I n Cod 
 
 AN. 
 
IN GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS 
 
THE WORKS OF WILLIAM A. QUAYLE 
 
 "THE POET'S POET AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 "A HERO AND SOME OTHER FOLK" 
 
 A STUDY IN CURRENT SOCIAL THEORIES 
 
 "THE BLESSED LIFE" 
 
 IN GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS 
 
IN GOD'S OUT-OF 
 DOORS 
 
 WILLIAM A. QUAYLE 
 
 CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND GRAHAM 
 NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS 
 
a- 
 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY 
 JENNINGS & PYE 
 
PRELUDE 
 
 RANKLY, little is to be anticipated from the Author 
 of this book. He is far from being a specialist. 
 He is not entomologist nor botanist nor ornitholo- 
 gist. He confesses to knowing which end of a 
 flower the root grows on and but little more. 
 
 He purposes writing because he loves God's 
 Out-of-Doors. The blue sky touches him to ji 
 sadness, like reading a letter from one much 
 loved and long dead; and the 
 shadows in quiet water affect him like a A 
 prayer. The author's wish is to people other < 
 hearts with love of flower and woodland path 
 and drifting cloud and dimming light and 
 moonlit distance and starlight and voices 
 of bird and wind and cadence of the rainfall and the 
 storm, and to make men and women more the lovers of 
 this bewildering world fashioned in loveliness by the 
 artist hand of God. And beyond all this, he would be 
 glad to bring them into fellowship and love with God, 
 which is the poesy and eloquence of life. 
 
 WILLIAM A. QUAYLE 
 
 4977,39 
 
The photographs interpretive of Nature in this book 
 are by Mr. George N. Jennings, Mrs. Jacoby, Mr. 
 J. F. Earhart, Mr. Wm. Simpkinson, Mr. Roy Holtz, 
 Mr. Charles C. Woods, Mr. Charles Schurman, and 
 Mr. Lare; but the great majority are by Dr. Charles 
 S. Parmenter; while the drawings are by Margaret 
 Robbins. ::::::: 
 
PLACES AND THINGS 
 IN GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS 
 
 HERE MADE MENTION OF 
 
 /. In God's Out-of-Doors, 
 
 II. On Seeing, - 
 
 III. When Spring Comes Home, 
 
 IV. Winter Trees, 
 V. Golden-rod, 
 
 VI. I Go A- Fishing, - 
 
 VII. The Goings of the Winds, 
 VIII. The Falls of St. Croix, 
 
 IX. When Autumn Fades, 
 
 X. A Walk Along a Railroad in June, 
 
 XI. The Windings of a Stream, 
 
 XII. Four Seasons^One Year, 
 
 XIII. On Winter Panes, - 
 
 XIV. Walking to My Farm, 
 XV. My Farm, 
 
 XVI. Gloaming, - 
 
 XVII. Good-Night, 
 
 15 
 23 
 33 
 37 
 69 
 77 
 93 
 107 
 119 
 123 
 137 
 145 
 161 
 165 
 177 
 225 
 232 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Page 
 
 AUTUMN LEAVES (Frontispiece), - 4 
 
 SPRING IS WAKING (Title Page), 5 
 FLAGS, -------- 
 
 'A BLACKBERRY BOW OF PROMISE, - 9 
 
 LILACS, H 
 
 A SPRIG OF WILD CRAB APPLE, ...... \2 
 
 PEACH BLOSSOMS, - 13 
 
 APPLE BLOSSOMS, - - 14 
 
 GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS, - 15 
 
 SUNSET, ----------- 17 
 
 A ROBIN REDBREAST IN HIS FAVORITE HAUNT, - - 20 
 
 WHERE WIND FLOWERS BLOOM, ------- 21 
 
 POND LILIES, 23 
 
 THE HAWTHORN WITH ITS BLOOM OF SNOW, - 25 
 
 EMPTY, -------- 27 
 
 A WOODLAND POOL OF DOGTOOTH VIOLETS, 
 
 ON AUTUMN HILLSIDES, 29 
 
 WHERE MEADOW LARKS SING, - 31 
 
 A TOUCH OF SPRING, - 33 
 
 WHEN SPRING COMES HOME, ------- 34, 35 
 
 WINTER TREES, 37 
 
 THE OAK, --------- - - 39 
 
 DESOLATE, 43 
 
 BIRCH-TREES, - 45 
 
 BEECH-TREES, 47 
 
 A HACKBERRY PILLAR, --------- 49 
 
 A WALNUT, _---.- 50 
 
 THE MAPLE, - 51 
 
 THE SPREADING ELM, 53 
 
 A WINTER COTTONWOOD, -------- 56 
 
 11 
 
THE SHELL-BARK HICKORY, 
 
 MY WILLOW, ______ 
 
 THE LOCUST, ------- 
 
 SYCAMORES, 
 
 THROUGH THE PINE WOODS, 
 
 GOLDEN-ROD, - - - 
 
 WHERE GOLDEN-RODS BLOOM, - 
 
 WINTER GOLDEN-ROD, - 
 
 THE OPEN ROAD, ----- 
 
 LAYS SNARES LIKE AN ASSASSIN, - 
 THE SPOILS, ------ 
 
 CROSSING THE STREAM, - 
 REEDS ALONG THE BANKS, 
 ALONG THE STREAM, - 
 
 THE SOLE PINE, - - - - - 
 
 WHERE THE POLE WAS LOST, 
 
 THE GOING OF THE WIND, - 
 
 WHERE ZEPHYRS TOUCH THE WILLOWS, 
 
 THE WIND PUFFS THE SAIL, 
 
 THUNDERHEAD, 
 
 THE SURF, 
 
 IN BATTLE MOOD, - 
 A PATCH OF CLOVER, - 
 A SINGING BROOK, - 
 THE OLD MILL, 
 
 WHENCE THE SPRINGS FLOW, 
 THE FALLS OF ST. CROIX, - 
 PINE TOPS EDGE THE SKY, 
 THE WALLED ROCKS, - - - . - 
 PINES RAGGED AS SPANISH SOLDIERS, 
 SUNRISE ON THE RIVER, 
 THE OTHER SHORE, - 
 THE MOANING TREES, - _ - - 
 
 12 
 
 Pag* 
 58 
 
 - 59 
 60 
 
 - 63 
 67 
 
 - 69 
 71 
 
 74, 75 
 77 
 
 - 79 
 83 
 
 - 84 
 85 
 
 - 87 
 88 
 
 - 90 
 93 
 
 - 95 
 98 
 
 - 99 
 100 
 
 - 101 
 103 
 
 - 105 
 107 
 
 - 109 
 111 
 
 - 112 
 113 
 
 - 114 
 116 
 
 - 117 
 119 
 
Page 
 
 WHEN AUTUMN FADES, 120 
 
 THE SLEEPY-EYED CATTLE, -------- 123 
 
 QUAIL, ------ 125 
 
 SWAMP GRASSES, ---------- 128 
 
 WHERE THE WATER LILIES GROW, ------ 129 
 
 THE LEANING WILLOW, --------- 131 
 
 THE BRIDGE, ------ 134 
 
 BLUE FLAGS, ----------- 135 
 
 A SILVER STREAM, - - 137 
 
 BETWEEN HIGH BANKS, - 139 
 
 IN WINDING WAYS, --------- 142 
 
 THROUGH LONG GRASSES, - - - 143 
 
 LOITERING, ----------- 144 
 
 THE BIRTHDAY OF THE YEAR, ------- 145 
 
 SPRING, _____ _ 147 
 
 AN IVY PILLAR, ----------- 150 
 
 SUMMER, ------------ 151 
 
 A SUMMER HARVEST, - - - - - - - - - 153 
 
 AUTUMN, ------------ 155 
 
 MY AUTUMN HILLSIDE, --------- 156 
 
 WINTER, ----- _______ 157 
 
 ON WINTER PANES, ---------- 161 
 
 VIOLETS AND FLEUR-DE-LIS, --_--_- 162 
 
 13 
 
THE CREEPING VINE, 
 
 IN THE COUNTRY QUIET, 
 
 THE ROAD TO MY FARM, - 
 
 THE LOWING CATTLE, - 
 
 THE CLOUDS ARE BONNIE, 
 
 SHADOWS, ._.__. 
 
 THE CROW'S NEST, - 
 
 THE BIRDS' WINTER BED, - 
 
 THE COMING HORSE, 
 
 THE TENANT PLOWS THE FIELD, 
 
 CORN SHOCKS PITCH THEIR TENTS, 
 
 THE OWL, ----._ 
 
 FARM FRIENDS, ----- 
 
 THE CROWS, ------ 
 
 CRACKS NUTS AND SQUIRREL JOKES, 
 
 THE GOLDEN DAYS OF HARVEST, 
 
 THE PLUM THICKET, - 
 
 A SPRAY OF APPLE BLOSSOMS, - 
 
 THE RAVINE, - 
 
 THE SPRING, ------ 
 
 THE VILLAIN AND HIS FRIENDS, - 
 
 JACK IN THE PULPIT, - 
 
 THE TENANT'S COW, - 
 
 TALL TREES RIM THE CREST, 
 
 LEAFLESS TREES, 
 
 MY WILD ROSE THICKET, 
 
 EVENING SHADOWS, - 
 
 GLOAMING, ---___ 
 
 THE POOL IN THE MEADOW, - 
 
 THE DAY IS DONE, 
 
 14 
 
 Page 
 
 163 
 
 165 
 
 167 
 
 170 
 
 172 
 
 73 
 
 174 
 
 175 
 
 177 
 
 179 
 
 185 
 
 188 
 
 189 
 
 191 
 
 193 
 
 195 
 
 197 
 
 200 
 
 202 
 
 205 
 
 209 
 
 213 
 
 215 
 
 217 
 
 218 
 
 221 
 
 225 
 
 227 
 
 231 
 
 232 
 
IN GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS 
 
SUNSET 
 
r 
 
 IN GOD'S OUT-OF-DOORS 
 
 OME people do not well know that God is out-of-doors. 
 I marvel at them. He is everywhere "though I take 
 the wings of the morning" but so God is in dusks 
 and dawns and twilights and noons, in doors and out, 
 at toil and on holidays, where deserts keep tryst with 
 the moonlight, and where the wide sea can behold no 
 shore God is always wherever I have gone. He is 
 in the little room where a baby learns its prayer 
 from mother lips, kneeling, and with fingers inter- 
 laced (God loves a sight like this), and in the 
 church where congregations meet to wait on the 
 Lord, and "worship in the beauty of holiness," and where in God's acre 
 we bury our beloved out of the sight of our eyes dimmed with weeping 
 God is there; but he is also out where he has planted the wind 
 flowers, and where the hawthorn stoops beneath its drifted snows fresh 
 fallen, and where sweet eglantine blooms and the fringed gentian, and 
 where the Indian pipe grows in the dusk of quiet woods, and where the 
 maple flushes a little in the early spring and sows the ground beneath, 
 where its shadows will soon shut sunlight out, with its own pink blos- 
 soms, and where the sycamore stands in winter with its yellow apples 
 like a jest of harvest for a tree so bulky, or where dodder plant, yellow 
 as gold, steals saps from other plants to feed its splendors on, and where 
 the sea-fowls float like a ghost of voices through the night skies, heard 
 but unseen, God is out-of-doors also God is everywhere. 
 
 He made the Out-of-doors and loves it, and haunts it, as Jesus did 
 the mountain and the sea. "Behold the lilies how they grow," He 
 said whose name is sweet; and so I will heed them; and, He said, 
 "Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?" True, sparrows are very 
 plentiful and bickering, but I will look at them, for He made them and 
 
 19 
 
:-*: V _ 
 W'i ^&4t 
 
 pointed them out to me The 
 trees where the birds nest and 
 the birds that nest there, the 
 shadows where the herds lie 
 and the herds panting in the 
 shadows with luminant eyes, 
 buds that swell toward blossom- 
 ing and blossoms in haste 
 toward fruitage, white sea gull 
 and robin redbreast with his 
 song like the gurgle of laughter 
 in a baby's throat, high sea 
 clifts leaning seaward and sea 
 marshes through which the salt 
 tides flood their crystal rivers, 
 fern and oak and sweet sur- 
 prise of mosses, rivulet and 
 broad river, plunge of waterfall 
 and placid stream where the 
 
 A ROBIN REDBREAST IN HIS FAVORITE HAUNT-AN APPLE-TREE 
 
current is asleep, russet grove of scrub oak on winter hills, and the vivid 
 greens of willows in fresh leaf in early springtime, I will behold "them 
 all." They belong in God's Out-of-doors; and God is out there looking 
 his premises over. And if he will let me I will go with him. And as I 
 look his way to ask him if I may go, he looking my way, before I say a 
 word, says, "Come, let us go into my Out-of-doors;" and I am going 
 with HIM into God's Out-of-doors. 
 
 WHERE WIND FLOWERS BLOOM 
 
 21 
 
ON SEEING 
 
THE HAWTHORN WITH ITS BLOOM OF SNOW 
 
ON SEEING 
 
 WOULD reverently add to the list of the 
 beatitudes this, "Blessed are those who help us 
 to see." From my heart I bless such men and 
 women. All the good must pray to God, 
 "Help us to see." The pity of this world is 
 not its limitations, but ours. Into the earth as 
 into a king's golden goblet, God has poured all 
 things which minister to an immortal and growing 
 life. He has made a world pregnant with ideas. Vistas 
 open as through a sunrise world to wide meadow lands beyond, where 
 are sunshine and flowers and birds swaying in the tall grasses and sing- 
 ing as they sway and flute notes of singing waters and odors of damp 
 sod and blooming flowers, and a meadow lark s dulcet note and swaying 
 shadows of the woods when rocked by south winds and 
 billowy motion of the grass like some emerald sea with 
 tide setting to shore. We are always on the way to 
 God's open as we are always on our way to God if we 
 would have it so. Nothing of God's perishes, but 
 endures. We have not gotten to the end, seeing 
 God is forever holding something back. We 
 can not bankrupt his opportunities nor provi- 
 dences nor knowledge nor joy; and how good 
 that is! Life is as a book whose best pages 
 are as yet uncut, and a growing interest holds 
 us, filling the mind as a flood tide the sinuous 
 shore line 
 
 Who knows what is hid under the open 
 sky? Some birds build their nest in plain 
 
 27 
 
sight, and so hide their summer's house. The very openness was a 
 hiding process. And under the wide, high sky, where hang bird and star 
 and flower, and tree-twig with its bursting green, under that open these 
 beatitudes are hidden as ferns are hid under a sandstone ledge, deep in 
 a wood and wet with a perpetual shower of dripping from the stony roof. 
 So much to see, so little seen; that is our grief. How we have let sum- 
 mers waste! Sparrows are not less provident. Nature's bounty runs 
 to waste, or, what is worse, runs to weed. And a poet thought of this 
 
 A WOODLAND POOL OF DOGTOOTH VIOLETS 
 
 (and, as for that, what have not the poets thought of ? Some one of 
 them has left a caress on every flower of the field as the winds do): 
 
 "There are flowerets down in the valley low 
 And over the mountain side, 
 That were never praised by a human voice 
 Nor by human eye descried; 
 But sweet as the breath of the royal rose 
 Is the perfume they exhale; 
 And where they bloom and why they bloom 
 The good Lord knoweth well.'" 
 28 
 
ON AUTUMN HILLSIDES 
 
How this waste shames us since men and women have eyes for 
 seeing! They are not blind. It were a mercy if one did not see that 
 he were blind, because the blind are not blameworthy for their lack of 
 sight. Deserts are flowerless; but this habitable world is a tangle of 
 beauties, like the interlacing of the sunshine and the shadows in a sum- 
 mer wood when sunlight rules the sky. A world full of loveliness, and 
 we see it not! That sounds a requiem. "Having eyes, see not," is our 
 pathos. That word haunts me as mourners haunt the grave of their 
 dear dead. May not a prophet's prayer for his servant be a prayer 
 uttered in our behalf as well? "I pray thee, open the young man's eyes 
 that he may see." So many dusks and dawns nobody watches. I 
 resent people running mad over carnivals and slighting the pageants of 
 the morning and the 
 night, worth a pil- 
 grimage about our 
 world to catch sight 
 of once. One sunset 
 in a decade; how 
 thronged the way 
 would be that led to 
 its mountain ! One in 
 a week; who watches? 
 Pity the blind who, having eyes, see not. Edward Rowland Sill tells a 
 benignant angel standing near, 
 
 "This is our earth most friendly earth and fair;" 
 
 and he was right. His praise was scant, not profuse. 
 
 A mercy to the heart is the ubiquity of this loveliness. Some beauty 
 abides everywhere. Deserts are 'flowerless; but night and moonlight on 
 the far-stretching sands are so beautiful as fairly to stoop beneath their 
 load. Beauty blooms unseen in shaded woodlands; in corn-rows; in field 
 corners; on barbed wires, where wild vines tangle and blur the green of 
 leaves with the surprise of flowers; on garbage heaps; among cinders; 
 on rocky ledges; in quiet pools as lilies; in quiet skies as stars; purpling 
 the hollows in remote mountains, and making the far hills blue as the far 
 sea; voyaging as clouds; stationary as trees; wandering as a child with 
 tangled hair and laughing face; vines visible, drooping over tumbling 
 sheds or modest cottage or on stake-and-rider fences, shading windows 
 of poverty; thrilling mornings with singing and soaring larks, and in 
 
 31 
 
twilight with the vespers of the whip-poor-will; the plover's cry; a 
 child's laughter and a child's face; a fair woman with her lovelit eyes; 
 a boy with dirty and gleeful face ; a leafless tree in a bare pasture ; the 
 distilled odors of night and dews, so beauty blooms and such things are 
 daily companionships; and we scarcely know that they are fair. What a 
 world Ruskin found in "The Stones of Venice!" and what rarer world 
 would God show every one of us if we would let him! Health to body 
 and soul is in this out-of-doors. A walk through dewy fields is to pass 
 into an enchanted land. Sometimes a friend says, "See, a falling star." 
 We look and see no passing light, and he replies, "It has fallen." No 
 brief flight of falling star is comparable for loveliness, though I love its 
 light, with what we wade knee-deep in as grasses growing in ravines, and 
 we have no thought for it. Nature as God left it is so much, has such a 
 pensive delight, and serves as evangel of a gospel of contentment and 
 peace. They are not poor who see. Riches unspeakable are theirs. I 
 would for myself and for others pray, "Teach me to see lest I be poor 
 beyond the depths of poverty." If I had might, as I would guide travelers 
 to a mountain which swept eyes over a visionary scene, so would I 
 guide to the vision of every day's delight. 
 
 To go abroad is not our need. To stay at home and have a variant 
 world report to us as if we were emperors, that is traveledness. God will 
 leave nothing wholly commonplace. He is against common things in 
 that he exalts them into uncommon loveliness. A dead tree-trunk is 
 overgrown with moss and vines; and tawny deserts have haunting dis- 
 tances and solitudes enthralling to imagination; the homeliest face has 
 a radiant light upon it when love goes by its door with loitering steps; 
 winter has hospitalities genial as those of summer. All the year is 
 hospitable if we are neighborly. 
 
 1 Flower in the crannied wall, 
 I pluck you out of the crannies, " 
 
 and hold you with a sense of joy not to be lightly told. Writing poetry is 
 not our classic achievement after all. Seeing and feeling and being 
 poetry is life's best work. 
 Come, for 
 
 "The swan on still St. Mary's lake 
 Floats double, swan and shadow.'" 
 
 Lord, teach me to see! 
 
 32 
 
WHEN SPRING COMES HOME 
 
hen Spring comes home 
 <^l^Qw fer /o^ gttjrimage, 
 ~ Unwearied, and unmarked by 
 When Spring comes home! 
 
 How wild with glee 
 The laughing children and the 
 And singing birds and golden hours, 
 And streams will be 
 When Spring comes home! 
 
 dull bank 
 
 Shall wake to smile with 
 Forgetting Winter's sad regrets, 
 
 And joys, to thank 
 
 Sweet Spring come. 
 
down long hills 
 There babble like a happy child, 
 And swirl and leap with Springtime wild 
 
 The crystal rills, 
 
 Sweet Spring come home! 
 
 When Spring comes home! 
 How passing sweet it is to know 
 Our spirits like God's violets grow, . -4^* 
 
 When Spring comes home! 
 
 And Spring comes home ! 
 When life's long Winter faints and dies, 
 There dawns upon our watching eyes 
 
 Heaven's Spring come home. 
 
 
WINTER TREES 
 
WINTER TREES 
 
 ; EAFLESS trees are, in ordinary thinking, a synonym 
 * J of desolation. They are nude, forlorn, forsaken, 
 mjti and are shivering through the winter as a beggar 
 * if* who thinks winter the necessary tribulation that 
 preludes spring. I have not so learned the trees. 
 Sympathy extended to them is, as I confidently 
 believe, misapplied. Winter trees are not mendi- 
 cants. The last thing they do is to ask alms. In 
 them, as I have become acquainted with them, is 
 a sturdy independence worthy of a Puritan colonist. 
 These words of Marianne Farningham are part true, 
 not wholly, though more nearly than the average 
 estimate : 
 
 "Poverty-stricken and gaunt they stand, 
 Dotted about o'er the hard brown land; 
 Stripped of their beauty they moan and sigh 
 To the pitiless breeze as it rushes by: 
 Leafless, forsaken, of song bereft, 
 
 They are like a life with no pleasure left : 
 
 \ 
 
 Beautiful even though stripped and bare, 
 Are the trees that are planted everywhere; 
 Winter' s best beauty belongs to them, 
 To their giant trunks and feathery stem, 
 And they bravely stand in the silent wood, 
 Like a patient life that is nobly good;'' 1 
 
 though I feel certain the trees will love her scarcely more because she 
 wrote of them, unless they are touched, as all good lives should be, by 
 thought given by the true hearts of women. Winter trees stand and 
 endure but they battle and enjoy and are beautiful as well. If I were 
 
 41 
 
to choose between leafless trees and leafy trees, I confess not to be 
 certain as to my choice, though I am sure the winter trees enjoy them- 
 selves not less than trees of summer time. To think that winter trees 
 are forlorn and beautyless is common. They are to my belief warlike, 
 strenuous, conquering, magnificent. Summer is the trees' furlough: 
 winter is their campaign one long battle both by night and day. 
 Winter rules them and gives them a hundred giants' thews. They are 
 as strong as Cassar's soldiers and heroic as Mark Antony's veterans. 
 
 In winter the individuality of trees comes out. In summer their 
 leaves are their chief circumstance and obscure their individuality. We 
 can not get at a tree's shape in summer. It is shut in of its own leaves 
 and shadow; but when winter, with icy sword blade, hacks away the last 
 tatter of summer finery, and leaves the tree to stand, naked as an 
 Indian warrior, then does it proclaim itself. To see the shadow cast 
 upon the snow or brown leaves (snow is better for taking a tree's 
 silhouette, and moonlight is better than sunlight), is to get acquainted 
 with the tree. But by moonlight, on the snow, stand long and see the 
 black and white picture of an elm-tree, or oak, or willow, or walnut, or 
 sycamore. Pine and cedar take poor pictures so, because their foliage 
 is perennial. To take a picture of a pine-tree always take it at noon 
 against a sky of intense blue (than such sight there is no lovelier in 
 heaven, especially if one could in the picture take the music winds and 
 pines, twin minstrels, make). I love trees all the year through in 
 spring when their coy green is hinted at rather than come ; in summer 
 when they make dense shadow and one might sleep from sunrise until 
 the night, nor have an intruding sunbeam peer into his face and make 
 him turn like a sleeper in pain; in autumn, when summer greens are 
 forgotten and trees are a sunset's splendor. I love this procession of 
 changing charm and meaning, but confess to the heterodoxy of believing 
 that winter trees are more beautiful to my eyes than those of spring, 
 summer, or autumn. 
 
 Tree branches are works of God's art than which even that Chief 
 Artist has done nothing lovelier, save only the face in child or woman. 
 All this beauty is lost in summer, like a woman's face hid under a 
 mourning veil. Than the tracery of elm twigs at the ends of curved 
 branches nothing could be more poetical. Think it not strange that 
 Turner and Ruskin should love trees to rapture; for in all the woods is 
 not one positively ungraceful tree The snarly gnarliness of certain 
 oaks minds a man of how true might grows when whipped with furious 
 
 42 
 
DESOLATE 
 
tempest; but they are far from 
 being unlovely. They mind me 
 of "Bob, Son of Battle." They 
 are in battle gusto and temper, 
 and love to fisticuff with storm 
 winds. 
 
 I do not well know the com- 
 mercial uses of trees, nor care 
 to. I know their character 
 product, which is more to my 
 purpose, for I am not commer- 
 cial; but with character I have 
 good need for forming comrade- 
 ship. Winter trees mean legiti- 
 mate strife Not the conten- 
 tion of the snarly and truculent, 
 not the tit-for-tat of the ruffian 
 who whips out sword and plies 
 it at a word, but the battle 
 method, which character never I 
 ceases to need; the battle that ? 
 
 BIRCH-TREES 
 45 
 
makes men and trees. War is an ingredient of souls, if souls are to 
 come to manhood. Every winter tree is like a man on guard at a 
 dangerous post No wind goes by, however sedate and conciliatory, that 
 the tree does not fling out naked arms of angry might before his face 
 and cry surlily, "Halt, who goes there?" and then the battle is fierce as 
 a Scotch clansman's onset. Winter trees make me proud of their grave 
 and reasonable pugnacity. 
 
 In winter is the time when most people get acquainted, I think. 
 The long evenings, and the shut-in firelight are conciliatory to friend- 
 ship and made for confidences. So it is natural in winter to grow 
 confidential with the trees. They then reveal their secret. Surly as 
 they look, you will not find them so if you will be companionable. Then 
 go out of town (trees stay in town because they are galley slaves 
 chained there). Go into the empty forest where a river runs (if Provi- 
 dence favor you so highly), and spend a day there, building a fire on 
 the sheltered side of some bank where the smoke curls on you, and the 
 delicious odors of the wood exhale, and the flame dances in the twist- 
 ing winds Let the day be gray. Cloudy days are the appropriate days 
 for making friendship with the trees. On open days the sky is too high, 
 too illuminated, there is no background for the trees; and besides the 
 sunlight makes shadow and gives wrong impression of twig, bark, and 
 limb The artists in their studios shut sunlight out. We who love the 
 trees must be as wise as they. When the gray clouds are just above 
 the tree tops, it is as if you looked at every tree against a background 
 of gray granite. A tree has its chance to declare itself as in a confes- 
 sional. There is no shadow ; and no light flames with its torch to make 
 wrong proportion, but it is as if twilight lit your lamp for you. On such 
 a day, wander, lover-like, among the trees, and they will be confidential 
 with you like women talking of their lovers. Give me a gray day with 
 its all-day twilight, and the naked might of forest, and I will not envy 
 kings their coronation. 
 
 A beech-tree is a picture. In the winter its sagging branches with 
 their gray-brown leaves hanging shiveringly, so wizen and little, like a 
 withered old man, and making their pitiful appeal as winds shiver by; 
 and its trunk like a pillar of dusk to hold the porch of the evening up. 
 Friend, if you do not know the beech-trees, you. have one acquaintance- 
 ship to contract wnich will do your life good. In autumn there is a 
 harvest sunlight on the beech leaves very fair to see, but after all the 
 beech trunk is the tree's treasure. I never pass a beech without a 
 
 46 
 
BEECH-TREES 
 
caress, for it is carven into 
 hundreds of hundreds of 
 cameos so lovely as that 
 they might each be a seal 
 for an artist's ring and 
 carven by Nassaro in the 
 days when his eyesight and 
 artist's instinct were perfec 
 tion This picture as you 
 see it is a hint only, for 
 every beech trunk has its 
 own wealth of cameos. 
 And you may use many a 
 daylight looking over their 
 patterns, just as you look 
 over the precious stones 
 
 in a cabinet, without any sense of weariness or 
 repetition. 
 
