1 have, at rare intervals, seen them climb up a bluff, but it was as if they had walked there in their sleep. The second strange thing about sycamores is their habits of dress. The habit of putting on thick garments, as other folks do in the cold season when winds are keen, and all agree with Hamlet, ‘It is a nipping and an eager air,’’ sycamores will have nothing of They don their heavy garments in summer, and strip them to the skin in winter. I think that one of the strangest freaks of freakish nature Even Indians are not so outrageous of the rights of winter. What evolutionist (allwise as they are and omniscient beyond their Maker), can explain such a performance on the theory of the survival of the fittest? Summer is the time for sycamores and other people to strip for bathing in the streams, but winter bathing—why, my friends, the sycamores, you shock me and you make me shiver. | feel cold with my clothes on, and you are naked as Greek wrestlers. What a talent for individuality of pro- cedure these sycamores have! We must allow that they have inde- pendency in their character. In autumn, when winter throws out a premonitory hoar frost to signify he is in the neighborhood, then the sycamores begin to disrobe. They take off their garments by stealth, as amaniac does. You can not, unless you are a close observer and look very narrowly, find a shred of their bark under the trees, and when they are done with their denudation you will probably not find one scrap of their garments. Watch them and see. They are strange folks. | watch them as if they were in politics. Then when they are as nude as nakedness, they are as beautiful as morning. Not the pilaster of a temple, snow-white under radiant skies of Italy is so white as these sycamore pillars. They stand tall as if they were hewn from ice-drifts, or snow-drifts, or marble-quarries. Sometimes, however, they are not snow-white, but a sort of shaded green, a flesh green, as | may say, for they look for all the world like flesh, and stand faint emerald against the sky like a forecast of spring. But whether flesh green or marble white, 62 SYCAMORES they are bewitching and satisfying. Who knows not the sycamore is to be pitied? He has missed so much ‘The pillared dusk of sounding sycamores,” of which the laureate sings, is not so beauty-burdened as the stately temple-pillars, lifting taper marble up as worthy for some Phidias to plant upon their Doric trunks some stately frieze wrought into pana- thenaic processions. Who would have thought of such a thing as a sycamore, save God only? “The birds and beasties '’ of winter woods are accessories not to be forgotten ‘Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," are visible in plenty. In summer these nests were hid from the eyes ‘of the wise and prudent,’’ but now are open to everybody's gaze. There is no secrecy. In the leafless hedgcrow is the thrush’s nest, and down by the stream is the bluebird’s house, and the crow’s log-house of knotty and unworkmanlike construction is seen from the treetops. Crows are bold builders. They haunt treetops as swallows the eaves. These nests seem so ill-built that one would tumble down if a flapping wing of its own builder were to cuff it unwarily, but, as experience shows, are so sturdily constructed that all the winter's tempests leave them in good repair. These crows are deceiving folks. We thought they tumbled their houses together in an unworkmanlike fashion, when lo, we found they built against seasons and naked winters, and storm-wind's brow- beating. And the crow is in the winter woods. His Satanic blackness glares through the naked woods, and makes a sort of plaintive picture. He flies low over the trees of winter and settles often for caucus or religious meeting,—I really never have been able to tell which. But | am not his chaplain; so it makes not much matter. And the redbird flings himself through the network of branches, like a firebrand borne by daylight; and his whistle is always as from a cheery heart, The cardinal is warming to the eyes, and his carelessness of weather makes him to me fraternal. I defy weather, only asking that there be weather. The kind is not for me to say, seeing I am not the weather bureau; but some kind of weather, fair, foul, wintry, windy, quiet; snow, rain, sleet, are little odds to me; I enjoy them all, and go out in one with the same delight as in the other. Each has its impact with my spirit. The cardinal cheers himself not with the hope of spring coming, but with the delight of winter here. All seasons make love to him and he to all seasons; and when he flings his torch across the gray- 65 black winter branches, and flies like an arrow of fire, shot by a hidden bowman, all the gray woods are lit up and radiant And the junco (I call him so by sort of conventionality as a tribute of social order, but call him by sweet familiarity, the snow-bird), so ] love him. The snows and he blow in the same wind. The fiercer the wind the more rollicking his demeanor. Storms are fiddle-music to his jigging feet Some birds shun winter and love summer. A snowbird shuns summer and loves winter. He seeks winter in sum- mer. He is a hard-weather bird, like a stormy petrel. Sparrows in winter cling to hedges and to sheltered places, if there be any; but snow- birds get out where the winds sweep wildest, and the snow curls like white soot, sicked on by furious blasts. Then the snowbird revels and is glad. How often I have watched him and rejoiced in his pluck! Such a little laddie, but such a laughing courage, like a drummer lad in the battle’s front. Squirrels, rabbits, coons, and sometimes the barking wolf, with its wild-dog waggishness, cross and recross these wintry, snowy woods, their tracks returning on each other as in frantic glee. A rabbit is a timid jester, but loves a joke, and in moonlight forgets his fear and keeps tryst, and pounds the ground with his heels in a sort of bellicose hilarity. O, there are good times in winter woods—just as good times were had in the old pioneer days, with sleigh rides, and bussing-bees, and spellings-down. With trees in battle, birds and beasts making merry in the storm, you will do well to call winter a summer of delight. When slow mists make tree trunk and branch a sheet of ice, and when rain comes after mists and thickens the ice into a sword-sheath thickness, and trees stand against the light armed in silver, then might a dumb man sing for joy. Watch this glow against the sun, and hear this crash of battle-hour when their naked sword-blades smite together in indignant warfare, see them clad in ‘‘light as in a garment,’’ and you wonder what God does not think of. What God does not think of none need desire to invent. These icy armors are brilliant as any old-time armorer could make of silver, and this is a world lit with silver, green, and blood, and crossed with march of winds, and the tangle of branches, and the silver bird’s nests, and