i^iMs^, ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^fi 43 4 4^ A JOURNEY TO NATURE BY J.P.MOWBRAT NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY PAGE and Co. . .* ff • • ' > Copyright, 1900, 1901, by THE NEW YORK EVENING POST COMPANY Copyright, 1901, by DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. INTRODUCTION The papers in this book were originally con- tributed to the New York Evening Post^ where they elicited a printed desire for their preserva- tion in book form. Written at intervals, with very slight continuity of narrative, for weekly readers, all of whom could hardly be expected to follow them consecutively, they were neces- sarily repetitious and explanatory In spots, and required rewriting and editing when collected in book form for continuous reading. Those papers therefore have been specially prepared for this volume, new matter having been in- troduced and much that was explanatory to weekly readers having been eliminated. The personages introduced are taken from life, and are put down with a free hand as the writer saw them at the time, one of them still coloured by the fantasy she evoked. The sketches neces- INTRODUCTION sarily vary with the varying moods which one brings with him to Nature, and which sometimes colour and distort Nature herself. But if in their entirety they convey in any small degree the author's slowly matured conviction that external Nature has a lesson of obedience and love behind all her aberrations and laws, and whispers that " God Is in his world '' to those who are recep- tive and attentive, they will have accompHshed the only purpose that the author had In his mind. J. P. M. *'-*C Contents CHAPTER I Page Scared to Life •...••• I CHAPTER II Living Backwards . • . • • • • II CHAPTER III The Killing of Marmion 31 CHAPTER IV Haying Time ••.•••• 47 CHAPTER V Dumb Intimacies • • . • • • •61 CHAPTER VI A Summer's Pippin ..•••• 70 CONTENTS CHAPTER VII Page Listen to the Mocking-bird 79 CHAPTER VIII The Convalescence of a Cracked Heart . • .85 CHAPTER IX The Light in a Dark Cell o .... 99 CHAPTER X The Glory of the Way 1 09 CHAPTER XI On a Porch 1 20 CHAPTER XII A September Chill 140 CHAPTER XIII Mature Truants 1 5 1 CHAPTER XIV The Baptism of Dirt 162 CHAPTER XV A Fringed Gentian . . . , . « ,181 CONTENTS CHAPTER XVI Page Stramonium . • • • . • • .192 CHAPTER XVn Chestnuts by the Way . . . . . .203 CHAPTER XVIII Out in the Cold 213 CHAPTER XIX Wood Fires ........ 226 CHAPTER XX High Wmds 236 CHAPTER XXI Indian Summer ..••••• 256 CHAPTER XXII Trailing Juniper . , • . • • .267 CHAPTER XXIII Winter Skies 283 CHAPTER XXIV Page Snowed In . 293 CHAPTER XXV The Return of the Exiles . 304 DECORATIONS BY Journey to Nature CHAPTER I SCARED TO LIFE TO pass suddenly out of the very tempest and agony of life into the dead calm of another existence; to stop all the rioting faculties at full speed and go quietly away to vege- tating dreams, is an experience that not many men have had, and the recital of it may not be without interpretative edification to some of my fellows. I went out for a year. I could not have severed myself more completely from my habitat and the myriad points of contact with my kind, if I had become what Coleridge calls "a blessed ghost." I cut my species dead and departed this life as absolutely as was possible for a man to do with- out severing an artery or blowing his brains out. I A JOURNEY TO NATURE I turned my back on the world. Not to rail against it, for it must be acknowledged that I was very fond of it, but to get out of myself. I was neither a Timon nor a Thoreau. Just the ordi- nary headlong egoist who is living at the top of his speed. I exiled myself to forget myself, and I found something. Do you know what it was ? It was myself. One day as I was coming out of the Stock Ex- change when that maelstrom was in full race and when I was in a sort of concentrated paroxysm of suspense, — I got a warning. It was like a stroke of lightning. Without premonition or explana- tion, it seemed as if the mental tension snapped suddenly. I was hurrying to my office when I was swiftly and softly struck with sudden death. I put it that way because I know of no other phrase that will answer exactly to my sensation at the moment. My relation to the rest of the world broke off, and a frightened consciousness seemed to be crying out — what's that ? I recall my interpretation of the sensation, and it was that an iron door had fallen with a clang and cut me off forever. I had run up unthinkingly against Eter- nity there on the curb in front of the Exchange. It is at such moments that we measure time not by its successions but by its packed simultane- ousness. I was not physiologically expert enough to know what had happened, but I readily fitted a current phrase to it. — Heart failure, I said. And that accommodating explanation conveys no idea SCARED TO LIFE of the sudden recession of all the tides of life in a storm. I must have been pretty thoroughly frightened. Some glimmering recollection there Is of somebody accosting me by name and jocu- larly asking me if I was sunstruck and then pass- ing on in the human flux. By some phantasmal and quick prescience, I saw the Secretary mount- ing the rostrum in the Exchange ; there was a picture of momentary hush ; all hats came off, and I heard my name called. It was coupled with the word "Suddenly." Then back went the hats again, the roar began, and I was dis- posed of. However, the mysterious organ, of which I had hitherto been profoundly ignorant, made a spas- modic jump or two, and concluded to resume business, with what I thought was a staggering protest, and I found myself in my office, wonder- ing for the first time in my life at the unnecessary headlong nature of messengers and typewriters, and showing that a good scare makes a man incoherent, by replying to the startled girl who asked me if anybody was dead, "Yes ; I am.'* Then I was rattling up Broadway in a cab, say- ing to myself with consummate imbecility, " Keep cool, for heaven's sake — don't excite yourself" But by the time I had put my smoking-jacket on in my bachelor quarters, and had sent a messenger for the doctor, 1 had recovered a little of my routine indifference. When the dear old man's knuckles struck my door and he pushed it open, I was walking the floor, smoking ; whereupon he 3 A JOURNEY TO NATURE threw his cane upon the table recklessly, and, drawing up his portly form, said : — " Well, confound your urgent impudence ! I expected to find you breathing your last." " Perhaps I am, Doctor," I said. " I had an attack on the street of heart failure. I want instant advice." " Heart failure ? " he shouted. " Is that all ? Confound you ; I thought you had the influenza. Suppose you open that window. I'll have heart failure myself if I breathe this atmosphere." " Do you think it would be safe for me in my present condition r " I asked. "Not only safe, but preferable." I opened the sash. It was an early spring after- noon, and the sound of a newsboy's voice came mellowed by the distance, as if from a world I had left behind. He was calling a late edition. " You'll excuse me a moment. Doctor," I said, as I rang my call again. " I'd like to see the latest quotations." He looked at me curiously. " There's a break in the market ^ " he asked. " Slump," I replied. " Are you in deep ? " " Up to my ears. But it's my health that's worrying me." Then I described my experience as well as I could, and presently he had my coat off, and I was under his professional manipulation. He called it taking a look at my assets — hardly thought I could make an assignment, and various cheerful remarks of that kind, while his cool thumb SCARED TO LIFE and finger were poking about, and his warm ear was trying to catch what he called the crack of doom. When finally he sat down in the chair before me, he disregarded my anxiety, and ran on in pretty much the same way. " You're a lively lot of boys down there on the street. Your mother's alive yet, I believe." "Yes.'' " How old is she ? " " Seventy-six." " How old was your father when he died ? " "Seventy-four. Come to the point. Doctor. What chance have I got ? " He looked at me a moment very much as if he hesitated to tell me the truth. Then he said : " Well, my boy, it's a toss up whether you live to be seventy-five or drop dead within six months." I felt a nerve in my face twitch, and he went on. " I suppose I ought to congratulate you. It isn't every one who has the privilege of going down bow first, all sails set, at full speed, without committing suicide." I asked him plainly if he could help my chances. " No," he said bluntly. " It would be an im- pertinence for me to disturb the intimacy which you have established with sudden death. Besides, mortuary neatness and despatch have been very much maligned. Some men are meant to live right up to the stopping point, take all there is of life, and then exit quickly and quietly without any fuss. It's quite characteristic of the business A JOURNEY TO NATURE man of our era. It's what somebody has called eliminating the corporal superfluities.'* " Then I am liable to die at any moment, Doctor ? " " Why, of course. But you needn't preen yourself. It's a very common privilege in Wall Street. You prefer it, don't you ? I've seen a good deal of dying, and I must say that as a rule most of the attempts are tiresome bites at a cherry." " Doctor," I said, " you will pardon me, I don't quite take your view of it. I prefer to linger and suffer a little. I sent for you because you are a doctor and not a philosopher. What can you do for me ? " " Nothing, except to give the undertaker a clean bill of voluntary felo de se. There's only one thing will save you." "Ah, what is it.?" " A miracle." " Good heavens. Doctor ! *' " Yes, sir. Perhaps you have heard the dynamic asses of this world say that a man can- not lift himself by his own waistband. I suppose it's true. When you can do that, you will live to be seventy-five, if that's any comfort to you." " You are brutally frank. I suppose I must submit to my doom, but I didn't send for you to sentence me." " Sentence you ? Confound it, you sent for me to make a monkey of me. What would you think of a man who ate cyanide of mercury every 6 SCARED TO LIFE morning and sent for me to give him some medi- cine that would prolong his life ?" "You cannot give me any treatment — is that it ? '' "Yes, I can. I can put the whole pharma- copoeia into one word and give it to you, but you will not take it. It's bitter, but it might cure you. " Give it to me." " Stop." " Do you mean give up business ? " " Give up everything. Stop living for a year, and live. If you don't want to die, let Wall Street die. You cannot both live together." "Am I to understand that I can avert an organic disaster with care ? " " No. You are bringing it on with care. Stop caring. Go away. Forget — and you will lift yourself by your waistband out of an early grave. Where's that boy of yours ? " " He is at school." " School at seven ! Atrocious ! So, you had to smash him, too." " I couldn't very well take care of him when his mother died, so I put him in a comfortable private home school." " When did you see him ? " I had to think. " Three or four weeks ago.'* " Great Scott — that fine little fellow handed over to orphanage to accommodate Wall Street!" "Oh, you mistake. I am working for his future." 7 A JOURNEY TO NATURE " By destroying your own. That's the deviFs logic." This treatment resulted somewhat as a counter- irritant will. The Doctor had cuffed me profes- sionally. When he went away I began to resent it. Besides, the farther I receded from the original point of shock, the less dangerous it appeared to be, and the events that had been momentarily suspended began to press up again. Telegrams, special messengers, urgent calls, came out of the world to which I belonged. It is not easy to step outside of a crisis when you are a part of it. A man does not suddenly resolve to become medita- tive in a mob. I had sufficient resolution to back out of a dinner party and send word to the office that I would not be down for a day or two. I was already compromising. I would slack up for a few days, and then go at it again more guardedly. This in effect was — to use Wendell Phillips's phrase — a weak determination not to commit suicide, but to jump only half way down Niagara. To be absolutely candid, neither physical warn- ing nor medical advice would have broken the nexus of my life at that time, but the Doctor had dropped one bit of acid into his advice that was to eat away the chain that I could not break. That word "orphanage" laid hold of some part of my system with a rankling persistency. It was as if the Doctor had left his scalpel sticking in my soul. " Where is that boy ^ " kept tolling in me like a deep, questioning bell. The next morning I was again flying up town 8 SCARED TO LIFE in a cab. I arrived at a shabby genteel home un- expectedly. The woman who let me in intimated very plainly by her manner that it was irregular to come at that hour. She ought to have been forewarned. I brushed her away with my sudden fatherhood. " He was in the class room," she said, with an air of finality, as if the class room were a bar to fathers. But she must have seen in my face some gleams of a sudden and irresistible voracity that would be dangerous to tamper with, for she led the way with a grim and silent protest, and I suddenly saw eight or ten little fellows in a row on a bench. It seemed to me then that I had never before encountered such a petrifaction of all the natural functions of childhood. The children appeared to be in some kind of a vise, meant to squeeze them into indistinguishable uni- formity. But, as my eye ran along that human gamut, it met one inscrutable note that made every string in me vibrate. One of the faces was mine. The moment it saw me, the big, blue eyes opened wide, a pair of lips involuntarily cried, " Papa," and a pair of little arms seemed to stretch across the space and clutch at me all over. I took him away in spite of protests, and when the matron asked me with an utterly unanswera- ble superiority what I was going to do with him, I crushed her with a bravado that could only come out of Wall Street. "We are going to play pinochle," I said. He and I had the flat to ourselves that night. I never had so much fun in my life. They must 9 A JOURNEY TO NATURE have heard us on the floor below and wondered. After he had said his prayers in his night-gown, he asked me if I wasn't going to say mine, and I think I blushed. Just before he went to sleep, he put his arm softly over to see if I was there, and then said tremulously, " Papa, are you going away in the morning ? " I turned over, kissed him on the cheek, and with that utter imbecility that is pristine, I said, " Charlie, if you love me as I love you, no knife can cut our love in two." 10 CHAPTER II LIVING BACKWARDS WHEN I made up my mind to back out of my environment, I encountered some poignant experiences which it is not worth while to narrate in detail. It is enough if I can make clear the resultant lesson of it all. Several impulses and desires, deep embedded, combined to make me step clean out of one habitat into an- other, and having taken the step, I had too much obduracy of character to go back. You have heard of men turning a new leaf In my case it was no mere ornamental figure of speech. If you will permit me to use a better phrase, — not irrev- erently, — I was born again, and like all births it had its pangs, but I emerged into a new world. That is the interesting part of it. The Doctor had declared that I could not Hft myself by my own waistband, and therefore must die. I ob- jected to dying. Somehow it hurt me to be knocked down in that manner, and when I looked II A JOURNEY TO NATURE at my boy, only eight years old, the idiotic idea occurred to me that perhaps he might help me to lift myself by my own waistband. One morning in late May we found ourselves, with our bridges burnt, standing with a yellow dog in front of a weather-beaten hut one hundred miles from Wall Street. It was so early that I could feel the wet wire grass through my thin shoes. I looked at the dilapidated house and wondered at my temerity. Then the two fellows who are always squabbling in one's subconscious- ness began their debate. "So," says one of them — a kind of Mephisto — "you have made up your mind to live in that hovel, have you ? Perhaps you think you were built for it." " No," says the other fellow, " Fm going to be rebuilt for it." "Well, it's a mediaeval funk — blank cowardice • — crass sentimentalism. You cannot change your skin by changing your geography. You will com- mit suicide before the year is out." " All right," said the other, setting his teeth, " suicide it must be then. I've got a little acro- batic feat to perform just to prove to a doctor that sorriewhere in the past I had a Puritan ancestor who died on the church steps with a gun in one hand and a hymn-book in the other. I can live on raw turnips and spring water when my mind is made up." This was the bravado of the will, and even while it was flourishing I was conscious that I LIVING BACKWARDS would give the hovel and the two big boxes that had been set down at its door for a cocktail. I asked the two men who had driven us and the boxes up where I could get some ice and a lemon. They looked at each other as if I had asked them for a French menu. " Ice ? " said one of them. " You might git some at the butcher's in Spelldown. It's four miles and a half. There's a spring in the medder yonder, but the lemon crop ain't very good this year." " That's so," said his companion, wiping his face with his shirt-sleeves, " the potato bugs hurt the young lemons awfully last season." I learned sooner or later that this kind of irony was in the air like the smell of the skunk cabbage. The inside of the hovel was not so dilapidated after all. There were only two rooms and a woodshed. But it was clean and bright and sweet, and scented airs wandered through it. A phoebe-bird sat on the sill of a low window and intimated that I was impertinent. Everything was in humble and homely shipshape order. There were two shakedowns, a pine table, camp- chairs, a Quaker rocker, some trunks, a little book-shelf, a dresser with thick cups and saucers on it, and a small writing-table under the window, over which a chintz curtain was flapping lazily. The big fireplace at the end of the room had some faggots piled ready for lighting. I sat down at the window, and surveying the homely surroundings, thought of my bachelor quarters in the city, and had to press my hand 13 A JOURNEY TO NATURE on my heart to restrain my heroism. The drone of the carpenter bee at the window and the voice of CharHe on the wire grass with the yellow dog, were the only sounds, save the occasional quick rat-a-tat of a woodpecker somewhere. I turned the last batch of letters that I had brought with me out of my breast pocket. How odd they looked in that place with their club monograms and hotel imprints. Some of them were super- scribed "Immediate" and "Personal" and "Wait for answer." Two or three of them were small and mauve and probably scented. I had not opened any of them, for I knew very well what was in them, and I was not going to weaken then. I pushed them aside and tried to get my bearings. Did I know where I was? Well — rather. The nearest house was a mile across the hill and valley to the northeast. It was somebody's deserted " Folly." The old man raised hay and butter- milk, and had a niece named Griselle. She never heard of me until her uncle told her that a strange gentleman with his boy had hired the cabin for a year on account of his health, and she came over and put things to rights. I never told her nor Charlie that I had been there before — it was nearly ten years before. What was the use ? They would not have understood. I had boarded in the " Folly " for a month. Somehow that romantic runaway may have led to this, but Charlie couldn't understand that, and it would be foolish to tell him that one day his mother and I were caught in a shower and took refuge 14 LIVING BACKWARDS in this hovel, and ate strawberries and cream and shortcake, there where that pine table stood, while the hail was pattering on the roof. No, I can be a Rousseau to you, curious reader, but not to Charlie. It is difficult to be as candid as Rous- seau without being as objectionable. Charlie could not understand if I told him that the ghost of an old sweetheart had come back again with me to the hovel and was going to eat strawberries and cream again at that same table. Besides, just now he was caring more for that yellow dog than for anything else on earth, or perhaps in heaven, for that matter. That cur was the only living thing that welcomed us when we came to the station at Spelldown. She seemed to sniff our predetermined vagabondage, and began to wag a most familiar reciprocity, that said, " I am with you, boys.'* So audaciously did she claim a prior acquaintance with Charlie in some other state of existence, that I gave a boy a dollar for her, and she wig-wagged with boisterous and unmistakable manumission all the way up to our destination. Before she had got there Charlie had named her " Samson " with reference to some dog ideal in his story-book, and a day or two later I had to correct it, accord- ing to the facts, there being indubitable evidence that the cur did not belong to the Samsonian gender. So I suggested as more appropriate to her character the name of " Delilah," and CharHe, with the felicity of blue-pencil infancy, instantly converted it into " Lilah " for all time. IS A JOURNEY TO NATURE I pulled the Quaker rocker outside the door, lit my brier-wood pipe, and tried to make myself believe that I felt like Cowper's Selkirk. But the attempt was frustrated by the arrival of Griselle. She came over the northeast pasture hill, in starched muslin, and brought Gabe Hotchkiss with her. Gabe was her uncle — a weazened Rip Van Winkle, who would split my wood, haul my supplies once a week, and, if I said so, sleep in my woodshed, and fetch me some trout and dace occasionally from the Cluny milldam, between my cottage and the " Folly." Against this prac- tical and case-hardened rustic Griselle was like a musk pink against a stone heap. I wanted to call her Phyllis, and I believe I have mentioned her in my diary as " Buttermilk and Daisies." But I soon found out that she had taught dis- trict school in winter and played the melodeon in the Reformed Church somewhere. She could come over and get Charlie's breakfast in the morning. Charlie's — mark that. Of course Charlie and I were going to run two tables. Having settled this, she abandoned me to Gabe, and went out on the wire grass to make Charlie's acquaintance. Finally she insisted on taking Charhe over to the " Folly " and showing him the milldam. In a moment of weakness I consented, and was then thrown upon my own resources for the rest of the day. I tried to fill the time out with petty industry. I got out the few books and arranged them on the shelf; tacked up the photograph of Charlie's i6 LIVING BACKWARDS mother over the writing-table ; tried on a blue flannel shirt and a pair of baseball shoes, whistling an air from that last opera of Delibes's. I took a walk and tried to find the spring — came back without finding it ; took down the photograph and put it up in another place ; rearranged the books; swung a hammock, and cut my thumb. It was the longest day I ever spent in my life. Finally it occurred to me suddenly that something was liable to happen to Charlie. Wasn't there a milldam ? Didn't I know that girls only thought of themselves ? Good heavens, the Hotchkisses might be kidnappers. The air began to get blue, and I snatched a stick and set out hurriedly on a rescue — to meet Griselle and Charlie coming over the pasture-field, hand in hand, beautifully silhouetted against the sky, and Lilah wig-wagging behind — all of them consum- mately unconcerned, and Charlie crammed with new experiences, in which milldam was most con- spicuous. Griselle passed him over in the most uneventful way and returned home. Then Charlie and I got our supper. If I remember correctly, we had bologna sausage, cheese, crackers, and tea, and would have had sardines if I had known where that infernal can-opener was. It was about the time of day that I usually took steak a la Bordelaise, or a bird, with several entrees and a pint of dry wine. I admired my nerve as I ate the bologna, and wondered how long I could keep this up. 17 A JOURNEY TO NATURE After supper I proposed that we sit outside our door and have a talk while I smoked my pipe. We could see the sun go down through the trees. The conversation was carried on, I must admit, mainly by Charlie. His imagination had been inflamed by the milldam. " It was only such a little ways off, too." " If you go there alone, I'll skin you," I said. " Oh, but it's full of big white flowers." "They're rank poison — sure death to boys if they haven't got some one with them." This was a fine parental beginning. I tried to steer the conversation into other channels. I had a story pat of a boy who got himself drowned by being alone and nobody to pull him out. I told it pathetically, and wound it up just as the sun dropped behind the hill. There was no response. I looked round. Charlie had gone down with the sun. He was asleep. I picked him up and carried him in. He was " dead beat," as we say. " You're a nice companion," I growled, as he climbed into his shakedown, " to keep me com- pany. What am I going to do with myself till twelve o'clock ^ " " Good night, papa," he said with inimitable indifference. To be left alone in this manner was hideous. The very stillness was asphyxiating to the ear. Nothing but a wailing whippoorwill cut into the hush of it. It seemed to me that she was frightened at the stillness. The moth finally put LIVING BACKWARDS my candle out. Then I went outside, and walked up and down like a sentry, and tried to picture to myself what the gay world v/as doing at that lively hour. Well — Tiliotson was playing bill- iards at the University Club ; Bannister would be eating a late dinner with the Farnsv/orth, and she would ask him between sips, "What do you sup- pose ever became of your friend ? " and Bannister would whistle me down the wind lightly, saying, " Oh, his accounts were all right. He slipped off to Europe for his health." And that would dispose of me. But the Farnsworth's little mauve letter was lying in there on the table under the chintz curtain. Confound her ! I had not opened it. Oh, Fve got some sand — blast that whippoorwill ! It must have been twelve o'clock when I concluded to try the bed, and it was cer- tainly two o'clock in the morning before I v/ent to sleep. And then up rose Griselle, with her muslin. She must have been hanging around the place all night, for I could swear that no sooner had I got my eyes closed than she began to clatter in the kitchen. She even went so far as to sing " The Sweet By and By." Just as I had the two pillows muffled round my ears, Charlie was pulling at my arm. " Papa, get up — get up. Griselle wants to get the breakfast." I must have growled like the captain of a tug, but it was six o'clock, and it slowly dawned upon me that that young ruffian had been up an hour. I went out in the shed and reprimanded myself quietly. " How do you like it ? " I said, as I 19 A JOURNEY TO NATURE looked for the spring water. " You haven't got so much sand at this hour of the day, have you ? " I don't think I answered myself If I did I made no record of it, but I did try to explain to Griselle why I couldn't eat her broiled chicken and fresh eggs at that time in the morning. And she said, Oh, I'd come to it after I got rested. " Rested ? Do I look tired ? " " I guess you're tired on the wrong side," she said. " When you get tired on the right side, you'll eat like a Cheshire shoat." This jarred a little, but it was prophecy. About half-past eleven I remarked to Charlie, "My kingdom for six small oysters on the half shell," and he said, " Let's go in and open the sardine- box." And we did. It was not an easy job that I had taken upon myself to reconstruct my life. I don't think I real- ized the innate difficulties of it until I had burned my bridges. It is all very well and quite natu- ral for us to talk about nature and obedience and simple living if we are sportsmen, or naturalists, or even poets. But if one is a stock-broker, who has been communing with the money market for eight years, it comes pretty tough at first. Noth- ing but the grim alternative of sudden death could have made me so determined a bridge-burner. But I must acknowledge that during the first week of my voluntary exile in the far-away Hotch- kiss woods I had to contemplate my eight-year- old son and heir with deadly concentration of 20 LIVING BACKWARDS purpose In order to understand that sudden death was not altogether preferable to slow extinction in utter solitude. The Doctor had used the lad as a sort of emo- tional lever, but I soon found out that the lad himself was as rigid in his views of life as the moral law. He never bent a single natural impulse to accommodate me. I was to bend all my case-hardened habits to accommodate him. He expected me to go to bed at eight o^clock and to get up at five. He had in his bones some kind of thermometrical arrangement with the sun. He insisted that a breakfast at seven o'clock was the proper thing, and he carried this obduracy so far that he serenely set up oatmeal and milk as a suf- ficient inducement. When I told him that we were going to play Robinson Crusoe in the woods for a year, he complacently accepted it with the immediate arrangement that I was to be the man Friday. The fact is I never suspected how consum- mately I had drifted into an artificial and selfish disregard of the normal mean of things until I began to associate on intimate terms with my own offspring. After a week of it I appealed to the Doctor by mail. " What am I going to do to occupy my mind ? " " Don't occupy it," he wrote back. " What did you climb out of the cerebral maelstrom for ? Stop thinking for a while. Play. Become an animal — and watch Charlie." " Is thy servant then a dog ? " I inquired. 