[Green trails and upland pastures

Green Trails
and Upland
~ Pastures "

Walter Pri chard Eaton

/ T/

OF CALIF. LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES

GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

Books by the Same Author

THE IDYL OF TWIN FIRES

THE BIRD HOUSE MAN

BARN DOORS AND BYWAYS

PLAYS AND PLAYERS

THE AMERICAN STAGE OF TO-DAY

AT THE NEW THEATRE AND OTHERS

PEANUT, CUB REPORTER

BOY SCOUTS OF BERKSHIRE

BOY SCOUTS IN THE DISMAL SWAMP

BOY SCOUTS IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS

BOY SCOUTS OF THE WILD CAT PATROL

THE RUNAWAY PLACE (With Elite Underfill)

THE MAN WHO FOUND CHRISTMAS

To
MY MOTHER

WHOSE HAND FIRST LED ME OUT

AMONG THE FLOWERS

AND WHOSE PLEA WAS THE FIRST I HEARD

IN DEFENSE OF THE WILD

FOLK OF THE WOODS

2128836

NOTE

CERTAIN of the chapters of this book have pre-
viously appeared in various magazines, "Upland Pas-
tures" in Scribner's; "Glacier Park," "Where Glaciers
Feed the Apple Roots," "The Harvests of the Wild
Places," "Neighbors of the Winter Night," "Weather
and the Sky," and "Nature and the Psalmist" in Har-
per's; "Trees" in the Century; "The Cohorts of the
Frost," "Bridges," "Stone WTalls," and "Christmas and
the WTinter World" in McBride's; and "The Skirmish
Line of Spring," "Rocky Mountain Wild Flowers"
and "Landscape Lines and Gardening" in the New
Country Life. The Author gratefully acknowledges
his indebtedness to the editors of these publications.

W. P. E.

Stockbridge, Massachusetts

Autumn, 1917

CONTENTS

Author's Note

PAGE

vii

I. Upland Pastures 3

H. The Cohorts of the Frost . . . . 21

III. The Skirmish Line of Spring ... 35

IV. Glacier Park 46

V. Where Glaciers Feed the Apple Roots

(Lake Chelan) 67

VI. Glacier Park Wild Flowers . . . .84

VII. The Harvest of the Wild Places . . 97

VIII. Neighbours of the Winter Night . . 117

IX. Stone Walls 133

X. Bridges . 150

XL The Little Town on the Hill ... 168

XII. R. F. D 185

XIII. Weather and the Sky 200

XIV. Old Boats 216

XV. The Land Below the River Bank . . 231

XVI. Trees 248

XVII. Landscape Lines and Gardening . . 264

XVIII. Nature and the Psalmist .... 276

XIX. Christmas and the Winter WTorld . . 292

ix

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Mt. Jackson, from Lincoln Pass — Glacier Park

Coloured Frontispiece

FACING PAGB

A greensward flung like a mantle over the tall

shoulder of a hill 8

The clearing extends up a steep slope to meet

the woods 16

A mottled old sycamore leans out over the dark ice 32
The snowfield of Chaney Glacier beating like

surf against the cliff walls 48

Waterfalls dropping from Grinnell Glacier to the

meadow levels 56

From Iceberg Lake magnificent battlements tower

four thousand feet into the air 64

A glimpse two thousand feet below of the green

water of Lake Chelan ... .... 80

The pattern of fields and pastures . . . stitched

with stone walls 144

Fitted to their age and station were the covered

bridges of New England 160

How gracefully the road swings with the curves

of the stream 192

Some naked tree stands out in startling, lacy

silhouette 208

xi

xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The great oak of the pastures flings its outline
against the cloud-race 256

Of all the . . . lines that mountains achieve,
the most beautiful ... is the dome . . 272

"Thou makest the outgoings of the morning and

evening to rejoice" 280

"All the beasts of the forest do creep forth" . 288
The cold, white world without, sparkling under
the frosty stars 296

GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

GREEN TRAILS AND
UPLAND PASTURES

CHAPTER I
UPLAND PASTURES

THERE are alluring names in the corner of the
world where I dwell, such as the Upper Meadow, Sky
Farm, and High Pasture. Is there not something
breeze-blown and spacious about the very words High
Pasture? You do not need a picture to bring the
image to your eye. Your image will not in the least
resemble our High Pasture, to be sure, but what does
that matter? You will see a greensward flung like a
mantle over the tall shoulder of a hill, the blue dome of
the sky dropping down behind it, and to the ear of mem-
ory will come the faint, lazy tinkle of a cow-bell. It is
the magic of the words which matters, not the realism
of the image.

Our High Pasture is on the southern shoulder of
Rattlesnake Hill, and it is splendidly isolated from the
lowlands by forest. The forest marches down from the

summit upon it and stops abruptly with an edge like a

s

4 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

tall green wall. The pasture itself goes over the
shoulder on either side with a beautiful dome-like billow,
and meets the forest again climbing up from the valley.
You see no road leading thither. It is a lonely clearing
on the heights, and behind the sharp, doming line of its
wave-crest the sky drops down to infinite depths of
space. How far one could see if he climbed there and
looked over the crest! How fresh the wind must blow
out of those deep sky spaces, though here in the valley
the summer day is breathless and sultry! How tiny
the black-and-white specks of the Holsteins appear,
as they seem barely to move, like lazy flies on a green
tapestry!

One Autumn not long ago the farmer ploughed High
Pasture, turning it from green to brown, and when the
first snow-spits of November came the furrows filled,
and suddenly it was a beautiful zebra-skin laid over the
shoulder of the hill. Then all Winter it was a dome of
glistening white amid the reddish-gray of the mountain
forest. But as Spring came up the land it grew emerald
with oats, and in lush midsummer we climbed through
the woods to reach it, up the bed of a forest brook, and
came out upon the lower edge as upon a beach. The
waves were breaking at our feet. Over the dome-line
above us, out of those deep sky spaces behind, came
the wind, and swept the billows down upon us with a
rustling murmur as of some magic, brittle sea.

We skirted the pasture to the highest point, while a

UPLAND PASTURES 5

woodchuck rushed off into the oats, stirring theft tops
like a fish swimming just under the surf ace of the water;
swallows skimmed the field like gulls, and even the
pines to our left spoke with the voice of the ocean. At
the crest of the ridge we set our backs to the forest
wall and looked out over the pasture below us. Ever
the wind went by across the oats, wave after wave of
emerald, and we saw, on the plain beneath, our tidy
village and the winding thread of the river, and beyond
that another hill going up with the green pastures of
Sky Farm perched on its fif teen-hundred-foot shoulder;
and farther still the mountain walls like smoky blue
billows on the horizon. Behind us, in the dim, cool
evergreens, a wood thrush sang. A chewink hopped
in a near-by tree, and a field sparrow was busy in the
oats. How fresh was the breeze, how peaceful this airy
spaciousness ! The world was being bathed in sunshine
and dried by the wind. We lay down at the pasture
edge, and the waving oats shut out everything but the
sky. We could look a long way into the green aisles
between the stalks, and once we saw a field mouse pass
across the end of a vista, a prowler in this pygmy forest.
He made no sound. There was no sound anywhere save
the brittle wave-swish of the grain, the deep murmur of
the evergreens behind us, and the music of the birds.

To me there is less allurement in Sky Farm, because
it is inhabited. The true upland pasture is isolated,
alone. But yet Sky Farm has many attractions not

6 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

often appreciated by the vacation visitors to our valley,
who almost invariably exclaim: "It must be dreadfully
cold there in Winter ! " The road to this farm winds up
the mountain for two miles through a wood of tall
chestnut trees, noble old fellows hung with bitter-sweet
and shading wild garden borders of fern and brake. It
is a road the motors never essay, and last year's leaves
lie in the wheel ruts in the Spring, while in the Autumn
the squirrels scold at your intrusion. Presently you
hear a brook falling down a ravine to the left, and the
road grows steeper, the thank-you-marms more fre-
quent. Light breaks ahead, and you stand suddenly
in the Sky Farm plum orchard. If it is blossom time,
you stand suddenly in Japan, after two miles of climbing
through a New England forest. But beyond the plum
orchard is the unmistakable gray barn and the unmis-
takable small, bare house of the New England hill farm.
A few steps bring you to the dooryard. The road ends
at the barn runway — the road ends and the view opens.
You look back over the forest, mile on mile to the hori-
zon hills, and, through the barn itself and the smaller
rear door, at the vacant sky, for on that side the hill
drops sheer away. Behind the house the clearing ex-
tends a quarter of a mile up a steep slope to meet the
woods coming down from the summit of the moun-
tain. Here browse the cattle which give the farm
excuse for being. Their steep pasturage is sown with
granite bowlders, amid which they move, or lie quietly

UPLAND PASTURES 7

on gray days when sky and rocks are of a colour. Some-
times they wander still higher into the summit woods,
and as you make your way up toward the peak of the
mountain you will hear their bells tinkling unseen.
From the doorstep of his house the farmer can look
down upon our village. On still Sabbath mornings
he can hear the call from the church steeples, and at
night, perhaps, the boom of the hours. Yet he dwells
strangely in a world apart, like one on a watch-tower.
His son, to be sure, in fine weather can reach school on a
bicycle (at no little personal risk) in an incredibly short
time. But it is slow work getting home again. Once
home for the evening, it must be a strong temptation
indeed to draw the inhabitants of this house down to
those twinkling lights of the town. They look out
upon our habitations, but they hear only the rushing
of the night wind over the mountain or the muffled
tinkle of a cow-bell as the herd moves to a new pasturage
under the stars. To such a farm might Teufelsdrockh
have retired.

I have never been able to decide in what season of the
year the Upper Meadow is at its best, for in each it has
a shy, elusive charm peculiarly its own. The Lower
Meadow, through which it is reached, is a link between
one of the largest farms and the extensive swamp which
lies at the steep side of a mountain. This meadow,
or hayfield, is many acres in extend, threaded by a slow-
moving, alder-fringed brook. On the farther side,

8 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

through a barred gate, a wood-road strikes upward.
It ascends rapidly for perhaps a quarter of a mile, and
comes out into an unexpected clearing, a genuine little
meadow two or three acres in extent, pocketed on a
shelf of the precipitous mountain wall, which was not
visible from the valley. Doubtless you have seen a
tiny lake with a wooded mountainside leaping up from
it. The Upper Meadow is exactly like such a lake,
with lush green grass for water, grass so rich, indeed,
that you almost look for it to hold reflections. No
prospect is possible from the Upper Meadow save the
view of the mountain wall springing beside it. It is shut
into the woods. Yet the steep climb thither, the silence,
the washed air, all conspire to the sense of height. It
is a man-made clearing, but only in haying time does
man intrude. It has all the artlessness of a forest glade.
In Spring the charm of the Upper Meadow is vir-
ginal, not because of the trilliums and dog-tooth violets
along its borders, but because of the birches bursting
into leaf. It is surrounded by woods in which birches
predominate, and there are many birches all up the
mountain wall. In the early season, while yet the
other hardwoods are naked, the winter-washed trunks
of the birches stand out with startling distinctness, one
great forked patriarch in particular looking like a
lightning stab against the background of a pine. Then,
as the warmth steals into the soil, the birches begin to
put on their brilliant foliage, almost a Nile green, per-

A greensward flung like a mantle over the tall
shoulder of a hill

UPLAND PASTURES 9

haps the most lively in our northern latitudes. As the
sun strikes in upon them, and upon the moist, rich
young grass of the meadow, they make a vivid screen
about this lonely glade, a screen of sharp white and
translucent foliage, and all up the mountain, amid the
bare, lilac trunks of the second-growth timber, you
can see the birch green shimmering in the golden light.
The birches are never so virginal as in their ^bright,
diaphanous robes of Spring, and no scene for me has
quite the delicate beauty of the Upper Meadow at that
hour.

But when the forest foliage has melted into the lush
monotony of midsummer, the meadow grass is high and
ripe, the thrushes have almost ceased their woodland
songs, and the laurel bushes on the borders of the clear-
ing have dropped their clustered petals of pink and
white, a sound comes to you as you climb through the
woods which contrasts oddly with the sylvan stillness—
the hot click-click-click of a mower. As you emerge in-
to the Upper Meadow you see half the grass lying low,
and against the upstanding edge, eating it down, ad-
vances the machine, behind the strong, willing breasts
of the brown horses glistening with sweat. Man has
made his annual invasion. Under the shade of a bush
stands a brown jug of barley water. Out in the sun
stands the rake, awaiting its turn. In a day or two
the great wagon will come and carry down the hay,
leaving the meadow once more to the birds and moun-

10 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

taiii silence for another twelvemonth. But meanwhile
the willing horses in their strength, the measured,
mathematical fall of the grass, the cicada click of the
mower, the occasional shout of the driver, are sights
and sounds not unpleasant, and you lie beneath the
shadows which creep out across the stubble, to look
and listen all the drowsy afternoon.

To emerge from the woods in Autumn into the
Upper Meadow is like putting your head and shoulders
through a great, gorgeous tapestry, from the dark
underside. The bordering trees, above the glossy green
of the laurel bushes, are in bright array, and above you
all the mountainside is triumphant with colour. Even
the meadow floor has reclothed itself in green after the
reaping, as if to be dressed for this pageantry.

But in Winter, perhaps, our meadow can be at its
best, when the world wears white and not a creature
that wanders unseen in the woods but leaves its track.
In Winter our Berkshire world becomes everywhere
more simplified. The myriad motors desert our high-
ways, and the horse comes into his own once more, with
a jingle of sleighbells. The deserted summer estates,
their rose bushes clad in straw, their garden beds buried
under pine boughs, no longer impose upon us an alien
and more sophisticated order. We may cut cross-lots
on our snowshoes without fear of trespass. And then
it is that the Upper Meadow becomes the hermit of the
pastures. No human tracks have preceded ours up

UPLAND PASTURES 11

the trail. We come out into the mountain clearing,
dazzling under the sun, amid the hush of the winter
woods. The mountain wall goes up beyond us, bearing
its dark, snow-flecked pines prominently against the
gray and white of bare birch and chestnut trunks,
etched with a myriad vertical strokes upon the ground-
work of snow. There is only the soft, padded swish of
our snowshoes to be heard as we advance to the centre
of the meadow. Yet life has been here. A deer has
crossed — two deer, three deer — plunging almost knee
deep in the snow. Over the white carpet a pheasant
has walked, one foot mathematically behind the other,
and at this point something startled him, for the tracks
cease abruptly. Here are the marks on the snow where
his long tail feathers brushed as he took the air. Nearer
the edge of the meadow, where the glossy laurel fringe
is still green, a rabbit emerged, hopped out a way, and
turned back. And it will be strange if we do not find
the track of a fox, sneaking down in the night from his
hole up in the mountain rocks to the valley farms.
There is not even the sign of mown grass to speak of
man in the clearing now. It is lonely as a frozen moun-
tain lake, wrapped secure in the heart of its upland
wilderness.

In these softer modern days, when we all desire the
valley warmth, the nervous companionship of our kind,
the handy motion-picture theatre, many an upland
pasture is going back to wildness, invaded by birch and

12 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

pine upon the borders, overrun with the hosts of the
shrubby cinquefoil, most provocative of plants because
it refuses to blossom unanimously, putting forth its
yellow flowers a few at a time here and there on the
sturdy bush. Such a pasture I know upon a hilltop
eighteen hundred feet above the sea, where now few
cattle browse, and seldom enough save at blueberry
season does a human foot pass through the rotted bars
or straddle the tumbling, lichen-covered stone wall,
where sentinel mulleins guard the gaps. It is not easy
now even to reach this pasture, for the old logging roads
are choked and the cattle tracks, eroded deep into the
soil like dry irrigation ditches, sometimes plunge through
tangles of hemlock, crossing and criss-crossing to reach
little green lawns where long ago the huts of charcoal-
burners stood, and only at the very summit converging
into parallels that are plain to follow. Some of them,
too, will lead you far astray, to a rocky shoulder of the
hill guarded by cedars, where you will suddenly view the
true pasture a mile away, over a ravine of forest. Yet
once you have reached the true summit pasture, there
bursts upon you a prospect the Lake country of Eng-
land cannot excel; here the northbound Peabodies rest
in May to tune their voices for their mating song, here
the everlasting flower sheds its subtle perfume on the
upland air, the sweet fern contends in fragrance, and
here the world is all below you with naught above but
Omar's inverted bowl and a drifting cloud.

UPLAND PASTURES 13

It is good now and then to hobnob with the clouds,
to be intimate with the sky. " The world is too much
with us" down below; every house and tree is taller
than we are, and discourages the upward glance. But
here in the hilltop pasture nothing is higher than the
vision save the blue zenith and the white flotilla of the
clouds. Climbing over the tumbled wall, to be sure,
the grass-line is above your eye; and over it, but not
resting upon it, is a great Denali of a cumulus. It is
not resting upon the pasture ridge, because the imagina-
tion senses with the acuteness of a stereoscope the great
drop of space between, and feels the thrill of aerial per-
spective. Your feet hasten to the summit, and, once
upon it, your hat comes off, while the mountain wind
lifts through your hair and you feel yourself at the apex
and zenith of the universe. Far below lie the blue eyes
of Twin Lakes, and beyond them rises the beautiful
dome of the Taconics, ethereal blue in colour, yet solid
and eternal. Lift your face ever so little, and the green
world begins to fall from sight, the great cloud-ships,
sailing in the summer sky, begin to be the one thing
prominent. How softly they billow as they ride ! How
exquisite they are with curve and shadow and puffs
of silver light! Even as you watch, one sweeps across
the sun, and trails a shadow anchor over the pasture,
over your feet. You almost hold your breath as it
passes, for it seems in some subtle way as if the cloud
had touched you, had spoken you on its passage.

14 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

From this upland pasture you may watch " the golden
light of afternoon" withdraw from the valleys, like the
receding waters of a flood, and the amethyst shadows
creep up the eastern hills. You may watch the cloud-
ships come to anchor over the Catskills hi the west, and
transform themselves into Himalayas, snow-capped,
rose-crowned. And, as you descend at last through
the cow paths and logging roads to the valley, it will
be breathless twilight in the hemlocks, and a wood
thrush will sing of the evening mysteries.

But the upland pasture that I love best of all is in
Franconia, high above the little Ham Branch intervale,
on the forest-clad slopes of Kinsman. A single road
runs up the intervale, into a region of abandoned clear-
ings. The great west wall of Kinsman, rearing to its
saddle-back twin summits more than four thousand
feet aloft, is uncompromising and discourages human
conceit. There is a rugged wildness here our Berkshire
land knows nothing of, and a tax on the breath in
climbing for which we have no adequate preparation.
No railroad whistle can here reach the ears. Creatures
wilder than deer may cross this clearing. And the air
of it is filled with the pungent fragrance of the northern
balsams.

The way to this pasture lies through a lower pasture
behind the tiny farmhouse by the road. It is a steep
way, past a running brook and through a sugar grove
where the sugar house of rough boards stands sur-

UPLAND PASTURES 15

rounded by huge woodpiles against next year's "b'ilin'
down." At the head of the grove, after an acre or
two more of clearing, the path suddenly starts upward
at a sharp angle, and for a quarter of a mile goes through
a dense forest of young spruces and balsams so dense
that scarce a leaf of undergrowth is visible on the brown
needles. It emerges from the evergreens as suddenly
as it entered them, and you find yourself on a plateau
pasture five or six acres in extent, once regular in shape
but now broken into tiny bays and inlets all along the
edges by the invasion of the forest, by jetties and capes
of Christmas trees. And out beyond each cape and
peninsula are reefs and islands of young balsams, any-
where from six inches to twenty feet high, rich in colour,
perfect in shape, incomparable in fragrance. The pas-
ture, in a few years, would be quite overrun, oblit-
erated, were it not for the cattle. They cannot quite
fight back the invasion, but they can hold it in check.
None of them is visible, perhaps, as you enter this
mountain glade, but you hear the sweet tinkle of a bell,
and presently, around a cape of Christmas trees, comes a
Jersey, head down, bell jingling, to lif t her soft eyes and
look at you.

The pasture is almost level, but at the farther side
the steep ascent is renewed again, the path marked by a
giant oak. Here the hardwood begins, witness of some
bygone lumbering. Behind the oak looms the great
north peak of Kinsman, which can now be climbed,

16 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

thanks to a trail recently cut by the son of Frederick
Goddard Tuckerman, whose collected poems, published
in 1860, have been quite unjustly forgotten. The
Tuckerman trail is a steep and rough one, part way
through absolutely virgin timber, where the trunks of
the great canoe birches are green with age and moss,
and it leads to the finest view in the White Mountains,
finer than that from Washington or Lafayette. But we
shall not leave our pasture now for the peak. The peak
is for special occasions, the pasture for our daily solace.
All day long in this pasture the Peabodies, or white-
throated sparrows, sing their flutelike call; out in the
sunlight or in the cool woods above the cow-bells tinkle
drowsily. All day long the great north peak looks down
upon you from the east, and you look down, in turn,
upon the world to the west — or so much of it as you can
glimpse through the vista of the steep trail in the ever-
greens. Looking westward, if you raise your eyes, you
see the pointed firs cutting sharp against the sky, the
sentinels of the pasture. It is at the sunset hour in
June that we love the pasture best, for it was at such an
hour that we discovered it many years ago, we two
together. The sun may have dropped behind Flagstaff
Hill when we leave the valley, and the cows have de-
scended to stand lowing behind the barn, but our ascent
is as rapid as the sun's declension, and we reach the up-
land in time to find the west taking fire, flaming into
gold.

The clearing extends up a steep slope to meet the woods

UPLAND PASTURES 17

Now there comes a hush in the bird songs, a hush in
all nature, while the peak behind us grows amethyst,
the high zenith clouds are salmon streamers, and the
golden west blushes into rose. The woods grow dim.
The rose dusks to a deeper hue, and suddenly against
it all the pointed firs stand darkly up like a spired city
in fairyland. At that moment the birds break their
hush, the Peabodies flute from spire to spire like little
Moslems in Christian belfries, and from the dusk of the
forest wall behind us comes ringing the full-throated
song of a hermit thrush. Even the sparrows respect
that master minstrel, and pause. An expectant silence
succeeds. Then, from farther off, from the very depths
of the woods, the coolness of their brooks, the greenness
of their leaves, the mystery of their silences made vocal,
the answer comes, in liquid triplets dripping twilight.
George Moore has called the songs of Schubert and
Schumann "the moonlit lakes and nightingales of
music." But what man-made music is twilight and
the hermit thrush? A few of Mozart's andantes?
Almost, perhaps, yet they lack the forest timbre and the
dusk; they are liquid and pensive, but they were com-
posed at sunrise, or while the sun yet lingered on the low-
land meadows. Incomparable of birds, uncelebrated
in classic story like the nightingale, uttering no home-
sick note in a warm and sentimental southland like
the mocking bird, your habitat in your musical mating-
time is the forests of our bleak New Hampshire hills,

18 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

and on the border of an upland pasture at twilight you
sing an unheard song that could ravish the world !

And we, listening breathless beneath the dimming
spires of the pointed firs, amid the warm fragrance of
the balsams, are secretly glad that this is so!

It is from an upland pasture that you may view the
cloud-drive best. The Franconia cloud-drives come
from the southeast, and usually the vanguard of the
procession sucks in through the funnel of the Notch,
on the other side of Kinsman, wrapping the Old Man
of the Mountain in vapour while yet the sun is shining
for us. But soon the vapours find then* way upward.
We lift our eyes and see their artillery smoke coming
over the north peak, trailing, wind-blown and shredded,
from its trees, and then rushing out over our valley to
obliterate the sun. Once over the rampart, the whole
storm follows in their wake. A great, dark mass of
vapour drops down with clammy affection about the
mountain, rushes through the tree-tops, and seems
about to descend to our very house, when it is sud-
denly whisked off. Above this, on a level with the
summit, the main storm clouds rush, pouring rain, and,
finally, through rift after closing rift in this layer, we can
see far aloft, moving more leisurely, great masses of
cumuli.

The point where the lowest cloud leaves the mountain
is the top of an upland pasture. In spite of the drench-
ing rain, we climb past the huddled, despondent cattle

UPLAND PASTURES 19

into the very vapours. The last heave of the pasture
into the woods is shrouded one moment in gray mist,
and cleared the next by a freak of the wind, revealing
the tall trees beyond and a glimpse into the high defile
of Cannon Mountain. The cloud whips cold and
numbing about us. Looking back down the pasture we
can see the rain-drenched farms, and the western hill
wall going up again into cloud. Just over us the dark
wrack moves with incredible speed, propelled by a wind
we cannot feel. We are on the very under edge of the
cloud-drive, in curious kinship with the storm.

But no words on upland pastures would be com-
plete without mention of the stars. The charm of up-
land pastures is their isolation, their fellowship with
cloud and wind, their silence and their spaciousness,
lifted far above the valley, adventurous of the heights;
and the boon companions of isolation are the stars.

The sunset glow has long faded in the west, the elfin
spires are but black shadows on purple depth, the Pea-
bodies and thrushes have ceased their song, and only
an owl or a night-hawk sneaks on silent wing from the
woods behind — yet still we remain amid the warm
fragrance of the balsams, loath to leave, or perhaps
wrapped in our blankets not intending to leave till we
have boiled our morning coffee against a bowlder, while
the sun flatters "the mountain tops with sovereign
eye." No valley lamps are visible from this high,
sheltered chamber. But a planet hangs like a beacon

20 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

in a fir-tree top, and all the zenith blazes. How patient
they are, the stars! How slow-moving, how unalter-
able ! You are very small, beneath this coverlet of the
Milky Way, and to your mind come back the words
from Tuckerman's sonnet — he whose son built the path
to the peak beyond:

And what canst thou, to whom no hands belong,
To hasten by one hour the morning's birth?

Or stay one planet at his circle hung,

In the great flight of stars across the earth?

It is good to feel such humbleness amid the solemnity
of the heights. But it is good, as well, to feel still the
fragrant warmth of the balsams keeping off the wind, to
listen quietly while a little bird close by wakes with a
sweet cheep and rustles to another perch, and to hear,
for good-night lullaby, the distant, drowsy tinkle of a
cow-bell, as the herd, turned loose again after milking,
make their way slowly back to their upland pasture.

CHAPTER II
THE COHORTS OF THE FROST

SNOW! What a host of pleasant associations the
word awakes! Words are but Pandoras, beneficent
or otherwise, each lifting the lid from its box of mem-
ories and suggestions and loosing them into the fancy.
For those of us, at least, who dwell in a land neither of
perpetual frost nor perpetual Summer, who expect the
delights of a white Christmas and the vernal resurrec-
tion of April, the word "snow" is key to one of the
choicest of caskets, wherein abide alike the homeliest
and heartiest of childhood memories, and the stored
impressions of Nature's subtlest of colour values or the
cold, quiet recollections of moonlight brooding on a
winter world.

The lid of the crystal casket has been lifted for me by
the action of my pen in writing the word. The memory
of a room flies out to me, and nestles warmly in my
fancy. I am in the room, yet, strangely enough, I
seem also for a moment outside looking at the house,
with its long hip roof behind, its single huge chimney, its
open-sided woodshed filled with log ends to the top, its

guardian trees. Then the sense of the room steals over

21

22 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

me, a room with low ceiling and a red cloth on the table.
In the corner stands a tall clock, and above the dial face
a brig, with all sails set, rocks to the swing of the pen-
dulum, upon a painted ocean. Tick-tack, tick-lock —
very slowly and resonantly the great clock measures the
flight of time, and the monotony of it is as a lullaby.
The sun pours sleepily in through the western windows,
over the pots of red geraniums. On the hearth afire
crackles and the cat is asleep on the rag rug before it.
Outside, the world is dazzling white at first, but pres-
ently it is blue, the same blue as the sky, for the sun is
smking and the tail columnar screen of the sugar grove
on the hill is chill with shadow. There is steam rising
from the muffler of the man driving past in a pung.
How cold is the outside world, how still, how buried!
Tick-tocky tick-lock — the brig rides up and down upon
its painted ocean. A log falls with a crackle of sparks
and then the flames wallow anew up the great chimney.
My eyes close drowsily even now at the memory, to
open again to the sound of dishes rattled in the kitchen
and the coming of the evening lamps.

The scene changes, and I stand outside of myself,
as it were, and see myself go by down the wind, the
spray of blown powder enveloping me to the waist and
whitening my shoulder blades. I am a dark little
figure in blue "pull-down" cap and navy blue pea-
jacket, with a japanned tin lunch box under my arm,
a figure as dark as the black cedars beside the road-

THE COHORTS OF THE FROST 23

side fence, or so much of the fence as is visible above the
drifts — often only the top rail. There is no sun, only a
patch of misty radiance in a white sky. The blown
snow is scurrying in clouds over the pastures, half
obscuring the rusty wall of woods beyond. Up the
road ahead of me it swirls, and it comes pushing behind,
hastening my footsteps and stinging my face when I
turn about. Now I am that little boy again and feel the
tingling joy of ploughing along before the wind, of
kicking through the drifts, of racing ahead to catch the
runner of a pung, perhaps, or of fighting my way home
again with my face wrapped to the eyes in my woollen
muffler — that supreme joy of contending with ele-
mental Nature when she demands of you your utmost.
Since that little boy blew down the road before the
wind, between the dark cedars, in a snowstorm which
rose from the ground, he has watched many a snow
descend upon a great city, there to blacken and melt and
finally to be carted ignominiously off and dumped in the
river. It would begin to fall, perhaps, hi the evening,
misting the lamps that blaze along Broadway and swirl-
ing in under sidewalk canopies to powder the hair of the
jewelled women who were alighting from their car-
riages and scurrying across the walk to the theatre en-
trance. In the morning the sun would rise over a city
transformed. The stark trees in the park would throw
out black limbs outlined beneath a white capping; in
Madison Square, Esquimaux igloos would rise in the

24 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

streets; for one glorious morning the drab pattern of the
town would disappear beneath the soft, clean blanket.
But then would come the slush, the blackening, the
spatter. The country boy grew homesick for the sound
of sleighbells, for the rush of sleds, for the great sweep
of the storm over mountain walls and the long weeks of
blue shadows on the silent fields, for all the unexpur-
gated drama of the snowy season. It was not the sum-
mer heat that drove him from New York, for that he
always had contrived to escape. It was much more the
snowless Winter, Winter without the dramatic entrance
of the storm, Winter without the happy ending of
silver brooks alive in every road and finally of vanishing
wisps of white drift behind pasture walls, melting like
clouds before the winds of Spring.

When you were a little boy did they tell you that
when it snowed the old woman up in the sky was
shaking out her feather bed? It was an appealing
fancy, and I sometimes wonder what is its modern sub-
stitute now that feather beds have passed. It was a
great joy, surely, when the first storm began, to stand
with upturned face and watch the great flakes come
down out of a white sky, assuming a separate indi-
viduality quite suddenly, about ten or fifteen feet
above your head. Your eyes would unconsciously
pick out a particularly large flake as it separated itself
from the blur of the descending thousands, and you
would watch it flutter easily to earth, sometimes with

THE COHORTS OF THE FROST 25

the lightness and irresponsibility of a feather, some-
times as if it were sliding down the air. Often you
would run to catch it on your coat sleeve, to admire its
fairy texture of interwoven crystals. Sometimes it
would swerve and hit you in the face, or fall into your
open, laughing mouth where it instantly dissolved with
the faintest hint of a cool waterdrop. Then faster and
faster the flakes began to come; they were getting smal-
ler now as the storm settled down to its work, and the
eyes were blinded trying to individualize them. The
paths were already white, the brown grass powdered,
the evergreens putting on their hoods. It was then
that you ceased your sport and looked out on the land-
scape in silence, no doubt unconscious of why it suddenly
held you, but yielding to its spell.

There is not Emerson's "tumultuous privacy of
storm" hi the first snowfall, nor the suggestion of
Whittier's rustic "Snowbound." It comes upon a land
notjyebdevoid of colour on the hills, the browns and yel-
lows and faint reds of hardwood foliage still shredding
the branches, and a great deal of it must fall before the
ground plan of the earth — the roads and pasture
squares and meadow swales — is obliterated. What the
first snow does is suddenly to spread a magic gauze
between you and the familiar world, which accom-
plishes what the white gauze in the playhouse is in-
tended to accomplish — the removal of the objects
behind it into a dream place of dimmed outlines and

26 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

shadowy values. Through this medium the high
lights, paradoxically, are the darkest spots, a fore-
ground evergreen, perhaps, or the barn across the road.
A pasture elm is a fountain of twig tracery, the wall of
the mountain a wave of shadow billowing against the
white sky. But there is nothing theatrical about the
soft gauze of the storm; there is no concentration or
colour in the illumination, but a uniform radiation of
pure light, as pure as water.

And now, when you have looked your fill on the soft
suffusion of your landscape spaces, you are at length
aware of the sound of the storm, a sound as soft as the
sight, not a patter nor a hiss, but something between
the two as the flakes descend on the dead grass and the
foliage, seeming to accelerate in pace when they near the
earth, as if eager for their lodging place. This delicate
sound, of course, is more apparent in the woods, or in
fields where the dried weeds stand up stiffly, and I have
walked many a mile in Winter listening to it in the dead
foliage above my head, while each new vista showed a
white world and under foot the snow was deepening.

Is the world ever more lovely than on the first morn-
ing after the first storm? From the Oh's ! and Ah's ! and
How Lovely's ! of the average inexpressive mortal, to the
poetry of Whittier or the canvases of innumerable
artists, the record runs of our delight in the "frolic
architecture" of the snow. I sometimes wonder, as
they spindle skyward, why Norway spruces were

27

planted before my dwelling, till the first storm has
come and the next morning's sun has risen bright and
cold. Then I know. Then their long lateral branches,
upcurved at the ends, bear great loads of white, in
cones and caps and pyramids, and the green pendants
of foliage below are like the beards of strange old
men, those unseen gnomes, perhaps, who so perplexed
Peer Gynt — and the critics ! Then a great white birch
among them is oddly whiter still — the only thing which
can look white against new snow, except the feet of
Nicolette. Then the spire of a hemlock beyond is like
a frosted Christmas card, and farther still, beyond the
white obscurity of the hedge, the world simply vanishes
into snow and sky, the background of a Japanese print,
which is to say, pure suggestion, the blank paper. How
curiously shut-in we feel on such a morning, in our little
red house among the evergreens ! We feel as shut-in, as
deliciously private, as when the mid-winter storm is
besieging us, and the fire roars, and we gaze through
the windows into a white darkness. But, though we
are thus shut in, we can hear from our porch the shouts
of our neighbour's children, the shrill screams of little
girls going by to school, pursued by wicked little boys
with snowballs, and — yes! there they are! — we can hear
the jingle of sleighbells. No work can be done this
morning! Down from the attic come the snowshoes,
the thongs are tested, moccasins are oiled, and we
are off for the deep woods.

28 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

The deep woods have many moods in Winter, more,
perhaps, than in Summer, or even in Spring. But
they are never quite so beautiful as on this brilliant
morning after the first heavy snowfall. Now the un-
derbrush is bowed everywhere in slender hoops and
arches of white. Now the brooks are still unfrozen and
have hollowed the snow on their banks into rounded
caps. Now the tree trunks down the forest aisles are
sharply divided like a Harlequin's costume into black
and white, white on the windward side, black on the
leeward. Now the forest overhead is one continuous
roof of frosted fairy tracery, dazzling where the sun
shoots through, soft and feathery in shadow. Down a
glittering forest aisle a fern stands up in the shelter
of a rock, a vivid green above the white carpet. About
us in the silence, as we walk, come down little plops of
snow from shaken branches. As the sun mounts and its
heat is felt, the tiny avalanches are sounding softly all
around us in the woods. By noon the fairy groins and
arches overhead, all this tracery as of elfin Gothic gone
delightfully mad, will have fallen. The trees will stand
up naked above a snow carpet packing down for the
first layer of Winter. But for one glorious morning we
walk in spangled aisles and count it the best day of the
year.

Later, when the real storms of Whiter have followed
and packed two feet of snow upon the forest floor, when
the brooks have frozen into winding coils of slippery

THE COHORTS OF THE FROST 29

black amid the great trunks, when the trees are stern
and naked with daggers of light between them, a hush
of death comes over the winter woods, a beautiful, sol-
emn hush, and one instinctively lowers his voice as in
the presence of mystery. Yet see where the deer-mice
have danced, and where a squirrel has jumped to the
foot of an evergreen, burrowed for cones, and emerged
again to leave the telltale husks of his meal. Looking
at the records on the ground, the woods seem very
much alive, alive at hours when we are sleeping, per-
haps, and the deer come through. See, here are their
tracks, and here a shrub eaten off clean to the snow line.
As the snow settles on the face of Nature and becomes
a part of it, as the village paths are packed as hard as
pavement and the roads glisten with runner tracks, we
begin to lose consciousness of tlje first all-pervading
whiteness and become aware of the colours in the whiter
world. I once kept a diary of the snow for an entire
season — need I say it was my first season after our ex-
odus from the land of bondage? Looking back over its
pages, I find descriptions of rhapsodic, not to say start-
ling, colour schemes. Here is one:

"The view from High Pasture this afternoon was lovely.
In the southwest, under a canopy of leaden clouds, was a
warm red rift over the peak of Tom Ball Mountain, and it
tinted the snow in the valley almost to my feet. To the
east the sky was clear, a pure mother-of-pearl green and opal,
over the long wave line of brilliant ultramarine mountains."

30 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

But that note is not exaggerated. It is an accurate
transcription. Many years ago I read somewhere a
statement by Maxfield Parrish that the colour scheme of
New England could be as vivid as that of Arizona, but it
was not till I had dwelt a Winter through amid the New
England hills that I believed him. Mount Lafayette
sometimes is a mighty amethyst in the August sunset,
but even our humble Berkshires are amethysts evening
after evening when the valleys are deep in snow and the
wooded slopes are gray with chestnuts and birches
streaked on the winter carpet; they are a beautiful chain
of amethysts binding the farms, the villages, the river
reaches, and at their feet at twilight into the rusty tama-
rack swamp steals a purple veil, which mounts the
eastern wall as the sun sinks behind the western, dusk-
ing into blue before it creeps quite to the summit, and
changing from blue to an elusive, shadowy gunmetal
colour as the evening comes and a silver moon rides high.

There are sometimes colours in the later snowstorms,
too. It may be, of course, merely a coincidence, but
within my observation these coloured snowstorms
have all occurred after the February thaws, when the
mind has begun to prepare itself for Spring. The in-
creased power of the sun and the higher tempera-
ture are, in fact, responsible for the atmospheric effects
which produce the colour. It can come from nothing
else, for the earth is as bare and brown as in December;
there is no more colour on the hills, no brighter hue on

THE COHORTS OF THE FROST 31

the evergreens. Such a storm is the winter analogy of
the summer shower which dusks the landscape with a
dun, ashen cloud, but leaves a hole of blue sky hi the
west and plays on far mountains here and there a tur-
quoise searchlight. From one quarter of the heavens
the white vapour drives down upon us out of colourless
space, but in the opposite quarter a mother-of-pearl sky
gleams faintly through the mist, the mountain wall be-
neath it is like blue and green watered silk seen through
a white veil, and the fir trees are emerald. Such a
storm passes quickly. We know it is not "fixin* for a
blizzard," as the saying goes. But while it lasts it has
something of the iridescent yet illusive colour of a tone-
poem by Debussy.

How lovely, in its soft, delicate shades, is the whiter
landscape by the river bank, where the gray and coffee-
tan of a mottled old sycamore leans out over the dark
ice or the black streaks of open water, while beneath
its bare limbs, over the snowy fields, we see the blue
dome of a mountain! The snow builds exquisite cor-
nices over the river bank, and the dead weed stalks rise
above them with a delicate, stiff grace. Every line —
the snow cornices, the edge of open water, the bare
limbs of the tree, the mountain dome — is a fluid curve,
and every colour is a tint, suffusing the black and white
ground plan. There is a subtler technique in the winter
landscape.

In the country, the old age of the snow is dignified

32 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

and its passing a beautiful thing. All Winter it has
covered the ground, protecting the shrubs and flower
beds, conserving our gardens, our woods, even our
soil. Then, on a March morning, it begins to feel the
deadly breath of the south wind and knows that its
time has come. I have unconsciously personified it,
falling into Mr. Ruskin's "pathetic fallacy" and violat-
ing the no doubt excellent principles once taught me by
the worthy " Rhetoric " of Professor Hill. But occasion-
ally one's instincts kick over the traces of rule and
reason, and the kindly snow, which has covered our
world the season through, will demand its place in our
pagan pantheon, our secret temple of the ancient
deities none of us has quite destroyed in his heart. Yes,
the snow feels the mortal kiss of the south wind and
knows that its time has come. By noon the roads are
water brooks, two silvery streams dancing and flashing
down the runner ruts. On exposed sections, where the
wind has blown the snow thin, bare ground begins to ap-
pear and the sleigh runners crunch and grind behind the
straining horse. On a southern slope of autumn plough-
ing, the brown tops of furrows begin here and there to
poke up above the white, like tiny islands in the sea.
The eaves drip. The chickadees are sounding their
love call. Then it is we go out into the buried garden
and see the dark cone of the manure pile melted off and
rising above the white, a happy harbinger of flowers.
A second day, a third day, of caressing south wind,

33

and the sleighbells jingle no more, the mountain pas-
tures are bare, the fields and gardens are wet, brown
earth, and suddenly a song sparrow sings in the hedge.
But we make one more trip into the deep woods, to say
farewell to the Winter, into the high forests on the
mountains this time, for it is there the snow longest
abides. We tramp at first along sloppy, muddy roads,
and then through soggy fields, past brooks which are
full to overflowing. There are white drifts along the
pasture walls, however, and as we draw near the
mountain side we can see the white carpet through the
trees, which explains why the mountains still look gray
though the rest of the world is brown. As we enter
the woods, our boots sink almost knee-high into the soft
mass, which is too heavy for snowshoes. As we climb,
it grows deeper, eighteen inches of it some years in late
March on the northern side of the hills. The mountain
wall grows steeper, the climbing harder, till at last the
soft, treacherous snow affords no footing at all, and we
can climb no more. We find an exposed rock which the
sun has melted clear, and sit there to rest, surrounded
by green arbutus plants and the fresh tendrils of Herb
Robert. We are hot and coatless, yet soaked with snow.
The melting is gradual up here in the woods, and so long
as the woods remain they are our protection from spring
floods, and our guarantee of a summer water supply.

The homeward trip is a matter of sliding, perhaps of
frequent tumbles, of panting breath and laughter. The

34 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

roads have dried out perceptibly since we came over
them earlier in the day. In many a furrow pools of
water have succeeded the zebra stripes of white. As we
look back to the upland pastures the shreds of drift along
the stone walls and by the edge of the woods are frailer
now. A day of warm ram, and they will be gone. How
tawny red the willows are in the swamp ! See, here are
bursting pussy buds ! We have said good-bye to the snow.
Yet not quite good-bye. In April it comes again, a
last belated rear guard of white cavalry skirmishing
across the garden after a dash over the northern
mountain. The early peas are up, two double rows of
them fifty feet long, and as the garden quickly whitens
they make four green lines across the snow. Then the
sun struggles through and drives back the attack. The
hotbeds, covered as with a mat of feathers, begin to melt
through; the manure pile steams; the eaves drip merrily;
the astonished song sparrows, driven into the pines and
even into the woodshed, emerge again, and redouble their
song as if to capture the lost time. This, indeed, is our
farewell to the snow, and as we contemplate the green
shoots of the perennials, protected, kept alive by their
long whiter covering; as we see our lilacs bursting into
bud and hear the brook's full-throated babble, fed
from the melting hills, there is tenderness and gratitude
in our farewell, as there will be once more warmth in our
welcome when over the northern hills comes back again
the first white skirmish line of the cohorts of the frost.

CHAPTER III

"I HAVE never been in the country in Spring be-
fore," said a visitor to our town, contemplating my pink
apple trees against their backing of pine, and sniffing
ecstatically.

"But, Madame," said I, "you have not been in the
country in Spring this time."

It would have been a shame to rob her of her joy, had
there been a chance that she would believe me. Of
course, she did not. Yet actually the best part of
Spring is over before the apple blossoms come. My
summer neighbours who open their places in May to
enjoy this season, and who suppose the "hardships" of
a mountain Winter to be almost unendurable, would
scarcely recognize Spring at all when it first arrives.
Its skirmishers would seem to them like another phase of
Winter, perhaps, or at any rate something disagreeable
and to be avoided, such as March mud. It is almost a
sign of Spring for us when we have to carry wax in our
pockets on a ski run, applying it frequently. It is a
sign of Spring when the runner ruts on the roads begin
to fill with slush at mid-day, and bare patches appear on

85

36 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

favoured southern slopes. From long experience, we are
under no delusion that Winter is preparing for a hasty
retreat. The old fellow has several batteries of snow
and sleet yet to discharge, and many a skirmisher of
Spring will fall before the main forces come up and win
back our land. But these first brushes with the on-
coming green hosts are more fascinating than the
final conquest, just as the dramatic moment at Luck-
now was not when the relief party entered the fort, but
when the bagpipes first were heard, far off and faint.

Moreover, in the earliest manifestations of Spring
there is an actual beauty like nothing else at any
season. I recall once going up by the old road over
October Mountain to help a neighbour drive home some
cows he had bought. We were forced to leave the
wagon at the foot, because as soon as the road left the
valley and began to ascend through the woods it was
deep with soft snow. It was a bright, clear morning
that might have been in midwinter, we thought as
we plodded up, save that the brook was running free of
ice, we tramped without our sweaters, and in the bare
woods the chickadees were fluttering silently. In mid-
winter they would all have been close to our dwellings.
But when we drove down the cows at two o'clock, the
scene was transformed. We splashed along through
water, for the two runner ruts in the road were now little
silver brooks, flashing and dancing in the sun. The
battle was on, and the first victory had gone to Spring!

THE SKIRMISH LINE OF SPRING 37

The snow was beginning to retreat down the mountain
side. It still held in the woods, but here in the road it
was in full rout, and beside the road, too, the brook had
risen to a rushing, milky torrent which eddied about the
stems of the alders and swayed their swollen buds like
some silent, violent wind.