cornfields standing erect as soldiers on duty with silver plumes, and the wide-armed oak harnessed in silver, but nothing daunted. When sleets are on, the world is transfigured and the heart rejoices above the spring. Or when snows stream over the skies 66 and smoke through the tree tops and make all the weeds and bushes Stoop under their weight of whiteness, and the boughs of the forest droop under their weights of snow as under weights of superabundant fruitage, and the lanes of the woods are dusk at noon when the snows come in silence, but with the dim lights of sunsets and after, and earth seems a memory, so far off it feels, then the woods are bewilderments. They are not kin to what we had known them. We could not recognize these as the woodland ways our fond feet had trodden so often All is new and strange, and we wander as those who have set foot on shores undis- covered till now. When snows dim all the sky and hide far and near in fogbanks of white wonder, then, friend, go into the woods and see them keep tryst with the snows and keep thy lips closed as in inaudible prayer, and walk quietly (for you can do no other when snows carpet the dead leaves), and have a hush of spirit before God as if you walked cathedral solitudes. And when bitter-sweet ‘Hangs its tufts of crimson berries,” and buckberries wear their surly reds, and the red-oaks hold their leaves and shiver night and day as with perpetual ague; and when the storms roar and are angry, and the trees rush out with ecstasy of gladness to give battle to the winds; then winter trees are glorious, and I watch them, and fellowship with them, and bless my God I live where winter comes, and where deciduous trees are plentiful, and where simple beauty gives way betimes to massive, yet beautiful might Then commend me to the battle and fury and anthems of the winter trees. THROUGH THE PINE WOODS 67 GOLDEN-ROD WHERE GOLDEN-ROD BLOOMS GOLDEN-ROD OBODY has been considerate enough of a N wise curiosity to tell us why in autumn the purples and yellows are the lavish colors. | would thank some of the knowing for such item of information. But certain | am that the autumn flowers riot in yellow hues. They have caught the sun in their heart through all the golden summer,—have caught every beam coming their way and held each as the naiads held fair Hylas what time he bathed him in Scamander, while his purple chlamys lay upon the shore. The autumn flowers seem never to forget a syllable of sunlight any more than love forgets a syllable of wooing; and in the Fall in blooming they rehearse all they have heard, as lovers tell each other all the sweet words the other had written or said, while each listening says, ‘‘Did I say that? and when? and you remembered?'’—and then they kiss each other on the lips. So the sunflowers and black-eyed susans and the golden-rods save up and rehearse the sunshine of the year. Bless them for aa their tenacious memories. Golden-rod may be deleterious to hay fever votaries, but is sympathetic and friendly to those of us who indulge in no such lachrymose luxury. Well people have some rights, though they are 73 \u seldom considered. Some slight consideration ‘y should be shown the healthy, and their wishes con- sulted at far-removed nows and thens. The golden- rod is one of my delights. From the time the first slender spike flashes its light upon the eyes to the last burnt-out splendor drooping shamed upon its stem, I keep them in niy study. | love their warm light—their laughter in bloom (for so their glow impresses me). I do not feel obligated to tell why I love what I love, and if pressed by some purist, I will not, but if let alone will probably disclose the secret of my passion. I love golden-rod because there is plenty of it, and I like plentiful things; hence, children, men, women, trees, stars, common-place things and people are dear to me. Golden-rod blooms mainly in flocks, as pigeons fly, and in many flocks, along fences, in pastures, by woods, in the woods, along highways (thank them for that courtesy). They are as the poet who pipes as the hedge sparrow does, “7 build my house by the side of the road."’ Where the dust clouds and chokes you on the long sun-burnt road, golden-rod will toss out its yellow light like some one you love looking at you through an open window. Golden-rod grows all across our America, in the north and south, in Maine and California. It is a hardy traveler. It dogs man’s steps. Trailing arbutus grows in New England and the north- east, but comes not out west (shame on the aristocracy of this sweet prisoner of humility); and the dumb fox-glove is a resident only in limited quarters; but golden-rod is a beautiful democrat, and comes wherever we are, and makes glad at our door, and kindles its wonderment of color to the whole continent's delight. Golden-rod is the common folk’s flower, like the hollyhock and old- fashioned roses and almost forgotten four o'clocks. There is rare grace in a frond of the golden-rod. Did you ever notice that? Did you ever see a gawky golden-rod? | never have. Its spike of flowers leaning a little in half bashfulness, though standing so tall and stately,—this pose is itself a picture. I do wonder if these smiling lovelinesses are sitting for their pictures? I will not believe so, for | think them too frank by odds to be dramatic. But if you care to sketch the golden- rod, hit or miss, you will be impressed by the continuity of gracefulness. What glorious golden-rod I have gathered in Connecticut, near beautiful Canaan, where the hills are sponges which squeeze out springs and rivulets and rushing streams, and where ai night you can hear the dim calling of the waterfalls through the cloudy darkness where the stream tumbles down a bank in its hurry to reach the Housatonic; and what torches have I seen and gathered in the White Mountains in sight of Mount Washington! I do believe that had I carried them in the dark for a torch they would have lit the way like a flaming pine knot; but they have lit my heart on many a dark night in winter, when the wind whistled and shivered, and the shutters slammed against the house in dismal din. And i have gathered golden-rod on the heights of Quebec, hard by where brave Wolfe fell, and down the St. Lawrence toward the northern sea, and on Mt. Desert Island, neighboring the rocky cliffs and melan- choly pines, and beside beautiful Champlain and back in the Adiron- dacks where the world seemed removed across some wide, wide sea, and in the Rockies where the continent billowed toward the skies, and the crest forgot to sink, and along the Great Lakes where the billows call like a sea, and on the fringe of the great desert with its parched lips and cheeks where fever burns forever, and along the Wabash with its stately tulip-trees and sycamores, beautiful as the pillars of the Parthenon, and along the Sacramento as it widens seaward, beside the Potomac as it stops a moment tenderly