Themudcat season has come. After the winter’s diet of salt herring, and before the open season for bass and pickerel, comes the mudcat, alias bullhead, to give us the taste of fresh fish again. From April fifteenth until the fifteenth of May is the closed season for pickerel, and from April fifteenth to June fifteenth it is forbidden to fish for bass, so now the humble mudcat comes to his own.
Over on the Drapeaus’ shore the men are all skinning bullheads for market. They have rigged up a machine that twists off the heads and strips off the skins at one turn of a handle. Andy Drapeau dips the fish out of the live box, Black Jack skins and beheads them, George Drapeau rakes away the offal, Harry Spriggins and Lewis Drapeau pack the fish in barrels. The whole shore reeks of them, the beach is red with their gore, for your bullhead is a very bloody fish. He is an ugly creature—great head, thorny spines, wicked-looking mouth, but he tastes very good indeed, if one has not seen Black Jack skin him.
I have come in for the usual present, and have to restrain my friends, or they would give me at least a half barrel.
“Kin you git their inside out, ef I take the hide offen them?” asks Black Jack. And I assure him that for the sake of fresh fish I can do anything.
John Beaulac was not there. The Beaulac baby—my godson—was “awful sick.”
Later in the day came young Louis to the island to ask for the loan of some alcohol. The doctor had seen the child, by chance, as he was passing through the farm on his way to the lake, and had prescribed a warm bath and an alcohol rub. Young Louis’ eyes were big with horror. To wash a sick child was evidently the same thing as killing it outright. I supplied the alcohol and, gathering up clean sheets, soft towels, a new washcloth and talcum powder, took shipping for Loon Lake.
Rose Beaulac sat in the center of a red-hot room, the window shut, the door shut, every chair, box and square foot of floor space occupied by a child or a dog, and held the gasping, moaning baby, despair in her face. One look at its crimson cheeks and glazed blueeyes told me that it was an ill child indeed. My thermometer showed a temperature of a hundred and four when it came out from the burning little armpit.
John stood beside the woodpile and called me as I left the house.
“Was the baby very ill? Ought he to send for the doctor?”
It was “Yes” to both questions.
Then John did some figuring in his mind. His beady black eyes stopped twinkling, his face grew stern and set. This has been a hard winter for Jack. The war stopped the export of mica and the mines have been shut down. Last year was a wet season when the hay floated in the meadows and the grain sprouted in the stooks. It has been almost impossible to make ends meet, but if the child needed the doctor—well, he must be called and he’d be paid somehow. John left the decision to me. I must call the doctor if I thought best.
So away up the lake, three miles to the telephone, I rowed, and the doctor promised to come the next day.
“Tell John to have a boat at Henderson’s landing for me, at seven-thirty. I can’t make the fifteen miles there and back over theseroads to-night. Meanwhile keep up the bathing and the alcohol rubs, and tell Rose to keep that door open. Don’t forget that. Tell her that child must have plenty of air”—an injunction that Dr. LeBaron did not in the least expect to have obeyed when he gave it; it was merely a part of his general course of education.
How did those eight people manage to breathe in that stifling room; how could that ill child survive in that foul atmosphere? I wondered, as I laid my weary body down on my clean, cool bed. And if I were worn out, what must Rose be, who had sat for three nights with that tossing, suffering baby in her arms?
Whether the lake is more beautiful in the early morning or at sunset, I have never been able to determine. At six o’clock, as I pushed off from the dock on the blue water, the thrasher’s liquid song followed the rhythm of the oars. Out on the open bay the swallows wheeled and dipped all round the boat, so near that I could have touched their burnished blue-green backs. On the beaches the sandpipers ran tipping up and down, their plaintive piping mingling with the robin’ssong. A gentle breeze roughened the water and every little ripple that hurried to the shore was tipped with a winking star.
At Beaulac’s all was in readiness for the doctor. Rose’s eyes were glazed with sleeplessness, her face lined with fatigue; but she had found strength to comb and braid her dark hair, the children’s faces had been washed, and the baby had been dressed in a little new pink cotton frock. There was a dishpan full of newly hatched turkeys behind the stove, for even if one’s child is dying one must try to save the fowl, and there was a basket of young kittens under the bed. But Richard, the pet lamb, had been banished to the meadow and the hounds were tied to the fence. John had gone for the doctor. Mary was alone with the ill child. She had done all she could, she could only wait.
