When a man sets forth on an out-of-door pleasure
jaunt, his prayer is for weather. If he is going
to the mountains, let him double his urgency.
In the mountains, if nowhere else, weather is
three fifths of life.
My first trip to New Hampshire the present
season[1] was made under smooth, high clouds,
which left the distance clear, so that the mountains
stood up grandly beyond the lake as we
ran along its western border. Not a drop of
rain fell till I stepped off the car at Warren.
At that moment the world grew suddenly dark,
and before I could get into the open carriage the
clouds burst, and with a rattling of thunder bolts
a deluge of rain and hail descended upon us.
There was no contending with such an adversary,
though a good woman across the way, commiserating
our plight, came to the door with proffers of
an umbrella. I retreated to the station, while the
driver hastened down the street to put his team
under shelter. So a half hour passed. Then we
tried again, and half frozen, in spite of a winter
overcoat and everything that goes with it (the
date was May 17), I reached my destination, five
miles away, at the foot of Moosilauke.
All this would hardly deserve narration, perhaps
(the story of travelers’ discomforts being
mostly matter for skipping), only that it marked
the setting in of a cold, rainy “spell” that hung
upon us for four days. Four sunless days out of
seven was a proportion fairly to be complained
of. The more I consider it, the truer seems the
equation just now stated, that mountain weather
is three fifths of life. For those four days I did
not even see Moosilauke, though we were living,
so to speak, upon its shoulder, and I knew by
hearsay that the summit house was visible from
the back doorstep.
My first brief walk before supper should reasonably
have been in the clearer valley country;
but if reason spoke inclination did not hear it,
and my feet—which seem to feel that they are
old enough by this time to know their master’s
business for him—took of their own motion an
opposite course. The mountain woods, as I entered
them, had the appearance of early March:
only the merest sprinkling of new life,—clintonia
leaves especially, with here and there a
round-leaved violet, both leaves and flowers,—upon
a ground still all defaced by the hand of
Winter. Dead leaves make an agreeable carpet,
as they rustle cheerfully-sadly under one’s feet in
autumn; but there was no rustle here; the snow
had pressed every leaf flat and left it sodden.
One thing consoled me: I had not arrived too
late. The “bud-crowned spring,” for all my
fears, was yet to “go forth.”
The next morning it was not enough to say that
it was cloudy. That impersonal expression would
have been quite below the mark. We were
cloudy. In short, the cloud was literally around
us and upon us. As I stepped out of doors, a
rose-breasted grosbeak was singing in one direction,
and a white-throated sparrow in another,
both far away in the mist. It was strange they
should be so happy, I was ready to say. But I
bethought myself that their case was no different
from my own. It was comparatively clear just
about me, while the fog shut down like a curtain
a rod or two away, leaving the rest of the world
dark. So every bird stood in a ring of light, an
illuminated chantry all his own,
And sang for joy, good Christian bird,
To be thus marked and favored.
Strange had he not been happy. To be blest
above one’s fellows is to be blest twice over.
This time I took the downward road, turning
to the left, and found myself at once in pleasant
woods, with hospitable openings and bypaths; a
birdy spot, or I was no prophet, though just now
but few voices were to be heard, and those of the
commonest. Here stood new-blown anemones,
bellworts, and white violets, an early flock, with
one painted trillium lording it over them; a small
specimen of its kind, but big enough to be king
(or shepherd) in such company. A brook, or
perhaps two, with the few birds, sang about me,
invisible. I knew not whither I was going, and
the all-embracing cloud deepened the mystery.
Soon the road took a sudden dip, and a louder
noise filled my ears. I was coming to a river?
Yes, for presently I was on the bridge, with a
raging mountain torrent, eighty feet, perhaps,
underneath, foaming against the boulders; a
bare, perpendicular cliff on one side, and perpendicular
spruces and hemlocks draping a similar
cliff on the other side. It was Baker’s River, I
was told afterward,—the same that I had looked
at here and there, the day before, from the car
window. It was good to see it so young and exuberant;
but even a young river need not be so
much in haste, I thought. It would get to the
sawmills soon enough, and by and by would
learn, too late, that it is only a little way to the
sea.
