Little Rivers; a book of essays in profitable idleness, by Henry Van Dyke

	Enter your search terms Submit search form
	Web www.freematerial.info

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Rivers, by Henry van Dyke

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: Little Rivers
       A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness

Author: Henry van Dyke

Release Date: May 12, 2006 [EBook #1562]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE RIVERS ***




Produced by Donald Lainson





LITTLE RIVERS

A BOOK OF ESSAYS IN PROFITABLE IDLENESS


by Henry Van Dyke


"And suppose he takes nothing, yet he enjoyeth a delightful walk by
pleasant Rivers, in sweet Pastures, amongst odoriferous Flowers, which
gratifie his Senses, and delight his Mind; which Contentments induce
many (who affect not Angling) to choose those places of pleasure for
their summer Recreation and Health."

COL. ROBERT VENABLES, The Experienc'd Angler, 1662.




DEDICATION

     To one who wanders by my side
     As cheerfully as waters glide;
     Whose eyes are brown as woodland streams,
     And very fair and full of dreams;
     Whose heart is like a mountain spring,
     Whose thoughts like merry rivers sing:
     To her--my little daughter Brooke--
     I dedicate this little book.



CONTENTS

     I.  Prelude

     II.  Little Rivers

     III.  A Leaf of Spearmint

     IV.  Ampersand

     V.  A Handful of Heather

     VI.  The Ristigouche from a Horse-Yacht

     VII.  Alpenrosen and Goat's-Milk

     VIII.  Au Large

     IX.  Trout-Fishing in the Traun

     X.  At the sign of the Balsam Bough

     XI.  A Song after Sundown




PRELUDE


AN ANGLER'S WISH IN TOWN

     When tulips bloom in Union Square,
     And timid breaths of vernal air
       Are wandering down the dusty town,
     Like children lost in Vanity Fair;

     When every long, unlovely row
     Of westward houses stands aglow
       And leads the eyes toward sunset skies,
     Beyond the hills where green trees grow;

     Then weary is the street parade,
     And weary books, and weary trade:
       I'm only wishing to go a-fishing;
     For this the month of May was made.


     I guess the pussy-willows now
     Are creeping out on every bough
       Along the brook; and robins look
     For early worms behind the plough.

     The thistle-birds have changed their dun
     For yellow coats to match the sun;
       And in the same array of flame
     The Dandelion Show's begun.

     The flocks of young anemones
     Are dancing round the budding trees:
       Who can help wishing to go a-fishing
     In days as full of joy as these?


     I think the meadow-lark's clear sound
     Leaks upward slowly from the ground,
       While on the wing the bluebirds ring
     Their wedding-bells to woods around:

     The flirting chewink calls his dear
     Behind the bush; and very near,
       Where water flows, where green grass grows,
     Song-sparrows gently sing, "Good cheer:"

     And, best of all, through twilight's calm
     The hermit-thrush repeats his psalm:
       How much I'm wishing to go a-fishing
     In days so sweet with music's balm!


     'Tis not a proud desire of mine;
     I ask for nothing superfine;
       No heavy weight, no salmon great,
     To break the record, or my line:

     Only an idle little stream,
     Whose amber waters softly gleam,
       Where I may wade, through woodland shade,
     And cast the fly, and loaf, and dream:

     Only a trout or two, to dart
     From foaming pools, and try my art:
       No more I'm wishing--old-fashioned fishing,
     And just a day on Nature's heart.

     1894.




LITTLE RIVERS


A river is the most human and companionable of all inanimate things.
It has a life, a character, a voice of its own, and is as full of good
fellowship as a sugar-maple is of sap. It can talk in various tones,
loud or low, and of many subjects, grave and gay. Under favourable
circumstances it will even make a shift to sing, not in a fashion that
can be reduced to notes and set down in black and white on a sheet of
paper, but in a vague, refreshing manner, and to a wandering air that
goes

     "Over the hills and far away."

For real company and friendship, there is nothing outside of the animal
kingdom that is comparable to a river.

I will admit that a very good case can be made out in favour of some
other objects of natural affection. For example, a fair apology has been
offered by those ambitious persons who have fallen in love with the sea.
But, after all, that is a formless and disquieting passion. It lacks
solid comfort and mutual confidence. The sea is too big for loving, and
too uncertain. It will not fit into our thoughts. It has no personality
because it has so many. It is a salt abstraction. You might as well
think of loving a glittering generality like "the American woman." One
would be more to the purpose.

Mountains are more satisfying because they are more individual. It is
possible to feel a very strong attachment for a certain range whose
outline has grown familiar to our eyes, or a clear peak that has looked
down, day after day, upon our joys and sorrows, moderating our passions
with its calm aspect. We come back from our travels, and the sight of
such a well-known mountain is like meeting an old friend unchanged.
But it is a one-sided affection. The mountain is voiceless and
imperturbable; and its very loftiness and serenity sometimes make us the
more lonely.

Trees seem to come closer to our life. They are often rooted in our
richest feelings, and our sweetest memories, like birds, build nests
in their branches. I remember, the last time that I saw James Russell
Lowell, (only a few weeks before his musical voice was hushed,) he
walked out with me into the quiet garden at Elmwood to say good-bye.
There was a great horse-chestnut tree beside the house, towering above
the gable, and covered with blossoms from base to summit,--a pyramid of
green supporting a thousand smaller pyramids of white. The poet looked
up at it with his gray, pain-furrowed face, and laid his trembling hand
upon the trunk. "I planted the nut," said he, "from which this tree
grew. And my father was with me and showed me how to plant it."

Yes, there is a good deal to be said in behalf of tree-worship; and when
I recline with my friend Tityrus beneath the shade of his favourite oak,
I consent in his devotions. But when I invite him with me to share my
orisons, or wander alone to indulge the luxury of grateful, unlaborious
thought, my feet turn not to a tree, but to the bank of a river, for
there the musings of solitude find a friendly accompaniment, and human
intercourse is purified and sweetened by the flowing, murmuring water.
It is by a river that I would choose to make love, and to revive old
friendships, and to play with the children, and to confess my faults,
and to escape from vain, selfish desires, and to cleanse my mind from
all the false and foolish things that mar the joy and peace of living.
Like David's hart, I pant for the water-brooks. There is wisdom in the
advice of Seneca, who says, "Where a spring rises, or a river flows,
there should we build altars and offer sacrifices."

The personality of a river is not to be found in its water, nor in its
bed, nor in its shore. Either of these elements, by itself, would be
nothing. Confine the fluid contents of the noblest stream in a walled
channel of stone, and it ceases to be a stream; it becomes what
Charles Lamb calls "a mockery of a river--a liquid artifice--a wretched
conduit." But take away the water from the most beautiful river-banks,
and what is left? An ugly road with none to travel it; a long, ghastly
scar on the bosom of the earth.

The life of a river, like that of a human being, consists in the union
of soul and body, the water and the banks. They belong together. They
act and react upon each other. The stream moulds and makes the shore;
hollowing out a bay here, and building a long point there; alluring the
little bushes close to its side, and bending the tall slim trees over
its current; sweeping a rocky ledge clean of everything but moss, and
sending a still lagoon full of white arrow-heads and rosy knot-weed
far back into the meadow. The shore guides and controls the stream;
now detaining and now advancing it; now bending it in a hundred sinuous
curves, and now speeding it straight as a wild-bee on its homeward
flight; here hiding the water in a deep cleft overhung with green
branches, and there spreading it out, like a mirror framed in daisies,
to reflect the sky and the clouds; sometimes breaking it with sudden
turns and unexpected falls into a foam of musical laughter, sometimes
soothing it into a sleepy motion like the flow of a dream.

Is it otherwise with the men and women whom we know and like? Does not
the spirit influence the form, and the form affect the spirit? Can we
divide and separate them in our affections?

I am no friend to purely psychological attachments. In some unknown
future they may be satisfying, but in the present I want your words and
your voice with your thoughts, your looks and your gestures to interpret
your feelings. The warm, strong grasp of Greatheart's hand is as dear
to me as the steadfast fashion of his friendships; the lively, sparkling
eyes of the master of Rudder Grange charm me as much as the nimbleness
of his fancy; and the firm poise of the Hoosier Schoolmaster's shaggy
head gives me new confidence in the solidity of his views of life. I
like the pure tranquillity of Isabel's brow as well as her

                         "most silver flow
     Of subtle-paced counsel in distress."

The soft cadences and turns in my lady Katrina's speech draw me into
the humour of her gentle judgments of men and things. The touches of
quaintness in Angelica's dress, her folded kerchief and smooth-parted
hair, seem to partake of herself, and enhance my admiration for the
sweet order of her thoughts and her old-fashioned ideals of love and
duty. Even so the stream and its channel are one life, and I cannot
think of the swift, brown flood of the Batiscan without its shadowing
primeval forests, or the crystalline current of the Boquet without
its beds of pebbles and golden sand and grassy banks embroidered with
flowers.

Every country--or at least every country that is fit for habitation--has
its own rivers; and every river has its own quality; and it is the
part of wisdom to know and love as many as you can, seeing each in the
fairest possible light, and receiving from each the best that it has
to give. The torrents of Norway leap down from their mountain home with
plentiful cataracts, and run brief but glorious races to the sea.
The streams of England move smoothly through green fields and beside
ancient, sleepy towns. The Scotch rivers brawl through the open moorland
and flash along steep Highland glens. The rivers of the Alps are born in
icy caves, from which they issue forth with furious, turbid waters; but
when their anger has been forgotten in the slumber of some blue lake,
they flow down more softly to see the vineyards of France and Italy,
the gray castles of Germany, the verdant meadows of Holland. The mighty
rivers of the West roll their yellow floods through broad valleys,
or plunge down dark canyons. The rivers of the South creep under dim
arboreal archways hung with banners of waving moss. The Delaware and
the Hudson and the Connecticut are the children of the Catskills and the
Adirondacks and the White Mountains, cradled among the forests of spruce
and hemlock, playing through a wild woodland youth, gathering strength
from numberless tributaries to bear their great burdens of lumber
and turn the wheels of many mills, issuing from the hills to water
a thousand farms, and descending at last, beside new cities, to the
ancient sea.

Every river that flows is good, and has something worthy to be loved.
But those that we love most are always the ones that we have known
best,--the stream that ran before our father's door, the current on
which we ventured our first boat or cast our first fly, the brook on
whose banks we first picked the twinflower of young love. However far we
may travel, we come back to Naaman's state of mind: "Are not Abana and
Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?"

It is with rivers as it is with people: the greatest are not always the
most agreeable, nor the best to live with. Diogenes must have been an
uncomfortable bedfellow: Antinous was bored to death in the society
of the Emperor Hadrian: and you can imagine much better company for a
walking trip than Napoleon Bonaparte. Semiramis was a lofty queen, but I
fancy that Ninus had more than one bad quarter-of-an-hour with her: and
in "the spacious times of great Elizabeth" there was many a milkmaid
whom the wise man would have chosen for his friend, before the royal
red-haired virgin. "I confess," says the poet Cowley, "I love littleness
almost in all things. A little convenient Estate, a little chearful
House, a little Company, and a very little Feast, and if I were ever to
fall in Love again, (which is a great Passion, and therefore, I hope, I
have done with it,) it would be, I think, with Prettiness, rather than
with Majestical Beauty. I would neither wish that my Mistress, nor my
Fortune, should be a Bona Roba, as Homer uses to describe his Beauties,
like a daughter of great Jupiter for the stateliness and largeness of
her Person, but as Lucretius says:

     'Parvula, pumilio, [Greek text omitted], tota merum sal.'"

Now in talking about women it is prudent to disguise a prejudice like
this, in the security of a dead language, and to intrench it behind
a fortress of reputable authority. But in lowlier and less dangerous
matters, such as we are now concerned with, one may dare to speak in
plain English. I am all for the little rivers. Let those who will, chant
in heroic verse the renown of Amazon and Mississippi and Niagara, but my
prose shall flow--or straggle along at such a pace as the prosaic
muse may grant me to attain--in praise of Beaverkill and Neversink
and Swiftwater, of Saranac and Raquette and Ausable, of Allegash and
Aroostook and Moose River. "Whene'er I take my walks abroad," it shall
be to trace the clear Rauma from its rise on the fjeld to its rest
in the fjord; or to follow the Ericht and the Halladale through the
heather. The Ziller and the Salzach shall be my guides through the
Tyrol; the Rotha and the Dove shall lead me into the heart of England.
My sacrificial flames shall be kindled with birch-bark along the wooded
stillwaters of the Penobscot and the Peribonca, and my libations drawn
from the pure current of the Ristigouche and the Ampersand, and my altar
of remembrance shall rise upon the rocks beside the falls of Seboomok.

I will set my affections upon rivers that are not too great for
intimacy. And if by chance any of these little ones have also become
famous, like the Tweed and the Thames and the Arno, I at least will
praise them, because they are still at heart little rivers.

If an open fire is, as Charles Dudley Warner says, the eye of a room;
then surely a little river may be called the mouth, the most expressive
feature, of a landscape. It animates and enlivens the whole scene. Even
a railway journey becomes tolerable when the track follows the course of
a running stream.

