TWILIGHT ON THE LAKE
The lake in summer is certain to be stirring with life. Insects upon and over the water, fish, frogs, birds, muskrats, and often large animals are in sight and moving both by day and by night. Now, as the waning sun grew pale behind the birches, no living creature moved. The yellow leaves drifted out upon the breeze, and kept on drifting across the ruffled water. Nothing cared where they drifted. They were dead, and just then all the world seemed full of falling, drifting leaves, with no one to notice them or care for them. Were they to blame for the feeling of sadness which crept over me as the sun went down and the first chill of night came into the air? Or was it the absence of those who might, had they been by the lake, have enjoyed the placid twilight with me? No lights gleamed behind the closed blinds of my home, no fire crackled upon the hearth. Those whom I loved were far away in the city. Leaves were falling in the city, birds had fled from it as well as from the mountains. Chilly night had fallen there too, and with it came, not the sweetness of clear streams and pine groves, but the foul breath of the Charles and of Alewife Brook, open sewers of filthy towns. No, it was not the sadness of the season or the influence of drifting leaves which cast a little shadow over my enjoyment of the exquisite scene before me. It was regret at being alone in its presence and of having to leave it so soon in favor of desk and drudgery.
At ten minutes past five, planets sparkled in the silvery sky, yet a mile away the colors of oaks and poplars still burned their way to me through the clear air. As I walked back to the hotel, I noticed more clearly the number of trees which had lost their leaves. By daylight they were inconspicuous, flanked and backed as they had been by evergreens and trees full of showy color. Now they reared their skeleton arms against the sky, making some parts of the way seem as desolate as in winter. Many of the goldenrods, asters, and immortelles contributed to the wintriness of the scene, for only dry white phantoms of their once cheerful flowers remained upon their stalks. The soft air with only a trace of cold in it belied these signs of winter, and so did the occasional note of a locust. From the little rustic bridge between the large and second lakes, the evening view of the mountains was bewitching. If a hermit thrush could have sung even one phrase of his holy music, I might have felt satisfied; but no bird was there to sing, and only the waves lapping upon the pebbles and the breeze sighing in the pines broke the silence of the starlit night. A leaf came sailing down the lake and passed under the bridge. Its little life as a green leaf was over. It had served the tree which bore it, and now its parched body was given to the stream to be borne away wherever wind and current decided. Was it, then, dead for all time? Ask this of the coal which glows in the grate, the oil which burns in the lamp, or the mayflower whose roots spread through the leaf mould in the forest. Where was this leaf a year ago, or a century ago? As certainly as the parts of this leaf have endured thus far, so certainly will they continue to endure in ages to come. It seems equally sure that if there is a something in me which will not and cannot in time be made into leaves to wither and go down-stream with the wind, then that something will necessarily have as good a chance as the leaf to go down a stream of its own and bring up safely where it can be used again in endless cycles.
The voices of young chickens awoke me next morning, and mingling with their melancholy peeping came the wailing of a northeast wind as it struggled through a window crack. Bed was warm and my watch said it was only six o’clock. I peeped through my blinds and saw that the piazza roof seemed to be shining with rain. Nothing but the momentum of a previous determination to open my shutters led my finger to press the snap and let the wind swing the blind from me; for by the dismal shining of the rain my mind had been completely robbed of any wish to see the sky. The blind slammed against the clapboards and a bewildering sea of color surged across my vision. Instead of a waste of gray mist and dull wet field, I saw six mountains set against a silver sky; and rolling from them towards me, line after line of wave-like wooded ridges and pasture slopes, each more brilliant in coloring than the last. The sunlight was just touching a solitary cloud which floated feather-like above Paugus, and a delicate sea-shell pink suffused it. Some of the same radiance fell upon the granite peak of Chocorua, floated over the highest ridges of spruce-hung Paugus and Passaconaway, warmed the naked shoulder of Whiteface, and touched even the dark head of the Sandwich Dome rising from the Pemigewasset forests. The flanks of these mountains and the whole of Mount Whittier, which rose in the southwest, were violet. A moment before they might have been dark purple, but now the rosy rays of dawn were stealing down them swiftly. I had scarcely time to note the wealth of suppressed color which lay upon the wave-like hills between me and the mountains, or to spring to my north window, fling its blinds wide open, and see the lake so ruffled by the wind and so hidden from the coming dawn as to be only the quicksilver side of the mirror, before the sunlight began creeping down the mountain-sides.