There comes a day in the first advent of Spring when a
perverse thermometer, which has been plunging nightly
below frost line and creeping too briefly up at noon, sud-
denly takes a jump. The air is balmy, the sun is
bright, there has been no frost the night before to make a
glistening mud-skin on the walks; the dead leaves, which
have apparently rotted down during the winter, are dry,
at least on the surface, and rustle about in a caressing
wind. Though snowdrifts yet linger under the ever-
greens and in northward shelters, the footing is firm over
the lawn, and the woods call. You cross fields that are
bare of snow, the brown and palest straw colour of dead
weeds and grasses, and enter the woods on the first
slope of the mountain. What an exquisite world it is!
The birches shine white, as if new-washed by Winter.
The chestnuts are gray, the poplars have a yellow tinge.
The forest floor, lying plain to view now with no shadow-
ing foliage, is a brown and gray carpet, almost silvery in
texture here and there, for dead leaves under a recently
melted snowdrift often seem to bear a film of gray
mould. The interlacing branches overhead make an
exquisite tracery against the sky and dapple the ground

38 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

with delicate shadows. Many plants, too, especially
the perennial ferns, have come through the Winter
green and fresh, so that it almost appears as if some
gardener had been here already, getting his first spring
planting done. But the greatest charm of the woods on
this bright morning is the water. Just on this day,
perhaps, can you see it. Yesterday the melting process
was too slow. To-morrow the run will be over. But,
for this once, those lingering white drifts you see up the
slope, under a protecting bowlder or in the shadow of the
evergreens, are pouring down little brooks of dancing
quicksilver over the forest floor. They follow no worn
channels; they flow not to rule or boundary. Over the
brown leaves they come, by any little hollow, irre-
sponsible, twinkling, with the softest of plashing sounds
as one of them jumps over a fern-covered rock or the
root of an aged chestnut, and sinks into the moss or the
mould.

And the smell of the forest that day ! It is the smell of
sweet, black humus, just exposed. It is the smell of
dead Winter. It is the indescribable smell of pure ice
water running over leaves. If you know it, you know it.
If not, no description can bring the odour to your
nostrils. It is the first and sweetest smell of Spring.

On such a day, too, the upland pastures, clear of the
woods, have their own little ice-water brooks that run
and spread and reunite over the dead grass, or plough
tiny channels through the soil, the spongy, soft soil, free

THE SKIRMISH LINE OF SPRING 39

at last of frost on the surface and almost too yielding
to the feet. The lone chestnuts or maples which senti-
nel such a pasture bear as yet no sign of life, though if
you break a twig from the maple a crystal drop of sap
will form, which you let fall on your tongue to taste its
faint sweetness. But though the maples and chestnuts
are bare as hi Winter, looking over to the doming slope
of birch forest across the ravine, where the sun hits it full
and warm, you catch, or think you do, the frailest
wraith of fuzzy colour in the treetops. It is as in-
tangible as a dream; a cloud dusks the sun, and it is
gone. Yet you are sure it is there, the birth-blush of the
foliage. In the upland pasture, too, on such a day, a
stone wall running east and west will present a curious
contrast, for on the northern side will lie a snowdrift,
still a foot or two deep, perhaps, with the snow darkened
by the wind-blown particles of bark and litter deposited
during the Winter, and melted into coarse texture like
rock salt; while on the southern side, beneath the dead
stalks of last year's mulleins, milkweed, and golden-rod,
the ground will be quite dry for several feet out, and you
are irresistibly drawn to lie down upon it, warm and
sheltered, and get your first lazy feel of Mother Earth.
Here, also, as you lie out of the wind on the south side of
the wall, you will catch the first subtle ground smell of
the Spring.

Like the two sides of the stone wall are the two sides of
the sweet-pea trenches, dug the previous Autumn, and

40 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

the two sides of the mound of excavated earth beside
them. The south side of the trench, in shadow, is
frozen solid, while the north side grows softer and
mushier day by day. The side of the piled earth exposed
to the sun is also soft, the dark side hard as ever. Day
after day in March I have watched those trenches, test-
ing with a pick or spade to see when I could begin to
sow. Ultimately there comes a day when enough of
the ice has melted out of the trench and enough of the
excavated earth has become friable, to enable me to
plant. Then the carefully soaked and chipped seeds are
brought forth, the labelled stakes are prepared, and
into ground that, after all, is still cold and wet and full of
frozen lumps, go the precious promises of bloom. More
than once I have covered the row and risen the next
morning to find even the tops of the labels buried hi
snow. But once those sweet pea seeds are in the
ground, we have ceased to think of Winter. Our faces
are set forward toward the Spring.

The first and sweetest sound of Spring, of course, is
the song of the Hylas, those little sappers and miners of
the advance guard who attack through the marshes, or
even through the melted snow water in the grassy hol-
lows beside a country road. In our Berkshire Hills
Spring is late in coming, sometimes almost a month
later than in New Jersey. There have been seasons
when the Hylas did not sing till April (once, to prove
the lateness of our season, I ran down my garden slope

THE SKIRMISH LINE OF SPRING 41

on skis on April 15th.) ! But, of course, we usually can
count on them some time in March. On March 21,
1913, for instance, I find this entry in my diary:

It has been a warm day. The thermometer was 58° at
ten o'clock to-night. The Hylas sang for the first time this
season. I heard them at half -past five, just as I was straight-
ening up my back after chopping out a stump. As usual,
they were singing in the meadow across the road, and a strong
south wind, blowing a gray storm-wrack overhead, brought
the sound plainly, but robbed it of its peculiar Spring quality.
However, the wind died at sunset, the moon came out, and we
sat on the veranda after dinner for the first time since last
Summer. Then the song of the frogs drifted to us with the
chime of distance, beating in its peculiar wave-like rhythm (or
is that rhythm a trick of the ear?) upon our consciousness, and
mingling with the fragrance of damp earth. "Spring!" we
said.

The Hylas are like a small boy with a pair of skates—
any water will do for them. I learned to skate on the
frozen gutter beside the road. The Hylas in our mead-
ows are often thickest and most tuneful in a little swale
of surface water which winds through the grass just at
this flood time, and by May is quite gone. It looks from
a distance like a brook, but in reality it is only a shallow
depression, with grass and elm leaves at the bottom,
the still, melted-snow water filling it, quite clear, but
that peculiar brown of water which has stood over dead
leaves. It has come with the advent of Spring; soon it
will be gone. Yet it is stirring with life for the short
period of its existence, and shrilly vocal.

42 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

It is at about this time that we go out in the garden
one morning to see half a hundred rufous fox sparrows
hippety-hopping down the paths with their character-
istic rapidity. It is now that the chickadees do not
have to be coaxed into replying to their love call, but
will answer immediately when we whistle the three
notes. It is now that we know the thrill of putting the
first vegetable seeds into the open ground, which will be
well-sprouted rows of peas when your summer resident
arrives in May. What does he know of that first testing
of the unploughed garden for underlying frost, that first
afternoon of stooping toil, with sleeves rolled up and the
sun at last caressingly warm on arms so white that you
are ashamed of them!

This is a season of raking, too, and of little bonfires
which send up a pungent smoke at first, thinning to a
straight blue vapour as the wind dies and the sunset
twines an amethyst veil in the lacy, naked apple boughs.
There is still a chill in the gathering twilight, but not
enough to drive you to your coat. You draw a little
closer to the embers, poke your rake into them and stir
up a flame, and then, leaning on your rake, watch the
red fire-glows jumping about amid the veined skeletons
of burned leaves with the discontinuity of dream images,
while far off the shrill of the Hylas rises sweetly from the
swamp. Does any but a gardener know this delicious
moment of the Spring?

I love to smell the early spring fires from afar, to come

THE SKIRMISH LINE OF SPRING 43

out on the edge of a clearing, perhaps, and look across a
rolling pasture where a few belated drifts of snow are
still stretched like fingers of Winter keeping a last grip
on the soil, to some white house and mouse-gray barns,
and to watch tiny figures moving about in the orchard,
piling the litter from trimming on the fires, which are
sending up their fragrant smoke plumes into the air.
As the sun drops into the west, these fires will burn low
and their gray smoke will be touched with salmon-rose,
even as the great white cumuli drifting in the sky
above. A little later, and they will glow like red eyes in
the dusk of the orchard, but the pungent fragrance of
their smoke will scent the quiet spring night long after
the flicker of their flames has disappeared.

There is a time when Spring, to the eye, is curiously
like Autumn, as if the seasons, passing one into the
other, went through the same process. That is the
time when the hillsides are tapestried. The colours of
Spring, of course, are not quite the same, and the texture
is totally different. Nevertheless, between the green of
Summer and the reds and grays of Winter, comes a time
both in October and in April when an intricate warm
pattern is woven up the slopes.

I read in my diary for April 6th, a few years ago:

A day of alternate snow squalls and sunshine, Spring and
Winter contending. Walking home past Monument Mountain
we saw a steep west shoulder now take the sun, now vanish
into a nothingness of white vapour. Emerging once in full

44 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

light, a long, wooded slope was a lovely pattern of lavender
and straw yellow, streaked with the white verticals of young
birch trees. The lavender came from birch buds in the
western light, the yellow from the poplar tops. The spring
where we paused to drink was gushing full, and farther
along the roadside the hepaticas were brave amid last year's
leaves.

But when the hepaticas have come, Winter is almost
in full retreat. The lavender birch buds will soon be a
frail green veil, and then, after a day of hot sun, a fresh,
intense colour note on every hillside. Soon the great
elm limbs that arch over our village street will be hazy
with a hint of red, and then red indeed against the pale
blue sky. A new note comes into the sunset then, a
new star into the west. Our village street runs east and
west almost on the compass line, and the winter sunset
glow is framed by the delicate, naked tracery of the
arching elm boughs. But when the red fuzz has sud-
denly appeared on the trees the whole quality of this
frame is altered, and with it the quality of the western
glow. It is as if a new colour note of warmth had been
sounded. At the same time, too, with the lengthening
twilight, comes the hour of the lone evening star, not
with the suddenness of Winter, the obscuring haze of
Summer, but swelling slowly into the western vista out
of the afterglow, with a sweet serenity.

Now like a crop from the famous dragon's teeth the
iris spears will be stiffening up all over the garden, and
in the woods a wake robin will nod in a shaft of sun by

THE SKIRMISH LINE OF SPRING 45

the brook. On a clear, warm morning I shall awake to a
thrilling flute call just outside my window — the first
white-throated sparrow! Spring will be here, the
Spring of the poets, of bird song and flowers. But its
sweetest moments will have passed, those first stirrings
in the sod, those anticipatory sounds and odours, those
whispered premonitions. Somehow, it is they that I
love best.

CHAPTER IV
GLACIER PARK

THE lure of the prairie, the lure of the rolling plains,
the lure of the sky-blue mountains! How good it was
to leave the East behind, to leave behind those midland
cities belching smoke, Chicago with its sooty roar, St.
Paul and the muddy Mississippi ! Now there was noth-
ing but prairie, endless wheat fields level to the sky with
little domestic oases where house and barns snuggled
into their encircling grove, to escape perhaps the Sum-
mer sun, perhaps the inquisitive eye of the next door
neighbour a mile away. Night came on the prairie, a
dusky emanation from the ground, and dawn came with
a wonderful orange glow, and night again. Then, at the
second dawn, we looked on a different world, a treeless
world but no longer an infinite calm ocean of grain. A
great ground swell had crossed the universe in the
night, and the green land was slowly settling down to
rest again with the heaving of ten thousand billows;
wave after wave of grassy slope, heave after heave of
the restless land, all day beside the rushing train. And
then the miracle, the sky-blue mountains!

They have no foothills, these Rocky Mountains of

46

GLACIER PARK 47

ours in northwestern Montana. Naked and sudden,
they leap up out of the prairie grass, a vast blue range
of them vanishing into the north, vanishing into the
south, on their march from the Arctic ice to the Equator.
They march beside the prairie flowers, their snowfields
glittering white above the carpet of lupines and gail-
lardias, and whisper of the mysteries their blue folds
hold. At three o'clock you see them sharp and clear,
but not till eight do you reach them, and as you leave
the stuffy train a wind is coining down from those snow-
fields, over the fringing forest of fir, cool, caressing,
fragrant. "Open your eyes," they say to you. Then,
"Open your lungs and breathe, deep, deep!'* But the
twilight rose is blushing now on the snowfields, a pearly
blue to the eastward has made the rolling prairie as the
sea. "Now, open your heart," they say, "for you are
doomed to be our lover."

The road northward into the depths of the range,
once only a dim trail but now passable for motors, runs
for a considerable distance over the prairie, as if it were
looking for an opening where it could squeeze into the
blue wall. No entrance could be better devised, for a
mountain, a lovely vale, a rock-walled lake, resents too
sudden an approach. Even in so little a thing as a
garden, the wise man knows it must not all be visible
from the veranda, or a secret magic has escaped. There
must be climaxes and surprises, and at least one nook
which shuts out all view save of itself. So the mountain

48 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

range, even the individual peak, must be seen afar, then
nearer with the play of different lights upon it, then
skirted, perhaps, to observe its varying contours (for the
beautiful mountain, like the perfect statue, must give
pleasure from any angle), before it becomes ultimate,
familiar, and ready to disclose its secrets. So we
travelled up the northward road, over the rolling
prairie where gaillardias, blue lupine, orange paintbrush,
lavender, bergamot, and many other flowers growing
thickly in the grass made the treeless slopes one vast
expanse of magic carpet, and the blue range marched
with us, wearing its upper snowfields like shoulder
mantles and thrusting out rock buttresses to our feet,
red and brown and green and gold with the colours we
were soon to know so well.

Now and then, as a canon opened westward toward
the main ridge of the Continental Divide, we saw a lake
embosomed, and now and then arose some peak of pe-
culiar dignity which captured our admiration. It is
odd how potent over the spirit are certain contours.
The span of the Brooklyn Bridge whispers of infinity and
holds the same beauty as the misty view down the
Lower Bay where the great ships go out to sea. The
span of the Williamsburg Bridge is so ugly that nobody
looks at it a second time. Mountains are seldom so
ugly as that, but it is only the rare summit which
sweeps up in dome-like serenity and seems a symbol of
the infinite. Such a mountain is old Rising Wolf, be-

The snow-field of Chancy Glacier beating like surf
against the cliff walls

GLACIER PARK 49

side Two Medicine Lake on the eastward side of the
range. How romantic its name, to the American who
from earliest boyhood has thrilled to the tales of trap-
pers and Indians ! Rising Wolf was the Indian title for
Hugh Monroe, an Englishman born in Montreal in
1798, and probably the first white man to behold these
mountains. He was a trapper for the Hudson Bay
Company, married a Blackfoot squaw, and spent most
of his long life in this region, dying in 1896 and resting
now beside the Two Medicine River, under the shadow
of that great red rock pile which bears his name, a
pyramid such as no Pharaoh ever dreamed. Almost
9,000 feet in height, standing free of the range to its
base, four-square and self-sufficient, with the curve of
infinity over its doming summit, old Rising Wolf
sentinels the Great Divide, the Mousilauke of the
Rockies, the promise of that benignant sweetness and
splendid spaciousness which is to come.

By riding thus free of the range, too, we gained an
insight into its topography. Possibly others are not
like me, but I fancy many are. For my part, at least, I
cannot be happy in a new country till I know, as we
Yankees say, "how the land lays." First I must know
which is north and which is south, and if I arrive by
night, or get turned about on the train, I am miserable
till the compass directions are straightened out in my
mind. Once, I recall, a perverse sun rose for three days
in the west, till I got a map and went carefully over my

50 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

line of approach. Next I must know which way the
water flows, and get the feel of the division ridges, the
contour of the country. Many a time after riding in
a motor car over a new region, I have been miserable
until I could walk a few miles, to catch from my own
exertions the sense of rise and dip, to explore with a quiet
eye the valley ramifications. Hence the long ride up
beside the Lewis Range was, for me, a necessary in-
troduction. I was getting my bearings. I was seeing
for myself the truth of what the literal Park folders had
told me.

Both the great northwestern prairie and the area now
split by mountain ranges were once lake or sea bottom.
By some pressure on the earth's crust a great crack was
formed, and one edge of the crust came up over the
other, sliding eastward from twelve to fourteen miles.
In Glacier Park it is called the Lewis Overthrust. As
this crust was thousands of feet thick, it is easy to see
that a vast line of precipice was formed, exposing every
strata of soil and rock deposited during untold ages be-
fore. Behind this precipice, for many miles, was the
hump made by the overlapping earth crust. Untold
ages since this upheaval have broken down this preci-
pice and carved this hump. Melting snows have made
vast erosion valleys. Frost and storm have swept
down shale slides into heaps at the base, the ice masses
of the glacial age ground out punch bowls or cirques, and
excavated canons. But even to the casual eye the line

GLACIER PARK 51

of the Overthrust is still visible to-day, a vast, broken,
pitted wall of petrified earth crust, strata after strata of
pink and gray and brown and green and white and red
stone laying their parallels one above the other up the
face of precipices, with the abrupt head wall of the
Continental Divide at the end of every erosion canon,
shooting straight up three or four thousand feet to the
castellated, knifeblade summit ridge where only the
goats and eagles dwell.

Up one of these canons we turned at last, climbing to
a beautiful sheet of milky green water in an evergreen
frame, and bearing the silly name of Lake McDermott.
Here, on its shore, was a great hotel. Standing at our
window in this hotel, at sunset, we looked out across the
milky green lake and its dark fringes of firs to the
pyramid of Sharps Peak towering over us. Behind
that, to left and right, we saw the vast sawtooth cliffs
of the Divide, holding to the south the snows of Grin-
nell Glacier high on its shoulders and then leaping up to
the lofty rock ridgepole of Gould Mountain, feathery
white now with a fresh fall of snow, on the north
climbing to the blue-gray pyramid of Mount Wilbur
and then curving in a magnificent circle of castellated
ridges around the hole where Iceberg Lake lay hidden.
Over them all was a sweet sunset sky flecked with every
tint of mother-of-pearl. The green lake, the dark firs,
the stupendous nakedness of rock, and yet the sweet,
clear calmness of the whole composition, was such a

52 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

combination as we had never experienced in the high
hills, at once awesome and benignant. Later, as we
came to know these mountains as our friends and com-
rades, we knew that effect to be the soul of Glacier
Park.

When you mount your horse for your first day on the
trail in the Rocky Mountains you feel a Columbus em-
barking for the Unknown which calls you deeper into the
shadow of those towering cliffs. You are intoxicated
with the air, lured by the summons of the high places.
Put a boy in a pasture, and he makes for the top of the
largest bowlder. Go into Glacier Park, and your feet
itch for the upland passes. And if, by chance, you are
not a horseman (or horsewoman), your first day's
emotions are likely to be somewhat complicated. Your
cowboy guide, who knows no more of mercy — so the
woman declares who is sitting a horse for the first
time — than he knows of the names of the peaks or the
wild flowers (and that is very little!), sets off at a brisk
trot at the head of the procession, and his motley
cavalcade come bouncing along behind him strewing
hairpins by the way. But no trot lasts long in Glacier
Park. Set out whither you will, a grade awaits you that
pulls your horse down to a walk, a patient, weary walk
carefully calculated to take you as close to the abrupt
edge of the narrow trail, where it creeps around a
precipitous slope, as it is possible to go without falling
off. Women give up their ancient prerogative of

GLACIER PARK 53

screaming after an hour or two, in sheer weariness (all
but the "womanly woman," who keeps it up for a
day), a set expression of terrified resignation taking the
place of oral appeal. Always, here, as in other moun-
tains, the first few miles of a trail are through timber,
with only occasional glimpses between the tree trunks
of the peaks beyond, standing up now in the morning
light, at evening, on the return journey, taking the rose
of sunset on their snow caps. A mountain summit seen
through the columnar aisles of a forest, however, its
lower slopes screened out, rises with an isolated majesty
against the sky, ethereal and alone. Up the first few
miles of the trail it beckons you, down the last few it
bids farewell.

But it was when we broke out of timber into a glimpse
of our first upland meadow that I knew I was lost, I was
a slave forever to the Rocky Mountains. The sirens
were singing beside the path, little brooks of ice water
tumbling down from the snowfields just above. Upon
a cliff sat the Lorelei, and combed her hair of spun
silver, which came streaming down the dripping ledge of
red and green and purple rock — and she, too, was sing-
ing. At her feet grew yellow columbine, blue lark-
spur, lupine, and false forget-me-not. In her hand she
held a dark red monkey flower. Over her, dwarfed like
a print by Hiroshige, a twisted, limber pine flaunted its
pink cone buds. And she looked up to a towering cliff
wall three thousand feet high, and she looked down over

54 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

the trail deep into a rich glade carpeted with green
grass, a carpet pricked with golden dog-tooth violets, on
which snow patches lay like great bear rugs and ever-
greens in groups were the figures forming for a minuet.
This glade rose in a series of terraces, and over each
terrace poured the white cascade of a brook. The last
terrace led to Iceberg Lake, which we now could see ahead
of us, lying at the base of a vast semicircle of naked
rock, a precipice four thousand feet from the glacier
at the foot to the castellated battlements which
cut against the sky, red its predominant colour, a great
smash in the face, an astonishing revelation in one sheer
jump of the Great Divide — and it frowning down upon
a meadow starred with violets, where fir trees were the
stately figures in a minuet, where little ice-water rills
sang seductively, where sky-blue forget-me-nots looked
up from the crannies and columbines nodded in a wan-
dering wind! There is nothing wonderful in the fact
that we moulded snowballs in our shirt sleeves by the
shore of the lake, which in mid-July was still a sheet of
snow-covered ice, nor chopped up its frozen greenness
to make our iced tea. The wonder is this conjunction
of the stupendous with the delicate, the Grand Canon
with something even softer, greener, and more in-
timately alluring than the Berkshires or the Lake
Country. The dog-tooth violets come up as fast as the
drifts disappear; many an impatient one we found
blossoming Bravely through two inches of snow, in fact;

GLACIER PARK 55

and they sometimes star the ground for acres, a veritable
cloth of gold, at the feet of Dantean shale piles, frown-
ing red precipices, or hanging masses of the snow that
never melts. When they are gone, sister flowers take
their place. Always there is bloom and colour, al-
ways the soft tinkle of water and the wine of a wander-
ing wind.

All days are not fair in the Park, of course, though the
proportion to one who has been accustomed to the
White Mountains or the Adirondacks seems very high,
and it is strange at first to waken morning after morn-
ing and find the daybreak rosy on cloudless summits,
while a good camera will pick out the pattern of a man's
clothes half a mile away, so brilliantly sharp is the
atmosphere. Clouds do come, however, settling down
in a vast, dun pall over the Divide, and forming a rest-
less roof over the canoned amphitheatres which lie in the
curves of this majestic wall. On such days the colour
seems to go out of the rocks, only a streak of dull red
here and there remaining. The wild-flower carpet loses
its vividness. The snowfields look sooty and cold.
You are chiefly aware of the great precipices hemming
you in and shooting up into the driving scud, their tops
invisible, prison walls of a height that might be infinite.
The spirit, on such a day, is unspeakably depressed, and
yet there is a strange joy, too, the joy of facing anything
in Nature so seemingly stupendous.

For two such days we waited, impatient, for the

56 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

clouds to lift from the Great Divide that we might cross
by one of the high passes. Far to the eastward we could
see the sun on the prairie, and at length we decided that
by the same token it might be shining over the range,
so at noon we set out, with a pack train and guides —
twenty horses in all — up the switchbacks of the head
Wall which leads to Swift Current Pass. There are no
gaps in the Continental Divide; a pass is merely a
col, as low as possible, between two higher summits.
Swift Current Pass, just above a hanging glacier of the
same name, is more than seven thousand feet above sea
level; but at this point the Divide is perhaps a quarter
of a mile wide, not, as in many places, a knifeblade
ridge. We went up the steep switchbacks, past the
glacier, into a dense cloud, the horses picking their way
carefully over extensive snowfields, and entered a
small level meadow, ground squirrels chattering at us
and a ptarmigan hen and her chicks, the colour of the
rocks, scattering away into the low shrubbery. We
crossed the meadow to the western side, and suddenly,
without warning, we looked out under the cloud, across
ten miles of hole, to the Livingstone Range, which
stood up nobly in full sunlight, peak after peak of mys-
terious blue, snowcapped and snowmantled, stretching
northward out of sight! Directly opposite stood
Heaven's Peak, which, when snow-blanketed, has real
Alpine quality. The whole western range, in fact,
more nearly merits the term Alpine than the eastern,

GLACIER PARK 57

but only so long as the snowcaps last. Between us and
Heaven's Peak was a hole of unfathomed depth. As
we began to descend, realizing that the storm had been
entirely centred over the crest of the Continental
Divide, we could see into this hole, which was disclosed
as a double canon entirely wooded with huge evergreen
timber. We camped that night in the clouds, above the
tops of the primeval forest.

The next morning the descent began to the bottom of
the canon between the two ranges. The good trail had
ceased. Uncle Sam doesn't care what becomes of you
beyond the pass. We scrambled down three thousand
feet, walking our horses most of the way and chopping
out fallen logs, getting into larger and larger timber as
we dropped. This forest is not comparable, of course,
to the stands of Oregon fir in the Cascades, but it is a
splendid wood, none the less, chiefly white pine, fir and
tamarack, averaging at least sixty feet of clear stump
before a limb is reached. At the bottom of the canon
we turned up Mineral Creek by the dim trail which
leads ultimately to Waterman Lake and Canada, a
trail known of old to the smugglers, and plodded on for
a dozen miles through the forest, seeing no wild thing,
hearing no birds, hardly glimpsing even the walls on
either side. Then, in late afternoon, we began to go up
again. We saw the Continental Divide above the trees
to the east. To the west we saw the cliffs of Flattop
Mountain, the long, low ridge which splits the canon.

58 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

The timber rapidly stunted till we were in open groves
of balsam only twenty feet high but at least fifty years
old. We began to cross little silvery brooks of ice
water every hundred feet. The horses were weary and
the women were dangling on the horns of their saddles
when we reached our camping place, on the shoulder of
the Divide where it dips to six thousand feet and crosses
from the western range to the eastern. The horses
were turned loose and driven up toward the snowfields
to graze, their herd bells tinkling. Tents were pitched,
balsam beds cut, and supper cooked. The total ab-
sence of hard wood in the Park makes cooking a smoky
and difficult task, but that is the only drawback to
camping bliss. Rills of purest ice water ran past our
tents on either side, the lingering northern sunset
painted redder the red rocks of the Divide to the east
and put a blush on the snow-white face of Heaven's
Peak, while under a salmon sky to the south all the
huddled mountains twenty miles or more away, in-
cluding the precipices of Cannon and the ten-thousand-
foot peak of Jackson, were like burnished billows of
gunmetal, turning slowly to amethyst. No one thought
of the War, no one missed his evening paper. In this
exquisite solitude, while night stole over the eastern
bulwark and the brooks whispered in the cool dark, and
from the ghostly snowfield far above us the tinkle of
our herd bells dropped faintly down, it was utterly im-
possible to bring the mind to think of "civilization " and

GLACIER PARK 59

its complexities. At nine o'clock the camp was still. I
heard one lone coyote barking just before I dropped to
sleep.

The next day we climbed a peak that promised, ac-
cording to the topographical map, a splendid prospect.
A rope was necessary on part of the climb, over slippery
snowfields and around certain transverse ledges of
treacherous shale rock, but probably only the academic
climber is interested in such details, unless the climb is
made up some peak of peculiar fame or danger. Every
step of the first conquest of the Matterhorn is, of course,
an epic! Our first objective was a col in the Divide,
on the eastward side of which we knew lay Chancy
Glacier. We reached this col in two hours, finding the
Divide here but a few feet across. On the other side we
looked directly down on the glacier, now but a vast, un-
broken snowfield which swept against the red cliff
walls in long white slides like surf beating up the coast of
Maine. Half a mile out the glacier dropped off into
space, and beyond the rim we could see the canon of the
Belly River holding in its depths a lake of iceberg green
which turned to vivid lilac when a cloud shadow
crossed it. North of the canon, and not more than ten
or a dozen miles from our perch, .rose the grim rock
pyramid of Mount Cleveland, 10,500 feet, the highest
mountain in the Park, though far from the most impres-
sive. To the northeast, beyond the canon mouth, was
the infinite ocean, still and level to the horizon a hun-

60 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

dred miles away. Reason told us it was the Alberta
prairie, but the illusion of the sea was too perfect to
give reason a voice.

From this col four of us kept on up the peak, now
but a steep naked pyramid of shale stone, with ex-
quisite tiny gardens of pink moss campion, mountain
saxifrage, mist maidens, rosewort, and other Alpine
flowers half hidden in sheltered crannies. We could see
nothing but the sky as we climbed, and the rock in our
faces. The prospect we sought remained for a climax
when the apex was reached. In his address, "In Praise
of Omar," John Hay tells how he rose one morning in
camp on the summit of the Great Divide and heard a
frontiersman quoting:

' 'Tis but a tent where takes his one day's rest
A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest;
The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrash
Strikes, and prepares it for another guest."

The guide of our party was a frontiersman, a lover of
this mountain world, blue-eyed, lean, taciturn, efficient.
Another member was a well-known mountaineer and
mountain lover, one]of the few men who have ever scaled
the north wall of Mount Baker. Another was an
eastern artist. The fourth member has known the
Rubaiyat by heart for twenty years, and is not un-
acquainted with other exalted expressions of emotion.
But, as our faces came up over the crest, as we crouched

GLACIER PARK 61

in the high wind on the summit rock no larger than a
good-sized clothes closet and faced the first shock of
that prospect, not one of us quoted Omar Khayyam.
Not one of us gave expression to an exalted emotion in
supposedly fitting words. On the contrary, what each
of us said is unfit for print. We swore! Each accord-
ing to his capacity, we swore — reverently, heartily,
though with gasping breath, and the frontiersman was
the most expressive. There are moments when formal
rhetoric does not seem to fit!

To our right, on a high shelf of the Divide, hung a
small glacier, feeding a white stream which leaped out
over the precipice and vanished. Directly under our
feet the mountain fell away in a clean drop of at least
three thousand feet, so that we lay on our bellies in the
high wind, to toss a stone over. Far beneath us, at the
bottom of the hole, lay a peaceful green lake. Out of
this lake, on the other side, rose the steep debris pile
from the sides of Mount Merritt, and then the sheer
gray and brown battlements of the mountain itself, so
steep that not even a snowfield could cling to them, up,
up, to the level of our faces, and then up still another
thousand feet to the almost ten thousand-foot castel-
lated summit, a mile-long ridge of battlements. No
house, no trail, no human thing was visible from this
perch — only a vast hole into the earth with a sweet
green lake at the bottom; only rearing precipices and
distant, tumbled peaks and glaciers, and far off the

62 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

green ocean of the prairie. There was no sound but
the rushing of the summit wind and the faint roar of
water falling three thousand feet.

Presently we suggested to the artist that he make a
sketch, but he sadly shook his head.

"It can't be done!" he answered.

There are times when Man is humble.

A great deal has been written by mountaineers about
the joys of climbing. The joys of climbing are often a
good deal like those of heavy dumb-bell exercises. In
Glacier Park you want to sing the joys of coming back
to camp in the afternoon and loafing on a bed of balsam
boughs, with your tent flap open wide to the view of
lupines and violets in the meadow and distant, snow-
capped peaks beyond. You want to sing the joys of
fragrant food and steaming tea, of twilight slowly
gathering as though so fair a day were reluctant to de-
part. To ascend a peak, to see the tumbled world at its
wildest; to sit again in camp, tired and warmed with
food, to hear with one ear the camp cook telling bear
stories, with the other the bird-like calls of the ground
squirrels; to smell the resinous wood smoke and the
balsams, to catch now and then the tinkle of little ice-
water brooks from the snowfields, to watch the sunset
blush on Heaven's Peak and the stars come slowly out
above the battlements of the Divide — well, that is, I fear,
to spoil you for any other life. The little ice- water
brooks sing a siren song in the uplands starred with

GLACIER PARK 63

violets, and woe to him whose ears have heard! He
can never be quite happy again east of the Great
Divide.

So I might continue the tale of the days when we
drove our pack train through the Park, over high passes,
across precipitous snowfields where a slip would have
meant death, but too confident now on our horses to
worry, camping by glacier lakes of milky green, scramb-
ling over goat trails on the backbone of the continent,
cooking our luncheon in gardens where by careful count
as many as thirty wild flowers grew in a space the size
of an ordinary room — chalice cups like white anemone
Japonica, lupine, larkspur, pink spiraea, orange paint-
brush, false forget-me-not, columbines, tiny twin flow-
ers, and the stately spikes of the Indian basket grass
like an army with banners. But the names of the hills
and passes would mean little to the reader who has not
seen them, though to one who has, each name is a
magic invocation, bringing the memory of some splen-
did rock pile, some alluring meadow, some campfire
doused with wistful reluctance. "Beyond the Alps lies
Italy "; but beyond Gunsight Pass lies Logan's Pass, and
beyond that another, and beyond that another. The
range is endless, and the image of tumbled peaks and
magic meadows, each with its own individual charm,
stretching into the north, into the south, mile after
hundred mile, captures the imagination.

Two names, however, I cannot forego to mention, one

64 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

the name of perhaps the most beautiful rock pile on
the continent, the other of the most beautiful meadow,
the meadow where Pegasus must once have browsed
and the white feet of Aphrodite twinkled on the grass.
Going-to-the-Sun Mountain, by some happy miracle,
bears a name that is worthy of it. It rises abrupt and
sheer out of the green mirror of St. Mary Lake, five
thousand feet of naked wall from the lake shore, its sum-
mit almost ten thousand above sea level. It is devoid
of timber, even of visible vegetation, and loses its snow
early. In colour it is gray flushed with pink, and from
the lake shows as an almost perfect pyramid with the
apex removed making a level summit. Viewed, how-
ever, from up the canon, its shape is totally different.
Then its sides are far more precipitous, its summit
wider, and as the low afternoon sun strikes along its
great buttressed flank vast masses of lavender shadow
and thousand-foot high lights mould it into an archi-
tectural structure of ethereal solidity, a vast cathedral
of the primeval earth spirit. ' Some day its name will
be famous among mountains.

Piegan Meadow ! All the morning we had plodded up
the long trail over Piegan Pass, at first directly under
and then across the canon from the absolutely precipi-
tous wall of Gould Mountain where a silver waterfall was
descending for three thousand feet, like the hair of
Melisande, its soft thunder windborne to our ears. We
crossed the summit in deep snow, amid a jumble of naked

GLACIER PARK 65

shale heaps like a Dore dream. We descended, long
past the noon hour, under a hot sun, by a trail which
was dug into a shale slide — a half hour to reach the
little figures which we saw plodding up, even their
faces distinct a mile away, another half hour to reach
the bottom of the shale, where the limber pines began
and the smell of ice- water rills was good in the horses'
nostrils. We swung at a trot around the base of a
precipice — and the meadow lay before us.

It was, perhaps, a mile wide, a deep cup between
beetling cliffs which held glaciers in their upper pockets.
On the southerly edge it dropped off into space. It was
carpeted with lush, emerald grass, plentifully studded
with gnarled, Japanese-like limber pines gay with red
cone buds, sprinkled everywhere with nodding, golden,
dog-tooth violets, and criss-crossed with tiny rills of
ice water from the patches of white snow, rills which
sparkled and flashed silver in the sun. But that was
not all. Looking out over the green and gold carpet,
beneath the frame of some twisted pine branch, you
gazed across the hole where the meadow disappeared in
space, and ten miles away, at the end of the vista, rose
serenely the ten thousand feet of Mount Jackson, a
pyramid of white and blue, with the great snow mantle
of Blackfeet Glacier glistening on its shoulder. Piegan
Meadow! It has no rival in mountain loveliness. The
hour was perilously late when we poured the nectar from
one of the ice- water rills on our campfire and heard the

66 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

embers sizzle, saddest of sounds when the camp has been
a happy one. We paused at the edge, looking down into
the dark forest far below us, where already the evening
shadows were gathering. Behind, in the meadow, the
sun was still bright; the yellow lily bells of the dog-
tooth violets were nodding in a vagrant wind; we could
hear the murmur of the little brooks that flow softly
over grass. I never took a downward step with more
reluctance.

I am back in the East now, but I cannot forget that
magic meadow of green and gold on Piegan Pass, nor a
certain campfire under Rising Wolf, nor the evening
shadows on the noble flanks of Going-to-the-Sun, nor the
faint, far thunder of waterfalls in the night, nor the siren
song of the little ice- water brooks in the uplands starred
with violets, nor the vast rock walls which make you
humble in your flush of health and happiness.

There was a small boy in our party who, on his return
to his home in the Berkshires, took a long look at Mount
Everett, at all the hills about his dwelling, at the pas-
tures and ploughed fields, and then remarked sadly:
"Father, this is practically a prairie!"

I know exactly how he felt.

CHAPTER V

WHERE the milky green waters of the Columbia
River roll steadily or churn into impatient rapids south-
westward in mid- Washington, looking for an opening in
the great Cascade Range that they may break through
to the Pacific, lies a land not many years ago a desert,
but now producing magnificent apples, apricots, and
cherries from its one-time seemingly hopeless soil. It is
a narrow land between high, basaltic cliffs and jagged
mountain walls, into which the river has cut still
deeper, a land of naked rock, of gray volcanic dust and
green sage brush, an arid land for all the water surging
by, water almost the exact colour of the sage. Before
man came the landscape was forbidding, dismal, a
thing of rock nakedness, of sage-green and dusty gray.
Only the eternal sweep of the great river and the
occasional glimpses of the far blue mountains whitened
with snow redeemed it from the sense of some primal
curse. Then man arrived, to build irrigation basins up
in the hills where the winter snows lay late, to run
pipe lines down to the flats of gray volcanic ash — and

67

68 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

the desert was no more. Acre after acre blossomed and
bore fruit, towns sprang up, the smoke of homes as-
cended from the midst of each ten-acre square of green
trees and alfalfa which now covered the floor of the
valley like a vast checkerboard. There, where the
oldest orchard boasts but a scant thirty years, its trees
so far as age is concerned but mere striplings beside the
orchards of New England — though in actual growth the
disparity is hardly apparent, thanks to the tremendous
fertility of volcanic ash and humus — is now a new in-
dustry, a new community of agricultural pioneers who
have made the apple a work of art.

They have done it with the aid of the mountain
snows, with the aid of the mountain barrier which keeps
off the killing winds of Winter, which guards from frost,
which seems to concentrate the long summer sunshine,
above all with the aid of the volcanic ash once belched
from Baker and Tacoma (or Rainier), from Glacier Peak
and Adams, no doubt from the vast mountain which
ages long ago towered 20,000 feet over the hole which
now holds Crater Lake in Oregon. It is no wonder that
the pioneers of Wenatchee and the Columbia River
fruit bottoms lift up their eyes unto the hills and look
with affection on the blue and white pyramids against
the west.

Their towns are not yet beautiful; they are rawly
new, and it takes some time to span a street with arch-
ing foliage, even when you are blest with five per cent.

WHERE GLACIERS FEED THE APPLE ROOTS 69

of potash in your soil; it takes some time, also, to build
macadam roads across miles of dusty sage brush,
especially when your own two hands have more than
they can do in your personal patch of orchard. Yet so
much has been accomplished in so brief a span, the bus-
tle of energy is so infectious, there are so few indications
anywhere of effort abandoned, that the visitor from the
East feels himself in a new world. Where he came from
the orchards are often more beautiful, with the beauty
of age, not infrequently of neglect. The old New
England apple tree, with its jungle of suckers, its trunk
gnarled and sprawling, and standing with its fellows
over the gray stone wall, knee deep in grass and butter-
cups, is a beautiful patriarch, telling tales of other
days and generations passed away. It matches the
mouse-gray barn and the shabby but dignified farm-
house close by, the rolling fields beyond, the languid
haze of the summer day. But the apples of Wenatchee
grow on tall, upstanding trees that speak in every line
of ceaseless care and lateral pruning; between the rows
flow the tiny irrigation ditches, and under them
flourishes the rich alfalfa. They are the very anti-
thesis of neglect, as they surround the plain, prac-
tical, well-painted farmhouse, usurping even the door-
yard. Here is no languid haze on a summer day; heat,
perhaps, but not haze. The eye goes out between the
rows to the hollow where the mighty river runs, or down
the valley to the far blue rampart of the Cascade Range

70 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

shining with snow, or up to the ragged basaltic cliffs
above the canon. It matters not what picture the
vista frames, the light is glittering clear, every detail of a
cliff wall five miles away is as sharp as through a field
glass, the air is vibrant with its own purity. In such an
orchard, in such an atmosphere, the mind turns toward
the future, never the past. This is the land of what-is-
to-be.

But a great river does not roll onward mile after mile
chafing to get through a mountain rampart, biting an
ever deeper canon into the basalt rock and disclosing
at its junction with confluent streams vistas into wild
gorges or glimpses of lofty summits, snow-mantled,
whence those tributaries come, without luring the
traveller to climb the ragged walls and go exploring, to
leave the river for the hills. So we were lured, and so
we found Lake Chelan, said by some to be the most
beautiful lake on the North American continent. I
have not seen all the lakes on the North American
continent, so I make no comparisons myself, content to
state that it is the most beautiful lake I ever saw, awake
or in my dreams.

We had gone northward from Wenatchee up the
canon of the Columbia, the walls narrowing in upon us,
the orchards on the bank growing fewer and smaller.
We alighted at a station called Chelan Falls, and the
train went on, leaving us apparently the sole occu-
pants of the river gorge. The sage-green Columbia, just

WHERE GLACIERS FEED THE APPLE ROOTS 71

across the track, was gently hissing, with that peculiar
noise a powerful stream makes when it is flowing
very rapidly but not quite over rapids. In front of us
the rocky cliff, with no verdure upon it except the in-
evitable sage brush, rose almost precipitous; but we
could see the scar of a road, unf enced, which descended
from the top in a series of switchbacks, dug out of the
wall. Down the road a motor was coming, closely fol-
lowed by a cloud of dust. A few moments later it
pulled up at the platform, dust and all. There was a
woman at the wheel, a woman who should have been the
heroine of some western romance, her hands tanned, her
shoulders square, her eyes alert, her face extraordinarily
good to look upon. But, alas, her grammar was im-
peccable, she was mistress of the graces of sophisticated
society no less than of the clutches of her car! With
her brown hands on the wheel, we crawled up the cliff
side to a comparatively level plain covered with gray
dust and sage brush, and stretching a few miles west-
ward to rolling hills. Over this plain we sped, and came
to a little town on the shore of a lake, a town rawly new
and busy, like all the others in this forward-looking land.
Neither was the lake remarkable, save for its exquisite
green colour. It stretched away between hilly shores,
and appeared to vanish around a headland. The
bounding hills, the height, perhaps, of those around Lake
George, but much less precipitous, were partially tim-
bered, partially cleared to young orchards which came

72 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

down to the water's edge. It was a gentle, somewhat
pastoral scene.

"This," said our fair driver, "is Lake Chelan — or a
little of it."

"Is there more?" I asked.

She smiled. "In the West," she said, "there is al-
ways more."

We abandoned the purr of the automobile for the un-
muffled cough of a large motor boat, and put-put-
putted out over the green water, a much more vivid green
than the waters of the Columbia River, holding some-
thing of the blue of the sky in suffusion. We had no
knowledge of our destination, no conception of what we
were to see; adventurers on unknown waters, we left
the dock and the crude, busy little town behind, sailing
in a summer sun toward the gateway of hills where
the lake disappeared northwestward. But we were
aware of a cool, fresh wind in our faces, and the smell
of pure water. We could not fail to note the extraor-
dinary clarity of the atmosphere, in which we could
easily detect a "rancher" working with a hoe in his
newly planted orchard of young trees no taller than he,
though the shore at that point was at least a mile away.
We could even see the sparkle of the water in the ditch,
as his hoe led the life-giving moisture down between the
rows. We crowded on the forward deck, and set our
faces to the wind.

The lake did not increase in breadth; it remained

seemingly about as wide as the Hudson River at Tarry-
town. But no sooner had we passed around the first
headland than we saw it stretching onward for many
miles, till it once more disappeared around a still loftier
wooded point. It may have been ten miles from the
foot of the lake that we put in at a small bay where a
new town was springing up, the result of a new irrigation
project. The hills had already become higher, their
sides more abrupt. They were crowding this new, shin-
ing little village down close to the water's edge, and the
orchards, as yet only squares of brown earth with
polka dots of frail green upon them where the young
trees were flourishing, were pushing bravely up the
slopes into the fir timber, clinging to every sheltering
shelf. There was something heroic about this orchard
town on the very outskirts of cultivation. These or-
chards were the first-line trenches in man's battle with
the soil. Just beyond the town the boundaries of the
Chelan National Forest began, the hills arose still more
abruptly, there was no foothold for the orchardist. He
had pressed forward as far as he could go, and the
Swiss peasant's herd bells tinkling on the meadows
under snow line, so celebrated in song and story, are no
more romantic than these last orchards clinging to the
mountainside above the green water of Lake Chelan.

When our boat rounded the next headland, we saw
the lake still stretching northwestward, but no longer a
jewel in a pastoral setting. A few last orchards, the

74 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

ultimate outposts, still clung to the precipitous shores,
but for the most part these shores rose too abruptly
from the water to give any foothold, and bared ledges of
rock began to crop out, crowned with spired firs. The
wind, drawing down the lake, was churning the surface
into a considerable sea. Ahead of us loomed a superb
portal to still-further-unseen reaches of the lake, a
natural gateway like that to the Highlands of the
Hudson between Storm King and the Point, but with
each precipitous mountain forest-clad and devoid of any
human habitation, and rising nearly five thousand feet
sharp out of the water. Between these splendid head-
lands, sentinels of the major range beyond, Lake
Chelan stretched its dancing green pathway, foam-
flecked and sky-tinted, whispering of magic splendours
yet to come.