Once over the bridge, the road climbed quickly
out of the narrow gorge, and at the first turn
brought me in sight of a small painted house,
with a small orchard of thrifty-looking small
trees behind it. Here a venerable collie came
running forth to bark at the stranger, but yielded
readily to the usual blandishments, and after
sniffing again and again at my heels, just to
make sure of knowing me the next time, went
back, contented, to lie down in his old place before
the window. He was the only person that
spoke to me—the only one I met—during
the forenoon, though I spent it all on the highway.
Another patch of woods, where a distant
Canadian nuthatch is calling (strange how I
love that nasal, penetrating, far-reaching voice,
whose quality my reasoning taste condemns),
and I see before me another house, standing in
broad acres of cleared land. This one is not
painted, and, as I presently make out, is uninhabited,
its old tenant gone, dead or discouraged,
and no new one looked for; an “abandoned
farm,” such as one grows used to seeing in our
northern country. It is beautiful for situation,
one of those sightly places which the city-worn
passer-by in a mountain wagon pitches upon at
once as just the place he should like to buy and
retire to—some day; in that autumn of golden
leisure of which, now and then,
“When all his active powers are still,”
he has a pleasing vision. Oh yes, he means to
do something of that kind—some day; and even
while he talks of it he knows in his heart that
“some day” is only another name for “next day
after never.”
A few happy barn swallows (wise enough, or
simple enough, to be happy now) go skimming
over the grass, and a pair of robins and a pair
of bluebirds seem to be at home in the orchard;
which they like none the worse, we may be sure,—the
bluebirds, especially,—because, along
with the house and the barn, it is falling into
decay. What are apple trees for, but to grow
old and become usefully hollow? Otherwise they
would be no better than so many beeches or
butternuts. It is impossible but that every creature
should look at the world through its own
eyes; and no bluebird ever ate an apple. A
purple finch warbles ecstatically, a white-throated
sparrow whistles in the distance, and now and
then, from far down the slope, I catch the upliftings
of a hermit thrush.
A man grows thoughtful, not to say sentimental,
in such a place, surrounded by fields on
which so many years of human labor have been
spent, so much ploughing and harrowing, planting
and reaping, now given up again to nature.
Here was the garden patch, its outlines still
traceable. Here was the well. Long lines of
stone wall still separate the mowing land from
the pasturage; and scattered over the fields are
heaps of boulders, thrown together thus to get
them out of the grass’s way. About the edges
of every pile, and sometimes through the midst,
have sprung up a few shrubs,—shad bushes,
cherries, willows, and the like. Here they escape
the scythe, as we are all trying to do. “Give us
room that we may dwell!”—so these children
of Zion cry. It is the great want of seeds, so
many millions of which go to waste annually in
every acre,—a place in which to take root and
(harder yet) to keep it. And the birds, too, find
the boulder heaps a convenience. I watch a savanna
sparrow as he flits from one to another,
stopping to sing a measure or two from each.
Even this humble, almost voiceless artist needs
a stage or platform. The lowliest sparrow ever
hatched has some rudiments of a histrionic faculty;
and be we birds or humans, it is hard to
do one’s best without a bit of posing.
What further uses these humble stone heaps
may serve I cannot say; no doubt they shelter
many insects; but it is encouraging to consider
how few things a farmer can do that will not be
of benefit to others beside himself. Surely the
man who piled these boulders for the advantage
of his hay crop never expected them to serve as
a text for preaching.
