Guess I’ve never told you, sonny, of the strandin’
and the wreck
Of the steamboat “Ezry Johnson” that run up
the Kennebec.
That was ’fore the time of steam-cars, and the
“Johnson” filled the bill
On the route between Augusty and the town of
Water ville.
She was built old-fashined model, with a
bottom’s flat’s your palm,
With a paddle-wheel behind her, druv’ by one
great churnin’ arm.
Couldn’t say that she was speedy—sploshed
along and made a touse,
But she couldn’t go much faster than a man
could tow a house.
Still, she skipped and skived tremendous, dodged
the rocks and skun the shoals,
In a way the boats of these days couldn’t do to
save their souls.
Didn’t draw no ’mount of water, went on top
instead of through.
This is how there come to happen what I’m go-
ing to tell to you.
—Hain’t no need to keep you guessing, for I
know you won’t suspect
How that thunderin’ old “Ez. Johnson” ever
happened to get wrecked.
She was overdue one ev’nin’, fog come down
most awful thick;
’Twas about like navigating round inside a
feather tick.
Proper caper was to anchor, but she seemed to
run all right,
And we humped her—though ’twas resky—
kept her sloshing through the night.
Things went on all right till morning, but along
’bout half-past three
Ship went dizzy, blind, and crazy—waves
seemed wust I ever see.
Up she went and down she scuttered; sometimes
seemed to stand on end,
Then she’d wallopse, sideways, cross-ways, in a
way, by gosh, to send
Shivers down your spine. She’d teeter, fetch a
spring, and take a bounce,
Then squat down, sir, on her haunches with a
most je-roosly jounce.
Folks got up and run a-screaming, forced the
wheelhouse, grabbed at me,
—Thought we’d missed Augusty landin’ and
had gone plum out to sea.
—Fairly shot me full of questions, but I said
’twas jest a blow;
Still, that didn’t seem to soothe ’em, for there
warn’t no wind, you know!
Yas, sir, spite of all that churnin’, warn’t a whis-
per of a breeze
—No excuse for all that upset and those strange
and dretful seas.
Couldn’t spy a thing around us—every way
’twas pitchy black,
And I couldn’t seem to comfort them poor crit-
ters on my back.
Couldn’t give ’em information, for ’twas dark’s
a cellar shelf;
—Couldn’t tell ’em nothing ’bout it—for I
didn’t know myself.
So I gripped the “Johnson’s” tiller, kept the
rudder riggin’ taut,
Kept a-praying, chawed tobacker, give her steam,
and let her swat.
Now, my friend, jest listen stiddy: when the sun
come out at four,
We warn’t tossin’ in the breakers off no stern
and rockbound shore;
But I’d missed the gol-durned river, and I swow
this ’ere is true,
I had sailed eight miles ’cross country in a heavy
autumn dew.
There I was clear up in Sidney, and the tossings
and the rolls
Simply happened ’cause we tackled sev’ral miles
of cradle knolls.
Sun come out and dried the dew up; there she
was a stranded wreck,
And they soaked me eighteen dollars’ cartage to
the Kennebec.
It’s a case of scuff in your stocking-feet, from
Seboomook down, my hearties;
Sling your spikers around your neck and swear
your way to town.
The dudes that we sent to legislate, and figger
at balls and parties,
Haye tinkered the laws to suit themselves, and
they’ve done us good and brown.
There’s a howl, you bet, from the Medway dam
across to the Caucmogummac,
For the laws came up in the tote-team mail, and
we’ve got the new statoots,
And of all the things that was ever planned to
give us a gripe in the stomach,
The worst is the corker that t’runs us down for
a-wearin’ our old calked boots.
You can’t chank on to a hotel floor,
You’ve got to leave calked boots at the door.
They make ye peel your hucks in the street
And walk to the bar in your stocking-feet.
It’s a blank of a note that a man with chink
Can’t prance to the rail and get his drink,
But it’s five and costs if ye mar the paint,
And ten if the feller that makes complaint
Gets mad at a playful push in the eyes
And goes into court with a lot of lies.
