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Winter Sunshine

by John Burroughs · English · Gutenberg #4279 · 365,516 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Winter Sunshine

Author: John Burroughs


        
Release date: July 1, 2003 [eBook #4279]
                Most recently updated: October 22, 2024

Language: English

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Credits: Jack Eden


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THE WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS
WITH PORTRAITS AND MANY ILLUSTRATIONS


VOLUME II

WINTER SUNSHINE




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 notable 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 argument 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 sensations 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 enable him to discriminate subtle
shades and differences at first sight which might escape a traveler of
another and antagonistic race. He has brought with him, but little
modified or impaired, his whole inheritance of English ideas and
predilections, and much of what he sees affects him like a memory. It
is his own past, his ante-natal life, and his long-buried ancestors
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 satisfaction. 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 "Britishers" 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 impressed me and stuck to me and tasted good, I shall be
satisfied.

   ESOPUS-ON-HUDSON, November, 1875.



CONTENTS
    I. WINTER SUNSHINE
   II. THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD
  III. THE SNOW-WALKERS
   IV. THE FOX
    V. A MARCH CHRONICLE
   VI. AUTUMN TIDES
  VII. THE APPLE
 VIII. AN OCTOBER ABROAD:
             I. MELLOW ENGLAND
            II. ENGLISH CHARACTERISTICS
           III. A GLIMPSE OF FRANCE
            IV. FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK
        INDEX



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
 AN ENGLISH LANE
     From a photograph by Walmsley Brothers
 DRIFTS ABOUT A STONE WALL
     From a photograph by Herbert W.  Gleason
 DOWNY WOODPECKER
     From drawing by L.  A.  Fuertes
 COWS IN AN ENGLISH LANDSCAPE
     From a photograph by Walmsley Brothers
 St. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL
     From a photograph by Clifton Johnson
 IRISH COTTAGES
     From a photograph by Clifton Johnson




WINTER SUNSHINE

I. WINTER SUNSHINE

An American resident in England is reported as saying that the English
have an atmosphere but no climate. The reverse of this remark would
apply pretty accurately to our own case. We certainly have a climate, a
two-edged one that cuts both ways, threatening us with sun-stroke on
the one hand and with frost-stroke on the other; but we have no
atmosphere to speak of in New York and New England, except now and then
during the dog-days, or the fitful and uncertain Indian Summer. An
atmosphere, the quality of tone and mellowness in the near distance, 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
reaching the Potomac you find an atmosphere as well as a climate. The
latter is still on the vehement American scale, full of sharp and
violent changes and contrasts, 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
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 brooding, 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 the full, from October to May.  There is
more haze and vapor in the atmosphere during that period, and every
pariticle 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 Herschel 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.

       "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 the Atlantic seaboard, 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 may be, perhaps,
because we have such splendid specimens of both at the 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 summer, that charming but
uncertain second youth of the New England year, but of regularly
recurring lucid intervals in the weather system of Virginia fall and
winter, when the best our climate is capable of stand
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
altitude about these dazzling November and December days, of
mountain-tops and pure ether. The earth in passing through the fire of
summer seems to have lost all its dross, and life all its impediments.

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 residuum 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 purpose of gathering
chestnuts, or autumn leaves, or persimmons, or exploring some run or
branch. It is, say, the last of October or the first of November. The
air is not balmy, but tart and pungent, like the flavor of the
red-cheeked apples by the roadside. 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 noticeable. 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 azure, and the buzzards look
like kingly birds, sailing round and round.

Or it may be later in the season, well into December.  The days are
equally bright, but a little more rugged. The mornings are ushered in
by an immense spectrum thrown upon the eastern sky. A broad bar of red
and orange lies along the low horizon, 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 orange 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 before long the mists and vapors
uprise like the breath of a giant army, and for an hour or two, one is
reminded 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 summons and a challenge to come forth. If the October days
were a cordial like the sub-acids of a fruit, these are a tonic like
the wine of iron. Drink deep, or 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 a friendly and
recuperating lightning. Are we led to think electricity abounds only in
the summer when we see storm-clouds, as it were, the veins and ore-beds
of it? I imagine it is equally abundant in winter, and more equable and
better tempered. Who ever breasted a snowstorm without being excited
and exhilarated, as if this meteor had come charged with latent aurorae
of the North, as doubtless it has? It is like being pelted with sparks
from a battery. Behold the frost-work on the pane,--the wild, fantastic
limnings and etchings! can there be any doubt but this subtle agent has
been here? Where is it not? It is the life of the crystal, the
architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam.
This crisp winter air is full of it. When I come in at night after an
all-day tramp I am charged like a Leyden jar; my hair crackles and
snaps beneath the comb like a cat's back, and a strange, new glow
diffuses itself 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 invitingly near. You do not miss the flowers and the songsters, or
wish the trees or the fields any different, or the 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
strait, light-gray trunks of the trees, where the woods have recently
been laid open by a road or 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 farm scenes,--the winter barnyards
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 privacy 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
distinctions. There is something 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 the eye. Even on a windy winter day he rides the vast aerial
billows as placidly as ever, rising and falling as he comes up toward
you, carving his way through the resisting currents by a slight
oscillation to the right and left, but never once beating the air
openly.

This superabundance of wing power is very unequally 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 consummate. 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 equipoise, 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 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 whatever. Nature dare
not trust him to speak. In his case she preserves discreet silence.

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
independence! 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 scornful, defiant whir-r-r-r-r. Hardy, happy outlaws, the crows,
how I love them! Alert, social, republican, always able to look out for
himself, not afraid of the cold and the snow, fishing when flesh is
scarce, and stealing when other resources fail, the crow is a character
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
always 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. Then he is one of Nature'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 flattered the crow when he told
him he had a sweet 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
reminded 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 attention.
This is no doubt the song the fox begged to be favored with, as in
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 summer, 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 seen on the
road. He bends his knees more than the white man, and oscillates more
to and fro, or from side to side. The imaginary line which his head
describes 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 rud box-traps. The freedman is a successful 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 peasant
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 benignity
and a depth of human experience and sympathy 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 nature. They have the quaintness and homeliness of the
simple English stock. I seem to see my grandfather and grandmother in
the ways and doings of these 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 has much to boast of.

The negro is a plastic human creature, and is thoroughly domesticated
and thoroughly anglicized. The same cannot be said of the Indian, for
instance, between whom and us there can never exist any fellowship, 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 latter 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 manner 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 churches. Indeed, I fear the
negro tries to ignore or forget himself as far as possible, and that he
would deem it felicity enough to play second fiddle to the white man
all his days. He liked his master, but he likes 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.

How far he has caught or is capable of being imbued with the Yankee
spirit of enterprise and industry, remains to be seen. In some things
he has already shown himself an apt scholar. I notice, for instance,
that 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
meetings, caucuses, and will soon shine on the stump. I observe, also,
that he is not far behind us in the observance of the fashions, and
that he is as good a church-goer, theatre-goer, and pleasure-seeker
generally, as his means will allow.

As a bootblack or newsboy, 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 prototype: 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 colored brethren, plenty of
them, of conscientious and well-directed effort and industry in the
worthiest fields, in agriculture, in trade, in the mechanic arts, that
show the colored man has in him all the best rudiments of a citizen of
the States.

