watching that tree all the morning. There hain’t been a breath of wind: but for hours the leaves have been falling, falling, just as you see them now; and at last it’s pretty much bare.” And after a pause, pensively: “Waal, I suppose its hour had come.”
This contemplative habit of Old Phelps is wholly unappreciated by his neighbors; but it has been indulged in no inconsiderable part of his life. Rising after a time, he said, “Now I want you to go with me and see my golden city I’ve talked so much about.” He led the way to a hill-outlook, when suddenly, emerging from the forest, the spectators saw revealed the winding valley and its stream. He said quietly, “There is my golden city.” Far below, at their feet, they saw that vast assemblage of birches and “popples,” yellow as gold in the brooding noonday, and slender spires rising out of the glowing mass. Without another word, Phelps sat a long time in silent content: it was to him, as Bunyan says, “a place desirous to be in.”
Is this philosopher contented with what life has brought him? Speaking of money one day, when we had asked him if he should do differently if he had his life to live over again, he said, “Yes, but not about money. To have had hours such as I have had in these mountains, and with such men as Dr. Bushnell and Dr. Shaw and Mr. Twichell, and others I could name, is worth all the money the world could give.” He read character very well, and took in accurately the boy nature. “Tom” (an irrepressible, rather overdone specimen),–” Tom’s a nice kind of a boy; but he’s got to come up against a snubbin’-post one of these days.”–“Boys!” he once said: “you can’t git boys to take any kinder notice of scenery. I never yet saw a boy that would look a second time at a sunset. Now, a girl will some times; but even then it’s instantaneous,–comes an goes like the sunset. As for me,” still speaking of scenery, “these mountains about here, that I see every day, are no more to me, in one sense, than a man’s farm is to him. What mostly interests me now is when I see some new freak or shape in the face of Nature.”
In literature it may be said that Old Phelps prefers the best in the very limited range that has been open to him. Tennyson is his favorite among poets an affinity explained by the fact that they are both lotos-eaters. Speaking of a lecture-room talk of Mr. Beecher’s which he had read, he said, “It filled my cup about as full as I callerlate to have it: there was a good deal of truth in it, and some poetry; waal, and a little spice, too. We’ve got to have the spice, you know.” He admired, for different reasons, a lecture by Greeley that he once heard, into which so much knowledge of various kinds was crowded that he said he “made a reg’lar gobble of it.” He was not without discrimination, which he exercised upon the local preaching when nothing better offered. Of one sermon he said, “The man began way back at the creation, and just preached right along down; and he didn’t say nothing, after all. It just seemed to me as if he was tryin’ to git up a kind of a fix-up.”
Old Phelps used words sometimes like algebraic signs, and had a habit of making one do duty for a season together for all occasions. “Speckerlation” and “callerlation” and “fix-up” are specimens of words that were prolific in expression. An unusual expression, or an unusual article, would be charactcrized as a “kind of a scientific literary git-up.”
“What is the program for tomorrow?” I once asked him. ” Waal, I callerlate, if they rig up the callerlation they callerlate on, we’ll go to the Boreas.” Starting out for a day’s tramp in the woods, he would ask whether we wanted to take a “reg’lar walk, or a random scoot,”–the latter being a plunge into the pathless forest. When he was on such an expedition, and became entangled in dense brush, and maybe a network of “slash” and swamp, he was like an old wizard, as he looked here and there, seeking a way, peering into the tangle, or withdrawing from a thicket, and muttering to himself, “There ain’t no speckerlation there.” And when the way became altogether inscrutable,–“Waal, this is a reg’lar random scoot of a rigmarole.” As some one remarked, “The dictionary in his hands is like clay in the hands of the potter.” A petrifaction was a kind of a hard-wood chemical git-up.”
There is no conceit, we are apt to say, like that born of isolation from the world, and there are no such conceited people as those who have lived all their lives in the woods. Phelps was, however, unsophisticated in his until the advent of strangers into his life, who brought in literature and various other disturbing influences. I am sorry to say that the effect has been to take off something of the bloom of his simplicity, and to elevate him into an oracle. I suppose this is inevitable as soon as one goes into print; and Phelps has gone into print in the local papers. He has been bitten with the literary “git up.” Justly regarding most of the Adirondack literature as a “perfect fizzle,” he has himself projected a work, and written much on the natural history of his region. Long ago he made a large map of the mountain country; and, until recent surveys, it was the only one that could lay any claim to accuracy. His history is no doubt original in form, and unconventional in expression. Like most of the writers of the seventeenth century, and the court ladies and gentlemen of the eighteenth century, he is an independent speller. Writing of his work on the Adirondacks, he says, “If I should ever live to get this wonderful thing written, I expect it will show one thing, if no more; and that is, that every thing has an opposite. I expect to show in this that literature has an opposite, if I do not show any thing els. We could not enjoy the blessings and happiness of riteousness if we did not know innicuty was in the world: in fact, there would be no riteousness without innicuty.” Writing also of his great enjoyment of being in the woods, especially since he has had the society there of some people he names, he adds, “And since I have Literature, Siance, and Art all spread about on the green moss of the mountain woods or the gravell banks of a cristle stream, it seems like finding roses, honeysuckels, and violets on a crisp brown cliff in December. You know I don’t believe much in the religion of seramony; but any riteous thing that has life and spirit in it is food for me.” I must not neglect to mention an essay, continued in several numbers of his local paper, on “The Growth of the Tree,” in which he demolishes the theory of Mr. Greeley, whom he calls “one of the best vegetable philosophers,” about “growth without seed.” He treats of the office of sap: “All trees have some kind of sap and some kind of operation of sap flowing in their season,” the dissemination of seeds, the processes of growth, the power of healing wounds, the proportion of roots to branches, &c. Speaking of the latter, he says, “I have thought it would be one of the greatest curiosities on earth to see a thrifty growing maple or elm, that had grown on a deep soil interval to be two feet in diameter, to be raised clear into the air with every root and fibre down to the minutest thread, all entirely cleared of soil, so that every particle could be seen in its natural position. I think it would astonish even the wise ones.” From his instinctive sympathy with nature, he often credits vegetable organism with “instinctive judgment.” ” Observation teaches us that a tree is given powerful instincts, which would almost appear to amount to judgment in some cases, to provide for its own wants and necessities.”
Here our study must cease. When the primitive man comes into literature, he is no longer primitive.
VI
CAMPING OUT
It seems to be agreed that civilization is kept up only by a constant effort: Nature claims its own speedily when the effort is relaxed. If you clear a patch of fertile ground in the forest, uproot the stumps, and plant it, year after year, in potatoes and maize, you say you have subdued it. But, if you leave it for a season or two, a kind of barbarism seems to steal out upon it from the circling woods; coarse grass and brambles cover it; bushes spring up in a wild tangle; the raspberry and the blackberry flower and fruit; and the humorous bear feeds upon them. The last state of that ground is worse than the first.
Perhaps the cleared spot is called Ephesus. There is a splendid city on the plain; there are temples and theatres on the hills; the commerce of the world seeks its port; the luxury of the Orient flows through its marble streets. You are there one day when the sea has receded: the plain is a pestilent marsh; the temples, the theatres, the lofty gates have sunken and crumbled, and the wild-brier runs over them; and, as you grow pensive in the most desolate place in the world, a bandit lounges out of a tomb, and offers to relieve you of all that which creates artificial distinctions in society. The higher the civilization has risen, the more abject is the desolation of barbarism that ensues. The most melancholy spot in the Adirondacks is not a tamarack-swamp, where the traveler wades in moss and mire, and the atmosphere is composed of equal active parts of black-flies, mosquitoes, and midges. It is the village of the Adirondack Iron-Works, where the streets of gaunt houses are falling to pieces, tenantless; the factory-wheels have stopped; the furnaces are in ruins; the iron and wooden machinery is strewn about in helpless detachment; and heaps of charcoal, ore, and slag proclaim an arrested industry. Beside this deserted village, even Calamity Pond, shallow, sedgy, with its ragged shores of stunted firs, and its melancholy shaft that marks the spot where the proprietor of the iron-works accidentally shot himself, is cheerful.
The instinct of barbarism that leads people periodically to throw aside the habits of civilization, and seek the freedom and discomfort of the woods, is explicable enough; but it is not so easy to understand why this passion should be strongest in those who are most refined, and most trained in intellectual and social fastidiousness. Philistinism and shoddy do not like the woods, unless it becomes fashionable to do so; and then, as speedily as possible, they introduce their artificial luxuries, and reduce the life in the wilderness to the vulgarity of a well-fed picnic. It is they who have strewn the Adirondacks with paper collars and tin cans. The real enjoyment of camping and tramping in the woods lies in a return to primitive conditions of lodging, dress, and food, in as total an escape as may be from the requirements of civilization. And it remains to be explained why this is enjoyed most by those who are most highly civilized. It is wonderful to see how easily the restraints of society fall off. Of course it is not true that courtesy depends upon clothes with the best people; but, with others, behavior hangs almost entirely upon dress. Many good habits are easily got rid of in the woods. Doubt sometimes seems to be felt whether Sunday is a legal holiday there. It becomes a question of casuistry with a clergyman whether he may shoot at a mark on Sunday, if none of his congregation are present. He intends no harm: he only gratifies a curiosity to see if he can hit the mark. Where shall he draw the line? Doubtless he might throw a stone at a chipmunk, or shout at a loon. Might he fire at a mark with an air-gun that makes no noise? He will not fish or hunt on Sunday (although he is no more likely to catch anything that day than on any other); but may he eat trout that the guide has caught on Sunday, if the guide swears he caught them Saturday night? Is there such a thing as a vacation in religion? How much of our virtue do we owe to inherited habits?
I am not at all sure whether this desire to camp outside of civilization is creditable to human nature, or otherwise. We hear sometimes that the Turk has been merely camping for four centuries in Europe. I suspect that many of us are, after all, really camping temporarily in civilized conditions; and that going into the wilderness is an escape, longed for, into our natural and preferred state. Consider what this ” camping out ” is, that is confessedly so agreeable to people most delicately reared. I have no desire to exaggerate its delights.
The Adirondack wilderness is essentially unbroken. A few bad roads that penetrate it, a few jolting wagons that traverse them, a few barn-like boarding-houses on the edge of the forest, where the boarders are soothed by patent coffee, and stimulated to unnatural gayety by Japan tea, and experimented on by unique cookery, do little to destroy the savage fascination of the region. In half an hour, at any point, one can put himself into solitude and every desirable discomfort. The party that covets the experience of the camp comes down to primitive conditions of dress and equipment. There are guides and porters to carry the blankets for beds, the raw provisions, and the camp equipage; and the motley party of the temporarily decivilized files into the woods, and begins, perhaps by a road, perhaps on a trail, its exhilarating and weary march. The exhilaration arises partly from the casting aside of restraint, partly from the adventure of exploration; and the weariness, from the interminable toil of bad walking, a heavy pack, and the grim monotony of trees and bushes, that shut out all prospect, except an occasional glimpse of the sky. Mountains are painfully climbed, streams forded, lonesome lakes paddled over, long and muddy “carries” traversed. Fancy this party the victim of political exile, banished by the law, and a more sorrowful march could not be imagined; but the voluntary hardship becomes pleasure, and it is undeniable that the spirits of the party rise as the difficulties increase.
