The jaunt with Edgar and the excitement about old "Three-Legs" had distracted my thoughts for the time being, but had not cured me of homesickness. Two days later my mother sent me by mail my book of arithmetic, the one I had recently used at school; she thought that I might attend the district school in Maine and need it.
Now there is not usually much in a text-book of arithmetic that excites fond memories in a boy of thirteen. Often the reverse. But I had no sooner taken that well-thumbed book from its wrapping of brown paper, than another pang of homesickness went through me; and this time it was nostalgia in earnest.
If, at this moment, there is anywhere in the United States, or in the whole world, a boy or girl who is homesick, I know how to pity each and all of them. I do not suppose that my pity will do them much good. Nothing does much good. But I know exactly how they feel, and they have my heartiest sympathy.
Whoever ridicules and laughs at any one who is truly homesick must have a hard heart and a shallow mind. It is no laughing matter. Homesickness is something midway between a physical disease and a mental worry. It has a real, physiological cause, and is due to the inability of the brain to adapt itself, without a struggle, to the strangeness of new scenes and new surroundings; and that struggle is often a very painful one.
Homesickness had not fallen upon me at first, therewere so many new things to see, so many new cousins and young neighbors to get acquainted with. For a time my attention was wholly taken up with the novelties of the place. The farm, the cattle, the birds, the work which we had to do, everything, in fact, was novel. Perhaps for that very reason, when the mental struggle to really adapt myself to it came, it was the more profound and severe.
That morning I had no sooner unwrapped this old book than the pang began again. I could not swallow a mouthful of breakfast. It really seemed to me that I should die right then and there if I did not get up and start for home.
Blueis no adequate word with which to describe what I suffered. It came upon me with a suddenness, too, which nearly took my breath with it. At the table were the bright, cheery faces of my cousins, and of the Old Squire and Gram; but for the moment, how saddening, poor and dreary everything looked to me! The thought of remaining there, month after month, gave me heart-sink like death.
Kind parent, if you have a boy or girl off at school, or anywhere at a distance, whom you wish to be happy and content, do not write very much to them, and above all things do not go on to tell them of home affairs, home scenes and familiar objects. It is mistaken kindness. It might possibly answer—if a boy—to speak of a woodpile soon to be sawn; or—if a girl—to allude to great heaps of dishes to be washed; but I would not even advise much of that, nor anything else in the least suggestive of home scenes; in fact, write as little as possible.
I remember, as I sat there at table, unable to eat, or even to swallow my coffee, that Cousin Theodora glanced compassionately at me, and Ellen and Addison curiously. They surmised what ailed me, from their own previous experience, but said nothing. The Old Squire and Gram, too, wisely forebore to stir meby foolishly expressed sympathy. How glad I was that they did not speak to me!
The day passed drearily enough, and as evening drew on, still gloomier shadows fell into my mind. I stole away to read my mother's letter again and be alone with my trouble. Billow after billow of the blackest misery broke over me. I went out into the garden, then around to the back side of the west barn; the darkening landscape was not more somber than my heart. How unspeakably dreary the dim, weathered old barn, the shadowy hills and forests looked to me! Not less dreary seemed my whole future. I felt exiled. It appeared to me that I should never know another happy moment, that I never could, by any possibility, enjoy myself again. I sat down on a stone, in the dark, put my head in my hands, and gave myself up to the most somber reflections. Cold despair crept into me at every pore. A fever of tears then filled my eyes. I laid wild plans to escape; I would run away that very night and go home. The distance, as I knew, was about five hundred miles; but I was sure that I could walk twenty miles per day, perhaps thirty. In twenty days I could reach home. I did not think much about food by the way; it did not appear to me that I should want to touch a mouthful of anything eatable till I reached home. If I did so far desire, I fancied that I might gather a few berries by the wayside. Then I began to plan the details of setting off. I would go indoors and put on my other suit of clothes, after the family were asleep; and not to be too mean and cause too much anxiety, I determined to write a few words on a bit of paper and slip it under Theodora's door, advising them all not to worry about me, as I had gone home, "for a time." These latter words I concluded to add, by way of breaking it a little more gently to them, not that I had the slightest intention of ever returning.
As I sat there with my hands over my face,planning, and brewing hot tears, I heard a step in the grass, and looking up, saw a tall, shadowy figure which I knew must be the Old Squire.
"Is that you, 'Edmund?'" he said, as I jumped up off the stone. He still called me that sometimes. "It is a close night, I declare," he continued. "I had about as lief be out here in the cool myself, as in the house abed. But the mosquitoes bite a little, don't they?".
I had neither noticed that the evening was hot, nor yet that there were any mosquitoes; I was quite insensible to ordinary physical influences.
The old gentleman lay down on the grass beside me. "Let's lay and talk a spell," said he. "I never come round back of the barn here, but that I think of the fox I shot when I was a young man. That fox had a 'brush' as big 'round as your leg, the biggest fox-tail I ever saw. He had been coming around the barns for some time; I used to hear him bark, mornings, about four o'clock."
The Old Squire then went on, at length, to tell me how he watched for the fox, and how he loaded the old "United-States-piece" musket for it, and how he finally fired and shot the fox, but that the gun nearly broke his collar-bone, he had loaded it so heavily. He was nigh half an hour telling me all about it, and in spite of myself, I grew somewhat interested.
"Why, how these mosquitoes do bite!" he finally exclaimed, giving one a rousing slap. "Let's go in before they eat us up, and go to bed."
I went in with him and went to bed, but my trouble had now cankered too deeply to be easily calmed. In the blackness of the bedchamber it beset me again. Like other maladies, nostalgia, when once set up, must run its course, I suppose. It never has appeared to me that I slept at all that night, yet perhaps I did. Long before daylight, however, I was again shedding hot tears and laying wild plans. But my thoughts hadnow taken on an even gloomier and more desperate shade. What was the use of my going home, I thought; my mother did not want me there. What was the use of living in such a hopelessly dreary world! Live there at the Old Squire's I could not, would not; of that I was certain. I never could endure it. The thought of existing there, as I then felt, week after week and month after month, was simply unbearable. Better die at once. I began to think of various cases of suicide of which I had heard, or read—in my happier days: the rope, poison, drowning. The latter I believed to be the easier method of death; and I thought of the Little Sea down where we washed the sheep and had begun to go in swimming on warm days. There was water enough there in the deepest place;—and once in, it would soon be over!