21 A JOURNEY TO NATURE "Yes/' he replied, "or some other more igno- ble animal. Perhaps Wail Street has inoculated you with the notion that you belong to the min- eral or vegetable kingdom. It's a great shame. You are indubitably and necessarily half animal. Take my advice, stay in your kennel and wag your tail." Once again I wrote him to say : " I think you have overestimated Charlie's abiUties as a guide. He hasn't quite understood my case from the first." Then I got this short and sharp rejoinder : " But I understand your case, believe me. There are some mountains in our early vistas, and the chil- dren get nearer their summits in their play than we ever get with our pack-mules." If I had not had a profound respect for this gifted old curmudgeon's knowledge, and a sneak- ing fear that he and sudden death had an under- standing, I think I should have shpped away in the most pusillanimous manner at the end of the first week. As it was, I girded my loins and stood up to the extraordinary job of lifting myself by my own waistband. But to be utterly frank, now that it is all over, the only thing I did was to hang on like grim death, and let Charlie do the rest. I must have looked very idiotic sitting there trying to coax myself into the beHef that I was enjoying an Arcadian existence and had got back to the primitive and joyous simplicity of life, which was a most preposterous conclusion ; for if 22 LIVING BACKWARDS I had reached that condition, I would have gone to sleep like Charlie, and not thought about it at all. But the man who has for years packed all his excitement, his society, and his indulgences into his nights is not going to wrap the drapery of his couch about him like a proper yokel at eight o'clock, and lie down to pleasant dreams. Night, as I knew her, was a luxurious Ethiope, who not only " wore so many jewels on her face you could not see 'twas black," but carried a good many dulcimers in her hand. The night that I had come into was undoubtedly the original insti- tution, made to sleep in. I made up my mind that it was absolutely barren of anything else, and then a June bug hit me, biff, in the forehead, and fell over dead on the Doctor's letter, as if he had given up his life in the attempt to prove me a liar. All that I could see of the night was a square, velvety black space where the window was. It was fretted by some dim flying wings that microscopically glistened in the vagrant star- light, like tiny threads woven into the blackness. Out of this mystery of the dark crept all kinds of shadow sounds and occult breathings. I could hear the dog barks dying off in a vanishing per- spective, but marking the dim distances and the sohtude with their grading accents. Along the ground at regular intervals came the throb of a bass viol as some bullfrog twanged his string over at the milldam. A man cannot fool with night when she is in furis naturalibus. It is only the wanton night 23 A JOURNEY TO NATURE that he has himself made that will tolerate his impertinence. While I sat there thinking of financial combinations that had been cut short, and saying to myself, " The bulls are up in Ber- lin and the Bourse is bellowing," another June bug hit me on the nose and fell over on his back on the table. Several more came in, bombarded my lamp-stand, and fell dead. There was quite a row of them on the Doctor's letter with their claws up. Harmless, jolly little imps of the darkness, they seemed at that moment to be punctuating the night's contempt for me. They recalled to me a vanished estate when they and I were on better terms. All at once the name came back through the window like the bug him- self — Phyllopertha horticola. It was as plain as some of the adages in my old copy-book, and along with it my juvenile translation — "leaf- eating, garden-haunting acrobat." Always he came with the early roses and the first hot, dry spell. And always without steering apparatus, he ran foul of everything, and always got the worst of it. Now, either he or I was an impertinence. Night with these winged siiccuhi was tedious. I looked at Charlie. His head was on his arm. How far away he appeared to be. Nothing could annoy him, for the same night that was bombard- ing me had her protective arm around him. I made a memorandum on the margin of the Doc- tor's letter. "Get mosquito netting, and send for book on entomology." Then I blew the light out and went to bed. 24 LIVING BACKWARDS The next day I stumbled in my stupid way backwards into the new life. I took a tin pail and called to Charlie. "We must find that spring/' I said, and we set out like two tramps through the jungle, starting a good many garru- lous chipmunks and seeing the occasional flash of a rabbit. We reached a wooded crest toil- somely, and I heard the far-away toot of a loco- motive whistle. The white clouds were sailing over the hazy hills in the east. Everything was slumberous and warm and restful. Somewhere in that direction there was social life. We would walk over there and discover it. So we stowed our pail away in a clump of bushes and set out on a long tramp of exploration — down winding dusty roads and over ancient stone fences, new vistas beguiling us on, and the yellow dog keep- ing ahead with a beckoning wag. Visions of a cool hamlet with the railroad running through it like an artery from a distant heart ; a quaint little station with jolly old telegraph poles, and some nice old hostelry where we could get a homely dinner and hire a horse to bring us back like two companionable German students. But the roads were elusive. They wound round with singular want of purpose, and wan- dered down to deserted mills or turned in at antique graveyards, and sometimes lost them- selves in grass-grown clearings where I suspected there had once been camp-meetings. So, finally, when the sun was getting vertically hot and the dust was working its way into our marrow, we 25 A JOURNEY TO NATURE sat down on a flat stone by the roadside, and Charlie mildly suggested that it was time to eat. As we sat there a farmer came by driving a heavy wagon leisurely. I hailed him, "Say, neighbour, how far is the town ? " " What town ? " "The nearest town." " Do you mean Slocum ? " "Yes, anything." " Well, you strike the Slocum pike about three miles over yander, and that'll fetch you to Slo- cum. It's about eighteen mile." " How far is it back to the Hotchkiss woods ?" He turned square round in his seat, threw one leg over the other, and regarded us with a new interest. " Be you the man that's livin' in the Hotch- kiss woods ? " I felt instinctively that the whole county had heard of me. " I be," I said. " I've lost my way. I'll give you a dollar to haul us back. Maybe you could tell us where we could get a lunch." That struck him as funny. "Lunch — hey? I s'pose you want yer dinner. Wal, it's an hour past dinner-time." The impropriety of being hungry when the dinner hour was past had never struck me so forcibly before. Finally he " allowed " that we might get a hunk of bread and a dish of milk at the sawmill, but he wasn't going any farther. So we climbed in, and he jolted out of us what little resignation we had left, and landed us in a stable- 26 LIVING BACKWARDS yard of the sawmill, where there was a strong and not unpleasant odour of hemlock sawdust, and where we were speedily the objects of benevolent suspicion to several persons who eyed us through the green blinds. Nevertheless, we were gra- ciously provided with hunks of bread and flowing bowls of milk served in a summer kitchen by a young woman in freckles whom the angels called Pauline, and who kept her eye on the big seal- ring on my little finger, so that when she refused to let me pay for the food I gave her the ring, coming dangerously near calling her Pauline and telling her that my grandfather the Doge of Ven- ice had married the Adriatic with it. By this time the old teamster, who had been wrestling with himself in the woodshed, had ob- tained a victory over his conscience and concluded to take us back for the dollar. As the life was nearly jolted out of us by the time we reached the edge of the Hotchkiss woods, we told him we would walk the rest of the way, and then Charlie and I set out to find our water pail, com- ing after much wandering upon a little brook winding down through the valley among water- cress and marsh-grasses with a pianissimo gurgle. We took off our shoes and stockings, and plunged our dust-covered feet into its cool pockets, and then set out to explore it, wading along its channel. Presently we came to a grassy basin with slop- ing green banks — a natural saucer that must at some time have been brimming, but now was left green by the little stream that wound through 27 A JOURNEY TO NATURE its centre. I imitated the yellow dog, and threw myself on the slope, but Charlie went to work promptly to dam up the outlet. I v/atched his futile hydraulics with lazy interest for a few mo- ments, and then went and helped him with my superior knowledge. I rolled the stones up and piled them, while he stopped the interstices with sod. It was very jolly to see the water put on an air of timidity, and race round the basin as if a little frightened and looking for an escape. I tugged at heavier stones, digging them out of a neighbouring bank with my fingers and rolling them over with incredible toil. Both of us vorked like slaves. There was something fasci- nating in the gracious conflict of the water. It was like romping with a handsome hoydenish girl, who as soon as you caught her eluded you with bursts of laughter and little gurgles to run off defiantly in a new direction. All at once every interest in the world suspended itself while that basin filled up. The element was so coy, so gently self-willed, and so flashingly and musi- cally capricious, that the desire to subdue and tame and possess it stirred some instinctive mas- culine impulse even in Charlie. I had no time to think about it then, but I can see now that we were savage Angelos painting a mural picture. The little lake rose to us with fairy response. It brimmed the basin, took on frills and furbelows of ripples, flung out jubilates as it leaped over our embankment. It snatched sky depths from the air, and planted magical willowy islets with 28 LIVING BACKWARDS miniature palms and ferns, and sailed argosies of leafy galleons round about — one of them had a luxuriant caterpillar curled up in its prow like a voluptuous Cleopatra. It was not until the lengthening shadows warned usj that we set out for our cabin, and then went to work without any didacticism or other nonsense to get our dinner. I had sand under my finger- nails and scratches on my wrists, but I remarked to Charlie, " Pot cheese and strawberries are aw- fully good, my boy," and he, with his mouth full, made voracious response, " Awfully, ain't they ? " About half-past eight o'clock he looked at me with sleepy surprise. " Are you going to bed, too ? " "Yes," I said, " I think Tm played out. Good- night." " Good-night, papa." I changed the memorandum on the Doctor's letter, to read — "Send for book on hydraulics." That's all I remember of that night. Having imitated Charlie up to this point, there was no good reason why I should not get up in the morning when he did. But he was ahead of me, and cavorting at five o'clock with the yellow dog on the wet wire grass. I heard his invitation to come out and see the sun rise, a performance that I thought should have worn its novelty off several thousand years ago. But I took a look at it, and it had some special features that were almost Persian or Hellenic. His Majesty rose over a wooded hill, setting fire to the trees in a most 29 A JOURNEY TO NATURE riotous manner, and to my disordered imagination presenting Aurora in propria persona coming down the hill with a long shadow in front of her and her chip hat burning like a crown of gold. Of course it was Griselle coming to get our breakfast, with a pail of fresh milk in her hand and Gabe Hotch- kiss trudging on behind. Really this was not so bad, but the disturbance that the birds made as she came trippingly down the slope, struck me as being a little overdone and rather like the claque at a professional matinee. Griselle utterly lacks the sense of proportion. I noticed at the breakfast table that Charlie had a new doily under his plate with a capital C worked in its centre. What does a child of his age care for such attentions ? Griselle's talents lack adapta- bility. However, I told her, with much pride, of our hydraulics, and explained to her how hard we had worked to make a pool of water in which we could bathe. She listened respectfully and only said that there was already a beautiful little pond only a few steps below that. I felt crushed, but Charlie rose with the Instinc- tive genius of his ago to th situation. " But we didn't make it," he said. 30 CHAPTER III THE KILLING OF MARMION MY doctor having succeeded in exiling me and my eight-year-old heir to what he called " the recuperative wilderness," sent me occasionally a tart reminder of the wholesome- ness and beauty of the process I was undergoing. He is a delightful megatherium of an extinct school, and his corrective bellowings, muffled by distance, afforded me much amusement in my solitude, and doubtless much edifying precept. " Isolation," he wrote mc, "is the balm of life, and it is better for the constitution than the spice of variety. If I had the power, I would provide unpadded cells for society and shove the gayest of its votaries into them regularly, and turn the key on them, merely to increase the average of human life. I am more and more convinced that the Frenchman was right who said that progress is a disease, and eventually society will die of civilization. It is fast losing the power 3^ A JOURNEY TO NATURE and the privilege of taking breath. The path to heaven is choked with late dinners, and we are forgetting the route." (The old pirate, I'll wager he was writing this in his dress-coat, while the coupe was waiting to take him to a banquet.) " I have tried my best to introduce a few of my gifted patients to their own economies, but they hadn't time to know themselves. They live in a mag- netic bath, and would die of ennui if they did not feel the shock of things going by. They are con- verting themselves into mere conduits. ' You are the first fellow I have met who, coming suddenly on his own grave yawning before him, had the pluck to say, ' No, I thank you,' and walk off in another direction. Bully for you." It was by such artful ticklings of my pride that the old ruffian got me to wear my chains with a sense of heroism. I begged for some news very much as a morphine patient begs for his drug. "News," he replied, "there is nothing new in the news. Everything seethes and roils and jostles and bursts just as it did when you were here. Men are running over each other ruthlessly, and dropping out of sight as usual. I don't know whether you remember Calhoun — he snapped his E string at concert pitch last week. He is pretty well forgotten by this time. He was so loaded with the events of the universe that his mind snapped. He was one of the modern idiots who try to play the role of Atlas with nothing but their sensibilities. Becky Moultrie you knew. I saw you at one of her receptions before she got 32 THE KILLING OF MARMION to be a woman of affairs. She sent for me last week ; said she had a stitch in her side — would I drop in between twelve and one. Her lunch time was the only opportunity she could spare me. ' I haven't time to be sick/ she wrote me ; ' I've got to preside at the meeting to-morroWj and my time is all laid out for next week.' It was three days before I called, for I had some- thing more important than a stitch in the side to look after. But she was a woman of neatness and despatch. When I got there, she was laid out. It turned out to be a pleuratic stitch, and the flowers were coming in as I arrived. This uni- verse of ours is constructed on the stop-over plan, and there is no use in kicking against it. This through-train business doesn't at all agree with the tropical swing of things, which provides clois- ters and still nights for forgetting. By Jove, old fellow, there wouldn't have been any Renaissance if there hadn't been Dark Ages first, and there wouldn't have been any Pilgrim's Progress if somebody hadn't impounded Bunyan. I have never read it, but I understand it's a great work. Go to, every man can be his own Buddha, inas- much as he has a Bo-tree in his soul — if he will only sit down under it at times and be mum and get acquainted with himself." The only scent of the city in this philosophy was sceptic and mortuary, and there were times when I would have given a good deal for a sniff of an ailantus tree or a whiff of consomme. But all the same, the regimen of isolation was working 33 A JOURNEY TO NATURE a quiet change in me. I was getting on better terms with myself without knowing it. I recalled a curiously trivial experience I once had in the city similar to something narrated by a well-known Frenchman. I came home one night from a late and rather riotous supper to my room. There v/as a full-length mirror in it, and as I lit my gas I got a glimpse of myself, flushed and eager, and it gave me a strange start ; why, I never could tell. But I regarded myself for a moment with startled awe. That ghost of iden- tity, forgotten in the rush of impressions, had caught me alone, and I must have shuddered at myself. It was nothing more than what Burns means when he says, '^ Oh, wad some power the giftie gie us to see oursel's as others see us." But it was an analogue of that old superstition which turns the mirror to the wall when there is a death in the house, for no one knows what uncanny recognitions may flit over its surface. There is always a lurking suspicion that some wraith will pass and taunt us. If you make the inquiry, you will find that no belle looks in her glass when she comes home from the revelry. The confounded thing betrays her. It reflects. How to get on comfortable terms with your- self when you are alone. This is where the Doctor's " Charlie philosophy," as I called it, came in. "The best way to contemplate your- self," he wrote me, " both medicinally and mor- ally, is through parentage. If a man would see himself through a crystal lens, let him become 34 THE KILLING OF MARMION the father of a boy. This is the answer to that vain prayer of experience — Oh, that I could YwQ my Hfe over again. You are living it over again. Watch it. While you have been throw- ing life away like a heap of faggots, it has been budding. It is given to every father of a boy to be his own incubus or his own good angel. If you will only listen to your primitive self, you will hear a Memnonian voice as of Nature her- self. It is saying, 'It is better to have one woman who believes you are the greatest man in the world, and who presents you with a boy who agrees with her, than it is to be the greatest man in the world.' Under all the flashing tumult and flying spume of a masterful life are the un- sullied depths of a creative love with a Kyrie Eleison in it. These sub-depths never get stirred by the life you have been leading. You must sit a while on the shore of this sea you have crossed, and see the shallop of yourself sporting on the beached margent, and feel how helpless you are to load your experience into it without swamping it. By and by, as its sails get stronger, it will venture out to try it all over again. No charts or compasses of yours will still the voices of the sirens, and no silken sails that you can fur- nish will turn him from the magical horizon. ' The isles are floating on a furlong still before.* Sit still a while and wait on the sands. Some day he will sail wearily back, looking for the love that he never found elsewhere, to And when he returns, mayhap, only the runes and the desolate 35 A JOURNEY TO NATURE water-marks. Now is your time, old fellow. Take yourself by the hand, let yourself climb up on your knees and enfold you in protective inno- cence and reproach you with warm kisses. There is a millennial touch in it, believe me, for you will have gotten rid of your carnivorous egotism and will He down with the lamb. A touch of prophecy, too, if you will but remember. For is it not written that 'a little child shall lead them ' ? " Literally to renew one's youth, according to the Doctor's prescription, turned out to be a series of gracious surprises. With Charhe's hand in mine, I walked into some mysteries that gladly turned into revelations. We took up with some toys in our imaginations, and let the real fairies into our experiences, so that little curtains were lifted all round us on worlds unrealized. One hot day we lay flat on our stomachs under the shade of a beech, among the June grass and the daisies, peering down into a magic spectacle, and yet it was the planet's history in petto. The great loom of the universe was working there with miniature continents. It was a paleontologi- cal glimpse of the pre-world, as if Nature kept ceaseless memoranda in shorthand of all her mon- strous cycles of change. There were the equato- rial forests and the prehistoric monsters. All one had to do was to get the inverse scale adapted, and the gigantic fronds waved their plumes, and stran- gUng creepers wound in tangles, and strange forms of life wandered through. Green leviathans 36 THE KILLING OF MARMION crouched in corners ; scurrying termites ran hither and thither. A slow-moving angleworm drew his ophidian length along the ancient geologic reaches, and an armoured pterodactyl, in the shape of a dragon-fly, came in flaming gorgeousness like Apollyon, and picked up an inhabitant or two. Here was the oldest Nibelungen Lied going on still, with real dragons amid the real elements in this demiurgic workshop. Somehow I fancy that Wagner, when he heard the eternal melodies, must have been lying on his stomach and looking at the eternal animate forces. But what is the use of trying to get these child- like experiences over into literature ? One must be a Thoreau to do it. When I interrogated the mysteries like Hamlet, there was Charlie with his round implicit face, and he seemed to say to me, "You want to know the secret of Nature; well, you will have to become an obedient part of it, then you will know, but you will lose the power and the desire to tell it." That boy never makes any demonstration over a sunrise, and he looks at me wonderingly when I begin to cavort and effuse. He seems to be more familiar with the processes than I am. They are spectacles and episodes to me. Heavens, it is always sunrise with him ; why make such a fuss over it ? And that is always the way with souls that live close to Nature. They take it as a matter of course because they are a part of it, and that is where Cooper made such a mistake with his Natty Bumppo, who was always going about attitudinizing and philosophizing 37 A JOURNEY TO NATURE about that which such a man would unconsciously appropriate. Even Poe, with all his genius, failed to lie on his stomach and look into the grasses of the field. His Raven and his Annabel Lee are not arrayed like one of these. Fancy him writ- ing the " Flower de Luce " of Longfellow, or the " Chambered Nautilus " of Holmes, or the " Water Fowl " of Bryant. If he had been guided by the implicit faith of the boy, he would have taken the advice of the guide in Dante's " Inferno " when he came to some of the horrors, " Look and pass on." Besides all other experiences there was one that I cannot help making some mention of. It was purely psychic and confidential. I found that Charlie was more or less of a telephone into eternity. Do not misunderstand me. In the breaks of our existence all of us come at some time to that tower in the valley of desolation where faith has run a wire out into the shoreless leagues. In all the ages man has come there and sent his messages out and waited for answers. But none ever came. His cry was for "the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still." He must have missed the right instru- ment. I only know that the sound of the voice came plainly back to me at times ; that I often felt the touch of the vanished hand, and some- thing out of eternity looked through the near-by windows of another soul. I have listened to it in playtime. The inflections, the ineffable some- thing was unmistakable, so that the voice was 38 THE KILLING OF MARMION not utterly still. At such times I was in danger of getting sentimental, but Griselle would come like a vestal and fill the whole woods with the incense of fried ham, and Charlie and I, like two devotees, would walk up to her altar and perform our duties with carnivorous disregard of all senti- ments. So does Nature, when she has her way, preserve and equalize her antagonisms and con- vert even fried ham into ambrosia. I think we grew quite like Brahmins under our mango trees. The entire population of the woods, having come to the conclusion that we were either too effeminate or too orthodox to kill anything, took advantage of our helplessness. The squirrels came in at the window in the morn- ing. The woodchucks sat on their haunches on our wire grass. The rabbits made burrows under our hearthstone. We could hear them scolding their broods at night and bumping their heads against the flooring. The wood-turtles crawled in over our sill, and the young ones dropped out of Charlie's pockets at night when he hung his trousers over a chair. As for the birds, they reminded me of the gamin in Frankfort Street. They gathered in front of our door in the morn- ings and waited to be fed, and there was never a night that a bat or two did not manage to worm himself into our confidence when Vv^e were trying to sleep. It was very amusing to see the com- placent contempt with which Lilah, the yellow dog, and Gabe Hotchkiss regarded this extraor- dinary tolerance. But I think there was a quiet 39 A JOURNEY TO NATURE understanding growing up between these two and Charlie that it was high time the killing began. One morning I surprised the infant in the wood- shed v/atching Gabe at work on a hickory limb. I was informed that the preparation was for bosen- narrers. My lamb had passed the stone age. " What on earth do you want with a bow and arrows ? " I asked. " Want to kill birds," he said triumphantly. And there was the old Adam beginning to peep out in my Arcadia. The Brahminical growth was very curious, and I now see that it was a part of the general obedi- ence to which I had subjected myself. No sooner had I condescended to strip off my aggressive individuality for a while, and put myself implicitly into the general order, and drift with the ordained arrangement, than the general order came inquir- ingly up to my threshold and held out paws and beaks and mandibles, and wag;p;ed tails as if it car- ried in its poor, half-developed consciousness a kindly desire to renew the paradisaical truce. It is astonishing how quickly the gossip of the v/oods carries. The birds told the squirrels and the squirrels told the woodchucks : " That man and his boy in the Hotchkiss hut are not killers. It is incredible, but true, they haven't destroyed anything since they arrived." This rumour appeared to have excited the curi- osity of every bug and beast and creeping thing within half a mile of us. There w^as one adven- turous chipmunk which, having heard these fly- 40 THE KILLING OF MARMION ing yarns in the bush, resolved to find out for himself, and being of a reckless disposition, he sat on our window-ledge one morning, and pushed his impertinence over the table, where there were some peanuts that Charlie had left scattered about. We stood still and watched him, and he sat up and tasted the new order of nut with a trembling kind of bravado, carrying one of them away with him to corroborate his story, knowing very well that he would be called a liar if there was a crow about. He must have made up a most interesting account, for the next morning several of them came and kept at a safe distance in the trees to watch him go through the performance that he had evidently boasted of He was such a pretty picture of tiny electrical energy, and so incapable of interfering in any way with our lax duties, that I could not find it in my heart to frighten him. That fellow became quite familiar and visited us regularly, and when the window was barred with mosquito net- ting he went round and came in through the kitchen door, always being rewarded with a few peanuts. Having at some time called him a "jack o' lantern," with reference to his marvel- lous swiftness of motion, Charlie shortened it into "Jack," and by that name he was known in the family as long as we stayed in the hut. Late in the fall he had the impudence to come with a companion and make a nest in a corner of the woodshed, much to the annoyance of Gabe Hotch- kiss, who ranked him as "vermin," and to the standing amazement of the yellow dog, that could 41 A JOURNEY TO NATURE never quite get it into her head that it was not an infringement of her proprietary right in Charhe. That this squirrel somehow spread the news that we were a pair of incomprehensible and effeminate duffers who lived on peanuts, without sufficient masculinity to interfere with anything, and that the whole animal creation ought to take advantage of it, I have not the slightest doubt, for it was not long before a woodchuck came in the morning and sat up like a kangaroo on our wire grass, and tried to guy us, casting occasional mild and inquiring glances at our open door. I remembered enough of my natural history to know that this was the American marmot, set down in the vulgar vernacular as the " ground- hog," and loaded by the American farmer with a number of amiable superstitions. But I never knew what a handsome and harmless animal he is till I consented to live in the same dimension of space for a while with him. He would sit there in his marsupial way, and vv^ash his face and comb out his whiskers, seeming to say all the while, " I understand that you're not on the shoot." By degrees Charlie coaxed him up to the door-step, telling me to keep out of sight, and when the early summer apples came he would roll out a ripe one to him, and we would watch him with amusement sit up and sample it. So this fellow had to be included in the happy family, and we called him " Marmion," merely on account of the sound, I suppose. It was Marmion that made me a Brahmin, or at 42 THE KILLING OF MARMION least brought me to the full consciousness that 1 was a Brahmin. He attached himself to us with such a confiding gentleness, and sat round with such a helpless and appealing dependency, that we admitted him to the entourage quite as a matter of course. Then, too, I was put to it by Charhe to draw on all my rusty stock of natural history to explain hibernation and rake up the old myths of the Farmers' Almanac about the marmot's weather prognostications, especially his immemo- rial habit of coming out in the spring to Jpok for his shadow ; and I discovered how deeply inter- ested, beyond all else, boys are in animals, most of them preferring the menagerie to the circus before they are sophisticated, and all of them caring more for a dog than for the Decalogue. In thinking the matter over, I arrived at the conclusion that it was on account of Charlie that the beasts of the field became so familiar. I framed a comfortable theory that there was a millennial link between childhood and the whole animal kingdom. No sooner had this fancy taken firm root than it began to throw out an- other, which was that childhood, thus extending a hand downward to the dumb up-looking origins of hfe, might extend another upward toward the serene Beyond to which all life was tending. It was in this way that our isolation and sweet com- panionship stirred some unsuspected and medici- nal forces in my own tired heart, as if a harassed and strained man could climb back into the cradle of life and hear the original lullaby. 43 A JOURNEY TO NATURE One Sunday morning Griselle had insisted on taking Charlie to church. She had come over in extra muslins, looking very crisp and blossomy. Together we had polished up the boy, and then they had gone away hand in hand, very happy, without even looking back or giving me a thought. Charlie's 'last instruction to me was, " Don't for- get to give that apple on the table to Marmion when he comes in, and give him the other one when he comes back." This led to the explana- tion from Charlie that the animal always carried the first apple away, and ate the second one con- tentedly on the lawn, because he had young ones somewhere. I rolled the two apples out on the wire grass, took my stick, went off for a solitary walk, and, coming to an inviting cloister on the edge of the wood, I sat down under a cedar canopy to take some deep breaths of Sunday solitude and to ask myself what inscrutable bar there was to my going to church with Griselle. The tinkling bell of the distant chapel added a faint melancholy rhythm to the air as it mingled with the low inarticulate psalm that went up from the earth, " making a cathedral of immensity for the everlasting worship without words." Every- thing was at rest and breathing a Te Deum. Suddenly there broke in upon it all the dis- cordant sound of men's voices, harsh and jarring, accompanied by eager dog barks — that blend of screams and yaps that indicates intense animal excitement, and I started off to find out what was the matter. It was not long before I came up 44 THE KILLING OF MARMION with a group of stalwart young men with their coats off, working hke mad at a stone wall to get at something hiding therein. They had with incredible labour and inexplicable enthusiasm and noise pulled down about six feet of it, cemented and v/ire-wound as it v/as with age and blackberry vines, their three dogs dancing about in half-delirious expectation. So intent were they all on their hunt that they gave no sort of heed to me, and, believing them to be after a venomous reptile, I watched them with curiosity, some kind of brute elation in me responding to the noise and conflict of it. At last, v/hen a bur- row had been uncovered, and the biggest dog of the three thrust his nose in, what was my aston- ishment to see him pull out an animal and throw him with a vicious jerk into the centre of the group, and there sat Marmion on his haunches, to be greeted by a chorus of relentless exultation as he looked at dogs and men, trying, in one momentary glance of wonder, before he was torn to pieces, to comprehend the inexplicable injustice and cruelty of it. I shall always remember the reproach of that look. Such intelligence as the poor animal had was wrought in a moment to a pitiful interrogation. "Why should four men and three dogs beset with demoniac delight such a harmless creature as I am .? " Something of the same futile astonishment beset me. There was no use trying to rescue Marmion. He was torn to pieces before I could make myself heard. But why it should afford such satisfaction to the 45 JOURNEY TO NATURE men, and why four such lusty examples of man- hood should be so devoid of a sense of magna- nimity, I could not for the life of me understand. I did not understand then, nor have I under- stood since, what it is impels intelligent immortal souls to this purposeless and cruel frenzy. I came slowly back, and when Charlie arrived and saw the two apples lying on the grass, he asked me if Marmion had not come that morning. I only said, " No ; he did not come." There are some things you do not tell a child. I suppose it is because you do not want him to be ashamed of his species too early in life. 46 CHAPTER IV HAYING TIME THE two human beings who had come to my assistance in my exile were admirably adapted to carry out the Doctor's regime. As I have already said, Gabe Hotchkiss split my wood and brought the supplies up from the village twice a week in his farm-wagon, and his niece Griselle came dancing o*er the flowery lea every morning like Aurora to cook my eggs and bacon. They both regarded my domestication with a small boy in that hut with respectful won- der, and I often saw them with their heads together comparing some fresh discovery and trying to get a new light on my mystery. I was evidently beyond their mental processes. I was undoubtedly a gentleman, and might be a million- naire doing penance, but there was no reason why a gentleman might not be a crank, or perhaps a counterfeiter. In any case, I was legitimate prey for the rustic appetite. They treated me with a discreet obeisance that no familiarity on my part 47 A JOURNEY TO NATURE could break through. There the mental pro- cesses stopped, and the obeisance ran on unevent- fully without theruo I managed to let them know by devious explanations that I was an invalid doing a quiet outing v/ith my boy for the sake of his and my health. It was very interest- ing to see Griselle's feminine solicitude peep out at times, as if she were wondering when I would have a spell, and she could get hot cloths ready and stew down some burdock, and Gabe could enliven matters by rattling that farm-wagon three or four miles for the country doctor and his bottle of quinine. Griselle was a human butter-pat, sweet and fresh from the rural churn, with the family stamp on her face, and ready for the market. She had not as yet been put on the dairy-shelf, wnere, as you know, all butter-pats begin to absorb what- ever is nearest and strongest. And then she took to Charlie so ingenuously and easily that I conceived an entirely new order of respect for this rustic handmaiden who, when she was not flitting, was standing on an inacces- sible pedestal of youth to which my maturity looked up with admiration, but without ever being able to exactly make out whether it was a fancy of Watteau's or a realistic part of the commonplace life that I had come into. She was always turning toward me an inquiring face of mingled girlhood and womanhood that I had never anywhere encountered. The demoiselles of my late life were all delicious 48 HAYING TIME and anxious antagonists whose prerogative it was to aggravate, and bafile, and outwit. They always kept one trying to make out what was beneath their decorative exteriors. Woman to me had been for several years a predetermined hallucina- tion from which man was always in danger of being freed by marrying it. Her most delightful piquancy was a little apprehension that she would at some time be caught and found out, and I fell into the easy cynicism of my set, believing it was pleasantest to be deceived and even saying that if love began with understanding, it v/ould begin where it ought to end — and that would be very much like an acorn beginning by being an oak. But then it is so different with a butter-pat ! You are liable to melt all its lineaments unless you keep it cool. Of course the masculine nature never sees a butter-pat fresh and inviting, but it has an irresistible dairy impulse to mould it anew and generally makes a mess of it. But when a man reaches the age of forty-four, perhaps butter is not so apt to melt in his mouth. There was a fine paternal dignity on my part for several weeks with this handmaiden. I in- structed her about Charlie and other duties with a proper sense of the chasm that was to yawn between us, and over which she invariably skipped without the slightest recognition of it. In other words, the butter-pat went on in its dairy way, and I was the thing that was melted. Now I think of it, it was the absence of shock that was doing all the work without my knowing 49 A JOURNEY TO NATURE it. The benignity of a graciously enforced loafing period never dawned on me until I began to pick up some of its surprises. My first discovery was that I could look myself in the face without being frightened. There's nothing so very dreadful about you when you're left to your own resources, I said. Then I began to discover the sanitation of uneventfulness. This life was a sort of homoeo- pathic application of death itself as a prophylactic of death, just as sleep is. To lie still for a while on this great breast of the universe and hear the mother breathe is suspensive but restorative. I found myself at various sly times trying to find out if Griselle was pretty, and I was generally baffled by the equally sly suspicion that she knew what I was up to. Her first appearance on the scene had been in the centre of an enormous arm- ful of lilacs, carelessly plucked as she crossed the field from the old Hotchkiss " Folly," and ever after she was associated in my mind with the spring odour of lilacs. She wore her rustic airs with the same superiority that a Niobe would give to her tears. She floated in and out of that homely Httle domicile not unlike an ordinary butterfly, always appearing to be a great deal more gossamer and ethereal than she really was, and creating the strange fantasy that it was her special duty in life to keep up that odour of lilacs. This girl element of the exile was very insidious. It had the soft, whelming quality of a summer cloud, that we have the best authority for saying never excites our special wonder. 