Once you have entered through this majestic portal,
you have left the lowland world behind, the world of
orchards and of men, of roads and barns, of strife and
barter. You are afloat on an inverted sky in the heart
of the primal wilderness, in the depths of the tumbled
mountains. The lake grows no wider; if anything it
narrows. But it stretches onward for another forty
miles between two unbroken walls of naked precipice
and fir-clad slopes rising to castellated summits of
progressively greater height till the snowfields begin to
glitter far above your head and white streams begin to
flash in the forest and leap out over the rocks. The

WHERE GLACIERS FEED THE APPLE ROOTS 75

depth of a lake, as a rule, adds little to pictorial im-
pressiveness. But the case is otherwise here. Lake
Chelan is sixteen hundred feet deep, which means that
its bottom is six hundred feet below sea level. As you
look upon the abrupt plunge of the mountain walls into
its green depths and realize that they continue their
descent below the surface for more than a thousand feet,
the imagination is staggered with the slit in the earth
crust this Chelan canon must have been before it was
partially filled with water. For nearly forty miles it
was once from one to almost three thousand feet deeper
than the Grand Canon of the Colorado — and still is,
could we see to the bottom of this green mid-surface on
which we float. At any point of the shore the Maure-
tania could throw a gang plank to the cliffs and never
graze her keel. Putting in close, our launch took us
under the spray of waterfalls and beneath hanging rock
gardens of lupine and paint brush, foxglove and goat's
beard, while on many a craggy headland some storm-
scarred fir flung long branches southward in the lee of
the twisted trunk, its northward limbs shaved off by
wind and sleet.

But the full glory of Chelan lies not in its depths of
green water, nor in its upleaping banks which slope back
a thousand feet above water level and carry mantles of
fir up to the seven-thousand-foot timber line. Its full
glory is the revelation of the main Cascade Range at
the head of the vista, a procession of pyramidal peaks

76 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

glittering with ice and snow, which come out of the
north, pass across the range of vision, and disappear to
the south. The green lane of the lake makes directly for
them; they grow nearer, putting off their blue to don the
grays and pinks of naked rock, the different textures of
glacier ice and temporary snowfield becoming more and
more distinct. At the last, the spur peaks which bound
the lake are as high as the summits of the Cascade
Divide, and they, too, are capped with the eternal
snows. The lake ends against a cliff wall adorned with
Indian pictures and the initials of the inevitable
American vandals, and in a little sedgy meadow beside
the cliff, through which the Stehekin River pours in its
milky waters direct from the high glaciers. Here is
journey's end, and here, the last bulwark of the lake,
Castle Rock springs up against the west, rearing its fairy
battlements eight thousand feet aloft and taking the sun-
set in rose and gold long after the twilight shadows have
dusked the lapping water and the evening lamps are lit.
Again, while the morning mists are still hovering
wraiths over the lake or cling like veils to the Douglas
firs on the lower slopes, these fairy towers catch the
rising sun, and send its welcome down to those below.

'•Full many a morning have I seen the sun

Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye. . . ."

Inevitably those words occur to you as the sky-
borne rocks blush and burn with salmon-rose and gold,

WHERE GLACIERS FEED THE APPLE ROOTS 77

while the green lake beneath is a dim, quiet mirror, as
if the breath of night were still clouding it. If on the
little hills of England, Shakespeare could find immortal
imagery, what heights of splendour would he not
have scaled could he have seen the sunrise over Lake
Chelan! Or would he have been dumb, and gone
a-fishing? Sometimes it is not the largest prospect, nor
indeed the largest event, which evokes the magic
utterance.

The entire upper water-shed of Lake Chelan, includ-
ing so much of the main Cascade Range as feeds the
Stehekin River, to the summit of the Divide, is a na-
tional forest, which means that the region is threaded
with rangers' trails practical for horses. The name of
War Creek Pass appealed to me. It was a person de-
luded by love who asked : " What's in a name? " There
is everything hi a name. Agnes Falls, which the map
showed me descending over a close maze of contour
intervals, left me quite cold for all the promised drop.
"David Copperfield" spoiled the name Agnes for me
many years ago. But War Creek Pass! That sug-
gested something rugged and difficult, that breathed
the romance of the ancient days when the Indians went
over the range by this route to attack their enemies
to the north. My feet should climb where their
moccasins had found the way, and I would look
down upon the same world they looked down upon,
for man as yet has made no scar on this tumbled

78 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

wilderness of peak and glacier. The horses were
brought forth, and we strung out in single file for
War Creek Pass.

The trail for several miles leads sharply upward
through the peculiar Cascade forest — peculiar, to an
Easterner, because it is at once meadow, garden, forest,
and rock precipice. The trees, for the most part great
upstanding Douglas firs, with a considerable admixture
of cedar and some hardwoods, on this side of the range
do not grow thickly together like a stand of eastern pine
or hemlock. The forest energy seems to have con-
centrated into single specimens often a hundred feet
apart, which rear brown trunks for fifty or seventy-five
feet without a limb. In our eastern woods a tree so
isolated would throw lateral branches, and we develop
no such shaggy columnar trunks rising from steep
lawns of grass, their feet set firm in beds of wild flowers.
Almost the first garden we came upon, close to the
water's edge, was a great bed of foxgloves on either
side of a tiny brook. Every year in my garden I sow
these queenly biennials, transplanting and retransplant-
ing the young plants, nursing them tenderly through the
Winter, and deploring their later tendency to throw back
to magenta. Yet, in this wild garden beside the ice-
water brook, self-sown and self-protected, the gorgeous
spikes were growing almost six feet tall, and not a
magenta one in the lot! Most of them were white,
flecked with pink. Their stalks were thick and strong.

WHERE GLACIERS FEED THE APPLE ROOTS 79

They were alike the envy and the despair of at least
one eastern amateur.

Close to the foxgloves, and companioning the trail for
a long distance, were several varieties of flowering
shrubs, now (early in July) in full bloom. The cap-
berry was perhaps the most conspicuous, a large shrub
with numerous blossoms not unlike small white wild
roses in appearance. But the showy goat's beard was
scarcely less frequent, a bush covered with white bloom
closely resembling spiraea. As the trail ascended more
and more sharply, coming out now and then on a dizzy
ledge far over the water, and again climbing a steep
bank of the powdered, volcanic soil by a series of switch-
backs, the shrubs began to drop behind and the lower
wild flowers became predominant, purple lupine, sky-
blue larkspur, and the flaming orange-red paint brush
being the most conspicuous. Both the lupine and
larkspur are known as annuals in our eastern gardens,
but they do not reach the brilliance of colour they
achieve in this volcanic ash, nor do we find them spread
like bits of sky in every forest glade. Above all, we do
not plant them — we cannot plant them — in happy con-
junction with bright orange paint brush around the feet
of great brown fir tree columns, with a glimpse two
thousand feet below of the green water of Lake Chelan,
and a vista across the canon hole of the towering walls of
Castle Rock and a dazzling snowfield ! In such a grove
and such a garden we let our horses rest, and looked

80 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

upon the scene. The bluish-purple lupines and the
flaming paint brush, varying in colour from orange to
almost pure scarlet, grew in luxurious profusion on a
carpet of grass and moss. The columnar trunks were
shaggy brown. Between them we looked down into a
vast hole and saw the iceberg green lake at the bottom.
A cloud ship was trailing its shadow anchor over the
mountain wall across the lake. Down the side it came,
dusking the forest. It swept out over the water, and
where this shadow lay the water changed to amethyst.
We lunched at six thousand feet, on the edge of the
first snowfield which was rapidly melting under a hot
July sun. The snow had receded several feet in the
past few days, leaving the ground bare, and through the
gray scum which you always find under the accumulated
Winter's snow the earliest Spring wild flowers were
pushing up, especially dog-tooth violets, which six feet
out from the present snow line were shaking their
golden bells in the breeze. We were not above timber,
however. In the White Mountains of New Hampshire
timber line is at 4,500 feet. In the Alps it is at 6,400.
The highest timber line that I have ever seen recorded is
13,800 feet, on Mount Orizaba, in Mexico. In Colorado
and the California Sierras it is between 11,000 and
12,000 feet. Above Lake Chelan, it appears to
average something under 8,000. At 6,000 feet on War
Creek Pass we found the Douglas firs still of consider-
able girth and height, but they began rapidly to dwarf

WHERE GLACIERS FEED THE APPLE ROOTS 81

above that level, and the trail entered a belt of hard-
woods, thin, close-growing, and rather naked trees, many
of them winter killed and leaning against their up-
standing brothers or fallen like barricades across the
path. The Pass itself is merely the lowest point on the
summit ridge, a col between two rock pyramids. It
was not till we were almost cresting this col, at con-
siderably more than 7,000 feet, that the wild, tortured,
low-growing outpost trees of the true timber line ap-
peared, and the true Alpine flowers in the sheltered cran-
nies. The tortured trees of timber line! Nothing in
nature, perhaps, is wilder and more thrilling. I have
cut a mountain fir no higher than my knee which num-
bered fifty summers. I have walked on a trunk half as
large as my body, which rose two feet from under the
shelter of a rock, met the stinging storm blasts, and bent
out flat parallel to the ground and grew thus for fifty
feet, as though some giant steam roller had passed over
it. You climb through thinning and dwarfing forests,
with an ever-larger prospect opening out below you,
you reach the heroic outposts of the trees, you inhale a
colder, clearer air, you feel the breath of the snow, you
see at last above you only the final heave of naked rock
and the vast dome of the sky!

And here, at last, where the forest gave up the fight as
it caught the full strength of the shearing wind, we
looked into the forest world beyond the Pass, the goal of
the Indians who first made the trail. We looked across

82 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

the forest into the tumbled gorges of the Cascade Range,
advancing like a sea of white-capped billows in a vast
wave line against the western sky. Far to the north-
west rose the blue and white cone of Mount Baker. To
the southwest, across the hole which held in its depths
the green jewel of Lake Chelan, and seemingly but just
beyond the opposite wall of that hole, lay the white-
crowned ridge of Glacier Peak, 10,435 feet, the glaciers
sprawling down its summit like some monstrous octopus
of ice. All between was a world of upheaved magnifi-
cence, of deep ravine and sun-washed pinnacle, of naked
precipices and dazzling snowfields, of dark, timbered
slopes and the glimpse of flashing water. Down those six
thousand feet below you lay the lake, the green pathway
to this pageant of the peaks. Lake and pinnacle, forest
and glacier, are dedicated to the nation; they are our own
forever. Yet they are but a relatively small section of
the unending range, set apart because of its perfection.
A young poet of the Hood River Valley, homesick in
New York, not long ago put his longing into verse. He
spoke of the call of the West, and then he said:

" But mightier still than its clarion call
Is the walloping bigness of it all,
And you live the days when your eye swept clear
From the slopes of Hood to old Rainier.
Canon on canon — rock-ribbed piles
Rolling away for a hundred miles —
And the gold of the sunset on leaf and branch
Crowding your soul like an avalanche."

WHERE GLACIERS FEED THE APPLE ROOTS 83

As I stood on the wind-swept col of War Creek Pass
and faced the advancing wave line of the Cascade Range
I knew exactly what he meant. I knew the pride
that was in his heart, the hunger for this lofty spacious-
ness, this tempestuous beauty, that gnawed his bosom
as he tramped the crowded eastern streets. Then my
thoughts descended into the hole where the green lake
lay, and went back down its jewelled pathway to the
orchards at its lower end, fighting their way up as close
as they could get to the fir-clad cliffs and the eternal
snows. There was no pity in my thoughts for these
pioneers of the apple, nor admiration, either. There
was only envy. They dwell by one of America's noblest
lakes, the great hills are their guardians, beauty their
priceless heritage. The pure sap of the glaciers is in
their perfect fruit. Is it not possible, is it not likely,
that something of this beauty and this spaciousness will
go into the generations yet to be, into the men and
women, too?

I stumbled down from War Creek Pass, leading my
horse till the gathering shadows made me prefer to trust
his feet rather than my own — a humbler and, I trust, a
better American.

CHAPTER VI
GLACIER PARK WILD FLOWERS

THE least impressionable person alive cannot go to
the Rocky Mountains without giving enthusiastic at-
tention to the wild flowers. This is only in part due to
the individual beauty of those flowers. In the East we
have many as beautiful, some more beautiful, and still
more we share with the West. But it is seldom that our
flowers grow in such masses and profusion, with so
many kinds and colours blended on one small square of
ground, and, above all, it is seldom that our flowers have
the field so much to themselves, sharing it only with a
little sparse grass, the scattered groups of limber pine
or firs, and the ice-water brooks from the snowfields.
The Rocky Mountain wild flowers often display their
colours, indeed, against a backing of pure snow, or grow
underneath pink and red and purple precipices, and
beside lakes of iceberg green. They are a foreground of
delicate beauty for a picture of stupendous impact. No
other flowers have such a setting, are so intimately
associated with landscape gardening in the grand style,
the style of Shakespeare and of Milton.

When I went into Glacier Park, I bought a book

84

GLACIER PARK WILD FLOWERS 85

about the wild flowers of the North American mountains
because for miles out in the prairie, as we drew near
the sky-blue range, I had been seeing wonderful gar-
dens in the grass. In fact, the prairie grass is mostly
wild flowers. Since that purchase, I have been seeking
everywhere to find the names of many flowers this book
didn't list. It was a provokingly unsatisfactory book,
especially because it failed to state the size and height of
flowers, or to tell which are indigenous to the moun-
tains. But that is neither here nor there. Some day, as
travel into our western wonderland increases, the right
book will be supplied at the hotels. The first, and most
astonishing, omission I discovered was that of the so-
called Indian basket grass, or squaw grass (Xerophyllum
tenax). As any one who has seen it knows, the blossom
of this * 'grass" is hardly inconspicuous . During late June
and July, indeed, the tall, yucca-like stalk rising from two
to six feet out of the clump of coarse, wiry leaves which the
horses will not eat, and bearing its great bloom-head of
creamy white flowers like a torch, is the most striking
plant in the woods and meadows. It grows in among
the timber; it breaks out into little glades and meadows
to run riot, an army with white battle plumes; it climbs
to the high "parks " just below the passes and flourishes
close to the snowfields. It is delicately fragrant, ex-
tremely decorative when picked, and altogether a re-
markably lovely and splendid wild flower. Naturally,
it is hardy, nor does it seem to have any decided soil

86 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

preference. I am told that it has been successfully
grown in the mountains of North Carolina, and it ought
to thrive near timber line on Mount Washington, if
some White Mountain enthusiast would take the
trouble to try it. I hope some day to experiment with
it in the Berkshire Hills.

Next to the squaw grass, the most conspicuous wild
flower in Glacier Park is undoubtedly the dog-tooth
violet (Erythronium grandiflorwn) with its smaller
variety, the parviflorum. There is nothing unusual
about this plant, of course, as it almost exactly resembles
the variety Americanum of the East, save that it grows
taller; but it is conspicuous in the Rockies for its brave
ubiquity. Naturally an early Spring bloomer, it
doesn't get its chance in the upland meadows and on the
high slopes till the snow melts, so that you may find its
golden lily bells nodding as late as August. When
a winter snowfield melts, it recedes along the edges,
showing bare ground for a day or two. Up through this
ground come the lily leaves of the "violets," and with
great rapidity, under the hot summer sun, the plants
burst into blossom. Sometimes they do not even wait
for the melting. I gathered scores of them blooming
through an inch or more of snow. Often the edge of a
large snowfield for half a mile will be bordered with a
solid belt of gold, from six to a hundred feet wide ac-
cording to the rapidity with which the melting has
taken place. If the snow melts slowly, other flowers

GLACIER PARK WILD FLOWERS 87

come in, and the border will mark the seasons — six feet
of dog-tooth violets, then six feet of chalice cup, per-
haps, then several feet of lupine or tall false forget-
me-not, then vetch and pale blue clematis and yellow
columbine and purple pentstemon, and so on, even to
goldenrod. Sometimes, on the sides of a steep gully
where the snow has packed hard and melted very slowly,
these belts of bloom will be only a foot or two wide, run-
ning all the changes from earliest Spring to late Summer
in a space of fifty feet.

But though when you enter an upland meadow,
studded with limber pines (their own reddish pink cones
a pretty blossom), and carpeted with white snow-
fields bordered with gold, you are first aware of the dog-
tooth violets, on closer inspection you find dell after
little dell where as many as thirty varieties of plants
will be blooming simultaneously. You have passed
many others on the wooded trail coming up. Soon, as
you leave the timber line and begin to climb those pink
and red and purple cliffs which tower over you, you
will find that what now looks like naked rock will be a
sub-Arctic or Alpine garden, no less lovely of its kind
than this incomparable meadow half way between the
lowlands and the peak.

Among the woodland flowers, the arnica is omnipres-
ent. There are several varieties, closely allied, and they
literally star the woods, for their pretty, yellow, daisy-
like petals, with a darker yellow centre, are borne erect

88 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

a foot or two, over a forest floor that has little under-
growth. Associated with the woods, too, is the fairy
twin flower, and the giant Indian hellebore (veratrum
viride), with its huge, lance-like leaves and its pale white
and greenish flowers. This plant, of course, is common
in the East, as "false hellebore," but owing to our
denser undergrowth it never seems so conspicuous.

However, it is difficult to draw the line on the slopes
of the Rockies between the forest and the open, so fre-
quent are the glades, and so much do the flowers tend to
run from one to the other. The exquisite and common
admixture of blue larkspur (Delphinium Brownii and
its variations), purple lupine and Indian paint brush
(which in the same group, sometimes actually in the
same plant, ranges in colour from a greenish white
through scarlet to its standard tone of bright, bricky
oraijge), is found out in the open, and beside the trail
through broken timber as well. It is an even more com-
mon colour combination in the volcanic soil of the Cas-
cade Range, where acres upon acres are resplendent
with blue, purple, and orange. I have brought back to
the East a box of paint brush seed (castilleja miniata),
which I hope will have a chance to try our mountain soil.
But if it thrives as well in this region as its eastern cou-
sin, the brilliant painted cup, our farmers may not thank
me!

A striking plant which you frequently encounter, in-
variably close to the edge of a little brook, is the monkey

GLACIER PARK WILD FLOWERS 89

flower (mimulus Lewisii), which somewhat resembles a
sturdy, dark wine-red petunia, though its irregular
trumpet has a narrower opening and the petals curl
back more. It, too, has an eastern relative, closely re-
sembling it in shape, but blue instead of red, and not
over half the size. The little brooks beside which the
western monkey flower grows come leaping down from
the snowfields or glaciers above, clear and cold as ice.
Often the trail is cut along the steep side of a bank, so
that they fall tinkling down to your feet, and once more
leap out in a waterfall the other side of the path. Thus,
on one side of you is a drop with a splendid prospect of
meadow and canon and far peaks, on the other side, so
close that you can often pluck the flowers without leav-
ing your saddle, a steep bank between little waterfalls,
a bank which is a perpetual garden. You look to the
left upon far tremendousness, you look to the right at
the small, close, intimate world of wild flowers.

In this intimate world, the yellow aquilegia, or
columbine, is conspicuous, and so is the false forget-
me-not, which grows everywhere. It is larger and
not always so true a blue as the true forget-me-not
which doesn't begin to appear until the higher alti-
tudes. But it is a lovely flower, none the less, hardly
deserving to be branded "false." Delicate harebells
sway here, too, in this land where all the flowers crowd
Spring and Summer and Autumn into one or two brief
months, and rough fleabane may be found beside tall

90 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

white viola Canadensis, or goldenrod beside lupine.
The palely purple to blue blossom of the clematis
columbiana grows shyly along such a bank, on vines that
run for the most part on the ground, or climb a little way
into the low, stunted branches of a limber pine. Near
them may be golden hairy hawkweed, and just across
the path on the edge of the cliff a clump of red heather,
or a gay group of pinkish purple pentstemon, one of the
showiest of the wild flowers. There is pink spiraea, too,
and bright, golden shrubby cinquefoil, wrongly known
as hardhack by our Berkshire farmers. Near it may be
a striking clump of the ascending milk vetch (astragalus
adsurgens), with its purple blooms. Another variety
(the Alpine milk vetch) is smaller and paler, and grows
above timber line. Both pink and white everlasting are
common, too. Indeed, the bank beside you is a per-
petually variegated garden, and on the other side, you
look down upon meadows which are gardens, too,
away to the far peaks.

There are, of course, certain flowers which you come
to hold in peculiar affection, and certain spots where
they grow are ever after remembered. I shall never for-
get, for instance, the little pine-studded meadow at the
foot of Grinnell Lake. Beyond the lake the cliffs leap
up to the great white mass of Grinnell Glacier, hanging
on a lofty shelf of the Continental Divide. Over these
cliffs waterfalls descend like silver hair, their soft thunder
coming to you across the green lake. To right and

GLACIER PARK WILD FLOWERS 91

left naked rock walls tower up into peaks. Yet the
moist little meadow is as intimate and peaceful as a
cloistered garden, and in mid-July, when we were there,
was carpeted with chalice cups. The chalice cup
(anemone occidentalis) is, of course, in reality a spring
flower. Its cream-white blossom is from one to two
inches across, with a fluffy, golden-green centre. Later
this fluffy seed head expands into a feathery tuft on a
stalk a foot or two high, and is almost as attractive as
the flower. But until you have seen a Rocky Mountain
meadow carpeted with these large, beautiful, soft
anemones, you cannot know their charm.

The mariposas of the Rocky Mountains are not to be
forgotten, either. The green-banded mariposa (calo-
chortus macrocarpus) throws up a straight, erect stem
and bears a lily of three pale lilac, concave petals, with a
green stripe down the centre. The calochortus alba,
however (a variety to be had of the Montana nursery-
men), found at such high altitudes as Mount Morgan
Pass, where its loveliness has only the sky and mountain
goat for witnesses, is the more beautiful of the two. It
is like Emerson's "rose of beauty on the brow of
chaos."

Nor is the traveller likely to forget certain bits of road
or trailside at the foot of the range, near St. Mary Lake
on the east and Lake Macdonald on the west, where
Nature has planted border clumps of "wild hollyhock."
This delightful plant bears a stalk from four to six feet

92 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

high, covered toward the end with pink blossoms about
the size of a wild rose, but clustered much like the
hollyhock, and resembling that blossom in appearance.
It has the same decorative value when picked and
brought into the house, but it adds a certain shy wild-
ness of its own. We never found this plant, very
evidently a mallow of some sort, except near these two
lakes, but not growing, however, in actual wet. It was
not listed in my annoying book of Rocky Mountain
wild flowers — there were no mallows listed there. Later
it was identified as the Sidalcea neo-mexicana, and there
is also a cream or white variety, the Candida. This mal-
vaceous plant would prove a rare and choice addition to
any garden, but I have found only one or two Eastern
houses listing anything like it.

When you pass above timber line in the Rockies,
especially as far north as Glacier Park, you enter a sub-
Arctic world rather than an Alpine. Timber line in
the Alps is at 6,400 feet, and the summits are covered
with eternal snow. Timber line, even in Glacier
Park, is often more than 7,000 feet (in Colorado it is
more than 11,000), and though there are numerous
permanent snowfields as well as glaciers above the last
twisted trees, the bulk of the great shale heaps and jag-
ged rock towers, which are the peaks of the range, are
free of snow for at least two months. In those two
months the brave little blossoms of these Arctic heights
concentrate their beauty and fragrance. You are

GLACIER PARK WILD FLOWERS 93

climbing Piegan Pass, for instance, which takes you
close under the more than 10,000-foot summit of Mount
Siyeh. You have left timber far behind, and are crawl-
ing up beside a yawning canon hole, amid naked, broken
shale, desolate beyond words or the pencil. of Dore.
Yet look at the ground close beside you! It is not
naked. In every sheltered cranny, in every spot where
a mite of soil has lodged, flowers are blooming! Some
of them are so tiny that it would require a microscope to
analyze them. Some, you note with surprise, are of the
lowland varieties, dwarfed by the summit storms like a
timber-line tree. I found a shrubby cinquefoil at al-
most 9,000 feet, with a stalk as large as my thumb and
tough as steel; but it grew as close along the ground as a
Mitchella vine, literally hugging the earth, and wasn't
more than a foot long. Yet it was bearing blossoms
quite as large as in its natural position. Here on the
wind-swept uplands the true forget-me-not grows, this
mountain variety being as a rule not more than six
inches high, but of a marvellous cerulean blue. Here are
various gentians, from true gentian blue through pinky
purple to almost white. Here, too, are found the blue
Greek valerians, fragrant, thick, bloom clusters on hairy
stems, and a still more attractive and showy plant, the
mountain phacelia. This phacelia sends up bluish-
purple bloom-spikes, on which the flowers cluster
thickly in a panicle, with their golden stamens pro-
jecting beyond the petal trumpet giving them a

94 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

bewhiskered appearance. The foliage is thick and hand-
some, and the plant has an odour, though not a pleasant
one.

But 'the real gem of the Arctic summits is the moss
campion. This exquisite and gay little pink, its blos-
soms like innumerable petalled pinheads in a green
cushion, braves the loftiest altitudes and caps the most
stupendous precipices. It must make fodder for the
mountain sheep and goats, and it certainly brings joy to
the heart of the climber. Often, under the shelter of a
rock, or even in the hollow on top of a rock, you will
find a dwarf garden of such dainty charm that you have
to kneel beside it and admire. There will be, first, a
cushion of moss campion two or three feet across, a
pretty swell of soft green velvet covered with the pink
blossoms. Then, growing around it, even out of it, will
be a plant or two of sky-blue forget-me-not, perhaps
some pale mauve Alpine vetch, and, if the altitude is
not too great, the slender stalk of the green lily (zygad-
enus elegans], with its many small, roundish, cream-
white flowers splashed with green. Indeed, it is not
impossible, again if the altitude is not too great, that
there will be a shooting star (dodecatheon pauciftorum)
in the garden — a strange, vivid little red flower spitting
down its pointed yellow nose toward the earth again.
Certainly, on the surrounding rocks there will be coloured
lichens and tiny stonecrop. Such a garden is unknown
on the only sub-Arctic summits of the East — the Presi-

GLACIER PARK WILD FLOWERS 95

dential Range In the White Mountains. And it is
worth a trip across the continent to see.

To lift a wild flower out of its setting is sometimes
a foolish thing. But yet the more American flowers we
can adapt, and as far as possible adapt some of their
natural setting with them, into our gardens, the sooner
we shall have a garden style of our own. Many of
these Rocky Mountain wild flowers can now be secured
from western nurseries. They are all perfectly hardy
so far as cold is concerned. Heat, rather, would be their
danger. Among the best now being exported to the
East are the false dandelion (possibly a dangerous experi-
ment); the gay arnica for shady places; the white mari-
posa lily; the calypso borealis (a western lady's slipper);
delphinium bicolor, or blue-veined larkspur, a low plant
for high, dry places; the gay shooting star; the gaillardia
aristata, or brown-eyed Susan of the prairies and lower
hills, possibly too much like our common garden variety
to bother with; northern bedstraw, which bears small
white clusters of bloom; and blue pentstemon, which is
certainly worth experiment. A bed of it, sown to grow
up through a ground cover of sweet alyssum, would be
extremely lovely. The eastern varieties, called beard
tongue, so far as I have ever observed are not thought
enough of to put in a garden. You have to visit the
Rockies before you appreciate this flower.

Of course, I have mentioned but a tiny proportion
of the blossoms that greet you when you enter the magic

98 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

wilderness of the Rocky Mountain chain. No doubt
each visitor will chide me for omitting his favourite. But
if I have made one reader desirous of seeing those gar-
dens for himself, I am satisfied. For all our talk, we
haven't yet begun to appreciate our own land. I will
match the chalice cup in Grinnell meadow against the
edelweiss any day, and give liberal odds at that!

CHAPTER VII
THE HARVEST OF THE WILD PLACES

OVER the hill behind our house, and then a mile
through the swamp, we come out into a pasture clear-
ing set on a slope. The slope is to the south, with
many an undulation and outcropping ledge, with here
and there a group of young hemlocks, here and there
an old apple tree bristling with suckers, or a spiky seed-
ling from the parent pippin cropped into a dwarf cone
like an inverted top; and almost in the centre of the
pasture a hollow where a spring makes an emerald patch
in the grass, and an emerald ribbon follows the outlet
brook into the woods. On its southern edge the
clearing meets the forest, with little bays running
into the pines, or sallies of young birch coming out
to prospect in the sunlight. The pasture grass is
cropped by occasional sheep and a cow or two which
wander through the woods from a distant farm. They
like it especially in hot weather, for its spring and its
clumps of hemlock, under which they gather in the
dense shade and look out at you blandly. But,
despite the cattle, it is a wild spot — an abandoned
clearing going back to forest; part of a farm where

97

98 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

man once reaped his hard-won harvests, and now
reaps no more.

Yet it is harvested daily by the four-footed and
flying creatures of the wilderness, and the human culti-
vation once expended upon it has made it the richer
farm for them. They toil not, neither do they sow, yet
they live well on a varied if vegetarian diet. They reap
as the fancy strikes them in man's abandoned clearing.

There is so much to see in our pasture, so much to in-
fer! It is so quiet, so delicately melancholy with its
suggestion of a vanished race of New England pioneers,
so lovely with its woods and spring, such a busy res-
taurant for the birds by day, with music furnished by
the patrons, and by night a restaurant, too, always
open, with no police restrictions, though we be not here
to see. To take morning reckoning of last night's
visitors, especially by their tracks hi the snow, is one of
the lesser but unfailing delights of woodcraft.

Birds are busy creatures, for all they find so much
time to sing, and they pay a great deal more attention
to their stomachs than the poets ever mention. You
will come closer to the facts in those government
bulletins which report the finding of two thousand mos-
quitoes in the stomach of a single martin, and similar
interesting discoveries, than in the poet's pages. I
don't know that I have ever seen it computed how many
raspberries a catbird can eat, but I know it is more than
I can spare from the vines in my own garden, where a

HARVEST OF WILD PLACES 99

pair of catbirds that nest each year in a red-osier dog-
wood beneath my study window, love to feed. Out in
our abandoned clearing, however, I do not begrudge
them the berries, which grow in a corner where the
vanished farmer made his last cutting of timber.
Many a time I have lam on the ground up the slope in
f ruiting season and watched a catbird darting back and
forth to these vines, as if his appetite were insatiable, his
trim gunmetal body taking the sun on head or wing-tip.
Presently I would get up and stroll over to gather some
berries for myself. You would have thought a band of
human pickers had been there, to see all the whitish,
thimble-shaped hulls hanging denuded from their stems.
Even as I would put out my hand for a red fruit there
would come from the thicket close by a mew of protest
and an angry flutter of wings. Though, in my own ex-
perience, the catbirds are most addicted to raspberries,
the thrushes, orioles, robins, flickers, and cedar wax-
wings also eat them, and doubtless other birds besides.
But there are many other harvest products in and
about our pasture besides the raspberries. Even the
weeds yield their store, and in Autumn, or better still
in Whiter, when the weed tops stand up dry and stiff
above a light covering of snow, you may see the Can-
adian or tree sparrows (so called, perhaps, because they
spend most of their lives on the ground !) hopping up to
peck at the seeds, or occasionally one more wise shaking
ihe seeds down and picking them up from the snow. In

100 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

our own farms and gardens, indeed, we may see the same
thing occurring, and often beneath a weed top find on
light snow the dust of seed shells and innumerable tiny
tracks. There is nothing more beautiful than the weed
tops above a deep snow by country roadside or forest
edge. Consider a group of wild-carrot tops (Queen Anne's
lace) dried and turned up into fretted cups to hold each
its thimbleful of snow, or a clump of withered golden-rod
blooms, as perfect in shape as they were when the frost
struck them down, but a brownish gray now instead of
gold. Above all, look for the pods of the milkweed,
three or more on a single tall stalk, a lovely yellowish
brown inside, a delicate mouse-gray on the tongue,
which curls over like the hood of a Jack-in-the-pulpit!
The milkweed pods, above the deep snows of Winter,
with the full sun upon them, are like petrified orchids.
Grass tops are lovely, too, rising through the dazzle, and
cattails in the swamp, and many a more humble weed.
And every one that bears seeds is harvest for the birds
and mice, as well as the most delicate of etchings — a few
gracefully stiff lines, a puff of withered bloom against
the dazzling ground plate of snow. The birds are not
the only creatures which benefit by the weeds. Tiny
footmarks, with the line of the tail between, make roads
amid all the weeds of our pasture after Winter has come.
We may call it an abandoned clearing, but it was busy
enough last night!

Richer food than the weeds, however, is provided

HARVEST OF WILD PLACES 101

near our pasture by the black cherry tree close to the
old fence just over the ridge toward a desolate cellar-
hole. It is the lush time of Summer when this tree is in
fruit, the time when the baby birds are getting their
growth, when the mother robins are anxiously busy.
Man may have forsaken this clearing, but if we take our
stand quietly under the cherry tree, and wait a few
moments till the frightened birds are reassured, we find
ourselves in the midst of almost feverish avian activity.
Robins dart into the tree incessantly, making a con-
siderable noise about it, too. Now and then a big
flicker comes winging into the branches. There is the
gorgeous flash of an oriole, and sometimes, perhaps, the
brilliance of a rose-breasted grosbeak or a tanager.
Only the robins so haunt our domestic cherry trees (can
you not remember how as a boy you were startled, when
robbing a neighbour's tree, by the rush of wings almost
against your face?) ; and I have been told that even in an
orchard, if a wild cherry is planted amid the cultivated
sorts, the red-breasted trespassers will choose it in
preference. Perhaps they find the small fruit better for
their young. I have seen a mother robin in our garden
try twelve successive times to stuff a large red cherry
down the throat of her offspring, and give up the task
only when the fruit was entirely battered off the stone.
The wild cherry trees, of course, are undesirable to the
gardener because they harbour so many insect pests,
especially tent caterpillars, but if these pests were kept

102 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

down by spraying, a few wild trees ought to be a con-
siderable protection on the edge of a cherry orchard.

Along such a fence as that where the cherry tree
stands might well be several cedars. The cedar is not a
common tree with us, to be sure, but it grows plentifully
twenty miles south in Connecticut. There the pastures
are studded with dark sentinels, and many an old fence
post is companioned by a sturdy tree or two. When the
blue cedar berries are ripe in the Autumn the late visi-
tors among the birds, such as cedar wax-wings, robins,
jays, and perhaps bluebirds and ruffed grouse (par-
tridges), find them a ready food, and find, as well, warm
protection from early snowstorms in the thick foliage.
The young cedars, too, make excellent nesting places
for the smaller sparrows in early summer. The foliage
is so dense and upstanding about the trunk that such a
nest is practically invisible, and one existed in our yard
last year, only breast-high beside a frequented garden
path, for many weeks before we discovered it.

The lively goldfinch is brother to the butterflies in our
forsaken pasture in thistle-time. There are but few
thistles, and they are clustered amid wild sunflowers in
a fork of an old logging road by the edge of the second
growth — a pretty colour scheme of pink and gold. It
seems almost as if the finches realized their own har-
mony with this bit of wild gardening, for they wing into
the bed, seeking thistle-down for their nests and starting
up a swarm of tiny brown butterflies which had been in-

HARVEST OF WILD PLACES 103

visible before. This garden-patch, too, is murmurous
with bees on a warm summer morning. Later the finch
returns to the sunflowers for their seeds, and later still
you may see the chickadees darting quickly and cheerily
out of the pines on the same errand.

Pine buds are still another form of food the pasture
affords, and the English pheasants which have overrun
our Berkshire woods in the last decade are the feeders.
The pheasant is a walking bird, treading with one foot
directly behind the other in a perfectly straight line,
and he will often tramp for miles without leaving the
ground. I have myself tracked one in light snow for
more than two miles, and found him at the end in a
nest of leaves. Unlike the partridge (perhaps because
they are protected fifty-one weeks in the year), the
pheasants like to feed in open spaces, and they par-
ticularly affect our pasture because many little seedling
pines have begun to creep out from the forest edge and
climb the slope, especially around the spring. Only the
other day, walking softly on snow-shoes, we came out of
the woods into the open dazzle and saw four brown
pheasants close to the spring, waddling on the snow.
They did not fly up till we were within fifty feet of
them. The snow was two feet deep, and it had thus
raised their feeding level. Their tracks were every-
where about the seedling pines, and the juicy little
terminal buds, which had been out of reach before the
storm, were nipped off by the hundred. Snow which

104 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

made food scarcer for other birds made it easier for them
to obtain. Perhaps that is one reason they are multi-
plying so fast. Many of their tracks led down to the
spring, which was still open in the centre — a black hole
in the expanse of snow. Evidently they had gone down
to drink or bathe.

This same deep snow and accompanying cold brought
down to New England and New York from the north
flocks upon flocks of the rare pine grosbeaks, large,
beautiful birds which move silently save for occasional
little soft notes, almost like the pleasant squeaking of a
tiny hinge. They grew very tame as winter pro-
gressed, and, from a discovery of the wild barberry
bushes in the woods and abandoned clearings, moved in
to feed upon the barberry hedges lining the drives of
summer estates, and then actually to the bushes in
front of occupied houses. On one of our walks we found
a barberry bush surrounded apparently by blood-stains
on the snow, but sitting on a topmost spray was the
cause. A young grosbeak, not yet arrived at the dig-
nity of red plumage, his bosom feathers puffed out by
the cold wind, held a barberry in his bill, and was work-
ing it back and forth, sideways, rolling off the skin,
evidently to get at the seeds and pulp. Presently he
dropped the skin on the snow, emitted a gentle squeak
or two, hopped to a new spray, and, quite unmindful of
us, began on another. The snow had no terrors for him
so long as that bush held out.

HARVEST OF WILD PLACES 105

The major harvest of our pasture is undoubtedly the
apple crop, and the major harvesters are the deer. The
apples are small and bitter — or else tasteless — now.
Encouraged by the optimism of Thoreau, I have bitten
into many hundreds of wild apples since I first read his
immortal psean in their praise, but I have yet to discover
a second Baldwin, or even an equal of the poorest
variety in our orchard crop. At any rate, I no longer
pick the apples in this pasture. No one picks them.
They fall to the gound on an autumn night, and no one
hears the soft, startling thud in the silence of the for-
gotten clearing. But the squirrels and the deer know
where they are. More than once, in Autumn, we have
come out into the pasture in time to see a squirrel
leaping across the open spaces toward the shelter of the
pines with an apple in his mouth, and we have often
seen one nip an apple from its stem, run down to the
ground to get it, and then climb back with it to a
crotch and eat at it. Sometimes they spit out the pulp,
apparently aiming to get at the seeds, especially after
the fruit is over-ripe. Sometimes they appear to
swallow it. In old fence-holes frequented by chip-
munks and squirrels you will often find apple seeds.
On the other hand, you will often find apples partially
eaten on the ground beneath the trees, but not bitten
through to the core, unmistakably by squirrels. The
rabbits, also, eat the apples in winter. They will even
come into our garden close to the village street, and

106 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

eat the rotten apples on the frozen compost heap. It is
there the cat hunts them, stalking behind the hedge.
One of the delights of a walk to our pasture is the soft,
sneaking approach through the woods, and the sur-
prised uprush of pheasants from the ground when we
are discovered, or the sudden appearance of a white
tennis-ball, bounding away from under the apple trees.
The pips and stalks of wild roses and the new wood of
raspberry vines are food for the rabbits, nor are they at
all averse to domestic roses and cultivated raspberry
stalks, as I know to my sorrow. They are out in almost
all weathers, and the alder thicket below the pasture, on
the swamp edge, is in winter a perfect network of their
regularly travelled roads leading out to the feeding
grounds. The dog goes quite mad on this criss cross of
trails.

The old apple trees of our clearing, studded with
suckers and spikes, are also a favourite roosting place
for the pheasants. The pheasants evidently eat the
terminal buds. The pine grosbeaks, too, discovered the
apple trees last winter, carefully rejecting the skin of the
fruit as they did the skin of the berries. Many people,
I find, who attempted to attract the grosbeaks around
their dwellings discovered that apples were one of the
few tempting baits. These birds have not yet learned,
like the chickadees and nuthatches, the ways of civiliza-
tion; they will not touch suet or crumbs — or even sun-
flower seeds. But apples will tempt them always.

HARVEST OF WILD PLACES 107

The deer come to the wild apple trees most frequently
at night. Wherever there is an abandoned clearing or
secluded orchard near their ranges, they will find it out,
and in the morning after a snowfall, or more likely the
second day after, you will find their hoof-marks all
about the trees, and plentiful signs where they have
pawed up the snow and nozzled out the frozen fruit be-
neath. If I were the particular sort of "sportsman"
who shoots tame deer in Massachusetts during our open
week in November, I know a certain old apple tree far
back from the road in a nearly deserted township where
I should build a blind and sit comfortably down to wait
for the slaughter. But that is hardly the way in which I
wish to hunt them. It is almost inconceivable to me,
indeed, that the law should give any opportunity for the
destruction of these beautiful and harmless creatures,
the last of the larger four-footed wild things to roam our
eastern woods. Those who hunt them are com-
paratively few, if damnably destructive; those who
would rejoice to see our forests peopled with the love-
liest of wild creatures are legion. Yet the kill-lust of the
few rules in our legislatures. The traditions of bar-
barism die hard !

As for me, I much prefer to track the deer back from
the apple tree in our clearing, where he has been pawing
up the snow, into the woods, following his rambles to see
what else he ate that day — not a difficult task when the
snow is fresh. It is obvious that he has nibbled at

108 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

young hemlocks, apparently pulling off the tips as he
passed along, much as a horse will do when you are
driving him idly down a country lane. But the ground-
hemlock, or American yew, is not thus lightly passed
over. When the deer find a clump of this evergreen
rising above the snow, they fall upon it eagerly, and
sometimes eat it down almost to ground level. It is a
staple of their diet. Another staple seems to be sumac.
More than once I have come upon a deer along some
back road, feeding close to the boundary wall, and in-
vestigation has disclosed that he was eating sumac fruit.
In whiter, when you pick up a deer track in the woods
and have time and patience to follow, it will frequently
lead you to some sumac hedge by a pasture wall or back
road. Before it gets there, to be sure, it may take you
into the deep forest for ground-hemlock, and over a
frozen swamp to a spot where there are water-holes pro-
tected from frost between the peaty hummocks, or even
over a mountain almost too steep and slippery for your
feet. But ultimately in our New England country the
deer will probably swing back toward a sumac patch,
even if it brings him close to a village, and leave the
signs of his feeding on the broken stems. To start a doe
with her fawns by a sumac hedge, to see her clear a stone
wall at a single leap with no running start, to see the
fawns with white tails like rabbits go cavorting after her
with all the grace of animated saw-horses, is one of the
prettiest sights in nature.

HARVEST OF WILD PLACES 109

As you are tracking your deer through the woods,
you will come upon many other signs of wild harvesting.
Perhaps you may be sitting under a pine tree, when sud-
denly a cone scale will fall on your head. Listen, and
you will hear the sound of crackling far above you.
Creep out away from the tree, and look up. It may
take you several seconds to find him, but presently you
will spot a red squirrel sitting in a crotch, tearing
busily at a cone held in his fore paws, to shred it down to
the edible part. Perhaps if you are very quiet you may
see him descend the trunk, spring out to the ground
when he gets three or four feet from the bottom, and
leap across the snow toward an old stump, or some other
tree which contains his hole. Occasionally, even, he
will disappear into the snow, working through a tunnel
he has built to some hiding place. There will be scarce
a clump in the pine woods without its litter of cone scales
on the snow about it, and scarce a tree without tracks
leading close to it, and tracks leading away from it which
start three, four, or even five feet out. The pine and
purple finches feed on the cones, also, as well as the rare
pine grosbeaks, and the crossbills. If you ever get a
chance to observe a crossbill at work shredding a cone,
you will no longer consider his odd bill poorly adapted
to its purpose. It never slips, but holds like a vise while
the hidden neck muscles under those brick-red feathers
do the work. This is the bird which an old German
legend says got its twisted bill from trying to pull the

110 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

nails from the Saviour's hands when he hung upon the
cross, and its red feathers from the sacred blood.

But hark! the dog has flushed a partridge! It goes
whirring off through the woods, with its uncanny facility
in dodging obstructions. There is little difficulty in
finding the spot whence it rose. On a southward-
sloping bank, in a shaft of sunlight, the snow has almost
melted away, and with a little scratching the bird has
uncovered some partridge-berries, or eyeberries as we
boys used to call the fruit of the Mitchella repens, that
dainty little evergreen trailer which bears its fragrant,
waxy flowers in June, and later its bright red berries,
on the forest floor of our American woods. How
glossy the leaves look now, and how brilliant the
berries, as they lie on the dark, exposed mould, amid
the snow and the scattered fragments of dead leaves
scratched away by the bird ! They are pleasant to the
human taste, also, though without the pungency of
checkerberries.

The partridges are growing scarce in our Berkshire
thickets. Certain gamekeepers say it is because the
English pheasants have driven them to the mountain-
tops, but I have my doubts of this, though it is un-
doubtedly true that this grouse we never tame is now
found above the 1,500-foot level, while the pheasants re-
main at a lower altitude. We have thousands of pheas-
ants and as they were until recently protected the year
through, they are extremely fearless, walking up to our

HARVEST OF WILD PLACES 111

very dooryards after grain. But there is a fatal open
season on partridges, and where they are hunted they are
shy and scarce. Ascend the Crawford Bridle Path up
Mount Washington, however, where they are ap-
parently not molested, and before you break out of the
woods on Clinton you will often come upon whole coveys
of them beside the path, so tame that they will almost
let you touch them with your hand, as they will in the
Canadian wilds. I have stood in the path and watched
a male bird, with three or four females about him,
scratching in the moss not six feet from me, and have
talked aloud with my companion while the partridges
continued feeding, quite indifferent to us, and keeping
up a soft, hen-like coot, coot of their own, a lovely little
woodland sound.

