The Writings of John Burroughs — Volume 05: Pepacton
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Title: The Writings of John Burroughs — Volume 05: Pepacton
Author: John Burroughs
Release date: February 1, 2005 [eBook #7441]
Most recently updated: December 30, 2020
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7441
Credits: This etext was produced by Jack Eden; wakerobin.org
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS — VOLUME 05: PEPACTON ***
This etext was produced by Jack Eden; wakerobin.org
THE WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS
WITH PORTRAITS AND MANY ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME V
PEPACTON
PREFACE
I HAVE all the more pleasure in calling my book after the title of
the first chapter, "Pepacton," because this is the Indian name of
my native stream. In its watershed I was born and passed my youth,
and here on its banks my kindred sleep. Here, also, I have gathered
much of the harvest, poor though it be, that I have put in this and
in previous volumes of my writings.
The term "Pepacton" is said to mean "marriage of the waters;" and
with this significance it suits my purpose well, as this book is
also a union of many currents.
The Pepacton rises in a deep cleft or gorge in the mountains, the
scenery of which is of the wildest and ruggedest character. For a
mile or more there is barely room for the road and the creek at the
bottom of the chasm. On either hand the mountains, interrupted by
shelving, overhanging precipices, rise abruptly to a great height.
About half a century ago a pious Scotch family, just arrived in
this country, came through this gorge. One of the little boys,
gazing upon the terrible desolation of the scene, so unlike in its
savage and inhuman aspects anything he had ever seen at home,
nestled close to his mother, and asked with bated breath, "Mither,
is there a God here?"
Yet the Pepacton is a placid current, especially in its upper
portions, where my youth fell; but all its tributaries are swift
mountain brooks fed by springs the best in the world. It drains a
high pastoral country lifted into long, round-backed hills and
rugged, wooded ranges by the subsiding impulse of the Catskill
range of mountains, and famous for its superior dairy and other
farm products. It is many long years since, with the restlessness
of youth, I broke away from the old ties amid those hills; but my
heart has always been there, and why should I not come back and
name one of my books for the old stream?
CONTENTS
I. PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE
II. SPRINGS
III. AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE
IV. NATURE AND THE POETS.
V. NOTES BY THE WAY
VI. FOOTPATHS....
VII. A BUNCH OF HERBS
VIII. WINTER PICTURES
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FRINGED GENTIAN
From a photograph by
Herbert W. Gleason
THE ASA GRAY SPRING.
From a photograph by
Herbert W. Gleason
KINGBIRD
From a drawing by L. A.
Fuertes
RED-WINGED BLACKBIRD
From a photograph by
Herbert W. Gleason
IN THE ORCHARD
From a drawing by Charles
H. Woodbury
A MUSKRAT'S NEST
From a photograph by
Herbert W. Gleason
A FIELD PATH
From a photograph by
Clifton Johnson
PEPACTON
I
A SUMMER VOYAGE
WHEN one summer day I bethought me of a voyage down the east or
Pepacton branch of the Delaware, I seemed to want some excuse for
the start, some send-off, some preparation, to give the enterprise
genesis and head. This I found in building my own boat. It was a
happy thought. How else should I have got under way, how else
should I have raised the breeze? The boat-building warmed the
blood; it made the germ take; it whetted my appetite for the
voyage. There is nothing like serving an apprenticeship to fortune,
like earning the right to your tools. In most enterprises the
temptation is always to begin too far along; we want to start where
somebody else leaves off. Go back to the stump, and see what an
impetus you get. Those fishermen who wind their own flies before
they go a-fishing,--how they bring in the trout; and those hunters
who run their own bullets or make their own cartridges,-- the game
is already mortgaged to them.
When my boat was finished--and it was a very simple affair--I was
as eager as a boy to be off; I feared the river would all run by
before I could wet her bottom in it. This enthusiasm begat great
expectations of the trip. I should surely surprise Nature and win
some new secrets from her. I should glide down noiselessly upon her
and see what all those willow screens and baffling curves
concealed. As a fisherman and pedestrian I had been able to come at
the stream only at certain points: now the most private and
secluded retreats of the nymph would be opened to me; every bend
and eddy, every cove hedged in by swamps or passage walled in by
high alders, would be at the beck of my paddle.
Whom shall one take with him when he goes a-courting Nature? This
is always a vital question. There are persons who will stand
between you and that which you seek: they obtrude themselves; they
monopolize your attention; they blunt your sense of the shy, half-
revealed intelligences about you. I want for companion a dog or a
boy, or a person who has the virtues of dogs and boys,--
transparency, good-nature, curiosity, open sense, and a nameless
quality that is akin to trees and growths and the inarticulate
forces of nature. With him you are alone, and yet have company; you
are free; you feel no disturbing element; the influences of nature
stream through him and around him; he is a good conductor of the
subtle fluid. The quality or qualification I refer to belongs to
most persons who spend their lives in the open air,--to soldiers,
hunters, fishers, laborers, and to artists and poets of the right
sort. How full of it, to choose an illustrious example, was such a
man as Walter Scott!
But no such person came in answer to my prayer, so I set out alone.
It was fit that I put my boat into the water at Arkville, but it
may seem a little incongruous that I should launch her into Dry
Brook; yet Dry Brook is here a fine large trout stream, and I soon
found its waters were wet enough for all practical purposes. The
Delaware is only one mile distant, and I chose this as the easiest
road from the station to it. A young farmer helped me carry the
boat to the water, but did not stay to see me off; only some calves
feeding alongshore witnessed my embarkation. It would have been a
godsend to boys, but there were no boys about. I stuck on a rift
before I had gone ten yards, and saw with misgiving the paint
transferred from the bottom of my little scow to the tops of the
stones thus early in the journey. But I was soon making fair
headway, and taking trout for my dinner as I floated along. My
first mishap was when I broke the second joint of my rod on a bass,
and the first serious impediment to my progress was when I
encountered the trunk of a prostrate elm bridging the stream within
a few inches of the surface. My rod mended and the elm cleared, I
anticipated better sailing when I should reach the Delaware itself;
but I found on this day and on subsequent days that the Delaware
has a way of dividing up that is very embarrassing to the
navigator. It is a stream of many minds: its waters cannot long
agree to go all in the same channel, and whichever branch I took I
was pretty sure to wish I had taken one of the others. I was
constantly sticking on rifts, where I would have to dismount, or
running full tilt into willow banks, where I would lose my hat or
endanger my fishing-tackle. On the whole, the result of my first
day's voyaging was not encouraging. I made barely eight miles, and
my ardor was a good deal dampened, to say nothing about my
clothing. In mid-afternoon I went to a well-to-do-looking
farmhouse and got some milk, which I am certain the thrifty
housewife skimmed, for its blueness infected my spirits, and I went
into camp that night more than half persuaded to abandon the
enterprise in the morning. The loneliness of the river, too, unlike
that of the fields and woods, to which I was more accustomed,
oppressed me. In the woods, things are close to you, and you
touch them and seem to interchange something with them; but upon
the river, even though it be a narrow and shallow one like this,
you are more isolated, farther removed from the soil and its
attractions, and an easier prey to the unsocial demons. The long,
unpeopled vistas ahead; the still, dark eddies; the endless
monotone and soliloquy of the stream; the unheeding rocks basking
like monsters along the shore, half out of the water, half in; a
solitary heron starting up here and there, as you rounded some
point, and flapping disconsolately ahead till lost to view, or
standing like a gaunt spectre on the umbrageous side of the
mountain, his motionless form revealed against the dark green as
you passed; the trees and willows and alders that hemmed you in on
either side, and hid the fields and the farmhouses and the road
that ran near by,--these things and others aided the skimmed milk
to cast a gloom over my spirits that argued ill for the success of
my undertaking. Those rubber boots, too, that parboiled my feet and
were clogs of lead about them,--whose spirits are elastic enough to
endure them? A malediction upon the head of him who invented them!
Take your old shoes, that will let the water in and let it out
again, rather than stand knee-deep all day in these extinguishers.
I escaped from the river, that first night, and took to the woods,
and profited by the change. In the woods I was at home again, and
the bed of hemlock boughs salved my spirits. A cold spring run came
down off the mountain, and beside it, underneath birches and
hemlocks, I improvised my hearthstone. In sleeping on the ground it
is a great advantage to have a back-log; it braces and supports
you, and it is a bedfellow that will not grumble when, in the
middle of the night, you crowd sharply up against it. It serves to
keep in the warmth, also. A heavy stone or other point DE
RÉSISTANCE at your feet is also a help. Or, better still, scoop out
a little place in the earth, a few inches deep, so as to admit your
body from your hips to your shoulders; you thus get an equal
bearing the whole length of you. I am told the Western hunters and
guides do this. On the same principle, the sand makes a good bed,
and the snow. You make a mould in which you fit nicely. My berth
that night was between two logs that the bark-peelers had stripped
ten or more years before. As they had left the bark there, and as
hemlock bark makes excellent fuel, I had more reasons than one to
be grateful to them.
In the morning I felt much refreshed, and as if the night had tided
me over the bar that threatened to stay my progress. If I can steer
clear of skimmed milk, I said, I shall now finish the voyage of
fifty miles to Hancock with increasing pleasure.
When one breaks camp in the morning, he turns back again and again
to see what he has left. Surely, he feels, he has forgotten
something; what is it? But it is only his own sad thoughts and
musings he has left, the fragment of his life he has lived there.
Where he hung his coat on the tree, where he slept on the boughs,
where he made his coffee or broiled his trout over the coals, where
he drank again and again at the little brown pool in the spring
run, where he looked long and long up into the whispering branches
overhead, he has left what he cannot bring away with him,--the
flame and the ashes of himself.
Of certain game-birds it is thought that at times they have the
power of withholding their scent; no hint or particle of themselves
goes out upon the air. I think there are persons whose spiritual
pores are always sealed up, and I presume they have the best time
of it. Their hearts never radiate into the void; they do not yearn
and sympathize without return; they do not leave themselves by the
wayside as the sheep leaves her wool upon the brambles and thorns.
This branch of the Delaware, so far as I could learn, had never
before been descended by a white man in a boat. Rafts of pine and
hemlock timber are run down on the spring and fall freshets, but of
pleasure-seekers in boats I appeared to be the first. Hence my
advent was a surprise to most creatures in the water and out. I
surprised the cattle in the field, and those ruminating leg-deep in
the water turned their heads at my approach, swallowed their
unfinished cuds, and scampered off as if they had seen a spectre. I
surprised the fish on their spawning-beds and feeding-grounds; they
scattered, as my shadow glided down upon them, like chickens when a
hawk appears. I surprised an ancient fisherman seated on a spit of
gravelly beach, with his back upstream, and leisurely angling in
a deep, still eddy, and mumbling to himself. As I slid into the
circle of his vision his grip on the pole relaxed, his jaw dropped,
and he was too bewildered to reply to my salutation for some
moments. As I turned a bend in the river I looked back, and saw
him hastening away with great precipitation. I presume he had
angled there for forty years without having his privacy thus
intruded upon. I surprised hawks and herons and kingfishers. I
came suddenly upon muskrats, and raced with them down the rifts,
they having no time to take to their holes. At one point, as I
rounded an elbow in the stream, a black eagle sprang from the top
of a dead tree, and flapped hurriedly away. A kingbird gave
chase, and disappeared for some moments in the gulf between the
great wings of the eagle, and I imagined him seated upon his back
delivering his puny blows upon the royal bird. I interrupted two
or three minks fishing and hunting alongshore. They would dart
under the bank when they saw me, then presently thrust out their
sharp, weasel-like noses, to see if the danger was imminent. At
one point, in a little cove behind the willows, I surprised some
schoolgirls, with skirts amazingly abbreviated, wading and playing
in the water. And as much surprised as any, I am sure, was that
hard-worked-looking housewife, when I came up from under the bank
in front of her house, and with pail in hand appeared at her door
and asked for milk, taking the precaution to intimate that I had no
objection to the yellow scum that is supposed to rise on a fresh
article of that kind.
"What kind of milk do you want?"
"The best you have. Give me two quarts of it," I replied.
"What do you want to do with it?" with an anxious tone, as if I
might want to blow up something or burn her barns with it.
"Oh, drink it," I answered, as if I frequently put milk to that
use.
"Well, I suppose I can get you some;" and she presently reappeared
with swimming pail, with those little yellow flakes floating about
upon it that one likes to see.
I passed several low dams the second day, but had no trouble. I
dismounted and stood upon the apron, and the boat, with plenty of
line, came over as lightly as a chip, and swung around in the eddy
below like a steed that knows its master. In the afternoon, while
slowly drifting down a long eddy, the moist southwest wind brought
me the welcome odor of strawberries, and running ashore by a
meadow, a short distance below, I was soon parting the daisies and
filling my cup with the dead-ripe fruit. Berries, be they red,
blue, or black, seem like a special providence to the camper-out;
they are luxuries he has not counted on, and I prized these
accordingly. Later in the day it threatened rain, and I drew up to
shore under the shelter of some thick overhanging hemlocks, and
proceeded to eat my berries and milk, glad of an excuse not to
delay my lunch longer. While tarrying here I heard young voices
upstream, and looking in that direction saw two boys coming down
the rapids on rude floats. They were racing along at a lively pace,
each with a pole in his hand, dexterously avoiding the rocks and
the breakers, and schooling themselves thus early in the duties and
perils of the raftsmen. As they saw me one observed to the other, --
"There is the man we saw go by when we were building our floats. If
we had known he was coming so far, maybe we could have got him to
give us a ride."
They drew near, guided their crafts to shore beside me, and tied
up, their poles answering for hawsers. They proved to be Johnny and
Denny Dwire, aged ten and twelve. They were friendly boys, and
though not a bit bashful were not a bit impertinent. And Johnny,
who did the most of the talking, had such a sweet, musical voice;
it was like a bird's. It seems Denny had run away, a day or two
before, to his uncle's, five miles above, and Johnny had been after
him, and was bringing his prisoner home on a float; and it was hard
to tell which was enjoying the fun most, the captor or the
captured.
"Why did you run away?" said I to Denny.
"Oh, 'cause," replied he, with an air which said plainly, "The
reasons are too numerous to mention."
"Boys, you know, will do so, sometimes," said Johnny, and he smiled
upon his brother in a way that made me think they had a very good
understanding upon the subject.
They could both swim, yet their floats looked very perilous,--three
pieces of old plank or slabs, with two cross-pieces and a fragment
of a board for a rider, and made without nails or withes.
"In some places," said Johnny, "one plank was here and another off
there, but we managed, somehow, to keep atop of them."
"Let's leave our floats here, and ride with him the rest of the
way," said one to the other.
"All right; may we, mister? "
I assented, and we were soon afloat again. How they enjoyed the
passage; how smooth it was; how the boat glided along; how quickly
she felt the paddle! They admired her much; they praised my
steersmanship; they praised my fish-pole and all my fixings down to
my hateful rubber boots. When we stuck on the rifts, as we did
several times, they leaped out quickly, with their bare feet and
legs, and pushed us off.
"I think," said Johnny, "if you keep her straight and let her have
her own way, she will find the deepest water. Don't you, Denny?"
"I think she will," replied Denny; and I found the boys were pretty
nearly right.
I tried them on a point of natural history. I had observed, coming
along, a great many dead eels lying on the bottom of the river,
that I supposed had died from spear wounds. "No," said Johnny,
"they are lamper eels. They die as soon as they have built their
nests and laid their eggs."
"Are you sure?"
"That's what they all say, and I know they are lampers."
So I fished one up out of the deep water with my paddle-blade and
examined it; and sure enough it was a lamprey. There was the row of
holes along its head, and its ugly suction mouth. I had noticed
their nests, too, all along, where the water in the pools shallowed
to a few feet and began to hurry toward the rifts: they were low
mounds of small stones, as if a bushel or more of large pebbles had
been dumped upon the river bottom; occasionally they were so near
the surface as to make a big ripple. The eel attaches itself to the
stones by its mouth, and thus moves them at will. An old fisherman
told me that a strong man could not pull a large lamprey loose from
a rock to which it had attached itself. It fastens to its prey in
this way, and sucks the life out. A friend of mine says he once saw
in the St. Lawrence a pike as long as his arm with a lamprey eel
attached to him. The fish was nearly dead and was quite white, the
eel had so sucked out his blood and substance. The fish, when
seized, darts against rocks and stones, and tries in vain to rub
the eel off, then succumbs to the sucker.
"The lampers do not all die," said Denny, "because they do not all
spawn;" and I observed that the dead ones were all of one size and
doubtless of the same age.
The lamprey is the octopus, the devil-fish, of these waters, and
there is, perhaps, no tragedy enacted here that equals that of one
of these vampires slowly sucking the life out of a bass or a trout.
My boys went to school part of the time. Did they have a good
teacher?
"Good enough for me," said Johnny.
"Good enough for me," echoed Denny.
Just below Bark-a-boom--the name is worth keeping--they left me. I
was loath to part with them; their musical voices and their
thorough good-fellowship had been very acceptable. With a little
persuasion, I think they would have left their home and humble
fortunes, and gone a-roving with me.
About four o'clock the warm, vapor-laden southwest wind brought
forth the expected thunder-shower. I saw the storm rapidly
developing behind the mountains in my front. Presently I came in
sight of a long covered wooden bridge that spanned the river about
a mile ahead, and I put my paddle into the water with all my force
to reach this cover before the storm. It was neck and neck most of
the way. The storm had the wind, and I had it--in my teeth. The
bridge was at Shavertown, and it was by a close shave that I got
under it before the rain was upon me. How it poured and rattled and
whipped in around the abutment of the bridge to reach me! I looked
out well satisfied upon the foaming water, upon the wet, unpainted
houses and barns of the Shavertowners, and upon the trees,
"Caught and cuffed by the gale."
Another traveler--the spotted-winged nighthawk--was also roughly
used by the storm. He faced it bravely, and beat and beat, but was
unable to stem it, or even hold his own; gradually he drifted back,
till he was lost to sight in the wet obscurity. The water in the
river rose an inch while I waited, about three quarters of an hour.
Only one man, I reckon, saw me in Shavertown, and he came and
gossiped with me from the bank above when the storm had abated.
The second night I stopped at the sign of the elm-tree. The woods
were too wet, and I concluded to make my boat my bed. A superb elm,
on a smooth grassy plain a few feet from the water's edge, looked
hospitable in the twilight, and I drew my boat up beneath it. I
hung my clothes on the jagged edges of its rough bark, and went to
bed with the moon, "in her third quarter," peeping under the
branches upon me. I had been reading Stevenson's amusing "Travels
with a Donkey," and the lines he pretends to quote from an old play
kept running in my head:--
'The bed was made, the room was fit,
By punctual eve the stars were lit;
The air was sweet, the water ran;
No need was there for maid or man,
When we put up, my ass and I,
At God's green caravanserai."
But the stately elm played me a trick: it slyly and at long
intervals let great drops of water down upon me, now with a sharp
smack upon my rubber coat; then with a heavy thud upon the seat in
the bow or stern of my boat; then plump into my upturned ear, or
upon my uncovered arm, or with a ring into my tin cup, or with a
splash into my coffee-pail that stood at my side full of water from
a spring I had just passed. After two hours' trial I found dropping
off to sleep, under such circumstances, was out of the question; so
I sprang up, in no very amiable mood toward my host, and drew my
boat clean from under the elm. I had refreshing slumber
thenceforth, and the birds were astir in the morning long before I
was.
There is one way, at least, in which the denuding the country of
its forests has lessened the rainfall: in certain conditions of the
atmosphere every tree is a great condenser of moisture, as I had
just observed in the case of the old elm; little showers are
generated in their branches, and in the aggregate the amount of
water precipitated in this way is considerable. Of a foggy summer
morning one may see little puddles of water standing on the stones
beneath maple-trees, along the street; and in winter, when there is
a sudden change from cold to warm, with fog, the water fairly runs
down the trunks of the trees, and streams from their naked
branches. The temperature of the tree is so much below that of the
atmosphere in such cases that the condensation is very rapid. In
lieu of these arboreal rains we have the dew upon the grass, but it
is doubtful if the grass ever drips as does a tree.
