In Hawthorne’s time this age of Homeric adventure had indeed passed from the port, yet Salem ships still sailed the seas, for in 1847, when he was dreaming of Hester Prynne, her preacher lover and her weird and satanic husband, as he bent over that old desk in the custom-house, 78 vessels cleared from Salem for foreign ports. So true it is that one’s eyes see only what they are fitted to see. All about the dreamer were the records of these mighty adventures told for the most part indeed in invoices and clearance papers, but also, one must believe, echoing in the traditions which his snug-harbored mariner confrères must have known, yet no story came from his pen that shows he felt the call of the sea to those keen, daring sea rovers on whose trail he camped. This was no loss to us, doubtless. We would not swap the “Scarlet Letter” for any tale that Stevenson told. Yet think what fancies would have taken shape in Stevenson’s brain out of the dusty ghosts that still linger in the nooks of the old custom-house!
More things than these are hidden away in Salem. The homing instinct of the old sailors brought back from the seas of all the earth thousands of strange relics which are still to be seen in the magnificent Peabody Academy of Science and in the Essex Institute, institutions free to all the world of which the city is justly proud. Yet the home-keeping instinct of those who remained behind was as strong, and the Salem homes of the days of the merchant princes still remain, in some cases much as they were a century and more ago. Now and then, within the uproar of a busy street one gets a glimpse over a high board fence of gardens of quaint beauty, the gravel walks bordered with prim box, the sward of a century green and smooth, and the hardy perennials that the old-time home-keepers loved and tended growing and blossoming there still, as beautiful and deep-rooted as were the lives of the Salem mothers that sent their sons forth to adventure on the seven seas while they waited and wove love and longing into the beds of garden bloom. The modern city has crowded these for long, yet the atmosphere of their brave beauty remains still and belongs with the square, patrician dignity of the houses.
In one of these gardens I glimpsed an oriole, flashing his tropic colors along the branches of a magnolia, now just in its wonder of white bloom. It was as if white patience of mother love had waited him there, a gay young wanderer from Surinam, where, very likely, he had spent the winter on an annual voyage. Gay and restless he was, and his mellow voice prattled no doubt of all the strange sights he had seen and the adventures he had met, while the fair tree enfolded him in her arms and worshiped him with the tender home perfume of mother love. It made me wonder a little, too, why Hawthorne missed the orioles in the Salem gardens which he must have seen each spring, and only birds of such somber colors flitted through the flowers of his fancy. But after all it was only one more proof that out of the inner eye come the colors of our thoughts, and that the inherited shadows of the witch-finding days must have dwelt deep in the soul of the Salem-born, Puritan-descended dreamer of weird and somber romances.
XII
VERMONT MAPLE SUGAR
Sap-Boiling Time in the Green Mountain State
At ten o’clock the sap began to tinkle all through the grove. In nearly eight hundred buckets it fell, drop by drop, and the sugar season had begun. It was late March, but from the snow to the sky the day had all the warmth and glow of June. The sun had been up since before six. By seven it was shining bright into the Southern Vermont valley which the Deerfield River has carved out of the everlasting hills that roll and rise till the cone of Haystack tips them, nearly four thousand feet above the sea level. Yet till ten o’clock the maples sulked.
More sap is boiled in this beautiful bowl-shaped valley of which Wilmington is the metropolis than in any other part of the State. Vermont makes four-fifths of the maple sugar that is made in New England, nearly half of what is made in the United States, and here if anywhere you may see the art practised in its perfection. There may be better sugar makers than C. S. Grimes, who has been at it for sixty years, but if so I do not know them. He began with the old-time black iron kettle, boiled in the open over a green wood fire. He has seen the business grow in the sugar house to the use of scientifically accurate evaporating pans where sap flows in a steady stream into one end and comes out syrup of a law-required density of eleven pounds to the gallon at the other, the whole working automatically; and in that time he has learned something of the whims of the maples themselves, though not all of them.
Much of the lore of the great gray trees he told me as we sat together on the broad doorstone of the little white farmhouse, steeping in the sun and looking down upon the peaceful valley and across to Haystack, hazed in the blue smoke of spring. Everything was ready. The spiles were driven and the white, pent-roofed pails hung. The wood-house end of the sugar house was full to the top of four-foot sticks ready for the boiling. Even the pan was full of sap, for there had been a slight run a week before. But the cold had shut down and the trees had quit. The morning before the thermometer had stood at zero and the sap in the pan was ice. So, no doubt, it was in the trees, and would be until the warmth had reached the heart of them. I learned more in the grove as the patient old horse drew the sled through a foot or two of old snow, and we gathered the crystal-clear sap from the buckets and poured it into the barrel, plodding from tree to tree. More still I got in the sugar house while the veteran fed the roaring fire and skimmed the scum from the boiling liquid as it flowed, an inch deep or so, along the winding channels, back and forth, sap at one end, syrup at the other.
The white men learned from the Indians the art of making maple sugar. In the “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,” published in 1684, we find the following: “The savages of Canada in the time that the sap rises in the maple make an incision in the tree by which it runs out. After they have evaporated eight pounds of the liquor there remains one pound as sweet and as much sugar as that which is got out of the canes. The savages here have practised this art longer than any now living among them remember.”
The white man has since brought the practice to a science. The art remains the same. How far back into the dim ages of the past it goes no man may tell.