“I’m glad you got me his picture,” she said with a piteous little smile and looking over at a kodak print of the baby that we had taken some weeks before. “He’s never been nowheres to have his picture took. I guess I’ll be glad of that one.”
Far out on the shining bay we saw the boat returning. There was only one figure in it.John was coming back alone. The doctor had been stopped by an accident case; he could not come until evening. Rose’s lips trembled, but she made no complaint. What was the life of one baby when there were so many, so many that needed the doctor?
Back to the island for my midday meal, back to Loon Bay to meet the doctor. This time there were two figures black against the evening sky. John was rowing with quick jerks of the short, straight oars. In the stern sat a bulky shape digging away with a paddle. Under its weight the upward pointing bow waved from side to side. Over the gunwale amidship came a steady stream of water. Mrs. LeBaron, the doctor’s wife, crouched on the bottom, was bailing away for life.
“By gol!” said John, in an aside to me, as the party climbed the hill. “By gol! but the doctor iss a heavy man. I thought she was over two, three times.”
Oh, the method of these country doctors! There’s no talk of “Call me in the night if the change should come.” No promise: “I’ll see you the first thing in the morning.” No, Dr. LeBaron only gave his verdict. The baby had pneumonia. The right lung was suffused. Hewas a very ill child, but he might pull through—no one could tell. And all the time the doctor’s deft hands were making up powders, counting tablets, measuring drops. On every package he wrote the day and the hour the dose was to be given. He set down the times for baths and nourishment, he told us what symptoms we might expect. He gave his directions over and over again, slowly, clearly, waiting for a repetition of his words. There was no haste, no irritation at our ignorance, only infinite care, infinite patience. Then he ordered out the children, the young turkeys and the cats, shook hands with the mother, stepped into the boat and was rowed away. If the child lived, we would not need him again; if it died, we were to notify him at once, and twice a day he wished me to telephone him the baby’s temperature, respiration, pulse, and a general account of the progress of the disease. And then when excitement was at its height, someone broke my thermometer, the only one in miles; there was no more taking of temperatures—and the child got well!
The last time that Dr. LeBaron came to Many Islands it was to treat HarrySpriggins’ boy, who had cleft his kneecap straight through with an ax. There was no fire in the house. The Doctor had to build one and boil a pan clean before he could sterilize his instruments. There was no one willing to help him give an anæsthetic, so he had to sew up that wound while the boy sat and watched him do it.
“How in the world did the child stand it, Doctor?” I asked.
“Well, it was pretty hard on him,” answered the doctor. “I told him that I’d thrash him within an inch of his life if he moved—it was the only way—and the poor kid gritted his teeth and swore like a trooper all the time. But the wound healed perfectly, almost without a scar, and the joint did not stiffen.”
“You would be quite surprised to know how little charity work I do,” continued the Doctor, giving me a very direct look from his keen, gray eyes. “There are not many bad debts on my books. The country people pay remarkably well, all things considered.”
A quick little smile flits over Mrs. LeBaron’s face at his words. I imagine she could tell quite another tale. Doubtless she knowshow much of time and strength and pity is given for which no money can ever pay.
“What do you call charity, Doctor?”
It is not, of course, charity to charge Johnny Bagneau ten dollars for driving twenty miles through the blinding snow; to sit, through the long night and half the day, beside the bed where little John makes his delayed entrance into life; to eat a breakfast of eggs in the shells and a dinner of potatoes in their jackets, and to stand outdoors in the bitter cold to eat them, because even the doctor, inured to filth and foul air, cannot eat in that poor room.
“No, the Doctor does not work for charity,” the people tell me. “He gits paid for what he does.”
Younger men come from the hospitals of Toronto and Montreal and hang out their signs in Queensport for awhile. They get a percentage of the town cases. They do not “go in” for the country practice.
“They young chaps is all very good when there’s nawthin’ much the matter,” says old Mrs. Drapeau. “But when it’s anything bad we wants the old Doctor.”
Yes, that is it. When danger threatens wewant the man we know. He has brought us into the world, he has stood by us through life’s trouble. It is he who must sit beside us, steadfast amid the gathering shadows, as the soul starts forth through the darkness of the long trail, to the land where there shall be no more night.
