A MILD WINTER ON THE CAPE.
"It's be'n a mild winter on the Cape;" the Wallencampers congratulated one another, blinking, with a delicious sense of warmth and comfort, in the rays of a strong March sun.
The Wallencampers were not, perhaps, generally incited by that love of stern, unceasing, and vigorous exertion which is, geographically considered, one of the chief characteristics of our hardy northern races. True poets and idealists, they were lazy, and they had but few clothes, both excellent reasons for inclining kindly to the warm weather.
And yet, notwithstanding this, they had grown used to a wild ruggedness of nature and condition, a terrible, sublime uncertainty about life and things in general when the wind blew, missing which, in this earthly state, they would have pined most sadly. And I do not believe that they would have exchanged their rugged, storm-swept, wind-beleaguered little section of Cape Cod for a realm in sunny Italy itself; no, not even if the waves of that bright clime had rippled over sands of literal gold, and their winter had been nine months in the year instead of the customary six and a half.
"A mild winter on the Cape." Grandpa Keeler often repeated the words; and sitting by the fire at night, his eyes grew big and wild, and his tones took on a terrible impressiveness as he told of rough winters on the Cape, when the snow lay drifted high across the fences in the lane, and "every time she came in yender"—pointing in the direction of the Bay—"she licked offa slice or two o' bank, and the old Ark whirled and shuk—O Lordy, teacher!—as ef she'd slipped her moorin's and gone off on a high sea, and ef you'd a heered the wind a screechin' inter them winders, you'd a thought the"——
"Bijonah Keeler!" Grandma Keeler spoke. She said no more. It was enough.
"You'd a thought something had got loose, sure," concluded Grandpa, with a keen glance aside to me that revealed, as with tenfold significance, the obstructed force of his narrative.
In the daytime, Grandpa was now much out of doors. He had most frequent and loving recourse to an interesting looking pile of rubbish at the south end of the barn. There he sat, and napped and nodded, and employed the brief interims of wakefulness in whittling bean poles, preparatory for another year's supply of that dreaded and inexorable crop. Earth's disturbing voices, Grandma Keeler herself, seldom reached him there.
Early, too, I saw him in the garden, leaning pensively on his hoe—a becalmed and striking figure in a ragged snuff-colored coat, and a hat marked by numerous small orifices, through which, here and there, strands from his silvery fringe of hair strayed and waved in the breezes.
It was Grandma and Grandpa Keeler's custom at the first approach of spring to detach themselves from Madeline's household, and to form a separate and complete establishment of their own in the sunny kitchen, away out at the end of the Ark. I was still, nominally, Madeline's boarder, and sat at the table with her and the little Keelers; but the impulses of my heart were ever guiding my feet to that other dear resort, where doors and hearts seemed always open to receive me, and an inexpressible warmth and light and comfort pervaded the atmosphere.
It was early in March, when, returning from school one day at the noontide intermission, I found Grandma standing without the Ark, singularly occupied. The sun was shining on her uncovered head, and the tranquil glow on her face was clearly the exponent of no fictitious happiness. In her apron she had a quantity of empty egg-shells, so carefully drained of their contents as to present an almost perfect external appearance, and these she was arranging on the twigs of a large bush that grew just outside the window.
I was glad, afterwards, that I intruded then no skeptical questions as to her purpose, for, as I stood and looked at her, her action gradually lost for me the tinge of eccentricity, with which it had at first seemed imbued. I realized that there was something grander than reason, more exalted than philosophy.
"I suppose you've heerd about egg-plants, teacher;" said she, at length, turning to me, while the sun in her face broke up into scintillant beams that penetrated my being, and quickened my very soul. "This 'ere old bush ain't bore nothin' for years, and it looked so bare and sorrerful, somehow, standin' out here all alone, and everything else a kinder wakin' up in the spring, I thought I'd try to sorter liven it up a little;" and she resumed her placid occupation.
"Blessed Grandma," I could only murmur, as I turned to enter the Ark; "inspired, delightful soul!"
It was in March that the Wallencamp sun-bonnets came forth, all in a single day, a curious and startling pageant. The Modoc, who had gone bareheaded through the winter, assumed hers as a turban of impressive altitude, while the diminutive Carietta and the infant Sophronia appeared but as vagrant telescopes on insufficient pegs.
