A Rambler's lease Part 3

[71:1] The birds at once became quiet, and I went back complacently to my book under the linden-tree. Who knows, however, whether there may not have been another side to the story? Who shall say what were the emotions of the snake, as he wriggled painfully homeward after such an a.s.sault? Myself no vegetarian, by what right had I belabored him for liking the taste of chicken? It were well, perhaps, not to pry too curiously into questions of this kind. Most likely it would not flatter our human self-esteem to know what some of our "poor relations" think of us.

A GREEN MOUNTAIN CORN-FIELD.

Thus, without theft, I reap another's field.--SIDNEY LANIER.

I was pa.s.sing some days of idleness in a shallow Vermont valley, situated at an elevation of fifteen or sixteen hundred feet, circled by wooded hills, and intersected by an old turnpike, which connects the towns near Lake Champlain with the region beyond the mountains. Small farmhouses stood here and there along the highway, while others were scattered at wide intervals over the lower slopes of the outlying hills.

With all the brightness and freshness of early summer upon it, it was indeed an enchanting picture; but even so, one could not altogether put aside a feeling of something like commiseration for the people who, year in and year out, from babyhood to old age, found in this narrow vale, with its severity of weather, and its scarcity of social comforts and opportunities, their only experience of what we fondly call this wide, wide world.

From my inn I had walked eastward for perhaps a mile; then at the little school-house had taken a cross-road, which presently began to climb.

Here I pa.s.sed two or three cottages (one of them boasting the singularity of paint), and after a while came to another, which appeared to be the last, as the road not far beyond struck into the ancient forest. First, however, it ran up to a small plateau, where, out of sight from the house, lay a scanty quarter of an acre, in which the old parable, "First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear,"

was in the primary stage of its fresh annual fulfillment. The ground was but newly cleared, and the brambles still felt themselves its true and rightful possessors. Who was this puny-looking, good-for-nothing foreigner, that they should be turned out of house and home for his accommodation? So they seemed to be asking among themselves, as they lifted up their heads here and there in the midst of the pale-green shoots. The crows, on the other hand, bade the newcomer welcome,--as the wolf welcomes the lamb. Against these hungry lovers of his crop (who loved not unwisely, but too well), the farmer had fenced his field with a single string, stretched from corner to corner. He must put extraordinary faith in the considerateness of the birds, a looker-on might think; such a barrier as this could be, at the most, nothing more than a polite hint of owners.h.i.+p, a delicate reminder against thoughtless trespa.s.sing, a courteously indirect suggestion to such as needed not a physical, but only a moral, restraint. Or one might take it as an appeal to some known or fancied superst.i.tiousness on the crows' part; as if the white cord were a kind of fetich, with which they would never presume to meddle. But the rustic would have laughed at all such far-fetched c.o.c.kneyish inferences. This strange-seeming device of his was simply an attempt to take the suspicious in their own suspiciousness; to set before Corvus a hindrance so unmistakably insufficient that he would mistrust it as a cover for some deep-laid and deadly plot. Probably the scheme had not been crowned with complete success in the present instance, for from a pole in the middle of the inclosure a dead crow was dangling in the breeze. This was a more business-like signal than the other; even a c.o.c.kney could hardly be in doubt as to its meaning; and the farmer, when I afterwards met him, a.s.sured me that it had answered its purpose to perfection. The crow is n.o.body's fool. "Live and learn"

is his motto; and he does both, but especially the former, in a way to excite the admiration of all disinterested observers. In the long struggle between human ingenuity and corvine sagacity, it is doubtful which has thus far obtained the upper hand. Nor have I ever quite convinced myself which of the contestants has the better case. "The crow is a thief," the planter declares; "he should confine himself to a wild diet, or else sow his own garden." "Yes, yes," Corvus makes reply; "but if I steal your corn, you first stole my land." Unlike his cousin the raven,--who, along with the Indian, has retreated before the pale-face,--the crow is no ultra-conservative. Civilization and modern ideas are not in the least distasteful to him. He has an unfeigned respect for agriculture, and in fact may be said himself to have set up as gentleman-farmer, letting out his land on shares, and seldom failing to get his full half of the crop; and, like the shrewd manager that he is, he insures himself against drought and other mischances by taking his moiety early in the season. As I plant no acres myself, I perhaps find it easier than some of my fellow-citizens to bear with the faults and appreciate the virtues of this sable aboriginal. Long may he live, I say, this true lover of his native land, to try the patience and sharpen the wits of his would-be exterminators.