For this straggling and stumbling band the world is young again: it has come to the beginning of things; it has cut loose from tradition, and is free to make a home anywhere: the movement has all the promise of a revolution. All this virginal freshness invites the primitive instincts of play and disorder. The free range of the forests suggests endless possibilities of exploration and possession. Perhaps we are treading where man since the creation never trod before; perhaps the waters of this bubbling spring, which we deepen by scraping out the decayed leaves and the black earth, have never been tasted before, except by the wild denizens of these woods. We cross the trails of lurking animals,–paths that heighten our sense of seclusion from the world. The hammering of the infrequent woodpecker, the call of the lonely bird, the drumming of the solitary partridge,–all these sounds do but emphasize the lonesomeness of nature. The roar of the mountain brook, dashing over its bed of pebbles, rising out of the ravine, and spreading, as it were, a mist of sound through all the forest (continuous beating waves that have the rhythm of eternity in them), and the fitful movement of the air- tides through the balsams and firs and the giant pines,–how these grand symphonies shut out the little exasperations of our vexed life! It seems easy to begin life over again on the simplest terms. Probably it is not so much the desire of the congregation to escape from the preacher, or of the preacher to escape from himself, that drives sophisticated people into the wilderness, as it is the unconquered craving for primitive simplicity, the revolt against the everlasting dress-parade of our civilization. From this monstrous pomposity even the artificial rusticity of a Petit Trianon is a relief. It was only human nature that the jaded Frenchman of the regency should run away to the New World, and live in a forest-hut with an Indian squaw; although he found little satisfaction in his act of heroism, unless it was talked about at Versailles.
When our trampers come, late in the afternoon, to the bank of a lovely lake where they purpose to enter the primitive life, everything is waiting for them in virgin expectation. There is a little promontory jutting into the lake, and sloping down to a sandy beach, on which the waters idly lapse, and shoals of red-fins and shiners come to greet the stranger; the forest is untouched by the axe; the tender green sweeps the water’s edge; ranks of slender firs are marshaled by the shore; clumps of white-birch stems shine in satin purity among the evergreens; the boles of giant spruces, maples, and oaks, lifting high their crowns of foliage, stretch away in endless galleries and arcades; through the shifting leaves the sunshine falls upon the brown earth; overhead are fragments of blue sky; under the boughs and in chance openings appear the bluer lake and the outline of the gracious mountains. The discoverers of this paradise, which they have entered to destroy, note the babbling of the brook that flows close at hand; they hear the splash of the leaping fish; they listen to the sweet, metallic song of the evening thrush, and the chatter of the red squirrel, who angrily challenges their right to be there. But the moment of sentiment passes. This party has come here to eat and to sleep, and not to encourage Nature in her poetic attitudinizing.
The spot for a shanty is selected. This side shall be its opening, towards the lake; and in front of it the fire, so that the smoke shall drift into the hut, and discourage the mosquitoes; yonder shall be the cook’s fire and the path to the spring. The whole colony bestir themselves in the foundation of a new home,–an enterprise that has all the fascination, and none of the danger, of a veritable new settlement in the wilderness. The axes of the guides resound in the echoing spaces; great trunks fall with a crash; vistas are opened towards the lake and the mountains. The spot for the shanty is cleared of underbrush; forked stakes are driven into the ground, cross-pieces are laid on them, and poles sloping back to the ground. In an incredible space of time there is the skeleton of a house, which is entirely open in front. The roof and sides must be covered. For this purpose the trunks of great spruces are skinned. The woodman rims the bark near the foot of the tree, and again six feet above, and slashes it perpendicularly; then, with a blunt stick, he crowds off this thick hide exactly as an ox is skinned. It needs but a few of these skins to cover the roof; and they make a perfectly water-tight roof, except when it rains. Meantime busy hands have gathered boughs of the spruce and the feathery balsam, and shingled the ground underneath the shanty for a bed. It is an aromatic bed: in theory it is elastic and consoling. Upon it are spread the blankets. The sleepers, of all sexes and ages, are to lie there in a row, their feet to the fire, and their heads under the edge of the sloping roof. Nothing could be better contrived. The fire is in front: it is not a fire, but a conflagration–a vast heap of green logs set on fire–of pitch, and split dead-wood, and crackling balsams, raging and roaring. By the time, twilight falls, the cook has prepared supper. Everything has been cooked in a tin pail and a skillet,–potatoes, tea, pork, mutton, slapjacks. You wonder how everything could have been prepared in so few utensils. When you eat, the wonder ceases: everything might have been cooked in one pail. It is a noble meal; and nobly is it disposed of by these amateur savages, sitting about upon logs and roots of trees. Never were there such potatoes, never beans that seemed to have more of the bean in them, never such curly pork, never trout with more Indian- meal on them, never mutton more distinctly sheepy; and the tea, drunk out of a tin cup, with a lump of maple-sugar dissolved in it,–it is the sort of tea that takes hold, lifts the hair, and disposes the drinker to anecdote and hilariousness. There is no deception about it: it tastes of tannin and spruce and creosote. Everything, in short, has the flavor of the wilderness and a free life. It is idyllic. And yet, with all our sentimentality, there is nothing feeble about the cooking. The slapjacks are a solid job of work, made to last, and not go to pieces in a person’s stomach like a trivial bun: we might record on them, in cuneiform characters, our incipient civilization; and future generations would doubtless turn them up as Acadian bricks. Good, robust victuals are what the primitive man wants.
Darkness falls suddenly. Outside the ring of light from our conflagration the woods are black. There is a tremendous impression of isolation and lonesomeness in our situation. We are the prisoners of the night. The woods never seemed so vast and mysterious. The trees are gigantic. There are noises that we do not understand,– mysterious winds passing overhead, and rambling in the great galleries, tree-trunks grinding against each other, undefinable stirs and uneasinesses. The shapes of those who pass into the dimness are outlined in monstrous proportions. The spectres, seated about in the glare of the fire, talk about appearances and presentiments and religion. The guides cheer the night with bear-fights, and catamount encounters, and frozen-to-death experiences, and simple tales of great prolixity and no point, and jokes of primitive lucidity. We hear catamounts, and the stealthy tread of things in the leaves, and the hooting of owls, and, when the moon rises, the laughter of the loon. Everything is strange, spectral, fascinating.
By and by we get our positions in the shanty for the night, and arrange the row of sleepers. The shanty has become a smoke-house by this time: waves of smoke roll into it from the fire. It is only by lying down, and getting the head well under the eaves, that one can breathe. No one can find her “things”; nobody has a pillow. At length the row is laid out, with the solemn protestation of intention to sleep. The wind, shifting, drives away the smoke.
Good-night is said a hundred times; positions are readjusted, more last words, new shifting about, final remarks; it is all so comfortable and romantic; and then silence. Silence continues for a minute. The fire flashes up; all the row of heads is lifted up simultaneously to watch it; showers of sparks sail aloft into the blue night; the vast vault of greenery is a fairy spectacle. How the sparks mount and twinkle and disappear like tropical fireflies, and all the leaves murmur, and clap their hands! Some of the sparks do not go out: we see them flaming in the sky when the flame of the fire has died down. Well, good-night, goodnight. More folding of the arms to sleep; more grumbling about the hardness of a hand-bag, or the insufficiency of a pocket-handkerchief, for a pillow. Good- night. Was that a remark?–something about a root, a stub in the ground sticking into the back. “You couldn’t lie along a hair?”— “Well, no: here’s another stub. It needs but a moment for the conversation to become general,–about roots under the shoulder, stubs in the back, a ridge on which it is impossible for the sleeper to balance, the non-elasticity of boughs, the hardness of the ground, the heat, the smoke, the chilly air. Subjects of remarks multiply. The whole camp is awake, and chattering like an aviary. The owl is also awake; but the guides who are asleep outside make more noise than the owls. Water is wanted, and is handed about in a dipper. Everybody is yawning; everybody is now determined to go to sleep in good earnest. A last good-night. There is an appalling silence. It is interrupted in the most natural way in the world. Somebody has got the start, and gone to sleep. He proclaims the fact. He seems to have been brought up on the seashore, and to know how to make all the deep-toned noises of the restless ocean. He is also like a war- horse; or, it is suggested, like a saw-horse. How malignantly he snorts, and breaks off short, and at once begins again in another key! One head is raised after another.
“Who is that?”
“Somebody punch him.”
“Turn him over.”
“Reason with him.”
The sleeper is turned over. The turn was a mistake. He was before, it appears, on his most agreeable side. The camp rises in indignation. The sleeper sits up in bewilderment. Before he can go off again, two or three others have preceded him. They are all alike. You never can judge what a person is when he is awake. There are here half a dozen disturbers of the peace who should be put in solitary confinement. At midnight, when a philosopher crawls out to sit on a log by the fire, and smoke a pipe, a duet in tenor and mezzo-soprano is going on in the shanty, with a chorus always coming in at the wrong time. Those who are not asleep want to know why the smoker doesn’t go to bed. He is requested to get some water, to throw on another log, to see what time it is, to note whether it looks like rain. A buzz of conversation arises. She is sure she heard something behind the shanty. He says it is all nonsense. “Perhaps, however, it might be a mouse.”
“Mercy! Are there mice?”
“Plenty.”
“Then that’s what I heard nibbling by my head. I shan’t sleep a wink! Do they bite?”
“No, they nibble; scarcely ever take a full bite out.”
“It’s horrid!”
Towards morning it grows chilly; the guides have let the fire go out; the blankets will slip down. Anxiety begins to be expressed about the dawn.
“What time does the sun rise?”
“Awful early. Did you sleep?
“Not a wink. And you?”
“In spots. I’m going to dig up this root as soon as it is light enough.”
“See that mist on the lake, and the light just coming on the Gothics! I’d no idea it was so cold: all the first part of the night I was roasted.”
“What were they talking about all night?
When the party crawls out to the early breakfast, after it has washed its faces in the lake, it is disorganized, but cheerful. Nobody admits much sleep; but everybody is refreshed, and declares it delightful. It is the fresh air all night that invigorates; or maybe it is the tea, or the slap-jacks. The guides have erected a table of spruce bark, with benches at the sides; so that breakfast is taken in form. It is served on tin plates and oak chips. After breakfast begins the day’s work. It may be a mountain-climbing expedition, or rowing and angling in the lake, or fishing for trout in some stream two or three miles distant. Nobody can stir far from camp without a guide. Hammocks are swung, bowers are built novel-reading begins, worsted work appears, cards are shuffled and dealt. The day passes in absolute freedom from responsibility to one’s self. At night when the expeditions return, the camp resumes its animation. Adventures are recounted, every statement of the narrator being disputed and argued. Everybody has become an adept in woodcraft; but nobody credits his neighbor with like instinct. Society getting resolved into its elements, confidence is gone.
