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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of More Jonathan Papers by Elisabeth
+Woodbridge
+
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no
+restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under
+the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or
+online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+
+Title: More Jonathan Papers
+
+Author: Elisabeth Woodbridge
+
+Release Date: December 19, 2006 [Ebook #20141]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MORE JONATHAN PAPERS***
+
+
+
+
+
+                          More Jonathan Papers
+
+                                   By
+                          Elisabeth Woodbridge
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+The Riverside Press Cambridge
+1915
+
+
+
+
+
+             COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY ELISABETH WOODBRIDGE MORRIS
+
+                           ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+                        _Published November 1915_
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   TO
+                                 JONATHAN
+
+
+
+
+
+                                 CONTENTS
+
+
+I. The Searchings of Jonathan
+II. Sap-Time
+III. Evenings on the Farm
+IV. After Frost
+V. The Joys of Garden Stewardship
+VI. Trout and Arbutus
+VII. Without the Time of Day
+VIII. The Ways of Griselda
+IX. A Rowboat Pilgrimage
+Colophon
+Appendix A: Extra Front Pages
+Errata
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                           More Jonathan Papers
+
+
+                                    I
+
+
+                        The Searchings of Jonathan
+
+
+"What I find it hard to understand is, why a person who can see a spray of
+fringed gentian in the middle of a meadow can't see a book on the
+sitting-room table."
+
+"The reason why I can see the gentian," said Jonathan, "is because the
+gentian is there."
+
+"So is the book," I responded.
+
+"Which table?" he asked.
+
+"The one with the lamp on it. It's a red book, about _so_ big."
+
+"It isn't there; but, just to satisfy you, I'll look again."
+
+He returned in a moment with an argumentative expression of countenance.
+"It isn't there," he said firmly. "Will anything else do instead?"
+
+"No, I wanted you to read that special thing. Oh, dear! And I have all
+these things in my lap! And I know it _is_ there."
+
+"And I _know_ it isn't." He stretched himself out in the hammock and
+watched me as I rather ostentatiously laid down thimble, scissors, needle,
+cotton, and material and set out for the sitting-room table. There were a
+number of books on it, to be sure. I glanced rapidly through the piles,
+fingered the lower books, pushed aside a magazine, and pulled out from
+beneath it the book I wanted. I returned to the hammock and handed it
+over. Then, after possessing myself, again rather ostentatiously, of
+material, cotton, needle, scissors, and thimble, I sat down.
+
+"It's the second essay I specially thought we'd like," I said.
+
+"Just for curiosity," said Jonathan, with an impersonal air, "where did
+you find it?"
+
+"Find what?" I asked innocently.
+
+"The book."
+
+"Oh! On the table."
+
+"Which table?"
+
+"The one with the lamp on it."
+
+"I should like to know where."
+
+"Why--just there--on the table. There was an 'Atlantic' on top of it, to be
+sure."
+
+"I saw the 'Atlantic.' Blest if it looked as though it had anything under
+it! Besides, I was looking for it on top of things. You said you laid it
+down there just before luncheon, and I didn't think it could have crawled
+in under so quick."
+
+"When you're looking for a thing," I said, "you mustn't think, you must
+look. Now go ahead and read."
+
+If this were a single instance, or even if it were one of many
+illustrating a common human frailty, it would hardly be worth setting
+down. But the frailty under consideration has come to seem to me rather
+particularly masculine. Are not all the Jonathans in the world continually
+being sent to some sitting-room table for something, and coming back to
+assert, with more or less pleasantness, according to their temperament,
+that it is not there? The incident, then, is not isolated; it is typical
+of a vast group. For Jonathan, read Everyman; for the red book, read any
+particular thing that you want Him to bring; for the sitting-room table,
+read the place where you know it is and Everyman says it isn't.
+
+This, at least, is my thesis. It is not, however, unchallenged. Jonathan
+has challenged it when, from time to time, as occasion offered, I have
+lightly sketched it out for him. Sometimes he argues that my instances are
+really isolated cases and that their evidence is not cumulative, at others
+he takes refuge in a _tu quoque_--in itself a confession of weakness--and
+alludes darkly to "top shelves" and "bottom drawers." But let us have no
+mysteries. These phrases, considered as arguments, have their origin in
+certain incidents which, that all the evidence may be in, I will here set
+down.
+
+Once upon a time I asked Jonathan to get me something from the top shelf
+in the closet. He went, and failed to find it. Then I went, and took it
+down. Jonathan, watching over my shoulder, said, "But that wasn't the top
+shelf, I suppose you will admit."
+
+Sure enough! There was a shelf above. "Oh, yes; but I don't count that
+shelf. We never use it, because nobody can reach it."
+
+"How do you expect me to know which shelves you count and which you
+don't?"
+
+"Of course, anatomically--structurally--it is one, but functionally it isn't
+there at all."
+
+"I see," said Jonathan, so contentedly that I knew he was filing this
+affair away for future use.
+
+On another occasion I asked him to get something for me from the top
+drawer of the old "high-boy" in the dining-room. He was gone a long while,
+and at last, growing impatient, I followed. I found him standing on an old
+wooden-seated chair, screw-driver in hand. A drawer on a level with his
+head was open, and he had hanging over his arm a gaudy collection of
+ancient table-covers and embroidered scarfs, mostly in shades of magenta.
+
+"She stuck, but I've got her open now. I don't see any pillow-cases,
+though. It's all full of these things." He pumped his laden arm up and
+down, and the table-covers wagged gayly.
+
+I sank into the chair and laughed. "Oh! Have you been prying at that all
+this time? Of _course_ there's nothing in _that_ drawer."
+
+"There's where you're wrong. There's a great deal in it; I haven't taken
+out half. If you want to see--"
+
+"I _don't_ want to see! There's nothing I want less! What I mean is--I
+never put anything there."
+
+"It's the top drawer." He was beginning to lay back the table-covers.
+
+"But I can't reach it. And it's been stuck for ever so long."
+
+"You said the top drawer."
+
+"Yes, I suppose I did. Of course what I meant was the top one of the ones
+I use."
+
+"I see, my dear. When you say top shelf you don't mean top shelf, and when
+you say top drawer you don't mean top drawer; in fact, when you say top
+you don't mean top at all--you mean the height of your head. Everything
+above that doesn't count."
+
+Jonathan was so pleased with this formulation of my attitude that he was
+not in the least irritated to have put out unnecessary work. And his
+satisfaction was deepened by one more incident. I had sent him to the
+bottom drawer of my bureau to get a shawl. He returned without it, and I
+was puzzled. "Now, Jonathan, it's there, and it's the top thing."
+
+"The real top," murmured Jonathan, "or just what you call top?"
+
+"It's right in front," I went on; "and I don't see how even a man could
+fail to find it."
+
+He proceeded to enumerate the contents of the drawer in such strange
+fashion that I began to wonder where he had been.
+
+"I said my bureau."
+
+"I went to your bureau."
+
+"The bottom drawer."
+
+"The bottom drawer. There was nothing but a lot of little boxes and--"
+
+"Oh, _I_ know what you did! You went to the secret drawer."
+
+"Isn't that the bottom one?"
+
+"Why, yes, in a way--of course it is; but it doesn't exactly count--it's not
+one of the regular drawers--it hasn't any knobs, or anything--"
+
+"But it's a perfectly good drawer."
+
+"Yes. But nobody is supposed to know it's there; it looks like a molding--"
+
+"But I know it's there."
+
+"Yes, of course."
+
+"And you know I know it's there."
+
+"Yes, yes; but I just don't think about that one in counting up. I see
+what you mean, of course."
+
+"And I see what you mean. You mean that your shawl is in the bottom one of
+the regular drawers--with knobs--that can be alluded to in general
+conversation. Now I think I can find it."
+
+He did. And in addition he amused himself by working out phrases about
+"when is a bottom drawer not a bottom drawer?" and "when is a top shelf
+not a top shelf?"
+
+It is to these incidents--which I regard as isolated and negligible, and he
+regards as typical and significant--that he alludes on the occasions when
+he is unable to find a red book on the sitting-room table. In vain do I
+point out that when language is variable and fluid it is alive, and that
+there may be two opinions about the structural top and the functional top,
+whereas there can be but one as to the book being or not being on the
+table. He maintains a quiet cheerfulness, as of one who is conscious of
+being, if not invulnerable, at least well armed.
+
+For a time he even tried to make believe that he was invulnerable as
+well--to set up the thesis that if the book was really on the table he
+could find it. But in this he suffered so many reverses that only strong
+natural pertinacity kept him from capitulation.
+
+Is it necessary to recount instances? Every family can furnish them. As I
+allow myself to float off into a reminiscent dream I find my mind
+possessed by a continuous series of dissolving views in which Jonathan is
+always coming to me saying, "It isn't there," and I am always saying,
+"Please look again."
+
+Though everything in the house seems to be in a conspiracy against him, it
+is perhaps with the fishing-tackle that he has most constant difficulties.
+
+"My dear, have you any idea where my rod is? No, don't get up--I'll look if
+you'll just tell me where--"
+
+"Probably in the corner behind the chest in the orchard room."
+
+"I've looked there."
+
+"Well, then, did you take it in from the wagon last night?"
+
+"Yes, I remember doing it."
+
+"What about the little attic? You might have put it up there to dry out."
+
+"No. I took my wading boots up, but that was all."
+
+"The dining-room? You came in that way."
+
+He goes and returns. "Not there." I reflect deeply.
+
+"Jonathan, are you _sure_ it's not in that corner of the orchard room?"
+
+"Yes, I'm sure; but I'll look again." He disappears, but in a moment I
+hear his voice calling, "No! Yours is here, but not mine."
+
+I perceive that it is a case for me, and I get up. "You go and harness.
+I'll find it," I call.
+
+There was a time when, under such conditions, I should have begun by
+hunting in all the unlikely places I could think of. Now I know better. I
+go straight to the corner of the orchard room. Then I call to Jonathan,
+just to relieve his mind.
+
+"All right! I've found it."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Here, in the orchard room."
+
+"_Where_ in the orchard room?"
+
+"In the corner."
+
+"What corner?"
+
+"The usual corner--back of the chest."
+
+"The devil!" Then he comes back to put his head in at the door. "What are
+you laughing at?"
+
+"Nothing. What are you talking about the devil for? Anyway, it isn't the
+devil; it's the brownie."
+
+For there seems no doubt that the things he hunts for are possessed of
+supernatural powers; and the theory of a brownie in the house, with a
+special grudge against Jonathan, would perhaps best account for the way in
+which they elude his search but leap into sight at my approach. There is,
+to be sure, one other explanation, but it is one that does not suggest
+itself to him, or appeal to him when suggested by me, so there is no need
+to dwell upon it.
+
+If it isn't the rod, it is the landing-net, which has hung itself on a
+nail a little to the left or right of the one he had expected to see it
+on; or his reel, which has crept into a corner of the tackle drawer and
+held a ball of string in front of itself to distract his vision; or a
+bunch of snell hooks, which, aware of its protective coloring, has
+snuggled up against the shady side of the drawer and tucked its
+pink-papered head underneath a gay pickerel-spoon.
+
+Fishing-tackle is, clearly, "possessed," but in other fields Jonathan is
+not free from trouble. Finding anything on a bureau seems to offer
+peculiar obstacles. It is perhaps a big, black-headed pin that I want. "On
+the pincushion, Jonathan."
+
+He goes, and returns with two sizes of safety-pins and one long hat-pin.
+
+"No, dear, those won't do. A small, black-headed one--at least small
+compared with a hat-pin, large compared with an ordinary pin."
+
+"Common or house pin?" he murmurs, quoting a friend's phrase.
+
+"Do look again! I hate to drop this to go myself."
+
+"When a man does a job, he gets his tools together first."
+
+"Yes; but they say women shouldn't copy men, they should develop along
+their own lines. Please go."
+
+He goes, and comes back. "You don't want fancy gold pins, I suppose?"
+
+"No, no! Here, you hold this, and I'll go." I dash to the bureau. Sure
+enough, he is right about the cushion. I glance hastily about. There, in a
+little saucer, are a half-dozen of the sort I want. I snatch some and run
+back.
+
+"Well, it wasn't in the cushion, I bet."
+
+"No," I admit; "it was in a saucer just behind the cushion."
+
+"You said cushion."
+
+"I know. It's all right."
+
+"Now, if you had said simply 'bureau,' I'd have looked in other places on
+it."
+
+"Yes, you'd have _looked_ in other places!" I could not forbear
+responding. There is, I grant, another side to this question. One evening
+when I went upstairs I found a partial presentation of it, in the form of
+a little newspaper clipping, pinned on my cushion. It read as follows:--
+
+
+    "My dear," said she, "please run and bring me the needle from the
+    haystack."
+
+    "Oh, I don't know which haystack."
+
+    "Look in all the haystacks--you can't miss it; there's only one
+    needle."
+
+
+Jonathan was in the cellar at the moment. When he came up, he said, "Did I
+hear any one laughing?"
+
+"I don't know. Did you?"
+
+"I thought maybe it was you."
+
+"It might have been. Something amused me--I forget what."
+
+I accused Jonathan of having written it himself, but he denied it. Some
+other Jonathan, then; for, as I said, this is not a personal matter, it is
+a world matter. Let us grant, then, a certain allowance for those who hunt
+in woman-made haystacks. But what about pockets? Is not a man lord over
+his own pockets? And are they not nevertheless as so many haystacks piled
+high for his confusion? Certain it is that Jonathan has nearly as much
+trouble with his pockets as he does with the corners and cupboards and
+shelves and drawers of his house. It usually happens over our late supper,
+after his day in town. He sets down his teacup, struck with a sudden
+memory. He feels in his vest pockets--first the right, then the left. He
+proceeds to search himself, murmuring, "I thought something came to-day
+that I wanted to show you--oh, here! no, that isn't it. I thought I put
+it--no, those are to be--what's this? No, that's a memorandum. Now, where
+in--" He runs through the papers in his pockets twice over, and in the
+second round I watch him narrowly, and perhaps see a corner of an envelope
+that does not look like office work. "There, Jonathan! What's that? No,
+not that--that!"
+
+He pulls it out with an air of immense relief. "There! I knew I had
+something. That's it."
+
+When we travel, the same thing happens with the tickets, especially if
+they chance to be costly and complicated ones, with all the shifts and
+changes of our journey printed thick upon their faces. The conductor
+appears at the other end of the car. Jonathan begins vaguely to fumble
+without lowering his paper. Pocket after pocket is browsed through in this
+way. Then the paper slides to his knee and he begins a more thorough
+investigation, with all the characteristic clapping and diving motions
+that seem to be necessary. Some pockets must always be clapped and others
+dived into to discover their contents.
+
+No tickets. The conductor is halfway up the car. Jonathan's face begins to
+grow serious. He rises and looks on the seat and under it. He sits down
+and takes out packet after packet of papers and goes over them with
+scrupulous care. At this point I used to become really anxious--to make
+hasty calculations as to our financial resources, immediate and
+ultimate--to wonder if conductors ever really put nice people like us off
+trains. But that was long ago. I know now that Jonathan has never lost a
+ticket in his life. So I glance through the paper that he has dropped or
+watch the landscape until he reaches a certain stage of calm and definite
+pessimism, when he says, "I must have pulled them out when I took out
+those postcards in the other car. Yes, that's just what has happened."
+Then, the conductor being only a few seats away, I beg Jonathan to look
+once more in his vest pocket, where he always puts them. To oblige me he
+looks, though without faith, and lo! this time the tickets fairly fling
+themselves upon him, with smiles almost curling up their corners. Does the
+brownie travel with us, then?
+
+I begin to suspect that some of the good men who have been blamed for
+forgetting to mail letters in their pockets have been, not indeed
+blameless, but at least misunderstood. Probably they do not forget.
+Probably they hunt for the letters and cannot find them, and conclude that
+they have already mailed them.
+
+In the matter of the home haystacks Jonathan's confidence in himself has
+at last been shaken. For a long time, when he returned to me after some
+futile search, he used to say, "Of course you can look for it if you like,
+but it is _not_ there." But man is a reasoning, if not altogether a
+reasonable, being, and with a sufficient accumulation of evidence,
+especially when there is some one constantly at hand to interpret its
+teachings, almost any set of opinions, however fixed, may be shaken. So
+here.
+
+Once when we shut up the farm for the winter I left my fountain pen
+behind. This was little short of a tragedy, but I comforted myself with
+the knowledge that Jonathan was going back that week-end for a day's hunt.
+
+"Be sure to get the pen first of all," I said, "and put it in your
+pocket."
+
+"Where is it?" he asked.
+
+"In the little medicine cupboard over the fireplace in the orchard room,
+standing up at the side of the first shelf."
+
+"Why not on your desk?" he asked.
+
+"Because I was writing tags in there, and set it up so it would be out of
+the way."
+
+"And it _was_ out of the way. All right. I'll collect it."
