Winter sunshine

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Southern Branch
of the

University of California

Los Angeles

Form Ll

This book is DUE on the last date stamped below

MAK S

DEC 8 1921
JAN 4 1926

MOV 2 2 1928
JAN 3
MAY 20 191

Form L-9-5»(-12,'M

SNOW BUNTINGS.

n.»tMt Cal.

WINTER SUNSHINE

JOHN BURROUGHS

AUTHOR OF

JUS AND POETS

Tenth Edition

BOSTON

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street

1885

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, by

JOHN BURKOUGHS,
In the Offloe of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE:

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY
B. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY-

PREFATORY.

THE only part of my book I wish to preface is
the last part, — the foreign sketches, — and it is not
much matter about these, since, if they do not contain
their own proof I shall not attempt to supply it here.

I have been told that De Lolme, who wrote a no-
table book on the English Constitution, said that
after he had been in England a few weeks, he fully
made up his mind to write a book on that country ;
after he had lived there a year, he still thought of
writing a book, but was not so certain about it, but
that after a residence of ten years he abandoned his
first design altogether. Instead of furnishing an ar-
gument against writing out one's first impressions of
a country, I think the experience of the Frenchman
shows the importance of doing it at once. The sen-
sations of the first day are what we want — the first
flush of the traveler's thought and feeling, before
his perception and sensibilities become cloyed or
blunted, or before he in any way becomes a part of
that which he would observe and describe. Then the
American in England is just enough at home to en-

IV PREFATOEY.

able him to discriminate subtle shades and differences
af'first sight which might escape a traveler of another
and antagonistic race. He has brought with him,
but little modified or impaired, his whole inheritance
of English ideas and predilections, and much of
what he sees affects him like a memory. It is his
own past, his ante-natal life, and his long buried an-
cestors look through his eyes and perceive with his
sense.

I have attempted only the surface, and to express
my own first day's uncloyed and unalloyed satisfac-
tion. Of course I have put these things through my
own processes and given them my own coloring (as
who would not), and if other travelers do not find
what I did, it is no fault of mine ; or if the " Brit-
.shers " do not deserve all the pleasant things I say of
them, why then so much the worse for them.

In fact, if it shall appear that I have treated this
part in the same spirit that I have the themes in the
other chapters, reporting only such things as im-
pressed me and stuck to me and tasted good, I shall
be satisfied.

, 1875.

CONTENTS.

MM

I. WINTER SUNSHINE 7

II. EXHILARATIONS OF THE KOAD . . . . 31 1/

III. THE Sxow- WALKERS 51 1/

IV. THE Fox 79/

V. ANARCH CHKOMCLE J$

_^VI. AUTUMN TIDES 113

TIL THE APPLE 129-X

VIIL An OCTOBER ABROAD 149

I. Mellow England . .... 151

n. English Characteristics .... 190

m. A Glimpse of France 205 ^

nr. From London to New York ... 220

WINTEK SUNSHINE.

WINTER SUNSHINE.

AN American resident in England is reported aa
Baying that the \JEnglish have an atmosphere but no
climate. The reverse of this remark would apply
pretty accurately to our own case. We certainly
have a climate, a two-edged one that cuts both ways,
threatening us with sun-stroke on the one hand and
with frost-stroke on the other, but we have no atmos-
phere to speak of in New York and New England,
except now and then during the dog-days, or the fit-
ful and uncertain Indian Summer. An atmosphere,
the quality of tone and mellowness in the near dis-
tance, is the product of a more humid climate. Hence,
as we go south from New York, the atmospheric
effects become more rich and varied, until on reach-
ing the Potomac you find an atmosphere as well as a
climate. The latter is still on the vehement Ameri-
can scale, full of sharp and violent changes and con-
trasts, baking and blistering in summer, and nipping
and blighting in winter, but the spaces are not so
purged and bare ; the horizon wall does not so often
have the appearance of having just been washed and
scrubbed down. There is more depth and visibility

10 WINTER SUNSHINE.

to the open air, a stronger infusion of the Indian
Summer element throughout the year, than is found
farther north. The days are softer and more brood-
ing, and the nights more enchanting. It is here that
Walt Whitman saw the full moon

" Pour down Night's nimbus floods,"

as any one may see her, during her full, from Octo-
ber to May. There is more haze and vapor in the
atmosphere during that period, and every particle
seems to collect and hold the pure radiance until the
world swims with the lunar outpouring. Is not the
full moon always on the side of fair weather ? I think
it is Sir William Herschell who says her influence
tends to dispel the clouds. Certain it is her beauty
is seldom lost or even veiled in this southern or semi-
southern clime.

It is here also the poet speaks of the

" Floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous,
Indolent sinking sun, burning, expanding the air,"

a description that would not apply with the same
force farther north, where the air seems thinner and
less capable of absorbing and holding the sunlight.
Indeed, the opulence and splendor of our climate, at
least the climate of our Atlantic sea-board, cannot be
fully appreciated by the dweller north of the thirty-
ninth parallel. It seemed as if I had never seen but
a second-rate article of sunlight or moonlight until I
had taken up my abode in the National Capital. It
Way be, perhaps, because we have such splendid sped

WINTER SUNSHINE. 11

wens of both at that period of the year when one
values such things highest, namely, in the fall and
winter and early spring. Sunlight is good any time,
but a bright, evenly tempered day is certainly more
engrossing to the attention in winter than in summer,
and such days seem the rule, and not the exception, in
the Washington winter. The deep snows keep to
the north, the heavy rains to the south, leaving a
blue space central over the border States. And there
is not one of the winter months but wears this blue
zone as a girdle.

I am not thinking especially of the Indian Sum-

/iner, that charming but uncertain second youth of the

/ New England year, but of regularly recurring lucid

I intervals in the weather system of the Virginia fall

\ and winter, when the best our climate is capable of

»tands revealed, — southern days with northern blood

in their veins, exhilarating, elastic, full of action, the

hyperborean oxygen of the North tempered by the

dazzling sun of the South, a little bitter in winter to

all travelers but the pedestrian — to him sweet and

warming — but in autumn a vintage that intoxicates

all lovers of the open air.

It is impossible not to dilate and expand under
such skies. One breathes deeply and steps proudly,
and if he have any of the eagle nature in him it
comes to the surface then. There is a sense of alti-
tude about these dazzling November and December
days, of mountain tops and pure ether. The earth in
passing through the fire of summer seema to have
•ost all its dross, and life all its impediments.

12 WINTER SUNSHINE.

\

But what does not the dweller in the National
Capital endure in reaching these days? Think of
the agonies of the heated term, the ragings of the
dog-star, the purgatory of heat and dust, of baking,
blistering pavements, of cracked and powdered fields,
of dead stifling night air, from which every tonic and
antiseptic quality seems eliminated, leaving a resid-
uum of sultry malaria and all diffusing privy and
sewer gases, that lasts from the first of July to near
the middle of September. But when October is
reached, the memory of these things is afar off, and
the glory of the days is a perpetual surprise.

I sally out in the morning with the ostensible pur-
pose of gathering chestnuts, or autumn leaves, or
persimmons, or exploring some run or branch. It is,
say, the last of October or the first of November.
The air is not balmy, but tart and pungent, like the
flavor o/ the red-cheeked apples by the road-side. In
the sky not a cloud, not a speck ; a vast dome of
blue ether lightly suspended above the world. The
woods are heaped with color like a painter's palette —
great splashes of red and orange and gold. The
ponds and streams bear upon their bosoms leaves of
all tints, from the deep maroon of the oak to the pale
yellow of the chestnut. In the glens and nooks it is
so still that the chirp of a solitary cricket is notice-
able. The red berries of the dogwood and spice-bush
and other shrubs shine in the sun like rubies and
coral. The crows fly high above the earth as they do
only on such days, forms of ebony floating across the

WINTER SUNSHINE. 18

azure, and the buzzards look like kingly birds, sail*
ing round and round.

Or it may be later in the season, well into Decem
ber. The days are equally bright, but a little more
rugged. The mornings are ushered in by an im-
mense spectrum thrown upon the eastern sky. A
broad bar of red and orange lies along the low hori-
zon, surmounted by an expanse of color in which
green struggles with yellow and blue with green half
the way to the zenith. By and by the red and or-
ange spread upward and grow dim, the spectrum fades
and the sky becomes suffused with yellow white light,
and in a moment the fiery scintillations of the sun
begin to break across the Maryland hills. Then be-
fore long the mists and vapors uprise like the breath
of a giant army, and for an hour or two one is re-
minded of a November morning in England. But
by mid-forenoon the only trace of the obscurity that
remains is a slight haze, and the day is indeed a sum-
mons and a challenge to come forth. If the Octo-
ber days were a cordial like the sub-acids of fruit,
these are a tonic like the wine of iron. Drink deep
T>r be careful how you taste this December vintage.
The first sip may chill, but a full draught warms and
invigorates. No loitering by the brooks or in the
woods now, but spirited, rugged walking along the
public highway. The sunbeams are welcome now.
They seem like pure electricity — like friendly and
recuperating lightning. Are we led to think elec-
tricity abounds only in summer, when we see in the

14 WINTER SUNSHINE.

storm-clouds as it were, the veins and ore-beds of it t
I imagine it is equally abundant in winter, and more
equable and better tempered. Who ever breasted
a snow-storm without being excited and exhilarated,
as if this meteor had come charged with latent auroras
of the North, as doubtless it has ? It is like being
pelted with sparks from a battery. Behold the frost-
work on the pane — the wild, fantastic limnings and
etchings, can there be any doubt but this subtle
agent has been here ? Where is it not ? It is the
life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire
of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp
whiter air is full of it. When I come in at night
after an all day tramp I am charged like a Leyden
jar, my hair crackles and snaps beneath the comb
like a cat's back, and a strange, new glow diffuses it-
self through my system.

It is a spur that one feels at this season more than
at any other. How nimbly you step forth! The
woods roar, the waters shine, and the hills look in-
vitingly near. You do not miss the flowers and the
songsters, or wish the trees or the fields any different,
or heavens any nearer. Every object pleases. A
rail fence, running athwart the hills, now in sunshine
and now in shadow — how the eye lingers upon it !
Or the straight, light-gray trunks of the trees, where
the woods have recently been laid open by a roaJ or
a clearing, how curious they look, and as if surprised
in undress. Next year they will begin to shoot out
branches and make themselves a screen. Or the

SUNSHINE. 15

farm scenes — the winter barn-yards littered with
husks and straw, the rough-coated horses, the cattle
sunning themselves or walking down to the spring to
drink, the domestic fowls moving about — there is a
touch of sweet homely life in these things that the
winter sun enhances and brings out. Every sign of
life is welcome at this season. I love to hear dogs
bark, hens cackle, and boys shout ; one has no pri-
vacy with Nature now, and does not wish to seek
her in nooks and hidden ways. She is not at home
if he goes there ; her house is shut up and her hearth
cold ; only the sun and sky, and perchance the waters,
wear the old look, and to-day we will make love
to them, and they shall abundantly return it.

Even the crows and the buzzards draw the eye
fondly. The National Capital is a great place for
buzzards, and I make the remark in no double or
allegorical sense either, for the buzzards I mean are
black and harmless as doves, though perhaps hardly
dovelike in their tastes. My vulture is also a bird of
leisure, and sails through the ether on long flexible
pinions, as if that was the one delight of his life.
Some birds have wings others have " pinions." The
buzzard enjoys this latter distinction. There is some-
thing in the sound of the word that suggests that
easy, dignified, undulatory movement. He does not
propel himself along by sheer force of muscle, after
the plebeian fashion of the crow for instance, but
progresses by a kind of royal indirection that puzzles
che eye. Even on a windy winter day he rides the

16 WINTER SUNSHINE.

vast aerial billows as placidly as ever, rising and fall-
ing as he comes up toward you, carving his way
through the resisting currents by a slight oscilla-
tion to the right and left, but never once beating the
air openly.

This superabundance of wing power is very un-
equally distributed among the feathered races, the
hawks and vultures having by far the greater share
of it. They cannot command the most speed, but
their apparatus seems the most delicate and con-
summate. Apparently a fine play of muscle, a subtle
shifting of the power along the outstretched wings, a
perpetual loss and a perpetual recovery of the equi-
poise, sustains them and bears them along. With
them flying is a luxury, a fine art, not merely a
quicker and safer means of transit from one point to
another, but a gift so free and spontaneous that
that work becomes leisure and movement rest They
are not so much going somewhere, from this perch to
that, as they are abandoning themselves to the mere
pleasure of riding upon the air.

And it is beneath such grace and high-bred leisure
that Nature hides in her creatures the occupation of
scavenger and carrion eater !

But the worst thing about the buzzard is his
silence. The crow caws, the hawk screams, the
eagle barks, but the buzzard says not a word. So
far as I have observed he has no vocal powers what-
ever. Nature dare not trust him to speak. In hia
zase she preserves a discreet silence.

WINTER SUNSHINE. 17

The crow may not have the sweet voice which the
fox in his flattery attributed to him, but he has a
good, strong, native speech nevertheless. How much
character there is in it ! How much thrift and in-
dependence ! Of course his plumage is firm, his color
decided, his wit quick. He understands you at once
and tells you so; so does the hawk by his scorn-
ful, defiant wkir-r-r-r-r. Hardy, happy outlaws, the
crows, how I love them. Alert, social, republican,
always able to look out for themselves, not afraid of
the cold and the snow, fishing when flesh is scarce and
stealing when other resources fail, the crow is a char-
acter I would not willingly miss from the landscape.
I love to see his track in the snow or the mud, and
his graceful pedestrianism about the brown fields.

He is no interloper but has the air and manner of
being thoroughly at home and in rightful possession
of the land. He is no sentimentalist like some of the
plaining, disconsolate song-birds, but apparently is al-
ways in good health and good spirits. No matter who
is sick, or dejected, or unsatisfied, or what the weather
is, or what the price of corn, the crow is well and
finds life sweet ( He is the dusky embodiment of
worldly wisdom and prudence. x Then he is one of Nat-
ure's self-appointed constables and greatly magnifies
his office. He would fain arrest every hawk or owl
or grimalkin that ventures abroad. I have known a
posse of them to beset the fox and cry " thief" till
Reynard hid himself for shame. Do I say the fox
battered the crow when he told him he had a sweet
2

18 WINTER SUNSHINE.

voice ? Yet one of the most musical sounds in nature
proceeds from the crow. All the crow tribe from the
blue jay up are capable of certain low ventriloquial
notes that have peculiar cadence and charm. I often
hear the crow indulging in his, in winter, and am re-
minded of the sound of the dulcimer. The bird
stretches up and exerts himself like a cock in the act
of crowing and gives forth a peculiarly clear, vitreous
sound that is sure to arrest and reward your atten-
tion. This is no doubt the song the fox begged to
be favored with, as hi delivering it the crow must
inevitably let drop the piece of meat.

The crow in his purity, I believe, is seen and heard
only in the North. Before you reach the Potomac
there is an infusion of a weaker element, the fish-
crow, whose helpless feminine call contrasts strongly
with the hearty masculine caw of the original Simon.

In passing from crows to colored men I hope I am
not guilty of any disrespect toward the latter. In
my walks about Washington, both winter and sum-
mer, colored men are about the only pedestrians I
meet ; and I meet them everywhere, in the fields
and in the woods and in the public road, swinging
along with that peculiar, rambling, elastic gait, taking
advantage of the short cuts and threading the country
with paths and byways. I doubt if the colored man
can compete with his white brother as a walker ; his
foot is too flat and the calves of his legs too small, but
he is certainly the most picturesque traveler to be
•een on the road. He bends his knees more than the

WINTER SUNSHINE. 19

white man, and oscillates more to and fro, or from
side to side. The imaginary line which his head de-
scribes is full of deep and long undulations. Even
the boys and young men sway as if bearing a burden.

Along the fences and by the woods I come upon
their snares, dead-falls, and rude box-traps. The
freedman is a sucessful trapper and hunter and has
by nature an insight into these things. I frequently
see him in market or on his way thither with a tame
'possum clinging timidly to his shoulders, or a young
coon or fox led by a chain. Indeed the colored man
behaves precisely like the rude unsophisticated peas-
ant that he is, and there is fully as much virtue in
him, using the word in its true sense, as in the white
peasant ; indeed, much more than in the poor whites
who grew up by his side, while there is often a be-
nignity and a depth of human experience and sym-
pathy about some of these dark faces that comes home
to one like the best one sees in art or reads in books.

One touch of Nature makes all the world akin, and
there is certainly a touch of Nature about the colored
man : indeed, I had almost said, of Anglo-Saxon nat-
ure. They have the quaintness and homeliness of
the simple English stock. I seem to see my grand-
father and grandmother in the ways and doings of
vhese old " uncles " and " aunties ; " indeed the lesson
comes nearer home than even that, for I seem to see
myself in them, and what is more, I see that they
see themselves in me, and that neither party haa
•nuch to boast of.

20 WINTER SUNSHINE,

The negro is a plastic human creature, and is thor
(Highly domesticated, and thoroughly anglicized. The
same cannot be said of the Indian for instance, be-
tween us and whom there can never exist any fellow-
ship, any community of feeling or interest ; or is there
any doubt but the Chinaman will always remain to
us the same impenetrable mystery he has been from
the first ?

But there is no mystery about the negro, and he
touches the Anglo-Saxon at more points than the lat-
ter is always willing to own, taking as kindly and
naturally to all his customs and usages, yea, to all
his prejudices and superstitions as if to the manor
born. The colored population in very many respects
occupies the same position as that occupied by our
rural populations a generation or two ago, seeing
signs and wonders, haunted by the fear of ghosts and
hobgoblins, believing in witchcraft, charms, the evil
eye, etc. In religious matters, also, they are on the
same level, and about the only genuine shouting
Methodists that remain are to be found in the colored
t'liurehes. Indeed, I fear the negro tries to ignore
or forget himself as far as possible, and that he would
4eem it felicity enough to play second fiddle to the
white man all his days. He liked his master, but he
/ikes the Yankee better, not because he regards him
as his deliverer, but mainly because the two-handed
thrift of the Northerner, his varied and wonderful
ability, completely captivates the imagination of the
black man, just learning to shift for himself.

WINTER SUNSHINE. 21

How far he has caught or is capable of being im-
bued with the Yankee spirit of enterprise and in-
dustry, remains to be seen. In some things he has
already shown himself an apt scholar. I notice, for
instance, he is about as industrious an office-seeker as
the most patriotic among us, and that he learns with
amazing ease and rapidity all the arts and wiles of
the politicians. He is versed in parades, mass meet-
ings, caucuses, and will soon shine on the stump. I
observe, also, that he is not far behind us in the ob-
servance of the fashions, and that he is as good a
church-goer, theatre-goer, and pleasure-seeker gen-
erally, as his means will allow.

As a boot-black or news-boy he is an adept in all
the tricks of the trade, and as a fast young man about
town among his kind, he is worthy his white pro-
totype ; the swagger, the impertinent look, the coarse
remark, the loud laugh, are all in the best style.
As a lounger and starer also, on the street corners of
a Sunday afternoon, he has taken his degree.

On the other hand, I know cases among our col-
ored brethren, plenty of them, of conscientious and
well-directed effort and industry in the worthiest
fields, in agriculture, in trade, in the mechanic arts,
tfiat show the colored man has in him all the best
ludiments of a citizen of the States.

Lest my winter sunshine appear to have too many
lark rays in it, buzzards, crows, and colored men, I
hasten to add the brown and neutral tints, and may
be a red ray can be extracted from some of these

22 WINTER SUNSHINE.

hard, smooth, sharp gritted roads that radiate from
the National Capital. Leading out of Washington
there are several good roads that invite the pedes-
trian. There is the road that leads west or north-
west from Georgetown, the Tenallytown road, the
very sight of which, on a sharp, lustrous winter Sun-
day, makes the feet tingle. "Where it cuts through a
hill or high knoll, it is so red it fairly glows in the
sunlight. I'll warrant you will kindle, and your
own color will mount if you resign yourself to it. It
will conduct you to the wild and rocky scenery of
the upper Potomac, to Great Falls, and on to Har-
per's Ferry, if your courage holds out. Then there
is the road that leads north over Meridian Hill,
across Piny Branch, and on through the wood of
Crystal Springs, to Fort Stevens, and so into Mary-
land. This is the proper route for an excursion in
the spring to gather wild flowers, or in the fall for a
nutting expedition, as it lays open some noble woods
and a great variety of charming scenery ; or for a
musing moonlight saunter, say in December, when
the Enchantress has folded and folded the world in
tier web, it is by all means the course to take. Your
staff rings on the hard ground, the road, a misty white
belt, gleams and vanishes before you, the woods are
cavernous and still, the fields lie in a lunar trance,
ind you will yourself return fairly mesmerized by
the beauty of the scene.

Or you can bend your steps eastward over the
Eastern Branch, up Good Hope Hill and on till you

WINTER SUNSHINE. 23

trike the Marlborough pike, as a trio of us did that
cold February Sunday we walked from "Washington
to Pumpkintown and back.

A short sketch of this pilgrimage is a fair sample
of these winter walks.

The delight I experienced in making this new ac-
quisition to my geography was, of itself, sufficient to
atone for any aches or weariness I may have felt.
The mere fact that one may walk from "Washington
to Pumpkintown, was a discovery I had been all
these years in making. I had walked to Sligo, and
to the Northwest Branch, and had made the Falls of
the Potomac in a circuitous route of ten miles, com-
ing suddenly upon tiie river in one of its wildest
passes ; but I little dreamed all the while that there,
in a wrinkle (or shall I say furrow ?) of the Mary-
land hills, almost visible from the outlook of the
bronze squaw on the dome of the Capitol, and just
around the head of Oxen Run, lay Pumpkintown.

The day was cold but the sun was bright, and the
foot took hold of those hard, dry, gritty Maryland
roads with the keenest relish. How the leaves of
the laurel glistened! The distant oak woods sug-
gested gray-blue smoke, while the recesses of the
pines looked like the lair of Night. Beyond the
District limits we struck the Marlborough pike,
^vhich, round and hard and white, held squarely to
;he east and was visible a mile ahead. Its friction
brought up the temperature amazingly and spurred
the pedestrians into their best time. As I trudged
\long, Thoreau's lines came naturally to mind : —

24 WINTER SUNSHINE.

" When the spring stirs my blood

With the instinct of travel,
I can get enough gravel

On the old Marlborough road."

Cold as the day was (many degrees below freez-
ing), I heard and saw bluebirds, and as we passed
along every sheltered tangle and overgrown field or
lane swarmed with snow-birds and sparrows — the
latter mainly Canada or tree-sparrows, with a sprink-
ling of the song, and, may be, one or two other varie-
ties. The birds are all social and gregarious in
winter, and seem drawn together by common instinct.
Where you find one, you will not only find others of
the same kind, but also several different kinds. The
regular winter residents go in little bands, like a well-
organized pioneer corps — the jays and woodpeckers
in advance, doing the heavier work ; the nuthatches
next, more lightly armed ; and the creepers and king-
lets with their slender beaks and microscopic eyes,
last of all.1

Now and then, among the gray-and-brown tints,
there was a dash of scarlet — the cardinal grossbeak,
whose presence was sufficient to enliven any scene.
In the leafless trees, as a ray of sunshine fell upon
him, he was visible a long way off, glowing like a
crimson spar — the only bit of color in the whole
. andscape.

Maryland is here rather a level, unpicturesque

1 It seems to me this is a borrowed observation, but I do not
know whom to credit it to.

WINTER SUNSHINE. 25

country — the gaze of the traveler bounded, at no
great distance, by oak woods, with here and there a
dark line of pine. We saw few travelers, passed a
ragged squad or two of colored boys and girls, and
met some colored women on their way to or from
church, perhaps. Never ask a colored person — at
least the crude, rustic specimens — any question that
involves a memory of names, or any arbitrary signs ;
you will rarely get a satisfactory answer. If you
could speak to them in their own dialect, or touch the
right spring in their minds, you would, no doubt, get
the desired information. They are as local in their
notions and habits as the animals, and go on much
the same principles, as, no doubt, we all do, more or
less. I saw a colored boy come inta a public office,
one day, and ask to see a man with red hair; the
name was utterly gone from him. The man had red
whiskers, which was as near as he had come to the
mark. Ask your washer-woman what street she
lives on, or where such a one has moved to, and the
chances are that she cannot tell you, except that it is
a " right smart distance " this way or that, or near
Mr. So-and-so, or by such and such a place, describ-
ing some local feature. I love to amuse myself, when
walking through the market, by asking the old
aunties, and the young aunties, too, the names of
their various " yarbs." It seems as if they must trip
jm the simplest names. Bloodroot they generally
jail " grubroot ; " trailing arbutus goes by the names
of " troling " arbutus, " training arbuty-flower," and

26 WINTER SUNSHINE.

gcound " ivory ; " in Virginia, they call woodchucks
" moonacks."

On entering Pumpkintown — a cluster of five or
six small, whitewashed block-houses, toeing squarely
on the highway — the only inhabitant we saw was a
small boy, who was as frank and simple as if he had
lived on pumpkins and marrow-squashes all his days.

Half a mile farther on, we turned to the right into
a characteristic Southern road — a way entirely un-
kempt, and wandering free as the wind ; now fading
out into a broad field ; now contracting into a narrow
track between hedges ; anon roaming with delight-
ful abandon through swamps and woods, asking no
leave and keeping no bounds. About two o'clock
we stopped in an opening in a pine wood, and ate
our lunch. We had the good fortune to hit upon a
charming place. A wood-chopper had been there,
and let in the sunlight full and strong ; and the white
chips, the newly-piled wood, and the mounds of green
boughs, were welcome features, and helped also to
keep off the wind that would creep through under
the pines. The ground was soft and dry, with a car-
pet an inch thick of pine-needles, and with a fire, less
for warmth than to make the picture complete, we
ate our bread and beans with the keenest satisfaction,
xnd with a relish that only the open air can give.

A fire, of course — an encampment in the woods
at this season without a fire would be like leaving
Hamlet out of the play. A smoke is your standard,
your flag ; it defines and locates your camp at once •

WINTER SUNSHINE. 27

you are an interloper until you have made a fire ;
then you take possession ; then the trees and rocks
seem to look upon you more kindly, and you look
more kindly upon them. As one opens his budget,
so he opens his heart by a fire. Already something
has gone out from you, and comes back as a faint
reminiscence and home feeling in the air and place.
One looks out upon the crow or the buzzard that
sails by as from his own fireside. It is not I that am a
wanderer and a stranger now ; it is the crow and the
buzzard. The chickadees were silent at first ; but
now they approach by little journeys, as if to make
our acquaintance. The nuthatches, also, cry " Yank !
yank ! " in no inhospitable tones ; and those purple
finches there in the cedars — are they not stealing
our berries ?

How one lingers about a fire under such circum-
stances, loath to leave it, poking up the sticks, throw-
ing in the burnt ends, adding another branch and yet
another, and looking back as he turns to go to catch
one more glimpse of the smoke going up through
the trees ! I reckon it is some remnant of the prim-
itive man, which we all carry about with us. He has
jot yet forgotten his wild, free life, his arboreal habi-
tations, and the sweet-bitter times he had in those
long-gone ages. With me, he wakes up directly at
ehe smell of smoke, of burning branches in the open
jur ; and all his old love of fire and dependence upon
t, in the camp or the cave, comes freshly to mind.

On resuming our march, we filed off along a

28 WINTER SUNSHINE.

charming wood-path — a regular little tunnel through
the dense pines, carpeted with silence, and allowing
us to look nearly the whole length of it through its
soft green twilight out into the open sunshine of the
fields beyond. A pine wood in Maryland or in Vir-
ginia is quite a different thing from a pine wood in
Maine or Minnesota — the difference, in fact, be-
tween yellow pine and white. The former, as it
grows hereabout, is short and scrubby, with branches
nearly to the ground, and looks like the dwindling
remnant of a greater race.

Beyond the woods, the path led us by a colored
man's habitation — a little, low frame house, on a
knoll, surrounded by the quaint devices and rude
makeshifts of these quaint and rude people. A few
poles stuck in the ground, clapboarded with cedar-
boughs and corn-stalks, and supporting a roof of the
same, gave shelter to a rickety one-horse wagon and
some farm implements. Near this there was a large,
compact tent, made entirely of corn-stalks, with, for
door, a bundle of the same, in the dry, warm, nest-
like interior of which the husking of the corn crop
seemed to have taken place. A few rods farther on,
we passed through another humble door-yard, musi-
cal with dogs and dusky with children. We crossed
Here the outlying fields of a large, thrifty, well-kept-
looking farm with a showy, highly ornamental frame
house in the centre. There was even a park with
deer, and among the gayly painted out-buildings I
noticed a fancy dove-cot, with an. immense flock of

WINTER SUNSHINE. 29

doves circling above it, — some whiskey-dealer from
the city, we were told, trying to take the poison out
of his money by agriculture.

We next passed through some woods, when we
emerged into a broad, sunlit, fertile-looking valley,
called Oxen Run. We stooped down and drank of
its clear white-pebbled stream, in the veritable spot I
suspect where the oxen do. There were clouds of
birds here on the warm slopes, with the usual sprink-
ling along the bushy margin of the stream of scarlet
grossbeaks. The valley of Oxen Run has many
good-looking farms, with old picturesque houses, and
loose rambling barns, such as artists love to put into
pictures.

But it is a little awkward to go east. It always
seems left-handed. I think this is the feeling of all
walkers, and that Thoreau's experience in this re-
spect was not singular. The great magnet is the
sun, and we follow him. I notice that people lost in
the woods work to the westward. When one comes
out of his house and asks himself " Which way shall
I walk ? " and looks up and down and around for a
sign or a token, does he not nine times out of ten
turn to the west ? He inclines this way as surely as
the willow wand bends toward the water. There is
something more genial and friendly in this direc-
tion.

Occasionally in winter I experience a southern in-
clination, and cross Long Bridge and rendezvous for
the day in some old earth-work on the Virginia hills.

30 WINTER SUNSHINE.

The roafls are not so inviting in this direction, but
the line of old forts with rabbits burrowing in the
bomb-proofs, and a magazine, or officers' quarters
turned into a cow stable by colored squatters, form
an interesting feature. But whichever way I go I
am glad I came. All roads lead up to the Jerusalem
the walker seeks. There is everywhere the vigorous
and masculine winter air, and the impalpable suste-
nance the mind draws from all natural forms.

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE
ROAD.

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD.

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road. — WHITMAH.

OCCASIONALLY on the sidewalk, amid the dapper,
swiftly-moving, high-heeled boots and gaiters, I catch
a glimpse of the naked human foot. Nimbly it scuffs
along, the toes spread, the sides flatten, the heel pro-
tudes ; it grasps the curbing, or bends to the form of
the uneven surfaces, — a thing sensuous and alive,
that seems to take cognizance of whatever it touches
or passes. / How primitive and uncivil it looks in such
company, — a real barbarian in the parlor. We are
so unused to the human anatomy, to simple, un-
adorned nature, that it looks a little repulsive ; but it
is beautiful for all that. Though it be a black foot
and an unwashed foot, it shall be exalted. ^It is a
thing of life amid leather, a free spirit amid cramped,
a wild bird amid caged, an athlete amid consumptives.
* It is the symbol of my order, the Order of Walkers.
iThat unhampered, vitally playing piece of anatomy is
the type of the pedestrian, man returned to first princi-
ples, in direct contact and intercourse with the earth
and the elements, his faculties unsheathed, his mind
plastic, his body toughened, his heart light, his soul

34 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD.

dilated : while those cramped and distorted members
in the calf and kid are the unfortunate wretches
doomed to carriages and cushions.

I am not going to advocate the disuse of boots and
shoes, or the abandoning of the improved modes of
travel ; but I am going to brag as lustily as I can on
behalf of the pedestrian, and show how all the shin-
ing angels second and accompany the man who goes
afoot, while all the dark spirits are ever looking out
for a chance to ride.

When I see the discomforts that able-bodied Amer-
ican men will put up with rather than go a mile or
half a mile on foot, the abuses they will tolerate and
encourage, crowding the street car on a little fall in
the temperature or the appearance of an inch or two
of snow, packing up to overflowing, dangling to the
straps, treading on each other's toes, breathing each
other's breaths, crushing the women and children,
hanging by tooth and nail to a square inch of the plat-
form, imperiling their limbs and killing the horses,
— I think the commonest tramp in the street has
good reason to felicitate himself on his rare privilege
of going afoot. Indeed, a race that neglects or de-
.jpises this primitive gift, that fears the touch of the
soil, that has no foot-paths, no community of ownership
in the land which they imply, that warns off the
walker as a trespasser, that knows no way but the
highway, the carriage-way, that forgets the stile, the
foot-bridge, that even ignores the rights of the pedes-

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. 35

but in the ditch or up the bank, is in a fair way to
far more serious degeneracy.

Shakespeare makes the chief qualification of the
walker a merry heart : —

"Jog on, jog on, the foot-path way,

And merrily hent the stile-a ;
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a."

''The human body is a steed that goes freest and
longest under a light rider, and the lightest of all riders
is a cheerful heart. Your sad, or morose, or embit-
tered, or preoccupied heart settles heavily into the
saddle, and the poor beast, the body, breaks down
the first mile. & Indeed, the heaviest thing in the
world is a heavy heart. //Next to that the most bur-
densome to the walker is a heart not in perfect sym-
pathy and accord with the body — a reluctant or un-
willing heart. The horse and rider must not only
both be willing to go the same way, but the rider must
.ead the way and infuse his own lightness and eager-
ness into the steed. Herein is no doubt our trouble
and one reason of the decay of the noble art in this
country. wWe are unwilling walkers. /-"We are not
innocent and simple-hearted enough to enjoy a walk.
We have fallen from that state of grace which capacity
to enjoy a walk implies. It cannot be said that as a
people we are so positively sad, or morose, or melan-
cholic as that we are vacant of that sportiveness and
surplusage of animal spirits that characterized our an-
cestors, and that springs from full and harmonious

36 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD.

life, — a sound heart in accord with a sound body
/A man must invest himself neai \t hand and in com-
mon things, and be content with a steady and moder-
ate return, if he would know the blessedness of a
cheerful heart and the sweetness of a walk over the
round earth. ^ This is a lesson the American has yet
to learn, — capability of amusement on a low key.
He expects rapid and extraordinary returns. He
would make the very elemental laws pay usury. [/He
has nothing to invest in a walk ; it is too slow, too
cheap. We crave the astonishing, the exciting, the
far away, and do not know the highways of the gods
when we see them, — always a sign of the decay of
the faith and simplicity of man.

If I say to my neighbor, " Come with me, I have
great wonders to show you," he pricks up his ears and
comes forthwith ; but when I take him on the hills
under the full blaze of the sun, or along the country
road, our footsteps lighted by the moon and stars, and
say to him, " Behold, these are the wonders, these are
the circuits of the gods, this we now tread is a morn-
ing star," he feels defrauded, and as if I had played him
a trick. And yet nothing less than dilatation and en-
thusiasm like this is the badge of the master walker.
I/If we are not sad, we are careworn, hurried, discon-
tented, mortgaging the present for the promise of
the future, vlf we take a walk, it is as we take a pre-
scription, with about the same relish and with about
the same purpose ; and the more the fatigue the
greater our faith in the virtue of the medicine.

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. 37

Of those gleesome saunters over the hills in spring,
or those sallies of the body in winter, those excursions
into space when the foot strikes fire at every step,
when the air tastes like a new and finer mixture,
when we accumulate force and gladness as we go
along, when the sight of objects by the roadside and
of the fields and woods pleases more than pictures
or than all the art in the world, — those ten or
twelve mile dashes that are but the wit and effluence
of the corporeal powers, — of such diversion and
open road entertainment, I say, most of us know very
little.

jp I notice with astonishment that at our fashionable
watering-places nobody walks ; that of all those vast
crowds of health-seekers and lovers of country air,
you can never catch one in the fields or woods, or
guilty of trudging along the country road with dust
on his shoes and sun-tan on his hands and face. The
sole amusement seems to be to eat and dress and sit
about the hotels and glare at each other. The men
look bored, the women look tired, and all seem to
sigh, " O Lord ! what shall we do to be happy and
not be vulgar?" Quite different from our British
cousins across the water, who have plenty of amuse-
ment and hilarity, spending most of the time at
their watering-places in the open air, strolling, pic-
nicking, boating, climbing, briskly walking, appar-
ently with little fear of sun-tan or of compromising
heir " gentility."
\/It is Indeed astonishing with what ease and hilarity

38 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD.

the English walk. 'To an American it seems a kind
of infatuation. When Dickens was in this country
I imagine the aspirants to the honor of a walk with
him were not numerous. In a pedestrian tour of
England by an American, I read that " after break-
fast with the Independent minister, he walked with
us for six miles out of town upon our road. Three
little boys and girls, the youngest six years old, also
accompanied us. They were romping and rambling
about all the while, and their morning walk must
have been as much as fifteen miles ; but they thought
nothing of it, and when we parted were apparently
as fresh as when they started, and very loath to
return."

