aJL. BESIDE LAKE BEAUTIFUL BY WILLIAM A. QUAYLE THE ABINGDON PRESS COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY WILLIAM A. QUAYLE oc / Contents PAGE THE JOY FOREVER, - - - - - 11 A GREAT WATER, 19 A SUMMER SEA, ----- 27 STAYING ON THE TOP OF THE WATER, 33 OUR PISCATORIAL ORIGIN, 45 OUR RIVER, - 53 THE SAND DUNES, ----- 73 THE RIVER MEADOW, - 87 THE LILY POND, 95 THE PINE FOREST, - - - - 101 FOLKS, - 107 WHERE WE SNUGGLE DOWN, - - 115 THE SILENT CHIMES, - 125 ANOTHER RIVER, ----- 135 THE LAKE MEADOW, ..,--- 157 5 CONTENTS PAGE DAYS OF IDLENESS, - - - 163 THE BELOVEDS, - - - . - - 167 GADDING ABOUT, - 171 MY BOATS, - 177 THE GAYLE, - 182 THE PRAIRIE, - 196 THE SNUG, - - - . - 202 THE PETREL, - * - - 206 SUMMER ANGER, 215 LAKE TERRIBLE, 225 LAKE BEAUTIFUL, - 237 Index to Pictures and Artists PAGE WHERE WE SNUGGLE DOWN.. . .Miss Smith. . Frontispiece THE BEECH WOODS Cable 13 OUR RIVER Parmenter . . . 15 "SUNSET AND EVENING STAR". . Harned 16 L\KE TERRIBLE Parmenter 17 WISTFUL Quayle 19 MEETING OF THE WATERS Parmenter 21 WAITING Quayle 23 IN PORT Cable . 25 THE GOOD-NIGHT Kiss Harned 27 THE Music OF THE WATERS. . . . Parmenter . . . 29 GYPSYING WITH THE WIND Hansen 30 THE SOLITARY VOYAGER Quayle 32 THE WISTFUL SUNSET Quayle 34 Two LOVERS OF THE RIVER .... Parmenter . . . 35 THE FOLDED OARS Quayle 36 THE WAITING OAR Quayle 39 SPRING WONDER Pilling 42 CAUGHT NAPPING Parmenter . . . 43 MAROONED Parmenter . . . 45 THE SINGING BOUGHS Hansen 47 SEA-BORN Smith 49 "WHISPERING HOPE" Parmenter . . . 51 THE LOITERING STREAM Parmenter. . . 53 UP STREAM . . Parmenter . . . 55 THE REEDS . . . .Parmenter . . , 57 INDEX TO PICTURES AND ARTISTS PAGE THE RUSHES Parmenter ... 59 SINGING TOWARD THE LAKE Hansen 60 THE GUARDSMEN Parmenter ... 63 LIKE SUNSET IN A LAND OF REEDS . . . Parmenter ... 65 THE IDYLL OF THE BRACKEN Pilling 67 WAITING FOR THE WINDS Parmenter. . . 69 THE DUNE GLORY Swarthout 71 A ROAD TO THE DUNES Quayle 73 THE CLOUDS AT ANCHOR Hansen 74 A SEA NOOK Hansen 76 DUNE DISTANCES Parmenter . . . 79 DUNE GRASSES Parmenter. . . 81 A DUNE CREST Parmenter ... 82 THE DUNE SWAMP Parmenter ... 83 A RIVER MEADOW Parmenter ... 85 NESTING TIME Parmenter. . . 87 A SUMMER GLORY Cable 89 GOD'S POETRY Parmenter ... 91 LOOKING FOR THE LILIES Hansen 93 THE LILY POND Quayle 95 TAKE No THOUGHT FOR THE MORROW. Cable 97 THE MURMUROUS PINES Miss Smith. . 99 LISTENING Parmenter . . . 101 LONELY Parmenter ... 102 A SOLITARY Parmenter. . . 103 LOVERS Parmenter. . . 104 WHERE TRILLIUMS BLOOM Pilling 105 FAREWELL TO CARE 107 THE HOUSE OF DREAMS Parmenter . . . 109 DAWDLING ON THE RIVER Parmenter. . . Ill THE BEND IN THE RIVER Parmenter ... 112 VIOLETS Pilling 113 NOSING AROUND Quayle 115 BUD-TIME Parmenter. . . 117 8 INDEX TO PICTURES AND ARTISTS PAGE THE THREE GRACES Parmenter ... 119 A SHADOW Parmenter ... 120 TOWARD THE LAND OF REST Hansen 123 THE CHIMES Powell 125 ISLANDED IN BEAUTY Hansen 127 THE VEILED SKIES Hansen 128 THE SOLACE OF THE WATERS Hansen 131 ONE OF GOD'S WILD FLOWERS Cable 133 SAILING TO THE RIVER Quayle 135 A LISTENING SHADOW Parmenter. . . 137 SOME SUMMER LAUGHTER Parmenter . . . 139 THE DAY STAR Pilling 140 IN GOD'S GARDEN Parmenter . . . 143 AN ETCHING OF NATURE Parmenter ... 145 LISTENING TO THE WATERS Parmenter. . . 146 THE SUNSHINE ROAD Pilling 149 ANOTHER RIVER Heeley 151 A SILHOUETTE OF SUMMER Parmenter. . . 152 LINGERING ON A SUNSET WATER Hansen 154 A ROAD SET TO Music Maywood. . . . 155 A PEACE TOKEN Parmenter . . . 157 GETTING HOME Lewis 159 A MAKER OF THE DUSK Parmenter ... 161 TIRED OUT Parmenter . . . 163 WHAT THE SKY LEANS ON Cable 165 A PLACE OF DREAMS Parmenter ... 167 A ROADWAY OF WINTER Cable 169 READY TO GAD ABOUT Quayle 171 ALL THE YEAR ROUND Parmenter ... 172 THE PIONEER Parmenter . . . 173 WIND-SWEPT Cable 175 A MORNING SKY Hansen 177 TRACERY Parmenter. . . 179 ENTHRONED Parmenter ... 181 INDEX TO PICTURES AND ARTISTS PAGE THE PRAIRIE Parmenter . . . 183 THE GAYLE Quayle 185 NATURE'S BOOKMARK Parmenter ... 186 REMOTE FROM STORM Parmenter . , . 189 LAKE BEAUTIFUL AT NOON Powell 191 SHADOW GRASSES Quayle 192 ALL READY Quayle 197 WAITING FOR THE BOY Quayle 198 SNOW-BOUND Pilling 199 THE SNUG Quayle 203 Do N'T HURRY Parmenter . . . 205 THE PETREL Quayle 207 ANCHORED Quayle 209 A HOME RUN Quayle 211 FRIENDS FOREVER Parmenter . . . 213 THE HEADLAND Maywood. ... 215 A WRACK OF STORM 217 "THERE is SORROW ON THE SEA" Pace 219 GOD 's SMILING Pilling 221 IT SNOWED LAST NIGHT Pilling 223 LATTICED WITH SNOW Cable 225 THE SNOW-BOUND WATER Cable 227 A CARNIVAL OF SNOW Cable 229 THE PINE FOREST 232 "O REST, YE BROTHER MARINERS" . . Cable 235 FOLDED WINGS Cable 238 FAREWELL . .Hansen. . . 240 The Joy Forever ON the east shore of one of Amer- The Joy ica's inland seas (which one is not Forever material) I have spent sundry summers, and if I set a-talking and grow garrulous, set it down not to age, but to love; for love and age are alike garrulous. Good things bear talk- ing of, and that right often. Did not Leonardo so frequently paint a smile upon the lips of those he loved to celebrate, as that this shadow of laughter has passed into the sayings of the world as the "smile of Leonardo?" Life's mercies will bear frequent celebration. There should be celebrated natal days for the visions and loveliness and heav- enly visitations of our hearts. Pack the 11 Beside Lake calendar full of birthdays of holy things, Beautiful anc j so make, by and by, each day an anniversary. I remember, with laughter, the rainy night on which, long ago, I began to read "The Fairie Queene," and a windy day when, blown by the untir- ing wind, I found upon the prairies Corn- well's poem, "The Whippoorwill;" and the afternoon when for the first time I lifted mine eyes unto the hills and saw the mountains build battlements of snow toward the sun; and the bewildering day when I first saw the pine trees in the Sierras and heard their haunting psalm- ody. Why, certes, these are birthdays to me, and shall be evermore; and if I were to take a calendar (as would be wiser than most I do) and inscribe thereon some glad event of soul, some revela- tional mood, some sacrament in religion or love or service or discovery of book or herohood where least I thought to find one, or poem that tuned the heart to new, sad music, or landscape beautiful with light or dusk or moonlight or caress of water and the vista of backward mov- 12 ing seas if I were to write over against each date some gladness it had brought into my life, each day in the year- long reckoning would be starred with some radiant memory. Such calendar is well worth anybody's making, inasmuch as it would give new data for thankfulness. How- ever, let this pass. I speak now of the lake with tilt of wave and music of it, of shore and dune and pine and mysti- fying lights upon the sunset waters and the windings of the river to meet the waiting am- plitude of horizonless waves. God's perpetuated mercy is that beauty is customary; but in some places beauties do as stars do in certain spaces of the skies they cluster. Be- side Lake Beautiful is such a spot. I have dwelt, in my time, 13 The Beech Woods Beside Lake beside many waters. As I am beside each, Beautiful I seem to love that most. No spot holds all. As when you hold one child upon your knee, that child is sweetest to you of your little brood; and when you hold another, that one seems dearest, too. So with the landscapes I have seen. Rivers are fair, so fair when you are beside them; and little lakes that blur a little area with their beauty; and hills of slight altitude with their fair sides undulating and with greens melting tint into tint and swaying from afar with sedate and stately motion ; or prairie lands billowing skyward with the wind as for that, all are fair. That is my heart's last word. I love them all. My pages of memory are sown to pic- tures which I humbly hope and pray my God will let me have when I have come to stay with Him in heaven: and I think He will. I must not forget this old home where all my schooldays have been passed and where I have met loves and mercies and sufferings and sore battles and hard-fought fights which 14 Beside Lake lifted up the shout of victory when the Beautiful fight was done. He who remembers is stocking up his life for eternal years, and can track his journey across the spaces by the album memory keeps. "Sunset and Evening Star" A Great Water BUT if you are going to the waters A Great for some sweaty summer days, this Water advice I give you: Go to a great water, where the waters can lose them- selves against the sky. The shoreless- ness will help you from yourself; and, be- sides, the trumpets of the great waters are louder than the trivial bugles of a lesser flood. They who live inland far from Wistful 19 Beside Lake the billow's accustomed beat, when they Beautiful go k es id e the waves, need to get in hearing of great waters whose warring voices shall deluge the long, dim coming year with fit- ful tumult of tremendous minstrelsy. Not that the lesser lakes have not their per- sonalities of grace which can nowhere be found but there! Each stream or lake has its own possession of beauty, like each woman's face. Who would have it otherwise? Not I, in any case. But I am beside a great lake, fronting its grass-green waves that swim out to the sky; and behind, rises a sand-dune, lifting to the elevation of a foothill and crowded with oak and beech and birch and cedars and pines, and aromatic with their mingled balsams; and beyond the hill a little lake in the confines of its pine-rimmed shores, catches the sky, with sunburnt noons and clouded mornings and gorgeous sunsettings; and miles away, through a woodland of stately Norway pines, is another lake, in which the lesser lake might be drowned a hundred times with scant compassion; 20 and far out on its sky-line there lift the A Great unspeakable lonelinesses of sand-dunes, Water flowerless as a waste of tossing waters and grassless as the unappeasable Sahara. Sand-cliff and pines and dunes of grass- grown or grassless yellow sands, and shining river drowsing to the wide open of the great lake, and baby lake, and lake in its teens, and then the grown lake,' unhorizoned like the sea these are our belongings who spend a summer beside Lake Beautiful. Waiting In Port A Summer Sea OUR cabin is not near the lake, but A Summer on the lake. This is a difference Sea not in words, but in meanings. To be on the lake is the pleasure paramount. So we are. Our front dooryard is the great expanse of waters. We have not fenced this dooryard, thinking it a trifle unman- nerly and unneighborly to do so civilized a thing; and, besides, it would be ex- pensive, and poor folks must be eco- nomical. And our front yard is so big Beside Lake that it would be like fencing in a field of Beautiful the blue sky. And in the winter when the waters put their rude shoulders, ar- mored in ice, against obstacles, puny hindrances crush up like flowers held in the hands of frantic wrath. We are here unfenced like the great plains when Coro- nado saw them first and wondered at them. The wide waters ! What a benefi- cence they are! How they shame our weariness to rest and our littleness to largeness! How their music sets the soul a-sobbing! How their night voices reach you, though you are a far wanderer in the misty land of dreams, and call to you as with voices of your half-forgotten yesterdays and bid you stumble back- ward through the black lanes of sleep to find the sunlight flashing on your pillow and flecking your face! The wide waters! Summer and the water and then your fins begin to sprout! I think that the original state of us all, when we had well gotten on in our evolution, was fishes. We breathed through gills: We scooted through the weeds on lake shore: We 28 neither needed nor wanted feet fins suf- A Summer ficed us: We ate our food uncooked: ^ ea We were brothers of the snapping turtle: We were easily fooled, biting at what was no meat for fishes: And now that we are evolved to men and women, we feel our origin on us and hie to the waters and practice, as it were, on ourselves im- paling our fishy kin on hooks, decoying them into the frying pan; and so are a race of cannibals eating our own kind. What barbarians we be! But who can be near the water without feeling his skin itch where the fins are incubating? Who can see the fluffy waters lift and fall without wanting to wade or souse or swim? There comes to be a swimmy motion in the walk such as sailors wear. Near water, we become part of the finny tribe. For my part, I can not keep out of the water when it is near. Not that I love cleanliness, though, after the manner of Jack Falstaff, my attempt is to live cleanly, as a nobleman should; but this gravitation to the lake and stream is not a passion for cleansing, but a passion for 29 The Music of the Waters Beside Lake aboriginal fishiness. Gypsying When I dive and With the Beautiful swim under the water, and my breath comes short and, like a turtle, I must come to the surface to breathe, I feel the defect of my evolution. I am moving backward. Aforetime, I dimly recall, I could sport with the porpoises and swim with the sharks and drink fresh water with the trout. And if I were in water long enough I could do the like again (I feel it in my fins). I have backslidden, that is clear. Environment is shingling off fins and scales until here I am only a land lubber who was meant for a catfish or a buffalo-fish. How are the mighty fallen ! Walking eleven months a year on asphalt pavements is not conducive to 30 Wind that jaunty and ecstatic motion which A Summer the fishes know. My vertebrae are jolty, ^ ea my fins are either eroded or, on my lower extremities (the reference is to my legs), are clubbed into feet. Small wonder I cut so sorry a figure in the water that the minnows even laugh out loud at my ungainliness. Atrophy, through disuse, is what the surgeons call my fishy malady. I fear it will not be mended till I am given a parish on the sea. Till then there really, in my conviction, is not any rea- sonable hope that I shall sprout fins or lose feet. Land lubbers can not grow such luxuries. But here, where the water winks at you through your window and makes a dash for you as soon as you walk through your door, I can not deny that where my fins were in the remem- bered state I feel the itch of growth and feel an almost irresistible tendency be- times to lie flat on the sandy road and try propelling myself by my invisible flippers. Should I be so overcome by my ancestral proclivities, some of the frivolous among the inhabitants will 31 Beside Lake sagely relate one to another, with a Beautiful solemn wagging of the pow, "Yes, yes, what a pity! He is insane: but I have been expecting it." Conventionalities forbid a return to ancestral type, more 's the pity. The Solitary Voyager Staying on the Top of the Water A a rule I stay on the top of the Staying on water, out of deference to my the Top of neighbors. Neighbors are exacting. the Water These summer neighbors are. I like it not, but must endure it. These people object to a man getting drowned in his own boat. I think that is exasperating. Why should a man own a boat if he may not be drowned in it? And, besides, does not the Declaration guarantee a man the right to liberty and the pursuit of happi- ness? This disinclination to let a man drown is a clear infringement on the rights of man. Once, in the face of public opinion, I tried this feat. The day was brave and the waters were ferocious. They were tempting above what is written. They shouted out at 33 Beside Lake me, "You dasn't, you dasn't, you ;" Beautiful and could a man, grown, take a dare? No, not and retain the spirit of a man; and so, with persistent endeavor, which suffered many things from many waves which swamped my boat and me