Lest my winter sunshine appear to have too many dark rays in
it,--buzzards, crows, and colored men,--I hasten to add the brown and
neutral tints; and maybe a red ray can be extracted from some of these
hard, smooth, sharp-gritted roads that radiate from the National
Capital. Leading out of Washington there are several good roads that
invite the pedestrian. There is the road that leads west or northwest
from Georgetown, the Tenallytown road, the very sight of which, on a
sharp, lustrous winter Sunday, 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 Harper'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 Maryland. 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 her
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, and 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 strike 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 acquisition 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, coming suddenly upon
the 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 Maryland
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 suggested
gray-blue smoke, while the recesses of the pines looked like the lair
of Night. Beyond the District limits we struck the Marlborough pike,
which, round and hard and white, held squarely to the 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 along,
Thoreau's lines came naturally to mind:--

       "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 freezing), I heard and saw
bluebirds, and as we passed along, every sheltered tangle and overgrown
field or lane swarmed with snowbirds and sparrows,--the latter mainly
Canada or tree sparrows, with a sprinkling of the song, and, maybe, one
or two other varieties. 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 kinglets, with their slender beaks and microscopic
eyes, last of all. [Footnote: It seems to me this is a borrowed
observation, but I do not know to whom to credit it.]

Now and then, among the gray and brown tints, there was a dash of
scarlet,--the cardinal grosbeak, 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 landscape.

Maryland is here rather a level, unpicturesque 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 into 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 washerwoman 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, describing 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 on the simplest names. Bloodroot
they generally call "grubroot;" trailing arbutus goes by the names of
"troling" arbutus, "training arbuty-flower," and ground "ivory;" in
Virginia they call woodchucks "moonacks."

On entering Pumpkintown--a cluster of five or six small, whitewashed
blockhouses, 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 unkempt, and wandering free as the wind;
now fading out into a broad field; now contracting into a narrow track
between hedges; anon roaming with delightful 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 carpet 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, and 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; 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 circumstances, loath to leave
it, poking up the sticks, throwing 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 primitive man, which we all carry about with us. He
has not yet forgotten his wild, free life, his arboreal habitations,
and the sweet-bitter times he had in those long-gone ages. With me, he
wakes up directly at the smell of smoke, of burning branches in the
open air; and all his old love of fire and his dependence upon it, in
the camp or the cave, come freshly to mind.

On resuming our march, we filed off along a 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 Virginia is quite a different thing from a pine
wood in Maine or Minnesota,--the difference, in fact, between 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 cornstalks, 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 cornstalks, 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 dooryard, musical 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 outbuildings I noticed a fancy dovecote, with an immense flock
of doves circling aboxe 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 sprinkling along the bushy margin of the stream
of scarlet grosbeaks. 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 respect 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 direction.

Occasionally in winter I experience a southern inclination, and cross
Long Bridge and rendezvous for the day in some old earthwork on the
Virginia hills. The roads 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
sustenance the mind draws from all natural forms.



II. THE EXHILARATIONS OF THE ROAD

       Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road.
                                               WALT WHITMAN.

Ocasionally 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 protrudes; 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, unadorned 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. That unhampered, vitally playing piece of anatomy is the
type of the pedestrian, man returned to first principles, 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 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
shining 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 American 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 platform, 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 despises this primitive
gift, that fears the touch of the soil, that has no footpaths, 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 pedestrian in the public road, providing no
escape for him 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 footpath 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 embittered, 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 burdensome to the walker is a heart not in perfect sympathy
and accord with the body,--a reluctant or unwilling heart. The horse
and rider must not only both be willing to go the same way, but the
rider must lead the way and infuse his own lightness and eagerness into
the steed. Herein is no doubt our trouble, and one reason of the decay
of the noble art in this country. We 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
melancholic as that we are vacant of that sportiveness and surplusage
of animal spirits that characterized our ancestors, and that springs
from full and harmonious life,--a sound heart in accord with a sound
body. A man must invest himself near at hand and in common things, and
be content with a steady and moderate 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 morning star," he feels defrauded, and as if I had played
him a trick. And yet nothing less than dilatation and enthusiasm like
this is the badge of the master walker.

If we are not sad, we are careworn, hurried, discontented, mortgaging
the present for the promise of the future. If we take a walk, it is as
we take a prescription, 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.

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.

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 amusement and
hilarity, spending most of the time at their watering-places in the
open air, strolling, picnicking, boating, climbing, briskly walking,
apparently with little fear of sun-tan or of compromising their
"gentility."

It is indeed astonishing with what ease and hilarity 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 breakfast with the Independent minister, he walked with us
for six miles out of town upon our road. Three little boys and girls,
the youngest six years old, also accompanied us. They were romping and
rambling about all the while, and their morning walk must have been as
much as fifteen miles; but they thought nothing of it, and when we
parted were apparently as fresh as when they started, and very loath to
return."

I fear, also, the American is becoming disqualified for the manly art
of walking by a falling off in the size of his foot. He cherishes and
cultivates this part of his anatomy, and apparently thinks his taste
and good breeding are to be inferred from its diminutive size. A small,
trim foot, well booted or gaitered, is the national vanity. How we
stare at the big feet of foreigners, and wonder what may be the price
of leather in those countries, and where all the aristocratic blood is,
that these plebeian extremities so predominate! If we were admitted to
the confidences of the shoemaker to Her Majesty or to His Royal
Highness, no doubt we should modify our views upon this latter point,
for a truly large and royal nature is never stunted in the extremities;
a little foot never yet supported a great character.

It 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 respect, every traveler can testify;
and that there is a difference equally astonishing between the
pedestrian habits and capabilities of the rival sisters, is also
certain.

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

Then their land is threaded with paths which invite the walker, and
which are scarcely less important than the highways. I heard of a surly
nobleman near London who took it into his head to close a footpath that
passed through his estate near his house, and open another a little
farther off. The pedestrians objected; the matter got into the courts,
and after protracted litigation the aristocrat was beaten. The path
could not be closed or moved. The memory of man ran not to the time
when there was not a footpath there, and every pedestrian should have
the right of way there still.

I remember the pleasure I had in the path that connects
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 traveler in it has the privilege of
crossing the railroad track, an unusual privilege in England, and one
denied to the lord in his carriage, who must either go over or under
it. (It is a privilege, is it not, to be allowed the forbidden, even if
it be the privilege of being run over by the engine?) In strolling over
the South Downs, too, I was delighted to find that where the hill was
steepest some benefactor of the order of walkers had made notches in
the sward, so that the foot could bite the better and firmer; the path
became a kind of stairway, which I have no doubt the plowman respected.

When you see an English country church withdrawn, secluded, out of the
reach of wheels, standing amid grassy graves and surrounded by noble
trees, approached by paths and shaded lanes, you appreciate more than
ever this beautiful habit of the people. Only a race that knows how to
use its feet, and holds footpaths sacred, could put such a charm of
privacy and humility into such a structure. I think I should 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 were sure
I should not be jostled or run over by the rival chariots of the
worshipers at the temple doors. I think that 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 astonishing 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 dress; 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.