+
+He went, and on his return I met him with eager hand--"My pen!"
+
+"I'm sorry," he began.
+
+"You didn't forget!" I exclaimed.
+
+"No. But it wasn't there."
+
+"But--did you look?"
+
+"Yes, I looked."
+
+"Thoroughly?"
+
+"Yes. I lit three matches."
+
+"Matches! Then you didn't get it when you first got there!"
+
+"Why--no--I had the dog to attend to--and--but I had plenty of time when I got
+back, and it _wasn't_ there."
+
+"Well--Dear me! Did you look anywhere else? I suppose I may be mistaken.
+Perhaps I did take it back to the desk."
+
+"That's just what I thought myself," said Jonathan. "So I went there, and
+looked, and then I looked on all the mantelpieces and your bureau. You
+must have put it in your bag the last minute--bet it's there now!"
+
+"Bet it isn't."
+
+It wasn't. For two weeks more I was driven to using other pens--strange and
+distracting to the fingers and the eyes and the mind. Then Jonathan was to
+go up again.
+
+"Please look once more," I begged, "and don't expect not to see it. I can
+fairly see it myself, this minute, standing up there on the right-hand
+side, just behind the machine oil can."
+
+"Oh, I'll look," he promised. "If it's there, I'll find it."
+
+He returned penless. I considered buying another. But we were planning to
+go up together the last week of the hunting season, and I thought I would
+wait on the chance.
+
+We got off at the little station and hunted our way up, making great
+sweeps and jogs, as hunters must, to take in certain spots we thought
+promising--certain ravines and swamp edges where we are always sure of
+hearing the thunderous whir of partridge wings, or the soft, shrill
+whistle of woodcock. At noon we broiled chops and rested in the lee of the
+wood edge, where, even in the late fall, one can usually find spots that
+are warm and still. It was dusk by the time we came over the crest of the
+farm ledges and saw the huddle of the home buildings below us, and quite
+dark when we reached the house. Fires had been made and coals smouldered
+on the hearth in the sitting-room.
+
+"You light the lamp," I said, "and I'll just take a match and go through
+to see if that pen _should_ happen to be there."
+
+"No use doing anything to-night," said Jonathan. "To-morrow morning you
+can have a thorough hunt."
+
+But I took my match, felt my way into the next room, past the fireplace,
+up to the cupboard, then struck my match. In its first flare-up I glanced
+in. Then I chuckled.
+
+Jonathan had gone out to the dining-room, but he has perfectly good ears.
+
+"NO!" he roared, and his tone of dismay, incredulity, rage, sent me off
+into gales of unscrupulous laughter. He was striding in, candle in hand,
+shouting, "It was _not there!_"
+
+"Look yourself," I managed to gasp.
+
+This time, somehow, he could see it.
+
+"You planted it! You brought it up and planted it!"
+
+"I never! Oh, dear me! It pays for going without it for weeks!"
+
+"_Nothing_ will ever make me believe that that pen was standing there when
+I looked for it!" said Jonathan, with vehement finality.
+
+"All right," I sighed happily. "You don't have to believe it."
+
+But in his heart perhaps he does believe it. At any rate, since that time
+he has adopted a new formula: "My dear, it may be there, of course, but I
+don't see it." And this position I regard as unassailable.
+
+One triumph he has had. I wanted something that was stored away in the
+shut-up town house.
+
+"Do you suppose you could find it?" I said, as gently as possible.
+
+"I can try," he said.
+
+"I think it is in a box about this shape--see?--a gray box, in the attic
+closet, the farthest-in corner."
+
+"Are you sure it's in the house? If it's in the house, I think I can find
+it."
+
+"Yes, I'm sure of that."
+
+When he returned that night, his face wore a look of satisfaction very
+imperfectly concealed beneath a mask of nonchalance.
+
+"_Good_ for you! Was it where I said?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Was it in a different corner?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Where was it?"
+
+"It wasn't in a corner at all. It wasn't in that closet."
+
+"It wasn't! Where, then?"
+
+"Downstairs in the hall closet." He paused, then could not forbear adding,
+"And it wasn't in a gray box; it was in a big hat-box with violets all
+over it."
+
+"Why, _Jonathan!_ Aren't you grand! How did you ever find it? I couldn't
+have done better myself."
+
+Under such praise he expanded. "The fact is," he said confidentially, "I
+had given it up. And then suddenly I changed my mind. I said to myself,
+'Jonathan, don't be a man! Think what she'd do if she were here now.' And
+then I got busy and found it."
+
+"Jonathan!" I could almost have wept if I had not been laughing.
+
+"Well," he said, proud, yet rather sheepish, "what is there so funny about
+that? I gave up half a day to it."
+
+"Funny! It isn't funny--exactly. You don't mind my laughing a little? Why,
+you've lived down the fountain pen--we'll forget the pen--"
+
+"Oh, no, you won't forget the pen either," he said, with a certain
+pleasant grimness.
+
+"Well, perhaps not--of course it would be a pity to forget that. Suppose I
+say, then, that we'll always regard the pen in the light of the violet
+hat-box?"
+
+"I think that might do." Then he had an alarming afterthought. "But, see
+here--you won't expect me to do things like that often?"
+
+"Dear me, no! People can't live always on their highest levels. Perhaps
+you'll _never_ do it again." Jonathan looked distinctly relieved. "I'll
+accept it as a unique effort--like Dante's angel and Raphael's sonnet."
+
+"Jonathan," I said that evening, "what do you know about St. Anthony of
+Padua?"
+
+"Not much."
+
+"Well, you ought to. He helped you to-day. He's the saint who helps people
+to find lost articles. Every man ought to take him as a patron saint."
+
+"And do you know which saint it is who helps people to find lost
+virtues--like humility, for instance?"
+
+"No. I don't, really."
+
+"I didn't suppose you did," said Jonathan.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                    II
+
+
+                                 Sap-Time
+
+
+It was a little tree-toad that began it. In a careless moment he had come
+down to the bench that connects the big maple tree with the old locust
+stump, and when I went out at dusk to wait for Jonathan, there he sat, in
+plain sight. A few experimental pokes sent him back to the tree, and I
+studied him there, marveling at the way he assimilated with its bark. As
+Jonathan came across the grass I called softly, and pointed to the tree.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+"Don't you see?"
+
+"No. What?"
+
+"Look--I thought you had eyes!"
+
+"Oh, what a little beauty!"
+
+"And isn't his back just like bark and lichens! And what are those things
+in the tree beside him?"
+
+"Plugs, I suppose."
+
+"Plugs?"
+
+"Yes. After tapping. Uncle Ben used to tap these trees, I believe."
+
+"You mean for sap? Maple syrup?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Jonathan! I didn't know these were sugar maples."
+
+"Oh, yes. These on the road."
+
+"The whole row? Why, there are ten or fifteen of them! And you never told
+me!"
+
+"I thought you knew."
+
+"Knew! I don't know anything--I should think you'd know that, by this time.
+Do you suppose, if I had known, I should have let all these years go
+by--oh, dear--think of all the fun we've missed! And syrup!"
+
+"You'd have to come up in February."
+
+"Well, then, I'll _come_ in February. Who's afraid of February?"
+
+"All right. Try it next year."
+
+I did. But not in February. Things happened, as things do, and it was
+early April before I got to the farm. But it had been a wintry March, and
+the farmers told me that the sap had not been running except for a few
+days in a February thaw. Anyway, it was worth trying.
+
+Jonathan could not come with me. He was to join me later. But Hiram found
+a bundle of elder spouts in the attic, and with these and an auger we went
+out along the snowy, muddy road. The hole was bored--a pair of them--in the
+first tree, and the spouts driven in. I knelt, watching--in fact, peering
+up the spout-hole to see what might happen. Suddenly a drop, dim with
+sawdust, appeared--gathered, hesitated, then ran down gayly and leapt off
+the end.
+
+"Look! Hiram! It's running!" I called.
+
+Hiram, boring the next tree, made no response. He evidently expected it to
+run. Jonathan would have acted just like that, too, I felt sure. Is it a
+masculine quality, I wonder, to be unmoved when the theoretically expected
+becomes actual? Or is it that some temperaments have naturally a certain
+large confidence in the sway of law, and refuse to wonder at its
+individual workings? To me the individual workings give an ever fresh
+thrill because they bring a new realization of the mighty powers behind
+them. It seems to depend on which end you begin at.
+
+But though the little drops thrilled me, I was not beyond setting a pail
+underneath to catch them. And as Hiram went on boring, I followed with my
+pails. Pails, did I say? Pails by courtesy. There were, indeed, a few real
+pails--berry-pails, lard-pails, and water-pails--but for the most part the
+sap fell into pitchers, or tin saucepans, stew-kettles of aluminum or
+agate ware, blue and gray and white and mottled, or big yellow earthenware
+bowls. It was a strange collection of receptacles that lined the roadside
+when we had finished our progress. As I looked along the row, I laughed,
+and even Hiram smiled.
+
+But what next? Every utensil in the house was out there, sitting in the
+road. There was nothing left but the wash-boiler. Now, I had heard tales
+of amateur syrup-boilings, and I felt that the wash-boiler would not do.
+Besides, I meant to work outdoors--no kitchen stove for me! I must have a
+pan, a big, flat pan. I flew to the telephone, and called up the village
+plumber, three miles away. Could he build me a pan? Oh, say, two feet by
+three feet, and five inches high--yes, right away. Yes, Hiram would call
+for it in the afternoon.
+
+I felt better. And now for a fireplace! Oh, Jonathan! Why did you have to
+be away! For Jonathan loves a stone and knows how to put stones together,
+as witness the stone "Eyrie" and the stile in the lane. However, there
+Jonathan wasn't. So I went out into the swampy orchard behind the house
+and looked about--no lack of stones, at any rate. I began to collect
+material, and Hiram, seeing my purpose, helped with the big stones.
+Somehow my fireplace got made--two side walls, one end wall, the other end
+left open for stoking. It was not as pretty as if Jonathan had done it,
+but "'t was enough, 't would serve." I collected fire-wood, and there I
+was, ready for my pan, and the afternoon was yet young, and the sap was
+drip-drip-dripping from all the spouts. I could begin to boil next day. I
+felt that I was being borne along on the providential wave that so often
+floats the inexperienced to success.
+
+That night I emptied all my vessels into the boiler and set them out once
+more. A neighbor drove by and pulled up to comment benevolently on my
+work.
+
+"Will it run to-night?" I asked him.
+
+"No--no--'t won't run to-night. Too cold. 'T won't run any to-night. You can
+sleep all right."
+
+This was pleasant to hear. There was a moon, to be sure, but it was
+growing colder, and at the idea of crawling along that road in the middle
+of the night even my enthusiasm shivered a little.
+
+So I made my rounds at nine, in the white moonlight, and went to sleep.
+
+I was awakened the next morning to a consciousness of flooding sunshine
+and Hiram's voice outside my window.
+
+"Got anything I can empty sap into? I've got everything all filled up."
+
+"Sap! Why, it isn't running yet, is it?"
+
+"Pails were flowin' over when I came out."
+
+"Flowing over! They said the sap wouldn't run last night."
+
+"I guest there don't nobody know when sap'll run and when it won't," said
+Hiram peacefully, as he tramped off to the barn.
+
+In a few minutes I was outdoors. Sure enough, Hiram had everything
+full--old boilers, feed-pails, water-pails. But we found some three-gallon
+milk-cans and used them. A farm is like a city. There are always things
+enough in it for all purposes. It is only a question of using its
+resources.
+
+Then, in the clear April sunshine, I went out and surveyed the row of
+maples. How they did drip! Some of them almost ran. I felt as if I had
+turned on the faucets of the universe and didn't know how to turn them off
+again.
+
+However, there was my new pan. I set it over my oven walls and began to
+pour in sap. Hiram helped me. He seemed to think he needed his feed-pails.
+We poured in sap and we poured in sap. Never did I see anything hold so
+much as that pan. Even Hiram was stirred out of his usual calm to remark,
+"It beats all, how much that holds." Of course Jonathan would have had its
+capacity all calculated the day before, but my methods are empirical, and
+so I was surprised as well as pleased when all my receptacles emptied
+themselves into its shallow breadths and still there was a good inch to
+allow for boiling up. Yes, Providence--my exclusive little fool's
+Providence--was with me. The pan, and the oven, were a success, and when
+Jonathan came that night I led him out with unconcealed pride and showed
+him the pan--now a heaving, frothing mass of sap-about-to-be-syrup, sending
+clouds of white steam down the wind. As he looked at the oven walls, I
+fancied his fingers ached to get at them, but he offered no criticism,
+seeing that they worked.
+
+The next day began overcast, but Providence was merely preparing for me a
+special little gift in the form of a miniature snowstorm. It was quite
+real while it lasted. It whitened the grass and the road, it piled itself
+softly among the clusters of swelling buds on the apple trees, and made
+the orchard look as though it had burst into bloom in an hour. Then the
+sun came out, there were a few dazzling moments when the world was all
+blue and silver, and then the whiteness faded.
+
+And the sap! How it dripped! Once an hour I had to make the rounds,
+bringing back gallons each time, and the fire under my pan was kept up so
+that the boiling down might keep pace with the new supply.
+
+"They do say snow makes it run," shouted a passer-by, and another called,
+"You want to keep skimmin'!" Whereupon I seized my long-handled skimmer
+and fell to work. Southern Connecticut does not know much about syrup, but
+by the avenue of the road I was gradually accumulating such wisdom as it
+possessed.
+
+The syrup was made. No worse accident befell than the occasional
+overflowing of a pail too long neglected. The syrup was made, and bottled,
+and distributed to friends, and was the pride of the household through the
+year.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+"This time I will go early," I said to Jonathan; "they say the late
+running is never quite so good."
+
+It was early March when I got up there this time--early March after a
+winter whose rigor had known practically no break. Again Jonathan could
+not come, but Cousin Janet could, and we met at the little station, where
+Hiram was waiting with Kit and the surrey. The sun was warm, but the air
+was keen and the woods hardly showed spring at all yet, even in that first
+token of it, the slight thickening of their millions of little tips,
+through the swelling of the buds. The city trees already showed this, but
+the country ones still kept their wintry penciling of vanishing lines.
+
+Spring was in the road, however. "There ain't no bottom to this road now,
+it's just dropped clean out," remarked a fellow teamster as we wallowed
+along companionably through the woods. But, somehow, we reached the farm.
+Again we bored our holes, and again I was thrilled as the first bright
+drops slipped out and jeweled the ends of the spouts. I watched Janet. She
+was interested but calm, classing herself at once with Hiram and Jonathan.
+We unearthed last year's oven and dug out its inner depths--leaves and dirt
+and apples and ashes--it was like excavating through the seven Troys to get
+to bottom. We brought down the big pan, now clothed in the honors of a
+season's use, and cleaned off the cobwebs incident to a year's sojourn in
+the attic. By sunset we had a panful of sap boiling merrily and already
+taking on a distinctly golden tinge. We tasted it. It was very syrupy.
+Letting the fire die down, we went in to get supper in the utmost content
+of spirit.
+
+"It's so much simpler than last year," I said, as we sat over our cozy
+"tea,"--"having the pan and the oven ready-made, and all--"
+
+"You don't suppose anything could happen to it while we're in here?"
+suggested Janet. "Shan't I just run out and see?"
+
+"No, sit still. What could happen? The fire's going out."
+
+"Yes, I know." But her voice was uncertain.
+
+"You see, I've been all through it once," I reassured her.
+
+As we rose, Janet said, "Let's go out before we do the dishes." And to
+humor her I agreed. We lighted the lantern and stepped out on the back
+porch. It was quite dark, and as we looked off toward the fireplace we saw
+gleams of red.
+
+"How funny!" I murmured. "I didn't think there was so much fire left."
+
+We felt our way over, through the yielding mud of the orchard, and as I
+raised the lantern we stared in dazed astonishment. The pan was a
+blackened mass, lit up by winking red eyes of fire. I held the lantern
+more closely. I seized a stick and poked--the crisp black stuff broke and
+crumbled into an empty and blackening pan. A curious odor arose.
+
+"It couldn't have!" gasped Janet.
+
+"It couldn't--but it has!" I said.
+
+It was a matter for tears, or rage, or laughter. And laughter won. When we
+recovered a little we took up the black shell of carbon that had once been
+syrup-froth; we laid it gently beside the oven, for a keepsake. Then we
+poured water in the pan, and steam rose hissing to the stars.
+
+"Does it leak?" faltered Janet.
+
+"Leak!" I said. I was on my knees now, watching the water stream through
+the parted seam of the pan bottom, down into the ashes below.
+
+"The question is," I went on as I got up, "did it boil away because it
+leaked, or did it leak because it boiled away?"
+
+"I don't see that it matters much," said Janet. She was showing symptoms
+of depression at this point.