I fear, also, the American is becoming disqualified
for the manly art of walking, by a falling off in the
size of his foot. /He cherishes and cultivates this part
of his anatomy, and apparently thinks his taste and
good breeding are to be inferred from its diminutive
size. vA. small, trim foot, well booted or gaitered, is
the national vanity. ''How we stare at the big feet
of foreigners, and wonder what may be the price of
leather in those countries, and where all the aristo-
cratic blood is, that these plebeian extremities so pre-
dominate. If Te were admitted to the confidences of
the shoemaker to Her Majesty or to His Royal High-
t.ess, no doubt we would modify our views upon this
latter point, for a truly large and royal nature is never
stunted in the extremities ; a little foot never ye*
utpported a great character.

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. 39

Vtt is said that Englishmen when they first come to
this country are for some time under the impression
that American women all have deformed feet, they
are so coy of them and so studiously careful to keep
them hid. That there is an astonishing difference
between the women of the two countries in this re-
spect, every traveler can testify ; and that there is
a difference equally astonishing between the pedes-
trian habits and capabilities of the rival sisters, is also
certain.

»The English pedestrian, no doubt, has the advan-
tage of us in the matter of climate ; for, notwithstand-
ing the traditional gloom and moroseness of English
skies, they have in that country none of those relaxing,
sinking, enervating days, of which we have so many
here, and which seem especially trying to the female
constitution — days which withdraw all support from
the back and loins, and render walking of all things
burdensome. Theirs is a climate of which it has been
said that " it invites men abroad more days in the year
and more hours in the day than that of any other
country."

N/Then their land is threaded with paths which invite
the walker, and which are scarcely less important than
the highways. I heard of a surly nobleman near Lon-
lon who took it into his head to close a foot-path that
passed through his estate near his house, and open
another one a little farther off. The pedestrians ob-
jected ; the matter got into the courts, and after pro-
tracted litigation the aristocrat was beaten. The path

10 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD,

3ould not be closed or moved. The memory of man
ran not to the time when there was not a foot-path
there, and every pedestrian should have the right of
way there still.

I remember the pleasure I had in the path that con-
nects Stratford-on-Avon with Shottery, Shakespeare's
path when he went courting Anne Hathaway. By
the king's highway the distance is some farther, so
there is a well-worn path along the hedgerows and
through the meadows and turnip-patches. The trav-
eler in it has the privilege of crossing the railroad
track, an unsual privilege in England, and one de-
nied to the lord in his carriage, who must either go
over or under it. (It is a privilege, is it not, to be
allowed the forbidden, even if it be the privilege of
being run over by the engine ?) In strolling over the
South Downs, too, I was delighted to find that where
the hill was steepest some benefactor of the order of
walkers had made notches in the sward, so that the
foot could bite the better and firmer ; the patli became
a kind of stairway, which I have no doubt the plow-
man respected.

V "When you see an English country church with-
drawn, secluded, out of the reach of wheels, standing
amid grassy graves and surrounded by noble trees, ap-
vroached by paths and shaded lanes, you appreciate
a.ore than ever this beautiful habit of the people.
Only a race that knows how to use its feet, and holds
*bot-paths sacred, could put such a charm of privacy
md humility into such a structure. I think I should

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE EOAD. 41

be tempted to go to church myself if I saw all my
neighbors starting off across the fields or along paths
that led to such charmed spots, and was sure I would
not be jostled or run over by the rival chariots of the
worshipers at the temple doors. /I think this is what
ails our religion ; humility and devoutness of heart
leave one when he lays by his walking shoes and
walking clothes, and sets out for church drawn by
something.

Indeed, I think it would be tantamount to an as-
tonishing revival of religion if the people would all
walk to church on Sunday and walk home again.
Think how the stones would preach to them by the
wayside ; how their benumbed minds would warm up
beneath the friction of the gravel; how their vain
and foolish thoughts, their desponding thoughts, their
besetting demons of one kind and another, would drop
behind them, unable to keep up or to endure the fresh
air. They would walk away from their ennui, their
worldly cares, their uncharitableness, their pride of
iress : for these devils always want to ride, while the
simple virtues are never so happy as when on foot
Let us walk by all means ; but if we will ride, get an

ass.
/Tt

"hen the English claim that they are a more hearty
and robust people than we are. U?t is certain they
are a plainer people! have plainer tastes, dress plainer,
build plainer, speak plainer, keep closer to facts, wear
>roader shoes and coarser clothes, place a lower esti-
on themselves, etc. -^all of which traits favor

42 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD.

pedestrian habits. The English grandee is not con-
fined to his carriage ; but if the American aristocrat
leaves his, he is ruined. 'Oh, the weariness, the emp-
tiness, the plotting, the seeking rest and finding
none, that goes by in the carriages ! while your pe-
destrian is always cheerful, alert, refreshed, with his
heart in his hand and his hand free to all. He looks
down upon nobody; he is on the common level.
His pores are all open, his circulation is active, his
digestion good. His heart is not cold, nor his facul-
ties asleep. He is the only real traveler ; he alone
tastes the " gay, fresh sentiment of the road." He is
not isolated, but one with things, with the farms and
industries on either hand. The vital, universal cur-
rents play through him. He knows the ground is
alive ; he feels the pulses of the wind, and reads the
mute language of things. His sympathies are all
aroused; his senses are continually reporting mes-
sages to his mind. "Wind, frost, rain, heat, cold, are
something to him. V He is not merely a spectator of
the panorama of nature, but a participator in it. He
experiences the country he passes through — tastes
it, feels it, absorbs it ; the traveler in his fine carriage
sees it merely. This gives the fresh charm to that
class of books that may be called " Views Afoot,"
and to the narratives of hunters, naturalists, explor-
ing parties, etc. The walker does not need a large
territory. When you get into a railway car you
want a continent, the man in his carriage requires a
township ; but a walker like Thoreau finds as much

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. 43

and more along the shores of Walden Pond. The
former, as it were, has merely time to glance at the
headings of the chapters, while the latter need not
miss a Hue, and Thoreau reads between the lines.
Then the walker has the privilege of the fields, the
woods, the hills, the by-ways. The apples by the
roadside are for him, and the berries, and the spring
of water, and the friendly shelter; and if the weather
is cold, he eats the frost grapes and the persimmons,
or even the white meated turnip, snatched from the
field he passed through, with incredible relish.
\/ Afoot and in the open road, one has a fair start in
life at last. There is no hindrance now. * Let him
put his best foot forward. He is on the broadest
human plane. This is on the level of all the great
laws and heroic deeds. From this platform he is eli-
gible to any good fortune. He was sighing for the
golden age ; let him walk to it. Every step brings
him nearer. The youth of the world is but a few
days' journey distant. Indeed, I know persons who
think they have walked back to that fresh aforetime
of a single bright Sunday in autumn or early spring.
Before noon they felt its airs upon their cheeks, and
by nightfall, on the banks of some quiet stream, or
along some path in the wood, or on some hill-top,
aver they have heard the voices and felt the wonder
and the mystery that so enchanted the early races
of men.

I think if I could walk through a country I should
not only see many things and have adventures that 1

44 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD.

should otherwise miss, but that I should come into re-
lations with that country at first baud, and with the
men and women in it, in a way that would afford the
deepest satisfaction. ^Hence I envy the good fortune
of all walkers, and feel like joining myself to every
tramp that comes along. I am jealous of the clergy-
man I read about the other day who footed it from
Edinburgh to London, as poor Effie Deans did, car-
rying her shoes in her hand most of the way, and
over the ground that rugged Ben Jonson strode,
larking it to Scotland, so long ago. I read with long-
ing of the pedestrian feats of college youths, so gay
and light-hearted, with their coarse shoes on their feet
and their knapsacks on their backs. It would have
been a good draught of the rugged cup to have
walked with "Wilson the ornithologist, deserted by
his companions, from Niagara to Philadelphia through
the snows of winter. I almost wish that I had been
born to the career of a German mechanic, that I
might have had that delicious adventurous year of
wandering over my country before I settled .down to
work. I think how much richer and firmer grained
life would be to me if I could journey afoot through
Florida and Texas, or follow the windings of the
Platte or the Yellowstone, or stroll through Oregon,
or browse for a season about Canada. In the bright
inspiring days of autumn I only want the time and
the companion to walk back to the natal spot, the
family nest, across two States and into the mountains
»f a third. What adventures we would have by the

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. 45

way, what hard pulls, what prospects from hills, what
spectacles we would behold of night and day, what
passages with dogs, what glances, what peeps into
windows, what characters we should fall in with, and
how seasoned and hardy we should arrive at our des-
tination !

I/For companion I should want a veteran of the
war ! Those marches put something into him I
like. Even at this distance his mettle is but little
softened. As soon as he gets warmed up it all comes
back to him. He catches your step and away you
go, a gay, adventurous, half predatory couple. How
quickly he falls into the old ways of jest and anecdote
and song ! You may have known him for years with-
out having heard him hum an air, or more than cas-
ually revert to the subject of his experience during
the war. You have even questioned and cross-ques-
tioned him without firing the train you wished. But
get him out on a vacation tramp, and you can walk
it all out of him. By the camp fire at night or swing-
ing along the streams by day, song, anecdote, advent-
ure, come to the surface, and you wonder how your
companion has kept silent so long.

ylt is another proof of how walking brings out the
true character of a man. The devil never yet asked
his victims to take a walk with him. You will not
be long in finding your companion out. All dis-
guises will fall away from him. As his pores open
Mis character is laid bare. His deepest and most
private self will come to the top. It matters little

46 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD.

whom you ride with, so he be not a pickpocket ; for
both of you will, very likely, settle down closer and
firmer in your reserve, shaken down like a measure
of corn by the jolting as the journey proceeds. But
walking is a more vital copartnership; the relation is
a closer and more sympathetic one, and you do not
feel like walking ten paces with a stranger without
speaking to him.

(xfience the fastidiousness of the professional walker
in choosing or admitting a companion, and hence the
truth of a remark of Emerson that you will generally
fare better to take your dog than to invite your
neighbor. You cur-dog is a true pedestrian, and
your neighbor is very likely a small politician. The
dog enters thoroughly into the spirit of the enter-
prise ; he is not indifferent or preoccupied ; he is con-
stantly sniffing adventure, laps at every spring, looks
upon every field and wood as a new world to be ex-
plored, is ever on some fresh trail, knows something
important will happen a little farther on, gazes with
the true wonder-seeing eyes, whatever the spot or
whatever the road finds it good to be there — in
short, is just that happy, delicious, excursive vaga-
bond that touches one at so many points, and whose
human prototype in a companion robs miles and
leagues of half their power to fatigue.

Persons who find themselves spent in a short walk
to the market or the post-office, or to do a little shop-
ping, wonder how it is that their pedestrian friends
can compass so many weary miles and not fall dowu

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. 47

from sheer exhaustion ; ignorant of the fact that the
walker is a kind of projectile that drops far or near
according to the expansive force of the motive that
set it in motion, and that it is easy enough to regulate
the charge according to the distance to be traversed.
If I am loaded to carry only one mile and am com-
pelled to walk three, I generally feel more fatigue
than if I had walked six under the proper impetus of
preadjusted resolution. In other words, the will or
corporeal mainspring, whatever it be, is capable of be-
ing wound up to different degrees of tension, so that
one may walk all day nearly as easy as half that time
if he is prepared beforehand. He knows his task,
and he measures and distributes his powers accord-
ingly. It is for this reason that an unknown road is
always a long road. We cannot cast the mental eye
along it and see the end from the beginning. We
are fighting in the dark, and cannot take the measure
of our foe. Every step must be preordained and
provided for in the mind. Hence also the fact that
to vanquish one mile in the woods seems equal to
compassing three in the open country. The furlongs
are ambushed, and we magnify them.

Then, again, how annoying to be told it is only
five miles to the next place when it is really eight or
ten ! We fall short nearly half the distance, and are
compelled to urge and roll the spent ball the rest of
the way.

In such a case walking degenerates from a fine art
to a mechanic art ; we walk merely ; to get over

48 THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD.

the ground becomes the one serious and engrossing
thought; whereas success in walking is not to let
your right foot know what your left foot doeth.
Your heart must furnish such music that in keeping
time to it your feet will carry you around the globe
without knowing it. The walker I would describe
takes no note of distance ; his walk is a sally, a bon-
mot, an unspoken jeu d 'esprit ; the ground is his butt,
his provocation ; it furnishes him the resistance his
body craves ; he rebounds upon it, he glances off and
returns again, and uses it gayly as his tool.
t^I do not think I exaggerate the importance or the
charms of pedestrianism, or our need as a people to
cultivate the art. I think it would tend to soften the
national manners, to teach us the meaning of leisure,
to acquaint us with the charms of the open air, to
strengthen and foster the tie between the race and
the land. No one else looks out upon the world so
kindly and charitably as the pedestrian ; no one else
gives and takes so much from the country he passes
through. Next to the laborer in the fields, the
walker holds the closest relation to the soil ; and he
holds a closer and more vital relation to Nature be-
cause he is freer and his mind more at leisure.

Man takes root at his feet, and at best he is no
more than a potted plant in his house or carriage, till
he has established communication with the soil by the
loving and magnetic touch of his soles to it. Then
the tie of association is born ; then spring those in-
visible fibres and rootlets through which character

THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD. 49

comes to smack of the soil, and which make a man
kindred to the spot of earth he inhabits.

The roads and paths you have walked along in
summer and winter weather, the fields and hills which
you have looked upon in lightness and gladness of
heart, where fresh thoughts have come into your
mind, or some noble prospect has opened before you,
and especially the quiet ways where you have walked
in sweet converse with your friend, pausing under the
trees, drinking at the spring — henceforth they are
not the same ; a new charm is added ; those thoughts
spring there perennial, your friend walks there for-
ever.

^•We have produced some good walkers and saun-
terers, and some noted climbers ; but as a staple rec-
reation, as a daily practice, the mass of the people
dislike and despise walking. Thoreau said he was a
good horse, but a poor roadster. I chant the virtues
of the roadster as well. I sing of the sweetness of
gravel, good sharp quartz-grit. It is the proper con-
diment for the sterner seasons, and many a human
gizzard would be cured of half its ills by a suitable
daily allowance of it. I think Thoreau himself
would have profited immensely by it. His diet was
too exclusively vegetable. A man cannot live on
grass alone. If one has been a lotus-eater all sum-
mer, he must turn gravel-eater in the fall and winter.
Those who have tried it know that gravel possesses
an equal though an opposite charm. It spurs to ac-
tion. The foot tastes it and henceforth rests not.

50 THE EXHILARATIONS OP THE ROAD.

The joy of moving and surmounting, of attrition and
progression, the thirst for space, for miles aud leagues
of distance, for sights and prospects, to cross mount-
ains and thread rivers, and defy frost, heat, snow,
danger, difficulties, seizes it ; and from that day forth
its possessor is enrolled in the noble army of walkers.

THE SNOW-WALKERS.

_ , THE SNOW-WALKERS.

HE who marvels at the beauty of the world in
summer will find equal cause for wonder and admira-
tion in winter. It is true the pomp and the pageantry
are swept away, but the essential elements remain, —
the day and the night, the mountain and the valley,
the elemental play and succession and the perpetual
presence of the infinite sky. In winter the stars v
seem to have rekindled their fires, the moon achieves
a fuller triumph, and the heavens wear a look of a
more exalted simplicity. Summer is more wooing ^
and seductive, more versjitTlji and human, appeals to
the affections and the sentiments, and fosters inquiry
and the art impulse. Winter is of a more heroic
cast, and addresses the intellect. The severe studies
and disciplines come easier in winte}1. One imposes
larger tasks upon himself, and is less tolerant of his
own weaknesses.

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, isj/'
more developed in. winter ; the fleshy, in summer. I
should say winter had given the bone and sinew to
Literature, summer the tissues and blood.

The simplicity of winter has a deep morahy The

54 THE SNOW-WALKEBS.

return of Nature, after such a career of splendor and
prodigality, to habits so simple and austere, is not
lost either upon the head or the heart. It is the
philosopher coming back from the banquet and the
wine to a cup of water and a crust of bread.

And then this beautiful masquerade of the ele-
ments, — the novel disguises our nearest friends put
on ! Here is another rain and another dew, water
that will not flow, nor spill, nor receive the taint of
an unclean vessel. And if we see truly, the same old
beneficence and willingness to serve lurk beneath all.

Look up at the miracle of the falling snow, — the
dizzy maze of whirling, eddying flakes, noise-
ly transforming the world, the exquisite crystals
Iropping in ditch and gutter, and disguising in the
same suit of spotless livery all objects upon which
they fall. IVHow novel and fine the first drifts ! The
old, dilapidated fence is suddenly set off with the
most fantastic ruffles, scalloped and fluted after an
unheard-of fashion ! Looking down a long line of
decrepit stone-wall, in the trimming of which the
wind had fairly run riot, I saw, as for the first time,
what a severe yet master artist old Winter is. \ Ah,
a severe artist ! J How stern the woods look, dark
and cold and as rigid against the horizon as iron !
J^All life and action upon the snow have an added
emphasis and significance. Every expression is un-
derscored. ^Summer has few finer pictures than this
winter one of the farmer foddering his cattle from a
»tack upon the clean snow, — the movement, the

THE SNOW-WALKERS. 55

sharply -defined figures, the great green flakes of hay,
the long file of patient cows, — the advance just ar-
riving and pressing eagerly for the choicest morsels,
and the bounty and providence it suggests. Or the
chopper in the woods — the prostrate tree, the white
new chips scattered about, his easy triumph over the
cold, coat hanging to a limb, and the clear, sharp ring
of his axe. The woods are rigid and tense, keyed
up by the frost, and resound like a stringed instru-
ment. Or the road-breakers, sallying forth with oxen
and sleds in the still, white world, the day after the
Btorm, to restore the lost track and demolish the be-
leaguering drifts.

t/M\ sounds are sharper in winter ; the air transmits
better. At night I hear more distinctly the steady
roar of the North Mountain. ¥ In summer it is a sort
of complacent purr, as the breezes stroke down its
sides ; but in winter always the same low, sullen
growl.

A severe artist ! No longer the canvas and the
pigments, but the marble and the chisel. When the
nights are calm and the moon full, I go out to gaze
upon the wonderful purity of the moonlight and the
snow. The air is full of latent fire, and the cold
warms me — after a different fashion from that of the
kitchen stove. < The world lies about me in a " trance
of snow." /The clouds are pearly and iridescent, and
seem the farthest possible remove from the condition
of a storm, — the ghosts of clouds, the indwelling
beauty freed from all dross. I see the hills, bulging

56 THE SNOW-WALKERS.

with great drifts, lift themselves up cold and white
against the sky, the black lines of fences here and
there obliterated by the depth of the snow. Pres-
ently a fox barks away up next the mountain, and I
imagine I can almost see him sitting there, in his
furs, upon the illuminated surface, and looking down
in my direction. As I listen, one answers him from
behind the woods in the valley. What a wild winter
sound, — wild and weird, up among the ghostly hills.
Since the wolf has ceased to howl upon these mount-
ains, and the panther to scream, there is nothing to
be compared with it. So wild ! I get up in the mid-
dle of the night to hear it. It is refreshing to the
ear, and one delights to know that such wild creatures
are among us. At this season Nature makes the
most of every throb of life that can withstand her
severity. How heartily she indorses this fox ! In
what bold relief stand out the lives of all walkers of
the snow ! The snow is a great tell-tale, and blabs
as effectually as it obliterates. I go into the woods,
and know all that has happened. I cross the fields,
and if only a mouse has visited his neighbor, the fact
is chronicled.

/The red fox is the only species that abounds in
my locality ; the little gray fox seems to prefer a
more rocky and prec?pitous country, and a less rigor-
ous climate ; the cross fox is occasionally seen, and
there are traditions of the silver gray among the old-
est hunters. But the red fox is the sportsman's
orize, and the only fur-bearer worthy of note in these

THE SNOW- -WALKERS. 57

mountains.1 I go out in the morning, after a fresh
fall of snow, and see at all points where he has
crossed the road. Here he has leisurely passed
within rifle-range of the house, evidently reconnoi
tring the premises, with an eye to the hen-roost.
That clear, sharp track, — there is no mistaking it
for the clumsy foot-print of a little dog. All his
wildness and agility are photographed in it. Here
he ha$ taken fright, or suddenly recollected an en-
gagement, and in long, graceful leaps, barely touch-
ing the fence, has gone careering up the hill as fleet
as the wind.

The wild, buoyant creature, how beautiful he is !
I had often seen his dead carcass, and, at a distance,
had witnessed the hounds drive him across the upper
fields ; but the thrill and excitement of meeting him
in his wild freedom in the woods were unknown to
me, till, one cold winter day, drawn thither by the
baying of a hound, I stood near the summit of the
mountain, waiting a renewal of the sound, that I
might determine the course of the dog and choose
my position, — stimulated by the ambition of all
young Nimrods, to bag some notable game. Long I
waited, and patiently, till, chilled and benumbed, I
was about to turn back, when, hearing a slight noise,
I looked up and beheld a most superb fox, loping
along with inimitable grace and ease, evidently dis-
turbed, but not pursued by the hound, and so ab-
toibed in his private meditations that he failed to see
1 A spur of the Catskills.

58 THE SNOW-WALKERS.

me, though I stood transfixed with amazement and
admiration, not ten yards distant. I took his meas-
ure at a glance, — a large male, with daik legs, and
massive tail tipped with white, — a most magnifi-
cent creature ; but so astonished and fascinated was
I by this sudden appearance and matchless beauty,
that not till I had caught the last glimpse of him,
as he disappeared over a knoll, did I awake to my
duty as a sportsman, and realize what an opportunity
to distinguish myself I had unconsciously let slip. I
clutched my gun, half angrily, as if it was to blame,
and went home out of humor with myself and all fox-
kind. But I have since thought better of the expe-
rience, and concluded that I bagged the game after
all, the best part of it, and fleeced Reynard of some-
thing more valuable than his fur, without his knowl-
edge.

Vrhis is thoroughly a winter sound, — this voice of
the hound upon the mountain, — and one that is
music to many ears. The long trumpet-like bay,
heard for a mile or more, — now faintly back to the
deep recesses of the mountain, — now distinct, but
Btill faint, as the hound comes over some prominent
point, and the wind favors, — anon entirely lost in
the gully, — then breaking out again much nearer,
and growing more and more pronounced as the dog
approaches, till, when he comes around the brow of
the mountain, directly above you, the barking is loud
And sharp. On he goes along the northern spur, his
voice rising and sinking as the wind and lay of the
ground modify it, till lost to hearing.

THE SNOW-WALKERS. 59

The fox usually keeps half a mile ahead, regulating
bis speed by that of the hound, occasionally pausing a
moment to divert himself with a mouse, or to contem-
plate the landscape, or to listen for his pursuer. If
the hound press him too closely, he leads off from
mountain to mountain, and so generally escapes the
hunter ; but if the pursuit be slow,, he plays about
some ridge or peak, and falls a prey, though not an
easy one, to the experienced sportsman.

A most spiriting and excited chase occurs when the
farm-dog gets close upon one in the open field, aa
sometimes happens in the early morning. The fox
relies so confidently upon his superior speed, that I
imagine he half tempts the dog to the race. But if
the dog be a smart one, and their course lies down
hill, over smooth ground, Reynard must put his best
foot forward ; and then, sometimes, suffer the igno-
miny of being run over by his pursuer, who, how-
ever, is quite unable to pick him up, owing to the
speed. But when they mount the hill, or enter the
woods, the superior nimbleness and agility of the fox
tell at once, and he easily leaves the dog far in his
rear. For a cur less than his own size he manifests
little fear, especially if the two meet alone, remote
from the house. In such cases, I have seen first one
turn tail, then the other.

A novel spectacle often occurs in summer, when the
•female has young. You are rambling on the mount-
ain, accompanied by your dog, when you are startled
Sy that wild, half-threatening squall, and in a moment

80 THE SNOW -WALKERS.

perceive your dog, with inverted tail, and shame and
confusion in his looks, sneaking toward you, the old
fox but a few rods in his rear. You speak to him
sharply, when he bristles up, turns about, and, bark-
ing, starts off vigorously, as if to wipe out the dis-
honor ; but in a moment comes sneaking back more
abashed than ever, and owns himself unworthy to be
called a dog. The fox fairly shames him out of the
woods. The secret of the matter is her sex, though
her conduct, for the honor of the fox be it said, seems
to be prompted only by solicitude for the safety of
her young.

^One of the most notable features of the fox is his
large and massive tail. Seen running on the snow
at a distance, his tail is quite as conspicuous as his
body ; and, so far from appearing a burden, seems to
contribute to his lightness and buoyancy. V It softens
the outline of his movements, and repeats or contin-
ues to the eye the ease and poise of his carriage.
/^But, pursued by the hound on a wet, thawy day it
often becomes so heavy and bedraggled as to prove
a serious inconvenience, and compels him to take
refuge in his den. He is very loath to do this ; both
his pride and the traditions of his race stimulate him
to run it out, and win by fair superiority of wind and
speed ; and only a wound or a heavy and moppish
tail will drive him to avoid the issue in this manner.
/ To learn his surpassing shrewdness and cunning,
attempt to take him with a trap. Rogue that he is,
be always suspects some trick, and one must be more

THE SNOW-WALKERS. 61

of a fox than he is himself to overreach him. At
first sight it would appear easy enough. With ap-
parent indifference he crosses your path, or walks in
your footsteps in the field, or travels along the beaten
highway, or lingers in the vicinity of stacks and re-
mote barns. Carry the carcass of a pig, or a fowl, or
a dog, to a distant field in midwinter, and in a few
nights his tracks cover the snow about it.

The inexperienced country youth, misled by this
seeming carelessness of Reynard, suddenly conceives
a project to enrich himself with fur, and wonders that
the idea has not occurred to him before, and to others.
I knew a youthful yeoman of this kind, who imag-
ined he had found a mine of wealth on discovering
on a remote side-hill, between two woods, a dead
porker, upon which it appeared all the foxes of the
neighborhood had nightly banqueted. The clouds
were burdened with snow ; and as the first flakes
commenced to eddy down, he set out, trap and broom
in hand, already counting over in imagination the
silver quarters he would receive for his first fox-skin.
With the utmost care, and with a palpitating heart,
he removed enough of the trodden snow to allow the
trap to sink below the surface. Then, carefully sift-
ing the light element over it and sweeping his tracks
full, he quickly withdrew, laughing exultingly over
the little surprise he had prepared for the cunning
rogue. The elements conspired to aid him, and the
falling snow rapidly obliterated all vestiges of his
work. The next morning at dawn, he was on hi*

62 THE SNOW-WALKERS.

way to bring in his fur. The snow had done ita
work effectually, and, he believed, had kept his secret
well. Arrived in sight of the locality, he strained
his vision to make out his prize lodged against the
fence at the foot of the hill. Approaching nearer,
the surface was unbroken, and doubt usurped the
place of certainty in his mind. A slight mound
marked the site of the porker, but there was no
foot-print near it. Looking up the hill, he saw where
Reynard had walked leisurely down toward his
wonted bacon till within a few yards of it, when he
had wheeled, and with prodigious strides disappeared
in the woods. The young trapper saw at a glance
what a comment this was upon his skill in the art,
and indignantly exhuming the iron, he walked home
with it, the stream of silver quarters suddenly setting
in another direction.

The successful trapper commences in the fall, or
before the first deep snow. In a field, not too re-
mote, with an old axe, he cuts a small place, say ten
inches by fourteen, in the frozen ground, and removes
the earth to the depth of three or four inches, then
fills the cavity with dry ashes, in which are placed
bits of roasted cheese. Reynard is very suspicious <
at first, and gives the place a wide berth. It looks
like design, and he will see how the thing behaves
before he approaches too near. But the cheese i?
«avory and the cold severe. He ventures a little
closer every night, until he can reach and pick a
piece from the surface. Emboldened by success, like

TEE SNOW-WALKERS. 63

other mortals, he presently digs freely among the
ashes, and, finding a fresh supply of the delectable
morsels every night, is soon thrown off his guard,
and his suspicions quite lulled. After a week of
baiting in this manner, and on the eve of a light fall
of snow, the trapper carefully conceals his trap in the
">ed. first smoking it thoroughly with hemlock boughs
;o kill or neutralize all smell of the iron. If the
weather favors and the proper precautions have been
taken, he may succeed, though the chances are still
greatly against him.

^ Reynard is usually caught very lightly, seldom
more than the ends of his toes being between the
jaws. He sometimes works so cautiously as to spring
the trap without injury even to his toes ; or may re-
move the cheese night after night without even
springing it. I knew an old trapper who, on finding
himself outwitted in this manner, tied a bit of cheese
to the pan, and next morning had poor Reynard by
the jaw. The trap is not fastened, but only encum-
bered with a clog, and is all the more sure in its hold
by yielding to every effort of the animal to extricate
himself.

I When Reynard sees his captor approaching, he
would fain drop into a mouse-hole to render himself
invisible. He crouches to the ground and remains
oerfectly motionless until he perceives himself discov-
ered, when he makes one desperate and final effort to
escape, but ceases all struggling as you come up, and
*ehaves in a manner that stamps him a very timid

64 THE SNOW-WALKERS.

warrior, — cowering to the earth with a mingled look
of shame, guilt, and abject fear. A young farmer
told me of tracing one with his trap to the border of
a wood, where he discovered the cunning rogue try-
ing to hide by embracing a small tree. Most animals,
when taken in a trap, show fight ; but Reynard has
more faith in the nimbleness of his feet than in the
terror of his teeth.

""^''''Entering the woods, the number and variety of the
/ tracks contrast strongly with the rigid, frozen aspect
I of things. Warm jets of life still shoot and play
amid this snowy desolation. Fox-tracks are far less
numerous than in the fields ; but those of hares,
skunks, partridges, squirrels, and mice abound. The
mjce tracks are very pretty, and look like a sort of
fantastic stitching on the coverlid of the snow. One
is curious to know what brings these tiny creatures
from their retreats ; they do not seem to be in quest
of food, but rather to be traveling about for pleasure
or sociability, though always going post-haste, and
linking stump with stump and tree with tree by fine,
hurried strides. That is when they travel openly ; but
they have hidden passages and winding galleries under
the snow, which undoubtedly are their main avenues
of communication. Here and there these passages
rise so near the surface as to be covered by only a
*rail arch of snow, and a slight ridge betrays their
course to the eye. I know him well. He is known
to the farmer as the " deer-mouse," to the naturalist
48 the white-footed mouse (Hesperomys leucopus) — a

THE SNOW-WALKERS. 65

very beautiful creature, nocturnal in his habits, with
large ears, and large, fine eyes, full of a wild, harm-
less look. He is daintily marked, with white feet
and a white belly. When disturbed by day he is
very easily captured, having none of the cunning
or viciousness of the common Old World mouse.

It is he who, high in the hollow trunk of some tree,
lays by a store of beech-nuts for winter use. Every
nut is carefully shelled, and the cavity that serves as
storehouse lined with grass and leaves. The wood-
chopper frequently squanders this precious store. I
have seen half a peck taken from one tree, as clean
and white as if put up by the most delicate hands, —
as they were. How long it must have taken the little
creature to collect this quantity, to hull them one by
one, and convey them up to his fifth-story chamber !
He is not confined to the woods, but is quite as com-
mon in the fields, particularly in the fall, amid the
corn and potatoes. When routed by the plow, I
have seen the old one take flight with half a dozen
young hanging to her teats, and with such reckless
speed that some of the young would lose their hold
and fly off amid the weeds. Taking refuge in a
stump with the rest of her family, the anxious mother
would presently come back and hunt up the missing
ones.

I/The snow-walkers are mostly night-walkers also,
and the record they leave upon the snow is the main
clew one has to their life and doings. The hare ia
nocturnal in its habits, and though a very lively creat-

66 THE SNOW-WALKERS.

are at night, with regular courses and run-ways
through the wood, is entirely quiet by day. ^imid
as he is, he makes little effort to conceal himself, usu-
ally squatting beside a log, stump, or tree, and seeni-
iug to avoid rocks and ledges where he might be par-
tially housed from the cold and the snow, but where
also — and this consideration undoubtedly determines
his choice — he would be more apt to fall a prey to his
enemies. In this, as well as in many other respects,
he differs from the rabbit proper (Lepus sylvaticus) ,
he never burrows in the ground, or takes refuge in a
den or hole, when pursued. If caught in the open
fields, he is much confused and easily overtaken by
the dog ; but in the woods, he leaves him at a bound.
In summer, when first disturbed, he beats the ground
violently with his feet, by which means he would ex-
press to you his surprise or displeasure ; it is a dumb
way he has of scolding. After leaping a few yards, he
pauses an instant, as if to determine the degree of dan-
ger, and then hurries away with a much lighter tread.
\ His feet are like great pads, and his track has little
of the sharp, articulated expression of Reynard's, or
of animals that climb or dig. Yet it is very pretty
like all the rest, and tells its own tale. There is
nothing bold or vicious or vulpine in it, and his timid,
harmless character is published at every leap. He
abounds in dense woods, preferring localities filled
with a small undergrowth of beech and birch, upon
the bark of which he feeds. \Nature is rather partial
to him, and matches his extreme local habits and char

THE SXOW-WALKEBS. 67

acter with a suit that corresponds with his surround-
ings, — reddish-gray ;n summer and white in winter.

The sharp-rayed tra^k of the partridge adds another
figure to this fantastic embroidery upon the winter
snow. Her course is a clear, strong line, sometimes
pite wayward, but generally very direct, steering
for the densest, most impenetrable places, — lead-
ing you over logs and through brush, alert and ex-
pectant, till, suddenly, she bursts up a few yards from
you, and goes humming through the trees, — the
complete triumph of endurance and vigor. Hardy
native bird, may your tracks never be fewer, or your
visits to the birch-tree less frequent !

The squirrel-tracks — sharp, nervous, and wiry —
have their histories also. But who ever saw squirrels
in winter ? The naturalists say they are mostly tor-
pid ; yet evidently that little pocket-faced depredator
the chipmunk, was not carrying buckwheat for so
many days to his hole for nothing ; — was he antici-
pating a state of torpidity, or providing against the
demands of a very active appetite? Eed and gray
squirrels are more or less active all winter, though
very shy, and, I am inclined to think, partially noc-
lurnal in their habits. Here a gray one has just
passed, — came down that tree and went up this;
there he dug for a beech-nut, and left the bur on
ihe snow. How did he know where to dig? During
an unusually severe winter I have known him to make
long journeys to a barn, in a remote field, where
wheat was stored. How did he know there was

68 THE SNOW-WALKERS.

wheat there? In attempting to return, the adventur-
ous creature was frequently run down and caught in
the deep snow.

"\His home is in the trunk of some old birch or ma-
ple, with an entrance far up amid the branches. In
the spring he builds himself a summer-house of small
leafy twigs in the top of a neighboring beech, where
the young are reared and much of the time passed.
But the safer retreat in the maple is not abandoned,
and both old and young resort thither in the fall, or
when danger threatens. 'Whether this temporary
residence amid the branches is for elegance or pleas-
ure, or for sanitary reasons or domestic convenience,
the naturalist has forgotten to mention.
I The elegant creature, so cleanly in its habits, so
graceful in its carriage, so nimble and daring in its
movements, excites feelings of admiration akin to
those awakened by the birds and the fairer forms of
nature./ His passage through the trees is almost a
flight. Indeed, the flying-squirrel has little or no ad-
vantage over him, and in speed and nimbleness can-
not compare with him at all. If he miss his footing
and fall, he is sure to catch on the next branch ; if
the connection be broken, he leaps recklessly for the
nearest spray or limb, and secures his hold, even if
it be by the aid of his teeth.

v/His career of frolic and festivity begins in the fall,
after the birds have left us and the holiday spirit of
nature has commenced to subside. How absorbing
the pastime of the sportsman, who goes to the woodfl

THE SNOW-WALKERS. 69

in the still October morning in quest of him ! You
step lightly across the threshold of the forest, and sit
down upon the first log or rock to await the signals.
It is so still that the ear suddenly seems to have ac-
quired new powers, and there is no movement to con-
fuse the eye. Presently you hear the rustling of a
branch, and see it sway or spring as the squirrel leaps
from or to it; or else you hear a disturbance in the
dry leaves, and mark one running upon the ground.
He has probably seen the intruder, and, not liking his
stealthy movements, desires to avoid a nearer ac-
quaintance. Now he mounts a stump to see if the
way is clear, then pauses a moment at the foot of a
tree to take his bearings, his tail, as he skims along,
undulating behind him, and adding to the easy grace
and dignity of his movements. Or else you are first
advised of his proximity by the dropping of a false
nut, or the fragments of the shucks rattling upon the
leaves. Or, again, after contemplating you a while
unobserved, and making up his mind that you are
riot dangerous, he strikes an attitude on a branch, and
commences to quack and bark, with an accompanying
movement of his tail. Late in the afternoon, when
the same stillness reigns, the same scenes are repeated.
There is a black variety, quite rare, but mating freely
with the gray, from which he seems to be distin-
guished only in color.