The cloud drops again, and is at its old trick
of exaggeration. A bird that I take for a robin
turns out to be a sparrow. Did it look larger
because it seemed to be farther away than it really
was? Or is it seen now as it actually is, my
vision not being deceived, but rather corrected
of an habitual error? The fog makes for me a
newer and stranger world, at any rate; I am
farther from home because of it; another day’s
travel might have done less for me. And for all
that, I am not sorry when it rises again, and the
hills come out. How beautiful they are! They
will hardly be more so, I think, when the June
foliage replaces the square miles of bare boughs
which now give them a blue-purple tint, interrupted
here and there by patches of new yellow-green
poplar leaves—a veritable illumination,
sun-bright even in this sunless weather—or a
few sombre evergreens.
As I get away from the farm, the mountain
woods on either side seem to be filled with something
like a chorus of rose-breasted grosbeaks.
Except for a few days at Highlands, North Carolina,
some years ago, I have never seen so many
together. A grand “migratory wave” must have
broken on the mountains within a night or two.
As far as music is concerned, the grosbeaks have
the field mostly to themselves, though a grouse
beats his drum at short intervals, and now and
then a white-throat whistles. There is no bird’s
voice to which a fog is more becoming, I say to
myself, with a pleasing sense of having said
something unintended. To my thinking, the
white-throat should always be a good distance
away (perhaps because in the mountains one
grows accustomed to hearing him thus); and
the fog puts him there, with no damage to the
fullness of his tone.
Looking at the flowers along the wayside,—a
few yellow violets, a patch of spring-beauties,
and little else,—my eye falls upon what seems
to be a miniature forest of curious tiny plants
growing in the gutter. At first I see only the
upright, whitish stalks, an inch or two in height,
each bearing at the top a globular brown knob.
Afterward I discover that the stalks, which, examined
more closely, have a crystalline, glassy
appearance, spring from a leaf-like or lichen-like
growth, lying prostrate upon the wet soil. The
plant is a liverwort, or scale-moss, of some kind,
I suppose, and is growing here by the mile. How
few are the things we see! And of those we see,
how few there are concerning which we have any
real knowledge,—enough, even, to use words
about them! (When a man can do that concerning
any class of natural objects, no matter what
they are or what he says about them, he passes
with the crowd for a scholar, or at the very least
a “close observer.”) But to tell the shameful
truth, my mood just now is not inquisitive. I
should like to know? Yes; but I can get on
without knowing. There are worse things than
ignorance. Let this plant be what it will. I
should be little the wiser for being able to name
it.[2] I have no body of facts to which to attach
this new one; and unrelated knowledge is almost
the same as none at all. At best it is quickly
forgotten. So my indolence excuses itself.
The road begins to climb rather sharply. Unless
I am going to the top of the ridge and
beyond, I have gone far enough. So I turn my
back upon the mountain; and behold, the cloud
having lifted again, there, straight before me
down the road and across the valley, is the
house from which I set out, almost or quite the
only one in sight. After all, I have walked but
a little way, though I have been a good while
about it; for I have hardly begun my return
before I find myself again approaching the
abandoned farm. Downhill miles are short.
Here a light shower comes on, and I raise my
umbrella. Then follows a grand excitement
among a flock of sheep, whose day, perhaps,
needs enlivening as badly as my own. They
gaze at the umbrella, start away upon the gallop,
stop again to look (“There are forty looking
like one,” I say to myself), and are again
struck with panic. This time they scamper
down the field out of sight. Another danger
escaped! Shepherds, it is evident, cannot be so
effeminate as to carry umbrellas.
Two heifers are of a more confiding disposition,
coming close to look at the stranger as he
sits on the doorsill of the old barn. Their curiosity
concerning me is perhaps about as lively
as mine was touching the supposed liverworts.
Like me they stand and consider, but betray no
unmannerly eagerness. “Who is he, I wonder?”
they might be saying; “I never saw him
before.” But their jaws still move mechanically,
and their beautiful eyes are full of a peaceful
satisfaction. A cud must be a great alleviation
to the temper. With such a perennial sedative,
how could any one ever be fretted into nervous
prostration? As a matter of fact, I am told,
cows rarely or never suffer from that most distressing
ailment. I have seen chewers of gum
before now who, by all signs, should have enjoyed
a similar immunity.