The crow's is only the common lot. The whole earth is one field of war.

Every creature's place upon it is coveted by some other creature. Plants and animals alike subsist by elbowing their rivals out of the way. Man, if he plants a corn-field, puts in no more grains than will probably have room to grow and thrive. But Nature, in her abhorrence of a vacuum, stands at no waste. She believes in compet.i.tion, and feels no qualms at seeing the weak go to the wall.

"The good old rule Sufficeth her, the simple plan, That they should take who have the power, And they should keep who can."

If she wishes a single oak, she drops acorns without number. Her recklessness equals that of some ambitious military despot, to whom ten thousand or a hundred thousand dead soldiers count as nothing, if only the campaign be fought through to victory.

Man's economy and Nature's prodigality,--here they were in typical operation, side by side. The corn was in "hills" uniformly s.p.a.ced, and evidently the proprietor had already been at work with plough and hoe, lest the weeds should spring up and choke it; but just beyond stood a perfect thicket of wild-cherry shrubs, so huddled together that not one in twenty could possibly find room in which to develop. If they were not all of them stunted beyond recovery, it would be only because a few of the st.u.r.diest should succeed in crowding down and killing off their weaker compet.i.tors.

The import of this apparent wastefulness and cruelty of Nature, her seeming indifference to the welfare of the individual, is a question on which it is not pleasant, and, as I think, not profitable, to dwell. We see but parts of her ways, and it must be unsafe to criticise the working of a single wheel here or there, when we have absolutely no means of knowing how each fits into the grand design, and, for that matter, can only guess at the grand design itself. Rather let us content ourselves with the prudent saying of that ancient agnostic, Bildad the Shuhite: "We are but of yesterday, and know nothing." The wisest of us are more or less foolish, by nature and of necessity; but it seems a gratuitous superfluity of folly to ignore our own ignorance. For one, then, I am in no mood to propose, much less to undertake, any grand revolution in the order of natural events. Indeed, as far as I am personally concerned, I fear it would be found but a dubious improvement if the wildness were quite taken out of the world,--if its wilderness, according to the word of the prophet, were to become all like Eden.

Tameness is not the only good quality, whether of land or of human nature.

As I sat on my comfortable log (the n.o.ble old tree had not been cut down for nothing), birds of many kinds came and went about me.

Wordsworth's couplet would have suited my case:--

"The birds around me hopped and played, Their thoughts I cannot measure;"

but I could hardly have rounded out the quotation; for, joyful as I believed the creatures to be, many of their motions were plainly not "thrills of pleasure," but tokens of fear. It was now the very heyday of life with them, when they are at once happiest and most wary. There were secrets to be kept close; eggs and little ones, whose whereabouts must on no account be divulged. For the birds, too, not less than the corn, the bramble, and the cherry, not less even than the saint, find this earthly life a daily warfare.

The artless ditty of the mourning warbler came to my ears at intervals out of a tangle of shrubbery, and once or twice he allowed me glimpses of his quaint attire. I would gladly have seen and heard much more of him, but he evaded all my attempts at familiarity. Nor could I blame him for his furtive behavior. How was he to be certain that I was no collector, but only an innocent admirer of birds in the bush? Sought after as his carca.s.s is by every New England ornithologist, the mourning warbler exercises only a reasonable discretion in fighting shy of every animal that walks upright.

It is evident, however, that for birds, as for ourselves, the same thing often has both a bright and a dark side. If men are sometimes heartless, and never to be altogether confided in, yet at the same time their doings are in various respects conducive to the happiness and increase of feathered life; and this not only in the case of some of the more familiar species, but even in that of many which still retain all their natural shyness of human society. A clearing like that in which I was now resting offers an excellent ill.u.s.tration of this; for it is a rule without exceptions that in such a place one may see and hear more birds in half an hour than are likely to be met with in the course of a long day's tramp through the unbroken forest. The mourning warbler himself likes a roadside copse better than a deep wood, jealous as he may be of man's approach. Up to a certain point, civilization is a blessing, even to birds. Beyond a certain point, for aught I know, it may be nothing but a curse, even to men.

