CHAPTER XV—ASSIMASQUA, AND MARSTON
Assimasqua Mountain rises abruptly to the west of the four ponds, a noble hill or range, five miles in length.
The west shore of the Assimasqua lakes sweeps abruptly up to the high crest of the ridge, which is very irregular. It is partly wooded, partly half-grown-up pasture, partly ledge, and along the high grassy summit small chasms open and lead away into deep woods of hemlock. The steep east side is covered for most of its length with an amazing growth of juniper, hundreds and hundreds of close-massed bushes of great size and thickness. The ridge holds a number of little dark mountain tarns, and half a dozen good brooks tumble down its sides in small cascades. The folds of its forest skirts broaden out to the west into the bottom lands at its feet. To the east, the valleys of the brooks deepen and sharpen into ravines through the woods, as they draw near the lakes.
The shores all about the four lakes, as I said, are heavily wooded, and there are but one or two farms, and these only small clearings. A singular person lived in one of them, who worked for years over a great invention, a boat which was to utilize the wind by means of a windmill, which in turn worked a small paddle-wheel. No one now knows whether he had never heard of such a thing as a sail, or merely thought sails dangerous. He was absorbed in his project; and he did get his boat to go, in time, and at least a few times she trundled a clumsy course around the lake.
Near the south end of the Mountain is the old Hale place. Mr. Hale was a gentle-looking man, very neat, with a quiet voice and ways. He kept his wide fields finely cultivated, and had a large orchard, and twelve Jersey cows. The lane through which they filed home at night is enclosed between the two mightiest stump fences I have ever seen, fully ten feet high, and a perfect wilderness to climb over. They look like the brandished arms of witches, or like enormous antlers, against the sky, and are thickly fringed all along their base with delicate Dicksonia fern. Stump fences are fast becoming rare with us, and these must be the over-turned stumps of first-growth pine.
After Mr. and Mrs. Hale died, the farm passed to a sister, Mrs. Wrenn, and when her husband, too, died—he had been a slack man, with no hold on anything—she made the fatal mistake, too common among old people on the farms, of making over the property to a kinsman (in this case, a married step-niece and her husband) on condition of support. I never knew Mrs. Wrenn, but a young farmer’s wife, a friend of mine, was anxious about her troubles, and through her there came to our notice an incident which seemed to light up the whole gray region of the farm.
The neighbors began to hear rumors of neglect and abuse. Mrs. Wrenn was never seen, and those who knew the skinflint ways of her entertainers suspected trouble and presently confided their fears to the young doctor of the neighborhood. He came at once, and found the poor soul in a fatal illness, left alone in unspeakable dirt and squalor in a sort of out-house, with unwashed bed-clothes, no one to feed or tend her, and food which she could not touch put roughly beside her once a day. There were signs too of actual rough handling.
“Don’t try to make me live!” the old lady whispered, with command and entreaty. “Don’t ye dare to keep me living,” and he assured her solemnly that he would not, except in reason, and would only make her more comfortable. He rated the bad woman in charge till he had her well frightened, and then, though it was not only dark already, but raining fast (and though he was poor himself, with his way to make and no financial backing) he drove five miles to town and brought back and installed a nurse at his own expense.
“The tears were running down his cheeks,” the nurse herself told me, “when he assured that poor old creature that either he or I would be with her day and night, that we would never leave her, and she would be safe with us. He paid my charges, and all supplies and food, out of his own pocket. He saw her every day, and when her release came, he was close beside her, and had her hand in his. He couldn’t have been more tender to his own mother. And he gave that bad woman a part of what she deserved.”
I should like to say something more of this young physician. He started as a farm boy, with no capital beyond insight and purpose, and skilled hands, and was led to his career, or rather could not keep himself from his career, because of the fire of pity and tenderness that possessed him. He has come to honor and recognition now, but at the time of which I write, and for years, he was known only to a thirty-mile circle of farm people, a good part of them too poor to pay for any services. He gave himself to them, without knowing that he was giving anything. He was a born citizen, too, served as overseer of the poor, and as selectman, and people consulted him about their quarrels and troubles.
I spoke of the incident about Mrs. Wrenn, which the nurse had told me a year or more after it happened, to the doctor’s wife, some weeks since. He had never told her of it. Her eyes filled with tears.
“That is just like him,” she said.
The Ridge slopes down to the west, to the rich plains through which the Marston communities are scattered—Marston Centre, North and West Marston, Marston Plains. The “Four Marstons” are a notable district, for Marston Academy had the luck to be founded, nearly a hundred years ago, by persons of liberal education, and the dwellers in the comfortable four-square brick houses of the neighborhood have more than kept up its intellectual traditions; though the town has no railroad communication, and only one mill, the shovel factory, since the old saw-mill which cut the first-growth pines on the slopes of Assimasqua has been given up.
