fv-i
 
 A JOURNEY TO
 
 JOURNEY TO 
 NATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 J. P. MOWBRAV 
 
 DOUBLEDAY PAGE AND Co. 
 
 
 1^ f *-**f~.- < --Sp ^x:* 1 ^. 
 -^\S_i>:^i ^^fiS^^ 
 
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 COPYRIGHT, 1900, igoi, BY 
 THE NEW YORK EVENING POST COMPANY 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. 
 
 PRINTED BY 
 
 THE MANHATTAN PRESS 
 474 WEST BROADWAY, N. Y., U. S. A
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE papers in this book were originally con 
 tributed to the New Tork Evening Post, where 
 they elicited a printed desire for their preserva 
 tion in book form. Written at intervals, with 
 very slight continuity of narrative, for weekly 
 readers, all of whom could hardly be expected 
 to follow them consecutively, they were neces 
 sarily repetitious and explanatory in spots, and 
 required rewriting and editing when collected 
 in book form for continuous reading. Those 
 papers therefore have been specially prepared 
 for this volume, new matter having been in 
 troduced and much that was explanatory to 
 weekly readers having been eliminated. 
 
 The personages introduced are taken from life, 
 and are put down with a free hand as the writer 
 saw them at the time, one of them still coloured 
 by the fantasy she evoked. The sketches neces-
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 sarily vary with the varying moods which one 
 brings with him to Nature, and which sometimes 
 colour and distort Nature herself. But if in their 
 entirety they convey in any small degree the 
 author s slowly matured conviction that external 
 Nature has a lesson of obedience and love behind 
 all her aberrations and laws, and whispers that 
 " God is in his world " to those who are recep 
 tive and attentive, they will have accomplished 
 the only purpose that the author had in his 
 mind. 
 
 J. P. M.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 Scared to Life .... 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 Laving Backwards .... 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 The Killing of Marmion . 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 Haying Time .... 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 Dumb Intimacies .... 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Page 
 
 I 
 
 II 
 
 A Summer s Pippin 
 
 47 
 
 61 
 
 7
 
 CONTENTS 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Page 
 Listen to the Mocking-bird . 79 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The Convalescence of a Cracked Heart . . .89 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 The Light in a Dark Cell 99 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 The Glory of the Way . . . 109 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 On a Porch . ... 1 20 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 A September Chill H 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 Mature Truants . . . l S I 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 The Baptism of Dirt . . . 162 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 A Fringed Gentian . . . . . . 1 8 1
 
 CONTENTS 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 Page 
 Stramonium . . . . .192 
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 Chestnuts by the Way ...... 203 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 Out in the Cold 213 
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 Wood Fires 226 
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 High Winds .236 
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 Indian Summer ....... 256 
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 Trailing Juniper ... ... 267 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 Winter Skies 283
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 Snowed In . 
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 The Return of the Exiles . 
 
 Page 
 293 
 
 34
 
 Journey to Nature 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 SCARED TO LIFE 
 
 TO pass suddenly out of the very tempest 
 and agony of life into the dead calm of 
 another existence; to stop all the rioting 
 faculties at full speed and go quietly away to vege 
 tating dreams, is an experience that not many men 
 have had, and the recital of it may not be without 
 interpretative edification to some of my fellows. 
 
 I went out for a year. I could not have severed 
 myself more completely from my habitat and the 
 myriad points of contact with my kind, if I had 
 become what Coleridge calls "a blessed ghost." 
 I cut my species dead and departed this life as 
 absolutely as was possible for a man to do with 
 out severing an artery or blowing his brains out.
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 I turned my back on the world. Not to rail 
 against it, for it must be acknowledged that I was 
 very fond of it, but to get out of myself. I was 
 neither a Timon nor a Thoreau. Just the ordi 
 nary headlong egoist who is living at the top of 
 his speed. I exiled myself to forget myself, and 
 I found something. Do you know what it was ? 
 It was myself. 
 
 One day as I was coming out of the Stock Ex 
 change when that maelstrom was in full race and 
 when I was in a sort of concentrated paroxysm of 
 suspense, I got a warning. It was like a stroke 
 of lightning. Without premonition or explana 
 tion, it seemed as if the mental tension snapped 
 suddenly. I was hurrying to my office when I 
 was swiftly and softly struck with sudden death. 
 I put it that way because I know of no other 
 phrase that will answer exactly to my sensation 
 at the moment. My relation to the rest of the 
 world broke off, and a frightened consciousness 
 seemed to be crying out what s that ? I recall 
 my interpretation of the sensation, and it was that 
 an iron door had fallen with a clang and cut me off 
 forever. I had run up unthinkingly against Eter 
 nity there on the curb in front of the Exchange. 
 
 It is at such moments that we measure time not 
 by its successions but by its packed simultane- 
 ousness. 
 
 I was not physiologically expert enough to 
 know what had happened, but I readily fitted a 
 current phrase to it. Heart failure, I said. And 
 that accommodating explanation conveys no idea 
 
 2
 
 SCARED TO LIFE 
 
 of the sudden recession of all the tides of life in 
 a storm. I must have been pretty thoroughly 
 frightened. Some glimmering recollection there 
 is of somebody accosting me by name and jocu 
 larly asking me if I was sunstruck and then pass 
 ing on in the human flux. By some phantasmal 
 and quick prescience, I saw the Secretary mount 
 ing the rostrum in the Exchange ; there was a 
 picture of momentary hush ; all hats came off, 
 and I heard my name called. It was coupled 
 with the word "Suddenly." Then back went 
 the hats again, the roar began, and I was dis 
 posed of. 
 
 However, the mysterious organ, of which I had 
 hitherto been profoundly ignorant, made a spas 
 modic jump or two, and concluded to resume 
 business, with what I thought was a staggering 
 protest, and I found myself in my office, wonder 
 ing for the first time in my life at the unnecessary 
 headlong nature of messengers and typewriters, 
 and showing that a good scare makes a man 
 incoherent, by replying to the startled girl who 
 asked me if anybody was dead, "Yes ; I am." 
 
 Then I was rattling up Broadway in a cab, say 
 ing to myself with consummate imbecility, " Keep 
 cool, for heaven s sake don t excite yourself." 
 But by the time I had put my smoking-jacket on 
 in my bachelor quarters, and had sent a messenger 
 for the doctor, I had recovered a little of my 
 routine indifference. When the dear old man s 
 knuckles struck my door and he pushed it open, 
 I was walking the floor, smoking ; whereupon he 
 
 3
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 threw his cane upon the table recklessly, and, 
 drawing up his portly form, said : 
 
 " Well, confound your urgent impudence ! I 
 expected to find you breathing your last." 
 
 " Perhaps I am, Doctor," I said. " I had an 
 attack on the street of heart failure. I want 
 instant advice." 
 
 " Heart failure ? " he shouted. " Is that all ? 
 Confound you; I thought you had the influenza. 
 Suppose you open that window. I ll have heart 
 failure myself if I breathe this atmosphere." 
 
 " Do you think it would be safe for me in my 
 present condition ? " I asked. 
 
 " Not only safe, but preferable." 
 
 I opened the sash. It was an early spring after 
 noon, and the sound of a newsboy s voice came 
 mellowed by the distance, as if from a world I had 
 left behind. He was calling a late edition. 
 
 " You ll excuse me a moment, Doctor," I said, 
 as I rang my call again. " I d like to see the 
 latest quotations." 
 
 He looked at me curiously. " There s a break 
 in the market ? " he asked. 
 
 " Slump," I replied. 
 
 " Are you in deep ? " 
 
 " Up to my ears. But it s my health that s 
 worrying me." Then I described my experience 
 as well as I could, and presently he had my coat 
 off, and I was under his professional manipulation. 
 He called it taking a look at my assets hardly 
 thought I could make an assignment, and various 
 cheerful remarks of that kind, while his cool thumb
 
 SCARED TO LIFE 
 
 and finger were poking about, and his warm ear 
 was trying to catch what he called the crack of 
 doom. When finally he sat down in the chair 
 before me, he disregarded my anxiety, and ran on 
 in pretty much the same way. 
 
 "You re a lively lot of boys down there on the 
 street. Your mother s alive yet, I believe." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " How old is she ? " 
 
 " Seventy-six." 
 
 " How old was your father when he died ? " 
 
 tc Seventy-four. Come to the point, Doctor. 
 What chance have I got ? " 
 
 He looked at me a moment very much as if he 
 hesitated to tell me the truth. Then he said : " Well, 
 my boy, it s a toss up whether you live to be 
 seventy-five or drop dead within six months." 
 
 I felt a nerve in my face twitch, and he went on. 
 
 " I suppose I ought to congratulate you. It 
 isn t every one who has the privilege of going 
 down bow first, all sails set, at full speed, without 
 committing suicide." 
 
 I asked him plainly if he could help my 
 chances. 
 
 " No," he said bluntly. " It would be an im 
 pertinence for me to disturb the intimacy which 
 you have established with sudden death. Besides, 
 mortuary neatness and despatch have been very 
 much maligned. Some men are meant to live 
 right up to the stopping point, take all there is 
 of life, and then exit quickly and quietly without 
 any fuss. It s quite characteristic of the business 
 
 5
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 man of our era. It s what somebody has called 
 eliminating the corporal superfluities." 
 
 " Then I am liable to die at any moment, 
 Doctor ? " 
 
 " Why, of course. But you needn t preen 
 yourself. It s a very common privilege in Wall 
 Street. You prefer it, don t you ? I ve seen 
 a good deal of dying, and I must say that as a 
 rule most of the attempts are tiresome bites at a 
 cherry." 
 
 "Doctor," I said, "you will pardon me, I 
 don t quite take your view of it. I prefer to 
 linger and suffer a little. I sent for you because 
 you are a doctor and not a philosopher. What 
 can you do for me ? " 
 
 " Nothing, except to give the undertaker a 
 clean bill of voluntary felo de se. There s only 
 one thing will save you." 
 
 "Ah, what is it?" 
 
 "A miracle." 
 
 " Good heavens, Doctor ! " 
 
 " Yes, sir. Perhaps you have heard the 
 dynamic asses of this world say that a man can 
 not lift himself by his own waistband. I suppose 
 it s true. When you can do that, you will live 
 to be seventy-five, if that s any comfort to you." 
 
 " You are brutally frank. I suppose I must 
 submit to my doom, but I didn t send for you to 
 sentence me." 
 
 " Sentence you ? Confound it, you sent for 
 me to make a monkey of me. What would you 
 think of a man who ate cyanide of mercury every 
 
 6
 
 SCARED TO LIFE 
 
 morning and sent for me to give him some medi 
 cine that would prolong his life ? " 
 
 "You cannot give me any treatment is that 
 it ? " 
 
 " Yes, I can. I can put the whole pharma 
 copoeia into one word and give it to you, but you 
 
 will not take it. It s bitter, but it might cure 
 
 
 you. 
 
 " Give it to me." 
 
 " Stop." 
 
 " Do you mean give up business ? " 
 
 " Give up everything. Stop living for a year, 
 and live. If you don t want to die, let Wall 
 Street die. You cannot both live together." 
 
 " Am I to understand that I can avert an 
 organic disaster with care ? " 
 
 " No. You are bringing it on with care. 
 Stop caring. Go away. Forget and you will 
 lift yourself by your waistband out of an early 
 grave. Where s that boy of yours ? " 
 
 " He is at school." 
 
 " School at seven ! Atrocious ! So, you had 
 to smash him, too." 
 
 " I couldn t very well take care of him when 
 his mother died, so I put him in a comfortable 
 private home school." 
 
 " When did you see him ? " 
 
 I had to think. " Three or four weeks ago." 
 
 " Great Scott that fine little fellow handed 
 over to orphanage to accommodate Wall Street!" 
 
 " Oh, you mistake. I am working for his 
 future." 
 
 7
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 " By destroying your own. That s the devil s 
 logic." 
 
 This treatment resulted somewhat as a counter- 
 irritant will. The Doctor had cuffed me profes 
 sionally. When he went away I began to resent 
 it. Besides, the farther I receded from the original 
 point of shock, the less dangerous it appeared to 
 be, and the events that had been momentarily 
 suspended began to press up again. Telegrams, 
 special messengers, urgent calls, came out of the 
 world to which I belonged. It is not easy to step 
 outside of a crisis when you are a part of it. A 
 man does not suddenly resolve to become medita 
 tive in a mob. I had sufficient resolution to back 
 out of a dinner party and send word to the office 
 that I would not be down for a day or two. I 
 was already compromising. I would slack up for 
 a few days, and then go at it again more guardedly. 
 This in effect was to use Wendell Phillips s 
 phrase a weak determination not to commit 
 suicide, but to jump only half way down Niagara. 
 
 To be absolutely candid, neither physical warn 
 ing nor medical advice would have broken the 
 nexus of my life at that time, but the Doctor had 
 dropped one bit of acid into his advice that was to 
 eat away the chain that I could not break. That 
 word "orphanage" laid hold of some part of my 
 system with a rankling persistency. It was as if 
 the Doctor had left his scalpel sticking in my soul. 
 " Where is that boy ? " kept tolling in me like a 
 deep, questioning bell. 
 
 The next morning I was again flying up town
 
 SCARED TO LIFE 
 
 in a cab. I arrived at a shabby genteel home un 
 expectedly. The woman who let me in intimated 
 very plainly by her manner that it was irregular 
 to come at that hour. She ought to have been 
 forewarned. I brushed her away with my sudden 
 fatherhood. " He was in the class room," she said, 
 with an air of finality, as if the class room were a 
 bar to fathers. But she must have seen in my 
 face some gleams of a sudden and irresistible 
 voracity that would be dangerous to tamper with, 
 for she led the way with a grim and silent protest, 
 and I suddenly saw eight or ten little fellows in a 
 row on a bench. It seemed to me then that I 
 had never before encountered such a petrifaction 
 of all the natural functions of childhood. The 
 children appeared to be in some kind of a vise, 
 meant to squeeze them into indistinguishable uni 
 formity. But, as my eye ran along that human 
 gamut, it met one inscrutable note that made every 
 string in me vibrate. One of the faces was mine. 
 The moment it saw me, the big, blue eyes opened 
 wide, a pair of lips involuntarily cried, " Papa," 
 and a pair of little arms seemed to stretch across 
 the space and clutch at me all over. 
 
 I took him away in spite of protests, and when 
 the matron asked me with an utterly unanswera 
 ble superiority what I was going to do with him, 
 I crushed her with a bravado that could only 
 come out of Wall Street. " We are going to 
 play pinochle," I said. 
 
 He and I had the flat to ourselves that night. 
 I never had so much fun in my life. They must
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 have heard us on the floor below and wondered. 
 After he had said his prayers in his night-gown, 
 he asked me if I wasn t going to say mine, and 
 I think I blushed. Just before he went to sleep, 
 he put his arm softly over to see if I was there, 
 and then said tremulously, " Papa, are you going 
 
 away in the morning ? " I turned over, kissed 
 him on the cheek, and with that utter imbecility 
 that is pristine, I said, " Charlie, if you love me 
 as I love you, no knife can cut our love in two." 
 
 10
 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 LIVING BACKWARDS 
 
 WHEN I made up my mind to back out 
 of my environment, I encountered some 
 poignant experiences which it is not worth 
 while to narrate in detail. It is enough if I can 
 make clear the resultant lesson of it all. Several 
 impulses and desires, deep embedded, combined 
 to make me step clean out of one habitat into an 
 other, and having taken the step, I had too much 
 obduracy of character to go back. You have 
 heard of men turning a new leaf. In my case it 
 was no mere ornamental figure of speech. If you 
 will permit me to use a better phrase, not irrev 
 erently, I was born again, and like all births it 
 had its pangs, but I emerged into a new world. 
 That is the interesting part of it. The Doctor 
 had declared that I could not lift myself by my 
 own waistband, and therefore must die. I ob 
 jected to dying. Somehow it hurt me to be 
 knocked down in that manner, and when I looked 
 
 ii
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 at my boy, only eight years old, the idiotic idea 
 occurred to me that perhaps he might help me 
 to lift myself by my own waistband. 
 
 One morning in late May we found ourselves, 
 with our bridges burnt, standing with a yellow 
 dog in front of a weather-beaten hut one hundred 
 miles from Wall Street. It was so early that I 
 could feel the wet wire grass through my thin 
 shoes. I looked at the dilapidated house and 
 wondered at my temerity. Then the two fellows 
 who are always squabbling in one s subconscious- 
 ness began their debate. 
 
 "So," says one of them a kind of Mephisto 
 
 "you have made up your mind to live in that 
 hovel, have you ? Perhaps you think you were 
 built for it." 
 
 " No," says the other fellow, " I m going to be 
 rebuilt for it." 
 
 "Well, it s a mediaeval funk blank cowardice 
 
 crass sentimentalism. You cannot change your 
 skin by changing your geography. You will com 
 mit suicide before the year is out." 
 
 " All right," said the other, setting his teeth, 
 "suicide it must be then. I ve got a little acro 
 batic feat to perform just to prove to a doctor that 
 somewhere in the past I had a Puritan ancestor 
 who died on the church steps with a gun in one 
 hand and a hymn-book in the other. I can live 
 on raw turnips and spring water when my mind 
 is made up." 
 
 This was the bravado of the will, and even 
 while it was flourishing I was conscious that I 
 
 12
 
 LIVING BACKWARDS 
 
 would give the hovel and the two big boxes that 
 had been set down at its door for a cocktail. 
 
 I asked the two men who had driven us and 
 the boxes up where I could get some ice and a 
 lemon. They looked at each other as if I had 
 asked them for a French menu. "Ice? " said one 
 of them. " You might git some at the butcher s 
 in Spelldown. It s four miles and a half. There s 
 a spring in the medder yonder, but the lemon 
 crop ain t very good this year." 
 
 " That s so," said his companion, wiping his 
 face with his shirt-sleeves, " the potato bugs hurt 
 the young lemons awfully last season." 
 
 I learned sooner or later that this kind of irony 
 was in the air like the smell of the skunk cabbage. 
 The inside of the hovel was not so dilapidated 
 after all. There were only two rooms and a 
 woodshed. But it was clean and bright and 
 sweet, and scented airs wandered through it. A 
 phoebe-bird sat on the sill of a low window and 
 intimated that I was impertinent. Everything 
 was in humble and homely shipshape order. 
 There were two shakedowns, a pine table, camp- 
 chairs, a Quaker rocker, some trunks, a little 
 book-shelf, a dresser with thick cups and saucers 
 on it, and a small writing-table under the window, 
 over which a chintz curtain was flapping lazily. 
 The big fireplace at the end of the room had 
 some faggots piled ready for lighting. 
 
 I sat down at the window, and surveying the 
 homely surroundings, thought of my bachelor 
 quarters in the city, and had to press my hand
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 on my heart to restrain my heroism. The drone 
 of the carpenter bee at the window and the voice 
 of Charlie on the wire grass with the yellow dog, 
 were the only sounds, save the occasional quick 
 rat-a-tat of a woodpecker somewhere. I turned 
 the last batch of letters that I had brought with 
 me out of my breast pocket. How odd they 
 looked in that place with their club monograms 
 and hotel imprints. Some of them were super 
 scribed "Immediate" and "Personal" and "Wait 
 for answer." Two or three of them were small 
 and mauve and probably scented. I had not 
 opened any of them, for I knew very well what 
 was in them, and I was not going to weaken then. 
 I pushed them aside and tried to get my bearings. 
 Did I know where I was ? Well rather. The 
 nearest house was a mile across the hill and valley 
 to the northeast. It was somebody s deserted 
 " Folly." The old man raised hay and butter 
 milk, and had a niece named Griselle. She never 
 heard of me until her uncle told her that a strange 
 gentleman with his boy had hired the cabin for a 
 year on account of his health, and she came over 
 and put things to rights. I never told her nor 
 Charlie that I had been there before it was 
 nearly ten years before. What was the use ? 
 They would not have understood. I had boarded 
 in the " Folly " for a month. Somehow that 
 romantic runaway may have led to this, but 
 Charlie couldn t understand that, and it would 
 be foolish to tell him that one day his mother 
 and I were caught in a shower and took refuge
 
 LIVING BACKWARDS 
 
 in this hovel, and ate strawberries and cream and 
 shortcake, there where that pine table stood, while 
 the hail was pattering on the roof. No, I can be 
 a Rousseau to you, curious reader, but not to 
 Charlie. It is difficult to be as candid as- Rous 
 seau without being as objectionable. Charlie 
 could not understand if I told him that the ghost 
 of an old sweetheart had come back again with 
 me to the hovel and was going to eat strawberries 
 and cream again at that same table. 
 
 Besides, just now he was caring more for that 
 yellow dog than for anything else on earth, or 
 perhaps in heaven, for that matter. That cur was 
 the only living thing that welcomed us when we 
 came to the station at Spelldown. She seemed 
 to sniff our predetermined vagabondage, and 
 began to wag a most familiar reciprocity, that 
 said, " I am with you, boys." So audaciously 
 did she claim a prior acquaintance with Charlie 
 in some other state of existence, that I gave a 
 boy a dollar for her, and she wig-wagged with 
 boisterous and unmistakable manumission all the 
 way up to our destination. Before she had got 
 there Charlie had named her " Samson " with 
 reference to some dog ideal in his story-book, 
 and a day or two later I had to correct it, accord 
 ing to the facts, there being indubitable evidence 
 that the cur did not belong to the Samsonian 
 gender. So I suggested as more appropriate to 
 her character the name of " Delilah," and Charlie, 
 with the felicity of blue-pencil infancy, instantly 
 converted it into " Lilah " for all time.
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 I pulled the Quaker rocker outside the door, 
 lit my brier-wood pipe, and tried to make myself 
 believe that I felt like Cowper s Selkirk. But the 
 attempt was frustrated by the arrival of Griselle. 
 She came over the northeast pasture hill, in 
 starched muslin, and brought Gabe Hotchkiss 
 with her. Gabe was her uncle a weazened Rip 
 Van Winkle, who would split my wood, haul my 
 supplies once a week, and, if I said so, sleep in 
 my woodshed, and fetch me some trout and dace 
 occasionally from the Cluny milldam, between 
 my cottage and the " Folly." Against this prac 
 tical and case-hardened rustic Griselle was like a 
 musk pink against a stone heap. I wanted to 
 call her Phyllis, and I believe I have mentioned 
 her in my diary as " Buttermilk and Daisies." 
 But I soon found out that she had taught dis 
 trict school in winter and played the melodeon 
 in the Reformed Church somewhere. She could 
 come over and get Charlie s breakfast in the 
 morning. Charlie s mark that. Of course 
 Charlie and I were going to run two tables. 
 Having settled this, she abandoned me to Gabe, 
 and went out on the wire grass to make Charlie s 
 acquaintance. 
 
 Finally she insisted on taking Charlie over to 
 the " Folly " and showing him the milldam. In a 
 moment of weakness I consented, and was then 
 thrown upon my own resources for the rest of the 
 day. I tried to fill the time out with petty industry. 
 I got out the few books and arranged them on 
 the shelf; tacked up the photograph of Charlie s 
 
 16
 
 LIVING BACKWARDS 
 
 mother over the writing-table ; tried on a blue 
 flannel shirt and a pair of baseball shoes, whistling 
 an air from that last opera of Delibes s. I took 
 a walk and tried to find the spring came back 
 without finding it ; took down the photograph 
 and put it up in another place ; rearranged the 
 books; swung a hammock, and cut my thumb. 
 It was the longest day I ever spent in my life. 
 Finally it occurred to me suddenly that something 
 was liable to happen to Charlie. Wasn t there 
 a milldam ? Didn t I know that girls only 
 thought of themselves ? Good heavens, the 
 Hotchkisses might be kidnappers. The air began 
 to get blue, and I snatched a stick and set out 
 hurriedly on a rescue to meet Griselle and 
 Charlie coming over the pasture-field, hand in 
 hand, beautifully silhouetted against the sky, and 
 Lilah wig-wagging behind all of them consum 
 mately unconcerned, and Charlie crammed with 
 new experiences, in which milldam was most con 
 spicuous. Griselle passed him over in the most 
 uneventful way and returned home. 
 
 Then Charlie and I got our supper. If I 
 remember correctly, we had bologna sausage, 
 cheese, crackers, and tea, and would have had 
 sardines if I had known where that infernal 
 can-opener was. It was about the time of 
 day that I usually took steak a la Bordelaise, 
 or a bird, with several entrees and a pint of 
 dry wine. I admired my nerve as I ate the 
 bologna, and wondered how long I could keep 
 this up. 
 
 17
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 After supper I proposed that we sit outside 
 our door and have a talk while I smoked my 
 pipe. We could see the sun go down through 
 the trees. The conversation was carried on, I 
 must admit, mainly by Charlie. His imagination 
 had been inflamed by the milldam. " It was 
 only such a little ways off, too." 
 
 "If you go there alone, I ll skin you," I said. 
 
 " Oh, but it s full of big white flowers." 
 
 " They re rank poison sure death to boys if 
 they haven t got some one with them." 
 
 This was a fine parental beginning. I tried to 
 steer the conversation into other channels. I had 
 a story pat of a boy who got himself drowned by 
 being alone and nobody to pull him out. I told 
 it pathetically, and wound it up just as the sun 
 dropped behind the hill. There was no response. 
 I looked round. Charlie had gone down with 
 the sun. He was asleep. I picked him up and 
 carried him in. He was " dead beat," as we 
 say. 
 
 " You re a nice companion," I growled, as he 
 climbed into his shakedown, " to keep me com 
 pany. What am I going to do with myself till 
 twelve o clock ? " 
 
 " Good night, papa," he said with inimitable 
 indifference. 
 
 To be left alone in this manner was hideous. 
 The very stillness was asphyxiating to the ear. 
 Nothing but a wailing whippoorwill cut into the 
 hush of it. It seemed to me that she was 
 frightened at the stillness. The moth finally put 
 
 18
 
 LIVING BACKWARDS 
 
 my candle out. Then I went outside, and walked 
 up and down like a sentry, and tried to picture 
 to myself what the gay world was doing at that 
 lively hour. Well Tillotson was playing bill 
 iards at the University Club ; Bannister would be 
 eating a late dinner with the Farnsworth, and she 
 would ask him between sips, "What do you sup 
 pose ever became of your friend ? " and Bannister 
 would whistle me down the wind lightly, saying, 
 " Oh, his accounts were all right. He slipped 
 off to Europe for his health." And that would 
 dispose of me. But the Farnsworth s little mauve 
 letter was lying in there on the table under the 
 chintz curtain. Confound her ! I had not 
 opened it. Oh, I ve got some sand blast that 
 whippoorwill ! It must have been twelve o clock 
 when I concluded to try the bed, and it was cer 
 tainly two o clock in the morning before I went 
 to sleep. And then up rose Griselle, with her 
 muslin. She must have been hanging around 
 the place all night, for I could swear that no 
 sooner had I got my eyes closed than she began 
 to clatter in the kitchen. She even went so far as 
 to sing " The Sweet By and By." Just as I had 
 got the two pillows muffled round my ears, Charlie 
 was pulling at my arm. " Papa, get up get up. 
 Griselle wants to get the breakfast." 
 
 I must have growled like the captain of a tug, 
 but it was six o clock, and it slowly dawned upon 
 me that that young ruffian had been up an hour. 
 I went out in the shed and reprimanded myself 
 quietly. " How do you like it ? " I said, as I 
 
 19
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 looked for the spring water. " You haven t got 
 so much sand at this hour of the day, have you ? " 
 I don t think I answered myself. If I did I made 
 no record of it, but I did try to explain to Griselle 
 why I couldn t eat her broiled chicken and fresh 
 eggs at that time in the morning. And she said, 
 Oh, I d come to it after I got rested. 
 
 " Rested ? Do I look tired ? " 
 
 " I guess you re tired on the wrong side," she 
 said. " When you get tired on the right side, 
 you ll eat like a Cheshire shoat." 
 
 This jarred a little, but it was prophecy. About 
 half-past eleven I remarked to Charlie, " My 
 kingdom for six small oysters on the half shell," 
 and he said, " Let s go in and open the sardine- 
 box." 
 
 And we did. 
 
 It was not an easy job that I had taken upon 
 myself to reconstruct my life. I don t think I real 
 ized the innate difficulties of it until I had burned 
 my bridges. It is all very well and quite natu 
 ral for us to talk about nature and obedience and 
 simple living if we are sportsmen, or naturalists, 
 or even poets. But if one is a stock-broker, who 
 has been communing with the money market for 
 eight years, it comes pretty tough at first. Noth 
 ing but the grim alternative of sudden death could 
 have made me so determined a bridge-burner. 
 But I must acknowledge that during the first 
 week of my voluntary exile in the far-away Hotch- 
 kiss woods I had to contemplate my eight-year- 
 old son and heir with deadly concentration of 
 
 20
 
 LIVING BACKWARDS 
 
 purpose in order to understand that sudden death 
 was not altogether preferable to slow extinction 
 in utter solitude. 
 
 The Doctor had used the lad as a sort of emo 
 tional lever, but I soon found out that the lad 
 himself was as rigid in his views of life as the 
 moral law. He never bent a single natural 
 impulse to accommodate me. I was to bend all 
 my case-hardened habits to accommodate him. He 
 expected me to go to bed at eight o clock and to 
 get up at five. He had in his bones some kind 
 of thermometrical arrangement with the sun. He 
 insisted that a breakfast at seven o clock was the 
 proper thing, and he carried this obduracy so far 
 that he serenely set up oatmeal and milk as a suf 
 ficient inducement. When I told him that we 
 were going to play Robinson Crusoe in the woods 
 for a year, he complacently accepted it with the 
 immediate arrangement that I was to be the man 
 Friday. 
 
 The fact is I never suspected how consum 
 mately I had drifted into an artificial and selfish 
 disregard of the normal mean of things until I 
 began to associate on intimate terms with my 
 own offspring. After a week of it I appealed to 
 the Doctor by mail. " What am I going to do 
 to occupy my mind ? " 
 
 " Don t occupy it," he wrote back. " What 
 did you climb out of the cerebral maelstrom for ? 
 Stop thinking for a while. Play. Become an 
 animal and watch Charlie." 
 
 " Is thy servant then a dog ? " I inquired. 
 
 21
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 "Yes," he replied, "or some other more igno 
 ble animal. Perhaps Wall Street has inoculated 
 you with the notion that you belong to the min 
 eral or vegetable kingdom. It s a great shame. 
 You are indubitably and necessarily half animal. 
 Take my advice, stay in your kennel and wag 
 your tail." 
 
 Once again I wrote him to say : " I think you 
 have overestimated Charlie s abilities as a guide. 
 He hasn t quite understood my case from the 
 first." 
 
 Then I got this short and sharp rejoinder : " But 
 I understand your case, believe me. There are 
 some mountains in our early vistas, and the chil 
 dren get nearer their summits in their play than 
 we ever get with our pack-mules." 
 
 If I had not had a profound respect for this 
 gifted old curmudgeon s knowledge, and a sneak 
 ing fear that he and sudden death had an under 
 standing, I think I should have slipped away in 
 the most pusillanimous manner at the end of the 
 first week. As it was, I girded my loins and stood 
 up to the extraordinary job of lifting myself by 
 my own waistband. But to be utterly frank, now 
 that it is all over, the only thing I did was to 
 hang on like grim death, and let Charlie do the 
 rest. 
 
 I must have looked very idiotic sitting there 
 trying to coax myself into the belief that I was 
 enjoying an Arcadian existence and had got back 
 to the primitive and joyous simplicity of life, 
 which was a most preposterous conclusion ; for if 
 
 22
 
 LIVING BACKWARDS 
 
 I had reached that condition, I would have gone 
 to sleep like Charlie, and not thought about it at 
 all. But the man who has for years packed all 
 his excitement, his society, and his indulgences 
 into his nights is not going to wrap the drapery 
 of his couch about him like a proper yokel at 
 eight o clock, and lie down to pleasant dreams. 
 Night, as I knew her, was a luxurious Ethiope, 
 who not only " wore so many jewels on her face 
 you could not see twas black," but carried a good 
 many dulcimers in her hand. The night that I 
 had come into was undoubtedly the original insti 
 tution, made to sleep in. I made up my mind 
 that it was absolutely barren of anything else, and 
 then a June bug hit me, biff, in the forehead, and 
 fell over dead on the Doctor s letter, as if he had 
 given up his life in the attempt to prove me a 
 liar. All that I could see of the night was a 
 square, velvety black space where the window 
 was. It was fretted by some dim flying wings 
 that microscopically glistened in the vagrant star 
 light, like tiny threads woven into the blackness. 
 Out of this mystery of the dark crept all kinds 
 of shadow sounds and occult breathings. I could 
 hear the dog barks dying off in a vanishing per 
 spective, but marking the dim distances and the 
 solitude with their grading accents. Along the 
 ground at regular intervals came the throb of a 
 bass viol as some bullfrog twanged his string over 
 at the milldam. 
 
 A man cannot fool with night when she is in 
 puris naturalibus. It is only the wanton night 
 
 2 3
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 that he has himself made that will tolerate his 
 impertinence. While I sat there thinking of 
 financial combinations that had been cut short, 
 and saying to myself, " The bulls are up in Ber 
 lin and the Boerse is bellowing," another June 
 bug hit me on the nose and fell over on his back 
 on the table. Several more came in, bombarded 
 my lamp-stand, and fell dead. There was quite 
 a row of them on the Doctor s letter with their 
 claws up. Harmless, jolly little imps of the 
 darkness, they seemed at that moment to be 
 punctuating the night s contempt for me. They 
 recalled to me a vanished estate when they and I 
 were on better terms. All at once the name 
 came back through the window like the bug him 
 self Phyllopertba horticola. It was as plain as 
 some of the adages in my old copy-book, and 
 along with it my juvenile translation "leaf- 
 eating, garden-haunting acrobat." Always he 
 came with the early roses and the first hot, dry 
 spell. And always without steering apparatus, he 
 ran foul of everything, and always got the worst 
 of it. Now, either he or I was an impertinence. 
 Night with these winged succubi was tedious. I 
 looked at Charlie. His head was on his arm. 
 How far away he appeared to be. Nothing could 
 annoy him, for the same night that was bombard 
 ing me had her protective arm around him. I 
 made a memorandum on the margin of the Doc- 
 
 o 
 
 tor s letter. " Get mosquito netting, and send 
 for book on entomology." Then I blew the 
 light out and went to bed. 
 
 24
 
 LIVING BACKWARDS 
 
 The next day I stumbled in my stupid way 
 backwards into the new life. I took a tin pail 
 and called to Charlie. " We must find that 
 spring," I said, and we set out like two tramps 
 through the jungle, starting a good many garru 
 lous chipmunks and seeing the occasional flash 
 of a rabbit. We reached a wooded crest toil 
 somely, and I heard the far-away toot of a loco 
 motive whistle. The white clouds were sailing 
 over the hazy hills in the east. Everything was 
 slumberous and warm and restful. Somewhere 
 in that direction there was social life. We would 
 walk over there and discover it. So we stowed 
 our pail away in a clump of bushes and set out 
 on a long tramp of exploration down winding 
 dusty roads and over ancient stone fences, new 
 vistas beguiling us on, and the yellow dog keep 
 ing ahead with a beckoning wag. Visions of a 
 cool hamlet with the railroad running through it 
 like an artery from a distant heart ; a quaint 
 little station with jolly old telegraph poles, and 
 some nice old hostelry where we could get a 
 homely dinner and hire a horse to bring us back 
 like two companionable German students. 
 
 But the roads were elusive. They wound 
 round with singular want of purpose, and wan 
 dered down to deserted mills or turned in at 
 antique graveyards, and sometimes lost them 
 selves in grass-grown clearings where I suspected 
 there had once been camp-meetings. So, finally, 
 when the sun was getting vertically hot and the 
 dust was working its way into our marrow, we 
 
 25
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 sat down on a flat stone by the roadside, and 
 Charlie mildly suggested that it was time to eat. 
 As we sat there a farmer came by driving a 
 heavy wagon leisurely. I hailed him, " Say, 
 neighbour, how far is the town ? " 
 
 " What town ? " 
 
 "The nearest town." 
 
 " Do you mean Slocum ? " 
 
 "Yes, anything." 
 
 " Well, you strike the Slocum pike about three 
 miles over yander, and that ll fetch you to Slo 
 cum. It s about eighteen mile." 
 
 " How far is it back to the Hotchkiss woods ?" 
 
 He turned square round in his seat, threw one 
 leg over the other, and regarded us with a new 
 interest. 
 
 " Be you the man that s livin in the Hotch 
 kiss woods ? " 
 
 I felt instinctively that the whole county had 
 heard of me. " I be," I said. " I ve lost my way. 
 I ll give you a dollar to haul us back. Maybe 
 you could tell us where we could get a lunch." 
 
 That struck him as funny. "Lunch hey? 
 I s pose you want yer dinner. Wai, it s an hour 
 past dinner-time." 
 
 The impropriety of being hungry when the 
 dinner hour was past had never struck me so 
 forcibly before. Finally he " allowed " that we 
 might get a hunk of bread and a dish of milk at 
 the sawmill, but he wasn t going any farther. So 
 we climbed in, and he jolted out of us what little 
 resignation we had left, and landed us in a stable- 
 
 26
 
 yard of the sawmill, where there was a strong and 
 not unpleasant odour of hemlock sawdust, and 
 where we were speedily the objects of benevolent 
 suspicion to several persons who eyed us through 
 the green blinds. Nevertheless, we were gra 
 ciously provided with hunks of bread and flowing 
 bowls of milk served in a summer kitchen by a 
 young woman in freckles whom the angels called 
 Pauline, and who kept her eye on the big seal- 
 ring on my little finger, so that when she refused 
 to let me pay for the food I gave her the ring, 
 coming dangerously near calling her Pauline and 
 telling her that my grandfather the Doge of Ven 
 ice had married the Adriatic with it. 
 
 By this time the old teamster, who had been 
 wrestling with himself in the woodshed, had ob 
 tained a victory over his conscience and concluded 
 to take us back for the dollar. As the life was 
 nearly jolted out of us by the time we reached 
 the edge of the Hotchkiss woods, we told him 
 ve would walk the rest of the way, and then 
 Charlie and I set out to find our water pail, com 
 ing after much wandering upon a little brook 
 winding down through the valley among water 
 cress and marsh-grasses with a pianissimo gurgle. 
 We took off our shoes and stockings, and plunged 
 our dust-covered feet into its cool pockets, and 
 then set out to explore it, wading along its channel. 
 
 Presently we came to a grassy basin with slop 
 ing green banks a natural saucer that must at 
 some time have been brimming, but now was left 
 green by the litde stream that wound through 
 
 27
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 its centre. I imitated the yellow dog, and threw 
 myself on the slope, but Charlie went to work 
 promptly to dam up the outlet. I watched his 
 futile hydraulics with lazy interest for a few mo 
 ments, and then went and helped him with my 
 superior knowledge. I rolled the stones up and 
 piled them, while he stopped the interstices with 
 sod. It was very jolly to see the water put on 
 an air of timidity, and race round the basin as if 
 a little frightened and looking for an escape. I 
 tugged at heavier stones, digging them out of a 
 neighbouring bank with my fingers and rolling 
 them over with incredible toil. Both of us 
 vorked like slaves. There was something fasci 
 nating in the gracious conflict of the water. It 
 was like romping with a handsome hoydenish 
 girl, who as soon as you caught her eluded you 
 with bursts of laughter and little gurgles to run 
 off defiantly in a new direction. All at once 
 every interest in the world suspended itself while 
 that basin filled up. The element was so coy, 
 so gently self-willed, and so flashingly and musi 
 cally capricious, that the desire to subdue and 
 tame and possess it stirred some instinctive mas 
 culine impulse even in Charlie. I had no time 
 to think about it then, but I can see now that 
 we were savage Angelos painting a mural picture. 
 The little lake rose to us with fairy response. It 
 brimmed the basin, took on frills and furbelows 
 of ripples, flung out jubilates as it leaped over 
 our embankment. It snatched sky depths from 
 the air, and planted magical willowy islets with 
 
 28
 
 LIVING BACKWARDS 
 
 miniature palms and ferns, and sailed argosies of 
 leafy galleons round about one of them had a 
 luxuriant caterpillar curled up in its prow like a 
 voluptuous Cleopatra. 
 
 It was not until the lengthening shadows warned 
 us, that we set out for our cabin, and then went 
 to work without any didacticism or other nonsense 
 to get our dinner. I had sand under my finger 
 nails and scratches on my wrists, but I remarked 
 to Charlie, " Pot cheese and strawberries are aw 
 fully good, my boy," and he, with his mouth full, 
 made voracious response, " Awfully, ain t they ? " 
 
 About half-past eight o clock he looked at me 
 with sleepy surprise. " Are you going to bed, 
 too ? " 
 
 "Yes," I said, "I think I m played out. Good 
 night." 
 
 " Good-night, papa." 
 
 I changed the memorandum on the Doctor s 
 letter, to read "Send for book on hydraulics." 
 That s all I remember of that night. 
 
 Having imitated Charlie up to this point, there 
 was no good reason why I should not get up in 
 the morning when he did. But he was ahead of 
 me, and cavorting at five o clock with the yellow 
 dog on the wet wire grass. I heard his invitation 
 to come out and see the sun rise, a performance 
 that I thought should have worn its novelty off 
 several thousand years ago. But I took a look at 
 it, and it had some special features that were almost 
 Persian or Hellenic. His Majesty rose over a 
 wooded hill, setting fire to the trees in a most 
 
 29
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 riotous manner, and to my disordered imagination 
 presenting Aurora in propria persona coming down 
 the hill with a long shadow in front of her and her 
 chip hat burning like a crown of gold. Of course 
 it was Griselle coming to get our breakfast, with a 
 pail of fresh milk in her hand and Gabe Hotch- 
 kiss trudging on behind. Really this was not so 
 bad, but the disturbance that the birds made as 
 she came trippingly down the slope, struck me as 
 being a little overdone and rather like the claque 
 at a professional matinee. 
 
 Griselle utterly lacks the sense of proportion. 
 I noticed at the breakfast table that Charlie had a 
 new doily under his plate with a capital C worked 
 in its centre. What does a child of his age care 
 for such attentions ? Griselle s talents lack adapta 
 bility. However, I told her, with much pride, of 
 our hydraulics, and explained to her how hard we 
 had worked to make a pool of water in which we 
 could bathe. 
 
 She listened respectfully and only said that there 
 was already a beautiful little pond only a few steps 
 below that. 
 
 I felt crushed, but Charlie rose with the instinc 
 tive genius of his ago to th situation. 
 
 " But we didn t make it," he said. 
 
 3
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE KILLING OF MARMION 
 
 MY doctor having succeeded in exiling me 
 and my eight-year-old heir to what he 
 called " the recuperative wilderness," sent 
 me occasionally a tart reminder of the wholesome- 
 ness and beauty of the process I was undergoing. 
 He is a delightful megatherium of an extinct 
 school, and his corrective bellowings, muffled by 
 distance, afforded me much amusement in my 
 solitude, and doubtless much edifying precept. 
 
 " Isolation," he wrote me, "is the balm of life, 
 and it is better for the constitution than the spice 
 of variety. If I had the power, I would provide 
 unpadded cells for society and shove the gayest 
 of its votaries into them regularly, and turn the 
 key on them, merely to increase the average of 
 human life. I am more and more convinced 
 that the Frenchman was right who said that 
 progress is a disease, and eventually society will 
 die of civilization. It is fast losing the power 
 
 3 1
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 and the privilege of taking breath. The path to 
 heaven is choked with late dinners, and we are 
 forgetting the route." (The old pirate, I ll wager 
 he was writing this in his dress-coat, while the 
 coupe was waiting to take him to a banquet.) " I 
 have tried my best to introduce a few of my gifted 
 patients to their own economies, but they hadn t 
 time to know themselves. They live in a mag 
 netic bath, and would die of ennui if they did not 
 feel the shock of things going by. They are con 
 verting themselves into mere conduits. You are 
 the first fellow I have met who, coming suddenly 
 on his own grave yawning before him, had the 
 pluck to say, * No, I thank you, and walk off in 
 another direction. Bully for you." 
 
 It was by such artful ticklings of my pride that 
 the old ruffian got me to wear my chains with a 
 sense of heroism. I begged for some news very 
 much as a morphine patient begs for his drug. 
 "News," he replied, "there is nothing new in the 
 news. Everything seethes and roils and jostles 
 and bursts just as it did when you were here. 
 Men are running over each other ruthlessly, and 
 dropping out of sight as usual. I don t know 
 whether you remember Calhoun he snapped 
 his E string at concert pitch last week. He is 
 pretty well forgotten by this time. He was so 
 loaded with the events of the universe that his 
 mind snapped. He was one of the modern idiots 
 who try to play the role of Atlas with nothing 
 but their sensibilities. Becky Moultrie you knew. 
 I saw you at one of her receptions before she got 
 
 32
 
 THE KILLING OF MARMION 
 
 to be a woman of affairs. She sent for me last 
 week; said she had a stitch in her side would 
 I drop in between twelve and one. Her lunch 
 time was the only opportunity she could spare 
 me. I haven t time to be sick, she wrote me; 
 I ve got to preside at the meeting to-morrow, 
 and my time is all laid out for next week. It 
 was three days before I called, for I had some 
 thing more important than a stitch in the side to 
 look after. But she was a woman of neatness and 
 despatch. When I got there, she was laid out. 
 It turned out to be a pleuratic stitch, and the 
 flowers were coming in as I arrived. This uni 
 verse of ours is constructed on the stop-over plan, 
 and there is no use in kicking against it. This 
 through-train business doesn t at all agree with 
 the tropical swing of things, which provides clois 
 ters and still nights for forgetting. By Jove, old 
 fellow, there wouldn t have been any Renaissance 
 if there hadn t been Dark Ages first, and there 
 wouldn t have been any Pilgrim s Progress if 
 somebody hadn t impounded Bunyan. I have 
 never read it, but I understand it s a great work. 
 Go to, every man can be his own Buddha, inas 
 much as he has a Bo-tree in his soul if he will 
 only sit down under it at times and be mum and 
 get acquainted with himself." 
 
 The only scent of the city in this philosophy 
 was sceptic and mortuary, and there were times 
 when I would have given a good deal for a sniff 
 of an ailantus tree or a whiff of consomme. But 
 all the same, the regimen of isolation was working 
 
 33
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 a quiet change in me. I was getting on better 
 terms with myself without knowing it. 
 
 I recalled a curiously trivial experience I once 
 had in the city similar to something narrated by 
 a well-known Frenchman. I came home one 
 night from a late and rather riotous supper to my 
 room. There was a full-length mirror in it, and 
 as I lit my gas I got a glimpse of myself, flushed 
 and eager, and it gave me a strange start ; why, I 
 never could tell. But I regarded myself for a 
 moment with startled awe. That ghost of iden 
 tity, forgotten in the rush of impressions, had 
 caught me alone, and I must have shuddered at 
 myself. It was nothing more than what Burns 
 means when he says, " Oh, wad some power the 
 giftie gie us to see oursel s as ithers see us." 
 But it was an analogue of that old superstition 
 which turns the mirror to the wall when there is 
 a death in the house, for no one knows what 
 uncanny recognitions may flit over its surface. 
 There is always a lurking suspicion that some 
 wraith will pass and taunt us. If you make the 
 inquiry, you will find that no belle looks in her 
 glass when she comes home from the revelry. 
 The confounded thing betrays her. It reflects. 
 
 How to get on comfortable terms with your 
 self when you are alone. This is where the 
 Doctor s " Charlie philosophy," as I called it, 
 came in. "The best way to contemplate your 
 self," he wrote me, " both medicinally and mor 
 ally, is through parentage. If a man would see 
 himself through a crystal lens, let him become 
 
 34
 
 THE KILLING OF MARMION 
 
 the father of a boy. This is the answer to that 
 vain prayer of experience Oh, that I could 
 live my life over again. You are living it over 
 again. Watch it. While you have been throw 
 ing life away like a heap of faggots, it has been 
 budding. It is given to every father of a boy to 
 be his own incubus or his own good angel. If 
 you will only listen to your primitive self, you 
 will hear a Memnonian voice as of Nature her 
 self. It is saying, It is better to have one 
 woman who believes you are the greatest man in 
 the world, and who presents you with a boy who 
 agrees with her, than it is to be the greatest man 
 in the world. Under all the flashing tumult 
 and flying spume of a masterful life are the un 
 sullied depths of a creative love with a Kyrie 
 Eleison in it. These sub-depths never get stirred 
 by the life you have been leading. You must sit 
 a while on the shore of this sea you have crossed, 
 and see the shallop of yourself sporting on the 
 beached margent, and feel how helpless you are 
 to load your experience into it without swamping 
 it. By and by, as its sails get stronger, it will 
 venture out to try it all over again. No charts 
 or compasses of yours will still the voices of 
 the sirens, and no silken sails that you can fur 
 nish will turn him from the magical horizon. 
 The isles are floating on a furlong still before. 
 Sit still a while and wait on the sands. Some 
 day he will sail wearily back, looking for the love 
 that he never found elsewhere, to find when he" 
 returns, mayhap, only the runes and the desolate 
 
 35
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 water-marks. Now is your time, old fellow. 
 Take yourself by the hand, let yourself climb up 
 on your knees and enfold you in protective inno 
 cence and reproach you with warm kisses. There 
 is a millennial touch in it, believe me, for you 
 will have gotten rid of your carnivorous egotism 
 and will lie down with the lamb. A touch of 
 prophecy, too, if you will but remember. For 
 is it not written that ( a little child shall lead 
 them ? " 
 
 Literally to renew one s youth, according to the 
 Doctor s prescription, turned out to be a series of 
 gracious surprises. With Charlie s hand in mine, 
 I walked into some mysteries that gladly turned 
 into revelations. We took up with some toys in 
 our imaginations, and let the real fairies into our 
 experiences, so that little curtains were lifted all 
 round us on worlds unrealized. 
 
 One hot day we lay flat on our stomachs under 
 the shade of a beech, among the June grass and 
 the daisies, peering down into a magic spectacle, 
 and yet it was the planet s history in petto. The 
 great loom of the universe was working there 
 with miniature continents. It was a paleontologi- 
 cal glimpse of the pre-world, as if Nature kept 
 ceaseless memoranda in shorthand of all her mon 
 strous cycles of change. There were the equato 
 rial forests and the prehistoric monsters. All one 
 had to do was to get the inverse scale adapted, and 
 ^the gigantic fronds waved their plumes, and stran 
 gling creepers wound in tangles, and strange forms 
 of life wandered through. Green leviathans 
 
 36
 
 THE KILLING OF MARMION 
 
 crouched in corners ; scurrying termites ran hither 
 and thither. A slow-moving angleworm drew his 
 ophidian length along the ancient geologic reaches, 
 and an armoured pterodactyl, in the shape of a 
 dragon-fly, came in flaming gorgeousness like 
 Apollyon, and picked up an inhabitant or two. 
 Here was the oldest Nibelungen Lied going on 
 still, with real dragons amid the real elements in 
 this demiurgic workshop. Somehow I fancy that 
 Wagner, when he heard the eternal melodies, must 
 have been lying on his stomach and looking afc the 
 eternal animate forces. 
 
 But what is the use of trying to get these child 
 like experiences over into literature ? One must 
 be a Thoreau to do it. When I interrogated the 
 mysteries like Hamlet, there was Charlie with his 
 round implicit face, and he seemed to say to me, 
 "You want to know the secret of Nature; well, 
 you will have to become an obedient part of it, 
 then you will know, but you will lose the power 
 and the desire to tell it." That boy never makes 
 any demonstration over a sunrise, and he looks at 
 me wonderingly when I begin to cavort and effuse. 
 He seems to be more familiar with the processes 
 than I am. They are spectacles and episodes to 
 me. Heavens, it is always sunrise with him ; why 
 make such a fuss over it ? And that is always the 
 way with souls that live close to Nature. They 
 take it as a matter of course because they are a 
 part of it, and that is where Cooper made such a 
 mistake with his Natty Bumppo, who was always 
 going about attitudinizing and philosophizing 
 
 37
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 about that which such a man would unconsciously 
 appropriate. Even Poe, with all his genius, failed 
 to lie on his stomach and look into the grasses of 
 the field. His Raven and his Annabel Lee are 
 not arrayed like one of these. Fancy him writ 
 ing the " Flower de Luce " of Longfellow, or the 
 " Chambered Nautilus " of Holmes, or the " Water 
 Fowl " of Bryant. If he had been guided by the 
 implicit faith of the boy, he would have taken the 
 advice of the guide in Dante s " Inferno " when 
 he came to some of the horrors, " Look and pass 
 on." 
 