repeat- edly, I at last, by portage, came into the river; and then with viking speed ran the gauntlet of the angry waters, much to my comfort, and by good sailorship running in the long troughs of the long waves, came out on the high seas. Where- upon it was my turn to shout, "Who dasn't? Aye, aye, Yeh!" The waves frothed and talked back with wild vocif- erations and gesticulations. They spoke words not in the dictionary. Talked of snobs and intruders, of " tender- foot " The Wistful Sunset and impertinence: but those trivialities touched me not. Was I not on the wagging crests of mad billows, and did not my boat sway with riot a transport of triumph, and did not the waves writhe and fling long arms of furious effort to engulf the boat and its fishy occupants, and did not the wind blow its wild- est, and did it not scorn to be quiet or leave the waters a mo- ment's peace? But those family difficulties were not my matter. I kept on my way and could not be mixed with the domestic fuss of wave and wind. I was swim- ming; and my fins were adum- brating. Arrah, there! And I was rowing against the wind, which was truly vicious; and what, with home troubles and my impertinence of trespassing on its imminent domain, the lake was really "nasty," and plunged its huge shoulder 35 Two Lovers of the Rioer Staying on the Top of the Water Beside Lake against my boat's prow and would not Beautiful j e t me g e t an oar's length to the forward : but I, being from the West, and some- thing of a schemer myself, and having grown from ladhood with prairie winds, knew a thing, and when the waters rose highest, urged thereto by the wind, I would scud along the quiet valley of the wave- trough, and laughed the outrageous wind to scorn when I met him on the wave crest again. Aye, but I thought the day a Marathon! I fear I boasted against both wind and water. I blush to think I might be so emboldened, but, fear me, I was. The flesh is weak, es- pecially fishy flesh ; and were my fins not fairly getting usable? And my laugh was redolent with success, I grant; and a spirit of Falstaffian boasting was on me: and on the plunging wave I laughed de- risively. The Bible has some sane re- marks on the haughty spirit coming into proximity with destruction. I should have had those words by heart ere I was boisterous in boast with the nettled wave. The Folded Howbeit, to hasten to the wet end of this Oars watery adventure, the wave crept upon Staying on me unawares like a cat and swamped my the Top of boat my boat and me filled my craft the Water so full of water that it ran over the top, which thing is not convenient for keep- ing on the top of riotous waters. The lad and I gracefully stepped out of the boat into the water. And the waves giggled and then roared, and were of- fensively personal in their hilarity. They would souse down on us as we swam gracefully (we did all things gracefully, be it observed), and frothed and bickered and swashed and fooled with the boat, and washed the oars out when I had put them in; for were not the oars and the boat my property? And could I not do as I would with mine own? But small sense of propriety had those jesting waves! They would come and decoy one oar one way, and, when I was swim- ming for that, another oar another way, and kept my blood circulating wildly: for I must not drift to the shore oarless. To be ducked in mad, wild water is no discredit, but not to have one's oars ready 37 Beside Lake for further propelling of the drenched Beautiful fo oa t t ne moment we came to land would reflect on one's seamanship. So I busied myself keeping the oars in the brave little boat I loved so much, and which was discreetly fond of me. And the nearer we drew to shore the more the waves were impertinent. They were grossly unmannerly. They would lift in sheer acclivities of cliff and frown over us and then bulge and, blurring the sky with angry churn of snow, would crash down and swallow us up, boat and boy and man, and set both oars gadding in inconvenient directions; and before I could gather the vagabonds, another wave would rage down on us, not in fun now, but spunky and, I thought, rather inclined to be mean sometimes; and then waves and waves and waves would drench us without a second's lull. But, withal, they did what they did not mean; and we were shrewd enough to know (for boat, boy, and man of us were shrewd, though waves and wind knew it not) they would do, namely, drift us wildly 38 shoreward. It beat rowing all to pieces. Staying on Rowing that morning had been arduous *he Top of business. My arms had grown vilely tired, though I never let on to the waves or winds; but I was sadly perspiring though sitting in my bathing suit, which is my nearest approach to being decol- lete : and when the waves took to rowing The Wailing Oar Beside Lake for me, who was I to suggest to them that Beautiful they were lackwits to do for nothing what I had been willing to pay good wages for? But so they shouldered us shoreward at a dead-run of speed. The boy and boat and I had our quiet laugh at their expense, but did it on the sly lest they should see us, which, unhappily, they did at last; and as we came into the surf near shore, they saw how we had fooled them and without a single flip of our fins had swam from far out on the surly lake to the surf, where we could almost jump to land, and how the boat, with never the propulsion of an oar, was almost at the landing, the waves, angry at being outwitted so, took to pulling us all out in the vicious undertow and ham- mering relentlessly wave on wave down on us till we \vere forced to breathe through our gills. But our spunk was up, too, and we held on our way, nettled at the interruption, but not diverted by it, and came to shore a trifle damp, be it conceded, but in hilarious frame and soaked not only with water, but with the 40 delight of battle with the cantankerous Staying on waters, and found our kind neighbors t ^ le Top * down to meet us and bent on believing * us drowned. We insisted we were not, made light of their gloomy forebodings, walked blithely up the drenched sands after hauling our boat up to rest and dry and getting the oars together ready for further business, as the occasion of- fered, but found some of our neighbors surly because they had thought we were drowned and we thought we were not, and others, of a more kindly frame, per- tinaciously insisting that we had no right to get drowned in our own boat. And the life-saver came in while the under- signed was eating his dinner and asked, "Where is that man that was drowned?" and I replied gleefully, "Here am I;" and he retreated, crestfallen. But what shall we say of the decay of liberty when in one's own conveyance he may not be drowned without stirring up objections among the neighbors? Among my sea- faring ancestors no such intrusions on personal rights were thought of. They 41 Beside Lake were all drowned and no objection of- Beautiful f e red, so far as we can discover on diligent inquiry. Marcus Brutus should be here, with his meek friend Cassius, to bemoan the passing of liberty. Spring Wonder Caught Napping Our Piscatorial Origin THAT man evolved from the fishes Our Pisca-. seems to me an elementary propo- torial Origin sition in evolution. Even the way- faring man must see that. We have be- come so skilled in tracing our descent, or rather ascent, from our curious and not always palatable ancestors that when once this piscatorial origin is mentioned, our minds will at once revert to a multitude of circumstances clearly supportive of the idea. Our simian ancestry must sink or swim with this theory. Our interior and exterior confirm this hypothesis. Why has science been so dilatory in seeing that when we attempt to trace our ascent through land-lubber animals we are hope- 45 Marooned Beside Lake lessly misled; but the moment we begin Beautiful to swim for our ancestry we can catch its fin and have safe sailing. Do we not speak of people being slippery? What is this but a survival of the time when we were nothing else? So viewed, being slippery is not a vice, but a primitive, though aqueous, virtue. Who that has handled fish recently impaled, and now en route from hook to boat, but may testify that slipperiness is a method of survival? We must change front from our unkind mood toward slippery folk. They are really the aboriginally virtuous. When once we light on the true hypothesis of origin, how convincingly clear does everything become. Volatility is not a vice; far away from it. It is an an- cestral virtue. We must slip to live. Back-sliding, in this true view, becomes a virtue. Woe to those theologians who have looked on it as a sin ! They are not modern. When once the true evolu- tionary and advanced thought is grasped, all those puerilities of blame vanish. The vain man, stuffed with promises and 46 slender in executions, has been blamed, Our Pisca- nay, vilified. I grieve to think of the torial Origin opprobrious epithets so good a man as myself has heaped on such as have prom- ised to return the money they borrowed of me and have even set the day when I, poor expectant, have waited for their appearance as the sick for the coming of the day, but not with as safe and sure results. For after the longest night, day gets here, sometimes sorely bedraggled and outrageously late, but comes with absolute certainty. Not so my debtor. I wait: he tarries. He is tarrying yet. And in my blindness, not knowing ori- gins, I thought him criminal, when lo! having seen that he once was a fish, this 47 The Singing Boughs Beside Lake slippery trick is solid virtue. It is the Beautiful virtue of the fathers. And what are liars but persons slippery in statement, men (or women) to whom former utter- ances have no binding character, persons whose feet slip from one statement to another, as one who walks on the sea- weed rocks of the ocean? The original safety of the fishy ancestor was just here. You could not locate him. He was versa- tile, and, so, unhampered. Praises be to the liar. He has been misprized long enough. The doctrine of evolution firmly grasped, the liar becomes the sure reliance of society. He is not to be condemned, but commended. Let those who slur Falstaff be humble in apologies. That good knight was the very fat of virtue. He was virtue grown obese. Then, how are we to account for the gullibility of mankind save on this fishy hypothesis? Foolish science has tripped and fallen. Here is the truth after which your Bacons and Spencers have clutched. Would they could have seen this revolutionary hypothesis and have rejoiced! Fish bite 48 without looking. Spoons, hooks, even Our Pisca- strings with no semblance of any real torial Origin attractiveness in edibles they bite at all. So mortals are. You can fool them with any spoon. You do not need a hook. You need nothing to make mention of. Simply suggest a thought and they will bite. I have no mood to boast, but in self-respect feel that I have hit on the explanatory clause of the entire set of human particulars. Fish we were and fishy we are, and the mystery of life is at last, and by me, reduced to simplicity. So much for dwelling in the neighbor- hood of the waters. Sea-born "Whispering Hope" I *ra Our River AND close by where we cabin is a Our River river emptying into Lake Beautiful. Wherever this word river is pro- nounced, a doorway of indefinite poetry has been opened to all such as love our world for its own sake. Such as are Grad- grinds will inquire: "Is it navigable?" "Are the bottoms wide, or are the banks high and climb straight up from the river and so exclude farming?" "Is the soil favorable' for the growth of corn or, better, for potatoes? " A series of such questions will the businessy person ask. But such simple questions are not for those who love the outdoors. To them a river means beauty just as sunsets do. Farm- ing will look after itself because it is The Loitering 53 Stream U-i Beside Lake lucrative: but plain beauty can not be Beautiful gold and has no mar k e t value. But a river may run anywhere in wild water- falls, roving through thickets dusky at noons, feeling for ledges with gusto as boys to turn somersaults, or babbling among pebbles or getting lost in marshes or taking wild detours around thousands of acres of farmed fields or bearing traffic, effortless, on its wide breast or hugging dark bases of bleak rocks where not one lone flower can find hospitality of rootage or bloom whether the stream be little or big, whether called creek or river, whether covered with laborious barge, commerce-laden, or beautified with row boat and canoe, what matters? The stream is fair as a human face and loved of those who love the beautiful. On a day sweet with sunlight and abundant in meadow-breath and tender passing of the wind, I set out in an indian canoe up the windings of our streams. My ship was poetry; for who has seen an indian canoe knows it is the one thing that race has handed to posterity as a memento 54 of its sojourn in this blessed land. I love to sit and watch its shadow in the water: for a swan-shadow is no more graceful. The exquisite prow, the bulge of side, the swift narrowing toward the prow again; for in the canoe there is no stern, as to a boat. Both ends are two prows that stand ready to cut the river into waves that run indian-footed shore- ward with much delight. Our River Up Stream Beside Lake A touch and this boat shivers either Beautiful way. It is a boat contrived for indolence, and by it. You need never to reverse it nor make superfluous motion. On the quiet water, tilting to a breath or touch of hand, uncertain as he who was its architect, the canoe is ready for the voyage. And because it is so light, so easy of portage, so skilled to sleuth the windings of the shore and vagaries of the current, and because it was a craft in- digenous to these waters before Pere Marquette walked along these dunes with wondering eyes of discovery, and because it is fairy-fleet and answers with such swift grace to a touch of paddle on the stream for such reasons I take the canoe. I cross the little lake which holds the river for a moment before it swims into the lost wastes of the great lake, slow along shores grown to sagging rank grasses, where haymakers swing sickle amongst these lush grasses, whose roots are in the river and whose meadows give to the foot of the mower as he swings his sweaty scythe along, and the sweet scent 56 The Reeds of hay, new-mown hay, comes to me re- Our River juvinant of memories of many years; and I ply my solitary oar in leisure fashion, being in no hurry : for the day is long, the sun is sweet, the rushes grow beside the stream, the blue flowers fluff to the wind, the weeds tangle around the canoe keel, the ripple behind the canoe is like the smile of the river, gladdening to the eyes, no haste, only happy leisure, and the river shining toward the hills. A day and a river and a canoe! And the stream in this widened part has no current to feel or see. It drowses like a laggard sail. The surface is glass to throw back shadow 59 The Rushes If Beside Lake of leaning flag and silent boat and tree Beautiful growing close against the river brim. Turtles are shining in the sun on logs everywhere. They get the summer through their spinal columns. When the canoe draws near they souse off into the stream making many ripples. Swallows undulate from far up in the blue sky to so close against the river's brim as at distant times to cut the water into a ripple with tilted wing, and the stream bends amongst water lilies, whose pads glisten as made of metal instead of veg- etable fiber. What is there among grow- ing things so full of sense of quiet as a lily pad recumbent on the water with indolent ease, or sometime fluffed up and half folded where some wind has turned down a page in this