 A hackberry is a beautiful trunk This one is 
 a picture taken from my farm, though truth to say 
 it is the most beautiful hackberry bole I have ever 
 seen. Deep corrugations, as if sculptured by some 
 genius And indeed, so it was; for this genius 
 sculptor was God He is painter, poet, landscape- 
 gardener, botanist, lover of flowers, keeper of birds, 
 
architect of mountains and stars, and sculptor 
 who fashions rocks, river beds, and sea cliffs, and 
 tree branches and cloud landscapes into artistic 
 and unfathomable loveliness. Each thing I see 
 him make seems his masterpiece, though I know 
 it is not that he has done above the ordinary for 
 him, but that I am filled with his glory of doing, 
 until 1 can contain no more, even as the sea's 
 channels can contain no more oceans. 
 
 A walnut-tree is very beautiful. Its corruga- 
 tions of bark, dark almost to blackness, are always 
 possessed of witchery to my eyes. I see through 
 the tree as if it were dusky amber, the black 
 tawniness of walnut wood. No wonder that 
 through centuries walnut has been favored wood; 
 for who that has eyes to see but must love it? 
 But walnut is never beautiful by the skill of man, 
 be that skill however great, as when it stands 
 solitary on the green woodland background of a 
 hillside, and I seem to see through the graven 
 rind its wine- dregs of wood, and feel its beauty as 
 I do the beauty of the dawn. 
 
 In winter, wild crab-trees are strong as 
 strength. Their trunks are usually twisted as if 
 some storm had wrenched them with violent and 
 outrageous hands, but the virile tree refused to be 
 twisted down, and wears its signs of struggle and 
 survival on its front like scars on a soldier's fore- 
 head. Why, a Greek wrestler's sinewy arm and 
 leg carved in bronze are not to my eyes so hercu- 
 lean and fascinating as a crab-apple trunk seen 
 under a winter's gray sky. When spring comes 
 and this bronze statue flashes into flower and 
 perfume such as even spring with her bewildering 
 riches of such, has only few of, I do not thrill 
 to that exotic loveliness of bloom as I do to the 
 sheer bronze of the sinewy trunk, standing knee- 
 deep in winter's snows. 
 
 A soft maple is more beautiful in bark than 
 50 
 
 I \ 
 
 mSjIm 
 
 A WALNUT 
 
the sugar-tree, though its autumn 
 foliage lacks the wealth of glory of 
 the sugar-maple; but the bark, 
 specially of the branches, of a soft 
 maple is something fine as an 
 etching, and to use the exquisite, 
 exact, and poetical eyesight of 
 MAPLE "Gert Jan Ridd" (than whom, 
 
 none, not even Ruskin, sees nature with surer fidelity), is "like the bottom 
 of a red doe's foot." I can not speak of the maple bark to effect, nor can 
 it be photographed, nor painted, but I love to look on its finished beauty 
 by the hour, and hold my hand on its faint flame-color as if I were 
 warmed thereby. I make mention of this delicate bark, if haply I may 
 make more than myself lovers of this dainty doing of Nature's leisure 
 
And the elm-tree is always bewitching. In summer, when you can 
 tell this tree far as you can catch the contour across the fields by the 
 grace of its pose, and its rhythmic swaying of branches as keeping time 
 to music we do not hear, in winter the tree has its winter array No 
 tree in our woods has the beautiful network of branches the elm has. 
 Flung on the snow or seen against the blue sky or gray, it is as graceful 
 as any tree that spreads under the sky. Every branch has its own 
 household of tracery and delicacies of invention, for you shall find the 
 unexpected in the elm-tree's goings. No palm branch waved at temple 
 or at triumph, is fair as an elm branch. You can feast your eyes on it 
 as on the traceries of a frosty window-pane. To try to wrestle an elm- 
 tree down (despite its beauty, for beauty and virility do not often coin- 
 cide), seems something the storm-winds of summer or winter do not 
 have audacity to attempt. Elms have a firmer hold on the earth than 
 an oak. They dig for rootage deep and far. They pre-empt the land 
 where they sink their anchorage of roots. I do not recall to have seen 
 an elm-tree uprooted by tempests, though I have seen tall pine-trees 
 fallen like dead soldiers, and oaks lying, half-fallen or wholly, like a man 
 sorely wounded; but elms have a tenacity of fiber and a sagacity in 
 ramification of roots which all but defy storm-winds. Those who 
 would kill an elm, girdle it, though I resent their cowardly practice. It 
 seems so dastardly to open the veins of a man you have not the courage 
 to face nor the force to kill. The Cambridge elm, with its glory of 
 history seen through its leaves and sitting beneath its shadow, is scarcely 
 so engaging as the elms of the ordinary forest; for they are so beautiful 
 as to need no wealth of historical association to make them fair. 
 
 The bark of elms, in corrugation and in tint, is enough like the ruts 
 of dry country roads to be accused of plagiarism. Who knows but the 
 elm has wrapped about him a cloak worn by dusty summer? There is 
 in any case a dusty-road look to his garments, for which he must be 
 held to account. I like the fit and tone of his garment. 
 
 The oak-tree has the allegiancy of the centuries; for beneath its 
 shadows the Druids worshiped and built altars, as if it were half-deity, 
 or more. Words are weak as tears when they essay to tell an oak- 
 tree's epic. Bashan was land of oaks as Lebanon was land of cedars 
 but oaks are freesoilers. They live across the world They voyage to 
 all shores, and stand ready to greet the colonist when he sets foot upon 
 the strand. They met the Puritans, and DeSoto and Coronado, and 
 gave them welcome. Great ships have been debtors to them for hulls, 
 
 52 
 
huge to withstand tempests; kings have wainscoated their palace walls 
 with these exquisitely striated woods ; and pictures that were priceless 
 have been framed in their tawny loveliness. Why, no picture can be 
 more beautiful than the graining of oak. To place it on a floor is a 
 sin; for it is like walking on a picture: but to wainscoat stately rooms 
 with it, and swing its perpetual beauty in doors to halls of festival, and 
 to build mantels and line ceilings, that is just and legitimate In 
 seeing a winter oak you see all of the fine lines drawn by the graver's 
 tool of the great God, who has time off to spend in making the oak as 
 beautiful as inlaid work of pearl and onyx. And the great limbs billow 
 out shaggy and fierce, and their photogravure is something to dream of 
 by night. I know a nook near Cawker City, Kansas, a peninsula which 
 is almost an island by the tortuous winding of what used to be a stream 
 in those days when the rains drained them into stream-beds rather than 
 sinking into tilled fields; and here in a country almost devoid of trees, 
 is a bur-oak forest where great oaks grow, some of which fling shadows 
 seventy feet in diameter, and under whose shade a caravan might rest 
 under shadows so dense no ray of sunlight could peer through. This 
 oak-grove is worth making a pilgrimage to see; for I have not often 
 seen its equal anywhere across this continent. When winter winds 
 of might charge down on the forest, then an oak-tree laughs like a 
 lover, and shoots out his hundred furious fists until the storm-winds 
 are abashed. None must think to commiserate this battling giant. 
 Ulysses loved the battle of warring Trojans and stormy seas, but not 
 more than the oak-tree loves its conflict. These winter onsets are 
 better to him than dew, or rain, or gentle spring zephyrs. Through all 
 his huge trunk, fury runs. He drinks wine pressed from the grapes of 
 wrath ; and his huge arms hammer at the wind , and like the sound of 
 winds from the seas in the rigging of the ships, so shrills the wind 
 through the branches of this oaken harp. There is joy to the oak-trees 
 when storm-winds blow. 
 
 Cottonwoods have a fan-top spread out in bare wantonness as if to 
 catch every wind that passed that way. Not summer is in winter 
 cottonwoods; for their summer minstrelsy is as rainfall in the dusk of 
 evenings; but exposing wide expanse of branches to the winds, winter 
 cottonwoods make grave and noble music. I think it strange how 
 .seldom these winter trees have broken branches lying beneath them ; in 
 other words, with what uniformity they conquer the winds. You would 
 not think those long, slender branches, seemingly so disqualified to 
 
 55 
 
ff 
 
 il 
 
 *zr 
 
 withstand long months of sleep- 
 less conflict, are in fact quite 
 admirably qualified. These 
 wrestlings do them good. Brown- 
 ing was right when he lets old 
 rabbi Ben Ezra say, 
 
 " Then, welcome each rebuff 
 
 That turns earth's smoothness rough 
 Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand. 
 
 but go ' 
 
 Be our joys three-parts pain ! 
 Strive, and hold cheap the strain: 
 Leam, nor account the pang: dare, 
 never grudge the throe !" 
 
 The hue of the hacked, horny 
 rind of the cottonwood trunk 
 near its base is all but black. 
 Some I have seen which were 
 nothing less, while their branches 
 are light to whiteness, a green- 
 ish silver, in fact; but a lamp 
 light with gentle glow to the eyes 
 that love to linger on them, so 
 that as seen in winter across a 
 field they stand white as wearing 
 light as a garment, and make all 
 trees about them to appear as 
 
 
 A WINTER COTTONWOOD 
 56 
 
under a cloud, while only the cottonwoods stood in the sunlight. They 
 make the dawn and summer to rise upon me whenever I cast my eyes 
 their way, which is so often as to preclude enumerations. Cottonwoods 
 under cloud or light refuse to forget the sunlight. I think they remem- 
 ber the sunny Kansas plains where they are often the sole tree occu- 
 pants of wide wildernesses of grass. I can not be quit of the radiancy 
 of these trees, standing tall, and with what seems a promise of sun- 
 shine for all the woods. They are the true light-bearers. Because of 
 this peculiarity cottonwoods in winter days have a surprise about them 
 as though they had recently hailed from some land of delight, and kept 
 glad memories always smiling in their looks. I would it lay in me to 
 get people to watch the cottonwoods in winter as to listen to them in 
 summer. I know not which mood entices my spirit the more. In 
 summer when all is laughter the cottonwoods weep; in winter when all 
 things else are sad or angry, cottonwoods are laughing like a holiday. 
 They are the contradictions of the year; and may their beauty never 
 know a twilight ! 
 
 Willows always interest me. They are a fragile wood, but who 
 would think so to see them travel along all shores ? They are like frail 
 men, who with a body as weak as that of William the Third do such 
 herculean labor as would incline you to think old Samson hugged at the 
 temple's pillars. Weakness hath its own puissance. Their sweet pen- 
 siveness, their graceful droop along every ravine, saying as plainly as 
 speech can say, "Where I throw my shadow you shall find a living 
 well;" their dainty lance-leaves, among the earliest greenery of spring, 
 and sometimes among the latest greenery of autumn, and in whose 
 shadows summer winds seem prone to fall asleep or loiter idly; their 
 dainty yellow of foliage of the autumntime, and their struggle with the 
 winter's wind without complaint, and with strange career of victory, are 
 things which should forever endear the willow to the lover of God's 
 Out-of-Doors. 
 
 A willow never stands erect. Either it can not or will not. I incline 
 to the belief that the latter is the correct view. As in the picture, 
 willows lean at an easy angle as in pensive mood. They dream, may- 
 hap, upon the da>s that are no more. 
 
 ' ' 0, those old days ! Those near yet far off days ! 
 Paged with dear legends, winsome with sweet ways! 
 When spendthrift hearts all went a-gypsying: 
 Cared naught for form or statute laws or king, 
 But lived in melodies.'" 
 57 
 
Mayhap, it Is Of these days the willows 
 dream, but dream they do, summer or 
 winter They have a touch of pathos 
 in them evermore. The bark is like to 
 an elm so as to be easily mistaken for 
 it, and ashy- red in hue. These of the 
 picture are taken from "my farm" in 
 the ravine I set such store by, and 
 where in springtime the waters will pour 
 about them to their knees; and they 
 know it! They love that knee -deep 
 wading like little boys. In spring, with 
 their flash of early green, or in sum- 
 mer, with half slumber, and their 
 pensive droop of leaf and branch and 
 trunk well, God did certainly deal ten- 
 derly with the willows, and made them 
 very fair ! 
 
 The shell-bark hickory is the sur- 
 liest seeming tree in the wood, save 
 only the honey-locust, which is vindic- 
 tive and humanity-hating as Timon of 
 Athens, though when the fair summer 
 is blooming this misanthropic tree 
 flashes out in throngs of tiny leaves 
 almost as exquisite as ferns, and much 
 after their likeness. Not any tree has 
 any more beautiful leaves than a thorny 
 locust, so man-hating and beast-hating, 
 that even the merry squirrel can not 
 climb it, but in which birds build nests, 
 as in a citadel; for there the larger 
 birds can not come seeking prey, nor 
 the wise serpent. This evil, angry 
 tree so comes to serve good uses, 
 building with angry skill a fortress 
 
where the gentle bh'ds may dwell in 
 quiet, far from enemies In the 
 winter season, however, nothing can 
 be less propitiating The thorn -spines 
 jag out in clusters on every angry bole 
 and branch. 
 
 But as I have said, next to the 
 locust is the shell-bark hickory Sum- 
 mer or winter it curls up its lips like a 
 bull-cur. As a child I used to be 
 insulted by them, though like crusty 
 people I have known, they would snarl 
 at you and make you merry at the 
 same minute; for when fall frosts whiten 
 the house-tops a little, I was wont to 
 go to the woods of the Marais Des 
 Cygnes and find a hail of hickory nuts 
 slanting to earth; and I would make 
 merry beneath the branches, getting 
 oftentimes a sound rap on the head 
 by a friendly nut on its way to the 
 autumn leaves lying thick upon the 
 ground. But surly the shell-bark 
 hickory is. Great flakes of its bark 
 curling inevitably from the trunk, as 
 you have seen old shingles curl from 
 an ancient roof, dyed black as darkness 
 in long years of rain and drench of 
 summer sun. Surly the shell-barks are, 
 but beautiful. I have loved to love 
 them more than I will here set down, 
 lest some who read should think me 
 foolish; I pass no one of them in my 
 wanderings without stopping to watch 
 its ill-fit of garments and truculence of 
 demeanor. A baby shell-bark is 
 
 
 
smooth as any other hickory, 
 but grows not long till it 
 begins to snarl at passers 
 by, at which time it is ridic- 
 ulous to me and makes me 
 giggle. This snappishness is 
 like a pretty woman's pout- 
 ing, attractive as laughter. 
 And when a shell-bark sap- 
 ling is, say, twenty feet high, I have seen a bark which would suit the 
 glad fancies of an artist. Lichens of select sort gather on their curl- 
 ing rinds, yellowish and greenish lichens being favorites, and when 
 these are on the bark and out under winter rains, they become beauti- 
 ful as photogravures. If you suppose that, one shell-bark seen, all are 
 
 60 
 
 LOCUST 
 
seen, you were never more mistaken. Each has its charm like man 
 and woman. There is no duplicating. God makes his creations to be 
 like the marked copies of de luxe editions. Shell-barks are among 
 the treasures of my woods, and among the richest riches of winter 
 forests. 
 
 Not lightly to estimate these winter riches, I would profess that of 
 all winter trees the sycamore is most beautiful. In Indiana, on the 
 Wabash, they are at their kingliest I have not seen their equals. 
 There they grow stately with few limbs, and the sycamores stand pillars 
 of carven marble. The sycamore is to me a fascinating tree for two 
 special reasons. First, where he lives, and second, how he does. 
 Oaks and elms and walnuts are like God's common people plenty of 
 them and everywhere. They grow down in broad valleys, on the edge 
 of the stream; they are on the hillsides climbing the bluffs; they are on 
 bluff edges; they are in ravines far back from any stream where they 
 can find an unpre-empted field for woodland; there they dig into the 
 earth, loam or clay, rock or woodland. Not so a sycamore, which will 
 not of its own accord grow on hills or run up a bank from a stream. 
 The sycamore hugs the water courses. Not, be it observed, as the 
 willow which grows in ravines, where waters sometimes run down in 
 marshy ground, and always knee-deep in ravines or streams, being very 
 ducks for loving water; for sycamores rarely or never stand in either 
 streams or swamp places. They are coy, and stand a few feet up and 
 back from the river's bank. They grow where water stays. You will 
 not find them in ravines whose custom is to go dry in summer. Where 
 waters stay, there sycamores stay. These waterways of the sycamore 
 are of singular interest, as I think any one who studies them will agree. 
 A wide valley on river-levels you will find thick sown to sycamores 
 across its entire breadth, for here they reach water. A stream-edge will 
 be sentineled with sycamores rooting above the stream, but very often 
 leaning over the water so as to see their own faces. Infrequently I have 
 seen them on so-called second bottoms, but as a very general rule 
 where a bluff begins to climb, a sycamore refuses to follow. Only the 
 other day, happening to be on the railroad that ran along the beautiful 
 Gasconade, I watched this fine power of selection of sycamores know- 
 ing what they want and getting it. And I saw their white pillars flash 
 snowy against the gray skyline, or the rocky cliffs, or the dim black 
 woodlands as they trooped along the river, never letting on they had a 
 purpose, but always having one, huddling together; for in this they are 
 
 61 
 
cliqueish folk (a thing I can not praise since it is quite un-American). 
 They are, moreover, lovers of ease, and scarcely working folk; but brave 
 aristocrats they are, stately as Colonial dames, and as unbending as 
 royal etiquette. But they held to the river and its valley. Only once 
 did I see a dwarf on a hillside not many feet above the level of the water, 
 and it was ashamed and seedy like a poor relation and expatriated. 
 Sycamores can not rough it, and unless planted there will not grow on 
 uplands, but when planted thrive admirably. Of their own liking they 
 will not attempt unaccustomed fields. I have, at rare intervals, seen 
 them climb up a bluff, but it was as if they had walked there in their 
 sleep. The second strange thing about sycamores is their habits of 
 dress. The habit of putting on thick garments, as other folks do in the 
 cold season when winds are keen, and all agree with Hamlet, "It is a 
 nipping and an eager air," sycamores will have nothing of They don 
 their heavy garments in summer, and strip them to the skin in winter. 
 I think that one of the strangest freaks of freakish nature Even Indians 
 are not so outrageous of the rights of winter. What evolutionist (allwise 
 as they are and omniscient beyond their Maker), can explain such a 
 performance on the theory of the survival of the fittest? Summer is 
 the time for sycamores and other people to strip for bathing in the 
 streams, but winter bathing why, my friends, the sycamores, you shock 
 me and you make me shiver. I feel cold with my clothes on, and you 
 are naked as Greek wrestlers. What a talent for individuality of pro- 
 cedure these sycamores have! We must allow that they have inde- 
 pendency in their character. In autumn, when winter throws out a 
 premonitory hoar frost to signify he is in the neighborhood, then the 
 sycamores begin to disrobe. They take off their garments by stealth, 
 as a maniac does. You can not, unless you are a close observer and 
 look very narrowly, find a shred of their bark under the trees, and when 
 they are done with their denudation you will probably not find one scrap 
 of their garments. Watch them and see. They are strange folks. I 
 watch them as if they were in politics. Then when they are as nude as 
 nakedness, they are as beautiful as morning. Not the pilaster of a 
 temple, snow-white under radiant skies of Italy is so white as these 
 sycamore pillars. They stand tall as if they were hewn from ice-drifts, 
 or snow-drifts, or marble-quarries. Sometimes, however, they are not 
 snow-white, but a sort of shaded green, a flesh green, as I may say, for 
 they look for all the world like flesh, and stand faint emerald against the 
 sky like a forecast of spring. But whether flesh green or marble white, 
 
 62 
 
SYCAMORES 
 
they are bewitching and satisfying. Who knows not the sycamore is to 
 be pitied? He has missed so much 
 
 "The pillared dusk of sounding sycamores," 
 
 of which the laureate sings, is not so beauty-burdened as the stately 
 temple-pillars, lifting taper marble up as worthy for some Phidias to 
 plant upon their Doric trunks some stately frieze wrought into pana- 
 thenaic processions. Who would have thought of such a thing as a 
 sycamore, save God only? 
 
 "The birds and beasties " of winter woods are accessories not to be 
 
 forgotten "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," 
 are visible in plenty. In summer these nests were hid from the eyes "of 
 the wise and prudent," but now are open to everybody's gaze. There 
 is no secrecy. In the leafless hedgerow is the thrush's nest, and down 
 by the stream is the bluebird's house, and the crow's log-house of knotty 
 and unworkmanlike construction is seen from the treetops. Crows are 
 bold builders. They haunt treetops as swallows the eaves. These nests 
 seem so ill-built that one would tumble down if a flapping wing of its 
 own builder were to cuff it unwarily, but, as experience shows, are so 
 sturdily constructed that all the winter's tempests leave them in good 
 repair. These crows are deceiving folks. We thought they tumbled 
 their houses together in an unworkmanlike fashion, when lo, we found 
 they built against seasons and naked winters, and storm-wind's brow- 
 beating. And the crow is in the- winter woods. His Satanic blackness 
 glares through the naked woods, and makes a sort of plaintive picture. 
 He flies low over the trees of winter and settles often for caucus or 
 religious meeting, I really never have been able to tell which. But I 
 am not his chaplain ; so it makes not much matter. 
 
 And the redbird flings himself through the network of branches, 
 like a firebrand borne by daylight; and his whistle is always as from a 
 cheery heart. The cardinal is warming to the eyes, and his carelessness 
 of weather makes him to me fraternal. I defy weather, only asking 
 that there be weather. The kind is not for rne to say, seeing I am not 
 the weather bureau; but some kind of weather, fair, foul, wintry, windy, 
 quiet; snow, rain, sleet, are little odds to me; I enjoy them all, and go 
 out in one with the same delight as in the other. Each has its impact 
 with my spirit. The cardinal cheers himself not with the hope of spring 
 coming, but with the delight of winter here. All seasons make love to 
 him and he to all seasons ; and when he flings his torch across the gray- 
 
 65 
 
black winter branches, and flies like an arrow of fire, shot by a hidden 
 bowman, all the gray woods are lit up and radiant 
 
 And the junco (I call him so by sort of conventionality as a tribute 
 of social order, but call him by sweet familiarity, the snow-bird), so 
 I love him. The snows and he blow in the same wind. The fiercer 
 the wind the more rollicking his demeanor. Storms are fiddle-music 
 to his jigging feet Some birds shun winter and love summer. A 
 snowbird shuns summer and loves winter. He seeks winter in sum- 
 mer. He is a hard-weather bird, like a stormy petrel. Sparrows in 
 winter cling to hedges and to sheltered places, if there be any; but snow- 
 birds get out where the winds sweep wildest, and the snow curls like 
 white soot, sicked on by furious blasts. Then the snowbird revels and 
 is glad. How often I have watched him and rejoiced in his pluck! 
 Such a little laddie, but such a laughing courage, like a drummer lad in 
 the battle's front. 
 
 Squirrels, rabbits, coons, and sometimes the barking wolf, with its 
 wild-dog waggishness, cross and recross these wintry, snowy woods, their 
 tracks returning on each other as in frantic glee. A rabbit is a timid 
 jester, but loves a joke, and in moonlight forgets his fear and keeps 
 tryst, and pounds the ground with his heels in a sort of bellicose 
 hilarity. 0, there are good times in winter woods just as good times 
 were had in the old pioneer days, with sleigh rides, and bussing-bees, 
 and spellings-down. With trees in battle, birds and beasts making 
 merry in the storm, you will do well to call winter a summer of 
 delight. 
 
 When slow mists make tree trunk and branch a sheet of ice, and 
 when rain comes after mists and thickens the ice into a sword-sheath 
 thickness, and trees stand against the light armed in silver, then might 
 a dumb man sing for joy. Watch this glow against the sun, and hear 
 this crash of battle-hour when their naked sword-blades smite together 
 in indignant warfare, see them clad in "light as in a garment," and you 
 wonder what God does not think of. What God does not think of none 
 need desire to invent. These icy armors are brilliant as any old-time 
 armorer could make of silver, and this is a world lit with silver, green, 
 and blood, and crossed with march of winds, and the tangle of branches, 
 and the silver bird's nests, and cornfields standing erect as soldiers on 
 duty with silver plumes, and the wide-armed oak harnessed in silver, but 
 nothing daunted. When sleets are on, the world is transfigured and the 
 heart rejoices above the spring. Or when snows stream over the skies 
 
 66 
 
and smoke through the tree tops and make all the weeds and bushes 
 stoop under their weight of whiteness, and the boughs of the forest droop 
 under their weights of snow as under weights of superabundant fruitage, 
 and the lanes of the woods are dusk at noon when the snows come in 
 silence, but with the dim lights of sunsets and after, and earth seems a 
 memory, so far off it feels, then the woods are bewilderments. They 
 are not kin to what we had known them. We could not recognize these 
 as the woodland ways our fond feet had trodden so often All is new 
 and strange, and we wander as those who have set foot on shores undis- 
 covered till now. When snows dim all the sky and hide far and near in 
 fogbanks of white wonder, then, friend, go into the woods and see them 
 keep tryst with the snows and keep thy lips closed as in inaudible prayer, 
 and walk quietly (for you can do no other when snows carpet the dead 
 leaves), and have a hush of spirit before God as if you walked cathedral 
 solitudes. And when bitter-sweet 
 
 "Hangs its tufts of crimson berries" 
 
 and buckberries wear their surly reds, and the red-oaks hold their leaves 
 and shiver night and day as with perpetual ague ; and when the storms 
 roar and are angry, and the trees rush out with ecstasy of gladness to 
 give battle to the winds; then winter trees are glorious, and I watch them, 
 and fellowship with them, and bless my God I live where winter comes, 
 and where deciduous trees are plentiful, and where simple beauty gives 
 way betimes to massive, yet beautiful might Then commend me to 
 the battle and fury and anthems of the winter trees. 
 
 THROUGH THE PINE WOODS 
 67 
 
GOLDEN-ROD 
 
GOLDEN-ROD 
 
 'OBODY has been considerate enough of a 
 wise curiosity to tell us why in autumn the 
 purples and yellows are the lavish colors. I 
 would thank some of the knowing for such 
 item of information. But certain I am that 
 the autumn flowers riot in yellow hues. They 
 have caught the sun in their heart through 
 all the golden summer, have caught every 
 beam coming their way and held each as the 
 naiads held fair Hylas what time he bathed 
 him in Scamander, while his 
 purple chlamys lay upon the 
 shore. The autumn flowers 
 seem never to forget a syllable 
 of sunlight any more than love 
 forgets a syllable of wooing; and in the 
 Fall in blooming they rehearse all 
 they have heard, as lovers tell 
 
 each other all the sweet words the other had written 
 
 or said, while each listening says, "Did I say that? 
 
 and when? and you remembered?" and then they 
 
 kiss each other on the lips. So the sunflowers and 
 
 black- eyed susans and the golden-rods save up and 
 
 rehearse the sunshine of the year. Bless them for * 
 
 their tenacious memories. 
 
 Golden-rod may be deleterious to hay fever 
 
 votaries, but is sympathetic and friendly to those 
 
 of us who indulge in no such lachrymose luxury. 
 
 Well people have some rights, though they are 
 
 73 
 
stem 
 
 seldom considered. Some slight consideration 
 should be shown the healthy, and their wishes con- 
 sulted at far-removed nows and thens. The golden- 
 rod is one of my delights. From the time the first 
 slender spike flashes its light upon the eyes to the 
 last burnt-out splendor drooping shamed upon its 
 , I keep them in my study. I love their warm 
 light their laughter in bloom (for so their 
 glow impresses me). I do not feel obligated 
 to tell why I love what I love, and if pressed 
 by some purist, I will not, but if let alone will 
 probably disclose the secret of my passion. 
 
