Now June is making the grass long about the little brown nests where the brown mother-bird sits so close, but the meadows are full of tinkling echoes of celestial music still. All the mountain world is rapturous with this same joy of something more than life which the bobolinks brought from on high in their songs, dancing and singing with it and tossing something of beauty skyward day and night. Round the margins of the bobolink meadows the apple trees have completed their adoration of bloom, the strewing of incense and purity of white petals down the wind, and now yearn skyward with tenderness of young leaves. The meadow violets smile bravely blue from shy nooks, and the snow that lingered so long on the slopes is born again in the gentler white of houstonias which frost the short grasses with star-dust bloom. All the heat of the dandelion suns that blaze in fiery constellations round the margins cannot melt away this lace-work of the houstonias, and it is not till the buttercups come, too, and focus the sun rays from their glazed petals of gold that the last frost of the season, that of the houstonia blooms, is melted away. Dearly as the bobolink loves his brown mate in the nest, the moist maze beneath the grass culms where he dines, and his swaying perch on the ferns that feather the meadow's edge, he, too, feels this upward impulse within him too strong to resist and continually flutters skyward, quivering with the joy of June and setting the air from hill to hill a-bubble with his song.
The bobolink meadows begin on the grassy levels between the Ellis and Wildcat rivers, the bottom land which forms the foothold of Jackson town, and they climb the mountains in all directions as do the summer visitors, scattering laughter and beauty as they go, till you hear the tinkle of the bobolink's song and find the beauty of meadow blooms in tiny nooks well up toward the very summits. Up here the shyest meadow birds and sweetest meadow flowers seem to love the rough rocks well and climb them by the route that the brooks take as they prattle down from the high springs. Up the very rivers they troop, and though they turn aside eagerly to the safer haven of the brook sides, they climb as well by way of the boulders that breast the roar of the bigger streams. The Wildcat River plunges right down into Jackson village by way of Jackson Falls, a thousand-foot slope over granite ledges worn smooth with flood, and mighty boulders scattered in bewildering confusion. In time of freshet this long incline is a welter of uproarious foam. This year a long spring drought has bared the rocks in many places, and one may climb the length of the falls as the stream comes down, from ledge to ledge and from boulder to boulder.
The Glen Ellis River at Jackson, New Hampshire, Thorn Mountain in the distance
The rush of the water drowns the warbling of the water-thrushes in the alders and viburnums on the banks, it drowns the cool melodies that the wood thrushes sing from the deep shade of the wooded slopes along the stream, but nothing has drowned the wild flowers that climb the falls by way of the ledges and boulders as the adventurous fisherman does. Why the whelming rush of freshets has not wiped them out of existence it is hard to say. There must be times each year when they are buried deep beneath the boiling foam, but there they cling this June and smile up in the sun and take the fresh scent of the churning waters as a strong basis for their perfumes. They knew the tricks of the perfumer's trade long before there were perfumers, and the moisture of the flood itself is their ambergris. Here the cranberry tree leans over the water and drops the white petals of the neutral blooms from its broad, flat cymes to go over one fall after another on their way to Ellis River and, later, the Saco. The gentle meadow-sweet dares far more than this. It grows from slender cracks in the face of perpendicular granite, and with but rocks and water for its roots thrives and bathes its serrate leaves in the spray. The mountain blueberries have set their feet in similar places and hang fascicles of white bells over the water for the more daring of the bumblebees that have their nests in the moss of the river banks.
Showiest and boldest of all is the rhodora which has taken possession of a rock island in midstream well up the falls. Here in a tangle of rock points and driftwood it grows in clumps and puts out its umbel clusters of richest rose, a mist of petals that seems to have caught and held one of the rainbow tints from the spray that dashes by the blooms on either side. Nor is even this, with its showy beauty that Emerson loved, the loveliest thing to be found growing out of granite in the very tumult of the waters. The blue violet is there, unseen from the bank but smiling shyly up to him who will clamber out to midstream, finding coigns of vantage down where even at low water the splash of spray sprinkles its pointed leaves and violet-blue flowers. Viola cucullata is common to all moist meadows and stream margins from Canada to the South, but nowhere does it bloom more cheerily and confidingly than in the midst of the rush and roar of Jackson Falls in these danger spots among the rocks. One clump I found in a square well of granite in the very wildest uproar, holding its sprays of bloom bravely up in a spot that at every freshet must be fairly whelmed with volumes of whirling icy water. How it holds this place at such times only the clinging, fibrous roots and the gray granite that they embrace can tell, but there it is, blooming as sweetly and contentedly as in any sheltered, grassy meadow in all the land.
Up from the bridge above Jackson Falls the road climbs by one bobolink meadow after another along the slope of Tin Mountain till it stops at the wide clearing on the higher shoulder of Thorn, which was once the Gerrish farm. Farm it is no longer, for the farmers are long gone. The jaw-post of the old well-sweep leans decrepitly over the well, which is choked with rubbish. The weight of winter snow and the rush of summer rain have long since broken through the roof of the old house and are steadily carrying it down into the earth from which it sprang. The chimney swifts have deserted the crumbled chimney, and the barn swallows no longer nest in the barn, last signs of the passing of a homestead, and even the phœbes have gone to newer habitations, but the broad acres are still strong in fertility and the grass grows lush and green on the gentle slopes. Down from Thorn summit and over from Tin the forest advances, but hesitatingly. It is as if it still had memory of the strokes of the pioneer's axe and did not yet dare an invasion of the land he marked off. It sends out skirmishers, plumed young knights of spruce and fir, scouts of white birch and yellow, of maple and beech, to spy out the land, and where these have found no enemy it is advancing, meaning to take peaceful possession, no doubt, for the wild cherries and berry bushes mingle with the old apple trees, and both hold out white blossom flags of truce.
Down the Wildcat River, over the brink of Jackson Falls, Moat Mountain in the distance
One wonders if the pioneer did not have an eye for mountain scenery as well as for strong, rich land, for from the very doorstone of the old house the glance sweeps a quarter of the horizon, scores of miles from one blue peak to another. At one's feet lies Jackson as if in a well among the hills, Eagle Mountain and Spruce and the ridges beyond dividing the valley of the Wildcat from the glen of Ellis River, yet not rising high enough to hide the peak of Wildcat Mountain, up between Carter and Pinkham notches. Iron Mountain rises on the left of Jackson, and beyond it the unnamed peaks of Rocky Branch Ridge lead the eye on to the snow still white in the ravines of the Presidential Range and Mount Washington looming in serene dignity to the northwest. One may climb thus far on Thorn Mountain by carriage if he will, or by motor car indeed, provided he has a good hill climber. The ascent is often made thus. But to get to the very summit, the point of the thorn, a footpath way leads up through the bars into the pioneer's pasture, onward and upward through the forest.