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THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
THE FACE OF THE
FIELDS
BY
DALLAS LORE SHARP
AUTHOR OF " WILD LIFE NEAR HOME," " ROOF AND
MEADOW," AND "THE LAY OF THE LAND"
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
<$&e Ritersibe prcstf Cambti&ae
1911
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY DALLAS LORE SHARP
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published March iqn
! QH
553f
TO Afr GOOD FRIEND
HINCKLEY GILBERT MITCHELL
HONEST SCHOLAR
CONTENTS
I. THE FACE OF THE FIELDS i
II. TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ . . 27
III. THE EDGE OF NIGHT .... 57
IV. THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS . . . 81
V. THE NATURE-WRITER . . . > in
VI. JOHN BURROUGHS 141
VII. HUNTING THE SNOW. , . , .177
VIII. THE CLAM FARM 193
IX. THE COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING .217
All but two of these papers made their first appearance in The
Atlantic Monthly. "The Nature- Writer " was first printed in
The Outlook and '« Hunting the Snow " in The Youth's Companion.
I
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
(HERE was a swish of wings, a flash
of gray, a cry of pain, a squawking,
cowering, scattering flock of hens,
a weakly fluttering pullet, and yon-
der, swinging upward into the Oc-
tober sky, a marsh hawk, buoyant and gleaming
silvery in the sun. Over the trees he beat, circled
once, and disappeared.
The hens were still flapping for safety in a
dozen directions, but the gray harrier had gone.
A bolt of lightning could not have dropped so
unannounced, could not have vanished so com-
pletely, could scarcely have killed so quickly. I
ran to the pullet, but found her dead. The har-
rier's stroke, delivered with fearful velocity, had
laid head and neck open as with a keen knife.
Yet a fraction slower and he would have missed,
for the pullet caught the other claw on her wing.
The gripping talons slipped off the long quills,
and the hawk swept on without his quarry. He
dared not come back for it at my feet; and
4 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
so with a single turn above the woods he was
gone.
The scurrying hens stopped to look about
them. There was nothing in the sky to see. They
stood still and silent a moment. The rooster
chucked. Then one by one they turned back into
the open pasture. A huddled group under the
hen-yard fence broke up and came out with the
others. Death had flashed among them, but had
missed them. Fear had come, but had gone.
Within two minutes — in less time — from the
fall of the stroke, every hen in the flock was intent
at her scratching, or as intently chasing the gray
grasshoppers over the pasture.
Yet, as they scratched, the high-stepping cock
would frequently cast up his eye toward the tree-
tops ; would sound his alarum at the flight of a
robin ; and if a crow came over, he would shout
and dodge and start to run. But instantly the
shadow would pass, and instantly chanticleer —
He loketh as it were a grim leoun,
And on his toos he rometh up and doun;
Thus roial, as a prince is in an halle.
He wasn't afraid. Cautious, alert, watchful he
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS 5
was, but not fearful. No shadow of dread hangs
dark and ominous across the sunshine of his pas-
ture. Shadows come — like a flash; and like a
flash they vanish away.
We cannot go far into the fields without sight-
ing the hawk and the snake, the very shapes of
Death. The dread Thing, in one form or another,
moves everywhere, down every wood-path and
pasture-lane, through the black close waters of the
mill-pond, out under the open of the winter sky,
night and day, and every day, the four seasons
through. I have seen the still surface of a pond
break suddenly with a swirl, and flash a hundred
flecks of silver into the light, as the minnows leap
from the jaws of the pike. Then a loud rattle, a
streak of blue, a splash at the centre of the swirl,
and I see the pike, twisting and bending in the
beak of the kingfisher. The killer is killed ; but
at the mouth of the nest-hole in the steep sand-
bank, swaying from a root in the edge of the turf
above, hangs the black snake, the third killer, and
the belted kingfisher, dropping the pike, darts off
with a cry. I have been afield at times when one
tragedy has followed another in such rapid and
continuous succession as to put a whole shining,
6 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
singing, blossoming world under a pall. Every-
thing has seemed to cower, skulk, and hide, to
run as if pursued. There was no peace, no stirring
of small life, not even in the quiet of the deep
pines; for here a hawk would be nesting, or a
snake would be sleeping, or I would hear the
passing of a fox, see perhaps his keen hungry face
an instant as he halted, winding me.
Fox and snake and hawk are real, but not the
absence of peace and joy — except within my own
breast. There is struggle and pain and death in
the woods, and there is fear also, but the fear does
not last long; it does not haunt and follow and
terrify ; it has no being, no substance, no continu-
ance. The shadow of the swiftest scudding cloud
is not so fleeting as this shadow in the woods,
this Fear. The lowest of the animals seem capable
of feeling it ; yet the very highest of them seem
incapable of dreading it ; for them Fear is not of
the imagination, but of the sight, and of the pass-
ing moment.
The present only toucheth thee !
It does more, it throngs him — our fellow mortal
of the stubble field, the cliff, and the green sea.
Into the present is lived the whole of his life —
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS 7
none of it is left to a storied past, none sold to a
mortgaged future. And the whole of this life is
action; and the whole of this action is joy. The
moments of fear in an animal's life are moments
of reaction, negative, vanishing. Action and joy
are constant, the joint laws of all animal life, of
all nature, from the shining stars that sing together,
to the roar of a bitter northeast storm across these
wintry fields.
We shall get little rest and healing out of na-
ture until we have chased this phantom Fear into
the dark of the moon. It is a most difficult drive.
The pursued too often turns pursuer, and chases
us back into our burrows, where there is nothing
but the dark to make us afraid. If every time a
bird cries in alarm, a mouse squeaks with pain,
or a rabbit leaps in fear from beneath our feet,
we, too, leap and run, dodging the shadow as if
it were at our own heels, then we shall never get
farther toward the open fields than Chuchundra,
the muskrat, gets toward the middle of the bun-
galow floor. We shall always creep around by
the wall, whimpering.
But there is no such thing as fear out of doors.
There was, there will be ; you may see it for an
8 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
instant on your walk to-day, or think you see it ;
but there are the birds singing as before, and as
before the red squirrel, under cover of large words,
is prying into your purposes. The universal cho-
rus of nature is never stilled. This part, or that,
may cease for a moment, for a season it may be,
only to let some other part take up the strain ; as
the winter's deep bass voices take it from the soft
lips of the summer, and roll it into thunder, until
the naked hills seem to rock to the measures of
the song.
So must we listen to the winter winds, to the
whistle of the soaring hawk, to the cry of the
trailing hounds.
I have had more than one hunter grip me ex-
citedly, and with almost a command bid me hear
the music of the baying pack. There are hollow
halls in the swamps that lie to the east and north
and west of me, that catch up the cry of the fox
hounds, that blend it, mellow it, round it, and
roll it, rising and falling over the meadows these
autumn nights in great globes of sound, as pure
and sweet as the pearly notes of the wood thrush
rolling around their silver basin in the summer
dusk.
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS 9
It is a different kind of music when the pack
breaks into the open on the warm trail: a chorus
then of individual tongues singing the ecstasy of
pursuit. My blood leaps; the natural primitive
wild thing of muscle and nerve and instinct within
me slips its leash, and on past with the pack it
drives, the scent of the trail single and sweet in its
nostrils, a very fire in its blood, motion, motion,
motion in its bounding muscles, and in its being
a mighty music, spheric and immortal, a carol,
chant and psean, nature's " unjarred chime," —
The fair music that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motions swayed
In perfect diapason, whilst they stood
In first obedience, and their state of good.
But what about the fox and his share in this
gloria? It is a solemn music to him, certainly,
loping wearily on ahead ; but what part has he in
the chorus? No part, perhaps, unless we grimly
call him its conductor. But the point is the cho-
rus, that it never ceases, the hounds at this mo-
ment, not the fox, in the leading role.
" But the chorus ceases for me," you say. " My
heart is with the poor fox." So is mine, and mine
is with the dogs too. Many a night I have bayed
io THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
with the pack, and as often, oftener, I think, I
have loped and dodged and doubled with the fox,
pitting limb against limb, lung against lung, wit
against wit, and always escaping. More than once,
in the warm moonlight of the early fall, I have led
them on and on, spurring their lagging muscles
with a sight of my brush, on and on, through the
moonlit night, through the day, on into the moon
again, and on until — only the stir of my own
footsteps has followed me. Then doubling once
more, creeping back a little upon my track, I
have looked at my pursuers, silent and stiff upon
the trail, and, ere the echo of their cry has died
away, I have caught up the chorus and carried
it single-throated through the wheeling singing
spheres.
There is more of fact than of fancy to this. That
a fox ever purposely ran a dog to death, would
be hard to prove ; but that the dogs run them-
selves to death in a single extended chase after a
single fox is a common occurrence here in the
woods about the farm. Occasionally the fox may
be overtaken by the hounds ; seldom, however,
except in the case of a very young one or of a
stranger, unacquainted with the lay of the land,
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS u"
driven into the rough country here by an unusual
combination of circumstances.
I have been both fox and hound ; I have run
the race too often not to know that both enjoy it
at times, fox as much as hound. Some weeks ago
the dogs carried a young fox around and around
the farm, hunting him here, there, everywhere, as
if in a game of hide-and-seek. An old fox would
have led them on a long coursing run across the
range. It was early fall and warm, so that at dusk
the dogs were caught and taken off the trail. The
fox soon sauntered up through the mowing field
behind the barn, came out upon the bare knoll
near the house, and sat there in the moonlight
yapping down at Rex and Dewy, the house dogs
in the two farms below. Rex is a Scotch collie,
Dewy a dreadful mix of dog-dregs. He had been
tail-ender in the pack for a while during the after-
noon. Both dogs answered back at the young fox.
But he could not egg them on. Rex was too fat,
Dewy had had enough; not so the young fox.
It had been fun. He wanted more. " Come on,
Dewy ! " he cried. " Come on, Rex, play tag again.
You 're still ' it.' "
I was at work with my chickens one day when
12 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
the fox broke from cover in the tall woods, struck
the old wagon road along the ridge, and came
at a gallop down behind the hencoops, with five
hounds not a minute behind. They passed with
a crash and were gone — up over the ridge and
down into the east swamp. Soon I noticed that
the pack had broken, deploying in every direc-
tion, beating the ground over and over. Reynard
had given them the slip, on the ridge-side, evi-
dently, for there were no cries from below in the
swamp.
The noon whistles blew, and leaving my work
I went down to re-stake my cow in the meadow.
I had just drawn her chain-pin when down
the road through the orchard behind me came
the fox, hopping high up and down, his neck
stretched, his eye peeled for poultry. Spying a
white hen of my neighbor's, he made for her,
clear to the barnyard wall. Then, hopping higher
for a better view, he sighted another hen in the
front yard, skipped in gayly through the fence,
seized her, loped across the road, and away up
the birch-grown hills beyond.
The dogs had been at his very heels ten min-
utes before. He had fooled them. He had done
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS 13
it again and again. They were even now yelping
at the end of the baffling trail behind the ridge.
Let them yelp. It is a kind and convenient habit
of dogs, this yelping, one can tell so exactly
where they are. Meantime one can take a turn
for one's self at the chase, get a bite of chicken,
a drink of water, a wink or two of rest, and when
the yelping gets warm again, one is quite ready
to pick up one's heels and lead the pack another
merry dance. The fox is almost a humorist.
This is the way the races are all run off. Now
and then they may end tragically. A fox cannot
reckon on the hunter with a gun. Only dogs en-
tered into the account when the balance in the
scheme of things was struck for the fox. But, mor-
tal finish or no, the spirit of the chase is neither
rage nor terror, but the excitement of a matched
game, the ecstasy of pursuit for the hound, the
passion of escape for the fox, without fury or fear
— except for the instant at the start and at the
finish — when it is a finish.
This is the spirit of the chase — of the race,
more truly, for it is always a race, where the stake
is not life and death, as we conceive of life and
death, but rather the joy of being. The hound
i4 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
cares as little for his own life as for the life he is
hunting. It is the race, instead ; it is the moment
of crowded, complete, supreme existence for him
— "glory" we call it when men run it off to-
gether. Death, and the fear of death, are incon-
ceivable to the animal mind. Only enemies exist
in the world out of doors, only hounds, foxes,
hawks — they, and their scents, their sounds and
shadows ; and not fear, but readiness only. The
level of wild life, of the soul of all nature, is a
great serenity. It is seldom lowered, but often
raised to a higher level, intenser, faster, more ex-
ultant.
The serrate pines on my horizon are not the
pickets of a great pen. My fields and swamps and
ponds are not one wide battlefield, as if the only
work of my wild neighbors were bloody war, and
the whole of their existence a reign of terror. This
is a universe of law and order and marvelous bal-
ance ; conditions these of life, of normal, peace-
ful, joyous life. Life and not death is the law, joy
and not fear is the spirit, is the frame of all that
breathes, of very matter itself.
And ever at the loom of Birth
The Mighty Mother weaves and sings;
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS 15
She weaves — fresh robes for mangled earth;
She sings — fresh hopes for desperate things.
" For the rest," says Hathi, most unscientific of
elephants, in the most impossible of Jungle Sto-
ries, " for the rest, Fear walks up and down the
Jungle by day and by night. . . . And only when
there is one great Fear over all, as there is now,
can we of the Jungle lay aside our little fears and
meet together in one place as we do now."
Now, the law of the Indian Jungle is as old
and as true as the sky, and just as widespread and
as all-encompassing. It is the identical law of my
New England pastures. It obtains here as it holds
far away yonder. The trouble is all with Hathi.
Hathi has lived so long in a British camp, has
seen so few men but British soldiers, and has felt
so little law but British military law in India, that
very naturally Hathi gets the military law and the
Jungle law mixed up.
Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty
are they;
But the head and the hoof of the Law, and the haunch and the
hump is — Obey !
else one of the little fears, or the BIG FEAR,
will get you !
16 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
But this is the Law of the Camp, and as beau-
tifully untrue of the Jungle, and of my woods
and pastures, as Hathi's account of how, before
Fear came, the First of the Tigers ate grass. Still,
Nebuchadnezzar ate grass, and he also grew eagles'
feathers upon his body. Perhaps the First of the
Tigers had feathers instead of fur, though Hathi
is silent as to that, saying only that the First of
the Tigers had no stripes. It might not harm us
to remember, however, that nowadays — as was
true in the days of the Sabretooth tiger (he is a
fossil) — tigers eat grass only when they feel very
bad, or when they find a bunch of catnip. The
wild animals that Hathi knew are more marvel-
ous than the Wild Animals I Have Known, but
Hathi's knowledge of Jungle law is all stuff and
nonsense.
There is no ogre, Fear, no command, Obey, but
the widest kind of a personal permit to live^ —
joyously, abundantly, intensely, frugally at times,
painfully at times, and always with large liberty ;
until, suddenly, the time comes to Let Live, when
death is almost sure to be instant, with little pain,
and less fear.
But am I not generalizing from the single case
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS 17
of the fox and hounds *? or at most from two
cases — the hen and the hawk? And are not these
cases far from typical ? Fox and hound are un-
usually matched, both of them are canines, and
so closely related that the dog has been known
to let a she-fox go unharmed at the end of an ex-
citing hunt. Suppose the fox were a defenseless
rabbit, what of fear and terror then *?
Ask any one who has shot in the rabbity fields
of southern New Jersey. The rabbit seldom runs
in blind terror. He is soft-eyed, and timid, and
as gentle as a pigeon, but he is not defenseless.
A nobler set of legs was never bestowed by nature
than the little cotton-tail's. They are as wings
compared with the deformities that bear up the
ordinary rabbit hound. With winged legs, pro-
tecting color, a clear map of the country in his
head, — its stumps, rail-piles, cat-brier tangles, and
narrow rabbit-roads, — with all this as a handicap,
Bunny may well run his usual cool and winning
race. The balance is just as even, the chances
quite as good, and the contest as interesting, to
him as to Reynard.
I have seen a rabbit squat close in his form
and let a hound pass yelping within a few feet of
i8 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
him, but as ready as a hair-trigger should he be
discovered. I have seen him leap for his life as
the dog sighted him, and bounding like a ball
across the stubble, disappear in the woods, the
hound within two jumps of his flashing tail. I
have waited at the end of the wood-road for the
runners to come back, down the home-stretch, for
the finish. On they go for a quarter, or perhaps
half a mile, through the woods, the baying of the
hound faint and intermittent in the distance, then
quite lost. No, there it is again, louder now. They
have turned the course. I wait.
The quiet life of the woods is undisturbed, for
the voice of the hound is only an echo, not un-
like the far-off tolling of a slow-swinging bell.
The leaves stir as a wood-mouse scurries from his
stump; an acorn rattles down; then in the wind-
ing wood-road I hear the pit-pat, -pit-pat, of soft
furry feet, and there at the bend is the rabbit. He
stops, rises high up on his haunches, and listens.
He drops again upon all fours, scratches himself
behind the ear, reaches over the cart-rut for a nip
of sassafras, hops a little nearer, and throws his
big ears forward in quick alarm, for he sees me,
and, as if something had exploded under him, he
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS 19
kicks into the air and is off, — leaving a pretty
tangle for the dog to unravel later on, by this
mighty jump to the side.
My children and the man were witnesses re-
cently of an exciting, and, for this section of
Massachusetts, a novel race, which, but for them,
must certainly have ended fatally. The boys had
picked up the morning fall of chestnuts, and were
coming through the wood-lot where the man was
chopping, when down the hillside toward them
rushed a little chipmunk, his teeth a-chatter with
terror, for close behind him, with the easy wavy
motion of a shadow, glided a dark brown animal,
which the man took on the instant for a mink,
but which must have been a large weasel or a pine
marten. When almost at the feet of the boys,
and about to be seized by the marten, the squeak-
ing chipmunk ran up a tree. Up glided the mar-
ten, up for twenty feet. Then the chipmunk
jumped. It was a fearfully close call. The marten
did not dare to jump, but turned and started down,
when the man intercepted him with a stick.
Around and around the tree he dodged, growling
and snarling and avoiding the stick, not a bit
abashed, stubbornly holding his own, until forced
20 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
to seek refuge among the branches. Meanwhile
the terrified chipmunk had recovered his nerve
and sat quietly watching the sudden turn of affairs
from a near-by stump.
I climbed into the cupola of the barn this morn-
ing, as I frequently do throughout the winter, and
brought down a dazed junco that was beating his
life out up there against the window-panes. He
lay on his back in my open hand, either feign-
ing death or really powerless with fear. His eyes
were closed, his whole tiny body throbbing con-
vulsively with his throbbing heart Taking him
to the door, I turned him over and gave him a
gentle toss. Instantly his wings flashed, they zig-
zagged him for a yard or two, then bore him
swiftly around the corner of the house and
dropped him in the midst of his fellows, where
they were feeding upon the lawn. He shaped
himself up a little and fell to picking with the
others.
From a state of collapse the laws of his being
had brought the bird into normal behavior as
quickly and completely as the collapsed rubber
ball is rounded by the laws of its being. The
memory of the fright seems to have been an im-
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS 21
pression exactly like the dent in the rubber ball
— as if it had never been.
Yet the analogy only half holds. Memories of
the most tenacious kind the animals surely have ;
but little or no voluntary, unaided power to use
them. Memory is largely a mechanical, a crank
process with the animals, a kind of magic-lantern
show, where the concrete slide is necessary for the
picture on the screen ; else the past as the future
hangs a blank. The dog will sometimes seem to
cherish a grudge ; so will the elephant. Some one
injures or wrongs him, and the huge beast harbors
the memory, broods it, and waits his opportunity
for revenge. Yet the records of these cases
usually show the creature to be living with the
object of his hatred — keeper or animal — and
that his memory goes no further back than the
present moment, than the sight of the enemy;
memory always taking an immediate, concrete
shape.
At my railroad station I frequently see a yoke
of great sleepy, bald-faced oxen, that look as much
alike as two blackbirds. Their driver knows them
apart; but as they stand there bound to one an-
other by the heavy bar across their foreheads, it
22 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
would puzzle anybody else to tell Buck from
Berry. But not if he approach them wearing an
overcoat. At sight of me in an overcoat the off
ox will snort and back and thresh about in terror,
twisting the head of his yoke-fellow, nearly break-
ing his neck, and trampling him miserably. But
the nigh ox is used to it. He chews and blinks
away placidly, keeps his feet the best he can, and
does n't try to understand at all why great-coats
should so frighten his cud-chewing brother. I will
drop off my coat and go up immediately to smooth
the muzzles of both oxen, blinking sleepily while
the lumber is being loaded on.
Years ago, the driver told me, the off ox
was badly frightened by a big woolly coat, the
sight or smell of which suggested to the creature
some natural enemy, a panther, perhaps, or a
bear. The memory remained, but beyond recall
except in the presence of its first cause, the great-
coat.
To us, and momentarily to the lower animals,
no doubt, there is a monstrous, a desperate aspect
to nature — night and drouth and cold, the light-
ning, the hurricane, the earthquake : phases of
nature that to the scientific mind are often appall-
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS 23
ing, and to the unthinking and superstitious are
usually sinister, cruel, personal, leading to much
dark talk of banshees and of the mysteries of Prov-
idence — as if there were still necessity to justify
the ways of God to man ! We are clutched by these
terrors even as the j unco was clutched in my gob-
lin hand. When the mighty fingers open, we zig-
zag, dazed from the danger; but fall to planning,
before the tremors of the earth have ceased, how
we can build a greater and finer city on the ruins
of the old. Upon the crumbled heap of the sec-
ond Messina the third will rise, and upon that the
fourth, unless the quaking site is forever swal-
lowed by the sea. Terror can kill the living, but
it cannot hinder them from forgetting, or prevent
them from hoping, or, for more than an instant,
stop them from doing. Such is the law of being
— the law of the Jungle, of Heaven, of my pas-
tures, of myself, and of the little j unco. The light
of the sun may burn out, motion may cease, mat-
ter vanish away, and life come to an end ; but so
long as life continues it must continue to assert
itself, to obey the law of being — to multiply and
replenish the earth, and rejoice.
Life, like Law and Matter, is all of one piece.
24 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
The horse in my stable, the robin, the toad, the
beetle, the vine in my garden, the garden itself,
and I together with them all, come out of the
same divine dust ; we all breathe the same divine
breath ; we have our beings under the same di-
vine law; only they do not know that the law,
the breath, and the dust are divine. If I do know,
and yet can so readily forget such knowledge, can
so hardly cease from being, can so eternally find
the purpose, the hope, the joy of life within me,
how soon for them, my lowly fellow mortals, must
vanish all sight of fear, all memory of pain ! And
how abiding with them, how compelling, the ne-
cessity to live ! And in their unquestioning obe-
dience what joy !
The face of the fields is as changeful as the
face of a child. Every passing wind, every shift-
ing cloud, every calling bird, every baying hound,
every shape, shadow, fragrance, sound, and tre-
mor, are so many emotions reflected there. But
if time and experience and pain come, they pass
utterly away; for the face of the fields does not
grow old or wise or seamed with pain. It is always
the face of a child, — asleep in winter, awake in
summer, — a face of life and health always, if we
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS 25
will but see what pushes the falling leaves off,
what lies in slumber under the covers of the snow;
if we will but feel the strength of the north wind,
and the wild fierce joy of the fox and hound as
they course the turning, tangling paths of the
woodlands in their race with one another against
the record set by Life.
II
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ
T is one of the wonders of the world
that so few books are written. With
every human being a possible book,
and with many a human being
capable of becoming more books
than the world could contain, is it not amazing that
the books of men are so few ? And so stupid !
I took down, recently, from the shelves of a
great public library, the four volumes of Agassiz's
" Contributions to the Natural History of the Uni-
ted States." I doubt if anybody but the charwoman,
with her duster, had touched those volumes for
twenty-five years. They are an excessively learned,
a monumental, an epoch-making work, the fruit
of vast and heroic labors, with colored plates on
stone, showing the turtles of the United States,
and their embryology. The work was published
more than half a century ago (by subscription) ;
but it looked old beyond its years — massive,
heavy, weathered, as if dug from the rocks. It was
difficult to feel that Agassiz could have written it
30 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
— could have built it, grown it, for the laminated
pile had required for its growth the patience and
painstaking care of a process of nature, as if it
were a kind of printed coral reef. Agassiz do this *?
The big, human, magnetic man at work upon
these pages of capital letters, Roman figures,
brackets, and parentheses in explanation of the
pages of diagrams and plates ! I turned away with
a sigh from the weary learning, to read the pre-
face.
When a great man writes a great book he usu-
ally flings a preface after it, and thereby saves it,
sometimes, from oblivion. Whether so or not, the
best things in most books are their prefaces. It
was not, however, the quality of the preface to
these great volumes that interested me, but rather
the wicked waste of durable book-material that
went to its making. Reading down through the
catalogue of human names and of thanks for help
received, I came to a sentence beginning : —
"In New England I have myself collected
largely ; but I have also received valuable con-
tributions from the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson
of Burlington; . . . from Mr. D. Henry Thoreau
of Concord; ... and from Mr. J. W. P. Jenks
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 31
of Middleboro'." And then it hastens on with the
thanks in order to get to the turtles, as if turtles
were the one and only thing of real importance
in all the world.
Turtles no doubt are important, extremely im-
portant, embryologically, as part of our genea-
logical tree ; but they are away down among the
roots of the tree as compared with the late Rev.
Zadoc Thompson of Burlington. I happen to
know nothing about the Rev. Zadoc, but to me
he looks very interesting. Indeed, any reverend
gentleman of his name and day who would catch
turtles for Agassiz must have been interesting.
And as for D. Henry Thoreau, we know he was
interesting. The rarest wood-turtle in the United
States was not so rare a specimen as this gentle-
man of Walden Woods and Concord. We are
glad even for this line in the preface about him ;
glad to know that he tried, in this untranscen-
dental way, to serve his day and generation. If
Agassiz had only put a chapter in his turtle book
about it ! But this is the material he wasted, this
and more of the same human sort ; for the " Mr.
J. W. P. Jenks of Middleboro' " (at the end of
the quotation) was, some years later, an old col-
32 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
lege professor of mine, who told me a few of the
particulars of his turtle contributions, particulars
which Agassiz should have found a place for in
his big book. The preface, in another paragraph,
says merely that this gentleman sent turtles to
Cambridge by the thousands — brief and scanty
recognition ! For that is not the only thing this
gentleman did. On one occasion he sent, not
turtles, but turtle eggs to Cambridge — brought
them, I should say ; and all there is to show for
it, so far as I could discover, is a sectional draw-
ing of a bit of the mesoblastic layer of one of the
eggs!
Of course, Agassiz wanted to make that meso-
blastic drawing, or some other equally important
drawing, and had to have the fresh turtle egg to
draw it from. He had to have it, and he got it.
A great man, when he wants a certain turtle egg,
at a certain time, always gets it, for he gets some
one else to get it. I am glad he got it. But what
makes me sad and impatient is that he did not
think it worth while to tell about the getting of
it, and so made merely a learned turtle book of
what might have been an exceedingly interesting
human book.
