Old Plymouth Trails

by Winthrop Packard

As the moon came up, gibbous and glowing, its beams seemed to skim into the darkness under the pines as a swallow flies, scaling along beneath the blackness of close-set plumes above, to light long aisles between the naked boles below. These that had been so invisible before that I had to find my way among them by the friendly leading of the path beneath my feet, now took on a radiance of their own. Green and brown no longer, they glowed with the witchery of the level light, their real colors only shining faintly through this transparent frosting, this veneer of cool fire, till the place was like those European salt caverns of which one reads where the dark roof is upheld by crystalline pillars that give ghostly reflections of the lights that the miners carry. Here, groping in the grotesque glow of their own lanterns might well come the gnomes of German tales although, so sweetly gentle is the light, I can think of them only as kindly goblins bent on quaint deeds of goodness.

Beyond the pines the path led me moonward through glades among deciduous trees, no doubt the abodes of elves. That may have been but a sphinx moth that flew down the path before me, his fat gray body silvered by the moonlight, his short, narrow wings beating so fast that they became but a gauzy nimbus about him, or it may have been Puck, training to put that girdle round about the earth in forty minutes. Here invisible creatures scurried away from a fairy ring whose flagging is of round pyrola leaves, lighted by ghostly white candelabras of the waxy blooms, field mice, very likely, or black beetles, or elves dancing in the moonlight about their queen. How am I to know which? Surely if elves dance anywhere it is on midsummer nights like this when the dew has clotted on all the leaves till they are pearled with a soft green fire as if from caverns under sea and I walk down the path through such caves and among such kelp and corals as a merman might. All about me I hear the stirring of the little people and now and then soft airs fanned from invisible wings touch my cheek. It may be moth, or bat, or tricksy Ariel for all I know or care, such glamour does the haunted air throw about him who will leave the brown earth behind and plunge in its silvery depths.

Pushing aside tapestries woven of such figures as these on a cloth of white silver, I stepped out of the wood on to the shore of the unruffled pond. Here a man might well pause and take no further step lest he fall into the blue depths of space. The moon hangs like a great shield in a sky of soft sapphire, piled with luminous figures. Within the wood are fairy and elf, goblin and gnome, half seen in the filmy light. Here giant genie stand revealed, passing in the dim perspective of mighty distances or leaning portentously from the radiant sky. In the mirror-like pond I see all these things repeated in an underworld that is as distinct and clear, yet strangely distorted. The miles of soft blue distance that stretch invitingly upward to the withdrawn stars of the zenith, stretch as soft and blue, but fearsomely deep beneath my feet to the nadir. Standing at the water's rim I am on the verge of a vast, deep gulf that no plummet might fathom, into which at another step I shall begin to fall, and once falling fall forever, for there is no bottom. It is all very well to say to one's self that an inch below the mirroring surface lies the good gray sand which was there by daylight. The midsummer moon is past the full and things are as they seem.

Rounding the Breakwater at Nantucket within the Call of the Old Lisbon Bell

By midnight the white genie of the sky had stalked off beyond the horizon out of sight. The moon that had been so great among them with its rim touching the eastern hills that it was like a great map of itself hung on the margining sky, had concentrated to a ball of white light near the zenith. Back in the wood I found the invisible little people out in full force, rustling, flitting and calling. But the white light had gone and under thick foliage of deciduous trees the real night had come again, dappled, indeed, by flecks of filtered moonlight which dazzled and made the shadows more obscure. In the depths of the pines the veritable darkness of Egypt smothered all sight. Here the path must be found by the feet alone, and it is singular what potency of understanding thrills up from the good brown earth through the boot-soles when it is needed. Every footpath is a shallow canal through which you flow as does water if you will but let it lead you. If the foot fall but a little to the right or left of the wonted spot some slight inequality of the earth that in the full daylight would never reach your senses, now sends definite messages to you. By it you swing with certainty to the right or the left and find the next footfall near enough within the narrow way to continue the guidance. No matter how winding the path, it will keep you within its borders if you will but give up your will to it.

Stepping from this Egyptian shadow of the pines to the full glare of midnight on the brow of the hill was like having a searchlight thrown on you. All things gleamed in a white radiance which had rainbow margins where the dew hung heaviest on nearby objects.

By day in this spot the eye is photographic and records every detail, by night you have the same story told again by the brush of an impressionist. It is the reverse with sounds. In the full glare of the sun the myriad voices of the world mingle in a clear roar that is a steady musical note, and soon you forget to hear it. By night each noise is individual, and leaves its impress on the mind. Whoever remembers the quality of noises he hears by day in the city, however great the uproar? Who can forget the soothing chirp of crickets in the grass at his feet by night?

Standing on a hilltop on such a midnight a man may map the watercourses, large and small, for miles around, though by day he can see from the same place no glint of water. Here is a deep lake of white fog which marks a marsh, and into it flow winding streams that are level with the treetops on the margin. Here the moon by night is distilling and vatting mountain dew from which all wild creatures may drink deep without fear of deleterious effects. It is the cup that cheers and does not inebriate. The waking robins tipple on it and sing the more joyously, nor is there in their midday any of the moroseness of reaction.