LITTLE RIVERS

Little Rivers
by Henry van Dyke
A BOOK OF ESSAYS IN PROFITABLE IDLENESS
"And suppose he takes nothing, yet he enjoyeth a delightful walk by
pleasant Rivers, in sweet Pastures, amongst odoriferous Flowers,
which gratifie his Senses, and delight his Mind; which Contentments
induce many (who affect not Angling) to choose those places of
pleasure for their summer Recreation and Health."
COL. ROBERT VENABLES, The Experienc'd Angler, 1662.
DEDICATION
To one who wanders by my side
As cheerfully as waters glide;
Whose eyes are brown as woodland streams,
And very fair and full of dreams;
Whose heart is like a mountain spring,
Whose thoughts like merry rivers sing:
To her--my little daughter Brooke--
I dedicate this little book.
CONTENTS
I. Prelude
II. Little Rivers
III. A Leaf of Spearmint
IV. Ampersand
V. A Handful of Heather
VI. The Ristigouche from a Horse-Yacht
VII. Alpenrosen and Goat's-Milk
VIII. Au Large
IX. Trout-Fishing in the Traun
X. At the sign of the Balsam Bough
XI. A Song after Sundown
PRELUDE
AN ANGLER'S WISH IN TOWN
When tulips bloom in Union Square,
And timid breaths of vernal air
Are wandering down the dusty town,
Like children lost in Vanity Fair;
When every long, unlovely row
Of westward houses stands aglow
And leads the eyes toward sunset skies,
Beyond the hills where green trees grow;
Then weary is the street parade,
And weary books, and weary trade:
I'm only wishing to go a-fishing;
For this the month of May was made.
I guess the pussy-willows now
Are creeping out on every bough
Along the brook; and robins look
For early worms behind the plough.
The thistle-birds have changed their dun
For yellow coats to match the sun;
And in the same array of flame
The Dandelion Show's begun.
The flocks of young anemones
Are dancing round the budding trees:
Who can help wishing to go a-fishing
In days as full of joy as these?
I think the meadow-lark's clear sound
Leaks upward slowly from the ground,
While on the wing the bluebirds ring
Their wedding-bells to woods around:
The flirting chewink calls his dear
Behind the bush; and very near,
Where water flows, where green grass grows,
Song-sparrows gently sing, "Good cheer:"
And, best of all, through twilight's calm
The hermit-thrush repeats his psalm:
How much I'm wishing to go a-fishing
In days so sweet with music's balm!
'Tis not a proud desire of mine;
I ask for nothing superfine;
No heavy weight, no salmon great,
To break the record, or my line:
Only an idle little stream,
Whose amber waters softly gleam,
Where I may wade, through woodland shade,
And cast the fly, and loaf, and dream:
Only a trout or two, to dart
From foaming pools, and try my art:
No more I'm wishing--old-fashioned fishing,
And just a day on Nature's heart.
1894.
LITTLE RIVERS
A river is the most human and companionable of all inanimate
things. It has a life, a character, a voice of its own, and is as
full of good fellowship as a sugar-maple is of sap. It can talk in
various tones, loud or low, and of many subjects, grave and gay.
Under favourable circumstances it will even make a shift to sing,
not in a fashion that can be reduced to notes and set down in black
and white on a sheet of paper, but in a vague, refreshing manner,
and to a wandering air that goes
"Over the hills and far away."
For real company and friendship, there is nothing outside of the
animal kingdom that is comparable to a river.
I will admit that a very good case can be made out in favour of
some other objects of natural affection. For example, a fair
apology has been offered by those ambitious persons who have fallen
in love with the sea. But, after all, that is a formless and
disquieting passion. It lacks solid comfort and mutual confidence.
The sea is too big for loving, and too uncertain. It will not fit
into our thoughts. It has no personality because it has so many.
It is a salt abstraction. You might as well think of loving a
glittering generality like "the American woman." One would be more
to the purpose.
Mountains are more satisfying because they are more individual. It
is possible to feel a very strong attachment for a certain range
whose outline has grown familiar to our eyes, or a clear peak that
has looked down, day after day, upon our joys and sorrows,
moderating our passions with its calm aspect. We come back from
our travels, and the sight of such a well-known mountain is like
meeting an old friend unchanged. But it is a one-sided affection.
The mountain is voiceless and imperturbable; and its very loftiness
and serenity sometimes make us the more lonely.
Trees seem to come closer to our life. They are often rooted in
our richest feelings, and our sweetest memories, like birds, build
nests in their branches. I remember, the last time that I saw
James Russell Lowell, (only a few weeks before his musical voice
was hushed,) he walked out with me into the quiet garden at Elmwood
to say good-bye. There was a great horse-chestnut tree beside the
house, towering above the gable, and covered with blossoms from
base to summit,--a pyramid of green supporting a thousand smaller
pyramids of white. The poet looked up at it with his gray, pain-
furrowed face, and laid his trembling hand upon the trunk. "I
planted the nut," said he, "from which this tree grew. And my
father was with me and showed me how to plant it."
Yes, there is a good deal to be said in behalf of tree-worship; and
when I recline with my friend Tityrus beneath the shade of his
favourite oak, I consent in his devotions. But when I invite him
with me to share my orisons, or wander alone to indulge the luxury
of grateful, unlaborious thought, my feet turn not to a tree, but
to the bank of a river, for there the musings of solitude find a
friendly accompaniment, and human intercourse is purified and
sweetened by the flowing, murmuring water. It is by a river that I
would choose to make love, and to revive old friendships, and to
play with the children, and to confess my faults, and to escape
from vain, selfish desires, and to cleanse my mind from all the
false and foolish things that mar the joy and peace of living.
Like David's hart, I pant for the water-brooks. There is wisdom in
the advice of Seneca, who says, "Where a spring rises, or a river
flows, there should we build altars and offer sacrifices."
The personality of a river is not to be found in its water, nor in
its bed, nor in its shore. Either of these elements, by itself,
would be nothing. Confine the fluid contents of the noblest stream
in a walled channel of stone, and it ceases to be a stream; it
becomes what Charles Lamb calls "a mockery of a river--a liquid
artifice--a wretched conduit." But take away the water from the
most beautiful river-banks, and what is left? An ugly road with
none to travel it; a long, ghastly scar on the bosom of the earth.
The life of a river, like that of a human being, consists in the
union of soul and body, the water and the banks. They belong
together. They act and react upon each other. The stream moulds
and makes the shore; hollowing out a bay here, and building a long
point there; alluring the little bushes close to its side, and
bending the tall slim trees over its current; sweeping a rocky
ledge clean of everything but moss, and sending a still lagoon full
of white arrow-heads and rosy knot-weed far back into the meadow.
The shore guides and controls the stream; now detaining and now
advancing it; now bending it in a hundred sinuous curves, and now
speeding it straight as a wild-bee on its homeward flight; here
hiding the water in a deep cleft overhung with green branches, and
there spreading it out, like a mirror framed in daisies, to reflect
the sky and the clouds; sometimes breaking it with sudden turns and
unexpected falls into a foam of musical laughter, sometimes
soothing it into a sleepy motion like the flow of a dream.
Is it otherwise with the men and women whom we know and like? Does
not the spirit influence the form, and the form affect the spirit?
Can we divide and separate them in our affections?
I am no friend to purely psychological attachments. In some
unknown future they may be satisfying, but in the present I want
your words and your voice with your thoughts, your looks and your
gestures to interpret your feelings. The warm, strong grasp of
Greatheart's hand is as dear to me as the steadfast fashion of his
friendships; the lively, sparkling eyes of the master of Rudder
Grange charm me as much as the nimbleness of his fancy; and the
firm poise of the Hoosier Schoolmaster's shaggy head gives me new
confidence in the solidity of his views of life. I like the pure
tranquillity of Isabel's brow as well as her
"most silver flow
Of subtle-paced counsel in distress."
The soft cadences and turns in my lady Katrina's speech draw me
into the humour of her gentle judgments of men and things. The
touches of quaintness in Angelica's dress, her folded kerchief and
smooth-parted hair, seem to partake of herself, and enhance my
admiration for the sweet order of her thoughts and her old-
fashioned ideals of love and duty. Even so the stream and its
channel are one life, and I cannot think of the swift, brown flood
of the Batiscan without its shadowing primeval forests, or the
crystalline current of the Boquet without its beds of pebbles and
golden sand and grassy banks embroidered with flowers.
Every country--or at least every country that is fit for
habitation--has its own rivers; and every river has its own
quality; and it is the part of wisdom to know and love as many as
you can, seeing each in the fairest possible light, and receiving
from each the best that it has to give. The torrents of Norway
leap down from their mountain home with plentiful cataracts, and
run brief but glorious races to the sea. The streams of England
move smoothly through green fields and beside ancient, sleepy
towns. The Scotch rivers brawl through the open moorland and flash
along steep Highland glens. The rivers of the Alps are born in icy
caves, from which they issue forth with furious, turbid waters; but
when their anger has been forgotten in the slumber of some blue
lake, they flow down more softly to see the vineyards of France and
Italy, the gray castles of Germany, the verdant meadows of Holland.
The mighty rivers of the West roll their yellow floods through
broad valleys, or plunge down dark canyons. The rivers of the
South creep under dim arboreal archways hung with banners of waving
moss. The Delaware and the Hudson and the Connecticut are the
children of the Catskills and the Adirondacks and the White
Mountains, cradled among the forests of spruce and hemlock, playing
through a wild woodland youth, gathering strength from numberless
tributaries to bear their great burdens of lumber and turn the
wheels of many mills, issuing from the hills to water a thousand
farms, and descending at last, beside new cities, to the ancient
sea.
Every river that flows is good, and has something worthy to be
loved. But those that we love most are always the ones that we
have known best,--the stream that ran before our father's door, the
current on which we ventured our first boat or cast our first fly,
the brook on whose banks we first picked the twinflower of young
love. However far we may travel, we come back to Naaman's state of
mind: "Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than
all the waters of Israel?"
It is with rivers as it is with people: the greatest are not always
the most agreeable, nor the best to live with. Diogenes must have
been an uncomfortable bedfellow: Antinous was bored to death in the
society of the Emperor Hadrian: and you can imagine much better
company for a walking trip than Napoleon Bonaparte. Semiramis was
a lofty queen, but I fancy that Ninus had more than one bad
quarter-of-an-hour with her: and in "the spacious times of great
Elizabeth" there was many a milkmaid whom the wise man would have
chosen for his friend, before the royal red-haired virgin. "I
confess," says the poet Cowley, "I love littleness almost in all
things. A little convenient Estate, a little chearful House, a
little Company, and a very little Feast, and if I were ever to fall
in Love again, (which is a great Passion, and therefore, I hope, I
have done with it,) it would be, I think, with Prettiness, rather
than with Majestical Beauty. I would neither wish that my
Mistress, nor my Fortune, should be a Bona Roba, as Homer uses to
describe his Beauties, like a daughter of great Jupiter for the
stateliness and largeness of her Person, but as Lucretius says:
'Parvula, pumilio, [Greek text omitted], tota merum sal.'"
Now in talking about women it is prudent to disguise a prejudice
like this, in the security of a dead language, and to intrench it
behind a fortress of reputable authority. But in lowlier and less
dangerous matters, such as we are now concerned with, one may dare
to speak in plain English. I am all for the little rivers. Let
those who will, chant in heroic verse the renown of Amazon and
Mississippi and Niagara, but my prose shall flow--or straggle along
at such a pace as the prosaic muse may grant me to attain--in
praise of Beaverkill and Neversink and Swiftwater, of Saranac and
Raquette and Ausable, of Allegash and Aroostook and Moose River.
"Whene'er I take my walks abroad," it shall be to trace the clear
Rauma from its rise on the fjeld to its rest in the fjord; or to
follow the Ericht and the Halladale through the heather. The
Ziller and the Salzach shall be my guides through the Tyrol; the
Rotha and the Dove shall lead me into the heart of England. My
sacrificial flames shall be kindled with birch-bark along the
wooded stillwaters of the Penobscot and the Peribonca, and my
libations drawn from the pure current of the Ristigouche and the
Ampersand, and my altar of remembrance shall rise upon the rocks
beside the falls of Seboomok.
I will set my affections upon rivers that are not too great for
intimacy. And if by chance any of these little ones have also
become famous, like the Tweed and the Thames and the Arno, I at
least will praise them, because they are still at heart little
rivers.
If an open fire is, as Charles Dudley Warner says, the eye of a
room; then surely a little river may be called the mouth, the most
expressive feature, of a landscape. It animates and enlivens the
whole scene. Even a railway journey becomes tolerable when the
track follows the course of a running stream.
What charming glimpses you catch from the window as the train winds
along the valley of the French Broad from Asheville, or climbs the
southern Catskills beside the Aesopus, or slides down the
Pusterthal with the Rienz, or follows the Glommen and the Gula from
Christiania to Throndhjem. Here is a mill with its dripping, lazy
wheel, the type of somnolent industry; and there is a white
cascade, foaming in silent pantomime as the train clatters by; and
here is a long, still pool with the cows standing knee-deep in the
water and swinging their tails in calm indifference to the passing
world; and there is a lone fisherman sitting upon a rock, rapt in
contemplation of the point of his rod. For a moment you become a
partner of his tranquil enterprise. You turn around, you crane
your neck to get the last sight of his motionless angle. You do
not know what kind of fish he expects to catch, nor what species of
bait he is using, but at least you pray that he may have a bite
before the train swings around the next curve. And if perchance
your wish is granted, and you see him gravely draw some unknown,
reluctant, shining reward of patience from the water, you feel like
swinging your hat from the window and crying out "Good luck!"
Little rivers seem to have the indefinable quality that belongs to
certain people in the world,--the power of drawing attention
without courting it, the faculty of exciting interest by their very
presence and way of doing things.
The most fascinating part of a city or town is that through which
the water flows. Idlers always choose a bridge for their place of
meditation when they can get it; and, failing that, you will find
them sitting on the edge of a quay or embankment, with their feet
hanging over the water. What a piquant mingling of indolence and
vivacity you can enjoy by the river-side! The best point of view
in Rome, to my taste, is the Ponte San Angelo; and in Florence or
Pisa I never tire of loafing along the Lung' Arno. You do not know
London until you have seen it from the Thames. And you will miss
the charm of Cambridge unless you take a little boat and go
drifting on the placid Cam, beneath the bending trees, along the
backs of the colleges.
But the real way to know a little river is not to glance at it here
or there in the course of a hasty journey, nor to become acquainted
with it after it has been partly civilised and spoiled by too close
contact with the works of man. You must go to its native haunts;
you must see it in youth and freedom; you must accommodate yourself
to its pace, and give yourself to its influence, and follow its
meanderings whithersoever they may lead you.
Now, of this pleasant pastime there are three principal forms. You
may go as a walker, taking the river-side path, or making a way for
yourself through the tangled thickets or across the open meadows.
You may go as a sailor, launching your light canoe on the swift
current and committing yourself for a day, or a week, or a month,
to the delightful uncertainties of a voyage through the forest.
You may go as a wader, stepping into the stream and going down with
it, through rapids and shallows and deeper pools, until you come to
the end of your courage and the daylight. Of these three ways I
know not which is best. But in all of them the essential thing is
that you must be willing and glad to be led; you must take the
little river for your guide, philosopher, and friend.
And what a good guidance it gives you. How cheerfully it lures you
on into the secrets of field and wood, and brings you acquainted
with the birds and the flowers. The stream can show you, better
than any other teacher, how nature works her enchantments with
colour and music.
Go out to the Beaver-kill
"In the tassel-time of spring,"
and follow its brimming waters through the budding forests, to that
corner which we call the Painter's Camp. See how the banks are all
enamelled with the pale hepatica, the painted trillium, and the
delicate pink-veined spring beauty. A little later in the year,
when the ferns are uncurling their long fronds, the troops of blue
and white violets will come dancing down to the edge of the stream,
and creep venturously out to the very end of that long, moss-
covered log in the water. Before these have vanished, the yellow
crow-foot and the cinquefoil will appear, followed by the star-
grass and the loose-strife and the golden St. John's-wort. Then
the unseen painter begins to mix the royal colour on his palette,
and the red of the bee-balm catches your eye. If you are lucky,
you may find, in midsummer, a slender fragrant spike of the purple-
fringed orchis, and you cannot help finding the universal self-
heal. Yellow returns in the drooping flowers of the jewel-weed,
and blue repeats itself in the trembling hare-bells, and scarlet is
glorified in the flaming robe of the cardinal-flower. Later still,
the summer closes in a splendour of bloom, with gentians and asters
and goldenrod.
You never get so close to the birds as when you are wading quietly
down a little river, casting your fly deftly under the branches for
the wary trout, but ever on the lookout for all the various
pleasant things that nature has to bestow upon you. Here you shall
come upon the cat-bird at her morning bath, and hear her sing, in a
clump of pussy-willows, that low, tender, confidential song which
she keeps for the hours of domestic intimacy. The spotted
sandpiper will run along the stones before you, crying, "wet-feet,
wet-feet!" and bowing and teetering in the friendliest manner, as
if to show you the way to the best pools. In the thick branches of
the hemlocks that stretch across the stream, the tiny warblers,
dressed in a hundred colours, chirp and twitter confidingly above
your head; and the Maryland yellow-throat, flitting through the
bushes like a little gleam of sunlight, calls "witchery, witchery,
witchery!" That plaintive, forsaken, persistent note, never
ceasing, even in the noonday silence, comes from the wood-pewee,
drooping upon the bough of some high tree, and complaining, like
Mariana in the moated grange, "weary, weary, weary!"
When the stream runs out into the old clearing, or down through the
pasture, you find other and livelier birds,--the robins, with his
sharp, saucy call and breathless, merry warble; the bluebird, with
his notes of pure gladness, and the oriole, with his wild, flexible
whistle; the chewink, bustling about in the thicket, talking to his
sweetheart in French, "cherie, cherie!" and the song-sparrow,
perched on his favourite limb of a young maple, dose beside the
water, and singing happily, through sunshine and through rain.
This is the true bird of the brook, after all: the winged spirit of
cheerfulness and contentment, the patron saint of little rivers,
the fisherman's friend. He seems to enter into your sport with his
good wishes, and for an hour at a time, while you are trying every
fly in your book, from a black gnat to a white miller, to entice
the crafty old trout at the foot of the meadow-pool, the song-
sparrow, close above you, will be chanting patience and
encouragement. And when at last success crowns your endeavour, and
the parti-coloured prize is glittering in your net, the bird on the
bough breaks out in an ecstasy of congratulation: "catch 'im, catch
'im, catch 'im; oh, what a pretty fellow! sweet!"
There are other birds that seem to have a very different temper.
The blue-jay sits high up in the withered-pine tree, bobbing up and
down, and calling to his mate in a tone of affected sweetness.
"salute-her, salute-her," but when you come in sight he flies away
with a harsh cry of "thief, thief, thief!" The kingfisher,
ruffling his crest in solitary pride on the end of a dead branch,
darts down the stream at your approach, winding up his red angrily
as if he despised you for interrupting his fishing. And the cat-
bird, that sang so charmingly while she thought herself unobserved,
now tries to scare you away by screaming "snake, snake!"
As evening draws near, and the light beneath the trees grows
yellower, and the air is full of filmy insects out for their last
dance, the voice of the little river becomes louder and more
distinct. The true poets have often noticed this apparent increase
in the sound of flowing waters at nightfall. Gray, in one of his
letters, speaks of "hearing the murmur of many waters not audible
in the daytime." Wordsworth repeats the same thought almost in the
same words:
"A soft and lulling sound is heard
Of streams inaudible by day."
And Tennyson, in the valley of Cauteretz, tells of the river
"Deepening his voice with deepening of the night."
It is in this mystical hour that you will hear the most celestial
and entrancing of all bird-notes, the songs of the thrushes,--the
hermit, and the wood-thrush, and the veery. Sometimes, but not
often, you will see the singers. I remember once, at the close of
a beautiful day's fishing on the Swiftwater, I came out, just after
sunset, into a little open space in an elbow of the stream. It was
still early spring, and the leaves were tiny. On the top of a
small sumac, not thirty feet away from me, sat a veery. I could
see the pointed spots upon his breast, the swelling of his white
throat, and the sparkle of his eyes, as he poured his whole heart
into a long liquid chant, the clear notes rising and falling,
echoing and interlacing in endless curves of sound,
"Orb within orb, intricate, wonderful."
Other bird-songs can be translated into words, but not this. There
is no interpretation. It is music,--as Sidney Lanier defines it,--
"Love in search of a word."
But it is not only to the real life of birds and flowers that the
little rivers introduce you. They lead you often into familiarity
with human nature in undress, rejoicing in the liberty of old
clothes, or of none at all. People do not mince along the banks of
streams in patent-leather shoes or crepitating silks. Corduroy and
home-spun and flannel are the stuffs that suit this region; and the
frequenters of these paths go their natural gaits, in calf-skin or
rubber boots, or bare-footed. The girdle of conventionality is
laid aside, and the skirts rise with the spirits.
A stream that flows through a country of upland farms will show you
many a pretty bit of genre painting. Here is the laundry-pool at
the foot of the kitchen garden, and the tubs are set upon a few
planks close to the water, and the farmer's daughters, with bare
arms and gowns tucked up, are wringing out the clothes. Do you
remember what happened to Ralph Peden in The Lilac Sunbonnet when
he came on a scene like this? He tumbled at once into love with
Winsome Charteris,--and far over his head.
And what a pleasant thing it is to see a little country lad riding
one of the plough-horses to water, thumping his naked heels against
the ribs of his stolid steed, and pulling hard on the halter as if
it were the bridle of Bucephalus! Or perhaps it is a riotous
company of boys that have come down to the old swimming-hole, and
are now splashing and gambolling through the water like a drove of
white seals very much sun-burned. You had hoped to catch a goodly
trout in that hole, but what of that? The sight of a harmless hour
of mirth is better than a fish, any day.
Possibly you will overtake another fisherman on the stream. It may
be one of those fabulous countrymen, with long cedar poles and bed-
cord lines, who are commonly reported to catch such enormous
strings of fish, but who rarely, so far as my observation goes, do
anything more than fill their pockets with fingerlings. The
trained angler, who uses the finest tackle, and drops his fly on
the water as accurately as Henry James places a word in a story, is
the man who takes the most and the largest fish in the long run.
Perhaps the fisherman ahead of you is such an one,--a man whom you
have known in town as a lawyer or a doctor, a merchant or a
preacher, going about his business in the hideous respectability of
a high silk hat and a long black coat. How good it is to see him
now in the freedom of a flannel shirt and a broad-brimmed gray felt
with flies stuck around the band.
In Professor John Wilson's Essays Critical and Imaginative, there
is a brilliant description of a bishop fishing, which I am sure is
drawn from the life: "Thus a bishop, sans wig and petticoat, in a
hairy cap, black jacket, corduroy breeches and leathern leggins,
creel on back and rod in hand, sallying from his palace, impatient
to reach a famous salmon-cast ere the sun leave his cloud, . . .
appears not only a pillar of his church, but of his kind, and in
such a costume is manifestly on the high road to Canterbury and the
Kingdom-Come." I have had the good luck to see quite a number of
bishops, parochial and diocesan, in that style, and the vision has
always dissolved my doubts in regard to the validity of their claim
to the true apostolic succession.
Men's "little ways" are usually more interesting, and often more
instructive than their grand manners. When they are off guard,
they frequently show to better advantage than when they are on
parade. I get more pleasure out of Boswell's Johnson than I do out
of Rasselas or The Rambler. The Little Flowers of St. Francis
appear to me far more precious than the most learned German and
French analyses of his character. There is a passage in Jonathan
Edwards' Personal Narrative, about a certain walk that he took in
the fields near his father's house, and the blossoming of the
flowers in the spring, which I would not exchange for the whole of
his dissertation On the Freedom of the Will. And the very best
thing of Charles Darwin's that I know is a bit from a letter to his
wife: "At last I fell asleep," says he, "on the grass, and awoke
with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up
the tree, and some woodpeckers laughing; and it was as pleasant and
rural a scene as ever I saw; and I did not care one penny how any
of the birds or beasts had been formed."
Little rivers have small responsibilities. They are not expected
to bear huge navies on their breast or supply a hundred-thousand
horse-power to the factories of a monstrous town. Neither do you
come to them hoping to draw out Leviathan with a hook. It is
enough if they run a harmless, amiable course, and keep the groves
and fields green and fresh along their banks, and offer a happy
alternation of nimble rapids and quiet pools,
"With here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling."
When you set out to explore one of these minor streams in your
canoe, you have no intention of epoch-making discoveries, or
thrilling and world-famous adventures. You float placidly down the
long stillwaters, and make your way patiently through the tangle of
fallen trees that block the stream, and run the smaller falls, and
carry your boat around the larger ones, with no loftier ambition
than to reach a good camp-ground before dark and to pass the
intervening hours pleasantly, "without offence to God or man." It
is an agreeable and advantageous frame of mind for one who has done
his fair share of work in the world, and is not inclined to grumble
at his wages. There are few moods in which we are more susceptible
of gentle instruction; and I suspect there are many tempers and
attitudes, often called virtuous, in which the human spirit appears
to less advantage in the sight of Heaven.
It is not required of every man and woman to be, or to do,
something great; most of us must content ourselves with taking
small parts in the chorus. Shall we have no little lyrics because
Homer and Dante have written epics? And because we have heard the
great organ at Freiburg, shall the sound of Kathi's zither in the
alpine hut please us no more? Even those who have greatness thrust
upon them will do well to lay the burden down now and then, and
congratulate themselves that they are not altogether answerable for
the conduct of the universe, or at least not all the time. "I
reckon," said a cowboy to me one day, as we were riding through the
Bad Lands of Dakota, "there's some one bigger than me, running this
outfit. He can 'tend to it well enough, while I smoke my pipe
after the round-up."
There is such a thing as taking ourselves and the world too
seriously, or at any rate too anxiously. Half of the secular
unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the
vain idea that every man is bound to be a critic of life, and to
let no day pass without finding some fault with the general order
of things, or projecting some plan for its improvement. And the
other half comes from the greedy notion that a man's life does
consist, after all, in the abundance of the things that he
possesses, and that it is somehow or other more respectable and
pious to be always at work making a larger living, than it is to
lie on your back in the green pastures and beside the still waters,
and thank God that you are alive.
Come, then, my gentle reader, (for by this time you have discovered
that this chapter is only a preface in disguise,--a declaration of
principles or the want of them, an apology or a defence, as you
choose to take it,) and if we are agreed, let us walk together; but
if not, let us part here with out ill-will.
You shall not be deceived in this book. It is nothing but a
handful of rustic variations on the old tune of "Rest and be
thankful," a record of unconventional travel, a pilgrim's scrip
with a few bits of blue-sky philosophy in it. There is, so far as
I know, very little useful information and absolutely no criticism
of the universe to be found in this volume. So if you are what
Izaak Walton calls "a severe, sour-complexioned man," you would
better carry it back to the bookseller, and get your money again,
if he will give it to you, and go your way rejoicing after your own
melancholy fashion.
But if you care for plain pleasures, and informal company, and
friendly observations on men and things, (and a few true fish-
stories,) then perhaps you may find something here not unworthy
your perusal. And so I wish that your winter fire may burn clear
and bright while you read these pages; and that the summer days may
be fair, and the fish may rise merrily to your fly, whenever you
follow one of these little rivers.
1895.
A LEAF OF SPEARMINT
RECOLLECTIONS OF A BOY AND A ROD.
"It puzzles me now, that I remember all these young impressions so,
because I took no heed of them at the time whatever; and yet they
come upon me bright, when nothing else is evident in the gray fog
of experience."--B. D. BLACKMORE: Lorna Doone.
Of all the faculties of the human mind, memory is the one that is
most easily "led by the nose." There is a secret power in the
sense of smell which draws the mind backward into the pleasant land
of old times.
If you could paint a picture of Memory, in the symbolical manner of
Quarles's Emblems, it should represent a man travelling the highway
with a dusty pack upon his shoulders, and stooping to draw in a
long, sweet breath from the small, deep-red, golden-hearted flowers
of an old-fashioned rose-tree straggling through the fence of a
neglected garden. Or perhaps, for a choice of emblems, you would
better take a yet more homely and familiar scent: the cool
fragrance of lilacs drifting through the June morning from the old
bush that stands between the kitchen door and the well; the warm
layer of pungent, aromatic air that floats over the tansy-bed in a
still July noon; the drowsy dew of odour that falls from the big
balm-of-Gilead tree by the roadside as you are driving homeward
through the twilight of August; or, best of all, the clean, spicy,
unexpected, unmistakable smell of a bed of spearmint--that is the
bed whereon Memory loves to lie and dream!
Why not choose mint as the symbol of remembrance? It is the true
spice-tree of our Northern clime, the myrrh and frankincense of the
land of lingering snow. When its perfume rises, the shrines of the
past are unveiled, and the magical rites of reminiscence begin.
I.
You are fishing down the Swiftwater in the early Spring. In a
shallow pool, which the drought of summer will soon change into dry
land, you see the pale-green shoots of a little plant thrusting
themselves up between the pebbles, and just beginning to overtop
the falling water. You pluck a leaf of it as you turn out of the
stream to find a comfortable place for lunch, and, rolling it
between your fingers to see whether it smells like a good salad for
your bread and cheese, you discover suddenly that it is new mint.
For the rest of that day you are bewitched; you follow a stream
that runs through the country of Auld Lang Syne, and fill your
creel with the recollections of a boy and a rod.
And yet, strangely enough, you cannot recall the boy himself at all
distinctly. There is only the faintest image of him on the endless
roll of films that has been wound through your mental camera: and
in the very spots where his small figure should appear, it seems as
if the pictures were always light-struck. Just a blur, and the dim
outline of a new cap, or a well-beloved jacket with extra pockets,
or a much-hated pair of copper-toed shoes--that is all you can see.
But the people that the boy saw, the companions who helped or
hindered him in his adventures, the sublime and marvellous scenes
among the Catskills and the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains, in
the midst of which he lived and moved and had his summer holidays--
all these stand out sharp and clear, as the "Bab Ballads" say,
"Photographically lined
On the tablets of your mind."
And most vivid do these scenes and people become when the vague and
irrecoverable boy who walks among them carries a rod over his
shoulder, and you detect the soft bulginess of wet fish about his
clothing, and perhaps the tail of a big one emerging from his
pocket. Then it seems almost as if these were things that had
really happened, and of which you yourself were a great part.
The rod was a reward, yet not exactly of merit. It was an
instrument of education in the hand of a father less indiscriminate
than Solomon, who chose to interpret the text in a new way, and
preferred to educate his child by encouraging him in pursuits which
were harmless and wholesome, rather than by chastising him for
practices which would likely enough never have been thought of, if
they had not been forbidden. The boy enjoyed this kind of father
at the time, and later he came to understand, with a grateful
heart, that there is no richer inheritance in all the treasury of
unearned blessings. For, after all, the love, the patience, the
kindly wisdom of a grown man who can enter into the perplexities
and turbulent impulses of a boy's heart, and give him cheerful
companionship, and lead him on by free and joyful ways to know and
choose the things that are pure and lovely and of good report, make
as fair an image as we can find of that loving, patient Wisdom
which must be above us all if any good is to come out of our
childish race.
Now this was the way in which the boy came into possession of his
undreaded rod. He was by nature and heredity one of those
predestined anglers whom Izaak Walton tersely describes as "born
so." His earliest passion was fishing. His favourite passage in
Holy Writ was that place where Simon Peter throws a line into the
sea and pulls out a great fish at the first cast.
But hitherto his passion had been indulged under difficulties--with
improvised apparatus of cut poles, and flabby pieces of string, and
bent pins, which always failed to hold the biggest fish; or perhaps
with borrowed tackle, dangling a fat worm in vain before the noses
of the staring, supercilious sunfish that poised themselves in the
clear water around the Lake house dock at Lake George; or, at best,
on picnic parties across the lake, marred by the humiliating
presence of nurses, and disturbed by the obstinate refusal of old
Horace, the boatman, to believe that the boy could bait his own
hook, but sometimes crowned with the delight of bringing home a
whole basketful of yellow perch and goggle-eyes. Of nobler sport
with game fish, like the vaulting salmon and the merry, pugnacious
trout, as yet the boy had only dreamed. But he had heard that
there were such fish in the streams that flowed down from the
mountains around Lake George, and he was at the happy age when he
could believe anything--if it was sufficiently interesting.
There was one little river, and only one, within his knowledge and
the reach of his short legs. It was a tiny, lively rivulet that
came out of the woods about half a mile away from the hotel, and
ran down cater-cornered through a sloping meadow, crossing the road
under a flat bridge of boards, just beyond the root-beer shop at
the lower end of the village. It seemed large enough to the boy,
and he had long had his eye upon it as a fitting theatre for the
beginning of a real angler's life. Those rapids, those falls,
those deep, whirling pools with beautiful foam on them like soft,
white custard, were they not such places as the trout loved to hide
in?
You can see the long hotel piazza, with the gossipy groups of
wooden chairs standing vacant in the early afternoon; for the
grown-up people are dallying with the ultimate nuts and raisins of
their mid-day dinner. A villainous clatter of innumerable little
vegetable-dishes comes from the open windows of the pantry as the
boy steals past the kitchen end of the house, with Horace's
lightest bamboo pole over his shoulder, and a little brother in
skirts and short white stockings tagging along behind him.
