[2]Both tom-cod and perch are now shipped to the cities in quantities.
[2]Both tom-cod and perch are now shipped to the cities in quantities.
You would never think now that tall Indiamen were once built here in our town, but they were, and sailed hence round the world away, and we too boasted our wharves, with the once-familiar notice:
“All ships required to cock-a-bill their yards before lying at this dock.”
The last ship built in the town was theValley Forge, launched about 1860; the last built at Bowman’s Point, two miles above, was theTwo Brothers. TheValley Forgefor ten whole years was never out of Eastern waters, plying between China and Sumatra, and the seaports of the Inland Sea.
Mr. Peter Simons, one of our early magnates, and “ship’s husband,” of many vessels (kind, merry, handsome Mr. Peter, he never was husband to anyone but his ships), took a treasure voyage to the Spanish Main once, and brought home a moderate sized treasure,some of the doubloons of which are preserved in his family to this day.
Ship-building was the chief industry of the place. There were four principal ship-yards. The skippers as well as the lumber came from close at hand. It seems a wonderful thing, in these stay-at-home times, that keen young lads from the farms could have been, at twenty-one, in command of full-rigged ships, fearlessly making their way, in prosperous trade, to places that might as well be in Mars, for all most of us know of them to-day: but Java and the Spice Islands, Shanghai, Tasmania, and the Moluccas were household words in those days, and you still hear a sentence now and then which shows the one-time familiarity of ways which have passed from our knowledge.
The portraits at the house of Captain George Annable, the last of our clipper-ship captains, were painted in Antwerp. So were those (very queer ones), at Captain Charles Aiken’s, and at Captain Andrews’. It appears now in talk with Captain Annable thatof coursethey were painted at Antwerp, for that was where the American skippersas a rule wintered. Living there was better and cheaper for them and their families than at any other foreign port. It became the custom to winter at Antwerp, and there grew to be an American society there.
Captain Annable has crossed the Atlantic sixty-three times, sailing clipper mail-ships.
The Captains are nearly all gone now. Little trace of the ship-yards remains, and even the wharves from which the Indiamen sailed have rotted, and been replaced by the lumber and coal wharves of to-day; but all through the countryside you come on touches of the shipping days, and of the East, as startling as a sudden fragrance of sandalwood in some old cabinet. At one house I know there is a collection of butterflies and moths of the Far East, with two cream-colored Atlas moths eight inches from tip to tip. At another there is a set of rice-paper paintings of the orders of the Japanese nobility and gentry, with full insignia of state robes, which ought to be in a museum; and the parlor of a third neighbor, the gracious widow of a sea-captain, has, besides carved teak furniture and Chinese embroideries, a set of carved ivorychessmen fit for a palace. The king and queen stand over eight inches high. The castles are true elephant-and-castles, and the pawns are tiny mounted and turbaned warriors, brandishing scimitars. The figures stand on carved open-work balls-within-balls, four deep—“Laborious Orient ivory, sphere in sphere”—as delicate as frost-work. This set was bought in Shanghai, when the foreign compound still had its guard of soldiers, and the Chinese thronged the doorways to stare at the “white devils.”
The great gold-figured lacquer cabinet, the pride of one of our statelier houses, was brought from China a hundred years ago, by a young Captain Jameson, who was coming home for his wedding. He sailed again with his bride immediately after the marriage, and their ship never was heard of. The cabinet was sold, and then sold again, till it finally reached the setting which fits it so well.
You find lacquered Indian teapoys, Eastern porcelains, shells and corals from all round the world far out in scattered farmhouses; and farm-hands are still summoned tomeals by a blast on a conch-shell, a queer note, not unlike the belling of an elk.
Beside the actual china and embroideries and carvings, something of the character bred in the seafaring days has spread, like nourishing silt, through our countryside. The Captains were grave, quiet men. They had power of command, and keenness in emergency. Contact with many people of many nations quickened their perceptions and gave them charming manners; but more than this, there was something large-minded and tranquil about them. All their lives they had to deal with an element stronger than themselves. The next day’s work could never be planned or calculated on, and something of the detached quality which comes from dealing with the sea, a long and simple perspective towards human affairs, became part of them.
An expression of married life, so beautiful that I can never forget it, came from the lips of the widow of one of our sea-captains, a little old lady, now over eighty, who lives alone in a tiny brick cottage (where she has accomplished the almost unique feat of making English ivy flourish in our sub-arcticclimate). She wears a wonderful cap, and fills her house with quilts and cushions of silk patch-work which would make a kaleidoscope blink. I had an errand to her about a poorer neighbor, one Thanksgiving time. Her house is an outlying one, and I remember how the farm lights, scattered all about our river hills, shone in the soft autumn evening.