What charming glimpses you catch from the window as the train winds
along the valley of the French Broad from Asheville, or climbs the
southern Catskills beside the Aesopus, or slides down the Pusterthal
with the Rienz, or follows the Glommen and the Gula from Christiania to
Throndhjem. Here is a mill with its dripping, lazy wheel, the type of
somnolent industry; and there is a white cascade, foaming in silent
pantomime as the train clatters by; and here is a long, still pool with
the cows standing knee-deep in the water and swinging their tails in
calm indifference to the passing world; and there is a lone fisherman
sitting upon a rock, rapt in contemplation of the point of his rod.
For a moment you become a partner of his tranquil enterprise. You turn
around, you crane your neck to get the last sight of his motionless
angle. You do not know what kind of fish he expects to catch, nor what
species of bait he is using, but at least you pray that he may have a
bite before the train swings around the next curve. And if perchance
your wish is granted, and you see him gravely draw some unknown,
reluctant, shining reward of patience from the water, you feel like
swinging your hat from the window and crying out "Good luck!"

Little rivers seem to have the indefinable quality that belongs to
certain people in the world,--the power of drawing attention without
courting it, the faculty of exciting interest by their very presence and
way of doing things.

The most fascinating part of a city or town is that through which the
water flows. Idlers always choose a bridge for their place of meditation
when they can get it; and, failing that, you will find them sitting
on the edge of a quay or embankment, with their feet hanging over the
water. What a piquant mingling of indolence and vivacity you can enjoy
by the river-side! The best point of view in Rome, to my taste, is the
Ponte San Angelo; and in Florence or Pisa I never tire of loafing along
the Lung' Arno. You do not know London until you have seen it from
the Thames. And you will miss the charm of Cambridge unless you take
a little boat and go drifting on the placid Cam, beneath the bending
trees, along the backs of the colleges.

But the real way to know a little river is not to glance at it here or
there in the course of a hasty journey, nor to become acquainted with it
after it has been partly civilised and spoiled by too close contact with
the works of man. You must go to its native haunts; you must see it in
youth and freedom; you must accommodate yourself to its pace, and give
yourself to its influence, and follow its meanderings whithersoever they
may lead you.

Now, of this pleasant pastime there are three principal forms. You may
go as a walker, taking the river-side path, or making a way for yourself
through the tangled thickets or across the open meadows. You may go as
a sailor, launching your light canoe on the swift current and
committing yourself for a day, or a week, or a month, to the delightful
uncertainties of a voyage through the forest. You may go as a wader,
stepping into the stream and going down with it, through rapids and
shallows and deeper pools, until you come to the end of your courage and
the daylight. Of these three ways I know not which is best. But in all
of them the essential thing is that you must be willing and glad to be
led; you must take the little river for your guide, philosopher, and
friend.

And what a good guidance it gives you. How cheerfully it lures you on
into the secrets of field and wood, and brings you acquainted with the
birds and the flowers. The stream can show you, better than any other
teacher, how nature works her enchantments with colour and music.

Go out to the Beaver-kill

     "In the tassel-time of spring,"

and follow its brimming waters through the budding forests, to that
corner which we call the Painter's Camp. See how the banks are all
enamelled with the pale hepatica, the painted trillium, and the delicate
pink-veined spring beauty. A little later in the year, when the ferns
are uncurling their long fronds, the troops of blue and white violets
will come dancing down to the edge of the stream, and creep venturously
out to the very end of that long, moss-covered log in the water. Before
these have vanished, the yellow crow-foot and the cinquefoil will
appear, followed by the star-grass and the loose-strife and the golden
St. John's-wort. Then the unseen painter begins to mix the royal colour
on his palette, and the red of the bee-balm catches your eye. If you
are lucky, you may find, in midsummer, a slender fragrant spike of
the purple-fringed orchis, and you cannot help finding the universal
self-heal. Yellow returns in the drooping flowers of the jewel-weed,
and blue repeats itself in the trembling hare-bells, and scarlet is
glorified in the flaming robe of the cardinal-flower. Later still, the
summer closes in a splendour of bloom, with gentians and asters and
goldenrod.

You never get so close to the birds as when you are wading quietly down
a little river, casting your fly deftly under the branches for the wary
trout, but ever on the lookout for all the various pleasant things that
nature has to bestow upon you. Here you shall come upon the cat-bird at
her morning bath, and hear her sing, in a clump of pussy-willows, that
low, tender, confidential song which she keeps for the hours of domestic
intimacy. The spotted sandpiper will run along the stones before
you, crying, "wet-feet, wet-feet!" and bowing and teetering in the
friendliest manner, as if to show you the way to the best pools. In the
thick branches of the hemlocks that stretch across the stream, the tiny
warblers, dressed in a hundred colours, chirp and twitter confidingly
above your head; and the Maryland yellow-throat, flitting through the
bushes like a little gleam of sunlight, calls "witchery, witchery,
witchery!" That plaintive, forsaken, persistent note, never ceasing,
even in the noonday silence, comes from the wood-pewee, drooping upon
the bough of some high tree, and complaining, like Mariana in the moated
grange, "weary, weary, weary!"

When the stream runs out into the old clearing, or down through the
pasture, you find other and livelier birds,--the robins, with his sharp,
saucy call and breathless, merry warble; the bluebird, with his notes
of pure gladness, and the oriole, with his wild, flexible whistle; the
chewink, bustling about in the thicket, talking to his sweetheart in
French, "cherie, cherie!" and the song-sparrow, perched on his favourite
limb of a young maple, dose beside the water, and singing happily,
through sunshine and through rain. This is the true bird of the brook,
after all: the winged spirit of cheerfulness and contentment, the patron
saint of little rivers, the fisherman's friend. He seems to enter into
your sport with his good wishes, and for an hour at a time, while you
are trying every fly in your book, from a black gnat to a white miller,
to entice the crafty old trout at the foot of the meadow-pool,
the song-sparrow, close above you, will be chanting patience and
encouragement. And when at last success crowns your endeavour, and the
parti-coloured prize is glittering in your net, the bird on the bough
breaks out in an ecstasy of congratulation: "catch 'im, catch 'im, catch
'im; oh, what a pretty fellow! sweet!"

There are other birds that seem to have a very different temper. The
blue-jay sits high up in the withered-pine tree, bobbing up and down,
and calling to his mate in a tone of affected sweetness, "salute-her,
salute-her," but when you come in sight he flies away with a harsh cry
of "thief, thief, thief!" The kingfisher, ruffling his crest in solitary
pride on the end of a dead branch, darts down the stream at your
approach, winding up his red angrily as if he despised you for
interrupting his fishing. And the cat-bird, that sang so charmingly
while she thought herself unobserved, now tries to scare you away by
screaming "snake, snake!"

As evening draws near, and the light beneath the trees grows yellower,
and the air is full of filmy insects out for their last dance, the voice
of the little river becomes louder and more distinct. The true poets
have often noticed this apparent increase in the sound of flowing waters
at nightfall. Gray, in one of his letters, speaks of "hearing the murmur
of many waters not audible in the daytime." Wordsworth repeats the same
thought almost in the same words:

     "A soft and lulling sound is heard
     Of streams inaudible by day."

And Tennyson, in the valley of Cauteretz, tells of the river

     "Deepening his voice with deepening of the night."

It is in this mystical hour that you will hear the most celestial and
entrancing of all bird-notes, the songs of the thrushes,--the hermit,
and the wood-thrush, and the veery. Sometimes, but not often, you will
see the singers. I remember once, at the close of a beautiful day's
fishing on the Swiftwater, I came out, just after sunset, into a little
open space in an elbow of the stream. It was still early spring, and the
leaves were tiny. On the top of a small sumac, not thirty feet away
from me, sat a veery. I could see the pointed spots upon his breast, the
swelling of his white throat, and the sparkle of his eyes, as he poured
his whole heart into a long liquid chant, the clear notes rising and
falling, echoing and interlacing in endless curves of sound,

     "Orb within orb, intricate, wonderful."

Other bird-songs can be translated into words, but not this. There is no
interpretation. It is music,--as Sidney Lanier defines it,--

     "Love in search of a word."

But it is not only to the real life of birds and flowers that the little
rivers introduce you. They lead you often into familiarity with human
nature in undress, rejoicing in the liberty of old clothes, or of none
at all. People do not mince along the banks of streams in patent-leather
shoes or crepitating silks. Corduroy and home-spun and flannel are the
stuffs that suit this region; and the frequenters of these paths go
their natural gaits, in calf-skin or rubber boots, or bare-footed. The
girdle of conventionality is laid aside, and the skirts rise with the
spirits.

A stream that flows through a country of upland farms will show you many
a pretty bit of genre painting. Here is the laundry-pool at the foot of
the kitchen garden, and the tubs are set upon a few planks close to the
water, and the farmer's daughters, with bare arms and gowns tucked up,
are wringing out the clothes. Do you remember what happened to Ralph
Peden in The Lilac Sunbonnet when he came on a scene like this? He
tumbled at once into love with Winsome Charteris,--and far over his
head.

And what a pleasant thing it is to see a little country lad riding one
of the plough-horses to water, thumping his naked heels against the ribs
of his stolid steed, and pulling hard on the halter as if it were the
bridle of Bucephalus! Or perhaps it is a riotous company of boys that
have come down to the old swimming-hole, and are now splashing and
gambolling through the water like a drove of white seals very much
sun-burned. You had hoped to catch a goodly trout in that hole, but what
of that? The sight of a harmless hour of mirth is better than a fish,
any day.

Possibly you will overtake another fisherman on the stream. It may be
one of those fabulous countrymen, with long cedar poles and bed-cord
lines, who are commonly reported to catch such enormous strings of fish,
but who rarely, so far as my observation goes, do anything more than
fill their pockets with fingerlings. The trained angler, who uses the
finest tackle, and drops his fly on the water as accurately as Henry
James places a word in a story, is the man who takes the most and the
largest fish in the long run. Perhaps the fisherman ahead of you is such
an one,--a man whom you have known in town as a lawyer or a doctor,
a merchant or a preacher, going about his business in the hideous
respectability of a high silk hat and a long black coat. How good it
is to see him now in the freedom of a flannel shirt and a broad-brimmed
gray felt with flies stuck around the band.

In Professor John Wilson's Essays Critical and Imaginative, there is a
brilliant description of a bishop fishing, which I am sure is drawn from
the life: "Thus a bishop, sans wig and petticoat, in a hairy cap, black
jacket, corduroy breeches and leathern leggins, creel on back and rod in
hand, sallying from his palace, impatient to reach a famous salmon-cast
ere the sun leave his cloud, . . . appears not only a pillar of his
church, but of his kind, and in such a costume is manifestly on the high
road to Canterbury and the Kingdom-Come." I have had the good luck to
see quite a number of bishops, parochial and diocesan, in that style,
and the vision has always dissolved my doubts in regard to the validity
of their claim to the true apostolic succession.

Men's "little ways" are usually more interesting, and often more
instructive than their grand manners. When they are off guard, they
frequently show to better advantage than when they are on parade. I get
more pleasure out of Boswell's Johnson than I do out of Rasselas or
The Rambler. The Little Flowers of St. Francis appear to me far more
precious than the most learned German and French analyses of his
character. There is a passage in Jonathan Edwards' Personal Narrative,
about a certain walk that he took in the fields near his father's house,
and the blossoming of the flowers in the spring, which I would not
exchange for the whole of his dissertation On the Freedom of the Will.
And the very best thing of Charles Darwin's that I know is a bit from a
letter to his wife: "At last I fell asleep," says he, "on the grass, and
awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running
up the tree, and some woodpeckers laughing; and it was as pleasant and
rural a scene as ever I saw; and I did not care one penny how any of the
birds or beasts had been formed."

Little rivers have small responsibilities. They are not expected to bear
huge navies on their breast or supply a hundred-thousand horse-power to
the factories of a monstrous town. Neither do you come to them hoping
to draw out Leviathan with a hook. It is enough if they run a harmless,
amiable course, and keep the groves and fields green and fresh along
their banks, and offer a happy alternation of nimble rapids and quiet
pools,

     "With here and there a lusty trout,
     And here and there a grayling."

When you set out to explore one of these minor streams in your canoe,
you have no intention of epoch-making discoveries, or thrilling and
world-famous adventures. You float placidly down the long stillwaters,
and make your way patiently through the tangle of fallen trees that
block the stream, and run the smaller falls, and carry your boat
around the larger ones, with no loftier ambition than to reach a good
camp-ground before dark and to pass the intervening hours pleasantly,
"without offence to God or man." It is an agreeable and advantageous
frame of mind for one who has done his fair share of work in the world,
and is not inclined to grumble at his wages. There are few moods in
which we are more susceptible of gentle instruction; and I suspect there
are many tempers and attitudes, often called virtuous, in which the
human spirit appears to less advantage in the sight of Heaven.