The fact that the English pheasants are not neces-
sarily inimical to partridges, at any rate, is attested by
the experience of a breeder in Lenox, who found both
birds nesting on terms of perfect peace in the thickets of
his carefully posted and patrolled estate. He has
several times tried to breed the grouse in captivity, but
with little success, owing to the strange fact that the
cock invariably attempted to kill the female after
union, and on seven occasions succeeded before the
keeper could rescue her. But in a wild state, this
breeder believes, the partridges could hold their own
with the pheasants if given the same protection. What
a pity the chance, at least, is not afforded them! No

GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

surprise in the woods is more startlingly sudden and
nerve-tingling than the uprush of an unsuspected par-
tridge and his booming flight along an alley of sunlight
ahead. Why must it forever be a temptation to pull a
trigger? Alas! man has got but little beyond the in-
stincts of his remote ancestors!

The partridge feeds on strawberries, as well as on the
berry which bears his name, on checkerberries, false
Solomon's seal, apple buds, pine buds, and even on wild
grapes. Sometimes the grouse will sit in a tall tree
almost like hens at roost, and perhaps you may see them
In the early morning, or late twilight after frosts. They
are more at ease than hens, however, and negotiate a
change of perch with far more grace and much less
audible excitement.

We have no quail in Berkshire County, which is one of
our serious failings. When I was a boy in eastern Mas-
sachusetts, a half-witted French Canadian was often
my companion in the open, because he could sit down in
a field by the edge of the woods, motion me to silence,
and then whistle "Bob White" till sometimes a whole
flock of quail would be gathered on the ground about us,
almost like the penguins about Captain Scott's phono-
graph on the Ross Barrier. I can still remember the
odd thrill of that experience, and my awe of the half-
witted youth who had so little kinship with the rest of us
boys, so much with the birds. But our Berkshire
winters are too severe for the ground-dwelling quail, and

HARVEST OF WILD PLACES 113

we have too many foxes, as well — and doubtless, in times
past, have had too many hunters.

Foxes are not generally accredited with vegetarian in-
stincts. You never see their tracks, as you see those of
the rabbits, around a young oak-tree shoot which has
been nibbled down to the tough stem. But Msop evi-
dently thought otherwise when he wrote his fable of the
sour grapes, and there is plenty of testimony that /Esop
was right. Foxes do eat wild grapes, as many observers
have testified, climbing a considerable way to get them;
and probably at times they eat berries and perhaps
apples. I have found their tracks, at any rate, beneath
apple trees. I have also been confidently assured that
they eat the persimmons in Virginia; that the "oF houn*
dawgs" know how good this fruit is, too, and if you
wish to find the very best tree, take a "dawg" with you.

Mr. Woodchuck, on the other hand, doesn't eat at all
after September. He hibernates, coming out on Candle-
mas Day to see his shadow and make an annual
"weather story" for the newspapers. Up in our pas-
ture one Winter the ground-hog who lives there had to
tunnel up through two feet of snow to get his outlook.
The six-inch bore by which he emerged was yellowed by
the dirt on his body, and he packed a hard, dirty track
across the snow for ten feet to a bore leading down to the
back entrance of his dwelling. Evidently he took some
exercise between the two doors. But there was not a
single track leading away in any direction.

114 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

\
The wood-mice — or deer-mice — eat apples, surely»

and many other things, including maple seeds. They
also harvest hazel and beech nuts in great quantities,
and they are not at all averse, as I can unfortunately
testify, to Spanish iris bulbs and the bark of young
apple trees. They nest not only in the woods, but in
our gardens, preferably under a pile of pea brush, or the
straw protection on the flower beds, and often I have
found their tracks in the snow all about the weed stalks,
and the dust of trampled seeds, as if they had shaken
down their food by climbing the stems.

The mention of maple seeds brings us around, by a
process of suggestion plain enough to the Yankee, to
Spring. When the sap runs in the maple trees, when
the melting snow steams in the sugar grove and makes a
haze that is permeated with the aroma of wood-smoke
and boiling syrup, Spring indeed is on the way. It is
then that the yellow-bellied woodpecker, or sapsucker,
comes into prominence, if not into repute. He makes
one or two holes in a tree — deep holes, sufficient to in-
duce a good run of sap — and then goes to another tree,
and another, and still another. When his taps are all
running, he starts back and makes the rounds, drinking
insatiably, and also, some say, feeding on the insects
which stick to the wet bark around his bores. Mr.
Burroughs denies this, and on the occasions when I
have driven a bird away from his bores I have never
yet found anything but clean sap and bark in the hole.

HARVEST OF WILD PLACES 115

He taps the yellow birches, also, for they have a very
considerable flow of sap in Spring, which, in an un-
boiled state, tastes nearly as sweet as maple. Later he
favours apple trees.

The squirrels, likewise, are sap-drinkers at this
season. If you will break the twig of a sugar maple in
Spring you will soon find a crystal drop depending from
the abrasion. The squirrels know this, and they either
nip several twigs off or bite deeply into the larger
shoots, and then go back over their tracks, drinking the
sweet sap drops. I have seen them do it in the maple
at my own door, as well as in the woods.

Our investigation of that deer's diet has taken us far
afield from our abandoned pasture, over the snow,
through the woods, even into our own gardens. Let us
return once more to the sunny slope where the stray
sheep wander and the finches dart and dip above the
nodding thistle-tops. The small wild apples are al-
ready forming in the trees, for future harvest. The
little trickle of water which runs away from the spring
over a ribbon of emerald grass into the woods, tempts
our feet for another brief excursion, till we stand on the
edge of a swamp and see amid the weeds the winding
canals of the muskrats, where they swim in their search
for lily-roots. As we retrace our steps a squirrel chat-
ters at us amid the pines, and when, a moment later, we
break into the clearing once more, a startled cock
pheasant rises from his feeding and skims away, his

116 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

long tail-feathers streaming out behind like the rudder
of a monoplane. The summer afternoon is very still,
yet a hundred sounds are audible — the chime of crickets,
the hum of bees, the croak of a frog in the spring, the
sweet cheeps and liquid songs of the birds, the murmur
of a lazy wind in the pines. How delicate, how peace-
ful, these sounds are! How unpro vocative of tiring
thought or senseless worry is this pasture solitude!
Here the beasts of the wood and birds of the air find
nourishment and go happily about their woodland har-
vesting. The declining sun bathes all the slope in "the
golden light of afternoon," and pushes its beams down
the forest aisles to play tag with the shadows. We lie
quiet beside the spring, and see a rabbit hop across one
of these aisles, his tail flashing white, and make for the
shelter of a young pine thicket. A catbird mews by the
raspberries. Out of the deep wood rings the elfin
clarion of a thrush. It is a little world of little creatures,
toiling happily for their bread; and yet the soul feels
for them all a curious kinship, here in this silent pasture
where the shadows lengthen and the rising sea-surf mur-
murs in the pines. To shoot the least and smallest
would be to break with murderous hands the bonds
which link Nature into unity. The drumming par-
tridge, the thrush which in shadowed thicket sounds his
liquid call, the poet with his verse — how much of star-
dust is in each? It is only the rash man who attempts
the answer with a gun.

CHAPTER VIII
NEIGHBOURS OF THE WINTER NIGHT

A BELATED snow had fallen, the glass went
down ten degrees and sleigh-bells again jingled. It
was the last Parthian shot of the retreating Winter.
Three days before I had been working in the garden
spading out my cold-frames, while the song-sparrows
and robins were heralding the Spring. This un-
expected return of Winter drove the poor sparrows in
close for refuge. Two of them found shelter in the
woodshed. Going out on the porch the morning after
the storm, I saw innumerable bird tracks in the sifted
snow-powder on the floor — hop, hop, hop, everywhere.
A pound of suet had been completely devoured in
twenty-four hours. I went down in the garden to look
for the rabbit which has visited there all winter. He
had been across the snow for his breakfast before I was
up, jumping steadily and straight for the lettuce bed,
his small fore feet coming down first and his long hind
feet swinging on either side and coming down a couple
of inches ahead. The frost caught a good deal of
young lettuce in the Fall, and the snow has kept it in
cold storage for him. He doesn't live in our garden,

117

118 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

though, but merely feeds there. He lives two lots away,
in a pile of straw round a rambler rose-bush. Our
dogs often try to catch him, but he is too clever. The
other day, before this spring snowfall, I was in the
garden with the dogs. We saw nothing. Hickey, how-
ever, picked up a scent and began following it over
the brown soil. Suddenly, under the terrier's nose, the
dead, brown lump of a cauliflower plant came to life and
began to jump. The dogs were after it, in full cry. Br'er
Rabbit doubled and gained a few steps, but the dogs
closed on him. Again he doubled, and this time made
for a sheet of ice in the shadow behind the house. The
instant his feet struck this ice he doubled again. The
dogs slid ten feet, helplessly. This gave him the time he
needed. He disappeared under the fence, like a vanish-
ing ball of white worsted, and left the dogs baying their
rage.

Our house is on the main street of a populous village
in the Berkshires, yet this rabbit has left his tracks in
the snow this Winter clear out to the front sidewalk.
He is a wild rabbit, too, not an escaped pet. After the
snow came in the Autumn, in addition to his track and,
of course, the innumerable tracks of squirrels under the
evergreens and of snowbirds around the crumb tray at
the back door, I used to find record in the morning of
unexpected night visitors. A skunk tracked several
times up from the swamp behind to the garbage pail.
Some years ago a wealthy resident of our hills stocked

NEIGHBOURS OF THE WINTER NIGHT 119

his game preserve with English pheasants, which have
now spread over the county. The pheasant is a
walker. You cannot mistake his tracks, for he puts one
foot neatly down directly in front of the other, making a
clean impression, as if he had picked it up again very
carefully. One morning I found close to the house the
end of a pheasant's trail. Something had evidently
scared him and he had risen from the ground, brushing
the snow on both sides with the first flap of his wings.
Curious to see how far he had walked, I put on my
pedometer and followed that trail. It led me through
my little swamp, up the hill through a neighbour's yard,
across the road, through a spruce hedge, across the great
lawn of a big summer estate, into the woods behind. I
put on my snow-shoes in the woods and kept on. The
trail finally ceased in a brush-heap, where the snow was
tracked all about and in one place scratched through to
the brown leaves. That pheasant had walked exactly
one mile and a quarter — a long walk for a bird ! And in
all that distance there was no sign that he had stopped
to scratch for food. It was as if he had set out deliber-
ately to walk to my house. I could not flatter myself
that such was the case; doubtless some sense of his had
told him it was useless to scratch, or perhaps he had fed
from the bushes through which he had walked. But
his trail was without a break.

My collie tracks like a fox, making, that is, but two
marks instead of four. But of course his stride is

120 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

longer and his feet are much larger, with a deeper im-
press, for he weighs three times as much as a fox. There
was no mistaking, then, one morning after a fresh, light
snowfall, the trail of a fox across the garden. We have
no chickens, and I was surprised that he had crossed our
lot, till I followed the trail. He had come up on the ice
of the sluggish, sunken brook behind, thus being con-
cealed by the high banks, had turned out in my back-
yard and followed the shelter of the fence up to the
garden, crossed that, gone through the fence on the
other side, and drawn near a chicken-coop. But some-
thing had then frightened him — the bark of a dog per-
haps— for his tracks suddenly swerved, turned from a
lope to a gallop, and he streaked for the sunken brook
again. Once there, he had settled down to his old pace
and gone on his way.

On this same brook I have occasionally found the
track of a mink, coming up, no doubt, from the more se-
cluded river to reach the chicken-and-duck farm near
the source. The mink, when he is taking it easy and the
snow is deep and soft, makes paw tracks on either side
of a line drawn by his tail. He is a crafty animal, and
we have but one boy in town who can trap him. My
wife, not usually bloodthirsty, looked sadly at those
tracks in our backyard. " To think of mink going right
past our house," she sighed, "and my old furs so
shabby!" Woman's tenderness curiously breaks down
at certain points.

NEIGHBOURS OF THE WINTER NIGHT 121

We have had weasels in the yard, too, though I have
never seen one there. The weasel is a land mink, or,
rather, the mink is a water weasel. A song of my boy-
hood used to affirm that "Pop goes the weasel." From
his tracks it is certain that he goes hop. He never
seems to walk, like his brother the mink, who has his
leisure moments, but always to leap, landing with feet
bunched, and rising almost from two tracks, side by
side, almost an inch apart, instead of the usual four of a
squirrel. The tracks in my yard showed that the
weasel was clearing a little more than a foot at a bound.
He , came up to investigate a pile of dead apple-tree trim-
mings, and jumped all around the pile. Then, evidently
finding nothing he wanted, he made off again. But
when a weasel is badly frightened he has the leaping
ability of a flea, and will clear sometimes as much as ten
feet.

Let us follow the weasel out of the yard into the wilder
countryside. He likes to live in pine stumps or by old
stone walls, and he is an eager, savage little hunter.
Sometimes you may find in the snow his leaping trail
closing in with that of a cottontail, and then the marks
of blood. Sometimes, perhaps, you may be rewarded
by a sight of the weasel himself, his beady, slightly
bulging black eyes looking intently straight ahead over
the black tip of his nose. His back is brownish and his
tail-tip is black, but the rest of him is so white that he
seems two black eyes set in white, as preternaturally

122 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

alert as his body — a wild and beautiful little animal on
the snow.

It is a clear, crisp morning when you set out. There
was a snowfall the day before yesterday — not yesterday,
because animals usually remain in their holes several
hours after a storm. The countryside is spangled
white. The rusty tamaracks in the swamps, the tawny
roadside willows, the delicate lilac of the bare black-
berry vines, give a note of subdued but rich colour to the
landscape. From the village behind, wood-smoke rises
in the still air. Ahead, you see the slender second-
growth trees up the mountains like a delicate cross-
hatching made with gray crayon on a white ground.
The world is lovely, but not wild. Winter is in her best
mood. Not a mile from home you enter the still
woods, where there is no sign of life save for an occas-
ional squirrel or chickadee, but where, through a break
in the trees or over the wall where the weasel lives, you
can still see the village spire. What wild things passed
through here last night? None, surely, for the high-
school sleigh-ride party went shouting by on the road.
But let us look at the telltale snow and see.

Here is a little clearing, a small meadow or forest
lawn, no doubt. The snow by the border is all crossed
and recrossed with a delicate, lacy design, made by tiny
feet. See, between the prints often trails a line. This
little four-footed creature had a tail. But why do the
tracks here cover the snow like lacework? There was a

NEIGHBOURS OF THE WINTER NIGHT 123

moon last night. That was why the high school went
on a sleigh-ride, and why the deer-mice danced! Had
you been hidden at the edge of this bit of moon-blanched
open, you might have seen them, like tiny sprites, or like
dead, curled-up russet-brown oak leaves wind-blown
over the snow, with their tails for stems. Follow one of
the tracks back from the open. It leads to a rotten
old stump. Inside, somewhere, the mouse is sleeping.

We have passed Mr. Weasel's wall, and the spot
where the deer-mice danced. Keeping our eyes to the
ground, we see innumerable squirrel tracks, groups of
four prints, sometimes three feet apart when the squir-
rel took a long bound, and every now and again they
disappear into a round hole in the snow. Usually there
is a second hole a few feet farther on. The squirrel
came up again probably with a cone. Follow his track,
and it will lead to the base of a tree or an old stump, and
there you will find fresh bits of the cone — crumbs from
his table. You will find tracks of partridges, too, and
places where they have scratched the snow on a
southern bank till the fresh green of the partridge-berry
vines gleams through, and perhaps a red berry or two,
overlooked by the bird. Squirrels and partridges, to be
sure, are day neighbours rather than night, but you may
be certain they were up earlier than we were.

The woods are getting a little wilder now. We come
upon an open place where the snow is trodden down by
large animals. In the centre are the remnants of a

124 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

ground-hemlock (or "snake bush," as we call it in
Massachusetts) — the Taxus Canadensis. It is eaten
down to the last leaf, as close to the snow as if a scythe
had been swept over it. The snow is covered with the
unmistakable hoof-prints of deer. These tracks are
fresh. The deer were here last night, two of them at
least, for two tracks lead off to the west, the larger one
trailing the hind feet a trifle, in snow more than six
inches deep, showing it to be made by a buck. The doe
picks her feet up cleaner. She is the high stepper of the
family. She also toes straight ahead, while the buck
toes out a trifle, a reversal of the typical human couple.

Now there is a break in the woods, for we are in
populous New England. We come into cleared land,
into a farm. An old orchard, much neglected, runs
along behind a stone wall close to the road. As we
come down through this orchard we again find deer
tracks, quantities of them. There is every indication
that the deer were here last night pawing up the snow
under the gnarled old trees for the frozen windfalls on
the ground below. Bits of frozen rotten apples are left
here and there to tell the tale. Last night, while the
farmer was sleeping, or even, perhaps, while there was
still a light in his window, the deer came into his
orchard to feed, and one of them, when a horse stamped
in the stable, raised his head and stood a shadowy,
beautiful statue of eternal vigilance.

Crossing the road and the pasture, we shall find yet

NEIGHBOURS OF THE WINTER NIGHT 125

more deer tracks by the sumac bushes before we enter
the woods again. Ground-hemlock, old apples, and
sumac berries seem to be the favourite winter food of the
New England deer. They are also fond of lettuce in
season — a farmer in Connecticut told me last summer
they came into his kitchen garden, not fifty feet from
the house, and ate up a whole row of lettuce one night,
without touching anything else or even trampling any-
thing down. Once more in the woods, the ground grows
broken, rising toward the rocks at the base of the
mountain. Here we begin to look for the tracks of the
fox. But first we come upon cottontail tracks, cen-
tring, in our northern woods, around white-oak shoots
which are often nibbled down to the snow. Farther
south the rabbit eats dogwood shoots. A friend of mine
once watched a rabbit feeding close to a young hedge.
A red Irish terrier came by, within a few feet. The
rabbit, which had just bitten off a shoot six inches long,
stopped eating, the shoot still in his mouth, and shrank
into an excellent imitation of a lump of earth. The dog
passed by within eight feet without seeing him, came
back again on the scent, sniffed around, and finally dis-
appeared. Meanwhile the rabbit never moved a
muscle. When the dog had finally gone, the rabbit
went on absorbing the shoot, end foremost, as calmly as
if his life had never been in peril. So our rabbit here, by
the white-oak twig in the woods, might have done had a
fox come by.

126 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

But here is a track like the rabbit's, only larger, with
the hind feet leaving four distinct toe marks, and nearly
four and one-half inches long. It is the track of a vary-
ing hare, or snow-shoe rabbit, a breed once common in
New England but now growing more and more rare. He
changes to white in winter, unlike the cottontail. I
once saw one cross a field in a mild December, the most
conspicuous thing in the landscape. Poor fellow, he
was protectively coloured for snow, and the weather
man had disappointed him. He is so rare in our country
now that to find his track in the woods or swamps is
something of an adventure, almost like finding (as we did
last winter, only a mile from home) the paw marks of a
wildcat. Now at last we pick up the track of a fox.

It was one January morning, in the foxes' mating
season, that the following drama was disclosed to us in
the snow. The stage was set with snow and rocks and
young second-growth timber, not three hundred yards
back from a farmhouse and a country road, but close to
the mountain. We came first on the tracks of the
heroine, which were unmistakable. She was walking,
making apparently but two paw marks in a line. Sud-
denly she began to gallop. After a few rods another
galloping track joined with hers and paralleled it. We
followed this second track back a way. The hero had
been bounding, too, but only for a short distance. Be-
yond that he had been walking. Slinking through the
night, he had heard the call of the mating season, and

had suddenly rushed to meet his fate. We went back
to the spot where the two converging tracks met, and
followed them. They ran parallel for a time, and then
there were signs in the snow that the heroine had grown
less coy, had paused and permitted the approach of her
mate. From this point the dual tracks radiated in
several directions, showing less signs of haste, came back
again, and finally made off zigzagging through the tim-
ber, toward a ledge of rocks no doubt suggested by one
or the other as a home possibility. The rocks gained,
the tracks led straight to a freshly dug hole under a
crack in the ledge. There was even fresh earth pawed
up on the snow. No tracks led away. It was the night
before that the drama had been enacted, and in their
newly built home the couple were already established.
We left them in peace, with the delicacy due to honey-
mooners.

It is seldom, to be sure, that you will find so perfect a
snow record as that of the actions of your night neigh-
bours in the woods, yet a little watchfulness on the win-
ter walk will disclose much about those wild folk that
will give a basis for reconstructing their habits, till your
imagination can people the st 11, snowy places, from the
mountain-top even to your front door, with mysterious
inhabitants of the dark. The pleasure of picking up a
trail behind the house and running it back into the
woods for two or three miles is not lightly to be dis-
missed. Sometimes my visitors from town look with a

128 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

supercilious tolerance upon this sport. They even
suggest that it very closely resembles the sport of dogs,
who tear madly through the woods on a scent, or the
hare-and-hound chases of boys, who track one another
through the snow. Of course they are right. It does
closely resemble the sport of dog and boy. That is one
of its charms.

But it has another charm, which they do not realize
until they, too, have indulged in it, properly clad and
properly led. It brings us as no mere aimless walking
can, nor any hunting expedition with rifle or shotgun,
into ultimate touch with the life of Nature, and gives a
new interest, an almost human neighbourly note, to the
woods and fields which border our dwellings.

My wife and I went for a tramp a day or two after the
belated snow-storm I spoke of. The world was still
white, but Spring was curiously in the air again, and
behind the hemlock hedge of a deserted formal garden
on a summer estate two song-sparrows were singing a
duet. We walked up the hill behind a neighbouring
farm, and came upon the track of a woodchuck. Spring
had tempted him out of his winter quarters (he came
out, of course, on Candlemas Day, but ducked back
again this year), and he had crossed the pasture rather
aimlessly, evidently wondering whether this snow
meant that he should go back to sleep or not. He toed
in more than most of his kind — a comical trail. At the
next fence was the track of a fox. It kept within three

NEIGHBOURS OF THE WINTER NIGHT 129

feet of the fence all the way down to the inclosed winter
cow pasture behind the barns, and was there lost in the
trample of cattle-prints. But back toward the wooded
hill it was distinct enough. We followed it. After the
sly manner of his kind, the fox had kept close to what
cover a rail fence provided, all the way across the pas-
ture. Once or twice he had stopped to listen, planting
an extra paw mark.

When we entered the woods we found that the trail
came down from the summit of a steep, rocky hill which
is part of a town park, but preserved in its native wild-
ness. The side of this hill is thickly sprinkled with
laurel bushes. Slipping and falling in the deep, soft
snow, we scrambled up the rocky slope on the trail. The
fox had not abandoned his cunning even in the deep
woods. He had so zigzagged down the hill that he had
been almost constantly protected by laurel bushes.
There was a young moon last night, and we could im-
agine him slinking down under the projecting waxy
leaves toward that delectable duck yard on the distant
farm. At the top of the hill we hoped to find his nest
among the piles of broken bowlders, but when we
reached the summit a great wind-blown ledge had
melted bare. Across this he had evidently walked, but
we could find no sign of the trail on the other side. The
sun had probably melted it out. We had to abandon
the chase.

Instead, still panting with the slippery climb, we

130 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

looked off over the dazzling, snowy world, over our
beautiful valley with its red and white houses, its
steeples and winding river, to the bounding ring of
amethyst hills. Last night that same scene had slept
under the moon, and out on this ledge had come the
little red form of a fox and sniffed the wind, and then,
slipping like a shadow into the cover of the laurels, had
sneaked down the slope. No one saw him. No one
ever sees him, though this rock is in a town park. Yet
he lives here. He is our neighbour in the night, and
takes possession of his own while we slumber. There
was the proof of it on the snow at our feet.

In Massachusetts there is a week in November when
it is permissible to shoot deer. As rifles are not allowed,
however, our brave hunters go out with shotguns
loaded with buckshot, and later attract the admiring
attention of the village by driving through with a poor
deer's head lolling over the tailboard — perhaps. That
open week in November probably explained our lame
buck. When we first saw his tracks he was trailing his
right hind leg badly; he was stopping frequently to lie
down, every hundred feet at first, and where he rested
there would be traces of blood. He was one of a small
herd. Week after week we came across records of this
herd — ground-hemlock eaten down to the snow, tram-
pled sumac bushes, old orchards pawed up, and hoof-
prints tracking through the deep snow of the woods.
And always the right hind leg of the buck was dragged.

NEIGHBOURS OF THE WINTER NIGHT 131

Once a farmer up the road saw him limping at early
morning through a pasture. But the blood stains dis-
appeared after a short time, and gradually the leg
trailed less. He was evidently getting well.

We soon came to take a personal interest in the for-
tunes of that buck. Every few days we would go
where we thought the herd might have fed and look for
his trail. Fortunately the snow stayed on the ground
without melting, with several new falls, for more than two
months, and the herd, too, remained in the neighbour-
hood. We were able to convince ourselves that the old
buck was finally almost as good as new, though he still
trailed that right hoof a trifle more than the left, and did
not tread up so close to the fore leg with it as with the
other. About the first of March a party of trampers
startled the herd in the woods. The deer, six of them,
in full view, made a break for a swamp, and from that
day we saw no more fresh deer tracks. It is curious
how close they had come to our houses, even feeding by
night in our very orchards, and yet how easily they were
frightened away. I never got a glimpse of them myself,
though I saw their tracks almost daily. Yet by this
sport of tracking alone I was able to follow them through
the woods and to live a little their wild life. The record
of their night prowlings gave a new charm and wildness
to our fields and forests.

There is one more track I shall look for in the timber
on Rattlesnake Hill before the snow is quite gone. It is

132 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

the most curious and interesting track of all, exactly like
the print of a tiny baby's shrivelled foot. Mr. Coon
hibernates, of course, but Spring is in the air long before
the snow melts in the mountain woods, and he often
comes forth in time to leave his quaint f ootprints on the
remnants of a drift. Coon-hunts at night, with dogs,
lanterns, and guns, are sometimes exciting and always
exhausting, but they never yield me quite the satisfac-
tion of finding that little snow-print record not two
miles from my home, of searching in muddy spots near
by for further tracks, of living in fancy the scene of the
night before — the still, dark woods, just budding with
Spring, the sleepy boom of the hours from the distant
steeple in the village, the sharp-nosed little face emerg-
ing from a rotten tree trunk, then the scramble down,
with the soft thud, perhaps, of a piece of dislodged bark,
and the midnight hunting.

Even our tamest woods and fields, even our own
suburban backyards, shelter their wild life. We have
neighbours in the night, though we know it not. They
leave their records behind them in the snow for seeing
eyes, and to read those records aright is to read a little
deeper into the book of Nature. The man who goes to
walk with his nose to the snow is sometimes thought a
crank, sometimes a bore. Perhaps he is both. But
you can never make him believe it; or, we might better
say, you cannot make him care if he is! It is not you
but his wild neighbours he is thinking of.

CHAPTER IX
STONE WALLS

MY GRANDFATHER was a man of great physical
prowess. When I was a little chap he used to sit
me on the palm of his hand and hold me out at arm's
length; and at a slightly later period he would regale
me with sagas of his mighty deeds. One of these
deeds, I well remember, was the erection of a long
stone wall. For some reason, this wall had to be con-
structed in as short a time as possible, and Grandfather
built so much the first day that it took him two days to
walk back to the starting point! Grandfather was a
Yankee, and so was I. He knew that I knew that such
a feat was impossible, and I knew that he knew that I
knew. This made us great friends. And yet I half be-
lieved him ! Besides, he once took me to a piece of that
very wall, and challenged me to doubt his story then.
It was a long walk, consuming the better part of an
afternoon. Though we stopped a while on Huckleberry
Hill to get our mouths black with the delicious fruit,
which is never sold in the city markets (no, they are not
huckleberries, they are various sorts of blueberries,
which are quite different, botanically and gastronom-

133

134 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

ically). After we left Huckleberry Hill we crossed a
meadow and entered the woods, following a dim cart
track for a long way, till we suddenly came upon the
mossy ruins of a stone wall, in the heart of the scrub
timber.

"There!" exclaimed my grandfather. "There she
is! You see, the wall must have come from a long way
off to get here."

"But why did you build a wall through the woods?"
I asked.

"There were no woods here when this wall was built,"
Grandfather answered — and I knew that he was telling
me the truth now, for the funny little squint had gone
out of his blue eyes. "My father kept sheep, hundreds
and hundreds of sheep, and this was part of their graz-
ing land. Why, my mother used to weave my clothes
herself, and they were warmer than the ones you buy
in Boston, I can tell you!"

"What became of the sheep?" said I, "and have all
these woods grown up since you were a boy? And
how did your mother — she was my great-grandmother,
wasn't she? — weave clothes? And did you use to help
shear the sheep? And

"Yes — and no," my grandfather laughed. "The
woods have all grown up since I was a young man, and
the sheep have all made chops for little boys to eat,
and nobody remembers how to make cloth any more."

"Why? "I asked.

STONE WALLS 135

It seems to me I can still recall the curious look on
my grandfather's face, as he answered, quite uncon-
scious of Tennyson, "The old ways change. They
make cloth in big factories now, and raise sheep by the
hundred thousand out West. That old wall is to me a
kind of monument."

His words, of course, had little meaning to my child-
ish mind, but his manner curiously impressed me, and
I stood silent beside him and looked at the mossy,
ruined wall, which ran over ridges and dipped into
hollows till it was lost to view in the gloom of the
chestnuts and maples. But his words have come back
to me since, many and many a time, in my wanderings
about New England, and to me, too, an old stone wall
suddenly discovered in the heart of the woods is a
melancholy monument to the ancient regime, to a
vanished order — a boundary line which once marked a
clearing, invaded now and recaptured by the forest.
The corollary of the old wall in the woods is the in-
creased population of our cities, it is factories and con-
gested industry. It is something curiously and harshly
at variance with the immediate scene — the mottled
shadows of the woods, the throb of a thrush, the sway-
ing stems of the Solomon's seal, the chatter of a squirrel
running along the green and gray stones and leaping up
a trunk which has pushed a whole section of the wall
down into a loose heap.

New England is a land of stone walls (stone fences,

136 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

visitors from alien regions sometimes call them, as
they call our doughnuts crullers); and it often seems
to me as if my earliest recollections of natural scenes
were invariably circumscribed by a line of piled gray
field-stone — circumscribed but not imprisoned, for al-
ways I could climb the wall and look forth over the
field beyond to the next one. "Stone walls do not a
prison make,*' except for silly cows. But how they
rib and pattern our rolling, hilly New England, over
dome and dale, in sun and shower, lines of the land-
scape as immutable now as the hills themselves ! Every
field must be cleared of stones for tillage, and the easiest
way to dispose of the stones is to build a wall with
them. And how many stones there are! A certain
lecturer in Boston used to have a story which never
failed to arouse his audience. He was travelling in
New Hampshire, he said, and came upon a farmer in a
field, with a derrick rigged up over two bowlders parted
by a narrow cleft.

"What are you doing?" he asked the farmer.

" Wall, there's a blade o* grass down in that gol dern
cleft," the farmer replied, "and I gotter git it up be-
fore my keow starves."

"Such is farming in New Hampshire," said this
lecturer, thereby proving the hardihood and courage of
the New England pioneers.

From the summit of any of our hills, you see New
England as a crazy quilt. Our fields are not laid out

STONE WALLS 137

on the gridiron plan, like the farms of Illinois. Na-
ture was their original architect, and man has followed
her design. It was always easiest to roll the stones
cleared from field or pasture into the first hollow, so
that we have achieved over and over again not only a
charming irregularity of pattern, but that most beau-
tiful of single effects, the domed field, where zebra
stripes curve up against the sky when the first snow
scud fills the autumn furrows, and in lush midsummer
wave after billowing wave of rye ripple down on the
wind against the breakwater of the gray stone wall.

Ascend any considerable hill in cultivated New
England, whether it be in Thoreau's haunts through
Middlesex or Monument Mountain in the Berkshires,
which Hawthorne and Herman Melville climbed to-
gether and which Bryant celebrated in his verse, and
you will see the crazy-quilt pattern of fields and pas-
tures spread out below you, stitched with stone walls.
Golden grain and brown stubble, green pasture and
tasselled corn, neglected fields of yellow "hardback,"
acres where the cows crop and wander amid the great
pink laurel shrubs — no matter what the season, there is
always infinite variety of colour and texture in the dif-
ferent patches of the quilt, always an infinite variety in
their shape, determined by the contours of the land; and
always the stone walls stitch the patches together, the
quilt is sewn with gray and green — green because every
wall is bordered with shrubs and wild flowers. In a hilly

138 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

country one does not need an aeroplane to show him
the pattern of the land. He may, by ascending any
summit, see the world as the birds see it. The ideal way
to teach a child the use of maps would be to take him
up on a hilltop above his native village. There is a
living map below him, with his father's boundaries
marked in stone.

We have all heard of the hedgerows of old England.
They have been so celebrated by the poets that even
those of us who have never walked in English lanes
seem to know them familiarly. But who will sing the
hedgerows of New England, which have grown up
everywhere along stone walls and fences between our
homestead farms or divided fields? Our bird-sown
hedgerows are to the hedges of England what the wild
garden is to the formal border, and all the charm and
shy surprises of the wild garden are theirs. Neglected
by "sightseers," never given a thought by the farmers
themselves, uncelebrated and unsung, they march
in feathery beauty between a thousand fields, up hill
and down, bright at their base with mulleins and milk-
weed, with roses and golden-rod, harbouring chipmunks
within the old wall which 'is their spine, and white-
throats fluting in their branches. Birches and maples,
poplars and dark cedars, now and then a chestnut,
alders in the hollows where the wall dips to a brook,
choke-cherries where the robins scold, aspens trembling
to the wandering winds of June, hazel bushes and dog-

STONE WALLS 139

wood — the variety is endless. Even a pine, sometimes,
will crown an eminence, its great limbs unrestricted by
surrounding forest, stretching out in crabbed hori-
zontals like a cedar of Lebanon, a monarch of the
pasture. These hedgerows are utterly artless. Be-
cause neither the plough nor the mower can go quite
to the wall, long ago a fringe of weeds and small shrubs
pushed out a foot or two on either side, even in pastures
cropped by cattle; and once this protecting base of
shrubs was established the birds and mice and squirrels,
even the courier wind bearing maple seeds and poplar
down, could begin successfully to plant their garden.
As the years passed, and the trees grew taller and
stronger, the sumac pushed out suckers into the field,
the wild flowers massed more solidly amid the shrub-
bery, often the hedgerow would invade the clearing
for ten feet on either side of the wall, and the farmer
would have to attack it, trimming it back to the best
and strongest trees. If you will examine one of these
old hedges to-day you will often find, when you have
penetrated through the tangle of shrubs and tall mul-
leins and golden-rod into its heart, that the original
wall has fallen and become half buried. Perhaps on
top of it a rough rail fence has later been erected,
which now also has gone to ruin, while as the latest
barrier to prevent an ambitious cow from squeezing
through into the corn a barbed wire has been strung
along the trees — natural fence posts which will not

140 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

decay. No English hedgerow holds such a record of
successive generations, from the first clearing of the
fields and the erection of the boundary wall.

And what a good time the dog has in our native
hedges! As we go out across the fields of a summer
afternoon, he bounds along beside us, picking up a
woodchuck scent or startled into sheepish stillness by
the sudden uprush of a meadow lark, but keeping pretty
close until we reach the long hedgerow which sepa-
rates a twenty-acre slope of mowing from a fifteen-acre
abandoned pasture, and which inarches between them
up the steep hill to the woods where a sentinel chestnut
marks the trail to the mountain-top. This hedgerow is
chiefly of maple, though there are aspens in it, and
chestnut, and cherry and alder. It is feathery as
a Corot in the level light of afternoon, and it twinkles
in the clear June breeze. It is ten or fifteen feet thick
at the base, almost completely concealing the original
stone wall and the later rail fence, while the heave of
the tree roots and the accumulation of compost has
raised the ground level beneath it so that if it were sud-
denly cut down the two fields would be separated by a
considerable mound. When we reach this hedgerow,
where the Peabodies are always fluting in early summer,
the dog abandons us. The hedge holds secrets for
him which we can only guess. We see his hind quarters
and his tail disappear into the tangle, and hear within
the crash of bushes, the grunts and pawings of a canine

STONE WALLS 141

on the hunt. He has forgotten us in the joy of this
cover, and we walk on beside the hedge, savouring its
wild border of flowers and hearing the rustle of its
leaves, till we enter the woods beyond, and presently
the dog rejoins us, subdued and domestic again, and
pokes an earthy muzzle into our hands.

In Winter the New England hedgerow, stripped of its
undergrowth of weeds and wild flowers, shows more
plainly its naked spine of wall, and how interesting a
thing it is to follow when the snow is on the ground, for
it seems to be both haven and highway for innumerable
little creatures of the field and forest. The tracks of
weasels and squirrels lead into it; the rabbits often beat
down a hard little path beside it, a regular travelled road
between feeding grounds; the deer come to it for the
sumac; the juncos and other winter birds perch upon it,
or in the trees of the hedge, and flutter down to feed on
the weed seeds below. How permanent the wall looks,
too, rising gray and a little grim above the snow, like an
infantry trench imposed against the charge of the
cohorts of the snow and storm. Against the northern
face the charge has piled itself till it reaches the top of
the wall, but in vain — it has gone no farther. Defeat
is written in the northward sloping drift, which packs
down harder and harder as Winter advances. On the
face of the open country those drifts are the last to dis-
appear in Spring. We walk through the soggy fields
late in March and see them everywhere, grown a little

142 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

dingy with dust and dead leaves, but flecking the land-
scape as if some Titanic artist had spattered the world
with a brush full of china white. They slowly recede
into the shadow of the walls, and suddenly on a morning
in April, when the song-sparrows are singing and the sun
is hot on your neck, they are gone, vanished in the
night, even the long white streak across the highest up-
land pasture. Then we know that Spring has come
indeed.

The old walls or fences which divide a country high-
way from the bounding fields are always alluring — al-
most as alluring as the bars which occasionally break
their line and invite the vagrant wayfarer to explore
down a lane to the river or up a wood road into the green
dimness of the hills. To the lover of gardens they are
alluring for the perfect background they always make to
the wild garden of the roadside. Even in Winter, a
gray stone wall rising above the snow, with the lavender
stalks of blackberry vines against it, is a lovely thing.
When it peeps between pink roses in June, or wild sun-
flowers in early August or golden-rod and asters in
September, here a round gray stone, there a pinnacle of
quartz, again a gap, perhaps, to show a tiny vista of the
fields beyond, it is the gardener's envy and despair.
Nor is the roadside fence much less effective, for over it
the clematis scrambles as upon a trellis, and the bitter-
sweet vines twine till they can find a tree to climb and
hang out their red berries against the coming Winter.

STONE WALLS 143

The split rail, or Virginia fence, is a relic of a happy
day when we could afford to be prodigal with lumber —
or thought we could. It was never common in New
England, though not unknown. I well recall one
where the quail nested in the corners, and every alter-
nate triangle of the snake line was a mass of blackcap
raspberries. The whip-poor-wills used to sing upon it,
too, in the summer evenings — a melancholy song which
always affected me with that indefinable Weltschmerz
peculiar to adolescence. But we all know that Lincoln
split the rails for such fences in Illinois, where a stone is
as rare as a hill to coast on, and in Virginia itself you
may still see them, mellowed by time, overgrown and
flower-bordered, exactly comporting with the long
horizontals of the pines and the roof trees of the negro
cabins. One such fence I have never forgotten. Two
of us had come out of the Dismal Swamp, upon the
western side, or "the coast," as it is called. It had been
a hard tramp out, through the damp heat of the almost
tropic swamp growth, in mud half up to our knees. We
emerged upon the sandy road at sunset time, and a
cool, fresh breeze was stirring from the higher regions as
we turned south. To our right was the old rail fence,
zigzagging along to keep us company, with some un-
known flower blooming, and as it seems to me now
faintly fragrant, in the alternate angles. Behind this
fence were the level fields, some bearing cotton, some
corn, but most of them filled with row on row of the

144 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

humble peanut. Now and then, at the back of the
fields, we saw a gray negro cabin, seemingly as old and
artless, and surely as virgin of paint, as the fence itself;
and always at the far edge of the fields, paralleling our
road, marched a long procession of southern pines, their
tops as level as the sky line of a Paris boulevard, the
daggers of the pink sunset between their trunks. Ever
the swamp, gloomy and darkening with the coming
night, was on our left, but westward the old rail fence
accompanied us, and the friendly cabins against the
pines; and in the gathering twilight we heard from far
off the sound of a negro singing.

The roadside wall or fence, too, besides its landscape
charm and friendliness, is interesting as the highway of
the lesser travellers. Man is the vagabond of the
wheel ruts; the squirrel takes the wall or the topmost
rail. The birds, too, in their migrations, like to rest
upon this rail, or even to dwell near it in preference to
the seemingly safer fields and woods. Just as you will
see the telegraph wires lined with swallows on the ap-
proaches leading into a city, you will find innumerable
birds along the country track in the trees and bushes or
even on the wall or fence itself. They seem to feel the
vagabondage of the open road, even though they have
all the heavens for their highway.

Nearly every New Englander's father or grandfather
(or so the family legends run) once laid a barbed-wire
fence on posts made of willow, and hence the pollards by

The pattern of fields and pastures . . . stitched with stone walls

STONE WALLS 145

the brook. It seems a little incredible that so many
Yankees could have been ignorant of the persistence of
the will-to-live in willows — or was it their Puritan way
of serving beauty under the deception of utilitarianism?
Beauty they did serve, at any rate, for the fence posts
always lived and grew into a noble row of trunks, bi-
ennially cut back to a head an axe-reach above the
ground, and so always bristling with a great cluster of
rich, glossy leaf stalks in Summer and with tawny, naked
spears in Winter, shining on a dull day over the snow
and the icy brook like a bit of captured sunlight. And
what whistles they made in the Spring! I wonder how
many of my readers could make a willow whistle now?
I believe the art is lost.

There is one bit of old stone wall I have not yet
spoken of, keeping it till the last in my memories of
walls and fences. It was some two miles from my boy-
hood home, on the way to a certain desirable swimming
hole in the Ipswich River, and the recollection of it is
still so vivid in my brain that I can call up the exact
sensations it evoked, though I have not looked upon it
now these twenty years. It could not, however, have
been without its counterparts elsewhere, and I have
often wondered if its effect upon me in boyhood is not a
remembered possession of many another New England
lad. Curiously enough, in later years, I found that
Ruskin had shared with me my emotions (the force of
my original sensation is such that I am compelled to the

146 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

egotistical transposition!), though Ruskin did not
know the stone wall in his picture, only the dome of
pasture.

The road to the Ipswich meadows led down a slope
and across a considerable cultivated plain, almost en-
tirely rich, alluvial grass land. It was carefully kept
and trimmed with a scythe behind the machine, to se-
cure every blade of grass close up to the walls and fences.
There were no hedgerows here. On the way down I
never noticed my particular stone wall, or, if I did, it
was only to wonder how it could be so tame and com-
monplace from this viewpoint. But after the swim,
lazy with too long immersion in warm fresh water, and
with the hot rays of the noonday sun baking on our
necks and sending up films of heat from the railroad bed
which ran through the bottom land, we would cross the
plain slowly, the hay cutters clicking like giant grass-
hoppers in the fields, and then I would see my wall and
feel its wonder.

It was a bare, gray, naked wall, cresting the ridge of
the plain against the sky, and the green meadows and
fields were like a long billow of the land gradually
swelling up into a wave crest, with the gray wall as the
foam. At first I thought of it as a wonderful place to
shelter a defending regiment, while we boys were the
enemy — Pickett's men, perhaps — charging across the
level. But the impress of a great wave of the land
gradually grew stronger and captured my whole im-

STONE WALLS 147

agination, and then suddenly I realized that the sea, the
great, blue, boundless open sea, was on the other side of
that wall and when I reached the top I should behold it!
Just before the road reached the sharp pitch of the ridge,
it swung abruptly to the right, to avoid a steep ascent,
and here the impression was strongest. The wall
stretched naked against the sky. Nothing whatever was
visible beyond it, not even a treetop. The dome of the
firmament dropped down majestically behind, with in-
finite depths of aerial perspective where the cloud
ships rode, exactly as it drops down to the far horizon
line of the ocean. Here, at this point, I used to pause
and tingle with the sensation, a feeling of the im-
manence of the sea, an illusion amounting almost to be-
lief that when I reached the top I should indeed behold
the line where the sky and water meet. I think my
feeling of the sea at these moments was a more profound
sensation than the actual sight of the ocean ever awaked.
I may have been a little ashamed to confess my sensa-
tions to the boys who accompanied me, for I do not re-
call that any of them ever expressed the same illusion.
It would not have been strange, however, if they could
not share it, for none of them, as I recall, was familiar
with the ocean. But in after years I came upon a pas-
sage in Ruskin — in "Modern Painters," I think —
wherein he speaks of the strange illusion of the sea im-
parted by a level earth line against the sky, shutting
out all sight of what lies beyond, and I read his words

148 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

with almost a shock of familiarity. He was my fa-
vourite author for several months thereafter!

It was more than a quarter of a century ago that my
gray stone wall gave me so profoundly the sensation of
the sea, rising above the inland meadows of Middlesex,
sharp against the sky. Yet the mystery, the lure, the
call to wonder and to dreams, which the ocean holds for
the heart of youth were crystallized for me by that stone
wall upon its ridge, and even to-day when I approach
the sea, f eeling its invisible presence in the great drop of
sky behind some dune of sand, it is the memory of my
wall which wakes and stirs within me, and I hear the hot
cicada click of the mowing machines in the fields and feel
once more the strange pain of dreaming boyhood when
the imagination has taken full command.

The other day I wandered to an upland pasture
and heard the mowers in a distant field. The day was
hot. The grasshoppers rose in a startled swarm about
my knees as I walked. The sunshine in the valley
was like an amber flood and the distant mountains
were smoky gray, almost like waves of floating vapour.
I lay down presently under the shade of a laurel bush,
to pick and munch some checkerberry leaves which
I saw growing there — and suddenly from this lower
angle I saw the near-by wall sharp against the sky, and
nothing beyond save the great spaces of aerial perspec-
tive and an Himalayan cumulus. It was my old stone
wall, and beyond lay the sea! No, beyond lay the

STONE WALLS 149

Brewer mowing, down the farther slope, where Jim
Brewer was even now at work; and it would be a good
time, incidentally, to go and ask him if he could come
to-morrow or next day and cut my rear lot. But I
did not go. I lay in the shade of the laurel bush and
looked, at the wall, and at the great drop of the sky
beyond growing pearly pink with afternoon, as it does
out over the waters, while the memories of boyhood
came back upon me and the wonder of the sea, the
haunting call for voyages of the untried soul. The
shadow of my laurel bush crept eastward, the click
of the mowers ceased, a song-sparrow sang his even-
song, before I rose from my converse with a dream.
I did not look over into Jim Brewer's mowing, but
climbed to my feet with my face to the west, and the
last sight of my wall was a line of old gray stones against
the pearly sky.