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 33
It would seem, naturally, that there could be
nothing unusual or interesting about the getting
of turtle eggs when you want them. Nothing at
all, if you should chance to want the eggs as you
chance to find them. So with anything else, —
good copper stock, for instance, if you should
chance to want it, and should chance to be along
when they chance to be giving it away. But if
you want copper stock, say of C & H quality,
when you want it, and are bound to have it, then
you must command more than a college profes-
sor's salary. And likewise, precisely, when it is
turtle eggs that you are bound to have.
Agassiz wanted those turtle eggs when he
wanted them — not a minute over three hours
from the minute they were laid. Yet even that
does not seem exacting, hardly more difficult
than the getting of hen eggs only three hours old.
Just so, provided the professor could have had
his private turtle-coop in Harvard Yard ; and pro-
vided he could have made his turtles lay. But
turtles will not respond, like hens, to meat-scraps
and the warm mash. The professor's problem was
not to get from a mud turtle's nest in the back
yard to the table in the laboratory ; but to get
34 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
from the laboratory in Cambridge to some pond
when the turtles were laying, and back to the
laboratory within the limited time. And this, in
the days of Darius Green, might have called for
nice and discriminating work — as it did.
Agassiz had been engaged for a long time upon
his " Contributions." He had brought the great
work nearly to a finish. It was, indeed, finished
but for one small yet very important bit of ob-
servation : he had carried the turtle egg through
every stage of its development with the single
exception of one — the very earliest — that stage
of first cleavages, when the cell begins to seg-
ment, immediately upon its being laid. That be-
ginning stage had brought the " Contributions "
to a halt. To get eggs that were fresh enough
to show the incubation at this period had been
impossible.
There were several ways that Agassiz might
have proceeded : he might have got a leave of
absence for the spring term, taken his laboratory
to some pond inhabited by turtles, and there
camped until he should catch the reptile digging
out her nest. But there were difficulties in all of
that — as those who are college professors and
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 35
naturalists know. As this was quite out of the
question, he did the easiest thing — asked Mr.
Jenks of Middleboro' to get him the eggs. Mr.
Jenks got them. Agassiz knew all about his get-
ting of them ; and I say the strange and irritating
thing is, that Agassiz did not think it worth while
to tell us about it, at least in the preface to his
monumental work.
It was many years later that Mr. Jenks, then
a gray-haired college professor, told me how he
got those eggs to Agassiz.
" I was principal of an academy, during my
younger years," he began, "and was busy one
day with my classes, when a large man suddenly
filled the doorway of the room, smiled to the four
corners of the room, and called out with a big,
quick voice that he was Professor Agassiz.
" Of course he was. I knew it, even before he
had had time to shout it to me across the room.
" Would I get him some turtle eggs ? he
called. Yes, I would. And would I get them to
Cambridge within three hours from the time they
were laid ? Yes, I would. And I did. And it was
worth the doing. But I did it only once.
" When I promised Agassiz those eggs I knew
36 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
where I was going to'get them. I had got turtle
eggs there before — at a particular patch of sandy
shore along a pond, a few miles distant from the
academy.
" Three hours was the limit. From my railroad
station to Boston was thirty-five miles; from the
pond to the station was perhaps three or four
miles ; from Boston to Cambridge we called about
three miles. Forty miles in round numbers ! We
figured it all out before he returned, and got the
trip down to two hours, — record time : driving
from the pond to the station ; from the station by
express train to Boston ; from Boston by cab to
Cambridge. This left an easy hour for accidents
and delays.
" Cab and car and carriage we reckoned into
our time-table ; but what we did n't figure on was
the turtle." And he paused abruptly.
" Young man," he went on, his shaggy brows
and spectacles hardly hiding the twinkle in the
eyes that were bent severely upon me, " young
man, when you go after turtle eggs, take into
account the turtle. No ! no ! that 's bad advice.
Youth never reckons on the turtle — and youth
seldom ought to. Only old age does that; and old
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 37
age would never have got those turtle eggs to
Agassiz.
" It was in the early spring that Agassiz came
to the academy, long before there was any like-
lihood of the turtles laying. But I was eager for
the quest, and so fearful of failure, that I started
out to watch at the pond fully two weeks ahead
of the time that the turtles might be expected to
lay. I remember the date clearly : it was May 14.
"A little before dawn — along near three o'clock
— I would drive over to the pond, hitch my horse
near by, settle myself quietly among some thick
cedars close to the sandy shore, and there I would
wait, my kettle of sand ready, my eye covering
the whole sleeping pond. Here among the cedars
I would eat my breakfast, and then get back in
good season to open the academy for the morn-
ing session.
"And so the watch began.
" I soon came to know individually the dozen
or more turtles that kept to my side of the pond.
Shortly after the cold mist would lift and melt
away, they would stick up their heads through the
quiet water ; and as the sun slanted down over
the ragged rim of treetops, the slow things would
38 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
float into the warm, lighted spots, or crawl out
and doze comfortably on the hummocks and
snags.
" What fragrant mornings those were ! How
fresh and new and unbreathed ! The pond odors,
the woods odors, the odors of the ploughed fields
— of water-lily, and wild grape, and the dew-laid
soil ! I can taste them yet, and hear them yet —
the still, large sounds of the waking day — the
pickerel breaking the quiet with his swirl ; the
kingfisher dropping anchor; the stir of feet and
wings among the trees. And then the thought
of the great book being held up for me ! Those
were rare mornings !
" But there began to be a good many of them,
for the turtles showed no desire to lay. They
sprawled in the sun, and never one came out
upon the sand as if she intended to help on the
great professor's book. The embryology of her
eggs was of small concern to her; her Contribu-
tion to the Natural History of the United States
could wait.
"And it did wait. I began my watch on the
14th of May; June 1st found me still among
the cedars, still waiting, as I had waited every
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 39
morning, Sundays and rainy days alike. June 1st
was a perfect morning, but every turtle slid out
upon her log, as if egg-laying might be a matter
strictly of next year.
" I began to grow uneasy, — not impatient yet,
for a naturalist learns his lesson of patience early,
and for all his years ; but I began to fear lest, by
some subtle sense, my presence might some-
how be known to the creatures ; that they might
have gone to some other place to lay, while I was
away at the schoolroom.
" I watched on to the end of the first week, on
to the end of the second week in June, seeing the
mists rise and vanish every morning, and along
with them vanish, more and more, the poetry of
my early morning vigil. Poetry and rheumatism
cannot long dwell together in the same clump of
cedars, and I had begun to feel the rheumatism.
A month of morning mists wrapping me around
had at last soaked through to my bones. But
Agassiz was waiting, and the world was waiting,
for those turtle eggs ; and I would wait. It was all
I could do, for there is no use bringing a china
nest-egg to a turtle ; she is not open to any such
delicate suggestion.
40 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
" Then came the mid-June Sunday morning,
with dawn breaking a little after three : a warm,
wide-awake dawn, with the level mist lifted from
the level surface of the pond a full hour higher
than I had seen it any morning before.
"This was the day. I knew it. I have heard
persons say that they can hear the grass grow;
that they know by some extra sense when danger
is nigh. That we have these extra senses I fully
believe, and I believe they can be sharpened by
cultivation. For a month I had been brooding
over this pond, and now I knew. I felt a stirring
of the pulse of things that the cold-hearted
turtles could no more escape than could the
clods and I.
" Leaving my horse unhitched, as if he, too,
understood, I slipped eagerly into my covert for
a look at the pond. As I did so, a large pickerel
ploughed a furrow out through the spatter-docks,
and in his wake rose the head of an enormous
turtle. Swinging slowly around, the creature
headed straight for the shore, and without a pause
scrambled out on the sand.
" She was about the size of a big scoop-shovel ;
but that was not what excited me, so much as her
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 41
manner, and the gait at which she moved ; for
there was method in it and fixed purpose. On she
came, shuffling over the sand toward the higher
open fields, with a hurried, determined see-saw
that was taking her somewhere in particular, and
that was bound to get her there on time.
" I held my breath. Had she been a dinosau-
rian making Mesozoic footprints, I could not
have been more fearful. For footprints in the
Mesozoic mud, or in the sands of time, were as
nothing to me when compared with fresh turtle
eggs in the sands of this pond.
"But over the strip of sand, without a stop, she
paddled, and up a narrow cow-path into the high
grass along a fence. Then up the narrow cow-
path, on all fours, just like another turtle, I pad-
dled, and into the high wet grass along the fence.
" I kept well within sound of her, for she moved
recklessly, leaving a trail of flattened grass a foot
and a half wide. I wanted to stand up, — and I
don't believe I could have turned her back with
a rail, — but I was afraid if she saw me that she
might return indefinitely to the pond ; so on I
went, flat to the ground, squeezing through the
lower rails of the fence, as if the field beyond were
42 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
a melon-patch. It was nothing of the kind, only
a wild, uncomfortable pasture, full of dewberry
vines, and very discouraging. They were exces-
sively wet vines and briery. I pulled my coat-
sleeves as far over my fists as I could get them,
and with the tin pail of sand swinging from be-
tween my teeth to avoid noise, I stumped fiercely
but silently on after the turtle.
" She was laying her course, I thought, straight
down the length of this dreadful pasture, when,
not far from the fence, she suddenly hove to,
warped herself short about, and came back, barely
clearing me, at a clip that was thrilling. I warped
about, too, and in her wake bore down across the
corner of the pasture, across the powdery public
road, and on to a fence along a field of young
corn.
" I was somewhat wet by this time, but not so
wet as I had been before wallowing through the
deep dry dust of the road. Hurrying up behind
a large tree by the fence, I peered down the corn-
rows and saw the turtle stop, and begin to paw
about in the loose soft soil. She was going to lay !
" I held on to the tree and watched, as she tried
this place, and that place, and the other place —
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 43
the eternally feminine ! — But the place, evidently,
was hard to find. What could a female turtle do
with a whole field of possible nests to choose from?
Then at last she found it, and whirling about, she
backed quickly at it, and, tail first, began to bury
herself before my staring eyes.
"Those were not the supreme moments of my
life; perhaps those moments came later that day;
but those certainly were among the slowest, most
dreadfully mixed of moments that I ever expe-
rienced. They were hours long. There she was,
her shell just showing, like some old hulk in the
sand along shore. And how long would she stay
there? and how should I know if she had laid an
egg?
" I could still wait. And so I waited, when,
over the freshly awakened fields, floated four mel-
low strokes from the distant town clock.
"Four o'clock ! Why, there was no train until
seven ! No train for three hours ! The eggs would
spoil ! Then with a rush it came over me that this
was Sunday morning, and there was no regular
seven o'clock train, — none till after nine.
" I think I should have fainted had not the
turtle just then begun crawling off. I was weak
44 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
and dizzy; but there, there in the sand, were the
eggs ! and Agassiz ! and the great book ! And I
cleared the fence, and the forty miles that lay be-
tween me and Cambridge, at a single jump. He
should have them, trains or no. Those eggs should
go to Agassiz by seven o'clock, if I had to gallop
every mile of the way. Forty miles ! Any horse
could cover it in three hours, if he had to; and
upsetting the astonished turtle, I scooped out her
round white eggs.
" On a bed of sand in the bottom of the pail I
laid them, with what care my trembling fingers
allowed ; filled in between them with more sand ;
so with another layer to the rim ; and covering
all smoothly with more sand, I ran back for my
horse.
" That horse knew, as well as I, that the turtles
had laid, and that he was to get those eggs to
Agassiz. He turned out of that field into the road
on two wheels, a thing he had not done for twenty
years, doubling me up before the dashboard, the
pail of eggs miraculously lodged between my
knees.
" I let him out. If only he could keep this
pace all the way to Cambridge ! or even halfway
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 45
there ; and I would have time to finish the trip
on foot. I shouted him on, holding to the dasher
with one hand, the pail of eggs with the other,
not daring to get off my knees, though the bang
on them, as we pounded down the wood-road,
was terrific. But nothing must happen to the
eggs ; they must not be jarred, or even turned
over in the sand before they came to Agassiz.
" In order to get out on the pike it was neces-
sary to drive back away from Boston toward the
town. We had nearly covered the distance, and
were rounding a turn from the woods into the
open fields, when, ahead of me, at the station it
seemed, I heard the quick sharp whistle of a lo-
comotive.
"What did it mean? Then followed the puff,
puff, puff, of a starting train. But what train ?
Which way going *? And jumping to my feet for
a longer view, I pulled into a side road, that
paralleled the track, and headed hard for the
station.
" We reeled along. The station was still out of
sight, but from behind the bushes that shut it from
view, rose the smoke of a moving engine. It was
perhaps a mile away, but we were approaching,
46 THF FACE OF THE FIELDS
head on, and topping a little hill I swept down
upon a freight train, the black smoke pouring
from the stack, as the mighty creature got itself
together for its swift run down the rails.
"My horse was on the gallop, going with the
track, and straight toward the coming train. The
sight of it almost maddened me — the bare
thought of it, on the road to Boston ! On I went ;
on it came, a half — a quarter of a mile between
us, when suddenly my road shot out along an
unfenced field with only a level stretch of sod
between me and the engine.
"With a pull that lifted the horse from his feet,
I swung him into the field and sent him straight
as an arrow for the track. That train should carry
me and my eggs to Boston !
" The engineer pulled the rope. He saw me
standing up in the rig, saw my hat blow off, saw
me wave my arms, saw the tin pail swing in my
teeth, and he jerked out a succession of sharp
halts ! But it was he who should halt, not I ; and
on we went, the horse with a flounder landing the
carriage on top of the track.
" The train was already grinding to a stop ; but
before it was near a standstill, I had backed off
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 47
the track, jumped out, and, running down the rails
with the astonished engineers gaping at me, swung
aboard the cab.
"They offered no resistance; they hadn't had
time. Nor did they have the disposition, for I
looked strange, not to say dangerous. Hatless,
dew-soaked, smeared with yellow mud, and hold-
ing, as if it were a baby or a bomb, a little tin
pail of sand.
" ' Crazy,' the fireman muttered, looking to the
engineer for his cue.
" I had been crazy, perhaps, but I was not crazy
now.
*' 'Throw her wide open,' I commanded. 'Wide
open ! These are fresh turtle eggs for Professor
Agassiz of Cambridge. He must have them be-
fore breakfast.'
" Then they knew I was crazy, and evidently
thinking it best to humor me, threw the throttle
wide open, and away we went.
" I kissed my hand to the horse, grazing un-
concernedly in the open field, and gave a smile
to my crew. That was all I could give them, and
hold myself and the eggs together. But the smile
was enough. And they smiled through their smut
48 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
at me, though one of them held fast to his shovel,
while the other kept his hand upon a big ugly
wrench. Neither of them spoke to me, but above
the roar of the swaying engine I caught enough
of their broken talk to understand that they were
driving under a full head of steam, with the in-
tention of handing me over to the Boston police,
as perhaps the safest way of disposing of me.
" I was only afraid that they would try it at
the next station. But that station whizzed past
without a bit of slack, and the next, and the next ;
when it came over me that this was the through
freight, which should have passed in the night,
and was making up lost time.
" Only the fear of the shovel and the wrench
kept me from shaking hands with both men at
this discovery. But I beamed at them ; and they
at me. I was enjoying it. The unwonted jar be-
neath my feet was wrinkling my diaphragm with
spasms of delight. And the fireman beamed at the
engineer, with a look that said, 'See the lunatic
grin ; he likes it ! '
"He did like it. How the iron wheels sang to
me as they took the rails ! How the rushing wind
in my ears sang to me ! From my stand on the
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 49
fireman's side of the cab I could catch a glimpse
of the track just ahead of the engine, where the
ties seemed to leap into the throat of the mile-
devouring monster. The joy of it ! of seeing space
swallowed by the mile !
"I shifted the eggs from hand to hand and
thought of my horse, of Agassiz, of the great
book, of my great luck, — luck, — luck, — until
the multitudinous tongues of the thundering train
were all chiming ' luck ! luck ! luck ! ' They
knew ! they understood ! This beast of fire and
tireless wheels was doing its best to get the eggs
to Agassiz !
" We swung out past the Blue Hills, and yon-
der flashed the morning sun from the towering
dome of the State House. I might have leaped
from the cab and run the rest of the way on foot*
had I not caught the eye of the engineer watch-
ing me narrowly. I was not in Boston yet, nor in
Cambridge either. I was an escaped lunatic, who
had held up a train, and forced it to carry me to
Boston.
" Perhaps I had overdone the lunacy business.
Suppose these two men should take it into their
heads to turn me over to the police, whether I
50 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
would or no ? I could never explain the case in
time to get the eggs to Agassiz. I looked at my
watch. There were still a few minutes left, in
which I might explain to these men, who, all at
once, had become my captors. But it was too
late. Nothing could avail against my actions,
my appearance, and my little pail of sand.
" I had not thought of my appearance before.
Here I was, face and clothes caked with yellow
mud, my hair wild and matted, my hat gone,
and in my full-grown hands a tiny tin pail of
sand, as if I had been digging all night with a
tiny tin shovel on the shore ! And thus to ap-
pear in the decent streets of Boston of a Sunday
morning !
" I began to feel like a lunatic. The situation
was serious, or might be, and rather desperately
funny at its best. I must in some way have shown
my new fears, for both men watched me more
sharply.
" Suddenly, as we were nearing the outer
freight-yard, the train slowed down and came to
a stop. I was ready to jump, but I had no chance.
They had nothing to do, apparently, but to guard
me. I looked at my watch again. What time we
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 51
had made ! It was only six o'clock, with a whole
hour to get to Cambridge.
"But I did n't like this delay. Five minutes —
ten — went by.
" ' Gentlemen,' I began, but was cut short by
an express train coming past. We were moving
again, on — into a siding ; on — on to the main
track ; and on with a bump and a crash and a
succession of crashes, running the length of the
train ; on at a turtle's pace, but on, — when the
fireman, quickly jumping for the bell-rope, left
the way to the step free, and — the chance had
come!
" I never touched the step, but landed in the
soft sand at the side of the track, and made a line
for the yard fence.
" There was no hue or cry. I glanced over my
shoulder to see if they were after me. Evidently
their hands were full, and they did n't know I had
gone.
" But I had gone ; and was ready to drop over
the high board-fence, when it occurred to me that
I might drop into a policeman's arms. Hanging
my pail in a splint on top of a post, I peered
cautiously over — a very wise thing to do before
52 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
you jump a high board-fence. There, crossing the
open square toward the station, was a big burly
fellow with a club — looking for me.
" I flattened for a moment, when some one in
the yard yelled at me. I preferred the policeman,
and grabbing my pail I slid over to the street.
The policeman moved on past the comer of the
station out of sight. The square was free, and
yonder stood a cab !
" Time was flying now. Here was the last lap.
The cabman saw me coming, and squared away.
I waved a paper dollar at him, but he only stared
the more. A dollar can cover a good deal, but I
was too much for one dollar. I pulled out another,
thrust them both at him, and dodged into the
cab, calling, ' Cambridge ! '
" He would have taken me straight to the
police station, had I not said, ' Harvard College.
Professor Agassiz's house ! I 've got eggs for
Agassiz ' ; and pushed another dollar up at him
through the hole.
" It was nearly half-past six.
" ' Let him go ! ' I ordered. ' Here 's another
dollar if you make Agassiz's house in twenty
minutes. Let him out. Never mind the police ! '
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 53
" He evidently knew the police, or there were
few around at that time on a Sunday morning.
We went down the sleeping streets, as I had gone
down the wood-roads from the pond two hours
before, but with the rattle and crash now of a fire
brigade. Whirling a corner into Cambridge Street,
we took the bridge at a gallop, the driver shout-
ing out something in Hibernian to a pair of wav-
ing arms and a belt and brass buttons.
" Across the bridge with a rattle and jolt that
put the eggs in jeopardy, and on over the cobble-
stones, we went. Half-standing, to lessen the jar,
I held the pail in one hand and held myself in
the other, not daring to let go even to look at
my watch.
" But I was afraid to look at the watch. I was
afraid to see how near to seven o'clock it might
be. The sweat was dropping from my nose, so
close was I running to the limit of my time.
" Suddenly there was a lurch, and I dove for-
ward, ramming my head into the front of the
cab, coming up with a rebound that landed me
across the small of my back on the seat, and sent
half of my pail of eggs helter-skelter over the
floor.
54 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
"We had stopped. Here was Agassiz's house;
and not taking time to pick up the scattered
eggs, I tumbled out, and pounded at the door.
"No one was astir in the house. But I would
stir them. And I did. Right in the midst of the
racket the door opened. It was the maid.
" * Agassiz,' I gasped, ' I want Professor Agas-
siz, quick ! ' And I pushed by her into the hall.
" 4 Go 'way, sir. I '11 call the police. Professor
Agassiz is in bed. Go 'way, sir/
" * Call him — Agassiz — instantly, or I '11 call
him myself ! '
"But I didn't; for just then a door overhead
was flung open, a white-robed figure appeared
on the dim landing above, and a quick loud
voice called excitedly, —
" ' Let him in ! Let him in ! I know him. He
has my turtle eggs ! '
" And the apparition, slipperless, and clad in
anything but an academic gown, came sailing
down the stairs.
*' The maid fled. The great man, his arms ex-
tended, laid hold of me with both hands, and
dragging me and my precious pail into his study,
with a swift, clean stroke laid open one of the
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ 55
eggs, as the watch in my trembling hands ticked
its way to seven — as if nothing unusual were
happening to the history of the world."
"You were in time then?" I said.
"To the tick. There stands my copy of the
great book. I am proud of the humble part I had
in it."
Ill
THE EDGE OF NIGHT
THE EDGE OF NIGHT
EYOND the meadow, nearly half a
mile away, yet in sight from my
window, stands an apple tree, the
last of an ancient line that once
marked the boundary between the
upper and lower pastures. For an apple tree it is
unspeakably woeful, and bent, and hoary, and
grizzled, with suckers from feet to crown. Un-
kempt and unesteemed, it attracts only the cattle
for its shade, and gives to them alone its gnarly,
bitter fruit.
But that old tree is hollow, trunk and limb ;
and if its apples are of Sodom, there is still no
tree in the Garden of the Hesperides, none even
in my own private Eden, carefully kept as they
are, that is half as interesting — I had almost
said, as useful. Among the trees of the Lord, an
apple tree that bears good Baldwins or greenings
or rambos comes first for usefulness ; but when
one has thirty-five of such trees, which the town
has compelled one to trim and scrape and plas-
'6o THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
ter-up and petticoat against the grewsome gypsy
moth, then those thirty-five are dull indeed,
compared with the untrimmed, unscraped, un-
plastered, undressed old tramp yonder on the
knoll, whose heart is still wide open to the birds
and beasts — to every small traveler passing by
who needs, perforce, a home, a hiding, or a har-
bor.
When I was a small boy everybody used to
put up overnight at grandfather's — for grand-
mother's wit and buckwheat cakes, I think, which
were known away down into Cape May County.
It was so, too, with grandfather's wisdom and
brooms. The old house sat in behind a grove
of pin-oak and pine, a sheltered, sheltering spot,
with a peddler's stall in the barn, a peddler's
place at the table, a peddler's bed in the herby
garret, a boundless, fathomless feather-bed, of a
piece with the house and the hospitality. There
were larger houses and newer, in the neighbor-
hood ; but no other house in all the region, not
even the tavern, two miles farther down the
Pike, was half as central, or as homelike, or as
full of sweet and juicy gossip.
The old apple tree yonder between the woods
THE EDGE OF NIGHT 61
and the meadow is as central, as hospitable, and,
if animals communicate with one another, just as
full of neighborhood news as was grandfather's
roof-tree.
Did I say none but the cattle seek its shade *?
Go over and watch. That old tree is no decrepit,
deserted shack of a house. There is no door-plate,
there is no christened letter-box outside the front
fence, because the birds and beasts do not adver-
tise their houses that way. But go over, say, to-
ward evening, and sit quietly down outside. You
will not wait long, for the doors will open that
you may enter — enter into a home of the fields,
and, a little way at least, into a life of the fields,
for this old tree has a small dweller of some sort
the year round.
If it is February or March you will be admit-
ted by my owls. They take possession late in
winter and occupy the tree, with some curious
fellow tenants, until early summer. I can count
upon these small screech-owls by February, —
the forlorn month, the seasonless, hopeless, lifeless
stretch of the year, but for its owls, its thaws, its
lengthening days, its cackling pullets, its possi-
bility of swallows, and its being the year's end.
62 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
At least the ancients called February the year's
end, maintaining, with fine poetic sense, that the
world was begun in March ; and they were nearer
the beginnings of things than we are.
But the owls come in February, and if they
are not swallows with the spring, they, never-
theless, help winter with most seemly haste into
an early grave. Yet across the faded February
meadow the old apple tree stands empty and
drear enough — until the shadows of the night
begin to fall.
As the dusk comes down, I go to my window
and watch. I cannot see him, the grim-beaked
baron with his hooked talons, his ghostly wings,
his night-seeing eyes; but I know that he has
come to his window in the turret yonder on the
darkening sky, and that he watches with me. I
cannot see him swoop downward over the ditches,
nor see him quarter the meadow, beating, dan-
gling, dropping between the flattened tussocks;
nor hear him, back on the silent shadows, slant
upward again to his turret. Mine are human
eyes, human ears. Even the quick-eared meadow-
mouse did not hear.
But I have been belated and forced to cross
THE EDGE OF NIGHT 63
this wild night-land of his; and I have felt him
pass — so near at times that he has stirred my
hair, by the wind, dare I say, of his mysterious
wings ? At other times I have heard him. Often
on the edge of night I have listened to his qua-
vering, querulous cry from the elm-tops below me
by the meadow. But oftener I have watched at
the casement here in my castle wall.
Away yonder on the borders of night, dim and
gloomy, looms his ancient keep. I wait. Soon
on the deepened dusk spread his soft wings, out
over the meadow he sails, up over my wooded
height, over my moat, to my turret tall, as silent
and unseen as the soul of a shadow, except he
drift across the face of the full round moon, or
with his weird cry cause the dreaming quiet to
stir in its sleep and moan.
Yes, yes, but one must be pretty much of a
child, with most of his childish things not yet put
away, to get any such romance out of a rotten
apple tree, plus a bunch of feathers no bigger than
one's two fists. One must be pretty far removed
from the real world, the live world that swings,
no longer through the heavens, but at the dis-
tributing end of a news wire — pretty far removed
64 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
to spend one's precious time watching screech-
owls.
And so one is, indeed, — sixteen miles re-
moved by space, one whole day by post, one
whole hour by engine and horse, one whole half-
minute by the telephone in the back hall. Lost !
cut off completely ! hopelessly marooned !
I fear so. Perhaps I must admit that the watch-
ing of owls is for babes and sucklings, not for
men with great work to do, that is, with money
to make, news to get, office to hold, and clubs to
address. For babes and sucklings, and, possibly,
for those with a soul to save, yet I hasten to
avow that the watching of owls is not religion ;
for I entirely agree with our Shelburne essayist
when he finds, " in all this worship of nature,"
— by Traherne, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Thoreau,
and those who seek the transfigured world of
the woods, — "there is a strain of illusion which
melts away at the touch of the greater realities
. . . and there are evils against which its seduc-
tion is of no avail."
