"'Here's handkerchiefs charming, book muslins like ermine,Brocaded, striped, corded, or checked.Sweet Venus, they say, on Cupid's birthdayIn British-made muslin was decked."'Now, ye Fair, if you choose any piece to peruse,With pleasure I'll instantly show it.If the peddler should fail to be favoured with sale,Then I hope you'll encourage the poet.'
"'Here's handkerchiefs charming, book muslins like ermine,Brocaded, striped, corded, or checked.Sweet Venus, they say, on Cupid's birthdayIn British-made muslin was decked.
"'Now, ye Fair, if you choose any piece to peruse,With pleasure I'll instantly show it.If the peddler should fail to be favoured with sale,Then I hope you'll encourage the poet.'
"The result seems to have been but small sale for British-made muslins and no sale at all for Wilson-made poems.
"Robert Burns was just then the idolised poet of Scotland, a new sun shining with vital splendour into all Scottish hearts. Friends of the young weaver and apparently the young weaver himself thought there was room inScotland for another Burns. Some of his poems were published anonymously and the authorship was attributed to Burns. That was bad for him, it made bad worse. Wilson greatly desired to know the rustic poet-king of Scotland. The two poets met in Edinburgh and were to become friends. Then Burns publishedTam O'Shanter. As young Kentuckians, of course, you love horses and cannot be indifferent even to poems on the tails of horses. Therefore, you must already know the world's most famous poem concerning a horse-tail—Tam O'Shanter. The Paisley weaver by this time had such conceit of himself as a poet that he wrote Burns a caustic letter, telling him the kind of poemTam O'Shantershould and should not be. Burns replied, closing the correspondence,ending the brief friendship and leaving the weaver to go back to his loom. It was a terrible rebuff, and left its mark on an already discouraged man.
"Next Wilson wrote an anonymous poem, so violently attacking a wealthy manufacturer on behalf of his poor brother weavers, that the enraged merchant demanded the name of the writer and had him put in prison and compelled him to stand in the public cross of Paisley and burn his poem.
"Darker, bitterer days followed. He shrank away to a little village even more obscure than his birthplace. There, lifting his eyes, again he looked all over Scotland: he saw the wrongs and sufferings of the poor, the luxury and oppression of the rich: he blamedthe British government for evils inherent in human nature and for the imperfections of all human society: turned against his native country and at heart found himself without a fatherland.
"Then that glorious vision which has opened before so many men in their despair, disclosed itself: his eyes turned to America. You should never forget that from the first your country has been the refuge and the hope for the oppressed, the unfortunate, the discouraged of the whole world. In America he thought all roads were open, new roads were being made for human lives; that should become his country. One autumn he saw in a newspaper an advertisement that an American merchantman would sail from Belfast thefollowing spring and he turned to weaving and wove as never before to earn his passage money. At this time he lived on one shilling a week! And it seems that just now he undertook to make up his lack of knowledge of arithmetic. Some of you boys will doubtless greatly rejoice to hear that he was deficient in arithmetic! When spring came, with the earnings of his loom he walked across Scotland to the nearest port. When he reached Belfast every berth on the vessel had been taken: he asked to be allowed to sleep on the deck and was accepted as a passenger.
"He had now left Scotland to escape the loom—never to see Scotland again.
"And you see, he is beginning to come nearer.
"The vessel was called The Swift andit took The Swift two months to make the passage. The port was to be Philadelphia but he seems to have been so impatient to set foot on the soil of the New World that he left the ship at New Castle, Delaware. He had borrowed from a fellow-passenger sufficient money to pay his expenses while walking to Philadelphia thirty-four miles away; and with this in his pocket and his fowling-piece on his shoulder he disappeared in the July forests of New Jersey. The first thing he did was to kill a red-headed wood-pecker which he declared to be the most beautiful bird he had ever seen.
"I do not find any word of his that he had ever killed a bird in Scotland during all his years of wandering. Now the first event that befell him in theNew World was to go straight to the American woods and kill what he declared to be the most beautiful bird he had ever seen. This might naturally have been to him a sign of his life-road. But he still stood blinded in his path, with not a plan, not an idea, of what he should be or could be: he had not yet read the handwriting on the wall within himself.
"His first years in the New World were more disastrous than any in Scotland, for always now he had the loneliness and dejection of a man who has rejected his own country and does not know that any other country will accept him. A fellow Scot, in Philadelphia, tried him at copper-plate printing. He quickly dropped this and went back to the old dreadful work ofweaving—he became an American weaver and went wandering through the forests of New Jersey as a peddler: at least peddling left him free to roam the forests. Next he tried teaching but he himself had been taken from school at the age of eleven and must prepare himself as one of his own beginners. He did not like this teaching experiment in New Jersey and migrated to Virginia. Virginia did not please him and he remigrated to Pennsylvania. There he tried one school after another in various places and finally settled on the outskirts of Philadelphia: here was his last school, for here was the turning point of his life.