 I love golden-rod because there is plenty of 
 it, and 1 like plentiful things; hence, children, 
 men, women, trees, stars, common-place things 
 and people are dear to me. Golden-rod 
 blooms mainly in flocks, as pigeons fly, and in 
 many flocks, along fences, in pastures, by 
 woods, in the woods, along highways (thank 
 them for that courtesy). They are as the 
 poet who pipes as the hedge sparrow does, 
 
 "/ build my house by the side of the road." 
 Where the dust clouds and chokes you on 
 the long sun-burnt road, golden-rod will toss out 
 its yellow light like some one you love looking 
 at you through an open window. 
 Golden-rod grows all across our 
 America, in the north and south, in 
 Maine and California. It is a hardy 
 traveler. It dogs man's steps. 
 Trailing arbutus grows in 
 New England and the north- 
 

 - --- 
 
 Jff : 
 
 east, but comes not out west (shame on 
 the aristocracy of this sweet prisoner of 
 humility); and the dumb fox-glove is a resident 
 only in limited quarters; but golden-rod is a beautiful 
 democrat, and comes wherever we are, and makes 
 glad at our door, and kindles its wonderment of color 
 to the whole continent's delight. Golden-rod is the 
 common folk's flower, like the hollyhock and old- 
 fashioned roses and almost forgotten four o 'clocks. 
 There is rare grace in a frond of the golden-rod. 
 Did you ever notice that? Did you ever see a 
 gawky golden-rod? I never have. Its spike of 
 flowers leaning a little in half bashfulness, though 
 standing so tall and stately, this pose is itself a 
 picture. I do wonder if these smiling lovelinesses 
 are sitting for their pictures? I will not believe 
 so, for I think them too frank by odds to be 
 dramatic. But if you care to sketch the golden- 41 
 rod, hit or miss, you will be impressed by the / 
 continuity of gracefulness. What glorious * ; 
 golden-rod I have gathered in Connecticut, near 
 beautiful Canaan, where the hills are sponges which 
 squeeze out springs and rivulets and rushing streams, 
 and where at night you can hear the dim calling of 
 the waterfalls through the cloudy darkness where 
 the stream tumbles down a bank in its hurry to reach 
 the Housatonic; and what torches have I seen and 
 gathered in the White Mountains in sight of Mount 
 Washington! I do believe that had I carried them 
 in the dark for a torch they would have lit the way 
 like a flaming pine knot; but they have lit my 
 
 \ 
 
heart on many a dark night in winter, when the wind whistled and 
 shivered, and the shutters slammed against the house in dismal din. 
 And 1 have gathered golden-rod on the heights of Quebec, hard by 
 where brave Wolfe fell, and down the St. Lawrence toward the northern 
 sea, and on Mt. Desert Island, neighboring the rocky cliffs and melan- 
 choly pines, and beside beautiful Champlain and back in the Adiron- 
 dacks where the world seemed removed across some wide,. wide sea, and 
 in the Rockies where the continent billowed toward the skies, and the 
 crest forgot to sink, and along the Great Lakes where the billows call 
 like a sea, and on the fringe of the great desert with its parched lips and 
 cheeks where fever burns forever, and along the Wabash with its stately 
 tulip-trees and sycamores, beautiful as the pillars of the Parthenon, and 
 along the Sacramento as it widens seaward, beside the Potomac as it 
 stops a moment tenderly to lave the bank on whose sloping side Wash- 
 ington lies buried, and on the Hudson when the Palisades were all in 
 conflagration in autumn days, and on my own beloved prairies stretching 
 mile on mile through Indian summer haze so widely have I gathered 
 the golden-rod, and reverently hope I may be commissioned to gather 
 its golden sprays in heaven ; so shall I feel quite at home. 
 
I GO A-FISHING 
 
I GO A- FISHING 
 
 tell the truth, scarcely a fisherman's bent as 
 you will suggest, I am an ill fisherman. I would 
 not decoy some ardent lover of rod and line to 
 read these inconsequent lines, thinking I was 
 piscatorial artist, or that I had fast friendship 
 * with our good friend, quaint and gentle, Ike 
 Walton. We are bare acquaintances. I met 
 him once, once only, along the river Dove tak- 
 '"***"" i n g a grayling from his hook, and so not seeing 
 
 me, for so true a fisherman was always more 
 engrossed with fish than men (nor do I blame 
 
 him); and I was only wandering along the stream watching the shadows 
 on the quiet water and the pools where sunlight came and staid as taking 
 a whole day of holiday. No, I know as little about fishing as about 
 botany. I know not what sort of bait catches what sort of fish. I 
 seldom get a nibble, and much more rarely get a fish, though Provi- 
 dence knows I wish the fish knew how safe it is to intrust themselves to 
 my hook, for I throw back into the stream, with scant reluctance, the 
 fish I catch. I am much more pious and tender-hearted than your piety- 
 professing fisherman, who, while he talks gently of the "gentle art," kills 
 whom he surprises, like any other bandit, and lays snares like an assas- 
 sin, and fresh in iniquity says his prayers like a murderer making the 
 sign of the cross above the corpse he has made. No, I never knew 
 enough, or so little, I know not which, as to succeed in catching fish, 
 yet I say boldly, though as I hope with modesty, that I can throw a line 
 into the water and let it stay there with a degree of resolution worthy of 
 a French cavalier of the reign of Louis the Saint. To state the facts 
 irankly, as becometh a Christian, I, having had many friends who were 
 
 81 
 
valorous fishermen, am persuaded that it is next door to an impossibility 
 to be a chronic fisherman and not become a chronic hyperbolist (I use 
 this term out of my love for my fishermen friends, and my disinclina- 
 tion to use the more ordinary and direct word which differs in no slight- 
 est shade of meaning. I refer to the little radical among the words 
 which is pronounced liar). There must be some men of unimpaired 
 virtue (1 do not speak this in any haughty spirit). Truthfulness, like 
 persecuted goodness, must have some fortress to which to retreat ; and 
 in claiming to be an unsuccessful fisherman it occurs to me that it has 
 become apparent that I am this rocky fortress of incorrupted truth. 
 Fish and men, specially the fish, may depend on me, I absolutely re- 
 fuse to prevaricate unless it be entirely convenient. 
 
 If I have been digging for morals when I should have been digging 
 bait and baiting my hook, I beg to suggest I have been decoyed to it 
 by the moralizing moods of the professional fisherman. He always acts 
 as if he fished from the same motive as he says his prayers, namely, 
 piety ; though I for my part think it a slimy trick to hide play under the 
 cloud of devotion. If men will fish let them not preach and attempt to 
 persuade others they are doing it as an act of religion. To be Shake- 
 spearean (a manner quite foreign to me), " Methinks they do profess too 
 much." I knew a truthful fisherman once (he is dead); and I feel 
 honor bound to prepare him an epitaph, though not at this time. But a 
 truthful fisherman has a right to pass into the list of heroes who over- 
 bore environment and gave the lie to centuries of precedent. 
 
 I have some friends, good men and true at home and in business, 
 but who seem to cast from them all their fine ethical distinctions so 
 soon as they get a fish pole in their hands ; and when they have donned 
 fisherman's boots and have hold on a reel, then farewell, beautiful truth. 
 As soon as they smell fish their truthfulness evaporates, or at all events 
 disappears, and I think the most scientific explanation of its disappear- 
 ance is to ascribe it to evaporation which goes on so systematically on 
 the water, as is known to all students of meteorology. These friends of 
 mine fish in remote waters, where, because of the remote distances and 
 the lack of shipping facilities, the spoils can not be sent to admiring 
 friends. The fisherman is thought to be by nature a sociable biped, and 
 generous in delivering up his ill-gotten gains to those who sunburned 
 not neither baited a hook. But these good men and true must smother 
 their generous impulses. They are perforce reduced to the necessity of 
 eating their own catch, or giving most of it to aborigines who inhabit the 
 
 82 
 
distant lands neighboring on the great water where this whaling expedi- 
 tion does business in ships. Do not think me skeptical. I am no 
 Montaigne ; but 1 state plainly, I mislike this manner. It looks theat- 
 rical. Out of this remote water, as I have suggested, they bring no fish. 
 We can all testify that when they fish in streams near at hand they 
 bring no fish ; and without desiring to call in question their veracity, 
 when they tell thrilling experiences with monster pickerel and musca- 
 longes and other finny gentry, "I doubt and fear" (perverted from 
 Burns). They dazzle me with their fine powers of romance. They would 
 have charmed our friend Sir Walter Scott with their powers of inven- 
 tion. However, they lack variety. There are evi- 
 dently about the same size and temper and fight- 
 ing quality of fish in all these distant fish 
 ing grounds. The same struggle besets 
 all these doughty spirits who fight with 
 rod and line. They find no new dragons, 
 but are satisfied with the old ones. Why, 
 Monsieur Athos could have told them a 
 thing The Three Guardsmen were fertile 
 liars, which is a thing I delight in if one 
 attempts that style of art (though I do not praise 
 it. Let us have truth is my motto, which I 
 commend with all heartiness to my many 
 friends after having practiced it for forty to 
 sixty days each year for a year or so). They 
 tell the same story, these truthful fishermen. 
 Besides this, they suborn witnesses (yet I like not the THE SPOILS 
 sound of that word, it seems harsh, though indeed I mean it only in 
 gentle courtesy as a method of expressing the facts); but they return 
 to their neglected home fishless, sunburnt, truculent lest you believe not 
 their fishing reminiscences, and on one occasion brought letters of refer- 
 ence for proof of their valiant exploits from the proprietor of the boats 
 used, from the postmaster, from the hostelkeeper, from the guide, from 
 the cook, and from sundry other functionaries ; but when on discreet 
 investigation (for I am of a stern and unyielding virtue in these mat- 
 ters), it was found that boat owner, postmaster, hostelkeeper, and the 
 remaining witnesses were one and the same man; and on being con- 
 fronted with this stern truth these men thrust each other in the ribs 
 and laughed to tears at the wickedness of their conceits. Such things 
 
 83 
 
grieve me. I fear there will be no fishermen In heaven except our 
 elderly friend Peter, who. being himself a fisherman, may in fellow 
 feeling let them slip through his fingers after the manner of fish. 
 
 But not to continue this secular pursuit of discovering such depravi- 
 ties (of which there would be no end), save so as to show why my virtue 
 is always at white heat however cold the thermometer may be and 
 that I will not be decoyed irito a sport which serves, if indulged in with 
 sufficient persistency, to eradicate the last faint vestige of truthfulness 
 from the heart of the votary. Truth must still have an ad- 
 vocate. I will not lie except at intervals and under severe 
 provocation ; and so I will not fish 
 
 1 start in a leisurely fashion ; for haste is foe to good 
 fishing. To have a deliberate air is impressive to fish. 
 1 make haste slowly therefore. I am not eager to be 
 known as starting on a voyage of fishing ; for such 
 enterprise engenders hallucinations of imagination as 
 to the results of your expedition (in the minds of 
 the populace). I move out calmly, like a ship 
 starting from its harbor toward high seas. A 
 sweet lady I know smiles at me going, with a touch 
 of irony in her face, and a boy picking up chips 
 on the beach pauses (much to his content, for he 
 does not admire work) in his efforts, to give me a 
 quizzical look, and a girl smiles at me with a wave 
 of hand good to look upon; and I go past the board 
 walk where the beech- trees grow and cast gentle 
 shadows, and down the lane of sand hills peaked with 
 pines, and loiter along with scant precipitancy as befits 
 a man going on such solemn business as fishing; for as 
 Ike Walton has shown, fishing is the soul of solemnity, and 
 is after all no sport, but life's real and serious business. We 
 must not therefore approach such vocation with the least spirit of levity. 
 I sight the river with reeds growing solid green along far banks where 
 the stream bends in gentle curves like a boat's prow, and rest my heart 
 in taking a long breathing view of the lake whose waters tilt against the 
 sky green as bulk glass, and let the cool wind from its bosom lave me 
 as if it were a wave washing some point of shore; and then I bethink 
 me that I have no bait nor any line nor any rod, and turn back in medi- 
 tative mood so as not to appear disconcerted. I reach home, take these 
 
 84 
 
inconsequential items as a conventional matter wholly ; and now having 
 rod and line and bait I slip out at the rear of my house and slink around 
 out of sight that no one see my implements of the chase (the aqueous 
 chase), and sidle toward the river. 
 
 I consider myself adroit to the point of genius in the matter of bait. 
 I think I ought to say that. Brains will tell even in the matter of going 
 fishing. While supposedly adroit fishermen keep every sort of fly and 
 deception for beguiling wary fish, I, believing that I have not been 
 weighted down with intellectuality for naught, sagaciously (I have under- 
 scored that word, not through conceit, but through honest speaking), 
 take for my bait mutton. This I do because mutton is so ambiguous, 
 so versatile. When I have mutton (in my pocket tied up daintily as a 
 man will tie things up, in a piece of newspaper, believing that even 
 dead sheep should have culture opportunities), I can boldly cast for all 
 sorts of fish inhabiting lake or stream. For certain sturdy, aged, self- 
 reliant fish, male fish, 
 I bait with mutton and * 
 can call it ram. This 
 bait brings experience 
 and pugilistic propen- 
 sionstothehook. When 
 I wish to catch young 
 and tender fish I retain the same bait on my hook ( I never change bait 
 while it can remain on the hook. I think changing bait a breach of 
 etiquette to the bait). While bait lasts it stays on my hook. I am 
 courteous in all details of life. So here, I retain the bait, but speak in 
 bleating tones and call it lamb. When I wish to approach bachelor fish 
 with years of conquest and satiety on them I call the bait ewe. When 
 I appeal to the gentler sex among the fish I call the bait wether. When 
 I angle for plebeian fish I state with democratic candor, "This is mut- 
 ton." The result is practical all the same. I have equal success with 
 the varied fish and varied ages, and I think you must see that I am not 
 nagged by the occult study of what bait to use. And I am successful 
 as success goes with me in a heterogenous fashion, and I have the 
 feeling that in so doing I have exhibited a manly individuality even in 
 baiting my hook. 
 
 So with my versatile bait I set out. One rod and line suffice. I 
 always have a cork because I like to see it bob. Things seen are 
 mightier than things felt (quoted in part from some poet), and I enjoy 
 
 85 
 
seeing the energetic twitching of the cork (red and green duly mixed 
 preferred), for it reminds me of the motion of a fish's fins. I put the 
 hook in the water, which is the stereotyped way of doing when one fishes, 
 though I have very often had the same degree of success when I have 
 left the hook on land. I thrust the pole into the shore with a jab which 
 insures the pole staying, whatever the cork does. Having done this, a 
 glow of virtue suffuses my frame as it does with a man who has gone to 
 church with his wife. 1 have done my duty. What need I do more ? 
 The line is in the water ; the pole is in the bank ; and I am on the bank 
 near the pole. Now let the fish do his duty. Let him make the cork 
 bob; let him, 1 say, for I shall exert myself no more. I am fishing. 
 Here I sit. Except for nettles, I am complaisant and self-righteous. 
 If the fish do their duty and measure up to their responsibility, why then 
 the cork bobs, whereat my fisherman luck is satisfed, and my passion 
 of sportsmanship is in a manner allayed. I consider the desire ex- 
 hibited among many fishermen to catch fish to be a rabid species of 
 militarism which I can not approve. Seeing the fish had expressed 
 neither viva voce nor aqua voce, a desire for the mild rule of my flag or 
 frying pan, I can not think of thrusting my sovereignty on them by im- 
 paling them on a hook, for this would be a glaring instance of militarism 
 and expansion ; and I am too true a mugwump (?) to be a friend to 
 either. No, fishermen have missed the point of the argument. Catch- 
 ing fish is not the end of fishing, Seeing the cork bob is the end of 
 fishing, and is the whole duty of the fisherman. Here is an advanced 
 idea which I hope may revolutionize the piscatorial art. New ideas I 
 know are frequently received with hostility. Great ideas often are. I 
 anticipate antagonism. I do not care. I may be a martyr, but no 
 matter. I reaffirm I do not care. I have the martyr's spirit. My an- 
 cestors were buccaneers and their valor survives in me, and if a sort of 
 fishy martyrdom awaits me for the bold, unflinching, intrepid, deter- 
 mined presentation of this grand and revolutionary thought, I will sit by 
 my bobbing cork and wait my death calmly. So strong is virtue. 
 When the cork bobs I feel a sense of relief as of a duty per- 
 formed in a satisfactory and even in a praiseworthy manner. I 
 shall now feel free to go on with my fishing. If the cork does not 
 bob I feel free from responsibility. I have done my duty. My business 
 is to bait the hook, not to bite at the bait. Let every fish bear his own 
 burden. Nor am I a monopolist. My soul spurns that thought. I have 
 done my part: I will not monopolize functions. Let the fish have room 
 
 86 
 
for the play of his powers. The hook is in the water. I have done my 
 part and done it well. I will leave results to the fish ; so that I (with 
 that sagacity which marks my proceedings) take my book from my 
 pocket I have brought it for such occasion. If the fish are idle I must 
 not emulate their example. I will read my friend Stephen Phillips. 
 His pastorals shall be my chore. Now when I have a book which, to 
 change my friend Milton's phrase, in harmony with my environment (I 
 use that word not as knowing its meaning, but because I have seen it in 
 print and once heard it mentioned by a speaker, now sick with the 
 grippe a book is the solace of those tardy hours in which a fisherman 
 awaits the desultory humors of the fish); "Having a book" (quoted 
 from my preceding remarks), I am well pleased and go on with my 
 
 ALONG THE STREAM 
 
 fishing. We shall get on well to-day. However inattentive to their 
 duty the fish are, I will not be inattentive to mine. I will read a spell. 
 My friend William Wadsworth was a fisher of my sort he walked 
 along the streams, loved them and dreamed of them ; and I will in defer- 
 ence to his good taste read him betimes. Now fishing seems a levity. 
 I leave the fish to their own devices. The cork may bob or sink for 
 all of me. I do not care. Virtue is its own reward. I have baited the 
 hook and have placed it in the watery element (whatever that is). Can 
 any ethical code demand more ? To do more would be a work of 
 supererogation, and I always hold that works of supererogation are void. 
 I will now rest until the sun gets in my eyes and the perspiration (peri- 
 phrasis for sweat), starts from my face, whereupon with a fine courtesy 
 worthy of Chesterfield I will move out of the sun's way. If I am not a 
 gentleman I am nothing, though I desire to make no boast. 
 
 87 
 
Sometimes for the sake of cultivating versatility in location though 
 not in result, I take up my traps and find a new bank to sit upon and 
 listen to the whine of the wind in the pine-trees (O the infinite sadness 
 of it!), or walk on and see the stream edge its way to the base of a 
 sand dune where not a grass tussock roots in the shifting sands, which 
 climbing, 1 see some friends I love, fishing at long distance, and out- 
 ward the sweep of the wondrous lake with sand dunes sowing the shore 
 with melancholy, or half inland again see the river moving meditatively 
 toward the lake with its quiet meadows edging its quiet goings. Here 
 the swallows skim and the birds build and rejoice, and the white clover 
 and the full-sapped milkweed vie with each other in their donative of 
 odors. There the pine-trees clump together in neighborly fashion and 
 
 whisper (sweet, sweet, their whis- 
 per is) together concerning sor- 
 row they have shared together, 
 and a crow flaps lazily along the 
 sky to some lonely pines across 
 the river But I must not dally. 
 I am a fisherman. I must to my 
 
 vocation , and I go down to where my boat is anchored in lush grasses 
 and unmoor it, and trail my line in the water what time I row leisurely 
 where the fishes ought to be. If they come not to me I go to them. 
 And the lap of the water against the prow is delicious, and the wind 
 from the lake drifts up stream like a wind taking holiday, and the waters 
 are clear and dainty, and heaven leans and looks full-face into the 
 stream. Do you own a boat, friend? Then you are rich. I feel poor 
 no longer since this boat swung at the end of my rusty chain, and the 
 oars across its breast were mine. And I forget to fish, but remember 
 to dream, and the landscape is fair enough to be part of heaven, and the 
 sky is utter blue and utter high, and the lake can be seen at a distance 
 leaning over to look at me, and the sole pine-tree stands a sentinel of 
 
 88 
 
sorrow. I am glad in my heart I came a-fishing. This is sport. But 
 I am fishless though that is a trifle not worth mentioning. 
 
 There is another affable way of fishing I have often practiced and 
 which I can commend. The modus operand! is as follows : Take your 
 pole across your shoulder, let the line dangle so the hook is free to catch 
 in the limbs of the trees and bushes as you walk along. The extracting 
 of the hook will occupy your hands; for "Satan finds some work for 
 idle hands to do:" and so I always think it wise to leave the line dangle 
 and keep my hands employed. This has saved me from many a snare. 
 Thus fortified for the fishing voyage, I go boldly near a stream. I walk 
 along its banks. I watch the shimmer on the stream, and the shadows 
 flung in the waters by the banks. A bunch of white flags sometimes 
 (and what lily-white blosoms these water-loving flags wear!) and some- 
 times a bank of sand touches the water, and is covered with bluebells 
 which cast their lovely shadows in the stream. God is the first of the 
 photographers. The smell of damp earth is in my nostrils, and the odor 
 of the mints on which I walk. A bird flings across my face so that his 
 wings almost touch me as he whirs by, and a redbird whistles as if he 
 were joking with you. And the swallows circle with an almost musical 
 motion, and the fair clouds lie listless as if absent on a day of quiet, and 
 the hill climbs up from the stream's edge into a tangle of thicket and 
 brier and moss, and the leap of some brave tree going toward the light 
 with ragged branches, or a meadow smiles across the stream, and a 
 woodland clouds with its green against the sky across the field. And I 
 throw the rod down and forget it and wander smiling along as a pair of 
 lovers, and gather flowers and find a red clover alone and gather it out 
 of sheer courtesy, or surprise, or love (what matters which?). Or a 
 bird's nest decoys me through the dark deeps of woods. And the 
 stream laughs along. And you, looking at the sky, step unwittingly into 
 its waters and like the souse of the water in your shoes. Fishermen of 
 high grade are careless of wet feet ; and besides, dew is in the thicket 
 and on the grass, and drops from the trees, and how can you help hav- 
 ing wet feet ? And not to have them is to play at fishing. Let us be 
 in earnest whatever we do. Let us not act at fishing ; let us fish. I 
 always do. Wade across the stream often if you can without total im- 
 mersion. That will bring you into contact with the native element of fish, 
 and may give you the smell of their scales ; but you can get wet, and 
 that is desirable, for you feel fishy and the feeling is the main thing in 
 fishing. I follow the winding of the stream. I go and caress the 
 
 89 
 
beech-tree as if it were a child, arid the walnut-trees with their corru- 
 gated barks, and the silver bark of the birch. I talk to the birds that 
 eye me slyly, calling them by name. I scramble up banks, and fall down 
 hills that is rare exercise. If I tear my trousers it gives me a positive 
 feeling of self-respect, for so the acrobats do, and boys and fishermen ; 
 and to be of this company is honor enough to be sung by troubadours ; 
 but where are the fishing pole and the line with its pith and point? I 
 laid them down, bless me I know not where Forgetfulness is a sign of 
 genius. Is it not glory enough to be born under the zodiacal sign of the 
 fishes? But where is that pole? To go home fishless and poleless is 
 like going to one's grave unwept. I will hunt that pole, but will now 
 pause to eat a sandwich. A good man who fishes should always take a 
 snack. It is sociable. You eat it yourself, and that has a radiant look 
 of hospitality. If you go fishing alone (which is the real etiquette of 
 fishing), it may seem selfish. But when you sit eating your lunch, that 
 is sociable. Your self-respect and spirit of genuine generosity are now 
 restored. There is a feeling of hospitableness when a lone fisherman 
 fishes out of his pocket a lunch which he has filched (not to say fished) 
 from his wife's cupboard. Besides, you feel self-sacrificing, for you are 
 eating for two to keep up the idea of friendliness And a lunch tastes 
 good under such circumstances. I make my appeal to all candid men, 
 if I am not speaking the truth when I say so. One combines business 
 and pleasure and philosophy in a solitary lunch; and the better the lunch 
 is the more business, philosophy, and pleasure there are. But where is 
 the pole? That is a thing to consider; but deep thought is not con- 
 ducive to good digestion, hence banish thought of the pole. Away, 
 base care ! On with the lunch ! Let hospitality 
 be encouraged ! There is yet a sliver of bread 
 or a piece of chicken to be dealt with. 
 On with the lunch ! And a chipmunk 
 standing inquiringly, and I may say 
 impertinently on end (and I may say 
 on the right end), looks inquiringly 
 at my book and at my lunch and at 
 me. I really have never settled the 
 literary preierences of the chipmunk, 
 though I think I could if I tried. A 
 kingfisher dashes down to the river 
 from a stump where he has been 
 
sitting so sedately. I really suppose that seeing 
 me eat has made him hungry. He will have his 
 lunch too. But the light on the water is sweet to 
 see, and the ripples run like laughter over the 
 river's face, and the cattails not yet tailed stand 
 sedately like folks at a funeral, and the blue of the 
 sky is clouding for rain, and a drop from the cloud 
 is on my face, and the gray sky is beautiful as a 
 Vision of the twilight and where is the pole? I 
 will leave a crust of bread and a chicken bone on the 
 bank. The chipmunk has been neighborly, maybe 
 he will like it; and I will throw some shreds of my 
 lunch into the water as an offering to the fish. 
 They have given me a rare morning. The line is 
 not wet, but I am, and the fish have not been be- 
 guiled, for I have not grown vicious yet and baited 
 my hook. But I'll be blessed if I know where the 
 pole and the line and the hook are ; and I will go and 
 hunt them. And after a series of meanderings in 
 mind I conclude they may be in one of seventeen 
 places, which is a serious gain in the question of 
 discovery and conclude them practically found 
 now. I may be leisurely and gather wild roses 
 and dainty ferns; and I sit down beside a wild 
 flower devoutly as beside a woman, and wonder 
 about its loneliness and loveliness, and if God 
 knows it is there; and I walk in ripples of undulat- 
 ing grasses that hem the edge of the stream, and 
 a phcebe plaints near me, and far across the river where the milk 
 weeds grow and hang their ball blossoms, a hawk flies and flings his 
 eager shadow on the water or on the meadow; for the sky has cleared 
 and the rain cloud has forgotten its business and has gone a-gypsying 
 with the wind. And here I go hunting for the fishing line. Strangely 
 enough I was mistaken. It was not in any of the seventeen places, 
 but is in the nineteenth. There it was sprawling indolently like a hobo 
 in the shade with his dinner fragments beside him, with the flies upon 
 him, and the blue bottles buzzing luxuriously around. But I stand with 
 a sense of triumph. I have found the pole and line. Some people 
 have poor memories. I pity them. There is no excuse for forgetting 
 
 91 
 
 
 f 
 
 L 
 
where you left your things! And I have had great luck in fishing, arid 
 a great day of sport. "What luck?" say the people leeringly as I 
 pass. "Fine," I answer bravely. "Where are the fish?" they insinu- 
 atingly ask. "I threw them back," I reply. So brave is truth. To 
 refrain from catching the fish is the most delicate and generous way 
 of throwing them back. The fish are there and truth is vindicated; 
 and I go home with my heels on the ground, but my head in the sky 
 and hang my day's fishing up with my fishing pole. And the rose is 
 fragrant yet, and the trees cast their shadows across my face, and the 
 river ripples and flashes brightly a perpetual pleasure. I am glad I 
 went fishing, and had good luck. 
 
 Sweet was the meadow scent, 
 
 And blue the sky, 
 When we a- fishing went, 
 
 My rod and I. 
 
 Cares staid at home in bed 
 
 While we went free; 
 And scurvy care is dead 
 
 To such as we. 
 
 Green was the summer land, 
 
 The air was balm; 
 Fair the bleak pine-trees stand; 
 
 My heart was calm. 
 
 Out on the river 's rim, 
 
 My spirit sings 
 Roundels of praise to Him 
 
 Who summer brings. 
 
 So while fair morning drifts, 
 
 Fishing I go. 
 Down through the green wood's rifts 
 
 Warm sunlights glow. 
 
 Glad laughter takes my hcnd 
 
 And holds it tight, 
 As through this summer land. 
 92 / stray till night. 
 