Here, then, I sat, now taken up with the beautiful landscape, and anon turning my head to behold some fowl of the air. I might have mused with Emerson,--

"Knows he who tills this lonely field, To reap its scanty corn, What mystic fruit his acres yield At midnight and at morn,"

--only "mystic fruit" would have been rather too high-sounding a phrase for my commonplace cogitations. Hermit thrushes, olive-backed thrushes, and veeries, with sundry warblers and a scarlet tanager, sang in chorus from the woods behind me, while in front bluebirds, robins, song sparrows, vesper sparrows, and chippers were doing their best to transform this fresh Vermont clearing into a time-worn Ma.s.sachusetts pasture; a.s.sisted meanwhile by a goldfinch who flew over my head with an ecstatic burst of melody, and a linnet who fell to warbling with characteristic fluency from a neighboring tree-top. At least two pairs of rose-breasted grosbeaks had summer quarters here; and busy enough they looked, flitting from one side of the garden to another, yet not too busy for a tune between whiles. One of the males was in really gorgeous plumage. The rose-color had run over, as it were (like Aaron's "precious ointment"), and spilled all down his breast. It is hard for me ever to think of this brilliant, tropically dressed grosbeak as a true Northerner; and here once more I was for the moment surprised to hear him and the olive-backed thrush singing together in the same wood. Could such neighborliness have any patriotic significance? I was almost ready to ask. Across the corn-field a Traill's flycatcher was tossing up his head pertly, and vociferating _kwee-kwee_. I took it for a challenge: "Find my nest if you can, brother!" But I found nothing. Nor was I more successful with a humming-bird, who had chosen the tip of a charred stub, only a few rods from my seat, for his favorite perch. Again and again I saw him there preening his feathers, and once or twice I tried to inveigle him into betraying his secret. Either his house was further off than I suspected, however, or else he was too cunning to fall into my snare. At any rate, he permitted me to trample all about the spot, without manifesting the first symptom of uneasiness.

What a traveler the humming-bird is! I myself had come perhaps three hundred miles, and had accounted it a long, tiresome journey, notwithstanding I had been brought nearly all the way in a carriage elaborately contrived for comfort, and moving over iron rails. But this tiny insect-like creature spent last winter in Central America, or it may be in Cuba, and now here he sat, perfectly at home again in this Green Mountain nook; and next autumn he will be off again betimes, as the merest matter of course, for another thousand-mile flight. Verily, a marvelous spirit and energy may be contained within a few ounces of fles.h.!.+ But if Trochilus be indeed Prospero's servant in disguise, as one of our poets makes out, why, then, to be sure, his flittings back and forth are little to wonder at. How slow, overgrown, and clumsy human beings must look in his eyes! I wonder if he is never tempted to laugh at us. Who knows but humming-birds have it for a by-word, "As awkward as a man"?

My ruminations were suddenly broken in upon by the approach of a carriage, driven by a boy of perhaps ten years, a son of the farmer from whose land I was, as it were, gathering the first fruits. We had made each other's acquaintance the day before, and now, as he surmounted the hill, he stopped to inquire politely whether I would ride with him. Yes, I answered, I would gladly be carried into the forest a little way. It proved a very little way indeed; for the road was heavy from recent rains, and the poor old hack was so short of breath that he could barely drag us along, and at every slump of the wheels came to a dead standstill. "Pity for a horse o'er-driven" soon compelled me to take to the woods, in spite of the protestations of my charioteer, who a.s.sured me that his steed _could_ trot "like everything," if he only would. It is an extremely unpatriotic Vermonter, I suspect (I have never yet discovered him), who will not brag a little over his horse; and I was rather pleased than otherwise to hear my flaxen-haired friend set forth the good points of his beast, even while he confessed that the "heaves"

were pretty bad. I was glad, too, to find the youngster in a general way something of an optimist. When I asked him how long the land had been cleared, he pointed to one corner of it, and responded, using the p.r.o.noun with perfect _navete_, "We cleared up that piece last fall;"

and on my inquiring whether it was not hard work, he replied, in a tone of absolute satisfaction, "Oh, yes, but you get your pay for it."