nature book, and the lilies float white boats at ease on sleepy stream? When did our God con- ceive a thing more fair, or how could He? And the canoe trails through these close- grown lily pads and turns the lily flowers Singing aside to make passage for me who am Toward going "upward with the flood." And the Lake 60 m when the water narrows to the river's Our River proper bed, then the current becomes visible and is always delicious. The sight of water bent on coming to the sea from w r hich it lifted long ago on the wings of the sun is sunny to the heart, and here the river grows neighborly of bank and the water flows deep and noiselessly, mak- ing no whispers, but full of light and speed, and hasting whither it knows, and keeping its current at the stream-center, so that the canoe must thrust hard to keep on its appointed way. Slight as canoe resistance is, resist it does when the current runs, noiseless and swift. Onward we go. The canoe is full of delight as we are, the stream and I. We say nothing, but sit smiling, all of us, like happy hearts. The whole sky is bathed in glo- rious light. The clouds are vanished. The sun has his way with the world this day, and the world is rapturous. My canoe slips on at the paddle-stroke. I am in no haste ; but it is good to feel the forward of the craft at my touch, and the river is out- ward and we are upward, so we must, this 61 Beside Lake boat and I, in common self-respect, hold Beautiful O n our way, while the hills approach where the surly beeches grow and the whispering birches, and on the ridge, pines silhouette against the vivid blue sky, and the banks narrow and the current shallows and runs fast and the river makes sudden turns, so that sometimes I can reach my paddle across the green ribband of lush grasses and touch the stream I have just sailed over from the stream I am sailing on; and the joy is great to the point of song. The grasses droop heavily into the water, and the waters run deep under the matted, leaning grasses, making pools of shadow and enticing quiet, and the shallowing stream makes its current run zigzag from shore to shore of the channel, and grows so shallow that the canoe must do the like lest it ground ; and we watch the cur- rent and turn with a jiffy motion to catch where the channel is deepest so we may not ground, which sometimes we do, and must pry with the paddle to unmoor us from the sands; and on we go, upward to- ward the sources of the river. And coming 62 BB to a bridge built low against the water, I Our River portage the canoe and dip in afresh and go laughing up the shining stream; and a trout brook comes babbling in from a ravine tangled with low-set trees and oc- casional pines and broken tree-stems, and on where the meadow broadens and cattle feed and the stream widens and shallows to my undoing, and pools stand betimes hip-deep to a grown man and the waters "Like Sunset 65 in a Land of Reeds' \m ' Beside Lake have grown talkative and sing snatches of Beautiful ^appy songs, and iron-weeds of a lilac hue gather in patches like some lilac gar- den, and the wild bees are garrulous, and the stream goes on and on. A cornfield tilts against the hill, and the owner is down in his pasture cutting nettles glow- ing with bloom; and he knows not the name of any flower that strews the field; and the canoe can go no further, and I haul it to a bit of grass for it to rest ; and I go up-stream on foot, but not alone. The river goes with me, laughing that I am afoot, and the ripples widen sometime and narrow at other times, and a log runs across the stream, one of nature's foot- bridges, and I, essaying to cross, find its other end sags, and I souse into a pool deeper than it looked ; but the water snig- gered at me and I at myself; and we were both glad. This is part of the poetry of the river. And a bridge casts shadow on the river it crosses, and a phcebe builds her house on the beam by the rocks, and the stream goes upward and I with it; and the meadows recede and then draw 66 near, and the river melts to a rill and the Our River beauty wastes not, though the river does ; and I wander along the banks and sit on green cushions of grass and lounge where a tree casts restful shadow, and at last, come to think of it, that home is far away, and the day has long past its noon and the shadows are lengthening, and the canoe far below must be lonesome and think I am lost, and down-river I begin to lag and chase the butterflies and wade the shallow stream and prod the pools to see the little fishes fly like sudden shuttles to and fro, and the wide sky is full of wonder and the river is lakeward bound, and the canoe and I are with the river. 69 Waiting for the Winds Beside Lake And down with the coming of the night Beautiful j paddle till I reach the winding river on the lake, with the bluebells growing low against the water and shining their tender blue as of a baby's eyes into the limpid river waters. And the crests of dark pines gloom on high and a canoe to row me into the setting of the sun! How can I hinder my goings at such an hour on such a place till I have glided out of the quiet river into the sea of the lake, where the swell from afar makes my pulse leap with a beat of pinion like an eagle's? O river! flow across my heart's meadow- field all my life's day, nor cease thy flow- ing at life's eventide. Flow, flow. 7U The Sand Dunes AID sand dunes! They are deserts The Sand intruding on the habitable world. Dunes They have not many equals for loneliness, desolation, bereftness which knows no comfort, and isolation which can never be overcome. Dunes are loneliness made majestic. Near our cabin, and front- ing for miles along Lake Beautiful, are the stretching sand dunes and grasses and hummocks and pools of pines. You can never weary of them if you learn to love them. They hold you with strange te- 73 A Road to the Dunes Beside Lake nacity. I dream of them and long for Beautiful them through the year when absent from them. They clutch the spirit. They are resultants of the wave and wind, the up- casts of the storm and the steady, in- sistent wind-drift. At one point along our coast is a sand-cliff cut to a roadway by the drift of wind from lake to lake; and to watch the sand-cloud through this roadway for the winds is to see the wind a-blowing. In the thing is something eerie, as if spirit passed into visibility. The Clouds at Anchor But miles on miles in a huge peninsula The Sand are the piled dunes, with their interven- Dunes ing valleys. Sometimes they are as naked as the sea, not one wisp of grass, not an adventurous pine, not a trail of grape- vine, nothing only the drift of sands, how- soever calm the day, spits in your face in spleen. Some are crested of grapevines, which sprawl in all their wild tracery of beauti- ful leaf and tendril or fruit green as em- erald or black as drops of rain at night, but such a wreath as conquerors might rejoice to wear about their warrior fore- heads. What taught these vines meant for clambering the ramparts of tall trees to be content on these dune crests I know not; but they crown the surly sand with such a profusion of loveliness as that the wandering winds are glad to freight them with the thrilling odor of grape blos- soms or dawdle when the clusters of grapes entice the bee and butterfly to sip their uninebriating wine. Sometimes between the dunes are meadows of lake grasses, pools cut off from the wide lake 75 Beside Lake by the drift of sand, but with water Beautiful enough to court the growing swamp things to come and stay. Sometimes in between high dunes are groups of pines, huddled close together like moose in win- ter quarters ; and to lie on the dull sands, sung to of these huddled pines, makes concert of loneliness not often equaled in the earth. Sometimes dune grasses grow, shining like steel swords, whipped with the wind and circumscribing a circumfer- ence with the sword-point as it s\vings round on its facile wrist. To see this at- tempt at putting some memorial of itself upon the earth is pitiful, and but adds to the dim loneliness of this dune region. And these shining grasses climb when they move to the dune-top, venturesome they are and full of aspiring, but sometimes the waves of sand drown them utterly, as they do pine trees, and leave only a withered trunk of pine or blade of grass to whistle to the wind. Desolation has rude sway in these peninsulas of sand. But, few things do I love more. Melan- 76 A Sea Nook choly is poured into our blood. We have Th e s a nd a passion for it, and shall have evermore. Dunes Long mile on mile of desolation. No one can inhabit this shifting waste save the pines, and they not always. Forests of them have been choked to death by the gripping fingers of the sand. No inhab- itant shall, through the long coming years, do other than pitch passing camp here for a night. You can not plow this waste, it wedges down and up in such rude fashion. No house shall plant its home- light here. The wild winds shall be ma- rauders here forever, and the curlew's call shall fringe the Lake with sadness, and the moan of winds inured to tempests shall lift the sands to mist like drifting snows and pile new dunes and lift new sand-cliffs whence the winds may plunge down into dune valleys and their pools of pines. To stand on summer days and look far off and see rehearsals of loneli- ness, sad, uninterrupted, save by the washing of our inland sea, watch the yel- low desert peaks of dune pursuing dune, 77 Beside Lake fl as h in the sun, and at the last front the Beautiful geaj tm - s is epochal to a soul. And these sand-heaps, from their formation, can se- crete forests with never a sigh of effort. No travel is more deceptive than this dune travel. You think it is a stone's-cast to the shining pool of the great Lake, and will walk for hours before you reach its refreshment of waters answering to the wind. Wedge-shaped enclosures have thick-grown forests of pine and cedar and beech, shut off from the world, islanded in this desert sand, making oases of sing- ing and lament and grim determinateness to hold this hard-fought fight against the wickedness of sand and wind. There gloom the dusks at noon. There moan the wintry seas at summer's prime; there comes the early night unpenetrated by the light of any star. There the owl hoots and the bitterns cry and the swift eagles nest. Long lunges of grim sand, tossed into billows which will not tarry and can not rest, and resent yet ever carry desolation in their heart and hold their world back from the encroachment 78 of mankind. Some place, so long as these T ne Sand dunes endure, will be unhurt of human Dunes presence and set apart for lasting solitude and silence and the unmarred earth. And to watch the dunes from a boat tossing out on the lonely water does but accentuate their quality, so that their bleak loneliness has scarcely any com- panion in all this world. I do not know a scene so sundered from gladness as this stretch of sand shifting to the wind or anchored feebly by the anchors of the dune-grasses that swish in an eerie music Dune Grasses Beside Lake to the wind which never quite sleeps on Beautiful those long reaches. To see these dunes I think worth a passage across a continent. I know not any so extensive and so be- reft of inhabitants. They transport you in a moment into the dim deserts remote from men. Not even the sea gives a more compelling sense of remoteness. On these dunes which stretch for miles to the A Dune Crest northward and westward and then crum- The Sand pie around to the northward and east- Dunes ward, the first stretch a white- tawn of slowly-lifting shore-sands thrust at the last into miniature peaks of vine-grown cliff or pine-crowned acclivity, the second a bleak assemblage of hills of sands that answer to the lake-wind's faintest sum- mons and trample dune after dune like a troop of lonely folks to a funeral. And the pines are here sentineling the cliff- edge of the sand-ledge or wading down deep into the wedge-shaped ravines of far sand-dunes, or protruding at the prow of some hill leaning toward lake or river. 83 The Dune Swamp The River Meadow A "'ID down on the river about a The River hundred boat lengths from the Meadow river-mouth, lies a river meadow, not marshland with marsh grasses and birds and kersloshings of the steps and sometimes kersousing of the body, to come up dripping and laughing, but lifted just enough to wet the bottom of the naked foot in the walking, and sown to grass and blackberry and raspberry- vines and dogwood and nest-places for birds and sweet and tangy with wild strawberries. To walk across this strip of green is as if a body were walking on wings. To set foot on this spongy heath is fun, so that you walk to rest yourself from walking. All wild things grow there, even laughter 87 Nesting Time Beside Lake and sun-up. To resist this meadow is Beautiful we ll- n igh impossible. I know its every hole where you break through ground to river, every vine-tangle and ingle-nook, every rise and fall of ground, every hum- mock where a sheep might nibble or a killdeer build a nest, but none the less I am servant of the place. I can hardly row or drift past it. It hath its way with my boat and me; and I pull the boat to the river margin and leave it lying like a gentle hand upon the shore, while I step ashore to feel the delicious spring of the sweet meadow, the smell of wild straw- berries faintly impregnating the air and turn to see my boat waiting for me and looking lonesome; and then to kneel, or what is better, to sprawl, and gather wild strawberries and eat them ! What epicure could figure out a menu like that? And the inexplicable azure of sky and lake to overarch you and invite you and the river shining and drifting and the birds mak- ing merry in the bushes and the swallows skimming the river or laughing out right joyously into the sky, and you eating wild strawberries to the accompaniment The River of birds and winds and waves heard dimly Meadow across the meadow, what is this but gath- ering and eating poetry? No book to read, surely not that, this day and this place. That can be done other wheres than in a river meadow, where we pick wild strawberries for the fun of the juice Beside Lake on the fingers and the fragrance in the Beautiful nostrils, and not intermit the task to listen to the bobolink's song, well this is life. Let us live awhile. Meantime the boat has grown tired waiting for you, and has let go hand-hold on the shore and has gone sauntering down the river and has idled out to the greater water, and you in no haste to pursue it. You can wade for it or swim for it when it has come whither it would. You are eating wild strawberries to the tune of indolent delight, while the meadow springs beneath you like heather. The Lily Pond ON the way to the pine woods, sel- The Lily dom trodden but well worth the Pond treading, is a path. Where Old Baldie obtrudes his drifting sands across the way and shoves you into the marsh, lies smiling brightly a white lily pond. It is not large; it is dainty. On one side the hidden dunes; to the forward the begloomed pines drowsing to the sound of their own music; to the east tamaracks knee-deep in the marsh; and like a broach at the throat of 95 Beside Lake beauty is a pond of white lilies. They Beautiful grow out of reach of all save that tribe of men and birds known as the waders, and so are the better preserved against the hasty-fingered who have not learned that some felicitous things are best let alone where God put them. Not all things should be picked and stuck in bouquets. That is a human fallacy. Be- cause the poet picked the last rose of summer is not a reason why he should do the like with the first rose of summer. Pines and tamaracks and certain trees which answer quickly to the wind