to lave the bank on whose sloping side Wash- ington lies buried, and on the Hudson when the Palisades were all in conflagration in autumn days, and on my own beloved prairies stretching mile on mile through Indian summer haze—so widely have I gathered the golden-rod, and reverently hope I may be commissioned to gather its golden sprays in heaven; so shall I feel quite at home. I GO A-FISHING re LAYS SNARES LIKE AN ASSASSIN I GO A-FISHING E © tell the truth, scarcely a fisherman’s bent as f you will suggest, | am an ill fisherman. [| would not decoy some ardent lover of rod and line to . read these inconsequent lines, thinking I was _- piscatorial artist, or that I had fast friendship =24 with our good friend, quaint and gentle, Ike Walton. We are bare acquaintances. I met him once, once only, along the river Dove tak- ing a grayling from his hook, and so not seeing me, for so true a fisherman was always more engrossed with fish than men (nor do | blaine him); and I was only wandering along the stream watching the shadows on the quiet water and the pools where sunlight came and staid as taking a whole day of holiday. No, I know as little about fishing as about botany. I know not what sort of bait catches what sort of fish. I seldom get a nibble, and much more rarely get a fish, though Provi- dence knows | wish the fish knew how safe it is to intrust themselves to my hook, for I throw back into the stream, with scant reluctance, the fish | catch. [I am much more pious and tender-hearted than your piety- professing fisherman, who, while he talks gently of the ‘gentle art,”’ kills whom he surprises, like any other bandit, and lays snares like an assas- sin, and fresh in iniquity says his prayers like a murderer making the sign of the cross above the corpse he has made. No, I never knew enough, or so little, | know not which, as to succeed in catching fish, yet I say boldly, though as I hope with modesty, that I can throw a line into the water and let it stay there with a degree of resolution wortny of a French cavalier of the reign of Louis the Saint. To state the facts frankly, as becometh a Christian, I], having had many friends who were 81 valorous fishermen, am persuaded that it is next door to an impossibility to be a chronic fisherman and not become a chronic hyperbolist (I use this term out of my love for my fishermen friends, and my disinclina- tion to use the more ordinary and direct word which differs in no slight- est shade of meaning. I refer to the little radical among the words which is pronounced liar). There must be some men of unimpaired virtue (1 do not speak this in any haughty spirit). Truthfulness, like persecuted goodness, must have some fortress to which to retreat; and in claiming to be an unsuccessful fisherman it occurs to me that it has become apparent that | am this rocky fortress of incorrupted truth. Fish and men, specially the fish, may depend on me. I absolutely re- fuse to prevaricate unless it be entirely convenient. If I have been digging for morals when | should have been digging bait and baiting my hook, | beg to suggest I have been decoyed to it by the moralizing moods of the professional fisherman. He always acts as if he fished from the same motive as he says his prayers, namely, piety; though | for my part think it a slimy trick to hide play under the cloud of devotion. If men will fish let them not preach and attempt to persuade others they are doing it as an act of religion. To be Shake- spearean (a manner quite foreign to me), ‘‘ Methinks they do profess too much.’" I knew a truthful fisherman once (he is dead); and I feel honor bound to prepare him an epitaph, though not at this time. But a truthful fisherman has a right to pass into the list of heroes who over- bore environment and gave the lie to centuries of precedent. | have some friends, good men and true at home and in business, but who seem to cast from them all their fine ethical distinctions so soon as they get a fish pole in their hands; and when they have donned fisherman's boots and have hold on a reel, then farewell, beautiful truth. “As soon as they smell fish their truthfulness evaporates, or at all events disappears, and | think the most scientific explanation of its disappear- ance is to ascribe it to evaporation which goes on so systematically on the water, as is known to all students of meteorology. These friends of mine fish in remote waters, where, because of the remote distances and the lack of shipping facilities, the spoils can not be sent to admiring friends. The fisherman is thought to be by nature a sociable biped, and generous in delivering up his ill-gotten gains to those who sunburned not neither baite’ a hook. But these good men and true must smother their generous impulses. They are perforce reduced to the necessity of eating their own catch, or giving most of it to aborigines who inhabit the 82 distant lands neighboring on the great water where this whaling expedi- tion does business in ships. Do not think me skeptical. | am no Montaigne; but | state plainly,I mislike this manner, It looks theat- rical. Out of this remote water, as | have suggested, they bring no fish. We can all testify that when they fish in streams near at hand they bring no fish; and without desiring to call in question their veracity, when they tell thrilling experiences with monster pickerel and musca- longes and other finny gentry, ‘{ doubt and fear’ (perverted from Burns), They dazzle me with their fine powers of romance. They would have charmed our friend Sir Walter Scott with their powers of inven- tion. However, they lack variety. There are evi- dently about the same size and temper and fight- ing quality of fish in all these distant fish ing grounds. The same struggle besets all these doughty spirits who fight with rod and line. They find no new dragons but are satisfied with the old ones. Why, Monsieur Athos could have told them a thing The Three Guardsmen were fertile liars, which is a thing I delight in if one attempts that style of art (though | do not praise it. Let us have truth is my motto, which | commend with all heartiness to my many friends after having practiced it for forty to sixty days each year for a year cr so). They tell the same story, these truthful fishermen. = Ty Besides this, they suborn witnesses (yet I like not the THE SPOILS sound of that word, it seems harsh, though indeed | mean it only in gentle courtesy as a method of expressing the facts); but they return to their neglected home fishless, sunburnt. truculent lest you believe not their fishing reminiscences, and on one occasion brought letters of refer- ence for proof of their valiant exploits from the proprietor of the boats used, from the postmaster, from the hostelkeeper, from the guide, from the cook, and from sundry other functionaries: but when on discreet investigation (for | am of a stern and unyielding virtue in these mat- ters), it was found that boat