 Besides all other experiences there was one 
 that I cannot help making some mention of. It 
 was purely psychic and confidential. I found 
 that Charlie was more or less of a telephone into 
 eternity. Do not misunderstand me. In the 
 breaks of our existence all of us come at some 
 time to that tower in the valley of desolation 
 where faith has run a wire out into the shoreless 
 leagues. In all the ages man has come there 
 and sent his messages out and waited for answers. 
 But none ever came. His cry was for "the touch 
 of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that 
 is still." He must have missed the right instru 
 ment. I only know that the sound of the voice 
 came plainly back to me at times ; that I often 
 felt the touch of the vanished hand, and some 
 thing out of eternity looked through the near-by 
 windows of another soul. I have listened to it 
 in playtime. The inflections, the ineffable some 
 thing was unmistakable, so that the voice was
 
 THE KILLING OF MARMION 
 
 not utterly still. At such times I was in danger 
 of getting sentimental, but Griselle would come 
 like a vestal and fill the whole woods with the 
 incense of fried ham, and Charlie and I, like two 
 devotees, would walk up to her altar and perform 
 our duties with carnivorous disregard of all senti 
 ments. So does Nature, when she has her way, 
 preserve and equalize her antagonisms and con 
 vert even fried ham into ambrosia. 
 
 I think we grew quite like Brahmins under 
 our mango trees. The entire population of the 
 woods, having come to the conclusion that we 
 were either too effeminate or too orthodox to kill 
 anything, took advantage of our helplessness. 
 The squirrels came in at the window in the morn 
 ing. The woodchucks sat on their haunches on 
 our wire grass. The rabbits made burrows under 
 our hearthstone. We could hear them scolding 
 their broods at night and bumping their heads 
 against the flooring. The wood-turtles crawled 
 in over our sill, and the young ones dropped out 
 of Charlie s pockets at night when he hung his 
 trousers over a chair. As for the birds, they 
 reminded me of the gamin in Frankfort Street. 
 They gathered in front of our door in the morn 
 ings and waited to be fed, and there was never a 
 night that a bat or two did not manage to worm 
 himself into our confidence when we were trying 
 to sleep. It was very amusing to see the com 
 placent contempt with which Lilah, the yellow 
 dog, and Gabe Hotchkiss regarded this extraor 
 dinary tolerance. But I think there was a quiet 
 
 39
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 understanding growing up between these two and 
 Charlie that it was high time the killing began. 
 One morning I surprised the infant in the wood 
 shed warching Gabe at work on a hickory limb. 
 I was informed that the preparation was for bosen- 
 narrers. My lamb had passed the stone age. 
 " What on earth do you want with a bow and 
 arrows ? " I asked. 
 
 "Want to kill birds," he said triumphantly. 
 
 And there was the old Adam beginning to peep 
 out in my Arcadia. 
 
 The Brahminical growth was very curious, and 
 I now see that it was a part of the general obedi 
 ence to which I had subjected myself. No sooner 
 had I condescended to strip off my aggressive 
 individuality for a while, and put myself implicitly 
 into the general order, and drift with the ordained 
 arrangement, than the general order came inquir 
 ingly up to my threshold and held out paws and 
 beaks and mandibles, and wagged tails as if it car 
 ried in its poor, half-developed consciousness a 
 kindly desire to renew the paradisaical truce. It 
 is astonishing how quickly the gossip of the 
 woods carries. The birds told the squirrels and 
 the squirrels told the woodchucks : " That man 
 and his boy in the Hotchkiss hut are not killers. 
 It is incredible, but true, they haven t destroyed 
 anything since they arrived." 
 
 This rumour appeared to have excited the curi 
 osity of every bug and beast and creeping thing 
 within half a mile of us. There was one adven 
 turous chipmunk which, having heard these fly- 
 
 40
 
 ing yarns in the bush, resolved to find out for 
 himself, and being of a reckless disposition, he 
 sat on our window-ledge one morning, and pushed 
 his impertinence over the table, where there were 
 some peanuts that Charlie had left scattered about. 
 We stood still and watched him, and he sat up and 
 tasted the new order of nut with a trembling kind 
 of bravado, carrying one of them away with him 
 to corroborate his story, knowing very well that 
 he would be called a liar if there was a crow about. 
 He must have made up a most interesting account, 
 for the next morning several of them came and 
 kept at a safe distance in the trees to watch him 
 go through the performance that he had evidently 
 boasted of. He was such a pretty picture of tiny 
 electrical energy, and so incapable of interfering 
 in any way with our lax duties, that I could not 
 find it in my heart to frighten him. That fellow 
 became quite familiar and visited us regularly, and 
 when the window was barred with mosquito net 
 ting he went round and came in through the 
 kitchen door, always being rewarded with a few 
 peanuts. Having at some time called him a 
 "jack o lantern," w th reference to his marvel 
 lous swiftness of motion, Charlie shortened it 
 into "Jack," and by that name he was known in 
 the family as long as we stayed in the hut. Late 
 in the fall he had the impudence to come with a 
 companion and make a nest in a corner of the 
 woodshed, much to the annoyance of Gabe Hotch- 
 kiss, who ranked him as " vermin," and to the 
 standing amazement of the yellow dog, that could
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 never quite get it into her head that it was not an 
 infringement of her proprietary right in Charlie. 
 
 That this squirrel somehow spread the news 
 that we were a pair of incomprehensible and 
 effeminate duffers who lived on peanuts, without 
 sufficient masculinity to interfere with anything, 
 and that the whole animal creation ought to take 
 advantage of it, I have not the slightest doubt, 
 for it was not long before a woodchuck came in 
 the morning and sat up like a kangaroo on our 
 wire grass, and tried to guy us, casting occasional 
 mild and inquiring glances at our open door. I 
 remembered enough of my natural history to 
 know that this was the American marmot, set 
 down in the vulgar vernacular as the " ground 
 hog," and loaded by the American farmer with 
 a number of amiable superstitions. But I never 
 knew what a handsome and harmless animal he is 
 till I consented to live in the same dimension of 
 space for a while with him. He would sit there 
 in his marsupial way, and wash his face and comb 
 out his whiskers, seeming to say all the while, " I 
 understand that you re not on the shoot." By 
 degrees Charlie coaxed him up to the door-step, 
 telling me to keep out of sight, and when the 
 early summer apples came he would roll out a 
 ripe one to him, and we would watch him with 
 amusement sit up and sample it. So this fellow 
 had to be included in the happy family, and we 
 called him " Marmion," merely on account of the 
 sound, I suppose. 
 
 It was Marmion who made me a Brahmin, or at 
 42
 
 THE KILLING OF MARMION 
 
 least brought me to the full consciousness that 1 
 was a Brahmin. He attached himself to us with 
 such a confiding gentleness, and sat round with 
 such a helpless and appealing dependency, that 
 we admitted him to the entourage quite as a matter 
 of course. Then, too, I was put to it by Charlie 
 to draw on all my rusty stock of natural history 
 to explain hibernation and rake up the old myths 
 of the Farmers Almanac about the marmot s 
 weather prognostications, especially his immemo 
 rial habit of coming out in the spring to look for 
 his shadow ; and I discovered how deeply inter 
 ested, beyond all else, boys are in animals, most 
 of them preferring the menagerie to the circus 
 before they are sophisticated, and all of them 
 caring more for a dog than for the Decalogue. 
 
 In thinking the matter over, I arrived at the 
 conclusion that it was on account of Charlie that 
 the beasts of the field became so familiar. I 
 framed a comfortable theory that there was a 
 millennial link between childhood and the whole 
 animal kingdom. No sooner had this fancy 
 taken firm root than it began to throw out an 
 other, which was that childhood, thus extending 
 a hand downward to the dumb up-looking origins 
 of life, might extend another upward toward the 
 serene Beyond to which all life was tending. It 
 was in this way that our isolation and sweet com 
 panionship stirred some unsuspected and medici 
 nal forces in my own tired heart, as if a harassed 
 and strained man could climb back into the cradle 
 of life and hear the original lullaby. 
 
 43
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 One Sunday morning Griselle had insisted on 
 taking Charlie to church. She had come over in 
 extra muslins, looking very crisp and blossomy. 
 Together we had polished up the boy, and then 
 they had gone away hand in hand, very happy, 
 without even looking back or giving me a thought. 
 Charlie s last instruction to me was, " Don t for 
 get to give that apple on the table to Marmion 
 when he comes in, and give him the other one 
 when he comes back." This led to the explana 
 tion from Charlie that the animal always carried 
 the first apple away, and ate the second one con 
 tentedly on the lawn, because he had young ones 
 somewhere. I rolled the two apples out on the 
 wire grass, took my stick, went off for a solitary 
 walk, and, coming to an inviting cloister on the 
 edge of the wood, I sat down under a cedar 
 canopy to take some deep breaths of Sunday 
 solitude and to ask myself what inscrutable bar 
 there was to my going to church with Griselle. 
 The tinkling bell of the distant chapel added a 
 faint melancholy rhythm to the air as it mingled 
 with the low inarticulate psalm that went up from 
 the earth, " making a cathedral of immensity for 
 the everlasting worship without words." Every 
 thing was at rest and breathing a Te Deum. 
 
 Suddenly there broke in upon it all the dis 
 cordant sound of men s voices, harsh and jarring, 
 accompanied by eager dog barks that blend 
 of screams and yaps that indicates intense animal 
 excitement, and I started off to find out what was 
 the matter. It was not long before I came up 
 
 44
 
 THE KILLING OF MARMION 
 
 with a group of stalwart young men with their 
 coats off, working like mad at a stone wall to 
 get at something hiding therein. They had with 
 incredible labour and inexplicable enthusiasm 
 and noise pulled down about six feet of it, 
 cemented and wire-wound as it was with age and 
 blackberry vines, their three dogs dancing about 
 in half-delirious expectation. So intent were 
 they all on their hunt that they gave no sort of 
 heed to me, and, believing them to be after a 
 venomous reptile, I watched them with curiosity, 
 some kind of brute elation in me responding to 
 the noise and conflict of it. At last, when a bur 
 row had been uncovered, and the biggest dog of 
 the three thrust his nose in, what was my aston 
 ishment to see him pull out an animal and throw 
 him with a vicious jerk into the centre of the 
 group, and there sat Marmion on his haunches, 
 to be greeted by a chorus of relentless exultation 
 as he looked at dogs and men, trying, in one 
 momentary glance of wonder, before he was torn 
 to pieces, to comprehend the inexplicable injustice 
 and cruelty of it. I shall always remember the 
 reproach of that look. Such intelligence as the 
 poor animal had was wrought in a moment to a 
 pitiful interrogation. " Why should four men 
 and three dogs beset with demoniac delight such 
 a harmless creature as I am ? " Something of 
 the same futile astonishment beset me. There 
 was no use trying to rescue Marmion. He was 
 torn to pieces before I could make myself heard. 
 But why it should afford such satisfaction to the 
 
 45
 
 JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 men, and why four such lusty examples of man 
 hood should be so devoid of a sense of magna 
 nimity, I could not for the life of me understand. 
 
 I did not understand then, nor have I under 
 stood since, what it is impels intelligent immortal 
 souls to this purposeless and cruel frenzy. I 
 came slowly back, and when Charlie arrived and 
 saw the two apples lying on the grass, he asked 
 me if Marmion had not come that morning. I 
 only said, " No ; he did not come." 
 
 There are some things you do not tell a child. 
 I suppose it is because you do not want him to 
 be ashamed of his species too early in life.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 HAYING TIME 
 
 THE two human beings who had come to 
 my assistance in my exile were admirably 
 adapted to carry out the Doctor s regime. 
 As I have already stated, Gabe Hotchkiss split 
 my wood and brought the supplies up from the 
 village twice a week in his farm-wagon, and his 
 niece Griselle came dancing o er the flowery lea 
 every morning like Aurora to cook my eggs and 
 bacon. They both regarded my domestication 
 with a small boy in that hut with respectful won 
 der, and I often saw them with their heads 
 together comparing some fresh discovery and 
 trying to get a new light on my mystery. I was 
 evidently beyond their mental processes. I was 
 undoubtedly a gentleman, and might be a million- 
 naire doing penance, but there was no reason why 
 a gentleman might not be a crank, or perhaps a 
 counterfeiter. In any case, I was legitimate prey 
 for the rustic appetite. They treated me with a 
 discreet obeisance that no familiarity on my part 
 
 47
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 could break through. There the mental pro 
 cesses stopped, and the obeisance ran on unevent 
 fully without thenio I managed to let them 
 know by devious explanations that I was an 
 invalid doing a quiet outing with my boy for the 
 sake of his and my health. It was very interest 
 ing to see Griselle s feminine solicitude peep out 
 at times, as if she were wondering when I would 
 have a spell, and she could get hot cloths ready 
 and stew down some burdock, and Gabe could 
 enliven matters by rattling that farm-wagon three 
 or four miles for the country doctor and his 
 bottle of quinine. 
 
 Griselle was a human butter-pat, sweet and 
 fresh from the rural churn, with the family stamp 
 on her face, and ready for the market. She had 
 not as yet been put on the dairy-shelf, where, as 
 you know, all butter-pats begin to absorb what 
 ever is nearest and strongest. 
 
 And then she took to Charlie so ingenuously 
 and easily that I conceived an entirely new order 
 of respect for this rustic handmaiden who, when 
 she was not flitting, was standing on an inacces 
 sible pedestal of youth to which my maturity 
 looked up with admiration, but without ever 
 being able to exactly make out whether it was 
 a fancy of Watteau s or a realistic part of the 
 commonplace life that I had come into. She 
 was always turning toward me an inquiring face 
 of mingled girlhood and womanhood that I had 
 never anywhere encountered. 
 
 The demoiselles of my late life were all delicious 
 48
 
 HAYING TIME 
 
 and anxious antagonists whose prerogative it was 
 to aggravate, and baffle, and outwit. They always 
 kept one trying to make out what was beneath 
 their decorative exteriors. Woman to me had 
 been for several years a predetermined hallucina 
 tion from which man was always in danger of 
 being freed by marrying it. Her most delightful 
 piquancy was a little apprehension that she would 
 at some time be caught and found out, and I fell 
 into the easy cynicism of my set, believing it was 
 pleasantest to be deceived and even saying that if 
 love began with understanding, it would begin 
 where it ought to end and that would be very 
 much like an acorn beginning by being an oak. 
 But then it is so different with a butter-pat ! You 
 are liable to melt all its lineaments unless you 
 keep it cool. Of course the masculine nature 
 never sees a butter-pat fresh and inviting, but it 
 has an irresistible dairy impulse to mould it anew 
 and generally makes a mess of it. But when a 
 man reaches the age of forty-four, perhaps butter 
 is not so apt to melt in his mouth. 
 
 There was a fine paternal dignity on my part 
 for several weeks with this handmaiden. I in 
 structed her about Charlie and other duties with 
 a proper sense of the chasm that was to yawn 
 between us, and over which she invariably skipped 
 without the slightest recognition of it. In other 
 words, the butter-pat went on in its dairy way, 
 and I was the thing that was melted. 
 
 Now I think of it, it was the absence of shock 
 that was doing all the work without my knowing 
 
 49
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 it. The benignity of a graciously enforced loafing 
 period never dawned on me until I began to pick 
 up some of its surprises. My first discovery was 
 that I could look myself in the face without being 
 frightened. There s nothing so very dreadful 
 about you when you re left to your own resources, 
 I said. Then I began to discover the sanitation 
 of uneventfulness. This life was a sort of homoeo 
 pathic application of death itself as a prophylactic 
 of death, just as sleep is. To lie still for a while 
 on this great breast of the universe and hear the 
 mother breathe is suspensive but restorative. 
 
 I found myself at various sly times trying to 
 find out if Griselle was pretty, and I was generally 
 baffled by the equally sly suspicion that she knew 
 what I was up to. Her first appearance on the 
 scene had been in the centre of an enormous arm 
 ful of lilacs, carelessly plucked as she crossed the 
 field from the old Hotchkiss " Folly," and ever 
 after she was associated in my mind with the 
 spring odour of lilacs. She wore her rustic airs 
 with the same superiority that a Niobe would 
 give to her tears. She floated in and out of that 
 homely little domicile not unlike an ordinary 
 butterfly, always appearing to be a great deal 
 more gossamer and ethereal than she really was, 
 and creating the strange fantasy that it was her 
 special duty in life to keep up that odour of lilacs. 
 This girl element of the exile was very insidious. 
 It had the soft, whelming quality of a summer 
 cloud, that we have the best authority for saying 
 never excites our special wonder. 
 
 50
 
 HAYING TIME 
 
 I acknowledge that the vacuum of such a life 
 was something dreadful at first. It was like some 
 of those gifted convicts who are compelled to 
 come down from transcontinental railroad-wreck 
 ing or bank-looting to making shoes. But even 
 the convict, when his sentence is determined, 
 must adapt himself to his stripes. All the time 
 that I was growling and groaning a change was 
 taking place. One day, at the end of three weeks, 
 I suddenly discovered that I had forgotten to lie 
 awake at night. I had been sleeping for a fort 
 night like the rude forefathers of the hamlet and 
 hadn t noticed it. The next discovery was that 
 ham allays hunger as well as broiled sweetbreads, 
 and strawberries gain a relish by picking them 
 yourself. That discovery led me to assist Griselle 
 in shelling peas and peeling the potatoes. As a 
 volunteer I had to lie a little. I told her that I 
 had learned all about it when camping out as 
 if one ever had peas when camping out, or ever 
 peeled his potatoes. But what did she know 
 about it ? She only held up my parings after 
 ward, and remarked that potatoes must have been 
 plentiful when I camped out. 
 
 The absolute unstrungness of shelling peas was 
 new to me. I should not hesitate now, as an 
 expert, to say to any master mind wearied with 
 the problem of existence try shelling peas. To 
 be relieved from the duty of circumventing Smith 
 and killing Brown, and saving your scalp from 
 Jones, and saying smart things to madame, and 
 being continually on the lookout that somebody 
 
 5 1
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 does not hit you in the back of the neck una 
 wares, gives a certain voluptuous spontaneity to 
 idleness. No dress-coat to put on in the even 
 ing ; no hypocritical letters to be answered ; no 
 flowers to be bought ; no new restaurant in some 
 ^dirty street to be put up with ; no tiresome hostess 
 to listen to ; no weary sense of being on parade. 
 Freedom to go barefooted if I felt like it, and eat 
 with my knife if the impulse took me. Safe from 
 that demoniac cry of " Ah there " ; never startled 
 by a " Halloo." All the social bandages gone, 
 and with them most of the lies that they engender. 
 One day I walked over with Griselle to see the 
 Hotchkiss " Folly " a great tumble-down man 
 sion, whose projector had ruined himself, and was 
 now out of sight and out of mind somewhere under 
 his old apple trees. What he had laid out as a 
 prospective park had reverted, in the inevitable 
 course of Nature, to a bedraggled farm. The 
 other practical Hotckisses had foreclosed, and 
 the latest Hotchkiss, crawling out like a spider 
 from some web where he was biding his time, 
 had taken possession, and was now making it pay 
 the taxes and keep him. An atmosphere of van 
 ished hopes mingled with its wild spilth. Great 
 big colonial rooms, weedy porches, rotted and 
 twisted by wistaria that had screwed itself into all 
 the chinks and made them gap. A grandmother 
 in one end of it, close to the summer kitchen, 
 and the big oven that had been closed up for 
 years, but had smoke stains still around its mouth, 
 telling how it had once flamed and roared. The 
 
 52
 
 HAYING TIME 
 
 well stood close to the door with a gourd for a 
 dipper, and some tall grasses leaned over the 
 curb to look at themselves in the cool mirror. 
 Griselle conducted me from room to room as an 
 ancient guide might do. She opened an old par 
 lor, threw back the shutters, letting in a yellow 
 gleam on the surprised matting. She even played 
 " I Would Not Live Always " on the old melo- 
 deon, after lifting off several boxes of seed and a 
 bunch of laurel that had evidently lain there since 
 last Christmas. It was very magical. The antique 
 squeak of that old bellows swept me back to other 
 days. How could she know that there was any 
 irony in her song, and that I would not have been 
 there if it had not been for my unreasonable desire 
 to live always ? The tender, asthmatic pulse of 
 the instrument made me feel like a Hawthorne, 
 and my emotions bulged as if with " Mosses 
 from an Old Manse." 
 
 On another occasion I arrived there in haying 
 time. Do you know what a dry spell in the 
 woods means in early July? It is at that fecund 
 hour that Nature comes into the full flush of life. 
 Her atoms seem to break into animate existence, 
 and you stand in a vortex of flying dust that takes 
 on the first stir of vitality. The days are heavy 
 with the weight of creation, and the tide of life 
 croons in your ears as you sit and fan yourself 
 helplessly. The hours are parched, and vegeta 
 tion languishes with its burden of insects. But 
 it was haying time, and Gabe Hotchkiss gave 
 me to understand that all the affairs connected 
 
 53
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 with man s destiny were suspended until the hay 
 was in. He had no time to go to the village, 
 and my letters had to wait. When he explained 
 to me that he had twenty acres of timothy stand 
 ing and couldn t get any help to "throw it down," 
 I asked him in a moment of reckless bravado why 
 he did not hire me to help him. " What do you 
 pay anyway ? " 
 
 " Dollern half a day. Did you ever cut grass ? " 
 
 I thought a moment. I could not remember 
 that I ever did. In fact, I could not remember 
 that I had ever cut anything but a few coupons 
 and some disagreeable friends, neither of which 
 operations requires a machine. I told him I 
 thought that any smart man could manage to get 
 through a day of it on a pinch, now that it had 
 been reduced to mechanism. 
 
 "You might work the raker," he said doubt 
 fully. " That would save Griselle. She wants 
 to do up her cherries." 
 
 I can safely and graciously write about haying 
 time now from my safe outlook. These things 
 get some kind of aura from the distance (you can 
 put that quotation about the loan of enchantment 
 to the view in here, if you know who said it I 
 don t). I m afraid that the felicities of agricul 
 ture are like those problem plays we read about, 
 and acquire beauty according to the square of the 
 distance. Perhaps my heroism was very much 
 like that of the bridge-jumper, but I really 
 thought at the time that the feat of manual labour 
 and the earning of a " dollern a half" would ele- 
 
 54
 
 HAYING TIME 
 
 vate me in my own estimation, and possibly in 
 the estimation of the practical young woman who 
 came over to get our breakfasts. Every man of 
 sedentary elegance likes to kick through his po 
 lite shackles at times, and show that his arms are 
 not utterly devoid of pith, and that he is not 
 such a " goldarned galoot" as the sententious 
 judgment of the yeoman declares him to be. 
 
 At all events, I learned some things which 
 possibly gave my after-thoughts a gentler and 
 less selfish colour when I got back among my fel 
 lows. First, I found out that there isn t any 
 delicious odour of new-mown hay in the haying 
 operation, or at least, if there is, you do not 
 notice it. There are too many other things to 
 attend to. In the second place, the Arcadian 
 delights of it are only apparent to the on-lookers, 
 and, if there is any satisfaction to the workers 
 themselves, it depends a great deal on whether 
 hay is worth twelve dollars a ton, and who owns 
 it. There are no iced drinks between swathes. 
 There is no shady side to it, and in haying time 
 the thermometer usually stands among the 9o s. 
 But I must acknowledge that Gabe Hotchkiss 
 never heard of a man being sunstruck in a hay- 
 field, and Gabe s going on sixty-two, coming 
 next apple time, and doesn t lie for a cent. Such 
 ideas as I may have possessed prior to this experi 
 ence were vaguely ideal and Watteauish. Hay 
 ing time, to me, was a sort of rural festival, with 
 village maidens in short dresses and ribbons and 
 high heel shoes, the heels generally painted red, 
 
 55
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 clustered in pretty tableaux, like Dryads on the 
 top of a heavily loaded wain, with their rakes on 
 their shoulders. I think if you had asked me 
 at any time in Wall Street what was the special 
 feature of haying, I would have answered, " Why, 
 the nooning, of course, under the hedge tree, 
 where the lusty farmers drink .their switchel out 
 of a jug, and c chomp their home-made bread 
 and home-cured ham in voracious innocence, 
 while the kindly animals look on with idyllic 
 composure." 
 
 That such a picture is not in strict accordance 
 with the facts, I have now to state very solemnly. 
 Beside a twenty acres hay-field of ripe timothy, 
 the Staked Plains have many advantages to the 
 luxuriant observer. But I am bound in honesty 
 to declare, from actual experience, that the work 
 in such a field has certain subtle compensations. 
 It does not drain the vital economy of a man 
 like a fifteen minutes walk on lower Broadway 
 in the middle of the day. In fact, I have known 
 stalwart girls in New York who exhausted more 
 fibre in one evening doing nothing, than they 
 possibly could have lost had they driven that 
 raker all day and earned their porridge with the 
 sweat of their marble brows. 
 
 One other thing I learned, and it was that in 
 a hay-field all conformities and considerations of 
 rules of life vanish. The one thing to do is to 
 get the hay in before it gets wet. Dinner-hour, 
 breathing-time, and all the amenities of life are 
 suspended till the job is done. No one is think- 
 
 56
 
 HAYING TIME 
 
 ing of how he looks, or what the criticism will be, 
 or what impression he is making on the observer. 
 He is simply taking the straight line between two 
 points, and the points are the field and the barn. 
 
 Gabe had two teams in the field so that he 
 could cut and rake simultaneously, for his 
 timothy was very dry, and he did not intend to 
 get more of it " thrown " than he could manage, 
 and I noticed that he kept his eye on the west as 
 though he expected a shower. About two o clock 
 I began to pray for it. My back ached, and my 
 hands were blistered. But Griselle had come 
 into the field with her chip hat, bringing a dis 
 tinctly Watteau flavour at last, and I was not going 
 to give way under her eye. She looked at me 
 with wonder, I thought, and presently had a 
 pitch-fork in her hand. By and by, when a bank 
 of dun clouds began to roll up in the west, I 
 rejoiced in my heart. It really looked like an 
 atmospheric rescue. We had cut about four 
 acres, and now it would be a race to get it in. I 
 distinctly remember that some kind of noble 
 enthusiasm was caught from Gabe, in this conflict 
 with Nature, of an entirely different quality from 
 that zest with which one enters into a conflict 
 with his fellow-man. I forgot all about my hands 
 and my back in my sympathic anxiety to see 
 Gabe beat that rain-storm, and I felt like giving 
 a shout as the last forkful went up into his hay 
 loft and a peal of congratulatory thunder broke 
 over us that startled the horses. 
 
 How it did rain ! It pounded. The water 
 
 57
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 came down in sheets mixed with hail. Little 
 rivers broke loose all around. The gutters 
 spouted and the roof reverberated. Everything 
 seemed to hold its mouth wide open, and Gabe 
 stood there in the corner of the barn enjoying the 
 almost savage copiousness of it. A Biblical line 
 came into my mind Biblical phrases always do 
 pop up to exactly fit an emotion. " The wild 
 asses drink their fill." I never before appreciated 
 the strength of that line. There we were, men 
 and horses, huddled in the barn, actually bom 
 barded with refreshment. But presently it cleared 
 up. A great fresco of sunset flamed in the west, 
 and we all climbed into the wagon and were 
 rattled back to the " Folly " under wet trees, 
 every one of which tried to imitate the shower in 
 its own way and shook its drops down on us as 
 we passed. But we were very jolly as we jolted. 
 The consciousness of a victorious accomplishment 
 made us boisterously kin ; and when we got to 
 the house, Griselle had a magnificent supper await 
 ing us of hot slapjacks and cold pork and beans 
 and fried chicken, a banquet entirely unfit for 
 gods, it was so bounteously human. After 
 ward Gabe jolted Charlie and me to our hut 
 and dumped us on the wire grass pretty well 
 fagged. When we were alone we sat and looked 
 at each other rather foolishly, and Charlie re 
 marked, " I thought you said we came up here 
 to play." 
 
 "Yes, we did, Comrade," I replied, feeling 
 after an appropriate didacticism, " but a little hard 
 
 58
 
 HAYING TIME 
 
 work now and then is relished by the wisest men. 
 I wished to set you a good example, my boy. 
 Look at my hands." 
 
 But you cannot deceive a boy with that kind 
 of hypocrisy. He looked at me straight, and 
 said, "Say, Dad, you re sleepy, ain t you?" 
 
 The blessed vacuity of being tired on the right 
 side was a novelty, and it was fraught with a dull 
 kind of satisfaction that at last I had arrived at 
 that condition in which, like the yellow dog, I 
 could drop down at a moment s notice and forget 
 obediently. When you are physically tired, you 
 take a header into sleep with a recklessness that 
 is juvenile, and the moment you let go everything, 
 Nature sets to work to fix things up thoroughly 
 and noiselessly, so that when you wake up the 
 next morning there isn t anything to remember. 
 You cannot do this when you are mentally tired. 
 The mind runs on with its artificial momentum 
 in spite of sleep. I could not even hear the clack 
 of that reaper, and how often the tick of the tele 
 graph had danced through my head the livelong 
 night. 
 
 And this is the whole lesion that recupera 
 tion means getting away from yourself. I remem 
 ber reading in Montaigne long ago that a man 
 may travel the world over like a fugitive without 
 escaping from himself. Now I found out that a 
 man cannot do an honest day s work at haying 
 without leaving a good deal of himself behind. 
 
 It occurs to me now that it happened to be 
 cherry year that July, and cherry year does not 
 
 59
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 come every twelvemonth. Cherry year occurs 
 about once in a decade. Then this fruit asserts 
 itself along the roadside with reckless prodigality. 
 Then the old trees remember the opulence of 
 other days, and the children climb up into them 
 and rejoice. All the neighbours mark time with 
 enormous cherry puddings and "slump." Have 
 you ever been present at " slump "? No? What 
 a lot you have missed. There is a rotund and 
 reckless profusion to " slump " when it is turned 
 out of the pot upon a big dish and comes on 
 steaming like a mountain of ambrosia that would 
 captivate your soul, narrowed as it is by petty 
 courses and relays of side dishes. Then it is that 
 the women stand over the hot stove and gossip 
 about the price of sugar, and try in vain to screw 
 the lids off their glass jars. 
 
 But after all, it is a shame to cook the jolly, 
 carnal cherry. He should be eaten alive, for he 
 is a gentle, meaty reminder of our primal carnivo 
 rous days, and we fondly call him an oxheart, as 
 if with a fleshly remembrance. 
 
 60
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 DUMB INTIMACIES 
 
 ABOUT five minutes walk from our cabin 
 was the Cluny Milldam, a very ragged and 
 weedy barrier across a little river, which it 
 had broadened into about an acre of sweet water 
 ten feet deep at the spillway, and shallowing off 
 to a thin pond at the upper end that died out 
 into a bit of wet meadow. The banks for the 
 greater part of the way were green and lush, and 
 willows and dogwood screened them nicely. 
 Such little artificial lakes are common enough all 
 over our country. They are never kept in repair, 
 but are suffered to grow rank and picturesque 
 and always have an old mill, long deserted, at 
 one end of the dam. From time immemorial 
 they have been the treasured trysting-places of 
 the boys. To this pond Charlie and I came on 
 the hot evenings and struck up an entirely new 
 friendship with the water. The basin was not 
 full enough to run over the lip of the dam, but 
 
 61
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 the water forced its way through many chinks 
 sportively, in cool jets, and ran glistening down 
 the old logs and beams into a pretty sandy pool 
 below, where it boiled and raced in solitude, and 
 then went singing down the valley through the 
 marsh grasses. On those torrid nights we came 
 stealthily with the yellow dog through the jun 
 gle, let ourselves down the bank, and, after de 
 nuding, sprawled and splashed in the pool until 
 the shadows wrapped us in their soft garments, 
 and the stars came out and laughed at us. 
 
 There was undoubtedly some kind of unsus 
 pected magic in the place, now that I think of it. 
 The old dam was like an orchestra of oboes and 
 flutes, to which the little raceway added a chorus 
 of its own, and somehow the element itself had 
 the air and the ingenuousness of youth not yet 
 grown lusty and rank and boisterous. All we 
 had to do was to accept its limpid invitation, and 
 it covered us with cool kisses in which there was 
 a breath of mint and calamus. To catch water 
 in its pudicity, before it has grown salacious and 
 turbulent and put on the hoary airs of the ocean, 
 is a rare delight. It is like establishing an under- 
 
 O O 
 
 standing with a dog or going down into the 
 nursery to rest your soul with a bit of " who s 
 got the button ? " If you have only known 
 water at the seashore, in its acrid puissance, when 
 it is like a trade union and glories in its whelm 
 ing multitudinousness, you can have no idea of 
 its tender intimacies when you catch it in the 
 nursery of its career. 
 
 62
 
 DUMB INTIMACIES 
 
 Such acquaintance as we struck up with the 
 sweet water was really a private and confidential 
 understanding. We did not insult it with any 
 social functions or have any other critics on the 
 bank than the muskrats and mud-turtles that 
 looked at us through the branches. We stripped 
 ourselves down to an instant comradeship. 
 Everywhere else in the world we should have 
 put on precautionary " duds," which seems to 
 me now very much like putting on a mask when 
 you are about to say your prayers. No one 
 knows how abominable it is to be rolled up in 
 wet rags except those fellows who have walked 
 in puris naturalibus into some of the private 
 grottoes of Nature where there is no immodesty 
 and no fear. How the flesh exults when it feels 
 the contact of the element. How astonishingly 
 .white one looks against the dusks and shadows. 
 What a new sense of benignity to lie down in 
 the pellucid drift and measure its going by the 
 caresses it flings on its way. What douche was 
 comparable to those cascades that went down our 
 backs as we sat under that old dam ? Those 
 persons who use water only to wash themselves 
 with degrade it, and it generally becomes a very 
 serious servant to them. To Charlie and me it 
 had no duty to perform but to frolic, and we 
 heard it calling to us in soft tones long before we 
 reached the dam. 
 
 This new relationship of man to Things was 
 what I meant when I said it was a kind of natural 
 faith, but it is Brahminical rather than Christian. 
 
 63
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 Browning wrote volumes to express it, and when 
 he got through, he had simply said : " All s well 
 in the world." But that is saying a great deal, 
 isn t it ? I am reminded just here that the late 
 Dr. James Martineau, after writing two monu 
 mental volumes of splendid metaphysics to es 
 tablish the reasonableness and the beauty of the 
 Nature of Things, put down this remarkable 
 acknowledgment in his preface : " I am now 
 aware of the tediousness of these metaphysical 
 tribunals, especially when the whole process wins 
 at last, through all its dizzying circuits, only the 
 very position which common sense had assumed 
 at first." 
 
 For the sensitive city man or woman, it would 
 be hard to find a more forbidding place than a dark 
 pool at night, shut in by thickets. He or she 
 brings to it some such fantastic horror as Poe 
 has furnished. It is a " ghoul-haunted woodland 
 of Weir," just as soon as the sun leaves it. It 
 swarms with obscene things and dangerous. Its 
 water pockets are pitfalls, and in its recesses lurk 
 enemies that writhe if you touch them. But all 
 this disappears on acquaintance. Man for the 
 most part breeds these monsters in himself. It 
 is true such a place is haunted by all manner of 
 strange forms, but a man finds out sooner or 
 later that one and all of them are held to a 
 noblesse oblige that they never violate. Some kind 
 of statute ordains that they shall quietly and 
 politely give way to man, and even the tenacious 
 snapping-turtle that comes up from the mud of 
 
 64
 
 DUMB INTIMACIES 
 
 the pond observes us with a Chinese decorum, and 
 sits stolidly by or goes his way. We learned by 
 insensible degrees that nothing interfered with us 
 so long as we were amicably inclined. Even 
 that exceptionally mischievous imp, Sir Stomoxys 
 Calcitrans, the incisive horse-fly, that later in the 
 season will bite through a dress-coat or Parisian 
 stays, goes to roost at sundown, and as for the 
 mosquitoes which every milldam spawns, I 
 learned soon enough that we could never coax 
 them out of their coverts into a current of air. 
 
 Perhaps you think that these things are not 
 worth learning, and are quite beneath the notice 
 of a Wall Street man. As for that, they are not 
 worth spending time and thought upon if you 
 have something better to do, but the beauty of 
 it is they do not exact any time or thought. 
 They merely accompany you as you frolic. They 
 are like the water. You must not make their 
 acquaintance with a reporter s inquisitiveness, but 
 like a fellow craftsman who receives the pass 
 word and keeps it to himself. 
 
 I recall my experience lying on my back on a 
 deep pool of those waters, looking up at the stars 
 and then looking down at them, until I 
 seemed to be suspended in the limitless ether and 
 could feel the soft tide of the great spaces. Then 
 Gretry s words came to my mind : " God shuts 
 off this world once every twenty-four hours so 
 that we can see the universes." It was impossi 
 ble to have these experiences without feeling that 
 the dull strifes of man s existence slunk back- 
 
 65
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 ward a little, and that one had touched upon 
 some kind of deep-lying assurance, for it is at 
 such moments of implicit abandonment that one 
 can hear the soft swing of the planets themselves. 
 Often when Charlie and I came home through 
 the cool woods, I would look at him and then, 
 like Dr. Martineau, feel that the course of my 
 dizzying speculations brought me out where the 
 boy started. 
 
 I may as well say that my conviction as a cas 
 ual observer of Nature and, alas, I have been 
 too busy to be anything more my conviction 
 is that you must seek her confidences when she 
 is not in one of her exhibition moods. Like 
 woman herself, she is only communicative when 
 her passions and pageants are over, and then it 
 is that she will put her cool hand in yours and 
 let you see her gray spirits and white lisping 
 through her bare ruined choirs. Then it is she 
 speaks in sibylline undertones. She is a little 
 hushed by the stars. The conventional man 
 only knows her in her exhibition spells. He 
 remembers her full-dress sunsets and her decora 
 tive autumns. He revels in her blazonry of sun 
 shine, but he never dared enter her cloisters and 
 catch her in dishabille. 
 
 I think the medicinal touch of the sweet waters 
 often remained with us in our dreams. We 
 could hear the Mother crooning while we slept, 
 and that cool lullaby was very apt to have a 
 minty breath. But better than all was the sense 
 of immunity that was built into me, and that is, 
 
 66
 
 DUMB INTIMACIES 
 
 I think, a very curious and a very precious thing. 
 We come into life bugaboo-haunted. Our infan 
 tile souls reverberate the fears of our ancestors 
 and shudder at the dark. But always there is at 
 the bottom of our consciousness an unexercised 
 mastership of soul that breaks loose often in 
 dreams and carries us defiantly against our envi 
 ronment. We walk in fiery furnaces and are not 
 consumed. We wander on fields of eternal ice 
 and are not cold ; we lie down with the kine in the 
 chilly spring rains and feel them not ; we float in 
 the ether without propulsion. To be able in the 
 slightest degree to approximate these experiences 
 in our waking hours ; to look serenely on the 
 grinding wheels of creation without a throb ; to 
 know that all the grades of existence beneath us 
 have been our playground, and are coming up 
 our way, makes the ghost stories disappear one 
 by one. That Nature rightly viewed and obedi 
 ently wooed has this intimation of immortality 
 and immunity in her was Wordsworth s creed. 
 Nature, when listened to rightly, always seems to 
 me to be saying exactly what my old tutor used to 
 say to me : "But why be so impatient? You have 
 
 an eternity before you and an eternity behind 
 
 
 you. 
 
 I put it down as the best outcome of my small 
 philosophy, gained in a long vacation, that it is a 
 good education for a man to stop wrestling with 
 Thoughts and get acquainted with Things. Of 
 course, we cannot all be philosophers or even 
 savants. We must go back into the thick of the 
 
 67
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 fight. But it is a very good plan at times to stop 
 overcoming and obey; to lie down and listen. 
 That there are sermons in stones and tongues in 
 trees, we have the best of authority for believing, 
 but the Shaksperian sense of it is not the recu 
 perative and obedient sense, for Shakspere im 
 puted a great deal to Things with the authority of 
 a poet, and, like Orlando, tacked himself up on the 
 trunks to their infinite embellishment. To me it 
 is the absence of books in running brooks that 
 delights. One gets past somebody s impression 
 of the thing to the thing itself, and, after all, that 
 is a fraternal realism that is not to be explicated. 
 Whatever the secret of the thing is, it is yours 
 when you cease to question it. 
 
 How often since, in the fever and disappoint 
 ments of life, when ingratitude or envy or insin 
 cerity hurt me, I have thought of that old Cluny 
 Milldam, and pictured myself once more lying on 
 my back between the illimitable depths above and 
 below, that were glittering with stars, and Charlie 
 somewhere near, adding his childish voice to the 
 waters. I suppose we are all prodigals at our 
 best, only it is hardly correct to say that we are 
 returning to the Mother, for we never quite got 
 away from her. But I think that most of us who 
 look backward over our winding paths, at all 
 the palaces we built and deserted, will find that 
 they had no such outlooks as the open doors and 
 ample windows of the cabins and rude blossomy 
 bowers we erected during our first pilgrimage ; 
 and I fancy that many a man who is tired of his 
 
 68
 
 DUMB INTIMACIES 
 
 Alhambra lingers with an immortal childishness 
 over his vagabondage, even when, as Eleanor 
 Sweetman puts it : 
 
 " Sorrow has built a palace in his soul 
 With windows opening on eternity." 
 
 6 9
 
 ... . - . . li^csvf-X .- . - . . . t 
 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 A SUMMER S PIPPIN 
 
 GABE HOTCHKISS was a forehanded vet 
 eran who had developed along "the cool 
 sequestered vale of life " until it was hard 
 to distinguish him from the materials he had 
 worked with. He wore the aspect of a sinewy 
 old trunk, gray and gnarled, whose roots in the 
 ground have outspread the branches in the air. I 
 was afraid his thrift was earthy. I could not 
 quite make out if that stoop in his shoulders was 
 humility or gravitation. His hair grew bushy 
 and gray all over his head and down his jaws to 
 a sort of mossy stalactite on his chin (I was get 
 ting bald at forty-four). He never was sick a 
 day in his life after he teethed, barring three days 
 that he was laid up that year of the Chicago fire 
 by Squire Losee s bull that hooked him under 
 the rib and threw him over a stone fence. He 
 had risen and set as regularly as the sun for sixty- 
 five years, and there was no physical intimation 
 
 70
 
 A SUMMER S PIPPIN 
 
 that he would not continue to rise and set for 
 sixty-five more. He was as punctual as the gas- 
 collector, or the seven-year locust, and he could 
 cut and pile a cord of wood without stopping to 
 take heed or take breath, and then walk to town 
 for his supplies when he wanted to save his horses. 
 Is this the standard that Nature sets up for us in 
 her ideal man ? 
 
 Gabe had fibre, but no temperament. There 
 was a stolid independence in his unassertive air 
 that was quietly masterful. He had put away a 
 thousand dollars a year for ten years " outen his 
 hay," and Heaven only knows what he had before 
 that. Panics might come, banks might break. 
 He would read of them in his weekly family paper, 
 and smile with the air of a man who has got past 
 most earthly contingencies. The old tortoise, he 
 made me feel like the agile hare in the fabulous 
 race. His lack of temperament and his static 
 health aggravated me unreasonably. A man ought 
 to decay obediently as well as develop obediently. 
 There is something repulsive in an old man who 
 preserves nothing but his physical vigour. It is 
 not even an animal, only a vegetable virtue, and 
 reminds one of the hair that grows through the 
 chinks of a coffin after a man is dead. The Doc 
 tor has amiably corroborated me, and says that a 
 man ought to begin to die gracefully at fifty. He 
 can prolong the job as long as possible, but he 
 should not neglect it. By giving up the ghost 
 gradually he will avoid a disagreeable convulsive 
 fight and not be called to give it up all at once. 
 
 7 1
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 I do not know that excessive health destroys 
 temperament, but Gabe had not as much as a tree. 
 A tree is at least sensitive and transmutes carbon 
 and silex into something a little more sympathetic 
 than gas and atoms. There was a young poplar 
 visible from the door of our hut that had many 
 indications of juvenile vivacity and responsive 
 delicacy. I have watched it dancing and whisper 
 ing in delight and turning up the white palms of 
 its myriad leaves when there was not air enough 
 to move the flame with which I was lighting my 
 corn-cob pipe, and all the oaks and chestnuts 
 stood wrapped in petrified disdain, utterly una 
 ware that anything was passing. 
 
 While I am writing this there comes back to 
 me like a fruity odour, the remembrance of an 
 apple tree that stood overshadowing the back 
 porch of my father s house. It was a gnarled 
 and stunted affair, but oh, what summer apples 
 it bore when it was in the mood. And that s the 
 point it had its moods, that no almanac or hor 
 ticulturist could get the hang of. I have never 
 tasted such apples since little red-streaked 
 affairs that burst into wine at the very sight of 
 your teeth, and bent the boughs low down with 
 their largesse. When the family of us grew up 
 and went our ways, we often wrote home from 
 different points of the compass for a basket of 
 the July apples, but although the " old man " 
 rolled them up in paper and packed them in cool 
 corn leaves, they always perished before we got 
 them, for they captivated with their odour every 
 
 72
 
 A SUMMER S PIPPIN 
 
 insect they met on their journey, and he bored 
 through all wrappages to get at them. Those 
 apples had to be eaten the moment they were 
 plucked. They resented anything like delay. 
 They were so evanescent that when the mater 
 put a dishful of them on the hall table, it was 
 for the fleeting odour, and she warned us children 
 not to touch them because they were spoiling. 
 
 That tree stood awkwardly in the roadway and 
 was more or less of an obstruction. It was scarred 
 by the hubs of passing vehicles, but " the old 
 man " could never find it in his heart to cut it 
 down. It was the most wayward, capricious fruit 
 tree I ever saw. It had spells when it pouted 
 in unblossomy poverty. But there were other 
 spells when the fulness and the overflow of Nature 
 laid hold of it. Then, like a beautiful wanton, it 
 made love to the children, the birds, and the bees 
 alike. No sooner had the robins arrived than it 
 began to array itself like a bride in odorous tulle 
 and became one great cloud of blossoms. It 
 banked the road up with a kind of fairy snow 
 and kept the brooms flying on the porch with a 
 teasing mischievousness. All the birds came and 
 flirted with it, even the wrens forgetting their 
 gamin habits and accepting it as a communal 
 music-stand. Thus it bore witness to us in our 
 thoughtless youth of the fleeting character of all 
 exquisite things. I never could quite divest 
 myself of the fancy that John Burroughs and 
 Thoreau had at some time sat under that tree 
 and munched, for did I not long afterward detect 
 
 73
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 in their sentences something of the same juicy 
 aroma of that elfin fruit? 
 
 But to return to Gabe, I found in him a grate 
 ful mental relaxation. His animal equanimity 
 had a soothing effect like the liberty of empty 
 rooms after a rout. You felt that he was not one 
 of those fellows who have a stock of words on 
 hand and are continually looking for an oppor 
 tunity to which they can fit them. His mind, or 
 whatever it was that occupied the place of that esse, 
 always took the straight line between a thing and 
 a word. He would no more be original or smart 
 than he would be liberal or imaginative. His 
 
 . 
 
 companionship was therefore a kind of mental 
 water-cure. I could sit and watch him saw wood 
 for an hour, and our conversation would, as 
 Henry James somewhere put it, " be ruffled 
 delightfully by the passing airs of the unsaid." 
 I remarked to him while thus employed, " This 
 will be a bad season for potatoes, Gabe." He 
 stopped a moment, expectorated, and then came 
 at it as the crow flies, " Gosh to hemlock, that s 
 so," and then the wood-sawing went on. 
 
 I noticed that irony and repartee took on, in 
 Gabe s presence, a curious analogy to water on a 
 duck s back, and you cannot imagine how deplet 
 ing and soothing all this is to get where every 
 thing is trite and simple, and has been said a 
 thousand times before, and is none the less valu 
 able on that account. It has occurred to me that 
 as heaven is always regarded as a place of rest, 
 perhaps it may be a place where everybody gives 
 
 74
 
 A SUMMER S PIPPIN 
 
 over trying to be " smart." Isn t there some 
 kind of intimation of this in the communications 
 that are said to come from the other side ? 
 
 But there was Gabe s niece, such a graceful 
 sapling coming up from the roots of this old 
 stump. Very pretty the girl was, with health and 
 vigour and a lot of fine qualities that were looking 
 out of her face and wondering what they were 
 made for. As the weeks rolled on, I grew to 
 admire her very loyally, as a well-disciplined mas 
 culine sense should, and I felt also very grateful 
 to her. It was really as if some one had come 
 every day and hung a Fortuny in our hut, just 
 for fun, as the children say. Her unconscious 
 animal grace, so wholly independent of any arti 
 ficial aid, was not unlike a simple melody. These 
 unsophisticated, long-limbed Hebes of the field 
 have a priority of command which we never ques 
 tion, and I think it oftenest expresses itself in 
 motion. Griselle swished about in the little 
 k : tchen, making grace audible, and to the acute 
 ear it had a finer nuance than that purely textile 
 swish that is purchasable in society by the yard. 
 I noticed her running on the wire grass, and she 
 had an unsuspected regnant swagger that is in the 
 bones, not in the mind. She did not walk she 
 bounded. Her animal economy exulted and gave 
 her head a fine toss. She seemed to be making 
 billows of emotion and crossing them without 
 ever knowing it. One morning she came over 
 and caught me unawares, bellowing a matinee 
 hymn out of sheer thankful exuberance, because 
 
 75
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 I was alive. I must have blushed a little, and 
 said apologetically and religiously, " I was prais 
 ing God while I was at my best." 
 
 " That s easy," she replied, " you can t help it. 
 It s a good deal more of a job to praise Him at 
 your worst," and then she blushed as if she had 
 unwittingly come down to my level of saying 
 things and swished off to the kitchen, actually 
 going through that narrow door, I thought, as if 
 it were a circus hoop. 
 
 I find a "mem." in my note-book which must 
 have been made about that time. It reads like 
 this, " When one finds a woman as God made 
 her and not as man refashioned her, is she not 
 apt to be a handmaiden ? " 
 
 I believe some vague chivalrous notion crept 
 into my mind of rescuing her. There was no 
 programme about it. I only said to myself, it 
 is a great shame to have those infinite possibili 
 ties grow up gnarled and sinewy. It makes one 
 feel like putting on armour and hunting round 
 for a lance, to see them peeping out of castle 
 windows into a world unrealized. 
 
 Charlie did not take my view of Griselle. A 
 child naturally lacks aesthetic appreciation. In 
 a moment of confidence I ventured to remark 
 to him that I was glad he admired the young 
 woman, for I considered her a very estimable 
 person, and he informed me that he had con 
 structed a rather contemptuous opinion of her. 
 In the first place she couldn t climb a tree, and 
 then she did not see any fun in making mud 
 
 76
 
 A SUMMER S PIPPIN 
 
 dams, and utterly failed to understand the yellow 
 dog s best qualities. Altogether, it was consider 
 able of a problem with him what girls were made 
 for anyway, and you can readily understand that 
 it was too esoteric a job for me to tell him. 
 
 It must have been about this time that the 
 following note was written down in my log-book 
 in the woods : 
 
 " Last night a pretty little black messenger 
 flew out of the night into the room. He was 
 vociferously urgent and woke me up. As I lay 
 on my back in the dim light, trying to make out 
 if he were a bat of reality or an incubus of sleep, 
 he clung to the mosquito-nettings, head down, 
 and twittered ominously and plaintively, and 
 made frightened excursions about the room, 
 knocking the breath out of his body against the 
 wall, always to come back to my canopy with an 
 alarum. What his message was I could not 
 make out, but I tried to reason with him, one 
 leg on the wakeful shore, and one on the dream 
 ful sea. I told him that even things from the 
 Night s Plutonian Shore need not be so noisy 
 and hysterical, and if he had delivered his mes 
 sage, he could go away again and leave me to 
 sleep on it. There was the open window, with 
 two or three late stars low down, looking in; 
 why not go out like a reasonable herald before 
 I got the broom ? 
 
 " But the fact is, mysterious messengers from 
 the shoreless darks are about the stupidest of 
 winged omens. As soon as I understood that 
 
 77
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 the stranger had flapped in at the open window 
 where the netting was torn and was making all 
 this disturbance because he did not know enough 
 to flap out again, I got up and tried to assist him. 
 He fought me bill and claw and knocked down 
 the photograph that was tacked over the table. 
 Getting tired of it, I went back to bed. When 
 I woke up in the morning, there he sat on the 
 sill against the lower half of the closed sash, 
 rather weak and dishevelled from overexertion, 
 and looking reproachfully at me as if I had been 
 the cause of it all ; whereupon I made up my 
 mind it was a female bird, and having caught it, 
 I brought it to the open sash to let it sail away, 
 for which act of mercy it nipped me viciously in 
 the thumb." 
 
 As I was looking after it, I saw Griselle com 
 ing over the hill like well, like a stave of Mil 
 ton s L Allegro reciting itself. 
 
