There was no chill in the air which surged over the hilltop. It was soft and caressing, yet so cool that thick clothing or constant exercise was needed to keep warm. Its perfect dryness made it seem less cool than it really was. The sky was wonderfully blue, and it lent its marvelous color to the lake. I have a friend who says that March water is bluer than any other. It certainly carries its blueness straighter into the heart than any other, but as I looked at Chocorua Lake from the hilltop it seemed to me that it could not be any bluer than it was, framed in glossy pines on the one hand, and in golden brown and wine color on the other. The wind was rough with the lake this morning. Striking it suddenly at the far north end, near where my well-loved home stands silent and deserted in the old orchard, it darkened the clear blue into angry flaw-lines and hurried them down the long mile towards the bridge, against which it hurled them in white-capped waves. I laughed as I watched one of the white-edged squalls pass down the length of the lake, for it reminded me of a day in mid-winter when I attempted to cross the lake near its middle, carrying my pet owl “Puffy” perched upon my gun-barrel. A squall came over the white ice, bearing stinging snow-dust in its van; it caught Puffy from his perch and set him down upon the ice with feet helplessly spread, and then as he opened his wings and tail and struggled in the breeze, it spun him southward, sliding and rolling, poor wisp of feathers that he was, until he was landed, more dead than alive, in the woods on the southern shore.
The pines below my breezy hilltop tempted me by their music into their aisles. Under them was spread the new carpet of their needles, dry, warm, and tempting as a couch of eiderdown. The wind sang in their tops, oh so sweetly, and it took me back to the moment in my earliest childhood when I was first conscious of that soft, soothing music. I do not know when it was, nor where it was, nor how young I may have been, but I can recall as from an almost infinite distance the memory of a sudden feeling of happiness at hearing the voice of the pines, and knowing that it was something kind and soothing. If we are in tune with Nature, all her music can find a way into the heart and satisfy something there which yearns for it, and never can be wholly happy without it. The man who trembles at thunder is more to be pitied than the poor Esquimau who was frightened the other day by the crash of orchestral music at a Boston theatre.
While I listened to the pines a chickadee sang his phœbe-note. It was but once, but it told of his happiness as he bustled about in the dark pine wood from which warbler and vireo had departed, and upon which before many days the first snows of winter are to fall. Brave little titmice! they are among the sturdiest of New England’s sons.
In the heart of the pines stands a house. I well remember the gray autumn morning when three of us, on a Thanksgiving holiday, staked out its foundation lines in the thin snow and drifted leaves. We tramped back and forth among the trees, now higher, now lower, then a little to the left, then more to the right. The peak of Chocorua must clear those monster pines; that bunch of low pines must be left low enough to give a free view of the large lake, and finally the young trees rising on the left must not on any account cover the charming glimpse of the third lake with its grove. At last we settled the spot, and drove our first stakes, fingered the long brass tape and drove more stakes. Our hands, ears, and noses were cold, but it was rare sport settling just where that new home should be planted among the singing pines.
CHOCORUA AND DR. CHADWICK’S PINES
To this house, deserted like my own sunny cottage, I took my way. Ascending its steps, I stood within its lofty, granite-walled piazza, as romantic a spot, with its three arched openings facing westward, as a screened loggia overlooking fair Maggiore’s azure waves. High above and out of sight of the road, embowered in the forest, and with the very essence of the exquisite Chocorua landscape framed in its arches, this house might well attract me and draw me, even from the singing pines, to linger the rest of the forenoon above its terraces. Bees and locusts made music in the sunlight, flaming geraniums bloomed at the foot of the castle wall, the perfume of sweet peas still in full flower hung lightly in the air, and upon one of the stone columns of the arches, morning-glories, unharmed by the several frosts which had wrought havoc with other tender plants, turned their filmy blossoms towards the sun. Society with its present habits is to blame for the desertion of such a home as this on such a day as this, when Nature is at her loveliest. Why is it that all New England which has brains, money, or philanthropy thinks the city the one proper sphere for life in all save a few weeks given grudgingly to rest? The cities are too large, too rich in human forces. They are debasing our New England stock, draining away the best of our vitality in their too nervous life. If a third of their population could be sown into the fallow places in the hill country, their own competition would become a less fatal flame, and the country districts, instead of steadily degenerating in physical, moral, and intellectual tone, would again become prolific in healthy men and women.
So far as I know, the word “moor” is not applied to any part of our New England scenery; yet there are dry, comparatively treeless uplands, wind-swept and dotted with bogs which closely resemble English moorland. I climbed to the level of one early in the afternoon and strolled along its rough surface. At the first bit of bog that I struck a wood-frog jumped across the path. He was listless, and made but short leaps. When I followed him he plunged beneath a log which lay in the cold mud. Beyond, on dry ground, a grouse rose noisily from low cover and flew far before going out of sight. As I crossed some stony ground a mouse ran from me and hid between two boulders. Blocking both entrances to his hiding-place with my feet, I tilted one rock away from the other. The mouse darted first towards one of my feet and then towards the other. He dared not cross either, for I kept them moving. So he remained trembling in the middle. He was Hesperomys, the deer mouse, big-eyed and white-footed. I left him unharmed.
Following the edge of my moor, I came to a little glen which cut deeply into its side. A few acres of bog fed a little brook that passed through the glen on its way to the river. The ravine was heavily wooded, mainly with tall and unusually slender beeches. Descending into this grove was like entering the halo which the sunlight of Paris, shining through golden-tinted glass, casts around the tomb of Napoleon in the chapel of the Hôtel des Invalides. The rushing of the wind in the dry leaves filled the glen with sweet, soothing sounds; the sun warmed it and suffused it with radiance; and a deep bed of beech leaves gathered in a hollow offered a couch too tempting to be passed by. Every sense was gratified in this abode of music and color, for a faint perfume came from the leaves, telling of ripening and the fulfillment of nature’s purposes. At ease in the drifted leaves, I watched the tree-tops bending before the gusts. One moment the golden roof of foliage concealed the sky; the next, as every lofty head inclined, wide areas of distant ether appeared, only to vanish again under the rhythmic movement of the trees. The gusts kept the air well filled with falling, fluttering fragments of the golden roof. Hundreds of leaves were often in the air at once, parting company from hundreds of thousands still upon the branches, but going to join legions already on the ground, waiting there the soft tyranny of the snow.
In the midst of the beeches stood a lofty hemlock. The owner of this wood had chosen it for his castle. About thirty feet from the ground at a point where several limbs diverged from the main trunk a nest was securely fixed. Perhaps an inexperienced eye would have taken it for a bird’s nest. It may have been a bird’s nest originally. Now the mass of dead beech leaves heaped upon it and woven into its fabric, making it a conspicuous object from every point of view, proclaimed it to be the home of a gray squirrel. Winds may blow, and rain, hail, and snow fall, but that nest will rest secure against the hemlock’s trunk, under the thatched roof of hemlock branches. Early in September I found a new nest of this kind in a large beech-tree, and upon opening it made a discovery. The compressed green beech leaves gave out a strong, aromatic odor which I at once recognized as one of which I had often obtained whiffs in walking through the beech woods, but which I never had been able to assign to any flower or shrub.