Her bright warm kitchen was coziness itself, with a shiny stove, full to the brim with red coals, and a big lamp. She sat with her cat on her knee, sewing on an orange and green cushion, made in queer little puffs, and she jumped up, dropping thimble, and spectacles, in her warm-hearted welcome. After my errand, we fell into talk, about “Cap’n,” and their long voyaging together. That was when the Captains as a matter of course took their wives, and often their children, with them, keeping a cow on board for the family’s use, and sometimes chickens and pigs. Many babies who grew to be sturdy citizens were born on the high seas in those days.
She told about long peaceful days, slipping through the Trades, and about gales, butmostly about china and pottery, for this was their hobby, almost their passion. They took inconvenient journeys of great length to see new potteries, and hoped at last to see all the sea-board china factories, in East and West. She showed me her treasures, pretty bits of Sevres, majolica, Doulton, and Wedgewood, all standing together, and among them an alabaster model of the leaning tower of Pisa (Pysa, she called it). At last, with a lowered voice, she spoke of the worst danger they had ever been through, a typhoon in the Bay of Bengal. The ship lay dismasted, and the waves broke over her helplessness. She was lifted up and dashed down like a log, and every soul on board expected only to perish.
“Cap’n come downstairs to our cabin:
“Oh, Mary,” he says, “if only you was to home! I could die easy if only you was to home!”
“I be to home!” I says. “If I had the wings of a dove, I wouldn’t be anywheres but where I be!”
This ranks with the epitaph at Nantucket:
“Think what a wife should be, and she was that!”
Another seafaring friend was, as so often happens, the last person whom you would ever connect with adventures, a little lady so tiny, so dainty, that a trip across the lawn with garden gloves and hat, to tie up her roses, might have been her longest excursion; but instead she has sailed round and round the world with her courtly sea-captain father, has lifted her quiet gray eyes to see coral islands and spice islands, and the strange mountain ranges of the East Indies.
“She wore white mostly when we were in the Trades or the Tropics,” her father has told me, “and she sat on deck all day, with her white fancy-work. She always seemed to like whatever was happening.”
One day, in a fog with a heavy sea running, the ship ran on a reef. The life-saving crew got the men off with great difficulty, but the Captain refused to leave his post, and little Miss Jessie refused too.
“No, thank you,” she said, in her soft voice, “No, thanks very much, I think I will stay with the Captain.”
“And you couldn’t move her,” he said, “any more than the rock of Gibraltar.”
With the night the storm lessened, and almost by a miracle the ship was got off safely next morning.
I must tell of one more seafaring couple, who lived down the river in a low white cottage where “Captain,” retired from service, could watch vessels passing, even without his handsome brass-bound binoculars, a much-prized tribute for life-saving.
The wife was long paralyzed, and the Captain, with the simple-minded nephew they had adopted, tended her as he might have tended an adored child. He bought her silk waists, fine aprons, little frills of one sort or another, fastened them on her with clumsy, loving fingers, and then would sit back, laughing with pride, while the paralyzed woman, with her wrecked face, managed to make uncouth sounds of pleasure.
“Don’t she look handsome? Don’t she look nice as anybody?” he would ask of the neighbors, and show the new wig he had bought her, as the poor hair was thin. His simple pride thought it as beautiful as any young girl’s curls, and indeed it was very youthful. One’s heart was wrung, yetuplifted, too, for here was love which had passed through the absolute wrecking of life, and was untouched.
The Captain was a tall hearty man, but it was he who died first, after all, and all in a minute. The paralyzed creature thus bereaved, moaned, day after day; her eyes seemed to be asking for something, there in the room, and no one could find the right thing, till someone thought of the Captain’s binoculars, which he always had by him. From that moment she became tranquil, and even grew happy again, if only she had the bright brass thing where her poor hand could touch it. If it was moved, she moaned for it to be set back. It was her precious token, from his hand to hers. With it beside her she could wait and be good, poor dear soul, until, in about two years, her release came, and she went to join “Captain.”
One word more about Mr. Peter Simons, of whom the town keeps pleasant memories. He lived handsomely, in a handsome house overlooking the river, and his housekeeper, Deborah Twycross, was as much of a magnate in her own way as himself. Mr. Peter wasvery high with her; but he stood in awe of her, too. Still, he never would let her engage his second servant, a privilege which she coveted.