 But when Charlie got up, the first thing he 
 said was, "Why, somebody s knocked down 
 mother s picture."
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 LISTEN TO THE MOCKING-BIRD 
 
 ABOUT the ist of August the delicate ear, no 
 less than the clear sight, can detect the wane 
 of summer. It is no use trying to comfort 
 yourself with the calendar, there is a still small 
 voice in the atmosphere. There will be sultry 
 days and close nights and volleying showers, but, 
 in spite of all, there is a growing restfulness, as if 
 the zest of it were over and the lusty hours had 
 grown mature. The first intimation will come 
 from the cricket that ticks the transitions of the 
 heyday in the grass, and presently the preliminary 
 creak of the cicada will remind you that the com 
 ing six weeks lead up to the frost. 
 
 August, in spite of all her furbelows, loses 
 some of the romp of June and July. She is like 
 a young matron whose beauty is shadowed with 
 the coming sheaves. The corn stands tasselled 
 in dark green platoons. When the wind throws 
 up the long blades, they are like the gonfalons of 
 
 79
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 the coming fall. If you rub the tassels in your 
 palms, they will hint to you of Bourbon and leave 
 a delicate flavour of sea-coal fires with jolly fel 
 lows taking off their furs to make a night of it. 
 The showers will die off in slanting rains. How 
 different from the thunderous gallopades of July, 
 with July s quick-firing guns and riotous trans 
 formations of golden sunshine and dissolute sun 
 sets of roses and wine. The drop of the summer 
 apples has already a melancholy thud, like the 
 fall of a curtain, and the south winds are queru 
 lous at the slightest provocation, and wheeze if 
 there is a cranny or a rusty weathercock. If you 
 look closely, you will see some premonitory yellow 
 leaves already on the maples. The sumach is 
 beginning to bleed, and the sides of the tomatoes 
 toward the sun gleam through the rank vines 
 with the late fires of the garden already kindled. 
 
 I was lying in the grass, attending strictly to 
 my regimen of rest and listening to the little 
 hurdygurdy of the cricket, when I heard on the 
 still air the far-away throb of a brass band. I 
 put my ear down close. There was no mistaking 
 it I felt the rhythmical beat of the drum and 
 caught the attenuated blare of the cornet. They 
 were playing " Listen to the Mocking-bird." 
 I wondered that that old stuffed melody could 
 hop out of its glass case and travel down the still 
 air so many miles in that lively style. There 
 was a wandering circus at Spelldown, and the 
 band was playing the people into a matinee. 
 
 I was like a Prohibitionist who is eating mince 
 80
 
 LISTEN TO THE MOCKING-BIRD 
 
 pie with brandy in it. I felt the pristine stir in 
 me and could smell the tan-bark ring. I was 
 rather proud of this childish impulse. I coaxed 
 myself to believe that I could hear the dear old 
 clown with the whitened face say, " Here we are 
 
 again," and wake the elemental soul with that old 
 " . 
 Eleusinian mystery, " What makes more noise 
 
 than a pig under a gate ? " This is coming back 
 to the very porridge of our first lunch of humour. 
 To know just how good brandy is in mince pie, 
 one must be a Prohibitionist. I suppose the zest 
 of anything depends on the deprivation, if not on 
 the prohibition. I remember that a great trav 
 eller once said to me, that the much-vaunted cata 
 ract of the Ganges was a poverty-struck puddle, 
 but that in a country where there was no water, a 
 puddle looked like an inundation. 
 
 " Listen to the Mocking-bird, " I said to my 
 self, as I leaned up against a tree and braced my 
 self to watch the clouds roll by, a task which I 
 have reduced to perfection. These sweetish run 
 agate tunes come waltzing down our recollections, 
 heavy with the dew of idle associations. Could 
 there anywhere be such a fresh innocent sensation 
 as to take Charlie and Griselle to the circus and 
 fill my unselfish nature up with their delight ! 
 " Gosh to hemlock," I exclaimed, with my new 
 provincial ardour, " it is engendered. Griselle will 
 come out with an extra crisp muslin and a new 
 ribbon, and, maybe, put on her high-heeled shoes, 
 and rub bergamot in that furzy hair of hers. All 
 the yokels of Spelldown will wonder who I am in 
 
 81
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 a negligee shirt and baseball shoes ; and every time 
 Griselle laughs and claps her hands I will smell 
 the spring lilacs again." 
 
 Now, this was going back to first principles. 
 Talk about renewing one s youth, it would 
 be renewing one s infancy. It isn t often that a 
 man of forty gets the opportunity to play at Paul 
 and Virginia and have the robins come and 
 cover him up so that he will not recognize his 
 own sentimentalism. To be a real, honest, rural 
 swain for a while and have a maid hang innocently 
 on your arm gosh to hemlock what would 
 there be left for the pellucid emotions but to buy 
 an accordion and learn to play " I Would Not 
 Live Always " and " Listen to the Mocking 
 bird " on it ? These pipings of Arcady come to 
 a man when his turtle-dove is a mocking-bird, 
 and he has acquired the art of leaning up against 
 a tree properly, and watching the season go by, 
 instead of the afternoon belles under the club 
 window. Charlie and I might even try to crawl 
 under the canvas if the pristine impulse did not 
 give out; at all events, we could eat gingerbread 
 on the same plane of enjoyment. 
 
 Presently Charlie and Griselle made their ap 
 pearance. " Did you hear the circus band ? " I 
 asked. "The show stays over to-morrow." 
 
 " And we ought to take Griselle," exclaimed 
 the instinctive Charlie, beginning to clap his 
 hands and jump up and down in a kind of St. 
 Vitus s dance. 
 
 " We ? " I inquired, with a mock parental 
 82
 
 LISTEN TO THE MOCKING-BIRD 
 
 gravity, trying to veil my own exuberance. 
 " We, Comrade ?" 
 
 " Yes," said Comrade, " but we can t. She s 
 going on a picnic, and I ve got to go with her." 
 
 I intimated that picnics could wait circuses 
 never did. 
 
 But it seems that the picnics of Spelldown are 
 arranged with consummate tact to offset the 
 circus. There are two churches in the town 
 the Methodist and the Dutch Reformed. They 
 wait till the advance agent of the show bills the 
 town and the cross-roads, then they sound their 
 clarion call to the two Sunday-schools to get ready 
 to take to the woods. The Methodists huddle 
 the children all out on one day and give them ice 
 cream enough to lay them up for the next day, 
 and then the Dutch Reformed drive out the other 
 battalion. In consequence of this ingenious ar 
 rangement, it is doubtful if any of the well-bred 
 children of Spelldown ever listened to the mock 
 ing-bird. 
 
 " So you have invited Charlie to your picnic ? " 
 
 " I thought," replied Griselle, evasively, " that 
 he would like to go with all the other children." 
 
 " I dare say." 
 
 " But he said he would have to speak to you 
 about it." 
 
 " What he meant was that it would be a good 
 idea to invite me too. But don t you think it 
 would be pleasanter if you accepted my invitation, 
 and we all went to the circus ? " 
 
 She declined promptly. There were reasons 
 
 83
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 that she kept out of her words, but they got into 
 that little toss of her head, and she looked quite 
 Florentine as she stood in the doorway with her 
 dress lifted ready for flight. Sometimes I thought 
 Rossetti could have written her. He never could 
 have painted her, she wouldn t stand still long 
 enough. 
 
 Evidently circuses did not lure her, and she 
 had promised the Rev. Mr. Hanks or Janks or 
 somebody to take care of a contingent of "young 
 ones " and keep them away from the circus. 
 
 Come to think it all over, she was right, and I 
 told her so. A clean-minded little fellow like 
 Charlie, starting out to avoid my pitfalls, would be 
 better off with her at a picnic, eating some of the 
 jelly-cake that everybody was sure to bring, than 
 at the circus, getting his clothes all stained with 
 pink lemonade. 
 
 " Perhaps," suggested Griselle, " you d be better 
 off yourself." I acknowledged to her that I had 
 a real curiosity to see a country picnic. I could 
 not for the life of me understand the raison d etre 
 of it. Why men and women who lived in the 
 country all the year round and were pretty well 
 saturated with it should suddenly take it into 
 their heads to enjoy it by the card, was beyond 
 me. It really looked to me as though Farmer 
 Jones, when he wanted to express his mad exu 
 berance, went over and ate his dinner on Farmer 
 Smith s field. I could understand folk in the city 
 going slumming and getting up vivisection clubs, 
 and when thoroughly blase taking nitrous oxide 
 
 84
 
 LISTEN TO THE MOCKING-BIRD 
 
 gas and having their teeth out. These things are 
 at least departures, but to eat the same jelly-cake 
 and hard-boiled eggs in a different field seems to 
 me to lack what the critics call motif. Of course 
 nobody can tell till he tries it just how superior 
 as a moral discipline a picnic is to a circus ; and a 
 country picnic, I said, is about the only thing I 
 haven t tried. 
 
 She looked at me, I thought, with just a flicker 
 of commiseration, as if a man who had tried every 
 thing could hardly be worth so much curiosity as 
 she felt. 
 
 I answered her look. " Perhaps it isn t quite 
 as bad as that. But I have had a foolish desire 
 to see all there is in life, and like the man in the 
 
 play, I looked into Vesuvius and there s nothing 
 
 . 
 in it. 
 
 " Not even ashes ? " 
 
 "Well, yes some ashes, but nothing else. 
 It leaves an aching sense of goneness. You see, 
 we city folk fall into the habit of regarding life as 
 a side-show, and if it doesn t keep up the pace, 
 we get dissatisfied." 
 
 " It must be dreadfully tiresome." 
 
 " Oh, everybody dees his best to get just as 
 tired as he can. Do you know, I thought I d 
 come up here for a change, where nothing goes 
 by but the seasons, and they seem to kiss their 
 hands to you and say they will come again. 
 There is no such promise in the side-show. 
 The same spring bonnets never come back. 
 The same play-bill is never seen twice. Nobody 
 
 85
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 says au revoir. It s hurrah, boys, and good-by. 
 Now you have the same picnic every year, do 
 you not, and the same jelly-cake ? 
 
 Griselle had a delicious, spontaneous laugh. 
 I know a soubrette who would give a hundred 
 dollars a link for it. 
 
 " Some day," I said, " I should like to have 
 Gabe bring you to the city when I am there, and 
 I ll show you the kind of picnics we have. I ll 
 take you to Coney Island. You never were in 
 the city, were you ? : 
 
 " Oh, yes. When I was studying music, 
 Cousin Ed Yerkes took me with his sister to 
 hear the music in The Old Homestead. 
 
 "Music in The Old Homestead ?" I said 
 inquiringly. " What music ? " 
 
 "Why, they sung The Old Oaken Bucket 
 in it beautifully." 
 
 "So they did, so they did," I said pathetically, 
 and stopped to wonder how a girl could leave the 
 real oaken bucket at her door, and go a hundred 
 miles to enjoy a property bucket. Still, this 
 knowledge made me feel that she was human like 
 myself. " How you would enjoy the wooden 
 milch cow and the painted dairy-maid from Mul 
 berry Street at Coney Island, after you had 
 milked your real cows." 
 
 Like all my kind, I felt a protective and pro 
 prietary interest in such innocence. I suppose 
 Griselle intended that I should. The upshot of 
 it was that Charlie and I toddled to her picnic, 
 and I was her willing slave for one day. In try- 
 
 86
 
 LISTEN TO THE MOCKING-BIRD 
 
 ing to recall some of its bright specialties, I find 
 that my recollection of it is much like the recol 
 lection of an orchestral performance, and you 
 know that if the performance is a good one, you 
 do not remember anything in particular. No one 
 tries to make a diagram of a warm glow. Only 
 a general sense of wagon-loads of farm babies in 
 white, and boisterous lads and lassies with base 
 ball bats and croquet mallets, all exulting in out 
 doors as if they had never seen it before. It was 
 very pleasant to see young life decant itself in 
 this simple manner, making the fields effervesce 
 and the thickets bubble. But in the recollection 
 of it is a pervading gleam of Griselle in her leg 
 horn hat, keeping up a quiet authoritative bustle 
 like the Lady of the Manor, directing, giving me 
 whispered orders that were imperative, but very 
 demure, making me fetch water, climb trees to 
 fasten ropes up for swings, everybody else regard 
 ing me, I thought, with a slight awe. It gave 
 me a great deal of quiet satisfaction to take my 
 orders, especially when they were confidential, 
 and tacitly to concede her right to direct me, 
 though how she got the right, or when it was 
 conferred, I m blessed if I know. 
 
 Altogether I entered into the spirit of the 
 thing with a zest that surprised me, and when 
 the sun was setting, we all bundled into our 
 wagons and went off homeward, making the 
 highway ring with our homely songs. 
 
 But that night when Charlie and I were in bed, 
 I asked him how he had enjoyed himself. 
 
 87 "
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 " I think, Dad," he said, " that we would have 
 had a good deal more fun if we had gone to the 
 circus and left Griselle out of it. She s too 
 smart." 
 
 " Do you think so, Comrade ? " 
 
 "Yes. She told me to go and play that 
 she d take care of you." 
 
 " Hark," I said, " there s the band. The 
 show is over. They are playing * Listen to the 
 Mocking-bird. " 
 
 88
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE CONVALESCENCE OF A CRACKED HEART 
 
 I HAVE tried to tell how I was frightened into 
 my vacation by a physical warning, and by the 
 Doctor who took it up and added to it. He 
 called it the disease of civilization, and said the 
 trouble was that it worked unseen at the centre, 
 so that you never suspected its ravages until you 
 collapsed suddenly. He held out a single plank 
 of rescue, and I ran over it with amazing alacrity 
 into the wild woods where I could escape from 
 civilization for a year. Fortunately for me, my 
 Doctor was a rational man, one of those rare doc 
 tors who do not weigh life in an apothecary s 
 scales, or insist that you can cut every domain of 
 it with a knife. He told me that my E string 
 was a little weak (the Doctor plays the violin, or 
 did in his younger days), and was screwed up too 
 tight. " Of course," he said, " it is going to snap 
 unless you let the rest of the instrument down to 
 a lower key. In a word, you must get out of the 
 orchestra."
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 If there is anything that an apparently robust 
 man of large appetites and energetic brain particu 
 larly dislikes, it is to snap. I suppose that he 
 can contemplate fading away and dwindling out 
 with complacency, but there is something dis 
 reputable in falling down dead at a moment of 
 supreme exultation or of conceded triumph. One 
 does not enjoy the prospect of being found dead 
 in his bed, or being carried out of the opera feet 
 first by the ushers, in one s dress-coat, with the 
 boutonniere on one s breast looking so superflu 
 ous, and the wide-open eye so helpless. Man is 
 here like a sick animal he prefers to keep some 
 unobserved place and take time to adjust his dying 
 with some sense of relevancy. 
 
 But what can a man do when the bell sounds ? 
 Somewhere, suddenly, like a vivid flash, comes 
 the summons out of a clear sky : " Here you are, 
 now presto, are you ready ? " He isn t ready, 
 of course. I have read of men who were ready, 
 but as a business man I never saw one who was. 
 To get this dire summons in the middle, perhaps, 
 of a smart remark, one-half of which must die out 
 on blue lips, and know beforehand that admira 
 tion is to be petrified into pity, hurts a man s 
 pride. It is curious, but we prefer death as a 
 torturing jailer rather than as a highwayman with 
 a club, who leaps at us out of unsuspected coverts. 
 I am free to acknowledge that when I got my 
 premonitory summons I took to my heels like a 
 panic-stricken horse. Then, during the months 
 of retirement, of which I have tried to tell, there 
 
 90
 
 A CRACKED HEART 
 
 came gusts of Gargantuan laughter from my lusty 
 doctor. It was like June thunder, full of bellow 
 ing promise. But he graduated his medicinal 
 mirth just as the season graduates its thunders. 
 In June he muttered far down on the horizon. 
 In July he pealed from the zenith. In August 
 he exploded, for by that time he found that, weak 
 as my heart might be, I had will-power enough 
 to follow his directions to the letter. I had wiped 
 out the world for the time being and come down 
 to mush and milk and first principles. I knew 
 very well that he did not believe that I was capa 
 ble of it. I had heard him say more than once 
 that there was no escape for a man who drugged 
 himself with society. 
 
 One morning I received a letter from him, say 
 ing he was coming up to take a week s loafing 
 in my cabin and examine my tongue. I jumped 
 with a glad apprehension and considerable solici 
 tude. That old Lucullus coming here for a 
 week. What would I do with him in this pov 
 erty-struck hut ? Where would I put his silk 
 shirts and pajamas ? How pamper his capacious 
 stomach ? How fill his enormous capacity for 
 comradeship? It was all very well for Charlie 
 and me, who were roughing it for our health, and 
 could sleep on a board and eat cold pork between 
 sea-biscuit, and wash ourselves in the brook, but 
 visitors and a visitor who was an epicure, a 
 connoisseur, and a social lion ! Oh, I d tele 
 graph him and stop it, but before I could get 
 a telegram down to Spelldown he arrived. I 
 
 9 1
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 heard his vibrations on the road above the rattle 
 of Gabe s wagon before I saw him. " We re in 
 for it, Charlie," I cried. " Put away the jack- 
 knives " (we had been making some chip yachts 
 for a race at the milldam) ; " we ve got to enter 
 tain company." 
 
 When the portly form of the Doctor reached 
 our door, and he sprang lightly enough out of 
 Gabe s wagon, dressed in a loose outing-shirt, 
 duck trousers, and hob-nailed shoes, his broad, 
 handsome face beaming with good-nature, I for 
 gave him ; and when he lifted Charlie up in the 
 air, held him at arm s length, and looked at his 
 tanned and freckled face and sparkling eyes with 
 unmistakable admiration, I cried: 
 
 " Nothing the matter with him, Doctor." 
 
 He came at me with both hands, hit me a 
 good fraternal whack in the breast with his fist, 
 and shouted : " How s that cracked heart of 
 yours ? " 
 
 " Doctor," I said deprecatingly, " I can t ac 
 commodate you in this dugout. Heavens, you 
 do not want to sleep on a shakedown and eat 
 army rations. Better let Gabe drive you over to 
 the Folly. 
 
 " No, I thank you," he said. " I slept on the 
 ground and ate army rations before you had your 
 second teeth ; besides, when I have a patient that 
 I am interested in, I never stop to consider what 
 floor he is on. Take my coat and satchel. 
 Charlie, you young rascal, bring me a camp-chair 
 out here where it is cool, and a match. Now, 
 
 92
 
 A CRACKED HEART 
 
 then, what are you, Timon, Orlando, or Hamlet? 
 How do you sleep ? Do you know ? " 
 
 " No. I have lost interest in the operation." 
 
 " Good. Can you eat without a menu, and 
 stop without tipping somebody ? Good. Does 
 salt junk at certain ecstatic moments look to your 
 purged vision like the staff" of life ? Good. You 
 can t spread the morning paper out beside your 
 plate and cram your brain and your stomach at 
 the same time ? Good. You ll live to be eighty- 
 rive if you keep on." 
 
 " Oh, you d better tell me the plain truth at 
 once. I can stand it." 
 
 " Dreams ? " 
 
 "Every day. Can t quite shut off the rubbish 
 of hopes and ambitions." 
 
 " Day be hanged. How about the night ? " 
 
 " Oh, I don t know anything about the night. 
 My system appears to have lost all interest in 
 that." 
 
 " Then you re all right. Night is the only im 
 portant part of a man s existence. It s the only 
 time when he ought to stop kicking against the 
 Eternal. If your nights are clean and empty, the 
 unimportant days will take care of themselves. 
 Man is such an infatuated suicide that Nature has 
 to drug him once every twenty-four hours to keep 
 him from destroying himself. Great Scott, what 
 a luxury it is to get rid of a coat once more ! 
 Have you got another brier-wood pipe ? Thank 
 you. Say, old fellow," he continued, as he took 
 the match from Charlie and lit the pipe, " did it 
 
 93
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 ever occur to you that man is an instrument, very 
 nicely adjusted, but played upon so continuously 
 by himself that he gets jangled ? When he takes 
 his hand off at night, the Great Tuner steps in 
 and fixes up the strings. What kind of tobacco 
 do you call that ? " 
 
 I continued apologetic and tried to explain away 
 my humble accommodations and prepare him 
 for the monastic penance of being my guest. He 
 only stripped off his necktie, unbuttoned his shirt, 
 exposing his brawny and pilous neck. " Now, 
 old chap, I m going to take my shoes off if you 
 don t object. I want to get my feet into that cool 
 grass." 
 
 I understood very well what this luxury of 
 looseness was. He walked up and down in the 
 wire grass, smoking, a fine picture of dishevelled 
 dignity. The grass was not very cool at that time 
 of day, but the delight of believing that it was and 
 the greater delight of freeing himself momentarily 
 from the constrictions of conventional life was 
 unmistakable. 
 
 "You can never know," he afterward said to 
 me, "how tired a doctor gets of his species. It 
 isn t that he only sees the worst side of it, but he 
 must contemplate the infatuated determination of 
 his race to be invalids, and the cool assumption 
 of the race that doctors are made only to relieve 
 it of some of the consequences of its own folly. 
 That is what makes a man of my temperament 
 desire to get somewhere at times where there are 
 others than his own species." 
 
 94
 
 A CRACKED HEART 
 
 " I should like to know," I asked, " if you in 
 clude me in your species." 
 
 "Well, hardly. You re a good deal of a curi 
 osity. The only patient I ever had who did what 
 I told him. I was so incredulous that I had to 
 come up here and see it with my own eyes. You 
 deserve to live for ever." 
 
 " There wasn t much merit in it. You scared 
 me into it." 
 
 He laughed. 
 
 " You were smart enough to rouse my will 
 power," I said, " to a panicky point of renuncia 
 tion." 
 
 "Will-power. There you go. I ve heard 
 about will-power till it makes me weary. The 
 whole finite world has gone crazy on will-power. 
 There is a new quackery in the market made to 
 fit it, which prescribes will-power instead of mor 
 phine. Exert your God-given volition, it cries, 
 and rise above physical evil. But not one of 
 its quacks can add or subtract a heart-beat by 
 will-power, or contract an involuntary muscle. 
 Will-power is the sovereign slave-driver of the 
 material world. It removes mountains ; but I ll 
 be hanged for a mountebank if it can remove re 
 morse or set the jig for an overridden heart. Man 
 will go on with his will-power till he has used up 
 all the material forces of this globe, and then, if 
 he cannot get to any other, he will die of ennui. 
 I always say to a patient of mine : ( Don t give 
 me any of that will-power nonsense, if you please. 
 Just take your hand off the machine for a little 
 
 95
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 while, and perhaps it will regulate itself. Did it 
 ever occur to you that there might be some will 
 power in the universe lying around loose that 
 wasn t yours? If I can get a patient to stop self- 
 focussing himself for a while, I feel quite certain 
 that some kind of regulative energy will drift into 
 him. Now, then, what time do you lunch ? " 
 
 "Charlie," I said, "put on your apron and set 
 out the hard-boiled eggs and crackers." 
 
 The Doctor was an old campaigner, and one 
 who has been, never quite gets over the habits of 
 it. He had slept in the snow, rolled up in a blue 
 overcoat, so he told me, when campaigning with 
 Crook, and had eaten raw pork between hardtack 
 for breakfast, when the pork had to be chopped 
 with a hatchet, and, said he, " I remember those 
 savage meals pleasantly, and have forgotten all the 
 dinners that I ate at the Holland House and Del- 
 monico s. After all, there s nothing so relative as 
 our gustatory zest. In fact, all our appetites are 
 conditional. A man enjoys a meal very much as he 
 enjoys female society it depends on the scarcity." 
 
 " And the liberty," I said. " There is nothing 
 so delightful as to be able to do as you please 
 without fear of interruption." 
 
 " Very fine for a change, old chap, but make 
 no mistake, it will not do for a steady thing. I 
 cannot imagine any condition of existence so hor 
 ribly full of ennui as absolute freedom would be. 
 Fancy all obligations, all the dear old fetters, the 
 very preservative weight of an atmosphere of 
 duty, removed, and the monition of ( Thou shalt 
 
 96
 
 A CRACKED HEART 
 
 not abrogated, and man, like a fatherless Ish- 
 maelite, wandering about in the desert of his own 
 desires." He called in the door to Charlie : 
 " Don t forget the cold pork and molasses." Then 
 he resumed his walk in the grass. " It will not 
 do, old fellow," he said ; " we must have orbits, 
 and gravitation to keep us in them, or there would 
 be universal high jinks. If you don t mind, I m 
 going to take these suspenders off." 
 
 " Look here, Doctor," I said, "if you will take 
 off your philosophy with your other duds and 
 come back to your proper business and tell me 
 what you think of my condition, you will do me a 
 
 favour. Perhaps I am cured and can go back with 
 
 
 you. 
 
 " You want to begin all over and get another 
 warning." 
 
 "Then I m not cured." 
 
 "You re convalescent that s* all. You must 
 keep this jig up for one year. I do not propose 
 to let up on my prescription, if you expect me to 
 carry you through to a good old age. You see, 
 I ve got a good deal at stake in this matter. If 
 I succeed in remaking you, I intend to start in 
 on a new line of practice and open an office in the 
 Yellowstone Park. You ve been a pretty good 
 boy so far. I did not believe you could do it. 
 In fact, you re the first man I ever met who could 
 give up female society entirely and take to the 
 woods on sanitary principles, and you will make 
 a shining example when you go back to Broadway 
 and Wall Street." 
 
 97
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 At that moment Charlie came to the door and 
 shouted, " Say, Dad, where do you suppose Gri- 
 selle keeps the pepper and salt?" 
 
 I remember that the Doctor, who looked very 
 absurd in his bare feet, came over and stood in 
 front of me, and said with as cavernous an intona 
 tion as he could command, " Who in thunder is 
 Griselle ? " 
 
 98
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE LIGHT IN A DARK CELL 
 
 I HAVE never been shut up in a dark eel), 
 but I have talked with men who have been, 
 and I can readily understand why a prolon 
 gation of such punishment brings insanity with 
 it. The best of us, who have what we call in 
 ternal resources, break down at the sudden loss 
 of our environment. We lose our bearings. 
 The points of the compass disappear. Our re 
 lation to things is disturbed. We begin to grope 
 after an adjustment. We turn and devour our 
 selves. To be lost in one s own abyss is insanity. 
 Really, it is like the fabled act of the helpless 
 reptile that plunges its fangs into its own 
 body. Very few minds can stand the test of 
 being driven in on themselves. And yet it is in 
 those cloisters that we carry with us that we often- 
 est run across ourselves as we grope in the dark, 
 and then, mayhap, we sit down and become our 
 own father confessors. 
 
 99
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 Nothing can be more interesting than the ex 
 perience of a man who has lived for years on the 
 periphery of life, and is suddenly plunged into 
 the dark of his own being. It is not unlike that 
 other experience which most of us have had at 
 some time, of waking up in a dark room at night 
 and feeling that cold shadow of consciousness 
 creeping upon us that we do not know where we 
 are. In such experiences you try to remember 
 where the window is or was, you try to make 
 memory take the place of cognition, and under 
 take to reconstruct your place in the universe. 
 But for the time being you have lost your own 
 trail. Then there is a slight cold shudder in the 
 soul for a moment. A voice cries out, " I am 
 lost." It is only a passing spasm of the sub- 
 consciousness, but you never forget it. I think, 
 myself, it is a prescient apprehension by the soul, 
 and pre-figures in a dumb way the experience 
 that awaits all souls when they pass from one 
 condition of existence to another. I recall that 
 once, at what purported to be a spiritual seance, 
 an unexpected message was received from what 
 claimed to be a spirit one who had been a very 
 dissolute, but withal a very lovable man. It 
 came among a number of incoherent, impossible, 
 and puerile messages, and threw a momentary 
 chill on the party. The question that had been 
 put was, " Where are you, Bob ? " and the 
 answer was, " Wandering in the cold and dark 
 between time and eternity." 
 
 A man can try the dark-cell experiment by 
 100
 
 THE LIGHT IN A DARK CELL 
 
 being his own jailer and locking himself up in 
 the wilderness, as I did. At least so I thought 
 when I executed the feat of banishing myself 
 from the mode of existence to which I had be 
 come habituated. For a month I went through 
 very much the same experience that attends the 
 waking up in a strange dark room. I had left 
 my environment behind me, not because I had 
 lost the desire for it, but because it had betrayed 
 the intention of killing me ruthlessly and sud 
 denly. One of two changes was offered me. I 
 was to abandon my existence or my habits. If 
 one should, with the magic power of Aladdin s 
 lamp, transport a man from the seething Board 
 of Brokers and set him down in the still waste 
 of the Syrian desert, the change would not be 
 more absolute than was mine. The Doctor s pre 
 scription was, " Come back to Hecuba." I 
 thought at the time that I had the choice of leav 
 ing this world or staying in its most endurable 
 dark cell, and I chose to stay. Doubtless it was 
 the pusillanimity of a man of the world. The 
 only result that is worth telling is this that, 
 if a man manages it properly, he can rob the 
 dark cell of all its horrors, and get comfortably 
 out of the world without bothering the under 
 taker. But why pursue that figure any further ? 
 The dark cell belongs exclusively to the punitive 
 side of man s hallucination. My experiment at 
 first was very much like the dearth of midnight, 
 for the glare and shock of the world had been 
 shut off. But no sooner had I accepted the loss 
 
 101
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 cred:er.t.lv, and the dirk, or isolation had er.com- 
 rassed me, than jut came the stars, one by one, 
 and, as my little world receded, the universes 
 whispered to me across trie eternal gaps. Those 
 sibylline vc-.ces are very restful, when your ear is 
 once purged or the artificial clang and has recov 
 ered its primal vibrations. 
 
 Had I been an artist or 2:: entomologist, rnv 
 ez- r ~ er.t v j z ... enabled me t ... fy the 
 ennui ot solitude. But, alas, I was neither. I 
 could not come to Nature like the sifted robber- 
 artist who steals her secrets and lug s them off to 
 his gallery, like so much plunder, with the hiero 
 glyphs nibbed rrT. That admirable marauder 
 wr.cse missicr. :t is to inJorm Nature how she 
 ought to do it is sustained in swamps and deserts 
 by a missionary fervour. I had not even the war 
 rant cr that other despoiler, the sportsman, who 
 corrects Nature with a gun, and wounds and kills, 
 even when he cannot eat, with a robust masculine 
 ioyousness. That superior quality which in tne 
 entomologist is called analysis, and which can box 
 the compass of a bug when he is properly pinned 
 down, with the dismembering acumen ol a musi 
 cal critic who tears the quivering semi-quavers 
 :: : ::~. .; - . . :v. and LVS t - ". it 1 dry in a 
 criticism that wonderful gift has been denied 
 me. I was myselt pinned down by Nature to a 
 ...:... : : _ . : - . . - . I . [ rn - barren 
 f the : : : ^tership that 1 be eved m : 
 musica. _ " - - .- ere tr.e :-tten".i"t : ex: :::.te 
 
 IC2
 
 THE LIGHT IV A DARK CELL 
 
 analyzed or explained, any more than a r raver. 
 but to be accepted and obeyed. Such a spirit as 
 mine would never have conquered the earth. I 
 acknowledge it. Trie on.v zuestion is, cou d 
 such a spirit understand tr.e eartr.. and w-_ . i the 
 wor .d say anvthing confidential to it : I was 
 under constitutional bonds not to interfere, but to 
 listen. I was looking tor nepenthe. Something 
 said to me it is not a clnig, but an adjustment. 
 Perhaps it was the D;;t:r. I v.a.s n:t tj dist 
 anvthins in the laboratory. 
 
 I dare sav I astonished mv nev.- envir .nment 
 both of animate am inanimate natu-e. 
 it v/as n t accust med t: -: : rit as mint. 
 
 Now that I look back at the experiment. I can 
 fancy Nature saying, ;: Whs: have we here? Is 
 this our lord and master, or has an invalid Francis 
 of Assisi come out of Wail Street: d:es not want 
 : :ur birds in - : . her 
 
 barium to corroborate his own theories ; does not 
 ; . :. -.-: :ut an v thing ~- :\ - ..-.- g ur : 
 can he be enr.re y numan : Perhaps, when he 
 lies, ir" h e e ve r s ;. : u i d . h e v .- . - - .- - re: - 
 .;,. am v. : . .-.-t us get at r.: .: m bv 
 atom, and ..:t mm benicnly a]on in our proces- 
 si : n. Trrat him gentiv, O winds, and enter softiv 
 into him, O sunshine, and all you myriad messen 
 gers or trie air. breatr.e vour inarricu.ate secrets to 
 
 siirred by. And \vhat %
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 mortal that I am, it was told me in effluence, but 
 not till long afterward did I find it written on the 
 deep pages of my experience, like the embroidery 
 of God in the Milky Way and in the marsh. I 
 have tried many times since to get that secret into 
 words, but words are so brittle that they break 
 down helplessly with the weight of a truth that is 
 like an atmosphere. There are some secrets, like 
 the ether, for which words have not been invented. 
 One day when I thought I had caught the feat of 
 fitting the ether to syllables, I wrote down, " Be 
 fore freedom can be, obedience is." It had all the 
 ethereal disadvantages of an abstraction trying to 
 perform a concrete trick. How barren the prop 
 osition was beside the Psalm that had sung itself 
 into my comprehension through all those months. 
 How far away from the ineffable eloquence which 
 had said without words : " Behold, all things but 
 man are under law, and man must come volunta 
 rily under it before he can be part of the scheme. 
 To him alone it is allowed to return. So do we 
 live and obey and die that he may learn the les 
 son." 
 
 Upon a man s capacity to emit a glow-worm ray 
 of his own will depend the darkness of his cell and 
 the limitations of it. There are men and women 
 who have so perverted their natures that they live 
 entirely through their superficies, and that kind 
 of life which furnishes continual external stimula 
 tion converts them, in time, to hollow resounding 
 shells, silent, indeed, unless they are beat upon. 
 We all know men the greater part of whose lives 
 
 104
 
 THE LIGHT IN A DARK CELL 
 
 are spent looking at the procession. They would 
 be of about as much use to themselves in a dark 
 room as would a mirror. They are decrepit in 
 fants, who must be fed continually by the spoon 
 of circumstance. Whenever things lose their 
 motion, they, too, lose theirs, as if they were mere 
 cogs in the social machinery. Their experience is 
 about as interesting as a book of old playbills. 
 That was what Goethe meant when he said that 
 the ordinary man is content to see something 
 going on. He is content because he does not 
 have to go on himself. 
 
 Probably conscience has a great deal to do with 
 a man s disinclination to be left alone with him 
 self. When one has nobody to look at but him 
 self, he is apt to be not only bored but frightened. 
 One s mistakes and follies always look more for 
 midable when one is alone. Conscience is like a 
 photographer it shuts off the general glare, gets 
 the light focussed and subdued, and out comes the 
 expression that belongs to you. I confess that at 
 first I acted like the ordinary man (that I am). I 
 hankered, pined, growled, complained, and looked 
 over my shoulder at the disturbance that I missed. 
 I was dreadfully bored because nothing was going 
 on. And mind you, the immeasureable proces 
 sion of the universe was jogging right along as 
 before. Not a cog had been slipped in the tre 
 mendous plan, but I felt that it had because I was 
 no longer on exhibition. There is a Chinese 
 adage which says that our hopes are our friends, 
 but our desires are our children ; and there was I, 
 
 105
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 like the old woman who lived in a shoe, sur 
 rounded by my brood, all clamouring. It was my 
 heroic duty to starve them to death. 
 
 But such is the gentle efficacy of the gold cure 
 under the autumn leaves that if one will only 
 stay in the sanitarium of outdoors long enough 
 and keep still and listen, he will begin to see 
 some things more clearly. I was trying to think 
 of a similitude that would convey to you some 
 idea of those kindly intimations that are made by 
 the external world when one is thoroughly recep 
 tive, and I recalled a trivial incident which had 
 for me at the time a peculiar eloquence. Charlie 
 and I had passed the winter resolutely in that 
 hut, growing very intimate indeed, and spending 
 many precious hours huddling over our wood 
 fire during the long nights when the storms 
 raged and the hut creaked and trembled. We 
 had been very brave, I am sure, to have stood it 
 out, but the winter was long, and we were wait 
 ing and pining for the spring. The days and 
 weeks crawled sluggishly along. We counted 
 them regularly on the calendar, and watched with 
 childish eagerness that receding; sunshine on the 
 
 O 
 
 wall which was an index of the solstice. We 
 longed for the end of it all. One night I opened 
 the window to fasten the shutter. I think it was 
 in April. It was very still, and I heard the first 
 faint peep from the milldam. Such weak, tim 
 orous, thin little elfin voices, peep, peep. But 
 there was a keen, arrowy heralding in the note. 
 The earth was stirring. I called Charlie. "What 
 
 1 06
 
 THE LIGHT IN A DARK CELL 
 
 is it ?" he said. " It s spring, Comrade," I replied. 
 And then we had a little war-dance in which the 
 yellow dog joined. 
 
 I never heard those tiny birth-pangs of the 
 season afterward, without a little quickening of 
 the pulse. Once you get on intimate terms with 
 this Not Me, who strums her zithers and thun 
 ders her open diapasons, she will have many 
 pleasant surprises for you. You will discover, 
 by degrees, that she is a blood relation. She 
 recognizes the same Father and knew him before 
 you did. After that you, shake hands with the 
 trees and salute the winds familiarly as they pass. 
 Then you learn, possibly, that Nature is not 
 aesthetic. She struggles just as hard as any artist 
 after an unseen prototype, but it is because she 
 is under orders. She is as austere as a Puritan, 
 in her duty, and never by any possibility bothers 
 with sentimentalism. We always bring that non 
 sense to her in our kits and our albums. She 
 stands up to her work with a rigid invincibility 
 that makes an aesthete shiver, and offers up her off 
 spring as unquestioningly as did Abraham, and so 
 well drilled are all her countless myriads that 
 there is not a blade of grass hidden from the eye 
 that does not strive as hard as it can to live and 
 die for something other than itself. 
 
 So it was, that in the smoky confines of our 
 far-away hut, swept by bleak storms or shone on 
 by yellow sunshine, Charlie and I sat through 
 the seasons, humbly, like the squirrels that we 
 often heard under our floor, playing at bowls with 
 
 107
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 their hickory nuts. We were learning to wait 
 and getting strong and calm with the sure Balm 
 of Gilead, for the time when we were to sally 
 forth and take up our fight uncomplainingly and 
 faithfully, like the dumb friends we were to leave 
 behind. 
 
 108
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE GLORY OF THE WAY 
 
 AFTER a prolonged hot spell in late August, 
 we usually get that transformation scene that 
 has cool reminders in it of the golden age. 
 A shower in the afternoon hisses and splashes 
 on the hot earth, and then dies out lingeringly 
 in what the farmers call a " drizzle-drozzle." 
 It rains well on through the night softly. You 
 can almost hear the muskmelons and tomatoes 
 saying thanks. But the sun comes up unobscured 
 in the morning, burning in a fathomless blue that 
 you seldom see anywhere outside of the Orient, 
 and calling to mind that tongue-twisting line of 
 Baildon s, 
 
 " Palely blue lucent, one great undulent gem," 
 
 only it is not " palely," but pronouncedly violet 
 in the unflecked gulfs of it. This is the annun 
 ciation of fall. It is usually a very showy cere 
 monial, and a very old one, from which, long ago, 
 
 109
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 Attica caught the feast of Demeter and mingled 
 jewels with the sheaves in joyful celebration. But 
 man could not, even in his Grecian moods, when 
 he loaded Ceres with poppies and gems, do more 
 than mimic with his stage properties the whelming 
 brilliancy and necromancy of such a morning. 
 
 Ceres is preserved to us only in philology. 
 She comes to us through Germany as Hertha, out 
 of which grew our word " earth," and it is the 
 earth that flashes her with all her gems across our 
 vision after the late rains. The largesse of it at 
 six o clock in the morning is dazzling. Every 
 tendril wears a tiara. The currant bushes, that 
 could never decorate themselves with anything 
 more pretentious than strings of garnets, now blaze 
 with diamonds and burn with rubies. The mean 
 est weed that grows is heavy with diadems. There 
 is nothing so poor that it cannot throw back an 
 iridescent greeting to the sun. 
 
 This prismatic jubilate only lasts half an hour. 
 The winds come up and gather the queen s jewels, 
 and the shadows creep along and put out the 
 lights. But even then, one ceremonial merges 
 into another in confluent evanescences. Nothing 
 that is beautiful stays. Even the shadows, that 
 have such a rich wine-coloured depth at this time, 
 pull themselves out in a cycle, and the cool winds 
 are hastening seaward. The very charm of it is 
 its transitoriness. The queen does not always sit 
 on exhibition with her jewels on. It is well that 
 man cannot stay the festival. He would fasten 
 it, if he could, and make a museum or a mauso- 
 
 110
 
 THE GLORY OF THE WAY 
 
 leum of it. He is so afraid of the divine pro 
 cesses and so blind to the glory of going on that 
 he tries to petrify his own perishing body when 
 the life is out of it. Never does he show himself 
 such a dog in the manger as when he embalms 
 himself. 
 
 Nature is forever emitting a pleasant irony at 
 our scale of values, trying to tell us that it is not 
 that which endures, but that which is transformed, 
 that best answers her equitable purpose. One 
 can easily fancy that in some other condition of 
 existence than ours, the evanescent best conforms 
 to the enduring, seeing that existence in any con 
 ceivable state cannot be static, but must still be 
 going on. That was rather a pretty conceit of 
 Swedenborg s that the best spirits in another world 
 concinually grow young. I say a " conceit," but 
 now I think of it, how do I know it is a conceit ? 
 With our scale of values we lapse continually into 
 a primitive admiration for magnitude. Great dis 
 tances, measureless periods of time how Tyn- 
 dall revelled in one and Proctor in the other, and 
 how awe-struck their audiences were at the effective 
 ness of meaningless magnitude. But there is a 
 continual intimation in Nature that mere bulk and 
 prodigiousness are not ranked so high in her scale 
 of values as in ours. She certainly endows a pis 
 mire with more communal intelligence than an 
 ox, and spends as much ingenuity on a mushroom 
 as on an oak. Who can say with accurate knowl 
 edge that our measurement of time by the revo 
 lutions of the earth fits all conditions of existence 
 
 in
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 and extends beyond man to unseen communities 
 which round up their affairs and die between 
 sunrise and sunset? Who shall say that our 
 subdivision of hours bears any reference to the 
 compacted lives that measure their destinies by 
 moments ? Do we not get occasionally in dreams, 
 and still more vividly in those marvellous syn 
 theses of thought and feeling that attend sudden 
 disaster, as for example in the premonition of 
 drowning, some startling evidences that the fac 
 ulties of the mind can transcend time altogether ? 
 Who shall deny that the fennel and June grass 
 and the downy gerardia, that have their succes 
 sions both of beauty and duty under the spreading 
 oak branches, and have matured and given up 
 their stored substance year after year to the arsenal 
 of the earth, have not been toiling like the coral 
 mite to help build the overshadowing bank of 
 greenery ? Read Darwin s biography of the earth 
 worm. 
 
 That side of our natures which gives heed only 
 to the prodigious is very apt to become theatric, 
 and occasionally, like the manager of the show, 
 try to impress us with the magnitude rather 
 than the worth of the exhibition. 
 
 I recall an incident of the last year of my aca 
 demic days. Trivial as it is, it fits pleasantly in 
 here. Our professor of physics, an amiable old 
 fellow, but slightly tinctured with Buchner, took 
 some kind of delight in belittling man and his 
 planet. Now and then it would creep out, a 
 mild pessimism, that took the shape of illustra- 
 
 112
 
 THE GLORY OF THE WAY 
 
 tion or passing reference. One day he called our 
 attention to the late Dr. John W. Draper s book, 
 " The History of the Conflict between Religion 
 and Science, which had just appeared and was 
 attracting much attention. It had made a deep 
 impression on him, and nothing would do but 
 he must read a page of it to the class, as a fine 
 example of insight and eloquence. The eminent 
 author had turned aside for a moment from his 
 historical thesis to show that man belonged 
 among the atoms and was startlingly insignificant 
 when compared to the celestial bulks ; and this is 
 what our professor read us, with solemn face and 
 deep tremulous voice: 
 
 Seen from the sun, the earth dwindles away to a mere 
 speck, a mere dust-mote glistening in his beams. If 
 the reader wishes a more precise valuation, let him hold 
 a page of this book a couple of feet from his eye and 
 then let him consider one of the dots or full stops. 
 That dot is several hundred times larger in surface than 
 is the earth as seen from the sun. Of what conse 
 quence then can such an almost imperceptible particle 
 be ? One might think that it could be removed or even 
 annihilated and never be missed. Of what consequence 
 is one of those human monads on the surface of this all 
 but invisible speck, of whom scarcely one will leave a 
 trace that he has ever existed ? Of what consequence 
 is man, his pleasures or his pains? DRAPER S "Con 
 flict," International Scientific Series, p. 174. 
 
 The unanswerable interrogation with which our 
 professor rounded up this quotation, a kind of
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 complacent defiance, did not quite dispel a feeling 
 in the class that there was an aching void in the 
 rhetoric. You know how a class of quick instinc 
 tive young minds will be annoyed by a galloping 
 sophism that they cannot put their fingers on. 
 It is like that one mosquito that blows his small 
 but mellow horn in the dark, and you slap the 
 wrong place and wish you might see him. A 
 rather stupid and vacuous silence fell on the class, 
 as if the professor had straggled into moonshine, 
 but nobody could tell how or where. Then up 
 rose Bannister, dear old Bannister he who had 
 not only translated but interpreted the Fourth 
 Eclogue of Virgil between prayers and praxis, 
 as easily, so it seemed to us dullards, as he had 
 feathered a stroke oar. His handsome face wore 
 the livery of outdoors. His brown eye flashed 
 a little with the light that comes regularly on land 
 and sea. He was one of those intuitional fellows 
 who occasionally rush past facts to a truth. He 
 was continually arriving by cutting across lots. 
 He was made up of moods of indifference and 
 moments of inspiration. As he stood there 
 fumbling his text-book of biology and feeling 
 after words to express himself, I was fresh and 
 imaginative enough to believe on the moment 
 that he was the voice that we had all lost. 
 
 "On behalf of insignificant man," he said, "of 
 whom I am the most insignificant example, I beg 
 to put in a disclaimer, and with all respect to Dr. 
 Draper to protest against this method of measur 
 ing the value of things by the distance at which 
 
 114
 
 THE GLORY OF THE WAY 
 
 you get away from them. Seen from the sun, of 
 what value is the earth ? Seen from Saturn, of 
 what value is the sun ? Seen from Alpha Cen- 
 tauri, of what value is Saturn ? If you take 
 space enough, of what value is anything ? I 
 don t know how it is with this class, but I for 
 one cannot make a practical application of the 
 brutal scale which Dr. Draper calls a more pre 
 cise valuation. According to such an inverse 
 appraisement, one s affection and admiration for 
 one s own mother will depend on her not leaving 
 the room. If she should go to the country, of 
 what value would such an insignificant speck be ? 
 I think we ought to tremble for Moses and Plato 
 and Shakspere as they diminish along their starry 
 orbits." 
 
 I believe some of us laughed with just the 
 least bit of malicious exultation. But Bannister 
 was seriously in for it. He flashed up, and the 
 words began to fuse and flow. 
 
 " If you will permit me, sir," he said, " I lay 
 last night on my back on a softly undulating 
 deck and listened to the great dialogue between 
 my soul and the universe. I climbed the stair 
 way of the galaxies into fields of light that bil 
 lowed out to the farthest boundaries of space. 
 I passed flaming suns, all journeying on, and 
 swept through vortexes of whirling worlds, but 
 it never occurred to me, sir, to drag a surveyor s 
 chain with me and stake off the distances for the 
 belittling of myself. I confess that no finite 
 mind can take this flight along the highway of
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 creation without trembling a little at the glory 
 of the way. But the pilgrim soul will feel the 
 fanning of his own wing, and the inconceivably 
 small shall rise up against the amplitudes of space, 
 and summon with a finite will a million flashing 
 messages from as many suns and register them 
 on a retina no bigger than the capital O in this 
 book. The infinitesimal commands the incalcu 
 lable. If such a soul, feeling itself lost in an 
 eternity of matter, should throw the interrogation 
 of the Psalmist into that flaming vault and ask, 
 What is man that thou shouldst consider him ? 
 that soul has but to listen, and the answer reaches 
 across the centuries, Thou hast made him a little 
 lower than the angels. I am content, sir, to 
 travel with that answer not only across the years, 
 but across the chasms of the universe, and some 
 where on the journey I shall be sure to meet that 
 kindred thought, emitted by another monad who 
 saw in man something greater than the leagues 
 he traversed, and who exclaimed, c ln apprehen 
 sion, how like a god. 
 
 Then we all broke out in applause, in which the 
 professor generously joined. Afterward he had 
 the hardihood to say in a sly way that he knew 
 how to wake up Bannister s theological idiosyn 
 crasy. 
 
 It was this kind of high-stepping improvisation 
 that distinguished Bannister. He came from 
 Kentucky, where one can still detect in the per- 
 fervid declamation of her gifted sons some reso 
 nances of Henry Clay, and hear words pacing along 
 
 116
 
 THE GLORY OF THE WAY 
 
 the old Appian Way of eloquence. All efforts 
 to make Bannister academic were more or less 
 fruitless. He would not or could not dig labori 
 ously at the text-books. If he could not absorb 
 a theme along the lines of his emotions, the labour 
 of it discouraged him. " What is the use of wast- 
 
 O 
 
 ing time with human guesses," he said to me, 
 " when one can converse with the truth itself, by 
 putting his hand in that of the solitudes and walk 
 ing humbly with the silences ? After all, Nature 
 confides the ultimates that Aristotle only groped 
 at." I grew to love Bannister very much during 
 that last year of our companionship, but it needed 
 the after-perspective to understand him. I often 
 thought then that he was a seer. I can see now 
 that he was only an orator. But his oratory was 
 strangely affluent with the fecundity and waste of 
 Nature. Those of us who heard him afterward, 
 when he held multitudes spellbound, recall how 
 like he was to one of those great Western rivers 
 that wind sluggishly along in narrow channels, 
 carrying the soil with them, but liable at any 
 moment to whelm their banks and spread flash- 
 ingly into broad lagoons, rich with floating islands 
 and the plunder of zones. Then it was that his 
 shoreless volubility rose with Miltonic periods and 
 bellowed grandly through the deeps of time, and 
 his emotions swept us away like those waves that 
 " o erthrew Busiris and his Memphian chivalry." 
 How much of this gift was the bestowal of Isis 
 herself, when he had lifted her curtain lying on 
 his back under the stars, who shall say ? And 
 
 117
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 yet I cannot quite divest myself of the suspicion 
 that the solitudes had given him grace of utter 
 ance. It seems to be the lesson of natural elo 
 quence that Nature s educational course makes 
 some of the nobler and deep-buried appetencies 
 of the soul imitate the grasses of the field and 
 spring their tender blades in waste places. More 
 than once I have noticed that those speakers who 
 are most effective have studied the book that was 
 never written. Eloquence, unlike wit, feeds itself 
 in unfrequented glades. The American savage, 
 who is never an inventor or a philosopher, is very 
 often an orator. The speeches of Red Jacket and 
 Sitting Bull have a large Roman vibration like the 
 echo of a strong voice in the woods. 
 
 In those academic days we were swept off our 
 feet by successive literary waves. We had Goethe 
 freshets, and, later, Carlyle inundations, when we 
 talked in the Chelsea dialect and called our pro 
 fessors " Sea-Green " and " Teufelsdrockh," and 
 tried, absurdly enough, in our dormitories, to 
 " welter in the immensities " and balance the 
 "Tartarian darks" on the tips of our tongues. 
 Then there was a year when we all went off with 
 Balzac, and neglected everything but our pipes 
 and beer, in making obeisance to Parisian analyses. 
 But Bannister never joined in the fellowcraft 
 worship at these shrines. Effloresce as he might 
 at the top, his roots remained fixed in the 
 American soil. I believe he tugged at Goethe 
 assiduously and plodded through the " Comedie 
 Humaine," as if to see what it was all about. 
 
 118
 
 THE GLORY OF THE WAY 
 
 But it was no use. He regarded Goethe very 
 much as a Puritan might regard a good statue of 
 Buddha, with curiosity and awe, but without a throb 
 of sympathy. He told me himself that when 
 he read Balzac he felt like a man who had been 
 through a vast national museum, and was not per 
 mitted to bring anything away with him. On a 
 little shelf in his room he had a copy of Milton, 
 a much-bethumbed volume of Pascal s " Pensees," 
 and a Shakspere, with the regulation mother s 
 Bible that could be found in all our rooms with 
 diligent searching, but generally poked in be 
 tween Dumas and Daudet. From that small 
 library Bannister drew refreshment that we knew 
 nothing of, and now that the years have given 
 me a clearer vision of Nature and man, I can see 
 that those books opened vistas to him not unlike 
 those he had seen when lying on his back. 
 