50 HAYING TIME I acknowledge that the vacuum of such a life was something dreadful at first. It was like some of those gifted convicts who are compelled to come down from transcontinental railroad-wreck- ing or bank-looting to making shoes. But even the convict, when his sentence is determined, must adapt himself to his stripes. All the time that I was growling and groaning a change was taking place. One day, at the end of three weeks, I suddenly discovered that I had forgotten to lie awake at night. I had been sleeping for a fort- night like the rude forefathers of the hamlet and hadn't noticed it. The next discovery was that ham allays hunger as well as broiled sweetbreads, and strawberries gain a relish by picking them yourself. That discovery led me to assist Griselle in shelling peas and peeling the potatoes. As a volunteer I had to lie a little. I told her that I had learned all about it when camping out — as if one ever had peas when camping out, or ever peeled his potatoes. But what did she know about it? She only held up my parings after- ward, and remarked that potatoes must have been plentiful when I cam^ped out. The absolute unstrungness of shelling peas was new to me. I should not hesitate now, as an expert, to say to any master mind wearied with the problem of existence — try shelling peas. To be relieved from the duty of circumventing Smith and killing Brown, and saving your scalp from Jones, and saying smart things to madame, and being continually on the lookout that somebody 51 A JOURNEY TO NATURE does not hit you in the back of the neck una- wares, gives a certain voluptuous spontaneity to idleness. No dress-coat to put on in the even- ing ; no hypocritical letters to be answered ; no flowers to be bought ; no new restaurant in some dirty street to be put up with ; no tiresome hostess to hsten to ; no weary sense of being on parade. Freedom to go barefooted if I felt like it, and eat with my knife if the impulse took me. Safe from that demoniac cry of " Ah there " ; never startled by a " Halloo." All the social bandages gone, and with them most of the lies that they engender. One day I walked over with Griselle to see the Hotchkiss " Folly " — a great tumble-down man- sion, whose projector had ruined himself, and was now out of sight and out of mind somewhere under his old apple trees. What he had laid out as a prospective park had reverted, in the inevitable course of Nature, to a bedraggled farm. The other practical Hotckisses had foreclosed, and the latest Hotchkiss, crawling out like a spider from som.e web where he was biding his time, had taken possession, and was now making it pay the taxes and keep him. An atmosphere of van- ished hopes mingled with its wild spilth. Great big colonial rooms, weedy porches, rotted and twisted by wistaria that had screwed itself into all the chinks and made them gap. A grandmother in one end of it, close to the summer kitchen, and the big oven that had been closed up for years, but had smoke stains still around its mouth, telling how it had once flamed and roared. The 52 HAYING TIME well stood close to the door with a gourd for a dipper, and some tall grasses leaned over the curb to look at themselves in the cool mirror. Griselle conducted me from room to room as an ancient guide might do. She opened an old par- lor, threw back the shutters, letting in a yellow gleam on the surprised matting. She even played " I Would Not Live Always " on the old melo- deon, after lifting off several boxes of seed and a bunch of laurel that had evidently lain there since last Christmas. It was very magical. The antique squeak of that old bellows swept me back to other days. How could she know that there was any irony in her song, and that I would not have been there if it had not been for my unreasonable desire to live always ? The tender, asthmatic pulse of the instrument made me feel like a Hawthorne, and my emotions bulged as if with " Mosses from an Old Manse." On another occasion I arrived there in haying time. Do you know what a dry spell in the woods means in early July? It is at that fecund hour that Nature comes into the full flush of life. Her atoms seem to break into animate existence, and you stand in a vortex of flying dust that takes on the first stir of vitality. The days are heavy with the weight of creation, and the tide of life croons in your ears as you sit and fan yourself helplessly. The hours are parched, and vegeta- tion languishes with its burden of insects. But it was haying time, and Gabe Hotchkiss gave me to understand that all the affairs connected 53 A JOURNEY TO NATURE with man's destiny were suspended until the hay was in. He had no time to go to the village, and my letters had to wait. When he explained to me that he had twenty acres of timothy stand- ing and couldn't get any help to "throw it down," I asked him in a moment of reckless bravado why he did not hire me to help him. " What do you pay anyway ? " " Dollern half a day. Did you ever cut grass ? " I thought a moment. I could not remember that I ever did. In fact, I could not remember that I had ever cut anything but a few coupons and some disagreeable friends, neither of which operations requires a machine. I told him I thought that any smart man could manage to get through a day of it on a pinch, now that it had been reduced to mechanism. " You might work the raker," he said doubt- fully. "That would save Griselle. She wants to do up her cherries." I can safely and graciously write about haying time now from my far outlook. These things get some kind of aura from the distance (you can put that quotation about the loan of enchantment to the view in here, if you know who said it — I don't). I'm afraid that the felicities of agricul- ture are like those problem plays we read about, and acquire beauty according to the square of the distance. Perhaps my heroism was very much like that of the bridge-jumper, but I really thought at the time that the feat of manual labour and the earning of a " dollern a half" would ele- 54 HAYING TIME vate me in my own estimation, and possibly in the estimation of the practical young woman who came over to get our breakfasts. Every man of sedentary elegance likes to kick through his po- lite shackles at times, and show that his arms are not utterly devoid of pith, and that he is not such a "goldarned galoot'* as the sententious judgment of the yeoman declares him to be. At all events, I learned some things which possibly gave my after-thoughts a gentler and less selfish colour when I got back among my fel- lows. First, I found out that there isn't any delicious odour of new-mown hay in the haying operation, or at least, if there is, you do not notice it. There are too many other things to attend to. In the second place, the Arcadian delights of it are only apparent to the on-lookers, and, if there is any satisfaction to the workers themselves, it depends a great deal on whether hay is worth twelve dollars a ton, and who owns it. There are no iced drinks between swathes. There is no shady side to it, and in haying time the thermometer usually stands among the 90's. But I must acknowledge that Gabe Hotchkiss never heard of a man being sunstruck in a hay- field, and Gabe's going on sixty-two, coming next apple time, and doesn't lie for a cent. Such ideas as I may have possessed prior to this experi- ence were vaguely ideal and Watteauish. Hay- ing time, to me, was a sort of rural festival, with village maidens in short dresses and ribbons and high heel shoes, the heels generally painted red, 55 A JOURNEY TO NATURE clustered in pretty tableaux, like Dryads on the top of a heavily loaded wain, with their rakes on their shoulders. I think if you had asked me at any time in Wall Street what was the special feature of haying, I would have answered, " Why, the nooning, of course, under the hedge tree, where the lusty farmers drink their switchel out of a jug, and ' chomp ' their home-made bread and home-cured ham in voracious innocence, while the kindly animals look on with idyllic composure." That such a picture is not in strict accordance with the facts, I have now to state very solemnly. Beside a twenty acres' hay-field of ripe timothy, the Staked Plains have many advantages to the luxuriant observer. But I am bound in honesty to declare, from actual experience, that the work in such a field has certain subtle compensations. It does not drain the vital economy of a man like a fifteen minutes' walk on lower Broadway in the middle of the day. In fact, I have known stalwart girls in New York who exhausted more fibre in one evening doing nothing, than they possibly could have lost had they driven that raker all day and earned their porridge with the sweat of their marble brows. Cne other thing I learned, and it was that in a hay-field all conformities and considerations of rules of life vanish. The one thing to do is to get the hay in before it gets wet. Dinner-hour, breathing-time, and all the amenities of life are suspended till the job is done. No one is think- 56 HAYING TIME ing of how he looks, or what the criticism will be, or what impression he is making on the observer. He is simply taking the straight line between two points, and the points are the field and the barn. Gabe had two teams in the field so that he could cut and rake simultaneously, for his timothy was very dry, and he did not intend to get more of it " thrown " than he could manage, and I noticed that he kept his eye on the west as though he expected a shower. About two o^clock I began to pray for it. My back ached, and my hands were blistered. But Griselle had come into the field with her chip hat, bringing a dis- tinctly Watteau flavour at last, and I was not going to give way under her eye. She looked at me with wonder, I thought, and presently had a pitch-fork in her hand. By and by, when a bank of dun clouds began to roll up in the west, I rejoiced in my heart. It really looked like an atmospheric rescue. We had cut about four acres, and now it would be a race to get it in. I distinctly remember that some kind of noble enthusiasm was caught from Gabe, in this conflict with Nature, of an entirely diflFerent quality from that zest with which one enters into a conflict with his fellow-man. I forgot all about my hands and my back in my sympathic anxiety to see Gabe beat that rain-storm, and I felt like giving a shout as the last forkful went up into his hay- loft and a peal of congratulatory thunder broke over us that startled the horses. How it did rain ! It pounded. The water 57 A JOURNEY TO NATURE came down in sheets mixed with hail. Little rivers broke loose all around. The gutters spouted and the roof reverberated. Everything seemed to hold its mouth wide open, and Gabe stood there in the corner of the barn enjoying the almost savage copiousness of it. A Biblical line came into my mind — Biblical phrases always do pop up to exactly fit an emotion. " The wdld asses drink their fill." I never before appreciated the strength of that line. There we were, men and horses, huddled in the barn, actually bom- barded with refreshment. But presently it cleared up. A great fresco of sunset flamed in the west, and we all climbed into the wagon and were rattled back to the " Folly " under wet trees, every one of which tried to imitate the shower in its own way and shook its drops down on us as we passed. But we were very jolly as we jolted. The consciousness of a victorious accomplishment made us boisterously kin ; and when we got to the house, Griselle had a magnificent supper await- ing us of hot slapjacks and cold pork and beans and fried chicken, a banquet entirely unfit for gods, it was so bounteously human. After- ward Gabe jolted Charlie and me to our hut and dumped us on the wire grass pretty well fagged. When we were alone we sat and looked at each other rather foolishly, and Charlie re- marked, " 1 thought you said we came up here to play." "Yes, we did, Comrade," I rephed, feeling after an appropriate didacticism, " but a little hard 58 HAYING TIME work now and then is relished by the wisest men. I wished to set you a good example, my boy. Look at my hands." But you cannot deceive a boy with that kind of hypocrisy. He looked at me straight, and said, "Say, Dad, you're sleepy, ain't you?" The blessed vacuity of being tired on the right side was a novelty, and it was fraught with a dull kind of satisfaction that at last I had arrived at that condition in which, like the yellow dog, I could drop down at a moment's notice and forget obediently. When you are physically tired, you take a header into sleep with a recklessness that is juvenile, and the moment you let go everything. Nature sets to work to fix things up thoroughly and noiselessly, so that when you wake up the next morning there isn't anything to remember. You cannot do this when you are mentally tired. The mind runs on with its artificial momentum in spite of sleep. I could not even hear the clack of that reaper, and how often the tick of the tele- graph had danced through my head the livelong night. And this is the whole lesson — that recupera- tion means getting away from yourself. I remem- ber reading in Montaigne long ago that a man may travel the world over like a fugitive without escaping from himself Now I found out that a man cannot do an honest day's work at haying without leaving a good deal of himself behind. It occurs to me now that it happened to be cherry year that July, and cherry year does not 59 A JOURNEY TO NATURE come everv ns-elvemcn:h. Cr.erry year occurs about once in a decade. Tnen rriis truit asserts itself along the roadside with reckless prodigality. Then the old trees remember the opulence of other davs, and the children climb up into them and reioice. All the neighbours mark time with enormous cherry puddings and "slump." Have vou ever been present at "" slump " ? No : ^^ hat a lot vou have missei. There is a rotund and reckless profusion to " slump " when it is turned out of the pot upon a big dish and comes on steaming like a mountain of ambrosia that would captivate vour soul, narrowed as it is by pett\' courses and relavs of side dishes. Then it is that the women stand over the hot stove and gossip about the price of sugar, sr.i try in vain to screw the lids off their glass jars. But after all, it is a shame :o cook the jolly, carnal chern. He should be eaten alive, for he is a gentle, meaty reminder of our primal carmvo- rous days, and we fondly call him an oxheart, as if with a fleshlv remembrance. 6c CHAPTER V DUMB INTIMACIES ABOUT ^ve minutes' walk from our cabin was the Cluny Milldam, a very ragged and weedy barrier across a little river, which it had broadened into about an acre of sweet water ten feet deep at the spillway, and shallowmg off to a thin pond at the upper end that died out into a bit of wet meadow. The banks for the greater part of the way were green and lush, and willows and dogwood screened them nicely. Such little artificial lakes are common enough all over our country. They are never kept in repair, but are suffered to grow rank and picturesque and always have an old mill, long deserted, at one end of the dam. From time immemorial they have been the treasured trysting-places of the boys. To this pond Charlie and I came on the hot evenings and struck up an entirely new friendship with the water. The basin was not full enough to run over the lip of the dam, but 6i A JOURNEY TO NATURE the water forced its way through many chinks sportively, in cool jets, and ran glistening down the old logs and beams into a pretty sandy pool below, where it boiled and raced in solitude, and then went singing down the valley through the marsh grasses. On those torrid nights we came stealthily with the yellow dog through the jun- gle, let ourselves down the bank, and, after de- nuding, sprawled and splashed in the pool until the shadows wrapped us in their soft garments, and the stars came out and laughed at us. There was undoubtedly some kind of unsus- pected magic in the place, now that I think of it. The old dam was like an orchestra of oboes and flutes, to which the little raceway added a chorus of its own, and somehow the element itself had the air and the ins^enuousness of youth not yet grown lusty and rank and boisterous. All we had to do was to accept its limpid invitation, and it covered us with cool kisses in which there was a breath of mint and calamus. To catch water in its pudicitv, before it has grown salacious and turbulent and put on the hoary airs of the ocean, is a rare delight. It is like establishing an under- standing with a dog or going down into the nursery to rest your soul with a bit of ''' who's got the button ? '* If you have only known water at the seashore, in its acrid puissance, when it is like a trade union and glories in its whelm- ing mulritudinousness, vou can have no idea of its tender intimacies when you catch it in the nursery of its career. # 62 DUMB INTIMACIES Such acquaintance as we struck up with the sweet water was really a private and confidential understanding. We did not insult it v/ith any social functions or have any other critics on the bank than the muskrats and mud-turtles that looked at us through the branches. We stripped ourselves dov/n to an instant comradeship. Everywhere else in the world we should have put on precautionary " duds," which seems to me now very much like putting on a mask when you are about to say your prayers. No one knows how abominable it is to be rolled up in wet rags except those fellows who have walked in pur is naturalibus into some of the private grottoes of Nature where there is no immodesty and no fear. How the flesh exults when it feels the contact of the element. How astonishingly white one looks against the dusks and shadows. What a new sense of benignity to lie down in the pellucid drift and measure its going by the caresses it flings on its way. What douche was comparable to those cascades that went down our backs as we sat under that old dam ? Those persons who use water only to wash themselves with degrade it, and it generally becomes a very serious servant to them. To Charlie and me it had no duty to perform but to frohc, and we heard it calling to us in soft tones long before we reached the dam. This new relationship of man to Things was what I meant when I said it was a kind of natural faith, but it is Brahminical rather than Christian. 63 A JOURNEY TO NATURE Browning wrote volumes to express it, and when he got through, he had simply said: "All's well in the world." But that is saying a great deal, isn't it? I am reminded just here that the late Dr. James Martineau, after writing two monu- mental volumes of splendid metaphysics to es- tablish the reasonableness and the beauty of the Nature of Things, put down this remarkable acknowledgment in his preface: "I am now aware of the tediousness of these metaphysical tribunals, especially when the whole process wins at last, through all its dizzying circuits, only the very position which common sense had assumed at first." For the sensitive city man or woman, it would be hard to find a more forbidding place than a dark pool at night, shut in by thickets. He or she brings to it some such fantastic horror as Poe has furnished. It is a " ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir,'* just as soon as the sun leaves it. It swarms with obscene things and dangerous. Its water pockets are pitfalls, and in its recesses lurk enemies that writhe if you touch them. But all this disappears on acquaintance. Man for the most part breeds these monsters in himself. It is true such a place is haunted by all manner of strange forms, but a man finds out sooner or later that one and all of them are held to a noblesse oblige that they never violate. Some kind of statute ordains that they shall quietly and politelv give way to man, and even the tenacious snapping-turtle that comes up from the mud of 64 DUMB INTIMACIES the pond observes us with a Chinese decorum, and sits stoHdly by or goes his way. We learned by insensible degrees that nothing interfered with us so long as we were amicably inclined. Even that exceptionally mischievous imp, Sir Stomoxys Calcitrans, the incisive horse-fly, that later in the season will bite through a dress-coat or Parisian stays, goes to roost at sundown, and as for the mosquitoes which every milldam spawns, I learned soon enough that we could never coax them out of their coverts into a current of air. Perhaps you think that these things are not worth learning, and are quite beneath the notice of a Wall Street manV As for that, they are not worth spending time and thought upon if you have something better to do, but the beauty of it is they do not exact any time or thought. They merely accompany you as you frolic. They are like the water. You must not make their acquaintance with a reporter's Inquisitiveness, but like a fellow craftsman who receives the pass- word and keeps it to himself I recall my experience lying on my back on a deep pool of those waters, looking up at the stars — and then looking down at them, until I seemed to be suspended in the limitless ether and could feel the soft tide of the great spaces. Then Gretry's words came to my mind : " God shuts off this world once every twenty-four hours so that we can see the universes." It was impossi- ble to have these experiences without feeling that the dull strifes of man's existence slunk back- 65 A JOURNEY TO NATURE ward a little, and that one had touched upon some kind of deep-lying assurance, for it is at such moments of implicit abandonment that one can hear the soft swing of the planets themselves. Often when Charlie and I came home through the cool woods, I would look at him and then, like Dr. Martineau, feel that the course of my dizzying speculations brought me out where the boy started. I may as well say that my conviction as a cas- ual observer of Nature — and, alas, I have been too busy to be anything more — my conviction is that you must seek her confidences when she is not in one of her exhibition moods. Like woman herself, she is only communicative when her passions and pageants are over, and then it is that she will put her cool hand in yours and let you see her gray spirits and white lisping through her bare ruined choirs. Then it is she speaks in sibylline undertones. She is a little hushed by the stars. The conventional man only knows her in her exhibition spells. He remembers her full-dress sunsets and her decora- tive autumns. He revels in her blazonry of sun- shine, but he never dared enter her cloisters and catch her in dishabille. I think the medicinal touch of the sweet waters often remained with us in our dreams. We could hear the Mother crooning while we slept, and that cool lullaby was very apt to have a minty breath. But better than all was the sense of immunity that was built into me, and that is, 66 DUMB INTIMACIES I think, a very curious and a very precious thing. We come into life bugaboo-haunted. Our infan- tile souls reverberate the fears of our ancestors and shudder at the dark. But always there is at the bottom of our consciousness an unexercised mastership of soul that breaks loose often in dreams and carries us defiantly against our envi- ronment. We walk in fiery furnaces and are not consumed. We wander on fields of eternal ice and are not cold ; we lie down with the kine in the chilly spring rains and feel them not ; we float in the ether without propulsion. To be able in the slightest degree to approximate these experiences in our v^^aking hours ; to look serenely on the grinding wheels of creation without a throb ; to know that all the grades of existence beneath us have been our playground, and are coming up our way, makes the ghost stories disappear one by one. That Nature rightly viewed and obedi- ently wooed has this intimation of immortality and immunity in her was Wordsworth's creed. Nature, when listened to rightly, always seems to me to be saying exactly what my old tutor used to say to me : "But why be so impatient? You have an eternity before you and an eternity behind you. I put it down as the best outcome of my small philosophy, gained in a long vacation, that it is a good education for a man to stop wrestling with Thoughts and get acquainted with Things. Of course, we cannot all be philosophers or even savants. We must go back into the thick of the 67 A JOURNEY TO NATURE fight. But it is a very good plan at times to stop overcoming and obey; to lie down and listen. That there are sermons in stones and tongues in trees, we have the best of authority for believing, but the Shaksperian sense of it is not the recu- perative and obedient sense, for Shakspere im- puted a great deal to Things with the authority of a poet, and, like Orlando, tacked himself up on the trunks to their infinite embellishment. To me it is the absence of books in running brooks that delights. One gets past somebody's impression of the thing to the thing itself, and, after all, that is a fraternal realism that is not to be explicated. Whatever the secret of the thing is, it is yours when vou cease to question it. How often since, in the fever and disappoint- ments of life, when ingratitude or envy or insin- cerity hurt me, I have thought of that old Cluny Milldam, and pictured myself once more lying on my back between the illimitable depths above and below, that were glittering with stars, and Charlie somewhere near, adding his childish voice to the waters. I suppose w^e are all prodigals at our best, onlv it is hardlv correct to say that we are returning to the Mother, for we never quite got awav from her. But I think that most of us who look backward over our winding paths, at all the palaces we built and deserted, will find that they had no such outlooks as the open doors and ample windows of the cabins and rude blossomy bowers we erected during our first pilgrimage; and I fancy that many a man who is tired of his 68 DUMB INTIMACIES Alhambra lingers with an immortal childishness over his vagabondage, even when, as Eleanor Sweetman puts it : — Sorrow has built a palace in his soul With windows opening on eternity.' 69 r—-r CHAPTER VI A summer's pippin GABE HOTCHKISS was a forehanded vet- eran who had developed along " the cool sequestered vale of life " until it was hard to distinguish him from the materials he had worked with. He wore the aspect of a sinewy old trunk, gray and gnarled, whose roots in the ground have outspread the branches in the air. I was afraid his thrift was earthy. I could not quite make out if that stoop in his shoulders was humility or gravitation. His hair grew bushy and gray all over his head and down his jaws to a sort of mossy stalactite on his chin (I was get- ting bald at forty-four). He never was sick a day in his life after he teethed, barring three days that he was laid up that year of the Chicago fire by Squire Losee's bull that hooked him under the rib and threw him over a stone fence. ^ He had risen and set as regularly as the sun for sixty- five years, and there was no physical intimation 70 A SUMMER'S PIPPIN that he would not continue to rise and set for sixty-five more. He was as punctual as the gas- collector, or the seventeen-year locust, and he could cut and pile a cord of wood without stopping to take heed or take breath, and then walk to town for his supplies when he wanted to save his horses. Is this the standard that Nature sets up for us in her ideal man .? Gabe had fibre, but no temperament. There was a stolid independence in his unassertive air that was quietly masterful. He had put away a thousand dollars a year for ten years " outen his hay," and Heaven only knows what he had before that. Panics might come, banks might break. He would read of them, in his weekly family paper, and smile with the air of a man who has got past most earthly contingencies. The old tortoise, he made me feel like the agile hare in the fabulous race. His lack of temperament and his static health aggravated me unreasonably. A man ought to decay obediently as well as develop obediently. There is something repulsive in an old man who preserves nothing but his physical vigour. It is not even an animal, only a vegetable virtue, and reminds one of the hair that grows through the chinks of a coffin after a man is dead. The Doc- tor has amiably corroborated me, and says that a man ought to begin to die gracefully at fifty. He can prolong the job as long as possible, but he should not neglect it. By giving up the ghost gradually he will avoid a disagreeable convulsive fight and not be called to give it up all at once. 7^ A JOURNEY TO NATURE I do not know that excessive health destroys temperament, but Gabe had not as much as a tree. A tree is at least sensitive and transmutes carbon and silex into something a little more sympathetic than gas and atoms. There was a young poplar visible from the door of our hut that had many indications of juvenile vivacity and responsive delicacy. I have watched it dancing and whisper- ing in delight and turning up the white palms of its myriad leaves when there was not air enough to move the flame with which I was lighting my corn-cob pipe, and all the oaks and chestnuts stood wrapped in petrified disdain, utterly una- ware that anything was passing. While I am writing this there comes back to me like a fruity odour, the remembrance of an apple tree that stood overshadowing the back porch of my father's house. It was a gnarled and stunted affair, but oh, what summer apples it bore when it was in the mood. And that's the point — it had its moods, that no almanac or hor- ticulturist could get the hang of I have never tasted such apples since — Httle red-streaked affairs that burst into wine at the very sight of your teeth, and bent the boughs low down with their largesse. When the family of us grew up and went our ways, we often wrote home from different points of the compass for a basket of the July apples, but although the "old man" rolled them up in paper and packed them in cool corn leaves, they always perished before we got them, for they captivated with their odour every 72 A SUMMER\S PIPPIN insect they met on their journey, and he bored through all wrappages to get at them. Those apples had to be eaten the moment they were plucked. They resented anything like delay. They were so evanescent that when the mater put a dishful of them on the hall table, it was for the fleeting odour, and she warned us children not to touch them because they were spoiling. That tree stood awkwardly in the roadway and was more or less of an obstruction. It was scarred by the hubs of passing vehicles, but " the old man " could never find it in his heart to cut it down. It was the most wayward, capricious fruit tree I ever saw. It had spells when it pouted in unblossomy poverty. But there were other spells when the fulness and the overflow of Nature laid hold of it. Then, like a beautiful wanton, it made love to the children, the birds, and the bees alike. No sooner had the robins arrived than it began to array itself like a bride in odorous tulle and became one great cloud of blossoms. It banked the road up with a kind of fairy snow and kept the brooms flying on the porch with a teasing mischievousness. All the birds came and flirted with it, even the wrens forgetting their gamin habits and accepting it as a communal music-stand. Thus it bore witness to us in our thoughtless youth of the fleeting character of all exquisite things. I never could quite divest myself of the fancy that John Burroughs and Thoreau had at some time sat under that tree and munched, for did I not long afterward detect 73 A JOURNEY TO NATURE in their sentences something of the same juicy aroma of that elfin fruit ? But to return to Gabe^ I found in him a grate- ful mental relaxation. His animal equanimity had a soothing effect like the liberty of empty rooms after a route You felt that he was not one of those fellows who have a stock of words on hand and are continually looking for an oppor- tunity to which they can fit them. His mind, or whatever it was that occupied the place of that esse^ always took the straight line between a thing and a word. He would no more be