It’s ten if ye sliver a steam-bo’t’s deck
—There ain’t no argue—it’s right in the neck.
And they soak you, too, on the railroad train;
—Why, there’s hardly a loggin’ crew in Maine
But what has claimed, as a nat’ral right,
A chance to holler and heller and fight,
And knock the stuffin’ out of the seats,
Rip off the blinds and club with the cleats.
But now if the bloomin’ brakeman talks,
And you vaccinate him once with calks;
If you feel like a man with a royal flush
And, jest for the joke of it, rip some plush,
Oh, they take that law and they peel you sore;
You pay for the damage, and ten plunks more.
’Tain’t much like the days when we had some
rights,
When we roosters sharpened our spurs in fights,
When never a crowd put up galoots
That could scrap with the fellers with spike-sole
boots.
It’s a case of step to the wangan camp, and buy
some partent leathers;
And go a-snoopin’ along to town like a dude on
his weddin’-trip;
And the only thing you can do to a guy is to tickle
his nose with feathers,
And curl in your seats in the smokin’-car when
a drummer gives you lip.
There was fun, by gee, in the good old days
when we whooped ’er into the city,
And you trailed our way by the slivers we left
from the railroad down to the dives,
And we owned the town where we left our cash;
and now it’s a thunderin’ pity
If all of a sudden you’ve grown too good for the
boys who are off the drives.
Oh, make the laws, go make the laws with your
derned old Legislature,
Jest give us orders to wear plug hats and come
down in full dress suits.
We’ll wear the togs; but give us spikes, or
you’ve busted the laws of nature,
For angels can just as well shed wings as a
driver his spike-sole boots.
Sing a song of paper; first the tall, straight
spruce,
Torn from off the mountains for the roaring
presses’ use.
—A shrieking laceration by the “barker” and
the saw;
A slow, grim maceration in the grinder’s grum-
bling maw;
A dizzy dash through calenders and over whir-
ring rolls,
—And the press can smut the paper so to save
or damn your souls;
The press has got the paper, it can give you lies
or facts
—That vexes not the fellow up in Maine who
swings the axe.
Chock!
Chock!
Chock!
The throb stuttered up from the heart of the
wood,
Erratic and faint, yet the trees understood,
—Though distant and dull like the tick of a
clock
It started a tremor through all the great flock.
King Spruce was a-shiver and rooted with dread,
While past him to safety the wood people fled;
The fox with his muzzle turned backward to
snuff
The bear trundling on like an animate muff,
And rabbits up-ending in wonder and fright,
Then scudding once more with the others in
flight.
Yet that which has reason most urgent to flee
Stands grim in the rout of the panic—the
Tree!
While up the long slope, glaring red ’gainst the
snow,—
His shirt of the hue of the butcher,—the foe,
Beating fierce at the trunks with relentless
attacks,
Comes on to the slaughter, the Man with the Axe.
Chock!
Chock!
Chock!
Shudder and totter and shiver and rock!
—Pygmy assailing with dull steady knock.
Trunk yawning wide with a hideous gash.
Snow-covered limbs thrown a-sprawl; and
then crash!
The pens and the presses are waiting, and eyes
That will glow with delight, or dilate with sur-
prise.
For there in the heart of the spruce there is
rolled
The fabric for thousands of stories untold.
And on the white paper may later be spread
The fall of a nation, or fame of one dead
Who now strides abroad in his health and suc-
cess,
But will pass to the tomb when that log meets
the press.
There under the bark of that spruce there is
furled
A web that will carry the news of a world,
That clamors and crowds at the swaying red
backs
Of the toilers of Maine, the rough men of the
axe.
’Tis the weirdly witching hour of the woods’
“dog-watch,”
When the guide suspends the kettle in the ash
limb’s crotch,
Stirs the drowsy, drowsy embers till the cozy
fire beams
And flickers dance like gnomes and elves athwart
the glowing dreams
Of the sleeping town-bred fisher who is stretched
with placid soul
On the earth in sweeter slumber than his town
couch can cajole.