But let the illusion melt. Other worships have
shown a strain of illusion at times, and against
certain evils been of small avail. And let it be
THE EDGE OF NIGHT 65
admitted that calling regularly at an old apple
tree is far short of a full man's work in the world,
even when such calling falls outside of his shop
or office-hours. For there are no such hours. The
business of life allows no spare time any more.
One cannot get rich nowadays in office-hours, nor
become great, nor keep telegraphically informed,
nor do his share of talking and listening. Every-
body but the plumber and paper-hanger works
overtime. How the earth keeps up a necessary
amount of whirling in the old twenty-four-hour
limit is more than we can understand. But she
can't keep up the pace much longer. She must
have an extra hour. And how to snatch it from
the tail-end of eternity is the burning cosmo-
logical question.
And this is the burning question with regard
to our individual whirling — How to add time,
or, what amounts to exactly the same, How to
increase the whirling.
There have been many hopeful answers. The
whirl has been vastly accelerated. The fly-wheel
of the old horse treadmill is now geared to an
electric dynamo. But it is not enough ; it is
not the answer. And I despair of the answer —
66 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
of the perfect whirl, the perpetual, invisible, un-
timable.
Hence the apple tree, the owls, the illusions,
the lost hours — the neglect of fortune and of
soul ! But then you may worship nature and still
find your way to church ; you may be intensely
interested in the life of an old apple tree and still
cultivate your next-door neighbor, still earn all
the fresh air and bread and books that your chil-
dren need.
The knoll yonder may be a kind of High
Place, and its old apple tree a kind of altar for
you when you had better not go to church, when
your neighbor needs to be let alone, when your
children are in danger of too much bread and of
too many books — for the time when you are in
need of that something which comes only out of
the quiet of the fields at the close of day.
" But what is it *? " you ask. " Give me its
formula." I cannot. Yet you need it and will get
it — something that cannot be had of the day,
something that Matthew Arnold comes very near
suggesting in his lines : —
The evening comes, the fields arc still.
The tinkle of the thirsty rill,
THE EDGE OF NIGHT 67
Unheard all day, ascends again ;
Deserted is the half-mown plain,
Silent the swaths! the ringing wain,
The mower's cry, the dog's alarms
All housed within the sleeping farms!
The business of the day is done,
The last-left haymaker is gone.
And from the thyme upon the height
And from the elder-blossom white
And pale dog-roses in the hedge,
And from the mint-plant in the sedge,
In puffs of balm the night-air blows
The perfume which the day foregoes.
I would call it poetry, if it were poetry. And it is
poetry, yet it is a great deal more. It is poetry
and owls and sour apples and toads ; for in this
particular old apple dwells also a tree-toad.
It is curious enough, as the summer dusk
comes on, to see the round face of the owl in
one hole, and out of another in the broken
limb above, the flat weazened face of the tree-
toad. Philosophic countenances they are, masked
with wisdom, both of them : shrewd and pene-
trating that of the slit-eyed owl ; contemplative
and soaring in its serene composure the counte-
nance of the transcendental toad. Both creatures
68 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
love the dusk ; both have come forth to their
open doors in order to watch the darkening;
both will make off under the cover — one for
mice and frogs over the meadow, the other for
slugs and insects over the crooked, tangled limbs
of the tree.
It is strange enough to see them together, but
it is stranger still to think of them together, for it
is just such prey as this little toad that the owl
has gone over the meadow to catch.
Why does he not take the supper ready here
on the shelf? There may be reasons that we,
who do not eat tree-toad, know nothing of; but
I am inclined to believe that the owl has never
seen his fellow lodger in the doorway above,
though he must often have heard him piping his
gentle melancholy in the gloaming, when his
skin cries for rain !
Small wonder if they have never met ! for this
gray, squat, disc-toed little monster in the hole,
or flattened on the bark of the tree like a patch
of lichen, may well be one of those things which
are hidden from the sharp-eyed owl. Whatever
purpose be attributed to his peculiar shape and
color, — protective, obliterative, mimicking, — it
THE EDGE OF NIGHT 69
is always a source of fresh amazement, the way
this largest of our hylas, on the moss-marked
rind of an old tree, can utterly blot himself out
before your staring eyes.
The common toads and all the frogs have
enemies enough, and it would seem from the
comparative scarcity of the tree-toads that they
must have enemies, too, but I do not know who
they are. The scarcity of the tree-toads is some-
thing of a puzzle, and all the more to me, that,
to my certain knowledge, this toad has lived in
the old Baldwin tree, now, for five years. Per-
haps he has been several, and not one; for who
can tell one tree-toad from another ? Nobody ;
and for that reason I made, some time ago, a
simple experiment, in order to see how long a
tree-toad might live, unprotected, in his own
natural environment.
Upon moving into this house, about seven
years ago, we found a tree-toad living in the big
hickory by the porch. For the next three springs
he reappeared, and all summer long we would
find him, now on the tree, now on the porch,
often on the railing and backed tight up against
a post. Was he one or many ? we asked. Then
70 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
we marked him ; and for the next four years we
knew that he was himself alone. How many
more years he might have lived in the hickory
for us all to pet, I should like to know ; but last
summer, to our great sorrow, the gypsy-moth
killers, poking in the hole, did our little friend to
death.
He was worth many worms.
It was interesting, it was very wonderful to me,
the instinct for home — the love for home I
should like to call it — that this humble little
creature showed. A toad is an amphibian to the
zoologist ; an ugly gnome with a jeweled eye to
the poet ; but to the naturalist, the lover of life
for its own sake, who lives next door to his toad,
who feeds him a fly or a fat grub now and then,
who tickles him to sleep with a rose lea£ who
waits as thirstily as the hilltop for him to call the
summer rain, who knows his going to sleep for
the winter, his waking up for the spring — to
such an one the jeweled eye and the amphibious
habits are but the forewords of a long, marvelous
life-history.
This small tree-toad had a home, had it in his
soul, I believe, precisely where John Howard
THE EDGE OF NIGHT 71
Payne had it, and where many another of us has
it. He had it in a tree, too, — in a hickory tree,
this one that dwelt by my house ; he had it in an
apple tree, that one yonder across the meadow.
"East, west,
Hame's best,"
croaked our tree-toad in a tremulous, plaintive
minor that wakened memories in the vague twi-
light of more old, unhappy, far-off things than any
other voice I ever knew.
These two tree-toads could not have been in-
duced to trade houses, the hickory for the apple,
because a house to a toad means home, and a
home is never in the market. There are many
more houses in the land than homes. Most of
us are only real-estate dealers. Many of us have
never had a home ; and none of us has ever had
more than one. There can be but one — mine
— and that has always been, must always be, as
imperishable as memory, and as far beyond all
barter as the gates of the sunset are beyond my
horizon's picket fence of pines.
The toad seems to feel it all, but feels it whole,
not analyzed and itemized as a memory. Here
in the hickory for four years (for seven, I am
72 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
quite sure) he lived, single and alone. He would
go down to the meadow when the toads gathered
there to lay their eggs, but back he would come,
without mate or companion, to his tree. Stronger
than love of kind, than love of mate, constant
and dominant in his slow cold heart is his in-
stinct for home.
If I go down to the orchard and bring up
from the apple tree another toad to dwell in the
hole of the hickory, I shall fail. He might re-
main for the day, but not throughout the night,
for with the gathering twilight there steals upon
him an irresistible longing, the Heimweb which he
shares with me ; and guided by it, as the bee and
the pigeon and the dog are guided, he makes his
sure way back to the orchard home.
Would he go back beyond the orchard, over
the road, over the wide meadow, over to the
Baldwin tree, half a mile away, if I brought him
from there? We shall see. During the coming
summer I shall mark him in some manner, and
bringing him here to the hickory, I shall then
watch the old apple tree yonder. It will be a
hard, perilous journey. But his longing will not
let him rest ; and guided by his mysterious sense
THE EDGE OF NIGHT 73
of direction — for this one place — he will arrive,
I am sure, or he will die on the way.
Yet I could wish there were another tree here,
besides the apple, and another toad. Suppose he
never gets back *? Only one toad less ? A great
deal more than that. Here in the old Baldwin he
has made his home for I don't know how long,
hunting over its world of branches in the sum-
mer, sleeping down in its deep holes during the
winter — down under the chips and punk and
castings, beneath the nest of the owls, it may be ;
for my toad in the hickory always buried him-
self so, down in the debris at the bottom of the
hole, where, in a kind of cold storage, he pre-
served himself until thawed out by the spring.
I never pass the old apple in the summer but
that I stop to pay my respects to the toad ; nor
in the winter that I do not pause and think of
him asleep in there. He is no mere toad any
more. He has passed into a genius loci, the Guard-
ian Spirit of the tree, warring in the green leaf
against worm and grub and slug, and in the dry
leaf hiding himself, a heart of life, within the
tree's thin ribs, as if to save the old shell to an-
other summer.
74 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
A toad is a toad, and if he never got back to
the tree there would be one toad less, nothing
more. If anything more, then it is on paper, and
it is cant, not toad at all. And so, I suppose,
stones are stones, trees trees, brooks brooks — not
books and tongues and sermons at all — except
on paper and as cant. Surely there are many
things in writing that never had any other, any
real existence, especially in writing that deals
with the out-of-doors. One should write care-
fully about one's toad; fearfully, indeed, when
that toad becomes one's teacher ; for teacher my
toad in the old Baldwin has many a time been.
Often in the summer dusk I have gone over
to sit at his feet and learn some of the things
my college professors could not teach me. I have
not yet taken my higher degrees. I was grad-
uated A. B. from college. It is A. B. C. that I
am working toward here at the old apple tree
with the toad.
Seating myself comfortably at the foot of the
tree, I wait ; the toad comes forth to the edge of
his hole above me, settles himself comfortably,
and waits. And the lesson begins. The quiet of
the summer evening steals out with the wood-
THE EDGE OF NIGHT 75
shadows and softly covers the fields. We do not
stir. An hour passes. We do not stir. Not to
stir is the lesson — one of the majors in this grad-
uate course with the toad.
The dusk thickens. The grasshoppers begin to
strum ; the owl slips out and drifts away ; a whip-
poorwill drops on the bare knoll near me, clucks
and shouts and shouts again, his rapid repetition
a thousand times repeated by the voices that call
to one another down the long empty aisles of the
swamp ; a big moth whirs about my head and is
gone ; a bat flits squeaking past ; a firefly blazes,,
but is blotted out by the darkness, only to blaze
again, and again be blotted, and so passes, his
tiny lantern flashing into a night that seems the
darker for the quick, unsteady glow.
We do not stir. It is a hard lesson. By all my
other teachers I had been taught every manner of
stirring, and this unwonted exercise of being still
takes me where my body is weakest, and it puts
me painfully out of breath in my soul. " Wisdom
is the principal thing," my other teachers would
repeat, "therefore get wisdom, but keep exceed-
ingly busy all the time. Step lively. Life is short.
There are only twenty-four hours to the day. The
76 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
Devil finds mischief for idle hands to do. Let us
then be up and doing " — all of this at random
from one of their lectures on "The Simple Life,
or the Pace that Kills."
Of course there is more or less of truth in this
teaching of theirs. A little leisure has no doubt
become a dangerous thing — unless one spend it
talking or golfing or automobiling, or aeroplan-
ing or elephant-killing, or in some other divert-
ing manner ; otherwise one's nerves, like pulled
candy, might set and cease to quiver; or one
might even have time to think.
"Keep going," — I quote from another of their
lectures, — "keep going; it is the only certainty
you have against knowing whither you are go-
ing." I learned that lesson well. See me go —
with half a breakfast and the whole morning pa-
per ; with less of lunch and the 4.30 edition. But
I balance my books, snatch the evening edition,
catch my car, get into my clothes, rush out to
dinner, and spend the evening lecturing or being
lectured to. I do everything but think.
But suppose I did think ? It could only dis-
turb me — my politics, or ethics, or religion. I
had better let the editors and professors and
THE EDGE OF NIGHT 77
preachers think for me. The editorial office is
such a quiet thought-inducing place; as quiet
as a boiler factory ; and the thinkers there, from
editor-in-chief to the printer's devil, are so thought-
ful for the size of the circulation ! And the college
professors, they have the time and the cloistered
quiet needed. But they have pitiful salaries, and
enormous needs, and their social status to worry
over, and themes to correct, and a fragmentary
year to contend with, and Europe to see every
summer, and — Is it right to ask them, with all
this, to think ? We will ask the preachers instead.
They are set apart among the divine and eternal
things ; they are dedicated to thought ; they have
covenanted with their creeds to think ; it is their
business to study, but, " to study to be careful and
harmless."
It may be, after all, that my politics and ethics
and religion need disturbing, as the soil about my
fruit trees needs it. Is it the tree"? or is it the soil
that I am trying to grow ? Is it I, or my politics,
my ethics, my religion *? I will go over to the toad,
no matter the cost. I will sit at his feet, where
time is nothing, and the worry of work even less.
He has all time and no task ; he is not obliged to
78 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
labor for a living, much less to think. My other
teachers all are; they are all professional think-
ers; their thoughts are words: editorials, lectures,
sermons, — livings. I read them or listen to
them. The toad sits out the hour silent, think-
ing, but I know not what, nor need to know. To
think God's thoughts after Him is not so high as
to think my own after myself. Why then ask his
of the toad, and so interrupt these of mine ? In-
stead we will sit in silence and watch Altair burn
along the shore of the sky, and overhead Arctu-
rus, and the rival fireflies flickering through the
leaves of the apple tree.
The darkness has come. The toad is scarcely
a blur between me and the stars. It is a long look
from him, ten feet above me, on past the fireflies
to Arcturus and the regal splendors of the North-
ern Crown — as deep and as far a look as the
night can give, and as only the night can give.
Against the distant stars, these ten feet between me
and the toad shrink quite away ; and against the
light far off yonder near the pole, the firefly's little
lamp becomes a brave but a very lesser beacon.
There are only twenty-four hours to the day
— to the day and the night! And how few are
THE EDGE OF NIGHT 79
left to that quiet time between the light and the
dark ! Ours is a hurried twilight. We quit work
to sleep; we wake up to work again. We measure
the day by a clock; we measure the night by an
alarm clock. Life is all ticked off. We are mur-
dered by the second. What we need is a day and
a night with wider margins — a dawn that comes
more slowly, and a longer lingering twilight. Life
has too little selvage; it is too often raw and
raveled. Room and quiet and verge are what we
want, not more dials for time, nor more figures
for the dials. We have things enough, too, more
than enough ; it is space for the things, perspec-
tive, and the right measure for the things that we
lack — a measure not one foot short of the dis-
tance between us and the stars.
If we get anything out of the fields worth while,
it will be this measure, this largeness, and quiet.
It may be only an owl or a tree-toad that we
go forth to see, but how much more we find —
things we cannot hear by day, things long, long
forgotten, things we never thought or dreamed
before.
The day is none too short, the night none too
long; but all too narrow is the edge between.
IV
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS
HE ragged quilt of snow had slipped
from the shoulders of the slopes,
the gray face of the maple swamp
showed a flush of warmth, and the
air, out of the south to-day, breathed
life, the life of buds and catkins, of sappy bark,
oozing gum, and running water — the life of
spring; and through the faintly blending breaths,
as a faster breeze ran down the hills, I caught a
new and unmistakable odor, single, pointed, pene-
trating, the sign to me of an open door in the
wood-lot, to me, indeed, the Open Sesame of
spring.
" When does the spring come ? And who brings
it?" asks the watcher in the woods. "To me
spring begins when the catkins on the alders and
the pussy-willows begin to swell," writes Mr. Bur-
roughs, "when the ice breaks up on the river and
the first sea-gulls come prospecting northward."
So I have written, also; written verses even to
the pussy-willow, to the bluebird, and to the he-
84 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
patica, as spring's harbingers; but never a line yet
to celebrate this first forerunner of them all, the
gentle early skunk. For it is his presence, blown
far across the February snow, that always ends
my New England winter and brings the spring.
Of course there are difficulties, poetically, with
the wood-pussy. I don't remember that even
Whitman tried the theme. But, perhaps, the good
gray poet never met a spring skunk in the streets
of Camden. The animal is comparatively rare in
the densely populated cities of New Jersey.
It is rare enough here in Massachusetts; at
least, it used to be; though I think, from my
observations, that the skunk is quietly on the
increase in New England. I feel very sure of this
as regards the neighborhood immediate to my
farm.
This is an encouraging fact, but hard to be
believed, no doubt. I, myself, was three or four
years coming to the conviction, often fearing
that this little creature, like so many others of
our thinning woods, was doomed to disappear.
But that was before I turned to keeping hens. I
am writing these words as a naturalist and
nature-lover, and I am speaking also with the
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 85
authority of one who keeps hens. Though a man
give his life to the study of the skunk, and have
not hens, he is nothing. You cannot say, " Go to,
I will write an essay about my skunks." There
is no such anomaly as professional nature-loving,
as vocational nature-writing. You cannot go into
your woods and count your skunks. Not until
you have kept hens can you know, can you even
have the will to believe, the number of skunks
that den in the dark on the purlieus of your farm.
That your neighbors keep hens is not enough.
My neighbors' hens were from the first a stone of
stumbling to me. That is a peculiarity of next-
door hens. It would have been better, I thought,
if my neighbors had had no hens. I had moved
in among these half-farmer folk, and while I found
them intelligent enough, I immediately saw that
their attitude toward nature was wholly wrong.
They seemed to have no conception of the beauty
of nature. Their feeling for the skunk was typi-
cal : they hated the skunk with a perfect hatred,
a hatred implacable, illogical, and unpoetical, it
seemed to me, for it was born of their chicken-
breeding.
Here were these people in the lap of nature,
86 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
babes in nature's arms, knowing only to draw at
her breasts and gurgle, or, the milk failing, to
kick and cry. Mother Nature ! She was only a
bottle and rubber nipple, only turnips and hay
and hens to them. Nature a mother ? a spirit ? a
soul? fragrance? harmony? beauty? Only when
she cackled like a hen.
Now there is something in the cackle of a
hen, a very great deal, indeed, if it is the~cackle
of your own hen. But the morning stars did not
cackle together, and there is still a solemn mu-
sic in the universe, a music that is neither an
anvil nor a barnyard chorus. Life ought to mean
more than turnips, more than hay, more than
hens to these rural people. It ought, and it must.
I had come among them. And what else was
my coming but a divine providence, a high and
holy mission? I had been sent unto this people
to preach the gospel of the beauty of nature. And
I determined that my first text should be the
skunk.
All of this, likewise, was previous to the period
of my hens.
It was now, as I have said, my second Febru-
ary upon the farm, when the telltale wind brought
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 87
down this poignant message from the wood-lot.
The first spring skunk was out ! I knew the very
stump out of which he had come — the stump of
his winter den. Yes, and the day before, I had
actually met the creature in the woods, for he
had been abroad now something like a week.
He was rooting among the exposed leaves in a
sunny dip, and I approached to within five feet
of him, where I stood watching while he grubbed
in the thawing earth. Buried to the shoulders in
the leaves, he was so intent upon his labor that he
got no warning of my presence. My neighbors
would have knocked him over with a club, —
would have done it eagerly, piously, as unto the
Lord. What did the Almighty make such ver-
min for, anyway *? No one will phrase an answer;
but every one will act promptly, as by command
and revelation. .
I stood several minutes watching, before the
little wood-pussy paused and pulled out his
head in order to try the wind. How shocked he
was ! He had been caught off his guard, and in-
stantly snapped himself into a startled hump, for
the whiff he got on the wind said danger ! — and
nigh at hand ! Throwing his pointed nose straight
88 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
into the air, and swinging it quickly to the four
quarters, he fixed my direction, and turning his
back upon me, tumbled off in a dreadful hurry
for home.
This interesting, though somewhat tame, ex-
perience, would have worn the complexion of
an adventure for my neighbors, a bare escape, —
a ruined Sunday suit, or, at least, a lost jumper
or overalls. I had never lost so much as a round-
about in all my life. My neighbors had had in-
numerable passages with this ramping beast, most
of them on the edge of the dark, and many of
them verging hard upon the tragic. I had small
patience with it all. I wished the whole neigh-
borhood were with me, that I might take this
harmless little wood-pussy up in my arms and
teach them again the first lesson of the Kingdom
of Heaven, and of this earthly Paradise, too, and
incidentally put an end forever to these tales of
Sunday clothes and nights of banishment in the
barn.
As nobody was present to see, of course I did
not pick the wood-pussy up. I did not need to
prove to myself the baselessness of these wild
misgivings ; nor did I wish, without good cause,
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 89
further to frighten the innocent creature. I had
met many a skunk before this, and nothing of
note ever had happened. Here was one, taken
suddenly and unawares, and what did he do?
He merely winked and blinked vacantly at me
over the snow, trying vainly to adjust his eyes to
the hard white daylight, and then timidly made
off as fast as his pathetic legs could carry him,
fetching a compass far around toward his den.
: I accompanied him, partly to see him safely
home, but more to study him on the way, for
my neighbors would demand something else
than theory and poetry of my new gospel : they
would require facts. Facts they should have.
I had been a long time coming to my mind
concerning the skunk. I had been thinking years
about him; and during the previous summer
(my second here on the farm) I had made a care-
ful study of the creature's habits, so that even
now I had in hand material of considerable bulk
and importance, showing the very great useful-
ness of the animal. Indeed, I was about ready to
embody my beliefs and observations in a mono-
graph, setting forth the need of national protec-
tion — of a Committee of One Hundred, say, of
90 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
continental scope, to look after the preservation
and further introduction of the skunk as the
friend and ally of man, as the most useful of all
our insectivorous creatures, bird or beast.
What, may I ask, was this one of mine doing
here on the edge of the February woods ? He was
grubbing. He had been driven out of his winter
bed by hunger, and he had been driven out into
the open snowy sunshine by the cold, because the
nights (he is nocturnal) were still so chill that
the soil would freeze at night past his ploughing.
Thus it chanced, at high noon, that I came upon
him, grubbing among my soft, wet leaves, and
grubbing for nothing less than obnoxious in-
sects !
My heart warmed to him. He was ragged
and thin, he was even weak, I thought, by the
way he staggered as he made off. It had been a
hard winter for men and for skunks, particularly
hard for skunks on account of the unbroken suc-
cession of deep snows. This skunk had been
frozen into his den, to my certain knowledge,
since the last of November.
Nature is a severe mother. The hunger of this
starved creature ! To be put to bed without even
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 91
the broth, and to be locked in, half awake, for
nearly three months. Poor little beastie! Per-
haps he had n't intelligence enough to know
that those gnawings within him were pain. Per-
haps our sympathy is all agley. Perhaps. But
we are bound to feel it when we watch him
satisfying his pangs with the pestiferous insects
of our own wood-lot.
I saw him safely home, and then returned to
examine the long furrows he had ploughed out
among the leaves. I found nothing to show what
species of insects he had eaten, but it was enough
to know that he had been bent on bugs — gypsy-
moth eggs, maybe, on the underside of some stick
or stone, where they had escaped the keen eye of
the tree-warden. We are greatly exercised over
this ghastly caterpillar. But is it entomologists,
and national appropriations, and imported para-
sites that we need to check the ravaging plague ?
These things might help, doubtless; but I was
intending to show in my monograph that it is
only skunks we need; it is the scarcity of skunks
that is the whole trouble — and the abundance
of cats.
\ My heart warmed, I say, as I watched my one
92 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
frail skunk here by the snowy woodside, and it
thrilled as I pledged him protection, as I acknow-
ledged his right to the earth, his right to share
life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness with
me. He could have only a small part in my life,
doubtless, but I could enter largely into his, and
we could live in amity together — in amity here
on this bit of the divine earth, anyhow, if nowhere
else under heaven.
This was along in February, and I was begin-
ning to set my hens.
A few days later, in passing through the wood-
lot, I was surprised and delighted to see three
skunks in the near vicinity of the den, — resi-
dents evidently of the stump ! " Think ! " I ex-
claimed to myself, " think of the wild flavor to
this tame patch of woods ! And the creatures so
rare, too, and beneficial! They multiply rapidly,
though," I thought, "and I ought to have a fine
lot of them by fall. I shall stock the farm with
them."
This was no momentary enthusiasm. In a book
that I had published some years before I had
stoutly championed the skunk. "Like every
predatory creature," I wrote, "the skunk more
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 93
than balances his debt for com and chickens by
his destruction of obnoxious vermin. He feeds
upon insects and mice, destroying great numbers
of the latter by digging out the nests and eat-
ing the young. But we forget our debt when the
chickens disappear, no matter how few we lose.
Shall we ever learn to say, when the red-tail
swoops among the pigeons, when the rabbits get
into the cabbage, when the robins rifle the cherry
trees, and when the skunk helps himself to a hen
for his Thanksgiving dinner — shall we ever
learn to love and understand the fitness of things
out-of-doors enough to say, 'But then, poor
beastie, thou maun live ' *? "
Since writing those warm lines I had made
further studies upon the skunk, all establishing
the more firmly my belief that there is a big bal-
ance to the credit of the animal. Meantime, too,
I had bought this small farm, with a mowing field
and an eight-acre wood-lot on it; with certain
liens and attachments on it, also, due to human
mismanagement and to interference with the
course of Nature in the past. Into the orchard,
for instance, had come the San Jose scale; into
the wood-lot had crawled the gypsy-moth — hu-
94 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
man blunders! Under the sod of the mowing
land had burrowed the white grub of the June-
bugs. On the whole fourteen acres rested the
black shadow of an insect plague. Nature had
been interfered with and thwarted. Man had taken
things into his own clumsy hands. It should be
so no longer on these fourteen acres. I held the
deed to these, not for myself, nor for my heirs,
but for Nature. Over these few acres the winds
of heaven should blow free, the birds should sing,
the flowers should grow, and through the gloam-
ing, unharmed and unaffrighted, the useful skunk
should take his own sweet way.
The preceding summer had been a season re-
markable for the ravages of the June-bug. The
turf in my mowing went all brown and dead sud-
denly in spite of frequent rains. No cause for the
trouble showed on the surface of the field. You
could start and with your hands roll up the tough
sod by the yard, as if a clean-cutting knife had
been run under it about an inch below the crowns.
It peeled off under your feet in great flakes. An
examination of the soil brought to light the big
fat grubs of the June-bugs, millions of the ghastly
monsters ! They had gone under the grass, eating
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 95
off the roots so evenly and so thoroughly that
not a square foot of green remained in the whole
field.
It was here that the skunk did his good work
(I say " the skunk," for there was only one on the
farm that summer, I think). I would go into the
field morning after morning to count the holes he
had made during the night in his hunt for the
grubs. One morning I got over a hundred holes,
all of them dug since last sundown, and each hole
representing certainly one grub, possibly more;
for the skunk would hear or smell his prey at
work in the soil before attempting to dig.
A hundred grubs for one night, by one skunk !
It took me only a little while to figure out the
enormous number of grubs that a fair-sized family
of skunks would destroy in a summer. A family
of skunks would rid my farm of the pest in a
single summer and make inroads on the grubs of
the entire community.
Ah! the community! the ignorant, short-
sighted, nature-hating community ! What chance
had a family of skunks in this community ? And
the fire of my mission burned hot within me.