"I wish I had time to describe for you the school-house with its surroundings, for the place is to us now a picturein the early American life of a great man—all such historic pictures are invaluable. Catch one glimpse of it: a neat stone school-house on a sloping green; with grey old white oaks growing around and rows of stripling poplars and scattered cedar trees. A road ran near and not far away was a little yellow-faced cottage where he lived. The yard was walled off from the road and there were seats within and rosebushes and plum trees and hop-vines. On one side hung a signboard waving before a little roadside inn; on the other a blacksmith shop with its hammering. Not far off stood the edge of the great forest 'resounding with the songs of warblers.' In the depths of it was a favourite spot—a secret retreat for him in Nature.
"There then you see him: no longer a youth but still young; every road he had tried closed to him in America as in Scotland: not a doctor, not a minister, not a good poet, not a good flutist, not a good violinist, not a copper-plate engraver, not a willing weaver, not a willing peddler, not a willing school-teacher—none of these. No idea yet in him that he could ever be anything. A homeless self-exile, playing at lonely twilights on flute and violin the loved airs of rejected Scotland.
"Now it happened that near his school was a botanical garden owned by an American naturalist. The American, seeing the stranger cast down by his aimless life, offered him his portfolio of drawings and suggested that he try to draw a landscape,draw the human figure. The Scotch weaver, the American school-teacher, tried and disastrously failed. As a final chance the American suggested that he try to draw a bird. He did try: he drew a bird. He drew again. He drew again and again. He kept on drawing. Nothing could keep him from drawing. And there at last the miracle of power and genius, so long restless in him and driving him aimlessly from one wrong thing to another wrong thing, disclosed itself as dwelling within his eyes and hands. His drawings were so true to life, that there could be no doubt: the road lay straight before him and ran clear through coming time toward eternal fame.
"All the experience which he hadbeen unconsciously storing as a peddler in Scotland now came back to him as guiding knowledge. The marvelous memory of his eye furnished its discipline: from early boyhood through sheer love he had unconsciously been studying birds in nature, and thus during all these wretched years had been laying up as a youth the foundation of his life-work as a man.
"Genius builds with lavish magnificence and inconceivable swiftness; and hardly had he succeeded with his first drawings before he had wrought out a monumental plan: to turn himself free as soon as possible into the vast, untravelled forest of the North American continent and draw and paint its birds. Other men, he said, would have to found the cities of the NewWorld and open up its country. His study was to be the lineaments of the owl and the plumage of the lark: he had cast in his lot with Nature's green magnificence untouched by man."
The lecturer paused, as a traveller instinctively stops to look around him at a pleasant turn of his road. It had, in truth, been a hard, crooked human road along which he had been leading his young listeners—a career choked at every step by inward and outward pressures. He had not failed to notice the change in every countenance, the brightening of every eye, as soon as his audience discovered that they were listening to a story, not of mere weaknesses and failures, but of the misfortunes and mistakes of a man, who at last stood out as truly great. Thishapless weaver, this aimless wanderer through the forests of two worlds, after all had success in him, strength in him, genius in him, fame in him! He was a hero. Henceforth they were alive with curiosity for the rest of the story which would bring the distant hero to Kentucky, to their Lexington.
The lecturer realised all this. But he had for some time been even more acutely aware that something wholly personal and extraordinary was taking place: one of the pupils of the high school was listening with an attention so absorbed and noticeable as to set him apart from all the rest. Just at what point this intense attention had been so aroused, had not been observed; but when once observed, there was no forgetting it: it filled the room, theother listeners were merely grouped around it as accessories and helped to make its breathless picture.
The particularly interested pupil sat rather far back in the school-room, near a window—as though from a vain wish to jump out and be free. The morning light thus fell across his face: it was possible to watch its expression, its responsive change of light at each turn of the story. He seemed to hold some kind of leadership in the school: other pupils occasionally turned their faces to glance at him, to keep in touch with him: he did not return their glances—being their leader; or he had forgotten them for the story he was hearing.
The lecturer became convinced that what had more than once happenedto him before as a teacher was happening again: before him a young life was unexpectedly being solved—to its own wonderment and liberation, to its amazement and joy.
That perpetual miracle in nature—the contexture of the generations—the living taking the meaning of their lives from the dead! You stand beside some all but forgotten mound of human ashes; before you are arrayed a band of youths, unconsciously holding in their hands the unlighted torches of the future. You utter some word about the cold ashes and silently one of them walks forward to the ashes, lights his torch and goes his radiant way.
Thus the Geologist felt a graver responsibility resting on him—placedthere by one of them, more than by all of them: the words he was speaking might or might not give final direction to a whole career. He went on with his heroic narrative more glowingly, more guardedly:
"For a while he must keep on teaching in order to live: he taught all day, often after night, barely had time to swallow his meals, at the end of one term tells us he had as large a sum as fifteen dollars. Often he coloured his first drawings by candle light, drew and painted birds without knowing what they were. Drawing and painting by candle light!—but now he had within himself the risen sun of a splendid enthusiasm. That sun kindled his schoolboys. They found out what he wanted and helped. One boybrought him a large basketful of crows. Another caught a mouse in school and contributed that—the incident is worth quoting by showing that the boy preferred a mouse to a school-book.