are on the sky-line of the Pond and embroider it gracefully. But the Lily Pond, forward, forward ! Through wood paths which spring kindly to the feet, by and over encroach- ing sands blown from the Lake which is invisible, though ever-present and preva- lent, encroaching on what was once a logging road, but now owned by sands and marsh waters, and, walk discreetly as you may, you will slosh into marsh betimes and more the gladness. The 96 wriggling along, sometimes on the steep The Lily- incline of the wooded hills, sometimes Pond wriggling off into the land of reeds and then the glistening lilies awaiting you, set far out in their safety beyond the en- croaching covetousness of passing hand. What a journey and what an arrival! I wonder if God has left anything out in this poem of deep content? "Take No Thought for the Morrow" The Murmurous Pines The Pine Forest AT a two-mile distance from our lake-front, banding together, is a pine forest the like of which is hard to find anywhere, a woods which is quite beyond the invasion of words. We lave us in its shadows and music and lie prone on its warm couch of needles fallen through many years and years, and hear in the tall tops the booming of seas re- mote and wintry, and watch the sunlight leaking through this Gothic roof and feel the majesty of where we are and speak no word save it should be a prayer, seeing prayer 101 never invades any sublim- ity, being a thing sublime as any earthly sublimity. To rest below the pines, to see the long, lean, graceful trunks flushed as with blushes soaring up straight- coursed into the blue of heaven, standing very noble and imposing, and holding harps of many strings up to catch the fingers of the wan- dering winds, and holding up so high that there is never quiet in the pine harps, al- ways a sob which some- times surges into a storm of gloomy voices, always in tune, but always to the tune of sorrow. We are shut in of music when lying below the pines. Long days are short as an hourglass drip of sand when through murk shadows as of many twilights I walk or stay, but always 102 delay till my last moment of delay is past, and then go with homesick feet out of this resonant wood, where hope seems stranger but heartache calls as ever asking heart's ease and finding none. Pine trees, " Ye bring dead winters fra' their graves To weary me, to weary me." Blessed is he who can wade into the solemn shadow of a pine woods where the nor- way pines reach on high their flesh-colored stems, plumed with the black music of pine boughs, and the air is red- olent with fragrance which only pine trees know how to distill. What a pine fores* this is! How isolate, how melancholy, how fragrant, how saturated with music, how consonant with dream- 103 '- 1 . A Solitary Beside Lake ing, how linked to the world's past, Beautiful now beyond praise yet waiting for praise ! Commend me, wearied, to the comfort, calm, and rest of this pine forest. God hath grown it for comfort of the world. Folks BESIDE Lake Beautiful are folks. Folks They are plenty, but not one too many. Old Dr. Johnson, with his fine coloquial gift, had felt at home in this company. Wise folks; college- keeping folks, business folks tired to the bone but not too tired for good fellowship; girls with their choice giggles, and matrons with their white fascina- tors thrown gracefully over their comely shoulders, and D. D's. with the dust of their theology washed off in the waters of the Lake, and folks full of pranks as a colt Farewell to Care Beside Lake or a kitten, think you, my friend, it is Beautiful no t good to be here? For we sit in our sweaters, and barefoot and bareheaded talk and talk and talk. Who would not do well to be where folks like these are gathered, and where on Sabbath evenings vesper hymns lift their incense unto Him who made the waters and the pines and all the wide blue sky and rejoicing and expectant human souls for their gladness and His? How a body grows to love these neigh- bors! How they dig wells of remem- brance in his heart! How, though we meet and part and rarely say good-bye, we hold their hands lingeringly the months of separation through, and when we see their faces again hearts and lips laugh out loud. Friendship has a stouter hold on most of us than we know. We do not put a tester on our loves till death takes our friends from us and will not let them come back to Lake Beautiful again. The habitual dwellers at this water are to us like the evanescent population of the summer time. They are all inhabitants 108 The House of Dreams of our heart, and to come back to those Folks folk who dwell in the city here all the year seems for the world like getting back home. The world is not big when human hearts are bigger. In years of pilgriming to this lovely land of heart's- ease and sweet quiet, not a few have gone not to return. ' Some have moved to far-away parts where they can not come back again, and we year by year find us yearning for them. They should be here, and were we with them we should 109 Beside Lake know how their hearts are eagering this Beautiful wa y. Love lasts and outlasts. Some we love are gone a farther jour- ney, whence we scarcely dream they turn homesick faces here. We are homesick for them. Would they knew it! and per- chance they do. How we should laugh out loud to see such coming once again along remembered paths and lounging- like, as in no haste to go, but only in good haste to stay! "They come no more," is what our longing says. "They stay so long," is how our yearning feels. Some come not who haunted these woods and waters with a haunting affection as though they had been by when God made the blessednesses we here record, who ever had wistful eyes and voices should you in mid-year some time have met them and you two had spoken of the going back next summer. And then the grief to come back and they to delay their coming! The sense of sorrow is on us then like the sudden scarlet of a fall leaf in summer's prime. Howbeit they fail us not. They walk our ways in imperishable beauty 110 that they loved and sighed for. They Folks add to this summer place and rest space a lilt above the lilt of bird or wave. The phoebe that all summer through takes its morning seat on the ball of the hotel flag- staff and therefrom calls plaintively and lustily, "phoe-be, phoe-be," is not more a part of the voices of our summer land Dawdling on the Rioer Beside Lake than the silent voices of such as came but Beautiful C ome no more. "The friends that are no more" we use not that phrase, but say rather, "The friends who are not here." They have their sunlight, brighter than we can boast of. The Bend in the River Where We Snuggle Down w HERE we snuggle down for the Where We summer is a lathless, unplastered " U! palace of the humble, so that it is fitted to those who dwell therein. What are lath and plaster but dividers from the weather? But we come here for the weather. We are lathed and plastered to death. We have to mount to the summit of our ordinary habitation to hear the rain upon the roof, and while we are mounting to get audience with the rain, the rain ceases. You have to be a connoisseur of weather reports to catch the patter of the rain on your domiciliary roof. If you 115 Nosing Around Beside Lake are fleet-footed you may, but rapidity not Beautiful being our chiefest characteristic, the rain has usually passed to others before we have caught the chime in its throat. So in this dulce domum of summer we rail at lath and plaster. We look at the striations in the pine boards with visible comfort. To be sure, the women apolo- gize for "our simplicity," or "our prim- itiveness," but women were born civil- ized and can no more avoid that kind of talk than the oriole can hinder the chuckle in his throat. Sometimes the women want to paint the inside of the house. This roils me. Not content with painting the outside of the house, they want interior tribulations. They do not want the fire- place to smoke. They want to go round and dust things. Their trite word is "Our neighbors do, or have so and so." What froth of speech. Am not I a leader in society? Can I not set fashions? Am I to follow the crowd? Am I not a drum- major in my own right, and may I not lead? I sometimes want to, but am not allowed to be. We may not be drum- 116 major, though we may serve as major- Where We domo, both offices being spelled with Snuggle small letters. But paint the inside of Down this Castle of Indolence? Never by my vote or voice, though singularly enough neither are much inquired after in the ordering of this establishment. Things are done, and then I am wheedled into acquiescence by the question, "Now, do n't you like that?" And what shall a man say? Shall he be argumentative and rush to his sure undoing? Shall he stand on his rights as the signer of checks and say, "I should have been consulted be- fore the act!" I do not quite know what he should do. That is domestic casu- istry. But what is expedient to do I do know. Expediency for a man is a chief word in the lexicon of domestic quiet. I dote on it. So, we are only partially painted on the inside of this Castle of Indolence. We are berugged, becur- tained, beflowered, befuddled, be center- tabled, beportiered, and beporch-lighted. A porch-light in a Castle of Indolence? Have we no sense of congruity? I have; 117 Bud- lime Beside Lake but the porch-light, there it glares like Beautiful an angry relative. Woe is me, though I say not mea culpa. I could n't help it. Albeit the rain still tattoos on our roof. As yet, no lath and plaster have stolen our summer melody, though I deem it discreet to stop just here to knock on wood. I desire to walk and speak humbly. I am a mere man, and will both walk and speak softly. We can not tell what a summer may bring forth in the way of lath and plaster. Our hut (which is synonymous with castle) is embowered in trees. Here also domestic tyranny has made life a battle. I like trees. The more arboreal we are, the more simial am I. We have a noble oak before our hut, which is the ladder- way to a bit of neutral territory on this property, to wit, a little porch in the oak tree-top, where hieth our friend, the writer hereof, and having reached that fortalice standeth or lieth or sitteth on his rights, gets out in the rain, feels the fogs troop up from the surly waters, and hears the bass of the wave which refuses 118 to sleep or grow silent. Here he stands humbly on his rights. The oak, lar- gest in these regions save only one, makes this front porch a place of seclu- sion and leaf music. On this little plot of ground where is builded our Castle of Indo- lence beside or under the wide- limbed oak, is an arbor vita and a beech tree, some hard maples, some pines, a fir tree, a stately cedar, 119 The Three Graces Beside Lake and behind, a dune where grow Solomon's Beautiful seals and bluebells and, swaying luxuri- antly from a cedar, a wild grape full of scents in blooming June and grapes in stately September. Our porch is screened in so as to invite the mosquitoes to go and banquet off our neighbors, and fronts on the lake far- going to the sky. Our dooryard is the shoreless waters, so I sit in the hospitality of the oak-top and dream and dream and hear the all but incessant calling of the waters. We are not near the lake; we are on the lake, or, possibly with more accuracy, we are in the lake. Much of the time we are. We are sand pipers or curlews or wading birds or swimming fowl. We bathe, skipping across a road from porch to the natatorium of Lake Beautiful. But on returning from the bath, I may not walk straight in across the porch. Nay verily, I must walk around the house and sneak in past the hydrant, and come by stealth into mine A own domestic abode! Am I mad? Not Shadow quite, but nearly. Once this would have 120 humbled me, though not now. We can Where We get used to anything. Snuggle And when I bring in driftwood which Down I have freighted in my boat from far up- shore, the bones of wreck scattered by the flood and brought hither I know not from whence by the whimsicality of wind and wave, and pile the fireplace with them, leaving the flame to do my wood- chopping for me, then we are buried in indolence and luxury. When I bring driftwood and pile the wide-throated fire- place and set the spoils of the sea afire and watch the lapping of the flame, then am I in the arms of romance. I am burning whispering waves and despoiled ships. I sprawl before the flame and pity Adam and Eve. All through the nights the waves thrum on their lutes. I hear them when I hear them not. I pillow my head out on the wave's lap, so to say, and the thousand years of the sea to which my race is natal recite their runes to my happy heart; and I am comforted. 121 Toward the Land of Rest The Silent Chimes HERE bluebells grow. They love The Silent these dewy dunes. The sands do C" imes not affront them, but invite them. In bosky dells where shadows are deep at noon there grow these blue beauties, lean- ing demurely and looking at the earth from which they sprang ; but also out on the gold dunes of shifting sands they cling to dune-side, where every moment is a breath of wind and a spray of sand. They love to watch the lake or, inland, 125 Beside Lake by basins where no lake can peer them in Beautiful hang ready for the fairies to ring their chimes. It may be because blue is to me the color of colors, so that any blue flower has my plaudit, as the blue sky has, that these bluebells are strangely dear to me. I love them all the while, nor ever tire. If asked if they were as rooted in my affections as violets, I should answer no; but then I grew up among violets, and a lifetime memory is on them for my heart. It was so that Shakespeare was touching that gentle flower, so that he gave it an immortality above every other flower that blooms and hath per- fume. He yclept it the "dim violet," and puffed its immortal perfume in the face of all the men that shall live and read, while men and poetry among them en- dure, saying how a certain strain of music came o'er the ear "like the sweet south that steals above a bank of violets, stealing and giving odors. ' ' No flower ever had biography written to compare with that. So the violet may stay my heart's 126 chief delight. But the bells we speak of The Silent are blue, colored like the sky and the sea Chimes and far distances seen from a vantage ground we love. It is not that here along our inland sea there are not many flowers of varied tints. Our cardinal flowers burn like a red sunset where they star the marshlands with their amazing fires; and golden flowers cluster along the dunes beside pools of hidden waters, forgotten of the sea, and water anemones are white and sweet as stars on calm summer Islanded in Beauty The Veiled Skies Beside Lake nights; and the wild fleur de lis are here Beautiful on certain summers in profusion and ecstasy. Yet withal, this land is the hab- itation of the bluebells. They own this place as by aboriginal right. They think they do. We think they do, and so be- side the waters and where no waters are, their cheery loveliness abates our lone- liness, and we stay and see the sky by looking at those silent chimes which, could they be rung, would give forth in- effable melody. All the summer through these bells swing in their humble steeples. They bloom and wither, and still some flowers will flash gently from a stalk hung to withered flowers that a few yesterdays ago were blue as the leaning sky. I love to wander on their track beside the lake, behind the lake, up and over the toss of sands, down where the wide waters' voice comes dreamily like a slumber song and on until, among lush-growing things pent 128 in deep shadow, these pilgrims of the The Silent place are still tramping by my side. Chimes Beside our door where