The birds, I say, were astir in the morning before I was, and some
of them were more wakeful through the night, unless they sing in
their dreams. At this season one may hear at intervals numerous
bird voices during the night. The whip-poor-will was piping when I
lay down, and I still heard one when I woke up after midnight. I
heard the song sparrow and the kingbird also, like watchers calling
the hour, and several times I heard the cuckoo. Indeed, I am
convinced that our cuckoo is to a considerable extent a night bird,
and that he moves about freely from tree to tree. His peculiar
guttural note, now here, now there, may be heard almost any summer
night, in any part of the country, and occasionally his better
known cuckoo call. He is a great recluse by day, but seems to
wander abroad freely by night.
The birds do indeed begin with the day. The farmer who is in the
field at work while he can yet see stars catches their first matin
hymns. In the longest June days the robin strikes up about half-
past three o'clock, and is quickly followed by the song sparrow,
the oriole, the catbird, the wren, the wood thrush, and all the
rest of the tuneful choir. Along the Potomac I have heard the
Virginia cardinal whistle so loudly and persistently in the tree-
tops above, that sleeping after four o'clock was out of the
question. Just before the sun is up, there is a marked lull, during
which, I imagine, the birds are at breakfast. While building their
nest, it is very early in the morning that they put in their big
strokes; the back of their day's work is broken before you have
begun yours.
A lady once asked me if there was any individuality among the
birds, or if those of the same kind were as near alike as two peas.
I was obliged to answer that to the eye those of the same species
were as near alike as two peas, but that in their songs there were
often marks of originality. Caged or domesticated birds develop
notes and traits of their own, and among the more familiar orchard
and garden birds one may notice the same tendency. I observe a
great variety of songs, and even qualities of voice, among the
orioles and among the song sparrows. On this trip my ear was
especially attracted to some striking and original sparrow songs.
At one point I was half afraid I had let pass an opportunity to
identify a new warbler, but finally concluded it was a song
sparrow. On another occasion I used to hear day after day a sparrow
that appeared to have some organic defect in its voice: part of its
song was scarcely above a whisper, as if the bird was suffering
from a very bad cold. I have heard a bobolink and a hermit thrush
with similar defects of voice. I have heard a robin with a part of
the whistle of the quail in his song. It was out of time and out of
tune, but the robin seemed insensible of the incongruity, and sang
as loudly and as joyously as any of his mates. A catbird will
sometimes show a special genius for mimicry, and I have known one
to suggest very plainly some notes of the bobolink.
There are numerous long covered bridges spanning the Delaware, and
under some of these I saw the cliff swallow at home, the nests
being fastened to the under sides of the timbers,--as it were,
suspended from the ceiling instead of being planted upon the
shelving or perpendicular side, as is usual with them. To have laid
the foundation, indeed, to have sprung the vault downward and
finished it successfully, must have required special engineering
skill. I had never before seen or heard of these nests being so
placed. But birds are quick to adjust their needs to the exigencies
of any case. Not long before, I had seen in a deserted house, on
the head of the Rondout, the chimney swallows entering the chamber
through a stove-pipe hole in the roof, and gluing their nests to
the sides of the rafters, like the barn swallows.
I was now, on the third day, well down in the wilds of Colchester,
with a current that made between two and three miles an hour,--just
a summer idler's pace. The atmosphere of the river had improved
much since the first day,--was, indeed, without taint,--and the
water was sweet and good. There were farmhouses at intervals of a
mile or so; but the amount of tillable land in the river valley or
on the adjacent mountains was very small. Occasionally there would
be forty or fifty acres of flat, usually in grass or corn, with a
thrifty-looking farmhouse. One could see how surely the land made
the house and its surrounding; good land bearing good buildings,
and poor land poor
In mid-forenoon I reached the long placid eddy at Downsville, and
here again fell in with two boys. They were out paddling about in a
boat when I drew near, and they evidently regarded me in the light
of a rare prize which fortune had wafted them.
"Ain't you glad we come, Benny?" I heard one of them observe to the
other, as they were conducting me to the best place to land. They
were bright, good boys, off the same piece as my acquaintances of
the day before, and about the same ages,-- differing only in being
village boys. With what curiosity they looked me over! Where had I
come from; where was I going; how long had I been on the way; who
built my boat; was I a carpenter, to build such a neat craft, etc.?
They never had seen such a traveler before. Had I had no mishaps?
And then they bethought them of the dangerous passes that awaited
me, and in good faith began to warn and advise me. They had heard
the tales of raftsmen, and had conceived a vivid idea of the perils
of the river below, gauging their notions of it from the spring and
fall freshets tossing about the heavy and cumbrous rafts. There was
a whirlpool, a rock eddy, and a binocle within a mile. I might be
caught in the binocle, or engulfed in the whirlpool, or smashed up
in the eddy. But I felt much reassured when they told me I had
already passed several whirlpools and rock eddies; but that
terrible binocle,--what was that? I had never heard of such a
monster. Oh, it was a still, miry place at the head of a big eddy.
The current might carry me up there, but I could easily get out
again; the rafts did. But there was another place I must beware of,
where two eddies faced each other; raftsmen were sometimes swept
off there by the oars and drowned. And when I came to rock eddy,
which I would know, because the river divided there (a part of the
water being afraid to risk the eddy, I suppose), I must go ashore
and survey the pass; but in any case it would be prudent to keep to
the left. I might stick on the rift, but that was nothing to being
wrecked upon those rocks. The boys were quite in earnest, and I
told them I would walk up to the village and post some letters to
my friends before I braved all these dangers. So they marched me up
the street, pointing out to their chums what they had found.
"Going way to Phil-- What place is that near where the river goes
into the sea?"
"Philadelphia?"
"Yes; thinks he may go way there. Won't he have fun?"
The boys escorted me about the town, then back to the river, and
got in their boat and came down to the bend, where they could see
me go through the whirlpool and pass the binocle (I am not sure
about the orthography of the word, but I suppose it means a double,
or a sort of mock eddy). I looked back as I shot over the rough
current beside a gentle vortex, and saw them watching me with great
interest. Rock eddy, also, was quite harmless, and I passed it
without any preliminary survey.
I nooned at Sodom, and found good milk in a humble cottage. In the
afternoon I was amused by a great blue heron that kept flying up in
advance of me. Every mile or so, as I rounded some point, I would
come unexpectedly upon him, till finally he grew disgusted with my
silent pursuit, and took a long turn to the left up along the side
of the mountain, and passed back up the river, uttering a hoarse,
low note.
The wind still boded rain, and about four o'clock, announced by
deep-toned thunder and portentous clouds, it began to charge down
the mountain-side in front of me. I ran ashore, covered my traps,
and took my way up through an orchard to a quaint little farmhouse.
But there was not a soul about, outside or in, that I could find,
though the door was unfastened; so I went into an open shed with
the hens, and lounged upon some straw, while the unloosed floods
came down. It was better than boating or fishing. Indeed, there
are few summer pleasures to be placed before that of reclining at
ease directly under a sloping roof, after toil or travel in the
hot sun, and looking out into the rain-drenched air and fields.
It is such a vital yet soothing spectacle. We sympathize with the
earth. We know how good a bath is, and the unspeakable
deliciousness of water to a parched tongue. The office of the
sunshine is slow, subtle, occult, unsuspected; but when the
clouds do their work, the benefaction is so palpable and copious,
so direct and wholesale, that all creatures take note of it, and
for the most part rejoice in it. It is a completion, a
consummation, a paying of a debt with a royal hand; the measure is
heaped and overflowing. It was the simple vapor of water that the
clouds borrowed of the earth; now they pay back more than water:
the drops are charged with electricity and with the gases of the
air, and have new solvent powers. Then, how the slate is sponged
off, and left all clean and new again!
In the shed where I was sheltered were many relics and odds and
ends of the farm. In juxtaposition with two of the most stalwart
wagon or truck wheels I ever looked upon was a cradle of ancient
and peculiar make,--an aristocratic cradle, with high-turned posts
and an elaborately carved and moulded body, that was suspended upon
rods and swung from the top. How I should have liked to hear its
history and the story of the lives it had rocked, as the rain sang
and the boughs tossed without! Above it was the cradle of a phbe-
bird saddled upon a stick that ran behind the rafter; its occupants
had not flown, and its story was easy to read.
Soon after the first shock of the storm was over, and before I
could see breaking sky, the birds tuned up with new ardor,--the
robin, the indigo-bird, the purple finch, the song sparrow, and in
the meadow below the bobolink. The cockerel near me followed suit,
and repeated his refrain till my meditations were so disturbed that
I was compelled to eject him from the cover, albeit he had the best
right there. But he crowed his defiance with drooping tail from the
yard in front. I, too, had mentally crowed over the good fortune
of the shower; but before I closed my eyes that night my crest was
a good deal fallen, and I could have wished the friendly elements
had not squared their accounts quite so readily and uproariously.
The one shower did not exhaust the supply a bit; Nature's hand was
full of trumps yet,--yea, and her sleeve too. I stopped at a
trout brook, which came down out of the mountains on the right, and
took a few trout for my supper; but its current was too roily from
the shower for fly-fishing. Another farmhouse attracted me, but
there was no one at home; so I picked a quart of strawberries in
the meadow in front, not minding the wet grass, and about six
o'clock, thinking another storm that had been threatening on my
right had miscarried, I pushed off, and went floating down into the
deepening gloom of the river valley. The mountains, densely
wooded from base to summit, shut in the view on every hand. They
cut in from the right and from the left, one ahead of the other,
matching like the teeth of an enormous trap; the river was caught
and bent, but not long detained, by them. Presently I saw the rain
creeping slowly over them in my rear, for the wind had changed; but
I apprehended nothing but a moderate sundown drizzle, such as we
often get from the tail end of a shower, and drew up in the eddy of
a big rock under an overhanging tree till it should have passed.
But it did not pass; it thickened and deepened, and reached a
steady pour by the time I had calculated the sun would be gilding
the mountain-tops. I had wrapped my rubber coat about my blankets
and groceries, and bared my back to the storm. In sullen silence I
saw the night settling down and the rain increasing; my roof-tree
gave way, and every leaf poured its accumulated drops upon me.
There were streams and splashes where before there had been little
more than a mist. I was getting well soaked and uncomplimentary in
my remarks on the weather. A saucy catbird, near by, flirted and
squealed very plainly, "There! there! What did I tell you! what
did I tell you! Pretty pickle! pretty pickle! pretty pickle to be
in!" But I had been in worse pickles, though if the water had been
salt, my pickling had been pretty thorough. Seeing the wind was in
the northeast, and that the weather had fairly stolen a march on
me, I let go my hold of the tree, and paddled rapidly to the
opposite shore, which was low and pebbly, drew my boat up on a
little peninsula, turned her over upon a spot which I cleared of
its coarser stone, propped up one end with the seat, and crept
beneath. I would now test the virtues of my craft as a roof, and I
found she was without flaw, though she was pretty narrow. The
tension of her timber was such that the rain upon her bottom made a
low, musical hum.
Crouched on my blankets and boughs,--for I had gathered a good
supply of the latter before the rain overtook me,--and dry only
about my middle, I placidly took life as it came. A great blue
heron flew by, and let off something like ironical horse laughter.
Before it became dark I proceeded to eat my supper,--my berries,
but not my trout. What a fuss we make about the "hulls" upon
strawberries! We are hypercritical; we may yet be glad to dine off
the hulls alone. Some people see something to pick and carp at
in every good that comes to them; I was thankful that I had the
berries, and resolutely ignored their little scalloped ruffles,
which I found pleased the eye and did not disturb the palate.
When bedtime arrived, I found undressing a little awkward, my berth
was so low; there was plenty of room in the aisle, and the other
passengers were nowhere to be seen, but I did not venture out. It
rained nearly all night, but the train made good speed, and reached
the land of daybreak nearly on time. The water in the river had
crept up during the night to within a few inches of my boat, but I
rolled over and took another nap, all the same. Then I arose, had a
delicious bath in the sweet, swift-running current, and turned my
thoughts toward breakfast. The making of the coffee was the only
serious problem. With everything soaked and a fine rain still
falling, how shall one build a fire? I made my way to a little
island above in quest of driftwood. Before I had found the wood I
chanced upon another patch of delicious wild strawberries, and took
an appetizer of them out of hand. Presently I picked up a yellow
birch stick the size of my arm. The wood was decayed, but the bark
was perfect. I broke it in two, punched out the rotten wood, and
had the bark intact. The fatty or resinous substance in this bark
preserves it, and makes it excellent kindling. With some seasoned
twigs and a scrap of paper I soon had a fire going that answered my
every purpose. More berries were picked while the coffee was
brewing, and the breakfast was a success.
The camper-out often finds himself in what seems a distressing
predicament to people seated in their snug, well-ordered houses;
but there is often a real satisfaction when things come to their
worst,--a satisfaction in seeing what a small matter it is, after
all; that one is really neither sugar nor salt, to be afraid of the
wet; and that life is just as well worth living beneath a scow or a
dug-out as beneath the highest and broadest roof in Christendom.
By ten o'clock it became necessary to move, on account of the rise
of the water, and as the rain had abated, I picked up and continued
my journey. Before long, however, the rain increased again, and I
took refuge in a barn. The snug, tree-embowered farmhouse looked
very inviting, just across the road from the barn; but as no one
was about, and no faces appeared at the window that I might judge
of the inmates, I contented myself with the hospitality the barn
offered, filling my pockets with some dry birch shavings I found
there where the farmer had made an ox-yoke, against the needs of
the next kindling.
After an hour's detention I was off again. I stopped at Baxter's
Brook, which flows hard by the classic hamlet of Harvard, and tried
for trout, but with poor success, as I did not think it worth while
to go far upstream.
At several points I saw rafts of hemlock lumber tied to the shore,
ready to take advantage of the first freshet. Rafting is an
important industry for a hundred miles or more along the Delaware.
The lumbermen sometimes take their families or friends, and have a
jollification all the way to Trenton or to Philadelphia. In some
places the speed is very great, almost equaling that of an express
train. The passage of such places as Cochecton Falls and "Foul
Rift" is attended with no little danger. The raft is guided by two
immense oars, one before and one behind. I frequently saw these
huge implements in the driftwood alongshore, suggesting some
colossal race of men. The raftsmen have names of their own. From
the upper Delaware, where I had set in, small rafts are run down
which they call "colts." They come frisking down at a lively pace.
At Hancock they usually couple two rafts together, when I suppose
they have a span of colts; or do two colts make one horse? Some
parts of the framework of the raft they call "grubs;" much depends
upon these grubs. The lumbermen were and are a hardy, virile race.
The Hon. Charles Knapp, of Deposit, now eighty-three years of age,
but with the look and step of a man of sixty, told me he had stood
nearly all one December day in the water to his waist,
reconstructing his raft, which had gone to pieces on the head of an
island. Mr. Knapp had passed the first half of his life in
Colchester and Hancock, and, although no sportsman, had once taken
part in a great bear hunt there. The bear was an enormous one, and
was hard pressed by a gang of men and dogs. Their muskets and
assaults upon the beast with clubs had made no impression. Mr.
Knapp saw where the bear was coming, and he thought he would show
them how easy it was to dispatch a bear with a club, if you only
knew where to strike. He had seen how quickly the largest hog
would wilt beneath a slight blow across the "small of the back."
So, armed with an immense handspike, he took up a position by a
large rock that the bear must pass. On she came, panting and nearly
exhausted, and at the right moment down came the club with great
force upon the small of her back. "If a fly had alighted upon her,"
said Mr. Knapp, "I think she would have paid just as much attention
to it as she did to me."
Early in the afternoon I encountered another boy, Henry Ingersoll,
who was so surprised by my sudden and unwonted appearance that he
did not know east from west. "Which way is west?" I inquired, to
see if my own head was straight on the subject.
"That way," he said, indicating east within a few degrees.
"You are wrong," I replied. "Where does the sun rise?"
"There," he said, pointing almost in the direction he had pointed
before.
"But does not the sun rise in the east here as well as elsewhere?"
I rejoined.
"Well, they call that west, anyhow."
But Henry's needle was subjected to a disturbing influence just
then. His house was near the river, and he was its sole guardian
and keeper for the time; his father had gone up to the next
neighbor's (it was Sunday), and his sister had gone with the
schoolmistress down the road to get black birch. He came out in the
road, with wide eyes, to view me as I passed, when I drew rein, and
demanded the points of the compass, as above. Then I shook my sooty
pail at him and asked for milk. Yes, I could have some milk, but I
would have to wait till his sister came back; after he had
recovered a little, he concluded he could get it. He came for my
pail, and then his boyish curiosity appeared. My story interested
him immensely. He had seen twelve summers, but he had been
only four miles from home up and down the river : he had been down
to the East Branch, and he had been up to Trout Brook. He took a
pecuniary interest in me. What did my pole cost? What my rubber
coat, and what my revolver? The latter he must take in his hand;
he had never seen such a thing to shoot with before in HIS life,
etc. He thought I might make the trip cheaper and easier by stage
and by the cars. He went to school: there were six scholars in
summer, one or two more in winter. The population is not crowded
in the town of Hancock, certainly, and never will be. The people
live close to the bone, as Thoreau would say, or rather close to
the stump. Many years ago the young men there resolved upon having
a ball. They concluded not to go to a hotel, on account of the
expense, and so chose a private house. There was a man in the
neighborhood who could play the fife; he offered to furnish the
music for seventy-five cents. But this was deemed too much, so one
of the party agreed to whistle. History does not tell how many
beaux there were bent upon this reckless enterprise, but there were
three girls. For refreshments they bought a couple of gallons of
whiskey and a few pounds of sugar. When the spree was over, and the
expenses were reckoned up, there was a shilling--a York shilling--
apiece to pay. Some of the revelers were dissatisfied with this
charge, and intimated that the managers had not counted themselves
in, but taxed the whole expense upon the rest of the party.
As I moved on, I saw Henry's sister and the schoolmistress picking
their way along the muddy road near the river's bank. One of them
saw me, and, dropping her skirts, said to the other (I could read
the motions), "See that man!" The other lowered her flounces, and
looked up and down the road, then glanced over into the field, and
lastly out upon the river. They paused and had a good look at me,
though I could see that their impulse to run away, like that of a
frightened deer, was strong.
At the East Branch the Big Beaver Kill joins the Delaware, almost
doubling its volume. Here I struck the railroad, the forlorn
Midland, and here another set of men and manners cropped out,--what
may be called the railroad conglomerate overlying this mountain
freestone.
"Where did you steal that boat?" and "What you running away for?"
greeted me from a handcar that went by.
I paused for some time and watched the fish hawks, or ospreys, of
which there were nearly a dozen sailing about above the junction of
the two streams, squealing and diving, and occasionally striking a
fish on the rifts. I am convinced that the fish hawk sometimes
feeds on the wing. I saw him do it on this and on another
occasion. He raises himself by a peculiar motion, and brings his
head and his talons together, and apparently takes a bite of a
fish. While doing this his flight presents a sharply undulating
line; at the crest of each rise the morsel is taken.
In a long, deep eddy under the west shore I came upon a brood of
wild ducks, the hooded merganser. The young were about half grown,
but of course entirely destitute of plumage. They started off at
great speed, kicking the water into foam behind them, the mother
duck keeping upon their flank and rear. Near the outlet of the
pool I saw them go ashore, and I expected they would conceal
themselves in the woods; but as I drew near the place they came
out, and I saw by their motions they were going to make a rush by
me upstream. At a signal from the old one, on they came, and
passed within a few feet of me. It was almost incredible, the
speed they made. Their pink feet were like swiftly revolving
wheels placed a little to the rear; their breasts just skimmed the
surface, and the water was beaten into spray behind them. They had
no need of wings; even the mother bird did not use hers; a
steamboat could hardly have kept up with them. I dropped my paddle
and cheered. They kept the race up for a long distance, and I saw
them making a fresh spirt as I entered upon the rift and dropped
quickly out of sight. I next disturbed an eagle in his meditations
upon a dead treetop, and a cat sprang out of some weeds near the
foot of the tree. Was he watching for puss, while she was watching
for some smaller prey?