owner, postmaster, hostelkeeper, and the remaining witnesses were one and the same man; and on being con- fronted with this stern truth these men thrust each other in the ribs and laughed to tears at the wickedness of their conceits. Such things 83 grieve me. | fear there will be no fishermen tn heaven except our elderly friend Peter, who, being himself a fisherman, may in fellow feeling let them slip through his fingers after the manner of fish. But not to continue this secular pursuit of discovering such depravi- ties (of which there would be no end), save so as to show why my virtue is always at white heat—however cold the thermometer may be—and that I will not be decoyed into a sport which serves, if indulged in with sufficient persistency, to eradicate the last faint vestige of truthfulness from the heart of the votary. Truth must still have an ad- vocate. I will not lie except at intervals and under severe provocation ; and so I will not fish I start in a leisurely fashion ; for haste is foe to good fishing. To have a deliberate air is impressive to fish. | make haste slowly therefore. I am not eager to be known as starting on a voyaze of fishing; for such enterprise engenders hallucinations of imagination as to the results of your expedition (in the minds of the populace). I move out calmly, like a ship starting from its harbor toward high seas. A | sweet lady I know smiles at me going, with a touch F of irony in her face, and a boy picking up chips on the beach pauses (much to his content, for he does not admire work) in his efforts, to give me a quizzical look, and a girl smiles at me with a wave aes of hand good to look upon; and I go past the board P walk where the beech-trees grow and cast gentle shadows, and down the lane of sand hills peaked with pines, and loiter along with scant precipitancy as befits a man going on such solemn business as fishing; for as ¥ Ike Walton has shown, fishing is the soul of solemnity, and is after all no sport, but life's real and serious business. We must not therefore approach such vocation with the least spirit of levity. 1 sight the river with reeds growing solid green along far banks where the stream bends in gentle curves like a boat's prow, and rest my heart in taking a long breathing view of the lake whose waters tilt against the sky green as bulk glass, and let the cool wind from its bosom lave me as if it weve a wave washing some point of shore; and then | bethink me that | have no bait nor any line nor any rod, and turn back in medi- tative r:ood so as not to appear disconcerted. I reach home, take these 84 om ale inconsequential items as a conventional matter wholly; and now having rod and line and bait I slip out at the rear of my house and slink around out of sight that no one see my implements of the chase (the aqueous chase), and sidle toward the river. I consider myself adroit to the point of genius in the matter of bait. I think | ought to say that. Brains will tell even in the matter of going fishing. While supposedly adroit fishermen keep every sort of fly and deception for beguiling wary fish, I, believing that I have not been weighted down with intellectuality for naught, sagaciously (I have under- scored that word, not through conceit, but through honest speaking), take for my bait mutton. This I do because mutton is so ambiguous, so versatile. When I have mutton (in my pocket tied up daintily as a man will tie things up, in a piece of newspaper, believing that even dead sheep should have culture opportunities), 1 can boldiy cast for all sorts of fish inhabiting lake or stream. For certain sturdy, aged, self- reliant fish, male fish, I bait with mutton and | can call it ram. This bait brings experience and pugilistic propen- sions to the hook. When I wish to catch young and tender fish I retain the same bait on my hook (I never change bait while it can remain on the hook. I think changing bait a breach of etiquette to the bait). While bait lasts it stays on my hook. | am courteous in all details of life. So here, I retain the bait, but speak in bleating tones and call it lamb. When I wish to approach bachelor fish with years of conquest and satiety on them I call the bait ewe. When ] appeal to the gentler sex among the fish I call the bait wether. When ] angle for plebeian fish I state with democratic candor, ‘‘ This is mut- ton." The result is practical all the same. I have equal success with the varied fish and varied ages, and I think you must see that I am not nagged by the occult study of what bait to use. And I am successful as success goes with me in a heterogenous fashion, and I have the feeling that in so doing | have exhibited a manly individuality even in baiting my hook. So with my versatile bait | set out. One rod and line suffice. I always have a cork because I like to see it bob. Things seen are mightier than things felt (quoted in part from some poet), and I enjoy 85 seeing the energetic twitching of the cork (red and green duly mixed preferred ), for it reminds me of the motion of a fish's fins. I put the hook in the water, which is the stereotyped way of doing when one fishes, though | have very often had the same degree of success when | have left the hook on land. I thrust the pole into the shore with a jab which insures the pole staying, whatever the cork does. Having done this, a glow of virtue suffuses my frame as it does with a man who has gone to church with his wife. | have done my duty. What need J do more? The line is in the water: the pole is in the bank: and I am on the bank near the pole. Now let the fish do his duty. Let him make the cork bob: let him, | say, for I shall exert myself no more. | am fishing. Here [| sit. Except for nettles, 1 am complaisant and self-righteous. If the fish do their duty and measure up to their responsibility, why then the cork bobs, whereat my fisherman luck is satisfed, and my passion of sportsmanship is in a manner allayed. I consider the desire ex- hibited among many fishermen to catch fish to be a rabid species of militarism which | can not approve. Seeing the fish had expressed neither viva voce nor aqua voce, a desire for the mild rule of my flag or frying pan, | can not think of thrusting my sovereignty on them by im- paling them on a hook, for this would be a glaring instance of militarism and expansion; and I am too true a mugwump (?) to be a friend to either. No, fishermen have missed the point of the argument. Catch- ing fish is not the end of fishing, Seeing the cork bob is the end of fishing, and is the whole duty of the fisherman. Here is an advanced Jidea which I hope may revolutionize the piscatorial art. New ideas I know are frequently received with hostility. Great ideas often are. | anticipate antagonism. | do not care. I may be a martyr, but no matter. I reaffirm I] do not care. | have the martyr’s spirit. My an- cestors were buccaneers and their valor survives in me, and if a sort of fishy martyrdom