THE GOINGS OF THE WINDS 
 
THE GOINGS OF THE WINDS 
 
 IKE many another word freighted with 
 beauty, this word "goings" comes from 
 the Bible. Those old King James trans- 
 lators were poets to a man, which accounts 
 for our Bible being both the classic of 
 Hebrew literature and English literature. 
 One translator gets the sense in a cold 
 ; literality like a dead tree trunk; another 
 suffuses his translation with poetry, as a 
 tree is shaded by its own leaves. "When 
 thou hearest the goings in the tops of 
 the mulberry-trees" is a poet's way of 
 telling a wind is blowing through tree 
 tops. "Goings" are sound mixed with 
 movement, the marching of the wind's 
 
 feet along the pathways of the tree tops; and what is or can be sweeter! 
 I have often wondered if God could forget; whether he ever had 
 obliviscent moods; whether any syllable ever fell out of his words as 
 they do from ours; whether he ever could forget anything belonging 
 to the calendar of beauty. I think he does not. Else how is every 
 beautiful possibility present? In making the world God thought of 
 everything ministrant to a blessed life. Can we think of any omitted 
 mercy? Did he not put beauty in the green sward and in the blue 
 sky? What colors could have been devised to rest the eyes and com- 
 fort the heart like this bewildering green upon the earth and this 
 bewildering blue in the sky? Did he forget grace when he was 
 making the cypress or pine, or the larch, or the quivering aspen, or 
 the doughty oak, or the leaning willow? He could have made all 
 
 97 
 
plants flowerless, as he did the ferns, or he could have dyed all flow- 
 ers with one pigment, or he might have left odors out in compounding 
 his flowers and leaves and grasses and earths; but thanks to his good 
 Providence, he forgot not the sandalwood's clinging fragrance, nor the 
 scents of roses and wheat stubble nor new-mown hay nor green wal- 
 nuts, nor forgot to make dews at night, to distill odors from woodlands 
 and plains, nor neglected that sweet inrush of earth and air smells 
 which puffs in the face some unexpected morning and sings to the 
 soul Springtime! God ransacked his treasuries when he made this 
 world; nor was it in spirit of haste or obliviousness, when, on the day 
 he finished the building of his world he said, "I have found all things 
 good." If the wind fans a hot cheek to blow its fever out, or fills the 
 flapping sails of innumerable ships, I count that to be a lesser blessing 
 than its gift of touch and music. The wind's touch can be as tender 
 as a loving woman's caress and its music as gentle and sweet as mem- 
 ories fetched from a happy past. To miss the blowing of the trumpets 
 of the winds is to suffer loss. The wind's voices are inexpressible 
 music. I love their laughter and their weeping, their wailing of autumn 
 and their leaf-patter, like the sound of spring showers. I was reared in 
 Kansas, where winds have what some esteem a vicious supremacy, but 
 to me their trumpetings and stormy chargings to and fro, their shrill 
 falsettos through leafless trees; their summer sweep, which wrecks 
 the fleets of clouds as if they, were ships blown on ragged ocean rocks; 
 their whine at the casement, like a patient dog pleading for its master, 
 and their wholly tender touch of a June evening wind I love them all. 
 Not one will I willingly leave out of my memory or deny room at the 
 fireside of my life. They are part of me. It may be because my 
 father's folk for unknown generations were sea captains and lovers of 
 the raging waters, tempest-swirled and were all drowned at sea, that 
 tempests are mixed with my blood and are part of my soul's dear 
 possessions. But certain I am that winds do not vex me and that I 
 am lonely apart from them as missing one of my home folks. Their 
 ardor warms my spirit and their gentle quiet is like a call to prayer. 
 Jesus loved the winds, and, as I think, tore a scrap 
 from the book of his boyhood when he said (he 
 was thinking of Nazareth when he spoke), "The 
 wind bloweth where it listeth" those un- 
 certain, unmannerly, brusque winds, which 
 
 ^ betimes whipped up Esdraelon's loitering 
 
 98 
 
 
valley from the Great Sea, or on occasion springing with sudden pas- 
 sion out of the Jordan Valley over the Nazareth cliffs toward the far 
 and fair blue waters. Could Jesus forget them? On many a solemn 
 night, alone but not lonely, he had sat with chin upon his hands and 
 listened to his hill winds 
 blow. The winds and he 
 made them! Think of that, 
 my heart. H is winds now 
 thine. And when the sea 
 was whipped with tempests 
 by the lashings of the winds 
 the wild and boisterous 
 waves disturbed him not 
 only in dreams, he thought 
 he heard the heavenly bu- 
 gles blow, and wakened 
 from his happy sleep when 
 the scared disciples wailed 
 above the wind's wild 
 "goings," "Carest thou not 
 if we perish?" Then he 
 awoke and spake lovingly 
 to the winds (no harshness 
 in his voice nor threat upon 
 his face) saying only, "Keep 
 still for a little while, your 
 fury frightens them, keep 
 still. Peace, be still," and 
 the winds threw their brazen 
 trumpets in the sea and 
 were still. He loved the 
 winds; and all their sobbing 
 lutes and viols and 'cellos THUNDERHEAD 
 
 were dear to him. 
 
 How I have rejoiced in God's winds! Under Niagara, when the 
 winds have blown fury blasts, and on the mountains, when the snows 
 had loosened their garments at the throat for freer wrestling and where 
 down some long canon winds swept like vernal freshets, and up among 
 melancholy pines, where every pine was as a chief musician, like Asaph 
 
 99 
 
in his ancient choir, and on bare plains, where only the surly sage brush 
 leaned prone before the gale, and on lakes, where water tumbled like 
 romping children when the winds frisked with them in gay moods of 
 laughter and romping, or when the winds were in outrageous anger and 
 plowed the fair waters with the share of the hurricane, and in forests, 
 where the paths are narrow and very dim and shadows are many and 
 sunshine rare O the goings of the winds in such a wood when leaves 
 flutter, as half in dream, and the sound sobs like remote surf, and winds 
 
 pass still, 
 
 "Fainter onward, like wild birds that change 
 Their season in the nigh* and wail their way 
 From cloud to cloud," 
 
 , and on headlands of the 
 
 old sad ocean, where 
 Mount Desert rocks, ban- 
 nered with pine-trees 
 fronted by the sea (rocks 
 naked as the strength of 
 death) or on headlands of 
 the Golden Gate fronting 
 burning sunsets and the 
 far and barren reaches of 
 the affable Pacific, and 
 on cliffs of the Isle of 
 Mona, where heather 
 mixes honey with ocean winds and rocks lean darkly over Spanish 
 Head, fruitful of shipwrecks, and against whose sword edges Philip's 
 fleet proved but a feeble jest on such headlands have I heard the 
 winds and gloried in their tumults as in the coming of a friend; and 
 many a night have I walked steamer decks to watch the marching 
 stars and hear the regurgitations of multitudinous waves a-sobbing; or 
 in winter in the city, when cold winds keyed their voices to distress 
 like beggars gaunt and cold, and shrieked like despair which had for- 
 gotten laughter, when the thin-clad and well-clad hurried home as 
 half afraid, and children play indoors, and snows whip up alley-ways and 
 down crowded half-quieted streets (seeing a storm makes its own 
 calm), and down chimneys with singing like a last minstrel, or spits in 
 your face like an indignant beggar to whom you have refused charity, 
 or tender summer winds which stray down where long marsh grasses 
 grow in hearing of the sea. 
 
 100 
 
 THE SURF 
 
How I love the dim wind on the wide water; but as for that, what 
 wind do I not love, and for what one do I not listen, whether singing a 
 quiet song or trumpeting in Titan anger; whether it is gentle touch, like 
 a beloved hand upon our sleeping cheek, or cruel and vindictive, like a 
 Scythian nay, I can not deny that I love them all. 
 
 What musicians winds are! They are, in truth, the only musicians. 
 All voices, whether human or blown from instruments, or shocked from 
 
 jjMifa w tfi 
 
 1h>cli 
 
 
 A PATCH OF CLOVER WHERE SPRING WINDS LINGER 
 
 wild waves that hammer on the rocks, what are they save the blowing 
 of the winds? Lowell says 
 
 "The organ blows its dream of storm," 
 
 and no more accurate word has ever been spoken regarding organ 
 music, which is the wind blowing across the reeds. I have sat in 
 cathedrals in the lowering dusk and felt the organ blow its gathering gale 
 about my spirit. The organ was the wind of God. The Devas play: 
 
 "We are the voices of the wandering wind 
 
 Which moan for rest and rest can never find," 
 and they are sad 
 
 "As sunset in a land of reeds," 
 103 
 
and very full of meaning. In an elect moment, Whittier made music 
 for the winds to make their meaning clear: 
 
 "Yet on my cheek I feel the western wind, 
 
 And hear it telling to the orchard trees, 
 
 And to the faint and flower-forsaken bees, 
 
 Tales of fair meadows green with constant streams, 
 And mountains rising blue and cold behind 
 
 Where in moist dells the purple orchis gleams, 
 And starred with white the virgin's bower is twined. 
 
 So the overwearied pilgrim as he fares 
 Along life's summer waste, at times is fanned 
 
 Even at noontide by the cool, sweet airs 
 Of a serener and a holier land." 
 
 And winds laded with odors you can not escape their sweet com- 
 radeship. And winds blowing across a field where haycocks exhale fra- 
 grance, who can escape their witchery? Such winds know how to spoil 
 waters and fields and forests of spikenards and balsams. I have in- 
 haled fragrance from winds blown fresh from the sea through moors of 
 purple heather, and can I forget the poetry of it even in heaven? I 
 pray I may not. 
 
 Winds of spring, apple-scented and with earth-smell in them ! And 
 walking through woods at night when dew drips from the leaves and 
 the score or more of odors saturate the air, and the frog's song sings 
 up from marshes and ravines as if that were audible odor, and star- 
 light plays hide-and-seek with you through the foliage, when there puffs 
 in your face the musk of many odors mixed, then you could catch the 
 Wind and kiss her on the cheek like a girl, for sheer delight. Then 
 when lilacs blow, and spring hastens on to June and white clover chokes 
 the air with heavy perfumes, and roses tell in the dark where they are 
 blooming by the fragrance they lent the breeze as it strayed indolently 
 through their dear delights, or later, when harvests spill their essences to 
 the languorous winds, and later still, when winds bear their sad freightage 
 of autumn leaves falling, or fallen, and faded. the wind is the poet 
 laureate of autumn; and the lonely, tearful music and autumnal fra- 
 grance of leaf-distilled perfumes fairly drug the senses of the spirit till 
 perforce the winds make us poets against our will and reason. 
 
 In one of Hosea Biglow's pastoral preludes (bless him who wrote 
 them and gave us Hosea!) is a touch of genius in discriminating 
 odors. "Mr. Wilbur sez to Hosea, 'Wut's the sweetest smell on 
 
 104 
 
airth?' 'Noomone hay,' sez I, pooty bresk, for he was allus hank- 
 erin' 'round in hayin'. 'Nawthin' of the kine,' sez he. 'My leetle 
 Huldy's breath,' sez I ag'in.' 'You're a good lad,' sez he, his eyes 
 sort of riplin' like, for he lost a babe onc't about her age 'the best of 
 perfooms is just fresh air, fresh air,' sez he, emphysizin', 'athout no 
 mixture.' " And that is worth thinking of. All odors the winds bear 
 are defective as compared v/ith the utter freshness of the moving airs 
 themselves. "Jest fresh air," what an exhilarant that is. Drinking 
 water spouting fresh from mountain snow 
 drifts, and the blowing of clean air in the 
 race, and the making your piayer to God 
 when life grows hard or glad are not these 
 apart from all things else and allow of no 
 comparisons. Similes are lifeless here. And 
 the breath of a wind after a rain! Wind is 
 unspeakable for music and odors. What a 
 happy fate to be associated with such recollec- 
 tions. If man or woman might hope in com- 
 ing years, when far beyond the sight of 
 eyes or hearing of the ears, to stay sweet 
 memories in hearts which could not forget 
 them, what could human heart ask more? 
 And I have known such folks. The mention 
 of their names makes me think of sunlit fields. 
 All sweet things lie adjacent to their person- 
 alities, just as trees and shade and gurgling 
 brooks and trailing clouds and sublime soli- 
 tudes and what seems the ragged frontiers of the world lie adjacent to 
 huge mountains. 
 
 Winds are fortunate to be the carriers of aromas and music; to 
 come freighted with the lilac's breath and the happy voices of happy 
 women s laughter. But I do not hesitate to confess that the rarest 
 wind I have ever experienced is blown from Kansas prairies on summer 
 twilights. About midway in Kansas, east and west, is this wind in 
 perfection. Nothing equals it. I have loved winds blown from briny 
 seas and from the emerald deserts of great lakes and the St. Lawrence 
 dreaming northward like a drifting ship, and from Alp and Sierra, and 
 my belief still holds that for unutterable tenderness, part wind, part 
 spirit, for poetry whose threads can never be unbraided, these Kansas 
 
 105 
 
 A SINGING BROOK 
 
June prairie winds have not any competitor. This may be the love of 
 my lifetime veering my judgment, though I incline to believe this is the 
 judgment of a balanced and an equal mind. The prairie wind, as I tell 
 you, has a witchery quite beyond the telling of any man. There have 
 I walked along the shores of summer twilight as on the shores of blue 
 and beautiful Galilee, and caressing, like an angel's hand, went the dear 
 wind, and in it a voice, half whisper and half dream, its touch, like the 
 shadow-touch of a fond hand passing across you, yet scarcely touching 
 you; the hush, and after that the slow streaming wind, like a breath 
 from heaven upon a pilgrimage across the spaces, so remote its origin 
 appeared; and journeying not any whither, yet everywhere and in no 
 haste, loverlike loving to linger for another kiss such a wind withal 
 as one might love to have kiss him on the face that evening, when, 
 after a long journey, with bleeding feet, he walked in through some 
 postern gate out on the fields of heaven sown to asphodels, and dim 
 lights and violets and immortelles. Such is the twilight summer wind 
 in Kansas when the prairie grasses stoop a little to let the zephyrs by. 
 To feel this necromancy once is worth a pilgrimage; seeing it will 
 endure among the luculent recollections of a happy life. 
 
 " The wind to-night is cool and free, 
 The wind to-night is westerly, 
 Sweeping in from the plains afar, 
 Sweet and faint. 
 
 My thoughts to-night are far and free, 
 My thoughts to-night are westerly; 
 Sweeping out on the plains afar, 
 Where roses grow and grasses are. 
 My heart to-night is wild and free, 
 My heart to-night is westerly," 
 
 -JOHN NORTHERN HILLIARD. 
 
 George Macdonald has felt the heavenly hill- 
 winds blow: 
 
 "0 wind of God that bio west in the mind, 
 Blow, blow and wake the gentle spring in me ; 
 Blow, swifter blow, a strong, warm summer wind, 
 Till all the flowers with eyes come out to see, 
 Blow till the fruit hangs red on every tree." 
 
 Blow, wind of God! 
 
 106 
 
THE FALLS OF ST. CROIX 
 
THE FALLS OF ST. CROIX 
 
 [HOUGH not an artist, I sit down in hearing 
 of the laughter of running water to paint a 
 picture. The commonest artists may at- 
 tempt the fairest landscape, which may 
 seem to justify this present attempt. The 
 place is the falls of the St. Croix; though I 
 would have you forget the village and re- 
 member the place. Yet, scarcely that, for 
 in the air last night swung the sweet ca- 
 dences of a church bell, a music not to be 
 heard lightly or without reverence, whether 
 in crowded city or in solitary hamlet, or on 
 far mountain side; for what minds of God, 
 in an instant, without effort, reaches the 
 sublime. However, forget the village, save 
 
 its swinging church bell, and remember only the place where the river 
 falls and runs away. 
 
 I am attracted by the river's name. There was a touch of the poet 
 in those old French voyageurs. And if they were Jesuits, as was so 
 often the fact, religion mixed with their poetry; and discovery was their 
 poetry as hymns were the poetry of George Herbert and Keble; and 
 they starred the way they discovered by their "saints" and a quaint and 
 touching festival of names, making their discoveries one long pilgrimage 
 to Jerusalem. This river, some forgotten lover of the cross named St. 
 Croix, and the name puts me to prayer. For which cause, seeking 
 some solitude where I might "knit up the raveled sleave of care," 1 
 chose this; and the name did not deceive me. I am glad I came. The 
 river is not what it once was, for rivers miss their youth as age does, 
 
 ill 
 
and their stature abates with the passage of years. The tilled lands 
 grow thirsty and drink like a sweaty harvester, and so exhaust the foun- 
 tains which used to flow into the rivers. The gains of our largest civili- 
 zation are touched with loss. Many of the pines have been taken, only 
 a few are left to tell survivors of another era, what sort of day was 
 theirs. At this point on the St. Croix, the banks are tall so as to leap 
 to the dignity of hills. There is no room for tillage near the river's bed, 
 and so the dusty road and the cottage, where love leans above its cradle, 
 and the woods with their hidden tinkle of cow bell and a mill, where 
 crystal waters of a boisterous brook turn the wheel, as if such labor were 
 a jest, these are my fellow-citizens at the falls of St. Croix. 
 
 Here the river runs from north to south, with barely a quiver of the 
 compass, only curving a little, as streams must. The valley dims upon 
 the eye, at either extreme hid in a cloud of trees, southward, northward. 
 The backlands stand somberly in the distance. Knobs of hills are sen- 
 tineled by pine-trees ragged as Spanish soldiers. The crests of the 
 ridges against the west are one uninterrupted forest, in whose shadow 
 insects drone in undisturbed quiet and violets blow with no one to pick 
 them. To the east is a zigzag line of hills, indented here and there by 
 an intruding valley or a road with its smoke of dust. On a sudden, a 
 point of green hills shoots up like the tangled leap of some emerald 
 fountain, and this hill catches and holds sunlight when the valley thinks 
 the sun has set. A dusty road ambles along the river's brink like some 
 loitering lad ; and along this a wagon rattles or a carriage clatters, or a 
 workman stoops with a lunch pail empty in his hand, or the woman and 
 her lover linger in the dusk, or a little child with bare feet patters in the 
 dust or wades in the clear stream edging the road with its indescribable 
 loveliness, and the wind "shakes from the trees the dust of day," as 
 Victor Hugo has it. 
 
 This retreat reminds me of New England hills, which always appeal 
 to me as a loveliness almost unapproachable. In New England hills is 
 a redundancy of moss and ferns and grasses and deep oozy earth, and 
 deep chalices in which the waters rest from motion, obscured from 
 
 112 
 
sight, and hidden alleys down which the waters pass with a stealthy step, 
 so that you may pass and repass and not know that you and the brook 
 are neighbors, such a confederation of beauty, entrancing as autumn 
 when it frequents the hills, is all but without competitor. This St. Croix 
 region more nearly reaches this faroff beauty than Rocky Mountain or 
 Sierra or any place I have lit on in my Western wanderings. Here the 
 St. Croix falls down a gorge with multitudinous music. What in old 
 times was perchance a falls is now a turbulent rapids, but is spend- 
 thrift in music; and what more could we require? and I love, sleeping 
 lightly with head at the window so as to miss no music when I wake, if 
 
 THE WALLED ROCKS 
 
 but for a moment (and the waters seem scarcely disquieted, the rapids 
 being not turbulent now nor precipitous) to hear the voices as if an 
 angel shook music from his mantle. The bed and banks of the river 
 are a red granite worn by the polishing of the waters smooth as the pol- 
 ished shaft which tells where lies some blessed sleeper dead, but not 
 forgotten. So polished are these rocks you must step with watchfulness 
 or lame you for your carelessness. Knots of rocks stand in the current 
 of the stream like some sturdy spirit in turbulent wars when others have 
 forgotten to be brave. Some of the wall rocks on the bank are yellow 
 as ocher; and against these dash crests of spray as the stream foams 
 
 113 
 
down the rapids betimes and flashes up as a spirit in prayer, or as 
 touching the old rock out of compassion for its eternal quiet or out 
 of sport and raillery, I know not which. 
 
 I lie under a ragged cedar on the eastern bank. Its shadows and 
 odors are a tent, and its leaning branches brush my face when the 
 wind stirs, and its odors house me in their sacred balsam. The winds 
 sing lazily through the trees and touch the quiet cedars into indolent 
 motion, and the aspen near by dances its every leaf as with some 
 apocalypse of joy; and the locust sends his strident call through the 
 woods and across the stream; and a solitary killdee shrills his plaintive 
 call as he races from pool to pool on the river's brink; and the wren 
 chatters in wren dialect, screened from inquisitive eyes, or the bluejay 
 calls hoarsely, "I am I am here here here," as if everybody was 
 interested in that information, and the wind blows in my face with a 
 breath as of early winter, refreshing as it comes from mountain streams; 
 and I lie and read Lowell, and am pensive and yet glad. I am reading 
 the search for the singing leaf, 
 
 "And deep through the green- wood rode he 
 
 And asked of every tree, 
 if you have ever a singing leaf 
 
 I pray you give it me. 
 And the trees all kept their counsel, 
 
 And never a word said they 
 Only, there sighed from the tree-tops 
 
 A music of seas far away. ' ' 
 
 And with such an afternoon in such a place the world draws off like 
 a defeated army, far off, where it seems not so much as be. The sun 
 
 PINES, RAGGED AS SPANISH SOLDIERS 
 114 
 
changes the position of shadows of rock and cedar and flings handf uls of 
 sunshine in my face out of sheer joy and sportiveness. The insects 
 whine drowsily (though they mean no music), and the voice of St. Croix 
 Falls sings on like a minstrel whose voice never grows husky nor weary, 
 nor his hands tired of the harp he holds and thrums. 
 
 And when the day snuffs out his light and falls asleep, the river 
 sings on. In the day there were other voices; now the river sings 
 alone. The voice of the waters is full of sorrow, like the story of a 
 broken heart. Sometimes the note seems to me like a dying man 
 who makes signs, beckoning you near with a world of intention in his 
 eyes, draws your ear close to his lips, tries to frame lips to the words 
 his heart would speak, but at the best his words are incoherent and he 
 dies with his secret unrevealed or half revealed. So these waters. 
 Their voices are, as says Longfellow: 
 
 "Full of hope and yet of heart-break;" 
 
 but seem to cry, "Hear my story, hear, hear my story!" And at night, 
 when other voices hush their jargon, then the waters have their way. 
 Their day is night; and they catch stars in their tangle of waters 
 and blur their light and seem to say, "This hour is mine," and send 
 up their mournful voices like incense through the darkness. How 
 sweet it is to hear the music of waters come through the lattices of 
 your sleep and dreams 1 I leave my window open and draw the bed-head 
 close to the window-ledge, so that in my score of wakings in the night 
 each tone of the singing waters may tell its story of lament; and I 
 whisper, "I thank you for your melody," and fall into slumber again. 
 Nor is this all the St. Croix can offer, though this is much, and 
 enough to change summer into a holiday. The stream's voice suffices 
 to change turmoil into quietness, and make room for the ineffable pres- 
 ence of the Christ of God. Along the eastern acclivities running south- 
 ward from the falls, spring after spring gushes out. You can not make 
 an inventory of them. They baffle you. Every bank has its fountain, 
 and I sit thus and write of them with the voices of these waters on 
 every side. One bubbles with a boyish self-assurance; another sounds 
 like a harp heard afar; another has haunting notes, quiet and tender as 
 a melody half-forgotten, so that I am compassed about with music. 
 Every mossy bank is a cluster from which nature is squeezing crystal 
 wines. Here are moss, and fern, and shrub, and violet leaves, flower- 
 less now, but reminiscent, all huddled here in quiet and hidden neighbor- 
 
 115 
 
liness. Some places, the silver of the stream gushes a fountain which 
 glasses the hillside and the far-off sky. How it clatters like a busy 
 street, or laughs cheerily like some sunshiny heart, and runs over 
 pebbles, saying, "I go but I tell not whither," and stays not a moment; 
 for the hill is steep, but running like one who hears a friend calling, fills 
 its woodland path with merry voices leaving sweet echoes when itself 
 is gone, and a memory in my heart more lasting than these echoes in 
 this shady wood. Other rivulets hide themselves as in modesty. You 
 
 SUNRISE ON THE RIVER 
 
 can not see whence they come; but they are come. Invisible threads of 
 silver are braided to make this rivulet, and it whispers along its way, 
 and if you will hear its voices you must lean down on the mossy bank it 
 loves, lean and grow glad; for sweet as a child's kiss in the sleepy night 
 is the voice of this silver thread of waters. Such dainty minstrelsy I 
 have not heard since I lay in New England hills. One thing only is 
 lacking here, just one; these brooks do not lose themselves in a tangle 
 of roots and grasses, and then dash out suddenly a sweet surprise; but 
 covetous would he be who would demand more than is here. The 
 
 116 
 
morning walks across the sky, and all these sunlit hours, these limpid 
 rivers saturate the woods with their music. All about you is the voice 
 of the lute of the rivulet ; and each voice seems sweetest. This is 
 God's glade, and these rivulets are a troop of his minstrels, and this 
 long day, too brief by many hours (for it is noon for it is afternoon 
 why it is evening) ! I have been heart to heart with God ; for these are 
 God's woods, and streams, and ferns, and sturdy rocks, and river banks, 
 and drowsy winds caught in the thickets, and dainty waterfalls trem- 
 bling on eminences or precipices of pebble or root, and laughter of 
 eddies and all are parts of God's thoughtfulness for us whose weari- 
 ness slips away in the heaven of his solitudes. 
 
 THE OTHER SHORE 
 
 117 
 
WHEN AUTUMN FADES 
 
WHEN AUTUMN FADES 
 
WHEN AUTUMN FADES 
 
 When autumn fades, and from the windy hill 
 And forest glades beside the quiet rill 
 The splendors waste,- and all the happy trees 
 Are quite defaced of beauty, and the breeze 
 
 Makes deep lament with laughter quite forgot, 
 As it were meant for threnody and not 
 For merry mood: and when the blackbirds fling 
 Their dusky brood across the sky on wing 
 
 Toward fields remote, and wild ducks flying high 
 With muffled note make speed across the sky, 
 And redbirds blaze through naked loneliness 
 Of woodland ways : and full of deep distress 
 
 The moaning trees where beat tumultuous tides 
 Of angry seas whose stormy music chides: 
 And all the ways are sown with withered leaves 
 And all the days are dim with haze, and grieves 
 The wintry wind, and the year's evening shades 
 Grow dusk, and blind the storms.; when autumn fades. 
 
 121 
 
A WALK ALONG A RAIL- 
 ROAD IN JUNE 
 
A WALK ALONG A RAILROAD 
 IN JUNE 
 
 SHE season was mid-June. The region was a 
 I prairie. The place was a five-mile stretch of 
 railroad running eastward, undeviatingly as the 
 flight of an arrow. Landing at a village in the 
 early morning, with three hours to wait for my 
 train, the out-of-doors challenged me to walk to 
 the next hamlet ; and, my custom being never 
 to take a dare from nature if my employment 
 will allow me leisure, I swung out right gayly 
 to answer the challenge. The day was dustless, 
 rains having sprinkled field and road and gardens 
 quite recently; the skies were dimmed with a 
 veil of cloud not dense enough to obscure the 
 sun nor to dim the blue completely, but enough to calm the sunlight into 
 entire pleasantness for a walk like mine. A pleasant wind blew from 
 the east and kept the track unhesitatingly as a locomotive, while I, with 
 the butterflies and wild bees, drifted from side to side as flowers and 
 grasses and tangle of vines invited me. 
 
