In late September an errand took us out to Sam Marston’s again. We wanted a quantity of early farm things, sweet cider, Porter apples, and honey.
The woods were in a flame of fiery color as we drove out through the intricacies of the river hills. They glowed like beds of tulips, with only the dark evergreens to set them off, and turned our whole country into a huge flower garden.
The crops had all been very good this season. Hay and grain were both heavy, and the apple trees had to be propped, the branches were so loaded with fruit. Our own grapes bore heavily.
The early apples were just gathering when we reached the farm, amongst all sorts of pleasant orchard sounds, the rumble of apples poured from bushel baskets into barrels, the squeak of the cider mill, and the men talkingat work. The large new orchard of Bellefleurs is hand-picked, in the modern method; each apple is wrapped in paper, and the fruit has its special first-rate market; but Sam is not going to take his father’s old miscellaneous orchard in hand until next year, and here he and his men were picking and piling in the old wholesale fashion. The sweet-smelling pyramids stood waist-high under the trees.
Sam scrambled down his ladder, and shouted to Susan, who came out from her baking with her hands white with flour. The last time we came, we had seen only the house and dairy; now we must see the farm, and we strolled together through the sunny orchard and then were taken to the apple cellar, where the filled barrels stood in close ranks already. The cellar was fragrant with them. Susan’s own special apples, Snows, Strawberries, and Porters, were at one side.
“Has to have ’em!” Sam said. “Every farm book tells you how mixed apples can’t pay, and hinder the farm, but come Grange suppers and church suppers, and young folks happening in, and Fair times, if Susancouldn’t have her mixed fruit, she’d think we might full as well be at the Town-Farm.”
The root cellar, smelling earthy, was next the apple cellar, and here Sam had a few beets and carrots, in neat bins, but the greater part of the roots were still undug.
The cider-mill was at the edge of the orchard, with piles of windfall apples beside it; Sam turned a fresh jug-full for us to drink, and then filled our cans.
After this we had to see all Susan’s pets. There were two handsome collies; and a yellow house cat, and a great black barn cat, on stiff terms with each other, came and rubbed against us with arched backs. There were the ducks and geese, and tumbler pigeons, fluttering down in great haste when Susan scattered corn. The newest pet was a raccoon. He was in the tool-room of the barn, nibbling corn. He steadied the ear as he ate, with little hands as careful as a child’s. He looked sly and mischievous, and sidled away as we came in, looking up at us with bright eyes. He wore a little collar, and dragged a short length of chain, so that the pigeons could hear him coming; but he wasnot confined in any way, and seemed entirely happy and at home about the barn.
“Pretty fellow, then,” said Susan, scratching his handsome fur. “But he’s a scamp, he is. Only to think, what happened to my pies, last baking! I’d made a quantity, both mince and pumpkin, and if this rascal doesn’t slip into the pantry, eat all he can hold, and mark the rest of the pies all over with his little hands, and throw them on the floor!”
She asked if we had ever seen a raccoon with a piece of meat. We had not, and she fetched a bit from the ice chest and gave it to her pet. He took it in his little hands, went to his water dish, andwashedthe meat thoroughly, sousing it up and down till it was almost a pulp, before he swallowed it. Susan said that raccoons, wild or tame, will always do this, with all animal food; mouse or mole or grasshopper, they will not touch it till they have washed it well, and will go hungry rather than eat unwashed food. Sam, who knows the woods like the back of his hand, confirmed this.
“Souse it in a brook, they will, till they have it soggy. They won’t eat it till then.”
While we were looking, a morose-looking old man drove into the yard. He checked his horse, and sat gazing straight before him with a wooden expression.
“Hullo, Uncle!” said Sam. “Come for apples?”
The old man shook his head, but said nothing.
“Cider?” said Sam.
He shook his head also at this, and at every other suggestion, and never opened his lips. After a while Sam, who seemed to know his ways, nodded cheerfully, said, “Well, tell us when you get ready to!” and turned towards the house.
The old man waited till he had gone twenty feet, and then said grudgingly:
“I come to see that there cow. You finish with your company! I’ll wait.”
“That’s old Ammi Peaslee,” Susan whispered. “He always acts odd. Oh, no, no relation; everyone on the road calls him Uncle: ‘Uncle Batch’ when he’s not round.”
