Rosalind Richards

“ Dew 67 falls all winter, but it is in star and fern shapes of frost; now every morning and evening the thick grass is pearled again with a million nourishing drops.
Now rainbow colors begin to show over the hillsides. It is as if a thousand and a thousand tiny butterflies, pink and cream color and living green and crimson, had alighted in the woods. Light comes through them, and they give back light, from the shining, fine down that covers them. The little leaves are almost like clear jewels against the sun, beaded all over the twigs. ”

“ The ice was frosted deep with delicate lace-work, and looking up underneath we saw a perfect wonderland of organ-pipes and colonnades of crystal, through which the water tinkled melodiously.
We came out high on the north side of Assimasqua, in the sugaring grove that spreads up the steep slope to the crest. The tall maples were very beautiful in their winter bareness, and the slope about their feet was massed with a close feathery growth of young balsam firs and hemlocks, with openings between. The snow lay even with the eaves of the small bark sugaring-shanty. ”

“ As the first shafts of sunlight strike across, they light up a million frost-crystals. The air is alive with them, on all sides, delicate star and wheel shapes, flashing like diamonds. This beautiful phenomenon lasts only about half an hour. The fairy crystals, light as the air, floating about you, vanish, but the snow continues to flash softly, from countless tiny stars and facets, all day.
Frost mists hover all day about our valley, the breath of the sleeping river. They are drawn through our streets all day in veils and wisps of softness. ”

“ What does anything matter but happiness? Christmas is coming! Every man, woman, and child is a hurrying Santa Claus. The first snow brings its strange hush, its strange sheltering pureness, and the sleigh-bells begin once more to jingle all about. During Christmas week hundreds of strings of colored lights are hung across the business streets. Wreaths and garlands of fragrant balsam fir, the very breath and expression of our countryside, are hung everywhere, over shop windows and doorways, in every house window, and on quiet mounds in the churchyard and cemetery. ”

“ We walked down between the stacks of fragrant new-cut lumber to the edge of the pond, which lay between its wooded shores, as blue as the sky, sparkling in the sunshine. We could make out three duck at the farther end of it. It is a pity to have the fine growth of pine cut, but it grows fast again with us. Nobody cares for the lesser hard wood growths in such an over-forested State as ours, and once the saw-mill is gone, the pond 156 will probably stay its wild lonely self, perhaps for ages. ”

“ There are cliffs, moss and fern-grown, and countless dark headlands. The islands are heavily wooded with characteristic evergreen growth, dense, fragrant, of a rich color, and they are ringed with cream-white granite above the sea-weed, where the blue water circles them.—And so down, till the first break of blue sea shows between the spruces.
We never feel cut off, or too far inland, having our river. The actual sea fog reaches us on a south wind, salt to the lips. ”

“ More often than not there is shining water, lake or pond or stream. Sometimes this lower valley country extends for miles before the next range rises, so that your glance travels restfully out over the wide spaces. Sometimes it is little, like a cup.
As you get up towards the Height of Land you come to what makes the returning New Englander draw breath quickly, the pleasure is so poignant: upland pastures dotted with juniper and boulders, and broken by clumps of balsam fir and spruce. Most fragrant, most beloved places. Dicksonia fern grows thick about the boulders. ”

“ You are confronted everywhere with this meeting of the natural and indented shore of the woods, close, feathery, impenetrable, with the bays and inlets of field and pasture and meadow. The jutting portions are apt to be made more sharp and marked by the most striking part of our growth, the evergreens. There they grow, white pine and red pine, black spruce, hemlock, and balsam fir, in lovely sisterhood. Their needles shine in the sun. ”

“ The elm tops are growing feathery and show a warm brown, and a crimson-coral mist begins to flush over the low-lying woods, where the swamp maples are in flower. Pussy-willows are as thick on their twigs as drops after a rain, and as silvery. You would say at first that nothing had changed yet in the main forest. The 66 brown aisles and misty dark hollows seem the same, but no; fringed about the openings and coverts along their borders the birch and alder catkins are in flower. They are powdery and gold-colored, and overhead they dangle like the tails of little fairy sheep against the sky. ”

“ Why should one clear-eyed boy among us have been born with the voice and vision, and the sorrow-and-reward-full consecration, of high poetry, rather than his brothers? Why should another, of different bringing-up, among a din of voices crying down the town’s possibilities, have had the wit and enterprise, yes, and the vision, too, to build up, here, a vigorous manufactory, whose wares, well planned and well made, now have their market many States away? ”

“ They are all out after dusk, like flights of chimney-swallows. They run and race down the streets, they don’t know why, and frolic like moths about the electric-light poles. 205
Memorial Day, with its grave celebration, renews our citizenship. The children are in the fields almost at sunrise, gathering scarlet columbines in the hill crannies, yellow dog-tooth violets, buttercups in the tall wet grass, stripping their mothers’ gardens of their brilliant blaze of tulips, bending down the heavy, dewy heads of white and purple lilacs. ”