These country doctors! Up and down the roads they go, by night and day, through storm and fair weather, treating everything, operating for anything, nursing, instructing, overcoming prejudice, performing miracles of healing despite incredible difficulties. To meet them is to come face to face with the eternal realities. To hear them talk is to listen to a tale that cuts down deep into the beating heart of life.
TheMay woods are full of color; the crimson of the young maple sprays, the bronze and yellows of the new birch and basswood leaves reflecting the tints of autumn.
The brakes are unclenching their little, woolly brown fists, the new ferns are uncurling their furry, pale-green spirals. The dwarf ginseng’s leaves carpet the damp hollows, from their clusters rise innumerable feathery balls of bloom. The little wild ginseng holds its treasure safe—the small, edible tuber hidden far underground. There is no long-nailed Caliban to dig for it here on the island.
The trillium flowers are turning pink. After about two weeks of snowy whiteness they have changed to a beautiful rose color, and oh, the perfume that comes blown across those far-stretching beds of trillium! No garden of summer roses was ever half so sweet.
On the mainland trail, that winds along the shore from Drapeau’s to Foret’s, the ground is blue with violets and yellow with adder’stongue, straw-colored bell wort and the downy yellow violet. Wild columbine beckons from the rocky crannies, Bishop’s cap and Solomon’s seal wave in the thickets, the wet fence corners are gay with the wine-red flowers of the wake robin and the tiny white stars of the wild strawberry dot the meadows.
This is insect time. The air hums with the whirring wings of the May flies, eel flies, woolly heads, and the great mosquitoes. They cling in clouds on all the window screens, they come into the house by hundreds, hanging on my clothes and tangled in the meshes of my hair. The wild cherry trees are festooned with the webs of the tent caterpillars and the worms are spinning down on long threads from thousands of teeming cocoons. When I walk through the woods I am decorated with a pair of little, live epaulets.
The treetops are noisy with a convention of bronzed grackles discussing all sorts of burning questions in their harsh, raucous voices.
“Cheerily, cheerily, cheer-up,” begs a robin in a white pine.
“I see you, I see you,” warns the meadow lark.
“We know it, we know it,” answer the vireos.
The sapsucker is back, beating a tattoo on the house roof. An empty wooden box at the door rings like a war drum under the blows of his hard bill. On the first morning he waked me I felt a sentimental pleasure in the sound; it seemed spring’s reveille. On three successive mornings I heard him with an ever-decreasing joy. On the fourth I sprang out of bed, dazed with sleep, and, seizing a stick from the woodpile, I let fly at that diligent fowl, and he dashed away with a squawk. So low may one’s love of nature ebb at four o’clock in the morning.
To-day, as I was dreaming on the porch, I heard a fat-sounding “plop,” and saw a yard-long snake hanging in a crotch of a poplar, twisting his wicked head and lashing his tail. Immediately a brilliant redstart flew down and began darting at the reptile’s eyes, screaming and fluttering at a great rate. The snake had probably gone up the tree for eggs, only to be driven down by the small, furious householder. In a moment more he slid down the trunk and disappeared under the house.
The snakes on the island are harmless, I amassured. Therefore I do not object to this one’s living under the porch, but I hope that he will stay under it, and that I shall not step into the middle of his coils some day when he is out sunning himself. The feel of a live snake under my foot would throw me back some millions of years and I should become, at once, the prehistoric female, fleeing in terror from the ancient enemy.
The young rabbits are out, hopping softly down all the paths. They look so exactly like the small brown plaster bunnies sold in the shops at Easter that, when something frightens them and they “freeze” motionless under a bush or fern, I can scarcely believe that they are not toys, after all. Comical little creatures! They eye me with such solemnity. I often wonder what makes babies and other young things look so very wise. They seem to know such weighty secrets, that all the rest of the world has long forgotten.
The old hares also are coming round the house again. One ventures so near and drives the others away so fiercely that I half believe he is little Peter returned to me.
Over at the farms the spring sowing is done—the wheat, the barley, and the oats; andin the long twilights, and under the Planter’s Moon, the farmers are putting in the last seed potatoes. Seed planted at the full of the May moon gives the heaviest crops, they say.