 Now, a railroad is what our friend Ruskin railed at with his delight- 
 ful spleen ; and the logic of his complaint was that the railroad stood 
 for utility and John Ruskin stood for nature, and what John Ruskin 
 stood for was what should be. Ruskin had all the sweet dogmatism 
 and self-confidence of a little child. I like his love of field and flood ; 
 more still, I love it, but scarcely enjoy his vituperation, though put into 
 English sweet enough to make even scolding charming, nor enjoy it at 
 all when he raves against those modern appliances which have changed 
 the economic world and us, from provincials into cosmopolites. And 
 
 127 
 
- ..s 
 
 beyond this, use is needful as beauty, and 
 more needful, if all the truth be told. Use 
 and beauty must not be thought of as enemies, 
 but friends. The cooking stove is quite as 
 essential as clematis. They cherish no 
 antipathy. Use is lacking in the picturesque ; 
 but drudgery must needs be for the world's 
 bettering. A railroad, while anything but 
 beautiful, is the chore-boy of civilization, the 
 stevedore that carries our burdens from 
 wharf to wharf and from hold to dock, and 
 with prospect of neither emolument nor de- 
 light serves all save itself. Such service, 
 free-handed and free-hearted, always compels 
 my regard. I half venerate it, as I do a 
 mother of many children, whose hands are 
 worn to scars and hardness by much toiling 
 for the ones she loves. Who serves, God 
 loves. The road gives its wealth of labor as 
 uncomplainingly as a mother to her daughter. 
 Let no jest nor sneer be directed toward 
 those whose sweaty shoulders bend to the 
 burden of world's work ; let us rather requite 
 such sturdy toil with appreciation which is 
 better far than gold. The railroad track is 
 to me the embodiment of uncomplaining, 
 unacknowledged toil whose praises are in no- 
 body's mouth. 
 
 However, I have found that if the railroad 
 is itself lacking in beauty, it affords shelter 
 for the beautiful. Any one who has been 
 much out of door? in our later days, knows 
 
how beauty of tangled thicket and room for 
 gathering of bloom and bird are growing rarer ; 
 for are not the straggling fences rotting down 
 and giving place to fences of wire, which leave 
 no least protection from grazing herd or flock, 
 or tramping foot, for brier, or clump of grasses 
 or blackberry, with its arch of vine and sweet, 
 blinding surprise of snow-white blossoms? But 
 all this shelter the railroad supplies, and calls to 
 the homeless garden of nature, " I will give you 
 room," and makes good this cordial invitation. 
 On either side of the track is a goodly breadth 
 given over to nature. A ditch dug in build- 
 ing the road-bed gives place for water to stand, 
 and where water stands there is invitation for 
 flag and cat-tail and swamp-grasses ; and the 
 embankment gives privilege for the wild rose to 
 hold tryst with the wild bee, and makes banks 
 leaning south, where in the new springtime 
 violets may stand in pools of blue, and grasses 
 may grow, unafraid of the lowing herd. If you, 
 friend, have never known how dear a shelter the 
 barren railroad affords nature's refugees, pray 
 you give the matter heed. 
 
 Five miles of invitation of perfumed June 
 lie before me. The last robin of my journey 
 calls with its flute-note from the fringes of the 
 village. He hugs the town, I fear me, over- 
 much, and I tremble lest his morals become 
 corrupted ; ,but he eyes me from his barn-roof 
 with a curious look, as if commiserating the 
 moneyless traveler who must plod along the 
 track instead of riding on the train or going on 
 a robin's speeding wings. If men are not small 
 folks in the bird's eyes, I miss my guess. They 
 have a right to feel aristocrats, who have wings 
 and know how to fly. The skies are fair high- 
 ways for treading; and I piously envy all winged 
 things. Sometimes, I fear I love the country 
 
 129 
 
more than is comely, and then I recall I do not love it so much as God 
 does and am content. My march this fair morning was as a king's 
 triumph, all royal things coming to meet me. The soft winds sweet 
 with rose perfumes welcomed me with a kiss full on the mouth ; vines 
 reached out their graceful tendrils my way ; a meadow-lark called to me 
 from a nodding red clover head ; a quail invisible, hid somewhere in 
 meadow or hedgerow, piped in his cheerful voice across a cornfield as if 
 to intimate he was where he had full right to be ; the talkative sparrows 
 chatted along the way, having their say about the traveler going past 
 with his arms full of flowers ; a single blackbird with his hot crimson 
 epaulets flung by me as in high dudgeon, though I had done him no 
 earthly harm. This way is poor in birds, much to my regret, and I 
 know not why. Blackbirds should have been here in garrulous multi- 
 tudes. Plovers I looked for and found none. I think perhaps this is a 
 bird's holiday and they are gone from home, for certainly they are not 
 here, and the day is fair and belongs to them. But vegetation there 
 was a fortune of. The spring had latter rains, and all things had the 
 brilliancy of perpetuated youth upon them. Leaves fairly flashed in the 
 light, as if sparks were smitten from them. Long miles of grasses, 
 rank and lush, grew nodding to the wind. On either side were fields 
 planted to corn, with the farmers plowing the long rows of emerald ; or 
 pastures of prairie grass, than which few sights are fairer to the eyes ; 
 or red clover fields lent modest perfume to the air, for few odors can 
 compare in delicacy with those wafted from the red clover meadow, so 
 delicate that unless the flowers are in masses of acres in breadth, you 
 will not get the fragrance at all. Fields of oats with their quick green 
 answered to the wind, and a wheatfield with a faint haze of harvest on 
 it felt the goings of the spring wind. Woods, there were none. Only 
 a willow stooped across a ravine showing where was hidden water, or a 
 planted elm waved its graceful curved plumes, or a cottonwood, which 
 tree I profess to love and have some times talked, some times written 
 my affection, not being content with a single declaration. One cotton- 
 wood I stop to listen to and indeed what one of them do I not stop to 
 listen to? for the rain upon their roof is very sweet to me, and their 
 tearful commotion is something my heart always remembers. This 
 tree stood along a field edge lifting its deep green into the air in a manly 
 fashion, as unashamed to front the sky, and through its branches ran the 
 drift of autumn rain, and I closed my eyes and listened, as loath to pass ; 
 and farther off, half across a field, a group stood together where I could 
 
 130 
 
THE LEANING WILLOW 
 
hear, as they half whispered their rainy colloquies. Spring it was, or 
 early summer, but they, as I gathered, were speaking about autumn and 
 the sere leaf and the last late rose and the departure of the swallows 
 and who could blame them for having tears in their voices ? 
 
 I made my leisure journey. Naught troubled me nor hasted me. 
 The time was God's and summer's and mine. I stopped at every 
 pastoral and grew inquisitive at every stop. Something enticed me 
 everywhere. Three hours I had, though I could use three days. One 
 can not have too much leisure with Nature. She is coy like a hermit 
 thrush, so that those who hasten may not know her; but I sped leisurely. 
 Most plants along the road I knew, some I had not seen, or, speaking 
 exactly, one, and that made me glad, because it is so good to make a 
 new friend among the flowers. One's life is infinitely enriched thereby. 
 To meet old friends in flowers or folk is delightful, and meeting new folk 
 and flowers has a tang of gladness also. One new friend among birds 
 or flowers, or gentle green among the leaves what think you of that, 
 my heart ? One white flower I met this day I had not met aforetime, 
 and the memory of its dainty beauty lingers caressingly. Five-petaled, 
 pure white as a blackberry blosom, growing low on the earth, beckoning 
 the wind, sheltered by the grasses, sometimes a few feet of ground 
 would be star-white with them, sometimes one bloomed solitary like a 
 forgotten life some one had died and left, but whether single or in 
 groups, the flower was dainty, fair, and left a gentle memory to my 
 heart. I see it yet. Along the track were no rose bushes with their 
 frowsy archings and interarchings, and had there been, the time of 
 roses was not yet. That sweetness was to be an anticipation. Not all 
 flowers bloom at once. God is too good for that. He sows his flowers 
 through all the lanes of spring, summer, autumn ; and I love him for it. 
 But, rose bushes being absent, rose blooms were present and burned 
 along the banks or flamed in the grasses like sparks from a hurrying 
 engine. They were inexpressibly beautiful. My eyes caressed them, 
 and I would linger over every flushed face I saw, as if it were the last 
 I was to set eyes upon. Seldom more than six to nine inches high, 
 they took you by surprise by a sweet surprise ; and they were always 
 fair, running in color from pure white to deep crimson, each seeming, 
 as I saw it, fairer than its sister, as each child in a family circle. Here 
 a single flame shot like a firefly's lamp, there a bank blushed into sud- 
 den flame with them. One was white sprinkled daintily with pink, 
 another was bronzed as with some chaste enamel, another pink as a 
 
 133 
 
seashell, so delicate you feared to look straight at it lest the blush die 
 away to be seen no more. I wished I were painter so as to paint them 
 all; but could I? And the buds, ready for flowering, were fairer than 
 the flower, and had moss upon them, so that I thought I had found a 
 colony of God's moss roses growing wild. When spring comes round 
 and the dwarf roses bloom, go you, good friend, and watch for them as 
 for the coming of a longed-for comrade ; and bring some of the love- 
 liest away with you and and press them in a book, and write in the book 
 where you found them, their color, when you gathered them, and their 
 
 sweet capricious ways, 
 and confess you love 
 them, whereat, mayhap, 
 they may learn to love 
 you in retur n w h o 
 knows? For a mile 
 and more along the 
 banks the wild parsnip 
 was swaying to the touch 
 of every wind whorls of 
 gold was what they were 
 and looking across a 
 mile of them was look- 
 ing at a pathway of 
 wrought gold, and who 
 was I, to walk on gold- 
 | paved streets before my 
 time, or to stand, as 
 sometimes I did, when 
 the flowers stood tall, in golden corridors? Once, just once, a rivulet 
 crossed the path. I saw it glint among the grasses and come slyly 
 closer, like some living thing filled with curiosity, and then it ran under 
 our bridge as one affrightened, but the water was clear and intent on 
 its journey. If I spoke to it in passing, it either heard not, or, if hear- 
 ing, made no reply, nor even gave a backward look. Perhaps its ret- 
 icence was to hide ignorance, for perchance it knew not whither it was 
 going, only knowing it was time to haste like a truant child overtaken 
 by the dark; and I cried, "You are going to the sea," but no word did 
 it reply, only there was audible laughter such as I loved to listen to ; 
 and I seemed to be bent on talking to the rivulet, for I said, "You are 
 
 134 
 
 THE BRIDGE 
 
journeying, but I too am journeying, and to the sea, only my 
 sea is shoreless and remote, and toward it I make haste, 
 though oftener I fear with tears than 
 with laughter. Yours is the better way, 
 laughing onward toward the sea " I 
 crossed a group of shrubs unknown 
 to me, whose leaves were of such 
 redness as to stand like a dull flame 
 in the midst of the gay greenery of 
 the grasses that hedged them in. 
 And the slough grasses are always 
 beautiful to my eyes. I never yet 
 have tired of them, and here they 
 grew in eager luxuriance, and in some 
 parts were of such brilliant green as if 
 they had barely wakened from 
 a refreshing winter sleep, and 
 with all freshness on them, like a 
 newly awakened child, locked at you 
 in sweet surprise. The grasses, grown 
 taller, had a sedateness and sense of dig- 
 nity such as I have sometimes seen in 
 women. Stately they were and drooping 
 all bowed as soldiers who had stood 
 guard all night and were sleeping in the 
 day. The wind came and caressed 
 them, but they woke not or barely 
 nodded as if saying, " Let me sleep, 
 let me " and the sleepy voice fell 
 asleep. They were secret-keeping like 
 marsh grasses by the sea. I love this 
 waving green when winds drowse or 
 flurry by, and the grass, somnolent yet 
 fluent, answered in a dream to this 
 fond caress, and I feared the winds might 
 disturb their rest; and the slumber was on 
 them when the wind was gone. The 
 crowning glory of the walk was the blue flags 
 
 135 
 
 BLUE FLAGS 
 
(spiderwort). They and I were old friends, though I had never known 
 them in such profusion, for they stood for two miles and more in solid 
 ranks on both sides the track. You do not know how beautiful the blue 
 flag is till you have seen it in such long procession. Standing alone, 
 this flower has a gawky appearance, and when seen in small groups this 
 awkwardness is not materially lessened ; but when seen in their armies, 
 where on looking back they drift like blue smoke lying low along the 
 ground and for miles then they are a pageant of beauty and color. I 
 gathered them till I could carry no more, but gathered them all in my 
 heart. Not a blue flag nodded on its stem when my love had passed 
 by. I see the mass of color and delight as I write, as I did the day I 
 walked in the midst as if I were crowned king of all that excellence; 
 and 1 mistake, if for all the days of my life I shall not feel as if on a 
 day in June I had walked in a royal procession. To see that blue 
 muster in the early summer was worth going mile on mile to see. The 
 violets had put their lights out weeks ago, and here is a flower that 
 holds its bloom aloft like clustered stars of blue, as if violets clustered 
 on the umbels. You must keep close to the ground to see a violet; 
 but these flowers hang their blue aloft like a light and there, shines blue 
 as the midoceans. There they stand, sometimes like soldiers in ranks 
 ready for war, sometimes they spring suddenly out of the dense green 
 of the swamp grass I have told you of, and you see no stalk of flower 
 at all, only a green sea waking from sleep into amethyst with downy 
 centers blue as the petals are and each pistil dipped in a pot of gold dust. 
 
 One thing I found this day I had never found before, and that was a 
 pure white flag with snow-white center and the pistil tipped with gold. 
 The beauty of it fairly took my breath. That day I had seen flags of 
 every hue of blue, from light sky blue to the black blue of ocean, and 
 some with only a haze of blue, faint, delicate, remote as if the color 
 were an afterthought; but this blue flag blooming cloud- white was quite 
 beyond me. So is God always and still always surprising us. 
 
 But down the track behind me I see a cloud of smoke. My holi- 
 day I plainly see is ended. My train is coming and is no laggard. I 
 must leave this long journey of gladness, though loath as ever sailor to 
 quit the sea. I have had a journey in the land of dreams, so fair they 
 were. I had walked down a five-mile stretch of railroad, and it had 
 been as if I had wandered inland across the hills of God. 
 
 136 
 
THE WINDINGS OF A STREAM 
 
THE WINDINGS OF A STREAM 
 
 TREAMS are poor geometers and are in ill repute 
 with rigid mathematicians. The mathematician 
 has engaged himself to and married the straight 
 line; and a straight line the 
 stream knows nothing of, or 
 knowing of, absolutely refuses to 
 recognize. I am proud of the 
 stream. It may not be mathe- 
 matical, but is poetical, which, 
 with all deference to mathema- 
 ticians, is much better. Mathe- 
 matics are necessary; poetry is 
 more necessary. God is both 
 
 mathematician and poet; but- such combination exists only in him. Men 
 must be mathematician or poet; and, as for me, I will join hands with 
 the poet if he will let me. 
 
 Every water course refuses (absolutely and without reason, like a 
 little man) to go on section lines. I have watched them through 
 many years and have never found a stream which would of its own 
 accord go as the crow flies. Water is a sad gad-about. It has no 
 more notion of sticking to a road than a dog has when he goes .driving 
 with you. In short, the stream has a mind of its own, like a little 
 woman; and there is the end of it. You can not argue with water. 
 Like a woman, it goes by intuition; but its ways, like a woman's 
 ways, are very sweet and self-justificatory. 
 
 Every stream is a poet. Poets are born so. How many streams 
 I have followed toward or to their source ! What wild rollics I have 
 had, with the streams laughing at me with wild rollicking laughter, 
 
 141 
 
like a man from Kansas, and slapping me on the shoulder like a man 
 from Nevada I In the mountains (was it yesterday or this forenoon?) 
 what boyish delight I have taken in going uphill in August with a 
 water-brook, till, with spent strength, but with wild, hilarious spirits, 1 
 have laid me down on my stomach to drink waters just squeezed from 
 the snow drift. Who would drink wine after such elixir? How could 
 he? And the laughter of the water God tuned its singing as he did the 
 singing of the winds; and there is no complaint of flatting or sharping, 
 no defective tones, only music, music, music! 
 
 I have followed streams on mountains and on prairie and through 
 thickets of Minnesota and through Wisconsin pines, and through the 
 dreary foot-hills, and through lonely sage-grown desert, and through the 
 high meadows of Colorado, standing above the summits of Tennessee 
 mountains, and in meadows in New England hills, where the streams 
 
 beguiled me back into the woodlands and through them to where be- 
 yond still other meadows lay, through grasses and out of sight under 
 grasses till you could only tell the water was not lost or was not asleep 
 by leaning ear on the grass, and hearing the chimes of it sweet as 
 vesper bells in the days gone by; and in the Berkshire Hills of Massa- 
 chusetts and the Derbyshire district in England, and where in an island 
 a runnel hurried to the sea as it were to keep tryst with her he loved, 
 and many a rivulet near the seashore where the waters lingered, as if 
 now that the great sea was so near it feared to take the last step of the 
 journey and have not any home on land forever, and the salt tides of 
 sea ran up and took the rivulet on its breast and bore it back far up 
 where the marsh grasses floated upstream with the tides, I have seen 
 water courses everywhere, but not one have I seen not sinuous as a 
 swallow's flight. 
 
 Streams flow to the point of least resistance (really, I feel proud of 
 that sentence. It has a weighty sound. I feel scientific. If I am not 
 
 142 
 
on guard I will speak of "environment" next lest I do, let me hasten 
 on, tightening my belt for speed); and in consequence their goings are 
 a series of sweet lawlessnesses. A bright stream in Syria was named 
 Meander, and from its multitudinous wanderings we keep the word 
 "meander" to mean a journey in winding ways. The reason why every 
 stream is beautiful is because every stream is bent on meandering. 
 Lovers can not keep to 
 a sidewalk. They give 
 scant attention to direc- 
 tion. A stream is the 
 same. I think it has no 
 compass and does not 
 know it can steer by the 
 pole star. I rejoice in 
 its ignorance. I am right 
 glad it has no theodolite 
 and chain, but has a 
 sweet unreasonableness 
 and pouting self-will and 
 strict inattention to rules 
 and advices the stream 
 " doeth whatsoever it 
 will." Who but God 
 taught the waters this 
 
 quaint unreasonableness? Every step the stream takes is a deviation. 
 Being in no hurry it may be as leisurely as a summer afternoon. 
 Streams are in no sweaty haste, but with blunt Walt Whitman, may 
 loaf and invite their soul ; and so it happens that they will spend a half 
 day in your field when they might get beyond it in a jiffy. I love their 
 loitering. The streams go nosing around, digging under banks, stop- 
 ping to demolish a sandbar, then waiting to build a sandbar, putting a 
 curve on everything as a rainbow does, building little peninsulas where 
 a wild flower may root, laving the roots a sycamore has inadvertently 
 thrust too near the stream, dawdling around in pools, chasing its own 
 bubbles as a kitten runs after its own tail (poor silly), making froth at 
 the edge of some root which has with temerity walked out across the 
 stream, pouring down its little world of waters from a play-ledge of rocks, 
 and so has dug a little hollow where the waters stay when the stream 
 runs dry, running around and building an island so they may study 
 
 143 
 
 THROUGH LONG GRASSES 
 
geography without going to school, making a bold maneuver, like a 
 skillful general, and swinging back so far as to construct a huge penin- 
 sula, and within a three-feet of flowing back into itself, when in strange 
 willfulness turning off in a new direction to go clean to the back of the 
 hill, where the rocks jut out, laughs at them for being naked, and 
 chasing sunlight along its way and then drowsing within the shadows 
 (for the heat is too intense to enjoy long at a time), thus loitering, then 
 running off in great speed as if to do an errand forgotten, then off into 
 another direction out into the open where grass is growing and willows 
 dream; then down where the banks are high and steep, and where no 
 sunlight is, and then dodges like children when they play blindman's 
 buff: and the upshot of all this is the stream has written a poem of 
 journeys. 
 
 Never walk across lots when a stream is in your neighborhood 
 (unless you are going on an errand for your wife. Then stay not on 
 the ordering of your going), but follow the stream as the sycamores 
 do. You shall find enchantment such as Merlin the mage knew not; 
 and you will be led afield where the voices will make you glad and 
 where every new step will be new delight, as with Merlin following 
 "The Gleam." 
 
 144 
 
FOUR SEASONS=ONE YEAR 
 
FOUR SEASONS=ONE YEAR 
 
 HAT the good God of the Out-of- Doors could 
 have made five seasons or six is quite among 
 his possibles, though not of ours ; yet am I , for 
 one, content that he made us four. That is 
 enough. Four is his sacred number ; and 
 sacred the quaternion of the seasons surely is. 
 Think through the four seasons as if your 
 thought were an arrow-flight speeding from 
 spring through summer, autumn, winter into 
 spring again, and feel how adequate the journey 
 |p I was. Spring was birthday, summer love- 
 _ v |j? I making, fall the glow and glory of the day of 
 
 If Jr I life, winter the battle mood and madness. 
 
 mm Fa : ' " fay 
 
 *'- I Beginning, wooing, enjoying, fighting with a 
 
 world of foes, what besides is there in life? 
 Four seasons are enough. They engulf the year in their glorious ocean 
 as reefs are swallowed in the high tides that caress and kiss and make 
 tiger springs of furious passion. Four seasons I will thank God for 
 that mercy also. They are none too many, not two nor one, but just 
 enough; like the number of children at anybody's house, never one 
 too many. 
 
 I want no climate where the seasons are reduced to two or one. A 
 year-long winter does not suit my thought nor me, nor does a year-long 
 summer. One season to fill the year is too sedate. I like not its 
 narcotic ; for it makes the faculties drowse like lotus-eating, whereas 
 Nature, if we are to make much of it, must be watched with undi- 
 minished interest and appetite. A drowsy man might as well be asleep 
 for all the good he gets from company or landscape. Did you ever try 
 to carry your part of a conversation when you were nodding and napped 
 
 149 
 
l& 
 
 between your own fragments of dialogue ? It is a grief 
 to me to think of my lapses of this sort, when, though 
 in goodly company, a too long journey in the wind had 
 blown awakement from my eyes and spirits and I 
 drowsed like an August afternoon. O, it was griev- 
 ous! And to wake with an intellectual summersault 
 and join blithely in the conversation, as if my silence 
 had arisen from cogitation well-nigh lost in the morass 
 of that fen too profound thought ! As I think of my 
 stealth of reapproach to convivial conversation and of 
 my vivid remorse over the outraged rites of hospital- 
 ity, I blush while setting these sad confessions down, 
 but rejoice that these sleepy moods of mine were ab- 
 normal, fitful, isolated. I am usually awake, my blinds 
 up and my doors open. The plover will not call and 
 I not hear, nor the veery cry nor the crickets chirr, 
 nor the dirty-faced, ragged lad sit astride an impossi- 
 ble landscape of toppling habitation and I not see his 
 ragged glee and rejoice. No, I am not customarily 
 asleep ; I am usually awake and have been known to 
 be wide awake. I will make my prayer to be pre- 
 served from the drowsy spirit ; and that my prayer 
 may be the surer of answer, I would wish to live in a 
 four-seasoned year. Give me the seasons' cycle to 
 keep my life awake. "When will the birds come?" 
 that is springtime's question. "When will the birds 
 cease their singing?" that is summer's query. "When 
 will the birds tire of us and be gone?" that is autumn's 
 sad question. "When will the dull clouds shake their 
 mantles and fleck the world with snow?" that is 
 winter's surly interrogative. Thought has little room 
 for sleep if the four seasons be kept pace with, seeing 
 they are so swift of foot, and outrun the speed of 
 mourning doves in autumn flights. Though he said 
 little enough about his subject, goodness knows, 
 Thomson wrote about the four seasons. But in the 
 mere writing about them was a virtue, specially in 
 days when men cared so little for any season as 
 Thomson's contemporaries did. We must never 
 forget that he "took his pen in hand" to celebrate 
 150 
 
the journeys of the year. Some people are virulently insistent on tell- 
 ing which season they like best. Such people vex me. I hope I may 
 be forgiven for my seeming ill-nature, but honestly, what is the need of 
 choosing? They are all ours. "All are yours." The round of the 
 seasons, glad, sunlit, sweaty, shivering, all are mine. I own the sum- 
 mer's sultry noon and winter's surly storm winds, so why choose? Who 
 owns mountain and valley need not vex himself to select between land- 
 scapes where he owns the whole. These "choosy" folks are like those 
 
 who persist in asking which fair woman in Shakespeare is loveliest. 
 They miss the mark. Each one of Shakespeare's women is loveliest 
 in what she is and for what she is. We do not always need to select. 
 Take what comes. What call for anybody to choose one star of the 
 firmament? I love them every one. Not one can be spared from the 
 wide pasture-lands of heaven. Let each star trim his lamp and burn 
 on, and may no single light blow out, that is all we ask. We must not 
 select, but embrace (I am speaking not of women, but of stars). Or 
 why should we be driven to the wall by "Which is your favorite flower?" 
 I will not answer that question, although I know, because the asking is 
 an impertinence. Woods and meadows, both are mme, and all the 
 flowers that haunt springtime woodlands and ravines or flaunt their gold 
 
 153 
 
on autumn hills, if there is one I do not love, I wonder which it is. 
 Homely flowers, half weed and more, and scant in color, or lacking in 
 form, impress me as homely women I am sorry for them ; but their 
 attempt at beauty pleases me. And the flowers, there are Maud Mul- 
 lers, barefoot and tanned, but they are dear to me. I like their rustic 
 simplicity. I will not choose so much as I will gather and enjoy all the 
 flowers which tangle in Nature's garden through the bewildering year. 
 
 I am so with the seasons. No one shall decoy me into expressing 
 preference now. What I may do later is immaterial. To-morrow I 
 may, but it is not to-morrow now. This is to-day . To-day is to-mor- 
 row in bud, and buds bloom if the frosts do not scar their immature 
 loveliness. But this I hold to as to the dirty, chubby hands of my little 
 children ; by and by I shall hold their hands as youths, and still further 
 on, if God shall loan me so many days, I shall hold their hands as man 
 and woman. Which shall I love the more ? the baby hands or the 
 lad's hands or the scarred hands of manhood? I will not answer; 
 whether I could is inconsequent. I will hold their hands all these 
 
 154 
 
AUTUMN 
 
days, and in that land where daylight lasts a long, glad while I shall 
 hold them still. I need not choose and will not. The hands are mine ; 
 say that, my heart, and hold thy peace. 
 
 So the four seasons, I would sing a madrigal for each. Let The- 
 ocritus or some good woodsman, who loves to brush the dew from the 
 stooping grasses of the early morning, let him sing a roundel for each 
 season as it comes ; and mind you, singer, spare no pains, sing sweetly 
 and shame the mockingbird when he sings his "dropping song," what 
 time he wooes and tosses wildly like a jet of salt sea spray to the rapture 
 of his own music. 
 
 "Sing me the song again! 
 
 The wild, sweet notes that thrill my heart with bliss : 
 Quick throbbing now with passionate disdain, 
 Now falling soft as evening breeze s kiss. 
 Sing me the song again ! 
 
 Repeat the wondrous tune ! 
 The full broad glory of the perfect moon, 
 The pearly glimmer of the clustering leaves, 
 The ghostly shadows of the night's high noon, 
 
 My listening soul perceives. 
 
 Repeat the wondrous tune! 
 
 -KATE MILLIARD. 
 
ON WINTER PANES 
 
' 
 
 
 ON WINTER PANES 
 
 In winter days on window panes 
 
 Fair summers dream their gladness o'er, 
 And grow dim, shadowy, restful lanes 
 
 Of elm-tree and of sycamore. 
 
 / watch the glass, and watching see 
 Dear summers flushed with radiant June 
 
 And hear the song bird wild with glee, 
 And insects drone their drowsy tune. 
 
 I see far mountains wrappea in blue 
 And clouds that drift along the sky, 
 
 And valleys where with variant hue 
 
 The wild flowers bloom and blooming die 
 
/ see the shaggy mountains throw 
 On high their plumes of oak and pine, 
 
 And roses in hid gardens grow 
 Their garlands ruddy as old wine. 
 
