The Magical Chance

by Dallas Lore Sharp

IV

But I am concerned with life and literature. How does the organization of society affect books, admitting that it affects life? What is a book but a life?—and a more abundant life? Everybody who has lived has a book to write. But only those who have lived abundantly should write their books. Starve a nation spiritually, as ours is being starved; reduce its life to a mechanical routine; rob its labor of all creative quality, and how shall it write?

The duty to dig applies first to the spirit. There is sound economy in it if one’s political economy is sound. I do not say money. Economy and money are not equivalent terms. I digged as a duty last year; and as a result I did not buy a potato from the “combine” in Maine; I nearly got on without a pound of beef from Chicago; and could have made my honey serve for Cuban sugar. The same amount of time spent putting left hind wheels on automobiles might have brought me more money, and so, more beef and potatoes and sugar, and so, more gout and rheumatism. The duty to dig comprehends a great deal more than ordinary economy.

I would not imply that I can handle the Beef Trust and the potato pirates and the sugar barons with my humble hoe; or snap my fingers in the face of Standard Oil, and say, “Go to, I’ll have none of your twenty-eight-cent gas!” I do say that several million bee-keepers and potato-patchers, and hen-coopers, keeping busy in their back yards, as I keep busy in mine, could mightily relieve the railroad congestion, and save gasoline, and cut in on the demand for Chicago beef and cold-storage eggs, and generally lower the high cost of living.

It is not because there are “millions in it” that I would have the banker plant his back yard to beans. Thoreau planted two acres and a half to beans and potatoes (on a weak market, however), with a “pecuniary profit of $8.71½.” Here is no very great financial inducement to a busy banker, or to a ward boss. Still, who better than the ward boss or the banker could afford a private beanfield?

I say it is not for the sake of this $8.71½ profit of Thoreau’s that we must dig; but rather for that chapter on the bean field in Walden Pond, which proves the real worth of digging.

There can hardly be a form of labor so elemental, so all-demanding, so abundantly yielding of the fruits of life, as digging. Yet there are those who doubt the wisdom of digging because things can be bought cheaper at the store; and those who question their right to dig when they can hire a man to dig for them; and there are those who hate to dig, who contemn duty, who, if they plant, will plant a piece of fallow land with golf-balls only, and hoe it with brassies, niblicks, cleeks, and spooners, saying with Chaucer’s Monk:

“... how shall the world be servèd?

Let Austyn have his swynk to his reservèd.”

Golf is an ancient game, no doubt, but not so old as gardening, though golf’s primordial club and vocabulary seem like things long left over, bits of that Missing-Link Period between our arboreal and cave-day past. Except for calling the cows from the meadow, or fighting in war, there is nothing we do that requires words and weapons, tools, instruments, implements, utensils, apparatus, machinery, or mechanisms so lacking in character and comeliness as the words and clubs of golf. The gurglings of infants seem articulate, even to unparental ears, compared with the jargon of golf; and as for billiard-cues, baseball-bats, pikes, spades, shillalahs, and teething-rings, they have the touch of poetry on them; whereas the golf-club was conceived and shaped in utter unimaginativeness.

Golf is not an ancient game: it has the mark of the Machine upon it; the Preadamites could not have figured the game out. Gardening, on the other hand, if we trust Holy Writ, was an institution founded before the Fall, incorporated with the social order from the start—an inherent, essential element in the constitution of human things:

“Great nature’s primal course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast,”

—which civilization doth murder as Macbeth murdered sleep.

Golf belongs to civilization strictly, not to the human race, being one of life’s post-Edenic precautions, like psychopathic hospitals, jails, and homes for the feeble-minded. A golf course is a little-wanderers’ home; and if we must have golf courses, let their hazards be carefully constructed on worthless land, and let the Civil Service Board examine the caddies, whether they be fit guards for the golfers, lest some small boy be wasted who might have tended real sheep on Norfolk Downs or have weeded in a garden.

It is a duty to dig, to nail the Stars and Stripes to a lima-bean pole, and plant the banner square in the middle of the garden. Profits? pleasures? Both sorts will grow, especially the pleasures, which really are part of the profits, till they fairly smother the weeds; not the least of these being your sense of living and your right to live, which comes out of actually hoeing your own row—a literal row of beans or corn or tomatoes.

Somebody must feed the soldiers; but nobody must needs feed me. It is not necessary that I live, however necessary I find it to eat; eating, like sleeping and breathing and keeping warm, being strictly a private enterprise that nobody but I need see as necessary or be responsible for.

The soldier must carry a shovel nowadays, but he will require a hoe, too, and a pruning hook, and a ploughshare, before he will be self-supporting. With such a kit war could support war forever, which is the Rathenau plan of war, with everything German left out, consequently everything of war left out. The soldier cannot feed himself. The crew of a battleship cannot be expected to catch their own cod and flounders. They must leave that to the trawlers, those human boats, with human crews who fish for a living. Men of the navy must die for a living. The captain of a United States destroyer, writing to his wife, says, “I think that the only real anxiety is lest we may not get into the big game at all. I do not think that any of us are bloodthirsty or desirous of glory or advancement, but we have to justify our existence.”

So does every human being; yet an existence that can be justified only by fighting and dying is too unproductive, too far from self-supporting, to warrant the sure calling and election of many of us. No Grand-Banker ever wrote so to his wife, though he might be returning with all his salt unwet; no college professor ever wrote so—not if he could get into his garden—in spite of his pupils, his college president, the trustees, and Mr. Carnegie’s Efficiency Board. Teaching may not justify a professor’s existence, though it ought to justify his salary; so, every time I start for the University, I put a dozen or two of eggs into my book-bag, that I may have a right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.

I am not independent of society. I do not wish to be independent. I wish to be debtor to all and have all debtors to me. But we buy too much and sell too much of life, and raise too little. We pay for all we get. Sometimes we get all we pay for, but not often; and if we never did, still life has so thoroughly adopted the business standard, that we had rather keep on paying than trying to grow our way.

Business is a way of living by proxy; money is society’s proxy for every sort of implement and tool. To produce something, however—some actual wealth, a pennyweight of gold-dust, a pound of honey, a dozen eggs, a book, a boy, a bunch of beets; some real wealth out of the soil, out of my loins, out of my brains, out of my muscles and the sap of the maple, the rains and sunshine and the soil, out of the rich veins of the earth or the swarming waters of the sea—this is to be; and to be myself, and not a proxy, is to lose my life and save it, and to justify my existence.

I have to buy a multitude of things—transportation, coal, dentistry, news, flour, and clothes. I have paid in money for them. I have also paid in real wealth, having given, to balance my charge on society, an equivalent in raw cabbage, pure honey, fresh eggs, and the like, from my own created store. I am doubtless in debt to society, but I have tried to give wealth for wealth, not the symbol of it merely; and last year, as I balanced my books, I think the world was in debt to me by several bunches of beets. I do not boast of the beets, though they take me out of the debtor’s prison where most of us live. I can face the world, however, with those beets; I have gone over the top, have done my bit, with beets.

The oldest duty on the human conscience is the duty to dig. I am a college teacher, and that is an honorable, if futile, profession. The Scriptures say: “He gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers”; but, before there were any such multifarious and highly specialized needs, it was said unto our first father: “Replenish the earth and subdue it”—a universal human need, a call to duty, from which no Draft Board of civilization can rightly exempt us.

Wealth is not created, not even increased, in trade. When was one pennyweight of gold on ’change by any magic metallurgy of trade made two pennyweight? The magic of the second pennyweight is the metallurgy of the pick and shovel and cradle rocking the shining sands of the Yukon. Real wealth is only circulated in trade. It comes from primal sources—from the gold-fields, the cotton-fields, the corn-fields, the fir-clad sides of Katahdin, the wide gray waters of the Grand Banks, the high valleys of the sheeped Sierras, and from back yards, like mine, that bring forth thirty- and sixty- and an hundred-fold.

And this is as profoundly true of life and literature as it is of cotton and lumber and gold.

Give me a garden and the wages of hoeing my row. And if not a garden, then a little house of hens, a coop of pigeons, a colony of bees—even in the city I should keep bees, if I had to keep them in the attic or on the roof. Not every one can have a garden, but every one can either plant a tree, or raise one pig, or keep a cow or goat, or feed a few hens, or raise a flock of pigeons, or do something that will bring him personally into contact with real things, and make it possible for him to help pay his way with real wealth, and in part, at least, to justify his existence, and his book.

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CHAPTER V

THE MAN AND THE BOOK

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CHAPTER V
THE MAN AND THE BOOK

Here on my desk lies a new book entitled, “For the Benefit of My Creditors,” the autobiography of Hinckley Gilbert Mitchell, a scholar, a teacher in a school of theology—and now this book, a simple, sad book of human struggle and defeat, of spiritual and scientific adventure and triumph and romance.

The scholar is not the accepted stuff of literature. What of human interest can come out of a classroom? Yet I have seen this scholar’s classroom when it was wilder than ten nights in a barroom crowded into one. I have seen some lively and human times in my own classroom; and I know that there is as real a chance, and as magical a chance, there as Dana found on the high seas. There are frontiers for the scholar, especially in theology, as dangerous in their crossing as any to be met with by the overland pioneer.

Dana escaped from the decorous and the conventional life of social Boston by way of the deep sea; Mitchell escaped from the decorous and conventional dogma of his church by way of honest study; and his Church tried him for heresy, and found him guilty, and would have burned him at the stake had that been the decorous and conventional manner of dealing with heretics at the moment. As it was, they only branded him, and cast him out as a thing unclean.

Perhaps that is not a life human enough, and abundant enough, for a book. It is the simple story of a poor boy picking stones and building walls on his father’s farm in New York State; then, as Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, rebuilding “The Wall of Nehemiah”; then, as scholar and professor, re-creating “The World before Abraham”; and finally, as the storm center of one of the bitterest theological controversies of recent years, dismissed, dishonored, betrayed for less than thirty pieces of silver, a silent, brokenhearted man. It is only another version of an old and very common story. Prophets and pioneers are all alike; and their stories are much alike, whether the pages turn westward, where new empires take their way, or eastward, back along the scholar’s crossed and tangled trails to a world before Abraham.

As the manuscript of the book lay upon my table, I wondered if any publisher would feel the human pathos of the struggle, and the mighty meaning of it all for truth. Who would publish it? But here it is, printed and bound, a book—“For the Benefit of My Creditors,” as if he were debtor to all, his enemies included, and owed them only love.

This is as modest and self-withholding a story as a man ever told of himself. There are all too few of such human stories. This one would never have been told had the author not hated intellectual cowardice as he hated moral cowardice, with a perfect hatred. He sought the truth—in the Bible, and in his own mind. The geologist seeks some of the same truth in the rocks; the astronomer in the stars. The Old Testament was this scholar’s field. And, laying aside tradition and the spirit of dogma, he sought as a scientist seeks, patiently, fearlessly, reverently, for what his long and thorough preparation made him eminently able to find.