"Take one instance of the energy with which he was now working and worked for the rest of his life: he wished to see Niagara Falls, and to lose no time while doing it he started out one autumn through the forest to walk to the Falls and back, a short trip for him of over twelve hundred miles. He reached home 'mid the deep snows of winter with no soles to his boots. What of that? On his way back he had shot two strange birds in the valley of the Hudson! For ten days—ten days, mind you!—he worked on a drawing of these and sent it witha letter to Thomas Jefferson. You may as yet have thought of Jefferson only as one of America's earliest statesmen: begin now to think of him as one of the first American naturalists. And if you wish to read a courteous letter from an American President to a young stranger, go back to Jefferson's letter to the Scotch weaver who sent him the drawing of a jaybird.
"Pass rapidly over the next few years. He has made one trip from Maine down the Atlantic Seaboard to the South. He has returned and is starting out again to cover the vast interior basin of the Mississippi Valley: he is to begin at Pittsburgh and end at New Orleans.
"Now again you see that he is coming nearer—nearer to you here.
"Look then at this bold, splendid picture of him outlined against the background of early American life. All such pictures are part of our richest heritage.
"The scene is Pittsburgh. He has ransacked the winter woods for new species, he has found only sparrows and snow-birds. That was the year 1810; this is the year 1916—over a hundred years later in the history of our country. Gaze then upon this wild scene of the olden time, all such pictures are good for young eyes: it is the twenty-fourth of February: the river, swollen with the spring flood, is full of white masses of moving ice. A frail skiff puts off from shore and goes winding its way until it is lost to sight among the noble hills.
"They warned him of his danger, urged him to take a rower, urged him not to go at all. Those who risked the passage of the river floated down on barges called Kentucky arks or in canoes hollowed each out of a single tree, usually the tulip tree, which you know is very common in our Kentucky woods. But to mention danger was to make him go to meet it. He would have no rower, had no money to hire one, had he wished one. He tells us what he had on board: in one end of the boat some biscuit and cheese, a bottle of cordial given him by a gentleman in Pittsburgh, his gun and trunk and overcoat; at the other end himself and his oars and a tin with which to bail out the skiff, if necessary, to keep it from sinking and also to useas his drinking-cup to dip from the river.
"That February day—the swollen, rushing river, the masses of white ice—the solitary young boatman borne away to a new world on his great work: his heart expanding with excitement and joy as he headed toward the unexplored wilderness of the Mississippi Valley.
"Wondrous experiences were his: from the densely wooded shores there would reach him as he drifted down, the whistle of the red bird—those first spring notes so familiar and so welcome to us on mild days toward the last of February. Away off in dim forest valleys, between bold headlands, he saw the rising smoke of sugar camps. At other openings on the landscape,grotesque log cabins looked like dog-houses under impending mighty mountains. His rapidly steered skiff passed flotillas of Kentucky arks heavily making their way southward, transporting men and women and children—the moving pioneers of the young nation: the first river merchant-marine of the new world: carrying horses and plows to clearings yet to be made for homesteads in the wilderness; transporting mill-stones for mills not yet built on any wilderness stream; bearing merchandise for the pioneers who in this way got their clothing until they could grow flax and weave to clothe themselves. Thus in the Alps of the Alleghenies he came upon the river peddlers of America as years before amid the Alps of Scotland he had comeupon the foot peddlers of his own land. On the river were floating caravans of men selling shawls and muslins. He boarded a number of these barges; as they approached a settlement, they blew a trumpet or a lonely horn on the great river stillness.
"The first night he drew in to shore some fifty miles down at a riverside hovel and tried to sleep on the only bed offered him—some corn-stalks. Unable to sleep, he got up before day and pushed out again into the river, listening to the hooting of the big-horned owl echoing away among the dawn-dark mountains, or to the strangely familiar crowing of cocks as they awoke the hen roosts about the first American settlements in the West.
"He records what to us now soundsincredible, that on March fifth he saw a flock of parrokeets. Think of parrokeets on the Ohio River in March! Of nights it turned freezing cold and he drew liberally on his bottle of cordial for warmth. Once he encountered a storm of wind and hail and snow and rain, during which the river foamed and rolled like the sea and he had to make good use of his tin to keep the skiff bailed out till he could put in to shore. The call of wild turkeys enticed him now toward the shore of Indiana, now toward the shore of Kentucky, but before he reached either they had disappeared. His first night on the Kentucky shore he spent in the cabin of a squatter and heard him tell tales of bear-treeing and wildcat-hunting and wolf-baiting. All night wolveshowled in the forests near by and kept the dogs in an uproar; the region swarmed with wolves and wildcats 'black and brown.'