I passed Partridge Island--which is or used to be the name of a
post-office--unwittingly, and encamped for the night on an island
near Hawk's Point. I slept in my boat on the beach, and in the
morning my locks were literally wet with the dews of the night, and
my blankets too; so I waited for the sun to dry them. As I was
gathering driftwood for a fire, a voice came over from the shadows
of the east shore: "Seems to me you lay abed pretty late!"
"I call this early," I rejoined, glancing at the sun.
"Wall, it may be airly in the forenoon, but it ain't very airly in
the mornin';" a distinction I was forced to admit. Before I had
reëmbarked some cows came down to the shore, and I watched them
ford the river to the island. They did it with great ease and
precision. I was told they will sometimes, during high water, swim
over to the islands, striking in well upstream, and swimming
diagonally across. At one point some cattle had crossed the river,
and evidently got into mischief, for a large dog rushed them down
the bank into the current, and worried them all the way over, part
of the time swimming and part of the time leaping very high, as a
dog will in deep snow, coming down with a great splash. The cattle
were shrouded with spray as they ran, and altogether it was a novel
picture.
My voyage ended that forenoon at Hancock, and was crowned by a few
idyllic days with some friends in their cottage in the woods by
Lake Oquaga, a body of crystal water on the hills near Deposit, and
a haven as peaceful and perfect as voyager ever came to port in.
II
SPRINGS
"I'll show thee the best springs."
--TEMPEST.
A MAN who came back to the place of his birth in the East, after an
absence of a quarter of a century in the West, said the one thing
he most desired to see about the old homestead was the spring.
This, at least, he would find unchanged. Here his lost youth would
come back to him. The faces of his father and mother he might not
look upon; but the face of the spring, that had mirrored theirs and
his own so oft, he fondly imagined would beam on him as of old. I
can well believe that, in that all but springless country in which
he had cast his lot, the vision, the remembrance, of the fountain
that flowed by his father's doorway, so prodigal of its precious
gifts, had awakened in him the keenest longings and regrets.
Did he not remember the path, also? for next to the spring itself
is the path that leads to it. Indeed, of all foot-paths, the
spring-path is the most suggestive.
This is a path with something at the end of it, and the best of
good fortune awaits him who walks therein. It is a well-worn path,
and, though generally up or down a hill, it is the easiest of all
paths to travel: we forget our fatigue when going to the spring,
and we have lost it when we turn to come away. See with what
alacrity the laborer hastens along it, all sweaty from the fields;
see the boy or girl running with pitcher or pail; see the welcome
shade of the spreading tree that presides over its marvelous birth!
In the woods or on the mountain-side, follow the path and you are
pretty sure to find a spring; all creatures are going that way
night and day, and they make a path.
A spring is always a vital point in the landscape; it is indeed the
eye of the fields, and how often, too, it has a noble eyebrow in
the shape of an overhanging bank or ledge! Or else its site is
marked by some tree which the pioneer has wisely left standing, and
which sheds a coolness and freshness that make the water more
sweet. In the shade of this tree the harvesters sit and eat their
lunch, and look out upon the quivering air of the fields. Here the
Sunday saunterer stops and lounges with his book, and bathes his
hands and face in the cool fountain. Hither the strawberry-girl
comes with her basket and pauses a moment in the green shade. The
plowman leaves his plow, and in long strides approaches the life-
renewing spot, while his team, that cannot follow, look wistfully
after him. Here the cattle love to pass the heat of the day, and
hither come the birds to wash themselves and make their toilets.
Indeed, a spring is always an oasis in the desert of the fields.
It is a creative and generative centre. It attracts all things to
itself,--the grasses, the mosses, the flowers, the wild plants, the
great trees. The walker finds it out, the camping party seek it,
the pioneer builds his hut or his house near it. When the settler
or squatter has found a good spring, he has found a good place to
begin life; he has found the fountain-head of much that he is
seeking in this world. The chances are that he has found a
southern and eastern exposure, for it is a fact that water does not
readily flow north; the valleys mostly open the other way; and it
is quite certain he has found a measure of salubrity, for where
water flows fever abideth not. The spring, too, keeps him to the
right belt, out of the low valley, and off the top of the hill.
When John Winthrop decided upon the site where now stands the city
of Boston, as a proper place for a settlement, he was chiefly
attracted by a large and excellent spring of water that flowed
there. The infant city was born of this fountain.
There seems a kind of perpetual springtime about the place where
water issues from the ground,--a freshness and a greenness that are
ever renewed. The grass never fades, the ground is never parched
or frozen. There is warmth there in winter and coolness in summer.
The temperature is equalized. In March or April the spring runs
are a bright emerald while the surrounding fields are yet brown and
sere, and in fall they are yet green when the first snow covers
them. Thus every fountain by the roadside is a fountain of youth
and of life. This is what the old fables finally mean.
An intermittent spring is shallow; it has no deep root, and is like
an inconstant friend. But a perennial spring, one whose ways are
appointed, whose foundation is established, what a profound and
beautiful symbol! In fact, there is no more large and universal
symbol in nature than the spring, if there is any other capable of
such wide and various applications.
What preparation seems to have been made for it in the conformation
of the ground, even in the deep underlying geological strata! Vast
rocks and ledges are piled for it, or cleft asunder that it may
find a way. Sometimes it is a trickling thread of silver down the
sides of a seamed and scarred precipice. Then again the stratified
rock is like a just-lifted lid, from beneath which the water
issues. Or it slips noiselessly out of a deep dimple in the
fields. Occasionally it bubbles up in the valley, as if forced up
by the surrounding hills. Many springs, no doubt, find an outlet
in the beds of the large rivers and lakes, and are unknown to all
but the fishes. They probably find them out and make much of them.
The trout certainly do. Find a place in the creek where a spring
issues, or where it flows into it from a near bank, and you have
found a most likely place for trout. They deposit their spawn
there in the fall, warm their noses there in winter, and cool
themselves there in summer. I have seen the patriarchs of the
tribe of an old and much-fished stream, seven or eight enormous
fellows, congregated in such a place. The boys found it out, and
went with a bag and bagged them all. In another place a trio of
large trout, that knew and despised all the arts of the fishermen,
took up their abode in a deep, dark hole in the edge of the wood,
that had a spring flowing into a shallow part of it. In midsummer
they were wont to come out from their safe retreat and bask in the
spring, their immense bodies but a few inches under water. A
youth, who had many times vainly sounded their dark hiding-place
with his hook, happening to come along with his rifle one day, shot
the three, one after another, killing them by the concussion of the
bullet on the water immediately over them.
The ocean itself is known to possess springs, copious ones, in many
places the fresh water rising up through the heavier salt as
through a rock, and affording supplies to vessels at the surface.
Off the coast of Florida many of these submarine springs have been
discovered, the outlet, probably, of the streams and rivers that
disappear in the "sinks" of that State.
It is a pleasant conception, that of the unscientific folk, that
the springs are fed directly by the sea, or that the earth is full
of veins or arteries that connect with the great reservoir of
waters. But when science turns the conception over and makes the
connection in the air,--disclosing the great water-main in the
clouds, and that the mighty engine of the hydraulic system of
nature is the sun,--the fact becomes even more poetical, does it
not? This is one of the many cases where science, instead of
curtailing the imagination, makes new and large demands upon it.
The hills are great sponges that do not and cannot hold the water
that is precipitated upon them, but let it filter through at the
bottom. This is the way the sea has robbed the earth of its various
salts, its potash, its lime, its magnesia, and many other mineral
elements. It is found that the oldest upheavals, those sections of
the country that have been longest exposed to the leeching and
washing of the rains, are poorest in those substances that go to
the making of the osseous framework of man and of the animals.
Wheat does not grow well there, and the men born and reared there
are apt to have brittle bones. An important part of those men went
downstream ages before they were born. The water of such sections
is now soft and free from mineral substances, but not more
wholesome on that account.
The gigantic springs of the country that have not been caught in
any of the great natural basins are mostly confined to the
limestone region of the Middle and Southern States,--the valley of
Virginia and its continuation and deflections into Kentucky,
Tennessee, northern Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Through this
belt are found the great caves and the subterranean rivers. The
waters have here worked like enormous moles, and have honeycombed
the foundations of the earth. They have great highways beneath
the hills. Water charged with carbonic acid gas has a very sharp
tooth and a powerful digestion, and no limestone rock can long
resist it. Sherman's soldiers tell of a monster spring in
northern Alabama,--a river leaping full-grown from the bosom of the
earth; and of another at the bottom of a large, deep pit in the
rocks, that continues its way under ground.
There are many springs in Florida of this character, large
underground streams that have breathing-holes, as it were, here
and there. In some places the water rises and fills the bottoms
of deep bowl-shaped depressions; in other localities it is reached
through round natural well-holes; a bucket is let down by a rope,
and if it becomes detached is quickly swept away by the current.
Some of the Florida springs are perhaps the largest in the world,
affording room and depth enough for steamboats to move and turn in
them. Green Cove Spring is said to be like a waterfall reversed; a
cataract rushing upward through a transparent liquid instead of
leaping downward through the air. There are one or two of these
enormous springs also in northern Mississippi,--springs so large
that it seems as if the whole continent must nurse them.
The Valley of the Shenandoah is remarkable for its large springs.
The town of Winchester, a town of several thousand inhabitants, is
abundantly supplied with water from a single spring that issues on
higher ground near by. Several other springs in the vicinity
afford rare mill-power. At Harrisonburg, a county town farther
up the valley, I was attracted by a low ornamental dome resting
upon a circle of columns, on the edge of the square that contained
the court-house, and was surprised to find that it gave shelter to
an immense spring. This spring was also capable of watering the
town or several towns; stone steps led down to it at the bottom
of a large stone basin. There was a pretty constant string of
pails to and from it. Aristotle called certain springs of his
country "cements of society," because the young people so
frequently met there and sang and conversed; and I have little
doubt this spring is of like social importance. There is a famous
spring at San Antonio, Texas, which is described by that excellent
traveler, Frederick Law Olmsted. "The whole river," he says,
"gushes up in one sparkling burst from the earth, with all the
accessories of smaller springs,--moss, pebbles, foliage, seclusion,
etc. Its effect is overpowering. It is beyond your possible
conception of a spring."
Of like copiousness and splendor is the Caledonia spring, or
springs, in western New York. They give birth to a white-pebbled,
transparent stream, several rods wide and two or three feet deep,
that flows eighty barrels of water per second, and is alive with
trout. The trout are fat and gamy even in winter.
The largest spring in England, called the Well of St. Winifred, at
Holywell, flows less than three barrels per second. I recently
went many miles out of my way to see the famous trout spring in
Warren County, New Jersey. This spring flows about one thousand
gallons of water per minute, which has a uniform temperature of
fifty degrees winter and summer. It is near the Musconetcong
Creek, which looks as if it were made up of similar springs. On
the parched and sultry summer day upon which my visit fell, it was
well worth walking many miles just to see such a volume of water
issue from the ground. I felt with the boy Petrarch, when he first
beheld a famous spring, that "were I master of such a fountain I
would prefer it to the finest of cities." A large oak leans down
over the spring and affords an abundance of shade. The water does
not bubble up, but comes straight out with great speed, like a
courier with important news, and as if its course underground had
been a direct and an easy one for a long distance. Springs that
issue in this way have a sort of vertebra, a ridgy and spine-like
centre that suggests the gripe and push there is in this element.
What would one not give for such a spring in his back yard, or
front yard, or anywhere near his house, or in any of his fields?
One would be tempted to move his house to it, if the spring could
not be brought to the house. Its mere poetic value and suggestion
would be worth all the art and ornament to be had. It would
irrigate one's heart and character as well as his acres. Then one
might have a Naiad Queen to do his churning and to saw his wood;
then one might "see his chore done by the gods themselves," as
Emerson says, or by the nymphs, which is just as well.
I know a homestead, situated on one of the picturesque branch
valleys of the Housatonic, that has such a spring flowing by the
foundation walls of the house, and not a little of the strong
overmastering local attachment that holds the owner there is born
of that, his native spring. He could not, if he would, break from
it. He says that when he looks down into it he has a feeling that
he is an amphibious animal that has somehow got stranded. A long,
gentle flight of stone steps leads from the back porch down to it
under the branches of a lofty elm. It wells up through the white
sand and gravel as through a sieve, and fills the broad space that
has been arranged for it so gently and imperceptibly that one does
not suspect its copiousness until he has seen the overflow. It
turns no wheel, yet it lends a pliant hand to many of the affairs
of that household. It is a refrigerator in summer and a frost-proof
envelope in winter, and a fountain of delights the year round.
Trout come up from the Weebutook River and dwell there and become
domesticated, and take lumps of butter from your hand, or rake the
ends of your fingers if you tempt them. It is a kind of sparkling
and ever-washed larder. Where are the berries? where is the
butter, the milk, the steak, the melon? In the spring. It
preserves, it ventilates, it cleanses. It is a board of health and
a general purveyor. It is equally for use and for pleasure.
Nothing degrades it, and nothing can enhance its beauty. It is
picture and parable, and an instrument of music. It is servant and
divinity in one. The milk of forty cows is cooled in it, and never
a drop gets into the cans, though they are plunged to the brim. It
is as insensible to drought and rain as to heat and cold. It is
planted upon the sand, and yet it abideth like a house upon a rock.
It evidently has some relation to a little brook that flows down
through a deep notch in the hills half a mile distant, because on
one occasion, when the brook was being ditched or dammed, the
spring showed great perturbation. Every nymph in it was filled
with sudden alarm and kicked up a commotion.
In some sections of the country, when there is no spring near the
house, the farmer, with much labor and pains, brings one from some
uplying field or wood. Pine and poplar logs are bored and laid in
a trench, and the spring practically moved to the desired spot. The
ancient Persians had a law that whoever thus conveyed the water of
a spring to a spot not watered before should enjoy many immunities
under the state, not granted to others.
Hilly and mountainous countries do not always abound in good
springs. When the stratum is vertical, or has too great a dip, the
water is not collected in large veins, but is rather held as it
falls, and oozes out slowly at the surface over the top of the
rock. On this account one of the most famous grass and dairy
sections of New York is poorly supplied with springs. Every creek
starts in a bog or marsh, and good water can be had only by
excavating.
What a charm lurks about those springs that are found near the tops
of mountains, so small that they get lost amid the rocks and debris
and never reach the valley, and so cold that they make the throat
ache! Every hunter and mountain-climber can tell you of such,
usually on the last rise before the summit is cleared. It is
eminently the hunter's spring. I do not know whether or not the
foxes and other wild creatures lap at it, but their pursuers are
quite apt to pause there to take breath or to eat their lunch. The
mountain-climbers in summer hail it with a shout. It is always a
surprise, and raises the spirits of the dullest. Then it seems to
be born of wildness and remoteness, and to savor of some special
benefit or good fortune. A spring in the valley is an idyl, but a
spring on the mountain is a genuine lyrical touch. It imparts a
mild thrill; and if one were to call any springs "miracles," as the
natives of Cashmere are said to regard their fountains, it would be
such as these.
What secret attraction draws one in his summer walk to touch at all
the springs on his route, and to pause a moment at each, as if what
he was in quest of would be likely to turn up there? I can seldom
pass a spring without doing homage to it. It is the shrine at
which I oftenest worship. If I find one fouled with leaves or
trodden full by cattle, I take as much pleasure in cleaning it out
as a devotee in setting up the broken image of his saint. Though I
chance not to want to drink there, I like to behold a clear
fountain, and I may want to drink next time I pass, or some
traveler, or heifer, or milch cow may. Leaves have a strange
fatality for the spring. They come from afar to get into it. In a
grove or in the woods they drift into it and cover it up like snow.
Late in November, in clearing one out, I brought forth a frog from
his hibernacle in the leaves at the bottom. He was very black, and
he rushed about in a bewildered manner like one suddenly aroused
from his sleep.
There is no place more suitable for statuary than about a spring or
fountain, especially in parks or improved fields. Here one seems
to expect to see figures and bending forms. "Where a spring rises
or a river flows," says Seneca, "there should we build altars and
offer sacrifices."
I have spoken of the hunter's spring. The traveler's spring is a
little cup or saucer shaped fountain set in the bank by the
roadside. The harvester's spring is beneath a widespreading tree
in the fields. The lover's spring is down a lane under a hill.
There is a good screen of rocks and bushes. The hermit's spring is
on the margin of a lake in the woods. The fisherman's spring is by
the river. The miner finds his spring in the bowels of the
mountain. The soldier's spring is wherever he can fill his
canteen. The spring where schoolboys go to fill the pail is a long
way up or down a hill, and has just been roiled by a frog or
muskrat, and the boys have to wait till it settles. There is yet
the milkman's spring that never dries, the water of which is milky
and opaque. Sometimes it flows out of a chalk cliff. This last is
a hard spring: all the others are soft.
There is another side to this subject,-- the marvelous, not to say
the miraculous; and if I were to advert to all the curious or
infernal springs that are described by travelers or others,--the
sulphur springs, the mud springs, the sour springs, the soap
springs, the soda springs, the blowing springs, the spouting
springs, the boiling springs not one mile from Tophet, the springs
that rise and fall with the tide; the spring spoken of by
Vitruvius, that gave unwonted loudness to the voice; the spring
that Plutarch tells about, that had something of the flavor of
wine, because it was supposed that Bacchus had been washed in it
immediately after his birth; the spring that Herodotus describes,--
wise man and credulous boy that he was,--called the "Fountain of
the Sun," which was warm at dawn, cold at noon, and hot at
midnight; the springs at San Filippo, Italy, that have built up a
calcareous wall over a mile long and several hundred feet thick;
the renowned springs of Cashmere, that are believed by the people
to be the source of the comeliness of their women,--if I were to
follow up my subject in this direction, I say, it would lead me
into deeper and more troubled waters than I am in quest of at
present.
Pliny, in a letter to one of his friends, gives the following
account of a spring that flowed near his Laurentine villa:--
"There is a spring which rises in a neighboring mountain, and
running among the rocks is received into a little banqueting-room,
artificially formed for that purpose, from whence, after being
detained a short time, it falls into the Larian Lake. The nature
of this spring is extremely curious: it ebbs and flows regularly
three times a day. The increase and decrease are plainly visible,
and exceedingly interesting to observe. You sit down by the side
of the fountain, and while you are taking a repast and drinking its
water, which is exceedingly cool, you see it gradually rise and
fall. If you place a ring or anything else at the bottom when it
is dry, the water creeps gradually up, first gently washing,
finally covering it entirely, and then, little by little, subsides
again. If you wait long enough, you may see it thus alternately
advance and recede three successive times."
Pliny suggests four or five explanations of this phenomenon, but is
probably wide of the mark in all but the fourth one:--
"Or is there rather a certain reservoir that contains these waters
in the bowels of the earth, and, while it is recruiting its
discharges, the stream in consequence flows more slowly and in less
quantity, but, when it has collected its due measure, runs on again
in its usual strength and fullness."
There are several of these intermitting springs in different parts
of the world, and they are perhaps all to be explained on the
principle of the siphon.
In the Idyls of Theocritus there are frequent allusions to springs.
It was at a spring--and a mountain spring at that--that Castor and
Pollux encountered the plug-ugly Amycus:--
"And spying on a mountain a wild wood of vast size, they found
under a smooth cliff an ever-flowing spring, filled with pure
water, and the pebbles beneath seemed like crystal or silver from
the depths; and near there had grown tall pines, and poplars, and
plane-trees, and cypresses with leafy tops, and fragrant flowers,
pleasant work for hairy bees," etc.
Or the story of Hylas, the auburn-haired boy, who went to the
spring to fetch water for supper for Hercules and stanch Telamon,
and was seized by the enamored nymphs and drawn in. The spring was
evidently a marsh or meadow spring: it was in a "low-lying spot,
and around it grew many rushes, and the pale blue swallow-wort, and
green maidenhair, and blooming parsley, and couch grass stretching
through the marshes." As Hercules was tramping through the bog,
club in hand, and shouting "Hylas!" to the full depth of his
throat, he heard a thin voice come from the water,--it was Hylas
responding, and Hylas, in the shape of the little frog, has been
calling from our marsh springs ever since.
