ODINTSR 'SUNSHIN6 JQl FN- BURROUGHS LIBRARY OF WELLES LEY COLLEGE PRESENTED BY i PRESH FIELDS. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25. BIRDS AND POETS, with Other Papers. i6mo. giit top, Si. 25. LOCUSTS AND WILD HONEY. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25. PEPACTON, AND Other Sketches. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25. WAKE ROBIN. Illustrated. Revised and enlarged edi- tion. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25 ; Riverside A Idine Edition, i6mo, $1.00. WINTER SUNSHINE. New edition, re\ased and en- larged. With Frontispiece. i6mo, gilt top, $1.35 SIGNS AND SEASONS. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25. INDOOR STUDIES. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25. The set, 8 vols., uniform, $10.00, HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Publishers, Boston and New York. SNOW BUNTINGS. WINTER SUNSHINE BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY j894 BY JOHN BURROUGHS Copyright, 1875, By JOHN BURROUGHS. PREFATORY. The only part of my book I wish to preface is the last part, — the foreign sketches,-— and it is not much matter about these, since, if they do not contain their own proof I shall not attempt to supply it here. I have been told that De Lolme, who wrote a no- table book on the English Constitution, said that after he had been in England a few weeks, he fully made up his mind to write a book on that country ; after he had lived there a year, he still thought of writing a book, but was not so certain about it, but that after a residence of ten years he abandoned his first design altogether. Instead of furnishing an ar- gument against writing out one's first impressions of a country, I think the experience of the Frenchman shows the importance of doing it at once. The sen- sations of the first day are what we want — the first flush of the traveler's thtDught and feeling, before his perception and sensibilities become cloyed or blunted, or before he in any way becomes a part of that which he would observe and describe. Then the Ajuerican in England is jusft enough at home to en- iv PREFATORY. able him to discriminate subtle shades and differencea at first sight which might escape a traveler of another and antagonistic race. He has brought with him, but little modified or impaired, his whole inheritance of English ideas and predilections, and much ol what he sees afi*ects him like a memory. It is hit own past, his ante-natal life, and his long buried an cestors look through his eyes and perceive with hii> sense. I have attempted only the surface, and to expresfi my own first day's uncloyed and unalloyed satisfac- tion. Of course I have put these things through my own processes and given them my own coloring (as who would not), and if other travelers do not find what I did, it is no fault of mine ; or if the " Brit- .shers " do not deserve all the pleasant things I say of them, why then so much the worse for them. In fact, if it shall appear that I have treated this part in the same spirit that I have the themes in the other chapters, reporting only such things as im- pressed me and stuck to me and tasted good, I shall be satisfied. E80i»u&-o.v-HuDsojf, November, 1876. CONTENTS. PAGI I. Winter Suxshixe 7 II. Exhilarations of the Road .... 31 III. The Sxow-Walkers 51 IV. The Fox . . 79 V. A March Chronicle ... . . 99 VI. Autumn Tides 113 VIL The Apple 129 mi. An October Abroad 149 I. Mellow England . .... 151 n. English Characteristics • . • . 190 m. A Glimpse of France ..... 205 XT. From London to N«w Tork • • . 220 WINTEB SUNSfflNE. WINTER SUNSHINE. An American resident in England is reported as Baying that the English have an atmosphere but no climate. The reverse of this remark would apply pretty accurately to our own case. We certainly have a climate, a two-edged one that cuts both ways, threatening us with sun-stroke on the one hand and with frost-stroke on the other, but we have no atmos- phere to speak of in New York and New England, except now and then during the dog-days, or the fit- ful and uncertain Indian Summer. An atmosphere, the quality of tone and mellowness in the near dis- tance, is the product of a more humid climate. Hence, as we go south from New York, the atmospheric effects become more rich and varied, until on reach- ing the Potomac you find an atmosphere as well as a climate. The latter is still on the vehement Ameri- can scale, full of sharp and violent changes and con- trasts, baking and blistering in summer, and nipping and blighting in winter, but the spaces are not so purged and bare ; the horizon wall does not so often have the appearance of having just been washed and icrubbed down. There is more depth and visibilitj 10 WINTER SUNSHINE. to the open air, a stronger infusion of the Indian Summer element throughout the year, than is found farther north. The days are softer and more brood- ing, and the nights more enchantiDg. It is here that Walt Whitman saw the full moon " Pour down Night's nimbus floods," as any one may see her, during her fiill, from Octo- ber to May. There is more haze and vapor in the atmosphere during that period, and every particle seems to collect and hold the pure radiance until the world swims with the lunar outpouring. Is not the full moon always on the side of fair weather ? I think it is Sir William Herschell who says her influence tends to dispel the clouds. Certain it is her beauty is seldom lost or even veiled in this southern or semi- southern clime. It is here also the poet speaks of the " Floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, Indolent sinking sun, burning, expanding the air," a description that would not apply with the same force farther north, where the air seems thinner and le&s capable of absorbing and holding the sunlight. Indeed, the opulence and splendor of our climate, at least the climate of our Atlantic sea-board, cannot be fully appreciated by the dweller north of the thii^ty- rinth parallel. It seemed as if I had never seen but a second-rate article of sunlight or moonlight until I had taken up my abode in the National Capital. It may be, perhaps, because we have such splendid sped WINTER SUNSHINE. 11 meus of both at that period of the year when one values such things highest, namely, in the fall and winter and early spring. Sunlight is good any time, but a bright, evenly tempered day is certainly more engrossing to the attention in winter than in summer, and such days seem the rule, and not the exception, in the Washington winter. The deep snows keep to the north, the heavy rains to the south, leaving a blue space central over the border States. And there is not one of the winter months but wears this blue zone as a girdle. I am not thinking especially of the Indian Sum- mer, that charming but uncertain second youth of the New England year, but of regularly recurring lucid intervals in the weather system of the Virginia fall and winter, when the best our climate is capable of stands revealed, — southern days with northern blood in their veins, exhilarating, elastic, full of action, the hyperborean oxygen of the North tempered by the dazzling sun of the South, a little bitter in winter to all travelers but the pedestrian — to him sweet and warming — but in autumn a vintage that intoxicates all lovers of the open air. It is impossible not to dilate and expand under such skies. One breathes deeply and steps proudly, and if he have any of the eagle nature in him it conies to the surface then. There is a sense of alti- tude about these dazzling November and December days, of mountain tops and pure ether. The earth in ^•assing through the fire of summer seems to have 08t all its dross, and life all its impediments. 12 WINTER SUNSHINE. But what does not the dweller in the National Capital endure in reaching these days ? Think of the agonies of the heated term, the ragings of the dog-star, the purgatory of heat and dust, of baking, blistering pavements, of cracked and powdered fields, of dead stifling night air, from which every tonic and antiseptic quality seems eliminated, leaving a resid- uum of sultry malaria and all diffusing privy and Bewer gases, that lasts from the first of July to near the middle of September. But when October is reached, the memory of these things is afar off, and the glory of the days is a perpetual surprise. I sally out in the morning with the ostensible pur- pose of gathering chestnuts, or autumn leaves, or persimmons, or exploring some run or branch. It is, say, the last of October or the first of November. The air is not balmy, but tart and pungent, like the flavor of the red-cheeked apples by the road-side. In the sky not a cloud, not a speck ; a vast dome of blue ether lightly suspended above the world. The woods are heaped with color like a painter's palette — great splashes of red and orange and gold. The ponds and streams bear upon their bosoms leaves of all tints, from the deep maroon of the oak to the pale yellow of the chestnut. In the glens and nooks it is ^o still that the chirp of a solitary cricket is notice- vble. The red berries of the dogwood and spice-bush and other shrubs shine in the sun like rubies and coral. The crows fly high above the earth as they do wily on such days, forms of ebony floating across th« WINTER SUNSHINE. 13 azure, and the buzzards look like kingly birds, sail- ing round and round. Or it may be later in the season, well into Decern ber. The days are equally bright, but a little more rugged. The mornings are ushered in by an im- mense spectrum thrown upon the eastern sky. A broad bar of red and orange lies along the low hori- zon, surmounted by an expanse of color in which green struggles with yellow and blue with green half the way to the zenith. By and by the red and or- ange spread upward and grow dim, the spectrum fades and the sky becomes suffused with yellow white light, and in a moment the fiery scintillations of the sun begin to break across the Maryland hills. Then be- fore long the mists and vapors uprise like the breath of a giant army, and for an hour or two one is re- minded of a November morning in England. But by mid-forenoon the only trace of the obscurity that remains is a slight haze, and the day is indeed a sum- mons and a challenge to come forth. If the Octo- ber days were a cordial like the sub-acids of fruit, these are a tonic like the wine of iron. Drink deep pr be careful how you taste this December vintage. The first sip may chill, but a full draught warms and invigorates. No loitering by the brooks or in the woods now, but spirited, rugged walking along the public highway. The sunbeams are welcome now. They seem like pure electricity — like friendly and recuperating lightning. Are we led to think elec- ^icity abounds only in summer when we see in tho 14 WINTER SUNSHINE. itorm-clouds as it were, the veins and ore-beds of it i I imagine it is equally abundant in winter, and more equable and better tempered. Who ever breasted a snow-storm without being excited aod exhilarated, as if this n^teor had come charged with latent aurorao of the North, as doubtless it has ? It is like being pelted with sparks from a battery. Behold the frost- work on the pane — the wild, fantastic limnings and etchings, can there be any doubt but this subtle agent has been here ? Where is it not ? It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp winter air is full of it. When I come in at night after an all day tramp I am charged like a Leyden jar, my hair crackles and snaps beneath the comb like a cat's back, and a strange, new glow diffuses it- self through my system. It is a spur that one feels at this season more than at any other. How nimbly you step forth! The woods roar, the waters shine, and the hills look in- vitingly near. You do not miss the flowers and the Bongsters, or wish the trees or the fields any different, or heavens any nearer. Every object pleases. A i-ail fence, running athwart the hills, now in sunshine and now in shadow — how the eye lingers upon itl Or the straight, light-gray trunks of the trees, where the woods have recently been laid open by a roaJ or a clearing, how curious they look, and as if surprised in undress. Next year they will begin to shoot out branches and make themselves a screen. Or the WINTER SUNSHINE. 15 farm scene? — the winter barn-yards littered with husks and straw, the rough-coated horses, the cattle Bunning themselves or walking down to the spring to drink, the domestic fowls moving about — there is a touch of sweet homely life in these things that the winter sun enhances and brings out. Every sign of iife is welcome at this season. I love to hear dogs bark, hens cackle, and boys shout ; one has no pri- vacy with Nature now, and does not wish to seek her in nooks and hidden ways. She is not at home if he goes there ; her house is shut up and her hearth cold ; only the sun and sky, and perchance the waters, wear the old look, and to-day we will make love to them, and they shall abundantly return it. Even the crows and the buzzards draw the eye fondly. The National Capital is a great place for buzzards, and I make the remark in no double or allegorical sense either, for the buzzards I mean are black and harmless as doves, though perhaps hardly dovelike in their tastes. My vulture is also a bird of leisure, and sails through the ether on long flexible pinions, as if that was the one delight of his life. Some birds have wings others have " pinions." The buzzard enjoys this latter distinction. There is some- thing in the sound of the word that suggests that easy, dignified, undulatory movement. He does not oropel himself along by sheer force of muscle, after whe plebeian fashion of the crow for instance, but progresses by a kind of royal indirection that puzzles .the eye. Even on a windy winter day he ndes the 16 WINTER SUNSHINK. vast aerial billows as placidly as ever, rising and fall" ing as he comes up toward you, carving liis way through the resisting currents by a slight oscilla- tion to the right and left, but never once beating the air openly. This superabundance of wing power is very un- equally distributed among the feathered races, the hawks and vultures having by far the greater share of it. They cannot command the n^ost speed, but their apparatus seems the most delicate and con- summate. Apparently a fine play of muscle, a subtle fehifting of the power along the outstretched wings, a perpetual loss and a perpetual recovery of the equi- poise, sustains them and bears them along. With them flying is a luxury, a fine art, not merely a quicker and safer means of transit from one point to another, but a gift so free and spontaneous that that work becomes leisure and movement rest. They are not so much going somewhere, from this perch to that, as they are abandoning themselves to the mere pleasure of riding upon the air. And it is beneath such grace and high-bred leisure that Nature hides in her creatures the occupation o^ scavenger and carrion eater ! But the worst thing about the buzzard is hi^ silence. The crow caws, the hawk screams, the eagle barks, but the buzzard says not a word. Sc ut the same purpose ; and the more the fatigue tht gieater our faith in the virtue of the medicine. THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. Of those gleesome saunters over the hills in spungy or those sallies of the body in winter, those excursiona Into space when the foot strikes fire at every step, when the air tastes like a new and finer mixture, when we accumulate force and gladness as we go along, when the sight of objects by the roadside and of the fields and woods pleases more than pictures or than all the art in the world, — those ten or twelve mile dashes that are but the wit and effluence of the corporeal powers, — of ^ucli diversion and open road entertainment, I say, most of us know very little. I notice with astonishment that at our fashionable watering-places nobody walks ; that of all those vast crowds of health-seekers and lovers of country air, you can never catch one in the fields or woods, or guilty of trudging along the country road with dust on his shoes and sun-tan on his hands and face. The sole amusement seems to be to eat and dress and sit about the hotels and glare at each other. The men look bored, the women look tired, and all seem to sigh, " O Lord ! what shall we do to be happy and not be vulgar?" Quite different from our British cousins across the water, who have plenty of, amuse- ment and hilarity, spending most of the time at their watering-places in the open air, strolling, pic- nicking, boating, climbing, briskly walking, appar- ')ntly with little fear of sun-tan or of compromising heir "gentility." It is Indeed astonishing with what ease and hilaritj 38 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. the English walk. To an American it seems a kind of infatuation. When Dickens was in this country I imagine the aspirants to the honor of a walk with him were not numerous. In a pedestrian tour of England by an American, I read that " after break- fast with the Independent minister, he walked with us for six miles out of town upon our road. Three little boys and girls, the youngest six years old, also accompanied us. They were romping and rambling about all the while, and their morning walk must have been as much as fifteen miles ; but they thought nothing of it, and when we parted were apparently as fresh as when they started, and very loath to return." I fear, also, the American is becoming disqualified for the manly art of walking, by a falling off in the size of his foot. He cherishes and cultivates this part of his anatomy, and apparently thinks his taste and good breeding are to be inferred from its diminutive size. A small, trim foot, well booted or gaitered, is the national vanity. How we stare at the big feet of foreigners, and wonder what may be the price ol leather in those countries, and where all the aristo- cratic blood is, that these plebeian extremities so pre- dominate. If we were admitted to the confidences of the shoemaker to Her Majesty or to His Royal High- v.ess, no doubt we would modify our views upon this latter point, for a truly large and royal nature is nevei Stunted in the extremities; a little foot never lupported a great character. THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. 