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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Great Possessions, by David Grayson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Great Possessions
+
+Author: David Grayson
+
+Release Date: January 4, 2004 [eBook #10593]
+[Most recently updated: August 20, 2023]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Juliet Sutherland, Sjaani and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREAT POSSESSIONS ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Great Possessions
+
+David Grayson
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Contents
+
+ CHAPTER I. THE WELL-FLAVOURED EARTH
+ CHAPTER II. OF GOOD AND EVIL ODOURS
+ CHAPTER III. FOLLOW YOUR NOSE!
+ CHAPTER IV. THE GREEN PEOPLE
+ CHAPTER V. PLACES OF RETIREMENT
+ CHAPTER VI. NO TRESPASS
+ CHAPTER VII. LOOK AT THE WORLD!
+ CHAPTER VIII. A GOOD APPLE
+ CHAPTER IX. I GO TO THE CITY
+ CHAPTER X. THE OLD STONE MASON
+ CHAPTER XI. AN AUCTION OF ANTIQUES
+ CHAPTER XII. A WOMAN OF FORTY-FIVE
+ CHAPTER XIII. HIS MAJESTY—BILL RICHARDS
+ CHAPTER XIV. ON LIVING IN THE COUNTRY
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+THE WELL-FLAVOURED EARTH
+
+
+“Sweet as Eden is the air
+    And Eden-sweet the ray.
+No Paradise is lost for them
+Who foot by branching root and stem,
+And lightly with the woodland share
+    The change of night and day.”
+
+For these many years, since I have lived here in the country, I have
+had it in my mind to write something about the odour and taste of this
+well-flavoured earth. The fact is, both the sense of smell and the
+sense of taste; have been shabbily treated in the amiable rivalry of
+the senses. Sight and hearing have been the swift and nimble brothers,
+and sight especially, the tricky Jacob of the family, is keen upon the
+business of seizing the entire inheritance, while smell, like hairy
+Esau, comes late to the blessing, hungry from the hills, and willing to
+trade its inheritance for a mess of pottage.
+
+I have always had a kind of errant love for the improvident and
+adventurous Esaus of the Earth. I think they smell a wilder fragrance
+than I do, and taste sweeter things, and I have thought, therefore, of
+beginning a kind of fragrant autobiography, a chronicle of all the good
+odours and flavours that ever I have had in my life.
+
+As I grow older, a curious feeling comes often to me in the spring, as
+it comes this spring more poignantly than ever before, a sense of the
+temporariness of all things, the swiftness of life, the sadness of a
+beauty that vanishes so soon, and I long to lay hold upon it as it
+passes by all the handles that I can. I would not only see it and hear
+it, but I would smell it and taste it and touch it, and all with a new
+kind of intensity and eagerness.
+
+Harriet says I get more pleasure out of the smell of my supper than I
+get out of the supper itself.
+
+“I never need to ring for you,” says she, “but only open the kitchen
+door. In a few minutes I’ll see you straighten up, lift your head,
+sniff a little, and come straight for the house.”
+
+“The odour of your suppers, Harriet,” I said, “after a day in the
+fields, would lure a man out of purgatory.”
+
+My father before me had a singularly keen nose. I remember well when I
+was a boy and drove with him in the wild North Country, often through
+miles of unbroken forest, how he would sometimes break a long silence,
+lift his head with sudden awareness, and say to me:
+
+“David, I smell open fields.”
+
+In a few minutes we were sure to come to a settler’s cabin, a log barn,
+or a clearing. Among the free odours of the forest he had caught, afar
+off, the common odours of the work of man.
+
+When we were tramping or surveying in that country, I have seen him
+stop suddenly, draw in a long breath, and remark:
+
+“Marshes,” or, “A stream yonder.”
+
+Part of this strange keenness of sense, often noted by those who knew
+that sturdy old cavalryman, may have been based, as so many of our
+talents are, upon a defect. My father gave all the sweet sounds of the
+world, the voices of his sons, the songs of his daughters, to help free
+the Southern slaves. He was deaf.
+
+It is well known that when one sense is defective the others fly to the
+rescue, and my father’s singular development of the sense of smell may
+have been due in part to this defect, though I believe it to have been,
+to a far larger degree, a native gift. Me had a downright good nose.
+All his life long he enjoyed with more than ordinary keenness the odour
+of flowers, and would often pick a sprig of wild rose and carry it
+along with him in his hand, sniffing at it from time to time, and he
+loved the lilac, as I do after him. To ill odours he was not less
+sensitive, and was impatient of rats in the barn, and could smell them,
+among other odours, the moment the door was opened. He always had a
+peculiar sensitiveness to the presence of animals, as of dogs, cats,
+muskrats, cattle, horses, and the like, and would speak of them long
+before he had seen them or could know that they were about.
+
+I recall once on a wild Northern lake, when we were working along the
+shore in a boat, how he stopped suddenly and exclaimed:
+
+“David, do you hear anything?”—for I, a boy, was ears for him in those
+wilderness places.
+
+“No, Father. What is it?”
+
+“Indians.”
+
+And, sure enough, in a short time I heard the barking of their dogs and
+we came soon upon their camp, where, I remember, they were drying deer
+meat upon a frame of poplar poles over an open fire. He told me that
+the smoky smell of the Indians, tanned buckskin, parched wild rice, and
+the like, were odours that carried far and could not be mistaken.
+
+My father had a big, hooked nose with long, narrow nostrils, I suppose
+that this has really nothing to do with the matter, although I have
+come, after these many years, to look with a curious interest upon
+people’s noses, since I know what a vehicle of delight they often are.
+My own nose is nothing to speak of, good enough as noses go—but I think
+I inherited from my father something of the power of enjoyment he had
+from that sense, though I can never hope to become the accomplished
+smeller he was.
+
+I am moved to begin this chronicle because of my joy this morning
+early—a May morning!—just after sunrise, when the shadows lay long and
+blue to the west and the dew was still on the grass, and I walked in
+the pleasant spaces of my garden. It was so still...so still...that
+birds afar off could be heard singing, and once through the crystal air
+came the voice of a neighbour calling his cows. But the sounds and the
+silences, the fair sights of meadow and hill I soon put aside, for the
+lilacs were in bloom and the bush-honeysuckles and the strawberries.
+Though no movement of the air was perceptible, the lilacs well knew the
+way of the wind, for if I stood to the north of them the odour was less
+rich and free than to the south, and I thought I might pose as a
+prophet of wind and weather upon the basis of this easy magic, and
+predict that the breezes of the day would be from the north—as, indeed,
+they later appeared to be.
+
+I went from clump to clump of the lilacs testing and comparing them
+with great joy and satisfaction. They vary noticeably in odour; the
+white varieties being the most delicate, while those tending to deep
+purple are the richest. Some of the newer double varieties seem less
+fragrant—and I have tested them now many times—than the old-fashioned
+single varieties which are nearer the native stock. Here I fancy our
+smooth Jacob has been at work, and in the lucrative process of
+selection for the eye alone the cunning horticulturist has cheated us
+of our rightful heritage of fragrance. I have a mind some time to
+practise the art of burbankry or other kind of wizardy upon the old
+lilac stock and select for odour alone, securing ravishing original
+varieties—indeed, whole new gamuts of fragrance.
+
+I should devise the most animating names for my creations, such as the
+Double Delicious, the Air of Arcady, the Sweet Zephyr, and others even
+more inviting, which I should enjoy inventing. Though I think surely I
+could make my fortune out of this interesting idea, I present it freely
+to a scent-hungry world—here it is, gratis!—for I have my time so fully
+occupied during all of this and my next two or three lives that I
+cannot attend to it.
+
+I have felt the same defect in the cultivated roses. While the odours
+are rich, often of cloying sweetness, or even, as in certain white
+roses, having a languor as of death, they never for me equal the
+fragrance of the wild sweet rose that grows all about these hills, in
+old tangled fence rows, in the lee of meadow boulders, or by some
+unfrequented roadside. No other odour I know awakens quite such a
+feeling—light like a cloud, suggesting free hills, open country, sunny
+air; and none surely has, for me, such an after-call. A whiff of the
+wild rose will bring back in all the poignancy of sad happiness a train
+of ancient memories old faces, old scenes, old loves—and the wild
+thoughts I had when a boy. The first week of the wild-rose blooming,
+beginning here about the twenty-fifth of June, is always to me a
+memorable time.
+
+I was a long time learning how to take hold of nature, and think now
+with some sadness of all the life I lost in former years. The
+impression the earth gave me was confused: I was as one only half
+awake. A fine morning made me dumbly glad, a cool evening, after the
+heat of the day, and the work of it, touched my spirit restfully; but I
+could have explained neither the one nor the other. Gradually as I
+looked about me I began to ask myself, “Why is it that the sight of
+these common hills and fields gives me such exquisite delight? And if
+it is beauty, why is it beautiful? And if I am so richly rewarded by
+mere glimpses, can I not increase my pleasure with longer looks?”
+
+I tried longer looks both at nature and at the friendly human creatures
+all about me. I stopped often in the garden where I was working, or
+loitered a moment in the fields, or sat down by the roadside, and
+thought intently what it was that so perfectly and wonderfully
+surrounded me; and thus I came to have some knowledge of the Great
+Secret. It was, after all, a simple matter, as such matters usually are
+when we penetrate them, and consisted merely in shutting out all other
+impressions, feelings, thoughts, and concentrating the full energy of
+the attention upon what it was that I saw or heard at that instant.
+
+At one moment I would let in all the sounds of the earth, at another
+all the sights. So we practise the hand at one time, the foot at
+another, or learn how to sit or to walk, and so acquire new grace for
+the whole body. Should we do less in acquiring grace for the spirit? It
+will astonish one who has not tried it how full the world is of sounds
+commonly unheard, and of sights commonly unseen, but in their nature,
+like the smallest blossoms, of a curious perfection and beauty.
+
+Out of this practice grew presently, and as it seems to me
+instinctively, for I cannot now remember the exact time of its
+beginning, a habit of repeating under my breath, or even aloud, and in
+a kind of singsong voice, fragmentary words and sentences describing
+what it was that I saw or felt at the moment, as, for example:
+
+“The pink blossoms of the wild crab-apple trees I see from the hill....
+The reedy song of the wood thrush among the thickets of the wild
+cherry.... The scent of peach leaves, the odour of new-turned soil in
+the black fields.... The red of the maples in the marsh, the white of
+apple trees in bloom.... I cannot find Him out—nor know why I am
+here....”
+
+Some form of expression, however crude, seemed to reenforce and
+intensify the gatherings of the senses; and these words, afterward
+remembered, or even written down in the little book I sometimes carried
+in my pocket, seemed to awaken echoes, however faint, of the exaltation
+of that moment in the woods or fields, and enabled me to live twice
+where formerly I had been able to live but once.
+
+It was by this simple process of concentrating upon what I saw or heard
+that I increased immeasurably my own joy of my garden and fields and
+the hills and marshes all about. A little later, for I was a slow
+learner, I began to practise the same method with the sense of smell,
+and still later with the sense of taste. I said to myself, “I will no
+longer permit the avid and eager eye to steal away my whole attention.
+I will learn to enjoy more completely all the varied wonders of the
+earth.”
+
+So I tried deliberately shutting the doorways of both sight and
+hearing, and centring the industry of my spirit upon the flavours of
+the earth. I tested each odour narrowly, compared it well with
+remembered odours, and often turned the impression I had into such poor
+words as I could command.
+
+What a new and wonderful world opened to me then! My takings of nature
+increased tenfold, a hundredfold, and I came to a new acquaintance with
+my own garden, my own hills, and all the roads and fields around
+about—and even the town took on strange new meanings for me. I cannot
+explain it rightly, but it was as though I had found a new earth here
+within the old one, but more spacious and beautiful than any I had
+known before. I have thought, often and often, that this world we live
+in so dumbly, so carelessly, would be more glorious than the tinsel
+heaven of the poets if only we knew how to lay hold upon it, if only we
+could win that complete command of our own lives which is the end of
+our being.
+
+At first, as I said, I stopped my work, or loitered as I walked, in
+order to see, or hear, or smell—and do so still, for I have entered
+only the antechamber of the treasure-house; but as I learned better the
+modest technic of these arts I found that the practice of them went
+well with the common tasks of the garden or farm, especially with those
+that were more or less monotonous, like cultivating corn, hoeing
+potatoes, and the like.
+
+The air is just as full of good sights and good odours for the worker
+as for the idler, and it depends only upon the awareness, the
+aliveness, of our own spirits whether we toil like dumb animals or
+bless our labouring hours with the beauty of life. Such enjoyment and a
+growing command of our surroundings are possible, after a little
+practice, without taking much of that time we call so valuable and
+waste so sinfully. “I haven’t time,” says the farmer, the banker, the
+professor, with a kind of disdain for the spirit of life, when, as a
+matter of fact, he has all the time there is, all that anybody has—to
+wit, _this_ moment, this great and golden moment!—but knows not how to
+employ it. He creeps when he might walk, walks when he might run, runs
+when he might fly—and lives like a woodchuck in the dark body of
+himself.
+
+Why, there are men in this valley who scout the idea that farming,
+carpentry, merchantry, are anything but drudgery, defend all the evils
+known to humankind with the argument that “a man must live,” and laugh
+at any one who sees beauty or charm in being here, in working with the
+hands, or, indeed, in just living! While they think of themselves
+cannily as “practical” men, I think them the most impractical men I
+know, for in a world full of boundless riches they remain obstinately
+poor. They are unwilling to invest even a few of their dollars unearned
+in the real wealth of the earth. For it is only the sense of the spirit
+of life, whether in nature or in other human beings, that lifts men
+above the beasts and curiously leads them to God, who is the spirit
+both of beauty and of friendliness. I say truly, having now reached the
+point in my life where it seems to me I care only for writing that
+which is most deeply true for me, that I rarely walk in my garden or
+upon the hills of an evening without thinking of God. It is in my
+garden that all things become clearer to me, even that miracle whereby
+one who has offended may still see God; and this I think a wonderful
+thing. In my garden I understand dimly why evil is in the world, and in
+my garden learn how transitory it is.
+
+Just now I have come in from work, and will note freshly one of the
+best odours I have had to-day. As I was working in the corn, a lazy
+breeze blew across the meadows from the west, and after loitering a
+moment among the blackberry bushes sought me out where I was busiest.
+Do you know the scent of the blackberry? Almost all the year round it
+is a treasure-house of odours, even when the leaves first come out; but
+it reaches crescendo in blossom time when, indeed, I like it least, for
+being too strong. It has a curious fragrance, once well called by a
+poet “the hot scent of the brier,” and aromatically hot it is and sharp
+like the briers themselves. At times I do not like it at all, for it
+gives me a kind of faintness, while at other times, as to-day, it fills
+me with a strange sense of pleasure as though it were the very breath
+of the spicy earth. It is also a rare friend of the sun, for the hotter
+and brighter the day, the hotter and sharper the scent of the brier.
+
+Many of the commonest and least noticed of plants, flowers, trees,
+possess a truly fragrant personality if once we begin to know them. I
+had an adventure in my own orchard, only this spring, and made a fine
+new acquaintance in a quarter least of all expected. I had started down
+the lane through the garden one morning in the most ordinary way, with
+no thought of any special experience, when I suddenly caught a whiff of
+pure delight that stopped me short.
+
+“What now can _that_ be?” and I thought to myself that nature had
+played some new prank on me.
+
+I turned into the orchard, following my nose. It was not the peach
+buds, nor the plums, nor the cherries, nor yet the beautiful new
+coloured leaves of the grape, nor anything I could see along the grassy
+margin of the pasture. There were other odours all about, old friends
+of mine, but this was some shy and pleasing stranger come venturing
+upon my land.
+
+A moment later I discovered a patch of low green verdure upon the
+ground, and dismissed it scornfully as one of my ancient enemies. But
+it is this way with enemies, once we come to know them, they often turn
+out to have a fragrance that is kindly.
+
+Well, this particular fierce enemy was a patch of chickweed. Chickweed!
+Invader of the garden, cossack of the orchard! I discovered, however,
+that it was in full bloom and covered with small, star-like white
+blossoms.
+
+“Well, now,” said I, “are you the guilty rascal?”
+
+So I knelt there and took my delight of it and a rare, delicate good
+odour it was. For several days afterward I would not dig out the patch,
+for I said to myself, “What a cheerful claim it makes these early days,
+when most of the earth is still cold and dead, for a bit of
+immortality.”
+
+The bees knew the secret already, and the hens and the blackbirds! And
+I thought it no loss, but really a new and valuable pleasure, to divert
+my path down the lane for several days that I might enjoy more fully
+this new odour, and make a clear acquaintance with something fine upon
+the earth I had not known before.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+OF GOOD AND EVIL ODOURS
+
+
+Of all times of the day for good odours I think the early morning the
+very best, although the evening just after sunset, if the air falls
+still and cool, is often as good. Certain qualities or states of the
+atmosphere seem to favour the distillation of good odours and I have
+known times even at midday when the earth was very wonderful to smell.
+There is a curious, fainting fragrance that comes only with sunshine
+and still heat. Not long ago I was cutting away a thicket of wild
+spiraea which was crowding in upon the cultivated land. It was a hot
+day and the leaves wilted quickly, giving off such a penetrating,
+fainting fragrance that I let the branches lie where they fell the
+afternoon through and came often back to smell of them, for it was a
+fine thing thus to discover an odour wholly new to me.
+
+I like also the first wild, sweet smell of new-cut meadow grass, not
+the familiar odour of new-mown hay, which comes a little later, and is
+worthy of its good report, but the brief, despairing odour of grass
+just cut down, its juices freshly exposed to the sun. One, as it richly
+in the fields at the mowing. I like also the midday smell of peach
+leaves and peach-tree bark at the summer priming: and have never let
+any one else cut out the old canes from the blackberry rows in my
+garden for the goodness of the scents which wait upon that work.
+
+Another odour I have found animating is the odour of burning wastage in
+new clearings or in old fields, especially in the evening when the
+smoke drifts low along the land and takes to itself by some strange
+chemical process the tang of earthy things. It is a true saying that
+nothing will so bring back the emotion of a past time as a remembered
+odour. I have had from a whiff of fragrance caught in a city street
+such a vivid return of an old time and an old, sad scene that I have
+stopped, trembling there, with an emotion long spent and I thought
+forgotten.
+
+Once in a foreign city, passing a latticed gateway that closed in a
+narrow court, I caught the odour of wild sweet balsam. I do not know
+now where it came from, or what could have caused it—but it stopped me
+short where I stood, and the solid brick walls of that city rolled
+aside like painted curtains, and the iron streets dissolved before my
+eyes, and with the curious dizziness of nostalgia, I was myself upon
+the hill of my youth—with the gleaming river in the valley, and a hawk
+sailing majestically in the high blue of the sky, and all about and
+everywhere the balsams—and the balsams—full of the sweet, wild odours
+of the north, and of dreaming boyhood.
+
+And there while my body, the shell of me, loitered in that strange
+city, I was myself four thousand miles and a quarter of a century away,
+reliving, with a conscious passion that boyhood never knew, a moment
+caught up, like a torch, out of the smouldering wreckage of the past.
+
+Do not tell me that such things die! They all remain with us-all the
+sights, and sounds, and thoughts of by-gone times awaiting only the
+whiff from some latticed gateway, some closed-in court to spring again
+into exuberant life. If only we are ready for the great moment!
+
+As for the odour of the burning wastage of the fields at evening I
+scarcely know if I dare say it. I find it produces in the blood of me a
+kind of primitive emotion, as though it stirred memories older than my
+present life. Some drowsy cells of the brain awaken to a familiar
+stimulus—the odour of the lodge-fire of the savage, the wigwam of the
+Indian. Racial memories!
+
+But it is not the time of the day, nor the turn of the season, nor yet
+the way of the wind that matters most but the ardour and glow we
+ourselves bring to the fragrant earth. It is a sad thing to reflect
+that in a world so overflowing with goodness of smell, of fine sights
+and sweet sounds, we pass by hastily and take so little of them. Days
+pass when we see no beautiful sight, hear no sweet sound, smell no
+memorable odour: when we exchange no single word of deeper
+understanding with a friend. We have lived a day and added nothing to
+our lives! A blind, grubbing, senseless life—that!
+
+It is a strange thing, also, that instead of sharpening the tools by
+which we take hold of life we make studied efforts to dull them. We
+seem to fear life and early begin to stop our ears and close our eyes
+lest we hear and see too much: we clog our senses and cloud our minds.
+We seek dull security and ease and cease longer to desire adventure and
+struggle. And then—the tragedy of it—the poet we all have in us in
+youth begins to die, the philosopher in us dies, the martyr in us dies,
+so that the long, long time beyond youth with so many of us becomes a
+busy death. And this I think truer of men than of women: beyond forty
+many women just begin to awaken to power and beauty, but most men
+beyond that age go on dying. The task of the artist, whether poet, or
+musician, or painter, is to keep alive the perishing spirit of free
+adventure in men: to nourish the poet, the prophet, the martyr, we all
+have in us.
+
+One’s sense of smell, like the sense of taste, is sharpest when he is
+hungry, and I am convinced also that one sees and hears best when
+unclogged with food, undulled with drink, undrugged with smoke. For me,
+also, weariness, though not exhaustion, seems to sharpen all the
+senses. Keenness goes with leanness. When I have been working hard or
+tramping the country roads in the open air and come in weary and hungry
+at night and catch the fragrance of the evening along the road or upon
+the hill, or at barn-doors smell the unmilked cows, or at the doorway,
+the comfortable odours of cooking supper how good that all is! At such
+times I know Esau to the core: the forthright, nature-loving, simple
+man he was, coming in dabbled with the blood of hunted animals and
+hungry for the steaming pottage.
+
+It follows that if we take excessive joys of one sense, as of taste,
+nature, ever seeking just balances, deprives us of the full enjoyment
+of the others, “I am stuffed, cousin,” cries Beatrice in the play, “I
+cannot smell.” “I have drunk,” remarks the Clown in Arcady, “what are
+roses to me?” We forget that there are five chords in the great scale
+of life—sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and—few of us ever master
+the chords well enough to get the full symphony of life, but are
+something like little pig-tailed girls playing Peter Piper with one
+finger while all the music of the universe is in the Great Instrument,
+and all to be had for the taking.
+
+Of most evil odours, it can be said that they are temporary or
+unnecessary: and any unpleasant odour, such as that of fruit sprays in
+spring, or fertilizer newly spread on the land, can be borne and even
+welcomed if it is appropriate to the time and place. Some smells, evil
+at first, become through usage not unpleasant. I once stopped with a
+wolf-trapper in the north country, who set his bottle of bait outside
+when I came in. He said it was “good and strong” and sniffed it with
+appreciation. I agreed with him that it was strong. To him it was not
+unpleasant, though made of the rancid fat of the muscallonge. All
+nature seems to strive against evil odours, for when she warns us of
+decay she is speeding decay: and a manured field produces later the
+best of all odours. Almost all shut-in places sooner or later acquire
+an evil odour: and it seems a requisite for good smells that there be
+plenty of sunshine and air; and so it is with the hearts and souls of
+men. If they are long shut in upon themselves they grow rancid.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+FOLLOW YOUR NOSE!
+
+
+“Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn—
+Look to this day! For it is Life,
+The very Life of Life!”
+
+On a spring morning one has only to step out into the open country,
+lift his head to the sky—and follow his nose....
+
+It was a big and golden morning, and Sunday to boot, and I walked down
+the lane to the lower edge of the field, where the wood and the marsh
+begin. The sun was just coming up over the hills and all the air was
+fresh and clear and cool. High in the heavens a few fleecy clouds were
+drifting, and the air was just enough astir to waken the hemlocks into
+faint and sleepy exchanges of confidence.