/The track of the red squirrel may be known by its
smaller size. He is more common and less dignified
than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny

TO THE SNOW-WALKERS.

about the barns and grain-fields. He is most abun«
dant in old bark -peelings, and low, dilapidated hem-
locks, from which he makes excursions to the fields
and orchards, spinning along the tops of the fences,
which afford, not only convenient lines of communi-
cation, but a safe retreat if danger threatens. He
loves to linger about the orchard ; and, sitting upright
on the topmost stone in the wall, or on the tallest
stake in. the fence, chipping up an apple for the seeds,
his tail conforming to the curve of his back, his paws
shifting and turning the apple, he is a pretty sight,
and his bright, pert appearance atones for all the mis-
chief he does, ^.t home, in the woods, he is the most
frolicsome and loquacious. The appearance of any-
thing unusual, if, after contemplating it a moment, he
concludes it not dangerous, excites his unbounded
mirth and ridicule, and he snickers and chatters,
hardly able to contain himself; now darting up the
trunk of a tree and squealing in derision, then hop-
ping into position on a limb and dancing to the
music of his own cackle, and all for your special
benefit.

I/There is something very human in this apparent
mirth and mockery of the squirrels. It seems to be
a sort of ironical laughter, and implies self-conscious
pride and exultation in the laughter. " What a ridic-
ulous thing you are, to be sure ! " he seems to say ;
" how clumsy and awkward, and what a poor show
for a tail! Look at me, look at me!" — and he
3apers about in his best style. Again, he would seem

THE SNOW-WALKERS. 71

to tease you and provoke your attention ; then sud-
denly assumes a tone of good-natured, child-like defi-
ance and derision. That pretty little imp, the chip-
munk, will sit on the stone above his den, and defy
you, as plainly as if he said so, to catch him before he
can get into his hole if you can. You hurl a stone at
him, and " No you did n't " comes up from the depth
of his retreat.

V In February another track appears upon the snow,
slender and delicate, about a third larger than that of
the gray squirrel, indicating no haste or speed, but, on
the contrary, denoting the most imperturbable ease
and leisure, the foot-prints so close together that the
trail appears like a chain of curiously carved links.
Sir Mephitis chinga, or, in plain English, the skunkj_
has woke up from his six weeks' nap, and come out
into society again. / He is a nocturnal traveler, very
bold and impudent, coming quite up to the barn and
out-buildings, and sometimes taking up his quarters
for the season unden the hay-mow. V'There is no such
word as hurry in his dictionary, as you may see by
his path upon the snow. VHe has a very sneaking,
insinuating way, and goes creeping about the fields
and woods, never once in a perceptible degree alter-
\ng his gait, and, if a fence crosses his course, steers
tor a break or opening to avoid climbing. l/He is too
in dol< Hit even to dig his own hole, but appropriates
that of a woodchuck, or hunts out a crevice in the
••ocks, from which he extends his rambling in all di-
rections, preferring damp, thawy weather. He haa

72 THE SNOW-WALKERS.

very little discretion or cunning, and holds a trap in
ntter contempt, stepping into it as soon as beside it,
relying implicitly for defense against all forms of
danger upon the unsavory punishment he is capable
of inflicting. ^He is quite indifferent to both man and
beast, and will not hurry himself to get out of the
way of either. Walking through the summer h'elda
at twilight, I have come near stepping upon him, and
was much the more disturbed of the two. Hrc hen at-
tacked in the open fields he confounds the plans of
his enemies by the unheard-of tactics of exposing his
rear rather than his front. " Come if you dare," he
says, and his attitude makes even the farm-dog pause.
After a few encounters of this kind, and if you enter-
tain the usual hostility towards him, your mode of
attack will speedily resolve itself into moving about
him in a circle, the radius of which will be the exact
distance at which you can hurl a stone with accuracy
and effect.

i/He has a secret to keep, and knows it, and is care-
ful not to betray himself until he can do so with the
most telling effect. I have known him to preserve
-• his serenity even when caught in a steel trap, and
look the very picture of injured innocence, manoeu-
vring carefully and deliberately to extricate his foot
fron: the grasp of the naughty jaws. Do not by any
means take pity on him, and lend a helping hand !

/How pretty his face and head ! How fine and
delicate his teeth, like a weasel's or cat's ! When
about a third grown, he looks so well that one cov

THE SNOW-WALKERS. 73

ets him for a pet. He is quite precocious, however,
and capable, even at this tender age, of making a
very strong appeal to your sense of smell.
V No animal is more cleanly in its habits than he.
He is not an awkward boy, who cuts his own face
with his whip ; and neither his flesh nor his fur hints
the weapon with which he is armed. The most silent
creature known to me, he makes no sound, so far as
I have observed, save a diffuse, impatient noise, like
that produced by beating your hand with a whisk-
broom, when the farm-dog has discovered his retreat
in the stone fence. He renders himself obnoxious to
the farmer by his partiality for hens' eggs and young
poultry. He is a confirmed epicure, and at plunder-
ing hen-roosts an expert. Not the full-grown fowls
are his victims, but the youngest and most tender.
At night Mother Hen receives under her maternal
wings a dozen newly hatched chickens, and with
much pride and satisfaction feels them all safely
tucked away in her feathers. In the morning she is
walking about disconsolately, attended by only two
or three of all that pretty brood. What has hap-
pened ? Where are they gone ? That pickpocket,
Sir Mephitis, could solve the mystery. Quietly has
he approached, under cover of darkness, and one by
one, relieved her of her precious charge. Look
slosely, and you will see their little yellow legs and
beaks, or part of a mangled form, lying about on the
ground. Or, before the hen has hatched, he may
ind her out, and, by the same sleight of hand, re-

74 THE SNOW-WALKERS.

move every egg, leaving only the empty blood
stained shells to witness against him. The birds, es«
pecially the ground-builders, suffer in like manner
from his plundering propensities.

The secretion upon which he relies for defense,
and which is the chief source of his unpopularity,
while it affords good reasons against cultivating him
as a pet, and mars his attractiveness as game, is by
no means the greatest indignity that can be offered
to a nose. It is a rank, living smell, and has none of
the sickening qualities of disease or putrefaction.
Indeed, I think a good smeller will enjoy its most re-
fined intensity. It approaches the sublime, and
makes the nose tingle. It is tonic and bracing, and,
I can readily believe, has rare medicinal qualities. I
do not recommend its use as eye-water, though an old
farmer assures me it has undoubted virtues when
thus applied. Hearing, one night, a disturbance
among his hens, he rushed suddenly out to catch the
thief, when Sir Mephitis, taken by surprise, and no
doubt much annoyed at being interrupted, discharged
the vials of his wrath full iu the farmer's face, and
with such admirable effect, that, for a few moments,
he was completely blinded, and powerless to revenge
himself upon the rogue, who embraced the opportu-
nity to make good his escape ; but he declared that
afterwards his eyes felt as if purged by fire, and his
aight was much clearer.

i/In March that brief summary of a bear, the rac
coon, comes out of his den in the ledges, and leave*

THE SNOW-WALKERS. 1 5

0is sharp digitigrade track upon the snow, — • travel-
ing not unfrequently in pairs, — a lean, hungry
couple, bent on pillage and plunder. They have an
unenviable time of it, — feasting in the summer and
fall, hibernating in winter, and starving in spring.
In April I have found the young of the previous
year creeping about the fields, so reduced by starva-
tion as to be quite helpless, and offering no resistance
to my taking them up by the tail, and carrying them
home.

A^The old ones also become very much emaciated,
and come boldly up to the barn or other out-build-
ings in quest of food. I remember one morning in
early spring, of hearing old Cuff, the farm-dog, bark-
ing vociferously before it was yet light. When we
got up we discovered him, at the foot of an ash-tree
standing about thirty rods from the house, looking up
at some gray object in the leafless branches, and by
his manners and his voice evincing great impatience
that we were so tardy in coming to his assistance.
Arrived on the spot, we saw in the tree a coon of un-
usual size. One bold climber proposed to go up and
shake him down. This was what old Cuff wanted,
and he fairly bounded with delight as he saw his
young master shinning up the tree. Approaching
within eight or ten feet of the coon, he seized the
orauch to which it clung and shook long and fiercely.
But the coon was in no danger of losing its hold,
and when the climber paused to renew his hold, it
turned toward him with a growl and showed very

76 THE SNOW-WALKERS.

clearly a purpose to advance to the attack. This
caused his pursuer to descend to the ground again
with all speed. When the coon was finally brought
down with a gun, he fought the dog, which was a
large, powerful animal, with great fury, returning
bite for bite for some moments ; and after a quarter
of an hour had elapsed and his unequal antagonist
had shaken him as a terrier does a rat, making his
teeth meet through the small of his back, the coon
still showed fight.

^j/hey are very tenacious of life, and like the badger
will always whip a dog of their own size and weight.
A woodchuck can bite severely, having teeth that cut
like chisels, but a coon has agility and power of limb
as well.

<U-JThey are only considered game in the fall or to-
wards the close of summer, when they become fat
and their flesh sweet. At this time, cooning in the
remote interior is a famous pastime. As this animal
is entirely nocturnal in its habits it is hunted only at
night. A piece of corn on some remote side hill near
the mountain, or between two pieces of woods, is
most apt to be frequented by them. While the corn
is yet green they pull the ears down like hogs, and
tearing open the sheathing of husks, eat the tender,
succulent kernels, bruising and destroying much more
than they devour. Sometimes their ravages are a
matter of serious concern to the farmer. But every
such neighborhood has its coon-dog, and the boys
and young men dearly love the sport. The party

THE SNOW-WALKERS. 77

gets out about eight or nine o'clock of a dark, moon-
less night, and stealthily approach the cornfield. The
dog knows his business and when he is put into a
patch of corn and told to " hunt them up " he makes
a thorough search and will not be misled by any
other scent. You hear him rattling through the corn
hither and yon, with great speed. The coons prick
np their ears, and leave on the opposite side of the
field. In the stillness you may sometimes hear a
single stone rattle on the wall as they hurry toward
the woods. If the dog finds nothing he comes back
to his master in a short time, and says in his dumb
way, " No coon there." But if he strikes a trail you
presently hear a louder rattling on the stone wall and
then a hurried bark as he enters the woods, followed
in few minutes by loud and repeated barking as he
reaches the foot of the tree in which the coon has
taken refuge. Then follows a pell-mell rush of the
cooning party up the hill, into the woods, through the
brush and the darkness, falling over prostrate trees,
pitching into gulleys and hollows, losing hats and
earing clothes, till finally, guided by the baying of
the faithful dog, the tree is reached. The first thing
now in order is to kindle a fire, and if its light reveals
the coon, to shoot him. If not, to fell the tree with
an axe. If this happens to be too great a sacrifice
of timber and of strength, to sit down at the foot of
the tree till morning.

But with March our interest in these phases of
animal life, which winter has so emphasized and

78 THE SNOW-WALKERS.

brought out, begins to decline. Vague rumors are
afloat in the air of a great and coming change. We
are eager for Winter to be gone, since he too is fugi-
tive, and cannot keep his place. Invisible hands de-
face his icy statuary ; his chisel has lost its cunning.
The drifts, so pure and exquisite, are now earth-
stained and weather-worn, — the flutes and scallops,
and fine, firm lines, all gone ; and what was a grace
and an ornament to the hills is now a disfiguration.
Like worn and unwashed linen appear the remains of
that spotless robe with which he clothed the world
as his bride.

But he will not abdicate without a struggle. Day
after day he rallies his scattered forces, and night
after night pitches his white tents on the hills, and
would fain regain his lost ground ; but the young
prince in every encounter prevails. Slowly and re-
luctantly the gray old hero retreats up the mountain,
till finally the south rain comes in earnest, and in a
night he is dead.

THE FOX.

THE FOX.

I HAVE already spoken of the fox at some length,
but it will take a chapter by itself to do half justice
to his portrait.

*^He furnishes, perhaps, the only instance that can
be cited of a fur-bearing animal that not only holds
its own, but that actually increases in the face of the
means that are used for its extermination. i/The
beaver, for instance, was gone before the earliest
settlers could get a sight of him ; and even the mink
arid marten are now only rarely seen, or not seen at
all, in places where they were once abundant.
| But the fox has survived civilization, and in some
localities is no doubt more abundant now than in the
time of the Revolution. |For half a century at least
he has been almost the only prize, in the way of fur,
that was to be found on our mountains, and he has
been hunted and trapped and waylaid, sought for as
»ame and pursued in enmity, taken by fair means
and by foul, and yet there seems not the slightest
danger of the species becoming extinct.

One would think that a single hound in a neigh-
borhood, filling the mountains with his bayings, and
6

82 THE FOX.

"leaving no nook or by-way of them unexplored, was
enough to drive and scare every fox from the coun-
try. But not so. (Indeed, I am almost tempted to
say, the more hounds, the more foxes.

I recently spent a summer month in a mountainous
district in the State of New York, where, from its
earliest settlement, the red fox has been the standing
prize for skill in the use of the trap and gun. At the
house where I was stopping were two fox-hounds, and
a neighbor, half a mile distant, had a third. There
were many others in the township, and in season they
were well employed, too ; but the three spoken of, at-
tended by their owners, held high carnival on the
mountains in the immediate vicinity. And many
were the foxes that, winter after winter, fell before
them, twenty-five having been shot the season before
my visit, on one small range alone. And yet the
foxes were apparently never more abundant than
they were that summer, and never bold, coming at
night within a few rods of the house, and of the un-
chained alert hounds, and making havoc among the
poultry.

One morning a large fat goose was found minus her*
head and otherwise mangled. Both hounds had dis-
appeared, and as they did not come back till near
night, it was inferred that they had cut short Rey-
nard's repast, and given him a good chase into the
bargain. But next night he was back again, and this
time got safely off with the goose. A couple of
nights after he must have come with recruits, for

THE FOX. 83

flext morning three large goslings were reported
missing. The silly geese now got it through their
noddles that there was danger about, and every night
thereafter came close up to the house to roost.

A brood of turkeys, the old one tied to a tree a
few rods to the rear of the house, were the next ob-
jects of attack. The predaceous rascal came, as
usual, in the latter half of the night. I happened to
be awake, and heard the helpless turkey cry " Quit,"
" quit," with great emphasis. Another sleeper, on
the floor above me, who, it seems, had been sleeping
with one ear awake for several nights in apprehen-
sion for the safety of his turkeys, heard the sound
also, and instantly divined its cause. I heard the
window open and a voice summon the dogs. A loud
bellow was the response, which caused Reynard to
take himself off in a hurry. A moment more, and
the mother turkey would have shared the fate of the
geese. There she lay at the end of her tether, with
extended wings, bitten and rumpled. The young
ones roosted in a row on the fence near by, and had
taken flight on the first alarm.

* Turkeys, retaining many of their wild instincts, are
less easily captured by the fox than any other of our
domestic fowls. On the slightest show of danger
they take to wing, and it is not unusual, in the local-
ity of which I speak, to find them in the morning
perched in the most unwonted places, as on the peak
of the barn or hay-shed, or on the tops of the apple-
trees, their tails spread and their manners showing

84 THE FOX.

much excitement. Perchance one turkey is minus
her tail, the fox having succeeded in getting only a
mouthful of quilL.

As the brood grows and their wings develop, they
wander far from the house in quest of grasshoppers.
)At such times they are all watchfulness and suspicion,
^Crossing the fields one day, attended by a dog that
much resembled a fox, I came suddenly upon a brood
about one third grown, which were feeding in a past-
ure just beyond a wood. It so happened that they
caught sight of the dog without seeing me, when in
stantly, with the celerity of wild game, they launched
into the air, and, while the old one perched upon a
tree-top, as if to keep an eye on the supposed enemy,
the young went sailing over the trees towards home.

The two hounds above referred to, accompanied by
a cur-dog, whose business it was to mind the farm,
but who took as much delight in running away from
prosy duty as if he had been a school-boy, would fre-
quently steal off and have a good hunt all by them-
selves, just for the fun of the thing, I suppose. I
more than half suspect that it was as a kind of taunt
or retaliation, that Reynard came and took the geese
from under their very noses. One morning they
went off and stayed till the afternoon of the next
day ; they ran the fox all day and all night, the
hounds baying at every jump, the cur-dog silent and
tenacious. When the trio returned they came drag-
ging themselves along, stiff, foot-sore, gaunt, and
hungry. For a day or two afterward they lay about

THE FOX. 85

the kennels, seeming to dread nothing so much as the
having to move. The stolen hunt was their " spree," V* '
their " bender," and of course they must take time to
get over it.

^Some old hunters think the fox enjoys the chase as
much as the hound, especially when the latter runs
slo\v, as the best hounds do. The fox will wait for
the hound, will sit down and listen, or play about,
crossing and recrossing and doubling upon his track,
as if enjoying a mischievous consciousness of the per-
plexity he would presently cause his pursuer. It is
evident, however, that the fox does not always have
his share of the fun : before a swift dog, or in a deep
snow, or on a wet day when his tail gets heavy, he
must put his best foot forward. As a last resort he
" holes up." Sometimes he resorts to numerous de-
vices to mislead and escape the dog altogether. He
will walk in the bed of a small creek, or on a rail-
fence. I heard of an instance of a fox, hard and long
pressed, that took to a rail-fence, and after walking
some distance, made a leap to one side to a hollow
stump, in the cavity of which he snugly stowed him-
self. The ruse succeeded, and the dogs lost the trail ;
but the hunter coming up, passed by chance near the
stump, when out bounded the fox, his cunning avail-
ing him less than he deserved. On another occasion
the fox took to the public road, and stepped with
great care and precision into a sleigh-track. The
^aul. polished snow took no imprint of the light foot,
and the scent was no doubt less than it would have

86 THE FOX.

been on a rougher surface. May be, also, the rogue
had considered the chances of another sleigh coming
along, before the hound, and obliterating the trail
entirely.

Audubon relates of a certain fox, which, when
sUrted by the hounds, always managed to elude them
at a certain point. Finally the hunter concealed
himself in the locality, to discover, if possible, the
trick. Presently along came the fox, and making a
leap to one side, ran up the trunk of a fallen tree
which had lodged some feet from the ground, and
concealed himself in the top. In a few minutes the
hounds came up, and in their eagerness passed some
distance beyond the point, and then went still farther,
looking for the lost trail. Then the fox hastened
down, and, taking his back-track, fooled the dogs
completely.

I was told of a silver-gray fox in northern New
York, which, when pursued by the hounds, would run
till it had hunted up another fox, or the fresh trail of
one, when it would so manoeuvre that the hound
would invariably be switched off on the second track.

In cold, dry weather the fox will sometimes elude
the hound, at least delay him much, by taking to a
\ bare, plowed field. The hard dry earth seems not to
\ *etain a particle of the scent, and the hound gives a
\ ioud, long, peculiar bark, to signify he has trouble.
\It is now his turn to show his wit, which he often
ttbes by passing completely around the field, and re-
euming the trail again where it crosses the fence or a
fltrip of snow.

THE FOX. 87

The fact that any dry, hard surface is unfavorable
to the hound, suggests, in a measure, the explanation
of the wonderful faculty that all dogs in a degree
possess to track an animal by the scent of the foot
alone. Did you ever think why a dog's nose it
always wet ? Examine the nose of a fox-hound, for
instance ; how very moist and sensitive ! Cause this
moisture to dry up, and the dog would be as power-
less to track an animal as you are ! The nose of the
cat, you may observe, is but a little moist, and, as
you know, her sense of smell is far inferior to that of
the dog. Moisten your own nostrils and lips, and
this sense is plainly sharpened. The sweat of a dog's
nose, therefore, is no doubt a vital element in its
power, and, without taking a very long logical stride^
we may infer how a damp, rough surface aids him in
tracking game.

A fox hunt in this country is, of course, quite a
different thing from what it is in England, where all
Mie squires and noblemen of a borough, superbly
mounted, go riding over the country, guided by the
yelling hounds, till the fox is literally run down and
murdered. Here the hunter prefers a rough, mount-
ainous country, and, as probably most persons know,
takes advantage of the disposition of the fox, when
pursued by the hound, to play or circle around a ridge
or bold point, and, taking his stand near the run-way
tfioots him down.

I recently had the pleasure of a turn with some ex-
perienced hunters. As we ascended the ridge toward

88 THE FOX.

"the mountain, keeping in our ears the uncertain bay-
ing of the hounds as they slowly unraveled an old
trail, my companions pointed out to me the different
run-ways, — a gap in the fence here, a rock just below
the brow of the hill there, that tree yonder near th3
corner of the woods, or the end of that stone wall
looking down the side hill, or commanding a cow
path, or the outlet of a wood road. A half wild ap-
ple orchard near a cross road was pointed out as an
invariable run-way, where the fox turned toward the
mountain again, after having been driven down the
ridge. There appeared to be no reason why the
foxes should habituallp pass any particular point, yet
the hunters told me that year after year they took
about the same turns, each generation of foxes run-
ning through the upper corner of that field, or cross-
ing the valley near vender stone wall, when pursued
by the dog. It seems the fox when he finds himself
followed is perpetually tempted to turn in his course,
to deflect from a right line, as a person would un-
doubtedly be under similar circumstances. If he is
on this side of the ridge, when he hears the dog
break around on his trail, he speedily crosses to the
other side ; if he is in the fields he takes again to the
woods ; if in the valley he hastens to the high land,
and evidently enjoys running along the ridge and lis-
tening to the dogs, slowly tracing out his course in
the fields below. At such times he appears to have
but one sense, hearing, and that reverted toward his
pursuers. He is constantly pausing, looking back

THE FOX. 89

and listening, and will almost run over the hunter if
he stands still, even though not at all concealed.

Animals of this class depend far less upon their
sight than upon their hearing and sense of smell.
Neither the fox nor the dog is capable of much dis-
crimination with the eye ; they seem to see things
only in the mass ; but with the nose they can analyze,
and define, and get at the most subtle shades of differ-
ence. The fox will not read a man from a stump or
a rock, unless he gets his scent, and the dog does not
know his master in a crowd until he has smelt him.

On the occasion to which I refer, it was not many
minutes after the dogs entered the woods on the side
of the mountain, before they gave out sharp and
eager, and we knew at once that the fox was started.
We were then near a point that had been designated
as a sure run-way, and hastened to get into position
with all speed. For my part I was so taken with
the music of the hounds as it swelled up over the
ridge, that I quite forgot the game. I saw one of
my companions leveling his gun, and looking a few
rods to the right, saw the fox coming right on to
us. I had barely time to note the silly and abashed
expression that came over him as he saw us in his
path, when he was cut down as by a flash of light-
ning. The rogue did not appear frightened, but
ashamed and out of countenance as one does when
some trick has been played upon him, or when de-
tected in some mischief.

Late in the afternoon, as we were passing through

90 THE FOX.

a piece of woods in the valley below, another fox, the
third that day, broke from his cover in an old tree top,
under our very noses, and drew the fire of three of our
party, myself among the number, but thanks to the
interposing trees and limbs, escaped unhurt. Then
the dogs took up the trail and there was lively music
again. The fox steered through the fields direct for
the ridge where we had passed up in the morning.
"We knew he would take a turn here and then point
for the mountain, and two of us with the hope of cut/-
ting him off by the old orchard, through which we
were again assured he would surely pass, made a pre-
cipitous rush for that point. It was nearly half a
mile distant, most of the way up a steep side hill, and
if the fox took the circuit indicated he would proba-
bly be there in twelve or fifteen minutes. Running V
up an angle of 45° seems quite easy work for a four- £
footed beast like a dog or fox, but to a two-legged^J
animal like a man, it is very heavy and awkward. ^»
Before I got half way up, there seemed to be a vac-
uum all about me, so labored was my breathing, and
when I reached the summit, my head swam and my
knees were about giving out, but pressing on I had
barely time to reach a point in the road abreast of
the orchard, when I heard the hounds, and looking
under the trees, saw the fox, leaping high above the
weeds and grass, coming straight toward me. He
evidently had not got over the first scare, which our
haphazard fusilade had given him, and was making
unusually quick time. I was armed with a rifle and

THE FOX. 91

said to myself now was the time to win the laurels I
had coveted. For half a day previous I had been
practicing on a pumpkin which a patient youth had
rolled down a hill for me and had improved my shot
considerably. Now a yellow pumpkin was coming
which was not a pumpkin, and for the first time during
the day opportunity favored me. I expected the fox
to cross the road a few yards below me but just then
I heard him whisk through the grass, and he bounded
upon the fence a few yards above. He seemed to
cringe as he saw his old enemy, and to depress his
fur to half his former dimensions. Three bounds
and he had cleared the road, when my bullet tore up
the sod beside him, but to this hour I do not know
whether I looked at the fox without seeing my gun,
or whether I did sight him across its barrel. I only
know that I did not distinguish myself in the use of
the rifle on that occasion, and went home to wreak
my revenge upon another pumpkin. But without
much improvement of my skill, for, a few days after,
another fox ran under my very nose with perfect
impunity. There is something so fascinating in the
sudden appearance of the fox, that the eye is quite
mastered, and unless the instinct of the sportsman is
very strong and quick, the prey will slip through hia
grasp.

A still-hunt rarely brings you in sight of a fox, as
his ears are much sharper than yours, and his tread
much lighter. But if the fox is mousing in the fields,
and you discover him before he does you, you may,

92 THE FOX.

Ihe wind favoring, call him within a few paces of you.
Secrete yourself behind the fence, or some other ob-
ject, and squeak as nearly like a mouse as possible.
Reynard will hear the sound at an incredible distance
Pricking up his ears, he gets the direction, and comes
trotting along as unsuspiciously as can be. I have
never had an opportunity to try the experiment, but
I know perfectly reliable persons who have. One
man, in the pasture getting his cows, called a fox
which was too busy mousing to get the first sight,
^ till it jumped upon the wall just over where he sat
t secreted. Giving a loud whoop and jumping up at
^^ the same time, the fox came as near being frightened
^ out of his skin as I suspect a fox ever was.

In trapping for the fox, you get perhaps about as
much " fun " and as little fur,, as in any trapping
amusement you can engage in. ^The one feeling that
ever seems present to the mind of Reynard, is sus-
picion. He does not need experience to teach him,
but seems to know from the jump that there is such
a thing as a trap, and that a trap has a way of
grasping a fox's paw that is more frank than friendly.
Cornered in a hole or den, a trap can be set so that
the poor creature has the desperate alternative of
being caught or starve. He is generally caught,
though not till he has braved hunger for a good
many days.

But to know all his cunning and shrewdness, bait
him in the field, or set your trap by some carcass
where he is wont to come. In some cases he wiL

THE FOX. 93

nncover the trap, and leave the marks of his con-
tempt for it in a way you cannot mistake, or else he
will not approach within a rod of it. Occasionally,
however, he finds in a trapper more than his match,
and is fairly caught. When this happens, the trap,
which must be of the finest make, is never touched
with the bare hand, but, after being thoroughly
smoked and greased, is set in a bed of dry ashes, or
chaff, in a remote field where the fox has been em-
boldened to dig for several successive nights for mor-
sels of toasted cheese.

A light fall of snow aids the trapper's art and con- *
spires to Reynard's ruin. But how lightly he is
caught, when caught at all ! barely the end of his
toes, or at most a spike through the middle of his
foot. I once saw a large painting of a fox struggling
with a trap which held him by the hind leg, above
the gambrel joint! A painting alongside of it repre-
sented a peasant driving an ox-team from the off-
side ! A fox would be as likely to be caught above
the gambrel-joint as a farmer would to drive his
team from the off-side. I knew one that was caught
by the tip of the lower jaw. He came nightly, and
took the morsel of cheese from the pan of the trap
without springing it. A piece was then secured to
the pan by a thread, with the result as above stated.
\j I have never been, able to see clearly why the
\nother-fox generally selects a burrow or hole in the
open field in which to have her young, except it be,
%g some hunters maintain, for better security. The

94 THE FOX.

'young foxes are wont to come out on a warm day,
and play like puppies in front of the den. The view
being unobstructed on all sides by trees or bushes, in
the cover of which danger might approach, they are
less liable to surprise and capture. On the slightest
sound they disappear in the hole. Those who have
watched the gambols of the young foxes, speak of
them as very amusing, even more arch and playful
than those of kittens, while a spirit profoundly wise
and cunning seems to look out of their young eyes,
taie parent-fox can never be caught in the den with
them, but is hovering near the woods, which are al-
ways at hand, and by her warning cry or bark telling
them when to be on their guard. V She usually has at
least three dens, at no great distance apart, and moves
stealthily in the night with her charge from one to
the other, so as to mislead her enemies. Many a
party of boys, and of men, too, discovering the where-
abouts of a litter, have gone with shovels and picks,
and, after digging away vigorously for several hours,
have found only an empty hole for their pains. The
i>ld fox, finding her secret had been found out, had
waited for darkness, in the cover of which to transfer
her household to new quarters ; or else some old fox-
hunter, jealous of the preservation of his game, and
getting word of the intended destruction of the litter
had gone at dusk the night before, and made some
disturbance about the den, perhaps flashed some pow-
der in its mouth — a hint which the shrewd anima-
knew how to interpret.

THE FOX. 95

The more scientific aspects of the question may not
be without interest to some of my readers. The fox
belongs to the great order of flesh-eating animals
called Carnivora, and to the family called Canidce, or
dogs. v/The wolf is a kind of wild dog, and the fox
is a kind of wolf. yFoxes, unlike wolves, however,
never go in packs or companies, but hunt singly.
The fox has a kind of bark, which suggests the dog,
as have all the members of this family. The kinship
is further shown by the fact that during certain pe-
riods, for the most part in the summer, the dog can-
not be made to attack or even pursue the female
fox, but will run from her in the most shamefaced
manner, which he will not do in the case of any other
animal except a wolf. \Alany of the ways and manners
of the fox, when tamed, are also like the dog's. I
once saw a young red fox exposed for sale in the
market in Washington. A colored man had him,
and said he had caught him out in Virginia. He led
him by a small chain, as he would a puppy, and
the innocent young rascal would lie on his side and
bask and sleep in the sunshine, amid all the noise
and chaffering around him, precisely like a dog.
He was about the size of a full-grown cat, and there
was a bewitching beauty about him that I could
hardly resist. On another occasion, I saw a gray fox
about two-thirds grown, playing with a dog, about
the same size, and by nothing in the manners of either
eould you tell which was the dog and which was the
fcx.

96 THE FOX. .

\/3ome naturalists think there are but two perma-
nent species of the fox in the United States, viz, the
gray fox and the red fox, though there are five or six
varieties. The gray fox, which is much smaller aud
less valuable than the red, is the southern species,
and is said to be rarely found north of Maryland,
though in certain rocky localities along the Hudson
they are common.

In the Southern States this fox is often hunted in
(he English fashion, namely, on horseback, the riders
tearing through the country in pursuit till the ani-
mal is run down and caught. This is the only fox
that will tree. When too closely pressed, instead of
taking to a den or hole, it climbs beyond the reach
of the dogs in some small tree.

The red fox is the northern species, and is rarely
found farther south than the mountainous districts
of Virginia. In the Arctic regions he gives place
to the Arctic fox which most of the season is white.

The prairie fox, the cross fox, and the black or
silver gray fox, seem only varieties of the red fox, as
the black squirrel breeds from the gray, and the black
woodchuck is found with the brown. There is little
to distinguish them from the red, except the color,
though the prairie fax is said to be the larger of the
two.

>AThe cross fox is dark brown on its muzzle and ex-
tremities, with a cross of red and black on its shoul-
ders and breast, which peculiarity of coloring, and not
any trait in its character, gives it its name. They

THE FOX. 97

»are very rare, and few hunters have ever seen one.
The American Fur Company used to obtain annu-
ally from fifty to one hundred skins. . The skins for-
merly sold for twenty-five dollars, tnough I believe
they now bring only about five dollars.

^/The black or silver gray fox is the rarest of all,
and its skin the most valuable. The Indians used to
estimate it equal to forty beaver skins. The great
fur companies seldom collect in a single season more
than four or five skins at any one post. Most of
those of the American Fur Company come from the
head waters of the Mississippi. One of the younger
Audubons shot one in northern New York. The fox
had been seen and fired at many times by the hunters
of the neighborhood, and had come to have the repu-
tation of leading a charmed life, and of being invul-
nerable to anything but a silver bullet. But Audu-
bon brought her down (for it was a female) on the
second trial. She had a litter of young in the vicin-
ity, which he also dug out, and found the nest to hold
three black and four red ones, which fact settled the
question with him that black and red often have the
some parentage, and are in truth the same species.

The color of this fox, in a point-blank view, is
black, but viewed at an angle it is a dark silver-gray,
whence has arisen the notion that the black and the
silver-gray are distinct varieties. The tip of the tail
£ always white.

In almost every neighborhood there are traditions
of this fox, and it is the dream of young sportsmen ;
7

98 THE FOX.

*

but I have yet to meet the person who has seen one.
I should go well to the north, into the British Pos-
session, if I was bent on obtaining a specimen.

One more item from the books. From the fact
that in the bone caves in this country skulls of the
gray fox are found, but none of the red, it is inferred
by some naturalists that the red fox is a descendant
from the European species, which it resembles in
form but surpasses in beauty, and its appearance on
this continent comparatively of recent date.

A MAECH CHKONICLE

A MARCH CHRONICLE.

ON THE POTOMAC.

MARCH 1. — The first day of spring and the first
ipring day ! I felt the change the moment I put my
head out of doors in the morning. A fitful, gusty
south wind was blowing, though the sky was clear.
But the sunlight was not the same. There was an
interfusion of a new element. Not ten days since
there had been a day just as bright, — even brighter
and warmer, — a clear, crystalline day of February,
with nothing vernal in it ; but this day was opaline ;
there was a film, a sentiment in it, a nearer approach
to life. Then there was that fresh, indescribable
odor, a breath from the Gulf, or from Florida and
the Carolinas, — a subtle, persuasive influence that
thrilled the sense. Every root and rootlet under
ground must have felt it ; the buds of the soft maple
and silver poplar felt it ; and swelled perceptibly dur-
ing the day. The robins knew it, and were here that
morning; so were the crow-blackbirds. The shad
must have known it, down deep in their marine re-
ireats, and leaped and sported about the mouths of

102 A MARCH CHRONICLE.

the rivers, ready to dart up them if the genial influ-
ence continued. The bees in the hive also, or iu the
old tree in the woods, no doubt awoke to new life ;
and the hibernating animals, the bears and wood-
chucks, rolled up in their subterranean dens, — I im-
agine the warmth reached even them, and quickened
their sluggish circulation.

Then in the afternoon there was the smell of smoke,
— the first spring fires in the open air. The Vir-
ginia farmer is raking together the rubbish in his
garden, or in the field he is preparing for the plow,
and burning it up. In imagination I am there to
help him. I see the children playing about, delighted
with the sport and the resumption of work ; the
smoke goes up through the shining haze ; the farm-
house door stands open, and lets in the afternoon sun ;
the cow lows for her calf, or hides it in the woods ;
and in the morning, the geese, sporting in the spring
sun, answer the call of the wild flock steering north-
ward above them.

As I stroll through the market I see the signs
here. That old colored woman has brought spring
in her basket in those great green flakes of moss,
with arbutus showing the pink ; and her old man is
just in good time with his fruit-trees and gooseberry-
bushes. Various bulbs and roots are also being
brought out and offered, and the onions are sprouting
on the stands. I see bunches of robins and cedar-
birds also — so much melody and beauty cut off from
the supply going north. The fish market is begin-

A MARCH CHRONICLE. 103

ning to be bright with perch and bass, and with shad
from the southern rivers, and wild ducks are taking
the place of prairie-hens and quails.

