“My heart leaps up when I behold
An eagle in the sky.”
On that point, as concerning the fine qualities of the cespitose blueberry, we were fully agreed.
Even in Franconia, however, most of our days are spent, not in mountain paths, but in the valley and lower hill roads. We keep out of the mountains partly because we love to look at them (“I pitch my walk low, but my prospects high,” says an old poet), and partly, perhaps, because the paths to their summits have seemed to fall out of repair, and even to become steeper, with the lapse of years. One of my good trips, this autumn, was over the road toward Littleton, and then back in the direction of Bethlehem as far as the end of the Indian Brook road. That, as I planned it, would be no more than six or seven miles, at the most, and there I was to be met by the driving members of the club, who would bring me home for the mid-day meal,—an altogether comfortable arrangement. It is good to have time to spare, so that one can dally along, fearful only of arriving at the end of the way too soon. Such was now my favored condition, and I made the most of it. If I crossed a brook, I stayed awhile to listen to it and moralize its song. If a flock of bluebirds and sparrows were twittering about a farmer’s barn, I lingered a little to watch their doings. When a white-crowned sparrow or a partridge showed itself in the road in advance of me, that was reason enough for another halt. It is a pretty picture: a partridge caught unexpectedly in the open, its ruff erect, and its tail, fully spread, snapping nervously with every quick, furtive step. And the fine old trees in the Littleton hill woods were of themselves sufficient, on a warm day like this, to detain any one who was neither a worldling nor a man sent for the doctor. They detained me, at all events; and very glad I was to sit down more than once for a good season with them.
And so the hours passed. At the top of the road, in the clearing by the farms, I met a pale, straight-backed young fellow under a military hat. “You look like a man from Cuba or from Chickamauga,” I ventured to say. “Chickamauga,” he answered laconically, and marched on. Whether it was typhoid fever or simple “malaria” that had whitened his face there was no chance to inquire. He was munching an apple, which at that moment was also my own occupation. I had just stopped under a promising-looking tree, whose generous branches spilled their crop over the roadside wall,—excellent “common fruit,” as Franconians say, mellow, but with a lively, ungrafted tang. Here in this sunny stretch of road were more of my small Grapta butterflies, and presently I came upon a splendid tortoise-shell (Vanessa Milberti). That I would certainly have captured had I been armed with a net. I had seen two like it the day before, to the surprise of my friends the carriage people, ardent entomological collectors, both of them. They had found not a single specimen the whole season through. “There are some advantages in beating out the miles on foot,” I said to myself. I have never seen this strikingly handsome butterfly in Massachusetts, as I once did its rival in beauty, the banded purple (Arthemis); and even here in the hill country it is never so common as to lose that precious bloom which rarity puts upon whatever it touches.
As I turned down the Bethlehem road, the valley and hill prospects on the left became increasingly beautiful. Here I passed hermit thrushes (it was good to see them already so numerous again, after the destruction that had wasted them a few winters ago), a catbird or two, and a few ruby-crowned kinglets,—some of them singing,—and before long found myself within the limits of a rich man’s red farm; fences, houses, barns, poultry coops, and the rest, all painted of the same deep color, as if to say, “All this is mine.” I remembered the estate well, and have never grudged the owner of it his lordly possessions. I enjoy them, also, in my own way. He keeps his roads in apple-pie order, without meddling with their natural beauty (I wish our Massachusetts “highway surveyors” all worked under his orders, or were endowed with his taste), and is at pains to save his woods from the hands of the spoiler. “Please do not peel bark from the birch trees,”—so the signs read; and I say Amen. He has splendid flower gardens, too, and plants them well out upon the wayside for all men to enjoy. Long may it be before his soul is required of him.
By this time I was in the very prettiest of the red-farm woods. Hermit thrushes were there, also, standing upright in the middle of the road, and in the forest hylas were peeping, one of them a real champion for the loudness of his tone. How full of glory the place was, with the sunlight sifting through the bright leaves and flickering upon the shining birch trunks! If I were an artist, I think I would paint wood interiors.
My forenoon’s walk was ended. Another turn in the road, and I saw the carriage before me, the driver minding the horses, and the passengers’ seat vacant. The entomologists had gone into the woods looking for specimens, and there I joined them. They were in search of beetles, they said, and had no objection to my assistance; I had better look for decaying toadstools. This was easy work, I thought; but, as is always the way with my efforts at insect collecting, I could find nothing to the purpose. The best I could do was to bring mushrooms full of maggots (larvæ, the carrier of the cyanide and alcohol bottles called them), and what was desired was the beetles which the larvæ turned into. Once I announced a small spider, but the bottle-holder said, No, it was not a spider, but a mite; and there was no disputing an expert, who had published a list of Franconia spiders,—one hundred and forty-nine species! (She had wished very much for one more name, she told me, but her friend and assistant had remarked that the odd number would look more honest!) However, it is a poor sort of man who cannot enjoy the sight of another’s learning, and the exposure of his own ignorance. It was worth something to see a first-rate, thoroughly equipped “insectarian” at work and to hear her talk. I should have been proud even to hold one of her smaller phials, but they were all adjusted beyond the need, or even the comfortable possibility, of such assistance. There was nothing for it but to play the looker-on and listener. In that part I hope I was less of a failure.
The enthusiastic pursuit of special knowledge, persisted in year after year, is a phenomenon as well worth study as the song and nesting habits of a thrush or a sparrow; and I gladly put myself to school, not only this forenoon, but as often as I found the opportunity. One day my mentor told me that she hoped she had discovered a new flea! She kept, as I knew, a couple of pet deer-mice, and it seemed that some almost microscopic fleas had left them for a bunch of cotton wherein the mice were accustomed to roll themselves up in the daytime. These minute creatures the entomologist had pounced upon, clapped into a bottle, and sent off straightway to the American flea specialist, who lived somewhere in Alabama. In a few days she should hear from him, and perhaps, if the species were undescribed, there would be a flea named in her honor.[1]
Distinctions of that nature are almost every-day matters with her. How many species already bear her name she has never told me. I suspect they are so numerous and so frequent that she herself can hardly keep track of them. Think of the pleasure of walking about the earth and being able to say, as an insect chirps, “Listen! that is one of my species,—named after me, you know.” Such specific honors, I say, are common in her case,—common almost to satiety. But to have a genus named for her,—that was glory of a different rank, glory that can never fall to the same person but once; for generic names are unique. Once given, they are patented, as it were. They can never be used again—for genera, that is—in any branch of natural science. To our Franconia entomologist this honor came, by what seemed a poetic justice, in the Lepidoptera, the order in which she began her researches. Hers is a genus of moths. I trust they are not of the kind that “corrupt.”