+
+It seemed to me that morning that the world was never before so high,
+so airy, so golden, All filled to the brim with the essence of sunshine
+and spring morning—so that one’s spirit dissolved in it, became a part
+of it. Such a morning! Such a morning!
+
+From that place and just as I was I set off across the open land.
+
+It was the time of all times for good odours—soon after sunrise—before
+the heat of the day had drawn off the rich distillations of the night.
+
+In that keen moment I caught, drifting, a faint but wild fragrance upon
+the air, and veered northward full into the way of the wind. I could
+not at first tell what this particular odour was, nor separate it from
+the general good odour of the earth; but I followed it intently across
+the moor-like open land. Once I thought I had lost it entirely, or that
+the faint northern airs had shifted, but I soon caught it clearly
+again, and just as I was saying to myself, “I’ve got it, I’ve got
+it!”—for it is a great pleasure to identify a friendly odour in the
+fields—I saw, near the bank of the brook, among ferns and raspberry
+bushes, a thorn-apple tree in full bloom.
+
+“So there you are!” I said.
+
+I hastened toward it, now in the full current and glory of its
+fragrance. The sun, looking over the taller trees to the east, had
+crowned the top of it with gold, so that it was beautiful to see; and
+it was full of honey bees as excited as I.
+
+A score of feet onward toward the wind, beyond the thorn-apple tree, I
+passed wholly out of the range of its fragrance into another world, and
+began trying for some new odour. After one or two false scents, for
+this pursuit has all the hazards known to the hunter, I caught an odour
+long known to me, not strong, nor yet very wonderful, but distinctive.
+It led me still a little distance northward to a sunny slope just
+beyond a bit of marsh, and, sure enough, I found an old friend, the
+wild sweet geranium, a world of it, in full bloom, and I sat down there
+for some time to enjoy it fully.
+
+Beyond that, and across a field wild with tangles of huckleberry bushes
+and sheep laurel where the bluets and buttercups were blooming, and in
+shady spots the shy white violet, I searched for the odour of a certain
+clump of pine trees I discovered long ago. I knew that I must come upon
+it soon, but could not tell just when or where. I held up a moistened
+finger to make sure of the exact direction of the wind, and bearing,
+then, a little eastward, soon came full upon it—as a hunter might
+surprise a deer in the forest. I crossed the brook a second time and
+through a little marsh, making it the rule of the game never to lose
+for an instant the scent I was following—even though I stopped in a low
+spot to admire a mass of thrifty blue flags, now beginning to bloom—and
+came thus to the pines I was seeking. They are not great trees, nor
+noble, but gnarled and angular and stunted, for the soil in that place
+is poor and thin, and the winds in winter keen; but the brown blanket
+of needles they spread and the shade they offer the traveller are not
+less hospitable; nor the fragrance they give off less enchanting. The
+odour of the pine is one I love.
+
+I sat down there in a place I chose long ago—a place already as
+familiar with pleasing memories as a favourite room—so that I wonder
+that some of the notes I have written there do not of themselves exhale
+the very odour of the pines.
+
+And all about was hung a fair tapestry of green, and the earthy floor
+was cleanly carpeted with brown, and the roof above was in arched
+mosaic, the deep, deep blue of the sky seen through the gnarled and
+knotted branches of the pines. Through a little opening among the
+trees, as through a window, I could see the cattle feeding in the wide
+meadows, all headed alike, and yellow butterflies drifted across the
+open spaces, and there were bumblebees and dragonflies. And presently I
+heard some one tapping, tapping, at the door of the wood and glancing
+up quickly I saw my early visitor. There he was, as neighbourly as you
+please, and not in the least awed by my intrusion; there he was, far
+out on the limb of a dead tree, stepping energetically up and down,
+like a sailor reefing a sail, and rapping and tapping as he worked—a
+downy woodpecker.
+
+“Good morning, sir,” I said.
+
+He stopped for scarcely a second, cocked one eye at me, and went back
+to his work again. Who was I that I should interrupt his breakfast?
+
+And I was glad I was there, and I began enumerating, as though I were
+the accredited reporter for the _Woodland Gazette_, all the good news
+of the day.
+
+“The beech trees.” said aloud, “have come at last to full leafage. The
+wild blackberries are ready to bloom, the swamp roses are budded. Brown
+planted fields I see, and drooping elms, and the young crows cry from
+their nests on the knoll.... I know now that, whoever I am, whatever I
+do, I am welcome here; the meadows are as green this spring for Tom the
+drunkard, and for Jim the thief, as for Jonathan the parson, or for
+Walt the poet: the wild cherry blooms as richly, and the odour of the
+pine is as sweet—”
+
+At that moment, like a flame for clearness, I understood some of the
+deep and simple things of life, as that we are to be like the friendly
+pines, and the elm trees, and the open fields, and reject no man and
+judge no man. Once, a long time ago, I read a sober treatise by one who
+tried to prove with elaborate knowledge that, upon the whole, good was
+triumphant in this world, and that probably there was a God, and I
+remember going out dully afterward upon the hill, for I was weighed
+down with a strange depression, and the world seemed to me a hard,
+cold, narrow place where good must be heavily demonstrated in books.
+And as I sat there the evening fell, a star or two came out in the
+clear blue of the sky, and suddenly it became all simple to me, so that
+I laughed aloud at that laborious big-wig for spending so many futile
+years in seeking doubtful proof of what he might have learned in one
+rare home upon my hill. And far more than he could prove far more.
+
+As I came away from that place I knew I should never again be quite the
+same person I was before.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Well, we cannot remain steadily upon the heights. At least I cannot,
+and would not if I could. After I have been out about so long on such
+an adventure as this, something lets go inside of me, and I come down
+out of the mountain—and yet know deeply that I have been where the bush
+was burning; and have heard the Voice in the Fire.
+
+So it was yesterday morning. I realized suddenly that I was
+hungry—commonly, coarsely hungry. My whole attention, I was going to
+say my whole soul, shifted to the thought of ham and eggs! This may
+seem a tremendous anti-climax, but it is, nevertheless, a sober report
+of what happened. At the first onset of this new mood, the ham-and-eggs
+mood, let us call it, I was a little ashamed or abashed at the
+remembrance of my wild flights, and had a laugh at the thought of
+myself floundering around in the marshes and fields a mile from home,
+when Harriet, no doubt, had breakfast waiting for me! What absurd,
+contradictory, inconsistent, cowardly creatures we are, anyway!
+
+The house seemed an inconceivable distance away, and the only real
+thing in the world the gnawing emptiness under my belt. And I was wet
+to my knees, and the tangled huckleberry bushes and sheep laurel and
+hardback I had passed through so joyously a short time before now clung
+heavily about my legs as I struggled through them. And the sun was hot
+and high—and there were innumerable small, black buzzing flies.
+
+To cap the climax, whom should I meet as I was crossing the fence into
+the lower land but my friend Horace, He had been out early looking for
+a cow that had dropped her calf in the woods, and was now driving them
+slowly up the lane, the cow a true pattern of solicitous motherhood,
+the calf a true pattern of youth, dashing about upon uncertain legs.
+
+“Takin’ the air, David?”
+
+I amuse Horace. Horace is an important man in this community. He has
+big, solid barns, and money in the bank, and a reputation for
+hardheadedness. He is also known as a “driver”; and has had sore
+trouble with a favourite son. He believes in “goin’ it slow” and
+“playin’ safe,” and he is convinced that “ye can’t change human
+nature.”
+
+His question came to me with a kind of shock. I imagined with a
+vividness impossible to describe what Horace would think if I answered
+him squarely and honestly, if I were to say:
+
+“I’ve been down in the marshes following my nose—enjoying the thorn
+apples and the wild geraniums, talking with a woodpecker and reporting
+the morning news of the woods for an imaginary newspaper.”
+
+I was hungry, and in a mood to smile at myself anyway (good-humouredly
+and forgivingly as we always smile at ourselves!) before I met Horace,
+and the flashing vision I had of Horace’s dry, superior smile finished
+me. Was there really anything in this world but cows and calves, and
+great solid barns, and oatcrops, and cash in the bank?
+
+“Been in the brook?” asked Horace, observing my wet legs.
+
+Talk about the courage to face cannon and Cossacks! It is nothing to
+the courage required to speak aloud in broad daylight of the finest
+things we have in us! I was not equal to it.
+
+“Oh, I’ve been down for a tramp in the marsh,” I said, trying to put
+him off.
+
+But Horace is a Yankee of the Yankees and loves nothing better than to
+chase his friends into corners with questions, and leave them
+ultimately with the impression that they are somehow less sound,
+sensible, practical, than he is and he usually proves it, not because
+he is right, but because he is sure, and in a world of shadowy
+halt-beliefs and half-believers he is without doubts.
+
+“What ye find down there?” asked Horace.
+
+“Oh, I was just looking around to see how the spring was coming on.”
+
+“Hm-m,” said Horace, eloquently, and when I did not reply, he
+continued, “Often git out in the morning as early as this?”
+
+“Yes,” I said, “often.”
+
+“And do you find things any different now from what they would be later
+in the day?”
+
+At this the humour of the whole situation dawned on me and I began to
+revive. When things grow hopelessly complicated, and we can’t laugh, we
+do either one of two things: we lie or we die. But if we can laugh, we
+can fight! And be honest!
+
+“Horace,” I said, “I know what you are thinking about.”
+
+Horace’s face remained perfectly impassive, but there was a glint of
+curiosity in his eye.
+
+“You’ve been thinking I’ve been wasting my time beating around down
+there in the swamp just to look at things and smell of things—which you
+wouldn’t do. You think I’m a kind of impractical dreamer, now, don’t
+you, Horace? I’ll warrant you’ve told your wife just that more than
+once. Come, now!”
+
+I think I made a rather shrewd hit, for Horace looked uncomfortable and
+a little foolish.
+
+“Come now, honest!” I laughed and looked him in the eye.
+
+“Waal, now, ye see—”
+
+“Of course you do, and I don’t mind it in the least.”
+
+A little dry gleam of humour came in his eye.
+
+“Ain’t ye?”
+
+It’s a fine thing to have it straight out with a friend.
+
+“No,” I said, “I’m the practical man and you’re the dreamer. I’ve
+rarely known in all my life, Horace, such a confirmed dreamer as you
+are, nor a more impractical one.”
+
+Horace laughed.
+
+“How do ye make that out?”
+
+With this my spirit returned to me and I countered with a question as
+good as his. It is as valuable in argument as in war to secure the
+offensive.
+
+“Horace, what are you working for, anyhow?”
+
+This is always a devastating shot. Ninety-nine out of every hundred
+human beings are desperately at work grubbing, sweating, worrying,
+thinking, sorrowing, enjoying, without in the least knowing why.
+
+“Why, to make a living—same as you,” said Horace.
+
+“Oh, come now, if I were to spread the report in town that a poor
+neighbour of mine, that’s you, Horace, was just making his living, that
+he himself had told me so, what would you say? Horace, what are you
+working for? It’s something more than a mere living.”
+
+“Waal, now, I’ll tell ye, if ye want it straight, I’m layin’ aside a
+little something for a rainy day.”
+
+“A little something!” this in the exact inflection of irony by which
+here in the country we express our opinion that a friend has really a
+good deal more laid aside than anybody knows about. Horace smiled also
+in the exact manner of one so complimented.
+
+“Horace, what are you going to do with that thirty thousand dollars?”
+
+“Thirty thousand!” Horace looks at me and smiles, and I look at Horace
+and smile.
+
+“Honest now!”
+
+“Waal, I’ll tell ye—a little peace and comfort for me and Josie in our
+old age, and a little something to make the children remember us when
+we’re gone. Isn’t that worth working for?”
+
+He said this with downright seriousness. I did not press him further,
+but if I had tried I could probably have got the even deeper admission
+of that faith that lies, like bed rock, in the thought of most men—that
+honesty and decency here will not be without its reward there, however
+they may define the “there.” Some “prophet’s paradise to come!”
+
+“I knew it!” I said. “Horace, you’re a dreamer, too. You are dreaming
+of peace and comfort in your old age, a little quiet house in town
+where you won’t have to labour as hard as you do now, where you won’t
+be worried by crops and weather, and where Mrs. Horace will be able to
+rest after so many years of care and work and sorrow—a kind of earthly
+heaven! And you are dreaming of leaving a bit to your children and
+grandchildren, and dreaming of the gratitude they will express. All
+dreams, Horace!”
+
+“Oh, waal——”
+
+“The fact is, you are working for a dream, and living on dreams—isn’t
+that true?”
+
+“Waal, now, if you mean it that way——”
+
+“I see I haven’t got you beaten yet, Horace!”
+
+He smiled broadly,
+
+“We are all amiable enough with our own dreams. You think that what you
+are working for—your dream—is somehow sounder and more practical than
+what I am working for.”
+
+Horace started to reply, but had scarcely debouched from his trenches
+when I opened on him with one of my twenty-fours.
+
+“How do you know that you are ever going to be old?”
+
+It hit.
+
+“And if you do grow old, how do you know that thirty thousand
+dollars—oh, we’ll call it that—is really enough, provided you don’t
+lose it before, to buy peace and comfort for you, or that what you
+leave your children will make either you or them any happier? Peace and
+comfort and happiness are terribly expensive, Horace—and prices have
+been going up fast since this war began!”
+
+Horace looked at me uncomfortably, as men do in the world when you
+shake the foundations of the tabernacle. I have thought since that I
+probably pressed him too far; but these things go deep with me.
+
+“No, Horace,” I said, “you are the dreamer—and the impractical dreamer
+at that!”
+
+For a moment Horace answered nothing; and we both stood still there in
+the soft morning sunshine with the peaceful fields and woods all about
+us, two human atoms struggling hotly with questions too large for us.
+The cow and the new calf were long out of sight. Horace made a motion
+as if to follow them up the lane, but I held him with my glittering
+eye—as I think of it since, not without a kind of amusement at my own
+seriousness.
+
+“I’m the practical man, Horace, for I want my peace now, and my
+happiness now, and my God now. I can’t wait. My barns may burn or my
+cattle die, or the solid bank where I keep my deferred joy may fail, or
+I myself by to-morrow be no longer here.”
+
+So powerfully and vividly did this thought take possession of me that I
+cannot now remember to have said a decent good-bye to Horace (never
+mind, he knows me!). At least when I was halfway up the hill I found
+myself gesticulating with one clenched fist and saying to myself with a
+kind of passion: “Why wait to be peaceful? Why not be peaceful now? Why
+not be happy now? Why not be rich now?”
+
+For I think it truth that a life uncommanded now is uncommanded; a life
+unenjoyed now is unenjoyed; a life not lived wisely now is not lived
+wisely: for the past is gone and no one knows the future.
+
+As for Horace is he convinced that he is an impractical dreamer. Not a
+bit of it! He was merely flurried for a moment in his mind, and
+probably thinks me now, more than ever before, just what I think him.
+Absurd place, isn’t it, this world?
+
+So I reached home at last. You have no idea, unless you have tried it
+yourself, how good breakfast tastes alter a three-mile tramp in the
+sharp morning air. The odour of ham and eggs, and new muffins, and
+coffee, as you come up the hill, there is an odour for you! And it was
+good to see Harriet.
+
+“Harriet,” I said, “you are a sight for tired eyes.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+THE GREEN PEOPLE
+
+
+I have always had a fondness, when upon my travels about the world of
+the near-by woods and fields, for nipping a bit of a twig here and
+there and tasting the tart or bitter quality of it. I suppose the
+instinct descends to me from the herbivorous side of my distant
+ancestry. I love a spray of white cedar, especially the spicy, sweet
+inside bark, or a pine needle, or the tender, sweet, juicy end of a
+spike of timothy grass drawn slowly from its close-fitting sheath, or a
+twig of the birch that tastes like wintergreen.
+
+I think this no strange or unusual instinct, for I have seen many other
+people doing it, especially farmers around here, who go through the
+fields nipping the new oats, testing the red-top, or chewing a bit of
+sassafras bark. I have in mind a clump of shrubbery in the town road,
+where an old house once stood, of the kind called here by some the
+“sweet-scented shrub,” and the brandies of it nearest the road are
+quite clipped and stunted I’m being nipped at by old ladies who pass
+that way and take to it like cat to catnip.
+
+For a long time this was a wholly unorganized, indeed all but
+unconscious, pleasure, a true pattern of the childish way we take hold
+of the earth; but when I began to come newly alive to all things as I
+have already related—I chanced upon this curious, undeveloped instinct.
+
+“What is it I have here?” I asked myself, for I thought this might be a
+new handle for getting hold of nature.
+
+Along one edge of my field is a natural hedge of wild cherry, young
+elms and ashes, dogwood, black raspberry bushes and the like, which has
+long been a pleasure to the eye, especially in the early morning when
+the shadows of it lie long and cool upon the meadow. Many times I have
+walked that way to admire it, or to listen for the catbirds that nest
+there, or to steal upon a certain gray squirrel who comes out from his
+home in the chestnut tree on a fine morning to inspect his premises.
+
+It occurred to me one day that I would make the acquaintance of this
+hedge in a new way; so I passed slowly along it where the branches of
+the trees brushed my shoulder and picked a twig here and there and bit
+it through. “This is cherry,” I said; “this is elm, this is dogwood.”
+And it was a fine adventure to know old friends in new ways, for I had
+never thought before to test the trees and shrubs by their taste and
+smell. After that, whenever I passed that way, I closed my eyes and
+tried for further identifications by taste, and was soon able to tell
+quickly half a dozen other varieties of trees, shrubs, and smaller
+plants along that bit of meadow.
+
+Presently, as one who learns to navigate still water near shore longs
+for more thrilling voyages, I tried the grassy old roads in the woods,
+where young trees and other growths were to be found in great variety:
+and had a joy of it I cannot describe, for old and familiar places were
+thus made new and wonderful to me. And when I think of those places,
+now, say in winter, I grasp them more vividly and strongly than ever I
+did before, for I think not only how they look, but how they taste and
+smell, and I even know many of the growing things by the touch of them.
+It is certain that our grasp of life is in direct proportion to the
+variety and warmth of the ways in which we lay hold of it. No thought
+no beauty and no joy.
+
+On these excursions I have often reflected that if I were blind, I
+should still find here unexplored joys of life, and should make it a
+point to know all the friendly trees and shrubs around about by the
+taste or smell or touch of them. I think seriously that this method of
+widening the world of the blind, and increasing their narrower joys,
+might well be developed, though it would be wise for such as do take it
+to borrow first the eyes of a friend to see that no poison ivy, which
+certain rascally birds plant along our fences and hedges, is lurking
+about.
+
+Save for this precaution I know of nothing that will injure the taster,
+though he must be prepared, here and there, for shocks and thrills of
+bitterness. A lilac leaf, for example, and to a scarcely lesser degree
+the willow and the poplar are, when bitten through, of a penetrating
+and intense bitterness; but do no harm, and will daunt no one who is
+really adventurous. There is yet to be written a botany, or, better
+yet, a book of nature, for the blind.
+
+It is by knowing human beings that we come to understand them, and by
+understanding them come to love them, and so it is with the green
+people. When I was a boy in the wild north country trees were enemies
+to be ruthlessly fought—to be cut down, sawed, split, burned—anything
+to be rid of them. The ideal in making a home place was to push the
+forest as far away from it as possible. But now, when I go to the
+woods, it is like going among old and treasured friends, and with riper
+acquaintance the trees come to take on, curiously, a kind of
+personality, so that I am much fonder of some trees than of others, and
+instinctively seek out the companionship of certain trees in certain
+moods, as one will his friends.
+
+I love the unfolding beeches in spring, and the pines in winter; the
+elms I care for afar off, like great aloof men, whom I can admire; but
+for friendly confidences give me an apple tree in an old green meadow.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In this more complete understanding I have been much aided by getting
+hold of my friends of the hedges and hills in the new ways I have
+described. At times I even feel that I have become a fully accepted
+member of the Fraternity of the Living Earth, for I have already
+received many of the benefits which go with that association; and I
+know now for a certainty that it makes no objection to its members
+because they are old, or sad, or have sinned, but welcomes them all
+alike.
+
+The essential taste of the cherry and peach and all their numerous
+relatives is, in variation, that of the peach pit, so that the whole
+tribe may be easily recognized, though it was some time before I could
+tell with certainty the peach from the cherry. The oak shoot, when
+chewed a little, tastes exactly like the smell of new oak lumber; the
+maple has a peculiar taste and smell of its own that I can find no
+comparison for, and the poplar is one of the bitterest trees that ever
+I have tasted. The trees—pines, spruces, hemlocks, balsams, cedars—are
+to me about the pleasantest of all, both in taste and odour, and though
+the spruces and pines taste and smell much alike at first, one soon
+learns to distinguish them. The elm has a rather agreeable,
+nondescript, bitterish taste, but the linden is gummy and of a mediocre
+quality, like the tree itself, which I dislike. Some of the sweetest
+flowering shrubs, such as the lilac, have the bitterest of leaves and
+twigs or, like certain kinds of clematis, have a seed that when green
+is sharper than cayenne pepper, while others, like the rose, are
+pleasanter in flavour. The ash tree is not too bitter and a little
+sour.
+
+I give here only a few of the commoner examples, for I wish to make
+this no tedious catalogue of the flavours of the green people. I am not
+a scientist, nor would wish to be taken for one. Only last winter I had
+my pretensions sadly shocked when I tasted twigs cut from various trees
+and shrubs and tried to identify them by taste or by smell, and while
+it was a pleasing experiment I found I could not certainly place above
+half of them; partly, no doubt, because many growing things keep their
+flavours well wrapped up in winter. No, I have not gone far upon this
+pleasant road, but neither am I in any great hurry; for there yet
+remains much time in this and my future lives to conquer the secrets of
+the earth. I plan to devote at least one entire life to science, and
+may find I need several!
+
+One great reason why the sense of taste and the sense of smell have not
+the same honour as the sense of sight or of hearing is that no way has
+yet been found to make a true art of either. For sight, we have
+painting, sculpturing, photography, architecture, and the like; and for
+hearing, music; and for both, poetry and the drama. But the other
+senses are more purely personal, and have not only been little studied
+or thought about, but are the ones least developed, and most dimmed and
+clogged by the customs of our lives.
+
+For the sense of smell we have, indeed, the perfumer’s art, but a poor
+rudimentary art it is, giving little freedom for the artist who would
+draw his inspirations freshly from nature. I can, indeed, describe
+poorly in words the odours of this June morning—the mingled lilacs,
+late wild cherries, new-broken soil, and the fragrance of the sun on
+green verdure, for there are here both lyrical and symphonic odours—but
+how inadequate it is! I can tell you what I feel and smell and taste,
+and give you, perhaps, a desire another spring to spend the months of
+May and June in the country, but I can scarcely make you live again the
+very moment of life I have lived, which is the magic quality of the
+best art. The art of the perfumer which, like all crude art, thrives
+upon blatancy, does not make us go to gardens, or love the rose, but
+often instils in us a kind of artificiality, so that perfumes, so far
+from being an inspiration to us, increasing our lives, become often the
+badge of the abnormal, used by those unsatisfied with simple, clean,
+natural things.
+
+And as a people deficient in musical art delights in ragtime tunes, so
+a people deficient in the true art of tasting and smelling delights in
+ragtime odours and ragtime tastes.
+
+I do not know that the three so-called lesser senses will ever be
+organized to the point where they are served by well-established arts,
+but this I do know—that there are three great ways of entering upon a
+better understanding of this magic earth which are now neglected.