This is the highest type of courage and daring. Who finds truth finds trial and adventure. In his condemnation by the bishops of his Church, he felt that truth had been assailed and the scientific method. He did not write this book to defend the truth, nor to defend himself; but to examine himself, as he would examine a difficult fragment of Hebrew manuscript, and make himself easy for other men to read.

His trial was long past, and most of his life had been lived, before a page of his book was written. He came at it reluctantly: he might seem personal—petty or selfish or egotistical; or he might say something bitter and vindictive and do harm to the Church. But neither himself nor his Church must stand in the way of truth; and in his trial, truth had been tried, and the only way of knowing truth had been condemned. So he sits down to write this story of his life exactly as he sat down to write a commentary on the Book of Genesis—to account for his being as a man and a scholar, his preparation, his methods of study, his attitude, and approach.

How much truth has he discovered? He makes no claims. Darwin may or may not have the truth about Evolution; but we have a certain and a great truth in Darwin—in his mind and method. It was how Darwin tried to solve the problem of life and its forms, rather than the solution, that has changed the thinking of the world.

For three years I was a student of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis under this scholar. I have forgotten all he taught me, and more. But the way he taught me has changed forever my outlook upon life. His attitude was truth, and it flooded not only the whole mind, but one’s whole being, with light. Many a time I have sat in his classroom during the discussion of some highly difficult and dangerous question of doctrine, and said to myself, amid the drawn daggers of those who had come to trap him, “Right or wrong his findings, he is himself truth, its life and way.”

Life enough for a book? He could have written a book on teaching. For he loved to teach! He loved to teach young preachers. He could not preach; but he was the teacher born. The classroom was his from the foundation of the world. Here he was preaching truly—from a thousand future pulpits at the very ends of the earth. He saw his students scattered over the whole world preaching to the intelligences of men as well as to their hearts; revealing the wisdom as well as the love of God; and expounding a diviner Bible because it was a wholly human Bible. In all of these pulpits he heard himself speaking with tongues not his own, but the message was his own, the simple sincere faith of his classroom.

The thought of it thrilled him. It lifted him up. He dwelt in the presence of the opportunity as in the very presence of the Most High. As humble a man as ever lived, doubting his every power and gift, and relying only on the truth to make him free, he would come into the classroom and take his chair on the six-inch platform, which raised him by so much above his students, as if that platform were the Mount of Transfiguration. His face would shine; his voice, his gestures, his attitude working with his careful words, made his whole being radiant with zeal for the truth and love for us, his students, so mysteriously given to his care.

Then suddenly, after more than twenty years of this, he was expelled—driven from this sacred classroom and branded as unsound, unsafe, unfit!

No, not suddenly. It was only the verdict of his judges that came suddenly. No one nowadays could prepare his mind for a judgment like that. For five or six of the years, during which the trouble-makers, under pretense of study, had elected his courses at the Theological School, I had either been a student under him or his close and sympathetic friend. I knew, as he knew, that his enemies would stop at nothing in their bitter zeal; still, I remember vividly the utter shock and astonishment of the bishops’ decision. And I remember—for I cannot forget—its strange numbing effect upon him. It came over him slowly, else I think he might have died. It crept upon him like a dreadful palsy, leaving him dazed and dumb. He was too simple a man to realize it quickly, too entirely single in mind and heart to realize it wholly. It slowly crushed him to the earth. And never in all the after years was he whole again. His heart was broken. He rose up and taught, until the very hour of his death, but never again in his old classroom nor with his old spirit. Day after day he would pass by the Theological School with its hundreds of eager students; he would see them gathering at the hour of his lecture; but another teacher (one whom he had trained) would come in and take his place, while he plodded down the street and on, a shepherd without his sheep.

Meantime he was called to teach in another graduate school. He welcomed this new work. He found honor, and love, and fellowship among his new colleagues. They gave him freedom. They created a place for him that had not been before. He could teach what he wished and as he wished. It was enough for them to have him among them, and many a time he told me of how unworthy he felt of all this love and honor in his declining years, and how it had stayed and steadied him in his deep defeat. But they did not need him here—so he felt. It was more for the honor of scholarship than for the good he would do them. But he felt that they did need him at his own beloved school, whose policies he had helped to shape, whose spirit he had helped to create, whose name and fame he had so largely helped to establish, and whose students, crowding in from the east and from the great west, he longed to take into his heart and his home, as for so many happy years he had been in the habit of doing.

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” he would cry as he passed by on the street, a stranger, and saw the students going in and out, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killeth the prophets, ... how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!”

This, however, was not the doing of the school. Faculty and students, with the exception of those few who came for the express purpose of accusing him, were loyal. The president of the University, his close friend, was loyal, and did all that lay in his power to prevent the iniquity of the trial and the decision. This only added to the tragedy. To have been tried by his peers and co-laborers, by those who knew him and the field of his labors, would have been perfectly fair, but to be accused by three or four narrow-minded students (one of whom recanted later and all of whom deserve oblivion), who had come with malice aforethought, whose very presence in the school was a lie, to be accused by such as these, I say, and then tried by a board of judges, to whom he was largely a stranger, not one of whom probably was his equal as a scholar in the field involved—this made the shame to the school, to himself, and to truth, doubly deep and sore.

There remained one thing more for him to do; and as soon as he could do it kindly, as a Christian, and dispassionately, as a scholar, without bias or prejudice or any personal ends except the ends of gratitude and truth, he set about his autobiography. And I wonder if, among autobiographies, there is another that approaches his for detachment, restraint, and self-negation; for absolute adherence to the facts for the sake of the truth involved, a truth not of self at all, but wholly of scholarship? This is more of a thesis than an autobiography—as if the author were writing of another “Wall of Nehemiah,” and no more involved in it, personally, than he was present in “The World before Abraham”!

This is one of the most remarkable evidences of severe and scientific scholarship that I have ever seen; and it is equal evidence of the inherent literary value of human life. No accusing word is here, nothing bitter and unchristian. But just the opposite: “For the Benefit of My Creditors” is a work of love. His very character had been assailed by his enemies, but this, while it hurt, could not harm him. He stood upon his conscious integrity, calm and silent. It was not the attack upon himself that concerned him. It was that Truth had been attacked. It was an attempt to make the Bible a denominational book; to confound truth with tradition and give it a doctrinal color or a denominational slant. The Church may compel its theologians to do that if it has to, but its scholars, those who discover truth, it should leave free. God and truth are not denominational, nor Protestant nor Catholic nor Hebrew. God is truth, and single or separate, God and Truth belong to the fearless, the frank, and the pure—in science not more than in religion. For “are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel?... Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?”

I recall the day we came upon that wonderful passage in Amos in our study of this prophet; and how for the first time in my life the universality of truth dawned upon me out of that passage. I had had a tribal, denominational God, up to that time. I had been seeing different kinds of truth—like the different tribes of old in Palestine—warring truths, each with its own territory, its own grip upon me, when suddenly, as the “Rabbi” opened up this mighty saying of Amos, I saw one God of us all, one truth for us all, and all of us searching, under God’s leading, for the truth. Henceforth the Philistines and the Syrians and the children of Israel were to be as the Ethiopians to me, as they are to God—all of us led by him, and all of us free. No teacher ever taught me a diviner lesson than that.

It was not a body of truth that this great teacher was called to expound. It was the spirit of truth—the desire for truth, the search for truth, the nature of truth, that it is God—this was his high calling. And in condemning him, his Church was confounding tradition and truth, blocking the road to truth, and threatening, in this example of him, to punish the daring who discover and bring us forward into new realms of truth. In his trial and condemnation the Church was saying: “Study, but study to perpetuate the past; to preserve the old; to defend doctrine, and establish tradition. We have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. No new light can possibly break forth from God’s word, or from any word. Revelation is closed. And if you think you have new light, hide it, and if you discover new truth, do not publish it, do not teach it, for among the three hundred men in your school there are three who have closed their minds to light and truth, and have sworn by all the past to keep them closed; and it would jeopardize the Church if you should pry those three minds open to the light and to the truth of to-day.”

These are not his words. There is a tang of bitterness in them. They are mine. Yet it was partly because he believed that the Church meant to make him a warning to all scholars and honest thinkers within its fold, that he set about his autobiography, which he died writing.

“Rabbi,” we students called him affectionately, and strangely enough he seemed to look the part. He was the thorough scholar. Careful, methodical by nature, he was severely trained, and to all of this he added a profound reverence for the Book which was his life’s study, and felt a deep sense of his responsibility as its teacher. Had his life’s task been a haystack with one single needle of divine truth lost within it, he would have tirelessly taken it down, straw by straw, for the needle of truth, just as Madame Curie, aware of some mysterious power in the crude common bulk of slag, patiently eliminated pound after pound, ton after ton of the gross elements until she held in her hand the pulsing particle of radium, hardly larger than the head of a pin, whose light illumines and almost blinds the groping world. Had Professor Mitchell not been a student of the Bible, he might have been a student of chemistry, for his methods and his zeal were exactly those of the discoverer in any field, and it might have been his honor and glory, as it chanced to be Madame Curie’s, to give radium to the world.

Instead of glory, his was condemnation and defeat. Yet his very mind and method, applied anywhere else, would have won him distinction and honor. There is no other mind or method, except the closed mind and the method of appeal to authority, as against the trial by experiment and fact. Truth is truth whether in Theology or in Chemistry, and only the open mind, the free, the bold, the experimenting mind finds it. Traditions have to be defended. Truth is its own defense. The mind of the great scholar is never on the defensive. Let “the Forts of Folly fall,” he is far over the frontier where there is no need for forts. So here in his life he writes not to defend himself, but to express himself, his gratitude; and to explain himself, his position, his purpose, his principles as to the way of truth.

Here is a man who was as simple as he was sincere. But simplicity in a great spirit is the sign, the very expression of sincerity. He was interested in all human things. He could make wonderful coffee. He could build a stone wall with the best of masons, and how he used to tramp the woods with me for mushrooms!

I was a stranger in Boston and had been in his classes for a week, perhaps, when I met him downtown. It was a very real pleasure to be stopped and called by name and quizzed by the great Rabbi. What was I looking for in Boston? A hammer? “Come along,” he said, turning short about, “there’s a good hardware store down this street. I’ll go with you and see that you get a Maydole—a Maydole now—they’re the only wear in hammers.” I got the Maydole; that was twenty-six years ago; I have it yet. His was a little act. But I have drawn many a nail with that hammer. Yea, I have built him a mansion with it.

I speak of that little thing because it was a characteristic act. The details of life tremendously interested him. He was entirely human and as interested in the human side of his students as he was in their intellectual and spiritual sides. From my study window here in Hingham as I write, eight stone faces stare at me out of the retaining wall in the driveway,—big granite chunks of boulder they were in my meadow years ago. It was the Rabbi who rigged the tackle and helped me put those stones here in the wall. He could fix a toggle, he could “cut” and “pize” and “wop” a stone with lever and chain so as to “move mountains.” “There! There!” he would say, “let the mare do the work; let the mare do the work,” when I would rush up at a quarter-ton chunk of solid granite and, bare-handed, try to hustle it on to the stone-boat.