And so did my desire for more skunks. My hay
96 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
crop was short, was nil, in fact, for the hayfield
was as barren of green as the hen-yard. I had to
have it ploughed and laid down again to grass.
And all because of this scarcity of skunks.
Now, as the green of the springing blades be-
gan to show through the melting snow, it was
with immense satisfaction that I thought of the
three skunks under the stump. That evening I
went across to my neighbor's, the milkman's, and
had a talk with him over the desirability, the ne-
cessity indeed, of encouraging the skunks about
us. I told him a good many things about these
harmless and useful animals that, with all his
farming and chicken-raising, he had never known.
But these rural folk are quite difficult. It is hard
to teach them anything worth while, so hope-
lessly surrounded are they with things — common
things. If I could only get them into a college
class-room — removed some way from hens and
hoes — I might, at least, put them into a receptive
attitude. But that cannot be. Perhaps, indeed, I
demand too much of them. For, after all, it takes
a naturalist, a lover of the out-of-doors, to appre-
ciate the beautiful adjustments in nature. A mere
farmer can hardly do it. One needs a keen eye,
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 97
but a certain aloofness of soul also, for the deeper
meaning and poetry of nature. One needs to spend
a vacation, at least, in the wilderness and solitary
place, where no other human being has ever come,
and there, where the animals know man only as a
brother, go to the school of the woods and study
the wild folk, one by one, until he discovers them
personally, temperamentally, all their likes and
dislikes, their little whimseys, freaks, and fancies
— all of this, there, far removed from the canker-
ing cares of hens and chickens, for the sake of
the right attitude toward nature.
My nearest neighbor had never been to the
wilderness. He lacked imagination, too, and a
ready pen. Yet he promised not to kill my three
skunks in the stump; a rather doubtful pledge,
perhaps, but at least a beginning toward the new
earth I hoped to see.
Now it was perfectly well known to me that
skunks will eat chickens if they have to. But I
had had chickens — a few hens — and had never
been bothered by skunks. I kept my hens shut
up, of course, in a pen — the only place for a hen
outside of a pie. I knew, too, that skunks like
honey, that they had even tampered with my
98 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
hives, reaching in at night through the wide sum-
mer entrances and tearing out the brood combs.
But I never lost much by these depredations.
What I felt more was the destruction of the wild
bees and wasps and ground-nesting birds, by the
skunks.
But these were trifles ! What were a few chick-
ens, bees, yellow-jackets, and even the occasional
bird's-nest, against the hay-devouring grubs of
the June-bug ! And as for the characteristic odor
which drifted in now and again with the evening
breeze, that had come to have a pleasant quality
for me, floating down across my two wide acres
of mowing.
February passed gently into March, and my
chickens began to hatch. Every man must raise
chickens at some period of his life, and I was
starting in for my turn now. Hay had been my
specialty heretofore, making two blades grow
where there had been one very thin one. But once
your two acres are laid down, and you have a
stump full of skunks, near by, against the rav-
ages of the June-bugs, then there is nothing for
you but chickens or something, while you wait.
I got Rhode Island Reds, fancy exhibition stock,
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 99
— for what is the use of chickens if you cannot
take them to the show?
The chickens began to hatch, little downy balls
of yellow, with their pedigrees showing right
through the fuzz. How the sixty of them grew !
I never lost one. And now the second batch of
sitters would soon be ready to come off.
Then one day, at the morning count, five of
one hen's brood were gone ! I counted again. I
counted all the other broods. Five were gone !
My nearest neighbor had cats, mere barn cats,
as many as ten, at the least. I had been suspicious
of those cats from the first. So I got a gun. Then
more of my chickens disappeared. I could count
only forty-seven.
I shifted the coop, wired it in, and stretched a
wire net over the top of the run. Nothing could
get in, nor could a chicken get out. All the time
I was waiting for the cat.
A few nights after the moving of the coop a
big hole was dug under the wire fence of the run,
another hole under the coop, and the entire brood
of Rhode Island Reds was taken.
Then I took the gun and cut across the pas-
ture to my neighbor's.
ioo THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
"Hard luck," he said. "It's a big skunk.
Here, you take these traps, and you '11 catch him ;
anybody can catch a skunk."
And I did catch him. I killed him, too, in spite
of the great scarcity of the creatures. Yet I was
sorry, and, perhaps, too hasty; for catching him
near the coop was no proof. He might have wan-
dered this way by chance. I should have put him
in a bag and carried him down to Valley Swamp
and liberated him.
That day, while my neighbor was gone with
his milk wagon, I slipped through the back pas-
ture and hung the two traps up on their nail in
the can-house.
I went anxiously to the chicken-yard the next
morning. All forty came out to be counted. It
must have been the skunk, I was thinking, as I
went on into the brooding-house, where six hens
were still sitting.
One of the hens was off her nest and acting
queerly. Her nest was empty ! Not a chick, not
a bit of shell ! I lifted up the second hen in the
row, and of her thirteen eggs, only three were
left. The hen next to her had five eggs; the
fourth hen had four. Forty chickens gone (count-
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 101
ing them before they were hatched), all in one
night.
I hitched up the horse and drove thoughtfully
to the village, where I bought six skunk-traps.
" Goin' skunk in' some, this spring," the store
man remarked, as he got me the traps, adding,
" Well, they 's some on 'em. I 've seen a scaac'ty
of a good many commodities, but I never yet see
a scaac'ty o' skunks."
I did n't stop to discuss the matter, being a
trifle uncertain just then as to my own mind, but
hurried home with my six traps. Six, I thought,
would do to begin with, though I really had no
conception of the number of cats (or skunks) it
had taken to dispose of the three and one third
dozens of eggs (at three dollars a dozen !) in a
single night
Early that afternoon I covered each sitting hen
so that even a mouse could not get at her, and
fixing the traps, I distributed them about the
brooding-house floor; then, as evening came on,
I pushed a shell into each barrel of the gun, took
a comfortable perch upon a keg in the comer of
the house, and waited.
I had come to stay. Something was going to
102 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
happen. And something did happen, away on in
the small hours of the morning, namely — one
little skunk. He walked into a trap while I was
dozing. He seemed pretty small hunting then,
but he looms larger now, for I have learned sev-
eral more things about skunks than I knew when
I had the talk with my neighbor : I have learned,
for one thing, that forty eggs, soon to hatch, are
just an average meal for the average half-grown
skunk.
The catching of these two thieves put an end
to the depredations, and I began again to exhibit
in my dreams, when one night, while sound asleep,
I heard a frightful commotion among the hens. I
did the hundred-yard dash to the chicken-house
in my unforgotten college form, but just in time
to see the skunk cross the moonlit line into the
black woods ahead of me.
He had wrought dreadful havoc among the
thoroughbreds. What devastation a skunk, single-
handed, can achieve in a pen of young chickens
beggars all description.
I was glad that it was dead of night, that the
world was home and asleep in its bed. I wanted
no sympathy. I wished only to be alone, alone in
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 103
the cool, the calm, the quiet of this serene and
beautiful midnight. Even the call of a whippoor-
will in the adjoining pasture worried me. I desired
to meditate, yet clear, consecutive thinking seemed
strangely difficult. I felt like one disturbed. I was
out of harmony with this peaceful environment.
Perhaps I had hurried too hard, or I was too
thinly clothed, or perhaps my feet were cold and
wet. I only know, as I stooped to untwist a long
and briery runner from about my ankle, that there
was great confusion in my mind, and in my spirit
there was chaos. I felt myself going to pieces, —
I, the nature-lover! Had I not advocated the
raising of a few extra hens just for the sake of
keeping the screaming hawk in air and the wild
fox astir in our scanty picnic groves ? And had I
not said as much for the skunk ? Why, then, at
one in the morning should I, nor clothed, nor in
my right mind, be picking my barefoot way
among the tangled dewberry vines behind the
barn, swearing by the tranquil stars to blow the
white-striped carcass of that skunk into ten mil-
lion atoms if I had to sit up all the next night to
do it?
One o'clock in the morning was the fiend's
io4 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
hour. There could be no unusual risk in leaving
the farm for a little while in the early evening,
merely to go to the bean supper over at the
chapel at the Corner. So we were dressed and
ready to start, when I spied one of my hens out-
side the yard, trying to get in.
Hurrying down, I caught her, and was turn-
ing back to the barn, when I heard a slow, faint
rustling among the bushes behind the hen-house.
I listened! Something was moving cautiously
through the dead leaves ! Tiptoeing softly around,
I surprised a large skunk making his way slowly
toward the hen-yard fence.
I grabbed a stone and hurled it, jumping, as I
let it drive, for another. The flying missile hit
within an inch of the creature's nose, hard upon
a large flat rock over which he was crawling. The
impact was stunning, and before the old rascal
could get to his groggy feet, I had fallen upon
him — literally — and done for him.
But I was very sorry. I hope that I shall never
get so excited as to fall upon another skunk, —
never !
I was picking myself up, when I caught a low
cry from the direction of the house — half scream,
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 105
half shout. It was a woman's voice, the voice of
my wife, I thought. Was something the matter ?
"Hurry!" I heard. But how could I hurry?
My breath was gone, and so were my spectacles,
and other more important things besides, while
all about me poured a choking blinding smother.
I fought my way out.
"Oh, hurry!"
I was on the jump; I was already rounding
the barn, when a series of terrified shrieks issued
from the front of the house. An instant more and
I had come. But none too soon, for there stood
the dear girl, backed into a corner of the porch,
her dainty robes drawn close about her, and a
skunk, a wee baby of a skunk, climbing confi-
dently up the steps toward her.
" Why are you so slow ! " she gasped. " I 've
been yelling here for an hour ! — Oh ! do — don't
kill that little thing, but shoo it away, quick ! "
She certainly had not been yelling an hour,
nor anything like it. But there was no time for
argument now, and as for shooing little skunks,
I was past that. I don't know exactly what I did
say, though I am positive that it was n't " shoo."
I was clutching a great stone, that I had run with
io6 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
all the way from behind the hen-yard, and letting
it fly, I knocked the little creature into a harmless
bunch of fur.
The family went over to the bean supper and
left me all alone on the farm. But I was calm
now, with a strange, cold calmness born of ex-
tremity. Nothing more could happen to me ; I
was beyond further harm. So I took up the bodies
of the two creatures, and carried them, together
with some of my late clothing, over beyond the
ridge for burial. Then I returned by way of my
neighbor's, where I borrowed two sticks of blast-
ing-powder and a big cannon fire-cracker. I had
watched my neighbor use these explosives on the
stumps in a new piece of meadow. The next
morning, with an axe, a crowbar, shovel, gun,
blasting-powder, and the cannon-cracker, I started
for the stump in the wood-lot. I wished the
cannon-cracker had been a keg of powder. I
could tamp a keg of powder so snugly into the
hole of those skunks !
It was a beautiful summer morning, tender
with the half-light of breaking dawn, and fresh
with dew. Leaving my kit at the mouth of the
skunks' den, I sat down on the stump to wait a
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 107
moment, for the loveliness and wonder of the
opening day came swift upon me. From the top
of a sapling, close by, a chewink sent his simple,
earnest song ringing down the wooded slope,
and, soft as an echo, floated up from the swampy
tangle of wild grape and azalea the pure notes
of a wood thrush, mellow and globed, and al-
most fragrant of the thicket where the white
honeysuckle was in bloom. Voices never heard
at other hours of the day were vocal now ; odors
and essences that vanish with the dew hung faint
in the air ; shapes and shadows and intimations
of things that slip to cover from the common
light, stirred close about me. It was very near —
the gleam ! the vision splendid ! How close to a
revelation seems every dawn ! And this early
summer dawn, how near a return of that
time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light.
From the crest of my ridge I looked out over
the treetops far away to the Blue Hills still slum-
bering in the purple west. How huge and prone
they lie ! How like their own constant azure does
io8 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
the spirit of rest seem to wrap them round ! On
their distant slopes it is never common day, never
more than dawn, for the shadows always sleep
among their hollows, and a haze of changing
blues, their own peculiar beauty, hangs, even at
high noon, like a veil upon them, shrouding them
with largeness and mystery.
A rustle in the dead leaves down the slope re-
called me. I reached instinctively for the gun,
but stayed my hand. Slowly nosing his way up
the ridge, came a full-grown skunk, his tail a-drag,
his head swinging close to the ground. He was
coming home to the den, coming leisurely, con-
tentedly, carelessly, as if he had a right to live.
I sat very still. On he came, scarcely checking
himself as he winded me. How like the dawn
he seemed ! — the black of night with the white
of day — the furtive dawn slipping into its den !
He sniffed at the gun and cannon-cracker, made
his way over them, brushed past me, and calmly
disappeared beneath the stump.
The chewink still sang from the top of the
sapling, but the tame broad day had come. I
stayed a little while, looking off still at the dis-
tant hills. We had sat thus, my six-year-old and
THE SCARCITY OF SKUNKS 109
I, only a few days before, looking away at these
same hills, when the little fellow, half question-
ingly, half pensively asked, " Father, how can
the Blue Hills be so beautiful and have rattle-
snakes?"
I gathered up the kit, gun and cannon-cracker,
and started back toward home, turning the ques-
tion of hills and snakes and skunks over and over
as I went along. Over and over the question still
turns : How can the Blue Hills be so beautiful *?
The case of my small wood-lot is easier : beauti-
ful it must ever be, but its native spirit, the un-
tamed spirit of the original wilderness, the free
wild spirit of the primeval forest, shall flee it, and
vanish forever, with this last den of the skunks.
V
THE NATURE-WRITER
THE NATURE- WRITER
•WELLING inland, far from those of
us who go down to the sea in
manuscripts, may be found the
reader, no doubt, to whom the title
of this essay is not anathema, to
whom the word nature still means the real out-
doors, as the word culture may still mean things
other than " sweetness and light." It is different
with us. We shy at the word nature. Good,
honest term, it has suffered a sea-change with us ;
it has become literary. Piety suffers the same
change when it becomes professional. There has
grown up about nature as a literary term a vo-
cabulary of cant, — nature-lover, nature-writer,
nature Throw the stone for me, you who are
clean! Inseparably now these three travel to-
gether, arm in arm, like Tom, Dick, and Harry
— the world, the flesh, and the devil. Name one,
and the other two appear, which is sad enough
for the nature-writer, because a word is known
by the company it keeps.
ii4 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
The nature-writer deserves, maybe, his dubi-
ous reputation; he is more or less of a fraud,
perhaps. And perhaps everybody else is, more
or less. I am sure of it as regards preachers and
plumbers and politicians and men who work by
the day. Yet I have known a few honest men of
each of these several sorts, although I can't recall
just now the honest plumber. I have known
honest nature-writers, too ; there are a number of
them, simple, single-minded, and purposefully
poor. I have no mind, however, thus to pro-
nounce upon them, dividing the sheep from the
goats, lest haply I count myself in with the
wrong fold. My desire, rather, is to see what
nature-writing, pure and undefiled, may be, and
the nature-writer, what manner of writer he ought
to be.
For it is plain that the nature-writer has now
evolved into a distinct, although undescribed,
literary species. His origins are not far to seek,
the course of his development not hard to trace,
but very unsatisfactory is the attempt, as yet, to
classify him. We all know a nature-book at .
sight, no matter how we may doubt the nature
in it ; we all know that the writer of such a book
THE NATURE-WRITER 115
must be a nature-writer ; yet this is not describ-
ing him scientifically by any means.
Until recent years the nature-writer had been
hardly more than a variant of some long-estab-
lished species — of the philosopher in Aristotle ;
of the moralizer in Theobaldus ; of the scholar
and biographer in Walton; of the traveler in
Josselyn ; of the poet in Burns. But that was in
the feudal past. Since then the land of letters has
been redistributed ; the literary field, like every
other field, has been cut into intensified and
highly specialized patches — the short story for
you, the muck-rake essay for me, or magazine
verse, or wild animal biography. The paragraph
of outdoor description in Scott becomes the
modern nature-sketch ; the " Lines to a Limping
Hare " in Burns run into a wild animal romance
of about the length of "The Last of the Mohi-
cans " ; the occasional letter of Gilbert White's
grows into an annual nature-volume, this year's
being entitled "Buzz-Buzz and Old Man Bar-
berry ; or, The Thrilling Young Ladyhood of a
Better-Class Bluebottle Fly." The story that fol-
lows is how she never would have escaped the
net of Old Man Barberry had she been a butter-
n6 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
fly — a story which only the modern nature-writ-
ing specialist would be capable of handling. Na-
ture-writing and the automobile business have
developed vastly during the last few years.
It is Charles Kingsley, I think, who defines "a
thoroughly good naturalist " as one " who knows
his own parish thoroughly," a definition, all ques-
tions of style aside, that accurately describes the
nature-writer. He has field enough for his pen in
a parish ; he can hardly know more and know
it intimately enough to write about it. For the
nature-writer, while he may be more or less of a
scientist, is never mere scientist — zoologist or
botanist. Animals are not his theme ; flowers are
not his theme. Nothing less than the universe is
his theme, as it pivots on him, around the distant
boundaries of his immediate neighborhood.
His is an emotional, not an intellectual, point
of view; a literary, not a scientific, approach;
which means that he is the axis of his world,
its great circumference, rather than any fact —
any flower, or star, or tortoise. Now to the
scientist the tortoise is the thing: the particu-
lar species Tbalassochelys kempi ; of the family
Testudinidse ; of the order Chelonia ; of the class
THE NATURE-WRITER 117
Reptilia; of the branch Vertebrata. But the na-
ture-writer never pauses over this matter to capi-
talize it. His tortoise may or may not come
tagged with this string of distinguishing titles.
A tortoise is a tortoise for a' that, particularly if
it should happen to be an old Sussex tortoise
which has been kept for thirty years in a yard
by the nature-writer's friend, and which "On
the ist November began to dig the ground in
order to the forming of its hybernaculum, which
it had fixed on just beside a great tuft of hepa-
ticas.
"P. S. — In about three days after I left Sus-
sex, the tortoise retired into the ground under
the hepatica."
This is a bit of nature-writing by Gilbert
White, of Selborne, which sounds quite a little
like science, but which you noticed was really
spoiled as science by its "tuft of hepaticas." There
is no buttonhole in science for the nosegay. And
when, since the Vertebrates began, did a scientific
tortoise ever retire ?
One more quotation, I think, will make clear
my point, namely, that the nature-writer is not
detached from himself and alone with his fact,
n8 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
like the scientist, but is forever relating his tor-
toise to himself. The lines just quoted were from
a letter dated April 12, 1772. Eight years after-
wards, in another letter, dated Selborne, April 21,
1 780, and addressed to " the Hon. Daines Bar-
rington," the good rector writes : —
" DEAR SIR, — The old Sussex tortoise, that I
have mentioned to you so often, is become my
property. I dug it out of its winter dormitory in
March last, when it was enough awakened to ex-
press its resentments by hissing, and, packing it in
a box with earth, carried it eighty miles in post-
chaises. The rattle and hurry of the journey so
perfectly roused it that, when I turned it out on
the border, it walked twice down to the bottom
of my garden."
Not once, not three times, but twice down to
the bottom of the garden ! We do not question it
for a moment ; we simply think of the excellent
thesis material wasted here in making a mere
popular page of nature-writing. Gilbert White
never got his Ph. D., if I remember, because, I
suppose, he stopped counting after the tortoise
made its second trip, and because he kept the
creature among the hepaticas of the garden, in-
THE NATURE-WRITER 119
stead of on a shelf in a bottle of alcohol. Still, let
us admit, and let the college professors, who do
research work upon everything except their stu-
dents, admit, that walking twice to the bottom
of a garden is not a very important discovery.
But how profoundly interesting it was to Gilbert
White ! And how like a passage from the Pen-
tateuch his record of it! Ten years he woos this
tortoise (it was fourteen that Jacob did for Ra-
chel) and wins it — with a serene and solemn
joy. He digs it out of its winter dormitory (a
hole in the ground), packs it carefully in a box,
carries it hurriedly, anxiously, by post-chaises for
eighty miles, rousing it perfectly by the end of
the journey, when, liberating it in the rectory
yard, he stands back to see what it will do ; and,
lo ! // walks twice to the bottom of the garden !
By a thoroughly good naturalist Kingsley may
have meant a thoroughly good nature-writer, for
I think he had in mind Gilbert White, who cer-
tainly was a thoroughly good naturalist, and who
certainly knew his own parish thoroughly. In
the letters from which I have quoted the gentle
rector was writing the natural history of Selborne,
his parish. But how could he write the natural
120 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
history of Selborne when his tortoise was away
over in Sussex !
A tortoise down by Sussex's brim
A Sussex tortoise was to him,
And it was nothing more —
nothing at all for the " Natural History of Sel-
borne " until he had gone after it and brought it
home.
Thus all nature-writers do with all their nature
in some manner or other, not necessarily by post-
chaise for eighty miles. It is characteristic of the
nature-writer, however, to bring home his out-
doors, to domesticate his nature, to relate it all to
himself. His is a dooryard universe, his earth a
flat little planet turning about a hop-pole in his
garden — a planet mapped by fields, ponds, and
cow-paths, and set in a circumfluent sea of neigh-
bor townships, beyond whose shores he neither
goes to church, nor works out his taxes on the
road, nor votes appropriations for the schools.
He is limited to his parish because he writes
about only so much of the world as he lives in,
as touches him, as makes for him his home. He
may wander away, like Thoreau, to the Maine
woods, or down along the far-off shores of Cape
THE NATURE-WRITER 121
Cod ; but his best writing will be that about his
hut at Walden.
It is a large love for the earth as a dwelling-
place, a large faith in the entire reasonableness of
its economy, a large joy in all its manifold life, that
moves the nature-writer. He finds the earth most
marvelously good to live in — himself its very
dust ; a place beautiful beyond his imagination,
and interesting past his power to realize — a mys-
tery every way he turns. He comes into it as a
settler into a new land, to clear up so much of
the wilderness as he shall need for a home.
Thoreau perhaps, of all our nature-writers, was
the wildest wild man, the least domestic in his
attitude. He went off far into the woods, a mile
and a half from Concord village, to escape do-
mestication, to seek the wild in nature and to free
the wild in himself. And what was his idea of
becoming a wild man but to build a cabin and
clear up a piece of ground for a bean-patch ! He
was solid Concord beneath his war-paint — a thin
coat of savagery smeared on to scare his friends
whenever he went to the village — a walk which
he took very often. He differed from Gilbert
White as his cabin at Walden differed from the
122 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
quaint old cottage at Selborne. But cabin and
cottage alike were to dwell in; and the bachelor
of the one was as much in need of a wife, and as
much in love with the earth, as the bachelor in
the other. Thoreau's " Walden " is as parochial
and as domestic with its woodchuck and beans as
White's "Natural History of Selborne " with its
tame tortoise and garden.
In none of our nature-writers, however, is this
love for the earth more manifest than in John
Burroughs. It is constant and dominant in him,
an expression of his religion. He can see the earth
only as the best possible place to live in — to live
with rather than in or on ; for he is unlike the
rector of Selborne and the wild-tame man of
Walden in that he is married and a farmer — con-
ditions, these, to deepen one's domesticity. Show-
ing somewhere along every open field in Bur-
roughs's books is a piece of fence, and among his
trees there is always a patch of gray sloping roof.
He grew up on a farm (a most excellent place
to grow up on), became a clerk, but not for long,
then got him a piece of land, built him a home
out of unhewn stone, and set him out an eighteen-
acre vineyard. And ever since he has lived in his
THE NATURE-WRITER 123
vineyard, with the Hudson River flowing along
one side of it, the Catskills standing along an-
other side of it, with the horizon all around, and
overhead the sky, and everywhere, through every-
thing, the pulse of life, the song of life, the sense
of home !
He loves the earth, for the earth is home.
" I would gladly chant a psean," he exclaims,
"for the world as I find it. What a mighty in-
teresting place to live in ! If I had my life to live
over again, and had my choice of celestial abodes,
I am sure I should take this planet, and I should
choose these men and women for my friends and
companions. This great rolling sphere with its
sky, its stars, its sunrises and sunsets, and with its
outlook into infinity — what could be more de-
sirable*? What more satisfying? Garlanded by
the seasons, embosomed in sidereal influences,
thrilling with life, with a heart of fire and a gar-
ment of azure seas and fruitful continents — one
might ransack the heavens in vain for a better or
a more picturesque abode."
A full-throated hymn, this, to the life that is,
in the earth that is, a hymn without taint of cant,
without a single note of that fevered desire for a
i24 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
land that is fairer than this, whose gates are of
pearl and whose streets are paved with gold. If
there is another land, may it be as fair as this !
And a pair of bars will be gate enough, and
gravel, cinders, grass, even March mud, will do
for paving; for all that one will need there, as all
that one needs here — here in New England in
March — is to have " arctics " on one's feet and an
equator about one's heart. The desire for heaven
is natural enough, for how could one help want-
ing more after getting through with this"? But he
sins and comes short of the glory of God who
would be quit of this world for the sake of a bet-
ter one. There is n't any better one. This one is
divine. And as for those dreams of heaven in old
books and monkish hymns, they cannot compare
for glory and for downright domestic possibilities
with the prospect of these snow-clad Hingham hills
from my window this brilliant winter morning.
That "this world is not my resting-place"
almost any family man can believe nowadays,
but that "this world is not my home" I can't
believe at all. However poor a resting-place we
make of it, however certain of going hence upon
a "longe journey," we may not find this earth
THE NATURE-WRITER 125
anything else than home without confessing
ourselves tenants here by preference, and liable,
therefore, to pay rent throughout eternity. The
best possible use for this earth is to make a home
of it, and for this span of life, to live it like a
human, earth-born being.
Such is the credo of the nature-writer. Not
until it can be proved to him that eternal day is
more to his liking than the sweet alternation of
day and night, that unending rest is less monoto-
nous than his round of labor until the evening,
that streets of gold are softer for his feet than dirt
roads with borders of grass and dandelions, that
ceaseless hallelujahs about a throne exalt the ex-
cellency of God more than the quiet contempla-
tion of the work of His fingers — the moon and
the stars which He has ordained — not until, I
say, it can be proved to him that God did not
make this world, or, making it, spurned it, cursed
it, that heaven might seem the more blessed —
not until then will he forego his bean-patch at
Walden, his vineyard at West Park, his garden
at Selborne ; will he deny to his body a house-
lot on this little planet, and the range of this timed
and tidy universe to his soul.
126 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
As between himself and nature, then, the thor-
oughly good nature-writer is in love — a purely
personal state ; lyric, emotional, rather than sci-
entific, wherein the writer is not so much con-
cerned with the facts of nature as with his view
of them, his feelings for them, as they environ
and interpret him, or as he centres and interprets
them.
Were this all, it would be a simple story of
love. Unfortunately, nature-writing has become
an art, which means some one looking on, and
hence it means self-consciousness and adaptation,
the writer forced to play the difficult part of
loving his theme not less, but loving his reader
more.