“ With the breaking-up of the ice, all our settled order breaks up, too, in the tremendous effort of Spring Cleaning. It is as chaotic within the house as without. The furniture is huddled in the middle of the room, swathed in sheets. The master of the house mourns and seeks, like a bird robbed of its nest. We live in aprons and sweeping caps, and in mock despair. ”

“ A little further on, the firs were assembled in groups and clumps, and then group was joined to group. The valley grew deeper and darker, and still the same small path led on, till I found myself in the tallest and most solemn wood of firs that I have ever seen. They were sixty feet high, needle-pointed, black, and they filled the long hollow between the hills, like a dark river.
The woods alternate with fields to clothe the hills and intervales and valleys, and make a constant and lovely variety over the landscape. Sometimes they seem a shore instead of a river. ”

“ The evergreens showed up everywhere, in delicate vigorous beauty, and we counted unguessed masses of pine among the hills. I think we always expect a little sadness with the fall of the leaves, but instead there is a sense of elation, with the greater spread of light and the wider views opening everywhere. The wood roads showed more plainly than in summer, and paths stood out green across the fields. The tender unveiling of autumn had revealed the hidden topography of the forest, and countless small ravines and slopes were suddenly made plain. ”

“ Below the bay the channel narrows almost to a gorge. The sides are steep and rocky, 14 crowned with black growth of fir and spruce, and through this space the swollen waters pour in great force. There are strong tide races, in which the river steamers reel and tremble, and below this there begins a perfect labyrinth of channels, some mere backwaters, some leading through intricate passages among a hundred fairy islands. ”

“ Innocents are out in patches in the pastures, looking as if white powder had been spilt. Purple and white hepaticas are clustered in crannies of the rocks, and after a rain mayflowers stand up thick, thick in the fields, in masses of pink and white fragrance. Blood-root covers whole banks with snow-white, and dog-tooth violets, littlest of lilies, nod their yellow-and-brown prettiness over the slopes carpeted with their strange mottled leaves. ”

“ The long ridges accentuate themselves suddenly into sharp slopes and steep cup-shaped valleys, covered with sweet-fern and juniper. The wooded hills are often full of hidden cliffs (rich gardens in themselves, they are so deep in ferns and moss) , and quick brooks run through them, so that you are never long without the talk of one to keep you company. There are rocky glens, where you meet cold, sweet air, the ceaseless comforting of a waterfall, and moss on moss, to velvet depths of green. ”

“ All around there is the general bog fragrance of sphagnum and water-lilies, and the woodsy perfume of the rose-colored orchids.
Farther in shore, among the balsam firs, 108 the growth dwindles to a general velvety richness of gem-like green and crimson mosses, blueberries, and cranberries and huckleberries, the large handsome maroon-crimson flowers of the Pitcher-Plant, and the little bright-yellow-flowered Sundew, getting its nourishment from the insects caught in its sticky crimson filaments.
The pond is alive all summer with butterflies and birds. ”

“ The tall gold-colored red-oaks make masses of strong color; and later, when we think the shimmering of the fairy rainbow is fading, the white oaks come out in a mist of pale carnation—pink and gray and cream.
In June, after all the hardwoods have merged into uniform light green, firs and spruces become jeweled at every point with tips of light, the new growth for the year. Red pines and white pines are set all over with candelabra of lighter green, until high on the tops of the seeding white pines little clusters of finger-slender pale green cones begin to show. ”

“ The whole locality is rich in treasures, and here on the north side of the pond is a stretch of mossy glades and openings in the underwood which are covered with the fairy elegance of maiden-hair fern, the delicate black stems standing out against the rocks and moss. They grow under cool rich woods, with pink Lady’s Slippers scattered in clumps among them.
The farm at Tresumpscott is an ample one, and Jacob Damren, who farms it, comes of fine stock, and is a big, hearty figure of a man. ”

“ There is a sad combination of receding prosperity and a run-out population in a town a long day’s drive from us. Poor place, it has become bankrupt. Its timber was cut off, and the cooperages, on which its tiny livelihood depended, moved away. Its farms straggle up the flanks of a round-topped mountain. Apple-raising might perhaps have saved it, but either such of its people as had the enterprise for this moved away, or it possessed none such. The people I saw there looked as different as possible from our hearty sun-and-air neighbors. ”

“ The house of this dear woman burned, not long after she and her husband died, and only the blossoming lilacs mark its empty cellar-hole, but the next farm, which belonged to Mr. Eastman’s brother, and is now his nephew’s, is a fine one. You drive on to a wide green, as smoothly kept as a lawn, where three huge trees, a willow and two elms, overhang the house. There are big comfortable barns and outhouses, a corn-crib and well-sweep, and the house is square and ample, with two big chimneys. ”