"The sea is over there!" I said, and walked home-
ward through strange, familiar fields.

BRIDGES

IS THERE any one for whom, since his earliest child-
hood, bridges have not had a curious, if perhaps almost
unconscious, fascination?

I stood with grooms and porters on the bridge,

wrote Tennyson, beginning his reconstruction of the
tale of Coventry's Queen. What were the grooms
and porters doing there? What was the poet doing
there? We have his word that they were not crossing.
As the reporter for the Sun once said of the press agent,
no doubt they were busily standing still. What
place is so inviting to stand busily still upon as a bridge?
The world goes by you there in open view. Beneath
flows the river, boats and bargess lipping under your
feet on its tide, and you look upon the backs of the
rowers or the piles of cargo on the decks of the larger
craft. To left and right you see the city, perhaps,
lying in perspective along the banks, hints of Whistler
etchings in the old river-front buildings, and spires
shooting up behind them. Out of the city comes a
street, to either end of the bridge, and once on the

150

BRIDGES 151

span it is like an artery stripped of the surrounding
flesh. You see the blood-flow of the town's traffic
with startling clearness. Motors and vans, cabs and
wagons, cars and pedestrians, rumble behind you as
you lean on the rail, and when you turn to watch them
are thrown into sharp relief against the river and sky —
perhaps against the foggy blue-gold of the harbour
mouth downstream. Where else but standing on the
bridge with grooms and porters could Tennyson have
seen Coventry go past, and dreamed again the ancient
legend of her Queen? Where but on Westminster
Bridge could Wordsworth have stood, the open sky
above him, the lapping water below, and seen the sun
come up over London and

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie :
Open to the fields and to the sky — ? .

Boston, too, is at her best and most characteristic
when seen from the Cambridge bridges, even that on
which Longfellow stood at midnight and pretended he
was a pessimist. Westward from the upper bridge,
over the white caps of the basin, the sun declines behind
Corey Hill in Brookline. Southward stretches the
broad highway of the bridge, alive with traffic, van-
ishing into the brick wilderness of the town. South-
eastward, looking once more across the dancing waters
of the basin, you see the new embankment flashing
green, and beyond that the mile-long row of houses on

152 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

Beacon Street, curving gracefully at the lower end to
the granite towers of the middle bridge. Hidden be-
hind this level line of houses is the smoky city, with tall
church towers rising at intervals; and far to the left the
city comes into view — tier on tier of red brick dwellings
climbing up the slopes of Beacon Hill to the golden
dome of the State House. Perhaps an eight-oared
shell comes downstream as you stand by the rail, the
bare, brown backs of the rowers knotting with the play
of tense muscles underneath the tan. The sharp bow
disappears beneath you, and, following the crowd, you
rush across the bridge to the other side and again
look down. Out from the shadow shoots the arrow-
like bow, then the knotted backs of the oarsmen, their
eight long sweeps flashing in beautiful rhythmic swing,
then the little coxswain with a megaphone strapped
to his mouth. It is scarcely a moment before the shell
is far downstream, the sweeps dripping silver on the
wind-wrinkled water. The crowd loiters on, its bit of
bridge excitement over. The harbour haze drifts above
the golden dome on Beacon Hill, and the tiers of red
brick dwellings rising to it send back the westering sun
from their windows. Few cities anywhere are more
beautiful than Boston from the upper Cambridge
bridge.

There is beauty, too, of a different and stupendous
kind in the bridges that connect Manhattan Island with
Brooklyn or the mainland. Your first feeling at these

BRIDGES 153

bridges is always one of admiration, even of awe, for
modern engineering. To stand on the East River
docks and see the gigantic, wirespun, airy boulevard
of the Brooklyn Bridge go leaping up into space and
descend in a curve of marvellous grace into the granite
gorges of lower Manhattan is to experience a sensation
no other city on earth can offer you. Even the glit-
tering white Matterhorn of the Woolworth Tower,
toward which the distant end of the bridge seems diving,
is less impressive than the space-hung boulevard of
the bridge itself. It would have been from the foot-
path of this bridge, too, that Wordsworth would have
written his sonnet to Manhattan — we wonder in what
spirit of solemn awe or bitter scorn?

The appeal of bridges to man's imaginative interest is
based, of course, upon deep racial facts. Bridges, no
less than ships, are a symbol of man's conquest of his
environment. They are an escape from the tyranny
of Nature. The first bridge, no doubt, was the bridge
the animals still use — a fallen tree across a little stream.
The next step was to fell a tree when a bridge was
needed, the next to provide supports for it, the next to
extend the length of span by mid-stream structures.
Every step on the way meant a rise in the scale of civili-
zation, and the simplest bit of plank across a brook,
where the path winds down through the trees, has for
us the curious interest of primitive things, taking us
back many ages in our history.

154 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

i
Bridges, too, have always been a strategic point in

times of war — bottle necks for defence; and our con-
sciousness carries the memory of this fact. We have
all fought with Horatius by the yellow Tiber, upon
the farther side, while Roman axes hewed down the
timbers behind us! We have all been proud, who
could, that some ancestor of ours fired one of those
shots heard, round the world, "by the rude bridge that
spanned the flood" of the Concord River (the flood
being, to be sure, a small, dark, sluggish, quiet stream
meandering through peaceful meadows). But the rude
span which crossed it was unquestionably a bridge, and
the stream too wide to jump, so the point was strategic,
and on one side stood the redcoats, on the other the
embattled farmers of Middlesex, and the rifles spoke
which made a nation free. All boys have fought beside
Napoleon, and know the bridge of Lodi. All boys,
living in the tales of battles (which to them are history),
know a hundred bridges, great and small, where an
advance was checked or a rear guard successfully cov-
ered a retreat; and every boy sees the reason for this
strategic importance of bridges and looks upon them
with interest and respect.

Then, too, there is the bridge Caesar built across the
Rhine — which wakes, perhaps, less pleasant memories.
Nor must London Bridge be forgotten, which in our
early childhood was in constant process of falling down,
to a tune we shall never forget. The mammoth im-

BRIDGES 155

portance of such a catastrophe as the destruction of
London Bridge can in no way be more justly esti-
mated than by the persistence through the generations
of this song-game.

It is curious how characteristic bridges are of the
region or the civilization which produced them. What
could be more characteristic of the Titanic materialism
of New York than the high-leaping boulevards of
steel which span the East River? They are the bridges
which befit Manhattan no less than the corduroy, laid
on two string pieces formed by felling hemlocks across
the rushing mountain stream, befits the logging road
which winds into the forests under Carrigain. The
bridges of Florence, too — the Ponte Vecchio, let us say
— are composed of exquisite ancient arches of hewn
stone, in perfect proportion, leading into squares where
stone architecture in exquisite proportion speaks of the
marvellous Renaissance. They are not vast, these
bridges. They do not leap. They are gravelly monu-
mental, however, on the scale of the city, built by
artists, to endure. As exactly fitted to their age and
station were the old covered bridges of New England
—nay, are, for many a one still stands across the Con-
necticut or the Androscoggin, witness to the enduring
qualities of native oak; we cannot say a mute witness,
because there was never yet a New England covered
bridge in which the planking did not rattle.

The road that winds down the hills to the covered

156 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

bridge, or crosses the green fields of the intervale, is
white with dust and lined with bramble-covered stone
walls and elm trees or maples. Always, as it draws
near, it runs up a little incline to the bridge (perhaps
just after you have paid your toll at the toll gate);
and warned by a large sign over the entrance you pull
your horses down to a walk or reduce the speed of your
motor. You pass at once out of the hot sunshine into
the dusty dimness of the long, telescope-like shed, and
the planks rumble beneath your wheels. What a
curious smell there is in the old covered bridge! It is
like no other smell in the world, and quite indescribable
to one who has never sniffed it — not the smell of a coun-
try barn, nor of a circus ring, yet reminiscent of both,
with a new quality entirely its own. It always brings
back my childhood to me with a sudden, startling
vividness, and I recall the covered bridge across the
Androscoggin at Bethel, with ancient circus posters
flaring from the dusty walls, with tin placards on every
beam proclaiming some magic spavin cure, with bits of
hay hanging from the cobwebs, pulled from a tower-
ing load recently passed through, and finally with
exquisite landscapes of the great curve of the river, the
green fields, and the far blue peaks of the Presidentials,
framed through the square windows — for every cov-
ered bridge is lighted by square windows at orthodox
intervals. The road on either side of that bridge is
as vague in my memory as yesterday's breakfast; but

BRIDGES 157

the entrance — a shadowy cave where dust motes danced
in the rays which streamed from cracks between the
boarding — and every detail of the interior, including the
smell, are so clear and vivid that I have only to shut my
eyes and be five years old again.

The old New England covered bridge (covered, of
course, to protect the traffic from the winter blasts dur-
ing the long crossing) had the box-like simplicity of the
New England farmhouse and barn. It was made of
wood, on stone piers, exactly as the barns and houses
were. It was invariably painted red, or else left to
weather a soft mouse-gray. It could never have been a
seemly approach to a city, yet in its setting of country
road and pasture, with the wide, clear, brown river
beneath it and the simple, box-like red or gray barns on
the distant hills, it not only admirably filled its function
of getting the farmer across the wide stream with ears
unfrozen in the bitterest storms, but, Winter or Summer,
it fitted the landscape. What should theoretically have
been angular and clumsy toned into the scheme with a
quaint, stiff grace, and threw its red reflection into the
water. Wherever such a bridge still stands, connecting
communities which retain the simplicity of the old
New England, it is a picturesque delight. Wherever
such a bridge is reached by a tarvia road, perhaps with
a steel trolley span beside it and modern houses on either
bank, it is almost pathetically ugly, and, I have dis-
covered, does not even retain its characteristic smell.

158 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

The old covered bridge belonged to a New England that
is too rapidly vanishing — to the age of the travelling
circus and the carry-all and first-growth timber and
"old-fashioned snowstorms." A motor looks as out of
place in one as the one-hoss shay on Fifth Avenue.

We all, I suppose, have cur favourite and familiar
little bridges — memories of childhood, summer pos-
sessions, or, perhaps, enjoyed the year through. There
used to be a bridge on the way to my grandfather's
house which always filled me with joy, because upon it I
caught the first sight of the stream which was to give me
a month of unalloyed delight — a pretty glimpse, with a
curve of the river on one side and on the other the dark,
glossy millpond, green with lily pads, and the gray mill
with its gigantic pile of fragrant sawdust beyond. This
little bridge was of a well-recognized type — wooden
string pieces set from stone piers built out on either
bank, with a rough and picturesque railing of poles
upon which you leaned to look down into the water, or
to fish. The loose planking rattled, and I remember
vividly the delightful sensation of rowing under the
bridge into the shadow, on a hot summer day, and
waiting there till a team passed overhead, to see the dust
sift down through the chinks, golden, perhaps, in a ray
of sunlight, and to hear its soft, almost bell-like tinkle
on the water. The fact that the people in the team
overhead didn't know we were under the bridge lent an
added zest to the adventure.

BRIDGES 159

There are many such wooden bridges still left on back
roads where motor traffic has not necessitated a change.
Often they are as picturesque, almost, as a consciously
designed bridge in Japan, with an artless grace in the
rough, semicircular arch occasionally constructed with
the pole railing, or the angular curve of the base line
over a mid-stream prop. If you go down to the river
level in winter, when the banks are white with snow,
and only in the centre of the current is there any water
visible, when the bare trees are sharp and delicate
against the sky and the road but three tracks of blue
shadow, you will see the bridge etched in timber on a
field of white, with naive, unconscious picturesqueness,
almost as much a part of nature as the nude maples
beyond.

On the farther side of Grandfather's house was a
second bridge, crossing the same river — which me-
andered in great loops through the meadows, going a
mile while the road went three hundred yards. This
was called the Red Bridge. It was much more pre-
tentious, but far less attractive to the eye, than the
first one. The sides, instead of being open railing, were
composed of double solid board fences, two feet apart,
and boxed in along the top. Unless you were a very
tall man, you could not look over them, so that when
you stood on this bridge you didn't see the river at all.
But you could climb up on them! On top was a two-
foot-wide, perilous path, with a sheer drop of twenty

160 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

feet to the river on one side, and your mother's express
command never to walk across spurring you on, not to
mention the admiring gaze of your small companion.
The Red Bridge, too (which must have been painted
about once every generation), was a superb place for
bill-posting. It fairly blazed with spavin cures, lini-
ments for man and beast, bargains in farm machinery,
announcements of county fairs, and circus posters.
How well I remember one fair trapeze performer who
was depicted in the act of flying through the air, hands
gracefully outstretched toward a far-distant, swinging
perch, and whose pink legs defied the winter storms and
summer suns long after the rest of her anatomy had
faded quite from view — which was not without its
ironic touch in our Puritan community !

A quaint feature of country bridges that is now dis-
appearing was the turnout on the roadway beside them,
when the stream was a small one, permitting you to
drive your horse through the ford and up the opposite
bank to the road again, thus watering him without get-
ting out of the carriage. It was bad, undoubtedly, for
the carriage wheels, but the horses certainly enjoyed it,
and many a time have I left my fishpole propped against
the rail, with the float bobbing far downstream, to cross
the bridge and watch some thirsty horse suck up the
water noisily, while the foam drifted away from his
nostrils and his driver let the reins dangle and inquired
of me (usually with annoying derisiveness): "Heow air

Fitted to their age and station were the covered bridges
of New England

BRIDGES 161

they bitin' ter-day, son?" Those drinking pools were
excellent places to wade in, too, on your way home from
berry picking, when there didn't happen to be a real
swimming hole on the lower side of the bridge. I don't
know why our swimming holes were always by a bridge,
but they invariably were, perhaps because a stream is
apt to be narrowest just before it widens into a pool.
At any rate, we were always forced to expose our naked-
ness just below the roadway where it crossed on the
rattling timbers, and it was the part of honour and de-
cency to go under water when a carry-all passed, and to
stay under if there were ladies in it until the rumble of
the^ boards had ceased. Many a boy learned to dive by
being caught on the left bank, where there were no trees
or bushes, a sudden clatter of hoofs or the sound of
women's voices warning him that he must leap.

Among the most interesting of little roads are the
lanes on a farm which radiate out from the barn into the
hayfields, the orchard, the sugar grove, the timber; and
among the most interesting of little bridges are those on
which these lanes and farm paths cross the brooks.
Such bridges are of the simplest construction, often but
a few planks laid on a couple of beams, without any
railing, to enable the hayracks to cross the brook, which
here is almost hidden deep down in the long grass and
flows lazily toward the river as if resting after its tumble
from the hills. But the view from such a little bridge is
always charming. On either side the winding of the

162 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

brook is visible, a snake-like indentation in the green of
the meadow. The cart tracks of the hay road lead back
from the bridge to the great barn, and forward into the
sunny reaches of the fields, or even farther into the tim-
ber. The verdant intervale is ringed with hills, near and
wooded, far off and blue. The grasshoppers leap
in a tiny cloud about your feet as you walk, the crick-
ets chirrup, and the bobolinks and larks are busy in the
air. Perhaps from the distance comes the steady
click, click, click of a mowing machine, hottest of summer
sounds. For many years when I was pent in a city ten
months of the year, just such a bridge was always in
my dreams, a bridge that lets the sugar grove brook pass
under on its way to the brown Ham Branch and invites
your eye to wander up the valley to the blue nobility of
Moosilauke, most beautiful of mountains.

Scarcely less to be desired is the little foot-bridge
which crosses the brook farther up, where it still tum-
bles and talks amid the trees. The path is a way of
dead leaves and dark mould and wild flowers, cloistered
amid great tree trunks. But from the tiny bridge a
vista suddenly opens. The brook has cleared a sight-
line down the slope through the forest, and you glimpse
unexpectedly the green meadows out there in the sun,
turning from emerald to gold as the sun sets, and the
songs of the hermit thrushes throb in the cool dimness
about you.

Less artless and simple than the little bridges of

BRIDGES 163

the farm, but scarcely less peaceful and with a calm
beauty all their own, are the little bridges which cross
canals. Nothing is so soothing and sedative as a
canal, with its endless levels, its winding tow path,
its brimming, quiet water. A canal always seems old,
and always lazy. It takes the reflection of every
bridge as in a mirror, whether the white-washed bridge
near Princeton, where the lock-keeper's house, white-
washed, too, is gay with red geraniums, and the lazy
barges are few and far between, or some more ancient
stone arch in England, formal like the countryside,
completed by the reflection into a perfect circle save
where the tow path cuts into the circumference. Some-
times there is hurry on the bridges; a motor whizzes
across, or a galloping horse clatters. How foolish
such haste seems from the level of the canal! Your
canoe drifts to the gentle impulse of your paddle, and
as you pass under the shadow of the bridge the life of
roads, leading into distant towns, into rush and tur-
moil, seems oddly far off and unreal. The bridge is a
reminder of things you had forgotten.

The modern steel bridge has not yet found itself.
It is useful enough, but too seldom beautiful. The steel
building is clothed in stone, but the bridge goes naked,
with unlovely skeleton. The Brooklyn Bridge, with
its stone suspension towers, and the new Charles Street
bridge between Cambridge and Boston, where the steel
is so fleshed with granite that the skeleton seems solid,

164 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

show clearly enough the importance of apparent solid-
ity in the aesthetic appeal of bridges — unless the steel
framework can find some new, airy grace of its own.
Occasionally we meet with a small steel bridge, not
designed for bearing heavy traffic, which does achieve a
pleasant effect of strength in lightness; and of course the
high railroad trestle, with its tall, lean piers and its
bare, level top, has a quaint, spider-like grace as it
strides the chasm and the foaming mountain torrent,
bearing the train far aloft against the face of the cliffs
upon its airy slenderness. The suspension type of
bridge is not a new one. The similarity between
one of those "home-made" suspension bridges for
foot passengers, so common on our American rivers,
which consists of a plank walk hung between two
cables stretched from trees on either bank, and the
pictures of native rope bridges in the Andes, is strik-
ing. Our little suspension bridge across the Housa-
tonic, which sways so deliciously when we cross upon
it, and so terrifies the dog, is, after all, but a pocket
edition of the boulevards that leap the East River out
of the flanks of Manhattan. But the cantilever
bridges of steel are something new as well as angular,
and grace is not yet their attribute, nor monumental
solidity, either. Unlike the builders of the Renais-
sance, our engineers are not yet artists. But this does
not mean that we must hark wailfully back to Ruskin
for an expression of our feelings. Why should we

BRIDGES 165

have so much confidence in the past, and none in the
future?

Pater, in his famous "Conclusion" (once, strange as
it seems, infamous, rather), says,

Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is
ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of per-
sonality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its
way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to
be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression
of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a soli-
tary prisoner its own dream of a world.

Is there not, perhaps, a little of this melancholy meta-
physic hi our contemplation of bridges? Some read-
ers will undoubtedly recall William Morris's tale,
"The Sundering Flood," with its yearning figure on
either bank of the uncrossed stream — young, hot
hearts aflame. We think of them, perhaps, when we
come to a river bank and see upon the farther shore
green fields and cool woods, with white roads lead-
ing "over the hills and far away" into a land of untried
delights — but no bridge crossing thither. Standing
balked upon the bank of the "sundering flood," we
realize afresh what a part bridges have played in the
happiness and progress of individuals and the race;
we realize it from that primitive viewpoint of unsat-
isfied need, which is still humanity's greatest teacher.

But suppose a bridge is there; suppose it leads out
over the swirling current, and shows us water vistas

166 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

as we pause at mid-stream to look left and right before
we pass on into the pleasant adventures that await.
Shall we not anticipate those adventures with a cer-
tain gravity, wondering whether, after all, the bridge
which takes us into realms unexplored can ever take us
out of ourselves, can lead us to sights which are not
already irrevocably conditioned by our personal vision,
can ever span the gulf between that self which alone we
may ever hope to know, and that not-our-self which
is all the world else? The reflection is melancholy,
and it would not do to dwell too long upon it, or else
the tramp-adventurer no less than Hamlet would
find his conscience "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of
thought" till it lost the name of action. Yet for a
moment, however brief, it can hardly be escaped.
The road winds down the pleasant hills to the bridge,
and for a span it is isolated and alone as it crosses the
brown water to the unknown hills beyond, with vil-
lages in their green folds and vistas through their
intervales. On that isolated span the individual is
alone, as well. The whence and whither of his life
flashes its questioning beam upon him, perhaps the
primal allegory of the running river beneath his feet
murmurs sadly in the sound of the waters, and even his
companion seems suddenly strange — he is conscious
of the sundering flood that rolls forever between per-
sonalities.

But a hay cart rattles on the planking, the smell of the

BRIDGES 167

hay mingles with the faint odour of fresh running
water, the farmer has a cheery hail, a swallow skims the
river, and the sky is blue! Once more the tramp-
adventurer sets his feet toward the unknown land
beyond the bridge, and lights his pipe afresh.

CHAPTER XI
THE LITTLE TOWN ON THE HILL

IT WAS many years ago that I first alighted from
the train at a station bearing the Biblical name of
Zoar, and, after the train had disappeared up the
winding track, felt my tortured ears suddenly soothed
with the sweet silence, my lungs with the keen air.
Just below the track the rapid brown Deerfield River
ran whispering over stones. Opposite the tiny station,
across the highway, were two or three houses. Be-
hind them leapt up the wooded walls of the gorge,
reproduced on the opposite side of the river. Looking
up stream or down, I could see great wooded headlands
jutting out — a wild and picturesque canon. After the
dust and smell of the train, the faint odour of the rapid
water was cool and agreeable. I drew a deep breath
before turning to find the stage driver who would take
me from Zoar up the walls of the gorge to the little
village on the hills above.

It was not difficult to find hjm, as he was the only
person on the platform besides myself and the station
agent. Conversely, I was his only passenger. In
addition to me and my luggage his load consisted of

168

THE LITTLE TOWN ON THE HILL 169

a mail bag, four sacks of feed, and a bundle of morning
newspapers. He belonged to the old-fashioned com-
municative school of Yankee stage drivers, and before
we had accomplished the six uphill miles to the vil-
lage (he said it was eight up and four down, but aver-
aged six, so they marked it six on the maps), I was in
possession of a considerable body of local history, New
England folk-lore, and highly flavoured, individual
philosophy. Alas! in those days I kept no note book,
(nor do I now, except spasmodically!), and this par-
ticular stage driver has long since carried his last mail,
so I cannot return to atone for my omission. But it
was from his lips, I remember, that I first heard the
story of the old woman who read in her Bible that faith
would remove mountains. As a particular mountain
behind her house annoyed her by shutting off the late
afternoon sun (he showed me the identical hill), she
decided to exercise her faith and will it to be gone,
which she accordingly did just as it was spoiling what
promised to be a particularly choice sunset. How-
ever, she gave it all night to get out of the way, and in
the morning ran expectantly to the window. It was
still there.

"Well, I knew it would be!" she said.

The road we were plodding up the hill led beside a
dashing, fern-embroidered and hemlock-shaded brook,
which had been the primal engineer without whose
aid no road could have been built. It was a beautiful

170 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

brook, full of waterfalls, and every fall, I am sure, was
duplicated by a thank-you-marm in the road. There
would be a short, steep ascent, then a high thank-you-
marm at the top, a stretch less steep, then another
sharp upgrade and another thank-you-marm. It was
as if the winding road was cascading down the moun-
tain gorge. The horses knew exactly how to pull the
rear wheels over one of these thank-you-marms and let
them settle into the little hollow above, which held the
wagon stationary while the horses caught their breath.

"Hosses has got a lot o' sense," the driver said on one
such occasion. "They don't tire themselves out ef you
don't push 'em. They take things natural. A man
don't. He don't let up till all the steam's out o' the
boiler."

Driving on this theory, he was a long time getting to
the upland, but I still recall the pleasures of that ride,
the rushing, ferny brook, the solemn hemlocks, the steep
mountain walls, the smell of woods and wild flowers and
brown water on the run. We came at last into a small
upland intervale, where there was a cleared field and a
house, and then, passing them and climbing another
slope, into a larger intervale, with more fields and
several houses. But there was still a hill ahead of us,
and mountain walls on either side, and we must have
ascended two hundred feet more before we reached the
lower end of the village.

This, my driver told me, was the "new" village,

THE LITTLE TOWN ON THE HILL 171

though it looked old enough to have been there always.
On one side of the road the brook had been dammed
into a little mill pond, full of lily pads, and between
the dam and the highway stood the sawmill, a rough
lean-to of weathered, mouse-gray boards, the big saw
singing its last snarling song for the day as we passed
by, the smell of fresh-cut pine flooding the surrounding
air. Just beyond the mill was the town hall, a small
building about the size of the traditional "little red
school house," and neatly painted white. Beyond that
was a neat white church, of about the same size. Then
came a house or two. On the opposite side of the road
were other houses, and the general store and post
office, where we left the mail, the papers, and the bags
of feed. It was an ancient story-and-a-half building,
with a front veranda supported by columns. The hitch-
ing posts in front were chewed into fantastic totem
poles by hungry horses. Around each white column
on the veranda, shoulder-high, was a darker ring where
the village had leaned, waiting for the mail. On the
floor of the veranda, flanking the door, stood ploughs
and rakes and other agricultural implements. Inside
were the usual curiously scented gloom, the ancient
collection of groceries, calico, thread, overalls, straw
hats, tobacco, axe handles, saws, kerosene, and the in-
evitable bunch of bananas. Since those days, a black
tin rack of souvenir post cards has been added, but
otherwise there has been but little change.

172 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

Yet even here we were not at the top of the hill. We
were on a plateau, to be sure, and a road branched to the
west, just beyond the store, and another, above the mill
pond, turned to the east. But both roads led to farms
which could be seen pushing their cleared pastures
up toward higher wooded summits, and ahead the main
road still climbed toward the "old" village. With a
lighter load, we continued our journey, coming, after
nearly half a mile, almost to the top of the world, and
finding to my amazement the weed-grown remnants of a
village green, with two fine old Colonial houses facing
it, houses with delicate fanlights over the doors and
graceful Greek borders under the eaves, and on one side
a dilapidated building which had been the town hall a
century ago — a building three times the size of the
present hall; on the other, a white meeting house
similarly dilapidated and similarly superior in size to the
new. Here the road divided, one branch going on
through the upland pastures, still climbing steadily till
it crested the two-thousand-foot divide between Massa-
chusetts and Vermont, the other keeping to the sixteen-
hundred-foot level and making for the hills of North
Heath to the east. It was toward one of those hills the
stage driver pointed, and delivered his final observation.

"There's a cemetery over yonder on that hill," he
remarked, "which they say is the highest p'int o' culti-
vated ground in Massachusetts."

I came to know this village well in the days that fol-

THE LITTLE TOWN ON THE HILL 173

lowed — to know, and to love, and to wonder at it.
Settled j in the eighteenth century by adventurous
pioneers who pushed on up into the hills from Deerfield,
it must always have been remote, inaccessible, drift-
piled in winter, with a thin, rocky soil. Nor, without
artillery on either side, is it easy to see why such a
hilltop village was much easier to defend from a surprise
attack by the Indians than a village amid rich valley
meadows. The hills were too broken, the forests too
numerous, to afford an unobstructed view for any
distance. It may be that the Indians themselves
avoided the hills — there is considerable testimony to
that effect, especially in the White Mountains. It may
also be that the prevalence of "summer fever" in
Colonial times (which, of course, was typhoid fever from
contaminated wells) caused our ancestors to seek the
hills, where they drank spring water and attributed their
health to the absence of "poisonous vapours" from the
lowlands. Then, too, in many cases it was easier to
maintain trails over the uplands than in the valleys.
But still more, I like to fancy, it was the pioneer urge
that brought the first settlers up the river gorges, and
then up the side gorges of the tributary brooks, till
some upland beaver meadow attracted their attention,
offering a ready-made clearing to start on, with superb
timber all about and unlimited water power for their
needs. These early pioneers lived a self-sufficient life,
and perhaps when you are entirely independent of the

174 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

outside world, the human instinct is to get upon a hill.
How else, at any rate, can we explain so many of our
New England hamlets which were founded and flour-
ished more than a century ago, and with the growth of
modern transportation and industrialism have grad-
ually been slipping down to the valleys, or dying of
dry rot, yielding up their hard-won fields to the read-
vancing waves of the forest?

In this hill town where the stage driver brought me
there was a notable fire in 1795, or thereabouts. It
burned the church to the ground, and with the church it
destroyed the Covenant. The minister at that time
was the Reverend Preserved Smith, a man of liberal
mind and warm heart, who at once set about rebuilding
his sheepfold. But he did not attempt to restore the
Covenant. It is said that neither he nor his congrega-
tion could recall definitely all its Calvinistic ramifica-
tions, and quite evidently they were not desirous of
sending away to the orthodox lowlands for aid. There-
fore the new church had no Covenant, and for a genera-
tion the Reverend Preserved Smith preached liberal
religion to his flock, up here on the windy hilltops, and
not a soul from the outside world interfered. Of course,
he was at last discovered in his heinous offence, and the
governing body of the New England church took drastic
action; but it was too late. A generation without a
Covenant and a creed had set the village on the liberal
path, and to this day the church remains Unitarian,

THE LITTLE TOWN ON THE HILL 175

I love to think of those ancient days on the hilltop,
when a breed of men and women who tilled the fields,
hewed the forest, spun their own warm woollen cloth,
built solidly and well their storm-defying houses, could
wrestle with the dogmas of Calvinism, overthrow them,
struggle up toward liberal thought, and, from their high-
flung pastures, defy the ecclesiastical big-wigs on the
plains. They were a splendid race, and each generation
sent out splendid men into the nation. Even in my boy-
hood they were still a splendid race, though an aged one.
They were narrow, they were often ignorant, but they
were shrewd, humorous, independent, neighbourly, with
a love for their hills less expressive, perhaps, but no less
intense than the love of the Southern mountaineers.
I once encountered a mountaineer in the Tennessee
Cumberlands who had gone to Texas and started well
on a fine ranch. But, after two years, he was back
again in his tumble-down cabin at the head of Thump-
ing Dick Cove.

"Didn't you like Texas?" I asked him.

"Yes," he drawled. "I liked it well enough. But
come every Spring, I took to chillin'. It didn't agree
with me."

That was his way of saying he was so homesick for
his hills that he gave up ambition and the prospects of a
comfortable fortune to return to his mountain cove-
side.

So the old folk used to be in our New England hill

176 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

towns when I first made their acquaintance. Already
their lot was getting hard, as the lowlands drained the
best of their youngsters away from them, and our
changing civilization made the problem of living without
money to exchange for goods once produced at home,
increasingly difficult. But they loved their homes,
they cherished intensively their traditions, in silence
they would take me to some hilltop whence a vista
stretched over green mountain billows and ravines of
steely shadow to the far plains or the blue saddle of
Graylock, and in the sunset hush and still time of the
world let their gray eyes wander back at last to the little
white village straggling up the slope at their feet, and
say, gruffly: "It's kind o' sightly, hain't it?"

But that generation is almost gone, and with its
passing many a white farmhouse built of home-hewn
oak and chestnut beams, of clear pine boarding and
clapboards cut from first-growth spruce, is vacant of
human occupants, and soon will be in ruins. The hill-
top towns are passing, the stock who settled them is
dying out. There are favoured villages, to be sure,
where the rising tide of summer home seekers has
brought a new prosperity, though a prosperity quite
unlike the old and lacking its flavour of democratic
independence. In some cases, too, the driving through
of state highways by the shortest route, over hill and
dale, has brought certain towns into new communica-
tion with the outside world. But for the most part our

THE LITTLE TOWN ON THE HILL 177

hilltop communities are slipping rapidly back into
decay and even, at times, degeneracy. It seems almost
impossible for the pioneer to remain true to his breed
when once the modern world has surrounded him. His
good young blood begins to hear the siren call of the
cities, and decay sets in.

Yet even in their decay our hill towns keep an old-
world charm. Their names, too, are picturesque.
There is Florida, on top of the mountain close to the
new Mohawk Trail. It was here that a passing auto-
mobilist once asked a little girl by the roadside where
she lived.

"Florida," the child replied.

"My, you are a long way from home, aren't you?"
exclaimed the tourist.

Then there is Peru, swept by all the winds that blow,
where the general store and the two or three houses at
the crossroads, which you reach after an endless climb,
mark the centre of village life, and it might be said (as it
is said of Goshen, Connecticut) that the inhabitants
never use their snow till the second Winter. Peru is a
hotbed of political strife, and the license question, too, is
a burning issue. Last year the town went wet by a
large majority, twenty-one to fourteen, if I remember
correctly. Mount Washington Township, under the
cone of Mount Everett, and above the leaping Bash Bish
Falls, boasts fourteen voters, twelve of them staunch
Republicans. It is said that every man in the village

178 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

holds a town office. New Maryborough (birthplace of
"The Learned Blacksmith") and Monterey are other
towns with sonorous names. They are reached only
by the toilsome ascent of Three Mile Hill, and several
other hills besides, and though in Summer a new life has
come to them now, in Winter they are still as isolated
as of old, dependent on themselves for their intellectual
life and their enjoyment, if not any longer for their flour
and clothing.

If you pass eastward from New Marlborough, ten
miles over one of the worst roads in Massachusetts, in
part through second-growth scrub (for all this hill
region has been ruthlessly and stupidly stripped of its
timber), in part through fields too plainly showing neg-
lect or actual abandonment, you come presently to the
other side of the plateau, where the hamlet of Sandis-
field hangs on the brink. Here are the typical hill-
town white dwellings, the meeting house and town hall,
and here the road is so steep as it plunges over that all
the soil has slipped off it and gone down the hill, leaving
the naked ledge. It was in Sandisfield that the post-
mastership was once forced on a reluctant citizen, who
presently amused the county by advertising a horse for
sale, and guaranteeing to throw in, to the purchaser, one
harness and "a perfectly good United States post
office."

Down the hill from Sandisfield is New Boston, in the
upper gorge of the Farmington River. It is fifteen miles

THE LITTLE TOWN ON THE HILL 179

from trolley or railroad, and the carriage road down the
river is none too good. But it boasts its saw mill, its
little street of white houses, even its Inn, once long
ago a tavern on the Hartford-Albany turnpike, and now
a resort of adventurous automobilists. The old turn-
pike climbs north through Otis, another hill town far re-
moved from lines of modern travel and sitting sleepily by
the road where once the stage coaches rattled through,
its old tavern still open but all its romance gone,
shabbiness and decay slowly but surely setting their
mark on the village as a plucked flower withers in a vase.
But of all our towns upon a hill, Beartown has suf-
fered most from the changed conditions. It lies — or,
rather, it lay — on a high plateau, the ten-mile-long,
flat summit of Beartown Mountain, between Monterey
to the south and the valley town of South Lee to the
north, with Stockbridge on the west and Tyringham on
the northeast. A century ago this plateau, which is
fertile and pleasant at an altitude of almost eighteen
hundred feet, was inhabited by a considerable popula-
tion and produced many thousands of dollars' worth of
wool, lumber, grain, and maple sugar every year.
There were well-tilled farms and acres of close-cropped
pasture. Trout brooks flowed down its ravines. It
boasted among the inhabitants a famous weather
prophet, Levi Beebe, who is still a Berkshire tradition.
Up and down the steep roads that climbed to it from
the valley passed the wagons of the Beartown farmers.

180 GREEN TRAILS AND, UPLAND PASTURES

But to-day Beartown, as a separate community, is a
memory. There are but five families left on the entire
plateau, and one or two of them live by squatter sov-
ereignty. Recently there was an outbreak of small-
pox among them which remained unknown to the
county health authorities for more than a month. You
climb the steep, winding road from South Lee, above the
ravine where a trout brook babbles, and you meet no-
body. You pass a cabin poorer than that of a Southern
mountaineer and come to the fork where of old the road
split to reach both sides of the plateau, finding one fork
hardly more than a trail through the woods, while the
other shows grass between the ruts. Mile after mile you
tramp past fields unploughed, uncared for, or actually
overrun by the new forest, with here and there the old
stone walls cropping out amid the golden-rod and mul-
leins and raspberry vines, or striding off through the
woods to show where once the open ranges lay. You
pass houses sometimes with a shy-faced child at the
door, staring as children stare who are unaccustomed to
strangers; sometimes with only the blank countenance
of dwellings vacant and abandoned. And finally, be-
fore the road plunges down the hill again to Monterey,
you come upon the ruin of a genuine Colonial dwelling,
with fanlight and panelled walls, and all the chaste
luxury of our grandfathers' homes, settling slowly into a
heap of bricks and rotten lumber. The forest stares
hungrily at it from across the narrow road — this forest

THE LITTLE TOWN ON THE HILL 181

which has already devoured the barn; and stalking it
from behind are the young pines and birches, yearly
advancing up the slope of the garden. You may look
out across the tops of those birches mile upon mile to the
far blue hills of Connecticut. It is a lovely and a peace-
ful and a fertile spot, where once the traffic passed
hourly, gossip was exchanged at the gate, and the
fields were animate with cattle. There is no life now
but the birds and the squirrels, and a woodchuck which
last year had made his hole beneath the kitchen door
sill. This beautiful dwelling is a ruin in the wilderness.
Beartown is no more. The hilltop that man conquered
a brief century ago has been captured by a counter
charge, and the wilderness once more holds possession.
There has been much talk in recent years about
"redeeming" our western Massachusetts hill towns.
From time to time agitations have been started to
persuade the legislature to grant trolley franchises,
which, in some mysterious way, the New Haven Rail-
road was going altruistically to use in the process of
redemption. More promising have been the move-
ments to bring state highways a little closer to these
isolated communities. But I sometimes wonder if
there is much use in all this effort. Our hill towns, ex-
cept in such rare instances as Litchfield, Connecticut,
were pioneer communities, even though they carried
with them up the cascades of thank-you-marms cer-
tain architectural graces and theological formulae of

182 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

the plains. They remained pioneer communities for a
century, while all around them the conditions of life
were changing, railroads were built, modern centralized
industrialism was born, large-scale farming and stock
raising superseded the old-time local husbandry, and
what markets the hill people had found for their sur-
plus produce disappeared. With the final exhaustion
of their timber (due, of course, to ignorant and short-
sighted methods of lumbering), they ceased to be desir-
able dwelling places for the intelligent and energetic,
and became the abode, too often, only of the dull and
unenergetic remnant of the old breed, who clung, from
inertia, and feebly fought decay.

Is it of any use to talk of "redemption"? What
redemption is possible? The old, happy, independent,
stimulating agricultural life of these hill towns can
never be restored, at any rate, because such isolation
as still must remain their portion, thanks to their
physical sites, cannot be endured by the energetic man
or woman in the midst of the modern world. The
pioneer perishes when his flank is turned by a rail-
road and a motor highway. Agriculturally, too, these
hills are now of little actual value. To be sure, as
sheep and even cattle ranges they have great potential
possibilities, but we shall have to educate our entire
nation before those possibilities can be realized, mean-
while meekly bowing our necks and opening our purses
to the meat barons. Regarding our forests, however,

THE LITTLE TOWN ON THE HILL 183

we are already a little enlightened, and as I tramp our
hills and see the young spruce creeping back; as I note
some patriarch pine spared by a miracle and bravely
setting to work, with the aid of the wind and a near-by
cleared field, to reforest the land with its seedlings, I
often wonder if that is not the solution of our hill-town
problem. We need the lumber, in all conscience, and
as state forests the areas of these hill townships could
be vastly more productive economically than they are
to-day; they could, in many cases if not in most, give
profitable employment to as many, if not more men
than are at present registered on the voting lists; and,
finally, there would be thus created; out of what to-day
amounts to waste land, great public parks and game
preserves which could be opened for vacation play-
grounds, as the national forests of the West are opened.
The hilltop villages need not die; indeed, they would
not die. They would be at the heart of the forest life,
human centres in the busy wilderness, and each in
time, no doubt, as trails were laid out and forest vaca-
tion tramps or horseback trips became popular, would
boast its inn, high above the plains, in true mountain
air scented by spruce and hemlock and the fragrant
odour of newly cut pine. Germany has (or had) its
Black Forest — a national resource and a national
playground. Our western Massachusetts hill country
is neither a resource to-day nor even a playground,
save in a few scattered cases. It might so easily be

184 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

both, and there seems little chance of its becoming either
save by state reforestation. Our hill people cannot be
trusted to reforest for themselves; they lack the in-
telligence now, even if they possessed the capital or the
ambition. So I climb the thank-you-marm rapids
past a tumbling brook, through scrub timber where the
half-hidden hemlocks are bravely striving up amid
the stump shoots, past fields where the vivid painter's
brush and the white Queen Anne's lace are disputing
possession with the invading forest, on my way toward
some gently dying hamlet on the windy hills above
— a hamlet without a doctor now and perhaps without
a parson — and I dream of a day when the splendid, up-
standing forest trees will rise again as they rose of old,
to be harvested aright this second time for the good of
all future generations; when through their cathedral
aisles will wind such trails as sturdy trampers love,
leading from camp to camp beside a waterfall or over-
looking some splendid gorge or placid pond; and, still
fulfilling its social function and keeping its pioneer
character, each ancient village on its hilltop shall be
the heart and watch tower of the people's preserve.
It is a splendid dream, I think, and some day I expect
myself to see its realization begun, even in Massachu-
setts, which has a quaint faculty of every now and
then kicking clean over the traces of tradition in which
it usually plods, and doing something radical and emi-
nently sane.

CHAPTER XII
R. F. D.

I NEVER write the initials, R. F. D., on the cor-
ner of an envelope, or see them written there, with-
out a curious thrill, which I fancy must be shared
by all country-bred Americans. Railroads, trolleys,
motors, movies, magazines, the tremendous growth of
our cities, have made us sophisticated, so that a large
number of us have but the vaguest idea how the rest
of us live, which sounds like a paradox but isn't. My
boyhood, for example, was spent in a New England
village less than fifteen miles from Boston, yet the
North Parish, four miles away, was still only to be
reached by a yellow stage coach slung on swaying
straps, the partridges came for grain into our stable
yard, and the lives of the farmers along the country
roads were as well known to me as the cases of stuffed
animals in the lobby of the old Boston Museum, where
I went once a week to see the play, or the maze of
alleys cutting across Cornhill, which I threaded to
and from the station. To-day a trolley runs to the
North Parish, and what once were back-country roads
are now lined with suburban cottages. One farm is a

185

186 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

golf club now! There is a movie theatre where an old
Colonial house used to stand by the village green, the
village trees have disappeared; the village, in fact, has
disappeared. That sophisticated thing, a suburb, has
displaced it, and the old democracy between town and
country is no more. The present generation is sharply
divided, and it is characteristic of the urban element
to have very little consciousness that the other still
exists. The self-sufficiency of our American cities is
rather naively amusing, in fact.

Yet we have only to consult the records of the Post
Office department to realize what a tremendous num-
ber of Americans are in communication with the cities
solely by the aid of the Rural Free Delivery. Millions
of people live in New York, who nearly perish with
the cold on the rare occasions when the thermometer
drops to zero. Their newspapers print long stories
about it on the front pages. Yet up here in the hills
where I live, not a hundred and fifty miles away, we
go about our business with the mercury at twenty
below — properly dressed for it, of course, which your
city dweller never is; and one of our rural mail men,
who is a woman, drives her plodding nag twice a day
across the bitterly cold flats, wind-swept and drift-piled,
carrying the messages from the outer world to the little
hamlet under the mountain, cheerful as the chickadees
in the evergreens beside the road. She has made
that journey twice a day every day for more than

R. F. D. 187

twenty-five years, though sometimes a six-horse sled
had to precede her to break the drifts. Scattered along
her path are little white houses and big gray barns.
In front of each house is a tin mail box on a post or
tree. The rattle of her buggy wheels or the jingle
of her sleigh-bells down the road proclaims her coming,
and even if she bears no mail for the waiting box she
bears a greeting and a bit of gossip for the housewife
in the door. I see her pass out of our village every
day, with her mail bags around her feet, and she seems
to me a symbol of the simpler, rural America that was
once so close to the consciousness of all of us, and which
we are but now beginning to realize must not be allowed
to perish or we perish, too, the victims of a top-heavy
industrialism and prohibitive food prices.

The Rural Free Delivery marks the outmost ex-
tension of our great postal service, and like all institu-
tions on the frontier it is less mechanical and more
human than the central portions of the system. In
the city post offices, men are machines; mail wagons or
motor trucks are juggernauts, letters are shot through
tubes and sped toward their destination on trains.
But the system is already less impersonal before the ru-
ral deliverer receives his pouches and packets. They
are often given to him in a small office where familiar-
ity reigns, and the postmaster or mistress peers at
you as you enter the door, and has your letters waiting
when you reach the little arched window. In such a

188 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

post office may be found almost a current history of the
village. In the windows are home-made posters an-
nouncing a church supper, a high school basket ball
game, a political rally. On the bulletin board, and
spilling from it out on the adjacent walls, are lost-and-
found notices, gloves, hair ribbons, and other trifles
picked up on the road and pinned here awaiting an
owner, the tax collector's warning, the list of voters, a
plea for soldiers to join the United States army, the
fish and game laws, a coloured picture of a gypsy moth,
and the list of unclaimed letters for the week. Every
one in the village comes to the post office, even if
only for the reason that brought the old gentleman in
Mr. Ade's fable, who went every day because in 1888
he got a seed catalogue. The post office is a social
institution and a clearing house for information, no
less than a means of distributing mail. It is from
such an office that the Rural Delivery man sets out
whom we are about to follow. He will take us back
into a world which some of us had almost forgotten.
This particular carrier still drives a buggy. Many
of his fellows, especially those with long routes in
regions where the Winters are not severe nor the dry
roads long delayed in Spring, now employ one of
those small, cheap automobiles that have been the
admiration of the European armies. But our carrier
is in a northern mountain region where as yet macadam
is almost unknown, and a motor would be impracticable

R. F. D. 189

for more than four or at most five months in the year.
He not only delivers along the route, but he carries the
mail to the little post office far from the railroad at the
end of his journey. That is in a leather sack or two at
his feet. The route mail is on the seat beside him, along
with a pile of private parcels, purchases he has been com-
missioned to make by those whom we had almost called
his patients. His is an ordinary-looking buggy, and a
somewhat less than ordinary-looking horse. He wears
no uniform. Yet he and his outfit are mysteriously
invested with the dignity of Uncle Sam. He is carrying
the United States Mail, and though we call him Tom
and have known him familiarly since boyhood, we would
not dream of interfering with his journey. Somehow,
for us, he represents the cooperative ideal made mani-
fest. He is our servant — and our fellow townsman.
To interfere with him would be to interfere with every
citizen of the village, of the nation. It is easier to
visualize democracy in the form of Tom Sherburn than
that of a mail tube to the Grand Central Station!