For the reader, then, his test of the nature-writer
will be the extreme test of sincerity. The nature-
writer (and the poet) more than many writers is
limited by decree to his experiences — not to
what he has seen or heard only, but as strictly to
what he has truly felt. All writing must be sin-
cere. Is it that nature-writing and poetry must
be spontaneously sincere ? Sincerity is the first
and greatest of the literary commandments. The
second is like unto the first. Still there is con-
THE NATURE-WRITER 127
siderable difference between the inherent market-
ableness of a cold thought and a warm, purely
personal emotion. One has a right to sell one's
ideas, to barter one's literary inventions ; one has
a right, a duty it may be, to invent inventions for
sale ; but one may not, without sure damnation,
make " copy " of one's emotions. In other words,
one may not invent emotions, nor observations
either, for the literary trade. The sad case with
much of our nature-writing is that it has become
professional, and so insincere, not answering to
genuine observation nor to genuine emotion, but
to the bid of the publisher.
You will know the sincere nature-writer by his
fidelity to fact. But, alas ! suppose I do not know
the fact"? To be sure. And the nature-writer
thought of that, too, and penned his solemn,
pious preface, wherein he declares that the fol-
lowing observations are exactly as he personally
saw them ; that they are true altogether ; that he
has the affidavits to prove it; and the Indians
and the Eskimos to swear the affidavits prove it.
Of course you are bound to believe after that;
but you wish the preface did not make it so un-
necessarily hard.
128 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
The sincere nature-writer, because he knows
he cannot prove it, and that you cannot prove it,
and that the scientists cannot prove it, knows that
he must not be asked for proofs, that he must be
above suspicion, and so he sticks to the truth as
the wife of Csesar to her spouse.
Let the nature-writer only chronicle his observ-
ations as Dr. C. C. Abbott does in " A Natural-
ist's Rambles about Home," or let him dream a
dream about his observations as Maeterlinck does
in " The Life of the Bee," yet is he still confined to
the truth as a hermit crab to his shell — a hard,
inelastic, unchangeable, indestructible house that
he cannot adapt, but must himself be adapted to,
or else abandon. Chronicle and romance alike we
want true to fact. But this particular romance
about the Bee will not thus qualify. It was not
written for beekeepers, even amateur beekeepers,
for they all know more or less about bees, and
hence they would not understand the book. It
was written for those, the city-faring folk, like
my market-man, who asked me how many pounds
of honey a bee would gather up in a year, and
whether I kept more than one bee in a hive. A
great many persons must have read " The Life
THE NATURE-WRITER 129
of the Bee," but only one of them, so far as I
know, had ever kept bees, and she had just a
single swarm in between the wall of her living-
room and the weather-boards outside. But she
had listened to them through the wall, and she
sent me her copy of " The Life," begging me to
mark on the margins wherever the Bee of the
book was unlike her bee in the wall. She had
detected a difference in the buzz of the two
bees.
Now the two bees ought to buzz alike — one
buzz, distinct and always distinguishable from
the buzz of the author. In the best nature-writ-
ing the author is more than his matter, but he is
never identical with it ; and not until we know
which is which, and that the matter is true, have
we faith in the author.
I knew a big boy once who had almost reached
the footprint in " Robinson Crusoe " (the tragedy
of almost reaching it !) when some one blunder-
ingly told him that the book was all a story,
made up, not true at all ; no such island ; no such
Crusoe ! The boy shut up the book and put it
forever from him. He wanted it true. He had
thought it true, because it had been so real.
130 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
Robbed of its reality, he was unable to make it
true again.
Most of us recover from this shock in regard
to books, asking only that they seem real. But
we are eternally childish, curious, credulous, in
our thought of nature ; she is so close and real to
us, and yet so shadowy, hidden, mysterious, and
remote ! We are eager to listen to any tale, will-
ing to believe anything, if only it be true. Nay,
we are willing to believe it true — we were, I
should say, until, like the boy with the book, we
were rudely told that all this fine writing was
made up, that we have no such kindred in the
wilds, and no such wilds. Then we said in our
haste, all men — who write nature-books — are
liars.
" How much of this is real ? " asked a keen
and anxious reader, eyeing me narrowly, as she
pointed a steady finger at an essay of mine in the
" Atlantic." " Have you, sir, a farm and four real
boys of your own, or are \hey faked? "
"Good heavens, madam ! " I exclaimed. " Has
it come to this *? My boys faked ! "
But it shows how the thoughtful and the fear-
ful regard the literary naturalist, and how para-
THE NATURE-WRITER 131
mount is the demand for honesty in the matter
of mere fact, to say nothing of the greater matter
of expression.
Only yesterday, in a review in the "Nation"
of an animal-man book, I read : " The best thing
in the volume is the description of a fight be-
tween a mink and a raccoon — or so it seems.
Can this be because the reader does not know the
difference between a mink and a raccoon, and
does know the difference between a human being
and the story-teller's manikin *? "
This is the wandering wood, this Errour's den,
is the feeling of the average reader — of even the
"Nation's" book reviewer — nowadays, toward
nature-writing, a state of mind due to the recent
revelations of a propensity in wild-animal litera-
ture to stand up rather than to go on all fours.
Whatever of the Urim and of the Thummim
you put into your style, whatever of the literary
lights and the perfections, see to it that you make
the facts "after their pattern, which hath been
shewed thee in the mount."
Thou shalt not bear false witness as to the
facts.
132 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
Nor is this all. For the sad case with much
nature-writing, as I have said, is that it not only
fails to answer to genuine observation, but it also
fails to answer to genuine emotion. Often as we
detect the unsound natural history, we much
oftener are aware of the unsound, the insincere,
art of the author.
Now the facts of nature, as Mr. Burroughs
says, are the material of nature literature — of one
kind of such literature, let me add ; for, while
fabrications can be made only into lies, there may
be another kind of good nature-literature com-
pounded wholly of fancies. Facts, to quote Mr.
Burroughs again, are the flora upon which the
nature-writer lives. " I can do nothing without
them." Of course he could not. But Chaucer
could. Indeed, Chaucer could do nothing with
the facts ; he had to have fancies. The truth in
his story of the Cock and the Fox is a different
kind of truth from the truth about Burroughs's
"Winter Neighbors," yet no less the truth. Good
nature-writing is literature, not science, and the
truth we demand first and last is a literary truth
— the fidelity of the writer to himself. He may
elect to use facts for his material ; yet they are
THE NATURE-WRITER 133
only material, and no better as material than
fancies. For it is not matter that counts last in
literature; it is manner. It is spirit that counts.
It is the man. Only honest men make literature.
Writers may differ in their purpose, as Burroughs
in his purpose to guide you through the woods
differs from Chaucer's purpose to entertain you by
the fire ; but they are one in their spirit of honesty.
Chaucer pulls a long face and begins his tale
of the Cock and the Fox with a vivid and very
realistic description of a widow's cottage,
B'syde a grove, standing in a dale,
as a setting, not for the poor widow and her two
daughters, not at all ; but rather to stage the heroic
comedy between Chauntecleer and his favorite
wife, the scarlet-eyed Pertelote.
It is just before daybreak. They are not up
yet, not off the roost, when they get into a dis-
cussion about the significance of dreams, Chaun-
tecleer having had a very bad dream during the
night. The dispute waxes as it spreads out over
medicine, philosophy, theology, and psychology.
Chauntecleer quotes the classics, cites famous
stories, talks Latin to her : —
134 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
For, also sicker as In principio
Mulier est bominis confuiio ;
translating it for her thus : —
Madam, the sentence of this Latin is —
Woman is manne's joy and all his blis,
while she tells him he needs a pill for his liver in
spite of the fact that he wears a beard. It is fine
scorn, but passing sad, following so close upon
the old English love song that Chauntecleer was
wont to wake up singing.
It is here, at this critical juncture of the nature-
story, that Chaucer pauses to remark seriously: —
For thilke tyme, as I have understands,
Bestes and briddes coulde speke and singe.
Certainly they could ; and " speking and singing
in thilke tyme " seems much more natural for
" bestes and briddes " than many of the things
they do nowadays.
Here, again, is Izaak Walton, as honest a man as
Chaucer — a lover of nature, a writer on angling ;
who knew little about angling, and less about na-
ture ; whose facts are largely fancies ; but — what
of it? Walton quotes, as a probable fact, that
pickerel hatch out of the seeds of the pickerel-
THE NATURE-WRITER 135
weed ; that toads are born of fallen leaves on the
bottoms of ponds. He finds himself agreeing with
Pliny " that many flies have their birth, or being,
from a dew that in the spring falls upon the leaves
of the trees " ; and, quoting the divine du Bartas,
he sings : —
So slow Bootes underneath him sees
In th' icy isles those goslings hatch'd of trees,
Whose fruitful leaves, falling into the water,
Are turn'd, they say, to living fowls soon after.
But the "Compleat Angler" is not a scientific
work on fishes, nor a handbook on angling for
anglers. It is a book for all that are lovers of
literature ; for " all that are lovers of virtue ; and
dare trust in his providence ; and be quiet ; and
go a Angling."
This is somewhat unscientific, according to
our present light; but, wonderful as it seemed
to Walton, it was all perfectly natural according
to his light. His facts are faulty, yet they are the
best he had. So was his love the best he had ;
but that was without fault, warm, deep, intense,
sincere.
Our knowledge of nature has so advanced since
Walton's time, and our attitude has so changed,
136 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
that the facts of nature are no longer enough for
literature. We know all that our writer knows;
we have seen all that he can see. He can no
longer surprise us ; he can no longer instruct us ;
he can no longer fool us. The day of the marvel-
ous is past; the day of the cum laude cat and the
magna cum laude pup is past, the day of the things
that I alone have seen is past ; and the day of the
things that I, in common with you, have honestly
felt, is come.
There should be no suggestion in a page of
nature-writing that the author — penetrated to the
heart of some howling summer camp for his raw
material ; that he ever sat on his roof or walked
across his back yard in order to write a book
about it. But nature-books, like other books, are
gone for that way — always and solely for the
pot. Such books are " copy " only — poor copy
at that. There is nothing new in them ; for the
only thing you can get by going afar for it is a
temptation to lie ; and no matter from what dis-
tance you fetch a falsehood — even from the top
of the world — you cannot disguise the true com-
plexion of it. Take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, and
THE NATURE-WRITER 137
you will find nothing new there ; ascend into
heaven or make your bed in hell for copy, as is
the fashion nowadays — But you had better look
after your parish, and go faithfully about your
chores ; and if you have a garden with a tortoise
in it, and you love them, and love to write about
them, then write.
Nature-writing must grow more and more hu-
man, personal, interpretative. If I go into the
wilderness and write a book about it, it must be
plain to my reader that " the writing of the book
was only a second and finer enjoyment of my
holiday in the woods." If my chippy sings, it
must sing a chippy's simple song, not some gloria
that only "the careless angels know." It must
not do any extraordinary thing for me; but it
may lead me to do an extraordinary thing — to
have an extraordinary thought, or suggestion,
or emotion. It may mean extraordinary things
to me ; things that have no existence in nature,
whose beginnings and ends are in me. I may
never claim that I, because of exceptional op-
portunities, or exceptional insight, or exceptional
powers of observation, have discovered these mar-
velous things here in the wilds of Hingham. My
138 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
pages may be anthropomorphic, human; not,
however, because I humanize my bees and toads,
but because I am human, and nature is meaning-
ful ultimately only as it is related to me. I must
not confuse myself with nature ; nor yet " strug-
gle against fact and law to develop and keep"
my " own individuality." I must not anthropo-
morphize nature ; never denature nature ; never
follow my own track through the woods, ima-
gining that I am on the trail of a better-class
wolf or a two-legged bear. I must never senti-
mentalize over nature again — write no more
about "Buzz-Buzz and Old Man Barberry";
write no more about wailing winds and weeping
skies ; for mine is not " a poet's vision dim," but
an open-eyed, scientific sight of things as they
actually are. Once I have seen them, gathered
them, if then they turn to poetry, let them turn.
For so does the squash turn to poetry when it
is brought in from the field. It turns to pie ; it
turns to poetry; and it still remains squash.
Good nature-literature, like all good literature,
is more lived than written. Its immortal part
hath elsewhere than the ink-pot its beginning.
The soul that rises with it, its life's star, first
THE NATURE-WRITER 139
went down behind a horizon of real experience,
then rose from a human heart, the source of all
true feeling, of all sincere form. Good nature-
writing particularly must have a pre-literary ex-
istence as lived reality ; its writing must be only
the necessary accident of its being lived again in
thought. It will be something very human, very
natural, warm, quick, irregular, imperfect, with
the imperfections and irregularities of life. And
the nature-writer will be very human, too, and
so very faulty ; but he will have no lack of love
for nature, and no lack of love for the truth.
Whatever else he does, he will never touch the
flat, disquieting note of make-believe. He will
never invent, never pretend, never pose, never
shy. He will be honest — which is nothing un-
usual for birds and rocks and stars ; but for hu-
man beings, and for nature-writers very particu-
larly, it is a state less common, perhaps, than it
ought to be.
VI
JOHN BURROUGHS
JOHN BURROUGHS
• OHN BURROUGHS began his literary
career (and may he so end it!)
by writing an essay for the " At-
lantic Monthly," as good an intro-
duction (and conclusion), speak-
ing by the rhetoric, as a lifelong composition
need have. That first essay entitled " Expression,"
" a somewhat Emersonian Expression," says its
author, was printed in the "Atlantic" for Novem-
ber, 1860, which was fifty years ago. Fifty years
are not threescore and ten ; many men have lived
past threescore and ten, but not many men have
written continuously for the " Atlantic " for fifty
years with eye undimmed and natural force un-
abated. Mr. Burroughs's eye for the truth of na-
ture has grown clearer during these fifty years,
and the vigor of his youth has steadied into a
maturity of strength which in some of his latest
essays — " The Long Road," for instance — lifts
one and bears one down the unmeasured reaches
of geologic time, compassing the timelessness of
i44 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
time, its beginninglessness, its endinglessness, as
none of his earlier chapters have done.
Many men have written more than Mr. Bur-
roughs. His eighteen or twenty books, as books
may be turned out, are nothing remarkable for
fifty years of work. It is not their numbers, but
the books, that are remarkable, that among them
should be found "Wake-Robin," "Winter Sun-
shine," " Birds and Poets," " Locusts and Wild
Honey," " Pepacton," " Fresh Fields," " Signs and
Seasons," " Riverby," " Far and Near," " Ways
of Nature," and " Leaf and Tendril " ; for these
eleven nature-books, as a group, stand alone and
at the head of the long list of books written
about the out-of-doors since the days of the His-
toria Animalium, and the mediaeval "Fables" and
" Beasteries."
These eleven volumes are Mr. Burroughs's
characteristic, his important work. His other
books are eminently worth while : there is rever-
ent, honest thinking in his religious essays, a
creedless but an absolute and joyous faith ; there
is simple and exquisite feeling in his poems ; close
analysis and an unmitigatedness, wholly Whit-
manesque, in his interpretation of Whitman ; and
JOHN BURROUGHS 145
no saner, happier criticism anywhere than in his
"Literary Values." There are many other excellent
critics, however, many poets and religious writers,
many other excellent nature- writers, too; but is
there any other who has written so much upon
the ways of nature as they parallel and cross the
ways of men, upon so great a variety of nature's
forms and expressions, and done it with such
abiding love, with such truth and charm ?
Yet such a comparison is beyond proof, ex-
cept in the least of the literary values — mere
quantity; and it may be with literature as with
merchandise : the larger the cask the greater the
tare. Charm? Is not charm that which /chance
to like, or you chance to like ? Others have writ-
ten of nature with as much love and truth as has
Mr. Burroughs, and each with his own peculiar
charm : Audubon, with the spell of wild places
and the thrill of fresh wonder; Traherne, with
the ecstasy of the religious mystic; Gilbert White,
with the sweetness of the evening and the morn-
ing; Thoreau, with the heat of noonday; Jef-
feries, with just a touch of twilight shadowing
all his pages. We want them severally as they
are ; Mr. Burroughs as he is, neither wandering
146 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
" lonely as a cloud" in search of poems, nor skulk-
ing in the sedges along the banks of the Guaso
Nyero looking for lions. We want him at Slab-
sides, near his celery fields. And whatever the
literary quality of our other nature-writers, no
one of them has come any nearer than Mr. Bur-
roughs to that difficult ideal, — a union of thought
and form, no more to be separated than the heart
and the bark of a live tree.
Take Mr. Burroughs's work as a whole, and it
is beyond dispute the most complete, the most re-
vealing, of all our outdoor literature. His pages
lie open like the surface of a pond, sensitive to
every wind, or calm as the sky, holding the
clouds and the distant blue, and the dragon-fly,
stiff-winged and pinned to the golden knob of a
spatter-dock.
All outdoor existence, all outdoor phenomena,
are deeply interesting to him. There is scarcely a
form of outdoor life, scarcely a piece of land-
scape, or natural occurrence characteristic of the
Eastern States, which has not been dealt with
suggestively in his pages : the rabbit under his
porch, the paleozoic pebble along his path, the
salt breeze borne inland by the Hudson, the
JOHN BURROUGHS 147
whirl of a snowstorm, the work of the honey-
bees, the procession of the seasons over Slabsides,
even the abundant soil out of which he and his
grapes grow and which, " incorruptible and unde-
filed," he calls divine.
He devotes an entire chapter to the bluebird,
a chapter to the fox, one to the apple, another to
the wild strawberry. The individual, the particu-
lar thing, is always of particular interest to him.
But so is its habitat, the whole of its environment.
He sees the gem, not cut and set in a ring, but
rough in the mine, where it glitters on the hand
of nature, and glitters all the more that it is worn
in the dark. Naturally Mr. Burroughs has writ-
ten much about the birds ; yet he is not an or-
nithologist. His theme has not been this or that,
but nature in its totality, as it is held within the
circle of his horizon, as it surrounds, supports, and
quickens him.
That nature does support and quicken the
spiritual of him, no less than the physical, is the
inspiration of his writing and the final comment
it requires. Whether the universe was shaped
from chaos with man as its end, is a question of
real concern to Mr. Burroughs, but of less con-
148 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
cern to him than the problem of shaping himself
to the universe, of living as long as he can upon
a world so perfectly adapted to life, if only one
be physically and spiritually adaptable. To take
the earth as one finds it, to plant one's self in it,
to plant one's roof-tree in it, to till it, to under-
stand it and the laws which govern it, and the
Perfection which created it, and to love it all, —
this is the heart of Mr. Burroughs's religion, the
pith of his philosophy, the conclusion of his
books.
But if a perfect place for the fit, how hard a
place is this world for the lazy, the ignorant, the
stubborn, the weak, the physically and spiritually
ill ! So hard that a torpid liver is almost a mortal
handicap, the stars in their courses fighting against
the bilious to defeat them, to drive them to take
exercise, to a copious drinking of water, to a
knowledge of burdock and calomel — to obedi-
ence and understanding.
Underlying all of Mr. Burroughs's thought and
feeling, framing every one of his books, is a deep
sense of the perfection of nature, the sharing of
which is physical life, the understanding of which
is spiritual life, is knowledge of God himself,
JOHN BURROUGHS 149
in some part of His perfection. " I cannot tell
what the simple apparition of the earth and sky
mean to me ; I think that at rare intervals one
sees that they have an immense spiritual mean-
ing, altogether unspeakable, and that they are the
great helps, after all." How the world was made
— its geology, its biology — is the great ques-
tion, for its answer is poetry and religion and
life itself. Mr. Burroughs is serenely sure as to
who made the world ; the theological speculation
as to why it was made, he answers by growing
small fruits on it, living upon it, writing about it.
Temperamentally Mr. Burroughs is an opti-
mist, as vocationally he is a writer, and avoca-
tionally a vine-dresser. He plants and expects
to gather — grapes from his grape-vines, books
from his book- vines, years, satisfactions, sorrows,
joys, all that is due him.
The waters know their own and draw
The brook that springs in yonder heights ;
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delights.
And what is it that is due him? Everything;
everything essential; as everything essential is
due the pine tree, the prairie, the very planet. Is
i5o THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
not this earth a star ? Are not the prairie, the pine
tree, and man the dust of stars *? each a part of the
other? all parts of one whole — a universe, round,
rolling, without beginning, without end, without
flaw, without lack, a universe self-sustained, per-
fect?
I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace ?
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face.
Mr. Burroughs came naturally by such a view
of nature and its consequent optimism. It is due
partly to his having been born and brought
up on a farm where he had what was due him
from the start. Such birth and bringing-up is the
natural right of every boy. To know and to do
the primitive, the elemental ; to go barefoot, to
drive the cows, to fish, and to go to school with
not too many books but with " plenty of real
things" — these are nominated in every boy's
bond.
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
is the poem of a childhood on the farm, and the
poem of a manhood on the farm, in spite of the
critic who says : —
JOHN BURROUGHS 151
"We have never ceased to wonder that this
friend of the birds, this kindly interpreter of na-
ture in all her moods, was born and brought up
on a farm ; it was in that smiling country watered
by the east branch of the Delaware. No man,
as a rule, knows less about the colors, songs, and
habits of birds, and is more indifferent to natural
scenery than the man born to the soil, who delves
in it and breathes its odors. Contact with it and
laborious days seem to deaden his faculties of ob-
servation and deprive him of all sympathy with
nature." During the days when the deadening
might have occurred, Mr. Burroughs was teaching
school. Then he became a United States bank
examiner, and only after that returned to the
country where he still lives. He is now in his
seventies, and coming full of years, and fuller
and fuller of books, as his vines are full of years,
and fuller and fuller of grapes.
Could it be otherwise ? If men and grapes
are of the same divine dust, should they not
grow according to the same divine laws ? Here
in the vineyard along the Hudson, Mr. Bur-
roughs planted himself in planting his vines, and
every trellis that he set has become his own sup-
152 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
port and stay. The very clearing of the land for
his vineyard was a preparation of himself physi-
cally and morally for a more fruitful life.
" Before the snow was off in March," he says in
" Literary Values," " we set to work under-drain-
ing the moist and springy places. My health and
spirits improved daily. I seemed to be under-
draining my own life and carrying off the stag-
nant water, as well as that of the land." And so
he was. There are other means of doing it — tak-
ing drugs, playing golf, walking the streets ; but
surely the advantages and the poetry are all in
favor of the vineyard. And how much fitter a
place the vineyard to mellow and ripen life, than
a city roof of tarry pebbles and tin !
Though necessarily personal and subjective,
Mr. Burroughs's writing is entirely free from self-
exploitation and confession. There are pages scat-
tered here and there dealing briefly and frankly
with his own natural history, but our thanks are
due to Mr. Burroughs that he never made a busi-
ness of watching himself. Once he was inveigled
by a magazine editor into doing " An Egotisti-
cal Chapter," wherein we find him as a boy of
sixteen reading essays, and capable at that age
JOHN BURROUGHS 153
of feeding for a whole year upon Dr. Johnson !
Then we find him reading Whipple's essays, and
the early outdoor papers of Higginson; and
later, at twenty-three, settling down with Emer-
son's essays, and getting one of his own into the
" Atlantic Monthly."
How early his own began to come to him !
That first essay in the " Atlantic " was followed
by a number of outdoor sketches in the New
York " Leader " — written, Mr. Burroughs says,
" mainly to break the spell of Emerson's influ-
ence and get upon ground of my own." He
succeeded in both purposes; and a large and
exceedingly fertile piece of ground it proved to
be, too, this which he got upon ! Already the
young writer had chosen his field and his crop.
The out-of-doors has been largely his literary
material, as the essay has been largely his liter-
ary form, ever since. He has done other things
— volumes of literary studies and criticisms ;
but his theme from first to last has been the
Great Book of Nature, a page of which, here
and there, he has tried to read to us.
Mr. Burroughs's work, in outdoor literature,
is a distinct species, with new and well-marked
154 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
•characteristics. He is the nature-writer, to be dis-
tinguished from the naturalist in Gilbert White,
the mystic in Traherne, the philosopher in Emer-
son, the preacher, poet, egotist in Thoreau, the
humorist in Charles Dudley Warner. As we now
know the nature-writer we come upon him for
the first time in Mr. Burroughs. Such credit
might have gone to Thomas Wentworth Hig-
ginson, had he not been something else before
he was a lover of nature — of letters first, then
of flowers, carrying his library into the fields;
whereas Mr. Burroughs brings the fields into the
library. The essay whose matter is nature, whose
moral is human, whose manner is strictly literary,
belongs to Mr. Burroughs. His work is distin-
guished by this threefold and even emphasis. In
almost every other of our early outdoor writers
either the naturalist or the moralist or the stylist
holds the pen.
Early or late, this or that, good outdoor writ-
ing must be marked, first, by fidelity to fact; and,
secondly, by sincerity of expression. Like quali-
ties mark all good literature ; but they are them-
selves the very literature of nature. When we
take up a nature-book we ask (and it was Mr.
JOHN BURROUGHS 155
Burroughs who taught us to ask), *' Is the record
true? Is the writing honest?"
In these eleven volumes by Mr. Burroughs
there are many observations, and it is more than
likely that some of them may be wrong, but it
is not possible that any of them could be mixed
with observations that Mr. Burroughs knows
he never made. If Mr. Burroughs has written a
line of sham natural history, which line is it *? In
a preface to "Wake-Robin," the author says his
readers have sometimes complained that they da
not see the things which he sees in the woods ; but
I doubt if there ever was a reader who suspected
Mr. Burroughs of not seeing the things.
His reply to these complaints is significant,
being in no manner a defense, but an exquisite
explanation, instead, of the difference between the
nature which anybody may see in the woods and
the nature that every individual writer, because he
is a writer, and an individual, must put into his
book : a difference like that between the sweet-
water gathered by the bee from the flowers and
the drop of acid-stung honey deposited by the
bee in the comb. The sweet-water undergoes a
chemical change in being brought to the hive, as
156 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
the wild nature undergoes a literary change —
by the addition of the writer's self to the nature,
while with the sweet-water it is by the addition
of the bee.
One must be able to walk to an editorial office
and back, and all the way walk humbly with his
theme, as Mr. Burroughs ever does — not en-
tirely forgetful of himself, nor of me (because he
has invited me along) ; but I must be quiet and
not disturb the fishing — if we go by way of a
trout-stream.
True to the facts, Mr. Burroughs is a great deal
more than scientific, for he loves the things — the
birds, hills, seasons — as well as the truths about
them; and true to himself, he is not by any means
a simple countryman who has never seen the city,
a natural idyl, who lisps in " Atlantic " essays, be-
cause the essays come. He is fully aware of the
thing he wants to do, and by his own confession
has a due amount of trouble shaping his raw
material into finished literary form. He is quite
in another class from the authors of " The Com-
plete Angler" and "New England's Rarities
Discovered." In Isaak Walton, to quote Leslie
Stephen, " a happy combination of circumstances has
JOHN BURROUGHS 157
provided us with a true country idyl, fresh and
racy from the soil, not consciously constructed by
the most skillful artistic hand."
Now the skillful artistic hand is everywhere
seen in Mr. Burroughs. What writer in these
days could expect happy combinations of cir-
cumstances in sufficient numbers for eleven vol-
umes? Albeit a stone house, in a vineyard by
the Hudson, seems a very happy combination,
indeed !