 And now that I have run afield in this inex 
 cusable manner, I ought to apologize. I set out 
 to exalt the small things and have not said a 
 word about myself. Thus is one s most precious 
 egotism reduced to a postscript when he remem 
 bers. I was reminded of Bannister by the rich 
 August hedgerows, where the cardinal-flower al 
 ready burns and the fringed gentian will follow in 
 unexpected places, and the smell of the wild 
 grapes will make the air real with a Grecian tipsi- 
 ness. All these wildings of Nature have disap 
 peared from the haunts of man. He plucks them 
 up by the roots and plants his hard, dry chrysan 
 themums in geometrical dreariness. 
 
 119
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 ON A PORCH 
 
 IT takes ordinary men like myself about forty 
 years to learn the alphabet of living. We 
 start in with a conquering sword, shouting 
 " Excelsior," and mistaking intensity of emotion 
 for integrity of being. At ten we believe all 
 things ; at twenty we dare all things ; at thirty 
 we obtain all things ; at forty, we question all 
 things. If we arrive at fifty, we bow our heads 
 and are silent. We have arrived with many scars 
 at either a conclusion or a conviction. If by any 
 means we reach a conviction, it will be shadowed 
 by an enormous waste and tinged with a reproach 
 that we have missed the preservative equilibrium. 
 Ghosts of a lost condition peer and smile ironi 
 cally in our memories and glide through our 
 dreams. 
 
 I suppose the ultimate punishment of man 
 in this world is the accomplishment of his desires. 
 In looking back at my summer in the solitary 
 
 1 20
 
 ON A PORCH 
 
 woods, I find that very little of it remains but 
 the equable and uneventful light of it. If 1 try 
 to recall what was disagreeable or annoying, I 
 have to refer to notes made at the time, and 
 those notes are for the most part meaningless 
 now and strangely superfluous, bearing the impli 
 cation that the annoyances of life are not to be 
 preserved, and inferentially that the forces that 
 make up real life preserve themselves without 
 our special wonder. How trite the dear old 
 trees were, how platitudinous and self-possessed. 
 How unoriginal and reiterative were the seasons, 
 doing just the same things over and over from 
 the beginning. How undemonstrative, regular, 
 and plodding the sunshine was, how incapable of 
 a new departure. In our callow days we placed 
 a Grecian Aurora in our sunrise. She always 
 wore a saffron robe and came out of a golden pal 
 ace with a torch in her hand. But how purely 
 infantile that conception is to the ordinary sage 
 like myself, who has been introduced to her and 
 enjoyed her homely hospitality. Instead of 
 being a frisky nymph, calling attention to her 
 flights, like a ballerina or a Bernhardt, she is an 
 old woman, attending to her regular routine with 
 precise decorum. If you accept that similitude 
 for a moment, it will grow clearer to you as you 
 remember. It was the old woman s benign regu 
 larity that we never thought of at the time, but 
 that was an awful deprivation when it was gone. 
 What did we know about her unseen traction 
 that kept us planets and comets in our courses, 
 
 121
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 and went with us into the far-off spaces to round 
 our orbits and bring us back at some time ? 
 What did we then know of the deposits of light, 
 layer upon layer, that in the alchemy of serene 
 love was to turn our carbon into chlorophyl, and 
 make a golden age for us in the bottom of our 
 souls ? 
 
 When I went off to the woods with my one 
 eight-year-old scion, I had something like fifty 
 thousand exigent things on my mind that enlisted 
 my interest and demanded concentration of 
 thought. It isn t necessary to make a list of 
 them. Refer to your own schedule. I was 
 really lopsided with events and sore with the 
 world s goings on. I used to get up in the morn 
 ing, heave a sigh, and take up the universal load. I 
 had to sympathize with the Armenians. I had 
 to denounce a Tory Government. I had to form 
 a theory of the latest murder mystery. I had to 
 keep my eye on the Berlin market. London 
 and Paris were tapping at my window before I 
 had taken my coffee. I had to circumvent 
 Tracy, and outbid Jackson, and balk Williams. 
 I had to make more money than I needed, 
 because there were several fellows who had more 
 than I had. I had to keep abreast of Wagner 
 and the latest novel, or I couldn t hold my own 
 with the ladies in the evening. I had some inter 
 ests in a mine and some in a railroad. They were 
 not fixed. Nothing was fixed. Uncertainty 
 about things in general was a devouring stimu 
 lant. I was getting to be permanently anxious 
 
 122
 
 ON A PORCH 
 
 about the drift of everything. In such a condi 
 tion, the fine spiculae of a man s sensibilities get 
 knocked off. I had to have something sharper 
 each day to keep up my interest. The artificial 
 vivacities of the playhouse were growing tiresome 
 and lacked shock. I noticed that wine was los 
 ing its tang, and beauty was overdone. Every 
 thing was wearing off its edges. I needed a new 
 sensation. 
 
 I found it in a child, a maid, and a yellow dog. 
 If I had found it in Paris, or Baden, or in moun 
 tain climbing, or in jumping off the Brooklyn 
 Bridge, it would have been conventional, but 
 would not be worth the telling. When a man 
 who begins to find that absinthe is not half as 
 strong as people think is suddenly put on milk 
 diet, he has the best chance of his life to be not 
 only original, but piquant. At least he discovers 
 a lot of things that are not usually thought to be 
 worth discovering. We start life with a milk diet. 
 Did it ever occur to you that there is a terrible 
 irony in being brought round to it again by the 
 doctor ? I suppose you are familiar with a banal 
 phrase about " bringing a man to his milk." 
 
 If I learned anything in the woods, it was this : 
 that the true piquancy of life often consists in get 
 ting rid of the piquancy. I thought at one time 
 that I was cut out for a young Napoleon of finance. 
 Perhaps I was, but I didn t know how to catch 
 eels or scrape new potatoes. I wanted to operate 
 largely, but I " snapped" and became tutor to my 
 own boy. I used to look around disdainfully for 
 
 123
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 a combination of Hypatia and Maintenon that I 
 might fall in love with it, and I was paralyzed by 
 a rustic handmaiden. I had believed that an in 
 tellect like mine would assert its mastership of the 
 world, and a yellow dog wagged his tail at me with 
 esoteric authority. As for the Florentine maid 
 who came regularly and beamed round us, I am 
 bound to say now that she was the sunshine of 
 many rainy hours and left layers of impalpable 
 light in our recollections. It was providentially 
 ordered that she should drop out of the clouds, 
 as it were, without any prevision on our part. If 
 I had offered to pay her for her services, she would 
 have vanished offended. It was a neighbourly 
 arrangement, unmarred by any contracts. She 
 could just as well as not run over and look after 
 things ; " a child like that should not be left alone 
 in the woods," she said ; so I agreed that she 
 should keep one eye on Charlie. I say one eye, 
 because even while I made the proposition there 
 was a non-committal twinkle in the other. 
 
 There is not a blase man living who has not a 
 niche in his constitution for a Gretchen, and there 
 is not a Gretchen who will not come some time, 
 like a song sparrow, and twitter in it, to fly away 
 again when she gets through. This circumam 
 bient freshness had begun to build a nest in my 
 heart before I knew it. I don t believe she knew 
 it herself. It was a general instinct of nidification 
 on her part, and I suppose that such nests began 
 to take form wherever she lit. It is worth men 
 tioning because it was part of the resurgence of 
 
 124
 
 ON A PORCH 
 
 past conditions under a milk diet. I understand 
 now that you cannot fasten yourself down to curds 
 and whey without waking up the Strephon who 
 has been biding his time in your bones, and find 
 ing yourself going about at times with an oaten 
 pipe that you do not know what to do with. 
 
 The first month I called Griselle " my young 
 lady " with a fine sense of reserve. The second 
 month I called her " Griselle " with an easy sense 
 of compromise. The third month I occasionally 
 addressed her as " my dear " with guarded pater 
 nal composure, and as nobody started at it, I 
 adopted that phrase. By the time I had recov 
 ered my appetite so that I could eat a hunk of 
 bread with school-boy zest, and would not have 
 flinched if it had been spread with New Orleans 
 molasses, I began to discover traits of character 
 in Griselle, which was very much like my discov 
 ering that the sun rose and set, and the brook water 
 ran down hill, two facts that I had never before 
 observed with interest. The young woman did 
 not belong to my social domain, but whether those 
 traits were paradisaical or merely primitive, I did 
 not stop to inquire. The light that glimmered 
 was tenuous, but it came from a great distance like 
 starlight. It nourished dreams. 
 
 Things had come to this pass when the Doctor 
 arrived at the cabin to join me in a week s savagery, 
 as he called it, and to come back to first principles. 
 No better man to give me lessons existed. He 
 showed me the masculine way of it ; how to throw 
 a fly ; how to eat tomatoes off the vines like apples, 
 
 125
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 without even salt ; how to roast corn in the ashes; 
 how to study sociology over an ant-hill ; how to 
 sleep on fir boughs and make raw potato salad ; 
 how to skin bullheads, which, by the way, you 
 could not tell from weakfish when he fried them. 
 
 I opened my mind to the Doctor, as we smoked 
 our pipes under melancholy boughs. 
 
 "What do you think of that young woman, 
 Griselle ? " I asked with studied carelessness. 
 
 " Good, healthy, and rather pretty country 
 wench," he replied, "but I have not thought about 
 her. Let me advise you not to." 
 
 " Why not ? Is she not part of the scheme ? " 
 
 "Yes; her scheme." 
 
 "Absurd. You do her great injustice. She 
 has no more scheme than a chipmunk." 
 
 "You are falling in love with her, my son. I 
 noticed it almost as soon as she did." 
 
 " Supposing such a preposterous thing possible, 
 would it be altogether unnatural or imprudent ? " 
 
 " Highly natural and decidedly imprudent." 
 
 " She is very fond of Charlie. Genuine mater 
 nal instinct. Think of the boy." 
 
 " Let him marry her when he comes of age." 
 
 " Seriously, would it not be a good thing for 
 me to contemplate some such person with a view 
 to his future ? " 
 
 " What does the young lady say to the 
 scheme ? " 
 
 "She doesn t know anything about it, of 
 course." 
 
 " Figs ! She probably knows all about it." 
 126
 
 ON A PORCH 
 
 " I have not spoken a word to her." 
 
 " It was not necessary." 
 
 " If she had any suspicion of my serious in 
 tentions she would have shown it." 
 
 " Then she would not be a fresh, ingenuous 
 thing. You don t know them. They never tell 
 their secrets even to themselves. They keep 
 them locked up in a casket like jewels, and if 
 they ever take them out to look at them, they 
 lock the door and turn the gas down first." 
 
 " Try and be practical a moment to accommo 
 date me. I admire the young woman s qualities 
 of mind and heart, and I sometimes feel a desire 
 to rescue them. What are you laughing at ? " 
 
 " I am laughing at the unexpected success of 
 my treatment. This exceeds anything that I 
 hoped for." 
 
 " What exceeds it ? " 
 
 " The triumphant manner in which you have 
 adapted yourself to the infant and the yellow 
 dog, and renewed your youth. Say, if you can 
 do this every twenty-five years, you will live to 
 be a hundred." 
 
 " You are disposed to treat the matter flip 
 pantly. It isn t of vital importance, and I ll 
 say no more about it." 
 
 "Yes, it is. It is simply beautiful. It crowns 
 my theory with a new wreath." 
 
 " Oh, hang your theory." 
 
 " No, no. I expected to make a man of you 
 physically, and I ll be hanged if the treatment 
 hasn t made a youth of you. Talk about elixir! 
 
 127
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 Sees traits of mind and character and wants to 
 mould them in a higher sphere. Lovely, lovely, 
 in four months too. Hang me if I don t get a 
 cabin up here myself and restore my unbounded 
 belief in the therapeutic sex. You wouldn t mind 
 if I wrote the case up for the County Medical 
 Association, would you ? No names mentioned." 
 
 " Yes. I object. You don t understand the 
 case at all." 
 
 " Don t I ? Would you like me to make a 
 prognosis ? " 
 
 " Certainly not, as you do not understand the 
 case." 
 
 " Pardon me " 
 
 " Pardon me, Doctor." 
 
 I believe we both scowled a little at each 
 other, and then the Doctor broke into a laugh. 
 
 " If you had not got mad," he said, " I should 
 have doubted my theory. The next thing to do 
 is to get jealous. Oh, I went through this when 
 I was eighteen. When a man goes through it at 
 forty-four, there is hope for him. You ought to 
 be proud of my treatment." 
 
 Something like a comic coolness ensued for 
 half a day, and we " sir d " each other. Then 
 it broke down, and we both laughed it off, but 
 I am bound to say that the Doctor made no 
 allusion to the affair when the girl was present, 
 though he noticed her with a critical interest. 
 
 My acquaintance with Griselle grew in its own 
 unobtrusive way so slyly that I can hardly tell 
 where it began. I think that perhaps I came 
 
 128
 
 ON A PORCH 
 
 nearer to understanding her and even to admiring 
 her during the few hours I spent with her on the 
 porch of the Hotchkiss " Folly." The nymph 
 passed into the woman during those lazy summer 
 hours when she was not flitting before my eyes, 
 but was in sober repose, listening to me. I trace 
 it all back to that old porch, and therefore I shall 
 have to tell you about it: It was the common 
 kind, twelve feet wide, fifty feet long, roofed and 
 shingled. Viewed from above, it was difficult to 
 tell where the house ended and the porch began. 
 An old-fashioned balustrade ran along its outer 
 edge, with here and there a broken baluster and 
 a sagging hand-rail. There were wide steps, 
 slightly concave with the tread of generations. 
 They descended to a grass-grown road, and at 
 their two sides there were rank bunches of phlox 
 and nasturtiums, dissolutely intertwined, with 
 spears of timothy sticking out of the tangle. 
 There, too, sprang the Virginia creeper and the 
 wild-grape vine that climbed the pillars and fes 
 tooned the spaces between, making, as Gabe 
 Hotchkiss said, " a pooty bad job when we come 
 to paint the house." But we never came to paint 
 it; you could see that by the fantastic streaks 
 the broken leaders made. Late in the summer 
 the morning-glories still distribute their trumpets 
 all through the vines, and the wrens quarrel there 
 as of old, I dare say. Sometimes a humming 
 bird vibrates above one of the blooms, and so 
 impalpable is he that you might take him to be 
 the spirit of the flower trying to disentangle him- 
 
 129
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 self. You cannot tell where the tlssuey corolla 
 ends and the wings begin. 
 
 You can easily imagine the house. The big 
 doors open from the porch into a spacious hall 
 way, running straight through, and making a cool 
 vista, with more phlox and wild-grape vines in 
 the perspective. On Sundays Gabe sits there 
 by the hall table and reads the religious weekly 
 through his iron spectacles. 
 
 This old porch is a spacious bowery and slum 
 brous vestibulum, always referred to by the 
 occupant of the house as " the stoop " ; always 
 designated by the minister when he makes his 
 visit as " the veranda," and always dignified by 
 summer boarders, if they come from the city, by 
 the name of " pe-azzer " or balcony, unless they 
 are Southerners, and then they call it " the gal 
 lery." But whether they draw their nomencla 
 ture from the Greek, the Italian, the Spanish, or 
 fetch it from Holland, they accept the big run- 
 around as a delightful compromise of outdoors 
 and in ; and in its hammocky days, as you may 
 imagine by the rusty old hooks on some of the 
 pillars, it wooed luxurious visitors to quiet dreams 
 with elfin orchestras. 
 
 These old porches are like the prefaces to old 
 books in which the author spreads a broad invi 
 tation and calls you " gentle reader." They 
 always hold out homely arms of hospitality, 
 though, to be sure, looked at from a little dis 
 tance, they are more like brooding wings. They 
 mark in the growing civilization the transition 
 
 130
 
 ON A PORCH 
 
 of domestic life from stress and peril to peace and 
 prosperity. When the big porch came in, the 
 block-house and the stockade went out. De 
 fiance gave way to invitation. Always to the 
 far-away country home, the porch is a gracious 
 neutral ground between the exclusiveness of the 
 home and the impertinence of the world why 
 not say, enchanted ground, and be done with it, 
 for really that old porch at the Hotchkiss house 
 had its unsubstantial enchantment. A rarefied 
 atmosphere hung over it. The odour of it comes 
 back to me with vague associations as I write this. 
 It had a flavour of its own, distilled, one might 
 say, by time, as we have it in old wine. The 
 spruce shingles and flooring had absorbed a dis 
 tinctive bouquet from the years as if the sun had 
 baked them to a memorial ripeness. It was 
 faintly balsamic and evasive, as in the odour of 
 sweet clover, that you cannot trace like a fact, but 
 must accept like a presence. 
 
 One does not need to be either a sensualist or 
 a sentimentalist to be wholesomely affected by the 
 inanimate serenities. I should dislike very much 
 to be thought incapable of separating an odour from 
 an orison, or an aesthetic thrill from an aspiration, 
 and yet the atmosphere of the old porch, of which 
 I was scarcely conscious at the time, must have 
 been making its deposit while I was thinking of 
 other things. Mine has not been a luxurious nor 
 an idle life. It is well marked by the scars of 
 endeavour, and there are in it such ordinary 
 triumphs as come to all ordinary men. But on
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 more than one occasion, when achievement had 
 been wrought through incalculable stress, and the 
 triumph seemed very hollow by the side of the 
 outlay on such occasions, I say, and on others, 
 when it seemed that all the malign forces of the 
 universe were arrayed against me, and I began to 
 doubt the moral government of the world, feeling 
 that the best a man can do is to fold his arms and 
 set his teeth with Greek defiance, and bid the gods 
 work their worst then there has come a filmy 
 recollection of Gabe Hotchkiss asleep in his 
 Quaker rocker, with his weekly paper on the 
 floor, and the cool scented wind coming lazily 
 through that hall, lifting his gray locks softly, 
 without waking him, and I have wondered, just 
 for a moment, if he did not have the best of it. 
 
 All these things come back to a man over lost 
 hours, bringing the scents with them. I must 
 have spent some time on that old porch. Does 
 any one suppose that its antique flavour, or even 
 its morning-glories that made cathedral windows 
 of the vines at sunrise, were the enchantment ? I 
 am sure I did not give particular heed to them 
 while the girl, Griselle, was present. But now, 
 the summer odours, the cool rustling of the leaves, 
 the architecture of the sky on the western side 
 of the house at sunset, the gradient colours of the 
 intervening fields, and that musky odour of the old 
 wood, and the girl herself, are all piarts of one 
 composition. The dry bones of the Hotchkiss 
 genealogy took on some kind of life when this 
 girl touched them in our conversation. The old 
 
 132
 
 ON A PORCH 
 
 house had been there half a century. It must 
 have been in its first period very patriarchal, with 
 a lordly air of domain and much riches on hoof 
 and in sheaves. I take it that this was the 
 grandfather period in the Hotchkiss chronology. 
 By a little adroit questioning, Griselle filled in 
 some of the gaps as best she could, partly from 
 hearsay, partly from the old Bible, and partly by 
 straight tradition through her uncle Gabe. 
 
 Why should I be interested in all this, which 
 is the commonplace history of so many American 
 homes ? I will tell you why. First of all, the 
 commonplace is very apt to be the enduring 
 elemental thing upon which the shocks and vi 
 vacities of life fasten themselves for your mere 
 divertisement. In the next place the girl was 
 inscrutably interesting to me as she thus uncon 
 sciously tied herself to all these antecedents, which 
 had woven her to what she was. Can there be 
 anything more delightful to the admiring intellect 
 than the genesis of a girl thus artlessly set forth 
 without the suspicion on her part that she is 
 exhibiting formative and converging lines of her 
 nature ? 
 
 There had been a great-grandmother Hotch 
 kiss, and the more you stirred the dust of the old 
 manse, the more distinctly her figure rose out of 
 the past. There was hunted up for me an old 
 miniature, no bigger than one of those morning- 
 glories, painted by Elliot, and in it one saw the 
 same pensive blue eyes, with the same slightly 
 oblique lines, the same tawny hair, but now fall- 
 
 33
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 ing in side ringlets on a staid coiffure, and the 
 same lift of the head on a quietly imperative neck, 
 that were only a few feet from me close to the 
 wild-grape vine. 
 
 "Tell me all about her," I said. "These old 
 mothers were the salt of the earth. Do you know 
 that you look like her a little ? " 
 
 Yes, she had been told that often enough when 
 she was younger and the Hotchkisses came thick 
 about the house on Christmas times. " But, dear 
 me, I m not at all like her, for she was what Uncle 
 Billy Hotchkiss called a grand dame." 
 
 " Uncle Billy was probably right. What did 
 he tell you about her ? Really, this interests me 
 deeply." 
 
 She tried to recall the old man s account, prob 
 ably garrulous disjecta membra, and I, with a sur 
 prising patience, listened attentively, and looked 
 on with admiration. It was very much as if a 
 pair of white hands were taking to pieces one of 
 those old bits of rag carpet, and a soft voice were 
 telling me that this bit of colour was part of a wed 
 ding dress, and that other was a scrap of baldric 
 worn when somebody was queen of the May, and 
 that other well, that was the old blue coat that 
 had brass buttons on it, and that was brushed 
 up for Henry Clay s funeral, and then hung in 
 the pantry long after they buried the old man that 
 wore it. But weave these old strands as one 
 might, there was always the vital colour of the 
 grandmother, and shift the events into any con 
 tinuity that was possible, there was always sure 
 
 J 34
 
 ON A PORCH 
 
 to be the old porch looming up and overlooking 
 them. Great stalwart sons grew up and took 
 after their full-blooded father. They romped 
 with bare feet on those old boards and got their 
 lessons on rainy days round that low window-sill. 
 They took in the atmosphere of the mother just 
 as they took in the smell of the hot roses that 
 came round the southern corner of the porch. 
 There would be one of them upon whom the 
 mother had set her heart. He was to do as a 
 man what she could not do as a woman ; put into 
 great heroic deeds the self-sacrifice and faith that 
 need muscle and will, and over that particular 
 member of her household she probably wept and 
 prayed when no one saw her. 
 
 But, as the boys grew up, they all straggled 
 off. The very freedom and brightness of the 
 farm life grew monotonous. It offered no chal 
 lenge to hot blood ; so they had to weave their 
 own mazes far away, and the sensitive one, upon 
 whom the hopes had rested like white doves, fell 
 into a youth s tangle, to escape which he ran away 
 and enlisted, being afterward heard of somewhere 
 on the Rio Grande, where he got a brass bullet in 
 his lung. Griselle did not say so, but I under 
 stood well enough that at this crisis he began to 
 smell the hot roses, and wished to be set down on 
 that old porch. Nothing would do but he must 
 speed that same bullet to the heart of his mother. 
 They brought him home from Vera Cruz, and 
 there was quite a cavalcade escorted the carriage 
 up from the village, with a show of flags and a
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 scream of fifes. It drew up there at the steps. 
 What do you suppose that mother cared for the 
 flags and the fifes, when she saw that grizzly and 
 dirty wreck lifted out with the deadly pallour on 
 his cheeks ? It was June, and the air was heavy 
 with sweet reproaches. " Put me down here," 
 he said, " on the porch for a while. I am going 
 to die. Let me die out here." 
 
 Out of Griselle s scraps and patches there looms 
 up another son who was speculative, and, I fear, 
 dissolute. He must have made a great deal of 
 money, in one way or another, and must have 
 squandered it in the risky endeavour to make 
 more. There were times when he was hard 
 pinched by his own recklessness, and then he 
 wrote to his mother, and she helped him out 
 secretly, from the little savings of her own, but 
 never questioning him. One summer he came 
 up for a visit to the farm and brought a young 
 wife with him. I see him sitting there under the 
 vines, with the air of an exhibitor, and expecting 
 all the family to admire his bride ; treating them 
 with the easy superiority of the young man who 
 suddenly knows it all. I can see the mother try 
 ing to meet this young woman with maternal 
 courtesy, and being regarded in return as very 
 prim and fussy. There must have been many 
 little stories current in the family after the young 
 wife went away. How she asked one of the girls 
 if somebody could not play the piano when she 
 was going to bed it was so awfully still and 
 couldn t they cut the bread a little thinner ; and 
 
 136
 
 ON A PORCH 
 
 how she had her husband s coffee brought up to 
 him in the morning while he was in bed. She 
 
 D 
 
 could not understand the old porch. What did 
 people want to sit out there for there was 
 nobody going by. 
 
 In one of his after exploits this woman left him, 
 and after that, it was said, he took to drink, and 
 finally in extremity wrote to Griselle s father, and 
 the letter was brought to the mather, as indeed 
 everything was. What must she do but quietly 
 pack her trunk and go without a word to New 
 York, hunt up her offspring, and when nothing 
 else would do, bring him back to the old porch ? 
 
 In brief, the old house could not be touched 
 reminiscently but there came out distinctly the 
 outlines of the old mother who had held it 
 together and brought back the renegades sooner 
 or later with a sure attraction. She must have 
 been the equitable sun that shone on the just 
 and the unjust, and then one day, after many 
 disappointments and hidden heartbreaks, she lay 
 down calmly and died, and a strange desolation 
 fell upon the place. The old house must have 
 shown signs of dissolution, as if its anima had 
 gone with her. The old porches, I dare say, 
 echoed vacantly when she no longer sat at the 
 low window. The morning-glories came as usual, 
 and the humming-bird vibrated in the bloom, and 
 the sun poured into the hall through the east 
 door ; but I judge that it all had a poignant irony 
 for the old man, who must have resented such 
 persistent continuance of peace and plenty when
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 his world had gone to pieces. He fell into an 
 apathy of discouragement, and presently they 
 laid him in the grave beside his wife. 
 
 I stood one day with Griselle at that little plot, 
 and with great difficulty pushed away the wild 
 blackberry vines to find the almost obliterated 
 grave of that mother. Eternity is very jealous 
 of the honours done to its favourites. Take good 
 care of your warriors and champions, it seems to 
 say I will take care of mine in silence. 
 
 But, as I looked at the handsome maid, with 
 her elbow on the old hand-rail, and the western 
 sun glorifying her bronze hair as she leaned pen 
 sively on her hand, I could not help saying to 
 myself how absurd it is to speak of the perish 
 ing influences of a mother when they live and 
 speak so vitally in the third generation. I was 
 quite sure that the grandmother was looking at 
 me out of those clear eyes with a waiting com 
 posure. Some kind of patience and nobility, I 
 thought, biding their time. 
 
 How ridiculous was the Doctor s theory that a 
 woman hugs and conceals her secrets, even from 
 herself, now that I was in the presence of a 
 woman who had no secrets. Something in the 
 old porch, perhaps, that transmuted the Hotch- 
 kiss pedigree into a fairy tale. I have told you 
 that it was often impossible there to tell where 
 the flower ended and the wings began. 
 
 If that girl made me feel that I was a good 
 deal of a void myself, can you blame me ? Man 
 is sent into this world unfinished. Nature seems 
 
 138
 
 ON A PORCH 
 
 to say to him at the start: " You are incomplete. 
 I have made that other part of you, but I do not 
 remember where I put it. You will have to hunt 
 for it." 
 
 I have met many men who went about for 
 years in this Psyche hunt, muttering to the 
 women they met, " Where do you suppose the 
 other half of me was put?" 
 
 And just as this fantasy went through my mind 
 the sun disappeared, and a pleasant gloom fell 
 round the Florentine maid. I heard the warning 
 rap of a bird as if on the door of twilight. " It s 
 a woodpecker," I said. 
 
 " No," said Griselle, getting up. " It s Uncle 
 Gabe knocking the ashes out of his pipe. He is 
 going to bed." 
 
 139
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 A SEPTEMBER CHILL 
 
 I FOUND that as the season waned the migra 
 tory instinct in me asserted itself as it does in 
 a bird. It was not difficult to extract content 
 ment from July and August, but with September 
 came certain vague longings and stirrings. The 
 Hotchkiss woods are no more deserted in winter 
 than in summer, and yet, with the first whiff of 
 cool air, carrying a few yellow leaves, there came 
 a restless desire to take wing. This is a charac 
 teristic of the social animal. He desires to go 
 
 O 
 
 with the flock, and however seductive September 
 may be to the eye, he is sure to hear far-away 
 voices calling to him ; even the rumble of trunks 
 and the fluttering of departing wings at the water 
 ing places reach him. He cannot disguise from 
 himself that the world is getting ready for com 
 fortable winter quarters. 
 
 I did not get the newspapers in the Hotchkiss 
 woods. It was part of my regimen not to get 
 
 140
 
 A SEPTEMBER CHILL 
 
 them, but how well I knew what they were saying. 
 There would be the lists of returning passengers 
 on the incoming steamships ; the bulletins of the 
 theatre managers ; I could almost hear the orches 
 tras tuning up on those still nights ; there would 
 be house-hunting and much hand-shaking and put 
 ting in of coal and airing of salons. To be left 
 out of these notes of preparation made me ner 
 vous. Besides, the joys of the woods would them 
 selves be slipping away presently. The robins 
 already wore an au-revoir look, and even the blue 
 birds would soon be seeking more comfortable 
 quarters ; the wire grass in front of my hovel was 
 getting yellow in spots ; the maples had hung out 
 a few stray beacons of warning. Presently the 
 cicada would dry up, and then how the still nights 
 would gape. Gabe had piled up a few cords of 
 hard wood on the westerly side of the hovel, be 
 cause I told him I was going to face it out, and 
 he had ominously hinted that it would be well to 
 bank up the other side with a few sod. All this 
 sounded chilly. " You could keep a barrel of 
 potaters in that kitchen," he said, " if you are 
 goin to keep a fire there." I walked away and 
 whistled a few bars of" La donna e mobile," that 
 being the proper expression of my mood. 
 
 The more I looked at the prospect, the more 
 cheerless it became. I was getting desperately 
 moody. It was not possible for a man of my 
 habits and associations to stick this thing out all 
 winter ! I was not a sportsman, a recluse, or a 
 cowboy. My nature required that I should hear 
 
 141
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 some good music and try on a dress-coat once 
 more ; it even occurred to me that in order to 
 preserve my interest in sublunary affairs I needed 
 an occasional soft-shell crab or a piece of pompano. 
 I kicked the yellow dog that day, to Charlie s 
 amazement, and I must have spoken gruffly to 
 Charlie, for I found him and the dog afterward 
 sitting on a fallen tree-trunk, silently sympathizing 
 with each other. I apologized to both of them, 
 but it was a mere duty. 
 
 I watched the sun go down that evening, and 
 I never before saw anything so consummately 
 melancholy. It was luridly and mockingly fan 
 tastic, and was barred by the grim trunks of the 
 trees, black and monolithic, that seemed to rise 
 from a graveyard. A September sunset is proba 
 bly the loneliest of all earthly spectacles. It is 
 like Chopin s music, hiding tears with colour. 
 Tears for what ? God knows. If you are alone 
 and in the mood, it will paint fathomless depths 
 of pathos that you cannot sound, and rim its 
 bulks of dun despair with ironical regrets. 
 
 Charlie and I fled from the twilight into the 
 house and shut the door, and lit our kerosene 
 lamp. Then we stumbled round in a haphazard 
 way to get our supper. I made a strong pot of 
 coffee, for which I had a sudden hankering, 
 instead of tea, and desperately drank three or 
 four cups of it, black, and when Charlie had 
 mumbled his prayer and crawled into bed, I lit 
 a cigar and paced up and down in the moonlight. 
 It was a very ghostly affair, I thought. The 
 
 142
 
 A SEPTEMBER CHILL 
 
 same melancholy that the sun had painted in oil 
 was now washed in with water. I even felt chilly, 
 although my thermometer said persistently that 
 I was mistaken. I came in and smoked so many 
 cigars that Charlie began to cough in his sleep, 
 and then I threw the door and window open, and 
 the night air struck me with a sharp shudder. 
 
 Finally I went to bed, and then set in an inter 
 minable tangle of dreams, crowded with human 
 beings. I was with my old companions. We 
 seemed to be going the rounds of well-remem 
 bered scenes of revelry. Theatres, concert saloons, 
 men and women in endless processions of fan 
 tastic sportiveness, coming and going, with vast 
 audiences, uneasy, oppressed, as if by a mysteri 
 ous presence, and looking at me askance as if I 
 had violated some inexorable law in coming back. 
 I had been away for a thousand years, and the 
 revelry all took on the melancholy of the sunset. 
 But what, more than anything else, excited my 
 astonishment in this hurrying phantasmagoria 
 was the curious pulsing rhythm of it. It all 
 expanded and shrank regularly, and everybody 
 spoke and acted as if keeping time to the beat of 
 a drum. Even the spectators vibrated with a 
 horrible systole and diastole. It puzzled and 
 pained me, and when I asked for an explanation, 
 somebody told me that I was the cause of it 
 all, and should not be permitted to go at large. 
 Even this explanation came in strange pulses, 
 as if one should speak in throbs. As I became 
 aware that this rhythmic impulse proceeded from
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 myself, I rushed into the street, only to find 
 everything beating and moving in the same meas 
 ure, even the vehicles swelling and collapsing as 
 if with the working of a great internal bellows ; 
 and the sound of far-away subterranean explosions 
 seemed to set the increasing pace. Then sud 
 denly the sense of an advancing catastrophe, of 
 which all this rhythm was the mere footfall ; a 
 world-wide terror, inexplicable but certain, creep 
 ing like a fog over humanity. In the numb 
 ecstasy of it I woke, and sitting up in bed, lis 
 tened to the same drum beat and rhythm going 
 on within me. 
 
 This was cruelly discouraging when I found 
 out what it was. I got up and lit my lamp, 
 determined to sleep no more on the edge of a 
 precipice. I sat there in the gloom a thoroughly 
 disheartened, if not a frightened man, saying to 
 myself: " So this is the end of the Doctor s 
 Nature cure. Here I am with this infernal dis 
 turbance breaking out again. What a jolly fool 
 I have been making of myself liable to die in 
 that bed, and not a soul within a mile, and that 
 child must get up some morning and discover me 
 cold and stiff." 
 
 What would I not have given to hear an am 
 bulance bell just for company, or to have grasped 
 a telephone fraternally ? But it was no use. I 
 looked out into the night and listened. An owl 
 far down in the woods was making sepulchral 
 moans, and I thought if I had died and gone to 
 Tartarus, it would not have been more spectral 
 
 144
 
 A SEPTEMBER CHILL 
 
 than those low-down stars looking through the 
 grim tree trunks and that unearthly chilly silence. 
 " Nature herself plays the ghost at times," I said, 
 and shut the door as if to keep her out. No 
 sooner had I sat down again to brood than I be 
 came aware that the yellow dog was lying under 
 Charlie s bed eying me wistfully. I had kicked 
 her in the morning, and I could see that she bore 
 no resentment. She was waiting anxiously to find 
 out if I would kick her again or speak a kind 
 word. It was really a matter of deep concern with 
 her, and it only needed a look of passing friendliness 
 in the corner of my eye, and everything would be 
 forgotten. I must have shown some kind of com- 
 
 O 
 
 punction, for I heard her tail rap inquiringly. 
 
 " Come here, you yellow brute," I said. "There 
 isn t anybody else to talk to. Oh, wag your tail. 
 There s no reason in the world why you should 
 not enjoy yourself to the top of your bent. You re 
 not a man. Yes, I know, I acted more like a 
 brute this morning than you possibly could, but 
 you must make some allowance for a human being 
 who hasn t anything to wag. There, that s all 
 right don t jump on me; you re a good dog, 
 and there s no need of being so demonstrative, 
 and everything is understood between us. I could 
 tell you a lot of handsome things that man has 
 said about dogs. You are the only domestic brute 
 that isn t his slave and is content to be his wor 
 shipper. Don t lick my hand either. I under 
 stand you perfectly. Don t try so hard to express 
 yourself. You want to know what s the matter
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 with me. Be quiet and I will tell you. I am sick. 
 I came up here to do as you do and sleep it off 
 in the sun ; but it didn t work worth a cent, be 
 cause I m only a man, and not a fortunate dog 
 like you. Hist, what do you want to bark for ? 
 Don t you know Charlie is asleep ? I ll bounce 
 you if you don t stop. You can just wag your 
 tail and talk, can t you, quietly? What time do 
 you suppose it is ? Wait till I look at my watch. 
 It must be nearly morning. Heavens, it s only 
 half-past three. What can we do for three hours? 
 The sun will not be up till six. I ll tell you, let s 
 light that wood fire. A wood fire is company. 
 Come on, there s some light wood in the kitchen, 
 and I feel chilly." 
 
 I might as well put down that dog s reply, if 
 for no other reason than that it is a true dog s 
 reply, and not man s, which dog talk is so apt to 
 be. This is what he said, exactly : " I can t make 
 out what it is you propose to do, but I under 
 stand in a general way that you are going to do 
 something, and I m with you whatever it is. Let s 
 make as much hullabaloo about it as we can." 
 
 I have learned that a dog apprehends a man s 
 meaning very much as a man apprehends the 
 meaning of a symphony. It is purely a matter 
 of tones and not of articulations. He seizes 
 upon your moods, not upon your ideas, with the 
 marvellous generalizing capacity of a sympathetic 
 ear. He responds to the allegros and andantes, 
 appropriates the rhythms without consciousness, 
 and keeps time to the feelings as they slip and 
 
 146
 
 A SEPTEMBER CHILL 
 
 merge. Man must be a continual Beethoven to 
 
 O 
 
 a dog, uttering mystic strophes that he cannot 
 analyze. A dog is thus superior to a man in that 
 he is always saved from being a critic. 
 
 From three o clock in the morning till sunrise 
 is the time when invalids die. It is the lowest 
 point of the great ebb. The ooze of life lies stark 
 and forbidding, and nothing stirs in it. Then it 
 is that time lags, especially if you are alone. I 
 thought of all the lonely vigils with death hover 
 ing around the near-by bed, and that being rather 
 gruesome, I tried to fill up the dismal gap with 
 an air of fussiness. I could at least imitate some 
 of the motions of life. I went out into the kitchen 
 to look for kindling, and as I pulled at the wood 
 pile, the yellow dog jumped to the conclusion that 
 I was looking for rats, and I had to choke him 
 kindly to prevent Charlie from waking up and 
 contemplating our nocturnal idiocy. I got down 
 on my hands and knees and blew at the sticks and 
 paper I had piled in the fireplace, and presently a 
 lazy spiral of smoke began to curl up the chimney. 
 Even that looked companionable. But no sooner 
 had the enlivening conflagration set in than an 
 unexpected rumpus broke out. The old chimney 
 was alive. There was a beating of wings, much 
 peeping and scratching, and down came a brood 
 of swallows, some of them flirting the firebrands 
 in all directions, and others circling round the 
 room with twittering alarm, knocking down all the 
 small articles and upsetting the lamp, as if chaos 
 had broken loose with a brood of night imps, in 
 
 H7
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 all of which the yellow dog, with the exuberance 
 of misdirection, in an animal that has no regular 
 
 3 O 
 
 conduits for her emotions, began to make the place 
 ring with barking. I understood perfectly well 
 every phrase of her declamation. " Oh, say, 
 master, I knew that you were up to something, 
 but I never dreamed it was as lively as this ! Yap, 
 yap, yap. It s as good as if rats had wings." 
 And presently, as I got the lamp lit, and burned my 
 fingers trying to pull one of the infernal imps out 
 of the ashes, and was dancing round the room 
 blowing my hands, with the dog at my heels, shout 
 ing, " Go it, this is something like life," I saw 
 Charlie sitting up in bed, rubbing his fists into his 
 eyes to get the smoke out, and trying to say with 
 all the features he had, " What s broke loose ? " 
 
 When this episode had quieted down, I looked 
 at my watch. It was only four o clock. I sat 
 down in a chair and laughed hysterically like a 
 woman, and there stood that expectant yellow dog, 
 saying as plainly as an oscillating spinal system 
 could say : " Now, that was fine. What next ? " 
 
 I had never before in my life waited for the 
 morning. Many persons, I dare say, have waited 
 for it every night of their lives. But I did not 
 think of that, nor of the other fact that to many 
 of them it never came. 
 
 By and by the flame of the lamp began to grow 
 greenishly dull, and a gray, ghostly light stole in 
 
 bv degrees. I heard the breath of dawn rustling 
 
 j 
 
 the leaves. It was like the footsteps of a return 
 ing friend why not say an airy herald ? Griselle 
 
 148
 
 A SEPTEMBER CHILL 
 
 herself would be coming across the fields presently, 
 bringing the sunrise with her. By Jove, " I d 
 walk over and meet her." But when I looked 
 into the little mirror I changed my mind, and 
 calling the dog, I went down to the pool and had 
 an early bath. By this and other devices I man 
 aged to fill in the time until I saw the muslin skirt 
 and the Florentine hat glancing in the perspective, 
 and, as I live, the Doctor was with her, and was 
 carrying her milk-pail. He had come up the night 
 before and stopped at the Hotchkiss house. He 
 looked me all over with a quick glance, and said : 
 
 " What have you been doing ? You look as 
 melancholy as if you had been editing a comic 
 paper." 
 
 As Griselle slipped into the house, I told him. 
 
 " It s anxiety. I ve got to move to-day. 
 Going to the city. Nature cure no good. 
 Theory don t work. Nature played out. Had 
 an attack. Just where I was when I started. If 
 I must shufBe off", I propose to do it where my 
 last moments will be cheered with the strains 
 of a hand-organ, and they can put me up in ice 
 for keeps." 
 
 He did not pay much attention to my words. 
 He was reading my condition and let me run on. 
 
 " Couldn t possibly stick it out here all winter. 
 In fact, I ve come to the conclusion that I would 
 rather go to the city and die than stay here and 
 live." 
 
 "All right," he said; "that s easy. Did you 
 make up your mind since last night ? " 
 
 149
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 "Yes had a second warning." 
 
 Just then Griselle came to the door with the 
 coffee-pot in her hand. 
 
 "Why, whatever have you done with the 
 coffee ? The pot is more than half full of 
 grounds." 
 
 " Oh, I made coffee for supper last night," I 
 said carelessly. 
 
 " Let me look at it," said the Doctor. 
 
 He took the coffee-pot and looked into it. 
 " Must have used about a pound, didn t you ? " 
 
 " I suppose so that s about the usual amount, 
 
 * >,_ 4_ 3 
 
 isn t it r 
 
 " And drank the whole of it, of course ? " 
 
 " Certainly." 
 
 He looked at me a moment rather benignantly, 
 and then he said : - 
 
 " Well, let s go in and get our breakfast, and 
 we ll talk it over afterward. Griselle has got 
 some quail to broil, and Gabe has brought over 
 a basket of cantaloupes that will make you more 
 comfortable. Then you can pack up and go to 
 the city. I m going to stay a week or two." 
 
 " What you ? Why, I want your advice." 
 
 "Then you ll have to stay here to get it." 
 
 150
 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 MATURE TRUANTS 
 
 THE next day he laughed me out of my de 
 termination to abandon the woods and go 
 O 
 
 to the city. I could defy his advice, but 
 I could not withstand his laughter. He warned 
 me with considerable mirthfulness, which I 
 thought superfluous, against what he called mer 
 curial moods city vestiges. Men who never 
 know when the east wind blows and do not care 
 a fig how much humidity is in the atmosphere, 
 were the best men for practical purposes. Alto 
 gether he had a good deal of jolly contempt for 
 what he called " the impertinent valetudinarian 
 sensibilities." The man who never knew that 
 he had a stomach, a heart, or even a brain, was 
 the man for him, for he came the nearest to 
 Nature s ideal. A man who would drink three 
 cups of black coffee, smoke six cigars, and then 
 turn into bed would be very apt to construct a 
 vast and dangerous theory of heart disease before
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 morning, and ought to be kept on milk and 
 apples. 
 
 Then I got a very edifying lecture on heart 
 disease, that I cannot remember, for it was 
 studded all over with technical names that stood 
 out like the brass nails on a hair trunk, but it 
 left a rather satisfactory impression on my mind 
 that the heart was a gay deceiver and played more 
 pranks with a man than any other organ, if it 
 once succeeded in attracting attention to itself. 
 The only way to treat it was with respectful dis 
 dain as not belonging to one s conscious set. 
 
 The Doctor was one of those physicians who 
 radiate health instead of prescribing it. He said 
 once that he got his diploma from Nature, and 
 had been forty years matriculating. But he had 
 the document of his human Alma Mater framed 
 and hung up in his study, all the same, and I 
 could afford to take his hyperboles with good 
 humour, as when he said that six out of ten sick 
 men would acquire health if they could only be 
 restored to primitive ignorance ; they knew too 
 much to be normal. 
 
 Absurd as all this was, it nevertheless had a 
 reviving effect that was inscrutable, like a smell 
 of terebinth. The Doctor exuded balm of Gilead 
 in his talk. It was always an exaggerated and 
 lusty kind of assertion that struck you like the 
 afflatus of the pine woods when the west wind 
 blows. It was as if he had more health himself 
 than he knew what to do with, and so shed it in 
 his conversation. 
 
 152
 
 MATURE TRUANTS 
 
 " I ll tell you what we ll do," he said to me 
 one evening. " We ll take our sticks and get out 
 of the beaten track." 
 
 " Where shall we go ? " I asked. 
 
 " Ah, that s it. We will just go like derelicts. 
 There shall be no goal and no purpose and no 
 provision, and then the way will be full of sur 
 prises. We shall never know where we are or 
 what the morrow will bring forth. We will 
 divest ourselves of all intent, and fill ourselves 
 with the delight of a road that leads nowhere. 
 Did you ever try that experiment ? " 
 
 " I never did, at least, since I played truant." 
 
 "Happy word truant. Let us be truants 
 for a few days ; run away from our arrogant 
 volitions and let the great tides of unconcern 
 swing us with their ebb and flow. It will be 
 evangelical." 
 
 " Be what ? " 
 
 " Evangelical." 
 
 " It might be jolly, but I never associated jol 
 lity with an evangel." 
 
 "That s because you are thinking of it theo 
 logically, and I am speaking of it etymologically ; 
 simply good news, without telegraph-wires. 
 Something like the dew, always encompassing, 
 but only obvious when you are cool enough to 
 condense it. I cannot imagine anything so evan 
 gelical as to strip one s self down to a purposeless 
 passivity and issue a general invitation to the 
 nature of things to say what it has to say in its 
 own way. Did it ever occur to you that the race
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 would have destroyed itself long ago if there had 
 not been an iron hand which crushed down its 
 impertinence once every twenty-four hours and 
 said : c Nothingness, if you please, for seven 
 hours ; say your prayers and shut your eyes in 
 helplessness, and I will try and repair damages ?" 
 
 I must have laughed, not disrespectfully, but 
 with that kind of gleeful surprise that one experi 
 ences when he sees a Scripture quotation in a yel 
 low journal, for he said: 
 
 " It sounds fanciful to you. Let me tell you 
 that in my profession I have many a time come 
 face to face with the Benign Universal doing for 
 man what his individualism could not do for 
 itself. Just as soon as his self-determination was 
 suspended entirely, some kind of protective arm 
 seemed to wind itself around him. You never 
 saw a somnambulist walk on the dizzy edge of a 
 precipice, did you ? " 
 
 " I congratulate my nerves that I never did." 
 
 "Well, I did. If we had recalled her to con 
 sciousness, she would have broken her neck. 
 You have probably seen a drunken man do 
 things that would have killed a sober man." 
 
 " True ; but I never felt that in the nature of 
 things one was safer when intoxicated than when 
 
 D 
 
 sober." 
 
 " It wasn t necessary to draw any such con 
 clusion. Because Nature takes pity on a drunken 
 man, you needn t imitate him. It is only neces 
 sary to perceive that back of the free and defiant 
 agent is another which cannot make itself operative 
 
 154
 
 MATURE TRUANTS 
 
 unless the subject is passively obedient. There 
 is a profound mystery of benignity in the drugs 
 that kill, when handled by the practitioner, for in 
 his hands they kill the volition without killing 
 the patient." 
 
 " Doctor, if I had a tail I would wag it. The 
 ideal man is obviously an automaton." 
 
 " He ought to be, not statically, like a codfish, 
 but alternately, like a prophet, who bows his head 
 at times and is content to be played upon. 
 
 "It has always been the religious way of acknowl 
 edging the Not Me. It might also be the vital 
 way. Did it ever occur to you that all the mas 
 ter volitions of the world that history has made 
 us acquainted with utterly failed to accomplish 
 what they set out to do ? Take Charlemagne, 
 Bonaparte, Luther, Wesley, as examples. They 
 had one purpose. Events had another, and they 
 were swept along to a goal they never saw. On 
 the other hand, those other geniuses, Phidias, 
 Shakspere, St. Paul, who lost themselves in their 
 work, lived forever in it. Themselves from God 
 they could not free. Fancy Shakspere giving 
 such an exposition of The Tempest as Poe did 
 of c The Bells, or explaining how he formed his 
 style, as our amiable friend Stevenson has done. 
 When Shakspere, or Dante, or Isaiah executed 
 a chef d auvre, he did not explain it intellectually 
 and call himself c big Injun. Those old fellows 
 rubbed their eyes with a glad surprise and sang 
 psalms : I will show forth all Thy marvellous 
 works. I will be glad and rejoice in Thee. So 
 
 155
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 does art, to use the words of an eloquent French 
 man, f continue the dream of God. 
 
 After this rhapsody the Doctor got up and 
 played with the yellow dog a moment, as if there 
 might be some brute confirmation of what he said 
 in tale-wagging and spontaneous irrelevancy. As 
 I said nothing, he came back to me gustily. 
 
 "You ll pardon me, old chap, for stuffing a 
 conversation with a lecture. Forget all about it 
 and let s play truant. I have an idea it will put 
 you on your spiritual legs, so to speak. We do 
 not need a formal introduction to the unpredica- 
 ble and eternal. All we have to do is to snub 
 ourselves. At all events we can imitate the laxity 
 of sleep for a while. There s recuperation in it. 
 I ve tried it." 
 
 One morning we started off early, roughly but 
 properly " togged," without knowing where we 
 were going. I confess that there was a boyish 
 zest in the uncertainty and freedom of it. We 
 were unfamiliar with the country except in the 
 immediate neighbourhood of the farm, and we 
 had looked at no map and asked no questions. 
 Charlie was left in the care of Griselle, with the 
 puzzling understanding that we did not know 
 when we should be back. The moment we were 
 out of sight of the house, the Doctor asked me if 
 I felt any of the true inwardness of being a tramp. 
 I told him I thought I had some faint premoni 
 tions of it. "Wait," he said, "till we have to 
 beg our dinner, and they ask us to saw wood." 
 
 How exhilarating that walk was ! There are 
 156
 
 MATURE TRUANTS 
 
 times when the body exults in motion. The 
 human machine springs to its work with wings, 
 and all the forces of the man exert a stimulating 
 pressure to the square inch. It is apt to be on 
 such an morning as was that in September, with a 
 bright sun shining, white clouds sailing over a 
 deep blue sky, with a fresh westerly breeze, and 
 the roads yet damp with the late rain ; something, 
 too, in the companionship, as if kindred spirits 
 were keeping step, or, better still, had taken hold 
 of hands, as children do when they romp. The 
 air was heavy with the fragrance of the wild-grape 
 vines, and the fields were deliciously russet just 
 that melting gradation of sienna and tawny 
 smears, running into a dull Naples yellow, that 
 you see on a finely baked custard and fringed 
 with early goldenrod. The old road ran be 
 tween stone walls, only visible here and there 
 through the flaming blackberry vines, but backed 
 up with great hedgerows, out of which the wild- 
 cherry trees and the elderberry, heavy with their 
 burdens, thrust themselves into view along with 
 the scrawny crab-apples. All that was seen of 
 human beings for several miles were the labourers 
 stacking the corn in the fields, and they gave no 
 heed to us. Once we passed a farm wagon heavily 
 loaded with great yellow pumpkins, and we left it 
 far behind creaking its way lazily. Now and then 
 a house by the roadside seemingly deserted, but 
 oftener the roofs of old-fashioned homesteads 
 sticking out of the vistas at a safe distance from 
 the highway, making themselves known as domes-
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 tic centres by the cry of the pea-hens or the bark 
 of a dog, and generally having an index-finger 
 stuck up in the shape of a well-sweep. 
 
 Once we came upon a printed warning: "No 
 trespassing on these grounds, under penalty of 
 the law. Beware of the dogs." That stopped 
 us. I think r.t jarred a little on the general sense 
 of looseness and laziness. The Doctor looked at 
 me inquiringly, and I undertook to explain : 
 
 "Modern improvements," I said; "lawns, 
 coverts, perhaps a preserve." 
 