3& It is said that Englishmen when they first come to Ais country are for some time under the impression that American women all have deformed feet, they are so coy of them and so studiously careful to keep them hid. That there is an astonishing difference between the women of the two countries in this re- Bpect, every traveler can testify ; and that there is a difference equally astonishing between the pedes- trian habits and capabilities of the rival sisters, is also certain. The English pedestrian, no doubt, has the advan- tage of us in the matter of climate ; for, notwithstand- ing the traditional gloom and moroseness of English skies, they have in that country none of those relaxing, sinking, enervating days, of which we have so many here, and which seem especially trying to the female constitution — days which withdraw all support from the back and loins, and render walking of all things burdensome. Theirs is a climate of which it has been said that it invites men abroad more days in the year and more hours in the day than that of any other country." Then their land is threaded with paths which invite the walker, and which are scarcely less important than the highways. I heard of a surly nobleman near Lon- Ion who took it into his head to close a foot-path that passed through his estate near his house, and open another one a little farther off. Tha pedestrians ob- iccted; the matter got into the courts, and after pio- tracted litigation the aristocrat was beaten. The path lO THE EXniLARATIONS OF THE ROAD. 2ould not be closed or moved. The memory of maw ran not to the time when there was not a foot-path there, and every pedestrian should have the right of way there still. I remember the pleasure I had in the path that con- nects Stratford-on-Avon with Shottery, Shakespeare's path when he went courting Anne Hathaway. By the king's highway the distance is some farther, so there is a well-worn path along the hedgerows and through the meadows and turnip-patches. The trav- eler in it has the privilege of crossing the railroad track, an unsual privilege in England, and one de- nied to the lord in his carriage, who must either go over or under it. (It is a privilege, is it not, to be allowed the forbidden, even if it be the privilege of being run over by the engine ?) In strolling over the South Downs, too, I was delighted to find that where the hill was steepest some benefactor of the order of walkers had made notches in the sward, so that the foot could bite the better and firmer ; the path became a kind of stairway, which I have no doubt the plow- man respected. When you see an English country church with- drawn, secluded, out of the reach of wheels, standing amid grassy graves and surrounded by noble trees, ap- proached by paths and shaded lanes, you appreciate nc.ore than ever this beautiful habit of the people Only a race that knows how to use its feet, and holds •bot-paths sacred, could put such a charm of privacy Mid humility into such a structure. I think I should THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. 41 De tempted to go to church myself if I saw all my neighbors starting off across the fields or along paths that led to such charmed spots, and was sure I would not be jostled or run over by the rival chariots of the worshipers at the temple doors. I think this is what ails our religion ; humility and devoutness of heart leave one when he lays by his walking shoes and walking clothes, and sets out for church drawn by something. Indeed, I think it would be tantamount to an as- tonishing revival of religion if the people would all walk to church on Sunday and walk home again. Think how the stones would preach to them by the wayside ; how their benumbed minds would warm up beneath the friction of the gravel ; how their vain and foolish thoughts, their desponding thoughts, their besetting demons of one kind and another, would drop behind them, unable to keep up or to endure the fresh air. They would walk away from their ennui, their worldly cares, their uncharitableness, their pride of iress : for these devils always want to ride, while the wmple virtues are never so happy as when on foot Let us walk by all means ; but if we will ride, get an ass. Then the English claim that they are a more hearty and robust people than we are. It is certain they are a plainer people, have plaine;* tastes, dress plainer, onild plainer, speak plainer, keep closer to facts, wear troader shoes and coarser clothes, place a lower esti mate on themselves, etc. — all of which iraits &vor 12 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. pedestrian habits. The English grandee is not con- fined to his carriage ; but if the American aristocrat leaves his, he is ruined. Oh, the weariness, the emp- tiness, the plotting, the seeking rest and finding none, that goes by in the carriages ! while your |)e- destrian is always cheerful, alert, refreshed, with his heart in his hand and his hand free to all. He looks down upon nobody ; he is on the common levels His pores are all open, his circulation is active, his digestion good. His heart is not cold, nor his facul- ties asleep. He is the only real traveler ; he alone tastes the " gay, fresh sentiment of the road." He is not isolated, but one with things, with the farms and industries on either hand. The vital, universal cur- rents play through him. He knows the ground is alive ; he feels the pulses of the wind, and reads the mute language of things. His sympathies are all aroused ; his senses are continually reporting mes- sages to his mind. Wind, frost, rain, heat, cold, are something to him. He is not merely a spectator of the panorama of nature, but a participator in it. He experiences the country he passes through — tastes it, feels it, absorbs it ; the traveler in his fine carriage rtees it merely. This gives the fresh charm to that class of books that may be called " Views Afoot," and to the narratives of hunters, naturalists, explor- ing parties, etc. The walker does not need a large territory. When you get into a railway car you want a continent, the man in his carriage requires a xownsliip ; but a walker like Thoreau finds as much THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. 43 %nd more along the shores of Walden Pond. The former, as it were, has merely time to glance at the headings of the chapters, while the latter need not miss a line, and Thoreau reads between the lines. Then the walker has the privilege of the fields, the woods, the hills, the by-ways. The apples by the roadside are for him, and the berries, and the spring of water, and the friendly shelter; and if the weather is cold, he eats the frost grapes and the persimmons, or even the white meated turnip, snatched from the field he passed through, with incredible relish. Afoot and in the open road, one has a fair start in iife at last. There is no hindrance now. Let him put his best foot forward. He is on the broadest human plane. This is on the level of all the great laws and heroic deeds. From this platform he is eli- gible to any good fortune. He was sighing for the golden age ; let him walk to it. Every step brings him nearer. The youth of the world is but a few days' journey distant. Indeed, I know persons who think they have walked back to that fresh aforetime of a single bright Sunday in autumn or early spring. Before noon they felt its airs upon their cheeks, and by nightfall, on the banks of some quiet stream, or along some path in the wood, or on some hill-top, aver they have heard the voices and felt the wonder and the mystery that so enchanted the early races of men. I think if I could walk through a country I should tot only see many things and have adventures that 1 44 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. should otherwise miss, but that I should come into re- lations with that country at first hand, and with the men and women in it, in a way that would afford the deepest satisfaction. Hence I envy the good fortune of all walkers, and feel like joining myself to every tramp that comes along. I am jealous of the clergy - man I read about the other day who footed it from Edinburgh to London, as poor Effie Deans did, cai • rying her shoes in her hand most of the way, and over the ground that rugged Ben Jonson strode^ larking it to Scotland, so long ago. I read with long- ing of the pedestrian feats of college youths, so gay and light-hearted, with their coarse shoes on their feet and their knapsacks on their backs. It would have been a good draught of the rugged cup to have walked with Wilson the ornithologist, deserted by his companions, from Niagara to Philadelphia through the snows of winter. I almost wish that I had been born to the career of a German mechanic, that I might have had that delicious adventurous year of wandering over my country before I settled down to work. I think how much richer and firmer grained life w^ould be to me if I could journey afoot through Florida and Texas, or follow the windings of the Platte or the Yellowstone, or stroll through Oregon, ^ or brow^se for a season about Canada. In the bright inspiring days of autumn I only want the time and the companion to walk back to the natal spot, thf ^mily nest, across two States and into the mountains »t a third. What adventures we would have by th« THE EXHILARA.TIONS OF THE ROAD. 45 way, what hard pulls, what prospects from hills, what spectacles we would behold of night and day, what passages with dogs, what glances, what peeps into windows, what characters we should fall in with, and how seasoned and hardy we should arrive at our des- tination ! For companion I should want a veteran of the war ! Those marches put something into him I like. Even at this distance his mettle is but little softened. As soon as he gets warmed up it all comes back to him. He catches your step and away you go, a gay, adventurous, half predatory couple. How quickly he falls into the old ways of jest and anecdote and song ! You may have known him for years with- out having heard him hum an airj'^or more than cas- ually revert to the subject of his experience during the war. You have even questioned and cross-ques- tioned him without firing the train you wished. But get him out on a vacation tramp, and you can walk it all out of him. By the camp fire at night or swing- ing along the streams by day, song, anecdote, advent- ure, come to the surface, and you wonder how your companion has kept silent so long. It is another proof of how walking brings out the true character of a man. The devil never yet asked his victims to take a walk with him. You will not be long in finding your companion out. All dis- guises will fall away from him. As his pores open his character is laid bare. His deepest and most private self will come to ^he top. It matters little 46 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. whom you ride with, so he be not a pickpocket ; for both of you will, very likely, settle down closer and firmer in your reserve, shaken down like a measure of corn by the jolting as the journey proceeds. But walking is a more vital copartnership ; the relation is a closer and more sympathetic one, and you do not feel like walking ten paces with a stranger without speaking to him. Hence the fastidiousness of the professional walker in choosing or admitting a companion, and hence the truth of a remark of Emerson that you will generally fare better to take your dog than to invite your neighbor. You cur-dog is a true pedestrian, and your neighbor is very likely a small politician. The dog enters thoroughly into the spirit of the enter- prise ; he is not indifferent or preoccupied ; he is con- stantly sniffing adventure, laps at every spring, looks upon every field and wood as a new world to be ex- plored, is ever on some fresh trail, knows something important will happen a little farther on, gazes with the true wonder-seeing eyes, whatever the spot or whatever the road finds it good to be there — in short, is just that happy, delicious, excursive vaga- bond that touches one at so many points, and whose human prototype in a companion robs miles and leagues of half their power to fatigue. Persons who find themselves spent in a short walk to the market or the post-office, or to do a little shop- ping, wonder how it is that their pedestrian frienda W) compass so many weary miles and not fall dowr THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. 47 from sheer exhaustion ; ignorant of the fact that the walker is a kind of projectile that drops far or near according to the expansive force of the motive that Bet it in motion, and that it is easy enough to regulate the charge according to the distance to be traversed If I am loaded to carry only one mile and am com- pelled to walk three, I generally feel more fatigue than if I had walked six under the proper impetus of preadjusted resolution. In other words, the will or corporeal mainspring, whatever it be, is capable of be- ing wound up to different degrees of tension, so that one may walk all day nearly as easy as half that time if he is prepared beforehand. He knows his task, and he measures and distributes his powers accord- ingly. It is for this reason that an unknown road is always a long road. We cannot cast the mental eye along it and see the end from the beginning. We are fighting in the dark, and cannot take the measure of our foe. Every step must be preordained and provided for in the mind. Hence also the fact that to vanquish one mile in the woods seems equal to compassing three in the open country. The furlongs are ambushed, and we magnify them. Then, again, how annoying to be told it is only five miles to the next place when it is really eight or ten ! We fall short nearly half the distance, and are compelled to urge and roll the spent ball the rest of the way. In such a case walking degenerates from a fine art to a mechanic art ; we walk merely ; to get over 48 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE KOAD. the groimd becomes the one serious and engrossing thought ; whereas success in walking is not to let your right foot know what your left foot doeth. Your heart must fiirnish such music that in keeping time to it your feet will carry you around the globe without knowing it. The walker I would describe takes no note of distance ; his walk is a sally, a bon- mot,3iJi unspoken y^z^ d' esprit ; the ground is his butt, his provocation ; it furnishes him the resistance his body craves ; he rebounds upon it, he glances off and returns aorain, and uses it cfavlv as his tool. I do not think I exaggerate the importance or the charms of pedestrianism, or our need as a people to cultivate the art, I think it would tend to soften the national manners, to teach us the meaning of leisure, to acquaint us with the charms of the open air, to strengthen and foster the tie between the race and the land. Xo one else looks out upon the world so kindly and charitably as the pedestrian ; no one else gives and takes so much from the country he passes through. Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil ; and he bolds a closer and more vital relation to Xature be- cause he is freer and his mind more at leisure. Man takes root at his feet, and at best he is no more than a potted plant in his house or carriage, till he has established communication with the soil by the 'oving and magnetic touch of his soles to it. Then the tie of association is bom ; then spring those in visible fibres and rootlets through which character THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. 