In the furrows, the big dew worms are working up out of the wet ground, to be bait for the fish hooks. Here, our object in fishing being to catch the fish, we use worms, frogs, anything that fish will bite, leaving flies, spoons, and sportsman devices to the campers who fish according to science and rule.
Walking along the shore trail yesterday, I came upon Black Jack Beaulac, sitting on a rock, fishing tackle beside him. He seemed deep in thought and I wondered what new deviltry he was hatching there, for Black Jack is the tease and torment of the countryside. It is he who starts the good stories that go the rounds of the stores and firesides, and the slower wits fly before his tongue like chaff before the fan.
If Black Jack’s tales on the other men are good, theirs of his performances are quite as well worth hearing. There is one of the time when he stole a hogshead of good liquor, and carried it off single-handed before thewondering eyes of the “Sports” encamped at Les Rapides. It was Black Jack who plunged into the icy waters of the lake to the rescue of the half breed drowning there, and it was he who came to the aid of poor, terrified Rebecca North, whose husband had gone suddenly deranged and was running amuck. The poor crazy giant has never forgotten the treatment he received at those great hands. Long after his madness was past he spoke with awe of Black Jack’s powerful grasp.
Again there is the story of the race on the ice of Henderson’s Bay that will never lose its flavor. I heard it from Uncle Dan Cassidy one wet Sunday afternoon, as we sat round the Blakes’ kitchen fire popping corn and capping stories. Uncle Dan has a brogue as thick as cream and a voice as smooth as butter. No writer of dialects could ever reproduce his speech. Translated, the tale runs thus:
There was to be a great race to which anyone having a horse was welcome. Yankee Jim Branch, a cousin of Black Jack’s, had an old nag, fit for little, which he entered by way of a joke. Black Jack, being temporarily out of horses, in consequence of some dealing with the local storekeeper and a chattel mortgage,was not included in the company. There had long been a feud between Black Jack and Yankee, so it was considered a good thing that they were not both to be represented in the contest.
It was a great occasion. The course was staked out on the ice with ceremony, little cedar bushes were stuck up to mark the quarter miles, and there was a flag at the judge’s stand. William Foret held Joe Bogg’s big silver stop watch to mark the time, Andy Drapeau had a stump of pencil and an old envelope on which to record it and the stakes were as much as two dollars.
The start was made, all horses had run, and the race, oddly enough, lay between Bogg’s gray and Yankee’s old hack, when—
“Ping!”
A shot sang out from somewhere, far back on the point, and Yankee’s horse dropped like a stone. His driver was leaning far out over the wretched creature’s back, belaboring him with a great gad. The halt was so sudden that away he went, straight on over the horse’s head, landing hard on the ice. Up he jumped raging, and ran back to the stupified group at the stand.
“Is any man in the crowd got his gun?” he demanded.
Every man was abundantly able to prove that his gun rested behind the door of his own cabin.
“Is Black Jack in the crowd?” inquired Yankee.
He was not, and Yankee was immediately convinced that his cousin, Black Jack, had fired that shot.
Then in the midst of the excitement Black Jack himself appeared, striding unconcernedly down the hill. He had been hidden among the bushes, far back on the point, and, unable to endure the thought of Yankee’s bragging if his horse should win, had raised his gun and shot the wretched animal, at the very instant of victory, and when, in Yankee’s mind, the two dollars was as good as spent.
History does not tell what Yankee did to get even. Probably nothing, for no one in the countryside cares to interfere with Black Jack. He is known as a man of his hands and a good person to let alone.
All this and more I remembered when I saw Jack sitting on the shore. But he was not wearing his usual devil-may-care swaggerand cheerful grin. Instead, his square, dark face was grim, his great shoulders were bent, his long arms hung relaxed and his black eyes gazed moodily over the water. He looked tired and gaunt and gray. Presently he rose heavily and, without seeing me, strode off to his boat, stepped in and rowed away and the next I heard of him, he had enlisted and was off to Valcartier to learn to be a soldier.
Following his example went Little John Beaulac and his son Louis, to the despair of poor Rose, and later, Charley McDougal and George Drapeau.