Then the English claim that they are a more hearty and robust people
than we are. It is certain they are a plainer people, have plainer
tastes, dress plainer, build plainer, speak plainer, keep closer to
facts, wear broader shoes and coarser clothes, and place a lower
estimate on themselves,--all of which traits favor pedestrian habits.
The English grandee is not confined to his carriage; but if the
American aristocrat leaves his, he is ruined. Oh the weariness, the
emptiness, the plotting, the seeking rest and finding none, that go by
in the carriages! while your pedestrian 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 are his faculties asleep. He is the only real traveler; he
alone tastes the "gay, fresh sentiment of the road." He is not
isolated, but is at one with things, with the farms and the industries
on either hand. The vital, universal currents 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 messages to his mind. Wind, frost, rain,
heat, cold, are something to him. He is not merely a spectator of the
panorama of nature, but a participator in it. He experiences the
country he passes through,--tastes it, feels it, absorbs it; the
traveler in his fine carriage 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, exploring 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 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 line, and Thoreau
reads between the lines. Then the walker has the privilege of the
fields, the woods, the hills, the byways. 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 eligible 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 hilltop, 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 I should otherwise miss, but that I
should come into relations with that country at first hand, and with
the men and women in it, in a way that would afford the deepest
satisfaction. Hence I envy the good fortune of all walkers, and feel
like joining myself to every tramp that comes along. I am jealous of
the clergyman I read about the other day, who footed it from Edinburgh
to London, as poor Effie Deans did, carrying 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 longing 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 of a third.
What adventures we would have by the 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 destination!

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 without having
heard him hum an air, or more than casually revert to the subject of
his experience during the war. You have even questioned and
cross-questioned 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 swinging along the streams by day, song,
anecdote, adventure, come to the surface, and you wonder how your
companion has kept silent so long.

It is another proof of how walking brings out the true character of a
man. The devil never yet asked his victims to take a walk with him. You
will not be long in finding your companion out. All disguises will fall
away from him. As his pores open his character is laid bare. His
deepest and most private self will come to the top. It matters little
with whom you ride, so he be not a pickpocket; for both of you will,
very likely, settle down closer and firmer in your reserve, shaken down
like a measure of corn by the jolting as the journey proceeds. But
walking is a more vital copartnership; the relation is a closer and
more sympathetic one, and you do not feel like walking ten paces with a
stranger without speaking to him.

Hence the fastidiousness of the professional walker in choosing or
admitting a companion, and hence the truth of a remark of Emerson, that
you will generally fare better to take your dog than to invite your
neighbor. Your cur-dog is a true pedestrian, and your neighbor is very
likely a small politician. The dog enters thoroughly into the spirit of
the enterprise; he is not indifferent or preoccupied; he is constantly
sniffing adventure, laps at every spring, looks upon every field and
wood as a new world to be explored, 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 vagabond 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 shopping, wonder how it is that their
pedestrian friends can compass so many weary miles and not fall down
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 compelled 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 being 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 accordingly. 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 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 bonmot, 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.

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 because
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 invisible fibres and
rootlets through which character 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 forever.

We have produced some good walkers and saunderers, and some noted
climbers; but as a staple recreation, 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 condiment 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 summer, 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 action.  The foot tastes it and henceforth rests not.  The
joy of moving and surmounting, of attrition and progression, the thirst
for space, for miles and leagues of distance, for sights and prospects,
to cross mountains 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.



III. THE SNOW-WALKERS

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

The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed 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 moral.  The return of nature, after
such a career of splendor and prodigality, to habits so simple and
austere, is not lost upon either 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 elements,--the novel
disguises our nearest friends put on! Here is another rain and another
dew, water that will not flow, nor spill, nor receive the taint of an
unclean vessel. And if we see truly, the same old beneficence and
willingness to serve lurk beneath all.

Look up at the miracle of the falling snow,--the air a dizzy maze of
whirling, eddying flakes, noiselessly transforming the world, the
exquisite crystals dropping in ditch and gutter, and disguising in the
same suit of spotless livery all objects upon which they fall. How
novel and fine the first drifts! The old, dilapidated fence is suddenly
set off with the most fantastic ruffles, scalloped and fluted after an
unheard-of fashion! Looking down a long line of decrepit stone wall, in
the trimming of which the wind had fairly run riot, I saw, as for the
first time, what a severe yet master artist old Winter is. Ah, a severe
artist! How stern the woods look, dark and cold and as rigid against
the horizon as iron!

All life and action upon the snow have an added emphasis and
significance. Every expression is underscored. Summer has few finer
pictures than this winter one of the farmer foddering his cattle from a
stack upon the clean snow,--the movement, the sharply defined figures,
the great green flakes of hay, the long file of patient cows, the
advance just arriving 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, his 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 instrument. Or the
road-breakers, sallying forth with oxen and sleds in the still, white
world, the day after the storm, to restore the lost track and demolish
the beleaguering drifts.

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

A severe artist!  No longer the canvas and the pigments, but the marble
and the chisel. When the nights are calm and the moon full, I go out to
gaze upon the wonderful purity of the moonlight and the snow. The air
is full of latent fire, and the cold warms me--after a different
fashion from that of the kitchen stove. The world lies about me in a
"trance of snow." The clouds are pearly and iridescent, and 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 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. Presently 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 mountains, and the panther to scream, there
is nothing to be compared with it. So wild! I get up in the middle of
the night to hear it. It is refreshing to the ear, and one delights to
know that such wild creatures are among us. At this season Nature makes
the most of every throb of life that can withstand her severity. How
heartily she indorses this fox! In what bold relief stand out the lives
of all walkers of the snow! The snow is a great tell-tale, and blabs as
effectually as it obliterates. I go into the woods, and know all that
has happened. I cross the fields, and if only a mouse has visited his
neighbor, the fact is chronicled.

The red fox is the only species that abounds in my locality; the little
gray fox seems to prefer a more rocky and precipitous country, and a
less rigorous climate; the cross fox is occasionally seen, and there
are traditions of the silver gray among the oldest hunters. But the red
fox is the sportsman's prize, and the only fur-bearer worthy of note in
these mountains.
[Footnote: A spur of the catskills.]

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 reconnoitring the premises
with an eye to the hen-roost. That clear, sharp track,--there is no
mistaking it for the clumsy footprint of a little dog. All his wildness
and agility are photographed in it. Here he has taken fright, or
suddenly recollected an engagement, and in long, graceful leaps, barely
touching 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
disturbed, but not pursued by the hound, and so absorbed in his private
meditations that he failed to see me, though I stood transfixed with
amazement and admiration, not ten yards distant. I took his measure at
a glance,--a large male, with dark legs, and massive tail tipped with
white,--a most magnificent 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
experience, and concluded that I bagged the game after all, the best
part of it, and fleeced Reynard of something more valuable than his
fur, without his knowledge.

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

The fox usually keeps half a mile ahead, regulating his speed by that
of the hound, occasionally pausing a moment to divert himself with a
mouse, or to contemplate 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 spirited and exciting chase occurs when the farm-dog gets close
upon one in the open field, as sometimes happens in the early morning.
The fox relies so confidently upon his superior speed, that I imagine
he half tempts the dog to the race. But if the dog be a smart one, and
their course lie downhill, over smooth ground, Reynard must put his
best foot forward, and then sometimes suffer the ignominy of being run
over by his pursuer, who, however, 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 mountain, accompanied by your dog, when you are
startled by that wild, half-threatening squall, and in a moment
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, barking,
starts off vigorously, as if to wipe out the dishonor; but in a moment
comes sneaking back more abashed than ever, and owns himself unworthy
to be called a dog. The fox fairly shames him out of the woods. The
secret of the matter is her sex, though her conduct, for the honor of
the fox be it said, seems to be prompted only by solicitude for the
safety of her young.