49 jomes to smack of the soil, and which make a man kindred to the spot of earth he inhabits. The roads and paths you have walked along in summer and winter weather, the fields and hills which you have looked upon in lightness and gladness of heart, where fresh thoughts have come into your mind, or some noble prospect has opened before you, and especially the quiet ways where you have walked in sweet converse with your friend, pausing under the trees, drinking at the spring — henceforth they are not the same ; a new charm is added ; those thoughts spring there perennial, your friend walks there for- ever. We have produced some good walkers and saun- terers, and some noted climbers ; but as a staple rec- reation, as a daily practice, the mass of the people dislike and despise walking. Thoreau said he was a good horse, but a poor roadster. I chant the virtues of the roadster as well. I sing of the sweetness of gravel, good sharp quartz-grit. It is the proper con- diment for the sterner seasons, and many a human gizzard would be cured of half its ills by a suitable daily allowance of it. I think Thoreau himself would have profited immensely by it. His diet was too exclusively vegetable. A man cannot live on grass alone. If one has been a lotus-eater all sum- mer, he must turn gravel-eater in the fall and winter. Those who have tried it know that gravel possesses an equal though an opposite charm. It Jipurs to ao tion. The foot tastes it and henceforth re?t» not 4 50 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. The joy of moving and surmounting, of attrition and progression, the thirst for space, for miles and leagues of distance, for sights and prospects, to cross mount- ains and thread rivers, and defy frost, heat, snow, danger, difficulties, seizes it ; and from that day forth its possessor is enrolled in the nohle army of walkers. THE SNOW-WALKERS. THE SNOW-WALKERS. He who marvels at the beauty of the world in Bummer will find equal cause for wonder and admira- tion in winter. It is true the pomp and the pageantry are swept away, but the essential elements remain, — the day and the night, the mountain and the valley, the elemental play and succession and the perpetual presence of the infinite sky. In winter the stars seem to have rekindled their fires, the moon achieves a fuller triumph, and the heavens wear a look of a more exalted simplicity. Summer is more wooing and seductive, more versatile and human, appeals to the affections and the sentiments, and fosters inquiry and the art impulse. Winter is of a more heroic cast, and addresses the intellect. The severe studies and disciplines come easier in winter. One imposes larger tasks upon himself, and is less tolerant of his own weaknesses. The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed ii? winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to Literature, summer the tissues and blood. The simplicity of winter has a deep iioral. T^« 54 THE SNOW-WALKERS. return of Nature, after such a career of splendor and prodigality, to habits so simple and austere, is not lost either upon the head or the heart It is the philosopher coming back from the banquet and the wine to a cup of water and a crust of bread. And then this beautiful masquerade of the ele- ments, — the novel disguises our nearest friends put on ! Here is another rain and another dew, water that will not flow, nor spill, nor receive the taint of an unclean vessel. And if we see truly, the same old beneficence and willingness to serve lurk beneath all. Look up at the miracle of the falling snow, — the air a dizzy maze of whirling, eddying flakes, noise- lessly transforming the world, the exquisite crystals dropping in ditch and gutter, and disguising in the game suit of spotless livery all objects upon which they fall. How novel and fine the first drifts ! The old, dilapidated fence is suddenly set off with the most fantastic ruffles, scalloped and fluted after an unheard-of fashion ! Looking down a long line of decrepit stone-wall, in the trimming of which the wind had fairly run riot, I saw, as for the first time, what a severe yet master artist old Winter is. Ah, ii severe artist! How stern the woods look, dark and cold and as rigid against the horizon as iron ! All life and action tipon the snow have an added emphasis and significance. Every expression is un- derscored. Summer has few finer pictures than this winter one of the farmer foddering his cattle fi'om a itack upon the clean snow, — the movement, the THE SXOW-WALKERS. 55 sharply-defined figures, the graat green flakes of hay the long file of patient cows, — the advance just ar- riving and pressing eagerly for the choicest morsels, and the bounty and providence it suggests. Or the chopper in the woods — the prostrate tree, the white new chips scattered about, his easy triumph over the cold, coat hanging to a limb, and the clear, sharp ring of his axe. The woods are rigid and tense, keyed up by the frost, and resound like a stringed instru- ment. Or the road-breakers, sallying forth with oxen and sleds in the still, white world, the day after the Btorm, to restore the lost track and demolish the be- leaguering drifts. All sounds are sharper in winter ; the air transmits better. At night I hear more distinctly the steady roar of the North Mountain. In summer it is a sort of complacent purr, as the breezes stroke down its sides ; but in winter always the same low, sullen growl. A severe artist ! No longer the canvas and the pigments, but the marble and the chisel. When the nights are calm and the moon full, I go out to gaze upon the wonderful purity of the moonlight and the snow. The air is full of latent fire, and the cold warms me — after a different fashion from that of the kitchen stove. The world lies about me in a "trance of snow." The clouds are pearly and iridescent, and Beom the farthest possible remove from the condition of a storm, — the ghosts of clouds, tlie indwelling beauty freed from all dross. I see the hills, bulging 56 THE SXOW-WALKERS. with great drifts, lift theras elves up cold and white against the sky^ tlie black lines of fences here and there obliterated by the depth of the snow. Pres- ently a fox barks away up next the mountain, and I imagine I can almost see him sitting there, in his furs, upon the illuminated surface, and looking down in my direction. As I listen, one answers him from behind the woods in the valley. What a wild winter sound, — wild and weird, up among the ghostly hills. Since the wolf has ceased to howl upon these mount- ains, and the panther to scream, there is nothing to be compared with it. So wild ! I get up in the mid- dle of the night to hear it. It is refreshing to the ear, and one delights to know that such wild creatures are among us. At this season Nature makes the most of every throb of life that can withstand her severity. How heartily she indorses this fox ! In what bold relief stand out the lives of all walkers of the snow ! The snow is a great tell-tale, and blabs as effectually as it obliterates. I go into the woods, and know all that has happened. I cross the fields, and if only a mouse has visited his neighbor, the fact is chronicled. The red fox is the only species that abounds in my locality ; the little gray fox seems to prefer a more rocky and precipitous country, and a less rigor- ous climate ; the cross fox is occasionally seen, and there are traditions of the silver gray among the old- est hunters. But the red fox is the sportsman's prize, and the only fur-bearer worthy of note in thew THE SNOW- -WALKERS. 57 oiountains.^ I go out in the morning, after a fresh fall of snow, and see at all points where he has crossed the road. Here he has leisurely passed within rifle-range of the house, evidently reconnoi tring the premises, with an eye to the hen-roost. That clear, sharp track, — there is no mistaking it for the clumsy foot-print of a little dog. All his wildness and agility are photographed in it. Here he has taken fright, or suddenly recollected an en- gagement^ and in long, graceful leaps, barely touch- ing the fence, has gone careering up the hill as fleet as the wind. The wild, buoyant creature, how beautiful he is ! I had often seen his dead carcass, and, at a distance, had witnessed the hounds drive him across the upper fields ; but the thrill and excitement of meeting him in his wild freedom in the woods were unknown to me, till, one cold winter day, drawn thither by the baying of a hound, I stood near the summit of the mountain, waiting a renewal of the sound, that I might determine the course of the dog and choose my position, — stimulated by the ambition of all young Nimrods, to bag some notable game. Long I waited, and patiently, till, chilled and benumbed, I was about to turn back, when, hearing a slight noise, I looked up and beheld a most superb fox, loping along with inimitable grace and ease, evidently dis- turbed, but not pursued by the hound, and so ab loibed in his private meditations that he failed to see 1 A spur of the Catskills. 68 THE SNOW-WALKERS. me, though I stood transfixed with amazement and admiration, not ten yards distant. I took his meas- ure at a glance, — a large male, with dark legs, and massive tail tipped with white, — a most magnifi- cent creature ; but so astonished and fascinated was I by this sudden appearance and matchless beauty, that not till I had caught the last glimpse of him, as he disappeared over a knoll, did 1 awake to my duty as a sportsman, and realize what an opportunity to distinguish myself I had unconsciously let slip. I clutched my gun, half angrily, as if it was to blame, and went home out of humor with myself and all fox- kind. But I have since thought better of the expe- rience, and concluded that I bagged the game after all, the best part of it, and fleeced Reynard of some- thing more valuable than his fur, without his knowl- edge. This is thoroughly a winter sound, — this voice of the hound upon the mountain, — and one that is music to many ears. The long trumpet-like bay, heard for a mile or more, — now faintly back to the deep recesses of the mountain, — now distinct, but still faint, as the hound comes over some prominent point, and the wind favors, — anon entirely lost in the gully, — then breaking out again much nearer, and growing more and more pronounced as the dog approaches, till, when he comes around the brow of the mountain, directly above you, the barking is loud and sharp. On he goes along the northern spur, his voice rising and sinking as the wind and lay of the ijround modify it, till lost to hearing. THE SNOW-WALKERS. 59 The fox usually keeps half a mile ahead, regulating his speed by that of the hound, occasionally pausing a moment to divert himself with a mouse, or to contem- plate the landscape, or to listen for his pursuer. If the hound press him too closely, he leads off from mountain to mountain, and so generally escapes the hunter ; but if the pursuit be slow, he plays about some ridge or peak, and falls a prey, though not an easy one, to the experienced sportsman. A most spiriting and excited chase occurs when the farm-dog gets close upon one in the open field, as sometimes happens in the early morning. The fox relies so confidently upon his superior speed, that 1 imagine he half tempts the dog to the race. But if the dog be a smart one, and their course lies down hill, over smooth ground, Reynard must put his best foot forward ; and then, sometimes, suffer the igno- miny of being run over by his pursuer, who, how- ever, is quite unable to pick him up, owing to the speed. But when they mount the hill, or enter the woods, the superior nimbleness and agility of the fox tell at once, and he easily leaves the dog far in his tear. For a cur less than his own size he manifests little fear, especially if the two meet alone, remote from the house. In such cases, I have seen first one urn tail, then the other. A novel spectacle often occurs in summer, when the ^rnale has young. You are rambling on the mount- nin, accompanied by your dog, when you are startled Sj that wild, half-threatening squall, and in a momeo 60 THE SNOW -WALKER3. perceive your dog, with inverted tail, and shame and confusion in his looks, sneaking toward you, the old fox but a few rods in his rear. You speak to hi in sharply, when he bristles up, turns about, and, bark- ing, starts off vigorously, as if to wipe out the dis- honor ; but in a moment comes sneaking back more abashed than ever, and owns himself unworthy to be called a dog. The fox fairly shames him out of the woods. The secret of the matter is her sex, though her conduct, for the honor of the fox be it said, seems to be prompted only by solicitude for the safety of her young. One of the most notable features of the fox is his large and massive tail. Seen running on the snow at a distance, his tail is quite as conspicuous as his body ; and, so far from appearing a burden, seems to contribute to his lightness and buoyancy. It softens the outline of his movements, and repeats or contin- ues to the eye the ease and poise of his carriage. But, pursued by the hound on a wet, thawy day it often becomes so heavy and bedraggled as to prove a serious inconvenience, and compels him to take refuge in his den. He is very loath to do this ; both his pride and the traditions of his race stimulate him to run it out, and win by fair superiority of wind and speed ; and only a wound or a heavy and moppish tail will drive him to avoid the issue in this manner. To learn his surpassing shrewdness and cunning, attempt to take him with a trap. Rogue that he is, he -always suspects some trick, and one must be more THE SNOW-WALKERS. 61 of a fox than he is himself to oven each him. At first sight it would appear easy enough. With ap- parent indiflference he crosses your path, or walks in your footsteps in the field, or travels along the beaten highway, or lingers in the vicinity of stacks and re- mote barns. Carry the carcass of a pig, or a fowl, or a dog, to a distant field in midwinter, and in a few nights his tracks cover the snow about it. The inexperienced country youth, misled by this seeming carelessness of Reynard,' suddenly conceives a project to enrich himself with fur, and wonders that the idea has not occurred to him before, and to others. I knew a youthful yeoman of this kind, who imag- ined he had found a mine of wealth on discovering on a remote side-hill, between two woods, a dead porker, upon which it appeared all the foxes of the neighborhood had nightly banqueted. The clouds were burdened with snow ; and as the first flakes commenced to eddy down, he set out, trap and broom in hand, already counting over in imagination the silver quarters he would receive for his first fox-skin. With the utmost care, and with a palpitating heart, he re^ioved enough of the trodden snow to allow ths trap to sink below the surface. Then, carefully sift- ing the light element over it and sweeping his tracks full, he quickly withdrew, laughing exultingly over the little surprise he had prepared for the cunning rogue. The elements conspired to aid him, and the falling snow rapidly obliterated all vestiges of his urork. The next morning at dawn, he was on hi< 62 THE SNOW-WALKERS. way to bring in his fur. The snow had done ita work effectually, and, he believed, had kept his secret well. Arrived in sight of the locality, he strained his vision to make out his prize lodged against the lence at the foot of the hill. Approaching nearer, the surface was unbroken, and doubt usurped the place of certainty in his mind. A slight mound marked the site of the porker, but there was no foot-print near it. Looking up the hill, he saw where Reynard had walked leisurely down toward his wonted bacon till within a few yards of it, when he had wheeled, and with prodigious strides disappeared in the woods. The young trapper saw at a glance what a comment this was upon his skill in the art, and indignantly exhuming the iron, he walked home with it, the stream of silver quarters suddenly setting in another direction. The successful trapper commences in the fall, or before the first deep snow. In a field not too re- mote, with an old axe, he cuts a small place, say ten inches by fourteen, in the frozen ground, and removes the earth to the depth of three or four inches, then fills the cavity with dry ashes, in which are placea bits of roasted cheese. Reynard is very suspicious at first, and gives the place a wide berth. It looks like design, and he will see how the thing behaves before he approaches too near. But the cheese ir savory and the cold severe. He ventures a little closer every night, until he can reach and pick a piece from the surface. Emboldened by success, like TKE SNOW-WALKERS. 