“He didn’t mean to be a batch” (bachelor), she went on reflectively; and thenwith some shamefacedness, she told us how Mr. Peaselee had once been engaged to be married to Miss Charity Jordan (who lived alone in the big brick Jordan house at the corner) for twenty-five long years. One day the lady’s roof needed shingling, and she called on her suitor to shingle it. (“She never could bear to spend money, nor he either, and it’s a fact that neither one of them had much to spend!”)
He did it, and did a good job; but afterwards, thinking it but right and fair, he brought a set of shirts for his sweetheart to make.
“She made them,and she sent him in a bill; and he paid it, and never spoke to her again from that day to this, and that is fifteen years ago.
“Now hear me gossip! I am fairly ashamed!” Susan cried out.
The barn was sweet with hay. Part of the season’s pumpkins were piled in the grain room, and lit up the dusk with their dark gold. Some of them still lay in golden piles in the barn-yard. The ears of corn, yellow and red, lay in separate heaps.
“I miss Mother!” Susan said (she spoke of Sam’s mother, who had passed on the year before). “She saw to all the pretty things about the farm. She used to hang the corn in patterns on the ceiling-hooks, red and yellow. She’d place the onions in amongst the corn, in ropes or bunches, and contrive all kinds of pretty notions.”
Susan sighed, and called the two collies to her, and patted and fondled their heads. As I said before, she and Sam have no children.
Sam went to get our honey, saying that he should be stung to death, and never mourned for, for nobody missed a left-handed fellar; and Susan took us into the house, and brought out doughnuts, a pumpkin pie, and cream so thick that it could hardly be skimmed.
When Sam came back with the honey there was a to-do, for Susan’s Jersey calf, outside in the orchard, had tangled itself in its rope, and fallen and sprained its shoulder. The little creature was trembling all over. Susan rubbed in fresh goose-oil, while Sam asked if she “didn’t want he should get him up a nice pair of crutches.”
For our cranberries, we were to go on a mile further, to a farm on the slope of the next hill, the Pennys’.
“The old woman’s deaf, but you can make her hear by shouting. Most likely she’ll be the only one of the folks at home. They’re odd folks,” Susan called, shading her eyes to look after us, after Sam had succeeded in packing our purchases in the wagon, laughing and talking about the way Noah filled the ark, and Susan had given my little sister a wistful kiss.
The Pennys’ was an out-of-the-way place. The farm was on the northern slope of a hill, the house a tiny unpainted one, weathered almost to black. The corn was standing among the golden pumpkins in stacks that looked like huddled witches. A wild grapevine grew over the shed, but the grapes were already shriveled.
Old Mrs. Penny was shriveled too, and witch-like, and she was smoking a pipe. It was hard to make her understand what we wanted, but at last she came out, with a checked shawl held over her head, and pointed out a path which led through a thicket and across the flank of the hills, to the cranberry bog in the hollow.
THE CORN WAS STANDING AMONG THE GOLDEN PUMPKINS IN STACKS THAT LOOKED LIKE HUDDLED WITCHESTHE CORN WAS STANDING AMONG THE GOLDEN PUMPKINS IN STACKS THAT LOOKED LIKE HUDDLED WITCHES
Mrs. Penny, Jr., was squatted down among the swamp mosses, picking cranberries into sacks. She was a fat Indian-looking woman, and two dark little girls, pretty, and also like Indians, with black hair neatly parted, were at work with her. They were delighted to sell their berries.
The swamp glowed like a Turkey carpet. The cranberry vines and huckleberry bushes were pure crimson, the black alder berries scarlet, and the ferns burnt-orange. Just beyond us, in the velvet of the swamp, was a pond, across which the wind ruffled; living blue, with tawny rushes around it.
As we came back, a hunter, in a leather jacket, with his gun on his shoulder and partridges hanging out of his pockets, stepped out of the woods on the path just ahead of us. This was old Mrs. Penny’s son Jason. The open season had not begun yet, but the farm looked a hard place for a living, and we saw no need of telling, in town, that the Penny family had partridge for supper.
We had a long quiet drive home. It hadbeen so extraordinarily warm, all through early September, that we saw a fine second crop of hay being got in, in a low-lying meadow bordered by thick woods, part of which must have been an old lake-bottom. The grass was heavy, and a good many fresh haycocks were made and standing already, as if in July. The solitary mower rested on his scythe to watch us, and then went on, though the dusk was fast deepening.
We stopped when we came to Height of Land, to look out over the painted woods. They flamed round us to the horizon.