But being an idyl, when you come to think
of it, is not the result of a happy combination of
circumstances, but rather of stars — of horoscope.
You are born an idyl or you are not, and where
and when you live has nothing to do with it.
\Vho would look for a true country idyl to-
day in the city of Philadelphia ? Yet one came
out of there yesterday, and lies here open before
me, on the table. It is a slender volume, called
" With the Birds, An Affectionate Study," by
Caroline Eliza Hyde. The author is discussing the
general subject of nomenclature and animal dis-
tribution, and says : —
"When the Deluge covered the then known
face of the earth, the birds were drowned with
158 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
every other living thing, except those that Noah,
commanded by God, took two by two into the
Ark.
"When I reflect deeply and earnestly about
the Ark, as every one should, thoughts crowd my
mind with an irresistible force."
[And they crowd my mind, too.]
" Noah and his family had preserved the names
of the birds given them by Adam. This is as-
sured, for Noah sent a raven and a dove out to
see if the waters had abated, and we have birds of
that name now. Nothing was known of our part
of the globe, so these birds must have remained
in the Holy Land for centuries. We do not hear
of them until America was discovered. . . .
"Bats come from Sur. They are very black
mouse-like birds, and disagreeable. . . . The bobo-
link is not mentioned in the Bible, but it is doubt-
less a primitive bird. The cock that crows too
early in the morning . . . can hardly be classed
with the song-birds. The name of the humming-
bird is not mentioned in the Bible, but as there
is nothing new under the sun, he is probably a
primitive bird."
Mr. Burroughs will agree that the humming-
JOHN BURROUGHS 159
bird is probably a primitive bird ; and also that
this is a true idyl, and that he could not write a
true idyl if he tried. No one could write like that
by trying. And what has any happy combination
of circumstances to do with it ? No, a book es-
sentially is only a personality in type, and he who
would not be frustrated of his hope to write a
true idyl must himself be born a true idyl. A
fine Miltonic saying !
Mr. Burroughs is not an idyl, but an essayist,
with a love for books only second to his love for
nature ; a watcher in the woods, a tiller of the soil,
a reader, critic, thinker, poet, whose chief busi-
ness these fifty years has been the interpretation
of the out-of-doors.
Upon him as interpreter and observer, his re-
cent books, " Ways of Nature " and " Leaf and
Tendril," are an interesting comment.
Truth does not always make good literature,
not when it is stranger than fiction, as it often is,
and the writer who sticks to the truth of nature
must sometimes do it at the cost of purely liter-
ary ends. Have I sacrificed truth to literature ?
asks Mr. Burroughs of his books. Have I seen
in nature the things that are there, or the strange
160 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
man-things, the "winged creeping things which
have four feet," and which were an abomination
to the ancient Hebrews, but which the readers
of modern nature-writing do greedily devour —
are these the things I have seen *? And for an
answer he sets about a reexamination of all he
has written, from " Wake-Robin " to " Far and
Near," hoping "that the result of the discussion
or threshing will not be to make the reader love
the animals less, but rather to love the truth
more."
But the result, as embodied in " Ways of Na-
ture" and in "Leaf and Tendril," is quite the
opposite, I fear; for these two volumes are more
scientific in tone than any of his other work; and
it is the mission, not of science, but of literature,
to quicken our love for animals, even for truth.
Science only adds to the truth. Yet here, in
spite of himself, Mr. Burroughs is more the writer,
more the interpreter, than the investigator. He is
constantly forgetting his scientific thesis, as, for
instance, in the account of his neighbor's errant
cow. He succeeds finally, however, in reducing
her fairly well to a mechanical piece of beef act-
ing to vegetable stimuli upon a nerve ganglion
JOHN BURROUGHS 161
located somewhere in the region between her
horns and her tail.
Now, all this is valuable, and the use made of
it is laudable, but would we not rather have the
account than the cow, especially from Mr. Bur-
roughs ? Certainly, because to us it is the account
that he has come to stand for. And so, if we do
not love his scientific animals more, and his sci-
entific findings more, we shall, I think, love all
his other books more ; for we see now that, from
the beginning, he has regarded the facts of na-
ture as the solid substance of his books, to be
kept as free from fancy and from false report, as
his interpretation of them is to be kept free from
all exaggeration and cant.
Here, then, are eleven volumes of honest see-
ing, honest feeling, honest reporting. Such hon-
esty of itself may not make good nature-literature,
but without such honesty there can be no good
nature-literature.
Nature-literature is not less than the truth, but
more ; how much more, Mr. Burroughs himself
suggests to us in a passage about his literary
habits.
" For my part," he says, " I can never inter-
162 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
view nature in the reporter fashion. I must camp
and tramp with her to get any good, and what I
get I absorb through my emotions rather than
consciously gather through my intellect. . . . An
experience must lie in my mind a certain time
before I can put it upon paper — say from three
to six months. If there is anything in it, it will
ripen and mellow by that time. I rarely take
any notes, and I have a very poor memory, but
rely upon the affinity of my mind for a certain
order of truths or observations. What is mine
will stick to me, and what is not will drop off.
We who write about nature pick out, I suspect,
only the rare moments when we have had glimpses
of her, and make much of them. Our lives are
dull, our minds crusted over with rubbish like
those of other people. Then writing about na-
ture, or about most other subjects, is an expansive
process ; we are under the law of evolution ; we
grow the germ into the tree; a little original
observation goes a good way." For " when you
go to nature, bring us good science or else good
literature, and not a mere inventory of what you
have seen. One demonstrates, the other inter-
prets."
JOHN BURROUGHS 163
Careful as Mr. Burroughs has been with his
facts, so careful as often to bring us excellent
science, he yet has left us no inventory of the
out-of-doors. His work is literature ; he is not a
demonstrator, but an interpreter, an expositor
who is true to the text and true to the whole of
the context.
Our pleasure in Mr. Burroughs as an inter-
preter comes as much from his wholesome good
sense, from his balance and sanity, I think, as
from the assurance of his sincerity. Free from
pose and cant and deception, he is free also from
bias and strain. There is something ordinary,
normal, reasonable, companionable, about him;
an even tenor to all his ways, a deliberateness,
naturalness to all his paths, as if they might have
been made originally by the cows. So they were.
If Mr. Burroughs were to start from my door
for a tramp over these small Hingham hills he
would cross the trout-brook by my neighbor's
stone bridge, and nibbling a spear of peppermint
on the way, would follow the lane and the cow-
paths across the pasture. Thoreau would pick
out the deepest hole in the brook and try to
swim across; he would leap the stone walls of
164 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
the lane, cut a bee-line through the pasture, and
drop, for his first look at the landscape, to the
bottom of the pit in the seam-face granite quarry.
Here he would pull out his note-book and a
gnarly wild apple from his pocket, and intensely,
critically, chemically, devouring said apple, make
note in the book that the apples of Eden were
flat, the apples of Sodom bitter, but this wild,
tough, wretched, impossible apple of the Hing-
ham hills united all ambrosial essences in its
striking odor of squash-bugs.
Mr. Burroughs takes us along with him. Tho-
reau comes upon us in the woods — jumps out
at us from behind some bush, with a "Scat!"
Burroughs brings us home in time for tea ; Tho-
reau leaves us tangled up in the briars.
It won't hurt us to be jumped at now and then
and told to " scat /" It won't hurt us to be digged
by the briars. It is good for us, otherwise we
might forget that we are beneath our clothes. It
is good for us and highly diverting, but highly
irritating too.
For my part, when I take up an outdoor
book I am glad if there is quiet in it, and fra-
grance, and something of the saneness and sweet-
JOHN BURROUGHS 165
ness of the sky. Not that I always want sweet
skies. It is ninety-eight degrees in the shade, and
three weeks since there fell a drop of rain. I
could sing like a robin for a sizzling, crackling
thunder-shower — less for the sizzling and crack-
ling than for the shower. Thoreau is a succession
of showers — " tempests " ; his pages are sheet-
lightning, electrifying, purifying, illuminating,
but not altogether conducive to peace. There is
a clear sky to most of Mr. Burroughs's pages, a
rural landscape, wide, gently rolling, with cattle
standing here and there beneath the trees.
Mr. Burroughs's natural history is entirely nat-
ural, his philosophy entirely reasonable, his reli-
gion and ethics very much of the kind we wish
our minister and our neighbor might possess;
and his manner of writing is so unaffected that
we feel we could write in such a manner ourselves.
Only we cannot.
Since the time he can be said to have " led " a
life, Mr. Burroughs has led a literary life; that
is to say, nothing has been allowed to interfere
with his writing; yet the writing has not been
allowed to interfere with a quiet successful busi-
ness, — with his raising of grapes.
i66 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
He has a study and a vineyard.
Not many men ought to live by the pen alone.
A steady diet of inspiration and words is hard
on the literary health. The writing should be
varied with some good wholesome work, actual
hard work for the hands; not so much work,
perhaps, as one would find in an eighteen-acre
vineyard; yet Mr. Burroughs's eighteen acres
have certainly proved no check — rather, indeed,
a stimulus — to his writing. He seems to have
gathered a volume out of every acre ; and he
seems to have put a good acre into every volume.
*' Fresh Fields " is the name of one of the vol-
umes, " Leaf and Tendril " of another ; but the
freshness of his fields, the leaves and the tendrils
of his vineyard, enter into them all. The grapes
of the vineyard are in them also.
Here is a growth of books out of the soil,
books that have been trimmed, trained, sprayed,
and kept free from rot. Such books may not
be altogether according to the public taste; they
will keep, however, until the public acquires a
better taste. Sound, ripe, fresh, early and late,
a full crop ! Has the vineyard anything to do
with it ?
JOHN BURROUGHS 167
It is not every farmer who should go to writ-
ing, nor every writer who should go to farming ;
but there is a mighty waste of academic literature,
of premature, precocious, lily-handed literature,
of chicken-licken literature, because the writers
do not know a spade when they see one, would
not call it a spade if they knew. Those writers
need to do less writing and more farming, more
real work with their soft hands in partnership
with the elemental forces of nature, or in com-
radeship with average elemental men — the only
species extant of the quality to make writing
worth while.
Mr. Burroughs has had this labor, this partner-
ship, this comradeship. His writing is seasoned
and sane. It is ripe, and yet as fresh as green
corn with the dew in the silk. You have eaten
corn on the cob just from the stalk and steamed
in its own husk ? Green corn that is corn, that
has all its milk and sugar and flavor, is corn on
the cob, and in the husk, — is cob and kernel and
husk, — not a stripped ear that is cooked into
the kitchen air.
Literature is too often stripped of its human
husk, and cut from its human cob : the man
i68 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
gone, the writer left; the substance gone, the
style left — corn that tastes as much like corn as
it tastes like puffed rice, — which tastes like no-
thing at all. There is the sweetness of the husk,
the flavor of the cob, the substance of the uncut
corn to Mr. Burroughs.
There is no lack of cob and husk to Thoreau,
of shell and hull, one should say, for he is more
like a green walnut than an ear of green corn.
Thoreau is very human, a whole man ; but he is
almost as much a tree, and a mountain, and a
pond, and a spell of weather, and a state of
morals. He is the author of "Walden," and
nobody else in the world is that ; he is a lover
of nature, as ardent a lover as ever eloped with
her ; he is a lover of men, too, loving them with
an intensity that hates them bag and baggage ;
he is poetical, prophetic, paradoxical, and utterly
impossible.
But he knew it. Born in Concord, under the
transcendental stars, at a time when Delphic say-
ings and philosophy, romance and poetry ran wild
in the gardens where Bouncing-Bet and Way-
ward Charlie now run wild, Thoreau knew that
he was touched, and that all his neighbors were
JOHN BURROUGHS 169
touched, and sought asylum at Walden. But
Walden was not distant enough. If Mr. Bur-
roughs in Roxbury, New York, found it neces-
sary to take to the woods in order to escape from
Emerson, then Thoreau should have gone to
Chicago, or to Xamiltapec.
It is the strain, in Thoreau, that wearies us;
his sweating among the stumps and woodchucks,
for a bean crop netting him eight dollars, seventy-
one and one half cents. But such beans ! Beans
with minds and souls! Yet, for baking, plain
beans are better than these transcendental beans,
because your transcendental beans are always
baked without pork. A family man, however, can-
not contemplate that piddling patch with any pa-
tience, even though he have a taste for literature
as real as his taste for beans. It is better to watch
Mr. Burroughs pruning his grape-vines for a
crop to net him one thousand, three hundred and
twenty-five dollars, and no cents, and no half-
cents. Here are eighteen acres to be cultivated,
whose fruit is to be picked, shipped, and sold in
the New York markets at a profit — a profit
plainly felt in Mr. Burroughs's books.
The most worthy qualities of good writing are
i7o THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
those least noticeable, — negative qualities of hon-
esty, directness, sincerity, euphony; noticeable
only by their absence. Yet in Mr. Burroughs
they amount to a positive charm. Indeed, are
not these same negative qualities the very sub-
stance of good style *? Such style as is had by a
pair of pruning-shears, as is embodied in the ex-
quisite lines of a flying swallow — the style that
is perfect, purposeful adaptability ?
But there is more than efficiency to Mr. Bur-
roughs's style ; there are strengths and graces ex-
isting in and for themselves. Here is a natural-
ist who has studied the art of writing. " What
little merit my style has," he declares, "is the
result of much study and discipline." And whose
style, if it be style at all, is not the result of much
study and discipline. Flourish, fine-writing, wordi-
ness, obscurity, and cant are exorcised in no other
way; and as for the " limpidness, sweetness, fresh-
ness," which Mr. Burroughs says should charac-
terize outdoor writing, and which do characterize
his writing, how else than by study and discipline
shall they be obtained ?
Outdoor literature, no less than other types
of literature, is both form and matter; the two
JOHN BURROUGHS 171
are mutually dependent, inseparably one ; but
the writer is most faithful to the form when he is
most careful of the matter. It makes a vast dif-
ference whether his interest is absorbed by what
he has to say, or by the possible ways he may say
it. If Mr. Burroughs writes in his shirt-sleeves,
as a recent critic says he does, it is because he
goes about his writing as he goes about his vine-
yarding — for grapes, for thoughts, and not to
see how pretty he can make a paragraph look,
or into what fantastic form he can train a vine.
The vine is lovely in itself, — if it bear fruit.
And so is language. Take Mr. Burroughs's man-
ner in any of its moods : its store of single, suffi-
cient words, for instance, especially the homely,
rugged words and idioms, and the flavor they
give, is second to the work they do ; or take his
use of figures — when he speaks of De Quin-
cey's " discursive, roundabout style, herding his
thoughts as a collie dog herds sheep," — and
unexpected, vivid, apt as they are, they are even
more effective. One is often caught up by the
poetry of these essays and borne aloft, but never
on a gale of words ; the lift and sweep are genu-
ine emotion and thought.
172 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
As an essayist, — as a nature-writer I ought to
say, — Mr. Burroughs's literary care is perhaps
nowhere so plainly seen as in the simple archi-
tecture of his essay plans, in their balance and
finish, a quality that distinguishes him from
others of the craft, and that neither gift nor
chance could so invariably supply. The common
fault of outdoor books is the catalogue — raw
data, notes. There are paragraphs of notes in
Mr. Burroughs, volumes of them in Thoreau.
The average nature-writer sees not too much of
nature, but knows all too little of literary values;
he sees everything, gets a meaning out of no-
thing; writes it all down; and gives us what he
sees, which is precisely what everybody may see ;
whereas, we want also what he thinks and feels.
Some of our present writers do nothing but feel
and divine and fathom — the animal psycho-
logists, whatever they are. The bulk of nature-
writing, however, is journalistic, done on the
spot, into a note-book, as were the journals of
Thoreau — fragmentary, yet with Thoreau often
exquisite fragments — bits of old stained glass,
unleaded, and lacking unity and design.
No such fault can be found with Mr. Bur-
JOHN BURROUGHS 173
roughs. He goes pencilless into the woods, and
waits before writing until his return home, until
time has elapsed for the multitudinous details of
the trip to blur and blend, leaving only the dom-
inant facts and impressions for his pen. Every
part of his work is of selected stock, as free from
knots and seams and sap-wood as a piece of old-
growth pine. There is plan, proportion, integrity
to his essays — the naturalist living faithfully up
to a sensitive literary conscience.
Mr. Burroughs is a good but not a great
naturalist, as Audubon and Gray were great
naturalists. His claim (and Audubon's in part)
upon us is literary. He has been a watcher in the
woods ; has made a few pleasant excursions into
the primeval wilderness, leaving his gun at home,
and his camera, too, thank Heaven ! He has
broken out no new trail, discovered no new ani-
mal, no new thing. But he has seen all the old,
uncommon things, has seen them oftener, has
watched them longer, through more seasons, than
any other writer of our out-of-doors ; and though
he has discovered no new thing, yet he has made
discoveries, volumes of them, — contributions
largely to our stock of literature, and to our store
174 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
of love for the earth, and to our joy in living
upon it. He has turned a little of the universe
into literature; has translated a portion of the
earth into human language; has restored to us
our garden here eastward in Eden — apple tree
and all.
For a real taste of fruity literature, try Mr. Bur-
roughs's chapter on "The Apple." Try Tho-
reau's, too, — if you are partial to squash-bugs.
There are chapters in Mr. Burroughs, such as
"Is it going to Rain?" "A River View," "A
Snow-Storm," which seem to me as perfect, in
their way, as anything that has ever been done
— single, simple, beautiful in form, and deeply
significant ; the storm being a piece of fine de-
scription, of whirling snow across a geologic land-
scape, distant, and as dark as eternity ; the whole
wintry picture lighted and warmed at the end by
a glowing touch of human life : —
" We love the sight of the brown and ruddy
earth; it is the color of life, while a snow-covered
plain is the face of death; yet snow is but the
mark of life-giving rain ; it, too, is the friend of
man — the tender, sculpturesque, immaculate,
warming, fertilizing snow."
JOHN BURROUGHS 175
There are many texts in these eleven volumes,
many themes ; and in them all there is one real
message : that this is a good world to live in ;
that these are good men and women to live
with; that life is good, here and now, and alto-
gether worth living.
VII
HUNTING THE SNOW
HUNTING THE SNOW
,HE hunt began at the hen-yard gate,
where we saw tracks in the thin,
new snow that led us up the ridge,
and along its narrow back, to a hol-
low stump. Here the hunt began in
earnest, for not until that trail of close, double,
nail-pointed prints went under the stump were
the three small boys convinced that we were
tracking a skunk and not a cat.
This creature had moved leisurely. That you
could tell by the closeness of the prints. Wide-
apart tracks in the snow mean hurry. Now a cat,
going as slowly as this creature went, would have
put down her dainty feet almost in single line,
and would have left round, cushion-marked holes
in the snow, not triangular, nail-pointed prints
like these. Cats do not venture into holes under
stumps, either.
We had bagged our first quarry ! No, no !
We had not pulled that wood pussy out of his
hole and put him into our game-bag. We did
i8o THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
not want to do that. We really carried no bag;
and if we had, we should not have put the wood
pussy in it, for we were hunting tracks, not the
animals, and " bagging our quarry " meant trail-
ing a creature to its den, or following its track
until we had discovered something it had done,
or what its business was, and why it was out.
We were on the snow for animal facts, not ani-
mal pelts.
We were elated with our luck, for this stump
was not five minutes by the steep ridge path
from the hen-yard. And here, standing on the
stump, we were only sixty minutes away from
Boston Common by the automobile, driving no
faster than the law allows. So we were not hunt-
ing in a wilderness, but just outside our dooryard
and almost within the borders of a great city.
And that is the interesting fact of our morning
hunt. No one but a lover of the woods and a
careful walker on the snow would believe that
here in the midst of hay-fields, in sight of the
smoke of city factories, so many of the original
wild wood-folk still live and travel their night
paths undisturbed.
Still, this is a rather rough bit of country,
HUNTING THE SNOW 181
broken, ledgy, boulder-strewn, which accounts
for the swamps and woody hills that alternate with
small towns and cultivated fields all the way to
the Blue Hill Reservation, fifteen miles to the
westward. This whole region, this dooryard of
Boston, is one of Nature's own reservations, a pre-
serve that she has kept for her small and humble
folk, who are just as dear to her as we are, but
whom we have driven, except in such small
places as these, quite off the earth.
Here, however, they are still at home, as this
hole of the skunk's under the stump proved.
But there was more proof. As we topped the
ridge on the trail of the skunk, we crossed an-
other trail, made up of bunches of four prints, —
two long and broad, two small and roundish, —
spaced about a yard apart.
A hundred times, the winter before, we had
tried that trail in the hope of finding the form or
the burrow of its maker, the great Northern hare,
but it crossed and turned and doubled, and al-
ways led us into a tangle, out of which we never
got a clue.
As this was the first tracking snow of the win-
ter, we were relieved to see the strong prints of
182 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
our cunning neighbor again, for what with the
foxes and the hunters, we were afraid it might
have fared ill with him. But here he was, with
four good legs under him; and after bagging
our skunk, we returned to pick up the hare's
trail, to try our luck once more.
We brought him in long, leisurely leaps down
the ridge, out into our mowing field, and over to
the birches below the house. Here he had capered
about in the snow, had stood up on his haunches
and gnawed the bark from off a green oak sucker
two and a half feet from the ground. This, doubt-
less, was pretty near his length, stretched out — an
interesting item ; not exact to the inch, perhaps,
but close enough for us ; and much more fasci-
nating, guessed at by such a rule, than if measured
dead, with scientific accuracy.
Nor was this all, for up the foot-path through
the birches came the marks of two dogs. They
joined the marks of the hare. And then, back
along the edge of the woods to the bushy ridge,
we saw a pretty race.
It was all in our imaginations, all done for us
by those long-flinging footprints in the snow.
But we saw it all — the white hare, the yelling
HUNTING THE SNOW 183
hounds, nip and tuck, in a burst of speed across
the open field that left a gap in the wind be-
hind.
It had all come as a surprise. The hounds had
climbed the hill on the scent of a fox, and had
"jumped " the hare unexpectedly. But just such
a jump of fear is what a hare's magnificent legs
were intended for.
They carried him a clear twelve feet in some
of the longest leaps for the ridge, and they carried
him to safety, so far as we could read the snow.
In the medley of hare-and-hound tracks on the
ridge there was no sign of a tragedy. He had
escaped again — but how and where we have still
to learn.
We had bagged our hare, — yet still we have
him to bag, — and taking up the trail of one of
the dogs, we continued our hunt.
One of the joys of this snow- walking is having
a definite road or trail blazed for you by know-
ing, purposeful feet. You do not have to blunder
ahead, breaking your way into this wilderness
world, trusting luck to bring you somewhere.
The wild animal or the dog goes this way, and
not that, for a reason. You are following that
184 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
reason all along; you are pack-fellow to the
hound ; you hunt with him.
Here the hound had thrust his muzzle into a
snow-capped pile of slashings, had gone clear
round the pile, then continued on his way. But
we stopped, for out of the pile, in a single, direct
line, ran a number of mice-prints, going and
coming. A dozen white-footed mice might have
traveled that road since the day before, when
the snow had ceased falling.
We entered the tiny road (for in this kind of
hunting a mouse is as good as a mink), and found
ourselves descending the woods toward the gar-
den-patch below. Halfway down we came to a
great red oak, into a hole at the base of which, as
into the portal of some mighty castle, ran the
road of the mice. That was the end of it. There
was not a single straying footprint beyond the
tree.
I reached in as far as my arm would go, and
drew out a fistful of pop-corn cobs. So here was
part of my scanty crop ! I pushed in again, and
gathered up a bunch of chestnut shells, hickory-
nuts, and several neatly rifled hazelnuts. This
was story enough. There was a nest, or family,
HUNTING THE SNOW 185
of mice living under the slashing pile, who for
some good reason kept their stores here in the
recesses of this ancient red oak. Or was this
some squirrel's barn being pilfered by the mice,
as my barn is the year round ? It was not all
plain. But this question, this constant riddle of
the woods, — small, indeed, in the case of the
mouse, and involving no great fate in its solu-
tion, — is part of our constant joy in the woods.
Life is always new, always strange, always fasci-
nating.
It has all been studied and classified accord-
ing to species. Any one knowing the woods at
all would know that these were mice-tracks,
the tracks of the white-footed mouse, even, and
not the tracks of the jumping mouse, the house
mouse, or the meadow mouse. But what is the
whole small story of these prints ? What pur-
pose, intention, feeling do they spell ? What and
why ? — a hundred times !
But the scientific books are dumb. Indeed,
they do not consider such questions worth an-
swering, just as under the species Mus they make
no record of the fact that
The present only toucheth thee.
i86 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
But that is a poem. Burns discovered that —
Burns, the farmer! The woods and fields are
poem-full, and it is largely because we do not
know, and never can know, just all that the tiny
snow-prints of a wood-mouse may mean, nor
understand just what
root and all, and all in all,
the humblest flower is.
The pop-corn cobs, however, were a known
quantity, a tangible fact, and falling in with a
gray squirrel's track not far from the red oak, we
went on, our game-bag heavier, our hearts lighter
at the thought that we, by the sweat of our brow,
had contributed a few ears of corn to the com-
fort of this snowy winter world.
The squirrel's track wound up and down the
hillside, wove in and out and round and round,
hitting every possible tree, as if the only road for
a squirrel was one that looped and doubled and
tied up every stump and zigzagged into every tree
trunk in the woods.
But all this maze was no ordinary journey.
The squirrel had not run this coil of a road for
breakfast, because when he travels, say, for dis-
tant nuts, he goes as directly as you go to your
HUNTING THE SNOW 187
school or office ; but he goes not by streets, but
by trees, never crossing more of the open in a
single rush than the space between him and the
nearest tree that will take him on his way.
What interested us here in the woods was the
fact that a second series of tracks just like the
first, only about half as large, dogged the larger
tracks persistently, leaping tree for tree, and land-
ing track for track with astonishing accuracy —
tracks which, had they not been evidently those
of a smaller squirrel, would have read to us most
menacingly.
As this was the mating season for squirrels,
I suggested that it might have been a kind of
Atalanta's race here in the woods. But why did
so little a squirrel want to marry one so big*?
They would not look well together, was the an-
swer of the small boys. They thought it much
more likely that Father Squirrel had been play-
ing wood-tag with one of his children.
Then, suddenly, as sometimes happens in the
woods, the true meaning of the signs was literally
hurled at us, for down the hill, squealing and pant-
ing, rushed a large male gray squirrel, with a red
squirrel like a shadow, like a weasel, at his heels.
i88 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
For just an instant I thought it was a weasel,
so swift and silent and gliding were its move-
ments, so set and cruel seemed its expression, so
sure, so inevitable its victory.
Whether it ever caught the gray squirrel or
not, and what it would have done had it caught
the big fellow, I do not know. But I have seen
the chase often — the gray squirrel put to the last
extremity with fright and fatigue, the red squirrel
an avenging, inexorable fate behind. They tore
round and round us, then up over the hill, and
disappeared.