63 Other mortals, he presently digs freely among the ashes, and, finding a fresh supply of the delectable morsels every night, is soon thrown off his guard, and his suspicions quite lulled. After a week of baiting in this manner, and on the eve of a light fall of snow, the trapper carefully conceals his trap in the bed, first smoking it thoroughly with hemlock boughs :o kill or neutralize all smell of the iron. If the weather favors and the proper precautions have been taken, he may succeed, though the chances are still greatly against him. Keynard is usually caught very lightly, seldom more than the ends of his toes being between the jaws. He sometimes works so cautiously as to spring the trap without injury even to his toes ; or may re- move the cheese night after night without even springing it. I knew an old trapper who, on finding himself outwitted in this manner, tied a bit of cheese to the pan, and next morning had poor Reynard by the jaw. The trap is not fastened, but only encum- bered with a clog, and is all the more sure in its hold by yielding to every efifort of the animal to extricate himself. When Reynard sees his captor approaching, he would fain drop into a mouse-hole to render himself invisible. He crouches to the ground and remains oei'fectly motionless until he perceives himself discov- ered, when he makes one desperate and final effort to escape, but ceases aVi struggling as you come up, and oehaves in a manner that stamps him a very timid 64 THE SNOW-WALKERS. v^airior, — cowering to the earth with a mingled look of shame, guilt, and abject fear. A young farmer told me of tracing one with his trap to the border of a wood, where he discovered the cunning rogue try- ing to hide by embracing a small tree. Most animals, when taken in a trap, show fight ; but Reynard has more faith in the nimbleness of his feet than in the terror of his teeth. Entering the woods, the number and variety of the tracks contrast strongly with the rigid, frozen aspect of things. Warm jets of life still shoot and play amid this snowy desolation. Fox-tracks are far less numerous than in the fields ; but those of hares, skunks, partridges, squirrels, and mice abound. The mice tracks are very pretty, and look like a sort of fantastic stitching on the coverlid of the snow. One is curious to know what brings these tiny creatures from their retreats ; they do not seem to be in quest of food, but rather to be traveling about for pleasure or sociability, though always going post-haste, and linking stump with stump and tree with tree by fine, hurried strides. That is when they travel openly ; but they have hidden passages and winding galleries under the snow, which undoubtedly are their main avenues of communication. Here and there these passages rise so near the surface as to be covered by only a ^ail arch of snow, and a slight ridge betrays their course to the eye. I know him well. He is known to the farmer as the " deer-mouse," to the naturalist the white-footed mouse {Hesperomys leucopm) — a THE SNOW-WALKERS. 65 rery beautiful creature, nocturnal in his habits, with .arge ears, and large, fine eyes, full of a wild, harm- less look. He is daintily marked, with white feet and a white belly. When disturbed by day he is very easily captured, having none of the cunning or viciousness of the common Old World mouse. It is he who, high in the hollow trunk of some tree, lays by a store of beech-nuts for winter use. Every nut is carefully shelled, and the cavity that serves as storehouse lined with grass and leaves. The wood- chopper frequently squanders this precious store. I have seen half a peck taken from one tree, as clean and white as if put up by the most delicate hands, — as they were. How long it must have taken the little creature to collect this quantity, to hull them one by one, and convey them up to his fifth-story chamber ! He is not confined to the woods, but is quite as com- mon in the fields, particularly in the fall, amid the corn and potatoes. When routed by the plow, I have seen the old one take flight with half a dozen young hanging to her teats, and with such reckless speed that some of the young would lose their hold and fly off amid the weeds. Taking refuge in a stump with the rest of her family, the anxious mother would presently come back and hunt up the missing ones. The snow-walkers are mostly night-walkers also, and the record they leave upon the snow is the main clew one has to their life and doings. The hare is ^aocturnal in its habits, and though a very lively creat- 66 THE SNOW-WALKEBS. are at night, with regular courses and run-wayi through the wood, is entirely quiet by day. Timid as he is, he makes little effort to conceal himself, usu- ally squatting beside a log, stump, or tree, and seem- ing to avoid rocks and ledges where he might be par- tially housed from the cold and the snow, but where also — and this consideration undo ibtedly determines his choice — he would be more apt .o fall a prey to his enemies. In this, as well as in many other respects, he differs from the rabbit proper {Lepus sylvaticus) , he never burrows in the ground, or takes refuge in a den or hole, when pursued. If caught in the open fields, he is much confused and easily overtaken by the dog ; but in the woods, he leaves him at a bound. In summer, when first disturbed, he beats the ground violently with his feet, by which means he would ex- press to you his surprise or displeasure ; it is a dumb way he has of scolding. After leaping a few yards, he pauses an instant, as if to determine the degree of dan- ger, and then hurries away with a much lighter tread. His feet are like great pads, and his track has little of the sharp, articulated expression of Reynard's, or of animals that climb or dig. Yet it is very pretty like all the rest, and tells its own tale. There is nothing bold or vicious or vulpine in it, and his timid, harmless character is published at every leap. He abounds in dense woods, preferring localities filled with a small undergrowth of beech and birch, upon che bark of which he feeds. Nature is rather partiaj o him, and matches his extreme local habits and chaj THE SNOW-WALKERS. 67 ftcter with a suit that corresponds with his surround- ings,— reddish-gray 'n summer and white in winter The sharp-rayed tra^^k of the partridge adds another figure to this fantastic embroidery upon the winter snow. Her course is a clear, strong line, sometimes pite wayward, but generally very direct, steering for the densest, most impenetrable places, — lead- ing you over logs and through brush, alert and ex- pectant, till, suddenly, she burstsi up a few yards from you, and goes humming through the trees, — the complete triumph of endurance and vigor. Hardy native bird, may your tracks never be fewer, or your visits to the birch- tree less frequent ! The squirrel-tracks — sharp, nervous, and wiry — have their histories also. But who ever saw squirrels in winter? The naturalists say they are mostly tor- pid ; yet evidently that little pocket-faced depredator the chipmunk, was not carrying buckwheat for so many days to his hole for nothing ; — was he antici- pating a state of torpidity, or providing against the demands of a very active appetite? Red and gray squirrels are more or less active all vvdnter, though very shy, and, I am inclined to think, partially noc- turnal in their habits. Here a gray one has just passeut seems to know from the jump that there is such thing as a trap, and that a trap has a way of grasping a fox's paw that is more frank than friendly. Cornered in a hole or den, a trap can be set so that the poor creature has the desperate alternative oi being caught or starve. He is generally caught, though not till he has braved hunger for a good many days. But to know all his cunning and shrewdness, bait him in the field, or set your trap by some carcass where he is wont to come. In some cases he wil THE FOX. 93 nncover the trap, and leave the marks of his con- tempt for it in a way you cannot mistake, or else he will not approach within a rod of it. Occasionally, however, he finds in a trapper more than his match, and is fairly canght. When this happens, the traj> which must be of the finest make, is never touched with the bare hand, but, after being thoroughly smoked and greased, is set in a bed of dry ashes, or chaff, in a remote field where the fox has been em boldened to dig for several successive nights for mor sels of toasted cheese. A light fall of snow aids the trapper's art and con spires to Reynard's ruin. But how lightly he is caught, when caught at all ! barely the end of his toes, or at most a spike through the middle of his foot. I once saw a large painting of a fox struggling with a trap which held him by the liind leg, above the gambrel-joint! A painting alongside of it repre- sented a peasant driving an ox-team from the off- side ! A fox would be as likely to be caught above the gambrel-joint as a farmer would to drive his team from the off-side. I knew one that was cauo^ht by the tip of the lower jaw. He came nightly, and took the morsel of cheese from the pan of the trap without springing it. A piece was then secured to the pan by a thread, with the result as above stated. I have never been able to see clearly why the '^other-fox generally selects a burrow or hole in the open field in which to have her young, excej)t it be, ts some hunters maintain, for better security. The 94 THE FOX. young foxes are wont to come out on a warm day and play like puppies in front of the den. The vie\v being unobstructed on all sides by trees ( r bushes, in the cover of which danger might approach, they are less liable to surprise and capture. On the slightest sound they disappear in the hole. Those who have watched the gambols of the young foxes, speak of them as very amusing, even moi'e arch and playful than those of kittens, while a spirit profoundly wise and cunning seems to look out of their young eyes. The parent-fox can never be caught in the den with them, but is hovering near the woods, which are al- ways at hand, and by her warning cry or bark telling them when to be on their guard. She usually has at least three dens, at no great distance apart, and moves stealthily in the night with her charge from one to the other, so as to mislead her enemies. Many a party of boys, and of men, too, discovering the where- abouts of a litter, have gone with shovels and picks, and, after digging away vigorously for several hours, have found only an empty hole for their pains. The pld fox, finding her secret had been found out, had waited for darkness, in the cover of which to transfer her household to new quarters ; or else some old fox- hunter, jealous of the preservation of his game, and getting word of the intended destruction of the litter had gone at dusk the night before, and made some disturbance about the den, perhaps flashed some pow der in its mouth — a hint which the shrewd anima knew how to interpret. THE FOX. 95 The more scientific aspects of the question may not be without interest to some of my readers. The fox belongs to the great order of flesh-eating animala* called Carnivora, and to' the family called Ganidce^ or dogs. The wolf is a kind of wild dog, and the fox is a kind of wolf. Foxes, unlike wolves, however, never go in packs or companies, but hunt singly. The fox has a kind of bark, which suggests the dog, as have all the members of this family. The kinship is furtlier shown by the fact that during certain pe- riods, for the most part in the summer, the dog can- not be made to attack or even pursue the female fox, but will run from her in the most shamefaced manner, which he will not do in the case of any other animal except a wolf. Many of the ways and manners of the fox, when tamed, are also like the dog's. I once saw a young red fox exposed for sale in the market in Washington. A colored man had him, and said he had caught him out in Virginia. He led him by a small chain, as he would a puppy, and the innocent young rascal would lie on his side and bask and sleep in the sunshine, amid all the noise and chaffering around him, precisely like a dog. He was about the size of a full-grown cat, and there was a bewitching beauty about him that I could hardly resist. On another occasion, I saw a gray fox about two-thirds grown, playing with a dog, about the same size, and by nothing in the manners of either eouH you tell whi-^h was the dog and WAiich was tlie fox. 96 THE FOX. Some naturalists think there are but two perms^' nent species of the fox in the United States, viz, the fgray fox and the red fox, though there are five or six varieties. The gray fox, which is much smaller and less valuable than the red, is the southern species, and is said to be rarely found north of Maryland, though in certain rocky localities along the Hudson they are common. In the Southern States this fox is often hunted in (he English fashion, namely, on horseback, the riders tearing through the country in pursuit till the ani- mal is run down and caught. This is the only fox that will tree. When too closely pressed, instead of taking to a den or hole, it climbs beyond the reach of the dogs in some small tree. The red fox is the northern species, and is rarely found farther south than the mountainous districts of Virginia. In the Arctic regions he gives place to the Arctic fox which most of the season is white. The prairie fox, the cross fox, and the black or silver gray fox, seem only varieties of the red fox, as the black squirrel breeds from the gray, and the black woodchuck is found with the brown. There is little to distinguish them from the red, except the color, though the prairie fox is said to be the larger of tlie two. The cross fox is dark brown on its muzzle and ex tremities, with, a cross of red and black on its shoul- iers and breast, which peculiarity of coloring, and no. any trait in its character, gives it its name. Thej THE FOX. 97 are very rare, and few hunters have ever seen one. The American Fur Company used to obtain annu- ally from fifty to one hundred skins. The skins for- merly sold for twenty-five dollars, though I believe they now bring only about five dollars. The black or silver gray fox is the rarest of all, and its skin the most valuable. The Indians used to estimate it equal to forty beaver skins. The great fur companies seldom collect in a single season more than four or five skins at any one post. Most of those of the American Fur Company come from the head waters of the Mississippi. One of the younger Audubons shot one in northern New York. The fox had been seen and fired at many times by the hunters of the neighborhood, and had come to have the repu- tation of leading a charmed life, and of being invul- nerable to anything but a silver bullet. But Audu- bon brought her down (for it was a female) on the second trial. She had a litter of young in the vicin- ity, which he also dug out, and found the nest to hold three black and four red ones, which fact settled the question with him that black and red often have the some parentage, and are in truth the same species. The color of this fox, in a point-blank view, is black, but viewed at an angle it is a dark silver-gray, whence has arisen the notion that the black and the Bilvei-gray are distinct varieties. The tip of the tail '3 always white. In almost every neighborhood there are traditions of this fox, and it is the dream of young sportsmen : 7 98 THE FOX. but I have yet to meet the person who has seen one, I should go well to the north, into the British Pos- session, if I was bent on obtaining a specimen. One more item from the books. From the fact that in the bone caves in this country skulls of the gray fox are found, but none of the red, it is inferred by some naturalists that the red fox is a descendant from- the European species, which it resembles in form but surpasses in beauty, and its appearance od ibid continent comparatively of recent date. A MAECH CHRONICLE. 4 A MARCH CHRONICLE. ON THE POTOMAC. March 1. — The first day of spring and the first spring day ! I felt the change the moment I put my head out of doors in the morning. A fitful, gusty Bouth wind was blowing, though the sky was clear. But the sunlight was not the same. There was an interfusion of a new element. Not ten days since there had been a day just as bright, — even brighter and warmer, — a clear, crystalline day of February, with nothing vernal in it ; but this day was opaline ; there was a film, a sentiment in it, a nearer approach to life. Then there was that fresh, indescribable odor, a breath from the Gulf, or from Florida and the Carolinas, — a subtle, persuasive influence that thrilled the sense. Every root and rootlet under ground must have felt it ; the buds of the soft maple and silver poplar felt it ; and swelled perceptibly dur- ing the day. The robins knew it, and were here that morning ; so were the crow-blackbirds. The shad must have known it, down deep in their marine re- 'aeats, and leaped and sported about the mouths o 102 A MARCH CHRONICLE. the rivers, ready to dart up them if the genial influ- ence continued. The bees in the hive also, or iu the old tree in the woods, no doubt awoke to new life ; Rnd the hibernating animals, the bears and wood- chucks, rolled up in their subterranean dens, — I im- agine the warmth reached even them, and quickened their sluggish circulation. Then in the afternoon there was the smell of smoke, — the first spring fires in the open air. The Vir- ginia farmer is raking together the rubbish in his garden, or in the field he is preparing for the plow, and burning it up. In imagination I am there to help him. I see the children playing about, delighted with the sport and the resumption of work ; the smoke goes up through the shining haze ; the farm- house door stands open, and lets in the afternoon sun ; the cow lows for her calf, or hides it in the woods ; and in the morning, the geese, sporting in the spring sun, answer the call of the wild flock steering north- ward above them. As I stroll through the market I see the signs here. That old colored woman has brought spring in her basket in those great green flakes of moss, with arbutus showing the pink ; and her old man is just in good time with his fruit-trees and gooseberry- bushes. Various bulbs and roots are also being brought out and offered, and the onions are sprouting the stands. I see bunches of robins and cedar- birds also — so much melody and beauty cut off from the supply going north. The fish market is begin- A MARCH CHRONICLE. 