+
+"It matters a great deal," I said. "Because, you see, we've got to tell
+Jonathan, and it makes all the difference how we put it."
+
+"I see," said Janet; then she added, experimentally, "Why tell Jonathan?"
+
+"Why, Janet, you know better! I wouldn't miss telling Jonathan for
+anything. What is Jonathan _for!_"
+
+"Well--of course," she conceded. "Let's do dishes."
+
+We sat before the fire that evening and I read while Janet knitted.
+Between my eyes and the printed page there kept rising a vision--a vision
+of black crust, with winking red embers smoldering along its broken edges.
+I found it distracting in the extreme....
+
+At some time unknown, out of the blind depths of the night, I was awakened
+by a voice:--
+
+"It's beginning to rain. I think I'll just go out and empty what's near
+the house."
+
+"Janet!" I murmured, "don't be absurd."
+
+"But it will dilute all that sap."
+
+"There isn't any sap to dilute. It won't be running at night." After a
+while the voice, full of propitiatory intonations, resumed:--
+
+"My dear, you don't mind if I slip out. It will only take a minute."
+
+"I do mind. Go to sleep!"
+
+Silence. Then:--
+
+"It's raining harder. I hate to think of all that sap--"
+
+"You don't _have_ to think!" I was quite savage. "Just go to sleep--and let
+me!" Another silence. Then a fresh downpour. The voice was pleading:--
+
+"_Please_ let me go! I'll be back in a minute. And it's not cold."
+
+"Oh, well--I'm awake now, anyway. _I'll_ go." My voice was tinged with that
+high resignation that is worse than anger. Janet's tone changed
+instantly:--
+
+"No, no! Don't! Please don't! I'm going. I truly don't mind."
+
+"_I'm_ going. I don't mind, either, not at all."
+
+"Oh, dear! Then let's not either of us go."
+
+"That was my idea in the first place."
+
+"Well, then, we won't. Go to sleep, and I will too."
+
+"Not at all! I've decided to go."
+
+"But it's stopped raining. Probably it won't rain any more."
+
+"Then what are you making all this fuss for?"
+
+"I didn't make a fuss. I just thought I could slip out--"
+
+"Well, you couldn't. And it's raining very hard again. And I'm going."
+
+"Oh, don't! You'll get drenched."
+
+"Of course. But I can't bear to have all that sap diluted."
+
+"It doesn't run at night. You said it didn't."
+
+"You said it did."
+
+"But I don't really know. You know best."
+
+"Why didn't you think of that sooner? Anyway, I'm going."
+
+"Oh, dear! You make me feel as if I'd stirred you up--"
+
+"You have," I interrupted, sweetly. "I won't deny that you _have_ stirred
+me up. But now that you have mentioned it"--I felt for a match--"now that
+you have mentioned it, I see that this was the one thing needed to make my
+evening complete, or perhaps it's morning--I don't know."
+
+We found the dining-room warm, and soon we were equipped in those curious
+compromises of vesture that people adopt under such circumstances, and,
+with lantern and umbrella, we fumbled our way out to the trees. The rain
+was driving in sheets, and we plodded up the road in the yellow circle of
+lantern-light wavering uncertainly over the puddles, while under our feet
+the mud gave and sucked.
+
+"It's diluted, sure enough," I said, as we emptied the pails. We crawled
+slowly back, with our heavy milk-can full of sap-and-rain-water, and went
+in.
+
+The warm dining-room was pleasant to return to, and we sat down to cookies
+and milk, feeling almost cozy.
+
+"I've always wanted to know how it would be to go out in the middle of the
+night this way," I remarked, "and now I know."
+
+"Aren't you hateful!" said Janet.
+
+"Not at all. Just appreciative. But now, if you haven't any _other_ plan,
+we'll go back to bed."
+
+It was half-past eight when we waked next morning. But there was nothing
+to wake up for. The old house was filled with the rain-noises that only
+such an old house knows. On the little windows the drops pricked sharply;
+in the fireplace with the straight flue they fell, hissing, on the embers.
+On the porch roofs the rain made a dull patter of sound; on the tin roof
+of the "little attic" over the kitchen it beat with flat resonance. In the
+big attic, when we went up to see if all was tight, it filled the place
+with a multitudinous clamor; on the sides of the house it drove with a
+fury that re-echoed dimly within doors.
+
+Outside, everything was afloat. We visited the trees and viewed with
+consternation the torrents of rain-water pouring into the pails. We tried
+fastening pans over the spouts to protect them. The wind blew them merrily
+down the road. It would have been easy enough to cover the pails, but how
+to let the sap drip in and the rain drip out--that was the question.
+
+"It seems as if there was a curse on the syrup this year," said Janet.
+
+"The trouble is," I said, "I know just enough to have lost my hold on the
+fool's Providence, and not enough really to take care of myself."
+
+"Superstition!" said Janet.
+
+"What do you call your idea of the curse?" I retorted. "Anyway, I have an
+idea! Look, Janet! We'll just cut up these enamel-cloth table-covers here
+by the sink and everywhere, and tack them around the spouts."
+
+Janet's thrifty spirit was doubtful. "Don't you need them?"
+
+"Not half so much as the trees do. Come on! Pull them off. We'll have to
+have fresh ones this summer, anyway."
+
+We stripped the kitchen tables and the pantry and the milk-room. We got
+tacks and a hammer and scissors, and out we went again. We cut a piece for
+each tree, just enough to go over each pair of spouts and protect the
+pail. When tacked on, it had the appearance of a neat bib, and as the
+pattern was a blue and white check, the effect, as one looked down the
+road at the twelve trees, was very fresh and pleasing. It seemed to cheer
+the people who drove by, too.
+
+But the bibs served their purpose, and the sap dripped cozily into the
+pails without any distraction from alien elements. Sap doesn't run in the
+rain, they say, but this sap did. Probably Hiram was right, and you can't
+tell. I am glad if you can't. The physical mysteries of the universe are
+being unveiled so swiftly that one likes to find something that still
+keeps its secret--though, indeed, the spiritual mysteries seem in no danger
+of such enforcement.
+
+The next day the rain stopped, the floods began to subside, and Jonathan
+managed to arrive, though the roads had even less "bottom to 'em" than
+before. The sun blazed out, and the sap ran faster, and, after Jonathan
+had fully enjoyed them, the blue and white bibs were taken off. Somehow in
+the clear March sunshine they looked almost shocking. By the next day we
+had syrup enough to try for sugar.
+
+For on sugar my heart was set. Syrup was all very well for the first year,
+but now it had to be sugar. Moreover, as I explained to Janet, when it
+came to sugar, being absolutely ignorant, I was again in a position to
+expect the aid of the fool's Providence.
+
+"How much _do_ you know about it?" asked Janet.
+
+"Oh, just what people say. It seems to be partly like fudge and partly
+like molasses candy. You boil it, and then you beat it, and then you pour
+it off."
+
+"I've got more to go on than that," said Jonathan. "I came up on the train
+with the Judge. He used to see it done."
+
+"You've got to drive Janet over to her train to-night; Hiram can't," I
+said.
+
+"All right. There's time enough."
+
+We sat down to early supper, and took turns running out to the kitchen to
+"try" the syrup as it boiled down. At least we said we would take turns,
+but usually we all three went. Supper seemed distinctly a side issue.
+
+"I'm going to take it off now," said Jonathan. "Look out!"
+
+"Do you think it's time?" I demurred.
+
+"We'll know soon," said Jonathan, with his usual composure.
+
+We hung over him. "Now you beat it," I said. But he was already beating.
+
+"Get some cold water to set it in," he commanded. We brought the dishpan
+with water from the well, where ice still floated.
+
+"Maybe you oughtn't to stir so much--do you think?" I suggested, helpfully.
+"Beat it more--up, you know."
+
+"More the way you would eggs," said Janet.
+
+"I'll show you." I lunged at the spoon.
+
+"Go away! This isn't eggs," said Jonathan, beating steadily.
+
+"Your arm must be tired. Let me take it," pleaded Janet.
+
+"No, me!" I said. "Janet, you've got to get your coat and things. You'll
+have to start in fifteen minutes. Here, Jonathan, you need a fresh arm."
+
+"I'm fresh enough."
+
+"And I really don't think you have the motion."
+
+"I have motion enough. This is my job. You go and help Janet."
+
+"Janet's all right."
+
+"So am I. See how white it's getting. The Judge said--"
+
+"Here come Hiram and Kit," announced Janet, returning with bag and wraps.
+"But you have ten minutes. Can't I help?"
+
+"He won't let us. He's that 'sot,'" I murmured. "He'll make you miss your
+train."
+
+"You _could_ butter the pans," he counter charged, "and you haven't."
+
+We flew to prepare, and the pouring began. It was a thrilling moment. The
+syrup, or sugar, now a pale hay color, poured out thickly, blob-blob-blob,
+into the little pans. Janet moved them up as they were needed, and I
+snatched the spoon, at last, and encouraged the stuff to fall where it
+should. But Jonathan got it from me again, and scraped out the remnant,
+making designs of clovers and polliwogs on the tops of the cakes. Then a
+dash for coats and hats and a rush to the carriage.
+
+When the surrey disappeared around the turn of the road, I went back,
+shivering, to the house. It seemed very empty, as houses will, being
+sensitive things. I went to the kitchen. There on the table sat a huddle
+of little pans, to cheer me, and I fell to work getting things in order to
+be left in the morning. Then I went back to the fire and waited for
+Jonathan. I picked up a book and tried to read, but the stillness of the
+house was too importunate, it had to be listened to. I leaned back and
+watched the fire, and the old house and I held communion together.
+
+Perhaps in no other way is it possible to get quite what I got that
+evening. It was partly my own attitude; I was going away in the morning,
+and I had, in a sense, no duties toward the place. The magazines of last
+fall lay on the tables, the newspapers of last fall lay beside them. The
+dust of last fall was, doubtless, in the closets and on the floors. It did
+not matter. For though I was the mistress of the house, I was for the
+moment even more its guest, and guests do not concern themselves with such
+things as these.
+
+If it had been really an empty house, I should have been obliged to think
+of these things, for in an empty house the dust speaks and the house is
+still, dumbly imprisoned in its own past. On the other hand, when a house
+is filled with life, it is still, too; it is absorbed in its own present.
+But when one sojourns in a house that is merely resting, full of the life
+that has only for a brief season left it, ready for the life that is soon
+to return--then one is in the midst of silences that are not empty and
+hollow, but richly eloquent. The house is the link that joins and
+interprets the living past and the living future.
+
+Something of this I came to feel as I sat there in the wonderful
+stillness. There were no house noises such as generally form the unnoticed
+background of one's consciousness--the steps overhead, the distant voices,
+the ticking of the clock, the breathing of the dog in the corner. Even the
+mice and the chimney-swallows had not come back, and I missed the
+scurrying in the walls and the flutter of wings in the chimney. The fire
+purred low, now and then the wind sighed gently about the corner of the
+"new part," and a loose door-latch clicked as the draught shook it. A
+branch drew back and forth across a window-pane with the faintest squeak.
+And little by little the old house opened its heart. All that it told me I
+hardly yet know myself. It gathered up for me all its past, the past that
+I had known and the past that I had not known. Time fell away. My own
+importance dwindled. I seemed a very small part of the life of the
+house--very small, yet wholly belonging to it. I felt that it absorbed me
+as it absorbed the rest--those before and after me--for time was not.
+
+There was the sound of slow wheels outside, the long roll of the
+carriage-house door, and the trampling of hoofs on the flooring within.
+Then the clinking of the lantern and the even tread of feet on the path
+behind the house, a gust of raw snow-air--and the house fell silent so that
+Jonathan might come in.
+
+"Your sugar is hardening nicely, I see," he said, rubbing his hands before
+the fire.
+
+"Yes," I said. "You know I _told_ Janet that for this part of the affair
+we could trust to the fool's Providence."
+
+"Thank you," said Jonathan.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   III
+
+
+                           Evenings on the Farm
+
+
+          I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
+          I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
+          (And wait to watch the water clear, I may);
+          I shan't be gone long.--You come too.
+
+          I'm going out to fetch the little calf
+          That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
+          It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
+          I shan't be gone long.--You come too.
+
+          ROBERT FROST.
+
+
+When we first planned to take up the farm we looked forward with especial
+pleasure to our evenings. They were to be the quiet rounding-in of our
+days, full of companionship, full of meditation. "We'll do lots of reading
+aloud," I said. "And we'll have long walks. There won't be much to do
+_but_ walk and read. I can hardly wait." And I chose our summer books with
+special reference to reading aloud.
+
+"Of course," I said, as we fell to work at our packing, "we'll have to do
+all sorts of things first. But the days are so long up there, and the life
+is very simple. And in the evenings you'll help. We ought to be settled in
+a week."
+
+"Or two--or three," suggested Jonathan.
+
+"Three! What is there to do?"
+
+"Farm-life isn't so blamed simple as you think."
+
+"But what _is_ there to do? Now, listen! One day for trunks, one day for
+boxes and barrels, one day for closets, that's three, one for curtains,
+four, one day for--for the garret, that's five. Well--one day for odds and
+ends that I haven't thought of. That's liberal, I'm sure."
+
+"Better say the rest of your life for the odds and ends you haven't
+thought of," said Jonathan, as he drove the last nail in a neatly headed
+barrel.
+
+"Jonathan, why are you such a pessimist?"
+
+"I'm not, except when you're such an optimist."
+
+"If I'd begun by saying it would take a month, would you have said a
+week?"
+
+"Can't tell. Might have."
+
+"Anyway, there's nothing bad about odds and ends. They're about all women
+have much to do with most of their lives."
+
+"That's what I said. And you called me a pessimist."
+
+"I didn't call you one. I said, why were you one."
+
+"I'm sorry. My mistake," said Jonathan with the smile of one who scores.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+And so we went.
+
+One day for trunks was all right. Any one can manage trunks. And the
+second day, the boxes were emptied and sent flying out to the barn.
+Curtains I decided to keep for evening work, while Jonathan read. That
+left the closets and the attic, or rather the attics, for there was one
+over the main house and one over the "new part,"--still "new," although now
+some seventy years old. They were known as the attic and the little attic.
+I thought I would do the closets first, and I began with the one in the
+parlor. This was built into the chimney, over the fireplace. It was low,
+and as long as the mantelpiece itself. It had two long shelves shut away
+behind three glass doors through which the treasures within were dimly
+visible. When I swung these open it felt like opening a tomb--cold, musty
+air hung about my face. I brushed it aside, and considered where to begin.
+It was a depressing collection. There were photographs and photographs,
+some in frames, the rest of them tied up in packages or lying in piles. A
+few had names or messages written on the back, but most gave no clue; and
+all of them gazed out at me with that expression of complete
+respectability that constitutes so impenetrable a mask for the personality
+behind. Most of us wear such masks, but the older photographers seem to
+have been singularly successful in concentrating attention on them. Then
+there were albums, with more photographs, of people and of "views." There
+was a big Bible, some prayer-books, and a few other books elaborately
+bound with that heavy fancifulness that we are learning to call Victorian.
+One of these was on "The Wonders of the Great West"; another was about
+"The Female Saints of America." I took it down and glanced through it, but
+concluded that one had to be a female saint, or at least an aspirant, to
+appreciate it. Then there were things made out of dried flowers, out of
+hair, out of shells, out of pine-cones. There were vases and other
+ornamental bits of china and glass, also Victorian, looking as if they
+were meant to be continually washed or dusted by the worn, busy fingers of
+the female saints. As I came to fuller realization of all these relics, my
+resolution flickered out and there fell upon me a strange numbness of
+spirit. I seemed under a spell of inaction. Everything behind those glass
+doors had been cherished too long to be lightly thrown away, yet was not
+old enough to be valuable nor useful enough to keep. I spent a long
+day--one of the longest days of my life--browsing through the books, trying
+to sort the photographs, and glancing through a few old letters. I did
+nothing in particular with anything, and in the late afternoon I roused
+myself, put them all back, and shut the glass doors. I had nothing to show
+for my day's experience except a deep little round ache in the back of my
+neck and a faint brassy taste in my mouth. I complained of it to Jonathan
+later.
+
+"It always tasted just that way to me when I was a boy," he said, "but I
+never thought much about it--I thought it was just a closet-taste."
+
+"And it isn't only the taste," I went on. "It does something to me, to my
+state of mind. I'm afraid to try the garret."
+
+"Garrets are different," said Jonathan. "But I'd leave them. They can
+wait."
+
+"They've waited a good while, of course," I said.
+
+And so we left the garrets. We came back to them later, and were glad we
+had done so. But that is a story by itself.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Meanwhile, in the evenings, Jonathan helped.
+
+"I'm afraid you were more or less right about the odd jobs," I admitted
+one night. "They do seem to accumulate." I was holding a candle while he
+set up a loose latch.
+
+"They've been accumulating a good many years," said Jonathan.