When they come to the five-rail fence where the brook runs out of
the field, the question is, Over or under? The lowlier method
seems safer for the little brother, as well as less conspicuous for
persons who desire to avoid publicity until their enterprise has
achieved success. So they crawl beneath a bend in the lowest
rail,--only tearing one tiny three-cornered hole in a jacket, and
making some juicy green stains on the white stockings,--and emerge
with suppressed excitement in the field of the cloth of buttercups
and daisies.
What an afternoon--how endless and yet how swift! What perilous
efforts to leap across the foaming stream at its narrowest points;
what escapes from quagmires and possible quicksands; what stealthy
creeping through the grass to the edge of a likely pool, and
cautious dropping of the line into an unseen depth, and patient
waiting for a bite, until the restless little brother, prowling
about below, discovers that the hook is not in the water at all,
but lying on top of a dry stone,--thereby proving that patience is
not the only virtue--or, at least, that it does a better business
when it has a small vice of impatience in partnership with it!
How tired the adventurers grow as the day wears away; and as yet
they have taken nothing! But their strength and courage return as
if by magic when there comes a surprising twitch at the line in a
shallow, unpromising rapid, and with a jerk of the pole a small,
wiggling fish is whirled through the air and landed thirty feet
back in the meadow.
"For pity's sake, don't lose him! There he is among the roots of
the blue flag."
"I've got him! How cold he is--how slippery--how pretty! Just
like a piece of rainbow!"
"Do you see the red spots? Did you notice how gamy he was, little
brother; how he played? It is a trout, for sure; a real trout,
almost as long as your hand."
So the two lads tramp along up the stream, chattering as if there
were no rubric of silence in the angler's code. Presently another
simple-minded troutling falls a victim to their unpremeditated art;
and they begin already, being human, to wish for something larger.
In the very last pool that they dare attempt--a dark hole under a
steep bank, where the brook issues from the woods--the boy drags
out the hoped-for prize, a splendid trout, longer than a new lead-
pencil. But he feels sure that there must be another, even larger,
in the same place. He swings his line out carefully over the
water, and just as he is about to drop it in, the little brother,
perched on the sloping brink, slips on the smooth pine-needles, and
goes sliddering down into the pool up to his waist. How he weeps
with dismay, and how funnily his dress sticks to him as he crawls
out! But his grief is soon assuaged by the privilege of carrying
the trout strung on an alder twig; and it is a happy, muddy, proud
pair of urchins that climb over the fence out of the field of
triumph at the close of the day.
What does the father say, as he meets them in the road? Is he
frowning or smiling under that big brown beard? You cannot be
quite sure. But one thing is clear: he is as much elated over the
capture of the real trout as any one. He is ready to deal mildly
with a little irregularity for the sake of encouraging pluck and
perseverance. Before the three comrades have reached the hotel,
the boy has promised faithfully never to take his little brother
off again without asking leave; and the father has promised that
the boy shall have a real jointed fishing-rod of his own, so that
he will not need to borrow old Horace's pole any more.
At breakfast the next morning the family are to have a private
dish; not an every-day affair of vulgar, bony fish that nurses can
catch, but trout--three of them! But the boy looks up from the
table and sees the adored of his soul, Annie V----, sitting at the
other end of the room, and faring on the common food of mortals.
Shall she eat the ordinary breakfast while he feasts on dainties?
Do not other sportsmen send their spoils to the ladies whom they
admire? The waiter must bring a hot plate, and take this largest
trout to Miss V---- (Miss Annie, not her sister--make no mistake
about it).
The face of Augustus is as solemn as an ebony idol while he plays
his part of Cupid's messenger. The fair Annie affects surprise;
she accepts the offering rather indifferently; her curls drop down
over her cheeks to cover some small confusion. But for an instant
the corner of her eye catches the boy's sidelong glance, and she
nods perceptibly, whereupon his mother very inconsiderately calls
attention to the fact that yesterday's escapade has sun-burned his
face dreadfully.
Beautiful Annie V----, who, among all the unripened nymphs that
played at hide-and-seek among the maples on the hotel lawn, or
waded with white feet along the yellow beach beyond the point of
pines, flying with merry shrieks into the woods when a boat-load of
boys appeared suddenly around the corner, or danced the lancers in
the big, bare parlours before the grown-up ball began--who in all
that joyous, innocent bevy could be compared with you for charm or
daring? How your dark eyes sparkled, and how the long brown
ringlets tossed around your small head, when you stood up that
evening, slim and straight, and taller by half a head than your
companions, in the lamp-lit room where the children were playing
forfeits, and said, "There is not one boy here that DARES to kiss
ME!" Then you ran out on the dark porch, where the honeysuckle
vines grew up the tall, inane Corinthian pillars.
Did you blame the boy for following? And were you very angry,
indeed, about what happened,--until you broke out laughing at his
cravat, which had slipped around behind his ear? That was the
first time he ever noticed how much sweeter the honeysuckle smells
at night than in the day. It was his entrance examination in the
school of nature--human and otherwise. He felt that there was a
whole continent of newly discovered poetry within him, and
worshipped his Columbus disguised in curls. Your boy is your true
idealist, after all, although (or perhaps because) he is still
uncivilised.
II.
The arrival of the rod, in four joints, with an extra tip, a brass
reel, and the other luxuries for which a true angler would
willingly exchange the necessaries of life, marked a new epoch in
the boy's career. At the uplifting of that wand, as if it had been
in the hand of another Moses, the waters of infancy rolled back,
and the way was opened into the promised land, whither the tyrant
nurses, with all their proud array of baby-chariots, could not
follow. The way was open, but not by any means dry. One of the
first events in the dispensation of the rod was the purchase of a
pair of high rubber boots. Inserted in this armour of modern
infantry, and transfigured with delight, the boy clumped through
all the little rivers within a circuit of ten miles from Caldwell,
and began to learn by parental example the yet unmastered art of
complete angling.
But because some of the streams were deep and strong, and his legs
were short and slender, and his ambition was even taller than his
boots, the father would sometimes take him up pickaback, and wade
along carefully through the perilous places--which are often, in
this world, the very places one longs to fish in. So, in your
remembrance, you can see the little rubber boots sticking out under
the father's arms, and the rod projecting over his head, and the
bait dangling down unsteadily into the deep holes, and the
delighted boy hooking and playing and basketing his trout high in
the air. How many of our best catches in life are made from some
one else's shoulders!
From this summer the whole earth became to the boy, as Tennyson
describes the lotus country, "a land of streams." In school-days
and in town he acknowledged the sway of those mysterious and
irresistible forces which produce tops at one season, and marbles
at another, and kites at another, and bind all boyish hearts to
play mumble-the-peg at the due time more certainly than the stars
are bound to their orbits. But when vacation came, with its annual
exodus from the city, there was only one sign in the zodiac, and
that was Pisces.
No country seemed to him tolerable without trout, and no landscape
beautiful unless enlivened by a young river. Among what delectable
mountains did those watery guides lead his vagrant steps, and with
what curious, mixed, and sometimes profitable company did they make
him familiar!
There was one exquisite stream among the Alleghanies, called
Lycoming Creek, beside which the family spent a summer in a
decadent inn, kept by a tremulous landlord who was always sitting
on the steps of the porch, and whose most memorable remark was that
he had "a misery in his stomach." This form of speech amused the
boy, but he did not in the least comprehend it. It was the
description of an unimaginable experience in a region which was as
yet known to him only as the seat of pleasure. He did not
understand how any one could be miserable when he could catch trout
from his own dooryard.
The big creek, with its sharp turns from side to side of the
valley, its hemlock-shaded falls in the gorge, and its long, still
reaches in the "sugar-bottom," where the maple-trees grew as if in
an orchard, and the superfluity of grasshoppers made the trout fat
and dainty, was too wide to fit the boy. But nature keeps all
sizes in her stock, and a smaller stream, called Rocky Run, came
tumbling down opposite the inn, as if made to order for juvenile
use.
How well you can follow it, through the old pasture overgrown with
alders, and up past the broken-down mill-dam and the crumbling
sluice, into the mountain-cleft from which it leaps laughing! The
water, except just after a rain-storm, is as transparent as glass--
old-fashioned window-glass, I mean, in small panes, with just a
tinge of green in it, like the air in a grove of young birches.
Twelve feet down in the narrow chasm below the falls, where the
water is full of tiny bubbles, like Apollinaris, you can see the
trout poised, with their heads up-stream, motionless, but quivering
a little, as if they were strung on wires.
The bed of the stream has been scooped out of the solid rock. Here
and there banks of sand have been deposited, and accumulations of
loose stone disguise the real nature of the channel. Great
boulders have been rolled down the alleyway and left where they
chanced to stick; the stream must get around them or under them as
best it can. But there are other places where everything has been
swept clean; nothing remains but the primitive strata, and the
flowing water merrily tickles the bare ribs of mother earth.
Whirling stones, in the spring floods, have cut well-holes in the
rock, as round and even as if they had been made with a drill, and
sometimes you can see the very stone that sunk the well lying at
the bottom. There are long, straight, sloping troughs through
which the water runs like a mill-race. There are huge basins into
which the water rumbles over a ledge, as if some one were pouring
it very steadily out of a pitcher, and from which it glides away
without a ripple, flowing over a smooth pavement of rock which
shelves down from the shallow foot to the deep head of the pool.
The boy wonders how far he dare wade out along that slippery floor.
The water is within an inch of his boot-tops now. But the slope
seems very even, and just beyond his reach a good fish is rising.
Only one step more, and then, like the wicked man in the psalm, his
feet begin to slide. Slowly, and standing bolt upright, with the
rod held high above his head, as if it must on no account get wet,
he glides forward up to his neck in the ice-cold bath, gasping with
amazement. There have been other and more serious situations in
life into which, unless I am mistaken, you have made an equally
unwilling and embarrassed entrance, and in which you have been
surprised to find yourself not only up to your neck, but over,--and
you are a lucky man if you have had the presence of mind to stand
still for a moment, before wading out, and make sure at least of
the fish that tempted you into your predicament.
But Rocky Run, they say, exists no longer. It has been blasted by
miners out of all resemblance to itself, and bewitched into a dingy
water-power to turn wheels for the ugly giant, Trade. It is only
in the valley of remembrance that its current still flows like
liquid air; and only in that country that you can still see the
famous men who came and went along the banks of the Lyocoming when
the boy was there.
There was Collins, who was a wondrous adept at "daping, dapping, or
dibbling" with a grasshopper, and who once brought in a string of
trout which he laid out head to tail on the grass before the house
in a line of beauty forty-seven feet long. A mighty bass voice had
this Collins also, and could sing, "Larboard Watch, Ahoy!" "Down in
a Coal-Mine," and other profound ditties in a way to make all the
glasses on the table jingle; but withal, as you now suspect, rather
a fishy character, and undeserving of the unqualified respect which
the boy had for him. And there was Dr. Romsen, lean, satirical,
kindly, a skilful though reluctant physician, who regarded it as a
personal injury if any one in the party fell sick in summer time;
and a passionately unsuccessful hunter, who would sit all night in
the crotch of a tree beside an alleged deer-lick, and come home
perfectly satisfied if he had heard a hedgehog grunt. It was he
who called attention to the discrepancy between the boy's appetite
and his size by saying loudly at a picnic, "I wouldn't grudge you
what you eat, my boy, if I could only see that it did you any
good,"--which remark was not forgiven until the doctor redeemed his
reputation by pronouncing a serious medical opinion, before a
council of mothers, to the effect that it did not really hurt a boy
to get his feet wet. That was worthy of Galen in his most inspired
moment. And there was hearty, genial Paul Merit, whose mere
company was an education in good manners, and who could eat eight
hard-boiled eggs for supper without ruffling his equanimity; and
the tall, thin, grinning Major, whom an angry Irishwoman once
described as "like a comb, all back and teeth;" and many more were
the comrades of the boy's father, all of whom he admired, (and
followed when they would let him,) but none so much as the father
himself, because he was the wisest, kindest, and merriest of all
that merry crew, now dispersed to the uttermost parts of the earth
and beyond.
Other streams played a part in the education of that happy boy: the
Kaaterskill, where there had been nothing but the ghosts of trout
for the last thirty years, but where the absence of fish was almost
forgotten in the joy of a first introduction to Dickens, one very
showery day, when dear old Ned Mason built a smoky fire in a cave
below Haines's Falls, and, pulling The Old Curiosity Shop out of
his pocket, read aloud about Little Nell until the tears ran down
the cheeks of reader and listener--the smoke was so thick, you
know: and the Neversink, which flows through John Burroughs's
country, and past one house in particular, perched on a high bluff,
where a very dreadful old woman come out and throws stones at "city
fellers fishin' through her land" (as if any one wanted to touch
her land! It was the water that ran over it, you see, that carried
the fish with it, and they were not hers at all): and the stream at
Healing Springs, in the Virginia mountains, where the medicinal
waters flow down into a lovely wild brook without injuring the
health of the trout in the least, and where the only drawback to
the angler's happiness is the abundance of rattlesnakes--but a boy
does not mind such things as that; he feels as if he were immortal.
Over all these streams memory skips lightly, and strikes a trail
through the woods to the Adirondacks, where the boy made his first
acquaintance with navigable rivers,--that is to say, rivers which
are traversed by canoes and hunting-skiffs, but not yet defiled by
steamboats,--and slept, or rather lay awake, for the first time on
a bed of balsam-boughs in a tent.
III.
The promotion from all-day picnics to a two weeks' camping-trip is
like going from school to college. By this time a natural process
of evolution has raised the first rod to something lighter and more
flexible,--a fly-rod, so to speak, but not a bigoted one,--just a
serviceable, unprejudiced article, not above using any kind of bait
that may be necessary to catch the fish. The father has received
the new title of "governor," indicating not less, but more
authority, and has called in new instructors to carry on the boy's
education: real Adirondack guides--old Sam Dunning and one-eyed
Enos, the last and laziest of the Saranac Indians. Better men will
be discovered for later trips, but none more amusing, and none
whose woodcraft seems more wonderful than that of this queerly
matched team, as they make the first camp in a pelting rain-storm
on the shore of Big Clear Pond. The pitching of the tents is a
lesson in architecture, the building of the camp-fire a victory
over damp nature, and the supper of potatoes and bacon and fried
trout a veritable triumph of culinary art.
At midnight the rain is pattering persistently on the canvas; the
fronts flaps are closed and tied together; the lingering fire
shines through them, and sends vague shadows wavering up and down:
the governor is rolled up in his blankets, sound asleep. It is a
very long night for the boy.
What is that rustling noise outside the tent? Probably some small
creature, a squirrel or a rabbit. Rabbit stew would be good for
breakfast. But it sounds louder now, almost loud enough to be a
fox,--there are no wolves left in the Adirondacks, or at least only
a very few. That is certainly quite a heavy footstep prowling
around the provision-box. Could it be a panther,--they step very
softly for their size,--or a bear perhaps? Sam Dunning told about
catching one in a trap just below here. (Ah, my boy, you will soon
learn that there is no spot in all the forests created by a
bountiful Providence so poor as to be without its bear story.)
Where was the rifle put? There it is, at the foot of the tent-
pole. Wonder if it is loaded?
"Waugh-ho! Waugh-ho-o-o-o!"
The boy springs from his blankets like a cat, and peeps out between
the tent-flaps. There sits Enos, in the shelter of a leaning tree
by the fire, with his head thrown back and a bottle poised at his
mouth. His lonely eye is cocked up at a great horned owl on the
branch above him. Again the sudden voice breaks out:
"Whoo! whoo! whoo cooks for you all?"
Enos puts the bottle down, with a grunt, and creeps off to his
tent.
"De debbil in dat owl," he mutters. "How he know I cook for dis
camp? How he know 'bout dat bottle? Ugh!"
There are hundreds of pictures that flash into light as the boy
goes on his course, year after year, through the woods. There is
the luxurious camp on Tupper's Lake, with its log cabins in the
spruce-grove, and its regiment of hungry men who ate almost a deer
a day; and there is the little bark shelter on the side of Mount
Marcy, where the governor and the boy, with baskets full of trout
from the Opalescent River, are spending the night, with nothing but
a fire to keep them warm. There is the North Bay at Moosehead,
with Joe La Croix (one more Frenchman who thinks he looks like
Napoleon) posing on the rocks beside his canoe, and only reconciled
by his vanity to the wasteful pastime of taking photographs while
the big fish are rising gloriously out at the end of the point.
There is the small spring-hole beside the Saranac River, where
Pliny Robbins and the boy caught twenty-three noble trout, weighing
from one to three pounds apiece, in the middle of a hot August
afternoon, and hid themselves in the bushes when ever they heard a
party coming down the river, because they did not care to attract
company; and there are the Middle Falls, where the governor stood
on a long spruce log, taking two-pound fish with the fly, and
stepping out at every cast a little nearer to the end of the log,
until it slowly tipped with him, and he settled down into the
river.
Among such scenes as these the boy pursued his education, learning
many things that are not taught in colleges; learning to take the
weather as it comes, wet or dry, and fortune as it falls, good or
bad; learning that a meal which is scanty fare for one becomes a
banquet for two--provided the other is the right person; learning
that there is some skill in everything, even in digging bait, and
that what is called luck consists chiefly in having your tackle in
good order; learning that a man can be just as happy in a log
shanty as in a brownstone mansion, and that the very best pleasures
are those that do not leave a bad taste in the mouth. And in all
this the governor was his best teacher and his closest comrade.
Dear governor, you have gone out of the wilderness now, and your
steps will be no more beside these remembered little rivers--no
more, forever and forever. You will not come in sight around any
bend of this clear Swiftwater stream where you made your last cast;
your cheery voice will never again ring out through the deepening
twilight where you are lingering for your disciple to catch up with
you; he will never again hear you call: "Hallo, my boy! What luck?
Time to go home!" But there is a river in the country where you
have gone, is there not?--a river with trees growing all along it--
evergreen trees; and somewhere by those shady banks, within sound
of clear running waters, I think you will be dreaming and waiting
for your boy, if he follows the trail that you have shown him even
to the end.
1895.
AMPERSAND
It is not the walking merely, it is keeping yourself in tune for a
walk, in the spiritual and bodily condition in which you can find
entertainment and exhilaration in so simple and natural a pastime.
You are eligible to any good fortune when you are in a condition to
enjoy a walk. When the air and water taste sweet to you, how much
else will taste sweet! When the exercise of your limbs affords you
pleasure, and the play of your senses upon the various objects and
shows of Nature quickens and stimulates your spirit, your relation
to the world and to yourself is what it should be,--simple, and
direct, and wholesome."--JOHN BURROUGHS: Pepacton.
The right to the name of Ampersand, like the territory of Gaul in
those Commentaries which Julius Caesar wrote for the punishment of
schoolboys, is divided into three parts. It belongs to a mountain,
and a lake, and a little river.
The mountain stands in the heart of the Adirondack country, just
near enough to the thoroughfare of travel for thousands of people
to see it every year, and just far enough from the beaten track to
be unvisited except by a very few of the wise ones, who love to
turn aside. Behind the mountain is the lake, which no lazy man has
ever seen. Out of the lake flows the stream, winding down a long,
untrodden forest valley, to join the Stony Creek waters and empty
into the Raquette River.
Which of the three Ampersands has the prior claim to the name, I
cannot tell. Philosophically speaking, the mountain ought to be
regarded as the head of the family, because it was undoubtedly
there before the others. And the lake was probably the next on the
ground, because the stream is its child. But man is not strictly
just in his nomenclature; and I conjecture that the little river,
the last-born of the three, was the first to be christened
Ampersand, and then gave its name to its parent and grand-parent.
It is such a crooked stream, so bent and curved and twisted upon
itself, so fond of turning around unexpected corners and sweeping
away in great circles from its direct course, that its first
explorers christened it after the eccentric supernumerary of the
alphabet which appears in the old spelling-books as &--and per se,
and.
But in spite of this apparent subordination to the stream in the
matter of a name, the mountain clearly asserts its natural
authority. It stands up boldly; and not only its own lake, but at
least three others, the Lower Saranac, Round Lake, and Lonesome
Pond, lie at its foot and acknowledge its lordship. When the cloud
is on its brow, they are dark. When the sunlight strikes it, they
smile.
Wherever you may go over the waters of these lakes you shall see
Mount Ampersand looking down at you, and saying quietly, "This is
my domain."
I never look at a mountain which asserts itself in this fashion
without desiring to stand on the top of it. If one can reach the
summit, one becomes a sharer in the dominion. The difficulties in
the way only add to the zest of the victory. Every mountain is,
rightly considered, an invitation to climb. And as I was resting
for a month one summer at Bartlett's, Ampersand challenged me
daily.
Did you know Bartlett's in its palmy time? It was the homeliest,
quaintest, coziest place in the Adirondacks. Away back in the
ante-bellum days Virgil Bartlett had come into the woods, and built
his house on the bank of the Saranac River, between the Upper
Saranac and Round Lake. It was then the only dwelling within a
circle of many miles. The deer and bear were in the majority. At
night one could sometimes hear the scream of the panther or the
howling of wolves. But soon the wilderness began to wear the
traces of a conventional smile. The desert blossomed a little--if
not as the rose, at least as the gilly-flower. Fields were
cleared, gardens planted; half a dozen log cabins were scattered
along the river; and the old house, having grown slowly and
somewhat irregularly for twenty years, came out, just before the
time of which I write, in a modest coat of paint and a broad-
brimmed piazza. But Virgil himself, the creator of the oasis--well
known of hunters and fishermen, dreaded of lazy guides and
quarrelsome lumbermen,--"Virge," the irascible, kind-hearted,
indefatigable, was there no longer. He had made his last clearing,
and fought his last fight; done his last favour to a friend, and
thrown his last adversary out of the tavern door. His last log had
gone down the river. His camp-fire had burned out. Peace to his
ashes. His wife, who had often played the part of Abigail toward
travellers who had unconsciously incurred the old man's mistrust,
now reigned in his stead; and there was great abundance of maple-
syrup on every man's flapjack.
The charm of Bartlett's for the angler was the stretch of rapid
water in front of the house. The Saranac River, breaking from its
first resting-place in the Upper Lake, plunged down through a great
bed of rocks, making a chain of short falls and pools and rapids,
about half a mile in length. Here, in the spring and early summer,
the speckled trout--brightest and daintiest of all fish that swim--
used to be found in great numbers. As the season advanced, they
moved away into the deep water of the lakes. But there were always
a few stragglers left, and I have taken them in the rapids at the
very end of August. What could be more delightful than to spend an
hour or two, in the early morning or evening of a hot day, in
wading this rushing stream, and casting the fly on its clear
waters? The wind blows softly down the narrow valley, and the
trees nod from the rocks above you. The noise of the falls makes
constant music in your ears. The river hurries past you, and yet
it is never gone.
The same foam-flakes seem to be always gliding downward, the same
spray dashing over the stones, the same eddy coiling at the edge of
the pool. Send your fly in under those cedar branches, where the
water swirls around by that old log. Now draw it up toward the
foam. There is a sudden gleam of dull gold in the white water.
You strike too soon. Your line comes back to you. In a current
like this, a fish will almost always hook himself. Try it again.
This time he takes the fly fairly, and you have him. It is a good
fish, and he makes the slender rod bend to the strain. He sulks
for a moment as if uncertain what to do, and then with a rush darts
into the swiftest part of the current. You can never stop him
there. Let him go. Keep just enough pressure on him to hold the
hook firm, and follow his troutship down the stream as if he were a
salmon. He slides over a little fall, gleaming through the foam,
and swings around in the next pool. Here you can manage him more
easily; and after a few minutes' brilliant play, a few mad dashes
for the current, he comes to the net, and your skilful guide lands
him with a quick, steady sweep of the arm. The scales credit him
with an even pound, and a better fish than this you will hardly
take here in midsummer.
"On my word, master," says the appreciative Venator, in Walton's
Angler, "this is a gallant trout; what shall we do with him?" And
honest Piscator, replies: "Marry! e'en eat him to supper; we'll go
to my hostess from whence we came; she told me, as I was going out
of door, that my brother Peter, [and who is this but Romeyn of
Keeseville?] a good angler and a cheerful companion, had sent word
he would lodge there tonight, and bring a friend with him. My
hostess has two beds, and I know you and I have the best; we'll
rejoice with my brother Peter and his friend, tell tales, or sing
ballads, or make a catch, or find some harmless sport to content
us, and pass away a little time without offence to God or man."
Ampersand waited immovable while I passed many days in such
innocent and healthful pleasures as these, until the right day came
for the ascent. Cool, clean, and bright, the crystal morning
promised a glorious noon, and the mountain almost seemed to beckon
us to come up higher. The photographic camera and a trustworthy
lunch were stowed away in the pack-basket. The backboard was
adjusted at a comfortable angle in the stern seat of our little
boat. The guide held the little craft steady while I stepped into
my place; then he pushed out into the stream, and we went swiftly
down toward Round Lake.
A Saranac boat is one of the finest things that the skill of man
has ever produced under the inspiration of the wilderness. It is a
frail shell, so light that a guide can carry it on his shoulders
with ease, but so dexterously fashioned that it rides the heaviest
waves like a duck, and slips through the water as if by magic. You
can travel in it along the shallowest rivers and across the
broadest lakes, and make forty or fifty miles a day, if you have a
good guide.
Everything depends, in the Adirondacks, as in so many other regions
of life, upon your guide. If he is selfish, or surly, or stupid,
you will have a bad time. But if he is an Adirondacker of the best
old-fashioned type,--now unhappily growing more rare from year to
year,--you will find him an inimitable companion, honest, faithful,
skilful and cheerful. He is as independent as a prince, and the
gilded youths and finicking fine ladies who attempt to patronise
him are apt to make but a sorry show before his solid and
undisguised contempt. But deal with him man to man, and he will
give you a friendly, loyal service which money cannot buy, and
teach you secrets of woodcraft and lessons in plain, self-reliant
manhood more valuable than all the learning of the schools. Such a
guide was mine, rejoicing in the Scriptural name of Hosea, but
commonly called, in brevity and friendliness, "Hose."
As we entered Round Lake on this fair morning, its surface was as
smooth and shining as a mirror. It was too early yet for the tide
of travel which sends a score of boats up and down this
thoroughfare every day; and from shore to shore the water was
unruffled, except by a flock of sheldrakes which had been feeding
near Plymouth Rock, and now went skittering off into Weller Bay
with a motion between flying and swimming, leaving a long wake of
foam behind them.
At such a time as this you can see the real colour of these
Adirondack lakes. It is not blue, as romantic writers so often
describe it, nor green, like some of those wonderful Swiss lakes;
although of course it reflects the colour of the trees along the
shore; and when the wind stirs it, it gives back the hue of the
sky, blue when it is clear, gray when the clouds are gathering, and
sometimes as black as ink under the shadow of storm. But when it
is still, the water itself is like that river which one of the
poets has described as
"Flowing with a smooth brown current."
And in this sheet of burnished bronze the mountains and islands
were reflected perfectly, and the sun shone back from it, not in
broken gleams or a wide lane of light, but like a single ball of
fire, moving before us as we moved.
But stop! What is that dark speck on the water, away down toward
Turtle Point? It has just the shape and size of a deer's head. It
seems to move steadily out into the lake. There is a little
ripple, like a wake, behind it. Hose turns to look at it, and then
sends the boat darting in that direction with long, swift strokes.
It is a moment of pleasant excitement, and we begin to conjecture
whether the deer is a buck or a doe, and whose hounds have driven
it in. But when Hose turns to look again, he slackens his stroke,
and says: "I guess we needn't to hurry; he won't get away. It's
astonishin' what a lot of fun a man can get in the course of a
natural life a-chasm' chumps of wood."
We landed on a sand beach at the mouth of a little stream, where a
blazed tree marked the beginning of the Ampersand trail. This line
through the forest was made years ago by that ardent sportsman and
lover of the Adirondacks, Dr. W. W. Ely, of Rochester. Since that
time it has been shortened and improved a little by other
travellers, and also not a little blocked and confused by the
lumbermen and the course of Nature. For when the lumbermen go into
the woods, they cut roads in every direction, leading nowhither,
and the unwary wanderer is thereby led aside from the right way,
and entangled in the undergrowth. And as for Nature, she is
entirely opposed to continuance of paths through her forest. She
covers them with fallen leaves, and hides them with thick bushes.
She drops great trees across them, and blots then out with
windfalls. But the blazed line--a succession of broad axe-marks on
the trunks of the trees, just high enough to catch the eye on a
level--cannot be so easily obliterated, and this, after all, is the
safest guide through the woods.
Our trail led us at first through a natural meadow, overgrown with
waist-high grass, and very spongy to the tread. Hornet-haunted
also was this meadow, and therefore no place for idle dalliance or
unwary digression, for the sting of the hornet is one of the
saddest and most humiliating surprises of this mortal life.
Then through a tangle of old wood-roads my guide led me safely, and
we struck one of the long ridges which slope gently from the lake
to the base of the mountain. Here walking was comparatively easy,
for in the hard-wood timber there is little underbrush. The
massive trunks seemed like pillars set to uphold the level roof of
green. Great yellow birches, shaggy with age, stretched their
knotted arms high above us; sugar-maples stood up straight and
proud under their leafy crowns; and smooth beeches--the most
polished and parklike of all the forest trees--offered
opportunities for the carving of lovers' names in a place where few
lovers ever come.
The woods were quiet. It seemed as if all living creatures had
deserted them. Indeed, if you have spent much time in our Northern
forests, you must have often wondered at the sparseness of life,
and felt a sense of pity for the apparent loneliness of the
squirrel that chatters at you as you pass, or the little bird that
hops noiselessly about in the thickets. The midsummer noontide is
an especially silent time. The deer are asleep in some wild
meadow. The partridge has gathered her brood for their midday nap.
The squirrels are perhaps counting over their store of nuts in a
hollow tree, and the hermit-thrush spares his voice until evening.
The woods are close--not cool and fragrant as the foolish romances
describe them--but warm and still; for the breeze which sweeps
across the hilltop and ruffles the lake does not penetrate into
these shady recesses, and therefore all the inhabitants take the
noontide as their hour of rest. Only the big woodpecker--he of the
scarlet head and mighty bill--is indefatigable, and somewhere
unseen is "tapping the hollow beech-tree," while a wakeful little
bird,--I guess it is the black-throated green warbler,--prolongs
his dreamy, listless ditty,--'te-de-terit-sca,--'te-de-us--wait.
After about an hour of easy walking, our trail began to ascend more
sharply. We passed over the shoulder of a ridge and around the
edge of a fire-slash, and then we had the mountain fairly before
us. Not that we could see anything of it, for the woods still shut
us in, but the path became very steep, and we knew that it was a
straight climb; not up and down and round about did this most
uncompromising trail proceed, but right up, in a direct line for
the summit.
Now this side of Ampersand is steeper than any Gothic roof I have
ever seen, and withal very much encumbered with rocks and ledges
and fallen trees. There were places where we had to haul ourselves
up by roots and branches, and places where we had to go down on our
hands and knees to crawl under logs. It was breathless work, but
not at all dangerous or difficult. Every step forward was also a
step upward; and as we stopped to rest for a moment, we could see
already glimpses of the lake below us. But at these I did not much
care to look, for I think it is a pity to spoil the surprise of a
grand view by taking little snatches of it beforehand. It is
better to keep one's face set to the mountain, and then, coming out
from the dark forest upon the very summit, feel the splendour of
the outlook flash upon one like a revelation.
The character of the woods through which we were now passing was
entirely different from those of the lower levels. On these steep
places the birch and maple will not grow, or at least they occur
but sparsely. The higher slopes and sharp ridges of the mountains
are always covered with soft-wood timber. Spruce and hemlock and
balsam strike their roots among the rocks, and find a hidden
nourishment. They stand close together; thickets of small trees
spring up among the large ones; from year to year the great trunks
are falling one across another, and the undergrowth is thickening
around them, until a spruce forest seems to be almost impassable.
The constant rain of needles and the crumbling of the fallen trees
form a rich, brown mould, into which the foot sinks noiselessly.
Wonderful beds of moss, many feet in thickness, and softer than
feathers, cover the rocks and roots. There are shadows never
broken by the sun, and dark, cool springs of icy water hidden away
in the crevices. You feel a sense of antiquity here which you can
never feel among the maples and birches. Longfellow was right when
he filled his forest primeval with "murmuring pines and hemlocks."
The higher one climbs, the darker and gloomier and more rugged the
vegetation becomes. The pine-trees soon cease to follow you; the
hemlocks disappear, and the balsams can go no farther. Only the
hardy spruce keeps on bravely, rough and stunted, with branches
matted together and pressed down flat by the weight of the winter's
snow, until finally, somewhere about the level of four thousand
feet above the sea, even this bold climber gives out, and the
weather-beaten rocks of the summit are clad only with mosses and
Alpine plants.
Thus it is with mountains, as perhaps with men, a mark of superior
dignity to be naturally bald.