As the hours of the night dragged by, I began to take a morbid pleasure in thinking about it, as if I had fully decided the question. I really believed that I had as good as decided to drown myself; and when at length we were called at five o'clock, I rose to dress in a very unhealthy frame of mind.
"What's the matter with you?" exclaimed Halstead, as we were putting on our shoes.
"Nothing," said I, heavily.
"You look as if you had lost your best friend," said he, with an unsympathetic grin.
"I shall lose something more than that before long," I replied, with a miserable effort at mystery.
"You don't say!" cried he, ironically, and went out with an air of hard indifference, not at all flattering to my self-love.
How poor and undesirable the house, the farm, the whole world, looked to me that morning. I plodded about, assisting to do the early chores; I really had no appetite for my breakfast, and stole away from the table after a few moments. Gram called after me, to know if I were unwell; I did not dare trustmyself to reply, lest I should burst forth weeping, and hastening out to the Balm o' Gilead trees, stood looking down the lane a moment, with a dreadful tumult of repressed misery raging within me. My mental malady had reached a crisis; I was wild with anguish. It appeared to me that I never could endure it. One thought only kept its place in my mind—the Little Sea! I stole away down the lane, crossed the road, then went on through the east field and pasture, till I reached the brook.
Not that I now believe there was much likelihood of my drowning myself. Even if I had been wretched enough to jump in, the first spoonful of cold water in my nose would probably have sent me scrambling out, as would have been the case with hundreds who have really drowned themselves, if only they had not jumped into too deep water. But I wanted to do something or other very desperate, what, I hardly knew myself. As I ran, I debated whether I should take off my clothes, or drown with them on; I did not remember reading how suicides of hydropathic tendencies had managed that detail. The boys would find my body Sunday morning when they came down to bathe, I thought. Yet some one else might find me; and it seemed more decent and proper to drown with them on. I walked around the Little Sea and singled out the deepest place in it, where there was four or five feet of water. It looked to be fully sufficient.
There was now nothing to prevent my going ahead with my project; but since I had looked into the water and saw how aqueous it appeared, considered as a place to spend from that morning on till Sunday in, haste did not seem altogether so desirable, and I was not in nearly so great a hurry. I sat down on a stone to think it over once more. It would be unbecoming, I recollected, to take such a step without mental preparation.
Still, I actually did half believe that when I rosefrom that stone, I should plunge into the pond. I imagine that I sat there for more than half an hour, and very likely should have remained much longer had the Old Squire not made his appearance, glancing curiously over the dam, a few rods below me.
It struck me as a little singular that he should be there so early and so very soon after breakfast. He had an axe on his shoulder, however, and it occurred to me that it might possibly be that he was there to mend the pasture fence. When he saw me sitting there, he smiled broadly, and coming nearer said, "Oh, this isn't nearly so good a brook for fishing as the other one on the west side."
"'Fishing!'" thought I. "How little he knows what brought me here! Can he not see that I haven't a pole?"
"Don't know exactly why," he continued, retrospectively, "but there never were nearly so many trout here as in the west brook. I meant to have given you and Addison a day to go over there before now, but work has been rather pressing ever since you came."
I rose from the stone, thinking—and not wholly sorry to think—that suicide must necessarily be postponed for that day, at least; for I could not, of course, harrow the old gentleman's feelings by plunging into the Little Sea before his very eyes. He seemed so guileless, too, and so wholly unsuspecting of my fell design!
As we walked away, he told me of great trout which he had caught when a boy, particularly of one big three-pound trout which he had captured at a deep hole in the west brook, down near the lake.
My mind was still too much disturbed to enjoy these piscatorial reminiscences, however; and noting this, after a time, Gramp opened another subject with me.
"A man has lately made an offer for my farm and timber lands here," said he. "I do not know that I shall accept it; but I have had some thoughts ofselling and moving out West. If I should, I suppose you would have to go back to Philadelphia. If I went West to look for a farm, I should call at Philadelphia on my way. You and I would make the trip there together."
It is astonishing what an effect that last remark of grandfather's produced upon me. The whole world changed from deepest, darkest blue to rose color in one minute; and I said, provisionally, to myself that even if he did not sell so that we could start for a month, I could perhaps endure it.
Observing the cheerier light in my face, probably, the old gentleman laughed good-naturedly. He had not forgotten what it is to be a boy and feel a boy's intense sorrows as well as joys; and he went on to say that a journey to Philadelphia was a mere nothing nowadays. Why, one might start, as for instance, that morning and be at Philadelphia the next morning at eleven o'clock!
But how glad I was that he did not notice that I was homesick! He did not even appear to mistrust such a thing. And as for drowning myself, well, the less said or thought about that now the better.
I walked back to the house with the Old Squire; and I got him to let me carry the axe, for I wanted Addison and Halse to think that Gramp and I had been off mending fence together.
At intervals, however, for a month or more, I continued to be afflicted by transient spasms of homesickness, but none of them were as severe as these first ones, and they gradually ceased altogether.
Dear boys and girls who are homesick, it is astonishing sometimes how quickly the spasm will pass off, and how bright and cheery life will look again a few moments later. So don't jump into deep water without waiting a bit to think it over. It is a hard old world to live in. I don't pretend to tell you that it isn't; yet life has a great many pleasant spots, afterall, if only we will have a little patience and courage to wait and look for them. Scores of poor, desperate young people have actually drowned themselves, from one cause or another, who would have scrambled out and lived happily for years afterwards, if only they had not jumped in where the water was so deep! A safe rule in all these cases is never try to commit suicide by drowning till after you have learned to swim.