Ah, ’tis tough on bone and muscle, is this chas-
ing after fun—
And a sleeper gets to sleeping forty knots along
’bout one.
But the guide is up a-stirring—monstrous shape
with flaring torch,
Prodding up the dozing fire for the woods’ “dog-
watch.”
And the slow unclosing eyelids of the startled
dreamer see
This dreadful apparition thrown in shadows on a
tree.
And his heart for just a second goes to skirrup-
ing about
As it flopped when he was wrestling with that
five-three-quarter trout.
But the ogre leaves the shadows, leans against
a handy tree
And remarks: “The water’s bilin’; won’t ye
have a cup o’ tea?”
And he wakes to a night of the fisherman’s
June,
—Afar the weird lilt of the dolorous loon
Floats up from the heart of the fair, velvet
night—
A globule of sound winging slow in its flight.
As elfin a note as a gnome ever blew,
It wells from the waters, “Ah-loo-hoo-ah-hoo-
o-o-o.”
O spell of the forest! O glimmer and gleam
From the sheen of the lake and the mist-breath-
ing stream!
The night and the stars and the dolorous loon
Make mystic the spell of the fisherman’s June.
The spruces sing the lyric of the wood’s dog-
watch;
The kettle as it bubbles in the ash limb’s crotch,
The rustle of the spindles of the hemlock and
the pine,
The crackle where the licking tongues of ruddy
fire twine,
The oboe, in the distance, of the weird and lone-
some loon,
—This chorus sings the lyric of the blessed
month of June.
What June? Your June of meadows or your
June of scented breeze,
Or your June begirt with roses stretched in
hammock at her ease?
Such a deity for maidens! I can bow to no
such June!
I extol the mystic goddess of the Forest’s Silent
Noon.
—Noon of day or noon of night-time—in the
vast and silent deeps,
Where human care or human woe or human
envy sleeps,
Where rugged depths surround me, dim and
silent, deep and wide,
And no human shares my joy but that second
self, my guide.
—Here’s a June that one can worship. Here’s
a June by right a queen, 'Neath her hand eternal mountains, ’neath her
feet eternal green..
And here will I adore her, seeking out her
awful throne
With the Silence swimming round me, and
alone, thank God, alone!
Wal, things they was deader’n old Billy-be-darn,
The boss was pernickity, cook wouldn’t yam;
For we’d heard ev’ry story old Beans had to spin,
And we hadn’t no longin’s to hear ’em agin;
Old Pitts, the head chopper, we’d pumped him
out, too,
—And he swow’d that he’d sung ev’ry song
that he knew.
As the rest wasn’t gifted, a sort of a damp
Old glister of silence fell over Peel’s camp.
The deacon-seat doldrums were blacker’n old Zip,
We’d set there an hour with never a yip,
’Cept the suckin’ o’ lips at the quackin’ T.D.‘s,
With the oof and the woo of the lonesome pine
trees
Wistling over our smok’-hole. It grew on us,
too;
Our thoughts got as thick an’ as musty an’ blue
As the cloud o’ tobacker smoke, mixed with the
steams
From the woolens that dried on the stringers
and beams.
Old Attegat Peter said we was bewitched;
He said that he seed the Old Gal when she
twitched
A fistful o’ hair out the gray hosses’ tail
For a-makin’ witch tattin’. She’d hung on a nail
The queerisome web, so he said, an’ the holes
—They were fifty—they stood for the whole
of our souls.
An’ there we would swing, an’ hang there we
must,
Till the hoodoo was busted. Eternally cussed,
So he said, was the buffle-brained feller that
dared
To touch the witch-web that was holding us
snared.
Aw, we didn’t believe it—‘tain’t like that we
did!
But still we warn’t fussy! If we could get
rid
Of the dumps by a charm, we was ready to try,
And Peter said singin’ would knock ’em sky
high.
Wal, Peter said “singin’;” I can’t tell a lie,
’Twarn’t singin’, ’twarn’t nothin’—that mourn-
ful ki-yi!