He had built stone walls before—back on the hill farm in New York State, where he was born and had his boyhood. Later he “restored” the Wall of Nehemiah about Jerusalem, but not with any more zest than he helped me build with actual stones the retaining wall for my driveway up Mullein Hill in Hingham. Such is the man. Would he be substance for a book?

Theological students are as naturally full of trouble as rag-weeds are of pollen. They know enough to doubt; they are old enough to be married; they are poor; and they preach; and they would like to be pious; but the world and the flesh and the devil are against them. They are only as good as the average of mankind, but they have more than an average share of tribulations. They need Hebrew—all of them—which is one more terrible trouble! But they sorely need human sympathy and wise counsel, and whether they got Hebrew or failed to get it, never a man came into the Rabbi’s classroom who did not also enter at the same moment into his open heart and open home. Classroom and heart and home belonged to every man who would enter. His capacity for patience in the classroom was only equaled by the boundless sympathy and the simple hospitality of his near-by home.

Is it a wonder that the great body of his students were confounded and dismayed that he could be tried on some technical point or other and be ejected from his chair as unfit to teach those who were to preach the Gospel?

After the trial the enforced leisure was immediately turned to new studies and larger literary plans. Fresh fields were opened, too, for lecturing—in the University of Chicago, in Harvard University; and then soon came the invitation to join the staff of Tufts Theological School as a member of the faculty. Life has its compensations and rewards; and if there was no cure for the mortal wound he had received at the hands of his brethren in his own Church, this invitation to Tufts, and the perfect fellowship there to the day he died, was a compensation and a satisfaction that gave to his life a sweet reasonableness, completeness, and reward.

There was no variableness nor shadow caused by turning in his unhurried life. The loss of his chair did not mean the end of his creative scholarship. He worked to the last, and was preparing for the day’s work when death came. He knew our hearts, but we ourselves hardly knew them till he had gone. Then the swift word reached us, and we were told that we should see him no more, that he was to be buried afar with no service of any kind for him here—here where he had labored so many years! It could not be. On every hand his old pupils appeared—Methodist, Universalist, Unitarian—in one mind, all differences forgotten in their single love for the honest scholar, the direct, the earnest, the sincere teacher, the simple man, whose life had been devoted to learning and to doing good,—on every hand they app eared and gave him “The Grammarian’s Funeral.”

“Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights!

Wait ye the warning?

Our low life was the level’s and the night’s:

He’s for the morning.

Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head,

’Ware the beholders!

This is our master, famous, calm, and dead,

Borne on our shoulders.

“This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed

Seeking shall find him.

So, with the throttling hands of death at strife,

Ground he at grammar;

Still, through the rattle, parts of speech were rife:

While he could stammer

He settled Hoti’s business—let it be!—

Properly based Oun—

Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,

Dead from the waist down.

“Here’s the top-peak; the multitude below

Live, for they can, there:

This man decided not to Live but Know—

Bury this man there?

Here—here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,

Lightnings are loosened,

Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,

Peace let the dew send!

Lofty designs must close in like effects:

Loftily lying,

Leave him—still loftier than the world suspects,

Living and dying.”

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CHAPTER VI

A JANUARY SUMMER

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CHAPTER VI
A JANUARY SUMMER

When winter winds blow cold and chill

And through the hawthorn howls the gale

The winter winds were truly cold and chill on this twenty-first of January here in Massachusetts. And I chance to know they were chill down along the Delaware this particular January day. I remember many a January day like this on the wide marshes of the Delaware and in the big woods along the Maurice River where I was a boy. But I was not thinking of those days at all here in my New England home, for I was busy at my desk.

Some one was at my study door. More than one, for I heard low talking. Then the door softly opened, and four bebundled boys stood before me—with an axe, a long-handled shovel, a covered basket, and a very big secret, which stuck out all over their faces.

They were not big boys outside. But they were almost bursting inside with their big secret. They were big with boots and coats and caps and mittens; and they looked almost like monsters in my study door with their axe and shovel and big basket.

“Come on, father,” they whispered (as if She hadn’t heard them tramping through the hall and upstairs with their kit!), “come on! It’s mother’s birthday to-morrow, and we’re going after the flowers.”

“What!” I exclaimed. “Are you going to chop the flowers down with an axe, and dig them up with a shovel?” And I tried to think what a chopped-down and dug-up birthday bouquet would look like. But it was too much for me.

“You are going to give her a nice bunch of frost flowers,” I said, feeling about in my puzzled mind for just what was afoot. “If you are going to give her frost flowers, you had better get the ice-saw, too, for we shall need a big block of ice to stick their stems in.”

Not a word of comment! No sign on the four faces that they had even heard my gentle banter. They knew what they were going to do; and all they wanted of me was to come along.

“Hurry up,” they answered, dropping my hip-boots on the floor. “Here are your scuffs.”

I hurried up! Scuffs and boots and cap and reefer on in a jiffy, and the five of us were soon in single file upon the meadow, the dry snow squealing under our feet, while the little imp-winds, capering fitfully about us, blew the snowdust into our faces, or catching up the thin drifts, sent them whirling and waltzing, like ghostly dancers, over the meadow’s level glittering floor.

I was beginning to warm up a little; but I was still guessing about the flowers, and not yet in the spirit of the game.

We were having a hard winter, and the novelty of zero weather was beginning to wear off—at least to me. The fact was I had intended to get the birthday flowers down at the greenhouse in the village. January is an awkward time to have a birthday, anyhow. June is a much more reasonable month for birthdays, if you gather wild flowers for the celebration. The fields are full of flowers in June! But here in January you must go with an axe and a shovel, mittens, rubber-boots, and reefers! And I confess I couldn’t make head or tail of this festive trip.

It is a lucky man who has boys, or who knows and “trains,” as our New Englanders say, with boys. They won’t let him freeze up.

“Come, father,” they say, “get into your scuffs and boots, and hit the old trail for the woods!” And father drops his pen; bundles up; “clomps” out in his boots, grumbling at the weather and the boys and the birthdays and the stiffness in his knees and in his soul—for a whole hundred yards or more into the meadow! Then he begins to warm up. Then he takes the axe from one of the boys and looks at its edge, and “hefts” it; and looks about for a big birthday flower, about the size of a hundred-year-old oak, to chop down. Something queer is happening to father. He is forgetting his knees; he is capering about on the snow; he is getting ahead of the boys; he hardly realizes it, but he is beginning to feel like a birthday inside of him; and he will soon be in danger of getting this January day mixed up with the days of June!

But not right off. I was warming up, I do confess, yet it was a numb, stiff world about us, and bleak and stark. It was a world that looked all black and white, for there was not a patch of blue overhead. The white underfoot ran off to meet the black of the woods, and the woods in turn stood dark against a sky so heavy with snow as to shut us apparently into some vast snow cave. A crow flapping over drew a black pencil-line across the picture—the one sign of life that we could see besides ourselves. Only small boys are likely to leave their firesides on such a day; only small boys and those men who can’t grow up. Yet never before, perhaps, had boys or men ever gone afield on such a tramp with an axe, a shovel, and a basket.

Suddenly one of the boys dashed off calling, “Let’s go see if the muskrats have gone to bed yet!” And trailing after him away we went, straight across the meadow. I knew what he was after; I could see the little mound, hardly more than an anthill in size, standing up in the meadow where the alder bushes and elderberry marked the bend in the brook. If my farmer neighbor had forgotten a small haycock, when he cut his rowen, it would have looked about as this muskrat lodge here buried under the snow. I was glad the boys had seen it. For only a practiced eye could have discovered it; and only a lover of bleak gray days would have known what might be alive deep down under its thatch of cat-tails and calamus here in the silent winter.

But is there any day in the whole year out of doors that real live boys and real live girls do not love? or any wild thing that they do not love—flower or bird or beast or star or storm?

We crept up softly, and surrounded the lodge; then with the axe we struck the frozen, flinty roof several ringing blows. Instantly one—two—three muffled splashy “plunks” were heard, as three little muskrats, frightened out of their naps and half out of their wits, plunged into the open water of their doorways from off their damp but cozy couch.

It was a mean thing to do, but not very mean as wild animal life goes. And it did warm me up so, in spite of the chilly plunge the little sleepers took! Chilly to them? Not at all, and that is why it warmed me. To hear the splash of water down under the two feet of ice and snow that sealed the meadow like a sheet of steel! To hear the sound of stirring life, and to picture that snug, steaming bed on the top of a tough old tussock, with its open water-doors leading into freedom and plenty below! “Why, it won’t be long before the arbutus is in bloom,” I began to think. I looked at the axe and shovel, and said to myself, “Well, the boys may know what they are doing, after all, though three muskrats don’t make a spring or a bouquet.”

But they did make me warmer inside and outside, too. Warm up your heart and you soon feel warmer in your fingers and toes.

We turned back from the muskrats’ lodge and headed again for the woods, where the flowers must be. Hardly had we reached the cart-path before another of the boys was off—this time to the left, going rapidly toward a low piece of maple swamp perhaps a quarter of a mile away.

“He’s going over to see if Hairy Woodpecker is in his hole,” said the boys in answer to my question. “Hairy has a winter hole over there in a big dead maple. Want to see him?”

Of course I wanted to see him. The only live thing outside of ourselves that we had seen (we had only heard the muskrats) had been a crow. Live birds on such days as these one would go far to see. So we all cut across toward the swamp where the hairy woodpecker reigned solitary in his bleak domain.

The “hole” was almost twenty-five feet up in a dead maple stub that had blown off and lodged against a live tree. The meadow had been bleak and wind-swept, but the swamp was naked and dead, filled with ice, and touched with a most forbidding emptiness and stillness. I was getting cold again, when the boy ahead tapped lightly on the old stub. At the hole upstairs appeared a head—a fierce black-and-white head, a sharp, long bill, a flashing eye—as Hairy came forth to fight for his castle. He was too wise a fighter to tackle all of us, however; so, slipping out, he spread his wings, and galloped off with a loud wild call that set all the swamp to ringing.

It was a thrilling, defiant challenge that set my blood to leaping again. Black and white, he was a part of the picture; but there was a scarlet band in the nape of his neck that, like his call, had fire in it and the warmth of life.

As his shout went booming through the hollow walls of the swamp, it woke a blue jay, which squalled back from a clump of pines, then, wavering out into the open on curious wings—flashing ice-blue and snow-white wings—he dived into the covert of pines again; and faint, as if beyond the swamp, the cheep of chickadees!

If anything was needed up to this moment to change my winter into spring, it was this call of the chickadees. The dullest day in winter smiles; the deepest, darkest woods speak cheerfully to me, if a chickadee is there. And did you ever know a winter day or a dank, gloomy forest hall without its chickadee? Give me a flower in my buttonhole and a chickadee in my heart and I am proof against all gloom and cold.

“What is all this noise about?” the chickadees came forward asking. It was a little troop of them, a family of them, possibly, last year’s children and one, or both, of the parents, hunting the winter woods together for mutual protection against the loneliness and long bitter cold.

How active and interested in life they were! A hard winter? Yes, of course, but what is the blue jay squawking over, anyhow? And the little troop of them came to peep into the racket, curious, but not excited, discussing the disturbance of the solemn swamp in that sewing-bee fashion of theirs, as if nipping off threads and squinting through needle-eyes between their running comments.