"On and on, until at last the skiff reached the rapids of the Ohio at Louisville and he stepped ashore and sold his frail saviour craft which, at starting, he had named the Ornithologist. The Kentuckian who bought it as the Ornithologist accepted the droll name as that of some Indian chief. He soon left Louisville, having sent his baggage on by wagon, and plunged into the Kentucky forest on his way to Lexington.
"And now, indeed, you see he is coming nearer.
"It was the twenty-fourth of March when he began his first trip southwardthrough the woods of Kentucky. Spring was on the way but had not yet passed northward. Nine-tenths of the Kentucky soil, he states, was then unbroken wilderness. The surface soil was deeper than now. The spring thaw had set in, permeating the rich loam. He describes his progress through it as like travelling through soft soap. The woods were bare as yet, though filled with pigeons and squirrels and wood-peckers. On everything he was using his marvellous eyes: looking for birds but looking at all human life, interested in the whole life of the forest. He mentions large corn fields and orchards of apple and of peach trees. Already he finds the high fences, characteristic of the Kentuckians. He turned aside once to visit a roosting place of the passenger pigeon.
"It was on March twenty-ninth that, emerging from the thick forest, he saw before him the little Western metropolis of the pioneers, the city of the forefathers of many of us here today—Lexington. I wish I could stop to describe to you the picture as he painted it: the town stretching along its low valley; a stream running through the valley and turning several mills—water mills in Lexington a hundred years ago! In the market-place which you now call Cheapside he saw the pillory and the stocks and he noted that the stocks were so arranged as to be serviceable for gallows: our Kentucky forefathers arranged that they should be conveniently hanged, if they deserved it, as a public spectacle of warning.
"On a country court day he saw athousand horses hitched around the courthouse square and in churchyards and in graveyards. He states that even then Kentucky horses were the most remarkable in the world.
"He makes no mention of one thing he must have seen, but was perhaps glad to forget—the weavers and the busy looms; for in those days Kentuckians were busy making good linen and good homespun, as in Paisley.
"He slept while in Lexington—this great unknown man—in a garret called Salter White's, wherever that was: and he shivered with cold, for you know we can have chill nights in April. He says that he had no firewood, it being scarce, the universal forest of firewood being half a mile away: this was like going hungry in a loft over a full baker-shop.
"And I must not omit one note of his on the Kentuckians themselves, which flashes a vivid historic light on their character. By this time he rightly considered that he had had adventures worth relating; but he declares that if he attempted to relate them to any Kentuckian, the Kentuckian at once interrupted him and insisted upon relating his own adventures as better worth while. Western civilization was of itself the one absorbing adventure to every man who had had his share in it.
"Here I must pause to intimate that Wilson all his life carried with him one bird—one vigourous and vociferous bird—a crow to pick. He picked it savagely with Louisville. But he had begun to pick it with Scotland. He had picked it with Great Britain and with NewJersey and Virginia. In New England the feathers of the crow fairly flew. In truth, civilization never quite satisfied him; wild nature alone he found no fault with—there only was he happy and at home. He now picked his crow with Lexington. Afterward an indignant Kentuckian, quite in the good Kentucky way, attacked him and left the crow featherless—as regards Lexington.
"On the fourteenth day of April he departed from Lexington, moving southward through the forest to New Orleans. Scarcely yet had the woods begun to turn green. He notes merely the white blossoms of the redroot peeping through the withered leaves, and the buds of the buckeye. With those sharp eyes of his he observed thatwherever a hackberry tree had fallen, cattle had eaten the bark.
"And now we begin to take leave of him: he passes from our picture. We catch a glimpse of him standing on the perpendicular cliffs of solid limestone at the Kentucky River, green with a great number of uncommon plants and flowers—we catch a glimpse of him standing there, watching bank swallows and listening to the faint music of the boat horns in the deep romantic valley below, where the Kentucky arks, passing on their way southward, turned the corners of the verduous cliffs as the musical gondolas turn the corners of vine-hung Venice in the waters of the Adriatic.
"On and on southward; visiting a roosting-place of the passenger pigeonwhich was reported to him as forty miles long: he counted ninety nests in one beech tree. We see him emerging upon the Kentucky barrens which were covered with vegetation and open for the sweep of the eye.
"Now, at last, he begins to meet the approach of spring in full tide: all Nature is bursting into leaf and blossom. No longer are the redbud and the dogwood and the sassafras conspicuous as its heralds. And now, overflowing the forest, advances the full-crested wave of bird-life up from the south, from the tropics. New and unknown species are everywhere before his eyes; their new melodies are in his ears; he is busy drawing, colouring, naming them for his work.
"So he passes out of our picture:southward bound, encountering a cloud of parrakeets and pigeons, emerging from a cave with a handkerchief full of bats, swimming creeks, sleeping at night alone in the wilderness, his gun and pistol in his bosom. He vanishes from the forest scene, never from the memory of mankind.
"Let me tell you that he did not live to complete his work. Death overtook him, not a youth but still young; for, as a Roman of the heroic years deeply said: 'Death always finds those young who are still at work for the future of the world.'