Whilst the hilarious party are at supper, a drop or two of rain falls. The head guide is appealed to. Is it going to rain? He says it does rain. But will it be a rainy night? The guide goes down to the lake, looks at the sky, and concludes that, if the wind shifts a p’int more, there is no telling what sort of weather we shall have. Meantime the drops patter thicker on the leaves overhead, and the leaves, in turn, pass the water down to the table; the sky darkens; the wind rises; there is a kind of shiver in the woods; and we scud away into the shanty, taking the remains of our supper, and eating it as best we can. The rain increases. The fire sputters and fumes. All the trees are dripping, dripping, and the ground is wet. We cannot step outdoors without getting a drenching. Like sheep, we are penned in the little hut, where no one can stand erect. The rain swirls into the open front, and wets the bottom of the blankets. The smoke drives in. We curl up, and enjoy ourselves. The guides at length conclude that it is going to be damp. The dismal situation sets us all into good spirits; and it is later than the night before when we crawl under our blankets, sure this time of a sound sleep, lulled by the storm and the rain resounding on the bark roof. How much better off we are than many a shelter-less wretch! We are as snug as dry herrings. At the moment, however, of dropping off to sleep, somebody unfortunately notes a drop of water on his face; this is followed by another drop; in an instant a stream is established. He moves his head to a dry place. Scarcely has he done so, when he feels a dampness in his back. Reaching his hand outside, he finds a puddle of water soaking through his blanket. By this time, somebody inquires if it is possible that the roof leaks. One man has a stream of water under him; another says it is coming into his ear. The roof appears to be a discriminating sieve. Those who are dry see no need of such a fuss. The man in the corner spreads his umbrella, and the protective measure is resented by his neighbor. In the darkness there is recrimination. One of the guides, who is summoned, suggests that the rubber blankets be passed out, and spread over the roof. The inmates dislike the proposal, saying that a shower-bath is no worse than a tub-bath. The rain continues to soak down. The fire is only half alive. The bedding is damp. Some sit up, if they can find a dry spot to sit on, and smoke. Heartless observations are made. A few sleep. And the night wears on. The morning opens cheerless. The sky is still leaking, and so is the shanty. The guides bring in a half-cooked breakfast. The roof is patched up. There are reviving signs of breaking away, delusive signs that create momentary exhilaration. Even if the storm clears, the woods are soaked. There is no chance of stirring. The world is only ten feet square.
This life, without responsibility or clean clothes, may continue as long as the reader desires. There are, those who would like to live in this free fashion forever, taking rain and sun as heaven pleases; and there are some souls so constituted that they cannot exist more than three days without their worldly–baggage. Taking the party altogether, from one cause or another it is likely to strike camp sooner than was intended. And the stricken camp is a melancholy sight. The woods have been despoiled; the stumps are ugly; the bushes are scorched; the pine-leaf-strewn earth is trodden into mire; the landing looks like a cattle-ford; the ground is littered with all the unsightly dibris of a hand-to-hand life; the dismantled shanty is a shabby object; the charred and blackened logs, where the fire blazed, suggest the extinction of family life. Man has wrought his usual wrong upon Nature, and he can save his self-respect only by moving to virgin forests.
And move to them he will, the next season, if not this. For he who has once experienced the fascination of the woods-life never escapes its enticement: in the memory nothing remains but its charm.
VII
A WILDERNESS ROMANCE
At the south end of Keene Valley, in the Adirondacks, stands Noon Mark, a shapely peak thirty-five hundred feet above the sea, which, with the aid of the sun, tells the Keene people when it is time to eat dinner. From its summit you look south into a vast wilderness basin, a great stretch of forest little trodden, and out of whose bosom you can hear from the heights on a still day the loud murmur of the Boquet. This basin of unbroken green rises away to the south and southeast into the rocky heights of Dix’s Peak and Nipple Top,–the latter a local name which neither the mountain nor the fastidious tourist is able to shake off. Indeed, so long as the mountain keeps its present shape as seen from the southern lowlands, it cannot get on without this name.
These two mountains, which belong to the great system of which Marcy is the giant centre, and are in the neighborhood of five thousand feet high, on the southern outposts of the great mountains, form the gate-posts of the pass into the south country. This opening between them is called Hunter’s Pass. It is the most elevated and one of the wildest of the mountain passes. Its summit is thirty-five hundred feet high. In former years it is presumed the hunters occasionally followed the game through; but latterly it is rare to find a guide who has been that way, and the tin-can and paper-collar tourists have not yet made it a runway. This seclusion is due not to any inherent difficulty of travel, but to the fact that it lies a little out of the way.
We went through it last summer; making our way into the jaws from the foot of the great slides on Dix, keeping along the ragged spurs of the mountain through the virgin forest. The pass is narrow, walled in on each side by precipices of granite, and blocked up with bowlders and fallen trees, and beset with pitfalls in the roads ingeniously covered with fair-seeming moss. When the climber occasionally loses sight of a leg in one of these treacherous holes, and feels a cold sensation in his foot, he learns that he has dipped into the sources of the Boquet, which emerges lower down into falls and rapids, and, recruited by creeping tributaries, goes brawling through the forest basin, and at last comes out an amiable and boat- bearing stream in the valley of Elizabeth Town. From the summit another rivulet trickles away to the south, and finds its way through a frightful tamarack swamp, and through woods scarred by ruthless lumbering, to Mud Pond, a quiet body of water, with a ghastly fringe of dead trees, upon which people of grand intentions and weak vocabulary are trying to fix the name of Elk Lake. The descent of the pass on that side is precipitous and exciting. The way is in the stream itself; and a considerable portion of the distance we swung ourselves down the faces of considerable falls, and tumbled down cascades. The descent, however, was made easy by the fact that it rained, and every footstep was yielding and slippery. Why sane people, often church-members respectably connected, will subject themselves to this sort of treatment,–be wet to the skin, bruised by the rocks, and flung about among the bushes and dead wood until the most necessary part of their apparel hangs in shreds,–is one of the delightful mysteries of these woods. I suspect that every man is at heart a roving animal, and likes, at intervals, to revert to the condition of the bear and the catamount.
There is no trail through Hunter’s Pass, which, as I have intimated, is the least frequented portion of this wilderness. Yet we were surprised to find a well-beaten path a considerable portion of the way and wherever a path is possible. It was not a mere deer’s runway: these are found everywhere in the mountains. It is trodden by other and larger animals, and is, no doubt, the highway of beasts. It bears marks of having been so for a long period, and probably a period long ago. Large animals are not common in these woods now, and you seldom meet anything fiercer than the timid deer and the gentle bear. But in days gone by, Hunter’s Pass was the highway of the whole caravan of animals who were continually going backward; and forwards, in the aimless, roaming way that beasts have, between Mud Pond and the Boquet Basin. I think I can see now the procession of them between the heights of Dix and Nipple Top; the elk and the moose shambling along, cropping the twigs; the heavy bear lounging by with his exploring nose; the frightened deer trembling at every twig that snapped beneath his little hoofs, intent on the lily-pads of the pond; the raccoon and the hedgehog, sidling along; and the velvet- footed panther, insouciant and conscienceless, scenting the path with a curious glow in his eye, or crouching in an overhanging tree ready to drop into the procession at the right moment. Night and day, year after year, I see them going by, watched by the red fox and the comfortably clad sable, and grinned at by the black cat,–the innocent, the vicious, the timid and the savage, the shy and the bold, the chattering slanderer and the screaming prowler, the industrious and the peaceful, the tree-top critic and the crawling biter,–just as it is elsewhere. It makes me blush for my species when I think of it. This charming society is nearly extinct now: of the larger animals there only remain the bear, who minds his own business more thoroughly than any person I know, and the deer, who would like to be friendly with men, but whose winning face and gentle ways are no protection from the savageness of man, and who is treated with the same unpitying destruction as the snarling catamount. I have read in history that the amiable natives of Hispaniola fared no better at the hands of the brutal Spaniards than the fierce and warlike Caribs. As society is at present constituted in Christian countries, I would rather for my own security be a cougar than a fawn.
There is not much of romantic interest in the Adirondacks. Out of the books of daring travelers, nothing. I do not know that the Keene Valley has any history. The mountains always stood here, and the Au Sable, flowing now in shallows and now in rippling reaches over the sands and pebbles, has for ages filled the air with continuous and soothing sounds. Before the Vermonters broke into it some three- quarters of a century ago, and made meadows of its bottoms and sugar- camps of its fringing woods, I suppose the red Indian lived here in his usual discomfort, and was as restless as his successors, the summer boarders. But the streams were full of trout then, and the moose and the elk left their broad tracks on the sands of the river. But of the Indian there is no trace. There is a mound in the valley, much like a Tel in the country of Bashan beyond the Jordan, that may have been built by some pre-historic race, and may contain treasure and the seated figure of a preserved chieftain on his slow way to Paradise. What the gentle and accomplished race of the Mound- Builders should want in this savage region where the frost kills the early potatoes and stunts the scanty oats, I do not know. I have seen no trace of them, except this Tel, and one other slight relic, which came to light last summer, and is not enough to found the history of a race upon.
Some workingmen, getting stone from the hillside on one of the little plateaus, for a house-cellar, discovered, partly embedded, a piece of pottery unique in this region. With the unerring instinct of workmen in regard to antiquities, they thrust a crowbar through it, and broke the bowl into several pieces. The joint fragments, however, give us the form of the dish. It is a bowl about nine inches high and eight inches across, made of red clay, baked but not glazed. The bottom is round, the top flares into four comers, and the rim is rudely but rather artistically ornamented with criss-cross scratches made when the clay was soft. The vessel is made of clay not found about here, and it is one that the Indians formerly living here could not form. Was it brought here by roving Indians who may have made an expedition to the Ohio; was it passed from tribe to tribe; or did it belong to a race that occupied the country before the Indian, and who have left traces of their civilized skill in pottery scattered all over the continent ?
If I could establish the fact that this jar was made by a prehistoric race, we should then have four generations in this lovely valley:-the amiable Pre-Historic people (whose gentle descendants were probably killed by the Spaniards in the West Indies); the Red Indians; the Keene Flaters (from Vermont); and the Summer Boarders, to say nothing of the various races of animals who have been unable to live here since the advent of the Summer Boarders, the valley being not productive enough to sustain both. This last incursion has been more destructive to the noble serenity of the forest than all the preceding.
But we are wandering from Hunter’s Pass. The western walls of it are formed by the precipices of Nipple Top, not so striking nor so bare as the great slides of Dix which glisten in the sun like silver, but rough and repelling, and consequently alluring. I have a great desire to scale them. I have always had an unreasonable wish to explore the rough summit of this crabbed hill, which is too broken and jagged for pleasure and not high enough for glory. This desire was stimulated by a legend related by our guide that night in the Mud Pond cabin. The guide had never been through the pass before; although he was familiar with the region, and had ascended Nipple Top in the winter in pursuit of the sable. The story he told doesn’t amount to much, none of the guides’ stories do, faithfully reported, and I should not have believed it if I had not had a good deal of leisure on my hands at the time, and been of a willing mind, and I may say in rather of a starved condition as to any romance in this region.
The guide said then–and he mentioned it casually, in reply to our inquiries about ascending the mountain–that there was a cave high up among the precipices on the southeast side of Nipple Top. He scarcely volunteered the information, and with seeming reluctance gave us any particulars about it. I always admire this art by which the accomplished story-teller lets his listener drag the reluctant tale of the marvelous from him, and makes you in a manner responsible for its improbability. If this is well managed, the listener is always eager to believe a great deal more than the romancer seems willing to tell, and always resents the assumed reservations and doubts of the latter.
There were strange reports about this cave when the old guide was a boy, and even then its very existence had become legendary. Nobody knew exactly where it was, but there was no doubt that it had been inhabited. Hunters in the forests south of Dix had seen a light late at night twinkling through the trees high up the mountain, and now and then a ruddy glare as from the flaring-up of a furnace. Settlers were few in the wilderness then, and all the inhabitants were well known. If the cave was inhabited, it must be by strangers, and by men who had some secret purpose in seeking this seclusion and eluding observation. If suspicious characters were seen about Port Henry, or if any such landed from the steamers on the shore of Lake Champlain, it was impossible to identify them with these invaders who were never seen. Their not being seen did not, however, prevent the growth of the belief in their existence. Little indications and rumors, each trivial in itself, became a mass of testimony that could not be disposed of because of its very indefiniteness, but which appealed strongly to man’s noblest faculty, his imagination, or credulity.