While the heifers are still making up their
minds about their unexpected visitor, I turn to
examine a couple of white-crowned sparrows,
male and female,—I wonder if they really are
a couple?—feeding before the house. I hope
the species is to prove common here. Three
birds were behind the hotel before breakfast,
and one of them sang. The quaint little medley,
sparrow song and warbler song together, is still
something of an event with me, I have heard it
so seldom and like it so well; and whether the
birds sing or not, they are musical to look at.
When I approach the painted house, on my
way homeward, the fat old collie comes running
out again, barking. This time, however, he
takes but one sniff. He has made a mistake,
and realizes it at once. “Oh, excuse me,” he
says quite plainly. “I didn’t recognize you.
You’re the same old codger. I ought to have
known.” And he is so confused and ashamed
that he hurries away without waiting to make
up.
It is a great mortification to a gentlemanly
dog to find himself at fault in this manner. I
remember another collie, much younger than
this one, with whom I once had a minute or two
of friendly intercourse. Then, months afterward,
I went again by the house where he lived, and
he came dashing out with all fierceness, as if he
would rend me in pieces. I let him come (there
was nothing else to do, or nothing else worth
doing), but the instant his nose struck me he
saw his error. Then, in a flash, he dropped flat
on the ground, and literally licked my shoes.
There was no attitude abject enough to express
the depth of his humiliation. And then, like the
dog of this morning, he jumped up, and ran
with all speed back to his doorstep.
Another descent into the gorge of Baker’s
River, and another stop on the bridge (how
gloriously the water comes down!), and I am
again in the pretty, broken woods below the
hotel. Here my attention is attracted by an
almost prostrate but still vigorous yellow birch,
like the one that stood for so many years by the
road below the Profile House, in the Franconia
Notch. Somehow the tree got an awkward slant
in its youth, and has always kept it, while the
larger branches have grown straight upward, at
right angles with the trunk, as if each were trying
to be a tree on its own account. The Franconia
Notch specimen became a landmark, and was
really of no inconsiderable service; a convenience
to the hotel proprietors, and a means of health
to idle boarders, who needed an incentive to exercise.
“Come, let’s walk down as far as the bent
tree,” one would say to another. The average
American cannot stroll; he has never learned;
if he puts his legs in motion, he must go to
some fixed point, though it be only a milestone
or a huckleberry bush. The infirmity is most
likely congenital, a taint in the blood. The
fathers worked,—all honor to them,—having
to earn their bread under hard conditions; and
the children, though they may dress like the
descendants of princes, cannot help turning even
their amusements into a stint.
And the sapient critic? Well, instead of
carrying a fishing rod or walking to a bent tree,
he had come out with an opera-glass, and had
made of his morning jaunt a bird-cataloguing
expedition. Considered in that light, the trip
had not been a brilliant success. In my whole
forenoon I had seen and heard but twenty-eight
species. If I had stayed in my low-country village,
and walked half as far, I should have
counted twice as many. But I should not have
enjoyed myself one quarter as well.
The next day and the next were rainy, with
Moosilauke still invisible. Then came a morning
of sunshine and clear atmosphere. So far it
was ideal mountain weather; but the cold wind
was so strong at our level that it was certain
to be nothing less than a hurricane at the top.
I waited, therefore, twenty-four hours longer.
Then, at quarter before seven on the morning
of May 23, I set out. I am as careful of my
dates, it seems, as if I had been starting for the
North Pole. And why not? The importance of
an expedition depends upon the spirit in which it
is undertaken. Nothing is of serious consequence
in this world except as subjective considerations
make it so. Even the North Pole is only an
imaginary point, the end of an imaginary line,
as old geographies used to inform us, pleonastically,—as
if “position without dimensions,”
a something without length, breadth, or thickness,
could be other than imaginary. I started,
then, at quarter before seven. Many years ago
I had been taken up the mountain road in a carriage;
now I would travel it on foot, spending
at least an hour upon each of its five miles, and
so see something of the mountain itself, as well
as of the prospect from the summit.