Evidently he believed in Green Mountain land, which I thought a very fortunate circ.u.mstance. "Be content with such things as ye have," said the Apostle; and it is certainly easier to obey the precept if one looks upon his own things as the best in the world. My youthful philosopher seemed to consider it altogether natural and reasonable that prosperity, instead of coming of itself, should have to be earned by the sweat of the brow. Perhaps the crow and the cherry-tree are equally unsophisticated. Perhaps, too, men's fates are less uneven than is sometimes supposed. For I could not help thinking that if this boy should retain his present view of things, he would pa.s.s his days more happily than many a so-called favorite of fortune.

On my way back to the inn I met an old man from the lowlands, driving over the mountains for the first time since boyhood. "You have a pretty good farming country here," he called out cheerily,--"a little rolling."

He took me for a native, and I hope to be forgiven for not disclaiming the compliment.

As I write, I find myself wondering how my nameless farmer's crop is prospered. In my corner of the world we have lately been afflicted with drought. I hope it has been otherwise on his hillside plateau. In my thought, at all events, his corn is now fully ta.s.seled, and waves in a pleasant mountain wind, all green and s.h.i.+ning.

BEHIND THE EYE.

As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been.--MATTHEW ARNOLD.

Nothing is seen until it is separated from its surroundings. A man looks at the landscape, but the tree standing in the middle of the landscape he does not see until, for the instant at least, he singles it out as the object of vision. Two men walk the same road; as far as the bystander can perceive, they have before them the same sights; but let them be questioned at the end of the journey, and it will appear that one man saw one set of objects, and his companion another; and the more diverse the intellectual training and habits of the two travelers, the greater will be the discrepancy between the two reports.

And what is true of any two men is equally true of any one man at two different times. To-day he is in a dreamy, reflective mood,--he has been reading Wordsworth, perhaps,--and when he takes his afternoon saunter he looks at the bushy hillside, or at the wayside cottage, or down into the loitering brook, and he sees in them all such pictures as they never showed him before. Or he is in a matter-of-fact mood, a kind of stock-market frame of mind; and he looks at everything through economical spectacles,--as if he had been set to appraise the acres of meadow or woodland through which he pa.s.ses. At another time he may have been reading some book or magazine article written by Mr. John Burroughs; and although he knows nothing of birds, and can scarcely tell a crow from a robin (perhaps for this very reason), he is certain to have tantalizing glimpses of some very strange and wonderful feathered specimens. They must be rarities, at least, if not absolute novelties; and likely enough, on getting home, he sits down and writes to Mr.

Burroughs a letter full of grat.i.tude and inquiry,--the grat.i.tude very pleasant to receive, we may presume, and the inquiries quite impossible to answer.

Some men (not many, it is to be hoped) are specialists, and nothing else. They are absorbed in farming, or in shoemaking, in chemistry, or in Latin grammar, and have no thought for anything beyond or beside.

Others of us, while there may be two or three subjects toward which we feel some special drawing, have nevertheless a general interest in whatever concerns humanity. We are different men on different days.

There is a certain part of the year, say from April to July, when I am an ornithologist; for the time being, as often as I go out-of-doors, I have an eye for birds, and, comparatively speaking, for nothing else.