"I told you I was going to speak to you of a boy's life. I asked you to fix your eyes upon it as a far-off human spark, barely glimmering through mist and fog but slowly, as the years passed,getting stronger, growing brighter, always drawing nearer until it shone about you here as a great light and then passed on, leaving an eternal glory.
"I have done that.
"You saw a little fellow taken from school at about the age of eleven and put to hard work at weaving; now you see one of the world's great ornithologists, who had traversed some ten thousand miles of comparative wilderness—an imperishable figure, doing an imperishable deed. I love to think of him as being in the end what he most hated to be in the beginning—a weaver: he wove a vast, original tapestry of the bird-life of the American forest.
"As he passed southward from Lexington that distant April of 1810, encountering his first spring in the Ohiovalley with its myriads of birds, somewhere he discovered a new and beautiful species of American wood warbler and gave it a local habitation and a name.
"He called it the Kentucky Warbler.
"And now," the lecturer said, by way of climax, "would you not like to see a picture of that mighty hunter who lived in the great days of the young American republic and crossed Kentucky in the great days of the pioneers? And would you not also like to see a picture of the exquisite and only bird that bears the name of our State—the Kentucky Warbler?"
He passed over to them a portrait engraving of Alexander Wilson in the dress of a gentleman of his time, his fowling-piece on his forearm. Andalong with this he delivered to them a life-like, a singing portrait, of the warbler, painted by a great American animal painter and bird painter—Fuertes.
chapter II, end decoration
chapter III, title decoration
I initialt was the first day of vacation.
Schools, if you were not through with them, had now become empty, closed, silent buildings, stripped of authority to imprison and bedevil you and then mark you discreditably because you righteously rebelled against being imprisoned and bedeviled. They could safely be left to dust and cobwebs within and to any weeds that might lodge and sprout outside—the more thebetter. You stood on the spring edge of the long, free, careless summer and could look unconcernedly across at the distant autumn edge. Then as the woods, now in their first full green, were beginning to turn dry and yellow, the powerless buildings would again become tyrannical schools.
But if you had finished high school, on this first day of vacation you were on the Boy's Common: schools behind you, the world of business around you, ahead of you ambitious college or the stately University. Webster had been turned loose on the Boy's Common.
The family were at breakfast. Every breakfast in the cottage was much the same breakfast: routine is the peace of the roadless. Existence there throughoutthe year was three hundred and sixty-five times more or less like itself. The earth meantime did change for the signs of the zodiac: the cottage changed also, but had a zodiac of its own. Thus, when the planet was in the sign ofCapricornus, the cottage on a morning had fried perch for breakfast, as a sign that it was inPisces; when earth was inGemini, the family might have a steak which showed that it was inTaurus—or thatTauruswas in the family.
There was always hot meat of one kind and hot bread of two kinds and hot coffee of any kind. If Webster's father upon entering the breakfast room had not seen a dish before him to carve or apportion, the shock could not have been greater, had he foundlying on his folded napkin an enclosure from the bank notifying him that he had been discharged for having made the figure four instead of the figure two.
He sat squarely facing the table as long as his own portion of the meat lasted, meantime eating rapidly and bending over to glance at his paper which lay flat beside his coffee cup. With the final morsel of meat he turned sidewise and sat cross-legged, with his paper held before his face as a screen—notification that he would rather not talk at the moment, unless they preferred.... If they showed that they did prefer, he still had means to discourage their preference. Now and then he reached around toward his plate and groped for the remaining crumbs of bread, or hooked his forefingerin the handle of his cup and conveyed it behind the paper.
Webster's mother, busied with service at the tray, commenced her breakfast after the others. She talked to her husband until he interposed his newspaper. Then she unconsciously lowered her voice and addressed remarks to the children. Occasionally she tried to arrange their dissensions.
A satirist of human life, studying Webster's father and mother at the head and foot of the table—symbol at once of their opposition and conjunction—a satirist, who for his own amusement turns life into pictures of something else, might have described their bodily and pictorial relation as that of a large, soft deep-dished puddingto a well trimmed mutton chop. Their minds he would possibly have imagined as two south winds moving along, side by side; whatever else they blew against, they could not possibly blow against each other.
On this fine June morning, the first day of his vacation, Webster was late for breakfast. He arranged to be late. From his bathroom-bedroom he could hear the family with their usual morning talk, Elinor's shrill chatter predominating. When her chatter ceased he would know that she had satisfied her whimsical appetite and had slipped from her chair, impatient either to get to the front porch with its creaky rocking-chair or to dart out the gate to other little girls in the block; restlessly seeking some adventure elsewhereif none should pass before her eyes at home.
He waited till she should go; there was something especial to speak of with his father and he did not wish this to be spoiled by Elinor's interference and ridicule.
When she was gone he went in to breakfast.
"Well, my son, how are you going to spend your first day of vacation?" his father inquired, helping him to his portion and not particularly noticing his own question.
"I thought I'd go over into the woods," Webster replied.
An unfavourable silence followed this announcement. That old stubborn controversy about the woods!...