 The Doctor climbed up on the fence and ex 
 amined the sign. " It has been painted about 
 ten years, I should judge," he said. " Suppose 
 we investigate it." 
 
 " I am with you," I said. " I can take care of 
 one dog if you will look out for the other." 
 
 We climbed over the fence, went through the 
 trees and underbrush, and came out on a road 
 that had once been gravelled. It brought us to a 
 house, mansion-like in proportions, with the shut 
 ters tight and the doors boarded up. In front 
 stood an old broken vase, with vestiges of a foun 
 tain and some broken pieces of plaster that may 
 have been a statue. We sat down and surveyed 
 the melancholy pile. 
 
 " The country is dotted with them every ten 
 miles from Penobscot to the Golden Gate," said 
 the Doctor. " I ll warrant that some old sea-cap 
 tain who gave his life to battling with the ocean 
 comforted himself up to the time of his dotage 
 with retirement on a farm. Doubtless he was a 
 
 158
 
 MATURE TRUANTS 
 
 whaling master and thought Nantucket was con 
 ventional. He came here and tried to shiver 
 timbers and pipe all the affections on deck, after 
 the affections had died of the scurvy. Then the 
 loneliness of it killed him, and none of his heirs 
 have had the decency to take that sign down." 
 
 Then he chuckled, as he always did, to take 
 the edge off an absurdity. 
 
 "Perhaps," I ventured to remark, "if we could 
 get at the heart of these old farmers who never 
 die, we should find that they had a similar inten 
 tion, to end their days on a whaler." 
 
 " No," said the Doctor, "it will not work both 
 ways. What you have called the homing instinct 
 is universal, but the migratory instinct is not. 
 The trouble with the homing instinct is, with 
 most men, that it is unaccompanied by a homing 
 capacity. It is so with all of us. As we grow 
 old, the desire to return is irresistible, but the 
 capacity to return is gone. I say, old fellow, if 
 you want to do the prodigal-son business, don t 
 wait until you are old. What do you suppose 
 was the age of that young man in the Bible 
 story ? " 
 
 "Judging from his recklessness, I should say 
 he was about sixty-two." 
 
 The Doctor sat down on the edge of the foun 
 tain. " By the way," he said, " I wonder how 
 that old germ story would have survived if it had 
 been told realistically and not dramatically." 
 
 " Dramatically ? " 
 
 " Certainly. Notice how it falls, away back
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 there, into five acts. You can put the descrip 
 tive titles to each act just as the dramatists do. 
 There is the first act, the Happy Family; second 
 act, the Estrangement and Temptation; third act, 
 the Suffering and Remorse ; fourth act, the 
 Return ; fifth act, the Merrymaking. There is 
 a shadow flits over it in the brother s envy, and 
 then all ends happily. Out of this fecund little 
 vesicle of a tale, how many thousands of the 
 world s legends have been wrought without ever 
 improving on the subtle simplicity of the original, 
 or broadening the ethical and romantic ground 
 plan of a return. The whole fabric of the peo 
 ple s legendary fiction, from the wandering of 
 Ulysses to the waking of Rip Van Winkle, seems 
 to have been woven upon the postulate of a re 
 turn, and when the imaginations of men tried to 
 fashion the most dreadful of possibilities, they 
 invented the Wandering Jew, for whom there was 
 no return. I wonder how Zola or Bourget would 
 have written the story of the prodigal. What 
 penetration into the customs and manners and 
 hereditary fatalism of the riotous livers ; what 
 accurate and thrilling photographs of the swine; 
 how pathetic the futile attempts of the Prodigal to 
 escape from the seductive determinism of husks, 
 and how admirably he would have failed to arrive 
 at the proper moment, when the father was wait 
 ing for him, because he had blown his brains out 
 or cut his throat with a potsherd on the way. 
 
 ^ brother, I prefer the highway." 
 We descended slowly into a valley, which grew 
 160
 
 MATURE TRUANTS 
 
 shadowy and wet, and there was the traditional 
 rustic bridge across a narrow stream. The Doc 
 tor looked at his watch. " How far," he asked, 
 " do you suppose we have come ? " 
 
 I thought five miles. He calculated eight. It 
 was noon. We leaned against the old hand-rail 
 and looked at each other. 
 
 " Doctor," said I, " I acknowledge the prodigal 
 feeling it is located mainly in my stomach." 
 
 He pointed down the stream to a flat rock, 
 very mossy and canopied by a marsh poplar. 
 "Let us repair," he said, " to yon umbrageous 
 spot. I have bread and butter with home-cured 
 ham interpolated, not to mention two hard-boiled 
 eggs, prepared by the dainty fingers of the girl 
 we have left behind. I will promise you not to 
 lecture." 
 
 161
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT 
 
 SEPTEMBER sets her quiet banquets occa 
 sionally, and, like Hamlet, we eat the air, 
 promise-crammed. There are breakfasts of 
 sunrise and long hours of aerial lunch, when the 
 atmosphere is golden with invisible fruit, and all 
 one can do is to feed the senses. Then it is that, 
 the old, worn earth is very beautiful, as she sits 
 with her hands crossed in her bounteous lap. 
 With her labour all finished, one might say that 
 she crooned softly on a royal death-bed. It is at 
 this rare interval of fruition and expectancy that 
 the poor devils lock their studio doors and steal 
 away to the woods and mountains to lay in inspi 
 ration after society has fled. September to them 
 is a rustic sweetheart, who welcomes them with 
 fruity breath and large calm eyes of blue. Then 
 it is that they renew their youth, looking for the 
 sleeping princess, and become princes themselves 
 in fairy solitudes. 
 
 162
 
 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT 
 
 No one but the artist knows how eloquently 
 still and prophetic September is. It is her rest 
 that floods him with inscrutable delight, and 
 coaxes out of him the longings and the hopes 
 that enter into and unite with the great inarticu 
 late psalm. I say " hopes " deliberately ; and 
 yet faith would be a better word, for the aesthetic 
 nature gets mildly and religiously intoxicated: 
 
 " His faith is fast 
 That all the loveliness he d sing 
 
 Is made to bear the mortal blast 
 And blossom in a better spring." 
 
 It is only the artist who can see the possible 
 sunrise in the actual sunset. 
 
 In the Doctor s office in the city there is hung 
 upon his wall one Scripture motto. I have often 
 looked at it wonderingly, asking myself what it 
 meant, and how it came to be there. This is 
 what it says : 
 
 " For thus saith the Lord God, the Holy One 
 of Israel. In returning and in rest shall ye be 
 saved. In quietness and confidence shall be your 
 strength, and ye would not." 
 
 One day I was waiting there with an artist 
 friend, who was badly run down, and needed 
 advice. We expected the Doctor to come in at 
 any moment. My friend stood looking at the 
 text, musingly. 
 
 " Well," I asked, "what do you make of it ? " 
 
 He looked at me dreamily, and said : 
 163
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 " I don t know why, but it put me in mind 
 of a day in September. I suppose those old 
 prophets lived in a kind of autumn of the soul. 
 Did you never have a thought rustle like the 
 dead leaves ? " 
 
 The Doctor and I sat down on a sloping rock, 
 eating bread and butter. Jack Horner was a 
 pessimist compared with us. To be able to eat 
 bread and butter at all was one of the victories of 
 the natural over the artificial man, but to eat it 
 voraciously and want more seemed to strike the 
 Doctor as a moral victory. There was only one 
 higher plane, he thought, for me, and it was to be 
 able to eat mush and milk with joy and thank 
 fulness. 
 
 The beautiful mountain stream ran swirlingly 
 but softly in front of us, weaving and melting into 
 confluent and vanishing curves, and making an 
 intoxicating chromotype of colour, as it swept in 
 under the overhanging shadows and out again 
 into the radiant sunlight, murmuring very softly 
 as if subdued to the season. Here and there a 
 cardinal-flower, that leaned over to look at itself 
 out of its own green and tangled cloister, shot 
 a spark of colour downward, and against a gnarled 
 bank the water spun silver tissues over the old 
 gold of the sand. Somewhere out of sight, we 
 could hear the muffled drum-beat of a little cas 
 cade pounding against the wet rock. That was all. 
 It was like an oboe uncertainly played. We 
 both listened. " Does the stillness oppress you 
 with its melancholy?" asked the Doctor. 
 
 164
 
 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT 
 
 I was not at all sure. There was something 
 pensive in it, I thought. It was as if Nature 
 were holding her breath. " I never could under- 
 
 O 
 
 stand," I said, "why the banquet of the year 
 should be tinged with solemnity." 
 
 " I can only offer a suggestion," remarked the 
 Doctor. " All the other months of the season 
 are obtrusive and jocund with incessant prepara 
 tion. July and August burst into insistence with 
 the pressure of life. Everything, from the tiniest 
 spark of animation to the highest form of animal 
 beauty and instinct, made those summer months 
 a workshop. They hammered, and wove, and 
 spun, and built, and multiplied, and rounded it 
 all up completely in perfect obedience, singing, 
 and chirping, and warbling, and flashing to get 
 it all done. They have finished the work and 
 gone away. It is impossible for a man to come 
 face to face with this glad consummation and rest 
 without feeling some kind of self-reproach. 
 There is something that he has not finished. 
 A mocking voice tells him he never will. That 
 is what Pascal meant when he said that the 
 superiority of a man to a tree is that the tree 
 does not know that it is miserable, and Emerson 
 somewhere says that man would not love Nature 
 so childishly if he were good." 
 
 Then the Doctor pulled up suddenly, as he 
 always did when he found himself getting preachy, 
 and said : " There is a sawmill a mile or two up 
 this stream. There may be hospitality and bread 
 and milk there." 
 
 165
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 <c How do you know ? " I asked ; " you never 
 were here before." 
 
 "True," he replied, "but there is sawdust in 
 the water, and the bank is wet a foot or two 
 higher than the stream, as if somebody opened 
 his flume occasionally." 
 
 The road, after passing over the little river on 
 the bridge, turned at a sharp bend and ran paral 
 lel with the banks for some distance, under the 
 grateful shade of chestnuts and elms, the open 
 ings in which afforded us continual glimpses of 
 the water, here broken into foamy hurries and 
 there spread out in dark pools. Not a bird sang 
 in the branches. The only vestiges of summer 
 life that we encountered for a mile or two were 
 some crows caucusing in a dead tree that looked, 
 against the blue sky, like a bunch of antlers, and 
 now and then we met with the little white butter 
 flies that flutter in couples and look like wayward 
 petunias blown about by imperceptible winds. 
 We were winding through the heart of real rus 
 ticity. Here and there we saw the bent labourers 
 at work digging potatoes. Looked at from the 
 distance, they presented all the aspects of ignoble 
 drudgery, grubbing for what at best must be a 
 scanty living. As the sun approached the hori 
 zon, and we began to wonder where we should 
 put up for the night, I suggested that we had 
 better interview some of these field hands as to 
 our whereabouts, and at last we crawled over a 
 stone fence and made our way through stubble 
 and furrows, and past long rows of bagged po- 
 
 166
 
 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT 
 
 tatoes, to a distant group, consisting of two men 
 and a woman, who were digging away mechani 
 cally. 
 
 " Good day, friends," said the Doctor, breezily; 
 " we are strangers and have lost our way." 
 
 One of the men leaned on his hoe and looked 
 us over. The others went on with their work. 
 
 " Where do you want to go ? " the man asked. 
 
 " Anywhere, my friend, so that we can get a 
 supper and a night s lodging. We are on a bit 
 of a jaunt for our health and have lost our bear 
 ings." The Doctor pulled out a very handsome 
 watch and looked at it. " It s a quarter of five," 
 he said. " Perhaps you can direct us so that we 
 can reach the nearest stopping-place before night." 
 
 I could not very well suppress a feeling of pity 
 as the man wiped the sweat from his face with a 
 cotton handkerchief and regarded us with a dull 
 astonishment. He must have been sixty years 
 old. His hard sinewy hands were like tangled 
 roots, his face was tanned to a mahogany colour, 
 so that the white hairs on it looked grizzly. He 
 wore an old torn felt hat, and he took it off and 
 fanned himself as he said : 
 
 " Wanderin around loose, hey ? Which way 
 was you pointin ? " 
 
 The Doctor looked at me, and we both laughed. 
 It would not do to tell this pragmatic rustic that 
 we had abandoned all definite intentions. 
 
 " We were examining the country," said the 
 Doctor, with magnificent indefiniteness. " Isn t 
 there a mill somewheres about ? " 
 
 167
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 "Only a sawmill. Runnin fire-wood now. 
 Jedge Dutcher s farm s about three miles west 
 there s nothin between him an me cept the saw 
 mill. Milligan s Corner s two miles beyond." 
 
 " Do you feel able to do five miles more ? " 
 asked the undiminished Doctor. 
 
 At this the young woman spoke up. " Why 
 don t you ask the gentlemen to stop with us, 
 Dad that s what they re fishin for. We can 
 spare em some grub." 
 
 " The team ll be along in a minute or two," 
 said the old man. " If you ve a mind to go back 
 with us, we can feed yer." 
 
 Then the three of them fell to digging again 
 without any further reference to us. The Doctor 
 picked up one of the potatoes. It was as big as 
 his two fists. While we were making compli 
 mentary remarks that did not call for any inter 
 ruption of the work, a farm wagon, drawn by 
 two lusty horses and driven by a boy, came up. 
 This was the signal to stop, and immediately the 
 labourers seemed to recover their humanity. The 
 girl shook the soil off her heavy skirt, threw her 
 hoe into the wagon, and entered at once into 
 conversation with us, while the men lifted a few 
 of the filled bags into the wagon. She was a slim, 
 but nervy damsel, with a very red face, and a pair 
 of bright eyes. She stepped over the furrows 
 with a vigorous and easy grace that surprised 
 me. 
 
 " It s pretty hard work on a woman," she said; 
 "but our hired man had his two fingers cut off in 
 
 168
 
 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT 
 
 the mill, and, being short-handed, I had to turn in 
 with the rest. It s the biggest crop we ever had, 
 and the old man wanted to get it in." 
 
 "It s a magnificent crop of potatoes," said the 
 Doctor, with the easy air of an expert. " What s 
 it worth ? " 
 
 " Well, if the old man don t realize five hun 
 dred on it, he ll be sick at Christmas. It won t 
 run as good as that more n once in five years. 
 Now, if you ll pile into that wagon, we ll take 
 you with us." 
 
 We drew up at a long, low house hidden away 
 in locust trees, very ancestral, I thought, for peas 
 ants. A shaft of ruddy light shot into the road 
 from the summer kitchen, where a motherly dame 
 in a white apron stood in the doorway with her 
 hand over her eyes, trying to make out what had 
 arrived in the wagon, a curiosity that suddenly 
 broke out in a shrill call, " Mercy on me, Lize, 
 who you got there ? " 
 
 "All right, mommy," said Lize. "I ll be 
 there in a minute. Now, then, I suppose you 
 want to wrench the dirt off. I ll show you the 
 basin." 
 
 How deliciously cool and vitalizing that well 
 water was. I put my head down into it, and it 
 had a fine magnetism in it. It was not long 
 before Lize came out on the porch where we were 
 waiting for her. She was attired in a clean mus 
 lin dress with a baby waist. She had evidently 
 "wrenched" herself expeditiously and thoroughly, 
 and she came out, as the Doctor said, like a silk- 
 
 169
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 worm. Presently we went in to supper with the 
 warning from Lize that we would have to take 
 what we could get. There was something inex 
 pressibly bright and inviting about the homeli 
 ness of that supper table, with its kerosene lamp 
 and blue shade, its mug of marigolds, its spotless 
 white cloth, and a certain simple bounty in the 
 great dish of steaming biscuit and superb roll of 
 sweet butter, to say nothing of the cold meat and 
 potatoes and the homely earthen teapot. The 
 old man held up his gnarled hands and mumbled 
 some hardly articulate words of thanks, and we 
 fell to as readily and easily as if we were in 
 a Bedouin tent and a kid had been killed 
 for us. 
 
 I thought I detected in the curiosity of our 
 hosts a latent pity for persons who came from the 
 city, which was to them a place where men took 
 their lives in their hands and were always in 
 danger of jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge from 
 excess of excitement or to escape from the noise. 
 The old lady thought it must be awfully tedious 
 to be always on the hop, skip, and jump for fear 
 of being crushed by an electric car. She said she 
 always felt when she was in a crowd as if she had 
 the pleurisy coming on again, and there wasn t a 
 scrap of boneset in the county. Broadway to her 
 was like a bull-yard with a fence down, and the 
 old lady said this with a calm superiority as if she 
 were looking down on us through her spectacles 
 from some primitive Elysium. 
 
 I really felt as if the Doctor s Scripture motto 
 170
 
 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT 
 
 had been woven out of drudgery into the fine 
 autumnal lines of her benign old face. 
 
 I have to confess that in coming upon this bit of 
 picturesque slavishness I regarded it at first as an 
 artist might, thinking it good enough to paint, but 
 not good enough to emulate. It was impossible 
 for my artificial daintiness to avoid feeling for it a 
 slight pity of superiority, which was of course only 
 an evidence that I knew nothing whatever about 
 it. I had grown into that sort of hypersensitive- 
 ness which calls soil " dirt," and regards physical 
 labour in the furrow as something which every self- 
 respecting American has outgrown by three gen 
 erations. I m afraid that if my conclusions at the 
 time had been brought to light, they would have 
 been found to be, that superior intellects never 
 delved, only aspired ; that American enterprise did 
 not bother about making dirt fat with an hundred 
 fold, but washed and dressed itself and stood round 
 to intercept with gloved hands some of the money 
 that passed from the consumer to the producer. 
 I dare say that, at first contact with this group, I 
 was Mohammedan enough in my sensibilities to 
 believe that a girl in a tow frock could by no pos 
 sibility become a Peri. All this is contemptibly 
 un-American by the record, and I am frankly 
 ashamed of it now. But it needed just such a 
 clod-hopping Peri to wipe the scales from my eyes 
 with the end of her tow frock. 
 
 That she " wrenched " herself in a pail of spring 
 water, or had a scented bath in some upper grotto 
 of her own, I do not know, but she shed her clod- 
 
 171
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 hopper integuments like a columbine, for they 
 were, after all, only an improvisation, and she came 
 out in a baby waist of muslin with short sleeves, 
 and fluttered a little guidon of ribbon in her rich 
 molasses-coloured hair, that made her look, upon 
 my word, like one of those late morning-glories 
 on Gabe s porch. 
 
 I could not help thinking as I watched her pre 
 side at that tea-table that was what she called it 
 with an innate and facile self-possession, and 
 saw with what unconscious chivalry the two men 
 treated her, how easily she would effect the trans 
 formation to a fine lady when some well-to-do 
 fellow pulled her up by the roots from her furrow 
 and planted her in his conservatory. I had seen 
 this marvellous plasticity of the uncut American 
 diamond in Paris and in London. How quick 
 she would cease to say " wrench " and " Pop " and 
 take to saying, " Bless my soul, governor." Not 
 a suspicion of the furrow in two years, not even 
 the freckles. If you destroy that possibility, you 
 nip the American progress in the bud. 
 
 Of course she was not of as fine a mettle as 
 Griselle ; I hope I have made it tolerably clear 
 before this, that few girls could be. But there was 
 about her a certain honest, easy, transparent dig 
 nity, with contentment that refreshed. She was 
 not ashamed of potatoes. That fact wrung from 
 me a silent tribute before I knew it. She showed 
 us her cottage piano and the inevitable sewing- 
 machine in the little parlour, not as one shows 
 furniture, but as one shows an acquirement, for 
 
 172
 
 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT 
 
 she said as she pointed to one, " potatoes," and 
 as she pointed to the other, " lima beans." There 
 was a surveyor s level in the corner of the room, 
 and seeing us regard it with surprise, she said : 
 " Oh, that s Ike s he s getting the levels of the 
 south fields, so as to run the water from the cold 
 spring into the house." Ike had been to the 
 seminary at some time in his life. 
 
 There was an hour or two of conversation on 
 the grass-plot after supper, where the old man 
 smoked his clay pipe regularly. He would no 
 more dare to smoke it in that homely dining room 
 than he would dare to go to bed with his boots on. 
 Then we were shown to a chamber, the peasant 
 girl holding the kerosene lamp for us like that 
 colossal girl in our harbour, and saying : " Pleasant 
 dreams, gents. I ll rap on your door at six o clock 
 if you re not up ;" and we both heard her starched 
 skirts rustle down the stairs. We went immedi 
 ately to bed between sheets that smelled of sweet 
 balsam, and if the Doctor snored I did not notice 
 it. I was awakened by the rumble of the wagon, 
 and saw in the early mists the two men going to 
 the potato-field, one of them whistling cheerily, 
 his notes coming back to me like a skylark s, long 
 after he was out of sight. 
 
 At the breakfast table we had an opportunity 
 of conversing more leisurely with the Peri of the 
 Soil. She poured our coffee very good coffee 
 it was, with fresh cream in it and she served us 
 with fresh eggs and home-cured bacon and hot 
 corn-meal muffins, and, placing a receptacle of
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 sewing material beside the coffee-pot, she pulled 
 up a chair and employed her time in fitting a new 
 neck-band on a hickory shirt, while we ate. 
 
 " I should suppose," said the Doctor, " that 
 even so charming a home as this would sometimes 
 be a little lonesome to you." 
 
 " Lonesome " evidently had a different mean 
 ing for her. She repeated the word inquiringly, 
 as if it had never occurred to her before. " I guess 
 people don t get lonesome if they have enough to 
 do," she said, and the Doctor smiled significantly 
 at me, as if he wanted to insert an aside to the 
 effect that digging potatoes does not ruin horse 
 sense. Then she added, " I suppose anybody 
 could find lonesomeness if he had time to wander 
 around looking for it. I should think you would 
 have found it on the road." 
 
 " Yes, but we had had too much of the other 
 thing and were trying to get away from it. I sup 
 pose it s very different with you." 
 
 " Yes," she said, " I guess it is. What were 
 you looking for on the road ? " 
 
 At that the Doctor guffawed outright. " What 
 was it we were looking for ? " he asked me, as if 
 he needed prompting, and the girl, seeing there 
 was some hesitancy, tried to help us out. " You 
 wasn t lookin for work, was you ? " 
 
 " No," replied the Doctor, " not exactly. We 
 were both of us a little overworked, and we were 
 looking for rest and a change. Everybody needs 
 them at times. I dare say now, even you would 
 like a change sometimes." 
 
 174
 
 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT 
 
 She let the hickory shirt drop in her lap and 
 looked into vacancy a moment, as if she had seen 
 a phantom temptation pass by. 
 
 " There s a good many stragglers stop here in 
 the course of the year," she said, "but they are 
 never women." 
 
 The Doctor instantly corroborated this idea. 
 " I understand," he said. " Women can be al 
 most everything that men can be, except tramps. 
 But we are not tramps." 
 
 " No, you don t talk like tramps. I have been 
 tryin to make out what you are." 
 
 " Neighbours," I ventured. " We are staying 
 at the Hotchkiss farm for a while." 
 
 "Oh, is that so Gabe Hotchkiss s. It ain t 
 so lonesome there, I guess." 
 
 "It s about the same kind of a farm as this. 
 They raise the same kind of stuff." 
 
 " We never could raise city boarders," she said 
 rather shyly. " I heard Gabe would be sellin the 
 place. I suppose his niece will be gettin married. 
 She s had plenty of chances." 
 
 As this verged upon gossip, and we were not 
 disposed to discuss our friends, the breakfast 
 came to an end ; and shortly afterward, when 
 we were about to set out, the girl slipped a 
 package of luncheon into the Doctor s pocket, 
 and when we were some distance down the 
 road, feeling sure that we would look back, 
 she waved an adieu to us with the hickory 
 shirt. 
 
 " What do you suppose she meant by saying 
 
 75
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 Griselle would be getting married ? " I asked 
 the Doctor. 
 
 " A general instinct of her sex," he replied 
 vaguely. " A girl like Griselle is not apt to die 
 an old maid." 
 
 "What kind of a man do you suppose she will 
 be apt to marry ? " 
 
 " I can tell you better," said the Doctor, " the 
 kind of a man she will not marry. It will be the 
 kind you have fixed in your mind that she ought 
 to marry." 
 
 We were walking along the grassy path by the 
 side of the road rather briskly, and at this speech 
 I stopped short ; and the Doctor doing the same 
 thing, we both stood there a moment, looking 
 each other in the face. 
 
 " Did you mean that for a warning, or is it one 
 of your glittering generalities ? " 
 
 " I meant it for a conclusion, based upon ob 
 served facts. You have of course allowed your 
 self to fall in love with Griselle." 
 
 " Why do you say, c of course ? " 
 
 " Because I am better aware than you are of 
 the general tendency of mankind." 
 
 " Do you mean to say that the general ten 
 dency is to fall in love with Griselle ? " 
 
 " I mean to say that the general tendency, when 
 there is only one girl in sight, is to think that she 
 is the only one in existence." 
 
 " Oh, rubbish ; you are putting up your feel 
 ings as scientific data." 
 
 " And you are verifying my suspicions by talk- 
 176
 
 ing as if you were actually jealous. Let s change 
 the subject before we quarrel. This is a regener 
 ating morning. Look at those flaming maples. 
 Did you ever see such dyes ? Great Scott ! what a 
 depth of feeling there is in yellow, if it be only 
 spattered with a little scarlet. Do you know, I 
 think yellow is the major note, after all. It repre 
 sents in the visual world what sodium does in the 
 universe. Everything tries to imitate gold when 
 it can. There s no passion in it. The magnifi 
 cent calm of the Chinese has some affiliation with 
 chrome yellow. The Mongolian probably wears 
 the original livery of Eden." 
 
 We walked on. "Doctor," I said, "suppos 
 ing such a thing possible, do you see anything 
 very preposterous in a large, cool, mature admira 
 tion for a girl like Griselle ? " 
 
 " Large, cool, mature admirations are not pos 
 sible outside of the domain of external nature. 
 Observe that delicious field of burnt umber just 
 turned up ; I suppose it is got ready for fall 
 planting rye perhaps. How silver gray every 
 stone in it looks in this light, and how vivid the 
 stems of those white birches by the brook, against 
 it all. Do you know, my boy, there is something 
 restful and recuperative in good virgin dirt ? I ve 
 got half a dozen hysterical patients who could 
 draw some kind of earthy virtue from the brown 
 field if I could only take their tight shoes off and 
 make them run barefoot in those furrows. Did 
 it ever occur to you that civilization, in abolishing 
 dirt, is very apt to substitute filth ? A ploughed 
 
 177
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 field is not half as nasty as the average vaude 
 ville." 
 
 "I was thinking," I said, "that a woman like 
 Griselle might really express in her perfection 
 what inanimate Nature is continually trying to say, 
 and cannot." 
 
 " There are two Griselles, my boy. One is in 
 Gabe s farmhouse, and the other is in your im 
 agination. There goes an early flock of wild 
 ducks. Listen you can hear the beat of the 
 wings. I suppose, now, John Burroughs could 
 tell us if they are canvasbacks or mallards by the 
 formation of the flying wedge; but I can t." 
 
 "You see," I continued, "a man don t know 
 much about a woman until he gets to be forty." 
 
 The Doctor broke in on my speech with : 
 
 "Wait till you are sixty, my boy. A man 
 really doesn t know much about them at forty. 
 You will allow that the judgment is more secure, 
 less liable to be disturbed by mere amorousness, 
 and better able to estimate the intrinsic qualities 
 and the sterling worth of character when he is 
 sixty. One is not so apt to be moved by a 
 pretty face. He sees the essentials more clearly. 
 Keep your eye on that distant line of hills a 
 moment. Notice how they deepen in colour, if 
 you watch them, when one of those white clouds 
 obscures the light. But they never change their 
 forms. The atmosphere in September is very 
 moody and expresses itself in clouds, much more 
 fantastically than in April. I suppose it is be 
 cause the landscape has more colour in it. Sep- 
 
 178
 
 THE BAPTISM OF DIRT 
 
 tember reminds me of a man who has reached 
 forty years of age. Listen to the cider-presses, 
 down in that meadow. It s the Yankee s vintage 
 time." 
 
 " I have remarked that girl carefully," I said. 
 " She has a magic that defies environment and 
 conditions. She doesn t escape drudgery. She 
 invites and transforms it. Her contented nature 
 is a continual harvest home. I wonder if it is 
 true that Gabe intends to sell out and marry her 
 off." 
 
 " Doubtless," said the Doctor. " She is proba 
 bly engaged to the village blacksmith. Do you 
 smell the wild grapes ? They hang high on those 
 old buttonball trees." 
 
 " I mentioned to you once before that she is 
 devotedly attached to Charlie." 
 
 " He probably doesn t invest her with any 
 magical virtues. I don t think you enjoy such a 
 morning as this as keenly as I do. This air re 
 minds me of one of those English glees that 
 require men s voices. There is always a lusty 
 eagerness in them. Take that glorious old song 
 of * Hail, Smiling Morn Spoffort s, I think. 
 How exultant and Saxon ! The voices all seem 
 to be horns. We can t write those songs any 
 more. We seem to have left September out of 
 the repertory. Curious, isn t it, that the farther 
 West music gets, the less muscle it has." 
 
 " But you must certainly see that Charlie would 
 be greatly benefited if he had a tenderer hand than 
 mine to shape and guide him while he is ductile." 
 
 179
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 " Did you ever drink any apple juice warm out 
 of a press ? Let s go down that old cow-path in 
 the meadow and get a tin dipper full of it." 
 
 "A man who has a child," I remarked, "must 
 take into consideration his responsibility. It s a 
 weight he cannot shirk." 
 
 " But we agreed to leave all our responsibilities 
 behind us," broke in the Doctor. " Come on, down 
 the cowpath. We are free from all the temporary 
 attachments of the Hotchkiss menage. Nothing 
 will follow us, if we keep in the cow-path there s 
 a rabbit or something in that bush look. No, 
 it isn t a rabbit well, I ll be blessed." 
 
 And at that moment the yellow dog put her 
 head through the bushes, and we could see by the 
 disturbance of the leaves that she was wagging her 
 tail inquiringly, Paul Pry fashion, and trying to 
 say, " I hope I don t intrude." 
 
 I replied to the Doctor with a subtle look of 
 triumph, but I refrained from gloating over him. 
 
 180
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 A FRINGED GENTIAN 
 
 THE burning leaves and stubble filled the 
 air with a smoky haze, which to the artistic 
 eye is like going over a poem and taking 
 the superfluous adjectives out of it. The autum 
 nal foliage has misty recessions, as if one saw the 
 perspectives through a delicate gauze, as we some 
 times see them in the theatre. It is during the 
 bright days when September has merged into 
 October that our landscapes wear for a while the 
 softened gradations that a wet climate affords, 
 and which the English artists, who visit us in 
 August, always miss. They shade their eyes from 
 the chromatic garishness of Midsummer, as if the 
 loveliness were too pronounced. But now the 
 emphasis gives way to suggestiveness. Every 
 thing is mellowed by the intervening medium. 
 October does for our picture what time has done 
 for most of the European pictures. The sumach 
 and the Virginia creeper, those proletariats of the 
 
 181
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 American autumn, that flaunt themselves in red 
 shirts and mob caps, are seen through smoked 
 glass. Even the sharply outlined white clouds 
 of September that were so like majolica work in 
 their insistent contrast, have now ripened and 
 melted away at the edges, and have assumed an 
 entirely new fitness to the general drowse. 
 
 If you have ever stood upon the Galata bridge 
 at Constantinople in the morning, and looked 
 across the Golden Horn upon Stamboul, you 
 must have been conscious that in those old coun 
 tries the atmosphere forever prevents colour from 
 becoming impertinent. Man has nowhere lifted 
 so much architectural blazonry into the air as 
 there. The historic city is a pile of softened 
 dyes gold, and crimson, and scarlet, melting 
 into impalpable greens and swept above and 
 below by a flashing cobalt blue. But it is like 
 a picture of Titian s with its imperishable gamut 
 of pigments played in a low key by time itself. 
 It is only in October that external Nature with 
 us puts on those vanishing distances. It is then 
 only that our Alleghanies and the great bulks of 
 the Rocky Mountains, which are so like the rug 
 ged peremptoriness of a Western statesman or a 
 muscular tragedian, catch up with the Tyrol in 
 spectral beauty. The sky drops down with a 
 mantle of gauze and wraps the peaks in opales 
 cent garments, so that the stalwart limbs of the 
 great range imitate the voluptuousness of a half- 
 draped beauty. There is always a week in Octo 
 ber when Nature holds a bit of yellow glass to 
 
 182
 
 A FRINGED GENTIAN 
 
 our eyes, and, like children, we catch a glimpse 
 of the golden age. I dare say that the paradi 
 saical fancies of all peoples have been caught 
 through the cathedral windows of the woods in 
 this voluptuous month. 
 
 I never knew until the Doctor and I set out 
 to make the acquaintance of October what a sweet 
 mystery it enfolded. Once under the spell I 
 could not quite rid myself of the notion that 
 Nature has her dim religious lights, and sits at 
 times, like Jeremy Taylor s widow, in a clean 
 apron with her hands crossed and her work done. 
 It was impossible not to feel that she had laid 
 her soft muffling finger upon all the cognitions. 
 Every sense was hushed and recipient. Every 
 sound that summer makes sharp and sibilant 
 sunk to a drowsy pianissimo. Every breeze 
 murmured. Even the crows had interposed mel 
 lowing spaces. I heard them in a new perspec 
 tive. It was so with the visual world. I saw 
 that it was drawing a soft drapery around it, and 
 animate things were hushed as if they had come 
 into the chancel of the year. 
 
 So, too, October has her special symbols and 
 inscrutable souvenirs, one of which the Doctor 
 hunted up and brought me with as much honest 
 delight as if he had found a new reading of Shak- 
 spere, or an old Biblical text had risen up and 
 fitted itself to a new want. 
 
 Later we seated ourselves at the foot of a gentle 
 slope, having reached a narrow and brambly mar 
 gin of a broad meadow. Over on the other side 
 
 183
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 we could see the gnarled and fantastic apple trees, 
 where an old orchard sprawled out into the level 
 land. We heard the softened voices of men and 
 women, who were gathering apples and making 
 cider, and the intermittent creak of the cider-mill 
 was not unlike a late cricket. 
 
 That such a vista should lay hold of the sensi 
 bilities of two unlike men of the world, not at all 
 given to the "album business," as the Doctor 
 called it, was, I thought, notable, and as I sat 
 down to drink it all in, I remarked that it was like 
 one of those old strains of Bellini s that have a 
 cloying sweetness. But the Doctor thought not. 
 It was an harmonic complex, making interminable 
 music without bars. It reminded him of the swan 
 music in Lohengrin. Whether it was the season 
 or the mood we brought to it, I do not know, but 
 we sat silent a moment to let it play its own tune 
 upon us. Out in the middle of the meadow a 
 winding stream had spread itself into a little la 
 goon, and round about were pools which looked 
 like blue eyes, and over them the huckleberry 
 bushes leaned, barring and etching the water with 
 a delicate tracery. On either side the grasses 
 spread out in orange, bronze, and tawny bands 
 that melted into each other and made of the 
 meadow a spectrum of the season. 
 
 These visual rhythms go very deep into a man s 
 subconsciousness, and the Doctor warned me not 
 to disturb them with any aestheticism. " They 
 cannot be unravelled," he said, " and they resent 
 explication. In that sense they are a higher kind 
 
 184
 
 A FRINGED GENTIAN 
 
 of music that fits itself to man s needs only in his 
 unquestioning acceptance." 
 
 But I was thinking of Griselle, and what I 
 wanted to know was why a meadow should call 
 up that maid, and October invite her into every 
 tender picture that it painted on its way. So I 
 asked the Doctor if the beguilement of Nature 
 did not leave something to be desired. I quoted 
 Coleridge at him from memory, 
 
 "It is her largeness and her overflow, 
 Which, being incomplete, disquieteth me so." 
 
 " I wonder how Coleridge knew it was incom 
 plete," said the Doctor. " What would you sug 
 gest as its consummation ? " 
 
 "Something human," I replied. "Art and 
 poetry have always tried to supply it. A beauti 
 ful landscape is like written music which needs a 
 voice or an instrument. Nature would be very 
 lonesome in her loveliest aspects to a man left 
 alone on this earth. It is impossible even for a 
 materialist to look at this scene without peopling 
 it. If the poets had not personified and human 
 ized Nature, it would be like Shakspere s ( Tem 
 pest with Miranda and Prospero left out." 
 
 "And yet," said the Doctor, " Nature goes her 
 own way and is never modified or changed by 
 man s imaginings, which in the main are efflor 
 escences of his magnificent and selfish will. When 
 a man is in love, he sees things only through his 
 desires. Artists and poets are always in love. 
 
 185
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 They think in hyperbole, like Romeo. They are 
 superbly anthropomorphic. Stars throb, trees 
 breathe, waves dance, leaves utter prayers, birds 
 woo. They make the planets think of the same 
 girl that has usurped their minds ; the ocean is 
 crammed with Aphrodites matter is hymeneal. 
 Do you suppose such a fellow is thinking of 
 Nature ? Confound it, he is thinking of himself, 
 and cunning Nature, who is thinking of her race, 
 cajoles and fools him to the top of his bent, and 
 when she has accomplished her own purpose, she 
 drops him like a hot potato. The surest way to 
 get rid of the Grecian mythology is to get married. 
 Then old Triton hands his * wreathed horn over 
 to the youngest member of the family. Our re 
 cent poets string Nature upon their desires. I 
 was reading the other day our friend Cawein, and 
 he has the audacity to say : 
 
 " There is no rhyme that is half so sweet 
 
 As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat. 
 
 There is no metre that s half so fine 
 
 As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine, 
 
 And the loveliest lyric I ever heard 
 
 Was the wild-wood strain of a forest bird. 
 
 I don t know that young man, his poetry pro 
 claims him to be young, but if ever he settles 
 down, he will probably rewrite that verse some 
 thing like this : 
 
 " There is no song that is half so sweet 
 As the clash of matter one is apt to meet. 
 
 186
 
 A FRINGED GENTIAN 
 
 There is nothing so fine to Jack and Jill 
 As a natural fluid that runs down hill, 
 And the loveliest lyric man ever heard 
 Was not lyric at all, but what he inferred. 
 
 " It seems to me," I ventured to say, " that 
 you are trying to play the part of Peter Bell, and 
 it does not become you." 
 
 " You utterly mistake me. I am only insisting 
 that the sane man shall accept the facts of Nature 
 while he exercises his imagination in using her 
 for his own purposes. She is stuffed full of facts 
 as well as symbols, but they do not always corrob 
 orate his desires. Wait a moment I am going 
 down in that meadow to look for an autumnal 
 fact." 
 
 Then off he started, and I saw him poking 
 about among the grasses, sometimes almost lost 
 to view, evidently looking for something with 
 great earnestness. 
 
 Left alone I wondered if Griselle would enjoy 
 this scene. It really seemed to me that her pres 
 ence would in some way banish the incomplete 
 ness. I was curious to know how she would regard 
 it. Would she, like so many women I had met, 
 pretend to enjoy it because I did ? I could not 
 rid myself of the notion that she would fit into 
 it and interpret it unconsciously. 
 
 I heard the Doctor shouting to me as he held 
 up something that looked like a bunch of grass. 
 When he came back, he handed me three or four 
 stems about eighteen inches long of the fringed 
 gentian, each stem having upon its curved branches 
 
 187
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 four or five flowers. I looked at the beautiful 
 specimens with the passing admiration that such 
 wildings always excite, and then I turned to him 
 expectantly to know why he had taken so much 
 trouble to get them. 
 
 " The last beautiful words of the season," he 
 said, " the daintiest and most eloquent that she 
 ever speaks." 
 
 " It is certainly a very pretty flower," I re 
 marked. 
 
 That appeared to vex him a little. " I don t 
 think you know it," he said. " As a rule, city 
 people do not. The poet Bryant wrote some 
 pretty verses on it. I suppose you know that? " 
 
 I had to confess that I did not. But I have 
 since read them several times. 
 
 " Look here," said the Doctor. "This is the 
 flower of America. They can t make it grow in 
 China, and there are only some dull hints of it in 
 Europe. Nowhere but in our land does it reach 
 its feminine loveliness, and then it makes the 
 fleur-de-lis meagre and the columbine and the 
 violet washed out." 
 
 He held the bunch at arm s length in front of 
 him. " Did you ever see branches with such a 
 queenly and pensive curve ? It is the grace of a 
 tall beauty making her first bow to the world. 
 The corolla is a perfect Etruscan vase look 
 at it, lifting four shell-shaped petals beauti 
 fully fringed and of an evasive azure that defies 
 description." 
 
 "Charming," I said. "Very like a rustic belle." 
 188
 
 A FRINGED GENTIAN 
 
 " Nothing so beautiful in all our fields. Were 
 it to grow in Thibet, they would canonize it. 
 Persia would ascribe supernatural virtue to it. 
 Greece would have immortalized it ; but not 
 having it, she had to take up with the less regal 
 flower, Narcissus. I dare say, if we could get 
 into the community of flowers, we should find 
 that this is the queen, though it is a shame to 
 call her a queen when she refuses to grow in any 
 but a republican country. Isn t that spray exactly 
 the curve of fresh beauty making vassals of us 
 all by mere contour ? Zenobia never held her 
 head more proudly, and Cleopatra could not wrap 
 herself so luxuriously after her bath as this poor 
 princess of the wild-wood." 
 
 This strain quite caught me. " I am glad to 
 hear you attribute such human qualities to a 
 flower," I said. " I was inclined to do that 
 myself, just now, and, to be idiomatic, you sat 
 upon me." 
 
 " Do you observe," said the Doctor, "that she 
 is wrapping her tissuey shawls about her and 
 hiding her face ? Look at the spiral fringe ; did 
 you ever see such an airy twist as that ? The 
 Sultan s women try to do it with their laces. If 
 one of our serpentine dancers could do that, she 
 would take Paris by storm." 
 
 It was true the flowers had closed up spirally, 
 and the line of fringe on each one of the four 
 leaves of the corolla were wound about as when a 
 belle wraps herself after the ball. 
 
 "You are right," I said. "I never saw a 
 189
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 flower before with such a feminine grace. I am 
 glad that it attracted you, and that you captured 
 it. You are only human, like myself." 
 
 "Perhaps I m inhuman," he replied. "Doctors 
 are apt to have that reputation, for the flower has 
 resented my impertinence. That is a fact to which 
 I wanted to call your attention. This beautiful 
 and almost human wild flower is placed wholly 
 beyond the desires or the plans of man. It hides 
 away from him. It will not grow in his garden. 
 A thousand attempts have been made to domes 
 ticate it, in vain. It disdains the parterre, and 
 refuses to bloom in the hothouse. It is the true 
 child of Nature, and if you pluck it as I have 
 done, it draws itself together, hides its virgin 
 beauty like a true vestal, and dies draped." 
 
 Then the Doctor, who, when he fires his gun, 
 always wants to get out of range, added : " Well, 
 let s be going. We don t want to sit here all day, 
 do we ? " 
 
 It must have been two weeks later. We had 
 returned from our tramp, and after a great deal 
 of skirmishing, I succeeded in getting Griselle to 
 let me drive her over and show her that scene. 
 She took a heavy wrap, for the wind was sharp. 
 It was the first time that I had dared to make a 
 companion of her, and as I had taken good care 
 to leave Charlie behind, we were seated side by 
 side for a couple of hours. Some kind of unrea 
 sonable desire to have the reality on that very 
 spot where so much ideality had been wasted 
 possessed me. There was no accounting for these 
 
 190
 
 A FRINGED GENTIAN 
 
 masculine whimsies. All that is worth telling at 
 this time is, that when I reached the spot where 
 the Doctor and I had sat down, October had 
 changed her tune and her dress. It was late in 
 the afternoon, and the sky was filled up with what 
 Keats calls " herded elephants slow moving in the 
 west," and low down, where the sun struck 
 through, they were caparisoned in gold brocade 
 and carried flaming plunder. It was dismal 
 enough. The color was all out of the meadow, 
 save where the pools seemed to wink their blood 
 shot eyes at us, as the stiff wind swayed the 
 huckleberry bushes. Griselle wound her wrap 
 about her and seemed to retire within it. Only 
 her face was visible, and that wore an inquiring 
 and somewhat vacuous look. 
 
 It gave me a numb feeling of despair. And 
 yet as she stood there, wound about as if by the 
 wind, I could not help saying to myself, "The 
 fringed gentian." 
 
 r 9 i
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 STRAMONIUM 
 
 IN our purposeless wandering over roads that 
 led nowhere, the Doctor and I came at last to 
 some discomfort that is to say, it would 
 have been discomfort but for the Doctor. We 
 had trudged along the whole afternoon, stopping 
 to get a drink of buttermilk at a small dairy over 
 a brook, and there the Doctor, fascinated by the 
 rolls of fresh butter, had bought half a pound, and 
 the buxom dairymaid had rolled it up in two or 
 three cool cabbage leaves. As we came along the 
 road, and I saw him carrying that bundle carefully 
 in his hand, I asked him what he expected to do 
 with it ; whereupon he asked me to hold it a moment 
 and went off into a near-by field, where I saw him 
 bent over, kicking and scratching as if in search 
 of something. When he came back he had three 
 or four good-sized potatoes, which he exhibited 
 with unbounded admiration, and insisted on wash 
 ing them off at the first rivulet we encountered. 
 
 192
 
 STRAMONIUM 
 
 It grew gray and chilly toward sunset. The 
 wind was blowing from the east, and presently it 
 began to rain that kind of fine slanting rain that 
 Gabe called " carpet tacks," and that is specially 
 cheerless and makes you think it much colder 
 than it really is. Where we were, neither of us 
 knew. All the perspectives that had fed us with 
 pictures were rapidly obliterated by a leaden mist, 
 and as the prospect closed heavily in about us, we 
 instinctively came closer together. I think the 
 Doctor s effort to enjoy it was a little obvious and 
 some\vhat marred by his absurd determination to 
 keep the half pound of butter some distance from 
 his person. 
 
 " It will hardly add to our store of pleasant 
 memories to plod all night in this," I ventured to 
 remark, as I slapped the drip off my soft hat. 
 " There is a lively prospect of our being soaked 
 to the bone." 
 
 11 If we do not run upon a house," he said, " we 
 shall have to crawl into some cave or covert. You 
 have read of such experiences, I suppose, when 
 you were a boy." 
 
 " Very delightful to read about," I suggested. 
 
 " I dare say we can find a shelter of some kind. 
 The animals do. That s the fun of it. To have 
 brought a waterproof house and modern conveni 
 ences along would have been aesthetic poltroonery." 
 
 " It looks to me as if it had set in for a week." 
 
 " Very likely. It usually does about this time 
 of year. Haven t you ever noticed the propriety 
 and regularity of the seasons ? They go on with
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 their work utterly regardless of the audience. 
 That s what I admire about them. Your eyes are 
 better than mine what do you make that thing 
 to be that is sticking up over in that field ? " 
 
 " I should say it was an old hayrick or sheep- 
 fold." 
 
 "Then we are saved," said the Doctor, "if it 
 is thatched. Forward." 
 
 He caught me by the arm as we trudged up a 
 sloping field, the fine rain driving in our faces, 
 and the night coming on sheeted and drizzly. 
 There was a nasty wind that blew stertorously 
 among the wet trees, and as we approached the 
 old shed, it lifted and banged some loose portion 
 of the structure with a snappish clatter. I felt 
 that the season had put on its shroud and was 
 wailing hideously. I thought of a cosey corner 
 in my restaurant, where there was apt to be at this 
 hour a pleasant odour of cut roses and black coffee, 
 and a lively gathering of gourmands, with jaded 
 appetites for a late dinner. I found myself once 
 or twice turning round, rather mechanically, to 
 call a cab, and then the wind slapped me in the 
 face. And all the time the perennial and inex 
 tinguishable Doctor sustained a really superior 
 complacency of indifference to anything but his 
 own authoritative babble. " If a man can learn 
 to laugh with vital defiance at these beneficent 
 
 O 
 
 ordinances of the atmosphere," he said, "he will 
 in time arrive at the supreme stoicism that can 
 take Death by the hand and call him a jolly good 
 fellow." 
 
 194
 
 STRAMONIUM 
 
 The remark rather overreached me at the mo 
 ment, for I was holding my hat on with one hand, 
 and its flapping in my face interfered with the 
 proper reflective processes. 
 
 The old shed proved to be some kind of a 
 forlorn sheepfold and hayrick combined, which 
 had evidently been long unused. It was only 
 partly enclosed, for its roof was half gone, and one 
 end of it was open to the elements. What was 
 formerly the entrance was flanked by two great 
 weeds, six feet high, very green and lush, and still 
 bearing a few large white trumpet-flowers, that 
 shone through the gathering gloom quite funere 
 ally, I thought. 
 
 " Stramonium," said the Doctor, actually stop 
 ping to investigate it as if he had met an old 
 friend. " I never saw it in bloom so late." 
 
 With sullen disregard of his triviality I got 
 inside the pen, and, finding that one end of it was 
 dry with a thatch over it, I leaned up against one 
 of the old posts and remarked : 
 
 " There must be a house somewhere to match 
 this outwork. We might as well find it before 
 night sets in." 
 
 " It has set in," said the Doctor. " We should 
 probably wander round for an hour looking for it. 
 You cannot see twenty feet ahead of you." 
 
 "That s cheerful," I said. "We can t stay 
 here that s certain. I m wet through and chilled 
 to the bone. You seem to have forgotten that 
 I m your patient." 
 
 He had put one of the trumpet-flowers in the 
 
 195
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 lapel of his coat, as if he were going to an evening 
 party, and was wiping his face and neck with a 
 white handkerchief. 
 
 " Quite right," he replied. " Suppose you go 
 on. It will be as dark as Erebus in half an hour. 
 After you have wandered in the mud for a while, 
 you will probably walk off a bank or tumble into 
 a hole. It s usually the way with men who seek 
 comfort instead of accepting it ; I ll stay here and 
 give thanks as the animals probably did before we 
 got here." 
 
 " Spend the night in this cow-shed ? " I asked, 
 with as much bitterness as incredulity could 
 muster. 
 
 " Cow-shed," he repeated, drawing himself up 
 with admirable inflation. " An ark of refuge, 
 sir. There are no cow-sheds in a healthy mind. 
 You are too particular. I suppose if a man 
 offered you a last straw, you would want to know 
 if it was wheat or rye. Cow-shed we ll make 
 this pavilion glow like the morning star." 
 
 " Doctor," I said, " there seems to be a sort of 
 gallery at this end of the ark. I suppose it was 
 intended for fodder in the pastoral age. I ll 
 climb up and see if I can discern a hospitable 
 light in the neighbourhood." 
 
 " Do," said he ; " there are some remnants of 
 a ladder against the siding. Be sure of the floor 
 ing or you will come through. If you see a 
 friendly gleam sing out Sail ho ! 
 
 I scrambled up as best I could, and found the 
 loft heaped with corn-husks and stalks that 
 
 196
 
 STRAMONIUM 
 
 rustled sharply under my exploring foot. After 
 much crawling and stumbling and groping, I 
 found a crack in the siding. As I put my eye 
 to it a sharp arrow of wet wind came through 
 it and transfixed me. There was nothing to be 
 seen but darkening rain-gusts, with sombre 
 smears of hills and ghastly fields. As far as I 
 could penetrate, the rain was coming down 
 steadily in business-like sheets of desolation. 
 When I came to the edge of the platform and 
 looked down, there was the Doctor some ten feet 
 below me with his coat off, whistling " Lead, 
 Kindly Light," and trying to scratch a damp 
 match. I looked at him with curious interest. 
 " What are you trying to do ? " I asked. 
 
 " I am trying to get supper," he answered 
 without looking up. " How s the bedroom ? 
 Dry ? " 
 
 I believe I tried to execute a true metropolitan 
 sneer and drop it on him, but it went off half 
 cocked into a derisive chuckle, and he called up 
 to me : " If there are any dry corn-cobs up there, 
 shove em down. They make a peat fire." 
 