In his young days a “hired girl” received $2.00 a week wages, if she could milk, $1.50 if she could not. By the time Mr. Peter was established in stately bachelor housekeeping no girl was any longer expected to milk, and few knew how. But when engaging a servant, if he did not like the applicant’s looks, Mr. Peter would say,
“Can you milk?”
Of course, she could not, and there the matter would end. He never asked a girl whose looks he liked, if she could milk!
He was a man of endless secret benevolence, and posed all the time as a hard-fisted person and a miser. He was at the most devious pains to conceal his constant kindnesses. The noble minister who at that time carried our Town on his young shoulders, received sums of money, in every time of need, for library, schools, or cases of poverty and suffering, directed in a variety of elaborately disguised handwritings. He was able intime to trace them all to Mr. Peter. Many a struggling young man was set on his feet and established in life by this secret benefactor; and after Mr. Peter’s death, his coal dealer told how for years he had had orders to deliver loads of coal to this and that family in distress, after dark, and as noiselessly as possible, under an agreement of secrecy, enforced by such threats that he never dared disobey.
The Town has changed since Mr. Peter’s day. Boys no longer brave the terrors of a visit to a White Witch to have their warts charmed, or a toothache healed. (“Mother Hatch,” who plied her arts some thirty years ago, was the last of these. Her appliances for fortune-telling were the correct ones of cards, an ink-well, and a glass to gaze in; but a small trembling sufferer in knickerbockers—a hero to the still more trembling group of friends and eggers-on outside—did not benefit by these higher mysteries. The enchantress, beside her traffic in the black arts, took in washing; she would withdraw her hands from the suds, and lay a reeking finger on the offending tooth, the patientgasping and shutting his terror-stricken eyes while she recited a sufficient incantation.)
Even the memory of the Whipping-post, which still stood in Mr. Peter’s childhood, has long since vanished. The town bell is no longer rung at seven in the morning and at noon, and a steam fire-whistle has replaced the tocsin of alarm that formerly was rung from all the church steeples; but the curfew still rings every night, at nine in the evening (the bell which rings it was made by Paul Revere); and, among the customary Scriptural-sounding offices of fence-viewers, field-drivers, measurers of wood and bark, etc., the town still has a town crier. A very few years ago it still had a pound-keeper and hog-reeve, but by now the outlines of the pound itself have disappeared.
A smaller river, the Acushticook, tumbles and foams down through the midst of our town, and brings us the wonderfully soft pure water of a chain of over twenty lakes and ponds. It flung the hills apart to join the larger stream which it meets at right angles at the Town Bridge, and the last mile of its course is through a beautiful small gorge, in a succession of falls, now compacted into the eight dams which turn our mills.
Above the falls, though it breaks into occasional rapids, its course is quieter, and as you travel towards the setting sun, your canoe follows a peaceful stream, running for the most part through woods.
The country along the Acushticook is broken and hilly, woods or open pastures full of boulders and junipers. The farms depend on their stock and apple orchards for their prosperity. You see big chicken yards, andthe more enterprising farmers send their eggs and broilers to city markets. Pigs do well among the apple trees, and most of the farms have ducks and geese as well as chickens. A well-trodden road follows the crest of the ridge, parallel to the river.
The Baxters, good, silent people, live well out on this road, and handsome Ambrose Baxter has a thriving milk route. Sefami Baxter, his uncle, worked in the paper mill his whole life, and now his son, young Sefami, has built up a good market garden business on the Acushticook road. He started it years ago with a tiny greenhouse, which he built on to his farm kitchen. He raised tomatoes and other seedlings, and early lettuce. It was an innovation in our part of the world, and neighbors shook their heads; but one bit of greenhouse was added to another, and now Sefami has three long stacks of them and is a prosperous man. He has a whole field of rhubarb and a large orchard, where he keeps twenty hives of bees. He had no capital beyond the savings of a plain working family, and he had to find his market for himself.
The Drews, now old people, live beyondAmbrose Baxter, and life has been a more poignant thing for them than for most of the farm neighbors. Their boy, Lawrence, was born for learning. Hefoamedto it, as a stream rushes down hill, and he had the vision and faithfulness which lead to high and lonely places. The parents were industrious and frugal, and Lawrence was the channel through which everything they had, mind and ambitions as well as savings, poured itself out. As a boy, he was all ardor and eagerness. Now he is a tall careworn man of fifty, unmarried, with hair and beard streaked with gray. He is a man of importance in many ways beside that of his own department in a great Western university. He is a good son, and comes home to the comfortable white farmhouse for every day in the year that it is possible, but his parents, of necessity, have had to grow old without him, and their look, in speaking of him, is one of acceptance, as well as of a high pride.