The cave existed; and it was inhabited by men who came and went on mysterious errands, and transacted their business by night. What this band of adventurers or desperadoes lived on, how they conveyed their food through the trackless woods to their high eyrie, and what could induce men to seek such a retreat, were questions discussed, but never settled. They might be banditti; but there was nothing to plunder in these savage wilds, and, in fact, robberies and raids either in the settlements of the hills or the distant lake shore were unknown. In another age, these might have been hermits, holy men who had retired from the world to feed the vanity of their godliness in a spot where they were subject neither to interruption nor comparison; they would have had a shrine in the cave, and an image of the Blessed Virgin, with a lamp always burning before it and sending out its mellow light over the savage waste. A more probable notion was that they were romantic Frenchmen who had grow weary of vice and refinement together,–possibly princes, expectants of the throne, Bourbon remainders, named Williams or otherwise, unhatched eggs, so to speak, of kings, who had withdrawn out of observation to wait for the next turn-over in Paris. Frenchmen do such things. If they were not Frenchmen, they might be honest-thieves or criminals, escaped from justice or from the friendly state-prison of New York. This last supposition was, however, more violent than the others, or seems so to us in this day of grace. For what well-brought-up New York criminal would be so insane as to run away from his political friends the keepers, from the easily had companionship of his pals outside, and from the society of his criminal lawyer, and, in short, to put himself into the depths of a wilderness out of which escape, when escape was desired, is a good deal more difficult than it is out of the swarming jails of the Empire State? Besides, how foolish for a man, if he were a really hardened and professional criminal, having established connections and a regular business, to run away from the governor’s pardon, which might have difficulty in finding him in the craggy bosom of Nipple Top!
This gang of men–there is some doubt whether they were accompanied by women–gave little evidence in their appearance of being escaped criminals or expectant kings. Their movements were mysterious but not necessarily violent. If their occupation could have been discovered, that would have furnished a clew to their true character. But about this the strangers were as close as mice. If anything could betray them, it was the steady light from the cavern, and its occasional ruddy flashing. This gave rise to the opinion, which was strengthened by a good many indications equally conclusive, that the cave was the resort of a gang of coiners and counterfeiters. Here they had their furnace, smelting-pots, and dies; here they manufactured those spurious quarters and halves that their confidants, who were pardoned, were circulating, and which a few honest men were “nailing to the counter.”
This prosaic explanation of a romantic situation satisfies all the requirements of the known facts, but the lively imagination at once rejects it as unworthy of the subject. I think the guide put it forward in order to have it rejected. The fact is,–at least, it has never been disproved,–these strangers whose movements were veiled belonged to that dark and mysterious race whose presence anywhere on this continent is a nest-egg of romance or of terror. They were Spaniards! You need not say buccaneers, you need not say gold- hunters, you need not say swarthy adventurers even: it is enough to say Spaniards! There is no tale of mystery and fanaticism and daring I would not believe if a Spaniard is the hero of it, and it is not necessary either that he should have the high-sounding name of Bodadilla or Ojeda.
Nobody, I suppose, would doubt this story if the moose, quaffing deep draughts of red wine from silver tankards, and then throwing themselves back upon divans, and lazily puffing the fragrant Havana. After a day of toil, what more natural, and what more probable for a Spaniard?
Does the reader think these inferences not warranted by the facts? He does not know the facts. It is true that our guide had never himself personally visited the cave, but he has always intended to hunt it up. His information in regard to it comes from his father, who was a mighty hunter and trapper. In one of his expeditions over Nipple Top he chanced upon the cave. The mouth was half concealed by undergrowth. He entered, not without some apprehension engendered by the legends which make it famous. I think he showed some boldness in venturing into such a place alone. I confess that, before I went in, I should want to fire a Gatling gun into the mouth for a little while, in order to rout out the bears which usually dwell there. He went in, however. The entrance was low; but the cave was spacious, not large, but big enough, with a level floor and a vaulted ceiling. It had long been deserted, but that it was once the residence of highly civilized beings there could be no doubt. The dead brands in the centre were the remains of a fire that could not have been kindled by wild beasts, and the bones scattered about had been scientifically dissected and handled. There were also remnants of furniture and pieces of garments scattered about. At the farther end, in a fissure of the rock, were stones regularly built up, the rem Yins of a larger fire,–and what the hunter did not doubt was the smelting furnace of the Spaniards. He poked about in the ashes, but found no silver. That had all been carried away.
But what most provoked his wonder in this rude cave was a chair I This was not such a seat as a woodman might knock up with an axe, with rough body and a seat of woven splits, but a manufactured chair of commerce, and a chair, too, of an unusual pattern and some elegance. This chair itself was a mute witness of luxury and mystery. The chair itself might have been accounted for, though I don’t know how; but upon the back of the chair hung, as if the owner had carelessly flung it there before going out an hour before, a man’s waistcoat. This waistcoat seemed to him of foreign make and peculiar style, but what endeared it to him was its row of metal buttons. These buttons were of silver! I forget now whether he did not say they were of silver coin, and that the coin was Spanish. But I am not certain about this latter fact, and I wish to cast no air of improbability over my narrative. This rich vestment the hunter carried away with him. This was all the plunder his expedition afforded. Yes: there was one other article, and, to my mind, more significant than the vest of the hidalgo. This was a short and stout crowbar of iron; not one of the long crowbars that farmers use to pry up stones, but a short handy one, such as you would use in digging silver-ore out of the cracks of rocks.
This was the guide’s simple story. I asked him what became of the vest and the buttons, and the bar of iron. The old man wore the vest until he wore it out; and then he handed it over to the boys, and they wore it in turn till they wore it out. The buttons were cut off, and kept as curiosities. They were about the cabin, and the children had them to play with. The guide distinctly remembers playing with them; one of them he kept for a long time, and he didn’t know but he could find it now, but he guessed it had disappeared. I regretted that he had not treasured this slender verification of an interesting romance, but he said in those days he never paid much attention to such things. Lately he has turned the subject over, and is sorry that his father wore out the vest and did not bring away the chair. It is his steady purpose to find the cave some time when he has leisure, and capture the chair, if it has not tumbled to pieces. But about the crowbar? Oh I that is all right. The guide has the bar at his house in Keene Valley, and has always used it. I am happy to be able to confirm this story by saying that next day I saw the crowbar, and had it in my hand. It is short and thick, and the most interesting kind of crowbar. This evidence is enough for me. I intend in the course of this vacation to search for the cave; and, if I find it, my readers shall know the truth about it, if it destroys the only bit of romance connected with these mountains.
VIII
WHAT SOME PEOPLE CALL PLEASURE
My readers were promised an account of Spaniard’s Cave on Nipple-Top Mountain in the Adirondacks, if such a cave exists, and could be found. There is none but negative evidence that this is a mere cave of the imagination, the void fancy of a vacant hour; but it is the duty of the historian to present the negative testimony of a fruitless expedition in search of it, made last summer. I beg leave to offer this in the simple language befitting all sincere exploits of a geographical character.
The summit of Nipple-Top Mountain has been trodden by few white men of good character: it is in the heart of a hirsute wilderness; it is itself a rough and unsocial pile of granite nearly five thousand feet high, bristling with a stunted and unpleasant growth of firs and balsams, and there is no earthly reason why a person should go there. Therefore we went. In the party of three there was, of course, a chaplain. The guide was Old Mountain Phelps, who had made the ascent once before, but not from the northwest side, the direction from which we approached it. The enthusiasm of this philosopher has grown with his years, and outlived his endurance: we carried our own knapsacks and supplies, therefore, and drew upon him for nothing but moral reflections and a general knowledge of the wilderness. Our first day’s route was through the Gill-brook woods and up one of its branches to the head of Caribou Pass, which separates Nipple Top from Colvin.
It was about the first of September; no rain had fallen for several weeks, and this heart of the forest was as dry as tinder; a lighted match dropped anywhere would start a conflagration. This dryness has its advantages: the walking is improved; the long heat has expressed all the spicy odors of the cedars and balsams, and the woods are filled with a soothing fragrance; the waters of the streams, though scant and clear, are cold as ice; the common forest chill is gone from the air. The afternoon was bright; there was a feeling of exultation and adventure in stepping off into the open but pathless forest; the great stems of deciduous trees were mottled with patches of sunlight, which brought out upon the variegated barks and mosses of the old trunks a thousand shifting hues. There is nothing like a primeval wood for color on a sunny day. The shades of green and brown are infinite; the dull red of the hemlock bark glows in the sun, the russet of the changing moose-bush becomes brilliant; there are silvery openings here and there; and everywhere the columns rise up to the canopy of tender green which supports the intense blue sky and holds up a part of it from falling through in fragments to the floor of the forest. Decorators can learn here how Nature dares to put blue and green in juxtaposition: she has evidently the secret of harmonizing all the colors.
The way, as we ascended, was not all through open woods; dense masses of firs were encountered, jagged spurs were to be crossed, and the going became at length so slow and toilsome that we took to the rocky bed of a stream, where bowlders and flumes and cascades offered us sufficient variety. The deeper we penetrated, the greater the sense of savageness and solitude; in the silence of these hidden places one seems to approach the beginning of things. We emerged from the defile into an open basin, formed by the curved side of the mountain, and stood silent before a waterfall coming down out of the sky in the centre of the curve. I do not know anything exactly like this fall, which some poetical explorer has named the Fairy-Ladder Falls. It appears to have a height of something like a hundred and fifty feet, and the water falls obliquely across the face of the cliff from left to right in short steps, which in the moonlight might seem like a veritable ladder for fairies. Our impression of its height was confirmed by climbing the very steep slope at its side some three or four hundred feet. At the top we found the stream flowing over a broad bed of rock, like a street in the wilderness, slanting up still towards the sky, and bordered by low firs and balsams, and bowlders completely covered with moss. It was above the world and open to the sky.
On account of the tindery condition of the woods we made our fire on the natural pavement, and selected a smooth place for our bed near by on the flat rock, with a pool of limpid water at the foot. This granite couch we covered with the dry and springy moss, which we stripped off in heavy fleeces a foot thick from the bowlders. First, however, we fed upon the fruit that was offered us. Over these hills of moss ran an exquisite vine with a tiny, ovate, green leaf, bearing small, delicate berries, oblong and white as wax, having a faint flavor of wintergreen and the slightest acid taste, the very essence of the wilderness; fairy food, no doubt, and too refined for palates accustomed to coarser viands. There must exist somewhere sinless women who could eat these berries without being reminded of the lost purity and delicacy of the primeval senses. Every year I doubt not this stainless berry ripens here, and is unplucked by any knight of the Holy Grail who is worthy to eat it, and keeps alive, in the prodigality of nature, the tradition of the unperverted conditions of taste before the fall. We ate these berries, I am bound to say, with a sense of guilty enjoyment, as if they had been a sort of shew-bread of the wilderness, though I cannot answer for the chaplain, who is by virtue of his office a little nearer to these mysteries of nature than I. This plant belongs to the heath family, and is first cousin to the blueberry and cranberry. It is commonly called the creeping snowberry, but I like better its official title of chiogenes,–the snow-born.
Our mossy resting-place was named the Bridal Chamber Camp, in the enthusiasm of the hour, after darkness fell upon the woods and the stars came out. We were two thousand five hundred feet above the common world. We lay, as it were, on a shelf in the sky, with a basin of illimitable forests below us and dim mountain-passes-in the far horizon.
