“In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.”
I looked at the garden patch and the mowed field, and thought what a strange world it is—ill-made, half-made, or unmade—in which man has to live, or, in our pregnant every-day phrase, to get his living; a world that goes whirling on its axis and revolving round its heat-and-light-giving body,—like a top which a boy has set spinning,—now roasted and parched, now drenched and sodden, now frozen dead; a world wherein, as our good American stoic complained, a man must burn a candle half the time in order to see to live; a world to which its inhabitants are so poorly adapted that a day of comfortable temperature is matter for surprise and thankfulness; a world which cannot turn round but that men die of heat and by freezing, of thirst and by drowning; a world where all things, appetite and passion, as well as heat and cold, run continually to murderous extremes. A strange world, surely, which men have agreed to justify and condemn in the same breath as the work of supreme wisdom, ruined by original sin. Children will have an explanation. The philosopher says: “My son, we must know how to be ignorant.”
So my thoughts ran away with me till the clematis vine and the cherry bushes brought me back to myself. The present hour was good; the birds and the plants were happy; and so was I, though for the moment I had almost forgotten it. The mountain had its old inscrutable, beckoning, admonishing, benignant look. The wise make no complaint. If the world is not the best we could imagine, it is the best we have; and such as it is, it is a pretty comfortable place in vacation time and fair weather. Let me not be among the fools who waste a bright to-day in forecasting dull to-morrows.
RED LEAF DAYS
“Woods over woods in gay theatric pride.”
Goldsmith.
White Mountain woods are generally at their brightest in the last few days of September. This year I had but a week or so to stay among them, and timed my visit accordingly, arriving on the 22d. As I drove over the hills from Littleton to Franconia there were only scattered bits of high color in sight—a single tree here and there, which for some reason had hung out its autumnal flag in advance of its fellows. It seemed almost impossible that all the world would be aglow within a week; but I had no real misgivings. Seed time and harvest would not fail. The leaves would ripen in their time. And so the event proved. Day by day the change went visibly forward (visibly yet invisibly, as the hands go round the face of a clock), till by the 30th the colors were as brilliant as one could wish, though with less than the usual proportion of yellow.
The white birches, which should have supplied that hue, were practically leafless. A small caterpillar (the larva of a tiny moth, one of the Microlepidoptera) had eaten the greenness from every white-birch leaf in the whole country round about. One side of Mount Cleveland, for example, looked from a distance as if a fire had swept over it. It was a real devastation; yet, to my surprise, as the maple groves turned red the total effect was little, if at all, less beautiful than in ordinary seasons. The leafless purplish patches gave a certain indefinable openness to the woods, and the eye felt the duller spaces as almost a relief. I could never have believed that destruction so widespread and lamentable could work so little damage to the appearance of the landscape. As the old Hebrew said, everything is beautiful in its time.
We were four at table, and in front of the evening fireplace, but in footing it we were only two. Sometimes we walked side by side; sometimes we were rods apart. When we felt like it we talked; then we went on a piece in silence, as Christians should. Let me never have a traveling companion who cannot now and then keep himself company. The ideal man for such a rôle is one who is wiser than yourself, yet not too wise, lest there be lack of reciprocity, and you find yourself no better than a boy rusticating with a tutor. He should be even-tempered, also, well furnished with philosophy, loving fair weather and good living, but taking things as they come; and withal, while not unwilling to intimate his own preference as to the day’s route and other matters, he should be always ready to defer with all cheerfulness to his partner’s wish. “The ideal man,” I say; but I am thinking of a real one.