They too were gray and black, gray as the swamp beeches, black as the spotted bark of the birches. And how tiny! But—

“Here was this atom in full breath

Hurling defiance at vast death;

This scrap of valor just for play

Fronts the north wind in waistcoat gray”;

and this is what Emerson says he sings:

“Good day, good sir!

Fine afternoon, old passenger!

Happy to meet you in these places

Where January brings few faces.”

And as I brought to mind the poet’s lines, I forgot to shiver, and quite warmed again to the idea of flowers, especially as one of the boys just then brought up a spray of green holly with a burning red berry on it.

I laid the spray of green holly on the hard white crust of the January snow. Then I stood a moment and spread my hands out over it to warm them! It was like a little fire in the snow. The boys laughed at me. They were warm enough in their mittens. But I had need of more than mittens to warm my fingers. I had need of a fire,—a fire of green pointed holly leaves and one glowing, flaming berry, a tiny red hot coal of summer blazing here in the wide white ashes of the winter.

We were tacking again now in order to get back on our course, and had got into the edge of the swamp among the pines when the boy with the shovel began to study the ground and the trees as if trying to find the location of something.

“Here it is,” he said, and began digging through the snow at the foot of a big pine. I knew what he was after. It was goldthread, and here was the only spot in all the woods about where we had ever found it, a spot no larger than the top of a dining-room table.

Soon we had a fistful of the delicate plants with their evergreen leaflets and long golden, threadlike roots that, mixed with the red and green of the partridge-berry in a finger-bowl, make a cheerful winter bouquet. And here with the goldthread, about the butt of the pine, was the partridge-berry, too, the dainty vines strung with the beads which seemed to burn holes in the snow that covered and banked their tiny fires.

For this is all that the ice and snow had done. The winter had come with enough wind to blow out every flame in the maple-tops, and with enough snow to smother every little fire in the peat-bogs of the swamp; but peat fires are hard to put out; and here and everywhere the winter had only banked the fires of summer. Dig down through the snow ashes anywhere, and the smouldering coals of life burst into blaze.

When that red-beaded partridge-vine was hastily placed with the goldthread in the covered basket, and the spray of holly put with them, a ray of light began to dawn on my snow-clouded mind. Did I begin to see the bouquet these boys were after? I said nothing. They said nothing. They were watching me, though, I knew, to see how long I should stumble blindly on through these glorious January woods, which were so full of joy for them.

I say I said nothing. I was thinking hard, however. “Holly, goldthread, partridge-berry,” I thought to myself. “I see so much of the birthday bouquet. But what else can they find?”

The boy with the axe had again gone on ahead. And we were off again after him, stopping to get a great armful of black alder branches that were literally aflame with red berries.

We were climbing a piny knoll when almost at our feet, jumping us nearly out of our skins, and warming the very roots of our hair, was a burrrr! burrrr! burrrr! burrrr!—four big partridges—as if four snow-mines had exploded under us, hurling bunches of brown feathers on graceful scaling wings over the dip of the hill!

This was getting livelier all the time. From my study window how dead and deserted, and windswept and bare the world had looked to me! Nothing but a live crow winging wearily against the leaden sky! But out here in the real woods and meadows—partridges, chickadees, hairy woodpecker, blue jay, and muskrats as well as crows! And then I knew a certain old apple tree where a pair of screech owls were wintering. And, as for white-footed mice, I could find them in any stump. Besides, here were rabbit holes in the snow, and up in a tall pine a gray squirrel’s nest and—

But I was losing sight of the boy with the axe who was leading the procession. On we went up over the knoll and down into a low bog where in the summer we gathered high-bush blueberries, the boy with the axe leading the way and going straight across the ice toward the middle of the bog.

My eye was keen for signs, and I soon saw he was heading for a sweet-pepper bush with a broken branch. My eye took in another bush a little to the right also with a broken branch. The boy with the axe walked up to the sweet-pepper bush, and drew a line on the ice between it and a bush off on the right, pacing off this line till he found the middle; then he started at right angles from it, and paced off a line to a clump of cat-tails sticking up through the ice on the flooded bog. Halfway back on this line he stopped, threw off his coat, and began to chop a hole about two feet square in the ice. Removing the block of ice while I looked on, he rolled up his sleeve, and reached down the length of his arm through the ice water.

“Give me the shovel,” he said, “it’s down here.” And with a few dexterous cuts he soon brought to the surface a beautiful cluster of pitcher-plants, the strange, almost uncanny, leaves filled with muddy water, but every pitcher of them intact, shaped and veined and tinted by a master potter’s hand.

Now at last I fully understood. Now I could see what those boys had been seeing with their inward eyes all the time. Now I had faith, too. But how late! The bouquet of flowers was now full.

We wrapped the wonderful pitcher-plant carefully in newspapers, and put it into the basket, starting back with our bouquet as cheerfully, and as full of joy in the season, as we could possible have been in June.

No, I did not say that we love January as much as we love June. January here in New England is a mixture of rheumatism, chilblains, frozen water-pipes, mittens, overshoes, blocked trains, and automobile-troubles by the hoodsful, whereas any automobile will run in June. It is so in Delaware and Texas and Oregon, too.

What I was saying is that we started home all abloom with our pitcher-plants and goldthread and partridge-berry and holly and glowing black alder, and all aglow inside with our vigorous tramp, and with the gray grave beauty of the landscape, and with the stern joy of meeting and beating the cold, and with the signs of life—of the cozy muskrats in their lodge beneath the ice-cap on the meadow; with the hairy woodpecker in his deep warm hole in the heart of a tree; with the red warm berries in our basket; with the chirping, the capable, the conquering chickadee accompanying us and singing,

“For well the soul, if stout within,

Can arm impregnably the skin;

And polar frost my form defied,

Made of the air that blows outside.”

And actually as we came over the bleak meadow, one of the boys said that he thought he heard a song-sparrow singing! And I said I thought the pussy-willows by the brook had opened a little since we had passed them coming out! And we all declared that the weather had changed, and that there were signs of a break-up. But the thermometer stood at fifteen above zero when we got home—one degree colder than when we started!

We had had a January thaw, however, and it had come off inside of us, as the color on the four glowing faces showed. The birthday came off on the morrow, and I wonder if there ever was a more interesting or a more loving gift of flowers than those from the January woods?

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CHAPTER VII

AFTER THE LOGGERS

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CHAPTER VII
AFTER THE LOGGERS

I lay listening to the rain spattering against the fly of the tent and dripping through the roof of birch leaves upon the sputtering fire and soaking down into the deep, spongy bottom of the forest—softly, as soft as something breathing and asleep. The guide and the boy beside me were asleep, but I had been awakened by the rain. The rain always wakens me. And in my grave, I think, if I lie sleeping under a roof of forest leaves, I shall wake and listen when it rains. Before the stars sang together the primordial waters made music to the rising land; before the winds came murmuring through the trees the waves were fingering the sweet-tuned sands strung down the sounding shores; and before the birds found their tongues, or the crickets their little fiddles, or even the toad had blown his quavering conch, it had rained! And when it rained—and not until it rained—the whole earth woke into song. Mother of music is the water, and, for me, the sweetest of her daughters is the rain, and never sweeter, not even on the shingles, nor down the rolled, fevered blades of the standing corn, than in the deep woods at night upon the low slant roof of your tent.

But suddenly the singing stopped, and the myriad rain-notes were turned to feet, tiny, stirring feet, creeping down the tent, skipping across the leaves, galloping over the forest floor, and jumping in and out of the fire. Then a twig snapped. Was that what had awakened me? I rose up on my elbow slowly. The tent flap was open; the woods were very dark, the dim light from above the roof of leaves and rain showing only shadows, and an ashen spot where the camp-fire still spluttered, and beyond the ashen spot a shadow—different from the other shadows; a shape—a doe with big ears forward toward the fire! A bit of birch bark flared in the darkness, and the shape was gone. I could hear her moving through the ferns; hear her jump a fallen log and step out among the grating pebbles on the shore. Then all was still, except for the scampering rain, and the little red-backed wood-mouse among the camp tins, and the teeth of a porcupine chilled and chattering in the darkness at the big wood-mouse among the tins, and the rain running everywhere.

I dropped back upon my pillow and left off listening. How good the duffle-bag felt beneath my head! And the thick, springy bows of the fir beneath the bag, how good they felt—springs and mattress in one, laid underside up, evenly, and a foot deep, all over the tent floor! And how good they smelled! A bed of balsam-fir boughs is more than a bed; it is an oblation to Sleep, and not a vain oblation—after miles of paddling in live water or a day of trailing through the spruce and fir.

“There’s a long, long trail a-winding”

runs the song—

“Into the land of my dreams.”

But, speaking of sleep, there is no trail, except a forest trail, that winds away to a land of such deep dreamlessness as that of a woodman’s sleep; and no sleep, from which a man will waken, half so fragrant and refreshing as his. I do not wish to be carried to the skies “on flowery beds of ease,” but I should like this balsam-fir bed, for two or three weeks every summer, in the woods of Maine. A reasonable and a wholesome wish that, as I lay there wrapped in the fragrant mantle of my couch, I coveted for city sleepers everywhere.

The odors (we should spell them with a “u”)—the odours of the big woods are so clean and pure and prophylactic! They clear the clogged senses, and keep them in a kind of antiseptic bath, washing a coated tongue as no wine can wash it; and tingling along the most snarled of nerves, straightening, tempering, tuning them till the very heart is timed to the singing of the firs. My bed of boughs was a full foot deep, covering every inch of the bottom of the tent, fresh cut that evening, and so bruised with the treading as we laid them that their smell, in the close, rainy air of the night, filled the tent like a cloud. I lay and breathed—as if taking a cure, this tent being the contagious ward of the great hospital, the Out-of-Doors. All around me poured the heavy, penetrating vapor distilled from the gums, and resins, and oils, and sweet healing essences of the woods, mingled here in the tent with the aromatic balsam of the fir. I breathed it to the bottom of my lungs; but my lungs were not deep enough; I must breathe it with hands and feet to get it all; but they were not enough. Then a breeze swept by the tent, pausing to lay its mouth over my mouth, and, catching away my little breath, breathed for me its own big breath, until my very bones, like the bones of the birds, were breathing, and every vein ran redolent of the breath of the fir.

That breeze blew the sharp, pungent smell of wood smoke past the tent. I caught it eagerly—the sweet smoke of the cedar logs still smouldering on the fire. There was no suggestion of hospitals in this whiff, but camps, rather, and kitchens, altars, caves, the smoke of whose ancient fires is still strong in our nostrils and cured into the very substance of our souls.

I wonder if our oldest racial memory may not be that of fire, and if any other form of fire, a coal off any other altar, can touch the imagination as the coals of a glowing camp-fire. And I wonder if any other odor takes us farther down our ancestral past than the smell of wood smoke, and if there is another smoke so sweet as cedar smoke, when the thin, faint wraith from the smouldering logs curls past your tent on the slow wind of the woods and drifts away.