Acushticook has changed her course from time to time through the centuries, and about five miles from town a stretch of flat land which must once have been either intervalealong the river’s course or one of its many small lakes, lies pocketed among the hills. This stretch, which is very fertile, belongs, or belonged, to the Dunnacks, and they were surely a family which will be remembered. They never pretended to be anything more than plain farming people, but they were marked by a personal dignity and refinement, even fastidiousness, by their intelligence, and alas, by their many sorrows. Old Warren Dunnack was a farmer of substance. His son, the Warren Dunnack of our time, was nearly all his life in charge of the “Homestead” (one of the few country places in our neighborhood), during the long absence abroad of its owners. He married a beautiful woman, Sarah Brant. She was a magnificent creature, in a hard, almost animal sort of way, but was a shallow person, with a vain nature, coveting show, fine food and clothes, and she broke Warren’s heart. He took her back again and again after her many flights, for he had an unconquerable chivalry and gentleness for all women, and he let her have everything that he could earn.
INTERVALE ALONG THE RIVER’S COURSEINTERVALE ALONG THE RIVER’S COURSE
Lucretia was the beauty of the family, a slip of a girl with eyes like black diamonds. She married a showy business man, who turned out badly. She came home, a handsome and embittered older woman, and made life uncomfortable for herself and everyone else on the farm. Afterwards she became companion to a widow of some means, a fantastic person, and they lived together (unharmoniously) all their days.
Delia, who was so pretty, though not striking like Lucretia, married silly Ephraim Simmons; but her affection for her brother Warren was the abiding thing of her life. When Warren’s wife left him, and Delia was offered the position of housekeeper at the Homestead, she took it, and there she and Warren kept house for fifteen years. Two good-natured slack daughters (they were all Simmons; not a trace of their mother’s fire in them) helped Ephraim with his farm, and he certainly needed the money that their mother earned. He was a poor enough farmer; but his foolish face used to look wistful when he drove the six miles, every other Saturday, to see Delia.
Delia, for her part, never seemed anything but clear as to her duty. She drove overnow and then to see Ephraim, and sent her money to him and the girls, or put it in the bank for them, but her heart clave to her brother. She kept the long delightfully rambling house, and he kept the farm, lawns, and gardens, punctiliously in order for the owners who never came; and the honeysuckles blossomed in the corner of the great dark hedges, the lilies opened, and the grapes ripened and dropped on the sunny terraces of the garden as the unmarked years went by. I think that Delia’s life was one of untroubled serenity. Warren was a grave man, and his trouble with his wife underlay all his days, but with Delia he found a rare companionship and understanding. Their sitting-room in the ell of the big house was a gathering place for the farm neighbors. There was a deep fireplace, a table with a big lamp, a sofa, high-backed arm-chairs with worsted-work cushions and tidies, and windows filled with blossoming plants.
Warren died after a lingering illness, which he met with his usual grave cheerfulness, and Delia went back to Ephraim on the Acushticook road. Whatever she thought of thedifference between the Homestead and the bare little farm, between Warren and Ephraim, she met the change with the charming, half-whimsical philosophy that was hers through life. She had pretty ways, and an unconquerable sense of fun. She lived to be nearly eighty. She was a fine, fine woman; delicately organized, but of such vigorous fibre that she struck her roots deep into life, and gave out good to everyone who came near her. She was a magnet, drawing people by her warmth and sweetness.
It was to poor, good, hard-working John Dunnack that actual tragedy came. He was a plain dull man, of a far humbler stripe than his brothers. Misfortune came to his only child, a young adopted daughter. He lost his place at the mill not long after, from age. He was eighty years old. It was too much. His mind failed, and he took his own life.
A cheerful family, the Greenleafs, live next beyond the Dunnacks. They keep bees on a large scale, and “Greenleaf Honey,” in pretty-shaped glass jars, with a green beech leaf on the label, has had its establishedmarket for two generations. They also grew cherries for market, nearly as large as damsons.
Harvey Greenleaf had luck, and has what our people know as “gumption,” and “git-up-and-git,” and Mrs. Greenleaf, a fair, ample person, is a born woman of business. Once a neighbor, a farm hand, who had been discharged for slackness, planted buckwheat in a small clearing next the Greenleafs’, out of spite. (Buckwheat honey is unmarketable, because of its marked peculiar flavor, and its dark color.) Harvey was away at the County Grange Meeting—he was Master of his Grange that year—at the time it flowered. Two little girls, out picking wild raspberries, brought word of the trouble.