Ampersand, falling short by a thousand feet of the needful height,
cannot claim this distinction. But what Nature has denied, human
labour has supplied. Under the direction of the Adirondack Survey,
some years ago, several acres of trees were cut from the summit;
and when we emerged, after the last sharp scramble, upon the very
crest of the mountain, we were not shut in by a dense thicket, but
stood upon a bare ridge of granite in the centre of a ragged
clearing.
I shut my eyes for a moment, drew a few long breaths of the
glorious breeze, and then looked out upon a wonder and a delight
beyond description.
A soft, dazzling splendour filled the air. Snowy banks and drifts
of cloud were floating slowly over a wide and wondrous land. Vast
sweeps of forest, shining waters, mountains near and far, the
deepest green and the palest blue, changing colours and glancing
lights, and all so silent, so strange, so far away, that it seemed
like the landscape of a dream. One almost feared to speak, lest it
should vanish.
Right below us the Lower Saranac and Lonesome Pond, Round Lake and
the Weller Ponds, were spread out like a map. Every point and
island was clearly marked. We could follow the course of the
Saranac River in all its curves and windings, and see the white
tents of the hay-makers on the wild meadows. Far away to the
northeast stretched the level fields of Bloomingdale. But westward
all was unbroken wilderness, a great sea of woods as far as the eye
could reach. And how far it can reach from a height like this!
What a revelation of the power of sight! That faint blue outline
far in the north was Lyon Mountain, nearly thirty miles away as the
crow flies. Those silver gleams a little nearer were the waters of
St. Regis. The Upper Saranac was displayed in all its length and
breadth, and beyond it the innumerable waters of Fish Creek were
tangled among the dark woods. The long ranges of the hills about
the Jordan bounded the western horizon, and on the southwest Big
Tupper Lake was sleeping at the base of Mount Morris. Looking past
the peak of Stony Creek Mountain, which rose sharp and distinct in
a line with Ampersand, we could trace the path of the Raquette
River from the distant waters of Long Lake down through its far-
stretched valley, and catch here and there a silvery link of its
current.
But when we turned to the south and east, how wonderful and how
different was the view! Here was no widespread and smiling
landscape with gleams of silver scattered through it, and soft blue
haze resting upon its fading verge, but a wild land of mountains,
stern, rugged, tumultuous, rising one beyond another like the waves
of a stormy ocean,--Ossa piled upin Pelion,--Mcintyre's sharp peak,
and the ragged crest of the Gothics, and, above all, Marcy's dome-
like head, raised just far enough above the others to assert his
royal right as monarch of the Adirondacks.
But grandest of all, as seen from this height, was Mount Seward,--a
solemn giant of a mountain, standing apart from the others, and
looking us full in the face. He was clothed from base to summit in
a dark, unbroken robe of forest. Ou-kor-lah, the Indians called
him--the Great Eye; and he seemed almost to frown upon us in
defiance. At his feet, so straight below us that it seemed almost
as if we could cast a stone into it, lay the wildest and most
beautiful of all the Adirondack waters--Ampersand Lake.
On its shore, some five-and-twenty years ago, the now almost
forgotten Adirondack Club had their shanty--the successor of "the
Philosophers' Camp" on Follensbee Pond. Agassiz, Appleton, Norton,
Emerson, Lowell, Hoar, Gray, John Holmes, and Stillman, were among
the company who made their resting-place under the shadow of Mount
Seward. They had bought a tract of forest land completely
encircling the pond, cut a rough road to it through the woods, and
built a comfortable log cabin, to which they purposed to return
summer after summer. But the civil war broke out, with all its
terrible excitement and confusion of hurrying hosts: the club
existed but for two years, and the little house in the wilderness
was abandoned. In 1878, when I spent three weeks at Ampersand, the
cabin was in ruins, and surrounded by an almost impenetrable growth
of bushes. The only philosophers to be seen were a family of what
the guides quaintly call "quill pigs." The roof had fallen to the
ground; raspberry-bushes thrust themselves through the yawning
crevices between the logs; and in front of the sunken door-sill lay
a rusty, broken iron stove, like a dismantled altar on which the
fire had gone out forever.
After we had feasted upon the view as long as we dared, counted the
lakes and streams, and found that we could see without a glass more
than thirty, and recalled the memories of "good times" which came
to us from almost every point of the compass, we unpacked the
camera, and proceeded to take some pictures.
If you are a photographer, and have anything of the amateur's
passion for your art, you will appreciate my pleasure and my
anxiety. Never before, so far as I knew, had a camera been set up
on Ampersand. I had but eight plates with me. The views were all
very distant and all at a downward angle. The power of the light
at this elevation was an unknown quantity. And the wind was
sweeping vigorously across the open summit of the mountain. I put
in my smallest stop, and prepared for short exposures.
My instrument was a thing called a Tourograph, which differs from
most other cameras in having the plate-holder on top of the box.
The plates are dropped into a groove below, and then moved into
focus, after which the cap is removed and the exposure made.
I set my instrument for Ampersand Pond, sighted the picture through
the ground glass, and measured the focus. Then I waited for a
quiet moment, dropped the plate, moved it carefully forward to the
proper mark, and went around to take off the cap. I found that I
already had it in my hand, and the plate had been exposed for about
thirty seconds with a sliding focus!
I expostulated with myself. I said: "You are excited; you are
stupid; you are unworthy of the name of photographer. Light-
writer! You ought to write with a whitewash-brush!" The reproof
was effectual, and from that moment all went well. The plates
dropped smoothly, the camera was steady, the exposure was correct.
Six good pictures were made, to recall, so far as black and white
could do it, the delights of that day.
It has been my good luck to climb many of the peaks of the
Adirondacks--Dix, the Dial, Hurricane, the Giant of the Valley,
Marcy, and Whiteface--but I do not think the outlook from any of
them is so wonderful and lovely as that from little Ampersand: and
I reckon among my most valuable chattels the plates of glass on
which the sun has traced for me (who cannot draw) the outlines of
that loveliest landscape.
The downward journey was swift. We halted for an hour or two
beside a trickling spring, a few rods below the summit, to eat our
lunch. Then, jumping, running, and sometimes sliding, we made the
descent, passed in safety by the dreaded lair of the hornet, and
reached Bartlett's as the fragrance of the evening pancake was
softly diffused through the twilight. Mark that day, Memory, with
a double star in your catalogue!
1895.
A HANDFUL OF HEATHER
"Scotland is the home of romance because it is the home of Scott,
Burns, Black, Macdonald, Stevenson, and Barrie--and of thousands of
men like that old Highlander in kilts on the tow-path, who loves
what they have written. I would wager he has a copy of Burns in
his sporran, and has quoted him half a dozen times to the grim Celt
who is walking with him. Those old boys don't read for excitement
or knowledge, but because they love their land and their people and
their religion--and their great writers simply express their
emotions for them in words they can understand. You and I come
over here, with thousands of our countrymen, to borrow their
emotions."--ROBERT BRIDGES: Overheard in Arcady.
My friend the Triumphant Democrat, fiercest of radicals and kindest
of men, expresses his scorn for monarchical institutions (and his
invincible love for his native Scotland) by tenanting, summer after
summer, a famous castle among the heathery Highlands. There he
proclaims the most uncompromising Americanism in a speech that
grows more broadly Scotch with every week of his emancipation from
the influence of the clipped, commercial accent of New York, and
casts contempt on feudalism by playing the part of lord of the
manor to such a perfection of high-handed beneficence that the
people of the glen are all become his clansmen, and his gentle lady
would be the patron saint of the district--if the republican
theology of Scotland could only admit saints among the elect.
Every year he sends trophies of game to his friends across the sea--
birds that are as toothsome and wild-flavoured as if they had not
been hatched under the tyranny of the game-laws. He has a pleasant
trick of making them grateful to the imagination as well as to the
palate by packing them in heather. I'll warrant that Aaron's rod
bore no bonnier blossoms than these stiff little bushes--and none
more magical. For every time I take up a handful of them they
transport me to the Highlands, and send me tramping once more, with
knapsack and fishing-rod, over the braes and down the burns.
I.
BELL-HEATHER.
Some of my happiest meanderings in Scotland have been taken under
the lead of a book. Indeed, for travel in a strange country there
can be no better courier. Not a guide-book, I mean, but a real
book, and, by preference, a novel.
Fiction, like wine, tastes best in the place where it was grown.
And the scenery of a foreign land (including architecture, which is
artificial landscape) grows less dreamlike and unreal to our
perception when we people it with familiar characters from our
favourite novels. Even on a first journey we feel ourselves among
old friends. Thus to read Romola in Florence, and Les Miserables
in Paris, and Lorna Doone on Exmoor, and The Heart of Midlothian
in Edinburgh, and David Balfour in the Pass of Glencoe, and The
Pirate in the Shetland Isles, is to get a new sense of the
possibilities of life. All these things have I done with much
inward contentment; and other things of like quality have I yet
in store; as, for example, the conjunction of The Bonnie Brier-Bush
with Drumtochty, and The Little Minister with Thrums, and The
Raiders with Galloway. But I never expect to pass pleasanter
days than those I spent with A Princess of Thule among the Hebrides.
For then, to begin with, I was young; which is an unearned
increment of delight sure to be confiscated by the envious years
and never regained. But even youth itself was not to be compared
with the exquisite felicity of being deeply and desperately in love
with Sheila, the clear-eyed heroine of that charming book. In this
innocent passion my gray-haired comrades, Howard Crosby, the
Chancellor of the University of New York, and my father, an ex-
Moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly, were ardent but
generous rivals.
How great is the joy and how fascinating the pursuit of such an
ethereal affection! It enlarges the heart without embarrassing the
conscience. It is a cup of pure gladness with no bitterness in its
dregs. It spends the present moment with a free hand, and yet
leaves no undesirable mortgage upon the future. King Arthur, the
founder of the Round Table, expressed a conviction, according to
Tennyson, that the most important element in a young knight's
education is "the maiden passion for a maid." Surely the safest
form in which this course in the curriculum may be taken is by
falling in love with a girl in a book. It is the only affair of
the kind into which a young fellow can enter without
responsibility, and out of which he can always emerge, when
necessary, without discredit. And as for the old fellow who still
keeps up this education of the heart, and worships his heroine with
the ardour of a John Ridd and the fidelity of a Henry Esmond, I
maintain that he is exempt from all the penalties of declining
years. The man who can love a girl in a book may be old, but never
aged.
So we sailed, lovers all three, among the Western Isles, and
whatever ship it was that carried us, her figurehead was always the
Princess Sheila. Along the ruffled blue waters of the sounds and
lochs that wind among the roots of unpronounceable mountains, and
past the dark hills of Skye, and through the unnumbered flocks of
craggy islets where the sea-birds nest, the spell of the sweet
Highland maid drew us, and we were pilgrims to the Ultima Thule
where she lived and reigned.
The Lewis, with its tail-piece, the Harris, is quite a sizable
island to be appended to such a country as Scotland. It is a
number of miles long, and another number of miles wide, and it has
a number of thousand inhabitants--I should say as many as three-
quarters of an inhabitant to the square mile--and the conditions of
agriculture and the fisheries are extremely interesting and
quarrelsome. All these I duly studied at the time, and reported in
a series of intolerably dull letters to the newspaper which
supplied a financial basis for my sentimental journey. They are
full of information; but I have been amused to note, after these
many years, how wide they steer of the true motive and interest of
the excursion. There is not even a hint of Sheila in any of them.
Youth, after all, is a shamefaced and secretive season; like the
fringed polygala, it hides its real blossom underground.
It was Sheila's dark-blue dress and sailor hat with the white
feather that we looked for as we loafed through the streets of
Stornoway, that quaint metropolis of the herring-trade, where
strings of fish alternated with boxes of flowers in the windows,
and handfuls of fish were spread upon the roofs to dry just as the
sliced apples are exposed upon the kitchen-sheds of New England in
September, and dark-haired women were carrying great creels of fish
on their shoulders, and groups of sunburned men were smoking among
the fishing-boats on the beach and talking about fish, and sea-
gulls were floating over the houses with their heads turning from
side to side and their bright eyes peering everywhere for
unconsidered trifles of fish, and the whole atmosphere of the
place, physical, mental, and moral, was pervaded with fish. It was
Sheila's soft, sing-song Highland speech that we heard through the
long, luminous twilight in the pauses of that friendly chat on the
balcony of the little inn where a good fortune brought us
acquainted with Sam Bough, the mellow Edinburgh painter. It was
Sheila's low sweet brow, and long black eyelashes, and tender blue
eyes, that we saw before us as we loitered over the open moorland,
a far-rolling sea of brown billows, reddened with patches of bell-
heather, and brightened here and there with little lakes lying wide
open to the sky. And were not these peat-cutters, with the big
baskets on their backs, walking in silhouette along the ridges, the
people that Sheila loved and tried to help; and were not these
crofters' cottages with thatched roofs, like beehives, blending
almost imperceptibly with the landscape, the dwellings into which
she planned to introduce the luxury of windows; and were not these
Standing Stones of Callernish, huge tombstones of a vanished
religion, the roofless temple from which the Druids paid their
westernmost adoration to the setting sun as he sank into the
Atlantic--was not this the place where Sheila picked the bunch of
wild flowers and gave it to her lover? There is nothing in
history, I am sure, half so real to us as some of the things in
fiction. The influence of an event upon our character is little
affected by considerations as to whether or not it ever happened.
There were three churches in Stornoway, all Presbyterian, of
course, and therefore full of pious emulation. The idea of
securing an American preacher for an August Sabbath seemed to fall
upon them simultaneously, and to offer the prospect of novelty
without too much danger. The brethren of the U. P. congregation,
being a trifle more gleg than the others, arrived first at the inn,
and secured the promise of a morning sermon from Chancellor Howard
Crosby. The session of the Free Kirk came in a body a little
later, and to them my father pledged himself for the evening sermon.
The senior elder of the Established Kirk, a snuff-taking man and
very deliberate, was the last to appear, and to his request for an
afternoon sermon there was nothing left to offer but the services
of the young probationer in theology. I could see that it struck
him as a perilous adventure. Questions about "the fundamentals"
glinted in his watery eye. He crossed and uncrossed his legs with
solemnity, and blew his nose so frequently in a huge red silk
handkerchief that it seemed like a signal of danger. At last he
unburdened himself of his hesitations.
"Ah'm not saying that the young man will not be orthodox--ahem!
But ye know, sir, in the Kirk, we are not using hymns, but just the
pure Psawms of Daffit, in the meetrical fairsion. And ye know,
sir, they are ferry tifficult in the reating, whatefer, for a young
man, and one that iss a stranger. And if his father will just be
coming with him in the pulpit, to see that nothing iss said amiss,
that will be ferry comforting to the congregation."
So the dear governor swallowed his laughter gravely and went surety
for his son. They appeared together in the church, a barnlike
edifice, with great galleries half-way between the floor and the
roof. Still higher up, the pulpit stuck like a swallow's nest
against the wall. The two ministers climbed the precipitous stair
and found themselves in a box so narrow that one must stand
perforce, while the other sat upon the only seat. In this "ride
and tie" fashion they went through the service. When it was time
to preach, the young man dropped the doctrines as discreetly as
possible upon the upturned countenances beneath him. I have
forgotten now what it was all about, but there was a quotation from
the Song of Solomon, ending with "Sweet is thy voice, and thy
countenance is comely." And when it came to that, the
probationer's eyes (if the truth must be told) went searching
through that sea of faces for one that should be familiar to his
heart, and to which he might make a personal application of the
Scripture passage--even the face of Sheila.
There are rivers in the Lewis, at least two of them, and on one of
these we had the offer of a rod for a day's fishing. Accordingly
we cast lots, and the lot fell upon the youngest, and I went forth
with a tall, red-legged gillie, to try for my first salmon. The
Whitewater came singing down out of the moorland into a rocky
valley, and there was a merry curl of air on the pools, and the
silver fish were leaping from the stream. The gillie handled the
big rod as if it had been a fairy's wand, but to me it was like a
giant's spear. It was a very different affair from fishing with
five ounces of split bamboo on a Long Island trout-pond. The
monstrous fly, like an awkward bird, went fluttering everywhere but
in the right direction. It was the mercy of Providence that
preserved the gillie's life. But he was very patient and
forbearing, leading me on from one pool to another, as I spoiled
the water and snatched the hook out of the mouth of rising fish,
until at last we found a salmon that knew even less about the
niceties of salmon-fishing than I did. He seized the fly firmly,
before I could pull it away, and then, in a moment, I found myself
attached to a creature with the strength of a whale and the agility
of a flying-fish. He led me rushing up and down the bank like a
madman. He played on the surface like a whirlwind, and sulked at
the bottom like a stone. He meditated, with ominous delay, in the
middle of the deepest pool, and then, darting across the river,
flung himself clean out of water and landed far up on the green
turf of the opposite shore. My heart melted like a snowflake in
the sea, and I thought that I had lost him forever. But he rolled
quietly back into the water with the hook still set in his nose. A
few minutes afterwards I brought him within reach of the gaff, and
my first salmon was glittering on the grass beside me.
Then I remembered that William Black had described this very fish
in A Princess of Thule. I pulled the book from my pocket, and,
lighting a pipe, sat down to read that delightful chapter over
again. The breeze played softly down the valley. The warm
sunlight was filled with the musical hum of insects and the murmur
of falling waters. I thought how much pleasanter it would have
been to learn salmon-fishing, as Black's hero did, from the Maid of
Borva, than from a red-headed gillie. But, then, his salmon, after
leaping across the stream, got away; whereas mine was safe. A man
cannot have everything in this world. I picked a spray of rosy
bell-heather from the bank of the river, and pressed it between the
leaves of the book in memory of Sheila.
II.
COMMON HEATHER.
It is not half as far from Albany to Aberdeen as it is from New
York to London. In fact, I venture to say that an American on foot
will find himself less a foreigner in Scotland than in any other
country in the Old World. There is something warm and hospitable--
if he knew the language well enough he would call it couthy--in the
greeting that he gets from the shepherd on the moor, and the
conversation that he holds with the farmer's wife in the stone
cottage, where he stops to ask for a drink of milk and a bit of
oat-cake. He feels that there must be a drop of Scotch somewhere
in his mingled blood, or at least that the texture of his thought
and feelings has been partly woven on a Scottish loom--perhaps the
Shorter Catechism, or Robert Burns's poems, or the romances of Sir
Walter Scott. At all events, he is among a kindred and
comprehending people. They do not speak English in the same way
that he does--through the nose---but they think very much more in
his mental dialect than the English do. They are independent and
wide awake, curious and full of personal interest. The wayside
mind in Inverness or Perth runs more to muscle and less to fat, has
more active vanity and less passive pride, is more inquisitive and
excitable and sympathetic--in short, to use a symbolist's
description, it is more apt to be red-headed--than in Surrey or
Somerset. Scotchmen ask more questions about America, but fewer
foolish ones. You will never hear them inquiring whether there is
any good bear-hunting in the neighbourhood of Boston, or whether
Shakespeare is much read in the States. They have a healthy
respect for our institutions, and have quite forgiven (if, indeed,
they ever resented) that little affair in 1776. They are all born
Liberals. When a Scotchman says he is a Conservative, it only
means that he is a Liberal with hesitations.
And yet in North Britain the American pedestrian will not find that
amused and somewhat condescending toleration for his peculiarities,
that placid willingness to make the best of all his vagaries of
speech and conduct, that he finds in South Britain. In an English
town you may do pretty much what you like on a Sunday, even to the
extent of wearing a billycock hat to church, and people will put up
with it from a countryman of Buffalo Bill and the Wild West Show.
But in a Scotch village, if you whistle in the street on a Lord's
Day, though it be a Moody and Sankey tune, you will be likely to
get, as I did, an admonition from some long-legged, grizzled elder:
"Young man, do ye no ken it's the Sawbath Day?"
I recognised the reproof of the righteous, an excellent oil which
doth not break the head, and took it gratefully at the old man's
hands. For did it not prove that he regarded me as a man and a
brother, a creature capable of being civilised and saved?
It was in the gray town of Dingwall that I had this bit of pleasant
correction, as I was on the way to a fishing tramp through
Sutherlandshire. This northwest corner of Great Britain is the
best place in the whole island for a modest and impecunious angler.
There are, or there were a few years ago, wild lochs and streams
which are still practically free, and a man who is content with
small things can pick up some very pretty sport from the highland
inns, and make a good basket of memorable experiences every week.
The inn at Lairg, overlooking the narrow waters of Loch Shin, was
embowered in honeysuckles, and full of creature comfort. But there
were too many other men with rods there to suit my taste. "The
feesh in this loch," said the boatman, "iss not so numerous ass the
feeshermen, but more wise. There iss not one of them that hass not
felt the hook, and they know ferry well what side of the fly has
the forkit tail."
At Altnaharra, in the shadow of Ben Clebrig, there was a cozy
little house with good fare, and abundant trout-fishing in Loch
Naver and Loch Meadie. It was there that I fell in with a
wandering pearl-peddler who gathered his wares from the mussels in
the moorland streams. They were not of the finest quality, these
Scotch pearls, but they had pretty, changeable colours of pink and
blue upon them, like the iridescent light that plays over the
heather in the long northern evenings. I thought it must be a hard
life for the man, wading day after day in the ice-cold water, and
groping among the coggly, sliddery stones for the shellfish, and
cracking open perhaps a thousand before he could find one pearl.
"Oh, yess," said be, "and it iss not an easy life, and I am not
saying that it will be so warm and dry ass liffing in a rich house.
But it iss the life that I am fit for, and I hef my own time and my
thoughts to mysel', and that is a ferry goot thing; and then, sir,
I haf found the Pearl of Great Price, and I think upon that day and
night."
Under the black, shattered peaks of Ben Laoghal, where I saw an
eagle poising day after day as if some invisible centripetal force
bound him forever to that small circle of air, there was a loch
with plenty of brown trout and a few salmo ferox; and down at
Tongue there was a little river where the sea-trout sometimes come
up with the tide.
Here I found myself upon the north coast, and took the road
eastward between the mountains and the sea. It was a beautiful
region of desolation. There were rocky glens cutting across the
road, and occasionally a brawling stream ran down to the salt
water, breaking the line of cliffs with a little bay and a half-
moon of yellow sand. The heather covered all the hills. There
were no trees, and but few houses. The chief signs of human labour
were the rounded piles of peat, and the square cuttings in the moor
marking the places where the subterranean wood-choppers had
gathered their harvests. The long straths were once cultivated,
and every patch of arable land had its group of cottages full of
children. The human harvest has always been the richest and most
abundant that is raised in the Highlands; but unfortunately the
supply exceeded the demand; and so the crofters were evicted, and
great flocks of sheep were put in possession of the land; and now
the sheep-pastures have been changed into deer-forests; and far and
wide along the valleys and across the hills there is not a trace of
habitation, except the heaps of stones and the clumps of straggling
bushes which mark the sites of lost homes. But what is one
country's loss is another country's gain. Canada and the United
States are infinitely the richer for the tough, strong, fearless,
honest men that were dispersed from these lonely straths to make
new homes across the sea.
It was after sundown when I reached the straggling village of
Melvich, and the long day's journey had left me weary. But the
inn, with its red-curtained windows, looked bright and reassuring.
Thoughts of dinner and a good bed comforted my spirit--prematurely.
For the inn was full. There were but five bedrooms and two
parlours. The gentlemen who had the neighbouring shootings
occupied three bedrooms and a parlour; the other two bedrooms had
just been taken by the English fishermen who had passed me in the
road an hour ago in the mail-coach (oh! why had I not suspected
that treacherous vehicle?); and the landlord and his wife assured
me, with equal firmness and sympathy, that there was not another
cot or pair of blankets in the house. I believed them, and was
sinking into despair when Sandy M'Kaye appeared on the scene as my
angel of deliverance. Sandy was a small, withered, wiry man,
dressed in rusty gray, with an immense white collar thrusting out
its points on either side of his chin, and a black stock climbing
over the top of it. I guessed from his speech that he had once
lived in the lowlands. He had hoped to be engaged as a gillie by
the shooting party, but had been disappointed. He had wanted to be
taken by the English fishermen, but another and younger man had
stepped in before him. Now Sandy saw in me his Predestinated
Opportunity, and had no idea of letting it post up the road that
night to the next village. He cleared his throat respectfully and
cut into the conversation.
"Ah'm thinkin' the gentleman micht find a coomfortaible lodgin' wi'
the weedow Macphairson a wee bittie doon the road. Her dochter is
awa' in Ameriky, an' the room is a verra fine room, an' it is a
peety to hae it stannin' idle, an' ye wudna mind the few steps to
and fro tae yir meals here, sir, wud ye? An' if ye 'ill gang wi'
me efter dinner, 'a 'll be prood to shoo ye the hoose."
So, after a good dinner with the English fishermen, Sandy piloted
me down the road through the thickening dusk. I remember a hoodie
crow flew close behind us with a choking, ghostly cough that
startled me. The Macpherson cottage was a snug little house of
stone, with fuchsias and roses growing in the front yard: and the
widow was a douce old lady, with a face like a winter apple in the
month of April, wrinkled, but still rosy. She was a little
doubtful about entertaining strangers, but when she heard I was
from America she opened the doors of her house and her heart. And
when, by a subtle cross examination that would have been a credit
to the wife of a Connecticut deacon, she discovered the fact that
her lodger was a minister, she did two things, with equal and
immediate fervour; she brought out the big Bible and asked him to
conduct evening worship, and she produced a bottle of old Glenlivet
and begged him to "guard against takkin' cauld by takkin' a glass
of speerits."
It was a very pleasant fortnight at Melvich. Mistress Macpherson
was so motherly that "takkin' cauld" was reduced to a permanent
impossibility. The other men at the inn proved to be very
companionable fellows, quite different from the monsters of
insolence that my anger had imagined in the moment of
disappointment. The shooting party kept the table abundantly
supplied with grouse and hares and highland venison; and there was
a piper to march up and down before the window and play while we
ate dinner--a very complimentary and disquieting performance. But
there are many occasions in life when pride can be entertained only
at the expense of comfort.
Of course Sandy was my gillie. It was a fine sight to see him
exhibiting the tiny American trout-rod, tied with silk ribbons in
its delicate case, to the other gillies and exulting over them.
Every morning he would lead me away through the heather to some
lonely loch on the shoulders of the hills, from which we could look
down upon the Northern Sea and the blue Orkney Isles far away across
the Pentland Firth. Sometimes we would find a loch with a boat on
it, and drift up and down, casting along the shores. Sometimes,
in spite of Sandy's confident predictions, no boat could be found,
and then I must put on the Mackintosh trousers and wade out over my
hips into the water, and circumambulate the pond, throwing the flies
as far as possible toward the middle, and feeling my way carefully
along the bottom with the long net-handle, while Sandy danced on
the bank in an agony of apprehension lest his Predestinated Opportunity
should step into a deep hole and be drowned. It was a curious fact
in natural history that on the lochs with boats the trout were in
the shallow water, but in the boatless lochs they were away out in
the depths. "Juist the total depraivity o' troots," said Sandy,
"an' terrible fateegin'."
Sandy had an aversion to commit himself to definite statements on
any subject not theological. If you asked him how long the
morning's tramp would be, it was "no verra long, juist a bit ayant
the hull yonner." And if, at the end of the seventh mile, you
complained that it was much too far, he would never do more than
admit that "it micht be shorter." If you called him to rejoice
over a trout that weighed close upon two pounds, he allowed that it
was "no bad--but there's bigger anes i' the loch gin we cud but
wile them oot." And at lunch-time, when we turned out a full
basket of shining fish on the heather, the most that he would say,
while his eyes snapped with joy and pride, was, "Aweel, we canna
complain, the day."
Then he would gather an armful of dried heather-stems for kindling,
and dig out a few roots and crooked limbs of the long-vanished
forest from the dry, brown, peaty soil, and make our campfire of
prehistoric wood--just for the pleasant, homelike look of the
blaze--and sit down beside it to eat our lunch. Heat is the least
of the benefits that man gets from fire. It is the sign of
cheerfulness and good comradeship. I would not willingly satisfy
my hunger, even in a summer nooning, without a little flame burning
on a rustic altar to consecrate and enliven the feast. When the
bread and cheese were finished and the pipes were filled with
Virginia tobacco, Sandy would begin to tell me, very solemnly and
respectfully, about the mistakes I had made in the fishing that
day, and mourn over the fact that the largest fish had not been
hooked. There was a strong strain of pessimism in Sandy, and he
enjoyed this part of the sport immensely.
But he was at his best in the walk home through the lingering
twilight, when the murmur of the sea trembled through the air, and
the incense of burning peat floated up from the cottages, and the
stars blossomed one by one in the pale-green sky. Then Sandy
dandered on at his ease down the hills, and discoursed of things in
heaven and earth. He was an unconscious follower of the theology
of the Reverend John Jasper, of Richmond, Virginia, and rejected
the Copernican theory of the universe as inconsistent with the
history of Joshua. "Gin the sun doesna muve," said he, "what for
wad Joshua be tellin' him to stond steel? 'A wad suner beleeve
there was a mistak' in the veesible heevens than ae fault in the
Guid Buik." Whereupon we held long discourse of astronomy and
inspiration; but Sandy concluded it with a philosophic word which
left little to be said: "Aweel, yon teelescope is a wonnerful
deescovery; but 'a dinna think the less o' the Baible."
III.
WHITE HEATHER.
Memory is a capricious and arbitrary creature. You never can tell
what pebble she will pick up from the shore of life to keep among
her treasures, or what inconspicuous flower of the field she will
preserve as the symbol of
"Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
She has her own scale of values for these mementos, and knows
nothing of the market price of precious stones or the costly
splendour of rare orchids. The thing that pleases her is the thing
that she will hold fast. And yet I do not doubt that the most
important things are always the best remembered; only we must learn
that the real importance of what we see and hear in the world is to
be measured at last by its meaning, its significance, its intimacy
with the heart of our heart and the life of our life. And when we
find a little token of the past very safely and imperishably kept
among our recollections, we must believe that memory has made no
mistake. It is because that little thing has entered into our
experience most deeply, that it stays with us and we cannot lose
it.
You have half forgotten many a famous scene that you travelled far
to look upon. You cannot clearly recall the sublime peak of Mont
Blanc, the roaring curve of Niagara, the vast dome of St. Peter's.
The music of Patti's crystalline voice has left no distinct echo in
your remembrance, and the blossoming of the century-plant is dimmer
than the shadow of a dream. But there is a nameless valley among
the hills where you can still trace every curve of the stream, and
see the foam-bells floating on the pool below the bridge, and the
long moss wavering in the current. There is a rustic song of a
girl passing through the fields at sunset, that still repeats its
far-off cadence in your listening ears. There is a small flower
trembling on its stem in some hidden nook beneath the open sky,
that never withers through all the changing years; the wind passes
over it, but it is not gone--it abides forever in your soul, an
amaranthine blossom of beauty and truth.
White heather is not an easy flower to find. You may look for it
among the highlands for a day without success. And when it is
discovered, there is little outward charm to commend it. It lacks
the grace of the dainty bells that hang so abundantly from the
Erica Tetralix, and the pink glow of the innumerable blossoms of
the common heather. But then it is a symbol. It is the Scotch
Edelweiss. It means sincere affection, and unselfish love, and
tender wishes as pure as prayers. I shall always remember the
evening when I found the white heather on the moorland above Glen
Ericht. Or, rather, it was not I that found it (for I have little
luck in the discovery of good omens, and have never plucked a four-
leaved clover in my life), but my companion, the gentle Mistress of
the Glen, whose hair was as white as the tiny blossoms, and yet
whose eyes were far quicker than mine to see and name every flower
that bloomed in those lofty, widespread fields.
Ericht Water is formed by the marriage of two streams, one flowing
out of Strath Ardle and the other descending from Cairn Gowar
through the long, lonely Pass of Glenshee. The Ericht begins at
the bridge of Cally, and its placid, beautiful glen, unmarred by
railway or factory, reaches almost down to Blairgowrie. On the
southern bank, but far above the water, runs the high road to
Braemar and the Linn of Dee. On the other side of the river,
nestling among the trees, is the low white manor-house,
"An ancient home of peace."
It is a place where one who had been wearied and perchance sore
wounded in the battle of life might well desire to be carried, as
Arthur to the island valley of Avilion, for rest and healing.
I have no thought of renewing the conflicts and cares that filled
that summer with sorrow. There were fightings without and fears
within; there was the surrender of an enterprise that had been
cherished since boyhood, and the bitter sense of irremediable
weakness that follows such a reverse; there was a touch of that
wrath with those we love, which, as Coleridge says,
"Doth work like madness in the brain;"
flying across the sea from these troubles, I had found my old
comrade of merrier days sentenced to death, and caught but a brief
glimpse of his pale, brave face as he went away into exile. At
such a time the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are
darkened, and the clouds return after rain. But through those
clouds the Mistress of the Glen came to meet me--a stranger till
then, but an appointed friend, a minister of needed grace, an angel
of quiet comfort. The thick mists of rebellion, mistrust, and
despair have long since rolled away, and against the background of
the hills her figure stands out clearly, dressed in the fashion of
fifty years ago, with the snowy hair gathered close beneath her
widow's cap, and a spray of white heather in her outstretched hand.