the many pass and, what is sad to think on, where the many pluck, a knot of bluebells hangs out in everybody's way, as if they were Christians that wanted to give their hand to all passers-by; and so we see the many pluck them, but never with our liking. They are too lovely to die at the hand of chance comers. They have right to die where God set their lamps alight. But when the day is new and fresh and all the wide spaces are refreshed after sleep, to see these blue chimes swinging ready for anybody's ringing, makes all the bells in a body's soul chime out their melody. These flowers were never meant for plucking. They are meant for hanging in their little sky. They do not offer themselves for mantlepiece decorations. They are fair to see, but rather prim for the indoors, and look out of place, like a small boy in party togs. They belong where the winds can swing them at every passer-by. They belong where the night 129 Beside Lake can lean over them and hush them to Beautiful sleep, as they were babes. They belong where they may greet the dawn and bid the world good-night. They belong where lingering lovers stroll and where poets hunt them out for utter love. They be- long where the summer forgets that spring had trailing arbutus in these wooded sands. They belong where the sky is near and accessible; and so do we all. Would we could all loiter where we should love to be and where we belong. Sometime I think to come on these bells when they are ringing their chimes. Across dim evening landscapes, when the untired kine turn homeward and the rooks make slow winging for their rook- ery, the chime of cathedral bells swims across the soul like a melody escaped from heaven, where it had its hearthstone next to God. And sometime, when my heart hath learned the psalm, I may come unawares on bluebells chiming, and may recognize their hymn. Meantime, though, I hear them not; I feel them in the land-locked harbor of my 130 heart. They beckon me out of the turbu- The Silent lence of the wild year. I see their tiny Chimes steeples with bells hung at chime, and mayhap they will ring some spring day to lure me back to my old haunts among the grasses and the pine woods and the dunes. Bluebells, I pluck you not, but neighbor with you. We are meant one for the other. You like my greenness, I your blue. In any case, we are friends. Nothing can hinder that. I long for you, and were you as witless as I, you might long for me; who knows? Silent though you be, I love you as I do not many clangorous bells. Bonnie bluebells, cease not to bloom while I come back to haunt these windy shores, which have come to be a beati- tude of my calendar of mercy. The Solace of the Waters One of God's Wild Flowers Another River A" ,ONG our shore and to the north- ward is another river, winsome and winding, but, in all, differ- ing from the one I have described. It is miles away, and the row up the lake to its mouth gives a memory for a whole lifetime. How the boat an- Another River Sailing to the River Beside Lake swers to the oars as out on the crystal Beautiful water it springs like a living thing in love with life. And thus out from the shore on waves which are sometimes the very slumber of the sea, but at most times whimsical with the wind and tumbling about right roisteringly, like things at play, the boat glides or tumbles, so that the shore of the long dunes is full under the eyes, a long sweep of gold cresting in hillocks seen afar, and black at interval with a clump of bleak pines, as if the day- light had been invaded by patches of midnight, but the entire reach of the landscape inexpressibly radiant in the light and glowing like Sahara, so that it is never possible to get enough of the beauty of it, and never can you grow ac- customed to the glow and glory. For many years I have taken this coasting tour, times on times, but the wash of the sea is not sweeter to my heart than the glow of this dune-glory is to my heart. It is as if all that shore were given over to a wheatfield of ripened grain 136 which, ever answering to the wind, yet never worried by it, stayed on and on the eternal gold, like that on which the angels wander in the skies. And come to think of it, may it not have been a golden wheat- field John saw in heaven an supposed it gold? Who knows? But who would not rather walk on the perpetuated gold of wheat-stubble than on a pavement of metal gold ? The boat tosses and the oars lift and fall in rhythmic glad- ness, and the pines and dunes bordering the lake wind and pass to the rearward and the far-away approaches and then slips like a whisper past and the headland of the river grows more apparent. The beauty of rowing here is that you are never in haste as to get some whither. You are approaching or receding, but 137 A Listening Shadow Beside Lake are always where you wish to be. You Beautiful are no t on a pilgrimage toward a des- tination, but are at home in the com- fort of a wide delight. What if you do not come to your desired haven? Why, no matter. You were never out of your desired haven. You were in your port of dreams all the while. Nothing goes amiss along this shore, so be you love God and the beautiful. It is rest and glee and cumulative comfort. What care I when I come or whether I come? I am not on the way to anywhere. I have arrived at everywhere. But I ply the oar. Yonder another river slips into Lake Beautiful and is lost in its sheen of waters. And having bathed my spirit, all the miles of rowing in the golden glory of the sands stretching far, which warms the heart like a wood-fire in the winter warms the hands, the boat veers shoreward and heads into the river. The current is swift, but kind. A lake larger than Galilee empties through this channel, and so the river has right to put on river airs. And it does. A business 138 Some Summer Laughter air is on it, as to say, " I am not on holi- day, I can not loiter as you do ; I must on and out. Time nor I must linger. Fare you well!" And the shining waters have shimmered away into the shore music of the mighty water where henceforth their home shall be. Here in other days was a wharf and here is a pier built for ships to lade them with perfumed pine trees or lumber for the building of cities. The pier languishes, as does the wharf; but 139 Another River side Lake the sky bends and the wind whispers and Beautiful the sands glow and the river whispers and glides on, still on, as if they had no memory of any other yesterday. And I for one, being no utilitarian, am in my heart glad the ships lade here no longer. And that this is now and shall stay al- ways a Port of Entry of Dreams. The dreams last. It is always so. Our dreams last and climb the hills of life and set their pennants floating from every empty hilltop and float them there for aye. The Day Slar Here is a place to dream; and the winds 140 V:,;".-:-:^: dream past and the waves dream in on Another the immemorial strand and the river cur- River rent dreams outward in its thrift of time, and I dream here in my boat, which is a fragment of my dreaming. Plainly it is not midday, but midnight, and all the world is wrapped in slumber, for how shall all this congeniality of place and balm and boat and oarsman of the boat be dreaming, except it be the dim middle of the dark? So up the giddy current we proceed, boat and rower. We can not haste. All things beautiful beckon to us and detain us. The tangled vines, the shivering cot- tonwoods low-growing, clinging, rainy- sweet, the pines which come close and then grow coy and wander back again into their ancient solitude, and the lions in the way where the snags gather, logs with them and dam the stream, the waters making merry with this attempted obstruction. The banks are banks, and not the swamp-grasses wherewith the other river rims itself, but banks meant to include a stream and preclude its vag- 141 Beside Lake abondage. A new type of river, with Beautiful versatility of beauty, is here. It winds and takes time for its winding. A long, slow curve where sometimes the waters are shallow, spreading from shore to shore, and at others where only a channel in the center contains the river, and the flow is deep and insistent and the boat can sink its depth and not drag keel on the sandy bottom. But always the river comes to some new pathway of wonder. The mosses grow and strain lakeward as the swift current goes gladly out. Fish flash their arrows in the streams. By and by the river comes to a rapids ; diminutive they are and rather funny to a man who has sailed rapids and been capsized by them, rapids such as are rapids and no make-believes. But this river takes its rapids seriously, never doubting they are illustrious, and I pull up them with great laughter, and the waters bend shoulders and obstruct the way rapid-wise, and the glee is constant and the summer sun laughs at the sport, but will not help a little bit, being indolent at summer prime. 142 In God's Garden But up the stream we come by degrees Another not caring. What is destination to the River boat and me? We have no destination. We have always arrived, when I take the oars and the boat sags under me and swims out in sheer love of its voyage. The sun clouds a trifle. The dunes and the pines and the river take on a sem- blance of fall time. The winds croon like a lonely heart. Summer is dead and win- ter will soon be here. The yellow leaf, where is it? And then the sun pushes the clouds back and laughs out into his open sky and fall is a thousand removes away. It is all golden summer, and we shall never know mournful leaf-fall here. These be the tropics of the Valley of Avillion. Who was it dreamt of autumn? And in shame, everything is silent. Plainly, we have shame left, which is encouraging. I come to a log dam, and there is no way for it but portage, and in the portage I am turned on a log which has a punster's trick, and go kerslosh in the river, and everybody laughs An Etching of Nature the logs that did 145 the kersloshing, the river in which is the kersloshing, the boat that did the kersloshing, and I who am the recipient of the kersloshing. We all laugh. What odds? Are we not off on an escapade, and are we not sportsmen enough to take what comes and be ready for more? I should hope so. I am in water to my neck, plus, and am swashing around in the smoothly-flowing and swiftly-flowing river. Here my boat eddies and comes to a laughing semi- quiet, anchored by the same logs which wriggled so as to upset a doctor of 146 divinity. Plainly, this boat is not Another specially my friend. She seems to play truant with my affections now, and stands in with the strongest, as was the old-time way with women. But all is lovely. Nobody is hurt and nobody is mad, and everybody is glad, and this free ducking is much to my liking. Usually under the bondage of civilization I undress before I take a plunge; but this has saved that needless effort. I am here in the right place and at the right time and in the right spirit, and am saved the trouble of undressing and that more taxing trouble of re-dressing. After all, the good old-fashioned way of wearing nothing had its advantages. Decolette habits are economical, both of material and labor. All aborigines love undress costumes, and I am aborigine. I feel it more and more. How I am hampered by this putting a crease in the trousers and keeping a crease out of the coat! What a waste of precious time and precious cash, both, these frivolities are! I loathe them. This just suits me. And with all 147 Beside Lake my impedimenta I am diligently applying Beautiful myself to not getting out of the water. I shall be wet through if I stay much longer. I feel damp even now. But the life-saver does not see me. And no hu- mane officer is in sight. And this dous- ing will doubtless help my sermons; and so, staying where the rolling logs sub- merged me will no doubt prove a real philanthropy, and when I can be a phi- lanthropist without inconvenience or cash, I positively dote on philanthropy. So, viewing myself as a submerged philan- thropist adds delightfully to my impro- vised bath. The boat smiles at wriggling anchorage by the bobbing logs which the stream tries to run out to the lake, but which utilitarian man has chained across the stream, only to make the waters foam and fuss a little and then to pass, and on with their outward voyaging. The sun is warm and the day is like rosemary for remembrance, and I am at leisure and waterlogged almost, though bobbing like a cork and the boat is bobbing like my- self and all is glee, but have I not portaged 148 this boat across these same unreliable Another logs? and should I now refrain from voy- R* ver aging on up the stream, as my evident intent was, then shall I be set down in the catalogue of the overcome by these slippery and moss-grown logs which know not how to behave to a Christian; so I climb into the boat and seize the oars and go on right merrily. Damp, am I? Well, in a manner, but I am to that manner born, being a sea- man's son, so that is not thought on. I am in harmony with my environment, which is a piece of good manners, as I take it. And so, on where the shallows are very shallow and the river widens out to expanse very riverlike, but has not enough water for the experiment. Thin fish only can swim in this shallowness, and this boat is no thin fish. But what of that? Is this to be considered as an impediment? Not so. This is a part of the lifetime of a stream. The water is 151 Another River Beside Lake clear as the sky and holds all the sky Beautiful there is around, and shines and smiles and wimples on, and I cease rowing and push up and push off, and that is our method of leisurely locomotion. We speed well when we speed none. The fun is on where the water floweth and where the river goeth. Never was water without a picture, though sometimes the picture without an artist; but God sees what He has made, and that is artist enough for the river. Then the rapids swing and the river narrows again, and there is a rush of fun, and the boat sometimes spins around on me and I can not stay it, but the end is ever the same; the end is delight, for the river and the boat and the man who is soaked, but is now hanging drying in the sun, are all here. And above, where I come in my leisurely hastelessness is a dam and a lake as ample as beatified A Silhouelte Galilee, and there somewhere is a boy of of Summer mine very dear to my heart, and he is fishing and loves Ike Walton, and has a vein of vagabondage 152 like Rip Van Winkle when the fishing Another season comes, and I halloo! and hello! River and an answering hello! and he comes, graceful as an indian in his indian canoe, with the paddle shining and blinking in the sun, and we meet and sit down amicably to a lunch which I have had the sagacity to bring along, and our mutual hospitality lasts a good while, till the skies cloud as for rain and we go below the falls, he portaging his canoe, and then we friends of happy days go down the stream, letting the stream do the work the women not being around and the afternoon declines toward night, and a Turnerian sunset spills splendor on all the dappled west, and we issue upon the lake and, in sight of the darkening shore sing homeward, never hasting; for the night will not mar the mercy of the voyage. Night or day is good on the sighing waters, for as we row the shore is never^- remote, and we hear the sea-sob always and the afterglow crowds the way with glory, and the stars come unbidden but 153 Lingering on a Sunset Water Beside Lake desired, and the shore hangs like a happy Beautiful haze and the lights where we have our summer home twinkle afar, and we sing along the homeward route and the tune we sing is "Happy Day, This Happy Day," and after the robin has said good- night and the phoebe has said "phoebe," a trifle