To this day I recall with what a zest my appetite returned after that last attack of homesickness, and how good the farm food tasted. That day, too, Gram had "mug-bread," and for supper pones made into Johnny-reb toast. But these, perhaps, are unheard-of dishes to many readers.
The pones were simply large, round, thin corn-meal cakes baked in a fritter-spider in a hot oven. I have lately written to Cousin Ellen, who now lives in the far Northwest, to ask her just how they used to make those pones at the old farm. She has replied lightly that for a batch of pones, they merely took a quart of yellow corn-meal, two tablespoonfuls of wheat flour, a teaspoonful of salt and half a teaspoonful of soda, all well stirred to a thin batter in boiling-hot water. This batter was then poured into large fritter-spiders, forming thin sheets, and baked yellow-brown in a hot oven. To make these pones into "Johnny-reb toast," they were basted while still hot with butter, then moistened plentifully with Jersey milk which was half cream, allowed to stand five minutes, then served still warm.
The recipe, I may add, came from Virginia in 1862, being brought home to Maine by one of my uncles, who lived for a time in an Old Dominion family, despite all the asperities of the War. From the same sunny homeland of historic Presidents we obtained the recipe for a marvellously good spider-cake, but that came later, as I shall relate in due course.
As a hungry boy I used sometimes to think that pones and "Johnny-reb toast" were pretty nearly worth the War to us!
Yet neither of these ever came quite up to "mug-bread"—the best flour bread ever made, I still verily believe.
But the making and the baking of it are not easy, and a failure with mug-bread is something awful!
The reader may not know it as mug-bread, for that was a local name, confined largely to our own Maine homestead and vicinity. It has been called milk-yeast bread, patent bread, milk-emptyings bread and salt-rising bread; and it has also been stigmatized by several opprobrious and offensive epithets, bestowed, I am told, by irate housewives who lacked the skill and genius to make it.
We named it "mug-bread" because Gram always started it in an old porcelain mug; a tall, white, lavender-and-gold banded mug, that held more than a quart, but was sadly cracked, and, for safety's sake, was wound just above the handle with fine white silk cord.
That mug was sixty-eight years old, and that silk cord had been on it since 1842. Its familiar kitchen name was "Old Hannah." I suspect that the interstices of this ancient silk string were the lurking-places of that delightful yeast microbe that gave the flavor to the bread. For there was rarely a failure when that mug was used.
About once in four days, generally at night, Gram would take two tablespoonfuls of corn-meal, ten of boiled milk, and half a teaspoonful of salt, mix them well in that mug, and set it on the low mantel-shelf, behind the kitchen stove funnel, where it would keep uniformly warm overnight. She covered in the top of the mug with an old tin coffee-pot lid, which just fitted it.
When we saw "Old Hannah" go up there, we knew that some mug-bread was incubating, and, if all worked well, would be due the following afternoon for supper. For you cannot hurry mug-bread.
The next morning, by breakfast-time, a peep into the mug would show whether the little "eyes" had begun to open in the mixture or not. Here was where housewifely skill came in. Those eyes must be opened just so wide, and there must be just so many of them, or else it was not safe to proceed. It might be better to throw the setting away and start new, or else to let it stand till noon. Gram knew as soon as she had looked at it. If the omens were favorable, a cup of warm water and a variable quantity of carefully warmed flour were added, and a batter made of about the consistency for fritters. This was set up behind the funnel again, to rise till noon.
More flour was then added and the dough carefully worked and set for a third rising. About three o'clock it was put in tins and baked in an even oven.
The favorite loaves with us were "cart-wheels," formed by putting the dough in large, round, shallow tin plates, about a foot in diameter. When baked, the yellow-brown, crackery loaf was only an inch thick. The rule at Gram's table was a "cart-wheel" to a boy, with all the fresh Jersey butter and canned berries or fruit that he wanted with it.
Sometimes, however, the mug would disappear rather suddenly in the morning, and an odor as of sulphureted hydrogen would linger about, till the kitchen windows were raised and the fresh west wind admitted.
That meant that a failure had occurred; the wrong microbe had obtained possession of the mug. In such cases Gram acted promptly and said little. She was always reticent concerning mug-bread. It had unspeakable contingencies.
Ellen and Theodora shared the old lady's reticence.Ellen, in fact, could never be persuaded to eat it, good as it was.
"I know too much about it," she would say. "It isn't nice."
Beyond doubt, when "mug-bread" goes astray at about the second rising, the consequences are depressing.
If its little eyes fail to open and the batter takes on a greasy aspect, with a tendency to crawl and glide about, no time should be lost. Open all the windows at once and send the batter promptly to the swill-barrel. It is useless to dally with it. You will be sorry if you do. When it goes wrong, it is utterly depraved.
I remember an experience which Theodora and Ellen had with mug-bread on one occasion, when Gram was away from home. Aunt Nabbie and Uncle Pascal Mowbray came on from Philadelphia while she and the Old Squire were gone.
Aunt Nabbie was grandmother's sister, and she and Uncle Mowbray had been talking all that season of coming to visit us. But September had been spoken of as the time they were coming.
They changed their minds, however. Uncle Pascal desired to look after some business venture of his in Portland, and decided to come in August. It was a somewhat sudden change of plan, but they sent us a letter the day before they started, thinking that we would get it and meet them at the railway station.
Now, all dear city cousins, aunts, uncles and the rest of you who visit your country relatives, summer or winter, hear me! Do not hold back your letter telling them you are coming till the day before you start.
Nine times out of ten they will not get it. You will get there before the letter does; and the chances are that you will have to provide your own transportation for the six or ten miles from the railway station tothe farm, and you will think that distance longer than all the rest of the journey.
Most likely, too, you will find the farmer gone to a Grange meeting; and by the time you have sat round the farmhouse door on your trunk till he gets back at sunset, you will be homesick, and maybe hungry.