“Mis’ Greenleaf! Mis’ Greenleaf! There’s buckwheat in blow at Jasper Derry’s clearing, an’ it’s full of your bees!”
Mrs. Greenleaf harnessed up the old white mare herself, and drove over to the offender’s house. No one knows how she dealt with him, but the buckwheat was cut before night. Harvey chuckles, and says she swung the scythe herself. Not much harm was done, andonly a little of the yield turned out to have been injured by the buckwheat.
There are no rules about the planting of buckwheat near bee-hives. It is a matter of good feeling and neighborliness, and buckwheat is seldom grown where a neighbor keeps bees for profit; but it is impossible to guard against the trouble entirely and I have known a whole season’s yield to be discolored with honey brought from buckwheat, nine miles from the hives.
One early morning this June, as we were at breakfast on the piazza, a boy came round the corner of the house, and asked if we wanted “a quart of wild strawberries, a pint of cream, and a dozen of Mother’s fresh rolls, for forty cents!” We certainly did; and in the driveway we saw “Mother” waiting in the wagon, an alert-looking woman with a friendly face. She told us that she was Harvey Greenleaf’s daughter-in-law, and the boy her eldest son.
“I think there’s lots of small extra business that folks can do on the farms, if they’re spry, that sets things ahead a lot,” she said,à proposof the strawberries.
The rolls were as light as feather, and the cream very thick. We arranged for the same bargain twice a week while the berry season lasted!
In the autumn the same couple came again, this time with vegetables and fruit, nicely arranged, and with small cakes of fresh cream cheese done up in waxed paper in neat packages, each package stamped with S. Greenleaf, Eagle Cliff Farm. This is a new venture in our part of the country.
A mile of beautiful pasture, on a big scale, as smooth as an English down, slopes down from the back of the Greenleafs’ farm, rises in a noble ridge, and slopes again to where the Acushticook sparkles and dances over some thirty yards of rapids. The turf is close cropped and there are boulders and groups of half-sized firs and spruces scattered over the slope. There is a little wood in the upper corner, cool and shadowy, with a brooklet set deep in mosses, trickling through the midst. The pasture road leads through the firs and hemlocks, growing closer and more feathery, then through this wood, where Lady’s Slippers grow.
April 3. Last night the river “went out.” We were so used, all winter, to its sleeping whiteness, that it seemed as unlikely to change as the outlines of the hills; then came a tumultuous week, and now it is a brown, strong, full-running stream, with swirls and whirlpools of hastening current all over its wide surface. These are indescribable days. The air is sweet with wet bark and melting snow and newly-uncovered earth. The lesser streams are rushing and roaring through the woods. There are little clear dark foam-topped pools under all the spouts, and bright drops falling from rocks and roofs, where there were icicles so lately; and the roads endure miniature floods, from the torrents of snow-water that gush down their gutters and spread the mud in fan-shapes over them. Wherever you stand, you cannot get away from the rushingand trickling and rilling. The whole frozen strength of winter is breaking up in a wealth of life-giving waters.
There is a neglected-looking time for the fields just after the snow goes. The snow-patches recede and leave the soaked grass covered with odds and ends of loose sticks and roots and with untidy wefts of cobweb. The dead leaves lie limp and dank, and are of lovely but sad colors, soft browns and umbers, ash-grays and ash-purples; but in the midst of this waste the ponds are all awake—dimpling, soft water, tender and alive—and their bright blue is a new wonder after our winter world of white and brown and gray.
Robins came yesterday. Their crisp voices woke us with a start, after the winter’s silence. They were busy all over the lawn, and nearly a week ago we heard the first blue-birds and meadow-larks.
The fir boughs that were banked about the houses last fall, for warmth, must be burnt, and bonfires are being lighted all about the fields and gardens. They blaze up into a crackling roar of burning brush, and the smoke comes pouring and creaming out in thick white torrents. The clean, hilarious smell spreads everywhere, the touch of it clings to our hair and clothing. This is a wonderful, Indian time for children, when all sorts of strange inherited knowledge stirs in them. Look at their eyes, as they play and plan round their fires!
THE SOUTH WIND IN MARCHTHE SOUTH WIND IN MARCH
Cumulus clouds came back, as always, with late winter. Through the autumn, and early winter, clear days are practically cloudless; and cloud-masses, cirrus, not cumulus, herald and follow storms; but with February, the clear-weather summer clouds return. They begin to be trim again, and marshaled, and take up the ordered leisurely sailing of their pretty squadrons.