103 niug to be bright with perch and bass, and with shad from the southern rivers, and wild ducks are taking the place of prairie-hens and quails. In the Carolinas, no doubt, the fruit-trees are in ✓ bloom, and the rice-land is being prepared for the seed. In the mountains of Virginia and in Ohio they are making maple-sugar ; in Kentucky and Ten- nessee they are sowing oats ; in Illinois they are, perchance, husking the corn which has remained on the stalk in the field all winter. Wild geese and ducks are streaming across the sky from the lower Mississippi toward the great lakes, pausing a while on the prairies, or alighting in the great corn-fields, making the air resound with the noise of their wings upon the stalks and dry shucks as they resume their journey. About this time, or a little later, in the still spring morning, the prairie-hens or prairie-cocks set up that low musical cooing or crowing that defies the ear to trace or locate. The air is filled with that soft, mysterious undertone ; and save that a bird is seen here and there flitting low over the ground, the sportsman walks for hours without coming any nearer the source of the elusive sound. All over a certain belt of the country the rivers and streams are roily, and chafe their banks. There is a movement of the soils. The capacity of the water to take up and hold in solution the salt and earths, seemed never so great before. The frost has •elinquished its hold, and turned everything over to tide water. Mud is the mother now ; and out of if creep the frogs, the turtles, the crawfish. 104 A MARCH CHRONICLE. lu the North how goes the season ? The wintei IS perchance just breaking up. The old frost-king ia just striking, or preparing to strike, his tents. The ice is going out of the rivers, and the first steamboat on the Hudson is picking its way through the blue^ lanes and channels. The white gulls are making ex- cursions up from the bay, to see what the prospects are. In the lumber countries, along the upper Ken- nebec and Penobscot, and along the northern Hudson starters are at work with their pikes and hooks start- ing out the pine logs on the first spring freshet. AP winter, through the deep snows, they have been haul ing them to the bank of the stream, or placing theiK where the tide woukT reach them. Now, in count- less numbers, beaten and bruised, the trunks of the noble trees come, borne by the angry flood. The snow that furnishes the smooth bed over which they were drawn, now melted, furnishes the power that carries them down to the mills. On the Delaware the raftsmen are at work running out their rafts. Floating islands of logs and lumber go down the swollen stream, bending over the dams, shooting through the rapids, and bringing up at last in Phila- delphia or beyond. In the inland farming districts what are the signs ? Few and faint, but very suggestive. The sun has [ ower to melt the snow ; and in the meadows all the knolls are bare, and the sheep are gnawing them in- dustriously. The di'ifts on the side hills also begin U) have a worn and dirty look, and where they crosi A MARCH CHRONICLE, 105 the highway, to become soft, letting the teams in up to tlieir bellies. The oxen labor and grunt, or pa- tiently wait for the shovel to release them ; but the Bpirited horse leaps and flounders, and is determined not to give up. In the woods the snow is melted around the trees, and the burs and pieces of bark have absorbed the heat till they have sunk half-way through to the ground. The snow is melting on the under side ; the frost is going out of the ground : now comes the trial of your foundations. About the farm -buildings there awakens the old familiar chorus, the bleating of calves and lambs, and the answering bass of their distressed mothers ; while the hens are cackling in the hay -loft, and the geese are noisy in the spring run. But the most delightful of all farm-work or of all rural occupations, is at hand, namely, sugar-making. In New York and northern New England the beginning of this season varies from the first to the middle of March, sometimes even holding off till April. The moment the contest be- tween the sun and frost fairly begins, sugar weather begins ; and the more even the contest, the more the iweet. I do not know what the philosophy of it is, out it seems a kind of see-saw, as if the sun drew the Bap up, and the frost drew it down ; and an excess of either stops the flow. Before the sun has got power to unlock the frost, there is no sap ; and after the frost has lost its power to lock up again the work o^ the sun, there is no sap. But when it freezes soundly ftt ^ight. with a bright, warm sun next day, wind ia 106 A MARCH CHRONICLE. the west, and do signs of a storm^ the veins of the maples fairly thrill.. Pierce the bark anywhere, and out gushes the clear, sweet liquid. But let the wind change to the south, and blow moist and warm, des- troying that crispness of the air, and the flow slackens at once, unless there be a deep snow in the woods to counteract or neutralize the warmth, in which case the run may continue till the rain sets in. The rough-coated old trees, one would not think they could scent a change so quickly through that wrapper of dead, dry bark an inch or more thick. I have to wait till I put my head out of doors, and feel the air on my bare cheek, and sniff it with my nose ; but their nerves of taste and smell are no doubt under ground, imbedded in the moisture, and if there is any- thing that responds quickly to atmospheric changes it is water. Do not the fish, think you, down deep in the streams, feel every wind that blows, whether it be hot or cold ? Do not the frogs and newts and turtles under the mud feel the warmth, though the water still seems like ice ? As the springs begin to rise in advance of the rain, so the intelligence of every change seems to travel ahead under ground, and forewarn things. A " sap-run " seldom lasts more than two or three days. By that time there is a change in the weather, perhaps a rain-storm, which takes the frost nearly all out of the ground. Then before there can be another ^n, the trees must be wound up again, the storm must have a white tail, and " come off" cold, Pre» A MARCH CHRONICLE, 107 end J the sun rises clear again, and cuts the snow or Boftens the hard frozen ground with his beams, and the trees take a fresh start. The boys go through the wood, emptying out the buckets or the pans, and reclaiming those that have blown away, and the de- lightful work is resumed. But the first run, like first love, is always the best, always the fullest, always the sweetest ; while there is a purity and delicacy of flavor about the sugar that far surpasses any sub- sequent yield. Trees differ much in the quantity as well as in the quality of sap produced in a given season. Indeed, in a bush or orchard of fifty or one hundred trees, as wide a difference may be observed in this respect as among that number of cows in regard to the milk they yield. I have in my mind now a " sugar-bush " nestled in the lap of a spur of the Catskills, every tree of which is known to me, and assumes a distinct individuality in my thought. I know the look and quality of the whole two hundred ; and when on my annual visit to the old homestead I find one has per- ished, or fallen before the axe, 1 feel a personal loss. They are all veterans, and have yielded up their life's blood for the profit of two or three generations. They stand in little groups or couples. One stands at the head of a spring-run, and lifts a large dry branch high above the woods, where hawks and crowa love to alight. Half a dozen are climbing a little hill ; while others stand far out in the field, as if they had come out to get the sun. A file of five or bli 108 A MAECH CHRONICLE. HTorthies sentry the woods on the northwest, and cou- front a steep side hill where sheep and cattle graze. An equal number crowd up to the line on the east ; and their gray, stately trunks are seen across meadows or fields of grain. Then there is a pair of Siamese twins, with heavy, bushy tops, while in the forks of a wood-road stand the two brothers, with their arms around each other's neck, and their bodies in gentle contact for a distance of thirty feet. One immense maple, known as the " old-cream- pan-tree," stands, or did stand, quite alone among a thick growth of birches and beeches. But it kept its end up and did the work of two or three ordinary trees, as its name denotes. Next to it the best milch er in the lot was a shaggy-barked tree in the edge of the field, that must have been badly crushed or broken when it was little, for it had an ugly crook near the ground, and seemed to struggle all the way up to get in an upright attitude, but never quite succeeded ; yet it could outrun all its neighbors nevertheless. The poorest tree in the lot was a short-bodied, heavy- topped tree, that stood in the edge of a spring-run. It seldom produced half a gallon of sap during the whole season ; but this half-gallon was very sweet, — 'hree or four times as sweet as the ordinary article. In the production of sap, top seems far less^ important than body. It is not length of limb that wins in this race, but length of trunk. A heavy, bushy-topped tree .n the open field, for instance, will not, according to ny observation, compare w'th a tall, long-tninked A MARCH CHRONICLE. 109 tree in the woods, that has but a small top. Young, thrifty, thin-skinned trees start up with great spirit, indeed, fairly on a run ; but they do not hold out, and their blood is very diluted. Cattle are very fond of sap ; so are sheep, and will drink enough to kill them. The honey-bees get here their first sweet, and the earliest bug takes up liis permanent abode on the spile." The squirrels also come timidly down the trees, and sip the sweet flow ; and occasionally an ugly lizard, just out of its winter-quarters, and in quest of novelties, creeps up into the pan or bucket. Soft maple makes a very fine white sugar, superior in qual- ity, but far less in quantity. I think any person who has tried it will agree with me about the charm of sugar-making, though he have no tooth for the sweet itself. It is enough that it if the first spring work, and takes one to the woods- The robins are just arriving, and their merry callt ring through the glades. The squirrels are now vent- uring out, and the woodpeckers and nuthatches run briskly up the trees. The crow begins to caw, with iiis accustomed heartiness and assurance ; and one sees the white rump and golden shafts of the high- hole as he flits about the open woods. Next week or the week after, it may be time to begin plowing, and other sober work about the farm ; but this week we will picnic among the maples, and our camp-fire shall be an incense to spring. Ah, I am there now 1 I see the woods flooded with sun-light ; I smell the •iry leaves, and the mould under them just quickened no A MAECH CHRONICLE. Dy the warmth ; the long-tmnked maples in theii gray rough liveries stand thickly about ; I sec the brimming pans arid buckets, always on the sunny side of the trees, and hear the musical dropping of the Bap ; the " boiling-place," with its delightful camp- features, is just beyond the first line, with its great arch looking to the southwest. The sound of its axe rings through the woods. Its huge kettles or broad pans boil and foam ; and I ask no other delight than to watch and tend them all day, to dip the sap from the great casks into them, and to replenish the fire with the newly-cut birch and beech wood. A slight breeze is blowing from the west ; I catch the glint here and there in the afternoon sun of the little rilla and creeks, coursing down the sides of the hills ; the awakening sounds about the farm and the woods reach my ear; and every rustle or movement of the air or on the earth seems like a pulse of returning life in Nature. I sympathize with that verdant Hibernian who liked sugar-making so well, that he thought he should follow it the whole year. I should at least be tempted to follow the season up the mountains, camping this week on one terrace, next week on one farther up, keeping just on the hem of Winter's gar- ment, and just in advance of the swelling buds, until my smoke went up through the last growth of maple that surrounds the summit. Maple sugar is peculiarly an American product, Uie discovery of it dating back in.*o the early history >f New England. The first settlers usually caught A MARCH CHRONICLE. Ill the sap in rude troughs, and boiled it down in ket- tles slung to a pole by a chain, the fire being built around them. The first step in the way of improve- ment was to use tin pans instead of troughs, and a large stone arch in which the kettles or caldrons were set with the fire beneath them. But of late years, as the question of fuel has become a more important one, greater improvements have been made. The arch has given place to an immense stove designed for that special purpose ; and the kettles to broad, shallow, sheet-iron pans, the object being to econo- mize all the heat, and to obtain the greatest possible extent of evaporating surface. March 15. — From the first to the middle of March the season made steady progress. There were no checks, no drawbacks. Warm, copious rains from the south and southwest, followed by days of unbroken sunshine. In the moist places — and what places are not moist at this season? — the sod buzzed like a hive. The absorption and filtration among the net- work of roots was an audible process. The clod fairly sang. How the trees responded also ! The silver poplars were masses of soft gray bloom, and the willows down toward the river seemed to have slipped off their old bark and on their new in a single night. The soft maples, too, when massed iu the distance, their tops deeply dyed in a bright maroon color, how fair they looked ! The 15th of the month was one of those charmed jays when the genius of God doth flow." The wind 112 A MARCH CHRONICLE. died away by mid-forenooD, and the day settled down so softly and lovingly upon the earth, touching every- thing, filling everything. The sky visibly came down= You could see it among the trees and between the hills. The sun poured himself into the earth as into a cup, and the atmosphere fairly swam with warmth and \\cr\\t. In the afternoon I walked out over the country roads north of the city. Innumerable columns of smoke were going up all around the horizon from burning brush and weeds, fields being purified by fire. The farmers were hauling out manure ; and I am free to confess, the odor of it, with its associations of the farm and the stable, of cattle and horses, was good in my nostrils. In the woods the li7erijaf and arbutus had just opened doubtingly ; and in the little pools great masses of frogs' spawn, with a milky tinge, were deposited. The youth who accompanied me brought some of it home in his handkerchief, to see it hatch in a goblet. The month came in like a lamb, and went out like a lamb, setting at naught the old. adage. The white fleecy clouds lay here and there, as if at rest, on the blue sky. The fields were a perfect emerald ; and :he lawns, with the new gold of the first dandelions sprinkled about, were lush with grass. In the parks and groves there was a faint mist of foliage, except among the willows, where there was not only a mist, but a perfect fountain-fall of green. In the distance \\\e river looked blue ; the spring freshets at last •jver ; and the ground settled, and the jocund season steps forth into April with a bright and confident look AUTUMN TIDES. AUTUMN TIDES. The season is always a little behind the sun in our climate, just as the tide is always a little behind the moon. According to the calendar, the summer ought to culminate about the 21st of June, but in reality it IS some weeks later ; June is a maiden month all through. It is not high noon in nature till about the first or second week in July. When the chestnut- tree blooms, the meridian of the year is reached. By the first of August, it is fairly one o'clock. The lus- tre of the season begins to dim, the foliage of the trees and woods to tarnish, the plumage of the birds to fade, and their songs to cease. The hints of ap- proaching fall are on every hand. How suggestive this thistle-down, for instance, which, as I sit by the open window, comes in and brushes softly across my hand ! The first snow-flake tells of winter not more plainly than this driving down heralds the approach »f fall. Come here, my fairy, and tell me whence you come and whither you go ? What brings you to port here, you gossamer ship sailing the great Boa ? How exquisitely frail and delicate ! One of the lightest things in nature; so light that in tha 116 AUTUMN TIDES. closed room here it will hardly rest in my open palm. A feather is a clod beside it. Only a spider's web will hold it; coarser objects have no power over it. Caught in the upper currents of the air and rising above the clouds, it might sail perpetually. Indeed, one fancies it might almost traverse the interstellar ether and drive against the stars. And every thistle- head by the road-side holds hundreds of these sky- rovers — imprisoned Ariels unable to set themselves free. Their liberation may be by the shock of the wind, or the rude contact of cattle, but it is oftener the work of the goldfinch with its complaining brood. The seed of the thistle is the proper food of this bird, and in obtaining it, myriads of these winged creatures are scattered to the breeze. Each one is fraught with a seed which it exists to sow, but its wild ca- reering and soaring does not fairly begin till its bur- den is dropped, and its spheral form is complete. The seeds of many plants and trees are disseminated through the agency of birds ; but the thistle furnishes its own birds, — flocks of them, with wings more ethereal and tireless than were ever given to mortal ireature. From the pains Nature thus takes to sow the thistle broadcast over the land, it might be ex- pected to be one of the most troublesome and abun - dant of weeds. But such is not the case ; the more pernicious and baffling weeds, like snapdragon or blind-nettles, being more local and restricted in their habits, and unable to fly at all. In the fall, the battles of the spring are fough* AUTUMN TIDES. 