One of the most notable features of the fox is his large and massive
tail. Seen running on the snow at a distance, his tail is quite as
conspicuous as his body; and, so far from appearing a burden, seems to
contribute to his lightness and buoyancy. It softens the outline of his
movements, and repeats or continues to the eye the ease and poise of
his carriage. But, pursued by the hound on a wet, thawy day, it often
becomes so heavy and bedraggled as to prove a serious inconvenience,
and compels him to take refuge in his den. He is very loath to do this;
both his pride and the traditions of his race stimulate him to run it
out, and win by fair superiority of wind and speed; and only a wound or
a heavy and moppish tail will drive him to avoid the issue in this
manner.

To learn his surpassing shrewdness and cunning, attempt to take him
with a trap. Rogue that he is, he always suspects some trick, and one
must be more of a fox than he is himself to overreach him. At first
sight it would appear easy enough. With apparent 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
remote 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 imagined 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 sifting 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 his way to bring in his fur. The snow had done its 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 footprint 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 remote, 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 is savory and the cold severe. He ventures a
little closer every night, until he can reach and pick a piece from the
surface. Emboldened by success, like other mortals, he presently digs
freely among the ashes, and, finding a fresh supply of the delectable
morsels every night, is soon thrown off his guard and his suspicions
quite lulled. After a week of baiting in this manner, and on the eve of
a light fall of snow, the trapper carefully conceals his trap in the
bed, first smoking it thoroughly with hemlock boughs to kill or
neutralize the 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 remove 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 encumbered with a clog, and is all the
more sure in its hold by yielding to every effort of the animal to
extricate himself.

When Reynard sees his captor approaching, he would fain drop into a
mouse-hole to render himself invisible. He crouches to the ground and
remains perfectly motionless until he perceives himself discovered,
when he makes one desperate and final effort to escape, but ceases all
struggling as you come up, and behaves in a manner that stamps him a
very timid 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 trying to hide by embracing a small tree. Most animals, when
taken in a trap, show fight; but Reynard has more faith in the
nimbleness of his feet than in the terror of his teeth.

Entering the woods, the number and variety of the tracks contrast
strongly with the rigid, frozen aspect of things. Warm jets of life
still shoot and I play amid this snowy desolation. Fox-tracks are far
less numerous than in the fields; but those of hares, skunks,
partridges, squirrels, and mice abound. The mice tracks are very
pretty, and look like a sort of fantastic stitching on the coverlid of
the snow. One is curious to know what brings these tiny creatures from
their retreats; they do not seem to be in quest of food, but rather to
be traveling about for pleasure or sociability, though always going
post-haste, and linking stump with stump and tree with tree by fine,
hurried strides. That is when they travel openly; but they have hidden
passages and winding galleries under the snow, which undoubtedly are
their main avenues of communication. Here and there these passages rise
so near the surface as to be covered by only a frail 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 as the
white-footed mouse,--a very beautiful creature, nocturnal in his
habits, with large ears, and large, fine eyes full of a wild, harmless
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
beechnuts 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 common in the fields, particularly in the fall, amid
the corn and potatoes. When routed by the plow, I have seen the old one
take flight with half a dozen young hanging to her teats, and with such
reckless speed that some of the young would lose their hold and fly off
amid the weeds. Taking refuge in a stump with the rest of her family,
the anxious mother would presently come back and hunt up the missing
ones.

The snow-walkers are mostly night-walkers also, and the record they
leave upon the snow is the main clew one has to their life and doings.
The hare is nocturnal in its habits, and though a very lively creature
at night, with regular courses and run-ways through the wood, is
entirely quiet by day. Timid as he is, he makes little effort to
conceal himself, usually squatting beside a log, stump, or tree, and
seeming to avoid rocks and ledges, where he might be partially housed
from the cold and the snow, but where also--and this consideration
undoubtedly determines his choice--he would be more apt fall a prey to
his enemies. In this, as well as in many other respects, he differs
from the rabbit proper: 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 express 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 danger, 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 character with a suit
that corresponds with his surroundings,--reddish gray in summer and
white in winter.

The sharp-rayed track of the partridge adds another figure to this
fantastic embroidery upon the winter snow. Her course is a clear,
strong line, sometimes quite wayward, but generally very direct,
steering for the densest, most impenetrable places,--leading you over
logs and through brush, alert and expectant, 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 how rarely we see squirrels in winter! The naturalists say
they are mostly torpid; yet evidently that little pocket-faced
depredator, the chipmunk, was not carrying buckwheat for so many days
to his hole for nothing: was he anticipating a state of torpidity, or
providing against the demands of a very active appetite? Red and gray
squirrels are more or less active all winter, though very shy, and, I
am inclined to think, partially nocturnal in their habits. Here a gray
one has just passed,--came down that tree and went up this; there he
dug for a beechnut, and left the burr on the 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 wheat there? In attempting to return,
the adventurous creature was frequently run down and caught in the deep
snow.

His home is in the trunk of some old birch or maple, 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 is 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 pleasure, or
for sanitary reasons or domestic convenience, the naturalist has
forgotten to mention.

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 advantage over him, and in speed and
nimbleness cannot 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.

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 woods 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
acquired new powers, and there is no movement to confuse 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 acquaintance. 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
awhile unobserved, and making up his mind that you are not 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 distinguished 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 about the barns and grain-fields. He is most abundant in
old barkpeelings, and low, dilapidated hemlocks, from which he makes
excursions to the fields and orchards, spinning along the tops of the
fences, which afford not only convenient lines of communication, 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 mischief he does. At home, in the woods, he is the most
frolicsome and loquacious. The appearance of anything 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 hopping into position on a limb and dancing
to the music of his own cackle, and all for your special benefit.

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 laugher. "What a ridiculous
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
capers about in his best style. Again, he would seem to tease you and
provoke your attention; then suddenly assumes a tone of good-natured,
childlike defiance and derision. That pretty little imp, the chipmunk,
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 didn't!" comes up from the depth of
his retreat.

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 footprints so close together that the trail
appears like a chain of curiously carved links. Sir Mephitis mephitica,
or, in plain English, the skunk, has awakened 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 outbuildings, and
sometimes taking up his quarters for the season under the haymow. There
is no such word as hurry in his dictionary, as you may see by his path
upon the snow. He has a very sneaking, insinuating way, and goes
creeping about the fields and woods, never once in a perceptible degree
altering his gait, and, if a fence crosses his course, steers for a
break or opening to avoid climbing. He is too indolent even to dig his
own hole, but appropriates that of a woodchuck, or hunts out a crevice
in the rocks, from which he extends his rambling in all directions,
preferring damp, thawy weather. He has very little discretion or
cunning, and holds a trap in utter 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 fields at
twilight, I have come near stepping upon him, and was much the more
disturbed of the two. When attacked in the open field 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 entertain 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.

He has a secret to keep and knows it, and is careful 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, manoeuvring carefully and
deliberately to extricate his foot from 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 a cat's! When about a third grown, he looks so well that
one covets 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.

No animal is more cleanly in his 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 plundering 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
happened?  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 closely 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
find her out, and, by the same sleight of hand, remove every egg,
leaving only the empty blood-stained shells to witness against him. The
birds, especially 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
refined 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 eyewater, 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 in the farmers face, and with such admirable effect that,
for a few minutes, he was completely blinded, and powerless to revenge
himself upon the rogue, who embraced the opportunity to make good his
escape; but he declared that afterwards his eyes felt as if purged by
fire, and his sight was much clearer.

In March that brief summary of a bear, the raccoon, comes out of his
den in the ledges, and leaves his sharp digitigrade track upon the
snow,--traveling 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 around the fields, so reduced by starvation as to be
quite helpless, and offering no resistance to my taking them up by the
tail and carrying them home.