+
+I think we have come upon hasty and heated days, and are too much
+mastered by the god of hurry and the swift and greedy eye. We accept
+flashing pictures of life for life itself; we rush here and rush there
+and, having arrived, rush away again—to what sensible purpose? Be still
+a little! Be still!
+
+I do not mean by stillness, stagnation not yet lazy contentment, but
+life more deeply thought about, more intensely realized, an activity so
+concentrated that it is quiet. Be still then!
+
+So it is that, though I am no worshipper of the old, I think the older
+gardeners had in some ways a better practice of the art than we have,
+for they planted not for the eye alone but for the nose and the sense
+of taste and even, in growing such plants as the lamb’s tongue, to
+gratify, curiously, the sense of touch. They loved the scented herbs,
+and appropriately called them simples. Some of these old simples I am
+greatly fond of, and like to snip a leaf as I go by to smell or taste;
+but many of them, I here confess, have for me a rank and culinary
+odour—as sage and thyme and the bold scarlet monarda, sometimes called
+bergamot.
+
+But if their actual fragrance is not always pleasing, and their uses
+are now grown obscure, I love well the names of many of them—whether
+from ancient association or because the words themselves fall
+pleasantly upon the ear, as, for example, sweet marjoram and dill,
+anise and summer savoury, lavender and sweet basil. Coriander! Caraway!
+Cumin! And “there’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love,
+remember,... there’s fennel for you, and columbines: there’s rue for
+you: and here’s some for me—” All sweet names that one loves to roll
+under his tongue.
+
+I have not any great number of these herbs in my own garden, but, when
+I go among those I do have, I like to call them by their familiar names
+as I would a dignified doctor or professor, if ever I knew him well
+enough.
+
+It is in this want of balance and quietude that the age fails most. We
+are all for action, not at all for reflection; we think there are easy
+ways to knowledge and shortcuts to perfection; we are for laws rather
+than for life.
+
+And this reminds me inevitably of a mellow-spirited old friend who
+lives not a thousand miles from here—I must not tell his name—whose
+greatest word is “proportion.” At this moment, as I write, I can hear
+the roll of his resonant old voice on the syllable p-o-r—prop-o-rtion.
+He is the kind of man good to know and to trust.
+
+If ever I bring him a hard problem, as, indeed, I delight to do, it is
+a fine thing to see him square himself to meet it. A light comes in his
+eye, he draws back his chin a little and exclaims occasionally:
+“Well—well!”
+
+He will have all the facts and circumstances fully mobilized, standing
+up side by side before him like an awkward squad, and there’s nothing
+more awkward than some facts that have to stand out squarely in
+daylight! And he inquires into their ancestry, makes them run out their
+tongues, and pokes them once or twice in the ribs, to make sure that
+they are lively and robust facts capable of making a good fight for
+their lives. He never likes to see any one thing too large, as a
+church, a party, a reform, a new book, or a new fashion, lest he see
+something else too small; but will have everything, as he says, in true
+proportion. If he occasionally favours a little that which is old,
+solid, well-placed, it is scarcely to be measured to him as a fault in
+an age so overwhelmed with the shiny new.
+
+He is a fine, up-standing, hearty old gentleman with white hair and
+rosy cheeks, and the bright eyes of one who has lived all his life with
+temperance. One incident I cannot resist telling, though it has nothing
+directly to do with this story, but it will let you know what kind of a
+man my old friend is, and when all is said, it would be a fine thing to
+know about any man. Not long ago he was afflicted with a serious loss,
+a loss that would have crushed some men, but when I met him not long
+afterward, though the lines around his eyes were grown deeper, he
+greeted me in his old serene, courtly manner, When I would have
+comforted him with my sympathy, for I felt myself near enough to speak
+of his loss, he replied calmly:
+
+“How can we know whether a thing is evil until we reach the end of it?
+It may be good!”
+
+One of the events I esteem among the finest of the whole year is my old
+friend’s birthday party. Every winter, on the twenty-sixth of February,
+a party of his friends drop in to see him. Some of us go out of habit,
+drawn by our affection for the old gentleman; others, I think, he
+invites, for he knows to perfection the delicate shadings of
+companionship which divide those who come unbidden from those, not less
+loved but shyer, who must be summoned.
+
+Now this birthday gathering has one historic ceremony which none of us
+would miss, because it expresses so completely the essence of our
+friend’s generous and tolerant, but just, nature. He is, as I have
+said, a temperate man, and dislikes as much as any one I know the whole
+alcohol business; but living in a community where the struggle for
+temperance has often been waged intemperately, and where there is a
+lurking belief that cudgelling laws can make men virtuous, he publishes
+abroad once a year his declaration of independence.
+
+After we have been with our friend for an hour or so, and are well
+warmed and happy with the occasion, he rises solemnly and goes to the
+toby-closet at the end of his generous fireplace, where the apple-log
+specially cut for the occasion is burning merrily, and as we all fall
+silent, knowing well what is coming, he unlocks the door and takes from
+the shelf a bottle of old peach brandy which, having uncorked, he
+gravely smells of and possibly lets his nearest neighbour smell of too.
+Then he brings from the sideboard a server set with diminutive glasses
+that have been polished until they shine for the great occasion, and,
+having filled them all with the ripe liquor, he passes them around to
+each of us. We have all risen and are becomingly solemn as he now
+proposes the toast of the year—and it is always the same toast:
+
+“Here’s to moderation—in all things!”
+
+He takes a sip or two, and continues:
+
+“Here’s to temperance—the queen of the virtues.”
+
+So we all drink off our glasses. Our mellow old friend smacks his lips,
+corks the tall bottle, and returns it to his toby-closet, where it
+reposes undisturbed for another year.
+
+“And now, gentlemen,” he says, heartily, “let us go in to dinner.”...
+
+As I think of it, now that it is written, this story bears no very
+close relationship to my original subject, and yet it seemed to follow
+naturally enough as I set it down, and to belong with the simple and
+well-flavoured things of the garden and fields; and recalling the
+advice of Cobbett to his nephew on the art of writing, “never to alter
+a thought, for that which has come of itself into your mind is likely
+to pass into that of another more readily and with more effect than
+anything which you can by reflection invent,” I leave it here just as I
+wrote it, hoping that the kinship of my genial old friend with simple
+and natural and temperate things may plainly appear.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+PLACES OF RETIREMENT
+
+
+“Good God, how sweet are all things here!
+How beautiful the fields appear!
+    How cleanly do we feed and lie!
+Lord, what good hours do we keep!
+How quietly we sleep!”
+
+
+CHARLES COTTON (a friend of Izaak Walton)
+
+
+_April 29th_.
+
+I have been spending a Sunday of retirement in the woods. I came out
+with a strange, deep sense of depression, and though I knew it was
+myself and not the world that was sad, yet I could not put it away from
+me. ... As I write, the wood seems full of voices, the little rustling
+of leaves, the minute sounds of twigs chafing together, the cry of
+frogs from the swamp so steady and monotonous that it scarcely arrests
+attention. Of odours, a-plenty! Just behind me, so that by turning my
+head I can see into their cool green depths, are a number of hemlock
+trees, the breath of which is incalculably sweet. All the earth the
+very earth itself has a good rich growing odour, pleasant to smell.
+
+These things have been here a thousand years a million years and yet
+they are not stale, but are ever fresh, ever serene, ever here to
+loosen one’s crabbed spirit and make one quietly happy. It seems to me
+I could not live if it were not possible often to come thus alone to
+the woods.
+
+...On later walking I discover that here and there on warm southern
+slopes the dog-tooth violet is really in bloom, and worlds of hepatica,
+both lavender and white, among the brown leaves. One of the notable
+sights of the hillsides at this time of the year is the striped maple,
+the long wands rising straight and chaste among thickets of
+less-striking young birches and chestnuts, and having a bud of a
+delicate pink—a marvel of minute beauty. A little trailing arbutus I
+found and renewed my joy with one of the most exquisite odours of all
+the spring; Solomon’s seal thrusting up vivid green cornucopias from
+the lifeless earth, and often near a root or stone the red partridge
+berries among their bright leaves. The laurel on the hills is sharply
+visible, especially when among deciduous trees, and along the old brown
+roads are patches of fresh wintergreen. In a cleft of the hills near
+the top of Norwottuck, though the day is warm, I found a huge
+snowbank—the last held trench of old winter, the last guerilla of the
+cold, driven to the fastnesses of the hills.... I have enjoyed this day
+without trying. After the first hour or so of it all the worries
+dropped away, all the ambitions, all the twisted thoughts—
+
+It is strange how much thrilling joy there is in the discovery of the
+ages-old miracle of returning life in the woods: each green adventurer,
+each fragrant joy, each bird-call—and the feel of the soft, warm
+sunshine upon one’s back after months of winter. On any terms life is
+good. The only woe, the only Great Woe, is the woe of never having been
+born. Sorrow, yes; failure, yes; weakness, yes the sad loss of dear
+friends—yes! But oh, the good God: I still live!
+
+Being alone without feeling alone is one of the great experiences of
+life, and he who practises it has acquired an infinitely valuable
+possession. People fly to crowds for happinesss not knowing that all
+the happiness they find there they must take with them. Thus they
+divert and distract that within them which creates power and joy, until
+by flying always away from themselves, seeking satisfaction from
+without rather than from within, they become infinitely boresome to
+themselves, so that they can scarcely bear a moment of their own
+society.
+
+But if once a man have a taste of true and happy retirement, though it
+be but a short hour, or day, now and then, he has found, or is
+beginning to find, a sure place of refuge, of blessed renewal, toward
+which in the busiest hours he will find his thoughts wistfully
+stealing. How stoutly will he meet the buffets of the world if he knows
+he has such a place of retirement where all is well-ordered and full of
+beauty, and right counsels prevail, and true things are noted.
+
+As a man grows older, if he cultivate the art of retirement, not indeed
+as an end in itself, but as a means of developing a richer and freer
+life, he will find his reward growing surer and greater until in time
+none of the storms or shocks of life any longer disturbs him. He might
+in time even reach the height attained by Diogenes, of whom Epictetus
+said, “It was not possible for any man to approach him, nor had any man
+the means of laying hold upon him to enslave him. He had everything
+easily loosed, everything only hanging to him. If you laid hold of his
+property, he would rather have let it go and be yours than he would
+have followed you for it; if you laid hold of his leg he would have let
+go his leg: if all of his body, all his poor body; his intimates,
+friends, country, just the same. For he knew from whence he had them,
+and from whom and on what conditions.”
+
+The best partners of solitude are books. I like to take a book with me
+in my pocket, although I find the world so full of interesting
+things—sights, sounds, odours—that often I never read a word in it. It
+is like having a valued friend with you, though you walk for miles
+without saying a word to him or he to you: but if you really know your
+friend, it is a curious thing how, subconsciously, you are aware of
+what he is thinking and feeling about this hillside or that distant
+view. And so it is with books. It is enough to have this writer in your
+pocket, for the very thought of him and what he would say to these old
+fields and pleasant trees is ever freshly delightful. And he never
+interrupts at inconvenient moments, nor intrudes his thoughts upon
+yours unless you desire it.
+
+I do not want long books and least of all story books in the
+woods—these are for the library—but rather scraps and extracts and
+condensations from which thoughts can be plucked like flowers and
+carried for a while in the buttonhole. So it is that I am fond of all
+kinds of anthologies. I have one entitled “Traveller’s Joy,” another,
+“Songs of Nature,” and I have lately found the best one I know called
+“The Spirit of Man” by Robert Bridges, the English laureate. Other
+little books that fit well in the pocket on a tramp, because they are
+truly companionable, are Ben Jonson’s “Timber,” one of the very best,
+and William Penn’s “Fruits of Solitude.” An anthology of Elizabethan
+verse, given me by a friend, is also a good companion.
+
+It is not a discourse or a narrative we want as we walk abroad, but
+conversation. Neither do we want people or facts or stories, but a
+person. So I open one of these little books and read therein the
+thoughtful remark of a wise companion. This I may reply to, or merely
+enjoy, as I please. I am in no hurry, as I might be with a living
+companion, for my book friend, being long dead, is not impatient and
+gives me time to reply, and is not resentful if I make no reply at all.
+Submitted to such a test as this few writers, old or new, give
+continued profit or delight. To be considered in the presence of the
+great and simple things of nature, or worn long in the warm places of
+the spirit, a writer must have supreme qualities of sense or humour, a
+great sensitiveness to beauty, or a genuine love of goodness—but above
+all he must somehow give us the flavour of personality. He must be a
+true companion of the spirit.
+
+There is an exercise given to young soldiers which consists in raising
+the hands slowly above the head, taking in a full breath at the same
+time, and then letting them down in such a way as to square the
+shoulders. This leaves the body erect, the head high, the eyes straight
+ahead, the lungs full of good air. It is the attitude that every man at
+arms should wish to take, After a day in the woods I feel some such
+erectness of spirit, a life of the head, and a clearer and calmer
+vision, for I have raised up my hands to the heavens, and drawn in the
+odours and sights and sounds of the good earth.
+
+One of the great joys of such times of retirement perhaps the greatest
+of the joys is the return, freshened and sweetened, to the common life.
+How good then appear the things of the garden and farm, the house and
+shop, that weariness had staled; how good the faces of friends.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+NO TRESPASS
+
+
+I live in a country of beautiful hills, and in the last few years,
+since I have been here with Harriet, I have made familiar and pleasant
+acquaintance with several of them....
+
+One hill I know is precious to me for a peculiar reason. Upon the side
+of it, along the town road, are two or three old farms with lilacs like
+trees about their doorways, and ancient apple orchards with great
+gnarly branches, and one has an old garden of hollyhocks, larkspurs,
+zinnias, mignonette, and I know not how many other old-fashioned
+flowers. Wild grapes there are along the neglected walls, and in a
+corner of one of them, by a brook, a mass of sweet currant which in
+blossom time makes all that bit of valley a bower of fragrance, I have
+gone that way often in spring for the sheer joy of the friendly odours
+I had across the ancient stone fences.
+
+The largest and stoniest of the farms is owned by an old man named
+Howieson. A strange, brown-clad, crooked, crabbed old man, I have seen
+him often creeping across his fields with his horses. An ineffective
+worker all his life long, he has scarcely made a living from his stony
+acres. His farm is tipped up behind upon the hill and runs below to the
+brook, and the buildings are old and worn, and a rocky road goes by to
+the town. Once, in more prosperous days, before the factories took over
+the winter work of these hill farms, the busy families finished shoes,
+and wove cloth, and plaited straw hats—and one I know was famous for
+wooden bowls craftily hollowed out of maple knots—and the hill people
+relied upon their stony fields for little more than their food. But in
+these later days, the farm industries are gone, the houses are no
+longer overflowing with children, for there is nothing for children to
+do, and those who remain are old or discouraged. Some homes have
+entirely disappeared, so that all that remains is a clump of lilacs or
+a wild tangle of rose bushes about a grass-covered or bush-grown cellar
+wall. The last thing to disappear is not that which the old farmers
+most set their hearts upon, their fine houses and barns or their
+cultivated fields, but the one touch of beauty they left—lilac clump or
+rose-tangle.
+
+Old Howieson, with that passion for the sense of possession which
+thrives best when the realities of possession are slipping away, has
+posted all his fields with warnings against intrusion. You may not
+enter this old field, nor walk by this brook, nor climb this hill, for
+all this belongs, in fee simple, to James Howieson!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+For a long time I did not meet James Howieson face to face, though I
+had often seen his signs, and always with a curious sense of the
+futility of them. I did not need to enter his fields, nor climb his
+hill, nor walk by his brook, but as the springs passed and the autumns
+whitened into winter, I came into more and more complete possession of
+all those fields that he so jealously posted. I looked with strange joy
+upon his hill, saw April blossom in his orchard, and May colour the
+wild grape leaves along his walls. June I smelled in the sweet vernal
+of his hay fields, and from the October of his maples and beeches I
+gathered rich crops and put up no hostile signs of ownership, paid no
+taxes, worried over no mortgage, and often marvelled that he should be
+so poor within his posted domain and I so rich without.
+
+One who loves a hill, or a bit of valley, will experiment long until he
+finds the best spot to take his joy of it; and this is no more than the
+farmer himself does when he experiments year after year to find the
+best acres for his potatoes, his corn, his oats, his hay. Intensive
+cultivation is as important in these wider fields of the spirit as in
+any other. If I consider the things that I hear and see and smell, and
+the thoughts that go with them or grow out of them, as really valuable
+possessions, contributing to the wealth of life, I cannot see why I
+should not willingly give to them a tenth or a hundredth part of the
+energy and thought I give to my potatoes or my blackberries or to the
+writing I do.
+
+I chose a place in a field just below Old Howieson’s farm, where there
+is a thorn-apple tree to sit or lie under. From the thorn-apple tree,
+by turning my head in one direction, I can look up at the crown of the
+hill with its green hood of oaks and maples and chestnuts, and high
+above it I can see the clouds floating in the deep sky, or, if I turn
+my head the other way, for I am a kind of monarch there on the hill and
+command the world to delight me, I can look off across the pleasant
+valley with its spreading fields and farmsteads set about with trees,
+and the town slumbering by the riverside. I come often with a little
+book in one pocket to read from, and a little book in the other to
+write in, but I rarely use either the one or the other, for there is
+far too much to see and think about.
+
+From this spot I make excursions round about, and have had many strange
+and interesting adventures: and now find thoughts of mine, like
+lichens, upon all the boulders and old walls and oak trees of that
+hillside. Sometimes I climb to the top of the hill. If I am in a
+leisurely mood I walk lawfully around Old Howieson’s farm by a kind of
+wood lane that leads to the summit, but often I cross his walls, all
+regardless of his trespass signs, and go that way to the top.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It was on one of these lawless excursions in Old Howieson’s field that
+I first saw that strange old fellow who is known hereabout as the
+Herbman. I came upon him so suddenly that I stopped short, curiously
+startled, as one is startled at finding anything human that seems less
+than human. He was kneeling there among the low verdure of a shallow
+valley, and looked like an old gray rock or some prehistoric animal. I
+stopped to look at him, but he paid no heed, and seemed only to shrink
+into himself as though, if he kept silent, he might be taken for stock
+or stone. I addressed him but he made no answer. I went nearer, with a
+sensation of uncanny wonder; but he did not so much as glance up at me,
+though he knew I was there. His old brown basket was near him and the
+cane beside it. He was gathering pennyroyal.
+
+“Another man who is taking an unexpected crop from Old Howieson’s
+acres,” I thought to myself.
+
+I watched him for some moments, quite still, as one might watch a
+turtle or a woodchuck—and left him there.
+
+Since then I have heard something about him, and seen him once or
+twice. A strange old man, a wanderer upon the face of the fragrant
+earth. Spring and summer he wears always an old overcoat, and carries a
+basket with double covers, very much worn and brown with usage. His
+cane is of hickory with a crooked root for a handle, this also shiny
+with age. He gathers bitter-bark, tansy; ginseng, calamus, smartweed,
+and slippery elm, and from along old fences and barnyards, catnip and
+boneset, I suppose he lives somewhere, a hole in a log, or the limb of
+a tree, but no one knows where it is, or how he dries or cures his
+findings. No one knows his name: perhaps he has forgotten it himself. A
+name is no great matter anyway. He is called simply the Herbman. He
+drifts into our valley in the spring, is seen here and there on the
+hills or in the fields, like the crows or the blackbirds, and
+disappears in the fall with the robins and the maple leaves. Perhaps he
+is one of those favoured souls to whom life is all spring and summer.
+
+The age has passed him by, and except for certain furtive old women,
+few care now for his sovereign remedies.
+
+I met him once in the town road, and he stopped humbly without lifting
+his eyes, and opening his basket let out into the air such a fragrance
+of ancient simples as I never smelled before. He said nothing at all;
+but took out dry bundles of catnip, sassafras, slippery elm, to show
+me. He had also pennyroyal for healing teas, and calamus and
+bitter-bark for miseries. I selected a choice assortment of his wares
+to take home to Harriet, but could get him to name no price. He took
+what I gave without objection and without thanks, and went his way. A
+true man of the hills.
+
+As I said, I came often to the field below Old Howieson’s farm. I think
+the old man saw me coming and going, for the road winds along the side
+of the hill within sight of his house, skirts a bit of wood, and with
+an unexpected turn comes out triumphantly to the top of the ridge
+beyond.
+
+At the turn of the road I always disappeared, for I crossed the wall
+into the field below Old Howieson’s farm, and mysteriously failed to
+appear to the watchful eye upon the ridge beyond. What could be more
+provoking or suspicious! To go in at one end of a well-travelled road
+and not to come out in the regular and expected way at the other! Or to
+be suspected of not being deferential toward trespass signs, or
+observant of closed ways! How disturbing to all those who dwell
+tremulously within posted enclosures of whatever sort, or those who
+base their sense of possession upon stumped paper, or take their God
+from a book. Men have been crucified for less.
+
+Sooner or later those who cross boundaries clash with those who defend
+boundaries: and those who adventure offend those who seek security; but
+it was a long time before I came face to face with Old Man Howieson.
+
+This was the way of it: Well back of Howieson’s buildings and reaching
+upward upon the face of the hill stretches a long and narrow field, a
+kind of barren back pasture with boulders in it, and gnarly hawthorn
+trees, and a stunted wild apple or so. A stone fence runs down one side
+of the cleared land and above it rises the hill. It is like a great
+trough or ravine which upon still spring evenings gathers in all the
+varied odours of Old Howieson’s farm and orchard and brings them down
+to me as I sit in the field below. I need no book then, nor sight of
+the distant town, nor song of birds, for I have a singular and
+incomparable album of the good odours of the hill. This is one reason
+why I chose this particular spot in the fields for my own, and it has
+given me a secret name for the place which I will not here disclose. If
+ever you should come this way in May, my friend, I might take you there
+of an evening, but could warrant you no joy of it that you yourself
+could not take. But you need not come here, or go there, but stop where
+you are at this moment, and I here assure you that if you look up, and
+look in, you, also, will see something of the glory of the world.
+
+One evening I had been upon the hill to seek again the pattern and
+dimensions of my tabernacle, and to receive anew the tables of the Jaw.
+I had crossed Old Howieson’s field so often that I had almost forgotten
+it was not my own. It was indeed mine by the same inalienable right
+that it belonged to the crows that flew across it, or to the partridges
+that nested in its coverts, or the woodchucks that lived in its walls,
+or the squirrels in its chestnut trees. It was mine by the final test
+of all possession—that I could use it.
+
+He came out of a thicket of hemlocks like a wraith of the past, a gray
+and crabbed figure, and confronted me there in the wide field. I
+suppose he thought he had caught me at last. I was not at all startled
+or even surprised, for as I look back upon it now I know that I had
+always been expecting him. Indeed, I felt a lift of the spirit, the
+kind of jauntiness with which one meets a crucial adventure.
+
+He stood there for a moment quite silent, a grim figure of denial, and
+I facing him.
+
+“You are on my land, sir,” he said.
+
+I answered him instantly and in a way wholly unexpected to myself:
+
+“You are breathing my air, sir.”
+
+He looked at me dully, but with a curious glint of fear in his eye,
+fear and anger, too.
+
+“Did you see the sign down there? This land is posted.”
+
+“Yes,” I said, “I have seen your signs. But let me ask you: If I were
+not here would you own this land any more than you do now? Would it
+yield you any better crops?”
+
+It is never the way of those who live in posted enclosures, of whatever
+sort, to reason. They assert.
+
+“This land is posted,” said the old man doggedly.
+
+“Are you sure you own it?” I asked. “Is it really yours?”
