CHAPTER VIII—RIDGEFIELD, AND WEIR’S MILLS

The two adjoining districts of Ridgefield and Weir’s Mills lie about ten miles to the east of us, in level and fertile farm country, between two ridges of hills. Ridgefield is an old Roman Catholic settlement. Twenty-five years ago it still had a prosperous convent, and children educated in the convent school have gone out all over the country; but the centre of the farming population shifted, and at last the convent was closed. The cheerful-faced, black-gowned sisters are all gone. The bell has been silent for years now, and its tower stands up with blank windows, nothing more than a strange landmark in the open farming landscape.

The Ridgefield Irish were a noted community. They all came from one county, and were marked to a surprising degree by their personal beauty. There were Esmonds and Desmonds, Considines, Burkes, and McCanns, and two names now gone (except for one old representative) Guilfoyles and Guilshannons. Four lovely Esmond girls of one family are now growing up, bearing four saints’ names—Agatha, Ursula, Patricia, Cecily.

Honoria Considine walks down our street, beautiful creature that she is, with a port and carriage that a princess might envy. She has brought up an orphaned nephew and niece to capability and prosperity, supporting them entirely by her sewing. The Considines have possessions which show that they came to this country as something more than farmers. They have a little old silver, two finely inlaid card-tables in the farm “best-room,” and two larger mahogany tables. They are great prohibitionists, and would be shocked, good souls, to know that what they call the “old refrigerator” is a beautifully carved wine-cooler!

Lawrence McCann and Joe Fitzgerald were two as handsome creatures as ever were seen, with great dark blue eyes, delicate brows, dark curls, and mantling Irish color.

Lawrence died of consumption at twenty-four, as did his cousin, delightful Con Guilshannon, but Joe did well and married. The other day I saw him out walking with three little rosy children, all with penciled eyebrows and very dark blue eyes.

There lives an old lady in a great western city (I don’t give its name) who ought to wear a crown instead of a bonnet. The town trembles before her masterful benevolence. Her magnificent house dominates the “best community,” and her six middle-aged married children, established near-by in houses of equal magnificence, do not dare call their souls their own.

A neighbor of mine was in her city last year, and was taken to see her. The old lady seemed to know an amazing amount, not only about our far-away eastern State, but about our actual county. She finally showed such an absorbing interest in particular households that my friend said:

“But how can you know? How can you have heard about so-and-so?”

“Child,” said the old chieftainess, her fine eyes twinkling and filling, “My name is no guide to you now, except that it’s Irish, but I was born and brought up in your county. I was an Esmond from Ridgefield, and had my schooling at the convent, not six miles from your door.”

After Ridgefield, with its deserted convent, you come presently to where the rolling country is suddenly flung amazingly apart in the chasm-like valley of the Winding River. Weir’s Mills, the village at the head of navigation, is a pleasant peaceful little place, a very old settlement, with a noted old church.

A neighbor of ours, a man now of eighty, has told me that in his childhood at Weir’s Mills, the school had neither paper nor blackboard nor slates for the children to write on. The teacher smoothed the ashes of the hearthstone out flat with a shingle, and the children did their figuring on that. Farmers going into town chalked the figures of their sales on their beaver hats, and the assessor chalked the taxes up on the doors.

The school-teachers were taken to board in turn, two weeks at a time, by different families; and a friend, now an elderly woman, has told me that when teaching, as a young girl, she had as a rule to share her bed with three or four children of the family. In several places the hens slept in the room too. The schools of course were ungraded. After her teaching hours she helped in the housework, but she liked it, and made warm friends. She found the life vigorous and hardy—“It was life that was every bit of it alive,” she has told me.

It is sometimes said that marriage and divorce are taken lightly in the country districts, and certainly the Jingroes and their like, of whom more later, make their gipsy marriages, which bind only at will; but even among some of our outlying communities of far higher standing than the forest settlements, it is true that a curious, primitive view of wedlock often obtains. Marriages in the country are deep as the rock, enduring as the hills, once the real mate is found. The fine, toil-worn faces of man and wife, in Golden-Wedding and Four-generations groups in local newspapers, show a thing before which one puts off the shoes from off one’s feet. But, when husband and wife find only misery in their marriage, find themselves fundamentally at variance, they quietly “get a bill,” (i. e. of divorce,) and each is considered free to marry again. The adjustment, according to their lights, is made decently and in order; and all cases come quickly before the final court of public opinion, which in these clear-eyed country districts metes out an inexorable judgment to lightness, to cowardice or selfishness.

It is difficult not to mis-state, about so subtle a matter; but the attitude of these neighborhoods is not a lax one. It is rather as if, in places so small, where the margin of everything is so narrow, the tremendous exigencies of life enforce a tolerance which is no conscious action of men’s minds, but a thing larger than themselves, before which they must bow. Life is so simple and vital, so cleared by necessity of a million extraneous complexities, that people are able, as one of the Saints says, to judge the action by the person, not the person by the action.

