Pastoral Days; or, Memories of a New England Year

by W. Hamilton Gibson

Another jutting corner, and we confront a swaying mass of gold and purple—that magnificent regal combination of graceful golden-rod and asters that glorifies our autumn from September to the falling leaf. There are a number of species of golden-rod, varying as much in their intensity of color as in their time of bloom. The earliest appear in the heart of summer, in wood and meadow; while others, larger and more stately, lift up in their midst their plumy, undeveloped tips, and wait until their predecessors are old and gray ere they roll out their wreaths of gold. For weeks the roads and by-ways have been lit up with their brilliant glow, that parting sunset gleam that lingers with the closing year. This splendid cluster is full six feet in height, and towers above the highest rail, or rather where the rail ought to be, for it is lost from sight beneath a dense fret-work of prickly smilax—and such brilliant, polished leaves! how they glitter in the sun! almost as though wet with dew.

And to think how those prickly canes, denuded of their leaves, are sold upon our city thoroughfares as “Spanish rose-trees” to the unsuspecting passer-by! Those guileless venders, too! I remember one that sought to enrich my store of botanical knowledge by telling me they “bloomed in winter!” and had a flower as “big as a saucer,” and “kinder like a holy hawk!!!?” I looked him straight in the eye, but he was the picture of innocence. “Can you tell me the botanical name,” I asked. “Oh yes,” he glibly replied, “I think they call it the Rubus epistaxis.” Eheu! but this was too much, and he saw it, and with a wink of his foxy eye and a shrewd grin, he whispered along the palm of his hand, “Got to git a livin’ somehow, boss; now don’t give me away.” “Here you are, lady, Spanish roses, lady, fresh from the steamer.” I never see a thicket of green-brier without thinking of its “winter blossom;” and, by-the-way, did you ever notice a thicket of this shrub, what a defiant, arbitrary tyrant it is—shutting out the very life-breath and light of day from its encumbered victims, monopolizing everything within its power, and even reaching out for more with searching tips in mid-air, and a couple of greedy tendrils at every leaf? And did you ever notice along the road that delicious whiff that comes to you every now and then, that pungent breath of the sweet-fern? We get it now; the air is laden with it from the dark-green beds across the road. The sweet-fern, as I remember it, was the simpler’s panacea and the small boy’s joy—an aromatic shrub, whose inhaled fumes, together with its corn-silk rival, seem destined by an all-wise Providence as a preparatory tonic to the more ambitious fumigation of after-years. Many a time have I sat upon this bank and tried to imagine in my domestic product the racy flavor of the famed Havana!

Between old Aunt Huldy, with her mania for the simples, and the demand of the village boys, I wonder there is any of it left. But Aunt Huldy has long since died; all her “yarbs,” and “yarrer tea,” and “paowerful gud stimmilants” could not give her the lease of eternal earthly life which she said lurked in the “everlastin’ flaowers;” and after she had reached the age of one hundred and three, her tansy decoctions and boneset potions ceased in their efficacy—the feeble pulse grew feebler, and one winter’s eve, sitting in her rocker by her kettle and andirons, she fell into a deep sleep, from which she never awoke. Aunt Huldy was as strange and eccentric a character as one rarely meets in the walks of life. Some said she was crazy; others said she was a witch; but whatever she may have been, this aged dame was picturesque with her bent figure, her long white hair and scarlet hood. And who shall describe the ancient withered face that looked out from the shadow of that hood, the small gray eyes and heavy white eyebrows, the toothless jaws and receding lips, and massive chin that made its appalling ascent across the face? But I cannot describe that face: think of how a witch should look, and old Huldy’s features will rise up before you. She knew every herb that grew, but her great stand-by was “sweet-fern:” she smoked it, she chewed it, she drank it, and even wore a little bag of it around her neck, “to charm away the rheumatiz.”

Since her time, however, the sweet-fern has had a chance to recuperate, and, as far as we can see along the road, the banks are covered with it; and there’s a clump of teazles in its midst! I wonder if that old carding-mill still stands. You also, perhaps, will wonder what relation can exist between the two, that should make my thoughts jump half a mile at the sight of a roadside weed. But that old woollen-mill offered a premium on the extermination of one weed at least, for all the teasels of the neighborhood were required to keep its cloth brushes in thorough repair; but I fear its buzzing wheels are silent, for in olden times no such splendid clump as this could have remained to go to seed upon the highway. This old mill lies right upon our path, only a short walk down the road beyond. It nestles among a bower of willows in a picturesque ravine known as the “Devil’s Hollow”—an umbrageous, rocky glen, by far too cool and comfortable a place to justify the name it bears.

Following the road, we now descend into a long, low stretch, hedged in between two tall banks of alder, overtopped with interwoven tangles of clematis, with its cloudy autumn clusters—that graceful vine which, like the dandelion, is even more beautiful in death than in the fulness of its bloom. And so, indeed, are nearly all those plants whose final state is thus endowed by nature with feathery wings to lift them from the earth.

When has this swamp milk-weed by the roadside looked so fair as now, with its bursting pods and silky seeds—those little waifs thrown out upon the world with every passing breeze. How tenderly they seem to cling to the little cosy home where they have been so snugly cradled and protected; and see how they sail away, two or three together, loth to part, until some rude gust shall separate them forever.

And here’s the great spiny thistle, too, that armed highwayman with florid face and pompon in his cap. But he has had his day, and now we see him old and seedy; his spears are broken, and his silvery gray hairs are floating everywhere and glistening in the sun.

Now we leave the alders, and another roadside mosaic of rich color opens up before us, where the old half-wall fence, with its overtopping rails, is luminous with a crimson glow of ampelopsis. It covers all the stones for yards and yards; it swings from every jutting rail; it clambers up the tree trunks and envelops them in fire, and hangs its waving fringe from all the branches.