“It’s the meal ticket with those fellows,” commented Henry Blake. “What do they know about this war? They don’t even know what they’ll be fighting for. No, it’s the money they’re after. The mines are not working, there’s little or no wood-cutting to be done, and they’re up against it for food. Jack thinks that he’ll get a pension for his woman and a bounty for each one of the kids. The recruiting sergeants get so much a head for every man they bring in and so, of course, they promise these poor fellows anything. But they find out different after they’ve enlisted. Black Jack’ll never stick at it. He’ll desert,and if he does they’ll never catch him. He’s here to-day and fifty miles away across the hills to-morrow. He travels like a mink, Black Jack does.”
Poor Jack! He will find the restraint of barracks and drill intolerable, he who has never known any law but his own will. Will he stand the life? I wonder.
November’smoon is said to be the Indian’s Moon of Magic, but here the June moon is the wonder moon and “the moon of my delight.” It sails resplendent in a luminous sky, pouring its brightness down on a lake that gleams like a silver shield. Its beams rain down through the leaves in a drenching flood of light, to lie in shining pools on the mossy ground. It illuminates the hidden nooks of the forest, it makes the stems of the birches look like slender columns of white marble, and the woods are so bright that half the flowers forget to shut their eyes, and stay wide open through the night. Slender, tall irises stand like ghost flowers in the swamps; the thousand little bells of the false lily of the valley—the Canada May Flower—swing in the breezes that run along the ground, and on the low, south point of the island the rushes rattle stiffly and bow their heads as the wind passes over them. They are the Equisetum, the Horsetail rush, known to the Pilgrim housewives as scouring rushes, with which they used to clean their pots and pans.
Mary Blake tells me that she has used them and that the flinty, hollow stems are excellent kettle cleaners. They do not suggest anything so prosaic here in the white moonlight—rather they make me think of small silver spears held upright in the hands of a fairy troop, the small, green yeomen of the forest, on guard through the white night.
There is great rushing and scurrying in the underbrush, for the deer mice, the rabbits, and other small folk of the forest are awake and active. The birds too are wakeful and chirp answers chirp from one nest to another all through the night.
This is going to be a good bird year judging from the number of broken egg shells—blue, cream, speckled—that are cast from the nests to the ground. There is a continuous sound of faint, wheezing cries, the voices of nestlings, begging for food.
A pair of robins have plastered their mud nest on a beam of the porch roof, a red-eyed vireo has hung her birch bark cradle in a low bush under the kitchen window, some phœbes have built on the lintel of the house door. It seems impossible that so small a nest can hold so many squirming little bodies as must belongto all those upstretched, gaping yellow bills. The parent phœbes do not hesitate about telling me in good round terms just what they think of me when I go too near their home, but the robins do not scold me, they only go off to a bush and mourn. The vireo cares not at all for anybody, but sits tranquil on her eggs and eyes me fearlessly.
I have seen a whippoorwill’s nest, a thing, I am told, that few people ever find. It lies on the ground under the shelter of cedar poles that serves John Beaulac for a wagon shed, and is so directly in the path of the horses’ hoofs that I wonder it has not been trampled into the mold. John’s small daughter, Sallie May, led me to it, and, as we approached, a dark, slenderly trailing bird slid away through the underbrush, leaving her two furry balls of nestlings rolling helplessly on the dry leaves of their bed. They were about half the size of young chickens and were covered with thick down of a red clay color that had so fiery and vital a glow that it made me think of live coals showing through the ashes. We took one look and hurried away lest the whippoorwill mother should become frightened and forsake her nest, and two sweet andplaintive bird voices be lost from the evening chorus.
At Beaulac’s, where I stopped on the homeward way, a lively discussion was going forward. The Bishop of Ontario was coming to Sark, for the first time in many years, to hold service and to confirm, and there was much speculation about who would join the English Church.
“I’m a goin’ to be a Catholic,” announced poor Ishmael, the half-wit, peering out from a dim nook behind the stove.
“They tells me the priest kin cure the fits,” he went on, hopefully, “but he won’t do it fer you lessen you bees a Catholic, so I’m a goin’ to jine his church.”
“I favors the Baptists, ef I favors any,” observed Bill Shelly, the frogger.
Whereupon John Beaulac retorted cruelly, that “We’d ought to send fer the preacher quick and have Bill dipped right off the dock, clothes and all,” further explaining that the suggestion was made in view of Bill’s general appearance and his boast that he had not touched water since early in the previous summer, and then only because he had “fell in.”