In the Carolinas, no doubt, the fruit-trees are in
bloom, and the rice-land is being prepared for the
seed. In the mountains of Virginia and in Ohio
they are making maple-sugar ; in Kentucky and Ten-
nessee they are sowing oats; in Illinois they are,
perchance, husking the corn which has remained on
the stalk in the field all winter. Wild geese and
ducks are streaming across the sky from the lower
Mississippi toward the great lakes, pausing a while
on the prairies, or alighting in the great corn-fields,
making the air resound with the noise of their wings
upon the stalks and dry shucks as they resume their
journey. About this time, or a little later, in the
still spring morning, the prairie-hens or prairie-cocks
set up that low musical cooing or crowing that defies
the ear to trace or locate. The air is filled with that
soft, mysterious undertone; and save that a bird is
seen here and there flitting low over the ground, the
sportsman walks for hours without coming any nearer
the source of the elusive sound.

All over a certain belt of the country the rivers
and streams are roily, and chafe their banks. There
is a movement of the soils. The capacity of the
water to take up and hold in solution the salt and
earths, seemed never so great before. The frost has
relinquished its hold, and turned everything over to
Ue water. Mud is the mother now ; and out of it
creep the frogs, the turtles, the crawfish.

104 A MARCH CHRONICLE.

In the North how goes the season ? The wintei
is perchance just breaking up. The old frost-king i»
just striking, or preparing to strike, his tents. The
ice is going out of the rivers, and the first steamboat
on the Hudson is picking its way through the blue
lanes and channels. The white gulls are making ex-
cursions up from the bay, to see what the prospects
are. In the lumber countries, along the upper Ken-
nebec and Penobscot, and along the northern Hudson,
starters are at work with their pikes and hooks start-
ing out the pine logs on the first spring freshet. All
winter, through the deep snows, they have been haul
ing them to the bank of the stream, or placing them
where the tide would reach them. Now, in count-
less numbers, beaten and bruised, the trunks of the
noble trees come, borne by the angry flood. The
snow that furnishes the smooth bed over which they
were drawn, now melted, furnishes the power that
carries them down to the mills. On the Delaware
the raftsmen are at work running out their rafts.
Floating islands of logs and lumber go down the
swollen stream, bending over the dams, shooting
through the rapids, and bringing up at last in Phila-
delphia or beyond.

In the inland farming districts what are the signs ?
Few and faint, but very suggestive. The sun has
j.ower to melt the snow ; and in the meadows all the
knolls are bare, and the sheep are gnawing them in-
dustriously. The drifts on the side hills also begin
to have a worn and dirty look, and where they cross

A MARCH CHRONICLE. 105

the highway, to become soft, letting the teams in op
to their bellies. The oxen labor and grunt, or pa-
tiently wait for the shovel to release them ; but the
spirited horse leaps and flounders, and is determined
not to give up. In the woods the snow is melted
around the trees, and the burs and pieces of bark
have absorbed the heat till they have sunk half-way
through to the ground. The snow is melting on the
under side ; the frost is going out of the ground :
now comes the trial of your foundations.

About the farm-buildings there awakens the old
familiar chorus, the bleating of calves and lambs, and
the answering bass of their distressed mothers ; while
the hens are cackling in the hay -loft, and the geese are
noisy in the spring run. But the most delightful of
all farm-work or of all rural occupations, is at hand,
namely, sugar-making. In New York and northern
New England the beginning of this season varies
from the first to the middle of March, sometimes even
holding off till April. The moment the contest be-
tween the sun and frost fairly begins, sugar weather
begins ; and the more even the contest, the more the
k.weet. I do not know what the philosophy of it is,
but it seems a kind of see-saw, as if the sun drew the
sap up, and the frost drew it down ; and an excess of
either stops the flow. Before the sun has got power
to unbck the frost, there is no sap ; and after the
frost has lost its power to lock up again the work of
the sun, there is no sap. But when it freezes soundly
»t night, with a bright, warm sun next day, wind in

106 A MARCH CHRONICLE.

the west, and no signs of a storm, the veins of the
maples fairly thrill. Pierce the bark anywhere, and
out gashes the clear, sweet liquid. But let the wind
change to the south, and blow moist and warm, des-
troying that crispness of the air, and the flow slackens
at once, unless there be a deep snow in the woods to
counteract or neutralize the warmth, in which case
the run may continue till the rain sets in. The
rough-coated old trees, one would not think they
could scent a change so quickly through that wrapper
of dead, dry bark an inch or more thick. I have to
wait till I put my head out of doors, and feel the air
on my bare cheek, and sniff it with my nose ; but
their nerves of taste and smell are no doubt under
ground, imbedded in the moisture, and if there is any-
thing that responds quickly to atmospheric changes it
is water. Do not the fish, think you, down deep in
the streams, feel every wind that blows, whether it be
hot or cold ? Do not the frogs and newts and turtles
under the mud feel the warmth, though the water
still seems like ice ? As the springs begin to rise in
advance of the rain, so the intelligence of every
change seems to travel ahead under ground, and
forewarn things.

A " sap-run " seldom lasts more than two or three
days. By that time there is a change in the weather,
perhaps a rain-storm, which takes the frost nearly all
out of the ground. Then before there can be another
run, the trees must be wound up again, the storm
nust have a white tail, and " come off" cold. Pres-

A MARCH CHRONICLE. 107

ently the sun rises clear again, and cuts the snow or
softens the hard frozen ground with his beams, and
the trees take a fresh start. The boys go through
the wood, emptying out the buckets or the pans, and
reclaiming those that have blown away, and the de-
lightful work is resumed. But the first run, like first
love, is always the best, always the fullest, always the
sweetest; while there is a purity and delicacy of
flavor about the sugar that far surpasses any sub-
sequent yield.

Trees differ much in the quantity as well as in the
quality of sap produced in a given season. Indeed, in
a bush or orchard of fifty or one hundred trees, as
wide a difference may be observed in this respect as
among that number of cows in regard to the milk
they yield. I have in my mind now a " sugar-bush "
nestled in the lap of a spur of the Catskills, every
tree of which is known to me, and assumes a distinct
individuality in my thought. I know the look and
quality of the whole two hundred ; and when on my
annual visit to the old homestead I find one has per-
ished, or fallen before the axe, I feel a personal loss.
They are all veterans, and have yielded up their life's
blood for the profit of two or three generations.
They stand in little groups or couples. One stands
at the head of a spring-run, and lifts a large dry
branch high above the woods, where hawks and crows
love to alight. Half a dozen are climbing a little
hill ; while others stand far out in the field, as if they
had come out to get the sun. A file of five or six

108 A MARCH CHRONICLE.

worthies sentry the woods on the northwest, and con-
front a steep side hill where sheep and cattle graze.
An equal number crowd up to the line on the east ;
and their gray, stately trunks are seen across meadows
or fields of grain. Then there is a pair of Siamese
twins, with heavy, bushy tops, while in the forks of
a wood-road stand the two brothers, with their arms
around each other's neck, and their bodies in gentle
contact for a distance of thirty feet.

One immense maple, known as the " old-cream-
pan-tree," stands, or did stand, quite alone among a
thick growth of birches and beeches. But it kept its
end up and did the work of two or three ordinary
trees, as its name denotes. Next to it the best milcher
in the lot was a shaggy-barked tree in the edge of the
field, that must have been badly crushed or broken
•when it was little, for it had an ugly crook near the
ground, and seemed to struggle all the way up to get
in an upright attitude, but never quite succeeded ;
yet it could outrun all its neighbors nevertheless.
The poorest tree in the lot was a short-bodied, heavy-
topped tree, that stood in the edge of a spring-run.
It seldom produced half a gallon of sap during the
whole season ; but this half-gallon was very sweet, —
'hree or four times as sweet as the ordinary article.
In the production of sap, top seems far less important
than body. It is not length of limb that wins in this
race, but length of trunk. A heavy, bushy-topped tree
in the open field, for instance, will not, according to
my observation, compare wHh a tall, long-trunked

A MARCH CHRONICLE. 109

tree in the woods, that has but a small top. Young,
thrifty, thin-skinned trees start up with great spirit,
indeed, fairly on a run ; but they do not hold out,
and their blood is very diluted. Cattle are very fond
of sap ; so are sheep, and will drink enough to kill
them. The honey-bees get here their first sweet, and
the earliest bug takes up his permanent abode on the
"spile." The squirrels also come timidly down the
trees, and sip the sweet flow ; and occasionally an
ugly lizard, just out of its winter-quarters, and in quest
of novelties, creeps up into the pan or bucket. Soft
maple makes a very fine white sugar, superior in qual-
ity, but far less in quantity.

I think any person who has tried it will agree with
me about the charm of sugar-making, though he have
no tooth for the sweet itself. It is enough that it if
the first spring work, and takes one to the woodi
The robins are just arriving, and their merry call:,
ring through the glades. The squirrels are now vent-
uring out, and the woodpeckers and nuthatches run
briskly up the trees. The crow begins to caw, with
iris accustomed heartiness and assurance ; and one
sees the white rump and golden shafts of the high-
hole as he flits about the open woods. Next week,
or the week after, it may be time to begin plowing,
and other sober work about the farm ; but this week
we will picnic among the maples, and our camp-fire
shall be an incense to spring. Ah, I am there now !
I see the woods flooded with sun-light ; I smell the
4ry leaves, and the mould under them just quickened

110 A MARCH CHRONICLE.

by the warmth ; the long-trunked maples in their
gray rough liveries stand thickly about ;* I see the
brimming pans and buckets, always on the sunny side
of the trees, and hear the musical dropping of the
sap ; the " boiling-place," with its delightful camp-
features, is just beyond the first line, with its great
arch looking to the southwest. The sound of its axe
rings through the woods. Its huge kettles or broad
pans boil and foam ; and I ask no other delight than
to watch and tend them all day, to dip the sap from,
the great casks into them, and to replenish the fire
with the newly-cut birch and beech wood. A slight
breeze is blowing from the west ; I catch the glint
here and there in the afternoon sun of the little rills
and creeks, coursing down the sides of the hills ; the
awakening sounds about the farm and the woods reach
my ear; and every rustle or movement of the air or
on the earth seems like a pulse of returning life in
Nature. I sympathize with that verdant Hibernian
who liked sugar-making so well, that he thought he
should follow" it the whole year. I should at least
be tempted to follow the season up the mountains,
camping this week on one terrace, next week on one
farther up, keeping just on the hem of Winter's gar-
ment, and just in advance of the swelling buds, until
my smoke went up through the last growth of maple
that surrounds the summit.

Maple sugar is peculiarly an American product,
ihe discovery of it dating back in.*o the early history
ef New England. The first settlers usually caught

A MARCH CHRONICLE. Ill

the sap in rude troughs, and boiled it down in ket-
tles slung to a pole by a chain, the fire being built
around them. The first step in the way of improve-
ment was to use tin pans instead of troughs, and a
large stone arch in which the kettles or caldrons were
set with the fire beneath them. But of late years, as
the question of fuel has become a more important
one, greater improvements have been made. The
arch has given place to an immense stove designed
for that special purpose; and the kettles to broad,
shallow, sheet-iron pans, the object being to econo-
mize all the heat, and to obtain the greatest possible
extent of evaporating surface.

March 15. — From the first to the middle of March
the season made steady progress. There were no
checks, no drawbacks. "Warm, copious rains from the
south and southwest, followed by days of unbroken
sunshine. In the moist places — and what places are
not moist at this season ? — the sod buzzed like a
hive. The absorption and filtration among the net-
work of roots was an audible process.

The clod fairly sang. How the trees responded
also ! The silver poplars were masses of soft gray
bloom, and the willows down toward the river seemed
to have slipped off their old bark and on their new
in a single night. The soft maples, too, when massed
.n the distance, their tops deeply dyed in a bright
maroon color, how fair they looked !

The 15th of the month was " one of those charmed
days when the genius of God doth flow." The wind

112 A MARCH CHRONICLE.

died away by mid-forenoon, and the day settled down
so softly and lovingly upon the earth, touching every-
thing, filling everything. The sky visibly came down.
You could see it among the trees and between the
hills. The sun poured himself into the earth as into
a cup, and the atmosphere fairly swam with warmth
and light. In the afternoon I walked out over the
country roads north of the city. Innumerable columns
of smoke were going up all around the horizon from
burning brush and weeds, fields being purified by fire.
The farmers were hauling out manure ; and I am free
to confess, the odor of it, with its associations of the
farm and the stable, of cattle and horses, was good in
my nostrils. In the woods the liverleaf and arbutus
had just opened doubtingly ; and in the little pools
great masses of frogs' spawn, with a milky tinge, were
deposited. The youth who accompanied me brought
some of it home in his handkerchief, to see it hatch
in a goblet.

The month came in like a lamb, and went out like
a lamb, setting at naught the old adage. The white
fleecy clouds lay here and there, as if at rest, on the
blue sky. The fields were a perfect emerald ; and
the lawns, with the new gold of the first dandelions
sprinkled about, were lush with grass. In the parks
and groves there was a faint mist of foliage, except
among the willows, where there was not only a mist,
but a perfect fountain-fall of green. In the distance
the river looked blue ; the spring freshets at last
over ; and the ground settled, and the jocund season
d« } s forth in'o April with a bright and confident look

AUTUMN TIDES.

AUTUMN TIDES.

v TnE season is always a little behind the sun in our
climate, just as the tide is always a little behind the
moon. VA.ccording to the calendar, the summer ought
to culminate about the 21st of June, but in reality it
is some weeks later ; June is a maiden month all
through. It is not high noon in nature till about the
first or second week in July. When the chestnut-
tree blooms, the meridian of the year is reached. /By"
the first of August, it is fairly one o'clock. The lus-
tre of the season begins to_dim, the foliage__o£_iha_.
trees^and woodsjojarnish. the plumage of the birds
to fade, and their songs__to cease. The hints of ap-
proaching fall are on every hand. How suggestive
this thistle-down, for instance, which, as I sit by the
open window, comes in and brushes softly across my
hand ! The first snow-flake tells of winter not more
plainly than this driving down heralds the approach
of fall. Come here, my fairy, and tell me whence
you come and whither you go? What brings you
to port here, you gossamer ship sailing the great
sea ? How exquisitely frail and delicate ! One of
the lightest things in nature; so light that in the

116 AUTUMN TIDES.

closed room here it will hardly rest in my open palm.
A feather is a clod beside it. Only a spider's web
will hold it ; coarser objects have no power over it.
Caught in the upper currents of the air and rising
above the clouds, it might sail perpetually. Indeed,
one fancies it might almost traverse the interstellar
ether and drive against the stars. And every thistle-
head by the road-side holds hundreds of these sky-
rovers — imprisoned Ariels unable to set themselves
free. Their liberation may be by the shock of the wind,
or the rude contact of cattle, but it is oftener the
work of the goldfinch with its complaining brood.
The seed of the thistle is the proper food of this bird,
and in obtaining it, myriads of these winged creatures
are scattered to the breeze. Each one is fraught
with a seed which it exists to sow, but its wild ca-
reering and soaring does not fairly begin till its bur-
den is dropped, and its spheral form is complete.
The seeds of many plants and trees are disseminated
through the agency of birds ; but the thistle furnishes
its own birds, — flocks of them, with wings more
ethereal and tireless than were ever given to mortal
Creature. From the pains Nature thus takes to sow
the thistle broadcast over the land, it might be ex-
pected to be one of the most troublesome and abun-
dant of weeds. But such is not the case ; the more
pernicious and baffling weeds, like snapdragon or
blind-nettles, being more local and restricted in their
habits, and unable to fly at all.
In the fall, the battles of the spring are fought

AUTUMN TIDES. 117

over again, beginning at the other, or little end of
the series. There is the same advance and retreat,
with many feints and alarms, between the contend-
ing forces that was witnessed in April and May.
The spring comes like a tide running against a strong
wind ; it is ever beaten back, but ever gain ing ground,
with now and then a mad " push upon the land " as
if to overcome its antagonist at one blow. The cold
from the north encroaches upon us in about the same
fashion. In September or early in October it usually
makes a big stride forward and blackens all the
more delicate plants, and hastens the " mortal ripen-
ing " of the foliage of the trees, but it is presently
beaten back again and the genial warmth repossesses
the land. Before long, however, the cold returns to
the charge with augmented forces and gains much

jjround.

— ^The course of the seasons never does run smooth,
owing to the unequal distribution of land and water,
mountain, wood, and plain.

"\An equilibrium, however, is usually reached in our
climate in October, sometimes the most marked in
November, forming the delicious Indian summer ; a
truce is declared and both forces, heat and cold, meet
and mingle in friendly converse on the field. In the
earlier season, this poise of the temperature, this
slack water in nature, comes in May and June ; but
the October calm is most marked. Day after day
and sometimes week after week, you cannot tell which
tray the current is setting. Indeed, there is no cur-

118 AUTUMN TIDES.

rent, but the season seems to drift a little this way,
or a little that, just as the breeze happens to freshen
a little in one quarter or the other. The fall of '74
was the most remarkable in this respect I remember
ever to have seen. The equilibrium of the season
lasted from the middle of October till near December,
with scarcely a break. There were six weeks of In-
dian summer, all gold by day, and when the moon
came, all silver by night. The river was so smooth
«t times as to be almost invisible, and in its place,
was the indefinite continuation of the opposite shore
down toward the nether world. One seemed to be in
an enchanted land, and to breathe all day the atmos-
phere of fable and romance. Not a smoke, but a
kind of shining nimbus filled all the spaces. The
vessels would drift by as if in mid air with all their
sails set. The gypsy blood in one, as Lowell calls it,
could hardly stay between four walls and see such
days go by. Living in tents, in groves and on the
hills, seemed the only natural life.

Late in December we had glimpses of the same
weather, — the earth had not yet passed all the golden
isles. On the 27th of that month, I find I made this
entry in my note-book : " A soft hazy day, the year
asleep and dreaming of the Indian summer again.
Not a breath of air and not a ripple on the river
The sunshine is hot as it falls across my table."

Buv what a terrible winter followed! what a sav-
age chief the fair Indian maiden gave birth to !

This halcyon period of our autumn will always ic

AUTUMN TIDES. 119

some way be associated with the Indian. It is red

and yellow and dusky like him. The smoke of his
camp-fire seems again in the air. The memory of
him pervades the woods. His plumes and moccasins
and blanket of skins form just the costume the season
demands. It was doubtless his chosen period. The
gods smiled upon him then if ever. The time of the
chase, the season of the buck and the doe, and of the
ripening of all forest fruits ; the time when all men
are incipient hunters, when the first frosts have given
pungency to the air, when to be abroad on the hills
or in the woods is a delight that both old and young
feel, — if the red aborigine ever had his summer of
fullness and contentment, it must have been at this
season, and it fitly bears his name.

In how many respects fall imitates or parodies the
spring ; it is indeed, in some of its features, a sort of
second youth of the year. Things emerge and be-
come conspicuous again. The trees attract all eyes
as in May. The birds come forth from their summer
privacy and parody their spring reunions and rival-
ries ; some of them sing a little after a silence of
.oonths. The robins, bluebirds, meadow-larks, spar-
rows, crows — all sport, and call, and behave in a
manner suggestive of spring. The cock grouse
drums in the woods as he did in April and May.
The pigeons reappear, and the wild geese and ducks.
The witch-hazel blooms. The trout spawns. The
streams are again fall. The air is humid, and the
moisture rises in the ground. Nature is breaking
?amp, as in spring she was going into camp. The

120 AUTUMN TIDES.

spring yearning and restlessness is represented in one
by the increased desire to travel.

Spring is the inspiration, fall the expiration. Both
seasons have their equinoxes, both their filmy, hazy
air, their ruddy forest tints, their cold rains, their
drenching fogs, their mystic moons; both have the
same solar light and warmth, the same rays of the
sun ; yet, after all, how different the feelings which
they inspire! One is the morning, the other the
evening ; one is youth, the other is age.

The difference is not merely in us ; there is a sub-
tle difference in the air and in the influences that
emanate upon us from the dumb forms of nature.
All the senses report a difference. The sun seems to
have burned out. One recalls the notion of Herod-
otus, that he is grown feeble, and retreats to the south
because he can no longer face the cold and the storms
from the north. There is a growing potency about
his beams in spring ; a waning splendor about them
in fall. One is the kindling fire ; the other the sub-
siding flame.

It is rarely that an artist succeeds in painting un-
mistakably the difference between sunrise and sunset ;
and it is equally a trial of his skill to put upon can-
vas the difference between early spring and late fall,
say between April and November. It was long ago
observed that the shadows are more opaque in the
morning than in the evening ; the struggle between
the light and the darkness more marked, the gloom
tnore solid, the contrasts more sharp, etc. The rays
%f the morning sun chisel out and cut down the shad-

AUTUMN TIDES. 121

ows in a way those of the setting sun do not. Then
the sunlight is whiter and newer in the morning, —
not so yellow and diffused. A difference akin to this
is true of the two seasons I am speaking of. The
spring is the morning sunlight, clear and determined;
the autumn the afternoon rays, pensive, lessening,
golden.

Does not the human frame yield to and sympa-
thize with the seasons ? Are there not more births
in the spring and more deaths in the fall ? In the
spring one vegetates ; his thoughts turn to sap ; an-
other kind of activity seizes him; he makes new
wood which does not harden till past midsummer.
For my part, I find all literary work irksome from
April to August ; my sympathies run in other chan-
nels ; the grass grows where meditation walked. As
fall approaches, the currents mount to the head again.
But my thoughts do not ripen well till after there has
been a frost. The burrs will not open much before
that. A man's thinking, I take it, is a kind of com-
bustion, as is the ripening of fruits and leaves, and he
wants plenty of oxygen in the air.

Then the earth seems to have become a positive
n.agnet in the fall ; the forge and anvil of the sun
have had their effect. In the spring it is negative to
all intellectual conditions and drains one of his light-
ning.

To-day, October 21st, I found the air in the bushy
fields and lanes under the woods loaded with the per-
fume of the witch-hazel — a sweetish, sickening odor
With the blooming of this bush, Nature says, " posi-

122 AUTUMN TIDES.

lively the last" It is a kind of birth in death, of
spring in fall, that impresses one as a little uncanny.
All trees and shrubs form their flower buds iu the
fall, and keep the secret till spring. How comes the
witch-hazel to be the one exception and to celebrate
its floral nuptials on the funereal day of its foliage ?
No doubt it will be found that the spirit of some love-
lorn squaw has passed into this bush, and that this is
why it blooms in the Indian summer rather than in
the white man's spring.

But it makes the floral series of the woods com-
plete. Between it and the shad-blow of earliest spring
lies the mountain of bloom ; the latter at the base on
one side, this at the base on the other, with the chest-
nut blossoms at the top in midsummer.

A peculiar feature of our fall may sometimes be
seen of a clear afternoon late in the season. Look-
ing athwart the fields under the sinking sun the
ground appears covered with a shining veil of gos-
samer. A fairy net, invisible at mid-day and which
the position of the sun now reveals, rests upon the
stubble and upon the spears of grass, covering acres
in extent, — the work of innumerable little spiders.
The cattle walk through it but do not seem to
break it. Perhaps a fly would make his mark upon
it. At the same time, stretching from the tops of the
trees, or from the top of a stake in the fence, and
leading off toward the sky may be seen the cables of
he flying spider, — a fairy bridge from the visible to
the invisible. Occasionally seen against a deep mass
of shadow, and perhaps enlarged by clinging particles

AUTUMN TIDES. 123

of dust, they show quite plainly and sag down like a
stretched rope, or sway and undulate like a hawser
in the tide.

They recall a verse of our rugged poet, Walt Whit-
man: —

" A noiseless patient spider,

I raark'd where, in a little promontory, it stood isolated :
Mark'd how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself;
Ever unreeling them — ever tirelessly spreading them.

" And you, 0 my soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing. —
Seeking the spheres to connect them.
Till the bridge you will need be formed — till the ductile anchor

hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, 0 my soul."

To return a little, September may be described as
the month of tall weeds. Where they have been suf-
fered to stand, along fences, by road-sides, and in for-
gotten corners, — red-root, pig- weed, rag-weed, ver-
vain, goldeu-rod, burdock, elecampane, thistles, teasels,
nettles, asters, etc., — how they lift themselves up as if
not afraid to be seen now ! They are all outlaws ; every
man's hand is against them ; yet how surely they hold
their own ! They love the road-side, because here
they are comparatively safe ; and ragged and dusty,
Jike the common tramps that they are, they form one
S»f the characteristic features of early fall.

I have often noticed in what haste certain weeds
are at times to produce their seeds. Red-root will
^row three or four feet high when it has the whole

124 AUTUMN TIDES.

season before it; but let it get a late start, let it come
up in August, and it scarcely gets above the ground
before it heads out and apparently goes to work with
all its might and main to mature its seed. In the
growth of most plants or weeds, April and May rep-
resent their root, June and July their stalk, and Au-
gust and September their flower and seed. Hence
when the stalk months are stricken out as in the pres-
ent case there is only time for a shallow root and a
foreshortened head. I think most weeds that get a
late start show this curtailment of stalk and this solici-
tude to reproduce themselves. But I have not ob-
served that any of the cereals are so worldly wise.
They have not had to think and shift for themselves
as the weeds have. It does indeed look like a kind
of forethought in the red-root. It is killed by the
first frost, and hence knows the danger of delay.

How rich in color, before the big show of the tree
foliage has commenced, our road-sides are in places in
early autumn, — rich to the eye that goes hurriedly
by and does not look too closely, — with the profu-
sion of golden-rod and blue and purple asters dashed
in upon here and there with the crimson leaves of
the dwarf sumac ; and at intervals, rising out of the
.'ence corner or crowning a ledge of rocks, the dark
green of the cedars with the still fire of the woodbine
ftt its heart. I wonder if the way-sides of other lands \
present any analogous spectacles at this season.
S Then when the maples have burst out into color _y
^showing like great bonfires along the hills, there is in- V J
7 iced a feast for the eye. A maple before your win-

AUTUMN TIDES. 125

(^ dows in October, when the sun shines upon it, will
S make up for a good deal of the light it has excluded ;
£jt fills the room with a soft golden glow.

Thoreau, I believe, was the first to remark upon
the individuality of trees of the same species with re-
spect to their foliage, — some maples ripening their
leaves early and some late, and some being of one tint
and some of another ; and moreover, that each tree
held to the same characteristics, year after year.
There is indeed as great a variety among the maples
as among the trees of an apple orchard ; some are
harvest apples, some are fall apples, and some are
winter apples, each with a tint of its own. Those
late ripeners are the winter varieties — the Rhode
Island greenings or swaars of their kind. The red
maple is the early astrachan. Then comes the red-
streak, the yellow-sweet, and others. There are wind-
falls among them too, as among the apples, and one
side or hemisphere of the leaf is usually brighter
than the other.

The ash has been less noticed for its autumnal foli-
age than it deserves. The richest shades of plum
color to be seen — becoming by and by, or, in certain
lights, a deep maroon — are afforded by this tree.
Then at a distance there 'seems to be a sort of
bloom upon it as upon the grape or plum. Amid a
grove of yellow maple, it makes a most pleasing con-
trast.

By mid-October, most of the Rip Van Winkles
among our brute creatures have lain down for their
winter nap. The toads and turtles have buried them

126 AUTUMN TIDES.

selves in the earth. The woodchuck is in his hiber-
naculum, the skunk in his, the mole in his ; and the
black bear has his selected, and will go in when the
snow comes. He does not like the looks of his big
tracks in the snow. They publish his goings and
comings too plainly. The coon retires about the
same time. The provident wood-mice and the chip-
munk are laying by a winter supply of nuts or grain,
the former usually in decayed trees, the latter in the
ground. I have observed that any unusual disturb-
ance in the woods, near where the chipmunk has hia
den, will cause him to shift his quarters. One Octo-
ber, for many successive days I saw one carrying into
his hole buckwheat which he had stolen from a near
field. The hole was only a few rods from where we
were getting out stone, and as our work progressed
and the racket and uproar increased, the chipmunk
became alarmed. He ceased carrying in, and after
much hesitating and darting about, and some pro-
longed absences, he began to carry out ; he had de-
termined to move ; if the mountain fell, he, at least,
would be away in time. So by mouthfuls, or cheek-
fuls, the grain was transferred to a new place. He
did not make a " bee" to get it done, but carried it all
himself, occupying several days, and making a trip
about every ten minutes.

The red and gray squirrels do not lay by winter
stores ; their cheeks are made without pockets, and
whatever they transport is carried in the teeth. They
»re more or less active all winter, but October and
November are their festal months. Invade some bat-

AUTUMN TIDES. 127

ternut or hickory-nut grove on a frosty October
morning, and hear the red squirrel beat the " juba"
on a horizontal branch. It is a most lively jig, what
the boys call a "regular break-down," interspersed
with squeals and snickers and derisive laughter. The
most noticeable peculiarity about the vocal part of it
is the fact that it is a kind of duet In other words,
by some ventriloqual tricks he appears to accompany
himself, as if his voice split up, a part forming a low
guttural sound, and a part a shrill nasal sound.

The distant bark of the more wary gray squirrel
may be heard about the same time. There is a teas-
ing and ironical tone in it also, but the gray squirrel
is not the Puck the red is.

Insects also go into winter-quarters by or before
this time ; the bumble-bee, hornet, and wasp. But
here only royalty escapes; the queen-mother alone
foresees the night of winter coming and the morning
of spring beyond. The rest of the tribe try gypsying
for a while, but perish in the first frosts. The present
October I surprised the queen of the yellow-jackets
in the woods looking out a suitable retreat. The
royal dame was house-hunting, and on being dis-
turbed by my inquisitive poking among the leaves,
she got up and flew away with a slow, deep hum.
Her body was unusually distended, whether with fat
or eggs I am unable to say. In September I took
down the nest of the black hornet and found several
large queens in it, but the workers had all gone.
The queens were evidently weathering the first frosts
ind storms here, and waiting for the Indian surnmei

128 AUTUMN TIDES.

to go forth and seek a permanent winter abode. If
the covers could be taken off the fields and woods at
this season, how many interesting facts of natural
history would be revealed ! The crickets, ants, bees,
reptiles, animals, and, for aught I know, the spiders
and flies asleep or getting ready to sleep in their win-
ter dormitories ; the fires of life banked up and burn-
ing just enough to keep the spark over till spring.

The fish all run down the stream in the fall except
the trout ; it runs up or stays up and spawns in No-
vember, the male becoming as brilliantly tinted as
the deepest dyed maple leaf. I have often wondered
why the trout spawns in the fall instead of in the
spring, like other fish. Is it not because a full supply
of clear spring water can be counted on at that season
more than at any other ? The brooks are not so
liable to be suddenly muddied by heavy showers and
defiled with the washings of the roads and fields as
they are in spring and summer. The artificial breeder
finds that absolute purity of water is necessary to
hatch the spawn ; also that shade and a low tempera-
ture are indispensable.

Our northern November day itself is like spring
water. It is melted frost, dissolved snow. There is
a chill in it and an exhilaration also. The forenoon
is all morning and the afternoon all evening. The
shadows seem to come forth and to revenge them-
*elves upon the day. The sunlight is diluted with
darkness. The colors fade from the landscape and
wily the sheen of the river lights up the gray and
brown distance.

THE APPLE.

THE APPLE.

Lo ! sweetened with the summer light,
The full-juiced apple, waxing over-mellow,
Drops in a silent autumn night. — TENNYSOW.

a little of the sunshine of our northern win-
ters is surely wrapped up in the agple. How could
we winter over without it ! How is life sweetened
by its mild acids ! I/A cellar well filled with apples is
more valuable than a chamber filled with flax and
wool. So much sound ruddy life to draw upon, to
strike one's roots down into, as it were.
I/Especially to those whose soil of life is inclined to
be a little clayey and heavy, is the apple a winter
necessity. It is the natural antidote of most of the
ills the flesh is heir to. Full of vegetable acids and
aromatics, qualities which act as refrigerants and an-
tiseptics, what an enemy it is to jaundice, indigestion,
torpidity of liver, etc. Ht is a gentle spur and tonic
to the whole biliary system. Then I have read that
it has been found by analysis to contain more phos-
phorus than any other vegetable. This makes it the
proper food of the scholar and the sedentary man ; it
and it stimulates his liver. ^Neither is

132 THE APPLE.

this all. Beside its hygienic properties, the apple ia
full of sugar and mucilage, which make it highly
nutritious. It is said "The operators of Cornwall,
England, consider ripe apples nearly as nourishing as
bread, and far more so than potatoes. In the year
1801 — which was a year of much scarcity — apples,
instead of being converted into cider, were sold to the
poor, and the laborers asserted that they could ' stand
their work ' on baked apples without meat ; whereas
a potato diet required either meat or some other sub-
stantial nutriment. The French and Germans use
apples extensively, so do the inhabitants of all Euro-
pean nations. The laborers depend upon them as
an article of food, and frequently make a dinner of
sliced apples and bread."

VYet the English apple is a tame and insipid affair,
compared with the intense, sun-colored and sun-
steeped fruit our orchards yield. The English have
no sweet apple I am told, the saccharine element ap-
parently being less abundant in vegetable nature in
that sour and chilly climate than in our own. It is
well known that the European maple yields no sugar,
while both our birch and hickory have sweet in their
veins. Perhaps this fact accounts for our excessive
love of sweets which may be said to be a national
trait.

j /The Russian apple has a lovely complexion, smooth
and transparent, but the Cossack is not yet all elimi-
nated from it. The only one I have seen — the
Duchess of Oldenburg — ia as beautiful as a Tartat

THE APPLE. 133

princess, with a distracting odor, but it is the least bit
puckery to the taste.

j'The best thing I know about Chili is not its guano
beds, but this fact which I learn from Darwin's " Voy-
age," namely, that the apple thrives well there. Dar-
win saw a town there so completely buried in a wood
of apple-trees, that its streets were merely paths in
an orchard. The tree indeed thrives so well, that
Jarge branches cut off in the spring and planted two
or three feet deep in the ground send out roots and

^develop into fine full-bearing trees by the third year.

\The people know the value of the apple too. They
make cider and wine of it and then from the refuse a
white and finely flavored spirit; then by another
process a sweet treacle is obtained called honey. The
\ children and pigs ate little or no other food. He
does not add that the people are healthy and temper-
ate, but I have no doubt they are. We knew the
apple had many virtues, but these Chilians have really
opened a deep beneath a deep. We had found out
the cider and the spirits, but who guessed the wine
and the honey, except it were the bees ? There is
a variety in our orchards called the winesap, a doubly
liquid name that suggests what 'might be done with
this fruit.

X/The apple is the commonest and yet the most
varied and beautiful of fruits. A dish of them is as
becoming to the centre-table in winter as was the vase
of flowers in the summer, — a bouquet of spitzen-
bergs and greenings and northern spies. A rose when

134 THE APPLE.

,*

tt blooms, the apple is a rose when its ripens. It
pleases every sense to which it can be addressed, the
touch, the smell, the sight, the taste ; and when it falls
in the still October days it pleases the ear. It is a
call to a banquet, it is a signal that the feast is ready.
The bough would fain hold it, but it can now assert
its independence ; it can now live a life of its own.

Daily the stem relaxes Its hold, till finally it lets
go completely and down comes the painted sphere
with a mellow thump to the earth, toward which it
has been nodding so long. It bounds away to seek
its bed, to hide under a leaf, or in a tuft of grass. It
will now take time to meditate and ripen ! What
delicious thoughts it has there nestled with its fellows
under the fence, turning acid into sugar, and sugar
ito wine !

How pleasing to the touch. I love to stroke its
polished rondure with my hand, to carry it in my
pocket on my tramp over the winter hills, or through
the early spring woods. You are company, you red-
cheeked spitz, or you salmon-fleshed greening ! I toy
with you ; press your face to mine, toss you in the air,
roll you on the ground, see you shine out where you
lie amid the moss and dry leaves and sticks. You
ivre so alive ! You glow like a ruddy flower. You
look so animated I almost expect to see you move !
I postpone the eating of you, you are so beautiful !
How compact ; how exquisitely tinted ! Stained by
the sun and varnished against the rains. An inde-
oendeut vegetable existence, alive and vascular as

THE APPLE. 135

my own flesh ; capable of being wounded, bleeding,
wasting away, or almost repairing damages !

VHow they resist the cold ! holding out almost as
long as the red cheeks of the boys do. A frost that
destroys the potatoes and other roots only makes the
apple more crisp and vigorous ; they peep out from
the chance November snows unscathed. When I see
the fruit vender on the street corner stamping his feet
and beating his hands to keep them warm and his
naked apples lying exposed to the blasts, I wonder
if they do not ache too to clap their hands and en-
liven their circulation. But they can stand it nearly
asJong as the vender can.

