Part 3 (2/2)
Wake Robin, though keyed in a much lower tone than the essay, is as fresh as the morning dew, and sparkles as much, and we cannot help but feel that Mr. Burroughs did the proper thing when he came down from his high perch of Transcendentalism.
After breakfast was over, and the ch.o.r.es were done, we prepared for the morning tramp in the hills. Our itinerary, which had already been mapped out by Mr. Burroughs, lead down the road by the old home farm and up the lane beyond to the south and east. In the corner of a meadow, to the right of the road beyond the Burroughs' house, is an old family grave yard, and when we reached this, Mr. Burroughs stopped and gave a little history of the farm and of several of the people who had been planted there in the city of the dead. ”Ezra Bartram owned this farm before father, and sold it to father. Bartram built the house in which I was born. When I was a young boy father built the house you see down there now. Edna Bartram, the grand-daughter of Ezra, was my first sweetheart and I recall now just how she looked.” We entered the old grave yard from the bars in the stone fence, and Mr. Burroughs had much pleasure reading the names and telling of the people who were buried there. When he came to the name of Jeremiah Dart, he recalled that he had three sons, Dave, Abe and Rube, and that Rube once worked for his father. The Scudders were teachers and preachers. The Corbins were successful farmers and respectable people. ”Deacon Jonathan Scudder had a farm joining father's farm on the southwest, and well do I remember how straight he was. The Deacon built that fence over there beyond our farm, and I can see him now as straight as a rod, picking up stones in that pasture. He never bent except at the hips. How he ever built that wall is a puzzle. But he was forever going through the pasture picking up stones and putting them on the fence one by one. He was thrifty and always had things done right about him.” Mr. Burroughs went on across the grave yard and came to a name that interested him a great deal.
”Nath Chase was the first to introduce top-knot chickens in our community, and O how I wanted some of those chickens!”
[Ill.u.s.tration: RESTING UNDERNEATH A CATSKILL LEDGE WHERE HE HAS OFTEN BEEN PROTECTED FROM THE RAIN IN SUMMER]
From this grave yard we went over the hill to the east, following the public road, till we came to a large patch of raspberries on the left of the road, which were growing in a hole surrounded by heaps of stone and brickbats. Mr. Burroughs did not tell me why his fancy led him there, but I knew when he told me that his father was born there, and that it was his grandfather's place. He was loath to leave here, but sat down on one of the old timbers in the centre of the place where the house stood and ate raspberries for some time. ”How delicious these berries are! Far better it seems to me than any cultivated berries that ever grew.”
Having said this, he gave me a handful that I might try those he himself was gathering. From this place we went to the site of his grandfather's barn, where Mr. Burroughs discovered a few years ago his father's initials cut in a slab of stone. ”These letters, 'C. A. B.' stand for Chauncey A. Burroughs, my father, born in 1803, who must have cut them here many, many years ago. I was very glad to make the discovery.”
Just as we began our journey toward the nearby woods, he pointed out to me the little red school on the edge of the opposite hillside, where he got most of his education. ”That school and the grounds about it, are about as they were when I was in school there over sixty years ago. The house was painted red then as it is now, and on some of the old seats I can see where some of my schoolmates cut their names.” The call of a sharp s.h.i.+nned hawk attracted our attention from the school house, to the woods. Now we halted for several moments in the lower edge of the meadow. Mr. Burroughs thought they must have found some prey and that we might see what it was if we kept still and quiet. But the hawks went across the valley in the direction of the school house and we never saw what was the cause of the disturbance.
Going south from here, we came to some beautiful woods, at the bottom of which flowed a clear cool brook. At the upper edge of the hill was an outcrop of stratified rock. This was of the greatest interest to the naturalist, who, just back from the petrified forests of Arizona and the Yosemite valley, where he had enjoyed the companions.h.i.+p of John Muir, was chuck full of Geology and the Geological history of the earth. ”You can see the effects of water in this perfect stratification here,” he would say, as he pointed out the leaves of stone so perfectly marked there in the hillside. ”If we could just roll back the pages of history a few millions of years, we could read some interesting and wonderful stories of the formation of Mother Earth's crust. Just look at the wave marks of the sea along the edges of the hill! How I wonder if old Triton did not have a great task allaying the waves that folded these pages! O what a small part man plays in the history of the earth! The creature of the hour and a mere speck on the face of nature.” There is a sadness and sweetness in the a.s.sociations with a man like this, and I could not help but think of Wordsworth's little poem as I listened to John Burroughs tell about his idea of the earth in its relation to man, and of how little man studies Mother Earth.
”The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This sea that bears her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.--Great G.o.d! I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”
There is kept before your mind the unquestionable seriousness of the influences of cosmic forces; the effects of an intimate relations.h.i.+p with Nature. Burroughs always sees the better and larger side of things.
You never hear any of the nature prattle so common among the less serious students.
At this moment the red-eyed vireo burst in full song only a few feet from us and a Rubenstein would not have commanded our attention quicker.
”The little fellow is doing almost the work of two,” said the naturalist, so fluent was the song. He came within close range and softened down into a low mellow song, whereupon Mr. Burroughs remarked: ”His audience is not quite as large as he first thought, so he is tuning his harp down accordingly.” Here we came into the settlement roadway and returned to the Lodge for dinner.