original or smart than he would be liberal or imaginative. His companionship was therefore a kind of mental water-cure. I could sit and watch him saw wood for an hour, and our conversation would, as Henry James somewhere put it, " be rufiied delightfully by the passing airs of the unsaid." I remarked to him while thus employed, "This will be a bad season for potatoes, Gabe." He stopped a moment, expectorated, and then came at it as the crow flies, " Gosh to hemlock, that's so," and then the wood-sawing went on. I noticed that irony and repartee took on, in Gabe's presence, a curious analogy to water on a duck's back, and you cannot imagine how deplet- ing and soothing all this is to get where every- thing is trite and simple, and has been said a thousand times before, and is none the less valu- able on that account. It has occurred to me that as heaven is always regarded as a place of rest, perhaps it may be a place where everybody gives 74 A SUMMER'S PIPPIN oyer trying to be "smart." Isn't there some kind of intimation of this in the communications that are said to come from the other side ? But there was Gabe's niece, such a graceful saphng coming up from the roots of this old stump. Very pretty the girl was, with health and vigour and a lot of fine qualities that were looking out of her face and wondering what they were made for. As the weeks rolled on, I grew to admire her very loyally, as a well-disciplined mas- culine sense should, and I felt also very grateful to her. It was really as if some one had come every day and hung a Fortuny in our hut, just for fun, as the children say„ Her unconscious animal grace, so wholly Independent of any arti- ficial aid, was not unlike a simple melody. These unsophisticated, long-limbed Hebes of the field have a priority of command which we never ques- tion, and I think it oftenest expresses itself in motion. Griselle swished about in the little kitchen, making grace audible, and to the acute ear it had a finer nuayice than that purely textile swish that is purchasable in society by the yard. I noticed her running on the wire grass, and she had an unsuspected regnant swagger that is in the bones, not in the mind. She did not walk — she bounded. Her animal economy exulted and gave her head a fine toss. She seemed to be making billows of emotion and crossing them without ever knowing it. One morning she came over and caught me unawares, bellowing a matinee hyrnn out of sheer thankful exuberance, because IS A JOURNEY TO NATURE I was alive. I must have blushed a little, and said apologetically and religiously, " I was prais- ing God while I was at my best." " That's easy,'' she replied, " you can't help it. It's a good deal more of a job to praise Him at your worst," and then she blushed as if she had unwittingly come down to my level of saying things and swished off to the kitchen, actually going through that narrow door, I thought, as if it were a circus hoop. I find a " mem." in my note-book which must have been made about that time. It reads like this, " When one finds a woman as God made her and not as man refashioned her, is she not apt to be a handmaiden ? " I believe some vague chivalrous notion crept into my mind of rescuing her. There was no programme about it. I only said to myself, it is a great shame to have those infinite possibili- ties grow up gnarled and sinewy. It makes one feel like putting on armour and hunting round for a lance, to see them peeping out of castle windows into a world unrealized. Charlie did not take my view of Griselle. A child naturally lacks aesthetic appreciation. In a moment of confidence I ventured to remark to him that I was glad he admired the young woman, for I considered her a very estimable person, and he informed me that he had con- structed a rather contemptuous opinion of her. In the first place she couldn't climb a tree, and then she did not see any fun in making mud 76 A SUMMER'S PIPPIN damSj and utterly failed to understand the yellow dog's best qualities. Altogether, it was consider- able of a problem with him what girls were made for anyway, and you can readily understand that it was too esoteric a job for me to tell him. It must have been about this time that the following note was written down in my log-book in the woods : — " Last night a pretty little black messenger flew out of the night into the room. He was vociferously urgent and woke me up. As I lay on my back in the dim light, trying to make out if he were a bat of reality or an incubus of sleep, he clung to the mosquito-nettings, head down, and twittered ominously and plaintively, and made frightened excursions about the room, knocking the breath out of his body against the wall, always to come back to my canopy with an alarum. What his message was I could not make out, but I tried to reason with him, one leg on the wakeful shore, and one on the dream- ful sea. I told him that even things from the Night's Plutonian Shore need not be so noisy and hysterical, and if he had delivered his mes- sage, he could go away again and leave me to sleep on it. There was the open window, with two or three late stars low down, looking in; why not go out like a reasonable herald before I got the broom ? " But the fact is, mysterious messengers from the shoreless darks are about the stupidest of winged omens. As soon as I understood that 11 A JOURNEY TO NATURE the stranger had flapped in at the open window where the netting was torn and was making all this disturbance because he did not know enough to flap out again, I got up and tried to assist him. He fought me bill and claw and knocked down the photograph that was tacked over the table. Getting tired of it, I went back to bed. When I woke up in the morning, there he sat on the sill against the lower half of the closed sash, rather weak and dishevelled from overexertion, and looking reproachfully at me as if I had been the cause of it all ; whereupon I made up my mind it was a female bird, and having caught it, I brought it to the open sash to let it sail away, for which act of mercy it nipped me viciously in the thumb." As I was looking after it, I saw Griselle com- ing over the hill like — well, like a stave of Mil- ton's L' Allegro reciting itself But when Charlie got up, the first thing he said was, "Why, somebody's knocked down mother's picture." 78 CHAPTER VII LISTEN TO THE MOCKING-BIRD ABOUT the 1st of August the delicate ear, no less than the clear sight, can detect the wane of summer. It is no use trying to comfort yourself with the calendar, there is a still small voice in the atmosphere. There will be sultry days and close nights and volleying showers, but, in spite of all, there is a growing restfulness, as if the zest of it were over and the lusty hours had grown mature. The first intimation will come from the cricket that ticks the transitions of the heyday in the grass, and presently the preliminary creak of the cicada will remind you that the com- ing six weeks lead up to the frost. August, in spite of all her furbelows, loses some of the romp of June and July. She is like a young matron whose beauty is shadowed with the coming sheaves. The corn stands tasselled in dark green platoons. When the wind throws up the long blades, they are like the gonfalons of 79 A JOURNEY TO NATURE the coming fall. If you rub the tassels in your palms, they will hint to you of Bourbon and leave a dehcate flavour of sea-coal fires with jolly fel- lows taking off their furs to make a night of it. The showers will die off in slanting rains. How diflFerent from the thunderous gallopades of July, with July's quick-firing guns and riotous trans- formations of golden sunshine and dissolute sun- sets of roses and wine. The drop of the summer apples has already a melancholy thud, like the fall of a curtain, and the south winds are queru- lous at the slightest provocation, and wheeze if there is a cranny or a rusty weathercock. If you look closely, you will see some premonitory yellow leaves already on the maples. The sumach is beginning to bleed, and the sides of the tomatoes toward the sun gleam through the rank vines with the late fires of the garden already kindled. I was lying in the grass, attending strictly to my regimen of rest and listening to the little hurdygurdy of the cricket, when I heard on the still air the far-away throb of a brass band. I put my ear down close. There was no mistaking it — I felt the rhythmical beat of the drum and caught the attenuated blare of the cornet. They were playing " Listen to the Mocking-bird.** I wondered that that old stuffed melody could hop out of its glass case and travel down the still air so many miles in that lively style. There was a wandering circus at Spelldown, and the band was playing the people into a matinee. I was like a Prohibitionist who is eating mince 80 LISTEN TO THE MOCKING-BIRD pie with brandy in it. I felt the pristine stir in me and could smell the tan-bark ring. I was rather proud of this childish impulse. I coaxed myself to believe that I could hear the dear old clown with the whitened face say, " Here we are again," and wake the elemental soul with that old Eleusinian mystery, " What makes more noise than a pig under a gate ? " This is coming back to the very porridge of our first lunch of humour. To know just how good brandy is in mince pie, one must be a Prohibitionist. I suppose the zest of anything depends on the deprivation, if not on the prohibition. I remember that a great trav- eller once said to me, that the much-vaunted cata- ract of the Ganges was a poverty-struck puddle, but that in a country where there was no water, a puddle looked like an inundation. " ' Listen to the Mocking-bird,' " I said to my- self, as I leaned up against a tree and braced my- self to watch the clouds roll by, a task which I have reduced to perfection. These sweetish run- agate tunes come waltzing down our recollections, heavy with the dew of idle associations. Could there anywhere be such a fresh innocent sensation as to take Charlie and Griselle to the circus and fill my unselfish nature up with their delight ! " Gosh to hemlock," I exclaimed, with my new provincial ardour, " it is engendered. Griselle will come out with an extra crisp muslin and a new ribbon, and, maybe, put on her high-heeled shoes, and rub bergamot in that furzy hair of hers. All the yokels of Spelldown will wonder who I am in A JOURNEY TO NATURE a negligee shirt and baseball shoes ; and every time Griselle laughs and claps her hands I will smell the spring lilacs again." Now, this was going back to first principles. Talk about renevv'ing one's youth, — it would be renewing one's infancy. It isn't often that a man of forty gets the opportunity to play at Paul and Virginia and have the robins come and cover him up so that he will not recognize his own sentimentalism. To be a real, honest, rural swain for a while and have a maid hang innocently on your arm — gosh to hemlock — what would there be left for the pellucid emotions but to buy an accordion and learn to play " I Would Not Live Always " and " Listen to the Mocking- bird " on it? These pipings of Arcady come to a man when his turtle-dove is a mocking-bird, and he has acquired the art of leaning up against a tree properly, and watching the season go by, instead of the afternoon belles under the club window. Charlie and I might even try to crawl under the canvas if the pristine impulse did not give out; at all events, we could eat gingerbread on the same plane of enjoyment. Presently Charlie and Griselle made their ap- pearance. " Did you hear the circus band ? " I asked. "The show stays over to-morrow." "And we ought to take Griselle," exclaimed the instinctive CharHe, beginning to^ clap his hands and jump up and down in a kind of St. Vitus's dance. " We ? " I inquired, with a mock parental 82 LISTEN TO THE MOCKING-BIRD gravity, trying to veil my own exuberance. " We, Comrade ? " " Yes," said Comrade, " but we can't. She's going on a picnic, and I've got to go with her." I intimated that picnics could wait — circuses never did. But it seems that the picnics of Spelldown are arranged with consummate tact to offset the circus. There are tv/o churches in the town — the Methodist and the Dutch Reformed. They wait till the advance agent of the show bills the town and the cross-roads, then they sound their clarion call to the two Sunday-schools to get ready to take to the woods. The Methodists huddle the children all out on one day and give them ice- cream enough to lay them up for the next day, and then the Dutch Reformed drive out the other battahon. In consequence of this ingenious ar- rangement, it is doubtful if any of the well-bred children of Spelldown ever listened to the mock- ing-bird. " So you have invited Charlie to your picnic ? " " I thought," replied Griselle, evasively, " that he would like to go with all the other children." " I dare say." " But he said he would have to speak to you about it." " What he meant was that it would be a good idea to invite me too. But don't you think it would be pleasanter if you accepted my invitation, and we all went to the circus ? " She declined promptly. There were reasons 83 Id be the A JOURNEY TO NATURE that she kept out of her words, but they got into that little toss of her head, and she looked quite Florentine as she stood in the doorway with her dress lifted ready for flight. Sometimes I thought Rossetti could have written hen He never could have painted her, she wouldn't stand still long enough. Evidently circuses did not lure her, and she had promised the Rev. Mr. Hanks or Janks or somebody to take care of a contingent of " young ones " and keep them away from the circus. Come to think it all over, she was right, and I told her so. A clean-minded little fellow like Charlie, starting out to avoid my pitfalls, wouh better off with her at a picnic, eating some of jelly-cake that everybody was sure to bring, than at the circus, getting his clothes all stained with pink lemonade. " Perhaps," suggested Griselle, " you'd be better off yourself" I acknowledged to her that I had a real curiosity to see a country picnic. I could not for the life of me understand the raiso7t d'etre of it. Why men and women who lived in the country all the year round and were pretty well saturated with it should suddenly take it into their heads to enjoy it by the card, was beyond me. It really looked to me as though Farmer Jones, when he wanted to express his mad exu- berance, went over and ate his dinner on Farmer Smith's field. I could understand folk in the city going slumming and getting up vivisection clubs, and when thoroughly blase taking nitrous oxide 84 LISTEN TO THE MOCKING-BIRD gas and having their teeth out. These things are at least departures, but to eat the same jelly-cake and hard-boiled eggs in a different field seems to me to lack what the critics caU motif. Of course nobody can tell till he tries it just how superior as a moral discipline a ])icnic is to a circus ; and a country picnic, I said, is about the only thing I haven't tried. She looked at me, I thought, with just a flicker of commiseration, as if a man who had tried every- thing could hardly be worth so much curiosity as she felt. I answered her look. " Perhaps it isn't quite as bad as that. But I have had a foolish desire to see all there is in life, and like the man in the play, I looked into Vesuvius and there's nothing in it." " Not even ashes ? " "Well, yes — some ashes, but nothing else. It leaves an aching sense of goneness. You see, vv^e city folk fall into the habit of regarding life as a side-show, and if it doesn't keep up the pace, we get dissatisfied." " It must be dreadfully tiresome." "Oh, everybody does his best to get just as tired as he can. Do you know, I thought I'd come up here for a change, where nothing goes by but the seasons, and they seem to kiss their hands to you and say they will come again. There is no such promise in the side-show. The same spring bonnets never come back. The same play-bill is never seen twice. Nobody 85 A JOURNEY TO NATURE says an revoir. It's hurrah, boys, and good-by. Now you have the same picnic every year, do you not, and the same jelly-cake ? " Griselle had a delicious, spontaneous laugh. I know a soubrette who would give a hundred dollars a link for it. "Some day," I said, "I should Hke to have Gabe bring you to the city when I am there, and I'll show you the kind of picnics we have. I'll take you to Coney Island. You never were in the city, were you ? " " Oh, yes. When I was studying music, Cousin Ed Yerkes took me with his sister to hear the music in ' The Old Homestead.' " " Music in ' The Old Homestead ' ? " I said inquiringly. " What music r '* "Why, they sung 'The Old Oaken Bucket' in it beautifully." " So they did, so they did," I said pathetically, and stopped to wonder how a girl could leave the real oaken bucket at her door, and go a hundred miles to enjoy a property bucket. Still, this knowledge made me feel that she was human like myself " How you would enjoy the wooden milch cow and the painted dairy-maid from Mul- berry Street at Coney Island, after you had milked your real cows." Like all my kind, I felt a protective and pro- prietary interest in such innocence. I suppose Griselle intended that I should. The upshot of it was that Charlie and I toddled to her picnic, and I was her willing slave for one day. In try- 86 LISTEN TO THE MOCKING-BIRD ing to recall some of its bright specialties, I find that my recollection of it is much like the recol- lection of an orchestral performance, and you know that if the performance is a good one, you do not remember anything in particular. No one tries to make a diagram of a warm glow. Only a general sense of wagon-loads of farm babies in white, and boisterous lads and lassies with base- ball bats and croquet mallets, all exulting in out- doors as if they had never seen it before. It was very pleasant to see young life decant itself in this simple manner, making the fields effervesce and the thickets bubble. But in the recollection of it is a pervading gleam of Griselle in her leg- horn hat, keeping up a quiet authoritative bustle like the Lady of the Manor, directing, giving me whispered orders that were imperative, but very demure, making me fetch water, climb trees to fasten ropes up for swings, everybody else regard- ing me, I thought, with a slight awe. It gave me a great deal of quiet satisfaction to take my orders, especially when they were confidential, and tacitly to concede her right to direct me, though how she got the right, or when it was conferred, I'm blessed if I know. Altogether I entered into the spirit of the thing with a zest that surprised me, and when the sun was setting, we all bundled into our wagons and went off homeward, making the highway ring with our homely songs. But that night when Charlie and I were in bed, I asked him how he had enjoyed himself. 87 A JOURNEY TO NATURE " I think, Dad," he said, " that we would have had a good deal more fun if we had gone to the circus and left Griselle out of it. She's too smart." " Do you think so. Comrade ? " "Yes. She told me to go and play — that she'd take care of you." "Hark," I said, "there's the band. The show is over. They are playing ' Listen to the Mocking-bird.' " 88 CHAPTER VIII THE CONVALESCENCE OF A CRACKED HEART I HAVE tried to tell how I was frightened into my vacation by a physical warning, and by the Doctor who took it up and added to it. He called it the disease of civilization, and said the trouble was that it worked unseen at the centre, so that you never suspected its ravages until you collapsed suddenly. He held out a single plank of rescue, and I ran over it with amazing alacrity into the wild woods where I could escape from civilization for a year. Fortunately for me, my Doctor was a rational man, one of those rare doc- tors who do not weigh life in an apothecary's scales, or insist that you can cut every domain of it with a knife. He told me that my E string was a little weak (the Doctor plays the violin, or did in his younger days), and was screwed up too tight. " Of course," he said, " it is going to snap unless you let the rest of the instrument down to a lower key. In a word, you must get out of the orchestra." 89 A JOURNEY TO NATURE If there is anything that an apparently robust man of large appetites and energetic brain particu- larly dislikes, it is to snap. I suppose that he can contemplate fading away and dwindling out with complacency, but there is something dis- reputable in falling down dead at a moment of supreme exultation or of conceded triumph. One does not enjoy the prospect of being found dead in his bed, or being carried out of the opera feet first by the ushers, in one's dress-coat, with the boutonniere on one's breast looking so superflu- ous, and the wide-open eye so helpless. Man is here like a sick animal — he prefers to keep some unobserved place and take time to adjust his dying with some sense of relevancy. But what can a man do when the bell sounds ? Somewhere, suddenly, like a vivid flash, comes the summons out of a clear sky : " Here you are, now — presto, are you ready ? " He isn't ready, of course. I have read of men who were ready, but as a business man I never saw one who was. To get this dire summons in the middle, perhaps, of a smart remark, one-half of which must die out on blue lips, and know beforehand that admira- tion is to be petrified into pity, hurts a man's pride. It is curious, but we prefer death as a torturing jailer rather than as a highwayman with a club, who leaps at us out of unsuspected coverts. I am free to acknowledge that when I got my premonitory summons I took to my heels like a panic-stricken horse. Then, during the months of retirement, of which I have tried to tell, there 90 A CRACKED HEART came gusts of Gargantuan laughter from my lusty doctor. It was like June thunder, full of bellow- ing promise. But he graduated his medicinal mirth just as the season graduates its thunders. In June he muttered far down on the horizon. In July he pealed from the zenith. In August he exploded, for by that time he found that, weak as my heart might be, I had will-power enough to follow his directions to the letter. I had wiped out the world for the time being and come down to mush and milk and first principles. I knew very well that he did not believe that I was capa- ble of it. I had heard him say more than once that there was no escape for a man who drugged himself with society. One morning I received a letter from him, say- ing he was coming up to take a week's loafing in my cabin and examine my tongue. I jumped with a glad apprehension and considerable solici- tude. That old Lucullus coming here for a week. What would I do with him in this pov- erty-struck hut ? Where would I put his silk shirts and pajamas ? How pamper his capacious stomach ? How fill his enormous capacity for comradeship ? It was all very well for Charlie and me, who were roughing it for our health, and could sleep on a board and eat cold pork between sea-biscuit, and wash ourselves in the brook, but visitors — and a visitor who was an epicure, a connoisseur, and a social lion ! Oh, Ed tele- graph him and stop it, but before I could get a telegram down to Spelldown he arrived. I 91 A JOURNEY TO NATURE heard his vibrations on the road above the rattk of Gabe's wagon before I saw him. " We're in for it, Charlie," I cried. " Put away the jack- knives " (we had been making some chip yachts for a race at the milldam) ; " we've got to enter- tain company." When the portly form of the Doctor reached our door, and he sprang lightly enough out of Gabe's wagon, dressed in a loose outing-shirt, duck trousers, and hob-nailed shoes, his broad, handsome face beaming with good-nature, I for- gave him ; and when he lifted Charlie up in the air, held him at arm's length, and looked at his tanned and freckled face and sparkling eyes with unmistakable admiration, I cried : — " Nothing the matter with him. Doctor." He came at me with both hands, hit me a good fraternal whack in the breast with his fist, and shouted : " How's that cracked heart of yours : " Doctor," I said deprecatingly, " I can't ac- commodate you in this dugout. Heavens, you do not want to sleep on a shakedown and eat army rations. Better let Gabe drive you over to the ' Folly.' " " No, I thank you," he said. " I slept on the ground and ate army rations before you had your second teeth ; besides, when I have a patient that I am interested in, I never stop to consider what floor he is on. Take my coat and satchel. Charlie, you young rascal, bring me a camp-chair out here where it is cool, and a match. Now, 92 A CRACKED HEART then, what are you, Timon, Orlando, or Hamlet? How do you sleep ? Do you know ? '* " No. I have lost interest in the operation." " Good. Can you eat without a menu, and stop without tipping somebody ? Good. Does salt junk at certain ecstatic moments look to your purged vision like the staff of life ? Good. You can't spread the morning paper out beside your plate and cram your brain and your stomach at the same time ^ Good. You'll live to be eighty- five if you keep on." " Oh, you'd better tell me the plain truth at once. I can stand it." " Dreams ? " " Every day. Can't quite shut off the rubbish of hopes and ambitions." " Day be hanged. How about the night ? " " Oh, I don't know anything about the night. My system appears to have lost all interest in that." " Then you're all right. Night is the only im- portant part of a man's existence. It's the only time when he ought to stop kicking against the Eternal. If your nights are clean and empty, the unimportant days will take care of themselves. Man is such an infatuated suicide that Nature has to drug him once every twenty-four hours to keep him from destroying himself Great Scott, what a luxury it is to get rid of a coat once more ! Have you got another brier-wood pipe ^ Thank you. Say, old fellow/* he continued, as he took the match from Charlie and lit the pipe, " did it 93 A JOURNEY TO NATURE ever occur to you that man is an instrument, very nicely adjusted, but played upon so continuously by himself that he gets jangled ? When he takes his hand off at night, the Great Tuner steps in and fixes up the strings. What kind of tobacco do you call that ? '* I continued apologetic and tried to explain away my humble accommodations and prepare him for the monastic penance of being my guest. He only stripped off his necktie, unbuttoned his shirt, exposing his brawny and pilous neck. " Now, old chap, Em going to take my shoes off if you don't object. I want to get my feet into that cool grass." I understood very well what this luxury of looseness was. He walked up and down in the wire grass, smoking, a fine picture of dishevelled dignity. The grass was not very cool at that time of day, but the delight of believing that it was and the greater delight of freeing himself momentarily from the constrictions of conventional life was unmistakable. " You can never know," he afterward said to me, "how tired a doctor gets of his species. It isn't that he only sees the worst side of it, but he must contemplate the infatuated determination of his race to be invalids, and the cool assumption of the race that doctors are made only to relieve it of some of the consequences of its own folly. That is what makes a man of my temperament desire to get somewhere at times where there are others than his own species." 94 A CRACKED HEART " I should like to know/' I asked, " if you in- clude me in your species." " Well, hardly. You're a good deal of a curi- osity. The only patient I ever had who did what I told him. I was so incredulous that I had to come up here and see it with my own eyes. You deserve to live for ever." " There wasn't much merit in it. You scared me into it." He laughed. " You were smart enough to rouse my will- power," I said, " to a panicky point of renuncia- tion." "Will-power. There you go. I've heard about will-power till it makes me weary. The whole finite world has gone crazy on will-power. There is a new quackery in the market made to fit it, which prescribes will-power instead of mor- phine. Exert your God-given volition, it cries, and rise above physical evil. But not one of its quacks can add or subtract a heart-beat by will-power, or contract an involuntary muscle. Will-power is the sovereign slave-driver of the material world. It removes mountains ; but I'll be hanged for a mountebank if it can remove re- morse or set the jig for an overridden heart. Man will go on with his will-power till he has used up all the material forces of this globe, and then, if he cannot get to any other, he will die of ennui. I always say to a patient of mine : ' Don't give me any of that will-power nonsense, if you please. Just take your hand off the machine for a little 95 A JOURNEY TO NATURE while, and perhaps it will regulate itself. Did it ever occur to you that there might be some will- power in the universe lying around loose that wasn't yours?' If I can get a patient to stop self- focussing himself for a while, I feel quite certain that some kind of regulative energy will drift into him. Now, then, what time do you lunch ? " " Charlie," I said, " put on your apron and set out the hard-boiled eggs and crackers." The Doctor was an old campaigner, and one who has been, never quite gets over the habits of it. He had slept in the snow, rolled up in a blue overcoat, so he told me, when campaigning with Crook, and had eaten raw pork between hardtack for breakfast, when the pork had to be chopped with a hatchet, and, said he, " I remember those savage meals pleasantly, and have forgotten all the dinners that I ate at the Holland House and Del- monico's. After all, there's nothing so relative as our gustatory zest. In fact, all our appetites are conditional. A man enjoys a meal very much as he enjoys female society — it depends on the scarcity." " And the liberty," I said. " There is nothing so delightful as to be able to do as you please without fear of interruption." " Very fine for a change, old chap, but make no mistake, it will not do for a steady thing. I cannot imagine any condition of existence so hor- ribly full of ennui as absolute freedom would be. Fancy all obligations, all the dear old fetters, the very preservative weight of an atmosphere of duty, removed, and the monition of ' Thou shalt 96 A CRACKED HEART not * abrogated, and man, like a fatherless Ish- maelite, wandering about in the desert of his own desires.'* He called in the door to Charlie : " Don't forget the cold pork and molasses." Then he resumed his walk in the grass. " It will not do, old fellow," he said ; " we must have orbits, and gravitation to keep us in them, or there would be universal high jinks. If you don't mind, I'm going to take these suspenders off." " Look here. Doctor," I said, " if you will take off your philosophy with your other duds and come back to your proper business and tell me what you think of my condition, you will do me a favour. Perhaps I am cured and can go back with you. " You want to begin all over and get another warning." "Then I'm not cured." "You're convalescent — that's all. You must keep this jig up for one year. I do not propose to let up on my prescription, if you expect me to carry you through to a good old age. You see, I've got a good deal at stake in this matter. If I succeed in remaking you, I intend to start in on a new line of practice and open an office in the Yellowstone Park. You've been a pretty good boy so far. I did not believe you could do it. In fact, you're the first man I ever met who could give up female society entirely and take to the woods on sanitary principles, and you will make a shining example when you go back to Broadway and Wall Street." 97 A JOURNEY TO NATURE At that moment Charlie came to the door and shouted, " Say, Dad, where do you suppose Gri- selle keeps the pepper and salt?'' I remember that the Doctor, who looked very absurd in his bare feet, came over and stood in front of me, and said with as cavernous an intona- tion as he could command, " Who in thunder is Griselle ? " 98 'n # "'^^t CHAPTER IX THE LIGHT IN A DARK CELL I HAVE never been shut up in a dark cell, but I have talked with men who have been, and I can readily understand why a prolon- gation of such punishment brings insanity with it. The best of us, who have what we call in- ternal resources, break down at the sudden loss of our environment. We lose our bearings. The points of the compass disappear. Our re- lation to things is disturbed. We begin to grope after an adjustment. We turn and devour our- selves. To be lost in one's own abyss is insanity. Really, it is like the fabled act of the helpless reptile that plunges its fangs into its own body. Very few minds can stand the test of being driven in on themselves. And yet it is in those cloisters that we carry with us that we often- est run across ourselves as we grope in the dark, and then, mayhap, we sit down and become our own father confessors. 