sleepily and for the last time, we blackbirds of the night come singing in and the women scold us happily for being late, but kiss us a welcome the same. O happy day! And as I write I am thousands of miles away from that summer water and in the 154 mountains of another land than that of Another my nativity, and the streets are white with snow and the climb of foothills and mountains is ermined and the skies win- terly, but I see them not nor heed them, for I see and hear and dawdle on the sum- mer river which ever waketh and ever wadeth to the summer sea and babbles of its voyage when it comes past the moor- ings for long-sunk ships and invades the fitful tumult of the vast, engaging deep. A Road Set to Music The Lake Meadow BEYOND our river and beside our The Lake lake lies a meadow lifted up above Meadow the marsh-lands, where the black- birds nest in multitudes. Here are no birds' nests save now and then some ground bird's trivial habitation, nor are there many bird voices. The wind is the meadow's min- strel ; and the grasshopper kicks his music from his joints, as if rheumatism had be- come melodious. Hard by an ancient and superannuated apple-orchard offers build- ing spots to the bluebirds and the jays and indiscreet diet for the small boy in the summer, when his ailment baffles his mother's diagnosis. But the meadow is treeless save on its inland edge, where 157 Beside Lake deep shadows lift sufficient for the noon. Beautiful fpjjg g rass i s w iry; the bushes are make- believes. The roll of the meadow is as that of a lake-wave, while the sward springs benignly to the foot and the breeze is always crisp, being on the run from the lake to the shade of the woods or from the wood shade to the crisping waves of the lake. The grass is at play with the winds, and afar the lake is blue and tilted against the sky as a meadow of amethyst. On the northward the wind from the lake comes summersaulting over the dunes and spitting sand from between its teeth, while far-off golfers are seen at their funny task of looking up little white balls which are worth little when they are found, and so the golfer promptly loses them again. They emerge from one state of lostness to another, and grow not weary of this rather meaningless industry. The grasshopper is multitudinous, and re- sents human intrusion on this particular meadow. He probably thinks he owns it, whereas he only eats it. We neither eat nor own it, though owning it would 158 be fun. The shady woods at the meadow- The Lake edge inland are full of invitations, but Meadow the sky is so benignant and the wind so free and fleet and the meadow-breath so insinuating, and the top of Old Baldie and its side glisten so in the sun, like a rampart of golden topaz, and lake and sky and meadow are busy singing with a blithe voice, "Hither, come hither," and whether to swim in the lake or walk and run and halloo on the meadow and watch from the meadow the blue sky beckon the blue lake into its heart, one can scarcely choose between them. Though why choose? They are all ours. A Maker of the Dusk Days of Idleness THESE are days off. We are never Days of busy unless we fish or lie (synony- Idleness mous terms, nearly). Here we don't have to do things. We do them or let them be, as the case is. And what a saving clause that is to such of us as have to do so many things incessantly ! Some- times men come here to fish as if it were a part of the day's work, but not often so. We get up or stay abed, swim or lie on the 163 Tired Out Beside Lake sand, go rowing or fall asleep in the Beautiful shadow, as happens. This is the place of happenings. We have no schedules save on the dummy which is our funny little, dear little vehicle of ingress and egress. We all love it. The cinders of the puffing little beast of burden that pulls us sail straight for the eyes and never miss their destination; the springs of the cars were either omitted or spoken to slightly as to their real business as springs; the seats have no cushions; the cars have no win- dows; the system has a jaunty and half- leary look, but we would trade for no system of locomotion under the canopy. The children love it and so do their for- bears. Should some philanthropist offer to electrocute this line and electrify an- other for our comfort, I think he would well-nigh be mobbed. We want the cin- ders in our eyes; we want the springless springs and the funny cars and locomotive with its loquacious whistle and its pudgy speed. It is part of this place, and woe be unto him who would make us modern ! We love things as they are. We do n't 164 approve the mosquito, but we speak Days of quietly of his faults. He is authentically Idleness of an old family, and sucked the blood of Adam. But the dummy is an institution here, venerable and funnily jaunty, but beloved and spoken of through the year with a twist in the voice, "When we see the little old dummy again," and then a touch of tumult in the talk which drowns 165 What the Sky Leans On Beside Lake what anybody says by what everybody Beautiful says. I wish the dummy knew we loved it. It is a little cock-sure thing, but may have deep feelings hidden away in its steam-chest. So to return to this un- scheduled life, this haphazard career of loafing. We are summering with God, and must have leisure. So we all come loafing back. We seem to have happened here. We seem to our- selves to have been away through a long winter night, that is all. "How are we all, this morning, and how is the water?" and things have begun. The same old way, the same dear old way, and we can't quit going and we do n't want to go away. We are hoodooed by the water and the sky. The waves they have be- witched us, until we demand that there be a Lake Beautiful in heaven. 166 The Beloveds THIS is a home place. We are here The by families. Love is mayor of this Beloveds community. If a body had ac- quired a crick in his social back, let him come here and be cured. To see women welcoming their husbands, husbands kiss- ing their wives, and children using their daddies for a trellis to climb on, as if they were morning-glory vines, will thaw the heart of a grindstone and make a millstone 167 A Place cf Dreams m Beside Lake sing. Folks love each other here. Christ Beautiful would feel at home on this lake front. They say grace before meat at these houses. They love the pause and pulse of prayer. They kiss each other good-morning and good-night. God's kind ordering of the world is visible hereabouts. And these folks think the world is sweet. They are not rich. Some are; the most are not. And nobody is rich enough to hurt or to notice. They pay their taxes and their bills and say their prayers. We are mostly poor, but unconscionably happy, and have little wearying thought for the morrow, but plenty of sunlit thought. Believing in God, praying for and loving this world, craving and seek- ing for His out-doors, admonished by His providence, each day becomes a poem fresh from His fingers. 168 Gadding About HOW we do gad about in this sum- Gadding mery world! Everybody is on About the road to everywhere. Not the young folks, so-called, are the pic- nickers, but all of us. We get in a boat and go. Where? Well, that de- Ready to Gad About pends. We go. That is the consequential thing. We go up-lake or up- river, to dune or pine- shadow or retreats behind woodlands, and cook our meals. This the men do mainly. They are the skilled chefs in the out- doors, where sands blow in the victuals and the domestic niceties can not be observed. The house- hold comes in slowly, this one in a canoe, this one in a row-boat, blowing in, as it were. No one in any hurry. Everybody drops in. There is no touch of premeditation nor precipitation, just the sweet and swift simplicity of spontaneity. And the man gathers the wood and builds the fire and fries things, and the woman 172 looks on from her citadel of rugs, where she Gadding is sewing things (she says) , and the dinner About bell is rung and the halloos all scattered and gathered. We come and look at the river or the lake, and the winds are fresh and glad and the landscape seems like a picture God had just painted, and we say grace and partake, and laugh when there is no joke and giggle when we are most solemn. Out in God's dining-room with those we love the very most in this world is pure delight. This is the land of pure delight whereof we wistfully sang in winter days, and we are its inhabitants. Lift the song. 173 The Pioneer Wind-Swept A Morning Sky My Boats WHOEVER may be communist, I My Boats am not. Frankly, I like my own things. Possibly, had I been other than a minister, where we have scant chance to have anything of our own, I might have set less store by possession. As it is now, I mildly gloat over possession. A dollar of my own charms me, though never for long. There is a reason. I prefer owning ten dollars to owing ten thousand dollars. Clearly, I am not a socialist. 177 Beside Lake As a man is so must he take account Beautiful o f himself. Renting is not to my mind. I should prefer owning a shack to rent- ing a palace, so meager a soul am I. Those who, possessing wealth, rent a flat in preference to owning a home perplex but do not edify me. To rent is legiti- mate, so be we ephemeralities who know not where the coming wind will blow us. To smilingly adjust life to its cramps and entrammelments is Christ philosophy, though never once have I heard our High Master disapprove the birds that had nests, nor speak slightingly of the foxes which had holes for the housing of their crafty broodies. A house possessed, en- joyed, tinkered with, patted on the back, where, if you wished to turn the chimney upside down and let the smoke circulate through the cellar, as is often the case, without expense of inverting the chim- ney, this appeals to me as the top-notch of human felicity. I covet possession. I should build a fence around a house, had I the house, so as to be able to chase my own wife around the premises without 178 her "tromping" on the neighbor's grass. My Boats Domestic segregation sounds good to me. I even want the chickens (the neighbors', of course,) to stay at home on their own crowing- or cackling-ground, in deference to gender. I want things. Yes, I want things. I would like to own a river and, had I the fortune, should be superfluously happy to own a runnel of shadow and meandering murmur. My socialistic friends entertain hopes of my conversion to their nobody-have-anything and everybody-have-everything theory, but they will know more (about me) when they are older. I summer on a bewitching spaciousness of water, and the first season there I rented a boat. Stealing a boat does not seem to me quite ethical. (I am a min- ister and a wee bit.j)rudish on such items of conduct) ; and borrowing a boat seems to me "wery wicious" (a la Sam Weller), and I know not any other way to secure a boat, save to own it. But renting a boat was like wearing new shoes there was no adjustment to my curves. Old 179 Tracery Beside Lake shoes have accepted a man's curves, until Beautiful wearer an d wearee are alike satisfied. The boat I rented seemed to eye me, but not knowingly nor quite approvingly. It had a broncho effect. Neither did I know the boat. Boats are feminine gender and must be studied, and the study is enter- taining, but lengthy and not always con- clusive, but certain general principles of etiquette may be settled on when you know a boat. You know its general de- meanors, and as a body is to take a boat to boisterous water, it behooves him to know the general lines of boat activity, so as to be prepared for boat-atics. Now, the rented boat mistrusted me. I think it did not distrust me. Either egotism or my nai've ministerial confidence in my fellow-men kept me from the pessimism of thinking the boat disliked me and dis- trusted me, though speaking with all charity, I am bound to say that it did not look me in the eye, but averted its glance when I looked straight its way. Now this vote of lack of confidence weighed upon my susceptible nature. I became reti- 180 cent; and the rented boat was never any- thing other than reticent, so there we were, two unfriendly friendlinesses. You can travel on a car without being injured by the lack of amicability with vour seat-mate, but to be on a holidav Boats Enthroned Beside Lake and out for fun and rampage and have Beautiful the boat look askance at you is, to a man of thin skin, frankly intolerable; and rent- ing a boat, to me, came to be both objec- tionable and impossible, so I wandered about the docks and the fisher nets and the fisher huts, preferring to buy a boat some one had used, on the theory that it might be broken in to human kind, and so prove tractable at the start. For the psychology of this attitude I do not now contend. The Gayle I lit upon a white craft built of oak, and heavy, therefore, but as sweet a swan as ever floated on a stream. So thought I then; so think I now. Its weight was a handicap in getting out on the water, and directing it against stormy water with a single oar was difficult be- cause of the overweight of the boat, but on the other side, when it was meeting with the windy waves and battling with them, it was not easily careened about. t82 To be frank at the risk of seeming con- My Boats ceit, the boat was a laddie. Just how to adjust calling a boat a laddie, when it is well known that all boats are lasses, I must concede to be a difficulty, but I am dealing with the boat, and can not linger with the difficulty about the boat's gender. Hang on to the facts I must, like clothes on to a clothesline. This boat was a laddie and is. That boat was as fearless as Ulysses. I am in a predicament which borders on a pickle, to sit in this laddie of a boat yclept Gayle (which is the name of my winsome daughter). This gender business is a difficulty, anyhow. It will never be anything else. However, my daughter's name was the family name. Gayles we were when we were not Quayles, so that caption will serve for both man and woman. Now I am out 185 The Beside Lake of that pickle with reasonable grace, so Beautiful that though I be a pickle, I am nothing more than a dill pickle, salty but not sour. The boat was a laddie; I hold to that. A fairer never floated on water. The picture "Floats Double" will prove my contention. That is "The Gayle." It might permissibly fall in love with its own shadow. A friend of mine, an Irish- man, brought up on the brine, and every one of his timbers soaked with salt, would sit and look at this laddie boat with half- closed, critical eyes and say, "That boat's lines could n't be bate," to which, with maidenly reserve, I gave blushing assent. And it was a joy to look at the boat, whether it lay indolently on its side on the tiger-tawney sand or rose and fell and fell and rose on water, crushing to- ward the sandy shore and leaving it furious with the tugging wind, or whether it be tugging at anchor, or whether it be facing the sea, with a whole sky of sea- break and spindrift rushing wildly down, or whether upon a quiet lake we, boat and man, row a la-leisure past sand- 186 dunes golden as harvest-fields and lulled My Boats as careless of the fact, tempus fugit, to which some one has averted (it probably was Shakespeare, that master of tongues, though I can not recall any play in which he used those stentorian tones, though probably it should have been, if at all, in "Julius Caesar"). Tempus fugit? Tempus was not fugi- tive, so far as we were concerned, and need not grow fugitive. If time were eternally on the run, as some people sup- pose, how romance would disappear! There is no call when you are in a boat on a summer sea for time to be so head- strong and fugitive, so far as I can per- ceive. A little more leisure at some point of the career and a little more