The characteristic flavor and suggestion of these Idyls is like
pure spring-water. This is, perhaps, why the modern reader is apt
to be disappointed in them when he takes them up for the first
time. They appear minor and literal and tasteless, as does most
ancient poetry; but it is mainly because we have got to the
fountain-head; and have come in contact with a mind that has been
but little shaped by artificial indoor influences. The stream of
literature is now much fuller and broader than it was in ancient
times, with currents and counter-currents, and diverse and curious
phases; but the primitive sources seem far behind us, and for the
refreshment of simple spring-water in art we must still go back to
Greek poetry.
III
AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE
THERE is no creature with which man has surrounded himself that
seems so much like a product of civilization, so much like the
result of development on special lines and in special fields, as
the honey-bee. Indeed, a colony of bees, with their neatness and
love of order, their division of labor, their public-spiritedness,
their thrift, their complex economies, and their inordinate love of
gain, seems as far removed from a condition of rude nature as does
a walled city or a cathedral town. Our native bee, on the other
hand, the "burly, dozing bumblebee," affects one more like the
rude, untutored savage. He has learned nothing from experience. He
lives from hand to mouth. He luxuriates in time of plenty, and he
starves in time of scarcity. He lives in a rude nest, or in a hole
in the ground, and in small communities; he builds a few deep cells
or sacks in which he stores a little honey and bee-bread for his
young, but as a worker in wax he is of the most primitive and
awkward. The Indian regarded the honey-bee as an ill omen. She was
the white man's fly. In fact, she was the epitome of the white man
himself. She has the white man's craftiness, his industry, his
architectural skill, his neatness and love of system, his
foresight; and, above all, his eager, miserly habits. The honey-
bee's great ambition is to be rich, to lay up great stores, to
possess the sweet of every flower that blooms. She is more than
provident. Enough will not satisfy her; she must have all she can
get by hook or by crook. She comes from the oldest country, Asia,
and thrives best in the most fertile and long-settled lands.
Yet the fact remains that the honey-bee is essentially a wild
creature, and never has been and cannot be thoroughly domesticated.
Its proper home is the woods, and thither every new swarm counts on
going; and thither many do go in spite of the care and watchfulness
of the bee-keeper. If the woods in any given locality are
deficient in trees with suitable cavities, the bees resort to all
sorts of makeshifts; they go into chimneys, into barns and
outhouses, under stones, into rocks, etc. Several chimneys in my
locality with disused flues are taken possession of by colonies of
bees nearly every season. One day, while bee-hunting, I developed a
line that went toward a farmhouse where I had reason to believe no
bees were kept. I followed it up and questioned the farmer about
his bees. He said he kept no bees, but that a swarm had taken
possession of his chimney, and another had gone under the
clapboards in the gable end of his house. He had taken a large lot
of honey out of both places the year before. Another farmer told
me that one day his family had seen a number of bees examining a
knothole in the side of his house; the next day, as they were
sitting down to dinner, their attention was attracted by a loud
humming noise, when they discovered a swarm of bees settling upon
the side of the house and pouring into the knothole. In subsequent
years other swarms came to the same place.
Apparently, every swarm of bees, before it leaves the parent hive,
sends out exploring parties to look up the future home. The woods
and groves are searched through and through, and no doubt the
privacy of many a squirrel and many a wood-mouse is intruded upon.
What cozy nooks and retreats they do spy out, so much more
attractive than the painted hive in the garden, so much cooler in
summer and so much warmer in winter!
The bee is in the main an honest citizen: she prefers legitimate to
illegitimate business; she is never an outlaw until her proper
sources of supply fail; she will not touch honey as long as honey-
yielding flowers can be found; she always prefers to go to the
fountain-head, and dislikes to take her sweets at second hand. But
in the fall, after the flowers have failed, she can be tempted.
The bee-hunter takes advantage of this fact; he betrays her with a
little honey. He wants to steal her stores, and he first
encourages her to steal his, then follows the thief home with her
booty. This is the whole trick of the bee-hunter. The bees never
suspect his game, else by taking a circuitous route they could
easily baffle him. But the honey-bee has absolutely no wit or
cunning outside of her special gifts as a gatherer and storer of
honey. She is a simple-minded creature, and can be imposed upon by
any novice. Yet it is not every novice that can find a bee-tree.
The sportsman may track his game to its retreat by the aid of his
dog, but in hunting the honey-bee one must be his own dog, and
track his game through an element in which it leaves no trail. It
is a task for a sharp, quick eye, and may test the resources of the
best woodcraft. One autumn, when I devoted much time to this
pursuit, as the best means of getting at nature and the open-air
exhilaration, my eye became so trained that bees were nearly as
easy to it as birds. I saw and heard bees wherever I went. One
day, standing on a street corner in a great city, I saw above the
trucks and the traffic a line of bees carrying off sweets from some
grocery or confectionery shop.
One looks upon the woods with a new interest when he suspects they
hold a colony of bees. What a pleasing secret it is,--a tree with a
heart of comb honey, a decayed oak or maple with a bit of Sicily or
Mount Hymettus stowed away in its trunk or branches; secret
chambers where lies hidden the wealth of ten thousand little
freebooters, great nuggets and wedges of precious ore gathered with
risk and labor from every field and wood about!
But if you would know the delights of bee-hunting, and how many
sweets such a trip yields besides honey, come with me some bright,
warm, late September or early October day. It is the golden season
of the year, and any errand or pursuit that takes us abroad upon
the hills or by the painted woods and along the amber-colored
streams at such a time is enough. So, with haversacks filled with
grapes and peaches and apples and a bottle of milk,--for we shall
not be home to dinner,--and armed with a compass, a hatchet, a
pail, and a box with a piece of comb honey neatly fitted into it,--
any box the size of your hand with a lid will do nearly as well as
the elaborate and ingenious contrivance of the regular bee-hunter,--
we sally forth. Our course at first lies along the highway under
great chestnut-trees whose nuts are just dropping, then through an
orchard and across a little creek, thence gently rising through a
long series of cultivated fields toward some high uplying land
behind which rises a rugged wooded ridge or mountain, the most
sightly point in all this section. Behind this ridge for several
miles the country is wild, wooded, and rocky, and is no doubt the
home of many swarms of wild bees. What a gleeful uproar the robins,
cedar-birds, high-holes, and cow blackbirds make amid the black
cherry-trees as we pass along! The raccoons, too, have been here
after black cherries, and we see their marks at various points.
Several crows are walking about a newly sowed wheat-field we pass
through, and we pause to note their graceful movements and glossy
coats. I have seen no bird walk the ground with just the same air
the crow does. It is not exactly pride; there is no strut or
swagger in it, though perhaps just a little condescension; it is
the contented, complaisant, and self-possessed gait of a lord over
his domains. All these acres are mine, he says, and all these
crops; men plow and sow for me, and I stay here or go there, and
find life sweet and good wherever I am. The hawk looks awkward and
out of place on the ground; the game-birds hurry and skulk; but the
crow is at home, and treads the earth as if there were none to
molest or make him afraid.
The crows we have always with us, but it is not every day or every
season that one sees an eagle. Hence I must preserve the memory of
one I saw the last day I went bee-hunting. As I was laboring up
the side of a mountain at the head of a valley, the noble bird
sprang from the top of a dry tree above me and came sailing
directly over my head. I saw him bend his eye down upon me, and I
could hear the low hum of his plumage as if the web of every quill
in his great wings vibrated in his strong, level flight. I watched
him as long as my eye could hold him. When he was fairly clear of
the mountain, he began that sweeping spiral movement in which he
climbs the sky. Up and up he went, without once breaking his
majestic poise, till he appeared to sight some far-off alien
geography, when he bent his course thitherward and gradually
vanished in the blue depths. The eagle is a bird of large ideas; he
embraces long distances; the continent is his home. I never look
upon one without emotion; I follow him with my eye as long as I
can. I think of Canada, of the Great Lakes, of the Rocky Mountains,
of the wild and sounding seacoast. The waters are his, and the
woods and the inaccessible cliffs. He pierces behind the veil of
the storm, and his joy is height and depth and vast spaces.
We go out of our way to touch at a spring run in the edge of the
woods, and are lucky to find a single scarlet lobelia lingering
there. It seems almost to light up the gloom with its intense bit
of color. Beside a ditch in a field beyond, we find the great blue
lobelia, and near it, amid the weeds and wild grasses and purple
asters, the most beautiful of our fall flowers, the fringed
gentian. What a rare and delicate, almost aristocratic look the
gentian has amid its coarse, unkempt surroundings!- It does not
lure the bee, but it lures and holds every passing human eye. If
we strike through the corner of yonder woods, where the ground is
moistened by hidden springs, and where there is a little opening
amid the trees, we shall find the closed gentian, a rare flower in
this locality. I had walked this way many times before I chanced
upon its retreat, and then I was following a line of bees. I lost
the bees, but I got the gentians. How curious this flower looks
with its deep blue petals folded together so tightly,--a bud and
yet a blossom! It is the nun among our wild flowers,--a form
closely veiled and cloaked. The buccaneer bumblebee sometimes
tries to rifle it of its sweets. I have seen the blossom with the
bee entombed in it. He had forced his way into the virgin corolla
as if determined to know its secret, but he had never returned with
the knowledge he had gained.
After a refreshing walk of a couple of miles we reach a point where
we will make our first trial,--a high stone wall that runs parallel
with the wooded ridge referred to, and separated from it by a broad
field. There are bees at work there on that golden-rod, and it
requires but little manuvring to sweep one into our box. Almost
any other creature rudely and suddenly arrested in its career, and
clapped into a cage in this way, would show great confusion and
alarm. The bee is alarmed for a moment, but the bee has a passion
stronger than its love of life or fear of death, namely, desire for
honey, not simply to eat, but to carry home as booty. "Such rage
of honey in their bosom beats," says Virgil. It is quick to catch
the scent of honey in the box, and as quick to fall to filling
itself. We now set the box down upon the wall and gently remove
the cover. The bee is head and shoulders in one of the half-filled
cells, and is oblivious to everything else about it. Come rack,
come ruin, it will die at work. We step back a few paces, and sit
down upon the ground so as to bring the box against the blue sky as
a background. In two or three minutes the bee is seen rising
slowly and heavily from the box. It seems loath to leave so much
honey behind, and it marks the place well. It mounts aloft in a
rapidly increasing spiral, surveying the near and minute objects
first, then the larger and more distant, till, having circled above
the spot five or six times and taken all its bearings, it darts
away for home. It is a good eye that holds fast to the bee till it
is fairly off. Sometimes one's head will swim following it, and
often one's eyes are put out by the sun. This bee gradually drifts
down the hill, then strikes off toward a farmhouse half a mile away
where I know bees are kept. Then we try another and another, and
the third bee, much to our satisfaction, goes straight toward the
woods. We can see the brown speck against the darker background
for many yards. The regular bee-hunter professes to be able to
tell a wild bee from a tame one by the color, the former, he says,
being lighter. But there is no difference; they are alike in
color and in manner. Young bees are lighter than old, and that is
all there is of it. If a bee lived many years in the woods, it
would doubtless come to have some distinguishing marks, but the
life of a bee is only a few months at the farthest, and no change
is wrought in this brief time.
Our bees are all soon back, and more with them, for we have touched
the box here and there with the cork of a bottle of anise oil, and
this fragrant and pungent oil will attract bees half a mile or
more. When no flowers can be found, this is the quickest way to
obtain a bee.
It is a singular fact that when the bee first finds the hunter's
box, its first feeling is one of anger; it is as mad as a hornet;
its tone changes, it sounds its shrill war trumpet and darts to and
fro, and gives vent to its rage and indignation in no uncertain
manner. It seems to scent foul play at once. It says, "Here is
robbery; here is the spoil of some hive, maybe my own," and its
blood is up. But its ruling passion soon comes to the surface, its
avarice gets the better of its indignation, and it seems to say,
"Well, I had better take possession of this and carry it home." So
after many feints and approaches and dartings off with a loud angry
hum as if it would none of it, the bee settles down and fills
itself.
It does not entirely cool off and get soberly to work till it has
made two or three trips home with its booty. When other bees come,
even if all from the same swarm, they quarrel and dispute over the
box, and clip and dart at each other like bantam cocks. Apparently
the ill feeling which the sight of the honey awakens is not one of
jealousy or rivalry, but wrath.
A bee will usually make three or four trips from the hunter's box
before it brings back a companion. I suspect the bee does not tell
its fellows what it has found, but that they smell out the secret;
it doubtless bears some evidence with it upon its feet or proboscis
that it has been upon honeycomb and not upon flowers, and its
companions take the hint and follow, arriving always many seconds
behind. Then the quantity and quality of the booty would also
betray it. No doubt, also, there are plenty of gossips about a
hive that note and tell everything. "Oh, did you see that? Peggy
Mel came in a few moments ago in great haste, and one of the
upstairs packers says she was loaded till she groaned with apple-
blossom honey, which she deposited, and then rushed off again like
mad. Apple-blossom honey in October! Fee, fi, fo, fum! I smell
something! Let's after."
In about half an hour we have three well-defined lines of bees
established,--two to farmhouses and one to the woods, and our box
is being rapidly depleted of its honey. About every fourth bee
goes to the woods, and now that they have learned the way
thoroughly, they do not make the long preliminary whirl above the
box, but start directly from it. The woods are rough and dense and
the hill steep, and we do not like to follow the line of bees until
we have tried at least to settle the problem as to the distance
they go into the woods,--whether the tree is on this side of the
ridge or into the depth of the forest on the other side. So we
shut up the box when it is full of bees and carry it about three
hundred yards along the wall from which we are operating. When
liberated, the bees, as they always will in such cases, go off in
the same directions they have been going; they do not seem to know
that they have been moved. But other bees have followed our scent,
and it is not many minutes before a second line to the woods is
established. This is called cross-lining the bees. The new line
makes a sharp angle with the other line, and we know at once that
the tree is only a few rods in the woods. The two lines we have
established form two sides of a triangle, of which the wall is the
base; at the apex of the triangle, or where the two lines meet in
the woods, we are sure to find the tree. We quickly follow up
these lines, and where they cross each other on the side of the
hill we scan every tree closely. I pause at the foot of an oak and
examine a hole near the root; now the bees are in this tree and
their entrance is on the upper side near the ground not two feet
from the hole I peer into, and yet so quiet and secret is their
going and coming that I fail to discover them and pass on up the
hill. Failing in this direction, I return to the oak again, and
then perceive the bees going but in a small crack in the tree. The
bees do not know they are found out and that the game is in our
hands, and are as oblivious of our presence as if we were ants or
crickets. The indications are that the swarm is a small one, and
the store of honey trifling. In "taking up" a bee-tree it is usual
first to kill or stupefy the bees with the fumes of burning sulphur
or with tobacco smoke. But this course is impracticable on the
present occasion, so we boldly and ruthlessly assault the tree with
an axe we have procured. At the first blow the bees set up a loud
buzzing, but we have no mercy, and the side of the cavity is soon
cut away and the interior with its white-yellow mass of comb honey
is exposed, and not a bee strikes a blow in defense of its all.
This may seem singular, but it has nearly always been my
experience. When a swarm of bees are thus rudely assaulted with an
axe, they evidently think the end of the world has come, and, like
true misers as they are, each one seizes as much of the treasure as
it can hold; in other words, they all fall to and gorge themselves
with honey, and calmly await the issue. While in this condition
they make no defense, and will not sting unless taken hold of. In
fact, they are as harmless as flies. Bees are always to be managed
with boldness and decision. Any halfway measures, any timid poking
about, any feeble attempts to reach their honey, are sure to be
quickly resented. The popular notion that bees have a special
antipathy toward certain persons and a liking for certain others
has only this fact at the bottom of it: they will sting a person
who is afraid of them and goes skulking and dodging about, and they
will not sting a person who faces them boldly and has no dread of
them. They are like dogs. The way to disarm a vicious dog is to
show him you do not fear him; it is his turn to be afraid then. I
never had any dread of bees, and am seldom stung by them. I have
climbed up into a large chestnut that contained a swarm in one of
its cavities and chopped them out with an axe, being obliged at
times to pause and brush the bewildered bees from my hands and
face, and not been stung once. I have chopped a swarm out of an
apple-tree in June, and taken out the cards of honey and arranged
them in a hive, and then dipped out the bees with a dipper, and
taken the whole home with me in pretty good condition, with
scarcely any opposition on the part of the bees. In reaching your
hand into the cavity to detach and remove the comb you are pretty
sure to get stung, for when you touch the "business end" of a bee,
it will sting even though its head be off. But the bee carries the
antidote to its own poison. The best remedy for bee sting is
honey, and when your hands are besmeared with honey, as they are
sure to be on such occasions, the wound is scarcely more painful
than the prick of a pin. Assault your bee-tree, then, boldly with
your axe, and you will find that when the honey is exposed every
bee has surrendered, and the whole swarm is cowering in helpless
bewilderment and terror. Our tree yields only a few pounds of
honey, not enough to have lasted the swarm till January, but no
matter: we have the less burden to carry.
In the afternoon we go nearly half a mile farther along the ridge
to a corn-field that lies immediately in front of the highest point
of the mountain. The view is superb; the ripe autumn landscape
rolls away to the east, cut through by the great placid river; in
the extreme north the wall of the Catskills stands out clear and
strong, while in the south the mountains of the Highlands bound the
view. The day is warm, and the bees are very busy there in that
neglected corner of the field, rich in asters, fleabane, and
goldenrod. The corn has been cut, and upon a stout but a few rods
from the woods, which here drop quickly down from the precipitous
heights, we set up our bee-box, touched again with the pungent oil.
In a few moments a bee has found it; she comes up to leeward,
following the scent. On leaving the box, she goes straight toward
the woods. More bees quickly come, and it is not long before the
line is well established. Now we have recourse to the same tactics
we employed before, and move along the ridge to another field to
get our cross-line. But the bees still go in almost the same
direction they did from the corn stout. The tree is then either on
the top of the mountain or on the other or west side of it. We
hesitate to make the plunge into the woods and seek to scale those
precipices, for the eye can plainly see what is before us. As the
afternoon sun gets lower, the bees are seen with wonderful
distinctness. They fly toward and under the sun, and are in a
strong light, while the near woods which form the background are in
deep shadow. They look like large luminous motes. Their swiftly
vibrating, transparent wings surround their bodies with a shining
nimbus that makes them visible for a long distance. They seem
magnified many times. We see them bridge the little gulf between us
and the woods, then rise up over the treetops with their burdens,
swerving neither to the right hand nor to the left. It is almost
pathetic to see them labor so, climbing the mountain and
unwittingly guiding us to their treasures. When the sun gets down
so that his direction corresponds exactly with the course of the
bees, we make the plunge. It proves even harder climbing than we
had anticipated; the mountain is faced by a broken and irregular
wall of rock, up which we pull ourselves slowly and cautiously by
main strength. In half an hour, the perspiration streaming from
every pore, we reach the summit. The trees here are all small, a
second growth, and we are soon convinced the bees are not here.
Then down we go on the other side, clambering down the rocky
stairways till we reach quite a broad plateau that forms something
like the shoulder of the mountain. On the brink of this there are
many large hemlocks, and we scan them closely and rap upon them
with our axe. But not a bee is seen or heard; we do not seem as
near the tree as we were in the fields below; yet, if some divinity
would only whisper the fact to us, we are within a few rods of the
coveted prize, which is not in one of the large hemlocks or oaks
that absorb our attention, but in an old stub or stump not six feet
high, and which we have seen and passed several times without
giving it a thought. We go farther down the mountain and beat
about to the right and left, and get entangled in brush and
arrested by precipices, and finally, as the day is nearly spent,
give up the search and leave the woods quite baffled, but resolved
to return on the morrow. The next day we come back and commence
operations in an opening in the woods well down on the side of the
mountain where we gave up the search. Our box is soon swarming
with the eager bees, and they go back toward the summit we have
passed. We follow back and establish a new line, where the ground
will permit; then another and still another, and yet the riddle is
not solved. One time we are south of them, then north, then the
bees get up through the trees and we cannot tell where they go.