The miles, some longer, some shorter, as I
thought (a not unpleasant variety, though the
fourth stage was excessively spun out, it seemed
to me, perhaps to make it end at the spring),
are marked off by guideboards, so that the newcomer
need not fall into the usual disheartening
mistake of supposing himself almost at the top
before he has gone halfway. As for the first
mile, which must measure near a mile and a half,
and which ends just above the “second brook”
(every mountain path has its natural waymarks),
I had been over it twice within the last few days,
so that the edge of my curiosity was dulled; but,
with one excuse and another, I managed easily
enough to give it its allotted hour. For one
thing, a hairy woodpecker detained me five or ten
minutes, putting such tremendous vigor into his
hammering that I was positively certain (with
a shade of uncertainty, nevertheless, such as all
“observers” will understand; there is nothing
so true as a paradox) that he must be a pileatus,
till at last he showed himself. “Well, well,” said
I, “guesswork is a poor dependence.” It was
well I had stayed by. The forest was so nearly
deserted, so little animated, that I felt under obligation
to the fellow for every stroke of his mallet.
Though a man goes to the wood for silence,
his ear craves some natural noises,—enough, at
least, to make the stillness audible.
The second mile is of steeper grade than the
first, and toward the close brought me suddenly
to a place unlike anything that had gone before.
I named it at once the Flower Garden. For an
acre, or, more likely, for two or three acres, the
ground—a steep southern exposure, held up to
face the sun—was covered with plants in bloom:
Dutchman’s-breeches (Dicentra cucullaria),—bunches
of heart-shaped, cream-white flowers
with yellow facings, looking for all the world
as if they had been planted there; round-leaved
violets in profusion; white violets (blanda);
spring-beauties; adder’s-tongue (dog’s-tooth violet);
and painted trillium. A pretty show; pretty
in itself, and a thousand times prettier for being
happened upon thus unexpectedly, after two hours
of woods that were almost as dead as winter.
Only a little way above this point were the
first beds of snow; and henceforward, till I came
out upon the ridge, two miles above, the woods
were mostly filled with it, though there was little
in the road. About this time, also, I began to
notice a deer’s track. He had descended the
road within a few hours, as I judged, or since the
last rainfall, and might have been a two-legged,
or even a one-legged animal,—biped or uniped,—so
far as his footsteps showed. I should
rather have seen him, but the hoofprints were
a deal better than nothing; and undoubtedly
I saw them much longer than I could possibly
have seen the maker of them, and so, perhaps,
got out of them more of companionship. They
were with me for two hours,—clean up to the
ridge, and part way across it.
Somewhere between the third and fourth mileboards
I stopped short with an exclamation.
There, straight before me, over the long eastern
shoulder of Moosilauke, beyond the big Jobildunk
Ravine, loomed or floated a shining snow-white
mountain-top. Nothing could have been
more beautiful. It was the crest of Mount
Washington, I assumed, though even with the
aid of a glass I could make out no sign of buildings,
which must have been matted with new-fallen snow.
I took its identity for granted, I
say. The truth is, I became badly confused
about it afterward, such portions of the range
as came into view having an unfamiliar aspect;
but later still, on arriving at the summit, found
that my first idea had been correct.
That sudden, heavenly apparition gave me
one of those minutes that are good as years.
Once, indeed, in early October, I had seen
Mount Washington when it was more resplendent:
freshly snow-covered throughout, and then,
as the sun went down, lighted up before my eyes
with a rosy glow, brighter and brighter and
brighter, till it seemed all on fire within. But
even that unforgettable spectacle had less of
unearthly beauty, was less a work of pure enchantment,
I thought, than this detached, fleecy-looking
piece of aerial whiteness, cloud stuff or
dream stuff, yet whiter than any cloud, lying at
rest yonder, almost at my own level, against the
deep blue of the forenoon sky.