It is not required of every man and woman to be, or to do, something
great; most of us must content ourselves with taking small parts in
the chorus. Shall we have no little lyrics because Homer and Dante have
written epics? And because we have heard the great organ at Freiburg,
shall the sound of Kathi's zither in the alpine hut please us no more?
Even those who have greatness thrust upon them will do well to lay the
burden down now and then, and congratulate themselves that they are not
altogether answerable for the conduct of the universe, or at least not
all the time. "I reckon," said a cowboy to me one day, as we were riding
through the Bad Lands of Dakota, "there's some one bigger than me,
running this outfit. He can 'tend to it well enough, while I smoke my
pipe after the round-up."

There is such a thing as taking ourselves and the world too seriously,
or at any rate too anxiously. Half of the secular unrest and dismal,
profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain idea that every
man is bound to be a critic of life, and to let no day pass without
finding some fault with the general order of things, or projecting
some plan for its improvement. And the other half comes from the greedy
notion that a man's life does consist, after all, in the abundance
of the things that he possesses, and that it is somehow or other more
respectable and pious to be always at work making a larger living, than
it is to lie on your back in the green pastures and beside the still
waters, and thank God that you are alive.

Come, then, my gentle reader, (for by this time you have discovered that
this chapter is only a preface in disguise,--a declaration of principles
or the want of them, an apology or a defence, as you choose to take it,)
and if we are agreed, let us walk together; but if not, let us part here
with out ill-will.

You shall not be deceived in this book. It is nothing but a handful of
rustic variations on the old tune of "Rest and be thankful," a record
of unconventional travel, a pilgrim's scrip with a few bits of blue-sky
philosophy in it. There is, so far as I know, very little useful
information and absolutely no criticism of the universe to be found
in this volume. So if you are what Izaak Walton calls "a severe,
sour-complexioned man," you would better carry it back to the
bookseller, and get your money again, if he will give it to you, and go
your way rejoicing after your own melancholy fashion.

But if you care for plain pleasures, and informal company, and friendly
observations on men and things, (and a few true fish-stories,) then
perhaps you may find something here not unworthy your perusal. And so
I wish that your winter fire may burn clear and bright while you read
these pages; and that the summer days may be fair, and the fish may rise
merrily to your fly, whenever you follow one of these little rivers.

1895.




A LEAF OF SPEARMINT

RECOLLECTIONS OF A BOY AND A ROD.


"It puzzles me now, that I remember all these young impressions so,
because I took no heed of them at the time whatever; and yet they
come upon me bright, when nothing else is evident in the gray fog of
experience."--B. D. BLACKMORE: Lorna Doone.


Of all the faculties of the human mind, memory is the one that is most
easily "led by the nose." There is a secret power in the sense of smell
which draws the mind backward into the pleasant land of old times.

If you could paint a picture of Memory, in the symbolical manner of
Quarles's Emblems, it should represent a man travelling the highway with
a dusty pack upon his shoulders, and stooping to draw in a long,
sweet breath from the small, deep-red, golden-hearted flowers of an
old-fashioned rose-tree straggling through the fence of a neglected
garden. Or perhaps, for a choice of emblems, you would better take a yet
more homely and familiar scent: the cool fragrance of lilacs drifting
through the June morning from the old bush that stands between the
kitchen door and the well; the warm layer of pungent, aromatic air that
floats over the tansy-bed in a still July noon; the drowsy dew of odour
that falls from the big balm-of-Gilead tree by the roadside as you are
driving homeward through the twilight of August; or, best of all, the
clean, spicy, unexpected, unmistakable smell of a bed of spearmint--that
is the bed whereon Memory loves to lie and dream!

Why not choose mint as the symbol of remembrance? It is the true
spice-tree of our Northern clime, the myrrh and frankincense of the land
of lingering snow. When its perfume rises, the shrines of the past are
unveiled, and the magical rites of reminiscence begin.


I.


You are fishing down the Swiftwater in the early Spring. In a shallow
pool, which the drought of summer will soon change into dry land, you
see the pale-green shoots of a little plant thrusting themselves up
between the pebbles, and just beginning to overtop the falling
water. You pluck a leaf of it as you turn out of the stream to find a
comfortable place for lunch, and, rolling it between your fingers to
see whether it smells like a good salad for your bread and cheese, you
discover suddenly that it is new mint. For the rest of that day you are
bewitched; you follow a stream that runs through the country of Auld
Lang Syne, and fill your creel with the recollections of a boy and a
rod.

And yet, strangely enough, you cannot recall the boy himself at all
distinctly. There is only the faintest image of him on the endless roll
of films that has been wound through your mental camera: and in the very
spots where his small figure should appear, it seems as if the pictures
were always light-struck. Just a blur, and the dim outline of a new cap,
or a well-beloved jacket with extra pockets, or a much-hated pair of
copper-toed shoes--that is all you can see.

But the people that the boy saw, the companions who helped or hindered
him in his adventures, the sublime and marvellous scenes among the
Catskills and the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains, in the midst of
which he lived and moved and had his summer holidays--all these stand
out sharp and clear, as the "Bab Ballads" say,

     "Photographically lined
     On the tablets of your mind."

And most vivid do these scenes and people become when the vague and
irrecoverable boy who walks among them carries a rod over his shoulder,
and you detect the soft bulginess of wet fish about his clothing, and
perhaps the tail of a big one emerging from his pocket. Then it seems
almost as if these were things that had really happened, and of which
you yourself were a great part.

The rod was a reward, yet not exactly of merit. It was an instrument of
education in the hand of a father less indiscriminate than Solomon, who
chose to interpret the text in a new way, and preferred to educate his
child by encouraging him in pursuits which were harmless and wholesome,
rather than by chastising him for practices which would likely enough
never have been thought of, if they had not been forbidden. The
boy enjoyed this kind of father at the time, and later he came to
understand, with a grateful heart, that there is no richer inheritance
in all the treasury of unearned blessings. For, after all, the love,
the patience, the kindly wisdom of a grown man who can enter into the
perplexities and turbulent impulses of a boy's heart, and give him
cheerful companionship, and lead him on by free and joyful ways to know
and choose the things that are pure and lovely and of good report, make
as fair an image as we can find of that loving, patient Wisdom which
must be above us all if any good is to come out of our childish race.

Now this was the way in which the boy came into possession of his
undreaded rod. He was by nature and heredity one of those predestined
anglers whom Izaak Walton tersely describes as "born so." His earliest
passion was fishing. His favourite passage in Holy Writ was that place
where Simon Peter throws a line into the sea and pulls out a great fish
at the first cast.

But hitherto his passion had been indulged under difficulties--with
improvised apparatus of cut poles, and flabby pieces of string, and
bent pins, which always failed to hold the biggest fish; or perhaps with
borrowed tackle, dangling a fat worm in vain before the noses of the
staring, supercilious sunfish that poised themselves in the clear
water around the Lake house dock at Lake George; or, at best, on picnic
parties across the lake, marred by the humiliating presence of nurses,
and disturbed by the obstinate refusal of old Horace, the boatman, to
believe that the boy could bait his own hook, but sometimes crowned
with the delight of bringing home a whole basketful of yellow perch and
goggle-eyes. Of nobler sport with game fish, like the vaulting salmon
and the merry, pugnacious trout, as yet the boy had only dreamed. But he
had heard that there were such fish in the streams that flowed down from
the mountains around Lake George, and he was at the happy age when he
could believe anything--if it was sufficiently interesting.

There was one little river, and only one, within his knowledge and the
reach of his short legs. It was a tiny, lively rivulet that came out
of the woods about half a mile away from the hotel, and ran down
cater-cornered through a sloping meadow, crossing the road under a flat
bridge of boards, just beyond the root-beer shop at the lower end of the
village. It seemed large enough to the boy, and he had long had his eye
upon it as a fitting theatre for the beginning of a real angler's life.
Those rapids, those falls, those deep, whirling pools with beautiful
foam on them like soft, white custard, were they not such places as the
trout loved to hide in?

You can see the long hotel piazza, with the gossipy groups of wooden
chairs standing vacant in the early afternoon; for the grown-up people
are dallying with the ultimate nuts and raisins of their mid-day dinner.
A villainous clatter of innumerable little vegetable-dishes comes from
the open windows of the pantry as the boy steals past the kitchen end of
the house, with Horace's lightest bamboo pole over his shoulder, and a
little brother in skirts and short white stockings tagging along behind
him.

When they come to the five-rail fence where the brook runs out of the
field, the question is, Over or under? The lowlier method seems safer
for the little brother, as well as less conspicuous for persons who
desire to avoid publicity until their enterprise has achieved success.
So they crawl beneath a bend in the lowest rail,--only tearing one tiny
three-cornered hole in a jacket, and making some juicy green stains on
the white stockings,--and emerge with suppressed excitement in the field
of the cloth of buttercups and daisies.

What an afternoon--how endless and yet how swift! What perilous efforts
to leap across the foaming stream at its narrowest points; what escapes
from quagmires and possible quicksands; what stealthy creeping through
the grass to the edge of a likely pool, and cautious dropping of the
line into an unseen depth, and patient waiting for a bite, until the
restless little brother, prowling about below, discovers that the hook
is not in the water at all, but lying on top of a dry stone,--thereby
proving that patience is not the only virtue--or, at least, that it does
a better business when it has a small vice of impatience in partnership
with it!

How tired the adventurers grow as the day wears away; and as yet they
have taken nothing! But their strength and courage return as if by
magic when there comes a surprising twitch at the line in a shallow,
unpromising rapid, and with a jerk of the pole a small, wiggling fish is
whirled through the air and landed thirty feet back in the meadow.

"For pity's sake, don't lose him! There he is among the roots of the
blue flag."

"I've got him! How cold he is--how slippery--how pretty! Just like a
piece of rainbow!"

"Do you see the red spots? Did you notice how gamy he was, little
brother; how he played? It is a trout, for sure; a real trout, almost as
long as your hand."

So the two lads tramp along up the stream, chattering as if there
were no rubric of silence in the angler's code. Presently another
simple-minded troutling falls a victim to their unpremeditated art; and
they begin already, being human, to wish for something larger. In the
very last pool that they dare attempt--a dark hole under a steep bank,
where the brook issues from the woods--the boy drags out the hoped-for
prize, a splendid trout, longer than a new lead-pencil. But he feels
sure that there must be another, even larger, in the same place. He
swings his line out carefully over the water, and just as he is about to
drop it in, the little brother, perched on the sloping brink, slips on
the smooth pine-needles, and goes sliddering down into the pool up to
his waist. How he weeps with dismay, and how funnily his dress sticks to
him as he crawls out! But his grief is soon assuaged by the privilege
of carrying the trout strung on an alder twig; and it is a happy, muddy,
proud pair of urchins that climb over the fence out of the field of
triumph at the close of the day.

What does the father say, as he meets them in the road? Is he frowning
or smiling under that big brown beard? You cannot be quite sure. But one
thing is clear: he is as much elated over the capture of the real trout
as any one. He is ready to deal mildly with a little irregularity
for the sake of encouraging pluck and perseverance. Before the three
comrades have reached the hotel, the boy has promised faithfully never
to take his little brother off again without asking leave; and the
father has promised that the boy shall have a real jointed fishing-rod
of his own, so that he will not need to borrow old Horace's pole any
more.

At breakfast the next morning the family are to have a private dish;
not an every-day affair of vulgar, bony fish that nurses can catch, but
trout--three of them! But the boy looks up from the table and sees the
adored of his soul, Annie V----, sitting at the other end of the room,
and faring on the common food of mortals. Shall she eat the ordinary
breakfast while he feasts on dainties? Do not other sportsmen send
their spoils to the ladies whom they admire? The waiter must bring a hot
plate, and take this largest trout to Miss V---- (Miss Annie, not her
sister--make no mistake about it).

The face of Augustus is as solemn as an ebony idol while he plays his
part of Cupid's messenger. The fair Annie affects surprise; she accepts
the offering rather indifferently; her curls drop down over her cheeks
to cover some small confusion. But for an instant the corner of her eye
catches the boy's sidelong glance, and she nods perceptibly, whereupon
his mother very inconsiderately calls attention to the fact that
yesterday's escapade has sun-burned his face dreadfully.

Beautiful Annie V----, who, among all the unripened nymphs that played
at hide-and-seek among the maples on the hotel lawn, or waded with white
feet along the yellow beach beyond the point of pines, flying with merry
shrieks into the woods when a boat-load of boys appeared suddenly around
the corner, or danced the lancers in the big, bare parlours before the
grown-up ball began--who in all that joyous, innocent bevy could be
compared with you for charm or daring? How your dark eyes sparkled,
and how the long brown ringlets tossed around your small head, when you
stood up that evening, slim and straight, and taller by half a head than
your companions, in the lamp-lit room where the children were playing
forfeits, and said, "There is not one boy here that DARES to kiss ME!"
Then you ran out on the dark porch, where the honeysuckle vines grew up
the tall, inane Corinthian pillars.

Did you blame the boy for following? And were you very angry, indeed,
about what happened,--until you broke out laughing at his cravat, which
had slipped around behind his ear? That was the first time he ever
noticed how much sweeter the honeysuckle smells at night than in the
day. It was his entrance examination in the school of nature--human and
otherwise. He felt that there was a whole continent of newly discovered
poetry within him, and worshipped his Columbus disguised in curls. Your
boy is your true idealist, after all, although (or perhaps because) he
is still uncivilised.


