Winthrop Packard

“ In the open pasture stands a tall hickory, clad in the golden tan of autumn foliage, dripping gray nuts and blackened husks upon the pasture grass beneath it. Taking his pick among these was a splendid great gray squirrel, and as I approached, instead of bounding across the open to the thick wood, where he would have been surely safe, he sprang to the trunk, and hiding behind it, eyed me over the lowest limb. ”

“ Crossing the glade again on my homeward way I plucked branches of juniper so thickly studded with blue berries that there seemed scarcely room for the scaly-pointed leaves, and in so doing I stumbled upon the real secret of the dainty odor left by the goddess and her train. For the matured shoots and leaves of the juniper give off a fragrance that is as much more dainty than that of the pitch pine as that is more dainty than the strongly resinous odor of the white pine when cut or bruised. ”

“ Stand on a knoll in the pasture and look over the tops of shrubs and trees on these keen and clear November days and you will see that the most beautiful colors of the year are there waiting your eye after you thought that all color had flamed to its climax and died in the dead ashes of autumn memories. Grays that are incredibly soft and coot in the vigorous young limbs of the maples warm into tender reds on the twig tips where the next year’s buds sit snug. ”

“ The sap of all trees has something of goodness and delight in it. The maples bear sugar that is more than sweetness; it has in it some Attic salt that makes the imagination smack its lips. The brew of the birch is more than beer; it is the embodiment of a flavor that bears dreams{35} of rosy mornings on woody ridges that look down on the golden glory of the primeval world. So the faint fragrance of the fir floats like a divine presence from a loving heart that would fain clasp to itself the wounded and stricken of the world and dress their wounds and make them whole again. ”

“ Along with these two fireweeds, breeders of sylphs, in my pine wood grows the pokeweed, a villainous name for a wonderfully vigorous and beautiful plant. Just now its close-set racemes of purple-black berries are ripening, their color a vivid contrast with the smooth rich green of its ovate-oblong leaves and the wine color of its stems. It is really a royal plant, and so great is its vigor that its dark berries threaten to burst their skins and scatter their rich crimson lifeblood. ”

“ FAIRY FRUIT TO-DAY the September west winds have begun the fall house-cleaning by sweeping the tops of the pine woods. All the morning the little brown scales which nestle close to the base of each pine leaf as it grows, protecting it from the withering force of the midsummer sun, have been soaring and spinning in high glee, curiously lighting up with brown glimmers the solemn sanctuaries beneath. ”

“ Already the ash trees, whose foliage has passed with much rapidity through olive-green and olive-yellow to tan-brown, which still holds a little of the olive tint, stand bare and gray against the sky, like the red maples, sure prophets of winter. The ash is never profuse of leaves. It drops them first of all in the autumn and{97} is among the latest to put them forth in the spring. Even in the height of summer you cannot say that its foliage is dense; and when the slender brown leaves lie upon the ground they do not make a thick carpet. They merely crisp under foot instead of rustling. ”

“ To-morrow the wind will be in the northwest again, the morning sun will glint on fields that are hoar with frost, and in the afternoon the Blue Hills will be blue no more, but brown with the rustling tannin of dead scrub oak leaves seen too clearly,—gray with granite angles, and sharply cut against a sky from which all dreams have fled. ”

“ Under a Norway maple the ground will later be half-leg deep in dense curled leaves that rustle and swish under your stride. You plough through them and they leap up and dance away from your progress, a splashing, undulating brown tide. Under oaks, much later, you find a similar sea, though its flood does not rise so high and there is a crisper rustle that is yet a large-hearted and generous sound. ”

“ The oaks are more tenacious of their leaves than any other deciduous tree, though they are fairly early in showing autumn tints. Long after the reds of other trees of the wood are buried in the brown drifts that cover the roots from the too fierce frosts of winter the rich deep crimsons and red-browns of the oak remain. ”

“ From below the fog seems to gradually grow warmer and to be dissolved in its own moisture. The frost that crisped underfoot before the mists began to shiver together in the lowlands now glistens as dew under the yellow sun. The day warms toward the noon and we note with satisfaction what a perfect one it is. ”

“ Yet, though flowers are rare on the third week in October and the pungency of dead leaves pervades the swamp, the upland pastures have a fine fragrance of their own,—a perfume so dainty and alluring that you look for its source in bewilderment, knowing that at this time of year no flowering shrub, no slender-blossoming vine, remains to float it down the wind. ”

“ Their rustle, as they cling to the twigs in December, makes the wood vocal as the winter winds sift the snow softly down among them. Oftentimes before you see the first fine, far-apart flakes of the coming storm you may hear them pat here and there on a resonant oak leaf, and their presence makes the winter outlook more perfectly and comfortingly bleak as the fine flakes whirl through them. Snow amongst perfectly bare twigs fails of its full effect. ”

“ About them are the green young leaves, vividly colored already, both only waiting for the mysterious thrill of spring sap to push forward to maturity, promising the leaves softly green, the blossoms vividly white, sticky with sweetness, and adorably fragrant. If you will pull one of the larger of the azalia buds apart you may easily see all this, and as you do it,{167} be haunted by the ghost of a perfume, an infinitesimally faint promise of the rich odor yet to be. ”

“ With their vivid colors, their premature baldness, their usually smaller size, and a generally devil-may-care air which, perhaps, is only seeming because of these facts, the swamp maples always appear to me like swashbucklers, roistering young blades in whom riots the wine of life, whose red faces early in the morning of the autumn and whose premature baldness both hint of dissipation. Their roots are deep in the richest of mold dissolved in the{92} water of copious springs. The most bounteous of banquets and the warmest of wine is continually at their lips. ”