Later the moon rose, in the half-blue, half-dusk, and presently shone on a white mist-lake, over the low land through which we were then passing. The mist was rising, and wreathing the colored woods with white. Next came two more hills, and then another mist-lake in the moonlight.
By October of this year the fires of September had sunk to a rich smouldering glow. The rolling woods, as far as the eye could see, were masses of dusky gold and wine-color. There was actual smoke, too, pale blue in the hollows, from many forest fires.
Nearly all of October was Indian Summer. Every day there was a soft golden haze, just veiling the yellow of the woods, and the days were warm and still, like midsummer, but with a kind of mellow peacefulness.
We spent a whole day out on Watson’s Hill, watching the distant smoke of forest fires, and listening to the different Autumn sounds, the ring of axes from the wooded part of the hill, an occasional shot, the tapping of woodpeckers, and the friendly chirruping of chickadees and juncos. The bare hill-top was steeped in sunshine. The checkerberries and beechnuts were just ripe, andvery good. We built our fire on a flat-topped, lichened rock, and found water to drink in a little tarn among the russet and tawny ferns and cotton-grasses, fed by a spring which stirred and dimpled the surface.
Driving home, at dusk, we passed field after field of Indian Warriors, corn-stacks, all looking the same way, with golden pumpkins among them; and suddenly, over the eastern ridge, the great round yellow Hunter’s Moon rose.
It was strange, later, to see the oaks and sugar maples, towers ofgold, instead of towers of green, in the moonlight.
A few days later we had a three days’ storm of rain and heavy wind, and then the golden harvest lay on the ground. It was heaped and piled along the roadsides in winrows, through which the children scuffed and frolicked.
(The leaves in the town streets are burned, which is a waste, but if we were so thrifty as to keep them we should lose the autumn bonfires. I counted fourteen about the different streets, one evening, each with a glow lighting up the dusk, and giving out anindescribable sweet-and-acrid smell as the smoke poured out in cream-white swirls, almost thick enough to be felt. The men in charge of them looked black against the blaze, and a flock of children were scampering about each fire.) The day after the rain the leaves lay all through the woods like a yellow carpet, and threw up actual light. In some places they had fallen in lines and patterns, and, wet with rain and autumn dew, they gave out fragrance which was as sweet as wine.
Late in October there was sudden illness at a friend’s house. Every nurse in town was busy already, and we drove out to see if we could get Marcia Watson, at Watson’s Hill. Marcia is not a graduate nurse, but she knows what a sick woman wants, and what a sick household, paralyzed by the illness of its head, must have, and can set the whole stricken machinery in order again. She is a tiny creature, as merry as a squirrel, with quick, tranquil ways.
The Watson’s Hill district is six miles east of us. The Hill is a beech-wooded ridge, rocky through its whole length, and curvingalmost enough to suggest an amphitheatre. A good farming region lies spread out below it, and there is a village nucleus, a store, the Grange Hall, and a meeting-house. The hall was burnt, two years ago, and the whole neighborhood set to work to rebuild it. They had fifteen-cent entertainments and peanut parties, and sales of aprons and cooked food. The men did the building, giving their time, and the women cooked for the men, and this fall the last shingle of the substantial new building was laid.
The only mill for many miles is the corn-cannery. Corn-husking always brings farm neighbors together; sweet corn, for canning, is husked in August, fodder corn in late October. Families come to husk for each other, and the wide barn floors where they sit are piled high with husks; but in the districts near a cannery, as here, the whole community gathers. In good weather the work is all done out of doors, and the laughing and chatting groups, men, women, and children, sit up to their waists in husks. The stoves and kitchens ofneighbors are all pre-empted, and the women bake and fry, and come bustling out to the workers with milk, bread and cheese, pies and doughnuts.
Here, at Watson’s Hill, as at nearly every farm village in our part of the world, the neighbors meet for the weekly dance, which is as much a matter of course as church on Sundays. It would be hard to describe adequately the friendliness and complete sociableness of these neighborhood gatherings. Old and middle-aged and young are called by their first names, and everybody dances; not round dances, but the beautiful old country dances, which, transplanted over seas and carried down a century, still show their quality, and keep something of the courtly nature of the great houses in France and England where they had their stately beginnings: a quality that gives a certain true social training. Everyone in the hall is truly in company. Hands must be given and glances met, all round the dance, and awkwardness and shyness are quickly danced out of existence.