And as we lay there courting sleep which the blinking stars refused to shower down, our philosopher discoursed to us of the principle of fire, which he holds, with the ancients, to be an independent element that comes and goes in a mysterious manner, as we see flame spring up and vanish, and is in some way vital and indestructible, and has a mysterious relation to the source of all things. “That flame,” he says, “you have put out, but where has it gone?” We could not say, nor whether it is anything like the spirit of a man which is here for a little hour, and then vanishes away. Our own philosophy of the correlation of forces found no sort of favor at that elevation, and we went to sleep leaving the principle of fire in the apostolic category of ” any other creature.”
At daylight we were astir; and, having pressed the principle of fire into our service to make a pot of tea, we carefully extinguished it or sent it into another place, and addressed ourselves to the climb of some thing over two thousand feet. The arduous labor of scaling an Alpine peak has a compensating glory; but the dead lift of our bodies up Nipple Top had no stimulus of this sort. It is simply hard work, for which the strained muscles only get the approbation of the individual conscience that drives them to the task. The pleasure of such an ascent is difficult to explain on the spot, and I suspect consists not so much in positive enjoyment as in the delight the mind experiences in tyrannizing over the body. I do not object to the elevation of this mountain, nor to the uncommonly steep grade by which it attains it, but only to the other obstacles thrown in the way of the climber. All the slopes of Nipple Top are hirsute and jagged to the last degree. Granite ledges interpose; granite bowlders seem to have been dumped over the sides with no more attempt at arrangement than in a rip-rap wall; the slashes and windfalls of a century present here and there an almost impenetrable chevalier des arbres; and the steep sides bristle with a mass of thick balsams, with dead, protruding spikes, as unyielding as iron stakes. The mountain has had its own way forever, and is as untamed as a wolf; or rather the elements, the frightful tempests, the frosts, the heavy snows, the coaxing sun, and the avalanches have had their way with it until its surface is in hopeless confusion. We made our way very slowly; and it was ten o’clock before we reached what appeared to be the summit, a ridge deeply covered with moss, low balsams, and blueberry-bushes.
I say, appeared to be; for we stood in thick fog or in the heart of clouds which limited our dim view to a radius of twenty feet. It was a warm and cheerful fog, stirred by little wind, but moving, shifting, and boiling as by its own volatile nature, rolling up black from below and dancing in silvery splendor overhead As a fog it could not have been improved; as a medium for viewing the landscape it was a failure and we lay down upon the Sybarite couch of moss, as in a Russian bath, to await revelations.
We waited two hours without change, except an occasional hopeful lightness in the fog above, and at last the appearance for a moment of the spectral sun. Only for an instant was this luminous promise vouchsafed. But we watched in intense excitement. There it was again; and this time the fog was so thin overhead that we caught sight of a patch of blue sky a yard square, across which the curtain was instantly drawn. A little wind was stirring, and the fog boiled up from the valley caldrons thicker than ever. But the spell was broken. In a moment more Old Phelps was shouting, “The sun!” and before we could gain our feet there was a patch of sky overhead as big as a farm. “See! quick!” The old man was dancing like a lunatic. There was a rift in the vapor at our feet, down, down, three thousand feet into the forest abyss, and lo! lifting out of it yonder the tawny side of Dix,–the vision of a second, snatched away in the rolling fog. The play had just begun. Before we could turn, there was the gorge of Caribou Pass, savage and dark, visible to the bottom. The opening shut as suddenly; and then, looking over the clouds, miles away we saw the peaceful farms of the Au Sable Valley, and in a moment more the plateau of North Elba and the sentinel mountains about the grave of John Brown. These glimpses were as fleeting as thought, and instantly we were again isolated in the sea of mist. The expectation of these sudden strokes of sublimity kept us exultingly on the alert; and yet it was a blow of surprise when the curtain was swiftly withdrawn on the west, and the long ridge of Colvin, seemingly within a stone’s throw, heaved up like an island out of the ocean, and was the next moment ingulfed. We waited longer for Dix to show its shapely peak and its glistening sides of rock gashed by avalanches. The fantastic clouds, torn and streaming, hurried up from the south in haste as if to a witch’s rendezvous, hiding and disclosing the great summit in their flight. The mist boiled up from the valley, whirled over the summit where we stood, and plunged again into the depths. Objects were forming and disappearing, shifting and dancing, now in sun and now gone in fog, and in the elemental whirl we felt that we were “assisting” in an original process of creation. The sun strove, and his very striving called up new vapors; the wind rent away the clouds, and brought new masses to surge about us; and the spectacle to right and left, above and below, changed with incredible swiftness. Such glory of abyss and summit, of color and form and transformation, is seldom granted to mortal eyes. For an hour we watched it until our vast mountain was revealed in all its bulk, its long spurs, its abysses and its savagery, and the great basins of wilderness with their shining lakes, and the giant peaks of the region, were one by one disclosed, and hidden and again tranquil in the sunshine.
Where was the cave? There was ample surface in which to look for it. If we could have flitted about, like the hawks that came circling round, over the steep slopes, the long spurs, the jagged precipices, I have no doubt we should have found it. But moving about on this mountain is not a holiday pastime; and we were chiefly anxious to discover a practicable mode of descent into the great wilderness basin on the south, which we must traverse that afternoon before reaching the hospitable shanty on Mud Pond. It was enough for us to have discovered the general whereabouts of the Spanish Cave, and we left the fixing of its exact position to future explorers.
The spur we chose for our escape looked smooth in the distance; but we found it bristling with obstructions, dead balsams set thickly together, slashes of fallen timber, and every manner of woody chaos; and when at length we swung and tumbled off the ledge to the general slope, we exchanged only for more disagreeable going. The slope for a couple of thousand feet was steep enough; but it was formed of granite rocks all moss-covered, so that the footing could not be determined, and at short intervals we nearly went out of sight in holes under the treacherous carpeting. Add to this that stems of great trees were laid longitudinally and transversely and criss-cross over and among the rocks, and the reader can see that a good deal of work needs to be done to make this a practicable highway for anything but a squirrel….
We had had no water since our daylight breakfast: our lunch on the mountain had been moistened only by the fog. Our thirst began to be that of Tantalus, because we could hear the water running deep down among the rocks, but we could not come at it. The imagination drank the living stream, and we realized anew what delusive food the imagination furnishes in an actual strait. A good deal of the crime of this world, I am convinced, is the direct result of the unlicensed play of the imagination in adverse circumstances. This reflection had nothing to do with our actual situation; for we added to our imagination patience, and to our patience long-suffering, and probably all the Christian virtues would have been developed in us if the descent had been long enough. Before we reached the bottom of Caribou Pass, the water burst out from the rocks in a clear stream that was as cold as ice. Shortly after, we struck the roaring brook that issues from the Pass to the south. It is a stream full of character, not navigable even for trout in the upper part, but a succession of falls, cascades, flumes, and pools that would delight an artist. It is not an easy bed for anything except water to descend; and before we reached the level reaches, where the stream flows with a murmurous noise through open woods, one of our party began to show signs of exhaustion.
This was Old Phelps, whose appetite had failed the day before,–his imagination being in better working order than his stomach: he had eaten little that day, and his legs became so groggy that he was obliged to rest at short intervals. Here was a situation! The afternoon was wearing away. We had six or seven miles of unknown wilderness to traverse, a portion of it swampy, in which a progress of more than a mile an hour is difficult, and the condition of the guide compelled even a slower march. What should we do in that lonesome solitude if the guide became disabled? We couldn’t carry him out; could we find our own way out to get assistance? The guide himself had never been there before; and although he knew the general direction of our point of egress, and was entirely adequate to extricate himself from any position in the woods, his knowledge was of that occult sort possessed by woodsmen which it is impossible to communicate. Our object was to strike a trail that led from the Au Sable Pond, the other side of the mountain-range, to an inlet on Mud Pond. We knew that if we traveled southwestward far enough we must strike that trail, but how far? No one could tell. If we reached that trail, and found a boat at the inlet, there would be only a row of a couple of miles to the house at the foot of the lake. If no boat was there, then we must circle the lake three or four miles farther through a cedar-swamp, with no trail in particular. The prospect was not pleasing. We were short of supplies, for we had not expected to pass that night in the woods. The pleasure of the excursion began to develop itself.
We stumbled on in the general direction marked out, through a forest that began to seem endless as hour after hour passed, compelled as we were to make long detours over the ridges of the foothills to avoid the swamp, which sent out from the border of the lake long tongues into the firm ground. The guide became more ill at every step, and needed frequent halts and long rests. Food he could not eat; and tea, water, and even brandy he rejected. Again and again the old philosopher, enfeebled by excessive exertion and illness, would collapse in a heap on the ground, an almost comical picture of despair, while we stood and waited the waning of the day, and peered forward in vain for any sign of an open country. At every brook we encountered, we suggested a halt for the night, while it was still light enough to select a camping-place, but the plucky old man wouldn’t hear of it: the trail might be only a quarter of a mile ahead, and we crawled on again at a snail’s pace. His honor as a guide seemed to be at stake; and, besides, he confessed to a notion that his end was near, and he didn’t want to die like a dog in the woods. And yet, if this was his last journey, it seemed not an inappropriate ending for the old woodsman to lie down and give up the ghost in the midst of the untamed forest and the solemn silences he felt most at home in. There is a popular theory, held by civilians, that a soldier likes to die in battle. I suppose it is as true that a woodsman would like to “pass in his chips,”–the figure seems to be inevitable, struck down by illness and exposure, in the forest solitude, with heaven in sight and a tree-root for his pillow.
The guide seemed really to fear that, if we did not get out of the woods that night, he would never go out; and, yielding to his dogged resolution, we kept on in search of the trail, although the gathering of dusk over the ground warned us that we might easily cross the trail without recognizing it. We were traveling by the light in the upper sky, and by the forms of the tree-stems, which every moment grew dimmer. At last the end came. We had just felt our way over what seemed to be a little run of water, when the old man sunk down, remarking, “I might as well die here as anywhere,” and was silent.
Suddenly night fell like a blanket on us. We could neither see the guide nor each other. We became at once conscious that miles of night on all sides shut us in. The sky was clouded over: there wasn’t a gleam of light to show us where to step. Our first thought was to build a fire, which would drive back the thick darkness into the woods, and boil some water for our tea. But it was too dark to use the axe. We scraped together leaves and twigs to make a blaze, and, as this failed, such dead sticks as we could find by groping about. The fire was only a temporary affair, but it sufficed to boil a can of water. The water we obtained by feeling about the stones of the little run for an opening big enough to dip our cup in. The supper to be prepared was fortunately simple. It consisted of a decoction of tea and other leaves which had got into the pail, and a part of a loaf of bread. A loaf of bread which has been carried in a knapsack for a couple of days, bruised and handled and hacked at with a hunting-knife, becomes an uninteresting object. But we ate of it with thankfulness, washed it down with hot fluid, and bitterly thought of the morrow. Would our old friend survive the night? Would he be in any condition to travel in the morning? How were we to get out with him or without him?