Long ago there was plenty of shipping direct from Weir’s Mills to Boston, and even to-day scows, and a few small schooners, come up between the hills for hay and wood, up all the windings of the Winding River, slipping through the draws at the peaceful, pretty hamlets of Upper, Middle, and Lower Bridge.

The country about Weir’s Mills shows in indefinable ways that you are approaching the sea. You get the taste of salt, with a south wind, more often than with us. The roads show sandy, and you see an occasional clump of sweet bay in the pastures. The pines grow more and more dwarfed, and so maritime in look that you expect to see blue water and the masts of ships ten miles before you come to them. We came on another indication one day, in asking our way of a young girl at a farm door.

“The second turn to the west,” she told us. In our part of the county we do not often think of the points of the compass. “The second turn on your left,” it would have been.

This is one of our older districts, and a certain amount of old-fashioned speech remains. Many persons still speak of ninepence (twelve and a half cents) and a shilling (sixteen and two-thirds cents). A High School pupil (one of the many boys who walk three or four miles in to our Town, in all weathers, to get their schooling) brought in some Mountain Ash berries to the botanical class. Round-Tree berries, he called them, and the master was puzzled, until he realized that this meant Rowan Tree, and that the name had come down straight from the boy’s English forefathers, who picked the rowan berries by their home streams.

All through our county, and in our Town itself, among the homelier neighbors, many of the old strong preterites, which have become obsolete elsewhere, are still in use. “I wed the garden,” for “I weeded,” “I bet the carpet”; riz for raised, hove for heaved; and among our old established families of substance you may still hear shew for showed and clim for climbed.

“I clim a little ways up into the rigging,” one of our magnates said to me this very week, speaking of an adventure of his seafaring youth.

After the Revolution certain of the unfortunate Hessians drifted to the southern part of our county, and being stranded, poor souls, they made the best of it, settled and married. They named our town of Dresden. The Theobalds come from this Hessian stock, the Vannahs, who started as Werners, the Dockendorffs, and we have a precious although extremely local seashore name, Winkiepaw, which began life as Wenckebach. But the adaptation of surnames is in process all around us. Uriah Briery’s people used to be Brieryhurst; and Samuel Powers has told me that his grandfather wrote his name in “a queer Frenchy sort of way, he spelled it de la Poer”(!) The Goslines, of whom we have a good sized family, were du Gueslins, not long since, and Alec Duffy, who sounds entirely Irish, was born Alexis D’Urfeé.

A queer old person lived on the Weir’s Mills road when we were children. He had prospered in farming and trade, and was quite a rich man for those parts. He wanted to be richer still, and all his last years he was ridden by two chimerical dreams; one, that a piece of his land was to be bought for a monster hotel, at a fabulous price, and the other that Captain Kidd’s treasure was buried in a small island he owned in the river. He dug and he dug for it. He had absolute faith in the superstition that a fork of green wood—perhaps of witch-hazel only, but I am not sure about this—held firmly in both hands, will point straight to buried water or buried treasure. He has led us all over his island, holding the forked stick.

“There! See him! See him turn!” he would cry out excitedly. “Wild oxen won’t hold him!” The stick certainly turned in his hands, and in ours, when he placed it right for us. I suppose the wood is so elastic and springy that, holding it in a certain way you unconsciously turn it yourself; but it gave a queer feeling.

This whole district is fragrant with the memory of a saint, Mary Scott. She was a cripple her whole life. Her shoulders and the upper part of her body were those of a powerful woman, but her feet and legs were those of a child, and were withered and useless. She lived all alone when I knew her, in a tiny neat house. She spent her days in a child’s cart, which she could move about by the wheels with her hands, and she was most active and busy.

No one could go through a life of such affliction without untellable suffering; but Mary’s sweet faith never seemed to know that she had a self at all, still less a crippled self. She had quick skillful hands, and her absorbing pleasure all through the year was her work for her Christmas tree. She saved, and her neighbors saved for her, every bit of tinfoil and silver or gold paper that could be found, and fashioned out of it bright stars and spangles for trimming. She knitted and knitted, mittens and stockings and comforters, and when the time came near she made candy, and corn-balls, and strung popcorn into garlands. The neighbors all helped her, and good Jacob Damren, at Tresumpscott, always cut her a tree from his woods and set it up for her; and then on Christmas Eve the door of her cottage stood open, and the light streamed out from the bright lighted tree, and the children of the whole district came thronging in with their parents.

The tributary streams from this eastern side of our river come in very quietly. Worromontogus, the largest, is dammed just as it emerges from its hills, to turn the Wilsons’ saw-mill, which was once owned and run by Mary Scott’s father. The mill and mill-pond are in an open, sunny pocket of the woods. The winding lane which leads in to them is bordered with elms and willows, and the road is soft underfoot with bark and sawdust. Feathery elms stand all about the stream’s basin, and after you have followed the road in you reach the weather-stained mill, the logs, the new-cut lumber, as fragrant as can be, and the great heap of bright-colored sawdust. Worromontogus drains the pond of the same name, five miles long, some distance back in the country.

CHAPTER IX—MARY GUILFOYLE

The sun had come out bright after a rain, and every leaf was shining, the June day when we drove over to Ridgefield to fetch Mary Guilfoyle. We started early in the morning, but it was already like noon in that midsummer season. Daisies were powdering the fields, as white as snow, and yellow and orange hawkweeds were growing in among them, so that whole fields showed yellow, orange, and white. The orange hawkweed is very fragrant, and its sweetness mixed with the spicy bitterness of the daisies. Then, on a knoll as the road rose above the river, we found patches of bright blue lupins in the yellow and orange and white, making such a blaze of color as I have never seen before in our northern fields.

There were streaks of crimson sorrel in the fields where there were no daisies, among the ripening June-grass and red-top; all the grasses, and the fields of grain, were beginning to turn a little tawny, and quick waves chased each other across them with the light summer wind.

Mary lives in a scrap of a new house, in a thick wood of young firs and spruces. The last mile of our road led through these sweet-smelling trees, which were set all over with light green jewels of new growth. Grass grew in the ruts, and the moist earth of the wood road was thronged with yellow butterflies; and tiny “blues,” like bits of the sky come to life, fluttered among the ferns. Breath after breath of sweetness came from the warm woods in the sunshine.

Mary was waiting for us at the door, with her knitting in her hand, and her cat at her skirts. Her small rough fields across the road were ploughed and planted, and she was ready to come to us. She is a strongly built old woman with bright blue eyes and yellowish gray hair, sturdy as a weather-beaten piece of white-oak timber. Many is the time that she has left our house of an afternoon (in our impossible spring going, too, with the frost coming out of the ground and the mud a foot deep); walked out to her farm, six full miles, seen to some detail of farm-work that worried her, and walked back, arriving before seven the next morning, to cook our breakfast.

She works on her farm all summer, planting and hoeing her corn and beans and potatoes. She has help from the men of the neighborhood when she can get it, but I believe she follows the plough herself when she is put to it. In winter she comes into town, and works for households in difficulties. If the cook deserts us, or we have a sudden influx of guests or everyone has grippe, we send for Mary Guilfoyle and she sees us through. She comes into a house like a blast of clear air. Nothing ruffles her, and her mere presence seems to return its right proportions and gayety to life. She knows how to work as few people do nowadays, and she is so sound-hearted and unafraid that there is something royal and powerful about her.

Mary’s mother was French, and it is from her she gets her gestures. Her hands move finely, with a dignity and control a duchess might envy, and they say more than mere words could. And then, her funny expressions! She is a Roman Catholic, but so far from being a church-goer that I was surprised, last Easter morning, at seeing her ready for church; and my surprise was rebuked with,

“Child, the heretic and the hangman go to church on this morning!”

Her speech is unlike anybody else’s. Every sentence is vivid, but they lose their quaint flavor in telling. She is delighted (she is a fine cook), but excited, too, at getting a “company meal,” and loses her appetite.

“The cook cannot eat, not if she were at the gates of heaven, at these times,” she puts it.

She was telling one day of an unfortunate young farm neighbor—

“He knelt on a nail, and took lock-jaw. They hoisted him to Portland, but it warn’t of no use. He died in four days. He was a beautiful young man. Warn’t it terrible?”

Somehow I never fail to see the poor youth caught up in a sheet and swung through the air the whole journey.

Mary was born and brought up in the Catholic community at Ridgefield; but she has spent little time there. Fifty-five years ago, when she was sixteen, she learned fine sewing and clear-starching at the Great House of our neighborhood, and then nothing would do but she must seek her fortune in Boston, where she already had two sisters in service. She made the voyage in a sailing vessel, a small brig laden with hay. She found out the name of a first-rate dressmaker, in Temple Place; next she bought a piece of fine gray cashmere, and cut and made herself a jacket and dress. Then she presented herself.

“How do I know you are a seamstress at all?” the dressmaker asked.

“I cut and made every stitch I have on me.”

“You may go right upstairs, at seven dollars a week, with the others.”

A sweep of the hand illustrated the triumph; seven dollars was fine pay in those days.

One of her sisters was cook for many years for Oliver Wendell Holmes.

(“A little man, the face wrinkled”—and Mary’s eloquent hands made me see the Doctor again in person.) He took care of her money for her; and Mary has often told me how one day, after many years, he said,

“Now, Anna, you are a rich woman; you need never work again, and can do what you like.”

She bought a nice little house in one of the suburbs.

“But a year was all she could stand of it. She couldn’t make out to live, away from the Holmeses, and back she goes to them.”

Mary married at twenty, and lived quietly in Chelsea for five and twenty years. Then her husband died, and instead of going home to the farm, or staying on where she was, to take boarders, this born adventurer was off to see the world.

“I hadn’t seen, not one thing, cooped up there in Chelsea. I wanted to find out about new things, and new places, whilst I was strong.”

She took a part of her savings, sewed up in the front of her gown, to fall back on, but her capable hands were the real funds on which she depended. She traveled to Denver, and there went out to service, and afterwards worked in a restaurant. She found light work in plenty, and in between jobs took her heart’s fill of sight-seeing. She saw Pike’s Peak and the Grand Canyon. By the end of the winter she had earned enough to take her to San Francisco. Here she had a sister- and brother-in-law who ran a good restaurant, and Mary joined forces with them. A year brim-full of life followed, but after this her two own sisters, her only surviving near relations, fell ill, and she came home to nurse them. It was then that she bought her farm, near her old home in Ridgefield, planning that the three should spend their old age together. Both sisters, though, died; but my indomitable Mary keeps the farm almost as well as a man could, and her strong nature, tremendously intent on the present moment, never feels loneliness.

As I said, she is not much of a church-goer, but she is devout in her own way, and plans to go back to San Francisco, to the convent where a cousin of hers is now Abbess, and there

“Get ready to die; and a good thing to do, too, first-rate!”

I never knew anyone so indifferent about dress as Mary; she is quite pretty in her way, and must always have been so, but she puts on whatever is nearest at hand, and will hamper her least. It is a fact that I saw her out in the rain the other day, taking in clothes from the line, with a length of brown oil-cloth tied about her stout person, by way of an apron, with marline, and an empty shredded-wheat box, split up on one side, on her head for a hat.

The lower meadows were still yellow with the gold of buttercups as we drove home, and where the swales ran lower and richer we saw tall Canada Lilies, Loose-strife, and purple and white fringed orchids, in among the Meadow-rue, and light green ferns and ripening grasses. There was Blue-eyed Grass, too, and Iris. It was all rich and fragrant, and butterflies were hovering about the lilies; and as if this were not enough, a breath of woodsy sweetness, much like the fragrance of Lady’s Slippers, met us from a mixed meadow and cranberry bog, and there were flocks of rose-pink Arethusas all delicately poised among the grasses.

Meadow-larks were rising all about, singing their piercingly sweet notes. The children were picking wild strawberries, and the blackberries flung out long springing sprays down the perfected June roadways. Their blossoms are very like small single sweet-briar roses.

CHAPTER X—TRESUMPSCOTT POND

Tresumpscott Pond lies three miles eastward from our river, set deep between the folds of wooded and rocky hills, and the woods frame it close.

You climb the rise of a long slow-mounting hill which at its southern extremity breaks sharply down in granite ledges, mostly pine-covered, and there right below you lies this little lonely, perfectly guarded lake. There is only one opening in the woods, a farm which slopes down to the shore in two wide fields, with a low rambling farmhouse. There is no other roof in sight.

The pond is about a mile long and half as wide. It has the attributes of a big lake, in little; deep bays up which loons nest, and wooded headlands, ending in smooth abrupt rocks which enclose small curved beaches of white sand, as firm and fine as sea sand. The western bay ends in a river of swamp, and all along the north side the wood screens a broken wall of fern-grown cliffs, with quantities of columbines among their crannies. The long slope above the woods is a sheep pasture, partly under pines and partly open, with ledge and cinquefoil-covered boulders cropping out in the close turf, and tall mulleins standing all about like candlesticks.

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. The Pond was his father’s before him. His wife is a plain little woman, always clean and trim in fresh cotton print. They say her habitual sadness is because she has never liked the Pond. She was town-bred, and finds it utterly lonely, while to Jacob it holds everything that earth can give.

The land is very fertile and they prospered till well past middle life, when Jacob met with an accident that was hard to bear. A neglected cut on his thumb became infected, and soon there was swelling and pain in the whole hand. No one did the right thing, no one knew what to do beyond the old-fashioned farm treatments, and after a week of fever the arm had to go. They said it was only his wife’s despairing weeping which brought him at last to consent to amputation. At first he begged to be allowed to die sooner than face life again thus maimed.

He met the blow, once it fell, in a steady manly way, and now has come well out from under its shadow. A month ago I saw him out with his horse and drag, getting out stumps, and he was managing this troublesome business successfully. He smiled a patient, slow smile, as we came up.

“This comes kind of awkward for a one-armed man!” he called out, but spoke cheerily, and seemed delighted at the way he was achieving his stumping.

They have had other troubles. A son who lived at home and shared the farm, married a shallow, heartless girl, who left him, and so broke his heart and his whole hold on life that he could not bear the place without her, and has led a wandering, broken sort of existence since. Their other boy, though, is a good son indeed. He is part owner in a small cooperage and he drives over from week to week, puts in solid help on the farm, and brings his wife and babies to make cheerful Sundays for the old people.

Jacob and his wife love animals. The last time I was over there the cosset lamb came into the kitchen to ask for milk. Mrs. Damren was caressing two new red calves as if they were kittens, while Flora, Jacob’s foxhound, and her two velvet-skinned, soft-eyed puppies played round them.

We drive over to the pond from time to time for swamp treasures of different kinds. Jacob has a tumble-down, lichen-covered boathouse where water-pewees and white-bellied swallows nest, in which he keeps a few of the worst boats in the world (with ash oars shaped like flattened poles and heavy as lead), and lets them out to people who come for pickerel or water-lilies. The whole western end of the pond is a laughing expanse of water-lilies and yellow Beaver Lilies, with the bright yellow butterfly-shaped blossoms of bladderwort in among them. Beyond these you come to a mixture of floating islands, tussocks, intricate channels of black water, and stretches of shaking cotton grass, which in June and July hide a host of slim-stemmed rose-colored swamp orchids, Arethusa, calopogon, and pogonia. You pole and shove your boat between the floating islands, submerging orchids and cotton-grasses alike in the black peat water, and beyond them reach the parti-colored velvet of the peat bog itself.

Balsam fir grows here, sweet rush and sweet gale, and quantities of Labrador Tea, with shining dark leaves (of which Thoreau made tea when camping on Chesuncook) and masses of delicate-stamened white flowers, which give out a warm resinous sweetness. 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, 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. We spent a day there in June, and tried to follow a pair of Carolina rails, which ran and hid among the cotton-grasses, and ran again, and suddenly vanished as completely as if they had melted in air. We put up a bittern, but did not find her nest. Scores of red-wing black-birds had nested in the clustered bushes of the floating islands. We laid our oars down on the shaking cotton grass as a sort of bridge and worked our way from island to island, while a perfect cloud of birds chuckled and wheeled round us, uttering their guttural warning cries and their fresh “Hock-a-lees!” We looked into three red-wings’ nests, and one king-bird’s, all with eggs. The red-wing’s eggs were pale blue, scratched and blotched with black as if by a child playing with ink and pen, while the king-bird’s were a beautiful cream-color, marked in a circle round the large end with rich brown blotches.

As we went on to gather Pitcher-Plants and Sundew, we saw an eagle fishing over the lonely little lake; saw, too, a thing I have never seen before or since, for he caught a fish so big it pulled him under. He vanished out of sight completely, came up with a great flap, and, making heavy work of it, and flying so low he almost touched the water, he made off and gained the woods with his prize.

Besides our orchids and pitcher-plants (we washed the pitchers clear of insects, and drank from them), we had come for stickle-backs, which are found in the clear shallows by one of the small beaches. We had a net, and glass jars. They are such quick darting creatures that it is hard to get them. They are the liveliest of all pets for an aquarium, and prosper very fairly in captivity.

Early in the morning, when we first reached the pond, the bobolinks were rising and singing all over the lower water meadows, and the mists were turning to silver in the early sunlight. When we came up from the bog in the late afternoon the bobolinks were silent, but a mother sand-peep wheeled and cried about the field, afraid that we would find her chickens.

We cooled our hands and faces in the clear water and washed off the black peat mold, and went up to the farm. Mrs. Damren had fresh gingerbread for us, and creamy milk, and we sat round a table with a cheerful red cloth. The room was very homelike, with a good deal of dark wood, and bright pots and pans. A shot-gun and a rifle hung over the mantel, the guns poor Jacob will never use again. His hunting dog sat close to his chair.

The wife’s sorrowful eyes turned always to her husband, but seemed at the same time to try to guard his empty sleeve from our glances. He, with a larger patience, was unconscious of it.

They told us a good thing; that two lads, sons of a minister in a neighboring town, have built a little camp in Jacob’s woods. They come over often to spend the night, and sometimes stay a week, and are great company. They come to Jacob for milk, butter, and eggs, and often spend the evening. The week before they had shot two coons, and they are busy mounting them, under his directions.

Jacob’s face has a great peace in it, that of a man who has given everything in him to the place he lives in, and held nothing back. His beautiful, lonely little holding of wood and field and lake is better, for the work he has put into it, than when his father left it to him. He has cleared more fields, enriched the land, and drained the lower meadows. His son will have it after him. I have seldom seen a place which seemed more entirely home.

Jacob had cut the hay in his upper meadow early (he has to take his son’s or a neighbor’s help when he can get it), and it was already piled in sweet-smelling haycocks as we drove by, but the water meadows, where the purple fringed orchids and loosestrife grow in among the grasses, were still uncut. It was dusk, and the fireflies were out. Thousands of them flashed their soft radiance low over the perfumed meadow, and the fragrance of sweet rush and of the open water came to us from the lake.

CHAPTER XI—IN THE TRESUMPSCOTT WOODS

The population of a district can never be classified. Once again, “folks are folks,” and the smallest hamlet shows infinite variety. Yet here and there the individual quality of a neighborhood seems as marked as that of the different belts and communities of trees which clothe the land about it.

Watson’s Hill, Ridgefield, and Weir’s Mills are fine up-standing neighborhoods, with good houses, big barns, fresh paint, and bright milk cans catching the sun; but in near-by folds of the hills, where the ridges slope up into higher country, there are poor and scattered farms and farmhouses which are no more than shanties. A neighborhood six miles from a big town may be more rustic than another twice as far. It is partly the soil, partly inheritance, and surely it is a third part influence. The land of our Silvester’s Mills Quakers is not specially good, but the impulse imparted by three or four industrious good families is the foundation of its marked prosperity.

A Swede and an Italian have lately taken up two farms which were considered quite run out, one in North Ridgefield, six miles from us, and the other at the top of a long hill on the Tresumpscott Road.

The Swede asked William Pender, a thin, vague, grumbling man, of whom he hired the land,

“How long time to clear these fields of stones?”

“Ninety-nine years!” said William solemnly. But the Swede, a fair, strong-built man named Jansen, went to work, with his wife and his three children. They put on leather aprons, and worked early and late, in every spare minute that could be taken from planting and cultivating. (William looked on, from his brother’s farm, whither he had retreated, in a mixture of incredulity, disapprobation and envy.) They worked in the rain; and now, after three years, the farm is clear of stones, and Jansen owns it clear. He has a thousand hens, and sells his eggs and broilers at fancy prices in New York; and Mrs. Jansen’s lawn and flower-beds are as gay as those of a neat farm in Holland.

The Italian farmer is a larger pattern of man. He came here as a young fellow with no better start than a push-cart, but he came of good intelligent Tuscan people, and has not only endless industry, but wits to see, and enterprise to take, all sorts of chances. He did not take any chances, though, when he married Alice Farrell, the daughter of one of our best farmers, a strong pretty girl, as industrious as her husband, and even more intelligent, with a free sort of outlook, and something kindling about her. Her husband is now the big man of his neighborhood. The district goes by his name, and he has represented it in the Legislature. He owns a fine herd of registered Guernseys, and his apples bring fancy prices.

A friend of mine, a farmer, once asked one of the great Connecticut nurserymen to what he attributed the success of the Italians in nursery work and truck farming. The older man’s eyes twinkled.

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “They’re willing to work in the rain!”

Our farm conditions are improving, almost while you watch them. The Agricultural Department of the State University is doing yeoman service. People are beginning to realize what science is bringing to agriculture, and the young men are fired by it. They are especially beginning to realize what ignorance it was to leave so many farms deserted, and to condemn so much of the land as hopeless and used up. The friend who asked the question about the Italians said of our own farmers:

“They stick to their grandfathers’ ways, and not to their grandfathers’ enterprise and ambition for improvement.” But this statement is fast coming to be untrue.

Interspersed, however, among the prosperous districts there are curious, backward hamlets, where the woods seem to encroach. Their hills shut them about too closely. Some set of the tide of human affairs, some change of transportation or of market, cuts off the wholesome currents of life from them, and they stagnate like cut-off water and become degenerate.

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. Unkempt faces thronged the dirty windows of farms that were mere shacks. They looked at once ambitionless and sinister. “Merricktown folks,” people of the neighboring districts say, when tools disappear or robes are stolen from the sleighs at a Grange supper.

No Indians are left in our part of the world; but here and there a family shows marked traces of Indian blood, as old Sile Taylor, beyond Watson’s Hill, a frowsy and hospitable patriarch, whose little black eyes twinkle with a kind of foxy kindliness. Though none dwell here, Indians come two or three times a year from the State Reservation, with snow-shoes, moccasins, and sweet-grass baskets to sell. They make a yearly pilgrimage to the seashore for the sweet-grass, which grows in the salt meadows at the mouths of a few rivers. They cut and dry it, and carry home many hundred pounds for the winter’s weaving. The Gabriel brothers, Joe and Bill, are regular visitors among us, enormous dark men, with that Indian habit of silence which implies not so much taciturnity, as a certain tranquil quality. Tranquillity and kindness seem to flow from the big brothers. They seem untroubled by any need of speech.

Then beyond Rattlesnake Hill there are the “Jingroes.” They are credited with being pure-blooded gipsies, and they certainly look it. I do not know whether they started with a definite Mr. and Mrs. Jingroe or not. The name is applied to the whole tribe. They live “over back,” in clearings in a wide belt of forest. They are perfectly indolent, but cheerful, and content with the most primitive farming.

Once in a while, when things go hard with them, they all set to work, and weave very good baskets, which they bring in town to sell. You are met at every street corner by handsome, dark-eyed Mrs. Jingroes, in kerchief and bright earrings, importuning every passer-by to buy a basket.

About once a year a gipsy caravan drives through our town, and stops in the street on its way. The slim, handsome barefooted children and their dark square-built mothers are all about. The women bustle from shop to shop, making small purchases, and pick up a little money by telling fortunes.

Once, when the gipsies camped in a rough pasture near town, one of the children died, and a touching deputation came, to ask permission (which was of course given) to bury it in the town cemetery.

Another time, as a caravan drove through the town, I noticed a girl lying at the back of one of the flimsy, covered wagons, so ill she seemed to be unconscious. She was a lovely creature, dark and pale, and her slim body swayed and shook with the shaking of the wheels. I wanted to call out to the drivers to stop, but the crazy caravan rattled away at a half-canter, and paid no attention.

Tresumpscott Pond lies in the midst of our most heavily forested district. There is no village or hamlet near it, but a handful of little farms, on tiny clearings or no clearings at all, are scattered through the woods.

The dwellers in these forest farms are not people of substance, like the farmers of the open country near them, but they are intelligent folk, and are rich in the treasure of a varied and interesting life. The men of the family are sure to have hunting coats and gaiters,—leather or canvas; good guns, which they keep well oiled and bright; and most of them keep a good fox hound or two, whose jubilant music may be heard as they range through the winter woods with their masters, or on independent hunting excursions. The boys begin by seven years old to have trapping enterprises of their own up the little quick forest brooks, and what looks to the ordinary person like the merest mossy runnel, hardly a brook at all, may be well known as a drinking-place of coons, or a haunt where sharp eyes may see a mink. They are sent out to gather thoroughwort, dill, dock, and other simples, and mosses and roots for the farm dyeing. (Cruttles, or crottles, the farm name for the dark moss growing on ash-trees, makes a fine yellow dye.) They know where to lie hidden at half past three in the morning on the chance of seeing a deer, and under which stretch of lily-pads is the best chance for a pickerel. And not only the boys: I know a girl on a farm, whose grown-up brother has such confidence in her marksmanship, that he will shake an apple-tree, while she nicks the falling apples with her rifle. They make use of a far greater number of wild plants than are known to the farmers of the more open country, as “greens,” cooking and eating young milk-weed stalks, shepherd’s purse, and the uncurling fronds of the Osmundas and other great ferns, which they call “fiddle-heads.”

They grow up sinewy and alert, under this eager life, and the best of them attain, beside their farm knowledge, to the undefinable huntsman’s knowledge, which sets its mark on a man. Their bearing is confident and fearless, and with it they have a certain forest quality on which it is hard to lay a finger. It is noticeable that the greater part of the families who cleave to this forest way of life are apt to be of dark complexion. It is a great pity that most of them can get so little schooling, but they have all been educated, since they were little, in a training which certainly develops and intensifies some of man’s best powers.

The deep tranquil woods cover the rise and fall of the ridges for a good stretch of miles, and a good deal of hunting and trapping is to be had in them. Last month we came on fresh raccoon tracks, like prints of little hands, in the leaf mould of the wood road, and coons are often shot here. One day, as we were walking, there was a great growling and barking from our dogs, and we found that they had treed a porcupine.

In my Grandfather’s time, sheep had to be driven at night to the tops of the hills, because of the bears in the Tresumpscott woods; and only two years ago there was an outcry among the farmers because sheep were being killed. Everybody watched his neighbor’s dog, but Oliver Newcomb, who lives on a little farm in the heart of the forest tract, coming home at dusk up the wood road, heard a growling and snarling, and came on a great Bay Lynx, the only one seen in this part of the country for many years. Oliver is a man who is almost never seen without his gun, and he shot the marauder, and got twenty-five dollars for the skin, a real windfall for a young man on a small forest farm, with wife to keep and five children. The skin was mounted, and set up in the library of the Soldiers’ Home.

The Bay Lynx is a much longer, more panther-like creature than our common Canada Lynx (the Loup Cervier or Bob-cat), and is of a general bay color, not unlike that of the Mountain Lion of the West. I have wondered if this might not be the panther or “painter” which was the terror of our Northern woods to early settlers.

“Big Game” has increased greatly in our State of late years, partly from the enforcement of strict game laws, partly because the wolves have nearly all been killed off. Deer are so common as to be a menace to crops in some places, and there are at least three thriving beaver colonies in our part of the State.

In 1868 my father, driving on a fishing trip through a town sixty-five miles north of us, was shown a pair of blanched moose antlers, set up over the sign-post at the cross-roads.

“Look at that well,” the stage driver said. “That’s a sight you’ll never see again, not in this State!”

To-day, as every hunter knows, moose are plentiful, all through the two-thirds of the State that lies under forest; and not only there, for this very autumn three have been seen in the Tresumpscott woods, while both last year and this, a black bear has spent several weeks in our neighborhood.

Muskrat are found in Tresumpscott Pond and its small tributary streams, hares and partridges and foxes all through its woods. Black duck, and sometimes wood duck, breed about the Pond, and Carolina rails; and where the brooks that feed the Pond spread out into broad estuaries of alder covert, you may see the marked flight of snipe or woodcock.

It was in these woods that Jerome Mitchell, our local authority on game and fur (a very fair naturalist, also), grew up. He is a slender, well-knit fellow, whose mother had great ambitions for him. He walked into town, five miles and back, every day, to get one year in the High School, after his country schooling. He could not afford any more, but when he was seventeen, having picked up a knowledge of taxidermy and simple mechanics, he moved into town. He worked early and late with dogged patience, taking every smallest job that offered, till at last he realized his ambition, and opened a small, but good sportsmen’s and general repair shop. Gradually he picked up the fur trade of the neighborhood. He is anxiously fair, and boys from the farms soon began to bring in skunk, squirrel, and muskrat skins, and every little while a fox or a coon.

Last year Jerome ran into hard luck. A stranger, a good-looking man, brought in an extra fine looking lot of muskrat skins. There were $600 worth, and this was a low figure for them. It was a serious venture, still Jerome took them; they turned out, however, to be stolen goods, and he had to pay the rightful owner, as the stranger was nowhere to be found. Poor Jerome! he was near tears when he told my father about it. Then, when he just had his store new painted and set in order for the summer’s trade, someone dropped a lighted match among the shavings, and the whole stock and fixtures were in a blaze.

This loss turned out to be not so serious. Jerome worked nearly all night for a week, and made better fittings than he had had before. The wholesale dealers were generous, and the shop re-opened with the best outfit of goods that it has had at all.

Now a good windfall has come to him. A rural mail-carrier brought word of a silver fox which had been trapped on a farm fifteen miles out in the country. Jerome only waited to telegraph to a big fur dealer for whom he works, who has lately established a fox farm, and started off at once. He found even better than he had hoped. The fox was a perfect young male, coal black, and hardly scratched by the trap.

In the recent craze over fox-raising, as much as ten thousand dollars has been paid, in our State, for a first-rate black fox. Of course Jerome would only get a commission, but this was the first big chance that had come to him and he was beside himself with anxiety lest it miscarry. It was a sharp February night, but he slept in the barn beside his prize, and the next morning drove home, dreading every drift and thank-you-ma’am, for fear they might upset, and the slight crate that held the fox might break.

That night he slept on the floor of his shop, wrapping himself in the sleigh robes. The fox ate the meat given him with a good appetite, and curled up contentedly enough to sleep; but as the first grayness began to show before dawn, he stood up, bristling a little, and barked, a far-away, lonely sound, Jerome said. The next day he was forwarded to the dealer in safety.

My father has shot and hunted all about this region, going on snow-shoes after foxes and hares in winter, with one of the forest farmers—generally one of the Huntingtons—as guide or companion; coming into the warm dark farm kitchen for a warm-up before the long ride or drive home. The Huntingtons always had good dogs. Bugle, a fox-hound famous through the countryside, belonged to them.

John Huntington is the man whom neither bee nor wasp will sting. He is sent for all about to take away troublesome hornets’ nests, which he simply tears down and pulls to pieces with his bare hands. Some hornets built a huge nest over the door of the stable at the Homestead not long ago, just where the men come and go for milking. One of the farm men wanted to take a torch and smoke it out, but Thomas Burnham, the farmer in charge, sent all the way over to Tresumpscott for John Huntington. He came, a silent, dark, shambling man; looked at the nest, nodded, asked for a ladder, climbed up, and unconcernedly pulled the whole thing down, while the furious hornets swarmed over his uncovered face and hands. He reached a finger down his neck, first on one side, then the other, and took out handfuls of them, and scraped them off where they had crawled up his sleeves. He tore the nest up, threw it on the ground, and stamped on it, and with few words went back to his farm.

I have never heard any adequate explanation of this phenomenon. Some people say that persons having this power have a distinctive odor about them, which wasps and bees dislike, and others ascribe it only to an entire fearlessness and unconcern.

Sam Huntington, John’s younger brother, is a handsome, strong, slender-built fellow, taller than John and even darker. It was Sam who showed my father, one day out snipe shooting, what a bee line really means, and how to take one, and find the bee-tree. You catch two wild bees, and attach a bit of cotton wool, big enough to mark the bee’s flight, to each; let the first bee go, getting the line of his flight well, then walk on two or three hundred yards, and let the second go, taking note equally carefully. Where the two lines intersect is the bee-tree and the hidden treasure of wild honey.

Sitting in Jacob Damren’s clover field one day, my father showed me how to find bumble-bee honey. We sat still, and watched the fat bee go his buzzing way from head to head of red clover. At last he had honey enough, and off he started on a swifter, straighter flight, but he was heavy with honey, and we could easily follow. He did not go far, but swung on a long slant to his hole in the ground. We dug where he entered (he emerged, part way through the process, very angry and buzzing) and about six inches down we found the honey cells. There was a lump or cluster of them, perhaps half as big as your hand. They were longer than the cells of honey bees; not hexagonal like these, but roughly cylindrical, dark brown, and full of very good, clear, dark brown honey.

Tresumpscott Pond is a great haunt of whippoorwills. As dusk begins to fringe the coverts of the wood, they begin their strange, almost ghostly chorus, like the swift whistling of a rod through the air, powerful and regular, “whip,” and “whip,” and “whip” again, answering each other all night. I noticed the time of their first notes, one night in early July. The voices of the veeries fell away, and then stopped, at quarter past eight, and at quarter of nine the first whippoorwill struck up, and was instantly answered. (I have known them to begin sharp at eight o’clock, or even earlier.)

It is extremely hard to see the birds themselves, for they lie hid all day in the deep woods, sleeping. Like owls, they seem unable to see well if roused by daylight. At night they gather close about the farms, one perhaps on the roof of the barn, and one or two on a fence (sitting always lengthwise to their perch, never across), and sometimes you can see their shape silhouetted against the sky. Last May, a whippoorwill was bewildered in a sudden gale, and did not get back to the woods, but spent the day sound asleep in broad sunlight on the railing of a balcony, right in the midst of our town. I stood within four feet of him. He is a strange-shaped bird, with whiskers like a cat’s, and a flat head; about the size of a small hawk, and mottled, like his cousin the night-hawk, with gray and white markings like those of rocks and lichens, or of some of the larger moths.