+
+“My father owned this farm before me,” he said, “and my grandfather
+cleared this field and built these walls. I was born in that house and
+have lived there all my life.”
+
+“Well, then, I must be going—and I will not come here again,” I said.
+“I am sorry I walked on your land—”
+
+I started to go down the hill, but stopped, and said, as though it were
+an afterthought:
+
+“I have made some wonderful discoveries upon your land, and that hill
+there. You don’t seem to know how valuable this field is.... Good-bye.”
+
+With that I took two or three steps down the hill—but felt the old
+man’s hand on my arm.
+
+“Say, mister,” he asked, “are you one of the electric company men? Is
+that high-tension line comin’ across here?”
+
+“No,” I said, “it is something more valuable than that!”
+
+I walked onward a few steps, as though I was quite determined to get
+out of his field, but he followed close behind me.
+
+“It ain’t the new trolley line, is it?”
+
+“No,” I said, “it isn’t the trolley line.”
+
+“What is it, then?”
+
+In that question, eager and shrill, spoke the dry soul of the old man,
+the lifelong hope that his clinging ownership of those barren acres
+would bring him from the outside some miraculous profit.
+
+His whole bearing had changed. He had ceased to be truculent or even
+fearful, but was now shrilly beseeching, A great wave of compassion
+came over me, I was sorry for him, imprisoned there within the walls of
+his own making, and expecting wealth from the outside when there was
+wealth in plenty within and everywhere about him.
+
+But how could I help him? You can give no valuable thing to any man who
+has not the vision to take it. If I had told him what I found upon his
+hill or in his fields he would have thought me—well, crazy; or he would
+have suspected that under cover of such a quest I hid some evil design.
+As well talk adventure to an old party man, or growth to a set
+churchman.
+
+So I left him there within his walls. So often when we think we are
+barring other people out, we are only barring ourselves in. The last I
+saw of him as I turned into the road was a gray and crabbed figure
+standing alone, looking after me, and not far off his own sign:
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Sometime, I thought, this old farm will be owned by a man who is also
+capable of possessing it. More than one such place I know already has
+been taken by those who value the beauty of the hills and the old
+walls, and the boulder-strewn fields. One I know is really possessed by
+a man who long ago had a vision of sheep feeding on fields too
+infertile to produce profitable crops, and many others have been taken
+by men who saw forests growing where forests ought to grow. For real
+possession is not a thing of inheritance or of documents, but of the
+spirit; and passes by vision and imagination. Sometimes, indeed, the
+trespass signs stand long—so long that we grow impatient—but nature is
+in no hurry. Nature waits, and presently the trespass signs rot away,
+one arm falls off, and lo! where the adventurer found only denial
+before he is now invited to—“pass.” The old walls are conquered by the
+wild cherries and purple ivy and blackberry bushes, and the old
+Howiesons sleep in calm forgetfulness of their rights upon the hills
+they thought they possessed, and all that is left is a touch of
+beauty—lilac clump and wild-rose tangle.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+LOOK AT THE WORLD!
+
+
+“Give me to struggle with weather and wind;
+    Give me to stride through the snow;
+Give me the feel of the chill on my cheeks,
+    And the glow and the glory within!”
+
+
+_March 17th._
+
+The joy of winter: the downright joy of winter! I tramped to-day
+through miles of open, snow-clad country. I slipped in the ruts of the
+roads or ploughed through the drifts in the fields with such a sense of
+adventure as I cannot describe.
+
+Day before yesterday we had a heavy north wind with stinging gusts of
+snow. Yesterday fell bright and cold with snow lying fine and crumbly
+like sugar. To the east of the house where I shovelled a path the heaps
+are nearly as high as my shoulder....
+
+This perfect morning a faint purplish haze is upon all the hills, with
+bright sunshine and still, cold air through which the chimney smoke
+rises straight upward. Hungry crows flap across the fields, or with
+unaccustomed daring settle close in upon the manure heaps around the
+barns. All the hillsides glisten and sparkle like cloth of gold, each
+glass knob on the telephone poles is like a resplendent jewel, and the
+long morning shadows of the trees lie blue upon the snow. Horses’ feet
+crunch upon the road as the early farmers go by with milk for the
+creamery—the frosty breath of each driver fluttering aside like a white
+scarf. Through the still air ordinary voices cut sharply and clearly,
+and a laugh bounds out across the open country with a kind of
+superabundance of joy. I see two men beating their arms as they follow
+their wood sled. They are bantering one another noisily. I see a man
+shovelling snow from his barn doors; as each shovelful rises and
+scatters, the sun catches it for an instant and it falls, a silvery
+shower. ... I tramped to-day through miles of it: and whether in broken
+roads or spotless fields, had great joy of it. It was good to stride
+through opposing drifts and to catch the tingling air upon one’s face.
+The spring is beautiful indeed, and one is happy at autumn, but of all
+the year no other mornings set the blood to racing like these; none
+gives a greater sense of youth, strength, or of the general goodness of
+the earth.
+
+Give me the winter: give me the winter! Not all winter, but just winter
+enough, just what nature sends.
+
+...Dry air in the throat so cold at first as to make one cough; and
+dry, sharp, tingling air in the nostrils; frost on beard and eyebrows;
+cheeks red and crusty, so that to wrinkle them hurts: but all the body
+within aglow with warmth and health. Twice the ordinary ozone in the
+air, so that one wishes to whistle or sing, and if the fingers grow
+chill, what are shoulders for but to beat them around!
+
+It is a strange and yet familiar experience how all things present
+their opposites. Do you enjoy the winter? Your neighbour loathes or
+fears it. Do you enjoy life? To your friend it is a sorrow and a
+heaviness. Even to you it is not always alike. Though the world itself
+is the same to-day as it was yesterday and will be to-morrow—the same
+snowy fields and polar hills, the same wintry stars, the same
+infinitely alluring variety of people—yet to-day you, that were a god,
+have become a grieving child.
+
+Even at moments when we are well pleased with the earth we often have a
+wistful feeling that we should conceal it lest it hurt those borne down
+by circumstances too great or too sad for them. What is there to offer
+one who cannot respond gladly to the beauty of the fields, or opens his
+heart widely to the beckoning of friends? And we ask ourselves: Have I
+been tried as this man has? Would I be happy then? Have I been wrung
+with sorrow, worn down by ill-health, buffeted with injustice as this
+man has? Would I be happy then?
+
+I saw on my walk to-day an old woman with a crossed shawl upon her
+breast creeping out painfully to feed her hens. She lives on a small,
+ill-kept farm I have known for years. She is old and poor and
+asthmatic, and the cold bites through her with the sharpness of knives.
+The path to the hen-house is a kind of via dolorosa, a terror of
+slipperiness and cold. She might avoid it: her son, worthless as he is,
+might do it for her, but she clings to it as she clings to her life. It
+is the last reason for staying here! But the white fields and drifted
+roads are never joyfully met, never desired. She spends half the summer
+dreading the return of winter from the severities of which she cannot
+escape.
+
+Nor is it all mere poverty, though she is poor, for there are those who
+would help to send her away, but she will not go. She is wrapped about
+with Old Terrors, Ancient Tyrannies—that Terror of the Unknown which is
+more painful even than the Terror of the Known: those Tyrannies of
+Habit and of Place which so often and so ruthlessly rule the lives of
+the old. She clings desperately to the few people she knows (“’tis hard
+to die among strangers!”) and the customs she has followed all her
+life. Against the stark power of her tragic helplessness neither the
+good nor the great of the earth may prevail. This reality too....
+
+I had a curious experience not long ago: One of those experiences which
+light up as in a flash some of the fundamental things of life. I met a
+man in the town road whom I have come to know rather more than
+slightly. He is a man of education and has been “well-off” in the
+country sense, is still, so far as I know, but he has a sardonic
+outlook upon life. He is discouraged about human nature. Thinks that
+politics are rotten, and that the prices of potatoes and bread are
+disgraceful. The state of the nation, and of the world, is quite beyond
+temperate expression. Few rays of joy seem to illuminate his pathway.
+
+As we approached in the town road I called out to him:
+
+“Good morning.”
+
+He paused and, to my surprise, responded:
+
+“Are you happy?”
+
+It had not occurred to me for some time whether I was happy or not, so
+I replied:
+
+“I don’t know; why do you ask?”
+
+He looked at me in a questioning, and I thought rather indignant, way.
+
+“Why shouldn’t a man be happy?” I pressed him.
+
+“Why _should_ he be? Answer me that!” he responded, “Why should he be?
+Look at the world!”
+
+With that he passed onward with a kind of crushing dignity.
+
+I have laughed since when I have recalled the tone of his voice as he
+said, “Look at the world!” Gloomy and black it was. It evidently made
+him indignant to be here.
+
+But at the moment his bitter query, the essential attitude of spirit
+which lay behind it, struck into me with a poignancy that stopped me
+where I stood. Was I, then, all wrong about the world? I actually had a
+kind of fear lest when I should look up again I should find the earth
+grown wan and bleak and unfriendly, so that I should no longer desire
+it.
+
+“Look at the world!” I said aloud.
+
+And with that I suddenly looked all around me and it is a strange, deep
+thing, as I have thought of it since, how the world came back upon me
+with a kind of infinite, calm assurance, as beautiful as ever it was.
+There were the hills and the fields and the great still trees—and the
+open sky above. And even as I looked down the road and saw my sardonic
+old friend plodding through the snow—his very back frowning—I had a
+sense that he belonged in the picture, too—and couldn’t help himself.
+That he even had a kind of grace, and gave a human touch to that wintry
+scene! He had probably said a great deal more than he meant!
+
+_Look at the world_!
+
+Well, look at it.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+A GOOD APPLE
+
+
+“I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible
+goods.”
+
+I have just had one of the pleasant experiences of life. From time to
+time, these brisk winter days, I like to walk across the fields to
+Horace’s farm. I take a new way each time and make nothing of the snow
+in the fields or the drifts along the fences....
+
+“Why,” asks Harriet, “do you insist on struggling through the snow when
+there’s a good beaten road around?”
+
+“Harriet,” I said, “why should any one take a beaten road when there
+are new and adventurous ways to travel?”
+
+When I cross the fields I never know at what moment I may come upon
+some strange or surprising experience, what new sights I may see, what
+new sounds I may hear, and I have the further great advantage of
+appearing unexpectedly at Horace’s farm. Sometimes I enter by the cow
+lane, sometimes by way of the old road through the wood-lot, or I
+appear casually, like a gust of wind, around the corner of the barn, or
+I let Horace discover me leaning with folded arms upon his cattle
+fence. I have come to love doing this, for unexpectedness in visitors,
+as in religion and politics, is disturbing to Horace and, as sand-grits
+in oysters produce pearls, my unexpected appearances have more than
+once astonished new thoughts in Horace, or yielded pearly bits of
+native humour.
+
+Ever since I have known him, Horace has been rather high-and-mighty
+with me; but I know he enjoys my visits, for I give him always, I
+think, a pleasantly renewed sense of his own superiority. When he sees
+me his eye lights up with the comfortable knowledge that he can plough
+so much better than I can, that his corn grows taller than mine, and
+his hens lay more eggs. He is a wonderfully practical man, is Horace;
+hard-headed, they call it here. And he never feels so superior, I
+think, as when he finds me sometimes of a Sunday or an evening walking
+across the fields where my land joins his, or sitting on a stone fence,
+or lying on my back in the pasture under a certain friendly thorn-apple
+tree. This he finds it difficult to understand, and thinks it highly
+undisciplined, impractical, no doubt reprehensible.
+
+One incident of the sort I shall never forget. It was on a June day
+only a year or so after I came here, and before Horace knew me as well
+as he does now. I had climbed the hill to look off across his own
+high-field pasture, where the white daisies, the purple fleabane, and
+the buttercups made a wild tangle of beauty among the tall herd’s
+grass. Light airs moved billowing across the field, bobolinks and
+meadow larks were singing, and all about were the old fences, each with
+its wild hedgerow of choke cherry, young elms, and black raspberry
+bushes, and beyond, across miles and miles of sunny green countryside,
+the mysterious blue of the ever-changing hills. It was a spot I loved
+then, and have loved more deeply every year since.
+
+Horace found me sitting on the stone fence which there divides our
+possessions; I think he had been observing me with amusement for some
+time before I saw him, for when I looked around his face wore a
+comfortably superior, half-disdainful smile.
+
+“David,” said he, “what ye doin’ here?”
+
+“Harvesting my crops,” I said.
+
+He looked at me sharply to see if I was joking, but I was perfectly
+sober.
+
+“Harvestin’ yer crops?”
+
+“Yes,” I said, the fancy growing suddenly upon me, “and just now I’ve
+been taking a crop from the field you think you own.”
+
+I waved my hand to indicate his high-field pasture.
+
+“Don’t I own it?”
+
+“No, Horace, I’m sorry to say, not all of it. To be frank with you,
+since I came here, I’ve quietly acquired an undivided interest in that
+land. I may as well tell you first as last. I’m like you, Horace, I’m
+reaching out in all directions.”
+
+I spoke in as serious a voice as I could command: the tone I use when I
+sell potatoes. Horace’s smile wholly disappeared. A city feller like me
+was capable of anything!
+
+“How’s that?” he exclaimed sharply. “What do you mean? That field came
+down to me from my grandfather Jamieson.”
+
+I continued to look at Horace with great calmness and gravity.
+
+“Judging from what I now know of your title, Horace,” said I, “neither
+your grandfather Jamieson nor your father ever owned all of that field.
+And I’ve now acquired that part of it, in fee simple, that neither they
+nor you ever really had.”
+
+At this Horace began to look seriously worried. The idea that any one
+could get away from him anything that he possessed, especially without
+his knowledge, was terrible to him.
+
+“What do you mean, Mr. Grayson?”
+
+He had been calling me “David,” but he now returned sharply to
+“Mister.” In our country when we “Mister” a friend something serious is
+about to happen. It’s the signal for general mobilization.
+
+I continued to look Horace rather coldly and severely in the eye.
+
+“Yes,” said I, “I’ve acquired a share in that field which I shall not
+soon surrender.”
+
+An unmistakable dogged look came into Horace’s face, the look inherited
+from generations of land-owning, home-defending, fighting ancestors.
+Horace is New England of New England.
+
+“Yes,” I said, “I have already had two or three crops from that field.”
+
+“Huh!” said Horace. “I’ve cut the grass and I’ve cut the rowen every
+year since you bin here. What’s more, I’ve got the money fer it in the
+bank.”
+
+He tapped his fingers on the top of the wall.
+
+“Nevertheless, Horace,” said I, “I’ve got my crops, also, from that
+field, and a steady income, too.”
+
+“What crops?”
+
+“Well, Eve just now been gathering in one of them. What do you think of
+the value of the fleabane, and the daisies, and the yellow five-finger
+in that field?”
+
+“Huh!” said Horace.
+
+“Well, I’ve just been cropping them. And have you observed the wind in
+the grass—and those shadows along the southern wall? Aren’t they
+valuable?”
+
+“Huh!” said Horace.
+
+“I’ve rarely seen anything more beautiful,” I said, “than this field
+and the view across it—I’m taking that crop now, and later I shall
+gather in the rowen of goldenrod and aster, and the red and yellow of
+the maple trees—and store it all away in _my_ bank—to live on next
+winter.”
+
+It was some time before either of us spoke again, but I could see from
+the corner of my eye that mighty things were going on inside of Horace;
+and suddenly he broke out into a big laugh and clapped his knee with
+his hand in a way he has.
+
+“Is that all!” said Horace.
+
+I think it only confirmed him in the light esteem in which he held me.
+Though I showed him unmeasured wealth in his own fields, ungathered
+crops of new enjoyment, he was unwilling to take them, but was content
+with hay. It is a strange thing to me, and a sad one, how many of our
+farmers (and be it said in a whisper, other people, too) own their
+lands without ever really possessing them: and let the most precious
+crops of the good earth go to waste.
+
+After that, for a long time, Horace loved to joke me about my crops and
+his. A joke with Horace is a durable possession.
+
+“S’pose you think that’s your field,” he’d say.
+
+“The best part of it,” I’d return, “but you can have all I’ve taken,
+and there’ll still be enough for both of us.”
+
+“You’re a queer one!” he’d say, and then add sometimes, dryly, “but
+there’s one crop ye don’t git, David,” and he’d tap his pocket where he
+carries his fat, worn, leather pocket-book. “And as fer feelin’s, it
+can’t be beat.”
+
+So many people have the curious idea that the only thing the world
+desires enough to pay its hard money for is that which can be seen or
+eaten or worn. But there never was a greater mistake. While men will
+haggle to the penny over the price of hay, or fight for a cent more to
+the bushel of oats, they will turn out their very pockets for strange,
+intangible joys, hopes, thoughts, or for a moment of peace in a
+feverish world the unknown great possessions.
+
+So it was that one day, some months afterward, when we had been thus
+bantering each other with great good humour, I said to him:
+
+“Horace, how much did you get for your hay this year?”
+
+“Off that one little piece,” he replied, “I figger fifty-two dollars.”
+
+“Well, Horace,” said I, “I have beaten you. I got more out of it this
+year than you did.”
+
+“Oh, I know what you mean——”
+
+“No, Horace, you don’t. This time I mean just what you do: money, cash,
+dollars.”
+
+“How’s that, now?”
+
+“Well, I wrote a little piece about your field, and the wind in the
+grass, and the hedges along the fences, and the weeds among the
+timothy, and the fragrance of it all in June and sold it last week——” I
+leaned over toward Horace and whispered behind my hand—in just the way
+he tells me the price he gets for his pigs.
+
+“What!” he exclaimed.
+
+Horace had long known that I was “a kind of literary feller,” but his
+face was now a study in astonishment.
+
+“_What?_”
+
+Horace scratched his head, as he is accustomed to do when puzzled, with
+one finger just under the rim of his hat.
+
+“Well, I vum!” said he.
+
+Here I have been wandering all around Horace’s barn—in the snow—getting
+at the story I really started to tell, which probably supports Horace’s
+conviction that I am an impractical and unsubstantial person. If I had
+the true business spirit I should have gone by the beaten road from my
+house to Horace’s, borrowed the singletree I went for, and hurried
+straight home. Life is so short when one is after dollars! I should not
+have wallowed through the snow, nor stopped at the top of the hill to
+look for a moment across the beautiful wintry earth—gray sky and bare
+wild trees and frosted farmsteads with homely smoke rising from the
+chimneys—I should merely have brought home a singletree—and missed the
+glory of life! As I reflect upon it now, I believe it took me no longer
+to go by the fields than by the road; and I’ve got the singletree as
+securely with me as though I had not looked upon the beauty of the
+eternal hills, nor reflected, as I tramped, upon the strange ways of
+man.
+
+Oh, my friend, is it the settled rule of life that we are to accept
+nothing not expensive? It is not so settled for me; that which is
+freest, cheapest, seems somehow more valuable than anything I pay for;
+that which is given better than that which is bought; that which passes
+between you and me in the glance of an eye, a touch of the hand, is
+better than minted money!
+
+I found Horace upon the March day I speak of just coming out of his new
+fruit cellar. Horace is a progressive and energetic man, a leader in
+this community, and the first to have a modern fruit cellar. By this
+means he ministers profitably to that appetite of men which craves most
+sharply that which is hardest to obtain: he supplies the world with
+apples in March.
+
+It being a mild and sunny day, the door of the fruit cellar was open,
+and as I came around the corner I had such of whiff of fragrance as I
+cannot describe. It seemed as though the vials of the earth’s most
+precious odours had been broken there in Horace’s yard! The smell of
+ripe apples!
+
+In the dusky depths of the cellar, down three steps, I could see
+Horace’s ruddy face.
+
+“How are ye, David,” said he. “Will ye have a Good Apple?”
+
+So he gave me a good apple. It was a yellow Bellflower without a
+blemish, and very large and smooth. The body of it was waxy yellow, but
+on the side where the sun had touched it, it blushed a delicious deep
+red. Since October it had been in the dark, cool storage-room, and
+Horace, like some old monkish connoisseur of wines who knows just when
+to bring up the bottles of a certain vintage, had chosen the exact
+moment in all the year when the vintage of the Bellflower was at its
+best. As he passed it to me I caught, a scent as of old crushed apple
+blossoms, or fancied I did or it may have been the still finer aroma of
+friendship which passed at the touching of our fingers.
+
+It was a hand-filling apple and likewise good for tired eyes, an
+antidote for winter, a remedy for sick souls.
+
+“A wonderful apple!” I said to Horace, holding it off at arm’s length.
+
+“No better grown anywhere,” said he, with scarcely restrained pride.
+
+I took my delight of it more nearly; and the odour was like new-cut
+clover in an old orchard, or strawberry leaves freshly trod upon, or
+the smell of peach wood at the summer pruning—how shall one describe
+it? at least a compound or essence of all the good odours of summer.
+
+“Shall I eat it?” I asked myself, for I thought such a perfection of
+nature should be preserved for the blessing of mankind. As I hesitated,
+Horace remarked:
+
+“It was grown to be eaten.”
+
+So I bit into it, a big liberal mouthful, which came away with a
+rending sound such as one hears sometimes in a winter’s ice-pond. The
+flesh within, all dewy with moisture, was like new cream, except a rim
+near the surface where the skin had been broken; here it was of a
+clear, deep yellow.
+
+New odours came forth and I knew for the first time how perfect in
+deliciousness such an apple could be. A mild, serene, ripe, rich
+bouquet, compounded essence of the sunshine from these old
+Massachusetts hills, of moisture drawn from our grudging soil, of all
+the peculiar virtues of a land where the summers make up in the passion
+of growth for the long violence of winter; the compensatory aroma of a
+life triumphant, though hedged about by severity, was in the bouquet of
+this perfect Bellflower.
+
+Like some of the finest of wines and the warmest of friends it was of
+two flavours, and was not to be eaten for mere nourishment, but was to
+be tasted and enjoyed. The first of the flavours came readily in a
+sweetness, richness, a slight acidity, that it might not cloy; but the
+deeper, more delicate flavour came later—if one were not crudely
+impatient—and was, indeed, the very soul of the fruit. One does not
+quickly arrive at souls either in apples or in friends. And I said to
+Horace with solemnity, for this was an occasion not to be lightly
+treated:
+
+“I have never in my life tasted a fine apple.”
+
+“There is no finer apple,” said Horace with conviction.
+
+With that we fell to discussing the kinds and qualities of all the
+apples grown this side China, and gave our more or less slighting
+opinions of Ben Davises and Greenings and Russets, and especially of
+trivial summer apples of all sorts, and came to the conclusion at last
+that it must have been just after God created this particular “tree
+yielding fruit” that he desisted from his day’s work and remarked that
+what he saw was good. The record is silent upon the point, and Moses is
+not given to adjectives, but I have often wondered what He would have
+said if He had not only seen the product of His creation, but _tasted_
+it.
+
+I forgot to say that when I would have slurred the excellence of the
+Baldwin in comparison with the Bellflower, Horace began at once to
+interpose objections, and defended the excellence and perfection of
+that variety.
+
+...He has fifty barrels of Baldwins in his cellar.
+
+While we talked with much enjoyment of the lore of apples and
+apple-growing, I finished the Bellflower to the very core, and said to
+Horace as I reluctantly tossed aside the stem and three seeds:
+
+“Surely this has been one of the rare moments of life.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+I GO TO THE CITY
+
+
+“Surely man is a wonderfull divers and varying subject: It is very hard
+to ground and directly constant and uniforme judgement upon him.”