Also—for there are two sides to the matter—your country brother and his wife will be troubled about it. So send your letter at least a week ahead.
The first we knew of the coming of Uncle Pascal and Aunt Nabbie, they drove into the yard with a livery team from the village, and an express wagon coming on behind with their trunks.
Besides Uncle and Aunt, there was a smiling, dark-haired youth with them, a grand-nephew of Uncle Mowbray, named Olin Randall, whom we had heard of often as a kind of third or fourth cousin, but had never seen. He had never beheld Maine before, and was regarding everything with curiosity and a little grin of condescension.
That grin of his nearly upset us, particularly Ellen and "Doad," who for a hundred reasons wished to make a very favorable impression on Uncle and Aunt Mowbray and all the family. I nearly forgot to mention that Uncle Mowbray was reputed very fussy and particular about his food.
Our two-story farmhouse was comfortable and big, and we had plenty of everything; but of course it was not altogether like one of the finest houses in Philadelphia. For Uncle Mowbray was a wealthy man, one of those thrifty, prosperous Philadelphia merchants of the era ending with the Civil War. He never let a dollar escape him.
They came just at dusk. We boys were doing the chores. The girls were getting supper. Theodora had resolved to try her hand at a batch of "mug-bread" for the next day, and had set "Old Hannah" up for it.
The unexpected arrival upset us all a good deal, particularly Ellen and Theodora, who had to bear the brunt of grandmother's absence, get tea, see to the spare rooms and do everything else. And then there was Olin, mildly grinning. His presence disturbed the girls worse than everything else. But Aunt Nabbie smoothed away their anxieties, and helped to make all comfortable.
We got through the evening better than had at first seemed likely, and in the morning the girls rose at five and tried to hurry that "mug-bread" along, with other things, so as to have some of it for dinner, for they found that they were short of bread.
Ellen, I believe, thought that they had better not attempt the risky experiment, but should start some hop-yeast bread.
Theodora, however, peeped into the old mug, saw encouraging eyes in it, and resolved to go on. They mixed it up with the necessary warm water and flour and set it carefully back for the second rising.
Perhaps they had a little hotter fire than usual, perhaps they had hurried it a shade too much, or—well, you can "perhaps" anything you like with milk-yeast bread. At all events, it took the wrong turn and began to perfume the kitchen.
If they had not been hard pressed and a little flurried that morning, the girls would probably have thrown it out. Instead, they took it down, saw that it was rising a little and—hoping that it would yet pull through—worked in more flour and soda, and hurried four loaves of it into the oven to bake.
Then it was that the unleavened turpitude of that hostile microbe displayed the full measure of its malignity. A horrible odor presently filled the place. Stale eggs would have been Araby the Blest beside it.
The girls hastily shut the kitchen doors, but doors would not hold it in. It captured the whole house.Aunt Nabbie, in the sitting-room, perceived it and came rustling out to give motherly advice and assistance.
And it chanced that while Theodora was confidentially explaining it to her, the kitchen door leading to the front piazza opened, and in walked Uncle Pascal, with Olin behind him. They had been out in the garden looking at the fruit, and had come back to get Aunt Nabbie to see the bees.
When that awful odor smote them they stopped short. Uncle Mowbray was a fastidious man. He sniffed and turned up his nose.
"Is it sink spouts?" he gasped. "Are the traps out of order?"
"No, no, Pascal!" said Aunt Nabbie, in a low tone, trying to quiet him. "It is only bread."
"Bread!" cried Uncle Mowbray, with a glance of rank suspicion at the two girls. "Bread smelling like that!"
Just then Ellen discovered something white, which appeared to be mysteriously increasing in size, in the shadow on the back side of the kitchen stove. After a glance she caught open the oven door.
It was that mug-bread dough! It had crawled—crawled out of the tins into the oven—crawled down under the oven door to the kitchen floor, where it made a viscous puddle, and was now trying, apparently, to crawl out of sight under the wood-box.
Aunt Nabbie burst out laughing; she could not help it. Then she tried to turn Uncle Mowbray out.
But no, he must stand there and talk about it. He was one of those men who are always peeping round the kitchen, to see if the women are doing things right. But Olin scudded out after one look, and the girls saw him under one of the Balm o' Gilead trees, shaking and laughing as if he would split.
Poor Doad and Nell! That was a dreadful forenoon for them. As youthful housekeepers they felt,themselves disgraced beyond redemption. In three years they had not recovered from it, and would cringe when any one reminded them of Uncle Mowbray and the mug-bread.
"Sing away, ye joyous birds,While the sun is o'er us."
"Sing away, ye joyous birds,While the sun is o'er us."
Looking back to that first fortnight after my arrival at the Old Squire's, I think what most impressed my youthful mind was the country verdure and the bird-songs. Everything looked so very green, accustomed as my eyes were to the red city bricks, white doorsteps and dusty streets. The universal green of those June days at times well nigh bewildered me.
Astronomers tell us that there are systems of worlds in outer space, presided over by green suns; it was as if I had been transported to such a world. Moreover, the effect was cool and calm and healthful; cities are abnormal places of abode; man originated and during all the early ages of his development, lived in the green, arboreal country, surrounded by rustic scenery and sylvan quiet. The clangor and roar of a great city, particularly the noise by night, is unnatural; nor are the reflected colors from urban structures normal to the eye. Add to these the undue tension to which city life, as a whole, braces the living substance of brain and nerve, and the reason why city populations have to be so constantly recruited from the country is in some degree explained. Children even more than older persons need country surroundings.
Next to the deep novelty of the wide green landscape, came the bird-songs. It was June. The air seemed to me all a-quiver with bird-notes, and I waslistening to each and every one. Ah, to my untried, youthful eyes those fresh great hay-fields, whitening with ox-eyed daisies, reddening with sweet-scented clover and streaked golden with vivid yellow butter-cups, over which the song-convulsed bobolinks hovered on arcuate wings!