We have the Lancers, the Tempest, the Lady of the Lake, and various quadrilles.They cannot now perhaps be called exactly stately.
“Balance to partners!” calls out old Abel Tarbox, master of ceremonies of the Grange Hall, as he fiddles.
“Balance to partner! Swing the same! All sashy!” And then comes the splendid romp of,
“Eight hands round!” and “Eight hands down the middle!”
Besides the old court dances, there are Pop Goes the Weasel, Money Musk, Hull’s Victory, and others, pretty, intricate frolics, which in their day were thedernier criof fashion, danced by gilded youth in great cities, velvet coat and ruffles, flowered silk petticoat, and spangled fan.
The Chorus Jig is very difficult. It has “contra-corners,” and other mysteries impossible to uninitiated feet.
When money is to be raised for some neighborhood purpose partners for the evening are chosen in what I should think might be a trying, though a most practical fashion. On one Saturday evening the ladies, on the next the gentlemen, are put up for auctionas partners, the price paid being in peanuts. A popular partner will sometimes bring as much as a hundred and twenty-five peanuts; and why little Alfred Stoddard, who never did anything in his life but get a musical degree at some tiny college (there are even those who say that he bought the degree), who reads catalogues and nurses his dignity while his wife works the farm, should regularly fetch this fancy price, I never could see.
“Oh, well!” says Sam Marston, “Alfred has them handsome, mournful dark eyes. The ladies can’t resist ’em.”
The three Watson farms lie to the east of the hill, right under its rocky ledges, and are sheltered by it; indeed the whole of the beautiful rounded valley which they occupy is rimmed entirely by low abrupt hills. It must be an old lake bottom, for the last remnant of the lake, a pond a hundred yards or so long, still sparkles bright blue in the midst of it.
Forty years ago Tristam Watson, with his wife and four children, three boys, and Marcia, the youngest, went north two hundred miles, to the Aroostook, when thatregion still lay under heavy forest. He built his cabin among the first-growth pines, and cleared and planted among the trees, burning and uprooting the stumps gradually, as he could. It was pioneer life, with no roads and almost no neighbors. Bear and moose were common, and deer more than common, and there were wolves in a hard winter; but he was a hardy, vigorous man with hardy children, and he did well.
He had no idea of cutting himself and his family off from their home ties. Nothing of the sort. The railroad ran only a short part of the way, and they could not afford that part, but every year they hitched up anddrovehome, the whole distance. It took them about five days. They had a little home-made tent, and they built their fire and set up their gipsy housekeeping each night beside the road. If it rained, “why then it rained,” Marcia says. The year was marked by this flight; it was their great adventure, and apparently a perfect frolic, at least for the children. They stayed two or three weeks, saw all the “folks,” and went back to their strenuous forest life.
Tristam died at about sixty, and the family came home, and took up the three beautiful farms left to the sons by their grandparents. The two elder sons married, the third stayed with his mother and sister.
Not long after they came back, Marcia fell ill. There was a badly aggravated strain, and she had measles and bronchitis, and after that, as we say in the country, she “commenced ailing.” She changed in a year from a blooming girl to the little thin, white-faced woman she is now (though her black eyes never stopped twinkling).
A long illness on an isolated farm is a bad thing for more than bodily health. The Rural Free Delivery and Rural Telephone, and the lengthening trolley lines, are bringing the most wholesome stir imaginable after the old colorless days; but in old times the outlying farms too often held pitiful brooding figures of women, sunk in depression. Marcia’s terror was lest she should fall under this shadow. She had seen only too many such cases, and the fear was beginning to realize itself, she often has told me; but from its very danger her mind, fundamentally sane andvigorous, plucked out its salvation. First absorbed in her own ailments, she began to question her doctor about the cure of other diseases. Soon she asked him for books on medicine. She read and studied, and then one day she asked him to take her to see a suffering neighbor. To humor her, he did, and almost at once, ill as she still was, she began to help nursing patients on the neighboring farms. Once her mind took hold of work, it cleared itself as the sky clears of clouds when the wind blows. It was like a slender but vigorous-fibred little tree reaching out and finding life-giving soil for itself. I do not believe she has an ounce of extra strength, even now, and she is by no means always free from pain, but she can do her work, and for five years she has been the most sought-after nurse in half the county.