II.


The arrival of the rod, in four joints, with an extra tip, a brass reel,
and the other luxuries for which a true angler would willingly exchange
the necessaries of life, marked a new epoch in the boy's career. At the
uplifting of that wand, as if it had been in the hand of another Moses,
the waters of infancy rolled back, and the way was opened into the
promised land, whither the tyrant nurses, with all their proud array of
baby-chariots, could not follow. The way was open, but not by any means
dry. One of the first events in the dispensation of the rod was the
purchase of a pair of high rubber boots. Inserted in this armour of
modern infantry, and transfigured with delight, the boy clumped through
all the little rivers within a circuit of ten miles from Caldwell, and
began to learn by parental example the yet unmastered art of complete
angling.

But because some of the streams were deep and strong, and his legs were
short and slender, and his ambition was even taller than his boots, the
father would sometimes take him up pickaback, and wade along carefully
through the perilous places--which are often, in this world, the very
places one longs to fish in. So, in your remembrance, you can see the
little rubber boots sticking out under the father's arms, and the rod
projecting over his head, and the bait dangling down unsteadily into the
deep holes, and the delighted boy hooking and playing and basketing his
trout high in the air. How many of our best catches in life are made
from some one else's shoulders!

From this summer the whole earth became to the boy, as Tennyson
describes the lotus country, "a land of streams." In school-days and
in town he acknowledged the sway of those mysterious and irresistible
forces which produce tops at one season, and marbles at another, and
kites at another, and bind all boyish hearts to play mumble-the-peg at
the due time more certainly than the stars are bound to their orbits.
But when vacation came, with its annual exodus from the city, there was
only one sign in the zodiac, and that was Pisces.

No country seemed to him tolerable without trout, and no landscape
beautiful unless enlivened by a young river. Among what delectable
mountains did those watery guides lead his vagrant steps, and with
what curious, mixed, and sometimes profitable company did they make him
familiar!

There was one exquisite stream among the Alleghanies, called Lycoming
Creek, beside which the family spent a summer in a decadent inn, kept by
a tremulous landlord who was always sitting on the steps of the porch,
and whose most memorable remark was that he had "a misery in his
stomach." This form of speech amused the boy, but he did not in
the least comprehend it. It was the description of an unimaginable
experience in a region which was as yet known to him only as the seat of
pleasure. He did not understand how any one could be miserable when he
could catch trout from his own dooryard.

The big creek, with its sharp turns from side to side of the valley, its
hemlock-shaded falls in the gorge, and its long, still reaches in the
"sugar-bottom," where the maple-trees grew as if in an orchard, and the
superfluity of grasshoppers made the trout fat and dainty, was too wide
to fit the boy. But nature keeps all sizes in her stock, and a smaller
stream, called Rocky Run, came tumbling down opposite the inn, as if
made to order for juvenile use.

How well you can follow it, through the old pasture overgrown with
alders, and up past the broken-down mill-dam and the crumbling sluice,
into the mountain-cleft from which it leaps laughing! The water, except
just after a rain-storm, is as transparent as glass--old-fashioned
window-glass, I mean, in small panes, with just a tinge of green in it,
like the air in a grove of young birches. Twelve feet down in the narrow
chasm below the falls, where the water is full of tiny bubbles, like
Apollinaris, you can see the trout poised, with their heads up-stream,
motionless, but quivering a little, as if they were strung on wires.

The bed of the stream has been scooped out of the solid rock. Here and
there banks of sand have been deposited, and accumulations of loose
stone disguise the real nature of the channel. Great boulders have
been rolled down the alleyway and left where they chanced to stick; the
stream must get around them or under them as best it can. But there are
other places where everything has been swept clean; nothing remains but
the primitive strata, and the flowing water merrily tickles the bare
ribs of mother earth. Whirling stones, in the spring floods, have cut
well-holes in the rock, as round and even as if they had been made with
a drill, and sometimes you can see the very stone that sunk the well
lying at the bottom. There are long, straight, sloping troughs through
which the water runs like a mill-race. There are huge basins into which
the water rumbles over a ledge, as if some one were pouring it very
steadily out of a pitcher, and from which it glides away without a
ripple, flowing over a smooth pavement of rock which shelves down from
the shallow foot to the deep head of the pool.

The boy wonders how far he dare wade out along that slippery floor. The
water is within an inch of his boot-tops now. But the slope seems very
even, and just beyond his reach a good fish is rising. Only one step
more, and then, like the wicked man in the psalm, his feet begin to
slide. Slowly, and standing bolt upright, with the rod held high above
his head, as if it must on no account get wet, he glides forward up to
his neck in the ice-cold bath, gasping with amazement. There have
been other and more serious situations in life into which, unless I am
mistaken, you have made an equally unwilling and embarrassed entrance,
and in which you have been surprised to find yourself not only up
to your neck, but over,--and you are a lucky man if you have had the
presence of mind to stand still for a moment, before wading out, and
make sure at least of the fish that tempted you into your predicament.

But Rocky Run, they say, exists no longer. It has been blasted by miners
out of all resemblance to itself, and bewitched into a dingy water-power
to turn wheels for the ugly giant, Trade. It is only in the valley of
remembrance that its current still flows like liquid air; and only in
that country that you can still see the famous men who came and went
along the banks of the Lyocoming when the boy was there.

There was Collins, who was a wondrous adept at "daping, dapping, or
dibbling" with a grasshopper, and who once brought in a string of trout
which he laid out head to tail on the grass before the house in a line
of beauty forty-seven feet long. A mighty bass voice had this Collins
also, and could sing, "Larboard Watch, Ahoy!" "Down in a Coal-Mine,"
and other profound ditties in a way to make all the glasses on the table
jingle; but withal, as you now suspect, rather a fishy character, and
undeserving of the unqualified respect which the boy had for him.
And there was Dr. Romsen, lean, satirical, kindly, a skilful though
reluctant physician, who regarded it as a personal injury if any one
in the party fell sick in summer time; and a passionately unsuccessful
hunter, who would sit all night in the crotch of a tree beside an
alleged deer-lick, and come home perfectly satisfied if he had heard
a hedgehog grunt. It was he who called attention to the discrepancy
between the boy's appetite and his size by saying loudly at a picnic,
"I wouldn't grudge you what you eat, my boy, if I could only see that
it did you any good,"--which remark was not forgiven until the doctor
redeemed his reputation by pronouncing a serious medical opinion, before
a council of mothers, to the effect that it did not really hurt a boy to
get his feet wet. That was worthy of Galen in his most inspired moment.
And there was hearty, genial Paul Merit, whose mere company was an
education in good manners, and who could eat eight hard-boiled eggs for
supper without ruffling his equanimity; and the tall, thin, grinning
Major, whom an angry Irishwoman once described as "like a comb, all back
and teeth;" and many more were the comrades of the boy's father, all
of whom he admired, (and followed when they would let him,) but none
so much as the father himself, because he was the wisest, kindest, and
merriest of all that merry crew, now dispersed to the uttermost parts of
the earth and beyond.

Other streams played a part in the education of that happy boy: the
Kaaterskill, where there had been nothing but the ghosts of trout
for the last thirty years, but where the absence of fish was almost
forgotten in the joy of a first introduction to Dickens, one very
showery day, when dear old Ned Mason built a smoky fire in a cave below
Haines's Falls, and, pulling The Old Curiosity Shop out of his pocket,
read aloud about Little Nell until the tears ran down the cheeks
of reader and listener--the smoke was so thick, you know: and the
Neversink, which flows through John Burroughs's country, and past one
house in particular, perched on a high bluff, where a very dreadful old
woman come out and throws stones at "city fellers fishin' through her
land" (as if any one wanted to touch her land! It was the water that ran
over it, you see, that carried the fish with it, and they were not hers
at all): and the stream at Healing Springs, in the Virginia mountains,
where the medicinal waters flow down into a lovely wild brook without
injuring the health of the trout in the least, and where the only
drawback to the angler's happiness is the abundance of rattlesnakes--but
a boy does not mind such things as that; he feels as if he were
immortal. Over all these streams memory skips lightly, and strikes a
trail through the woods to the Adirondacks, where the boy made his first
acquaintance with navigable rivers,--that is to say, rivers which
are traversed by canoes and hunting-skiffs, but not yet defiled by
steamboats,--and slept, or rather lay awake, for the first time on a bed
of balsam-boughs in a tent.


III.


The promotion from all-day picnics to a two weeks' camping-trip is
like going from school to college. By this time a natural process
of evolution has raised the first rod to something lighter and more
flexible,--a fly-rod, so to speak, but not a bigoted one,--just a
serviceable, unprejudiced article, not above using any kind of bait
that may be necessary to catch the fish. The father has received the new
title of "governor," indicating not less, but more authority, and
has called in new instructors to carry on the boy's education: real
Adirondack guides--old Sam Dunning and one-eyed Enos, the last and
laziest of the Saranac Indians. Better men will be discovered for
later trips, but none more amusing, and none whose woodcraft seems more
wonderful than that of this queerly matched team, as they make the
first camp in a pelting rain-storm on the shore of Big Clear Pond. The
pitching of the tents is a lesson in architecture, the building of the
camp-fire a victory over damp nature, and the supper of potatoes and
bacon and fried trout a veritable triumph of culinary art.

At midnight the rain is pattering persistently on the canvas; the fronts
flaps are closed and tied together; the lingering fire shines through
them, and sends vague shadows wavering up and down: the governor is
rolled up in his blankets, sound asleep. It is a very long night for the
boy.

What is that rustling noise outside the tent? Probably some small
creature, a squirrel or a rabbit. Rabbit stew would be good for
breakfast. But it sounds louder now, almost loud enough to be a
fox,--there are no wolves left in the Adirondacks, or at least only a
very few. That is certainly quite a heavy footstep prowling around the
provision-box. Could it be a panther,--they step very softly for their
size,--or a bear perhaps? Sam Dunning told about catching one in a trap
just below here. (Ah, my boy, you will soon learn that there is no spot
in all the forests created by a bountiful Providence so poor as to be
without its bear story.) Where was the rifle put? There it is, at the
foot of the tent-pole. Wonder if it is loaded?

"Waugh-ho! Waugh-ho-o-o-o!"

The boy springs from his blankets like a cat, and peeps out between the
tent-flaps. There sits Enos, in the shelter of a leaning tree by the
fire, with his head thrown back and a bottle poised at his mouth. His
lonely eye is cocked up at a great horned owl on the branch above him.
Again the sudden voice breaks out:

"Whoo! whoo! whoo cooks for you all?"

Enos puts the bottle down, with a grunt, and creeps off to his tent.

"De debbil in dat owl," he mutters. "How he know I cook for dis camp?
How he know 'bout dat bottle? Ugh!"

There are hundreds of pictures that flash into light as the boy goes on
his course, year after year, through the woods. There is the luxurious
camp on Tupper's Lake, with its log cabins in the spruce-grove, and its
regiment of hungry men who ate almost a deer a day; and there is the
little bark shelter on the side of Mount Marcy, where the governor
and the boy, with baskets full of trout from the Opalescent River, are
spending the night, with nothing but a fire to keep them warm. There is
the North Bay at Moosehead, with Joe La Croix (one more Frenchman who
thinks he looks like Napoleon) posing on the rocks beside his canoe,
and only reconciled by his vanity to the wasteful pastime of taking
photographs while the big fish are rising gloriously out at the end
of the point. There is the small spring-hole beside the Saranac River,
where Pliny Robbins and the boy caught twenty-three noble trout,
weighing from one to three pounds apiece, in the middle of a hot August
afternoon, and hid themselves in the bushes when ever they heard a party
coming down the river, because they did not care to attract company; and
there are the Middle Falls, where the governor stood on a long spruce
log, taking two-pound fish with the fly, and stepping out at every cast
a little nearer to the end of the log, until it slowly tipped with him,
and he settled down into the river.

Among such scenes as these the boy pursued his education, learning many
things that are not taught in colleges; learning to take the weather
as it comes, wet or dry, and fortune as it falls, good or bad;
learning that a meal which is scanty fare for one becomes a banquet for
two--provided the other is the right person; learning that there is some
skill in everything, even in digging bait, and that what is called luck
consists chiefly in having your tackle in good order; learning that a
man can be just as happy in a log shanty as in a brownstone mansion, and
that the very best pleasures are those that do not leave a bad taste
in the mouth. And in all this the governor was his best teacher and his
closest comrade.

Dear governor, you have gone out of the wilderness now, and your steps
will be no more beside these remembered little rivers--no more, forever
and forever. You will not come in sight around any bend of this clear
Swiftwater stream where you made your last cast; your cheery voice
will never again ring out through the deepening twilight where you are
lingering for your disciple to catch up with you; he will never again
hear you call: "Hallo, my boy! What luck? Time to go home!" But there is
a river in the country where you have gone, is there not?--a river with
trees growing all along it--evergreen trees; and somewhere by those
shady banks, within sound of clear running waters, I think you will be
dreaming and waiting for your boy, if he follows the trail that you have
shown him even to the end.