In March the "pipers" lifted up their homesick notes at nightfall, in the meadows. On the last day of that month, I found arbutus in bloom under the leaves in the cedar woods.
Scarcely had the first faint signs of herbage appeared on the earth ere the Wallencamp cows and horses were given over exclusively to the guardianship of nature, and to wander whithersoever they would, for the Wallencamp fences had ceased to present themselves as obstacles in the way. Indeed, some portions of them had been utterly obliterated, and this was easily traced to a habit prevalent among the Wallencampers of resorting to them for fuel when, on some winter night, other resources were found to be low.
Other portions of them were decayed, or blown over in the wind, so that there was just enough left to sit on for private soliloquy, or social debate, and to give a picturesque charm to the landscape; yet, it was a fact which I found worthy of notice, that, in going from one place to another, no true Wallencamper ever walked over a broken-down part of the fence, or went through a gap in the fence; he always selected an upright part of the fence to climb over, even going a little out of the way, if necessary, to effect this purpose.
The Wallencampers were staunch on the matter of individual rights; they turned each his own horse and cow into his own door-yard. Animated, doubtless, by something of the same principle, those attenuated animals, having made an impartial détour of the premises, congregated, as of one accord, along the highway, especially in that part of the lane between the Ark and the school-house.
I made my way through these new perils from day to day, in safety, until the deepening green of the hills and fields called the herd away to wider pastures.
Dr. Aberdeen, however, remained behind. Dr. Aberdeen, as he was termed by the Wallencampers, was a horse of peculiar and distinguished parts. Among his other eccentric gifts, he had a harmless habit of chasing beings of a superior race. In what manner this propensity had first manifested itself, I do not know, but it had been eagerly seized upon as ground for further development by the juvenile element of Wallencamp, and especially by the Modoc, under whose lively tuition the animal had reached an almost strategic ability in the art.
Dr. Aberdeen was truly of the mildest disposition imaginable. He had never been known to kick. He had never even been known to open his mouth and snap at a fly, but the expression of his countenance, if it might be so called, when he was on the chase, was vicious and determined in the extreme, and by no means betrayed the purely facetious nature of his intentions. During school hours he seldom wandered from the immediate vicinity of the school-house, where he appeared to be waiting for the children to come out to play. Often have I looked up to see him gazing in at the windows with a gleam of evil expectancy in his melancholy dun brown eye.
With the joyful advent of the spring came, also, Tommy's tame owl and "Happy Moses." Tommy's owl emerged from his winter-quarters, and took up his daily post of observation on the fence on the shady side of the school-house. He was blind in one eye, which eye was always open, the other was always closed. Yet with that one glassy, unblinking orb, Tommy's owl seemed to me, as I lifted my eyes to the window, to be reviewing the past with an indifference as calm and all-embracing as that with which he sent his inexorable gaze into the future; and to take in me and the passing events of the school-room as a mere speck in his kaleidoscopic vision of the ages.
What was the winter's thraldom from which Happy Moses had escaped, I never learned. He was a broad-shouldered fellow, six feet in height, with a beard like flax, and a sunny, ingenuous countenance. What term should have been applied to his eccentricities in politer circles I cannot say, but in Wallencamp, he was artlessly designated as "the fool." Whether it was on this account, that with a certain rashness of perception peculiar to the Wallencampers, they always prefixed the adjective "happy" to his name, or merely on account of the transparent sunniness of his disposition, I cannot say, either.
Happy Moses played with the children. He regarded me, as one of the class of those who presume to teach, with mingled scorn and aversion. When I went to the door to blow the children in from their play, he invariably turned his back upon me, cocked his hat on one side of his head, and walked away with an air that was palpably reckless, defiant, and jaunty.
When he reappeared, it was usually with his knitting-work, to which he devoted himself in a desultory way, reclining on the school-house steps. But sometimes he sat on the fence with the owl, and then it was noticeable that while the gaze of the one was transient and silly, the gaze of the other seemed to grow the more unutterably searching and profound. So, at last, the new term was fairly established with these three—Dr. Aberdeen, Happy Moses, and the owl.