awaits me for the bold, unflinching, intrepid, deter- mined presentation of this grand and revolutionary thought, I will sit by my bobbing cork and wait my death calmly. So strong is virtue. When the cork bobs | feel a sense of relief as of a duty per- _ formed in a satisfactory and even in a praiseworthy manner. | ~— shall now feel free to go on with my fishing. If the cork does not bob | feel free from responsibility. I have done my duty. My business is to bait the hook, not to bite at the bait. Let every fish bear his own burden. Nor am [a monopolist. My soul spurns that thought. | have done my part: I will not monopolize functions. Let the fish have room 86 for the play of his powers. The hook is in the water. I have done my part and done it well. | will leave results to the fish; so that I (with that sagacity which marks my proceedings) take my book from my pocket—! have brought it for such occasion. If the fish are idle | must not emulate their example. I will read my friend Stephen Phillips. His pastorals shall be my chore. Now when | have a book which, to change my friend Milton's phrase, in harmony with my environment (1 use that word not as knowing its meaning, but because | have seen it in print and once heard it mentioned by a speaker, now sick with the grippe—a book is the solace of those tardy hours in which a fisherman awaits the desultory humors of the fish); ‘Having a book’’ (quoted from my preceding remarks), | am well pleased and go on with my ALONG THE STREAM fishing. We shall get on well to-day. However inattentive to their duty the fish are, I will not be inattentive to mine. | will read a spell. My friend William Wadsworth was a fisher of my sort—he walked along the streams, loved them and dreamed of them , and | will in defer- ence to his good taste read him betimes. Now fishing seems a levity. I leave the fish to their own devices. The cork may bob or sink for all of me. I do not care. Virtue is its own reward. | have baited the hook and have placed it in the watery element (whatever that is). Can any ethical code demand more? To do more would be a work of supererogation, and | always hold that works of supererogation are void. { will now rest until the sun gets in my eyes and the perspiration (peri- phrasis for sweat), starts from my face, whereupon with a fine courtesy worthy of Chesterfield | will move out of the sun’s way. If I am not a gentleman | am nothing, though I desire to make no boast. 87 Sometimes for the sake of cultivating versatility in location though not in result, | take up my traps and find a new bank to sit upon and listen to the whine of the wind in the pine-trees (O the infinite sadness of it!), or walk on and see the stream edge its way to the base of a sand dune where not a grass tussock roots in the shifting sands, which climbing, | see some friends I love, fishing at long distance, and out- ward the sweep of the wondrous lake with sand dunes sowing the shore with melancholy, or half inland again see the river moving meditatively toward the lake with its quiet meadows edging its quiet goings. Here the swallows skim and the birds build and rejoice, and the white clover and the full-sapped milkweed vie with each other in their donative of odors. There the pine-trees clump together in neighborly fashion and Te whisper (sweet, sweet, their whis- per is) together concerning sor- row they have shared together, and a crow flaps lazily along the sky to some lonely pines across the river But I must not dally. I ama fisherman. I must to my vocation ; and I go down to where my boat is anchored in lush grasses and unmoor it, and trail my line in the water what time I row leisurely where the fishes ought to be. If they come not to me I go to them. And the lap of the water against the prow is delicious, and the wind from the lake drifts up stream like a wind taking holiday, and the waters are clear and dainty, and heaven leans and looks full-face into the stream. Do you own a boat, friend? Then you are rich. I feel poor no longer since this boat swung at the end of my rusty chain, and the oars across its breast were mine. And | forget to fish, but remember to dream, and the landscape is fair enough to be part of heaven, and the sky is utter blue and utter high, and the lake can be seen at a distance leaning over to look at me, and the sole pine-tree stands a sentinel of 88 sorrow. Iam glad in my heart 1 came a-fishing. This is sport. But I am fishless—though that is a trifle not worth mentioning. There is another affable way of fishing I have often practiced and which | can commend. The modus operandi is as follows: Take your pole across your shoulder, let the line dangle so the hook is free to catch in the limbs of the trees and bushes as you walk along. The extracting of the hook will occupy your hands; for ‘Satan finds some work for idle hands to do:"’ and so | always think it wise to leave the line dangle and keep my hands employed. This has saved me from many a snare. Thus fortified for the fishing voyage, I go boldly near a stream. I walk along its banks. I watch the shimmer on the stream, and the shadows flung in the waters by the banks. A bunch of white flags sometimes (and what lily-white blosoms these water-loving flags wear!) and some- times a bank of sand touches the water, and is covered with bluebells which cast their lovely shadows in the stream. God is the first of the photographers. The smell of damp earth is in my nostrils, and the odor of the mints on which I walk. A bird flings across my face so that his wings almost touch me as he whirs by, and a redbird whistles as if he were joking with you. And the swallows circle with an almost musical motion, and the fair clouds lie listless as if absent on a day of quiet, and the hill climbs up from the stream's edge into a tangle of thicket and brier and moss, and the leap of some brave tree going toward the light with ragged branches, or a meadow smiles across the stream, and a woodland clouds with its green against the sky across the field. And I throw the rod down and forget it and wander smiling along as a pair of lovers, and gather flowers and find a red clover alone and gather it out of sheer courtesy, or surprise, or love (what matters which?). Ora bird's nest decoys me through the dark deeps of woods. And the stream laughs along. And you, looking at the sky, step unwittingly into its waters and like the souse of the water in your shoes. Fishermen of high grade are careless of wet feet; and besides, dew is in the thicket and on the grass, and drops from the trees, and how can you help hav- ing wet feet? And not to have them is to play at fishing. Let us be in earnest whatever we do. Let us not act at fishing; let us fish. 1 always do. Wade across the stream often if you can without total im- mersion. That will bring you into contact with the native element of fish, and may give you the smell of their scales; but you can get wet, and that