It is a pretty sight in the twilight or darkness to see a rosy edge of flame play along the margin of a sheet of burning paper, slowly devouring it. Some parts of the paper burn more brightly than others, but the whole line of advancing fire is beautiful and animating. So it was with the line of sunlight slowly passing from the rosy crests of the high mountains, downward, with even march across their flanks, their projecting spurs, then the nearer hills, the lake, and river hollow, and finally over the great reach of woods and field nearest to me. In summer nearly the whole of this wide landscape is green or grayish green. In winter it is white, grayish brown, and dark green. Early autumn dots the woods with vivid points of scarlet and gold which stand out sharply from the mass of green; but as the sunlight crept downward over this late October foliage the prevailing color, which glowed forth full of strength, warmth, and meaning, was red,—the red of dregs of wine, of iron rust, of sleek kine, of blood. Intermingled with it were bits of golden or of sulphur yellow, marking birches and poplars, and in the pastures a few maples late in turning blazed with fiery scarlet as their fellows had weeks earlier.
The warmest of the color came from the oaks, but the beeches supported them with generous pigments, and so did the masses of blackberry vines, choke-cherry and huckleberry bushes, and other small shrubs which had turned crimson, red, or madder-brown under the October sun. Sweet-fern bushes, brakes, ferns, pine needles, many of the grasses, and most of the fallen leaves constituting the greater part of the earth’s carpet, answered the sun’s greeting by showing broad expanses of brown, ranging from burnt umber to dark straw color.
Near the lake were many pines, and as the light reached them they seemed to grow higher, broader, nearer, and to shed into the surrounding air something of their steadfastness and strength. They change not, falter not, fail not, come what may to their deciduous neighbors. In this northern land they are a symbol of constancy and faith. No one can look at a pine-tree in winter without knowing that spring will come again in due time. The lake itself soon shared in the flood of color brought out by the sun. Most of its surface was ruffled by the breeze, but at points where the high pines sheltered the water and left it rippleless, the mountain-sides mirrored themselves, and the reflection was red like wine.
As the sun rose higher above the hill behind me, and cast its rays against the west, more and more from above, and less from a level, the colors in the landscape became less vivid, and leafless trees, birch trunks, and softer tints in general, blended with the maroons and browns, toning them down and flattening them, until the prevailing coloring on the mountain slopes became like the bloom on the cheek of a plum; and even the brighter, stronger tints in the nearer view grew softer and dimmer.
After breakfast I climbed the ridge behind the Chocorua House and sought a small beech grove on its crest. In the pasture one of the hawkweeds, two goldenrods, autumn buttercups, yarrow, the red and the white clover were still in bloom, sparingly, of course, and only in warm corners, but still clinging bravely to sunlight and life. Crickets and small green locusts were active and noisy. They frequented hollows in the pasture surface, where beech leaves had blown and lodged among the dry and matted fern fronds. Lying in one of these hollows, which made a warm dry cradle, I watched the locusts hopping from leaf to leaf, crawling along the warm faces of lichen-crusted boulders, and now and then working their bent legs up and down, while their fine, strident music fretted upon my ear. Some were green, some brown, both large and small, some almost buff, tiny, and very agile. They were not the only insects enjoying the sunlight, for spiders, house-flies, now and then a bee, small, gauzy-winged flies, and many a queer and, to me, nameless thing, with nervous antennæ, passed that way by wing or foot. At a spring in the woods where I drank of icy water, countless hosts of springtails or bristletails skipped, in sprightly humor, over the leaves and the surface of the pool. About noon I saw a dragonfly dart past, and later a solitary ant crawl slowly across a patch of sand. No butterflies came to me, yet they were still abundant in Cambridge.