III
In the afternoon, we set out early from Woodchuck Lodge for a long tramp through the pasture south of the Burroughs farm and in the direction of the Nath Chase farm. Back through the woods between the Lodge and the old farm, were scattered apple trees, which had some apples on them. Mr.
Burroughs told something of the history of some of these apple trees, that they had been grafted many years ago by his father, and that others had been planted by the cattle as they followed the pathway through this pasture. There were signs that the gray squirrels had been eating the apples. We saw several piles of chips and a few apple seeds scattered on the wall fence, which the squirrels had chosen for a festal hall. On this wall, the naturalist would lean and look off over the hills toward the town of Roxbury, and tell of the neighbors who had settled this field and that. His mind sometimes seemed to be on,
”Far-off things, And battles long ago.”
Suddenly he looked around and said: ”It's sweet to muse over one's early years and first experiences. I was just thinking of the many times I had gone through these woods. But O, how I dislike to see these trees cut down for wood, when so many are already down and rotting. This patch of woods extended to the bottom of the hillside, when I was a boy, and I think it was much prettier then than it is now.” A very interesting piece of natural history pointed out to me beyond this pasture, was the tendency of birch to trace its roots over large areas of stone almost barren of soil. It has a preference for rocky places. The root of this tree will sometimes trace a small crevice in the stone twenty or thirty feet and does not seem to reach into any soil throughout its whole length.
At the edge of the flat gra.s.s covered hill beyond the pasture, was a perpendicular wall of several feet in height,--the outcrop of the same stratification of stone we had observed during the earlier part of the day. A number of birch roots had reached all the way down to the bottom of this ledge and fastened themselves in the soil below. Several phoebe nests had been built on the shelves of rock along under the ledge, which the naturalist pointed out to me. Under one ledge that extended over at least twelve feet, was a phoebe's nest that Mr. Burroughs thought had been there for more than a quarter of a century. On the table of rock beneath the nest was a pile of waste ten or twelve inches in height, and there was enough material in the nest itself to build more than a dozen phoebe's nests. The place was so inaccessible to other animals, that the birds took advantage of this, and doubtless made of it hereditary property, handing it down from generation to generation since its discovery.
Pa.s.sing on down through the Scudder pasture toward the lower woods, to the south, we met a lad herding cattle for the night, and after a few words with him, we turned to the left and went up the side of a steep hill through a deep hemlock forest. This was a pretty hard climb, and I kept looking for Mr. Burroughs to stop and blow a little, but not a bit of it. He took the lead and kept up the climb without even a hint of exhaustion. In fact, I had begun to wish that he would stop and rest for a moment, when pointing up to a white wall of stone he said, ”There is the Old Gray Ledge. It looks like a white house from here. This is one of the most beautiful places you will find in this part of the Catskill mountains, and O, the times I have come here for rest and study!” There is a rough broken surface of rock wall at least seventy-five feet high, all covered with moss and lichens, and almost as gray as whitewash on a stone house. In the hemlocks toward the valley from here, are hundreds of fine timber trees, and we could hear among them nut-hatches, chickadees and t.i.tmice. We spent almost an hour about this beautiful place, discussing in a friendly way, neighbors and people, great and small. Our next task was to get to the top of the Old Gray Ledge, which we did by going a little distance south and picking the place that showed the least resistance. The woods on the top of the Ledge were level and consisted of much shrubbery and some large hardwood trees and a few hemlocks and pines. We soon came out of the woods to the west and entered a pasture on the Nath Chase farm, from which we could see across the beautiful valley to the south and many mountain peaks, among which were a few that Mr. Burroughs said he could see from the top of a mountain by Slabsides, down at West Park. This was the connecting link between the old and the new home.
Turning around, we could see to the north across the valley, in which was the Burroughs farm and the Old Clump beyond. There was a swift breeze from the northeast and the air was quite cool for the early part of August. But after our climb up The Old Gray Ledge, it was quite wholesome and renewed our strength. The pure swift mountain breeze fitted well with my own feelings, for I had begun to feel the effects of a steady pull up the hill and needed oxygen and ozone. But best of all, I had enjoyed the day with the man who brought the pleasures of the woods and the mountains to me, and I felt that I had been blest. I had felt the sympathies and love of a strong poetic pulse. I had a glimpse of something that,
”Made the wild blood start In its mystic springs,”
and I wondered if we have any greater heights to look forward to! I wondered if we should ever find in the trackless paths of eternity a joy that would eclipse this! I thought I had learned ”that a good man's life is the fruit of the same balance and proportion as that which makes the fields green and the corn ripen. It is not by some fortuitous circ.u.mstances, the especial favor of some G.o.d, but by living in harmony with immutable laws through which the organic world has evolved, that he is what he is.” We reached the Lodge just as the sun was going down, and soon the evening meal was over. I went back across the hill to the old home for the night, and as I pa.s.sed down the road way, I called to mind many things that had interested me during the day. After I had retired for the night and sleep had been induced, the joys, the pleasures, the happiness of the day, haunted me in my dreams, and I knew that I had 'staid my haste and made delays, and what was mine had known my face.'
[Ill.u.s.tration: A CATSKILL MOUNTAIN SIDE WHERE THE PHOEBE BUILDS]
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