"Father," asked Webster, with hiseyes on his plate, "did you ever see the Kentucky warbler?"
Webster's father looked over the top of the wood-pulp screen. His face had a somewhat vacant expression. He waited. Finally he said:
"My son, I believe you asked me a question: I shall have to ask you to repeat your question; I may be losing my hearing or I may be losing my mind. You asked me—?"
Webster, in the same deliberate tone, repeated his question:
"Did you ever see the Kentucky warbler?"
Webster's father looked over his spectacles at Webster's mother as with the air of an appeal for guidance:
"My dear, your son asks me, if Iunderstand him, whether I have ever seen a Kentucky wooden war horse?"
He was not above fun-making and it seemed to him that the occasion called for it.
Webster's mother explained:
"One of the professors from the University lectured to them in April about birds. His head has been full of birds ever since: I shouldn't wonder if his dreams have been full of them." She looked at Webster not without ineradicable tenderness and pride; she could not quite have explained the pride, she could have explained the tenderness.
Now the truth of the matter was that since that memorable morning of the April talk at high school, she had been hearing from Webster repeatedlyon that subject. He had told her of the lecture immediately upon reaching home; she had never seen him so wrought up. And from that time he had upon occasion plied her with questions: as to what she knew of birds when she lived in the country. She had to tell him that she knew very little; everybody identified the several species that preyed upon fruit and berries and young chickens; she named these readily enough. She had never heard of a bird called the Kentucky warbler. And she had never heard of Alexander Wilson.
All this she had duly narrated to Webster's father—greatly to his dejection. A bank officer with a solitary son, now graduated from high school, going after bird-nests—that was aprospect before such a father! He had shaken his head in silence that more than spoke.
"I told him," Webster's mother had concluded, "that the only Wilsons worth knowing in Kentucky were the horse-people Wilsons: of course we knowthem. It has been amusing to watch Elinor. Whenever Webster has begun about birds, if she has overheard him, she has made it convenient to settle somewhere near and listen. She would break in and stop his questions, but then there would be no more entertainment for her. She has been a study."
Thus Webster's father was not so ill-informed as he now appeared. In return for the information from Webster's mother, apparently for the firsttime imparted, he looked at his son with an expression which plainly meant that as a speculation the latter was becoming a graver risk.
"No, my son," he said, "I have never met your forest friend. I am merely a Kentucky bank warbler. One who did his warbling years ago. There is somewarleft in me. I suppose there will always bewarleft in me, but there isn't anywar-ble. I warbled one distant solitary spring to your mother. She replied beautifully in kind and lavishly in degree. We made a nest and had a hatching. Since then the male bird has been trying—not to escape the consequences of his song—but to meet his notes like a man. I have never stumbled upon your forest friend."
Webster ate in silence for a few moments and then remarked, as though it were a matter of vital importance:
"His notes are:
"'Tweedle tweedle tweedle, Tweedle tweedle tweedle,' Wilson described them that way a hundred and six years ago."
"I don't doubt it, my son. I am not questioning your word—nor Mr. Wilson's. But I don't see anything very remarkable in that: if you come to the bank any day, you can hear men say the same thing. They come in and say, 'Tweedle.' And they go out."
Webster continued:
"Audubon described the notes as 'Turdle turdle turdle.'"
Deeper silence at the table. Webster continued in the face of the silence;
"A living naturalist says the notes may be:
"'Toodle toodle toodle.'"
Silence at the table still more deep. Webster broke it:
"Another naturalist describes the bird as saying:
"'Ter-wheeter wheeter wheeter wheeter wheeter.'"
The silence! Webster continued:
"Another naturalist thinks the song is:
"'Che che che peery peery peery.'"
Webster's father raised his eyebrows—he had no hair to raise—at Webster's mother: a sign that their graduate was beginning to celebrate his vacation.
"My son," he said, "when I was a little fellow in school, one of the reading lessons was a poem called 'Try,Try Again.' Perhaps the bird is working along that line."
"Thomas Jefferson followed a bird for hours in the woods," said Webster, with dignity: he somehow felt rebuked. "And for twenty years he tried to catch sight of another."
"Don't let me come between you and Thomas Jefferson," said Webster's father, waving his hand toward his son in protest. "God forbid that I should come between any two such persons as Daniel Webster and Thomas Jefferson!"
"The government at Washington," observed Webster stoutly, "is behind the Kentucky warbler."
"Then, my son, I advise you to get behind the Government."
The rusty bell at the little front doorwent off with a sound like the whirr of a frightened prairie chicken. The breakfast maid, also the cook, also the maid of all work, also a unit of the standardised population of disservice and discontent, entered and pushed a bill at Webster's father.
"The butcher," she announced with sullen gratification, "He's waiting."
As Webster's father left the table, he tapped his son affectionately on the head with his paper: "You follow the bird, my boy; and follow Thomas Jefferson, if you can. The butcher follows me."