April 10.
There is already a general warming and yellowing of twigs. The elm tops are growing feathery and show a warm brown, and a crimson-coral mist begins to flush over the low-lying woods, where the swamp maples are in flower. Pussy-willows are as thick on their twigs as drops after a rain, and as silvery. You would say at first that nothing had changed yet in the main forest. Thebrown aisles and misty dark hollows seem the same, but no; fringed about the openings and coverts along their borders the birch and alder catkins are in flower. They are powdery and gold-colored, and overhead they dangle like the tails of little fairy sheep against the sky.
The wild geese woke us in the dark, just before dawn, this morning. Last year there was a violent snow-storm, a perfect smothering whirl of flakes, the night they flew over, and the great birds were beaten down among the house-tops, creakling and honkling in dismay and confusion, but holding on their way.
Now at dusk comes the first silvery evening whistling of the frogs, the peepers. If a cloud passes over the sun, even as early as three in the afternoon, they start up as if at a signal, all together, and as the sun shines out again fall instantly silent.
May 3.
All this time the green has been spreading and spreading through the pastures till now it clothes them, and the dandelions are scattered over them like a king’s largesse. Dewfalls all winter, but it is in star and fern shapes of frost; now every morning and evening the thick grass is pearled again with a million nourishing drops.
Now rainbow colors begin to show over the hillsides. It is as if a thousand and a thousand tiny butterflies, pink and cream color and living green and crimson, had alighted in the woods. Light comes through them, and they give back light, from the shining, fine down that covers them. The little leaves are almost like clear jewels against the sun, beaded all over the twigs. They only make a slightly dotted veil as yet, they do not hide or screen. You can see as far into the wood-openings as in winter. The brown stems and branches are as delicate and distinct as those of a bed of maiden-hair fern.
The roadside willows are puffs of gold-green smoke, the sapling birches and quaking aspens like green mounting flames up the hillsides, and the catkins of the canoe birches shine like the mist of gold sparks from a rocket.
The different trees develop by different stages, and each stands out in turn against its fellows, as if illuminated, before it losesitself in the growing sea of green. You see its full leafy shape, the mass of each round top, as at no other time of year; yet the individual habit of branching is still manifest, as in winter: the long springing sprays of the swamp maples, the more compact strong branches of the oaks, the maze-like firm twigs of the hop-hornbeams, lying in whorls and layers. The branchlets of the beeches are like thorns. The elms are soft brown spirits of trees throughout the woods; their entire fern-like outline is silhouetted, and the swamp maples stand like delicate living shapes of bronze.
Innocents are out in patches in the pastures, looking as if white powder had been spilt. Purple and white hepaticas are clustered in crannies of the rocks, and after a rain mayflowers stand up thick, thick in the fields, in masses of pink and white fragrance. Blood-root covers whole banks with snow-white, and dog-tooth violets, littlest of lilies, nod their yellow-and-brown prettiness over the slopes carpeted with their strange mottled leaves.
Shad-bush is out now in fairy white,tasseled over knolls and hillsides and overhanging wooded banks along the streams. Its opening leaves are reddish, delicately serrate, and finely downy. The pure white flowers are loosely starred all over it. They are long-petaled and lightly hung, and the tree is slender and very pliable, the whole thing suggesting a delicate raggedness, as if young Spring went lightly on bare feet with fluttering clothes.
This is the most fairy-scented time of the whole year. “The wood-bine spices are wafted abroad,” indeed. The willows perfume the lanes with their intoxicating sweetness; and there is a cool pure dawn-like fragrance everywhere, from the countless millions of opening leaves, steeped every night with dew.
Last week we saw the first swallows. There they skimmed and flew, as if they had never gone to other skies at all. Their flight is so effortless, they seem to pour and stream down unseen cataracts of air. To-day chimney-swallows came, and we watched their endless rippling and circling. They sailed and wheeled, in little companies or singly, now twittering and now silent, andfrom now on all summer the sky will never be empty of their beautiful activities.
May 26.
At last the woods are like a garden of delicate flowers, clothing the hills as far as eye can see with colors of sunrise. The red-oaks are gold color, with strong brown stems; ash and lindens are golden green; maples soft copper and bronze, or deep flesh-color.
The flower-like delicacy of leafing out is wonderfully prolonged. The willows come first, then elms, in brown flower, then quaking-asps and birches, and then maples. Later, lindens and ash-trees catch the light, and the ash leaves (which grow far apart, and in bunches, with the flower-buds) are indeed like just-alighted butterflies. The small leaves are so bright that even in the rain they shine as if a shaft of sunlight from some unseen break in the clouds were lighting the woods.