117 tver again, beginning at the other, or little end of the series. There is the same advance and retreat, with many feints and alarms, between the contend- mg foixes that was witnessed in April and May. The spring comes like a tide running against a strong wind ; it is ever beaten back, but ever gaining ground, with DOW and then a mad " push upon the land " as if to overcome its antagonist at one blow. The cold from the north encroaches upon us in about the same fashion. Li September or early in October it usually makes a big stride forward and blackens all the more delicate plants, and hastens the " mortal ripen- mg"of the foliage of the trees, but it is presently beaten back again and the genial warmth repossesses the land. Before long, however, the cold returns to the charge with augmented forces and gains much ground. The course of the seasons never does run smooth, owing to the unequal distribution of land and water, mountain, wood, and plain. An equilibrium, however, is usually reached in our climate in October, sometimes the most marked in November, forming the delicious Indian summer ; a truce is declared and both forces, heat and cold, meet and mingle in friendly converse on the field. In the earlier season, this poise of the temperature, this slack water in nature, comes in May and June ; but Uie October calm is most marked. Day after day and sometimes week after week, you cannot tell whiclj W&j the rurrent is setting. Indeed, there is no cur 118 AUTUMN TIDES. rent, but the season seems to drift a little this way, or a little that, jiist as the breeze happens to freshen a little in one quarter or the other. The fall of '74 was the most remarkable in this respect I remember ever to have seen. The equilibrium of the season lasted from the middle of October till near December, \nth scarcely a break. There were six weeks of In- dian summer, all gold by day, and when the moon came, all silver by night. The river was so smooth lit times as to be almost invisible, and in its place, was the indefinite continuation of the opposite shore down toward the nether world. One seemed to be in an enchanted land^ and to breathe all day the atmos- phere of fable and romance. Xot a smoke, but a kind of shining nimbus filled all the spaces. The vessels would drift by as if in mid air with all their sails set. The gypsy blood in one, as Lowell calls it, could hardly stay between four walls and see such days go by. Living in tents, in groves and on the hills, seemed the only natural life. Late in December we had glimpses of the same weather, — the earth had not yet passed all the golden isles. On the 27th of that month, I find I made this entry in my note-book : A soft hazy day, the year asleep and dreaming of the Indian summer again. Not a breath of air ari not a ripple on the river The sunshine is hot as it falls across my table.** Bu' what a terrible winter followed what a sav Hge chief the fair Indian maiden gave oirth to I Tliis halcyon period of our autumn will always ir AUTUMN TIDES. 119 gome way be associated with the Indian. It is reJ and yellow and dusky like him. The smoke of his camp-fire seems again in the air. The memory of him pervades the woods. His plumes and moccasins and blanket of skins form just the costume the season demands. It was doubtless his chosen period. The gods smiled upon him then if ever. The time of the chase, the season of the buck and the doe, and of the ripening of all forest fruits ; the time when all men are incipient hunters, when the first frosts have given pungency to the air, when to be abroad on the hills or in the woods is a delight that both old and young feel, — if the red aborigine ever had his summer of fullness and contentment, it must have been at this season, and it fitly bears his name. In how many respects fall imitates or parodies the spring ; it is indeed, in some of its features, a sort of second youth of the year. Things emerge and be- come conspicuous again. The trees attract all eyes as in May. The birds come forth from their summer privacy and parody their spring reunions and rival- ries ; some of them sing a little after a silence of .nonths. The robins, bluebirds, meadow-larks, spar- rows, crows — all sport, and call, and behave in a manner suggestive of spring. The cock grouse drums in the woods as he did in April and May. The pigeons reappear, and the wild geese and ducks. The witch-hazel blooms. The trout spawns. The streams are again full. The air is humid, and the vnoisture rises in the ground. Nature is breaking :amp, as in spring she was go'ng into camp. The 120 AUTUMN TIDES. spring yearning and restlessness is represented in one by the increased desire to travel. Spring is the inspiration, fall the expiration. Both seasons have their equinoxes, both their filmy, hazy air, their ruddy forest tints, their cold rains, their drenching fogs, their mystic moons; both have the same solar light and warmth, the same rays of the sun ; yet, after all, how different the feelings which they inspire! One is the morning, the other the evening ; one is youth, the other is age. The difference is not merely in us ; there is a sub- tle difference in the air and in the influences that emanate upon us from the dumb forms of nature. All the senses report a difference. The sun seems to have burned out. One recalls the notion of Herod- otus, that he is grown feeble, and retreats to tlie south because he can no longer face the cold and the storms from the north. There is a growing potency about his beams in spring ; a waning splendor about them in fall. One is the kindling fire ; the other the sub- siding flame. It is rarely that an artist succeeds in painting un- mistakably the difference between sunrise and sunset; and it is equally a trial of his skill to put upon can- vas the difference between early spring and late fall, say between April and November. It was long ago observed that the shadows are more opaque in the morning than in the evening ; the struggle between ihe light and the darkness more marked, the gloom more solid, the contrasts more sharp, etc. The raya •f the morning sun chisel out and cut down the sli»*i AUTUMN TIDES. 121 ows in a way those of the setting sun do not. Then the sunlight is whiter and newer in the morning, — not so yellow and diffused. A difference akin to this is true of the two seasons I am speaking of. The Bpring is the morning sunlight, clear and determined; the autumn the afternoon rays, pensive, lessening, golden. Does not the human frame yield to and sympa- thize with the seasons ? Are there not more births in the spring and more deaths in the fall ? In the spring one vegetates ; his thoughts turn to sap ; an- other kind of activity seizes him ; he makes new wood which does not harden till past midsummer. For my part, I find all literary work irksome from April to August my sympathies run in other chan- nels ; the grass grows where meditation walked. As fall approaches, the currents mount to the head again. But my thoughts do not ripen well till after there has been a frost. The burrs will not open much before that. A man's thinking, I take it, is a kind of com- bustion, as is the ripening of fruits and leaves, and he wants plenty of oxygen in the air. Then the earth seems to have become a positive n.agnet in the fall ; the forge and anvil of the sun have had their effect. In the spring it is negative to all intellectual conditions and drains one of his light- ning. To-day, October 21st, I found the air in the bushj Qelds and lanes under the woods loaded with the per fume of the witch-hazel — a sweetish, sickening odor With the blooming of this bush, Nuture says, " posi- 122 AUTUaiK TIDES. lively the last." It is a kind of birth in death, oi Epring in fall, that impresses one as a little nncanny. All trees and shrubs form their flower buds in the fall, and keep the secret till spring. How comes the witch-hazel to be the one exception and to celebrate its floral nuptials on the funereal day of its foliage ? No doubt it will be found that the spirit of some love- lorn sqnaw has passed into this bush, and that this m why it blooms in the Indian summer rathtr than in the white man's spring. But it makes the floral series of the woods com- plete. Between it and the shad-blow of earliest spring lies the mountain of bloom; the latter at the base on one side, this at the base on the other, with the chest- nut blossoms at the top in midsummer. A peculiar feature of our fall may sometimes be Been of a clear afternoon late in the season. Look- ing athwart the fields under the sinking sun the ground appears covered with a shining veU of gos- samer. A feiry net, invisible at mid-day and which the position of the sun now reveals, rests upon the stubble and upon the spears of grass, covering acres in extent, — the work of innumerable little spiders. The cattle walk through it but do not seem to break it. Perhaps a fly would make his mark upon it. At the same time, stretching from the tops of the trees, or from the top of a stake in the fence, anO leading off toward the sky may be seen the cables ol he Hying spider, — a Mry bridge fi om the visible tc Ihe invisible. OccasionaUy seen against a deep mav sbadow, and perhaps enlarged by clinging partidet AUTUMN TIDES. 123 of dust, they show quite plainly and sag down like a Itretched rope, or sway and undulate like a hawser in the tide. They recall a verse of our rugged poet, Walt Whit« man : — ** A noiseless patient spider, I mark'd where, in a little promontory, it stood isolated : Mark'd how, to explore the vacant, vast surroundinj^, It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself; Ever unreeling them — ever tirelessly spreading them. * And you, 0 my soul, where you stand, Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, — Seeking the spheres to connect them. Till the bridge you will need he formed — till the ductile anchoi hold ; Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, 0 my soul.*' To return a little, September may be described as the month of tall weeds. Where they have been suf- fered to stand, along fences, by road-sides, and in for- gotten corners, — red-root, pig- weed, rag-weed, ver- vain, golden-rod, burdock, elecampane, thistles, teasels, nettles, asters, etc., — how they lift themselves up as if not afraid to be seen now ! They are all outlaws ; every man's hand is against them ; yet how surely they hold their own ! They love the road-side, because here they are comparatively safe ; and ragged and dusty, !ike the common tramps that they are, they form one jf the characteristic features of early fall. I have often noticed in what haste certain weeds Bre at times to produce their seeds. Red-root will PTOW three or four feet high when it has the whole 124 AUTUMN TIDES. Beason before it ; but let it get a late start, let it come up in August, and it scarcely gets above the ground before it heads out and apparently goes to work with all its might and main to mature its seed. In the growth of most plants or weeds, April and May rep- resent their root, June and July their stalk, and Au- gust and September their flower and seed. Hence when the stalk months are stricken out as in the pres* ent case there is only time for a shallow root and a foreshortened head. I think most weeds that get a late start show this curtailment of stalk and this solici- tude to reproduce themselves. But I have not ob- served that any of the cereals are so worldly wise. They have not had to think and shift for themselves as the weeds have. It does indeed look like a kind of forethought in the red-root. It is killed by the first frost, and hence knows the danger of delay. How rich in color, before the big show of the tree foliage has commenced, our road-sides are in places in early autumn, — rich to the eye that goes hurriedly by and does not look too closely, — with the profu- sion of golden-rod and blue and purple asters dashed in upon here and there with the crimson leaves of the dwarf sumac ; and at intervals, rising out of the .ence corner or crowning a ledge of rocks, the dark green of the cedars with the still fire of the woodbine at its heart. I wonder if the way-sides of other lands V)reseut any analogous spectacles at this season. Then when the maples have burst out into color showing like great bonfires along the hills, there is in ieed a feast for the eye. A maple before your win AUTUMN TIDES. 125 dows in October, when the sun shhies upon it, will make up for a good deal of the light it has excluded ; it fills the room with a soft golden glow. Thoreau, I believe, was the first to remark upon the individuality of trees of the same species with re- spect to their foliage, — some maples ripening their leaves early and some late, and some being of one tint and some of another ; and moreover, that each tree held to the same characteristics, year after year. There is indeed ns great a variety among the maples fts among the trees of an apple orchard ; some are harvest apples, some are fall apples, and some are winter apples, each with a tint of its own. Those late ripeners are the winter varieties — the Rhode Island greenings or swaars of their kind. The red maple is the early astrachan. Then comes the red- Btreak, the yellow-sweet, and others. There are wind- falls among them too, as among the apples, and one side or hemisphere of the leaf is usually brighter than the other. The ash has been less noticed for its autumnal foli- age than it deserves. The richest shades of plum color to be seen — becoming by and by, or, in certain lights, a deep maroon — are afforded by this tree. Then at a distance there seems to be a sort of bloom upon it as upon the grape or plum. Amid a grove of yellow maple, it makes a most pleasing con- trast. By mid- October, most of the Rip Van Winkles among our brute creatures have lain down for thei? *int«r nap. The toads and turtles have buried thora 126 AUTUilN TIDES. selves in the earth. The woodchuck is in his hiber* naculum, the skunk in his, the mole in his ; and the black bear has his selected, and will go in when the snow comes. He does not like the looks of his big tracks in the snow. They publish liis goings and comings too plainly. The coon retires about lh«3 same time. The provident wood-mice and the chip- munk are laying by a winter supply of nuts or grain, the former usually in decayed trees, the- latter in the ground. I have observed that any unusual disturb- ance in the woods, near where the chipmunk has his den, will cause him to shift his quarters. One Octo- ber, for many successive days I saw one carrying into his hole buckwheat which he had stolen from a near field. The hole was only a few rods from where we were getting out stone, and as our work progressed and the racket and uproar increased, the chipmunk became alarmed. He ceased carrying in, and after much hesitating and darting about, and some pro- longed absences, he began to carry out ; he had de- t-ermined to move ; if the mountain fell. he. at least, would be away in time. So by mouthfuls, or cheek- fuls, the grain was transferred to a new place. He did not make a bee" to get it done, but carried it all himself, occupying several days, and making a trip about every ten minutes. The red and gray squirrels do not lay by winter stores ; their cheeks are made without pockets, and whatever they transport is carried in the teeth. They ire more or less active all winter, but October and KoYsmber are their festal months. Invade some but- AUTUMN TIDES. 