May live to work another day.
So it was that, like Christian of old, I suddenly decided to escape for my life from my city.
There were many reasons. It was a holiday. Then the sun rose on one of the most perfect days that ever dawned since the calendar was invented. Furthermore, there was the thought of a little cabin hidden in the heart of the pine barrens. So I ran away through snow-covered meadows and silent woods and past farmhouses that were old when this republic was first born, until my law offices and the city and the noise and the dust and the smoke were all behind the horizon.
An hour later I was following a little path that zigzagged back and forth through thickets of scrub oak and stiff rows of pitch pines. Above the trees was the rush of wings. The upper air was filled with the victorious sound of going that heartened David from the tops of the mulberry trees in that dread valley of Rephaim. Perhaps it was the wind; but why did not the tree-tops sway instead of standing in frozen rows? The sky above was the color of the eggs of the wood thrush, a tender blue faintly washed with white. As the sun rose higher and higher, the color deepened to that bluest of blues which burns in May under the breast of the brooding catbird. Filtered through frost, the sunlight shone, intensely bright but without heat. The air was full of the spicery of a million pine trees. With every breath it went tingling through my blood, carrying with it the joy of the open and the freedom of the barrens.
At last I came to the cabin. It is set on the very edge of the brownest, crookedest, sweetest stream in the world—the cedar-stained Rancocas. The wide porch overhangs the water, and over the doorway is a tiny horseshoe, which was dug out of the bog at Upper Mill, undoubtedly cast by some fairy steed. One whole side of the cabin is taken up by an arched fireplace built of brown and yellow and red sandstone, the only stone that can be found in the Barrens. Squat and curly, two massive andirons, hammered out of bog iron, stand among the ashes. They have a story all their own.
Five miles through the woods is Upper Mill, which is not a mill at all, but marks the place where, a century ago, one stood. The only occupied house there is a log cabin built of imperishable white-cedar logs in 1720, the date still showing on one of the logs. Charlie Rogers lives there alone. It used to be an old tavern on the cattle-road from Perth Amboy. Every now and then Charlie finds old coins, King George III pennies and farthings, and the rare New Jersey pennies which were coined only during two years, and which bear a plough and the old name of New Jersey—Nova Cæsarea. One day, when I was gossiping with Charlie, I told him that, if he took up the old dirt floor and sifted it through an ash-sifter during the long winter evenings, he might find a further store of rare coins. He took my advice, and the first treasure he uncovered was these andirons buried where once had been a hearth. Charlie gave them to me, and they hold up logs now as well as they did two hundred years ago.
As I slipped into a well-worn suit of khaki, all the worry of the month fell off my shoulders and rolled down the bank and was drowned in the golden water. Tucking a pair of field-glasses into one pocket and a package of lunch into the other, I started off on an exploring trip. In the barrens everywhere are paths that wind for miles in and out among the trees and along the edges of brooks and bogs. Who made them? Who keeps them open? No one knows. I have been able to follow a few of them out to the end. One leads to Ong’s Hat, a little clearing in the heart of the woods, where grows an enormous white-oak tree. A century and a half ago Ong, the Indian, lived there. One day he disappeared. Nothing was ever found except his blood-stained hat. Then there is the path that leads to Sheep-Pen Hill, where seven empty houses and a well stand deserted and alone. Others lead to Gum Sprung, which, being translated, means Gum-Tree Cove, and to Double Trouble and Mount Misery, where the rattlesnake den is, and Apple-Pie Hill, and Friendship, and a host of other places that I have not explored.
To-day I walked for miles and miles through stretches of low, gleaming pines and past pools set in golden sphagnum moss. The wind had died down, and the silence seeped in and carried with it the comfort of the wilderness. The first friend I met was a little bird that dived like a mouse into a pile of brush. I saw a brook, and hurried to it, knowing that if the bird were a winter wren it could not possibly keep from running along the edges of that brook. Sure enough, in a minute I saw it darting in and out of holes and with cocked tail curtsying on the stones. It is the next to the smallest of our five wrens—only the rare short-billed marsh wren is tinier.
To-day all through the tree-tops I heard the high-pitched tiny notes of that tiny bird, the golden-crowned kinglet. Its forked tail, striped head, and wing-bars are the field-marks by which it can be told in spite of its quick movements. It is the third smallest of all our birds: only the hummingbird and the short-billed marsh wren are smaller. Beyond the kinglet I heard the clicking alarm-notes and saw a flutter of the white skirts of a junco as it flew up ahead of me, showing its white tail-feathers, while in the woods a silver-and-blue bird sprang out of the bushes, for a wonder without a sound. It was the blue jay, which scolds and squalls all day long. Overhead, in spite of the bitter cold, the grim black buzzards, with their fringed wings and black-and-gray undersides, wheeled in the air, while the smaller crow flapped laboriously beneath them.
Near a stream I came upon a patch of the rare climbing fern, an evergreen fern which climbs like a vine and has flat, veined leaves that look like little green hands with four and five fingers. The stem is like drawn copper wire. Beyond the fern I met the pale-gray poison sumac, with its corpse-colored berries growing out from the sides of the twigs instead of from the end, as do the berries of the harmless varieties.