She has an imp’s fun (and had, even when she was most ill) and can make a groaning patient laugh, as she lays on hot compresses. As we drove home that day in October, she told me how she had been outwitting her brother. (He is a handsome blond-bearded fellow, with what is rare on the farms, acarriage as erect as a soldier’s. He is far slower-natured than Marcia.)
“He’s been real tardy, this year, in getting the hams smoked, and he put off building a smoke-house. He was all for hauling his lumber. Nothing would do but that lumber must be hauled first, whether the pigs were smoked, or whether they flew; and there were Mother and I in want of our bacon.”
He started out with the lumber. The moment his back was turned Marcia pounced on his brand-new chicken coop (“he fusses like a woman buying a bonnet, over his chicken coops”), which was just finished and right, and smoked the meat for herself.
“That man was fairly annoyed!” she told me demurely.
Last spring the brother and sister shingled the barn roof together. Leonard, the brother, was deliberate and painstaking, and Marcia in triumph nailed his coat-tails to the roof, according to the time-honored privilege of the shingle-nailer, if the shingle-layer lets himself get caught up with.
It was from Marcia and her brother that I first heard the expression “var,” for balsamfir. This is our general country term; but I do not know whether this is a survival of some older form, or a corruption. Here in the Watson Hill neighborhood I have also heard the old-fashioned word “suent,” meaning convenient, suitable, so familiar in dialect stories of Somersetshire and Devon.
It was well past the fall of the year before we drove Marcia home again, and a wild autumn storm of wind and heavy rain had carried away all but the last of the hanging leaves. The shores of the ponds and rivers showed clear ashes-and-slate colors, and clear dark grays, but the fields were the pale russet which lasts all winter under the snow. Beech leaves were still hanging, a beautiful tender fawn color, and, of course, oak leaves, and the gray birches were like puffs of pale yellow smoke in among the purple and ashen woods. Crab-apples still hung, withered red, on the trees, and the hips of the wild roses and haws of the hawthorns, and the black alder berries, made little blurs of scarlet in the swamps. Here and there the road dipped through small copses, bare of leaves, where there were masses of clematis, carrying its tufts of softgray fluff, entwined among the bushes, and milkweed pods, just letting out their shining silver-white silk. Witch-hazel was in flower all through the woods.
The evergreens showed up everywhere, in delicate vigorous beauty, and we counted unguessed masses of pine among the hills. I think we always expect a little sadness with the fall of the leaves, but instead there is a sense of elation, with the greater spread of light and the wider views opening everywhere. The wood roads showed more plainly than in summer, and paths stood out green across the fields. The tender unveiling of autumn had revealed the hidden topography of the forest, and countless small ravines and slopes were suddenly made plain. There were smaller, friendly revelations, too, for we came here and there, on large and small nests, and saw where the vireos and warblers had had their tiny housekeeping.
Late ploughing was over, and hauling had begun. We passed a good many loads of potatoes and apples, on their way to the railroad, and then a load of wood, and one of balsam fir boughs, for banking the houses.The wood was drawn by a pair of handsome black and cream-white oxen, and the boughs by a pair of “old natives,” plain red brown. The potatoes and fruit must all be hauled before the cold is too great.
For the last three miles before the land opens out into the Watson farms, the hills are covered with low woods, above which rises the pointed head of Rattlesnake Hill, the only high land in sight. The woods were like purplish fur over the hillsides, and nearer showed countless perfect rounded gray rods and wands, like fine strokes of a brush. There was a great shining of wet rocks and mossy places. It was one of those still late-autumn mornings, perfectly clear after the rain, when the air is as fragrant and full of life as in spring.
Longfellow Pond lies in a hollow of the woods, three miles from anywhere, a beautiful little wild wooded place, three-quarters of a mile long, where wild duck come. Alas! when we came near, a portable saw-mill was at work close to the shore! A high pile of warm-colored sawdust rose already in the beautiful green of the pine wood. They had just felled three big pines, and the new-cut butts showed white among the masses of lopped branches.
LONGFELLOW POND LIES IN THE HOLLOW OF THE WOODSLONGFELLOW POND LIES IN THE HOLLOW OF THE WOODS
The stretch of wooded country about the pond lies in a belt or fold between two prosperous farming districts, and has its own population, a gipsy-looking set, living in the woods in little shacks, half-farmhouse, half-shanty, with a few straggling chickens. The men of this place were working for the operator of the saw-mill. It was dinner-time when we came by, and half a dozen lithe dark young men were sitting about on the log ends, eating their dinner, which some little dusky children had brought them in pails and odd dishes.