The Marston saw-mill is chiefly remembered because of Hiram Andros, who worked there as sawyer for forty-five years, and had the name of the best judge of timber in the State. The sawyer’s is a notable position. He himself does no actual work, but stands near the saw, and in the brief moment when each log is run on to the carriage, holds up the requisite number of fingers to show whether it is to be a three, a four, or five-inch timber, or cut into boards or planks; which cut will make the best use of the log, with the least waste. The sawyer gets high pay, six to ten dollars a day, and earns it, for on his single judgment, delivered in that fraction of a minute, the mill’s prosperity hangs.
What is it that gives a town so distinct a color and fibre? Marston people have kept, generation after generation, a fine flavor and distinction. They are in touch with the world, in the best sense, and men of science and leaders of thought in university life, as well as business magnates, have gone out from Marston, yet still feel they belong there.
Eliphalet Marston, who built and owned the shovel factory, made it his study to produce the best shovel that could be made, the best wearing, the soundest. In later life his son tried to induce him to go about through the country, and look up his customers, to increase trade. The son was very emphatic; it was what everyone did, the only way to keep up-to-date and advertise the business, and Eliphalet must not become moss-grown. He shook his head, but after much hammering started off, though not really persuaded. He went to a big wholesale dealer in Chicago, but did not mention his name, merely said he was there to talk shovels.
“Don’t mention shovels to me,” said the dealer. “There’s just one shovel that’s worth having, just one that’s honest, and that’s the one that I’m handling. There it is,” he said, producing it. “Look at it; that’s the only shovel that’s made in this country; made by a man named Marston, at Marston Plains, State of ——”
Eliphalet chuckled, and went home.
The Barnards were Marston people, a brilliant but strange family; and next door to the Barnards lived a remarkable woman, Miss Persis Wayland. She was a tall handsome person, of a large frame. She lived to a great age, passing all her later life alone, save for one attendant, in her father’s large house, with its gardens and hedges around it. She was well-to-do, and dressed with old-fashioned stateliness in heavy black silk.
She was a woman of fine understanding, and a trained scholar. She read four languages easily, and at forty took up the study of Hebrew, that she might have her Bible free from the perversions of translation. She was about thirty when the religious temperament which was later to dominate her first manifested itself. She has told me herself of her experience.
She had been conscious for years of a vague dissatisfaction, and of life’s seeming empty and purposeless. She threw herself, first into study, then into works of charity, in her effort to find peace. She rose early, and worked till she was utterly worn out and exhausted, at her Sunday School class, at missionary work, and till late hours at her Spanish and Latin, all to no purpose.
Then one day she found herself at a meeting at which a Methodist evangelist (she herself was a strict Episcopalian) was to speak. She went in without thought, from a chance impulse as she passed the door. After the speaking, those who felt moved to do so were asked to come forward and kneel; and as she knelt, she felt the breath of the Spirit upon her forehead.
“It was as plain as the touch of your hand and mine,” she said, as she laid her handsome old hand on my fingers; and from that moment, all her life, the light never left her, she felt “held round by an unspeakable peace and sunshine.”
She always held to her own church, but became more and more of a Spiritualist, till she saw her rooms constantly thronged with the faces of her childhood, father and mother, and the brothers and sisters and playmates who had passed on.
She gradually withdrew from active life, and for the last ten years, I think, never stepped outside her door. She had a fine presence always, rapt and stately. She was distantly glad to see friends who called upon her, but never showed much human warmth. She lived till her ninety-eighth year.
THE WIND CARVES OUT WAVE-LIKE SHAPES OF DRIFT
In the farming country near Marston began the ministry of Clarissa Gray, the beloved evangelist. An unusual experience in illness led this grave, charming girl to thought apart upon the things of God, and as she grew up, persons vexed in spirit began to turn to her for comfort. Her personality was so tranquil and at rest that she seemed to diffuse a sense of musing peace about her; yet she was not dreamy; her nature was rather so limpidly clear that she was never pre-occupied, and she had clear practical good-sense. Hard-drinking, violent men would yield to her direct and fearless influence. Presently she was asked more and more widely to lead in meeting, and to her unquestioning nature this came as a clear call. Her voice, fervent and pure, led in prayer, her crystal judgement solved problems, till without her ever knowing it the community lay in the hollow of her small hands.
I was last at Marston on a day of deep winter. We were to make a visit in the town, and then explore the fields and woods of the west slopes of Assimasqua.
A marked change comes to us by the middle of January. We emerge from the softened twilight world of earlier winter into a brilliancy of white, with bright blue shadows. The deep snow is changed by the action of the wind and its own weight, to a wonderful smooth firmness. It takes on carved and graven shapes, and might be a sublimated building material, a fairy alabaster or marble, fit to built the palaces in the clouds. After each storm the snow-plough piles it, often above one’s head, on both sides of the roads and sidewalks; we walk between high walls built of blocks and masses of blue-shadowed white.
The brightness is almost too great, through the middle of the day; it is dazzling; but about sunset a curious opaque look falls on the landscape; a flattening, till they are like the hues of old pastels, of all the delicate colors. The country has an appearance of almost infinite space, under the snow, and the wind carves out pure sharp wave-like curves of drift about the fields and hills.