All this while, the birds, which had been few
from the start,—black-throated greens and
blues, Blackburnians, oven-birds, a bay-breast,
blue yellow-backs, siskins, Swainson thrushes,
a blue-headed vireo, winter wrens, rose-breasted
grosbeaks, chickadees, grouse, and snowbirds,—had
grown fewer and fewer, till at last, among
these stunted, low-branched spruces, with the
snow under them, there was little else but an
occasional myrtle warbler (“The brave myrtle,”
I kept saying to myself), with its musical, soft
trill, so out of place,—the voice of peaceful
green valleys rather than of stormy mountain-tops,—yet
so welcome. Once a gray-cheeked
thrush called just above me. These impenetrable
upper woods are the gray-cheeks’ summer
home,—a worthy one; but I heard nothing of
their wild music, and doubted whether they had
yet arrived in full summer force.
It was past eleven o’clock when I came out at
the clearing by the woodpile, with half the world
before me. From this point it was but a little
way to the bare ridge connecting the South Peak—up
which I had been trudging all the forenoon—and
the main summit. This, with its
little hotel, that looked as if it were in danger of
sliding off the mountain northward, was straight
before me across the ravine, a long but easy mile
away.
On the ridge I found myself all at once in
something like a gale of ice-cold wind. Who
could have believed it? It was well I had
brought a sweater; and squatting behind a lucky
clump of low evergreens, I wormed my way into
what is certainly the most comfortable of all garments
for such a place,—as good, at least, as
two overcoats. Now let the wind whistle, especially
as it was at my back, and was bearing
me triumphantly up the slope. So I thought,
bravely enough, till the trail took a sudden
shift, and the gale caught me on another tack.
Then I sang out of the other corner of my
mouth, as I used to hear country people say.
I no longer boasted, but saved my breath for
better use.
Wind or no wind, it is an exhilaration to walk
here above the world. Once a bird chirps to me
timidly from the knee-wood close by. I answer
him, and out peeps a white-throat. “You here!”
he says; “so early!” At my feet is plenty of
Greenland sandwort,—faded, winter-worn, gray-green
tufts, tightly packed among the small
boulders. Whatever lives here must lie low and
hang on. And with it is the shiny-leaved mountain
cranberry,—Vaccinium Vitis-Idæa. Let
me never omit that pretty name. Neither cranberry
nor sandwort shows any sign of blossom
or bud as yet; but it is good to know that they
will both be ready when the clock strikes. I can
see them now, pink and white, just as they will
look in July—nay, just as they will look a
thousand years hence.
Again my course alters, and the wind lets me
lean back upon it as it lifts me forward. Who
says we are growing old? The years, as they
pass, may turn and look at us meaningly, as
if to say, “You have lived long enough;” yet
even to us the climbing of a mountain road
(though by this time it must be a road, or something
like it) is still only the putting of one foot
before the other.
So I come at last to the top, and make haste
to get into the lee of the house, which is tightly
barred, of course, just as its owners left it seven
or eight months ago. The wind chases me round
the corners, one after another; but by searching
I discover a nook where it can hit me no more
than half the time. Here I sit and look at the
mountains,—a glorious company: Mount Washington
and its fellows, with all their higher parts
white; the sombre mass of the Twins on this
side of them; and, nearer still, the long, sharp,
purple crest of dear old Lafayette and its southern
neighbors. So many I can name. The rest
are mountains only; a wilderness of heaped-up,
forest-covered land; a prospect to dilate the
soul.