 I believe I pushed a half a ton of corn-cobs 
 down with my foot, making as much dust as 
 possible, and then I climbed down myself. No 
 man with the slightest vestige of his primitive 
 masculinity surviving could withstand the Doc 
 tor s defiant jollity of spirit. I soon found my 
 self piling corn-cobs " criss-cross," and watching 
 the Doctor down on his marrow-bones blowing 
 at the husks he had lighted, which presently broke 
 
 197
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 out into a flickering flame and sent up a thread 
 of scented smoke, whereupon he stepped back 
 and admired it as if he had seen a patient coming 
 out of a syncope. I placed armful after armful 
 of the cobs on end around the little blaze and 
 saw them with boyish delight turn into glowing 
 coals and totter over into a bed of ashes, the pile 
 throwing out a pleasant warmth and a phosphores 
 cent glow that changed the whole aspect of affairs. 
 The rain rattled on the siding and came at times 
 in windy swashes that made the old structure 
 bend and creak, but it only added to the glow 
 of our fire that made a pleasant circle of red 
 light and threw our moving shadows in grotesque 
 silhouettes against the walls. We hung our cor 
 duroy jackets on some projecting boards to dry 
 and frisked round in our flannel shirts. Finding 
 two short logs, which at some time had evidently 
 been used as milking-stools, the Doctor tore off 
 a loose board and extemporized a little table, 
 upon which he spread the remnants of a lunch 
 that he drew from his capacious pockets. Then, 
 seeing it laid out, he took the trumpet-flower 
 from his coat and stuck it in a crack of the board 
 as a decorative touch, and gave himself, with 
 many airs of connoisseurship, to the roasting of 
 his pet potatoes, an exquisite job which consisted 
 in " chucking them into the ashes " and not let 
 ting them burn up. 
 
 I recall now with reminiscent pleasure how my 
 old friend wooed me into the boyishness of all 
 this, making me forget all my discomfort, and 
 
 198
 
 STRAMONIUM 
 
 before I was well aware of it, cajoling me into the 
 improvisation with a clear zest. What would 
 I not give if I had a picture of that pair of vol 
 untary gypsies, sitting there in the glow, under 
 a canopy of smoke, making ogreish shadows and 
 eating their baked potatoes with chop-sticks, as 
 if they were Olympians, the Doctor s own glow 
 outshining the fire, and answering the gust out 
 side with heartier gusts of laughter within. He 
 had to initiate me into the esoterics of baked 
 potato. When he pulled the black lumps out 
 of the fire, and burned his fingers, and danced the 
 cancan, and slapped his flanks before he landed 
 the charcoal on the board, his antic shadow filled 
 me with juvenile mirth, and, wraiths of Arden 
 and ghosts of Lincoln Green, how I laughed ! 
 
 " Charcoal is good for the stomach, I suppose," 
 I remarked, as I looked at the burned chunks. 
 
 " Charcoal," he cried, snapping his burnt 
 fingers. " Ambrosia. You take him up in a 
 corn-husk, thus, like a napkin, knock the top off, 
 this way, put in a goodly chunk of butter, and, 
 gods of the cuisine ! tamales and yams and bread 
 fruit hide themselves in tropic insignificance." 
 
 I have often tried since to restore that potato 
 episode, but it cannot be done without corn-cobs, 
 and, I suspect, a cow-shed. The range oven 
 kills the delicious earthy aroma. The potato 
 must be tumbled into the hot ashes, and all the 
 essences driven in and confined in a jacket of 
 charcoal. " There is just the difference," said 
 the Doctor, " in eating the fruit this way and 
 
 199
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 eating it embalmed by a French restaurateur, that 
 there is in hearing a fine oration and reading the 
 report of it the next morning. A potato must 
 be smelted in its own ashes. Then it has the 
 fine flavour of martyrdom combined with the 
 aroma of Father Prout." 
 
 Then that roistering old savant, shut off from 
 his own world by the whistling rain, actually 
 became jovial, as if the potato, properly baked, 
 was intoxicating ; and before I knew it he was 
 trolling a stave of an old and forgotten song : 
 
 "At all feasts, if enough, 
 I most heartily stuff, 
 
 And a song at my heart alike rushes, 
 Though I ve not fed my lungs 
 Upon nightingale s tongues, 
 
 Nor the brains of goldfinches or thrushes." 
 
 This struck me as being somewhat reckless. 
 I had my doubts about the philosophy, but he 
 cut me short by saying, " Some doubts are like 
 dirty water ; let them alone and they will evapo 
 rate " ; and then he pulled out the white flower, 
 saying, "we live in a world of similitudes that s 
 stramonium." 
 
 " Yes, you said that before. Go ahead. There 
 seems to be a text in it." 
 
 " It s a symbol that has baffled man ever since 
 the time of Pliny. It belongs to the reptilian 
 class of plants and has followed in the footsteps 
 of man ever since the Fall. Unlike the gentian, 
 
 200
 
 STRAMONIUM 
 
 it flaunts itself all about his beaten tracks and 
 reminds him of the snake story. No one ever 
 found it in the wilderness." 
 
 " It looks something like a morning-glory." 
 
 "That s it. I suppose it tries to imitate the 
 morning-glory round the cow-sheds, and children 
 who mistake it often die. A strange, occult, ser 
 pentine plant with a virus in it. If you put a 
 white man down in Africa or Alaska, up it comes 
 for the first time with its trumpet-flower. Pliny 
 calls it Nepenthe and says the sibyls drank 
 its juice. The negroes along the James River 
 have a superstition that if you put the leaves 
 under your pillow, you will dream of snakes." 
 
 "All of which is very interesting, Doctor, in 
 materia medica, but will you kindly come to the 
 similitude ? " 
 
 " Doesn t it grow in society ? Haven t you 
 encountered the trumpet-flower in life, so like a 
 morning-glory, with a fang under it ? Haven t 
 you seen men wear it on their breasts and then 
 dream of snakes ? Isn t it rather strange that the 
 earth s flora should spring its Marguerites and its 
 Messalinas flowers that hide away and almost 
 die if you touch them, like the mimosa, and 
 flowers that flaunt themselves at the doorways and 
 hold out brazen corolla like that, always growing 
 where the soil is rank ? " 
 
 " Let me look at it. It has a peculiar odour, 
 slightly fetid." 
 
 " But it does not shrink if you handle it." 
 
 " What are its medical results ? " 
 
 201
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 " Dilatation, delirium, incoherence, frenzy, 
 death. Throw it away." 
 
 " I ll drop it in the fire, see? Let s change the 
 subject. I never did care much for trumpet- 
 flowers." 
 
 " My dear fellow, your knowledge of flowers is 
 very limited. You obtained it in a hothouse. 
 You think they were created for buttonholes. 
 There are, however, some kinds that die there, 
 and then men throw them away." 
 
 " Oh, nonsense. Don t reduce me to the 
 traditional brute. There are flowers which, if 
 they once take root in a man s soul, embower and 
 sanctify his whole life, and then he sits, as the old 
 seer said, under his own vine and fig tree." 
 
 At which the Doctor took his cigar out of his 
 mouth, emitted a long, low whistle, and then 
 throwing the stump into the fire, said : 
 
 " Suppose we go upstairs to bed." 
 
 Then it was that Cuyp or some other Dutch 
 man should have seen us climbing up that old 
 ladder, the yellow dog barking after us with alarm, 
 as if he thought we were leaving the earth. 
 
 And so, we rolled ourselves in husks, pulled 
 the dry stalks under our heads, and with a canopy 
 of smoke over us, fell asleep like two tired gyp 
 sies, the yellow dog keeping watch by the embers 
 below, and we never knowing until morning broke 
 that the field mice ran over us all night. 
 
 202
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 CHESTNUTS BY THE WAY 
 
 at sixty," said the Doctor, " is apt 
 to find himself opening an account with 
 life. He starts a set of books in his con 
 sciousness and begins a debit and credit account, 
 striking daily balances. Owe so much to sleep ; 
 paid out so much to a late supper ; borrowed of 
 enthusiasm ; lost by last night s emotions, etc. 
 He becomes the banker of his own blood, trying 
 by hoarding his supplies to keep himself in cir 
 culation. It is the first stage of an insidious de 
 crepitude to take care of one s self. He has lost 
 the divine gift of heedless enthusiasms ; those 
 noble impulses that lifted him headlong over 
 every barrier with an aerated optimism that 
 winged him with a godlike recklessness. I have 
 a great admiration for the superb animality of 
 youth. Every man of sixty has." 
 
 " I do not see why he should have," I ven- 
 203
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 tured to remark, " when he, like you, has pre 
 served so much of it." 
 
 " But I have to try to preserve it, my dear fel 
 low. That s the rub. If I had known as much 
 at your age as I know now, I would have let it 
 preserve itself." 
 
 " Oh, it has, Doctor. It has ; believe me." 
 
 It was still October, and six o clock in the 
 morning. We were miles from nowhere, stand 
 ing side by side in a fall exhibition, where every 
 picture was on the line, and all the artists had 
 gone away. 
 
 I suppose it is the crowning futility of senti- 
 mentalism to try and remember all the sunrises 
 and sunsets of one s heydays. It only adds to 
 one s late pathos in life to open his old album and 
 smile wearily at the souvenirs that have grown 
 meaningless. How many pages with a crisp rem 
 nant of perished stalk or leaf, and under it the 
 attempt to fasten the fleeting emotion in words 
 "A happy day at ," or "A little souvenir of 
 unalloyed brightness." How clumsily we try to 
 climb back on these faded memorials to suggested 
 heights, and how invariably we give it up with the 
 appalling conviction that the emotion, whatever it 
 was, belonged only to that hour, like the flower. 
 But here and there some sunrises burn themselves 
 into the page of our experience without our aid, 
 and they stay like the golden shield that some one 
 hangs upon our wall, catching the same old light 
 even when our eyes have grown dim. 
 
 I can see now that those sunrises were only half 
 204
 
 CHESTNUTS BY THE WAY 
 
 on the horizon. The other half was in the soul. 
 If there is not a responsive luminary within that 
 rises with equal gladness and stretches out a kin 
 dred ray, then are we cattle. I think it is well to 
 keep an album for these daybreaks of the soul. 
 Not that it shall be shown, but that it may shine 
 permanently into one s own private darks. And 
 I am free to confess that I should never have 
 made this discovery of my own sunrise if the 
 Doctor had not been along with me and in his 
 own vital way pointed out to me that if there are 
 any darks at all, it is the fault of our vision. 
 
 Six o clock of an October morning, and two 
 men of the world, mind you, standing by the side 
 of a cow-shed, drunken with the prospect ; actu 
 ally struck dumb for a few moments by the blaz 
 onry of the regularly uneventful. The sun was 
 coming up behind the distant trees. We looked 
 at it as if it were a revelation. My idea of a sun 
 rise was of something placidly grand ; a kind of 
 orbed and systematic attention to business ; some 
 thing superbly unperturbed and inevitable and 
 too far off to elicit more than a respectful awe. 
 But this sunrise had a reckless dance in it. We 
 had caught the old orb unawares in a positive 
 dithyramb, and as I watched the choric rhythmus 
 in the trees, flashing and leaping amid the gnarled 
 branches that took on grotesque involutions 
 in one blessed instant I felt sure that there were 
 satyrs and fauns, wet with the cool dew, cavorting 
 in Attic exuberance under those trees. 
 
 On the opposite side of our outlook the groves 
 205
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 along the high ground were beginning to breathe 
 in colours at the top in a long rim of deepening 
 dyes, with measureless chasms of changing shad 
 ows at the bottom, that opened depth after depth 
 of colour as the light crawled down. There were 
 some gray clouds outstretched above, like spectral 
 arms in a benediction, and as we looked, they 
 softly receded blushingly, like belated ghosts, as 
 the king in his majesty came revelling up. 
 
 The Doctor looked at me. " So Dionysos 
 and Arion saw it," he said. " So the shepherd- 
 poet saw it, on the edge of the vanishing night, 
 when he stood with his flocks in the fields of Pal 
 estine and called on the hills to clap their hands, 
 which you can see they are now doing. I can 
 pick out every psalm that was inspired by the 
 daybreak ; there is a lusty elemental crow in it. 
 How is your sense of smell this morning? Do 
 you detect a flavor of fried ham on this atmos 
 phere ? There is a little pillar of smoke twisting 
 up under that hill. I dare say now that we can 
 get some ( biled coffee there. Let us on." 
 
 He was right. We stood up in a big summer 
 kitchen among some stalwart farm hands and 
 took our bowls of "biled coffee" ravenously. It 
 was heavy and yellow with cream. It had a 
 humble " body " that no French distillation ever 
 had. What it lacked in aroma it made up in fibre. 
 The windows were wide open. The stiff west 
 ern breeze blew through and wrapped the frocks 
 of the maids about their legs, as they waited on 
 us, and the men in their shirt-sleeves were bois- 
 
 206
 
 CHESTNUTS BY THE WAY 
 
 terously good-natured and rudely gallant. I 
 retain a vivid picture in my memory of a broad- 
 hipped, red-faced, bare-armed Gretchen with an 
 enormous loaf of home-made bread against her 
 breast, as she drew a big knife through it, and 
 cut off a slice as big and as thick as a sirloin 
 steak, and handed it on the point of the knife to 
 a handsome fellow, who immediately poured the 
 molasses over it and fell to devouring it with a 
 carnivorous zest that was softened and, I might 
 say, enamelled by his smile and his white teeth. 
 So intent was I on these happy rustics, and so 
 easily did they fit themselves into the oxygen 
 and translucence of the morning, without taking 
 any heed, that they grew in my fancy perilously 
 near to being the fauns and satyrs that the sun 
 and my vagrant fantasy had evoked, and the half 
 hour went by without my knowing it. 
 
 When we set out on our journey, we really 
 walked out of a reality that had been warmed by 
 the morning into an illusion. The air was what 
 Shakspere called " nipping and eager," but we 
 enjoyed it as one does the grip of a strong hand 
 or the prickle of the surf. We were both unusu 
 ally springy in step and full-lunged, and the Doctor 
 assured me that it was not alone the oxygen, but 
 the disencumberment. I dare say he was right. 
 I remember that morning now because the world 
 suddenly appeared to be deeper, calmer, and less 
 dependent on anything I could do in it, which I 
 understood later, thanks to the Doctor, was a 
 symptom of health. Some of the things the 
 
 207
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 Doctor had said began to take on a new light at 
 the top. " If you want to see how beautiful the 
 world is, go up on the mountain. If you want 
 to know how brave and patient it is, go down in 
 the coal mine. There are sunrises even in disas 
 ter." I have tried that sentence on others since, 
 just to see if they had any auroral apprehension. 
 Some lights were beginning to burn for me along 
 lower ranges, and these steady little lamps seemed 
 to have been lit by the sun. 
 
 When we looked back at our hayrick, it was 
 turned into a golden dome against the western 
 sky, and the naked fields beyond were trying to 
 wrap their furrows in pink scarfs. We came to a 
 bit of table-land intersected by the road, and by 
 this time the sun was above the trees, with one or 
 two islands of transparent coral floating over its 
 lower limb. As the rays fell across the higher 
 levels, they tipped every detail with rosy light, and 
 all at once we saw the old earth at her morning 
 sacrifice, sending up incense from a thousand altars. 
 
 By the side of the road stood a magnificent 
 chestnut tree. It was one of the bronzes that 
 October keeps in reserve for her exhibition day. 
 It lifted its great splendour against the deep blue 
 like a knight in golden armour. We both stood a 
 moment at some little distance, caught open-eyed 
 by the magic of its transformation, without sus 
 pecting that we had ourselves been magically 
 transformed into artists. I wondered like a child 
 at the alchemy of light, that could turn blood and 
 rust and earthly ochres into such burnished efful- 
 
 208
 
 CHESTNUTS BY THE WAY 
 
 gence. The great bole of the tree came down 
 and gnarled itself into the earth with mighty con 
 volutions. The bursting burrs had been shaken 
 down by the wind, and they shone in the dead 
 leaves like lumps of flesh as the rays picked them 
 out. 
 
 " We have caught the atoms at their Orphic 
 hymn," said the Doctor, softly. 
 
 Under the tree, hunting in the dead leaves, 
 were two children with little tin pails, such as one 
 sees in the stores with lard in them. The elder, 
 a boy of eight, barefooted, was running heedlessly 
 among the burrs, intent only on filling his pail. 
 The other, a girl of six, was digging her plump 
 fist into her eyes and holding her little head down 
 in inexpressible sorrow. As we came up, she 
 made a start like a bird as if to run, and the 
 Doctor caught her. " What s the matter, my little 
 maid?" he said. " Are you cold ?" 
 
 " Oh, she s afraid of the burrs," said the boy. 
 " A girl s no good to pick chestnuts, anyway." 
 
 He had his pail half full and went on with his 
 gathering quite disdainfully. The Doctor lifted 
 the little woman up into the air, and I looked 
 into her pail. There were two miserable chest 
 nuts rattling on the bottom, and one was wormy. 
 As he held her there a moment, she looked like 
 a chestnut herself, so ripe and brown. Her two 
 plump little cheeks were just as hard and inviting, 
 and her swimming eyes were the same colour. 
 Her little brown legs hung down, only half- 
 covered with stockings, and her plump pads of 
 
 209
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 feet were covered with broken slippers, into which 
 the prickles of the burrs were saucily sticking. 
 She wore a dilapidated chip hat, with a bit of blue 
 ribbon on it, and under it the chestnut curls were 
 trying to imitate the tree above her with golden 
 interlacing and burnished strands. 
 
 " Why, you poor little mother spark," said the 
 Doctor, kissing her squarely on the bulgy cheek, 
 and throwing her up on one arm, as he took the 
 pail in his other hand. " He wouldn t even pull 
 the prickles out of your shoes, the young Indian." 
 
 " He don t tare a bit," said the chestnut, as her 
 arm went round the Doctor s neck. 
 
 " Of course he doesn t ; boys don t care for 
 anything. But we ll just beat him dead. You 
 and I ll fill the pail. Don t cry any more. Let 
 me wipe the wet off your chubby little face." 
 
 " I don t like to hunt for chesn s," she said. 
 And this conveyed to the Doctor the whole 
 inscrutable sex difference in these germs. She 
 wasn t interested in chestnuts. Her heart was 
 broken because chestnuts had made the only 
 companion she had utterly indifferent to her. 
 It was like discovering a tiny rill of the universal 
 sweet water trying to come up between the stones 
 and the stubble. 
 
 " Of course, of course, what can you expect 
 of a puppy man ? He s young and inhuman. 
 Look at me, my dear." 
 
 I think the spark of woman understood clearly 
 what the Doctor did not say, namely, that he was 
 old and sympathetic, for she wound her brown 
 
 210
 
 CHESTNUTS BY THE WAY 
 
 arm round his burly neck and looked down at 
 the indifferent cub very much as if she had come 
 to her inalienable rights. 
 
 " I ll tell you what we ll do. You shall sit on 
 the sheltered side of that trunk, on one of those 
 roots, and we ll fill your pail. How does that 
 strike your ladyship ? " 
 
 I suppose it struck her ladyship as the only 
 proper course that should have been followed 
 from the first. The Doctor carried her across 
 the carpeted space made by the great canopy of 
 the tree, the side lights hitting her with successive 
 shafts as she passed, and the shadows dappling 
 her with a kind of bo-peep. He set her high up 
 on a root, pulled the prickles out of her broken 
 slipper, put the latchet round her ankle, and 
 placed the pail in her lap. I had already picked 
 up a handful of the nuts, and I walked up and 
 turned them obediently into the pail, where they 
 made a loud tinkle. The Doctor had to put on 
 his glasses to do his share. The boy looked at 
 him with momentary surprise, and then concen 
 trated all his contempt into one brief remark : 
 "Well, I ll be dod gormed ! " But the young 
 scamp managed to keep just ahead of the Doctor 
 and snatch the best prizes, until he got a shove 
 from a lusty foot that rolled him over, at which 
 there came a little piccolo burst of laughter from 
 the tree-trunk. The acorn of a woman was 
 already the little lady of the joust, for whose 
 smiles we were digging into the dead leaves with 
 our gloves on. 
 
 211
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 " If we succeed in outdoing that cub," I re 
 marked, " I should not be surprised to see the 
 little lady take that blue ribbon off her hat and 
 pin it on your coat, Sir Launcelot." 
 
 " The little fraud," replied the Doctor, " do 
 you see how she is trying to stimulate us with 
 baby smiles? They get out of their cradles ready- 
 made, and I m not punning either." 
 
 We stopped to argue, and the boy beat us. In 
 a contest of brains and juvenile brawn, brains will 
 
 eet the worst of it when chestnutting. While the 
 
 & 
 
 Doctor was throwing one of his sarcasms around, 
 the cub filled his pail. 
 
 " Woman," said the Doctor, " is always a hal 
 lucination. Even at six she sits on a throne 
 regally and reigns without governing." 
 
 Then the boy, having accomplished his task, 
 proposed that one of us climb up and thrash the 
 tree, if we wanted to fill the other pail, and I 
 quite fell in with this humorous idea, for certainly 
 nothing could be more jolly than to see the Doc 
 tor in his spectacles clasping that tree with his 
 arms and legs while I "boosted" him up, and 
 the little maid clapping her hands, and the yellow 
 dog going round about like a clown round a circus 
 pole. 
 
 But the Doctor paid no attention to the sug 
 gestion, and lifting the little brown maiden on his 
 shoulder, we started up the road, I carrying the 
 pail. 
 
 212
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 OUT IN THE COLD 
 
 THE first frost that touched us in the waning 
 October had gloves on. It was gentle and 
 uncertain. It left little filmy crystals, 
 exquisitely wrought, clinging helplessly close 
 along the still fringes of the pools. I under 
 stood by these first tiny shoots that winter germi 
 nated like spring, having its tender pellicles and 
 fragile blades ; the infancy, in fact, of its flower 
 ing life, afterward to bloom like a great camel 
 lia in snowdrifts, and come to its autumn of 
 falling icicles and asthmatic gusts. The first 
 efflorescence of the bleak season was, therefore, 
 curiously infantile. I had never had my atten 
 tion called to it before, and now it seemed as if 
 I had been in at the birth. It was like a new 
 intimacy with the old sovereign system. Per 
 haps there was in me some molecular response, 
 as there is in the capillary hearts of the oak and 
 the elm, where arcane saps rise and fall in the 
 
 213
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 great swing of the universal tides. The first 
 fretwork of the winter seemed rather winsome. 
 It was like the goo-goo of an Indian baby, as if 
 Boreas were not yet out of his hyperborean cra 
 dle, but, done up in laces, allowed you to take 
 liberties with him before he was able to go upon 
 the war-path. To begin the better acquaintance 
 with the traditional ruffian at this helpless stage, 
 and to see him grow and bluster confidentially, 
 is to rob him of his traditional terror. 
 
 In our colloquia -peripatetica, my Virgil, the 
 Doctor, threw a good deal of his delightful rhap 
 sodical light upon the cold, but it was less his 
 plunging philosophy than my new intimacy with 
 the reputed monster that stirred the vegetable 
 sap of me, and sent it to the roots of things. 
 
 " Cold," the Doctor said, with a superb air of 
 finality, " is man s chief bugaboo, created by his 
 sensory nerves. He has declared that heat is 
 life and cold is death a preposterous conclusion 
 that modern science is doing its best^to upset." 
 
 He defied me to furnish one scrap of revela 
 tion or analogy to show that heaven is heated ; 
 and all the traditions, he said, plainly set forth 
 that the other place is. " What nonsense it was 
 to say that cold was death, when cold absolutely 
 interfered with all the processes of death ; and a 
 frozen man puts a stopper on dissolution, while, 
 on the other hand, heat was a destroyer, a con 
 sumer. It was the cold-blooded animals that 
 lived the longest. Some of the pythons," he 
 declared, " had lived a thousand years." He 
 
 214
 
 OUT IN THE COLD 
 
 was glad to know that physical research in our 
 day was unlocking some of the benign secrets of 
 the cold and putting ice on the hypotheses of our 
 fathers. There was priceless knowledge to be 
 drawn from the zero of the ether, when men got 
 through digging for the central fires. 
 
 Then the Doctor, who, when he touched upon 
 the secrets of his own profession, always took on 
 a little hush, as if there were some dire mysteries 
 in it that must not be betrayed to lay ears, bent 
 down and said softly: "Invalids die of heat, not 
 of cold. Life is never congealed, it is burnt out; 
 and when at last the fires are extinguished, all 
 the combustible stuff has been purged away, and 
 if there is any ethereal life it begins in the cold." 
 
 " Nevertheless, Doctor," I said, " I should not 
 like to be caught on a prairie in a blizzard." 
 
 " I have been," he replied. " It is one of the 
 most beautiful lessons of the august Mother." 
 
 " What is ? " 
 
 " To be caught on the plains in a blizzard, if 
 you have with you one or two primitive heathen 
 who obey Nature instead of defying her." 
 
 " Oh, of course, if you have trained guides to 
 bring you out in spite of the benign Mother." 
 
 " That is just what the guide does not do. The 
 arrogant intelligence of the godlike man would 
 wrestle with it and get thrown. We hugged it; 
 lay down in it like good children, and were cov 
 ered up with warm blankets and tucked in, and 
 when morning broke we gave thanks and pursued 
 our journey on a crystal highway." 
 
 215
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 There were always some frosty crystals in the 
 Doctor s talk. He invariably blew from the 
 west. 
 
 In such purposeless wandering as ours we were 
 sure to stumble on hamlets lying between the hills 
 snugly, with blue ribbons of river winding through, 
 as if the toy houses were strung upon them. They 
 were all alike, sending up little pillars of smoke in 
 the mornings lazily, which spread out in amber 
 clouds above, that gave a sort of auroral drench 
 of brown sherry to the view. I suppose the con 
 tinent is dotted with them from the Atlantic to 
 the Pacific ; and looked at from the vantage- 
 ground of the morning through the veil of the 
 ascending incense, these little towns suggest for 
 civilization the same germinative process that 
 Nature employs. They cling along the little 
 rivers like the frost-work, but they have in them 
 the enfolded fibres of cities. To a man somewhat 
 bruised by too much life, the complacency of 
 these villages was interesting. They lacked cor 
 porate self-consciousness. A delightful air of 
 improvisation hung over them, as if the people 
 had accidentally met there, and, finding it pleas 
 ant, had concluded to stop, a natural accretion and 
 solidification of dispersed agricultural elements 
 taking on the first form of social life. When we 
 penetrated into one of these hamlets in search of 
 its tavern, these characteristics became more pro 
 nounced. The town held easily and loosely to 
 gether, linked by the wheelwright, the blacksmith, 
 the storekeeper, and the shoemaker, into a stout 
 
 216
 
 OUT IN THE COLD 
 
 associate chain, and it had somewhere, no doubt, 
 the schoolmaster and the dominie who were the 
 dry batteries at each end of it. 
 
 It was interesting to note how large a place the 
 first frost occupied in the minds of this commu 
 nity. Thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit was in some 
 way an event that mingled in the morning salu 
 tations. It was the first thing the landlord of the 
 tavern spoke of. " Well," he remarked, with 
 beaming satisfaction, " we had a frost last night." 
 The wheelwright reminded the shoemaker of it, 
 and the shoemaker smiled and reminded the 
 storekeeper. 
 
 I had just learned that a sunrise, to my aston 
 ishment, may be an epoch. I had seen that com 
 monplace event turned into a pageant, covering 
 the prosaic old earth with halos, so that the dul 
 lard material took on an atomic apotheosis. It 
 was like a romance of Victor Hugo s, in which all 
 the scullions talk mots., and the canaille act epi 
 grams ; but I had hardly expected to see the frost 
 poke its glittering needles into the disposition of 
 men and lace their little outlooks with airy fili 
 gree. I tried to think of myself going about in 
 Broad Street, in the morning, grasping stock 
 brokers by the hand and saying, with joy and 
 gladness, " Lift up your eyes, brother, it has 
 arrived." 
 
 " What has arrived, Colonel ? " 
 
 " The frost. She went down to thirty degrees 
 last night. Hurrah ! " 
 
 I do not say that my fraternal associates would 
 217
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 look askance and begin to inquire how much 
 paper I had out, and whether I had been buying 
 diamonds lately. But by all odds they would 
 wonder at the triviality of an immortal soul that 
 could interest itself in the vagaries of the season, 
 when there were so many large events waiting on 
 the market. 
 
 But, of course, when the markets are forgotten 
 in the wreck of matter with all its events, the 
 frosts will still come, and when the globe itself is 
 burned to a cinder, other suns will rise somewhere, 
 and other winters weave the same old crystals ; 
 all of which is intolerably eternal and preachy, I 
 know, but when the frost gets into one s mind, 
 these films spin themselves across the reflection ; 
 and the first frost had affected me like the first 
 gray hairs. These confoundedly complacent ter 
 mites in their village carried about with them an 
 air of self-assurance. They gave you to under 
 stand that their kerosene lamps were filled and 
 trimmed, and their treasures laid up in their cel 
 lars, and the world could go hang itself. A 
 stranger is peculiarly susceptible to this kind of 
 well-built impudence when the frost comes. He 
 rather enjoys it in August or September, when 
 one can get along without a kerosene lamp or a 
 woodpile, but in late October it puts him at some 
 disadvantage. It has the import of a parable, and 
 knocks gently at his conscience or his moral thrift 
 shakes up his retrospection, so that he looks 
 through the colours of his autumn for the coming 
 ghost. These fellows, the Doctor said, were like 
 
 218
 
 OUT IN THE COLD 
 
 the man who is well insured, and when his house 
 gets afire, takes his tin box and sits on his lawn, 
 
 O * " 
 
 and rather enjoys the effort of other people to 
 stop the blaze. On the other hand, they re 
 minded me of the man in the blizzard, who wraps 
 the storm about him and lies down to pleasant 
 slumbers. One cannot escape the premonitory 
 note in the frost. 
 
 I walked briskly up and down the one street of 
 the hamlet, rather oppressed by its hearty famil 
 iarity. Everybody gave me a cheery good-morn 
 ing, and went about his business as if I were of 
 less importance than the frost. So I was forced 
 in self-superiority to become retrospective, and I 
 called on my past to come up and shine for my 
 rescue. It was very much like looking over a 
 collection of old menus that cannot preserve the 
 appetite. Fancy a man whose memories smell of 
 stale consomme. How splendid my airy parabola 
 against the burrowing in the earth of these con 
 tented souls ! What effervescent feasting ; what 
 memorable chewings and swallowings ; what rockets 
 went up night after night ; what siren faces swept 
 by with the same set smiles ; what a lot of sensu 
 ous strains ; what exquisite badinage ; what stimu 
 lant mockery of each other ! Something told me 
 that this was like looking through the empyrean 
 for the lost sticks we sent up, as if one could 
 recover the precious sizzlings and sputterings and 
 coruscating extinction. Perhaps, after all, this is 
 where the real weariness is. The truth of the 
 matter is, that a man cannot be a joyous vagrant 
 
 219
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 with a spontaneous zest after the frost comes. It 
 drives the gayety of thought ahead of it as it 
 drives the birds. There must be cellars in a 
 man s disposition that ought to be well stored 
 when the cold sets in. Mine had a kind of echo 
 ing emptiness, as if I had put spangles on the 
 shelves instead of potatoes. 
 
 A man does not see the fun of wandering 
 about aimlessly in the face of a northeast twister. 
 I recalled that little nut-brown maid that the 
 Doctor had carried on his shoulder, and who 
 had given him a hug and flown out into the 
 dark like a frightened bird. I pictured him 
 clutching after it as one will after a dream, when 
 he wakes up. 
 
 " We must get back, Doctor," I said, " there s 
 a big storm brewing." 
 
 The Doctor looked at me. " Metaphorically 
 or literally ? " he asked. 
 
 " Literally." 
 
 " I ve been making some inquiries," he said, 
 "and it isn t an easy matter. We are just eigh 
 teen miles from the railroad and twenty by the 
 highway from Hecuba. It is Hecuba you are 
 thinking about, I suppose." 
 
 " I am thinking about a lot of things. Waste 
 of time is one of them. I have something seri 
 ous to do. In fact, this frost has given me the 
 blues, and I want to get back." 
 
 " Egad," said the Doctor, " it s a good sign. 
 I ve often noticed that the best way to go on is to 
 go back. But it s damnably difficult sometimes. 
 
 220
 
 OUT IN THE COLD 
 
 There isn t a team in this place that we can hire 
 or steal." 
 
 Then, it so happened that we received a good 
 deal of wholesome irony from the butcher and 
 others, instead of sympathy- They were wholly 
 unable to comprehend how anybody could get 
 somewhere without purpose, and not know how 
 to get somewhere else. 
 
 The exultation of these inhabitants over a frost 
 that had gone, grew into something like a wild 
 delight at the prospect of a coming " twister." 
 They informed us on all sides that a big storm 
 was brooding and as our vagabondage had ex 
 tended as far as the Doctor s engagements per 
 mitted, we began to think about a conveyance 
 to rattle us back before the storm broke. The 
 landlord of the tavern looked at us in blank help 
 lessness. cc You ll find it pretty hard to get a rig, 
 I guess," he said. " I don t know of anybody 
 who could spare a team just to drive you twenty 
 miles, unless it s the young man over there that 
 works in the wheelwright s shop. He s got a 
 horse that ain t in use, but J don t think he d 
 stop work to harness him up." 
 
 The Doctor was studying a New York paper, 
 and he called out to me as I set out to find 
 the young wheelwright "The weather bureau 
 predicts a fierce spell of weather a big storm 
 coming from the northwest." 
 
 Slocum at the best was not a desirable place in 
 which to be storm-bound. I hurried away and 
 entered the wheelwright s shop. An old man at 
 
 221
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 a bench was working with a draw-knife. As 1 
 accosted him, he looked up over his iron spec 
 tacles with a jerk. 
 
 " Can you tell me where I can get a team to 
 take me back to the Hotchkiss Farm? " I asked. 
 
 " No, I can t," said the old man. " I don t 
 keep teams to let." 
 
 " But you might know of somebody who 
 does." 
 
 "Yes, I might, but I don t." And the crusty 
 old fellow resumed work with his draw-knife. 
 
 " I beg your pardon for supposing that you 
 had time enough to answer a question civilly," 
 I said. " I took you for the average human 
 being;" and I was turning away, when a young 
 man who was working under a wagon in the rear 
 of the shop rose up and turned upon me such a 
 frank and friendly countenance that it was like a 
 burst of sunshine. 
 
 " Did you come from the Hotchkiss Farm ? " 
 he asked. 
 
 "Yes. There are two of us. We were taking 
 a jaunt through the country afoot. There is a 
 storm coming on, and we wish to hire some one 
 to take us back." 
 
 The young man was a fine specimen of mascu 
 line strength, frankness, and good humour. His 
 broad open face invited confidence. 
 
 " Is it important to get back right away ? " 
 
 "Yes rather. I shouldn t like to be left 
 here over night, judging from what I have seen 
 of your inhabitants." 
 
 222
 
 OUT IN THE COLD 
 
 The young man smiled pleasantly, and the old 
 man said sharply, " You d better stick to your 
 work if you know when you re well off." 
 
 But without paying the slightest attention to 
 him, his workman laid down the tool that he had 
 in his hand and said : 
 
 " I ll try and see if I can get you back," and 
 took off his apron. 
 
 "You will not lose anything by it," I re 
 marked. u It will be a great act of kindness." 
 
 " He won t, hey ? " snarled the old man. 
 " Mabbee he ll lose his job if he neglects his 
 work for everybody that comes along." 
 
 The young man gave no heed to him, and 
 accompanying me to the street, said, as he looked 
 at me inquiringly, "You re the gentleman who 
 is living in the Hotchkiss woods;" and he said it 
 as if that fact had some kind of claim upon his 
 good nature. 
 
 O 
 
 " I don t want you to lose your job to accom 
 modate me," I remarked. 
 
 " Never fear," he replied. " The old man 
 can t get along without me. If you will go over 
 to the tavern and wait for me, I ll tidy myself up 
 a bit and try and get you back." 
 
 I thanked him and rejoined the Doctor. It 
 must have been an hour before my amiable friend 
 appeared with a spanking team and properly 
 tidied up. He came out a handsome young 
 athlete in a tweed suit and a derby hat. 
 
 I said to the Doctor as we saw him drive up, 
 " He expects to bleed us handsomely for this, 
 
 223
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 I dare say." But when we were seated in the 
 vehicle the frankness and geniality of the fellow 
 interested me. " I have heard of you," he said. 
 "You have a fine boy." 
 
 " Why, yes," I replied. " He and I are study 
 ing the country and taking a vacation. You are 
 one of the few interesting curiosities I have met 
 here." 
 
 " Why curiosity ? " 
 
 "You exhibit a human quality that does not 
 appear to grow wild." 
 
 He laughed. " You must not take these folk 
 too seriously," he said. " Their hardness is all 
 on the surface. Under the crust they have warm 
 hearts and are very stanch." 
 
 " But you do not belong to the order appar 
 ently." 
 
 " Oh, yes, I do. I was born here, and some 
 times I feel afraid that I have outgrown my 
 place." 
 
 " Young man," said the Doctor, " I hope you 
 will not consider it impertinent if I ask you what 
 your place is." 
 
 "Not at all. My place appears to be to earn 
 ten dollars a week and support an old and crip 
 pled mother. Does that interest you ? It doesn t 
 look very brilliant to you, I suppose, but I m not 
 kicking. My chance will come along one of these 
 days, perhaps." 
 
 "It wouldn t be such a good turn of luck if 
 your civility to us cost you your job," I said. 
 
 " Oh, no danger of that. The old man would 
 224
 
 OUT IN THE COLD 
 
 have to shut up shop without me. The old man 
 is to be pitied." 
 
 " That would be a waste of good material. I 
 prefer to pity you," I remarked. 
 
 " Oh, that would be a waste," he said, with una 
 bated good humour. " I can take care of myself." 
 
 There was a fresh honest naivete about the 
 fellow that was exceedingly captivating. For a 
 village workman, he was surprisingly intelligent, 
 but his ambition, if he had any, appeared to have 
 been merged in a comfortable belief that things 
 would come around all right in the end if he only 
 plodded on faithfully. 
 
 When he landed us in front of my hut, I 
 pulled out a ten-dollar bill and offered it to him. 
 He rejected it with a kindly smile, saying : 
 
 " One gentleman can do another a good turn 
 when it is in his way, without being paid for it." 
 
 Before the Doctor and I had recovered from 
 our astonishment, he was gone.
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 WOOD FIRES 
 
 WHEN the Doctor went away, I felt like the 
 prisoner who hears the departing foot 
 steps of his friends and the shooting of 
 the bolts. Now at last I was in for it, and no 
 mistake. But there were some compensations and 
 mitigations, and some quiet triumphs flowers, 
 you will say, in the condemned cell. I was to 
 have access to the world by mail. The Doctor 
 thought I had earned that by not writing a letter 
 for four months. He promised to send me up a 
 box of books from his own library, and I gave 
 him an order for an ample stock of canned goods. 
 When they came, I got Gabe to put up some 
 pine shelves in the cabin in the woods ; and we 
 spent one whole day arranging the place for the 
 winter, tightening the sash, putting in a few shin 
 gles on the kitchen, fixing up a kennel for the yel 
 low dog, and cleaning the chimney, a task which 
 Gabe accomplished most successfully by dragging 
 
 226
 
 WOOD FIRES 
 
 a juniper bush up through it to the roof, and pre 
 cipitating an amazing mass of old birds nests and 
 egg-shells, to say nothing of soot. Then I helped 
 him build a storm door, surprising myself more 
 than I surprised him by my dexterity with a saw 
 and hammer. When the roughest of the work 
 was done, Griselle came over and added the fin 
 ishing touches. She put a new curtain on the 
 window, standing on the table to tack it up, and I 
 holding the table. When she had fastened the 
 chintz properly in plaits, .she took my hand and 
 jumped down like a springbok, and picked up the 
 large photograph of Charlie s mother that had 
 fallen on the table. "We must tack that up," 
 she said, " where you study and write." 
 
 " No," I protested ; " I ll put it away in my 
 trunk. Photographs fade in the light." 
 
 " I should think," she said softly, as she pushed 
 a tack through it, " that they would be more apt 
 to fade if you packed them out of sight." 
 
 I was watching her, because she looked very 
 pretty in her employment. Did you ever try to 
 read or make out a picture, sitting in the cross- 
 lights of a lamp and the moon ? How the far 
 away beams confuse you ! 
 
 She sent over a pair of old hand-irons that she 
 had pulled out of the garret, and what with rotten- 
 stone and ashes, the brass came out scintillant and 
 added a continuous sparkle to the long evenings 
 for months afterward. She even made a cushion 
 for the big Quaker rocker, and lugged over two 
 old conch shells and put them on the little mantel 
 
 227
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 for colour ; hideous old relics I thought at first. 
 But I learned the utility of them later, when my 
 lamp was out, and I saw them reflecting the warmth 
 of the fire like two far-away spots of sunset at 
 sea with a dusky haze over them. I suppose the 
 literal Doctor would have said that was just what 
 they had been storing up on some desolate shore 
 for a thousand years. 
 
 When everything was all ship-shape, and the 
 first bleak night came, I fastened the oaken shut 
 ter, lit the student lamp, pulled up the cushioned 
 rocker before the fire, and took a comfortable 
 survey of the place. Upon my word, it looked 
 quite cosey and inviting. 
 
 In all this I had followed the Doctor s advice. 
 Just before he took the train, he put his hand on 
 my shoulder and fired his parting shot. 
 
 " Don t forget," he said ; " I ve got a sort of 
 contract to pull you up to a hoary eighty-five 
 or was it ninety-five ? Don t frustrate me. I m 
 on my mettle with this thing now. I shall not 
 live to see it, but you will live to thank me. 
 When men suffer from too much light, we have to 
 put them in a dark room, where they cannot see 
 what is going on or read medical books. You ll 
 come out like a beaver in the spring. Write as 
 many letters as you please, but no business letters. 
 Good-by. Write to me once a week. I can 
 always reach you in four hours. But you will not 
 need me unless " and he got out of reach before 
 he finished the sentence "unless you want me 
 for your best man." 
 
 228
 
 WOOD FIRES 
 
 I thought of this on that first November night, 
 with the wood fire burning inside and the wind 
 soughing outside. The yellow dog was stretched 
 out limp and contented, broadside on to the blaze ; 
 and Charlie, examining the books, was firing ques 
 tions at me like a Maxim gun. Was not this the 
 real Robinson Crusoe thing of one s boyhood, 
 once unattainable: I was not skilled in self- 
 analysis, and I tried very hard to find out, as I 
 stretched out my legs in imitation of the yellow 
 dog, what the charm of it was to the masculine 
 brute. Was it his independence of his fellows, or 
 only the desire to be monarch of all he surveyed, 
 and get away from the " church-going bell ? " I 
 had a sneaking suspicion, which I took good care 
 that the yellow dog should not see, that at the 
 bottom it was sheer selfishness, but as I said, I 
 was not skilled in this unravelling, and so I gave 
 it up. One assurance was much more definite. I 
 had outwitted sudden death, actually pulled out 
 his dart and thrown it back at him, and he had 
 slunk away. Was this an illusion? No, the 
 Doctor was right. Life was not, he said, an ad 
 justment to one s environment. There he flew, 
 in his usual vigorous manner, in the face of Her 
 bert Spencer. Life was a coordination of self. 
 Adjust your own triple natures, and the environ 
 ment will adjust itself. I remember that, because 
 I wrote it down at the time with a grim resolution 
 to understand it if it took all winter, and it grew 
 clearer as I went on. He had quoted Marcus 
 Aurelius to me. " Life was the wrestler Sj not the 
 
 229
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 dancer s, art. One stripped himself of superflui 
 ties, the other put on extra skirts and ribbons. 
 In nine cases out of ten health was abnegation, 
 not possession. Men could bloat themselves with 
 life, and it wasn t comfortable." I had put that 
 down, too. 
 
 Some chill things come out of the dark to 
 warm themselves at those wood fires, and if they 
 do not grow ruddier, they are at least clearer in 
 the glow. It is difficult to say exactly what they 
 are, they dance and flicker so. Sometimes they 
 point filmy monitory fingers at you. Sometimes 
 they stretch themselves, like the yellow dog, in 
 slumbrous indifference, and sometimes they make 
 you look behind into the darker recesses of the 
 room to see if some one did not come in on tip 
 toe without opening the door. 
 
 A wood fire is full of liquid pigments, fancy- 
 fed, and it has wondrous depths and recessions, 
 like the sunset itself. Always a beyond in its 
 soft turmoil of pictures, as if fire alone opened 
 the gates of fantasy as it opens the gate of victory, 
 and ghosts slip through. 
 
 It was pleasant, I thought, to see the little 
 tongues of flame try to imitate Griselle with 
 melting Hogarthian curves and fluctuant poses, 
 throwing lambent halos, and dancing over beds 
 of roses that vanished and came again aggravat- 
 ingly; and if you watched long enough, sank into 
 still gray heaps of ashes with little recurrent throbs 
 of heat, as if illusions disliked to die like realities. 
 Strange what fuel the reposeful mind will heap 
 
 230
 
 WOOD FIRES 
 
 upon the wood fire, and how the greedy flame is 
 sure to reduce it all to a gray mass ! But while 
 it lasted, Griselle was sure to dance in it and float 
 over it with line and colour, evanescing into some 
 beyond with a beckoning incandescence, just be 
 cause the insistent fancy, when it is in a yellow dog s 
 condition of receptivity, will not rest at ashes. 
 
 Sometimes during these vigils, when Charlie 
 had dropped off to sleep, and I was dreamily 
 boring, with my imagination, into the voluptuous 
 embers for a fleeting phantasm, there would come 
 a rustle behind me, as if something had lit softly 
 on the earth. It was probably a little gust that 
 came under the door as the wind shifted. But in 
 the dead silence it was like the folding of a wing. 
 Once, and only once, the yellow dog lifted up 
 her head sharply, cocked her ears, and looked 
 eagerly into the shadows ; but not having any 
 imagination, fell into a new limpness and went to 
 sleep again. That was all; and yet, do you know 
 that such is the hypnotic influence of a wood fire 
 and unperturbed solitude, that I could not quite 
 divest myself of the absurd notion that all the 
 ardent fancies that had gone up the chimney had 
 spread themselves out ethereally and telegraphed 
 something into the Beyond. 
 
 These traumerei were healthy and illuminative 
 beside the dreams that I had experienced in the 
 city, and which always left a waking shudder. 
 They had come with a tocsin crash ; and blanched 
 faces, stricken with sudden terror, went swiftly 
 by. Always a quick panic and mighty rushes 
 
 231
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 from impending doom, with the sudden knell 
 of mankind ringing in one s ears. These fata 
 morgana^ thrown on the screen of the sensorium 
 in the dark, were always woven out of the rush 
 and smash of the day, and were always cut off 
 without a beyond. One night in the city the 
 bang of the gong sounded ; and in the twinkling 
 of an eye, I was marching with a million felons in 
 midnight darkness, shoulder to shoulder, none 
 of us knowing where we were going, but pushed 
 on in steady tramp by the pressure of the inex 
 tricable. I did not get over that inscrutable 
 dream for days. I carried it about in my con 
 sciousness like a corpse. When I met Griselle 
 and discovered the sunrise, these dreams all dis 
 appeared. The Doctor said they belonged to 
 the pathognomy of Wall Street. 
 
 While I was musing on that first winter night 
 before the fire, Charlie, who had been asleep, I 
 thought, half an hour, sat up in bed and startled 
 me with an interrogative : 
 
 " Papa ? " 
 
 " Halloo, Comrade ; I thought you were fast 
 asleep. What is it ? " 
 
 "What did the Doctor mean by saying he 
 would be your best man ? " 
 
 "Well, upon my word, my boy; have you 
 been lying there thinking about that ? " 
 
 " No ; I was asleep, but I woke up." 
 
 " What made you wake up ? " 
 
 " Nothing ; I just woke. I guess you touched 
 me." 
 
 232
 
 WOOD FIRES 
 
 "No, I didn t. You ve been dreaming. Don t 
 bother me with such intricate questions." 
 
 " What s intricate, papa ? " 
 
 " Knotty." 
 
 " He can t be your best man, can he ? " 
 
 I got up and went to the bedside and looked 
 into the little ingenuous face, upon which this 
 problem had dropped like a film of frost. 
 
 With the influence of the wood fire still upon 
 me, I thought, as he closed his eyes, and I 
 smoothed the hair down on his forehead, that 
 all at once he was telephonic, to be talked 
 through, not at. 
 
 " Charlie, my boy," I said, " nobody can be 
 my best man but you. You are the best and 
 only. So don t you worry." 
 
 But he was asleep. He had delivered his mes 
 sage. 
 
 I stood there and listened a moment, as if I 
 expected to hear a halloo at the other end of an 
 ethereal wire. The little round clock on the 
 shelf ticked audibly. The yellow dog had heard 
 Charlie s voice and given two or three responsive 
 raps with her tail, and then gone off on the same 
 dream path with the boy. The fire spat weakly. 
 The wooden shutter shivered a little. I was stark 
 alone. I have often asked myself since if I was. 
 
 But that wood fire must have danced illumina- 
 tively through my mind when I was asleep. The 
 last things I saw were the two conch-shells, like 
 dull, pink eyes winking at me. Then that fan 
 tasy of the telegraph smoke began to weave itself 
 
 2 33
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 newly and take on new significances. The Doc 
 tor and I stood on a high mountain, looking at 
 the human race. He had dressed himself in a 
 Roman toga, He wore a wreath around his 
 head and had a copy of the " Bucolica " under his 
 arm. " You are permitted," he said, " to see the 
 whole of mankind. Few men can grasp it until 
 the scales have fallen from their eyes." 
 
 They were running about in all directions like 
 frenzied ants, but from each one of them streamed 
 a little silver thread, that like a fine ray of light 
 went tremulously upward and was lost in the air. 
 These myriad pencils intermingled, but were never 
 confused. " What does it all mean ? " I asked. 
 
 "That is the silver cord to the Beyond," he 
 said. " Every man brings it with him and is 
 fastened by it. You will see it brightest over the 
 school-houses and the nurseries. Only a few men 
 have been permitted to see it as you see it, and 
 they generally mistook it. Wordsworth called it 
 a c trailing cloud. Swedenborg said it was the 
 umbilicus of the Unseen. Reichenbach called it 
 odic force. It is only the chain of the Eternal." 
 
 " But what are they all trying to do with it? " 
 
 " Get rid of it," said the Doctor. " It ham 
 pers them. What they want is freedom." 
 
 " And do they succeed ? " 
 
 " Yes. They work all their lives to sever it, 
 and then they break the circuit of the Beyond. 
 But they are free. It s too bad, for that is the 
 only means by which the Beyond can communi 
 cate with them." 
 
 234
 
 WOOD FIRES 
 
 Curious it is what a psychic effect wood fires 
 have. My recollection of this dream was rather 
 pleasant. I don t know why, but somehow it 
 seemed to me, as I looked at Charlie when we 
 sat down to our breakfast, that some of the lines 
 of communication were still open to me. 
 
 1 tried to interview Charlie on his dreams. 
 " Try and recollect what you dreamed last night 
 and tell me. Think a moment and get it 
 straight." 
 
 " Oh, I know what I dreamed about without 
 thinking," said Charlie, promptly. 
 
 "Yes well, tell me all about it." 
 
 " I dreamed that I had a new sled and the 
 name was painted on it in red letters." 
 
 " Yes and what was the name ? " 
 
 "Bully Boy." 
 
 "Was that all?" 
 
 " No, I dreamed I had a new pair of fur 
 mittens." 
 
 One thing seems quite plain to me now, and 
 it is that wood fires have no psychology for small 
 boys. 
 
 2 35
 
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 HIGH WINDS 
 
 THE Doctor had remarked to me that man, 
 relieved of woman s influence, always rushes 
 off to some place where he can eat with 
 his knife, and immediately sends out pickets to 
 see if there is not a place a little farther on where 
 he can eat with his fingers. I meant to prove, if 
 possible, that this, like some other of the Doctor s 
 generalizations, would not hold water, as we say. 
 I had been for five months just a hundred miles 
 from the refined restrictions, and none of the baser 
 habits of the carnivora had made themselves ap 
 parent, so far as I could see. Charlie and I were 
 as scrupulous about the small amenities as two 
 dormice could well be. It is true enough, we 
 had to play the part of scullery maid for our 
 selves, and come flat-footed down to washing our 
 own dishes and shaking out our own tablecloth ; 
 for it is not to be supposed that Griselle could 
 walk over in winter weather just to relieve us of 
 
 236
 
 these menial duties. It was just here in the per 
 formance of these necessary banalities that we 
 grew to appreciate her extraordinary superiority 
 to them, and, to tell the truth, I think our appre 
 ciation of her had grown to that point where we 
 did not want her to play the part of help. 
 