We walked down between the stacks of fragrant new-cut lumber to the edge of the pond, which lay between its wooded shores, as blue as the sky, sparkling in the sunshine. We could make out three duck at the farther end of it. It is a pity to have the fine growth of pine cut, but it grows fast again with us. Nobody cares for the lesser hard wood growths in such an over-forested State as ours, and once the saw-mill is gone, the pondwill probably stay its wild lonely self, perhaps for ages.
The last day that Marcia was with us she wanted to see the river, and we went down and found the flood tide making strongly, two or three gulls sailing peacefully about, and a late coal barge being towed down against the tide. We had three days of still deep frost after this, and the next day when I went down to a hill overlooking one of the most beautiful reaches of the river, there it lay, a transparent gray mirror, not to move again until April. All the colors of the banks were pearl and ashen. Though it lay so still, it whispered and talked to itself incessantly. There were little ringing gurgles, like the sound of a glass water-hammer; now tinklings, now the fall of a tiny crystal avalanche; with occasional deeper soft boomings and resoundings, and all the time a whispered swish-swish along the banks, the sound of the soft breaking and fall of the shell ice as the tide ebbed.
Like the inside of a pearl; like the inside of a star-sapphire; like a rainbow at twilight. We are in a white world, and save for the rich warmth of the pines and hemlocks there is no color stronger than the delicate penciling of the woods; but the whiteness is softened all day by a frost-haze which the sunlight turns into silver. The horizon is veiled with smoke-color and tender opal. It is as if the world retired for a little to a space of softened sunrise colors, never hard or sharp; lovely and unearthly as the clouds. We are so well to the north that in winter we enter the sub-arctic borderland, the shadowy-twilight regions of the two ends of the earth.
It is a very still time of year, there is a wonderful uplifting quiet. The sun burns low in the south, a mass of soft white fire, not blinding as in summer; its light plainly that of a great low-hanging star.
This is the dark season; but to make up for the shortness of the days we are given such glories of sunrise and sunset, and such a glittering brilliancy of stars, as come at no other time. All summer these belong to farmers, shepherds, and sailors; but now even slug-abeds can be out before first light, and watch the great stars fade, and dawn grow, and then come back to that cozy and exciting feast, breakfast by candle and fire light.
You step out into the frosty dark, with Venus pulsing and burning like a great lamp, and the snow luminous around you. The stars are like diamonds, and the sky black, and lo! there is the Dipper, straight overhead. It is night, yet not night, because of the whiteness of the snow, and because the air is already alive with the coming morning. The snow crunches sharply underfoot. The dry air tickles and tingles and makes you cough. The street lamps are still bright, and here and there the lighted windows of other early risers show a cheerful yellow in the snow. It is a friendly time of day. Neighbors call good-morning to each other in the dark, and sleigh-bells jingle past. Then you come hometo the firelight and the gay-lighted breakfast table, with dawn stealing up fast, like lamplight spreading from the bright crack under a door.
As the first shafts of sunlight strike across, they light up a million frost-crystals. The air is alive with them, on all sides, delicate star and wheel shapes, flashing like diamonds. This beautiful phenomenon lasts only about half an hour. The fairy crystals, light as the air, floating about you, vanish, but the snow continues to flash softly, from countless tiny stars and facets, all day.
Frost mists hover all day about our valley, the breath of the sleeping river. They are drawn through our streets all day in veils and wisps of softness. Smoke and steam clouds hold their shape long in the winter temperatures. At night the smoke from the chimneys curls up in pale blue columns in the rarefied air, against the dark but clear blue of the winter night sky. By day the steam puffs from the locomotives rise pinky-buff, or almost gold-color, and keep their shape for a few moments as firm as thunderheads.
This year, mid-winter for the sun is themoon’s midsummer. The full moon rises and sets so far to the north that she completes full three-quarters of the circle. At night she rides at the zenith, high and small, and the snow fields seem illimitable and remote under her lonely light. The expanse of snow so increases both sun and moon light that she seems to rise while it is still broad day; and still to be shining with full silver, in her unwonted northern station, after broad day again, at dawn.
We share some of the phenomena of light of the polar regions. Moon rainbows are sometimes seen at night; and as this is the season of most frequent mock suns—par-helia—so also mock moons—par-selenes—half-nebulous, massed effects of softly bright radiance, appear on the hovering frost mists; and sharply outlined lunar halos herald snowstorms.