1895.




AMPERSAND


"It is not the walking merely, it is keeping yourself in tune for a
walk, in the spiritual and bodily condition in which you can find
entertainment and exhilaration in so simple and natural a pastime. You
are eligible to any good fortune when you are in a condition to enjoy
a walk. When the air and water taste sweet to you, how much else will
taste sweet! When the exercise of your limbs affords you pleasure, and
the play of your senses upon the various objects and shows of Nature
quickens and stimulates your spirit, your relation to the world and
to yourself is what it should be,--simple, and direct, and
wholesome."--JOHN BURROUGHS: Pepacton.


The right to the name of Ampersand, like the territory of Gaul in those
Commentaries which Julius Caesar wrote for the punishment of schoolboys,
is divided into three parts. It belongs to a mountain, and a lake, and a
little river.

The mountain stands in the heart of the Adirondack country, just near
enough to the thoroughfare of travel for thousands of people to see it
every year, and just far enough from the beaten track to be unvisited
except by a very few of the wise ones, who love to turn aside. Behind
the mountain is the lake, which no lazy man has ever seen. Out of the
lake flows the stream, winding down a long, untrodden forest valley, to
join the Stony Creek waters and empty into the Raquette River.

Which of the three Ampersands has the prior claim to the name, I cannot
tell. Philosophically speaking, the mountain ought to be regarded as the
head of the family, because it was undoubtedly there before the others.
And the lake was probably the next on the ground, because the stream
is its child. But man is not strictly just in his nomenclature; and I
conjecture that the little river, the last-born of the three, was the
first to be christened Ampersand, and then gave its name to its parent
and grand-parent. It is such a crooked stream, so bent and curved and
twisted upon itself, so fond of turning around unexpected corners and
sweeping away in great circles from its direct course, that its first
explorers christened it after the eccentric supernumerary of the
alphabet which appears in the old spelling-books as &-- and per se, and.

But in spite of this apparent subordination to the stream in the matter
of a name, the mountain clearly asserts its natural authority. It stands
up boldly; and not only its own lake, but at least three others, the
Lower Saranac, Round Lake, and Lonesome Pond, lie at its foot and
acknowledge its lordship. When the cloud is on its brow, they are dark.
When the sunlight strikes it, they smile. Wherever you may go over the
waters of these lakes you shall see Mount Ampersand looking down at you,
and saying quietly, "This is my domain."

I never look at a mountain which asserts itself in this fashion without
desiring to stand on the top of it. If one can reach the summit, one
becomes a sharer in the dominion. The difficulties in the way only add
to the zest of the victory. Every mountain is, rightly considered, an
invitation to climb. And as I was resting for a month one summer at
Bartlett's, Ampersand challenged me daily.

Did you know Bartlett's in its palmy time? It was the homeliest,
quaintest, coziest place in the Adirondacks. Away back in the
ante-bellum days Virgil Bartlett had come into the woods, and built his
house on the bank of the Saranac River, between the Upper Saranac and
Round Lake. It was then the only dwelling within a circle of many miles.
The deer and bear were in the majority. At night one could sometimes
hear the scream of the panther or the howling of wolves. But soon the
wilderness began to wear the traces of a conventional smile. The desert
blossomed a little--if not as the rose, at least as the gilly-flower.
Fields were cleared, gardens planted; half a dozen log cabins were
scattered along the river; and the old house, having grown slowly and
somewhat irregularly for twenty years, came out, just before the time of
which I write, in a modest coat of paint and a broad-brimmed piazza.
But Virgil himself, the creator of the oasis--well known of hunters and
fishermen, dreaded of lazy guides and quarrelsome lumbermen,--"Virge,"
the irascible, kind-hearted, indefatigable, was there no longer. He had
made his last clearing, and fought his last fight; done his last favour
to a friend, and thrown his last adversary out of the tavern door. His
last log had gone down the river. His camp-fire had burned out. Peace
to his ashes. His wife, who had often played the part of Abigail toward
travellers who had unconsciously incurred the old man's mistrust, now
reigned in his stead; and there was great abundance of maple-syrup on
every man's flapjack.

The charm of Bartlett's for the angler was the stretch of rapid water
in front of the house. The Saranac River, breaking from its first
resting-place in the Upper Lake, plunged down through a great bed of
rocks, making a chain of short falls and pools and rapids, about half
a mile in length. Here, in the spring and early summer, the speckled
trout--brightest and daintiest of all fish that swim--used to be found
in great numbers. As the season advanced, they moved away into the deep
water of the lakes. But there were always a few stragglers left, and I
have taken them in the rapids at the very end of August. What could be
more delightful than to spend an hour or two, in the early morning or
evening of a hot day, in wading this rushing stream, and casting the fly
on its clear waters? The wind blows softly down the narrow valley, and
the trees nod from the rocks above you. The noise of the falls makes
constant music in your ears. The river hurries past you, and yet it is
never gone.

The same foam-flakes seem to be always gliding downward, the same spray
dashing over the stones, the same eddy coiling at the edge of the pool.
Send your fly in under those cedar branches, where the water swirls
around by that old log. Now draw it up toward the foam. There is a
sudden gleam of dull gold in the white water. You strike too soon.
Your line comes back to you. In a current like this, a fish will almost
always hook himself. Try it again. This time he takes the fly fairly,
and you have him. It is a good fish, and he makes the slender rod bend
to the strain. He sulks for a moment as if uncertain what to do, and
then with a rush darts into the swiftest part of the current. You can
never stop him there. Let him go. Keep just enough pressure on him to
hold the hook firm, and follow his troutship down the stream as if he
were a salmon. He slides over a little fall, gleaming through the foam,
and swings around in the next pool. Here you can manage him more easily;
and after a few minutes' brilliant play, a few mad dashes for the
current, he comes to the net, and your skilful guide lands him with
a quick, steady sweep of the arm. The scales credit him with an
even pound, and a better fish than this you will hardly take here in
midsummer.

"On my word, master," says the appreciative Venator, in Walton's
Angler, "this is a gallant trout; what shall we do with him?" And
honest Piscator, replies: "Marry! e'en eat him to supper; we'll go to
my hostess from whence we came; she told me, as I was going out of door,
that my brother Peter, [and who is this but Romeyn of Keeseville?] a
good angler and a cheerful companion, had sent word he would lodge there
tonight, and bring a friend with him. My hostess has two beds, and I
know you and I have the best; we'll rejoice with my brother Peter and
his friend, tell tales, or sing ballads, or make a catch, or find
some harmless sport to content us, and pass away a little time without
offence to God or man."

Ampersand waited immovable while I passed many days in such innocent and
healthful pleasures as these, until the right day came for the ascent.
Cool, clean, and bright, the crystal morning promised a glorious noon,
and the mountain almost seemed to beckon us to come up higher. The
photographic camera and a trustworthy lunch were stowed away in the
pack-basket. The backboard was adjusted at a comfortable angle in the
stern seat of our little boat. The guide held the little craft steady
while I stepped into my place; then he pushed out into the stream, and
we went swiftly down toward Round Lake.

A Saranac boat is one of the finest things that the skill of man has
ever produced under the inspiration of the wilderness. It is a frail
shell, so light that a guide can carry it on his shoulders with ease,
but so dexterously fashioned that it rides the heaviest waves like a
duck, and slips through the water as if by magic. You can travel in
it along the shallowest rivers and across the broadest lakes, and make
forty or fifty miles a day, if you have a good guide.

Everything depends, in the Adirondacks, as in so many other regions of
life, upon your guide. If he is selfish, or surly, or stupid, you will
have a bad time. But if he is an Adirondacker of the best old-fashioned
type,--now unhappily growing more rare from year to year,--you will find
him an inimitable companion, honest, faithful, skilful and cheerful. He
is as independent as a prince, and the gilded youths and finicking fine
ladies who attempt to patronise him are apt to make but a sorry show
before his solid and undisguised contempt. But deal with him man to man,
and he will give you a friendly, loyal service which money cannot buy,
and teach you secrets of woodcraft and lessons in plain, self-reliant
manhood more valuable than all the learning of the schools. Such a
guide was mine, rejoicing in the Scriptural name of Hosea, but commonly
called, in brevity and friendliness, "Hose."

As we entered Round Lake on this fair morning, its surface was as smooth
and shining as a mirror. It was too early yet for the tide of travel
which sends a score of boats up and down this thoroughfare every day;
and from shore to shore the water was unruffled, except by a flock
of sheldrakes which had been feeding near Plymouth Rock, and now
went skittering off into Weller Bay with a motion between flying and
swimming, leaving a long wake of foam behind them.

At such a time as this you can see the real colour of these Adirondack
lakes. It is not blue, as romantic writers so often describe it, nor
green, like some of those wonderful Swiss lakes; although of course
it reflects the colour of the trees along the shore; and when the wind
stirs it, it gives back the hue of the sky, blue when it is clear, gray
when the clouds are gathering, and sometimes as black as ink under the
shadow of storm. But when it is still, the water itself is like that
river which one of the poets has described as

     "Flowing with a smooth brown current."

And in this sheet of burnished bronze the mountains and islands were
reflected perfectly, and the sun shone back from it, not in broken
gleams or a wide lane of light, but like a single ball of fire, moving
before us as we moved.

But stop! What is that dark speck on the water, away down toward Turtle
Point? It has just the shape and size of a deer's head. It seems to
move steadily out into the lake. There is a little ripple, like a wake,
behind it. Hose turns to look at it, and then sends the boat darting
in that direction with long, swift strokes. It is a moment of pleasant
excitement, and we begin to conjecture whether the deer is a buck or
a doe, and whose hounds have driven it in. But when Hose turns to look
again, he slackens his stroke, and says: "I guess we needn't to hurry;
he won't get away. It's astonishin' what a lot of fun a man can get in
the course of a natural life a-chasm' chumps of wood."

We landed on a sand beach at the mouth of a little stream, where a
blazed tree marked the beginning of the Ampersand trail. This line
through the forest was made years ago by that ardent sportsman and lover
of the Adirondacks, Dr. W. W. Ely, of Rochester. Since that time it has
been shortened and improved a little by other travellers, and also not
a little blocked and confused by the lumbermen and the course of Nature.
For when the lumbermen go into the woods, they cut roads in every
direction, leading nowhither, and the unwary wanderer is thereby led
aside from the right way, and entangled in the undergrowth. And as for
Nature, she is entirely opposed to continuance of paths through her
forest. She covers them with fallen leaves, and hides them with thick
bushes. She drops great trees across them, and blots then out with
windfalls. But the blazed line--a succession of broad axe-marks on
the trunks of the trees, just high enough to catch the eye on a
level--cannot be so easily obliterated, and this, after all, is the
safest guide through the woods.

Our trail led us at first through a natural meadow, overgrown with
waist-high grass, and very spongy to the tread. Hornet-haunted also
was this meadow, and therefore no place for idle dalliance or unwary
digression, for the sting of the hornet is one of the saddest and most
humiliating surprises of this mortal life.

Then through a tangle of old wood-roads my guide led me safely, and we
struck one of the long ridges which slope gently from the lake to the
base of the mountain. Here walking was comparatively easy, for in the
hard-wood timber there is little underbrush. The massive trunks seemed
like pillars set to uphold the level roof of green. Great yellow
birches, shaggy with age, stretched their knotted arms high above us;
sugar-maples stood up straight and proud under their leafy crowns;
and smooth beeches--the most polished and parklike of all the forest
trees--offered opportunities for the carving of lovers' names in a place
where few lovers ever come.

The woods were quiet. It seemed as if all living creatures had deserted
them. Indeed, if you have spent much time in our Northern forests, you
must have often wondered at the sparseness of life, and felt a sense of
pity for the apparent loneliness of the squirrel that chatters at you
as you pass, or the little bird that hops noiselessly about in the
thickets. The midsummer noontide is an especially silent time. The deer
are asleep in some wild meadow. The partridge has gathered her brood for
their midday nap. The squirrels are perhaps counting over their store
of nuts in a hollow tree, and the hermit-thrush spares his voice until
evening. The woods are close--not cool and fragrant as the foolish
romances describe them--but warm and still; for the breeze which sweeps
across the hilltop and ruffles the lake does not penetrate into these
shady recesses, and therefore all the inhabitants take the noontide as
their hour of rest. Only the big woodpecker--he of the scarlet head
and mighty bill--is indefatigable, and somewhere unseen is "tapping
the hollow beech-tree," while a wakeful little bird,--I guess it is
the black-throated green warbler,--prolongs his dreamy, listless
ditty,--'te-de-terit-sca,--'te-de-us--wait.

After about an hour of easy walking, our trail began to ascend more
sharply. We passed over the shoulder of a ridge and around the edge of
a fire-slash, and then we had the mountain fairly before us. Not that we
could see anything of it, for the woods still shut us in, but the path
became very steep, and we knew that it was a straight climb; not up and
down and round about did this most uncompromising trail proceed, but
right up, in a direct line for the summit.