There were no other guests in the house by the river during those
still days in the noontide hush of midsummer. Every morning, while
the Mistress was busied with her household cares and letters, I
would be out in the fields hearing the lark sing, and watching the
rabbits as they ran to and fro, scattering the dew from the grass
in a glittering spray. Or perhaps I would be angling down the
river, with the swift pressure of the water around my knees, and an
inarticulate current of cooling thoughts flowing on and on through
my brain like the murmur of the stream. Every afternoon there were
long walks with the Mistress in the old-fashioned garden, where
wonderful roses were blooming; or through the dark, fir-shaded den
where the wild burn dropped down to join the river; or out upon the
high moor under the waning orange sunset. Every night there were
luminous and restful talks beside the open fire in the library,
when the words came clear and calm from the heart, unperturbed by
the vain desire of saying brilliant things, which turns so much of
our conversation into a combat of wits instead of an interchange of
thoughts. Talk like this is possible only between two. The
arrival of a third person sets the lists for a tournament, and
offers the prize for a verbal victory. But where there are only
two, the armour is laid aside, and there is no call to thrust and
parry.
One of the two should be a good listener, sympathetic, but not
silent, giving confidence in order to attract it--and of this art a
woman is the best master. But its finest secrets do not come to
her until she has passed beyond the uncertain season of compliments
and conquests, and entered into the serenity of a tranquil age.
What is this foolish thing that men say about the impossibility of
true intimacy and converse between the young and the old?
Hamerton, for example, in his book on Human Intercourse, would have
us believe that a difference in years is a barrier between hearts.
For my part, I have more often found it an open door, and a
security of generous and tolerant welcome for the young soldier,
who comes in tired and dusty from the battle-field, to tell his
story of defeat or victory in the garden of still thoughts where
old age is resting in the peace of honourable discharge. I like
what Robert Louis Stevenson says about it in his essay on Talk and
Talkers.
"Not only is the presence of the aged in itself remedial, but their
minds are stored with antidotes, wisdom's simples, plain
considerations overlooked by youth. They have matter to
communicate, be they never so stupid. Their talk is not merely
literature, it is great literature; classic by virtue of the
speaker's detachment; studded, like a book of travel, with things
we should not otherwise have learnt. . . where youth agrees with
age, not where they differ, wisdom lies; and it is when the young
disciple finds his heart to beat in tune with his gray-haired
teacher's that a lesson may be learned."
The conversation of the Mistress of the Glen shone like the light
and distilled like the dew, not only by virtue of what she said,
but still more by virtue of what she was. Her face was a good
counsel against discouragement; and the cheerful quietude of her
demeanour was a rebuke to all rebellious, cowardly, and
discontented thoughts. It was not the striking novelty or
profundity of her commentary on life that made it memorable, it was
simply the truth of what she said and the gentleness with which she
said it. Epigrams are worth little for guidance to the perplexed,
and less for comfort to the wounded. But the plain, homely sayings
which come from a soul that has learned the lesson of patient
courage in the school of real experience, fall upon the wound like
drops of balsam, and like a soothing lotion up on the eyes smarting
and blinded with passion.
She spoke of those who had walked with her long ago in her garden,
and for whose sake, now that they had all gone into the world of
light, every flower was doubly dear. Would it be a true proof of
loyalty to them if she lived gloomily or despondently because they
were away? She spoke of the duty of being ready to welcome
happiness as well as to endure pain, and of the strength that
endurance wins by being grateful for small daily joys, like the
evening light, and the smell of roses, and the singing of birds.
She spoke of the faith that rests on the Unseen Wisdom and Love
like a child on its mother's breast, and of the melting away of
doubts in the warmth of an effort to do some good in the world.
And if that effort has conflict, and adventure, and confused noise,
and mistakes, and even defeats mingled with it, in the stormy years
of youth, is not that to be expected? The burn roars and leaps in
the den; the stream chafes and frets through the rapids of the
glen; the river does not grow calm and smooth until it nears the
sea. Courage is a virtue that the young cannot spare; to lose it
is to grow old before the time; it is better to make a thousand
mistakes and suffer a thousand reverses than to refuse the battle.
Resignation is the final courage of old age; it arrives in its own
season; and it is a good day when it comes to us. Then there are
no more disappointments; for we have learned that it is even better
to desire the things that we have than to have the things that we
desire. And is not the best of all our hopes--the hope of
immortality--always before us? How can we be dull or heavy while
we have that new experience to look forward to? It will be the
most joyful of all our travels and adventures. It will bring us
our best acquaintances and friendships. But there is only one way
to get ready for immortality, and that is to love this life, and
live it as bravely and cheerfully and faithfully as we can.
So my gentle teacher with the silver hair showed me the treasures
of her ancient, simple faith; and I felt that no sermons, nor
books, nor arguments can strengthen the doubting heart so deeply as
just to come into touch with a soul which has proved the truth of
that plain religion whose highest philosophy is "Trust in the Lord
and do good." At the end of the evening the household was gathered
for prayers, and the Mistress kneeled among her servants, leading
them, in her soft Scottish accent, through the old familiar
petitions for pardon for the errors of the day, and refreshing
sleep through the night and strength for the morrow. It is good to
be in a land where the people are not ashamed to pray. I have
shared the blessing of Catholics at their table in lowly huts among
the mountains of the Tyrol, and knelt with Covenanters at their
household altar in the glens of Scotland; and all around the world,
where the spirit of prayer is, there is peace. The genius of the
Scotch has made many contributions to literature, but none I think,
more precious, and none that comes closer to the heart, than the
prayer which Robert Louis Stevenson wrote for his family in distant
Samoa, the night before he died:--
"We beseech thee, Lord, to behold us with favour, folk of many
families and nations, gathered together in the peace of this roof:
weak men and women subsisting under the covert of thy patience. Be
patient still; suffer us yet a while longer--with our broken
promises of good, with our idle endeavours against evil--suffer us
a while longer to endure, and (if it may be) help us to do better.
Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these
must be taken, have us play the man under affliction. Be with our
friends, be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any
awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day
returns to us--our sun and comforter--call us with morning faces,
eager to labour, eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our
portion, and, if the day be marked to sorrow, strong to endure it.
We thank thee and praise thee; and, in the words of Him to whom
this day is sacred, close our oblation."
The man who made that kindly human prayer knew the meaning of white
heather. And I dare to hope that I too have known something of its
meaning, since that evening when the Mistress of the Glen picked
the spray and gave it to me on the lonely moor. "And now," she
said, "you will be going home across the sea; and you have been
welcome here, but it is time that you should go, for there is the
place where your real duties and troubles and joys are waiting for
you. And if you have left any misunderstandings behind you, you
will try to clear them up; and if there have been any quarrels, you
will heal them. Carry this little flower with you. It's not the
bonniest blossom in Scotland, but it's the dearest, for the message
that it brings. And you will remember that love is not
getting, but giving; not a wild dream of pleasure, and a madness of
desire--oh no, love is not that--it is goodness, and honour, and
peace, and pure living--yes, love is that; and it is the best thing
in the world, and the thing that lives longest. And that is what I
am wishing for you and yours with this bit of white heather."
1893.
THE RISTIGOUCHE FROM A HORSE-YACHT
Dr. Paley was ardently attached to this amusement; so much so that
when the Bishop of Durham inquired of him when one of his most
important works would be finished, he said, with great simplicity
and good humour, 'My Lord, I shall work steadily at it when the
fly-fishing season is over.'--SIR HUMPHRY DAVY: Salmonia.
The boundary line between the Province of Quebec and New Brunswick,
for a considerable part of its course, resembles the name of the
poet Keats; it is "writ in water." But like his fame, it is water
that never fails,--the limpid current of the river Ristigouche.
The railway crawls over it on a long bridge at Metapedia, and you
are dropped in the darkness somewhere between midnight and dawn.
When you open your window-shutters the next morning, you see that
the village is a disconsolate hamlet, scattered along the track as
if it had been shaken by chance from an open freight-car; it
consists of twenty houses, three shops, and a discouraged church
perched upon a little hillock like a solitary mourner on the
anxious seat. The one comfortable and prosperous feature in the
countenance of Metapedia is the house of the Ristigouche Salmon
Club--an old-fashioned mansion, with broad, white piazza, looking
over rich meadow-lands. Here it was that I found my friend
Favonius, president of solemn societies, pillar of church and
state, ingenuously arrayed in gray knickerbockers, a flannel shirt,
and a soft hat, waiting to take me on his horse-yacht for a voyage
up the river.
Have you ever seen a horse-yacht? Sometimes it is called a scow;
but that sounds common. Sometimes it is called a house-boat; but
that is too English. What does it profit a man to have a whole
dictionary full of language at his service, unless he can invent a
new and suggestive name for his friend's pleasure-craft? The
foundation of the horse-yacht--if a thing that floats may be called
fundamental--is a flat-bottomed boat, some fifty feet long and ten
feet wide, with a draft of about eight inches. The deck is open
for fifteen feet aft of the place where the bowsprit ought to be;
behind that it is completely covered by a house, cabin, cottage, or
whatever you choose to call it, with straight sides and a peaked
roof of a very early Gothic pattern. Looking in at the door you
see, first of all, two cots, one on either side of the passage;
then an open space with a dining-table, a stove, and some chairs;
beyond that a pantry with shelves, and a great chest for
provisions. A door at the back opens into the kitchen, and from
that another door opens into a sleeping-room for the boatmen. A
huge wooden tiller curves over the stern of the boat, and the
helmsman stands upon the kitchen-roof. Two canoes are floating
behind, holding back, at the end of their long tow-ropes, as if
reluctant to follow so clumsy a leader. This is an accurate
description of the horse-yacht. If necessary it could be sworn to
before a notary public. But I am perfectly sure that you might
read this page through without skipping a word, and if you had
never seen the creature with your own eyes, you would have no idea
how absurd it looks and how comfortable it is.
While we were stowing away our trunks and bags under the cots, and
making an equitable division of the hooks upon the walls, the
motive power of the yacht stood patiently upon the shore, stamping
a hoof, now and then, or shaking a shaggy head in mild protest
against the flies. Three more pessimistic-looking horses I never
saw. They were harnessed abreast, and fastened by a prodigious
tow-rope to a short post in the middle of the forward deck. Their
driver was a truculent, brigandish, bearded old fellow in long
boots, a blue flannel shirt, and a black sombrero. He sat upon the
middle horse, and some wild instinct of colour had made him tie a
big red handkerchief around his shoulders, so that the eye of the
beholder took delight in him. He posed like a bold, bad robber-
chief. But in point of fact I believe he was the mildest and most
inoffensive of men. We never heard him say anything except at a
distance, to his horses, and we did not inquire what that was.
Well, as I have said, we were haggling courteously over those hooks
in the cabin, when the boat gave a lurch. The bow swung out into
the stream. There was a scrambling and clattering of iron horse-
shoes on the rough shingle of the bank; and when we looked out of
doors, our house was moving up the river with the boat under it.
The Ristigouche is a noble stream, stately and swift and strong.
It rises among the dense forests in the northern part of New
Brunswick--a moist upland region, of never-failing springs and
innumerous lakes--and pours a flood of clear, cold water one
hundred and fifty miles northward and eastward through the hills
into the head of the Bay of Chaleurs. There are no falls in its
course, but rapids everywhere. It is steadfast but not impetuous,
quick but not turbulent, resolute and eager in its desire to get to
the sea, like the life of a man who has a purpose
"Too great for haste, too high for rivalry."
The wonder is where all the water comes from. But the river is fed
by more than six thousand square miles of territory. From both
sides the little brooks come dashing in with their supply. At
intervals a larger stream, reaching away back among the mountains
like a hand with many fingers to gather
"The filtered tribute of the rough woodland,"
delivers its generous offering to the main current.
The names of the chief tributaries of the Ristigouche are curious.
There is the headstrong Metapedia, and the crooked Upsalquitch, and
the Patapedia, and the Quatawamkedgwick. These are words at which
the tongue balks at first, but you soon grow used to them and learn
to take anything of five syllables with a rush, as a hunter takes a
five-barred gate, trusting to fortune that you will come down with
the accent in the right place.
For six or seven miles above Metapedia the river has a breadth of
about two hundred yards, and the valley slopes back rather gently
to the mountains on either side. There is a good deal of
cultivated land, and scattered farm-houses appear. The soil is
excellent. But it is like a pearl cast before an obstinate,
unfriendly climate. Late frosts prolong the winter. Early frosts
curtail the summer. The only safe crops are grass, oats, and
potatoes. And for half the year all the cattle must be housed and
fed to keep them alive. This lends a melancholy aspect to
agriculture. Most of the farmers look as if they had never seen
better days. With few exceptions they are what a New Englander
would call "slack-twisted and shiftless." Their barns are pervious
to the weather, and their fences fail to connect. Sleds and
ploughs rust together beside the house, and chickens scratch up the
front-door yard. In truth, the people have been somewhat
demoralised by the conflicting claims of different occupations;
hunting in the fall, lumbering in the winter and spring, and
working for the American sportsmen in the brief angling season, are
so much more attractive and offer so much larger returns of ready
money, that the tedious toil of farming is neglected. But for all
that, in the bright days of midsummer, these green fields sloping
down to the water, and pastures high up among the trees on the
hillsides, look pleasant from a distance, and give an inhabited air
to the landscape.
At the mouth of the Upsalquitch we passed the first of the fishing-
lodges. It belongs to a sage angler from Albany who saw the beauty
of the situation, years ago, and built a habitation to match it.
Since that time a number of gentlemen have bought land fronting on
good pools, and put up little cottages of a less classical style
than Charles Cotton's "Fisherman's Retreat" on the banks of the
river Dove, but better suited to this wild scenery, and more
convenient to live in. The prevailing pattern is a very simple
one; it consists of a broad piazza with a small house in the middle
of it. The house bears about the same proportion to the piazza
that the crown of a Gainsborough hat does to the brim. And the
cost of the edifice is to the cost of the land as the first price
of a share in a bankrupt railway is to the assessments which follow
the reorganisation. All the best points have been sold, and real
estate on the Ristigouche has been bid up to an absurd figure. In
fact, the river is over-populated and probably over-fished. But we
could hardly find it in our hearts to regret this, for it made the
upward trip a very sociable one. At every lodge that was open,
Favonius (who knows everybody) had a friend, and we must slip
ashore in a canoe to leave the mail and refresh the inner man.
An angler, like an Arab, regards hospitality as a religious duty.
There seems to be something in the craft which inclines the heart
to kindness and good-fellowship. Few anglers have I seen who were
not pleasant to meet, and ready to do a good turn to a fellow-
fisherman with the gift of a killing fly or the loan of a rod. Not
their own particular and well-proved favourite, of course, for that
is a treasure which no decent man would borrow; but with that
exception the best in their store is at the service of an
accredited brother. One of the Ristigouche proprietors I remember,
whose name bespoke him a descendant of Caledonia's patron saint.
He was fishing in front of his own door when we came up, with our
splashing horses, through the pool; but nothing would do but he
must up anchor and have us away with him into the house to taste
his good cheer. And there were his daughters with their books and
needlework, and the photographs which they had taken pinned up on
the wooden walls, among Japanese fans and bits of bright-coloured
stuff in which the soul of woman delights, and, in a passive,
silent way, the soul of man also. Then, after we had discussed the
year's fishing, and the mysteries of the camera, and the deep
question of what makes some negatives too thin and others too
thick, we must go out to see the big salmon which one of the ladies
had caught a few days before, and the large trout swimming about in
their cold spring. It seemed to me, as we went on our way, that
there could hardly be a more wholesome and pleasant summer-life for
well-bred young women than this, or two amusements more innocent
and sensible than photography and fly-fishing.
It must be confessed that the horse-yacht as a vehicle of travel is
not remarkable in point of speed. Three miles an hour is not a
very rapid rate of motion. But then, if you are not in a hurry,
why should you care to make haste?
The wild desire to be forever racing against old Father Time is one
of the kill-joys of modern life. That ancient traveller is sure to
beat you in the long run, and as long as you are trying to rival
him, he will make your life a burden. But if you will only
acknowledge his superiority and profess that you do not approve of
racing after all, he will settle down quietly beside you and jog
along like the most companionable of creatures. That is a pleasant
pilgrimage in which the journey itself is part of the destination.
As soon as one learns to regard the horse-yacht as a sort of moving
house, it appears admirable. There is no dust or smoke, no rumble
of wheels, or shriek of whistles. You are gliding along steadily
through an ever-green world; skirting the silent hills; passing
from one side of the river to the other when the horses have to
swim the current to find a good foothold on the bank. You are on
the water, but not at its mercy, for your craft is not disturbed by
the heaving of rude waves, and the serene inhabitants do not say "I
am sick." There is room enough to move about without falling
overboard. You may sleep, or read, or write in your cabin, or sit
upon the floating piazza in an arm-chair and smoke the pipe of
peace, while the cool breeze blows in your face and the musical
waves go singing down to the sea.
There was one feature about the boat, which commended itself very
strongly to my mind. It was possible to stand upon the forward
deck and do a little trout-fishing in motion. By watching your
chance, when the corner of a good pool was within easy reach, you
could send out a hasty line and cajole a sea-trout from his hiding-
place. It is true that the tow-ropes and the post made the back
cast a little awkward; and the wind sometimes blew the flies up on
the roof of the cabin; but then, with patience and a short line the
thing could be done. I remember a pair of good trout that rose
together just as we were going through a boiling rapid; and it
tried the strength of my split-bamboo rod to bring those fish to
the net against the current and the motion of the boat.
When nightfall approached we let go the anchor (to wit, a rope tied
to a large stone on the shore), ate our dinner "with gladness and
singleness of heart" like the early Christians, and slept the sleep
of the just, lulled by the murmuring of the waters, and defended
from the insidious attacks of the mosquito by the breeze blowing
down the river and the impregnable curtains over our beds. At
daybreak, long before Favonius and I had finished our dreams, we
were under way again; and when the trampling of the horses on some
rocky shore wakened us, we could see the steep hills gliding past
the windows and hear the rapids dashing against the side of the
boat, and it seemed as if we were still dreaming.
At Cross Point, where the river makes a long loop around a narrow
mountain, thin as a saw and crowned on its jagged edge by a rude
wooden cross, we stopped for an hour to try the fishing. It was
here that I hooked two mysterious creatures, each of which took the
fly when it was below the surface, pulled for a few moments in a
sullen way and then apparently melted into nothingness. It will
always be a source of regret to me that the nature of these fish
must remain unknown. While they were on the line it was the
general opinion that they were heavy trout; but no sooner had they
departed, than I became firmly convinced, in accordance with a
psychological law which holds good all over the world, that they
were both enormous salmon. Even the Turks have a proverb which
says, "Every fish that escapes appears larger than it is." No one
can alter that conviction, because no one can logically refute it.
Our best blessings, like our largest fish, always depart before we
have time to measure them.
The Slide Pool is in the wildest and most picturesque part of the
river, about thirty-five miles above Metapedia. The stream,
flowing swiftly down a stretch of rapids between forest-clad hills,
runs straight toward the base of an eminence so precipitous that
the trees can hardly find a foothold upon it, and seem to be
climbing up in haste on either side of the long slide which leads
to the summit. The current, barred by the wall of rock, takes a
great sweep to the right, dashing up at first in angry waves, then
falling away in oily curves and eddies, until at last it sleeps in
a black deep, apparently almost motionless, at the foot of the
hill. It was here, on the upper edge of the stream, opposite to
the slide, that we brought our floating camp to anchor for some
days. What does one do in such a watering-place?
Let us take a "specimen day." It is early morning, or to be more
precise, about eight of the clock, and the white fog is just
beginning to curl and drift away from the surface of the river.
Sooner than this it would be idle to go out. The preternaturally
early bird in his greedy haste may catch the worm; but the salmon
never take the fly until the fog has lifted; and in this the
scientific angler sees, with gratitude, a remarkable adaptation of
the laws of nature to the tastes of man. The canoes are waiting at
the front door. We step into them and push off, Favonius going up
the stream a couple of miles to the mouth of the Patapedia, and I
down, a little shorter distance, to the famous Indian House Pool.
The slim boat glides easily on the current, with a smooth buoyant
motion, quickened by the strokes of the paddles in the bow and the
stern. We pass around two curves in the river and find ourselves
at the head of the pool. Here the man in the stern drops the
anchor, just on the edge of the bar where the rapid breaks over
into the deeper water. The long rod is lifted; the fly unhooked
from the reel; a few feet of line pulled through the rings, and the
fishing begins.
First cast,--to the right, straight across the stream, about twenty
feet: the current carries the fly down with a semicircular sweep,
until it comes in line with the bow of the canoe. Second cast,--to
the left, straight across the stream, with the same motion: the
semicircle is completed, and the fly hangs quivering for a few
seconds at the lowest point of the arc. Three or four feet of line
are drawn from the reel. Third cast to the right; fourth cast to
the left. Then a little more line. And so, with widening half-
circles, the water is covered, gradually and very carefully, until
at length the angler has as much line out as his two-handed rod can
lift and swing. Then the first "drop" is finished; the man in the
stern quietly pulls up the anchor and lets the boat drift down a
few yards; the same process is repeated on the second drop; and so
on, until the end of the run is reached and the fly has passed over
all the good water. This seems like a very regular and somewhat
mechanical proceeding as one describes it, but in the performance
it is rendered intensely interesting by the knowledge that at any
moment it is liable to be interrupted.
This morning the interruption comes early. At the first cast of
the second drop, before the fly has fairly lit, a great flash of
silver darts from the waves close by the boat. Usually a salmon
takes the fly rather slowly, carrying it under water before he
seizes it in his mouth. But this one is in no mood for
deliberation. He has hooked himself with a rush, and the line goes
whirring madly from the reel as he races down the pool. Keep the
point of the rod low; he must have his own way now. Up with the
anchor quickly, and send the canoe after him, bowman and sternman
paddling with swift strokes. He has reached the deepest water; he
stops to think what has happened to him; we have passed around and
below him; and now, with the current to help us, we can begin to
reel in. Lift the point of the rod, with a strong, steady pull.
Put the force of both arms into it. The tough wood will stand the
strain. The fish must be moved; he must come to the boat if he is
ever to be landed. He gives a little and yields slowly to the
pressure. Then suddenly he gives too much, and runs straight
toward us. Reel in now as swiftly as possible, or else he will get
a slack on the line and escape. Now he stops, shakes his head from
side to side, and darts away again across the pool, leaping high
out of water. Don't touch the reel! Drop the point of the rod
quickly, for if he falls on the leader he will surely break it.
Another leap, and another! Truly he is "a merry one," and it will
go hard with us to hold him. But those great leaps have exhausted
his strength, and now he follows the rod more easily. The men push
the boat back to the shallow side of the pool until it touches
lightly on the shore. The fish comes slowly in, fighting a little
and making a few short runs; he is tired and turns slightly on his
side; but even yet he is a heavy weight on the line, and it seems a
wonder that so slight a thing as the leader can guide and draw him.
Now he is close to the boat. The boatman steps out on a rock with
his gaff. Steadily now and slowly, lift the rod, bending it
backward. A quick sure stroke of the steel! a great splash! and
the salmon is lifted upon the shore. How he flounces about on the
stones. Give him the coup de grace at once, for his own sake as
well as for ours. And now look at him, as he lies there on the
green leaves. Broad back; small head tapering to a point; clean,
shining sides with a few black spots on them; it is a fish fresh-
run from the sea, in perfect condition, and that is the reason why
he has given such good sport.
We must try for another before we go back. Again fortune favours
us, and at eleven o'clock we pole up the river to the camp with two
good salmon in the canoe. Hardly have we laid them away in the
ice-box, when Favonius comes dropping down from Patapedia with
three fish, one of them a twenty-four pounder. And so the
morning's work is done.
In the evening, after dinner, it was our custom to sit out on the
deck, watching the moonlight as it fell softly over the black hills
and changed the river into a pale flood of rolling gold. The
fragrant wreaths of smoke floated lazily away on the faint breeze
of night. There was no sound save the rushing of the water and the
crackling of the camp-fire on the shore. We talked of many things
in the heavens above, and the earth beneath, and the waters under
the earth; touching lightly here and there as the spirit of vagrant
converse led us. Favonius has the good sense to talk about himself
occasionally and tell his own experience. The man who will not do
that must always be a dull companion. Modest egoism is the salt of
conversation: you do not want too much of it; but if it is
altogether omitted, everything tastes flat. I remember well the
evening when he told me the story of the Sheep of the Wilderness.
"I was ill that summer," said he, "and the doctor had ordered me to
go into the woods, but on no account to go without plenty of fresh
meat, which was essential to my recovery. So we set out into the
wild country north of Georgian Bay, taking a live sheep with us in
order to be sure that the doctor's prescription might be faithfully
followed. It was a young and innocent little beast, curling itself
up at my feet in the canoe, and following me about on shore like a
dog. I gathered grass every day to feed it, and carried it in my
arms over the rough portages. It ate out of my hand and rubbed its
woolly head against my leggings. To my dismay, I found that I was
beginning to love it for its own sake and without any ulterior
motives. The thought of killing and eating it became more and more
painful to me, until at length the fatal fascination was complete,
and my trip became practically an exercise of devotion to that
sheep. I carried it everywhere and ministered fondly to its wants.
Not for the world would I have alluded to mutton in its presence.
And when we returned to civilisation I parted from the creature
with sincere regret and the consciousness that I had humoured my
affections at the expense of my digestion. The sheep did not give
me so much as a look of farewell, but fell to feeding on the grass
beside the farm-house with an air of placid triumph."
After hearing this touching tale, I was glad that no great intimacy
had sprung up between Favonius and the chickens which we carried in
a coop on the forecastle head, for there is no telling what
restrictions his tender-heartedness might have laid upon our
larder. But perhaps a chicken would not have given such an opening
for misplaced affection as a sheep. There is a great difference in
animals in this respect. I certainly never heard of any one
falling in love with a salmon in such a way as to regard it as a
fond companion. And this may be one reason why no sensible person
who has tried fishing has ever been able to see any cruelty in it.
Suppose the fish is not caught by an angler, what is his
alternative fate? He will either perish miserably in the struggles
of the crowded net, or die of old age and starvation like the long,
lean stragglers which are sometimes found in the shallow pools, or
be devoured by a larger fish, or torn to pieces by a seal or an
otter. Compared with any of these miserable deaths, the fate of a
salmon who is hooked in a clear stream and after a glorious fight
receives the happy despatch at the moment when he touches the
shore, is a sort of euthanasia. And, since the fish was made to be
man's food, the angler who brings him to the table of destiny in
the cleanest, quickest, kindest way is, in fact, his benefactor.
There were some days, however, when our benevolent intentions
toward the salmon were frustrated; mornings when they refused to
rise, and evenings when they escaped even the skilful endeavours of
Favonius. In vain did he try every fly in his book, from the
smallest "Silver Doctor" to the largest "Golden Eagle." The "Black
Dose" would not move them. The "Durham Ranger" covered the pool in
vain. On days like this, if a stray fish rose, it was hard to land
him, for he was usually but slightly hooked.
I remember one of these shy creatures which led me a pretty dance
at the mouth of Patapedia. He came to the fly just at dusk, rising
very softly and quietly, as if he did not really care for it but
only wanted to see what it was like. He went down at once into
deep water, and began the most dangerous and exasperating of all
salmon-tactics, moving around in slow circles and shaking his head
from side to side, with sullen pertinacity. This is called
"jigging," and unless it can be stopped, the result is fatal.
I could not stop it. That salmon was determined to jig. He knew
more than I did.
The canoe followed him down the pool. He jigged away past all
three of the inlets of the Patapedia, and at last, in the still,
deep water below, after we had laboured with him for half an hour,
and brought him near enough to see that he was immense, he calmly
opened his mouth and the fly came back to me void. That was a sad
evening, in which all the consolations of philosophy were needed.
Sunday was a very peaceful day in our camp. In the Dominion of
Canada, the question "to fish or not to fish" on the first day of
the week is not left to the frailty of the individual conscience.
The law on the subject is quite explicit, and says that between six
o'clock on Saturday evening and six o'clock on Monday morning all
nets shall be taken up and no one shall wet a line. The
Ristigouche Salmon Club has its guardians stationed all along the
river, and they are quite as inflexible in seeing that their
employers keep this law as the famous sentinel was in refusing to
let Napoleon pass without the countersign. But I do not think that
these keen sportsmen regard it as a hardship; they are quite
willing that the fish should have "an off day" in every week, and
only grumble because some of the net-owners down at the mouth of
the river have brought political influence to bear in their favour
and obtained exemption from the rule. For our part, we were
nothing loath to hang up our rods, and make the day different from
other days.
In the morning we had a service in the cabin of the boat, gathering
a little congregation of guardians and boatmen, and people from a
solitary farm-house by the river. They came in pirogues--long,
narrow boats hollowed from the trunk of a tree; the black-eyed,
brown-faced girls sitting back to back in the middle of the boat,
and the men standing up bending to their poles. It seemed a
picturesque way of travelling, although none too safe.
In the afternoon we sat on deck and looked at the water. What a
charm there is in watching a swift stream! The eye never wearies
of following its curls and eddies, the shadow of the waves dancing
over the stones, the strange, crinkling lines of sunlight in the
shallows. There is a sort of fascination in it, lulling and
soothing the mind into a quietude which is even pleasanter than
sleep, and making it almost possible to do that of which we so
often speak, but which we never quite accomplish--"think about
nothing." Out on the edge of the pool, we could see five or six
huge salmon, moving slowly from side to side, or lying motionless
like gray shadows. There was nothing to break the silence except
the thin clear whistle of the white-throated sparrow far back in
the woods. This is almost the only bird-song that one hears on the
river, unless you count the metallic "chr-r-r-r" of the kingfisher
as a song.
Every now and then one of the salmon in the pool would lazily roll
out of water, or spring high into the air and fall back with a
heavy splash. What is it that makes salmon leap? Is it pain or
pleasure? Do they do it to escape the attack of another fish, or
to shake off a parasite that clings to them, or to practise jumping
so that they can ascend the falls when they reach them, or simply
and solely out of exuberant gladness and joy of living? Any one of
these reasons would be enough to account for it on week-days. On
Sunday I am quite sure they do it for the trial of the fisherman's
faith.
But how should I tell all the little incidents which made that lazy
voyage so delightful? Favonius was the ideal host, for on water,
as well as on land, he knows how to provide for the liberty as well
as for the wants of his guests. He understands also the fine art
of conversation, which consists of silence as well as speech. And
when it comes to angling, Izaak Walton himself could not have been
a more profitable teacher by precept or example. Indeed, it is a
curious thought, and one full of sadness to a well-constituted
mind, that on the Ristigouche "I. W." would have been at sea, for
the beloved father of all fishermen passed through this world
without ever catching a salmon. So ill does fortune match with
merit here below.
At last the days of idleness were ended. We could not
"Fold our tents like the Arabs,
and as silently steal away;"
but we took down the long rods, put away the heavy reels, made the
canoes fast to the side of the house, embarked the three horses on
the front deck, and then dropped down with the current, swinging
along through the rapids, and drifting slowly through the still
places, now grounding on a hidden rock, and now sweeping around a
sharp curve, until at length we saw the roofs of Metapedia and the
ugly bridge of the railway spanning the river. There we left our
floating house, awkward and helpless, like some strange relic of
the flood, stranded on the shore. And as we climbed the bank we
looked back and wondered whether Noah was sorry when he said good-
bye to his ark.
1888.
ALPENROSEN AND GOAT'S MILK
Nay, let me tell you, there be many that have forty times our
estates, that would give the greatest part of it to be healthful
and cheerful like us; who, with the expense of a little money, have
ate, and drank, and laughed, and angled, and sung, and slept
securely; and rose next day, and cast away care, and sung, and
laughed, and angled again; which are blessings rich men cannot
purchase with all their money."--IZAAK WALTON: The Complete Angler.
A great deal of the pleasure of life lies in bringing together
things which have no connection. That is the secret of humour--at
least so we are told by the philosophers who explain the jests that
other men have made--and in regard to travel, I am quite sure that
it must be illogical in order to be entertaining. The more
contrasts it contains, the better.
Perhaps it was some philosophical reflection of this kind that
brought me to the resolution, on a certain summer day, to make a
little journey, as straight as possible, from the sea-level streets
of Venice to the lonely, lofty summit of a Tyrolese mountain,
called, for no earthly reason that I can discover, the Gross-
Venediger.
But apart from the philosophy of the matter, which I must confess
to passing over very superficially at the time, there were other
and more cogent reasons for wanting to go from Venice to the Big
Venetian. It was the first of July, and the city on the sea was
becoming tepid. A slumbrous haze brooded over canals and palaces
and churches. It was difficult to keep one's conscience awake to
Baedeker and a sense of moral obligation; Ruskin was impossible,
and a picture-gallery was a penance. We floated lazily from one
place to another, and decided that, after all, it was too warm to
go in. The cries of the gondoliers, at the canal corners, grew
more and more monotonous and dreamy. There was danger of our
falling fast asleep and having to pay by the hour for a day's
repose in a gondola. If it grew much warmer, we might be compelled
to stay until the following winter in order to recover energy
enough to get away. All the signs of the times pointed northward,
to the mountains, where we should see glaciers and snow-fields, and
pick Alpenrosen, and drink goat's milk fresh from the real goat.
I.