That seemed like a beller in ev’ry man’s boot,
An’ ’twarn’t none surprisin’ the witch didn’t
scoot.
So there did we set in a stew an’ a cloud,
A grumpy old, lumpy old dob of a crowd.
But oh, landsy sake a-Peter, when the fiddle come
to camp,
W’y you wouldn’t know the place:
—Wuz a grin on ev’ry face
W’en we know’d the critter’d got it. An’ it
reely seemed the lamp
Had a ’leetric light attachment; an’ you
oughter heard us stamp
When that feller took his fiddle out an’ rosined
up the bow.
Then he yawked an’ yeaked an’ yawked
’Twistin’ keys ontil she squawked,
An’ we set there jest a-gawpin’; not a word to
say, but, oh,
We was right on pins an’ needles fer to have
him let ’er go.
Tweedle-weedle, yeaky, yawky, ’nother twist,
an’ pretty soon
He was waitin’ to begin,
With ’er underneath his chin;
He a-askin’, all a-grinnin’, “Wall, boys, name
it; what’s your tune?”
An’ we hollered all in concert, “Whoop ’er up
on ‘Old Zip Coon’!”
Oh, the deacon-seat had cushions an’ the bunks
were stuffed with down,
While the feller sawed the strings;
We could feel our sproutin’ wings,
An’ we wanted to go soarin’, go a-sailin’, wear a
crown,
Tear the ground up, whoop-ta-ra-ra, mix some
red and paint the town.
Oh, he played the “Lights o’ London” an’ he
played “The Devil’s Dream,”
—All the old ones—played ’em all;
Rode right on ’er—made ’er squall;
Didn’t stop to semi-quiver, tip-toe Nancy, pass
the cream;
No; he let ’er go Jerooshy, clear the track an’
lots o’ steam.
Thought I’d never heerd such playin’ sence the
Lord had giv’ me breath
An’ that P. I.—seems as if
He could put the bang an’ biff
In the chitter of a cat-gut like to touch the very
peth
In yer marrow; like to raise yer from the very
jaws of death.
So, oh, landsy sake a-Peter, when that fiddle
come our way,
Say, you wouldn’t know the place,
—Wus a grin on ev’ry face.
—Went to workin’ like the blazes an’ our vittles
set—an’ say,
Guess the Hoodoo flew to thunder when the
Haw-Haw come to stay.
The song is the shriek of the strong that are
slain,
—The monarchs that people the woodlands of
Maine;
—‘Tis the cry of a merciless war.
And it echoes by river, by lake, and by stream,
Wherever saws scream or the bright axes gleam,
—‘Tis keyed to the sibilant rush of the steam,
And the song is the song of the saw.
Come stand in the gloom of this clamorous
room,
Where giants groan past us a-drip from the
boom,
Borne here from the calm of the forest and hill,
—Aghast at the thunderous roar of the mill,
At rumble of pulley and grumble of shaft
And the tumult and din of the sawyer’s rude
craft.
Stand here in the ebb of the riotous blast,
As the saw’s mighty carriage goes thundering
past,
One man at the lever and one at the dog.
The slaughter is bloodless and senseless the
log,
Yet the anguish of death and the torment of
hell
Are quavering there in the long, awful yell,
That shrills above tumult of gearing and wheel
As the carriage rolls down and the timber meets
steel.
Scream! And a board is laid bare for a home.
Shriek! And a timber for mansion and dome,
For the walls of a palace, or toil’s homely use,
Is reft from the flanks of the prostrate King
Spruce.
And thus in the clamor of pulley and wheel,
In the plaint of the wood and the slash of the
steel,
Is wrought the undoing of Maine’s sturdy lords,
—The martyrs the woodlands yield up to our
swords.
The song is the knell of these strong that are
slain,
The monarchs that people the woodlands of
Maine.
And the Fury that whirls in the din of this
war,
With rioting teeth and insatiable maw, is the
saw!
And this is the song of the saw.