 On winter panes! There summer springs 
 Like Lark into deep skies of blue, 
 
 And lifts itself on singing wings 
 
 From meadow nest begemmed with dew. 
 
 Without, the winter blast sings loud 
 And trumpets like an angry bard; 
 
 Within, spring with its wind and cloud 
 Drifts incense sweet as precious nard. 
 
WALKING TO MY FARM 
 
WALKING TO MY FARM 
 
 >HE date is October four and the place 
 Kansas, when I, a city man (0 the pity 
 of it!) land at a siding on a hilltop to 
 take a day apart from the city calendar 
 and rest my heart in the country quiet, 
 away from the huckster, with his strident 
 vociferations ; away from the ragman, 
 with his highly-developed theories of eco- 
 nomics and his equally highly-developed 
 lungs; away from the jangle of street 
 cars and the ceaseless grind of wagon- 
 wheels in their industrious pursuits ; away 
 from the blue-coated policeman, with his 
 vigilant " Move on, there!" enforced with 
 his uplifted billy; away from the train- 
 caller, with his nasal "Nail aboard for 
 thu Santa Fe for Topeka. Santa Fe, 
 San Francisco and the Philippines train on the third track: Nail 
 aboard;" and then, in a lower and confidential voice adds, "The Santa 
 Fe is now ready." Away from this jargon without the courtesy of a 
 good-bye ; for I slipped off as if trying to avoid an officer ; and here I am 
 on the siding, with the day before me and no wagon grinding along the 
 pavement, nor any street car clanging at me with its virago bell ; here, 
 with autumn's quietness about me and the day before me, My heart, 
 carpe diem. Enjoy, enjoy this day. 
 
 And I will. I shall walk to my farm. Those who always ride miss 
 a good share of delight if their way leads through the country. Flowers 
 and leaves and pastorals must be seen close at hand. Nature says 
 
 169 
 
"Come nearer." Bike riders do not see the country, nor do buggj 
 and horseback riders. Be leisurely and walk. Dally, loiter, poke along, 
 putter, or, if you like not these words get a word you do like, only let 
 the word express delayed and loving motion, the sort of leisureliness a 
 brook knows, running when it feels like running, drowsing when it has 
 a drowsy mood, in silvern basins where sun and shadows meet, shadows 
 to woo to slumber, sun to stoop and kiss the waters awake. So the 
 brook loiters. Do you, friend, when and if you would see an autumn 
 landscape do the like. Choose your word to fit that motion and fit 
 your goings to the word. 
 
 The autumn wind slows to a saunter coming up the long ravine. 
 Purple asters (and I have seldom if ever seen them so royal as this 
 fall) cluster in flocks of loveliness. Black-eyed Susans had in coyness 
 shaded their faces till they looked like buttercups long delayed in 
 blooming, months past due, but keeping faith at last. Now and then 
 morning-glories, with beauty of leaf and tendril and bell-shaped flower, 
 stray and bloom, many of them being so deep a pink as to approach 
 the glow of flame. Iron weed stands on its dignity (as usual) unbend- 
 ing, as people I have known, with its surly purple. Sumacs were dying, 
 but this autumn have the fresh green of spring, so that here is a vivid 
 green good for eyes to look upon. Wild grapes hang in purple bunches, 
 sometimes in the shadow of their own leaves, rare as arabesques, but 
 the grape leaves are turning brown as tired of this long daylight of 
 summer and will soon be quit of it. For days past now they 
 
 "Have been half in love with easeful Death, 
 Caird him soft names in many a mused rhyme."'' 
 
 Oaks have, somo of them, the dull browns of winter save those glossy 
 greens that so well become the:n, fairly flashing in the sun when the 
 wind tosses them into momentary perturbation like play shields used in 
 fairy tournaments. A distance in the background against a hill, sumacs 
 stand in clumps, crimson as flushed sunsets. I am a good lover of the 
 sumac. In the summer its leaves are so glossy and its fronds so beau- 
 tiful, and in late summer its bunches of crimson berries are held on 
 
 high with such loyal pride 
 as if they were a lady's 
 favor to be worn on 
 a knight's helmet, and 
 those berries covered 
 
 
thicker with frost than barn roof in October, and when the berries ripen 
 to hang for the winter with their dull, coal-glow red and these frosts 
 still unmelted by this glowing heat, I watch the wonder and the beauty 
 of it with joy unconcealed. What is the sumac that God should lavish so 
 much glory on it? And at the last, before the fronds fall, sumacs build 
 their bonfires on the hills and keep them burning through many nights 
 and days, for with them as with good lives "at eventide it shall be 
 light;" for sumacs, which, as you watch them at sunset on a night, will 
 the next morning be naked as dull death, only beneath them is a bed of 
 living coals which shall soon be ashes. How the sumacs burn on this 
 hillside! In a pasture beside my path as I saunter down the ravine a 
 herd of calves lie under the shadow of a courteous elm (and has any 
 tree more courtesy of shade than the elm?) ruminating in their care- 
 free leisureliness which no creatures save the kine know. A crow 
 (quite alone) goes soaring aloft (crows seldom soar they fly, nor often 
 fly high; this crow is soaring, and far up) and I accost him (country 
 style, without introduction) with a hoarse "Ha, kha, caw," to which he 
 pays scant heed, though I think he deflects his course just a trifle to 
 see what manner of crow this free-mannered bird may be, and a little 
 later calls in his catarrhal voice (he should consult a specialist) "Ha, 
 ha, ha, kha! " and I am well repaid for my pertness. Here are no 
 
 "Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves." 
 
 Would there were. But violets are one with the spring that brought 
 them. 
 
 I am come to where a clump of trees willow, hickory, walnut, elm, 
 oak with their fast-falling leaves carpet the grass, and hazels with gold 
 purses full of nuts lean tantalizingly near, and a runnel builds a toy bank 
 for a divan. Here I take mine ease at mine inn and break bread with 
 myself and watch the cattle going with their ample leisure down to the 
 spring to drink, and eying me with a quizzical "You are lost, and 
 who will find you?" and going on with never an offer of bovine help. 
 Meantime I sit and listen to leaf fall and catch the autumn-leaf per- 
 fumes and hear the moan of the winds passing through the tree tops 
 or curling the brown leaves in miniature fury, and while the wind makes 
 its music I read Keats's "Ode to the Nightingale." Maurice Thompson 
 was right in saying this ode should be read out of doors, and I shall 
 add, as my contribution to his advice, it should be read Out-of-Doors 
 and in autumn. To-day is the day. The poem has the odors of leaf 
 
 171 
 
fall. T is as lonely as an autumn night, when you hear only the falling 
 of the leaves to disturb the hush of darkness. Keats was stableboy, 
 but deserted the stable for the blue sky and the Out- 
 of-Doors, which was where he belonged, for all who 
 are familiar with our poets must know that 
 Keats is one of our chief pastoral poets. He 
 loves and sees nature, and, without stammer- 
 ing, tells what he saw. Theories of beauty 
 may limp, but beauty's self is as sure of foot 
 as daylight, and as fleet of foot as morning. 
 Those who frequent Out-of- Doors may have 
 beauty for ashes an exchange worth mak- 
 ing. And Keats had made this exchange. 
 He had often been 
 
 ' 7w some melodious plot 
 Of beechen green, and shadows numberless," 
 
 and had in " sun-burnt mirth " longed 
 
 "For a beaker full of the warm South, 
 With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, 
 And purple- stained mouth," 
 
 and heard the nightingale a-singing 
 
 'Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 
 Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home, 
 She stood in tears amid the alien corn and wept. 
 
 Thy plaintive anthem fades 
 Past the near meadows, over the still stream, 
 Up the hill- side; and now 'tis buried deep 
 
 In the next valley glades" 
 
 So Keats sings, and so, under the trees, 
 with heart set to leaf -fall, I read. 
 
 And here, while the light sifts down drowsily 
 through the gorgeous leaves, as if loath to leave 
 their glad glow, and leaves fall in leisurely fash- 
 ion, as doing it for their own delight, while birds 
 come, and with head leaning pertly on one side, 
 twitter "Who are you and what are you doing here ?" 
 The leaves rustle. The wind takes occasional gusts and then sits down 
 for rest, as I do. The clouds are bonnie, bonnie. When did I learn to 
 
 172 
 
love the clouds, and did I teach myself or did John Ruskin teach me? 
 No matter. I think it was bom with me, like loving my mother, or 
 being hungry for sight and hearing of the sea. But anyway I love the 
 clouds and to-day they would make a dullard love them. They are so 
 high, gauzy, tenuous. Those high cirrus clouds nobody ever painted so 
 well as Turner, because nobody ever saw them so well. Seeing comes 
 before painting. There is a chronology in production. These clouds 
 this day are diaphanous, remote, leisurely, out a-strolling like myself. 
 I wonder if they have a farm they are walking to? No one need giggle 
 
 SHADOWS 
 
 as if I were not walking to my farm. Because I am sitting around 
 and reading Keats and watching clouds and herds of cattle and leaves 
 is no sign I am not walking to my farm. To rest is to get ready for 
 walking. This business is all of a piece. I am on my way to my farm. 
 But where the clouds are going, with their slow step, I do not now say, 
 not knowing, only they are taking their time. But nobody could paint 
 them. Each one in all the fleecy multitudes has a new, fleeting loveli- 
 ness. God loans them one divine form, and that only for a moment, 
 and then changes it to another. How rich God is in patterns, which 
 
 173 
 
THE CROWS NEST 
 
 neither tapestries nor lace can ever hope 
 to emulate ! And this sunlight, dimmed 
 but not gray, half wakes, half sleeps, and 
 gives a light as of sunlight turned down 
 as some study-lamp, and so gives a mild, 
 sweet glow to gladden the eyes. I must 
 go now. I put my book in my pocket. 
 So, I feel a scholar; and down the ra- 
 vine with desultory steps I go. The wind 
 begins to walk with me and laughs sadly 
 amidst a glow of leaves. The crickets 
 are fiddling, though I do not quite know 
 the tune; but I am not musical, which 
 is no fault of theirs. A rabbit slouches 
 through a thicket and eyes me shyly and 
 ducks into the briers; and a redbird calls 
 with a voice of flame from his ruby 
 throat. A cooing dove (just one) moans 
 for a minute and is still. The corn- 
 fields stand half gray, half-golden-green, 
 resting against the coming rain and tem- 
 pests. Apple-trees stand with flashes of 
 red fruit through their branches and 
 leaves, for apple-trees are brave folk to 
 retain their leaves till the last minute. 
 Only the suckers of oak-trees hold them 
 longer with flame of anger because the 
 winter comes. A little child is gather- 
 174 
 
ing walnuts under my trees with his hands dyed with walnut juice, as 
 mine were when I was a boy; and a bluejay is stealing my acorns and 
 hiding them (he is a merry thief who steals for the love of stealing, for 
 he forgets where he has hid his plunder) ; and blackbirds are making 
 tumult in the tree-tops, talking all at once, and though I do not profess 
 familiarity with their dialect I catch enough to know they are planning 
 to leave my woods, for which I am sorry enough. Now they take long 
 gyrations and swift, framing a black cloud like gathering tempest, and 
 then settle down with a choppy kind of laughter. To-night they will go 
 
 to sleep in the tree-tops, but in the morning they will be gone ; for in the 
 night, down some long stream's windings, they will have haled to a sunlit 
 land where, instead of fallen leaves, flowers perfume the air. Than 
 these night migrations of the birds nature has no stranger doing and no 
 sadder. 
 
 And I trudge along the highway like a tramp; but the moment I set 
 foot on my farm I strut like a turkey en route to thanksgiving. I am 
 here. I walked here. I knew I was walking when I was sitting in the 
 leaf-fall and dreaming awhile. I am here. Let turnips and corn-shocks, 
 planted trees and those God planted, bushes frowsy as an unkempt head, 
 
 175 
 
and trees dyed with blood, all know that the proprietor of this manor is 
 come. 
 
 I climb the hill. I see the cattle browsing on the meadow. I hear 
 the musings of winds in the trees, and look at Quaylecroft, and flush with 
 pride, and stand at the gash in the woods at the hilltop and see the blue, 
 far, partly surly dimness of distance that clothes valley and hill and corn- 
 field and wandering of stream in beauty of dimness; and see how the 
 hills are great bonfires, and seared grasses and burning sumacs make 
 one hillside a regal purple. And I go down the hill and walk along my 
 wood road (you ought to see it) paved with leaves multicolored and 
 odorous, where shade and sunlight meet like old cronies; there I sit 
 and dream, sometimes of yesterday, sometimes of to-morrow, some- 
 times of that far, glad to-morrow where burdens never tire us nor any 
 tears wear ruts on the face nor dim the eyes from seeing, but where 
 beloved meet the BELOVED, and holy laughter fills the heart forever. 
 
 ' 'Lightly he blows, and at his breath they fall, 
 
 The perishing kindreds of the leaves; 'they drift, 
 Spent flames of scarlet, gold aerial, 
 
 Across the hollow year, noiseless and swift. 
 Lightly he blows, and countless as the falling 
 
 Of snow by night upon a solemn sea, 
 The ages circle down beyond recalling. 
 
 To strew the hollows of eternity. 
 He sees them drifting through the spaces dim, 
 And leaves and ages are as one to him.'" 
 
 CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS. 
 
MY FARM 
 
MY FARM 
 
 [OWN a farm. This is stated in a 
 spirit of pardonable vanity. I am 
 of those who are "purse proud," 
 | having a farm which some friends 
 of mine affect to make light of as 
 if the possession of a demesne of 
 eighty acres was a matter of small 
 consequence. However, none of 
 these things move me. I am im- 
 pervious to such intimations, know- 
 ing as I do, though I regret to say 
 it, that they all spring from envy. 
 One friend though I have cut his 
 acquaintance since the remark being asked where my farm lay, re- 
 plied with a Machiavelian look, "It does not lie, it stands on end," 
 referring to the fact, in which I take great and legitimate pride, that this 
 estate of mine lies on a very steep hill. I think it strange that envy can 
 so seize one who is otherwise pleasant and companionable and virtuous. 
 After careful and disinterested observation, I am prone to believe 
 that owning a farm tends to catholicity and magnanimity. In any case, 
 since having the estate alluded to, I am totally disinterested. Mansions 
 tempt me not. No roomy ranch with herds and harvests stings me to 
 covetousness. I too am a landholder. Some of Mother Earth is mine. 
 I own a tree, and a ravine, and a spring of running water, and a red 
 clover pasture, and a whip-poor-will, and much moonlight, and a small bil 
 of sky, and now and then a cloud. What hinders me being a landed 
 proprietor? Do I not pay taxes and own tax receipts, and work road 
 
 tax? Do not neighboring landed gentry complain of the ill-repair of 
 
 181 
 
my fences so that their cattle come into my field and eat of my corn, 
 which they lay as a grievance against me, instead of complaining at 
 their cattle as culprits? Are not these things credentials of proprietor- 
 ship of such magnitude as that no holders of a principality can do better 
 save in the quantity of taxes and complaints? 
 
 I consider landholding gives a man an independence of spirit not 
 obtainable in any other way. He has a spot whereon to live, and if 
 need be whereon to die and wherein to be buried. Wherever he is, 
 though he own not the land on which he walks, he yet retains the feel- 
 ing that there is a bit of earth whereon he walks with the step of a lord, 
 not to say a conqueror. A landholder loses that apologetic air so detri- 
 mental to manhood. His proprietary instinct precipitates (to speak in 
 chemical phrase in deference to the soil of my farm) in his attitude 
 and conduct. He can not be browbeaten by the vulgar or the elite. 
 Truly some have larger holdings than mine ; but the depth of their land 
 is not greater than mine, nor the height of their sky. They may grow 
 a little more crop ; but if they grow a little more, I grow a little less, so 
 that I too have my idiosyncrasy of genius. 
 
 As appears, I am not a Henry Georgeite. He vexes my soul. I 
 am for ownership of soil, and albeit the owning is rather expensive, I do 
 not retract a sentiment, nor regret a penny planted in my soil (though 
 it has never had the courtesy to so much as sprout). No, with all 
 deference to the ghost of Henry George, I must say that so far from 
 land ownership being against nature, it is strictly in harmony with 
 nature, especially with my nature. I am of opinion that land, like a 
 child, likes to belong to somebody. 
 
 I am a son of the soil. Emerson says (and his words are golden), 
 that contact with the earth is medicinal; and I doubt not he is right. 
 Confident I am that contact with my earth is medicinal. The moment 
 I set foot on my farm I seem to have stepped under my meridian. But 
 Christian humility is so developed in me that I walk not haughtily nor 
 yet obsequiously, though I confess to a certain erectness of shoulders 
 not native to me, for I am a large trifle stooped (much learning is 
 presumed to be the cause) ; but Emerson did not say all the truth. 
 Contact with the earth is medicinal, but we do not need medicine much 
 of the time. I will advance on my friend Emerson's dictum, affirming 
 that contact with the earth is dietary. We must all eat, not as a matter 
 of luxury, but necessity. Now, contact with the ground is one way a 
 man "can live without dining." (Apology to Owen Meredith's ghost), 
 
 182 
 
[ have long since been persuaded that I breathe through my feet (not 
 to the exclusion of my lungs, to be sure), and I am now, since becom- 
 ing a landholder, prone to believe that eyes, hands, and feet, are sorts 
 of receptive and assimilative organs, and that on the earth one can eat 
 without the usual routine. I feel a satisfied hunger when I get on my 
 farm (not denying that a lunch helps to the entire satisfaction of 
 hunger). A look about me as corn shocks stand yellow as rusty brass 
 in the slant light of autumn, or on the growing corn, standing tall and 
 straight as regulars on duty, with the utter grace of the blades as they 
 swing indolently as doing it out of courtesy and not of necessity; or 
 when I see tangles of weeds down along the runnels or hedge corners 
 (for I confess to a frank delight in weeds, even if they grow in a spirit 
 of impertinence in my field; for tangles of weeds are never inartistic. 
 They are like women, always of beautiful pose) and when I see weeds 
 on my farm and know that they are mine, I feel as if I had been at 
 Thanksgiving dinner (at another man's house). Contact with earth, 
 friend Emerson, is not only medicinal, but dietary. Set that down for 
 certain. When on my farm a spirit of courtesy controls me. I feel a 
 rising hospitality. I wish to invite the farmless to come in and sit 
 under my shade, and walk in my sunshine ; for I have both. People 
 may have their chance when on my premises. I feel a resident spirit 
 of pity for learned men, and lawyers, and merchants, and all such as 
 have no farm. I find myself looking at them with commiserative eyes, 
 though themselves look at my farm and me with ill-concealed pity, 
 while I hold on tight to my overalls one suspender being "busted;" 
 these landless men, I repeat, look at me with a smile ill concealed; 
 and I am not so blind as not to see that they have their jest at my 
 expense the minute they pass me by, turning to look back at me as if I 
 were a joke. To be patient with such superficiality and frivolity is hard, 
 but I am. If they pity me, I pity them; and I have the farm. And 
 this farm of mine is much more than people suppose. They think I 
 was buncoed when I bought the place; but I was not. They think so 
 because the descent of the farm is swift and the ascent slow. These 
 .are facts; but it does not follow that I was beaten in my bargain far 
 from it. This is my shrewdness. There is more land on a farm with 
 steep hills on it than on a level plot. One would think people would 
 know that, but people are not profound as I have discovered since 
 becoming a landholder; they see neither deep nor far. Now, as I have 
 intimated in plain statement, my farm taxes at eighty acres but after 
 
 183 
 
climbing up the thing and sliding down the thing a good many times, 1 
 am firmly convinced that I own in the neighborhood of one hundred and 
 sixty acres; and this increase in my estate is wholly attributable to the 
 steep incline. To own a hill seems to me the acme of desire. Aspira- 
 tion blooms out on hills, and besides so situated, I need not migrate 
 with the birds to get the seasons, or summer or winter residence. All 
 I need do is to toil up the hill, or slide down it. At one extremity, viz., 
 the hill, I call the habitation there erected Quaylecliff, and the residence 
 erected at the base of the hill I call Quaylecroft. Now, could a man 
 owning a level farm, every foot of which is tillable, have so economical, 
 and yet so delightful arrangement, or coin such names for his vernacu- 
 lar? Evidently he could not. The flat farm owner may have larger 
 crops and may in consequence get some rent, and moreover, his land 
 may stay where it was put with more tenacity ; but these are inconse- 
 quential matters when compared with the legitimate aristocracy of 
 possessing such names as "cliff" and "croft." Now these localities 
 are on my farm and have been for several years. They go with the 
 place. I own one hundred and sixty acres (or close to that), of spring, 
 summer, autumn, winter. I do not wish to boast. Vanity is not natural 
 to me. I have not been accused of a predisposition to braggadocio, but 
 do confess that when I consider how sections of the four seasons are 
 mine to rent, loan, or sell, I am with difficulty restrained from a little 
 Falstaffian swagger, not to say lying. Sometime, I fear, when off 
 guard, I shall be guilty of both ; but the provocation will, to my thought, 
 justify. 
 
 This farm has had a fine diversity of tenants since I have been 
 paying taxes on it. Variety is the spice (allspice, also pepper), of 
 farming. I detest the humdrum of changelessness, and have suffered 
 nothing from ennui from this cause since becoming proud possessor of 
 this estate. My first tenant was an Ethiopian. He was a good man, 
 and religious, and his wife raised turkeys, and he had a family great for 
 multitude, but his wife had in some calamity prior to coming to my 
 farm lost one of her bodily supports, and so chased her family over 
 my farm on one leg. Now this condition irritated my sense of female 
 grace. Woman is a biped. This woman was a uniped. Such a con- 
 dition was contrary to nature ; and a farmer must not go in the face of 
 nature any more than in the face of Providence. I say no more. The 
 next renter was, in the vernacular, a Dutchman. He was a brave 
 horse trader, and set posts for my vineyard, and possessed much suavity 
 
 184 
 
of manner (though not much suavity of farming) ; but when he met me 
 he had a habit of saying in a loud voice fitted for calling cattle, "Hello, 
 Doc., how ish de old vooman?" This considerate attention coming to 
 Mrs. Mugwump's ears, the man moved from the farm before his lease 
 expired. The next gentleman to do me the courtesy to reside on my 
 farm gratis, was an American. He was a devotee of business, but not 
 of my business. He took the medal, however, for raising sunflowers. 
 When he was on horseback (and he rode a tall and angular nag), he 
 could ride through his sunflower grove and not be detected. He was 
 as practically concealed as if he had been riding through the forests of 
 the Amazon. Now I was gratified to see the excessive fertility of my 
 soil ; but the neighbors smiled at the harvest, and I think one's neigh- 
 bors are to be considered (no man liveth to himself). This tenant 
 went away leaving the spring in the old spot, for which I was duly 
 grateful. The barb wire fence he wrapped up in reels. I hope he used 
 it for settees. The next tenant was an Irishman and was a choice 
 spirit, kindly, but not facetious ; courageous, but not a man of levity ; a 
 Sir Walter Raleigh in the use of the pipe, and as honest as Aristides. 
 He encourages the apples to grow, but discourages the cockle burs, and 
 the reverse had been the uniform custom of his predecessors my ten- 
 ants (I speak with pride in my pencil), and the change was to me pleas- 
 ant because it had the virtue of absolute novelty. My only fault with 
 this tenant is that he is so overworked keeping my farm in order (this 
 according to him) that he has no time to go to church. This intensity 
 of application, while it speaks well for his industry, does not commend 
 itself to me as first rate piety; however under his vigilant administra- 
 tion, the sunflowers are not a good crop, but the corn can be seen even 
 by the casual observer, and in the winter, corn shocks pitch their teiits 
 on the place like some army in winter quarters. While lauding with 
 all intensity the industry of this tenant and studying the corn he raised 
 with admiration, since I have not seen its like before, I still confess 
 missing the sunflowers that grew with such enthusiasm and made such 
 fine shade, and even in the winter under their kind auspices, the rabbits 
 ate my apple-trees with delightful avidity and friendliness which always 
 challenged my admiration. I always like to have my neighbors feel at 
 home with me. The rabbits used (and used-up) my apple-trees ; but 
 the apple-trees are generally understood to have nourished the rabbits, 
 and apple-trees and myself are in this world to do other people good. 
 Strange things happen on my farm. Any night of clear skies the 
 
 187 
 
Pleiades take a stroll over my farm looking at it intently ; but what they 
 see justifies a long journey. The sun walks on the south line of my 
 farm in winter, and straight across my farm in summer. A public high- 
 way goes along the east and just the same on the west of said real estate, 
 and on the north I run a domestic highway, which is, I may say, how- 
 ever, "eloquent with beauty." Nothing keeps away from this farm. 
 This, I think, creditable to the place for instance, the road on the west 
 crowds rather rudely on my ground, ostensibly because the hill is so 
 steep, the road must make the ascent by angles; actually because I 
 have such inviting shade that the road panting hot in long summer 
 days urges its tired way under my spreading trees to rest like a school- 
 boy tired with climbing. 
 