One of the rarest prints for most snow-hunters
nowadays, but one of the commonest hereabouts,
is the quick, sharp track of the fox. In the spring
particularly, when my fancy young chickens are
turned out to pasture, I have spells of fearing that
the fox will never be exterminated here in this
untillable but beautiful chicken country. In the
winter, however, when I see Reynard's trail across
my lawn, when I hear the music of the baying
hounds, and catch a glimpse of the white-tipped
brush swinging serenely in advance of the com-
ing pack, I cannot but admire the capable, cun-
ning rascal, cannot but be glad for him, and marvel
HUNTING THE SNOW 189
at him, so resourceful, so superior to his almost
impossible conditions, his almost innumerable
foes.
We started across the meadow on his trail, but
found it leading so straightaway for the ledges,
and so continuously blotted out by the passing
of the pack, that, striking the wallowy path of
a muskrat in the middle of the meadow, we
took up the new scent to see what the shuf-
fling, cowering water-rat wanted from across the
snow.
A man is known by the company he keeps, by
the way he wears his hat, by the manner of his
laugh ; but among the wild animals nothing tells
more of character than their manner of moving.
You can read animal character as easily in the
snow as you can read act and direction.
The timidity, the indecision, the lack of pur-
pose, the restless, meaningless curiosity of this
muskrat were evident from the first in the log-
like, the starting, stopping, returning, going-on
track he had ploughed out in the thin snow.
He did not know where he was going or what
he was going for ; he knew only that he insisted
upon going back, but all the while kept going
190 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
on ; that he wanted to go to the right or to the
left, yet kept moving straight ahead.
We came to a big wallow in the snow, where,
in sudden fear, he had had a fit at the thought of
something that might not have happened to him
had he stayed at home. Every foot of the trail
read, " He would if he could; but if he would n't,
how could he?"
We followed him on, across a dozen other
trails, for it is not every winter night that the
muskrat's feet get the better of his head, and,
willy-nilly, take him abroad. Strange and fatal
weakness ! He goes and cannot stop.
Along the stone wall of the meadow we tracked
him, across the highroad, over our garden, into the
orchard, up the woody hill to the yard, back down
the hill to the orchard, out into the garden, and
back toward the orchard again ; and here, on a
knoll just in the edge of the scanty, skeleton
shadow where the moon fell through the trees, we
lost him.
Two mighty wings had touched the snow lightly
here, and the lumbering trail had vanished as into
the air.
Close and mysterious the silent wings hang
HUNTING THE SNOW 191
poised indoors and out. Laughter and tears are
companions. Comedy begins, but tragedy often
ends the trail. Yet the sum of life indoors and
out is peace, gladness, and fulfillment.
VIII
THE CLAM FARM
THE CLAM FARM:
A CASE OF CONSERVATION
UR hunger for clams and their pre-
sent scarcity have not been the
chief factors in the new national
movement for the conservation of
our natural resources ; nor are the
soaring prices of pork and lumber and wheat
immediate causes, although they have served to
give point and application to the movement.
Ours is still a lavishly rich country. We have
long had a greed for land, but we have not felt
a pang yet of the Old World's land-hunger.
Thousands of acres, the stay for thousands of hu-
man lives, are still lying as waste places on the
very borders of our eastern cities. There is plenty
of land yet, plenty of lumber, plenty of food, but
there is a very great and growing scarcity of
clams.
Of course the clam might vanish utterly from
the earth and be forgotten ; our memory of its
juicy, salty, sea-fat flavor might vanish with it ;
196 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
and we, ignorant of our loss, be none the poorer.
We should live on, — the eyeless fish in the
Mammoth Cave live on, — but life, neverthe-
less, would not be so well worth living. For it
would be flatter, with less of wave-wet freshness
and briny gusto. No kitchen-mixed seasoning
can supply the wild, natural flavors of life ; no
factory-made sensations the joy of being the nor-
mal, elemental, primitive animal that we are.
The clam is one of the natural flavors of life,
and no longer ago than when I was a freshman
was considered one of life's necessities. Part of
the ceremony of my admission to college was a
clambake down the Providence River — such a
clambake as never was down any other river,
and as never shall be again down the Providence
River, unless the Rhode Island clam-diggers take
up their barren flats and begin to grow clams.
This they will do ; our new and general alarm
would assure us of that, even if the Massachu-
setts clam-diggers were not leading the way. But
Rhode Island already has one thriving clam
farm of her own at Rum stick Point along the
Narragansett. The clam shall not perish from our
tidal flats. Gone from long reaches where once it
THE CLAM FARM 197
was abundant, small and scattering in its present
scanty beds, the clam (the long-neck clam) shall
again flourish, and all of New England shall again
rejoice and be glad.
We are beginning, as a nation, while still the
years are fat with plenty, to be troubled lest
those of the future come hungry and lean. Up
to the present time our industrial ethics have
been like our evangelical religion, intensely, nar-
rowly individualistic, — my salvation at all costs.
" Dress-goods, yarns, and tops " has been our in-
dustrial hymn and prayer. And religiously, even
yet, I sing of my own salvation : —
While in this region here below,
No other good will I pursue :
I '11 bid this world of noise and show,
With all its glittering snares, adieu ;
A most un-Christian sentiment truly, and all too
common in both religion and business, yet far from
representing, to-day, the guiding spirit of either
business or religion. For the growing conception
of human brotherhood is mightily expanding our
narrow religious selfishness ; and the dawning re-
velation of industrial solidarity is not only mak-
ing men careful for the present prosperity of the
i98 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
ends of the earth, but is making them concerned
also for the future prosperity of the Farther-Off.
Priests and prophets we have had heretofore.
"Woodman, woodman, spare that tree," they
have wailed. And the flying chips were the
woodman's swift response. The woodman has
not heard the poet's prayer. But he is hearing
the American public's command to let the sap-
ling alone ; and he is beginning to heed. It is a
new appeal, this for the sapling; there is sound
scientific sense in it, and good business sense, too.
We shall save our forests, our watersheds, and
rivers ; we shall conserve for time to come our
ores and rich deposits ; we shall reclaim the last
of our western deserts, adopt the most forlorn of
our eastern farms ; we shall herd our whales of
the Atlantic, our seals of the Pacific, number and
multiply our truant schools of mackerel that
range the waters of the sea ; just as we shall re-
stock with clams the waste, sandy shores of the
sea, shores which in the days of Massasoit were
as fruitful as Eden, but which through years of
digging and no planting have become as barren
as the bloodless sands of the Sahara.
It is a solemn saying that one will reap, in the
THE CLAM FARM 199
course of time, what one sows — even clams if
one sows clams ; but it is a more solemn saying
that one shall cease to reap, after a time, and for
all eternity, what one has not sown — even clams
out of the exhausted flats of the New England
coast, and the sandy shores of her rivers that run
brackish to the sea.
Hitherto we have reaped where we have not
sown, and gathered where we have not strawed.
But that was during the days of our industrial
pilgrimage. Now our way no longer threads the
wilderness, where manna and quails and clams
are to be had fresh for the gathering. Only bar-
berries, in my half-wild uplands, are to be had
nowadays for the gathering. There are still enough
barberries to go round without planting or tres-
passing, for the simple, serious reason that the
barberries do not carry their sugar on their
bushes with them, as the clams carry their salt.
The Sugar Trust carries the barberries' sugar.
But soon or late every member of that trust shall
leave his bag of sweet outside the gate of Eden or
the Tombs. Let him hasten to drop it now, lest
once inside he find no manner of fruit, for his
eternal feeding, but barberries !
200 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
We have not sown the clam hitherto: we
have only digged ; so that now, for all practical
purposes, that is to say, for the old-time, twenty-
five-cent, rock-weed clambake, the native, un-
cultivated clam has had its day; as the unenter-
prising, unbelieving clammers themselves are
beginning to see.
The Providence River fishermen are seeking
distant flats for the matchless Providence River
clams, bringing them overland from afar by train.
So, too, in Massachusetts, the distinguished Dux-
bury clams come out of flats that reach all the
way from the mouth of the St. Johns, on the
down-east coast, to the beds of the Chesapeake.
And this, while eight hundred acres of superb
clam-lands lie barren in Duxbury town, which
might be producing yearly, for the joy of man,
eighty thousand bushels of real Duxbury clams !
What a clambake Duxbury does not have
each year! A multitude of twice eighty thousand
might sit down about the steaming stones and be
filled. The thought undoes one. And all the more,
that Duxbury does not hunger thus alone. For this
is the story of fifty other towns in Massachu-
setts, from Salisbury down around the Cape to
THE CLAM FARM 201
Dighton — a tale with a minus total of over two
million bushels of clams, and an annual minus
of nearly two millions of dollars to the clammers.
Nor is this the story of Massachusetts alone,
nor of the tide-flats alone. It is the story of the
whole of New England, inland as well as coast.
The New England farm was cleared, worked,
exhausted, and abandoned. The farmer was as
exhausted as his farm, and preferring the hazard
of new fortunes to the certain tragedy of the old,
went West. But that tale is told. The tide from
New England to the West is at slack ebb. There
is still a stream flowing out into the extreme
West ; rising in the Middle Western States, how-
ever, not in the East. The present New England
farmers are staying on their farms, except where
the city buyer wants an abandoned farm, and in-
sists upon its being abandoned at any price. So
will the clammer stay on his shore acres, for his
clams shall no more run out, causing him to turn
cod-fisher, or cranberry-picker, or to make worse
shift. The New England clam-digger of to-day
shall be a clam-farmer a dozen years hence ; and
his exhausted acres along shore, planted, culti-
vated, and protected by law, shall yield him a
202 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
good living. A living for him and clams for us ;
and not the long-neck clams of the Providence
River and Duxbury flats only : they shall yield
also the little-neck clams and the quahaug, the
scallop, too, the oyster, and, from farther offshore,
the green-clawed lobster in abundance, and of a
length the law allows.
Our children's children may run short of coal
and kerosene; but they need never want for
clams. We are going to try to save them some
coal, for there are mighty bins of it still in the
earth, while here, besides, are the peat-bogs —
bunkers of fuel beyond the fires of our imagin-
ations to burn up. We may, who knows? save
them a little kerosene. No one has measured the
capacity of the tank; it has been tapped only
here and there ; the plant that manufactured it,
moreover, is still in operation, and is doubtless
making more. But whether so or not, we still
may trust in future oil, for the saving spirit of
our new movement watches the pipes that carry
it to our cans. There is no brand of economy
known to us at present that is more assuring than
our kerosene economy. The Standard Oil Com-
pany, begotten by Destiny, it would seem, as dis-
THE CLAM FARM 203
tributor of oil, is not one to burn even its paraf-
fine candles at both ends. There was, perhaps, a
wise and beneficent Providence in its organiza-
tion, that we might have five gallons for fifty-five
cents for our children's sake — a price to preserve
the precious fluid for the lamps of coming gen-
erations.
But should the coal and kerosene give out,
the clam, I say, need not. The making of Frank-
lin coal and Standard Oil, like the making of
perfect human character, may be a process re-
quiring all eternity, — longer than we can wait,
— so that the present deposits may some time
fail ; whereas the clam comes to perfection within
a summer or two. The coal is a dead deposit;
the clam is like the herb, yielding seed, and the
fruit tree, yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed
is in itself upon the earth. All that the clam re-
quires for an endless and an abundant existence
is planting and protection, is — conservation.
Except for my doubts about a real North Pole,
my wrath at the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, my dread-
ful fears at the vast smallness of our navy (I
have a Japanese student in a class of mine !),
" and one thing more that may not be " (which,
204 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
probably, is the " woman question " or the round-
ness of the " Square Deal ") — except, I say, for
a few of such things, I were wholly glad that my
lines have fallen unto me in these days, when
there are so many long-distant movements on
foot ; glad though I can only sit at the roadside
and watch the show go by. I can applaud from
the roadside. I can watch and dream. To this
procession of Conservators, however (and to the
anti-tariff crowd), I shall join myself, shall take a
hand in saving things by helping to bury every
high protectionist and planting a willow sapling
on his grave, or by sowing a few " spats " in a gar-
den of clams. For here in the opposite direction
moves another procession, an endless, countless
number that go tramping away toward the desert
Future without a bag of needments at their backs,
without a staff to stay them in their hands.
The day of the abandoned farm is past; the
time of the adopted, of the adapted, farm has
come. We are not going to abandon anything
any more, because we are not going to work any-
thing to death any more. We shall not abandon
even the empty coal mines hereafter, but turn
them into mushroom cellars, or to uses yet un-
THE CLAM FARM 205
dreamed. We have found a way to utilize the
arid land of the West — a hundred and fifty
thousand acres of it at a single stroke, as Presi-
dent Taft turns the waters of the Gunnison River
from their ancient channel into a man-made tun-
nel, and sends them spreading out
Here and there,
Everywhere,
Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-
lying lanes,
And the desert is meshed with a million veins, —
in order that it might be fulfilled, which was
spoken by the prophet, saying, " The wilderness
and the solitary place shall be glad for them;
and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the
rose."
We are utilizing these arid lands, reclaiming
the desert for a garden, with an effort of hands
and a daring of soul, that fall hardly short of the
original creative work which made the world —
as if the divine fiat had been : " In our image,
to have dominion ; to subdue the earth ; and to
finish the work we leave undone." And while we
are finishing these acres and planting them with
fruit at so lavish a cost, shall we continue stupidly
206 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
and criminally to rob, despoil, and leave for dead
these eleven thousand acres of natural clam gar-
den on the Massachusetts coast *? If a vast ir-
rigating work is the divine in man, by the same
token are the barren mountain slopes, the polluted
and shrunken rivers, the ravished and abandoned
plough-lands, and these lifeless flats of the shore
the devils in him — here where no reclaiming is
necessary, where the rain cometh down from
heaven, and twice a day the tides flow in from the
hills of the sea !
There are none of us here along the Atlantic
coast who do not think with joy of that two-hun-
dred-and-fifty-thousand-acre garden new-made
yonder in the distant West. It means more, and
cheaper, and still fairer fruit for us of the East ;
more musk-melons, too, we hope; but we know
that it cannot mean more clams. Yet the clam,
also, is good. Man cannot live on irrigated fruit
alone. He craves clams — clams as juicy as a
Redlands Bartlett, but fresh with the salty savor
of wind-blown spray.
And he shall have them, for the clam farm —
the restocked, restored flat of earlier times — has
passed the stage of theory and experiment, being
THE CLAM FARM 207
now in operation on the New England shore, a
producing and very paying property.
The clam farm is not strictly a new venture,
however, but up to the present it has been a
failure, because, in the first place, the times were
not ripe for it; the public mind lacked the neces-
sary education. Even yet the state, and the local
town authorities, give the clam-farmer no protec-
tion. He can obtain the state's written grant to
plant the land to clams, but he can get no legal
protection against his neighbor's digging the
clams he plants. And the farm has failed, because,
in the second place, the clam-farmer has lacked
the necessary energy and imagination. A man
who for years has made his bread and butter and
rubber boots out of land belonging to everybody
and to nobody, by simply digging in it, is the last
man to build a fence about a piece of land and
work it. Digging is only half as hard as " work-
ing"; besides, in promiscuous digging one is
getting clams that one's neighbor might have got,
and there is something better than mere clams in
that.
But who will plant and wait for a crop that
anybody, when one's back is turned, and, indeed,
208 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
when one's back is n't turned, can harvest as his
own"? Yet this the fishing laws of Massachusetts
still allow. Twenty years ago, in 1889, grants
were made for clam farms in and around the town
of Essex, but no legal rights were given with
the grants. Any native of Essex, by these old
barnacled laws, is free to help himself to clams
from any town flat. Of course the farm failed.
Meantime the cry for clams has grown louder ;
the specialists in the new national college of con-
servators have been studying the subject ; " ex-
tension courses," inter-flat conventions, and lab-
oratory demonstrations have been had up and
down the coast; and as a result, the clam farm in
Essex, since the reissue of the grants in 1906, has
been put upon a hopeful, upon a safe and paying
basis.
It is an interesting example of education, — a
local public sentiment refined into an actual, de-
pendable public conscience ; in this case largely
through the efforts of a state's Fish and Game
Commission, whose biologists, working with the
accuracy, patience, and disinterestedness of the
scientist, and with the practical good sense of
the farmer, made their trial clam gardens pay,
THE CLAM FARM 209
demonstrating convincingly that a clam-flat will
respond to scientific care as readily and as profit-
ably as a Danvers onion-bed or the cantaloupe
fields at Rocky Ford.
This must be the direction of the new move-
ment for the saving of our natural resources —
this roundabout road of education. Few laws can
be enacted, fewer still enforced, without the help
of an awakened public conscience; and a pub-
lic conscience, for legislative purposes, is nothing
more than a thorough understanding of the facts.
As a nation, we need a popular and a thorough
education in ornithology, entomology, forestry,
and farming, and in the science and morality
of corporation rights in public lands. We want
sectionally, by belts or states, a scientific training
for our specialty, as the shell-fish farmer of the
Massachusetts coast is being scientifically trained
in clams. These state biologists have brought the
clam men from the ends of the shore together;
they have plotted and mapped the mollusk terri-
tory ; they have made a science of clam-culture ;
they have made an industry of clam-digging; and
to the clam-digger they are giving dignity and a
sense of security that make him respect himself
210 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
and his neighbor's clams — this last item being a
most important change in the clam-farm outlook.
With so much done, the next work — framing
new laws to take the place of the old fishing laws
— should be a simple matter. Such a procedure
will be slow, yet it is still the only logical and
effective one. Let the clam-digger know that he
can raise clams; let New England know that
the forests on her mountains must be saved, and
within a twelvemonth the necessary bills would
be passed. So with the birds, the fish, the coal
of Alaska, and every other asset of our national
wealth. The nation-wide work of this saving
movement will first be educative, even by way
of scandals in the Cabinet. We shall hasten very
slowly to Congress and the legislatures with our
laws. The clam-flat is typical of all our multitu-
dinous wealth ; the clam-digger is typical of all of
us who cut, or mine, or reap, or take our livings,
in any way, directly from the hands of Nature ;
and the lesson of the clam farm will apply the
country over.
We have been a nation of wasters, spoiled and
made prodigal by over-easy riches ; we have de-
manded our inheritance all at once, spent it, and
THE CLAM FARM 211
as a result we are already beginning to want —
at least for clams. At this moment there are not
enough clams to go round, so that the market-
man sticks the end of a rubber hose into his tub
of dark, salty, fresh-shucked clams, and soaks
them ; soaks them with fresh water out of rusty
iron pipes, soaks them, and swells them, whitens
them, bloats them, sells them — ghastly corpses,
husks, that we would fain fill our soup-bowls
with; for we are hungry, and must be fed, and
there are not enough of the unsoaked clams for
a bowl around.
But there shall be. With the coming of the
clam farm there shall be clams enough, and oysters
and scallops ; for the whole mollusk industry, in
every flat and bar and cove of the country, shall
take to itself a new interest, and vastly larger pro-
portions. Then shall a measure of scallops be sold
for a quarter, and two measures of clams for a
quarter, and nothing, any more, be soaked.
For there is nothing difficult about growing
clams, nothing half so difficult and expensive as
growing corn or cabbage. In fact, the clam farm
offers most remarkable opportunities, although the
bid, it must be confessed, is pretty plainly to one's
212 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
love of ease and one's willing dependence. To be-
gin with, the clam farm is self- working, ploughed,
harrowed, rolled, and fertilized by the tides of the
sea; the farmer only sowing the seed and digging
the crop. Sometimes even the seed is sown for
him by the hands of the tide ; but only on those
flats that lie close to some natural breeding-bar,
where the currents, gathering up the tiny floating
"spats," and carrying them swiftly on the flood,
broadcast them over the sand as the tide recedes.
While this cannot happen generally, still the
clam-farmer has a second distinct advantage in
having his seed, if not actually sown for him, at
least grown, and caught for him on these natural
breeding-bars, in such quantities that he need only
sweep it up and cradle it, as he might winnow
grain from a threshing floor. In Plum Island
Sound there is such a bar, where it seems that
Nature, in expectation of the coming clam farm,
had arranged the soil of the bar and the tidal cur-
rents for a natural set of clam-spats to supply the
entire state with its yearly stock of seed.
With all of this there is little of romance about
a clam farm, and nothing at all spectacular about
its financial returns. For clams are clams, whereas
THE CLAM FARM 213
cobalt and rubber and wheat, and even squabs
and ginseng roots, are different, — according to
the advertisements. The inducements of the clam
farm are not sufficient to cause the prosperous
Middle-West farmer to sell out and come East,
as he has been selling out and going on to the
farther West, for its larger, cheaper farms, and
bigger crops. Farming, mining, lumbering, what-
ever we have had to do, in fact, directly with Na-
ture, has been for us, thus far, a speculation and a
gamble. Earnings have been out of all proportion
to investments, excessive, abnormal. We do not
earn, we strike it rich ; and we have struck it rich
so long in this vast rich land, that the strike has
lost its element of luck, being now the expected
thing, which, failing to happen, we sell out and
move on to the farthest West, where there is still
a land of chance. But that land is passing, and
with it is passing the lucky strike. The day is
approaching when a man will pay for a western
farm what he now pays for an eastern farm — the
actual market value, based upon what the land,
in expert hands, can be made yearly to yield.
Values will rise to an even, normal level; earn-
ings will settle to the same level; and the clam
214 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
farm of the coast and the stock farm of the prairie
will yield alike — a living; and if, when that day
comes, there is no more "Promised Land" for
the American, it will be because we have crossed
over, and possessed the land, and divided it among
us for an inheritance.
When life shall mean a living, and not a
dress-parade, or an automobile, or a flying-ma-
chine, then the clam farm, with its two or three
acres of flats, will be farm enough, and its aver-
age maximum yield, of four hundred and fifty
dollars an acre, will be profits enough. For the
clammer's outfit is simple, — a small boat, two
clam-diggers, four clam-baskets, and his hip-
boots, the total costing thirty dollars.
The old milk farm here under the hill below
me, with its tumbling barn and its ninety acres
of desolation, was sold not long ago for six thou-
sand dollars. The milkman will make more
money than the clam man, but he will have no
more. The milk farm is a larger undertaking,
calling for a larger type of man, and developing
larger qualities of soul, perhaps, than could ever
be dug up with a piddling clam-hoe out of the
soft sea-fattened flats. But that is a question of
THE CLAM FARM 215
men, not of farms. We must have clams ; some-
body must dig clams ; and matters of the spirit
all aside, reckoned simply as a small business,
clam-farming offers a sure living, a free, inde-
pendent, healthful, outdoor living — and hence
an ample living — to thousands of men who may
lack the capital, or the capabilities, or, indeed,
the time for the larger undertakings. And viewed
as the least part of the coming shell-fish industry,
and this in turn as a smallest part of the coming
national industry, due to our reclaiming, restock-
ing, and conserving, and wise leasing, the clam
farm becomes a type, a promise ; it becomes the
shore of a new country, a larger, richer, longer-
lasting country than our pioneer fathers found
here.
For behold the clam crop how it grows ! —
precisely like any other crop, in the summer, or
more exactly, from about the first of May to the
first of December ; and the growth is very rapid,
a seed-clam an inch long at the May planting,
developing in some localities (as in the Essex
and Ipswich rivers) into a marketable clam, three
inches long by December. This is an increase
in volume of about nine hundred per cent. The
216 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
little spats, scattered broadcast over the flat, bur-
row with the first tide into the sand, where with
each returning tide they open their mouths, like
young birds, for their meal of diatoms brought
in by the never-failing sea. Thus they feed twice
a day, with never too much water, with never a
fear of drouth, until they are grown fat for the
clammer's basket.
If, heretofore, John Burroughs among the un-
certainties of his vineyard could sing, —
Serene, I fold my hands and wait, —
surely now the clammer in his cottage by the sea
can sing, and all of us with him, —
The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave comes to the sea ;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
Can keep my own away from me.
IX
THE COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING
THE COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING
,HE cottages are closed; the summer
people have gone back to the city;
only the farmers and the commu-
ters— barnacled folk — remain as
the summer tide recedes, fixed to
the rocks of winter because they have grown fast.
To live is to have two houses: a country house
for the summer, a city house for the winter; to
close one, and open the other ; to change, to flit !
How different it used to be when I was a boy
— away yonder in the days of farms and old-
fashioned homes and old-time winters! Things
were prepared for, were made something of,
and enjoyed in those days — the " quiltings," the
"raisings," the Thanksgivings! What getting
ready there used to be — especially for the win-
ter ! for what was n't there to get ready ! and how
much of everything to get ready there used to be !
It began along in late October, continuing with
more speed as the days shortened and hurried us
into November. It must all be done by Thanks-
220 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
giving Day — everything brought in, everything
housed and battened down tight. The gray low-
ering clouds, the cold snap, the first flurry of
snow, how they hastened and heartened the work !
Thanksgiving found us ready for winter, indoors
and out.
The hay-mows were full to the beams where
the swallows built; the north and west sides of
the barnyard were flanked with a deep wind-break
of corn-fodder that ran on down the old worm-
fence each side of the lane in yellow zigzag walls ;
the big wooden pump under the turn-o'-lane tree
by the barn was bundled up and buttoned to
the tip of its dripping nose ; the bees by the cur-
rant bushes were double-hived, the strawberries
mulched, the wood all split and piled, the cellar
windows packed, and the storm-doors put on.
The very cows had put on an extra coat, and
turned their collars up about their ears ; the tur-
keys had changed their roost from the ridge-pole
of the corn-crib to the pearmain tree on the sunny
side of the wagon-house ; the squirrels had fin-
ished their bulky nests in the oaks ; the muskrats
of the lower pasture had completed their lodges;
the whole farm — house, barn, fields, and wood-
COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 221
lot — had shuffled into its greatcoat, its muffler
and muffetees, and settled comfortably down for
the winter.
The old farmhouse was an invitation to winter.
It looked its joy at the prospect of the coming cold.
Low, weather-worn, mossy-shingled, secluded in
its wayward garden of box and bleeding-hearts,
sheltered by its tall pines, grape-vined, hop-vined,
clung to by creeper and honeysuckle, it stood
where the roads divided, halfway between every-
where, unpainted, unpretentious, as much a part
of the landscape as the muskrat-lodge; and, like
the lodge, roomy, warm, and hospitable.
Round at the back, under the wide, open shed,
a door led into the kitchen, another led into the
living-room, another into the storeroom, and two
big, slanting double-doors, scoured and slippery
with four generations of sliders, covered the cav-
ernous way into the cellar. But they let the smell
of apples up, as the garret door let the smell of
sage and thyme come down; while from the
door of the storeroom, mingling with the odor of
apples and herbs, filling the whole house and
all my early memories, came the smell of broom-
corn, came the sound of grandfather's loom.
222 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
Behind the stove in the kitchen, fresh-papered
like the walls, stood the sweet-potato box (a sweet
potato must be kept dry and wafm), an ample,
ten-barrel box, full of Jersey sweets that were
sweet, — long, golden, syrupy potatoes, grown
in the warm sandy soil of the "Jethro Piece."
Against the box stood the sea-chest, fresh with
the same paper and piled with wood. There was
another such chest in the living-room near the
old fireplace, and still another in grandfather's
work-room behind the "tern-plate" stove.
But wood and warmth and sweet smells were
not all. There was music also, the music of life,
of young life and of old life — grandparents,
grandchildren (about twenty-eight of the latter).