My expectation has been to stay here for two
hours or more; but the wind is merciless, and
after going out over the broad, bare, boulder-sprinkled
summit till I can see down into Franconia
(which looks pretty low and pretty far off,
though I distinguish certain of the buildings
clearly enough), I begin to feel that I shall enjoy
the sight of my eyes better from some sheltered
position on the upper part of the road. Even on
the ridge, however, I take advantage of every
tuft of spruces to stand still for a bit, looking
especially at the mountain itself, so big, so bare,
and so solid: East Peak, South Peak, and the
Peak, as they are called, although neither of
them is in the slightest degree peaked, with the
great gulf of Jobildunk—in which Baker’s
River rises—wedged among them. If the word
Moosilauke means a “bald place,” as it is said
to do, then we have here another proof of the
North American Indian’s genius for fitting words
to things.[3]
Even to-day, windy and cold as it is, a butterfly
passes over now and then (mostly red admirals),
and smaller insects flit carelessly about.
Insects are capable mountaineers, as I have often
found occasion to notice. The only time I was
ever on the sharp point of Mount Adams, where
my companion and I had barely room to stand
together, the air about our heads was black with
insects of all sorts and sizes, a veritable cloud;
and when we unscrewed the Appalachian Club’s
brass bottle to sign the roll of visitors, we found
that the signers immediately before us, after putting
down a date and their names, had added,
“Plenty of bugs.” And surely I was never pestered
worse by black flies than once, years ago, on
this very summit of Moosilauke. All the hours
of a long, breathless, tropical July day they made
life miserable for me. Better a thousand times
such a frosty, man-compelling wind as I am now
fleeing from.
Once off the ridge, I can loosen my hat and
sit down in comfort. The sun is good. How incredible
it seems that the air is so furiously in motion
only fifty rods back! Here it is like Elysium.
And almost I believe that this limited prospect
is better than the grander sweep from the summit
itself,—less distracting and more restful. So
half a loaf may be better than a whole one, if a
man cannot be contented without trying to eat the
whole one. A white-throat and a myrtle warbler
sing to me as I nibble my sandwich. They are
the loftiest spirits, it appears. I take off my hat
to them.
Already I am down far enough to catch the
sound of running water; and every rod brings a
new mountain into view from behind the long
East Peak. One of the best of them all is cone-shaped
Kearsarge, topped with its house. Now
the white crest of Washington rises upon me,—snow
with the sun on it; and here, by the fourth
mileboard, are a few pale-bright spring-beauties,—five
or six blossoms only. They have found a
bit of earth from which the snow melted early,
and here they are, true to their name, with the
world on every side nothing but a desolation. If it
is time for myrtle warblers, why not for them?
Now I see not only Washington, but the mountains
with it, all strangely foreshortened, so as to
give the highest peak a most surprising preëminence.
No wonder I was in doubt what to call it.
In days past I have walked that whole ridge, from
Clinton to Adams; and glad I am to remember
it. A man should do such things while he can,
teaching his feet to feel the ground, and letting
his heart cheer him.
A turn in the road, and straight below me lies
my deserted farmhouse. Another turn, and I lose
it. In ascending a mountain we face the path;
in descending we face the world. I speak thus
because at this moment I am looking down a
charming vista,—forest-covered mountains, row
beyond row. But for the gravel under my feet I
might be a thousand miles from any human habitation.
Presently a Swainson thrush whistles.
By that token I am getting away from the summit,
though things are still wintry enough, with
no sign of bud or blossom.
And look! What is that far below me, facing
up the road? A four-footed beast of some kind.
A bear? No; I raise my glass, and see a porcupine.