The first stage on the journey thither was by rail to Belluno--
about four or five hours. It is a sufficient commentary on railway
travel that the most important thing about it is to tell how many
hours it takes to get from one place to another.
We arrived in Belluno at night, and when we awoke the next morning
we found ourselves in a picturesque little city of Venetian aspect,
with a piazza and a campanile and a Palladian cathedral, surrounded
on all sides by lofty hills. We were at the end of the railway and
at the beginning of the Dolomites.
Although I have a constitutional aversion to scientific information
given by unscientific persons, such as clergymen and men of
letters, I must go in that direction far enough to make it clear
that the word Dolomite does not describe a kind of fossil, nor a
sect of heretics, but a formation of mountains lying between the
Alps and the Adriatic. Draw a diamond on the map, with Brixen at
the northwest corner, Lienz at the northeast, Belluno at the
southeast, and Trent at the southwest, and you will have included
the region of the Dolomites, a country so picturesque, so
interesting, so full of sublime and beautiful scenery, that it is
equally a wonder and a blessing that it has not been long since
completely overrun by tourists and ruined with railways. It is
true, the glaciers and snowfields are limited; the waterfalls are
comparatively few and slender, and the rivers small; the loftiest
peaks are little more than ten thousand feet high. But, on the
other hand, the mountains are always near, and therefore always
imposing. Bold, steep, fantastic masses of naked rock, they rise
suddenly from the green and flowery valleys in amazing and endless
contrast; they mirror themselves in the tiny mountain lakes like
pictures in a dream.
I believe the guide-book says that they are formed of carbonate of
lime and carbonate of magnesia in chemical composition; but even if
this be true, it need not prejudice any candid observer against
them. For the simple and fortunate fact is that they are built of
such stone that wind and weather, keen frost and melting snow and
rushing water have worn and cut and carved them into a thousand
shapes of wonder and beauty. It needs but little fancy to see in
them walls and towers, cathedrals and campaniles, fortresses and
cities, tinged with many hues from pale gray to deep red, and
shining in an air so soft, so pure, so cool, so fragrant, under a
sky so deep and blue and a sunshine so genial, that it seems like
the happy union of Switzerland and Italy.
The great highway through this region from south to north is the
Ampezzo road, which was constructed in 1830, along the valleys of
the Piave, the Boite, and the Rienz--the ancient line of travel and
commerce between Venice and Innsbruck. The road is superbly built,
smooth and level. Our carriage rolled along so easily that we
forgot and forgave its venerable appearance and its lack of
accommodation for trunks. We had been persuaded to take four
horses, as our luggage seemed too formidable for a single pair.
But in effect our concession to apparent necessity turned out to be
a mere display of superfluous luxury, for the two white leaders did
little more than show their feeble paces, leaving the gray wheelers
to do the work. We had the elevating sense of traveling four-in-
hand, however--a satisfaction to which I do not believe any human
being is altogether insensible.
At Longarone we breakfasted for the second time, and entered the
narrow gorge of the Piave. The road was cut out of the face of the
rock. Below us the long lumber-rafts went shooting down the swift
river. Above, on the right, were the jagged crests of Monte Furlon
and Premaggiore, which seemed to us very wonderful, because we had
not yet learned how jagged the Dolomites can be. At Perarolo,
where the Boite joins the Piave, there is a lump of a mountain in
the angle between the rivers, and around this we crawled in long
curves until we had risen a thousand feet, and arrived at the same
Hotel Venezia, where we were to dine.
While dinner was preparing, the Deacon and I walked up to Pieve di
Cadore, the birthplace of Titian. The house in which the great
painter first saw the colours of the world is still standing, and
tradition points out the very room in which he began to paint. I
am not one of those who would inquire too closely into such a
legend as this. The cottage may have been rebuilt a dozen times
since Titian's day; not a scrap of the original stone or plaster
may remain; but beyond a doubt the view that we saw from the window
is the same that Titian saw. Now, for the first time, I could
understand and appreciate the landscape-backgrounds of his
pictures. The compact masses of mountains, the bold, sharp forms,
the hanging rocks of cold gray emerging from green slopes, the
intense blue aerial distances--these all had seemed to be unreal
and imaginary--compositions of the studio. But now I knew that,
whether Titian painted out-of-doors, like our modern
impressionists, or not, he certainly painted what he had seen, and
painted it as it is.
The graceful brown-eyed boy who showed us the house seemed also to
belong to one of Titian's pictures. As we were going away, the
Deacon, for lack of copper, rewarded him with a little silver
piece, a half-lira, in value about ten cents. A celestial rapture
of surprise spread over the child's face, and I know not what
blessings he invoked upon us. He called his companions to rejoice
with him, and we left them clapping their hands and dancing.
Driving after one has dined has always a peculiar charm. The
motion seems pleasanter, the landscape finer than in the morning
hours. The road from Cadore ran on a high level, through sloping
pastures, white villages, and bits of larch forest. In its narrow
bed, far below, the river Boite roared as gently as Bottom's lion.
The afternoon sunlight touched the snow-capped pinnacle of Antelao
and the massive pink wall of Sorapis on the right; on the left,
across the valley, Monte Pelmo's vast head and the wild crests of
La Rochetta and Formin rose dark against the glowing sky. The
peasants lifted their hats as we passed, and gave us a pleasant
evening greeting. And so, almost without knowing it, we slipped
out of Italy into Austria, and drew up before a bare, square stone
building with the double black eagle, like a strange fowl split for
broiling, staring at us from the wall, and an inscription to the
effect that this was the Royal and Imperial Austrian Custom-house.
The officer saluted us so politely that we felt quite sorry that
his duty required him to disturb our luggage. "The law obliged him
to open one trunk; courtesy forbade him to open more." It was
quickly done; and, without having to make any contribution to the
income of His Royal and Imperial Majesty, Francis Joseph, we rolled
on our way, through the hamlets of Acqua Bona and Zuel, into the
Ampezzan metropolis of Cortina, at sundown.
The modest inn called "The Star of Gold" stood facing the public
square, just below the church, and the landlady stood facing us in
the doorway, with an enthusiastic welcome--altogether a most
friendly and entertaining landlady, whose one desire in life seemed
to be that we should never regret having chosen her house instead
of "The White Cross," or "The Black Eagle."
"O ja!" she had our telegram received; and would we look at the
rooms? Outlooking on the piazza, with a balcony from which we
could observe the Festa of to-morrow. She hoped they would please
us. "Only come in; accommodate yourselves."
It was all as she promised; three little bedrooms, and a little
salon opening on a little balcony; queer old oil-paintings and
framed embroideries and tiles hanging on the walls; spotless
curtains, and board floors so white that it would have been a shame
to eat off them without spreading a cloth to keep them from being
soiled.
"These are the rooms of the Baron Rothschild when he comes here
always in the summer--with nine horses and nine servants--the Baron
Rothschild of Vienna."
I assured her that we did not know the Baron, but that should make
no difference. We would not ask her to reduce the price on account
of a little thing like that.
She did not quite grasp this idea, but hoped that we would not find
the pension too dear at a dollar and fifty-seven and a half cents a
day each, with a little extra for the salon and the balcony. "The
English people all please themselves here--there comes many every
summer--English Bishops and their families."
I inquired whether there were many Bishops in the house at that
moment.
"No, just at present--she was very sorry--none."
"Well, then," I said, "it is all right. We will take the rooms."
Good Signora Barbaria, you did not speak the American language, nor
understand those curious perversions of thought which pass among
the Americans for humour; but you understood how to make a little
inn cheerful and home-like; yours was a very simple and agreeable
art of keeping a hotel. As we sat in the balcony after supper,
listening to the capital playing of the village orchestra, and the
Tyrolese songs with which they varied their music, we thought
within ourselves that we were fortunate to have fallen upon the
Star of Gold.
II.
Cortina lies in its valley like a white shell that has rolled down
into a broad vase of malachite. It has about a hundred houses and
seven hundred inhabitants, a large church and two small ones, a
fine stone campanile with excellent bells, and seven or eight
little inns. But it is more important than its size would signify,
for it is the capital of the district whose lawful title is
Magnifica Comunita di Ampezzo--a name conferred long ago by the
Republic of Venice. In the fifteenth century it was Venetian
territory; but in 1516, under Maximilian I., it was joined to
Austria; and it is now one of the richest and most prosperous
communes of the Tyrol. It embraces about thirty-five hundred
people, scattered in hamlets and clusters of houses through the
green basin with its four entrances, lying between the peaks of
Tofana, Cristallo, Sorapis, and Nuvolau. The well-cultivated grain
fields and meadows, the smooth alps filled with fine cattle, the
well-built houses with their white stone basements and balconies of
dark brown wood and broad overhanging roofs, all speak of industry
and thrift. But there is more than mere agricultural prosperity in
this valley. There is a fine race of men and women--intelligent,
vigorous, and with a strong sense of beauty. The outer walls of
the annex of the Hotel Aquila Nera are covered with frescoes of
marked power and originality, painted by the son of the innkeeper.
The art schools of Cortina are famous for their beautiful work in
gold and silver filigree, and wood-inlaying. There are nearly two
hundred pupils in these schools, all peasants' children, and they
produce results, especially in intarsia, which are admirable. The
village orchestra, of which I spoke a moment ago, is trained and
led by a peasant's son, who has never had a thorough musical
education. It must have at least twenty-five members, and as we
heard them at the Festa they seemed to play with extraordinary
accuracy and expression.
This Festa gave us a fine chance to see the people of the Ampezzo
all together. It was the annual jubilation of the district; and
from all the outlying hamlets and remote side valleys, even from
the neighbouring vales of Agordo and Auronzo, across the mountains,
and from Cadore, the peasants, men and women and children, had come
in to the Sagro at Cortina. The piazza--which is really nothing
more than a broadening of the road behind the church--was quite
thronged. There must have been between two and three thousand
people.
The ceremonies of the day began with general church-going. The
people here are honestly and naturally religious. I have seen so
many examples of what can only be called "sincere and unaffected
piety," that I cannot doubt it. The church, on Cortina's feast-
day, was crowded to the doors with worshippers, who gave every
evidence of taking part not only with the voice, but also with the
heart, in the worship.
Then followed the public unveiling of a tablet, on the wall of the
little Inn of the Anchor, to the memory of Giammaria Ghedini, the
founder of the art-schools of Cortina. There was music by the
band; and an oration by a native Demosthenes (who spoke in Italian
so fluent that it ran through one's senses like water through a
sluice, leaving nothing behind), and an original Canto sung by the
village choir, with a general chorus, in which they called upon the
various mountains to "re-echo the name of the beloved master John-
Mary as a model of modesty and true merit," and wound up with--
"Hurrah for John-Mary! Hurrah for his art!
Hurrah for all teachers as skilful as he!
Hurrah for us all, who have now taken part
In singing together in do . . re . . mi."
It was very primitive, and I do not suppose that the celebration
was even mentioned in the newspapers of the great world; but, after
all, has not the man who wins such a triumph as this in the hearts
of his own people, for whom he has made labour beautiful with the
charm of art, deserved better of fame than many a crowned monarch
or conquering warrior? We should be wiser if we gave less glory to
the men who have been successful in forcing their fellow-men to
die, and more glory to the men who have been successful in teaching
their fellow-men how to live.
But the Festa of Cortina did not remain all day on this high moral
plane. In the afternoon came what our landlady called "allerlei
Dummheiten." There was a grand lottery for the benefit of the
Volunteer Fire Department. The high officials sat up in a green
wooden booth in the middle of the square, and called out the
numbers and distributed the prizes. Then there was a greased pole
with various articles of an attractive character tied to a large
hoop at the top--silk aprons, and a green jacket, and bottles of
wine, and half a smoked pig, and a coil of rope, and a purse.
The gallant firemen voluntarily climbed up the pole as far as
they could, one after another, and then involuntarily slid down
again exhausted, each one wiping off a little more of the grease,
until at last the lucky one came who profited by his forerunners'
labours, and struggled to the top to snatch the smoked pig.
After that it was easy.
Such is success in this unequal world; the man who wipes off the
grease seldom gets the prize.
Then followed various games, with tubs of water; and coins fastened
to the bottom of a huge black frying-pan, to be plucked off with
the lips; and pots of flour to be broken with sticks; so that the
young lads of the village were ducked and blackened and powdered to
an unlimited extent, amid the hilarious applause of the spectators.
In the evening there was more music, and the peasants danced in the
square, the women quietly and rather heavily, but the men with
amazing agility, slapping the soles of their shoes with their
hands, or turning cartwheels in front of their partners. At dark
the festivities closed with a display of fireworks; there were
rockets and bombs and pin-wheels; and the boys had tiny red and
blue lights which they held until their fingers were burned, just
as boys do in America; and there was a general hush of wonder as a
particularly brilliant rocket swished into the dark sky; and when
it burst into a rain of serpents, the crowd breathed out its
delight in a long-drawn "Ah-h-h-h!" just as the crowd does
everywhere. We might easily have imagined ourselves at a Fourth of
July celebration in Vermont, if it had not been for the costumes.
The men of the Ampezzo Valley have kept but little that is peculiar
in their dress. Men are naturally more progressive than women, and
therefore less picturesque. The tide of fashion has swept them
into the international monotony of coat and vest and trousers--
pretty much the same, and equally ugly, all over the world. Now
and then you may see a short jacket with silver buttons, or a pair
of knee-breeches; and almost all the youths wear a bunch of
feathers or a tuft of chamois' hair in their soft green hats. But
the women of the Ampezzo--strong, comely, with golden brown
complexions, and often noble faces--are not ashamed to dress as
their grandmothers did. They wear a little round black felt hat
with rolled rim and two long ribbons hanging down at the back.
Their hair is carefully braided and coiled, and stuck through and
through with great silver pins. A black bodice, fastened with
silver clasps, is covered in front with the ends of a brilliant
silk kerchief, laid in many folds around the shoulders. The white
shirt-sleeves are very full and fastened up above the elbow with
coloured ribbon. If the weather is cool, the women wear a short
black jacket, with satin yoke and high puffed sleeves. But,
whatever the weather may be, they make no change in the large, full
dark skirts, almost completely covered with immense silk aprons, by
preference light blue. It is not a remarkably brilliant dress,
compared with that which one may still see in some districts of
Norway or Sweden, but upon the whole it suits the women of the
Ampezzo wonderfully.
For my part, I think that when a woman has found a dress that
becomes her, it is a waste of time to send to Paris for a fashion-
plate.
III.
When the excitement of the Festa had subsided, we were free to
abandon ourselves to the excursions in which the neighbourhood of
Cortina abounds, and to which the guide-book earnestly calls every
right-minded traveller. A walk through the light-green shadows of
the larch-woods to the tiny lake of Ghedina, where we could see all
the four dozen trout swimming about in the clear water and catching
flies; a drive to the Belvedere, where there are superficial
refreshments above and profound grottos below; these were trifles,
though we enjoyed them. But the great mountains encircling us on
every side, standing out in clear view with that distinctness and
completeness of vision which is one charm of the Dolomites, seemed
to summon us to more arduous enterprises. Accordingly, the Deacon
and I selected the easiest one, engaged a guide, and prepared for
the ascent.
Monte Nuvolau is not a perilous mountain. I am quite sure that at
my present time of life I should be unwilling to ascend a perilous
mountain unless there were something extraordinarily desirable at
the top, or remarkably disagreeable at the bottom. Mere risk has
lost the attractions which it once had. As the father of a family
I felt bound to abstain from going for amusement into any place
which a Christian lady might not visit with propriety and safety.
Our preparation for Nuvolau, therefore, did not consist of ropes,
ice-irons, and axes, but simply of a lunch and two long sticks.
Our way led us, in the early morning, through the clustering houses
of Lacedel, up the broad, green slope that faces Cortina on the
west, to the beautiful Alp Pocol. Nothing could exceed the
pleasure of such a walk in the cool of the day, while the dew still
lies on the short, rich grass, and the myriads of flowers are at
their brightest and sweetest. The infinite variety and abundance
of the blossoms is a continual wonder. They are sown more thickly
than the stars in heaven, and the rainbow itself does not show so
many tints. Here they are mingled like the threads of some strange
embroidery; and there again nature has massed her colours; so that
one spot will be all pale blue with innumerable forget-me-nots, or
dark blue with gentians; another will blush with the delicate pink
of the Santa Lucia or the deeper red of the clover; and another
will shine yellow as cloth of gold. Over all this opulence of
bloom the larks were soaring and singing. I never heard so many as
in the meadows about Cortina. There was always a sweet spray of
music sprinkling down out of the sky, where the singers poised
unseen. It was like walking through a shower of melody.
From the Alp Pocol, which is simply a fair, lofty pasture, we had
our first full view of Nuvolau, rising bare and strong, like a huge
bastion, from the dark fir-woods. Through these our way led onward
now for seven miles, with but a slight ascent. Then turning off to
the left we began to climb sharply through the forest. There we
found abundance of the lovely Alpenrosen, which do not bloom on the
lower ground. Their colour is a deep, glowing pink, and when a
Tyrolese girl gives you one of these flowers to stick in the band
of your hat, you may know that you have found favour in her eyes.
Through the wood the cuckoo was calling--the bird which reverses
the law of good children, and insists on being heard, but not seen.
When the forest was at an end we found ourselves at the foot of an
alp which sloped steeply up to the Five Towers of Averau. The
effect of these enormous masses of rock, standing out in lonely
grandeur, like the ruins of some forsaken habitation of giants, was
tremendous. Seen from far below in the valley their form was
picturesque and striking; but as we sat beside the clear, cold
spring which gushes out at the foot of the largest tower, the
Titanic rocks seemed to hang in the air above us as if they would
overawe us into a sense of their majesty. We felt it to the full;
yet none the less, but rather the more, could we feel at the same
time the delicate and ethereal beauty of the fringed gentianella
and the pale Alpine lilies scattered on the short turf beside us.
We had now been on foot about three hours and a half. The half
hour that remained was the hardest. Up over loose, broken stones
that rolled beneath our feet, up over great slopes of rough rock,
up across little fields of snow where we paused to celebrate the
Fourth of July with a brief snowball fight, up along a narrowing
ridge with a precipice on either hand, and so at last to the
summit, 8600 feet above the sea.
It is not a great height, but it is a noble situation. For Nuvolau
is fortunately placed in the very centre of the Dolomites, and so
commands a finer view than many a higher mountain. Indeed, it is
not from the highest peaks, according to my experience, that one
gets the grandest prospects, but rather from those of middle
height, which are so isolated as to give a wide circle of vision,
and from which one can see both the valleys and the summits. Monte
Rosa itself gives a less imposing view than the Gorner Grat.
It is possible, in this world, to climb too high for pleasure.
But what a panorama Nuvolau gave us on that clear, radiant summer
morning--a perfect circle of splendid sight! On one side we looked
down upon the Five Towers; on the other, a thousand feet below, the
Alps, dotted with the huts of the herdsmen, sloped down into the
deep-cut vale of Agordo. Opposite to us was the enormous mass of
Tofana, a pile of gray and pink and saffron rock. When we turned
the other way, we faced a group of mountains as ragged as the
crests of a line of fir-trees, and behind them loomed the solemn
head of Pelmo. Across the broad vale of the Boite, Antelao stood
beside Sorapis, like a campanile beside a cathedral, and Cristallo
towered above the green pass of the Three Crosses. Through that
opening we could see the bristling peaks of the Sextenthal.
Sweeping around in a wider circle from that point, we saw, beyond
the Durrenstein, the snow-covered pile of the Gross-Glockner; the
crimson bastions of the Rothwand appeared to the north, behind
Tofana; then the white slopes that hang far away above the
Zillerthal; and, nearer, the Geislerspitze, like five fingers
thrust into the air; behind that, the distant Oetzthaler Mountain,
and just a single white glimpse of the highest peak of the Ortler
by the Engadine; nearer still we saw the vast fortress of the Sella
group and the red combs of the Rosengarten; Monte Marmolata, the
Queen of the Dolomites, stood before us revealed from base to peak
in a bridal dress of snow; and southward we looked into the dark
rugged face of La Civetta, rising sheer out of the vale of Agordo,
where the Lake of Alleghe slept unseen. It was a sea of mountains,
tossed around us into a myriad of motionless waves, and with a
rainbow of colours spread among their hollows and across their
crests. The cliffs of rose and orange and silver gray, the valleys
of deepest green, the distant shadows of purple and melting blue,
and the dazzling white of the scattered snow-fields seemed to shift
and vary like the hues on the inside of a shell. And over all,
from peak to peak, the light, feathery clouds went drifting lazily
and slowly, as if they could not leave a scene so fair.
There is barely room on the top of Nuvolau for the stone shelter-
hut which a grateful Saxon baron has built there as a sort of
votive offering for the recovery of his health among the mountains.
As we sat within and ate our frugal lunch, we were glad that he had
recovered his health, and glad that he had built the hut, and glad
that we had come to it. In fact, we could almost sympathise in our
cold, matter-of-fact American way with the sentimental German
inscription which we read on the wall:--
Von Nuvolau's hohen Wolkenstufen
Lass mich, Natur, durch deine Himmel rufen--
An deiner Brust gesunde, wer da krank!
So wird zum Volkerdank mein Sachsendank.
We refrained, however, from shouting anything through Nature's
heaven, but went lightly down, in about three hours, to supper in
the Star of Gold.
IV.
When a stern necessity forces one to leave Cortina, there are
several ways of departure. We selected the main highway for our
trunks, but for ourselves the Pass of the Three Crosses; the Deacon
and the Deaconess in a mountain waggon, and I on foot. It should
be written as an axiom in the philosophy of travel that the easiest
way is best for your luggage, and the hardest way is best for
yourself.
All along the rough road up to the Pass, we had a glorious outlook
backward over the Val d' Ampezzo, and when we came to the top, we
looked deep down into the narrow Val Buona behind Sorapis. I do
not know just when we passed the Austrian border, but when we came
to Lake Misurina we found ourselves in Italy again. My friends
went on down the valley to Landro, but I in my weakness, having
eaten of the trout of the lake for dinner, could not resist the
temptation of staying over-night to catch one for breakfast.
It was a pleasant failure. The lake was beautiful, lying on top of
the mountain like a bit of blue sky, surrounded by the peaks of
Cristallo, Cadino, and the Drei Zinnen. It was a happiness to
float on such celestial waters and cast the hopeful fly. The trout
were there; they were large; I saw them; they also saw me; but,
alas! I could not raise them. Misurina is, in fact, what the
Scotch call "a dour loch," one of those places which are outwardly
beautiful, but inwardly so demoralised that the trout will not
rise.
When we came ashore in the evening, the boatman consoled me with
the story of a French count who had spent two weeks there fishing,
and only caught one fish. I had some thoughts of staying thirteen
days longer, to rival the count, but concluded to go on the next
morning, over Monte Pian and the Cat's Ladder to Landro.
The view from Monte Pian is far less extensive than that from
Nuvolau; but it has the advantage of being very near the wild
jumble of the Sexten Dolomites. The Three Shoemakers and a lot
more of sharp and ragged fellows are close by, on the east; on the
west, Cristallo shows its fine little glacier, and Rothwand its
crimson cliffs; and southward Misurina gives to the view a glimpse
of water, without which, indeed, no view is complete. Moreover,
the mountain has the merit of being, as its name implies, quite
gentle. I met the Deacon and the Deaconess at the top, they having
walked up from Landro. And so we crossed the boundary line
together again, seven thousand feet above the sea, from Italy into
Austria. There was no custom-house.
The way down, by the Cat's Ladder, I travelled alone. The path was
very steep and little worn, but even on the mountain-side there was
no danger of losing it, for it had been blazed here and there, on
trees and stones, with a dash of blue paint. This is the work of
the invaluable DOAV--which is, being interpreted, the German-
Austrian Alpine Club. The more one travels in the mountains, the
more one learns to venerate this beneficent society, for the
shelter-huts and guide-posts it has erected, and the paths it has
made and marked distinctly with various colours. The Germans have
a genius for thoroughness. My little brown guide-book, for
example, not only informed me through whose back yard I must go to
get into a certain path, but it told me that in such and such a
spot I should find quite a good deal (ziemlichviel) of Edelweiss,
and in another a small echo; it advised me in one valley to take
provisions and dispense with a guide, and in another to take a
guide and dispense with provisions, adding varied information in
regard to beer, which in my case was useless, for I could not touch
it. To go astray under such auspices would be worse than
inexcusable.
Landro we found a very different place from Cortina. Instead of
having a large church and a number of small hotels, it consists
entirely of one large hotel and a very tiny church. It does not
lie in a broad, open basin, but in a narrow valley, shut in closely
by the mountains. The hotel, in spite of its size, is excellent,
and a few steps up the valley is one of the finest views in the
Dolomites. To the east opens a deep, wild gorge, at the head of
which the pinnacles of the Drei Zinnen are seen; to the south the
Durrensee fills the valley from edge to edge, and reflects in its
pale waters the huge bulk of Monte Cristallo. It is such a
complete picture, so finished, so compact, so balanced, that one
might think a painter had composed it in a moment of inspiration.
But no painter ever laid such colours on his canvas as those which
are seen here when the cool evening shadows have settled upon the
valley, all gray and green, while the mountains shine above in rosy
Alpenglow, as if transfigured with inward fire.
There is another lake, about three miles north of Landro, called
the Toblacher See, and there I repaired the defeat of Misurina.
The trout at the outlet, by the bridge, were very small, and while
the old fisherman was endeavouring to catch some of them in his new
net, which would not work, I pushed my boat up to the head of the
lake, where the stream came in. The green water was amazingly
clear, but the current kept the fish with their heads up stream; so
that one could come up behind them near enough for a long cast,
without being seen. As my fly lighted above them and came gently
down with the ripple, I saw the first fish turn and rise and take
it. A motion of the wrist hooked him, and he played just as gamely
as a trout in my favourite Long Island pond. How different the
colour, though, as he came out of the water. This fellow was all
silvery, with light pink spots on his sides. I took seven of his
companions, in weight some four pounds, and then stopped because
the evening light was failing.
How pleasant it is to fish in such a place and at such an hour!
The novelty of the scene, the grandeur of the landscape, lend a
strange charm to the sport. But the sport itself is so familiar
that one feels at home--the motion of the rod, the feathery swish
of the line, the sight of the rising fish--it all brings back a
hundred woodland memories, and thoughts of good fishing comrades,
some far away across the sea, and, perhaps, even now sitting around
the forest camp-fire in Maine or Canada, and some with whom we
shall keep company no more until we cross the greater ocean into
that happy country whither they have preceded us.
V.
Instead of going straight down the valley by the high road, a drive
of an hour, to the railway in the Pusterthal, I walked up over the
mountains to the east, across the Platzwiesen, and so down through
the Pragserthal. In one arm of the deep fir-clad vale are the
Baths of Alt-Prags, famous for having cured the Countess of Gorz of
a violent rheumatism in the fifteenth century. It is an antiquated
establishment, and the guests, who were walking about in the fields
or drinking their coffee in the balcony, had a fifteenth century
look about them--venerable but slightly ruinous. But perhaps that
was merely a rheumatic result.
All the waggons in the place were engaged. It is strange what an
aggravating effect this state of affairs has upon a pedestrian who
is bent upon riding. I did not recover my delight in the scenery
until I had walked about five miles farther, and sat down on the
grass, beside a beautiful spring, to eat my lunch.
What is there in a little physical rest that has such magic to
restore the sense of pleasure? A few moments ago nothing pleased
you--the bloom was gone from the peach; but now it has come back
again--you wonder and admire. Thus cheerful and contented I
trudged up the right arm of the valley to the Baths of Neu-Prags,
less venerable, but apparently more popular than Alt-Prags, and on
beyond them, through the woods, to the superb Pragser-Wildsee, a
lake whose still waters, now blue as sapphire under the clear sky,
and now green as emerald under gray clouds, sleep encircled by
mighty precipices. Could anything be a greater contrast with
Venice? There the canals alive with gondolas, and the open harbour
bright with many-coloured sails; here, the hidden lake, silent and
lifeless, save when
"A leaping fish
Sends through the tarn a lonely cheer."
Tired, and a little foot-sore, after nine hours' walking, I came
into the big railway hotel at Toblach that night. There I met my
friends again, and parted from them and the Dolomites the next day,
with regret. For they were "stepping westward;" but in order to
get to the Gross-Venediger I must make a detour to the east,
through the Pusterthal, and come up through the valley of the Isel
to the great chain of mountains called the Hohe Tauern.
At the junction of the Isel and the Drau lies the quaint little
city of Lienz, with its two castles--the square, double-towered one
in the town, now transformed into the offices of the municipality,
and the huge mediaeval one on a hill outside, now used as a damp
restaurant and dismal beer-cellar. I lingered at Lienz for a
couple of days, in the ancient hostelry of the Post. The hallways
were vaulted like a cloister, the walls were three feet thick, the
kitchen was in the middle of the house on the second floor, so that
I looked into it every time I came from my room, and ordered dinner
direct from the cook. But, so far from being displeased with these
peculiarities, I rather liked the flavour of them; and then, in
addition, the landlady's daughter, who was managing the house, was
a person of most engaging manners, and there was trout and grayling
fishing in a stream near by, and the neighbouring church of Dolsach
contained the beautiful picture of the Holy Family, which Franz
Defregger painted for his native village.
The peasant women of Lienz have one very striking feature in their
dress--a black felt hat with a broad, stiff brim and a high crown,
smaller at the top than at the base. It looks a little like the
traditional head-gear of the Pilgrim Fathers, exaggerated. There
is a solemnity about it which is fatal to feminine beauty.
I went by the post-waggon, with two slow horses and ten passengers,
fifteen miles up the Iselthal, to Windisch-Matrei, a village whose
early history is lost in the mist of antiquity, and whose streets
are pervaded with odours which must have originated at the same
time with the village. One wishes that they also might have shared
the fate of its early history. But it is not fair to expect too
much of a small place, and Windisch-Matrei has certainly a
beautiful situation and a good inn. There I took my guide--a wiry
and companionable little man, whose occupation in the lower world
was that of a maker and merchant of hats--and set out for the
Pragerhutte, a shelter on the side of the Gross-Venediger.
The path led under the walls of the old Castle of Weissenstein, and
then in steep curves up the cliff which blocks the head of the
valley, and along a cut in the face of the rock, into the steep,
narrow Tauernthal, which divides the Glockner group from the
Venediger. How entirely different it was from the region of the
Dolomites! There the variety of colour was endless and the change
incessant; here it was all green grass and trees and black rocks,
with glimpses of snow. There the highest mountains were in sight
constantly; here they could only be seen from certain points in the
valley. There the streams played but a small part in the
landscape; here they were prominent, the main river raging and
foaming through the gorge below, while a score of waterfalls leaped
from the cliffs on either side and dashed down to join it.
The peasants, men, women and children, were cutting the grass in
the perpendicular fields; the woodmen were trimming and felling the
trees in the fir-forests; the cattle-tenders were driving their
cows along the stony path, or herding them far up on the hillsides.
It was a lonely scene, and yet a busy one; and all along the road
was written the history of the perils and hardships of the life
which now seemed so peaceful and picturesque under the summer
sunlight.
These heavy crosses, each covered with a narrow, pointed roof and
decorated with a rude picture, standing beside the path, or on the
bridge, or near the mill--what do they mean? They mark the place
where a human life has been lost, or where some poor peasant has
been delivered from a great peril, and has set up a memorial of his
gratitude.
Stop, traveller, as you pass by, and look at the pictures. They
have little more of art than a child's drawing on a slate; but they
will teach you what it means to earn a living in these mountains.
They tell of the danger that lurks on the steep slopes of grass,
where the mowers have to go down with ropes around their waists,
and in the beds of the streams where the floods sweep through in
the spring, and in the forests where the great trees fall and crush
men like flies, and on the icy bridges where a slip is fatal, and
on the high passes where the winter snowstorm blinds the eyes and
benumbs the limbs of the traveller, and under the cliffs from which
avalanches slide and rocks roll. They show you men and women
falling from waggons, and swept away by waters, and overwhelmed in
land-slips. In the corner of the picture you may see a peasant
with the black cross above his head--that means death. Or perhaps
it is deliverance that the tablet commemorates--and then you will
see the miller kneeling beside his mill with a flood rushing down
upon it, or a peasant kneeling in his harvest-field under an
inky-black cloud, or a landlord beside his inn in flames, or a
mother praying beside her sick children; and above appears an
angel, or a saint, or the Virgin with her Child.
Read the inscriptions, too, in their quaint German. Some of them
are as humourous as the epitaphs in New England graveyards. I
remember one which ran like this:
Here lies Elias Queer,
Killed in his sixtieth year;
Scarce had he seen the light of day
When a waggon-wheel crushed his life away.
And there is another famous one which says:
Here perished the honoured and virtuous maiden,
G.V.
This tablet was erected by her only son.
But for the most part a glance at these Marterl und Taferl, which
are so frequent on all the mountain-roads of the Tyrol, will give
you a strange sense of the real pathos of human life. If you are a
Catholic, you will not refuse their request to say a prayer for the
departed; if you are a Protestant, at least it will not hurt you to
say one for those who still live and suffer and toil among such
dangers.
After we had walked for four hours up the Tauernthal, we came to
the Matreier-Tauernhaus, an inn which is kept open all the year for
the shelter of travellers over the high pass that crosses the
mountain-range at this point, from north to south. There we dined.