Tom's buggy jogs down the village street and in
under the shadow of the old covered bridge, where the
cross planking rattles loudly and there is a curious smell
known to every one familiar with old covered bridges,
and quite indescribable to anybody else. Inside the
bridge are tin posters advertising liniment for man and
beast, and up in the cobwebs hang wisps of hay caught
from some passing load. Through the little square

190 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

windows you catch a momentary glimpse of the brown
river and bending willows — a pretty picture in a dusky
frame. After the road has crossed the bridge, it fol-
lows up the side of the river, rapidly leaving the village
behind, taking us toward the hills.

How gracefully the road swings with the curves of the
stream, each bend ending one tree-shaded vista, and,
once it is passed, beginning another! The brown water
is visible always at our side, between the willows, the
white birches, the swaying alders that dip their twigs
into the rushing water in the Spring. The soil is moist
here, and tall meadow rue lines the road. Over the
wall and beyond the .fringe of trees on the opposite side
from the stream are level fields of hay or corn, rich bot-
tom lands with now and then stately vase elms marching
across them along the bank of some hidden swale — once,
perhaps, the bed of the river. The farmhouses here are
prosperous, with big red barns, and the mail boxes are
nailed to painted posts close beside the sandy road, with
little red flags which are raised straight up in the morn-
ing, when mail is to be collected, as a signal to Tom.
Nor is there much gossip here when the carrier comes by.
The folk on these farms are too busy — and, perhaps,
too near the village. It is a well-known law of physics
that roadside gossip varies directly with the distance
from town.

It is when the road begins to leave the river bottom
and wind up the long hill toward the forested plateau

R. F. D. 191

that the farms lose their bustle and Tom pulls his old
horse up for a moment under the shade of a big sugar
maple, while a leisurely figure in the traditional straw
hat comes to the split rail fence, or the stone wall, and
holds converse. Has Tom seen a paper that morning?
What are them German nuisances up to now? Is it
true beans are forty cents a quart? Well, well, and he
didn't put in more'n two rows, and might hev put in ten
times as many more, seein's how he cut off the poverty
birch last winter from the upper pasture and hed the
poles, or could hev hed 'em, if he hadn't cut 'em up fer
stove wood. What's goin' to be the end of this cost o'
things, anyhow? It's gettin' so a man can't afford to
buy grain for his cattle, and without no cattle, you ain't
got no manure, and without no manure you can't keep
up your land — and there you be! Having arrived at
this melancholy predicament, and seeing no way out, he
gazes across the valley fields below to the rising green
wall of the hill beyond, while Tom flecks off a horse fly
with his whip and adds his bit of complaint that Uncle
Sam ain't raisin' his pay none, either, and the horse
costin' more to feed every day.

Either the fleck of the whip or the mention of food
causes the horse gently to move forward, and, thus re-
minded, Tom clucks to him and goes on up the road.
But he seems quite cheerful when he reaches the last
house up the hill, and stops to give Mrs. Sanborn her
pound of tea and the bottle of medicine he promised to

192 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

get for her when he went by early that morning. Few
can be ill along the road without Tom knowing it, and
not many without his learning, too, what brand of med-
icine they are taking. Mrs. Sanborn has cramps, which
is an extremely euphonious way of stating a desire for
alcoholic stimulation, equally euphoniously supplied by
Jamaica ginger. Mrs. Sanborn strongly disapproves of
the cider drinking which goes on in the rural regions,
especially of the custom, hallowed by tradition, of letting
a barrel of hard cider freeze almost solid and then,
on a winter night, boring a hole into the heart of the ice
cake and extracting the highly stimulating unfrozen
core. But Mrs. Sanborn's secret remains compara-
tively secure with Tom and the village druggist. "Live
and let live" is still the motto in a land of individualists.
Tom is generally whistling again by the time he
reaches the top of the long trail and enters the deep
woods on the summit plateau. But his whistle ceases
as the horse's hoofs sound less metallic on the damper
ground, or in Autumn swish and thud softly through the
fallen leaves. Here in these woods, where the sunlight
is dappled gold and there are dim green vistas, Tom
likes to drive slowly, enjoying the cool shadows in
Summer, the hushed, windless calm in Winter, and only
in Spring annoyed by the frost holes and black, mucky
ruts. Here he sometimes surprises a deer, which
bounds away through the forest, and almost daily a
rabbit or two scamper across his path, or a partridge

R. F. D. 193

goes drumming up and whirrs down an evergreen aisle.
Tom was a mighty hunter in his younger days, and has
never yet forgiven the state legislature for making
it illegal for him to go out with a gun on the Sabbath
(not, of course, that he doesn't go out with a gun on the
Sabbath!). This drive through the woods appeals to
some deep instinct within him, and his eyes become keen
and youthful. He likes, too, in a less expressive way,
the red bunchberries by the road, the bloodroot and
hepaticas of Spring, the gentians in the late Summer.
He loves the ground pine trailing on the bank, the earthy
smell, the distant hammer of a woodpecker, the sweet
clarion of a hermit thrush. It seems almost as if such a
man, passing daily through this timber with senses alert
and instinctive sympathy with nature, might fashion a
woodland lyric to the rhythmic plod of his horse's hoofs
and the gentle sway of the buggy. So far as we know,
however, Tom has never broken into verse. His near-
est approach was his statement one day to a summer
boarder in the big farmhouse down the hill on the other
side.

" I seen the white tail of a deer go boundin' off through
the balsams," he said, "like a snowball through a velvet
veil."

The forest is, in reality, on the" crest of a divide, and
when the road emerges on the farther side a splendid
prospect opens out. The road plunges abruptly down,
past a sentinel pine and over a cascade of thank-you-

194 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

marms, into a mountain intervale, an isolated com-
munity of little farms which is walled on the farther side
by the upspringing green flanks of the major range.
From the broader valley where Tom's journey began
these mountains had not been visible, hidden by the
foothills and the forest plateau. They come into the
view with a dramatic suddenness, never quite the same
under the changing play of mist and light and cloud-
shadow upon them, and never seen, however often,
without a secret thrill.

It is frequently twilight, in Winter it may be quite
dark, when Tom comes down the last slope into the
hamlet which is journey's end. Perhaps a young
moon is hanging in the black tracery of the maple
boughs and the village lights are golden across the snow.
All his packages and letters have been distributed and
only the sacks of mail at his feet are left. The usual
familiar crowd is awaiting him, in Summer under the
porch in front of the store, in Winter around the stove
within. The post office is one corner of the "general
store," barricaded off by a partition of numbered mail
boxes like an artificial bee-hive comb, stood on end,
except that it has a little window in the centre through
which the postmaster peers. Tom tosses in the mail-
sacks over the counter, and warms his hands at the stove,
while his neighbours interrogate him regarding the state
of the road. There is a curious smell in the store, of ker-
osene, coffee, grain, tobacco smoke, cotton cloth, bananas,

R. F. D. 195

and newly dampened woollen drying by the stove.
Familiar faces come in out of the night; the mail is
sorted; you hear the rustle of newspapers; and then the
crowd fades away, following Tom who has gone home to
put the horse in her stall and get his own supper.

Through Summer and Winter, through storm and
shine, the rural carrier drives every morning over that
route, and home again every afternoon — twelve miles
from this mountain intervale to the little town by the
railroad, and twelve long miles back again — bringing his
messages from the larger world. It is a beautiful road
he travels, but it may also be a severe one. The winter
winds howl past that sentinel pine where the road
breaks out of the forest; the drifts pile deep in the cuts
and across the river flats. Tom knows from long ex-
perience exactly where he will encounter bare ground
and where the snow will suddenly pack into diagonal
ridges across the road, some rock or tree or wall splitting
the blast, so that his "pung" rides them like a boat on a
choppy sea. Yet Tom and his old horse get the mail
through. That is what Uncle Sam pays him for, and he
harnesses up on a bitter morning, when the thermometer
registers twenty below, with no thought of heroism, to
make a twelve-mile trip which no automobile on earth
could negotiate and which would probably put the
average city dweller of to-day into the hospital for a
month. In Spring he splashes along through the mud ; in
the Autumn, when the rains come down from the cloud-

196 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

enveloped hills and the trees are lashed by the wind, we
still see him jogging past, a humble but a human and a
faithful cog in the great machinery of our government,
linking up the old, pioneer America with the new.

Nowadays in Summer he often meets automobiles
bearing registration numbers of far states, drawn here
by the lure of the mountains. But there are none in
Winter. They disappear before the white snow-caps on
the range have crept down to timber; and by the time
the world is on runners, Tom meets most often the sleds
of the lumber men hauling the precious timber to the
railroad, or bringing out the cord wood which makes the
wise farmer independent of coal. Sometimes a load of
hay on runners will go by, on its way to some farm where
the supply has run low, and then Tom will have to turn
out of the single track, nearly upsetting his pung as it
dips in the drift, while the driver on top of the hay
shouts a "Thank you!" He meets, too, the school
barge, bringing in the children to the "centre school,"
and he has been known to have to dodge snowballs on
such occasions. He meets a neighbour, now and then,
wrapped up to the ears like himself, and slipping along
over the blue-shadowed road with jingling sleigh-bells.
But always it is the simple life of the frontier country
that he encounters, with its suggestion of a living wrung
from the soil and a mode of existence dependent on the
earth and its moods of wind and weather. It is not a
sign of intellectual poverty that when Tom and a

R. F. D. 197

neighbour meet on the road one of them is almost sure to
inquire: "Well, what's it goin' to do to-morrow?" If
you had to make a round trip every day over Tom's
route, in an open sleigh or buggy, you would ask the
same question, with a good bit more anxiety in your
tone, too, than he betrays when the northeast winds are
piling the storm scud over the peaks of the range and
trailing fingers of cloud down the slopes !

I am afraid it is the maintenance of Tom and his kind
by the Government which has caused one interesting
traveller almost to disappear from the country roads —
the itinerant merchant. Some still exist, but they are
growing fewer every year, as the great mail-order houses
increase their range. I well remember one such mer-
chant of my boyhood. He kept his wagon, between
trips, in my grandfather's barn, and he was always
familiarly known as "Mr. Wanamaker." This wagon,
painted a gay red and yellow, was shaped like a huge
box. A lid lifted behind the driver's seat, and dis-
closed such bulky objects as washboards, boxes of soap,
and the like. The back of the wagon, however, was the
fascinating part. Climbing out, "Mr. Wanamaker"
(whose real name was Lovejoy, and he had ample Burn-
side whiskers which gave him a most benevolent expres-
sion), came around to the rear, like a butcher, and threw
open a double door, while the farmer's wife, his daugh-
ters, and all and sundry female visitors, as well as the
children, gathered in an eager group. Behind the doors,

198 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

arranged in the most skilful manner, were all the con-
tents of a well-equipped dry goods store. Everything
was there, from the material for a new silk dress to garter
elastic and spools of thread (the spools were kept in a
tier of little drawers, I remember, which made a bright
pattern of colour when pulled out and displayed).
There was always much rushing about and snipping of
samples when "Mr. Wanamaker" drew near, and then a
great matching of these samples against the spools of
silk or cotton. His advice was regarded with great
deference, I recall, and was always given in measured,
judicial tones.

Then there was the tin peddler and ragman, too, who
made periodical visits along the country roads. His
cart, less spick and span than "Mr. Wanamaker's," was
a curious contrivance, box-like in front, with a rack be-
hind in which were stowed the sacks of rags. Behind
the driver, like yellow plumes, stuck up a row of new
brooms. Smaller whisk brooms dangled from the sides,
and shining pans were suspended, also, which flashed
in the sun and rattled merrily on the rare occasions
when the dejected horse consented to trot. But the tin
peddler was no such elegant and eminent Anglo-Saxon
person as Mr. Lovejoy. Business with him was con-
ducted purely as business, and his thumb was carefully
watched as he weighed the rags on the rusty scales which
hung from the back of his wagon, giving a pot or a pan
or a broom in exchange.

R. F. D. 199

It was only a year or two ago that I encountered a
Wanamaker on wheels, in a sleepy little hamlet in
Rhode Island. But it has been many years since I have
seen the genuine tin peddler and ragman of my boy-
hood. Doubtless the rural mail carrier has taken this
job away from all such itinerant venders, and a pictur-
esque feature of rural life has almost vanished. But the
rural carrier himself still journeys, day in and day out,
along thousands of pleasant country roads, through rain
and shine, mud and drift, an unsung hero of faithfulness,
a link between our modern interdependent industrial
society and the simpler life of the pioneer, a reminder for
all of us, when we write R. F. D. on a letter, that rural
America still exists, and hundreds of thousands of our
countrymen are still rural Americans, not "soft," as re-
cent alarmists would have us believe, but hardy from
their age-long battle with soil and tree and winter storm.
The talk of "softness " emanates from city dwellers. If
we were really soft as a nation, at any rate, a large part of
our postal service would come to an abrupt halt. No
man who was soft could make Tom Sherburn's trip, from
January to December.

CHAPTER XIII
WEATHER AND THE SKY

IT IS surprising what a large number of us never see
the sky, never see it intimately, that is to say, if
such a word may be applied to our relations with
immensity. Dwellers in cities or towns, travellers of
illuminated highways, we never hobnob with Orion or
feel the earth ball swinging east below the still procession
of the stars. We make our plans for the morrow, when
they are dependent on the weather, by consulting not
the heavens but the Herald. The sunset means little to
us, and the sunrise we never see. A high flotilla of little
wind clouds on a summer day, a vast Himalaya of cumuli
piled against the blue, a scudding cloud-wrack where
the moon rides like a golden galleon in a heavy sea, the
great downward sweep of the Milky Way, are magnifi-
cent handiworks of space we do not know, meaningless
and unobserved. Poor bond slaves to our canon walls
and municipal illumination, we yet walk in our pride and
have quaint pity for the plainsman, the sailor ringed by
the vast horizon, the Yankee farmer who watches the
clouds after sunrise, the action of the mist curtain on the

mountain side, to see if he shall cut his hay that morning.

200

WEATHER AND THE SKY 201

Yet those of us who dwell in the open have our pride,
too, and our pity for those who do not know how the
firmament showeth His handiwork; those to whom the
simple question, "Well, what's it going to do to-
morrow?" is not fraught with profound importance.

In the old days before the Government took a hand
at prophecy and gave its weather reports each day to
the papers, every rural community boasted its own
"weather prophet," who read the heavens for signs and
very often displayed an uncanny shrewdness in pre-
diction. Such a one was Levi Beebe, who lived on
Beartown Mountain in western Massachusetts and
whose fame is still perpetuated by a tablet beside the
Berkshire County street railroad. These old-time
prophets shared, of course, in the common weather
lore of the countryside, some of it borrowed from
the Indians, some of it no doubt brought from England
by the early colonists, but still more of it the slow ac-
cumulation of rural American observers. Not a little
of it persists to this day, and the farther back you get
into the country, the larger it bulks in the speech, even
in the belief of the natives. Was there ever an Ameri-
can boy who did not learn that,

Mackerel sky

Never leaves the earth dry?

Is there a country child, even to-day, who does not
hope to see the new moon over his right shoulder, which

202 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

will bring him good luck, and, if he makes a wish, will
cause that wish to come true, especially if it is a wish
for money and is accompanied by the jingling of some
loose change in the pocket? The moon, indeed, is
vastly important. Not only was it once supposed
that all crops, especially onions and beans, did better
when planted in the old of the moon (the beans, other-
wise, as I recall, would run to vine), but even in this
day of popularized science you will hear farmers say,
as they look at the young crescent: "It's goin' to be
a dry month," or "It's goin' to be a wet month." In
the city you will never see the new moon; some tall
building will always hide it. But in the country, as
the sunset glow is dying out, as the bird songs are
hushed and the night insects have not begun their
antiphonal chorus, in "the still-time of the world," you
will suddenly become aware in the west of that sweetly
curved, golden crescent, dropping down, perhaps, into
a feathery treetop, or hung over quiet water, or poised
on the tip of a pointed fir. It was "an old Injun sign"
that if you can hang your powder horn on the new
moon, it is going to be a dry month. If you can't, it
will be a wet one. Doubtless this superstition goes
back to some primitive belief that rains come from the
moon. If the crescent were tipped up enough to hold
the powder horn on one point, it meant the crescent
would hold water, too. Otherwise the water would
spill out. Though nowadays this primitive prediction

WEATHER AND THE SKY 203

is made with a smile, as I listened to the farmer who
made it I have more than once been reminded of a little
cousin of mine who stoutly affirmed there were no
fairies, but when she went to "Peter Pan" she applauded
as loudly as any Miss Adams's appeal for all who
believed in fairies to clap their hands.

"But I thought you didn't believe in fairies," said
her mother.

"I don't," she answered. "But I don't want Tinker
Bell to die."

The skipper of the Hesperus was wise to another
belief about moon signs.

Last night the moon had a silver ring,
To-night no moon we see.

Therefore, he argued, they were in for a storm, and
events certainly proved him right. It has always been
a common belief that a ring around the moon portends
bad weather, and it used to be further added that the
number of stars visible inside the moon ring indicate
the number of days before the storm will come. There
is a good deal of sense to this belief, of course, for the
ring means thick atmosphere, and the thicker it is the
fewer stars will be visible inside the ring (or, for that
matter, anywhere else !) . The moon ring is still used by
country weather prophets as a basis of prediction, and in
this past winter I have several times seen it prove a reli-
able prognosticator of snow.

204 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

When the moon is riding high and small through a
driving cloud-wrack, the farmer on his way in from his
last trip to the barn pauses to contemplate it, and is
aware of the curious alternation of moonlight and
shadow over the landscape, almost like slow lightning
flashes indefinitely prolonged. The distant fields, the
timbered mountain side, come into dim view, and then
slowly they are obliterated again as a dark cloud sweeps
across the moon, and the world seems to shiver. Then
the farmer says to himself:

Open and shet
Is a sign of wet,

and looks, perhaps, to see if the spout is adjusted over
the rain barrel, or thinks of the hay he had to leave out
in the field.

Whether "open and shet" is a sign of wet depends, of
course, on the quality of the clouds and the direction
of the wind, and to read these more intricate signs aright
was the province once of the weather prophets. That
they could tell so unerringly, as many of them often
did, whether the clouds were "wind clouds" or were
shredded off from some storm that would not advance
farther; whether they threatened actual precipitation
or whether changes of temperature were due which
would alter the meteorological conditions, was truly a
remarkable proof of their powers of observation and
deduction. I once knew an old woman who lived

WEATHER AND THE SKY 205

under the shadow of the White Mountains, and whose
instinct for weather changes was almost uncanny.
She did not have barometrical bones, either, as so
many old people maintain they have. Her deductions
were all based on observation. Once, I recall, she was
taking in some clothes from the line, at ten o'clock at
night — a still, starlit night without a cloud. I saw
her shadow bobbing about, huge and fantastic, on
the barn wall, thrown from the lantern she carried in
her left hand, and went out to ask her why she took
the clothes in.

"There wa'n't a cloud in the sky all day," she said,
"and to-night the mountain's talkin'."

I listened carefully, and sure enough in the silence I
could hear, three thousand feet above us, the steady
rush of wind through the stunted spruce forest at
timber line. Up there the wind was roaring, then! I
thought of Martineau's words, that the noisy hurricane
rushes silently through the upper spaces where there
is nothing to oppose it — that force by itself is silent.
There seemed to me something almost Celtic, too, in
this old Yankee woman's imagery. And her prediction
proved correct: the next day came a deluge.

In this connection, I wonder how many boys used
to do what we lads did twenty-five years ago in eastern
Massachusetts. We would lay our ears to the tele-
graph poles, and if "the wires were buzzing," as we put
it, we felt sure we were in for bad weather. This

206 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

i

quaint superstition could not have had an ancient

origin, surely, for the telegraph is a nineteenth-century
creation. Yet it is equally certain that we did not in-
vent the superstition for ourselves. It was handed
down to us from our elders.

Akin to the saying that "open and shet is a sign of
wet" is the ancient saw that if you can see enough
blue sky to make a pair of Dutchman's breeches, it is
going to clear up. I have found this saying almost
universally familiar to young and old, in various parts
of the country. How well I remember, in my child-
"hood, the wide divergences of opinion which used to
develop between my parents and me regarding the ex-
act amount of material required for a Dutchman's
nether garments ! Standing at the western windows, or
on the veranda, I would gaze hopefully at the cloud
dome overhead, looking for a rift, and when one ap-
peared I would rush to my mentors with the informa-
tion. It did no good to look for it in the east, for
unless the west cleared my father affirmed that no
dependence could be placed even on the bluest sky.
Dragging my parents back to the window, I would
point to my rift of blue and triumphantly affirm that it
would make at least six pairs of breeches, only to be
told that I hadn't the most rudimentary knowledge of
Dutch fashions. Before I was allowed to venture
forth on my fishing trip or hunting expedition, it
seems to me now that acres of blue had to be revealed

WEATHER AND THE SKY 207

through the parting cloud-wrack. Never did proverb
have a more annoying flexibility of interpretation than
that one!

The farmer, the dweller in the open, rises early and
looks at once to the sky. Quite aside from any ma-
terial considerations, indeed, the weather to such of us
seems of as much importance as the temper of our
companions, and almost as intimate. We look at the
thermometer as soon as we descend the stairs, just as
we look at it the last thing before going to bed. We
gaze at the eastern horizon, at the portent of the
sky, and often take our mood therefrom. We step
out, perhaps, to see if the "cobwebs" are on the grass,
or if there has been a heavy dew (both prophecies to
the weather wise), and in the freshness of the new- waked
world we lift our heads to the great dome of the sky —
felt only as a dome when the eye can rove the full hori-
zon— and see there the little flecks and streamers of
cloud, touched rosy by the sun, which has not yet
chased the shadows from the world about our feet,
riding to meet the dawn. The sun heaves up above
the world rim, the shiver of night chill suddenly de-
parts as the long, golden rays stream over the moun-
tains and across the valley to our feet, the birds re-
double their song, and looking aloft again we see the
army of little white clouds, like spirits of the night,
vanishing mysteriously as if they melted into the
blue.

208 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

Such is the dawning of a fair summer day. But
there are other mornings when the clouds hang heavier,
low in the heavens, and those of us who are not weather
wise are in doubt, asking the first neighbour we meet,
"Well, what's it going to do to-day?" Invariably,
then, both questioner and questioned come to a pause,
and both lift their faces to study the sky, once more
aware of it as something near and intimate. If the
sun goes into a cloud soon after rising, or if the day
starts fair and rapidly "clouds up," we are told that the
rain is certain to arrive, and most of us have come by
experience to believe the saying. Connected with
this bit of weather lore, of course, is the familiar rhyme:

Rainbow in the morning,
Sailors take warning;
Rainbow at night,
Sailors delight;
Rainbow at noon,
Rain very soon.

Another early morning sign to look for is the action
of the cattle. If they lie down as soon as they are
turned out to pasture, they are supposed to feel
rheumatic weariness in their bones, like the old folk,
due to an approaching storm. However, this supersti-
tion about the cattle is not confined alone to their
early morning actions. If at any time of the day
the cows are seen lying down some one is sure to say :
"It's going to rain." But the true weather prophets

Some naked tree stands out in startling, lacy silhouette

WEATHER AND THE SKY 209

know that only in the early hours of the day is the
sign significant.

(Parenthetically, we might suggest that a delightful
essay is yet to be written on Bones as a Barometer.
Almost every family has at least one member who feels
the coming of bad weather "in his bones," the fact that
rheumatism is now known to be a muscular complaint
having no effect on the hallowed phraseology. And
in my boyhood there was not a village so small but it
boasted a veteran whose honourable bullet wound
throbbed at the approach of a storm.)

During the day there are a thousand signs to ob-
serve, if you are wise in weather lore, quite too numer-
ous to mention here. There is, for instance, the whirl-
wind, a little spiral of dust and dry leaves, which so
often springs up mysteriously and goes waltzing across
a road or a field. If it revolves from right to left the
weather will continue fair, but if it revolves the other
way rain will soon follow. Then, too, if you see the
sheep feeding more eagerly than usual, look out for
rain, or if the frogs are jumping with unwonted liveli-
ness in the meadows. If the chimney swallows flock
high and dart about excitedly, watch for thunder show-
ers or high wind, while if the barn swallows fly very
low, rain is coming. If it is already raining, watch the
chickens. If they stay under cover the storm will not
last long. If, however, they go out into the yard or
runway, in spite of the wetting, the storm may be

210 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

expected to continue for some time. Evidently the
theory here is that they say to themselves: "Oh, what's
the use? It's going to last all day" — and plunge out
into the rain.

The heavens, too, must be constantly observed.
Select a single cloud for observation, and if it grows
larger, that is a bad sign. If it diminishes, fair weather
may be expected. On the other hand, it is very sus-
picious if the sky is absolutely cloudless all day. (Per-
haps there is a hint of Puritan pessimism in this be-
lief; nothing so perfect can long endure in this vale of
tears!) Again, watch the direction the clouds are
taking, or keep an eye on the vane, and if the wind is
backing around into the fair weather, quarter don't
let it deceive you. It has to go around into the west
by the full route before fair weather can be hoped for.

When sunset comes, the summer boarders go out
on the pasture knoll to rhapsodize, the farmer scans the
west carefully to predict therefrom to-morrow's weather.
A red sun ball means a hot day coming. If the wester-
ing sun is "drawing water," look out for rain. Draw-
ing water, perhaps we should explain, is the Yankee
phrase to describe the shining of the sun through dis-
tant clouds so that it sends down fanlike ribs of light
toward the horizon. As a matter of fact, it is a bad
sign in general if the sun sets in a cloud. Certain
other sunsets are portentous of cold, perhaps because
they look so cold. It is chiefly in Winter that the sun

WEATHER AND THE SKY 211

sinks through a belt of pure, cool amber, leaving a still
cooler green above which melts into the night sky.
Against this western light some naked tree will stand
out in startling, lacy, silhouette, disclosing all the in-
tricate beauty of its limbs but looking chill enough the
while. Such a sunset, for all its loveliness, makes us
turn gratefully to the red window squares in the house
behind and sniff the pungent smell of wood smoke
from the chimney. In Autumn, and more rarely in
Summer, when we see such a sunset we exclaim: "It's
going to be a cold day to-morrow!" — and generally
it is.

After sunset, the stars, as well as the moon, may
still tell you something of the weather. A neighbour
of mine who used to be an almost unerring weather
prophet — till he began taking the Federal weather map
and tried to predict scientifically, since when he has
been flagrantly unreliable and has lost his former de-
lightful assurance — used to startle me sometimes on a
vivid, starry night by gazing up into the spangled sky,
through an opening between our elms, and wisely
affirming that to-morrow the wind would be southeast
(a southeast wind meaning rain). Time after time his
prophecy was fulfilled, to my admiration and wonder.
Finally he let me into the secret. He always made the
prediction when the southeast branch of the milky way
could be plainly seen, in its great downward swoop.
After all, then, his lore was the same as the common

212 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

saying that a day of unusual atmospheric clarity
means foul weather ahead, for our rainstorms come so
generally from the southeast that he was nearly always
safe in his boastful little flourish about the direction
of the wind, put on to increase my admiration. The
weather sharps in old South County, Rhode Island,
have a similarly mysterious method of prediction.
Looking out across the blue water to the line where it
meets the paler sky, on a brilliant, cloudless day, they
mournfully predict rain, and shake their heads when
you ask for an explanation. The prediction is always
based, however, on the fact that Block Island can be
seen with unusual distinctness. I don't know what the
percentage of error is, but many Summers have taught
me that it is extremely low.

Old South County ! The mere name calls to my mind
the pictures of wide horizons and a great, blue, doming
sky, an "inverted bowl " so spacious that not even Omar
could feel "cooped" or compelled to "crawl" beneath
it, and out over the sea to the eastward, in the level light
of afternoon, cloud ships of pearl and sea-shell pink rid-
ing peacefully at anchor. How good it is for the soul to
look into those deep-sea spaces, those leagues of upper
air! How good it is for the soul to look out into the
open, anywhere, when the world is still and the heavens
imminent and familiar! I love to go out to a point of
vantage in our mountain valley and watch the snow-
storm coming, wiping out the distant summits first with

WEATHER AND THE SKY 213

its great white battle smoke, the upper edges of its
clouds feathery and vague so that they melt in to the silver
gray sky, and then pushing on to our nearer peaks,
and finally sweeping down upon us and hurling in our
faces the first cool, stinging shot of its beneficent shrap-
nel. I love to watch some great thunderhead, dark as
a cannon's mouth, mass behind a steep, wooded moun-
tain wall, a cloud with an ominous glitter in its sharply
defined edges, edges so sharp at first that they would
seem almost cut out of sheet metal and laid against the
blue were it not for the fact that we are aware of the im-
mense aerial perspective behind them, between the
thunderhead and the roof of the sky. Against such a
cloud an ancient white birch will often stand out with
startling distinctness, like a white lightning stab. The
vast mass seems to swell and grow from within itself.
The ominously glittering rim moves up toward the sun,
crosses it, wipes half the light off the landscape; and then
suddenly, from the underside, comes the white mist of
the rain, obliterates the distant mountains, walks down
their slopes, marches up the valley, and we dash for
shelter, getting under the cover of veranda or barn, per-
haps, just as the great drops hit the drive, kicking up
little puffs of dust.

I love — and only too well, I fear — to sit in my garden
summer house, forgetful of the task before me, and gaze
out on a summer day over the beds where the bees are
busy in the blue veronica and the goldfinches are sway-

214 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

ing in the cosmos, to the doming hardwoods on the hill
beyond, which throw their leafy outlines against the
lower slopes of vast mountain ranges, mighty Hima-
layas robed in eternal snow but with no terror in their
billowy ravines — the ethereal heights of the cumuli. A
great, snowy, pink-tipped cumulus cloud above a dom-
ing green hill, rising into the blue of the summer sky, the
hum of bees, the scent of flowers, and far off, perhaps,
the sweet shrill of children at play — who for such a pic-
ture would not neglect his work? Who, indeed, but
would let even his imagination grow languid, and if
Hamlet were to say: "It is very like a camel," would re-
ply: "By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed"; and
when he said: "Or like a whale?" would answer quite as
cheerfully: "Very like a whale." After all, camel or
whale or Mount Everest — what does it matter? It is a
great white cloud on a summer day !

But it is when we leave the city abruptly, where we
have scarcely been aware of moon or stars, sunsets or
sunrisings, and go into camp, perhaps, on the shore of
some forest lake, or on the shoulder of a mountain, that
we become most startlingly aware of the importance of
the weather and the beauty and familiarity of the sky.
What camper rising in the night to poke a dying fire,
or waking on the ground with unaccustomed aches, has
not looked up in sudden astonishment to the vault of
stars, amazed at their number and aware, too, with a
strange, new sensitiveness, that they are shedding a

WEATHER AND THE SKY 215

perceptible radiance around him which he had never
detected on his electrically illumined pavements?
What camper on the mountain side, as he turned over on
his back and looked up, nothing in his field of vision but
the spire of a stunted spruce and the great garden of the
stars, has failed to sense with something akin to awe the
eastward swing of the earth ball, a sense so sharp some-
times that all the stars seem the torches of a great pro-
cession marching by the other way, far aloft in the mid-
night? It is at such moments that the little cares and
perplexities and ambitions of our human life seem most
to fall away, to shrink into insignificance, and we feel
new springs of power pouring in from the silent places;
or, at the very least, we wonder if, after all, the life
which is lived close to the earth and the sky, the waters
and mountains, however lowly it may be, does not hold
something we have lost in our hurry, our herding, our
unrest. It is well thus to sit in humbleness now and
again at the feet of Orion.

CHAPTER XIV
OLD BOATS

ANYTHING which man has hewn from stone or
shaped from wood, put to the uses of his pleasure
or his toil, and then at length abandoned to crum-
ble slowly back into its elements of soil or metal, is
fraught for the beholder with a wistful appeal, whether
it be the pyramids of Egyptian kings, or an abandoned
farmhouse on the road to Moosilauke, or only a rusty
hay-rake in a field now overgrown with golden-rod and
Queen Anne's lace, and fast surrendering to the return-
ing tide of the forest. A pyramid may thrill us by its
tremendousness; we may dream how once the legions
of Mark Antony encamped below it, how the eagles of
Napoleon went tossing past. But in the end we shall
reflect on the toiling slaves who built it, block upon
heavy block, to be a monarch's tomb, and on the mon-
arch who now lies beneath (if his mummy has not been
transferred to the British Museum). The old gray
house by the roadside, abandoned, desolate, with a
bittersweet vine entwined around the chimney and a
raspberry bush pushing up through the rotted doorsill,

216

OLD BOATS 217

takes us back to the days when the pioneer's axe rang
in this clearing, hewing the timbers for beam and rafter,
and the smoke of the first fire went up that ample flue.
How many a time have I paused in my tramping to
poke around such a ruin, reconstructing the vanished
life of a day when the cities had not sucked our hill
towns dry and this scrubby wilderness was a productive
farm!

The motor cars go through the Berkshires in steady
procession by the valley highways, past great estates
betokening our changed civilization. But the back
roads of Berkshire are known to few, and you may
tramp all the morning over the Beartown Mountain
plateau, by a road where the green grass grows between
the ruts, without meeting a motor, or, indeed, a vehicle
of any sort. A century ago Beartown was a thriving
community, producing many thousand dollars' worth of
grain, maple sugar, wool, and mutton. To-day there are
less than half a dozen families left, and they survive by
cutting cord wood from the sheep pastures! We must
haul our wool from the Argentine, and our mutton from
Montana, while our own land goes back to unproductive
wilderness. As the road draws near the long hill down
into Monterey, there stands a ruined house beside it,
one of linany ruins you will have passed, the plaster
in heaps on the floor, the windows gone, the door half
fallen from its long, hand-wrought hinges. It is a house
built around a huge central chimney, which seems still

218 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

as solid as on the day it was completed. The rotted man-
tels were simply wrought, but with perfect lines, and the
panelling above them was extremely good. So was the
delicate fanlight over the door, in which a bit of glass
still clings, iridescent now like oil on water. Under the
eaves the carpenter had indulged in a Greek border, and
over the woodshed opening behind he had spanned a
keystone arch. Peering into this shed, under the collaps-
ing roof, you see what is left of an axe embedded in a
pile of reddish vegetable mould, which was once the
chopping block. Peering through the windows of the
house, you see a few bits of simple furniture still in-
habiting the ruined rooms. Just outside, in the door-
yard, the day lilies, run wild in the grass, speak to you of
a housewife's hand across the vanished years. The
barn has gone completely, overthrown and wiped out by
the advancing forest edge. Enough of the clearing still
remains, however, to show where the cornfields and the
pastures lay. They are wild with berry stalks and
flowers now, still and vacant under the Summer sun.

The ruins of war are melancholy, and raise our bitter
resentment. Yet how often we pass such an abandoned
farm as this without any realization that it, too, is a ruin
of war, the ceaseless war of commercial greed. No less
surely than in stricken Belgium has there been a depor-
tation here. Factories and cities have swallowed up a
whole population, indeed, along the Beartown road.
It is easy to say that they went willingly, that they pre-

OLD BOATS 219

f erred the life of cities; that the dreary tenement under
factory grime, with a "movie" theatre around the
corner, is an acceptable substitute to them for the ample
fireplaces, the fanlight door, the rolling fields and road-
side brook. We hear much discussion in New England
to-day of "how to keep the young folks on the farm."
But why should they stay on the farm, to toil and starve,
in body and mind? We have so organized our whole
society on a competitive commercial basis that they
can now do nothing else. Those ancient apple trees be-
side the ruined house once grew fruit superior in taste to
any apple which ever came from Hood River or Wenat-
chee, and could grow it again; but greed has determined
that our cities shall pay five cents apiece for the showy
western product, and the small individual grower of the
East is helpless. We have raised individualism to a
creed, and killed the individual. We have exalted
"business," and depopulated our farms. The old gray
ruin on the back road to Monterey is an epitome of our
history for a hundred years.

But to pursue such reflections too curiously would
take our mind from the road, our eyes from the wild
flower gardens lining the way — the banks of blueberries
fragrant in the sun, the stately borders of meadow rue
where the grassy track dips down through a moist hol-
low. And to pursue such reflections too curiously
would take us far afield from the spot we planned to
reach when we took up our pen for this particular

220 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

journey. That spot was the bit of sandy lane, just in
front of Cap'n Bradley 's house in old South County,
Rhode Island. The lane leads down from the colonial
Post Road to the shore of the Salt Pond, and the
Cap'n's house is the first one on the left after you leave
the road. The second house on the left is inhabited by
Miss Maria Mills. The third house on the left is the
Big House, where they take boarders. The Big House
is on the shore of the Salt Pond. There are no houses on
the right of the lane, only fields full of bay and huckle-
berries. The lane runs right out on a small pier and
apparently jumps off the end into whatever boat is
moored there, where it hides away in the hold, waiting
to be taken on a far journey to the yellow line of the
ocean beach, or the flag-marked reaches of the oyster
bars. It is a delightful, leisurely little lane, a by-
way into another order from the modernized macadam
Post Road where the motors whiz. You go down a
slight incline to the Cap'n's house, and the motors are
shut out from your vision. From here you can glimpse
the dancing water of the Salt Pond, and smell it, too,
when the wind is south, carrying the odour of gasolene
the other way. The Cap'n's house is painted brown,
a little, brown dwelling with blue-legged sailor men on
poles in the dooryard, revolving in the breeze. The
Cap'n is a little brown man, for that matter. He is rec-
onciled to a life ashore by his pipe and his pension, and
by his lookout built of weathered timber on a grass-

OLD BOATS 221

covered sand drift just abaft the kitchen door, whither
he betakes himself with his spy glass on clear days to see
whether it is his old friend Cap'n Perry down there on
number two oyster bar, or how heavy the traffic is to-
day far out beyond the yellow beach line, where Block
Island rises like a blue mirage.

Cap'n Bradley boasts a garden, too. It is just across
the lane from his front door. There are three varieties
of flowers in it — nasturtiums, portulacas, and bright red
geraniums. The portulacas grow around the border,
then come the nasturtiums, and finally the taller gerani-
ums in the centre. The Cap'n has never seen nor heard of
those ridiculous wooden birds on green shafts which it
is now the fashion to stick up in flower beds, but he has
something quite appropriate, and, all things considered,
quite as "artistic." In the bow of his garden, astride a
spar, is a blue-legged sailor man ten inches tall, keeping
perpetual lookout up the lane. For this flower bed is
planted in an old dory filled with earth. She had out-
lived her usefulness down there in the Salt Pond, or
even, it may be, out on the blue sea itself, but no vandal
hands were laid upon her to stave her up for kindling
wood. Instead, the Captain himself painted her a
bright yellow, set her down in front of his dwelling, and
filled her full of flowers. She is disintegrating slowly;
already, after a rain, the muddy water trickles through
her sides and stains the yellow paint. But what a
pretty and peaceful process ! She might not strike you

222 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

as a happy touch set down in one of those formal
gardens depicted in The House Beautiful or Country
Lifey but here beside the salty lane past Cap'n
Bradley's door, gaudy in colour, with her load of
homely flowers and her quaint little sailor man astride
his spar above the bright geraniums, she is perfect.
No boat could come to a better end. She's taking
portulacas to the Islands of the Blest!

Miss Maria Mills, in the next house, never followed
the sea, and her idea of a garden is more conventional.
She grows hollyhocks beside the house, and sweet peas
on her wire fence. But at the lane's end, where the
water of the Salt Pond laps the pier, you may see another
old boat put to humbler uses, now that its seafaring
days are over, and uses sometimes no less romantic
than the Cap'n's garden. It is a flat-bottomed boat,
and lies bottom side up just above the little beach made
by the lap of the waves, for the tide does not affect the
Salt Pond back here three miles from the outlet. The
paint has nearly gone from this aged craft, though a
few flakes of green still cling under the gunwales. But
in place of paint there have appeared an incredible
number of initials, carved with every degree of skill or
clumsiness, over bottom and sides. This boat is the
bench whereon you wait for the launch to carry you
down the Pond, for the catboat or thirty-footer to be
brought in from her moorings, for Cap'n Perry to land
with a load of oysters; or it is the bench you sit upon to

OLD BOATS 223

watch the sunset glow behind the pines on the opposite
headland, the pines where the blue herons roost, or to
see the moon track on the dancing water. The Post
Road is alive with motors now, far into the evening.
You get your mail from the little post office beside it as
quickly as possible — which isn't very quickly, to be
sure, for we do not hurry in South County, even when
we are employed by Uncle Sam — and then you turn
down the quiet lane, past the Cap'n's garden, toward the
lap of quiet water and the salty smell. Affairs of State
are now discussed, of a summer evening, upon the bot-
tom of this upturned boat, while a case knife dulled by
oyster shells picks out a new initial. And when the fate
of the nation is settled, or to-morrow's weather thor-
oughly discussed (the two are of about equal importance
to us in South County, with the balance in favour of the
weather), and the debaters have departed to bed, some
of them leaving by water with a rattle of tackle or, more
often in these degenerate days, the put, put of an un-
muffled exhaust, then other figures come to the upturned
boat, speaking softly or not at all, and in the morning
you may, perhaps, find double initials freshly cut, with a
circle sentimentally enclosing them. So the old craft
passes her last days beside the lapping water, a pleasant
and a useful end.

On the other side of the Big House from the pier,
at the head of a tiny dredged inlet, there is an old boat-
house. It seems but yesterday that we used to warp

224 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

the Idler in there when summer was over, get the
chains under her, and block her up for the winter.
She spent the winter on one side of the slip; the Sea
Mist, a clumsy craft that couldn't stir short of a half
gale, spent the winter on the other side. Over them,
on racks, the rowboats were slung. There was a larger
boathouse for the big fellows. What busy days we
spent in May or June, caulking and scraping and paint-
ing, splicing and repairing, making the little Idler
ready for the sea again! She was an eighteen-foot
cat, a bit of a tub, I fear, but the best on the Pond in
her day, eating up close into the wind, sensitive, alert,
with a pair of white heels she had shown to many a
larger craft. Surely it was but yesterday that I
rowed out to her where she was moored a hundred
feet from shore, climbed aboard, hoisted sail, and, with
my pipe drawing sweetly, sat down beside the tiller and
played out the sheet till the sail filled, there was a crack
and snaffle of straining tackle, the boat leaped for-
ward, the tiller batted my ribs, the Idler heeled over,
and then quietly, softly, as rhythmic as a song, the
water raced hissing along her rail, the little waves
slapped beneath her bow — and the world was good to
be alive in! Surely it was but yesterday that the
white sail of the Idler was like a gull's wing on the
Pond!

But the white sail wings are few on the Pond to-day,
and the Idler lies on her side in the weeds behind the

OLD BOATS 225

boathouse. She had to make room for the motor
craft. She is too bulky for a flower bed, too convex
for a bench. Her paint is nearly gone now, both the
yellow body colour and the pretty green and white
stripe along her rail that we used to put on with such
care. Her seams are yawning, and the rain water
pool that at first settled on the low side of her cockpit
has now seeped through, and a little deposit of soil
has accumulated, in which a sickly weed is growing.
Poor old Idler ! One day I got an axe, resolved to
break her up, but when it came to the point of burying
the first blow my resolution failed. I thought of all
the hours of enthusiastic labour I had spent upon those
eighteen feet of oak ribs and planking; I thought
of all the thrilling hours of the race, when we had
squeezed her into the wind past Perry's Point and
saved a precious tack; I thought of the dreamy hours
when she had borne us down the Pond in the summer
sunshine, or through the gray, mysterious fog, or
under the stars above the black water. So, instead, I
laid my hand gently on her rotting tiller, and then
took the axe back to the woodshed. She will never ride
the waves again, but she shall dissolve into her ele-
ments peacefully, in sight of the salt water, in the
quiet grass behind the boathouse.

It seems to me that all my life I have had memories
of old boats. One of my earliest recollections is of Old
Ironsides., in the Charlestown Navy Yard, dismantled

226 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

and decked over, but saved from destruction by Dr.
Holmes's poem. What thrilling visions it awoke to
climb aboard her and tread her decks! Acres of spin-
naker and topgallants broke out aloft, cannon boomed,
smoke rolled, "grape and cannister" flew through the
air, chain shot came hurtling, and the Stars and Stripes
waved through it all, triumphant. The white iron-
clads out in the channel (for in those days they were
white) evoked no such visions. Another memory is of
a childhood trip to New Bedford and a long walk for
hours by the water front, out on green and rotting
piers where chunky, square-rigged whalers, green and
rotting, too, were moored alongside. The life of the
whaler was in those days something infinitely fascinat-
ing to us boys. We read of the chase, the hurling of
the harpoon, the mad ride over the waves towed by
the plunging monster. And here were the very ships
which had taken the brave whalers to the- hunting
grounds, here on their decks were some of the whale
boats which had been towed over the churned and
blood-flecked sea! Why should they be green and
rotting now? They produced upon me an impression
of infinite sadness. It seemed as if a great hand had
suddenly wiped a romantic bloom off my vision of the
world.