But after much searching, and after the mystery seems rather to
deepen than to clear up, we chance to pause beside the old stump.
A bee comes out of a small opening like that made by ants in
decayed wood, rubs its eyes and examines its antennæ, as bees
always do before leaving their hive, then takes flight. At the
same instant several bees come by us loaded with our honey and
settle home with that peculiar low, complacent buzz of the well-
filled insect. Here then, is our idyl, our bit of Virgil and
Theocritus, in a decayed stump of a hemlock-tree. We could tear it
open with our hands, and a bear would find it an easy prize, and a
rich one, too, for we take from it fifty pounds of excellent honey.
The bees have been here many years, and have of course sent out
swarm after swarm into the wilds. they have protected themselves
against the weather and strengthened their shaky habitation by a
copious use of wax.
When a bee-tree is thus "taken up" in the middle of the day, of
course a good many bees are away from home and have not heard the
news. When they return and find the ground flowing with honey, and
plies of bleeding combs lying about, they apparently do not
recognize the place, and their first instinct is to fall to and
fill themselves; this done, their next thought is to carry it home,
so they rise up slowly through the branches of the trees till they
have attained an altitude that enables them to survey the scene,
when they seem to say, "Why, THIS is home," and down they come
again; beholding the wreck and ruins once more, they still thinking
there is some mistake, and get up a second or a third time and then
drop back pitifully as before. It is the most pathetic sight of
all, the surviving and bewildered bees struggling to save a few
drops of their wasted treasures.
Presently, if there is another swarm in the woods, robber bees
appear. You may know them by their saucy, chiding, devil-may-care
hum. It is an ill wind that blows nobody good, and they make the
most of the misfortune of their neighbors, and thereby pave the way
for their own ruin. The hunter marks their course, and the next
day looks them up. On this occasion the day was hot and the honey
very fragrant, and a line of bees was soon established south-
southwest. Though there was much refuse honey in the old stub, and
though little golden rills trickled down the hill from it, and the
near branches and saplings were besmeared with it where we wiped
our murderous hands, yet not a drop was wasted. It was a feast to
which not only honey bees came, but bumblebees, wasps, hornets,
flies, ants. The bumblebees, which at this season are hungry
vagrants with no fixed place of abode, would gorge themselves, then
creep beneath the bits of empty comb or fragments of bark and pass
the night, and renew the feast next day. The bumble-bee is an
insect of which the bee-hunter sees much. There are all sorts and
sizes of them. They are dull and clumsy compared with the honeybee.
Attracted in the fields by the bee-hunter's box, they will come up
the wind on the scent and blunder into it in the most stupid,
lubberly fashion.
The honey-bees that licked up our leavings on the old stub belonged
to a swarm, as it proved, about half a mile farther down the ridge,
and a few days afterward fate overtook them, and their stores in
turn became the prey of another swarm in the vicinity, which also
tempted Providence and were overwhelmed. The first-mentioned swarm
I had lined from several points, and was following up the clew over
rocks and through gullies, when I came to where a large hemlock had
been felled a few years before, and a swarm taken from a cavity
near the top of it; fragments of the old comb were yet to be seen.
A few yards away stood another short, squatty hemlock, and I said
my bees ought to be there. As I paused near it, I noticed where
the tree had been wounded with an axe a couple of feet from the
ground many years before. The wound had partially grown over, but
there was an opening there that I did not see at the first glance.
I was about to pass on when a bee passed me making that peculiar
shrill, discordant hum that a bee makes when besmeared with honey.
I saw it alight in the partially closed wound and crawl home; then
came others and others, little bands and squads of them, heavily
freighted with honey from the box. The tree was about twenty
inches through and hollow at the butt, or from the axe-mark down.
This space the bees had completely filled with honey. With an axe
we cut away the outer ring of live wood and exposed the treasure.
Despite the utmost care, we wounded the comb so that little rills
of the golden liquid issued from the root of the tree and trickled
down the hill.
The other bee-tree in the vicinity to which I have referred we
found one warm November day in less than half an hour after
entering the woods. It also was a hemlock, that stood in a niche
in a wall of hoary, moss-covered rocks thirty feet high. The tree
hardly reached to the top of the precipice. The bees entered a
small hole at the root, which was seven or eight feet from the
ground. The position was a striking one. Never did apiary have a
finer outlook or more rugged surroundings.. A black, wood-embraced
lake lay at our feet; the long panorama of the Catskills filled the
far distance, and the more broken outlines of the Shawangunk range
filled the rear. On every hand were precipices and a wild
confusion of rocks and trees.
The cavity occupied by the bees was about three feet and a half
long and eight or ten inches in diameter. With an axe we cut away
one side of the tree, and laid bare its curiously wrought heart of
honey. It was a most pleasing sight. What winding and devious
ways the bees had through their palace! What great masses and
blocks of snow-white comb there were! Where it was sealed up,
presenting that slightly dented, uneven surface, it looked like
some precious ore. When we carried a large pailful of it out of
the woods, it seemed still more like ore.
Your native bee-hunter predicates the distance of the tree by the
time the bee occupies in making its first trip. But this is no
certain guide. You are always safe in calculating that the tree is
inside of a mile, and you need not as a rule look for your bee's
return under ten minutes. One day I picked up a bee in an opening
in the woods and gave it honey, and it made three trips to my box
with an interval of about twelve minutes between them; it returned
alone each time; the tree, which I afterward found, was about half
a mile distant.
In lining bees through the woods, the tactics of the hunter are to
pause every twenty or thirty rods, lop away the branches or cut
down the trees, and set the bees to work again. If they still go
forward, he goes forward also, and repeats his observations till
the tree is found, or till the bees turn and come back upon the
trail. Then he knows he has passed the tree, and he retraces his
steps to a convenient distance and tries again, and thus quickly
reduces the space to be looked over till the swarm is traced home.
On one occasion, in a wild rocky wood, where the surface alternated
between deep gulfs and chasms filled with thick, heavy growths of
timber, and sharp, precipitous, rocky ridges like a tempest-tossed
sea, I carried my bees directly under their tree, and set them to
work from a high, exposed ledge of rocks not thirty feet distant.
One would have expected them under such circumstances to have gone
straight home, as there were but few branches intervening, but they
did not; they labored up through the trees and attained an altitude
above the woods as if they had miles to travel, and thus baffled me
for hours. Bees will always do this. They are acquainted with the
woods only from the top side, and from the air above; they
recognize home only by landmarks here, and in every instance they
rise aloft to take their bearings. Think how familiar to them the
topography of the forest summits must be,--an umbrageous sea or
plain where every mark and point is known.
Another curious fact is that generally you will get track of a bee-
tree sooner when you are half a mile from it than when you are only
a few yards. Bees, like us human insects, have little faith in the
near at hand; they expect to make their fortune in a distant field,
they are lured by the remote and the difficult, and hence overlook
the flower and the sweet at their very door. On several occasions
I have unwittingly set my box within a few paces of a bee-tree and
waited long for bees without getting them, when, on removing to a
distant field or opening in the woods, I have got a clew at once.
I have a theory that when bees leave the hive, unless there is some
special attraction in some other direction, they generally go
against the wind. They would thus have the wind with them when they
returned home heavily laden, and with these little navigators the
difference is an important one. With a full cargo, a stiff head-
wind is a great hindrance, but fresh and empty-handed, they can
face it with more ease. Virgil says bees bear gravel-stones as
ballast, but their only ballast is their honey-bag. Hence, when I
go bee-hunting, I prefer to get to windward of the woods in which
the swarm is supposed to have refuge.
Bees, like the milkman, like to be near a spring. They do water
their honey, especially in a dry time. The liquid is then of course
thicker and sweeter, and will bear diluting. Hence old bee-hunters
look for bee-trees along creeks and near spring runs in the woods.
I once found a tree a long distance from any water, and the honey
had a peculiar bitter flavor, imparted to it, I was convinced, by
rainwater sucked from the decayed and spongy hemlock-tree in which
the swarm was found. In cutting into the tree, the north side of
it was found to be saturated with water like a spring, which ran
out in big drops, and had a bitter flavor. The bees had thus found
a spring or a cistern in their own house.
Bees are exposed to many hardships and many dangers. Winds and
storms prove as disastrous to them as to other navigators. Black
spiders lie in wait for them as do brigands for travelers. One
day, as I was looking for a bee amid some golden-rod, I spied one
partly concealed under a leaf. Its baskets were full of pollen,
and it did not move. On lifting up the leaf I discovered that a
hairy spider was ambushed there and had the bee by the throat. The
vampire was evidently afraid of the bee's sting, and was holding it
by the throat till quite sure of its death. Virgil speaks of the
painted lizard, perhaps a species of salamander, as an enemy of the
honey-bee. We have no lizard that destroys the bee; but our tree-
toad, ambushed among the apple and cherry blossoms, snaps them up
wholesale. Quick as lightning that subtle but clammy tongue darts
forth, and the unsuspecting bee is gone. Virgil also accuses the
titmouse and the woodpecker of preying upon the bees, and our
kingbird has been charged with the like crime, but the latter
devours only the drones. The workers are either too small and
quick for it or else it dreads their sting.
Virgil, by the way, had little more than a child's knowledge of the
honey-bee. There is little fact and much fable in his fourth
Georgic. If he had ever kept bees himself, or even visited an
apiary, it is hard to see how he could have believed that the bee
in its flight abroad carried a gravel-stone for ballast:
"And as when empty barks on billows
float,
With sandy ballast sailors trim the
boat;
So bees bear gravel-stones, whose
poising weight
Steers through the whistling winds
their steady flight;"
or that, when two colonies made war upon each other, they issued
forth from their hives led by their kings and fought in the air,
strewing the ground with the dead and dying:--
"Hard hailstones lie not thicker on the
plain,
Nor shaken oaks such show'rs of
acorns rain."
It is quite certain he had never been bee-hunting. If he had, we
should have had a fifth Georgic. Yet he seems to have known that
bees sometimes escaped to the woods:--
"Nor bees are lodged in hives alone,
but found
In chambers of their own beneath the
ground:
Their vaulted roofs are hung in
pumices,
And in the rotten trunks of hollow
trees."
Wild honey is as near like tame as wild bees are like their
brothers in the hive. The only difference is, that wild honey is
flavored with your adventure, which makes it a little more
delectable than the domestic article.
IV
NATURE AND THE POETS
I HAVE said on a former occasion that "the true poet knows more
about Nature than the naturalist, because he carries her open
secrets in his heart. Eckermann could instruct Goethe in
ornithology, but could not Goethe instruct Eckermann in the meaning
and mystery of the bird?" But the poets sometimes rely too
confidently upon their supposed intuitive knowledge of nature, and
grow careless about the accuracy of the details of their pictures.
I am not aware that this was ever the case with Goethe; I think it
was not, for as a rule, the greater the poet, the more correct and
truthful will be his specifications. It is the lesser poets who
trip most over their facts. Thus a New England poet speaks of
"plucking the apple from the pine," as if the pineapple grew upon
the pine-tree. A Western poet sings of the bluebird in a strain in
which every feature and characteristic of the bird is lost; not one
trait of the bird is faithfully set down. When the robin and the
swallow come, he says, the bluebird hies him to some mossy old
wood, where, amid the deep seclusion, he pours out his song.
In a poem by a well-known author in one of the popular journals, a
hummingbird's nest is shown the reader, and it has BLUE eggs in it.
A more cautious poet would have turned to Audubon or Wilson before
venturing upon such a statement. But then it was necessary to have
a word to rhyme with "view," and what could be easier than to make
a white egg "blue"? Again, one of our later poets has evidently
confounded the hummingbird with that curious parody upon it, the
hawk or sphinx moth, as in his poem upon the subject he has hit off
exactly the habits of the moth, or, rather, his creature seems a
cross between the moth and the bird, as it has the habits of the
one and the plumage of the other. The time to see the hummingbird,
he says, is after sunset in the summer gloaming; then it steals
forth and hovers over the flowers. Now, the hummingbird is
eminently a creature of the sun and of the broad open day, and I
have never seen it after sundown, while the moth is rarely seen
except at twilight. It is much smaller and less brilliant than the
hummingbird; but its flight and motions are so nearly the same that
a poet, with his eye in a fine frenzy rolling, might easily mistake
one for the other. It is but a small slip in such a poet as poor
George Arnold, when he makes the sweet-scented honeysuckle bloom
for the bee, for surely the name suggests the bee, though in fact
she does not work upon it; but what shall we say of the Kansas
poet, who, in his published volume, claims both the yew and the
nightingale for his native State? Or of a Massachusetts poet, who
finds the snowdrop and the early primrose blooming along his native
streams, with the orchis and the yellow violet, and makes the
blackbird conspicuous among New England songsters? Our ordinary
yew is not a tree at all, but a low spreading evergreen shrub that
one may step over; and as for the nightingale, if they have the
mockingbird in Kansas, they can very well do without him. We have
several varieties of blackbirds, it is true; but when an American
poet speaks in a general way of the blackbird piping or singing in
a tree, as he would speak of a robin or a sparrow, the suggestion
or reminiscence awakened is always that of the blackbird of English
poetry.
"In days when daisies deck the ground,
And blackbirds whistle clear,
With honest joy our hearts will bound
To see the coming year"--
sings Burns. I suspect that the English reader of even some of
Emerson's and Lowell's poems would infer that our blackbird was
identical with the British species. I refer to these lines of
Emerson:--
"Where arches green the livelong day
Echo the blackbirds' roundelay;"
and to these lines from Lowell's "Rosaline:"--
"A blackbird whistling overhead
Thrilled through my brain;"
and again these from "The Fountain of Youth:"--
" 'T is a woodland enchanted;
By no sadder spirit
Than blackbirds and thrushes
That whistle to cheer it,
All day in the bushes."
The blackbird of the English poets is like our robin in everything
except color. He is familiar, hardy, abundant, thievish, and his
habits, manners, and song recall our bird to the life. Our own
native blackbirds, the crow blackbird, the rusty grackle, the
cowbird, and the red-shouldered starling, are not songsters, even
in the latitude allowable to poets; neither are they whistlers,
unless we credit them with a "split-whistle," as Thoreau does. The
two first named have a sort of musical cackle and gurgle in spring
(as at times both our crow and jay have), which is very pleasing,
and to which Emerson aptly refers in these lines from "May-Day:"--
"The blackbirds make the maples ring
With social cheer and jubilee"--
but it is not a song. The note of the starling in the trees and
alders along the creeks and marshes is better calculated to arrest
the attention of the casual observer; but it is far from being a
song or a whistle like that of the European blackbird, or our
robin. Its most familiar call is like the word "BAZIQUE,"
"BAZIQUE," but it has a wild musical note which Emerson has
embalmed in this line:--
"The redwing flutes his O-KA-LEE."
Here Emerson discriminates; there is no mistaking his blackbird
this time for the European species, though it is true there is
nothing fluty or flute-like in the redwing's voice. The flute is
mellow, while the "O-KA-LEE" of the starling is strong and sharply
accented. The voice of the thrushes (and our robin and the European
blackbird are thrushes) is flute-like. Hence the aptness of this
line of Tennyson:--
"The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm,"--
the blackbird being the ouzel, or ouzel-cock, as Shakespeare calls
him.
In the line which precedes this, Tennyson has stamped the cuckoo:--
"To left and right,
The cuckoo told his name to all the
hills."
The cuckoo is a bird that figures largely in English poetry, but he
always has an equivocal look in American verse, unless sharply
discriminated. We have a cuckoo, but he is a great recluse; and I
am sure the poets do not know when he comes or goes, while to make
him sing familiarly like the British species, as I have known at
least one of our poets to do, is to come very wide of the mark.
Our bird is as solitary and joyless as the most veritable
anchorite. He contributes nothing to the melody or the gayety of
the season. He is, indeed, known in some sections as the rain-
crow," but I presume that not one person in ten of those who spend
their lives in the country has ever seen or heard him. He is like
the showy orchis, or the lady's-slipper, or the shooting star among
plants,-- a stranger to all but the few; and when an American poet
says cuckoo, he must say it with such specifications as to leave no
doubt what cuckoo he means, as Lowell does in his "Nightingale in
the Study:"--
"And, hark, the cuckoo, weatherwise,
Still hiding farther onward, wooes
you."
In like manner the primrose is an exotic in American poetry, to say
nothing of the snowdrop and the daisy. Its prominence in English
poetry can be understood when we remember that the plant is so
abundant in England as to be almost a weed, and that it comes early
and is very pretty. Cowslip and oxlip are familiar names of
varieties of the same plant, and they bear so close a resemblance
that it is hard to tell them apart. Hence Tennyson, in "The
Talking Oak:"--
"As cowslip unto oxlip is,
So seems she to the boy."
Our familiar primrose is the evening primrose,--a rank, tall weed
that blooms with the mullein in late summer. Its small, yellow,
slightly fragrant blossoms open only at night, but remain open
during the next day. By cowslip, our poets and writers generally
mean the yellow marsh marigold, which belongs to a different family
of plants, but which, as a spring token and a pretty flower, is a
very good substitute for the cowslip. Our real cowslip, the
shooting star, is very rare, and is one of the most beautiful of
native flowers. I believe it is not found north of Pennsylvania.
I have found it in a single locality in the District of Columbia,
and the day is memorable upon which I first saw its cluster of pink
flowers, with their recurved petals cleaving the air. I do not
know that it has ever been mentioned in poetry.
Another flower, which I suspect our poets see largely through the
medium of English literature and invest with borrowed charms, is
the violet. The violet is a much more winsome and poetic flower in
England than it is in this country, for the reason that it comes
very early and is sweet-scented; our common violet is not among the
earliest flowers, and it is odorless. It affects sunny slopes,
like the English flower; yet Shakespeare never could have made the
allusion to it which he makes to his own species in these lines:--
"That strain again! it had a dying fall:
Oh! it came o'er my ear like the sweet south
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor,"
or lauded it as
"Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
Or Cytherea's breath."
Our best known sweet-scented violet is a small, white, lilac-veined
species (not yellow, as Bryant has it in his poem), that is common
in wet, out-of-the-way places. Our common blue violet--the only
species that is found abundantly everywhere in the North--blooms in
May, and makes bright many a grassy meadow slope and sunny nook.
Yet, for all that, it does not awaken the emotion in one that the
earlier and more delicate spring flowers do,--the hepatica, say,
with its shy wood habits, its pure, infantile expression, and at
times its delicate perfume; or the houstonia,--"innocence,"--
flecking or streaking the cold spring earth with a milky way of
minute stars; or the trailing arbutus, sweeter scented than the
English violet, and outvying in tints Cytherea's or any other
blooming goddess's cheek. Yet these flowers have no classical
associations, and are consequently far less often upon the lips of
our poets than the violet.
To return to birds, another dangerous one for the American poet is
the lark, and our singers generally are very shy of him. The term
has been applied very loosely in this country to both the meadow-
lark and the bobolink, yet it is pretty generally understood now
that we have no genuine skylark east of the Mississippi. Hence I
am curious to know what bird Bayard Taylor refers to when he speaks
in his "Spring Pastoral" of
"Larks responding aloft to the mellow flute of the
bluebird."
Our so-called meadowlark is no lark at all, but a starling, and the
titlark and shore lark breed and pass the summer far to the north,
and are never heard in song in the United States. [Footnote: The
shore lark has changed its habits in this respect of late years.
It now breeds regularly on my native hills in Delaware County, New
York, and may be heard in full song there from April to June or
later.]