99 A JOURNEY TO NATURE Nothing can be more interesting than the ex- perience of a man who has lived for years on the periphery of life, and is suddenly plunged into the dark of his own being. It is not unlike that other experience which most of us have had at some time, of waking up in a dark room at night and feeling that cold shadow of consciousness creeping upon us that we do not know where we are. In such experiences you try to remember where the window is or was, you try to make memory take the place of cognition, and under- take to reconstruct your place in the universe. But for the time being you have lost your own trail. Then there is a slight cold shudder in the soul for a moment. A voice cries out, " I am lost." It is only a passing spasm of the sub- consciousness, but you never forget it. I think, myself, it is a prescient apprehension by the soul, and pre-figures in a dumb way the experience that awaits all souls when they pass from one condition of existence to another. I recall that once, at what purported to be a spiritual seance, an unexpected message was received from what claimed to be a spirit — one who had been a very dissolute, but withal a very lovable man. It came among a number of incoherent, impossible, and puerile messages, and threw a momentary chill on the party. The question that had been put was, " Where are you, Bob ? " and the answer was, " Wandering in the cold and dark between time and eternity." A man can try the dark-cell experiment by ^ 100 THE LIGHT IN A DARK CELL being his own jailer and locking himself up in the wilderness, as I did. At least so I thought when I executed the feat of banishing myself from the mode of existence to which I had be- come habituated. For a month I went through very much the same experience that attends the waking up in a strange dark room. I had left my environment behind me, not because I had lost the desire for it, but because it had betrayed the intention of killing me ruthlessly and sud- denly. One of two changes was offered me. I was to abandon my existence or my habits. If one should, with the magic power of Aladdin's lamp, transport a man from the seething Board of Brokers and set him down in the still waste of the Syrian desert, the change would not be more absolute than was mine. The Doctor's pre- scription was, " Come back to Hecuba." I thought at the time that I had the choice of leav- ing this world or staying in its most endurable dark cell, and I chose to stay. Doubtless it was the pusillanimity of a man of the world. The only result that is worth telHng is this — that, if a man manages it properly, he can rob the dark cell of all its horrors, and get comfortably out of the world without bothering the under- taker. But why pursue that figure any further ? The dark cell belongs exclusively to the punitive side of man's hallucination. My experiment at first was very much like the dearth of midnight, for the glare and shock of the world had been shut off. But no sooner had I accepted the loss lOI A JOURNEY TO NATURE obediently, and the dark of isolation had encom- passed me, than out came the stars, one by one, and, as my little world receded, the universes whispered to me across the eternal gaps. Those sibylline voices are very restful, when your ear is once purged of the artificial clang and has recov- ered its primal vibrations. Had I been an artist or an entomologist, my equipment would have enabled me to defy the ennui of solitude. But, alas, I was neither. I could not come to Nature like the gifted robber- artist who steals her secrets and lugs them off to his gallery, like so much plunder, with the hiero- glyphs rubbed off. That admirable marauder whose mission it is to inform Nature how she ought to do it is sustained in swamps and deserts by a missionary fervour. I had not even the war- rant of that other despoiler, the sportsman, who corrects Nature with a gun, and wounds and kills, even when he cannot eat, with a robust masculine joyousness. That superior quality which in the entomologist is called analysis, and which can box the compass of a bug when he is properly pinned down, with the dismembering acumen of a musi- cal critic who tears the quivering semi-quavers from a symphony, and lays them out to dry in a criticism — that wonderful gift has been denied me. I was myself pinned down by Nature to a dull, obedient synthesis. I was born so barren of the divine mastership that I believed most musical criticisms were the attempt to explicate an implication — that music was not made to be 102 THE LIGHT IN A DARK CELL analyzed or explained, any more than a prayer, but to be accepted and obeyed. Such a spirit as mine would never have conquered the earth. I acknowledge it. The only question is, could such a spirit understand the earth, and would the world say anything confidential to it ? I was under constitutional bonds not to interfere, but to listen. I was looking for nepenthe. Something said to me it is not a drug, but an adjustment. Perhaps it was the Doctor. I was not to disturb anything in the laboratory. I dare say I astonished my new environment both of animate and inanimate nature. Perhaps it was not accustom.ed to such a spirit as mine. Now that I look back at the experiment, I can fancy Nature saying, "What have we here? Is this our lord and master, or has an invalid Francis of Assisi come out of Wall Street ; does not want to put our birds in cages and our flowers in a her- barium to corroborate his own theories ; does not want to cut anything down or tear anything up ; can he be entirely human ? Perhaps, when he dies, if he ever should, he will refuse to be put Into a casket, and will let us get at him atom by atom, and lift him benignly along In our proces- sion. Treat him gently, O winds, and enter softly Into him, O sunshine, and all you myriad messen- gers of the air, breathe your Inarticulate secrets to him." Such Indeed was the compensation, softly to glimmer like star-points In my exile, as the months slipped by. And what v/as the secret ^ Dull 103 A JOURNEY TO NATURE mortal that I am, it was told me in effluence, but not till long afterward did I find it written on the deep pages of my experience, like the embroidery of God in the Milky Way and in the marsh. I have tried many times since to get that secret into words, but words are so brittle that they break down helplessly with the weight of a truth that is like an atmosphere. There are some secrets, like the ether, for which words have not been invented. One day when I thought I had caught the feat of fitting the ether to syllables, I wrote down, " Be- fore freedom can be, obedience is." It had all the ethereal disadvantages of an abstraction trying to perform a concrete trick. How barren the prop- osition was beside the Psalm that had sung itself into my comprehension through all those months. How far away from the ineffable eloquence which had said without words : " Behold, all things but man are under law, and man must come volunta- rily under it before he can be part of the scheme. To him alone it is allowed to return. So do we live and obey and die that he may learn the les- son.'^ Upon a man's capacity to emit a glow-worm ray of his own will depend the darkness of his cell and the limitations of it. There are men and women who have so perverted their natures that they live entirely through their superficies, and that kind of life which furnishes continual external stimula- tion converts them, in time, to hollow resounding shells, silent, indeed, unless they are beat upon. We all know men the greater part of whose lives 104 THE LIGHT IN A DARK CELL are spent looking at the procession. They would be of about as much use to themselves in a dark room as would a mirror. They are decrepit in- fants, who must be fed continually by the spoon of circumstance. Whenever things lose their motion, they, too, lose theirs, as if they were mere cogs in the social machinery. Their experience is about as interesting as a book of old playbills. That was what Goethe meant when he said that the ordinary man is content to see something going on. He is content because he does not have to go on himself. Probably conscience has a great deal to do with a man's disinclination to be left alone with him- self. When one has nobody to look at but him- self, he is apt to be not only bored but frightened. One's mistakes and follies always look more for- midable when one is alone. Conscience is like a photographer — it shuts off the general glare, gets the light focussed and subdued, and out comes the expression that belongs to you. I confess that at first I acted like the ordinary man (that I am). I hankered, pined, growled, complained, and looked over my shoulder at the disturbance that I missed. I was dreadfully bored because nothing was going on. And mind you, the immeasureable proces- sion of the universe was jogging right along as before. Not a cog had been slipped in the tre- mendous plan, but I felt that it had because I was no longer on exhibition. There is a Chinese adage which says that our hopes are our friends, but our desires are our children ; and there was I, 105 . A JOURNEY TO NATURE like the old woman who lived in a shoe, sur- rounded by my brood, all clamouring. It was my heroic duty to starve them to death. But such is the gentle efficacy of the gold cure under the autumn leaves that if one will only stay in the sanitarium of outdoors long enough and keep still and listen, he will begin to see some things more clearly. I was trying to think of a similitude that would convey to you some idea of those kindly intimations that are made by the external world when one is thoroughly recep- tive, and I recalled a trivial incident which had for me at the time a peculiar eloquence. Charlie and I had passed the winter resolutely in that hut, growing very intimate indeed, and spending many precious hours huddling over our wood fire during the long nights when the storms raged and the hut creaked and trembled. We had been very brave, I am sure, to have stood it out, but the winter was long, and we were wait- ing and pining for the spring. The days and weeks crawled sluggishly along. We counted them regularly on the calendar, and watched with childish eagerness that receding sunshine on the wall which was an index of the solstice. We longed for the end of it all. One night I opened the window to fasten the shutter. I think it was in April. It was very still, and I heard the first faint peep from the milldam. Such weak, tim- orous, thin little elfin voices, feep^ peep. But there was a keen, arrowy heralding in the note. The earth was stirring. I called Charlie. "What 106 THE LIGHT IN A DARK CELL is It ?" he said. " It's spring, Comrade/' I replied. And then we had a little war-dance in which the yellow dog joined. I never heard those tiny birth-pangs of the season afterward, without a little quickening of the pulse. Once you get on intimate terms with this Not Me, who strums her zithers and thun- ders her open diapasons, she will have many pleasant surprises for you. You will discover, by degrees, that she is a blood relation. She recognizes the same Father and knew him before you did. After that you shake hands with the trees and salute the winds familiarly as they pass. Then you learn, possibly, that Nature is not aesthetic. She struggles just as hard as any artist after an unseen prototype, but it is because she is under orders. She is as austere as a Puritan, in her duty, and never by any possibility bothers with sentimentalism. We always bring that non- sense to her in our kits and our albums. She stands up to her work with a rigid invincibility that makes an aesthete shiver, and offers up her off- spring as unquestioningly as did Abraham, and so well drilled are all her countless myriads that there is not a blade of grass hidden from the eye that does not strive as hard as it can to live and die for something other than itself So it was, that in the smoky confines of our far-away hut, swept by bleak storms or shone on by yellow sunshine, Charlie and I sat through the seasons, humbly, like the squirrels that we often heard under our floor, playing at bowls with 107 A JOURNEY TO NATURE their hickory nuts. We were learning to wait and getting strong and calm with the sure Balm of Gileadj for the time when we were to sally forth and take up our fight uncomplainingly and faithfully, like the dumb friends we were to leave behind. 1 08 CHAPTER X THE GLORY OF THE WAY AFTER a prolonged hot spell in late August, we usually get that transformation scene that has cool reminders in it of th*e golden age. A shower in the afternoon hisses and splashes on the hot earth, and then dies out lingeringly in what the farmers call a " drizzle-drozzle." It rains well on through the night softly. You can almost hear the muskmelons and tomatoes saying thanks. But the sun comes up unobscured in the morning, burning in a fathomless blue that you seldom see anywhere outside of the Orient, and calling to mind that tongue-twisting line of Baildon^s, — ** Palely blue lucent, one great undulent gem,*' only it is not " palely," but pronouncedly violet in the unflecked gulfs of it. This is the annun- ciation of Fall. It is usually a very showy cere- monial, and a very eld one, from which^ long ago, 109 A JOURNEY TO NATURE Attica caught the feast of Demeter and mingled jewels with the sheaves in joyful celebration. But man could not, even in his Grecian moods, when he loaded Ceres with poppies and gems, do more than mimic with his stage properties the whelming brilhancy and necromancy of such a morning. Ceres is preserved to us only in philology. She comes to us through Germany as Hertha, out of which grew our word " earth," and it is the earth that flashes her with all her gems across our vision after the late rains. The largesse of it at six o'clock in the morning is dazzling. Every tendril wears a tiara. The currant bushes, that could never decorate themselves with anything more pretentious than strings of garnets, now blaze with diamonds and burn with rubies. The mean- est weed that grows is heavy with diadems. There is nothing so poor that it cannot throw back an iridescent greeting to the sun. This prismatic jubilate lasts only half an hour. The winds come up and gather the queen's jewels, and the shadows creep along and put out the lights. But even then, one ceremonial merges into another in confluent evanescences. Nothing that is beautiful stays. Even the shadovys, that have such a rich wine-coloured depth at this time, pull themselves out in a cycle, and the cool winds are hastening seaward. The very charm of it is its transitoriness. The queen does not always sit on exhibition wdth her jewels on. It is well that man cannot stay the festival. He would fasten it, if he could, and make a museum or a mauso- IIO THE GLORY OF THE WAY leum of it. He is so afraid of the divine pro- cesses and so blind to the glory of going on that he tries to petrify his own perishing body when the life is out of it. Never does he show himself such a dog in the manger as when he embalms himself Nature is forever emitting a pleasant irony at our scale of values, trying to tell us that it is not that which endures, but that which is transformed, that best answers her equitable purpose. One can easily fancy that in some other condition of existence than ours, the evanescent best conforms to the enduring, seeing that existence in any con- ceivable state cannot be static, but must still be going on. That was rather a pretty conceit of Swedenborg's that the best spirits in another world continually grow young. I say a " conceit," but now I think of it, how do I know it is a conceit ? With our scale of values we lapse continually into a primitive admiration for magnitude. Great dis- tances, measureless periods of time — how Tyn- dall revelled in one and Proctor in the other, and how awe-struck their audiences were at the effective- ness of meaningless magnitude. But there is a continual intimation in Nature that mere bulk and prodigiousness are not ranked so high in her scale of values as in ours. She certainly endows a pis- mire with more communal intelligence than an ox, and spends as much ingenuity on a mushroom as on an oak. Who can say with accurate knowl- edge that our measurement of time by the revo- lutions of the earth fits all conditions of existence III A JOURNEY TO NATURE and extends beyond man to unseen communities which round up their affairs and die between sunrise and sunset ? Who shall say that our subdivision of hours bears any reference to the compacted lives that measure their destinies by moments ? Do we not get occasionally in dreamxS, and still more vividly in those marvellous syn- theses of thought and feeling that attend sudden disaster, as for example in the premonition of drowning, some startling evidences that the fac- ulties of the mind can transcend time altogether ? Who shall deny that the fennel and June grass and the downy gerardia, that have their succes- sions both of beauty and duty under the spreading oak branches, and have matured and given up their stored substance year after year to the arsenal of the earth, have not been toiling like the coral mite to help build the overshadowing bank of greenery ? Read Darwin's biography of the earth- worm. That side of our natures which gives heed only to the prodigious is very apt to become theatric, and occasionally, like the manager of the show, try to impress us with the magnitude rather than the worth of the exhibition. I recall an incident of the last year of my aca- demic days. Trivial as it is, it fits pleasantly in here. Our professor of physics, an amiable old fellow, but slightly tinctured with Buchner, took some kind of delight in belittling man and his planet. Now and then it would creep out, a mild pessimism, that took the shape of illustra- H2 THE GLORY OF THE WAY tion or passing reference. One day he called our attention to the late Dr. John W. Draper's book, " The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, ' which had just appeared and was attracting much attention. It had made a deep impression on him, and nothing would do but he must read a page of it to the class, as a fine example of insight and eloquence. The eminent author had turned aside for a moment from his historical thesis to show that man belonged among the atoms and was startlingly insignificant when compared to the celestial bulks ; and this is what our professor read us, with solemn face and deep tremulous voice: — Seen from the sun, the earth dwindles away to a mere speck, a mere dust-mote glistening in his beams. If the reader wishes a more precise valuation, let him hold a page of this book a couple of feet from his eye and then let him consider one of the dots or full stops. That dot is several hundred times larger in surface than is the earth as seen from the sun. Of what conse- quence then can such an almost imperceptible particle be ? One might think that it could be removed or even annihilated and never be missed. Of what consequence is one of those human monads on the surface of this all but invisible speck, of whom scarcely one will leave a trace that he has ever existed ? Of what consequence Is man, his pleasures or his pains? — Draper's "Con- flict," International Scientific Series, p. 174. The unanswerable interrogation with which our professor rounded up this quotation^ a kind of 113 A JOURNEY TO NATURE complacent defiance, did not quite dispel a feeling in the class that there was an aching void in the rhetoric. You know how a class of quick instinc- tive young minds will be annoyed by a galloping sophism that they cannot put their fingers on. It is like that one mosquito that blows his small but mellow horn in the dark, and you slap the wrong place and wish you might see him. A rather stupid and vacuous silence fell on the class, as if the professor had straggled into moonshine, but nobody could tell how or where. Then up rose Bannister, dear old Bannister — he who had not only translated but interpreted the Fourth Edogue of Virgil between prayers and praxis, as easily, so it seemed to us dullards, as he had feathered a stroke oar. His handsome face wore the livery of outdoors. His brown eye flashed a little with the light that comes regularly on land and sea. He was one of those intuitional fellows who occasionally rush past facts to a truth. He was continually arriving by cutting across lots. He was made up of moods of indifference and moments of inspiration. As he stood there fumbling his text-book of biology and feeling after words to express himself, I was fresh and imaginative enough to believe at the moment that he was the voice that we had all lost. "On behalf of insignificant man," he said, "of whom I am the most insignificant example, I beg to put in a disclaimer, and with all respect to Dr. Draper to protest against his method of measur- ing the value of things by the distance at which 114 THE GLORY OF THE WAY you get away from them. Seen from the sun, of what value is the earth ? Seen from Saturn, of what value is the sun ? Seen from Alpha Cen- tauri, of what value is Saturn ? If you take space enough, of what value is anything ? I don't know how it is with this class, but I for one cannot make a practical application of the brutal scale which Dr. Draper calls ' a more pre- cise valuation.* According to such an inverse appraisement, one's affection and admiration for one's own mother will depend on her not leaving the room. If she should go to the country, of what value would such an insignificant speck be ? I think we ought to tremble for Moses and Plato and Shakspere as they diminish along their starry orbits." I believe some of us laughed with just the least bit of malicious exultation. But Bannister was seriously in for it. He flashed up, and the words began to fuse and flow. " If you will permit me, sir," he said, " I lay last night on my back on a softly undulating deck and listened to the great dialogue between my soul and the universe. I climbed the stair- way of the galaxies into fields of light that bil- lowed out to the farthest boundaries of space. I passed flaming suns, all journeying on, and swept through vortexes of whirling worlds, but it never occurred to me, sir, to drag a surveyor's chain with me and stake off the distances for the belittling of myself. I confess that no finite mind can take this flight along the highway of 115 A JOURNEY TO NATURE creation without trembling a little at the glory of the way. But the pilgrim soul will feel the fanning of his own wing, and the inconceivably small shall rise up against the amplitudes of space, and summon with a finite will a million flashing messages from as many suns and register them on a retina no bigger than the capital O in this book. The infinitesimal commands the incalcu- lable. If such a soul, feeling itself lost in an eternity of matter, should throw the interrogation of the Psalmist into that flaming vault and ask, ' What is man that thou shouldst consider him ? ' that soul has but to listen, and the answer reaches across the centuries, ' Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels.' I am content, sir, to travel with that answer not only across the years, but across the chasms of the universe, and some- where on the journey I shall be sure to meet that kindred thought, emitted by another monad who saw in man something greater than the leagues he traversed, and who exclaimed, ' In apprehen- sion, how like a god.' " Then we all broke out in applause, in which the professor generously joined. Afterward he had the hardihood to say in a sly way that he knew how to wake up Bannister's theological idiosyn- crasy. It was this kind of high-stepping improvisation that distinguished Bannister. He came from Kentucky, where one can still detect in the per- fervid declamation of her gifted sons some reso- nances of Henry Clay, and hear words pacing along ii6 THE GLORY OF THE WAY the old Appian Way of eloquence. All efforts to make Bannister academic were more or less fruitless. He would not or could not dig labori- ously at the text-books. If he could not absorb a theme along the lines of his emotions, the labour of it discouraged him. " What is the use of wast- ing time with human guesses/' he said to me, " when one can converse with the truth itself, by putting his hand in that of the solitudes and walk- ing humbly with the silences ? After all. Nature confides the ultimates that Aristotle only groped at." I grew to love Bannister very much during that last year of our companionship, but it needed the after-perspective to understand him. I often thought then that he was a seer. I can see now that he was only an orator. But his oratory was strangely affluent with the fecundity and waste of Nature. Those of us who heard him afterward, when he held multitudes spellbound, recall how like he was to one of those great Western rivers that wind sluggishly along in narrow channels, carrying the soil with them, but liable at any moment to whelm their banks and spread flash- ingly into broad lagoons, rich with floating islands and the plunder of zones. Then it was that his shoreless volubility rose with Miltonic periods and bellowed grandly through the deeps of time, and his emotions swept us av/ay like those waves that " overthrew Busiris and his Memphian chivalry." How much of this gift was the bestowal of Isis herself, when he had lifted her curtain lying on his back under the stars, who shall say P And 117 A JOURNEY TO NATURE yet I cannot quite divest myself of the suspicion that the solitudes had given him grace of utter- ance. It seems to be the lesson of natural elo- quence that Nature's educational course makes some of the nobler and deep-buried appetencies of the soul imitate the grasses of the field and spring their tender blades in waste places. More than once I have noticed that those speakers who are most effective have studied the book that was never written. Eloquence, unlike wit, feeds itself in unfrequented glades. The American savage, who is never an inventor or a philosopher, is very often an orator. The speeches of Red Jacket and Sitting Bull have a large Roman vibration like the echo of a strong voice in the woods. In those academic days we were swept off our feet by successive literary waves. We had Goethe freshets, and, later, Carlyle inundations, when we talked in the Chelsea dialect and called our pro- fessors "Sea-Green" and " Teufelsdrockh," and tried, absurdly enough, in our dormitories, to " welter in the immensities " and balance the "Tartarian darks" on the tips of our tongues. Then there was a year when we all went off with Balzac, and neglected everything but our pipes and beer, in making obeisance to Parisian analyses. But Bannister never joined in the fellowcraft worship at these shrines. Effloresce as he might at the top, his roots remained fixed in the American soil. I believe he tugged at Goethe assiduously and plodded through the " Comedie Humaine," as if to see what it was all about. ii8 THE GLORY OF THE WAY But it was no use. He regarded Goethe very much as a Puritan might regard a good statue of Buddha, with curiosity and awe, but without a throb of sympathy. He told me himself that when he read Balzac he felt like a man who had been through a vast national museum, and was not per- mitted to bring anything away with him. On a little shelf in his room he had a copy of Milton, a much-bethumbed volume of Pascal's " Pensees," and a Shakspere, with the regulation mother's Bible that could be found in all our rooms with diligent searching, but generally poked in be- tween Dumas and Daudet. From that small library Bannister drew refreshment that we knew nothing of, and now that the years have given me a clearer vision of Nature and man, I can see that those books opened vistas to him not unlike those he had seen when lying on his back. And now that I have run afield in this inex- cusable manner, I ought to apologize. I set out to exalt the small things and have not said a word about myself Thus is one's most precious egotism reduced to a postscript when he remem- bers. I was reminded of Bannister by the rich August hedgerows, where the cardinal-flower al- ready burns and the fringed gentian will follow in unexpected places, and the smell of the wild grapes will make the air reel with a Grecian tipsi- ness. All these wildings of Nature have disap- peared from the haunts of man. He plucks them up by the roots and plants his hard, dry chrysan- themums in geometrical dreariness. 119 CHAPTER XI ON A PORCH IT takes ordinary men like myself about forty years to learn the alphabet of living. We start in with a conquering sword, shouting " Excelsior/* and mistaking intensity of emotion for integrity of being. At ten we believe all things ; at twenty we dare all things ; at thirty we obtain all things ; at forty, we question all things. If we arrive at fifty, we bow our heads and are silent. We have arrived with many scars at either a conclusion or a conviction. If by any means we reach a conviction, it will be shadowed by an enormous waste and tinged with a reproach that we have missed the preservative equilibrium. Ghosts of a lost condition peer and smile ironi- cally in our memories and glide through our dreams. I suppose the ultimate punishment of man in this world is the accomplishment of his desires. In looking back at my summer in the solitary 120 ON A PORCH woods, I find that very little of it remains but the equable and uneventful light of it. If 1 try to recall what was disagreeable or annoying, I have to refer to notes made at the time, and those notes are for the most part meaningless now and strangely superfluous, bearing the impli- cation that the annoyances of life are not to be preserved, and inferentially that the forces that make up real life preserve themselves without our special wonder. How trite the dear old trees were, how platitudinous and self-possessed. How unoriginal and reiterative were the seasons, doing just the same things over and over from the beginning. How undemonstrative, regular, and plodding the sunshine was, how incapable of a new departure. In our callow days we placed a Grecian Aurora in our sunrise. She always wore a saffron robe and came out of a golden pal- ace with a torch in her hand. But how purely infantile that conception is to the ordinary sage like myself, who has been introduced to her and enjoyed her homely hospitality. Instead of being a frisky nymph, calling attention to her flights, like a ballerina or a Bernhardt, she is an old woman, attending to her regular routine with precise decorum. If you accept that similitude for a moment, it will grow clearer to you as you remember. It was the old woman's benign regu- larity that we never thought of at the time, but that was an awful deprivation when it was gone. What did we know about her unseen traction that kept us planets and comets in our courses, 121 A JOURNEY TO NATURE and went with us into the far-off spaces to round our orbits and bring us back at some time ? What did we then know of the deposits of light, layer upon layer, that in the alchemy of serene love was to turn our carbon into chlorophyl, and make a golden age for us in the bottom of our souls ? When I went off to the woods with my one eight-year-old scion, I had something like fifty thousand exigent things on my mind that enlisted my interest and demanded concentration of thought. It isn't necessary to make a list of them. Refer to your own schedule. I was really lopsided with events and sore with the world's goings on. I used to get up in the morn- ing, heave a sigh, and take up the universal load. I had to sympathize with the Armenians. I had to denounce a Tory Government. I had to form a theory of the latest murder mystery. I had to keep my eye on the Berlin market. London and Paris were tapping at my window before I had taken my coffee. I had to circumvent Tracy, and outbid Jackson, and balk Williams. I had to make more money than I needed, because there were several fellows who had more than I had. I had to keep abreast of Wagner and the latest novel, or I couldn't hold my own with the ladies in the evening. I had some inter- ests in a mine and some in a railroad. They were not fixed. Nothing was fixed. Uncertainty about things in general was a devouring stimu- lant. I was getting to be permanently anxious 122 ON A PORCH about the drift of everything. In such a condi- tion, the fine spiculae of a man's sensibilities get knocked off. I had to have something sharper each day to keep up my interest. The artificial vivacities of the playhouse were growing tiresome and lacked shock. I noticed that wine was los- ing its tang, and beauty was overdone. Every- thing was wearing off its edges. I needed a new sensation. I found it in a child, a maid, and a yellow dog. If I had found it in Paris, or Baden, or in moun- tain climbing, or in jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, it would have been conventional, but would not be worth the telling. When a man who begins to find that absinthe is not half as strong as people think is suddenly put on milk diet, he has the best chance of his life to be not only original, but piquant. At least he discovers a lot of things that are not usually thought to be worth discovering. We start life with a milk diet. Did it ever occur to you that there is a terrible irony in being brought round to it again by the doctor ? I suppose you are familiar with a banal phrase about " bringing a man to his milk.'