Now this side of Ampersand is steeper than any Gothic roof I have ever
seen, and withal very much encumbered with rocks and ledges and fallen
trees. There were places where we had to haul ourselves up by roots and
branches, and places where we had to go down on our hands and knees to
crawl under logs. It was breathless work, but not at all dangerous or
difficult. Every step forward was also a step upward; and as we stopped
to rest for a moment, we could see already glimpses of the lake below
us. But at these I did not much care to look, for I think it is a pity
to spoil the surprise of a grand view by taking little snatches of it
beforehand. It is better to keep one's face set to the mountain, and
then, coming out from the dark forest upon the very summit, feel the
splendour of the outlook flash upon one like a revelation.

The character of the woods through which we were now passing was
entirely different from those of the lower levels. On these steep places
the birch and maple will not grow, or at least they occur but sparsely.
The higher slopes and sharp ridges of the mountains are always covered
with soft-wood timber. Spruce and hemlock and balsam strike their
roots among the rocks, and find a hidden nourishment. They stand close
together; thickets of small trees spring up among the large ones; from
year to year the great trunks are falling one across another, and the
undergrowth is thickening around them, until a spruce forest seems to be
almost impassable. The constant rain of needles and the crumbling of
the fallen trees form a rich, brown mould, into which the foot sinks
noiselessly. Wonderful beds of moss, many feet in thickness, and softer
than feathers, cover the rocks and roots. There are shadows never broken
by the sun, and dark, cool springs of icy water hidden away in the
crevices. You feel a sense of antiquity here which you can never feel
among the maples and birches. Longfellow was right when he filled his
forest primeval with "murmuring pines and hemlocks."

The higher one climbs, the darker and gloomier and more rugged the
vegetation becomes. The pine-trees soon cease to follow you; the
hemlocks disappear, and the balsams can go no farther. Only the hardy
spruce keeps on bravely, rough and stunted, with branches matted
together and pressed down flat by the weight of the winter's snow, until
finally, somewhere about the level of four thousand feet above the sea,
even this bold climber gives out, and the weather-beaten rocks of the
summit are clad only with mosses and Alpine plants.

Thus it is with mountains, as perhaps with men, a mark of superior
dignity to be naturally bald.

Ampersand, falling short by a thousand feet of the needful height,
cannot claim this distinction. But what Nature has denied, human labour
has supplied. Under the direction of the Adirondack Survey, some years
ago, several acres of trees were cut from the summit; and when we
emerged, after the last sharp scramble, upon the very crest of the
mountain, we were not shut in by a dense thicket, but stood upon a bare
ridge of granite in the centre of a ragged clearing.

I shut my eyes for a moment, drew a few long breaths of the glorious
breeze, and then looked out upon a wonder and a delight beyond
description.

A soft, dazzling splendour filled the air. Snowy banks and drifts of
cloud were floating slowly over a wide and wondrous land. Vast sweeps
of forest, shining waters, mountains near and far, the deepest green
and the palest blue, changing colours and glancing lights, and all so
silent, so strange, so far away, that it seemed like the landscape of a
dream. One almost feared to speak, lest it should vanish.

Right below us the Lower Saranac and Lonesome Pond, Round Lake and the
Weller Ponds, were spread out like a map. Every point and island was
clearly marked. We could follow the course of the Saranac River in all
its curves and windings, and see the white tents of the hay-makers on
the wild meadows. Far away to the northeast stretched the level fields
of Bloomingdale. But westward all was unbroken wilderness, a great sea
of woods as far as the eye could reach. And how far it can reach from
a height like this! What a revelation of the power of sight! That faint
blue outline far in the north was Lyon Mountain, nearly thirty miles
away as the crow flies. Those silver gleams a little nearer were the
waters of St. Regis. The Upper Saranac was displayed in all its length
and breadth, and beyond it the innumerable waters of Fish Creek were
tangled among the dark woods. The long ranges of the hills about the
Jordan bounded the western horizon, and on the southwest Big Tupper Lake
was sleeping at the base of Mount Morris. Looking past the peak of Stony
Creek Mountain, which rose sharp and distinct in a line with Ampersand,
we could trace the path of the Raquette River from the distant waters
of Long Lake down through its far-stretched valley, and catch here and
there a silvery link of its current.

But when we turned to the south and east, how wonderful and how
different was the view! Here was no widespread and smiling landscape
with gleams of silver scattered through it, and soft blue haze resting
upon its fading verge, but a wild land of mountains, stern, rugged,
tumultuous, rising one beyond another like the waves of a stormy
ocean,--Ossa piled upin Pelion,--Mcintyre's sharp peak, and the ragged
crest of the Gothics, and, above all, Marcy's dome-like head, raised
just far enough above the others to assert his royal right as monarch of
the Adirondacks.

But grandest of all, as seen from this height, was Mount Seward,--a
solemn giant of a mountain, standing apart from the others, and looking
us full in the face. He was clothed from base to summit in a dark,
unbroken robe of forest. Ou-kor-lah, the Indians called him--the Great
Eye; and he seemed almost to frown upon us in defiance. At his feet, so
straight below us that it seemed almost as if we could cast a stone
into it, lay the wildest and most beautiful of all the Adirondack
waters--Ampersand Lake.

On its shore, some five-and-twenty years ago, the now almost forgotten
Adirondack Club had their shanty--the successor of "the Philosophers'
Camp" on Follensbee Pond. Agassiz, Appleton, Norton, Emerson, Lowell,
Hoar, Gray, John Holmes, and Stillman, were among the company who made
their resting-place under the shadow of Mount Seward. They had bought a
tract of forest land completely encircling the pond, cut a rough road to
it through the woods, and built a comfortable log cabin, to which they
purposed to return summer after summer. But the civil war broke out,
with all its terrible excitement and confusion of hurrying hosts: the
club existed but for two years, and the little house in the wilderness
was abandoned. In 1878, when I spent three weeks at Ampersand, the cabin
was in ruins, and surrounded by an almost impenetrable growth of bushes.
The only philosophers to be seen were a family of what the guides
quaintly call "quill pigs." The roof had fallen to the ground;
raspberry-bushes thrust themselves through the yawning crevices between
the logs; and in front of the sunken door-sill lay a rusty, broken iron
stove, like a dismantled altar on which the fire had gone out forever.

After we had feasted upon the view as long as we dared, counted the
lakes and streams, and found that we could see without a glass more than
thirty, and recalled the memories of "good times" which came to us from
almost every point of the compass, we unpacked the camera, and proceeded
to take some pictures.

If you are a photographer, and have anything of the amateur's passion
for your art, you will appreciate my pleasure and my anxiety. Never
before, so far as I knew, had a camera been set up on Ampersand. I had
but eight plates with me. The views were all very distant and all at a
downward angle. The power of the light at this elevation was an unknown
quantity. And the wind was sweeping vigorously across the open summit
of the mountain. I put in my smallest stop, and prepared for short
exposures.

My instrument was a thing called a Tourograph, which differs from most
other cameras in having the plate-holder on top of the box. The plates
are dropped into a groove below, and then moved into focus, after which
the cap is removed and the exposure made.

I set my instrument for Ampersand Pond, sighted the picture through the
ground glass, and measured the focus. Then I waited for a quiet moment,
dropped the plate, moved it carefully forward to the proper mark, and
went around to take off the cap. I found that I already had it in my
hand, and the plate had been exposed for about thirty seconds with a
sliding focus!

I expostulated with myself. I said: "You are excited; you are stupid;
you are unworthy of the name of photographer. Light-writer! You ought to
write with a whitewash-brush!" The reproof was effectual, and from
that moment all went well. The plates dropped smoothly, the camera
was steady, the exposure was correct. Six good pictures were made, to
recall, so far as black and white could do it, the delights of that day.

It has been my good luck to climb many of the peaks of the
Adirondacks--Dix, the Dial, Hurricane, the Giant of the Valley, Marcy,
and Whiteface--but I do not think the outlook from any of them is so
wonderful and lovely as that from little Ampersand: and I reckon among
my most valuable chattels the plates of glass on which the sun
has traced for me (who cannot draw) the outlines of that loveliest
landscape.

The downward journey was swift. We halted for an hour or two beside a
trickling spring, a few rods below the summit, to eat our lunch. Then,
jumping, running, and sometimes sliding, we made the descent, passed in
safety by the dreaded lair of the hornet, and reached Bartlett's as
the fragrance of the evening pancake was softly diffused through the
twilight. Mark that day, Memory, with a double star in your catalogue!

1895.




A HANDFUL OF HEATHER


"Scotland is the home of romance because it is the home of Scott, Burns,
Black, Macdonald, Stevenson, and Barrie--and of thousands of men like
that old Highlander in kilts on the tow-path, who loves what they have
written. I would wager he has a copy of Burns in his sporran, and has
quoted him half a dozen times to the grim Celt who is walking with him.
Those old boys don't read for excitement or knowledge, but because they
love their land and their people and their religion--and their great
writers simply express their emotions for them in words they can
understand. You and I come over here, with thousands of our countrymen,
to borrow their emotions."--ROBERT BRIDGES: Overheard in Arcady.


My friend the Triumphant Democrat, fiercest of radicals and kindest
of men, expresses his scorn for monarchical institutions (and his
invincible love for his native Scotland) by tenanting, summer after
summer, a famous castle among the heathery Highlands. There he proclaims
the most uncompromising Americanism in a speech that grows more broadly
Scotch with every week of his emancipation from the influence of the
clipped, commercial accent of New York, and casts contempt on feudalism
by playing the part of lord of the manor to such a perfection of
high-handed beneficence that the people of the glen are all become
his clansmen, and his gentle lady would be the patron saint of the
district--if the republican theology of Scotland could only admit saints
among the elect.

Every year he sends trophies of game to his friends across the
sea--birds that are as toothsome and wild-flavoured as if they had not
been hatched under the tyranny of the game-laws. He has a pleasant trick
of making them grateful to the imagination as well as to the palate by
packing them in heather. I'll warrant that Aaron's rod bore no bonnier
blossoms than these stiff little bushes--and none more magical.
For every time I take up a handful of them they transport me to
the Highlands, and send me tramping once more, with knapsack and
fishing-rod, over the braes and down the burns.


I.

BELL-HEATHER.


Some of my happiest meanderings in Scotland have been taken under the
lead of a book. Indeed, for travel in a strange country there can be
no better courier. Not a guide-book, I mean, but a real book, and, by
preference, a novel.

Fiction, like wine, tastes best in the place where it was grown. And the
scenery of a foreign land (including architecture, which is artificial
landscape) grows less dreamlike and unreal to our perception when we
people it with familiar characters from our favourite novels. Even on a
first journey we feel ourselves among old friends. Thus to read Romola
in Florence, and Les Miserables in Paris, and Lorna Doone on Exmoor, and
The Heart of Midlothian in Edinburgh, and David Balfour in the Pass of
Glencoe, and The Pirate in the Shetland Isles, is to get a new sense of
the possibilities of life. All these things have I done with much inward
contentment; and other things of like quality have I yet in store; as,
for example, the conjunction of The Bonnie Brier-Bush with Drumtochty,
and The Little Minister with Thrums, and The Raiders with Galloway.
But I never expect to pass pleasanter days than those I spent with A
Princess of Thule among the Hebrides.

For then, to begin with, I was young; which is an unearned increment of
delight sure to be confiscated by the envious years and never regained.
But even youth itself was not to be compared with the exquisite felicity
of being deeply and desperately in love with Sheila, the clear-eyed
heroine of that charming book. In this innocent passion my gray-haired
comrades, Howard Crosby, the Chancellor of the University of New York,
and my father, an ex-Moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly,
were ardent but generous rivals.

How great is the joy and how fascinating the pursuit of such an ethereal
affection! It enlarges the heart without embarrassing the conscience. It
is a cup of pure gladness with no bitterness in its dregs. It spends the
present moment with a free hand, and yet leaves no undesirable mortgage
upon the future. King Arthur, the founder of the Round Table, expressed
a conviction, according to Tennyson, that the most important element in
a young knight's education is "the maiden passion for a maid." Surely
the safest form in which this course in the curriculum may be taken is
by falling in love with a girl in a book. It is the only affair of the
kind into which a young fellow can enter without responsibility, and out
of which he can always emerge, when necessary, without discredit. And as
for the old fellow who still keeps up this education of the heart, and
worships his heroine with the ardour of a John Ridd and the fidelity of
a Henry Esmond, I maintain that he is exempt from all the penalties of
declining years. The man who can love a girl in a book may be old, but
never aged.

So we sailed, lovers all three, among the Western Isles, and whatever
ship it was that carried us, her figurehead was always the Princess
Sheila. Along the ruffled blue waters of the sounds and lochs that wind
among the roots of unpronounceable mountains, and past the dark hills
of Skye, and through the unnumbered flocks of craggy islets where the
sea-birds nest, the spell of the sweet Highland maid drew us, and we
were pilgrims to the Ultima Thule where she lived and reigned.