The old ones also become very much emaciated, and come boldly up to the
barn or other outbuildings in quest of food. I remember, one morning in
early spring, of hearing old Cuff, the farm-dog, barking 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 objects 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 unusual
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 branch 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 clearly a purpose to advance to the attack. This
caused his pursuer to descend to the ground 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.

They 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.

They are considered game only in the fall, or towards 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 sets out about eight or nine o'clock of a dark, moonless night,
and stealthily approaches 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 up 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 a 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 pellmell rush of the cooning party up the hill, into the
woods, through the brush and the darkness, falling over prostrate
trees, pitching into gullies and hollows, losing hats and tearing
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 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 fugitive and cannot keep his
place. Invisible hands deface 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 reluctantly the gray old hero
retreats up the mountain, till finally the south rain comes in earnest,
and in a night he is dead.



IV. 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.
The beaver, for instance, was gone before the earliest settlers could
get a sight of him; and even the mink and 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 game 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 neighborhood, filling the
mountains with his bayings, and leaving no nook or byway of them
unexplored, was enough to drive and scare every fox from the country.
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 staying were two foxhounds, 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,
attended 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 bolder,
coming at night within a few rods of the house, and of the unchained
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 disappeared, and, as they did not come back
till near night, it was inferred that they had cut short Reynard'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 next 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 objects 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 apprehension 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, roosting in a row on the
fence near by, 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 locality 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 much excitement. Perchance one turkey is minus her tail, the
fox having succeeded in getting only a mouthful of quills.

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 pasture just beyond a wood. It so happened that
they caught sight of the dog without seeing me, when instantly, with
the celerity of wild game, they launched into the air, and, while the
old one perched upon a treetop, as if to keep an eye on the supposed
enemy, the young went sailing over the trees toward 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 schoolboy, would
frequently steal off and have a good hunt all by themselves, 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 dragging themselves along, stiff,
footsore, gaunt, and hungry. For a day or two afterward they lay about
the kennels, seeming to dread nothing so much as the having to move.
The stolen hunt was their "spree," 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 slow, 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 perplexity 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
devices 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 himself. 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 availing 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
hard, polished snow took no imprint of the light foot, and the scent
was no doubt less than it would have been on a rougher surface. Maybe,
also, the rogue had considered the chances of another sleigh coming
along, before the hound, and obliterating the trail entirely.

Audubon tells us of a certain fox, which, when started 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 retain a particle of the scent, and the hound gives a
loud, long, peculiar bark, to signify he has trouble. It is now his
turn to show his wit, which he often does by passing completely around
the field, and resuming the trail again where it crosses the fence or a
strip of snow.

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 is always wet? Examine
the nose of a foxhound, for instance; how very moist and sensitive!
Cause this moisture to dry up, and the dog would be as powerless 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 much 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 the 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, mountainous 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, shoots him down.

I recently had the pleasure of a turn with some experienced hunters.
As we ascended the ridge toward the mountain, keeping in our ears the
uncertain baying 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 the 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 apple 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 habitually pass any particular point, yet
the hunters told me that year after year they took about the same
turns, each generation of foxes running through the upper corner of
that field, or crossing the valley near yonder 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 undoubtedly 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
listening 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 seems to be reverted toward his pursuers. He is constantly
pausing, looking back 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 discrimination 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 difference. 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 smelled 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 lightning. 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 detected in some mischief.

Late in the afternoon, as we were passing through a piece of woods in
the valley below, another fox, the third that day, broke from his cover
in an old treetop, 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 cutting him off by the old orchard, through which we were
again assured he would surely pass, made a precipitous 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 probably
be there in twelve or fifteen minutes. Running up an angle of 45
degrees seems quite easy work for a four-footed beast like a dog or a
fox, but for a two-legged animal like a man it is very heavy and
awkward. Before I got halfway up there seemed to be a vacuum 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 fusillade had given
him, and was making unusually quick time. I was armed with a rifle, and
said to myself that 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 his 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, the wind favoring, call him within a few paces of you. Secrete
yourself behind the fence, or some other object, 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 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 a 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 suspicion. 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 a den, a trap can be set so that the poor creature has the
desperate alternative of being caught or starving. 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 will uncover the trap, and leave the marks of his contempt 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 emboldened to dig for several
successive nights for morsels of toasted cheese.

A light fall of snow aids the trapper's art and conspires 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
represented a peasant driving an ox-team from the offside! 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.

I have never been able to see clearly why the mother fox generally
selects a burrow or hole in the open field in which to have her young,
except it be, as some hunters maintain, for better security. The 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 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. The parent fox can never be caught in the den with them,
but is hovering near the woods, which are always at hand, and by her
warning cry or bark tells them when to be on their guard. She usually
has at least three, dens, at no great distance apart, and moves
stealthily in the night with her charge from one to the other, so as to
mislead her enemies. Many a party of boys, and of men, too, discovering
the whereabouts 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 old 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 powder in its
mouth,--a hint which the shrewd animal knew how to interpret.

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 of the family called
Canidae, or dogs. The wolf is a kind of wild dog, and the fox is a kind
of wolf. Foxes, unlike wolves, however, never go in packs or companies,
but hunt singly. The fox has a kind of bark which suggests the dog, as
have all the members of this family. The kinship is further shown by
the fact that during certain periods, for the most part in the summer,
the dog cannot be made to attack or even to pursue the female fox, but
will run from her in the most shamefaced manner, which he will not do
in the case of any other animal except a wolf. Many of the ways and
manners of the fox, when tamed, are also like the dog's. I once saw a
young red fox exposed for sale in the market in Washington. A colored
man had him, and said he had caught him out in Virginia. He led him by
a small chain, as he would a puppy, and the innocent young rascal would
lie on his side and bask and sleep in the sunshine, amid all the noise
and chaffering around him, precisely like a dog. He was about the size
of a full-grown cat, and there was a bewitching beauty about him that I
could hardly resist. On another occasion, I saw a gray fox, about two
thirds grown, playing with a dog of about the same size, and by nothing
in the manners of either could you tell which was the dog and which the
fox.

Some naturalists think there are but two permanent species of the fox
in the United States, namely, the gray fox and the red fox, though
there are five or six varieties. The gray fox, which is much smaller
and less valuable than the red, is the Southern species, and is said to
be rarely found north of Maryland, though in certain rocky localities
along the Hudson it is common.

In the Southern States this fox is often hunted in the English fashion,
namely, on horseback, the riders tearing through the country in pursuit
till the animal is run down and caught. This is the only fox that will
tree. When too closely pressed, instead of taking to a den or a 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 it
gives place to the Arctic fox, which most of the season is white.

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

The cross fox is dark brown on its muzzle and extremities, with a cross
of red and black on its shoulders and breast, which peculiarity of
coloring, and not any trait in its character, gives it its name. It is
very rare, and few hunters have ever seen one. The American Fur Company
used to obtain annually from fifty to one hundred skins. The skins
formerly sold for twenty-five dollars, though I believe they now bring
only about five dollars.

The black or silver-gray fox is the rarest of all, and its skin the
most valuable. The Indians used to estimate it equal to forty beaver
skins. The great fur companies seldom collect in a single season more
than four or five skins at any one post. Most of those of the American
Fur Company come from the head-waters of the Mississippi. One of the
younger Audubons shot one in northern New York. The fox had been seen
and fired at many times by the hunters of the neighborhood, and had
come to have the reputation of leading a charmed life, and of being
invulnerable to anything but a silver bullet. But Audubon brought her
down (for it was a female) on the second trial. She had a litter of
young in the vicinity, 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 same 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 silvergray, whence has arisen the notion that the
black and the silver-gray are distinct varieties. The tip of the tail
is always white.