There were seven of us alone — a girl at each
end of the seven and one in the middle, which is
Heaven's own mystic number and divine arrange-
ment. Thanksgiving always found us all at grand-
father's and brimming full of thanks.
That, of course, was long, long ago. Things
are different nowadays. There are as many grand-
fathers, I suppose, as ever; but they don't make
brooms in the winter any more, and live on farms.
They live in flats. The old farm with its open
COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 223
acres has become a city street ; the generous old
farmhouse has become a speaking-tube, kitchen-
ette and bath — all the " modern conveniences " ;
the cows have evaporated into convenient cans of
condensed " milk " ; the ten-barrel box of potatoes
has changed into a convenient ten-pound bag, the
wood-pile into a convenient five-cent bundle of
blocks tied up with a tarred string, the fireplace
into a convenient moss-and-flame-painted gas-log,
the seven children into one, or none, or into a
convenient bull-terrier pup. Still, we may give
thanks, for convenient as life has become to-day,
it has not yet all gone to the dogs.
It is true, however, that there might be fewer
dogs and more children, possibly ; fewer flats and
more farms ; less canned milk (or whatever the
paste is) and more real cream. Surely we might
buy less and raise more, hire less and make more,
travel less and see more, hear less and think more.
Life might be quieter for some of us ; profounder,
perhaps, for others of us, — more inconvenient
indeed, for all of us, and yet a thing to be thank-
ful for.
It might, but most of us doubt it. It is not for
the things we possess, but only for the things we
224 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
have not, for the things we are relieved of, the
things we escape, — for our conveniences, — that
we are thankful nowadays. Life is summed up
with us in negations. We tally our conveniences
only, quick-detachable-tired, six-cylindered, sev-
enty-horse-powered conveniences. To construct
eighteen-million dollars' worth of destruction in
the shape of a gunboat ! to lay out a beautiful
road and then build a machine to " eat it " ! to
be allotted a span of time and study how to an-
nihilate it ! O Lord, we thank Thee that we have
all the modern conveniences, from cucumbers at
Christmas to a Celestial Creche ! Heaven is such a
nice, fit, convenient place for our unborn children !
God is their home. The angels take such gentle
care of them ! Besides, they are not so in the way
there ; and, if need be, we have the charity chil-
dren and other people's children ; or we have the
darling little sweet-faced bull-terrier pup.
For myself, I have never had a little cherub-
faced bull-pup, but at this present writing I am
helping to bring up our fourth baby, and I think
I see the convenience of the pup. And I am only
the father of the baby at that !
To begin with, you can buy a pup. You can
COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 225
send the stable-man after it. But not a baby. Not
even the doctor can fetch it. The mother must go
herself after her baby — to Heaven it may be ;
but she will carry it all the way through Hell be-
fore she brings it to the earth, this earth of sunlit
fields and stormy skies, so evidently designed to
make men of babies. A long perilous journey
this, across a whole social season.
Certainly the little dog is a great convenience,
and as certainly he is a great negation, — the sub-
stitution, as with most conveniences, of a thing
for a self.
Our birth may be a sleep and a forgetting,
but life immediately after is largely an inconven-
ience. That is the meaning of an infant's first
strangling wail. He is protesting against the in-
convenience of breathing. Breathing is an incon-
venience ; eating is an inconvenience ; sleeping is
an inconvenience ; praying is an inconvenience ;
but they are part and parcel of life, and nothing
has been done yet to relieve the situation, except
in the item of prayer. From prayer, and from a
multitude of other inconveniences, not mentioned
above, that round out life (death excepted), we
have found ways of escape — by borrowing, rent-
226 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
ing, hiring, avoiding, denying, until life, which is
the sum of all inconveniences, has been reduced
to its infantile nothingness — the protest against
the personal effort of breathing which is exist-
ence.
Not so for the Commuter. He is compelled
to live. I have been reckoning up my incon-
veniences: the things that I possess; the things
I have that are mine ; not rented, borrowed, hired,
avoided, but claimed, performed, made, owned;
that I am burdened with, responsible for ; that re-
quire my time and my hands. And I find that, for
a fairly full life there are inconveniences enough
incidental to commuting.
To begin with, there is the place of the Com-
muter's home. Home? Yes, no doubt, he has a
home, but where is it*? Can Heaven, besides the
Commuter, find out the way there ?
You are standing with your question at the en-
trance of the great terminal station as the wintry
day and the city are closing, and it is small won-
der that you ask if God knows whither, over the
maze of tracks reaching out into the night, each
of this commuting multitude is going. But folio"'
one, any one of the bundled throng — this one,
COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 227
this tired, fine-faced Scotchman of fifty years
whom we chanced to see during the day selling
silks behind the counter of a department store.
It is a chill November evening, with the mea-
gre twilight already spent. Our Commuter has
boarded a train for a nineteen-mile ride ; then an
electric car for five miles more, when he gets off,
under a lone electric light, swinging amid the
skeleton limbs of forest trees. We follow him,
now on foot, down a road dark with night and
overhanging pines, on past a light in a barn, and
on — when a dog barks, a horse whinnies, a lan-
tern flares suddenly into the road and comes pat-
tering down at us, calling, "Father! father!"
We stop at the gate as father and daughter en-
ter the glowing kitchen. A moment later we hear
a cheerful voice greeting the horse, and then, had
we gone closer to the barn, we might have heard
the creamy tinkle of milk, spattering warm into
the bottom of the tin pail.
Heaven knew whither, over the reaching rails,
this tired seller of silks was going. Heaven was
there awaiting him. The yard-stick was laid down
at half-past five o'clock ; at half-past six by the
clock the Commuter was far away, farther than
228 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
the other side of the world, in his own small barn
where they neither sell silk nor buy it, but where
they have a loft full of fragrant meadow hay, and
keep a cow, and eat their oatmeal porridge with
cream.
It is an inconvenient world, this distant, dark-
ened, unmapped country of the Commuter. Only
God and the Commuter know how to get there,
and they alone know why they stay. But there
are reasons, good and sufficient reasons — there
are inconveniences, I should say, many and com-
pelling inconveniences, such as wife and children,
miles in, miles out, the isolation, the chores, the
bundles — loads of bundles — that keep the Com-
muter commuting. Once a commuter, always a
commuter, because there is no place along the
road, either way, where he can put his bundles
down.
Bundles, and miles in, and miles out, and iso-
lation, and children, and chores'? I will count
them all.
The bundles I have carried ! And the bundles
I have yet to carry ! to "tote" ! to "tote " ! But
is it all of life to be free from bundles'? How, in-
deed, may one so surely know that one has a hold
COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 229
upon life as when one has it done into a bundle ?
Life is never so tangible, never so compact and
satisfactory as while still wrapped up and tied
with a string. One's clothes, to take a single ex-
ample, as one bears them home in a box, are an
anticipation and a pure joy — the very clothes
that, the next day, one wears as a matter of course,
or wears with disconcerting self-consciousness, or
wears, it may be, with physical pain.
Here are the Commuter's weary miles. Life to
everybody is a good deal of a journey ; to nobody
so little of a journey, however, as to the Com-
muter, for his traveling is always bringing him
home.
And as to his isolation and his chores it is just
the same, because they really have no separate
existence save in the urban mind, as hydrogen
and oxygen have no separate existence save in
the corked flasks of the laboratory. These gases
are found side by side nowhere in nature. Only
water is to be found free in the clouds and springs
and seas — only the union of hydrogen and oxy-
gen, because it is part of the being of these two
elements to combine. So is it the nature of chores
and isolation to combine — into water, like hydro-
230 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
gen and oxygen, into a well of water, springing
up everlastingly to the health, the contentment,
and to the self-sufficiency of the Commuter.
At the end of the Commuter's evening journey,
where he lays his bundles down, is home, which
means a house, not a latch-key and " rooms " ; a
house, I say, not a "floor," but a house that has
foundations and a roof, that has an outside as well
as inside, that has shape, character, personality,
for the reason that the Commuter and not a Com-
munity, lives there. Flats, tenements, " chambers,"
" apartments " — what are they but public build-
ings, just as inns and hospitals and baths are,
where you pay for your room and ice-water, or for
your cot in the ward, as the case may be ? And
what are they but unmistakable signs of a rever-
sion to earlier tribal conditions, when not only the
cave was shared in common, but the wives and chil-
dren and the day's kill ? The differences between
an ancient cliff-house and a modern flat are mere
details of construction ; life in the two would have
to be essentially the same, with odds, particularly
as to rooms and prospect, in favor of the cliff-
dweller.
The least of the troubles of flatting is the flat ;
COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 231
the greatest is the shaping of life to fit the flat,
conforming, and sharing one's personality, losing
it indeed! I'll commute first! The only thing
I possess that distinguishes me from a factory
shoe-last or an angel of heaven is my personality.
Shoe-lasts are known by sizes and styles, angels
by ranks ; but a man is known by what he is n't,
and by what he has n't, in common with anybody
else.
One must commute, if one would live in a
house, and have a home of one's own, and a per-
sonality of one's own, provided, of course, that
one works in New York City or in Boston or
Chicago; and provided, further, that one is as
poor as one ought to be. And most city workers
are as poor as they ought to be — as poor, in
other words, as I am.
Poor ! Where is the man rich enough to buy
Central Park or Boston Common ? For that he
must needs do who would make a city home with
anything like my dooryard and sky and quiet.
A whole house, after all, is only the beginning of
a home ; the rest of it is dooryard and situation.
A house is for the body ; a home for body and
soul; and the soul needs as much room outside
232 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
as inside the house, — needs a garden and some
domestic animal and the starry vault of the
sky.
It is better to be cramped for room within the
house than without. Yet the yard need not be
large, certainly not a farm, nor a gentleman's es-
tate, nor fourteen acres of woodchucks, such as
my own. Neither can it be, for the Commuter,
something abandoned in the remote foothills, nor
something wanton, like a brazen piece of sea-sand
"at the beach."
The yard may vary in size, but it must be of
soil, clothed upon with grass, with a bush or a
tree in it, a garden, and some animal, even if the
tree has to grow in the garden and the animal
has to be kept in the tree, as with one of my
neighbors, who is forced to keep his bees in his
single weeping willow, his yard not being large
enough for his house and his hive. A bee needs
considerable room.
And the soul of the Commuter needs room, —
craves it, — but not mere acres, nor plentitude
of things. I have fourteen acres, and they are too
many. Eight of them are in woods and gypsy
moths. Besides, at this writing, I have one cow,
COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 233
one yearling heifer, one lovely calf, with nature
conspiring to get me a herd of cows ; I have also
ten colonies of bees, which are more than any
Commuter needs, even if they never swarmed;
nor does he need so many coming cows.
But with only one cow, and only one colony
of bees, and only one acre of yard, still how im-
possibly inconvenient the life of the Commuter
is ! A cow is truly an inconvenience if you care
for her yourself — an inherent, constitutional, un-
exceptional inconvenience are cows and wives if
you care for them yourself. A hive of bees is an
inconvenience ; a house of your own is an incon-
venience, and, according to the figures of many
of my business friends, an unwarranted luxury.
It is cheaper to rent, they find. " Why not keep
your money in your business, where you can turn
it ? " they argue. " Real estate is a poor invest-
ment generally, — so hard to sell, when you want
to, without a sacrifice."
It is all too true. The house, the cow, the
children, are all inconvenient. I can buy two
quarts of blue Holstein milk of a milkman,
typhoid and scarlet-fever germs included, with
much less inconvenience than I can make my
s34 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
yellow-skinned Jersey give down her fourteen
quarts a day. I can live in a rented house with
less inconvenience than in this house of my own.
I am always free to go away from a rented house,
and I am always glad to go. The joy of renting
is to move, or sublet; to be rid also of taxes and
repairs.
" Let the risers rot ! It is n't my house, and if I
break my neck I '11 sue for damages ! "
There is your renter, and the joy he gets in
renting.
There are advantages, certainly, in renting;
your children, for instance, can each be born in a
different house, if you rent; and if they chance to
come all boys, like my own, they can grow up
at the City Athletic Association — a convenient,
and more or less permanent place, nowadays,
which may answer very well their instinctive
needs for a fixed abode, for a home. There are
other advantages, no doubt. But however you
reckon them, the rented house is in the end a
tragedy, as the willful renter and his homeless
family is a calamity, a disgrace, a national men-
ace. Drinking and renting are vicious habits. A
house and a bit of land of your own are as neces-
COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 235
sary to normal living as fresh air, food, a clear
conscience, and work to do.
If so, then the question is, Where shall one
make his home ? " Where shall the scholar
live ? " asks Longfellow ; " In solitude or in so-
ciety *? In the green stillness of the country, where
he can hear the heart of Nature beat, or in the
dark gray city, where he can feel and hear the
throbbing heart of man *? I make answer for him,
and say, In the dark, gray city."
I should say so, too, and I should say it with-
out so much oracular solemnity. The city for the
scholar. He needs books, and they do not grow
in cornfields. The pale book-worm is a city worm*
and feeds on glue and dust and faded ink. The
big green tomato-worm lives in the country. But
this is not a question of where scholars should
live ; it is where men should live and their children.
Where shall a man's home be *? Where shall he
eat his supper *? Where lay him down to sleep
when his day's work is done *? W^here find his
odd job and spend his Sunday *? Where shall his
children keep themselves usefully busy and find
room to play *? Let the Commuter, not the scholar,
make answer.
236 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
The Commuter knows the dark gray city,
knows it darker and grayer than the scholar, for
the Commuter works there, shut up in a basement,
or in an elevator, maybe, six days a week ; he
feels and hears the throbbing heart of man all the
day long; and when evening comes he hurries
away to the open country, where he can hear the
heart of Nature beat, where he can listen a little to
the beating of his own.
Where, then, should a man live *? I will make
answer only for myself, and say, Here in Hing-
ham, right where I am, for here on Mullein Hill
the sky is round and large, the evening and the
Sunday silences are deep, the dooryards are wide,
the houses are single, and the neighborhood am-
bitions are good kitchen-gardens, good gossip,
fancy chickens, and clean paint.
There are other legitimate ambitions, and the
Commuter is not without them; but these few go
far toward making home home, toward giving
point and purpose to life, and a pinch of pride.
The ideal home depends very much, of course,
on the home you had as a child. I can think of
nothing so ideally homelike as a farm, — an ideal
farm, ample, bountiful, peaceful, with the smell
COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 237
of apples coming up from the cellar, and the
fragrance of herbs and broom-corn haunting store-
room and attic.
The day is past when every man's home can
be his farm, dream as every man may of some-
time having such a home ; but the day has just
arrived when every man's home can be his gar-
den and chicken-pen and dooryard, with room
and quiet and a tree.
The day has come, for the means are at hand,
when life, despite its present centralization, can
be more as it used to be — spread out, roomier,
simpler, healthier, more nearly normal, because
again lived near to the soil. It is time that every
American home was built in the open country,
for there is plenty of land — land in my imme-
diate neighborhood for a hundred homes where
children can romp, and your neighbor's hens, too,
and the inter-neighborhood peace brood undis-
turbed. And such a neighborhood need not be
either the howling wilderness, where the fox still
yaps, or the semi-submerged suburban village,
where every house has its Window-in-Thrums.
The Commuter cannot live in the wild country,
else he must cease to commute; and as for small-
238 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
village life — I suppose it might be worse. It is
not true that man made the city, that God made
the country, and that the devil made the village
in between ; but it is pretty nearly true, perhaps.
But the Commuter, it must be remembered, is
a social creature, especially the Commuter's wife,
and no near kin to stumps and stars. They may
do to companion the prophetic soul, not, how-
ever, the average Commuter, for he is common
and human, and needs his own kind. Any scheme
of life that ignores this human hankering is sure
to come to grief; any benevolent plan for home-
steading the city poor that would transfer them
from the garish day of the slums to the sweet soli-
tudes of unspoiled nature had better provide them
with copies of " The Pleasures of Melancholy "
and leave them to bask on their fire-escapes.
Though to my city friends I seem somewhat
remote and incontiguous, still I am not dissevered
and dispersed from my kind, for I am only twenty
miles from Boston Common, and as I write I
hear the lowing of a neighbor's cows, and the
voices of his children as they play along the
brook below, and off among the fifteen square
miles of treetops that fill my front yard, I see
COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 239
faint against the horizon two village spires, two
Congregational spires, once one, that divided and
fell and rose again on opposite sides of the village
street. I often look away at the spires. And I
as often think of the many sweet trees that wave
between me and those tapering steeples, where
they look up to worship toward the sky, and look
down to scowl across the street.
Any lover of the city could live as far out as
this. I have no quarrel with the city as a place
to work in. Cities are as necessary as wheat-fields
and as lovely, too — from twenty miles away,
or from Westminster Bridge at daybreak. The
city is as a head to the body, the nervous centre
where the multitudinous sensations are organized
and directed, where the multitudinous and inter-
related interests of the round world are directed.
The city is necessary; city work is necessary;
but less and less is city living necessary.
It is less and less possible also. New York City
— the length and breadth of Manhattan — and
Boston, from the Fenway in three directions to
the water-front, are as unfit for a child to grow
up in as the basement floor of a china store for a
calf. There might be hay enough on such a floor
24o THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
for a calf, as there is doubtless air enough on a
New York City street for a child. It is not the
lack of things — not even of air — in a city that
renders life next to impossible there; it is rather
the multitude of things. City life is a three-ringed
circus, with a continuous performance, with in-
terminable side-shows and peanuts and pink lem-
onade ; it is jarred and jostled and trampled and
crowded and hurried; it is overstimulated, spin-
dling, and premature — it is too convenient.
You can crowd desks and pews and work-
benches without much danger, but not outlooks
and personalities, not beds and doorsteps. Men
will work to advantage under a single roof; they
cannot sleep to advantage so. A man can work
under almost any conditions; he can live under
very few.
Here in New England — as everywhere — the
conditions of labor during the last quarter-cen-
tury have vastly changed, while the conditions of
healthful living have remained essentially as they
ever were, as they must continue to remain for the
next millennium.
Some years ago I moved into an ancient house
in one of the oldest of New England towns. Over
COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 241
the kitchen I found a room that had to be entered
by ladder from without. That room was full of
lasts and benches — all the kit necessary for shoe-
making on a small scale. There were other houses
scattered about with other such rooms — closed
as if by death. Far from it. Yonder in the dis-
tance smoked the chimney of a great factory. All
the cobblers of these houses had gathered there
to make shoes by machine. But where did they
live ? and how ? Here in the old houses where
their fathers lived, and as their fathers lived,
riding, however, to and from their work on the
electric cars.
I am now living in an adjoining town, where,
on my drive to the station, I pass a small hamlet
of five houses grouped about a little shop, through
whose windows I can see benches, lasts, and old
stitching-machines. Shoes were once made here
on a larger scale, by more recent methods. Some
one is building a boat inside now. The shoe-
makers have gathered at the great factory with
the shoemakers of the neighbor town. But they
continue to live in the hamlet, as they used to,
under the open sky, in their small gardens. And
they need to. The conditions of their work have
242 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
quite changed ; the simple, large needs of their
lives remain forever the same.
Let a man work where he will, or must; let
him live where only the whole man can live —
in a house of his own, in a yard of his own, with
something green and growing to cultivate, some-
thing alive and responsive to take care of; and let
it be out under the sky of his birthright, in a quiet
where he can hear the wind among the leaves, and
the wild geese as they honk high overhead in the
night to remind him that the seasons have changed,
that winter is following down their flying wedge.
As animals (and we are entirely animal) — we
are as far under the dominion of nature as any
ragweed or woodchuck. But we are entirely hu-
man too, and have a human need of nature, that
is, a spiritual need, which is no less real than the
physical. We die by the million yearly for lack
of sunshine and pure air; and who knows how
much of our moral ill-health might be traced to
our lack of contact with the healing, rectifying
soul of the woods and skies ?
A man needs to see the stars every night that
the sky is clear. Turning down his own small
lamp, he should step out into the night to see the
COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 243
pole star where he burns or " the Pleiads rising
through the mellow shade."
One cannot live among the Pleiads ; one can-
not even see them half of the time ; and one must
spend part of one's time in the mill. Yet never
to look for the Pleiads, or to know which way to
look, is to spend, not part, but all of one's time in
the mill.
The dales for shade,
The hills for breathing space,
and life for something other than mere work !
The Commuter is bound to see the stars nightly,
as he goes down to shut up the hens. He has the
whole outdoors in his yard, with the exception of
a good fish-pond; but if he has no pond, he has,
and always will have, to save him from the round
of the mill, a little round of his own — those
various endless, small, inconvenient home-tasks,
known as " chores." To fish is " to be for a space
dissolved in the flux of things, to escape the
calculable, drop a line into the mysterious realms
above or below conscious thought " ; to " chore "
is for a space to stem the sweeping tides of time,
to outride the storms of fate, to sail serene the sea
of life — to escape the mill !
244 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
Blessed is the man who has his mill-work to
do, perfunctory, necessitous, machine-work to do ;
twice blessed the man who has his mill-work to
do and who loves the doing of it ; thrice blessed
the man who has it, who loves it, and who, be-
sides, has the varied, absorbing, self-asserting, self-
imposed labors about his own barn to perform !
There are two things in the economy of un-
perverted nature that it was never intended, I
think, should exist : the childless woman and the
choreless man. For what is a child but a woman
with a soul? And what is a chore1? Let me
quote the dictionary : —
" Chore, char, a small job ; especially a piece
of minor domestic work, as about a house or barn ;
. . . generally in the plural."
A small, domestic, plural job ! There are men
without such a job, but not by nature's intention ;
as there are women without children, and cows
without cream.
What change and relief is this small, domestic,
plural job from the work of the shop ! That work
is set and goes by the clock. It is nine hours long,
and all in the large or all in the infinitesimally
small, and all alike. It may deal with millions,
COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 245
but seldom pays in more than ones and twos.
And too often it is only for wages; too seldom
is it for love — for one's self.
Not so this small domestic job. It is plural
and personal, to be done for the joy of doing it.
So it ought to be with these Freshmen themes
that I go on, year after year, correcting; so it
ought to be with the men's shoes that my honest
neighbor goes on, year after year, vamping. But
the shoes are never all vamped. Endless vistas
of unvamped shoes stretch away before him
down the working days of all his years. He never
has the joy of having finished the shoes, of hav-
ing a change of shoes. But recently he reshingled
his six by eight hencoop and did a finished piece
of work ; he trimmed and cemented up his apple
tree and did a finished piece of work ; he built a
new step at the kitchen door and did a finished
piece of work. Step and tree and hencoop had
beginnings and ends, little undertakings, that
will occur again, but which, for this once, were
started and completed ; small, whole, various do-
mestic jobs, thrice halting for him the endless
procession, — the passing, the coming, the tramp-
ling of the shoes.
246 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
And here are the teachers, preachers, writers,
reformers, politicians — men who deal, not in
shoes, but in theories, ideals, principalities, and
powers, those large, expansive, balloonish com-
modities that show the balloon's propensity to
soar and to explode — do they not need ballast
as much as the shoemaker, bags of plain sand in
the shape of the small domestic job ?
During some months' stay in the city not long
ago, I sent my boys to a kindergarten. Neither
the principal nor the teachers, naturally, had any
children of their own. Teachers of children and
mothers' advisers seldom have. I was forced to
lead my dear lambs prematurely forth from this
Froebel fold, when the principal, looking upon
them with tears, exclaimed, " Yes, your farm is
no doubt a healthful place, but they will be so
without guidance ! They will have no one out
there to show them how to play ! "
That dear woman is ballooning, and without a
boy of her own for ballast. Only successful mo-
thers and doting old grandfathers (who can still
go on all fours) should be allowed to kinder-
garten. Who was it but old Priam, to whom
Andromache used to lead little Astyanax?
COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 247
The truth is, all of the theorizing, sermoniz-
ing, inculcating professions ought to be made
strictly avocational, strictly incidental to some
real business. Let our Presidents preach (how
they love it !) ; let our preachers nurse the sick,
catch fish, or make tents. It is easier for the
camei, with both his humps, to squeeze through
the eye of the needle than for the professional
man of any sort to perform regularly his whole
duty with sound sense and sincerity.
But ballast is a universal human need — chores,
I mean. It is my privilege frequently to ride
home in the same car with a broker's book-
keeper. Thousands of dollars' worth of stock pass
through his hands for record every day. The
"odor" of so much affluence clings to him. He
feels and thinks and talk in millions. He lives
over-night, to quote his own words, " on the end
of a telephone wire." That boy makes ten dollars
a week, wears "swagger clothes," and boards
with his grandmother, who does all his washing,
except the collars. What ails him ? and a mil-
lion other Americans like him *? Only the need
to handle something smaller, something realer
than this pen of the recording angel — the need
248 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
of chores. He should have the wholesome reality
of a buck-saw twice a day ; he might be saved if
he could be interested in chickens; could feed
them every morning, and every evening could
" pick up the eggs."
So might many another millionaire. When a
man's business prohibits his caring for the chick-
ens, when his affairs become so important that
he can no longer shake down the furnace, help
dress one of the children, or tinker about the
place with a hammer and saw, then that man's
business had better be pur into the hands of a re-
ceiver, temporarily ; his books do not balance.
I know of a college president who used to
bind (he may still) a cold compress about his
head at times, and, lying prone upon the floor,
have two readers, one for each ear, read simul-
taneously to him different theses, so great was the
work he had to do, so fierce his fight for time —
time to lecture to women's clubs and to write his
epoch-making books.
Oh, the multitude of epoch-making books !
But as for me, I am a Commuter, and I live
among a people who are Commuters, and I have
stood with them on the banks of the Ohio, ac-
COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 249
cording to the suggestion of one of our wisest
philosophers (Josh Billings, I think), and, in order
to see how well the world could get on without
me, I have stuck my finger into the yellow cur-
rent, pulled it out, and looked for the hole.
The placid stream flowed on.
So now, when the day's work is done, I turn
homeward here to Mullein Hill, and these early
autumn nights I hang the lantern high in the
stable, while four shining faces gather round on
upturned buckets behind the cow. The lantern
flickers, the milk foams, the stories flow —
" Bucksy " stories of the noble red-man ; stories
of Arthur and the Table Round, of Guyon and
Britomart, and the heroes of old ; and marvelous
stories of that greatest hero of them all — their
father, far away yonder when he was a boy, when
there were so many interesting things to do, and
such fun doing them !
Now the world is so "full of a number of
things" — things to do still, but things, instead
of hands, and things instead of selves, so many
things to do them with — even a thing to milk
with, now! But I will continue to use my
hands.
250 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS
No, I shall probably never become a great
milk-contractor. I shall probably remain only a
Commuter to the end. But if I never become
anything great, — the Father of my Country, or
the Father of Poetry, or the Father of Chemistry,
or the Father of the Flying Machine, — why, I
am at least the father of these four shining faces
in the lantern light; and I have, besides them,
handed down from the past, a few more of life's
old-fashioned inconveniences, attended, gentle
reader, with their simple old-fashioned blessings.
car be fiitoetfibe
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY
Los Angeles
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