+
+Though I live most of the time in the country, as I love best to do,
+sometimes I go to the city and find there much that is strange and
+amusing. I like to watch the inward flow of the human tide in the
+morning, and the ebb at evening, and sometimes in the slack tide of
+noon I drift in one of the eddies where the restless life of the city
+pauses a moment to refresh itself. One of the eddies I like best of all
+is near the corner of Madison Square, where the flood of Twenty-third
+Street swirls around the bulkhead of the Metropolitan tower to meet the
+transverse currents of Madison Avenue. Here, of a bright morning when
+Down-at-Heels is generously warming himself on the park benches, and
+Old Defeat watches Young Hurry striding by, one has a royal choice of
+refreshment: a “red-hot” enfolded in a bun from the dingy sausage wagon
+at the curb, or a plum for a penny from the Italian with the trundle
+cart, or news of the world in lurid gulps from the noon edition of the
+paper—or else a curious idea or so flung out stridently over the heads
+of the crowd by a man on a soap box.
+
+I love this corner of the great city; I love the sense of the warm
+human tide flowing all about me. I love to look into the strange, dark,
+eager, sensitive, blunt faces.
+
+The other noon, drifting there in that human eddy, I stopped to listen
+to a small, shabby man who stood in transitory eminence upon his soap
+box, half his body reaching above the knobby black soil of human heads
+around him—black, knobby soil that he was seeking, there in the spring
+sunshine, to plough with strange ideas. He had ruddy cheeks and a tuft
+of curly hair set like an upholstery button on each side of his bald
+head. The front teeth in his upper jaw were missing, and as he opened
+his mouth one could see the ample lining of red flannel.
+
+He raised his voice penetratingly to overcome the noise of the world,
+straining until the dark-corded veins of his throat stood out sharply
+and perspiration gleamed on his bald forehead. As though his life
+depended upon the delivery of his great message he was explaining to
+that close-packed crowd that there was no God.
+
+From time to time he offered for sale pamphlets by R.G. Ingersoll and
+Frederic Harrison, with grimy back numbers of a journal called the
+“Truth-Seeker.”
+
+By the slant and timbre of his speech he was an Englishman; he had a
+gift of vigorous statement, and met questioners like an intellectual
+pugilist with skilful blows between the eyes: and his grammar was bad.
+
+I stood for some time listening to him while he proved with excellent
+logic, basing his reasoning on many learned authorities, that there was
+no God. His audience cheered with glee his clever hits, and held up
+their hands for the books he had for sale.
+
+“Who is this speaker?” I asked the elbowing helper who came through the
+crowd to deliver the speaker’s wares and collect the silver for them.
+“Who is this speaker who says there is no God?”
+
+“Henry Moore,” he responded.
+
+“And who,” I asked, “is Henry Moore?”
+
+“He is an Englishman and was brought up a Presbyterian—but he seen the
+light.”
+
+“And no longer thinks there is any God?”
+
+“Nope.”
+
+“And these books prove the same thing?”
+
+“Yep.”
+
+So I bought one of them, thinking it wonderful that proof of so
+momentous a conclusion could be had for so small a sum.
+
+This Henry Moore could fling arguments like thunderbolts; he could
+marshall his authorities like an army; he could talk against the roar
+of the city and keep his restless audience about him; and if he did not
+believe in God he had complete faith in Haeckel and Jacques Loeb, and
+took at face value the lightest utterances of John Stuart Mill.
+
+I enjoyed listening to Henry Moore. I enjoyed looking into the faces
+all around me—mostly keen foreign or half-foreign faces, and young
+faces, and idle faces, and curious faces, and faces that drank in, and
+faces that disdainfully rejected.
+
+After a time, however, I grew unaccountably weary of the vehemence of
+Henry Moore and of the adroit helper who hawked his books. And suddenly
+I looked up into the clear noon blue of the ancient sky. A pigeon was
+flying across the wide open spaces of the square, the sunlight glinting
+on its wings. I saw the quiet green tops of the trees in the park, and
+the statue of Roscoe Conkling, turning a nonchalant shoulder toward the
+heated speaker who said there was no God. How many strange ideas,
+contradictory arguments, curious logic, have fallen, this last quarter
+century, upon the stony ears of Roscoe Conkling! Far above me the
+Metropolitan tower, that wonder work of men, lifted itself grandly to
+the heavens, and all about I suddenly heard and felt the roar and surge
+of the mighty city, the mighty, careless, busy city, thousands of
+people stirring about me, souls full of hot hopes and mad desires,
+unsatisfied longings, unrealized ideals. And I stepped out of the group
+who were gathered around the man who said there was no God....
+
+But I still drifted in the eddy, thinking how wonderful and strange all
+these things were, and came thus to another group, close gathered at
+the curb. It was much smaller than the other, and at the centre stood a
+patriarchal man with a white beard, and with him two women. He was
+leaning against the iron railing of the park, and several of the
+free-thinker’s audience, freshly stuffed with arguments, had engaged
+him hotly. Just as I approached he drew from his pocket a worn,
+leather-covered Bible, and said, tapping it with one finger:
+
+“For forty years I have carried this book with me. It contains more
+wisdom than any other book in the world. Your friend there can talk
+until he is hoarse—it will do no harm—but the world will continue to
+follow the wisdom of this book.”
+
+A kind of exaltation gleamed in his eye, and he spoke with an
+earnestness equal to that of Henry Moore. He, too, was a street
+speaker, waiting with his box at his side to begin. He would soon be
+standing up there to prove, also with logic and authority, that there
+was a God. He, also, would plough that knobby black soil of human heads
+with the share of his vehement faith. The two women were with him to
+sing their belief, and one had a basket to take up a collection, and
+the other, singling me out as I listened with eagerness, gave me a
+printed tract, a kind of advertisement of God.
+
+I looked at the title of it. It was called: “God in His World.”
+
+“Does this prove that God is really in the world?” I asked.
+
+“Yes,” she said. “Will you read it?”
+
+“Yes,” I said, “I am glad to get it. It is wonderful that so great a
+truth can be established in so small a pamphlet, and all for nothing.”
+
+She looked at me curiously, I thought, and I put the tract by the side
+of the pamphlet I had bought from the freethinker, and drifted again in
+the eddy.
+
+The largest crowd of all was close packed about a swarthy young chap
+whose bushy hair waved in response to the violence of his oratory. He,
+too, was perspiring with his ideas. He had a marvellous staccato method
+of question and answer. He would shoot a question like a rifle bullet
+at the heads of his audience, and then stiffen back like a wary boxer,
+both clenched hands poised in a tremulous gesticulation, and before any
+one could answer his bullet-like question, he was answering it himself.
+As I edged my way nearer to him I discovered that he, also, had a
+little pile of books at his feet which a keen-eyed assistant was busily
+selling. How well-established the technic of this art of the city
+eddies! How well-studied the psychology!
+
+I thought this example the most perfect of them all, and watched with
+eagerness the play of the argument as it was mirrored in the intent
+faces all about me. And gradually I grew interested in what the man was
+saying, and thought of many good answers I could give to his
+questionings if he were not so cunning with answers of his own.
+Finally, in the midst of one of his loftiest flights, he demanded,
+hotly:
+
+“Are you not, every one of you, a slave of the capitalist class?”
+
+It was perfectly still for a second after he spoke, and before I knew
+what I was doing, I responded:
+
+“Why, no, I’m not.”
+
+It seemed to astonish the group around me: white faces turned my way.
+
+But it would have been difficult to dash that swarthy young man. He was
+as full of questions as a porcupine is full of quills.
+
+“Well, sir,” said he, “if I can prove to you that you are a slave, will
+you believe it?”
+
+“No,” I said, “unless you make me feel like a slave, too! No man is a
+slave who does not feel slavish.”
+
+But I was no match for that astonishing young orator; and he had the
+advantage over me of a soap box! Moreover, at that moment, the
+keen-eyed assistant, never missing an opportunity, offered me one of
+his little red books.
+
+“If you can read this without feeling a slave,” he remarked, “you’re
+John D. himself in disguise.”
+
+I bought his little red book and put it with the pamphlet of the
+freethinker, and the tract of the God-fearing man, and stepped out of
+that group, feeling no more servile than when I went in. And I said to
+myself:
+
+“This, surely, is a curious place to be in.”
+
+For I was now strangely interested in these men of the eddy.
+
+“There are more gods preached here,” I said, “than ever were known on
+the Acropolis.”
+
+Up the square a few paces I saw a covered wagon with a dense crowd
+around it. And in front of it upon a little platform which raised the
+speaker high above the heads of the audience stood a woman, speaking
+with shrill ardour. Most of the hearers were men; and she was telling
+them with logic and authority that the progress of civilization waited
+upon the votes of women. The army of the world stood still until the
+rear rank of its women could be brought into line! Morals languished,
+religion faded, industries were brutalized, home life destroyed! If
+only women had their rights the world would at once become a beautiful
+and charming place! Oh, she was a powerful and earnest speaker; she
+made me desire above everything, at the first opportunity, to use my
+share of the power in this Government to provide each woman with a
+vote. And just as I had reached this compliant stage there came a girl
+smiling and passing her little basket. The sheer art of it! So I
+dropped in my coin and took the little leaflet she gave me and put it
+side by side with the other literature of my accumulating library.
+
+And so I came away from those hot little groups with their perspiring
+orators, and felt again the charm of the tall buildings and the wide
+sunny square, and the park with Down-at-Heels warming his ragged
+shanks, and the great city clanging heedlessly by. How serious they all
+were there in their eddies! Is there no God? Will woman suffrage or
+socialism cure all the evils of this mad world which, ill as it is, we
+would not be without? Is a belief for forty years in the complete
+wisdom of the Book the final solution? Why do not all of the seeking
+and suffering thousands flowing by in Twenty-third Street stop here in
+the eddies to seek the solution of their woes, the response to their
+hot desires?
+
+So I came home to the country, thinking of what I had seen and heard,
+asking myself, “What is the truth, after all? What _is_ real?”
+
+And I was unaccountably glad to be at home again. As I came down the
+hill through the town road the valley had a quiet welcome for me, and
+the trees I know best, and the pleasant fields of corn and tobacco, and
+the meadows ripe with hay. I know of nothing more comforting to the
+questioning spirit than the sight of distant hills....
+
+I found that Bill had begun the hay cutting. I saw him in the lower
+field as I came by in the road. There he was, stationed high on the
+load, and John, the Pole, was pitching on. When he saw me he lifted one
+arm high in the air and waved his hand—and I in return gave him the
+sign of the Free Fields.
+
+“Harriet,” I said, “it seems to me I was never so glad before to get
+home.”
+
+“It’s what you always say,” she remarked placidly.
+
+“This time it’s true!” And I put the pamphlets I had accumulated in the
+city eddies upon the pile of documents which I fully intend to read but
+rarely get to.
+
+The heavenly comfort of an old shirt! The joy of an old hat!
+
+As I walked down quickly into the field with my pitchfork on my
+shoulder to help Bill with the hay, I was startled to see, hanging upon
+a peach tree at the corner of the orchard, a complete suit of black
+clothes. Near it, with the arms waving gently in the breeze, was a
+white shirt and a black tie, and at the foot of the tree a respectable
+black hat. It was as though the peach tree had suddenly, on that bright
+day, gone into mourning.
+
+I laughed to myself.
+
+“Bill,” I said, “what does this mean?”
+
+Bill is a stout jolly chap with cheeks that look, after half a day’s
+haying, like raw beef-steaks. He paused on his load, smiling broadly,
+his straw hat set like a halo on the back of his head.
+
+“Expected a funeral,” he said cheerfully.
+
+Bill is the undertaker’s assistant, and is always on call in cases of
+emergency.
+
+“What happened, Bill?”
+
+“They thought they’d bury ’im this afternoon, but they took an’ kep’
+’im over till to-morrow.”
+
+“But you came prepared.”
+
+“Yas, no time to go home in hayin’. The pump fer me, and the black
+togs.”
+
+Bill calls the first rakings of the hay “tumbles,” and the scattered
+re-rakings, which he despises, he calls “scratchings.” I took one side
+of the load and John, the Pole, the other and we put on great forkfuls
+from the tumbles which Bill placed skilfully at the corners and sides
+of the load, using the scratchings for the centre.
+
+John, the Pole, watched the load from below. “Tank he too big here,” he
+would say, or, “Tank you put more there”; but Bill told mostly by the
+feel of the load under his feet or by the “squareness of his eye.”
+John, the Pole, is a big, powerful fellow, and after smoothing down the
+load with his fork he does not bother to rake up the combings, but
+gathering a bunch of loose hay with his fork, he pushes it by main
+strength, and very quickly, around the load, and running his fork
+through the heap, throws it upon the mountain-high load in a
+twinkling—an admirable, deft performance.
+
+Hay-making is a really beautiful process: the clicking mower cutting
+its clean, wide swath, a man stepping after, where the hay is very
+heavy, to throw the windrow back a little. Then, after lying to wilt
+and dry in the burning sun—all full of good odours—the horse-rake draws
+it neatly into wide billows, and after that, John, the Pole, and I roll
+the billows into tumbles. Or, if the hay is slow in drying, as it was
+not this year, the kicking tedder goes over it, spreading it widely.
+Then the team and rack on the smooth-cut meadow and Bill on the load,
+and John and I pitching on; and the talk and badinage that goes on, the
+excitement over disturbed field mice, the discussion of the best
+methods of killing woodchucks, tales of marvellous exploits of loaders
+and stackers, thrilling incidents of the wet year of ’98 when two men
+and one team saved four acres of hay by working all night—“with
+lanterns, I jing”—much talk of how she goes on, “she” being the hay,
+and no end of observations upon the character, accomplishments, faults,
+and excesses of the sedate old horses waiting comfortably out in front,
+half hidden by the mountain of hay above them and nibbling at the
+tumbles as they go by.
+
+Then the proud moment when Bill the driver, with legs apart, almost
+pushing on the reins, drives his horses up the hill.
+
+“Go it, Dick. Let ’er out, Daisy. Stiddy, ol’ boy. Whoa, there. Ease
+down now. Hey, there, John, block the wheel—block the wheel I tell ye.
+Ah-h now, jes’ breathe a bit. I jing, it’s hot.”
+
+And then the barn, the cavernous dark doors, the hoofs of the horses
+thundering on the floor, the smell of cattle from below, the pigeons in
+the loft whirring startled from their perches. Then the hot, scented,
+dusty “pitching off” and “mowing in”—a fine process, an _honest_
+process: men sweating for what they get.
+
+As I came in from the field that night the sun was low in the hills,
+and a faint breeze had begun to blow, sweetly cool after the burning
+heat of the day. And I felt again that curious deep sense I have so
+often here in the country, of the soundness and reality of the plain
+things of life.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+THE OLD STONE MASON
+
+
+Of well-flavoured men, I know none better than those who live close to
+the soil or work in common things. Men are like roses and lilacs,
+which, too carefully cultivated to please the eye, lose something of
+their native fragrance. One of the best-flavoured men I know is my
+friend, the old stone mason.
+
+To-day I rode over with the old stone mason to select some wide stones
+for steps in my new building. The old man loves stones. All his life
+long—he is now beyond seventy years old—he has lived among stones,
+lifted stones, fitted stones. He knows all the various kinds, shapes,
+sizes, and where they will go best in a wall. He can tell at a glance
+where to strike a stone to make it fit a particular place, and out of a
+great pile he can select with a shrewd eye the stone for the exact
+opening he has to fill. He will run his stubby rough hand over a stone
+and remark:
+
+“Fine face that. Ye don’t see many such stones these days,” as though
+he were speaking of the countenance of a friend.
+
+I veritably believe there are stones that smile at him, stones that
+frown at him, stones that appear good or ill-humoured to him as he
+bends his stocky strong body to lift or lay them. He is a slow man, a
+slow, steady, geologic man, as befits one who works with the elemental
+stuff of nature. His arms are short and his hands powerful. He has been
+a servant of stones in this neighbourhood alone for upward of fifty
+years.
+
+He loves stones and can no more resist a good stone than I a good book.
+When going about the country, if he sees comely stones in a wayside
+pile, or in a fine-featured old fence he will have them, whether or no,
+and dickers for them with all the eagerness, sly pride, and
+half-concealed cunning with which a lover of old prints chaffers for a
+Seymour Haden in a second-hand book shop. And when he has bought them
+he takes the first idle day he has, and with his team of old horses
+goes into the hills, or wherever it may be, and brings them down. He
+has them piled about his barn and even in his yard, as another man
+might have flower beds. And he can tell you, as he told me to-day, just
+where a stone of such a size and such a face can be found, though it be
+at the bottom of a pile. No book lover with a feeling sense for the
+place in his cases where each of his books may be found has a sharper
+instinct than he. In his pocket he carries a lump of red chalk, and
+when we had made our selections he marked each stone with a broad red
+cross.
+
+I think it good fortune that I secured the old stone mason to do my
+work, and take to myself some credit for skill in enticing him. He is
+past seventy years old, though of a ruddy fresh countenance and a clear
+bright eye, and takes no more contracts, and is even reluctantly
+persuaded to do the ordinary stone work of the neighbourhood. He is
+“well enough off,” as the saying goes, to rest during the remainder of
+his years, for he has lived a temperate and frugal life, owns his own
+home with the little garden behind it, and has money in the bank. But
+he can be prevailed upon, like an old artist who has reached the time
+of life when it seems as important to enjoy as to create, he can
+sometimes be prevailed upon to lay a wall for the joy of doing it.
+
+So I had the stone hauled onto the ground, the best old field stone I
+could find, and I had a clean, straight foundation dug, and when all
+was ready I brought the old man over to look at it. I said I wanted his
+advice. No sooner did his glance light upon the stone, no sooner did he
+see the open and ready earth than a new light came in his eye. His step
+quickened and as he went about he began to hum an old tune under his
+breath. I knew then that I had him! He had taken fire. I could see that
+his eye was already selecting the stones that should “go down,” the
+fine square stones to make the corners or cap the wall, and measuring
+with a true eye the number of little stones for the fillers. In no time
+at all he had agreed to do my work; indeed, would have felt aggrieved
+if I had not employed him.
+
+I enjoyed the building of the wall, I think, as much as he did, and
+helped him what I could by rolling the larger stones close down to the
+edge of the wall. As the old man works he talks, if any one cares to
+listen, or if one does not care to listen he is well content to remain
+silent among his stones. But I enjoyed listening, for nothing in this
+world is so fascinating to me as the story of how a man has come to be
+what he is. When we think of it there are no abstract adventures in
+this world, but only your adventure and my adventure, and it is only as
+we come to know a man that we can see how wonderful his life has been.
+
+He told me all about the great walls and the little walls—miles and
+miles of them—he has built in the course of fifty years. He told of
+crude boyhood walls when he was a worker for wages only, he told of
+proud manhood walls when he took contracts for foundations, retaining
+walls, and even for whole buildings, such as churches, where the work
+was mostly of stone; he told me of thrilling gains and profits, and of
+depressing losses; and he told me of his calm later work, again on
+wages, for which he is chosen as a master of his craft. A whole long
+lifetime of it—and the last years the best of all!
+
+As we drove up yesterday to select the steps from his piles of old
+field stone, riding behind his great, slow, hairy-hoofed horse, in the
+battered and ancient wagon, he pointed with his stubby whip to this or
+that foundation, the work of his hands.
+
+“Fine job, that,” said he, and I looked for the first time in my life
+at the beautiful stonework beneath the familiar home of a friend. I had
+seen the house a thousand times, and knew well the people in it, but my
+unobservant eye had never before rested consciously upon that bit of
+basement wall. How we go through life, losing most of the beauties of
+it from sheer inability to see! But the old man, as he drives about,
+rarely sees houses at all, especially wooden houses, and for all modern
+stucco and cement work he entertains a kind of lofty contempt. Sham
+work of a hasty and unskilled age! He never, I think, put in a
+shovelful of cement except in the place where it belongs, as a mortar
+for good walls, and never will do so as long as he lives. So long as he
+lives the standards of high art will never be debased!
+
+He built that foundation, and this chimney, he worked on the tower of
+the Baptist church in the town, “and never yet has there been a crack
+in her, winter or summer”; and more than forty years ago he laid the
+cornerstone of the old schoolhouse, the foundation walls of which stand
+to-day as sound and strong as they were when they were put down.
+
+In dry walls I think the old stone mason takes the greatest pride of
+all: for it is in the dry wall—I mean by that a wall laid without
+mortar—that the sheer art of the mason comes most into play. Any one
+can throw a wall together if he has mortar to make it stick, but a dry
+wall must stand out for what it is, built solid from the bottom up,
+each stone resting securely upon those below it, and braced and nested
+in by the sheer skill of the mason. The art of the dry wall is the
+ancient heritage of New England and speaks not only of the sincerity
+and the conscientiousness of the old Puritan spirit but strikes the
+higher note of beauty. Many of the older walls I know are worth going
+far to see, for they exhibit a rare sense of form and proportion, and
+are sometimes set in the landscape with a skill that only the
+Master-Artist himself could exceed. Those old, hard-wrought stone
+fences of the Burnham Hills and Crewsbury, the best of them, were
+honestly built, and built to last a thousand years. A beautiful art—and
+one that is passing away! It is the dry wall that stands of itself that
+the old stone mason loves best of all.
+
+As we drove along the road the old man pointed out to me with his
+stubby whip so many examples of his work that it seemed finally as if
+he had borne a hand in nearly everything done in this neighbourhood in
+the last half-century. He has literally built himself into the country
+and into the town, and at seventy years of age he can look back upon it
+all with honest pride. It stands. No jerry-work anywhere. No cracks. It
+stands.
+
+I never realized before how completely the neighbourhood rests upon the
+work of this simple old man. He _founded_ most of the homes here, and
+upon his secure walls rest many of the stores, the churches, and the
+schools of the countryside. I see again how important each man is to
+the complete fabric of civilization and know that we are to leave no
+one out, despise no one, look down upon no one.
+
+He told me stories of this ancient settler and of that.
+
+He was a powerful queer man—he wanted the moss left on his stones when
+I put ’em in; never a hammer touched the facings of _his_ wall...
+
+“That is properly a woman’s wall. She was the boss, you might call it,
+and wanted stone, but _he_ wanted brick. So you see the front, where
+people can see it, is of stone, but the sides is all brick.”
+
+Thus like the true artist that he is, he has not only built himself his
+own honesty, truth, skill, into the town, but he has built in the
+inexhaustible peculiarities, the radiant charm, the hates and the
+loves, of the people of this place. He has mirrored his own little age
+in stone. He knows the town, indeed, better than most of us, having a
+kind of stone-age knowledge of it—the fundamental things men build in
+when they set about building permanently.
+
+“And that is what you might call a spite-wall,” said he, showing me a
+long wall leading between two shady homes, making one of them a prison
+on the south, and the other a prison on the north. He told me the story
+of an ancient and bitter quarrel between two old friends, a story which
+sounded to-day among spring blossoms like the account of some ancient
+baronial feud.
+
+But if the old stone mason has built walls to keep enemies apart how
+many more walls has he built to keep friends together? How many times
+has he been consulted by shy lovers seeking a foundation for a new
+home, a new family, how many times by Darby and Joan planning a resting
+place for the sunny closing years of their lives! He could point,
+indeed, to one wall that symbolized hatred; all the others meant homes,
+roof-trees, families, or they were the foundations for the working
+places of men, or else, like the tower of the church, they pointed
+heavenward and were built to the glory of God.
+
+The old stone mason has not the slightest idea that he has done
+anything unusual or wonderful. He is as simple and honest a man as ever
+I knew; and if he has pride, simple and honest also in that. He was
+anxious not to charge me too much for the stone I bought—in an age like
+this! I have never talked with him about God, or about religion: I had
+no need to.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+He has done his duty in other ways by his time and his place. He has
+brought up a large family of children; and has known sorrow and loss,
+as well as happiness and contentment. Two of his children were taken in
+one day with pneumonia. He told me about it with a quaver in his old
+voice.