 Speaking for myself, it was interesting to observe 
 how my consideration for her had outstripped the 
 facts of the case, and how entirely oblivious she 
 was of the growth she had attained in my imagina 
 tion. If she understood clearly that I was an 
 invalid knight errant, playing at rustication, and 
 was to be humoured accordingly in all my freaks 
 of isolation, she never betrayed it. She had 
 placed Charlie and me under obligations by the 
 most womanly assistance, but I dared not assume 
 that she would not have done the same for any 
 body who had taken the cabin and proved him 
 self a gentleman and a harmless neighbour. I had 
 not discovered that this aggravating Florentine 
 rustic, who had volunteered as our handmaiden 
 with such an easy grace of condescension, dis 
 covered in me anything out of the usual run of 
 her experience. There was an impregnable im 
 partiality in her kindness that baffled egotism. 
 
 But now that our housekeeping had lost her 
 supervision, we had to rely on our moral forti 
 tude, and prove to ourselves that in the perform 
 ance of a duty we were not to depend upon the 
 allurements. It was a very old task. We were 
 to face the gray days without sunshine ; that was 
 all. And the sunshine of Griselle was something 
 
 237
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 more than a mere figure of speech. It was a pene 
 trative and pervasive fact that had gilded the 
 humilities of our home, just as I had seen the sun 
 rise kindle the furrows and emblazon the drudgery 
 of the fields. Breakfast in a hovel had taken on, 
 when she was there, that kind of sparkle one 
 meets in the early morning before the dew is 
 gone. She simply poured herself over it. A few 
 magic passes in the little kitchen, some kind of 
 sibylline trolling in low tones, and presto, Indian 
 meal came out in golden chunks and was cut up 
 by the alchemist into steaming ingots, and we 
 heaped the butter on it and silently felt that it 
 was driving the shadows out of us. The coffee 
 was never so yellow when we tried our chemistry 
 on it. It would not exhale. We did our best on 
 those mornings, but there was always a little dis 
 tress of human hurry in it, and we ran against 
 each other and dropped things, and the yellow 
 dog, distressed at the confusion, got between our 
 legs, and I think sometimes we kicked at her. 
 
 O y 
 
 When we arrived at the vital point of sitting down 
 and taking a long breath preparatory to eating, it 
 always seemed that the preparation before and the 
 rehabilitation afterward made the eating a little 
 overestimated. But when Griselle had been there, 
 we sat breathless and saw all the little contempti 
 ble trivialities of domesticity fall into line like so 
 many dwarf courtiers, and results danced after her 
 like so many notes under magic fingers, melting 
 into melody. 
 
 Three, four days went by, and the Robinson 
 238
 
 HIGH WINDS 
 
 Crusoe thing was beginning to fray itself at the 
 edges. Charlie and the yellow dog, having no 
 manful pride in the matter, betrayed their depri 
 vation shamelessly. Charlie proposed that we 
 walk over to the homestead, he would like to see 
 Griselle ; and the yellow dog, when the confusion 
 was greatest in the mornings, went out sometimes 
 and blew her clarion toward the homestead for 
 help. When we went off for our morning walks, 
 I explained to Charlie that we had started the 
 Robinson Crusoe thing wrong end foremost, and 
 it was that which made it so hard to rectify. 
 " What a terrible thing," I said, " it would have 
 been for Crusoe if he had found a fairy on his 
 island who made everything easy for him." 
 
 " Why, how could it be terrible ? I should 
 think," said Charlie, " that it would be just 
 scrum." 
 
 " I mean that it would be terrible when she 
 went away, and they always go away, Charlie, 
 after spoiling us. We should have begun without 
 one as Crusoe did, and depended on ourselves, 
 and worked out our comfort with our own hands. 
 That s the way brave men do." 
 
 "Then what s the good of a woman, anyhow?" 
 asked Charlie. 
 
 " Oh, they have to work out their own affairs 
 on their own islands," I said vaguely and con 
 clusively. 
 
 So we took our walks away from the Hotch- 
 kiss place, and I did my best to make the abstract 
 old mistress fill the void that the concrete maid 
 
 239
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 had evidently left in the affections of the boy and 
 the dog, for it was becoming quite plain to me 
 that children and animals cannot rise to the moral 
 plane of heroic self-abnegation. 
 
 Those walks in the sharp November mornings 
 with a child were, I dare say, disciplinary as well 
 as sensuous. There were many chaste- revealings 
 in the frosty gallery of the season. Nature had 
 passed in a few weeks from a painter to a sculptor. 
 Her Fortuny trees were changed to Thorvaldsen 
 statues. November on her exhibition days scorns 
 any drapery but that of her own incense. The 
 white flesh of the maenad birches flashed, marble- 
 like, behind the solid junipers. I could see their 
 beautiful limbs glistening far off on the pedestals 
 of the moss, and the hills themselves, only yester 
 day wrapped in Indian dyes, were gray and naked. 
 It does not take an invalid knight errant long to 
 see that November, like June, is driving the way 
 ward fancies back to woman. I do not wonder 
 that some of the physicists have declared that the 
 atoms themselves are male and female. If ever 
 the amateur worshipper at this outdoor shrine 
 grows restless at the anthropomorphic returns of 
 his fancy to concrete Dryads, and rushes to the 
 poets to escape from the earthly gravitation of 
 his impersonation, he will plunge into a greater 
 labyrinth than before, for the poets all steer their 
 argosies by the sex-magnet. The invincible Flor 
 entine maid sails unperturbed through Tasso, and 
 Petrarch, and Dante, just as she sails through 
 Horace. Whenever you can get Fiammetta and 
 
 240
 
 HIGH WINDS 
 
 Laura and Beatrice out of the transcript or stop 
 the cry for the " lost Lenore," you may go back 
 to the Bassarids of the birch grove and feel that 
 you are androgynous. 
 
 Pardon this tangent ; the Doctor had only been 
 gone a week, and I could not help thinking of 
 that great actress s advice to an inexperienced and 
 beautiful human crystal that had come to her with 
 her aspirations. " How shall I create something ? " 
 she cried. " Go and fall in love," said the actress. 
 (I believe it was Cushman.) Fancy the vestal 
 astonishment of crystal art just in its first congeal- 
 ment. " And would you give that advice to a 
 man if he had come to you ? " 
 
 " No ; men are always in love." 
 
 But with a boy for a companion, one has Eros 
 himself along, unsophisticated perhaps by the 
 Grecian myth, and therefore a delightful protection 
 from the seductive ghosts of Nature, and one s 
 stream of tendency. He does not give a passing 
 thought to the Bassarids. He is trying every 
 film of ice to see if it will hold him. He is the 
 real chipmunk amid these eerie dangers. Keep 
 close to him in the morning. 
 
 Some curiosity to know if Griselle would not 
 come over as a visitor, now that she did not have 
 to come as a handmaiden, would naturally take 
 possession of me. I would be patient and see. 
 She had professed such a deep interest in Charlie 
 that she would certainly walk over some sunny 
 morning and inquire after him. 
 
 I kept this up for a week, expecting every morn- 
 241
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 ing to see the Florentine vision breaking softly 
 in the trees. But it did not. I suspect that the 
 yellow dog, supremely indifferent to the principle 
 involved, stole off regularly and had interviews 
 with the maid. There was an air of satisfaction 
 and placid contentment about her that was suspi 
 cious, and I wondered if yellow dogs and astral 
 maids had a Volapuk of their own. I have often 
 thought since that I must write to Miss Hapgood 
 and make some inquiries about this. 
 
 However, I enjoyed the situation secretly. Gri- 
 selle was waiting for me to come first, and I was 
 determined that she should make the advance. 
 There was a soft chuckle in this, because it seemed 
 to be on the edge of flirtation, in spite of all her 
 splendid indifference. Ha, ha ! I said to myself 
 if you were a truly astral maid, you would 
 never have thought of hanging fire in this manner. 
 
 When it began to look as if my unchivalrous 
 determination had to give way, there was a great 
 hullabaloo one morning. I believe I had put on 
 a white apron and was trying to do some kind of 
 housework, when Charlie and the yellow dog and 
 the sun all broke out at once. My recollection 
 of it is that I kicked the wet white apron in a wad 
 under the book-shelves, and galloped about to get 
 my smoking-jacket and my air of indifference on, 
 and then sauntered out with a fine carelessness , 
 and there she was, coming down the woody colon 
 nade, looking very trim in a new warm walking- 
 suit, swinging a fragile dress umbrella as a 
 walking-stick, very much as if she had been on 
 
 242
 
 HIGH WINDS 
 
 Broadway, the yellow dog turning the occasion 
 into an idiotic Saturnalia, giving everything away 
 with the most unpardonable looseness of de 
 meanour. 
 
 Griselle s eyes sparkled. The blood was in her 
 cheeks. She was extra aerated by the walk, and 
 she really outshone, without knowing it, all the 
 Fiammettas and Lauras who are paged and in 
 dexed. One or two degrees more of animal frank 
 ness, and I would have danced round her like the 
 yellow dog. I strangled my exuberance and said 
 with hospitable dignity, "Good morning, Miss 
 Hotchkiss, you are quite a stranger Charlie, 
 behave yourself. Walk inside, please." 
 
 Once inside and vis a vis, we got out our foils. 
 I sat with my face a little averted, for I did not 
 care to give her the advantage of knowing that I 
 could not help admiring her in her new shape as 
 a visitor. Besides, Charlie was taking irreverent 
 liberties with her, and I did not intend to condone 
 her crafty familiarity with him. 
 
 " You see we are as comfortable as mortals can 
 be without woman s society," I said. " Will you 
 take your hat off and stay awhile ? Perhaps you 
 can stop to dinner. Charlie, take her umbrella." 
 
 She sat there like a handsome pincushion, I 
 thought, for me to stick my absurd observations 
 into, and instead of making any replies let me run 
 on to see how much of a fool I could make of 
 myself. Nothing in the world can be more ridic 
 ulous than to use foils with a pincushion. 
 
 " I came over/ she said, " to bring you this 
 
 243
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 letter. It came last night. Mr. Minnerly brought 
 it up with the empty barrels. I thought it might 
 be important." 
 
 As she leaned over to give me the letter, which 
 I saw was from the Doctor, I wondered if it was 
 necessary for her to put on those six-button gloves 
 and that exquisite little French boot to bring the 
 letter to me. But she went on quite matter-of- 
 fact like, "A week from next Thursday is Thanks 
 giving, and Gabe thought maybe you would like 
 to eat dinner at the house." 
 
 I was about to thank her, when I caught that 
 look in the corner of her eye. I must have stared 
 instead, as if Shakspere s Beatrice had arrived. 
 The very words danced before my eyes. " I took 
 no more pains for those thanks than you take 
 pains to thank me. If it had been painful, I 
 would not have come." 
 
 " Gabe thought so, did he ? " I said, beating a 
 kind of mental retreat. " Well, I guess Charlie 
 and I will rough it out together on canned turkey 
 and bottled cranberries, eh, Charlie ? " 
 
 I began to think I was the only one with a foil, 
 and that I was brandishing it rather absurdly. 
 " Of course," I said, " it would be pleasanter for 
 you if you had some company on Thanksgiving 
 Day." She must have read underneath my man 
 ner that it only needed the faintest of invitations 
 for me to rush headlong to the homestead, but I 
 was determined not to go without it. I was master 
 of the situation, and intended to be as obdurately 
 cruel as the circumstances would warrant. 
 
 244
 
 HIGH WINDS 
 
 If she understood this, she did not betray it. 
 " We shall not be without company," she said. 
 " The Doctor is sending us a young gentleman 
 boarder." 
 
 I got up, tore open the Doctor s letter, and 
 read it. 
 
 " I am sending up another invalid to the home 
 stead. I have given him a letter to you. He 
 will amuse you, and perhaps convince you that a 
 man can be a bigger d fool than you are, with 
 his health, and that ought to comfort you. He 
 is only twenty-eight or thirty, but he has burst 
 his hoops with too much life. Cultivate him. 
 He will serve as a guide-post. He is good-look 
 ing, infernally clever, and trying to be, like your 
 self, tardily penitent." 
 
 I held the letter in my hand and looked at 
 Griselle. She was bent over, purring against 
 Charlie. 
 
 " Has the gentleman from the city arrived ? " 
 
 " No. He is coming this morning." 
 
 " I beg your pardon," I said, "of course Gabe 
 thought it would be awkward for him on Thanks 
 giving Day not to have a city person to talk to. 
 I ought to have been more considerate of Gabe." 
 
 " I don t believe Gabe ever thought of that," 
 said Griselle, " and I m sure that he would not like 
 to interfere with your and Charlie s roughing it." 
 
 She said this with a bland, open eye, the corner 
 of which twinkled. 
 
 " Nevertheless," I said, " as I am under obliga 
 tions to Gabe, and he sent you over " 
 
 245
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 "But he didn t send me over. I thought your 
 letter might be important. Is it ? " 
 
 Here the twinkle spread all over her eye. 
 
 "Yes very important, quite urgent, Miss 
 Hotchkiss," I said, " I will go over immediately 
 and see your uncle. Are you going back that 
 
 3 
 
 way r 
 
 All she said was, " Oh, dear, is it as important 
 as that ? " 
 
 But her eye discoursed, and as I walked over 
 to the window, she added : " Perhaps you will not 
 feel like giving thanks. Some people don t." 
 
 " The only way to determine that," I said, " is 
 to go over at once." 
 
 It was one of those clear, crisp November 
 mornings that make all the sluggish corpuscles 
 leap. I could feel the pressure of the blood in 
 my finger-tips. Such a morning is both a sur 
 prise and a suspense. It is like those circum 
 stances in life which come with a flashing sharpness 
 of peril, and touch all the senses with a new appre 
 hension. We see clearly for a moment through 
 awakening crises. There was an insistent and 
 uncertain west wind blowing. My nerves shrank 
 a little at first, as if there were peril in it. But it 
 blew all that out of me, and I presently felt that 
 this preluding of the cold was another revel. 
 The blasts came like Gargantuan gusts of laugh 
 ter, and made Griselle hold her hat on with both 
 hands, and it wrapped her frock about her with a 
 satyr s rudeness and a sculptor s skill. But she 
 only laughed, as if heaven were romping with 
 
 246
 
 HIGH WINDS 
 
 her ; and I admired with unspeakable wonder the 
 streaming and fluttering arabesques with which 
 she answered to the wind, blow for blow, grace 
 against rudeness, converting the jolly old beast 
 into a willing artist, as if beauty after all had more 
 resisting power than strength. The fact is, beauty 
 was better acquainted with the marauder than I 
 was. Her resiliency gave way to his bluster, 
 while I planted my feet wide apart and braced 
 myself against him, making him howl with deri 
 sion at my Ajax defiance. It was a field-day with 
 the elements, and they were playing a lusty game 
 of atmospheric bowls, in which the robust natures 
 joined; and I have to confess that I for the first 
 time was taught so to regard it by the dog, the 
 boy, and the maiden, each one of them coming 
 into the wrestle with a responsive exultation that 
 was new to me. 
 
 When we reached the brow of the hill where 
 there was a fringe of leafless timber, we stood 
 awhile to see an entirely new sport that I had 
 never dreamed of. It was the collie winds shep 
 herding the dead leaves. Whew, with what mad 
 sportiveness they went at it ! Along the edge 
 of the timber the whole flock had been herded in 
 an enormous bank, and there they leapt and 
 danced with restless mischief, in an invisible pen, 
 every one of them quivering with a desire to 
 escape, and the dogs of the air baying at them 
 with shrill delight, and racing after them as they 
 broke loose and went streaming out like a flight 
 of birds, and rising in riotous swirls, to round them 
 
 247
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 all up and land them back again pantingly for a 
 fresh dash. 
 
 Into this charivari the dog threw herself with 
 what to us was reckless spontaneity. The wind 
 blew her sideways, as she tried to obey the pack 
 above, bent down her tiller, so that she could not 
 make short turns, but she kept pace somehow 
 with the cohorts, sometimes lost entirely to view ; 
 and coming back along the home stretch to dis 
 appear utterly in the great bank, where we heard 
 her muffled barking, and occasionally saw her 
 tail sticking out and working like a semaphore. 
 While we stood there, not more than half a 
 score of the million leaves got away into utter 
 freedom, and it was absurd to see how little 
 they knew what to do with their freedom when 
 they obtained it. The silly things tried to roost 
 in the trees, as they had seen the birds do, 
 and the sullen old limbs shook them off and 
 seemed to say to them, " Oh, be quiet ; when 
 you have seen as much of this as I have, you will 
 not get into such a twitter over it." I had seen 
 the same thing among human beings who were all 
 rounded up the same way by invisible forces ; but, 
 of course, it did not occur to me then that it 
 would have made a good Addisonian article for 
 the Spectator. 
 
 As we came over the crest into the wood, the 
 revel went on above us. We could see the tops 
 of the oaks and chestnuts over our heads bending 
 and swaying and writhing, and here and there a 
 stray leaf was swirling away high up in solitary 
 
 248
 
 HIGH WINDS 
 
 freedom. We had come out of the game into 
 gray peace with " sunny spots of greenery," where 
 the moss was still lush, and Griselle sat down on 
 the root of a beech tree, and smilingly pretended 
 to adjust the awryness of Charlie s hair and apparel ; 
 but as she kept him in front of her, I suspected 
 that she wished to adjust herself, so I walked in 
 another direction, and bawled out a stave of 
 " The Brave Old Oak," one of Charlie s favourite 
 songs, while he, with the example of the wind 
 still before him, tried to get her to bowl after him 
 as if he were a leaf. 
 
 Give any man of my age trees enough, I care 
 not what the season may be, and in half an hour 
 he will create a Rosalind to fit them, and if he has 
 a jack-knife, he will carve her name in the bark. 
 I suppose Nature is always trying to be Shak- 
 sperian, even in her sly moments ; certainly it 
 looks like it to a man of sensibility, and it is in 
 her interludes that she approaches nearest to her 
 human master. Always he stepped out of the 
 gusts of human passion to lilt. You feel his 
 muscles relax and his wing unfold. It is when 
 his muse pushes the playwright aside and touches 
 the strings herself that you listen hushed. The 
 gusts go by overhead, and he stops before Dun 
 can s castle to pay a tribute to* the " temple- 
 haunting martlet," or drags Hamlet out of his 
 whirlwind to the window to eulogize the "brave 
 o erhanging firmament." 
 
 De Quincey spent a great deal of analytic 
 talent upon the interruption of "the knocking at 
 
 249
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 the gate " in Macbeth, as if it were unique. But 
 there is not a tragedy of Shakspere s in which the 
 winds do not hold their breath while he taps on 
 the windows of your soul. These little interludes 
 " have nothing to do with the case " in a dramatic 
 sense. They are the divine irrelevance of Na 
 ture herself who moves by surprises and not by 
 precedent. 
 
 My Daphne would not have been so vivid if 
 she had not come out of the gusts. She sat there 
 against the grays and the browns of the despoiled 
 wood, making an interlude that must have gone 
 racing off like those leaves into my recollections 
 forever. With the Shaksperian mood upon me, 
 I felt for my knife. I would carve her name in 
 the tree. What prettier entablature of the event ! 
 To my astonishment the tree already bore scores 
 of names when I came to look at it. Was she 
 then the actress Rosalind, who sat regularly under 
 this tree for all the actors who came along? In a 
 twinkling she dispelled that doubt by saying, 
 "Why, it s a beech tree, and men come under it 
 in a thunderstorm and wait, because a beech tree 
 is never struck by lightning, and they always cut 
 their names in it, I suppose." 
 
 These November winds have a large winnow 
 ing benignity. - They come with their brooms 
 and clean house bravely. All the exhalations of 
 the dead summer and all the off-cast clothing of 
 the autumn are swept away. They hunt out the 
 miasma, and descend like the Sabines on the hid 
 ing fogs. Away, all of you, begone ! The earth 
 
 250
 
 HIGH WINDS 
 
 must be tidied up. They stir the waters, blowing 
 oxygen into stagnant lagoons, turning over the 
 tepid ponds, and shouting to the lazy runlets, if 
 we can believe Lanier, 
 
 Run home, little streams. 
 With your laps full of stars 
 And of dreams." 
 
 They are clarion winds, and they start the 
 trumpets in you, if you have any. But they are 
 not only frolicsome, trumpeting, housecleaning 
 they are supervising, regulating, policing, sanitary 
 winds. They go through the woods with mighty 
 scalpels. They tap on the oak to hear if the heart 
 is sound. They cut away his dead branches ruth 
 lessly, and bring down the bare pinnacle on the 
 elm with a crash ; they hate dry superfluities ; 
 they try every trunk and inquire about its roots ; 
 they skylark like Goths with the young poplars 
 and birches, and if they find one careless and 
 giddy, with little underpinning, ah me, they 
 stretch her lengthwise sprawling and go galavant- 
 ing off for others. 
 
 I wonder if some of those earlier confreres of 
 mine who were wont to sit about the Parisian 
 Parnassus in lofty garrets, and who wrote starry 
 poems about Nature in the late and reeking hours 
 amid clouds of tobacco smoke, and with black 
 coffee for the muse or perhaps it was absinthe 
 I wonder if the November winds would not 
 blow the celestial fire out of them on top of that 
 
 251
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 crest. I cannot quite think that their flickering 
 flame would survive the contact with Nature in 
 this mood. But, mayhap, it would be the other 
 way, and blow only the fetid and morbid fancies 
 out of them. As I am not equal to the psychic 
 problem, I might as well dismiss it. 
 
 This thought was, however, an odd premonition ; 
 for when we reached Gabe Hotchkiss s big porch, 
 a glowing group, there was the new guest walking 
 up and down on the sheltered side in a light fall 
 overcoat, with the collar turned up. He appeared 
 fragile, pale, and pinched. He wore a little crush 
 hat and a monocle, and the hat was pulled down 
 over his head to keep the wind from blowing it 
 away. His hands were thrust deep in the side 
 pockets of his coat to keep them warm. He was 
 obviously blue with the largeness and atmospheric 
 looseness of the place. He recalled in an instant 
 the geniuses I had been gloating over. I said to 
 myself, with prompt resentment . <r What wind, I 
 wonder, blew him hither. He must have the 
 consumption. I ll take him round on the windy 
 side of the porch and buttonhole him there ; that 
 will finish him." 
 
 After we had exchanged preliminaries, and he 
 had handed me the Doctor s letter, we looked 
 each other in the face and became absurdly 
 sententious. 
 
 " Heart disease ? " he inquired. 
 
 " Yes ; and you - 
 
 " Hyperasmia of the brain. I thought this was 
 a water cureo" 
 
 252
 
 HIGH WINDS 
 
 u No. Air cure. Come round on the other 
 side." 
 
 " Who s the young lady ? " 
 
 " Hostess, daughter, maid, Daphne, anything 
 you like." 
 
 " Not at all bad looking." 
 
 " Not at all, for a rustic." 
 
 " Understand you are roughing it over in the 
 woods." 
 
 " Yes trying to get all there is out of it." 
 
 " How much have you got ? " 
 
 " Doctor says forty-five years." 
 
 " Good Heavens, you don t expect to live that 
 long! What for?" 
 
 " To get all there is out of it." 
 
 " You must be of German extraction." 
 
 " Probably." 
 
 " Perhaps there s something in it worth getting 
 out that I haven t heard of." 
 
 " Very likely." 
 
 " Picked the idea up in the woods, perhaps ? 
 Let s get out of this infernal wind." 
 
 " It will go down in a minute. Observe the 
 view." 
 
 " Pardon me. You observe it. I ll get round 
 where there s less of it." 
 
 I saw him turn the corner of the porch as if 
 he were pushed from behind, and for a moment 
 he reminded me of the yellow dog. But I kept 
 after him relentlessly. He sat down in one of the 
 heavy rockers, and just as I was expecting to see 
 him cough, Griselle appeared with a rug. 
 
 253
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 " You ll find the air here much sharper than in 
 the city," she said to the young man, and then 
 actually tucked him in before my very eyes. I 
 walked away. As she came toward me, I said 
 between my teeth : " What did you do that for ? 
 He would have had the pneumonia in another 
 half hour." 
 
 " How mean you can pretend to be," she said, 
 " and there isn t the smallest excuse for it, as you 
 ought to know." 
 
 " Isn t there ? " I gasped. 
 
 But she had given herself that fringed-gentian 
 twist, that I have already tried to describe, and 
 was gone. She seemed to disappear through the 
 kitchen door as if pursued by her own indiscretion. 
 
 Sometimes it seemed to me that Griselle blew 
 through one like those winds, and set all the 
 fancies scurrying. "No excuse for being mean," 
 I repeated. But being Shaksperian that morning 
 at the rate of thirty miles an hour, I must reason 
 like Benedick, " That is to say, you are jealous, 
 and need not be." 
 
 "My dear fellow," I said to the guest, "if I 
 were you I wouldn t expose myself to this wind 
 unless you are exercising." 
 
 " Oh, I like it," he remarked. " Don t let me 
 detain you if you are chilly This isn t a circum 
 stance to the North Seas, and I ve often sat on 
 deck there when it was blowing what the sailors 
 call great guns. It presents the happy illusion 
 of something going on." 
 
 " I cannot imagine why the Doctor should 
 
 254
 
 HIGH WINDS 
 
 select such a place as this for hypertemia," I re 
 marked. " To a man accustomed to the intensi 
 ties, that is, the activities of life, it must wear 
 some of the aspects of death." 
 
 " I think," he replied, " that the Doctor referred 
 to you as a remarkable example of the revivifying 
 effects, and I was to follow in your footsteps." 
 
 "How fantastic! Mine was a case of heart; 
 yours is a case of head. Imagine if you can the 
 head following in the footsteps of the heart in our 
 days. The Doctor must have relapsed into the 
 M iddle Ages." 
 
 " Not at all. I suppose the modern practice 
 follows Nature and tries to divert a disease from 
 one overworked organ to another that is not over 
 worked, in which case the Doctor may have meant 
 to relieve my brain by affecting my heart. In 
 your case, the process may have been reversed, 
 and in order to relieve your heart he may have 
 affected your brain." 
 
 That was my introduction to the clever young 
 guest. There was some danger of my getting to 
 like him after all, for he was not such a dead calm 
 as he looked. 
 
 255
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 INDIAN SUMMER 
 
 THERE are some laggard days in November 
 that have been left behind by the autumnal 
 procession. They are wayward, dilatory, 
 irrelevant days, and come in the rear of the re 
 treating season, like indolent nymphs that, dressed 
 for the nuptials, only arrived for the funeral, and 
 could not abandon their voluptuous moods. They 
 wear their bridal veils, and look at us reminiscently 
 through clouds of mist. These beautiful, dreamy 
 days appear to have been thrown off somewhere 
 like fragments by the revolving August, and they 
 come along like the Leonids, and as softly disap 
 pear. We call them the Indian summer. 
 
 Sometimes, when there is a group of them hand 
 in hand, they re-create for us in a brief way and 
 vaporously the delights of the early fall, as if the 
 atmosphere had a memory and could, like our 
 selves, summon lost hours. They blow zephyr- 
 ously from the west and south; bring masquerading 
 
 256
 
 INDIAN SUMMER 
 
 showers, amateurish, with mimetic flashes and imi 
 tative peals, that remind you of the children play 
 ing at Shaksperian declamation. 
 
 It is interesting to observe how these calendar 
 sirens beguile animate and inanimate things, here 
 and there. Always there will be a robin or two that 
 make their appearance, and try to get up a nidify 
 ing twitter. They are the unconventional fellows 
 that probably laughed to scorn the absurd migratory 
 instincts of the common flock, and rejected all the 
 worn-out traditions of winter and the illusions of 
 another and warmer clime. Fine, rationalistic 
 birds these, that are not moved by vague intui 
 tions, but wait for the evidence of the senses, and 
 a great deal of exultant, self-satisfied peeping and 
 " chortling " they do when this mirage of the 
 Indian summer hangs in the air. 
 
 There are similarly disposed peach and apple 
 trees scattered about, that show independence of 
 tradition in their own way. They break out in 
 blossom in November, and do their best to load 
 the air with a spring perfume. They probably 
 think (there is no other word but " think " for me 
 to use when speaking of a tree s volitions) that 
 the curious observers are admiring their indepen 
 dence, and never for a moment suspect that those 
 observers are regarding; them as "freaks." Charlie 
 
 o o 
 
 says he saw a woodchuck sitting on his haunches 
 under an apple tree, with a winter apple in his 
 paws, eating it, kangaroo fashion, in this sympa 
 thetic sunshine, instead of attending to his ordained 
 hibernating business ; and as I sat at my table, the 
 
 257
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 warm ray stirred some flies and wasps out of ob 
 scurity into crawling and buzzing impertinence. 
 
 For all I know, Nature may be a humourist 
 and have her Mark Twain moods. I dislike, 
 however, to think of her as a practical joker. It 
 invites the suspicion that one has been reading 
 Heine, and taken him seriously. And yet, when 
 Nature wrung the neck of the robin she had be 
 guiled, and ravaged the peach tree ruthlessly, scat 
 tering its confident blossoms and freezing its 
 misplaced sap with sardonic sport, I thought I 
 detected an Aristophanic laugh. 
 
 Nature, I am forced to confess, is no laughing 
 matter to the man who dares to consider. (To 
 considerate is to look to the stars. To desiderate 
 is to want the earth.) I have a haunting recollec 
 tion that Goethe somewhere says that the severity 
 of Nature is an exact counterpart of the severity 
 of the Jewish Jehovah. But, whether he meant 
 that the Jews got their God out of the terrors of 
 the universe, or meant only that physical facts 
 corroborate what the Jews held to be revelation 
 I do not at this moment know. But this I know. 
 It will not do to come to the measurement of the 
 great scheme with one s sensibilities only. There 
 are some vast chasms in the universe, for which 
 our nerves have no plummets. They swim with 
 ignes fatui that oppress a Heine, but that, to the 
 brave vision of a Martineau or a Pressense^ open 
 like the milky way, and disclose worlds. 
 
 As a rule, a man does not look askance at his 
 sensibilities till he passes his fortieth year, and then 
 
 258
 
 INDIAN SUMMER 
 
 he begins to perceive that he has Indian summers 
 in his bones, and does not quite know if he at 
 times be not separated from his season. These 
 lassitudes of maturity, when a man parts his hair 
 in the middle, but exposes the frost on his temples, 
 and mistakes the harking back of the senses for a 
 new season, are his Indian summers. He ought 
 to be very wary of them. His imagination is very 
 apt to break out in blossom, and his recollections 
 twitter and peep, as if winter were a myth or a 
 mere creed. You see that intimacy with outdoors 
 has its introspections and suspicions. Even a 
 hysterical peach tree sets you pondering. Given 
 a few pulses of the convalescence that abides in 
 the external world, and I do not see how a man in 
 a hut can help becoming more or less of a Thoreau 
 or a Montaigne not that they are at all alike, 
 for dear old Montaigne always reminds me of a 
 large cup of English breakfast tea, in which milk 
 and water make copiousness take the hue of 
 stimulation. 
 
 Nevertheless, there was the amber day, calling 
 with an imitative croon, very much like a dowager 
 trying a lullaby. One must dance like a cobra to 
 these zithers, whether he will or not. Charlie and 
 I set out for one of those indeterminable rambles 
 which were always deliciously like reading Henry 
 James, for they led nowhere, but enticed us with 
 the suave glory of going. 
 
 The atmosphere was like a great piece of copal, 
 its brilliancy slightly thickened to a slumberous 
 translucence ; that kind of voluptuousness that 
 
 259
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 you have felt but not seen in Stamboul coming 
 through aggravating veils. The air was like chil 
 dren s kisses and as sweetly cogent as a mother s 
 prayer is to an infant that does not understand 
 one word of it. There was a tantalizing humid 
 balm in it that suggested rainbows. Some invo 
 lutions of smoke over distant fields, where the 
 brush was burning, refused to leave the earth and 
 hung in vaporous flirtation about the figurante 
 hills. A few far-off crows, low down, swam like 
 motes in our eyes, and where the western horizon 
 rounded itself in a curved sky-line against a 
 specially deep gap of distance, there was a re 
 flected light as if from a hidden sea. I felt sure 
 the waves were curling there on sandy beaches, 
 and be hanged to the geography. I said to 
 myself: 
 
 "Though inland far we be, 
 
 Our souls have sight of that immortal sea." 
 
 Immediately, Heine somewhere in me whis 
 pered that Wordsworth was sure to come across 
 the disk of one s mood at such times, like these 
 crows. An assertion that somebody else in me 
 who it was I do not know promptly resented, 
 because the crows do not fly high enough 
 
 " To see the children sporting on the shore 
 And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." 
 
 Charlie broke in on this reflection with his 
 usual irrelevancy. " It is just like Sunday," 
 
 260
 
 INDIAN SUMMER 
 
 he said. I called his attention to the tinkle of 
 the blacksmith s anvil in the far-away village. 
 It came on the pulses of the south wind, an 
 infinitesimal point of sound, rhythmic and elfin- 
 like. "The world is hard at it, my boy," I re 
 plied, " but it is Sunday with outdoors. I guess 
 the sky is at its prayers." That seemed to him 
 to have an element of exaggeration rather than 
 of poetry in it, for he took on an incredulous 
 smile and said, " Oh, I don t believe the sky has 
 to pray like we do." And standing corrected, 
 what could I do but say : " Right you are, Com 
 rade, it doesn t have to That s just it." 
 
 I wondered to myself how it would do to have 
 Charlie annotate Heine for private use. What 
 jolly footnotes, with dispelling laughs in them, 
 and jocund but shattering shouts of young faith. 
 Such an edition of Heine, you will say, would 
 remind you of the old tombs that were garnished 
 with meaningless cherubs. But why not say, 
 rather, the old tombs that had Rosicrucian tapers 
 set round them, that did not go out ? 
 
 The hours on such mornings are noiseless. 
 The unctuous sunshine seems to lubricate time 
 itself, and the diurnal machinery makes no sound. 
 The ongoing nymphs are softly sandalled. Now 
 and then one trips in the dead leaves, and you 
 hear a sly stir, as if she had swept her drapery 
 up, but you see nothing, and if you listen for a 
 footfall only the low breathing of the drowsy 
 earth and a cricket here and there ticking the 
 transitions. 
 
 261
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 Neither the boy nor the yellow dog could 
 understand why I should sit down and moon 
 over this. One of them had a neighbouring 
 butternut tree in his eye, and could not for the 
 life of him see why we should stop and keep still, 
 when one could throw sticks and stones into the 
 trees at the crows nests, and run his hands dili 
 gently under the dead leaves for the butternuts. 
 The other member of the group stood with her 
 tail slightly curled and vibratory with expectation, 
 and one paw held up tentatively, as if this idle 
 suspense could not last much longer. Both of 
 them had more resisting power than I had. At 
 all events, they were not burdened with simili 
 tudes, and as a consequence could radiate the 
 influences instead of absorbing them as I did, 
 and rolling them over under their tongues. To 
 them the conditions were sufficient unto them 
 selves. To me they were inadequate, like a 
 wandering melody that does not reach the key 
 note. Then it was that Griselle appeared, com 
 ing over the rustic field, glinting between the 
 cedars, now lost behind the clumps, and now 
 fluttering out nearer on, her courier gladness 
 coming ahead of her, and waking yaps and 
 yahoos and giving even me a rising pulse. 
 Charlie and the dog took it as part of the 
 morning s happenings, while I, miserable culprit 
 that I am, knew that she would come that way. 
 
 Some years have gone by since that Indian 
 summer morning, but I am unable to say, after 
 all that has intervened, that I should have been 
 
 262
 
 INDIAN SUMMER 
 
 ashamed of myself. You see that the man trained 
 to study, and if possible to " do," the other fel 
 low, is baffled when he comes to take a hand at 
 doing himself. The other fellow presents the 
 advantage of always being in the singular, whereas 
 there are two or three of yourselves that take you 
 in relays. But, to tell the truth, I do not know 
 that there was any moral aspect of the case pre 
 sented to the group of me. I probably ambled 
 collectively very much like the yellow dog. As 
 I bring back the circumstances in all their dreamy 
 cajolement, I appear to have given way to the 
 evanescent enchantment more like an instinctive 
 goat than a composite and calculating fellow. To 
 be able to feel again at forty-four that elation of 
 the senses which belongs to youth ; to believe 
 once more that everything comes your way be 
 cause you want it, and to spin all the realities 
 that swim before you into ideal tissues, this is 
 to become intoxicated with one s own blood, and 
 once you begin to reel with that old ichor of the 
 gods, you no longer are able to see that you are 
 in one world, and the deceptive circumstances in 
 another. 
 
 The boy and the dog ran to meet Griselle as 
 if even they had an intuition that she completed 
 the tune that the morning was trying to sing, and 
 they danced round her with what, centuries ago, 
 was called a " glad noise." She stood a moment 
 with her dress lifted and her head up, accepting 
 the fantastic homage as a matter of course, but 
 trying to look astonished that she should have 
 
 263
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 encountered us. Where she was going, or why 
 she should be going at that particular hour, I 
 do not to this day know. When these things 
 are arranged for us by a benign morning, why 
 ask questions ? My impression at the time was 
 that the hour could no more help flowering into 
 Griselle than a turn of the earth can help bringing 
 the sunrise ; and after that, anything was possible. 
 If the birches tried to make triumphal arches for 
 her as she passed under, and the dotard oaks 
 pulled the few leaves they had left over their bald 
 heads as she leaned against their trunks, it was 
 all as probable and natural as anything can be in 
 a dream. I was not even surprised when, as she 
 was looking for sweet-flag along the edge of a 
 marsh, the vapours, in league with the sun, tried 
 to make halos and spin them round her jaunty 
 Scotch cap. I accepted the girl implicitly as part 
 of the wise en scene, but as one in dreams often 
 has a lurking suspicion that it is a dream, I found 
 myself at times saying, " Go slow, old fellow, you 
 are under a spell." It would have astonished 
 her, I dare say, if she could by some necromancy 
 have seen the several of me whispering and con 
 sulting and comparing notes, like the conspirators 
 in a comic opera. I said, " Easy, easy, my 
 friend " (fancy one calling himself his friend ; this 
 is the meridian of moon madness), " she is only a 
 comely rustic ; you are spending a fortune of fan 
 cies on her. If you cannot be reasonable, at least 
 be economical." But such bleak considerations 
 fell like the butternuts and were lost in the leaves. 
 
 264
 
 INDIAN SUMMER 
 
 There was an echo somewhere in the woods, 
 and we rang all the changes on it. I shouted 
 " Griselle " at the top of my voice, to hear the 
 taunt come back " sell, sell." But even that 
 monitory sibyl did not move me. Wrought upon 
 by the Indian incantation, I refused to reflect 
 and only exulted. 
 
 It must be a very white magic that can so 
 whelm a man and make the various trivialities of 
 a day s vagabondage take on such hues and melt 
 so sunningly into illusions. I called her Griselle 
 with an easy zest, as if my mouth were a new 
 beaker, and the word had new bubbles on its 
 brim. It is interesting to watch a young tender 
 ness begin to walk, especially if it has been creep 
 ing around for months in the dark. 
 
 She came and sat down beside me, flushing 
 and radiant, on a buttonball trunk that the light 
 ning had felled during the summer, and the wounds 
 of which had been covered by a Samaritan creeper. 
 She was not a foot away from me. I had felt her 
 fan the warm odorous air, loaded with the burnt 
 incense of the leaves, as she came toward me, and 
 yet I was suddenly conscious of some kind of 
 chasm between us that no words I could think 
 of would bridge. In the first place, these lan 
 guorous episodes have no vocabulary only 
 barks, and yaps, and peeps. I think the Indian 
 summer would have us sit mute and breathe hard. 
 It certainly does its best, when you pass the ves 
 tibule, to inebriate you with strange distillations. 
 I have tasted the calamus across several years. 
 
 265
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 " It is a beautiful and dreamy day," I said 
 platitudinously enough. "But it cannot be half 
 so beautiful to you, who are familiar with Nature, 
 as to me. I have been in a sort of Oriental swoon 
 ever since I came out." 
 
 "It s a weather-breeder, according to Uncle 
 Gabe," said Daphne, with her two hands at the 
 back of her hair. 
 
 " It reminds me of a day I spent at Capri, and 
 ate raspberries and white figs, and drank wine 
 that smelled of violets. It is a magical isle; one 
 can never get it out of his memory." 
 
 "And this Indian summer reminds you of it, 
 you say ? " 
 
 " Why, yes. I met a beautiful woman there." 
 
 " And she died, didn t she ? " 
 
 "No she s alive yet. I met her in my 
 fancy." 
 
 " Oh. Gabe says there s a nor easter coming to 
 fill up the ponds. I guess this is the last of the 
 pleasant days." 
 
 " I hope not," I said. " Only the last of the 
 Indian summer. After all, the weather has very 
 little to do with one s feelings." 
 
 And then there came a soft sigh from the marsh, 
 with the floss of the cattails spinning in it, and it 
 seemed to say to me, reproachfully, " What a liar 
 you are." 
 
 266
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 TRAILING JUNIPER 
 
 WHATEVER may be the case with youth, 
 I am satisfied in my own mind that the 
 mature man does not "fall in love." 
 You might as well speak of falling in gambling 
 or in gluttony. He glides in with both feet over 
 a long grade whether it is up or down, you 
 shall say. Very absurd it is to a man of large 
 experience to speak of love as a precipice over 
 which he is liable to tumble inadvertently in the 
 twinkling of an eye, and with all respect to the 
 Montagues and Capulets whose " ill-advised af 
 fair " had to conform with precipitancy to the three 
 hours limitation of the stage, I think the ordi 
 nary man of the world wades in with much lin 
 gering deliberation, and in nine cases out of ten 
 doesn t know that he is in until he is up to his 
 ears. 
 
 There would be no excuse for my dwelling upon 
 it if the experience had not been, so far as I could 
 
 267
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 judge, a part of the change which the Doctor 
 called " renewing one s infancy," and which was 
 attributable to my life for several months in the 
 wilderness. I shall therefore be pardoned, I hope, 
 for telling of my slipping into a condition of 
 amorous sentimentality when I insist that it was 
 altogether the result of a cleared vision. Unques 
 tionably, I saw some things which I had never 
 seen before, or if I had seen them, they were so 
 indistinct that I gave no heed to them, and this 
 consciousness of a rectified vision needs some 
 explanation. 
 
 When I was a lad I had a grandmother, one of 
 those dear, lovable old women of another epoch, 
 who managed to make some deep impressions upon 
 ductile minds, that were never outgrown, and 
 which were very often impressions that should not 
 have been made. One of her favourite phrases 
 directed to me when my boy s heedlessness became 
 very obvious was, " Ah, my boy, the scales will 
 fall from your eyes some day." I was accustomed 
 to hear that admonitory speech from the nursery 
 to the school days. It was always said with a 
 tender finality that barred all further speech. It 
 bothered me a good deal, as I began to think. 
 The only scales that my limited experience had 
 made me acquainted with were fish-scales, and I 
 could not, do my best, adjust the metaphor, if it 
 was one, to the physical facts. I often wondered 
 in my crib if men had invisible fish-scales growing 
 over their eyes, which at some crisis dropped off. 
 Then, as I grew older, and read the phrase in the 
 
 268
 
 TRAILING JUNIPER 
 
 Bible, so explicitly given, " There fell from his 
 eyes, as it had been, scales," instead of its being a 
 strong Oriental way of stating a mental change, it 
 took hold of me as a mysterious supernatural and 
 physical occurrence, that was specially awful, and 
 to my youthful mind specially cruel. In the first 
 questioning stages of my growth, I wanted to 
 know why a man should be blind so that he could 
 not see the error of his way until he had traversed 
 a long route. This after-problem bothered me 
 for years in a metaphysical way, as the earlier prob 
 lem had bothered me with its physics. But as I 
 went out into the world with a lively retina that 
 had all it could do to register the impressions that 
 crowded upon it, I passed the puzzle over to a 
 spiritual domain, as not being exigent or explica 
 ble on business principles. Still, as I have said, 
 these early impressions, once made, pop up unex 
 pectedly at odd times all through a man s life, as 
 he encounters new experiences and learns sooner 
 or later that his vision varies with his conditions 
 and moods. 
 
 These quick and passing perceptions of an 
 equable truth, lying just beyond our ordinary 
 range of vision, are little apocalyptic glimpses that 
 come to all men at times in varying degrees of 
 vividness, so that I am not assuming any special 
 faculty. It is as if a veil parts, and the eternal 
 real is lying there with a strangely familiar majesty 
 and calm. One could almost say that at such 
 times our cognitions smite, or at least that we only 
 come to the apprehension of the truth per saltum^ 
 
 269
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 and without volition, paradoxical as that may 
 sound. 
 
 When the spiteful and spitting snow gusts came, 
 and an incisive northeast chilliness presaged Christ 
 mas glows, I sat before my log fire wondering 
 again if the scales had fallen from my eyes. In 
 the elf light of my wood blaze, with a great black 
 tea-kettle on our crane, singing and tinkling its 
 lid, I could almost fancy that my old grandmother 
 was somewhere near, smoothing down her apron 
 and saying, " Yes, I told you the scales would fall 
 from your eyes some day." 
 
 Unquestionably I was looking at things and 
 not only things, but thoughts with a simpler 
 vision. Most of the disturbing elements of my 
 life had been left behind. The emotions, as dis 
 tinct from the feelings, were less insurgent, and 
 did not ruffle my judgment so obstreperously. I 
 looked out at the first snow with a reflective equa 
 nimity. It was, in a sense, a hysterical preludium 
 of winter, as if the prentice season were flirting 
 with us, giving us fierce dashes of flakes that 
 drove with a blinding bravado, and then vanished 
 weakly. Some kind of over-effort to snow, and 
 not quite able to accomplish it, very characteristic, 
 Gabe said, of the modern winters, that lack the 
 gravity and steady, business-like effectiveness of 
 the old-fashioned whelming snow-storm. Gabe 
 evidently thought that the elements, like human 
 society, had grown strenuous and discursive, and 
 lacked prosaic continuity of purpose. " There 
 will be a great hue and cry of snow," said Gabe, 
 
 270
 
 TRAILING JUNIPER 
 
 " but it won t amount to much but wind. Why, 
 I remember when we were snowed in regularly 
 about this time o year, and it was generally a 
 week or more before we got the roads open through 
 the drifts. We allers looked for it as a winter s 
 holiday. Snow for Christmas was the reg lar 
 thing. Them was the times when this was a grass 
 country, and pasture-lands kind o took care of 
 themselves." 
 
 What was it made me contemplate these homely 
 affairs with a complacency that was well, what 
 was it enervating or inspiring ? I do not exactly 
 know. But I was certainly at rest with myself, 
 if not absolutely at peace. Something assured me 
 that I had taken up a broken link and riveted it ; 
 and believe me, there is no achievement in this 
 life so profoundly satisfactory as the consciousness 
 of having retrieved something of being able to 
 stand with both feet in the inevitable and say, " No 
 longer canst thou crush me, O ocean of the Great 
 Necessity, for I too, with my will, am one with 
 you." Then I would look at the round intent 
 face of the child who was my companion. He 
 would be eagerly poring over the books the Doctor 
 had sent him, and as I stretched invisible arms 
 across the table and enfolded him, without his 
 knowing it, I thought with a deep wondering 
 horror that a few months ago there was a great 
 gulf between us, and I with a drawn face and 
 blood-shot eyes was plunging with short breaths 
 and heavily burdened heart amid a sordid mob. 
 Scales on my eyes, forsooth. I must have been 
 
 271
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 covered with them like a prehistoric dragon. It 
 seemed to me now, in the serene flare of our 
 wood fire, that in those rabid days I had lit the 
 torch of life at both ends, and was flourishing it 
 madly like a firebrand, while this little shrine was 
 left somewhere to die slowly out in darkness. At 
 such moments Charlie would look up from his 
 book with a passing wonder in his clear blue 
 eyes, as if he had felt the invisible arms touch 
 ing him. 
 
 When a man comes to this condition, it is 
 absolutely necessary that he should tell it to some 
 one. To arrive in a new world and find nobody 
 in it is perilously near to wanting to go back 
 again. The only person who belonged to this 
 new world, who was an integral part of it, and 
 had never heard of any other, was Griselle. The 
 Doctor had coasted it, and thrown over some ob 
 servations that floated about in it like bottles 
 containing valuable memoranda, which I might 
 fish up as the occasion served, but as for talking 
 to the Doctor, that was out of the question, for 
 he always did the talking himself. Gabe was 
 only a statue, erected by the years, and one doesn t 
 talk to bronzes, however historic. Charlie 
 well, Charlie invariably thawed out my state 
 ments into mere intuitions for which there were 
 no words, and they trickled off into warm silences. 
 
 Not being a literary man, I did not keep a 
 private diary for other people to read, and gener 
 ally tore up my letters with a dull obliviousness 
 of future biographers. Griselle was the only 
 
 272
 
 TRAILING JUNIPER 
 
 person in this new order of equilibrium, who wore 
 a shining air of perception and invitation. Always 
 she seemed to be saying in a sly mute way : "Yes, 
 I know, you have something to say to me that 
 you haven t said, but it will keep. Wait." It 
 is true the winter had kept her out of our little 
 circle, but Gabe came over pretty regularly to us, 
 and he nearly always brought a neat little bunch 
 of her winter carnations, and there was something 
 subtle in his bringing them, as if they said in 
 spite of him, " Oh, he wouldn t have thought of 
 it don t you make any mistake." They were 
 always delicate reminders to me, at least, that the 
 woman s remembrance was fragrant. 
 
 Now, how could a mature man in my condi 
 tion help growing sentimental toward Griselle ? 
 How could I help observing what an improved 
 vision I had for trifles, as I watched all the shoots 
 of this sentimentality, as they came out in small 
 solicitudes and little jealousies ? I wondered if 
 she preserved her ineffable impartiality by putting 
 carnations every day in her new guest s chamber. 
 " I suppose," I remarked to Gabe, " that Mr. 
 Cumberland enjoys a bunch of flowers in his 
 room, for nothing takes the edge off desolation 
 like flowers." " I d know nothin bout that," 
 said Gabe, with sincere indifference. " I guess 
 the gal ain t got pinks enough this time o year 
 to hand out to everybody." Sometimes there 
 were tones in Gabe s voice, uncouth as he was, 
 that were really quite human. Three months ago, 
 I remarked to myself, she would have sent the 
 
 2 73
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 flowers to Charlie. That affectation has died a 
 natural death. 
 
 It is not possible for the mature man to obtain 
 this kind of vision without having some doubts 
 about it There were times when I told myself 
 that I had weakly given way to hallucination ; that 
 my ideal was the one-eyed person in the land of 
 the blind ; that my fancies, being starved, were 
 creating phantoms. Very interesting it was to 
 observe with what conclusive evidence I took my 
 own part against myself, and fell back on my 
 clear vision. Hallucinations be confounded. Did 
 I know comeliness when I saw it, or didn t I ? 
 Did I have to send to the city for an elite direc 
 tory ? Was I such a dolt that purity, innocence, 
 grace, and loveliness had to be stamped and au 
 thenticated before I could accept them ? What 
 was I up in the woods for if not for Nature ? A 
 nice poltroon I would be to turn up my nose at 
 her best offerings. 
 
 The shortest way out of this was to take Gris- 
 elle into my confidence. When Gabe came over 
 and laid the carnations on the table, I asked how 
 the young lady s health was. This was very much 
 like asking how Venus liked the water. But Gabe 
 only grunted out, " Oh, the gal s in pretty good 
 shape. She s out somewhere looking for Christ 
 mas greens," and he trundled out to fix up our 
 woodpile. 
 
 "Comrade," I said to Charlie, "did you hear 
 that ? Griselle is looking for Christmas greens. 
 What are we thinking about ? " 
 
 274
 
 TRAILING JUNIPER 
 
 " I know," said Charlie, " she was going over 
 to see if there wasn t some trailing juniper on the 
 rocks. I ll bet I can find her." 
 
 It was not so easy as he thought. We traversed 
 the woods, skirted one or two farms, and threw our 
 yodels against all the rocks, before we found the 
 imprint of her little foot in one of the thin snow 
 flurries under the cedars. What a fine zest that 
 gave to our search ! I could not quite make out 
 whether I felt like Orpheus or like a trapper. 
 We put the nose of the yellow dog down in the 
 footmark to give her the trail, but the exuberant 
 idiot only barked and obliterated it by rolling in it, 
 for which she was kicked. To know that Griselle 
 had passed that way like balsamic winds was 
 something. It reminded me how well she could 
 play the lost Eurydice. Once we thought we 
 heard her answering our call, and we shouted 
 and listened. A faint mellow response came on 
 the frosty air, but it turned out to be one of those 
 other illusive nymphs that take to the woods and 
 rocks and stay there. 
 
 Such a hunt only adds fuel to a man s fancies, 
 giving to the object of his search an airy unattain- 
 ableness that converts a Gretchen into a Psyche. 
 Strange transcendental possibilities there were in 
 rustic womanhood that kept her just one re 
 move beyond realization, or even comprehension. 
 Wonderful transmutations, when one s scales have 
 dropped, as if ordinary femininity, before it is 
 captured, could pass with fluctuant tenuity through 
 all the phases of Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola. 
 