is desirable, for you feel fishy and the feeling is the main thing in fishing. I follow the winding of the stream. I go and caress the 89 beech-tree as if it were a child, atid the walnut-trees with their corru- gated barks, and the silver bark of the birch I talk to the birds that eye me slyly, calling them by name. I scramble up banks, and fall down hills—that is rare exercise. If I tear my trousers it gives me a positive feeling of self-respect, for so the acrobats do, and boys and fishermen; and to be of this company is honor enough to be sung by troubadours - but where are the fishing pole and the line with its pith and point? I laid them down, bless me I know not where Forgetfulness is a sign of genius. Is it not glory enough to be born under the zodiacal sign of the fishes? But where is that pole? To go home fishless and poleless is like going to one’s grave unwept. I will hunt that pole, but will now pause to eat a sandwich. A good man who fishes should always take a snack. It is sociable. You eat it yourself, and that has a radiant look of hospitality. If you go fishing alone (which is the real etiquette of fishing ), it may seem selfish. But when you sit eating your lunch, that is sociable. Your self-respect and spirit of genuine generosity are now restored. There is a feeling of hospitableness when a lone fisherman fishes out of his pocket a lunch which he has filched (not to say fished) from his wife's cupboard. Besides, you feel self-sacrificing, for you are eating for two to keep up the idea of friendliness And a lunch tastes good under such circumstances. | make my appeal to all candid men, if | am not speaking the truth when | say so. One combines business and pleasure and philosophy in a solitary lunch; and the better the lunch is the more business, philosophy, and pleasure there are. But where is the pole? That is a thing to consider; but deep thought is not con- ducive to good digestion, hence banish thought of the pole. Away, base care! Onwith the lunch! Let hospitality be encouraged! There is yeta sliver of bread MeN or a piece of chicken to be dealt with, a\ On with the lunch! And a chipmunk standing inquiringly, and 1 may say impertinently on end (and I may say on the right end), looks inquiringly at my book and at my lunch and at me. | really have never settled the literary preterences of the chipmunk, though | think I could if I tried. A kingiisher dashes down to the 1iver from a stump where he has been sitting so sedately. I really suppose that seeing me eat has made him hungry. He will have his lunch too. But the light on the water is sweet to see, and the ripples run like laughter over the river’s face, and the cattails not yet tailed stand sedately like folks at a funeral, and the blue of the sky is clouding for rain, and a drop from the cloud is on my face, and the gray sky is beautiful as a vision of the twilight—and where is the pole? | will leave a crust of bread and a chicken bone on the bank. The chipmunk has been neighborly, maybe he will like it;and I will throw some shreds of my lunch into the water as an offering to the fish. They have given me a rare morning. The line is not wet, but I am, and the fish have not been be- guiled, for | have not grown vicious yet and baited my hook. But I'll be blessed if I know where the pole and the line and the hook are; and I will go and hunt them. And after a series of meanderings in mind I conclude they may be in one of seventeen places, which is a serious gain in the question of discovery and conclude them practically found now. I may be leisurely and gather wild roses and dainty ferns; and I sit down beside a wild flower devoutly as beside a woman, and wonder about its loneliness and loveliness, and if God knows it is there; and I walk in ripples of undulat- ing grasses that hem the edge of the stream, and « a phoebe plaints near me, and far across the river where the milk weeds grow and hang their ball blossoms, a hawk flies and flings his eager shadow on the water or on the meadow; for the sky has cleared and the rain cloud has forgotten its business and has gone a-gypsying with the wind. And here I go hunting for the fishing line. Strangely enough I was mistaken. It was not in any of the seventeen places, but /s in the nineteenth. There it was sprawling indolently like a hobo in the shade with his dinner fragments beside him, with the flics upon him, and the blue bottles buzzing luxuriously around. But I stand with a sense of triumph. I have found the pole and line. Some people have poor memories. I pity them. There is no excuse for forgetting 91 where you left your things! And I have had great luck in fishing, and a great day of sport. ‘What luck?” say the people leeringly as | pass. ‘‘Fine,’’ I answer bravely. ‘‘Where are the fish?’’ they insinu- atingly ask. ‘I threw them back,’’ I reply. So brave is truth. To refrain from catching the fish is the most delicate and generous way of throwing them back. The fish are there and truth is vindicated; and I go home with my heels on the ground, but my head in the sky and hang my day's fishing up with my fishing pole. And the rose is fragrant yet, and the trees cast their shadows across my face, and the river ripples and flashes brightly a perpetual pleasure. I am glad | went fishing, and had good luck. Sweet was the meadow scent, And blue the sky, When we a-fishing went, My rod and I. Cares staid at home in bed While we went free; And scurvy care ts dead To such as we. Green was the summer land, The air was balm; Fair the bleak pine-trees stand; My heart was calm. Out on the river's rim, My spirit sings Roundels of praise to Him Who summer brings. So while fair morning drifts, Fishing I go. Down through the green wood's rifts Warm sunlights glow. Glad laughter takes my hcnd And holds it tight, As through this summer land I stray till night. THE GOINGS OF THE WINDS WHERE ZEPHYRS TOUCH THE WILLOWS THE GOINGS OF THE: WINDS IKE many another word freighted with beauty, this word ‘“goings’’ comes from the Bible. Those old King James trans- lators were poets to a man, which accounts for our Bible being both the classic of Hebrew literature and English literature. One translator gets the sense in a ccld literality like a dead tree trunk; another suffuses his translation with poetry, as a tree is shaded by its own leaves. ‘‘When thou hearest the goings in the tops of the mulberry-trees'’ is a poet’s way of telling a wind is blowing through tree tops. ‘‘Goings”’ are sound mixed with movement, the marching of the winds feet along the pathways of the tree tops; and what is or can be sweete ! I have often wondered if God could forget; whether he ever had obliviscent moods; whether any syllable ever fell out of his words as they do from ours; whether he ever could forget anything belonging to the calendar of beauty. I think he does not. Else how is every beautiful possibility present? In making the world God thought of everything