The poets are entitled to a pretty free range, but they must be
accurate when they particularize. We expect them to see the fact
through their imagination, but it must still remain a fact; the
medium must not distort it into a lie. When they name a flower or
a tree or a bird, whatever halo of the ideal they throw around it,
it must not be made to belie the botany or the natural history. I
doubt if you can catch Shakespeare transgressing the law in this
respect, except where he followed the superstition and the
imperfect knowledge of his time, as in his treatment of the honey-
bee. His allusions to nature are always incidental to his main
purpose, but they reveal a careful and loving observer. For
instance, how are fact and poetry wedded in this passage, put into
the mouth of Banquo!--
"This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does
approve,
By his loved masonry that the
heaven's breath
Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze.
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but
this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and
procreant cradle:
Where they most breed and haunt,
I have observed,
The air is delicate."
Nature is of course universal, but in the same sense is she local
and particular,--cuts every suit to fit the wearer, gives every
land an earth and sky of its own, and a flora and fauna to match.
The poets and their readers delight in local touches. We have both
the hare and the rabbit in America, but this line from Thomson's
description of a summer morning,--
"And from the bladed field the fearful
hare limps awkward,"--
or this from Beattie,--
"Through rustling corn the hare
astonished sprang"--
would not apply with the same force in New England, because our
hare is never found in the fields, but in dense, remote woods. In
England both hares and rabbits abound to such an extent that in
places the fields and meadows swarm with them, and the ground is
undermined by their burrows, till they become a serious pest to the
farmer, and are trapped in vast numbers. The same remark applies
to this from Tennyson:--
"From the woods
Came voices of the well-contented
doves."
Doves and wood-pigeons are almost as abundant in England as hares
and rabbits, and are also a serious annoyance to the farmer; while
in this country the dove and pigeon are much less marked and
permanent features in our rural scenery,--less permanent, except in
the case of the mourning dove, which is found here and there the
season through; and less marked, except when the hordes of the
passenger pigeon once in a decade or two invade the land, rarely
tarrying longer than the bands of a foraging army. I hardly know
what Trowbridge means by the "wood-pigeon" in his midsummer poem,
for, strictly speaking, the wood-pigeon is a European bird, and a
very common one in England. But let me say here, however, that
Trowbridge, as a rule, keeps very close to the natural history of
his own country when he has occasion to draw material from this
source, and to American nature generally. You will find in his
poems the wood pewee, the bluebird, the oriole, the robin, the
grouse, the kingfisher, the chipmunk, the mink, the bobolink, the
wood thrush, all in their proper places. There are few bird-poems
that combine so much good poetry and good natural history as his
"Pewee." Here we have a glimpse of the catbird:--
"In the alders, dank with noonday
dews,
The restless catbird darts and mews;"
here, of the cliff swallow: -
"In the autumn, when the hollows
All are filled with flying leaves
And the colonies of swallows
Quit the quaintly stuccoed eaves."
Only the dates are not quite right. The swallows leave their nests
in July, which is nearly three months before the leaves fall. The
poet is also a little unfaithful to the lore of his boyhood when he
says
"The partridge beats his throbbing drum"
in midsummer. As a rule, the partridge does not drum later than
June, except fitfully during the Indian summer, while April and May
are his favorite months. And let me say here, for the benefit of
the poets who do not go to the woods, that the partridge does not
always drum upon a log; he frequently drums upon a rock or a stone
wall, if a suitable log be not handy, and no ear can detect the
difference. His drum is really his own proud breast, and beneath
his small hollow wings gives forth the same low, mellow thunder
from a rock as from a log. Bryant has recognized this fact in one
of his poems.
Our poets are quite apt to get ahead or behind the season with
their flowers and birds. It is not often that we catch such a poet
as Emerson napping. He knows nature, and he knows the New England
fields and woods, as few poets do. One may study our flora and
fauna in his pages. He puts in the moose and the "surly bear," and
makes the latter rhyme with "woodpecker:"--
"He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous
beds,
The slight Linnæa hang its twin-born
heads.
. . . . . . . .
.
He heard, when in the grove, at
intervals,
With sudden roar the aged pine-tree
falls,--
One crash, the death-hymn of the
perfect tree,
Declares the close of its green
century."
"They led me through the thicket
damp,
Through brake and fern, the beavers'
camp."
"He saw the partridge drum in the
woods;
He heard the woodcock's evening
hymn;
He found the tawny thrushes' broods;
And the shy hawk did wait for him."
His "Titmouse" is studied in our winter woods, and his "Humble-Bee"
in our summer fields. He has seen farther into the pine-tree than
any other poet; his "May-Day" is full of our spring sounds and
tokens; he knows the "punctual birds," and the "herbs and simples
of the wood:"--
"Rue, cinque-foil, gill, vervain, and
agrimony,
Blue-vetch, and trillium, hawk-weed,
sassafras,
Milk-weeds and murky brakes, quaint
pipes and sun-dew."
Here is a characteristic touch:--
"A woodland walk
A quest of river-grapes, a mocking
thrush,
A wild rose, or rock-loving columbine,
Salve my worst wounds."
That "rock-loving columbine" is better than Bryant's "columbines,
in purple dressed," as our flower is not purple, but yellow and
scarlet. Yet Bryant set the example to the poets that have
succeeded him of closely studying Nature as she appears under our
own skies.
I yield to none in my admiration of the sweetness and simplicity of
his poems of nature, and in general of their correctness of
observation. They are tender and heartfelt, and they touch chords
that no other poet since Wordsworth has touched with so firm a
hand. Yet he was not always an infallible observer; he sometimes
tripped up on his facts, and at other times he deliberately moulded
them, adding to, or cutting off, to suit the purposes of his verse.
I will cite here two instances in which his natural history is at
fault. In his poem on the bobolink he makes the parent birds feed
their young with "seeds," whereas, in fact, the young are fed
exclusively upon insects and worms. The bobolink is an
insectivorous bird in the North, or until its brood has flown, and
a granivorous bird in the South. In his "Evening Revery" occur
these lines:--
"The mother bird hath broken for her
brood
Their prison shells, or shoved them
from the nest,
Plumed for their earliest flight."
It is not a fact that the mother bird aids her offspring in
escaping from the shell. The young of all birds are armed with a
small temporary horn or protuberance upon the upper mandible, and
they are so placed in the shell that this point is in immediate
contact with its inner surface; as soon as they are fully developed
and begin to struggle to free themselves, the horny growth "pips"
the shell. Their efforts then continue till their prison walls are
completely sundered and the bird is free. This process is rendered
the more easy by the fact that toward the last the shell becomes
very rotten; the acids that are generated by the growing chick eat
it and make it brittle, so that one can hardly touch a fully
incubated bird's egg without breaking it. To help the young bird
forth would insure its speedy death. It is not true, either, that
the parent shoves its young from the nest when they are fully
fledged, except possibly in the case of some of the swallows and of
the eagle. The young of all our more common birds leave the nest
of their own motion, stimulated probably by the calls of the
parents, and in some cases by the withholding of food for a longer
period than usual.
As an instance where Bryant warps the facts to suit his purpose,
take his poems of the "Yellow Violet" and "The Fringed Gentian." Of
this last flower he says:--
"Thou waitest late and com'st alone,
When woods are bare and birds are
flown,
And frosts and shortening days
portend
The aged year is near his end."
The fringed gentian belongs to September, and, when the severer
frosts keep away, it runs over into October. But it does not come
alone, and the woods are not bare. The closed gentian comes at the
same time, and the blue and purple asters are in all their glory.
Goldenrod, turtle-head, and other fall flowers also abound. When
the woods are bare, which does not occur in New England till in or
near November, the fringed gentian has long been dead. It is in
fact killed by the first considerable frost. No, if one were to go
botanizing, and take Bryant's poem for a guide, he would not bring
home any fringed gentians with him. The only flower he would find
would be the witch-hazel. Yet I never see this gentian without
thinking of Bryant's poem, and feeling that he has brought it
immensely nearer to us.
Bryant's poem of the "Yellow Violet" has all his accustomed
simplicity and pensiveness, but his love for the flower carries him
a little beyond the facts; he makes it sweet-scented,--
"Thy faint perfume
Alone is in the virgin air;"
and he makes it the first flower of spring. I have never been able
to detect any perfume in the yellow species (VIOLA ROTUNDIFOLIA).
This honor belongs alone to our two white violets, VIOLA BLANDA and
VIOLA CANADENSIS.
Neither is it quite true that
"Of all her train, the hands of Spring
First plant thee in the watery mould."
Now it is an interesting point which really is our first spring
flower. Which comes second or third is of less consequence, but
which everywhere and in all seasons comes first; and in such a case
the poet must not place the honor where it does not belong. I have
no hesitation in saying that, throughout the Middle and New England
States, the hepatica is the first spring flower. [Footnote:
excepting, of course, the skunk-cabbage.] It is some days ahead
of all others. The yellow violet belongs only to the more northern
sections,--to high, cold, beechen woods, where the poet rightly
places it; but in these localities, if you go to the spring woods
every day, you will gather the hepatica first. I have also found
the claytonia and the coltsfoot first. In a poem called "The
Twenty-Seventh of March," Bryant places both the hepatica and the
arbutus before it:--
"Within the woods
Tufts of ground-laurel, creeping
underneath
The leaves of the last summer, send
their sweets
Upon the chilly air, and by the oak,
The squirrel cups, a graceful
company,
Hide in their bells, a soft aerial
blue,"--
ground-laurel being a local name for trailing arbutus, called also
mayflower, and squirrel-cups for hepatica, or liver-leaf. But the
yellow violet may rightly dispute for the second place.
In "The Song of the Sower" our poet covers up part of the truth
with the grain. The point and moral of the song he puts in the
statement, that the wheat sown in the fall lies in the ground till
spring before it germinates; when, in fact, it sprouts and grows
and covers the ground with "emerald blades" in the fall:--
"Fling wide the generous grain; we fling
O'er the dark mould the green of
spring.
For thick the emerald blades shall
grow,
When first the March winds melt the
snow,
And to the sleeping flowers, below,
The early bluebirds sing.
. . . . . . . .
.
Brethren, the sower's task is done.
The seed is in its winter bed.
Now let the dark-brown mould be
spread,
To hide it from the sun,
And leave it to the kindly care
Of the still earth and brooding air,
As when the mother, from her
breast,
Lays the hushed babe apart to rest,
And shades its eyes and waits to see
How sweet its waking smile will be.
The tempest now may smite, the
sleet
All night on the drowned furrow beat,
And winds that, from the cloudy hold
Of winter, breathe the bitter cold,
Stiffen to stone the mellow mould,
Yet safe shall lie the wheat;
Till, out of heaven's unmeasured
blue,
Shall walk again the genial year,
To wake with warmth and nurse with
dew
The germs we lay to slumber here."
Of course the poet was not writing an agricultural essay, yet one
does not like to feel that he was obliged to ignore or sacrifice
any part of the truth to build up his verse. One likes to see him
keep within the fact without being conscious of it or hampered by
it, as he does in "The Planting of the Apple-Tree," or in the
"Lines to a Water-Fowl."
But there are glimpses of American scenery and climate in Bryant
that are unmistakable, as in these lines from "Midsummer:"--
"Look forth upon the earth--her
thousand plants
Are smitten; even the dark,
sun-loving maize
Faints in the field beneath the torrid
blaze;
The herd beside the shaded fountain
pants;
For life is driven from all the
landscape brown;
The bird has sought his tree, the
snake his den,
The trout floats dead in the hot
stream, and men
Drop by the sunstroke in the
populous town."
Here is a touch of our "heated term" when the dogstar is abroad and
the weather runs mad. I regret the "trout floating dead in the hot
stream," because, if such a thing ever has occurred, it is entirely
exceptional. The trout in such weather seek the deep water and the
spring holes, and hide beneath rocks and willow banks. The
following lines would be impossible in an English poem:--
"The snowbird twittered on the
beechen bough,
And 'neath the hemlock, whose thick
branches bent
Beneath its bright, cold burden, and
kept dry
A circle, on the earth, of withered
leaves,
The partridge found a shelter."
Both Bryant and Longfellow put their spring bluebird in the elm,
which is a much better place for the oriole,--the elm-loving
oriole. The bluebird prefers a humbler perch. Lowell puts him
upon a post in the fence, which is a characteristic attitude:--
"The bluebird, shifting his light load of
song,
From post to post along the cheerless
fence."
Emerson calls him "April's bird," and makes him "fly before from
tree to tree," which is also good. But the bluebird is not
strictly a songster in the sense in which the song sparrow or the
indigo-bird, or the English robin redbreast, is; nor do Bryant's
lines hit the mark:--
"The bluebird chants, from the elm's
long branches,
A hymn to welcome the budding
year."
Lowell, again, is nearer the truth when he speaks of his "whiff of
song." All his notes are call-notes, and are addressed directly to
his mate. The songbirds take up a position and lift up their
voices and sing. It is a deliberate musical performance, as much
so as that of Nilsson or Patti. The bluebird, however, never
strikes an attitude and sings for the mere song's sake. But the
poets are perhaps to be allowed this latitude, only their pages
lose rather than gain by it. Nothing is so welcome in this field
as characteristic touches, a word or a phrase that fits this case
and no other. If the bluebird chants a hymn, what does the wood
thrush do? Yet the bluebird's note is more pleasing than most bird-
songs; if it could be reproduced in color, it would be the hue of
the purest sky.
Longfellow makes the swallow sing:--
"The darting swallows soar and sing;"--
which would leave him no room to describe the lark, if the lark had
been about. Bryant comes nearer the mark this time:--
"There are notes of joy from the
hang-bird and wren,
And the gossip of swallows through all
the sky;"
so does Tennyson when he makes his swallow
"Cheep and twitter twenty million
loves;"
also Lowell again in this line:--
"The thin-winged swallow skating on
the air;"
and Virgil:--
"Swallows twitter on the chimney
tops."
Longfellow is perhaps less close and exact in his dealings with
nature than any of his compeers, although he has written some fine
naturalistic poems, as his "Rain in Summer," and others. When his
fancy is taken, he does not always stop to ask, Is this so? Is this
true? as when he applies the Spanish proverb, "There are no birds
in last year's nests," to the nests beneath the eaves; for these
are just the last year's nests that do contain birds in May. The
cliff swallow and the barn swallow always reoccupy their old nests,
when they are found intact; so do some other birds. Again, the
hawthorn, or whitethorn, field-fares, belong to English poetry more
than to American. The ash in autumn is not deep crimsoned, but a
purplish brown. "The ash her purple drops forgivingly," says Lowell
in his "Indian-Summer Reverie." Flax is not golden, lilacs are
purple or white and not flame-colored, and it is against the law to
go trouting in November. The pelican is not a wader any more than a
goose or a duck is, and the golden robin or oriole is not a bird of
autumn. This stanza from "The Skeleton in Armor" is a striking
one:--
"As with his wings aslant,
Sails the fierce cormorant,
Seeking some rocky haunt,
With his prey laden,
So toward the open main,
Beating to sea again,
Through the wild hurricane,
Bore I the maiden."
But unfortunately the cormorant never does anything of the kind; it
is not a bird of prey: it is web-footed, a rapid swimmer and diver,
and lives upon fish, which it usually swallows as it catches them.
Virgil is nearer to fact when he says:--
"When crying cormorants forsake the
sea
And, stretching to the covert, wing
their way."
But cormorant with Longfellow may stand for any of the large
rapacious birds, as the eagle or the condor. True, and yet the
picture is a purely fanciful one, as no bird of prey SAILS with his
burden; on the contrary, he flaps heavily and laboriously, because
he is always obliged to mount. The stress of the rhyme and metre
are of course in this case very great, and it is they, doubtless,
that drove the poet into this false picture of a bird of prey laden
with his quarry. It is an ungracious task, however, to cross-
question the gentle Muse of Longfellow in this manner. He is a true
poet if there ever was one, and the slips I point out are only like
an obscure feather or two in the dove carelessly preened. The
burnished plumage and the bright hues hide them unless we look
sharply.
Whittier gets closer to the bone of the New England nature. He
comes from the farm, and his memory is stored with boyhood's wild
and curious lore, with
"Knowledge never learned of schools,
Of the wild bee's morning chase,
Of the wild flower's time and place,
Flight of fowl and habitude
Of the tenants of the wood;
How the tortoise bears his shell,
How the woodchuck digs his cell,
And the ground-mole sinks his well;
How the robin feeds her young;
How the oriole's nest is hung;
Where the whitest lilies blow,
Where the freshest berries grow,
Where the ground-nut trails its vine,
Where the wood-grape's clusters
shine;
Of the black wasp's cunning way,
Mason of his walls of clay,
And the architectural plans
Of gray hornet artisans!"
The poet is not as exact as usual when he applies the epithet
"painted" to the autumn beeches, as the foliage of the beech is the
least painty of all our trees; nor when he speaks of
"Wind-flower and violet, amber and
white,"
as neither of the flowers named is amber-colored. From "A Dream of
Summer" the reader might infer that the fox shut up house in the
winter like the muskrat:--
"The fox his hillside cell forsakes,
The muskrat leaves his nook,
The bluebird in the meadow brakes
Is singing with the brook."
The only one of these incidents that is characteristic of a January
thaw in the latitude of New England is the appearance of the
muskrat. The fox is never in his cell in winter, except he is
driven there by the hound, or by soft or wet weather, and the
bluebird does not sing in the brakes at any time of the year. A
severe stress of weather will drive the foxes off the mountains
into the low, sheltered woods and fields, and a thaw will send them
back again. In the winter the fox sleeps during the day upon a rock
or stone wall, or upon a snowbank, where he can command all the
approaches, or else prowls stealthily through the woods.
But there is seldom a false note in any of Whittier's descriptions
of rural sights and sounds. What a characteristic touch is that in
one of his "Mountain Pictures:"--
"The pasture bars that clattered as
they fell."
It is the only strictly native, original, and typical sound he
reports on that occasion. The bleating of sheep, the barking of
dogs, the lowing of cattle, the splash of the bucket in the well,
"the pastoral curfew of the cowbell," etc., are sounds we have
heard before in poetry, but that clatter of the pasture bars is
American; one can almost see the waiting, ruminating cows slowly
stir at the signal, and start for home in anticipation of the
summons. Every summer day, as the sun is shading the hills, the
clatter of those pasture bars is heard throughout the length and
breadth of the land.
"Snow-Bound" is the most faithful picture of our Northern winter
that has yet been put into poetry. What an exact description is
this of the morning after the storm:--
"We looked upon a world unknown,
On nothing we could call our own.
Around the glistening wonder bent
The blue walls of the firmament,
No cloud above, no earth below,--
A universe of sky and snow!"
In his little poem on the mayflower, Mr. Stedman catches and puts
in a single line a feature of our landscape in spring that I have
never before seen alluded to in poetry. I refer to the second line
of this stanza:--
"Fresh blows the breeze through
hemlock-trees,
The fields are edged with green
below,
And naught but youth, and hope, and
love
We know or care to know!"
It is characteristic of our Northern and New England fields that
they are "edged with green" in spring long before the emerald tint
has entirely overspread them. Along the fences, especially along
the stone walls, the grass starts early; the land is fatter there
from the deeper snows and from other causes, the fence absorbs the
heat, and shelters the ground from the winds, and the sward quickly
responds to the touch of the spring sun.
Stedman's poem is worthy of his theme, and is the only one I recall
by any of our well-known poets upon the much-loved mayflower or
arbutus. There is a little poem upon this subject by an unknown
author that also has the right flavor. I recall but one stanza:--
"Oft have I walked these woodland
ways,
Without the blest foreknowing,
That underneath the withered leaves
The fairest flowers were blowing."
Nature's strong and striking effects are best rendered by closest
fidelity to her. Listen and look intently, and catch the exact
effect as nearly as you can. It seems as if Lowell had done this
more than most of his brother poets. In reading his poems, one
wishes for a little more of the poetic unction (I refer, of course,
to his serious poems; his humorous ones are just what they should
be), yet the student of nature will find many close-fitting phrases
and keen observations in his pages, and lines that are exactly, and
at the same time poetically, descriptive. He is the only writer I
know of who has noticed the fact that the roots of trees do not
look supple and muscular like their boughs, but have a stiffened,
congealed look, as of a liquid hardened.
"Their roots, like molten metal cooled
in flowing,
Stiffened in coils and runnels down
the bank."