It does not matter of what the fire is built. I can still taste the spicy smoke of the sagebrush in my last desert camp. And how hot that sagebrush fire! And as sweet as the spicy sage is the smell in my nostrils of the cypress and gum in my camp-fires of the South. Swamp or desert or forest, the fire is the lure—the light, the warmth, the crackle of the flames, and the mystic incense of the smoke rising as a sweet savor to the deities of the woods and plains.

It is the camp-fire that lures me to the woods when I might go down to the sea. I love the sea. Perhaps I fear it more; and perhaps I have not yet learned to pitch my tent and build my fire upon the waves; certainly I have not yet got used to the fo’c’s’le smell. For, of all foul odors known to beast or man, the indescribable stench of the fo’c’s’le is to me the worst. What wild wind of the ocean can blow that smell away? When bilges are sprayed with attar of roses, and fo’c’s’les sheathed in sandalwood, and sailors given shower-baths and open fires, I shall take a vacation before the mast; but until then give me the woods and my fir-bough bed, and my fire of birch and cedar logs, and the rain upon my tent.

When I woke at dawn it was still raining; and off and on all day it rained, spoiling our plans for the climb up Spencer Mountain and keeping us close to camp and the drying fire. The forest here at the foot of the mountain was a mixed piece of old-growth timber, that had been logged for spruce and pine some years before—as every mile of the forest of Maine has been logged—yet so low and spongy was the bottom that the timber seems to have overgrown and long since ceased to be fit for lumber, so that most of it was left standing when the lumber-jacks went through. We were camped by the side of Spencer Pond in the thick of these giant trees—yellow birch, canoe birch, maple and spruce, hemlock and fir and pine—where the shade was so dense and the forest floor so strewn with fallen trees that only the club mosses, and the sphagnum, and a few of the deep-woods flowers could grow. The rain made little difference to my passage here, so low were these lesser forest forms under the perpetual umbrage of the mighty trees, and I came back from as far in as I dared to venture on so dull a day, my clothes quite dry, but my spirit touched with a spell of the forest, which I should have missed had the sun been shining and the points of the compass clear.

For in the big woods one is ever conscious of direction, a sense that is so exaggerated in the deepest bottoms, especially when only indirect, diffused light fills the shadowy spaces, as to border on fear. I am never free, in a strange forest, from its haunting Presence; so close to it that I seem to hear it; seem able to touch it; and when, for a moment of some minor interest or excitement, I have forgotten to remember and, looking up, find the Presence gone from me, I am seized with sudden fright. What other panic comes so softly, yet with more terrible swiftness? And once the maze seizes you, once you begin to meet yourself, find yourself running the circle of your back tracks, the whole mind goes to pieces and madness is upon you.

“Set where you be and holler till I come get ye, if ye’re lost,” the guide would say. “Climb a tree and holler; don’t run around like a side-hill gouger, or you’re gone.”

I do not know what sort of animal is Johnny’s side-hill gouger; though I saw, one day, far up on the side of the mountain a big bare spot where he had been digging—according to the guide. It is enough for me that there is such a beast in the woods, and that he gets those who turn round and round in the forest on rainy days and forget to look up.

The gouger was abroad in the woods to-day. The clouds hung at the base of the mountains, just above the tops of the trees; the rain came straight down; the huge fallen trunks lay everywhere criss-cross; and once beyond the path to the spring the semi-gloom blurred every trail and put at naught all certainty of direction.

But how this fear sharpened the senses and quickened everything in the scene about me! I was in the neighborhood of danger, and every dull and dormant faculty became alert. Nothing would come from among the dusky trees to harm me; no bear, or lynx, or moose, for they would run away; it was the dusk itself, and the big trees that would not run away; and I watched them furtively as they drew nearer and nearer and closed in deeper about me. I knew enough to “set down and holler” if I got turned hopelessly around; but this very knowledge of weakness, of inability to cope alone with these silent, sinister forces, woke all my ancient fears and called back that brood of more than fabled monsters from their caves and fens and forest lairs.

This was the real woods, however, deep, dark, and primeval, and no mere fantasy of fear. It looked even older than its hoary years, for the floor was strewn with its mouldering dead, not one generation, but ages of them, form under form, till only long, faint lines of greener moss told where the eldest of them had fallen an æon since and turned to earth. Time leaves on nothing its failing marks so deeply furrowed as upon men and trees, and here in the woods upon no other trees so deeply as upon the birches. Lovely beyond all trees in their shining, slender youth, they grow immeasurably aged with the years, especially the yellow birch, whose grim, grizzled boles seemed more like weathered columns of stone than living trees.

One old monster, with a hole in his base that a bear might den in, towering till his shoulders overtopped the tallest spruce, stood leaning his gnarled hands upon the air, as a bent and aged man leans with his knotty hands upon a cane. A hundred years he might have been leaning so; a hundred years more he might continue in his slow decline, till, with a crash, he falls to lie for a hundred years to come across a prostrate form that fell uncounted years before.

I was standing on the tough, hollow rind of such a birch, so long, long dead that its carcass had gone to dust, leaving only this empty shell that looked like a broken, half-buried piece of aqueduct. It was neither tree nor pipe, however, but the House of Porcupines, as I could plainly hear by the grunting inside. A pile of droppings at the door of the house told the story of generations of porkies going in and out before the present family came into their inheritance. I knocked on the rubbery walls with my foot, but not hard, for I might break through and hurt Mother or Father Porky, or possibly the baby that I saw along the pond that night. No careful, right-minded person steps on or hurts a porcupine in any manner.

I went on out of the sound of their teeth, for chattering teeth are not consoling, and the woods were gray enough. Gray and vast and magnificently ruinous, yet eternally new they were, the old walls slowly crumbling, and over them, out of their heaped disorder, the fresh walls rising to the high-arched roof that never falls. To-day the deep, hollow halls were shut to me by the arras of the gloom, and so smoky rolled the rain beneath the roof that even the black rafters of the birches were scarcely visible; but all the closer about me, in the wildest wealth and splendor, lay the furniture of the forest floor.

Never were wools dyed and woven with a pile so rich and deep as the cover of mosses and lichens that carpeted this rude, cluttered floor. Rolled and wrinkled and heaped up over the stumps, it lay, nowhere stretched, nowhere swept, a bronze and green and gold ground, figured and flowered endlessly; and down the longest, deepest wrinkle a darkling little stream! It was a warp of sphagnum moss with woof of lichens, liverworts, ferns, mushrooms, club mosses, and shier flowers of the shadows, that was woven for the carpet—long, vivid runners of lycopodium, the fingered sort, or club moss, and its fan-leaved cousin, the ground pine, now in fruit, its clusters of spikes like tiny candelabra standing ready to be lighted all over the floor; and everywhere, on every tree-trunk, stump, and log, and stone the scale mosses, myriads of them, in blotches of exquisite shapes and colors, giving the gray-green tone to the walls as the sphagnums gave the vivid bronze-green to the floor. Down to about the level of my head, the dominant note in the color scheme of the walls, hung the gray reindeer moss, tufts and shreds and pointed bunches of it like old men’s grizzled beards. Some of the spruces and twisted cedars were covered with it. Shorter in staple than the usnea of the South, stiffer and lighter in color, it is far less somber and funereal; but a forest bearded with it looks older than time. This moss is the favorite winter food of the moose and caribou and deer, and so clean had the moose and deer eaten it from the trees, up as high as they could reach, that the effect on a clear day was as if a thin gray fog had settled in the forest at an even six-foot level from the ground.

Worked in among the lichens and mosses, quite without design, were the deep-woods flowers—patches of goldthread, beds of foam-flower and delicate wood-sorrel and the brilliant little bunchberry. Wherever the sunlight had a chance to touch the cold, boggy bottom it seemed to set the punk on fire and blaze up into these scarlet berries, stumps and knolls and slopes aflame with them, to burn on through the gloom until they should be smothered by the snow. Twin-flower and partridge-berry were laced in little mats about the bases of the trees; here and there the big red fruit of trillium and the nodding blue berries of clintonia were mixed in a spot of gay color with berries of the twisted stalk, the wild lily-of-the-valley, and the fiery seed-balls of the Indian turnip.

These touches of color were like the effect of flowers about a stately, somber room, for this was an ancient and a solemn house of mighty folk. If the little people came to dwell in the shadow of these noble great they must be content with whatever crumbs of sunshine fell from the heaven-spread table over them to the damp and mouldering floor. There were corners so dark that only the coral orchid and the Indian pipe pushed up through the mat of leaves; and other spots, half open to the sky, where the cinnamon fern and the lady fern waved their lovely plumes, and the wood fern, the beech, the oak, and the crested shield ferns grew together, forced thus to share the scanty light dropped to them from the overflowing feast above.

But I never saw mushrooms in such marvelous shapes and colors and in such indescribable abundance as here. The deep forest was like a natural cavern for them, its cold, dank twilight feeding their elfin lamps until the whole floor was lighted with their ghostly glow. Clearest and coldest burned the pale-green amanita, and with it, surpassingly beautiful in color and design, the egg-topped muscaria, its baleful taper in a splotched and tinted shade of blended orange yellows, fading softly toward the rim. Besides these, and shorter on their stems, were white and green and purple russulas, and great burning red ones, the size of large poinsettia blooms; and groups of brown boletus, scattered golden chanterelles, puff-balls, exquisite coral clusters, and, strangest of them all, like handfuls of frosted fog, the snowy medusa. These last I gathered for my lunch, together with some puff-balls and a few campestris, whose spores, I suppose, may have been brought into the woods with the horses when this tract was lumbered years ago. But I had little appetite for mushrooms. It was the sight of them, dimly luminous in the rain, that held me, their squat lamps burning with a spectral light which filled the dusky spaces of the forest full of goblin gloom.

As I sat watching the uncanny lights there was a rush of small feet down the birch at my back, a short stop just above my head, and a volley of windy talk that might have blown out every elf light in the neighborhood. It was very sudden and, breaking into the utter stillness, it was almost startling. A moose could hardly have made more noise. I said nothing back nor took any notice of him. He could kick up the biggest sort of a rumpus if he wished to, for the woods needed it. I only wondered that he had a tongue, dwelling forever here in this solitude. But a red squirrel’s tongue is equal to any solitude, and more than once I have caught him talking against it, challenging the silence of all outdoors, as I have seen small boys challenge each other to a blatting-match.

By and by I turned, and so startled him that he dropped a cluster of green berries from his mouth almost upon my head. It was a large bunch of arbor vitæ berries that he was going to store away, for, though he sleeps much of the winter, he is an inveterate hoarder, working overtime, down the summer, as if the approaching winter were to be seven lean years long.

I was glad he had not obtruded earlier, but now he reminded me properly that it was long past noon, and high time for me to get back to camp. It was later than I thought, for the woods had gradually grown lighter, the rain had almost ceased, and by the time I reached camp had stopped altogether. While we were at supper the sun broke through on the edge of the west and ran the rounded basin of the pond over-full with gold. I stepped down to the shore to watch the glorious closing of the day. The clouds had lifted nearly to the tops of the mountains, where their wings were still spread, feathering the sky with gray for far around; a few fallen plumes lying snowy white upon the dark slopes of the lesser hills; then pouring down the hills into the pond, splashing over the gleaming mountains and up against the sky, burst the flood of golden light with indescribable glory.