 More things than I, love my farm, so that I conclude good taste is 
 really prevalent. The sportsmen come to my wooded hill, though I like 
 not the art of killing. But my neighbors do have the courtesy to come 
 and send a cloud of powder smoke along my fields or in my 
 woods, and a flock of quails whirrs by on startled wing, and 
 more 's the pity sometimes one flutters out of his com- 
 pany and falls dying in the grass, or on the leaves. The 
 rabbit frequents my cornfield, which I take as a compli- 
 ^ment, though he is a costly visitor, because he persists in 
 dining off the bark of my apple orchard, and I have a scuffle 
 all winter long with him and his to teach them manners; 
 but any way, all hospitality is costly, and the hospitable man must not sulk 
 if his bills are heavy when his friends are many. Friends are cheap 
 whatever they cost. I would not have my farm deserted of these neigh- 
 borly folk, squirrel and jay and quail and rabbit and crow. Burns 
 was right, I think. The mouse is worth his board. From such a 
 tenant we lose a little and gain a great deal. What were a hundred 
 fields in their loss of grain matched with Burns's poem on the 
 "Mousie," which fairly aches with sympathy for the beasties of the field? 
 I confess to a love for the hawk with his swift shadow and his bold flight 
 rich in the ecstasy of motion ; and when I hear the owl call piteously 
 through the dark in the back lands, along the fringes of the hills in the 
 dark woods, I like him too. He is not mannerly, nor cordial. He is 
 not even commonly sociable. I have found him a sort of morose, sullen 
 creature, but he has a touch of sadness in his voice, and doubtless may 
 have his own family troubles, which may account for his behavior 
 ("Judge not, lest ye be judged"). These folks are all my neighbors and 
 
 188 
 
are welcome. They have rights as well as I; and after these years of 
 farming wherein losses have much outranked my gains, so much so that 
 long since I have ceased to keep accounts because I felt so sad and dis- 
 appointed when I looked at my balance sheet. After these years, I say, 
 I like these marauders. Were they absent, I might raise more (I can 
 not say), but I would enjoy less. I am a hedonist when on my farm. 
 I love to hear the quail's call on a summer afternoon when evening is not 
 far away. His note is so clear, so liquid clear, and his cheer is like peren- 
 nial joy, and when you can give him a playground and house and garden 
 patch in your field for so little cost, and for such cheerful piping, I, for one, 
 love him for a tenant. And the rabbits, with their strange timorous- 
 ness, that seem to dwell in perpetual fear, yet have delight through all 
 their troubles, I love them. To 
 see a rabbit sprawling like a 
 pickaninny in the sun, is to see 
 a life-size picture of content- 
 ment and grace ; and in the 
 summer, when the dogs seem 
 to have their teeth pulled, the 
 rabbit will calm his fear for a 
 moment to look at your com- 
 ing, and the rabbit child no 
 bigger than a country biscuit 
 is so cute as to make me always 
 call him by some pet diminu- 
 tive as 1 do my baby. And 
 
 when they hie them to the thicket where the briers are rabbit barri- 
 cades, their scurry away is like dim laughter, and I like them for 
 tenants too. They may stay without gruff talk from me. I am for the 
 rights of the world. The crow nothing would induce me to part from 
 him. Frankly, I love him, though to the best of my belief, he does not 
 return my affection. I love him and am glad I have woods where he 
 nests in summer, and where he spends his nights in winter with his 
 dusky wings close against his dusky sides and his sagacious eyes asleep. 
 He may do harm, but 1 doubt it ; he does more good than harm. He 
 is friend to the farmer, but we farmers do not always know our friends ; 
 but, friend or foe, I like him. His dudish and impertinent walk, his dis- 
 inclination to have anything to do with me, his stay with us all winter 
 when other birds are mostly gone leaving us alone, his remarks which 
 
 189 
 
some think dull, but I think droll, his fondness for his own kind and 
 apparent ability to get along with his wife's folks, his choppy, short 
 flights, like an inexpert rower rowing hard over tumbling waters, his 
 higher flights, sometimes graceful as the soaring hawk, and all but as 
 swift, his sure home comLig at the night, sometimes with wild 
 speed and sometimes slowly as if in his long journey of the day he had 
 grown wing-weary, his steadfast love for home ; for wherever he may 
 have been by daylight, home he comes by twilight; and if you have ever 
 heard him calling across the evening sky glorious with sunset, and wing- 
 ing his way as if he might cross a continent, and then all of a sudden 
 he gyrates like a cyclone funnel for he has gotten home, if you have 
 seen this, your heart must have been touched as well as your eye grati- 
 fied, for if everybody knew enough to come home at night wherever they 
 may have been by day, the world would have more laughter, and sweeter 
 mirth, and more heaven before heaven were journeyed to. No, I like 
 the crow and his independence of me and my liking (for he ignores me 
 as he struts along my field as if he paid taxes instead of myself). When 
 I speak to him, he deigns no reply, but walks on with his proprietary 
 air; he does not know me and apparently does not want to. Who has 
 set his black mind against me, I can not tell, but certain it is he will 
 not be friends with me (some people think he is wise in that, but my 
 judgment is he makes a mistake). I do not like to be ignored, even by 
 a crow; however, I like him so well he is welcome to his impertinent 
 mien. He survives, no thanks to others. Nobody seems to love him ; 
 but he is indifferent. He does not sulk nor hide, he never runs to 
 shelter like the rabbits, nor hides in the hedge rows like the quail, but 
 affects the open, flies low over your head, talks to himself sometimes 
 while he swaggers across the sky, lights among your corn shocks, grows 
 pnggish before your very eyes, snubs you, neither laughs nor giggles, but 
 is always solemn as a hired mourner, propitiates nobody except himself. 
 He is brave as a soldier and sometimes as truculent ; but winter, spring, 
 summer, autumn, here he is, sometimes by himself walking along like a 
 preacher concocting his sermon, sometimes with a few intimate friends 
 like a bevy of girls after a party, and like the girls all talking at once, 
 sometimes, especially in autumn or winter, in great conventions noisy 
 as stump orators and as indefinite in destination, here he stays, and 
 here he lives despite his foes; and to be brief, I like him, and I fee* 
 proud with what I hope is Scriptural pride, that so stately a gentleman 
 condescends to help me farm. I like that part immensely. 
 
 190 
 
CROWS 
 
And the squirrel, I like him. I love his russet hilarity. I enjoy his 
 impudence, for at sight of me he orders me off the place. I have 
 the tax receipts. I have by the sweat of my face secured them ; but 
 no difference, he has the rights of squatter sovereignity, and bids me in 
 an unseemly and bossy fashion to quit the premises and leave the woods 
 to him. He is delicious in his effrontery as the nip of a winter wind. 
 He scurries across my winter leaves, zigzags up the trees, pauses not to 
 get breath, but to give me a piece of his mind, tosses himself from tree- 
 top to treetop, crows over me because I can not do it, sits and giggles 
 at me, " I dare you to do it ;" eats a nut he has stolen from me in my 
 presence, and eats it with the method of an epicure, tosses off squirrel 
 jokes at me, which I being only a man and a trifle slow do not see the fun 
 in until the next day, and throws them at me in a catarrhal voice (for 
 a squirrel always has a cold which affects his bronchial tubes), and 
 while taking another one of my walnuts from his pocket, he sails off 
 without the courtesy of an " Excuse me, please;" notwithstanding I like 
 him, and had 1 my way, no squirrel should ever be shot in my woods. 
 I would pension him to stay. 
 
 But come, friend, and I will take you through my farm, or to speak 
 with greater accuracy in deference to my neighbors and critics, I will 
 take you up and down my farm, and you shall see for yourself what 
 riches I am master of. Come to the hilltop. This hill, to use the 
 phrase of our sweet friend, Alfred Tennyson, is " tiptilted like the petal 
 of a flower," which is poetry for the prose of pug-nosed. This hill has 
 considerable individuality, for which I praise it. There is no hill just like 
 it hereabouts, nor for that matter thereabouts wherever that is. I 
 want you to notice this view, actually it beats all. I have traveled 
 well, I will not boast, I simply say I have traveled let your imagina- 
 tion fill in the rest, lest I seem to be like those vain boasters who com- 
 pare everything they see with what they profess to have seen. How- 
 ever, resuggesting, "I have traveled" 
 and this hill just beats all and this view 
 is like the hill. This view is worth a gold x 
 
 mine. Have you traveled far and seen 
 much ? Then, friend, look and tell me 
 in candor, have you seen more beauty 
 than here ? From this cliff you can see 
 many unhindered miles, where beauty 
 blooms profuse as lilacs in the spring. 
 
 193 
 
If you look southward, and I want you to, note that delicious blue 
 beyond the blue. See how it tilts against the sky like the dear sea! 
 Really, friend, my farm is cheap whatever it cost me, to have the 
 sea on its south horizon. Here I am, geographically stated, fifteen 
 hundred miles from the ocean, and, in all honor, as I look over and over 
 again, I feel looking at the sea as I have seen it from the inlands of the 
 Isle of Mona, as I have seen it from the shores of Maine, back in the 
 r meadows with the pines for background, or in Cali- 
 fornia, where scorched deserts smoked at my back 
 in the furious sun; but this sea we are looking on 
 now has all the ravishment of those, and did I not 
 know (for I am a knowing man, notwithstanding 
 many intimations to the contrary) that the sea was 
 not there, 1 could take oath that there its waters 
 lashed shoreward with multitudinous music and 
 gentle laughter. Often from this hill have - 1 re- 
 freshed my tired spirit by watching this bewilder- 
 ment of sea, and have been fain to believe that a 
 sea breeze went lingering by my cheek. Here I 
 entertain dreams of the sea, and the murmur of 
 soft music comes to me as when in long blessed 
 nights, I have half slumbered and half wakened on 
 a seabeach listening to the hoarse calls from the 
 tremendous deep when it "moans round with many 
 voices." This is my seashore, and these cliffs a/e 
 my sea cliffs, and I could stand and watch this blue, 
 unhindered ocean, all the glad day as in a happy 
 dream. Here I may with Friend Whittier pitch 
 my tent upon the beach, and hear the night wind 
 surging through the tree tops with unquenchable 
 music, and think I hear the music of the sea. 
 And then this sea is not a dream of the sea, but 
 a dreamless sea, and do you wonder I love my farm when it borders on 
 what sweet Blackmore calls "the great unvintaged ocean?" 
 
 Now, friend, look northward, Once I tried to experiment on my 
 Dutchman (mine then, but mine no longer; he has changed pasture, 
 much to the benefit of my pasture) saying, "That is a beautiful view, 
 is n't it?" To which, while he tamped the posts down and spat copious 
 tobacco on my grass, he replied, "Bully." That was praise and I was 
 
 194 
 
rfr V jLjiiF^yyy^ 
 * ^" '%*-." 
 
 elated, for not every farm has 
 "bully" views. This farm has; 
 but, in honor, know you any 
 blues like Kansas blues, if there 
 be sufficient distance? I have 
 seen the blues in the Alleghanies 
 and in the Adirondacks, and the 
 White Mountains and Green 
 Mountains, in the San Francisco 
 Mountains and the Sierras, and 
 the high roof ridges of the 
 Rockies, but am bound to say 
 I know not any blue distance so 
 dreamy, quieting, and satisfying 
 as a Kansas distance. This 
 valley seen from my hill is 
 scarred with figures of green 
 trees where the scant brooks 
 run, and the delight of green 
 hills where fields and orchards 
 
cling in sheer fertility, and valleys where deep green of cornfields is 
 islanded in seas of amethyst, and in June, harvests are billowy with gold 
 whose stately waves toss and break on a green strand of the field edge 
 with never a white crest of billow, nor a sound of waters breaking on the 
 shore, and when the grain is harvested and stands in tents of gold as if 
 an army of angels were camped there upon a holiday ah ! but the valley 
 is sweet to look upon ; and in such golden days of harvests, I have some- 
 times dreamed I was looking upon the city (where my hopes and my 
 loves build a little house eternal in the heavens), whose streets are pure 
 gold. And if angels would come flying homeward on a summer after- 
 noon and look, they would think that they were nearer than they dreamed. 
 And, besides, this view is a surprise, for the road that comes from the 
 south leading straight up to it must take a sharp turn when it passes my 
 hedge and jog into my land when through the lattice of the trees and 
 through the gateway in my woods this fair vision breaks on you like 
 the vision poets see. This crop never fails me (the other crops never 
 succeed). Drouth, hot winds, too late spring, or too early spring, insects 
 of divers names but all with ravenous instincts, poor plowing or no 
 plowing, late sowing, or too early sowing, or no sowing whatsoever (I 
 have had considerable of this kind of crops last mentioned), whatever 
 the condition and whatever happens to the crops I put in, nothing 
 tampers with this harvest of beauty and this blessed vintage. God 
 always gives me this crop. 0! it is good to own this farm! 
 
 Rest your eyes now, friend (pardon me, your name slips my mem- 
 ory) , from that long vision and look behind you. This is my red clover- 
 field. If I am proud of this bit of landscape gardening, do not blame 
 me. This red clover pasture here on this hilltop has a dreamy sway as 
 if a wind blew from very far off. But when that leaf of the clover 
 (have you noticed its perfect shape, and the inroads the varying lines of 
 green make on the leaf?) flushes out a smile to spring, so like a plain 
 face illuminated with a great love, it is well worth a pilgrimage to see, 
 and I think nothing could be lovelier. But when June comes with her 
 sweet beauty, and kisses the green clover fronds and they blaze out 
 blossoming, then I know God made nothing lovelier (save children and 
 women only) ; and when the soft south wind dreams over the field and 
 comes away with faint odors clinging to its garments, then I wonder God 
 could think on so many sweet things to do. I wonder he has any beauty 
 left to give to any field or flower; but he needs not to study parsimony 
 as the poets do. He hath, and to him hath been given and he giveth 
 
 198 
 
to the morning its light, and to the violet its blue, and to the golden-rod 
 its gold, and to the whip-poor-will his dolorous cry, and to the rose its 
 blushes, and to the stars their light; and after he has given to all he 
 h23 not yet begun. He is the affluent God and his resources are past 
 all possibility of exhaustion. 
 
 There is a patch of plum-trees fringing the edges of the cloverfield, 
 thick-sown they are God sowed them and when spring is new, they 
 are a tall pile of snow fresh fallen, only there blows from them an odor 
 not of snowdrifts or winter, since snowdrifts are odorless ; plum-sown 
 drifts are odor-full. Sweet it is after long winter months, when woods 
 and fields have all their odors sealed for frozen fields are odorless to 
 walk over my hillfield and on a sudden have wafted in my face odors 
 that might have been distilled for kings to use on coronation days, and 
 feel myself in the path of the winds a-blowing from my drift of plum 
 blossoms, My heart sings, "Spring is here! Spring is here!" And 
 the meadowlark singing to the sun makes not more music than my 
 heart, with its bird-call, "Spring is come, is come!" 
 
 Friend, I can see you want my farm ; but I remind you of the com- 
 mandment, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's" farm. Let us go 
 down through the woods slowly. Make no haste, for woods are not made 
 to pass through lightly. God has been a good while growing these trees 
 and is not through yet. Walk down from the crest of the hill through 
 the thickets where vines and briers tangle (get some nettles on your 
 clothes so you look better), and pass that big elm, off with your hat, 
 man ; and now lift up your eyes that is my orchard. Do you see long 
 rows of apple trees? Why, I have come up through great tribulation to 
 get them. Every one represents courage on my part, besides some 
 trifling expense, and no end of forbearance. Those of mine own house- 
 hold have flouted me as a visionary and have looked knowingly at each 
 other, as to say, "Poor dear, his reason was once as balanced as ours." 
 Genius is not understood, Columbus found it so; I have found it so. 
 Great dreamers are.alwa>s derided (see Palissy the potter, and Morse 
 and Goodyear). Because I profess to see the day when, from those 
 boughs apples shall hang their crimson spheres, even that person related 
 to me, as Job's wife was to him, has snubbed me publicly and held me 
 up domestically to the ridicule of mine own children; but I persevered. 
 Genius does. I have. Each year I planted a new installment of apples 
 till now I have some thirty acres or over sown to them. I have sown 
 the wind, but to this writing I have not reaped the whirlwind, nor even 
 
 199 
 
a good Kansas breeze of apples. 
 I do not despair. "They also serve 
 who only stand and wait," says my 
 special friend, Milton. This being so, 
 I am a high-grade servant of the 
 apple crop. I stand and wait. 
 This fall I went through the 
 orchard, and (say it with 
 no haste, nor yet "trip- 
 pingly on the 
 tongue, "but with 
 
 ruddy; 
 luscious 
 scions 
 of the 
 house of apple. 
 What a day that 
 was ! I can not for- 
 get it; and, to be plain 
 I have not tried to. 
 That was my day of 
 vindication. I was like 
 Job when his trouble 
 was over I felt good. I felt 
 very good. "Apples! apples! " 
 I cried, instead of calling out 
 that ancient word (so archaic), 
 "Eureka!" That same day I picked 
 pears (not from the apple-trees), and 
 some late peaches (hard as biscuits new 
 wives bake). But providence has vindi- 
 cated me. Those who thought me mad (and 
 what is worse, told me and others what they 
 thought) are now humiliated, and I, to use the 
 psalmist's phrase, may stand by and say, "Aha! 
 
 200 
 
 
 studied delibera- 
 
 ll t 
 
 tion, as a man 
 
 E5& 
 &* 
 
 **<*. ^ , ^ 
 
 would kiss his 
 sweetheart), 
 I found 
 apples, big 
 
 
 and 
 
 
 
aha!" This being the Scriptural method, I have done so. But I can 
 advise an apple orchard. It is better than investing in mines. You 
 never know what you will get by what you plant. A quartet of things 
 or a double quartet of things may happen to the tree. It may freeze 
 to death, or borers may probe it, or rabbits may girdle it, or your tenant 
 may drive plow or wagon over it, or hot winds may bake it, or your 
 neighbor's cattle may come uninvited into your field and eat it, or 
 out I desist. Enough has been said to show how delicious the uncer- 
 tainty, such as is attendant on either fishing or mining. If the tree 
 escapes all these snares of appleyouth it may come to applehood. This 
 also is uncertain. This process is as thrilling as reading a serial story 
 written by Mrs. Southworth. Aye, but it is bonnie! In winter, to look 
 across the tops of apple-trees is to warm both eyes and hands ; for the 
 branches have a half-crimson, half-purple glow, so that after looking at 
 them I feel as if I had warmed my hands and heart at a ruddy wood- 
 blaze. And some morning you will walk into your field, and suddenly 
 your spirit will sing, like happy music beside the conquering sea, when 
 long rows of apple-trees are in early spring bloom and the grass has 
 had courage to grow green, and the brown fields in which the trees 
 grow have hint of spring's coming; for the field will be pink as a 
 winter-evening sky, and the apple-blossoms, with their dainty fragrance, 
 and their exquisite form and delicacy of coloring make it so that resur- 
 rection seems not myth, but truth. An apple orchard is a success, you 
 know, when the apple-trees bloom. They may not come to crop, what 
 odds? They have done enough for one season. Let them bloom this 
 year and bear next year. A man must not be covetous. When apple- 
 branches flush with bloom heaven is no remote province, but nearer 
 than " Down to old Aunt Mary's." 
 
 The pear-trees are beautiful specimens of arboreal life. The bark 
 is shiny and dainty, and in color like unto dregs of wine, and smooth as 
 polished hardwoods. God has taken pains with pear-trees. They grow 
 tall and graceful as a woman, and, like a woman, are winsome. The 
 blossoms are snow-white why, the almond is not whiter, nor may-apple 
 blossoms (than these, what could be more snow-white) ? And the cherry- 
 trees, their bark is smooth and polished, and blackberry and raspberry 
 vines have rare crimsons to cross their tangle of branch and color over 
 the little plot where they are sown. They are the ruddiest colors of the 
 winter, save those which glow in the skies when daylight shames into 
 the dusk. Peach-trees I love more in summer than in winter, for they 
 
 201 
 
are a rotund tree, chunky, like a little body, and the peach leaf is a lance 
 with which fairy warriors might wage war. So delicate in green and 
 veining, and with such a tang to the taste as distinct as an olive's, 
 the peach leaf is itself alone, and has no relations. The peach blooms 
 early and has a roseate tint, and not many fruits are so beautiful as the 
 peach, with its perfection of shade and many hues, varying from dim 
 green to deep crimson. I am glad I planted peaches on this farm. My 
 sagacity is something to wonder at. I knew my business, that is clear. 
 
 THE RAVINE 
 
 When apple branches stoop low beneath their burdens of delicious fruit 
 (how sweet the odor of apples when you wander slowly through a laden 
 orchard!), and when peach-trees, flush from their thicket of deep green 
 leaves, their surprise of crimson fruit, and when, from their delicate 
 stems leaning gracefully, the yellow pears, flushed with reds, hang in 
 clusters, what farmer but must be proud of himself and be mindful of 
 the sweet Providence that keeps orchard trees, unforgetful of what 
 fruits each tree ought to bring to harvest; for I recall that every tree 
 
 202 
 
remembers what fruit is expected of it, and that, though customary, is 
 very, very strange. God made it so. How else? 
 
 Sauntering across the gentle slopes of my farm down in the croft 
 (for I have gentle slopes sedate as middle age not all the farm is 
 a jump up and fall down) is a ravine, which spring rains have digged 
 deep, until it is deep enough to hide a man on horseback, even if horse 
 and man were Kentucky bred. A ravine, with trees growing in it and 
 on its edge, is poetry if one knows enough to know poetry when it is 
 written in prose form. This ravine lacks only one thing to make me 
 love it to excess. As it is I love it quite enough to satisfy an exacting 
 affection. The ravine lacks water, that is its omission which alone pre- 
 vents it from perfection of beauty. But not to dwell on lacks, which 
 would be a breach of courtesy, notice how knowingly the ravine jogs 
 and zigzags, as if possessed of all the field; how it beats back on itself, 
 as having forgotten something; how it makes spaces shut from winter 
 winds, where birds find covert; here saplings and trees of sweet sixteen 
 climb up the bank, or lean over the edges, or stand on the bank, as 
 guarding a secret, or stand in the bottom of the ravine, like lads knee 
 deep in summer streams. How the wild grapevine trails with its inde- 
 scribable grace from tree to tree, and tosses out long tendrils to float to 
 and fro with the incoming and outgoing tides of air! You shall see this 
 ravine in the picture, and I take pride (albeit a religious pride) in call- 
 ing attention to the fact that this ravine grows on my farm. If I can 
 ever get money (the time seems strangely remote at this writing) I will 
 dig a well and erect a windmill, and build a waterfall in this ravine, and 
 plant cress along the watercourse, and have a lily pond at the far side 
 where my ravine steps off my farm with hesitant step, as disinclined 
 to go. In one thing I am inflexible with my hale friend, the renter, 
 namely, that no limb be cut or broken from the trees, nor any briers 
 be cut, nor any golden-rod dug from the banks of this ravine. And, 
 withal, how the ravine thrives under my ownership* I am proud of its 
 delight in my partiality. Each year the place grows in beauty and 
 tangle of growth, as if eager to please me. Whether or not I am a 
 success at raising corn and potatoes I can raise a fine ravine, which, 
 to my mind, requires much more ability than the production of potatoes 
 and com. 
 
 Have you, my friend, have you the topography of my farm clearly in 
 your mind ? The hill-top where we saw the sea on the far south and the 
 bewildering beauty of hills and orchard and harvest field and woods 
 
 203 
 
and blue to the north, and on this hill the red clover pasture and the 
 plum-trees and some gnarly oaks, then down hill through a fringe of 
 woodland on the steep hill incline and then the cornfield and the 
 orchard, and after that the rich soil through which the ravine digs its 
 deep trench and grows its many pastorals and on the north-east corner 
 some noble walnuts which shake their odorous fruits on the ground after 
 the first keen frost bites into them, and under their shadows my house 
 of two rooms is built. In the front room is the organ and in the back 
 room the coffee pot ; though I have scarcely stated the case with the 
 accuracy such as marks my usual observations. Accurately stated there 
 is no back room. Both are front rooms. I think highly of this architec- 
 tural plan. The family lives in the front of the house, which gives an 
 air of gentility and breeding not secured in the old architecture. The 
 house is built lengthwise with the road, which plan does not necessitate 
 the housewife leaving the meat to burn or the coffee to boil over while 
 she runs to the front room to see who is going past in a buggy and what 
 beau that Smith girl (the one who was sixteen ten years ago) has now 
 but she can keep on with the cooking and look out at the front window 
 at the same time. It saves shoes and time and nerve force and 
 muscles, and biscuits from burning. A grasping man would have 
 patented this revolutionary idea in architecture and vended it as they 
 do proprietary medicines. Not so I. In this open way I give my dis- 
 covery to the world as physicians their remedies. The design oi the 
 house is as follows : 
 
 This is the public road 
 
 These are the 
 walnut-trees 
 
 
 D D D 
 
 cp 
 
 
 
 
 n 
 
 n 
 
 
 This is the house 
 
 
 204 
 
Note (1) that the c p is an abbreviation for coffee pot and o is con- 
 traction for organ, and note (2) that both c p and o are located at front 
 windows. Now that may not be genius, but I am inclined to think it is. 
 Whether you are playing on the coffee pot or the organ, you can glance 
 out and see the Smith girl with her city beau (sometimes beaux) pass 
 and neither interrupt the aroma of the coffee nor the hilarity of the 
 organ. With this lucid, brief, and yet comprehensive plan of my 
 country house presented, I pass to other parts of my farm. 
 
 You will do well to come and take a drink out of my spring. I am 
 always glad to get thirsty so as to take a drink at this fountain. It 
 never has run dry. I keep the thicket growing here above the spring, 
 with neither weed, nor vine, nor sapling, nor any tree cut; all the under- 
 growth and uppergrowth untouched, because I want dense shade for the 
 spring to enjoy. This soggy damp is fitted for the growth of ferns (I 
 have brought sandstone, and fern, and moss, and planted here), and the 
 spring wells up quietly, no sputtering, as of a hen announcing that she 
 has just laid an egg; but the water comes, not cold like mountain 
 springs, to be sure, but cold enough to need no iceman, and requires no 
 paying of ice bills. It is cold enough ; and there, in plain sight, with 
 the foliage reflected, leaf for leaf and spray for spray; and drinking 
 water from a chalice like this is thirst-producing as well as thirst-sat- 
 isfying; and I will come here to drink, whether I am thirsty or not. 
 The birds drink here in welcome as the water drowses from the spring 
 down a little ravine and into my neighbor's woods. I let it. I am not 
 stingy. What I can't keep I give away, which is the true art of gener- 
 osity. Come and drink from this spring. What a farm this is! 
 
 In every play there is a villain. There is one on my farm. In y e 
 olden tyme a villain was a man who belonged to the soil a digger in 
 the ground a vocation very honorable to this day and to all days. But 
 this is not the sort of a villain I allude to. This is a live and vicious 
 villain a bold, bad man, who carries a gun and a kodak. When these 
 two peculiarities combine in a man I set him down as the consumma- 
 tion of villainies. Which wickedness the kodak wickedness or the 
 gun wickedness is the wickeder, I am not prepared to say. I do not 
 here give my mind though I have settled opinions on the subject. This 
 man has never shot me with his gun, but has often done so with his 
 kodak, which is a breech-loader and always full of shells. This instru- 
 ment of death has been turned on me when I have been playing base- 
 ball, when I made a base-hit, when I was making a home run, when I 
 
 207 
 
sat down ii the center-field and made my mark, to the great delight of 
 the college boys, whose taskmaster I was; when I have been walking 
 through the college campus with my Horace Greeley hat set jauntily on 
 my intellectual forehead ; when my shoulders have been stooped under 
 life's onerous loads; when I have been going to the train with coat-tail 
 horizontal and legs vainly beating the air ; when I have been on this 
 farm with my overalls on and hay-seed in my hair; when I have been 
 talking to a lady with whom the head of our house had forbidden me to 
 hold dialogue ; and this villain has moreover sent the head of our house 
 the picture (villain! villain!). In short, there is no time when he should 
 not have kodaked me when he did not do it, and no time when he 
 should have done so that he did so. The kodak microbe is a demor- 
 alizing microbe, in my observation, and makes for total depravity. The 
 last wickedness this man was guilty of was putting the sun up to take 
 my picture when I was in the mild act of appeasing my hunger at noon 
 in the woods. This is the picture he took. When we (the other man 
 and I ) suggested that if a picture was to be thought of the villain should 
 be in it, he said that much as he desired to be taken with us nothing 
 could induce him to because he had to pull the trigger. He was the 
 sportsman, we the game. This seemed candid. We (the victim and 
 myself, both good men, he a banker and I a minister) suspected no 
 lurking animosity. The villain looked pious (he always does ; that is, 
 he looks as if he was either at his devotions or going to them) and took 
 the picture, but when the proofs were forthcoming gloated over us like 
 Mr. Poe's raven on the pallid bust of Pallas, saying, "I would not be in 
 the picture. Nothing would induce me. I am a temperance man;" 
 and then, with Mephistophelian finger pointed to the water-cruse in the 
 ioreground, which, through his viciousness (the jug was his), was in our 
 midst. "A Sunday-school superintendent," he said for my friend the 
 banker is a pious man on Sunday "and a preacher and a jug ha! ha! 
 ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! " Some people think there is no 
 .sin, and that wickedness is a piece of imagination. They do not know 
 the villain or they would believe in sin and the father of it. I would not 
 exonerate him from any evil design. Nothing will tempt me to put 
 confidence in him. He is well connected, and is a man of brains, but 
 neither ancestry nor culture avails in his behalf. He is undeniably wicked 
 .and refuses a work of grace, and will not attend a revival. He is a 
 biologist, an ornithologist, an entomologist, and I would not put it past 
 him to practice vivisection on me. I would not feel surprised if he 
 
 208 
 
were to charge his kodak with chloroform and put me in a state of 
 coma, so as to photograph my freckles. "Vigilance, eternal vigilance, 
 is the price of liberty," said some old orator. That may be so, but I 
 know that eternal vigilance is insufficient to guard me against this 
 villain's depredations. Every gun is likely to kick its owner. Some 
 
 cameras are so. This camera kicked 
 the villain. Here is the villain himself. 
 He has been on my farm among my 
 cornshocks killing my rabbits and quail. 
 He is caught red-handed. Though he 
 wears after his name a learned title and 
 browbeats students with threats of poor 
 grades, that will avail him nothing now. 
 He has paid no heed to my signs on my 
 farm. One is "Do not watter stalk 
 here." Another is 
 "No shoting on this 
 
 has found farm." He has paid 
 
 him with my M K no attention to either 
 
 birds and ffl |^P I sign. His kodak has 
 
 beasts slung ^ m. JpB m caught him "watter- 
 
 at his belt. IB %ftr " i , mT in nis stalk," and 
 
 My word for 
 it but it shall 
 go hard with 
 
 him ere he gets out of the grip 
 of the law. He will rue having 
 sided with Mrs. Mugwump 
 against me, and having joined 
 blithely in the witticisms at my 
 expense. I will not be revenge- 
 ful, but just. A neighbor has the 
 sign, "This farm for sail." I do 
 not have that because this farm 
 is not in the market, but the signs I do have mean business, and the 
 villain must find out signs mean what they say. "No lickin', no larn- 
 in';" but I mean he shall not grow old (he is already grown up) igno- 
 rant. I will see that he " larns." 
 