alacrity at other points in the time-card will prove actually as expeditious. If time will come into this boat with me, I will defy him to be flying. He will find his wings clipped, and will putter along and fall asleep to the gentle swish of waves and the rhythmic dip of oars. How I loved to loiter in that bonny boat! We fitted 187 Beside Lake eac h other as a collar-button does a Beautiful shirt. We were of one mind. What one of us want both of us wanted. Our moods synchronized. It was a delight. Which of us wanted to do a given thing was never controverted between us. We both wanted to do that thing. That was the amount of it. We both wanted to lie on the beach at the same time and listen to the rhythmic ecstasy of waves in the dark, or lie on the same beach in the glow of the golden summer sunlight when all the yellow sands were set on fire by the splen- dor of the day. From the level of the water to listen to the water is a poetic thing, and differs materially from the same water-music heard a few feet higher up. So, on many a night, when the day had spent all its light and emptied all its splendor on the sky and cloud and sun- set and afterglow-water, and when the dusk had with leisureliness but with in- sistence taken charge of the water and shore, boat, boatman, the nearby lapping tide, the remote distance, the dim shore- land, misty spaciousness of lake, a wider 188 Remote From Storm Lake, Beautiful at Noon spaciousness of sky, where the stars My Boats blinked as if newly-awakened and not quite awakened, then the boat and I would hobnob, nor utter a word, I with my back against the boatside as it lay a-tilt like a huge white bird with a broken wing, and the sob of the water smote the level shore and whispered its way back- ward and upward, till lost amongst the solemn but not silent pines, but always sobbed to the boat and me first. And the boat and I said nothing, always nothing (and what a solace such conversation 191 Beside Lake o ften is), and the water, wistful and won- Beautiful derful> babbled on w i t h the sweet gar- rulity of the angels; and we, boat and boatman, listened and understood. Or if, when these cadences charmed the night, I brought the oar-locks and the oars and the locks clanked with their living melody, like boys and girls giggling in the dark, and the oars knocked together as I strode down the dune, then the boat seemed to be on tiptoe for the spring into the water, and to call like a 'cello's dusky voice, Shadow Grasses "Ready, already," and in we splashed, My Boats and how we rowed or loitered under the stilly stars! Or if I chose the river, to the neglect of the lake, and we went whispering along the sedges and under the foot of pines in dark or day, the boat would aver, with fraternal insistency, "This is my choice." We were still of one mind, and what is strikingly unique amongst the people I have known, we were always of a "sound mind." The last remark is not debatable, but is in the nature of a syllogism. Then when the water of the lake boiled and the storm was in stress, and the gale blew its thou- sand trumpets, then the Gayle and I had tantrums. Aye, but it was bonny! The sea-gulls were not more at home than the boat and I. We swam not so well as they, but had more fun, and the gulls are a solemn lot, as all gulls by land and sea are bound to be. The gulls always stayed on the top of the water, but the boat and I were more versatile and im- practicable. We went under, over, criss- cross, keel down, keel up, sidewise, head 193 Beside Lake first, stern first. Every way known to Beautiful nautical exploit we went. And all were to our mood. Sometimes we were soused and borne down, but always came up, bobbing and giggling. Everything suited us. There we were the superiors of the gulls. They always wanted lunch, while we could well get on without a lunch for a while, and joyed in the whole of the procedure, whether it was swimming after a vagrant paddle or diving after a sunken oar-lock. And all went well with the Gayle and me till one day, when the water was choleric beyond its wont and my oar broke, and ere I could deliver myself from rather unministerial summer- sets when the oar had snapped, the bonny laddie of a boat, hurled by a wave, hit prow first on some logs along-shore and broke that beautiful prow which had been my peculiar joy. A boat-prow gets me addled any day quicker than any other thing can addle me, though the discern- ing many declare that addling me is not difficult. That, however, is carping crit- icism. Nothing of all the somethings man 194 has made excites my admiration as the My Boats boat-prow. I love it to distraction. And when I came to the rescue of the Gayle, after much cavorting in the waves, which was not a matter of strict fun, but rather for a time a question of life and death, I am bound to admit the boat was wounded by the storm beyond repair. I am a man, but could have cried like a kid-boy, yet brave end the boat had made, like a sea- man as broken by the storm. Prow pum- meled by the stormy sea, what more could a seaman ask? So the Gayle still stays on the yellow sands by our sea-hut door. Many have required that I put a price upon the boat. I have spurned their monetary suggestions. No cash can buy this craft. While I live and stay a disciple of the seas, this first boat of my love shall stay, with the scars of battle and brave defeat on it, in hearing of the wist- ful waves. I have borne it down on the sandy beach and have taken its picture " Defeated by the Storm," and all of oak, magnetic as a thrilling story of the sea, there it lies but does not languish. It and 195 Beside Lake I being still of one mind, and of sound Beautiful m j nc l ) an d love the dusk and dark and the sea voices and the smell of waves. The Prairie My next boat was an indian canoe, the one benefaction the American indian has made the world; and it suffices. It is as lithe, indolent, taciturn as its maker. Its shape hints at an arrow. As an ar- row it can cleave the water if it has the need. It glides with wondering and si- lence along lake or stream. It has no pulse-beat nor any indication of breath. Positive quiet is on it, as of an indian, under whose moccasined feet not even a twig snaps. To loiter in this vehicle of silence, the pathfinder of the water, is like whispering across the waves. Its build is a swan build : its prow lifts as if looking at the coming waves. It is not born for the lake, but for the river the river's winding ways, where river-waters play hide - and - seek with themselves beside 196 All Ready rushes and reeds, in sunlight and shadow. My Boats So light is the canoe as to be easy of portage; so sinewy it is like an indian racer naked. Built of cedar, it is as if sired by the red man in his naked prime. This canoe I call "The Prairie," so that it reminds me always of those wide plains, clouded with green and sown to flowers, which touch my heart and shall until I die. And so double romance is on the boat and me when it is so named, and in it I always feel at home, born prairie man that I am. And while this indian canoe 197 Waiting for the Boy Beside Lake is primarily meant for haunting the rivers Beautiful and the trivial streams, sometimes I take it on the rage of the lake at storm, and it sloughs on the top of the running waves like spindrift, with a flight like an arrow, flying until for speed and behold- ing it seems not boat but arrow, and I myself, the boatman, become a fitful ar- row of the chase. T is great sport. And sometimes in the arrow-flight, canoe and occupant will take a sudden skyward lift and fall promiscuously in regurgitant foam, paddle here, anywhere, nowhere, 198 but all of the crew somewhere. Thrice- My Boats happy day ! But most of all I love the shadows of trees and sedges of a winding stream, where shadows and sunlight make love together, and do not notice who comes or goes. So the canoe and I may come and go, solitary, neglected, and neglectful of all courtesy and company, as if we spurned the world. While I live this canoe, or its like, shall stay mine for haunting summer streams and for falling fast asleep, like an indian, in the sun where the lush grasses loll indolently quiet. In the picture "The Prairie" has fallen asleep. The Snug Beside Lake And now I have another rowboat to Beautiful succeed the "Gayle." Its lines are daintily drawn, though, to be sincere, not so daintily as that of my sea-wrecked boat, the "Gayle." I shall not see its like again, and all of oak! The "Snug" is so light I can load it on my back when I needs must, though to be certain it is meant not for me to carry it, but for it to carry me. But I bought it for lightness and spring of immediate response to the oar; for it was procured with special ref- erence to stormy water, on which my cus- tom is to use a row-boat, but to propel it with a single oar, while I sit and face the breadth of seas and madness of them, and under touch of this single oar it is really flattering to see this feather-weight row- boat answer. A single plunge of the oar will bring the boat from sidewise to the waves to looking straight in the eye of wind and wave, and there, light as a toss 202 The Snug of foam, the "Snug" lies on the crest of My Boats an impending billow. Aye, but that is frolic ! Or when the wave is still and it is early morning, or at shadowy evening, or when it is sunny forenoon or after- noon when the dunes flaunt their glory on the lake, or on gray days of cloud, when the fogs wrap round you like a sea-made cloak and drive in your face, lingering and chill, then at the touch of the oar we toy with the waves as if they were playthings and make-believes, and we, 203 Beside Lake boat and man, imperialities at whose nod Beautiful all things became obeisant, and went on with no seeming rush, but yet with a speed which makes the shore envious. On and on at gray of morning, when the shore is waking or the dusk of evening when the world is saying its prayers sleepily before it sleeps, how this light craft of mine pushes on silent as the starlight, gentle as the morning light. And "The Snug" loves to be with me and I to be with her. And when the days are sweaty with summer and I take the woman of my love, with her sweet face shaded by a breath of ragged straw hat, cinctured with a piece of ribbon, and we load lunch and rugs and camp belongings and a trophy of a frying-pan, and go leisurely up a little breadth of water which issues into a winding river, and where marshes are aglow with cardinal flowers and kildeers are fussing at intruders, and mulleins standing sentry by the stream, and I have to stop and pitch camp and kiss the woman and put her down at making 204 doilies or some such like unimportances, My Boats and I see a body, a sweet slip of a girl, come loitering up in a canoe, and then wife's relatives, with one baby, which seems a house full, and when landed seems a shore full, and all come, and the women are resented as to the cooking, while as chief chef and bottle-washer I proceed with the meal, and "The Snug" tucks its head against the shore amongst the bending grasses and falls dead asleep, nor cares how long we camp. And I continue chef and cook the meal amidst female jeers; but, nothing distracted thereby, serve a meal which has been cooked with- out reference to the skillet which was brought along for make- believe. But this meat is cooked, religiously spitted on the dry prong from a for- gotten tree, and the aroma of juicy beefsteak mixes with the aroma of aromatic pines, and I am burdened with the grandiloquent feel- 205 Don't Hurry Beside Lake ing of being chief cook and bottle-washer Beautiful (for how seldom can a mere man feel "chief" in anything): it is then that the row-boat becomes a picture of joy which knows not any cloud. The Petrel Then one other boat I had. Alas! alack! the past tense of the boat haunts me and, to speak a little deeper, saddens me. "The Petrel" had been a fishing smack which for years had done business on the great waters. Many a night had it stayed all night in the wet silence, re- mote from shore, and long before the rooster rouses the daylight with his crow- ing summons (for I still hold, despite that play "Chanticlee," that the rooster does waken the sun. If he does not, who does? That is what may be called a knock-down argument. I resort to it only in cases of extreme irritation. But your cowardly attack on the age-long authority of the rooster makes me indignant or, to speak with more accuracy though with less re- 206 The Petrel ligion, makes me mad. Why on earth My Boats should a rooster sit up all night and wake his female household and be multitudi- nous in his crowing if he does not waken the sun? Let this puny dramatic drone become less self-important. The rooster knows his business, which is more than can be said for many playwrights) . But apart from this digression in the interest of a fel- low-creature whose prerogative has been invaded, this boat of mine has been 207 Beside Lake W atcher through the evening and stilly Beautiful n jgj lt an( j happy watcher through the long and starry night, and with the dawn has come to port laden with sea spoils, and has sometimes battled with winds and with waves where wreck was imminent, and the sailors drew in sail and jib and peered through the waves and darkness and peered for the pier or shore, lest they should be their sudden undoing. I bought this boat for the memory of tempest and toils that were upon it. Six hundred feet of sail it had and jib extra! No trim, im- maculate, dapper yacht, built for leisure and for looks and by a nautical milliner, was "The Petrel." None of that for me, who am son of sea-forbears and working men. A yacht lures me not, and any craft with a smokestack or with a cluck- ing sput-sput-sput of gasoline launch at- tracts not this sea man. They are not boats; they are vehicles. They go, but that is all. I would rather be becalmed all night out of sight of any shore in a boat with sails than to get in on exact schedule time from a little "sput-sput" launch. 