+
+"Yes, that's it. And so the doors all stick, and the latches won't latch,
+and the shades are sulky or wild, and the pantry shelves--have you
+noticed?--they're all warped so they rock when you set a dish on them."
+
+"And the chairs pull apart," added Jonathan.
+
+"Yes. Of course after we catch up we'll be all right."
+
+"I wouldn't count too much on catching up."
+
+"Why not?" I asked.
+
+"The farm has had a long start."
+
+"But you're a Yankee," I argued; "the Yankee nature fairly feeds on such
+jobs--'putter jobs,' you know."
+
+"Yes, I know."
+
+"Only, of course, you get on faster if you're not too particular about
+having the exact tool--"
+
+Considered as a Yankee, Jonathan's only fault is that when he does a job
+he likes to have a very special tool to do it with. Often it is so special
+that I have never heard its name before and then I consider he is going
+too far. He merely thinks I haven't gone far enough. Perhaps such matters
+must always remain matters of opinion. But even with this handicap we did
+begin to catch up, and we could have done this a good deal faster if it
+had not been for the pump.
+
+The pump was a clear case of new wine in an old bottle. It was large and
+very strong. The people who worked it were strong too. But the walls and
+floor to which it was attached were not strong at all. And so, one night,
+when Jonathan wanted a walk I was obliged instead to suggest the pump.
+
+"What's the matter there?"
+
+"Why, it seems to have pulled clear of its moorings. You look at it."
+
+He looked, with that expression of meditative resourcefulness peculiar to
+the true Yankee countenance. "H'm--needs new wood there,--and there; that
+stuff'll never hold." And so the old bottle was patched with new skin at
+the points of strain, and in the zest of reconstruction Jonathan almost
+forgot to regret the walk. "We'll have it to-morrow night," he said: "the
+moon will be better."
+
+The next evening I met him below the turn of the road. "Wonderful night
+it's going to be," he said, as he pushed his wheel up the last hill.
+
+"Yes--" I said, a little uneasily. I was thinking of the kitchen pump.
+Finally I brought myself to face it.
+
+"There seems to be some trouble--with the pump," I said apologetically. I
+felt that it was my fault, though I knew it wasn't.
+
+"More trouble? What sort of trouble?"
+
+"Oh, it wheezes and makes funny sucking noises, and the water spits and
+spits, and then bursts out, and then doesn't come at all. It sounds a
+little like a cat with a bone in its throat."
+
+"Probably just that," said Jonathan: "grain of sand in the valve, very
+likely."
+
+"Shall I get a plumber?"
+
+"Plumber! I'll fix it myself in three shakes of a lamb's tail."
+
+"Well," I said, relieved: "you can do that after supper while I see that
+all the chickens are in, and those turkeys, and then we'll have our walk."
+
+Accordingly I went off on my tour. When I returned the pale moon-shadows
+were already beginning to show in the lingering dusk of the fading
+daylight. Indoors seemed very dark, but on the kitchen floor a candle sat,
+flaring and dipping.
+
+"Jonathan," I called, "I'm ready."
+
+"Well, I'm not," said a voice at my feet.
+
+"Why, where are you? Oh, there!" I bent down and peered under the sink at
+a shape crouched there. "Haven't you finished?"
+
+"Finished! I've just got the thing apart."
+
+"I should say you had!" I regarded the various pieces of iron and leather
+and wood as they lay, mere dismembered shapes, about the dim kitchen.
+
+"It doesn't seem as if it would ever come together again--to be a pump," I
+said in some depression.
+
+"Oh, that's easy! It's just a question of time."
+
+"How much time?"
+
+"Heaven knows."
+
+"Was it the valve?"
+
+"It was--several things."
+
+His tone had the vagueness born of concentration. I could see that this
+was no time to press for information. Besides, in the field of mechanics,
+as Jonathan has occasionally pointed out to me, I am rather like a
+traveler who has learned to ask questions in a foreign tongue, but not to
+understand the answers.
+
+"Well, I'll bring my sewing out here--or would you rather have me read to
+you? There's something in the last number of--"
+
+"No--get your sewing--blast that screw! Why doesn't it start?"
+
+Evidently sewing was better than the last number of anything. I settled
+myself under a lamp, while Jonathan, in the twilight beneath the sink,
+continued his mystic rites, with an accompaniment of mildly vituperative
+or persuasive language, addressed sometimes to his tools, sometimes to the
+screws and nuts and other parts, sometimes against the men who made them
+or the plumbers who put them in. Now and then I held a candle, or steadied
+some perverse bit of metal while he worked his will upon it. And at last
+the phoenix did indeed rise, the pump was again a pump,--at least it looked
+like one.
+
+"Suppose it doesn't work," I suggested.
+
+"Suppose it does," said Jonathan.
+
+He began to pump furiously. "Pour in water there!" he directed. "Keep on
+pouring--don't stop--never mind if she does spout." I poured and he pumped,
+and there were the usual sounds of a pump resuming activity: gurglings and
+spittings, suckings and sudden spoutings; but at last it seemed to get its
+breath--a few more long strokes of the handle, and the water poured.
+
+"What time is it?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, fairly late--about ten--ten minutes past."
+
+Instead of our walk, we stood for a moment under the big maples before the
+house and looked out into a sea of moonlight. It silvered the sides of the
+old gray barns and washed over the blossoming apple trees beyond the
+house. Is there anything more sweetly still than the stillness of
+moonlight over apple blossoms! As we went out to the barns to lock up,
+even the little hencoops looked poetic. Passing one of them, we half
+roused the feathered family within and heard muffled peepings and a
+smothered _clk-clk_. Jonathan was by this time so serene that I felt I
+could ask him a question that had occurred to me.
+
+"Jonathan, how long _is_ three shakes of a lamb's tail?"
+
+"Apparently, my dear, it is the whole evening," he answered unruffled.
+
+The next night was drizzly. Well, we would have books instead of a walk.
+We lighted a fire, May though it was, and settled down before it. "What
+shall we read?" I asked, feeling very cozy.
+
+Jonathan was filling his pipe with a leisurely deliberation good to look
+upon. With the match in his hand he paused--"Oh, I meant to tell you--those
+young turkeys of yours--they were still out when I came through the yard. I
+wonder if they went in all right."
+
+I have always noticed that if the turkeys grow up very fat and strutty and
+suggestive of Thanksgiving, Jonathan calls them "our turkeys," but in the
+spring, when they are committing all the naughtinesses of wild and silly
+youth, he is apt to allude to them as "those young turkeys of yours."
+
+I rose wearily. "No. They never go in all right when they get out at this
+time--especially on wet nights. I'll have to find them and stow them."
+
+Jonathan got up, too, and laid down his pipe. "You'll need the lantern,"
+he said.
+
+We went out together into the May drizzle--a good thing to be out in, too,
+if you are out for the fun of it. But when you are hunting silly little
+turkeys who literally don't know enough to go in when it rains, and when
+you expected and wanted to be doing something else, then it seems
+different, the drizzle seems peculiarly drizzly, the silliness of the
+turkeys seems particularly and unendurably silly.
+
+We waded through the drenched grass and the tall, dripping weeds,
+listening for the faint, foolish peeping of the wanderers. Some we found
+under piled fence rails, some under burdock leaves, some under nothing
+more protective than a plantain leaf. By ones and twos we collected them,
+half drowned yet shrilly remonstrant, and dropped them into the dry shed
+where they belonged. Then we returned to the house, very wet, feeling the
+kind of discouragement that usually besets those who are forced to furnish
+prudence to fools.
+
+"Nine o'clock," said Jonathan, "and we're too wet to sit down. If you
+could just shut in those turkeys on wet days--"
+
+"Shut them in! Didn't I shut them in! They must have got out since four
+o'clock."
+
+"Isn't the shed tight?" he asked.
+
+"Chicken-tight, but not turkey-tight, apparently. Nothing is
+turkey-tight."
+
+"They're bigger than chickens."
+
+"Not in any one spot they aren't. They're like coiled wire--when they
+stretch out to get through a crack they have _no_ dimension except length,
+their bodies are mere imaginary points to hang feathers on. You don't know
+little turkeys."
+
+It might be said that, having undertaken to raise turkeys, we had to
+expect them to act like turkeys. But there were other interruptions in our
+evenings where our share of responsibility was not so plain. For example,
+one wet evening in early June we had kindled a little fire and I had
+brought the lamp forward. The pump was quiescent, the little turkeys were
+all tucked up in the turkey equivalent for bed, the farm seemed to be
+cuddling down into itself for the night. We sat for a moment luxuriously
+regarding the flames, listening to the sighing of the wind, feeling the
+sweet damp air as it blew in through the open windows. I was considering
+which book it should be and at last rose to possess myself of two or
+three.
+
+"Sh--h--h!" said Jonathan, a warning finger raised.
+
+I stood listening.
+
+"I don't hear anything," I said.
+
+"Sh--h!" he repeated. "There!"
+
+This time, indeed, I heard faint bird-notes.
+
+"Young robins!" He sprang up and made for the back door with long strides.
+
+I peered out through the window of the orchard room, but saw only the
+reflection of the firelight and the lamp. Suddenly I heard Jonathan
+whistle and I ran to the back porch. Blackness pressed against my eyes.
+
+"Where are you?" I called into it.
+
+The whistle again, quite near me, apparently out of the air.
+
+"Bring a lantern," came a whisper.
+
+I got it and came back and down the steps to the path, holding up my light
+and peering about in search of the voice.
+
+"Where are you? I can't see you at all."
+
+"Right here--look--here--up!" The voice was almost over my head.
+
+I searched the dark masses of the tree--oh, yes! the lantern revealed the
+heel of a shoe in a crotch, and above,--yes, undoubtedly, the rest of
+Jonathan, stretched out along a limb.
+
+"Oh! What are you doing up there?"
+
+"Get me a long stick--hoe--clothes-pole--anything I can poke with. Quick! The
+cat's up here. I can hear her, but I can't see her."
+
+I found the rake and reached it up to him. From the dark beyond him came a
+distressed mew.
+
+"Now the lantern. Hang it on the teeth." He drew it up to him, then, rake
+in one hand and lantern in the other, proceeded to squirm out along the
+limb.
+
+"Now I see her."
+
+I saw her too--a huddle of yellow, crouched close.
+
+"I'll have her in a minute. She'll either have to drop or be caught."
+
+And in fact this distressing dilemma was already becoming plain to the
+marauder herself. Her mewings grew louder and more frequent. A few more
+contortions brought the climber nearer his victim. A little judicious
+urging with the rake and she was within reach. The rake came down to me,
+and a long, wild mew announced that Jonathan had clutched.
+
+"I don't see how you're going to get down," I said, mopping the rain-mist
+out of my eyes.
+
+"Watch me," panted the contortionist.
+
+I watched a curious mass descend the tree, the lantern, swinging and
+jerking, fitfully illumined the pair, and I could see, now a knee and an
+ear, now a hand and a yellow furry shape, now a white collar, nose, and
+chin. There was a last, long, scratching slide. I snatched the lantern,
+and Jonathan stood beside me, holding by the scruff of her neck a very
+much frazzled yellow cat. We returned to the porch where her victims
+were--one alive, in a basket, two dead, beside it, and Jonathan, kneeling,
+held the cat's nose close to the little bodies while he boxed her
+ears--once, twice; remonstrant mews rose wild, and with a desperate twist
+the culprit backed out under his arm and leaped into the blackness.
+
+"Don't believe she'll eat young robin for a day or two," said Jonathan.
+
+"Is that what they were? Where were they?"
+
+"Under the tree. She'd knocked them out."
+
+"Could you put this one back? He seems all right--only sort of naked in
+spots."
+
+"We'll half cover the basket and hang it in the tree. His folks'll take
+care of him."
+
+Next morning early there began the greatest to-do among the robins in the
+orchard. They shrieked their comments on the affair at the top of their
+lungs. They screamed abusively at Jonathan and me as we stood watching.
+"They say we did it!" said Jonathan. "I call that gratitude!"
+
+I wish I could record that from that evening the cat was a reformed
+character. An impression had indeed been made. All next day she stayed
+under the porch, two glowing eyes in the dark. The second day she came
+out, walking indifferent and debonair, as cats do. But when Jonathan took
+down the basket from the tree and made her smell of it, she flattened her
+ears against her head and shot under the porch again.
+
+But lessons grow dim and temptation is freshly importunate. It was not two
+weeks before Jonathan was up another tree on the same errand, and when I
+considered the number of nests in our orchard, and the number of cats--none
+of them really our cats--on the place, I felt that the position of
+overruling Providence was almost more than we could undertake, if we hoped
+to do anything else.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+These things--tinkering of latches and chairs, pump-mending, rescue work in
+the orchard and among the poultry--filled our evenings fairly full. Yet
+these are only samples, and not particularly representative samples
+either. They were the sort of things that happened oftenest, the common
+emergencies incidental to the life. But there were also the uncommon
+emergencies, each occurring seldom but each adding its own touch of
+variety to the tale of our evenings.
+
+For instance, there was the time of the great drought, when Jonathan,
+coming in from a tour of the farm at dusk, said, "I've got to go up and
+dig out the spring-hole across the swamp. Everything else is dry, and the
+cattle are getting crazy."
+
+"Can I help?" I asked, not without regrets for our books and our
+evening--it was a black night, and I had had hopes.
+
+"Yes. Come and hold the lantern."
+
+We went. The spring-hole had been trodden by the poor, eager creatures
+into a useless jelly of mud. Jonathan fell to work, while I held the
+lantern high. But soon it became more than a mere matter of holding the
+lantern. There was a crashing in the blackness about us and a huge horned
+head emerged behind my shoulder, another loomed beyond Jonathan's stooping
+bulk.
+
+"Keep 'em back," he said. "They'll have it all trodden up again--Hi! You!
+Ge' back 'ere!" There is as special a lingo for talking to cattle as there
+is for talking to babies. I used it as well as I could. I swung the
+lantern in their faces, I brandished the hoe-handle at them, I jabbed at
+them recklessly. They snorted and backed and closed in again,--crazy, poor
+things, with the smell of the water. It was an evening's battle for us.
+Jonathan dug and dug, and then laid rails, and the precious water filled
+in slowly, grew to a dark pool, and the thirsty creatures panted and
+snuffed in the dark just outside the radius of the hoe-handle, until at
+last we could let them in. I had forgotten my books, for we had come close
+to the earth and the creatures of the earth. The cows were our sisters and
+the steers our brothers that night.
+
+Sometimes the emergency was in the barn--a broken halter and trouble among
+the horses, or perhaps a new calf. Sometimes a stray creature,--cow or
+horse,--grazing along the roadside, got into our yard and threatened our
+corn and squashes and my poor, struggling flower-beds. Once it was a break
+in the wire fence around Jonathan's muskmelon patch in the barn meadow.
+The cows had just been turned in, and if it wasn't mended that evening it
+meant no melons that season, also melon-tainted cream for days.
+
+Once or twice each year it was the drainpipe from the sink. The drain,
+like the pump, was an innovation. Our ancestors had always carried out
+whatever they couldn't use or burn, and dumped it on the far edge of the
+orchard. In a thinly settled community, there is much to be said for this
+method: you know just where you are. But we had the drain, and
+occasionally we didn't know just where we were.
+
+"Coffee grounds," Jonathan would suggest, with a touch of sternness.
+
+"No," I would reply firmly; "coffee grounds are always burned."
+
+"What then?"
+
+"Don't know. I've poked and poked."
+
+A gleam in the corner of Jonathan's eye--"What with?"
+
+"Oh, everything."
+
+"Yes, I suppose so. For instance what?"
+
+"Why--hair-pin first, of course, and then scissors, and then
+button-hook--you needn't smile. Button-hooks are wonderful for cleaning out
+pipes. And then I took a pail-handle and straightened it out--" Jonathan
+was laughing by this time--"Well, I have to use what I have, don't I?"
+
+"Yes, of course. And after the pail-handle?"
+
+"After that--oh, yes. I tried your cleaning-rod."
+
+"The devil you did!"
+
+"Not at all. It wasn't hurt a bit. It just wouldn't go down, that's all.
+So then I thought I'd wait for you."
+
+"And now what do you expect?"
+
+"I expect you to fix it."
+
+Of course, after that, there was nothing for Jonathan to do but fix it.
+Usually it did not take long. Sometimes it did. Once it took a whole
+evening, and required the services of a young tree, which Jonathan went
+out and cut and trimmed and forced through a section of the pipe which he
+had taken up and laid out for the operation on the kitchen floor. It was a
+warm evening, too, and friends had driven over to visit us. We received
+them warmly in the kitchen. We explained that we believed in making them
+members of the family, and that members of the family always helped in
+whatever was being done. So they helped. They took turns gripping the pipe
+while Jonathan and I persuaded the young tree through it. It required
+great strength and some skill because it was necessary to make the tree
+and the pipe perform spirally rotatory movements each antagonistic and
+complementary to the other. We were all rather tired and very hot before
+anything began to happen. Then it happened all at once: the tree burst
+through--and not alone. A good deal came with it. The kitchen floor was a
+sight, and there was--undoubtedly there was--a strong smell of coffee.