ministrant to a blessed life. Can we think of any omitted mercy? Did he not put beauty in the green sward and in the blue sky? What colors could have been devised to rest the eyes and com- fort the heart like this bewildering green upon the earth and this bewildering blue in the sky? Did he forget grace when he was making the cypress or pine, or the larch, or the quivering aspen, or tne doughty oak, or the leaning willow? He could have made all 97 plants flowerless, as he did the ferns, or he could have dyed all flow- ers with one pigment, or he might have left odors out in compounding his flowers and leaves and grasses and earths; but thanks to his good Providence, he forgot not the sandalwood’s clinging fragrance, nor the scents of roses and wheat stubble nor new-mown hay nor green wal- nuts, nor forgot to make dews at night, to distill odors from woodlands and plains, nor neglected that sweet inrush of earth and air smells which puffs in the face some unexpected morning and sings to the soul—Springtime! God ransacked his treasuries when he made this world; nor was it in spirit of haste or obliviousness, when, on the day he finished the building of his world he said, ‘I have found all things good.’’ If the wind fans a hot cheek to blow its fever out, or fills the flapping sails of innumerable ships, | count that to be a lesser blessing than its gift of touch and music. The wind’s touch can be as tender as a loving woman’s caress and its music as gentle and sweet as mem- ories fetched from a happy past. To miss the blowing of the trumpets of the winds is to suffer loss. The wind’s voices are inexpressible music. I love their laughter and their weeping, their wailing of autumn and their leaf-patter, like the sound of spring showers. | was reared in Kansas, where winds have what some esteem a vicious supremacy, but to me their trumpetings and stormy chargings to and fro, their shrill falsettos through leafless trees; their summer sweep, which wrecks the fleets of clouds as if they were ships blown on ragged ocean rocks; their whine at the casement, like a patient dog pleading for its master, and their wholly tender touch of a June evening wind—I love them all. Not one will I willingly leave out of my memory or deny room at the fireside of my life. They are part of me. It may be because my father's folk for unknown generations were sea captains and lovers of the raging waters, tempest-swirled and were all drowned at sea, that tempests are mixed with my blood and are part of my soul's dear possessions. But certain | am that winds do not vex me and that I am lonely apart from them as missing one of my home folks. Their ardor warms my spirit and their gentle quiet is like a call to prayer. Jesus loved the winds, and, as | think, tore a scrap from the book of his boyhood when he said (he was thinking of Nazareth when he spoke), “The wind bloweth where it listeth"—those un- certain, unmannerly, brusque winds, which betimes whipped up Esdraelon’s loitering 98 valley from the Great Sea, or on occasion springing with sudden pas- sion out of the Jordan Valley over the Nazareth cliffs toward the far and fair blue waters. Could Jesus forget them? On many a solemn night, alone but not lonely, he had sat with chin upon his hands and listened to his hill winds blow. The winds—and he made them! Think of that, my heart. His winds—now thine. And when the sea was whipped with tempests by the lashings of the winds the wild and boisterous waves disturbed him not only in dreams, he thought he heard the heavenly bu- gles blow, and wakened from his happy sleep when the scared disciples wailed above the wind’s wild “goings,’’ ‘‘Carest thou not if we perish?’’ Then he awoke and spake lovingly to the winds (no harshness in his voice nor threat upon his face) saying only,‘‘Keep still for a little while, your fury frightens them, keep still. Peace, be still,’ and the winds threw their brazen trumpets in the sea and were still. He loved the winds; and all their sobbing lutes and viols and ’cellos THUNDERHEAD were dear to him. How | have rejoiced in God's winds! Under Niagara, when the winds have blown fury blasts, and on the mountains, when the snows had loosened their garments at the throat for freer wrestling and where down some long cafion winds swept like vernal freshets, and up among melancholy pines, where every pine was as a chief musician, like Asaph 99 in his ancient choir, and on bare plains, where only the surly sage brush leaned prone before the gale, and on lakes. where water tumbled like romping children when the winds frisked with them in gay moods of laughter and romping, or when the winds were in outrageous anger and plowed the fair waters with the.share of the hurricane, and in forests, where the paths are narrow and very dim and shadows are many and sunshine rare—O the goings of the winds in such a wood when leaves flutter, as half in dream, and the sound sobs like remote surf, and winds pass still, ‘“Fainter onward. like wild birds that change Their season in the nigh’ and wail their way From cloud to cloud."’ and on headlands of the old sad ocean, where Mount Desert rocks, ban- nered with pine-trees fronted by the sea (rocks naked as the strength of death) or on headlands of the Golden Gate fronting burning sunsets and the far and barren reaches of the affable Pacific, and on cliffs of the Isle of Mona, where heather mixes honey with ocean winds and rocks lean darkly over Spanish Head, fruitful of shipwrecks, and against whose sword edges Philip's fleet proved but a feeble jest—on such headlands have | heard the winds and gloried in their tumults as in the coming of a friend; and many a night have I walked steamer decks to watch the marching Stars and hear the regurgitations of multitudinous waves a-sobbing; or in winter in the city, when cold winds keyed their voices to distress like beggars gaunt and cold, and shrieked like despair which had for- gotten laughter, when the thin-clad and well-clad hurried home as half afraid, and children play indoors, and snows whip up alley-ways and ‘down crowded half-quieted streets (seeing a storm makes its own ‘calm ), and down chimneys with singing like a last minstrel, or spits in your face like an indignant beggar to whom you have refused charity, or tender summer winds which stray down where long marsh grasses grow in hearing of the sea. THE SURF 100 IN BATTLE MOOD How | love the dim wind on the wide water; but as for that, what wind do | not love, and for what one do I not listen, whether singing a quiet song or trumpeting in Titan anger; whether it is gentle touch, like a beloved hand upon our sleeping cheek, or cruel and vindictive, like a Scythian—nay, I can not deny that | love them all. What musicians winds are! They are, in truth, the only musicians. All voices, whether human or blown from instruments, or shocked from A PATCH OF CLOVER WHERE SPRING WINDS LINGER wild waves that hammer on the rocks, what are