“ Over on the ridge, some miles to the westward of the Macwahoc-Kingman road, stands a sole survivor of the old-time pumpkin pines. Forty and fifty feet from the earth toward its limbs the birches and beeches lift whispering leaves. Timber and cat-spruce and resinous fir spire higher yet and fling incense toward him. Sixty and seventy feet they reach, growing tenuous to the tip of nothingness, yet the stately column of his trunk soars half a hundred feet beyond their tops, lonely and unapproachable. ”

“ It is for this reason that the crow is so well hated by smaller birds, and I don’t doubt it is this consciousness of guilt that makes him hang his head and flee away before the attack of the least of them. Blackbird and kingbird alike will send him flapping in shamed haste for the big wood, and it makes no difference whether or not he has attempted to burglarize their homes or slaughter their children. ”

“ It is no wonder if their youth is tempted to excesses.
Most of the lady birches stand aloof on the upland slopes; I notice not far enough away to forbid the handsome young maples from climbing out of their mire of dissipation to nibble the dry husks of gravel-bank breakfast food and drink dew among them if they have the courage. But not all thus withdraw in whispering groups. Down into the swamp others have stepped and stand, erect and dainty, among the rubicund roisterers. ”

“ On days when the northeaster sings along the Gloucester shore, tears white wraiths off the red rocks of Marblehead and Nahant, and spins them in beaten spume along the gray sands of Nantasket,{47} we of the inland country tread our heat-browned pastures with lifted heads, watching mysterious vapors wrap the land in legend, breathing the same air as the stormy petrel, and knowing that in our hearts the strong pulse beats with the blood of vikings. ”

“ Some years ago there came from South African mines a wonderful lump of crystallized carbon,—a great diamond that, cut and polished, yet weighed one hundred and twenty-five carats,—the famous Tiffany yellow diamond, in whose heart glows the same yellow radiance which wells throughout the birch wood{75} of a sunlit October day. The Tiffany gem is worth its hundreds of thousands, and you might lose it from a hole in your vest pocket. The birch wood is a half-mile wide, and once you have felt its soft radiance flood your soul it is yours forever. Neither deserts nor cities can take it from you. ”

“ All the under-pine world is spread just now with beautiful berries, for which neither we nor the birds seem to have a taste. There are the partridge berries, which, by the way, I have never seen a partridge eat, nor have I found them in the crops of partridges, which I have been mean enough to shoot. Yet these are, to my mind, the most edible of all, though they are insipidly sweet, and their flavor is so finely pleasant that it is not for the coarse palate of most mortals. ”

“ AMONG AUTUMN LEAVES THE deep woods catch all the rich colors of the autumn sunsets in their foliage. The dull reds and the vivid ones, the maroons and the scarlets, the golden yellows and the wondrously soft and mellow shades of tan and brown they hold till from a hilltop you see the forest afire. ”

“ They are simply darkened and grizzled. The Norway maples are showing a bronzy-yellow now, but holding their leaves bravely still, as if in the memory that, though the winter night of their homeland is long and dark, its shores are bathed by the Gulf Stream and the cold is late in coming. I think none of the imported trees and shrubs of Europe show the gorgeous coloring of our native ones, though they may have been here long enough to have been trained to it by the climate, if that is the cause of it. ”

“ A subtle glow pervades all things,—an atmos{88}phere that is a yellow from which the sap has run, a very ghost of color. The domes of the hickories that grow in the open pasture are a rich brown, a most lovable shade; those hickory saplings that are rooted in the shade, and wait so patiently for fate to carry off the big trees that they may take their places, take an autumnal tint of this ghost of yellow also, and all the leaves of the wood ferns are pale with it,—a paleness that becomes with the more delicate an almost transparent whiteness. ”

“ The stronger odor{126} of the pitch pine carries it far on the soft south wind across the glade and down the path through the pasture, but this is only the vehicle. The dainty essence of perfume which stops you as if a soft hand fell upon your arm floats from the loving heart of the rough and lowly juniper. ”

“ Through the August midday of the pitch-pine grove we pass to the home path among the birches, and though October dusk slips its cool hand into ours, it is only to lead us toward a western horizon where springtime seems still to wait for us wistfully. ”

“ For Nature’s successes are by no means easily won. She lays such plans for a hickory tree that if all the blossoms which open in May were to produce fruit the trees’ tough limbs would be torn from their sockets with the weight of it long before maturity. Some years, because of storm or frost, the tree’s crop is a total failure, but the resourceful mother, the moment she notes the death of the embryos, sets the wood to making a more vigorous growth than would have been possible in a fruiting season. ”

“ The blue jays flutter back and forth on softer wing, and their usual strident clangor is subdued to an almost caressing babble, in which you think you hear the tones of spring love-making. They know the feel of nesting weather, and though it is but for a day it soothes them to happy response. ”

“ On either side of it, here and there, the hand of man has hewn an open space for a farm. Yet you may stand on the summit of the ridge at Number One and look eastward for forty miles and see only the unbroken green of the forest, with the black lances of the firs and{24} spruce stabbing the sky. The thin gray road seems about to be crushed and wiped off the world by these green eastern and western millstones which press upon it. They smooth off the boundaries of the farm spaces, roll over fences, and crush them into the black earth beneath. ”

“ So, looking over the result of harvest and round-up in pasture and woodland, I can see no reason why Nature should shed many tears or go into any tantrums over{163} the results of her busy season. These seem to me to be above the average, and I look forward to a bright and sunny November, during which she will count up the finished product with all good cheer.
The tally of young brought to successful maturity is all that the animal world has to show for the success of its department during the season of growth. ”

“ The spruce partridge winds along the brakes and undergrowth just ahead of you, or in the more open space under the dense evergreens flutters up into the lower branches, and seems to think himself secure there. ”