“All ready,” said the guide, touching me on the arm, and I stepped into the bow of the canoe as he pushed quietly off. An Indian never moved with softer paddle, nor ever did a birch-bark canoe glide off with the ease of this one under the hand of John Eastman, as we moved along in the close shadows of the shore.

The light was passing, but the flush of color still lay on the lovely face of the water with a touch of warmth and life that seemed little less than joy; a serene, but not a solemn joy, for there was too much girlish roundness and freshness to the countenance of the water, too much happiness in the little hills and woods that watched her, and in the jealous old mountain that frowned darkly down. Mine, too, were the eyes of a lover, and in my heart was the lover’s pain, for what had I to offer this eternal youth and loveliness?

The prow of the canoe swerved with a telling movement that sent my eyes quick to the shore, to see a snow-shoe rabbit racing down a little cove hard at me, with something—a stir of alder leaves, a sound of long, leaping feet making off into the swamp—that had been pursuing him. It was probably a wildcat that had leaped and missed the rabbit and seen us from within his covert. What lightning eyes and lightning legs, thus to leap and turn together! The rabbit had run almost to the canoe, and sat listening from behind a root at the edge of the water, ears straight up and body so tense with excitement that we nosed along close enough to touch him with a paddle before he had eyes and ears for us. Even then it was his twitching, sensitive nose that warned him, for his keen ears caught no sound; and, floating down upon him thus, we must have looked to his innocent eyes as much like a log or a two-headed moose as like men.

Softly in and out with the narrow fret of shadow that hemmed the margin of the pond swam the gray canoe, a creature of the water, a very part of our creature selves, our amphibious body, the form we swam with before the hills were born. Brother to the muskrat and the beaver, I stemmed along, as much at home as they among the pickerel-weed and the cow-lilies, and leaving across the silvery patches of the open water as silent a wake as they.

Nothing could move across such silvery quiet without a trail. So stirless was the water that the wake of a feeding fish was visible a hundred yards away. Within the tarnished smooches of the lily-pads a muskrat might move about and not be seen; but not a trout could swirl close to the burnished surface of the open water without a ripple that ran whispering into every little inlet around the shore. The circle of the pond was almost perfect, so that I roved, at a glance, the whole curving shore-line, watching keenly for whatever might come down to feed or drink.

We came up to a patch of pickerel-weed and frightened a brood of half-grown sheldrakes that went rushing off across the water, kicking up a streak of suds and making a noise like the launching of a fleet of tiny ships. Heading into a little cove, we met a muskrat coming straight across our bows. A dip of the paddle sent us almost into her. A quicker dive she never made nor a more startling one, for the smack as she struck the water jumped me half out of the canoe. Her head broke the surface a dozen yards beyond us, and we followed her into the mouth of a stream and on to a hummock into which she swam as a boat swims under a bridge, or more as a train runs into a tunnel, for an arching hole opened into the mound, just above the level of the stream, through which she had glided out of sight. Hardly had she disappeared before she popped up again from deep under the mound, at the other side, and close to the canoe, starting back once more down-stream. She had dodged us. Her nose and eyes and ears were just above the water and a portion of her back; her bladelike tail was arched, its middle point, only, above the surface, its sheering, perpendicular edges doing duty as propeller, keel, and rudder all at once.

As she made off the guide squeaked shrilly with his lips. Instantly she turned and came back, swimming round and round the canoe, trying to interpret the sounds, puzzled to know how they could come from the canoe, and fearing that something might be wrong inside the house. She dived to find out. By this time two young ones had floated into the mouth of the tunnel, thinking their mother was calling them, blinking there in the soft light so close that I might have reached them with my hand. Satisfied that the family was in order, the old rat reappeared, and no amount of false squeaking would turn her back.

A few bends up the stream and we heard the sound of falling water at the beaver dam. Fresh work had been done on the dam; but we waited in vain for a sight of the workers. They would not go on with their building. One of the colony (there were not more than two families of them, I think) swam across the stream, and came swiftly down to within a few feet of us, when, scenting us, perhaps, he warped short about and vanished among the thick bushes that trailed from the bank of the stream.

A black duck came over, just above our heads, with wings whirring like small airplane propellers, as she bore straight out toward the middle of the pond. We were passing a high place along the shore when a dark object, a mere spot of black, seemed to move off at the side of us against the white line of the pebbles, and I found that I was already being sent silently toward it. My pulse quickened, for the thing moved very slowly; and behind it a lesser blur that also moved—very slowly; so deep was the darkness of the overhanging trees, however, that the nose of the canoe ploughed softly into the sand beside the creatures, and I had not made out the fat old porcupine, and, creeping a foot or two behind her, as if he might catch up by to-morrow, perhaps, the baby porky.

The old mother was feeding on bits of lily-pads washed up along the shore, picking them from among the stones with her paws as if she intended to finish her supper by to-morrow, perhaps, when her baby had covered the foot or two of space between them and caught up with her. She was so intent on this serious and deliberate business that she never looked up as I stopped beside her; she only grunted and chattered her teeth; but I disturbed the baby, apparently, for he speeded up, and pretty soon came alongside his mother, who turned savagely upon him and told him to mind his manners, which he did by humping into a little heap, sticking his head down between two stones, and raying the young quills out across his back in a fan of spines. He didn’t budge for about five minutes. Then he hurried again—right up beside the old one—a thing so highly improper in porkypinedom, and so deleterious to porkypine health, that she turned and, with another growl, humped her fat little porky again into a quiet and becoming bunch of quills. This time she read him a lecture on the “Whole Duty of Children.” It was in the porcupine-pig language, and her teeth clicked so that I am not sure I got it verbatim, but I think she said, quite distinctly:

“A child should always say what’s true,

And speak when he is spoken to,

And behave mannerly at table:

At least as far as he is able”—

for, seeing him so obediently and properly humped, she repented her of her severity and, reaching out with her left paw, picked up a nice, whole lily-pad and, turning half around, handed it to him as much as to say, “There, now; but chew it up very thoroughly, as you did the handle of the carving-knife in the camp last night.”

It was a sweet glimpse into the family life of the woods; and as the canoe backed off and turned again down-stream I was saying to myself:

“Every night my prayers I say,

And get my dinner every day,

And every day that I’ve been good

I get an orange after food”—

or a nice, round lily-pad.

The precious light was fading, and we had yet more than half the magic circle of the shore to round. As we passed out into the pond again a flock of roosting blackbirds whirred noisily from the “pucker-brush,” or sweet-gale bushes, frightened by the squeal of the bushes against the sides of the canoe; and hardly had their whirring ceased when, ahead of me, his head up, his splendid antlers tipped with fire, stood a magnificent buck. He had heard the birds, or had scented us, and, whirling in his tracks, curiosity, defiance, and alarm in every line of his tense, tawny body, stood for one eternal instant in my eye, when, shaking off his amazement, he turned and, bounding over the sweet-gale and alders, went crashing into the swamp.

I had neither camera nor gun; but, better than both, I had eyes—not such good eyes as John Eastman’s, for he could see in the dark—but mine with my spectacles were better than a camera; for mine are a moving-picture theater—screen, film, machine, and camera, all behind my spectacles, and this glorious creature for the picture, with the dark hills beyond, the meadowy margin of the pond in the foreground, and over the buck, and the pond, and the dark green hills, and over me a twilight that never was nor ever can be thrown upon a screen!

I had come into the wilds of Maine without so much as a fish-line—though I have fished months of my life away, and am not unwilling to fish away a considerable portion of whatever time may still be left me. But am I not able, in these later days, to spend my time “in the solitude of this vast wilderness with other employments than, these,—employments perfectly sweet and innocent and ennobling? For one that comes with a pencil to sketch or sing, a thousand come with an axe or rifle. What a coarse and imperfect use Indians and hunters make of Nature!... Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light,—to see its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success!... Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.”

Thoreau did not teach me that truth, for every lover of life discovers it himself; but how long before me it was that he found it out, and how many other things besides it he found out here in the big woods! Three-quarters of a century ago he camped on Katahdin, and on Chesuncook, and down the Allegash; but now he camps wherever a tent is pitched or a fire is lighted in the woods of Maine. His name is on the tongue of every forest tree, and on every water; and over every carry at twilight may be seen his gray canoe and Indian guide.

And I wonder, a century hence, who will camp here where I am camping, and here discover again the woods of Maine? For the native shall return. And as “every creature is better alive than dead, man and moose and pine tree”; and as “he who understands it aright will rather preserve his life than destroy it” so shall he seek his healing here.

The light had gone out of the sky. It was after nine o’clock. A deep purple had flowed in and filled the basin of the pond, thickening about its margins till nothing but the long chalk-marks of the birches showed double along the shore. The high, inverted cone of Spencer stood just in front of the canoe as we headed out across the pond toward the camp, its shadow and its substance only faint suggestions now, for all things had turned to shadow, the solid substance of the day having been dissolved in this purple flood and poured into the beaker of the night. A moose “barked” off on a marshy point near the dam behind us; a loon went laughing over, shaking the hollow sides of Spencer and all the echoing walls of the woods with his weird and mirthless cry. Against the black base of the mountain a faint bluish cloud appeared—the smoke of our camp-fire that, slowly sinking through the heavy air, spread out to meet us over the hushed and sleeping pond.

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CHAPTER VIII

WOODCHUCK LODGE AND LITERATURE

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CHAPTER VIII
WOODCHUCK LODGE AND LITERATURE

Have I proof of my contention here? Throughout this book, on many sides of the question, I have argued that the earth is as young as it ever was; that Nature, though it can all but be destroyed in spots, as in New York City, cannot be tamed; that we are still the stuff of dreams, if we could find rest for our souls and the chance to dream. We are not lacking imagination and the power for high endeavor. We master material things; we can also handle the raw materials of the spirit and give them enduring form. But how can we come by the raw materials of the spirit? And where shall we find new patterns on which to mould our new and enduring forms? Matter and pattern are still to be found in nature—substance, essence, presence,

“Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.”

I have had much to do with young people, especially with those of creative minds, divinely capable minds, could they be freed from the doubt of their times, and the fear of their own powers. Here let me give them a glimpse of an old man of their own times, these evil times when all of the raw material of books has been used up; an old man with a boy’s eyes and a child’s heart and a pen and a bluebird or two, and a woodchuck—and, of course, a magical chance.

It was an October day. And how it rained that day! An October day in the Catskills, and I was making my way, with my friend DeLoach, out of the little village of Roxbury by the road that winds up the hills to Woodchuck Lodge. Hardscrabble Creek knew it was raining, and met me noisily at a turn of the road, just before I came to the square stone schoolhouse (now a dwelling) where little Johnny Burroughs had gone for his book learning some seventy-five years before. Leaving the creek, I found myself on a roller-coaster road athwart the hills, making up with spurt and dip to a low, weathered farmhouse, thin and gray and old, that seemed to be resting by the roadside thus far over the mountain on its way to the valley.