 Then the villain is a hunter. He has no conscience. I have seen 
 
 209 
 
 THE VILLAIN AND HIS FRIENDS 
 
him shoot a jack-rabbit, and a hawk, and a squirrel, and when in the 
 presence of these vicious capers have heard him laugh and say, "A good 
 shot!" Will a man laugh at a funeral? This man will. He does. 
 Hunting and kodaking demoralize the moral nature of man. The 
 villain is old and bold. His conscience (allowing, as a matter of pure 
 courtesy to him, that originally he had one) is atrophied. There is not 
 even a vermiform appendage left. I have known him to shoot quails 
 out of season. He thinks nothing of breaking the law. Once he in- 
 veigled me into carrying the game he had slain unlawfully as well as 
 murderously. This I did as a matter of courtesy (for I am a Chester- 
 field in etiquette), for I was his guest (he driving me out after his red 
 horses, two beasties about as big as two-year-old jack- rabbits), and I 
 could not, with my code of manners, refuse mine host's request to 
 skirmish around and pick up his game ; but afterward it leaked out that 
 he did this because the law holds that man guilty who has the ill-gotten 
 game. Such perfidy I had read of, but scarcely believed. I thought 
 lago was an imaginary creation; now I know he is a photograph, and 
 I could find Shakespeare a subject for a sitting. 
 
 Beyond this, the villain professes to like me, writes me postal 
 cards, takes me riding, invites me to his home, drives me out when the 
 purple aster is in bloom, comes to my hospitable board, drives me to my 
 farm and says he enjoys it, praises my. view, says it is "bully," caresses 
 my trees (he is an lago) loans me his red horses and red dog, glows 
 over my ravine, says nice things about my hackberry and shell-bark 
 hickory-trees, speaks in hopeful terms of my apple orchard, is sympathetic 
 in my fondest aspirations of getting ten or fifteen dollars rent in the 
 remote future, and even suggests I may some time get enough to pay a 
 year's taxes ; and I being of a confiding turn (interpreting others by 
 myself) think him well-meaning and virtuous. But this man "who 
 hath broken bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me" (quoted 
 from the Psalter). When with Mrs. Mugwump, who holds my farm in 
 slight esteem, he joins her hilarity at my expense; echoes her wickedest 
 snigger; constructs poor jests about my farm and its achievements; 
 joins in crude and unusual remarks about "chiggers;" laughs loudly at 
 jests at my expense, refuses to look at me, being so engrossed with Mrs. 
 Mugwump's humor and hospitality; thanks her for his dinner, whereas I 
 paid for it and the black girl cooked it, well he is a villain. That is all 
 I can say now. Had I my way in my house (do I need to say I do 
 not?) he would jest no more at me over my fried chicken. 
 
 210 
 
The seasons all come to this farm. It is astonishing how far they 
 come to enjoy this view. Birds from far-off woodlands bordering on 
 the gulf come here and nest. I think highly of their taste. They know 
 where to come. Thank goodness there are some creatures which, 
 whatever the lack of the aesthetic on the part of the many, retain a fine 
 Greek taste for the beautiful. The seasons all come here annually. I 
 have never known them to miss. They are as regular as I am, and 
 enjoy this farm with a gusto which is warming to my heart. Sometimes 
 one season comes first, sometimes another. That depends entirely on 
 what season you begin with. I begin with winter. Winter on this 
 estate is a rare season. The land lies brown and beautiful. The many 
 colors of a winter landscape are things not sufficently attended to in 
 popular thinking. People talk as if winter fields were uneventful and 
 monotonous. Nothing is less true. Winter browns are quite as varied as 
 summer greens. My woods stand black in winter, especially when the 
 skies are gray with no hint of sunlight, the trees standing against such a 
 sky look black as stormy water. Nature indulges in no black colors 
 in vegetation save this. And I have seen my woods gloom against a 
 winter evening sky like a rising storm-cloud. They are prodigal in this 
 tempestuous quality. I love to look at it so, and can all but hear the 
 mutter of the thunder which in summer booms intermittently from black 
 thunder heads. And if you walk into the fields, the grasses are of 
 varied hues. Some are light-toned, almost gray, some a deep russet, 
 some species of slough grass are like browns touched with flame full of 
 surprise and delight, and the wheat stubble keeps its old gold all the 
 winter through, and corn stalks have the richness of color which minds 
 the eye of a lion's skin brown as the desert he goes fleetly across ; 
 and golden-rod stands in the hedge-corners grouped in its miniature 
 forests graceful in form as when they lean plumes of gold in autumn 
 noons, but now the plumes are white like those which nod in a knight's 
 helmet. This golden-rod flames out gold in autumn and snow in winter, 
 and whether to love the more its gold or snow I know not. They belong 
 to the two seasons and in either are radiant to my eyes. Weeds are brave 
 winter folk. Flowers die in autumn, and even in the woods the bunches 
 of violet leaves are pressed flat against the earth and have lost their 
 green, or it is almost altogether blotted out, but weeds stand self-reliant 
 nodding to the shivering winds. Winter weeds are prepared foods for 
 the birds. They are their winter pasture fields. God is so thoughtful in 
 leaving for his birds a spread table, standing high above the snow fall 
 
 211 
 
and drift, so that the birds shall breakfast at every hazard. The sun- 
 flower stands through the winter storms unintimidated and is gray in 
 color like a winter's dusk when clouds are over all the sky, and the 
 leaves in the woods are rusty as iron, and the red oak-trees keep their 
 leaves, a kindly shelter for the houseless birds; and what a brave winter 
 themselves made ! I have been beneath them on winter days when the 
 sun was bright and genial and when I walked without a shiver, but step- 
 ping beneath the oak-trees and closing my eyes and listening to the 
 whetting of leaf against leaf, I began to shiver as with nipping cold. 
 Winter leaves in the wind sound so wintery. Winter stays on this farm. 
 Then spring comes laughing like happy lovers. The earth smell is. 
 in the air, the frogs sing every night and very early in the spring from 
 the ravines, the tenant plows the brown fields and turns them into black 
 and the crow follows in the furrows, so do the blackbirds with their 
 garrulous conversation ; and the meadow lark, before a sprig of green is 
 anywhere, tunes his voice to sing a spring poem, and I wonder if there is 
 anything sweeter than a meadow lark's music floating over brown fields 
 which have been mute in bird voices these months past. On my farm 
 the meadow lark is the courier of the spring. Nobody is as welcome as 
 he, with the splotches of yellow flecking his breast and his springy step 
 as if he owns this meadow, and his constant tryst with the open field 
 (he will have none of the forest) there he spills out his music, thence 
 he whirrs his springy flight. Sometimes he will tilt a minute on a 
 fence-post, but I do not recall seeing him on this farm in a hedge-row. 
 There the golden thrush loves to live, but the meadow lark lives on the 
 ground where we men and women walk. I would be pouting all the 
 spring if he did not come. Contact with the earth gives him his gift of 
 singing. He is a sweet son of the soil and dear to the heart as love. 
 The blue jay is belligerent and garrulous, but he stays with me through 
 the winter sometimes and comes very early in the spring, and I love. his 
 untuned voice as it cuts through the air like a sword swish. I give him 
 warm welcome and am glad he is come. His morals I can not control; 
 I have trouble enough with my own ; but if he did not come to my woods 
 I would be out of humor. The red bud gets the earliest color from the 
 skies and wears it a trifle haughtily, being as I take it, a sort of vege- 
 table aristocrat. The red buds have no beautiful curve like the elm, 
 but stand angular as soldiers on guard. Though they think themselves 
 aristocrats I will not quarrel with their self opinionation. They are 
 here and they like my farm and are the earliest colors the woods wear. 
 
 212 
 
Therefore are they welcome. The elms have the earliest cloud of green 
 bloom visiting my woods except the willow. Willows are first comers 
 with their leaves. They come first, the elms follow, and later the 
 buckeye and hickory and walnut and sycamore. Gooseberries leaf 
 early and have a vivid green. The oak-trees are tardier than anybody. 
 They are late sleepers. Even the blue jay's voice does not wake this 
 drowsy sleeper, although it clings in his branches. Nobody but the 
 sun can wake the oak. He is thick-skinned and impervious to hints. 
 The sun must come and spill flame on his face or ever the oak-tree 
 wakes, and long after all other trees are green the oak's brown leaves 
 with a dogged tenacity hang to their year-long home till the new buds 
 thrust them from their hold. Only new life will loose the grip of death; 
 and when peach and cherry and apple and pear and blackberry take 
 their turn at blooming, O ! we have royal mornings 
 on my farm. And then comes the late snowfall of 
 falling petals of blooms from apple-trees, and the 
 bees drone and take my honey paying no royalty 
 (like a foreign publisher), and the cooing dove 
 makes lamentation without cause, and the bluebirds 
 chatter so as to warm the heart, and the blue violets 
 make a man wonder at the dainty doings of the 
 fingers of the God of beauty, and the Mayapples 
 hold their parasols to keep the sun from their faces 
 
 white as fresh snows, and the Sweet Williams hold 
 their blue flowers up like a rustic lad presenting a 
 nosegay to a woman, and the wild crabapple pours 
 its delicious odors on the springtime wind and spring 
 is come to my farm, and April rain drips from the 
 eaves of the glowing leaves, and clouds and sun- 
 light play hide-and-seek over my plowed fields, and 
 young lovers hunt four-leaf clover in my cloverfield, 
 and the birds woo 
 and get married 
 with never the in- 
 tervention of justice 
 or minister, and the 
 frogs sing with 
 melodious voices 
 through the sweet * * 
 
 215 
 
 * 
 
springtime night, and a hundred perfumes mix in the fields and woods 
 by night then my farm is an Eden meet for angels' visits. 
 
 Here summer comes and sweats with toil of growing cabbages, and 
 peas, and lettuce, and pears, and onions (that perfumery for the humble), 
 and cherries, and strawberries. Now stop. Strawberries? Why didn't 
 you come, friend, when my strawberries were ripe? I had tame and 
 wild ones, though for me I like wild ones better. But any will do. 
 And when the tenant's cow gives cream instead of skimmed milk, and 
 the strawberries are ripe and luscious well, all I say is you had better 
 happen around. And when summer gets down to hard work, and ripens 
 the oats, and makes the corn grow so fast you can fairly see it grow if 
 you stay half an hour, and turns wheatfields from green to gold, and 
 makes my clover bloom, and has the sun work long hours and keep the 
 stars out late o' nights if they want to shine a spell then summer is 
 bewildering. 
 
 And in autumn my vineyard is worth a voyage across the ocean to 
 get to see. The beautiful leaf delicately contrived of Him who invented 
 beauty, throws its shadow on purple clusters with an earlier frost on 
 them than gathers on the housetops in October. Then I forget 
 whether grapes are utilitarian or artistic, whether they should be eaten 
 or looked at and wondered at. I love to see their abundance of cluster 
 arid loveliness, and am glad to own this farm ; and when the leaves 
 begin to weary of fluttering to the winds and fall through sheer idleness, 
 and the elms grow yellow, and willow leaves have a jaundice look, and 
 the ivies are glorious as skies of sunset, and every tree trunk they 
 engirdle is ruby, as if it were not tree, but gem, and the maples blush 
 and hang out scarlet banners, and oaks are gorgeous, and when the 
 leaves rustle under your feet, then I wish fall lasted twelve months. 
 To kick around over your own leaves is to taste bliss ; and I am 
 haughty to own a farm. Winter, spring, summer and fall come here 
 to enjoy themselves, and they are very welcome. 
 
 In summer, when I lie, surcharged with indolence, down by my 
 spring in the shadows, with the water standing in pools, and catching 
 leaf and sky and cloud in its mirror, and holding them up like signals 
 to the clouds sailing over my farm, life grows glad. We are a hos- 
 pitable lot, the farm and the spring and I, and, like Abraham at his 
 tent door, hail all who go along our way to stop and be sociable (all 
 except the assessor. Not the farm, nor the spring, nor the ravine, 
 nor the corn growing in rows or standing in shock, none of us nor all of 
 
 216 
 
TALL TREES RIM THE CREST 
 
 us like the assessor. He invades our quiet and disturbs our receipts, 
 and reminds us we are not in Arcadia, which, prior to his coming, was 
 our settled belief). And while I lie in the shade beside my spring on 
 the north line of my estate and on the lowest levels my farm reaches, 
 it is sweet to half drowse, half wake in the quiet while the wooded 
 hills high above shut out all boisterousness of wind, so that here truly 
 summer quiet lies. The day dreams. It is noon. A crow intermit- 
 tently and lazily calls his " caw, caw," but the birds seem tired out, and a 
 quiet and languid breeze is all that puffs summer perfumes in my face. 
 And the slow clouds float by like icebergs seen afar, but by and by 
 even the clouds fall wholly asleep. Watching them through the leaves 
 they affect me as having forgotten action long ago, or push lazily for- 
 ward, like a drifting boat, and then sink back into slumber again. But 
 the oatfield on the farm running up the hill's slope to the woods, nods 
 its thousands heads so sagaciously, as if to say, "No doubt, no doubt, 
 that is the truth of it." And upon the hill, where the tall trees rim 
 the crest, how solemnly the trees toss to the wind! If one were under 
 their shadows there would be laughter in the leaves and the sunlight 
 sifting through, but thus far removed there is neither sunlight nor 
 music, only the solemn waving to and fro of plumes, looking strangely 
 dark against the sky of utter blue. In this accord of motion seen afar 
 is something exceeding remote, as if from some far headland jutting 
 out into the spiritual sea, dim companies were signaling us in stately 
 and rhythmic fashion. In the far off elm-trees is the wind that does 
 not blow on me, nor draw near my green hollow lying in the shadow; 
 and looking from afar thus seeming like a boat with oars that dip and 
 lift, out on water against the sky when you hear no drip of water 
 from the lifted oar, nor dip of oar touching the water again, nor any 
 lap of water against the keel. Thus I love the quiet of this croft, where 
 the spring is better than wine for my thirsty lips ; but I leave it and 
 
 217 
 

 i 
 
 saunter up toward the woods which climb the hill and 
 stand strong and manfully upon the brow, coquetting 
 with the south wind in the summer and defying the 
 north winds in winter. And just this side the hill- 
 top I stop and lie down in the shadows and listen 
 and hear the sea. On the hilltop I can sight 
 the sea ; below the hilltop I can hear the sea. How 
 the branches toss here ; not sedately, as when I saw 
 them from far below by the spring, but wildly, and 
 each tree after its own fashion! And how sad the 
 voices of the wind are! One could weep for sorrow 
 hearing the lonely winds washed through the tree- 
 tops. In Kansas winds are hardly ever quiet, and 
 often blow like a triumph, so that there is much 
 singing of summer songs through the woods. 
 Always, by daylight in particular, you may climb 
 from the wooded valley to this wooded crest, and 
 walk through the quiet of calm, where scarcely a 
 leaf will nod, or a note of music be struck by the 
 winds from the forest, till, as you approach the hill- 
 top, the beat of distant waves on distant rocks is 
 audible, and when at the top you are in a very fury 
 of fighting surf, dashing white spray up the long 
 rocks. I love this music and I can not tell how 
 dear it is, but hearing it I can dream and see 
 visions, and climb God's highest hills while this 
 surf-music is in my ears and in my heart. 
 
 But when trees are leafless in autumn and 
 
 winter, and the wind rages and snarls like a hungry 
 
 lion, and tears at the branches, as a lion at the 
 
 bars which make his prison, then is the music 
 
 218 
 
frightful, but sublime. Then, when the woeful surges rush through the 
 trees, as I have seen ocean surges rush at high tides, with stormwinds 
 behind them over snags of teeth of ocean rocks, where bravest ships 
 of knit steel would have been laughingstocks to those furious waters 
 when such winds blow their tiger lungs 1 cease dreaming and leap 
 to battle. I come to be imperious, as if I were Napoleon. My 
 courage defies impossibility. I could climb Alps or break pyramids 
 down, or leap from sea cliffs down into the boiling ocean in sheer 
 luxury. Nothing daunts me. My spirit clamors with the storm. The 
 giant branches twist and combat, like a cyclops caught in battle in 
 the clammy arms of an octopus, and the wind blows battle charges, 
 and all the storm drives like cavalrymen going into the fight. Then 
 the music is something to be remembered for a century. Give me 
 not always calm, with its hushed quiet, but the clamor of the riotous 
 winds, when nature is fighting nature in frightful combat, and when 
 neither combatant will yield. 
 
 Friend, most things are on this farm. To own a winter tempest 
 in the treetops and its tremendous music, what think you of that? I 
 call that riches. I own acres of soil and sunshine, and winter and 
 spring and October, but besides I own acres of angry wind, and furious 
 onset, and a Niagara of organ music. How rich I am owning this farm! 
 
 A wild crab stands on the hill where years ago they . quarried stanes 
 for a college hard by. The quarry is now overgrown, a reminiscence. I 
 am glad it is so, for I like its dishevelment, feeling its way back to 
 nature. A huge thorn-tree stands on the quarry's edge, and in the 
 quarry are thickets of roses where birds nest in the sweet summer; and 
 leaves in autumn gather in the disused quarry as in a pool where waters 
 had drifted them, and in the quarry stands the wild crab. There it 
 stands quite alone, but never lonely. In winter, its brawn of brazen 
 muscle sneers at the tempests and looks rigid as death. No hint at 
 smiling. I would as lief think a brazen pillar would bloom as to think 
 this wild crab would flash into flower. Howbeit, when spring is come 
 and sets up housekeeping, this crab lights a lamp like the pleasant 
 flame of an evening sky, not crimson, but a gentle flame a man might 
 warm him by, but would never burn his hands. This is a spring fire this 
 crab in bloom. How I love its tender twilight of crimson! I warm my 
 eyes here and my heart; for hearts need warming as hands do on a 
 chilly morning. And then, saturating the air like the perfume of a fair 
 woman's garments as she comes to meet her lover, is a whiff of this 
 
 219 
 
aromatic flame. I did not know when I bought this farm that it grew 
 spices, but it does. This is my spice grove which I will not exchange 
 for sandalwood. Who could have thought in the bare winter that this 
 crab-tree was an alabaster box holding precious ointment? I never 
 dreamed it. How could I ? But now, when spring has come like fair 
 Mary, lover of the Christ, and has broken the alabaster box, lo! the air 
 is faint with fragrance as if Christ were here and the sacred odors laved 
 his sacred feet. And were he here, he would say in gentle voice, 
 " Whence brought you this ointment, very precious ? I have not known 
 its like for fragrance." Friend, come to my farm when my spice grove 
 of one wild crab-tree is in bloom and you will grow glad as a happy child. 
 And then I have a whip-poor-will in my woods in the moonlight. A 
 nightingale is not an American singer. He certainly is not a Kansas 
 singer. He is not on my farm; but I am not regretful. I have the 
 meadow lark on my brown fields, and his note is sweet enough to make 
 a heart long for springtime just to hear his lute voice once. Yonder 
 where the woods stand black against the hill and moonlight makes all the 
 sky radiant, and dim distances are enchanting, and heaven seems to have 
 settled down about my farm for the night, and the owl hoots with a leer 
 in his voice, and the screech owl makes his pitiful complaint, then all of 
 a sudden my whip-poor-will sets a-singing. A flute is not clearer. He 
 is not a player of wide range of theme or tune, but has one he seems to 
 love, and as I take it, having listened to him often (how often ? no 
 matter, not often enough), a song his beloved is fond of, for when once 
 he blows its sweet staccatos and all of them, not one note omitted, and 
 stops, I think I have heard his lady for whom he made the music say, 
 " Sing it once more, beloved, I love that love song so ;" and so like any 
 lover, obedient to his beloved, he tunes the instrument and sings his love 
 song once again. If his lady is as I am, he will sing it night by night, 
 nor ever grow weary. The whip-poor-will's voice fits the moonlight 
 and the starlight and the dusk and the dense darkness. O, but the 
 notes are " rainy sweet." I will ask my friend Harry D. Cornwell to say 
 his say about our common friend the whip-poor-will. Friend Cornwell, 
 
 have your say : 
 
 " When apple-branches, flushed with bloom. 
 Load June 's warm evenings with perfume, 
 And balmier grows each perfect day, 
 And fields are sweet with new-mown hay, 
 Then, minstrel lone, I hear thy note, 
 Up from the pasture-thickets float 
 Whip-poor-will! 
 220 
 
Thine are the hours to love endeared, 
 And summoned by thy accents weird, 
 What wild regrets what tender pain, 
 Recall my youthful dreams again, 
 As floating down the shadowy years, 
 That old refrain fond memory hears-~ 
 Whip-poor-will ! 
 
 The garish day inspires thee not ; 
 But hid in some deep-shaded grot, 
 Thou like a sad recluse dost wait 
 The silver hours inviolate. 
 When every harsher sound is flown, 
 And groves and glen are thine alone. 
 Whip-poor-will. 
 
 Then, when the rapt, voluptuous night 
 Pants in the young moon's tender light, 
 And wood, and cliffs, and shimmering streams 
 Are splendid in her argent beams 
 How thrills the lover's heart to hear 
 Thy loud staccato, liquid-clear, 
 Whip- poor- will. 
 
 Whence comes the iterated phrase, 
 That to the wondering ear conveys 
 Half-human sounds, yet cheats the sense 
 With vagueness of intelligence, 
 And, like a wandering voice of air, 
 Haunts the dim fields, we know not where? 
 Whip-poor-will. 
 
 Now while the white moonlight fills all the void 'twixt me and heaven, 
 and all the trees are flung upon the grass in lifelike silhouettes, and a 
 gentle wind mixes with the starlight and moonlight going through the 
 trees caressingly like a lover's whisper, and the whip-poor-will flutes his 
 tearful note so that the valley hears him from the hilltops, while the 
 birds in their nests are so asleep they hear not these notes of his wooing, 
 while this radiant mood lies on my spirit like heaven's exceeding calm, I 
 think I will say, "Good-night, God keep you, good-night ;" and I will pull 
 my cloak about me and lie down on this mosaic of moonlight and shadow, 
 and with my prayer haling toward God through the long moonlit 
 reaches (for no prayer misses its way, not one, thank God for that, my 
 heart) , I will lie down and go to sleep ; and so I will say good-night 
 
 223 
 
GLOAMING 
 

 
GLOAMING 
 
 HILD, go and pray for see! the night is here! 
 Through cloudy rifts the golden lights appear; 
 The hills faint outline trembles in the mist ; 
 Scarce is heard a distant chariot list! 
 The world 's at rest ; the tree beside the way 
 Gives to the evening wind the dust of day. 
 
 Twilight unlocks the hiding-place of stars; 
 They gleam and glow behind night's shadowy bars. 
 The fringe of carmine narrows in the west, 
 The moonlight water lies in shining rest; 
 Furrow and foot path melt and disappear; 
 The anxious traveler doubts the far and near. 
 
 VICTOR HUGO. 
 
 Gloaming is day's aftermath. When the labor of the light is ended, 
 when our work lies behind us like a plain crossed in journeying toward 
 high hills, there is a borderland sweet as dreams lying dim between 
 day and dark. This is the gloaming. It is day's respite from itself, 
 when what we are is merging into what we are to be; when the world 
 seems far removed, as waves beating on a distant shore; when, as in 
 a neutral territory, we belong neither to to-day nor to to-morrow, but 
 in a certain high regard belong to ourselves alone, and thus sit solitary. 
 
 Gloaming is the time of glooming, gloam and gloom being forms 
 of one word; and so understood, how full is the descriptive energy of 
 the name for what it pictures! Not day nor night, nor light nor black- 
 ness, but this, light gloaming into lampless darkness. Gloom sifting 
 through the skies like powdered smoke, until the world is changed, and 
 the one word on the gloaming's lips is, "Toil, take rest." 
 
 And this gray gloaming is a time of rest for the spirit. The glory 
 of the sunset fades. Light retreats like a vanquished army. Gray 
 quiet falls on land and sky. An unseen angel whispers, "Peace." 
 
 229 
 
Now is the time for folding the hands time to rest and rest is sweet 
 when rest is needed. Now is the time to watch the day dim and the 
 night darken, until, at the end, you, who began your dreamings in the 
 day, find you end them in the night. 
 
 For years I have planned to spend this too-brief gloaming alone, 
 not thinking, but letting thoughts drift over me like summer clouds, 
 which drop their passing shadows on the field and stream. This is 
 mv hour to banish care; to leave the hush of prayer on the spirit and 
 let God walk silent in the heart, as in a garden. 
 
 "To wander lonely as a cloud," 
 
 as Wordsworth phrases it. If I may, in the open, with the neighborly 
 sky and the companionable stars, and hear the moan of winter winds 
 through naked trees, or feel the touch of summer's lips; or, if I may 
 not be Out-of-Doors, to be Out-of-Doors in spirit and watch, as I sit 
 in my study before the lights are lit, the droop of ashen hues into the 
 sky, and the shadow these ashen tints cast across our spirit. 
 
 Floating, floating, from dawn to dusk, 
 
 Till the pearly twilight dies, 
 And the mists float up from the sapphire sea 
 
 And cloud all the sapphire skies. 
 Hooting, floating, while golden stars 
 
 Seem to float in a sea overhead, 
 And starry lights from a sea below 
 
 Glow orange, and purple, and red : 
 Till we seem floating out from the sea of life, 
 The tempests of passion, the storm winds of strife, 
 Out into a strange, mysterious space, 
 Till God shall find us a landing-place. 
 
 Drifting, drifting, to lands unknown, 
 
 From a world of love and care. 
 Drifting away to a home untried 
 
 And a heart that is waiting there. 
 ship! sail swiftly waters deep! 
 
 Bear me safe to that haven unknown 
 Safe to that tender love that waits 
 
 To be forever my own; 
 Till we drift away from the sea of life, 
 The tempests of passion, the storm winds of strife, 
 Out to a haven, out to a shore 
 
 Where life is love for evermore. 
 
 -GOOD WORDS. 
 
 230 
 
The day dies slowly in the western sky, 
 The sunset splendor fades, and wan and cold 
 
 The far peaks wait the sunrise; cheerily 
 
 The goatherd calls his wanderers to their fold; 
 
 My weary soul, that fain would cease to roam, 
 
 Take comfort ; evening bringeth all things home. 
 
 Homeward the swift-winged seagull takes its flight ; 
 
 The ebbing tide breaks softly on the sand; 
 The red-sailed boats draw shoreward for the night ; 
 
 The shadows deepen over sea and land; 
 Be still, my soul; thine hc'ir shall also come; 
 
 Behold, one evening God shall lead thee home. 
 
 LIVING AGE. 
 
 Ah me, heart! thank God for the gloaming; and may there be a 
 gloaming somewhere in heaven for those who want it! 
 
GOOD-NIGHT 
 
 The day is done; and in the morning's east 
 The shadows lie, dim dreams of night. 
 
 The time is past for labor; and released, 
 Like galley slaves let loose in fight 
 
 On seas that rock with battle shock, spent strength 
 
 Turns face and step with love, homeward at length. 
 
 The night has come ; and with the evening, star 
 Day's pain drifts back like ebbing tide; 
 
 And blessed moonlight ripples o'er the bar 
 Of twilight. Then, Love glorified, 
 
 Our God's good angel, sings, voice sweet and deep; 
 
 And with the ebbing music cometh sleep. 
 
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