Bill, so far from being offended, took thiswitticism in excellent part, joining uproariously in the laugh that followed it.
For the rest of that week, telephones were busy calling a congregation. I was invited to drive to church in Mrs. Swanson’s spring wagon, and reached her farm by a devious route on the great day. I rowed across the half mile that lies between the island and the nearest point of mainland and walked the wood trail from Drapeau’s to Foret’s. There William’s motor boat was waiting to ferry me across the lake and up Blue Bay to the Swan-sons’ landing.
Here also there was a flutter of excitement, for Susie Dove was going to be confirmed.
Clarence Nutting too had wished to be of the class, but at the last moment it had been remembered that he had never been baptized. As baptism must precede confirmation the Rector, amid the hurry and work of entertaining the Bishop and conveying him to and from the several churches where there were to be services, had been diligently striving to come up with Clarence to baptize him.
But each time he searched for him Clarence was away, either in a distant field or over in the next township, and so the Rector nevercaught him, and when the service commenced poor Clarence sat humbly at the side of the church with the men, and could not come forward.
There was no trouble about little Susie. Her case was entirely clear. Her new dress and white veil were spread forth on the spare room bed for display and admiration; her hair was plaited in innumerable tight pigtails as a prelude to subsequent frizzes.
Susie looked quiet and subdued. There was a frightened expression in her china-blue eyes. She could eat no dinner, she could not even taste her pie, and soon she and Mrs. Swanson retired to dress. On the way to church Susie sat silent, clutching her new Prayer Book in a moist and trembling hand. On the homeward drive she confided to me that she had been very afraid of the Bishop.
“I knew my Commandments,” she assured me, “but I was not so certain about the creed, and I was afeared lest the Bishop should ask me some hard questions.”
Her face then was radiant. The Bishop had been kind and had asked no one any hard questions, and so this little one had not been put to confusion.
The church at Sark is old and falling to pieces but it looked lovely that day. Each window sill held a plant in bloom, its tin can covered with gay, flowered wall paper—geraniums, fuchsias, patience plants—the ornaments of many a parlor. Each window framed a picture of soft, rolling meadows, fruit trees in bloom, homesteads nestled in the hollows, and, over all, stretches of blue sky, flecked with wisps of floating vapor. In the center of the church sat the group of ten or a dozen candidates for confirmation. Through the misty veils their young faces looked out, awed and grave and very sweet. There had been a great disappointment for little Mary Spellman, for her veil had not come from town with the rest. She looked like a gentle little nun, with a square of plain white muslin laid over her flaxen head. Most of these girls will not wear bridal dress at their weddings, so confirmation is the one great occasion in their lives when they can put on the dignity and the mystery of the veil.
“Defend, O Lord, this thy child with thy heavenly grace”—The words seemed to reach me from a great way off, repeated each time the Bishop laid his hands on a bowed head.The Bishop’s voice was kind, his tone gentle when, his sermon finished, he turned from the congregation to deliver his charge to the class. I do not remember much of what he said, but I have not forgotten his manner. It seemed to me, listening, that he must feel a peculiar tenderness for these little cut-off country parishes.
After service I was led forward to be presented to his Lordship. He said that he had heard of “the lady from the Southern States who was living alone at Many Islands.” I could not help feeling that the Episcopal eye regarded me with a certain suspicion, as one not quite right in her mind—which supposition was, I fear, confirmed by my own behavior, for when Mrs. Rector said: “My Lord, I wish to present Miss X. to you,” the unaccustomed sound of the title, and my own total ignorance of the proper mode of addressing one called “My Lord,” gave me a foolish, flustered manner that must have betrayed me.
We locked the silent church, stripped of its flowers and white-robed girls, and drove along the tree-shaded roads to the shore, where the motor boat was waiting. Thewater was so still and so clear that we could see every rock and pebble lying a dozen feet below. We passed over schools of big fish, bass and pickerel, hanging suspended in a crystal medium. Between the sheer walls of the Loon Lake Portage the sun was going down in a lake of gold and the rocks were purple and red in its glow.