+Jonathan smiled. Then he went down cellar and restored the pipe to its
+position, while the rest of us cleared up the kitchen,--it's astonishing
+what a little job like that can make a kitchen look like,--and as our
+friends started to go a voice from beneath us, like the ghost in "Hamlet,"
+shouted, "Hold 'em! There's half a freezer of ice-cream down here we can
+finish." Sure enough there was! And then he wouldn't have to pack it down.
+We had it up. We looted the pantry as only irresponsible adults can loot,
+in their own pantry, and the evening ended in luxurious ease. Some time in
+the black of the night our friends left, and I suppose the sound of their
+carriage-wheels along the empty road set many a neighbor wondering,
+through his sleep, "Who's sick now?" How could they know it was only a
+plumbing party?
+
+As I look back on this evening it seems one of the pleasantest of the
+year. It isn't so much what you do, of course, as the way you feel about
+it, that makes the difference between pleasant and unpleasant. Shall we
+say of that evening that we meant to read aloud? Or that we meant to have
+a quiet evening with friends? Not at all. We say, with all the conviction
+in the world, that we meant, on that particular evening, to have a
+plumbing party, with the drain as the _piA"ce de rA(C)sistance_. Toward this
+our lives had been yearning, and lo! they had arrived!
+
+Some few things, however, are hard to meet in that spirit. When the pigs
+broke out of the pen, about nine o'clock, and Hiram was away, and Mrs.
+Hiram needed our help to get them in--there was no use in pretending that
+we meant to do it. Moreover, the labor of rounding up pigs is one of
+mingled arduousness and delicacy. Pigs in clover was once a popular game,
+but pigs in a dark orchard is not a game at all, and it will, I am firmly
+convinced, never be popular. It is, I repeat, not a game, yet probably the
+only way to keep one's temper at all is to regard it, for the time being,
+as a major sport, like football and deep-sea fishing and
+mountain-climbing, where you are expected to take some risks and not think
+too much about results as such. On this basis it has, perhaps, its own
+rewards. But the attitude is difficult to maintain, especially late at
+night.
+
+On that particular evening, as we returned, breathless and worn, to the
+house, I could not refrain from saying, with some edge, "I never wanted to
+keep pigs anyway."
+
+"Who says we're keeping them?" remarked Jonathan; and then we laughed and
+laughed.
+
+"You needn't think I'm laughing because you said anything specially
+funny," I said. "It's only because I'm tired enough to laugh at anything."
+
+The pump, too, tried my philosophy now and then. One evening when I had
+worn my hands to the bone cutting out thick leather washers for Jonathan
+to insert somewhere in the circulatory system of that same monster, I
+finally broke out, "Oh, dear! I hate the pump! I wanted a moonlight walk!"
+
+"I'll have the thing together now in a jiffy," said Jonathan.
+
+"Jiffy! There's no use talking about jiffies at half-past ten at night," I
+snarled. I was determined anyway to be as cross as I liked. "Why can't we
+find a really simple way of living? This isn't simple. It's highly complex
+and very difficult."
+
+"You cut those washers very well," suggested Jonathan soothingly, but I
+was not prepared to be soothed.
+
+"It was hateful work, though. Now, look what we've done this evening!
+We've shut up a setting hen, and housed the little turkeys, and driven
+that cow back into the road, and mended a window-shade and the dog's
+chain, and now we've fixed the pump--and it won't stay fixed at that!"
+
+"Fair evening's work," murmured Jonathan as he rapidly assembled the pump.
+
+"Yes, as work. But all I mean is--it isn't _simple_. Farm life has a
+reputation for simplicity that I begin to think is overdone. It doesn't
+seem to me that my evening has been any more simple than if we had dressed
+for dinner and gone to the opera or played bridge. In fact, at this
+distance, that, compared with this, has the simplicity of a--I don't know
+what!"
+
+"I like your climaxes," said Jonathan, and we both laughed. "There! I'm
+done. Now suppose we go, in our simple way, and lock up the barns and
+chicken-houses."
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+And so the evenings came and went, each offering a prospect of fair and
+quiet things--books and firelight and moonlight and talk; many in
+retrospect full of things quite different--drains and latches and
+fledglings and cows and pigs. Many, but not all. For the evenings did now
+and then come when the pump ceased from troubling and the "critters" were
+at rest. Evenings when we sat under the lamp and read, when we walked and
+walked along moonlit roads or lay on the slopes of moon-washed meadows. It
+was on such an evening that we faced the vagaries of farm life and
+searched for a philosophy to cover them.
+
+"I'm beginning to see that it will never be any better," I said.
+
+"Probably not," said Jonathan, talking around his pipe.
+
+"You seem contented enough about it."
+
+"I am."
+
+"I don't know that I'm contented, but perhaps I'm resigned. I believe it's
+necessary."
+
+"Of course it's necessary."
+
+Jonathan often has the air of having known since infancy the great truths
+about life that I have just discovered. I overlooked this, and went on,
+"You see, we're right down close to the earth that is the ultimate basis
+of everything, and all the caprices of things touch us immediately and we
+have to make immediate adjustments to them."
+
+"And that knocks the bottom out of our evenings."
+
+"Now if we're in the city, playing bridge, somebody else is making those
+adjustments for us. We're like the princess with seventeen mattresses
+between her and the pea."
+
+"She felt it, though," said Jonathan. "It kept her awake."
+
+"I know. She had a poor night. But even she would hardly have maintained
+that she felt it as she would have done if the mattresses hadn't been
+there."
+
+"True," said Jonathan.
+
+"Farm life is the pea without the mattresses--" I went on.
+
+"Sounds a little cheerless," said Jonathan.
+
+"Well--of course, it isn't really cheerless at all. But neither is it easy.
+It's full of remorseless demands for immediate adjustment."
+
+"That was the way the princess felt about her pea."
+
+"The princess was a snippy little thing. But after all, probably her life
+was full of adjustments of other sorts. She couldn't call her soul her own
+a minute, I suppose."
+
+"Perhaps that was why she ran away," suggested Jonathan.
+
+"Of course it was. She ran away to find the simple life and didn't find
+it."
+
+"No. She found the pea--even with all those mattresses."
+
+"And we've run away, and found several peas, and fewer mattresses," said
+Jonathan.
+
+"Let's not get confused--"
+
+"I'm not confused," said Jonathan.
+
+"Well, I shall be in a minute if I don't look out. You can't follow a
+parallel too far. What I mean is, that if you run away from one kind of
+complexity you run into another kind."
+
+"What are you going to do about it?"
+
+"I'm going to like it all," I answered, "and make believe I meant to do
+it."
+
+After that we were silent awhile. Then I tried again. "You know your trick
+of waltzing with a glass of water on your head?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, I wonder if we couldn't do that with our souls."
+
+"That suggests to me a rather curious picture," said Jonathan.
+
+"Well--you know what I mean. When you do that, your body takes up all the
+jolts and jiggles before they get to the top of your head, so the glass
+stays quiet."
+
+"Well--"
+
+"Well, I don't see why--only, of course, our souls aren't really anything
+like glasses of water, and it would be perfectly detestable to think of
+carrying them around carefully like that."
+
+"Perhaps you'd better back out of that figure of speech," suggested
+Jonathan. "Go back to your princess. Say, 'every man his own mattress.' "
+
+"No. Any figure is wrong. The trouble with all of them is that as soon as
+you use one it begins to get in your way, and say all sorts of things for
+you that you never meant at all. And then if you notice it, it bothers
+you, and if you don't notice it, you get drawn into crooked thinking."
+
+"And yet you can't think without them."
+
+"No, you can't think without them."
+
+"Well--where are we, anyway?" he asked placidly.
+
+"I don't know at all. Only I feel sure that leading the simple life
+doesn't depend on the things you do it _with_. Feeding your own cows and
+pigs and using pumps and candles brings you no nearer to it than marketing
+by telephone and using city water supply and electric lighting. I don't
+know what does bring you nearer, but I'm sure it must be something inside
+you."
+
+"That sounds rather reasonable," said Jonathan; "almost scriptural--"
+
+"Yes, I know," I said.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                    IV
+
+
+                               After Frost
+
+
+It is late afternoon in mid-September. I stand in my garden sniffing the
+raw air, and wondering, as always at this season, _will_ there be frost
+to-night or will there not? Of course if I were a woodchuck or a muskrat,
+or any other really intelligent creature, I should know at once and act
+accordingly, but being only a stupid human being, I am thrown back on
+conjecture, assisted by the thermometer, and an appeal to Jonathan.
+
+"Too much wind for frost," says he.
+
+"Sure? I'd hate to lose my nasturtiums quite so early."
+
+"You won't lose 'em. Look at the thermometer if you don't believe me. If
+it's above forty you're safe."
+
+I look, and try to feel reassured. But I am not quite easy in my mind
+until next morning when, running out before breakfast, I make the rounds
+and find everything untouched.
+
+But a few days later the alarm comes again. There is no wind this time,
+and, what is worse, an ominous silence falls at dusk over the orchard and
+meadow. "Why is everything so still?" I ask myself. "Oh, of course--the
+katydids aren't talking--and the crickets, and all the other whirr-y
+things. Ah! That means business! My poor garden!"
+
+"Jonathan!" I call, as I feel rather than see his shape whirling
+noiselessly in at the big gate after his ride up from the station. "Help
+me cover my nasturtiums. There'll be frost to-night."
+
+"Maybe," says Jonathan's voice.
+
+"Not maybe at all--surely. Listen to the katydids!"
+
+"You mean, listen to the absence of katydids."
+
+"Very well. The point is, I want newspapers."
+
+"No. The point is, I am to bring newspapers."
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"And tuck up your nasturtiums for the night in your peculiarly ridiculous
+fashion--"
+
+"I know it looks ridiculous, but really it's sensible. There may be weeks
+of summer after this."
+
+And so the nasturtiums are tucked up, cozily hidden under the big layers
+of sheets, whose corners we fasten down with stones. To be sure, the
+garden _is_ rather a funny sight, with these pale shapes sprawling over
+its beds. But it pays. For in the morning, though over in the vegetable
+garden the squash leaves and lima beans are blackened and limp, my
+nasturtiums are still pert and crisp. I pull off the papers, wondering
+what the passers-by have thought, and lo! my gay garden, good for perhaps
+two weeks more!
+
+But a day arrives when even newspaper coddling is of no avail. Sometimes
+it is in late September, sometimes not until October, but when it comes
+there is no resisting.
+
+The sun goes down, leaving a clear sky paling to green at the horizon. A
+still cold falls upon the world, and I feel that it is the end. Shears in
+hand, I cut everything I can--nasturtiums down to the ground,--leaves, buds,
+and all,--feathery sprays of cosmos, asters by the armful. Those last
+bouquets that I bring into the house are always the most beautiful, for I
+do not have to save buds for later cutting. There will, alas, be no later
+cutting.
+
+So I fill my bowls and vases, and next morning I go out, well knowing what
+I shall see. It is a beautiful sight, too, if one can forget its meaning.
+The whole golden-green world of autumn has been touched with silver. In
+the low-lying swamp beyond the orchard it is almost like a light snowfall.
+The meadows rising beyond the barns are silvered over wherever the long
+tree-shadows still lie. And in my garden, too, where the shadows linger,
+every leaf is frosted, but as soon as the sun warms them through, leaf and
+twig turn dark and droop to the ground. It is the end.
+
+Except, indeed, for my brave marigolds and calendulas and little button
+asters. It is for this reason that I have given them space all summer,
+nipping them back when they tried to blossom early, for they seem a bit
+crude compared with the other flowers. But now that frost is here, my
+feelings warm to them. I cannot criticize their color and texture, so
+grateful am I to them for not giving up. And when last night's cuttings
+have faded, I shall be very glad of a glowing mass of marigold beside my
+fireplace, and of the yellow stars of calendula, like embodied sunshine,
+on my dining-table.
+
+Well, then, the frost has come! And after the first pang of realization, I
+find that, curiously enough, the worst is over. Since it has come, let it
+come! And now--hurrah for the garden house-cleaning! The garden is dead--the
+garden of yesterday! Long live the garden--the garden of to-morrow! For
+suddenly my mind has leaped ahead to spring.
+
+I can hardly wait for breakfast to be over, before I am out in working
+clothes, pulling up things--not weeds now, but flowers, or what were
+flowers. Nasturtiums, asters, cosmos, snapdragon, stock, late-blooming
+cornflowers--up they all come, all the annuals, and the biennials that have
+had their season. I fling them together in piles, and soon have small
+haystacks all along my grass paths, and--there I am! Down again to the good
+brown earth!
+
+It is with positive satisfaction that I stand and survey my beds, great
+bare patches of earth, glorified here and there by low clumps of calendula
+and great bushes of marigold. Now, then! I can do anything! I can dig, and
+fertilize, and transplant. Best of all, I can plan and plan! The crisp
+wind stings my cheeks, but as I work I feel the sun hot on the back of my
+neck. I get the smell of the earth as I turn it over, mingled with the
+pungent tang of marigold blossoms, very pleasant out of doors, though
+almost too strong for the house except near a fireplace. I believe the
+most characteristic fall odors are to me this of marigold, mingled with
+the fragrance of apples piled in the orchard, the good smell of earth
+newly turned up, and the flavor of burning leaves, borne now and then on
+the wind, from the outdoor house-cleaning of the world.
+
+There is perhaps no season of all the garden year that brings more real
+delight to the gardener, no time so stimulating to the imagination. This
+year in the garden has been good, but next year shall be better. All the
+failures, or near-failures, shall of course be turned into successes, and
+the successes shall be bettered. Last year there were not quite enough
+hollyhocks, but next year there shall be such glories! There are seedlings
+that I have been saving, over on the edge of the phlox. I dash across to
+look them up--yes, here they are, splendid little fellows, leaves only a
+bit crumpled by the frost. I dig them up carefully, keeping earth packed
+about their roots, and one by one I convey them across and set them out in
+a beautiful row where I want them to grow next year. Their place is beside
+the old stone-flagged path, and I picture them rising tall against the
+side of the woodshed, whose barrenness I have besides more than half
+covered with honeysuckle.
+
+Then, there are my foxgloves. Some of them I have already transplanted,
+but not all. There is a little corner full of stocky yearlings that I must
+change now. And that same corner can be used for poppies. I have kept
+seeds of this year's poppies--funny little brown pepper-shakers, with tiny
+holes at the end through which I shake out the fine seed dust. Doubtless
+they would attend to all this without my help, but I like to be sure that
+even my self-seeding annuals come up where I most want them.
+
+Biennials, like the foxglove and canterbury bells, are of course, the
+difficult children of the garden, because you have to plan not only for
+next year but for the year after. Next year's bloom is secured--unless they
+winter-kill--in this year's young plants, growing since spring, or even
+since the fall before. These I transplant for next summer's beauty. But
+for the year after I like to take double precautions. Already I have tiny
+seedlings, started since August, but besides these I sow seed, too late to
+start before spring. For a severe winter may do havoc, and I shall then
+need the early start given by fall sowing.
+
+As I work on, I discover all sorts of treasures--young plants, seedlings
+from all the big-folk of my garden. Young larkspurs surround the bushy
+parent clumps, and the ground near the forget-me-nots is fairly carpeted
+with little new ones. I have found that, though the old forget-me-nots
+will live through, it pays to pull out the most ragged of them and trust
+to the youngsters to fill their places. These, and English daisies, I let
+grow together about as they will. They are pretty together, with their
+mingling of pink, white, and blue, they never run out, and all I need is
+to keep them from spreading too far, or from crowding each other too much.
+
+When my back aches from this kind of sorting and shifting, I straighten up
+and look about me again. Ah! The phlox! Time now to attend to that!
+
+My white phlox is really the most distinguished thing in my garden. I have
+pink and lavender, too, but any one can have pink and lavender by ordering
+them from a florist. They can have white, too, but not my white. For mine
+never saw a florist; it is an inheritance.
+
+Sixty or seventy years ago there was a beautiful little garden north of
+the old house tended and loved by a beautiful lady. The lady died, and the
+garden did not long outlive her. Its place was taken by a crab-apple
+orchard, which flourished, bore blossom and fruit, until in its turn it
+grew old, while the garden had faded to a dim tradition. But one day in
+August, a few years ago, I discovered under the shade of an old crab tree,
+two slender sprays of white phlox, trying to blossom. In memory of that
+old garden and its lady, I took them up and cherished them. And the
+miracle of life was again made manifest. For from those two little
+half-starved roots has come the most splendid part of my garden. All
+summer it makes a thick green wall on the garden's edge, beside the
+flagged path. In the other beds it rises in luxuriant masses, giving
+background and body with its wonderful deep green foliage, which is
+greener and thicker than any other phlox I know. And when its season to
+bloom arrives--a long month, from early August to mid-September--it is a
+glory of whiteness, the tallest sprays on a level with my eyes, the
+shortest shoulder high, except when rain weighs down the heavy heads and
+they lean across the paths barring my passage with their fragrant wetness.