This is exactly the appearance the roots of most trees, when
uncovered, present; they flow out from the trunk like diminishing
streams of liquid metal, taking the form of whatever they come in
contact with, parting around a stone and uniting again beyond it,
and pushing their way along with many a pause and devious turn. One
principal office of the roots of a tree is to gripe, to hold fast
the earth: hence they feel for and lay hold of every inequality of
surface; they will fit themselves to the top of a comparatively
smooth rock, so as to adhere amazingly, and flow into the seams and
crevices like metal into a mould.
Lowell is singularly true to the natural history of his own
country. In his "Indian-Summer Reverie" we catch a glimpse of the
hen-hawk, silently sailing overhead
"With watchful, measuring eye,"
the robin feeding on cedar berries, and the squirrel,
"On the shingly shagbark's bough."
I do not remember to have met the "shagbark" in poetry before, or
that gray lichen-covered stone wall which occurs farther along in
the same poem, and which is so characteristic of the older farms of
New York and New England. I hardly know what the poet means by
"The wide-ranked mowers wading to
the knee,"
as the mowers do not wade in the grass they are cutting, though
they might appear to do so when viewed athwart the standing grass;
perhaps this is the explanation of the line.
But this is just what the bobolink does when the care of his young
begins to weigh upon him:--
"Meanwhile that devil-may-care,
the bobolink,
Remembering duty, in mid-quaver
stops
Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's
tremulous brink,
And 'twixt the winrows most
demurely drops."
I do not vouch for that dropping between the windrows, as in my
part of the country the bobolinks flee before the hay-makers, but
that sudden stopping on the brink of rapture, as if thoughts of his
helpless young had extinguished his joy, is characteristic.
Another carefully studied description of Lowell's is this:--
"The robin sings as of old from the
limb!
The catbird croons in the lilac-bush!
Through the dim arbor, himself more
dun,
Silently hops the hermit thrush."
Among trees Lowell has celebrated the oak, the pine, the birch; and
among flowers; the violet and the dandelion. The last, I think, is
the most pleasing of these poems:--
"Dear common flower, that grow'st
beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless
gold,
First pledge of blithesome May."
The dandelion is indeed, in our latitude, the pledge of May. It
comes when the grass is short, and the fresh turf sets off its
"ring of gold" with admirable effect; hence we know the poet is a
month or more out of the season when, in "Al Fresco," he makes it
bloom with the buttercup and the clover:--
"The dandelions and buttercups
Gild all the lawn; the drowsy bee
Stumbles among the clover-tops,
And summer sweetens all but me."
Of course the dandelion blooms occasionally throughout the whole
summer, especially where the grass is kept short, but its proper
season, when it "gilds all the lawn," is, in every part of the
country, some weeks earlier than the tall buttercup and the clover.
These bloom in June in New England and New York, and are
contemporaries of the daisy. In the meadows and lawns, the
dandelion drops its flower and holds aloft its sphere of down,
touching the green surface as with a light frost, long before the
clover and the buttercup have formed their buds. In "Al Fresco" our
poet is literally in clover, he is reveling in the height of the
season, the full tide of summer is sweeping around him, and he has
riches enough without robbing May of her dandelions. Let him say,--
"The daisies and the buttercups
Gild all the lawn."
I smile as I note that the woodpecker proves a refractory bird to
Lowell, as well as to Emerson:--
Emerson rhymes it with bear,
Lowell rhymes it with hear,
One makes it woodpeckair,
The other, woodpeckear.
But its hammer is a musical one, and the poets do well to note it.
Our most pleasing drummer upon dry limbs among the woodpeckers is
the yellow-bellied. His measured, deliberate tap, heard in the
stillness of the primitive woods, produces an effect that no bird-
song is capable of.
Tennyson is said to have very poor eyes, but there seems to be no
defect in the vision with which he sees nature, while he often hits
the nail on the head in a way that would indicate the surest sight.
True, he makes the swallow hunt the bee, which, for aught I know,
the swallow may do in England. Our purple martin has been accused
of catching the honey-bee, but I doubt his guilt. But those of our
swallows that correspond to the British species, the barn swallow,
the cliff swallow, and the bank swallow, subsist upon very small
insects. But what a clear-cut picture is that in the same poem
("The Poet's Song"):--
"The wild hawk stood, with the down on
his beak,
And stared, with his foot on the
prey."
It takes a sure eye, too, to see
"The landscape winking thro' the
heat"--
or to gather this image:--
"He has a solid base of temperament;
But as the water-lily starts and slides
Upon the level in little puffs of wind,
Though anchor'd to the bottom, such
is he;"
or this:--
"Arms on which the standing muscle
sloped,
As slopes a wild brook o'er a little
stone,
Running too vehemently to break
upon it,"--
and many other gems that abound in his poems. He does not cut and
cover in a single line, so far as I have observed. Great caution
and exact knowledge underlie his most rapid and daring flights. A
lady told me that she was once walking with him in the fields, when
they came to a spring that bubbled up through shifting sands in a
very pretty manner, and Tennyson, in order to see exactly how the
spring behaved, got down on his hands and knees and peered a long
time into the water. The incident is worth repeating as showing how
intently a great poet studies nature.
Walt Whitman says he has been trying for years to find a word that
would express or suggest that evening call of the robin. How
absorbingly this poet must have studied the moonlight to hit upon
this descriptive phrase:--
"The vitreous pour of the full moon
just tinged with blue;"
how long have looked upon the carpenter at his bench to have made
this poem:--
"The tongue of his fore-plane whistles
its wild ascending lisp;"
or how lovingly listened to the nocturne of the mockingbird to have
turned it into words in "A Word out of the Sea "! Indeed, no poet
has studied American nature more closely than Whitman has, or is
more cautious in his uses of it. How easy are his descriptions!--
"Behold the daybreak!
The little light fades the immense
and diaphanous shadows!"
"The comet that came unannounced
Out of the north, flaring in
heaven."
"The fan-shaped explosion."
"The slender and jagged threads of
lightning, as sudden and fast amid
the din they chased each other
across the sky."
"Where the heifers browse--where
geese nip their food with short
jerks;
Where sundown shadows lengthen
over the limitless and lonesome
prairie;
Where herds of buffalo make a
crawling spread of the square miles
far and near;
Where the hummingbird shimmers--
where the neck of the long-lived
swan is curving and winding;
Where the laughing-gull scoots by the
shore when she laughs her near
human laugh;
Where band-neck'd partridges roost
in a ring on the ground with their
heads out."
Whitman is less local than the New England poets, and faces more to
the West. But he makes himself at home everywhere, and puts in
characteristic scenes and incidents, generally compressed into a
single line, from all trades and doings and occupations, North,
East, South, West, and identifies himself with man in all straits
and conditions on the continent. Like the old poets, he does not
dwell upon nature, except occasionally through the vistas opened up
by the great sciences, as astronomy and geology, but upon life and
movement and personality, and puts in a shred of natural history
here and there,--the "twittering redstart," the spotted hawk
swooping by, the oscillating sea-gulls, the yellow-crowned heron,
the razor-billed auk, the lone wood duck, the migrating geese,
the sharp-hoofed moose, the mockingbird "the thrush, the hermit,"
etc.,--to help locate and define his position. Everywhere in
nature Whitman finds human relations, human responsions. In entire
consistence with botany, geology, science, or what not, he endues
his very seas and woods with passion, more than the old hamadryads
or tritons. His fields, his rocks, his trees, are not dead
material, but living companions. This is doubtless one reason why
Addington Symonds, the young Hellenic scholar of England, finds him
more thoroughly Greek than any other man of modern times.
Our natural history, and indeed all phases of life in this country,
is rich in materials for the poet that have yet hardly been
touched. Many of our most familiar birds, which are inseparably
associated with one's walks and recreations in the open air, and
with the changes of the seasons, are yet awaiting their poet,--as
the high-hole, with his golden-shafted quills and loud continued
spring call; the meadowlark, with her crescent-marked breast and
long-drawn, piercing, yet tender April and May summons forming,
with that of the high-hole, one of the three or four most
characteristic field sounds of our spring; the happy goldfinch,
circling round and round in midsummer with that peculiar undulating
flight and calling PER-CHICK'-O-PEE, PER-CHICK'-O-PEE, at each
opening and shutting of the wings, or later leading her plaintive
brood among the thistle-heads by the roadside; the little indigo-
bird, facing the torrid sun of August and singing through all the
livelong summer day; the contented musical soliloquy of the vireo,
like the whistle of a boy at his work, heard through all our woods
from May to September:--
"Pretty green worm, where are you?
Dusky-winged moth, how fare you,
When wind and rain are in the tree?
Cheeryo, cheerebly, chee,
Shadow and sun one are to me.
Mosquito and gnat, beware you,
Saucy chipmunk, how dare you
Climb to my nest in the maple-tree,
And dig up the corn
At noon and at morn?
Cheeryo, cheerebly, chee."
Or the phbe-bird, with her sweet April call and mossy nest under
the bridge or woodshed, or under the shelving rocks; or the brown
thrasher--mocking thrush--calling half furtively, half archly from
the treetop back in the bushy pastures: "Croquet, croquet, hit it,
hit it, come to me, come to me, tight it, tight it, you're out,
you're out," with many musical interludes; or the chewink, rustling
the leaves and peering under the bushes at you; or the pretty
little oven-bird, walking round and round you in the woods, or
suddenly soaring above the treetops, and uttering its wild lyrical
strain; or, farther south, the whistling redbird, with his crest
and military bearing,--these and many others should be full of
suggestion and inspiration to our poets. It is only lately that the
robin's song has been put into poetry. Nothing could be happier
than this rendering of it by a nameless singer in "A Masque of
Poets:"--
"When the willows gleam along the
brooks,
And the grass grows green in sunny
nooks,
In the sunshine and the rain
I hear the robin in the lane
Singing, 'Cheerily,
Cheer up, cheer up;
Cheerily, cheerily,
Cheer up.'
"But the snow is still
Along the walls and on the hill.
The days are cold, the nights forlorn,
For one is here and one is gone.
'Tut, tut. Cheerily,
Cheer up, cheer up;
Cheerily, cheerily,
Cheer up.'
"When spring hopes seem to wane,
I hear the joyful strain--
A song at night, a song at morn,
A lesson deep to me is borne,
Hearing, 'Cheerily,
Cheer up, cheer up;
Cheerily, cheerily,
Cheer up.' "
The poetic interpretation of nature, which has come to be a
convenient phrase, and about which the Oxford professor of poetry
has written a book, is, of course, a myth, or is to be read the
other way. It is the soul the poet interprets, not nature. There is
nothing in nature but what the beholder supplies. Does the sculptor
interpret the marble or his own ideal? Is the music in the
instrument, or in the soul of the performer? Nature is a dead clod
until you have breathed upon it with your genius. You commune with
your own soul, not with woods or waters; they furnish the
conditions, and are what you make them. Did Shelley interpret the
song of the skylark, or Keats that of the nightingale? They
interpreted their own wild, yearning hearts. The trick of the poet
is always to idealize nature,--to see it subjectively. You cannot
find what the poets find in the woods until you take the poet's
heart to the woods. He sees nature through a colored glass, sees it
truthfully, but with an indescribable charm added, the aureole of
the spirit. A tree, a cloud, a bird, a sunset, have no hidden
meaning that the art of the poet is to unlock for us. Every poet
shall interpret them differently, and interpret them rightly,
because the soul is infinite. Milton's nightingale is not
Coleridge's; Burns's daisy is not Wordsworth's; Emerson's bumblebee
is not Lowell's; nor does Turner see in nature what Tintoretto
does, nor Veronese what Correggio does. Nature is all things to all
men. "We carry within us," says Sir Thomas Browne, "the wonders we
find without." The same idea is daintily expressed in these
tripping verses of Bryant's:--
"Yet these sweet sounds of the early
season
And these fair sights of its early
days,
Are only sweet when we fondly listen,
And only fair when we fondly gaze.
"There is no glory in star or blossom,
Till looked upon by a loving eye;
There is no fragrance in April breezes,
Till breathed with joy as they
wander by;"
and in these lines of Lowell:--
"What we call Nature, all outside
ourselves,
Is but our own conceit of what we see,
Our own reaction upon what we feel."
"I find my own complexion
everywhere."
Before either, Coleridge had said:--
"We receive but what we give,
And in our life alone doth Nature live;
Ours is the wedding-garment, ours
the shroud;"
and Wordsworth had spoken of
"The light that never was on sea or
land,
The consecration and the poet's
dream."
That light that never was on sea or land is what the poet gives us,
and is what we mean by the poetic interpretation of nature. The
Oxford professor struggles against this view. "It is not true," he
says, "that nature is a blank, or an unintelligible scroll with no
meaning of its own but that which we put into it from the light of
our own transient feelings." Not a blank, certainly, to the
scientist, but full of definite meanings and laws, and a storehouse
of powers and economies; but to the poet the meaning is what he
pleases to make it, what it provokes in his own soul. To the man of
science it is thus and so, and not otherwise; but the poet touches
and goes, and uses nature as a garment which he puts off and on.
Hence the scientific reading or interpretation of nature is the
only real one. Says the SOOTHSAYER in "Antony and Cleopatra:"--
'In Nature's infinite book of secrecy a
little do I read."
This is science bowed and reverent, and speaking through a great
poet. The poet himself does not so much read in nature's book--
though he does this, too--as write his own thoughts there. Nature
reads him, she is the page and he the type, and she takes the
impression he gives. Of course the poet uses the truths of nature
also, and he establishes his right to them by bringing them home to
us with a new and peculiar force,--a quickening or kindling force.
What science gives is melted in the fervent heat of the poet's
passion, and comes back to us supplemented by his quality and
genius. He gives more than he takes, always.
V
NOTES BY THE WAY
A NEW NOTE IN THE WOODS
THERE is always a new page to be turned in natural history, if one
is sufficiently on the alert. I did not know that the eagle
celebrated his nuptials in the air till one early spring day I saw
a pair of them fall from the sky with talons hooked together. They
dropped a hundred feet or more, in a wild embrace, their great
wings fanning the air, then separated and mounted aloft, tracing
their great circles against the clouds. "Watch and wait" is the
naturalist's sign. For years I have been trying to ascertain for a
certainty the author of that fine plaintive piping to be heard more
or less frequently, according to the weather, in our summer and
autumn woods. It is a note that much resembles that of our small
marsh frog in spring,--the hyla; it is not quite so clear and
assured, but otherwise much the same. Of a very warm October day I
have heard the wood vocal with it; it seemed to proceed from every
stump and tree about one. Ordinarily it is heard only at
intervals throughout the woods. Approach never so cautiously the
spot from which the sound proceeds, and it instantly ceases, and
you may watch for an hour without again hearing it. Is it a frog,
I said, the small tree-frog, the piper of the marshes, repeating
his spring note, but little changed, amid the trees? Doubtless it
is, yet I must see him in the very act. So I watched and waited,
but to no purpose, till one day, while bee-hunting in the woods, I
heard the sound proceed from beneath the leaves at my feet.
Keeping entirely quiet, the little musician presently emerged,
and, lifting himself up on a small stick, his throat palpitated and
the plaintive note again came forth. "The queerest frog ever I
saw," said a youth who accompanied me, and whom I had enlisted to
help solve the mystery. No; it was no frog or toad at all, but
the small red salamander, commonly called lizard. The color is
not strictly red, but a dull orange, variegated with minute specks
or spots. This was the mysterious piper, then, heard from May till
November through all our woods, sometimes on trees, but usually on
or near the ground. It makes more music in the woods in autumn
than any bird. It is a pretty, inoffensive creature, walks as
awkwardly as a baby, and may often be found beneath stones and old
logs in the woods, where, buried in the mould, it passes the
winter. (I suspect there is a species of little frog--Pickering's
hyla [footnote: A frequent piper in the woods throughout the
summer and early fall.]--that also pipes occasionally in the
woods.) I have discovered, also, that we have a musical spider.
One sunny April day, while seated on the borders of the woods, my
attention was attracted by a soft, uncertain, purring sound that
proceeded from the dry leaves at my feet. On investigating the
matter, I found that it was made by a busy little spider. Several
of them were traveling about over the leaves, as if in quest of
some lost cue or secret. Every moment or two they would pause, and
by some invisible means make the low, purring sound referred to.
Dr. J. A. Alien says the common turtle, or land tortoise, also has
a note,--a loud, shrill, piping sound. It may yet be discovered
that there is no silent creature in nature.
THE SAND HORNET
I turned another (to me) new page in natural history, when, during
the past season, I made the acquaintance of the sand wasp or
hornet. From boyhood I had known the black hornet, with his large
paper nest, and the spiteful yellow-jacket, with his lesser
domicile, and had cherished proper contempt for the various
indolent wasps. But the sand hornet was a new bird,--in fact, the
harpy eagle among insects,--and he made an impression. While
walking along the road about midsummer, I noticed working in the
towpath, where the ground was rather inclined to be dry and sandy,
a large yellow hornet-like insect. It made a hole the size of one's
little finger in the hard, gravelly path beside the roadbed. When
disturbed, it alighted on the dirt and sand in the middle of the
road. I had noticed in my walks some small bullet-like holes in
the field that had piqued my curiosity, and I determined to keep an
eye on these insects of the roadside. I explored their holes, and
found them quite shallow, and no mystery at the bottom of them. One
morning in the latter part of July, walking that way, I was quickly
attracted by the sight of a row of little mounds of fine, freshly
dug earth resting upon the grass beside the road, a foot or more
beneath the path. "What is this?" I said. "Mice, or squirrels, or
snakes," said my neighbor. But I connected it at once with the
strange insect I had seen. Neither mice nor squirrels work like
that, and snakes do not dig. Above each mound of earth was a hole
the size of one's largest finger, leading into the bank. While
speculating about the phenomenon, I saw one of the large yellow
hornets I had observed quickly enter one of the holes. That
settled the query. While spade and hoe were being brought to dig
him out, another hornet appeared, heavy-laden with some prey, and
flew humming up and down and around the place where I was standing.
I withdrew a little, when he quickly alighted upon one of the
mounds of earth, and I saw him carrying into his den no less an
insect than the cicada or harvest-fly. Then another came, and after
coursing up and down a few times, disturbed by my presence,
alighted upon a tree, with his quarry, to rest. The black hornet
will capture a fly, or a small butterfly, and, after breaking and
dismembering it, will take it to his nest; but here was this hornet
carrying an insect much larger than himself, and flying with ease
and swiftness. It was as if a hawk should carry a hen, or an eagle
a turkey. I at once proceeded to dig for one of the hornets, and,
after following his hole about three feet under the footpath and to
the edge of the roadbed, succeeded in capturing him and recovering
the cicada. The hornet weighed fifteen grains, and the cicada
nineteen; but in bulk the cicada exceeded the hornet by more than
half. In color, the wings and thorax, or waist, of the hornet were
a rich bronze; the abdomen was black, with three irregular yellow
bands; the legs were large and powerful, especially the third or
hindmost pair, which were much larger than the others, and armed
with many spurs and hooks. In digging its hole the hornet has been
seen at work very early in the morning. It backed out with the
loosened material, like any other animal under the same
circumstances, holding and scraping back the dirt with its legs.
The preliminary prospecting upon the footpath, which I had
observed, seems to have been the work of the males, as it was
certainly of the smaller hornets, and the object was doubtless to
examine the ground, and ascertain if the place was suitable for
nesting. By digging two or three inches through the hard, gravelly
surface of the road, a fine sandy loam was discovered, which seemed
to suit exactly, for in a few days the main shafts were all started
in the greensward, evidently upon the strength of the favorable
report which the surveyors had made. These were dug by the larger
hornets or females. There was but one inhabitant in each hole, and
the holes were two or three feet apart. One that we examined had
nine chambers or galleries at the end of it, in each of which were
two locusts, or eighteen in all. The locusts of the locality had
suffered great slaughter. Some of them in the hole or den had been
eaten to a mere shell by the larvæ of the hornet. Under the wing
of each insect an egg is attached; the egg soon hatches, and the
grub at once proceeds to devour the food its thoughtful parent has
provided. As it grows, it weaves itself a sort of shell or cocoon,
in which, after a time, it undergoes its metamorphosis, and comes
out, I think, a perfect insect toward the end of summer.