I walked the home trail slowly, lingering in the falling dusk. The odors of the cedars, hemlocks, and basswoods came to me mingled with the wet smell from the bogs and the perfume of the tiny twin trumpets of the partridge vine, twining the damp moss. I came out of the dimness of the woods to the path worn along the grass of meadows starred all over with myriads of misty little globes, the seed heads of the dandelions. I pushed the row boat off on the quiet water, and drifted while “the moth hour went from the fields.” The sky was bright with the rising moon as I climbed the island path. There was great scurrying of rabbits in the underbrush and away in the misty thickets the whippoorwills were calling.
Itis wild strawberry time in lower Canada. The fields are carpeted with them and the fern-covered rocks hold each a little garden where the red berries hang over the water like rubies in a setting of clustered leaves. The birds are feasting royally and I walk along the edges of the meadows, gathering handfuls of the ripe fruit. No one is at home any more. When I stop at a house the women have all gone a-berrying. Thousands of quarts go off to the markets, or are cooked here into jellies and jam, for the delicacy of the winter is wild strawberry preserve. I had it every time I went out to tea. Now they give me strawberry shortcake and, O how good it is! No garden fruit can compare, in sweetness or perfume, with the little wild berry of the fields.
Not all my friends go berrying every day, however. Yesterday I was kneeling on the dock busy washing my clothes, when a heavily laden motor boat, with a row boat in tow, rounded the point and headed for the island. In it were Mary Blake, Mrs. Swanson, Anna Jackson, and Jean Foret. Rose Beaulac andGranny Drapeau sat in the little boat behind and all space not filled by women of ample build, was piled high with pails and baskets.
“We’ve come to spend the day,” they hailed me. “Don’t get scared, we’ve brought our dinners along.”
“Dinner or no dinner, I am glad to see you,” I called back, waving an apron in welcome.
“We knew this would be our last chance to have a visit with you before the campers come, so we’ve come to have a picnic.”
Ah! What a happy, friendly day! These women—busy heads of households, women of affairs—laid aside their cares, forgot their responsibilities and enjoyed their party with the simplicity of children. And how good was the chicken, brought already cooked in a shining pail, and the cakes and pies in the baskets! Mrs. Swanson had journeyed in to Sark to buy candy, and all that the store there boasted was the dear old candy of our childhood, little chocolate boys and girls and rabbits, sugar hearts with mottoes, jaw-breakers and pep’mint sticks.
We sat long at the big table on the porch. We talked and talked, or, rather, they talked; I listened, marking the shrewdness of theirdeductions, the keenness of their comment, the kindliness of their judgments. I heard all about the fine new store at Frontenac and the bargains one and another had found. They described the magnificence of the yearly celebration there when the Orangemen walk in procession. They told me that this year Joey Trueman, the storekeeper, had not scrupled to set off a whole twenty-three dollars’ worth of fireworks by way of advertisement.
We explored the scant five acres of the island, peeping in at the doors of the little summer sleeping shacks, all swept and furnished for the campers, and then, in the pleasant languor of the afternoon, I brought out my stack of photographs and told all about my homefolk.
For I too have formed the photo-displaying habit of this neighborhood, a friendly, kindly custom that makes one free at once of the home and all the family. I have never gone visiting here without being at once presented with the album. Many a time has my hostess hurried in from the kitchen to ask: “Has Miss X. seen the pictures yet?”
Big, unmercifully true-to-life crayon likenesses of grandparents stare down from allthe parlor walls—ancestral portraits. There are photographs of all the brides and grooms and babies, snapshots of sons fighting “somewhere in France,” of daughters gone out to make homes of their own on the far-off frontier, and there are the faces of those lying safe under the cedars in the little graveyards close at home. I have heard the life stories of all, and so it seems quite natural for me to hand out my pictures too.
As evening drew on and milking time approached, my guests gathered together pails and baskets and, as we walked single file along the trail to the dock, I tried to say something of what lies in my heart about all the kindness they had shown me in the year gone by, but the lump that rose in my throat choked back the words. They climbed into their boats, that sank to the gunwales under their weight, and I watched them away across the purple water.
My holiday is over. In a very few weeks I must go back to the city and take up my work—the same, yet never again to be the same. Here in the quiet of the woods I am trying to take stock of all that this year has done for me.