In almost every neighborhood there are traditions of this fox, and it
is the dream of young sportsmen; but I have yet to meet the person who
has seen one. I should go well to the north, into the British
Possessions, if I were 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 is of comparatively recent
date.



V. A MARCH CHRONICLE

ON THE POTOMAC

March 1.--The first day of spring and the first spring day!  I felt the
change the moment I put my head out of doors in the morning. A fitful,
gusty 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 before 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 during 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 retreats, and leaped and
sported about the mouths of the rivers, ready to dart up them if the
genial influence continued. The bees in the hive also, or in the old
tree in the woods, no doubt awoke to new life; and the hibernating
animals, the bears and woodchucks, rolled up in their subterranean
dens,--I imagine 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 Virginia 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 farmhouse 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 northward 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 beginning 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 Tennessee 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 awhile on the prairies, or alighting in the great
cornfields, 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 elusivc 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 the water. Mud is the mother now;
and out of it creep the frogs, the turtles, the crawfish.

In the North how goes the season?  The winter is perchance just
breaking up. The old frost king is 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 excursions up from the bay, to see
what the prospects are. In the lumber countries, along the upper
Kennebec and Penobscot, and along the northern Hudson, starters are at
work with their pikes and hooks starting out the pine logs on the first
spring freshet. All winter, through the deep snows, they have been
hauling them to the bank of the stream, or placing them where the tide
would reach them. Now, in countless, 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
Philadelphia or beyond.

In the inland farming districts what are the signs?  Few and faint, but
very suggestive. The sun has power to melt the snow; and in the meadows
all the knolls are bare, and the sheep are gnawing them industriously.
The drifts on the side-hills also begin to have a worn and dirty look,
and, where they cross the highway, to become soft, letting the teams in
up to their bellies. The oxen labor and grunt, or patiently 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 burrs and pieces of bark have absorbed the
heat till they have sunk halfway 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 between the sun and
frost fairly begins, sugar weather begins; and the more even the
contest, the more the sweet. 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 unlock 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 at night, with a bright,
warm sun next day, wind in the west, and no signs of a storm, the veins
of the maples fairly thrill. Pierce the bark anywhere, and out gushes
the clear, sweet liquid. But let the wind change to the south and blow
moist and warm, destroying 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 anything 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 rainstorm, 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 must have a white
tail, and "come off" cold. Presently 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 delightful 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 subsequent 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 perished, 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 for
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
worthies sentry the woods on the northwest, and confront 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-creampan-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 shortbodied,
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,--three 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 with a tall, long-trunked
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 quality, 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 is the first spring work, and takes one to the woods.
The robins are just arriving, and their merry calls ring through the
glades. The squirrels are now venturing out, and the woodpeckers and
nuthatches run briskly up the trees. The crow begins to caw, with his
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 sunlight; I smell the dry leaves, and
the mould under them just quickened 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 garment, 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, the discovery of it
dating back into the early history of New England. The first settlers
usually caught the sap in rude troughs, and boiled it down in kettles
slung to a pole by a chain, the fire being built around them. The first
step in the way of improvement 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 economize 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 network 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 in 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 died away by mid-forenoon, and the day settled
down so softly and lovingly upon the earth, touching everything,
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, the ground settled, the jocund
season steps forth into April with a bright and confident look.


VI. AUTUMN TIDES

The season is always a little behind the sun in our climate, just as
the tide is always a little behind the moon. According to the calendar,
the summer ought to culminate about the 21st of June, but in reality it
is some weeks later; June is a maiden month all through. It is not high
noon in nature till about the first or second week in July. When the
chestnut-tree blooms, the meridian of the year is reached. By the first
of August it is fairly one o'clock. The lustre of the season begins to
dim, the foliage of the trees and woods to tarnish, the plumage of the
birds to fade, and their songs to cease. The hints of approaching 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 snowflake 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 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 roadside 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 careering and soaring does not fairly begin
till its burden 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 expected to be one of the most troublesome and
abundant of weeds. But such is not the case; the more pernicious and
baffling weeds, like snapdragon or blind nettles, are more local and
restricted in their habits, and unable to fly at all.

In the fall, the battles of the spring are fought 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 contending 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 gaining
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 ripening" of the foliage of the trees, but it
is presently beaten back again, and the genial warmth repossesses the
land. Before long, however, the cold returns to the charge with
augmented forces and gains much ground.

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

An equilibrium, however, is usually reached in our climate in October,
sometimes the most marked in November, forming the delicious Indian
summer; a truce is declared, and both forces, heat and cold, meet and
mingle in friendly converse on the field. In the earlier season, this
poise of the temperature, this slack-water in nature, comes in May and
June; but the October calm is most marked. Day after day, and sometimes
week after week, you cannot tell which way the current is setting.
Indeed, there is no current, 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 Indian summer,
all gold by day, and, when the moon came, all silver by night. The
river was so smooth at 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 atmosphere 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."

But what a terrible winter followed! what a savage chief the fair
Indian maiden gave birth to!

This halcyon period of our autumn will always in 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 become conspicuous again. The trees attract all eyes
as in May. The birds come forth from their summer privacy and parody
their spring reunions and rivalries; some of them sing a little after a
silence of months. The robins, bluebirds, meadowlarks, sparrows, crows,
all sport, and call, and behave in a manner suggestive of spring. The
cock grouse drums in the woods as he did in April and May. The pigeons
reappear, and the wild geese and ducks. The witch-hazel blooms. The
trout spawns. The streams are again full. The air is humid, and the
moisture rises in the ground. Nature is breaking camp, as in spring she
was going into camp. The 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 subtle 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 Herodotus 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 subsiding flame.

It is rarely that an artist succeeds in painting unmistakably the
difference between sunrise and sunset; and it is equally a trial of his
skill to put upon canvas 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 more
solid, the contrasts more sharp. The rays of the morning sun chisel out
and cut down the shadows 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 sympathize 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; another 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 channels; 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 combustion, 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 magnet 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
lightning.

To-day, October 21, I found the air in the bushy fields and lanes under
the woods loaded with the perfume of the witch-hazel,--a sweetish,
sickening odor. With the blooming of this bush, Nature says,
"Positively 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 in the fall, and keep the secret till spring. How
comes the witch-hazel to be the one exception, and to celebrate its
floral nuptials on the funeral day of its foliage? No doubt it will be
found that the spirit of some lovelorn 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 complete.  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
chestnut blossoms at the top in midsummer.

A peculiar feature of our fall may sometimes be seen of a clear
afternoon late in the season. Looking athwart the fields under the
sinking sun, the ground appears covered with a shining veil of
gossamer. A fairy net, invisible at midday 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 the 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 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 Whitman:--

         "A noiseless patient spider,
   I mark'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 tireless spreading them.

   "And you, O 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, O my
         soul."

To return a little, September may be described as the month of tall
weeds. Where they have been suffered to stand, along fences, by
roadsides, and in forgotten corners,--redroot, pigweed, ragweed,
vervain, goldenrod, 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 roadside, because here they
are comparatively safe; and ragged and dusty, like the common tramps
that they are, they form one of the characteristic features of early
fall.