Now long shining leaf buds show among the elm flowers and on the beeches. The later poplars are cream-white and as downy as velvet. A wood of maples and poplarsis almost a pink-and-white wood; shell-pink, and palest, most silvery-and-creamy gray.
The tall gold-colored red-oaks make masses of strong color; and later, when we think the shimmering of the fairy rainbow is fading, the white oaks come out in a mist of pale carnation—pink and gray and cream.
In June, after all the hardwoods have merged into uniform light green, firs and spruces become jeweled at every point with tips of light, the new growth for the year. Red pines and white pines are set all over with candelabra of lighter green, until high on the tops of the seeding white pines little clusters of finger-slender pale green cones begin to show.
By this time the forest-flowers have faded through the woods. The brighter colors of the field-flowers are gay along the roadsides and over meadows and pastures, and with them Summer has come.
The cross-road under the great leafy ridge of Eastman Hill has pretty farms along it, and half-way across there is a country burying ground, where wild plums blossom, and the grave-stones are half hidden all summer in a green thicket.
One name in the graveyard we all hold in special honor, that of Serena Eastman. I never knew her myself, and it is only from her granddaughter and from the neighbors that I learned of her beautiful life.
She was a mother in Israel; one of
“All-Saints—the unknown good that restIn God’s still memory folded deep.”
She brought up eleven children to upright manhood and womanhood, and beside this a whole neighborhood was nourished from the wells of her deep nature. She lived and diedbefore the days of trained nurses, and in addition to her own cares she was the principal nurse of her countryside. Those were the days when nursing was not and could not be paid for, but was a priceless gift from neighbor to neighbor. She stood ready to be up all night, and night after night, to ease pain by her ministering, or to help to bring a new life into the world; her faith lifted the spirits of the dying, and of those about to be bereaved, as if on strong pinions.
Small-pox was still a terrible scourge in those times, and she was the only woman in the district who would nurse it. Her granddaughter has told me how she kept a change of clothes in an out-house, and how she bathed and dressed there (the only precautions against infection known to the times), whether in winter or summer, before rejoining her family. She always drove to and from such cases at night, to run as little danger as possible of coming in contact with people. Her husband took the same risks that she did. He drove back and forth, and lent his strength in lifting and carrying patients.
They had a large farm, which meant cooking for hired men in the busy seasons, and beside Serena’s eleven children there were older relations to do for, her husband’s father and mother, and one or two unmarried sisters. She was active in Dorcas society and in meeting. Her granddaughter feels that only the completeness of her religious life could have carried her through the fatigues which she underwent. She lived in that conscious obedience to duty which eliminates friction, and her view of duty was one taken through wide-opened windows. She walked with God daily.
The house of this dear woman burned, not long after she and her husband died, and only the blossoming lilacs mark its empty cellar-hole, but the next farm, which belonged to Mr. Eastman’s brother, and is now his nephew’s, is a fine one. You drive on to a wide green, as smoothly kept as a lawn, where three huge trees, a willow and two elms, overhang the house. There are big comfortable barns and outhouses, a corn-crib and well-sweep, and the house is square and ample, with two big chimneys.
Next to the Eastmans’, beyond their orchard, comes a neat small farm, with a long wide stone wall, where grapes are trained, owned once by two queer old sisters, the Misses Pushard, or as we have it, the Miss Pushhards. (A Huguenot name, pronouncedPushawby the older generation.) They went to Lyceum in their young days, and, a rare thing then so far in the country, they had a piano. This gave them “a great shape.” Poor ladies, with their piano! Years later they were in straitened circumstances, and anxious to sell it, but to their indignation nobody wanted it, or not at the price they thought fitting; so, one night, theychopped it up, and hid the pieces. Thus they were not left with the instrument on their hands; and they had not accepted an unworthy price for their treasure. All this was learned years afterwards from some old papers. The fragments of the piano were found in the cistern.
The last farm on the road is owned by Sam Marston and his dear wife, Susan; who, though you never would think it (except for a little remaining crispness of speech), was born in England, in Essex, and came as ayoung English housemaid—dear me, how long ago now!—to the Homestead, eight miles away, by the River. Sam Marston worked there in the stables, and lost his heart promptly, and after four or five years of characteristic Yankee courting, leisurely, but humorously determined, Susan made up her mind, and said “yes,” and came out to the farm, with her fresh print gowns, her trimness and stanchness, and her abiding religion.