I understood now the meaning of that sudden cry of alarm I had so
often heard proceed from the locust or cicada, followed by some
object falling and rustling amid the leaves; the poor insect was
doubtless in the clutches of this arch enemy. A number of locusts
usually passed the night on the under side of a large limb of a
mulberry-tree near by: early one morning a hornet was seen to
pounce suddenly upon one and drag it over on the top of the limb; a
struggle ensued, but the locust was soon quieted and carried off.
It is said that the hornet does not sting the insect in a vital
part,--for in that case it would not keep fresh for its young,--but
introduces its poison into certain nervous ganglia, the injury to
which has the effect of paralyzing the victim and making it
incapable of motion, though life remains for some time.
My friend Van, who watched the hornets in my absence, saw a fierce
battle one day over the right of possession of one of the dens. An
angry, humming sound was heard to proceed from one of the holes;
gradually it approached the surface, until the hornets emerged
locked in each other's embrace, and rolled down the little
embankment, where the combat was continued. Finally, one released
his hold and took up his position in the mouth of his den (of
course I should say SHE and HER, as these were the queen hornets),
where she seemed to challenge her antagonist to come on. The other
one manuvred about awhile, but could not draw her enemy out of her
stronghold; then she clambered up the bank and began to bite and
tear off bits of grass, and to loosen gravel-stones and earth, and
roll them down into the mouth of the disputed passage. This caused
the besieged hornet to withdraw farther into her hole, when the
other came down and thrust in her head, but hesitated to enter.
After more manuvering, the aggressor withdrew, and began to bore a
hole about a foot from the one she had tried to possess herself of
by force.
Besides the cicada, the sand hornet captures grasshoppers and other
large insects. I have never met with it before the present summer
(1879), but this year I have heard of its appearance at several
points along the Hudson.
THE SOLITARY BEE
If you "leave no stone unturned" in your walks through the fields,
you may perchance discover the abode of one of our solitary bees.
Indeed, I have often thought what a chapter of natural history
might be written on "Life under a Stone," so many of our smaller
creatures take refuge there,--ants, crickets, spiders, wasps,
bumblebees, the solitary bee, mice, toads, snakes, and newts. What
do these things do in a country where there are no stones? A stone
makes a good roof, a good shield; it is water-proof and fire-proof,
and, until the season becomes too rigorous, frost-proof too. The
field mouse wants no better place to nest than beneath a large,
flat stone, and the bumblebee is entirely satisfied if she can get
possession of his old or abandoned quarters. I have even heard of
a swarm of hive bees going under a stone that was elevated a little
from the ground. After that, I did not marvel at Samson's bees
going into the carcass or skeleton of the lion.
In the woods one day (it was November) I turned over a stone that
had a very strange-looking creature under it,--a species of
salamander I had never before seen, the banded salamander. It was
five or six inches long, and was black and white in alternate
bands. It looked like a creature of the night,--darkness dappled
with moonlight,--and so it proved. I wrapped it up in some leaves
and took it home in my pocket. By day it would barely move, and
could not be stimulated or frightened into any activity; but an
night it was alert and wide awake. Of its habits I know little,
but it is a pretty and harmless creature. Under another stone was
still another species, the violet-colored salamander, larger, of a
dark plum-color, with two rows of bright yellow spots down its
back. It evinced more activity than its fellow of the moon-
bespattered garb. I have also found the little musical red newt
under stones, and several small dark species.
But to return to the solitary bee. When you go a-hunting of the
honey-bee, and are in quest of a specimen among the asters or
goldenrod in some remote field to start a line with, you shall see
how much this little native bee resembles her cousin of the social
hive. There appear to be several varieties, but the one I have in
mind is just the size of the honey-bee, and of the same general
form and color, and its manner among the flowers is nearly the
same. On close inspection, its color proves to be lighter, while
the under side of its abdomen is of a rich bronze. The body is
also flatter and less tapering, and the curve inclines upward,
rather than downward. You perceive it would be the easiest thing
in the world for the bee to sting an enemy perched upon its back.
One variety, with a bright buff abdomen, is called "sweat-bee" by
the laborers in the field, because it alights upon their hands and
bare arms when they are sweaty,--doubtless in quest of salt. It
builds its nest in little cavities in rails and posts. But the one
with the bronze or copper bottom builds under a stone. I
discovered its nest one day in this wise: I was lying on the ground
in a field, watching a line of honey-bees to the woods, when my
attention was arrested by one of these native bees flying about me
in a curious, inquiring way. When it returned the third time, I
said, "That bee wants something of me," which proved to be the
case, for I was lying upon the entrance to its nest. On my
getting up, it alighted and crawled quickly home. I turned over
the stone, which was less than a foot across, when the nest was
partially exposed. It consisted of four cells, built in succession
in a little tunnel that had been excavated in the ground. The
cells, which were about three quarters of an inch long and half as
far through, were made of sections cut from the leaf of the maple,--
cut with the mandibles of the bee, which work precisely like
shears. I have seen the bee at work cutting out these pieces. She
moves through the leaf like the hand of the tailor through a piece
of cloth. When the pattern is detached, she rolls it up, and,
embracing it with her legs, flies home with it, often appearing to
have a bundle disproportionately large. Each cell is made up of a
dozen or more pieces: the larger ones, those that form its walls,
like the walls of a paper bag, are oblong, and are turned down at
one end, so as to form the bottom; not one thickness of leaf
merely, but three or four thicknesses, each fragment of leaf
lapping over another. When the cell is completed, it is filled
about two thirds full of bee-bread,--the color of that in the comb
in the hive, but not so dry, and having a sourish smell. Upon this
the egg is laid, and upon this the young feed when hatched. Is the
paper bag now tied up? No, it is headed up; circular bits of
leaves are nicely fitted into it to the number of six or seven.
They are cut without pattern or compass, and yet they are all
alike, and all exactly fit. Indeed, the construction of this cell
or receptacle shows great ingenuity and skill. The bee is, of
course, unable to manage a single section of a leaf large enough,
when rolled up, to form it, and so is obliged to construct it of
smaller pieces, such as she can carry, lapping them one over
another.
A few days later I saw a smaller species carrying fragments of a
yellow autumn leaf under a stone in a cornfield. On examining the
place about sundown to see if the bee lodged there, I found her
snugly ensconced in a little rude cell that adhered to the under
side of the stone. There was no pollen in it, and I half suspected
it was merely a berth in which to pass the night.
These bees do not live even in pairs, but absolutely alone. They
have large baskets on their legs in which to carry pollen, an
article they are very industrious in collecting.
Why the larger species above described should have waited till
October to build its nest is a mystery to me. Perhaps this was the
second brood of the season, or can it be that the young were not to
hatch till the following spring?
THE WEATHERWISE MUSKRAT
I am more than half persuaded that the muskrat is a wise little
animal, and that on the subject of the weather, especially, he
possesses some secret that I should be glad to know. In the fall
of 1878 I noticed that he built unusually high and massive nests.
I noticed them in several different localities. In a shallow,
sluggish pond by the roadside, which I used to pass daily in my
walk, two nests were in process of construction throughout the
month of November. The builders worked only at night, and I could
see each day that the work had visibly advanced. When there was a
slight skim of ice over the pond, this was broken up about the
nests, with trails through it in different directions where the
material had been brought. The houses were placed a little to one
side of the main channel, and were constructed entirely of a
species of coarse wild grass that grew all about. So far as I
could see, from first to last they were solid masses of grass, as
if the interior cavity or nest was to be excavated afterward, as
doubtless it was. As they emerged from the pond they gradually
assumed the shape of a miniature mountain, very bold and steep on
the south side, and running down a long, gentle grade to the
surface of the water on the north. One could see that the little
architect hauled all his material up this easy slope, and thrust it
out boldly around the other side. Every mouthful was distinctly
defined. After they were two feet or more above the water, I
expected each day to see that the finishing stroke had been given
and the work brought to a close. But higher yet, said the builder.
December drew near, the cold became threatening, and I was
apprehensive that winter would suddenly shut down upon those
unfinished nests. But the wise rats knew better than I did; they
had received private advices from headquarters, that I knew not of.
Finally, about the 6th of December, the nests assumed completion;
the northern incline was absorbed or carried up, and each structure
became a strong, massive cone, three or four feet high, the largest
nest of the kind I had ever seen. Does it mean a severe winter? I
inquired. An old farmer said it meant "high water," and he was
right once, at least, for in a few days afterward we had the
heaviest rainfall known in this section for half a century. The
creeks rose to an almost unprecedented height. The sluggish pond
became a seething, turbulent water-course; gradually the angry
element crept up the sides of these lake dwellings, till, when the
rain ceased, about four o'clock, they showed above the flood no
larger than a man's hat. During the night the channel shifted till
the main current swept over them, and next day not a vestige of the
nests was to be seen; they had gone downstream, as had many other
dwellings of a less temporary character. The rats had built wisely,
and would have been perfectly secure against any ordinary high
water, but who can foresee a flood? The oldest traditions of their
race did not run back to the time of such a visitation.
Nearly a week afterward another dwelling was begun, well away from
the treacherous channel, but the architects did not work at it with
much heart: the material was very scarce, the ice hindered; and
before the basement story was fairly finished, Winter had the pond
under his lock and key.
In other localities I noticed that, where the nests were placed on
the banks of streams, they were made secure against the floods by
being built amid a small clump of bushes. When the fall of 1879
came, the muskrats were very tardy about beginning their house,
laying the corner-stone--or the corner-sod--about December 1, and
continuing the work slowly and indifferently. On the 15th of the
month the nest was not yet finished. This, I said, indicates a
mild winter; and, sure enough, the season was one of the mildest
known for many years. The rats had little use for their house.
Again, in the fall of 1880, while the weather-wise were wagging
their heads, some forecasting a mild, some a severe winter, I
watched with interest for a sign from my muskrats. About November
1, a month earlier than the previous year, they began their nest,
and worked at it with a will. They appeared to have just got
tidings of what was coming. If I had taken the hint so palpably
given, my celery would not have been frozen up in the ground, and
my apples caught in unprotected places. When the cold wave struck
us, about November 20, my four-legged "I-told-you-so's" had nearly
completed their dwelling; it lacked only the ridge-board, so to
speak; it needed a little "topping out," to give it a finished
look. But this it never got. The winter had come to stay, and it
waxed more and more severe, till the unprecedented cold of the last
days of December must have astonished even the wise muskrats in
their snug retreat. I approached their nest at this time, a white
mound upon the white, deeply frozen surface of the pond, and
wondered if there was any life in that apparent sepulchre. I
thrust my walking-stick sharply into it, when there was a rustle
and a splash into the water, as the occupant made his escape. What
a damp basement that house has, I thought, and what a pity to rout
a peaceful neighbor out of his bed in this weather, and into such a
state of things as this! But water does not wet the muskrat; his
fur is charmed, and not a drop penetrates it.
Where the ground is favorable, the muskrats do not build these
mound-like nests, but burrow into the bank a long distance, and
establish their winter-quarters there.
Shall we not say, then, in view of the above facts, that this
little creature is weatherwise? The hitting of the mark twice might
be mere good luck; but three bull's-eyes in succession is not a
mere coincidence; it is a proof of skill. The muskrat is not found
in the Old World, which is a little singular, as other rats so
abound there, and as those slow-going English streams especially,
with their grassy banks, are so well suited to him. The water-rat
of Europe is smaller, but of similar nature and habits. The
muskrat does not hibernate like some rodents, but is pretty active
all winter. In December I noticed in my walk where they had made
excursions of a few yards to an orchard for frozen apples. One
day, along a little stream, I saw a mink track amid those of the
muskrat; following it up, I presently came to blood and other marks
of strife upon the snow beside a stone wall. Looking in between
the stones, I found the carcass of the luckless rat, with its head
and neck eaten away. The mink had made a meal of him.
CHEATING THE SQUIRRELS
For the largest and finest chestnuts I had last fall I was indebted
to the gray squirrels. Walking through the early October woods one
day, I came upon a place where the ground was thickly strewn with
very large unopened chestnut burrs. On examination, I found that
every burr had been cut square off with about an inch of the stem
adhering, and not one had been left on the tree. It was not
accident, then, but design. Whose design? The squirrels'. The
fruit was the finest I had ever seen in the woods, and some wise
squirrel had marked it for his own. The burrs were ripe, and had
just begun to divide, not "threefold," but fourfold, "to show the
fruit within." The squirrel that had taken all this pains had
evidently reasoned with himself thus: "Now, these are extremely
fine chestnuts, and I want them; if I wait till the burrs open on
the tree, the crows and jays will be sure to carry off a great many
of the nuts before they fall; then, after the wind has rattled out
what remain, there are the mice, the chipmunks, the red squirrels,
the raccoons, the grouse, to say nothing of the boys and the pigs,
to come in for their share; so I will forestall events a little: I
will cut off the burrs when they have matured, and a few days of
this dry October weather will cause every one of them to open on
the ground; I shall be on hand in the nick of time to gather up my
nuts." The squirrel, of course, had to take the chances of a
prowler like myself coming along, but he had fairly stolen a march
on his neighbors. As I proceeded to collect and open the burrs, I
was half prepared to hear an audible protest from the trees about,
for I constantly fancied myself watched by shy but jealous eyes.
It is an interesting inquiry how the squirrel knew the burrs would
open if left to lie on the ground a few days. Perhaps he did not
know, but thought the experiment worth trying.
The gray squirrel is peculiarly an American product, and might
serve very well as a national emblem. The Old World can beat us on
rats and mice, but we are far ahead on squirrels, having five or
six species to Europe's one.
THE SKYLARK ON THE HUDSON
My note-book of the past season is enriched with the unusual
incident of an English skylark in full song above an Esopus meadow.
I was poking about a marshy place in a low field one morning in
early May, when, through the maze of bird-voices,--laughter of
robins, call of meadowlarks, song of bobolinks, ditty of sparrows,
whistle of orioles, twitter of swallows,--with which the air was
filled, my ear suddenly caught an unfamiliar strain. I paused to
listen: can it be possible, I thought, that I hear a lark, or am I
dreaming? The song came from the air, above a wide, low meadow many
hundred yards away. Withdrawing a few paces to a more elevated
position, I bent my eye and ear eagerly in that direction. Yes,
that unstinted, jubilant, skyward, multitudinous song can be none
other than the lark's! Any of our native songsters would have
ceased while I was listening. Presently I was fortunate enough to
catch sight of the bird. He had reached his climax in the sky, and
was hanging with quivering wings beneath a small white cloud,
against which his form was clearly revealed. I had seen and heard
the lark in England, else I should still have been in doubt about
the identity of this singer. While I was climbing a fence I was
obliged to take my eye from the bird, and when I looked again the
song had ceased and the lark had gone. I was soon in the meadow
above which I had heard him, and the first bird I flushed was the
lark.
How strange he looked to my eye (I use the masculine gender because
it was a male bird, but an Irishman laboring in the field, to whom
I related my discovery, spoke touchingly of the bird as "she," and
I notice that the old poets do the same); his long, sharp wings,
and something in his manner of flight suggested a shore-bird. I
followed him about the meadow and got several snatches of song out
of him, but not again the soaring, skyward flight and copious
musical shower. By appearing to pass by, I several times got
within a few yards of him; as I drew near he would squat in the
stubble, and then suddenly start up, and, when fairly launched,
sing briefly till he alighted again fifteen or twenty rods away. I
came twice the next day and twice the next, and each time found
the lark in the meadow or heard his song from the air or the sky.
What was especially interesting was that the lark had "singled out
with affection" one of our native birds, and the one that most
resembled its kind, namely, the vesper sparrow, or grass finch. To
this bird I saw him paying his addresses with the greatest
assiduity. He would follow it about and hover above it, and by
many gentle indirections seek to approach it. But the sparrow was
shy, and evidently did not know what to make of her distinguished
foreign lover. It would sometimes take refuge in a bush, when the
lark, not being a percher, would alight upon the ground beneath it.
This sparrow looks enough like the lark to be a near relation. Its
color is precisely the same, and it has the distinguishing mark of
the two lateral white quills in its tail. It has the same habit of
skulking in the stubble or the grass as you approach; it is
exclusively a field-bird, and certain of its notes might have been
copied from the lark's song. In size it is about a third smaller,
and this is the most marked difference between them. With the
nobler bipeds, this would not have been any obstacle to the union,
and in this case the lark was evidently quite ready to ignore the
difference, but the sparrow persisted in saying him nay. It was
doubtless this obstinacy on her part that drove the lark away, for,
on the fifth day, I could not find him, and have never seen nor
heard him since. I hope he found a mate somewhere, but it is
quite improbable. The bird had, most likely, escaped from a cage,
or, maybe, it was a survivor of a number liberated some years ago
on Long Island. There is no reason why I the lark should not
thrive in this country as well as in Europe, and, if a few hundred
were liberated in any of our fields in April or May, I have little
doubt they would soon become established. And what an acquisition
it would be! As a songster, the lark is deserving of all the
praise that has been bestowed upon him. He would not add so much
to the harmony or melody of our bird-choir as he would add to its
blithesomeness, joyousness, and power. His voice is the jocund and
inspiring voice of a spring morning. It is like a ceaseless and
hilarious clapping of hands. I was much interested in an account a
friend gave me of the first skylark he heard while abroad. He had
been so full of the sights and wonders of the Old World that he had
quite forgotten the larks, when one day, as he was walking
somewhere near the sea, a brown bird started up in front of him,
and mounting upward began to sing. It drew his attention, and as
the bird went skyward, pouring out his rapid and jubilant notes,
like bees from a hive in swarming-time, the truth suddenly flashed
upon the observer.
"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, "that is a skylark; there is no
mistaking that bird."
It is this unique and unmistakable character of the lark's song,
and its fountain-like sparkle and copiousness, that are the main
sources of its charm.
NOCTURNAL INSECTS
How the nocturnal insects, the tree-crickets and katydids, fail as
the heat fails! They are musicians that play fast or slow, strong
or feeble, just as the heat of the season waxes or wanes; and they
play as long as life lasts: when their music ceases, they are dead.
The katydids begin in August, and cry with great vigor and spirit,
"Katy-did," "Katydid," or "Katy-did n't." Toward the last of
September they have taken in sail a good deal, and cry simply,
"Katy," "Katy," with frequent pauses and resting-spells. In
October they languidly gasp or rasp, "Kate," "Kate," "Kate," and
before the end of the month they become entirely inaudible, though
I suspect that if one's ear were sharp enough he might still hear a
dying whisper, "Kate," "Kate." Those cousins of Katy, the little
green purring tree-crickets, fail in the same way and at the same
time. When their chorus is fullest, the warm autumn night fairly
throbs with the soft lulling undertone. I notice that the sound is
in waves or has a kind of rhythmic beat. What a gentle, unobtrusive
background it forms for the sharp, reedy notes of the katydids! As
the season advances, their life ebbs and ebbs: you hear one here
and one there, but the air is no longer filled with that regular
pulse-beat of sound. One by one the musicians cease, till, perhaps
on some mild night late in October, you hear--just hear and that is
all--the last feeble note of the last of these little harpers.
LOVE AND WAR AMONG THE BIRDS
In the spring movements of the fishes up the stream, toward their
spawning-beds, the females are the pioneers, appearing some days in
advance of the males. With the birds the reverse is the case, the
males coming a week or ten days before the females. The female
fish is usually the larger and stronger, and perhaps better able to
take the lead; among most reptiles the same fact holds, and
throughout the insect world there is to my knowledge no exception
to the rule. Among the birds, the only exception I am aware of is
in the case of the birds of prey. Here the female is the larger
and stronger. If you see an exceptionally large and powerful
eagle, rest assured the sex is feminine. But higher in the scale
the male comes to the front and leads in size and strength.
But the first familiar spring birds are cocks; hence the songs and
tilts and rivalries. Hence also t
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