Hulled corn and beans had now become but as a dream of the past in Wallencamp, and for a brief season before the accession of lobsters, life was mainly supported on winter-green-berries, or box-berries, as they were called. These grew in large quantities at "Black Ground," a section of the woods which had been burned over. Daily I met happy groups of Wallencampers, with baskets and pails in their hands, going "boxberry plummin.'"
We had boxberry bread, boxberry stews and pies, and one day, I caught a glimpse of Grandma, in her part of the Ark, frying boxberry griddle-cakes.
Grandpa, when I met him, at this time, wore an air of deep dejection; yet he bore his woes in silence, doubtless avoiding any concession that should suggest the need of another clarification of his system. Once, when nobody was looking, he cautiously withdrew a handful of scraped birch bark from his pocket and gave it to me, remarking that he thought it was "a little more bracin' than them tarnal woodsy plums."
Next in the order of events, as the Modoc stood in her place in the reading-class and slowly enunciated each separate syllable of the lesson in a tone as remarkable for a loud distinctness as it was for a total lack of meaning and modulation, from that side of her dress which had been sagging most heavily, something fell with a crash to the floor. It was a boiled lobster of anomalous proportions. The pocket had given way at last under its overpowering burden, and now appeared ignominiously upborne on the claws of its former prisoner. The Modoc seized the crustacean with glittering defiance in her eyes, and at recess, I saw that turbaned Amazon devouring it, with a group of wistful and admiring faces gathered round. The boys were out in the bay "setting pots" and "trolling for bait." Soon, not a child at Wallencamp was lobsterless. I discovered two under the infant Sophronia's desk one morning, and afterwards kept a sharp eye in that direction. Sophronia's conduct throughout the session was in an unusual degree exemplary. I detected no guilty blush on her countenance, I heard not the crackling of a claw, but when she went out, I observed that she took no lobsters with her.
Investigating the place where she had been sitting, I found a wild confusion of claws and shells, as carefully denuded of meat as though they had been turned inside out for that purpose.
What was my surprise and mortification to find a like collection at nearly every seat in the school-room, and all the while my flock had seemed unusually silent and attentive; such proficiency had those children acquired in the art of dissecting lobsters.
I saw how many they devoured day by day, and how much water they drank, and I fancied that they themselves grew to partake more and more of the form and character of marine animals. I believed that they could have existed equally well crawling at the bottom of the deep or swimming on its surface.
We had lobsters, too, at the Ark. For the first day or two of this dispensation, Grandpa's face perceptibly brightened. At the end of two weeks it was longer than ever before.
He came over from his potato patch, I remember, and leaned on the fence, as I was going by to school.
"It's be'n a mild winter on the Cape, teacher," he observed, studying the heavens with an air of utter abstraction. Then his glance fell as it were inadvertently in the direction of the house, and he immediately continued with a peculiar spark of animation kindling in his eye; "I've et so many o' them 'tarnal critters, teacher, that I swon if I don't feel like a 'tarnal, long-fingered, sprawlin' shell-fish myself! But it's comin' nigh time for ale-whops. They're very good, teacher, ale-whops are—very good, though they're bony as the—they're 'tarnal bony, teacher. They're what we call herrin's in the winter."
Grandpa then laughed a little and showed his teeth.
"I was goin' to tell ye, Bachelder Lot, here," he went on; "he was a' askin' Captain Sartell what kind o' fish them was that it's recorded in the Scripters to 'a' fed the multitude, and then took up so many baskets full o' leavin's; and the Captain told him that as to exactly what manner of fish them was, he hadn't sufficient acquaintance with the book of Jonah to say, but, as near as he could calk'late, he reckoned they was ale-whops.
"And the Bachelder told him that it seemed to him he was right, and had solved a mystery, for it stood to reason that there wa'n't no other fish but an ale-whop, that they could feed five thousand folks out of seven little ones and then take up twelve bushel baskets full of bones!
"And the Captain was pleased, and kind o' half owned up that he hadn't felt no ways sure as to his surmise to begin with, but he said when the question was put to him, he didn't think no man ought to hesitate to come down strong on a doctrinal p'int.
"Wall, as I was a sayin', teacher," concluded Grandpa, his teeth still skinned and gleaming, "it's be'n a mild winter on the Cape."