127 tern lit or hickory -nut grove on a frosty October morning, and hear the red squirrel beat the "juba" on a horizontal branch. It is a most lively jig, what the boys call a "regular break-down," interspersed with squeals and snickers and derisive laughter. The most noticeable peculiarity about the vocal part of it is the fact that it is a kind of duet. In other words, by some ventriloqual tricks he appears to accompany himself, as if his voice split up, a part forming a low guttural sound, and a part a shrill nasal sound. The distant bark of the more wary gray squirrel may be heard about the same time. There is a teas- ing and ironical tone in it also, but the gray squirrel is not the Puck the red is. Insects also go into winter-quarters by or before this time ; the bumble-bee, hornet, and wasp. But here only royalty escapes ; the queen-mother alone foresees the night of winter coming and the morning of spring beyond. The rest of the tribe'try gypsying for a while, but perish in the first frosts. The present October I surprised the queen of the yellow-jackets in the woods looking out a suitable retreat. The royal dame was house-hunting, and on being dis- turbed by my inquisitive poking among the leaves, she got up and flew away with a slow, deep hum. Her body was unusually distended, whether with fat t)r eggs I am unable to saj. In September I took down the nest of the black hornet and found several large queens in it, but the workers had all gone The queens were evidently weathering the first frosti xnd fttorms here, and waiting for4he Indian sijinmer 128 AUTUilN TIDES. to go forth and ?eek a permaDent winter abode. D the covers couki be taken off the fields and woods at this season, how many interesting facts of natural history would be revealed ! The crickets, ants, bees, reptiles, animals, and, for aught I know, the spiders and flies asleep or getting ready to sleep in their win- ter dormitories ; the fires of life banked up and burn- ing just enough to keep the spark over till spring. The fish all run down the stream in the fall except the trout ; it runs up or stays up and spawns in No- vember, the male becoming as brilliantly tinted a^ the deepest dyed maple leaf I have often wondered why the trout spawns in the fall instead of in the spring, like other fish. Is it not because a full supply of clear spring water can be counted on at that season more than at any other ? The brooks are not so liable to be suddenly muddied by heavy showers and defiled with the washings of the roads and fields as they are in spring and summer. The artificial breeder finds that absolute purity of water is necessary to hatch the spawn ; also that shade and a low tempera- ture are indispensable. Our northern November day Uself is like spring water. It is melted frost, dissolved snow. There is ft chill in it and an exhilaration also. The forenoon is all mornin^r and the afternoon all eveninor. The shadows seem to come forth and to revenge them- selves upon the day. The sunlight is diluted with darkness. The colors fade from the landscape and inly the sheen of the river lights up the gray and trown distance. THE APPLE. THE APPLE. Lo I sweetened with the summer light, The fuII-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow, Drops in a silent autumn night. — Tennysow Not a little of the sunshine of our northern \^ in- ters is surely wrapped up in the apple. How could we winter over without it ! How is life sweetened by its mild acids ! A cellar well filled with apples is more valuable than a chamber filled with flax and wool. So much sound ruddy life to draw upon, to strike one's roots down into, as it were. Especially to those whose soil of life is inclined to be a little clayey and heavy, is the apple a winter necessity. It is the natural antidote of most of the ills the flesh is heir to. Full of vegetable acids and aromatics, qualities which act as refrigerants and an- tiseptics, what an enemy it is to jaundice, indigestion, torpidity of liver, etc. It is a gentle spur and tonic to the whole biliary system. Then I have read that t has been found by anal^^sis ^o contain more phos- phorus than any other vegetable. This makes it the proper food of the scholar and the sedentary man ; it feeds his brain and it stimulates his liver. Neither is 182 THE APPLE. this all. Beside its hygienic properties, the apple :>8 full of sugar and mucilage, which make it highly Dutritious. It is said "The operators of Cornwall, England, consider ripe apples nearly as nourishing as bread, and far more so than potatoes. In the year 1801 — which was a year of much scarcity — apples, nstead of being converted into cider, were sold to the poor, and the laborers asserted that they could ' stand their work' on baked apples without meat; whereas a potato diet required either meat or some other sub- stantial nutriment. The French and Germans use apples extensively, so do the inhabitants of all Euro- pean nations. The laborers depend upon them as an article of food, and frequently make a dinner of sliced apples and bread." Yet the English apple is a tame and insipid affair, compared with the intense, sun -colored and sun- steeped fruit our orchards yield. The English have no sweet apple I am told, the saccharine element ap- parently being less abundant in vegetable nature in that sour and chilly climate than in our own. It is well known that the European maple yields no sugar, while both our birch and hickory have sweet in their veins. Perhaps this fact accounts for our excessive love of sweets which may be said to be a national trait. The Russian apple has a lovely complexion, smooth and transparent, but the Cossack is not yet all elimL aated from it. The only une I have seen — the Duchess of Oldenburg — is as beautiful as a Tartai THE APPLE. 133 princess, with a distracting odor, but it is the least bit puckery to the taste. The best thing I know about Chili is not its guano beds, but this fact which I learn from Darwin's " Voy- age," namely, that the apple thrives well there. Dar- win saw a town there so completely buried in a wood of apple-trees, that its streets were merely paths in an orchard. The tree indeed thrives so well, that I'arge branches cut off in the spring and planted two or three feet deep in the ground send out roots and develop into fine full-bearing trees by the third year. The people know the value of the apple too. They make cider and wine of it and then from the refuse u white and finely flavored spirit; then by another process a sweet treacle is obtained called honey. The children and pigs ate little or no other food. He does not add that the people are healthy and temper- ate, but T have no doubt they are. We knew the apple had many virtues, but these Chilians have really opened a deep beneath a deep. We had found out the cider and the spirits, but who guessed the wine and the honey, except it were the bees ? There is a variety in our orchards called the winesap, a doubly liquid name that suggests what might be done with this fruit. The apple is the commonest and yet the most varied and beautiful of fruits. A dish of them is as becoming to the centre-table in winter as was the vase of flowers in the summer, — a bouquet of spitzen oergs and greenings and northern spies. A rose whe» 134 THE APPLE. »t blooms, the apple is a rose when its ripens. It pleases every sense to which it can be addressed, the touch, the smell, the sight, the taste ; and when it falls in the still October days it pleases the ear. It is a call to a banquet, it is a signal that the feast is ready. The bough would fain hold it, but it can now asser its independence ; it can now live a life of its own. Daily the stem relaxes its hold, till finally it lets go completely and down comes the painted sphere with a mellow thump to the earth, toward which it has been nodding so long. It bounds away to seek its bed, to hide under a "leaf, or in a tuft of grass. It will now take time to meditate and ripen ! What delicious thoughts it has there nestled with its fellows under the fence, turning acid into sugar, and sugar into wine ! How pleasing to the touch. I love to stroke its polished rondure with my hand, to carry it in my pocket on my tramp over the winter hills, or through the early spring woods. You are company, you red- cheeked spitz, or you salmon-fleshed greening ! I toy with you ; press your face to mine, toss you in the air, roll you on the ground, see you shine out where you lie amid the moss and dry leaves and sticks. You fire so alive ! You glow like a ruddy flower. You look so animated I almost expect to see you move I I postpone the eating of you, you are so beautiful ! How compact ; how exqiusitely tinted ! Stained by the sun and varnished against the rains. An inde- oeodeut vegetable existence, alive and vascular as THE APPLE. 135 my own flesh ; capable of being wounded, bleeding wasting away, or almost repairing damages ! How they resist the cold ! holding out almost aa long as the red cheeks of the boys do. A frost that destroys the potatoes and other roots only makes the apple more crisp and vigorous ; they peep out from the chance November snows unscathed. When I see the fruit vender on the street corner stamping his feet and beating his hands to keep them warm and his naked apples lying exposed to the blasts, I wonder if they do not ache too to clap their hands and en- liven their circulation. But they can stand it nearly as long as the vender can. Noble common fruit, best fiiend of man and most loved by him, following him like his dog or his cow, wherever he goes. His homestead is not planted till you are planted, your roots intertwine with his ; thriv- ing best where he thrives best, loving the limestone and the frost, the plow and the pruning-knife, you are indeed suggestive of hardy, cheerful industry, and a healthy life in the open air. Temperate, chaste fruit ! you mean neither luxury nor sloth, neither satiety nor indolence, neither enervating heats nor the Frigid Zones. Uncloying fruit, fruit whose best lauce is the open air, whose finest flavors only he whose taste is sharpened by brisk work or walking ^ knows ; winter fruit, when the fire of life burns brightest ; fruit alwa3^s a little hyperborean, leaning V)ward the cold; bracing, sub-acid, active fruit. I ihiuk you must come from the north, you are so frank 136 THE APPLE. ftnd honest, so sturdy and appetizing. You are stocky and homely like the northern races. Your quality is Saxon. Surely the fiery and impetuous south is not akin to thee. Not spices or olives or the sumptuous liquid fruits, but the grass, the snow, the grains, the coolness is akin to thee. I think if I could subsist on you or the like of you, I should never have an intem- perate or ignoble thought, never be feverish or de- spondent. So far as I could absorb or transmute your quality I should be cheerful, continent, equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmth and contentment around. Is there any other fruit that has so much facial ex- pression as the apple? What boy does not more than half believe they can see with that single eye of theirs ? Do they not look and nod to him from the bough? The swaar has one look, the rambo another, the spy another. The youth recognizes the seek-no-further buried beneath a dozen other varieties, the moment he catches a glance of its eye, or the bonny-cheeked Newtown pipin, or the gentle but sharp-nosed gilli- flower. He goes to the great bin in the cellar and sinks his shafts here and there in the garnered weaUh of the orchards, mining for his favorites, sometimes •coming plump upon them, sometimes catching a ^rlimpse of them to the right or left, or uncovering them as keystones in an arch made up of many varie- ties. In the dark he can usually tell them by the sense 3f touch. There is lot only the size and shape, but THE APPLE. 137 there is the texture and polish. Some apples are coarse-grained and some are fine ; some are thin skinned and some are thick. One variety is quick and vigorous beneath the touch ; another gentle and yielding. The pinnock has a thick skin with a spongy lining, a bruise in it becomes like a piece of cork. The tallow apple has an unctuous feel as its name suggests. It sheds water like a duck. . What apple is that with a fat curved stem that blends so prettily with jts own flesh, — the- wine-apple ? Some varieties impress me as masculine, — weather-stained, freckled, lasting and rugged ; others are indeed lady apples, fair, delicate, shining, mild-flavored, white- meated, like the egg-drop and lady-finger. The prac- ticed hand knows each kind by the touch. Do you remember the apple hole in the garden or back of the house, Ben Bolt ? In the fall after the bins in the cellar had been well stocked, we excavated a circular pit in the warm mellow earth and covering the bottom with clean rye straw, emptied in basketftd after basketful of hardy choice varieties, till there was a tent-shaped mound several feet high of shining variegated fruit. Then wrapping it about with a thick layer of long rye straw, and tucking it up snug and warm, the mound was covered with a thin coating of ^arth, a flat stone on the top holding down the straw winter set in another coating of earth was put upon ^t, with perhaps an overcoat o^ coarse dry stable ma- Duro, and the precious pile was left in silence and larkuess till spring. No marmot hibernating under 138 IriE APPLE. ground in his nest of leaves and dry grass, more cosy and warm. No frost, no wet, but fragrant privacy and quiet. Then how the earth tempers and flavors the apples ! It draws out all the acrid unripe quali ties, and infuses into them a subtle refreshing taste of the soil. Some varieties perish, but the ranker, hardier kinds, like the northern spy, the greening, or the black apple, or the russet, or the pinnock, how they ripen and grow in grace, how the green becomes gold, and the bitter becomes sweet ! As the supply in the bins and barrels gets low and spring approaches, the buried treasures in the garden are remembered. With spade and axe we go out and penetrate through the snow and frozen earth till the inner dressing of straw is laid bare. It is not quite as clear and bright as when we placed it there last fall, but the fruit beneath, which the hand soon ex- poses, is just as bright and far more luscious. Then, as day after day you resort to the hole, and removing the straw and earth from the opening, thrust your arm into the fragrant pit, you have a better chance ;han ever before to become acquainted with your favorites by the sense of touch. How you feel for them, reaching to the right and left ? Now you have got a Tolman sweet ; you imagine you can feel that single meridian line that divides it into two hemis- pheies. Now a greening fills your hand, you feel its iSne quality beneath its rough coat. Now you have at jked a swaar, you recognize its full face; now a ^andevere or a King rolls down from the apex above THE APPLE. 139 %iid you bag it at once. When you were a school- boy you stowed these away in your pockets and ate thein along the road and at recess, and again at noon- time ; and they, in a measure, corrected the effects of the cake and pie with which your indulgent mother filled your lunch-basket. The boy is indeed the true apple-eater, and is not to be questioned how he came by the fruit with which his pockets are filled. It belongs to him and he may steal it if it cannot be had in any other way. His own juicy flesh craves the juicy flesh of the apple. Sap draws sap. His fruit eating has little reference to the state of his appetite. Whether he be full of meat or empty of meat he wants the apple just the same. Before meal or after meal it never comes amiss. The farm-boy munches apples all day long. He has nests of them in the hay-mow, mellowing, to which he makes frequent visits. Sometimes old Brindle, having access through the open door, smells them out and makes short work of them. In some countries the custom remains of placing a rDsy apple in the hand of the dead that they may find it when they enter paradise. In northern my- thology the giants eat apples to keep off old age. The apple is indeed the fruit of youth. As we grow old we crave apples less. It is an ominous sign. When you are ashamed to be seen eating them on the street ; when you can carry them in your ^ocket and your hand not constantly find its way to ^hem ; when your neighbor has apples and you have 140 THE APPLL, Done, and you make no nocturnal visits to his or* chard ; when your luDch-basket is without them and jrou can pass a winter's night by the fireside with no thought of the fruit at your elbow, then be assured you are no longer a boy, either in heart or years. The genuine apple-eater comforts himself with an apple in their season as others with a pipe or cigar. When he has nothing else to do, or is bored, he eata an apple. While he is waiting for the train he eats an apple, sometimes several of them. When he takes a walk he arms himself with apples. His trav- eling bag is full of apples. He offers an apple to his companion, and takes one himself. They are his chief solace when on the road. He sows their seed all along the route. He tosses the core from the car window and from the top of the stage-coach. He would, in time, make the land one vast orchard. He dispenses with a knife. He prefers that his teeth shall have the first taste. Then he knows the best flavor is immediately beneath the skin, and that in a pared apple this is lost. If you will stew the apple, he says, instead of baking it, by all means leave ihe skin on. It improves the color and vastly height- ens the flavor of the dish. The apple is a masculine fruit ; hence women are poor apple-eaters. It belongs to the open air, and requires an open air taste and relish. I instantly sympathized with that clergyman I read of, who on pulling out his pocket-handkerchief in the midst of his discourse, pulled out two bounc- THE APPLE. 