* If I learned anything in the woods, it was this : that the true piquancy of life often consists in get- ting rid of the piquancy. I thought at one time that I was cut out for a young Napoleon of finance. Perhaps I was, but I didn't know how to catch eels or scrape new potatoes. I wanted to operate largely, but I " snapped" and became tutor to my own boy. I used to look around disdainfully for 123 A JOURNEY TO NATURE a combination of Hypatia and Maintenon that 1 might fall in love with it, and I was paralyzed by a rustic handmaiden. I had believed that an in- tellect Hke mine would assert its mastership of the world, and a yellow dog wagged his tail at me with esoteric authority. As for the Florentine maid who came regularly and beamed round us, I am bound to say now that she was the sunshine of many rainy hours and left layers of impalpable light in our recollections. It was providentially ordered that she should drop out of the clouds, as it were, without any prevision on our part. If I had offered to pay her for her services, she would have vanished offended. It was a neighbourly arrangement, unmarred by any contracts. She could just as well as not run over and look after things ; " a child like that should not be left alone in the woods," she said ; so I agreed that she should keep one eye on Charlie. I say one eye, because even while I made the proposition there was a non-committal twinkle in the other. There is not a blase man living who has not a niche in his constitution for a Gretchen, and there is not a Gretchen who will not come some time, like a song sparrow, and twitter in it, to fly away again when she gets through. This circumam- bient freshness had begun to build a nest in my heart before I knew it. I don't believe she knew it herself It was a general instinct of nidification on her part, and I suppose that such nests began to take form wherever she lit. It is worth men- tioning because it was part of the resurgence of 124 ON A PORCH past conditions under a milk diet. I understand now that you cannot fasten yourself down to curds and whey without waking up the Strephon who has been biding his time in your bones, and find- ing yourself going about at times with an oaten pipe that you do not know what to do with. The first month I called Griselle " my young lady " with a fine sense of reserve. The second month I called her " Griselle " with an easy sense of compromise. The third month I occasionally addressed her as " my dear ** with guarded pater- nal composure, and as nobody started at it, I adopted that phrase. By the time I had recov- ered my appetite so that I could eat a hunk of bread with school-boy zest, and would not have flinched if it had been spread with New Orleans molasses, I began to discover traits of character in Griselle, which was very much like my discov- ering that the sun rose and set, and the brook water ran down hill, — two facts that I had never before observed with interest. The young woman did not belong to my social domain, but whether those traits were paradisaical or merely primitive, I did not stop to inquire. The light that glimmered was tenuous, but it came from a great distance like starlight. It nourished dreams. Things had come to this pass when the Doctor arrived at the cabin to join me in a week's savagery, as he called it, and to come back to first principles. No better man to give me lessons existed. He showed me the masculine way of it ; how to throw a fly ; how to eat tomatoes oflF the vines like apples, 125 A JOURNEY TO NATURE without even salt ; how to roast corn in the ashes ; how to study sociology over an ant-hill ; how to sleep on fir boughs and make raw potato salad ; how to skin bullheads, which, by the way, you could not tell from weakfish when he fried them. I opened my mind to the Doctor, as we smoked our pipes under melancholy boughs. " What do you think of that young woman, Griselle ? " I asked with studied carelessness. " Good, healthy, and rather pretty country wench," he replied, "but I have not thought about her. Let me advise you not to." " Why not ? Is she not part of the scheme ? " " Yes ; her scheme." "Absurd. You do her great injustice. She has no more scheme than a chipmunk." " You are falling in love with her, my son. I noticed it almost as soon as she did." " Supposing such A preposterous thing possible, would it be altogether unnatural or imprudent ? " " Highly natural and decidedly imprudent." " She is very fond of Charlie. Genuine mater- nal instinct. Think of the boy." " Let him marry her when he comes of age." " Seriously, would it not be a good thing for me to contemplate some such person with a view to his future ? " " What does the young lady say to the scheme ? " " She doesn*t know anything about it, of course." " Figs ! She probably knows all about it." 126 ON A PORCH " I have not spoken a word to her." " It was not necessary." " If she had any suspicion of my serious in- tentions she would have shown it." " Then she would not be a fresh, ingenuous thing. You don't know them. They never tell their secrets even to themselves. They keep them locked up in a casket like jewels, and if they ever take them out to look at them, they lock the door and turn the gas down first." " Try and be practical a moment to accommo- date me. I admire the young woman's qualities of mind and heart, and I sometimes feel a desire to rescue them. What are you laughing at ? " " I am laughing at the unexpected success of my treatment. This exceeds anything that I hoped for." "What exceeds it?" " The triumphant manner in which you have adapted yourself to the infant and the yellow dog, and renewed your youth. Say, if you can do this every twenty-five years, you will live to be a hundred." " You are disposed to treat the matter flip- pantly. It Isn't of vital importance, and I'll say no more about it." "Yes, it is. It is simply beautiful. It crowns my theory with a new wreath." " Oh, hang your theory." " No, no. I expected to make a man of you physically, and I'll be hanged if the treatment hasn't made a youth of you. Talk about elixir! 127 A JOURNEY TO NATURE Sees traits of mind and character and wants to mould them in a higher sphere. Lovely, lovely, in four months too. Hang me if I don't get a cabin up here myself and restore my unbounded belief in the therapeutic sex. You wouldn't mind if I wrote the case up for the County Medical Association, would you ? No names mentioned." " Yes. I object. You don't understand the case at all." " Don't I ? Would you like me to make a prognosis ? " " Certainly not, as you do not understand the case. " Pardon me — " " Pardon me. Doctor." I believe we both scowled a little at each other, and then the Doctor broke into a laugh. " If you had not got mad," he said, " I should have doubted my theory. The next thing to do is to get jealous. Oh, I went through this when I was eighteen. When a man goes through it at forty-four, there is hope for him. You ought to be proud of my treatment." Something like a comic coolness ensued for half a day, and v/e " sir'd " each other. Then it broke down, and Vv'e both laughed it off, but I am bound to say that the Doctor made no allusion to the affair when the girl was present, though he noticed her with a critical interest. My acquaintance with Griselle grew in its own unobtrusive way so slyly that I can hardly tell where it began. I think that perhaps I came 128 ON A PORCH nearer to understanding her and even to admiring her during the few hours I spent with her on the porch of the Hotchkiss " Folly." The nymph passed into the woman during those lazy summer hours when she was not flitting before my eyes, but was in sober repose, listening to me. I trace it all back to that old porch, and therefore I shall have to tell you about it : It was the common kind, twelve feet wide, fifty feet long, roofed and shingled. Viewed from above, it was difficult to tell where the house ended and the porch began. An old-fashioned balustrade ran along its outer edge, with here and there a broken baluster and a sagging hand-rail. There were wide steps, slightly concave with the tread of generations. They descended to a grass-grown road, and at their two sides there were rank bunches of phlox and nasturtiums, dissolutely intertwined, with spears of timothy sticking out of the tangle. There, too, sprang the Virginia creeper and the wild-grape vine that climbed the pillars and fes- tooned the spaces between, making, as Gabe Hotchkiss said, " a pooty bad job when we come to paint the house." But we never came to paint it; you could see that by the fantastic streaks the broken leaders made. Late in the summer the morning-glories still distribute their trumpets all through the vines, and the wrens quarrel there as of old, I dare say. Sometimes a humming- bird vibrates above one of the blooms, and so impalpable is he that you might take him to be the spirit of the flower trying to disentangle him- 129 A JOURNEY TO NATURE self. You cannot tell where the tissuey corolla ends and the wings begin. You can easily imagine the house. The big doors open from the porch into a spacious hall- way, running straight through, and making a cool vista, with more phlox and wild-grape vines in the perspective. On Sundays Gabe sits there by the hall table and reads the religious weekly through his iron spectacles. This old porch is a spacious bowery and slum- brous vestibulmn, always referred to by the occupant of the house as " the stoop '' ; always designated by the minister when he makes his visit as " the veranda,'' and always dignified by summer boarders, if they come from the city, by the name of " pe-azzer " or balcony, unless they are Southerners, and then they call it " the gal- lery.'* But whether they draw their nomencla- ture from the Greek, the Italian, the Spanish, or fetch it from Holland, they accept the big run- around as a delightful compromise of outdoors and in ; and in its hammocky days, as you may imagine by the rusty old hooks on some of the pillars, it wooed luxurious visitors to quiet dreams with elhn orchestras. These old porches are like the prefaces to old books in which the author spreads a broad invi- tation and calls you "gentle reader." They always hold out homely arms of hospitality, though, to be sure, looked at from a little dis- tance, they are more like brooding wings. They mark in the growing civilization the transition 130 ON A PORCH of domestic life from stress and peril to peace and prosperity. When the big porch came in, the block-house and the stockade went out. De- fiance gave way to invitation. Always to the far-away country home, the porch is a gracious neutral ground between the exclusiveness of the home and the impertinence of the world — why not say, enchanted ground, and be done with it, for really that old porch at the Hotchkiss house had its unsubstantial enchantment. A rarefied atmosphere hung over it. The odour of it comes back to me with vague associations as I write this. It had a flavour of its own, distilled, one might say, by time, as we have it In old wine. The spruce shingles and flooring had absorbed a dis- tinctive bouquet from the years as if the sun had baked them to a memorial ripeness. It was faintly balsamic and evasive, as is the odour of sweet clover, that you cannot trace like a fact, but must accept like a presence. One does not need to be either a sensualist or a sentimentalist to be wholesomely affected by the inanimate serenities. I should dislike very much to be thought incapable of separating an odour from an orison, or an aesthetic thrill from an aspiration, and yet the atmosphere of the old porch, of which I was scarcely conscious at the time, must have been making its deposit while I was thinking of other things. Mine has not been a luxurious nor an idle life. It is well marked by the scars of endeavour, and there are in it such ordinary triumphs as come to all ordinary men. But on 131 A JOURNEY TO NATURE more than one occasion, when achievement had been wrought through incalculable stress, and the triumph seemed very hollow by the side of the outlay — on such occasions, I say, and on others, when it seemed that all the malign forces of the universe were arrayed against me, and I began to doubt the moral government of the world, feeling that the best a man can do is to fold his arms and set his teeth with Greek defiance, and bid the gods work their worst — then there has come a filmy recollection of Gabe Hotchkiss asleep in his Quaker rocker, with his weekly paper on the floor, and the cool scented wind coming lazily through that hall, lifting his gray locks softly, without waking him, and I have wondered, just for a moment, if he did not have the best of it. All these things come back to a man over lost hours, bringing the scents with them. I must have spent some time on that old porch. Does any one suppose that its antique flavour, or even its morning-glories that made cathedral windows of the vines at sunrise, were the enchantment ? I am sure I did not give particular heed to them while the girl, Griselle, v/as present. But now, the summer odours, the cool rustling of the leaves, the architecture of the sky on the western side of the house at sunset, the gradient colours of the intervening fields, and that musky odour of the old wood, and the girl herself, are all parts of one composition. The dry bones of the Hotchkiss genealogy took on some kind of life when this girl touched them in our conversation. The old 132 ON A PORCH house had been there half a century. It must have been in its first period very patriarchal, with a lordly air of domain and much riches on hoof and in sheaves. I take it that this was the grandfather period in the Hotchkiss chronology. By a little adroit questioning, Griselle filled in some of the gaps as best she could, partly from hearsay, partly from the old Bible, and partly by straight tradition through her uncle Gabe. Why should I be interested in all this, which is the commonplace history of so many American homes ? I will tell you why. First of all, the commonplace is very apt to be the enduring elemental thing upon which the shocks and vi- vacities of life fasten themselves for your mere divertisement. In the next place the girl was inscrutably interesting to me as she thus uncon- sciously tied herself to all these antecedents, which had woven her to what she was. Can there be anything more delightful to the admiring intellect than the genesis of a girl thus artlessly set forth without the suspicion on her part that she is exhibiting formative and converging lines of her nature ? There had been a great-grandmother Hotch- kiss, and the more you stirred the dust of the old manse, the more distinctly her figure rose out of the past. There was hunted up for me an old miniature, no bigger than one of those morning- glories, painted by Elliot, and in it one saw the same pensive blue eyes, with the same slightly oblique lines, the same tawny hair, but now fall- 133 A JOURNEY TO NATURE ing in side ringlets on a staid coiffure, and the same lift of the head on a quietly imperative neck, that were only a few feet from me close to the wild-grape vine. " Tell me all about her,*' I said. " These old mothers were the salt of the earth. Do you know that you look like her a little ^ " Yes, she had been told that often enough when she was younger and the Hotchkisses came thick about the house on Christmas times. " But, dear me, Tm not at all like her, for she was what Uncle Billy Hotchkiss called a grand dame." " Uncle Billy was probably right. What did he tell you about her ^ Really, this interests me deeply." She tried to recall the old man's account, prob- ably garrulous disjecta membra, and I, with a sur- prising patience, listened attentively, and looked on with admiration. It was very much as if a pair of white hands were taking to pieces one of those old bits of rag carpet, and a soft voice were telling me that this bit of colour was part of a wed- ding dress, and that other was a scrap of baldric worn when somebody was queen of the May, and that other — well, that was the old blue coat that had brass buttons on it, and that was brushed up for Henry Clay's funeral, and then hung in the pantry long after they buried the old man that wore it. But weave these old strands as one might, there was always the vital colour of the grandmother, and shift the events into any con- tinuity that was possible, there was always sure 134 ON A PORCH to be the old porch looming up and overlooking them. Great stalwart sons grew up and took after their full-blooded father. They romped with bare feet on those old boards and got their lessons on rainy days round that low window-sill. They took in the atmosphere of the mother just as they took in the smell of the hot roses that came round the southern corner of the porch. There would be one of them upon whom the mother had set her heart. He was to do as a man what she could not do as a woman ; put into great heroic deeds the self-sacrifice and faith that need muscle and will, and over that particular member of her household she probably wept and prayed when no one saw her. But, as the boys grew up, they all straggled off. The very freedom and brightness of the farm life grew monotonous. It offered no chal- lenge to hot blood ; so they had to weave their own mazes far away, and the sensitive one, upon whom the hopes had rested like white doves, fell into a youth's tangle, to escape which he ran away and enlisted, being afterward heard of somewhere on the Rio Grande, where he got a brass bullet in his lung. Griselle did not say so, but I under- stood well enough that at this crisis he began to smell the hot roses, and wished to be set down on that old porch. Nothing would do but he must speed that same bullet to the heart of his mother. They brought him home from Vera Cruz, and there was quite a cavalcade escorted the carriage up from the village, with a show of flags and a 135 A JOURNEY TO NATURE scream of fifes. It drew up there at the steps. What do you suppose that mother cared for the flags and the fifes, when she saw that grizzly and dirty wreck lifted out with the deadly pallour on his cheeks ? It was June, and the air was heavy with sweet reproaches. " Put me down here," he said, " on the porch for a while. I am going to die. Let me die out here." Out of Griselle's scraps and patches there looms up another son who was speculative, and, I fear, dissolute. He must have made a great deal of money, in one way or another, and must have squandered it in the risky endeavour to make more. There were times when he was hard pinched by his own recklessness, and then he wrote to his mother, and she helped him out secretly, from the little savings of her own, but never questioning him. One summer he came up for a visit to the farm and brought a young wife with him. I see him sitting there under the vines, with the air of an exhibitor, and expecting all the family to admire his bride ; treating them with the easy superiority of the young man who suddenly knows it all. I can see the mother try- ing to meet this young woman with maternal courtesy, and being regarded in return as very prim and fussy. There must have been many little stories current in the family after the young wife went away. How she asked one of the girls if somebody could not play the piano when she was going to bed — it was so awfully still — and couldn't they cut the bread a little thinner ; and 136 ON A PORCH how she had her husband's coffee brought up to him in the morning while he was in bed. She could not understand the old porch. What did people want to sit out there for — there was nobody going by. In one of his after exploits this woman left him, and after that, it was said, he took to drink, and finally in extremity wrote to Griselle's father, and the letter was brought to the mother, as indeed everything was. What must she do but quietly pack her trunk and go without a word to New York, hunt up her offspring, and when nothing else would do, bring him back to the old porch ? In brief, the old house could not be touched reminiscently but there came out distinctly the outlines of the old mother who had held it together and brought back the renegades sooner or later with a sure attraction. She must have been the equitable sun that shone on the just and the unjust, and then one day, after many disappointments and hidden heartbreaks, she lay down calmly and died, and a strange desolation fell upon the place. The old house must have shown signs of dissolution, as if its anima had gone with her. The old porches, I dare say, echoed vacantly when she no longer sat at the low window. The morning-glories came as usual, and the humming-bird vibrated in the bloom, and the sun poured into the hall through the east door ; but I judge that it all had a poignant irony for the old man, who must have resented such persistent continuance of peace and plenty when 137 A JOURNEY TO NATURE his world had gone to pieces. He fell into an apathy of discouragement, and presently they laid him in the grave beside his wife. I stood one day with Griselle at that little plot, and with great difficulty pushed away the wild blackberry vines to find the almost obliterated grave of that mother. Eternity is very jealous of the honours done to its favourites. Take good care of your warriors and champions, it seems to say — I will take care of mine in silence. But, as I looked at the handsome maid, with her elbow on the old hand-rail, and the western sun glorifying her bronze hair as she leaned pen- sively on her hand, I could not help saying to myself — how absurd it is to speak of the perish- ing influences of a mother when they live and speak so vitally in the third generation. I was quite sure that the grandmother was looking at me out of those clear eyes with a waiting com- posure. Some kind of patience and nobility, I thought, biding their time. How ridiculous was the Doctor's theory that a woman hugs and conceals her secrets, even from herself, now that I was in the presence of a woman who had no secrets. Something in the old porch, perhaps, that transmuted the Hotch- kiss pedigree into a fairy tale. I have told you that it was often impossible there to tell where the flower ended and the wings began. If that girl made me feel that I was a good deal of a void myself, can you blame me ? Man is sent into this world unfinished. Nature seems 138 ON A PORCH to say to him at the start: "You are incomplete. I have made that other part of you, but I do not remember where I put it. You will have to hunt for it." I have met many men who went about for years in this Psyche hunt, muttering to the women they met, " Where do you suppose the other half of me was put ? " And just as this fantasy went through my mind the sun disappeared, and a pleasant gloom fell round the Florentine maid. I heard the warning rap of a bird as if on the door of twilight. " It's a woodpecker," I said. " No," said Griselle, getting up. " It's Uncle Gabe knocking the ashes out of his pipe. He is going to bed." 139 CHAPTER XII A SEPTEMBER CHILL I FOUND that as the season waned the migra- tory instinct in me asserted itself as it does in a bird. It was not difficult to extract content- ment from July and August, but with September came certain vague longings and stirrings. The Hotchkiss woods are no more deserted in winter than in summer, and yet, with the first whiff of cool air, carrying a few yellow leaves, there came a restless desire to take wing. This is a charac- teristic of the social animal. He desires to go with the flock, and however seductive September may be to the eye, he is sure to hear far-away voices calling to him ; even the rumble of trunks and the fluttering of departing wings at the water- ing places reach him. He cannot disguise from himself that the world is getting ready for com- fortable winter quarters. I did not get the newspapers in the Hotchkiss woods. It was part of my regimen not to get 140 A SEPTEMBER CHILL them, but how well I knew what they were saying. There would be the lists of returning passengers on the incoming steamships ; the bulletins of the theatre managers ; I could almost hear the orches- tras tuning up on those still nights ; there would be house-hunting and much hand-shaking and put- ting in of coal and airing of salons. To be left out of these notes of preparation made me ner- vous. Besides, the joys of the woods would them- selves be slipping away presently. The robins already wore an au-revoir look, and even the blue- birds would soon be seeking more comfortable quarters ; the wire grass in front of my hovel was getting yellow in spots ; the maples had hung out a few stray beacons of warning. Presently the cicada would dry up, and then how the still nights would gape. Gabe had piled up a few cords of hard wood on the westerly side of the hovel, be- cause I told him I was going to face it out, and he had ominously hinted that it would be well to bank up the other side with a few sod. All this sounded chilly. "You could keep a barrel of potaters in that kitchen," he said, "if you are goin* to keep a fire there." I walked away and whistled a few bars of" La donna e mobile," that being the proper expression of my mood. The more I looked at the prospect, the more cheerless it became. I was getting desperately moody. It was not possible for a man of my habits and associations to stick this thing out all winter ! I was not a sportsman, a recluse, or a cowboy. My nature required that I should hear 141 A JOURNEY TO NATURE some good music and try on a dress-coat once more ; it even occurred to me that in order to preserve my interest in sublunary affairs I needed an occasional soft-shell crab or a piece of pompano. I kicked the yellow dog that day, to Charlie's amazement, and I must have spoken gruffly to Charlie, for I found him and the dog afterward sitting on a fallen tree-trunk, silently sympathizing with each other. I apologized to both of them, but it was a mere duty. I watched the sun go down that evening, and I never before saw anything so consummately melancholy. It was luridly and mockingly fan- tastic, and was barred by the grim trunks of the trees, black and monolithic, that seemed to rise from a graveyard. A September sunset is proba- bly the loneliest of all earthly spectacles. It is like Chopin's music, hiding tears with colour. Tears for what ? God knows. If you are alone and in the mood, it will paint fathomless depths of pathos that you cannot sound, and rim its bulks of dun despair with ironical regrets. Charlie and I fled from the twilight into the house and shut the door, and lit our kerosene lamp. Then we stumbled round in a haphazard way to get our supper. I made a strong pot of coffee, for which I had a sudden hankering, instead of tea, and desperately drank three or four cups of it, — black, — and when Charlie had mumbled his prayer and crawled into bed, I lit a cigar and paced up and down in the moonlight. It was a very ghostly affair, I thought. The 142 A SEPTEMBER CHILL same melancholy that the sun had painted in oil was now washed in with water. I even felt chilly, although my thermometer said persistently that I was mistaken. I came in and smoked so many cigars that Charlie began to cough in his sleep, and then I threw the door and window open, and the night air struck me with a sharp shudder. Finally I went to bed, and then set in an inter- minable tangle of dreams, crowded with human beings. I was with my old companions. We seemed to be going the rounds of well-remem- bered scenes of revelry. Theatres, concert saloons, men and women in endless processions of fan- tastic sportiveness, coming and going, with vast audiences, uneasy, oppressed, as if by a mysteri- ous presence, and looking at me askance as if I had violated some inexorable law in coming back. I had been away for a thousand years, and the revelry all took on the melancholy of the sunset. But what, more than anything else, excited my astonishment in this hurrying phantasmagoria was the curious pulsing rhythm of it. It all expanded and shrank regularly, and everybody spoke and acted as if keeping time to the beat of a drum. Even the spectators vibrated with a horrible systole and diastole. It puzzled and pained me, and when I asked for an explanation, somebody told me that I was the cause of it all, and should not be permitted to go at large. Even this explanation came in strange pulses, as if one should speak in throbs. As I became aware that this rhythmic impulse proceeded from 143 A JOURNEY TO NATURE myself, I rushed into the street, only to find everything beating and moving in the same meas- ure, even the vehicles swelling and collapsing as if with the working of a great internal bellows ; and the sound of far-away subterranean explosions seemed to set the increasing pace. Then sud- denly the sense of an advancing catastrophe, of which all this rhythm was the mere footfall ; a world-wide terror, inexplicable but certain, creep- ing like a fog over humanity. In the numb ecstasy of it I woke, and sitting up in bed, lis- tened to the same drum beat and rhythm going on within me. This was cruelly discouraging when I found out what it was. I got up and lit my lam^p, determined to sleep no more on the edge of a precipice. I sat there in the gloom a thoroughly disheartened, if not a frightened man, saying to myself: " So this is the end of the Doctor's Nature cure. Here I am with this infernal dis- turbance breaking out again. What a jolly fool I have been making of myself — liable to die in that bed, and not a soul within a mile, and that child must get up some morning and discover me cold and stiff." What would I not have given to hear an am- bulance bell just for company, or to have grasped a telephone fraternally ? But it was no use. I looked out into the night and listened. An owl far down in the woods was making sepulchral moans, and I thought if I had died and gone to Tartarus, it would not have been more spectral H4 A SEPTEMBER CHILL than those low-down stars looking through the grim tree trunks and that unearthly chilly silence. " Nature herself plays the ghost at times/' I said, and shut the door as if to keep her out. No sooner had I sat down again to brood than I be- came aware that the yellow dog was lying under Charlie's bed eying me wistfully. I had kicked her in the morning, and I could see that she bore no resentment. She was waiting anxiously to find out if I would kick her again or speak a kind word. It was really a matter of deep concern with her, and it only needed a look of passing friendliness in the corner of my eye, and everything would be forgotten. I must have shown some kind of com- punction, for I heard her tail rap inquiringly. " Come here, you yellow brute," I said. "There isn't anybody else to talk to. Oh, wag your tail. There's no reason in the world why you should not enjoy yourself to the top of your bent. You're not a man. Yes, I know, I acted more like a brute this morning than you possibly could, but you must make some allowance for a human being who hasn't anything to wag. There, that's all right — don't jump on me; you're a good dog, and there's no need of being so demonstrative, and everything is understood between us. I could tell you a lot of handsome things that man has said about dogs. You are the only domestic brute that isn't his slave and is content to be his wor- shipper. Don't lick my hand either. I under- stand you perfectly. Don't try so hard to express yourself. You want to know what's the matter 145 A JOURNEY TO NATURE with me. Be quiet and I will tell you. I am sick. I came up here to do as you do and sleep it off in the sun ; but it didn't work worth a cent, be- cause I'm only a man, and not a fortunate dog like you. Hist, what do you want to bark for ? Don't you know Charlie is asleep ? I'll bounce you if you don't stop. You can just wag your tail and talk, can't you, quietly? What time do you suppose it is ? Wait till I look at my watch. It must be nearly morning. Heavens, it's only half-past three. What can we do for three hours? The sun will not be up till six. I'll tell you, let's light that wood iire. A wood fire is company. Come on, there's some light wood in the kitchen, and I feel chilly." I might as well put down that dog's reply, if for no other reason than that it is a true dog's reply, and not man's, which dog talk is so apt to be. This is what he said, exactly : " I can't make out what it is you propose to do, but I under- stand in a general way that you are going to do something, and I'm with you whatever it is. Let's make as much hullabaloo about it as we can." I have learned that a dog apprehends a man's meaning very much as a man apprehends the meaning of a symphony. It is purely a matter of tones' and not of articulations. He seizes upon your moods, not upon your ideas, with the marvellous generalizing capacity of a sympathetic ear. He responds to the allegros and andantes, appropriates the rhythms without consciousness, and keeps time to the feelings as they slip and 146 A SEPTEMBER CHILL merge. Man must be a continual Beethoven to a dog, uttering mystic strophes that he cannot analyze. A dog is thus superior to a man in that he is always saved from being a critic. From three o'clock in the morning till sunrise is the time when invalids die. It is the lovv^est point of the great ebb. The ooze of life lies stark and forbidding, and nothing stirs in it. Then it is that time lags, especially if you are alone. I thought of all the lonely vigils with death hover- ing around the near-by bed, and that being rather gruesome, I tried to fill up the dismal gap with an air of fussiness. I could at least imitate some of the motions of life. I went out into the kitchen to look for kindling, and as I pulled at the wood- pile, the yellow dog jumped to the conclusion that I was looking for rats, and I had to choke him kindly to prevent Charhe from waking up and contemplating our nocturnal idiocy. I got down on my hands and knees and blew at the sticks and paper I had piled in the fireplace, and presently a lazy spiral of smoke began to curl up the chimney. Even that looked companionable. But no sooner had the enlivening conflagration set in than an unexpected rumpus broke out. The old chimney was alive. There was a beating of wings, much peeping and scratching, and down came a brood of swallows, some of them flirting the firebrands in all directions, and others circling round the room with twittering alarm, knocking down all the small articles and upsetting the lamp, as if chaos had broken loose with a brood of night imps, in 147 A JOURNEY TO NATURE all of which the yellow dog, with the exuberance of misdirection, in an animal that has no regular conduits for her emotions, began to make the place ring with barking. I understood perfectly well every phrase of her declamation. " Oh, say, master, I knew that you were up to something, but I never dreamed it was as lively as this ! Yap, yap, yap. It's as good as if rats had wings." And presently, as I got the lamp lit, and burned my fingers trying to pull one of the infernal imps out of the ashes, and was dancing round the room blowing my hands, with the dog at my heels, shout- ing, " Go it, this is something like life," I saw Charlie sitting up in bed, rubbing his fists into his eyes to get the smoke out, and trying to say with all the features he had, " What's broke loose ? " When this episode had quieted down, I looked at my watch. It was only four o'clock. I sat down in a chair and laughed hysterically like a woman, and there stood that expectant yellow dog, saying as plainly as an oscillating spinal system could say : " Now, that was fine. What next ? " I had never before in my life waited for the morning. Many persons, I dare say, have waited for it every night of their lives. But I did not think of that, nor of the other fact that to many of them it never came. By and by the flame of the lamp began to grow greenishly dull, and a gray, ghostly light stole in by degrees. I heard the breath of dawn rustling the leaves. It was like the footsteps of a return- ing friend — why not say an airy herald ? Griselle 148 A SEPTEMBER CHILL herself would be coming across the fields presently, bringing the sunrise with her. By Jove, " I'd walk over and meet her." But when I looked into the little mirror I changed my mind, and calling the dog, I went down to the pool and had an early bath. By this and other devices I man- aged to fill in the time until I saw the muslin skirt and the Florentine hat glancing in the perspective, and, as I live, the Doctor was with her, and was carrying her milk-pail. He had come up the night before and stopped at the Hotchkiss house. He looked me all over with a quick glance, and said : — " What have you been doing ? You look as melancholy as if you had been editing a comic paper." As Griselle slipped into the house, I told him. " It's anxiety. I've got to move to-day. Going to the city. Nature cure no good. Theory don't work. Nature played out. Had an attack. Just where I was when I started. If I must shuffle off, I propose to do it where my last moments will be cheered with the strains of a hand-organ, and they can put me up in ice for keeps." He did not pay much attention to my words. He was reading my condition and let me run on. " Couldn't possibly stick it out here all winter. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that I would rather go to the city and die than stay here and live." " All right," he said ; " that's easy. Did you make up your mind since last night ? " 149 A JOURNEY TO NATURE " Yes — had a second warning/* Just then Griselle came to the door with the coffee-pot in her hand. "Why, whatever have you done with the coffee ? The pot is more than half full of grounds." " Oh, I made coffee for supper last night," I said carelessly. " Let me look at it," said the Doctor. He took the coffee-pot and looked into it. " Must have used about a pound, didn't you ? " "I suppose so — that's about the usual amount, isn't it ? " " And drank the whole of it, of course ? " " Certainly." He looked at me a moment rather benignantly, and then he said : — " Well, let's go in and get our breakfast, and we'll talk it over afterward. Griselle has got some quail to broil, and Gabe has brought over a basket of cantaloupes that will make you more comfortable. Then you can pack up and go to the city. I'm going to stay a week or two." " What — you ? Why, I want your advice." " Then you'll have to stay here to get it." 150 CHAPTER XIII MATURE TRUANTS THE next day he laughed me out of my de- termination to abandon the woods and go to the city. I could defy his advice, but I could not withstand his laughter. He warned me with considerable mirthfulness, which I thought superfluous, against what he called mer- curial moods — city vestiges. Men who never know when the east wind blows and do not care a fig how much humidity is in the atmosphere, were the best men for practical purposes. Alto- gether he had a good deal of jolly contempt for what he called " the impertinent valetudinarian sensibilities." The man who never knew that he had a stomach, a heart, or even a brain, was the man for him, for he came the nearest to Nature's ideal. A man who would drink three cups of black coffee, smoke six cigars, and then turn into bed would be very apt to construct a vast and dangerous theory of heart disease before 151 A JOURNEY TO NATURE morning, and ought to be kept on milk and apples. Then I got a very edifying lecture on heart disease, that I cannot remember, for it was studded all over with technical names that stood out like the brass nails on a hair trunk, but it left a rather satisfactory impression on my mind that the heart was a gay deceiver and played more pranks with a man than any other organ, if it once succeeded in attracting attention to itself The only way to treat it was with respectful dis- dain as not belonging to one's conscious set. The Doctor was one of those physicians who radiate health instead of prescribing it. He said once that he got his diploma from Nature, and had been forty years matriculating. But he had the document of his human Alma Mater framed and hung up in his study, all the same, and I could afford to take his hyperboles with good humour, as when he said that six out of ten sick men would acquire health if they could only be restored to primitive ignorance ; they knew too much to be normal. Absurd as all this was, it nevertheless had a reviving effect that was inscrutable, like a smell of terebinth. The Doctor exuded balm of Gilead in his talk. It was always an exaggerated and lusty kind of assertion that struck you like the afflatus of the pine woods when the west wind blows. It was as if he had more health himself than he knew what to do with, and so shed it in his conversation. 152 MATURE TRUANTS " I'll tell you what we'll do," he said to me one evening. " We'll take our sticks and get out of the beaten track." " Where shall we go ? " I asked. " Ah, that's it. We will just go like derelicts. There shall be no goal and no purpose and no provision, and then the way will be full of sur- prises. We shall never know where we are or what the morrow will bring forth. We will divest ourselves of all intent, and fill ourselves with the delight of a road that leads nowhere. Did you ever try that experiment ? " " I never did, at least, since I played truant." "Happy word — truant. Let us be truants for a few days ; run away from our arrogant volitions and let the great tides of unconcern swing us with their ebb and flow. It will be evangelical." " Be what ? " " Evangelical." " It might be jolly, but I never associated jol- lity with an evangel." "That's because you are thinking of it theo- logically, and I am speaking of it etymologically ; simply good news, without telegraph-wires. Something like the dew, always encompassing, but only obvious when you are cool enough to condense it. I cannot imagine anything so evan- gelical as to strip one's self down to a purposeless passivity and issue a general invitation to the nature of things to say what it has to say in its own way. Did it ever occur to you that the race 153 A JOURNEY TO NATURE would have destroyed itself long ago if there had not been an iron hand which crushed down its impertinence once every twenty-four hours and said : ' Nothingness, if you please, for seven hours ; say your prayers and shut your eyes in helplessness, and I will try and repair damages'?" I must have laughed, not disrespectfully, but with that kind of gleeful surprise that one experi- ences when he sees a Scripture quotation in a yel- low journal, for he said: — " It sounds fanciful to you. Let me tell you that in my profession I have many a time come face to face with the Benign Universal doing for man what his individualism could not do for itself. Just as soon as his self-determination was suspended entirely, some kind of protective arm seemed to wind itself around him. You never saw a somnambulist walk on the dizzy edge of a precipice, did you ? " " I congratulate my nerves that I never did." "Well, I did. If we had recalled her to con- sciousness, she would have broken her neck. You have probably seen a drunken man do things that would have killed a sober man." " True ; but I never felt that in the nature of things one was safer when intoxicated than when sober." " It wasn't necessary to drav/ any such con- clusion. Because Nature takes pity on a drunken man, you needn't imitate him. It is only neces- sary to perceive that back of the free and defiant agent is another which cannot make itself operative 154 MATURE TRUANTS unless the subject is passively obedient. There is a profound mystery of benignity in the drugs that kill, when handled by the practitioner, for in his hands they kill the volition without kiUing the patient.'* " Doctor, if I had a tail I would wag it. The ideal man is obviously an automaton." " He ought to be, not statically, like a codfish, but alternately, like a prophet, who bows his head at times and is content to be played upon. "It has always been the religious way of acknowl- edging the Not Me. It might also be the vital way. Did it ever occur to you that all the mas- ter volitions of the world that history has made us acquainted with utterly failed to accompHsh what they set out to do ? Take Charlemagne, Bonaparte, Luther, Wesley, as examples. They had one purpose. Events had another, and they were swept along to a goal they never saw. On the other hand, those other geniuses, Phidias, Shakspere, St. Paul, who lost themselves in their work, lived forever in it. Themselves from God they could not free. Fancy Shakspere giving such an exposition of ' The Tempest ' as Poe did of ' The Bells,' or explaining how he formed his style, as our amiable friend Stevenson has done. When Shakspere, or Dante, or Isaiah executed a chef d' oeuvre^ he did not explain it intellectually and call himself ' big Injun.' Those old fellows rubbed their eyes with a glad surprise and sang psalms : ' I will show forth all Thy marvellous works. I will be glad and rejoice in Thee.' So 155 A JOURNEY TO NATURE does art, to use the words of an eloquent French- man, 'continue the dream of God.' " After this rhapsody the Doctor got up and played with the yellow dog a moment, as if there might be some brute confirmation of what he said in tale-wagging and spontaneous irrelevancy. As I said nothing, he came back to me gustily. "You'll pardon me, old chap, for stufiing a conversation with a lecture. Forget all about it and let's play truant. I have an idea it will put you on your spiritual legs, so to speak. We do not need a formal introduction to the unpredica- ble and eternal. All we have to do is to snub ourselves. At all events we can imitate the laxity of sleep for a while. There's recuperation in it. I've tried it." One morning we started off early, roughly but properly " togged," without knowing where we were going. I confess that there was a boyish zest in the uncertainty and freedom of it. We were unfamiliar with the country except in the immediate neighbourhood of the farm, and we had looked at no map and asked no questions. Charlie was left in the care of Griselle, with the puzzling understanding that we did not know when we should be back. The moment we were out of sight of the house, the Doctor asked me if I felt any of the true inwardness of being a tramp. I told him I thought I had some faint premoni- tions of it. "Wait," he said, " till we have to beg our dinner, and they ask us to saw wood." How exhilarating that walk was ! There are 156 MATURE TRUANTS times when the body exults in motion. The human machine springs to its work with wings, and all the forces of the man exert a stimulating pressure to the square inch. It is apt to be on such an morning as was that in September, with a bright sun shining, white clouds sailing over a deep blue sky, with a fresh westerly breeze, and the roads yet damp with the late rain ; something, too, in the companionship, as if kindred spirits were keeping step, or, better still, had taken hold of hands, as children do when they romp. The air was heavy with the fragrance of the wild-grape vines, and the fields were deliciously russet — just that melting gradation of sienna and tawny smears, running into a dull Naples yellow, that you see on a finely baked custard — and fringed with early goldenrod. The old road ran be- tween stone walls, only visible here and there through the flaming blackberry vines^ but backed up with great hedgerows, out of which the wild- cherry trees and the elderberry, heavy with their burdens, thrust themselves into view along with the scrawny crab-apples. All that was seen of human beings for several miles were the labourers stacking the corn in the fields, and they gave no heed to us. Once we passed a farm wagon heavily loaded with great yellow pumpkins, and we left it far behind creaking its way lazily. Now and then a house by the roadside seemingly deserted, but oftener the roofs of old-fashioned homesteads sticking out of the vistas at a safe distance from the highway, making themselves known as domes- 157 A JOURNEY TO NATURE tic centres by the cry of the pea-hens or the bark of a dog, and generally having an index-finger stuck up in the shape of a well-sweep. Once we came upon a printed warning : " No trespassing on these grounds, under penalty of the law. Beware of the dogs." That stopped us. I think rt jarred a little on the general sense of looseness and laziness. The Doctor looked at me inquiringly, and I undertook to explain : — " Modern improvements," I said ; " lawns, coverts, perhaps a preserve." The Doctor climbed up on the fence and ex- amined the sign. " It has been painted about ten years, I should judge," he said. " Suppose we investigate it." " I am with you," I said. " I can take care of one dog if you will look out for the other." We climbed over the fence, went through the trees and underbrush, and came out on a road that had once been gravelled. It brought us to a house, mansion-like in proportions, with the shut- ters tight and the doors boarded up. In front stood an old broken vase, with vestiges of a foun- tain and some broken pieces of plaster that may have been a statuCc We sat down and surveyed the melancholy pile. " The country is dotted with them every ten miles from Penobscot to the Golden Gate," said the Doctor. " I'll warrant that some old sea-cap- tain who gave his life to battling with the ocean comforted himself up to the time of his dotage with retirement on a farm. Doubtless he was a 158 MATURE TRUANTS whaling master and thought Nantucket was con- ventional. He came here and tried to shiver timbers and pipe all the affections on deck, after the affections had died of the scurvy. Then the loneliness of it killed him, and none of his heirs have had the decency to take that sign down.'* Then he chuckled, as he always did, to take the edge off an absurdity. " Perhaps," I ventured to remark, "if we could get at the heart of these old farmers who never die, we should find that they had a similar inten- tion, to end their days on a whaler." " No," said the Doctor, " it will not work both ways.^ What you have called the homing instinct is universal, but the migratory instinct is not. The trouble with the homing instinct is, with most men, that it is unaccompanied by a homing capacity. It is so with all of us. As we grow old, the desire to return is irresistible, but the capacity to return is gone. I say, old fellow, if yoyi want to do the prodigal-son business, don't wait until you are old. What do you suppose was the age of that young man in the Bible story ? " "Judging from his recklessness, I should say he was about sixty-two." The Doctor sat down on the edge of the foun- tain. "By the way," he said, "I wonder how that old germ story would have survived if it had been told realistically and not dramatically." " Dramatically ? " "Certainly. Notice how it falls, away back 159 A JOURNEY TO NATURE there, into five acts. You can put the descrip- tive titles to each act just as the dramatists do. There is the first act, the Happy Family; second act, the Estrangement and Temptation; third act, the Suffering and Remorse ; fi3urth act, the Return ; fifth act, the Merrymaking. There is a shadow flits over it in the brother's envy, and then all ends happily. Out of this fecund little vesicle of a tale, how many thousands of the world's legends have been wrought without ever improving on the subtle simplicity of the original, or broadening the ethical and romantic ground plan of a return. The whole fabric of the peo- ple's legendary fiction, from the wandering of Ulysses to the waking of Rip Van Winkle, seems to have been woven upon the postulate of a re- turn, and when the imaginations of men tried to fashion the most dreadful of possibilities, they invented the Wandering Jew, for whom there was no return. I wonder how Zola or Bourget would have written the story of the prodigal. What penetration into the customs and manners and hereditary fatalism of the riotous livers ; what accurate and thrilling photographs of the swine; how pathetic the futile attempts of the Prodigal to escape from the seductive determinism of husks, and how admirably he would have failed to arrive at the proper moment, when the father was wait- ing for him, because he had blown his brains out or cut his throat with a potsherd on the way. Allans, brother, I prefer the highway." We descended slowly into a valley, which grew i6o MATURE TRUANTS shadowy and wet, and there was the traditional rustic bridge across a narrow stream. The Doc- tor looked at his watch. " How far," he asked, " do you suppose we have come ? " I thought five miles. He calculated eight. It was noon. We leaned against the old hand-rail and looked at each other. "^ Doctor," said I, " I acknowledge the prodigal feeling — it is located mainly in my stomach." He pointed down the stream to a flat rock, very mossy and canopied by a marsh poplar. "Let us repair," he said, " to yon umbrageous spot. I have bread and butter with home-cured ham interpolated, not to mention two hard-boiled eggs, prepared by the dainty fingers of the girl we have left behind. I will promise you not to lecture." i6i CHAPTER XIV THE BAPTISM OF DIRT SEPTEMBER sets her quiet banquets occa- sionally, and, like Hamlet, we eat the air, promise-crammed. There are breakfasts of sunrise and long hours of aerial lunch, when the atmosphere is golden with invisible fruit, and all one can do is to feed the senses. Then it is thai the old, worn earth is very beautiful, as she sits with her hands crossed in her bounteous lap. With her labour all finished, one might say that she crooned softly on a royal death-bed. It is at this rare interval of fruition and expectancy that the poor devils lock their studio doors and steal away to the woods and mountains to lay in inspi- ration after society has fled. September to them is a rustic sweetheart, who welcomes them with fruity breath and large calm eyes of blue. Then it is that they renew their youth, looking for the sleeping princess, and become princes themselves in fairy solitudes. 162 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT No one but the artist knows how eloquently still and prophetic September is. It is her rest that floods him with inscrutable delight, and coaxes out of him the longings and the hopes that enter into and unite with the great inarticu- late psalm. I say " hopes " deliberately ; and yet faith would be a better word, for the aesthetic nature gets mildly and rehgiously intoxicated: — *' His-faith is fast That all the loveliness he'd sing Is made to bear the mortal blast And blossom in a better spring." It is only the artist who can see the possible sunrise in the actual sunset. In the Doctor's office in the city there is hung upon his wall one Scripture motto. I have often looked at it wonderingly, asking myself what it meant, and how it came to be there. This is what it says : — " For thus saith the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel. In returning and in rest shall ye be saved. In quietness and confidence shall be your strength, and ye would not." One day I was waiting there with an artist friend, who was badly run down, and needed advice. We expected the Doctor to come in at any moment. My friend stood looking at the text, musingly. "Well," I asked, "what do you make of it?" He looked at me dreamily, and said : — 163 A JOURNEY TO NATURE " I don't know why, but it put me in mind of a day in September. I suppose those old prophets lived in a kind of autumn of the soul. Did you never have a thought rustle like the dead leaves ? " The Doctor and I sat down on a sloping rock, eating bread and butter. Jack Horner was a pessimist compared with us. To be able to eat bread and butter at all was one of the victories of the natural over the artificial man, but to eat it voraciously and want more seemed to strike the Doctor as a moral victory. There was only one higher plane, he thought, for me, and it was to be able to eat mush and milk with joy and thank- fulness. The beautiful mountain stream ran swirlingly but softly in front of us, weaving and melting into confluent and vanishing curves, and making an intoxicating chromotype of colour, as it swept in under the overhanging shadows and out again into the radiant sunlight, murmuring very softly as if subdued to the season. Here and there a cardinal-flower, that leaned over to look at itself out of its own green and tangled cloister, shot a spark of colour downward, and against a gnarled bank the water spun silver tissues over the old gold of the sand. Somewhere out of sight, we could hear the muflled drum-beat of a little cas- cade pounding against the wet rock. That was all. It was like an oboe uncertainly played. We both listened. " Does the stillness oppress you with its melancholy?" asked the Doctor. 164 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT I was not at all sure. There was something pensive in it, I thought. It was as if Nature were holding her breath. " I never could under- stand," I said, " why the banquet of the year should be tinged with solemnity." " I can only offer a suggestion," remarked the Doctor. "All the other months of the season are obtrusive and jocund with incessant prepara- tion. July and August burst into insistence with the pressure of life. Everything, from the tiniest spark of animation to the highest form of animal beauty and instinct, made those summer months a workshop. They hammered, and wove, and spun, and built, and multiplied, and rounded it all up completely in perfect obedience, singing, and chirping, and warbling, and flashing to get it all done. They have finished the work and gone away. It is impossible for a man to come face to face with this glad consummation and rest without feeling some kind of self-reproach. There is something that he has not finished. A mocking voice tells him he never will. That is what Pascal meant when he said that the superiority of a man to a tree is that the tree does not know that it is miserable, and Emerson somewhere says that man would not love Nature so childishly if he were good." Then the Doctor pulled up suddenly, as he always did when he found himself getting preachy, and said : " There is a sawmill a mile or two up this stream. There may be hospitality and bread and milk there." 165 A JOURNEY TO NATURE " How do you know ? " I asked ; " you never were here before." "True/' he replied, "but there is sawdust in the water, and the bank is wet a foot or two higher than the stream, as if somebody opened his flume occasionally.'' The road, after passing over the little river on the bridge, turned at a sharp bend and ran paral- lel with the banks for some distance, under the grateful shade of chestnuts and elms, the open- ings in which afforded us continual glimpses of the water, here broken into foamy hurries and there spread out in dark pools. Not a bird sang in the branches. The only vestiges of summer life that we encountered for a mile or two were some crows caucusing in a dead tree that looked, against the blue sky, Hke a bunch of antlers, and now and then we met with the little white butter- flies that flutter in couples and look like wayward petunias blown about by imperceptible winds. We were winding through the heart of real rus- ticity. Here and there we saw the bent labourers at work digging potatoes. Looked at from the distance, they presented all the aspects of ignoble drudgery, grubbing for what at best must be a scanty living. As the sun approached the hori- zon, and we began to wonder where we should put up for the night, I suggested that we had better interview some of these field hands as to our whereabouts, and at last we crawled over a stone fence and made our way through stubble and furrows, and past long rows of bagged po- i66 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT tatoeSj to a distant group, consisting of two men and a woman, who were digging away mechani- cally. " Good day, friends," said the Doctor, breezily; '' we are strangers and have lost our way." One of the men leaned on his hoe and looked us over. The others went on with their work. " Where do you want to go ? " the man asked. " Anywhere, my friend, so that we can get a supper and a night's lodging. We are on a bit of a jaunt for our health and have lost our bear- ings." The Doctor pulled out a very handsome watch and looked at it. " It's a quarter of five," he said. " Perhaps you can direct us so that we can reach the nearest stopping-place before night." I could not very well suppress a feeling of pity as the man wiped the sweat from his face with a cotton handkerchief and regarded us with a dull astonishment. He must have been sixty years old. His hard sinewy hands were like tangled roots, his face was tanned to a mahogany colour, so that the white hairs on it looked grizzly. He wore an old torn felt hat, and he took it off and fanned himself as he said : — " Wanderin' around loose, hey .? Which way was you pointin' .? " The Doctor looked at me, and we both laughed. It would not do to tell this pragmatic rustic that we had abandoned all definite intentions. " We were examining the country," said the Doctor, with magnificent indefiniteness. " Isn't there a mill somewheres about ? " 167 A JOURNEY TO NATURE " Only a sawmill. Runnin' fire-wood now. Jedge Butcher's farm's about three miles west — there's nothin' between him an' me 'cept the saw- mill. Milligan's Corner's two miles beyond." " Do you feel able to do five miles more ? " asked the undiminished Doctor. At this the young woman spoke up. " Why don't you ask the gentlemen to stop with us, Dad — that's what they're fishin' for. We can spare 'em some grub." "The team'll be along in a minute or two," said the old man. " If you've a mind to go back with us, we can feed yer." Then the three of them fell to digging again without any further reference to us. The Doctor picked up one of the potatoes. It was as big as his two fists. While we were making compli- mentary remarks that did not call for any inter- ruption of the work, a farm v/agon, drawn by two lusty horses and driven by a boy, came up. This was the signal to stop, and immediately the labourers seemed to recover their humanity. The girl shook the soil off her heavy skirt, threw her hoe into the wagon, and entered at once into conversation with us, while the men lifted a few of the filled bags into the wagon. She was a slim, but nervy damsel, with a very red face, and a pair of bright eyes. She stepped over the furrows with a vigorous and easy grace that surprised me. " It's pretty hard work on a woman," she said; "but our hired man had his two fingers cut off in i68 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT the mill, and, being short-handed, I had to turn in with the rest. It's the biggest crop we ever had, and the old man wanted to get it in." "It's a magnificent crop of potatoes," said the Doctor, with the easy air of an expert. " What's it worth ? " " Well, if the old man don't realize fivQ hun- dred on it, he'll be sick at Christmas. It won't run as good as that more'n once in five years. Now, if you'll pile into that wagon, we'll take you with us." We drew up at a long, low house hidden away in locust trees, very ancestral, I thought, for peas- ants. A shaft of ruddy light shot into the road from the summer kitchen, where a motherly dame in a white apron stood in the doorway with her hand over her eyes, trying to make out what had arrived in the wagon, a curiosity that suddenly broke out in a shrill call, " Mercy on me, Lize, who you got there ? " "All right, mommy," said Lize. "I'll be there in a minute. Now, then, I suppose you want to wrench the dirt off. I'll show you the basin." How deliciously cool and vitalizing that well water was. I put my head down into it, and it had a fine magnetism in it. It was not long before Lize came out on the porch where we were waiting for her. She was attired in a clean mus- lin dress with a baby waist. She had evidently "wrenched" herself expeditiously and thoroughly, and she came out, as the Doctor said, like a silk- 169 A JOURNEY TO NATURE worm. Presently we went in to supper with the warning from Lize that we would have to take what we could get. There was something inex- pressibly bright ^and inviting about the homeli- ness of that supper table, with its kerosene lamp and blue shade, its mug of marigolds, its spotless white cloth, and a certain simple bounty in the great dish of steaming biscuit and superb roll of sweet butter, to say nothing of the cold meat and potatoes and the homely earthen teapot. The old man held up his gnarled hands and mumbled some hardly articulate v/ords of thanks, and we fell to as readily and easily as if we were in a Bedouin tent and a kid had been killed for us. I thought I detected in the curiosity of our hosts a latent pity for persons who came from the city, which was to them a place where men took their lives in their hands and were always in danger of jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge from excess of excitement or to escape from the noise. The old lady thought it must be awfully tedious to be always on the hop, skip, and jump for fear of being crushed by an electric car. She said she always felt when she was in a crowd as if she had the pleurisy coming on again, and there wasn't a scrap of boneset in the county. Broadway to her was like a bull-yard with a fence down, and the old lady said this with a calm superiority as if she were looking down on us through her spectacles from some primitive Elysium. I really felt as if the Doctor's Scripture motto 170 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT had been woven out of drudgery into the fine autumnal lines of her benign old face. I have to confess that in coming upon this bit of picturesque slavishness I regarded it at first as an artist might, thinking it good enough to paint, but not good enough to emulate. It was impossible for my artificial daintiness to avoid feeling for it a slight pity of superiority, which was of course only an evidence that I knew nothing whatever about it. I had grown into that sort of hypersensitive- ness which calls soil " dirt," and regards physical labour in the furrow as something which every self- respecting American has outgrown by three gen- erations. I'm afraid that if my conclusions at the time had been brought to light, they would have been found to be, that superior intellects never delved, only aspired ; that American enterprise did not bother about making dirt fat with an hundred fold, but washed and dressed itself and stood round to intercept with gloved hands some of the money that passed from the consumer to the producer. I dare say that, at first contact with this group, I was Mohammedan enough in my sensibilities to believe that a girl in a tow frock could by no pos- sibility become a Peri. All this is contemptibly un-American by the record, and I am frankly ashamed of it now. But it needed just such a clod-hopping Peri to wipe the scales from my eyes with the end of her tow frock. That she " wrenched " herself in a pail of spring water, or had a scented bath in some upper grotto of her own, I do not know, but she shed her clod- 171 A JOURNEY TO NATURE hopper integuments like a columbine, for they were, after all, only an improvisation, and she came out in a baby waist of muslin with short sleeves, and fluttered a little guidon of ribbon in her rich molasses-coloured hair, that made her look, upon my word, like one of those late morning-glories on Gabe's porch. I could not help thinking as I watched her pre- side at that tea-table — that was what she called it — with an innate and facile self-possession, and saw with what unconscious chivalry the two men treated her, how easily she would effect the trans- formation to a fine lady when some well-to-do fellow pulled her up by the roots from her furrow and planted her in his conservatory. I had seen this marvellous plasticity of the uncut American diamond in Paris and in London. How quick she would cease to say " wrench " and " Pop " and take to saying, " Bless my soul, governor." Not a suspicion of the furrow in two years, not even the freckles. If you destroy that possibility, you nip the American progress in the bud. Of course she was not of as fine a mettle as Griselle ; I hope I have made it tolerably clear before this, that few girls could be. But there was about her a certain honest, easy, transparent dig- nity, with contentment that refreshed. She was not ashamed of potatoes. That fact wrung from me a silent tribute before I knew it. She showed us her cottage piano and the inevitable sewing- machine in the little parlour, not as one shows furniture, but as one shows an acquirement, for 172 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT she said as she pointed to one, " potatoes," and as she pointed to the other, " lima beans." There was a surveyor's level in the corner of the room, and seeing us regard it with surprise, she said : "Oh, that's Ike's — he's getting the levels of the south fields, so as to run the water from the cold spring into the house." Ike had been to the seminary at some time in his life. There was an hour or two of conversation on the grass-plot after supper, where the old man smoked his clay pipe regularly. He would no more dare to smoke it in that homely dining room than he would dare to go to bed with his boots on. Then we were shown to a chamber, the peasant girl holding the kerosene lamp for us like that colossal girl in our harbour, and saying : " Pleasant dreams, gents. I'll rap on your door at six o'clock if you're not up ;" and we both heard her starched skirts rustle down the stairs. We went immedi- ately to bed between sheets that smelled of sweet balsam, and if the Doctor snored I did not notice it. I was awakened by the rumble of the wagon, and saw in the early mists the two men going to the potato-field, one of them whistling cheerily, his notes coming back to me like a skylark's, long after he was out of sight. At the breakfast table we had an opportunity of conversing more leisurely with the Peri of the Soil. She poured our coffee — very good coffee it was, with fresh cream in it — and she served us with fresh eggs and home-cured bacon and hot corn-meal muffins, and, placing a receptacle of 173 A JOURNEY TO NATURE sewing material beside the cofFee-pot, she pulled up a chair and employed her time in fitting a new neck-band on a hickory shirt, while we ate. " I should suppose," said the Doctor, " that even so charming a home as this would sometimes be a little lonesome to you." " Lonesome " evidently had a different mean- ing for her. She repeated the word inquiringly, as if it had never occurred to her before. " I guess people don't get lonesome if they have enough to do," she said, and the Doctor smiled significantly at me, as if he wanted to insert an aside to the effect that digging potatoes does not ruin horse sense. Then she added, " I suppose anybody could find lonesomeness if he had time to wander around looking for it. I should think you would have found it on the road." " Yes, but we had had too much of the other thing and were trying to get away from it. I sup- pose it's very different with you." " Yes," she said, " I guess it is. What were you looking for on the road ? " At that the Doctor guffawed outright. " What was it we were looking for ? " he asked me, as if he needed prompting, and the girl, seeing there was some hesitancy, tried to help us out. " You wasn't lookin' for work, was you ? " " No," replied the Doctor, " not exactly. We were both of us a little overworked, and we were looking for rest and a change. Everybody needs them at times. I dare say now, even you would like a change sometimes." 