But it was not long after that I knew the romance
of a launching. It was at Kennebunkport in Maine.
All summer the ship yards on either side of the river.

OLD BOATS 227

close to the little town and under the very shadow
of the white meeting house steeple, had rung with the
blows of axe and hammer. The great ribs rose into
place, the sheathing went on, the decks were laid, the
masts stepped; finally the first rigging was adjusted.
After the workmen left in the late afternoon, we boys
swarmed over the ships — three-masters, smelling de-
liciously of new wood and caulking, and played we were
sailors. When the rope ladders were finally in place,
we raced up and down them, sitting in the crow's nest
on a line with the church weather vane, and pretending
to reef the sails. It was an event when the ships were
launched. The tide was at the flood, gay canoes
filled the stream along both banks, hundreds of people
massed on the shore. A little girl stood in the bow with
a bottle of wine on a string. An engine tooted, cables
creaked, and down the greased ways slid the ship,
with a dip and a heave when she hit the water that
made big waves on either side and set the canoes to
rocking madly, while the crowd cheered and shouted.
After the launching, the schooners were towed out to
sea, and down the coast, to be fitted elsewhere. We
boys followed them in canoes as far as the breakwater,
and watched them disappear. Soon their sails would
be set, and they would join the white adventurers out
there on the world rim.

Where are they now, I wonder? Are they still
buffeting the seas, or do they lie moored and outmoded

228 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

beside some green wharf, their days of usefulness over?
I remember hoping, as I watched them pass out to
sea, that they would not share the fate of the unknown
craft which lay buried in the sands a mile down the
coast. It was said that she came ashore in the "Great
Storm" of 1814 (or thereabouts). Nothing was left
of her in our day but her sturdy ribs, which thrust up a
few feet above the sand, outlining her shape, and were
only visible at low water. On a stormy day, when the
seas were high, I used to stand at the head of the
beach and try to picture how she drove up on the
shore, shuddering deliciously as each great wave came
pounding down on all that was left of her oaken frame.
When I read in the newspaper of a wreck I thought of
her, and I think of her to this day on such occasions,
thrusting up black and dripping ribs above the wet
sands at low water, or vanishing beneath the pounding
foam of the breakers.

If you take the shore line train from Boston to New
York, you pass through a sleepy old town in Connecti-
cut where a spur track with rusty rails runs out to the
wharves, and moored to these wharves are side-wheel
steamers which once plied the Sound. It served
somebody's purpose or pocket better to discontinue
the line, and with its cessation and the cessation of
work in the ship yards close by, the old town passed
into a state of salty somnolence. The harbour is
glassy and still, opening out to the blue waters of the

OLD BOATS 229

>
Sound. Still are the white steamers by the wharves,

where once the gang planks shook with the tread of
feet and the rumble of baggage trucks. Many a time,
as the train paused at the station, I have watched the
black stacks for some hint of smoke, hoping against
hope that I should see the old ship move, and turn, and
go about her rightful seafaring. But it was never to
be. There were only ghosts in engine room and pilot
house. Like the abandoned dwelling on the upland
road to Monterey, these steamers were mute witnesses
to a vanished order. But always as the train pulled
out from the station I sat on the rear platform and
watched the white town and the white steamers and
the glassy harbour slip backward into the haze — and
it seemed as if that haze was the gentle breath of
oblivion.

I live inland now, far from the smell of salt water
and the sight of sails. Yet sometimes there comes
over me a longing for the sea as irresistible as the lust
for salt which stampedes the reindeer of the north.
I must gaze on the unbroken world-rim, I must feel
the sting of spray, I must hear the rhythmic crash and
roar of breakers and watch the sea-weed rise and fall
where the green waves lift against the rocks. Once in
so often I must ride those waves with cleated sheet
and tugging tiller, and hear the soft hissing song of the
water on the rail. And "my day of mercy" is not com-
plete till I have seen some old boat, her seafaring done,

230 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

heeled over on the beach or amid the fragrant sedges, a
mute and wistful witness to the romance of the deep,
the blue and restless deep where man has adventured
in craft his hands have made since the earliest sun of
history, and whereon he will adventure, ardently and
insecure, till the last syllable of recorded time.

CHAPTER XV
THE LAND BELOW THE RIVER BANK

OUR little northern river winds along through
the Berkshire intervales, polluted with many a
mill and sewer near its source, but running clear
again when it breaks into the country south of
the Taconics, a pretty stream when glimpsed from
road or railway, a binding thread for our mountain
landscape, but known aright, after all, only to those
who launch boat or canoe upon it, who get down into
the land below the bank.

It is a different world, this land below the river bank,
with different inhabitants, a different quality of land-
scape, a sense of strangeness perpetually alluring, and a
sweet, peaceful mood of languid solitude. You are
oddly shut in on the river, alike by high banks and
bounding trees, and by your angle of vision, which is
lowered many feet from the accustomed. Thus you
gain an intimacy with your immediate surroundings, a
friendliness with the landscape, elsewhere impossible.
When you leave your canoe at the end of your idle
afternoon and climb the bank, the sense of transition is
sometimes almost startling. Six steps up from water-

231

232 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

way to footway, and you are in another order. Almost
you hear different sounds. Certainly you smell differ-
ent odours, see different flowers, and your range of
vision expands to its accustomed horizon. So the land
below the river bank forever retains its charm of a shy,
secluded personality that must be sought, and one which
is therefore comparatively unknown.

Our river twists and turns through the rich sandy
loam of the flat Canaan plains, running more than ten
miles between two towns that are but six miles apart
by road, and dropping but eighteen inches in the entire
distance. It averages, perhaps, one hundred to one
hundred and fifty feet across. You might not suppose,
to see its quiet brown water mirroring the banks, that the
current would ever be strong enough to alter the bed.
But in Spring the freshets come down till the water
level often rises six feet or more, overflowing the banks
and lopping off in the course of a few years an acre on
one side of a bend, to deposit it on the other side farther
down the stream. If land values were higher in this
valley, there might be pretty chances for litigation ! One
of the first interests the river awakes is this of the
shifting current.

The bottom meadows, varying in width from two or
three miles to less than a quarter of a mile, are flanked
by wooded mountain walls, dome after dome, with here
and there a pasture running up the slope into the timber.
Where the meadow joins the high land on either side are

BELOW THE RIVER BANK 233

parallel roads down the valley, the West Road and the
East Road, studded with small gray farmhouses and
large gray barns. From either road you see the
meadows, now soft and rippling with oats, now golden
brown where the hay has been cut, now green with
pastures, or just gone wild and tinted with the white of
Queen Anne's lace, the primrose yellow of our Berkshire
shrubby cinquefoil (which the farmers here wrongly
call hardhack), the pretty pink of Bouncing Bet, and
at rare intervals the flame of Devil's paint brush. Al-
ways, through the meadows, you are aware of the river,
its water seldom seen, but its course clearly marked by
the winding procession of stately elms and shimmering
willows. Strike off through the meadows now, and
presently, as you draw nearer the stream, you see the
grayish brown half circle of the exposed bank, where the
current has devoured a hundred yards of trees and eaten
on into the cultivated fields. Across from this exposed
bank is a tongue of beach, almost its exact convex,
though a little sharper, and rapidly growing up with
verdure. But it is characteristic of our river that al-
most all such acute bends are followed by one, two, or
three more. The current, thrown sharply off at an
angle, eats into the shore at the point to which it is de-
flected as well as at the point of deflection, and then
repeats the operation till it has sometimes almost
doubled on its tracks. From the point where we
stand a second exposed bank is visible beyond that

234 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

feathery pile of willows, and to the left still another, al-
most as close to us as the first, so that this tongue of
meadow here is like a peninsula.

We enter a canoe — a canoe because it slips noiselessly
through the water, and can go almost anywhere — and
examine the river bank more closely, with quite a new
impression of its size here on the surface of the water,
where it towers six feet above us and shuts out all but
the tops of the mountains. It is composed of compact
layers of loamy sand, with here and there a little slippery
clay. The constant erosion of the water at freshet time
has hollowed it out beneath the surface soil, and the
grass and flowers, holding together the surface overhang
by tenacious roots, curve out and droop along the top
like peat thatching. Each Spring great chunks of this
overhang break away and fall into the water, as the
river continues to deepen the bend. Under this thatch,
looking quaintly like a street of Upper West Side
apartment houses, are the dark little holes of the bank
swallows, row after row of them, neatly tunnelled into
the damp brown earth. The swallows skim low over the
surrounding fields, snapping up insects as they fly, or
come home unerringly to their abodes and disappear
with a flutter of tail. The nests are so exactly similar
in appearance that one marvels at the birds' discrimina-
tion. It is fortunate, certainly, that sobriety is one of
their virtues. Now and then among the swallows' cliff
dwellings is a larger hole, where dog or woodchuck or

235

predatory rat has burrowed, hunting, perhaps, for
eggs.

The complementary tongue of land which is always
formed by the river opposite one of these concave
sweeps of exposed bank is no less interesting. Close
to the water it is like a sand bar, forming an excellent
shelving beach for bathing, and a playground for the
sandpipers and the plovers. You may often come upon
a flock of these birds on a bar, as your canoe rounds the
bend, running back and forth and bobbing their heads
up and down. "Tip ups," some boys call them. But
back a few feet from the new shelf of the bar, the re-
ceding waters have deposited soil and seeds, and last
year's deposit is already rank and green with swampy
verdure. Then the willows begin. Almost every new
tongue of land has its clump of willows, sown by the
sweep of the stream on a curve as regular as any
topiary artist could lay down, and trimmed to a uniform
height. There is one long bend on our river, perhaps
four hundred yards in extent, which is not a sharp but a
gradual curve. The river was evidently nearly straight
at this point a generation or two ago, but something de-
flected its current — perhaps a tree which fell into the
water and piled up a dam of roots and tangled flotsam.
The current, swinging out from this new obstruction,
ate into the farther bank and gradually channelled a
great bend, depositing new land on the eastern side.
Along high -water mark on this new land, following the

236 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

new curve of the channel, it planted a hedge of willow
possibly fifteen years ago. That hedge is now thirty
feet high, as uniform along the top as though it were
annually trimmed, and presenting an unbroken wall of
shimmering, delicate green set on the sweeping curve of
the stream, with a pink garden of Joe-pye-weed at its
feet. There is no gardener like the river when you give
him a chance!

The river understands the art of the border. In
Stockbridge is a fine old estate which has two miles and a
half of river front, though the entire frontage of the
estate on the highway is less than half a mile. It used
to be known as the Ox Bow Farm. There have been
many striking shrubbery borders planted on its drives,
no doubt at considerable expense; but down on one
of the innumerable bends of the river bank, at the feet
of aged, stately willows, and visible only to him who
voyages by boat or canoe, is the most beautiful border
of all. It is, of course, on the convex side of the bend.
The curve is gentle, and the opposite bank shows no
exposed soil, being exquisitely draped with wild grape
vines, a little feathery clematis, and great masses
of wild balsam apple (Echinocystis lobata) with its
delicate white blooms, its light green foliage, and its
prickly fruit gourds. Some people call it by the
homelier but perhaps more appropriate name of wild
cucumber. Around the sweep beneath the great wil-
lows, set close to the water in dark, rich mould, is a long

BELOW THE RIVER BANK 237

border of the mild water pepper (Polygonum hydro-
piperoides) — that and nothing else. Its own lux-
uriousness keeps out all other weeds and alien flowers.
The current is the gardener who keeps the edge in line,
the beautiful sweeping line of the bend. There are four
hundred feet, perhaps, of this border, and it is twenty
feet thick. The pepper grows half as tall as a man, a
graceful plant with lance-shaped leaves, and in August
its level top is a delicate, creamy white, flushed with
pink, where the finger-like blooms droop gracefully
atop the stalks. No border could be more formal than
this, and yet none could be more utterly artless. As
you drift by in the low sun of a summer afternoon, hear-
ing the insects hum in the flowers, seeing the white flash
of a kingfisher down the tree-hung aisles of the river
ahead, listening to the distant chimes floating from the
village tower, you know the peace of gardens as you
scarce may ever know it in a garden made with hands.
But the shiftings of the river bed bring even more
secret delights. Often in the course of years an old
channel becomes closed, no sign of it remaining but a
little break in the bank and a bay of still water winding
into the woods. Sometimes the current has even laid a
sand bar completely across the opening, converting the
ancient bed into a swamp or stagnant pond. In some
parts of our country these old channels are known as
coves, in other parts as swales. As your canoe drifts
along they tempt you from the main stream, and they

238 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

always repay any effort you may expend pushing
through the reeds and lily pads. Coming downstream
upon one, you might readily miss it, for the sand bar
always noses a little way across the mouth, even when
it has not closed up the bank completely, and so hides
it from view. The mouth of the swale is sometimes
marked in our country, however, by a sycamore tree,
the white mottled bark shining out against the land-
scape. Presumably the tree has found security here,
where the current no longer worries its roots, and has
survived. Stopping your craft before the entrance, you
look into a cool green forest glade over a carpet of lily
pads, with the golden blossoms of the cow lilies gaily
gemming it. You are less than mortal if this water
glade does not tempt you to push your canoe through
the leaves — slowly, secretly, for the stillness of the river
is even deeper here, where the water mirror is black
ahead and its oozy edges are odorous with sweet flag.
The very flowers speak the silent wildness of the place,
for here, if anywhere, the shy cardinal flower makes a
red reflection on the water, an incomparable red in this
dark, ^hadowy spot, and here the purple loosestrife
grows in such a gloom that we understand at last why
Shakespeare wrote that "our cold maids do dead men's
fingers call them . ' ' (To be sure, it is disputed that Shakes-
peare did mean loosestrife by "long purples." We
hasten to make this admission before somebody hurls
the Variorum "Hamlet" at our head!) Here, also, the

BELOW THE RIVER BANK 239

yellow jewel weed on the higher ground is most like an
orchid, and the blue vervain — which is purple — most like
fairy candelabra; and here is no vista over the banks
to the surrounding hilltops. The rank foliage forms a
solid wall, and arches like a groined roof overhead.
Only through the opening behind us do we catch a bit
of the river, glistening under the sun, as through an
open door. This is a chapel beside the river road, a
spot for deeper meditation on our languid way.

Here, too, as we watch over the side of the boat, we
see just the ghost of a pickerel move like a sudden
lightning streak of shadow under the weeds that bear
his name, and wonder why the boy whom we passed
upstream sitting in the sun on the bank does not come
here to cast his line. Perhaps it is because the small
boy loves the sense of a procession in a river, loves to
see the water go by, to watch the passing boats, to feel
the sweep of landscape, almost as much as (if less con-
sciously than) he loves to fish. The cloistered spots
are, after all, for a more contemplative maturity —
it is only our pride that prevents us from saying for
middle age. The swales are beautiful back waters, and
youth is not yet satiated with midstream.

The bird and animal life of the land below the river
bank is a different thing, no less than are the flora and
the view. Two live things stand out most prominently
in my memories of our northern rivers — kingfishers and
turtles, the kingfisher flying ever on ahead of the boat

240 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

down the willow aisles, flashing as white sometimes
as the occasional birches which stab their reflection
into the dark water, the turtles plopping off logs as the
boat draws near, or thrusting out inquiring heads to
watch it pass. The proud-crested kingfisher is the
over-lord of our rivers, as the turkey buzzard patrols
the red rivers of the South. Whether sitting high on a
limb overhanging the water, or flying down the green
aisle ahead, or swooping for a fish, this beautiful bird is
seldom absent from the vista to give it a characteristic
.touch. The kingfishers, indeed, seem to have each
his well-defined river beat, and if one bird encroaches
on the fish preserves of his neighbour upstream there is
trouble at once. He is driven back with a great noise
and flutter, and as soon as he is back on his own ground
he is just as quick to turn and drive out his neighbour.
Often the kingfisher will fly ahead of your boat, alight-
ing on tree after tree, as if afraid to pass you; but ulti-
mately he will get up courage, fly over your head, and
return to the point where you first flushed him. I have
never known a kingfisher to continue with the boat in-
definitely. Sooner or later they always ref.urn, and
you will often find each bird at the old spot when you
come back upstream.

Another bird characteristic of our northern waters
is the blue heron, which lives alike on the rivers and by
the salt ponds making in from the sea. The baby
herons attain a very considerable size before they

BELOW THE RIVER BANK

essay locomotion, and the first waddles of one of these
ungainly birds are easily watched from a considerable
distance, and are quite irresistible. A mother and child
used to come up from the secluded banks of the Ham
Branch in Franconia, and take an early morning or
late afternoon stroll in the meadows in full sight of the
cottage where we were spending the summer. "Here
come the herons!" was a familiar cry, which brought
us tumbling out upon the veranda. But it proved
useless to try to walk up on the birds. At first the
baby struggled back, at the note of warning from its
mother, with a great flapping of wings, into the bushes.
But in a short time it could fly as well as she, and both
birds would get up speed, swaying from side to side
on their long, spidery legs, thrusting out their necks and
flapping their great wings, the very acme of awkward-
ness, till suddenly, like an aeroplane leaving the ground,
they caught the air. Then their long legs trailed out
in a graceful line beneath them, their necks were folded
down, the soft blue of their feathers glinted in the sun,
and they sailed away with all the grace of supreme
efficiency, to a rhythmic beat of wings. Perhaps no
bird illustrates so complete a change from the shambling
and ungainly to the compact, graceful, even stately.
The blue heron are less numerous in our Berkshire
country than in wilder regions, of course, yet they are
not rare by any means, and often add their peculiar
touch of Japanese charm to our river vistas. Their

242 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

smaller cousins, the little green herons, are common,
also, flying back and forth over the fishing grounds.

A bird that is rare, however, is the wood duck. It is
rare in any region now, more's the pity. It is one of
the few ducks which nest in trees, preferring an old
hollow branch hanging over a stream. I have never
found such a nest myself, but once, on the golf links in
Stockbridge; a horribly hooked drive took me into a
piece of woods by the river bend, and under the over-
hanging trees on the opposite bank I saw a family of
wood duck swimming, four little ones in a row follow-
ing the mother about like some tiny flotilla in practice
evolutions. A misstep of mine on a dead limb sent
them all scurrying under the dark bank, and I saw them
no more, for the impatient foursome rudely : interrupted
my vigil. Nor have I ever [seen them at that spot again.

Of the four-footed inhabitants of the land below the
river bank, the painted turtle is most common with
us. The turtles lead a lazy life, lying for the most part
on an old log in the sun, and it is difficult to see why
their dispositions are not more amiable. Perhaps, in-
deed, they are amiable among themselves, keeping their
ill temper for the human finger. Half a dozen of them
will often bask on a foot or two of snag above the water
without any sign of quarrel, dropping plop, plop, plop
into the stream as the boat draws near. Yet I seem to
remember disastrous domestic strife, when, as a boy, I
tried to keep several turtles in the same tub. Turtles

BELOW THE RIVER BANK 243

are credited with attaining great antiquity. Perhaps
age makes them snappy — age and idleness. The com-
bination has been known to work a similar effect on
the disposition of animals more elevated on the biological
ladder! Our northern snapping turtles attain a very
considerable size, a foot across, and make a delicious
pie. Often, too, they seem to be smitten with a wan-
derlust, leaving their land below the river bank to go
adventuring across the fields. The big fellows are
usually thus caught out of their element, at times half a
mile from the water. The largest snapper I ever saw
was lumbering along down a country road, in the dust
and heat, so comically like an illustration for the fable
that we looked about for the hare.

Another common inhabitant of our river world is
the muskrat, though the rise in value of his pelt is
rapidly working havoc in his ranks. He is now, in his
final transformation, often mink, and not infrequently,
I am afraid, something more expensive still! The
muskrat is a little brother of the beaver, and while not
so industrious, he is more spunky. He lives on lily
roots and fresh-water mussels. You will often see
mussel shells open, and the mussels gone, close to the
water's edge on the sand shelf or at the foot of a log.
The muskrat has been enjoying his midnight supper
there. His summer home is in a hole under the bank,
either of the river itself, or of some bordering swale.
In winter, however, he remaims in the swales almost

244 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

entirely, and builds himself a good imitation of a small
beaver lodge out of reeds. An old lodge often resembles
a hummock in the shoal water, and would readily
escape detection. Next to man, the muskrat's chief
foes are the horned owls and the foxes. When he
hears, sees, or smells one of these enemies, he dives into
the water, slapping it with his tail in warning to his
fellows, and swims under an overhanging bank. The
owl, however, often waits patiently over the spot where
he dove, and gets him when he comes up. He can hardly
be a savory meal, but owls are notoriously not particular.
There are otters in our stream, but most people have
never seen them. A few of those men who are still
born with the woodcraft instinct amid an alien genera-
tion, and surreptitiously trap on the outskirts of our
groomed and gardened villages, know where the otters
are to be found, know where they have established
then: cross-country trails, and now and then in Spring
mysterious bundles are shipped to West Twelfth Street,
New York. But most of us never guess that the otter is
our neighbour. Where the main stream is polluted,
he appears to keep to the tributaries, and only rarely,
in a secluded spot, will you find a trace of his slide down
the bank, or his web-footed tracks leading away from
the stream, probably cross-country to some other
stream. It is this habit of the otter to establish regular
overland crossings which is his undoing, for it enables
the hunter to place his traps.

BELOW THE RIVER BANK 245

A young otter at play is perhaps the happiest crea-
ture on sea or land. He will climb a slippery bank,
and slide down, plop, into the water, over and over
again, dragging his feet as he slides, his brown, cylin-
drical body going head first like a torpedo. In the
water his feats put the finest water polo player to the
blush. He will lie on his back and kick a floating
stick into the air, or worry it from paw to paw, playing,
no doubt, that it is a fish. Then he will retreat from
it, or dive beneath it, and suddenly dart upon it with
incredible speed. The otter can outswim a pickerel,
in fact. Its dexterity in the water is amazing. But the
chances of seeing it are becoming fewer and fewer.

There are daughters of Eve, and sons of Adam, who
do not like snakes, yet what is more beautiful than a
mottled water snake coiled amid the curiously blotched
roots of a sycamore tree above the dark water of a river
pool? He will not harm you. Indeed, his first in-
stinct is to get out of your way. Even the deadly
cotton-mouth moccasins of the Southern swamps flee
shyly from your approach. Down in the deep, shad-
owed pool at the foot of some dam or rapids a water
snake will often live to a venerable old age, till his
bright spots have almost entirely disappeared and
his skin is a dull, slaty gray before he sheds it, a glossy
black when it is renewed. He feeds on unwary little
fishes, and adds a touch of mystery to the pool, the
mystery of his serpentine wisdom and the dusky

246 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

wriggle of his body just caught where a sunbeam pierces
the water below the boat.

"It's brother and sister to me," said the Water Rat
in "The Wind hi the Willows," speaking, you will re-
call, of his land below the river bank, "and aunts and
company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing.
It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it
hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't
know is not worth knowing." The Rat was one of
those excellent good fellows who have passed the age of
adventuring, and settled down to a kind of glowing
and enthusiastic content with then- chosen surroundings.
A bit of a poet, too, was the Rat, glorifying his river.

But there are days when all our sympathies are
with Ratty. It is the full tide of August now, and the
river garden is at its height. Two days of recent rain
have filled the channel and flushed the swales. Yester-
day we spent a long, lazy afternoon voyaging in this
other-world so close to us, yet so far removed, and came
back as from a dream. A soft haze silvered the bound-
ing hills and lazy white clouds looked at themselves in
the water. Mild water peppers waved their finger-
like blooms above us upon the bends; the blue vervains
held up their purple spikes; where a chunk of bank
thatch had fallen almost into the water, a tiny garden of
forget-me-nots was nodding at its reflection; on a green
eyeot in midstream, wild sunflowers and jewel weed
and pink thistles grew together; and everywhere be-

BELOW THE RIVER BANK 247

neath the willows the great beds of Joe-pye-weed made
glorious the vistas. Golden-rod, too, nodded at us over
the banks, and in the cloistered swales the cardinal
flower glowed. Once a great blue heron, resting on
motionless wings, went by us overhead, like a perfectly
controlled monoplane. Each bend of the river invited
to new mysteries. At a break in the trees mild-faced
cattle came down to drink and gazed at us with placid
curiosity, their forelegs submerged — perhaps the cool-
est and most luscious sight in nature upon a summer
day! Once, through the willows, we saw a country
house sitting proudly in its broad acres; once the white
spire of a village church; again, at the end of a sun-
flecked lane, a green pasture running up a hillside
crowned by a sentinel oak. On the dark, quiet water
always was a second landscape which shimmered, a little
unquiet and reversed, and between the two we floated,
down the fairy aisles of a garden, peaceful, unworldly,
remote. My formal beds of phlox and antirrhinums, of
platycodons and stock and balsam, and my tiny cement
pool, looked stiff and mean enough when I came back to
them. Even the compost heap was better than they,
for it had draped itself with a gigantic squash vine, a
mass of sunflowers, a wild cucumber, and a tangle of
poppies. Some day I shall own a place which takes in
both banks of a river, and the genius of the stream will
be my gardener.

CHAPTER XVI
TREES

ANY real estate dealer can bear witness to the
depth and universality of the human love for
trees. A country house without trees is almost
unthinkable — certainly unsellable; and when Nature
has not provided arboreal adornment, the builder at
once sets out to supply the deficiency. Sometimes, to
be sure, he uses but little judgment in so doing, sticking
Colorado blue spruces in the middle of New England
lawns or messing other exotics into clumps which
Nature would disdain; but his instinct is sound, if his
taste is not. He must have trees about his dwelling.
Some men demand them for architectural effect, to
frame the house, to back the borders, to make those
masses of shadow at the end of a lawn or vista which are
essential to a successful garden. A garden without
trees, in fact, is even more depressing than a land
without hills. Some men, again, demand trees for their
protection from the prying world or the winter wind,
some for their shade, some, perhaps, just for their mute
friendliness. But at bottom, I believe, all these
reasons are the same. A man demands trees about his

248

TREES 249

dwelling because deep within him, deep perhaps as the
primal instincts of the race, is a great and trustful
affection humorously akin to the dog's trust in the table
beneath which he lies whether to escape the heat of
Summer or the 4th of July fire crackers. For all the
centuries of upward development, for all our tall-built
cities and snug dwellings, we are close to the ancient
Mother still. Go out some day into the wild places,
let night come on, or a storm, and see how you turn like
a homing bird to the shelter of the hemlock thicket!
Even on my own little place of a few acres, there is a
grove of pines near the house, murmurous like the sea,
and beside it three gnarled old apple trees which put a
green roof over that bit of the lawn, and to them I return
a dozen times a day out of the sunshine or the moonlight
on the garden, as a man returns to the welcome of his
roof and hearth. It has never occurred to me before to
explain or analyze this feeling, it has been so much an
unconscious part of my life; but I realize its implications
now.

Trees, of course, are the most beautiful as well as the
most useful of growing things, not because they are the
largest but because they attain often to the finest
symmetry and because they have the most decided and
appealing personalities. Any one who has not felt the
personality of trees is oddly insensitive. I cannot,
indeed, imagine a person wholly incapable of such
feeling, though the man who plants a Colorado blue

250 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

spruce on a trimmed lawn east of the Alleghanies, where
it is obliged to comport itself with elms and trolley cars,
is admittedly pretty callous. Trees are peculiarly the
product of their environment, and their personalities, in
a natural state, have invariably a beautiful fitness.

Take the white pine for example, noblest of all our
common North American trees. The pine by nature
is gregarious in the extreme. One old patriarch, if left
alone, will in a few years breed a family of seedlings half
an acre in extent about its feet, and this little stand of
seedlings, in time, if they are left alone, will in a single
generation begin to breed more seedlings out to wind-
ward, and thus in a hundred years the patriarch, the
grandfather of the forest, will be hidden perhaps in the
depths of an extensive wood. The young trees as they
begin to grow are crowded thickly together, and very
soon their lateral branches begin to touch and shade
completely the ground beneath. As soon as this hap-
pens, of course, all the lateral branches below the upper
layer are shaded, too, and begin to die. Only the tops
of the trees get the sun, so they give up the natural
effort to spread, and devote most of their attention to
racing upward after more and more sunshine. The
weaker trees, crowded in between the strong, sooner or
later give up the struggle and die, but the strong ones
keep going up and up, till all signs of their lower lateral
branches have completely disappeared and the lofty
trunks tower straight as ruled lines for fifty, seventy-

TREES 251

five, in primeval forests even for one hundred feet in air,
before the trees grow a single limb. It takes many gen-
erations to make such a forest, though, alas ! but a few
months to destroy it. What man who has ever entered
the hushed cathedral aisles of a mighty pine grove — fra-
grant with that indescribable incense, murmurous over-
head with the whisper of surf upon a lonely shore,
mysterious with the tiny patter of pitch, illumined
through vistas between the solemn uprights that look
like blue daggers of light — can ever forget it? It is like
nothing else on earth. One fancies, sometimes, that the
Egyptian temples must have been, on their man-made
scale, something akin, though with far less grace and
airiness. A pine tree is always graceful, which is hardly
the word for an Egyptian column.

Yet the isolated pine, which has not fought upward in
the crowded phalanx of its fellows but has expanded
laterally as well, is a totally different tree, with a totally
different personality — a very noble and sturdy person-
ality, too. How characteristic of our northern moun-
tains is the ragged upland pasture, where the cattle
wander through hassocks of grass and sweet fern, and by
some bit of gray stone wall a single pine stands up
alone, its branches extended in angular parallels like a
cedar of Lebanon, broken and stunted short on the side
toward the prevailing winter storms, streaming away
more gracefully to leeward, and the massive trunk —
comparatively short and gnarled instead of tall and

252 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

mast-like — inclined a little from the winter gales as if it
had stood its ground and taken their buffets for a hun-
dred years without more than bending backward from
the hips when the blows rained thickest. I know such a
pine on a hilltop which has been carved by the storms
of a century into a quaint and splendid replica of the
Winged Victory, and there is no passer who sees it but
pauses a moment to admire its rugged beauty, its sug-
gestion of triumphant, dogged strength. To deny that
pine personality is to prove your utter lack of imagina-
tion.

The American elm is another common native tree
possessing both great beauty and a strongly marked
personality. It is easy to say that the elm was madejthe
standard shade tree of American municipalities by the
early settlers because it was easily procured and phys-
ically well adapted to the purpose. But that really does
not explain the choice. The maple was quite as com-
mon, is more easily transplanted, and a much more rapid
grower. Indeed, as a matter of fact, it was rather more
generally used on that account. The ash and the oak
were at hand, the pine and the hemlock, the sycamore
and linden. All of them, moreover, were employed.
So were the chestnut and the black cherry. But the
elm was felt to be the standard then, and is still recog-
nized as the standard, because its personality so exactly
comports with geometrical street vistas, with the formal
lines of architecture, with the orderliness and dignity

TREES 253

of university campuses and civic squares. The elm is
essentially a self-sufficient tree. It does not thrive in
groves. It has a standard type of its own, and it either
attains this type or is lost to view. Sometimes, in a
wild state, it attains it by killing out its immediate com-
petitors, but more often it is killed out by them, and
the elm which comes to maturity is the one which has
lodged in a favoured spot where there is no com-
petition, such as a river meadow, where the spring fresh-
ets have dropped the seed on fertile soil and the roots
can get down to water.

We all know the type — the noble trunk of massive
girth, tapering very gradually upward to the first spring
of branches, and then dissolving in those branches as a
water jet might dissolve in many upward and out-curv-
ing streams, till the whole is lost in the spray of the fo-
liage. Like many trees which grow alone, it develops an
exquisite symmetry, but with the elm this symmetry is
not only one of general contour but of individual limbs.
Not only is the silhouette symmetrical, but the skeleton,
branch balancing branch. That is what gives it its re-
markable fitness to comport with architectural lines,
with geometrically designed vistas. It has a formal
structure, and a consequent dignity, which make it the
logical shade for a village street, a chapel, a library, the
scholarly procession in cap and gown. Add to that
dignity its arched and airy lightness and its splendid
size, and you have the king of urban trees.

254 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

Yet I sometimes think the elm is never so lovely as
when it grows along the river bends, where Nature
planted it. We all know such river bends, every Amer-
ican cherishes in memory the picture of a green inter-
vale, of browsing cattle, of a winding stream with
vervain and wild cucumber on the banks, and now and
then, rising like graceful green fountains or like great
Vases on slender stems, the noble elms — the wardens
oB the peaceful landscape. The valley of the Housa-
tonic, in the Berkshire Hills, is peculiarly rich, per-
haps, in splendid trees of many kinds, especially wil-
lows. Yet its elms stand out with a certain aristo-
cratic aloofness, and demand, or rather compel, the
chief attention. Over the well-kept village streets
they spread magnificently, with the spring of a Gothic
arch in their massive limbs, and oriole nests depend
like tiny platinum ear-drops from the outer twigs.
But along the river you see the whole tree, you are not
conscious of it as the underside of an arch but rather
as a complete and beautiful design, a mammoth vase
rising on its graceful stem from the emerald meadows.
There are five such elms in a row near my home. They
grow along the bank of a swale close to the river, with
space enough between them so that each tree has
reached its standard of form, and yet each, too, has
conceded a little something to its neighbour and made
up for the loss by a fringe of foliage close around the
trunk, as well-fed elms sometimes do. They are of

TREES 255

almost exactly the same height and girth, and yet, if
you look closely, no two are really alike. They differ
as the great doors of Notre Dame in Paris differ—
individual yet harmonious. When the bulwarks of
willow around the river bends are turning to soft,
grayish silver in the low afternoon light, when the
shadows are creeping like long amethyst fingers over
the grass, these five trees rise in radiant lightness against
the west, every detail of their lovely symmetry out-
lined sharply against the sky, and from the topmost
branches a meadow lark pours out his vesper song.
They are like a row of figures by Botticelli arrested in a
stately dance.

These same trees are scarcely less beautiful in Win-
ter. Some lovers of trees, indeed, delight in the body
more than the raiment. A nude tree may be pathetic
in its suggestion of vanished Summer, but it is seldom
or never unlovely. Did not Ruskin somewhere speak
of the wonderful life in the line of a twig or branch?
Certainly no line in Nature is so vital, whether it be
the straight taper of a Norway spruce trunk or the
radiating forked lightning of an aged locust top. The
locust tree, indeed, is too little appreciated, especially
by our artists. Those people who are enraptured by
the crooked pine branch in a Japanese print will often
pass beneath a fine old native locust without so much
as glancing up to observe its true aspect. Its branches
are always at the top, in flowering time hung with

25G GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

fragrant white blossoms not unlike the Japanese wis-
taria, later conspicuous for their curiously sparse and
delicate foliage, and, best of all, in Winter showing in
stark outline the most bewildering forks and twists
and angles of growth, yet not a limb of them which,
for all its irregularity, has not a splendid force and
rugged picturesqueness. Those tough, jabbing branches
bespeak the tough fibre of the wood. Perhaps only
the man who has been forced to tackle a dead locust
with an axe can truly appreciate this tree. I cannot
say why — some childish and now forgotten association,
no doubt — but a gray, aged locust always reminds me
of Ulysses after his years of wanderings, and never
more so than in Winter when the limbs are nude and
the joints seem twisted as if with conflict.

Against an evening sky, indeed, almost any bare
tree takes on a strange mystery and charm. Where
the still brook gleams like quicksilver in the grass and
the gathering night seems to exhale from the under-
growth, the ash trees and other sentinels on some old
fence line stand up to the fading west with every
branch and twig distinct and black, making a lacy
pattern of infinite intricacy, which for all its trans-
parency seems somehow to imprison a little of the
rising twilight. I remember once tramping north
from Cambridge, in those youthful days when one
wandered cross-country with his boon companion and
settled all the problems of the universe; and presently,

TREES 257

out in the rolling Middlesex fields, we crested a hill
by a long, straight road which ran mournfully into the
gathering November twilight, like some road in Hardy's
novels. At the crest we had a glimpse on the far hori-
zon of the last red banner of the defeated day, and
running down the slope toward it was a leafless apple
orchard. The trees were gray, the ground beneath
them was a smoky brown, and in their gray tracery of
branches the sunset had hung a veil, a veil of softest
amethyst, the mysterious veil of Astarte. To this
day I can recall our consciousness that this orchard
was alive, that it was a personality, or a group of per-
sonalities, whom we were passing. We seemed to
leave it behind whispering strange things, as the
mournful November wind came over the upland.

Did you ever look carefully at an old, neglected
apple tree in Winter? An old, neglected apple tree, of
course, always makes the arms of the true agriculturist
yearn for a pruning saw, as Grizel's arms rocked for a
sponge and water when she saw a dirty baby. But,
forgetting farmers' bulletins for a moment, did you ever
pause to admire the veritable spray of "suckers" such
a tree will have sent up, like a shower-bath nozzle
turned upside down? The pattern they make is
tangled and formless, but what a testimony they are
to the vitality of the tree, what eloquent witnesses of
its will to live! A dead limb-end may have rotted
back to make a flicker's or a bluebird's nest, the trunk

258 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

may be ringed with the sapsucker's bores, the tree may
be lopsided and perishing with scale — but all over it
sprout the suckers, its symbol of continued struggle.
The poor old apple tree beside some abandoned farm-
house or cellar-hole, where, perchance, no house has
stood for generations, still fighting for life, still striving
to "function," is to me a brave and beautiful thing.

The trees of the hills and rocky pastures have a dif-
ferent character from their fatly nourished brothers of
the plain, and, as among men, they are often less beau-
tiful and more interesting. The sugar maple which
starts life as a tiny seedling in the sediment of a rain
pool on top of a boulder, and survives by sending its
roots down around the very rock till it seems, in the
course of a century, to clasp the rock "with crooked
hands" as an eagle might hold a ball in its claws, usu-
ally develops a rough sturdiness of trunk and very
often a twisted formation of growth, which suggest
almost human qualities of aggressiveness and tenacity.
Such a tree seems actually to have wrestled with its
environment, and put its enemies underfoot. It is to
the upland hardwoods, too, that all boys know they
must go for nuts. Did not the finest chestnuts always
grow on a hill? And what man is so poor in memories
that he cannot recall those golden October mornings
when there was frost in the air, and the pungent smell
of dried sweet fern, and up among the boulders the
gray hickories, still flaunting a few yellow leaves, had

TREES 259

shed their store? The nut tree has a certain rough,
scraggly quality, a clean, hard, wiry, knotted char-
acter, that exactly comports with bowlder-strewn pas-
tures, a keen October sky, and the autumn wind piping
over the hilltops. The great oak of the pastures, also,
flings its outlines against the cloud-race and the blue
with magnificent masculinity, and the dignity of age
and power.

The canoe birch, too, is essentially an upland tree;
it does not thrive near sea level, at any rate in Mass-
achusetts. Farther north it creeps down nearer the
coast. The birch, above all our American trees, de-
lights in theatrical effects. And if that sentence is
objected to on the ground of "pathetic fallacy," we will
commit the whole sin at once, and add that it is the
most feminine of trees! In earliest Spring, when
the hepaticas are pushing up last year's leaves and our
Berkshire mountain sides are donning their frail, deli-
cate veils of colour, the young birches are conspicuous
for the startling brightness of their new foliage, a
green so much lighter and more vivid than all the other
greens that it would arrest attention even if it were
not borne on a snow-white stem. Your young birch
has all the daring of a debutante! Later, when the
summer thunder-storms come, the birch has another
trick up its sleeve. Some afternoon a dark, gunmetal
thunder-head will mass behind the crest of a hill, and
suddenly an old birch on the summit will leap into

260 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

startling prominence, so that it focusses the entire
attention, like a single splendid streak of chalk-white
lightning. Again, in mid-winter, when the birch by
rights should be protectively coloured and incon-
spicuous, it is the other trees we do not notice, and the
birch which rises by the edge of the frozen stream,
perhaps, or against the dark wall of the pines, and dis-
plays all its snowy limbs to best advantage against
evergreen or sky.

Only the sycamore has a bark which can rival the
birch for showy effect — yet how different are the two
trees. It has never occurred to any one to call the
sycamore a feminine tree. It is large, dignified, mas-
culine, and totally unaware of the picturesque effect
created by its tortuous branches and its great mottled
patches of grayish white bark, alternating with brown.
When all is said, the birch is a vain tree, but we must
also admit it has a right to be; and we cannot scold it,
either, it wears its white betimes with such an air of
virgin innocence.

Many years ago a lover of trees in the village where
my boyhood was passed prepared a little booklet,
describing and picturing a score or so of the finest
trees in the township. Only the other day I came
across a copy, after the lapse of more than two decades.
I sat down to its pages as to a feast. Yes, there was
the old Cap'n George Bachelder sassafras, the largest
in the State, sixty-two feet high! How familiar it

TREES 261

looked ! How my nostrils could inhale again the aroma
of the chips hacked with a jack knife from its roots!
And here, on the next page, was the Emerson oak,
growing between the barn and the house, and throwing
mottled shadows over both — a mighty spread, indeed!
I could hear the horses stamping in the barn, I could
smell the hay, I could savour again the coolness of the
shade as we dropped beneath it on our way home from
the swimming hole. That oak and the old Emerson
homestead were unthinkable apart. If I, who merely
lived a mile on down the road, could so thrill to a picture
of that tree in after years, what, I reflected, must be the
affection in which an Emerson holds it? Is it still
there? Surely it must be, for the oak outlives our little
spans, and that any one could lay an axe to it is in-
conceivable.

So I lingered through the book, greeting each picture
as I would greet the likeness of a boyhood friend, each
bringing back to me not only its own image, but what a
wealth else of associated memories ! Surely, every man
holds certain trees thus warmly in his affection — trees
he planted, or his father or his grandfather planted,
trees which gave him shade and shelter, trees which
were an integral part of his home, trees which had some
grace of limb or charm of character which forever en-
deared them to him, through the subtle channels of
aesthetic satisfaction. "Trees have no personality?" I
said, as I closed the pamphlet. "Then there is no such

GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

thing as the influence of line and contour on the human
mind, and no such thing as affection for the inanimate —
which is nonsense."

But one tree this pamphlet did not picture. It was a
great chestnut, full five feet through, storm-torn and
lightning-scarred, which stood high upon a windy sum-
mit, the shepherd of a hundred hills. They were little
hills, green and rolling, and from the first great limb of
the chestnut (which was as big as a barrel) they looked
like a patchwork quilt stitched with stone walls. Over
them the cattle browsed, or the reapers clicked their
midsummer locust song, or just the breeze passed
whispering. And four feet dangled from the great limb
of the chestnut, and four eyes looked out across the little
hills to a far pond and the misty horizon, and two
hearts sang a song as old as the hills themselves. When
the sun declined, the shadow of the great tree swept out
eastward; the cattle filed down to the bars and lowed,
the leader shaking her bell protestingly ; one pair of arms
must needs be raised to assist the more encumbered
climber down to the top of our ladder, which was a huge
piece of broken limb propped against the trunk, and
then again be raised from the ground to swing a burden,
all too light, to earth. Then there must follow a little
ceremony — the cutting of a tiny notch in a deep and
secret recess of the bark to signify one more day of hap-
piness spent in that protecting shelter, and sometimes
a warm pink cheek was laid against the furrowed

TREES 263

trunk, and a voice whispered: "Nice old grandpa chest-
nut!"

That was many years ago. I wonder if that noble old
tree is standing yet, or whether the chestnut blight, the
axe, or the lightning, has robbed the little hills of their
shepherd. I shall never know, I shall never count
again the little notches in a secret recess of the bark, nor
hear the sweet, silly secrets the old tree would not be-
tray. I could go there now, to the very spot, yes, on the
darkest night; a memory in the soles of my feet would
wake and tell me the path. But I shall never take the
risk. Some memories must never be dusted, some paths
never retrod. For me that storm-scarred grandfather
of a tree shall forever stand shepherd over the little hills,
the little, green rolling hills where the cattle browse and
the wind whispers to the mullein stalks; and against its
hoary bark a soft pink cheek is pressed, and I am
twenty -one again.

CHAPTER XVII
LANDSCAPE LINES AND GARDENING

THERE are certain lines or a composition of lines
in Nature which have a definite effect on the spirit
of, Man, induce a definite mood, and, recognizing
this Man has often made use of them in his archi-
tectural structures. There is, for instance, a pro-
nounced difference between the spiritual effect of a
vertical and a horizontal line, when they are stressed
sufficiently to dominate the scene or the structure. The
long horizontal is a symbol of peace, the soaring vertical
of aspiration. It is easy to see why this should be so,
the one remaining plodding and pedestrian on the com-
fortable level, the other leaving the ground and making
for the stars.

Nothing is more peaceful, more soothing to the spirit,
than a canal. Brimming and level, without flow or
current, it lays its watery highway through the flat
fields, and life would seem leisurely as you strolled be-
side it even if you were unaware that traffic is actually
leisurely upon its bosom. A canal is the apotheosis of
the horizontal, the trees which march by its bank falling
into misty green procession like a line of level housetops,

264

LANDSCAPE LINES AND GARDENING 265

the barge lying horizontal on its flood, even the driver
and the mules and the cable falling into level line as you
see them through a haze of rain, perhaps, or the morning
fog. There was once an unhappy time in my life when I
fought the demon Insomnia, and when my nerves were
at the breaking point I used to take a train to Princeton
and idle in a canoe up the canal there, with the dreaming
towers of the college rising above the trees on the distant
hill and presently a sight of the quaint little whitewashed
lock house with its window boxes of gay geraniums.
That canal was better than medicine for me, soothing,
tranquil, sleepy.