+
+“How long ago was it?” I asked.
+
+“Twenty-seven years.”
+
+He has sons and daughters left, and two of the sons he has well trained
+as stone masons after him. They are good as young men go in a
+degenerate age. They insist on working in cement! He has grandchildren
+in school, and spoils them.
+
+He is also a man of public interests and upon town-meeting day puts on
+his good clothes and sits modestly toward the back of the hall. Though
+he rarely says anything he always has a strong opinion, an opinion as
+sound and hard as stones and as simple, upon most of the questions that
+come up. And he votes as he thinks, though the only man in meeting who
+votes that way. For when a man works in the open, laying walls true to
+lines and measurements, being honest with natural things, he comes
+clear, sane, strong, upon many things. I would sooner trust his
+judgment upon matters that are really important as between man and man,
+and man and God, than I would trust the town lawyer. And if he has
+grown a little testy with some of the innovations of modern life, and
+thinks they did everything better forty years ago—and says so—he
+speaks, at least, his honest conviction.
+
+If I can lay my walls as true as he does, if I can build myself a third
+part as firmly into any neighbourhood as he has into this, if at
+seventy years of age—if ever I live to lay walls with joy at that time
+of life—if I can look back upon _my_ foundations, _my_ heaven-pointing
+towers, and find no cracks or strains in them, I shall feel that I have
+made a great success of my life....
+
+I went out just now: the old man was stooping to lift a heavy stone.
+His hat was off and the full spring sunshine struck down warmly upon
+the ruddy bald spot on the top of his head, the white hair around about
+it looking silvery in that light. As he placed the stone in the wall,
+he straightened up and rubbed his stubby hand along it.
+
+“A fine stone that!” said he.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+AN AUCTION OF ANTIQUES
+
+
+“I would not paint a face
+    Or rocks or streams or trees
+Mere semblances of things—
+    But something more than these.”
+
+“I would not play a tune
+    Upon the sheng or lute
+Which did not also sing
+    Meanings that else were mute.”
+
+John Templeton died on the last day of August, but it was not until
+some weeks later that his daughter Julida, that hard-favoured woman,
+set a time for the auction. It fell happily upon a mellow autumn day,
+and as I drove out I saw the apples ripening in all the orchards along
+the road, and the corn was beginning to look brown, and the meadows by
+the brook were green with rowen. It was an ideal day for an auction,
+and farmers and townsmen came trooping from all parts of the country,
+for the Templeton antiques were to be sold.
+
+John Templeton lived in one house for seventy-eight years; he was born
+there, and you will find the like of that in few places in America. It
+was a fine house for its time, for any time, and not new when John
+Templeton was born. A great, solid, square structure, such as they
+built when the Puritan spirit was virile in New England, with an almost
+Greek beauty of measured lines. It has a fanlight over the front door,
+windows exquisitely proportion, and in the center a vast brick chimney.
+Even now, though weathered and unpainted, it stands four-square upon
+the earth with a kind of natural dignity. A majestic chestnut tree
+grows near it, and a large old barn and generous sheds, now somewhat
+dilapidated, ramble away to the rear.
+
+Enclosing the fields around about are stone fences representing the
+infinite labour of John Templeton’s forebears. More toil has gone into
+the stone fences of New England, free labour of a free people, than
+ever went into the slave-driven building of the Pyramids of Egypt.
+
+I knew John Templeton in his old age—a stiff, weather-beaten old man
+driving to town in a one-horse buggy.
+
+“How are you, Mr. Templeton?”
+
+“Comin’ on, comin’ on.” This was his invariable reply.
+
+He had the old New England pronunciation, now disappearing. He said
+“rud” for road, “daown” for down, and gave an indescribable twist to
+the word garden, best spelled “gardin.” He had also the old New England
+ways. He was forehanded with his winter woodpile, immaculately neat
+with his dooryard, determined in his Sunday observance, and if he put
+the small apples in the middle of the barrel he refused to raise
+tobacco, lest it become a cause of stumbling to his neighbour. He paid
+his debts, disciplined his children, and in an age which has come to
+look chummily upon God, he dreaded His wrath.
+
+He grew a peculiar, very fine variety of sweet apple which I have never
+seen anywhere else. He called it the Pumpkin Sweet, for it was of a
+rich yellow. I can see him yet, driving into town with a shallow wagon
+box half full of this gold of the orchard; can see him turn stiffly to
+get one of the apples for me; can hear him say in the squeaky voice of
+age:
+
+“Ye won’t find no sweeter apples hereabout, I can tell ye that.”
+
+He was a dyed-in-the-wool abolition Republican and took the Boston
+_Transcript_ for forty-six years. He left two cords of them piled up in
+a back storeroom. He loved to talk about Napoleon Bonaparte and the
+Battle of Waterloo, and how, if there had not been that delay of half
+an hour, the history of the world might have been different. I can see
+him saying, with the words puffing out his loose cheeks:
+
+“And then Blooker kem up—”
+
+To the very last, even when his eyes were too dim to read and his voice
+was cracked, he would start up, like some old machine set a-whirring
+when you touched the rusty lever, and talk about the Battle of
+Waterloo.
+
+No one, so far as I know, ever heard him complain, or bemoan his age,
+or regret the change in the times; and when his day came, he lay down
+upon his bed and died.
+
+“Positively nothing will be reserved,” were the familiar words of the
+poster, and they have a larger meaning in an old country neighbourhood
+than the mere sale of the last pan and jug and pig and highboy. Though
+we live with our neighbours for fifty years we still secretly wonder
+about them. We still suspect that something remains covered, something
+kept in and hidden away, some bits of beauty unappreciated—as they are,
+indeed, with ourselves. But death snatches away the last friendly
+garment of concealment; and after the funeral the auction. We may enter
+now. The doors stand at last flung widely open; all the attics have
+been ransacked; all the chests have been turned out; a thousand
+privacies stand glaringly revealed in the sunny open spaces of the
+yard. Positively nothing will be reserved; everything will be knocked
+down to the highest bidder. What wonder that the neighbourhood gathers,
+what wonder that it nods its head, leaves sentences half uttered,
+smiles enigmatically.
+
+Nearly all the contents of the house had been removed to the yard,
+under the great chesnut tree. A crowd of people, mostly women, were
+moving about among the old furniture, the old furniture that had been
+in John Templeton’s family for no one knows how long—old highboys and
+lowboys, a beautifully simple old table or so, and beds with carved
+posts, and hand-wrought brasses, and an odd tall clock that struck with
+sonorous dignity. These things, which had been temptingly advertised as
+“antiques,” a word John Templeton never knew, were only the common
+serviceable things of uncounted years of family life.
+
+Nothing about the place was of any great value except the antiques, and
+it was these that drew the well-dressed women in automobiles from as
+far away as Hempfield and Nortontown; and yet there were men in plenty
+to poke the pigs, look sarcastically at the teeth of the two old
+horses, and examine with calculating and rather jeering eyes John
+Templeton’s ancient buggy, and the harness and the worn plough and
+cultivator and mowing machine. Everything seems so cheap, so poor, so
+unprotected, when the spirit has departed.
+
+Under the chestnut tree the swarthy auctioneer with his amiable
+countenance and ironical smile acquired through years of dispassionate
+observation of the follies of human emotion, the mutability of human
+affairs, the brevity of human endeavour, that brought everything at
+last under his hammer—there by the chestnut tree the auctioneer had
+taken his stand in temporary eminence upon an old chest, with an
+ancient kitchen cupboard near him which served at once as a pulpit for
+exhortation, and a block for execution. Already the well-worn smile had
+come pat to his countenance, and the well-worn witticisms were ready to
+his tongue.
+
+“Now, gentlemen, if you’ll give me such attention as you can spare from
+the ladies, we have here to-day——”
+
+But I could not, somehow, listen to him: the whole scene, the whole
+deep event, had taken hold upon me strangely. It was so full of human
+meaning, human emotion, human pathos. I drifted away from the crowd and
+stepped in at the open door of the old house, and walked through the
+empty, resounding rooms with their curious old wallpaper and low
+ceilings and dusty windows. And there were the old fireplaces where the
+heavy brick had been eaten away by the pokings and scrapings of a
+century; and the thresholds worn by the passage of many feet, the
+romping feet of children, the happy feet of youth the bride passed here
+on her wedding night with her arm linked in the arm of the groom; the
+sturdy, determined feet of maturity; the stumbling feet of old age
+creeping in; the slow, pushing feet of the bearers with the last
+burden, crowding out—
+
+The air of the house had a musty, shut-in odour, ironically cut
+through, as all old things are, by the stinging odour of the new: the
+boiling of the auction coffee in the half-dismantled kitchen, the
+epochal moment in the life of Julia Templeton. I could hear,
+occasionally, her high, strident worried voice ordering a helper about.
+Such a hard-favoured woman!
+
+It is the studied and profitable psychology of the auction that the
+rubbish must be sold first—pots and bottles and jugs at five-cent bids,
+and hoes at ten—and after that, the friction of the contest having
+warmed in the bidders an amiable desire to purchase goods they do not
+want and cannot use, the auctioneer gradually puts forth the treasures
+of the day.
+
+As I came out of the old house I could see that the mystic web had been
+spun, that the great moment of the sale was arriving. The auctioneer
+was leaning forward now upon the tall cupboard with an air of command,
+and surveying the assembled crowd with a lordly eye.
+
+“Now, Jake, careful there—pass it along—steady.... We come now to the
+cheff dooves of the day, the creem delly creems of this sale. Gentleman
+_and_ ladies, it is a great moment in the life of an auctioneer when he
+can offer, for sale, free and without reservation, such treasures as
+these....”
+
+I could feel the warming interest of the crowd gathering in more
+closely about Mr. Harpworth, the furtive silences of shrewd bargainers,
+eagerness masked as indifference, and covetousness cloaking itself with
+smiling irony. It is in the auction that trade glorifies itself finally
+as an Art.
+
+“Here, gentlemen _and_ ladies, is a genuine antique, hand-wrought and
+solid all the way through. Just enough worn to give the flavour and
+distinction of age. Well built in the first place, plain, simple lines,
+but, ladies, _beautiful_.”
+
+It was the tall four-post bed he was selling and he now put his hand
+upon this object—a hardy service with a cunningly simulated air of
+deference. It was to be profaned by no irreverent handling!
+
+“What am I offered for this heirloom of the Templeton family? Ten? Ten!
+Fifteen over there, thank you, Mr. Cody. Why, gentlemen, that bed
+cannot be duplicated in America! A real product of Colonial art! Look
+at the colour of it! Where will you find such depth of colour in any
+modern piece? Age varnished it, gentlemen, age and use—the use of a
+hundred years.... Twenty over there, twenty I hear, twenty, twenty,
+make it thirty.... Speak up now, Ike, we know you’ve come here to-day
+to make your fortune—do I hear thirty?”
+
+No sooner had the great bed been sold (“it’s yours, Mrs. Craigie, a
+treasure and dirt cheap”) there came an ancient pair of hand-wrought
+andirons, and a spider-legged table, and a brass warming-pan, and a
+banjo clock....
+
+I scarcely know how to explain it, but the sale of these inanimate
+antiques, so charged with the restrained grace, the reticent beauty,
+the serviceable strength, of a passing age, took hold upon me with
+strange intensity. In times of high emotion the veil between sight and
+insight slips aside and that which lies about us suddenly achieves a
+higher reality. We are conscious of
+
+“Something beside the form
+Something beyond the sound.”
+
+It came to me with a thrill that this was no mere sale of antique wood
+and brass and iron, but a veritable auction, here symbolized, of the
+decaying fragments of a sternly beautiful civilization.
+
+I looked off across the stony fields, now softly green in the sunlight,
+from which three generations of the Templeton family had wrung an
+heroic living; I looked up at the majestic old house where they had
+lived and married and died....
+
+As my eye came back to the busy scene beneath the chestnut tree it
+seemed to me, how vividly I cannot describe—that beside or behind the
+energetic and perspiring Mr. Harpworth there stood Another Auctioneer.
+And I thought he had flowing locks and a patriarchal beard, and a
+scythe for a sign of the uncertainty of life, and a glass to mark the
+swiftness of its passage. He was that Great Auctioneer who brings all
+things at last under his inexorable hammer.
+
+After that, though Mr. Harpworth did his best, he claimed my attention
+only intermittently from that Greater Sale which was going on at his
+side, from that Greater Auctioneer who was conducting it with such
+consummate skill—for _he_ knew that nothing is for sale but life. The
+mahogany highboy, so much packed and garnered life cut into inanimate
+wood; the andirons, so much life; the bookshelves upon which John
+Templeton kept his “Life of Napoleon Bonaparte,” so much life. Life for
+sale, gentlemen! What am I offered to-day for this bit of life—and
+this—and this—
+
+Mr. Harpworth had paused, for even an auctioneer, in the high moment of
+his art, remains human; and in the silence following the cessation of
+the metallic click of his voice, “Thirty, thirty, thirt, thirt—make it
+thirty-five—thank you—forty,” one could hear the hens gossiping in the
+distant yard.
+
+“There were craftsmen in those days, gentlemen,” he was resuming; “look
+at this example of their art—there is quality here and durability——”
+
+At this point the Great Auctioneer broke in upon my attention and
+caught up Mr. Harpworth’s words:
+
+“Yes, quality and durability—quality and durability. I also have here
+to-day, and will offer you, gentlemen, a surpassing antique, not built
+of wood nor fashioned in brass or iron, but a thing long attached to
+these acres and this house. I present for your consideration the
+married life of John Templeton and Hannah his wife. They lived together
+forty years, and the record scarcely shows a dent. In all that time
+hardly a word of love passed between them; but never a word of hatred,
+either. They had a kind of hard and fast understanding, like the laws
+of Moses. He did the work of the fields and she did the work of the
+house, from sunrise to sunset. On Sunday they went to church together.
+He got out at five o’clock to milk and harness up; and it made double
+work for her, what with getting the children cleaned, and the milk
+taken care of, and the Sunday dinner made ready. But neither he nor she
+every doubted or complained. It was the Lord’s way. She bore him eight
+children. She told him before the last one came that she was not equal
+to it.... After that she was an invalid for seventeen years until she
+died. And there was loss of children to bear between them, and
+sickness, and creeping age, but this bit of furniture held firm to the
+last. Gentlemen, it was mad solid, no veneer, a good job all the way
+through.”
+
+As he spoke I thought that his roving eye (perhaps it was only my own!)
+fell upon Johnny Holcomb, whose married life has been full of
+vicissitudes.
+
+“John, take this home with you; _you_ can use it.”
+
+“Nope, no such married life for me,” I thought I could hear him
+responding, rather pleased than not to be the butt of the auctioneer.
+
+“Do I hear any bids?” the Great Auctioneer was saying, almost in the
+words of Mr. Harpworth. “_What!_ No one wants n married life like this?
+Well, put it aside, Jake. It isn’t wanted. Too old-fashioned.”
+
+It was Julia Templeton herself who now appeared with certain of the
+intimate and precious “bedroom things”—a wonderful old linen bedspread,
+wrought upon with woollen figures, and exaling an ancient and exquisite
+odour of lavender, and a rag rug or so, and a little old rocking chair
+with chintz coverings in which more than one Templeton mother had
+rocked her baby to sleep. Julia herself——
+
+I saw Julia, that hard-favoured woman, for the first time at that
+moment, really saw her. How fiercely she threw down the spread and the
+rugs! How bold and unweeping her eyes! How hard and straight the lines
+of her mouth!
+
+“Here they are, Mr. Harpworth!”
+
+How shrill her voice; and how quickly she turned back to the noisy
+kitchen! I could see the angular form, the streakings of gray in her
+hair. ...
+
+“What am I offered now for this precious antique? This hand-made
+spread? Everything sold without reserve! Come, now, don’t let this
+opportunity slip by.” He leaned forward confidentially and
+persuasively: “Fellah citizens, styles change and fashions pass away,
+but things made like these, good lines, strong material, honest work,
+they never grow old....”
+
+Here the Shadowy Auctioneer broke in again and lifted me out of that
+limited moment.
+
+“A true word!” he was saying. “Styles change and fashions pass away,
+and only those things that are well made, and made for service the
+beautiful things remain. I am offering to-day, without reservation,
+another precious antique. What will you give for such a religious faith
+as that of John Templeton? Worn for a lifetime and sound to the end. He
+read the Bible every Sunday morning of his life, went to church, and
+did his religious duty by his children. Do you remember young Joe
+Templeton? Wouldn’t learn his chapter one Sunday, and the old gentleman
+prayed about it and then beat him with a hitching strap. Joe ran away
+from home and made his fortune in Minnesota. Nearly broke the mother’s
+heart, and old John’s, too; but he thought it right, and never repented
+it. Gentlemen, an honest man who feared God and lived righteously all
+his days! What am I offered for this durable antique, this
+characteristic product of New England? Do I hear a bid?”
+
+At this I felt coming over me that strange urge of the auction, to bid
+and to buy. A rare possession indeed, not without a high, stern kind of
+beauty! It would be wonderful to possess such a faith; but what had I
+to offer that Shadowy Auctioneer? What coin that would redeem past
+times and departed beliefs?
+
+It was curious how the words of Mr. Harpworth fitted into the fabric of
+my imaginings. When he next attracted my attention he was throwing up
+his hands in a fine semblance of despair. We were such obtuse
+purchasers!
+
+“I think,” said Mr. Harpworth, “that this crowd came here to-day only
+to eat Julia Templeton’s auction luncheon. What’s the matter with this
+here generation? You don’t want things that are well made and durable,
+but only things that are cheap and flashy. Put ’er aside, Jake. We’ll
+sell ’er yet to some historical museum devoted to the habits and
+customs of the early Americans.”
+
+He was plainly disgusted with us, and we felt it keenly, and were glad
+and pleased when, a moment later, he gave evidence of being willing to
+go on with us, paltry as we were.
+
+“Jake, pass up that next treasure.”
+
+His spirits were returning; his eyes gleamed approvingly upon the newly
+presented antique. He looked at us with fresh confidence; he was still
+hopeful that we would rise to his former good opinion of us.
+
+“And now before I sell the hail clock by Willard, date of 1822, I am
+going to offer what is possibly the best single piece in this sale....”
+
+Here again the Old Auctioneer, having caught his * broke in. When he
+spoke, who could listen to Mr. Harpworth:
+
+“... the best single piece in this sale, gentlemen! I offer you now the
+Templeton family pride! A choice product of old New England. A little
+battered, but still good and sound. The Templetons! They never did
+anything notable except to work, work early and late, summer and
+winter, for three generations. They were proud of any one who bore the
+Templeton name; they were proud even of Jim, simple Jim, who got a job
+driving the delivery wagon at the hill store, and drove it for
+twenty-two years and was drowned in Mill River. I’ll tell you what
+family pride meant to old John Templeton....”
+
+I thought he leaned forward to take us into his confidence, motioning
+at the same time toward the house.
+
+“You know Julia Templeton——”
+
+Know her? Of course we knew her! Knew her as only the country knows its
+own.
+
+“When Julia ran away with that sewing-machine agent—it was her only
+chance!—old John Templeton drove his best cow into town and sold her,
+he mortgaged his team of horses, and went after the girl and brought
+her home with him. They were firm and strong and as righteous as God
+with her; and they paid off, without whining, the mortgages on the
+horses, and never spoke of the loss of the cow—but never forgot it.
+They held up their heads to the end. Gentlemen, what am I offered for
+this interesting antique, this rare work of art?”
+
+The auction was considered, upon the whole, a great success. Mr.
+Harpworth himself said so. Ike, the Jewish dealer, bought the family
+clock and the spring-tooth harrow, and even bid on the family crayon
+portraits (the frames could be sold for something or other); a Swede
+bought the pigs and the old buggy; an Irish teamster bid in John
+Templeton’s horses, and a Pole, a good man, I know him well, bought the
+land, and will no doubt keep his geese in the summer kitchen, and get
+rich from the cultivation of the ancient fields. While old John
+Templeton bowed himself humbly before a wrathful God he would never go
+down on his knees, as the Poles do, to the fertile earth. And—I
+forgot—an Italian from Nortontown bought for a song the apple and
+chestnut crops, and busy third generation Americans loaded in the
+antiques and drove off with them to the city.
+
+The last I saw of Julia Templeton, that hard-favoured woman, she was
+standing, an angular figure, in the midst of the wreck of the luncheon
+dishes, one arm wrapped in her apron, the other hand shading her eyes
+while she watched the company, in wagons and automobiles, trailing away
+to the westward, and the towns....
+
+The sale was over; but the most valuable antiques of all found no
+purchasers: they were left behind with Julia Templeton: only she could
+use them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+A WOMAN OF FORTY-FIVE
+
+
+We have an Astonishing Woman in this community. She acts in a way that
+no one expects, and while we are intensely interested in everything she
+does, and desire to know about it to the uttermost detail, we are
+inclined to speak of her in bated breath.
+
+Some Woman to Talk About in a country neighbourhood is a kind of public
+necessity. She fills one of the stated functions like the town
+assessor, or the president of the Dorcas Society; and if ever the
+office falls vacant we have immediate resort to one of those silent
+elections at which we choose our town celebrities. There are usually
+several candidates, and the campaign is accompanied by much heated
+argument and exemplification. We have our staunch party men and our
+irresponsible independents on whom you can never put your finger; and
+if we are sometimes a little vague in our discussion of principles and
+issues we share with our national political leaders an intense interest
+in personalities. Prominent citizens “come out” for this candidate or
+that, we “spring surprises,” and launch new booms, and often, at the
+last moment, we are taken off our feet by the circulation of comebacks.
+I take a pardonable pride, however, in saying, to the credit of our
+democratic institutions that most of the candidates elected are chosen
+strictly upon merit.
+
+I shall never forget the afternoon, now more than a year ago, that
+Harriet came up the road bearing the news which, beyond a doubt, placed
+the present incumbent in office; and has served to keep her there,
+despite the efforts in certain quarters, which shall be nameless, to
+use that pernicious instrument of radicalism, the recall.
+
+I can always tell when Harriet brings important news. She has a
+slightly quicker step, carries her head a little more firmly, and when
+she speaks impresses her message upon me with a lowered voice. When
+Harriet looks at me severely and drops down an octave I prepare for the
+worst.
+
+“David,” she said, “Mary Starkweather has gone to live in the barn!”
+
+“In the _barn_!”
+
+“In the barn.”
+
+I don’t know quite why it is, but I dislike being surprised, and do my
+best to cover it up, and, besides, I have always liked Mary
+Starkweather. So I remarked, as casually as I could:
+
+“Why not? It’s a perfectly good barn.”
+
+“David Grayson!”
+
+“Well, it is. It’s a better building to-day than many of the people of
+this town live in. Why shouldn’t Mary Starkweather live in the barn if
+she wants to? It’s her barn.”
+
+“But, _David_—there are her children—and her husband!”
+
+“There always are, when anybody wants to live in a barn.”
+
+“I shall not talk with you any more,” said Harriet, “until you can be
+serious.”
+
+I had my punishment, as I richly deserved to have, in the gnawing of
+unsatisfied curiosity, which is almost as distressing as a troubled
+conscience.