I had never heard the nesting song of a bobolink before. What a song it is!—the eager zeal, the exultation in it. The overflowing, rollicking joy with which it is poured forth, filled me with such gleeful astonishment, the first time I heard one, and struck such a chord of sympathetic feeling in my heart and so powerfully, that I recollect shouting, "ye-ho!" and racing tumultuously after the rapturous singer.
"What does that bird say?" I cried.
Laughing quietly at my fresh curiosity, the Old Squire told me that the bird was supposed to say,—
"Bob o' Lincoln, take-a-stick-and-give-a-lick, Bob-olink, Kitty-link, Withy-link, Billy-seeble, see, see, see!"
Addison gave a somewhat different interpretation which has now slipped my memory; I deemed the Old Squire's version the more reliable one. While strawberrying in the fields, that summer, I searched three or four times for the nests which I felt sure were close by, in the grass, for the little plain gray wife of the noisy singer sat on the weed-tops, crying,—"Skack! skack!" but I could not find them.
Once, I remember, the following year Theodora and I resolved that we would find the nest of one bold fellow that kept singing close over our heads, as we were gathering strawberries in a grassy swale, in the west field. We set down our dishes and crept over every foot of a tract at least a quarter of an acre in extent, and went over a part of it two or three times. At last, we found it, but not till we had crushed both nest and eggs beneath our crawling knees—a denouement which distressed Theodora so much that shedeclared she would never search for a bobolink's nest again. "Clumsy monsters that we are," said she; "the poor thing's nest is crushed into the dirt!"
When we came to mow that swale a few days after, Gramp first marvelled, then grumbled repeatedly; for the grass was in a mat. He spoke of it at the dinner table that day, making a covert accusation against Gram, whereupon Theodora and I owned up in the matter, Doad naively adding that we had done it "on the strength of Gram's original permit," but that we had agreed never to do so again. The Old Squire laughed a little grimly and said he wanted it understood, that the permit, alluded to, was not transferable. But the old lady now interposed her opinion, that the permit could be made a moderate use of by others, if she saw fit—and needed strawberries.
A pair of blue-birds built their nest in a box which Addison had nailed to a short pole and set up in the barnyard wall; and every morning, as we milked the cows, we would hear their plaintive notes, repeated over and over to each other as they flew about;—"Deary, cheer up, Deary, cheer up!" as if life needed constant mutual consolation, to be supported. "Old Ummy," the house cat, was much inclined to watch their box and once attempted to climb up to them.
Two pairs of peewees built about the premises, one just inside the south barn cellar, the other under a projecting window-sill at the end of the wagon-house. These two pairs, or younger birds reared there, had built in these same places for seven or eight years. Night and morning as we milked, and at noon also, as we sat grinding scythes at the well, those old peewees would alight on posts, or gables, rub their beaks twice on the dry wood and cry, "Peewee, peewee, peewitic; pewee, peer-a-zitic!" For some not very good reason, I took a boyish dislike to peewees. They are very useful birds, great destroyers of worms, moths and flies, and so far as I know, never do the slightestharm, which can hardly be said of all our feathered favorites.
As we hoed potatoes and corn on those green June days, the song of the little gray ground sparrows was constantly in my ears, although the others seemed not to notice it.
"And what does that one say?" I asked Gramp.
"What one?" the old gentleman asked.
"Why, that bird! It sings all the time," I rejoined. "Don't you hear it?"
He stopped and appeared to listen, at a loss, for a minute, as to what I heard.
"Oh, those sparrows," replied he, at length. "Addison, can you tell him what they say?"
"Yes," replied Ad, laughing, "they say and say it very distinctly, too, 'Charlotte, Charlotte, don't you hear me whistle?' Charlotte is his mate, you know; and the reply to that is 'Philip, Philip's sitting on the thistle.'"
"That is a little different from what they used to tell me when I was a boy," Gramp remarked. "I was told that they say, 'War-link, war-link, christle, christle, christle; high-link, high-link, twiddle, twiddle, twiddle.'"
"Good deal anybody knows what a bird says," Halstead exclaimed, derisively. "They don't say anything that I can make out."
But it seemed to me, after Addison had mentioned it, that the first, or opening note of the song sparrow, was much like, "Charlotte, Charlotte, don't you hear me whistle?" They had several other notes, too, not as easily likened to human language; indeed, these humble little sparrows, when one comes to listen closely to them in all their moods, have a curious variety of shortarias.
During my second week at the farm, I found a sparrow's nest in a small bunch of hard-hack, a few rods from the cow-pasture bars, with four eggs,resembling, only a little larger than, speckled garden beans; and I visited it every morning, till the sprawling, skinny little chicks were hatched. But on the third morning the nest was empty; something had taken them. Addison said that it was most likely a crow, but possibly a snake. We often found the nests, while haying in the fields; the scythe generally passed over them without doing any harm, and to save them from the rake, we would put up a stick close beside them. But their enemies are wofully numerous; not half the nests of young are reared. Ants, I think, kill numbers of the nestlings, soon after they are hatched, when they chance to be near an ant-hill.
But in the early mornings and evenings, and before the quickly gathering south rains, the songsters of all others, which made the air vocal, were the great, bold, red-breasted robins, not fewer than nine pairs of which had their capacious nests in the garden, orchard and Balm o' Gilead trees. They always took the greater part of our cherries, till Addison at a considerable expense, some years later, bought mosquito netting to spread over the tree tops; and they also ate strawberries greedily; but we as constantly overlooked their offenses, they sang so royally and came familiarly back to us so early every spring. No one can long find the heart to injure Robin Red-Breast.
I do not think it necessary to qualify, or speak of this our fine bird as the "American robin, or red-breasted thrush," because a different bird is called the robin in England. This our bird is the Robin; and we shall call it so without apology, or explanatory adjectives.
