“A nice and subtle happiness, I see,
Thou to thyself proposest.”
Milton.
Once more I am in old Franconia, and in a new season. With all my visits to the New Hampshire mountains, I have never seen them before in August. I came on the last day of July,—a sweltering journey. That night it rained a little, hardly enough to lay the dust, which is deep in all these valley roads, and the next morning at breakfast time the mercury marked fifty-seven degrees. All day it was cool, and at night we sat before a fire of logs in the big chimney. The day was really a wonder of clearness, as well as of pleasant autumnal temperature; an exceptional mercy, calling for exceptional acknowledgment.
After breakfast I took the Bethlehem road at the slowest pace. The last time I had traveled it was in May. Then every tree had its bird, and every bird a voice. Now it was August—the year no longer young, and the birds no longer a choir. And when birds are neither in tune nor in flocks, it is almost as if they were absent altogether. It seemed to me, when I had walked a mile, that I had never seen Franconia so deserted.
An alder flycatcher was calling from a larch swamp; a white-throated sparrow whistled now and then in the distance; and from still farther away came the leisurely, widely spaced measures of a hermit thrush. When he sings there is no great need of a chorus; the forest has found a tongue; but I could have wished him nearer. A solitary vireo, close at hand, regaled me with a sweet, low chatter, more musical twice over than much that goes by the name of singing,—the solitary being one of the comparatively few birds that do not know how to be unmusical,—and a sapsucker, a noisy fellow gone silent, flew past my head and alighted against a telegraph pole.
Wild red cherries (Prunus Pennsylvanica) were ripe, or nearly so; very bright and handsome on their long, slender stems, as I stood under the tree and looked up. With the sun above them they became fairly translucent, the shape of the stone showing. They were pretty small, I thought, and would never take a prize at any horticultural fair; I needed more than one in the mouth at once when I tested their quality; but a robin, who had been doing the same thing, seemed reluctant to finish, and surely robins are competent judges in matters of this kind. My own want of appreciation was probably due to some pampered coarseness of taste.
An orchid, with one leaf and a spike of minute greenish flowers, attracted notice, not for any showy attributes, but as a plant I did not know. Adder’s-mouth, it proved to be; or, to give it all the Grecian Latinity that belongs to it, Microstylis ophioglossoides. How astonished it would be to hear that mouth-confounding name applied to its modest little self; as much astonished, perhaps, as we should be, who are not modest, though we may be greenish, if we heard some of the more interesting titles that are applied to us, all in honest vernacular, behind our backs. This year’s goldthread leaves gave me more pleasure than most blossoms could have done; lustrous, elegantly shaped, and in threes. Threes are prettier than fours, I said to myself, as I looked at some four-leaved specimens of dwarf cornel growing on the same bank. The comparison was hardly decisive, it is true, since the cornus leaves lacked the goldthread’s shapeliness and brilliancy; but I believe in the grace of the odd number.
With trifles like these I was entertaining the time when a man on a buckboard reined in his horse and invited me to ride. He was going down the Gale River road a piece, he said, and as this was my course also I thankfully accepted the lift. I would go farther than I had intended, and would spend the forenoon in loitering back. My host had two or three tin pails between his feet, and I was not surprised when he told me that he was “going berrying.” What did surprise me was to find, fifteen minutes later, when I got on my legs again, that with no such conscious purpose, and with no tin pail, I had myself come out on the same errand. “It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.”
The simple truth was that the raspberries would not take no for an answer. If I passed one clump of bushes, another waylaid me. “Raspberries, all ripe,” they said. It was not quite true: that would have been a misfortune unspeakable; but the ripe ones were enough. Softly they dropped into the fingers—softly in spite of their asperous name—and sweetly, three or four together for goodness’ sake, they melted upon the tongue. They were so many that a man could have his pick, taking only those of a deep color (ten minutes of experience would teach him the precise shade) and a worthy plumpness, passing a bushel to select a gill.