Webster's mother sat watching him. He had begun to get his lunch ready. He held the bottom-half of a long, slender roll, which might have served as a miniature model for an old-timeKentucky river-ark; and with his knife, grasped like an oar, he was lining the inside with some highly specialised yellow substance. She deplored his awkwardness and fought his independence.
"Let me put up your lunch for you, my son!"
"I'll put it up."
He was not to be cheated out of that fresh sensation of pleasure which comes to the male, young or old, who tries to cook in camp, to fry, to boil, to season, or to serve things edible.
Webster pulled out of his pocket a crumpled piece of brown paper and smoothed it out on the table cloth. It showed butcher stains.
Webster's mother protested.
"My son! Take a napkin! Take this clean napkin for your lunch!"
"I like this paper."
The idea of being in the forest and unrolling his lunch from a napkin: what would Wilson have thought? Elinor, being "nice," always rolled her lunch in a napkin.
"But you will be hungry: let me get you some preserves!"
"Not anything sweet." Elinor always had preserves. He rolled his lunch roughly and thrust it, butcher-stains and all, into his pocket. His mother was exasperated and distressed.
"My son, your lunch will come loose in your pocket: I'll get you a string."
"I don't want a string." Elinor tied everything. Girls tied; boys buttoned. The difference between men and women was strings.
"But you'll get the grease on you,Webster! It will run down your legs!"
"Very well, then, I'll have greasy legs. Why not?"
She followed him out to the porch. Her character lacked capacity of initiative. She waited for him to be old enough to take some initiative; then she would stand by him.
"Don't go too far," she said tenderly, "and you ought to have some of your friends to go with you, some of the boys from school."
"They can't go today. Nobody can go today. Anybody would be in the way today."
He said this to himself.
She watched him from the porch and called: "Don't stay too late."
Webster walked quickly to the maincorner of the block—Jenny's corner. On this first morning of being through with school and of feeling more like a man free to do as he pleased, Jenny for that reason became more important—he must see her before starting. Heretofore the pleasure of being with Jenny had definitely depended upon what Jenny might do; this morning the idea was beginning to be Jenny herself.
She was in her trumpet-vine arbour, the roof of which was already sun-dried. The shaded sides were still dew-wet. She bounded across to him, very exquisite in her light blue frock with broad, fresh white ribbons in her light-brown hair: healthy, docile, joyous, with innocent blue eyes and the complexion of apple blossoms.
"Where are you going?" she askedin a voice which implied that the day would be as pleasant, no matter where he went: nevertheless she had no thought of appearing indifferent to him.
He told her.
"What are you going into the woods for?" she inquired, with little dancing movements of her feet on the yard grass in irrepressible health and joy and with no especial interest in his reply.
He told her.
"Couldyougo?" He very well knew she could not and merely yielded to an impulse to express himself: he was offering to ruin the day for her.
"They wouldn't let me," said Jenny, apparently not disappointed at being thus kept at home.
He sought to make the best of his disappointment.
"Even if you could go, I am afraid you never would be quiet, Jenny."
"I'm afraid I wouldn't," Jenny replied, responsive to every suggestion.
He lingered, tenderly disturbed by her: the roots of the future were growing in him this morning. He was changing, he was changingher: there was an outreaching of his nature to draw her into the future alongside him.
Jenny suddenly stopped dancing and came closer to the fence, having all at once become more conscious of Webster, standing there as he had never stood before, looking at her as he had never looked. Her nature was of yielding sweetness, clasping trust. She glanced around the cottage windows: the situation was very exposed. Webster glanced at the cottage windows:the situation did not appear in the least exposed. Her eyes became more round with an idea:
"Are you coming back this way?"
"Iwillcome back this way."
Jenny danced away from the fence, laughing excitedly: "Will it be late?"
"I canmakeit late?"
Webster climbed the fence of the forest under the foliage of a big tree of some unknown kind and descended waist-deep into the foliage of a weed with a leaf as big as an elephant's ear: it had a beautiful trumpet-shaped white and purple flower. He wished he knew what it was: on the very edge of the forest, at his very first step, he had sunk waist-deep into ignorance. Then he waded through the rank nightshadeand stepped out upon the grass of the woods—the green carpet of thick turf, Kentucky bluegrass.
At last he was there under those softly waving trees which summer after summer he had watched from the porch and windows: long they had called to him and now he had answered their call.
But the disappointment! As he had looked at the forest across the distance, the tree-tops had made an unbroken billowy line of green along the blue horizon, continuous like the waves of the sea as he imagined the sea. Somewhere under that forest roof he had taken it for granted that there would be thick undergrowth, wild spots for shy singing nesting birds. The disappointment! The trees stood ten or twenty or thirty feet apart. The longestboughs barely touched each other, their lowest sometimes hung forty or fifty feet in the air. He did not see a tree whose branches he could reach with his upstretched arm. The sun shone everywhere under them every bright day and the grass grew thick up to their trunks.