It was a bare, rude place, but the dish of juicy trout was
garnished with flowers, each fish holding a big pansy in its mouth,
and as the maid set them down before me she wished me "a good
appetite," with the hearty old-fashioned Tyrolese courtesy which
still survives in these remote valleys. It is pleasant to travel
in a land where the manners are plain and good. If you meet a
peasant on the road he says, "God greet you!" if you give a child a
couple of kreuzers he folds his hands and says, "God reward you!"
and the maid who lights you to bed says, "Goodnight, I hope you
will sleep well!"
Two hours more of walking brought us through Ausser-gschloss and
Inner-gschloss, two groups of herdsmen's huts, tenanted only in
summer, at the head of the Tauernthal. Midway between them lies a
little chapel, cut into the solid rock for shelter from the
avalanches. This lofty vale is indeed rightly named; for it is
shut off from the rest of the world. The portal is a cliff down
which the stream rushes in foam and thunder. On either hand rises
a mountain wall. Within, the pasture is fresh and green, sprinkled
with Alpine roses, and the pale river flows swiftly down between
the rows of dark wooden houses. At the head of the vale towers the
Gross-Venediger, with its glaciers and snow-fields dazzling white
against the deep blue heaven. The murmur of the stream and the
tinkle of the cow-bells and the jodelling of the herdsmen far up
the slopes, make the music for the scene.
The path from Gschloss leads straight up to the foot of the dark
pyramid of the Kesselkopf, and then in steep endless zig-zags along
the edge of the great glacier. I saw, at first, the pinnacles of
ice far above me, breaking over the face of the rock; then, after
an hour's breathless climbing, I could look right into the blue
crevasses; and at last, after another hour over soft snow-fields
and broken rocks, I was at the Pragerhut, perched on the shoulder
of the mountain, looking down upon the huge river of ice.
It was a magnificent view under the clear light of evening. Here
in front of us, the Venediger with all his brother-mountains
clustered about him; behind us, across the Tauern, the mighty chain
of the Glockner against the eastern sky.
This is the frozen world. Here the Winter, driven back into his
stronghold, makes his last stand against the Summer, in perpetual
conflict, retreating by day to the mountain-peak, but creeping back
at night in frost and snow to regain a little of his lost
territory, until at last the Summer is wearied out, and the Winter
sweeps down again to claim the whole valley for his own.
VI.
In the Pragerhut I found mountain comfort. There were bunks along
the wall of the guest-room, with plenty of blankets. There was
good store of eggs, canned meats, and nourishing black bread. The
friendly goats came bleating up to the door at nightfall to be
milked. And in charge of all this luxury there was a cheerful
peasant-wife with her brown-eyed daughter, to entertain travellers.
It was a pleasant sight to see them, as they sat down to their
supper with my guide; all three bowed their heads and said their
"grace before meat," the guide repeating the longer prayer and the
mother and daughter coming in with the responses. I went to bed
with a warm and comfortable feeling about my heart. It was a good
ending for the day. In the morning, if the weather remained clear,
the alarm-clock was to wake us at three for the ascent to the
summit.
But can it be three o'clock already. The gibbous moon still hangs
in the sky and casts a feeble light over the scene. Then up and
away for the final climb. How rough the path is among the black
rocks along the ridge! Now we strike out on the gently rising
glacier, across the crust of snow, picking our way among the
crevasses, with the rope tied about our waists for fear of a fall.
How cold it is! But now the gray light of morning dawns, and now
the beams of sunrise shoot up behind the Glockner, and now the sun
itself glitters into sight. The snow grows softer as we toil up
the steep, narrow comb between the Gross-Venediger and his
neighbour the Klein-Venediger. At last we have reached our
journey's end. See, the whole of the Tyrol is spread out before us
in wondrous splendour, as we stand on this snowy ridge; and at our
feet the Schlatten glacier, like a long, white snake, curls down
into the valley.
There is still a little peak above us; an overhanging horn of snow
which the wind has built against the mountain-top. I would like to
stand there, just for a moment. The guide protests it would be
dangerous, for if the snow should break it would be a fall of a
thousand feet to the glacier on the northern side. But let us dare
the few steps upward. How our feet sink! Is the snow slipping?
Look at the glacier! What is happening? It is wrinkling and
curling backward on us, serpent-like. Its head rises far above us.
All its icy crests are clashing together like the ringing of a
thousand bells. We are falling! I fling out my arm to grasp the
guide--and awake to find myself clutching a pillow in the bunk.
The alarm-clock is ringing fiercely for three o'clock. A driving
snow-storm is beating against the window. The ground is white.
Peer through the clouds as I may, I cannot even catch a glimpse of
the vanished Gross-Venediger.
1892.
AU LARGE
Wherever we strayed, the same tranquil leisure enfolded us; day
followed day in an order unbroken and peaceful as the unfolding of
the flowers and the silent march of the stars. Time no longer ran
like the few sands in a delicate hour-glass held by a fragile human
hand, but like a majestic river fed by fathomless seas. . . . We
gave ourselves up to the sweetness of that unmeasured life, without
thought of yesterday or to-morrow; we drank the cup to-day held to
our lips, and knew that so long as we were athirst that draught
would not be denied us." --HAMILTON W. MABIE: Under the Trees.
There is magic in words, surely, and many a treasure besides Ali
Baba's is unlocked with a verbal key. Some charm in the mere
sound, some association with the pleasant past, touches a secret
spring. The bars are down; the gate open; you are made free of all
the fields of memory and fancy--by a word.
Au large! Envoyez au large! is the cry of the Canadian voyageurs as
they thrust their paddles against the shore and push out on the
broad lake for a journey through the wilderness. Au large! is what
the man in the bow shouts to the man in the stern when the birch
canoe is running down the rapids, and the water grows too broken,
and the rocks too thick, along the river-bank. Then the frail bark
must be driven out into the very centre of the wild current, into
the midst of danger to find safety, dashing, like a frightened
colt, along the smooth, sloping lane bordered by white fences of
foam.
Au large! When I hear that word, I hear also the crisp waves
breaking on pebbly beaches, and the big wind rushing through
innumerable trees, and the roar of headlong rivers leaping down the
rocks, I see long reaches of water sparkling in the sun, or
sleeping still between evergreen walls beneath a cloudy sky; and
the gleam of white tents on the shore; and the glow of firelight
dancing through the woods. I smell the delicate vanishing perfume
of forest flowers; and the incense of rolls of birch-bark,
crinkling and flaring in the camp-fire; and the soothing odour of
balsam-boughs piled deep for woodland beds--the veritable and only
genuine perfume of the land of Nod. The thin shining veil of the
Northern lights waves and fades and brightens over the night sky;
at the sound of the word, as at the ringing of a bell, the curtain
rises. Scene, the Forest of Arden; enter a party of hunters.
It was in the Lake St. John country, two hundred miles north of
Quebec, that I first heard my rustic incantation; and it seemed to
fit the region as if it had been made for it. This is not a little
pocket wilderness like the Adirondacks, but something vast and
primitive. You do not cross it, from one railroad to another, by a
line of hotels. You go into it by one river as far as you like, or
dare; and then you turn and come back again by another river,
making haste to get out before your provisions are exhausted. The
lake itself is the cradle of the mighty Saguenay: an inland sea,
thirty miles across and nearly round, lying in the broad limestone
basin north of the Laurentian Mountains. The southern and eastern
shores have been settled for twenty or thirty years; and the rich
farm-land yields abundant crops of wheat and oats and potatoes to a
community of industrious habitants, who live in little modern
villages, named after the saints and gathered as closely as
possible around big gray stone churches, and thank the good Lord
that he has given them a climate at least four or five degrees
milder than Quebec. A railroad, built through a region of granite
hills, which will never be tamed to the plough, links this outlying
settlement to the civilised world; and at the end of the railroad
the Hotel Roberval, standing on a hill above the lake, offers to
the pampered tourist electric lights, and spring-beds, and a wide
veranda from which he can look out across the water into the face
of the wilderness.
Northward and westward the interminable forest rolls away to the
shores of Hudson's Bay and the frozen wastes of Labrador. It is an
immense solitude. A score of rivers empty into the lake; little
ones like the Pikouabi and La Pipe, and middle-sized ones like the
Ouiatehouan and La Belle Riviere, and big ones like the Mistassini
and the Peribonca; and each of these streams is the clue to a
labyrinth of woods and waters. The canoe-man who follows it far
enough will find himself among lakes that are not named on any map;
he will camp on virgin ground, and make the acquaintance of
unsophisticated fish; perhaps even, like the maiden in the fairy-
tale, he will meet with the little bear, and the middle-sized bear,
and the great big bear.
Damon and I set out on such an expedition shortly after the nodding
lilies in the Connecticut meadows had rung the noon-tide bell of
summer, and when the raspberry bushes along the line of the Quebec
and Lake St. John Railway had spread their afternoon collation for
birds and men. At Roberval we found our four guides waiting for
us, and the steamboat took us all across the lake to the Island
House, at the northeast corner. There we embarked our tents and
blankets, our pots and pans, and bags of flour and potatoes and
bacon and other delicacies, our rods and guns, and last, but not
least, our axes (without which man in the woods is a helpless
creature), in two birch-bark canoes, and went flying down the
Grande Decharge.
It is a wonderful place, this outlet of Lake St. John. All the
floods of twenty rivers are gathered here, and break forth through
a net of islands in a double stream, divided by the broad Ile
d'Alma, into the Grande Decharge and the Petite Decharge. The
southern outlet is small, and flows somewhat more quietly at first.
But the northern outlet is a huge confluence and tumult of waters.
You see the set of the tide far out in the lake, sliding, driving,
crowding, hurrying in with smooth currents and swirling eddies,
toward the corner of escape. By the rocky cove where the Island
House peers out through the fir-trees, the current already has a
perceptible slope. It begins to boil over hidden stones in the
middle, and gurgles at projecting points of rock. A mile farther
down there is an islet where the stream quickens, chafes, and
breaks into a rapid. Behind the islet it drops down in three or
four foaming steps. On the outside it makes one long, straight
rush into a line of white-crested standing waves.
As we approached, the steersman in the first canoe stood up to look
over the course. The sea was high. Was it too high? The canoes
were heavily loaded. Could they leap the waves? There was a quick
talk among the guides as we slipped along, undecided which way to
turn. Then the question seemed to settle itself, as most of these
woodland questions do, as if some silent force of Nature had the
casting-vote. "Sautez, sautez!" cried Ferdinand, "envoyez au
large!" In a moment we were sliding down the smooth back of the
rapid, directly toward the first big wave. The rocky shore went by
us like a dream; we could feel the motion of the earth whirling
around with us. The crest of the billow in front curled above the
bow of the canoe. "Arret', arret', doucement!" A swift stroke of
the paddle checked the canoe, quivering and prancing like a horse
suddenly reined in. The wave ahead, as if surprised, sank and
flattened for a second. The canoe leaped through the edge of it,
swerved to one side, and ran gayly down along the fringe of the
line of billows, into quieter water.
Every one feels the exhilaration of such a descent. I know a lady
who almost cried with fright when she went down her first rapid,
but before the voyage was ended she was saying:--
"Count that day lost whose low, descending sun
Sees no fall leaped, no foaming rapid run."
It takes a touch of danger to bring out the joy of life.
Our guides began to shout, and joke each other, and praise their
canoes.
"You grazed that villain rock at the corner," said Jean; "didn't
you know where it was?"
"Yes, after I touched it," cried Ferdinand; "but you took in a
bucket of water, and I suppose your m'sieu' is sitting on a piece
of the river. Is it not?"
This seemed to us all a very merry jest, and we laughed with the
same inextinguishable laughter which a practical joke, according to
Homer, always used to raise in Olympus. It is one of the charms of
life in the woods that it brings back the high spirits of boyhood
and renews the youth of the world. Plain fun, like plain food,
tastes good out-of-doors. Nectar is the sweet sap of a maple-tree.
Ambrosia is only another name for well-turned flapjacks. And all
the immortals, sitting around the table of golden cedar-slabs, make
merry when the clumsy Hephaistos, playing the part of Hebe,
stumbles over a root and upsets the plate of cakes into the fire.
The first little rapid of the Grande Decharge was only the
beginning. Half a mile below we could see the river disappear
between two points of rock. There was a roar of conflict, and a
golden mist hanging in the air, like the smoke of battle. All
along the place where the river sank from sight, dazzling heads of
foam were flashing up and falling back, as if a horde of water-
sprites were vainly trying to fight their way up to the lake. It
was the top of the grande chute, a wild succession of falls and
pools where no boat could live for a moment. We ran down toward it
as far as the water served, and then turned off among the rocks on
the left hand, to take the portage.
These portages are among the troublesome delights of a journey in
the wilderness. To the guides they mean hard work, for everything,
including the boats, must be carried on their backs. The march of
the canoes on dry land is a curious sight. Andrew Marvell
described it two hundred years ago when he was poetizing beside the
little river Wharfe in Yorkshire:--
"And now the salmon-fishers moist
Their leathern boats begin to hoist,
And like antipodes in shoes
Have shod their heads in their canoes.
How tortoise-like, but none so slow,
These rational amphibii go!"
But the sportsman carries nothing, except perhaps his gun, or his
rod, or his photographic camera; and so for him the portage is only
a pleasant opportunity to stretch his legs, cramped by sitting in
the canoe, and to renew his acquaintance with the pretty things
that are in the woods.
We sauntered along the trail, Damon and I, as if school were out
and would never keep again. How fresh and tonic the forest seemed
as we plunged into its bath of shade. There were our old friends
the cedars, with their roots twisted across the path; and the white
birches, so trim in youth and so shaggy in age; and the sociable
spruces and balsams, crowding close together, and interlacing their
arms overhead. There were the little springs, trickling through
the moss; and the slippery logs laid across the marshy places; and
the fallen trees, cut in two and pushed aside,--for this was a
much-travelled portage.
Around the open spaces, the tall meadow-rue stood dressed in robes
of fairy white and green. The blue banners of the fleur-de-lis
were planted beside the springs. In shady corners, deeper in the
wood, the fragrant pyrola lifted its scape of clustering bells,
like a lily of the valley wandered to the forest. When we came to
the end of the portage, a perfume like that of cyclamens in
Tyrolean meadows welcomed us, and searching among the loose grasses
by the water-side we found the exquisite purple spikes of the
lesser fringed orchis, loveliest and most ethereal of all the
woodland flowers save one. And what one is that? Ah, my friend,
it is your own particular favourite, the flower, by whatever name
you call it, that you plucked long ago when you were walking in the
forest with your sweetheart,--
"Im wunderschonen Monat Mai
Als alle Knospen sprangen."
We launched our canoes again on the great pool at the foot of the
first fall,--a broad sweep of water a mile long and half a mile
wide, full of eddies and strong currents, and covered with drifting
foam. There was the old campground on the point, where I had
tented so often with my lady Greygown, fishing for ouananiche, the
famous land-locked salmon of Lake St. John. And there were the big
fish, showing their back fins as they circled lazily around in the
eddies, as if they were waiting to play with us. But the goal of
our day's journey was miles away, and we swept along with the
stream, now through a rush of quick water, boiling and foaming, now
through a still place like a lake, now through
"Fairy crowds
Of islands, that together lie,
As quietly as spots of sky
Among the evening clouds."
The beauty of the shores was infinitely varied, and unspoiled by
any sign of the presence of man. We met no company except a few
king-fishers, and a pair of gulls who had come up from the sea to
spend the summer, and a large flock of wild ducks, which the guides
call "Betseys," as if they were all of the gentler sex. In such a
big family of girls we supposed that a few would not be missed, and
Damon bagged two of the tenderest for our supper.
In the still water at the mouth of the Riviere Mistook, just above
the Rapide aux Cedres, we went ashore on a level wooded bank to
make our first camp and cook our dinner. Let me try to sketch our
men as they are busied about the fire.
They are all French Canadians of unmixed blood, descendants of the
men who came to New France with Samuel de Champlain, that
incomparable old woodsman and life-long lover of the wilderness.
Ferdinand Larouche is our chef--there must be a head in every party
for the sake of harmony--and his assistant is his brother Francois.
Ferdinand is a stocky little fellow, a "sawed off" man, not more
than five feet two inches tall, but every inch of him is pure vim.
He can carry a big canoe or a hundred-weight of camp stuff over a
mile portage without stopping to take breath. He is a capital
canoe-man, with prudence enough to balance his courage, and a fair
cook, with plenty of that quality which is wanting in the ordinary
cook of commerce--good humour. Always joking, whistling, singing,
he brings the atmosphere of a perpetual holiday along with him.
His weather-worn coat covers a heart full of music. He has two
talents which make him a marked man among his comrades. He plays
the fiddle to the delight of all the balls and weddings through the
country-side; and he speaks English to the admiration and envy of
the other guides. But like all men of genius he is modest about
his accomplishments. "H'I not spik good h'English--h'only for
camp--fishin', cookin', dhe voyage--h'all dhose t'ings." The
aspirates puzzle him. He can get though a slash of fallen timber
more easily than a sentence full of "this" and "that." Sometimes
he expresses his meaning queerly. He was telling me once about his
farm, "not far off here, in dhe Riviere au Cochon, river of dhe
pig, you call 'im. H'I am a widow, got five sons, t'ree of dhem
are girls." But he usually ends by falling back into French,
which, he assures you, you speak to perfection, "much better than
the Canadians; the French of Paris in short--M'sieu' has been in
Paris?" Such courtesy is born in the blood, and is irresistible.
You cannot help returning the compliment and assuring him that his
English is remarkable, good enough for all practical purposes,
better than any of the other guides can speak. And so it is.
Francois is a little taller, a little thinner, and considerably
quieter than Ferdinand. He laughs loyally at his brother's jokes,
and sings the response to his songs, and wields a good second
paddle in the canoe.
Jean--commonly called Johnny--Morel is a tall, strong man of fifty,
with a bushy red beard that would do credit to a pirate. But when
you look at him more closely, you see that he has a clear, kind
blue eye and a most honest, friendly face under his slouch hat. He
has travelled these woods and waters for thirty years, so that he
knows the way through them by a thousand familiar signs, as well as
you know the streets of the city. He is our pathfinder.
The bow paddle in his canoe is held by his son Joseph, a lad not
quite fifteen, but already as tall, and almost as strong as a man.
"He is yet of the youth," said Johnny, "and he knows not the
affairs of the camp. This trip is for him the first--it is his
school--but I hope he will content you. He is good, M'sieu', and
of the strongest for his age. I have educated already two sons in
the bow of my canoe. The oldest has gone to Pennsylvanie; he peels
the bark there for the tanning of leather. The second had the
misfortune of breaking his leg, so that he can no longer kneel to
paddle. He has descended to the making of shoes. Joseph is my
third pupil. And I have still a younger one at home waiting to
come into my school."
A touch of family life like that is always refreshing, and doubly
so in the wilderness. For what is fatherhood at its best,
everywhere, but the training of good men to take the teacher's
place when his work is done? Some day, when Johnny's rheumatism
has made his joints a little stiffer and his eyes have lost
something of their keenness, he will be wielding the second paddle
in the boat, and going out only on the short and easy trips. It
will be young Joseph that steers the canoe through the dangerous
places, and carries the heaviest load over the portages, and leads
the way on the long journeys.
It has taken me longer to describe our men than it took them to
prepare our frugal meal: a pot of tea, the woodsman's favourite
drink, (I never knew a good guide that would not go without whisky
rather than without tea,) a few slices of toast and juicy rashers
of bacon, a kettle of boiled potatoes, and a relish of crackers and
cheese. We were in a hurry to be off for an afternoon's fishing,
three or four miles down the river, at the Ile Maligne.
The island is well named, for it is the most perilous place on the
river, and has a record of disaster and death. The scattered
waters of the Discharge are drawn together here into one deep,
narrow, powerful stream, flowing between gloomy shores of granite.
In mid-channel the wicked island shows its scarred and bristling
head, like a giant ready to dispute the passage. The river rushes
straight at the rocky brow, splits into two currents, and raves
away on both sides of the island in a double chain of furious falls
and rapids.
In these wild waters we fished with immense delight and fair
success, scrambling down among the huge rocks along the shore, and
joining the excitement of an Alpine climb with the placid pleasures
of angling. At nightfall we were at home again in our camp, with
half a score of onananiche, weighing from one to four pounds each.
Our next day's journey was long and variegated. A portage of a
mile or two across the Ile d'Alma, with a cart to haul our canoes
and stuff, brought us to the Little Discharge, down which we
floated for a little way, and then hauled through the village of
St. Joseph to the foot of the Carcajou, or Wildcat Falls. A mile
of quick water was soon passed, and we came to the junction of the
Little Discharge with the Grand Discharge at the point where the
picturesque club-house stands in a grove of birches beside the big
Vache Caille Falls. It is lively work crossing the pool here, when
the water is high and the canoes are heavy; but we went through the
labouring seas safely, and landed some distance below, at the head
of the Rapide Gervais, to eat our lunch. The water was too rough
to run down with loaded boats, so Damon and I had to walk about
three miles along the river-bank, while the men went down with the
canoes.
On our way beside the rapids, Damon geologised, finding the marks
of ancient glaciers, and bits of iron-ore, and pockets of sand full
of infinitesimal garnets, and specks of gold washed from the
primitive granite; and I fished, picking up a pair of ouananiche in
foam-covered nooks among the rocks. The swift water was almost
passed when we embarked again and ran down the last slope into a
long deadwater.
The shores, at first bold and rough, covered with dense thickets of
second-growth timber, now became smoother and more fertile.
Scattered farms, with square, unpainted houses, and long, thatched
barns, began to creep over the hills toward the river. There was a
hamlet, called St. Charles, with a rude little church and a
campanile of logs. The cure, robed in decent black and wearing a
tall silk hat of the vintage of 1860, sat on the veranda of his
trim presbytery, looking down upon us, like an image of propriety
smiling at Bohemianism. Other craft appeared on the river. A man
and his wife paddling an old dugout, with half a dozen children
packed in amidships a crew of lumbermen, in a sharp-nosed bateau,
picking up stray logs along the banks; a couple of boatloads of
young people returning merrily from a holiday visit; a party of
berry-pickers in a flat-bottomed skiff; all the life of the
country-side was in evidence on the river. We felt quite as if we
had been "in the swim" of society, when at length we reached the
point where the Riviere des Aunes came tumbling down a hundred-foot
ladder of broken black rocks. There we pitched our tents in a
strip of meadow by the water-side, where we could have the sound of
the falls for a slumber-song all night and the whole river for a
bath at sunrise.
A sparkling draught of crystal weather was poured into our stirrup-
cup in the morning, as we set out for a drive of fifteen miles
across country to the Riviere a l'Ours, a tributary of the crooked,
unnavigable river of Alders. The canoes and luggage were loaded on
a couple of charrettes, or two-wheeled carts. But for us and the
guides there were two quatre-roues, the typical vehicles of the
century, as characteristic of Canada as the carriole is of Norway.
It is a two-seated buckboard, drawn by one horse, and the back seat
is covered with a hood like an old-fashioned poke bonnet. The road
is of clay and always rutty. It runs level for a while, and then
jumps up a steep ridge and down again, or into a deep gully and out
again. The habitant's idea of good driving is to let his horse
slide down the hill and gallop up. This imparts a spasmodic
quality to the motion, like Carlyle's style.
The native houses are strung along the road. The modern pattern
has a convex angle in the roof, and dormer-windows; it is a rustic
adaptation of the Mansard. The antique pattern, which is far more
picturesque, has a concave curve in the roof, and the eaves project
like eyebrows, shading the flatness of the face. Paint is a
rarity. The prevailing colour is the soft gray of weather-beaten
wood. Sometimes, in the better class of houses, a gallery is built
across the front and around one side, and a square of garden is
fenced in, with dahlias and hollyhocks and marigolds, and perhaps a
struggling rosebush, and usually a small patch of tobacco growing
in one corner. Once in a long while you may see a balm-of-Gilead
tree, or a clump of sapling poplars, planted near the door.
How much better it would have been if the farmer had left a few of
the noble forest-trees to shade his house. But then, when the
farmer came into the wilderness he was not a farmer, he was first
of all a wood-chopper. He regarded the forest as a stubborn enemy
in possession of his land. He attacked it with fire and axe and
exterminated it, instead of keeping a few captives to hold their
green umbrellas over his head when at last his grain fields should
be smiling around him and he should sit down on his doorstep to
smoke a pipe of home-grown tobacco.
In the time of adversity one should prepare for prosperity. I
fancy there are a good many people unconsciously repeating the
mistake of the Canadian farmer--chopping down all the native
growths of life, clearing the ground of all the useless pretty
things that seem to cumber it, sacrificing everything to utility
and success. We fell the last green tree for the sake of raising
an extra hill of potatoes; and never stop to think what an ugly,
barren place we may have to sit in while we eat them. The ideals,
the attachments--yes, even the dreams of youth are worth saving.
For the artificial tastes with which age tries to make good their
loss grow very slowly and cast but a slender shade.
Most of the Canadian farmhouses have their ovens out-of-doors. We
saw them everywhere; rounded edifices of clay, raised on a
foundation of logs, and usually covered with a pointed roof of
boards. They looked like little family chapels--and so they were;
shrines where the ritual of the good housewife was celebrated, and
the gift of daily bread, having been honestly earned, was
thankfully received.
At one house we noticed a curious fragment of domestic economy.
Half a pig was suspended over the chimney, and the smoke of the
summer fire was turned to account in curing the winter's meat. I
guess the children of that family had a peculiar fondness for the
parental roof-tree. We saw them making mud-pies in the road, and
imagined that they looked lovingly up at the pendent porker,
outlined against the sky,--a sign of promise, prophetic of bacon.
About noon the road passed beyond the region of habitation into a
barren land, where blueberries were the only crop, and partridges
took the place of chickens. Through this rolling gravelly plain,
sparsely wooded and glowing with the tall magenta bloom of the
fireweed, we drove toward the mountains, until the road went to
seed and we could follow it no longer. Then we took to the water
and began to pole our canoes up the River of the Bear. It was a
clear, amber-coloured stream, not more than ten or fifteen yards
wide, running swift and strong, over beds of sand and rounded
pebbles. The canoes went wallowing and plunging up the narrow
channel, between thick banks of alders, like clumsy sea-monsters.
All the grace with which they move under the strokes of the paddle,
in large waters, was gone. They looked uncouth and predatory, like
a pair of seals that I once saw swimming far up the river
Ristigouche in chase of fish. From the bow of each canoe the
landing-net stuck out as a symbol of destruction--after the fashion
of the Dutch admiral who nailed a broom to his masthead. But it
would have been impossible to sweep the trout out of that little
river by any fair method of angling, for there were millions of
them; not large, but lively, and brilliant, and fat; they leaped in
every bend of the stream. We trailed our flies, and made quick
casts here and there, as we went along. It was fishing on the
wing. And when we pitched our tents in a hurry at nightfall on the
low shore of Lac Sale, among the bushes where firewood was scarce
and there were no sapins for the beds, we were comforted for the
poorness of the camp-ground by the excellence of the trout supper.
It was a bitter cold night for August. There was a skin of ice on
the water-pail at daybreak. We were glad to be up and away for an
early start. The river grew wilder and more difficult. There were
rapids, and ruined dams built by the lumbermen years ago. At these
places the trout were larger, and so plentiful that it was easy to
hook two at a cast. It came on to rain furiously while we were
eating our lunch. But we did not seem to mind it any more than the
fish did. Here and there the river was completely blocked by
fallen trees. The guides called it bouchee, "corked," and leaped
out gayly into the water with their axes to "uncork" it. We passed
through some pretty lakes, unknown to the map-makers, and arrived,
before sundown, at the Lake of the Bear, where we were to spend a
couple of days. The lake was full of floating logs, and the water,
raised by the heavy rains and the operations of the lumbermen, was
several feet above its usual level. Nature's landing-places were
all blotted out, and we had to explore halfway around the shore
before we could get out comfortably. We raised the tents on a
small shoulder of a hill, a few rods above the water; and a
glorious camp-fire of birch logs soon made us forget our misery as
though it had not been.
The name of the Lake of the Beautiful Trout made us desire to visit
it. The portage was said to be only fifty acres long (the arpent
is the popular measure of distance here), but it passed over a
ridge of newly burned land, and was so entangled with ruined woods
and desolate of birds and flowers that it seemed to us at least
five miles. The lake was charming--a sheet of singularly clear
water, of a pale green tinge, surrounded by wooded hills. In the
translucent depths trout and pike live together, but whether in
peace or not I cannot tell. Both of them grow to an enormous size,
but the pike are larger and have more capacious jaws. One of them
broke my tackle and went off with a silver spoon in his mouth, as
if he had been born to it. Of course the guides vowed that they
saw him as he passed under the canoe, and declared that he must
weigh thirty or forty pounds. The spectacles of regret always
magnify.
The trout were coy. We took only five of them, perfect specimens
of the true Salvelinus fontinalis, with square tails, and carmine
spots on their dark, mottled sides; the largest weighed three
pounds and three-quarters, and the others were almost as heavy.
On our way back to the camp we found the portage beset by
innumerable and bloodthirsty foes. There are four grades of insect
malignity in the woods. The mildest is represented by the winged
idiot that John Burroughs' little boy called a "blunderhead." He
dances stupidly before your face, as if lost in admiration, and
finishes his pointless tale by getting in your eye, or down your
throat. The next grade is represented by the midges. "Bite 'em no
see 'em," is the Indian name for these invisible atoms of animated
pepper which settle upon you in the twilight and make your skin
burn like fire. But their hour is brief, and when they depart they
leave not a bump behind. One step lower in the scale we find the
mosquito, or rather he finds us, and makes his poisoned mark upon
our skin. But after all, he has his good qualities. The mosquito
is a gentlemanly pirate. He carries his weapon openly, and gives
notice of an attack. He respects the decencies of life, and does
not strike below the belt, or creep down the back of your neck.
But the black fly is at the bottom of the moral scale. He is an
unmitigated ruffian, the plug-ugly of the woods. He looks like a
tiny, immature house-fly, with white legs as if he must be
innocent. But, in fact, he crawls like a serpent and bites like a
dog. No portion of the human frame is sacred from his greed. He
takes his pound of flesh anywhere, and does not scruple to take the
blood with it. As a rule you can defend yourself, to some degree,
against him, by wearing a head-net, tying your sleeves around your
wrists and your trousers around your ankles, and anointing yourself
with grease, flavoured with pennyroyal, for which cleanly and
honest scent he has a coarse aversion. But sometimes, especially
on burned land, about the middle of a warm afternoon, when a rain
is threatening, the horde of black flies descend in force and fury
knowing that their time is short. Then there is no escape. Suits
of chain armour, Nubian ointments of far-smelling potency, would
not save you. You must do as our guides did on the portage, submit
to fate and walk along in heroic silence, like Marco Bozzaris
"bleeding at every pore,"--or do as Damon and I did, break into
ejaculations and a run, until you reach a place where you can light
a smudge and hold your head over it.
"And yet," said my comrade, as we sat coughing and rubbing our eyes
in the painful shelter of the smoke, "there are worse trials than
this in the civilised districts: social enmities, and newspaper
scandals, and religious persecutions. The blackest fly I ever saw
is the Reverend -----" but here his voice was fortunately choked by
a fit of coughing.
A couple of wandering Indians--descendants of the Montagnais, on
whose hunting domain we were travelling--dropped in at our camp
that night as we sat around the fire. They gave us the latest news
about the portages on our further journey; how far they had been
blocked with fallen trees, and whether the water was high or low in
the rivers--just as a visitor at home would talk about the effect
of the strikes on the stock market, and the prospects of the newest
organization of the non-voting classes for the overthrow of Tammany
Hall. Every phase of civilisation or barbarism creates its own
conversational currency. The weather, like the old Spanish dollar,
is the only coin that passes everywhere.
But our Indians did not carry much small change about them. They
were dark, silent chaps, soon talked out; and then they sat sucking
their pipes before the fire, (as dumb as their own wooden effigies
in front of a tobacconist's shop,) until the spirit moved them, and
they vanished in their canoe down the dark lake. Our own guides
were very different. They were as full of conversation as a
spruce-tree is of gum. When all shallower themes were exhausted
they would discourse of bears and canoes and lumber and fish,
forever. After Damon and I had left the fire and rolled ourselves
in the blankets in our own tent, we could hear the men going on and
on with their simple jests and endless tales of adventure, until
sleep drowned their voices.
It was the sound of a French chanson that woke us early on the
morning of our departure from the Lake of the Bear. A gang of
lumbermen were bringing a lot of logs through the lake. Half-
hidden in the cold gray mist that usually betokens a fine day, and
wet to the waist from splashing about after their unwieldy flock,
these rough fellows were singing at their work as cheerfully as a
party of robins in a cherry-tree at sunrise. It was like the
miller and the two girls whom Wordsworth saw dancing in their boats
on the Thames:
"They dance not for me,
Yet mine is their glee!
Thus pleasure is spread through the earth
In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find;
Thus a rich loving-kindness, redundantly kind,
Moves all nature to gladness and mirth."
