It is not always easy to get mamma to a picnic; but it is good for her, and for all the others, if she will go. She is apt to be anxious about rain, and is afraid of farmer Bell’s bull; and she should be allowed to go in an easy carriage. She also fears to take cold, and is mightily frightened at those crazy boats on the lake. But it is better for all parties if these fears are assuaged and she really goes. The change does her good, and she acts as a temporary restraint on the too volatile spirits of the party.
Another power hard to coerce is Statira, who is the head of the commissary department. Statira, cook and factotum, was brought up on the wrong side of a mullein-patch herself, and she is not in love with the country. She remembers the woods as a place where she went to look, in her youth, for recalcitrant cows; and in winter, how cold and bleak the woods were! Her present warm and cultivated kitchen, with stationary wash-tubs, is to her a far more agreeable spot. She hesitates, as the young people ask for her delicate apple-pies and her delicious cakes, “to cram into baskets,” to “eat out in the pasture,” as she sniffingly avers.
However, although Statira is a greater tyrant than Nero, the young people prevail, and the picnic gets started somehow. What a jolly hour is passed in driving through the still valley to the brow of yonder hill, which commands a view of the whole country! Then Susan, the thoughtful one, dreads lest the coffee-pot has been forgotten. Hurried search! The coffee-pot is found under a back seat. Happiness restored, the songs go on, and the murmuring pines and the hemlocks take up the wondrous tale.
Then the party arrive at the lake. The girls take off their hats. The winds play with the “tangles in Nerea’s hair.” The picnic is a nice opportunity for a pretty foot, a fine figure, and a splendid head of hair—so it is said. Then come rambles into the forest.
That is a pretty story of a nymph who appeared on the edge of a forest, but who disappeared as she was followed, until, at last, as her lover pursued her farther into the forest, he threw his arms about a white hawthorn-tree. It is the world’s earliest romance that the first courtship took place at a picnic. Roses and briers twine around lovers for ever, and the lotus and the buttercup tell the same story.
Picnics are healthy; but should be appropriately dressed. Balmoral boots, broad hats, and flannel dresses, warm, plain, and serviceable. A white Marseilles which will wash—percales and cambrics and ginghams will do; but no finery should be allowed. At Newport one may try the Watteau combination of brocade and satin, with fine old house, grounds, and trellised arcades. But at a country picnic Watteau dresses are out of place. Our climate is too fitful for safe picnicking, as we dread rain. In England they do not care, but lunch at Ascot, with the rain pouring into the champagne. But here we need to go prepared with aquiscutums and umbrellas, and a neighboring barn is well in the near distance.
It is a common want, this need of the confessional of Nature. We leave our morbid fancies, our discontents, in the bosom of our dear common mother, and we come back as cheerful as is the dappled deer. We like to go back to that idyllic spot where the race started.
In the spring certain natures get frisky, like the colts. One pasture will not hold them. We get tired of white man’s work. It was a true reading of the human heart which made the Greeks place Apollo with the shepherds of Admetus, and Jove stooping to the people of the hill-sides. “The populous all-loving solitude” of Nature draws us with a potent hand. Our houses are a false shell. Titania’s subjects will rebel. That rural solitude, which has no conventionality; that desert rock, against which the noisy wave of human folly breaks itself; the dense forest, where is sung the mighty hymn of the pines; the brow of the hill which the sun kisses last; the lone seashore; the distant heath; that cloud-shadow on the mountain—these are all necessary to us once a year. We must go once to “La roche qui pleure.” We must go where the forest-growths expand in all their strength and splendor. We must find the shyest wild flower, the most untamable vine. It is in the fable of Daphne that we read the deep significance, the poetry, the true meaning of our love of the picnic.
Who of us—comfortable and well housed—but has in some moment of nomadic instinct envied the tramp and the gypsy their life of chapleted ease, as they lie on the greensward, hugging dear mother Nature to their very bosoms? Who has not some wild, untamed blood in his veins—some fellowship for the Indian—some desire for the flitting caress of the passing breeze, or the somber greeting of the mountain shadow?