 275
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 If ever you would know with a finer sense than 
 Cowper possessed, what a wealth of crystal delights 
 is in a winter s walk, you must project a hand 
 some girl ahead of you, just out of sight. Then 
 only will your imaginings feel the real spur of 
 poetry, without, perhaps, as in my case, the power 
 of utterance. You come then to the edge of a 
 great soft mystery, as if the amorous emotions 
 and the physical world somewhere had a common 
 starting-point in the serene conception of beauty. 
 I never knew before how beautiful the dead tree 
 trunks were. They shone with new colours; de 
 licious sombres of Vandyke, and soft, dull terra 
 cottas, and deep sage greens, with splashes of 
 bronze where the light burnished the boles. The 
 vistas shifted and arranged themselves in colon 
 nades and spectral avenues, through which the 
 bacchante lights danced, and along which the 
 stately cedars and hemlocks, tonsured by the snow, 
 stood in priestly gravity, chanting a new gloria. 
 Back of all this paganism of the mind there was 
 a softer association, somehow emitting a deeper 
 muffled tone of expectation, as if the minster bells 
 of Christmas were already rung by the wind, and 
 were reverberating through these cathedral aisles. 
 
 Griselle was looking for trailing juniper. What 
 trailing juniper was, I did not know. It was prob 
 ably a new order of the conifera belonging to the 
 fairy domain into which Griselle slipped so easily. 
 But the kalmia I knew. It stuck its green leaves 
 out of the snow patches unblemished and un 
 daunted. I think we called it mountain laurel 
 
 276
 
 TRAILING JUNIPER 
 
 when we were boys. I had always thought of it 
 wreathed round the head of Petrarch until now, 
 and now it crept out of the snow patches and into 
 my memory as festoons wrought by white fingers 
 for merry days and nights, and specially made to 
 throw back from its shining leaves the splendours 
 of our wood fires. We cut and hacked at it, and 
 loaded ourselves with triumphant branches, and 
 
 set out homeward, leaving the invisible Griselle, 
 
 o y 
 
 with much reluctance and many lookings back, to 
 go her way. 
 
 Can a man I mean a mature man be a 
 poet in desire without having a pure and lovely 
 form ahead of him, baffling him ? I often thought 
 afterward how fortunate it was that 1 had not come 
 suddenly upon Griselle in the winter walk with my 
 load of ideals. What stumbling foolishness might 
 
 D 
 
 I not have committed ! What wreck and ruin 
 might I not have made of the unattainable, de 
 scending in one evil moment to melodramatic 
 frenzy, rushing at her and shouting, " Be mine 
 be mine." Be sure I would have wreathed the 
 kalmia about her and danced in my own moon 
 madness like a destroying satyr. 
 
 It was much better for the ideal that she should 
 shimmer indistinctly, and that we should hang the 
 kalmia up like mistletoe in our cabin and wait. 
 There was an airy gulf to be patiently crossed. 
 
 How old was Leander when he swam the Hel 
 lespont ? I ll have to look that up. But what 
 use ? 
 
 Then the late rains set in, chilly and continuous. 
 277
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 They beat all day against our panes, blurring 
 them with running films, tapping on our shingles 
 with little bills, and sometimes reaching our wood 
 fire, which spat at them like a cat. I had, in 
 anticipation, dreaded this episode, but now that 
 it had come, the dreariness, like the other dis 
 comforts of our life, melted away before a new 
 mental attitude. 
 
 It is quite impossible for me to tell you why 
 the leaden prospect, with rain, rain, rain, falling 
 as far as the eye could reach, running down the 
 tree trunks all day, and gurgling somewhere in 
 spasmodic rivulets, should all at once present 
 some slumberous depths that defied scrutiny, but 
 that cajoled one s mood. I sat there before my 
 fire, a veritable eremite, listening to a broken 
 spout, and it reminded me of the oboes in some 
 symphony I had heard. Perhaps it was the 
 symphony of Beethoven s which Coleridge said 
 was " like a funeral procession in deep purple." 
 Not that the sound of the spout was at all like 
 the oboe but what was the oboe like, or the 
 symphony itself for that matter ? I have never 
 seen a funeral procession in deep purple. I sup 
 pose it occasionally sweeps by on the invisible ele 
 ments. Out of the gray desolate hours I heard 
 Griselle saying again, "A nor easter is coming 
 to fill up the ponds." Must the ponds be filled 
 like the granaries ? Was this a harvest duty of 
 the skies ? It really seemed so to me at that 
 moment. 
 
 What did men do when they were shut up by 
 278
 
 TRAILING JUNIPER 
 
 the weather in a cabin ? I tried to recall what it 
 was Ik Marvel did on wet days at Edgewood. I 
 may be wrong, but it seemed to me he had made 
 very delightful criticisms with pleasant quotations 
 from the old poets. He probably had a library 
 at his elbow, and sat in a deep, cushioned chair. 
 Was that not what immemorial country parsons 
 had done in their rainy leisure, telling us what 
 they thought of Chaucer and Marlowe and Lan- 
 dor and the author of " Greenland s Icy Moun 
 tains " ? These rainy-day essayists were charming 
 literary persons. What should a man do who 
 was only sentimental and not at all literary ? 
 
 It occurred to me that the proper and consist 
 ent thing to do was to go out and make the 
 acquaintance of the rainy weather by personal 
 contact. That alone would warrant an unliterary 
 man talking about it. The proposition met with 
 the instant approbation of Charlie and the yellow 
 dog ; the latter signified, as usual, that she had 
 not the faintest conception of the nuances of the 
 affair, and did not care a rap of her tail for the 
 moral aspects of it, but was always delighted to 
 be up to something that had no particular end in 
 view. We put on rubber coats, and off we started 
 among the trees, holding our faces up bravely 
 against the rain. It ran down our cheeks in cool 
 rivulets, and dropped off the ends of our noses ; 
 it came round the corners in the woods at us in 
 sheets and swirling dashes. But we laughed and 
 defied it. Nothing so clearly and indefensibly 
 boyish as this had so far in my mature experience 
 
 279
 
 
 URNEY TO NATURE 
 
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 inJL ~~ ~ -~~- i De r*-i>.ne> ^j- i n^ tne rxinsj? .rrKr-i
 
 TRAILING JUNIPER 
 
 cold did not pinch her. Two or three sheep 
 were in the woods nibblinz the sparse laureL 
 They hid evidently not been ofEcially informed 
 of tie dreariness- Some kind of 2:2.7 there was 
 between our sensibilities and their?. Whit wo>uld 
 one not give to be able to pat their view s of rt 
 all into our words r a. ta.sk. that has never vet been 
 accom: iis ied. Tne,- ail talk at us in Bterature 
 
 _ * " 
 
 from our standpoint, and are interesting to us 
 only by coming over into our do-main arid re- 
 exhibiting our purpose? and desire?. Always the 
 anknal story is a ghost story to which the narrator 
 adds his own feelings and desires. 
 
 Once back in our cabin, its cheerv homeliness 
 was enhanced by our excursion. We hea.t>ed the 
 loss, fastened the shutter, moved our tabie into 
 the glow, and beean to huz our human deligrits 
 with the old self-consciousness. Charlie put hs 
 hand on my shoulder, his face came verv near to 
 mine as we bent over the sto-rv of adventure, pro- 
 fa sely illustrated, which I was to read to him. 
 Mv arm went around his warm little bocv with 
 an easv clasp. All at once some new sense of 
 t>reciou.sness in the companionship a fine draw- 
 ins to-zether ot the nerves of consanzuinitv, as 
 if the bleakness and violence or tne riours n.-^.~ 
 torzed some new links, rust as vou have seen tne 
 members of a suddenly bereaved family kxln 
 hands silently. 
 
 v- n^.T ^*^- A 521*-.^ T^*S is wO S-w"^" ^n <M. *~~ ~~ ^~* T^^ .^ 
 It only needs one thinz to be quite homelike- 
 Can ou zuess what it is : "
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 " We ought to have deer s horns and skins 
 nailed up," said Charlie. 
 
 What a gap between us ! I drew him a little 
 closer. " No," I said. " Deer s horns and furs 
 would not make it more secure and abiding. In 
 the early days of man, when he hunted and killed, 
 he learned gradually to come and sit down beside 
 his fire and rest and hope. But it wasn t the fire, 
 Charlie. By and by he hung his weapons over 
 the mantle changed them into ornaments but 
 it wasn t the fire. I think men would get tired 
 of living alone together. There must be some 
 thing else." 
 
 " I know," said Charlie, " more dogs, and a 
 pony, and snow-shoes." 
 
 " Can t you think of anything else ? " 
 
 He racked his imagination. " It would be nice 
 if there was a circus in the woods, with monkeys 
 and hyenas, and you didn t have to pay to go in." 
 
 Dear little ambitions, travelling their own round 
 in spite of me ! I gave it up, pulled him closer 
 and touched his soft cheek, but there was some 
 kind of invisible space between us, and I wondered 
 if it would grow larger and deeper in spite of our 
 clasped hands. 
 
 282
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 WINTER SKIES 
 
 THE December woods have their cordial 
 aspects if one is not over-coddled in his 
 sensations. We impute to them a melan 
 choly of which they are entirely innocent, but it 
 is our immemorial habit to hang our emotions 
 upon all boughs, and then, seeing our own human 
 desires flaunting like the washerwoman s linen, to 
 call, as Shakspere did, the boughs " melancholy." 
 We carry the pensive depths of winter woods 
 in our memories they are within us, and so long 
 as we do not utterly confuse the intent of Nature 
 with the ineradicable sense of evanescence in our 
 selves, the melancholy may play its part whole 
 somely enough. 
 
 I can understand now that the trees, more 
 columnar and sedate without their garnishment 
 of chlorophyl, are like cenotaphs of the summer, 
 and do, indeed, seem to the bereaved sense like 
 " bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds 
 
 283
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 sang," and offer us newly disclosed brackets to 
 hang our regrets upon. 
 
 The winter aspects of the woods are like all the 
 other aspects of Nature when seen clearly and re 
 ceptively. They are strangely akin to music in 
 stirring unsuspected depths softly. The stark 
 tree stems with the afternoon sun streaming 
 through them a deep yellow sunshine that 
 had no warmth in it were often associated in 
 my mind with old hymns that I knew in child 
 hood, gaunt inexplicable hymns that never should 
 have been taught to childhood. And the winter 
 sunsets similarly flooded me at times with an in 
 expressible sense of loneliness and separation. 
 Why a mere deflection in the angle of light should 
 strike an unknown key in the minor mode, if 
 there is not an A minor in Nature herself, I can 
 not tell. Those winter sunsets were, by every 
 measurement of the eye, pageants of exultant 
 colour. But by the measurement of some deeper 
 and not understood sense, they were sheeted 
 ghosts masquerading in a bale light. All the 
 crimson rivers of life that one sees in August 
 were there, but they were clotted. The Isles of 
 the Blest, floating in sapphire seas, were apt to 
 reach out affrighted arms, and resolve it all into 
 a witches sunset with dun shadows lowering and 
 vast bleak stretches intervening. 
 
 Sometimes the December sunset, seen through 
 the tree trunks, had momentary mockeries of un 
 earthly architecture and vast golden pampas out 
 of which waved gigantic fronds, and about which 
 
 284
 
 WINTER SKIES 
 
 rose stupendous II Capitans of agate and brass. 
 But something whispered that over those cliffs had 
 gone all the sandalled hopes and blithe promises 
 into shoreless vacancy. A phantasmic sub-light 
 gave it all a tone of irony that was like a faint 
 chill, and taunted me with lost laughter and music 
 frozen in mystery and silence. 
 
 It requires considerable courage to confront the 
 ominous banners that we ourselves fling into the 
 winter sunset. Men and women who never look 
 into themselves without being frightened, run from 
 the country when December sets her reminders in 
 the air. We call it the social season, because we 
 come closer together, and look into each other s 
 faces, and try to forget. 
 
 Had I been alone when these thoughts were 
 stirred in me, they must have taken on a momen 
 tary desolation ; that kind of melancholy which 
 has sobs in it, involuntary and unexpressed ; we 
 listen to them as we do in dreams, and they seem, 
 as De Quincey puts it, to have swept the fields of 
 mortality for a thousand years. 
 
 But I was not alone. Griselle and I were 
 straying aimlessly among the trees, and my mood 
 wore her as a kind of armour. We came suddenly 
 upon a bright spot, no bigger than the floor of 
 my cabin. It was vividly green, with a defiant 
 moss that spread around in little hummocks, and 
 was fringed by hardy ferns, and picked out here 
 and there with the red berries of the partridge- 
 vine that looked like drops of blood against the 
 bronze leaves. Over it all poured the almost level 
 
 285
 
 rays of the setting sun with what seemed to me at 
 the moment to be the most desolate effulgence. 
 
 "It looks," said Griselle, "like a little old 
 graveyard." 
 
 "Yes," I replied quickly, somewhat surprised 
 that she should have seen the same sadness in it. 
 " The graveyard of the race. I wonder why we 
 should both have the same idea ? " 
 
 " I don t think I quite know what you mean 
 by the graveyard of the race." 
 
 " I mean that it reminds me that this is just 
 what the sun will be doing when we are all gone 
 
 O D 
 
 and forgotten." 
 
 The tranquil look of wonder that passed over 
 her face as she stood there, irradiated by the same 
 yellow light, was quite childlike. 
 
 "What a strange idea," she said. 
 
 " Does not this sunshine make you melan 
 choly ? " 
 
 "Not a bit. Why should it?" 
 
 " I don t know, except that life itself is melan 
 choly, and Nature betrays it to us at times." 
 
 "If the sunlight made me feel that way, I am 
 sure I should want to live in the dark." 
 
 " I m afraid we do live in the dark, Griselle, 
 and the light only enhances the mystery. Tell 
 me how it makes you feel." 
 
 " Oh, I couldn t. I never thought about it. 
 It never affected me that way. Most always I 
 feel like singing in the sunshine." 
 
 " Look, in a minute it will be all sullen and 
 gray and cold. It hurries so." 
 
 286
 
 WINTER SKIES 
 
 " Why, of course. Does that make you feel 
 bad?" 
 
 "Yes a little. If it were only the sunshine, 
 one wouldn t care. But everything else goes 
 the same way and leaves us in the cold and 
 dark." 
 
 " Well, upon my word, I never heard you talk 
 so before. Are you afraid the sun will not come 
 back to-morrow ? " 
 
 " Oh, it will come back, but it will never shine 
 twice on the same conditions. Everything else 
 goes on, too, toward night." 
 
 " I hope you do not talk that way to your 
 boy." 
 
 " Would you like me to talk to you as I talk 
 to Charlie ? I am very confidential with him." 
 
 " No. I think not. I am older than Charlie, 
 and you have taught him to look up to you " 
 
 "Yes, that is true, and I couldn t teach you to 
 look up to me, because in some things you are 
 taller than I am. Do you know, as you stand 
 there now, you seem to be looking down on me ? " 
 
 " I do ? Why, you know so much it frightens 
 me. I don t really know anything." 
 
 " And that I find gives a certain kind of stature 
 to one. There are some persons, Griselle, who do 
 not know; they just are. It s curious, isn t it, that 
 I should think of you in that way? " 
 
 "Yes, it is. It doesn t sound as if it were quite 
 
 
 true. 
 
 How inexpressibly beautiful was the naivete 
 of this girl, listening to the ring of my rhetoric 
 
 287
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 and with poised instinct detecting the false note 
 in it ! 
 
 " But I want it to be," I said. " Let me be 
 frank with you, and tell you some things." 
 
 " If they are unpleasant things, why tell them ? " 
 
 " Because my life has not been made up alto 
 gether of pleasant things, like yours." 
 
 " Are you going to tell me about your life ? 
 Why should you ? It isn t necessary." 
 
 " Some things grow clearer in the telling. You 
 know I came up here by the Doctor s advice. He 
 thought it was time I stopped living one kind of 
 life and began another ; in fact, he said if I didn t 
 stop I wouldn t have any life to lead. At first I 
 thought it was pretty tough. You see, he didn t 
 tell me that I would meet you, and when I did 
 it wasn t so tough. I think I should have gone 
 
 back at the end of a month if it had not been for 
 
 
 you. 
 
 We were walking slowly on our way back, 
 quite close together, and I waited a moment for 
 her to say something. 
 
 " Perhaps," she said presently, " that would 
 have been the better way who can tell ? " 
 
 " And that does not sound as if it were true," 
 I answered. " I am a better man than I was." 
 
 " Were you really so very bad then ? " 
 
 " It looks in this light as if I must have been, 
 not quite a reprobate, perhaps, but about as sel 
 fish, heedless, and headlong as a man can be. 
 Try and fancy a man living at the top of his 
 speed ; short-breathed, in a kind of blind high 
 
 288
 
 WINTER SKIES 
 
 fever of excitement, too eager for him to stop, too 
 impatient for him to consider, too anxious for 
 him to rest. Fancy him whipped out of it all 
 suddenly and set down where it is cool and calm 
 and silent, and everything seemed to be saying, 
 1 What have you been making such a clatter 
 about ? All that is abiding and precious in life 
 was before you, and will be here after you, secure 
 and unperturbed. Then imagine some one com 
 ing into that still life who seemed to be the ulti 
 mate expression of it, as if the indulgent skies 
 and equitable sunshine had said, ( We will do our 
 best to help you on in the paths of peace, but as 
 you cannot yet understand our language, we send 
 you our best human product to say what we can 
 not. I suppose it has been so in all dispensa 
 tions, Griselle. Whenever man gets beyond the 
 reach of the ministering elements, they send him 
 articulate prophets and priestesses out of the 
 wilderness." 
 
 Poor Griselle. She had never been talked to 
 like this before. But was there ever a true 
 woman anywhere in field or in palace who was 
 not made to be talked to at some time in just this 
 way, and who, unlike Gretchen, did not accept it 
 all as the service due to her womanly ordination ? 
 
 " I am sure," said Griselle, somewhat falteringly, 
 and with her head turned away, " I was only try 
 ing to be neighbourly and social it is quite 
 natural." 
 
 " Quite natural, yes. That was the crowning 
 glory of it. It was so sure to take its natural 
 
 289
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 course. You can understand that your acquaint 
 anceship might become so necessary to me that 
 I could not think of losing it." 
 
 " It never entered my head to break it off," 
 said Griselle. 
 
 " But some intimacies are like fevers ; they come 
 to a crisis, and there is either a convalescence or a 
 collapse beyond." 
 
 " It seems very odd to speak of a friendship as 
 you would of a sickness. Why should there be 
 any fever in our acquaintance ? " 
 
 This was an allowable prevarication that we 
 admire and condone in a woman who is in a cor 
 ner and has no other weapon. The sun was gone; 
 but there was a flash of his red light, I thought, 
 in her cheek as I bent forward and tried to look 
 into her face. It would not do to carry this in 
 determinate conversation much further, or I would 
 begin to feel a pity for her. 
 
 " Griselle," I said, and my attempt to be ex 
 plicit made it sound somewhat solemn. 
 
 "Yes," said Griselle, in the softest abeyant 
 tone. 
 
 " You know what I have been trying to say, 
 although I have not said it." 
 
 I thought she started a little ahead of me as 
 if mere maiden modesty had impulses like mas 
 culine ardour. We were nearing the cabin. I 
 could see the dull flicker of our wood fire in the 
 window-panes, and I thought I heard Charlie and 
 the yellow dog coming to meet me. 
 
 "Griselle," I said, "I have been making love 
 290
 
 WINTER SKIES 
 
 to you. I did it in a most clumsy way, but I 
 want you to know that I would not have dared 
 to do it, even in that round-about fashion, if I 
 had not intended to ask you to be my wife." 
 
 She stopped suddenly and looked at me. Her 
 eyes were full of water, and I thought she looked 
 a little frightened. 
 
 " Oh, you mustn t," she said. 
 
 "Must not oh, come, now; when you have 
 thought it all over, and know how deliberate and 
 sincere it is, you will be able to listen to me with 
 out any timidity. Is there any good reason why 
 I should not at least ask you ? " 
 
 "Yes there is. I m engaged to be married 
 already. I ought to have told you before." 
 Then she whipped out her little handkerchief, 
 and it gleamed in the dusk a moment like a 
 night-moth. 
 
 I stood mute. We were not far from the cabin. 
 The door was open, and a red glow shot across 
 the space in front like a patch. In it I saw the 
 silhouettes of Charlie and the yellow dog. I 
 think I called her " Miss Hotchkiss," and said 
 something about begging her pardon, that must 
 have been awfully unlike my previous tones. 
 But she only said, " It s my fault. I ll tell you 
 about it at some other time. You have made 
 me so nervous that I cannot talk now. Let me 
 go back, please, alone." 
 
 And then she fled away into the shadows. I 
 saw her cross the red glow that came from my 
 door, all her sylphlike beauty coming out sud- 
 
 291
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 denly in the last gleam. Charlie was there. I 
 saw her bend down, put her arm about him, and 
 kiss him. Then she melted out like a vision into 
 the dull vista. 
 
 I leaned against one of the tree trunks, staring 
 in the direction she had taken. As I recall the 
 state of mind in which she had left me, it seems 
 to me that it was chiefly that of acutely sharpened 
 faculties. I heard a cricket chirping somewhere, 
 and wondered if he kept it up all winter. I 
 counted some of the tree trunks mechanically, 
 and noticed how unchangeable they were. A 
 heavy, musky scent came up from the meadow. 
 I thought it was unnecessarily odorous. I looked 
 about me to discover some evidences of change. 
 But everything was obdurately unmoved, and a 
 star glimmered through the branches with cold 
 indifference. 
 
 Charlie and the yellow dog were approaching 
 with noisy ignorance of any disturbance of the 
 natural order. I started forward sullenly, saying 
 to myself, " Here the Nature cure breaks down. 
 What a farce it all is ! Life is an endless series 
 of metamorphoses, and those men were right who 
 got all there was out of it while it lasted." 
 
 "What did you scold Griselle for?" asked 
 Charlie. 
 
 " I didn t scold her, Comrade." 
 
 " Well, she was crying, and she acted as if she 
 was sorry." 
 
 " Sorry," I repeated, taking him by the hand, 
 " Perhaps she is." 
 
 292
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 SNOWED IN 
 
 TH E great disadvantage of being in the woods 
 to a man of affairs is that he has no friendly 
 distractions no boon excitements. He 
 cannot disentangle himself from the snarl of him 
 self, cannot step out into external hullabaloo. 
 That vortex which was always a near-by relief is 
 gone. He cannot drown his conscience or his 
 memory by taking a header into absolute calm. 
 He is thus in danger of becoming an incubus to 
 himself, if he is driven in upon solitude by the 
 season. He is unable to expend his emotional 
 forces along the lines of his muscles. As there 
 is nothing to see or to do, the surplus energies 
 revert to the centres and he goes up and down, 
 as you have seen the carnivora pace their cages. 
 
 To make matters worse, it came on to snow. 
 That promised imprisonment. Charlie and I 
 watched the great flakes coming softly down thick 
 and fast, and Charlie s delight became ironical, for 
 
 2 93
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 he echoed the very words I had used when in 
 another mood. 
 
 " It is going to be awfully jolly," he said, " to 
 be snowed in. We can heap up our logs. No 
 one will interrupt us, and you can put on your 
 slippers, and read me all the books that you 
 promised." 
 
 "Perhaps," I said, "it will turn to rain. I 
 don t think it will snow long. It is coming down 
 too thick." 
 
 Then we stood at the window and \vatched it 
 with entirely unlike feelings. " Oh, yes, it will," 
 he said, with something like eager delight. " See, 
 the hickory stump is all covered already. Maybe 
 we ll have to stay indoors for a month," and he 
 actually clapped his hands. I heard a responsive 
 rap of a tail somewhere on the floor. It was a 
 dog s way of applauding. 
 
 There was something accusative in that dear 
 boy s gladness at being shut in with me for a 
 month. Such loyalty as that, springing from a 
 simple, satisfied affection,, made my manhood 
 blush. 
 
 " Charlie," I said, " I don t think it is snowing 
 so thick and fast now. Doesn t it look as if the 
 flakes are smaller ? " 
 
 " No ; they are bigger. Wouldn t it be fun if 
 it kept on all day and all night ? Gracious ! it 
 would be up to the windows." 
 
 " We couldn t walk to the railroad station 
 through this very well," I remarked meditatively. 
 
 " Oh, yes, we could," said exultant young Faith. 
 294
 
 SNOWED IN 
 
 " But we don t want to." Then a new thought 
 occurred to him. " If it should snow all night, 
 it might freeze, and then we could make snow- 
 shoes, and go out on the crust." 
 
 " Yes, if it only would, that would be some 
 comfort. Nobody can get to us from the farm 
 house if this continues for two hours." 
 
 " Griselle will come over sure. She likes the 
 snow, and Gabe has got a jumper. She promised 
 me a straw-ride as soon as the snow came." 
 
 " I m afraid that she has changed her mind, 
 Comrade." 
 
 There was some kind of fascination in the fall 
 ing flakes. We stood there and watched them 
 with an indescribable interest. The moment we 
 stopped talking, the stillness of it all seemed pal 
 pable, and the silent spectacle of motion without 
 sound was suggestive to me of unmeasured forces 
 that I had not been in the habit of estimating. 
 So thick were the flakes that the prospect through 
 the trees was completely veiled fifty feet away. 
 Alt that we could see were myriad fluttering crys 
 tals near at hand as they crossed the dark trunks, 
 and the occasional bend of a cedar branch to 
 empty its load softly upon the ground. 
 
 To stand still and watch the snow-storm with a 
 wondering restfulness, and to acknowledge that 
 there was in its silence some kind of inscrutable 
 beneficence, had not been possible for me a year 
 before. It had in it, in spite of myself, a dumb 
 soft reminder of being once more covered up and 
 tucked in, without words, by protective hands. 
 
 295
 
 It seemed to me to possess an unhuman equa 
 nimity and to breathe into one a serene helpless 
 ness. There was nothing to do but to submit. 
 I walked the floor in a brown study, coming back 
 to the window at intervals to see it it were turning 
 into rain, and to find that it was coming down as 
 thick and fast as ever. 
 
 I must confess that I took it more easily than 
 my mood warranted ; and when, as Charlie had 
 predicted, we were snowed in up to the windows, 
 and the odorous smokiness of our cabin invited 
 me to sit down and become as snug as a bug in a 
 rus, and watch Charlie build railroad cars with 
 
 O 
 
 Montaigne and " Robinson Crusoe " and Jules 
 Verne, I could not help picturing what ought to 
 have been, if I could have directed Nature into 
 the proper path, and there was a Florentine maid 
 sewing in the rocker beside me. This sort of 
 reverie was invariably followed by a strong desire 
 to get out immediately and plunge into the world, 
 where I could make some glittering sensations do 
 service for the illusions that had been destroyed. 
 I did not undertake to disguise from myself 
 that I had made what we call on the street " a 
 very bad break." It was rather humiliating to 
 acknowledge that I had been fooling myself to 
 
 *. 
 
 the top of my bent with a rustic hallucination. 
 But I did not become quite maudlin over it, and 
 stoutly insisted to myself that I would easily get 
 
 * ^- 
 
 over the matter, if I could only once return to the 
 habitual diversions and projects of a busy life. 
 That was easily and bravely said, no doubt, but 
 296
 
 SNOWED IN 
 
 it only brought vividly to my mind what an 
 incredible blank Griselle had left in it. And how 
 was one to get out with the snow coming down at 
 that rate ? It is the easiest thing in the world to 
 carry the flowers that annoy you into another room 
 and shut the door. But it is not so easy to get 
 rid of the odour they leave behind. Somehow that 
 girl had grown tenderly and softly like a wild vine 
 round my recollections. To grub up the whole 
 growth and scatter its petals was at once a duty 
 and a desecration. She was engaged to be mar 
 ried. Why had not my mature acumen discovered 
 that ; n time? Why had she not discovered it to 
 me as in duty bound when she saw, as a woman 
 must have seen, how matters were going ; and 
 when she did discover it to me, why the tears, 
 and the nervous fight, as if she, too, had been 
 drifting and had suddenly woke up to it all ? 
 
 Still it snowed. The whirling flakes were piling 
 up a barrier of reminders, great banks of spotless 
 separation. When we went to bed it was snowing 
 still. Long after Charlie was asleep, I lay on my 
 back dumbly conscious of an unearthly stillness, 
 for all the entrances of sound were choked, and 
 the house itself, which ordinarily had so many 
 whispering voices, was muffled. The only lisp 
 that gave evidence of motion was the sap that was 
 stewing at the end of my backlog in the fireplace. 
 
 When morning came, we were snowed in and the 
 flakes were coming down still, but finer and more 
 dispersed. We had to stand on a chair and 
 look out of the upper part of the sash to see the 
 
 297
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 result. To Charlie it was a supreme consumma 
 tion. He had never before seen so much snow, 
 and he had an impatient desire to get out into it. 
 It made its presence felt in our cosey room in 
 a manner wholly indescribable. We knew that 
 the snow was lying deep over the whole country 
 before we satisfied ourselves of it with our eyes. 
 The sound of our voices had a muted quality. 
 There was about us a new hush that suggested 
 enswathement, and the atmosphere was full of 
 nitrogen. 
 
 Such a situation recalled into service the Rob 
 inson Crusoe instincts. We were suddenly cut 
 off absolutely from our kind. I had no means 
 of knowing how deep the drifts were on the roads, 
 but it was certain that travel must be blocked 
 temporarily. Doubtless a rescue party would 
 start out in time and try to get through to us 
 from the farm-house. Charlie had a confident 
 belief that we would hear Griselle approaching 
 with the sound of sleigh-bells. Meanwhile we 
 must wait and count up our resources. Fortu 
 nately our woodpile was handy and ample ; our 
 barrel of kerosene not half used ; our shelves of 
 canned goods still full, and there were several 
 bags of Boneless bacon hanging from the kitchen 
 beams. " We shall not have to eat the yellow 
 dog, I said with forced hilarity to Charlie. " But 
 we must open a path or two from our doors. 
 What was that ? Something cracked." 
 
 " I heard that several times," said Charlie. " I 
 guess it s the roof." 
 
 298
 
 SNOWED IN 
 
 It gave me quite a start. I had not thought 
 of it before, but that old roof was hardly able to 
 stand under two feet of snow, and it complained 
 when the overhanging boughs emptied an addi 
 tional load upon it. It might collapse at any 
 moment. With a great deal of difficulty I got 
 the door open, for it opened out and the snow 
 was piled against it three feet high. Then we 
 tried to get the yellow dog to play the part of 
 Noah s dove, but she utterly refused the role, 
 and only sniffed at the white bank, and wagged 
 her tail with the general significance of " No, I 
 thank you, master." After much pushing and 
 floundering, I made my way through the drift 
 far enough to get a view of the roof, and found 
 that on the northern side of the house the snow 
 was piled up halfway to the eaves. Then it 
 occurred to me that there was an unused hemlock 
 board lying against the kitchen, and if I could get 
 that on top of the drift, I could stand upon it, 
 and with an extemporized hoe pull a great deal 
 of the snow from the roof. I must have worked 
 the whole morning at this job, forgetting for the 
 time being everything else ; pulling out old nails 
 here and there with a hatchet, for I had no ham 
 mer, and finally, with incredible exertion, getting 
 upon my plank and finding that I could dislodge 
 with superhuman effort about five pounds of 
 snow at a pull and the roof must have been 
 carrying about a ton and a half. Just as I was 
 getting discouraged, about ten feet of it gave way, 
 and sliding down, landed upon me like an ava- 
 
 299
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 lanche, knocking me off the board and burying 
 me out of sight not so deep, however, as to 
 prevent me from hearing the joyous chorus of 
 laughter and barks inside the house. When I 
 regained the surface, I saw that where the snow 
 had slid off, the roof was black and wet, and then 
 I knew that the warm shingles were doing my 
 work better than I could do it myself. When I 
 got back into the house and had shaken myself 
 clear of snow, I explained to Charlie what I 
 thought at the time was a brilliant discovery. 
 There was a wooden trap in our ceiling that led 
 to the loft. I managed, with extraordinary labour, 
 to get it open, and then we piled the logs on the 
 fire. Never before was there such a blaze seen 
 on .a hearth. In a little while, it was roaring and 
 spitting and vomiting flame out under the trees. 
 " We ll make it too hot for the snow," I said, as 
 I danced in front of the scorching conflagration, 
 with a broom in my hand and my hat over my 
 face, sweeping back the coals. We stood it as long 
 as we could with our coats off, Charlie going up 
 and down, fanning himself, and saying "Phew;" 
 and the yellow dog with her tongue hanging out, 
 backed away to a far corner. Then we took to 
 the kitchen, and it was not long before we heard 
 the drip from the eaves, and an occasional slide 
 of snow, which led me to congratulate myself 
 that the pressure on the roof was growing momen 
 tarily less. But no sooner had this relief come, 
 than we became aware of a general commotion 
 under our floor. " Whatever inhabitants are there, 
 
 300
 
 SNOWED IN 
 
 are moving their chattels and families from the 
 vicinity of the red-hot hearthstone," I said. 
 
 " Perhaps it s afire," said Charlie. 
 
 "Well, don t clap your hands. If it is, we 
 shall have to move ourselves. Suppose you look 
 around the surbase and see if there s any smoke, 
 while I get a pail of water." 
 
 I h)ok back at those hours now with placid 
 enjoyment. We were snowed in for a week, but 
 we came to know each other with an intimacy 
 that has lasted through many years. 
 
 While I have been writing this, Charlie has 
 come in. He is almost as tall as I am now. He 
 came over and put his arm on my shoulder, for 
 I called him " Comrade," as I did in those jolly 
 vagabond days, and it must have brought back 
 some tacit pledges that we made to each other 
 when we were shut up together, and which I am 
 proud to say we have never broken. 
 
 But to go back. I was about to say that the 
 enforced solitude drove me in on myself with a 
 finer scrutiny ; and as that was, after all, the prin 
 cipal result that the Doctor had in view, I ought 
 to emphasize it as much as possible for the bene 
 fit of all my brother acrobats and contortionists 
 in the great circus. The Doctor was quite right 
 when he said that to " stop " was little less than a 
 miracle, and I now feel convinced that he drew 
 me into this box, where I was compelled to 
 "stop" whether I would or not. And there he 
 showed his sagacity. Meditative as the snow 
 storm made me, I confess that if I could have 
 
 301
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 summoned a cutter, I would have fled with 
 Charlie away from the vacuum that had suddenly 
 come into it all, and plunged once more into the 
 madding crowd. 
 
 One grows restless when he is forced to sit 
 down with the ghosts of bright hours perished, 
 even when it is before his own wood fire. It is 
 too much like the temptations of those old saints, 
 without their resisting power. Do my best, a 
 Florentine maid fitted in between me and the 
 flames, absurdly enough wearing the air of a 
 " Lost Lenore." She beckoned from autumnal 
 woods with a bunch of calamus. She came over 
 russet fields, always like one of Canova s nymphs, 
 and she murmured beside the still waters, " I 
 would not live always," as if she wished me to 
 understand that she was only a fleeting fantasy. 
 But always to me she was a princess in disguise, 
 and I was detecting her under her rusticity. 
 
 When a girl or a hallucination gets so braided 
 into one s imagination, one is not going to take 
 her at her word too recklessly and let her slip out 
 of keeping. The tears the tears, why the tears? 
 Merely being engaged is not always final, at least 
 with a girl or a hallucination. 
 
 At the end of five days Gabe got through to 
 me with a team and a large farm sled. He had 
 had hard work, and his horses were lathered and 
 steaming. When he came in and lit his pipe with 
 a coal of my fire, I pushed a chair over at him and 
 tackled him, as we say, on a vital subject, coming 
 at him bluntly and familiarly. 
 
 302
 
 SNOWED IN 
 
 " Mr. Hotchkiss, your niece told me she was 
 engaged to be married. Now, I take as much 
 interest in that girl as if I were another uncle. 
 Who s the man ? " 
 
 " He s a young wheelwright over at Slocum," 
 said Gabe, without the decency of hesitation. 
 
 "Oh, a wheelwright, is he? Honest, industri 
 ous, poor, and all that sort of thing, I suppose ! " 
 
 " Guess he s about as honest as the rest of 
 said Gabe, " but he hasn t come to that 
 
 em, 
 
 p int where he can make a livin fer two. We re 
 goin to hev a big February thaw and an early 
 spring." 
 
 Gabe s information made me a trifle desperate. 
 " If you get to the village, I wish you would send 
 me a livery team," I said. " I want to go to the 
 city." 
 
 Then I walked to the window, and I ll be 
 hanged if it wasn t snowing again. 
 
 33
 
 r 
 
 H 
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 THE RETURN OF THE EXILES 
 
 ERE we are again," said the Doctor, 
 quite like the clown in the circus, as he 
 stamped about, shedding snow and over 
 wraps. " You see, I defy heaven itself, my son, 
 when you begin to blubber. I got your letter. 
 What in thunder has happened to you now ? " 
 
 I tried to laugh. " Genuine heart failure this 
 time," I said. " But I did not intend to drag 
 you through this snow. I only wanted to relieve 
 myself when I wrote that letter. I had to con 
 fide in somebody. You will say I am a consum 
 mate noodle, and so I am, but the blow staggered 
 me a little." 
 
 " The blow ? What blow ? Are you using 
 metaphors or medical terms ? Suppose you come 
 down to the literal tomfoolery of it." 
 
 "That girl." 
 
 Oh, ho ! " 
 
 34
 
 THE RETURN OF THE EXILES 
 
 " Have patience with me. She is going to 
 marry the village wheelwright." 
 
 " Christopher Columbus ! and so the heavens 
 are falling. Did you get me up here for that 
 cataclysm, confound your lubberly organic pulp!" 
 
 " I didn t suppose you would come flying up 
 in this manner. There s nothing you can do 
 except listen to me ; about the last thing in the 
 world I should expect you to do. The blow 
 has fallen. The account is made up. The cur 
 tain has dropped. Don t you want to take those 
 heavy boots off and make yourself comfortable, 
 now you are here ? " 
 
 " No. It may be necessary for me to get away 
 in order to be comfortable, and so I will remain 
 prepared to fly in disgust, if this thing goes too 
 far. Do you understand that I haven t wasted 
 all this time with you for a mere diversion ; that 
 there was a great principle at stake ; that my pro 
 fessional acumen was involved ; that I was pitted 
 against sudden death, and did not expect to be 
 done up by a rustic petticoat ? And now you 
 write me that the jig is up. Have you taken 
 nine months to make a monkey of me?" 
 
 " Doctor, you had better keep your explosion 
 for the last act it is always more appropriate 
 there than in the prelude." 
 
 But I might as well have tried to stop that 
 mill-race over at the dam with an apostrophe. 
 He swept on : 
 
 " You may have a right to smash your own 
 prospects, but you have no right to upset my 
 
 35
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 theories with your nonsense, and. after neorlv a 
 veor or discipline and moral purgation, to tell me 
 that it is all ror nothing, and you haven t learned 
 i bi.essed duns, \\nat have you dene killed 
 your rival : ^ 
 
 ^Yes. What else could a man do who has 
 been raking the nature cure so long, and had all 
 his natural energies at high tension, thanks to 
 you. ? Do vou know who the man is : 
 
 ~ How the devil should I know, or why should 
 I care : " 
 
 ~ It is the vacmg wheelwright who drove us over 
 from Slocum ; that trogiodvte or" the sequestered 
 hamlet has been engaged to the nymph of the air 
 all along. The incommensurable is to marry the 
 unessential. Tne ideal ends in a negation, and 
 spirituality drops to spokeshaves. Daphne re 
 verts to potatoes. Nature breaks on 7 in a chasm. 
 It must be plain to you that, with all your teach 
 ings fresh in mv mind. I could not stand still and 
 see this sacrilege without reeling that the ongoing, 
 uplifting, and inspiring nature of things had been 
 threatened, and that it was the dutv or the purged 
 mar: to become a rescuer, a champion, an avenge-. 
 a restorer." 
 
 The Doctor was potindins the list of one hand 
 
 * 
 
 into the palm of the ether impatiently. 
 
 " Ongoing and uplirting pickles ! he said. I 
 h.id a mint hope that, if you became intimate with 
 the ordained ongoing of some things, vou would 
 learn not to stick your Wall Street impertinence 
 in between them. If you have not learned that 
 
 3-6
 
 THE RETURN OF THE EXILES 
 
 some things arrange themselves by primordial 
 decree better than you can arrange them, then is 
 the Nature cure a hissing sham, and I am a con 
 victed duffer. You led me to believe that you 
 could lift yourself by your own waistband above 
 the animals. I was fool enough to believe it. 
 And now you shatter all my hopes and smash 
 your own peace of mind with an act of incompre 
 hensible damn nonsense. Excuse my vehemence 
 where is that boy ? " 
 
 " He s out there with the yellow dog, making 
 a snow-man. Swear away." 
 
 " That is what you oufrht to be doing, in 
 stead of trying to make snow-women out of hot 
 blood." 
 
 You are right. I acknowledge it. But you 
 might as well let me make a clean breast of it. 
 It will aggravate you, but it will relieve me; be 
 sides, it will all come out sooner or later, and you 
 had better hear it from me." 
 
 " Great Scott ! has the ongoing got so far as a 
 scandal, or a crime ? " 
 
 " Listen to me, please. That girl came into my 
 life with a thousand irresistible charms that were 
 like tentacles." 
 
 " Figs ! " said the Doctor. 
 
 " She wound herself about all the outlooks of 
 my better nature like a wild vine " 
 
 " Moonshine," said the Doctor. 
 
 " She fitted herself unconsciously to all the 
 sweeter aspirations that you had evoked " 
 
 " Laura Matilda rubbish," remarked the Doctor. 
 
 37
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 " She let me grow up to believe that she was a 
 necessity of my existence 
 
 " Raspberry jam," said the Doctor. 
 
 " Then she told me that she was engaged to 
 the village wheelwright." 
 
 " Well, I told you that three months ago. It 
 was part of the nature of things." 
 
 " Pardon me. It was a glaring impossibility 
 in the nature of things as you had taught me to 
 observe them. It was one of those outrages that 
 defy and desecrate the evolution of the beautiful. 
 It could not, it must not be. In my healthful 
 condition of mind, the wheelwright was a disease. 
 I must meet it as you would, and remove it, for 
 I had your example before me." 
 
 "Bosh!" 
 
 " I found him. I was deadly calm and deter 
 mined. He was weakly frank and amiable. ( You 
 love Griselle, I said. Yes, I do, he answered, 
 with the bland innocence of a mollusk trying to 
 scale heaven. You thought of marrying her. 
 Dreamed of it for two years, he said. c But 
 you haven t accomplished your fell purpose, I 
 said between my teeth. ( I am waiting, he said, 
 until I can support a wife. You must be 
 aware by this time that you never can such a 
 wife, and that having wasted a reasonable length 
 of time in vain hopes, you ought to give some 
 one else a chance. f Oh, no, said this Lothario 
 of the workbench, f she will wait ten years. So 
 will I. Something will turn up at some time to 
 help us out. I have an old mother to take care 
 
 308
 
 THE RETURN OF THE EXILES 
 
 of, and I cannot neglect her at present to get 
 married, for I only make ten dollars a week, and 
 a man can t marry on that, at least not such a 
 woman as Griselle. But you never expect to 
 get any more, I said grimly. c Oh, yes, I do, 
 he replied. If I had a little capital just now, 
 I d go to Spelldown and set up for myself. The 
 wheelwright of that place has just died. { How 
 much capital would it take ? I asked, with cold 
 irony. About six hundred dollars, he said 
 frankly. I tried to borrow it of Gabe Hotch- 
 kiss, but he said that the man who married his 
 niece ought to be able to make his own way 
 without coming to him, and he was right. 
 
 " Well, well, well," said the Doctor. " How 
 much more of this is there ? You gloated over 
 the poor fellow s helplessness, and then triumphed 
 over the girl like an anthropoid ape." 
 
 " Yes. I asked him if he was in business for 
 himself, if he would immediately get married, and 
 he said he would. He even insulted me by letting 
 his eye sparkle a little." 
 
 "Well, well, have done with it you smashed 
 your poor rival with his own poverty." 
 
 " No, I didn t." 
 
 " Well, what did you do ? " 
 
 " I lent him the six hundred dollars." 
 
 What _" 
 
 " I told him that one gentleman could do another 
 a good turn when it was in his way, without being 
 paid for it." 
 
 The Doctor looked into the fire a moment. 
 
 39
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 He did not like to acknowledge that I had the 
 turn on him, and that he had blown off a great 
 
 O 
 
 deal more steam than was necessary. " I ll just 
 get these heavy boots off," he said. 
 
 " Do," I replied, "and drop all the other things 
 that annoy you at the same time. I haven t quite 
 relinquished my grip on my own waistband." 
 
 Dear old leviathan ! He never was so majesti 
 cally human as during the next hour. He was 
 unreservedly proud, I could see, although he 
 tried to hide it, that his patient had not made a 
 monkey of himself, as he called it. He advised 
 me to read the story of "Undine," and slapped 
 me on the back once or twice before he was quite 
 aware of it, and pulled out new jack-knives and 
 things from his capacious overcoat pocket for 
 Charlie. When he was comfortably spread out 
 before the fire, he brought forth a city news 
 paper. 
 
 " There may be a bit of good news in it," he 
 said. "Look at the quotations. If you had dis 
 appointed me, I ll be hanged if I wouldn t have 
 carried it back without telling you." 
 
 I uttered a note of surprise. " Why, the Es- 
 meralda is up in the clouds twenty points." 
 
 "Yes, so I see. If you had stayed in the 
 market, you d have sold out. It is like one of 
 those letters of Napoleon s that he did not open. 
 It answered itself, and it s so with a good many 
 other things." 
 
 I was figuring on the margin of the paper, and 
 did not heed him. 
 
 310
 
 THE RETURN OF THE EXILES 
 
 " Trying to calculate the amount of anxiety and 
 stress you ve missed ? " he asked. 
 
 " No, I was figuring the gain. It s a pretty 
 nice lump." 
 
 " I congratulate you," he said. " When a man 
 can plant his mining stock as the farmer plants 
 his turnips, and doesn t worry, the stock-market 
 will be as healthful as a truck-garden." 
 
 I did not exult very much. Somebody had 
 somewhere said that good luck always comes to a 
 man when he has lost the zest for it. I did not 
 seem to care so much just at that moment. The 
 good news seemed belated and somehow slightly 
 trivial. 
 
 But the Doctor was exuberant. " I withdraw 
 my prescription," he said. " You shall go back 
 with me. I think I can trust you now even in 
 the jaws of Wall Street." 
 
 " I m in no hurry," I replied. " Gabe brought 
 me over a bunch of winter carnations this morn 
 ing. They were white. It was like a message 
 of high esteem, and I think I ll stay over and 
 stand up with that young wheelwright. But I ll 
 tell you what I ll do, Doctor. I will eat dinner 
 with you at your own house on Easter, if you will 
 promise not to lecture." 
 
 We sat there and talked it all over, and the 
 Doctor slowly drew out of me an acknowledg 
 ment of moral convalescence. He said I had 
 put on sandals and walked with the mysteries. 
 I dare say he was right. I can only tell how 
 Nature had affected a stranger who took her in 
 
 3 11
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 and entertained her unawares. Some of her Darks, 
 as Carlyle calls them, have lightened a little under 
 an equable internal flame. Her horizons are so 
 wide and her balances so perfect, that I do not 
 see how the apothecary observer can help laying 
 aside his small scales, and paying tribute to the 
 immeasurable equilibriums and purposes, or avoid 
 arriving at the serene acknowledgement of a league- 
 less Somewhat to which a universe of things is 
 tending. That he will, if he gives up a little to 
 Nature, become either a Pantheist with some of 
 the philosophers, or a mere gatherer like some of 
 the savants, it is not for me to say. But I feel 
 confident that a healthy adjustment of faculties, 
 and the suspension of an aggressive egotism, put 
 a man en rapport with new harmonies that he never 
 before suspected. If he walk in the cordial but 
 silent woods, he finds that the defiance goes out of 
 his vertebrae, and he is acquiring the bowed head ; 
 and if we look narrowly here we shall find, I 
 think, that the bowed head of the savant and the 
 saint are the tokens of a similar but unequal 
 humility. These conclusions bore into one s old 
 timbers unobserved like the teredo, when one 
 lives apart from his fellows for a while; so that I 
 grew to think with the Doctor, that it was good 
 for every man to have hermit hours, and to keep 
 a wilderness somewhere into which he can escape 
 from himself. In such sequestered moments tides 
 of soft intimations come from afar, and there are 
 apt to be astral banners fluttering in one s out 
 reach whisperings of origins and outcomes, 
 
 312
 
 THE RETURN OF THE EXILES 
 
 never before heard in the soft procession of the 
 universes ; faint, kindly voices reaching up from 
 the lowliest processes, trying to speak of kinship 
 and fatherhood. There are new and tiny links 
 far down the inscrutable depths, and they glitter 
 in the gloom with threads of promise, forever 
 weaving the continuity and indestructibility of life 
 in a majestic synthesis. 
 
 I think it is an unforced similitude to say that 
 I came to Nature very much as a recreant son is 
 carried on a litter to his old mother. I had a 
 generous contempt for the "old woman " who did 
 not know as much as I did. But her homely 
 balms put me on my feet. I grew insensibly to 
 perceive that some bereavements are not blows 
 but benisons ; and as my physical system re 
 adjusted itself, my moral apprehension took on 
 a keener edge. That is all. 
 
 All that I have been telling here took place 
 well along into February. The Doctor went 
 back, and there were days of dull imprisonment 
 when we were encompassed by the acrid storms 
 of the season. Rain and snow and sleet ; with the 
 thermometer lurking stubbornly at zero, and the 
 monotony of it all becoming unbearable. But let 
 me say without any boasting that I was strangely 
 cheerful, if not jolly, under it all with some 
 kind of inner complacency that was like a new 
 vital spring. Something had gone out of my 
 life, but the vacuum was filled by something new 
 that had come into it. What it was, I can hardly 
 find words to tell. " When the spring comes, we
 
 A JOURNEY TO NATURE 
 
 will go back," I had said to Charlie. And how 
 we longed for it. The season seemed to have 
 stuck fast while we watched the sunshine on the 
 wall, and there were long days when there was 
 no sunshine. But there were little premonitions. 
 The inhabitants under the floor were getting more 
 lively, and then one night we heard that peep, 
 peep from the pond, the first stir of life in the 
 warming earth. 
 
 It was in March that the announcement was 
 officially made. The Doctor had sent me a thin 
 little book of Maurice Thompson s, and one verse 
 of his tells the whole story as nobody else can 
 tell it : 
 
 "I heard the woodpecker pecking, 
 The sapsucker tenderly sing ; 
 I turned and looked out of my window, 
 And lo, it was spring." 
 
 What more have I to tell you ? Our idyl of 
 exile was done. We were to go away, taking with 
 us some soft memories of happy hours and sacred 
 companionship, inwrought, at least for me, with 
 some gracious lessons. 
 
 One morning we stood on the platform at the 
 Spelldown station, watching the men put our boxes 
 into the baggage-car. A soft breeze came down 
 from the direction of the Hotchkiss woods, bring 
 ing, I thought, the odour of the swelling rose vines 
 and lilac bushes. Lilacs. It gave me a little 
 momentary twinge. Then I straightened myself, 
 and tried to whistle a bit of the hymn " Onward, 
 
 3H
 
 THE RETURN OF THE EXILES 
 
 Christian Soldiers," but I didn t know it, and I 
 fancy it ran into " Listen to the Mocking-bird." 
 
 " Come on, Comrade," I said. " Let us say 
 good-by to the country and get aboard." 
 
 When we were seated in the car, Charlie pointed 
 through the window with his finger. Men and 
 boys were moving about in careless and animated 
 groups ; and at one corner of the platform, quite 
 alone, was the yellow dog, the most woebegone 
 picture of canine neglect and grief I ever saw. 
 Her head drooped, her tail hung limp, and she 
 was wrapped in her own desolation. Charlie 
 impulsively cried out, " Good-by, Lilah," and the 
 sound striking against the depot made the dog 
 turn her head, cock her ears, and wag her tail as 
 she expectantly looked for the familiar owner of 
 the voice ; then realizing that it was an illusion, 
 she walked wearily away. 
 
 This was a little too much for me. I went out, 
 called to her, and when she came gladly, I took 
 her by the back of the neck, put her into the 
 baggage-car, and gave the baggageman a dollar. 
 
 And so my last act was to interfere with the 
 nature of things, for the yellow dog came to the 
 city with us.