+
+Here and there I have let the pink and lavender phlox come in, for they
+begin to bloom two weeks earlier, when the garden needs color. But always
+my white must dominate. And it does. Most wonderful of all is it on
+moonlight nights of late August, when it broods over the garden like a
+white cloud, and the night moths come crowding to its fragrant feast, with
+their intermittent burring of furry wings.
+
+Ah, well! the phlox has passed now, and its trim green leaves are brown
+and crackly. I can do what I like with it after this. So when my other
+transplanting grows tiresome, I fall upon my phlox. Every year some of it
+needs thinning, so quickly does it spread. I take the spading-fork, and,
+with what seems like utter ruthlessness, I pry out from the thickest
+centers enough good roots to give the rest breathing and growing space.
+Along the path edges I always have to cut out encroaching roots each year,
+or else soon there would be no path. But all that I take out is precious,
+either to give to friends for their gardens, or to enlarge the edges of my
+own. For this phlox needs almost no care, and will fight grass and weeds
+for itself.
+
+There are phlox seedlings, too, all over the garden, but I have no way of
+telling what color they are, though usually I can detect the white by its
+foliage. I take them up and set them out near the main phlox masses, and
+wait for the next season's blossoming before I give them their final
+place.
+
+This is the time of year, too, when I give some attention to the rocks in
+my garden. Of course, in order to have a garden at all, it was necessary
+to take out enough rock to build quite a respectable stone wall. But that
+was not the end. There never will be an end. A Connecticut garden grows
+rocks like weeds, and one must expect to keep on taking them out each
+fall. The rest of the year I try to ignore them, but after frost I like to
+make a fresh raid, and get rid of another wheelbarrow load or so. And I
+always notice that for one barrow load of stones that go out, it takes at
+least two barrow loads of earth to fill in. Thus an excellent circulation
+is maintained, and the garden does not stagnate. Moreover, I take great
+pleasure in showing my friends--especially friends from the more earthy
+sections of New York and farther west--the piles of rock and the parts of
+certain stone walls about the place that have been literally made out of
+the cullings of my garden. They never believe me.
+
+As I am thus occupied,--digging, planting, thinning, sowing,--I find it one
+of the happiest seasons of the year. It is partly the stimulus of the
+autumn air, partly the pleasure of getting at the ground. I think there
+are some of us, city folk though we be, who must have the giant AntA|us
+for ancestor. We still need to get in close touch with the earth now and
+then. Children have a true instinct with their love of barefoot play in
+the dirt, and there are grown folks who still love it--but we call it
+gardening. The sight and the feel and the smell of my brown garden beds
+gives me a pleasure that is very deep and probably very primitive.
+
+But there is another source of pleasure in my fall gardening--a pleasure
+not of the senses but of the imagination.
+
+For as I do my work my fancy is active. As I transplant my young
+hollyhocks, I see them, not little round-leaved bunches in my hand, but
+tall and stately, aflare with colors--yellows, whites, pinks. As I dig
+about my larkspur and stake out its seedlings, they spire above me in
+heavenly blues. As I arrange the clumps of coarse-leaved young foxgloves,
+I seem to see their rich tower-like clusters of old-pink bells bending
+always a little towards the southeast, where most sun comes from. As I
+thin my forget-me-not I see it--in my mind's eye--in a blue mist of spring
+bloom. Thus, a garden rises in my fancy, a garden where neither beetle,
+borer, nor cutworm doth corrupt, and where the mole doth not break in or
+steal, where gentle rain and blessed sun come as they are needed, where
+all the flowers bloom unceasingly in colors of heavenly light--a garden
+such as never yet existed nor ever shall, till the tales of fairyland come
+true. I shall never see that garden, yet every year it blooms for me
+afresh--after frost.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                    V
+
+
+                      The Joys of Garden Stewardship
+
+
+I sometimes think I am coming to classify my friends according to the way
+they act when I talk about my garden. On this basis, there are three sorts
+of people.
+
+First there are those who are obviously not interested. Such as these feel
+no answering thrill, even at the sight of a florist's spring catalogue. A
+weed inspires in them no desire to pull it. They may, however, be really
+nice people if they are still young; for, except by special grace, no one
+under thirty need be expected to care about gardens--it is a mature taste.
+But in the mean time I turn our talk in other channels.
+
+Then there are the people who, when I approach the subject, brighten up,
+look intelligent, even eager, but in a moment make it clear that what they
+are eager for is a chance to talk about their own gardens. Mine is merely
+the stepping-stone, the bridge, the handle. This is better than
+indifference, yet it is sometimes trying. One of my dearest friends thus
+tests my love now and then when she walks in my garden.
+
+"Aren't those peonies lovely?" I suggest.
+
+"Yes," dreamily; "you know I can't have that shade in my garden because--"
+and she trails off into a disquisition that I could, just at that moment,
+do without.
+
+"Look at the height of that larkspur!" I say.
+
+"Yes--but, you know, it wouldn't do for me to have larkspur when I go away
+so early. What I need is things for April and May."
+
+"Well, I am not trying to _sell_ you any," I am sometimes goaded into
+protesting. "I only wanted you to say they are pretty--pretty right here in
+_my_ garden."
+
+"Yes--yes--of course they are pretty--they're lovely--you have a lovely
+garden, you know." She pulls herself up to give this tribute, but soon her
+eyes get the faraway look in them again, and she is murmuring, "Oh, I must
+write Edward to see about that hedge. Tell me, my dear, if you had a brick
+wall, would you have vines on it or wall-fruit?"
+
+It is of no use. I cannot hold her long. I sometimes think she was nicer
+when she had no garden of her own. Perhaps she thinks I was nicer when I
+had none.
+
+But there is another kind of garden manners--a kind that subtly soothes,
+cheers, perhaps inebriates. It is the manner of the friend who may,
+indeed, have a garden, but who looks at mine with the eye of adoption,
+temporarily at least. She walks down its paths, singling out this or that
+for notice. She suggests, she even criticizes, tenderly, as one who tells
+you an "even _more_ becoming way" to arrange your little daughter's hair.
+She offers you roots and seeds and seedlings from her garden, and--last
+touch of flattery--she begs seeds and seedlings from yours.
+
+For garden purposes, give me the manners of this third class. And, indeed,
+not for garden purposes alone. They are useful as applied to many
+things--children, particularly, and houses.
+
+Undoubtedly the demand that I make upon my friends is a form of vanity,
+yet I cannot seem to feel ashamed of it. I admit at once that not the
+least part of my pleasure in my flowers is the attention they get from
+others. Moreover, it is not only from friends that I seek this, but from
+every passer-by along my country road. There are gardens and gardens.
+Some, set about with hedges tall and thick, offer the delights of
+exclusiveness and solitude. But exclusiveness and solitude are easily had
+on a Connecticut farm, and my garden will none of them; it flings forth
+its appeal to every wayfarer. And I like it. I like my garden to "get
+notice." As people drive by I hope they enjoy my phlox. I furtively glance
+to see if they have an eye for the foxglove. I wonder if the calendulas
+are so tall that they hide the asters. And if, as I bend over my weeding,
+an automobile whirling past lets fly an appreciative phrase--"lovely
+flowers--" "wonderful yellow of--" "garden there,"--my ears are quick to
+receive it and I forgive the eddies of gasolene and dust that are also
+left by the vanishing visitant.
+
+About few things can one be so brazen in one's enjoyment of recognition.
+One's house, one's clothes, one's work, one's children, all these demand a
+certain modesty of demeanor, however the inner spirit may puff. Not so
+one's garden. I fancy this is because, while I have a strong sense of
+ownership in it, I also have a strong sense of stewardship. As owner I
+must be modest, but as steward I may admire as openly as I will. Did I
+make my phlox? Did I fashion my asters? Am I the artificer of my fringed
+larkspur? Nay, truly, I am but their caretaker, and may glory in them as
+well as another, only with the added touch of joy that I, even I, have
+given them their opportunity. Like Paul I plant, like Apollos I water, but
+before the power that giveth the increase I stand back and wonder.
+
+But it is not alone the results of my stewardship that give me joy. Its
+very processes are good. Delight in the earth is a primitive instinct.
+Digging is naturally pleasant, hoeing is pleasant, raking is pleasant, and
+then there is the weeding. For I am not the only one who sows seeds in my
+garden. One of my friends remarked cheerfully that he had planted
+twenty-seven different vegetables in his garden, and the Lord had planted
+two hundred and twenty-seven other kinds of things.
+
+This is where the weeding comes in. Now a good deal has been said about
+the labor of weeding, but little about the gratifications of weeding. I
+don't mean weeding with a hoe. I mean yanking up, with movements suited to
+the occasion, each individual growing thing that doesn't belong. Surely I
+am not the only one to have felt the pleasure of this. They come up so
+nicely, and leave such soft earth behind! And intellect is needed, too,
+for each weed demands its own way of handling: the adherent plantain
+needing a slow, firm, drawing motion, but very satisfactory when it comes;
+the evasive clover requiring that all its sprawling runners shall be
+gathered up in one gentle, tactful pull; the tender shepherd's purse
+coming easily on a straight twitch; the tough ragweed that yields to
+almost any kind of jerk. Even witch-grass, the bane of the farmer, has its
+rewarding side, when one really does get out its handful of
+wicked-looking, crawly, white tubers.
+
+Weeding is most fun when the weeds are not too small. Yes, from the aspect
+of a sport there is something to be said for letting weeds grow. Pulling
+out little tender ones is poor work compared with the satisfaction of
+hauling up a spreading treelet of ragweed or a far-flaunting wild
+buckwheat. You seem to get so much for your effort, and it stirs up the
+ground so, and no other weeds have grown under the shade of the big one,
+so its departure leaves a good bit of empty brown earth.
+
+Surely, weeding is good fun. If faults could be yanked out of children in
+the same entertaining way, the orphan asylums would soon be emptied
+through the craze for adoption as a major sport.
+
+One of the pleasantest mornings of my life was spent weeding, in the rain,
+a long-neglected corner of my garden, while a young friend stood around
+the edges and explained the current political situation to me, and carted
+away armfuls of green stuff as I handed them out to him. The rain
+drizzled, and the air was fragrant with the smell of wet earth and bruised
+stems. Ideally, of course, weeds should never reach this state of sportive
+rankness. But most of my friends admit, under pressure, that there are
+corners where such things do happen.
+
+Naturally, all this is assuming that one is one's own gardener. There may
+be pleasure in having a garden kept up by a real gardener, but that always
+seems to me a little like having a doll and letting somebody else dress
+and undress it. My garden must never grow so big that I cannot take care
+of it--and neglect it--myself.
+
+In saying this, however, I don't count rocks. When it comes to rocks, I
+call in Jonathan. And it often comes to rocks.
+
+For mine is a Connecticut garden. Now in the beginning Connecticut was
+composed entirely of rocks. Then the little earth gnomes, fearing that no
+one would ever come there to give them sport, sprinkled a little earth
+amongst the rocks, partly covered some, wholly covered others, and then
+hid to see what the gardeners would do about it. And ever since the
+gardeners have been patiently, or impatiently, tucking in their seeds and
+plants in the thimblefuls of earth left by the gnomes. They have been
+picking out the rocks, or blowing them up, or burying them, or working
+around them; and every winter the little gnomes gather and push up a new
+lot from the dark storehouses of the underworld. In the spring the
+gardeners begin again, and the little gnomes hold their sides with still
+laughter to watch the work go on.
+
+"Rocks?" my friends say. "Do you mind the rocks? But they are a special
+beauty! Why, I have a rock in my garden that I have treated--"
+
+"Very well," I interrupt rudely. "_A rock_ is all very well. If I had _a
+rock_ in my garden I could treat it, too. But how about a garden that is
+all rocks?"
+
+"Oh--why--choose another spot."
+
+Whereupon I reply, "You don't know Connecticut."
+
+Ever since I began having a garden I have had my troubles with the rocks,
+but the worst time came when, in a mood of enthusiastic and absolutely
+unintelligent optimism, I decided to have a bit of smooth grass in the
+middle of my garden. I wanted it very much. The place was too restless;
+you couldn't sit down anywhere. I felt that I had to have a clear green
+spot where I could take a chair and a book. I selected the spot, marked it
+off with string, and began to loosen up the earth for a late summer
+planting of grass seed. Calendulas and poppies and cornflowers had bloomed
+there before, self-sown and able to look out for themselves, so I had
+never investigated the depths of the bed to see what the little gnomes had
+prepared for me. Now I found out. The spading-fork gave a familiar dull
+clink as it struck rock. I felt about for the edge; it was a big one. I
+got the crowbar and dropped it, in testing prods; it was a _very_ big one,
+and only four inches below the surface. Grass would never grow there in a
+dry season. I moved to another part. Another rock, big too! I prodded all
+over the allotted space, and found six big fellows lurking just below the
+top of the soil. Evidently it was a case for calling in Jonathan.
+
+He came, grumbling a little, as a man should, but very efficient, armed
+with two crowbars and equipped with a natural genius for manipulating
+rocks. He made a few well-placed remarks about queer people who choose to
+have grass where flowers would grow, and flowers where grass would grow,
+also about Connecticut being intended for a quarry and not for a garden
+anyhow. But all this was only the necessary accompaniment of the
+crowbar-play. Soon, under the insistent and canny urgency of the bars, a
+big rock began to heave its shoulder into sight above the soil. I hovered
+about, chucking in stones and earth underneath, placing little rocks under
+the bar for fulcrums, pulling them out again when they were no longer
+needed, standing guard over the flowers in the rest of the garden, with
+repeated warnings. "Please, Jonathan, don't step back any farther; you'll
+trample the forget-me-nots!" "_Could_ you manage to roll this fellow out
+along that path and not across the mangled bodies of the marigolds?"
+Jonathan grumbled a little about being expected to pick a half-ton pebble
+out of the garden with his fingers, or lead it out with a string.
+
+"Oh, well, of course, if you _can't_ do it I'll have to let the marigolds
+go this year. But you do such wonderful things with a crowbar, I thought
+you could probably just guide it a little." And Jonathan responds nobly to
+the flattery of this remark, and does indeed guide the huge thing, eases
+it along the narrow path, grazes the marigolds but leaves them unhurt,
+until at last, with a careful arrangement of stone fulcrums and a skillful
+twist of the bars, the great rock makes its last response and lunges
+heavily past the last flower bed on to the grass beyond.
+
+When the work was done, the edge of the garden looked like Stonehenge, and
+the spot where my grass was to be was nothing but a yawning pit, crying to
+be filled. We surveyed it with interest. "If we had a water-supply, I
+wouldn't make a grass-plot," I said; "I'd make a swimming-pool. It's deep
+enough."
+
+"And sit in the middle with your book?" asked Jonathan.
+
+But there was no water-supply, so we filled it in with earth. Thirty
+wheelbarrow loads went in where those rocks came out. And the little
+gnomes perched on Stonehenge and jeered the while. I photographed it, and
+the rocks "took" well, but as regards the gnomes, the film was
+underexposed.
+
+Thus the grass seed was planted. And we reminded each other of the version
+of "America" once given, with unconscious inspiration, by a little friend
+of ours:--
+
+
+    "Land where our father died,
+    Land where the pilgrims pried."
+
+
+It seemed to us to suit the adventure.
+
+As I have said, I love to have my friends love my garden. But there is one
+thing about it that I find does not always appeal to them pleasantly, and
+that is its color-schemes. Yet this is not my doing. For in nothing do I
+feel more keenly the fact of my mere stewardship than in this matter of
+color-scheme.
+
+I set out with a very rigid one. I was quite decided in my own mind that
+what I wanted was white and salmon-pink and lavender. Asters, phlox, sweet
+peas, hollyhocks, all were to bend themselves to my rules. At first
+affairs went very well. White was easy. White phlox I had, and have--an
+inheritance--which from a few roots is spreading and spreading in waves of
+whiteness that grow more luxuriant every year. But I bought roots of
+salmon-pink and lavender, and then my troubles commenced. About the third
+season strange things began to happen. The pink phlox had the strength of
+ten. It spread amazingly; but it forgot all about my rules. It
+degenerated, some of it--reverted toward that magenta shade that nature
+seems so naturally to adore in the vegetable world. To my horror I found
+my garden blossoming into magenta pink, blue pink, crimson, cardinal--all
+the colors I had determined not under any circumstances to admit. On the
+other hand, the lavender phlox, which I particularly wanted, was most
+lovely, but frail. It refused to spread. It effaced itself before the
+rampant pink and its magenta-tainted brood. I vowed I would pull out the
+magentas, but each year my courage failed. They bloomed so bravely; I
+would wait till they were through. But by that time I was not quite sure
+which was which; I might pull out the wrong ones. And so I hesitated.