//Noble common fruit, best friend of man and most
loved by him, following him like his dog or his cow,
wherever he goes. His homestead is not planted till
you are planted, your roots intertwine with his ; thriv-
ing best where he thrives best, losing the limestone
and the frost, the plow and the pruning-knife, you
are indeed suggestive of hardy, cheerful industry, and
a healthy life in the open air. Temperate, chaste
fruit ! you mean neither luxury nor sloth, neither
satiety nor indolence, neither enervating heats nor
the Frigid Zones. Uncloying fruit, fruit whose best
sauce is the open air, whose finest flavors only he
whose taste is sharpened by brisk work or walking
knows ; winter fruit, when the fire of life burns
nrightest ; fruit always a little hyperborean, leaning
toward the cold; bracing, sub-acid, active fruit. I
think you must come from the north, you are so frank

136 THE APPLE.

•'and honest, so sturdy and appetizing. You are stocky
and homely like the northern races. Your quality ia
Saxon. Surely the fiery and impetuous south is not
akin to thee. Not spices or olives or the sumptuous
liquid fruits, but the grass, the snow, the grams, the
coolness is akin to thee. I think if I could subsist on
you or the like of you, I should never have an intem-
perate or ignoble thought, never be feverish or de-
spondent. So far as I could absorb or transmute
your quality I should be cheerful, continent, equitable,
sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmth
and contentment around.

/jl Is there any other fruit that has so much facial ex-
pression as the apple ? What boy does not more than
half believe they can see with that single eye of theirs ?
Do they not look and nod to him from the bough ?
The swaar has one look, the rambo another, the spy
another. The youth recognizes the seek-no-further
buried beneath a dozen other varieties, the moment
he catches a glance of its eye, or the bonny-cheeked
Newtown pipin, or the gentle but sharp-nosed gilli-
flower. He goes to the great bin in the cellar and
sinks his shafts here and there in the garnered wealth
of the orchards, mining for his favorites, sometimes
coming plump upon them, sometimes catching a
glimpse of them to the right or left, or uncovering
them as keystones in an arch made up of many varie-
ties.

j In the dark he can usually tell them by the sense
»f touch. There is not only the size and shape, but

THE APPLE. 137

there is the texture and polish. Itoome apples are
coarse-grained and some are fine ; some are thiu
skinned and some are thick. One variety is quick
and vigorous beneath the touch ; another gentle and
yielding. The pinnock has a thick skin with a
spongy lining, a bruise in it becomes like a piece of
cork. The tallow apple has an unctuous feel as its
name suggests. It sheds water like a duck. What
apple is that with a fat curved stem that blends so
prettily with its own flesh, — the wine-apple ? Some
varieties impress me as masculine, — weather-stained,
freckled, lasting and rugged ; others are indeed lady
apples, fair, delicate, shining, mild-flavored, white-
meated, like the egg-drop and lady-finger. The prac-
ticed hand knows each kind by the touch.

Do you remember the apple hole in the garden or
back of the house, Ben Bolt ? In the fall after the
bins in the cellar had been well stocked, we excavated
a circular pit in the warm mellow earth and covering
the bottom with clean rye straw, emptied in basketful
after basketful of hardy choice varieties, till there was
a tent-shaped mound several feet high of shining
variegated fruit. Then wrapping it about with a thick
layer of long rye straw, and tucking it up snug and
warm, the mound was covered with a thin coating of
^arth, a flat stone on the top holding down the straw
As winter set in another coating of earth was put upon
it, with perhaps an overcoat of coarse dry stable ma-
nure, and the precious pile was left in silence and
darkness till spring. No marmot hibernating under

138 THE APPLE.

ground in his nest of leaves and dry grass, more cosy
and warm. No frost, no wet, but fragrant privacy
and quiet. Then how the earth tempers and flavors
the apples ! It draws out all the acrid unripe quali-
ties, and infuses into them a subtle refreshing taste
of the soil. Some varieties perish, but the ranker,
hardier kinds, like the northern spy, the greening, or
the black apple, or the russet, or the pinnock, how
they ripen and grow in grace, how the green becomes
gold, and the bitter becomes sweet !

As the supply in the bins and barrels gets low and
spring approaches, the buried treasures in the garden
are remembered. With spade and axe we go out and
penetrate through the snow and frozen earth till the
inner dressing of straw is laid bare. It is not quite
as clear and bright as when we placed it there last
fall, but the fruit beneath, which the hand soon ex-
poses, is just as bright and far more luscious. Then,
as day after day you resort to the hole, and removing
the straw and earth from the opening, thrust your
arm into the fragrant pit, you have a better chance
than ever before to become acquainted with your
favorites by the sense of touch. How you feel for
them, reaching to the right and left ? Now you have
got a Tolman sweet ; you imagine you can feel that
single meridian line that divides it into two hemis-
pheres. Now a greening fills your hand, you feel its
fine quality beneath its rough coat. Now you have
hooked a swaar, you recognize its full face ; now a
Vandevere or a King rolls down from the apex above

THE APPLE. 139

*nd you bag it at once. When you were a school-
boy you stowed these away in your pockets and ate
them along the road and at recess, and again at noon-
time ; and they, in a measure, corrected the effects
af the cake and pie with which your indulgent mother
filled your lunch-basket.

/'The boy is indeed the true apple-eater, and is not
to be questioned how he came by the fruit with which
his pockets are filled. It belongs to him and he may
steal it if it cannot be had in any other way. His
own juicy flesh craves the juicy flesh of the apple.
Sap draws sap. His fruit eating has little reference
to the state of his appetite. Whether he be full of
meat or empty of meat he wants the apple just the
same. Before meal or after meal it nevfer comes
amiss. The farm-boy munches apples all day long.
He has nests of them in the hay-mow, mellowing, to
which he makes frequent visits. Sometimes old
Brindle, having access through the open door, smells
them out and makes short work of them.

In some countries the custom remaius of placing a
i Dsy apple in the hand of the dead that they may
find it when they enter paradise. In northern my-
thoiogy the giants eat apples to keep off old age.
I/The apple is indeed the fruit of youth. As we
grow old we crave apples less. It is an ominous
sign. When you are ashamed to be seen eating them
on the street ; when you can carry them in your
pocket and your hand not constantly find its way to
•(hem ; when your neighbor has apples and you have

140 THE APPLE.

none, and you make no nocturnal visits to his or«
chard ; when your lunch-basket is without them and
you can pass a winter's night by the fireside with no
thought of the fruit at your elbow, then be assured
y»u are no longer a boy, either in heart or years.
1 1 The genuine apple-eater comforts himself with an
apple in their season as others with a pipe or cigar.
When he has nothing else to do, or is bored, he eats
an apple. While he is waiting for the train he eats
an apple, sometimes several of them. When he
takes a walk he arms himself with apples. His trav-
eling bag is full of apples. He offers an apple to
his companion, and takes one himself. They are his
chief solace when on the road. He sows their seed
all along the route. He tosses the core from the car
window and from the top of tlie stage-coach. He
would, in time, make the land one vast orchard. He
dispenses with a knife. He prefers that his teeth
shall have the first taste. Then he knows the best
flavor is immediately beneath the skin, and that in a
pared apple this is lost. If you will stew the apple,
he says, instead of baking it, by all means leave
;he skin on. It improves the color and vastly height-
ens _the flavor of the dish.

I/ The apple is a masculine fruit ; hence women are
ooor apple-eaters. It belongs to the open air, and
requires an open air taste and relish.

I instantly sympathized with that clergyman I
•ead of, who on pulling out his pocket-handkerchief
in tke midst of his discourse, pulled out two bouno

THE APPLE. 141

ing apples with it that went rolling across the pulpit
floor and down the pulpit stairs. These apples were,
no doubt, to be eaten after the sermon on his way
home, or to his next appointment. They would take
the taste of it out of his month. Then, would a
minister be apt to grow tiresome with two big apples
in his coat-tail pockets ? Would he not naturally
hasten along to " lastly," and the big apples ? If they
were the dominie apples, and it was April or May,
he certainly would.

£/TIow the early settlers prized the apple ! When
their trees broke down or were split asunder by the
storms, the neighbors turned out, the divided tree was
put together again and fastened with iron bolts. In
some of the oldest orchards one may still occasionally
see a large dilapidated tree with the rusty iron bolt
yet visible. Poor, sour fruit, too, but sweet in those
early pioneer days. My grandfather, who was one
of these heroes of the stump, used every fall to make
a journey of forty miles for a few apples, which he
brought home in a bag on horseback. He frequently
started from home by two or three o'clock in the
morning, and at one time both himself and horse
were much frightened by the screaming of panthers
in a narrow pass in the mountains through which the
road led.

\yEmerson, I believe, has spoken of the apple as the
social fruit of New England. Indeed, what a pro-
laoter or abettor of social intercourse among our rural
population the apple has been, the company grow

142 THE APPLE.

"Ing more merry and unrestrained as soon as the bas-
ket of apples was passed round. When the cider
followed, the introduction and good understanding
were complete. Then those rural gatherings that en-
livened the autumn in the country, known as " apple
cuts," now, alas ! nearly obsolete, where so many
things were cut and dried besides apples ! The
larger and more loaded the orchard, the more fre-
quently the invitations went round and the higher
the social and convivial spirit ran. Ours is eminently
a country of the orchard. Horace Greeley said he
had seen no land in which the orchard formed such
a prominent feature in the rural and agricultural dis-
tricts. Nearly every farmhouse in the Eastern and
Northern States has its setting or its background of
apple-trees, which generally date back to the first
settlement of the farm. «<djideed, the orchard, more
than almost any other thing, tends to soften and hu-
manize the country, and give the place of which it is
an adjunct, a settled, domestic look. The apple-tree
takes the rawness and wildness off any scene. On
the top of a mountain, or in remote pastures, it sheds
the sentiment of home. It never loses its domestic
air, or lapses into a wild state. And in planting a
homestead, or in choosing a building site for the new
house, what a help it is to have a few old, maternal
apple-trees near by ; regular old grandmothers, who
have seen trouble, who have been sad and glad
through so many winters and summers, who have
blossomed till the air about them is sweeter than else-

THE APPLE. 143

where, and borne fruit till the grass beneath them has
become thick and soft from human contact, and who
have nourished robins and finches in their branches
till they have a tender, brooding look. The ground,
the turf, the atmosphere of an old orchard, seem
several stages nearer to man than that of the adjoin-
ing field, as if the trees had given back to the soil
more than they had taken from it ; as if they had
tempered the elements and attracted all the genial
and beneficent influences in the landscape around.
[^^n apple orchard is sure to bear you several crops
beside the apple. There is the crop of sweet and-t£Pr..
item childhood and span-

ning the seasons from May to October, and making
the orchard a sort of outlying part of the household.
You have played there as a child, mused there as a
youth or lover, strolled there as a thoughtful, sad-
eyed man. Your father, perhaps, planted the trees,
or reared them from the seed, and you yourself have
pruned and grafted them, and worked among them,
till every separate tree has a peculiar history and
meaning in your mind. Then there_is_jthe__jaej:£x»
failing crop of. birds — robins, goldfinches, king-birds,
cedar-birds, hairjnrds, orioles, starlings — all nest-
,ng and breeding in its branches, and fitly described
oy Wilson Flagg, as " Birds of the Garden and Or-
chard." Whether the pippin and sweetbough bear
or not, the " punctual birds " can always be depended
On. Indeed, there are few better places to study orni-
thology than in the orchard. Besides its regular oo

144 THE APPLE.

cupants, many of the birds of the deeper forest find
occasion to visit it during the season. The cuckoo
comes for the tent-caterpillar, the jay for frozen ap-
ples, the ruffed grouse for buds, the crow foraging for
birds' eggs, the woodpecker and chickadees for their
food, and the high-hole for ants. The red-bird comes
too, if only to see what a friendly covert its branches
form, and the wood-thrush now and then comes out
of the grove near by, and nests alongside of its cousin,
the robin. The smaller hawks know that this is a
most likely spot for their prey, and in spring the shy
northern warblers may be studied as they pause to
feed on the fine insects amid its branches. The mice
love to dwell here also, and hither comes from the
near woods the squirrel and the rabbit. The latter
will put his head through the boy's slipper-noose any
time for a taste of the sweet apple, and the red squir-
reband chipmunk esteem its seeds a great rarity.

All the domestic animals love the apple, but none
so much so as the cow. The taste of it wakes her
up as few other things do, and bars and fences must
be well looked after. No need to assort" them or
pick out the ripe ones for her. An appFe is an ap-
ple, and there is no best about it. I heard of a quick-
witted old cow that learned to shake them down from
the tree. While rubbing herself she had observed
that an apple sometimes fell. This stimulated her to
rub a little harder, when more apples fell. She then
took the hint and rubbed her shoulder with such
vigor that the farmer had to check her and keep an
eye on her to save his fruit.

THE APPLE. 145

But the cow is the friend of the apple. How many
trees she has planted about the farm, in the edge of
the woods, and in remote fields and pastures. The
wild apples, celebrated by Thoreau, are mostly of her
planting. She browses them down to be sure, but
theyare hers, and why should she not?
^•"What an individuality the apple-tree has, each va-
riety being nearly as marked by its form as by its
fruit. What a vigorous grower, for instance, is the
Ribston pippin, an English apple. Wide branching
like the oak, and its large ridgy fruit, in late fall or
early whiter, is one of my favorites. Or the thick
and more pendent top of the belleflower, with its
equally rich, sprightly, uncloying fruit.
^^Sweet apples are perhaps the most nutritious, and
when baked are a feast of themselves. With a tree
of the Jersey sweet or of Tolman's sweeting in bear-
ing, no man's table need be devoid of luxuries and
one of the most wholesome of all deserts. Or the
red astrachan, an August apple, what a gap may be
filled in the culinary department of a household at this
season, by a single tree of this fruit ! And what a
feast is its shining crimson coat to the eye before its
snow-white flesh has reached the tongue. But the
apple of apples for the household is the spitzenberg.
In this casket Pomona has put her highest flavors.
It can stand the ordeal of cooking, and still remain
a spitz. I recently saw a barrel of these apples from
the orchard of a fruit grower in the northern part of
New York, who has devoted especial attention to
10

146 THE APPLE.

this variety. They were perfect gems. Not large,
that had not been the aim, but small, fair, uniform,
and red to the core. How intense, how spicy and
aromatic.

tj^But all the excellences of the apple are not con-
fined to the cultivated fruit. Occasionally a seedling
springs up about the farm that produces fruit of rare
beauty and worth. In sections peculiarly adapted to
the apple, like a certain belt along the Hudson River,
I have noticed that most of the wild unbidden trees
bear good, edible fruit. In cold and ungenial districts,
the seedlings are mostly sour and crabbed, but in
more favorable soils they are oftener mild and sweet.
I know wild apples that ripen in August, and that do
not need, if it could be had, Thoreau's sauce of sharp,
November air to be eaten with. At the foot of a
hill near me and striking its roots deep in the shale,
is a giant specimen of native tree that bears an apple
that has about the clearest, waxiest, most transparent
complexion I ever saw. It is good size, and the
color of a tea rose. Its quality is best appreciated in
the kitchen. I know another seedling of excellent
quality and so remarkable for its firmness and den-
sity, that it is known on the farm where it grows as
the " heavy apple."

I have alluded to Thoreau, to whom all lovers of
the apple and its tree are under obligation. His
chapter on "Wild Apples is a most delicious piece of
writing. It has a " tang and smack " like the fruit
it celebrates, and is dashed and streaked with coloj

THE APPLE. 147

in the same manner. It has the hue and perfume of
the crab, and the richness and raciness of the pippin.
But Thoreau loved other apples than the wild sorts
and was obliged to confess that his favorites could
not be eaten in doors. Late in November he found
a blue-pearmain tree growing within the edge of a
swamp, almost as good as wild. " You would not
suppose," he says, " that there was any fruit left there
on the first survey, but you must look according to
system. Those which lie exposed are quite brown
and rotten now, or perchance a few still show one
blooming cheek here and there amid the wet leaves.
Nevertheless, with experienced eyes I explore amid
the bare alders, and the huckleberry bushes, and the
withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which
are full of leaves, and pry under the fallen and decayed
ferns which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly
strew the ground. For I know that they lie con-
cealed, fallen into hollows long since, and covered up
by the leaves of the tree itself — a proper kind of
packing. From these lurking places, everywhere
within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth the
fruit all wet and glossy, may be nibbled by rabbits
and hollowed out by crickets, and perhaps a leaf or two
cemented to it (as Curzon an old manuscript from a
monastery's mouldy cellar), but still with a rich bloom
on it, and at least as ripe and well kept, if no better
than those in barrels, more crisp and lively than they.
Tf these resources fail to yield anything, I have
learned to look between the leaves of the suckers

148 THE APPLE.

which spring thickly from some horizontal limb, for
now and then one lodges there, or in the very midst
of an alder-clump, where they are covered by leaves,
safe from cows which may have smelled them out
Jf I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the blue-
pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side ; and as I
retrace my steps, in the frosty eve, being perhaps four
or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side,
and then from that, to keep my balance."

AN OCTOBER ABEOAD.

MELLOW ENGLAND.

*rty at the outset, as I believe some one else
b.«« said: on a like occasion, that in this narrative I
shall probably describe myself more than the objects
I look upon. The facts and particulars of the case
have already been set down in the guide-books and
in innumerable books of travel. I shall only at-
tempt to give an account of the pleasure and satisfac-
tion I had in coming face to face with things in the
mother country, seeing them as I did with kindred
and sympathizing eyes.

The ocean was a dread fascination to me — a
world whose dominion I had never entered ; but I
proved to be such a wretched sailor that I am obliged
to confess, Hibernian-fashion, that the happiest mo-
ment I spent upon the sea was when I set my foot
upon the land.

It is a wide and fearful gulf that separates the two
worlds. The landsman can know little of the wild-
ness, savageness, and mercilessness of nature till he
haG been upon the sea. It is as if he had taken a
leap off into the interstellar spaces. In voyaging to
Mars or Jupiter he might cross such a desert —

152 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

might confront such awful purity and coldness. An
astronomic solitariness and remoteness encompass
the sea. The earth and all remembrance of it is
blotted out ; there is no hint of it anywhere. This
is not water, this cold, hlue-black, vitreous liquid. It
suggests not life but death. Indeed, the regions of
everlasting ice and snow are not more cold and in-
human than is the sea.

Almost the only thing about my first sea voyage
that I remember with pleasure is the circumstance of
the little birds that, during the first few days out,
took refuge on the steamer. The first afternoon,
just as we were losing sight of land, a delicate little
wood bird, — the black and white creeping warbler,
— having lost its reckoning, in making perhaps its
first southern voyage, came aboard. It was much
fatigued and had a disheartened, demoralized look.
After an hour or two it disappeared, having, I fear, a
hard pull to reach the land in the face of the wind
that was blowing, if indeed it reached it at all.

The next day, just at night, I observed a small
hawk sailing about conveniently near the vessel, but
with a very lofty, independent mien, as if he had just
happened that way on his travels, and was only
lingering to take a good view of us. It was amus-
ing to observe his coolness and haughty unconcern
n that sad plight he was ha ; by nothing in his man-
i er betraying that he was several hundred miles at
»ea, and did not know how he was going to get back
to land. But presently I noticed he found it not in-

MELLOW ENGLAND. 153

consistent with his dignity to alight on the rigging
under friendly cover of the tops'l, where I saw hid
feathers rudely ruffled by the wind, till darkness set
in. If the sailors did not disturb him during the
night, he certainly needed all his fortitude in the
morning to put a cheerful face on his situation.

The third day, when we were perhaps off Nova
Scotia or Newfoundland, the American pipit or tit-
lark, from the far North, a brown bird about the size
of a sparrow, dropped upon the deck of the ship, so
nearly exhausted that one of the sailors was on the
point of covering it with his hat. It stayed about
the vessel nearly all day, flitting from point to point,
or hopping along a few feet in front of the prom-
enaders, and prying into every crack and crevice
for food. Time after time I saw it start off with a
reassuring chirp, as if determined to seek the land,
but before it had got many rods from the ship its
heart would seem to fail it, and ifter circling about
for a few moments, back it would come, more dis-
couraged than ever.

These little waifs from the shore ! I gazed upon
them with a strange, sad interest. They were friends
in distress, but the sea-birds, skimming along indiffer-
ent to us, or darting in and out among those watery
hills, I seemed to look upon as my natural enemies.
They were the nurslings and favorites of the sea, and
I had no sympathy with them.

No doubt the number of our land birds that act
Ually perish in the sea during their autumn migra

154 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

"tion, being carried far out of their course by the
prevailing westerly winds of this season, is very
great. Occasionally one makes the passage to Great
Britain, by following the ships and finding them at
convenient distances along the route, and I have been
told that over fifty different species of our more com-
mon birds, such as robins, starlings, grossbeaks,
thrushes, etc., have been found in Ireland, having, of
course, crossed in this way. What numbers of these
little navigators of the air are misled and wrecked
during those dark and stormy nights, on the light-
houses alone that line the Atlantic Coast? Is it
Celia Thaxter who tells of having picked up her
apron full of sparrows, warblers, flycatchers, etc., at
the foot of the light-house, on the Isles of Shoals,
one morning after a storm, the ground being still
strewn with birds of all kinds that had dashed them-
selves against the beacon, bewildered and fascinated
by its tremendous light?

If a land bird perishes at sea, a sea bird is equally
cast away upon the land, and I have known the sooty
tern, with its almost omnipotent wing, to fall down
utterly famished and exhausted, two hundred miles
from salt water.

But my interest in these things did not last beyond
the third day. About this time we entered what the
sailors call the " devil's hole," and a very respectably
s'zed hole it is, extending from the Banks of New-
Sb mdland to Ireland, and in all seasons and weathers
it seems to be well stirred up.

MELLOW ENGLAND. 155

Amidst the tossing and rolling, the groaning of
penitent travelers, and the laboring of the vessel as
she climbed those dark unstable mountains, my mind
reverted feebly to Huxley's statement, that the bot-
tom of this sea, for over a thousand miles, presents
to the eye of science a vast chalk plain, over which
one might drive as over a floor, and I tried to solace
myself by dwelling upon the spectacle of a solitary
traveler whipping up his steed across it. The imag-
inary rattle of his wagon was like the sound of
lutes and harps, and I would rather have clung to his
axletree than been rocked in the best berth in the
ship.

LAND.

On the tenth day, about four o'clock in the after-
noon, we sighted Ireland. The ship came up from
behind the horizon where for so many days she had
been buffeting with the winds and the waves, but had
never lost the clew, bearing straight as an arrow for
the mark. I "think if she had been aimed at a fair
sized artillery target, she would have crossed the
ocean and struck the bull's eye.

In Ireland, instead of an emerald isle rising out of
the sea, I beheld a succession of cold, purplish mount-
ains, stretching along the northeastern horizon, but I
am bound to say that no tints of bloom or verdure
were ever half so welcome to me as were those dark,
heather-clad ranges. It is a feeling which a man can
nave but once in his life, when he first sets eyes upon
% foreign land, and in my case, to this feeling waa

156 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

*dded the delightful thought that the " devil's hole *
would soon be cleared and my long fust over.

Presently, after the darkness had set in, signal
rockets were let off from the stern of the vessel, writ-
ing their burning messages upon the night, and when
answering rockets rose slowly up far ahead, I suppose
we all felt that the voyage was essentially done, and
no doubt a message flashed back under the ocean,
that the Scotia had arrived.

The sight of the land had been such medicine to
me that I could now hold up my head and walk
about, and so went down for the first time and took
a look at the engines — those twin monsters that had
not stopped once, or apparently varied their stroke at
all since leaving Sandy Hook ; I felt like patting their
enormous cranks and shafts with my hand ; then at
the coal bunks, vast cavernous recesses in the belly of
the ship, like the chambers of the original mine in
the mountains, and saw the men and firemen at work
in a sort of purgatory of heat and dust. When it is
remembered that one of these ocean steamers con-
sumes about one hundred tons of coal per day, it is
iiasy to imagine what a burden the coal for a voyage
alone must be, and one is not at all disposed to laugh
at Dr. Lardner, who proved so convincingly that no
steamship could ever cross the ocean because it could
tiOt carry coal enough to enable it to make the pas-
lage.

On the morrow, a calm lustrous day, we steamed at
pur leisure up the Channel and across the Irish Sea,

MELLOW ENGLAND. 157

the coast of Wales and her groups of lofty mount-
ains in full view nearly all day. The mountains
were in profile like the Catskills viewed from the
Hudson below, only it was evident there were no
trees or shrubbery upon them, and their summits, on
this last day of September, were white with the snow.

The first day or half day ashore is, of course, the
most novel and exciting ; but who, as Mr. Higginson
says, can describe his sensations and emotions this
first half day. It is a page of travel that has not yet
been written. Paradoxical as it may seem, one gen-
erally comes out of pickle much fresher than he went
in. The sea has given him an enormous appetite for
the land Every one of his senses is like a hungry
wolf clamorous to be fed. For my part I had sud-
denly emerged from a condition bordering on that of
the hibernating animals — a condition in which I had
neither ate, nor slept, nor thought, nor moved, when
I could help it, into not only a full, but a keen and
joyous possession of my health and faculties. It was
almost a metamorphosis. I was no longer the clod I
had been, but a bird exulting in the earth and air,
and in the liberty of motion. Then to remember it
was a new earth and a new sky that I was behold-
ing, that it was England, the old mother at last, no
longer a faith or a fable, but an actual fact there be-
fore my eyes and under my feet — why should I not
exult? Go to! I will be indulged. These treea

158 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

those fields, that bird darting along the hedge-rows,
those men and boys picking blackberries in October,
those English flowers by the road-side (stop the car-
riage while I leap out and pluck them), the homely,
domestic looks of things, those houses, those queer
vehicles, those thick-coated horses, those big-footed,
coarsely-clad, clear-skinned men and women, this
massive, homely, compact architecture — let me have
a good look, for this is my first hour in England, and
I am drunk with the joy of seeing ! This house-fly
even, let me inspect it,1 and that swallow skimming
along so familiarly ; is he the same I saw trying to
cling to the sails of the vessel the third day out ? or
is the swallow the swallow the world over ? This
grass I certainly have seen before, and this red and
white clover, but this daisy and dandelion are not the
same, and I have come three thousand miles to see
the mullein cultivated in a garden, and christened the
velvet plant.

As we sped through the land, the heart of England,
toward London, I thought my eyes would never get
their fill of the landscape, and that I would lose them
out of my head by their eagerness to catch every ob-
ject as we rushed along ! How they reveled, how
they followed the birds and the game, how they
glanced ahead on the track — that marvelous track !
• — or shot off over the fields and downs, finding their
delight in the streams, the roads, the bridges, the

l The English house-fly actually seemed coarse ind more hairy
than curs.

MELLOW ENGLAND. 159

splendid breeds of cattle and sheep in the fields, the
superb husbandry, the rich mellow soil, the drainage,
the hedges — in the iucouspicuousness of any given
feature and the mellow tone and homely sincerity of
all ; now dwelling fondly upon the groups of neatly
modeled stacks, then upon the field occupations, the
gathering of turnips and cabbages, or the digging of
potatoes, — how I longed to turn up the historic soil
into which had passed the sweat and virtue of so
many generations, with my own spade, — then upon
the quaint, old, thatched houses, or the cluster of
tiled roofs, then catching at a church spire across a
meadow (and it is all meadow) or at the remains of
tower or wall overrun with ivy.

Here, something almost human looks out at you
from the landscape ; nature here has been so long
under the dominion of man, has been taken up and
laid down by him so many times, worked over and
over with his hands, fed and fattened by his toil and
industry, and on the whole, has proved herself so will-
ing and tractable, that she has taken on something of
his image, and seems to radiate his presence. She is
completely domesticated, and no doubt loves the tit-
ivation of the harrow and plow. The fields look half
conscious, and if ever the cattle have " great and tran-
quil thoughts," as Emerson suggests they do, it must
be when lying upon these lawns and meadows. I
noticed that the trees, the oaks and elms, looked like
fruit-trees, or as if they had felt the humanizing in-
fluences of so many generations of men, and were be-

160 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

•taking themselves from the woods to the orchard
The game is more than half tame, and one could
easily understand that it had a keeper.

But the look of those fields and parks went straight
to my heart. It is not merely that they were so
smooth and cultivated, but that they were so benign
and maternal, so redolent of cattle and sheep and of
patient, homely, farm labor. One gets only here and
there a glimpse of such in this country. I see occa-
sionally about our farms a patch of an acre or half
acre upon which has settled this atmosphere of ripe
and loving husbandry ; a choice bit of meadow about
the barn or orchard, or near the house, which has
had some special fattening, perhaps been the site of
some former garden, or barn, or homestead, or which
has had the wash of some building, where the feet of
children have played for generations, and the flocks
and herds been fed in winter, and where they love to
lie and ruminate at night — a piece of sward thick and
smooth, and full of warmth and nutriment, where the
grass is greenest and freshest in spring, and the hay
finest and thickest in summer.

This is the character of the whole of England that
I saw. I had been told I should see a garden, but I
did not know before to what extent the earth could
become a living repository of the virtues of so many
generations of gardeners. The tendency to run to
weeds and wild growths seems to have been utterly
eradicated from the soil, and if anything were to
spring up spontaneously, I think it would be cabbage
and turnips, or grass and grain.

MELLOW ENGLAND. 161

And yet, to American eyes, the country seems
quite uninhabited, there are so few dwellings, and so
few people. Such a landscape at home would be dot-
ted all over with thrifty farm-houses, each with its
group of painted out-buildings, and along every road
and highway would be seen the well-to-do turnouts
of the independent freeholders. But in England the
dwellings of the poor people, the farmers, are so
humble and inconspicuous and are really so far apart,
and the halls and the country-seats of the aristocracy
are so hidden in the midst of vast estates, that the
landscape seems almost deserted, and it is not till you
see the towns and great cities that you can under-
stand where so vast a population keeps iteelf.

Another thing that would be quite sure to strike
my eye on this my first ride across British soil and
on all subsequent rides, was the enormous number of
birds and fowls of various kinds that swarmed in the
air or covered the ground. It was truly amazing.
It seemed as if the feathered life of a whole continent
must have been concentrated on this island. Indeed,
I doubt if a sweeping together of all the birds of the
United States into any two of the largest States,
would people the earth and air more fully. There
appeared to be a plover, a crow, a rook, a blackbird,
and a sparrow, to every square yard of ground. They
know the value of birds in Britain — that they are
the friends, not the enemies, of the farmer. It must
be the paradise of crows and rooks. It did me good
to see them so much at home about the fields and
11

162 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

even in the towns. I was glad also to see that the
British crow was not a stranger to me. and that he
differed from his brother on the American side of the
Atlantic only in being less alert and cautious, having
less use for these qualities.

Now and then the train would start up some more
tempting game. A brace or two of partridges or a
covey of quails would settle down in the stubble, or a
cock pheasant drop head and tail and slide into the
copse. Rabbits also would scamper back from the
borders of the fields into the thickets or peep slyly
out, making my sportsman's fingers tingle.

I have no doubt I should be a notorious poacher in
England. How could an American see so much
game and not wish to exterminate it entirely as he
does at home ? But sporting is an expensive luxury
here. In the first place a man pays a heavy tax on
his gun, nearly or quite half its value ; then he has
to have a license to hunt, for which he pays smartly,
then permission from the owner of the land upon
which he wishes to hunt, so that the game is hedged
about by a triple safeguard.

An American, also, will be at once struck with the
look of greater substantiality and completeness in
everything he sees here. No temporizing, no make-
shifts, no evidence of hurry, or failure, or contract
work ; no wood and little paint, but plenty of iron
%ud brick and stone. This people have taken plenty
of time, and have built broad and deep, and placed
the cap-stone on. All this I had been told, but it

MELLOW ENGLAND. 163

pleased me so in the seeing that I must tell it again.
It is worth a voyage across the Atlantic to see the
bridges alone. I believe I had seen little other than
wooden bridges before, and in England I saw not
one such, but everywhere solid arches of masonry,
that were refreshing and reassuring to behold. Even
the lanes aud by-ways about the farm, I noticed,
crossed the little creeks with a span upon which
an elephant would not hesitate to tread, or artillery
traius to pass. There is no form so pleasing to look
upon as the arch, or that affords so much food and
suggestion to the mind. It seems to stimulate the vo-
lition, the will-power, and for my part, I cannot look
upon a noble span without a feeling of envy, for I
know the hearts of heroes are thus keyed and forti-
fied. The arch is the symbol of strength and activity,
and of rectitude.

In Europe I took a new lease of this feeling, this
partiality for the span, and had daily opportunities to
indulge and confirm it. In London I had immense
satisfaction in observing the bridges there and in
walking over them, firm as the geological strata, and
as enduring. London Bridge, Waterloo Bridge
Blackfriars, etc., clearing the river in a few gigantic
leaps, like things of life and motion — to pass over
one of these bridges or to sail under it awakens the
emotion of the sublime. I think the moral value of
such a bridge as the Waterloo must be inestimable.
It seems to me the British Empire itself is stronger
por such. a bridge, and that all public and private vir-

164 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

"tues are stronger. In Paris, too, those superb monu-
ments over the Seine — I think they alone ought to
inspire the citizens with a love of permanence, and
help hold them to stricter notions of law and depend-
ence. No doubt kings and tyrants know the value of
these things, and as yet they certainly have the mo-
nopoly of them.

LONDON.

I am too good a countryman to feel much at home
in cities, and usually value them only as conveniences,
but for London I conceived quite an affection ; per-
haps because it is so much like a natural formation
itself, and strikes less loudly, or perhaps sharply,
upon the senses than our great cities do. It is a for-
est of brick and stone of the most stupendous dimen-
sions, and one traverses it in the same adventurous
kind of way that he does woods and mountains. The
maze and tangle of streets is something fearful, and
any generalization of them a step not to be hastily
taken. My experience heretofore had been that
cities generally were fractions that could be greatly
reduced, but London I found I could not simplify,
and every morning for weeks, when I came out of
my hotel, it was a question whether my course lay in
this direction or in squarely the opposite. It has no
unit of structure, but is a vast aggregation of streets
and bouses, or in fact of towns and cities, which have
to be mastered in detail. I tried the .third or fourth
day to get a bird's-eye view from the top of St. Paul's

MELLOW ENGLAND. 165

but saw through the rifts in the smoke only a waste
— literally a waste of red tiles and chimney pots.
The confusion and desolation were complete.

But I finally mastered the city, in a measure, by
the aid of a shilling map which I carried with me
wherever I went, and upon which when I was lost I
would hunt myself up, thus making in the end a very
suggestive and entertaining map. Indeed every inch
of this piece of colored paper is alive to me. If I did
not make the map itself, I at least verified it, which
is nearly as good, and the verification, on street cor-
ner by day, and under lamp or by shop window at
night, was often a matter of so much concern that I
doubt if the original surveyor himself put more heart
into certain parts of his work than I did in the proof
of them.

London has less metropolitan splendor than New
York, and less of the full-blown pride of the shopman.
Its stores are not nearly so big, and it has no sign-
boards that contain over one thousand feet of lumber,
neither did I see any names painted on the gable ends
of the buildings that the man in the moon could read
without his opera-glass. I went out one day to look
up one of the great publishing houses, and passed it
and repassed it several times trying to find the sign.
Finally, having made sure of the building, I found the
name of the firm cut into the door jamb.

London seems to have been built and peopled by
countrymen, who have preserved all the rural remi-
tUcences possible. All its great streets or arenues

166 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

" are called roads, as Kiug's Road, City Road, Edge-
ware Road, Tottenham Court Road, etc., with innu-
merable lesser roads. Then there are lanes and walks,
and such rural names among the streets as Long
Acre, Snowhill, Poultry, Bush-lane, Hill-road, Houns-
ditch, etc., and not one grand street or imperial
avenue.

My visit fell at a most favorable juncture as to
weather, there being but few rainy days and but little
fog. I had imagined that they had barely enough fair
weather in London, at any season, to keep alive the
tradition of sunshine and of blue sky, but the October
days I spent there were not so very far behind what
we have at home at this season. London often puts
on a night-cap of smoke and fog, which it pulls down
over its ears pretty close at times, and the sun has a
habit of lying abed very late in the morning, which
all the people imitate ; but I remember some very
pleasant weather there, and some bright moonlight
nights.