But how different an effect is wrought by even so
short a vertical as a ten-foot dam or natural waterfall.
Even though the stream is descending, the eye takes an
upward tilt, catching on the rocks at the side or the
smooth, gleaming columns of the water, and seeing in
imagination the higher level above. One views such a
cataract as Niagara, of course, with a confusion of emo-
tions, half stunned by its roar and overwhelmed by the
volume of its waters. Yet when you stand under the
falls and look up, you feel distinctly the mood of aspira-
tion, you are less aware of a descending deluge than of a
beautiful upward-soaring line ending in a suave, glitter-
ing curve that springs out of sight into the sun and
spray. One of the most perfect examples of the vertical
line in Nature, of course, is furnished by a pine grove on
the shore of a lake, where each tall, straight trunk stands

266 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

up companioning its fellows, in stately silhouette against
the sunlit water beyond. Our eyes may not seek the
branches above, the mere passage across the vision of
those upright columns being enough to evoke the mood,
a grave, solemn cathedral mood. I have often wondered
if it were not such a grove of trees which gave to the
sculptor of the Parthenon frieze his idea for the pro-
cession of vertical draperies which add such grave state-
liness to that composition.

Man's use of the vertical in his buildings, of course,
reaches its most characteristic expression in Gothic
architecture. The mood of aspiration so closely asso-
ciated with all religions is directly appealed to alike by
the Moslem minaret and the Christian spire, but it was
in the Gothic style that it reached its flower, and the
soaring uprights sprang unbroken into the dim tracery
of sky-borne vaults, the innermost skeleton structure of
the cathedral revealing itself in verticals. One of the
chief reasons, of course, why an English cathedral never
gives you quite the stirring effect of Rheims or Chartres
is because horizontals have been introduced. Cu-
riously enough, it was not until Cass Gilbert applied
Gothic to our modern skyscrapers (in the West Street
building and the Wool worth Tower, particularly), that
they justified their height aesthetically. If you look
attentively at the ordinary skyscraper, you will see that
the various stories are clearly marked by horizontal
rows of windows — the building is a layer cake of hori-

LANDSCAPE LINES AND GARDENING 267

zontals, a scheme which obviously does not comport
with its extraordinary proportions. But by stressing the
spaces between the windows into unbroken piers and thus
throwing the windows back and relating each one not to
those on either side, but to those below and above on-the
same vertical line, an entirely new effect is achieved.
The mood of the upright is evoked, as befits so tall and
narrow a structure, and a true and fitting beauty is created.
We naturally think of mountains as something verti-
cal, but they are seldom vertical as a matter of fact;
they have a vast variety of line and of mood. The
Berkshire Hills, for example, run in two parallel ranges
east and west of a sweet green valley, with level tops
like the crest of an advancing wave, and the scenery
among them is most often spoken of as "peaceful." It
is the peace, of course, of the horizontal, the peace, al-
most, of the slow canal or the long green marshes border-
ing the sea, or would be were it not for the pleasant
contrast of sloping shoulders. It is only the sharp
peak or the towering pyramid which has the true
vertical aspiration, such a peak as the Matterhorn, or
Chief Mountain in northern Montana (which stands out
sharp and precipitous from the wall of the Great Divide,
sentinelling the prairie) , or the white-capped cone of Fuji-
yama, used over and over in their prints by Hokusai or
Hiroshige, like a religious motif. Mountains, indeed, are
rather more frequently disturbing on a near view, be-
cause of their broken lines, their half uprights and

268 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

shattered horizontals, with the emphasis now on one,
now on the other. Such complete chaos of lines breeds
restlessness, and on a dull day which takes out the colour,
actual depression. One of the most miserable days I ever
spent was under a cloud in the pocket canon which holds
Cracker Lake, in Glacier Park. The Divide soared up-
ward into the creeping gray roof with a tremendous, an
overwhelming vertical magnificence, but all around its
base were vast shale slides at an angle halfway between
vertical and horizontal, pitching into the flat lake, and
behind, through the canon mouth, was every con-
ceivable tilt and angle of rock and shale and forest. No
line predominated, since the top of the Divide was
buried in scud and could not take the eye up to the blue
above. You felt yourself in the heart of upheaved chaos.
Of all the individual lines that mountains achieve,
probably the most beautiful and potent is the dome.
The mood evoked by the dome is the grave, calm ac-
ceptance of infinity, and that corresponding sense of
mystery and wonder. Curiously enough, it is most
often the doming summit we hold in affection, too, per-
haps because of its benignity. It has such amplitude
of base, such easy lines of ascent, such an aspect of
monumental solidity, and such sheer beauty in its
sweeping curves, that it is almost invariably our
favourite among its fellows. At least, that is the case
with me. Moosilauke is my best loved mountain in the
White Hills of New Hampshire, and always seems to me

LANDSCAPE LINES AND GARDENING 269

a more impressive as well as a more beautiful pile than
Mount Washington, which out-tops it by fifteen hun-
dred feet. In my own Berkshire Hills, Mount Everett
(or The Dome, as it is popularly called), in the south-
western corner of Massachusetts, is nearly one thousand
feet lower than Gray lock, in the northwestern; yet as
you view it from the plain below it seems far more like a
major mountain, it actually suggests size and dignity
and eternal solidity to a much greater extent, because
it rises in a beautiful and perfect dome out of the long
rampart of the range and lays a majestic curve against
the western sky, a curve as sweet as that of a woman's
breast, as infinite as the sea rim.

Man, of course, has used the dome in his structures
since the days of the Romans, undaunted by its diffi-
culties; Brunelleschi, Michael Angelo, Wren wrestled
with its problems in later times; and to-day it is a symbol
of the enduring solidity of the state. Man's domes are
sprung more sharply than Nature's, however, and the
long, sweet curve of infinity is almost lost in them.
Oddly enough, where that curve is most happily caught
in an architectural structure is in the span of the old
Brooklyn Bridge, springing out of the flank of lower
Manhattan, the most architecturally chaotic section of
the globe ! The newer bridges upstream have missed it,
but the air-flung boulevard of the first great suspension
structure rises and hovers and dips with the alluring,
solemn, and lovely span of the infinite.

270 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

i

There is one more line in Nature which must not be

forgotten — the circle. Whether you stand upon a
mountain-top or on the deck of a ship or in the centre of
the Newark marshes ringed by crawling freight trains
and smoking chimney stacks, you have only to glimpse
the horizon in a circle all about you to feel at once a
sudden awareness of the great dome of the sky over-
head, Omar's inverted bowl, and to sense yourself
at the exact centre of the universe, directly beneath
the zenith. If a plumb line were dropped from the
zenith, it would, you feel sure, pierce your hat — or your
head, for at such a time you remove your hat to feel
the sun, as you fill your lungs deep with air. The
sensation is distinctly pleasant, with distinct motor
reactions of expansion. Here the sunshine seems con-
centrated, here is the focal point of its rays, the pivot
of the bright, blue day.

I am not a landscape architect, nor even a skilled
horticulturist, but in thinking over some of these
moods I have tried to describe, evoked more or less
directly by the lines and contours of Nature, and in
reflecting how such lines are similarly employed in
building construction, I have come to wonder if the
natural landscape does not hold lessons for our garden
makers which at present they have not always scanned.
To be sure, it is pretty well recognized to-day, or so I
gather from the gardens I visit, that a chaos of lines
in the ground plan, whether in beds, walks, or tree

LANDSCAPE LINES AND GARDENING 271

specimens, creates restlessness and is quite at variance
with the peace of a long horizontal of lawn and path,
or a flat, unbroken surface. But it has also seemed to me
that our gardens are somewhat over-given to the horizon-
tal, that they are too often ironed out into a peaceful,
flat enclosure* and little effort is made to catch from Na-
ture some of her loveliest landscape moods and overtones.

The Lombardy poplar, for instance, is a columnar
tree, and eminently adapted to carry the eye straight
up, to evoke aspiration like a spire. But to plant such
trees in groups, or in rows, is to thr.ow away this effect.
That is like building a whole street of churches, each
spire "killing" its neighbour. In his book, "What
England Can Teach Us About Gardening," Wilhelm
Miller prints a picture of "the proper use" of this tree,
in Kew Gardens, by the lake shore. Here a single
specimen rises out of the lower foliage, as Ruskin said a
cathedral spire should rise, "dreaming over the purple
crowd of humble roofs." Even in the photograph, it
strikes the note of aspiration. In some of the old
Italian gardens a similar note is struck with columnar
evergreens — certain of our cedars or arbor vitses strike
it with unpremeditated stateliness on a rocky hillside.
But the trees cannot be grouped, nor planted in rows.
They must be set with a sparing hand, and in distinct
relation to lower masses.

Again, how few gardens one ever sees which employ
pines as Nature employs them, to throw a screen of

272 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

aspiring uprights against a lake or a sunny field or a
sunset glow of rose and gold. Here again the spaced
row is fatal, though for a different reason — the careless
composition of Nature would be lost. I have in mind
a pine grove at the end of a large and formal garden,
set out at great expense many years ago and now per-
haps thirty feet high. The trees are spaced as rigidly as
line and rule could plant them, and they do not make a
screen, moreover, but a solid mass. Their lower branches
were never trimmed out to make smooth, aspiring
uprights, and the grove is but a poor and formal imi-
tation of a bit of uninteresting young forest, with
rhododendrons growing peakedly underneath by the
paths, instead of our native, hardy wood flowers. As
this garden is on a hillside (but flattened out into arti-
ficial terraces), with a lovely prospect of the lower
valley and the sunset over the blue hills beyond, the
opportunity for some fine and imaginative use of pines
was great — and it has been utterly muffed. Yet this
estate cost its owner thousands upon thousands of
dollars.

Not long ago I was passing the home of one of
America's leading sculptors whose garden is chiefly
the native hemlock forest which he permits to march
down the hill upon his studio, and he was hi his shirt
sleeves at the foot of his lawn, superintending the con-
struction of a ha-ha wall. He seemed chiefly con-
cerned with the line on which the wall was to be laid,

Of all the . . . lines that mountains achieve, the most
beautiful ... is the dome

LANDSCAPE LINES AND GARDENING 273

which he had carefully staked out, following a gentle
undulation of the slope and swinging in an open arc
to its upper base. Here was a man who could appre-
ciate pure line! A year later I passed again, purposely
to see the effect. The sod above now grew down and
covered the top of the wall, so that from the house you
were aware only of the natural undulations. But
from below, or from the road, the line of the wall was
visible, a sweet, gracious curve that might have been
sculptored by a full-flooded river, a line that was
Nature's own and subtly removed the taint of formal-
ity and tampering. Similarly, the sweep of trees and
shrubbery by a lawn-side, so often now either a matter
of ruled perspective or jagged, broken capes and prom-
ontories, might be planned to a sweeter curve, alike
on its ground and its summit line, and new emotional
values be secured. In such a border, for example,
sharp-topped trees would be out of place, but a swell and
dip and swell again of round-headed foliage, with some
great umbrella elm as the Moosilauke of the range,
would give a sky line of perpetual allure, with a hint
of the mountain mystery in its green bulwark. It is a
good deal to have cleared out from so many of our
estates the "specimen" trees which used to dot the
lawns and slopes like abandoned lunch boxes on the
beach at Coney Island. But need our conscious plan-
ning stop with the opened vista? We have cleared the
valley, but we can still arrange the walls.

274 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

The mood of the circle is the mood we should feel,
it seems to me, when we stand by a sun-dial. That is
the instinct of most people, I fancy, for dials are most
often placed where the garden rings them and they are
at the focus. A dial huddled up against a wall or set
at the end of the enclosure never seems quite right.
After all, it has no utilitarian use to-day, it is a sym-
bol of our tribute to the sun, and it should be where the
sunshine seems to concentrate, so that standing be-
side it we may remove our hat, fill our lungs, and feel
that delicious sensation of warm expansion. In my
ideal garden I would wish to glimpse from the dial a
vista of the horizon to the four points of the compass,
certainly to east and west, that I might be aware of
the world rim and of the great inverted dome of the
sky, with its blue intensity and its lazy cloud flotillas
riding to the zenith directly over the crown of my
head. Then, though my garden were set in lowly places,
I would know for an instant the mood of the peak!

The natural landscape, of course, is seldom a matter
of one line exclusively. Only at the base of a preci-
pice or on the naked prairie is the vertical or the hori-
zontal supreme. The earth's contours are full of broken
lines, of curves and swells, which give contrast and
variety, and because they are physiographically so
interrelated they flow one into the other. Even the
precipice meets the valley floor not with a right angle
but the lovely curve of debris. To a certain extent

LANDSCAPE LINES AND GARDENING 275

Nature looks after our gardens to achieve the same ef-
fect, even when we are neglectful, tending always, for
instance, to throw out a debris-curve of shrubbery and
grasses from a group of trees. But in the gardens I
have visited (and the more elaborate they are the
greater the extent of this tampering) I find a wide-
spread tendency to iron out natural irregularities of
ground, to make a flat floor wherever possible, to ter-
race a beautifully sloping hillside and build a wall or a
rose arbour across a lovely curve. It seems to me that
the loveliest garden is the better if somewhere hi it
there is a rise or dip, untampered with, maintaining
its natural flow of line, to suggest the variety and con-
trast and stimulating irregularity of Nature. How
otherwise shall we escape monotony of mood? I may
be quite wrong in assuming that the best gardens,
like the best literature, ought to seem spontaneous and
natural, a bit of selected reality. But if I am right,
what some of our gardeners need are fewer drag scrap-
ers and more imagination. Wise is the man who
buildeth his garden upon a hill, or near it, for it may
be by some happy planning he can achieve a lovely
curve of lawn or spray-crest of rock and columbine to
cut the blue sky, or an inverted curve to slide into
a ferny hollow, and thus know the mystery and the
stimulation of the natural prospect, where peace and
aspiration, quietude and wonder, dwell side by side.

CHAPTER XVHI
NATURE AND THE PSALMIST

HOW much of the influence of early environ-
ment, of those habituated reactions which com-
prise for each one of us the iron ring of his destiny,
there is in even our deeper attitude toward the
external world — toward what we call Nature! Not
long ago I spent many weeks in the prairie coun-
try of the West, a sense of oppression constantly in-
creasing in weight upon my spirit. Those endless,
level plains! Those roads that stretched without a
break to infinity! A house, a group of barns, a fruit
orchard, now and then a clump of hardwoods, alone
broke the endless, flat monotony of snow-covered
fields — no, not fields, but infinitudes where a single
furrow could put a girdle about an entire township in
my home land! My soul hungered for a hill; my heart
craved, with a dull longing, the sight of a naked birch
tree flung aloft against the winter sky. Back through
the endless plains of Illinois the train crawled, away
from the setting sun. But the next daylight disclosed
the gentle, rolling slopes of the Mohawk Valley, and
before many hours had passed the Berkshire Hills

276

NATURE AND THE PSALMIST 277

were all about us, like familiar things recovered. The
camel-hump of Greylock to the north was sapphire-
blue and beckoning. The nearer mountains wore their
reddish mantles, pricked with green, above the snowy
intervales, and laid their upreared outlines stark against
the sky. Shadowy ravines let into their flanks, sug-
gestive of roaring brooks and the mystery of the wilder-
ness. The clouds trailed purple shadow-anchors; the
sun flashed from the ice on their scarred ledges. And a
weight seemed suddenly lifted from my spirit. The
words of the ancient Psalmist came to my lips uncon-
sciously: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.
From whence cometh my help? My help cometh from
God."

Yes, God dwells in the high places! The Pemige-
wasset Indians who would not climb Mount Moosilauke
because the Great Spirit abode on the windswept sum-
mit, the ancient Hebrew Psalmist who dwelt in the
shadow of the Syrian hills, and I, "the heir to all the
ages," are alike in this primitive sense that God's
dwelling place is up there where our eyes instinctively
lift; for the glory and the wonder of the hills is upon us
all, and we cannot believe otherwise.

Yet what of the man who never saw a hill? What of
the tribesman of the plain or desert, or the Illinois farm-
er's boy? Where, for him, is God's dwelling? I have
seen men from the prairie whom the hills oppressed,
who hungered for their level roads stretching arrow-

278 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

like to the far horizon, just as I hungered for the blue
heave of Greylock. I once spent several days in camp
in the tumbled wilderness under Carrigain, with a man
who all his life had followed the sea. The early sun-
sets and the late dawns, the constant sense of vast rock
walls confronting the vision and cutting off half the sky,
depressed him. He was homesick for the sea. God for
him, I suppose, dwelt on the deep and spoke in the wail
of the wind through the rigging, or roared with the voice
of many waters. Does He speak to the prairie boy in
the rustle of the endless miles of corn? Does He dwell
in that pearly cloud which hangs forever above the far
horizon? Is His dwelling this pervasive immensity of
space? Somewhere He dwells for each of us, for man
perishes who does not find for Him a habitation; but
where it is depends, after all, on habit — on so simple a
thing as the silent influence in early years of external
sights and sounds. I was born near the hills and
nurtured on their breast, and I am never happy long
away from them. The most beautiful thing in the world
to me is Mount Moosilauke; and the loveliest music ever
made is the song of the hermit thrushes on the slopes of
Cannon when the sunset shadows are creeping amid the
hemlock aisles and far below on an upland pasture the
cow-bells tinkle as the herd winds down to the valley.
Were I a psalmist, from such things would my meta-
phors be drawn, and I would bid the world once more
lift up its eyes unto the hills. But there may be psalm-

NATURE AND THE PSALMIST 279

ists of the sea and prairie, of the frozen North and the
languid tropics. After all, what matters is the sense of
divinity that surrounds us, the enkindled spirit which
strikes out from Nature the ultimate metaphor.

The Psalms are lyric poems. Whatever perversions
may have resulted from the conflict between Judaistic
scriptures and a superimposed Ajyan mysticism, a wise
world has known the Psalms all the time for what they
are. The God of the psalmists may have been a tribal
God, to be sure. For that matter, what nation to-day,
after two thousand years of so-called Christianity, but
worships a tribal God? We have of late been forced to
contemplate the sorry spectacle of various nations on the
eve of battle each lifting its voice in prayer to its tribal
divinity, with that terrible certainty and lack of hu-
mour which characterize such narrow devotions. But
the Psalms are not theology: they are lyric poetry — the
expression of a single individual (of his time and his
people, to be sure) in the face of life. Whether he was a
single individual for all the Psalms, or a separate one for
each, does not in the least matter. What the world
cares about is the personal reaction of a human soul, for
that, direct and certain, carries its message to all other
souls, and time or place, name or nationality, are as
naught.

The griefs the Psalmist sang are still our griefs, the
doubts and consolations still are ours, and the world
the Psalmist looked upon is still about us. The sun

280 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

rose and set in Judea, and the Psalmist chanted, "Thou
makest the outgoings of the morning and evening to
rejoice." Here was no "subtle observation " of meteor-
ological conditions peculiar to the east coast of the
Mediterranean; no aesthetic analysis, no scientific spec-
ulation. Here was simply the soul of a man touched
by the beauty and the mystery of a natural phenomenon
till poetry kindled on his lips and devotion in his heart.
It is that simple attitude toward Nature which I some-
times think the world has lost in these latter days, veri-
fying Goethe's statement that "animated inquiry into
causes does great harm." "Thou makest the out-
goings of the morning and evening to rejoice" — how
calm and hushed the picture evoked, how peaceful and
brooding, how like a benediction it falls upon the spirit!
I think of my own mountain land, of a wooded knoll
that rises from the valley, and I stand bareheaded in the
fields while the golden floods of the sunset fill all the in-
tervale with liquid light, an intervale which is like a
green chalice amid the hills. The golden flood creeps
up the eastern slopes, and out of the darkening fields
below the shadows follow, amethyst shadows 'that stray
like smoke amid the birches. At last the gold burns
only in the kindled west, in a gap between two mountain
summits — a gateway to that Land of Wonder which
lies forever around the world-rim underneath the set-
ting sun. The trees upon the little foreground knoll are
silhouetted now, black against the gold. The fields

'Thou makest the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice"

NATURE AND THE PSALMIST 281

are very still. Only a far-off cow-bell tinkles and a
vesper sparrow sings softly to himself. The spirit, too,
is very still, hushed with happy awe. "Thou makest
the outgoings of the morning and the evening to re-
joice." The slow feet turn homeward through a world
transformed, a world not of bicker and restriction and
the small, strutting ego, but of imminent divinity.

Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it [the same hymn
continues in a mood of adoration].

. . . Thou waterest her furrows abundantly;
Thou settlest the ridges thereof:
Thou makest it soft with showers;
Thou blessest the springing thereof.
Thou crownest the year with thy goodness;
And thy paths drop fatness.

We may wax learned over this passage, declaring that
it shows the influence of "the simple nature-religion of
a long-established agricultural people," the Hittites of
the land of Canaan. We may discourse on the geog-
raphy and climate of Canaan, and show that in a time
and region where all life depended upon the success of
the crops, nothing could be more natural than this ado-
ration. Yet all our discourse and discussion will seem
futile enough on a day late in April, when we stand in
familiar fields and watch the world made soft with
showers. There will be a frail green upon the bosom
of the earth where it is not ridged into gleaming brown
furrows. In the orchard and the woods there will be a
haze of emerald. A fringe of poplars or of birches by

282 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

the wall have put on their virgin veils, and suddenly
they bow gracefully in the rising gust, tossing against a
sky where sunshine and blue seem to be chased down
from the zenith and back again from the horizon by the
cloudy cohorts of the shower. The rain comes with a
long, lateral swish, then straightens up to fall gently, till
the fields send forth a rich earthy fragrance, the incense
of the Spring. If it be the simple Nature- worship of a
primitive agricultural people to feel, in this beautiful
and benignant spectacle, this picture so soft and
virginal and fragrant, repeated through the years and
the centuries, the hand that loosed the floodgates of the
shower, to view it calmly with the faith of a child un-
troubled by too animated an inquiry into causes, then
let us be thankful that some instincts of our racial child-
hood still persist. Facts, facts, facts — why must we be
forever going to Nature in search of facts! Let us go
to Nature now and then in search of the great, simple
mysteries.

And thy paths drop fatness.

They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness:

And the hills are girded with joy.

The pastures are clothed with flocks;

The valleys also are covered over with corn;

They shout for joy, they also sing.

It is a lush midsummer day. The cattle are lying
beneath a great oak in the upland pasture. Across the
valley other hills go up with pastures flung like mantles

NATURE AND THE PSALMIST 283

over their shoulders. The corn is in the green valley,
with the winding thread of the river, and the glittering
track of the railroad, the white church-spire above the
village elms, and a certain roof that I call home. The
dome of heaven is overhead; the sunshine is every-
where. "They shout for joy, they also sing." I am
quite content to drop into a lazy bed of sweet-fern and
become a Hittite for the time, a countryman of the
manly Uriah, whose dignified devotion to duty, as
Chamberlain has pointed out, contrasted so favourably
with the "criminal levity" of King David!

In our mountain world the Lord indeed "stretcheth
out the heavens like a curtain" and "maketh the clouds
his chariot." It is not for us that he "layeth the beams
of his chambers in the waters"; dwellers by lake or sea
can best realize the force of that majestic metaphor;
but he walketh upon the wings of our winds and maketh
them his messengers. I know a great oak that stands
alone and self-sufficient in a pasture (what is so self-
sufficient as a sturdy, well-developed tree isolated in a
clearing?), and when the northwest winds come charg-
ing down the valley it tosses its branches protestingly
against the buffet, and the silent, rushing current be-
comes audible, is given a voice. It is only when the
hurricane meets opposition that its voice is heard;
its sweep is soundless through the upper air. Behind
the great tree domes the blue sky where the clouds
drive, an endless flotilla hurrying down the gale. The

picture is full of colour, of spaciousness, of "go." How
far off and deep the sky appears! How melodious is
the tossing, wailing rustle of the giant tree! How
sweet in my ear, as I sit amid the hardback, is the
sudden little whistle as a gust sweeps down even into
my lowly shelter! In such a mood I am asking no
questions of Nature; I am humble before the spectacle,
content to observe why the Psalmist said that the Lord
maketh the clouds his chariot. My imagination is ex-
panded; my soul goes up to ride upon the racing cumuli!

He appointed the moon for seasons:

The sun knoweth his going down.
Thou makest darkness, and it is night;

Wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth.
The young lions roar after their prey,

And seek their meat from God.
The sun ariseth, they get them away,

And lay them down in their dens.
Man goeth forth unto his work

And to his labour until the evening.

What a simple statement this is of the rotation of
the hours, and yet how all-sufficient, in certain of our
moods, even to this day ! A mile or two back from the
coast in the old Narragansett country of Rhode Isl-
and, amid the pitchpines and oaks, there is a fresh-
water pond of great beauty. Here on its shores until
a generation ago the last of the Narragansetts had
their reservation, their council-ring, and their school -
house. The pond still bears the name they gave it,

NATURE AND THE PSALMIST 285

Quacom-paug— "The Lake of the Great White Gull"—
and their trails lead away from its shores into the
surrounding swamps, overgrown now with blackberry
vines or eroded deep into the sandy soil. Once I
tramped in through the woods to this pond as the
afternoon was failing and launched a canoe on its
dark, still mirror. The sunset reddened till it glowed
like a far-off conflagration between the pine boles on
the western bank. The shadows of twilight stole out
of the forest behind me. Creeping along shore, it
seemed that night was already come, but by shooting
the canoe out free of the lily pads and the reflections
of the forest edge, the lake surface appeared to give up
daylight still. Presently the canoe slipped around a
wooded promontory — noiselessly, without even a drip
from the paddle — and there, knee-deep in the dark-
brown water, stood two deer, their tails startlingly
white against the black wall of the forest. They were
drinking, but one of them looked up, surprised, and
gazed at me with his great eyes, as deer will often do
before they make a move. He let me slide the canoe
still closer before he turned, and, with evidently a
whispered word to his companion, crashed up the
bank and disappeared, the doe following obediently.
A flash of white tail in the night blackness of the
forest was the last thing I saw, but for a full minute I
could hear, in diminuendo, the cracking of undergrowth
and twigs.

286 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

I paddled slowly back to my landing, with the stars
twinkling and bobbing in the water off the bow, and
curled up, after a quiet, lonely supper, for the night,
pleasantly aware of the soft, melancholy whistle of a
screech-owl, the sounds of little creatures coming down
to the lake to drink, the splash of a fish jumping for in-
sects, and once, as I woke and turned, of a swish
through the grasses, as if a fox had been prowling
near the provisions.

The next morning the birds were busy at their
matins, but along all the shore-line, where the green
forest came down to dip its toes in the lake, not a crea-
ture was visible. There was, however, a fresh track
in the mud near my canoe, as if a wizened foot had been
set down there: a coon had visited the water, perhaps
to drink, perhaps to wash a morsel of food. In half an
hour after breakfast I came out of the woods upon
the Post Road. It was too early for the day's pro-
cession of touring automobiles (whose passengers would
rush past this knoll where I stood nor ever guess that
the trail behind me led into the real Narragansett
country, which they would never see) ; but in the fields
men were astir. Already I could hear the hot "click,
click, click" of a mowing-machine. A hay-rake rattled
past on the road. Smoke was coming from the chim-
neys of the gray houses that looked almost like great
bowlders on the low, green plain between the Post Road
and the yellow sand bar a mile or two away. The

NATURE AND THE PSALMIST 287

sun was up, the world of men was astir and had gone
forth to its labour until evening. I lifted my eyes to
the yellow sand bar, while my nostrils sniffed the salt.
Yonder was the sea, "great and wide"; yes, and there
went the ships, trailing their long smoke-plumes far
out where Block Island lay like a blue cloud on the
horizon line. The Psalmist's cycle had been completed,
and I walked homeward strangely at peace, the salt
wind and the sunshine for my companions.

It is Winter now, and the snow has come, the deep
snow which settles over our mountain world, trans-
forming all the landscape for three or four months, al-
tering its colour values, softening its outlines, and giv-
ing us a season which those who dwell in cities know
nothing of. How expectantly we awaited the first
steady storm from the northwest! The bare, frozen
earth awaited it expectantly, too, each flower-root chill
for its coverlid. I once heard of a little girl who ex-
claimed, when she saw her first snowfall, "Look,
mamma! God has busted His feather-bed!" I like
that exclamation. It is picturesque, and it is instinct
with primitive devotion. Does it not suggest, indeed,
the words of the Psalmist:

He giveth snow like wool;

He scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes.

"He giveth snow like wool." We go out in the first
storm, away from our warm house amid its spruces, and

288 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

swing rapidly -into the open country, our faces up-
turned to feel the gentle sting of the flakes on cheek
and lip. We cannot see far into the dull, whitish-gray
sky; we are looking into opacity, a vast opacity which
overhangs the world and drops cool wool upon our
cheeks. The familiar landscape about us, too, is sud-
denly strange. The well-loved peaks have disappeared.
Perspective is curiously marked by the quality of sharp-
ness in upstanding objects. Close to us along the
road runs a wall and a row of nude sugar-maples, dark
and solid against the drift of the storm. Between the
trunks we can see, perhaps, a group of corn-shocks
standing in the field, and they are of fainter tone.
Beyond them the hedge-row of poplars and choke-
cherries which marks the farther boundary is fainter
still, almost as shadowy as the storm itself. Beyond
that there is nothing but the white mystery. Out
of the vast opacity above us the flakes fall without
ceasing, and our boots have already become silent on
the frozen road. In this great transformation of the
visible universe we are isolated beings carrying with us
as we move a narrow circle of familiar objects, yet
aware always of the immensity beyond. One is never
so intimate with Nature, so conscious of the pervasive-
ness of her phenomena, as in a snowstorm. In the
little circle of visible objects, reduced to their barest
essentials of mass and shade value, we are the exact cen-
tre always; and in some manner not easy to explain

NATURE AND THE PSALMIST 289

— perhaps impossible to explain to any one not ac-
customed to a voluntary life in the open — that gives
us a curious sense of relationship with Nature, of
dependence upon her, a deep, impregnable belief that
in her manifestations we come closest to divinity.

When the snow has laid its winter mantle on our
hills and built magic cornices along our brooks, Orion
greets us from the evening sky and the Dog Star hangs
like a lamp amid the spires of the firs. I return some-
times from New York — from the noise and glare and
hurry of its streets, from the feverishness of its spirit,
the oppression of its imprisoning canon walls — and old
Orion is like a friend awaiting me. Often I think of
Martineau's words:

Silence is in truth the attribute of God; and those who
seek Him from that side invariably learn that meditation is
not the dream but the reality of life; not its illusion, but its
truth; not its weakness, but its strength. Such act of the
mind is quite needful, in order to rectify the estimates of the
senses and the lower understanding, to shake off the drowsy
order of perceptions, in which, with the eyes of the soul half
closed, we are apt to doze away existence here. Neglecting
it now, we shall wake into it hereafter, and find that we have
been walking in our sleep. It is necessary even for preserving
the truthfulness of our practical life.

To meditate in the night watches, to ascend through
the frosty darkness the pasture slope behind the garden
and from the hill to watch the slow procession of the
stars across the sky — worlds which reck so little of

290 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

those valley lamps down here where our small village
nestles — is to know indeed that

The heavens declare the glory of God,
And the firmament sheweth His handiwork.

From Jupiter our earth would be but a tiny star; from
Sirius it would be, no doubt, invisible. What "insect
cares" are these that trouble us, in the face of such im-
mensity? As the imagination leaps into depth beyond
depth of space, layer after layer of passion and small-
ness seem cast off from our spirits, and in the silence
of the midnight our soul taps anew the primal sources of
its strength.

"Silence came before creation, and the heavens were
spread without a word." The stars and the sunshine,
the grass and the trees, the snow that is sent like wool,
the blessing of soft showers, all the lovely spectacle of
the seasons, the dome of the hills, the curve of the sea-
rim, were man's inheritance before he builded cities and
made himself triumphant and ubiquitous. Of course,
to say that God dwells only on the hills or speaks with
the voice of many waters, to make of Nature- worship a
denial of His habitation in the human heart, a denial of
man's urgent need for the Presence in the market-
place, would be the merest folly. But, especially per-
haps in these latter days when we speak so much of a
"love of Nature" and know so little what that means,
when neither the scientific inquiry of the naturalist nor

NATURE AND THE PSALMIST 291

the summer exodus through the countryside in auto-
mobiles is enough to give the world again the quick,
poetic, instinctive sense of the divinity of rocks and
trees and springing crops, we can more than ever feel
the need for a return to primal wonder. God will not
speak in the market till he has whispered in the still
places. To invest stocks and stones with the incom-
municable Name is not an act of childishness, but of the
deepest wisdom, the wisdom of the heart that worships
and is amazed, that re-creates in meditation the powers
by which men live. In the fever of our modern life we
cannot return to Nature too intimately. We have as
yet, in spite of our pose, hardly begun that return. The
ancient nurse awaits our humbleness.

CHAPTER XIX

I LIKE the coming of Winter, nor can I easily read
into it the symbols of sadness which the poets find.

Ah, minstrel, how strange is
The carol you sing !
Let Psyche who ranges
The gardens of Spring
Remember the changes
December will bring!

Yet Psyche was of immortal stuff, and might easily have
comforted herself with Shelley's reflection, "If Winter
comes, can Spring be far behind?" The seasons wax
and wane, each with its own peculiar charm, and the last
rose of Summer is, after all, but the promise of a larger
bush next year, rather than the sad reminder of man's
mortality. We may be permitted some sober moments,
some lingering melancholy, when we walk in the garden
and see the sweet alyssum borders withered down, the
Japanese anemones cut off in their perfection by the
frost, the leaves of the poplars by the pool blowing
across the sward or floating on the dark water. But
even then we remember that the potatoes are dug and

292

CHRISTMAS AND THE WINTER WORLD 293

stowed away in the cellar, and from the orchard comes
the pungent fragrance of apples; and lifting our eyes to
the hills, we see the banners of Autumn already flying on
their wooded slopes.

The garden dies down for its winter sleep, the harvest
is reaped, and the season slips into that indefinite stage
between autumn glory and winter snow, when a blue
haze hangs in the leafless trees, the chill winds of No-
vember blow, and there is ice on the little water pools of
a morning. It is in this season, this hush of Nature be-
fore the winter storms, that Thanksgiving comes, our
most characteristic and best-loved American holiday.
Surely there is no melancholy in Thanksgiving, though
there may be just a touch of soberness as we think back
to those grim days when the Pilgrims reaped their first
scanty harvest between the sea beach and the forest
edge, and thanked God for the mere gift of life. The
last warmth of Indian Summer has gone from the air,
the last golden leaves have dropped from the maples,
the smell of bonfires is no longer pungent; yet every
country-bred American, I fancy, knows what I mean
when I say that the Thanksgiving season has a peculiar,
a unique charm.

From the Tennessee Cumberlands north to Canada
leaves have fallen and lie restless on the ground, not yet
shrivelled nor rotted, but crisp beneath the foot and in
the morning indescribably fragrant with frost. The
sky has lost its autumn clarity; there is a touch of lead

in it, a hint of gathering winter storms. Out in the
bare, brown fields a few corn-shocks stand, and perhaps
now and then a golden pumpkin; and already the crows
and the pheasants have discovered this food supply.
The deep woods are very still. The insect under-song
of Summer has died in the grass, the bird songs in the
trees. Only the wiry little cheeps of the chickadees are
heard in the woods, or now and then the distant blows
of a woodpecker or the startled uprush and booming
flight of a partridge. The woodchucks have dug them-
selves in for the Winter. The squirrels have already
hoarded their nuts, though occasionally you will see one
sitting on a pine stump shredding a cone. Occasionally,
too, you will see ahead a strange glint of light and come
upon a maple tree so well protected that it has not yet
lost its golden foliage. On a leaden November day it
seems for all the world like a burst of sunshine down
the forest aisle. Perhaps, far off, the crack of a hunter's
gun will wake the echoes. There may be ice on the lip
of the spring under the fern bank, and the sweet water is
very cold. As you come back into the fields again, you
hear the shouts of the football players, playing the an-
nual Thanksgiving game, the last of the season. Smoke
is ascending from all the chimneys, and your nostrils
scent food. Could Thanksgiving come at any time but
this gray, frosty November season, in this hush of
Nature before the winter storms? We who were born
in the country, at any rate, would not have it otherwise.

CHRISTMAS AND THE WINTER WORLD 295

It is not long after Thankgsiving, in my mountain
home, that Winter comes upon us in full force. It may
have been that he sent cavalry scouts of snow before
Thanksgiving — as early as November seventh they have
arrived, I recall — but these have melted away before a
morning's bombardment of sun. In December, how-
ever, Winter brings up his main forces, and we wake
some morning to find the leaden sky milky in the north-
west and a strange expectancy of chill in the air. Pres-
ently, over the battlement of our guardian mountain,
comes the first puff of artillery, then the whole long
ridge is hidden in the smoke, and ten minutes later the
enemy is up and over, the storm has enveloped us,
Winter, the conqueror, is here!

We wake the second morning into a world trans-
formed, a world of white dazzle, with every angular line
in the landscape softened into a curve by the snow, every
fir tree a lovely minaret, every vista carpeted with
crystal. "It is a Christmas-card world!" we say.

A Christmas-card world! How can Winter be
cheerless when it reminds us of Christmas? Christmas,
the wise ones tell us, is only half a Christian festival
—it represents in part a pagan survival, like Easter.
The thought, instead of being disconcerting to the
orthodox, should be pleasant, for the continuity of
man's spiritual nature is thus attested. Certainly, to
us northern peoples, the spirit of Christmas and the
spirit of Winter are inextricably knit. The strange

296 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

white purity of Nature under snow, the aspect of a
world transformed from its rigid outlines, with its bare-
ness and ugliness softly hidden, gives us all an im-
memorial thrill; the delight and the wonder never grow
less. And with such a world transformed is Christmas
associated. We pray for a "white Christmas." We
frost our Christmas cards. We depict the Star of
Bethlehem as shining over a snow-laden land. Our
artists even fancy steam ascending from the nostrils of
the gentle cattle in the stable. Such minor lapses
from physiographical accuracy do not trouble us in
the least, because for us the great, outstanding fact
about Christmas is that it is the sweet, solemn, joyous
festival of Winter. That for the inhabitants of the
underside of our spinning ball it comes in Summer is a
fact totally beyond the range of our comprehensions.
I used to wonder as a child how the people of Aus-
tralia could have any Christmas at all !

The origin of the Christmas tree I do not now re-
member. Is the tree a gift from Paganism, also? At
any rate, it is another link connecting Christmas with
the winter world. The unfortunate inhabitants of
towns, who must needs buy their tree from the corner
grocer, miss one of the season's rarest delights. In our
mountain world, a couple of days before the holiday
we put on our moccasins, our snow-shoes, our mittens
and caps, and, armed with an axe, we set forth into the
woods. The woods are quite silent now, for even

The cold, white world without, sparkling under the frosty stars

CHRISTMAS AND THE WINTER WORLD 297

the chickadees have deserted them, coming in about
our dwellings. The only sound is made by the snow
falling from wind-stirred branches or melted off by the
sun. We hear it falling, with tiny, soft thuds, as we
go along. The forest aisles are like a frost cathedral.
Low branches shake "their frosty pepper'* in our faces.
On the ground are many tracks, mute records of the
wood creatures. Here a squirrel has run from a tree
to his storehouse under a stump. There a pheasant
slept last night, scratching away the snow to the bed
of leaves below. Here a rabbit has gone bounding
along. There a deer has passed, stopping to browse
off a ground hemlock. But there is no sound of them
now. The woods are still, save for the soft thuds of the
tiny falling drifts from the branches — still and white,
and lit by the winter sun. Presently we come upon the
stand of young evergreens we are seeking, and hunting
out the perfect specimen we desire, thick branched to
the very ground, our axe rings out in the frosty silence
and the fragrant spruce or balsam topples down. We
tug it home with laughter, meeting others with similar
loads, and as we draw near our dwelling, and the low
afternoon sun is casting purple shadows over the snow
and the eastern mountains are melting into amethyst,
we smell the pungent fragrance of wood fires burn-
ing and hear on the village street the jingle of sleigh-
bells.

We always have a little Christmas tree, too, for the

birds. Winter is the season when the birds need most
protection, for their natural food supply is largely cut
off, and our house is ringed with suet boxes and feed-
ing tables. But just outside the dining-room window,
on the very ledge, is the chief feeding place, and here
are sunflower seeds and suet at all hours; and at all
hours the chickadees, juncos, nuthatches, and wood-
peckers may be seen feeding. The chickadees will
feed from our hands, and if the window is open they will
hop boldly inside, even taking food from the table while
we are at dinner. They are so pretty, so friendly,
such brave and cheerful little creatures, that a far less
tender soul than Saint Francis would desire to share
with them his Christmas joys. So we give them a
Christmas tree all their own. It is a tiny fir tree, set
in a pail outside the window. It is hung with bits of
suet and seeds, and on the top is a little red candle,
which we light before dark on Christmas Eve, because
birds retire early, and the chickadees must have their
celebration before bedtime!

It is the proper thing, I know, to sit around the
family hearth (or the family radiator) at Christmas
time and read "The Christmas Carol." But I have to
make the shameless confession that I cannot read
"The Christmas Carol" any more. For me, it no
longer represents Christmas, nor the spirit of Christmas.
You remember that old Scrooge, after his conversion,
among various other remarkable performances gave

CHRISTMAS AND THE WINTER WORLD 299

Bob Cratchit, his clerk, a playful dig in the ribs and a
rise in pay. It was Dr. Crothers, I believe, who first
suggested that it would have been rather embarrassing
for Scrooge (and incidentally, we may add, for Dickens)
if Bob, instead of showing a very proper lower-middle-
class gratitude, had demanded all the back pay which
Scrooge, by this act, had confessed was really his due —
in other words, if he had demanded justice, not charity.
The longer I live, the more I am learning the truth of
a statement once made to me by the best man I have
ever known, and the truest Christian, a man who lit-
erally gives half of his time and nearly half of his income
to the salvation of the sinful, the homeless, the outcast.
"Charity," he said, "is the most abominable word in
the English language."

I once knew a New York woman of wealth and social
position to argue against socialism on the ground that
socialism strove to abolish the rich and poor alike.
"And without the poor," she said, "we can have no
charity, which is at the very basis of Christianity."

I was amazed at her words, nor have I quite recovered
yet, for I have been realizing more and more that be-
hind a vast deal of our Christmas literature lurks, in
reality, this very spirit. And we have been calling
this thing, which, when stripped of its gloss, its senti-
mentalities, its glad holiday wrappings, is so appal-
ling, the Spirit of Christmas! After all, isn't it the
spirit behind even the beloved "Carol"? I am afraid

300 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

that it is. I find it there, at any rate, and I never
read the "Carol" any more.

"The meek and gentle Jesus," whose meekness and
whose gentleness have been far too much insisted
on, would have quite other ideas of the spirit of Christ-
mas. If ever a flame was born into the world to incite
men to a passion not for charity but for love, not for the
spirit which finds satisfaction in handing down to
those below, but in raising those below to full equality,
not for almsgiving but for justice, that flame burst
into light in the manger of Bethlehem. When shall we
realize that Jesus was a radical? That He was so rad-
ical that He is even yet not understood ? When shall we
realize that the chant of the multitude of the heavenly
host, heard of those shepherds who were abiding in
their fields by night, can never be fulfilled so long as one
half of the human race has so much that it finds self-
satisfaction in making Christmas gifts to the other half,
and the other half has so little that it knows no good-
will for covetousness, and no peace for hunger? "Peace
on earth, good-will to men!" Yes, that was the chant
of the heavenly host, and to-day the guns are booming
and the world is red with blood that the nations may
have more trade, while little children toil in mills and
factories, and pregnant mothers bow with work and
hunger. What more than those simple shepherds have
we done? They went and worshipped. We fill a
basket with the leavings from our ample board, and

CHRISTMAS AND THE WINTER WORLD 301

make a visit to the "deserving poor," feeling as good as
Scrooge, and expecting that some Tiny Tim will cry,
"God bless us every one."

But perhaps we are pressing the essayist's privilege
of discursiveness too far in thus departing from our
theme of Christmas and the winter world. Yet it is
often such thoughts as these which come to me, far
though I am from cities and the problems of cities,
from wars and rumours of wars, wandering over snowy
fields where only the varying hare has been ahead.
Sometimes the problems of life are never so clearly
seen as in solitude, and certainly the strength to
meet them is never so well engendered as in silence and
meditation. I like best to think of Christmas with
all its old-fashioned flavouring of roast goose and plum
pudding and Santa Claus and tinselled trees and rap-
turous kiddies and jingling sleigh-bells. I like to see the
light and jollity within, the clear, cold, white world
without, sparkling under the frosty stars. I like to
glow with greeting for my neighbours, and feel well-
disposed toward all the universe. I love to put the
candles behind the wreaths in the windows and wait
for our village choir to arrive outside, and then to hear
their voices raised in the still night air, singing,

Good King Wenceslaus looked out

On the feast of Stephen —
and

We three kings of Orient are,
Bearing gifts, we travel afar —

302 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES

and other lovely, plaintive old carols of the season,
coming uncorrupted from Shakespeare's England.

Yet it isn't in any of these things that the deepest
suggestion of Christmas lies. It is rather when I
come from the woods on Christmas afternoon, across
the snowy fields that are already stiffening up as the
low sun sets till they creak under my snow-shoes, and
draw near my own home when twilight is stealing down
the eastern hills and hanging like a veil in my evergreens.
Then I see, in the dark block of the house, two reddish
gold squares of light, light that dances on the panes be-
cause the logs are snapping, the flames are wallowing
up the chimney. I smell the smoke of them, a delicate
fragrance on the cold winter air. Those golden win-
dow squares mean home, they mean not affluence, I
am sure, nor yet poverty, but they are the result of
wholesome struggle, which, I pray God, has harmed no
other man. I should be less than human if I were
not proud of them, if they did not make me warm with
happiness, more tender toward the dear ones behind
their shelter. But should I not be less than human,
too, certainly less than Christian, if I did not confess
that the true spirit of Christmas is the spirit which
admits that some such a home is the right of every
man who is born of woman, and which ardently de-
sires each man to come into his birthright? I cannot
see Christmas in any other way. I cannot approach
my house behind its evergreens, coming out of the

CHRISTMAS AND THE WINTER WORLD 303

winter world into the fragrance of its open fires and the
glow of its window squares, without a pang of passionate
happiness, and in the shadow a stab of remorse. The
winter world is so exquisite, so white, so purged and
still and beautiful! A happy home is so wonderful a
thing! And yet the Babe who was born in Bethlehem
has sorrow in His eyes.

"Justice," He seems to say, "and a little of the
white world for us all!"

THE END

•THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

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