I suppose about the most beautiful thing in life is novelty. In it is the chief charm of youth and travel and honeymoons. I will not say it is the most valuable thing there is, and it is likely to be about the most transient. But while it lasts it is precious, and inspiring beyond words.
No other autumn could ever be quite like that first one of our new possession, none could ever have the halo and the bloom of novelty that made us revel in all the things we could do and moved us to undertake them all. Days to come would be more peaceful and abundantly satisfying, happier, even, in the fullness of accomplishment, but never again would we know quite the thrill that each day brought during our first golden September at Brook Ridge.
To begin with, it was September, and golden. The rains of August had ceased and their lavish abundance had filled brook and river and left the world a garden of wild aster and goldenrod, with red apples swinging from the trees, massed umbels of dark elderberries, and pink and purple grapes ripening in the sun. Our satisfaction with everything was unbounded. A New England farm, with its brook and springs and gray walls and odd corners, seemed to us, of all possessions, the most desirable. We took long walks through our quiet woods where there were hickory and chestnut trees, and oaks and hemlocks, and slender white birches that were like beautiful spirits, and tall maples, and even apple-trees, wild seedlings, planted by the birds, but thrifty and bearing. We had never seen that in the West. The fruit was not very tender, but well flavored and made delicious sauce.
"Why, it must be the Garden of Eden," we said, "if the apple-tree grows wild!"
We carried baskets and gathered in infinite variety. Apples, hickory-nuts, berries, mushrooms—especially mushrooms, for we were fond of them and had carefully acquainted ourselves with the deadly kinds. Those, by the way, are all that one needs to know. All the others may be eaten. Some of them may taste like gall and wormwood, or living and enduring fire, and an occasional specimen may make the experimenter feel briefly unwell, but if he will acquaint himself with the virulent amanita varieties, and shun them, he will not die—not from poison. I do not guarantee against indigestion.
We would bring home as many as seventeen sorts of those edible toadstools, beautiful things in creamy white, brown, purple, yellow, coral, and vivid scarlet, and get out our Book of a Thousand Kinds, and patiently identify them, tasting for the flavor and sometimes getting a hot one or a bitter one, but often putting as many as a dozen kinds into the chafing-dish. Even if the result was occasionally a bit "woodsy" as to savor, we did not mind much, not in those days of novelty, though Elizabeth did once think she felt a "little dizzy" after an unusually large collection, and I had a qualm or two myself. But when we looked up and found that mushroom poison does not begin to destroy for several hours, we fell to discussing other matters, and did not remember our slight inconvenience until long after we should have been dead, by the book limitation.
There was a gap in the stone wall where we passed from our land into Westbury's, and beyond it an open place that was a mushroom-garden. Green and purple russulas grew there as if they had been planted, beds of coral-hued "Tom Thumbs" that were like strawberries, and a big, bitter variety of boletus, worthless but beautiful, having the size and appearance of a pie—a meringue pie, well browned. A path led to another garden where in a hidden nook we one day discovered a quantity of chanterelles that were like wonderful black morning-glories. It was duskily shaded there, and through the flickering green we noticed a vivid, red spot that was like a flame. We pushed out to it and came upon a tiny, silent brook slipping through a bed of cowslip and water-arum, and at its margin a scarlet cardinal-flower, burning a star upon the afternoon.
There was a place which we sometimes visited to see the trout. You crossed the bean-lot and came to a little secluded land where there were slim cedars and grass and asters and goldenrod, a spot so still and unvisited that it was like a valley that one might find in a dream. Our brook flowed through it and in one place there was a quiet pool and an overhanging rock. Willows and alders sheltered it, and if you slipped through without noise and lay very still, you were pretty sure to see a school of trout, for it was their favorite haunt. Once we counted twenty-two there, lying head up-stream, gently fanning their tails and white-edged fins. They were a handsome lot, ranging in size from eight to twelve inches, and we would not have parted with them for the cost of the farm.