they save the blowing of the winds? Lowell says ‘The organ blows its dream of storm,” and no more accurate word has ever been spoken regarding organ music, which is the wind blowing across the reeds. | have sat in cathedrals in the lowering dusk and felt the organ blow its gathering gale about my spirit. The organ was the wind of God. The Devas play: “We are the voices of the wandering wind Which moan for rest and rest can never find,"’ and they are sad ‘As sunset in a land of reeds,’’ 103 and very full of meaning. In an elect moment, Whittier made music for the winds to make their meaning clear: “Yet on my cheek I feel the western wind, And hear it telling to the orchard trees, And to the faint and flower-forsaken bees, Tales of fair meadows green with constant streams, And mountains rising blue and cold behind Where in moist dells the purple orchis gleams, And starred with white the virgin’s bower is twined. So the o'’erwearied pilgrim as he fares Along life's summer waste, at times is fanned Even at noontide by the cool, sweet airs Of a serener and a holier land.” And winds laded with odors—you can not escape their sweet com- radeship. And winds blowing across a field where haycocks exhale fra- grance, who can escape their witchery? Such winds know how to spoil waters and fields and forests of spikenards and balsams. I have in- haled fragrance from winds blown fresh from the sea through moors of purple heather, and can I forget the poetry of it even in heaven? | pray I may not. Winds of spring, apple-scented and with earth-smell in them! And walking through woods at night when dew drips from the leaves and the score or more of odors saturate the air, and the frog’s song sings up from marshes and ravines as if that were audible odor, and star- light plays hide-and-seek with you through the foliage, when there puffs in your face the musk of many odors mixed, then you could catch the Wind and kiss her on the cheek like a girl, for sheer delight. Then when lilacs blow, and spring hastens on to June and white clover chokes the air with heavy perfumes, and roses tell in the dark where they are blooming by the fragrance they lent the breeze as it strayed indolently through their dear delights, or later, when harvests spill their essences to the languorous winds, and later still, when winds bear their sad freightage of autumn leaves falling, or fallen, and faded. O the wind is the poet laureate of autumn; and the lonely, tearful music and autumnal fra- grance of leaf-distilled perfumes fairly drug the senses of the spirit till perforce the winds make us poets against our will and reason. In one of Hosea Biglow’s pastoral preludes (bless him who wrote them and gave us Hosea!) is a touch of genius in discriminating odors. ‘Mr. Wilbur sez to Hosea, ‘Wut’s the sweetest smell on 104 airth?’ ‘Noomone hay,’ sez I, pooty bresk, for he was allus hank- erin’ ‘round in hayin’. ‘Nawthin' of the kine,’ sez-he. ‘My leetle Huldy’s breath,’ sez I ag’in.’ ‘You're a good lad,’ sez he, his eyes sort of riplin’ like, for he lost a babe onc’t about her age—‘the best of perfooms is just fresh air, fresh air,’ sez he, emphysizin', ‘athout no mixture.’’’ And that is worth thinking of. All odors the winds bear are defective as compared with the utter freshness of the moving airs themselves. ‘Jest fresh air,’"—what an exhilarant that is. Drinking water spouting fresh from mountain snow drifts, and the blowing of clean air in the tace, and the making your riayer to God when life grows hard or glad—are not these apart from all things else and allow of no comparisons. Similes are lifeless here. And the breath of a wind after a rain! Wind is unspeakable for music and odors. What a | happy fate to be associated with such recollec- | tions. If man or woman might hope in com- ing years, when far beyond the sight of eyes or hearing of the ears, to stay sweet memories in hearts which could not forget them, what could human heart ask more? And I have known such folks. The mention of their names makes me think of sunlit fields. All sweet things lie adjacent to their person- alities, just as trees and shade and gurgling A Svein Bebo brooks and trailing clouds and sublime soli- tudes and what seems the ragged frontiers of the world lie adjacent to huge mountains. Winds are fortunate to be the carriers of aromas and music; to come freighted with the lilac’s breath and the happy voices of happy womens Jaughter. But I do not hesitate to confess that the rarest wind I have ever experienced is blown from Kansas prairies on summer twilights. About midway in Kansas, east and west, is this wind in perfection. Nothing equals it. I have loved winds blown from briny seas and from the emerald deserts of great lakes and the St. Lawrence dreaming northward like a drifting ship, and from Alp and Sierra, and my belief still holds that for unutterable tenderness, part wind, part spirit, for poetry whose threads can never be unbraided, these Kansas 105 June prairie winds have not any competitor. This may be the love of my lifetime veering my judgment, though I incline to believe this is the judgment of a balanced and an equal mind. The prairie wind, as | tell you, has a witchery quite beyond the telling of any man. There have I walked along the shores of summer twilight as on the shores of blue and beautiful Galilee, and caressing, like an angel’s hand, went the dear wind, and in it a voice, half whisper and half dream, its touch, like the shadow-touch of a fond hand passing across you, yet scarcely touching you; the hush, and after that the slow streaming wind, like a breath from heaven upon a pilgrimage across the spaces, so remote its origin appeared; and journeying not any whither, yet everywhere and in no haste, loverlike loving to linger for another kiss—such a wind withal as one might love to have kiss him on the face that evening, when, after a long journey, with bleeding feet, he walked in through some postern gate out on the fields of heaven sown to asphodels, and dim lights and violets and immortelles. Such is the twilight summer wind in Kansas when the prairie grasses stoop a little to let the zephyrs by. To feel this necromancy once is worth a pilgrimage; seeing it will endure among the luculent recollections of a happy life. ‘‘The wind to-night is cool and free, The wind to-night is westerly, Sweeping in from the plains afar, Sweet and faint. k My thoughts to-night are far and free, am My thoughts to-night are westerly; Sweeping out on the plains afar, Where roses grow and grasses are. My heart to-night is wild and free, My heart to-night is westerly,” —JOHN NORTHERN HILLIARD. George Macdonald has felt the heavenly hill- winds blow: “O wind of God that blowest in the mind, Blow, blow and wake the gentle spring in me; Blow, swifter blow, a strong, warm summer wind, Till all the flowers with eyes come out to see, | Blow till the fruit hangs red on every tree."’ Blow, wind of God! hie Able Or oi