Then comes a season during which my walks all take on a botanical complexion. I have had my turn at b.u.t.terflies, also; for one or two summers I may be said to have seen little else but these winged blossoms of the air. I know, too, what it means to visit the seash.o.r.e, and scarcely to notice the breaking waves because of the sh.e.l.ls scattered along the beach. In short, if I see one thing, I am of necessity blind, or half-blind, to all beside. There are several men in me, and not more than one or two of them are ever at the window at once. Formerly, my enjoyment of nature was altogether reflective, imaginative; in a pa.s.sive, unproductive sense, poetical. I delighted in the woods and fields, the seash.o.r.e and the lonely road, not for the birds or flowers to be found there, but for the "serene and blessed mood" into which I was put by such friends.h.i.+p. Later in life, it transpired, as much to my surprise as to anybody's else, that I had a bent toward natural history, as well as toward nature; an inclination to study, as well as to dream over, the beautiful world about me. I must know the birds apart, and the trees, and the flowers. A bit of country was no longer a mere landscape, a picture, but a museum as well. For a time the poet seemed to be dead within me; and happy as I found myself in my new pursuits, I had fits of bewailing my former condition. Science and fancy, it appeared, would not travel hand in hand; if a man must be a botanist, let him bid good-by to the Muse. Then I fled again to Emerson and Wordsworth, trying to read the naturalist asleep and reawaken the poet. Happy thought! The two men, the student and the lover, were still there; and there they remain to this day. Sometimes one is at the window, sometimes the other.

So it is, undoubtedly, with other people. My fellow-travelers, who hear me discoursing enthusiastically of vireos and warblers, thrushes and wrens, whilst they see never a bird, unless it be now and then an English sparrow or a robin, talk sometimes as if the difference between us were one of eyesight. They might as well lay it to the window-gla.s.s of our respective houses. It is not the eye that sees, but the man behind the eye.

As to the comparative advantages and disadvantages of such a division of interests as I have been describing, there may be room for two opinions.

If distinction be all that the student hungers for, perhaps he cannot limit himself too strictly; but for myself, I think I should soon tire of my own society if I were only one man,--a botanist or a chemist, an artist, or even a poet. I should soon tire of myself, I say; but I might have said, with equal truth, that I should soon tire of nature; for if I were only one man, I should see only one aspect of the natural world.

This may explain why it is that some persons must be forever moving from place to place. If they travel the same road twice or thrice, or even to the hundredth time, they see only one set of objects. The same man is always at the window. No wonder they are restless and famished. For my own part, though I should delight to see new lands and new people, new birds and new plants, I am nevertheless pretty well contented where I am. If I take the same walks, I do not see the same things. The botanist spells the dreamer; and now and then the lover of beauty keeps the ornithologist in the background till he is thankful to come once more to the window, though it be only to look at a bluebird or a song sparrow.

How much influence has the will in determining which of these several tenants of a man's body shall have his turn at sightseeing? It would be hard to answer definitely. As much, it may be, as a teacher has over his pupils, or a father over his children; something depends upon the strength of the governing will, and something upon the tractability of the pupil. In general, I a.s.sume to command. As I start on my ramble I give out word, as it were, which of the men shall have the front seat.

But there are days when some one of them proves too much both for me and for his fellows. It is not the botanist's turn, perhaps; but he takes his seat at the window, notwithstanding, and the ornithologist and the dreamer must be content to peep at the landscape over his shoulders.

On such occasions, it may as well be confessed, I make but a feeble remonstrance; and for the sufficient reason that I feel small confidence in my own wisdom. If the flower-lover or the poet must have the hour, then in all likelihood he ought to have it. So much I concede to the nature of things. A strong tendency is a strong argument, and of itself goes far to justify itself. I borrow no trouble on the score of such compulsions. On the contrary, my lamentations begin when n.o.body sues for the place of vision. Such days I have; blank days, days to be dropped from the calendar; when "those that look out of the windows be darkened." The fault is not with the world, nor with the eye. The old preacher had the right of it; it is not the windows that are darkened, but "those that look out of the windows."

A NOVEMBER CHRONICLE.

I've gathered young spring-leaves, and flowers gay.--KEATS.

I looked forward to the month with peculiar interest, as it was many years since I had pa.s.sed a November in the country, and now that it is over I am moved to publish its praises: partly, as I hope, out of feelings of grat.i.tude, and partly because it is an agreeable kind of originality to commend what everybody else has been in the habit of decrying.

In the first place, then, it was a month of pleasant weather; something too much of wind and dust (the dust for only the first ten days) being almost the only drawback. To me, with my prepossessions, it was little short of marvelous how many of the days were nearly or quite cloudless.