The robin songs in the Balm o' Gileads, just across the yard from our chamber windows, were the matins that often waked us in June, and sounded in our drowsy ears as we lay, still half asleep, reluctant to rise and dress. For however it may be with most boys, I am obliged to confess that both then and later, Iwas a sleepy-head in the morning; it always seemed to me on waking, particularly in the summer months, that I was not half rested, and that I would give almost anything I possessed for another hour of sleep. As a fact, I now feel sure that I did not get sleep enough, from half past nine in the evening to five in the morning; and I think that most boys and girls of thirteen and fourteen need nine hours of sleep in every twenty-four hours, especially where they are in active exercise or work throughout the day. It is really cruel to drive a boy up when he is so shockingly sleepy! There was always so much going on, that we could not well go to bed till after nine in the evening, although I would sometimes steal away up-stairs as soon as it was dark.
Curiously enough it was when I was but about half awake in the morning, that those robin-songs sounded the most distinctly, and I seemed to hear every note and trill which they uttered.
"Tulip, tulip, tulip; skillit, skillit,Tulip, skillit; fill it, fill it, fill it;"—
"Tulip, tulip, tulip; skillit, skillit,Tulip, skillit; fill it, fill it, fill it;"—
followed after a moment or two, perhaps, by a shrill and noisy "Piff! piff! piff!"—as some sudden dissension broke out, or some suspicious cat, or other marauder, came near the nest tree. The crows, always bold in the early morning hours, would come into the Balm o' Gileads after birds' nests, sometimes, before we were astir. I remember that Addison once cut my nap short by firing his gun from the chamber window at a crow that was sneaking into the Balm o' Gileads after young robins. He shot the crow, but my own ear rang for more than two hours, and I was so confused for a time, that I scarcely knew enough to dress myself.
There is no combination of letters which more nearly represents the song notes of the robin than theabove, I think, although many attempts have been made to render them into some semblance of human language. Addison always insisted that they said, "Dew-lip, Dew-lip; bill it, bill it, bill it;"—the whole song being an exhortation of the robin to his mate whose name wasDew-lip, to get up andbill itfor worms. Halstead had somewheres got hold of a medical rendering of the song, by a waggish doctor who declared that the robins were constantly admonishing him in the line of his profession:—
"Kill 'em, cure 'em; physic, physic."
"Kill 'em, cure 'em; physic, physic."
But the rest of us scouted this partisan interpretation.
The explosive, alarmingly energetic danger cry of, "Piff, piff," which will so suddenly wake the entire vicinity of the nest, is at times modified and given quite a different intonation, as if to express discontent: "Fibb, fibb!" and sometimes even loneliness: "Pheeb, pheeb!"—very mournful.
During a shower, accompanied by wind in heavy wrenching gusts, in the night, that summer, a nest containing four young robins fell from a maple, a few rods down the lane, into the grass beneath. Theodora heard the outcry of the old robins, blended with the thunder and the roar of the rain, in the night, and noticing their mournful notes next morning about the tree, made search and discovered the calamity. Addison and she gathered up the nestlings and putting them in an old berry box, lined with grass and cotton batting, tied the improvised nest to a branch of the maple. For an hour or two the scolding old birds would not go near the thing, but later in the day we saw them, feeding their young in it, quite as if nothing had happened to disturb them.
In the rear of the wagon-house there grew a good-sized mountain ash or round-wood tree which nearly every fall was crowned with the usual great bright-redclusters of bitter berries. Late in October the robins always came for those berries, and sometimes a flock of fifty or sixty would assemble. We often tried to frighten the birds away, for the red clusters are beautiful in winter, but for a long time we never succeeded in saving them. The robins would linger about for a week, or more, rather than leave a single bunch of those berries ungathered. Addison once placed a stuffed cat-skin in the tree, at which the robins scolded vociferously for a day or two from the neighboring shrubs and fence; but they suddenly discovered the deception and got all the remaining berries in the course of a single forenoon. Addison was boasting a little of the success of his ruse when, at dinner, Ellen quietly bade him go look at the tree. The robins had already got every berry and gone, leaving the feline effigy in the bare tree, an object of mirth and ridicule. A scarecrow made of old clothes, stuffed with hay and crowned by an old hat, set up in the tree the following year, served no better purpose. Ellen and Theodora then hung an old tin clothes boiler in the tree, and arranged a jangling bunch of tin ware inside it, with a long line running to the kitchen window, where they could conveniently give it a jerk every few minutes. This device answered well for a day or two, and it was very amusing to see those robins scatter from the tree, when the line was pulled. They were some little time making up their minds concerning it, and would sit on the back fence and rub their beaks on the posts, at intervals, as if making a great effort to comprehend the cause of the "manifestations" inside the boiler. No doubt the more superstitious ones attributed it to "spirits." Skepticism increased, however, and by the second day one unbelieving red fellow refused to budge, till the line was jerked twice, and soon after that they wore the girls out, pulling it, and got the berries as usual.The year after, Addison saved the berries by stretching one of his cherry-tree nets over the round-wood tree, in October. It chanced, however, that the tree failed to produce a crop of berries the next season and died a year or two later;—a circumstance which Gram hinted, mysteriously, might be a "dispensation," on account of our persistent efforts to thwart the robins. It should be taken into account, however, that the mountain-ash is not long-lived, and that this was already an old tree.
In a large maple, down the lane, a preacher-bird sang every day in June and until into August, generally loudest and most continuously, from eleven till two o'clock. On coming to or going from our dinner, we would often hear him: sometimes he sang in the morning and now and then after supper. This bird—it is the red-eyed vireo—has an oddly persistent, pragmatic note, which can hardly be called singing, being more like declamation and somewhat disconnected and disjoint, as if the "preacher" were laying down certain truths and facts and seeking by constant iteration to impress them upon dullards. Betwixt every one of these short sentences, there is a little pause, as if the preacher were waiting for the truth to strike home to his hearers; but if the bird is watched, he will be seen to be picking and hopping about on the branch which serves him as a pulpit, snapping up a bug or a seed here and there. Yet his discourse goes steadily on, by the half hour, or hour, sometimes with a rising inflection, as after a question, sometimes the falling, as having given an irrefutable answer, himself. Once the idea that the bird is preaching has entered a listener's mind, he can never shake it off.