I have often noticed in what haste certain weeds are at times to
produce their seeds. Redroot will grow three or four feet high when it
has the whole 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
represent their root, June and July their stalk, and August and
September their flower and seed. Hence, when the stalk months are
stricken out, as in the present 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 solicitude to reproduce
themselves. But I have not observed that any of the cereals are so
worldly wise. They have not had to think and to shift for themselves as
the weeds have. It does indeed look like a kind of forethought in the
redroot. 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 roadsides are in places in early autumn,--rich to the
eye that goes hurriedly by and does not look too closely,--with the
profusion of goldenrod 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 fence corner or crowning a ledge of rocks, the dark
green of the cedar with the still fire of the woodbine at its heart. I
wonder if the waysides of other lands present any analogous spectacles
at this season.

Then, when the maples have burst out into color, showing like great
bonfires along the hills, there is indeed a feast for the eye. A maple
before your windows in October, when the sun shines upon it, will make
up for a good deal of the light it has excluded; it fills the room with
a soft goldenglow.

Thoreau, I believe, was the first to remark upon the individuality of
trees of the same species with respect 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 come the red-streak, the
yellow-sweet, and others. There are windfalls 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 foliage 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 on it, as upon the
grape or plum. Amid a grove of yellow maple, it makes a most pleasing
contrast.

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
themselves in the earth. The woodchuck is in his hibernaculum, 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
chipmunk 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 disturbance in the woods, near where the chipmunk has
his den, will cause him to shift his quarters. One October, 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 prolonged
absences, he began to carry out; he had determined to move; if the
mountain fell, he, at least, would be away in time. So, by mouthfuls or
cheekfuls, 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 are more or less active all winter, but October and
November are their festal months. Invade some butternut 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
ventriloquial 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 teasing 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 disturbed 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 and storms here, and
waiting for the Indian summer 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
winter dormitories; the fires of life banked up, and burning 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 November, 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 whashings 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 temperature 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 themselves upon the day. The sunlight
is diluted with darkness. The colors fade from the landscape, and only
the sheen of the river lights up the gray and brown distance.



VII. THE APPLE

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

Not a little of the sunshine of our northern winters is surely wrapped
up in the apple. How could we winter over without it! How is life
sweetened by its mild acids! A cellar well filled with apples is more
valuable than a chamber filled with flax and wool. So much sound, ruddy
life to draw upon, to strike one's roots down into, as it were.

Especially to those whose soil of life is inclined to be a little
clayey and heavy, is the apple a winter necessity. It is the natural
antidote of most of the ills the flesh is heir to. Full of vegetable
acids and aromatics, qualities which act as refrigerants and
antiseptics, what an enemy it is to jaundice, indigestion, torpidity of
liver, etc.! It is a gentle spur and tonic to the whole biliary system.
Then I have read that it has been found by analysis to contain more
phosphorus than any other vegetable. This makes it the proper food of
the scholar and the sedentary man; it feeds his brain and it stimulates
his liver. Nor is this all. Besides its hygienic properties, the apple
is 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 substantial
nutriment. The French and Germans use apples extensively; so do the
inhabitants of all European nations. The laborers depend upon them as
an article of food, and frequently make a dinner of sliced apples and
bread."

Yet the English apple is a tame and insipid affair, compared with the
intense, sun-colored, and sunsteeped fruit our orchards yield. The
English have no sweet apple, I am told, the saccharine element
apparently being less abundant in vegetable nature in that sour and
chilly climate than in our own.

It is well known that the European maple yields no sugar, while both
our birch and hickory have sweet in their veins. Perhaps this fact
accounts for our excessive love of sweets, which may be said to be a
national trait.

The Russian apple has a lovely complexion, smooth and transparent, but
the Cossack is not yet all eliminated from it. The only one I have
seen--the Duchess of Oldenburg--is as beautiful as a Tartar princess,
with a distracting odor, but it is the least bit puckery to the taste.

The best thing I know about Chili is, not its guano beds, but this fact
which I learn from Darwin's "Voyage," namely, that the apple thrives
well there. Darwin 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 large branches cut off in the
spring and planted two or three feet deep in the ground send out roots
and develop into fine, fullbearing 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 the pigs eat little or no other food. He does not add that
the people are healthy and temperate, 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, unless it were the bees? There is a
variety in our orchards called the winesap, a doubly liquid name that
suggests what might be done with this fruit.

The apple is the commonest and yet the most varied and beautiful of
fruits. A dish of them is as becoming to the centre-table in winter as
was the vase of flowers in the summer,--a bouquet of spitzenburgs and
greenings and northern spies. A rose when it blooms, the apple is a
rose when it 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 into
wine!

How pleasing to the touch!  I love to stroke its polished rondure with
my hand, to carry it in my pocket on my tramp over the winter hills, or
through the early spring woods. You are company, you red-checked 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 are 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 independent vegetable existence, alive
and vascular as my own flesh; capable of being wounded, bleeding,
wasting away, or almost of repairing damages!

How it resists 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; it peeps 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 enliven their circulation. But they
can stand it nearly as long 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; thriving
best where he thrives best, loving the limestone and the frost, the
plow and the pruning-knife: you are indeed suggestive of hardy,
cheerful industry, and a healthy life in the open air. Temperate,
chaste fruit! you mean neither luxury nor sloth, neither satiety nor
indolence, neither enervating heats nor the frigid zones. Uncloying
fruit,--fruit whose best 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 brightest; 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 and honest, so
sturdy and appetizing. You are stocky and homely like the northern
races. Your quality is Saxon. Surely the fiery and impetuous south is
not akin to you. Not spices or olives, or the sumptuous liquid fruits,
but the grass, the snow, the grains, the coolness, is akin to you. I
think if I could subsist on you, or the like of you, I should never
have an intemperate or ignoble thought, never be feverish or
despondent. So far as I could absorb or transmute your quality, I
should be cheerful, continent, equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived,
and should shed warmth and contentment around.

Is there any other fruit that has so much facial expression 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
pippin, or the gentle but sharp-nosed gillyflower. 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
varieties.

In the dark he can usually tell them by the sense of touch.  There is
not only the size and shape, but there is the texture and polish. Some
apples are coarse-grained and some are fine; some are thinskinned 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,--weatherstained, freckled, lasting, and rugged; others are
indeed lady apples, fair, delicate, shining, mildflavored,
white-meated, like the egg-drop and the lady-finger. The practiced 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 earth, 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 manure, and the
precious pile was left in silence and darkness till spring. No marmot,
hibernating under ground in his nest of leaves and dry grass, more cozy
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 qualities, 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 exposes, 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 Talman sweet; you imagine you can
feel that single meridian line that divides it into two hemispheres.
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 and you bag it
at once. When you were a schoolboy, you stowed these away in your
pockets, and ate them along the road and at recess, and again at
noontime; and they, in a measure, corrected the effects of the cake and
pie with which your indulgent mother filled your lunchbasket.

The boy is indeed the true apple-eater, and is not to be questioned how
he came by the fruit with which his pockets are filled. It belongs to
him, and he may steal it if it cannot be had in any other way. His own
juicy flesh craves the juicy flesh of the apple. Sap draws sap. His
fruit-eating has little reference to the state of his appetite. Whether
he be full of meat or empty of meat, he wants the apple just the same.
Before meal or after meal it never comes amiss. The farm-boy munches
apples all day long. He has nests of them in the haymow, mellowing, to
which he makes frequent visits. Sometimes old Brindle, having access
through the open door, smells them out and makes short work of them.