I saw but one full-blown characteristic London fog.
I was in the National Gallery one day, trying to make
up my mind about Turner, when this chimney-pot
meteor came down. It was like a great yellow clog
taking possession of the world. The light faded from
the room, the pictures ran together in confused masses
of shadow on the walls, and in the street only a dim
yellowish twilight prevailed, through which faintly
twinkled the lights in the shop windows. Vehicles
came slowly out of the dirty obscurity on one side and

MELLOW ENGLAND. 167

plunged into it on the other. Waterloo Bridge gave
one or two leaps and disappeared, and the Nelson
Column in Trafalgar Square was obliterated for half
its length. Travel was impeded, boats stopped on the
river, trains stood still on the track and for an hour
and a half London lay buried beneath this sickening
eruption. I say eruption, because a London fog is
only a London smoke, tempered by a moist atmos-
phere. It is called "fog" by courtesy, but lampblack
is its chief ingredient. It is not wet like our fogs, but
quite dry, and makes the eyes smart and the nose
tingle. Whenever the sun can be seen through it,
his face is red and dirty; seen through a bond fide
fog his face is clean and white. English coal, — or
" coals " as they say here, — in burning gives out an
enormous quantity of thick, yellowish smoke, which
is at no time absorbed or dissipated as it would be in
our hard, dry atmosphere, and which at certain times
is not absorbed at all, but falls down swollen and
augmented by the prevailing moisture. The atmos-
phere of the whole island is more or less impregnated
with smoke, even on the fairest days, and it becomes
more and more dense as you approach the great
towns. Yet this compound of smut, fog, and common
air is an elixir of youth ; and this is one of the sur-
prises of London, to see amid so much soot and dingi-
Oess such fresh, blooming complexions and in general
euch a fine physical tone and full-bloodedness among
the people — such as one has come to associate only
*rith the best air and the purest, wholesomest country

168 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

influences. What the secret of it may be, I am at a
loss to know, unless it is that the moist atmosphere
does not dry up the blood as our air does and that
the carbon and creosote have some rare antiseptic
and preservative qualities, as doubtless they have, that
are efficacious in the human physiology. It is no
doubt true, also, that the people do not tan in this
climate, as in ours, and that the delicate flesh tints
show more on that account.

I speak thus of these things with reference to our
standards at home, because I found that these stand-
ards were ever present in my mind, and that I was
unconsciously applying them to whatever I saw, and
wherever I went, and often, as I shall have occasion
to show, to their discredit

Climate is a great matter, and no doubt many of
the differences between the English stock at home
and its offshoot in our country, are traceable to this
source. Our climate is more heady and less sto-
machic than the English ; sharpens the wit, but dries
up the fluids and viscera ; favors an irregular, nervous
energy, but exhausts the animal spirits. It is, per-
haps, on this account that I have felt since my return
how much easier it is to be a dyspeptic here than in
Great Britain. One's appetite is keener and more
ravenous, and the temptation to bolt one's food
greater. The American is not so hearty an eater as
the Englishman, but the forces of his body are con-
stantly leaving his stomach in the lurch, and running
off into his hands and feet and head. His eyes are

MELLOW ENGLAND. 169

bigger than his belly, but an Englishman's belly is
a deal larger than his eyes, and the number of plum
puddings and amount of Welsh rare-bit he devours
annually would send the best of us to his grave in
half that time. We have not enough constitutional
inertia and stolidity ; our climate gives us no rest,
but goads us day and night, and the consequent wear
and tear of life is no doubt greater in this country
than in any other on the globe. We are playing the
game more rapidly, and I fear less thoroughly and
sincerely than the mother country.

The more uniform good health of English women
is thought to be a matter of exercise in the open air,
as walking, riding, etc., but the prime reason is
mainly a climatic one, uniform habits of exercise being
more easily kept up in that climate than in this and
being less exhaustive, one day with another. You
can walk there every day in the year without much
discomfort, and the stimulus is about the same. Here
it is too hot in summer and too cold in winter, or
else it keys you up too tight one day and unstrings
you the next ; all fire and motion in the morning
and all listlessness and ennui in the afternoon ; a
spur one hour and a sedative the next.

A watch will not keep as steady time here as in
Britain and the human clock-work is more liable to
get out of repair for the same reason. Our women,
eepecially, break down prematurely, and the decay of
maternity in this country is no doubt greater than in
»ny of the oldest civilized communities. One reason,

170 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

doubtless, is that our women are the greatest slaves
of fashion in the whole world, and in following tha
whims of that famous courtesan have the most fickle
and destructive climate to contend with.

English women all have good-sized feet, and Eng-
lishmen, too, and wear large, comfortable shoes. This
was a noticeable feature at once ; coarse, loose-fitting
clothes of both sexes, and large boots and shoes with
low heels. They evidently knew the use of their
feet, and had none of the French, or American, or
Chinese fastidiousness about this part of their anat-
omy. I notice that when a family begins to run out,
it turns out its toes, drops off at the heel, shortens
its jaw, and dotes on small feet and hands.

Another promoter of health in England is woolen
clothes, which are worn the year round, the summer
driving people into no such extremities as here. And
the good, honest woolen stuffs of one kind and an-
other that fill the shops, attest the need and the taste
that prevails. They had a garment when I was in
London called the Ulster overcoat — a coarse, shaggy,
bungling coat, with a skirt nearly reaching to the
feet, very ugly, tried by the fashion plates, but very
comfortable, and quite the fashion. This very sen-
sible garment has since become well known in Amer-
ica.

The Americans in London were put out with the
tailors, and could rarely get suited, on account of the
•oose cutting and the want of " style." But " style "
B the hiatus that threatens to swallow us all one of

MELLOW ENGLAND. 171

these days. About the only monstrosity I saw in
the British man's dress was the stove-pipe hat, which
everybody wears. At first I feared it might be a
police regulation or a requirement of the British
Constitution, for I seemed to be about the only man
in the kingdom with a soft hat on, and I had noticed
that before leaving the steamer every man brought
out from its hiding-place one of these polished brain
squeezers. Even the boys wear them — youths of
nine and ten years with little stove-pipe hats on ;
and at Eton School I saw black swarms of them —
even the boys in the field were playing foot-ball in
stove-pipe hats.

What we call beauty in woman is so much a mat-
ter of youth and health that the average of female
beauty in London is, I believe, higher than in this
country. English women are comely and ^corf-look-
ing. It is an extremely fresh and pleasant face that
you see everywhere — softer, less clearly and sharply
cut than the typical female face in this country — less
spirituelle, less perfect in form, but stronger and
sweeter. There is more blood, and heart, and sub-
stance back of it. The American race of the pres-
ent generation is doubtless the most shapely, both in
face and figure, that has yet appeared. American
children are far less crude, and lumpy, and awkward
looking than European children. One generation in
this country suffices vastly to improve the looks of
the offspring of the Irish or German or Norwegian
emigrant. There is surely something in our climate

172 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

or conditions that speedily refines and sharpens, and,
shall I add, hardens ? the human features. The face
loses something, but it comes into shape ; and of such
beauty as is the product of this tendency we can un-
doubtedly show more, especially in our women, than
the parent stock, in Europe ; while American school-
girls, I believe, have the most bewitching beauty in
th3 world.

The English plainness of speech is observable
even in the signs or notices along the streets. In-
stead of " Lodging," " Lodging," as with us, one sees
" Beds," " Beds," which has a very homely sound ;
and in place of " gentlemen's " this, that, or the other,
about public places, the word " men's " is used.

I suppose if it was not for the bond of a written
language and perpetual intercourse, the two nations
would not be able to understand each other in the
course of a hundred years, the inflection and accent-
uation is so different. I recently heard an English
lady say, referring to the American speech, that she
could hardly believe her own language could be
spoken so strangely.

ARCHITECTURE.

One sees right away that the English are a home
people, a domestic people. And he does not need to
go into their houses or homes to find this out. It is
in the air and in the general aspect of things. Every
where you see the virtue and quality that we ascribe
to home-made articles. It seems as if things had

MELLOW ENGLAND. 173

been made by hand, and with care and affection, as
they have been. The land of caste and kings, there
is yet less glitter aud display than in this country,
less publicity, and, of course, less rivalry and emula-
tion also, for which we pay very dearly. You have
got to where the word homely preserves its true sig-
nification, and is no longer a term of disparagement,
but expressive of a cardinal virtue.

I liked the English habit of naming their houses ;
it shows the importance they attach to their homes.
All about the suburbs of London and in the outlying
villages I noticed nearly every house and cottage had
some appropriate designation, as Terrace House,
Oaktree House, Ivy Cottage, or some Villa, etc.,
usually cut into the stone gate post, and this name is
put on the address of the letters. How much better
to be known by your name than by your number !
I believe the same custom prevails in the country,
and is common to the middle classes as well as to the
aristocracy. It is a good feature. A house or a
farm with an appropriate name, which everybody rec-
ognizes, must have an added value and importance.

Modern English houses are less showy than ours,
and have more weight and permanence — no flat roofs
and no painted outside shutters. Indeed, that pride
of American country people, and that abomination
in the landscape, a white house with green blinds, I
did not see a specimen of in England. They do
\iot aim to make their houses conspicuous, but the
contrary. They make a large, yellowish brick that

174 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

Uas a pleasing effect in the wall. Then a very short
space of time in that climate suffices to take off the
effect of newness, and give a mellow, sober hue to
the building. Another advantage of the climate is
that it permits outside plastering. Thus almost any
stone may be imitated, and the work endure for ages ;
while our sudden changes, and extremes of heat and
cold, of dampness and dryiiess, will cause the best
work of this kind to peel off in a few years.

Then this people have better taste in building than
we have, perhaps because they have the noblest sam-
ples and specimens of architecture constantly before
them — those old feudal castles and royal residences,
for instance. I was astonished to see how homely
and good they looked, how little they challenged ad-
miration, and how much they emulate rocks and trees.
They were surely built in a simpler and more poetic
age than this. It was like meeting some plain, natu-
ral nobleman after contact with one of the bedizened,
artificial sort. The Tower of London, for instance, is
as pleasing to the eye, has the same fitness and har-
mony, as a hut in the woods ; and I should think an
artist might have the same pleasure in copying it
into his picture as he would in copying a pioneer's
log cabin. So with Windsor Castle, which has the
beauty of a ledge of rocks, and crowns the hill like a
vast natural formation. The warm, simple interior,
too, of these castles and palaces, the honest oak with-
out paint or varnish, the rich wood carvings, the ripe
human tone and atmosphere, how it all contrasts, for

MELLOW ENGLAND. 17 b

Instance, with the showy, gilded, cast-iron interior of
our commercial or political palaces, where every
tiling that smacks of life or nature is studiously ex-
cluded under the necessity of making the building
fire-proof.

I was not less pleased with the higher ornamental
architecture, — the old churches and cathedrals, —
which appealed tome in a way architecture had never
before done. In fact, I found that I had never seen
architecture before — a building with genius and
power in it, and that one could look at with the
eye of the imagination. Not mechanics merely, but
poets had wrought and planned here, and the granite
was tender with human qualities. The plants and
weeds growing in the niches and hollows of the walls ,
the rooks and martins and jackdaws inhabiting the
towers and breeding about the eaves, are but types of
the feelings and emotions of the human heart that flit
and hover over these old piles, and find affectionate
lodgment in them.

Time, of course, has done a great deal for this old
architecture. Nature has taken it lovingly to her-
self, has set her seal upon it, and adopted it into her
system. Just the foil which beauty, — especially the
crystallic beauty of architecture, — needs, has been
given by this hazy, mellowing atmosphere. As the
grace and suggestiveness of all objects are enhanced
by a fall of snow, — forest, fence, hive, shed, knoll,
rock, tree, all being laid under the same white en-
chantment,— so time has wrought in softening and

176 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

toning down this old religious architecture, and bring
ing it into harmony with nature.

Our climate has a much keener edge, both of frost
and fire, and touches nothing so gently or creatively ;
yet time would, no doubt, do much for our architect-
ure, if we would give it a chance — for that apotheosis
of prose, the National Capitol at Washington, upon
which, I notice, a returned traveler bases our claim
to be considered " ahead " of the Old World, even in
architecture ; but the reigning gods interfere, and
each spring or fall give the building a clean shirt, in
the shape of a coat of white paint. In like manner,
other public buildings never become acclimated, but
are annually scoured with soap and sand, the national
passion for the brightness of newness interfering to
defeat any benison which the gods might be disposed
to pronounce upon them. Spotlessness, I know, is
not a characteristic of our politics, though it is said
that whitewashing is, which may account for this
ceaseless paint-pot renovation of our public buildings.
In a world lit only by the moon our Capitol would
be a paragon of beauty, and the spring whitewash-
ing could also be endured ; but under our blazing sun
and merciless sky it parches the vision, and makes it
turn with a feeling of relief to rocks and trees, or to
some weather-stained, dilapidated shed or hovel.

How winningly and picturesquely in comparison
the old architecture of London addresses itself to the
eye — St Paul's Cathedral, for instance, with its vast
blotches and stains, as if it had been dipped in some

MELLOW ENGLAND. 177

black Lethe of oblivion, and then left to be restored
by the rains and the elements. This black Lethe is
the London smoke and fog, which has left a dark de-
posit over all the building, except the upper and more
exposed parts, where the original silvery whiteness of
the stone shows through, the effect of the whole thus
being like one of those graphic Rembrandt photo-
graphs or carbons, the prominences in a strong light,
and the rest in deepest shadow. I was never tired of
looking at this noble building, and of going out of my
way to walk around it, but I am at a loss to know
whether the pleasure I had in it arose from my love
of nature or from a susceptibility to art for which I
had never given myself credit. Perhaps from both,
for I seemed to behold Art turning toward and rev-
erently acknowledging Nature — indeed, in a manner
already become Nature.

I believe the critics of such things find plenty of
fault with St. Paul's ; and even I could see that its
bigness was a little prosy, that it suggested the his-
toric rather than the poetic muse, etc. ; yet, for all
that, I could never look at it without a profound
emotion. Viewed coolly and critically it might
seem like a vast specimen of Episcopalianism in ar-
chitecture. Miltonic in its grandeur and proportions,
and Miltonic in its prosiness and mongrel classicism
also, yet its power and effectiveness are unmistaka-
ble. The beholder has no vantage ground from
which to view it, or take in its total effect, on account
of its being so closely beset by such a mob of shops
12

178 AN OCTOBEB ABROAD.

and buildings ; yet the glimpses he does get here and
there through the opening made by some street,
when passing in its vicinity, are very striking and
suggestive ; the thin veil of smoke, which is here as
constant and uniform as the atmosphere itself, wrap-
ping it about with the enchantment of time and dis-
tance.

The interior I found even more impressive than
the exterior, perhaps because I was unprepared for
it. I had become used to imposing exteriors at home,
and did not reflect that in a structure like this I
should see an interior also, and that here alone the
soul of the building would be fully revealed. It was
Miltonic in the best sense ; it was like the mightiest
organ music put into form. Such depths, such solemn
vastness, such gulfs and abysses of architectural space,
the rich, mellow light, the haze outside becoming a
mysterious, hallowing presence within, quite mas-
tered me, and I sat down upon a seat, feeling my first
genuine cathedral intoxication. As it was really an
intoxication, a sense of majesty and power quite
overwhelming in my then uncloyed condition, I speak
of it the more freely. My companions rushed about
as if each one had had a search-warrant in his pocket ;
but I was content to uncover my head and drop into
a seat, and busy my mind with some simple object
near at hand, while the sublimity that soared about
ints oujlc Into my soul, and possessed it. My sensa-
tion was like that imparted by suddenly reaching a
great altitude ; there was a sort of relaxation of the

MELLOW ENGLAND. 179

muscles, followed by a sense of physical weakness,
and after half an hour or so I felt compelled to go
out into the open air, and leave till another day the
final survey of the building. Next day I came back,
but there can be only one first time, and I could not
again surprise myself with the same feeling of won-
der and intoxication. But St. Paul's will bear many
visits. I came again and again, and never grew tired
of it. Crossing its threshold was entering another
world, where the silence and solitude were so pro-
found and overpowering, that the noise of the streets
outside, or of the stream of visitors, or of the work-
men engaged on the statuary, made no impression.
They were all belittled, lost, like the humming of
flies. Even the afternoon services, the chanting, and
the tremendous organ, were no interruption, and left
me just as much alone as ever. They only served to
set off the silence, to fathom its depth.

The dome of St. Paul's is the original of our dome
at Washington ; but externally I think ours is the
more graceful of the two, though the effect inside is
tame and flat in comparison. This is owing partly to
the lesser size and height, and partly to our hard,
transparent atmosphere, which lends no charm or il-
lusion, but mainly to the stupid, unimaginative plan
of it. Our dome shuts down like an inverted iron
Dot ; there is no vista, no outlook, no relation, and
hence no proportion. You open a door and are in a
circular pen, and can look in only one direction —
up. If the iron pot were slashed through here and

180 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

there, or if it rested on a row of tall columns, or
piers, and was shown to be a legitimate part of the
building, it would not appear the exhausted receiver
it does now.

The dome of St. Paul's is the culmination of the
whole interior of the building. Kising over the cen-
tral area, it seems to gather up the power and maj-
esty of the nave, the aisles, the transepts, the choir,
and give them expression and expansion in its lofty
firmament.

Then those colossal piers, forty feet broad, some of
them, and nearly one hundred feet high ; they easily
eclipsed what I had recently seen in a mine, and
which I at the time, imagined shamed all the architect-
ure of the world — where the mountain was upheld
over a vast space by massive piers left by the miners,
with a ceiling unrolled over your head, and appar-
ently descending upon you, that looked like a petrified
thundercloud.

The view from the upper gallery, or top of the
dome looking down inside, is most impressive. The
public are not admitted to this gallery, for fear, the
keeper told me, it would become the scene of suicides ;
people unable to withstand the terrible fascination
would leap into the yawning gulf. But with the priv-
ilege usually accorded to Americans, I stepped down
into the narrow circle, and leaning over the balustrade,
coolly looked the horrible temptation in the face.

On the whole, St. Paul's is so vast and imposing
that one wonders what occasion or what ceremony can

MELLOW ENGLAND. 181

rise to the importance of not being utterly dwarfed
within its walls. The annual gathering of the char-
ity children, ten or twelve thousand in number, must
make a ripple or two upon its solitude, or an exhibi-
tion like the thanksgiving of the Queen, when sixteen
or eighteen thousand persons were assembled beneath
its roof. But one cannot forget that it is, for the
most part, a great toy — a mammoth shell, whose
bigness bears no proportion to the living (if, indeed,
it is living), indwelling necessity. It is a tenement
BO large that the tenant looks cold and forlorn, and
in danger of being lost within it.

No such objection can be made to Westminster
Abbey, which is a mellow, picturesque old place, the
interior arrangement and architecture of which affects
one like some ancient, dilapidated forest. Even the
sunlight streaming through the dim windows, and
falling athwart the misty air, was like the sunlight of
a long gone age. The very atmosphere was pensive,
and filled the tall spaces like a memory and a dream.
I sat down and listened to the choral service and to
the organ, which blended perfectly with the spirit and
sentiment of the place.

ON THE SOUTH DOWNS.

One of my best days in England was spent amid
the singing of skylarks on the South Down Hills,
Bear an old town at the mouth of t'ae Little Ouse,
where I paused on my way to France. The pros-
oect of hearing one or two of the classical birds oi

182 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

the Old World had not heen the least of the attrac-
tions of my visit, though I knew the chances were
against me so late in the season, and I have to thank
my good genius for guiding me to the right place at
the right time. To get out of London was delight
enough, and then to find myself quite unexpectedly
on these soft rolling hills, of a mild October day,
in full sight of the sea, with the larks pouring out
their gladness overhead, was to me good fortune in-
deed.

The South Downs form a very remarkable feature
of this part of England, and are totally unlike any
other landscape I ever saw. I believe it is Huxley
who applies to them the epithet of muttony, which
they certainly deserve, for they are like the backs of
immense sheep, smooth, and round, and fat — so
smooth indeed, that the eye can hardly find a place
to take hold of, not a tree, or bush, or fence, or house,
or rock, or stone, or other object, for miles and miles,
save here and there a group of straw-capped stacks,
or a flock of sheep crawling slowly over them, at-
tended by a shepherd and dog, and the only lines
visible, those which bound the squares where different
i rops had been gathered. The soil was rich and mel-
low, like a garden — hills of chalk with a pellicle of
black loam.

These hills stretch a great distance along the coast,
\nd are cut squarely off by the sea, presenting on this
lide a chain of white chalk cliffs suggesting the old
Latin name of this land, Albion.

MELLOW ENGLAND. 183

Before I had got fifty yards from the station I
began to hear the larks, and being unprepared for
them I was a little puzzled at first, but was not long
in discovering what luck I was in. The song disap-
pointed me at first, being less sweet and melodious
than I had expected to hear, indeed I thought it a
little sharp and harsh, — a little stubbly, — but in
other respects, in strength and gladness and continu-
ity, it was wonderful. And the more I heard it the
better I liked it, until I would gladly have given any
of my songsters at home for a bird that could shower
down such notes, even in autumn. Up, up, went the
bird, describing a large easy spiral till he attained an
altitude of three or four hundred feet, when, spread
out against the sky for a space of ten or fifteen min-
utes, or more, he poured out his delight, filling all the
vault with sound. The song is of the sparrow kind,
and, in its best parts, perpetually suggested the notes
of our vesper sparrow ; but the wonder of it is its copi-
ousness and sustained strength. There is no theme,
no beginning, middle, or end, like most of our best
bird songs, but a perfect swarm of notes pouring out
like bees from a hive and resembling each other
nearly as closely, and only ceasing as the bird nears
the earth again. We have many more melodious
songsters ; the bobolink in the meadows, for instance;
the vesper sparrow in the pastures, the purple finch
in the groves, the winter wren, or any of the thrushes

184 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

"even more rapid and ringing, and is delivered in
nearly the same manner ; but our birds all stop when
the skylark has only just begun. Away he goes on
quivering wing, inflating his throat fuller and fuller,
mounting and mounting, and turning to all points of
the compass as if to embrace the whole landscape in
his song, the notes still raining upon you as distinct
as ever, after you have left him far behind. You feel
that you need be in no hurry to observe the song lest
the bird finish, you walk along, your mind reverts
to other things, you examine the grass and weeds, or
search for a curious stone, still there goes the bird ;
you sit down and study the landscape, or send your
thoughts out toward France or Spain, or across the
sea to your own laud, and yet when you get them
back, there is that song above you almost as unceas-
ing as the light of a star. This strain indeed suggests
some rare pyrotechnic display, musical sounds being
substituted for the many-colored sparks and lights.
And yet I will add what perhaps the best readers do
not need to be told, that neither the lark song, nor any
other bird song in the open air and under the sky, is
as noticeable a feature as my description of it might
imply, or as the poets would have ' us believe ; and
that most persons, not especially interested in birds
or their notes, and intent upon the general beauty of
the landscape, would probably pass it by unremarked.
I suspect that it is a little higher flight than the
i^cts will bear out when the writers make the birds
go out of sight into the sky. I could easily follow

MELLOW ENGLAND. 185

them on this occasion, though if I took my eye away
for a moment it was very difficult to get it back again.
I had to search for them as the astronomer searches
for a star. It may be that in the spring, when the
atmosphere is less clear, and the heart of the bird full
of a more mad and reckless love, that the climax is
not reached until the eye loses sight of the singer.

Several attempts have been made to introduce the
lark into this country, but for some reason or other
the experiment has never succeeded. The birds have
been liberated in Virginia and on Long Island, but do
not seem to have ever been heard of afterwards. I
see no reason why they should not thrive anywhere
along our Atlantic sea-board, and I think the question
of introducing them worthy of more thorough and
serious attention than has yet been given it, for the
lark is really an institution, and as he sings long after
the other birds are silent, — as if he had perpetual
spring in his heart, — he would be a great acquisition
to our fields and meadows. It may be that he can-
not stand the extremes of our climate, though the
English sparrow thrives well enough. The Smith-
sonian Institute has received specimens of the sky-
lark from Alaska where, no doubt, they find a climate
more like the English.

They have another prominent singer in England,

namely the robin, — the original robin redbreast, —

slight, quick, active bird with an orange front and

an olive back, and a bright musical warble that I

caught by every garden, lane, and hedge-row. It

186 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

-suggests our bluebird, and has similar habits and
manners, though it is a much better musician.

The European bird that corresponds to our robin
is the blackbird of which Tennyson sings : —

" 0 Blackbird, sing me something well ;
While all the neighbors shoot thee round
I keep smooth plats of fruitful ground
Where thou may'st warble, eat, and dweL."

It quite startled me to see such a resemblance, to
see, indeed, a black robin. In size, form, flight, man-
ners, note, call, there is hardly an appreciable differ-
ence. The bird starts up with the same flirt of the
wings, and calls out in the same jocund, salutatory-
way, as he hastens off. The nest of coarse mortar
in the fork of a tree, or in an out-building, or in the
side of a wall, is also the same.

The bird I wished most to hear, namely, the night-
ingale, had already departed on its southern journey.
I saw one in the Zoological Gardens in London, and
took a good look at him. He struck me as bearing
a close resemblance to our hermit-thrush, with some-
thing in his manners that suggested the water-thrush
also. Carlyle said he first recognized its song from
the description of it in " Wilhelm Meister," and that
it was a " sudden burst," which is like the song of our
water-thrush.

I have little doubt our songsters excel in melody,
while the European birds excel in profuseness and
/olubility. I heard many bright, animated notes
Hid many harsh ones, but few that were melodious,

MELLOW ENGLAND. 187

IThis fact did not harmonize with the general drift of
the rest of my observations, for one of the first things
that strikes an American in Europe is the mellow-
ness and rich tone of things. The European is
Bofter voiced than the American and milder mannered,
but the bird voices seem an exception to this rule.

PARKS.

While in London I had much pleasure in strolling
through the great parks, Hyde Park, Regent's Park,
St. James Park, Victoria Park, etc., and in making
Sunday excursions to Richmond Park or Hampden
Court Parks or the great parks at Windsor Castle.
The magnitude of all these parks was something I
was entirely unprepared for, and their freedom also ;
one could roam where he pleased. Not once did I
see a sign-board, " Keep off the grass," or go here or
go there. There was grass enough, and one could
launch out in every direction without fear of tres-
passing on forbidden ground. One gets used, at
least I do, to such petty parks at home, and walks
amid them so cautiously and circumspectly, every
shrub and tree and grass plat saying " hands off,"
that it is a new sensation to enter a city pleasure
ground like Hyde Park — a vast natural landscape,
nearly two miles long and a mile wide, with broad,
rolling plains, with herds of sheep grazing, and for-
ests and lakes, and all as free as the air. We have
some quite sizable parks and reservations in Wash-
ngton, and the citizen has the right of way over

188 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

their tortuous gravel walks, but he puts his foot upon
the grass at the risk of being insolently hailed by the
local police. I have even been called to order for re-
clining upon a seat under a tree in the Smithsonian
grounds. I must sit upright as in church. But in
Hyde Park or Regent's Park I could not only walk
upon the grass, but lie upon it, or roll upon it, or play
" one catch all " with children, boys, dogs, or sheep
upon it ; and I took my revenge for once for being
so long confined to gravel walks, and gave the grass
an opportunity to grow under my foot whenever I en-
tered one of these parks.

This free and easy rural character of the London
parks is quite in keeping with the tone and atmos-
phere of the great metropolis itself, which in so many
re'spects has a country homeliness and sincerity, and
shows the essentially bucolic taste of the people ; con-
trasting in this respect with the parks and gardens
of Paris, which show as unmistakably the citizen
and the taste for art and the beauty of design and
ornamentation. Hyde Park seems to me the perfec-
tion of a city pleasure ground of this kind, because it
is so free and so thoroughly a piece of the country,
and so exempt from any petty artistic displays.

In walking over Richmond Park I found I had
quite a day's work before me, as it was like traversing
a township ; while the great park at Windsor Castle,
being upwards of fifty miles around, might well make
the boldest pedestrian hesitate. My first excursion
tfas to Hampden Court, an old royal residence, where

MELLOW ENGLAND. 189

I spent a delicious October day wandering through
Bushy Park and looking with covetous, though ad-
miring eyes upon the vast herds of deer that dotted
the plains or gave way before me as I entered the
woods. There seemed literally to be many thou-
sands of these beautiful animals in this park, and the
loud, hankering sounds of the bucks, as they pursued
or circled around the does, was a new sound to my
ears. The rabbits and pheasants also were objects of
the liveliest interest to me, and I found that after all
a good shot at them with the eye, especially when I
could credit myself with alertness or stealthiness, was
satisfaction enough.

I thought it worthy of note that though these great
parks in and about London were so free and appar-
ently without any police regulations whatever, yet I
never saw prowling about them any of those vicious,
ruffianly looking characters that generally infest the
neighborhood of our great cities, especially of a Sun-
day. There were troops of boys, but they were as-
tonishingly quiet and innoxious, very unlike American
boys, white or black, a band of whom making excur-
sions into the country are always a band of outlaws.
Ruffianism with us is no doubt much more brazen and
pronounced, not merely because the law is lax, but
because such is the genius of the people.

190 AN OCTOBER ABROAD

ENGLISH CHARACTERISTICS.

/v-

ENGLAND is a mellow country ,\ and the English
people are a mellow people. They have hung on
the tree of nations a long time, and will/ no doubt,
hang as much longer ; .for windfalls, I reckon, are not
the order in this island. We are pitched several de-
grees higher in this country. By contrast^hings here
are loud, sharg, and garish. Our geography is loud ; s
the manners of the people are loud ;^our climate is
loud, very loud, so dry and sharp, and full of violent
changes and contrasts j and our goings-out and com-
ings-in as a nation are anything but silent. Dcrwe
not occasionally give the door an extra slam, just^for
effect?

In England, everything is on a Iowj3£.ke.y, slower,
steadier, gentler. Life is, no doubt/as full, or fuller,
in its material forms and 'measures, but le^s violent
and aggressive. The buffers the English have be-
tween their cars to break the shock^'are typical of
much one sees there.

All sounds are softer in England v the surface o.
things is less hard. The eye of day and the face 01
are less bright. Everything has a mellow

ENGLISH CHARACTERISTICS. 191

subdued cast. There is no abruptness in the land-
scape,nio sharp and violent contrasts, no brilliant and
striking tints in the foliage. A soft, pale yellow is
all one sees in the way of tints along the borders of
the autumn woods. English apples (very small and
inferior, by the way) are not so highly colored as
ours. The blackberries, just ripening in October, are
less pungent and acid ; and the garden vegetables,
such as cabbage, celery, oauliftewcr, beet, and other
root crops, are less rajik and fibrous ; and I am very
sure that the meats also are tenderer and sweeter.
There can be no doubt about the superiority of mut-
ton ; and the tender and succulent grass, and the moist
and agreeable climate, must tell upon the beet'

English coal is all soft coal, and the stone is. .soft
stone. The foundations of the hills are chalk in-
stead of granite. The stone with which most of the
old churches and cathedrals are built would not en-
dure in onr climate half a century ; but in Britain the
tooth of Time is much blunter, and the hunger of the
old man less ravenous, and the ancient architecture
stands half a millennium, or until it is slowly worn
away by the gentle attrition of the wind and rain.

At Chester, the old Roman wall that surrounds the
town, built in the first century and repaired in the
ninth, is still standing without a break or a swerve,
though in some places the outer face of the wall is
worn through. The cathedral, and St. John's church
*n the same town, present to the beholder outlines as
jagged and broken as rocks and cliffs ; and yet it is

192 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

only chip by chip, or grain by grain, that ruin ap
preaches. The timber also lasts an incredibly long
time. Beneath one of the arched ways, in the Ches-
ter wall above referred to, I saw timbers that must
have been in place five or six hundred years. The
beams in the old houses, also fully exposed to the
weather, seem incapable of decay ; those dating from
Shakespeare's time being apparently as firm as ever.
f I noticed that the characteristic aspect of the clouds
/in England was different from ours — soft, fleecy,
/ vapory, indistinguishable — never the firm, compact,
S sharply-defined, deeply-dyed masses and fragments,
(so common in our own sky. It rains easily but
slowly. The average rain-fall of London is less than
that of New York, and yet it doubtless rains ten days
in the former to one in the latter. Storms accompa-
Aiied with thunder are rare ; while the crashing,
wrenching, explosive thunder-gusts so common with
/ as, deluging the earth and convulsing the heavens,
Vare seldom known.

In keeping with this elemental control and moder-
ation, I found the character and manners of the peo-
ple gentler and sweeter than I had been led to
believe they were. No loudness, brazenness, imper-
tinence; no oaths, no swaggering, no leering at
women, no irreverence, no flippancy, no bullying, no
insolence of porters, or clerks, or conductors, no im-
portunity of boot-blacks or newsboys, no omnivorous-
ness of hackmen — at least, comparatively none — all
of which an American is apt to notice and I hop«

ENGLISH CHARACTERISTICS. 193

appreciate. In London, the boot-black salutes you
with a respectful bow, and touches his cap, and would
no more thiuk of pursuing you or answering your
refusal than he would of jumping into the Thames.
The same is true of the newsboys. If they were to
scream arid bellow in London, as they do in New
York or Washington, they would be suppressed by
the police, as they ought to be. The vender of
papers stands at the corner of the street, with his
goods in his arms, and a large placard spread out at
his feet, giving in big letters the principal news-head-
ings.

Street-cries of all kinds are less noticeable, less
aggressive, than in this country, and the manners of
the shopmen make you feel you are conferring a ben-
efit instead of receiving one. Even their locomotives
are less noisy than ours, having a shrill, infantile
whistle that contrasts strongly with the loud demoniac
yell that makes a residence near a railway or depot,
in this country, so unbearable. The trains themselves
move with wonderful smoothness and celerity, mak-
ing a mere fraction of the racket made by our flying
palaces as they go swaying and jolting over our hasty,
ill-ballasted roads.

It is characteristic of the* English prudence and
plain dealing, that they put so little on the cars and
so much on the road, while the reverse process is
equally characteristic of American enterprise. Our
railway system, no doubt, has certain advantages or
rather conveniences over the English, but, for my part

194 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

I had rather ride smoothly, swiftly, and safely in a
luggage-van, than be jerked and jolted to destruction
in the velvet and veneering of our palace cars. Uphol-
ster the road first, and let us ride on bare boards, until
a cushion can be afforded ; not till after the bridges are
of granite and iron, and the rails of steel, do we want
this more than aristocratic splendor and luxury of
palace and drawing-room cars. To me there is no
more marked sign of the essential vulgarity of the
national manners than these princely cars and beg-
garly, clap-trap roads. It is like a man wearing a
ruffled and jeweled shirt-front, but too poor to afford
a shirt itself.

I have said the English are a sweet and mellow
people. There is, indeed, a charm about these an-
cestral races that goes to the heart. And herein was
one of the profoundest surprises of my visit, namely,
that, in coining from the New World to the Old, from
a people the most recently out of the woods of any, to
one of the ripest and venerablest of the European na-
tionalities, I should find a race more simple, youthful,
and less sophisticated than the one I had left behind
me. Yet this was my impression. We have lost
immensely in some things, and what we have gained
is not yet so obvious or so definable. We have lost
in reverence, in homeliness, in heart and conscience —
in virtue, using the word in its proper sense. To
some the difference which I note may appear a differ-
ence in favor of the greater 'cuteness, wideawakeness,
and enterprise of the American, but is simply a differ

ENGLISH CHARACTERISTICS. 195

ence expressive of our greater forwardness. We
are a forward people, and the god we worship is
Smartness. In one of the worst tendencies of the age,
namely, an impudent, superficial, journalistic intel-
lectuality and glibness, America, in her polite and
literary circles, no doubt, leads all other nations.
English books and newspapers show more homely
veracity, more singleness of purpose, in short, more
character than ours. The great charm of such a man
as Darwin, for instance, is his simple manliness and
transparent good faith, and the absence in him of that
finical, self-complacent smartness which is the bane
of our literature.

The poet Clough thought the New England man
more simple than the man of Old England. Haw-
thorne, on the other hand, seemed reluctant to admit
that the English were a "franker and simpler people,
from peer to peasant," than we are ; and that they
had not yet wandered so far from that " healthful
and primitive simplicity in which man was created "
as have their descendants in America. My own im-
pression accords with Hawthorne's. We are a more
alert and curious people, but not so simple, — not so
easily angered, nor so easily amused. "We have par-
taken more largely of the fruit of the forbidden tree.
The English have more of the stay-to-home virtues,
which, on the other hatd, they no doubt pay pretty
well for by their more insular tendencies.

The youths and maidens seemed more simple, with
their softer and less intellectual faces. When I re«

196 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

turned from Paris the only person in the second class
compartments of the car with me, for a long distance,
was an English youth eighteen or twenty years old,
returning home to London after an absence of nearly
a year, which he had spent as waiter in a Parisian
hotel. He was born in London and had spent nearly
his whole life there, where his mother, a widow, then
lived. He talked very freely with me, and told me
his troubles, and plans, and hopes, as if we had long
known each other. What especially struck me in the
youth was a kind of sweetness and innocence — per-
haps what some would call " greenness " — that at
home I had associated only with country boys and
not even with them latterly. The smartness and
knowingness and a certain hardness or keenness of
our city youths, — there was no trace of it at all in
this young Cockney. But he liked American travel-
ers better than those from his own country. They
were more friendly and communicative — were not
BO afraid to speak to " a fellow," and at the hotel
were more easily pleased.

