A MOUNTAIN-SIDE RAMBLE.
I will go lose myself.—Shakespeare.
There are two sayings of Scripture which to my mind seem peculiarly appropriate for pleasant Sundays,—"Behold the fowls of the air," and "Consider the lilies." The first is a morning text, as anybody may see, while the second is more conveniently practiced upon later in the day, when the dew is off the grass. With certain of the more esoteric doctrines of the Bible (the duty of turning the other cheek, for example, or of selling all that one has and giving to the poor) we may sometimes be troubled what to do,—unless, like the world in general, we turn them over to Count Tolstoï and his followers; but such precepts as I have quoted nobody is likely ever to quarrel with, least of all any "natural man." For myself, I find them always a comfort, no matter what my mood or condition, while their observance becomes doubly agreeable when I am away from home; the
thought of beholding a strange species of fowl, or of considering a new sort of lily, proving even more attractive than the prospect of listening to a new minister, or, what is somewhat less probable, of hearing a new sermon.
Thus it was with me, not long ago, when I found myself suddenly left alone at a small hotel in the Franconia Valley. The day was lowery, as days in the mountains are apt to be; but when duty goes along with inclination, a possible sprinkling is no very serious hindrance. Besides, a fortnight of "catching weather" had brought me into a state of something like philosophical indifference. I must be reckoned either with the just or with the unjust,—so I had come to reason,—and of course must expect now and then to be rained on. Accordingly, after dinner I tucked my faithful umbrella under my arm, and started up the Notch road.
I had in view a quiet, meditative ramble, in harmony with the spirit of the day, and could think of nothing more to the purpose than a visit to a pair of deserted farms, out in the woods on the mountain-side. The
lonesome fields and the crumbling houses would touch my imagination, and perhaps chasten my spirit. Thither would I go, and "consider the lilies." I am never much of a literalist,—except when a strict construction favors the argument,—and in the present instance it did not strike me as at all essential that I should find any specimens of the genus Lilium. One of the humbler representatives of the great and noble family of the Liliaceæ—the pretty clintonia, now a little out of season, or even the Indian cucumber-root—would come fairly within the spirit of the text; while, if worst came to worst, there would certainly be no scarcity of grass, itself nothing but a kind of degenerate lily, if some recent theories may be trusted.
I followed the highway for a mile or two, and then took a wood-road (a "cart-path" I should call it, if I dared to speak in my own tongue wherein I was born) running into the forest on the left. This brought me before long to a "pair of bars," over which I clambered into a grassy field, the first of the two ancient clearings I had come out to see. The scanty acres must have been
wrested from the encompassing forest at no small cost of patience and hard labor; and after all, they had proved not to pay for their tillage. A waste of energy, as things now looked; but who is to judge of such matters? It is not given to every man to see the work of his hands established. A good many of us, I suspect, might be thankful to know that anything we have ever done would be found worthy of mention fifty years hence, though the mention were only by way of pointing a moral.