The old man lay silent in the bushes out of sight, and desired only to be let alone. We tried to tempt him with the offer of a piece of toast: it was no temptation. Tea we thought would revive him: he refused it. A drink of brandy would certainly quicken his life: he couldn’t touch it. We were at the end of our resources. He seemed to think that if he were at home, and could get a bit of fried bacon, or a piece of pie, he should be all right. We knew no more how to doctor him than if he had been a sick bear. He withdrew within himself, rolled himself up, so to speak, in his primitive habits, and waited for the healing power of nature. Before our feeble fire disappeared, we smoothed a level place near it for Phelps to lie on, and got him over to it. But it didn’t suit: it was too open. In fact, at the moment some drops of rain fell. Rain was quite outside of our program for the night. But the guide had an instinct about it; and, while we were groping about some yards distant for a place where we could lie down, he crawled away into the darkness, and curled himself up amid the roots of a gigantic pine, very much as a bear would do, I suppose, with his back against the trunk, and there passed the night comparatively dry and comfortable; but of this we knew nothing till morning, and had to trust to the assurance of a voice out of the darkness that he was all right.
Our own bed where we spread our blankets was excellent in one respect,–there was no danger of tumbling out of it. At first the rain pattered gently on the leaves overhead, and we congratulated ourselves on the snugness of our situation. There was something cheerful about this free life. We contrasted our condition with that of tired invalids who were tossing on downy beds, and wooing sleep in vain. Nothing was so wholesome and invigorating as this bivouac in the forest. But, somehow, sleep did not come. The rain had ceased to patter, and began to fall with a steady determination, a sort of soak, soak, all about us. In fact, it roared on the rubber blanket, and beat in our faces. The wind began to stir a little, and there was a moaning on high. Not contented with dripping, the rain was driven into our faces. Another suspicious circumstance was noticed. Little rills of water got established along the sides under the blankets, cold, undeniable streams, that interfered with drowsiness. Pools of water settled on the bed; and the chaplain had a habit of moving suddenly, and letting a quart or two inside, and down my neck. It began to be evident that we and our bed were probably the wettest objects in the woods. The rubber was an excellent catch-all. There was no trouble about ventilation, but we found that we had established our quarters without any provision for drainage. There was not exactly a wild tempest abroad; but there was a degree of liveliness in the thrashing limbs and the creaking of the tree- branches which rubbed against each other, and the pouring rain increased in volume and power of penetration. Sleep was quite out of the question, with so much to distract our attention. In fine, our misery became so perfect that we both broke out into loud and sarcastic laughter over the absurdity of our situation. We had subjected ourselves to all this forlornness simply for pleasure. Whether Old Phelps was still in existence, we couldn’t tell: we could get no response from him. With daylight, if he continued ill and could not move, our situation would be little improved. Our supplies were gone, we lay in a pond, a deluge of water was pouring down on us. This was summer recreation. The whole thing was so excessively absurd that we laughed again, louder than ever. We had plenty of this sort of amusement. Suddenly through the night we heard a sort of reply that started us bolt upright. This was a prolonged squawk. It was like the voice of no beast or bird with which we were familiar. At first it was distant; but it rapidly approached, tearing through the night and apparently through the tree-tops, like the harsh cry of a web-footed bird with a snarl in it; in fact, as I said, a squawk. It came close to us, and then turned, and as rapidly as it came fled away through the forest, and we lost the unearthly noise far up the mountain-slope.
“What was that, Phelps? “we cried out. But no response came; and we wondered if his spirit had been rent away, or if some evil genius had sought it, and then, baffled by his serene and philosophic spirit, had shot off into the void in rage and disappointment.
The night had no other adventure. The moon at length coming up behind the clouds lent a spectral aspect to the forest, and deceived us for a time into the notion that day was at hand; but the rain never ceased, and we lay wishful and waiting, with no item of solid misery wanting that we could conceive.
Day was slow a-coming, and didn’t amount to much when it came, so heavy were the clouds; but the rain slackened. We crawled out of our water-cure “pack,” and sought the guide. To our infinite relief he announced himself not only alive, but in a going condition. I looked at my watch. It had stopped at five o’clock. I poured the water out of it, and shook it; but, not being constructed on the hydraulic principle, it refused to go. Some hours later we encountered a huntsman, from whom I procured some gun-grease; with this I filled the watch, and heated it in by the fire. This is a most effectual way of treating a delicate Genevan timepiece.
The light disclosed fully the suspected fact that our bed had been made in a slight depression: the under rubber blanket spread in this had prevented the rain from soaking into the ground, and we had been lying in what was in fact a well-contrived bathtub. While Old Phelps was pulling himself together, and we were wringing some gallons of water out of our blankets, we questioned the old man about the “squawk,” and what bird was possessed of such a voice. It was not a bird at all, he said, but a cat, the black-cat of the woods, larger than the domestic animal, and an ugly customer, who is fond of fish, and carries a pelt that is worth two or three dollars in the market. Occasionally he blunders into a sable-trap; and he is altogether hateful in his ways, and has the most uncultivated voice that is heard in the woods. We shall remember him as one of the least pleasant phantoms of that cheerful night when we lay in the storm, fearing any moment the advent to one of us of the grimmest messenger.
We rolled up and shouldered our wet belongings, and, before the shades had yet lifted from the saturated bushes, pursued our march. It was a relief to be again in motion, although our progress was slow, and it was a question every rod whether the guide could go on. We had the day before us; but if we did not find a boat at the inlet a day might not suffice, in the weak condition of the guide, to extricate us from our ridiculous position. There was nothing heroic in it; we had no object: it was merely, as it must appear by this time, a pleasure excursion, and we might be lost or perish in it without reward and with little sympathy. We had something like a hour and a half of stumbling through the swamp when suddenly we stood in the little trail! Slight as it was, it appeared to us a very Broadway to Paradise if broad ways ever lead thither. Phelps hailed it and sank down in it like one reprieved from death. But the boat? Leaving him, we quickly ran a quarter of a mile down to the inlet. The boat was there. Our shout to the guide would have roused him out of a death-slumber. He came down the trail with the agility of an aged deer: never was so glad a sound in his ear, he said, as that shout. It was in a very jubilant mood that we emptied the boat of water, pushed off, shipped the clumsy oars, and bent to the two-mile row through the black waters of the winding, desolate channel, and over the lake, whose dark waves were tossed a little in the morning breeze. The trunks of dead trees stand about this lake, and all its shores are ragged with ghastly drift-wood; but it was open to the sky, and although the heavy clouds still obscured all the mountain- ranges we had a sense of escape and freedom that almost made the melancholy scene lovely.
How lightly past hardship sits upon us! All the misery of the night vanished, as if it had not been, in the shelter of the log cabin at Mud Pond, with dry clothes that fitted us as the skin of the bear fits him in the spring, a noble breakfast, a toasting fire, solicitude about our comfort, judicious sympathy with our suffering, and willingness to hear the now growing tale of our adventure. Then came, in a day of absolute idleness, while the showers came and went, and the mountains appeared and disappeared in sun and storm, that perfect physical enjoyment which consists in a feeling of strength without any inclination to use it, and in a delicious languor which is too enjoyable to be surrendered to sleep.
’74
HOW SPRING CAME IN NEW ENGLAND
BY A READER OF “’93”
New England is the battle-ground of the seasons. It is La Vendee. To conquer it is only to begin the fight. When it is completely subdued, what kind of weather have you? None whatever.
What is this New England? A country? No: a camp. It is alternately invaded by the hyperborean legions and by the wilting sirens of the tropics. Icicles hang always on its northern heights; its seacoasts are fringed with mosquitoes. There is for a third of the year a contest between the icy air of the pole and the warm wind of the gulf. The result of this is a compromise: the compromise is called Thaw. It is the normal condition in New England. The New-Englander is a person who is always just about to be warm and comfortable. This is the stuff of which heroes and martyrs are made. A person thoroughly heated or frozen is good for nothing. Look at the Bongos. Examine (on the map) the Dog-Rib nation. The New-Englander, by incessant activity, hopes to get warm. Edwards made his theology. Thank God, New England is not in Paris!
Hudson’s Bay, Labrador, Grinnell’s Land, a whole zone of ice and walruses, make it unpleasant for New England. This icy cover, like the lid of a pot, is always suspended over it: when it shuts down, that is winter. This would be intolerable, were it not for the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is a benign, liquid force, flowing from under the ribs of the equator,–a white knight of the South going up to battle the giant of the North. The two meet in New England, and have it out there.
This is the theory; but, in fact, the Gulf Stream is mostly a delusion as to New England. For Ireland it is quite another thing. Potatoes ripen in Ireland before they are planted in New England. That is the reason the Irish emigrate–they desire two crops the same year. The Gulf Stream gets shunted off from New England by the formation of the coast below: besides, it is too shallow to be of any service. Icebergs float down against its surface-current, and fill all the New-England air with the chill of death till June: after that the fogs drift down from Newfoundland. There never was such a mockery as this Gulf Stream. It is like the English influence on France, on Europe. Pitt was an iceberg.
Still New England survives. To what purpose? I say, as an example: the politician says, to produce “Poor Boys.” Bah! The poor boy is an anachronism in civilization. He is no longer poor, and he is not a boy. In Tartary they would hang him for sucking all the asses’ milk that belongs to the children: in New England he has all the cream from the Public Cow. What can you expect in a country where one knows not today what the weather will be tomorrow? Climate makes the man. Suppose he, too, dwells on the Channel Islands, where he has all climates, and is superior to all. Perhaps he will become the prophet, the seer, of his age, as he is its Poet. The New-Englander is the man without a climate. Why is his country recognized? You won’t find it on any map of Paris.
And yet Paris is the universe. Strange anomaly! The greater must include the less; but how if the less leaks out? This sometimes happens.
And yet there are phenomena in that country worth observing. One of them is the conduct of Nature from the 1st of March to the 1st of June, or, as some say, from the vernal equinox to the summer solstice. As Tourmalain remarked, “You’d better observe the unpleasant than to be blind.” This was in 802. Tourmalain is dead; so is Gross Alain; so is little Pee-Wee: we shall all be dead before things get any better.
That is the law. Without revolution there is nothing. What is revolution? It is turning society over, and putting the best underground for a fertilizer. Thus only will things grow. What has this to do with New England? In the language of that flash of social lightning, Beranger, “May the Devil fly away with me if I can see!”
Let us speak of the period in the year in New England when winter appears to hesitate. Except in the calendar, the action is ironical; but it is still deceptive. The sun mounts high: it is above the horizon twelve hours at a time. The snow gradually sneaks away in liquid repentance. One morning it is gone, except in shaded spots and close by the fences. From about the trunks of the trees it has long departed: the tree is a living thing, and its growth repels it. The fence is dead, driven into the earth in a rigid line by man: the fence, in short, is dogma: icy prejudice lingers near it. The snow has disappeared; but the landscape is a ghastly sight,– bleached, dead. The trees are stakes; the grass is of no color; and the bare soil is not brown with a healthful brown; life has gone out of it. Take up a piece of turf: it is a clod, without warmth, inanimate. Pull it in pieces: there is no hope in it: it is a part of the past; it is the refuse of last year. This is the condition to which winter has reduced the landscape. When the snow, which was a pall, is removed, you see how ghastly it is. The face of the country is sodden. It needs now only the south wind to sweep over it, full of the damp breath of death; and that begins to blow. No prospect would be more dreary.
And yet the south wind fills credulous man with joy. He opens the window. He goes out, and catches cold. He is stirred by the mysterious coming of something. If there is sign of change nowhere else, we detect it in the newspaper. In sheltered corners of that truculent instrument for the diffusion of the prejudices of the few among the many begin to grow the violets of tender sentiment, the early greens of yearning. The poet feels the sap of the new year before the marsh-willow. He blossoms in advance of the catkins. Man is greater than Nature. The poet is greater than man: he is nature on two legs,–ambulatory.