141 fog apples with it that went rolling across the pulpit floor and down the pulpit stairs. These apples were, DO doubt, to be eaten after the sermon on his way home, or to his next appointment. They would take the taste of it out of his mouth. Then, would a minister be apt to grow tiresome with two big apples in his coat-tail pockets? Would he not naturally hasten along to " lastly," and the big apples ? If they were the dominie apples, and it was April or May, he certainly would. How the early settlers prized the apple ! When their trees broke down or were split asunder by the storms, the neighbors turned out, the divided tree was put together again and fastened with iron bolts. In some of the oldest orchards one may still occasionally see a large dilapidated tree with the rusty iron bolt yet visible. Poor, sour fruit, too, but sweet in those early pioneer days. My grandfather, who was one of these heroes of the stump, used every fall to make a journey of forty miles for a few apples, which he brought home in a bag on horseback. He frequently etarted from home by two or three o'clock in the morning, and at one time both himself and horse were much frightened by the screaming of panthers in a narrow pass in the mountains through which the road led. Emerson, I believe, has spoken of the apple as the Bocial fruit of New England. Indeed, what a pro- «ioter or abettor of social intercourse among our rura population the apple has been, the company grow 142 THE APPLE. big more merry and unrestrained as soon as the bas- ket of apples was passed round. When the cider followed, the introduction and good understanding were complete. Then those rural gatherings that en- livened the autumn in the country, known as " apple cuts," now, alas ! nearly obsolete, where so many things were cut and dried besides apples ! The larger and more loaded the orchard, the more fre- quently the invitations went round and the higher the social and convivial spirit ran. Ours is eminently a country of the orchard. . Horace Greeley said he had seen no land in which the orchard formed such a prominent feature in the rural and agricultural dis- tricts. Nearly every farmhouse in the Eastern and Northern States has its setting or its background of apple-trees, which generally date back to the first settlement of the farm. Indeed, the orchard, more than almost any other thing, tends to soften and hu- manize the country, and give the place of which it is an adjunct, a settled, domestic look. The apple-tree takes the rawness and wildness off any scene. On the top of a mountain, or in remote pastures, it sheds the sentiment of home. It never loses its domestic air, or lapses into a wild state. And in planting a homestead, or in choosing a building site for the new house, what a help it is to have a few old, maternal apple-trees near by ; regular old grandmothers, who have seen trouble, who have been sad and glad through so many winters and summers, who have tflossomed till the air about them is sweeter than els©" THE APPLE. 14a where, and borne fruit till the grass beneath them has become thick and soft from human contact, and who have nourished robins and finches in their branches till they have a tender, brooding look. The ground, the turf, the atmosphere of an old orchard, seem 83veral stages nearer to man than that of the adjoin- ing field, as if the trees had given back to the soil more than they had taken from it; as if they had tempered the elements and attracted all the genial and beneficent influences in the landscape around. An apple orchard is sure to bear you several crops beside the apple. There is the crop of sweet and ten- der reminiscences dating from childhood and span- ning the seasons from May to October, and making the orchard a sort of outlying part of the household. You have played there as a child, mused there as a youth or lover, strolled there as a thoughtful, sad- eyed man. Your father, perhaps, planted the trees, or reared them from the seed, and you yourself have pruned and grafted them, and worked among them, wU every separate tree has a peculiar history and meaning in your mind. Then there is the never- failing crop of birds — robins, goldfinches, king-birds, cedar-birds, hair-birds, orioles, starlings — all nest- ing and breeding in its branches, and fitly described oy Wilson Flagg, as " Birds of the Garden and Or- chard." Whether the pippin and sweetbough bear or not, the " punctual birds " can always be depended on. Indeed, there are few better places to study orni- ♦iology than in the orchard. Besides its regular oo 144 THE APPLE. cupants, many of the birds of the deeper forest find occasion to visit it during the season. The cuckoo comes for the tent-caterpillar, the jay for frozen ap- ples, the ruffed grouse for buds, the crow foraging for birds' eggs, the woodpecker and chickadees for thei> food, and the high-hole for ants. The red-bird come> too, if only to see what a friendly covert its branches form, and the wood-thrush now and then comes out of tlie grove near by, and nests alongside of its cousin, the robin. The smaller hawks know that this is a most likely spot for their prey, and in spring the shy northern warblers may be studied as they pause to feed on the fine insects amid its branches. The mice love to dwell here also, and liither come fi'om the near woods the squirrel and the rabbit. The latter will put liis head through the boy^s slipper-noose any time for a taste of the sweet apple, and the red squir- rel and chipmunk esteem its seeds a great rarity. All the domestic animals love the apple, but none 60 much so as the cow. The taste of it wakes her up as few other things do, and bars and fences must be well looked after. No need to assort them or \\ick out the ripe ones for her. An apple is an ap- ple, and there is no best about it. I heard of a quick- witted old cow that learned to shake them down from the tree. While rubbing herself she had observed that an apple sometimes fell. This stimulated her to rub a little harder, when more apples fell. She then took the hint and rubbed her shoulder with such vigor that the farmer had to check her and keep as l^TC on her to save his fruiu THE APPLE. 145 But the cow is the friend of the apple. How many trees she has planted about the farm, in the edge of the woods, and in remote fields and pastures. The wild apples, celebrated by Thoreau, are mostly of her planting. She browses them down to be sure, but they are hers, and wliy should she not? What an individuality the apple-tree has, each va- riety being nearly as marked by its form as by its fruit. What a vigorous grower, for instance, is the Ribston pippin, an English apple. Wide branching like the oak, and its large ridgy fruit, in late fall or early winter, is one of my favorites. Or the thick and more pendent top of the belleflower, with its equally rich, sprightly, uncloyiiig fruit. Sweet apples are perhaps the most nutritious, and when baked are a feast of themselves. With a tree of the Jersey sweet or of Tolman's sweeting in bear- ing, no man's table need be devoid of luxuries and one of the most wholesome of all deserts. Or the red astrachan, an August apple, what a gap may be filled in the culinary department of a household at this season, by a single tree of this fruit ! And' what a feast is its shining crimson coat to the eye before its snow-white flesh has reached the tongue. But the apple of apples for the household is the spitzenberg. In this casket Pomona has put her highest flavors. It can stand the ordeal of cooking, and still remain a spitz. I recently saw a barrel of these apples from the orchard of a fruit grower in the northern part of New York, who has devoted especial attention to 10 146 THE APPLE. this variety. They were perfect gems. Not large, that had not been the aim, but smalL fair, uniform, and red to the core. How intense, how spicy and aromatic. But all the excellences of the apple are not con- fined to the cultivated fruit. Occasionally a seedling springs up about the farm that produces fruit of rare beauty and worth. In sections peculiarly adapted to the apple, like a certain belt along the Hudson River, I have noticed that most of the wild unbidden treea bear good, edible fruit. In cold and ungenial districts, the seedlings are mostly sour and crabbed, but in more favorable soils they are oftener mild and sweet, I know wild apples that ripen in August, and that do not need, if it could be had, Thoreau's sauce of sharp, November air to be eaten with. At the foot of a hill near me and striking its roots deep in the shale, is a giant specimen of native tree that bears an apple that has about the clearest, waxiest, most transparent complexion I ever saw. It is good size, and the color of a tea rose. Its quality is best appreciated in the kitchen. I know another seedling of excellent quality and so remarkable for its firmness and den- sity, that it is known on the farm where it grows as the *' heavy apple." I have alluded to Thoreau, to whom all lovers of the apple and its tree are under obligation. His chapter on AVild Apples is a most delicious piece of •mling. It has a " tang and smack "like the frui* •t celebrates, and is dashed and streaked with colo THE APPLE. 147 in the same manner. It has the hue and perfume of the crab, and the richness and raciness of the pippin. But Thoreau loved other apples than the wild sorts and was obliged to confess that his favorites could not be eaten in doors. Late in November he found a blue-pearmain tree growing within the edge of a Bwamp. almost as good as wild. "You would not Buppose," he says, " that there was any fruit left there on the first survey, but you must look according to system. Those which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there amid the wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes I explore amid the bare alders, and the huckleberry bushes, and the withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under the fallen and decayed ferns which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie con- cealed, fallen into hollows long since, and covered up by the leaves of the tree itself — a proper kind of packing. From these lurki'ng places, everywhere within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit all wet and glossy, may be nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets, and perhaps a leaf or two cemented to it (as Curzon an old manuscript from a monastery's mouldy cellar), but still with a rich bloom on it, and at least as ripe and well kept, if no better than those in barrels, more crisp and lively than they. If these resources fail to yield anything, I have earned to look between the leaves of the suckers 148 THE APPLE. which spring thickly from some horizontal limb, for DOW and then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an alder-clump, where they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may have smell ed them out. If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the blue- pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side ; and as I retrace my steps, in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance," AN OCTOBER ABROAD. MELLOW ENGLAND. I WILL say at the outset, as I believe some one else has saia ou a like occasion, that in this narrative I shall probably describe myself more than the objects I look upon. The facts and particulars of the case have already been set down in the guide-books and in innumerable books of travel. I shall only at- tempt to give an account of the pleasure and satisfac- tion I had in comins: face to face with things in the mother country, seeing them as I did with kindred and sympathizing'eyes. The ocean was a dread fascination to me — a world whose dominion I had never entered ; but I proved to be such a wretched sailor that I am obliged to confess, Hibernian-fashion, that the happiest mo- ment I spent upon the sea was when I set my foot upon the land. It is a wide and fearful gulf that separates the two worlds. The landsman can know little of the wild- uess, savageness, and mercilessness of nature till he aac been upon the sea. It is as if he had taken a leap off into the interstellar spaces. In voyaging to Mars or Jupiter he might cross such a desert — 152 AN OCTOBER ABROAD. might confront such awful purity and coldness. An astronomic solitariness and remoteness encompass the sea. The earth and all remembrance of it is blotted out ; there is no hint of it anywhere. This is not water, this cold, blue-black, vitreous liquid. It suggests not life but death. Indeed, the regions of everlasting ice and snow are not more cold and in- human than is the sea. Almost the only thing about my first sea voyage that I remember with pleasure is the circumstance of the little birds that, during the first few days out, took refuge on the steamer. The first afternoon, just as we were losing sight of land, a delicate little wood bird, — the black and white creeping warbler, — having lost its reckoning, in making perhaps its first southern voyage, came aboard. It was much fatigued and had a disheartened, demoralized look. After an hour or two it disappeared, having, I fear, a hard pull to reach the land in the face of the wind that was blowing, if indeed it reached it at all. The next day, just at night, I observed a small hawk sailing about conveniently near the vessel, but with a very lofty, independent mien, as if he had just happened that way on his travels, and was only lingering to take a good view of us. It was amus- ing to observe his coolness and haughty unconcern n that sad plight he was in ; by nothing in his man- \ er betraying that he was several hundred miles at lea, and did not know how he was going to get back to land. But presently I noticed he found it not in- MELLOW ENGLAND. 158 consistent with his dignity to alight on the rigging under friendly cover of the tops'l, where I saw hia feathers rudely ruffled by the wind, till darkness set in. If tlie sailors did not disturb him during the night, he certainly needed all his fortitude in the morning to put a cheerful face on his situation. The third day, when we were perhaps off Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, the American pipit or tit- lark, from the far North, a brown bird about the size of a sparrow, dropped upon the deck of the ship, so nearly exhausted that one of the sailors was on the point of covering it with his hat. It stayed about the vessel nearly all day, flitting from point to point, or hopping along a few feet in front of the prom- enaders, and prying into every crack and crevice for food. Time after time I saw it start off with a reassuring chirp, as if determined to seek the land but before it had got many rods from the ship its heart would seem to fail it, and ifter circling about for a few moments, back it would come, more dis- couraged than ever. These little waifs from the shore ! I gazed upon them with a strange, sad interest. They were friends in distress, but the sea-birds, skimming along indiffer- ent to us, or darting in and out among those watery hills, I seemed to look upon as my natural enemies. They were the nurslings and favorites of the sea, and [ had no sympathy with them. No doubt the number of our land birds tliat act ually perish in the sea during their autumn migra 154 AX OCTOBER ABROAD. tion, being carried far out of their course by the prevailiDg westerly winds of this season, is very great. Occasionally one makes the passage to Great Britain, by following the ships and finding them at convenient distances along the route, and I have been told that over fifty different species of our more com- mon birds, such as robins, starlings, grossbeaks, thrushes, etc., have been found in Ireland, having, of course, crossed in this way. What numbers of these little navigators of the air are misled and wrecked durino: those dark and stormv nio:hts, on the liojht- houses alone that line the Atlantic Coast ? Is it Celia Thaxter who tells of having picked up her apron full of sparrows, warblers, flycatchers, etc.. at the foot of the light-house, on the Isles of Shoals, one mornino: after a storm, the orrouud beinor still strewn with birds of all kinds that had dashed them selves against the beacon, bewildered and fascma:e