+
+Within the next few days, I remember, I heard the great news buzzing
+everywhere I went. We had conjectured that the barn was being refitted
+for the family of a caretaker, and it was Mary Starkweather herself,
+our sole dependable representative of the Rich, who was moving in! Mary
+Starkweather, who had her house in town, and her home in the country,
+and her automobiles, and her servants, and her pictures, and her books,
+to say nothing of her husband and her children and her children’s maid
+going to live in her barn! I leave it to you if there was not a valid
+reason for our commotion.
+
+It must have been two weeks later that I went to town by the upper hill
+road in order to pass the Starkweather place. It is a fine old estate,
+the buildings, except the barn, set well back from the road with a
+spacious garden near them, and pleasant fields stretching away on every
+hand. As I skirted the shoulder of the hill I looked eagerly for the
+first glimpse of the barn. I confess that I had woven a thousand
+stories to explain the mystery, and had reached the point where I could
+no longer resist seeing if I could solve it.
+
+Well, the barn was transformed. Two or three new windows, a door with a
+little porch, a lattice or so for vines, a gable upon the roof lifting
+an inquiring eyebrow—and what was once a barn had become a charming
+cottage. It seemed curiously to have come alive, to have acquired a
+personality of its own. A corner of the great garden had been cut off
+and included in the miniature grounds of the cottage; and a simple
+arbour had been built against a background of wonderful beech trees.
+You felt at once a kind of fondness for it.
+
+I saw Mary Starkweather in her garden, in a large straw hat, with a
+trowel in her hand.
+
+“How are you, David Grayson?” she called out when I stopped.
+
+“I have been planning for several days,” I said, “to happen casually by
+your new house.”
+
+“Have you?”
+
+“You don’t know how you have stirred our curiosity. We haven’t had a
+good night’s rest since you moved in.”
+
+“I’ve no doubt of it,” she laughed. “Won’t you come in? I’d like to
+tell you all about it.”
+
+“I also prepared to make excuses for not stopping,” I said, “and
+thought up various kinds of urgent business, such as buying a new snow
+shovel to use next winter, but after making these excuses I intended to
+stop—if I were sufficiently urged.”
+
+“You are more than urged: you are commanded.”
+
+As I followed her up the walk she said earnestly:
+
+“Will you do me a favour? When you come in will you tell me the first
+impression my living-room gives you? No second thoughts. Tell me
+instantly.”
+
+“I’ll do it.” I said, my mind leaping eagerly to all manner of
+mysterious surprises.
+
+At the centre of the room she turned toward me and with a sweeping
+backward motion of the arms, made me a bow—a strong figure instinct
+with confident grace: a touch of gray in the hair, a fleeting look of
+old sadness about the eyes.
+
+“Now, David Grayson,” she said, “quick!”
+
+It was not that the room itself was so remarkable as that it struck me
+as being confusingly different from the heavily comfortable rooms of
+the old Starkweather house with their crowded furnishings, their
+overloaded mantels, their plethoric bookcases.
+
+“I cannot think of you yet,” I stumbled, “as being here.”
+
+“Isn’t it _like_ me?”
+
+“It is a beautiful room—” I groped lamely.
+
+“I was afraid you would say that.”
+
+“But it is. It really is.”
+
+“Then I’ve failed, after all.”
+
+She said it lightly enough, but there was an undertone of real
+disappointment in her voice.
+
+“I’m in rather the predicament,” I said, “of old Abner Coates. You
+probably don’t know Abner. He sells nursery stock, and each spring when
+he comes around and I tell him that the peach trees or the raspberry
+bushes I bought of him the year before have not done well, he says,
+with the greatest astonishment, ‘Wal, now, ye ain’t said what I hoped
+ye would.’ I see that I haven’t said what you hoped I would.”
+
+It was too serious a matter, however, for Mary Starkweather to joke
+about.
+
+“But, David Grayson,” she said, “isn’t it _simple_?”
+
+I glanced around me with swift new comprehension.
+
+“Why, yes, it _is_ simple.”
+
+I saw that my friend was undergoing some deep inner change of which
+this room, this renovated barn, were mere symbols.
+
+“Tell me,” I said, “how you came to such a right-about-face.”
+
+“It’s just that!” she returned earnestly, “It _is_ a right-about-face.
+I think I am really in earnest for the first time in my life.”
+
+I had a moment of flashing wonder if her marriage had not been in
+earnest, a flashing picture of Richard Starkweather with his rather
+tired, good-humoured face, and I wondered if her children were not
+earnest realities to her, if her busy social life had meant nothing.
+Then I reflected that we all have such moments, when the richest
+experiences of the past seem as nothing in comparison with the fervour
+of this glowing moment.
+
+“Everything in my life in the past,” she was saying, “seems to have
+happened to me. Life has done things _for_ me; I have had so few
+chances of doing anything for myself.”
+
+“And now you are expressing yourself.”
+
+“Almost for the first time in my life!”
+
+She paused. “All my life, it seems to me, I have been smothered with
+things. Just things! Too much of everything. All my time has been taken
+up in caring for things and none in enjoying them.”
+
+“I understand!” I said with a warm sense of corroboration and sympathy.
+
+“I had so many pictures on my walls that I never saw, really saw, any
+of them. I saw the dust on them, I saw the cracks in the frames, that
+needed repairing, I even saw better ways of arranging them, but I very
+rarely saw, with the inner eye, what the artists were trying to tell
+me. And how much time I have wasted on mere food and clothing—it is
+appalling! I had become nothing short of a slave to my house and my
+things.”
+
+“I see now,” I said, “why you have just one rose on your table.”
+
+“Yes”—she returned eagerly—“isn’t it a beauty! I spent half an hour
+this morning looking for the best and most perfect rose in the garden,
+and there it is!”
+
+She was now all alight with her idea, and I saw her, as we sometimes
+see our oldest friends, as though I had not seen her before. She was
+that phenomenon of the modern world—the free woman of forty-five.
+
+When a woman reaches the old age of youth, the years between forty and
+forty-five, she either surrenders or revolts. In the older days in
+America it was nearly always surrender. Those women of a past
+generation bore many children: how many graves there are in our hill
+cemeteries of women of forty to fifty who died leading families of five
+or eight or ten children! How many second and third wives there were,
+often with second and third families. Or if they did not die, how
+terribly they toiled, keeping the house, clothing the children, cooking
+the food. Or if they bore no children, yet they were bound down by a
+thousand chains of convention and formality.
+
+But in these days we have a woman of forty-five who has not
+surrendered. She is a vigorous, experienced, active-minded human being,
+just beginning to look restlessly around her and take a new interest in
+the world. Such a woman was Mary Starkweather; and this was her first
+revolt.
+
+“You cannot imagine,” she was saying, “what a joy it has been to
+unaccumulate! To get rid of things! To select.”
+
+“To become an artist in life!”
+
+“Yes! At last! What a lot of perfectly worthless trash accumulates
+around us. Not beautiful, not even useful! And it is not only the lives
+of the well-to-do that are choked and cluttered with things. I wish you
+could see the house of our Polish farmer. He’s been saving money, and
+filling up his house with perfectly worthless ornaments—ornate clocks,
+gorgeous plush furniture, impossible rugs—and yet he is only doing what
+we are all doing on a more elaborate scale.”
+
+I laughed.
+
+“That reminds me of a family of squirrels that lives in an oak tree on
+my hill,” I said. “I am never tired of watching them. In the fall they
+work desperately, stealing all the hickory nuts and chestnuts on my
+neighbour Horace’s back pastures, five times as many as they need, and
+then they forget, half the time, where they’ve hidden them. We’re all
+more or less in the squirrel stage of civilization.”
+
+“Yes,” she responded. “There are my books! I gathered up books for
+years, just squirrel fashion, until I forgot what I had or where I put
+them. You cannot know what joy I’m going to have in selecting just the
+essential books, the ones I want by me for daily companions. All the
+others, I see now, are temporary rubbish.”
+
+“And you’ve made your selections?”
+
+“No, but I’m making them. You’ll laugh when you come next time and I
+show them to you. Oh, I am going to be stern with myself. I’m not going
+to put a single book in that case for show, nor a single one to give
+the impression that I’m profoundly interested in Egypt or Maeterlinck
+or woman suffrage, when I’m positively not.”
+
+“It’s terribly risky,” I said.
+
+“And I’m terribly reckless,” she responded.
+
+As I went onward toward the town I looked back from the hilltop beyond
+the big house for a last glimpse of the reconstructed barn, and with a
+curious warm sense of having been admitted to a new adventure. Here was
+life changing under my eyes! Here was a human being struggling with one
+of the deep common problems that come to all of us. The revolt from
+things! The struggle with superfluities!
+
+And yet as I walked along the cool aisles of the woods with the quiet
+fields opening here and there to the low hill ridges, and saw the
+cattle feeding, and heard a thrush singing in a thicket, I found myself
+letting go—how can I explain it?—relaxing! I had been keyed up to a
+high pitch there in that extraordinary room, Yes, it _was_
+beautiful—and yet as I thought of the sharp little green gate, the new
+gable, the hard, clean mantel with the cloisonne vase, it wanted
+something....
+
+As I was gathering the rowen crop of after-enjoyment which rewards us
+when we reflect freshly upon our adventures, whom should I meet but
+Richard Starkweather himself in his battered machine. The two boys, one
+of whom was driving, and the little girl, were with him.
+
+“How are you, David?” he called out. “Whoa, there! Draw up, Jamie.”
+
+We looked at each other for a moment with that quizzical, half-humorous
+look that so often conveys, better than any spoken words, the
+sympathetic greeting of friends. I like Richard Starkweather.
+
+He had come up from the city looking rather worn, for the weather had
+been trying. He has blue, honest, direct-gazing eyes with small humour
+wrinkles at the corners. I never knew a man with fewer theories, or
+with a simpler devotion to the thing at hand, whatever it may be. At
+everything else he smiles, not cynically, for he is too modest in his
+regard for his own knowledge; he smiles at everything else because it
+doesn’t seem quite real to him.
+
+“Been up to see Mary’s new house?” he asked.
+
+“Yes,” And for the life of me I couldn’t help smiling in response.
+
+“It’s a wonder isn’t it?”
+
+He thought his wife a very extraordinary woman. I remember his saying
+to me once, “David, she’s got the soul of a poet and the brain of a
+general.”
+
+“It _is_ a wonder,” I responded.
+
+“I can’t decide yet what chair to sit in, nor just what she wants the
+kids to do.”
+
+I still smiled.
+
+“I expect she hasn’t determined yet,” he went drawling on, “in what
+chair I will look most decorative.”
+
+He ruminated.
+
+“You know, she’s got the idea that there’s too much of everything. I
+guess there is, too—and that she ought to select only those things that
+an essential. I’ve been wondering, if she had more than one husband
+whether or not she’d select me——”
+
+The restless young Jamie was now starting the machine, and Richard
+Starkweather leaned out and said to me in parting:
+
+“isn’t she a wonder! Did all the planning herself—wouldn’t have an
+architect—wouldn’t have a decorator—all I could do—”
+
+As he turned around I saw him throw one arm carelessly about the
+shoulders of the sturdy younger boy who sat next him.
+
+When I got home I told Harriet all about what I had seen and heard. I
+think I must feel when I am retailing such fascinating neighbourhood
+events to Harriet—how she _does_ enjoy them!—I must feel very much as
+she does when she is urging me to have just a little more of the new
+gingerbread.
+
+In the next few months I watched with indescribable interest the
+unfolding of the drama of Mary Starkweather. I saw her from time to
+time that summer and she seemed, and I think she was, happier than ever
+she had been before in her whole life. Making over her garden,
+selecting the “essential books,” choosing the best pictures for her
+rooms, even reforming the clothing of the boys, all with an emphasis
+upon perfect simplicity—her mind was completely absorbed. Occasionally
+Richard appeared upon the stage, a kind of absurd Greek chorus of one,
+who remarked what a wonderful woman this was and poked fun at himself
+and at the new house, and asserted that Mary could be as simple as ever
+she liked, he insisted on thick soup for dinner and would not sacrifice
+his beloved old smoking jacket upon the altar of any new idea.
+
+“She’s a wonder, David,” he’d wind up: “but this simple life is getting
+more complicated every day.”
+
+It was in December, about the middle of the month, as I remember, that
+I had a note one day from Mary Starkweather.
+
+“The next time you go to town,” it ran, “stop in and see me. I’ve made
+a discovery.”
+
+With such a note as that us my hand it appeared imperative that I go to
+town at once. I discovered, to Harriet’s astonishment, that we were
+running out of all sorts of necessaries.
+
+“Now, David,” she said, “you know perfectly well that you’re just
+making up to call on Mary Starkweather.”
+
+“That,” I said, “relieves my conscience of a great burden.”
+
+As I went out of the door I heard her saying: “Why Mary Starkweather
+should _care_ to live in her barn....”
+
+It was a sparkling cold day, sun on the snow and the track crunching
+under one’s feet, and I walked swiftly and with a warm sense of coming
+adventure.
+
+To my surprise there was no smoke in the cottage chimney, and when I
+reached the door I found a card pinned upon it:
+
+PLEASE CALL AT THE HOUSE
+
+Mary Starkweather herself opened the door—she had seen me coming—and
+took me into the big comfortable old living-room, the big, cluttered,
+overfurnished living-room, with the two worn upholstered chairs at the
+fireplace, in which a bright log fire was now burning. There was a
+pleasant litter of books and magazines, and a work basket on the table,
+and in the bay window an ugly but cheerful green rubber plant in a tub.
+
+“Well!” I exclaimed.
+
+“Don’t smile—not yet.”
+
+As I looked at her I felt not at all like smiling.
+
+“I know,” she was saying, “it does have a humorous side. I can see
+that. Dick has seen it all along. Do you know, although Dick pretends
+to pooh-pooh everything intellectual, he has a really penetrating
+mind.”
+
+I had a sudden vision of Dick in his old smoking jacket, standing in
+the midst of the immaculate cottage that was once a barn, holding his
+pipe with one finger crooked around the stem just in front of his nose
+in the way he had, and smiling across at me.
+
+“Have you deserted the cottage entirely?”
+
+“Oh, we may possibly go back in the spring———” She paused and looked
+into the fire, her fine, strong face a little sad in composure, full of
+thought.
+
+“I am trying to be honest with myself David. Honest above everything
+else. That’s fundamental. It seems to me I have wanted most of all to
+learn how to live my life more freely and finely.... I thought I was
+getting myself free of things when, as a matter of fact, I was devoting
+more time to them than ever before-and, besides that, making life more
+or less uncomfortable for Dick and the children. So I’ve taken my
+courage squarely in my hands and come back here into this blessed old
+home, this blessed, ugly, stuffy old home—I’ve learned _that_ lesson.”
+
+At this, she glanced up at me with that rare smile which sometimes
+shines out of her very nature: the smile that is herself.
+
+“I found,” she said, “that when I had finished the work of becoming
+simple—there was nothing else left to do.”
+
+I laughed outright, for I couldn’t help it, and she joined me. How we
+do like people who can laugh at themselves.
+
+“But,” I said, “there was sound sense in a great deal that you were
+trying to do.”
+
+“The fireplace smoked; and the kitchen sink froze up; and the cook left
+because we couldn’t keep her room warm.”
+
+“But you were right,” I interrupted, “and I am not going to be put off
+by smoking fireplaces or chilly cooks; you were right. We do have too
+much, we are smothered in things, we don’t enjoy what we do have—”
+
+I paused.
+
+“And you were making a beautiful thing, a beautiful house.”
+
+“The trouble with making a beautiful thing,” she replied, “is that when
+you have got it done you must straightway make another. Now I don’t
+want to keep on building houses or furnishing rooms. I am not after
+beauty—I mean primarily—what I want is to _live_, live simply, live
+greatly.”
+
+She was desperately in earnest.
+
+“Perhaps,” I said, feeling as though I were treading on dangerous
+ground, “you were trying to be simple for the sake of being simple. I
+wonder if true simplicity is ever any thing but a by-product. If we aim
+directly for it, it eludes us: but if we are on fire with some great
+interest that absorbs on lives to the uttermost, we forget ourselves
+into simplicity, Everything falls into simple lines around us, like a
+worn garment.”
+
+I had the rather uncomfortable feeling on the way home that I had been
+preachy; and the moment you became preachy begin to build up barriers
+between yourself and your friends: but that’s a defect of character
+I’ve never been able, quite, to overcome. I keep thinking I’ve got the
+better of it, but along will come a beautiful temptation and down I
+go—and come out as remorseful as I was that afternoon on the way home
+from Mary Starkweather’s.
+
+A week or two later I happened to meet Richard Starkweather on the
+street in Hempfield. He was on his way home.
+
+“Yes,” he said, “we’re in the old house again until spring, anyway. I
+haven’t been so comfortable in a year. And, say,” here he looked at me
+quizzically, “Mary has joined the new cemetery association; you know
+they’re trying to improve the resting places of the forefathers, and,
+by George, if they didn’t elect her chairman at the first meeting.
+She’s a wonder!”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+HIS MAJESTY—BILL RICHARDS
+
+
+Well, I have just been having an amusing and delightful adventure and
+have come to know a Great Common Person. His name is Bill Richards, and
+he is one of the hereditary monarchs of America. He belongs to our
+ruling dynasty.
+
+I first saw Bill about two weeks ago, and while I was strongly
+interested in him I had no idea, at the time, that I should ever come
+to know him well. It was a fine June day, and I was riding on the new
+trolley line that crosses the hills to Hewlett—a charming trip through
+a charming country—and there in the open car just in front of me sat
+Bill himself. One huge bare forearm rested on the back of the seat, the
+rich red blood showing through the weathered brown of the skin. His
+clean brown neck rose strongly from the loose collar of his shirt,
+which covered but could not hide the powerful lines of his shoulders.
+He wore blue denim and khaki, and a small round felt hat tipped up
+jauntily at the back. He had crisp, coarse light hair rather thin—not
+by age, but by nature—so that the ruddy scalp could be seen through it,
+and strong jaws and large firm features, and if the beard was two days
+old, his face was so brown, so full of youthful health, that it gave no
+ill impression.
+
+He could not sit still for the very life that was in him. He seemed to
+have some grand secret with the conductor and frequently looked around
+at him, his eyes full of careless laughter, and once or twice he called
+out—some jocose remark. He helped the conductor, in pantomime, to pull
+the cord and stop or start the car, and he watched with the liveliest
+interest each passenger getting on or getting off. A rather mincing
+young girl with a flaring red ribbon at her throat was to him the
+finest comedy in the world, so that he had to wink a telegram to the
+conductor about her. An old woman with a basket of vegetables who
+delayed the car was exquisitely funny.
+
+I set him down as being about twenty-two years old and some kind of
+outdoor workman, not a farmer.
+
+When he got off, which was before the car stopped, so that he had to
+jump and run with it, he gave a wild flourish with both arms, grimaced
+at the conductor, and went off down the road whistling for all he was
+worth. How I enjoyed the sight of him! He was so charged with youthful
+energy, so overflowing with the joy of life, that he could scarcely
+contain himself. What a fine place the world was to him! And what
+comical and interesting people it contained! I was sorry when he got
+off.
+
+Two or three days later I was on my way up the town road north of my
+farm when I was astonished and delighted to see Bill for the second
+time. He was coming down the road pulling a wire over the crosspiece of
+a tall telephone pole (the company is rebuilding and enlarging its
+system through our town). He was holding the wire close drawn over his
+right shoulder, his strong hands gripped and pressed upon his breast.
+The veins stood out in his brown neck where the burlap shoulder pad he
+wore was drawn aside by the wire. He leaned forward, stepping first on
+his toe, which he dug into the earth and then, heavily letting down his
+heel, he drew the other foot forward somewhat stiffly. The muscles
+stood out in his powerful shoulders and thighs. His legs were
+double-strapped with climbing spurs. He was a master lineman.
+
+As I came alongside he turned a good-humoured sweaty face toward me.
+
+“It’s dang hot,” said he.
+
+“It is,” said I.
+
+There is something indescribably fascinating about the sight of a
+strong workman in the full swing of his work, something—yes, beautiful!
+A hard pull of a job, with a strong man doing it joyfully, what could
+be finer to see? And he gave such a jaunty sense of youth and easy
+strength!
+
+I watched him for some time, curiously interested, and thought I should
+like well to know him, but could not see just how to go about it.
+
+The man astride the cross-arm who was heaving the wire forward from the
+spool on the distant truck suddenly cried out:
+
+“Ease up there, Bill, she’s caught.”
+
+So Bill eased up and drew his arm across his dripping face.
+
+“How many wires are you putting up?” I asked, fencing for some opening.
+
+“Three,” said Bill.
+
+Before I could get in another stroke the man on the pole shouted:
+
+“Let ’er go, Bill.” And Bill let ’er go, and buckled down again to his
+job.
+
+“Gee, but it’s hot,” said he.
+
+In the country there are not so many people passing our way that we
+cannot be interested in all of them. That evening I could not help
+thinking about Bill, the lineman, wondering where he came from, how he
+happened to be what he was, who and what sort were the friends he made,
+and the nature of his ambitions, if he had any. Talk about going to the
+North Pole! It is not to be compared, for downright fascination, with
+the exploration of an undiscovered human being.
+
+With that I began to think how I might get at Bill, the lineman, and
+not merely weather talk, or wages talk, or work talk, but at Bill
+himself. He was a character quite unusual in our daily lives here in
+the country. I wondered what his interests could be, surely not mine
+nor Horace’s nor the Starkweathers’. As soon as I began trying to
+visualize what his life might be, I warmed up to a grand scheme of
+capturing him, if by chance he was to be found the next day upon the
+town road.
+
+All this may seem rather absurd in the telling, but I found it a
+downright good adventure for a quiet evening, and fully believe I felt
+for the moment like General Joffre planning to meet the Germans on the
+Marne.
+
+“I have it!” I said aloud.
+
+“You have what?” asked Harriet, somewhat startled.
+
+“The grandest piece of strategy ever devised in this town,” said I.
+
+With that I went delving in a volume of universal information I keep
+near me, one of those knowing books that tells you how tall the great
+Pryamid is and why a hen cackles after laying an egg, and having found
+what I wanted I asked Harriet if she could find a tape measure around
+the place. She is a wonderful person and knows where everything is.
+When she handed me the tape measure she asked me what in the world I
+was so mysterious about.
+
+“Harriet,” I said, “I’m going on a great adventure. I’ll tell you all
+about it to-morrow.”
+
+“Nonsense,” said Harriet.
+
+It is this way with the fancies of the evening—they often look flat and
+flabby and gray the next morning. Quite impossible! But if I’d acted on
+half the good and grand schemes I’ve had o’ nights I might now be quite
+a remarkable person.
+
+I went about my work the next morning just as usual. I even avoided
+looking at the little roll of tape on the corner of the mantel as I
+went out. It seemed a kind of badge of my absurdity. But about the
+middle of the fore-noon, while I was in my garden, I heard a tremendous
+racket up the road. Rattle—bang, zip, toot! As I looked up I saw the
+boss lineman and his crew careering up the road in their truck, and the
+bold driver was driving like Jehu, the son of Nimshi. And there were
+ladders and poles clattering out behind, and rolls of wire on upright
+spools rattling and flashing in the sunshine, and the men of the crew
+were sitting along the sides of the truck with hats off and hair flying
+as they came bumping and bounding up the road. It was a brave thing to
+see going by on a spring morning!
+
+As they passed, whom should I see but Bill himself, at the top of the
+load, with a broad smile on his face. When his eye fell on me he threw
+up one arm, and gave me the railroad salute.
+
+“Hey, there!” he shouted.
+
+“Hey there, yourself,” I shouted in return—and could not help it.
+
+I had a curious warm feeling of being taken along with that jolly crowd
+of workmen, with Bill on the top of the load.