Another disappointment! The wood was small. He walked to the middle of it and from there could see to its edge on each of its four sides. On one side was a field of yellow grain—what the grain was he did not know—ignorance again. On the side opposite this was a field of green grain—what he did not know. Straight ahead of him as he looked through the trees, he could see an open paddock on which the sunlight fell in a blazing sheen; itturned to silver the white flanks of some calves and made soft gold of the coats of grazing thoroughbreds. Beyond the paddock he could see stables and sheds and beyond these a farmhouse: he could faintly hear the cackle of barnyard poultry.
He stood in bluegrass pasture—once Kentucky wilderness. It was like an exquisite natural park. As he had skirmished toward the country along turnpikes with school-mates or other friends during his life, often his eyes had been drawn toward these world-famous bluegrass pastures. Now he was in one; and it was here that he had come to look for the warbler which haunts the secret forest solitudes!
He sat down under a big tree with a feeling of how foolish he had been.This was again followed by an overwhelming sense of his ignorance.
He did not know the kind of tree he sat under nor of any other that stood far or near. These were such as sugar maple and red oak and white oak and black ash and white ash and black walnut and white walnut—rarely white walnut—and hickory and locust and elm and a few haws: he did recognise a locust tree but then a locust tree grew in Jenny's yard! All around him weeds and wild flowers and other grasses sprang up out of the bluegrass: he did not know them.
There was one tree he curiously looked around for, positive that he should not be blind to it if fortunate enough to set his eyes on one—the coffee tree. That is, he felt sure he'drecognise it if it yielded coffee ready to drink, of which never in his life had they given him enough. Not once throughout his long troubled experience as to being fed had he been allowed as much coffee as he craved. Once, when younger, he had heard some one say that the only tree in all the American forest that bore the name of Kentucky was the Kentucky coffee tree; and he had instantly conceived a desire to pay a visit in secret to that corner of the woods. To take his cup and a few lumps of sugar and sit under the boughs and catch the coffee as it dripped down.... No one to hold him back ... as much as he wanted at last ...! The Kentucky coffee tree—his favourite in Nature!
He said to himself, looking allround him, that he had the outdoor loneliness and blindness of Silas Marner this wonderful morning.
Propped against the tree he sat still a while, thinking of the long day before him and of how he should spend it in this thin empty pasture, abandoned by the wild creatures. But as he deliberated, suddenly and then more and more he awoke to things going on around him.
A few feet away and on a level with his eyes a little fellow descended from high over-head. A little green gymnast trying to reach the ground by means of his own rope which he manufactured out of his body as he came down. How could he do it? How had he learned the very first time to make the rope strong enough to bear hisweight instead of its giving way and letting him drop? Something seized one of Webster's ankles with a pair of small jaws like pincers and reminded him that his foot was in the way: it had better move on. A black ant suddenly rushed angrily over his knee. A cricket leaped in the grass. One autumn one of them had started its song behind the wainscoting, Elinor had pushed her toe against the woodwork and silenced it. A few feet away a bunch of white clover blossomed: a honey bee was searching it. Webster found on the back of one of his hands, which was pressed against the grass, a tiny crimson coach—a mere dot of a crimson coach being moved along he could not see how. The colour was most gorgeous and the material of the finest velvet. He let itgo on its way across his hand withersoever it might be journeying. Directly opposite his eyes, some forty feet from the ground, was a round hole in a rotten tree-trunk. Webster wondered whether a bird ever pecked a square hole in anything. Suddenly from behind him a red-headed bird flew to the dead tree-trunk and alighted near the hole: he recognised the wood-pecker. And he remembered that this was the first bird Wilson had killed that first day he entered the American forest: he was glad that it was the firstheencountered! No sooner had the wood-pecker alighted than the head of another bird appeared at the hole and the wood-pecker took to his heels—to his wings. Webster wished he had known what this other bird was: it had a blackband across its chest and wore a speckled jacket and a dull reddish cap on the back of its head. A disturbance reached him from a nearby treetop, a wailing voice, a gulping sound, as if something up there were sick and full of suffering and were trying to take its medicine. He watched the spot and presently a crow flew out of the thick leaves: the crow's family seemed not in good health. A ground squirrel jumped to the end of a rotting log some yards away but at sight of him shrieked and darted in again. The whole pasture was alive.
Webster had all this time become conscious that another sound had been reaching his ear at regular intervals from the high branches of the trees, first in one place and then in another.His eyes had followed the voice but he could see no bird. The sound was like this:
Se—u—re?
That was the first half of the song—a question. A few moments later the other half followed, perhaps from another tree—the answer:
Se—u—u.
Here was a mystery: what was the bird? Could it be the bluebird!—his ignorance again, the comicality of his ignorance! Webster had never seen or heard a bluebird. He recalled what the professor had told them—that Alexander Wilson had written the first poem on the American bluebird, perhaps still the best poem; and he had given them the poem to memorise if they liked, saying that they might not think itgood poetry, but at least it was the poetry of a man who thought he could criticise Robert Burns! Webster had memorised the verses and as he now searched the forest boughs for this invisible bluebird, he repeated to himself some of Wilson's lines: