I will go lose myself.—Shakespeare.
There are two sayings of which to my mind seem peculiarly appropriate for pleasant Sundays,—" the of the air," and "Consider the lilies." The first is a morning text, as anybody may see, while the second is more conveniently practiced upon later in the day, when the dew is off the grass. With certain of the more esoteric of the Bible (the duty of turning the other cheek, for example, or of selling all that one has and giving to the poor) we may sometimes be troubled what to do,—unless, like the world in general, we turn them over to Count Tolstoï and his ; but such as I have quoted nobody is likely ever to quarrel with, least of all any "natural man." For myself, I find them always a comfort, no matter what my mood or condition, while their observance becomes doubly agreeable when I am away from home; the thought of a strange species of , or of considering a new sort of lily, proving even more attractive than the of listening to a new minister, or, what is somewhat less probable, of hearing a new sermon.
Thus it was with me, not long ago, when I found myself suddenly left alone at a small hotel in the Franconia Valley. The day was lowery, as days in the mountains are apt to be; but when duty goes along with , a possible sprinkling is no very serious . Besides, a fortnight of " weather" had brought me into a state of something like . I must be reckoned either with the just or with the unjust,—so I had come to reason,—and of course must expect now and then to be rained on. Accordingly, after dinner I tucked my faithful umbrella under my arm, and started up the road.
I had in view a quiet, , in harmony with the spirit of the day, and could think of nothing more to the purpose than a visit to a pair of farms, out in the woods on the mountain-side. The [166]lonesome fields and the houses would touch my imagination, and perhaps chasten my spirit. would I go, and "consider the lilies." I am never much of a literalist,—except when a strict construction favors the argument,—and in the present instance it did not strike me as at all essential that I should find any of the genus Lilium. One of the humbler representatives of the great and noble family of the Liliaceæ—the pretty clintonia, now a little out of season, or even the Indian cucumber-root—would come fairly within the spirit of the text; while, if worst came to worst, there would certainly be no of grass, itself nothing but a kind of lily, if some recent theories may be trusted.
I followed the highway for a mile or two, and then took a wood-road (a "cart-path" I should call it, if I dared to speak in my own tongue wherein I was born) running into the forest on the left. This brought me before long to a "pair of bars," over which I clambered into a field, the first of the two ancient clearings I had come out to see. The acres must have been from the forest at no small cost of patience and hard ; and after all, they had proved not to pay for their tillage. A waste of energy, as things now looked; but who is to judge of such matters? It is not given to every man to see the work of his hands established. A good many of us, I suspect, might be thankful to know that anything we have ever done would be found of mention fifty years hence, though the mention were only by way of pointing a moral.
The old barn was long ago blown down, and as I mounted the fence a woodchuck went out of sight among the timbers. The place was not uninhabited, as it seemed, in spite of appearances: and as I turned toward the house, the door of which stood uninvitingly open, there sat a second woodchuck in the , facing me, intent and motionless, full of wonderment, no doubt, at the unspeakable impertinence of such an intrusion. I was glad to see him, at any rate, and made haste to tell him so; greeting him in the rather unceremonious language wherewith the now famous titmouse is said to have addressed our foremost American gentleman and philosopher:—
"Good day, good sir!
Fine afternoon, old passenger!
Happy to meet you in these places."
But the churlish fellow had no notion of doing the honors, and by the time I had advanced two or three paces he whisked about and vanished inside the door. "Well done!" I thought. "Great is evolution. Woodchucks used to be cave-dwellers, but they are getting to live above ground, like the rest of us. So does history repeat itself. Who knows how soon they may be putting up cottages on their own account?" Perhaps I gave the creature more credit than really belonged to him. I followed him into the house, but he was nowhere to be seen, and it is not unlikely that he lived in a cave, after all. Nearly half the flooring had rotted away, and there was nothing to hinder his getting into the cellar. He may have taken the old as a convenient for his , a sort of storm-porch, as it were. In his eyes this may be the final end and aim, the purpose, of all such board-and-shingle . Mr. Ruskin seems to hold that a house falls short of its highest usefulness until it has become a ruin; and who knows but woodchucks may be of the same opinion?
This particular house was in two parts, one of them more ancient than the other. This older portion it was, of which the floor had so badly (or so well) fallen into decay; while the ceiling, as if in a spirit of , had settled till it described almost a semicircle of convexity. To look at it, one felt as if the law of gravity were actually being imposed upon.
It must have marked an in the history of the household, this doubling of its quarters. Things were looking well with the man. His crops were good, his family increasing; his wife had begun to find the house uncomfortably small; they could afford to enlarge it. Hence this addition, this "new part," as no doubt they were in the habit of calling it, with pardonable satisfaction. It was more substantially built than the original , and , what I dare say its mistress had set her heart upon, one plastered room. The "new part"! How the words sounded, as I repeated them to myself! If things would only stay new, or if it were men's houses only that grew old!
The people who lived here had little occasion to hang their walls with pictures. When they wanted something to look at, they had but to go to the window and gaze upon the upper slopes of Mount Lafayette and Mount , rising in beauty beyond the intervening forest. But every New England woman must have a bit of flower garden, no matter what her surroundings; and even here I was glad to notice, just in front of the door, a of cinnamon rose-bushes, all uncared for, of course, but flourishing as in a kind of youth (this old-fashioned rose must be one of Time's favorites), and just now bright with blossoms. For sentiment's sake I plucked one, thinking of the hands that did the same years ago, and ere this, in all likelihood, were under the sod; thinking, too, of other hands, long, long vanished, and of a white rose-bush that used to stand beside another door.
On both sides of the house were apple-trees, a few of them still in good trim, but the greater number after years of by mountain storms. A phœbe sat quietly on the ridge-pole, and a chipper was singing from the . What knew they of time, or of time's mutations? The house might grow old,—the house and the trees; but if the same misfortune ever befalls phœbes and sparrows, we are, fortunately, none the wiser. To human eyes they are always young and fresh, like the buttercups that bespangled the grass before me, or like the sun that shone brightly upon the scene.
Turning away from the house and the grassy field about it, I got over a stone wall into a pasture fast growing up to wood: spruces, white pines, red pines, paper birches, and , with a of meadow-sweet sprinkled everywhere among them. A nervous started at my approach, stopped for an instant to reconnoitre, and then made off in haste. A thrush was singing, and the bird that is called the "preacher"—who takes no summer vacation, but holds in "God's first temple" for the seven days of every week—was delivering his homily with all earnestness. He must preach, it seemed, whether men would hear or forbear. He had already announced his text, but I could not certainly make out what it was. "Here we have no continuing city," perhaps; or it might have been, "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, all is vanity." It should have been one of these, or so I thought; but, as all church-goers must have observed, the connection between text and sermon is sometimes more or less , and once in a while, like the of the sermon itself, requires to be taken on faith. In the present instance, indeed, as no doubt in many others, the pew was quite as likely to be at fault as the pulpit. The red-eye's was never very to my ear. Its short sentences, its upward inflections, its repetitiousness, and its sharp, querulous tone long since became to me an old story; and I have always thought that whoever this vireo the "preacher"............