The Lewis, with its tail-piece, the Harris, is quite a sizable island to
be appended to such a country as Scotland. It is a number of miles
long, and another number of miles wide, and it has a number of thousand
inhabitants--I should say as many as three-quarters of an inhabitant to
the square mile--and the conditions of agriculture and the fisheries are
extremely interesting and quarrelsome. All these I duly studied at
the time, and reported in a series of intolerably dull letters to the
newspaper which supplied a financial basis for my sentimental journey.
They are full of information; but I have been amused to note, after
these many years, how wide they steer of the true motive and interest of
the excursion. There is not even a hint of Sheila in any of them.
Youth, after all, is a shamefaced and secretive season; like the fringed
polygala, it hides its real blossom underground.

It was Sheila's dark-blue dress and sailor hat with the white feather
that we looked for as we loafed through the streets of Stornoway, that
quaint metropolis of the herring-trade, where strings of fish alternated
with boxes of flowers in the windows, and handfuls of fish were spread
upon the roofs to dry just as the sliced apples are exposed upon the
kitchen-sheds of New England in September, and dark-haired women
were carrying great creels of fish on their shoulders, and groups of
sunburned men were smoking among the fishing-boats on the beach and
talking about fish, and sea-gulls were floating over the houses with
their heads turning from side to side and their bright eyes peering
everywhere for unconsidered trifles of fish, and the whole atmosphere of
the place, physical, mental, and moral, was pervaded with fish. It was
Sheila's soft, sing-song Highland speech that we heard through the long,
luminous twilight in the pauses of that friendly chat on the balcony
of the little inn where a good fortune brought us acquainted with Sam
Bough, the mellow Edinburgh painter. It was Sheila's low sweet brow, and
long black eyelashes, and tender blue eyes, that we saw before us as
we loitered over the open moorland, a far-rolling sea of brown billows,
reddened with patches of bell-heather, and brightened here and there
with little lakes lying wide open to the sky. And were not these
peat-cutters, with the big baskets on their backs, walking in silhouette
along the ridges, the people that Sheila loved and tried to help; and
were not these crofters' cottages with thatched roofs, like beehives,
blending almost imperceptibly with the landscape, the dwellings into
which she planned to introduce the luxury of windows; and were not these
Standing Stones of Callernish, huge tombstones of a vanished religion,
the roofless temple from which the Druids paid their westernmost
adoration to the setting sun as he sank into the Atlantic--was not this
the place where Sheila picked the bunch of wild flowers and gave it to
her lover? There is nothing in history, I am sure, half so real to us
as some of the things in fiction. The influence of an event upon our
character is little affected by considerations as to whether or not it
ever happened.

There were three churches in Stornoway, all Presbyterian, of course,
and therefore full of pious emulation. The idea of securing an American
preacher for an August Sabbath seemed to fall upon them simultaneously,
and to offer the prospect of novelty without too much danger. The
brethren of the U. P. congregation, being a trifle more gleg than the
others, arrived first at the inn, and secured the promise of a morning
sermon from Chancellor Howard Crosby. The session of the Free Kirk came
in a body a little later, and to them my father pledged himself for the
evening sermon. The senior elder of the Established Kirk, a snuff-taking
man and very deliberate, was the last to appear, and to his request for
an afternoon sermon there was nothing left to offer but the services of
the young probationer in theology. I could see that it struck him as a
perilous adventure. Questions about "the fundamentals" glinted in his
watery eye. He crossed and uncrossed his legs with solemnity, and blew
his nose so frequently in a huge red silk handkerchief that it
seemed like a signal of danger. At last he unburdened himself of his
hesitations.

"Ah'm not saying that the young man will not be orthodox--ahem! But ye
know, sir, in the Kirk, we are not using hymns, but just the pure Psawms
of Daffit, in the meetrical fairsion. And ye know, sir, they are ferry
tifficult in the reating, whatefer, for a young man, and one that iss a
stranger. And if his father will just be coming with him in the pulpit,
to see that nothing iss said amiss, that will be ferry comforting to the
congregation."

So the dear governor swallowed his laughter gravely and went surety for
his son. They appeared together in the church, a barnlike edifice, with
great galleries half-way between the floor and the roof. Still higher
up, the pulpit stuck like a swallow's nest against the wall. The two
ministers climbed the precipitous stair and found themselves in a box so
narrow that one must stand perforce, while the other sat upon the only
seat. In this "ride and tie" fashion they went through the service. When
it was time to preach, the young man dropped the doctrines as discreetly
as possible upon the upturned countenances beneath him. I have forgotten
now what it was all about, but there was a quotation from the Song
of Solomon, ending with "Sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is
comely." And when it came to that, the probationer's eyes (if the truth
must be told) went searching through that sea of faces for one that
should be familiar to his heart, and to which he might make a personal
application of the Scripture passage--even the face of Sheila.

There are rivers in the Lewis, at least two of them, and on one of these
we had the offer of a rod for a day's fishing. Accordingly we cast
lots, and the lot fell upon the youngest, and I went forth with a tall,
red-legged gillie, to try for my first salmon. The Whitewater came
singing down out of the moorland into a rocky valley, and there was a
merry curl of air on the pools, and the silver fish were leaping from
the stream. The gillie handled the big rod as if it had been a fairy's
wand, but to me it was like a giant's spear. It was a very different
affair from fishing with five ounces of split bamboo on a Long Island
trout-pond. The monstrous fly, like an awkward bird, went fluttering
everywhere but in the right direction. It was the mercy of Providence
that preserved the gillie's life. But he was very patient and
forbearing, leading me on from one pool to another, as I spoiled the
water and snatched the hook out of the mouth of rising fish, until
at last we found a salmon that knew even less about the niceties of
salmon-fishing than I did. He seized the fly firmly, before I could pull
it away, and then, in a moment, I found myself attached to a creature
with the strength of a whale and the agility of a flying-fish. He led
me rushing up and down the bank like a madman. He played on the surface
like a whirlwind, and sulked at the bottom like a stone. He meditated,
with ominous delay, in the middle of the deepest pool, and then, darting
across the river, flung himself clean out of water and landed far up on
the green turf of the opposite shore. My heart melted like a snowflake
in the sea, and I thought that I had lost him forever. But he rolled
quietly back into the water with the hook still set in his nose. A few
minutes afterwards I brought him within reach of the gaff, and my first
salmon was glittering on the grass beside me.

Then I remembered that William Black had described this very fish in
A Princess of Thule. I pulled the book from my pocket, and, lighting a
pipe, sat down to read that delightful chapter over again. The breeze
played softly down the valley. The warm sunlight was filled with the
musical hum of insects and the murmur of falling waters. I thought how
much pleasanter it would have been to learn salmon-fishing, as Black's
hero did, from the Maid of Borva, than from a red-headed gillie. But,
then, his salmon, after leaping across the stream, got away; whereas
mine was safe. A man cannot have everything in this world. I picked a
spray of rosy bell-heather from the bank of the river, and pressed it
between the leaves of the book in memory of Sheila.


II.

COMMON HEATHER.


It is not half as far from Albany to Aberdeen as it is from New York
to London. In fact, I venture to say that an American on foot will find
himself less a foreigner in Scotland than in any other country in
the Old World. There is something warm and hospitable--if he knew the
language well enough he would call it couthy--in the greeting that he
gets from the shepherd on the moor, and the conversation that he holds
with the farmer's wife in the stone cottage, where he stops to ask for a
drink of milk and a bit of oat-cake. He feels that there must be a drop
of Scotch somewhere in his mingled blood, or at least that the texture
of his thought and feelings has been partly woven on a Scottish
loom--perhaps the Shorter Catechism, or Robert Burns's poems, or the
romances of Sir Walter Scott. At all events, he is among a kindred and
comprehending people. They do not speak English in the same way that
he does--through the nose---but they think very much more in his mental
dialect than the English do. They are independent and wide awake,
curious and full of personal interest. The wayside mind in Inverness or
Perth runs more to muscle and less to fat, has more active vanity
and less passive pride, is more inquisitive and excitable and
sympathetic--in short, to use a symbolist's description, it is more
apt to be red-headed--than in Surrey or Somerset. Scotchmen ask more
questions about America, but fewer foolish ones. You will never
hear them inquiring whether there is any good bear-hunting in the
neighbourhood of Boston, or whether Shakespeare is much read in the
States. They have a healthy respect for our institutions, and have quite
forgiven (if, indeed, they ever resented) that little affair in 1776.
They are all born Liberals. When a Scotchman says he is a Conservative,
it only means that he is a Liberal with hesitations.

And yet in North Britain the American pedestrian will not find that
amused and somewhat condescending toleration for his peculiarities, that
placid willingness to make the best of all his vagaries of speech and
conduct, that he finds in South Britain. In an English town you may do
pretty much what you like on a Sunday, even to the extent of wearing
a billycock hat to church, and people will put up with it from a
countryman of Buffalo Bill and the Wild West Show. But in a Scotch
village, if you whistle in the street on a Lord's Day, though it be
a Moody and Sankey tune, you will be likely to get, as I did, an
admonition from some long-legged, grizzled elder:

"Young man, do ye no ken it's the Sawbath Day?"

I recognised the reproof of the righteous, an excellent oil which doth
not break the head, and took it gratefully at the old man's hands. For
did it not prove that he regarded me as a man and a brother, a creature
capable of being civilised and saved?

It was in the gray town of Dingwall that I had this bit of
pleasant correction, as I was on the way to a fishing tramp through
Sutherlandshire. This northwest corner of Great Britain is the best
place in the whole island for a modest and impecunious angler. There
are, or there were a few years ago, wild lochs and streams which are
still practically free, and a man who is content with small things can
pick up some very pretty sport from the highland inns, and make a good
basket of memorable experiences every week.

The inn at Lairg, overlooking the narrow waters of Loch Shin, was
embowered in honeysuckles, and full of creature comfort. But there were
too many other men with rods there to suit my taste. "The feesh in this
loch," said the boatman, "iss not so numerous ass the feeshermen, but
more wise. There iss not one of them that hass not felt the hook, and
they know ferry well what side of the fly has the forkit tail."

At Altnaharra, in the shadow of Ben Clebrig, there was a cozy little
house with good fare, and abundant trout-fishing in Loch Naver and Loch
Meadie. It was there that I fell in with a wandering pearl-peddler who
gathered his wares from the mussels in the moorland streams. They were
not of the finest quality, these Scotch pearls, but they had pretty,
changeable colours of pink and blue upon them, like the iridescent light
that plays over the heather in the long northern evenings. I thought it
must be a hard life for the man, wading day after day in the ice-cold
water, and groping among the coggly, sliddery stones for the shellfish,
and cracking open perhaps a thousand before he could find one pearl.
"Oh, yess," said be, "and it iss not an easy life, and I am not saying
that it will be so warm and dry ass liffing in a rich house. But it iss
the life that I am fit for, and I hef my own time and my thoughts to
mysel', and that is a ferry goot thing; and then, sir, I haf found the
Pearl of Great Price, and I think upon that day and night."

Under the black, shattered peaks of Ben Laoghal, where I saw an eagle
poising day after day as if some invisible centripetal force bound him
forever to that small circle of air, there was a loch with plenty of
brown trout and a few salmo ferox; and down at Tongue there was a little
river where the sea-trout sometimes come up with the tide.

Here I found myself upon the north coast, and took the road eastward
between the mountains and the sea. It was a beautiful region of
desolation. There were rocky glens cutting across the road, and
occasionally a brawling stream ran down to the salt water, breaking the
line of cliffs with a little bay and a half-moon of yellow sand. The
heather covered all the hills. There were no trees, and but few houses.
The chief signs of human labour were the rounded piles of peat, and the
square cuttings in the moor marking the places where the subterranean
wood-choppers had gathered their harvests. The long straths were once
cultivated, and every patch of arable land had its group of cottages
full of children. The human harvest has always been the richest and most
abundant that is raised in the Highlands; but unfortunately the supply
exceeded the demand; and so the crofters were evicted, and great flocks
of sheep were put in possession of the land; and now the sheep-pastures
have been changed into deer-forests; and far and wide along the valleys
and across the hills there is not a trace of habitation, except the
heaps of stones and the clumps of straggling bushes which mark the sites
of lost homes. But what is one country's loss is another country's gain.
Canada and the United States are infinitely the richer for the tough,
strong, fearless, honest men that were dispersed from these lonely
straths to make new homes across the sea.

It was after sundown when I reached the straggling village of Melvich,
and the long day's journey had left me weary. But the inn, with its
red-curtained windows, looked bright and reassuring. Thoughts of dinner
and a good bed comforted my spirit--prematurely. For the inn was full.
There were but five bedrooms and two parlours. The gentlemen who had the
neighbouring shootings occupied three bedrooms and a parlour; the other
two bedrooms had just been taken by the English fishermen who had
passed me in the road an hour ago in the mail-coach (oh! why had I not
suspected that treacherous vehicle?); and the landlord and his wife
assured me, with equal firmness and sympathy, that there was not another
cot or pair of blankets in the house. I believed them, and was sinking
into despair when Sandy M'Kaye appeared on the scene as my angel of
deliverance. Sandy was a small, withered, wiry man, dressed in rusty
gray, with an immense white collar thrusting out its points on either
side of his chin, and a black stock climbing over the top of it. I
guessed from his speech that he had once lived in the lowlands. He had
hoped to be engaged as a gillie by the shooting party, but had been
disappointed. He had wanted to be taken by the English fishermen, but
another and younger man had stepped in before him. Now Sandy saw in me
his Predestinated Opportunity, and had no idea of letting it post up the
road that night to the next village. He cleared his throat respectfully
and cut into the conversation.