+
+Moreover, I discovered, lingering among the flowers at dusk, that there
+were certain colors, most unpleasant by daylight, which at that time took
+on a new shade, and, for perhaps half an hour before night fell, were
+richly lovely. This is true of some of the magentas, which at dusk turn
+suddenly to royal purples and deep lavender-blues that are wonderfully
+satisfying.
+
+For that half-hour of beauty I spare them. While the sun shines I try to
+look the other way, and at twilight I linger near them and enjoy their
+strange, dim glories, born literally of the magic hour. But I have trouble
+explaining them, by daylight, to some of my visitors who like
+color-schemes.
+
+Insubordination is contagious. And I found after a while that my asters
+were not running true; queer things were happening among the sweet peas,
+and in the ranks of the hollyhocks all was not as it should be. And the
+last charge was made upon me by the children's gardens. Children know not
+color-schemes. What they demand is flowers, flowers--flowers to pick and
+pick, flowers to do things with. Snapdragon, for instance, is a jolly
+playmate, and little fingers love to pinch its cheeks and see its jaws
+yawn wide. But snapdragon tends dangerously toward the magenta. Then there
+was the calendula--a delight to the young, because it blooms incessantly
+long past the early frosts, and has brittle stems that yield themselves to
+the clumsiest plucking by small hands. But calendula ranges from a faded
+yellow, through really pretty primrose shades, to a deep red-orange
+touched with maroon.
+
+And, finally, there was the portulaca. Children love it, perhaps, best of
+all. It offers them fresh blossoms and new colors each morning, and it is
+even more easy to pick than the calendula. Who would deny them portulaca?
+Yet if this be admitted, one may as well give up the battle. For, as we
+all know, there is absolutely no color, except green, that portulaca does
+not perpetrate in its blossoms. It knows no shame.
+
+In short, I am giving up. I am beginning to say with conviction that
+color-schemes are the mark of a narrow and rigid taste--that they are born
+of convention and are meant not for living things but for wall-papers and
+portiA"res and clothes. Moreover, I am really growing callous--or is it,
+rather, broad? Colors in my garden that would once have made my teeth ache
+now leave them feeling perfectly comfortable. I find myself looking with
+unmoved flesh--no creeps nor withdrawals--upon a bed of mixed magentas,
+scarlets, rose-pinks, and yellow-pinks. I even look with pleasure. I begin
+to think there may be a point beyond which discord achieves a higher
+harmony. At least, this sounds well. But, again, I find it hard to explain
+to some of my friends.
+
+Indoors, it is another story. When I bring in the spoils of the garden I
+am again mistress and bend all to my will. Here I'll have no tricks of
+color played on me. Sunshine and sky, perhaps, work some spell, for as
+soon as I get within four walls my prejudices return; scarlets and
+crimsons and pinks have to live in different rooms. I must have my
+color-schemes again, and perhaps I am as narrow as the worst. Except,
+indeed, for the children's bowls; here the pink and the magenta, the lamb
+and the lion, may lie down together. But it takes a little child to lead
+them.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Out in my garden I feel myself less and less owner, more and more merely
+steward. I decree certain paths, and the phlox says, "Paths? Did you say
+paths?" and obliterates them in a season's growth, so that children walk
+by faith and not by sight. I decree iris in one corner, and the primroses
+say, "Iris? Not at all. This is our bed. Iris indeed!" And I submit, and
+move the iris elsewhere.
+
+And yet this slipping of responsibility is pleasant, too. So long as my
+garden will let me dig in it and weed it and pick it, so long as it
+entertains my friends for me, so long as it tosses up an occasional rock
+so that Jonathan does not lose all interest in it, so long as it plays
+prettily with the children and flings gay greetings to every passer-by, I
+can find no fault with it.
+
+The joys of stewardship are great and I am well content.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                    VI
+
+
+                            Trout and Arbutus
+
+
+Every year, toward the end of March, I find Jonathan poking about in my
+sewing-box. And, unless I am very absent-minded, I know what he is after.
+
+"No use looking there," I remark; "I keep my silks put away."
+
+"I want red, and as strong as there is."
+
+"I know what you want. Here." and I hand him a spool of red buttonhole
+twist.
+
+"Ah! Just right!" And for the rest of the evening his fingers are busy.
+
+Over what? Mending our trout-rods, of course. It is pretty work, calling
+for strength and precision of grasp, and as he winds and winds, adjusting
+all the little brass leading-rings, or supplying new ones, and staying
+points in the bamboo where he suspects weakness, we talk over last year's
+trout-pools, and wonder what they will be like this year.
+
+But beyond wonder we do not get, often for weeks after the trout season
+is, legislatively, "open." Jonathan is "busy." I am "busy." We know that,
+if April passes, there is still May and June, and so, if at the end of
+April, or early May, we do at last pick up our rods,--all new-bedight with
+red silk windings, and shiny with fresh varnish,--it is not alone the call
+of the trout that decides us, but another call which is to me at least
+more imperious, because, if we neglect it now, there is no May and June in
+which to heed it. It is the call of the arbutus.
+
+Any one with New England traditions knows what this call is. Its appeal is
+to something far deeper than the love of a pretty flower. For it is the
+flower that, to our fathers and our grandfathers, and to their fathers and
+grandfathers, meant spring; and not spring in its prettiness and ease,
+appealing to the idler in us, nor spring in its melancholy, appealing
+to--shall I say the poet in us? But spring in its blessedness of
+opportunity, its joyously triumphant life, appealing to the worker in us.
+Here, of course, we touch hands with all the races of the world for whom
+winter has been the supreme menace, spring the supreme and saving miracle.
+But each race has its own symbols, and to the New Englander the symbol is
+the arbutus.
+
+This may seem a bit of sentimentality. And, indeed, we need not expect to
+find it expressed by any New England farmer. New England does not go out
+in gay companies to bring back the first blossoms. But New England does
+nothing in gay companies. It has been taught to distrust ceremonies and
+expression of any sort. It rejoices with reticence, it appreciates with a
+reservation. And yet I have seen a sprig of arbutus in rough and clumsy
+buttonholes on weather-faded lapels which, the rest of the twelve-month
+through, know no other flower. And when, in unfamiliar country, I have
+interrupted the ploughing to ask for guidance, I usually get it:--"Arbutus?
+Yaas. The's a lot of it up along that hillside and in the woods over
+beyond--'t was out last week, some of it, I happened to notice"--this in the
+apologetic tone of one who admits a weakness--"guess you'll find all you
+want." I venture to say that of no other wild flower, except those which
+work specific harm or good, could I get such information.
+
+To many of us, city-bred, the tradition comes through inheritance. It
+means, perhaps, the shy, poetic side of our father's boyhood, only half
+acknowledged, after the New England fashion, but none the less real and
+none the less our possession. It means rare days, when the city--whose
+chiefest signs of spring were the flare of dandelions in yards and parks
+and the chatter of English sparrows on ivy-clad church walls--was left
+behind, and we were "in the country." It was a country excitingly
+different from the country of the summer vacation, a country not deeply
+green, but warmly brown, and sweet with the smell of moist, living earth.
+Green enough, indeed, in the spring-fed meadows and folds of the hills,
+where the early grass flashes into vividest emerald, but in the woods the
+soft mist-colored mazes of multitudinous twigs still show through their
+veilings and dustings of color--palest green of birches, gray-green of
+poplar, yellow-green of willows, and redder tones of the maples; and along
+the fence-lines and roadsides--blessed, untidy fence-lines and roadsides of
+New England--a fine penciling of red stems--the cut-back maple bushes and
+tangled vines alive to their tips and just bursting into leaf. And
+everywhere in the woods, on fence-lines and roadsides, the white blossoms
+of the "shad-blow," daintiest of spring trees,--too slight for a tree,
+indeed, though too tall for a bush and looking less like a tree in blossom
+than like floating blossoms caught for a moment among the twigs. A moment
+only, for the first gust loosens them again and carpets the woods with
+their petals, but while they last their whiteness shimmers everywhere.
+
+Such rare days were all blown through with the wonderful wind of spring.
+Spring wind is really different from any other. It is not a finished
+thing, like the mellow winds of summer and the cold blasts of winter. It
+is an imperfect blend of shivering reminiscence and eager promise. One
+moment it breathes sun and stirring earth, the next it reminds us of old
+snow in the hollows, and bleak northern slopes.
+
+When, on these days, the wind blew to us, almost before we saw it, the
+first greeting of the arbutus, it always seemed that the day had found its
+complete and satisfying expression. Every one comes to realize, at some
+time in his life, the power of suggestion possessed by odors. Does not
+half the power of the Church lie in its incense? An odor, just because it
+is at once concrete and formless, can carry an appeal overwhelmingly
+strong and searching, superseding all other expression. This is the appeal
+made to me by the arbutus. It can never be quite precipitated into words,
+but it holds in solution all the things it has come to mean--dear human
+tradition and beloved companionship, the poetry of the land and the
+miracle of new birth.
+
+In late March or early April I am likely to see the first blossom on some
+friend's table--I try not to see it first in a florist's display! To my
+startled question she gives reassuring answer, "Oh, no, not from around
+here. This came from Virginia."
+
+Days pass, and, perhaps, the mail brings some to me, this time from
+Pennsylvania or New Jersey, and soon I can no longer ignore the trays of
+tight, leafless bunches for sale on street corners and behind plate-glass
+windows. "From York State," they tell me. I grow restive.
+
+"Jonathan," I say, holding up a spray for him to smell, "we've got to go.
+You can't resist that. We'll take a day and go for it--and trout, too."
+
+It is as well that arbutus comes in the trout season, for to take a day
+off just to pick a flower might seem a little absurd. But, coupled with
+trout--all is well. Trout is food. One must eat. The search for food needs
+no defense, and yet, the curious fact is, that if you go for trout and
+don't get any, it doesn't make so much difference as you might suppose,
+but if you go for arbutus and don't get any, it makes all the difference
+in the world. And so Jonathan knows that in choosing his brook for that
+particular day, he must have regard primarily to the arbutus it will give
+us and only secondarily to the trout.
+
+Every one knows the kind of brook that is, for every one knows the kind of
+country arbutus loves--hilly country, with slopes toward the north; bits of
+woodland, preferably with pine in it, to give shade, but not too deep
+shade; a scrub undergrowth of laurel and huckleberry and bay; and always,
+somewhere within sight or hearing, water. It is curious how arbutus, which
+never grows in wet places, yet seems to like the neighborhood of water. It
+loves the slopes above a brook or the shaggy hillsides overlooking a
+little pond or river.
+
+Fortunately, there is such a brook, in just such country, on our list.
+There are not so many trout as in other brooks, but enough to justify our
+rods; and not so much arbutus as I could find elsewhere, but enough--oh,
+enough!
+
+To this brook we go. We tie Kit at the bridge, Jonathan slings on a
+fish-basket, to do for both, and I take a box or two for the flowers. But
+from this moment on our interests are somewhat at variance. The fact is,
+Jonathan cares a little more about the trout than about the arbutus, while
+I care a little more about the arbutus than about the trout. His eye is
+keenly on the brook, mine is, yearningly, on the ragged hillsides that
+roll up above it.
+
+Jonathan feels this. "There isn't any for two fields yet--might as well
+stick to the brook."
+
+"I know. I thought perhaps I'd go on down and let you fish this part. Then
+I'd meet you beyond the second fence--"
+
+"Oh, no, that won't do at all. Why, there's a rock just below here--down by
+that wild cherry--where I took out a beauty last year, and left another. I
+want you to go down and get him."
+
+"You get him. I don't mind."
+
+"Oh, but I mind. Here, I've got it all planned: there's a bit of
+brush-fishing just below--"
+
+"No brush-fishing for me, please!"
+
+"That's what I'm saying, if you'll only give me time. I'll take that--there
+are always two or three in there--and when you've finished here you can go
+around me and fish the bend, under the hemlocks, and then the first
+arbutus is just beside that, and I'll join you there."
+
+"Well"--I assent grudgingly--"only, really, I'd be just as happy if you'd
+fish the whole thing and let me go right on down--"
+
+"No, you wouldn't. Now, remember to sneak before you get to that rock.
+Drop in six feet above it and let the current do the rest. They're awfully
+shy. I expect you to get at least one there, and two down at the bend." He
+trudges off to his brush-fishing and leaves me bound in honor to extract a
+trout from under that rock. I deposit my boxes in the meadow above it, and
+"sneak" down. The sneak of a trout fisherman is like no other form of
+locomotion, and I am convinced that the human frame was not evolved with
+it in mind. But I resort to it in deference to Jonathan's prejudices--in
+deference, also, to the fact that when I do not the trout seldom bite. And
+Jonathan is so trustfully counting on my getting that trout!
+
+I did get him. I dropped in my line, as per directions, and let the
+current do the rest; had the thrill of feeling the line suddenly caught
+and drawn under the rock, held, then wiggled slightly; I struck, felt the
+weight, drew back steadily, and in a few moments there was a flopping in
+the grass behind me.
+
+So that was off my mind.
+
+I strung him on a twig of wild cherry, gathered up my boxes, and wandered
+along the faint path, back of the patch of brush where, I knew, Jonathan
+was cheerfully threading his line through tangles of twig, briar, and
+vine, compared with which the needle's eye is as a yawning barn door.
+Jonathan's attitude toward brush-fishing is something which I respect
+without understanding. Down one long field I went, where the brook ran in
+shallow gayety, and there, ahead, was the bend, a sudden curve of water,
+deepening under the roots of an overhanging hemlock. I climbed the stone
+wall beside, glanced at the water--very trouty water indeed--glanced at the
+hill-pasture above--very arbutusy indeed--laid down my rod and my trout and
+my box, and ran up the low bank to a clump of bay and berry-bushes that I
+thought I remembered.... Yes! There it was! I had remembered! Ah! The dear
+things!
+
+When you first find arbutus, there is only one thing to do:--lie right down
+beside it. Its fragrance as it grows is different from what it is after it
+is picked, because with the sweetness of the blossoms is mingled the good
+smell of the earth and of the woody twigs and of the dried grass and
+leaves. And there are other rewards one gets by lying down. It is all very
+well to talk proudly about man's walking with his head erect and his face
+to the heavens, but if we keep that posture all the time we miss a good
+deal. The attitude of the toad and the lizard is not to be scorned, though
+when the needs of locomotion convert it into the fisherman's "sneak," it
+is, as I have suggested, to be sparingly indulged in. But if we could only
+nibble now and then from "the other side" of Alice's mushroom, what a new
+outlook we should get on the world that now lies about our feet! What new
+aspects of its beauty would be revealed to us: the forest grandeurs of the
+grass, the architecture of its slim shafts with their pillared aisles and
+pointed arches of interlocking and upspringing curves, their ceiling
+traceries of spraying tops against a far-away background of sky!
+
+To know arbutus, you must stoop to its level, and look across the fine,
+frosty fur of its stiff little leaves, and feel the nestle of its stems to
+the ground, the little up-fling of their tips toward the sun, and the neat
+radiance of its flower clusters, with their blessed fragrance and their
+pure, babyish color.
+
+But after that? You want to pick it. Yes, you really want to pick it!
+
+In this it is different from other flowers. Most of them I am well content
+to leave where they grow. In fact, the love of picking things--flowers or
+anything else--is a youthful taste: we lose it as we grow older; we become
+more and more willing to appreciate without acquiring, or rather,
+appreciation becomes to us a finer and more spiritual form of acquiring.
+Is it possible that, after all, the old idea of heaven as a state of
+enraptured contemplation is in harmony with the trend of our development?
+
+But if there is arbutus in heaven, I shall need to develop a good deal
+further not to want to pick it. It suggests picking; it almost invites it.
+There is something about the way it nestles and hides, that makes you want
+to see it better. Here is a spray of pure white, living under a green tent
+of overlapping leaves; one must raise it, and nip off just one leaf, so
+that the blossoms can see out. There is another, a pink cluster, showing
+faintly through the dry, matted grass. You feel for the stem, pull it
+gently, and, lo, it is many stems, which have crept their way under the
+tangle, and every one is tipped with a cluster of stars or round little
+buds each on its long stem, fairly begging to be picked. It gets picked.
+
+Yet sometimes its very beauty has stayed my hand. I shall never forget one
+clump I found, growing out of a bank of deep green moss, partly shaded by
+a great hemlock. The soft pink blossoms--luxuriant leafy sprays of
+them--were lying out on the moss in a pagan carelessness of beauty, as
+though some god had willed it there for his pleasure. I sat beside it a
+long time, and in the end I left it without picking it.