The American is certainly not the grumbler the
Englishman is ; he is more cosmopolitan and concil-
iatory. The Englishman will not adapt himself to
his surroundings ; he is not the least bit an imitative
animal ; he will be nothing but an Englishman, and
is out of place — an anomaly — in any country but
his own. To Understand him, you must see him at
home in the British island, where he grew, where ho
belongs, where he has expressed himself and justified

ENGLISH CHARACTERISTICS. 197

himself, and his interior, unconscious characteristics
are revealed. There he is quite a different creature
from what he is abroad. There he is " sweet," but
he sours the moment he steps off the island. In this
country he is too generally arrogant, fault-finding, and
supercilious. The very traits of louduess, sharpness,
and unleavenedness which I complain of in our na-
tional manners, he very frequently exemplifies in an
exaggerated form.

The Scotch or German element no doubt fuses
and mixes with ours much more readily than the
purely British.

The traveler feels the past in England as of course
he cannot feel it here ; and, along with impressions
of the present, one gets the flavor and influence of
earlier, simpler times, which, no doubt, is a potent
charm, and one source of the " rose-color " which
some readers have found in my sketches, as the ab-
sence of it is one cause of the raw, acrid, unlovely
character of much there is in this country. If the
English are the old wine, we are the new. We are
not yet thoroughly leavened as a people, nor have
we more than begun to transmute and humanize our
surroundings ; and, as the digestive and assimila-
tive powers of the American are clearly less than
those of the Englishman, to say nothing of our
Larsher, more violent climate, I have no idea that
ours can ever become the mellow land that Brit-
\in is.

As for the charge of brutality that is often brought

198 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

against the English, and which is so successfully de-
picted by Dickens and Thackery, there is, doubtless,
good ground for it, though I actually saw very little
of it during five-weeks' residence in London, and I
poked about into all the dens and corners I could
find, and perambulated the streets at nearly all hours
of the night and day. Yet I am persuaded there is
a kind of brutality among the lower orders in Eng-
land that does not exist in the same measure in
this country — an ignorant animal coarseness, an in-
sensibility, which gives rise to wife-beating and kin-
dred offenses. But the brutality of ignorance and
stolidity is not the worst form of the evil. It is
good material to make something better of. It is
an excess and not a perversion. It is not man fallen/
but man undeveloped. Beware, rather, that refined,
subsidized brutality ; that thin, depleted, moral con-
sciousness ; or that contemptuous, cankerous, euphe-
mistic brutality, of which, I believe, we can show
vastly more samples than Great Britain. Indeed, I
believe, for the most part, that the brutality of the
English people is only the excess and plethora of
that healthful, muscular robustness and full-blooded-
ness for which the nation has always been famous, and
which it should prize beyond almost anything else.
But for our brutality, our recklessness of life and
property, the brazen ruffianism in our great cities,
the hellish greed and robbery and plunder in high
places, I should have to look a long time to find sa
Jausible an excuse.

ENGLISH CHARACTERISTICS. 199

[But I notice with pleasure that English travelers
are beginning to find more to admire than to con-
dem'n in this country, and that they accredit us with
some virtues they do not find at home in the same
measure. They are charmed with the independence,
the self-respect, the good-nature and the obliging
dispositions, shown by the mass of our people ; while
American travelers seem to he more and more ready
to acknowledge the charm and the substantial qual-
ities of the mother country. It is a good omen.
One principal source of the pleasure which each
takes in the other is no doubt to be found in the nov-
elty of the impressions. It is like a change of cook-
ery. The flavor of the dish is fresh and uncloying
to each. The English probably tire of their own snob-
bishness and flunkeyism, and we of our own smart-
ness and puppyism. After the American has got
done bragging about his independence, and his " free
and equal " prerogatives, he begins to see how these
things run into impertinence and forwardness ; and
the Englishman, in visiting us, escapes from his social
bonds and prejudices, to see for a moment how ab-
surd they all are.]

A London crowd I thought the most normal and
unsophisticated I had ever seen, with the least ad-
mixture of rowdyism and ruffianism. No doubt it is
ihere, but this scum is not upon the surface, as with
as. I went about very freely in the hundred and one
places of amusement where the average working
-jasses assemble, with their wives an^ daughters and

200 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

- iweethearts, and smoke villainous cigars, and drink
ale and stout. There was to me something notably
fresh and canny about them, as if they had only yes-
terday ceased to be shepherds and shepherdesses.
They certainly were less developed, in certain direc-
tions, or shall I say depraved, than similar crowds in
our great cities. They are easily pleased, and laugh
at the simple and childlike, but there is little that
hints of an impure taste, or of abnormal appetites. I
often smiled at the tameness and simplicity of the
amusements, but my sense of fitness, or proportion,
or decency, was never once outraged. They always
stop short of a certain point — the point where wit
degenerates into mockery, and liberty into license :
nature is never put to shame, and will commonly
bear much more. Especially to the American sense
did their humorous and comic strokes, their negro-
minstrelsy, and attempts at Yankee comedy, seem in
in a minor key. There was not enough irreverence,
and slang, and coarse ribaldry, in the whole evening's
entertainment, to have seasoned one line of some of
our most popular comic poetry. But the music, and
the gymnastic, acrobatic, and other feats, were of a
very high order. And I will say here that the char-
acteristic flavor of the hmmor and fun-making of the
average English people, as it impressed my sense, is
what one gets in Sterne — very human and stomachic,
and entirely free from the contempt and supercilious-
uess of most current writers. I did not get one whiff
->f Dickens anywhere. No doubt, it is there in some

ENGLISH CHARACTERISTICS. 201

form or other, but it is not patent, or even apprecia-
ble, to the sense of such an observer as I am.

I was not less pleased by the simple good-will and
bonhomie that pervaded the crowd. There is in all
these gatherings an indiscriminate mingling of the
sexes, a mingling without jar or noise or rudeness of
any kind, and marked by a mutual respect on all sides
that is novel and refreshing. Indeed, so uniform is
the courtesy, and so human and considerate the inter-
est, that I was often at a loss to discriminate the wife
or the sister from the mistress or the acquaintance of
the hour, and had many times to check my American
curiosity, and cold, criticising stare. For it was curi-
ous to see young men and women from the lowest
social strata meet and mingle in a public hall with-
out lewdness or badinage, but even with gentleness
and consideration. The truth is, however, that the
class of women known as victims of the social evil
do not sink within many degrees as low in P^urope
as they do in this country, either in their own opinion
or in that of the public ; and there can be but little
doubt that gatherings of the kind referred to, if per-
mitted in our great cities, would be tenfold more
scandalous and disgraceful than they are in London
or Paris. There is something so reckless and des-
perate in the career of man or woman in this coun-
try, when they begin to go down, that the only feel-
tog they too often excite is one of loathsomeness and
disgust. The lowest depth must be reached, and it
v reached quickly. But, in London, the same char-

202 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

" »cters seem to keep a sweet side from corruption to
the last, and you will see good manners everywhere.

We boast of our deference to women, but, if the
Old World made her a tool, we are fast making her
a toy ; and the latter is the more hopeless condition.
But among the better classes in England I am con-
vinced that woman is regarded more as a sister and
an equal than in this country, and is less subject to
insult and to leering, brutal comment there than here.
We are her slave or her tyrant ; so seldom her
brother and friend. I thought it a significant fact
that I found no place of amusement set apart for the
men ; where one sex went the other went ; what was
sauce for the gander was sauce for the goose ; and the
spirit that prevailed was soft and human accordingly.
The hotels had no " ladies' entrance," but all passed
in and out the same door, and met and mingled com
monly in the same room, and the place was as much
for one as for the other. It was no more a mascu-
line monopoly than it was a feminine. Indeed, in
the country towns and villages the character of the
inns is unmistakably given by woman ; hence the
sweet, domestic atmosphere that pervades and fills
hem is balm to the spirit. Even the larger hotels of
Liverpool and London have a private, cosy home
character that is most delightful. On entering them,
instead of finding yourself in a sort of public thorough-
fare or political caucus, amid crowds of men talking,
and smoking, and spitting, with stalls on either side,
<rhere cigars and tobacco, and books and papers are

ENGLISH CHARACTERISTICS. 203

Bold, you perceive you are in something like a larger
hall of a private house, with perhaps a parlor and
coffee-room on one side, and the office, and smoking-
room, and stairway, on the other. You may leave
your coat and hat on the rack in the hall, and stand
your umbrella there also, with full assurance that you
will find them there when you want them, if it be the
next morning or the next week. Instead of that
petty tyrant the hotel-clerk, a young woman sits in
the office with her sewing or other needlework, and
quietly receives you. She gives you your number
on a card, rings for a chambermaid to show you to
your room, and directs your luggage to be sent up ;
and there is something in the look of things, and the
way they are done, that goes to the right spot at
once.

At the hotel in London where I stopped, the
daughters of the landlord, three fresh, comely young
women, did the duties of the office ; and their pres-
ence, so quiet and domestic, gave the prevailing hue
and tone to the whole house. I wonder how long a
young woman could preserve her self-respect and
sensibility in such a position 'n New York or Wash-
ington ?

The English regard us as a wonderfully patient
people, and there can be no doubt but we put up with
abuses unknown elsewhere. If we have no big
tyrant, we have ten thousand little ones, who tread
tipon our toes at every turn. The tyranny of cor
oorations and of public servants of one kind and au

204 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

other, as the ticket-man, the railroad-conductor, or
even of the country stage-driver, seem to be features
peculiar to American democracy. In England, the
traveler is never snubbed, or made to feel that it is
by somebody's sufferance that he is allowed aboard
or to pass on his way.

If you get into an omnibus or a railroad or tram-
way carriage in London, you are sure of a seat. >i'ot
another person can get aboard after the seats are all
full. Or, if you enter a public hall, you know you
will not be required to stand up unless you pay the
standing-up price. There is everywhere that system,
and order, and' fair dealing, which all men love. The
science of living has been reduced to a fine point. You
pay a sixpence and get a sixpence worth of whatever
you buy. There are all grades and prices, and the
robbery and extortion so current at home appear to
be unknown.

I am not contending for the superiority of every-
thing English, but would not disguise from myself or
my readers the fact of the greater humanity and con-
sideration that prevail in the mother country. Things
here are yet in the green, but I trust there is no good
reason to doubt that our fruit will mellow and ripen
u time like the rest.

A GLIMPSE OF FRANCE. 205

A GLIMPSE OF FRANCE.

coming over to France, I noticed that the
chalk-hills, which were stopped so abruptly by the sea
on the British side of the Channel, began again on
the French side, only they had lost their smooth, pas-
toral character, and were more broken and rocky, and
that they continued all the way to Paris, walling in
the Seine, and giving the prevailing tone and hue to
the country. — scrape away the green and brown
epidermis of the hills anywhere, and out shine their
white frame-work, — and that Paris itself was built
of stone evidently quarried from this formation — a
light, cream-colored stone, so soft that rifle-bullets
bury themselves in it nearly their own depth, thus
pitting some of the more exposed fronts during the
recent strife in a very noticeable manner, and which,
in building, is put up in the rough, all the carving,
sculpturing, and finishing being done after the blocks
we in position in the wall.

Disregarding the counsel of friends, I braved the
Channel at one of its wider points, taking the vixen
by the waist instead of by the neck, and found her as
placid as a lake, as I did also on my return a week
later.

- 206 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

It was a bright October morning as we steamed
into the little harbor at Dieppe, and the first scene
that met my eye was, I suppose, a characteristic one
— four or five old men and women towing a vessel
into a dock. They bent beneath the rope that passed
from shoulder to shoulder, and tugged away dog-
gedly at it, the women apparently more than able to
do their part. There is no equalizer of the sexes
like poverty and misery, and then it very ofteu hap-
pens that the gray mare proves the better horse.
Throughout the agricultural regions, as we passed
along, the men apparently all wore petticoats; at
least, the petticoats were the most active and prom-
inent in the field occupations. Their wearers were
digging potatoes, pulling beets, following the harrow
(in one instance a thorn-bush drawn by a cow), and
stirring the wet, new-mown grass. I believe the
pantaloons were doing the mowing. But I looked in
vain for any Maud Miillers in the meadows, and have
concluded that these can only be found in New Eng-
land hay-fields ! And herein is one of the first sur-
prises that awaits one on visiting the Old World
countries, the absence of graceful, girlish figures, and
bright girlish faces, among the peasantry or rural
population. In France I certainly expected to see
female beauty everywhere, but did not get one gleam
all that sunny day till I got to Paris. Is it a plant
that only flourishes in cities on this side of the
Atlantic, or do all the pretty girls, as soon as they
are grown, pack their trunks, and leave for the gay
xnetropolis ?

A GLDIPSE OF FRANCE. 207

At Dieppe I first saw the wooden shoe, and heard
its dry, senseless clatter upon the pavement. How
suggestive of the cramped and inflexible conditions
with which human nature has borne so long in these
lands !

A small paved square near the wharf was the scene
of an early market, and afforded my first glimpse of
the neatness and good taste that characterize nearly
everything in France. ' Twenty or thirty peasant-
women, coarse and masculine, but very tidy, with
their snow-white caps and short petticoats, and per-
haps half as many men, were chattering and chaffer-
ing over little heaps of fresh country produce. The
onions and potatoes and cauliflowers, etc., were pret-
tily arranged on the clean pavement, or on white linen
cloths, and the scene was altogether animated and
agreeable.

La belle France is the woman's country clearly, and
it seems a mistake or an anomaly that woman is not
at the top, and leading in all departments, compelling
the other sex to play second fiddle, as she so fre-
quently has done for a brief time in isolated cases in
the past ; not. that the man is effeminate, but that the
woman seems so nearly his match and equal, and
even so often proves his superior. In no other na-
tion, during times of popular excitement and insur-
rection or revolution, do women emerge so conspicu-
ously, often in the front ranks, the most furious and
ungovernable of any. I think even a female conscrip-
tion might be advisable in the present condition of

208 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

France, if I may judge of her soldiers from the speci-
mens I saw. Small, spiritless, inferior-looking men
all of them. They were like Number Three mack-
erel or the last run of shad, as doubtless they were —
the last pickings and resiftings of the population.

I don't know how far it may be a national custom,
but I observed that the women of the humbler classes,
in meeting or parting with friends at the stations,
saluted each other on both cheeks, never upon the
mouth, as our dear creatures do, and I commended
their good taste, though I certainly approve the
American custom too.

Among the male population I was struck with the
frequent recurrence of the Louis Napoleon type of
face. " Has this man," I said, " succeeded in impress-
ing himself even upon the physiognomy of the peo-
ple ? Has he taken such a hold of their imagina-
tions that they have grown to look like him ? " The
guard that took our train down to Paris might easily
play the double to the ex-emperor ; and many times
in Paris and among different classes I saw the same
countenance.

Coming from England, the traveling seems very
slow in this part of France, taking eight or nine
hours to go from Dieppe to Paris, with an hour's
delay at Rouen. The valley of the Seine, which the
road follows or skirts more than half the way, is
very winding, with immense flats or plains shut in by
a wall of steep, uniform hills, and, in the progress of
Jie journey, is from time to time laid open to the

A GLIMPSE OF FRANCE. 209

traveler in a way that is full of novelty and surprise.
The day was bright and lovely, and I found my eyes
running riot the same as they had done during my
first ride on British soil. The contrast between the
two countries is quite marked, France in this region
being much more broken and picturesque, with some
waste or sterile land, a thing I did not see at all in
England. Had I awoke from a long sleep just before
reaching Paris, I should have guessed I was riding
through Maryland, and would soon see the dome of
the Capitol at "Washington rising above the trees.
So much wild and bushy, or barren and half-cultivated
land, almost under the walls of the French capital,
was a surprise.

Then there are few or none of those immense
home-parks which one sees in England, the land being
mostly held by a great number of small proprietors,
and cultivated in strips or long, narrow parallelo-
grams, making the landscape look like many-colored
patchwork. Everywhere along the Seine, stretching
over the flats, or tilted up against the sides of the
hills, in some places seeming almost to stand on end,
were these acre or half-acre rectangular farms, with-
out any dividing lines or fences, and of a great vari-
ety of shades and colors, according to the crop and
the tillage.

I/I was glad to see my old friend, the beech-tree, all
along the route. His bole wore the same gray and
patched appearance it does at home, and, no doubt,
Thoreau would have found his instep even fairer, for
14

210 AN OCTOBLR ABROAD.

the beech on this side of the Atlantic is a more fluent
and graceful tree than the American species, resem-
bling, in its branchings and general form, our elm,
though never developing such an immense green
dome as our elm when standing alone, and I saw no
European tree that does. The European elm is not
unlike our beech in form and outline.

Going from London to Paris is, in some respects,
like getting out of the chimney on to the house-top
— the latter city is, by contrast, so light and airy,

I had Come to

Paris for my dessert after my feast of London joints,
and I suspect I was a little dainty in that most dainty
of cities. In fact, I had become quite sated with
sight-seeing, and the prospect of having to go on and
** do " the rest of Europe after the usual manner
of tourists, and as my companions did, would have
been quite appalling. Said companions steered off
like a pack of fox hounds in full blast. The game
they were in quest of led them a wild chase, up the
Rhine, off through Germany and Italy, taking a turn
back through Switzerland, giving them no rest and
apparently eluding them at last. I had felt obliged
to cut loose from them at the outset, my capacity to
digest kingdoms and empires at short notice being far
below that of the average of my countrymen. My
interest and delight had been too intense at the out-
set ; I had partaken too heartily of the first courses,
and now, where other travelers begin to warm to the
subject, and to have the keenest relish, I began tc

A GLDIPSE OF FRANCE. 211

wish the whole thing well through with. So that
Paris was no paradise to oue American at least.
Yet, the mere change of air and sky, and the escape
from that sooty, all-pervasive, chimney-flue smell of
London, was so sudden and complete, that the first
hour of Paris was like a refreshing bath, and gave
rise to a satisfaction in which every pore of the skin
participated. My room at the hotel was a gem of
neatness and order, and the bed a marvel of art, com-
fort, and ease, three feet deep at least.

Then the uniform imperial grace and eclat of the
city was a new experience. Here was the city of
cities, the capital of taste and fashion, the pride and
flower of a great race and a great history, the city of
kings and emperors, and of a people which, after all,
loves kings and emperors, and will not long, I fear,
be happy without them — a gregarious, urbane peo-
ple, a people of genius and destiny, whose God is Art
and whose devil is Communism. London has long
ago outgrown itself, has spread, and multiplied, and
accumulated, without a corresponding inward expan-
sion and unification ; but, in Paris, they have pulled
down and built larger, and the spirit of centralization
has had full play. Hence, the French capital is su-
perb, but soon grows monotonous. See one street
and boulevard, and you have seen it all. It has the
unity and consecutiveness of a thing deliberately
planned and built to order, from beginning to end
Its stone is all from one quarry, and its designs alJ
the work of one architect. London has infinite va-

212 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

riety, and quaintness, and picturesqueness, and is of
all possible shades of dinginess and weather-stains.
It shows its age, shows the work of innumerable gen-
erations, and is more an aggregation, a conglomeration
than Paris is. Paris shows the citizen, and is mod-
ern and democratic in its uniformity. On the whole,
I liked London best, because I am so much of a coun-
tryman, I suppose, and affect so little the metropoli-
tan spirit. In London there are a few grand things
to be seen, and the pulse of the great city itself is
like the throb of the ocean ; but in Paris, owing
either to my jaded senses, or some other cause, I saw
nothing that was grand, but enough that was beauti-
ful and pleasing. The more pretentious and elabo-
rate specimens of architecture, like the palace of the
Tuileries, or the Palais Royal, are truly superb, but
they as truly do not touch that deeper chord whose
awakening we call the emotion of the sublime.

But the fitness and good taste everywhere dis-
played in the French capital may well offset any con-
siderations of this kind, and cannot fail to be refresh-
ing to a traveler of any other land ; in the dress and
manners of the people, in the shops, and bazaars, and
show-windows, in the markets, the equipages, the fur-
niture, the hotels. Kit is entirely a new sensation to
an American to look into a Parisian theatre, and see
the acting and hear the music. The chances are
that, for the first time he sees the interior of a theatre
that does not have a hard, business-like, matter-of-fact
iir. The auditors look comfortable and cozy, an

A GLIMPSE OF FRANCE. 213

quite at home, and do not, shoulder to shoulder, and
in solid lines, make a dead set at the play and the
music. *The theatre has warm hangings, warm col-
ors, cozy boxes and stalls, and is in no sense the pub-
lic, away-from-home place we are so familiar with in
this country. Again, one might know it was Paris by
the character of the prints and pictures in the shop-
windows; they are so clever, as art, one becomes
reprehensibly indifferent to their license. Whatever
sins the French may be guilty of, they never sin
against art and good taste (except when in the frenzy
of revolution), and, if Propriety is sometimes obliged
to cry out " For shame ! " in the French capital, she
must do so with ill-concealed admiration, like a fond
mother chiding with word and gesture, while she ap-
proves with tone and look. It is a foolish charge,
often made, that the French make vice attractive;
they make it provocative of laughter ; the spark of
wit is always evolved, and what is a better antidote
tOythis kind of poison than mirth.

They carry their wit even into their cuisine. Every
dish set before you at the table is a picture, and
tickles your eye before it does your palate. When I
ordered fried eggs, they were brought on a snow-
white napkin, which was artistically folded upon a
jiece of ornamented tissue-paper, that covered a china
plate ; if I asked for cold ham, it came in flakes, ar-
rayed like great rose-leaves, with a green sprig or
kwo of parsley dropped upon it, and surrounded by a
border of calves-foot jelly, like a setting of crystals.

214 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

The bread revealed new qualities in the wheat, it was
BO sweet and nutty ; and the fried potatoes, with
which your beef-steak comes snowed under, are the
very flower of the culinary art, and I believe impossi-
ble in any other country,
v Even the ruins are in excellent taste, and are by

/far the best-behaved ruins I ever saw for so recent
x ones. I came near passing some of the most noted
during my first walk without observing them. The
main walls were all standing, and the fronts were as
imposing as ever. No litter or rubbish, no charred
timbers or blackened walls, only vacant windows and
wrecked interiors, which do not very much mar the
general outside effect

My first genuine surprise was the morning after my
arrival, which, according to my reckoning, was Sun-
day ; and when I heard the usual week-day sounds,
and, sallying forth, saw the usual week-day occupa-
tions going on, — painters painting, glaziers glazing,
masons on their scaffolds, etc., and heavy drays and
market-wagons going through the streets, and many
shops and bazaars open, — I must have presented to
a scrutinizing beholder the air and manner of a man
in a dream, so absorbed was I in running over the
events of the week to find where the mistake had
occurred, where I had failed to turn a leaf, or else
had turned over two leaves for one. But each day
had a distinct record, and every count resulted the
Bame. It must be Sunday. Then it all dawned
ttpon me that this was Paris, and that the Parisians

A GLIMPSE OF FRANCE. 215

did not have the reputation of being very strict Sab-
batarians.

/The French give a touch of art to whatever they
do. Even the drivers of drays, and carts, and trucks,
about the streets, are not content with a plain, mat-
ter-of-fact whip, as an English or American laborer
would be, but it must be a finely-modeled stalk, with
a long, tapering lash tipped with the best silk snap-
per. Always the inevitable snapper. I doubt if
there is a whip in Paris without a snapper. Here is
where the fine art, the rhetoric of driving, comes in.
This converts a vulgar, prosy " gad " into a delicate
instrument, to be wielded with pride and skill, and
never to be literally applied to the backs of the ani-
mals, but to be launched to the right and left into
the air with a professional flourish, and a sharp, ring-
ing report. Crack ! crack ! crack ! all day long go
these ten thousand whips, like the boys' Fourth of
July fusillade. It was invariably the first sound I
heard when I opened my eyes in the morning, and
generally the last one at night. Occasionally some
belated drayman would come hurrying along just as
I was going to sleep, or some early bird before I was
fully awake in the morning, and let off, in rapid suc-
cession in front of my hotel, a volly from the tip of
his lash that would make the street echo again, and
that might well have been the envy of any ring-
master that ever trod the tan-bark. Now and then,
during my ramblings, I would suddenly hear some
«iaster-whip, perhaps that of an old omnibus-driver,

216 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

that would crack like a rifle, and, as it passed along,
all the lesser whips, all the amateur snappers, would
strike up with a jealous and envious emulation, mak-
ing every foot-passenger wink, and one (myself) at
least almost to shade his eyes from the imaginary
missiles.

I record this fact because it " points a moral and
adorns a tail." The French always give this extra
touch. Everything has its silk snapper. Are not
the literary whips of Paris famous for their rhetor-
ical tips and the sting there is in them? What
French writer ever goaded his adversary with the
belly of his lash, like the Germans and English, when
he could blister him with its silken end, and the per-
cussion of wit he heard at every stroke ?

In the shops, and windows, and public halls, etc.,
this passion takes the form of mirrors, — mirrors
mirrors everywhere, on the walls, in the panels, in
the cases, on the pillars, extending, multiplying, open-
ing up vistas this way and that, and converting the
smallest shop, with a solitary girl and a solitary cus-
tomer, into an immense enchanted bazaar, across
whose endless counters customers lean and pretty
girls display goods. The French are always before
the looking-glass, even when they eat and drink. I
never went into a restaurant without seeing four or
five fac-similes of myself approaching from as many
different directions, giving the order to the waiter,
wad sitting down at the table. Hence, I always had
plenty of company at dinner, though we were none o

A GLIMPSE OF FRANCE. 217

as very social, and I was the only one who entered
or passed out at the door. The show-windows are
the greatest cheat. What an expanse, how crowded,
and how brilliant ! You see, for instance, an immense
array of jewelry, and pause to have a look. You
begin at the end nearest you, and, after gazing a
moment, take a step to run your eye along the daz-
zling display, when, presto ! the trays of watches and
diamonds vanish in a twinkling, and you find yourself
looking into the door, or your delighted eyes suddenly
bring up against a brick wall, disenchanted so quickly
that you almost stagger.

I went into a popular music and dancing hall one
night, and found myself in a perfect enchantment of
mirrors. Not an inch of wall was anywhere visible.
I was suddenly caught up into the seventh heaven
of looking-glasses, from which I came down with a
shock the moment I emerged into the street again.
I observed that this mirror contagion had broken out
in spots in London, and, in the narrow and crowded
condition of the shops there, even this illusory en-
largement would be a relief. It might not improve
the air, or add to the available storage capacity of the
establishment, but it would certainly give a wider
range to the eye.

The American no sooner sets foot on the soil of
France than he perceives he has entered a nation of
drinkers as he has left a nation of eaters. Men do
act live by bread here, but by wine. Drink, drink,
drink everywhere — along all the boulevards, and

218 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

streets, and quays, and by-ways ; in the restaurants
and under awnings, and seated on the open sidewalk;
social and convivial wine-bibbing — not hastily and
in large quantities, but leisurely and reposingly, and
with much conversation and enjoyment.

Drink, drink, drink, and with equal frequency and
nearly as much openness, the reverse or diuretic side
of the fact. (How our self-consciousness would
writhe ! "We should all turn to stone !) Indeed, the
ceaseless deglutition of mankind in this part of the
world is only equaled by the answering and enormous
activity of the human male kidneys. This latter was
too astonishing, and too public a fact to go unmen-
tioned. At Dieppe, by the reeking tubs standing
about, I suspected some local distemper, but when I
got to Paris, and saw how fully and openly the wants
of the male citizen in this respect were recognized by
the sanitary and municipal regulations, and that the
urinals were thicker than the lamp-posts, I concluded
it must be a national trait, and at once abandoned
the theory that had begun to take possession of my
mind, viz, that diabetes was no doubt the cause of the
decadence of France. Yet I suspect it is no more
a peculiarity of French manners than of European
manners generally, and in its light I relished im-
mensely the history of a well-known statue which
stands in a public square in one of the German cities
The statue commemorates the unblushing audacity o*
a peasant going to market with a goose under eact
*rm, who ignored even the presence of the king, and

A GLIMPSE OF FRANCE. 219

it is at certain times dressed up and made the centre
of holiday festivities. It is a public fountain, and its
living streams of water make it one of the most ap-
propriate and suggestive monuments in Europe. I
would only suggest, that they canonize the Little
Man, and that the Parisians recognize a tutelar deity
in the Goddess Urea, who should have an appropri-
ate monument somewhere in the Place de la Con-
corde !

\ One of the loveliest features of Paris is the Seine.
I was never tired of walking along its course. Its
granite embankments; its numberless superb bridges,
throwing their graceful spans across it ; its clear,
limpid water ; its paved bed ; the women washing ;
the lively little boats ; and the many noble buildings
that look down upon it — make it the most charm-
ing citizen-river I ever beheld. Rivers generally get
badly soiled when they come to the city, like some
other rural travelers ; but the Seine is as pure as a
meadow-brook wherever I saw it, though I dare say
it does not escape without some contamination. I
believe it receives the sewerage discharges farther
down, and is, no doubt, turbid and pitchy enough
there, like its brother, the Thames, which comes into
London with the sky and the clouds in its bosom,
and leaves it reeking with filth and slime.

After I had tired of the city, I took a day to visit
St. Cloud, and refresh myself by a glimpse of the
.mperial park there, and a little of Nature's privacy,
t' such could be had, which proved to be the case, for

220 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

a more agreeable day I have rarely passed. The
park, toward which I at once made my way, is an
immense natural forest, sweeping up over gentle hills
from the banks of the Seine, and brought into order
and perspective by a system of carriage-ways and
avenues, which radiate from numerous centres like
the boulevards of Paris. At these centres were foun-
tains and statues, with sunlight falling upon them ;
and, looking along the cool, dusky avenues, as they
opened, this way and that, upon these marble tab-
leaux, the effect was very striking, and was not at all
marred to my eye by the neglect into which the place
had evidently fallen. The woods were just mellow-
ing into October ; the large, shining horse-chestnuts
dropped at my feet as I walked along; the jay
screamed over the trees ; and occasionally a red
squirrel — larger and softer-looking than ours, not
so sleek, nor so noisy and vivacious — skipped among
the branches. Soldiers passed, here and there, to
and from some encampment on the farther side of the
park ; and, hidden from view somewhere in the for-
est-glades, a band of buglers filled the woods with
wild musical strains.

English royal parks and pleasure grounds are quite
different. There the prevailing character is pastoral
— immense stretches of lawn, dotted with the royal
oak, and alive with deer. But the Frenchman loves
forests, evidently, and nearly all his pleasure grounds
About Paris are immense woods. The Bois de Bou-
logne, the forests of Vincennes, of St. Germain, of

A GLIMPSE OF FRANCE. 221

Bondy, and I don't know how many others, are near
at hand, and are much prized. What the animus of
this love may be is not so clear. It cannot be a love
of solitude, for the French are characteristically a
Bocial and gregarious people. It cannot be the Eng-
lish poetical or "Wordsworthian feeling for Nature,
because French literature does not show this sense or
this kind of perception. I am inclined to think the
forest is congenial to their love of form and their
sharp perceptions, but more especially to that kind of
fear and wildness which they at times exhibit ; for
civilization has not quenched the primitive ardor and
fierceness of the Frenchman yet, and it is to be hoped
it never may. He is still more than half a wild man,
and, if turned loose in the woods, I think would de-
velop, in tooth and nail, and in all the savage, brute
instincts, more rapidly than the men of any other
race, except possibly the Slavic. Have not his de-
scendants in this country — the Canadian French —
turned and lived with the Indians, and taken to wild,
savage customs with more relish and genius than have
any other people ? How hairy and vehement and
pantomimic he is ! How his eyes glance from under
his heavy brows ! His type among the animals is
the wolf, and one readily recalls how largely the
wolf figures in the traditions and legends and folk-
lore of Continental Europe, and how closely his re-
oiains are associated with those of man in the bone-
caves of the geologists. He has not stalked through
their forests and fascinated their imaginations so long

222 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

"for nothing. The she-wolf suckled other founders
beside those of Rome. Especially when I read of
the adventures of Russian and Polish exiles in Siberia
— men of aristocratic lineage, wandering amid snow
and arctic cold, sleeping in rocks or in hollow trees,
and holding their own, empty-handed, against hunger
and frost and their fiercer, brute embodiments — do
I recognize a hardihood and a ferity whose wet-nurse,
ages back, may well have been this gray dut of the
woods.

It is this fierce, untamable core that gives the point
and the splendid audacity to French literature and
art — its vehemence and impatience of restraint. It
is the salt of their speech, the nitre of their wit.
When morbid, it gives that rabid and epileptic ten-
dency which sometimes shows itself in Victor Hugo.
In this great writer, however, it more frequently
takes the form of an aboriginal fierceness and hunger
that glares and bristles, and is insatiable and omnivo-
rous.

And how many times has Paris, that boudoir of
beauty and fashion, proved to be a wolfs lair, swarm-
ing with jaws athirst for human throats ! — the lust
for blood and the greed for plunder, sleeping, biding
their time, never extinguished.

I do not contemn it. To the natural historian, it
is good. It is a return to first principles again after
6O much art, and culture, and lying, and chaavinisme,
and shows these old civilizations in no danger of be-
coming effete yet. It is like the hell of fire beneath

A GLIMPSE OF FRANCE. 223

our feet, which the geologists tell us is the life of the
globe. Were it not for it, who would not at times
despair of the French character? As long as this
fiery core remains, I shall believe France capable of
recovering from any disaster to her arms. The
" mortal ripening " of the nation is stayed.

The English and Germans, on the other hand, are
saved by great breadth and heartiness, and a consti-
tutional tendency to coarseness of fibre which art and
civilization abate very little.

What is to save us in this country, I wonder, who
have not the French regnancy and fire, nor the Teu-
tonic heartiness and vis inertia, and who are already
in danger of refining or attenuating into a high-heeled,
short-jawed, genteel race, with more brains than
stomach, and more address than character ?

224 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK.

I HAD imagined that the next best thing to seeing
England would be to see Scotland ; but as this latter
pleasure was denied me, certainly the next best thing
was seeing Scotland's greatest son. Carlyle has been
so constantly and perhaps justly represented as a
stormy and wrathful person, brewing bitter denunci-
ation for America and Americans, that I cannot for-
bear to mention the sweet and genial mood in which
we found him — a gentle and affectionate grandfather,
with his delicious Scotch brogue and rich melodious
talk, overflowing with reminiscences of his earlier
life, of Scott and Goethe and Edinburgh, and other
men and places he had known. Learning I was
especially interested in birds, he discoursed of the
lark and nightingale and mavis, framing his remarks
about them in some episode of his personal ex-
perience, and investing their songs with the double
charm of his description and his adventure.

" It is only geese who get plucked there," said my
companion after we had left — a man who had known
Carlyle intimately for many years ; " silly persons who
have no veneration for the great man, and come to

FBOM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 225

convert him or change his convictions upon subjects
to which he has devoted a life-time of profound
thought and meditation. With such persons he has
no patience."

Carlyle had just returned from Scotland, where he
had spent the summer. The Scotch hills and mount-
ains, he said, had an ancient, mournful look, as if the
weight of immeasurable time had settled down upon
them. Their look was in Ossian — his spirit reflected
theirs ; and as I gazecT-upon the venerable man be-
fore me and noted his homely and rugged yet pro-
found and melancholy expression, I knew that their
look was upon him also, and that a greater than Os-
eian had been nursed amid those lonely hills. Few
men in literature have felt the burden of the world,
the weight of the inexorable conscience, as has Car-
lyle, or drawn such fresh inspiration from that source.
However we may differ from him (and almost in self-
defense one must differ from a man of such intense
and overweening personality), it must yet be admit-
ted that he habitually speaks out of that primitive
silence and solitude in which only the heroic soul
dwells. Certainly not in contemporary British lit-
erature is there another writer whose bowstring has
such a twang.

I left London in the early part of November, and
turned my face westward, going leisurely through
England and Wales, and stringing upon my thread a
few of the famous places, as Oxford, Stratford, War-
wrick, Birmingham, Chester, and taking a last look of
15

226 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

the benign land. The weather was fair ; I was yoked
to no companion, and was apparently the only touris*
on that route. The field occupations drew my eye
as usual. They were very simple, and consisted
mainly of the gathering of root crops. I saw no
building of fences, or of houses or barns, and no
draining or improving of any kind worth mentioning,
these things having all been done long ago. Speak-
ing of barns reminds me that I do not remember to
have seen a building of this kind while in England,
much less a group or cluster of them as at home, hay
and grain being always stacked, and the mildness ol
the climate rendering a protection of this kind un-
necessary for the cattle and sheep. In contrast, Amer-
ica may be called the country of barns and out-
buildings :

"Thou lucky Mistress of the tranquil barns,"

as Walt Whitman apostrophizes the Union.