But our later thoughts of the lumbermen were not altogether
grateful, when we arrived that day, after a mile of portage, at the
little Riviere Blanche, upon which we had counted to float us down
to Lac Tchitagama, and found that they had stolen all its water to
float their logs down the Lake of the Bear. The poor little river
was as dry as a theological novel. There was nothing left of it
except the bed and the bones; it was like a Connecticut stream in
the middle of August. All its pretty secrets were laid bare; all
its music was hushed. The pools that lingered among the rocks
seemed like big tears; and the voice of the forlorn rivulets that
trickled in here and there, seeking the parent stream, was a voice
of weeping and complaint.
For us the loss meant a hard day's work, scrambling over slippery
stones, and splashing through puddles, and forcing a way through
the tangled thickets on the bank, instead of a pleasant two hours'
run on a swift current. We ate our dinner on a sandbank in what
was once the middle of a pretty pond; and entered, as the sun was
sinking, a narrow wooded gorge between the hills, completely filled
by a chain of small lakes, where travelling became easy and
pleasant. The steep shores, clothed with cedar and black spruce
and dark-blue fir-trees, rose sheer from the water; the passage
from lake to lake was a tiny rapid a few yards long, gurgling
through mossy rocks; at the foot of the chain there was a longer
rapid, with a portage beside it. We emerged from the dense bush
suddenly and found ourselves face to face with Lake Tchitagama.
How the heart expands at such a view! Nine miles of shining water
lay stretched before us, opening through the mountains that guarded
it on both sides with lofty walls of green and gray, ridge over
ridge, point beyond point, until the vista ended in
"You orange sunset waning slow."
At a moment like this one feels a sense of exultation. It is a new
discovery of the joy of living. And yet, my friend and I confessed
to each other, there was a tinge of sadness, an inexplicable regret
mingled with our joy. Was it the thought of how few human eyes had
even seen that lovely vision? Was it the dim foreboding that we
might never see it again? Who can explain the secret pathos of
Nature's loveliness? It is a touch of melancholy inherited from
our mother Eve. It is an unconscious memory of the lost Paradise.
It is the sense that even if we should find another Eden, we would
not be fit to enjoy it perfectly, nor stay in it forever.
Our first camp on Tchitagama was at the sunrise end of the lake, in
a bay paved with small round stones, laid close together and beaten
firmly down by the waves. There, and along the shores below, at
the mouth of a little river that foamed in over a ledge of granite,
and in the shadow of cliffs of limestone and feldspar, we trolled
and took many fish: pike of enormous size, fresh-water sharks,
devourers of nobler game, fit only to kill and throw away; huge old
trout of six or seven pounds, with broad tails and hooked jaws,
fine fighters and poor food; stupid, wide-mouthed chub--ouitouche,
the Indians call them--biting at hooks that were not baited for
them; and best of all, high-bred onananiche, pleasant to capture
and delicate to eat.
Our second camp was on a sandy point at the sunset end of the lake--
a fine place for bathing, and convenient to the wild meadows and
blueberry patches, where Damon went to hunt for bears. He did not
find any; but once he heard a great noise in the bushes, which he
thought was a bear; and he declared that he got quite as much
excitement out of it as if it had had four legs and a mouthful of
teeth.
He brought back from one of his expeditions an Indian letter, which
he had found in a cleft stick by the river. It was a sheet of
birch-bark with a picture drawn on it in charcoal; five Indians in
a canoe paddling up the river, and one in another canoe pointing in
another direction; we read it as a message left by a hunting party,
telling their companions not to go on up the river, because it was
already occupied, but to turn off on a side stream.
There was a sign of a different kind nailed to an old stump behind
our camp. It was the top of a soap-box, with an inscription after
this fashion:
A.D. MEYER & B. LEVIT
Soap Mfrs. N. Y.
CAMPED HERE JULY 18--
1 TROUT 17 1/2 POUNDS. II OUAN
ANISHES 18 1/2 POUNDS. ONE
PIKE 147 1/2 LBS.
There was a combination of piscatorial pride and mercantile
enterprise in this quaint device, that took our fancy. It
suggested also a curious question of psychology in regard to the
inhibitory influence of horses and fish upon the human nerve of
veracity. We named the place "Point Ananias."
And yet, in fact, it was a wild and lonely spot, and not even the
Hebrew inscription could spoil the sense of solitude that
surrounded us when the night came, and the storm howled across the
take, and the darkness encircled us with a wall that only seemed
the more dense and impenetrable as the firelight blazed and leaped
within the black ring.
"How far away is the nearest house, Johnny?"
"I don't know; fifty miles, I suppose."
"And what would you do if the canoes were burned, or if a tree fell
and smashed them?"
"Well, I'd say a Pater noster, and take bread and bacon enough for
four days, and an axe, and plenty of matches, and make a straight
line through the woods. But it wouldn't be a joke, M'sieu', I can
tell you."
The river Peribonca, into which Lake Tchitagama flows without a
break, is the noblest of all the streams that empty into Lake St.
John. It is said to be more than three hundred miles long, and at
the mouth of the lake it is perhaps a thousand feet wide, flowing
with a deep, still current through the forest. The dead-water
lasted for several miles; then the river sloped into a rapid,
spread through a net of islands, and broke over a ledge in a
cataract. Another quiet stretch was followed by another fall, and
so on, along the whole course of the river.
We passed three of these falls in the first day's voyage (by
portages so steep and rough that an Adirondack guide would have
turned gray at the sight of them), and camped at night just below
the Chute du Diable, where we found some ouananiche in the foam.
Our tents were on an islet, and all around we saw the primeval,
savage beauty of a world unmarred by man,
The river leaped, shouting, down its double stairway of granite,
rejoicing like a strong man to run a race. The after-glow in the
western sky deepened from saffron to violet among the tops of the
cedars, and over the cliffs rose the moonlight, paling the heavens
but glorifying the earth. There was something large and generous
and untrammelled in the scene, recalling one of Walt Whitman's
rhapsodies:--
"Earth of departed sunsets! Earth of the mountains misty-topped!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!"
All the next day we went down with the current. Regiments of black
spruce stood in endless files like grenadiers, each tree capped
with a thick tuft of matted cones and branches. Tall white birches
leaned out over the stream, Narcissus-like, as if to see their own
beauty in the moving mirror. There were touches of colour on the
banks, the ragged pink flowers of the Joe-Pye-weed (which always
reminds me of a happy, good-natured tramp), and the yellow ear-
drops of the jewel-weed, and the intense blue of the closed
gentian, that strange flower which, like a reticent heart, never
opens to the light. Sometimes the river spread out like a lake,
between high bluffs of sand fully a mile apart; and again it
divided into many channels, winding cunningly down among the
islands as if it were resolved to slip around the next barrier of
rock without a fall. There were eight of these huge natural dams
in the course of that day's journey. Sometimes we followed one of
the side canals, and made the portage at a distance from the main
cataract; and sometimes we ran with the central current to the very
brink of the chute, darting aside just in time to escape going
over. At the foot of the last fall we made our camp on a curving
beach of sand, and spent the rest of the afternoon in fishing.
It was interesting to see how closely the guides could guess at the
weight of the fish by looking at them. The ouananiche are much
longer in proportion to their weight than trout, and a novice
almost always overestimates them. But the guides were not
deceived. "This one will weigh four pounds and three-quarters, and
this one four pounds, but that one not more than three pounds; he
is meagre, M'sieu', BUT he is meagre." When we went ashore and
tried the spring balance (which every angler ought to carry with
him, as an aid to his conscience), the guides guess usually proved
to be within an ounce or two of the fact. Any one of the senses
can be educated to do the work of the others. The eyes of these
experienced fishermen were as sensitive to weight as if they had
been made to use as scales.
Below the last fall the Peribonca flows for a score of miles with
an unbroken, ever-widening stream, through low shores of forest and
bush and meadow. Near its mouth the Little Peribonca joins it, and
the immense flood, nearly two miles wide, pours into Lake St. John.
Here we saw the first outpost of civilisation--a huge unpainted
storehouse, where supplies are kept for the lumbermen and the new
settlers. Here also we found the tiny, lame steam launch that was
to carry us back to the Hotel Roberval. Our canoes were stowed
upon the roof of the cabin, and we embarked for the last stage of
our long journey.
As we came out of the river-mouth, the opposite shore of the lake
was invisible, and a stiff "Nor'wester" was rolling big waves
across the bar. It was like putting out into the open sea. The
launch laboured and puffed along for four or five miles, growing
more and more asthmatic with every breath. Then there was an
explosion in the engine-room. Some necessary part of the
intestinal machinery had blown out. There was a moment of
confusion. The captain hurried to drop the anchor, and the narrow
craft lay rolling in the billows.
What to do? The captain shrugged his shoulders like a Frenchman.
"Wait here, I suppose." But how long? "Who knows? Perhaps till
to-morrow; perhaps the day after. They will send another boat to
look for us in the course of time."
But the quarters were cramped; the weather looked ugly; if the wind
should rise, the cranky launch would not be a safe cradle for the
night. Damon and I preferred the canoes, for they at least would
float if they were capsized. So we stepped into the frail, buoyant
shells of bark once more, and danced over the big waves toward the
shore. We made a camp on a wind-swept point of sand, and felt like
shipwrecked mariners. But it was a gilt-edged shipwreck. For our
larder was still full, and as if to provide us with the luxuries as
well as the necessities of life, Nature had spread an inexhaustible
dessert of the largest and most luscious blueberries around our
tents.
After supper, strolling along the beach, we debated the best way of
escape; whether to send one of our canoes around the eastern shore
of the lake that night, to meet the steamer at the Island House and
bring it to our rescue; or to set out the next morning, and paddle
both canoes around the western end of the lake, thirty miles, to
the Hotel Roberval. While we were talking, we came to a dry old
birch-tree, with ragged, curling bark. "Here is a torch," cried
Damon, "to throw light upon the situation." He touched a match to
it, and the flames flashed up the tall trunk until it was
transformed into a pillar of fire. But the sudden illumination
burned out, and our counsels were wrapt again in darkness and
uncertainty, when there came a great uproar of steam-whistles from
the lake. They must be signalling for us. What could it mean?
We fired our guns, leaped into a canoe, leaving two of the guides
to break camp, and paddled out swiftly into the night. It seemed
an endless distance before we found the feeble light where the
crippled launch was tossing at anchor. The captain shouted
something about a larger steamboat and a raft of logs, out in the
lake, a mile or two beyond. Presently we saw the lights, and the
orange glow of the cabin windows. Was she coming, or going, or
standing still? We paddled on as fast as we could, shouting and
firing off a revolver until we had no more cartridges. We were
resolved not to let that mysterious vessel escape us, and threw
ourselves with energy into the novel excitement of chasing a
steamboat in the dark.
Then the lights began to swing around; the throbbing of paddle-
wheels grew louder and louder; she was evidently coming straight
toward us. At that moment it flashed upon us that, while she had
plenty of lights, we had none! We were lying, invisible, right
across her track. The character of the steamboat chase was
reversed. We turned and fled, as the guides say, a quatre pattes,
into illimitable space, trying to get out of the way of our too
powerful friend. It makes considerable difference, in the voyage
of life, whether you chase the steamboat, or the steamboat chases
you.
Meantime our other canoe had approached unseen. The steamer passed
safely between the two boats, slackening speed as the pilot caught
our loud halloo! She loomed up above us like a man-of-war, and as
we climbed the ladder to the main-deck we felt that we had indeed
gotten out of the wilderness. My old friend, Captain Savard, made
us welcome. He had been sent out, much to his disgust, to catch a
runaway boom of logs and tow it back to Roberval; it would be an
all night affair; but we must take possession of his stateroom and
make ourselves comfortable; he would certainly bring us to the
hotel in time for breakfast. So he went off on the upper deck, and
we heard him stamping about and yelling to his crew as they
struggled to get their unwieldy drove of six thousand logs in
motion.
All night long we assisted at the lumbermen's difficult enterprise.
We heard the steamer snorting and straining at her clumsy, stubborn
convoy. The hoarse shouts of the crew, disguised in a mongrel
dialect which made them (perhaps fortunately) less intelligible and
more forcible, mingled with our broken dreams.
But it was, in fact, a fitting close of our voyage. For what were
we doing? It was the last stage of the woodman's labour. It was
the gathering of a wild herd of the houses and churches and ships
and bridges that grow in the forests, and bringing them into the
fold of human service. I wonder how often the inhabitant of the
snug Queen Anne cottage in the suburbs remembers the picturesque
toil and varied hardship that it has cost to hew and drag his walls
and floors and pretty peaked roofs out of the backwoods. It might
enlarge his home, and make his musings by the winter fireside less
commonplace, to give a kindly thought now and then to the long
chain of human workers through whose hands the timber of his house
has passed, since it first felt the stroke of the axe in the snow-
bound winter woods, and floated, through the spring and summer, on
far-off lakes and little rivers, au large.
1894.
TROUT-FISHING IN THE TRAUN
"Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent
themselves for a time from the ties and objects that recall them;
but we can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that
gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend
the whole of my life in travelling abroad if I could anywhere
borrow another life to spend afterwards at home."--WILLIAM HAZLITT:
On Going a Journey.
The peculiarity of trout-fishing in the Traun is that one catches
principally grayling. But in this it resembles some other pursuits
which are not without their charm for minds open to the pleasures
of the unexpected--for example, reading George Borrow's The Bible
in Spain with a view to theological information, or going to the
opening night at the Academy of Design with the intention of
looking at pictures.
Moreover, there are really trout in the Traun, rari nantes in
gurgite; and in some places more than in others; and all of high
spirit, though few of great size. Thus the angler has his
favourite problem: Given an unknown stream and two kinds of fish,
the one better than the other; to find the better kind, and
determine the hour at which they will rise. This is sport.
As for the little river itself, it has so many beauties that one
does not think of asking whether it has any faults. Constant
fulness, and crystal clearness, and refreshing coolness of living
water, pale green like the jewel that is called aqua marina,
flowing over beds of clean sand and bars of polished gravel, and
dropping in momentary foam from rocky ledges, between banks that
are shaded by groves of fir and ash and poplar, or through dense
thickets of alder and willow, or across meadows of smooth verdure
sloping up to quaint old-world villages--all these are features of
the ideal little river.
I have spoken of these personal qualities first, because a truly
moral writer ought to make more of character than of position. A
good river in a bad country would be more worthy of affection than
a bad river in a good country. But the Traun has also the
advantages of an excellent worldly position. For it rises all over
the Salzkammergut, the summer hunting-ground of the Austrian
Emperor, and flows through that most picturesque corner of his
domain from end to end. Under the desolate cliffs of the
Todtengebirge on the east, and below the shining ice-fields of the
Dachstein on the south, and from the green alps around St. Wolfgang
on the west, the translucent waters are gathered in little tarns,
and shot through roaring brooks, and spread into lakes of wondrous
beauty, and poured through growing streams, until at last they are
all united just below the summer villa of his Kaiserly and Kingly
Majesty, Francis Joseph, and flow away northward, through the rest
of his game-preserve, into the Traunsee. It is an imperial
playground, and such as I would consent to hunt the chamois in, if
an inscrutable Providence had made me a kingly kaiser, or even a
plain king or an unvarnished kaiser. But, failing this, I was
perfectly content to spend a few idle days in fishing for trout and
catching grayling, at such times and places as the law of the
Austrian Empire allowed.
For it must be remembered that every stream in these over-civilised
European countries belongs to somebody, by purchase or rent. And
all the fish in the stream are supposed to belong to the person who
owns or rents it. They do not know their master's voice, neither
will they follow when he calls. But they are theoretically his.
To this legal fiction the untutored American must conform. He must
learn to clothe his natural desires in the raiment of lawful
sanction, and take out some kind of a license before he follows his
impulse to fish.
It was in the town of Aussee, at the junction of the two highest
branches of the Traun, that this impulse came upon me, mildly
irresistible. The full bloom of mid-July gayety in that ancient
watering-place was dampened, but not extinguished, by two days of
persistent and surprising showers. I had exhausted the
possibilities of interest in the old Gothic church, and felt all
that a man should feel in deciphering the mural tombstones of the
families who were exiled for their faith in the days of the
Reformation. The throngs of merry Hebrews from Vienna and Buda-
Pesth, amazingly arrayed as mountaineers and milk-maids, walking up
and down the narrow streets under umbrellas, had Cleopatra's charm
of an infinite variety; but custom staled it. The woodland paths,
winding everywhere through the plantations of fir-trees and
provided with appropriate names on wooden labels, and benches for
rest and conversation at discreet intervals, were too moist for
even the nymphs to take delight in them. The only creatures that
suffered nothing by the rain were the two swift, limpid Trauns,
racing through the woods, like eager and unabashed lovers, to meet
in the middle of the village. They were as clear, as joyous, as
musical as if the sun were shining. The very sight of their
opalescent rapids and eddying pools was an invitation to that
gentle sport which is said to have the merit of growing better as
the weather grows worse.
I laid this fact before the landlord of the hotel of the Erzherzog
Johann, as poetically as I could, but he assured me that it was of
no consequence without an invitation from the gentleman to whom the
streams belonged; and he had gone away for a week. The landlord
was such a good-natured person, and such an excellent sleeper, that
it was impossible to believe that he could have even the smallest
inaccuracy upon his conscience. So I bade him farewell, and took
my way, four miles through the woods, to the lake from which one of
the streams flowed.
It was called the Grundlsee. As I do not know the origin of the
name, I cannot consistently make any moral or historical
reflections upon it. But if it has never become famous, it ought
to be, for the sake of a cozy and busy little Inn, perched on a
green hill beside the lake and overlooking the whole length of it,
from the groups of toy villas at the foot to the heaps of real
mountains at the head. This Inn kept a thin but happy landlord,
who provided me with a blue license to angle, for the
inconsiderable sum of fifteen cents a day. This conferred the
right of fishing not only in the Grundlsee, but also in the smaller
tarn of Toplitz, a mile above it, and in the swift stream which
unites them. It all coincided with my desire as if by magic. A
row of a couple of miles to the head of the lake, and a walk
through the forest, brought me to the smaller pond; and as the
afternoon sun was ploughing pale furrows through the showers, I
waded out on a point of reeds and cast the artful fly in the shadow
of the great cliffs of the Dead Mountains.
It was a fit scene for a lone fisherman. But four sociable
tourists promptly appeared to act as spectators and critics. Fly-
fishing usually strikes the German mind as an eccentricity which
calls for remonstrance. After one of the tourists had suggestively
narrated the tale of seven trout which he had caught in another
lake, WITH WORMS, on the previous Sunday, they went away for a row,
(with salutations in which politeness but thinly veiled their
pity,) and left me still whipping the water in vain. Nor was the
fortune of the day much better in the stream below. It was a long
and wet wade for three fish too small to keep. I came out on the
shore of the lake, where I had left the row-boat, with empty bag
and a feeling of damp discouragement.
There was still an hour or so of daylight, and a beautiful place to
fish where the stream poured swirling out into the lake. A rise,
and a large one, though rather slow, awakened my hopes. Another
rise, evidently made by a heavy fish, made me certain that virtue
was about to be rewarded. The third time the hook went home. I
felt the solid weight of the fish against the spring of the rod,
and that curious thrill which runs up the line and down the arm,
changing, somehow or other, into a pleasurable sensation of
excitement as it reaches the brain. But it was only for a moment;
and then came that foolish, feeble shaking of the line from side to
side which tells the angler that he has hooked a great, big,
leather-mouthed chub--a fish which Izaak Walton says "the French
esteem so mean as to call him Un Vilain." Was it for this that I
had come to the country of Francis Joseph?
I took off the flies and put on one of those phantom minnows which
have immortalised the name of a certain Mr. Brown. The minnow
swung on a long line as the boat passed back and forth across the
current, once, twice, three times-- and on the fourth circle there
was a sharp strike. The rod bent almost double, and the reel sang
shrilly to the first rush of the fish. He ran; he doubled; he went
to the bottom and sulked; he tried to go under the boat; he did all
that a game fish can do, except leaping. After twenty minutes he
was tired enough to be lifted gently into the boat by a hand
slipped around his gills, and there he was, a lachsforelle of three
pounds' weight: small pointed head; silver sides mottled with dark
spots; square, powerful tail and large fins--a fish not unlike the
land-locked salmon of the Saguenay, but more delicate.
Half an hour later he was lying on the grass in front of the Inn.
The waiters paused, with their hands full of dishes, to look at
him; and the landlord called his guests, including my didactic
tourists, to observe the superiority of the trout of the Grundlsee.
The maids also came to look; and the buxom cook, with her spotless
apron and bare arms akimbo, was drawn from her kitchen, and pledged
her culinary honour that such a pracht-kerl should be served up in
her very best style. The angler who is insensible to this sort of
indirect flattery through his fish does not exist. Even the most
indifferent of men thinks more favourably of people who know a good
trout when they see it, and sits down to his supper with kindly
feelings. Possibly he reflects, also, upon the incident as a hint
of the usual size of the fish in that neighbourhood. He remembers
that he may have been favoured in this case beyond his deserts by
good-fortune, and resolving not to put too heavy a strain upon it,
considers the next place where it would be well for him to angle.
Hallstatt is about ten miles below Aussee. The Traun here expands
into a lake, very dark and deep, shut in by steep and lofty
mountains. The railway runs along the eastern shore. On the other
side, a mile away, you see the old town, its white houses clinging
to the cliff like lichens to the face of a rock. The guide-book
calls it "a highly original situation." But this is one of the
cases where a little less originality and a little more
reasonableness might be desired, at least by the permanent
inhabitants. A ledge under the shadow of a precipice makes a
trying winter residence. The people of Hallstatt are not a
blooming race: one sees many dwarfs and cripples among them. But
to the summer traveller the place seems wonderfully picturesque.
Most of the streets are flights of steps. The high-road has barely
room to edge itself through among the old houses, between the
window-gardens of bright flowers. On the hottest July day the
afternoon is cool and shady. The gay, little skiffs and long, open
gondolas are flitting continually along the lake, which is the main
street of Hallstatt.
The incongruous, but comfortable, modern hotel has a huge glass
veranda, where you can eat your dinner and observe human nature in
its transparent holiday disguises. I was much pleased and
entertained by a family, or confederacy, of people attired as
peasants--the men with feathered hats, green stockings, and bare
knees--the women with bright skirts, bodices, and silk
neckerchiefs--who were always in evidence, rowing gondolas with
clumsy oars, meeting the steamboat at the wharf several times a
day, and filling the miniature garden of the hotel with rustic
greetings and early Salzkammergut attitudes. After much
conjecture, I learned that they were the family and friends of a
newspaper editor from Vienna. They had the literary instinct for
local colour.
The fishing at Hallstatt is at Obertraun. There is a level stretch
of land above the lake, where the river flows peaceably, and the
fish have leisure to feed and grow. It is leased to a peasant, who
makes a business of supplying the hotels with fish. He was quite
willing to give permission to an angler; and I engaged one of his
sons, a capital young fellow, whose natural capacities for good
fellowship were only hampered by a most extraordinary German
dialect, to row me across the lake, and carry the net and a small
green barrel full of water to keep the fish alive, according to the
custom of the country. The first day we had only four trout large
enough to put into the barrel; the next day I think there were six;
the third day, I remember very well, there were ten. They were
pretty creatures, weighing from half a pound to a pound each, and
coloured as daintily as bits of French silk, in silver gray with
faint pink spots.
There was plenty to do at Hallstatt in the mornings. An hour's
walk from the town there was a fine waterfall, three hundred feet
high. On the side of the mountain above the lake was one of the
salt-mines for which the region is celebrated. It has been worked
for ages by many successive races, from the Celt downward. Perhaps
even the men of the Stone Age knew of it, and came hither for
seasoning to make the flesh of the cave-bear and the mammoth more
palatable. Modern pilgrims are permitted to explore the long, wet,
glittering galleries with a guide, and slide down the smooth wooden
rollers which join the different levels of the mines. This pastime
has the same fascination as sliding down the balusters; and it is
said that even queens and princesses have been delighted with it.
This is a touching proof of the fundamental simplicity and unity of
our human nature.
But by far the best excursion from Hallstatt was an all-day trip to
the Zwieselalp--a mountain which seems to have been especially
created as a point of view. From the bare summit you look right
into the face of the huge, snowy Dachstein, with the wild lake of
Gosau gleaming at its foot; and far away on the other side your
vision ranges over a confusion of mountains, with all the white
peaks of the Tyrol stretched along the horizon. Such a wide
outlook as this helps the fisherman to enjoy the narrow beauties of
his little rivers. No sport is at its best without interruption
and contrast. To appreciate wading, one ought to climb a little on
odd days.
Isehl is about ten or twelve miles below Hallstatt, in the valley
of the Traun. It is the fashionable summer-resort of Austria. I
found it in the high tide of amusement. The shady esplanade along
the river was crowded with brave women and fair men, in gorgeous
raiment; the hotels were overflowing; and there were various kinds
of music and entertainments at all hours of day and night. But all
this did not seem to affect the fishing.
The landlord of the Konigin Elizabeth, who is also the Burgomaster
and a gentleman of varied accomplishments and no leisure, kindly
furnished me with a fishing license in the shape of a large pink
card. There were many rules printed upon it: "All fishes under
nine inches must be gently restored to the water. No instrument of
capture must be used except the angle in the hand. The card of
legitimation must be produced and exhibited at the polite request
of any of the keepers of the river." Thus duly authorised and
instructed, I sallied forth to seek my pastime according to the
law.
The easiest way, in theory, was to take the afternoon train up the
river to one of the villages, and fish down a mile or two in the
evening, returning by the eight o'clock train. But in practice the
habits of the fish interfered seriously with the latter part of
this plan.
On my first day I had spent several hours in the vain effort to
catch something better than small grayling. The best time for the
trout was just approaching, as the broad light faded from the
stream; already they were beginning to feed, when I looked up from
the edge of a pool and saw the train rattling down the valley below
me. Under the circumstances the only thing to do was to go on
fishing. It was an even pool with steep banks, and the water ran
through it very straight and swift, some four feet deep and thirty
yards across. As the tail-fly reached the middle of the water, a
fine trout literally turned a somersault over it, but without
touching it. At the next cast he was ready, taking it with a rush
that carried him into the air with the fly in his mouth. He
weighed three-quarters of a pound. The next one was equally eager
in rising and sharp in playing, and the third might have been his
twin sister or brother. So, after casting for hours and taking
nothing in the most beautiful pools, I landed three trout from one
unlikely place in fifteen minutes. That was because the trout's
supper-time had arrived. So had mine. I walked over to the
rambling old inn at Goisern, sought the cook in the kitchen and
persuaded her, in spite of the lateness of the hour, to boil the
largest of the fish for my supper, after which I rode peacefully
back to Ischl by the eleven o'clock train.
For the future I resolved to give up the illusory idea of coming
home by rail, and ordered a little one-horse carriage to meet me at
some point on the high-road every evening at nine o'clock. In this
way I managed to cover the whole stream, taking a lower part each
day, from the lake of Hallstatt down to Ischl.
There was one part of the river, near Laufen, where the current was
very strong and waterfally, broken by ledges of rock. Below these
it rested in long, smooth reaches, much beloved by the grayling.
There was no difficulty in getting two or three of them out of each
run.
The grayling has a quaint beauty. His appearance is aesthetic,
like a fish in a pre-raphaelite picture. His colour, in midsummer,
is a golden gray, darker on the back, and with a few black spots
just behind his gills, like patches put on to bring out the pallor
of his complexion. He smells of wild thyme when he first comes out
of the water, wherefore St. Ambrose of Milan complimented him in
courtly fashion "Quid specie tua gratius? Quid odore fragrantius?
Quod mella fragrant, hoc tuo corpore spiras." But the chief glory
of the grayling is the large iridescent fin on his back. You see
it cutting the water as he swims near the surface; and when you
have him on the bank it arches over him like a rainbow. His mouth
is under his chin, and he takes the fly gently, by suction. He is,
in fact, and to speak plainly, something of a sucker; but then he
is a sucker idealised and refined, the flower of the family.
Charles Cotton, the ingenious young friend of Walton, was all wrong
in calling the grayling "one of the deadest-hearted fishes in the
world." He fights and leaps and whirls, and brings his big fin to
bear across the force of the current with a variety of tactics that
would put his more aristocratic fellow-citizen, the trout, to the
blush. Twelve of these pretty fellows, with a brace of good trout
for the top, filled my big creel to the brim. And yet, such is the
inborn hypocrisy of the human heart that I always pretended to
myself to be disappointed because there were not more trout, and
made light of the grayling as a thing of naught.
The pink fishing license did not seem to be of much use. Its
exhibition was demanded only twice. Once a river guardian, who was
walking down the stream with a Belgian Baron and encouraging him to
continue fishing, climbed out to me on the end of a long
embankment, and with proper apologies begged to be favoured with a
view of my document. It turned out that his request was a favour
to me, for it discovered the fact that I had left my fly-book, with
the pink card in it, beside an old mill, a quarter of a mile up the
stream.
Another time I was sitting beside the road, trying to get out of a
very long, wet, awkward pair of wading-stockings, an occupation
which is unfavourable to tranquillity of mind, when a man came up
to me in the dusk and accosted me with an absence of politeness
which in German amounted to an insult.
"Have you been fishing?"
"Why do you want to know?"
"Have you any right to fish?"
"What right have you to ask?"
"I am a keeper of the river. Where is your card?"
"It is in my pocket. But pardon my curiosity, where is YOUR card?"
This question appeared to paralyse him. He had probably never been
asked for his card before. He went lumbering off in the darkness,
muttering "My card? Unheard of! MY card!"
The routine of angling at Ischl was varied by an excursion to the
Lake of St. Wolfgang and the Schafberg, an isolated mountain on
whose rocky horn an inn has been built. It stands up almost like a
bird-house on a pole, and commands a superb prospect; northward,
across the rolling plain and the Bavarian forest; southward, over a
tumultuous land of peaks and precipices. There are many lovely
lakes in sight; but the loveliest of all is that which takes its
name from the old saint who wandered hither from the country of the
"furious Franks" and built his peaceful hermitage on the
Falkenstein. What good taste some of those old saints had!
There is a venerable church in the village, with pictures
attributed to Michael Wohlgemuth, and a chapel which is said to
mark the spot where St. Wolfgang, who had lost his axe far up the
mountain, found it, like Longfellow's arrow, in an oak, and "still
unbroke." The tree is gone, so it was impossible to verify the
story. But the saint's well is there, in a pavilion, with a bronze
image over it, and a profitable inscription to the effect that the
poorer pilgrims, "who have come unprovided with either money or
wine, should be jolly well contented to find the water so fine."
There is also a famous echo farther up the lake, which repeats six
syllables with accuracy. It is a strange coincidence that there
are just six syllables in the name of "der heilige Wolfgang." But
when you translate it into English, the inspiration of the echo
seems to be less exact. The sweetest thing about St. Wolfgang was
the abundance of purple cyclamens, clothing the mountain meadows,
and filling the air with delicate fragrance like the smell of
lilacs around a New England farmhouse in early June.
There was still one stretch of the river above Ischl left for the
last evening's sport. I remember it so well: the long, deep place
where the water ran beside an embankment of stone, and the big
grayling poised on the edge of the shadow, rising and falling on
the current as a kite rises and falls on the wind and balances back
to the same position; the murmur of the stream and the hissing of
the pebbles underfoot in the rapids as the swift water rolled them
over and over; the odour of the fir-trees, and the streaks of warm
air in quiet places, and the faint whiffs of wood-smoke wafted from
the houses, and the brown flies dancing heavily up and down in the
twilight; the last good pool, where the river was divided, the main
part making a deep, narrow curve to the right, and the lesser part
bubbling into it over a bed of stones with half-a-dozen tiny
waterfalls, with a fine trout lying at the foot of each of them and
rising merrily as the white fly passed over him--surely it was all
very good, and a memory to be grateful for. And when the basket
was full, it was pleasant to put off the heavy wading-shoes and the
long rubber-stockings, and ride homeward in an open carriage
through the fresh night air. That is as near to sybaritic luxury
as a man should care to come.
The lights in the cottages are twinkling like fire-flies, and there
are small groups of people singing and laughing down the road. The
honest fisherman reflects that this world is only a place of
pilgrimage, but after all there is a good deal of cheer on the
journey, if it is made with a contented heart. He wonders who the
dwellers in the scattered houses may be, and weaves romances out of
the shadows on the curtained windows. The lamps burning in the
wayside shrines tell him stories of human love and patience and
hope, and of divine forgiveness. Dream-pictures of life float
before him, tender and luminous, filled with a vague, soft
atmosphere in which the simplest outlines gain a strange
significance. They are like some of Millet's paintings--"The
Sower," or "The Sheepfold,"--there is very little detail in them
but sometimes a little means so much.
Then the moon slips up into the sky from behind the hills, and the
fisherman begins to think of home, and of the foolish, fond old
rhymes about those whom the moon sees far away, and the stars that
have the power to fulfil wishes--as if the celestial bodies knew or
cared anything about our small nerve-thrills which we call
affection and desires! But if there were Some One above the moon
and stars who did know and care, Some One who could see the places
and the people that you and I would give so much to see, Some One
who could do for them all of kindness that you and I fain would do,
Some One able to keep our beloved in perfect peace and watch over
the little children sleeping in their beds beyond the sea--what
then? Why, then, in the evening hour, one might have thoughts of
home that would go across the ocean by way of heaven, and be better
than dreams, almost as good as prayers.