Indeed the greatly increased extent of snow-expanse magnifies all effects of light extraordinarily.
At sunset, softened colors, “peach-blossom and dove-color,” like the bands of a wide and diffused rainbow, appear in theeast; this is the sunset light, caught by the snowfields, andreflected on the eastern clouds and mists. Not only this; the “old moon in the new moon’s arms,” instead of being a blank mass, as in summer, is darkly luminous, so greatly has the earth-shine on the moon been magnified.
A winter night is never really dark. Thanks to the rarefied air, the stars burn and blaze as at no other season; Sirius appearing to sparkle with an even bluer light than in summer. You can tell time by a small watch, easily, by starlight, with no other aid but the diffused glimmer of the snow fields.
The other morning an errand took my brother and me out early over the long hill that makes the Height of Land to the west. There must have been an amazing fall of frost-dew the night before, for we saw a sight which I shall never forget; not only the twigs and the branches, but the actual trunks of the trees, the stone-walls, and the roadside shrubberies and seed-vessels, frosted with crystals like fern-fronds, two inches or more long. There is a wood of pines at the crest of the hill, and here not a green needle showed, not one bit of bark; the trees rose pure white against the pure bluesky, over the white skyline of the hill. Looking out over the country, all the woods were silver; silver-white where the light took them, silver-gray in shadow. Light flashed round us everywhere, so that it was almost dazzling, yet it was softened light; stars, not diamonds.
Once the snow comes, the neighborhood settles to a certain happy quiet. It is as if winter laid a strong arm about us, encircling and soothing. The dry air sparkles like wine. Dusk falls early; the wood fires on the hearths burn bright, and the evenings beside them are never too long. It is a neighborly time, and the long peaceful hours of work bring a sense of achievement.
Out on the farms, the year’s supply of wood is being cut. This, with hauling the hay, and ice-cutting, makes the chief winter work; and the men who are out chopping all day in the woods become hardy indeed.
ICE-CUTTING ON THE RIVER BEGINS IN JANUARYICE-CUTTING ON THE RIVER BEGINS IN JANUARY
Ice-cutting on the river begins in January. The wide hollow of the river valley is so white that the men and horses moving up and down stand out in warm color; the strange snow silence makes an almost palpable background to the cheerful and sharp sounds of work, the ring of metal, the squeak of leather, the men’s shouts and talk, and the steady roar which goes up from the ice ploughs and cutters. There are small portable forges here and there for mending tools, at the fires of which the men heat their coffee. The ice-cakes are clear blue, and they are lifted out and started up the run in leisurely procession. Directly the first cutting is made you have the startling sight of a field of bright blue living water in the midst of the whiteness; while along the shore, the rising tide often overflows the shore ice, in pools and rivulets, the color of yellow-green jade.
The work is done with heavy steel tools. First the ice must be marked, then planed to a smooth surface, then grooved more deeply, and for the last few inches sawed by hand with long ice-saws. It is pleasant work on sunny days, and the men, who have mostly come in from the farms, like its sociableness; but often the wind sweeps down the valley bitterly cold, and then it is very severe, especially the work of keeping the canals open at night. The ice generally runs to about two feet thick.
The ice-business in our valley has fallen off since the formation of the Ice Trust and the increased use of artificial ice. A great part of our ice fields are only held in reserve now, in case the more southern ice fails, but it still makes a winter harvest for us. The river towns must always have their own ice, and the farmers who cut it get good pay for their work and that of their horses. They speak of the work entirely in farm terms. They “cultivate” the ice, and “harvest” the “crop.”
Last week we made an expedition across country to where the beautiful little chain of the Assimasqua ponds and streams lies between the ranges of Maple Hill on the west, and Wrenn’s Mountain on the east; and there, on Upper Assimasqua, was the same phenomenon of frost-crystals which we saw on Dunnack Hill, only here it was on the ice. We thought at first the pond was covered with snow, but as we walked out on it, we saw it was frost, in such ice-flowers as I have never seen before. They were like clusters of crystal fern-fronds, each frond an inch and a half to two inches long. At first these flowerswere scattered in clusters about six inches apart over the black ice, but farther on they ran together into a solid field of silver, a miniature forest of flashing fern or palm fronds, so delicate and light it seemed as if they must bend with the breeze. They outlined each crack in the ice with close garlands. We could hardly bear to crush them as we walked through them.