I missed also many familiar features in the autumn
fields — those given to our landscape by Indian corn,
for instance, the tent-like stouts, the shucks, the rus-
tling blades, the ripe pumpkins strewing the field; for
notwithstanding England is such a garden our corn
loes not flourish there. I saw no buckwheat either,
the red stubble and little squat figures of the upright
sheaves of which are so noticeable in our farming
districts at this season. Neither did I see any gather-
ing of apples, or orchards from which to gather them.
* As sure as there are apples in Herefordshire," seems

FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 227

!o be a proverb in England ; yet it is very certain
that the orchard is not the institution anywhere in
Britain that it is in this country, or so prominent a
feature in the landscape. The native apples are in-
ferior in size and quality, and are sold by the pound.
Pears were more abundant at the fruit stands, and
were of superior excellence and very cheap.

I hope it will not be set down to any egotism of
my own, but rather to the effect upon an ardent pil-
grim of the associations of the place and its renown
in literature, that all my experience at Stratford seems
worthy of recording, and to be invested with a sort of
poetical interest — even the fact that I walked up from
the station with a handsome young country-woman
who had chanced to occupy a seat in the same com-
partment of the car with me from Warwick, and who,
learning the nature of my visit, volunteered to show
me the Red Horse Inn, as her course led her that
way. We walked mostly in the middle of the street,
with our umbrellas hoisted, for it was raining slightly,
while a boy whom we found lying in wait for such a
chance trudged along in advance of us with my lug-
gage-

At the Red Horse the pilgrim is in no danger of
having the charm and the poetical atmosphere with
which he has surrounded himself dispelled, but rather
enhanced and deepened, especially if he has the luck
I had, to find few other guests, and to fall into the
hands of one of those simple strawberrylike English
housemaids, who gives him a cozy, sung little parlor

228 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

all to himself, as was the luck of Irving also ; who
answers his every summons, and looks into his eyes
with the simplicity and directness of a child ; who
could step from no page but that of Scott or the
divine William himself ; who puts the " coals " on
your grate with her own hands, and when you ask
for a lunch spreads the cloth on one end of the table
while you sit reading or writing at the other, and
places before you a whole haunch of delicious cold
mutton with bread and homebrewed ale, and requests
you to help yourself; who, when bedtime arrives,
lights you up to a clean, sweet chamber, with a high
canopied bed hung with snow-white curtains ; who
calls you in the morning, and makes ready your
breakfast while you sit with your feet on the fender
before the blazing grate ; and to whom you pay your
reckoning on leaving, having escaped entirely all the
barrenness and publicity of hotel life, and had all the
privacy and quiet of home without any of its cares
or interruptions. And this, let me say here, is the
great charm of the characteristic English inn ; it has
a domestic, homelike air. " Taking mine ease at
mine inn " has a real significance in England. You
can tafe your ease and more ; you can take real solid
comfort. In the first place, there is no bar-room,
«ind consequently no loafers, or pimps, or fumes of
tobacco or whiskey; then there is no landlord or
proprietor or hotel clerk to lord it over you. The
host, if there is such a person, has a way of keeping
himself in the background, or absolutely out of sight,

FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 229

that is entirely admirable. You are monarch of all
you survey. You are not made to feel that it is ir
Borne one else's house you are stopping, and that you
must court the master for his favor. It is your house,
you are the master, and you have only to enjoy your
own.

In the gray, misty afternoon I walked out over
the Avon, like all English streams full to its grassy
brim, and its current betrayed only by a floating
leaf or feather, and along English fields and roads,
and noted the familiar sights and sounds and smells
of autumn. The spire of the church where Shake-
speare lies buried shot up stately and tall from the
banks of the Avon, a little removed from the village ;
and the church itself, more like a cathedral in size
and beauty, was' also visible above the trees. Thith-
erward I soon bent my steps, and while I was lin-
gering among the graves,1 reading the names and
dates so many centuries old, and surveying the gray
and weather-worn exterior of the church, the slow
tolling of the bell announced a funeral. Upon such
a stage, and amid such surroundings, with all this
past for a background, the shadowy figure of the peer«
less bard towering over all, the incident of the mo-
.nent \iad a strange interest to me, and I looked about
for the funeral cortege. Presently a group of three

1 In England the church always stands in the midst of tha
graveyard, and hence can be approached only on foot. People, it
seems, never go to church in carriages or wagons, but on foot,
tlong paths and lanes.

230 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

or four figures appeared at the head of the avenue of
limes, foremost of them, a woman, bearing an infant's
coffin under her arm, wrapped in a white sheet. tThe
clerk and sexton, with their robes on, went out to
meet them, and conducted them into the church,
where the service proper to such occasions was read,
after which the coffin was taken out as it was brought
in, and lowered into the grave. It was the smallest
funeral I ever saw, and my efforts to play the part of
a sympathizing public by hovering in the background,
I fear, was only an intrusion after all.

Having loitered to my heart's content amid the
stillness of the old church, and paced to and fro above
the illustrious dead, I set out, with the sun about an
hour high, to see the house of Anne Hathaway at
Shattery, shunning the highway and following a
path that followed hedge-rows, crossed meadows and
pastures, skirted turnip fields and cabbage patches, to
a quaint gathering of low thatched houses — a little
village of farmers and laborers about a mile from
Stratford. At the gate in front of the house a boy
was hitching a little gray donkey, almost hidden be-
.teath two immense panniers filled with coarse hay.

" Whose house is this ? " inquired I, not being quite
able to make out the name.

" Harm 'Ataway's 'ouse," said he.

So I took a good look at Anne's house — a homely
numan-looking habitation, with its old oak beams and
thatched roof — but did not go in, as Mrs. Baker, who
was eyeing me from the door, evidently hoped I would.

FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 231

but chose rather to walk past it and up the slight
rise of ground beyond, where I paused and looked
out over the fields just lit up by the setting sun. Re-
turning, I stepped into the Shakespeare Tavern, a
little homely wayside place on a street, or more like
a path, apart from the main road, and the good dame
brought me some "home-brewed," which I drank
sitting by a rude table on a rude bench in a small,
low room, with a stone floor and an immense chim-
ney. The coals burned cheerily, and the crane and
hooks in the fireplace called up visions of my earliest
childhood. Apparently the house and the surround-
ings, and the atmosphere of the place and the ways
of the people, were what they were three hundred
years ago. It was all sweet and good, and I enjoyed
it hugely, and was much refreshed.

Crossing the fields in the gloaming, I came up with
some children, each with a tin bucket of milk, thread-
ing their way toward Stratford. The little girl, a
child ten years old, having a larger bucket than the
rest, was obliged to set down her burden every few
rods and rest ; so I lent her a helping hand. I
thought her prattle, in that broad but musical patois,
Mid along these old hedge-rows, the most delicious I
ever heard. She said they came to Shattery for milk
because it was much better than they got at Stratford.
*n America they had a cow of their own. Had she
lived in America then ? " Oh, yes, four years," and
the stream of her talk was fuller at once. But I
hardly recognized even the name of my own country

232 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

in her innocent prattle ; it seemed like a land of fa-
ble — all had a remote mythological air, and I
pressed my iniquiries as if I was hearing of this
strange land for the first time. She had an uncle
still living in the " States of Hoio," but exactly where
her father had lived was not so clear. In The States
somewhere, and in " Ogden's Valley." There was a
lake there that had salt in it, and not far off was the
sea. " In America," she said, and she gave such a
sweet and novel twang to her words, " we had a cow
of our own, and two horses and a wagon and a dog."
" Yes," joined in her little brother, " and nice chick-
ens and a goose." " But," continued the sister, " we
owns none o' them here." "In America 'most every-
body owned their houses, and we could a' owned a
house if we had stayid."

" What made you leave America ? " I inquired.

" 'Cause me father wanted to see his friends."

" Did your mother want to come back ? "

" No, me mother wanted to stay in America."

" Is food as plenty here — do you have as much to
eat as in The States ? "

u Oh, yes, and more. The first year we were in
America we could not get enough to eat."

u But you do not get meat very often here, do
you?"

" Quite often," — not so confidently.

" How often ? "

" Well, sometimes we has pig's liver in the week
time, and we allers has meat of a Sunday ; we likes

FBOM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 233

Here we emerged from the fields into the high-
way, and the happy children went their way and 1
mine.

In the evening, as I was strolling about the town,
a poor, crippled, half-witted fellow came jerking him-
self across the street after me and offered himself as
a guide.

"I'm the feller what showed Artemus Ward
around when he was here. You 've heerd on me, I
expect ? Not ? Why, he characterized me in ' Punch,'
he did. He asked me if Shakespeare took all the wit
out of Stratford? And this is what I said to him:
' No, he left some for me.' "

But not wishing to be guided just then, I bought
the poor fellow off with a few pence, and kept on my
way.

Stratford is a quiet old place, and seems mainly
the abode of simple common folk. One sees no
marked signs of either poverty or riches. It is situ-
ated in a beautiful expanse of rich rolling farming
country, but bears little resemblance to a rural town
in America : not a tree, not a spear of grass ; the
houses packed close together and crowded up on the
ttreet, the older ones presenting their gables and
showing their structure of oak beams. English oak
seems incapable of decay even when exposed to the
weather, while in-doors it takes three or four centu-
ries to give it its best polish and hue.

I took my last view of Stratford quite early of a
br^ht Sunday morning, when the ground was white

234 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

with a dense hoar-frost. The great church, as I ap-
proached it, loomed up under the sun through a bank
of blue mist. The Avon was like glass, with little
wraiths of vapor cliugiug here and there to its sur-
face. Two white swans stood on its banks in front
of the church, and, without regarding the mirror that
so drew my eye, preened their plumage ; while farther
up, a piebald cow reached down for some grass under
the brink where the frost had not settled, and a pie-
bald cow in the river reached up for the same morsel.
Rooks and crows and jackdaws were noisy in the
trees overhead and about the church spire. I stood
a long while musing upon the scene.

At the birthplace of the poet, the keeper, an elderly
woman, shivered with cold as she showed me about.
The primitive, home-made appearance of things, the
stone floor much worn and broken, the rude oak
beams and doors, the leaden sash with the little win-
dow panes scratched full of names, among others that
of Walter Scott, the great chimneys where quite a
family could literally sit in the chimney corner, etc.,
were what I expected to see, and looked very humao
Mid good. It is impossible to associate anything bu*
sterling qualities and simple, healthful characters
with these early English birthplaces. They are nests
built with faithfulness and affection, and through them
me seems to get a glimpse of devouter, sturdier
times.

From Stratford I went back to Warwick, thence
to Birmingham, thence to Shrewsbury, thence to

FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 235

Chester, the old Roman camp, thence to Holyhead,
being intent on getting a glimpse of Wales and the
Welsh, and may be taking a tramp up Snowdon or
some of his congeners, for my legs literally ached for
a mountain climb, a certain set of muscles being so
long unused. In the course of my journeyings I tried
each class or compartment of the cars, first, second,
and third, and found but little choice. The difference
is simply in the upholstering, and if you are provided
with a good shawl or wrap-up, you need not be par-
ticular about that. In the first, the floor is carpeted
and the seats substantially upholstered, usually in
blue woolen cloth ; in the second, the seat alone is
cushioned ; and in the third, you sit on a bare bench.
But all classes go by the same train, and often in the
same car, or carriage, as they say here. In the first
class, travel the real and the shoddy nobility and
Americans ; in the second, commercial and profes-
sional men ; and in the third, the same, with such of
the peasantry and humbler classes as travel by rail.
The only annoyance I experienced in the third class
arose from the freedom with which the smokers,
always largely in the majority, indulged in their
favorite pastime. VI perceive there is one advantage
in being a smoker : you are never at a loss for some-
thing to do — you can smoke.)

At Chester I stopped over night, selecting my
hotel for its name, the " Green Dragon." It was
Sunday night, and the only street scene my rambles
afforded was quite a large gathering of persons on a

236 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

corner listening, apparently with indifference or cu-
riosity, to an ignorant, hot-headed street preacher.
" Now I am going to tell you something you will not
like to hear — something that will make you angry.
I know it will. It is this : I expect to go to heaven,
I am perfectly confident I shall go there. I know
you do not like that." But why his hearers should
not like that did not appear. For my part I thought,
for the good of all concerned, the sooner he went the
better.

In the morning I mounted the wall in front of the
cathedral, and with a very lively feeling of wonder and
astonishment walked completely around the town on
top of it, a distance of about two miles. The wall, be-
ing in places as high as the houses, afforded some in-
teresting views into attics, chambers, back yards, etc.
I envied the citizens such a delightful promenade
ground, full of variety and interest Just the right
distance, too, for a brisk turn to get up an appetite^
or a leisurely stroll to tone down a dinner ; while as
a place for chance meetings of happy lovers, or to get
away from one's companions if the flame must burn
in secret and in silence, it is unsurpassed. I occa-
sionally met or passed other pedestrians, but noticed
that it required a brisk pace to lessen the distance
between myself and an attractive girlish figure a few
aundred feet in advance of me. The railroad cuts
across one corner of the town, piercing the walls with
two very carefully constructed archways. Indeed
the people are very choice of the wall, and one seei

FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 237

posted notices of the city authorities, offering a re-
ward for any one detected in injuring it. It has stood
now some seven or eight centuries, and from appear-
ances is good for one or two more. There are several
towers on the wall, from one of which some English
king, over two hundred years ago, witnessed the de-
feat of his army on Rowton Moor. But when I was
there, though the sun was shining, the atmosphere
was so loaded with smoke that I could not catch even
a glimpse of the moor where the battle took place.
There is a gateway through the wall on each of the
four sides, and this slender and beautiful but blackened
and worn span, as if to afford a transit from the
chamber windows on one side of the street to those
of the other, is the first glimpse the traveler gets of
the wall. The gates beneath the arches have en
tirely disappeared. The ancient and carved oak
fronts of the buildings on the main street, and the
inclosed sidewalk that ran through the second storiea
of the shops and stores, were not less strange and
novel to me. The sidewalk was like a gentle up-
heaval in its swervings and undulations, or like a walk
through the woods, the oaken posts and braces on the
outside answering for the trees, and the prospect
ahead for the vista.

The ride along the coast of Wales was crowded
with novelty and interest — the sea on one side and
the mountains on the other — the latter bleak and
heathery in the foreground, but cloud-capped and
•now-white in the distance. The afternoon was dark

238 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

and lowering, and just before entering Conway we
had a very striking view. A turn in the road sud-
denly brought us to where we looked through a
black frame-work of heathery hills, and beheld Suow-
don and his chiefs apparently with the full rigors of
winter upon them. It was so satisfying that I lost
at once my desire to tramp up them. I barely had
time to turn from the mountains to get a view of
Conway Castle, one of the largest and most impres-
sive ruins I saw. The train cuts close to the great
round tower, and plunges through the wall of gray,
shelving stone into the bluff beyond, giving the
traveler only time to glance and marvel.

About the only glimpse I got of the Welsh charac-
ter was on this route. At one of the stations, Aber-
gele, I think, a fresh, blooming young woman got into
our compartment, occupied by myself and two com-
mercial travelers (bag-men, or, as we say, " drum-
mers "), and before she could take her seat was com-
plimented by one of them on her good looks. Feeling
in a measure responsible for the honor and good
breeding of the compartment, I could hardly conceal
my embarrassment; but the young Abergeless her-
self did not seem to take it amiss, and when presently
the jolly bag-man addressed his conversation to her,
replied beseemingly and good-naturedly. As she
arose to leave the car at her destination, a few stations
beyond, he said " he thought it a pity that such a
sweet, pretty girl should leave us so soon," and seiz-
ing her hand the audacious rascal actually solicited a

FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 239

kiss. I expected this would be the one drop too
much, and that we should have a scene, and began to
regard myself in the light of an avenger of an insulted
Welsh beauty, when my heroine paused, and I be-
lieve actually deliberated whether or not to comply
before two spectators ! Certain it is that she yielded
the highwayman her hand, and bidding him a gentle
good-night in Welsh, smilingly and blushiugly left
the car. "Ah," said the villain, " these Welsh girls
are capital ; I know them like a book, and have had
many a lark with them."

At Holyhead I got another glimpse of the Welsh.
I had booked for Dublin, and having several hours on
my hands of a dark, threatening night before the de-
parture of the steamer, I sallied out in the old town,
tilted up against the side of the hill, in the most ad-
venturous spirit I could summon up, threading my
way through the dark, deserted streets, pausing for a
moment in front of a small house with closed doors
and closely-shuttered windows, where I heard sup-
pressed voices, the monotonous scraping of a fiddle,
and a lively shuffling of feet, and passing on finally
entered, drawn by the musical strains, a quaint old
place, where a blind harper seated in the corner of a
rude kind of coffee and sitting-room, was playing
on a harp. I liked the atmosphere of the place, so
primitive and wholesome, and was quite willing to
have my attention drawn off from the increasing
Btorm without, and from the bitter cup which I knew
the Irish sea was preparing for me. The harper

240 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

presently struck up a livelier strain, when two "Welsh
girls, who were chatting before the grate, one of them
as dumpy as a bag of meal, and the other slender and
tall, stepped into the middle of the floor and began to
dance to the delicious music, a Welsh mechanic and
myself drinking our ale and looking on approvingly.
After a while the pleasant, modest-looking bar-maid,
whom I had seen behind the beer levers as I entered,
came in, and, after looking on for a moment, was
persuaded to lay down her sewing and join in the
dance. Then there came in a sandy-haired Welsh-
man, who could speak and understand only his native
dialect, and finding his neighbors affiliating with an
Englishman, as he supposed, and trying to speak the
hateful tongue, proceeded to berate them sharply (for
it appears the Welsh are still jealous of the English) ;
but when they explained to him that I was not an
Englishman, but an American, and had already twice
stood the beer all around (at an outlay of sixpence),
he subsided into a sulky silence and regarded me in-
tently.

About eleven o'clock a policeman paused at the
door and intimated that it was time the house was
shut up and the music stopped, and to outward ap-
pearances bis friendly warning was complied with ;
but the harp still discoursed in a minor key, and a
light tripping and shuffling of responsive feet might
occasionally have been heard for an hour later.
When I arose to go it was with a feeling of regret
that I could not see more of this simple and social

FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 241

people, with whom I at once felt that " toiich of nat-
ure " which " makes all the world kin," and my leave-
taking was warm and hearty accordingly.

Through the wind and the darkness I threaded my
way to the wharf, and in less than two hours after-
ward was a most penitent voyager, and fitfully join-
ing in that doleful gastriloqual chorus that so often
goes up from the cabins of those channel steamers.

I hardly know why I went to Ireland, except it
was to indulge the few drops of Irish blood in my
veins, and may be also with a view to shorten my
sea voyage by a day. I also felt a desire to see one
or two literary men there, and in this sense my jour-
ney was eminently gratifying ; but so far from short-
ening my voyage by a day, it lengthened it by three
days, that being the time it took me to recover from
the effects of it ; and as to the tie of blood, I think it
must nearly all have run out, for I felt but few con-
genital throbs while in Ireland.

The Englishman at home is a much more lova-
ble animal than the Englishman abroad, but Pat in
Ireland is even more of a pig than in this country.
Indeed, the squalor and poverty, and cold, skinny
wretchedness one sees in Ireland, and (what freezes
our sympathies) the groveling, swiny shiftlessness
that pervades these hovels, no traveler can be pre-
pared for. It is the bare prose of misery, the unhe-
roic of tragedy. There is not one redeeming or miti-
gating feature.

Railway traveling in Ireland is not so rapid or so
16

242 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

„*

cheap as in England. Neither are the hotels as good
or as clean, or the fields so well kept, or the look of
the country so thrifty and peaceful. The dissatisfac-
tion of the people is in the very air. Ireland looks
Bour and sad. She looks old, too, as do all those
countries beyond seas, old in a way that the Ameri-
can is a stranger to. It is not the age of nature, the
unshaken permanence of the hills through long peri-
ods of time, but the weight of human years and
human sorrows, as if the earth sympathized with man
and took on his attributes and infirmities.

I did not go much about Dublin, and the most
characteristic thing I saw there were those queer,
uncomfortable dog carts, a sort of Irish bull on wheels,
with the driver on one side balancing the passenger
on the other, and the luggage occupying the seat of
safety between. It comes the nearest to riding on
horseback, and on a side-saddle at that, of any vehicle
traveling I ever did.

I stopped part of a day at Mallow, an old town on
the Blackwater, in one of the most fertile agricultural
districts of Ireland. The situation is fine, and an
American naturally expects to see a charming rural
town planted with trees and filled with clean, com-
fortable homes ; but he finds instead a wretched place,
emitten with a plague of filth and mud, and offering
but one object upon which the eye can dwell with
pleasure, and that is the ruins of an old castle, " Mal-
low Castle over Blackwater," which dates back to the
time of Queen Elizabeth. It stands amid noble trees

FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 243

on the banks of the river, and its walls, some of them
thirty or forty feet high, are completely overrun with
ivy. The Blackwater, a rapid, amber-colored stream,
is spanned at this point by a superb granite bridge.

And I will say here that anything like a rural town
in our sense, a town with trees and grass and large
spaces about the houses, gardens, yards, shrubbery,
coolness, fragrance, etc., seems unknown in England
or Ireland. The towns and villages are all remnants
of feudal times, and seem to have been built with an
eye to safety and compactness, or else men were more
social and loved to get closer together then than now.
Perhaps the damp, chilly climate made them draw
nearer together. At any rate, the country towns are
little cities ; or rather it is as if another London had
been cut up in little and big pieces and distributed
over the land.

In the afternoon, to take the kinks out of my legs,
and quicken if possible my circulation a little, which
since the passage over the Channel had felt as if it was
thick and green, I walked rapidly to the top of the
Kockmeledown Mountains, getting a good view of
Irish fields and roads and fences as I went up, and a
very wide and extensive view of the country after I
had reached the summit, and improving the atmos-
phere of my physical tenement amazingly. These
mountains have no trees or bushes or other growth
than a harsh prickly heather, about a foot high,
which begins exactly at the foot of the mountain.
You are walking on smooth, fine meadow laud, when

244 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

you leap a fence and there is the heather. On the
highest point of this mountain, and on the highest
point of all the mountains around, was a low stone
mound, which I was puzzled to know the meaning of.
Standing there, the country rolled away beneath me
under a cold, gray November sky, and, as was the case
with the English landscape, looked singularly deso-
late — the desolation of a dearth, of human homes, in-
dustrial centres, families, workers, and owners of the
soil. Few roads, scarce ever a vehicle, no barns, no
groups of bright, well-ordered buildings, indeed no
farms and neighborhoods and school-houses, but a
wide spread of rich, highly-cultivated country, with
here and there visible to close scrutiny small gray
stone houses with thatched roofs, the abodes of pov-
erty and wretchedness. A recent English writer says
the first thing that struck him in American landscape
painting was the absence of man and the domestic
animals from the pictures, and the preponderance of
rude, wild nature ; and his first view of this country
seems to have made the same impression. But it is
certainly true that the traveler through any of our
plder States, will see ten houses, rural habitations, to
one in England or Ireland, though, as a matter of
course, nature here looks much less domesticated and
much less expressive of human occupancy and con-
tact. The Old World people have clung to the soil
closer and more lovingly than we do. The ground
has been more precious. They have had none to
waste, and have made the most of every inch of it

FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 245

WTierever they have touched they have taken root
and throve as best they could. Then the American
Is more cosmopolitan and less domestic. He is not
so local in his feelings and attachments. He does
not bestow himself upon the earth or upon his home
as his ancestors did. He feathers his nest very little.
Why should he? He may migrate to-morrow and
build another. He is like the passenger pigeon that
lays its eggs and rears its young upon a little platform
of bare twigs. Our poverty and nakedness is, in this
respect, I think, beyond dispute. There is nothing
nest-like about our homes, either in their interiors or
exteriors. Even wealth and taste and foreign aids
rarely attain that cozy, mellowing atmosphere that
pervades not only the lowly birthplaces but the halls
and manor-houses of older lands. And what do our
farms represent but so much real estate, so much
cash value?

Only where man loves the soil and nestles to it
closely and long, will it take on this beneficent and
human look which foreign travelers miss in our land-
scape ; and only where homes are built with fondness
*nd emotion, and in obedience to the social, paternal,
snd domestic instincts, will they hold the charm and
radiate and be warm with the feeling I have de-
scribed.

And while I am upon the subject, I will add that
European cities differ from ours in this same particu-
'ar. They have a homelier character — more the
air of dwelling-places, the abodes of men drawn to-

246 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

gether for other purposes than traffic. People actu-
ally live in them, and find life sweet and festal. But
what does our greatest city, New York, express be-
sides commerce or politics, or what other reason has
it for its existence ? This is, of course, in a measure
the result of the modern worldly and practical business
spirit, which more and more animates all nations, and
which led Carlyle to say of his own countrymen that
they were becoming daily more " flat, stupid, and
mammonish." Yet I am persuaded that in our case
it is traceable also to the leanness and depletion of
our social and convivial instincts, and to the fact that
the material cares of life are more serious and en-
grossing with us than with any other people.

I spent part of a day at Cork, wandering about the
town, threading my way through the back streets and
alleys, and seeing life reduced to fewer makeshifts
than I had ever before dreamed of. I went through,
or rather skirted, a kind of second-hand market, where
the most sorry and dilapidated articles of clothing
and household utensils were offered for sale, and
where the cobblers were cobbling up old shoes that
would hardly hold together. Then the wretched old
women one sees, without any sprinkling of young
ones — youth and age alike bloomless and unlovely.

In a meadow on the hills that encompass the
city, I found the American dandelion in bloom and
some large red clover, and started up some skylarks
as I might start up the field sparrows in our own up»
fields.

FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 247

Is the magpie a Celt and a Catholic ? I saw no
one in England, but plenty of them in France, and
again when I reached Ireland.

At Queenstown I awaited the steamer from Liver-
pool, and about nine o'clock in the morning was de-
lighted to see her long black form moving up the
bay. She came to anchor about a mile or two out,
and a little tug was in readiness to take us off. A
score or more of emigrants, each with a bag and box,
had been waiting all the morning at the wharf. "When
the time of embarkation arrived, the agent stepped
aboard the tug and called out their names one by one,
when Bridget and Catherine and Patrick and Mi-
chael, and the rest, came aboard, received their tick-
ets and passed " forward " with a half-frightened, half-
bewildered look. But not much emotion was dis-
played until the boat began to move off, when the
tears fell freely, and they continued to fall faster and
faster and the sobs to come thicker and thicker, un-
til, as the faces of friends began to fade on the wharf,
both men and women burst out into a loud, unre-
strained bawl. This sudden demonstration of grief
seemed to frighten the children and smaller fry, who
up to this time had been very jovial ; but now, sus-
pectii g something was wrong, they all broke out in a
most pitiful chorus, forming an anti-climax to the
wail of their parents that was quite amusing, and
that seemed to have its effect upon the " children
of a larger growth," for they instantly hushed their
lamentations and turned their attention toward the

248 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

great steamer. There was a rugged but bewildered
old granny among them on her way to join her daugh-
ter somewhere in the interior of New York who
seemed to regard me with a kindred eye, and toward
whom, I confess, I felt some family affinity. Before we
had got halfway to the vessel, the dear old creature
missed a sheet from her precious bundle of worldy ef-
fects, and very confidentially told me that her suspi-
cions pointed to the stoker, a bristling, sooty, "wild
Irishman." The stoker resented the insinuation, and
I overheard him berating the old lady in Irish so
sharply and threateningly (I had no doubt of his
guilt) that she was quite frightened, and ready to re-
tract the charge to hush the man up. She seemed
to think her troubles had just begun. If they be-
haved thus to her on the little tug, what would they
not do on board the great black steamer itself? So
when she got separated from her luggage in getting
aboard the vessel, her excitement was great, and I
met her following about the man whom she had ac-
cused of filching her bed linen, as if he must have
the clew to the lost bed itself. Her face brightened
when she saw me, and giving me a terribly hard
wink and a most expressive nudge, said she wished
I would keep near her a little. This I did, and soon
Lad the pleasure of leaving her happy and reassured
beside her box and bundle.

The passage home, though a rough one, was cheer-
fully and patiently borne. I found a compound mo-
tion, the motion of a screw steamer, a roll and a

FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 249

plunge, less trying to my head than the simple rock-
ing or pitching of the side-wheeled Scotia. One mo-
tion was in a measure a foil to the other. My brain,
acted upon by two forces, was compelled to take the
hypothenuse, and I think the concussion was con-
siderably diminished thereby. The vessel was for-
ever trembling upon the verge of immense watery
chasms that opened now under her port bows, now
under her starboard, and that almost made one catch
for his breath as he looked into them ; yet the noble
ship had a way of skirting them or striding across
them that was quite wonderful. Only five days was
I compelled to " hole up " in my state-room, hiber-
nating, weathering the final rude shock of the At-
lantic. Part of this time I was capable of feeling a
languid interest in the oscillations of my coat sus-
pended from a hook in the door. Back and forth,
back and forth, all day long vibrated this black pen-
dulum, at long intervals touching the sides of the
room, indicating great lateral or diagonal motion of
the ship. The great waves, I observed, go in packs
like wolves. Now one would pounce upon her, then
another, then another in quick succession, making the
ship strain every nerve to shake them off. Then she
would glide along quietly for some minutes and my
coat would register but a few degrees in its imagin-
ary arc, when another baud of the careering demons
would cross our path and harass us as before. Some-
times they would pound and thump on the sides of
the vessel like immense sledge hammers, beginning

250 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

."

away up toward the bows and quickly running down
her whole length, jarring, raking, and venting their
wrath in a very audible manner ; or a wave would
rake along the side with a sharp; ringing, metallic
sound, like a huge spear point seeking a vulnerable
place, or some hard-backed monster would rise up
from the deep and grate and bump the whole length
of the keel, forcibly suggesting hidden rocks and con-
sequent wreck and ruin.

Then it seems there is always some biggest wave
to be met with somewhere on the voyage, a monster
billow that engulfs disabled vessels and sometimes
carries away parts of the rigging of the stanchest.
This big wave struck us the third day out about mid-
night, and nearly threw us all out of our berths, and
careened the ship over so far that it seemed to take
her last pound of strength to right herself up again.
There was a slamming of doors, a rush of crockery,
and a screaming of women, heard above the general
din and confusion, while the steerage passengers
thought their last hour had come. The vessel before
is encountered this giant wave during a storm in mid
ocean, and was completely buried beneath it ; one of
the officers was swept overboard, the engines sud-
denly stopped, and there was a terrible moment dur-
ing which it seemed uncertain whether the vessel
would shake off the sea or go to the bottom.

Besides observing the oscillations of my coat, I
had at times a stupid satisfaction in seeing my two
Dew London trunks belabor each other about my

FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 251

state room floor. Nearly every day they would break
from their fastenings under my berth and start on a
wild race for the opposite side of the room. Natur-
ally enough the little trunk would always get the
start of the big one, but the big one followed close
and sometimes caught the little one in a very uncom-
fortable manner. Once a knife and fork and a break-
fast plate slipped off the sofa and joined in the race,
but if not distanced they got sadly the wjrst of it,
especially the plate. But the carpet hau the most
reason to complain. Two or three turns sufficed to
loosen it from the floor, when, shoved to one side, the
two trunks took turns in butting it. I used to allow
this sport to go on till it grew monotonous, when I
would alternately shont and ring until "Robert"
appeared and restored order.

The condition of certain picture-frames and vases
and other frail articles among my effects, when I
reached home, called to mind not very pleasantly this
trunken frolic.

It is impossible not to sympathize with the ship in
her struggles with the waves. You are lying there
wedged into your berth, and she seems indeed a thing
of life and conscious power. She is built entirely of
rron, is 500 feet long, and besides other freight car-
ries 2,500 tons of railroad iron which lies down there
flat in her bottom, a dead, indigestible weight, so un-
like a cargo in bulk, yet she is a quickened spirit for
ill that. You feel every wave that, strikes her, you
feel the sea bearing her down, she has run her nose

252 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

into one of those huge swells, and a solid blue wall
of water tons in weight comes over her bows and
floods her forward deck, she braces herself, every rod
and rivet and timber seems to lend its support, you
almost expect to see the wooden walls of your room
grow rigid with muscular contraction ; she trembles
from stem to stern, she recovers, she breaks the gripe
of her antagonist and rising up, shakes the sea from
her with a kind of gleeful wrath ; I hear the torrents
of water rush along the lower decks, and finding a
means of escape, pour back into the sea, glad to get
away on any terms, and I say, " Noble ship ! you are
indeed a god ! "

I wanted to see a first-class storm at sea, and per-
haps ought to be satisfied with the heavy blow 01
hurricane we had when off Sable Islands, but I con-
fess I was not, though, by the lying- to of the vessel
and the frequent soundings, it was evident there was
danger about A dense fog uprose, which did not
drift like a land fog, but was as immovable as iron ;
it was like a spell, a misty enchantment, and out of
this fog came the wind, a steady, booming blast, that
smote the ship over on her side and held her there
and howled in the rigging like a chorus of fiends.
The waves did not know which way to flee; they
were heaped up and then scattered in a twinkling
.1 thought of the terrible line of one of our poets : —

'• The spasm of the sky and the shatter of the sea."
The sea looked wrinkled and old, and oh, so pitiless
I had stood long before Turner's " Shipwreck " in the

FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK. 258

National Gallery in London, and this sea recalled
his, and I appreciated more than ever the artist'i
great powers.

These storms it appears, are rotary in their wild
dance and promenade up and down the seas. " Look
the wind squarely in the teeth," said an ex-sea-cap-
tain among the passengers, " and eight points to the
right in the northern hemisphere will be the centre
of the storm, and eight points to the left in the south-
ern hemisphere." I remembered that in Victor
Hugo's terrible dynamics, storms revolved in the
other direction in the northern hemisphere, or fol-
lowed the hands of a watch, while south of the equator
they no doubt have ways equally original.

Late in the afternoon the storm abated, the fog
was suddenly laid, and looking toward the setting
sun, I saw him athwart the wildest, most desolate
scene that it was ever my fortune to behold the face
of that god. The sea was terribly agitated, and the
endless succession of leaping, frothing waves between
me and the glowing west, formed a picture I shall
not soon forget.

I think the excuse that is often made in behalf of
American literature, namely, that our people are too
busy with other things yet, and will show the proper
aptitude in this field too as soon as leisure is afforded,
is fully justified by events of daily occurrence.
Throw a number of them together without anything
else to do, and they at once communicate to each
other ihe itch of authorship. Confine them on board

254 AN OCTOBER ABROAD.

an ocean steamer, and by the third or fourth day a
large number of them will break out all over with a
sort of literary rash that nothing will assuage but
some newspaper or journalistic enterprise, which will
give the poems and essays and jokes with which they
are surcharged a chance to be seen and heard of men.
I doubt if the like ever occurs among travelers of
any other nationality. Englishmen or Frenchmen
or Germans want something more warm and human,
if less " refined ; " but the average American, when in
company, likes nothing so well as an opportunity to
show the national tnxit of " smartness." There is
not a bit of danger that we shall ever relapse into
barbarism while so much latent literature lies at the
bottom of our daily cares and avocations, and is sure
to come to the surface the moment the latter are sus-
pended or annulled !

While abreast of New England, and I don't know
how many miles at sea, as I turned in my deck prom-
enade, I distinctly scented the land — a subtle, de-
licious odor of farms and homesteads, warm and
human, that floated on the wild sea air, a promise and
a token. The broad red line that had been slowly
creeping across our chart for so many weary days,
ndicating the path of the ship, had now completely
biidged the chasm, and had got a good purchase
down under the southern coast of New England, and
according to the reckoning we ought to have made
Sandy Hook that night; but though the position oi
Jie vessel was no doubt theoretically all right, yet

FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK 255

practically she proved to be much farther out at sea,
for all that afternoon and night she held steadily on
her course, and not till next morning did the coast of
Long Island, like a thin broken cloud just defined on
the horizon, come into view. But before many hours
we had passed the Hook, and were moving slowly up
the bay in the mid-day splendor of the powerful and
dazzling light of the New World sun. And how good
things looked to me after even so brief an absence !
the brilliancy, the roominess, the deep transparent
blue of the sky, the clear, sharp outlines, the metro-
politan splendor of New York, and especially of
Broadway ; and as I walked up that great thorough-
fare and noted the familiar physiognomy and the
native nonchalance and independence, I experienced
the delight that only the returned traveler can feel,
the instant preference of one's own country and coun-
trymen over all the rest of the world.

3UTHERN BRANCH,

DIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

LIBRARY,

ANGELES, CALIF.