Well, their absence, the fact of it once accepted, left me free-minded for the main object of my trip. I would go up the hill, over the grass, and take the prospect northward. A narrow depression, down which a brook trickled with a pleasant, companionable noise, as if it were talking to itself, afforded me shelter from the wind, and at the same time bounded my outlook on either side, as a frame bounds a picture. The hill fell away sharply to the water just beyond my feet, and up and down the inlet gulls were flying. Once, to my pleasure, two black-backed “coffin-bearers” passed, the only ones I was able to discover among the thousands of herring gulls that filled the air and the water, and crowded the sand-bars, the whole day long. Across the blue water were miles of brown marsh, and beyond the marsh rose wooded hills veiled with haze, the bright autumnal colors shining through. Crickets were still musical, buttercups and dandelions starred the turf, and once a yellow butterfly (Philodice) flitted near. The summer was gone, but here were some of its children to keep it remembered. Titlarks walked daintily about the grass, or balanced themselves upon the boulders, and once I turned my head just in time to see a marsh hawk sailing over the hill at my back, his white rump showing.
When I had left the hills behind me, and was again skirting the muddy flats, I found myself all at once near a few sandpipers,—a dozen, more or less, of white-rumps,—one with a foot dragging, one with a leg held up, and beside them a single red-back, or dunlin, staggering on one leg, the same bird, it seemed likely, that I had pitied a week ago. I pitied him still. Ornithology, studied under such conditions, was no longer the cheerful, exhilarating science to which I am accustomed. It was more like sociology.
Perhaps I am sentimental. If so, may I be forgiven. There is no man but has his weakness. The dunlin was nothing, I knew; one among thousands; a few ounces of flesh with feathers on it; what if he did suffer? It was none of my business. Why should I take other men’s amusements sadly? The bird was greatly inferior to the being who shot him; at least that is the commonly accepted theory; and the superior, as every one but an anarchist must admit, has the rights of superiority. And for all that, the dunlin seemed a pretty innocent, and I wished that he had two good legs. As for his being only one of thousands, so am I—and no very fine one either; but I shouldn’t like to be shot at from behind a wall; and when I have a toothache, the sense of my personal insignificance is of small use in dulling the pain. Poor dunlin!
I allowed myself two hours from the gate back to the railroad station, though it is less than an hour’s walk. Some of the fairest views are to be obtained from the road; and there, I told myself, I should be sheltered from the wind and could sit still at my ease. The first half of the distance, too, would take me between pleasant hedgerows, in which are many things worthy of a stroller’s notice.
For some time, indeed, I did little but stop and look behind. The marshes pulled me about: so level, so expansive, so richly brown, so pointed with haycocks (once, the notion taking me, I counted far enough to see that there were more than two hundred in sight), and so beautifully backed by the golden autumnal hills. I can see them yet, though I have nothing to say about them.
“The world lies east: how ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky!”
Trains of gulls went flying up the inlet as the tide went out. They live by the sea’s almanac as truly as the clam-diggers, two of whom I had watched, an hour before, sailing across the inlet in a rude boat (more picturesque by half than a gentleman’s yacht), and setting about their day’s work on a shoal newly uncovered. Thank Heaven, there are still some occupations that cannot be carried on in a factory.
The roadsides were bright with gay-colored fruits: barberries, thorn apples, Roxbury waxwork, and rose-hips. Of thorn bushes there were at least two kinds; one already bare-branched, with scattered small fruit; the other still in leaf, and loaded with gorgeous clusters of large red apples. More interesting to me than any of these were the frost grapes; familiar acquaintances of an Old Colony boyhood, but now grown to be strangers. They were shining black, ripe and juicy (of the size of peas), and if their sweetness failed to tempt the palate, that, for aught I know, may have been the eater’s fault rather than theirs. Why might not their quality be of a too excellent sort, beyond his too effeminate powers of appreciation? Is there any certainty that man’s taste is final in such matters? Was my own criticism of them anything more than a piece of unscientific, inconclusive impressionism?
Surely they were not without a tang. The most exacting mouth could not deny them individuality. I tried them, and retried them; but after all, they seemed most in place on the vines. To me, in the old days, they were known only as frost grapes. Others, it appears, have called them chicken grapes, possum grapes, and winter grapes. No doubt they find customers before the season is over. Thoreau should have liked them and praised them, but I do not recall them in his books. Probably they do not grow in Concord. They are of his kin, at all events, wildings of the wild. I wish I had brought a bunch or two home with me. In my present mood I believe they would “go to the spot.”
But if I was glad to see the frost grapes, I was gladder still to see a certain hickory tree. I was scarcely off the marsh before I came to it, and had hardly put my eye upon it before I said to myself (although so far as I could have specified, it looked like any other hickory; but there is a kind of knowledge, or half knowledge, that does not rest upon specifications), “There! That should be a bitternut tree.” Now the bitternut is not to be called a rarity, I am assured; but somehow I had never found it, notwithstanding I was a nut-gatherer in my youth, and have continued to be one to this day, an early taste for wild forage being one of the virtues that are seldom outgrown. Well, something distracted my attention just then, and I contented myself with putting a leaf and a handful of nuts into my pocket. Only on getting home did I crack one and find it bitter. Now, several days afterward, I have cracked another, and tested it more fully. The shell is extremely thin,—like a pecan nut’s for fragility,—and the meat, which is large and full, is both bitter and puckery, suggesting the brown inner partitions of a pecan shell, which the eater learns so carefully to avoid. In outward appearance the nut is a pig-nut pure and simple, the reader being supposed to be enough of a countryman to know that pig-nuts, like wild fruits in general, vary interminably in size, shape, and goodness.