174 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT She let the hickory shirt drop in her lap and looked into vacancy a moment, as if she had seen a phantom temptation pass by. " There's a good many stragglers stop here in the course of the year," she said, "but they are never women." The Doctor instantly corroborated this idea. "I understand," he said. "Women can be al- most everything that men can be, except tramps. But we are not tramps." " No, you don't talk like tramps. I have been tryin' to make out what you are." " Neighbours," I ventured. " We are staying at the Hotchkiss farm for a while." "Oh, is that so — Gabe Hotchkiss's. It ain't so lonesome there, I guess." " It's about the same kind of a farm as this. They raise the same kind of stuff." " We never could raise city boarders," she said rather shyly. " I heard Gabe would be sellin' the place. I suppose his niece will be gettin' married. She's had plenty of chances." As this verged upon gossip, and we were not disposed to discuss our friends, the breakfast came to an end ; and shortly afterward, when we were about to set out, the girl slipped a package of luncheon into the Doctor's pocket, and when we were some distance down the road, feeling sure that we would look back, she waved an adieu to us with the hickory shirt. "What do you suppose she meant by saying 175 A JOURNEY TO NATURE Griselle would be getting married ? '* I asked the Doctor. "A general instinct of her sex," he replied vaguely. " A girl like Griselle is not apt to die an old maid." " What kind of a man do you suppose she will be apt to marry ? " " I can tell you better," said the Doctor, " the kind of a man she v/ill not marry. It will be the kind you have fixed in your mind that she ought to marry." We were walking along the grassy path by the side of the road rather briskly, and at this speech I stopped short ; and the Doctor doing the same thing, we both stood there a moment, looking each other in the face. " Did you mean that for a warning, or is it one of your glittering generalities ? " " I meant it for a conclusion, based upon ob- served facts. You have of course allowed your- self to fall in love with Griselle." " Why do you say, ' of course ' ? " " Because I am better aware than you are of the general tendency of mankind." " Do you mean to say that the general ten- dency is to fall in love with Griselle ? " " I mean to say that the general tendency, when there is only one girl in sight, is to think that she is the only one in existence." " Oh, rubbish ; you are putting up your feel- ings as scientific data." " And you are verifying my suspicions by talk- 176 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT ing as if you were actually jealous. Let's change the subject before we quarrel. This is a regener- ating morning. Look at those flaming maples. Did you ever see such dyes ? Great Scott ! what a depth of feeling there is in yellow, if it be only spattered with a little scarlet. Do you know, I think yellow is the major note, after all. It repre- sents in the visual world what sodium does in the universe. Everything tries to imitate gold when it can. There's no passion in it. The magnifi- cent calm of the Chinese has some affiliation with chrome yellow. The Mongolian probably wears the original livery of Eden." We walked on. "Doctor," I said, "suppos- ing such a thing possible, do you see anything very preposterous in a large, cool, mature admira- tion for a girl like Griselle.^ " " Large, cool, mature admirations are not pos- sible outside of the domain of external nature. Observe that delicious field of burnt umber just turned up ; I suppose it is ready for fall plant- ing — rye perhaps. How silver gray every stone in it looks in this light, and how vivid the stems of those white birches by the brook, against it all. Do you know, my boy, there is something restful and recuperative in good virgin dirt ^ I've got half a dozen hysterical patients who could draw some kind of earthy virtue from the brown field if I could only take their tight shoes off and make them run barefoot in those furrows. Did it ever occur to you that civilization, in abolishing dirt, is very apt to substitute filth ? A ploughed 177 A JOURNEY TO NATURE field is not half as nasty as the average vaude- ville. " I was thinking," I said, " that a woman like Griselle might really express in her perfection what inanimate Nature is continually trying to say, and cannot." " There are two Griselles, my boy. One is in Gabe's farmhouse, and the other is in your im- agination. There goes an early flock of wild ducks. Listen — you can hear the beat of the wings. I suppose, now, John Burroughs could tell us if they are canvasbacks or mallards by the formation of the flying wedge; but I can't." " You see," I continued, " a man don't know much about a woman until he gets to be forty." The Doctor broke in on my speech with : — "Wait till you are sixty, my boy. A man really doesn't know much about women at forty. You will allow that the judgment is more secure, less Hable to be disturbed by mere amorousness, and better able to estimate the intrinsic qualities and the sterHng worth of character when he is sixty. One is not so apt to be moved by a pretty face. He sees the essentials more clearly. Keep your eye on that distant hne of hills a moment. Notice how they deepen in colour, if you watch them, when one of those white clouds obscures the light. But they never change their forms. The atmosphere in September is very moody and expresses itself in clouds, much more fantastically than in April. I suppose it is be- caAise the landscape has more colour in it. Sep- 178 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT tember reminds me of a man who has reached forty years of age. Listen to the cider-presses, down in that meadow. It's the Yankee's vintage time." " I have remarked that girl carefully," I said. " She has a magic that defies environment and conditions. She doesn't escape drudgery. She invites and transforms it. Her contented nature is a continual harvest home. I wonder if it is true that Gabe intends to sell out and marry her off." " Doubtless," said the Doctor. " She is proba- bly engaged to the village blacksmith. Do you smell the wild grapes ? They hang high on those old buttonball trees." " I mentioned to you once before that she is devotedly attached to Charlie." " He probably doesn't invest her with any magical virtues. I don't think you enjoy such a morning as this as keenly as I do. This air re- minds me of one of those English glees that require men's voices. There is always a lusty eagerness in them. Take that glorious old song of ' Hail, Smiling Morn ' — SpofFort's, I think. How exultant and Saxon ! The voices all seem to be horns. We can't write those songs any more. We seem to have left September out of the repertory. Curious, isn't it, that the farther West music gets, the less muscle it has." " But you must certainly see that CharHe would be greatly benefited if he had a tenderer hand than mine to shape and guide him while he is ductile." 179 A JOURNEY TO NATURE " Did you ever drink any apple juice warm out of a press ? Let's go down that old cow-path in the meadow and get a tin dipper full of it." "A man who has a child," I remarked, "must take into consideration his responsibihty. It's a weight he cannot shirk." " But we agreed to leave all our responsibilities behind us," broke in the Doctor. " Come on, down the cowpath. We are free from all the temporary attachments of the Hotchkiss menage. Nothing will follow us, if we keep in the cow-path — there's a rabbit or something in that bush — look. No, it isn't a rabbit — well, I'll be blessed." And at that moment the yellow dog put her head through the bushes, and we could see by the disturbance of the leaves that she was wagging her tail inquiringly, Paul Pry fashion, and trying to say, " I hope I don't intrude." I replied to the Doctor with a subtle look of triumph, but I refrained from gloating over him. i8o CHAPTER XV A FRINGED GENTIAN THE burning leaves and stubble filled the air with a smoky haze, which to the artistic eye is like going over a poem and taking the superfluous adjectives out of it. The autum- nal foliage has misty recessions, as if one saw the perspectives through a delicate gauze, as we some- times see them in the theatre. It is during the bright days when September has merged into October that our landscapes wear for a while the softened gradations that a wet chmate affords, and which the English artists, who visit us in August, always miss. They shade their eyes from the chromatic garishness of Midsummer, as if the loveHness were too pronounced. But now the emphasis gives way to suggestiveness. Every- thing is mellowed by the intervening medium. October does for our picture what time has done for most of the European pictures. The sumach and the Virginia creeper, those proletariats of the i«i A JOURNEY TO NATURE American autumn, that flaunt themselves in red shirts and mob caps, are seen through smoked glass. Even the sharply outlined white clouds of September that were so like majolica work in their insistent contrast, have now ripened and melted away at the edges, and have assumed an entirely new fitness to the general drowse. If you have ever stood upon the Galata bridge at Constantinople in the morning, and looked across the Golden Horn upon Stamboul, you must have been conscious that in those old coun- tries the atmosphere forever prevents colour from becoming impertinent. Man has nowhere lifted so much architectural blazonry into the air as there. The historic city is a pile of softened dyes — gold, and crimson, and scarlet, melting into impalpable greens and swept above and below by a flashing cobalt blue. But it is like a picture of Titian's with its imperishable gamut of pigments played in a low key by time itself. It is only in October that external Nature with us puts on those vanishing distances. It is then only that our Alleghanies and the great bulks of the Rocky Mountains, which are so like the rug- ged peremptoriness of a Western statesman or a muscular tragedian, catch up with the Tyrol in spectral beauty. The sky drops down with a mantle of gauze and wraps the peaks in opales- cent garments, so that the stalwart limbs of the great range imitate the voluptuousness of a half- draped beauty. There is always a week in Octo- ber when Nature holds a bit of yellow glass to 182 A FRINGED GENTIAN our eyes, and, like children, we catch a glimpse of the golden age. I dare say that the paradi- saical fancies of all peoples have been caught through the cathedral windows of the woods in this voluptuous month. I never knew until the Doctor and I set out to make the acquaintance of October what a sweet mystery it enfolded. Once under the spell I could not quite rid myself of the notion that Nature has her dim religious lights, and sits at times, like Jeremy Taylor's widow, in a clean apron with her hands crossed and her work done. It was impossible not to feel that she had laid her soft muffling finger upon all the cognitions. Every sense was hushed and recipient. Every sound that summer makes sharp and sibilant sunk to a drowsy pianissimo. Every breeze murmured. Even the crows had interposed mel- lowing spaces. I heard them in a new perspec- tive. It was so with the visual world. I saw that it was drawing a soft drapery around it, and animate things were hushed as if they had come into the chancel of the year. So, too, October has her special symbols and inscrutable souvenirs, one of which the Doctor hunted up and brought me with as much honest delight as if he had found a new reading of Shak- spere, or an old Biblical text had risen up and fitted itself to a new want. Later we seated ourselves at the foot of a gentle slope, having reached a narrow and brambly mar- gin of a broad meadow. Over on the other side 183 A JOURNEY TO NATURE we could see the gnarled and fantastic apple trees, where an old orchard sprawled out into the level land. We heard the softened voices of men and women, who were gathering apples and making cider, and the intermittent creak of the cider-mill was not unlike a late cricket. That such a vista should lay hold of the sensi- bilities of two unlike men of the world, not at all given to the " album business," as the Doctor called it, was, I thought, notable, and as I sat down to drink it all in, 1 remarked that it was like one of those old strains of Bellini's that have a cloying sweetness. But the Doctor thought not. It was an harmonic complex, making interminable music without bars. It reminded him of the swan music in Lohengrin. Whether it was the season or the mood we brought to it, I do not know, but we sat silent a moment to let it play its own tune upon us. Out in the middle of the meadow a winding stream had spread itself into a little la- goon, and round about were pools which looked like blue eyes, and over them the huckleberry bushes leaned, barring and etching the water with a delicate tracery. On either side the grasses spread out in orange, bronze, and tawny bands that melted into each other and made of the meadow a spectrum of the season. These visual rhythms go very deep into a man's subconsciousness, and the Doctor warned me not to disturb them with any asstheticism. " They cannot be unravelled," he said, " and they resent explication. In that sense they are a higher kind 184 A FRINGED GENTIAN of music that fits itself to man's needs only in his unquestioning acceptance." But I was thinking of Griselle, and what I wanted to know was why a meadow should call up that maid, and October invite her into every tender picture that it painted on its way. So I asked the Doctor if the beguilement of Nature did not leave something to be desired. I quoted Coleridge at him from memory, — "It is her largeness and her overflow. Which, being incomplete, disquieteth me so.'* " I wonder how Coleridge knew it was incom- plete/' said the Doctor. " What would you sug- gest as its consummation ? " " Something human," I replied. " Art and poetry have always tried to supply it. A beauti- ful landscape is like written music which needs a voice or an instrument. Nature would be very lonesome in her loveliest aspects to a man left alone on this earth. It is impossible even for a materialist to look at this scene without peopling it. If the poets had not personified and human- ized Nature, it would be like Shakspere's ' Tem- pest ' with Miranda and Prospero left out." "And yet," said the Doctor, " Nature goes her own way and is never modified or changed by man's imaginings, which in the main are efflor- escences of his magnificent and selfish will. When a man is in love, he sees things only through his desires. Artists and poets are always in love. 185 A JOURNEY TO NATURE They think in hyperbole, like Romeo. They are superbly anthropomorphic. Stars throb, trees breathe, waves dance, leaves utter prayers, birds Vv'oo. They make the planets think of the same girl that has usurped their minds ; the ocean is crammed with Aphrodites — matter is hymeneal. Do you suppose such a fellow is thinking of Nature ? Confound it, he is thinking of himself, and cunning Nature, who is thinking of her race, cajoles and fools him to the top of his bent, and when she has accomplished her own purpose, she drops him like a hot potato. The surest way to get rid of the Grecian mythology is to get married. Then old Triton hands his Svreathed horn' over to the youngest member of the family. Our re- cent poets string Nature upon their desires. I was reading the other day our friend Cawein, and he has the audacity to say : — ** * There is no rhyme that is half so sweet As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat. There is no metre that's half so fine As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine. And the loveliest lyric I ever heard Was the wild-wood strain of a forest bird.' I don't know that young man, — his poetry pro- claims him to be young, — but if ever he settles down, he will probably rewrite that verse some- thing like this : — <* * There is no song that is half so sweet As the clash of matter one is apt to meet. i86 A FRINGED GENTIAN There is nothing so fine to Jack and Jill As a natural fluid that runs down hill. And the loveliest lyric man ever heard Was not lyric at all, but what he inferred.' ** "It seems to me," I ventured to say, "that you are trying to play the part of Peter Bell, and it does not become you." " You utterly mistake me. I am only insisting that the sane man shall accept the facts of Nature while he exercises his imagination in using her for his own purposes. She is stuffed full of facts as well as symbols, but they do not always corrob- orate his desires. Wait a moment — I am going down in that meadow to look for an autumnal fact." Then off he started, and I saw him poking about among the grasses, sometimes almost lost to view, evidently looking for something with great earnestness. Left alone I wondered if Griselle would enjoy this scene. It really seemed to me that her pres- ence would in some way banish the incomplete- ness. I was curious to know how she would regard it. Would she, like so many women I had met, pretend to enjoy it because I did ? I could not rid myself of the notion that she would fit into it and interpret it unconsciously. I heard the Doctor shouting to me as he held up something that looked like a bunch of grass. When he came back, he handed me three or four stems about eighteen inches long of the fringed gentian, each stem having upon its curved branches 187 A JOURNEY TO NATURE four or five flowers. I looked at the beautiful specimens with the passing admiration that such wildings always excite, and then I turned to him expectantly to know why he had taken so much trouble to get them. " The last beautiful words of the season," he said, " the daintiest and most eloquent that she ever speaks." "It is certainly a very pretty flower," I re- marked. That appeared to vex him a little. " I don't think you know it," he said. " As a rule, city people do not. The poet Bryant wrote some pretty verses on it. I suppose you know that ? " I had to confess that I did not. But I have since read them several times. "Look here," said the Doctor. "This is the flower of America. They can't make it grow in China, and there are only some dull hints of it in Europe. Nowhere but in our land does it reach its feminine loveliness, and then it makes the fleur-de-lis meagre and the columbine and the violet washed out." He held the bunch at arm's length in front of him. " Did you ever see branches with such a queenly and pensive curve ? It is the grace of a tall beauty making her first bow to the world. The corolla is a perfect Etruscan vase — look at it, lifting four shell-shaped petals beauti- fully fringed and of an evasive azure that defies description." "Charming," I said. "Very like a rustic belle." i88 A FRINGED GENTIAN " Nothing so beautiful in all our fields. Were it to grow in Thibet, they would canonize it. Persia would ascribe supernatural virtue to it. Greece would have immortalized it ; but not having it, she had to take up with the less regal flower. Narcissus. I dare say, if we could get into the community of flowers, we should find that this is the queen, though it is a shame to call her a queen when she refuses to grow in any but a republican country. Isn't that spray exactly the curve of fresh beauty making vassals of us all by mere contour ? Zenobia never held her head more proudly, and Cleopatra could not wrap herself so luxuriously after her bath as this poor princess of the wild-wood." This strain quite caught me. " I am glad to hear you attribute such human qualities to a flower," I said. " I was inclined to do that myself, just noWj and, to be idiomatic, you sat upon me." " Do you observe," said the Doctor, " that she is wrapping her tissuey shawls about her and hiding her face ? Look at the spiral fringe ; did you ever see such an airy twist as that ? The Sultan's women try to do it with their laces. If one of our serpentine dancers could do that, she would take Paris by storm." It was true — the flowers had closed up spirally, and the line of fringe on each one of the four leaves of the corolla were wound about as when a belle wraps herself after the ball. " You are right," I said. " I never saw a 189 A JOURNEY TO NATURE flower before with such a feminine grace. I am glad that it attracted you, and that you captured it. You are only human, like myself" "Perhaps I'm inhuman," he replied. "Doctors are apt to have that reputation, for the flower has resented my impertinence. That is a fact to which I wanted to call your attention. This beautiful and almost human wild flower is placed wholly beyond the desires or the plans of man. It hides away from him. It will not grow in his garden. A thousand attempts have been made to domes- ticate it, in vain. It disdains the parterre, and refuses to bloom in the hothouse. It is the true child of Nature, and if you pluck it as I have done, it draws itself together, hides its virgin beauty like a true vestal, and dies draped." Then the Doctor, who, when he fires his gun, always wants to get out of range, added : " Well, let's be going. We don't want to sit here all day, do we ? " It must have been two weeks later. We had returned from our tramp, and after a great deal of skirmishing, I succeeded in getting Griselle to let me drive her over and show her that scene. She took a heavy wrap, for the wind was sharp. It was the first time that I had dared to make a companion of her, and as I had taken good care to leave Charlie behind, we were seated side by side for a couple of hours. Some kind of unrea- sonable desire to have the reality on that very spot where so much ideality had been wasted possessed me. There was no accounting for these 190 A FRINGED GENTIAN masculine whimsies. All that is worth telling at this time is, that when I reached the spot where the Doctor and I had sat down, October had changed her tune and her dress. It was late in the afternoon, and the sky was filled up with what Keats calls " herded elephants slow moving in the west," and low down, where the sun struck through, they were caparisoned in gold brocade and carried flaming plunder. It was dismal enough. The color was all out of the meadow, save where the pools seemed to wink their blood- shot eyes at us, as the stiff wind swayed the huckleberry bushes. Griselle wound her wrap about her and seemed to retire within it. Only her face was visible, and that wore an inquiring and somewhat vacuous look. It gave me a numb feehng of despair. And yet as she stood there, wound about as if by the wind, I could not help saying to myself, " The fringed gentian." 391 CHAPTER XVI STRAMONIUM IN our purposeless wandering over roads that led nowhere, the Doctor and I came at last to some discomfort — that is to say, it would have been discomfort but for the Doctor. We had trudged along the whole afternoon, stopping to get a drink of buttermilk at a small dairy over a brook, and there the Doctor, fascinated by the rolls of fresh butter, had bought half a pound, and the buxom dairymaid had rolled it up in two or three cool cabbage leaves. As we came along the road, and I saw him carrying that bundle carefully in his hand, I asked him what he expected to do with it ; whereupon he asked me to hold it a moment and went off into a near-by field, where I saw him bent over, kicking and scratching as if in search of something. When he came back he had three or four good-sized potatoes, which he exhibited with unbounded admiration, and insisted on wash- ing them off at the first rivulet we encountered. 192 STRAMONIUM It grew gray and chilly toward sunset. The wind was blowing from the east, and presently it began to rain — that kind of fine slanting rain that Gabe called " carpet tacks," and that is specially cheerless and makes you think it much colder than it really is. Where we were, neither of us knew. All the perspectives that had fed us with pictures were rapidly obliterated by a leaden mist, and as the prospect closed heavily in about us, we instinctively came closer together. I think the Doctor's effort to enjoy it was a little obvious and somewhat marred by his absurd determination to keep the half pound of butter some distance from his person. " It will hardly add to our store of pleasant memories to plod all night in this," I ventured to remark, as I slapped the drip off my soft hat. " There is a lively prospect of our being soaked to the bone." " If we do not run upon a house," he said, " we shall have to crawl into some cave or covert. You have read of such experiences, I suppose, when you were a boy." " Very delightful to read about," I suggested. " I dare say we can find a shelter of some kind. The animals do. That's the fun of it. To have brought a waterproof house and modern conveni- ences along would have been aesthetic poltroonery." " It looks to me as if it had set in for a week." " Very likely. It usually does about this time of year. Haven't you ever noticed the propriety and regularity of the seasons ? They go on with 193 A JOURNEY TO NATURE their work utterly regardless of the audience. That's what I admire about them. Your eyes are better than mine — what do you make that thing to be that is sticking up over in that field P " " I should say it was an old hayrick or sheep- fold." " Then we are saved," said the Doctor, " if it is thatched. Forward." He caught me by the arm as we trudged up a sloping field, the fine rain driving in our faces, and the night coming on sheeted and drizzly. There was a nasty wind that blew stertorously among the wet trees, and as we approached the old shed, it lifted and banged some loose portion of the structure with a snappish clatter. I felt that the season had put on its shroud and was wailing hideously. I thought of a cosey corner in my restaurant, where there was apt to be at this hour a pleasant odour of cut roses and black coffee, and a lively gathering of gourmands, with jaded appetites for a late dinner. I found myself once or twice turning round, rather mechanically, to call a cab, and then the wind slapped me in the face. And all the time the perennial and inex- tinguishable Doctor sustained a really superior complacency of indifference to anything but his own authoritative babble. " If a man can learn to laugh with vital defiance at these beneficent ordinances of the atmosphere," he said, "he will in time arrive at the supreme stoicism that can take Death by the hand and call him a iollv good fellow." 19+ STRAMONIUM The remark rather overreached me at the mo- ment, for I was holding my hat on with one hand, and its flapping in my face interfered with the proper reflective processes. The old shed proved to be some kind of a forlorn sheepfold and hayrick combined, which had evidently been long unused. It was only partly enclosed, for its roof was half gone, and one end of it was open to the elements. What was formerly the entrance was flanked by two great weeds, six feet high, very green and lush, and still bearing a few large white trumpet-flowers, that shone through the gathering gloom quite funere- ally, I thought. " Stramonium," said the Doctor, actually stop- ping to investigate it as if he had met an old friend. " I never saw it in bloom so late." With sullen disregard of his triviality I got inside the pen, and, finding that one end of it was dry with a thatch over it, I leaned up against one of the old posts and remarked : — " There must be a house somewhere to match this outwork. We might as well find it before night sets in." " It has set in," said the Doctor. " We should probably wander round for an hour looking for it. You cannot see twenty feet ahead of you." " That's cheerful," I said. " We can't stay here — that's certain. I'm wet through and chilled to the bone. You seem to have forgotten that I'm your patient." He had put one of the trumpet-flowers in the 195 A JOURNEY TO NATURE lapel of his coat, as if he were going to an evening party, and was wiping his face and neck with a white handkerchief. " Quite right," he replied. " Suppose you go on. It will be as dark as Erebus in half an hour. After you have wandered in the mud for a while, you will probably walk off a bank or tumble into a hole. It's usually the way with men who seek comfort instead of accepting it ; I'll stay here and give thanks as the animals probably did before we got here." " Spend the night in this cow-shed ? " I asked, with as much bitterness as incredulity could muster. " Cow-shed," he repeated, drawing himself up with admirable inflation. "An ark of refuge, sir. There are no cow-sheds in a healthy mind. You are too particular. I suppose if a man offered you a last straw, you would want to know if it was wheat or rye. Cow-shed — we'll make this pavilion glow like the morning star." " Doctor," I said, " there seems to be a sort of gallery at this end of the ark. I suppose it was intended for fodder in the pastoral age.^ I'll climb up and see if I can discern a hospitable light in the neighbourhood." " Do," said he ; " there are some remnants of a ladder against the siding. Be sure of the floor- ing or you will come through. If you see a friendly gleam sing out ' Sail ho ! ' " I scrambled up as best I could, and found the loft heaped with corn-husks and stalks that 196 STRAMONIUM rustled sharply under my exploring foot. After much crawling and stumbling and groping, I found a crack in the siding. As I put my eye to it a sharp arrow of wet wind came through it and transfixed me. There was nothing to be seen but darkening rain-gusts, with sombre smears of hills and ghastly fields. As far as I could penetrate, the rain was coming down steadily in business-like sheets of desolation. When I came to the edge of the platform and looked down, there was the Doctor some ten feet below me with his coat ofi^, whistling " Lead, Kindly Light," and trying to scratch a damp match. I looked at him with curious interest. "What are you trying to do?" I asked. " I am trying to get supper," he answered without looking up. " How's the bedroom ? Dry ? " I believe I tried to execute a true metropolitan sneer and drop it on him, but it went off half cocked into a derisive chuckle, and he called up to me : " If there are any dry corn-cobs up there, shove 'em down. They make a peat fire." I believe I pushed a half a ton of corn-cobs down with my foot, making as much dust as possible, and then I climbed down myself. No man with the slightest vestige of his primitive masculinity surviving could withstand the Doc- tor's defiant jollity of spirit. I soon found my- self piling corn-cobs " criss-cross," and watching the Doctor down on his marrow-bones blowing at the husks he had lighted, which presently broke 197 A JOURNEY TO NATURE out into a flickering flame and sent up a thread of scented smoke, whereupon he stepped back and admired it as if he had seen a patient coming out of a syncope. I placed armful after armful of the cobs on end around the little blaze and saw them with boyish delight turn into glowing coals and totter over into a bed of ashes, the pile throwing out a pleasant warmth and a phosphores- cent glow that changed the whole aspect of affairs. The rain rattled on the siding and came at times in windy swashes that made the old structure bend and creak, but it only added to the glow of our fire that made a pleasant circle of red light and threw our moving shadovv^s in grotesque silhouettes against the walls. We hung our cor- duroy jackets on some projecting boards to dry and frisked round in our flannel shirts. Finding two short logs, which at some time had evidently been used as milking-stools, the Doctor tore off a loose board and extemporized a little table, upon which he spread the remnants of a lunch that he drew from his capacious pockets. Then, seeing it laid out, he took the trumpet-flower from his coat and stuck it in a crack of the board as a decorative touch, and gave himself, with many airs of connoisseurship, to the roasting of his pet potatoes, an exquisite job which consisted in " chucking them into the ashes " and not let- ting them burn up. I recall now with reminiscent pleasure how my old friend wooed me into the boyishness of all this, making me forget all my discomfort, and 198 STRAMONIUM before I was well aware of it, cajoling me into the improvisation with a clear zest. What would I not give if I had a picture of that pair of vol- untary gypsies, sitting there in the glow, under a canopy of smoke, making ogreish shadows and eating their baked potatoes with chop-sticks, as if they were Olympians, the Doctor's own glow outshining the fire, and answering the gust out- side with heartier gusts of laughter within. He had to initiate me into the esoterics of baked potato. When he pulled the black lumps out of the fire, and burned his fingers, and danced the cancan, and slapped his flanks before he landed the charcoal on the board, his antic shadow filled me with juvenile mirth, and, wraiths of Arden and ghosts of Lincoln Green, how I laughed ! " Charcoal is good for the stomach, I suppose," I remarked, as I looked at the burned chunks. " Charcoal," he cried, snapping his burnt fingers. "Ambrosia. You take him up in a corn-husk, thus, like a napkin, knock the top off, this way, put in a goodly chunk of butter, and, gods of the cuisine ! tamales and yams and bread- fruit hide themselves in tropic insignificance." I have often tried since to restore that potato episode, but it cannot be done without corn-cobs, and, I suspect, a cow-shed. The range oven kills the delicious earthy aroma. The potato must be tumbled into the hot ashes, and all the essences driven in and confined in a jacket of charcoal. " There is just the difference," said the Doctor, "in eating the fruit this way and 199 A JOURNEY TO NATURE eating it embalmed by a French restaurateur, that there is in hearing a fine oration and reading the report of it the next morning. A potato must be smelted in its own ashes. Then it has the fine flavour of martyrdom combined with the aroma of Father Prout." Then that roistering old savant, shut off from his own world by the whistling rain, actually became jovial, as if the potato, properly baked, was intoxicating ; and before I knew it he was trolling a stave of an old and forgotten song : — *