AT THE SIGN OF THE BALSAM BOUGH
"Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, or hills, or field,
Or woods and steepy mountains yield.
"There we will rest our sleepy heads,
And happy hearts, on balsam beds;
And every day go forth to fish
In foamy streams for ouananiche."
Old Song with a new Ending.
It has been asserted, on high philosophical authority, that woman
is a problem. She is more; she is a cause of problems to others.
This is not a theoretical statement. It is a fact of experience.
Every year, when the sun passes the summer solstice, the
"Two souls with but a single thought,"
of whom I am so fortunate as to be one, are summoned by that
portion of our united mind which has at once the right of putting
the question and of casting the deciding vote, to answer this
conundrum: How can we go abroad without crossing the ocean, and
abandon an interesting family of children without getting
completely beyond their reach, and escape from the frying-pan of
housekeeping without falling into the fire of the summer hotel?
This apparently insoluble problem we usually solve by going to camp
in Canada.
It is indeed a foreign air that breathes around us as we make the
harmless, friendly voyage from Point Levis to Quebec. The boy on
the ferry-boat, who cajoles us into buying a copy of Le Moniteur
containing last month's news, has the address of a true though
diminutive Frenchman. The landlord of the quiet little inn on the
outskirts of the town welcomes us with Gallic effusion as well-
known guests, and rubs his hands genially before us, while he
escorts us to our apartments, groping secretly in his memory to
recall our names. When we walk down the steep, quaint streets to
revel in the purchase of moccasins and water-proof coats and
camping supplies, we read on a wall the familiar but transformed
legend, L'enfant pleurs, il veut son Camphoria, and remember with
joy that no infant who weeps in French can impose any
responsibility upon us in these days of our renewed honeymoon.
But the true delight of the expedition begins when the tents have
been set up, in the forest back of Lake St. John, and the green
branches have been broken for the woodland bed, and the fire has
been lit under the open sky, and, the livery of fashion being all
discarded, I sit down at a log table to eat supper with my lady
Greygown. Then life seems simple and amiable and well worth
living. Then the uproar and confusion of the world die away from
us, and we hear only the steady murmur of the river and the low
voice of the wind in the tree-tops. Then time is long, and the
only art that is needful for its enjoyment is short and easy. Then
we taste true comfort, while we lodge with Mother Green at the Sign
of the Balsam Bough.
I.
UNDER THE WHITE BIRCHES.
Men may say what they will in praise of their houses, and grow
eloquent upon the merits of various styles of architecture, but,
for our part, we are agreed that there is nothing to be compared
with a tent. It is the most venerable and aristocratic form of
human habitation. Abraham and Sarah lived in it, and shared its
hospitality with angels. It is exempt from the base tyranny of the
plumber, the paper-hanger, and the gas-man. It is not immovably
bound to one dull spot of earth by the chains of a cellar and a
system of water-pipes. It has a noble freedom of locomotion. It
follows the wishes of its inhabitants, and goes with them, a
travelling home, as the spirit moves them to explore the
wilderness. At their pleasure, new beds of wild flowers surround
it, new plantations of trees overshadow it, and new avenues of
shining water lead to its ever-open door. What the tent lacks in
luxury it makes up in liberty: or rather let us say that liberty
itself is the greatest luxury.
Another thing is worth remembering--a family which lives in a tent
never can have a skeleton in the closet.
But it must not be supposed that every spot in the woods is
suitable for a camp, or that a good tenting-ground can be chosen
without knowledge and forethought. One of the requisites, indeed,
is to be found everywhere in the St. John region; for all the lakes
and rivers are full of clear, cool water, and the traveller does
not need to search for a spring. But it is always necessary to
look carefully for a bit of smooth ground on the shore, far enough
above the water to be dry, and slightly sloping, so that the head
of the bed may be higher than the foot. Above all, it must be free
from big stones and serpentine roots of trees. A root that looks
no bigger that an inch-worm in the daytime assumes the proportions
of a boa-constrictor at midnight--when you find it under your hip-
bone. There should also be plenty of evergreens near at hand for
the beds. Spruce will answer at a pinch; it has an aromatic smell;
but it is too stiff and humpy. Hemlock is smoother and more
flexible; but the spring soon wears out of it. The balsam-fir,
with its elastic branches and thick flat needles, is the best of
all. A bed of these boughs a foot deep is softer than a mattress
and as fragrant as a thousand Christmas-trees. Two things more are
needed for the ideal camp-ground--an open situation, where the
breeze will drive away the flies and mosquitoes, and an abundance
of dry firewood within easy reach. Yes, and a third thing must not
be forgotten; for, says my lady Greygown:
"I shouldn't feel at home in camp unless I could sit in the door of
the tent and look out across flowing water."
All these conditions are met in our favourite camping place below
the first fall in the Grande Decharge. A rocky point juts out into
the rivet and makes a fine landing for the canoes. There is a
dismantled fishing-cabin a few rods back in the woods, from which
we can borrow boards for a table and chairs. A group of cedars on
the lower edge of the point opens just wide enough to receive and
shelter our tent. At a good distance beyond ours, the guides' tent
is pitched; and the big camp-fire burns between the two dwellings.
A pair of white-birches lift their leafy crowns far above us, and
after them we name the place Le Camp aux Bouleaux.
"Why not call trees people?--since, if you come to live among them
year after year, you will learn to know many of them personally,
and an attachment will grow up between you and them individually."
So writes that Doctor Amabilis of woodcraft, W. C. Prime, in his
book, Among the Northern Hills, and straightway launches forth into
eulogy on the white-birch. And truly it is an admirable, lovable,
and comfortable tree, beautiful to look upon and full of various
uses. Its wood is strong to make paddles and axe handles, and
glorious to burn, blazing up at first with a flashing flame, and
then holding the fire in its glowing heart all through the night.
Its bark is the most serviceable of all the products of the
wilderness. In Russia, they say, it is used in tanning, and gives
its subtle, sacerdotal fragrance to Russia leather. But here, in
the woods, it serves more primitive ends. It can be peeled off in
a huge roll from some giant tree and fashioned into a swift canoe
to carry man over the waters. It can be cut into square sheets to
roof his shanty in the forest. It is the paper on which he writes
his woodland despatches, and the flexible material which he bends
into drinking-cups of silver lined with gold. A thin strip of it
wrapped around the end of a candle and fastened in a cleft stick
makes a practicable chandelier. A basket for berries, a horn to
call the lovelorn moose through the autumnal woods, a canvas on
which to draw the outline of great and memorable fish--all these
and many other indispensable luxuries are stored up for the skilful
woodsman in the birch bark.
Only do not rob or mar the tree, unless you really need what it has
to give you. Let it stand and grow in virgin majesty, ungirdled
and unscarred, while the trunk becomes a firm pillar of the forest
temple, and the branches spread abroad a refuge of bright green
leaves for the birds of the air. Nature never made a more
excellent piece of handiwork. "And if," said my lady Greygown, "I
should ever become a dryad, I would choose to be transformed into a
white-birch. And then, when the days of my life were numbered, and
the sap had ceased to flow, and the last leaf had fallen, and the
dry bark hung around me in ragged curls and streamers, some
wandering hunter would come in the wintry night and touch a lighted
coal to my body, and my spirit would flash up in a fiery chariot
into the sky."
The chief occupation of our idle days on the Grande Decharge was
fishing. Above the camp spread a noble pool, more than two miles
in circumference, and diversified with smooth bays and whirling
eddies, sand beaches and rocky islands. The river poured into it
at the head, foaming and raging down a long chute, and swept out of
it just in front of our camp in a merry, musical rapid. It was
full of fish of various kinds--long-nosed pickerel, wall-eyed pike,
and stupid chub. But the prince of the pool was the fighting
ouananiche, the little salmon of St. John.
Here let me chant thy praise, thou noblest and most high-minded
fish, the cleanest feeder, the merriest liver, the loftiest leaper,
and the bravest warrior of all creatures that swim! Thy cousin,
the trout, in his purple and gold with crimson spots, wears a more
splendid armour than thy russet and silver mottled with black, but
thine is the kinglier nature. His courage and skill compared with
thine
"Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine."
The old salmon of the sea who begot thee, long ago, in these inland
waters, became a backslider, descending again to the ocean, and
grew gross and heavy with coarse feeding. But thou, unsalted
salmon of the foaming floods, not landlocked, as men call thee, but
choosing of thine own free-will to dwell on a loftier level, in the
pure, swift current of a living stream, hast grown in grace and
risen to a higher life. Thou art not to be measured by quantity,
but by quality, and thy five pounds of pure vigour will outweigh a
score of pounds of flesh less vitalised by spirit. Thou feedest on
the flies of the air, and thy food is transformed into an aerial
passion for flight, as thou springest across the pool, vaulting
toward the sky. Thine eyes have grown large and keen by peering
through the foam, and the feathered hook that can deceive thee must
be deftly tied and delicately cast. Thy tail and fins, by
ceaseless conflict with the rapids, have broadened and
strengthened, so that they can flash thy slender body like a living
arrow up the fall. As Lancelot among the knights, so art thou
among the fish, the plain-armoured hero, the sunburnt champion of
all the water-folk.
Every morning and evening, Greygown and I would go out for
ouananiche, and sometimes we caught plenty and sometimes few, but
we never came back without a good catch of happiness. There were
certain places where the fish liked to stay. For example, we
always looked for one at the lower corner of a big rock, very close
to it, where he could poise himself easily on the edge of the
strong downward stream. Another likely place was a straight run of
water, swift, but not too swift, with a sunken stone in the middle.
The ouananiche does not like crooked, twisting water. An even
current is far more comfortable, for then he discovers just how
much effort is needed to balance against it, and keeps up the
movement mechanically, as if he were half asleep. But his
favourite place is under one of the floating islands of thick foam
that gather in the corners below the falls. The matted flakes give
a grateful shelter from the sun, I fancy, and almost all game-fish
love to lie in the shade; but the chief reason why the onananiche
haunt the drifting white mass is because it is full of flies and
gnats, beaten down by the spray of the cataract, and sprinkled all
through the foam like plums in a cake. To this natural confection
the little salmon, lurking in his corner, plays the part of Jack
Horner all day long, and never wearies.
"See that belle brou down below there!" said Ferdinand, as we
scrambled over the huge rocks at the foot of the falls; "there
ought to be salmon there en masse." Yes, there were the sharp
noses picking out the unfortunate insects, and the broad tails
waving lazily through the foam as the fish turned in the water. At
this season of the year, when summer is nearly ended, and every
ouananiche in the Grande Decharge has tasted feathers and seen a
hook, it is useless to attempt to delude them with the large gaudy
flies which the fishing-tackle-maker recommends. There are only
two successful methods of angling now. The first of these I tried,
and by casting delicately with a tiny brown trout-fly tied on a
gossamer strand of gut, captured a pair of fish weighing about
three pounds each. They fought against the spring of the four-
ounce rod for nearly half an hour before Ferdinand could slip the
net around them. But there was another and a broader tail still
waving disdainfully on the outer edge of the foam. "And now," said
the gallant Ferdinand, "the turn is to madame, that she should
prove her fortune--attend but a moment, madame, while I seek the
sauterelle."
This was the second method: the grasshopper was attached to the
hook, and casting the line well out across the pool, Ferdinand put
the rod into Greygown's hands. She stood poised upon a pinnacle of
rock, like patience on a monument, waiting for a bite. It came.
There was a slow, gentle pull at the line, answered by a quick jerk
of the rod, and a noble fish flashed into the air. Four pounds and
a half at least! He leaped again and again, shaking the drops from
his silvery sides. He rushed up the rapids as if he had determined
to return to the lake, and down again as if he had changed his
plans and determined to go to the Saguenay. He sulked in the deep
water and rubbed his nose against the rocks. He did his best to
treat that treacherous grasshopper as the whale served Jonah. But
Greygown, through all her little screams and shouts of excitement,
was steady and sage. She never gave the fish an inch of slack
line; and at last he lay glittering on the rocks, with the black
St. Andrew's crosses clearly marked on his plump sides, and the
iridescent spots gleaming on his small, shapely head. "Une belle!"
cried Ferdinand, as he held up the fish in triumph, "and it is
madame who has the good fortune. She understands well to take the
large fish--is it not?" Greygown stepped demurely down from her
pinnacle, and as we drifted down the pool in the canoe, under the
mellow evening sky, her conversation betrayed not a trace of the
pride that a victorious fisherman would have shown. On the
contrary, she insisted that angling was an affair of chance--which
was consoling, though I knew it was not altogether true--and that
the smaller fish were just as pleasant to catch and better to eat,
after all. For a generous rival, commend me to a woman. And if I
must compete, let it be with one who has the grace to dissolve the
bitter of defeat in the honey of a mutual self-congratulation.
We had a garden, and our favourite path through it was the portage
leading around the falls. We travelled it very frequently, making
an excuse of idle errands to the steamboat-landing on the lake, and
sauntering along the trail as if school were out and would never
keep again. It was the season of fruits rather than of flowers.
Nature was reducing the decorations of her table to make room for
the banquet. She offered us berries instead of blossoms.
There were the light coral clusters of the dwarf cornel set in
whorls of pointed leaves; and the deep blue bells of the Clintonia
borealis (which the White Mountain people call the bear-berry, and
I hope the name will stick, for it smacks of the woods, and it is a
shame to leave so free and wild a plant under the burden of a Latin
name); and the gray, crimson-veined berries for which the Canada
Mayflower had exchanged its feathery white bloom; and the ruby
drops of the twisted stalk hanging like jewels along its bending
stem. On the three-leaved table which once carried the gay flower
of the wake-robin, there was a scarlet lump like a red pepper
escaped to the forest and run wild. The partridge-vine was full of
rosy provision for the birds. The dark tiny leaves of the creeping
snow-berry were all sprinkled over with delicate drops of spicy
foam. There were few belated raspberries, and, if we chose to go
out into the burnt ground, we could find blueberries in plenty.
But there was still bloom enough to give that festal air without
which the most abundant feast seems coarse and vulgar. The pale
gold of the loosestrife had faded, but the deeper yellow of the
goldenrod had begun to take its place. The blue banners of the
fleur-de-lis had vanished from beside the springs, but the purple
of the asters was appearing. Closed gentians kept their secret
inviolate, and bluebells trembled above the rocks. The quaint
pinkish-white flowers of the turtle-head showed in wet places, and
instead of the lilac racemes of the purple-fringed orchis, which
had disappeared with midsummer, we found now the slender braided
spikes of the lady's-tresses, latest and lowliest of the orchids,
pale and pure as nuns of the forest, and exhaling a celestial
fragrance. There is a secret pleasure in finding these delicate
flowers in the rough heart of the wilderness. It is like
discovering the veins of poetry in the character of a guide or a
lumberman. And to be able to call the plants by name makes them a
hundredfold more sweet and intimate. Naming things is one of the
oldest and simplest of human pastimes. Children play at it with
their dolls and toy animals. In fact, it was the first game ever
played on earth, for the Creator who planted the garden eastward in
Eden knew well what would please the childish heart of man, when He
brought all the new-made creatures to Adam, "to see what he would
call them."
Our rustic bouquet graced the table under the white-birches, while
we sat by the fire and watched our four men at the work of the
camp--Joseph and Raoul chopping wood in the distance; Francois
slicing juicy rashers from the flitch of bacon; and Ferdinand, the
chef, heating the frying-pan in preparation for supper.
"Have you ever thought," said Greygown, in a contented tone of
voice, "that this is the only period of our existence when we
attain to the luxury of a French cook?"
"And one with the grand manner, too," I replied, "for he never
fails to ask what it is that madame desires to eat to-day, as if
the larder of Lucullus were at his disposal, though he knows well
enough that the only choice lies between broiled fish and fried
fish, or bacon with eggs and a rice omelet. But I like the fiction
of a lordly ordering of the repast. How much better it is than
having to eat what is flung before you at a summer boarding-house
by a scornful waitress!"
"Another thing that pleases me," continued my lady, "is the
unbreakableness of the dishes. There are no nicks in the edges of
the best plates here; and, oh! it is a happy thing to have a home
without bric-a-brac. There is nothing here that needs to be
dusted."
"And no engagements for to-morrow," I ejaculated. "Dishes that
can't be broken, and plans that can--that's the ideal of
housekeeping."
"And then," added my philosopher in skirts, "it is certainly
refreshing to get away from all one's relations for a little
while."
"But how do you make that out?" I asked, in mild surprise. "What
are you going to do with me?"
"Oh," said she, with a fine air of independence, "I don't count
you. You are not a relation, only a connection by marriage."
"Well, my dear," I answered, between the meditative puffs of my
pipe, "it is good to consider the advantages of our present
situation. We shall soon come into the frame of mind of the Sultan
of Morocco when he camped in the Vale of Rabat. The place pleased
him so well that he staid until the very pegs of his tent took root
and grew up into a grove of trees around his pavilion."
II.
KENOGAMI.
The guides were a little restless under the idle regime of our lazy
camp, and urged us to set out upon some adventure. Ferdinand was
like the uncouth swain in Lycidas. Sitting upon the bundles of
camp equipage on the shore, and crying,--
"To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new,"
he led us forth to seek the famous fishing grounds on Lake
Kenogami.
We skirted the eastern end of Lake St. John in our two canoes, and
pushed up La Belle Riviere to Hebertville, where all the children
turned out to follow our procession through the village. It was
like the train that tagged after the Pied Piper of Hamelin. We
embarked again, surrounded by an admiring throng, at the bridge
where the main street crossed a little stream, and paddled up it,
through a score of back yards and a stretch of reedy meadows, where
the wild and tame ducks fed together, tempting the sportsman to
sins of ignorance. We crossed the placid Lac Vert, and after a
carry of a mile along the high-road toward Chicoutimi, turned down
a steep hill and pitched our tents on a crescent of silver sand,
with the long, fair water of Kenogami before us.
It is amazing to see how quickly these woodsmen can make a camp.
Each one knew precisely his share of the enterprise. One sprang to
chop a dry spruce log into fuel for a quick fire, and fell a harder
tree to keep us warm through the night. Another stripped a pile of
boughs from a balsam for the beds. Another cut the tent-poles from
a neighbouring thicket. Another unrolled the bundles and made
ready the cooking utensils. As if by magic, the miracle of the
camp was accomplished.--
"The bed was made, the room was fit,
By punctual eve the stars were lit"--
but Greygown always insists upon completing that quotation from
Stevenson in her own voice; for this is the way it ends,--
"When we put up, my ass and I,
At God's green caravanserai."
Our permanent camp was another day's voyage down the lake, on a
beach opposite the Point Ausable. There the water was contracted
to a narrow strait, and in the swift current, close to the point,
the great trout had fixed their spawning-bed from time immemorial.
It was the first week in September, and the magnates of the lake
were already assembling--the Common Councilmen and the Mayor and
the whole Committee of Seventy. There were giants in that place,
rolling lazily about, and chasing each other on the surface of the
water. "Look, M'sieu'!" cried Francois, in excitement, as we lay
at anchor in the gray morning twilight; "one like a horse has just
leaped behind us; I assure you, big like a horse!"
But the fish were shy and dour. Old Castonnier, the guardian of
the lake, lived in his hut on the shore, and flogged the water,
early and late, every day with his home-made flies. He was
anchored in his dugout close beside us, and grinned with delight as
he saw his over-educated trout refuse my best casts. "They are
here, M'sieu', for you can see them," he said, by way of
discouragement, "but it is difficult to take them. Do you not find
it so?"
In the back of my fly-book I discovered a tiny phantom minnow--a
dainty affair of varnished silk, as light as a feather--and quietly
attached it to the leader in place of the tail-fly. Then the fun
began.
One after another the big fish dashed at that deception, and we
played and netted them, until our score was thirteen, weighing
altogether thirty-five pounds, and the largest five pounds and a
half. The guardian was mystified and disgusted. He looked on for
a while in silence, and then pulled up anchor and clattered ashore.
He must have made some inquiries and reflections during the day,
for that night he paid a visit to our camp. After telling bear
stories and fish stories for an hour or two by the fire, he rose to
depart, and tapping his forefinger solemnly upon my shoulder,
delivered himself as follows:--
"You can say a proud thing when you go home, M'sieu'--that you have
beaten the old Castonnier. There are not many fishermen who can
say that. "But," he added, with confidential emphasis, "c'etait
votre sacre p'tit poisson qui a fait cela."
That was a touch of human nature, my rusty old guardian, more
welcome to me than all the morning's catch. Is there not always a
"confounded little minnow" responsible for our failures? Did you
ever see a school-boy tumble on the ice without stooping
immediately to re-buckle the strap of his skates? And would not
Ignotus have painted a masterpiece if he could have found good
brushes and a proper canvas? Life's shortcomings would be bitter
indeed if we could not find excuses for them outside of ourselves.
And as for life's successes--well, it is certainly wholesome to
remember how many of them are due to a fortunate position and the
proper tools.
Our tent was on the border of a coppice of young trees. It was
pleasant to be awakened by a convocation of birds at sunrise, and
to watch the shadows of the leaves dance out upon our translucent
roof of canvas.
All the birds in the bush are early, but there are so many of them
that it is difficult to believe that every one can be rewarded with
a worm. Here in Canada those little people of the air who appear
as transient guests of spring and autumn in the Middle States, are
in their summer home and breeding-place. Warblers, named for the
magnolia and the myrtle, chestnut-sided, bay-breasted, blue-backed,
and black-throated, flutter and creep along the branches with
simple lisping music. Kinglets, ruby-crowned and golden-crowned,
tiny, brilliant sparks of life, twitter among the trees, breaking
occasionally into clearer, sweeter songs. Companies of redpolls
and crossbills pass chirping through the thickets, busily seeking
their food. The fearless, familiar chickadee repeats his name
merrily, while he leads his family to explore every nook and cranny
of the wood. Cedar wax-wings, sociable wanderers, arrive in
numerous flocks. The Canadians call them "recollets," because they
wear a brown crest of the same colour as the hoods of the monks who
came with the first settlers to New France. They are a songless
tribe, although their quick, reiterated call as they take to flight
has given them the name of chatterers. The beautiful tree-sparrows
and the pine-siskins are more melodious, and the slate-coloured
juncos, flitting about the camp, are as garrulous as chippy-birds.
All these varied notes come and go through the tangle of morning
dreams. And now the noisy blue-jay is calling "Thief--thief--
thief!" in the distance, and a pair of great pileated woodpeckers
with crimson crests are laughing loudly in the swamp over some
family joke. But listen! what is that harsh creaking note? It is
the cry of the Northern shrike, of whom tradition says that he
catches little birds and impales them on sharp thorns. At the
sound of his voice the concert closes suddenly and the singers
vanish into thin air. The hour of music is over; the commonplace
of day has begun. And there is my lady Greygown, already up and
dressed, standing by the breakfast-table and laughing at my belated
appearance.
But the birds were not our only musicians at Kenogami. French
Canada is one of the ancestral homes of song. Here you can still
listen to those quaint ballads which were sung centuries ago in
Normandie and Provence. "A la Claire Fontaine," "Dans Paris y a-t-
une Brune plus Belle que le Jour," "Sur le Pont d'Avignon," "En
Roulant ma Boule," "La Poulette Grise," and a hundred other folk-
songs linger among the peasants and voyageurs of these northern
woods. You may hear
"Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre--
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine,"
and
"Isabeau s'y promene
Le long de son jardin,"
chanted in the farmhouse or the lumber shanty, to the tunes which
have come down from an unknown source, and never lost their echo in
the hearts of the people.
Our Ferdinand was a perfect fountain of music. He had a clear
tenor voice, and solaced every task and shortened every voyage with
melody. "A song, Ferdinand, a jolly song," the other men would
say, as the canoes went sweeping down the quiet lake. And then the
leader would strike up a well-known air, and his companions would
come in on the refrain, keeping time with the stroke of their
paddles. Sometimes it would be a merry ditty:
"My father had no girl but me,
And yet he sent me off to sea;
Leap, my little Cecilia."
Or perhaps it was:
"I've danced so much the livelong day,--
Dance, my sweetheart, let's be gay,--
I've fairly danced my shoes away,--
Till evening.
Dance, my pretty, dance once more;
Dance, until we break the floor."
But more frequently the song was touched with a plaintive pleasant
melancholy. The minstrel told how he had gone into the woods and
heard the nightingale, and she had confided to him that lovers are
often unhappy. The story of La Belle Francoise was repeated in
minor cadences--how her sweetheart sailed away to the wars, and
when he came back the village church bells were ringing, and he
said to himself that Francoise had been faithless, and the chimes
were for her marriage; but when he entered the church it was her
funeral that he saw, for she had died of love. It is strange how
sorrow charms us when it is distant and visionary. Even when we
are happiest we enjoy making music
"Of old, unhappy, far-off things."
"What is that song which you are singing, Ferdinand?" asks the
lady, as she hears him humming behind her in the canoe.
"Ah, madame, it is the chanson of a young man who demands of his
blonde why she will not marry him. He says that he has waited long
time, and the flowers are falling from the rose-tree, and he is
very sad."
"And does she give a reason?"
"Yes, madame--that is to say, a reason of a certain sort; she
declares that she is not quite ready; he must wait until the rose-
tree adorns itself again."
"And what is the end--do they get married at last?"
"But I do not know, madame. The chanson does not go so far. It
ceases with the complaint of the young man. And it is a very
uncertain affair--this affair of the heart--is it not?"
Then, as if he turned from such perplexing mysteries to something
plain and sure and easy to understand, he breaks out into the
jolliest of all Canadian songs:
"My bark canoe that flies, that flies,
Hola! my bark canoe!"
III.
THE ISLAND POOL.
Among the mountains there is a gorge. And in the gorge there is a
river. And in the river there is a pool. And in the pool there is
an island. And on the island, for four happy days, there was a
camp.
It was by no means an easy matter to establish ourselves in that
lonely place. The river, though not remote from civilisation, is
practically inaccessible for nine miles of its course by reason of
the steepness of its banks, which are long, shaggy precipices, and
the fury of its current, in which no boat can live. We heard its
voice as we approached through the forest, and could hardly tell
whether it was far away or near.
There is a perspective of sound as well as of sight, and one must
have some idea of the size of a noise before one can judge of its
distance. A mosquito's horn in a dark room may seem like a trumpet
on the battlements; and the tumult of a mighty stream heard through
an unknown stretch of woods may appear like the babble of a
mountain brook close at hand.
But when we came out upon the bald forehead of a burnt cliff and
looked down, we realised the grandeur and beauty of the unseen
voice that we had been following. A river of splendid strength
went leaping through the chasm five hundred feet below us, and at
the foot of two snow-white falls, in an oval of dark topaz water,
traced with curves of floating foam, lay the solitary island.
The broken path was like a ladder. "How shall we ever get down?"
sighed Greygown, as we dropped from rock to rock; and at the bottom
she looked up sighing, "I know we never can get back again." There
was not a foot of ground on the shores level enough for a tent.
Our canoe ferried us over, two at a time, to the island. It was
about a hundred paces long, composed of round, coggly stones, with
just one patch of smooth sand at the lower end. There was not a
tree left upon it larger than an alder-bush. The tent-poles must
be cut far up on the mountain-sides, and every bough for our beds
must be carried down the ladder of rocks. But the men were gay at
their work, singing like mocking-birds. After all, the glow of
life comes from friction with its difficulties. If we cannot find
them at home, we sally abroad and create them, just to warm up our
mettle.
The ouananiche in the island pool were superb, astonishing,
incredible. We stood on the cobble-stones at the upper end, and
cast our little flies across the sweeping stream, and for three
days the fish came crowding in to fill the barrel of pickled salmon
for our guides' winter use; and the score rose,--twelve, twenty-
one, thirty-two; and the size of the "biggest fish" steadily
mounted--four pounds, four and a half, five, five and three-
quarters. "Precisely almost six pounds," said Ferdinand, holding
the scales; "but we may call him six, M'sieu', for if it had been
to-morrow that we had caught him, he would certainly have gained
the other ounce." And yet, why should I repeat the fisherman's
folly of writing down the record of that marvellous catch? We
always do it, but we know that it is a vain thing. Few listen to
the tale, and none accept it. Does not Christopher North,
reviewing the Salmonia of Sir Humphry Davy, mock and jeer
unfeignedly at the fish stories of that most reputable writer?
But, on the very next page, old Christopher himself meanders
on into a perilous narrative of the day when he caught a whole
cart-load of trout in a Highland loch. Incorrigible, happy
inconsistency! Slow to believe others, and full of sceptical
inquiry, fond man never doubts one thing--that somewhere in the
world a tribe of gentle readers will be discovered to whom his fish
stories will appear credible.
One of our days on the island was Sunday--a day of rest in a week
of idleness. We had a few books; for there are some in existence
which will stand the test of being brought into close contact with
nature. Are not John Burroughs' cheerful, kindly essays full of
woodland truth and companionship? Can you not carry a whole
library of musical philosophy in your pocket in Matthew Arnold's
volume of selections from Wordsworth? And could there be a better
sermon for a Sabbath in the wilderness than Mrs. Slosson's immortal
story of Fishin' Jimmy?
But to be very frank about the matter, the camp is not stimulating
to the studious side of my mind. Charles Lamb, as usual, has said
what I feel: "I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I
cannot settle my spirits to it."
There are blueberries growing abundantly among the rocks--huge
clusters of them, bloomy and luscious as the grapes of Eshcol. The
blueberry is nature's compensation for the ruin of forest fires.
It grows best where the woods have been burned away and the soil is
too poor to raise another crop of trees. Surely it is an innocent
and harmless pleasure to wander along the hillsides gathering these
wild fruits, as the Master and His disciples once walked through
the fields and plucked the ears of corn, never caring what the
Pharisees thought of that new way of keeping the Sabbath.
And here is a bed of moss beside a dashing rivulet, inviting us to
rest and be thankful. Hark! There is a white-throated sparrow, on
a little tree across the river, whistling his afternoon song
"In linked sweetness long drawn out."
Down in Maine they call him the Peabody-bird, because his notes
sound to them like Old man--Peabody, peabody, peabody. In New
Brunswick the Scotch settlers say that he sings Lost--lost--
Kennedy, kennedy, kennedy. But here in his northern home I think
we can understand him better. He is singing again and again, with
a cadence that never wearies, "Sweet--sweet--Canada, canada,
canada!" The Canadians, when they came across the sea, remembering
the nightingale of southern France, baptised this little gray
minstrel their rossignol, and the country ballads are full of his
praise. Every land has its nightingale, if we only have the heart
to hear him. How distinct his voice is--how personal, how
confidential, as if he had a message for us!
There is a breath of fragrance on the cool shady air beside our
little stream, that seems familiar. It is the first week of
September. Can it be that the twin-flower of June, the delicate
Linnaea borealis, is blooming again? Yes, here is the threadlike
stem lifting its two frail pink bells above the bed of shining
leaves. How dear an early flower seems when it comes back again
and unfolds its beauty in a St. Martin's summer! How delicate and
suggestive is the faint, magical odour! It is like a renewal of
the dreams of youth.
"And need we ever grow old?" asked my lady Greygown, as she sat
that evening with the twin-flower on her breast, watching the stars
come out along the edge of the cliffs, and tremble on the hurrying
tide of the river. "Must we grow old as well as gray? Is the time
coming when all life will be commonplace and practical, and
governed by a dull 'of course'? Shall we not always find
adventures and romances, and a few blossoms returning, even when
the season grows late?"
"At least," I answered, "let us believe in the possibility, for to
doubt it is to destroy it. If we can only come back to nature
together every year, and consider the flowers and the birds, and
confess our faults and mistakes and our unbelief under these silent
stars, and hear the river murmuring our absolution, we shall die
young, even though we live long: we shall have a treasure of
memories which will be like the twin-flower, always a double
blossom on a single stem, and carry with us into the unseen world
something which will make it worth while to be immortal."
1894.
A SONG AFTER SUNDOWN
"There's no music like a little river's. It plays the same tune
(and that's the favourite) over and over again, and yet does not
weary of it like men fiddlers. It takes the mind out of doors; and
though we should be grateful for good houses, there is, after all,
no house like god's out-of-doors. And lastly, sir, it quiets a man
down like saying his prayers."--ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: Prince
Otto.
THE WOOD-NOTES OF THE VEERY
The moonbeams over Arno's vale in silver flood were pouring,
When first I heard the nightingale a long-lost love deploring:
So passionate, so full of pain, it sounded strange and eerie,
I longed to hear a simpler strain, the wood-notes of the veery.
The laverock sings a bonny lay, above the Scottish heather,
It sprinkles from the dome of day like light and love together;
He drops the golden notes to greet his brooding mate, his dearie;
I only know one song more sweet, the vespers of the veery.
In English gardens green and bright, and rich in fruity treasure,
I've heard the blackbird with delight repeat his merry measure;
The ballad was a lively one, the tune was loud and cheery,
And yet with every setting sun I listened for the veery.
O far away, and far away, the tawny thrush is singing,
New England woods at close of day with that clear chant are ringing;
And when my light of life is low, and heart and flesh are weary,
I fain would hear, before I go, the wood-notes of the veery.
1895.
End