It has given me health. I have forgotten all about jerking nerves and aching muscles. I sleep all night like a stone; I eat plain food with relish; I walk and row mile after mile; I work rejoicing in my strength and glad to be alive.
There has been also the renewing of my mind, for my standards of values are changed. Things that once were of supreme importance seem now the veriest trifles. Things that once I took for granted, believing them the common due of mankind—like air and sunshine, warm fires and the kind faces of friends—are now the most valuable things in the world. What I have learned here of the life of birds and beasts, of insects and trees are the veriest primer facts of science to the naturalist—to me they are inestimably precious, the possessions of my mind, for, like Chicken Little, “I saw them with my eyes, and heard them with my ears.” And I shall carry away a gallery of mind-pictures to be a solace and refreshment through all the years to come.
The camp is ready for its owner. I have spent many hours in cleaning, arranging, replacing, that she may find all as she left it ten months ago. The island lies neat and fair inthe sunshine, reminding me of a good child that has been washed and dressed and seated on the doorstep to wait for company. Never have the woods looked so fair to me, or the wide lake, where the dragonflies are hawking to and fro over the water, so beautiful.
This is dragonfly season. Millions of them are darting through the air—great green and brown ones with a wing-spread of three to four inches; wee blue ones, like lances of sapphire light; little inch-long yellow ones, and beautiful, rusty red.
To-day I spent three hours on the dock watching one make that wonderful transition from the life amphibious to the life of the air. Noon came and went, food was forgotten while that miracle unfolded there before my very eyes.
I was tying the boat, when I saw what looked like a very large spider, crawling up from the water and out on a board. It moved with such effort and seemed so weak that I was tempted to put it out of its pain. But if I have learned nothing else in all these months in the woods, I have thoroughly learned to keep hands off the processes of nature. Too often have I seen my well-meant attempts tohelp things along end in disaster. So I gave the creature another glance and prepared to go about my business, when I noticed a slit in its humped back, and a head with great, dull beads of eyes pushing out through the opening. Then I sat down to watch, for I realized that this was birth and not death.
Very slowly the head emerged and the eyes began to glow like lamps of emerald light. A shapeless, pulpy body came working out and two feeble legs pushed forth and began groping for a firm hold. They fastened on the board and then, little by little and ever so slowly, the whole insect struggled out, and lay weak, almost inanimate, beside the empty case that had held it prisoner so long.
Two crumpled lumps on either side began to unfurl and show as wings. The long abdomen, curled round and under, like a snail-shell, began to uncurl and change to brilliant green, while drops of clear moisture gathered on its enameled sides and dripped from its tip. The transparent membrane of the wings, now held stiffly erect, began to show rainbow colors, as they fanned slowly in the warm air, and, at last, nearly three hours after the creature had crept out of the water, the greatdragon-fly stood free, beside its cast-off body lying on the dock. And
“Because the membraned wings,So wonderful, so wide,So sun-suffused, were thingsLike soul and nought beside.”
Certain stupendous phrases rose in my mind and kept sounding through my thoughts.
“Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”
There it stood, that living jewel, growing every moment more strong, more exquisite, waiting perhaps for some trumpet call of its life. Suddenly it stiffened, the great wings shot out horizontally, and with one joyous, upward bound, away it flashed, an embodied triumph, out across the shining water, straight up into the glory of the sun.
When I came to myself I was standing a tiptoe gazing up after it, my breath was coming in gasps and I heard my own voice saying: “It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. . . . Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory.”
Then, standing there under those trees, clothed in their new green and upspringingto the sky, and beside the lake, where the young ferns troop down to the water’s edge, valiant little armies with banners, there came to me one of those strange flashes of understanding, that pierce for an instant the thick dullness of our minds, and give us a glimpse of the meaning of this life we live in blindness here.
I had seen those woods, all bare and dead, rise triumphant in a glorious spring. I had seen that lake grow dark and still and lie icebound through the strange sleep of winter. Its water now lay rippling in the sun.
Since my coming to Many Islands, one year ago, the Great War has broken forth, civilization has seemed to die, and the hearts of half the world have gone down into a grave.
But even to me has come the echo of the Great Voice that spoke to John, as he stood gazing on a new heaven and new earth:
“I am the beginning and the end,” it said. “Behold I make all things new.”