"My hearers—where are you?—You know it—you see it.—Do you hear me?—Do you believe it?" And so on, upon the same insistent and at length tiresome strain.
"Oh, I do wish that preacher bird would stop," Ellen would exclaim at times. "He has 'preached' steadily all the forenoon!"
His place for singing was always about half way from the ground to the top of the maple, and he rarely came out in sight. The female was probably sitting on her nest, hard by. They are trim little olive-tinted birds and often rear two broods, I think, for they remain north till autumn.
Once while Elder Witham was with us, in haying time, Ellen exclaimed, inadvertently, as we were going in to sit down at table one day, "There's that preacher bird again!"
The Elder looked at her a moment and said slowly, "'Preacher-bird, preacher-bird,' what kind of a bird is that, young lady?"
Greatly abashed at her lapse, Ellen hardly knew how to best explain it, but Addison came to her rescue. "There are two of those vireos," he remarked in a perfectly natural, matter-of-fact tone. "One of them, the warbling vireo, they call the 'brigadier' on account of its peculiar note, and the other or red-eyed vireo, the 'preacher,' from its earnest manner of utterance. I don't know," Addison continued, with candid frankness, "that the names are very well chosen, but we have got in the habit of calling them that way."
The Elder listened to this, observing Addison closely, then appeared thoughtful for a moment and said, impressively, "Well, all God's creatures preach, if only we have ears to hear them." Ellen drew a long breath of relief, and after dinner, out on the wood-shed walk, she took Addison by the button and said, "You're a treasure, Ad; ask me for a cooky any time after this."
The brigadier, or warbling vireo, frequently sits on the tops of trees, when singing; while the preacher takes his stand midway from the ground upwards;the brigadier, too, more frequently joins in the great opening overture of all bird voices, at dawn, to usher in the new day, while preacher reserves his notes till the earlier choir has ceased its anthem. Withal the little preacher is much more apt to nest in trees near the habitations of men than his congener, the brigadier, who not unfrequently makes his abode at a distance from buildings, where forests border pastures, or old roads enter woody lands.
Another shrill, small songster of habits quite similar to the brigadier we used sometimes to hear, but rarely saw, on our way over to the "Aunt Hannah lot," an adjunct of the Old Squire's farm, to reach which we crossed a tract of sparse woods. Its notes, prolonged on a very sharp, high key, resembled the words,My fee-fee-fee-fee-fee!each louder and keener than the preceding.
Addison was quite uncertain as to this bird, during the first and second summers we were at the farm. We only saw it once or twice; for its favorite place, while singing, is at the top of some large dense tree; and we were never able to find its nest. Addison at length decided that it was an oven-bird, a surmise which he greatly desired to verify by finding the rest.
Later in life he has often laughed over our ignorance and our fruitless quests at that time.
Among the raspberry and blackberry briars, beside the stone wall on the south side of this same old road, leading to the Aunt Hannah lot, we used to see, occasionally, a deep blue indigo-bird, a very active little fellow, always flitting and hopping about amongst the briars. But we never heard it sing, nor utter any note, save rarely a petulantsnip, snip, and never found its nest.
To the south of the same lot there was a tract of mixed wood, sapling pines, maples, a few beeches, and farther down, nearer the brook, white ash and greatyellow birches, with swamp maples, osier and alder. Here among the beeches, maples and pines, we at times heard a Theresa-bird. Theodora chanced to know something of this bird; and I remember that the first time we ever went there together, she called out to us to listen to the low, sweet note, which otherwise, in our haste, we should not have noticed. Addison had never heard it then, and his volumes of Audubon did not describe New England birds very clearly; but Theodora said this was a Theresa-bird (which we subsequently found to be the Green Warbler) and that its song was supposed, in Catholic countries, to be a petition toSt. Theresa, viz.,—"Hear me, St. Theresa," beginning quite high and sinking to a much lower strain. I have since seen in the naturalist Nuttall's work, that this author compares the note of the Green Warbler to the syllables,te-de-deritsea, repeated slowly and melodiously.
On the north side of the lane, leading from the house down to the road, opposite the maple above alluded to, where the robins had a nest, there stood two elms, quite tall trees, in the uppermost of which, during three summers, a pair of Baltimore orioles built. These orioles had never come there previously; at least, the Old Squire had never seen one, but Gram recognized them the first time one sang, as an old acquaintance of her girlhood days; she called them Golden Robins and was much delighted to hear them. They came on one of the first days of June; and as I had arrived but a few days previously, Gram declared that I "had brought them with me." But the fact is, that the Baltimore oriole moves its habitat slowly northeastward, in the wake of man and his orchards and shade trees; for it is one of those birds which, like the robin, depend on mankind for protection. This pair constructed a hanging nest from a twig of one of the drooping elm branches and reared a brood successfully that season; and throughout that entire monthof June, their song, uttered at intervals of their labors, was a daily delight to us all. Next after the wood thrush and the robin, the loud yet sweetly modulated call of the Baltimore oriole is the most pleasing of all our bird notes. Pure and sweet as it is, too, it nearly always startles the hearer, from its regal volume and 5 strength. Gram's version of its song was,Cusick, cusick!So-ho-o-o!Do you know I'm back with you!But the words themselves give no idea whatever of the song, unless uttered with the strange, liquid modulations which characterize it.
During the third season some accident befell the pair, or their nest; they suddenly disappeared and thenceforward we missed their melodious invocations. Gram, in particular, lamented their departure. A pair, perhaps the same pair, afterwards built in a butternut tree near the Edwards' farmhouse; but they never returned to us. To the lover of birds, the oriole in its flight among the trees, like a yellow meteor flashing past, is a sight that instantly rivets the attention, and is as delightfully startling to the eye as its song is to the ear. But I know of no device by means of which they can be attracted to nest in any given locality; their tastes are not well enough known to us; "houses," like those which attract the blue-bird and the martin, possess no charm for the oriole. With the first of June Gram watched, wistfully, for the return of this pair, during a number of successive springs; and for her sake especially, we all hoped they would come back.