Susan keeps also her fixed ideas of the “quality.” She is now a power in her whole neighborhood. She and Sam, alas, have no children, a great sorrow, but the young people growing up near her show the reflection of her uprightness and that of her Sam. But after all these years she is still an exotic. The Sunday-school which she has gathered about her is strictly Church of England. The children learn their catechism, and “to do their duty in life in that station into which it shall please God to call them”; and they are instructed perfectly clearly as to their betters!
The other day we drove out to her farm. We were going to climb Eastman Hill, afterLady’s Slippers, and then were to have supper with Susan.
The sky was very deep blue, with flocks of little white clouds sailing. The woods were still all different shades of light and bright green, and the apple trees were in full blossom. The barn swallows were skimming and pouring low about the green fields in their effortless flight. I think I never drove through so smiling a country.
The house is a long low brick one, with dormer windows, in the midst of an old orchard. There is a fence and a hedge, and a brick path leads to the door. There are lilac bushes at the corner of the house, and cinnamon roses and yellow lilies on each side of the doorway.
Susan came out, laughing, and nearly crying, with pleasure, to welcome us. She “jumped” us down with her kind hands, and took all our wraps. We went as far as the house, asking questions and chattering, and then Susan showed us our way, an opening in the screen of the woods reached by a path through the orchard, and stood shading her eyes with her hand to look after us.
We followed a bit of mossy old corduroy road, through moist rich woods, and then began to climb among a wood of beeches. Soon the rock began to crop out in small cliffs, and we found different treasures, the little pale pinkcorydalis, a black-and-white creeper’s nest in a ferny cleft between two rocks, quantities of twin-flower, and then, rising a beech-covered knoll, we came on our first Lady’s Slippers. The glade ahead was thronged with them. They spread their broad light-green leaves like wings, and their beautiful heads bent proudly. They grew sometimes singly, sometimes in clumps of fifteen or twenty blossoms, and were scattered over the whole glade as if a flight of rose-colored butterflies had just alighted.
We came on this same sight seven different times; this lovely company scattered over the slope among the rocks, where the ridge broke out into low gray pinnacles among the beeches.
When at last we could make up our minds to climb down, following the white thread of a waterfall, into the deeper woods, wefound Painted Trilliums, bright white and painted with crimson, with Jack-in-the-pulpits, both grown to a great size in the rich mould, amongst a green mist of uncurling ferns.
The brook which we followed came out at last in an open pasture above the farm. It was as refreshing as a bath in running water to come out into the cool, sweet evening air, for the heavy woods were warm, and there had been quantities of black flies and mosquitoes, which our hands were too full to fight. Beside all our baskets, our handkerchiefs and hats were full of flowers. One of our number carried a young cherry tree, with roots and sod, over his shoulder, and mosses in his pockets, and the girls had Lady’s Slippers and fern roots in their caught-up skirts.
The turf was powdered white as snow with Innocents, and there were violets. The pasture slopes down through dark needle-pointed clumps of balsam fir, and scattered hawthorn and cherry trees, which were in flower. A hermit thrush sang from one of the firs as we came down. The heavenly, pure carillon rang out again and again, as dusk fell deeper, the singer altering the pitch with eachrepetition of the song, ringing one lovely change after another.
Such a supper was set out on the porch! Fresh rolls and butter, cream cheese and chicken, jugs of milk and cream, fresh hot gingerbread, and bowls of wild strawberries. The porch runs out into the orchard, and the white petals of the apple-blossoms drifted down as we sat laughing and talking. Susan placed her chair near us, but nothing would induce her to eat with us, and she jumped up every minute and fluttered into the house, to press more good things on us. Presently, Sam came in from milking, and was a fellow-Yankee and a brother at once.
We could hardly bear to go home, and almost took Sam’s offer (which so scandalized Susan) of a night in the hay in the new barn. It would be so pretty to lie watching the swallows darting in and out after sunrise.
We went all through Susan’s trim farmhouse, and saw her dairy, with its airy and spotless arrangements. The milk, thick and yellow with cream, was in curious blue glass pans, which Susan said came long agofrom the Homestead. We saw all the chickens, the calves, and the black pigs. The Jerseys blew long breaths at us from their mangers, and the horses put out their soft noses for sugar. The ducks were quacking and waddling all over the yard, and the pigeons fluttered about.
The late veeries and robins were singing, and the warm fragrance of the apple-blossoms was all about us, as we gathered our treasures together and drove home in the dusk.