No raspberry should be pulled upon ever so little; it should fall at the touch; and the teeth should have nothing to do with it, more than with honey or cream. So I meditated, and so with all daintiness I practiced, finishing my banquet again and again as a fresh cluster beguiled me; for raspberry-eating, like woman’s work, is never done. If the apple in Eden was as pleasant to the eyes and half as good to eat, then I have no reflections to cast upon the mistress of the garden. In fact, it seems to me not unlikely that the Edenic apple may have been nothing more nor less than a Franconian raspberry. Small wonder, say I, that one taste of its “sciential sap” “gave elocution to the mute.”
So I came up out of the Gale River woods into the bushy lane—a step or two and a mouthful of berries—and thence into the level grassy field by the grove of pines; a favorite place, with a world of mountains in sight—Moosilauke, Kinsman, Cannon, Lafayette, Haystack, the Twins, and the whole Mount Washington range. A pile of timbers, the bones of an old barn, offered me a seat, and there I rested, facing the mountains, while a company of merry barn swallows, loquacious as ever, went skimming over the grass. Moving clouds dappled the mountain-sides with shadows, the sun was good, a rare thing in August, and I was happy.
This lasted for a matter of half an hour. Then a sound of wheels caused me to turn my head. Yes, a pair of gray horses and a covered carriage, with a white net protruding behind,—an entomological flag well known to all Franconia dwellers in summer time, one of the institutions of the valley. A hand was waved, and in another minute I was being carried toward Bethlehem, all my pedestrian plans forgotten. I was becoming that disreputable thing, an opportunist. But what then! As I remarked just now, “It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.” In vacation days the wisest of us may go with the wind.
A pile of decaying logs by the roadside soon tempted the insect collector to order a halt. She was brought up, as I have heard her say regretfully, on the stern New England doctrine that time once past never returns, and she is still true to her training. We stripped the bark from log after log, but uncovered nothing worth while (such beetles as the unprofessional assistant turned up being damned without hesitation as “common”) except two little mouse-colored, red-bellied snakes, each with two or three spots on the back of its head. One of these pretty creatures the collector proceeded to mesmerize by rubbing its crown gently with a stick. “See! he enjoys it,” she said; and if thrusting out the tongue is a sign of enjoyment, no doubt he was in something like an ecstasy. Storeria occipitomaculata, the books call him. Short snakes, like small orchids, are well pieced out with Latinity. I would not disturb the savor of raspberries by trying just then to put my tongue round that specific designation, though it goes trippingly enough with a little practice, and is plain enough in its meaning. One did not need to be a scholar, or to look twice at the snake, to see that its occiput was maculated.
At the top of the hill—for we took the first turn to the left—“creation widened,” and we had before us a magnificent prospect westward, with many peaks of the Green Mountains beyond the valley. Atmosphere so transparent as to-day’s was not made for nothing. Insects and even raspberries were for the moment out of mind. There was glory everywhere. We looked at it, but when we talked it was mostly of trifles: the bindweed, the goldenrod, a passing butterfly, a sparrow. Those who are really happy are often pleased to speak of matters indifferent. Sometimes I think it is those who only wish to be happy who deal in superlatives and exclamations.
One thing I was especially glad to see: the big pastures on the Wallace Hill road full of hardhack bloom. Many times, in September and October, I had stopped to gaze upon those acres on acres of brown spires; now I beheld them pink. It was really a sight, a sea of color. If cattle would eat Spiræa tomentosa, the fields would be as good as gold mines. So I thought. I thought, too, what an ocean of “herb tea” might be concocted from those millions and millions of leafy stalks. The idea was too much for me; imagination was near to being drowned in a sea of its own creating; and I was relieved when we left the rosy wilderness behind us, and came to the famous clump of pear-leaved willow (Salix balsamifera) near the edge of the wood. This I must get over the fence and put my hand on, just for old times’ sake. A man may take it as one of the less uncomfortable indications of increasing age when he loves to do things simply because he used to do them, or has done them in remembered company. In that respect I humor myself. If there is anything good in the multiplying of years, by all means let me have it. And so I wore the willow.
On the way down the steep hill through the forest my friends pointed out a maple tree which a pileated woodpecker had riddled at a tremendous rate. The trunk contained the pupæ of wasps (they were not strictly wasps, the entomologist was careful to explain, but were always called so by “common people”), and no doubt it was these that the woodpecker had been after. He had gone clean to the heart of the trunk, now on this side, now on that. Chips by the shovelful covered the ground. The big, red-crested fellow must love wasp pupæ almost as well as some people love raspberries. Green leaves, a scanty covering, were still on the tree, but its days were numbered. Who could have foreseen that the stings of insects would bring such destruction? Misfortunes never come singly. After the wasps the woodpecker. “Which things are an allegory.”
One of my pleasures of the milder sort was to sit on the piazza before breakfast (the lateness of the White Mountain breakfast hour being one of a walking man’s displeasures) and watch the two morning processions: one of tall milk-cans to and from the creamery,—an institution which any country-born New Englander may be glad to think of, for the comfort it has brought to New England farmers’ wives; the other of boys, each with a tin pail, on their way to serve as caddies at the new Profile House golf links. This latter procession I had never seen till the present year. Half the boys of the village, from seven or eight to fifteen or sixteen years old, seemed to have joined it; some on bicycles, some in buggies, some on foot, none on horseback—a striking omission in the eyes of any one who has ever lived or visited at the South.
Franconia boys, I have noticed, have a cheerful, businesslike, independent way with them, neither bashful nor overbold, and it was gratifying to see them so quick to improve a new and not unamusing method of turning a penny. Work that has to do with a game is no more than half work, though the game be played by somebody else; and some of the boys, it was to be remarked, carried golf sticks of their own. Trust a Yankee lad to combine business and pleasure. One such I heard of, who was already planning how to invest his prospective capital.