I arrived too late the first spring, to hear the woodlands echo to the May-note of the white-throated sparrow. Once only, while going out to get the cows with little Wealthy, the second week after I came, I heard it twice repeated, from the woods along the south side of the pasture, and when I asked my small companion what kind of a bird that was, she roguishly cried, "Oh, that's old Ben Peabody."
"Is that what he says?" I asked, for the name at once struck me as being like the bird's note.
"Yes," cried Wealthy. "He says, 'Old Ben Peabody, Peabody, Peabody,' just as plain as anything; Theodora says so; and so does Nell and all of us, but Addison. Ad thinks he says, 'All day whittling, whittling, whittling.' And Alf Batchelder says,—but I'll not tell what he thinks the bird says."
"What is it?" I queried.
"It's nothing very pretty," quoth Wealthy, running off to get around the cows, thereby evading the question altogether, for she had not as yet grown very well acquainted with me.
But I have perhaps lingered too long with birds and bird-songs. It is a fond subject, however, and scarcely can I forbear to speak of the veeries, the vesper-birds, and "hair-birds" whose nests we so often found in the orchard; the cedar birds or cherry birds which so persistently stripped the wild cherry trees and pear-plum shrubs; the wood thrushes that trilled forth such sad, mellow refrains in the cool, gray border of the wood-lot below the fields, at eventide; the yellow-hammers that tapped on the pasture stumps and cried out boisterously when rain was impending; the wrens that filled and re-filled a bit of hollow aqueduct log on the lane wall, with sticks for a nest and laid thirteen eggs in it; the hundreds of black-birds that built in the reeds down at the great bog, near the head of the lake; the sap-suckers that punctured the trunks of the apple-trees with thousands of tiny holes; the many-voiced blue-jays that came around when the corn was ripening in September and sometimes lingered all winter in the neighborhood.
And of the great pileated woodpeckers, a pair of which occasionally cried loud and long from the five lofty pine stubs in the colt pasture, beyond the Aunt Hannah lot; the yellow-birds that piped,pee-chid-aby,pee-chid-aby, on wavy lines of flight, upon the lastdays of August, just ere taking wing for warmer climes; the imitative cat-birds that built in the alders along the road across the meadow, whose nests the boys held it lawful to destroy because, forsooth, "they sucked other birds' eggs," a false accusation rendered plausible, perhaps, from their disagreeable feline squalls, and not wholly ingenuous imitations of the songs of the thrush, the veery and the robin.
How well, too, I recall the cuckoos that, night or day, intoned so moodily in the willow copses below the east field fence and suffered from a like unpopular accusation of "laying their eggs in other birds' nests." Also the mated triads of sooty chimney swallows that rumbled nightly in the great brick flues of the farmhouse, and at first almost terrified me, but at length furnished the thalamian refrain that most surely lulled me asleep; the red-headed woodpeckers that with sharp cries and concave stoop of flight moved fitfully, from tree to tree, tapping this one loudly, that one low and dull, and whose nest hole in the dead maple on the hillside was re-occupied year after year, till at last the stub blew down and broke short off at the hole itself; the king-fishers that with the same stooping flight, sprung their sharp rattles along the brooks and lakeside; the martins that feloniously caught the bees, and every season dragged their squalling, screaming young out of their pole-house, then poked them off the platform to fly for themselves, having first, however, cleared the yard of cats.
The militant king birds, too, that built every June on the tops of the small apple-trees in the young orchard, and raged in mid air, overhead, pouring out a wild farago of sharp cries, never so happy as when in full career after crows, hawks, cats or dogs; the moth-catching night-hawks that criedpeerkfrom their wide mouths, high in the sky at nightfall, and dived far aslant on stiff wings, with a long drawnsoo-oo-ook; the clucking whip-poor-wills, that chanted from the bare flat pasture rocks; the chickadees that came into the orchard and about the great loose farm woodpile, in February, with their odd little minor refrain ofcic-a-da-da-da-da, mere feathery mites of ceaseless activity that somehow did not freeze, at 20° below zero.
In this freezing weather, too, came the white-winged flocks of snow-buntings, that heralded the coming storm and flew away, blending with the whirling snowflakes, uttering queer thin notes that seemed like spirit voices from the upper air: all these and many others, Nature's humble angels, what part and parcel they were of that dear old farm life of ours!
Nor yet have I mentioned the larger game birds, nor the birds of prey; the "hoot-owls" that both in summer and winter, but oftenest in March and October, on still, dark, cloudy evenings, uttered their dismal, deep basshoot, hoot, hoo-oo-oot, from the depths of the gloomy forest side, beyond the Little Sea; the hen-hawks that cried downchickee-eeto us, from endless mazy circles high over the farm, and occasionally decimated the poultry, or were seen sailing low across the fields with a snake dangling from their claws; the eagles that seldom, but on a few occasions paid a brief visit to the vicinity; the herons that frogged along the boggy shore of the lake and built their nests in the tops of the Foy Brook pines; the wild geese that flew northward in a wide V, early in the spring and again southward in October; the sheldrake and the black ducks which Addison had such success shooting every fall, in the old mill pond, beyond the east wood-lot; the swift-diving loons of the blue Pennesseewassee, that flew heavily across the hills, to several northerly ponds, uttering shaken, hollow cries, or that in the early evening and morning hours, pealed their mellow, alto horns from the calm bosom of the lake;the partridges that "drummed" in the outlying copses and patches of second growth, in April, and led forth their broods in June, subject every autumn to our first excited, early efforts at gunning; and last of all, the flapping, canny, thievish, black crows that like the foxes were always about, and always at loggerheads with the farmers.