The still air, dry and fiery, is like champagne. It almost burns, it is so cold and pure. A great feeling of lightness comes to moccasined feet, in walking in this rarefied air through powdery snow; but fingers and toes quickly become numb without even feeling the cold.
Starting early out of Marston Plains village, we passed a tall rounded hill which had a grove of maples near its top, the countless fine lines of their stems like the strings of some harp-like instrument. The light breeze, hardly more than a stirring, made music through them. The sunrise was hidden behind this hill, but the delicate bare trees were lighted up as with a gold mist.
As we entered the forest on the skirts of Assimasqua, the wind rose outside. A fresh fall of snow the day before had weighted every branch of the evergreens with piled-up whiteness, which now came down in bright showers, the snow crystals glinting around us where stray sunbeams stole down among the trees: but in the shelter of the great pines and hemlocks not a breath of wind reached us, and the woods were held fast in the snow hush, against which any chance sound rings out sharply.
The bark of the different trees was like a set of fine etchings, the yellow birches shining as if burnished; the patches of handsome dark mosses on the ash-trees, and the fine-grained bark of lindens, ashes, and hop-hornbeams stood out brightly.
As we followed a wood road we heard chirruping and tweeting, and saw a flock of pine siskins among the pine-tops, and later we heard the vigorous tapping of a great pileated woodpecker.
All the northern woodpeckers winter with us; as do bluejays, and chickadees, (the “friendly birds” of the Indians); juncos and nuthatches; and partridges, which burrow under the snow for roots and berries, and are sometimes caught, poor things, by the foxes, when the crust freezes over them. Crows stay with us through a very mild winter, but more often are off to the sea, thirty miles distant, to grow fat on periwinkles; and very rarely indeed a winter wren or a song-sparrow remains with us. The beautiful cream-white snow-buntings, cross-bills, fat handsome pine-grosbeaks, golden-crowned kinglets, brown-creepers, and those pirates, the butcher birds, come for short winter visits. Evening grosbeaks, and Bohemian wax-wings, we see more rarely. By the end of February, when the cold may be deepest, the great owls are already building, deep in the woods.
Ever so many small sharp valleys and ravines were revealed among the woods, some winding deep into the darkness of the pines and hemlocks. Their perfect curves were made more perfect by the unbroken snow, and they were flecked all over with the feathery blue shadows of their trees. At the bottom of one we heard a musical tinkling, and found a brook partly open. We scrambled down to it, and knelt there, watching it, till we were half frozen. The ice was frosted deep with delicate lace-work, and looking up underneath we saw a perfect wonderland of organ-pipes and colonnades of crystal, through which the water tinkled melodiously.
We came out high on the north side of Assimasqua, in the sugaring grove that spreads up the steep slope to the crest. The tall maples were very beautiful in their winter bareness, and the slope about their feet was massed with a close feathery growth of young balsam firs and hemlocks, with openings between. The snow lay even with the eaves of the small bark sugaring-shanty. The sight of a roof made the silence seem almost palpable, but in March the hillside will have plenty of sound and stir, for fires will be lighted and the big kettles swung, while the men come and go on sledges. Sugaring goes on all through the countryside, and even in the town boys are out with “spiles,” drilling the maple “shade-trees,” as soon as the sap begins running. The bright drops fall slowly, one by one, into the pail hung to the end of the spile, and the sap is like the clearest spring water, with a refreshing woodsy sweetness.
The high rough crest of Assimasqua dominates a wide stretch of country. The long sweep of the fields, and the lakes, lying asleep, showed perfect, featureless white, as we stood looking down; but all about, and in among them, the low broken hills, the knolls and ridges, bore scarfs or mantles of smoke-colored bare woods, mixed with evergreens.
All day the sky had been of an aquamarine color, of the liquid and luminous clearness which comes only in mid-winter, and deep afternoon shadows were falling as we came down the hillside. We were on snow-shoes, and had brought a toboggan, as the last part of our way lay down hill. The country was open below the sugaring grove, and the unbroken snow masked all the contours and mouldings of the fields, so that we found ourselves suddenly dropping into totally unrealized hollows and skimming up unrealized hillocks.
When we reached the small dome-like hill where we were to take the cross-country trolley, the blue-green sky had changed to a pure primrose, and in this, as the marvelous dusk of the snow fields deepened about us, the thin golden sickle of the new moon, and then Venus, came out slowly till they blazed above the horizon; the primrose hue changed to a low band of burning orange beneath the fast-striding darkness, then to a blue-green color, a robin’s egg blue, which showed liquid-clear behind the pines; but long before we reached home the colors had deepened into the peacock blue darkness of the winter night.
Just before the distant whistle of the trolley broke the stillness, we had a tiny adventure; we strayed over the brow of the hill, and came on two baby foxes playing in the soft snow like kittens.