At first there is no appearance of conflict. The winter garrison seems to have withdrawn. The invading hosts of the South are entering without opposition. The hard ground softens; the sun lies warm upon the southern bank, and water oozes from its base. If you examine the buds of the lilac and the flowering shrubs, you cannot say that they are swelling; but the varnish with which they were coated in the fall to keep out the frost seems to be cracking. If the sugar-maple is hacked, it will bleed,–the pure white blood of Nature.
At the close of a sunny day the western sky has a softened aspect: its color, we say, has warmth in it On such a day you may meet a caterpillar on the footpath, and turn out for him. The house-fly thaws out; a company of cheerful wasps take possession of a chamber- window. It is oppressive indoors at night, and the window is raised. A flock of millers, born out of time, flutter in. It is most unusual weather for the season: it is so every year. The delusion is complete, when, on a mild evening, the tree-toads open their brittle- brattle chorus on the edge of the pond. The citizen asks his neighbor, “Did you hear the frogs last night?” That seems to open the new world. One thinks of his childhood and its innocence, and of his first loves. It fills one with sentiment and a tender longing, this voice of the tree-toad. Man is a strange being. Deaf to the prayers of friends, to the sermons and warnings of the church, to the calls of duty, to the pleadings of his better nature, he is touched by the tree-toad. The signs of the spring multiply. The passer in the street in the evening sees the maid-servant leaning on the area- gate in sweet converse with some one leaning on the other side; or in the park, which is still too damp for anything but true affection, he sees her seated by the side of one who is able to protect her from the policeman, and hears her sigh, “How sweet it is to be with those we love to be with!”
All this is very well; but next morning the newspaper nips these early buds of sentiment. The telegraph announces, “Twenty feet of snow at Ogden, on the Pacific Road; winds blowing a gale at Omaha, and snow still falling; mercury frozen at Duluth; storm-signals at Port Huron.”
Where now are your tree-toads, your young love, your early season? Before noon it rains, by three o’clock it hails; before night the bleak storm-cloud of the northwest envelops the sky; a gale is raging, whirling about a tempest of snow. By morning the snow is drifted in banks, and two feet deep on a level. Early in the seventeenth century, Drebbel of Holland invented the weather-glass. Before that, men had suffered without knowing the degree of their suffering. A century later, Romer hit upon the idea of using mercury in a thermometer; and Fahrenheit constructed the instrument which adds a new because distinct terror to the weather. Science names and registers the ills of life; and yet it is a gain to know the names and habits of our enemies. It is with some satisfaction in our knowledge that we say the thermometer marks zero.
In fact, the wild beast called Winter, untamed, has returned, and taken possession of New England. Nature, giving up her melting mood, has retired into dumbness and white stagnation. But we are wise. We say it is better to have it now than later. We have a conceit of understanding things.
The sun is in alliance with the earth. Between the two the snow is uncomfortable. Compelled to go, it decides to go suddenly. The first day there is slush with rain; the second day, mud with hail; the third day a flood with sunshine. The thermometer declares that the temperature is delightful. Man shivers and sneezes. His neighbor dies of some disease newly named by science; but he dies all the same as if it hadn’t been newly named. Science has not discovered any name that is not fatal.
This is called the breaking-up of winter.
Nature seems for some days to be in doubt, not exactly able to stand still, not daring to put forth anything tender. Man says that the worst is over. If he should live a thousand years, he would be deceived every year. And this is called an age of skepticism. Man never believed in so many things as now: he never believed so much in himself. As to Nature, he knows her secrets: he can predict what she will do. He communicates with the next world by means of an alphabet which he has invented. He talks with souls at the other end of the spirit-wire. To be sure, neither of them says anything; but they talk. Is not that something? He suspends the law of gravitation as to his own body–he has learned how to evade it–as tyrants suspend the legal writs of habeas corpus. When Gravitation asks for his body, she cannot have it. He says of himself, “I am infallible; I am sublime.” He believes all these things. He is master of the elements. Shakespeare sends him a poem just made, and as good a poem as the man could write himself. And yet this man–he goes out of doors without his overcoat, catches cold, and is buried in three days. “On the 21st of January,” exclaimed Mercier, “all kings felt for the backs of their necks.” This might be said of all men in New England in the spring. This is the season that all the poets celebrate. Let us suppose that once, in Thessaly, there was a genial spring, and there was a poet who sang of it. All later poets have sung the same song. “Voila tout!” That is the root of poetry.
Another delusion. We hear toward evening, high in air, the “conk” of the wild-geese. Looking up, you see the black specks of that adventurous triangle, winging along in rapid flight northward. Perhaps it takes a wide returning sweep, in doubt; but it disappears in the north. There is no mistaking that sign. This unmusical “conk” is sweeter than the “kerchunk” of the bull-frog. Probably these birds are not idiots, and probably they turned back south again after spying out the nakedness of the land; but they have made their sign. Next day there is a rumor that somebody has seen a bluebird. This rumor, unhappily for the bird (which will freeze to death), is confirmed. In less than three days everybody has seen a bluebird; and favored people have heard a robin or rather the yellow-breasted thrush, misnamed a robin in America. This is no doubt true: for angle-worms have been seen on the surface of the ground; and, wherever there is anything to eat, the robin is promptly on hand. About this time you notice, in protected, sunny spots, that the grass has a little color. But you say that it is the grass of last fall. It is very difficult to tell when the grass of last fall became the grass of this spring. It looks “warmed over.” The green is rusty. The lilac-buds have certainly swollen a little, and so have those of the soft maple. In the rain the grass does not brighten as you think it ought to, and it is only when the rain turns to snow that you see any decided green color by contrast with the white. The snow gradually covers everything very quietly, however. Winter comes back without the least noise or bustle, tireless, malicious, implacable. Neither party in the fight now makes much fuss over it; and you might think that Nature had surrendered altogether, if you did not find about this time, in the Woods, on the edge of a snow-bank, the modest blossoms of the trailing arbutus, shedding their delicious perfume. The bravest are always the tenderest, says the poet. The season, in its blind way, is trying to express itself.
And it is assisted. There is a cheerful chatter in the trees. The blackbirds have come, and in numbers, households of them, villages of them,–communes, rather. They do not believe in God, these black- birds. They think they can take care of themselves. We shall see. But they are well informed. They arrived just as the last snow-bank melted. One cannot say now that there is not greenness in the grass; not in the wide fields, to be sure, but on lawns and banks sloping south. The dark-spotted leaves of the dog-tooth violet begin to show. Even Fahrenheit’s contrivance joins in the upward movement: the mercury has suddenly gone up from thirty degrees to sixty-five degrees. It is time for the ice-man. Ice has no sooner disappeared than we desire it.
There is a smile, if one may say so, in the blue sky, and there is. softness in the south wind. The song-sparrow is singing in the apple-tree. Another bird-note is heard,–two long, musical whistles, liquid but metallic. A brown bird this one, darker than the song- sparrow, and without the latter’s light stripes, and smaller, yet bigger than the queer little chipping-bird. He wants a familiar name, this sweet singer, who appears to be a sort of sparrow. He is such a contrast to the blue-jays, who have arrived in a passion, as usual, screaming and scolding, the elegant, spoiled beauties! They wrangle from morning till night, these beautiful, high-tempered aristocrats.
Encouraged by the birds, by the bursting of the lilac-buds, by the peeping-up of the crocuses, by tradition, by the sweet flutterings of a double hope, another sign appears. This is the Easter bonnets, most delightful flowers of the year, emblems of innocence, hope, devotion. Alas that they have to be worn under umbrellas, so much thought, freshness, feeling, tenderness have gone into them! And a northeast storm of rain, accompanied with hail, comes to crown all these virtues with that of self-sacrifice. The frail hat is offered up to the implacable season. In fact, Nature is not to be forestalled nor hurried in this way. Things cannot be pushed. Nature hesitates. The woman who does not hesitate in April is lost. The appearance of the bonnets is premature. The blackbirds see it. They assemble. For two days they hold a noisy convention, with high debate, in the tree-tops. Something is going to happen.
Say, rather, the usual thing is about to occur. There is a wind called Auster, another called Eurus, another called Septentrio, another Meridies, besides Aquilo, Vulturnus, Africus. There are the eight great winds of the classical dictionary,–arsenal of mystery and terror and of the unknown,–besides the wind Euroaquilo of St. Luke. This is the wind that drives an apostle wishing to gain Crete upon the African Syrtis. If St. Luke had been tacking to get to Hyannis, this wind would have forced him into Holmes’s Hole. The Euroaquilo is no respecter of persons.
These winds, and others unnamed and more terrible, circle about New England. They form a ring about it: they lie in wait on its borders, but only to spring upon it and harry it. They follow each other in contracting circles, in whirlwinds, in maelstroms of the atmosphere: they meet and cross each other, all at a moment. This New England is set apart: it is the exercise-ground of the weather. Storms bred elsewhere come here full-grown: they come in couples, in quartets, in choruses. If New England were not mostly rock, these winds would carry it off; but they would bring it all back again, as happens with the sandy portions. What sharp Eurus carries to Jersey, Africus brings back. When the air is not full of snow, it is full of dust. This is called one of the compensations of Nature.
This is what happened after the convention of the blackbirds: A moaning south wind brought rain; a southwest wind turned the rain to snow; what is called a zephyr, out of the west, drifted the snow; a north wind sent the mercury far below freezing. Salt added to snow increases the evaporation and the cold. This was the office of the northeast wind: it made the snow damp, and increased its bulk; but then it rained a little, and froze, thawing at the same time. The air was full of fog and snow and rain. And then the wind changed, went back round the circle, reversing everything, like dragging a cat by its tail. The mercury approached zero. This was nothing uncommon. We know all these winds. We are familiar with the different “forms of water.”
All this was only the prologue, the overture. If one might be permitted to speak scientifically, it was only the tuning of the instruments. The opera was to come,–the Flying Dutchman of the air.
There is a wind called Euroclydon: it would be one of the Eumenides; only they are women. It is half-brother to the gigantic storm-wind of the equinox. The Euroclydon is not a wind: it is a monster. Its breath is frost. It has snow in its hair. It is something terrible. It peddles rheumatism, and plants consumption.
The Euroclydon knew just the moment to strike into the discord of the weather in New England. From its lair about Point Desolation, from the glaciers of the Greenland continent, sweeping round the coast, leaving wrecks in its track, it marched right athwart the other conflicting winds, churning them into a fury, and inaugurating chaos. It was the Marat of the elements. It was the revolution marching into the ” dreaded wood of La Sandraie.”
Let us sum it all up in one word: it was something for which there is no name.
Its track was destruction. On the sea it leaves wrecks. What does it leave on land? Funerals. When it subsides, New England is prostrate. It has left its legacy: this legacy is coughs and patent medicines. This is an epic; this is destiny. You think Providence is expelled out of New England? Listen!
Two days after Euroclydon, I found in the woods the hepatica– earliest of wildwood flowers, evidently not intimidated by the wild work of the armies trampling over New England–daring to hold up its tender blossom. One could not but admire the quiet pertinacity of Nature. She had been painting the grass under the snow. In spots it was vivid green. There was a mild rain,–mild, but chilly. The clouds gathered, and broke away in light, fleecy masses. There was a softness on the hills. The birds suddenly were on every tree, glancing through the air, filling it with song, sometimes shaking raindrops from their wings. The cat brings in one in his mouth. He thinks the season has begun, and the game-laws are off. He is fond of Nature, this cat, as we all are: he wants to possess it. At four o’clock in the morning there is a grand dress-rehearsal of the birds. Not all the pieces of the orchestra have arrived; but there are enough. The grass-sparrow has come. This is certainly charming. The gardener comes to talk about seeds: he uncovers the straw-berries and the grape-vines, salts the asparagus-bed, and plants the peas. You ask if he planted them with a shot-gun. In the shade there is still frost in the ground. Nature, in fact, still hesitates; puts forth one hepatica at a time, and waits to see the result; pushes up the grass slowly, perhaps draws it in at night.