I knew it from the distance and through the rain, only it seemed even older, smaller, poorer than I had expected to find it. But how close it sat to the roadside, and how eagerly it gazed down into the valley where the store and the station and the meeting-house were—to see who might be stirring, I thought, down there in the valley! Or perhaps it sat here for the landscape. I was approaching Woodchuck Lodge, and it seemed very old and lonely in the rain that slanted along the wide gray slopes, and too frail to stand long against the pull of the valley and the push of the heights crowding hard upon it from behind.

A tiny kitchen garden at its corner, and across the road a stone wall, an orchard of untrimmed apple trees bent with fruit, and a small barn on the edge of a sharply falling field—this was the picture in the rain, the immediate foreground of the picture, which stood out on a field of hay-lands and pastures rolling out of the rainy sky and down, far down where their stone walls ran into the mists at the bottom of the valley.

These were the ancestral fields. Burroughs was born a little farther along this road, the house no longer standing. Here at the Lodge he was now living, and in the old barn across the road he had a study. These were his fields by right of pen, not plough; these were his buildings, too, and they showed it. They sheltered him and gave him this outlook, but they utterly lacked the pride of the gilded weathervane, the stolid, four-square complacency, that well-fed, well-stocked security of the prosperous American farm. An old pair of tramps were house and barn, lovers of the hills, resting here above the valley. It was in that old barn, on an overturned chicken-coop, with a door or some other thing as humble for table, that Burroughs had written most of the chapters in “The Summit of the Years,” in “Time and Change,” “The Breath of Life,” and “Under the Apple-Trees.”

So a literary farm should look, I suppose,—a farm that produces books as abundantly as a prairie farm produces cattle and corn; yet every farm, I think, should have a patch of poetry, as every professional poet certainly needs to keep a garden and a pig. For years Burroughs grew fancy grapes and celery for the New York market, along with his literary essays for the reading public.

As we came in on the vine-covered porch of the Lodge, we were met by Dr. Barrus, Burroughs’s physician and biographer, who told us with considerable anxiety that the old man was not at home.

“He is out visiting his traps, I suppose,” she said. “He’s just like a boy. I can’t do anything with him. He’ll come home wringing wet. And he’s not a bit well.”

He came home true to form. It was an hour later, perhaps, that I saw, from the steps, a dim figure in the blur of the rain: an old man plodding slowly down the hill road, a stick and a steel trap in his left hand, and in his right hand a heavy woodchuck.

It was John Burroughs, the real Burroughs, for I knew as I watched him that I had never seen, never clearly seen, this man before—not exactly this simple, rain-soaked man with the snow of more than eighty winters on his head, with the song of eternal springtime in his heart, and a woodchuck, like a lantern, in his hand.

This figure in the rain should be seen coming down every page of Burroughs’s books. Every line should be read in the light of this lantern in his hand, for its wick is in his heart, and its flame shines from “Wake-Robin” to “The Summit of the Years.” Burroughs was the eternal boy—splashing through the puddles, wet to the skin; the boy for whom these fields of his father’s farm were as wild as the jungles of Africa; and this woodchuck in his hand (it was a big one!) a very elephant, except for the tusks. But to be like this is to be both boy and philosopher—boy and writer, I should say. And to see him thus—falling with the rain, whirling with the dust, singing with the birds, growing with the grass, his whole being one with the elements, earth and wild-life and weather—thus to see the man is to know how to read his books.

As he came up to the porch, his slouch hat spouting like an eaves-trough, he greeted me cordially, but as a stranger, not recognizing me for an instant; then dashing the rain from his eyes, he dropped the woodchuck, drew off, and with a quick righthander to my chest, which almost took me off my feet, he cried, “Sharp, we’ll have woodchuck for dinner!”

And we did—not the one he had just dropped on the floor, for that one he skinned and salted and gave me to bring home to Boston. We had canned woodchuck that noon at the Lodge. It was Burroughs’s custom to serve his guests a real literary dinner; and of course it must savor of the locality.

This called for woodchuck, or “Roxbury Lamb,” as you preferred; and for roast Roxbury Lamb the rule for rabbit-stew prevails: first get your woodchuck; not always readily done, for the meat-market down at the village is sometimes out of woodchuck. So the Laird of the Lodge keeps them canned ahead.

The clouds cleared in the afternoon, the sun came down upon the mountains, and we looked out from the porch over a world so large and new and lovely that I remember it still as a keen pain, so unprepared was I for it, with my level background of meadow and marsh and bay.

Endless reaches of river and bay, of wavy marshland and hazy barrens of pine, were my heritage of landscape as a child. And I have never been able to measure up to the mountains, nor to this scene, here from the porch—this reach without level; space both deep and high as well as wide; this valley completely hiding a village below you; ridges above you where stone walls climb over the sky; mountains far across with forests flung over their shoulders, and farms, like colored patchwork, stitched into the rents of the forests; runnels singing down the pastures; and roads, your road to school, so close to the verge that only the stone wall stays you from stepping off the edge of the world!

None of this had I known as a boy. “Who couldn’t write,” I muttered, “born into this glorious world!” I have seen much grander mountains. “Not a rugged, masculine touch in all the view,” Burroughs said to me. “It is all sweet and feminine, and doubtless has had a feminizing influence upon my character and writing.” It may be so. There is a plenty of wilder, stormier landscape than this in these Western Catskills, but certainly none that I ever saw that is lovelier for a human home. And here Burroughs now sleeps, under the boulder where he played as a child, and where all this beauty of winding valley and blue, bending sky upon the mountains lies forever about him.

There is something terribly important and lasting about childhood. Almost any environment will do, if only the child is happy. It is the child who counts. In every child the world is recreated and in his memory stays recreated. More and more, as the years lengthen, do we find ourselves longing—for the pine barrens, for the vast green reach of the marshes; and were my feet free this summer day, they would run with my heart to the river—not to the mountains; to the river, the Maurice River, where the bubbling wrens build in the smother of reed and calamus, and where this very day the pink-white marshmallows make, at high noon, a gorgeous sunset over miles of the meadows. I love and understand those great, green levels of marshland as I shall love and understand no other face of nature, it may be. I know perfectly what Lanier means when he sings,

“Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?

Somehow my soul seems suddenly free

From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,

By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.”

I said the clouds cleared late that afternoon, but it was still raining when, after dinner, I brought a box from the woodshed to the front porch for Burroughs to skin the woodchuck. Here we sat down together, the flabby, flaccid marmot between us, the whole October afternoon our own.

Burroughs pulled a rudimentary whetstone out of his coat pocket and touched up the blade of his knife—of his spirit, too, running his thumb along the blade of every faculty as he settled to the skinning, his shining eyes, his vibrant voice, his eager movements, all showing how razor-keen an edge the old man was still capable of taking. He got hold of a forefoot of the ’chuck and started to talk on the flight of birds, reviewing the various stages of the controversy on the soaring of hawks that he had been carrying on in the press, when, suddenly dropping his knife, he disappeared through the door and returned in a minute with a letter from some scientist, whose argument, as I remember it, was wholly at variance with Burroughs’s theory, but which closed with a strange word, a word the old man had never seen before and could not find in his dictionary. It was some aeronautical term, I think. Handing me the letter, his finger, as well as his eyes, fastened to that stranger from beyond the dictionary, he said:

“That chap doesn’t know much about soaring hawks; but there’s a new word. See that! He knows a heap more than I do about the English language.”

He sat down to the skinning again. No cut had yet been made, nor ever would be made, apparently, unless he used the back of his blade, for it was plain that Burroughs kept that old whetstone for his wits only. He sawed away and talked as if inspired. I held the other forefoot, a short, broad foot, like a side-hill gouger’s, on the oldest, toughest ’chuck in the Catskills.

“Do you know what I am going to do?” he asked, switching the conversation into the hard-working knife. “I’m going to pickle this old rascal and send him by you to your family. I want you all to have a dish of ‘Roxbury Lamb.’”

“But we have our own Hingham Lamb out on Mullein Hill,” I suggested cautiously. “And I don’t like to rob you this way.”

“No robbery at all. Besides, these are a better breed than yours in Hingham.”

“But my folks don’t seem very fond of ’em,” I protested. “They cook with a rank odor.”

“Oh, you don’t know how to prepare them,” he answered. “Let me show you a trick,” and deftly cutting in between the neck and the shoulder, he took out the thyroid glands.

“Now you’re going to take this one home. There’ll be no strong smell when you cook this fellow.”

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Our talk turned to poetry—the skinning still going forward—the woodchuck brimming full of verse; for Burroughs, at every other turn of his knife, would seem to open up a vein of song. The beauty of nature to Burroughs had always been more than skin deep. He wanted the skin for a coat; the carcass he wanted for a roast; but here was a chance for him to look into some of the hidden, fearful things of nature, and the sight inside of that woodchuck made him stop and sing.

But how old and frail he looked! And he was old, very old, eighty-four the coming April 9. And he was suddenly sad.

Resting a bit from his labor, he began to chant to the slackening rain:

“’Tis a dull sight

To see the year dying.

When winter winds

Set yellow woods sighing,

Sighing, O sighing.

“When such a time cometh,

I do retire

Into an old room

Beside a bright fire;

Oh, pile a bright fire!

“I never look out

Nor attend to the blast,

For all to be seen

Is the leaves falling fast,

Falling, falling!”

And he rubbed his thin hands together, spread them to the warmth, and repeated two or three times,

“Oh, pile a bright fire!”

“Oh, pile a bright fire!”

More than once, I heard him returning to those lines; and saw him several times reading the last stanzas of the poem from a typewritten copy on his porch table, chafing his hands the while, and extending them before the imaginary fire as if they were cold, or as if he felt through his hands, so sensitive was he physically, an actual fire in the written lines. The poem is Edward Fitzgerald’s “Old Song,” and I am sure Burroughs was learning it by heart, and making rather hard work of it, I thought, for one who had already in memory so much good poetry. But he was getting very old.

Then, at my request he said some of the lines of his own poem, “Waiting.” “The only thing I ever did,” he remarked, “with real poetry in it.”

“How about the philosophy in it,” I inquired, “Do you find it sound after all these years?”

There was an audible chuckle inside of him. Then rather solemnly he replied: “My father killed himself early trying to clear these acres of debts and stones. I might have been in my grave, too, these forty years had I tried to hurry it his way. I waited. By and by Henry Ford came along and cleared up the whole farm for me. Here I am, and here

“Serene, I fold my hands and wait,

Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;

I rave no more ’gainst Time or Fate,

For lo! my own shall come to me.”

We were soon deep in a discussion of free verse, no hungry trout ever rising to the fly with more snap than Burroughs. He called the free-verse writers the Reds of American literature, the figure sticking to him, until some months later in California he worked the idea out into a brief newspaper article under that title, the last piece, I think, for publication from his pen.

“Name me one good modern poem,” I said, “moulded on the old forms, with rhyme and meter.”