208 Anchored And this broad-breasted boat fairly hurls My Boats itself through the water when its splendid spread of sails is on, and the melodious prow (I say so knowingly, for have I not lain for hours and watched and heard the water swirl from the prow of this sea- sailing boat of mine, and have observed the lake break into hemispheres of em- erald, until I well knew what the dreamer saw when he saw a sea of glass?), this musical prow that leaps against the seas and lives against the seas and conquers 209 Beside Lake the seas how the boat spun out on the Beautiful wa ter! How, in rollicking water, the waves dashed up over the prow and doused us lying there and watching and listening watching for the mercy of the sea and listening for the music of it! And not a little of my love for "The Petrel" lies in that I had a boy who loved it, too, and sailed in it with a skill which I had not, and which put his viking an- cestors and mine to the blush. And he and his chum did set the sails and he did hold the tiller, and we did float and float out while the day shined bright, out when the wind went quiet and we were ma- rooned on a sunset sea of splendor, and sometimes wakened all night to the whis- per of the waves. So did this lad love the water, j And I have stood on the shore and have seen the lad come smiling in with sails lifted or sails lowered for the anchorage, and my heart sung out, glad in the sight of a boat and boy and boy and boat. I have at dreamy times wondered whether boat were ever loved as that 210 A Home Run boat was loved by boy and father, but My Boats no matter, it was loved ; and one night in a fog on a stream a steamer, losing way in the harbor and thrusting too near shore, crushed the ' ' Petrel . " O Absalom ! But I had taken pictures of the craft with my sailor lad upon it and the winds blowing free through the sails and the sun shining frankly across the boy's frec- kled face and standing at prow or stern in capable captaincy, and the boat is a past only in a dull, prosaic way. In a way 211 Beside Lake more real it stays for always present, Beautiful tense, full of life, and spread sails and broad breast lowered against the gleeful water and the voices of the seas are eternal on its prow and in its sails, and the sails spread toward the port of dreams. My boats, two wrecked, two still sea- sailing, but all mine, all jubilant, all song, all sea-song, all tireless, melting melody. Friends Forever The Headland Summer Anger WHEN summer laughter rules the Summer lake, then the heavenly halcyon Anger is here and nowhere else, and storms seem incredible. Our waters here are kindly and invitational, though that word is to be construed as not meaning that Lake Beautiful is not a lion whelp eager for prey. It will slay while it is smiling, not snarling, and not snarling, but laughing. Life has no value in the vocabulary of the sea. It is as the lion-play, which purs and tosses 215 Beside Lake in playful paws, then lunges and drinks Beautiful blood. The prey of summer waters is something very terrible. While the wa- ters laugh they devour, and no apology. They are conscienceless. We have had so few deaths on this shore in many happy years that it would seem ungra- cious to speak harshly of the waters. They have been good to us. Why speak of their ruth? Only two deaths have made us sad on this beach for a dozen years one a strong man in the prime of strength, whom a wicked sea whipped down and drowned, another a lad who had gone out on a morning sunny water to take a bef ore-breakfast plunge and play with the glassy flood, and I dragged him from their embracement dead as death. Bayard Taylor's captivating poem, "Hy- las," remains the biography of the water- slain. The waters do not care. They will drown a beetle or a butterfly or a man with equal smiling. When on a golden morning the sun- light weaves golden cobwebs on the lake- floor and your boat glides like a whisper 216 A Wrack of Storm over a sea-floor tessellate with radiant Summer mosaics, when the wave barely lips the Anger shore and does not lave it, seeming all tired out and about to fall fast asleep, when the summer wind has tied up her tresses so that not a stray lock touches her cheek, then no storm scares us. We have forgotten storms ever rise. How can they come into this sunny quiet? Then will a tempest rush on us. The winds grow diligent. The still shore booms like Gettysburg guns. The wind skirls and slaps the waves with wild hands and breaks the spindrift and cuffs it shoreward as it were part of the sky. 217 Beside Lake In our dooryard on a summer night a Beautiful barge was mashed into irrecoverable wreck on our bar. The sailors escaped; the wreck still shifts along our shore, changing its anchorage from spring to spring, steered by the winter's tempest. The mild waters become so vociferous, so lacerative, so drunk for death, and noth- ing placates them when they drink the wine of wrath. I crossed the lake one night when the morning shore was strewn with seventy wrecks. At the mouth of our harbor in grizzly winter vessels of steel have been pummeled to death, and passengers have been saved by the rocket and the breeches life-preserver; and once when the storm was petulant rather than angry, a ship in sight of other ships was gulped down, to leave not a wafted voice nor a floating face of the dead. And once a barge loaded with Christmas-trees (O happy freightage!) came not to its desired haven, nor any whisper came across the silent waters, only for months they found here and there, voyaging there and here, belated Christmas-trees, 218 howbeit not hung with happy children's Summer stockings, but with the stockings of the Anger dead and drenched with the salt of women's tears. Lake waves are not given to curved lines as sea waves are. They grow pre- cipitous in a handbreadth of time. And I have heard on waters of no moment, shining waters which could scarcely rock a boat, a man call "Help!" and had not some one been near to answer to the call, a widow had gone from her happy holiday clad in widow's weeds and not seeing her homeward road for her tears. 'There is Sorrow on the Sea" Beside Lake I was once swimming in angry water. Beautiful The breakers were very wild. The windy waves crushed and crashed, and their tumult was the voice of many waters, through which one would have guessed no human voice could be heard. I had been in the surf for hours, for I am Viking- born, and I was weary beyond my knowl- edge and was out in a strange beach to me, and so found myself swimming and making no headway against the wave- wrath. I was being borne steadily and surely out. The breakers were having their way with me and crashing over me full of sound and fury. I had sandals on, and so had not the free use of my swimmer strength, as otherwise I should have had. There was the boiling water, my delight, and it was gripping me and I knew it. Death was not half a boat's length from me, and I was swimming now, not for fun, but for life; and the tug of war was against me, my fatigue mak- ing my stroke a random venture; and I turned my head toward where my son was swimming afar in the same wild 220 *&&- God's Smiling waters I loved so well and giving no heed Summer to me, knowing my love of the athletics Anger of the sea and my strength as a swim- mer; but through the hurly-burly of the crashing waters I called, steady- voiced, "Will!" and the lad turned swift face his father's way and, less from the voice he heard than the set determination on my face, as he said afterward, knew I was in extremity; and being a powerful swim- mer and wearer of many medals there- 221 Beside Lake for, he dived through the crush of waves Beautiful w hich was beating bitterly on me, and when I knew not he was near, he rose with the lift of the sea and outside from me, and his voice swung like a bell, a golden bell, "I 'm here, old Daddy," and gave me a shove forward, and then another, and I was safe! 3r> r! :r/-x Latt/cerf with Snow Lake Terrible AID Lake Beautiful becomes Lake Lake Terrible in the winter, when the Terrible north wind owns the waters and the waves can not be quiet, but anger at each other and crash their ice-cakes to- gether like furious cymbals in bedlam con- fusion, and pile the shores with wrecked icebergs, where the tumult of the waters is the bass and the grinding of the ice is the tenor, and the cruel duet continues for days and days, an orgy of music, and the laceration of the ice and wave is terrible and eats the shore as if it were bread in the fingers of the famishing. 225 Beside Lake That this riot of surging and sagging Beautiful tempest could ever have been placid water is beyond a sane mind to conceive. When this writhing turbulence is on, then you feel it must be the ravings of an eternal drunkenness of the sea and sky and shore. Here is one place where calm has never attempted to cast anchor. That where in wintry rancor icebergs leap at each other's throats like madmen in murderous mood, in summer little chil- dren play and sing and wade to heart's delight, and happy folks dapple the lake with boats that sing like bonny larks, is blank unreason. This is the landscape of despair. Here ruin walks with hurly- burly anger which he mistakes for glad- ness. Nothing can withstand this winter onset of ice and wave and hectoring wind. It could drown and grind into unrecogni- tion the armadas. Pitiless as the waste- ful sea is this riotous water, where in summer, balm breathes so gently that a lute-string will not be blown to a whisper. The versatility of genius is on this sway- ing water. God must delight in it above 226 The Snow-bound Water measure. The land is scabbarded in snow. The deserted cottages where in summer laughter sings, forgetting how to weep, are now in hibernation. No smoke drifts gently from any chimney, perfum- ing the air with the breath of dead forests. No swallow circles by any housetop or low against the river brim. No boat sprawls on the beach in shapely and lovely comeliness. No footprint gives to the 227 Lake Terrible Beside Lake snow a sense of companionship. Through Beautiful the bare branches of oaks and beech and birch and maples the strident winds leap frantically, and the battle seems ever- lasting. The pines and larches and cedars are black against the snows of the ground, and the gray of the sky, and take the storm to their shadowed breasts in vast content and sonorous melody. They are for the winters born. River and swamp are part of the level lands. You can not tell where either is. The earth is snow- land. The voice of the waters on the shore and the voice of the winds in the responsive treetops make a diapason fit for angels to listen to in wonderment. Here beats the dithyramb of the storm. Along the wave-beaten and the ice- hammered shore the life-saver makes his daily round with that quiet fortitude, that unrecognized service which is ever the safety of the world. How he walks the beat no one knows, not even he. There is no path. The ice, the snows, the waves, the clouds, the winds say "No thoroughfare." How he travels in this 228 A Carnival of Snow antarctic bleakness neither the stormy Lake waves nor the stormy sky can tell. They Terrible have done their mightiest and malignest to buffet him to death. But being a man, he defies them. A silent man is the one conqueror the elements ever encounter. I see that silent, lone, momentous man making slow way and sure through all the winter riot, keeping calmly on, buf- feted but not beaten, listening for the sea-voice help-call flung from the throats of men about to die; and this pilgrim of the storm and the God of the storm and the pilgrim and the drowning seaman listening to hear! It is sublime. Not the storm, with all its majesty and dominion, moves the soul as this voiceless, indom- itable man making headway where no headway can be made. There is ever the thrill of the battle. Nobody is to be commiserated who is in a battle, any battle; for a battle-breath hath passion and power and glory. When swords swing and horses gallop to the battle's core the rapture is on. And the scowl and wrangle and onset of such 231 Beside Lake winterly storm as is on this wild shore is Beautiful somet hing to blow battle music into the blood. It is silence that stabs the soul and lets the blood to the last dim drop. It sees this silent man in the tempest-fury, alone but not forsaken, the pilgrim of duty, the man accustomed to peril but not in- troduced to fear. I see him walking the beat of the imperiling tempest. The tu- mult makes him glad. Then comes the - mm The Pine Forest silence like the silence of the dead when Lake the snows are deep and the winds whist Terrible and the lake frozen and the waves sheathed in the scabbard of ice, in the long, hard calm when the land is snow- bound, when from the dune crest (now a dune of snow) you might look across the landscape of the land and the far, shivering but silent water and see no human being, and every voice is mute, one empire of deserted loneliness where lake and shore and dune and where the river ran and runs not now, is as passion- less and voiceless as a circumpolar world, and the sands of the dunes which sift, though there be no wind, are now sands of snow which sift, sift, though they have no wings nor any vitality, but seem to be the breathing of the winter, the slow ex- haling of the breath from the frozen lungs of the snows. And through this realm of silence, the watchman passes, intrepid as the winter and masterful as the sun. Silence can not strangle him nor the storm dismay him. 233 Beside Lake Although Lake Beautiful is a summer- Beautiful i anc i w ith most of us who neighbor here from year to year, this regal winter rule is only a wave-beat from us. At August prime the swamp shrubs will set a sudden crimson banner floating on the wind, as to say, "Winter comes; danger." And the growing things in meadow and swamp and woodland feel the neighborliness of the winter fear, and their cheeks tingle and burn with the rush of blood or trep- idation at the onset of the storm. Swal- lows fly southward, and we do as the swallows do; but the drama of the year wakes on nor sleeps, but puts the terrible bugle of winter tempest to its lips and blows its blasts, and the world is changed and is new and tragical but august. Lake Beautiful WE boat and bathe. The water is Lake cool enough to bring a tingle to Beautiful the flesh and pure enough to make washing a beatitude. How deep into the wave on sunny summer days a man can see as he leans over the boat's edge and looks through grass- green waters quite beyond describing, and then, souse you go, as not being able to resist the invitation to the plunge. Bathing here is a luxury and, wisely con- sidered, is an economy, for you can wash enough so you may take a vacation of bathing for the next twelve months. And westward, stretching to the set- ting of the sun, is Lake Beautiful. Green are its waters in the usual, but sometimes on summer days they rise and swim across our sky-line blue as skies after a 237 Beside Lake shower. The curl of breaking play- Beautiful waves is green as emerald; the water, wading out from shore, is clear as crystal springs; wading farther, it is green as bulk grass, and thence stays this ac- customed green save when, as I have said, for reasons only God is conversant with, it floods blue as mid sea. This lake can not weary us. Its dusky mantle of twilight, its gray mantle of clouded weather, its emerald mantle of mornings, its patched mantle of rising winds, its frayed mantle of wild winds blowing, its iris mantle of sunset and afterglows, its quiet mantle of wave fallen fast asleep, its torn, blown mantle of wild storm, its black mantle of starless nights, its star- sown mantle of starry nights, its silver mantle of nights when the moon swings rapturous into the heavens has this lake any mantle we do not love? Not one, not one. Or has it any moods we do not love? Its becalmed quiet, when the waves Folded Wings 238 do not even wrinkle along the shore, its Lake gentle swing of waters, with music like Beautiful trivial bells at chime, its blustery-mooded calling when far out at lake spaces some riot has churned the deep waves into majestical marching, its boom of angry voices when the winds are wrathful all voices wake our hearts to wonder and content. All night the ebb and flow of many waters drifting their music through your dreams; at morning, the waking wonder of the wide water from yellow shore-line to the distant sky ; at noon the lake lifted into white crests innumerable and billows breaking on the old pier-head with roar of booming seas and flash as of jets of light ; at evening, the lake a shifting glory of strange, never-to-be-forgotten lights, olive and wine and emerald and bronze and black and pinks like those the moun- tains wear in their distant hollows, and at night moonlight paving its street to the far-off loneliness of the black sky-line, a bewilderment of beauty and of joy, making apparent what heaven's night 239 Beside Lake might be, did heaven have such a holiday Beautiful in its gladness; or on moonless nights to drift under the stars with waters lapping at your boat's prow and making that wistful, melancholy sobbing which lingers in your heart all the year through, in- capable of exclusion, to lie in your boat and drift at the wave's and the wind's will and watch the stars in distant skies, or in the near waters and feel them shin- ing in your heart, ah, but Lake Beautiful is fair as the purple twilight which anchors along the sky-line of the land of dreams. Farewell