This indecision we call Spring.
It becomes painful. It is like being on the rack for ninety days, expecting every day a reprieve. Men grow hardened to it, however.
This is the order with man,–hope, surprise, bewilderment, disgust, facetiousness. The people in New England finally become facetious about spring. This is the last stage: it is the most dangerous. When a man has come to make a jest of misfortune, he is lost. “It bores me to die,” said the journalist Carra to the headsman at the foot of the guillotine: “I would like to have seen the continuation.” One is also interested to see how spring is going to turn out.
A day of sun, of delusive bird-singing, sight of the mellow earth,– all these begin to beget confidence. The night, even, has been warm. But what is this in the morning journal, at breakfast?–“An area of low pressure is moving from the Tortugas north.” You shudder.
What is this Low Pressure itself,–it? It is something frightful, low, crouching, creeping, advancing; it is a foreboding; it is misfortune by telegraph; it is the “’93” of the atmosphere.
This low pressure is a creation of Old Prob. What is that? Old Prob. is the new deity of the Americans, greater than AEolus, more despotic than Sans-Culotte. The wind is his servitor, the lightning his messenger. He is a mystery made of six parts electricity, and one part “guess.” This deity is worshiped by the Americans; his name is on every man’s lips first in the morning; he is the Frankenstein of modern science. Housed at Washington, his business is to direct the storms of the whole country upon New England, and to give notice in advance. This he does. Sometimes he sends the storm, and then gives notice. This is mere playfulness on his part: it is all one to him. His great power is in the low pressure.
On the Bexar plains of Texas, among the hills of the Presidio, along the Rio Grande, low pressure is bred; it is nursed also in the Atchafalaya swamps of Louisiana; it moves by the way of Thibodeaux and Bonnet Carre. The southwest is a magazine of atmospheric disasters. Low pressure may be no worse than the others: it is better known, and is most used to inspire terror. It can be summoned any time also from the everglades of Florida, from the morasses of the Okeechobee.
When the New-Englander sees this in his news paper, he knows what it means. He has twenty-four hours’ warning; but what can he do? Nothing but watch its certain advance by telegraph. He suffers in anticipation. That is what Old Prob. has brought about, suffering by anticipation. This low pressure advances against the wind. The wind is from the northeast. Nothing could be more unpleasant than a northeast wind? Wait till low pressure joins it. Together they make spring in New England. A northeast storm from the southwest!–there is no bitterer satire than this. It lasts three days. After that the weather changes into something winter-like.
A solitary song-sparrow, without a note of joy, hops along the snow to the dining-room window, and, turning his little head aside, looks up. He is hungry and cold. Little Minnette, clasping her hands behind her back, stands and looks at him, and says, “Po’ birdie!” They appear to understand each other. The sparrow gets his crumb; but he knows too much to let Minnette get hold of him. Neither of these little things could take care of itself in a New-England spring not in the depths of it. This is what the father of Minnette, looking out of the window upon the wide waste of snow, and the evergreens bent to the ground with the weight of it, says, “It looks like the depths of spring.” To this has man come: to his facetiousness has succeeded sarcasm. It is the first of May.
Then follows a day of bright sun and blue sky. The birds open the morning with a lively chorus. In spite of Auster, Euroclydon, low pressure, and the government bureau, things have gone forward. By the roadside, where the snow has just melted, the grass is of the color of emerald. The heart leaps to see it. On the lawn there are twenty robins, lively, noisy, worm-seeking. Their yellow breasts contrast with the tender green of the newly-springing clover and herd’s-grass. If they would only stand still, we might think the dandelions had blossomed. On an evergreen-bough, looking at them, sits a graceful bird, whose back is bluer than the sky. There is a red tint on the tips of the boughs of the hard maple. With Nature, color is life. See, already, green, yellow, blue, red! In a few days–is it not so?–through the green masses of the trees will flash the orange of the oriole, the scarlet of the tanager; perhaps tomorrow.
But, in fact, the next day opens a little sourly. It is almost clear overhead: but the clouds thicken on the horizon; they look leaden; they threaten rain. It certainly will rain: the air feels like rain, or snow. By noon it begins to snow, and you hear the desolate cry of the phoebe-bird. It is a fine snow, gentle at first; but it soon drives in swerving lines, for the wind is from the southwest, from the west, from the northeast, from the zenith (one of the ordinary winds of New England), from all points of the compass. The fine snow becomes rain; it becomes large snow; it melts as it falls; it freezes as it falls. At last a storm sets in, and night shuts down upon the bleak scene.
During the night there is a change. It thunders and lightens. Toward morning there is a brilliant display of aurora borealis. This is a sign of colder weather.
The gardener is in despair; so is the sportsman. The trout take no pleasure in biting in such weather.
Paragraphs appear in the newspapers, copied from the paper of last year, saying that this is the most severe spring in thirty years. Every one, in fact, believes that it is, and also that next year the spring will be early. Man is the most gullible of creatures.
And with reason: he trusts his eyes, and not his instinct. During this most sour weather of the year, the anemone blossoms; and, almost immediately after, the fairy pencil, the spring beauty, the dog-tooth violet, and the true violet. In clouds and fog, and rain and snow, and all discouragement, Nature pushes on her forces with progressive haste and rapidity. Before one is aware, all the lawns and meadows are deeply green, the trees are opening their tender leaves. In a burst of sunshine the cherry-trees are white, the Judas-tree is pink, the hawthorns give a sweet smell. The air is full of sweetness; the world, of color.
In the midst of a chilling northeast storm the ground is strewed with the white-and-pink blossoms from the apple-trees. The next day the mercury stands at eighty degrees. Summer has come.
There was no Spring.
The winter is over. You think so? Robespierre thought the Revolution was over in the beginning of his last Thermidor. He lost his head after that.
When the first buds are set, and the corn is up, and the cucumbers have four leaves, a malicious frost steals down from the north and kills them in a night.
That is the last effort of spring. The mercury then mounts to ninety degrees. The season has been long, but, on the whole, successful. Many people survive it.
CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH
PREFACE
When I consented to prepare this volume for a series, which should deal with the notables of American history with some familiarity and disregard of historic gravity, I did not anticipate the seriousness of the task. But investigation of the subject showed me that while Captain John Smith would lend himself easily enough to the purely facetious treatment, there were historic problems worthy of a different handling, and that if the life of Smith was to be written, an effort should be made to state the truth, and to disentangle the career of the adventurer from the fables and misrepresentations that have clustered about it.
The extant biographies of Smith, and the portions of the history of Virginia that relate to him, all follow his own narrative, and accept his estimate of himself, and are little more than paraphrases of his story as told by himself. But within the last twenty years some new contemporary evidence has come to light, and special scholars have expended much critical research upon different portions of his career. The result of this modern investigation has been to discredit much of the romance gathered about Smith and Pocahontas, and a good deal to reduce his heroic proportions. A vague report of- -these scholarly studies has gone abroad, but no effort has been made to tell the real story of Smith as a connected whole in the light of the new researches.
This volume is an effort to put in popular form the truth about Smith’s adventures, and to estimate his exploits and character. For this purpose I have depended almost entirely upon original contemporary material, illumined as it now is by the labors of special editors. I believe that I have read everything that is attributed to his pen, and have compared his own accounts with other contemporary narratives, and I think I have omitted the perusal of little that could throw any light upon his life or character. For the early part of his career–before he came to Virginia–there is absolutely no authority except Smith himself; but when he emerges from romance into history, he can be followed and checked by contemporary evidence. If he was always and uniformly untrustworthy it would be less perplexing to follow him, but his liability to tell the truth when vanity or prejudice does not interfere is annoying to the careful student.
As far as possible I have endeavored to let the actors in these pages tell their own story, and I have quoted freely from Capt. Smith himself, because it is as a writer that he is to be judged no less than as an actor. His development of the Pocahontas legend has been carefully traced, and all the known facts about that Indian–or Indese, as some of the old chroniclers call the female North Americans–have been consecutively set forth in separate chapters. The book is not a history of early Virginia, nor of the times of Smith, but merely a study of his life and writings. If my estimate of the character of Smith is not that which his biographers have entertained, and differs from his own candid opinion, I can only plead that contemporary evidence and a collation of his own stories show that he was mistaken. I am not aware that there has been before any systematic effort to collate his different accounts of his exploits. If he had ever undertaken the task, he might have disturbed that serene opinion of himself which marks him as a man who realized his own ideals.
The works used in this study are, first, the writings of Smith, which are as follows:
“A True Relation,” etc., London, 1608.
“A Map of Virginia, Description and Appendix,” Oxford, 1612.
“A Description of New England,” etc., London, 1616.
“New England’s Trials,” etc., London, 1620. Second edition, enlarged, 1622.
“The Generall Historie,” etc., London, 1624. Reissued, with date of title-page altered, in 1626, 1627, and twice in 1632.
“An Accidence: or, The Pathway to Experience,” etc., London, 1626.
“A Sea Grammar,” etc., London, 1627. Also editions in 1653 and 1699.
“The True Travels,” etc., London, 1630.
“Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England,” etc., London, 1631.
Other authorities are:
“The Historie of Travaile into Virginia,” etc., by William Strachey, Secretary of the colony 1609 to 1612. First printed for the Hakluyt Society, London, 1849.
“Newport’s Relatyon,” 1607. Am. Ant. Soc., Vol. 4.
“Wingfield’s Discourse,” etc., 1607. Am. Ant. Soc., Vol. 4.
“Purchas his Pilgrimage,” London, 1613.
“Purchas his Pilgrimes,” London, 1625-6.
“Ralph Hamor’s True Discourse,” etc., London, 1615.
“Relation of Virginia,” by Henry Spelman, 1609. First printed by J. F. Hunnewell, London, 1872.
“History of the Virginia Company in London,” by Edward D. Neill, Albany, 1869.
“William Stith’s History of Virginia,” 1753, has been consulted for the charters and letters-patent. The Pocahontas discussion has been followed in many magazine papers. I am greatly indebted to the scholarly labors of Charles Deane, LL.D., the accomplished editor of the “True Relation,” and other Virginia monographs. I wish also to acknowledge the courtesy of the librarians of the Astor, the Lenox, the New York Historical, Yale, and Cornell libraries, and of Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, the custodian of the Brinley collection, and the kindness of Mr. S. L. M. Barlow of New York, who is ever ready to give students access to his rich “Americana.”
C. D. W.
HARTFORD, June, 1881
CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH
BIRTH AND TRAINING
Fortunate is the hero who links his name romantically with that of a woman. A tender interest in his fame is assured. Still more fortunate is he if he is able to record his own achievements and give to them that form and color and importance which they assume in his own gallant consciousness. Captain John Smith, the first of an honored name, had this double good fortune.
We are indebted to him for the glowing picture of a knight-errant of the sixteenth century, moving with the port of a swash-buckler across the field of vision, wherever cities were to be taken and heads cracked in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and, in the language of one of his laureates
“To see bright honor sparkled all in gore.”