+
+It was this that finished me. I hurried through an early dinner, and
+taking the tape measure off the mantel I put it in my pocket as though
+it were a revolver or a bomb, and went off up the road feeling as
+adventurous as ever I felt in my life. I never said a word to Harriet
+but disappeared quietly around the lilac bushes. I was going to waylay
+that crew, and especially Bill. I hoped to catch them at their nooning.
+
+Well, I was lucky. About a quarter of a mile up the road, in a little
+valley near the far corner of Horace’s farm, I found the truck, and
+Bill just getting out his dinner pail. It seems they had flipped
+pennies and Bill hod been left behind with the truck and the tools
+while the others went down to the mill pond in the valley below.
+
+“How are you?” said I.
+
+“How are _you_?” said he.
+
+I could see that he was rather cross over having been left behind.
+
+“Fine day,” said I.
+
+“You bet,” said he.
+
+He got out his pail, which was a big one, and seated himself on the
+roadside, a grassy, comfortable spot near the brook which runs below
+into the pond. There were white birches and hemlocks on the hill, and
+somewhere in the thicket I heard a wood thrush singing.
+
+“Did you ever see John L. Sullivan?” I asked.
+
+He glanced up at me quickly, but with new interest.
+
+“No, did you?”
+
+“Or Bob Fitzsimmons?”
+
+“Nope—but I was mighty near it once. I’ve seen ’em both in the movies.”
+
+“Well, sir,” said I, “that’s interesting. I should like to see them
+myself. Do you know what made me speak of them?”
+
+He had spread down a newspaper and was taking the luncheon out of his
+“bucket,” as he called it, including a large bottle of coffee; but he
+paused and looked at me with keen interest.
+
+“Well,” said I, “when I saw you dragging that wire yesterday I took you
+to be a pretty husky citizen yourself.”
+
+He grinned and took a big mouthful from one of his sandwiches. I could
+see that my shot had gone home.
+
+“So when I got back last night,” I said, “I looked up the arm
+measurements of Sullivan and Fitzsimmons in a book I have and got to
+wondering how they compared with mine and yours. They were considerably
+larger than mine—”
+
+Bill thought this a fine joke and laughed out in great good humour.
+
+“But I imagine you’d not be far behind either of them.”
+
+He looked at me a little suspiciously, as if doubtful what I was
+driving at or whether or not I was joking him. But I was as serious as
+the face of nature; and proceeded at once to get out my tape measure.
+
+“I get very much interested in such things,” I said, “and I had enough
+curiosity to want to see how big your arm really was.”
+
+He smiled broadly.
+
+“You’re a queer one,” said he.
+
+But he took another bite of sandwich, and clenching his great fist drew
+up his forearm until the biceps muscles looked like a roll of Vienna
+bread—except that they had the velvety gleam of life. So I measured
+first one arm, then the other.
+
+“By George!” said I, “you’re ahead of Fitzsimmons, but not quite up to
+Sullivan.”
+
+“Fitz wasn’t a heavy man,” said Bill, “but a dead game fighter.”
+
+I saw then that I had him! So I sat down on the grass near by and we
+had great talk about the comparative merits of Fitzsimmons and Sullivan
+and Corbett and Jack Johnson, a department of knowledge in which he
+out-distanced me. He even told me of an exploit or two of his own,
+which showed that he was able to take care of himself.
+
+While we talked he ate his luncheon, and a downright gargantuan
+luncheon it was, backed by an appetite which if it were offered to the
+highest bidder on the New York Stock Exchange would, I am convinced,
+bring at least ten thousand dollars in cash. It even made me envious.
+
+There were three huge corned-beef sandwiches, three hard-boiled eggs, a
+pickle six inches long and fat to boot, four doughnuts so big that they
+resembled pitching quoits, a bottle of coffee and milk, a quarter of a
+pie, and, to cap the climax, an immense raw onion. It was worth a long
+journey to see Bill eat that onion. He took out his clasp knife, and
+after stripping off the papery outer shell, cut the onion into thick
+dewy slices. Then he opened one of the sandwiches and placed several of
+them on the beef, afterward sprinkling them with salt from a small
+paper parcel. Having restored the top slice of bread he took a
+moon-shaped bite out of one end of this glorified sandwich.
+
+“I like onions,” said he.
+
+When we first sat down he had offered to share his luncheon with me but
+I told him I had just been to dinner, and I observed that he had no
+difficulty in taking care of every crumb in his “bucket.” It was
+wonderful to see.
+
+Having finished his luncheon he went down to the brook and got a drink,
+and then sat down comfortably with his back among the ferns of the
+roadside, crossed his legs, and lit his pipe. There was a healthy and
+wholesome flush in his face, and as he blew off the first cloud of
+smoke he drew a sigh of complete comfort and looked around at me with a
+lordly air such as few monarchs, no matter how well fed, could have
+bettered. He had worked and sweat for what he got, and was now taking
+his ease in his roadside inn. I wonder sometimes if anybody in the
+world experiences keener joys than unwatched common people.
+
+How we talked! From pugilists we proceeded to telephones, and from that
+to wages, hours, and strikes, and from that we leaped easily to Alaska
+and gold-mining, and touched in passing upon Theodore Roosevelt.
+
+“I was just thinking,” I said, “that you and I can enjoy some things
+that were beyond the reach of the greatest kings of the world.”
+
+“How’s that?” said he.
+
+“Why, Napoleon never saw a telephone nor talked through one.”
+
+“That’s so!” he laughed.
+
+“And Caesar couldn’t have dreamed that such a thing as you are doing
+now was a possibility—nor George Washington, either.”
+
+“Say, that’s so. I never thought o’ that.”
+
+“Why,” I said, “the world is only half as big as it was before you
+fellows came along stringing your wires! I can get to town now from my
+farm in two minutes, when it used to take me an hour.”
+
+I really believe I gave him more of his own business than ever he had
+before, for he listened so intently that his pipe went out.
+
+I found that Bill was from Ohio, and that he had been as far south as
+Atlanta and as far west as Denver. He got his three dollars and a half
+a day, rain or shine, and thought it wonderful pay; and besides, he was
+seein’ the country “free, gratis, fer nothing.”
+
+He got his coat out of the truck and took from the pocket a
+many-coloured folder.
+
+“Say, Mister, have you ever been to the Northwest?”
+
+“No,” said I.
+
+“Well, it’s a great country, and I’m goin’ up there.”
+
+He spread out the glittering folder and placed his big forefinger on a
+spot about the size of Rhode Island somewhere this side of the Rockies.
+
+“How’ll you do it?” I asked.
+
+“Oh, a lineman can go anywhere,” said he with a flourish, “A lineman
+don’t have to beg a job. Besides, I got eighty dollars sewed up.”
+
+Talk about freedom! Never have I got a clearer impression of it than
+Bill gave me that day. No millionaire, no potentate, could touch him.
+
+The crew came back all too soon for me. Bill knocked the ashes out of
+his pipe on his boot heel, and put his “bucket” back in the truck. Five
+minutes later he was climbing a tall pole with legs bowed out, striking
+in his spikes at each step. From the cross-arm, up among the hemlock
+tops, he called out to me:
+
+“Good-bye, pard.”
+
+“Stop in, Bill, and see me when you come by my place,” said I.
+
+“You bet,” said he.
+
+And he did, the next day, and I showed him off to Harriet, who brought
+him a plate of her best doughnuts and asked him about his mother.
+
+Yesterday I saw him again careering by in the truck. The job was
+finished. He waved his hand at me.
+
+“I’m off,” said he.
+
+“Where?” I shouted.
+
+“Canada.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+ON LIVING IN THE COUNTRY
+
+
+“Why risk with men your hard won gold?
+Buy grain and sow—your Brother Dust
+Will pay you back a hundred fold—
+The earth commits no breach of trust.”
+
+
+_Hindu Proverb, Translated by Arthur Guiterman_.
+
+It is astonishing how many people there are in cities and towns who
+have a secret longing to get back into quiet country places, to own a
+bit of the soil of the earth, and to cultivate it. To some it appears
+as a troublesome malady only in spring and will be relieved by a whirl
+or two in country roads, by a glimpse of the hills, or a day by the
+sea; but to others the homesickness is deeper seated and will be
+quieted by no hasty visits. These must actually go home.
+
+I have had, in recent years, many letters from friends asking about
+life in the country, but the longer I remain here, the more I know
+about it, the less able I am to answer them—at least briefly. It is as
+though one should come and ask: “Is love worth trying?” or, “How about
+religion?” For country life is to each human being a fresh, strange,
+original adventure. We enjoy it, or we do not enjoy it, or more
+probably, we do both. It is packed and crowded with the zest of
+adventure, or it is dull and miserable. We may, if we are skilled
+enough, make our whole living from the land, or only a part of it, or
+we may find in a few cherished acres the inspiration and power for
+other work, whatever it may be. There is many a man whose strength is
+renewed like that of the wrestler of Irassa, every time his feet touch
+the earth.
+
+Of all places in the world where life can be lived to its fullest and
+freest, where it can be met in its greatest variety and beauty, I am
+convinced that there is none to equal the open country, or the country
+town. For all country people in these days may have the city—some city
+or town not too far away: but there are millions of men and women in
+America who have no country and no sense of the country. What do they
+not lose out of life!
+
+I know well the disadvantages charged against country life at its
+worst. At its worst there are long hours and much lonely labour and an
+income pitifully small. Drudgery, yes, especially for the women, and
+loneliness. But where is there not drudgery when men are poor—where
+life is at its worst? I have never seen drudgery in the country
+comparable for a moment to the dreary and lonely drudgery of city
+tenements, city mills, factories, and sweat shops. And in recent years
+both the drudgery and loneliness of country life have been disappearing
+before the motor and trolley car, the telephone, the rural post, the
+gasoline engine. I have seen a machine plant as many potatoes in one
+day as a man, at hand work, could have planted in a week. While there
+is, indeed, real drudgery in the country, much that is looked upon as
+drudgery by people who long for easy ways and a soft life, is only
+good, honest, wholesome hard work—the kind of work that makes for fiber
+in a man or in a nation, the kind that most city life in no wise
+provides.
+
+There are a thousand nuisances and annoyances that men must meet who
+come face to face with nature itself. You have set out your upper acres
+to peach trees: and the deer come down from the hills at night and
+strip the young foliage; or the field mice in winter, working under the
+snow, girdle and kill them. The season brings too much rain and the
+potatoes rot in the ground, the crows steal the corn, the bees swarm
+when no out is watching, the cow smothers her calf, the hens’ eggs
+prove infertile, and a storm in a day ravages a crop that has been
+growing all summer. A constant warfare with insects and blights and
+fungi—a real, bitter warfare, which can cease neither summer nor
+winter!
+
+It is something to meet, year after year, the quiet implacability of
+the land. While it is patient, it never waits long for you. There is a
+chosen time for planting, a time for cultivating, a time for
+harvesting. You accept the gauge thrown down—well and good, you shall
+have a chance to fight! You do not accept it? There is no complaint.
+The land cheerfully springs up to wild yellow mustard and dandelion and
+pig-weed—and will be productive and beautiful in spite of you.
+
+Nor can you enter upon the full satisfaction of cultivating even a
+small piece of land at second hand. To be accepted as One Who Belongs,
+there must be sweat and weariness.
+
+The other day I was digging with Dick in a ditch that is to run down
+through the orchard and connect finally with the land drain we put in
+four years ago. We laid the tile just in the gravel below the silt,
+about two feet deep, covering the openings with tar paper and then
+throwing in gravel. It was a bright, cool afternoon. In the field below
+a ploughman was at work: I could see the furrows of the dark earth
+glisten as he turned it over. The grass in the meadow was a full rich
+green, the new chickens were active in their yards, running to the
+cluck of the hens, already the leaves of the orchard trees showed
+green. And as I worked there with Dick I had the curious deep feeling
+of coming somehow into a new and more intimate possession of my own
+land. For titles do not really pass with signatures and red seals, nor
+with money changing from one hand to another, but for true possession
+one must work and serve according to the most ancient law. There is no
+mitigation and no haggling of price. Those who think they can win the
+greatest joys of country life on any easier terms are mistaken.
+
+But if one has drained his land, and ploughed it, and fertilized it,
+and planted it and harvested it—even though it be only a few acres— how
+he comes to know and to love every rod of it. He knows the wet spots,
+and the stony spots, and the warmest and most fertile spots —until his
+acres have all the qualities of a personality, whose every
+characteristic he knows. It is so also that he comes to know his horses
+and cattle and pigs and hens. It is a fine thing, on a warm day in
+early spring, to bring out the bee-hives and let the bees have their
+first flight in the sunshine. What cleanly folk they are! And later to
+see them coming in yellow all over with pollen from the willows! It is
+a fine thing to watch the cherries and plum trees come into blossom,
+with us about the first of May, while all the remainder of the orchard
+seems still sleeping. It is a fine thing to see the cattle turned for
+the first time in spring into the green meadows. It is a fine thing—one
+of the finest of all—to see and smell the rain in a corn-field after
+weeks of drought. How it comes softly out of gray skies, the first
+drops throwing up spatters of dust and losing themselves in the dry
+soil. Then the clouds sweep forward up the valley, darkening the
+meadows and blotting out the hills, and then there is the whispering of
+the rain as it first sweeps across the corn-field. At once what a stir
+of life! What rustling of the long green leaves. What joyful shaking
+and swaying of the tassels! And have you watched how eagerly the
+grooved leaves catch the early drops, and, lest there be too little
+rain after all, conduct them jealously down the stalks where they will
+soonest reach the thirsty roots? What a fine thing is this to see!
+
+One who thus takes part in the whole process of the year comes soon to
+have an indescribable affection for his land, his garden, his animals.
+There are thoughts of his in every tree: memories in every fence
+corner. Just now, the fourth of June, I walked down past my blackberry
+patch, now come gorgeously into full white bloom—and heavy with
+fragrance. I set out these plants with my own hands, I have fed them,
+cultivated them, mulched them, pruned them, trellised them, and helped
+every year to pick the berries. How could they be otherwise than full
+of associations! They bear a fruit more beautiful than can be found in
+any catalogue: and stranger and wilder than in any learned botany book!
+
+Why, one who comes thus to love a bit of countryside may enjoy it all
+the year round. When he awakens in the middle of a long winter night he
+may send his mind out to the snowy fields—I’ve done it a thousand
+times!—and visit each part in turn, stroll through the orchard and pay
+his respects to each tree—in a small orchard one comes to know
+familiarly every tree as he knows his friends—stop at the strawberry
+bed, consider the grape trellises, feel himself opening the door of the
+warm, dark stable and listening to the welcoming whicker of his horses,
+or visiting his cows, his pigs, his sheep, his hens, or so many of them
+as he may have.
+
+So much of the best in the world seems to have come fragrant out of
+fields, gardens, and hillsides. So many truths spoken by the Master
+Poet come to us exhaling the odours of the open country. His stories
+were so often of sowers, husbandmen, herdsmen: his similes and
+illustrations so often dealt with the common and familiar beauty of the
+fields. “Consider the lilies how they grow.” It was on a hillside that
+he preached his greatest Sermon, and when in the last agony he sought a
+place to meet his God, where did he go but to a garden? A carpenter you
+say? Yes, but of this one may be sure: there were gardens and fields
+all about: he knew gardens, and cattle, and the simple processes of the
+land: he must have worked in a garden and loved it well.
+
+A country life rather spoils one for the so-called luxuries. A farmer
+or gardener may indeed have a small cash income, but at least he eats
+at the first table. He may have the sweetest of the milk, there are
+thousands, perhaps millions, of men and women in America who have never
+in their lives tasted really sweet milk and the freshest of eggs, and
+the ripest of fruit. One does not know how good strawberries or
+raspberries are when picked before breakfast and eaten with the dew
+still on them. And while he must work and sweat for what he gets, he
+may have all these things in almost unmeasured abundance, and without a
+thought of what they cost. A man from the country is often made
+uncomfortable, upon visiting the city, to find two cans of sweet corn
+served for twenty or thirty cents, or a dish of raspberries at
+twenty-five or forty—and neither, even at their best, equal in quality
+to those he may have fresh from the garden every day. One need say this
+in no boastful spirit, but as a simple statement of the fact: for
+fruits sent to the city are nearly always picked before they are fully
+ripe—and lose that last perfection of flavour which the sun and the
+open air impart: and both fruits and vegetables, as well as milk and
+eggs, suffer more than most people think from handling and shipment.
+These things can be set down as one of the make-weights against the
+familiar presentation of the farmer’s life as a hard one.
+
+One of the greatest curses of mill or factory work and with much city
+work of all kinds, is its interminable monotony: the same process
+repeated hour after hour and day after day. In the country there is
+indeed monotonous work but rarely monotony. No task continues very
+long: everything changes infinitely with the seasons. Processes are not
+repetitive but creative. Nature hates monotony, is ever changing and
+restless, brings up a storm to drive the haymakers from their hurried
+work in the fields, sends rain to stop the ploughing, or a frost to
+hurry the apple harvest. Everything is full of adventure and
+vicissitude! A man who has been a farmer for two hours at the mowing
+must suddenly turn blacksmith when his machine breaks down and tinker
+with wrench and hammer; and later in the day he becomes dairyman,
+farrier, harness-maker, merchant. No kind of wheat but is grist to his
+mill, no knowledge that he cannot use! And who is freer to be a citizen
+than he: freer to take his part in town meeting and serve his state in
+some one of the innumerable small offices which form the solid blocks
+of organization beneath our commonwealth.
+
+I thought last fall that corn-husking came as near being monotonous
+work, as any I had ever done in the country. I presume in the great
+corn-fields of the West, where the husking goes on for weeks at a time,
+it probably does grow really monotonous. But I soon found that there
+was a curious counter-reward attending even a process as repetitive as
+this.
+
+I remember one afternoon in particular. It was brisk and cool with
+ragged clouds like flung pennants in a poverty-stricken sky, and the
+hills were a hazy brown, rather sad to see, and in one of the apple
+trees at the edge of the meadow the crows were holding their mournful
+autumn parliament.
+
+At such work as this one’s mind often drops asleep, or at least goes
+dreaming, except for the narrow margin of awareness required for the
+simple processes of the hands. Its orders have indeed been given: you
+must kneel here, pull aside the stalks one by one, rip down the husks,
+and twist off the ear—and there is the pile for the stripped stalks,
+and here the basket for the gathered corn, and these processes
+infinitely repeated.
+
+While all this is going on, the mind itself wanders off to its own far
+sweet pastures, upon its own dear adventures—or rests, or plays. It is
+in these times that most of the airy flying things of this beautiful
+world come home to us—things that heavy-footed reason never quite
+overtakes, nor stodgy knowledge ever knows. I think sometimes (as
+Sterne says) we thus intercept thoughts never intended for us at all,
+or uncover strange primitive memories of older times than these—racial
+memories.
+
+At any rate, the hours pass and suddenly the mind comes home again, it
+comes home from its wanderings refreshed, stimulated, happy. And
+nowhere, whether in cities, or travelling in trains, or sailing upon
+the sea, have I so often felt this curious enrichment as I have upon
+this hillside, working alone in field, or garden, or orchard, It seems
+to come up out of the soil, or respond to the touch of growing things.
+
+What makes any work interesting is the fact that one can make
+experiments, try new things, develop specialties and _grow_. And where
+can he do this with such success as on the land and in direct contact
+with nature. The possibilities are here infinite new machinery,
+spraying, seed testing, fertilizers, experimentation with new
+varieties. A thousand and one methods, all creative, which may be tried
+out in that great essential struggle of the farmer or gardener to
+command all the forces of nature.
+
+Because there are farmers, and many of them, who do not experiment and
+do not grow, but make their occupation a veritable black drudgery, this
+is no reason for painting a sombre-hued picture of country life. Any
+calling, the law, the ministry, the medical profession, can be blasted
+by fixing one’s eyes only upon its ugliest aspects. And farming, at its
+best, has become a highly scientific, extraordinarily absorbing, and
+when all is said, a profitable, profession. Neighbours of mine have
+developed systems of overhead irrigation to make rain when there is no
+rain, and have covered whole fields with cloth canopies to increase the
+warmth and to protect the crops from wind and hail, and by the analysis
+of the soil and exact methods of feeding it with fertilizers, have come
+as near a complete command of nature as any farmers in the world. What
+independent, resourceful men they are! And many of them have also grown
+rich in money. It is not what nature does with a man that matters but
+what he does with nature.
+
+Nor is it necessary in these days for the farmer or the country dweller
+to be uncultivated or uninterested in what are often called, with no
+very clear definition, the “finer things of life.” Many educated men
+are now on the farms and have their books and magazines, and their
+music and lectures and dramas not too far off in the towns. A great
+change in this respect has come over American country life in twenty
+years. The real hardships of pioneering have passed away, and with good
+roads and machinery, and telephones, and newspapers every day by rural
+post, the farmer may maintain as close a touch with the best things the
+world has to offer as any man. And if he really have such broader
+interests the winter furnishes him time and leisure that no other class
+of people can command.
+
+I do not know, truly, what we are here for upon this wonderful and
+beautiful earth, this incalculably interesting earth, unless it is to
+crowd into a few short years—when all is said, terribly short
+years!—every possible fine experience and adventure: unless it is to
+live our lives to the uttermost: unless it is to seize upon every fresh
+impression, develop every latent capacity: to grow as much as ever we
+have it in our power to grow. What else can there be? If there is no
+life beyond this one, we have lived _here_ to the uttermost. We’ve had
+what we’ve had! But if there is more life, and still more life, beyond
+this one, and above and under this one, and around and through this
+one, we shall be well prepared for that, whatever it may be.
+
+The real advantages of country life have come to be a strong lure to
+many people in towns and cities: but no one should attempt to “go back
+to the land” with the idea that it is an easy way to escape the real
+problems and difficulties of life. The fact is, there is no escape. The
+problems and the difficulties must be boldly met whether in city or
+country. Farming in these days is not “easy living,” but a highly
+skilled profession, requiring much knowledge, and actual manual labour
+and plenty of it. So many come to the country too light-heartedly, buy
+too much land, attempt unfamiliar crops, expect to hire the work
+done—and soon find themselves facing discouragement and failure. Any
+city man who would venture on this new way of life should try it first
+for a year or so before he commits himself—try himself out against the
+actual problems. Or, by moving to the country, still within reach of
+his accustomed work, he can have a garden or even a small farm to
+experiment with. The shorter work-day has made this possible for a
+multitude of wage-workers, and I know many instances in which life
+because of this opportunity to get to the soil has become a very
+different and much finer thing for them.
+
+It is easy also for many men who are engaged in professional work to
+live where they can get their hands into the soil for part of the time
+at least: and this may be made as real an experience as far as it goes
+as though they owned wider acres and devoted their whole time to the
+work.
+
+A man who thus faces the problem squarely will soon see whether country
+life is the thing for him; if he finds it truly so, he can be as nearly
+assured of “living happily ever after” as any one outside of a
+story-book can ever be. Out of it all is likely to come some of the
+greatest rewards that men can know, a robust body, a healthy appetite,
+a serene and cheerful spirit!
+
+And finally there is one advantage not so easy to express. Long ago I
+read a story of Tolstoi’s called “The Candle”—how a peasant Russian
+forced to plough on Easter Day lighted a candle to his Lord and kept it
+burning on his plough as he worked through the sacred day. When I see a
+man ploughing in his fields I often think of Tolstoi’s peasant, and
+wonder if this is not as true a way as any of worshipping God. I wonder
+if any one truly worships God who sets about it with deliberation, or
+knows quite why he does it.
+
+“My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the dew,
+as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as showers upon the grass.”
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
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