No Indians are left in our part of the world; but here and there a family shows marked traces of Indian blood, as old Sile Taylor, beyond Watson’s Hill, a frowsy and hospitable patriarch, whose little black eyes twinkle with a kind of foxy kindliness. Though none dwell here, Indians come two or three times a year from the State Reservation, with snow-shoes, moccasins, and sweet-grass baskets to sell. They make a yearly pilgrimage to the seashore for the sweet-grass, which grows in the salt meadows at the mouths of a few rivers. They cut and dry it, and carry home many hundred pounds for the winter’s weaving. The Gabriel brothers, Joe and Bill, are regular visitors among us, enormous dark men, with that Indian habit of silence which implies not so much taciturnity, as a certain tranquil quality. Tranquillity and kindness seem to flow from the big brothers. They seem untroubled by any need of speech.
Then beyond Rattlesnake Hill there are the “Jingroes.” They are credited with being pure-blooded gipsies, and they certainly look it. I do not know whether they started with a definite Mr. and Mrs. Jingroe or not. The name is applied to the whole tribe. They live “over back,” in clearings in a wide belt of forest. They are perfectly indolent, but cheerful, and content with the most primitive farming.
Once in a while, when things go hard with them, they all set to work, and weave very good baskets, which they bring in town to sell. You are met at every street corner by handsome, dark-eyed Mrs. Jingroes, in kerchief and bright earrings, importuning every passer-by to buy a basket.
About once a year a gipsy caravan drives through our town, and stops in the street on its way. The slim, handsome barefooted children and their dark square-built mothers are all about. The women bustle from shop to shop, making small purchases, and pick up a little money by telling fortunes.
Once, when the gipsies camped in a rough pasture near town, one of the children died, and a touching deputation came, to ask permission (which was of course given) to bury it in the town cemetery.
Another time, as a caravan drove through the town, I noticed a girl lying at the back of one of the flimsy, covered wagons, so ill she seemed to be unconscious. She was a lovely creature, dark and pale, and her slim body swayed and shook with the shaking of the wheels. I wanted to call out to the drivers to stop, but the crazy caravan rattled away at a half-canter, and paid no attention.
Tresumpscott Pond lies in the midst of our most heavily forested district. There is no village or hamlet near it, but a handful of little farms, on tiny clearings or no clearings at all, are scattered through the woods.
The dwellers in these forest farms are not people of substance, like the farmers of the open country near them, but they are intelligent folk, and are rich in the treasure of a varied and interesting life. The men of the family are sure to have hunting coats and gaiters,—leather or canvas; good guns, which they keep well oiled and bright; and most of them keep a good fox hound or two, whose jubilant music may be heard as they range through the winter woods with their masters, or on independent hunting excursions. The boys begin by seven years old to have trapping enterprises of their own up the little quick forest brooks, and what looks to the ordinary person like the merest mossy runnel, hardly a brook at all, may be well known as a drinking-place of coons, or a haunt where sharp eyes may see a mink. They are sent out to gather thoroughwort, dill, dock, and other simples, and mosses and roots for the farm dyeing. (Cruttles, or crottles, the farm name for the dark moss growing on ash-trees, makes a fine yellow dye.) They know where to lie hidden at half past three in the morning on the chance of seeing a deer, and under which stretch of lily-pads is the best chance for a pickerel. And not only the boys: I know a girl on a farm, whose grown-up brother has such confidence in her marksmanship, that he will shake an apple-tree, while she nicks the falling apples with her rifle. They make use of a far greater number of wild plants than are known to the farmers of the more open country, as “greens,” cooking and eating young milk-weed stalks, shepherd’s purse, and the uncurling fronds of the Osmundas and other great ferns, which they call “fiddle-heads.”
They grow up sinewy and alert, under this eager life, and the best of them attain, beside their farm knowledge, to the undefinable huntsman’s knowledge, which sets its mark on a man. Their bearing is confident and fearless, and with it they have a certain forest quality on which it is hard to lay a finger. It is noticeable that the greater part of the families who cleave to this forest way of life are apt to be of dark complexion. It is a great pity that most of them can get so little schooling, but they have all been educated, since they were little, in a training which certainly develops and intensifies some of man’s best powers.