For an entire week, indeed, the weather had seemed to be trying to outdo itself. I remember in particular the day before Christmas. I rose long before daylight, crossed the Mystic River marshes as the dawn was beginning to break, and shortly after sunrise was on my way down the South Shore. Leaving the cars at Cohasset, I sauntered over the Jerusalem Road to Nantasket, spent a little while on the beach, and brought up at North Cohasset, where I was attracted by a lonesome-looking road running into the woods all by itself, with a guide-board marked "Turkey Hill." Why not accept the pleasing invitation, which seemed meant on purpose for just such an idle pedestrian as myself? As for Turkey Hill, I had never heard of it, and presumed it to be some uninteresting outlying hamlet. My concern, as a saunterer's ought always to be, was with the road itself, not with what might lie at the end of it. I did not discover my mistake till I had gone half a mile, more or less, when the road all at once turned sharply to the right and commenced ascending. Then it dawned upon me that Turkey Hill must be no other than the long, gradual, grassy slope at which I had already been looking from the railway station. The prospect of sea and land was beautiful; all the more so, perhaps, because of a thick autumnal haze. It might be called excellent Christmas weather, I said to myself, when a naturally prudent man, no longer young, could sit perched upon a fence rail at the top of a hill, drinking in the beauties of the landscape.
At the station, after my descent, I met a young man of the neighborhood. "Do you know why they call that Turkey Hill?" said I. "No, sir, I don't," he answered. I suggested that probably somebody had killed a wild turkey up there at some time or other. He looked politely incredulous. "I don't think there are any wild turkeys up there," said he; "I never saw any." He was not more than twenty-five years old, and the last Massachusetts turkey was killed on Mount Tom in 1847, so that I had no doubt he spoke the truth. Probably he took me for a simple-minded fellow, while I thought nothing worse of him than that he was one of those people, so numerous and at the same time so much to be pitied, who have never studied ornithology.
The 25th was warmer even than the 24th; and it, likewise, I spent upon the South Shore, though at a point somewhat farther inland, and in a town where I was not likely to lose myself, least of all in any out-of-the-way woodland road. In short, I spent Christmas on my native heath,—a not inappropriate word, by the bye, for a region so largely grown up to huckleberry bushes. "Holbrook's meadows," and "Norton pasture!"—the names are not to be found on any map, and will convey no meaning to my readers; but in my ears they awaken memories of many and many a sunny hour. On this holiday I revisited them both. Warm as it was, boys and girls were skating on the meadows (in spite of their name, these have been nothing but a pond for as long as I can remember), and I stood awhile by the old Ross cellar, watching their evolutions. How bright and cheery it was in the little sheltered clearing, with nothing in sight but the leafless woods and the ice-covered pond! "Shan't I take your coat?" the sun seemed to be asking. At my elbow stood a bunch of lilac bushes ("laylocks" they were probably called by the man who set them out [7]) that had blossomed freely in the summer. The house has been gone for these thirty years or more (alas! my sun must be rapidly declining when memory casts so long a shadow), but the bushes seem likely to hold their own for at least a century. They might have prompted a wise man to some wise reflections; but for myself, it must be acknowledged, I fell instead to thinking how many half days I had fished—and caught nothing, or next to nothing—along this same pleasant, willow-bordered shore.
In Norton pasture, an hour or two later, I made myself young again by putting a few checkerberries into my mouth; and in a small new clearing just over the brook ("Dyer's Run," this used to be called, but I fear the name is falling into forgetfulness) I stumbled upon a patch of some handsome evergreen shrub, which I saw at once to be a novelty. I took it for a member of the heath family, but it proved to belong with the hollies,—Ilex glabra, or ink-berry, a plant not to be found in the county where it is my present lot to botanize. So, even on my native heath, I had discovered something new.
The [flora] of a Massachusetts December is of necessity limited. Even in the month under review, singularly favorable as it was, I found but sixteen sorts of wild blossoms; a small number, surely, though perhaps larger by sixteen than the average reader would have guessed. The names of these hardy adventurers must by no means go unrecorded: shepherd's purse, wild pepper-grass, pansy, common chickweed (Stellaria media), mouse-ear chickweed (Cerastium viscosum), knawel, common mallow, witch-hazel, cinque-foil (Potentilla Norvegica,—not argentea, as I should certainly have expected), many-flowered aster, cone-flower, yarrow, two kinds of groundsel, fall dandelion, and jointweed. Six of these—mallow, cinque-foil, aster, cone-flower, fall dandelion, and jointweed—were noticed only at Nahant; and it is further to be said that the jointweed was found by a friend, not by myself, while the cone-flower was not in strictness a blossom; that is to say, its rays were well opened, making what in common parlance is called a flower, but the true florets were not yet perfected. Such [witch-hazel] blossoms as can be gathered in December are of course nothing but belated specimens. I remarked a few on the 2d, and again on the 10th; and on the afternoon of Christmas, happening to look into a hamamelis-tree, I saw what looked like a flower near the top. The tree was too small for climbing and almost too large for bending, but I managed to get it down; and sure enough, the bit of yellow was indeed a perfectly fresh blossom. How did it know I was to pass that way on Christmas afternoon, and by what sort of freemasonry did it attract my attention? I loved it and left it on the stalk, in the true Emersonian spirit, and here I do my little best to embalm its memory.
One of the [groundsels] (Senecio viscosus) is a recent immigrant from Europe, but has been thoroughly established in the Back Bay lands of Boston—where I now found it, in perfect condition, December 4th—for at least half a dozen years. In Gray's "Flora of North America" it is said to grow there and in the vicinity of Providence; but since that account was written it has made its appearance in Lowell, and probably in other places. It is a coarse-looking little plant, delighting to grow in pure gravel; but its blossoms are pretty, and now, with not another flower of any sort near it, it looked, as the homely phrase is, "as handsome as a picture." Its more generally distributed congener, Senecio vulgaris,—also a foreigner—is, next to the common chickweed, I should say, our very hardiest bloomer. At the beginning of the month it was in flower in an old garden in Melrose; and at Marblehead Neck a considerable patch of it was fairly yellow with blossoms all through December and January, and I know not how much longer. I saw no shepherd's purse after December 27th, but knawel was in flower as late as January 18th. The golden-rods, it will be observed, are absent altogether from my list; and the same would have been true of the [asters], but for a single plant. This, curiously enough, still bore five heads of tolerably fresh blossoms, after all its numberless companions, growing upon the same hillside, had succumbed to the frost.
Of my sixteen plants, exactly one half are species that have been introduced from Europe; six are members of the composite family; and if we omit the cone-flower, all but three of the entire number are simple whites and yellows. Two red flowers, the clover and the pimpernel, disappointed my search; but the blue hepatica would almost certainly have been found, had it come in my way to look for it.
Prettier even than the flowers, however, was the December greenness, especially of the humbler sorts: St. John's-wort, five-finger, the creeping [blackberries],—whose modest winter loveliness was never half appreciated,—herb-robert, corydalis, partridge-berry, checkerberry, wintergreen, rattlesnake-plantain, veronica, and linnæa, to say nothing of the ferns and mosses. Most refreshing of all, perhaps, was an occasional patch of bright green grass, like the one already spoken of, at Marblehead, or like one even brighter and prettier, which I visited more than once in Swampscott.
As I review what I have written, I am tempted to exclaim with Tennyson:—
"And was the day of my delight As pure and perfect as I say?"