"Ah'm thinkin' the gentleman micht find a coomfortaible lodgin' wi' the
weedow Macphairson a wee bittie doon the road. Her dochter is awa' in
Ameriky, an' the room is a verra fine room, an' it is a peety to hae it
stannin' idle, an' ye wudna mind the few steps to and fro tae yir meals
here, sir, wud ye? An' if ye 'ill gang wi' me efter dinner, 'a 'll be
prood to shoo ye the hoose."

So, after a good dinner with the English fishermen, Sandy piloted me
down the road through the thickening dusk. I remember a hoodie crow
flew close behind us with a choking, ghostly cough that startled me. The
Macpherson cottage was a snug little house of stone, with fuchsias and
roses growing in the front yard: and the widow was a douce old lady,
with a face like a winter apple in the month of April, wrinkled, but
still rosy. She was a little doubtful about entertaining strangers, but
when she heard I was from America she opened the doors of her house and
her heart. And when, by a subtle cross examination that would have been
a credit to the wife of a Connecticut deacon, she discovered the fact
that her lodger was a minister, she did two things, with equal and
immediate fervour; she brought out the big Bible and asked him to
conduct evening worship, and she produced a bottle of old Glenlivet
and begged him to "guard against takkin' cauld by takkin' a glass of
speerits."

It was a very pleasant fortnight at Melvich. Mistress Macpherson was so
motherly that "takkin' cauld" was reduced to a permanent impossibility.
The other men at the inn proved to be very companionable fellows, quite
different from the monsters of insolence that my anger had imagined
in the moment of disappointment. The shooting party kept the table
abundantly supplied with grouse and hares and highland venison; and
there was a piper to march up and down before the window and play while
we ate dinner--a very complimentary and disquieting performance. But
there are many occasions in life when pride can be entertained only at
the expense of comfort.

Of course Sandy was my gillie. It was a fine sight to see him exhibiting
the tiny American trout-rod, tied with silk ribbons in its delicate
case, to the other gillies and exulting over them. Every morning he
would lead me away through the heather to some lonely loch on the
shoulders of the hills, from which we could look down upon the Northern
Sea and the blue Orkney Isles far away across the Pentland Firth.
Sometimes we would find a loch with a boat on it, and drift up and
down, casting along the shores. Sometimes, in spite of Sandy's confident
predictions, no boat could be found, and then I must put on the
Mackintosh trousers and wade out over my hips into the water, and
circumambulate the pond, throwing the flies as far as possible toward
the middle, and feeling my way carefully along the bottom with the long
net-handle, while Sandy danced on the bank in an agony of apprehension
lest his Predestinated Opportunity should step into a deep hole and be
drowned. It was a curious fact in natural history that on the lochs with
boats the trout were in the shallow water, but in the boatless lochs
they were away out in the depths. "Juist the total depraivity o'
troots," said Sandy, "an' terrible fateegin'."

Sandy had an aversion to commit himself to definite statements on any
subject not theological. If you asked him how long the morning's tramp
would be, it was "no verra long, juist a bit ayant the hull yonner." And
if, at the end of the seventh mile, you complained that it was much too
far, he would never do more than admit that "it micht be shorter."
If you called him to rejoice over a trout that weighed close upon two
pounds, he allowed that it was "no bad--but there's bigger anes i' the
loch gin we cud but wile them oot." And at lunch-time, when we turned
out a full basket of shining fish on the heather, the most that he would
say, while his eyes snapped with joy and pride, was, "Aweel, we canna
complain, the day."

Then he would gather an armful of dried heather-stems for kindling, and
dig out a few roots and crooked limbs of the long-vanished forest
from the dry, brown, peaty soil, and make our campfire of prehistoric
wood--just for the pleasant, homelike look of the blaze--and sit down
beside it to eat our lunch. Heat is the least of the benefits that man
gets from fire. It is the sign of cheerfulness and good comradeship. I
would not willingly satisfy my hunger, even in a summer nooning, without
a little flame burning on a rustic altar to consecrate and enliven the
feast. When the bread and cheese were finished and the pipes were filled
with Virginia tobacco, Sandy would begin to tell me, very solemnly and
respectfully, about the mistakes I had made in the fishing that day, and
mourn over the fact that the largest fish had not been hooked. There was
a strong strain of pessimism in Sandy, and he enjoyed this part of the
sport immensely.

But he was at his best in the walk home through the lingering twilight,
when the murmur of the sea trembled through the air, and the incense of
burning peat floated up from the cottages, and the stars blossomed one
by one in the pale-green sky. Then Sandy dandered on at his ease down
the hills, and discoursed of things in heaven and earth. He was an
unconscious follower of the theology of the Reverend John Jasper, of
Richmond, Virginia, and rejected the Copernican theory of the universe
as inconsistent with the history of Joshua. "Gin the sun doesna muve,"
said he, "what for wad Joshua be tellin' him to stond steel? 'A wad
suner beleeve there was a mistak' in the veesible heevens than ae fault
in the Guid Buik." Whereupon we held long discourse of astronomy and
inspiration; but Sandy concluded it with a philosophic word which left
little to be said: "Aweel, yon teelescope is a wonnerful deescovery; but
'a dinna think the less o' the Baible."


III.

WHITE HEATHER.


Memory is a capricious and arbitrary creature. You never can tell
what pebble she will pick up from the shore of life to keep among her
treasures, or what inconspicuous flower of the field she will preserve
as the symbol of

     "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

She has her own scale of values for these mementos, and knows nothing
of the market price of precious stones or the costly splendour of rare
orchids. The thing that pleases her is the thing that she will hold
fast. And yet I do not doubt that the most important things are always
the best remembered; only we must learn that the real importance of what
we see and hear in the world is to be measured at last by its meaning,
its significance, its intimacy with the heart of our heart and the life
of our life. And when we find a little token of the past very safely and
imperishably kept among our recollections, we must believe that memory
has made no mistake. It is because that little thing has entered into
our experience most deeply, that it stays with us and we cannot lose it.

You have half forgotten many a famous scene that you travelled far to
look upon. You cannot clearly recall the sublime peak of Mont Blanc,
the roaring curve of Niagara, the vast dome of St. Peter's. The music of
Patti's crystalline voice has left no distinct echo in your remembrance,
and the blossoming of the century-plant is dimmer than the shadow of
a dream. But there is a nameless valley among the hills where you can
still trace every curve of the stream, and see the foam-bells floating
on the pool below the bridge, and the long moss wavering in the current.
There is a rustic song of a girl passing through the fields at sunset,
that still repeats its far-off cadence in your listening ears. There
is a small flower trembling on its stem in some hidden nook beneath the
open sky, that never withers through all the changing years; the wind
passes over it, but it is not gone--it abides forever in your soul, an
amaranthine blossom of beauty and truth.

White heather is not an easy flower to find. You may look for it among
the highlands for a day without success. And when it is discovered,
there is little outward charm to commend it. It lacks the grace of the
dainty bells that hang so abundantly from the Erica Tetralix, and the
pink glow of the innumerable blossoms of the common heather. But then it
is a symbol. It is the Scotch Edelweiss. It means sincere affection,
and unselfish love, and tender wishes as pure as prayers. I shall always
remember the evening when I found the white heather on the moorland
above Glen Ericht. Or, rather, it was not I that found it (for I have
little luck in the discovery of good omens, and have never plucked a
four-leaved clover in my life), but my companion, the gentle Mistress
of the Glen, whose hair was as white as the tiny blossoms, and yet
whose eyes were far quicker than mine to see and name every flower that
bloomed in those lofty, widespread fields.

Ericht Water is formed by the marriage of two streams, one flowing out
of Strath Ardle and the other descending from Cairn Gowar through the
long, lonely Pass of Glenshee. The Ericht begins at the bridge of Cally,
and its placid, beautiful glen, unmarred by railway or factory, reaches
almost down to Blairgowrie. On the southern bank, but far above the
water, runs the high road to Braemar and the Linn of Dee. On the
other side of the river, nestling among the trees, is the low white
manor-house,

     "An ancient home of peace."

It is a place where one who had been wearied and perchance sore wounded
in the battle of life might well desire to be carried, as Arthur to the
island valley of Avilion, for rest and healing.

I have no thought of renewing the conflicts and cares that filled that
summer with sorrow. There were fightings without and fears within;
there was the surrender of an enterprise that had been cherished since
boyhood, and the bitter sense of irremediable weakness that follows such
a reverse; there was a touch of that wrath with those we love, which, as
Coleridge says,

     "Doth work like madness in the brain;"

flying across the sea from these troubles, I had found my old comrade of
merrier days sentenced to death, and caught but a brief glimpse of his
pale, brave face as he went away into exile. At such a time the sun and
the light and the moon and the stars are darkened, and the clouds return
after rain. But through those clouds the Mistress of the Glen came to
meet me--a stranger till then, but an appointed friend, a minister of
needed grace, an angel of quiet comfort. The thick mists of rebellion,
mistrust, and despair have long since rolled away, and against the
background of the hills her figure stands out clearly, dressed in the
fashion of fifty years ago, with the snowy hair gathered close beneath
her widow's cap, and a spray of white heather in her outstretched hand.

There were no other guests in the house by the river during those
still days in the noontide hush of midsummer. Every morning, while the
Mistress was busied with her household cares and letters, I would be out
in the fields hearing the lark sing, and watching the rabbits as they
ran to and fro, scattering the dew from the grass in a glittering spray.
Or perhaps I would be angling down the river, with the swift pressure
of the water around my knees, and an inarticulate current of cooling
thoughts flowing on and on through my brain like the murmur of the
stream. Every afternoon there were long walks with the Mistress in the
old-fashioned garden, where wonderful roses were blooming; or through
the dark, fir-shaded den where the wild burn dropped down to join the
river; or out upon the high moor under the waning orange sunset. Every
night there were luminous and restful talks beside the open fire in the
library, when the words came clear and calm from the heart, unperturbed
by the vain desire of saying brilliant things, which turns so much of
our conversation into a combat of wits instead of an interchange of
thoughts. Talk like this is possible only between two. The arrival of a
third person sets the lists for a tournament, and offers the prize for a
verbal victory. But where there are only two, the armour is laid aside,
and there is no call to thrust and parry.

One of the two should be a good listener, sympathetic, but not silent,
giving confidence in order to attract it--and of this art a woman is
the best master. But its finest secrets do not come to her until she
has passed beyond the uncertain season of compliments and conquests, and
entered into the serenity of a tranquil age.

What is this foolish thing that men say about the impossibility of
true intimacy and converse between the young and the old? Hamerton, for
example, in his book on Human Intercourse, would have us believe that
a difference in years is a barrier between hearts. For my part, I
have more often found it an open door, and a security of generous and
tolerant welcome for the young soldier, who comes in tired and dusty
from the battle-field, to tell his story of defeat or victory in the
garden of still thoughts where old age is resting in the peace of
honourable discharge. I like what Robert Louis Stevenson says about it
in his essay on Talk and Talkers.

"Not only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial, but their
minds are stored with antidotes, wisdom's simples, plain considerations
overlooked by youth. They have matter to communicate, be they never so
stupid. Their talk is not merely literature, it is great literature;
classic by virtue of the speaker's detachment; studded, like a book of
travel, with things we should not otherwise have learnt . . . where youth
agrees with age, not where they differ, wisdom lies; and it is when
the young disciple finds his heart to beat in tune with his gray-haired
teacher's that a lesson may be learned."

The conversation of the Mistress of the Glen shone like the light and
distilled like the dew, not only by virtue of what she said, but still
more by virtue of what she was. Her face was a good counsel against
discouragement; and the cheerful quietude of her demeanour was a rebuke
to all rebellious, cowardly, and discontented thoughts. It was not the
striking novelty or profundity of her commentary on life that made it
memorable, it was simply the truth of what she said and the gentleness
with which she said it. Epigrams are worth little for guidance to the
perplexed, and less for comfort to the wounded. But the plain, homely
sayings which come from a soul that has learned the lesson of patient
courage in the school of real experience, fall upon the wound like
drops of balsam, and like a soothing lotion up on the eyes smarting and
blinded with passion.

She spoke of those who had walked with her long ago in her garden, and
for whose sake, now that they had all gone into the world of light,
every flower was doubly dear. Would it be a true proof of loyalty to
them if she lived gloomily or despondently because they were away? She
spoke of the duty of being ready to welcome happiness as well as to
endure pain, and of the strength that endurance wins by being grateful
for small daily joys, like the evening light, and the smell of roses,
and the singing of birds. She spoke of the faith that rests on the
Unseen Wisdom and Love like a child on its mother's breast, and of the
melting away of doubts in the warmth of an effort to do some good in
the world. And if that effort has conflict, and adven