The four Assimasqua Ponds lie low between hills that are heavily wooded, mostly with beech and hemlock. The shores are high and irregular and jut out in narrow points, and these and the islands have small cliffs, of gnarled and twisted strata, which the hemlocks overhang, in masses of feathery green.
There was something appealing and endearing in the beauty of this little forest chain of lakes and streams, lying still and white between its wooded shores. We crossed its wide surface on foot, and followed up the course of the stream which whirled and tumbled so, only a month ago. Every tiny reach and channel was ours to explore. It was as quiet as a child lying asleep.
We built a fire on the south shore of aheadland, where a curve of the gnarled cliffs enclosed a tiny beach, cooked bacon, and heated coffee. Twenty yards from the shore there was a round hole, some eight inches across, of black dimpling water. It had not been cut, but was natural, being, I suppose, over a warm spring. The ice was so strong around it that we could drink from it.
It was so warm in the sun that we sat about bareheaded and barehanded, yet not a frost-needle melted. The sunlight glinted on the hemlock needles, all the way up the hillsides, and a balsamy sweetness seemed to be all about us, mixed with the pungent smoke of our wood fire.
The chickadees were busy all round us, making little bright chirrupy sounds. We could hear blue-jays calling, deeper in the woods, and the occasional “crake, crake, crake,” of a blue nuthatch. The dry winter woods cracked and the pond rang and gurgled with pretty hollow noises. The hemlocks had fruited heavily, and were hung all over with little bright brown cones, like Christmas trees. They seem to give outfragrant sunny health all winter, a dry thrifty vigor.
We did not see a soul on all the Upper Ponds, and only fox tracks ran in and out of the marsh-grasses of the stream, but on Lower Assimasqua there were men cutting wood. They were cutting out beech and white and yellow birch for firewood, and leaving the hemlock, which grew very thick here. The cut wood stood about the slope in neatly piled bright-colored stacks, with colored chips among the fallen branches, and the axe blows rang sharp and musical in the winter silence. The men, who were good-looking fellows, wore woolen or corduroy, with high moccasins, and their sheepskin and mackinaw coats were thrown aside on the snow. There were five or six of them, mostly young men, and one handsome older man, with hawk features and a bright color, silver hair and beard, and bright warm brown eyes. They had bread, doughnuts, and pie for their dinner, and a jug of cider.
The Lower is the largest of the four ponds. It is, perhaps, three miles long by a mile wide, but it seemed almost limitless, under thesnow, and we felt like pygmy creatures, walking in the midst, with the unbroken level stretching away around us.
The sky was deepening into indescribable colors, peacock blue, peacock gray, and in the middle of the expanse, over the woods, we saw the great full moon, just rising clear out of the violet and opal tenebrae, the fringes of the sky. She was as pale as a bubble, or as the palest pink summer cloud, but gathered color fast, then poured her floods of silver. The whiteness of the pond glimmered more and more strangely as dusk increased.
We came home, stiff and happy, to a great wood fire, piled in a wide and deep fireplace, and to a room of firelight and evergreen-scented shadows.
That night a light rain fell, then turned to a busy snow-storm, which fell for hours on the wet surfaces in thick soft-falling flakes, so that by the next morning the world was a fairy forest of white. The trees bent down under their feathery load. Wonderful low intricately crossed branches were everywhere. Each littlest grove andclump of shrubbery became a dense thicket of white. This fairy forest was close, close round us, so that each street seemed magical and unfamiliar, a place that we had never seen before. It was a perfectly hushed world. Our footsteps made no sound, and even the masses from the overladen branches came down silently. Everything but whiteness was obliterated; then at night the moon came out clear again, and lighted up this fairy world, and the white spirits of trees stood up against the gray-black sky.
Ten days after this there followed a great ice-storm, when for two days rain fell incessantly, and, as it fell, covered the twigs and branches with crystal. It cleared on the third morning, and instead of white, we were in a world of diamond. The dazzling brilliancy was almost more than the eye could bear. Every blade of grass and seed-vessel was changed to a crystal jewel, and the breeze set them tinkling. The sky was fairy blue. The woods and all the fields flashed round us as we walked almost spell-bound through their strange beauty. The wonder was that the whole star-like world did notclash and ring as if with silver harp music.
As the sun rose higher, the country was veiled with frost haze, but through it, and beyond, we saw the shining of the crust on all the distant hills.