He has his mobile, sensitive nose to the
ground, and continues to smell, and perhaps to
feed, as I draw nearer and nearer. By and by,
being very near, and still unworthy of the creature’s
notice, I roll a stone toward him. At this
he shows a gleam of interest. He sits up, folds
his hands,—puts his fore paws together over his
breast,—looks at me, and then waddles a few
steps toward the upper side of the road. “I must
be getting out of this,” he seems to think. But
he reconsiders his purpose, comes back, sits on
end again and folds his hands; and then, the reconnoissance
being satisfactory, falls to smelling
the ground as before. I can see the tips of his
nostrils twitching as in a kind of ecstasy. There
must be something savory under them. Meantime,
still with my glass lifted, I come closer and
closer, till I am right upon him. If porcupines
can shoot, I must be in danger of a quill. Another
step or two, and he waddles to the lower
side of the road. He is a vacillating body, however;
and once more he turns to sit up and fold
his hands. This time I hear him rattling his teeth,
but not very fiercely,—nothing to compare with
the gnashings of an angry woodchuck; and at
last, when I cluck to him, he hastens his steps a
little, as much, perhaps, as a porcupine can, and
disappears in the brush, dragging his ridiculous,
sloping, straw-thatched hinder parts—a combination
of lean-to and L—after him. He has
never cultivated speed or decision of character,
having a better defense. So far as appearances
go, he is certainly an odd one.
There are no blossoms yet, nor visible promise
of any, but once in a while a bright Atalanta (red
admiral) butterfly flits before me. I wonder
if I could capture one by the old schoolboy
method? I am moved to try; but my best effort—not
very determined, it must be confessed—ends
in failure. Perhaps I should have had some
golden apples.
At last I come to a few adder’s-tongues, the
first flowers since the five or six spring-beauties a
mile and a half back. Yes, I am approaching the
Flower Garden; for here is a most lovely bank
of yellow violets, a hundred or two together, a
real bed of them. Nobody ever saw anything
prettier. Here, also, is the showy purple trillium,
not so unhandsomely overgrown as it sometimes
is, in addition to all the flowers that I noticed on
the ascent. A garden indeed. I pull up a root
of Dutchman’s-breeches, and sit down to examine
the cluster of rice-like pink kernels at the base
of the stem. Excellent fodder they must make
for animals of some kind. “Squirrel-corn” is an
apt name, I think, though I believe it is applied,
not to this species, but to its relative, Dicentra
Canadensis.
The whole plant is uncommonly clean-looking
and attractive, with its pale, finely dissected leaves
and its delicate, waxy bloom; but looking at
it, and then at a bank of round-leaved violets opposite,
I say once more, “Those are my flowers.”
Something in the shade of color is most exactly
to my taste. The very sight of them gladdens
me like sunshine. But before I get out of the
garden, as I am in no haste to do (if it was attractive
this morning, it is doubly so now, after
those miles of snowbanks), I am near to changing
my mind; for suddenly, as my eye follows
the border of the road, it falls upon a small blue
violet, the first of that color that I have noticed
since my arrival at Moosilauke. It must be my
long-desired Selkirkii, I say to myself, and down
I go to look at it. Yes, it is not leafy-stemmed,
the petals are not bearded, and the leaves are unlike
any I have ever seen. I take it up, root and
all, and search carefully till I find one more. If
it is Selkirkii, as I feel sure it is,[4] then I am
happy. This is the one species of our eastern North
American violets that I have never picked. It
completes my set. And it is especially good to
find it here, where I was not in the least expecting
it. With the two specimens in my pocket I
trudge the remaining two miles in high spirits.
The violets are no newer to me than the liverwort
specimens on Mount Cushman were, but
they have the incomparable advantage of things
long looked for,—things for the lack of which,
so to speak, a pigeonhole in the mind has stood
consciously vacant. Blessed are they who want
something, for when they get it they will be
glad.
The weather below had been warm and still,
a touch of real summer. So said the people at
the hotel; and I knew it already; for, as I came
through the cattle pasture, I saw below me a
new, strange-looking, brightly illuminated grove
of young birches. “Were those trees there this
morning?” I thought. A single day had covered
them with sunny, yellow-green leaves, till
the change was like a miracle. Indeed, it was a
miracle. May the spring never come when I shall
fail to feel it so. Then I looked back at the summit.
Was it there, no farther away than that,
that so icy a wind had chased me about?—or
had I been in Greenland?