In some countries the custom remains of placing a rosy apple in the
hand of the dead, that they may find it when they enter paradise. In
northern mythology the giants eat apples to keep off old age.

The apple is indeed the fruit of youth.  As we grow old we crave apples
less. It is an ominous sign. When you are ashamed to be seen eating
them on the street; when you can carry them in your pocket and your
hand not constantly find its way to them; when your neighbor has aples
and you have none, and you make no nocturnal visits to his orchard;
when you lunch-basket is without them, and you can pass a winter's
night by the fireside with not thought of the fruit at your
elbow,--then be assured you are no longer a boy, either in heart or in
years.

The genuine apple-eater comforts himself with an apple in its season,
as others do with a pipe or a 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. Whe he takes a walk he arms
himself with apples. His traveling-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 winedow and from the top of the
stage-coach. He would, in time, make the land one vast orchard. He
dispenses with a knife. He prefers that his teeth shall have the first
taste. Then he knows that 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 the skin on.
It improves the color and vastly heightens the flavor of the dish.

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

I instantly sympathized with that clergyman I read of, who on pulling
out his pocket-handkerchief in the midst of his discourse, pulled out
two bouncing apples with it that went rolling across the pulpit floor
and down the pulpit stairs. These apples were, do doubt, to be eaten
after the sermon, on his way home, or to his next appointment. They
would take the taste of it out of his mouth. Then, would a minister be
apt to grow tiresome with tow big apples in his coat-tail pockets?
Would he not naturally hasten along to "lastly" and the big apples? If
they were the dominie apples, and it was April or May, he certainly
would.

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

Emerson, I believe, has spoken of the apple as the social fruit of New
England. Indeed, what a promoter or abettor of social intercourse among
our rural population the apple has been, the company growing more merry
and unrestrained as soon as the basket of apples was passed round! When
the cider followed, the introduction and good understanding were
complete. Then those rural gatherings that enlivened 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 frequently 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 districts. Nearly every farmhouse in the Eastern and
Northern States has its setting or its background of apple-trees, which
generally date back to the first settlement of the farm. Indeed, the
orchard, more than almost any other thing, tends to soften and humanize
the country, and to 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 elsewhere, and
borne fruit till the grass beneath them has become thick and soft from
human contact, and who have nourisbed 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 adjoining field, as if the trees had given back to the
soil more than they had taken from it; as if they had tempered the
elements, and attracted all the genial and beneficent influences in the
landscape around.

An apple orchard is sure to bear you several crops beside the apple.
There is the crop of sweet and tender reminiscences, dating from
childhood and spanning 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 the never-failing crop
of birds,--robins, goldfinches, kingbirds, cedar-birds, hairbirds,
orioles, starlings,--all nesting and breeding in its branches, and
fitly described by Wilson Flagg as "Birds of the Garden and Orchard."
Whether the pippin and sweet bough bear or not, the "punctual birds"
can always be depended on. Indeed, there are few better places to study
ornithology than in the orchard. Besides its regular occupants, 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
apples, 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 redbird 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 come 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 squirrel and chipmunk
esteem its seeds a great rarity.

All the domestic animals love the apple, but none so much 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 to pick out
the ripe ones for her. An apple is an apple, 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.

But the cow is the friend of the apple.  How many trees she has planted
about the farm, in the edge of the woods, and in remote fields and
pastures! The wild apples, celebrated by Thoreau, are mostly of her
planting. She browses them down, to be sure, but they are hers, and why
should she not?

What an individuality the apple-tree has, each variety 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; its large ridgy fruit, in late fall or early winter, is one of
my favorites. Or the thick and more pendent top of the bellflower, with
its equally rich, sprightly, uncloying fruit.

Sweet apples are perhaps the most nutritious, and when baked are a
feast in themselves. With a tree of the Jersey sweet or of the Talman
sweet in bearing, no man's table need be devoid of luxuries and one of
the most wholesome of all desserts. 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 spitzenburg. 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 this variety. They were perfect gems. Not large,--that had
not been the aim,--but small, fair, uniform, and red to the core. How
intense, how spicy and aromatic!

But all the excellences of the apple are not confined 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 of
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 density 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 color 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 indoors.
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 decaying ferns which, with apple
and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie
concealed, fallen into hollows long since, and covered up by the leaves
of the tree itself,--a proper kind of packing. From these
lurkingplaces, anywhere within the circumference of the tree, I draw
forth the fruit all wet and glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and
hollowed out by crickets, and perhaps with 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
not better than those in barrels, more crisp and lively than they. If
these resources fail to yield anything, I have learned to look between
the bases of the suckers which spring thickly from some horizontal
limb, for now and then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an
alderclump, where they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may
have smelled them out. If I am sharp-set,--for I do not refuse the
blue-pearmain,--I fill my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my
steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I
eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance."



VIII. AN OCTOBER ABROAD

       I. MELLOW ENGLAND

I will say at the outset, as I believe some one else has 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 guidebooks and in innumerable books
of travel. I shall only attempt to give an account of the pleasure and
satisfaction 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 moment 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 wildness, savageness, and mercilessness
of nature till he has 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,--might confront such awful purity and
coldness. An astronomic solitariness and remoteness encompass the sea.
The earth and all remembrance of it is blotted out; there is no hint of
it anywhere. This is not water, this cold, blue-black, vitreous liquid.
It suggests, not life, but death. Indeed, the regions of everlasting
ice and snow are not more cold and inhuman 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 amusing to observe his
coolness and haughty unconcern in that sad plight he was in; by nothing
in his manner betraying that he was several hundred miles at sea, and
did not know how he was going to get back to land. But presently I
noticed he found it not inconsistent with his dignity to alight on the
rigging under friendly cover of the tops'l, where I saw his 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 titlark, 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 promenaders, 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, after circling about for a few moments, back it would
come, more discouraged 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 indifferent 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 actually perish in the sea
during their autumn migration, 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 common
birds, such as robins, starlings, grosbeaks, 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 lighthouses 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
lighthouse on the Isles of Shoals, one morning after a storm, the
ground being still strewn with birds of all kinds that had dashed
themselves 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 sized hole it is, extending from the banks of
Newfoundland to Ireland, and in all seasons and weathers it seems to be
well stirred up.

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
bottom 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 imaginary rattle
of his wagon was like the sound of lutes and harps, and I would rather
have clung to his axletree than have been rocked in the best berth in
the ship.


LAND

On the tenth day, about four o'clock in the afternoon, 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 mountains, 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 have but once in
his life, when he first sets eyes upon a foreign land; and in my case,
to this feeling was added the delightful thought that the "devil's
hole" would soon be cleared and my long fast over.

Presently, after the darkness had set in, signal rockets were let off
from the stern of the vessel, writing 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 consumes
about one hundred tons of coal per day, it is easy 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 not carry coal
enough to enable it to make the passage.

On the morrow, a calm, lustrous day, we steamed at our leisure up the
Channel and across the Irish Sea, the coast of Wales, and her groups of
lofty mountains, 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 snow.


ASHORE

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 generally 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 suddenly emerged
from a condition bordering on that of the hibernating animals--a
condition in which I had neither eaten, 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 beholding,--that it was
England, the old mother at last, no longer a faith or a fable, but an
actual fact there before my eyes and under my feet,--why should I not
exult? Go to! I will be indulged. Those trees, those fields, that bird
darting along the hedge-rows, those men and boys picking blackberries
in October, those English flowers by the roadside (stop the carriage
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 m

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