He let go his knife again, turned his face once more to the rain, through which the mountains were now emerging, and asked,

“Do you know Loveman’s ‘Raining’ and how he wandered up from Georgia to find himself in New York City, his boat gone, or his money gone, or something gone—for he was someway stranded, I believe—and it was raining?” And the old man began—

“‘It isn’t raining rain to me,

It’s raining daffodils;

In every dimpled drop I see

Wild flowers on the hills.

The clouds of gray engulf the day,

And overwhelm the town,

It isn’t raining rain to me,

It’s raining roses down.,’”

while the rain across the hills, shot through with sunset light, fell all violets and clover-bloom and roses on the mountains and on the roof of Woodchuck Lodge.

The thing on the box between us was utterly forgotten, but only for the moment.

“Damn those fleas!” the old poet exploded, at the end of the recitation, swinging with both hands at his long white whiskers, “That ’chuck’s alive with fleas!”

So I had observed; and I had been speculating, as I watched them quitting their sinking craft and boarding the sweeping beard of the poet, how many of them it might take to halt the flow of song. I was far off in my reckoning. Burroughs knocked them out and went on:

“That’s a good poem because it goes straight to the heart. It’s an experience. He lived it. And its form is perfect. You can’t change a syllable in it. It’s on the old forms, yet it’s true to itself. And see how simple, direct, and sincere it is! and how lovely! I call that good poetry.”

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We had been more than three hours getting the pelt off that woodchuck and all of the poetry out of him. As I sat by, I saw what I had hardly realized before: that the hand with the knife must often rest, though the eager mind seemed almost incapable of resting.

The national elections were approaching, and from poetry we plunged into politics, where I feared we were bound to disagree, but where, to my surprise, I found we were standing together on the League of Nations, Burroughs having forsaken his party on that issue.

“It’s the only thing!” he cried. “That’s what we fought for. Rob us of that, and the whole terrible sacrifice is futile—criminal!”

And later, after my return home, he wrote me:

“Well, the elections did not go as both of us had hoped. DeLoach was on the winning side, as I suppose all the great moneyed interests were. But thank heaven I am not in that crowd. If it means an utter repudiation of the League of Nations, then for the first time I am ashamed that I am an American. If I were in Europe I could not hold up my head and say, ‘I am from the United States!’ If we have failed to see ourselves as a member of the great family of nations, with solemn duties toward the rest of the world, to perform as such a member, then we have slumped morally as badly as did the Germans when they set out to enslave the rest of the world!”

But to return to Woodchuck Lodge, to the old man with the boy’s jack-knife in his hand, and the boy’s heart in his breast—and so, the poet’s outlook in his eyes. For he was more poet than scientist, more poet than theologian, though every poet, like all Gaul, is divided into three parts, and these—science, music, and theology—are the parts.

The theologian is the ultimate thinker. His chief attribute is consistency—even unto death. Nothing will shatter a system of theology as will a trifling inconsistency. Burroughs was a bad theologian, the worst I know by the test of consistency. Yet who among the theologians is more religious? Or leaves us with a realer consciousness of the presence of God in nature?

“You and I approach this thing from different angles,” he said to me. “We come to God down different roads. Our terms differ. You say ‘Father.’ I say ‘Nature.’ But whatever we call Him, He is the same, and the same for each of us. Our divergent paths at the start, come out together at the end. We worship the same God.”

We did differ radically in our approach, in our terminology, and as I had always thought, must of necessity differ as radically in our faiths and works. That was a foolish, vainglorious conceit. I wish every disconcerted reader of “The Light of Day” and “Accepting the Universe” had heard the old author interpret himself that day. That reader would have understood, as he sat there watching the light of a real day breaking in over the rainy autumn landscape, what Carruth meant by,

“A haze on the far horizon,

The infinite tender sky,

The ripe rich tint of the corn-fields,

And the wild geese sailing high,

And all over upland and lowland

The charm of the goldenrod—

Some of us call it Autumn,

And others call it God!”

The pelt was finally off; the carcass in pickle for me; and the sun was out, flooding Montgomery Valley and the heaving ranges beyond. An automobile load of callers came, stopped a little time, and went away; another load came and went away, and Burroughs, now quite rested, brought out the manuscripts of two new books, which were about ready for the publishers.

I looked at the piles of work, then at the frail old man who had heaped them up, and thought with shame of my own strength—and laziness. To be approaching eighty-four with one book on the press and two other books in manuscript! What a long steady stroke he had pulled across these more than sixty years of writing to be bringing him in at the finish, two full volumes ahead of the race! Three volumes indeed, for “Accepting the Universe” had not yet come from the press.

The quiet and calm of it all deeply impressed me. The extreme opposite in temperament and action from his friend Roosevelt, there was nothing “strenuous” about this plodding old man, nor ever had been. “Serene I fold my hands and wait” he had written in his twenty-third year, and had practiced all these four-and-eighty years. Yet look at this amount of durable work accomplished. It is well for us Americans to remember just now that there is another than the “strenuous” type of life, which is just as worthy of emulation, and which is likely to be even more effective.

This was an October day at Woodchuck Lodge. Sixty-one years before the “Atlantic Monthly” was actually printing Burroughs’s first essay, “Expression.” I looked at the old man beside me with the pen in his fingers. Was it the same man? the same pen? Lowell was the editor; then Fields, Howells, Aldrich, Scudder, Page, Perry, to the present editor, who has held his chair these dozen years; and I watched the pen in Burroughs’s hand travel slowly across a corrected line of the manuscript and I remembered that in all the years since Lowell was editor, not for a single year had that pen failed to appear in the pages of the “Atlantic.” Was it strange that as I looked from the pen away to the Catskills surrounding me I wondered if I were really looking into Montgomery Valley and not into Sleepy Hollow?

We guests had a plenty that night, but Burroughs went to bed supperless. We guests slept indoors, but Burroughs made his bed out on the front porch, where he could see the stars come over the mountains, and the gates of dawn swing wide on the wooded crests, when the new sweet day should come through and down into Montgomery Valley.

For Burroughs has lived and loved everything he has written. He cannot write of anything else. Our present-day writers, especially our poets and nature writers, take the wings of the morning (or of the night) unto the uttermost parts of the earth for copy. Burroughs visited distant places; but he always wrote about the things at home. “Fresh Fields,” to be sure, is out of England; yet England was only an older home. Burroughs had seen strange, extraordinary, tropical things; seen them, to write little about them, however, for it is only the homely, the ordinary, the familiar things that stirred his imagination and moved his pen. These were his things, the furniture of his house, the folks of his town; for it was the hearth where he lived, his home, that he loved, and it was the creatures living on it with him that gave him his great theme. “The whole gospel of my books,” he wrote, “is stay at home, see the wonderful and beautiful and the simple things all about you. Make the most of the near at hand.”

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It was a constant wonder to me how one could be so simple as Burroughs, and yet know so many places, persons, and books. Burroughs had met many people; he had read many books, and had written more than a score himself; yet he was the simplest man I ever knew, as simple as a child,—simpler, indeed. For children may be suspicious and self-conscious, and even uninterested; but Burroughs’s interest and curiosity grew with the years. He carried his culture and his knife and his whetstone in his pocket. They belonged to him; but he belonged strictly to himself. He remained to the end what the Lord made him—and that is to be original.

Pietro, the sculptor, has made Burroughs in bronze, resting on a rock, his arm shading his face, his eyes peering keenly into the future or the far-away. Pietro has made him a seer or a prophet. He was much more the lover and the poet. I sat with Burroughs on that same rock, the morning after the rainy day at the Lodge, and talked with him of some things long past, of many things round about us, but of few things of the future. I saw him shield his face with his arm, and look far off from the rock—to the rounded, green-crested hills in the distance, and down into the beautiful valley below. But most of the time he was watching a chipmunk near by, or scanning the pasture for woodchucks. Had I been Pietro I should have made the old man flat on that boulder, his beard a patch of lichen, his slouch hat hard down on his eyes, his head just over the round of the rock—and down the slope, at the mouth of his burrow, a big woodchuck on his haunches.

“I’ve been studying the woodchuck all my life,” he said, as we sat there on the rock, “and there is no getting to the bottom of him.”

I do not know whether Burroughs climbed over the walls and up through the field again to this favorite spot of his boyhood in the few remaining days he had at the Lodge. This may have been the last time he looked out with seeing eyes over this landscape of valley and mountain that had been one of the deepest, most abiding influences of his life. As we sat there together, the largeness and glory of the world: colors, contours, the valley depths, the quiet hills, the wealth of life, the full, deep flood of autumn light—almost too much for common human eyes—the old man beside me said, with a sigh:

“I love it. But it is hard to live up to it. Sometimes, especially of late, I feel it a burden too great to bear.” Then, as if guilty of some evil thought, he brightened instantly, pointed out a dam that he had built as a boy in the field below us, for his own swimming-hole, the ridge of sod and stone still showing; told me stories of his parents; described his sugar-making in the “bush” behind us; nor referred again to the burden of the years, weighing so heavily now upon him, until we were leaving. Then, as he came out to the road to see us off, he said with tears in his eyes:

“I hate to have you go. I wish you could stay. You boys are life to me now. Come again soon. Good-bye.”

We promised we would, and we did—in April, the next April, when we went up to say our last good-bye. Meantime he was off to California for the winter months. Before leaving he wrote to me from West Park, his home on the Hudson:

I neglected to make any apologies for the long letter I wrote you the other day. I promise not to do so again. I am sending you an old notebook of mine, filled with all sorts of jottings, as you will see. I send it as a keepsake.

We are off for California to-morrow. Hope to be there in early December. We leave Chicago on the 29th. My address there will be La Jolla, San Diego. Good luck to you and yours.

Ever your friend

John Burroughs

He kept his promise. This was his last letter to me. They were not very happy months in California. Visitors came to see him as usual; he spoke in the schools; and wrote up to the very end; but he was weak, often sick, and always longing for home. He knew if he was ever to see home again he must not delay long; and he counted the days. He wished to celebrate his birthday with his old friends, at the old place; and he was on the way, speeding homeward, with most of the long journey covered, when, suddenly, the end came. And is it at all strange that his last uttered words, as he sank into unconsciousness, should have been “How far are we from home?”

On the front of the boulder which marks his grave, those last words might well be cut, as expressing the real theme of all his books, the dominant note in all his life.

His old friends kept his birthday in the old place—in the “Nest” at Riverby, for the funeral; and the next day, his eighty-fourth birthday, they carried him into his beloved mountains, to his grave by the rock, where so lately we had talked together, and where, since childhood, he had found an altar for his soul.

How great a man Burroughs was I do not know. Time knows. I know that he had three of the elements of greatness as a writer: simplicity, sincerity, and a true feeling for form. And he had these to an uncommon degree. I know that great men and little children loved him; and that three generations already have been led oftener and farther into the out-of-doors by him than by any other American writer. I know how Burroughs thought of himself and of Thoreau; for in a letter, several years ago to me he wrote:

Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am. I may be more human, but he is as certainly more divine. His moral and ethical value I think is much greater, and he has a heroic quality that I cannot approach.

But I am not trying to estimate Burroughs. I am only sketching, through the gray rain and in the golden light at the far end of the autumn, one whom thousands of us read and love.

THE END

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.