+
+On this particular day, Jonathan being still lost in the brush patch, I
+had risen from my visit with the first-discovered blossoms and wandered
+on, from clump to clump, wherever the glimpse of a leaf attracted me,
+picking the choicest here and there and dropping them into my box. After I
+do not know how long, I was roused by Jonathan's whistle. I was some
+distance up the hillside by this time, and he was beside the brook, at the
+bend.
+
+"What luck?" he called.
+
+"Good luck! I've found lots. Come up!"
+
+He took a few steps up toward me, so that conversation could drop from
+shouting to speaking levels. "How many did you get?" he asked.
+
+"How many?... Oh ... why ... Oh, I got one up there where you showed me--under
+the rock, you know."
+
+"Good one?"
+
+"Eight inches. He's down there by the bars."
+
+"Good! And what about the bend?"
+
+"The bend? Oh, I didn't fish there--look at these! Aren't they beauties?" I
+came down the hill to hold my open box up to his face. But my casual word
+almost effaced the scent of the flowers.
+
+"Ah--yes--delicious--didn't fish there? Why not? Did they see you?"
+
+"Who? The trout? I don't know. But I saw this. And I just had to pick it."
+
+"Well! You're a great fisherman! And with that water right there beside
+you! Lord!"
+
+"With the arbutus right here beside me! Lord!"
+
+"But the arbutus would wait."
+
+"But the trout would wait. They're waiting for you now, don't you hear
+them? Go and fish there!"
+
+"No. That's your pool." Jonathan has a way of bestowing a trout-pool on me
+as if it were a bouquet. To refuse its opportunities is almost like
+throwing his flowers back in his face.
+
+"Well--of course it's a beautiful pool--"
+
+"Best on the brook," murmured Jonathan.
+
+"But, truly, I'd enjoy it just as much to have you fish it."
+
+"Nobody can fish it now for a while. I thought you'd be there, of course,
+and I came stamping along down, close by the bank. They wouldn't bite
+now--not for half an hour, anyway."
+
+"Well, then, that's just right. We'll go on up the hillside for half an
+hour, and then come back and fish it. Set your rod up against the bayberry
+here, and come along--look there! you're almost stepping on some!"
+
+Jonathan, gradually adjusting himself to the turn of things, stood his rod
+up against the bush with the meticulous care of the true sportsman. "Where
+did you leave yours?" he asked, with a suspiciousness born of a deep
+knowledge of my character.
+
+"Oh, down by the bars."
+
+"Standing up or lying down?"
+
+"Lying down, I think. It's all right."
+
+"It's not all right if it's lying down. Anything might trample on it."
+
+"For instance, what?--birds or crickets?"
+
+"For instance, people or cows." He strode down the hill, and I saw him
+stoop. As he returned I could read disapproval in his gait. "Will you
+never learn how to treat a rod! It was lying just beyond the bars. I must
+have landed within two feet of it when I jumped over."
+
+"I'm sorry. I meant to go back. I know perfectly how to treat a rod. My
+trouble comes in knowing when to apply my knowledge.... Well, let's go up
+there. Near those big hemlocks there's some, I remember." And we wandered
+on, separating a little to scan the ground more widely.
+
+Once having pried his mind away from the trout, Jonathan was as keen for
+arbutus as I could wish, and soon I heard an exclamation, and saw him
+kneel. "Oh, come over!" he called; "you really ought to see this growing!"
+
+"But there's some I want, right here, that's lovely--"
+
+"Never mind. Come and see this--oh, come!"
+
+Of course I come, and of course I am glad I came, and of course soon I am
+obliged to call Jonathan to see some I have found--"Jonathan, it is truly
+the loveliest _yet!_ It's the way it grows--with the moss and all--please
+come!" And of course he comes.
+
+We had been on the hillside a long half-hour, much nearer an hour, when
+Jonathan began to grow restive. "Don't you think you have enough?" he
+suggested several times. Finally, he spoke plainly of the trout.
+
+"Oh, yes, of course," I said, "you go down and I'll follow just as soon as
+I've gone along that upper path."
+
+Not at all. That was not what was wanted. So I turned and we went down the
+hill, back to the bend, whose seductions I had been so puzzlingly able to
+resist. I am sure Jonathan has never yet quite understood how I could
+leave that bit of water at my left hand and turn away to the right.
+
+"Now--sneak!"
+
+We sneaked, and I sank down just back of the edge of the bank. Jonathan
+crouched some feet behind, coaching me:--"Now--draw out a little more
+line--not too much--there--and have some slack in your hand. Now, up-stream
+fifteen feet--allow for the wind--wait till that gust passes--now! Good!
+First-rate! Now let her drift--there--what did I tell you? Give him line!
+_Give_ him line! Now, feel of him--careful! You'll know when to strike ...
+there!... Oh! too bad!"
+
+For as I struck, my line held fast.
+
+"Snagged, by gummy! Can't you pull clear?"
+
+"Not without stirring up the whole pool. You'll have to do the fishing,
+after all."
+
+"Oh! _too_ bad! That's hard luck!"
+
+"Not a bit. I like to watch you do it."
+
+And so indeed I did. Once having realized that I was temporarily laid by,
+Jonathan put his whole mind on the pool, while I, being honorably released
+from all responsibility, except that of keeping my line taut, could put my
+whole mind on his performance. There is a little the same sort of pleasure
+in watching the skillful handling of a rod that there is in watching the
+bow-action of a violinist. Both things demand the utmost nicety of
+adjustment: body, arm, wrist, fingers uniting in an interplay of
+efficiency exactly adapted to the intricately shifting needs of each
+moment.
+
+Thus I watched, through the typical stages of the sport: the delicate flip
+of the bait into the current at just the right spot; its swift descent,
+imperceptibly guided by the rod's quivering tip; its slower drift toward
+deep water; its sudden vanishing, and the whir of the reel as the line
+goes out; then the pause, the critical moments of "feeling for him"; at
+last the strike ... and then, a flopping in the grass behind me, and
+Jonathan crawling back to kill and unhook him.
+
+"Don't get up. There's probably another one," he said; and soon, by the
+same reptilian methods, was back for another try. There was another one,
+and yet another, and then a little fellow, barely hooked. "That's all,"
+said Jonathan, as he rose to put him back into the pool, and we watched
+the pretty spotted creature fling himself upstream with a wild flourish of
+his gleaming body.
+
+"Now I'll get you clear," said Jonathan, wading out into the water, and,
+with sleeves rolled high, feeling deep, deep down under the opposite bank.
+"He had you all right--it's wound round a root and then jabbed deep into it
+... hard luck! I wanted you to get those fellows!" And to this day I am sure
+he remembers those trout with a tinge of regret.
+
+I had intended leaving him to fish the rest of the brook, while I went
+back to that upper path to look up two or three special arbutus clumps
+that I knew, but seeing his depression over the snag incident, I could not
+suggest this. Instead I followed the stream with him, accepting his urgent
+offer of all the best pools, while he, taking what was left, drew out
+perfectly good trout from the most unhopeful-looking bits of water. And at
+the end, there was time to return along the upper path and visit my old
+friends, so both of us were satisfied.
+
+On such days, however, there is always one person who is not satisfied,
+and that is, Kit the horse. Kit has borne with our vagaries for many
+years, but she has never come to understand them. She never fails to greet
+our return, as our voices come within the range of her pricked-up ears, by
+a prolonged and reproachful whinny, which says as plainly as is necessary,
+"Back? Well--I should _think_ it was time! _I should think it was TIME!_"
+Now and then we have thought it would be pleasant to have a little
+motor-car that could be tucked away at any roadside, without reference to
+a good hitching-place, but if we had it, I am sure we should miss that
+ungracious welcoming whinny. We should miss, too, the exasperated violence
+of Kit's pace on the first bit of the home road--a violence expressing in
+the most ostentatious manner her opinion of folks who keep a respectable
+horse hitched by the roadside, far from the delights of the dim, sweet
+stable and the dusty, sneezy, munchy hay.
+
+But leaving out this little matter of Kit's preference, and also the other
+little matter of the trout's preference, I feel sure that an
+arbutus-trouting is peculiarly satisfying. It meets every human need--the
+need of food and beauty, the need of feeling strong and skillful, the need
+of becoming deeply aware of nature as living and kind. Moreover, it is
+very satisfying afterwards. As we sat that evening, over a late supper,
+with a shallow dish of arbutus beside us, I remarked, "The advantage of
+getting arbutus is, that you bring the whole day home with you and have it
+at your elbow."
+
+"The advantage of getting trout," remarked Jonathan dreamily, as if to
+himself, "is, that you bring your whole day home with you, and have it for
+breakfast."
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   VII
+
+
+                         Without the Time of Day
+
+
+"Jonathan, did you ever live without a clock,--whole days, I mean,--days and
+days--"
+
+"When I was a boy--most of the time, I suppose. But the family didn't like
+it."
+
+"Of course. But did you like it?"
+
+"Yes, I liked it all. I seem to remember getting pretty hungry sometimes,
+but it's all rather good as I look back on it."
+
+"Let's do it!"
+
+"Now?"
+
+"No. Society is an enlarged family, and wouldn't like it. But this summer,
+when we camp."
+
+"How do you know we're going to camp?"
+
+"The things we know best we don't always know how we know."
+
+"Well, then,--_if_ we camp--"
+
+"_When_ we camp--let's live without a watch."
+
+"You'd need one to get there."
+
+"Take one, and let it run down."
+
+As it turned out, my "when" was truer than Jonathan's "if." We did camp.
+We did, however, use watches to get there: when we expressed our baggage,
+when we sent our canoe, when we took the trolley car and the train; and
+the watch was still going as our laden craft nosed gently against the bank
+of the river-island that was to be our home for two weeks. It was late
+afternoon, and the shadows of the steep woods on the western bank had
+already turned the rocks in midstream from silver to gray, and dimmed the
+brightness of the swift water, almost to the eastern shore.
+
+"Will there be time to get settled before dark?" I asked, as we stepped
+out into the shallow water and drew up the canoe to unload.
+
+"Shall I look at my watch to see?" asked Jonathan, with a note of amiable
+derision in his voice.
+
+"Well, I _should_ rather like to know what time it is. We won't begin till
+to-morrow."
+
+"You mean, we won't begin to stop watching. All right. It's just seventeen
+and a half minutes after five. I'll give you the seconds if you like."
+
+"Minutes will do nicely, thank you."
+
+"Lots of time. You collect firewood while I get the tent ready. Then it'll
+need us both to set it up."
+
+We worked busily, happily. Ah! The joyous elation of the first night in
+camp! Is there anything like it? With days and days ahead, and not even
+one counted off the shining number! All the good things of childhood and
+maturity seem pressed into one mood of flawless, abounding happiness.
+
+By dark the tent was up, the baggage stowed, the canoe secured, the fire
+glowing in a bed of embers, and we sat beside it, looking out past the
+glooms of the hemlocks across the moonlit river,--sat and ate city-cooked
+chicken and sandwiches and drank thermos-bottled tea.
+
+"To-morrow we'll cook," I said. "To-night it's rather nice not to have to.
+Look at the moonlight on that rock! How black it makes the eddy below!"
+
+"Good bass under there," said Jonathan. "We'll get some to-morrow."
+
+"Maybe."
+
+"Well, of course, it's always maybe, with bass. Well--I'm done--and it's
+quarter to ten--late! Oh! Excuse me! Maybe you'd rather I hadn't told you.
+By the way, do I wind my watch to-night or not?"
+
+"Not."
+
+"Not it is, then. Sure you wouldn't rather have it wound, though? We can
+leave it hanging in the tent. It won't break loose and bite you."
+
+"Yes, it would. There would be a something--a taint--"
+
+"Oh, _all_ right!"
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+We slept with the murmur of the river running through our dreams,--a murmur
+of many voices: deep voices, high voices, grumbling voices as the stones
+go grinding and rolling along the ever-changing bottom,--and only half
+roused when the dawn chorus of the birds filled the air. That dawn chorus
+was something we should have been loath to miss. Through the first gray of
+the morning there comes a stir in the woods, an expectant tremor; a bird
+peeps softly and is still; then another, and another, "softly conferring
+together." As the light grows warmer, comes a clearer note from some
+leader, then a full, complete song; another, and the woods are awake,
+flinging out their wonderful song-greeting to the morning. There is in it
+a prodigality of swift-changing beauty like ocean surf: a continuous and
+intricate interweaving of rhythms, pulses and ebbings of clear tone,
+beautiful phrases rising antiphonal, showerings of bright notes, moments
+of subsidence, almost of pause. As the light grows and sharpens, the music
+reaches a crescendo of exuberance, and at last dies down as real day
+comes, bringing with it the day's work. On our island the leader of the
+chorus was almost always a song sparrow, though once or twice a wood
+thrush came over from the shore woods and filled the hemlock shadows with
+the limpid splendors of his song.
+
+Hearing the chorus through our dreams, we slept again, and when I really
+waked the sun was high, flecking the eastern V of our tent with dazzling
+patches. I heard Jonathan moving about outside, and the crackling of a
+new-made fire. I went to the front of the tent and looked out. Yes, there
+they were, the fire and Jonathan, in a quiet space of shade where the
+early coolness still hung. Beyond them, half shut out from view by the
+low-spreading hemlock boughs, was the open river--such gayety of swift
+water! Such dazzle of midsummer morning! I drew back, eager to be out in
+it.
+
+"Bacon and eggs, is it?" called Jonathan, "or shall I run down and try for
+a bass?"
+
+"Don't!" I called. I knew that if he once got out after bass he was lost
+to me for the day. And now we had cut loose from even the mild tyranny of
+his watch. As I thought of this I went over to the many-forked tree, whose
+close-trimmed branches served our tent as hat-rack, clothes-rack,
+everything-that-can-hang-or-perch-rack, and opened Jonathan's watch.
+
+"Well, what time is it?" Jonathan was peering in between the tent-flaps.
+
+"Twenty-two minutes before five."
+
+"A.M., I judge. Sorry you didn't let me wind it?"
+
+"Not a bit. I was just curious to see when it stopped, that was all."
+
+"Well, now you know. Hereafter the official time for the camp is 4:38--A.M.
+or P.M., according to taste. Come along. The bacon's done, and I'm blest
+if I want to drop in the eggs."
+
+Dropping an egg will never, I fear, be one of Jonathan's most finished
+performances. He watched me do it with generous admiration. "If you could
+just get over being scared of them," I suggested, as the last one plumped
+into the pan and set up its gentle sizzle.
+
+"No use. I _am_ scared of the things. I tap and tap, and nothing happens,
+and then I get mad and tap hard, and they're all over the place."
+
+By the time breakfast was over, even the coolness under the hemlocks was
+beginning to grow warm and aromatic. The birds in the shore woods were
+quieter, though out at the sunny end of our island, where the hemlocks
+gave place to low scrub growth, the song sparrow sang gayly now and then.
+
+"Now," said Jonathan, "what about fishing?"
+
+"Well--let's fish!"
+
+"One up stream and one down, or keep together?"
+
+"Together," I decided. "If we go two ways there's no telling when I'll
+ever see you again."
+
+"Yes, there is: when I'm hungry."
+
+"No; some time after you've noticed you're hungry."
+
+"Now, if we had watches it would be so much simpler: we could meet here
+at, say, one o'clock."
+
+"Simple, indeed! When did you ever look at a watch when you were fishing,
+unless I made you? No, my way is simple, but we stay together."
+
+Of course, in river fishing, "together" means simply not absolutely out of
+sight of each other. Jonathan may be up to his arm-pits in mid-current, or
+marooned on a rock above a swirling eddy, while I am in a similar
+situation beyond calling distance, but so long as a bend in the river does
+not cut us off, we are "together," and very companionable togetherness it
+is, too. When I see Jonathan wildly waving to attract my attention, I know
+he has either just caught a big bass or else just lost one, and this gives
+me something to smile over as I wonder which it is. After a time, if I am
+catching shiners and no bass, and Jonathan doesn't seem to be moving, I
+infer that his luck is better than mine, and drift along toward him. Or it
+may be the other way around, and he comes to look me up. Bass are the most
+uncertain of fish, and no one can predict when they will elect to bite, or
+where. Sometimes they are in the still water, deep or shallow according to
+their caprice; sometimes they hang on the edges of the rapids; sometimes
+they are in the dark, smooth eddies below the great boulders; sometimes in
+the clear depths around the rocks near shore. Each day afresh,--indeed,
+each morning and each afternoon,--the fisherman must try, and try, and try,
+until he discovers what their choice has been for that special time. Yet
+no fisherman who has once drawn out a good bass from a certain bit of
+water can help feeling, next time, that there is another waiting for him
+there. That is one of the reasons why he is always hopeful, and so always
+happy. The fish he has caught, at this well-remembered spot and that, rise
+up out of the past and flick their tails at him; and all the stretches
+between--stretches of water that have never for him held anything but
+shiners, stretches of time diversified by not even a nibble--sink into
+pleasant insignificance.
+
+We banked our fire, stowed everything in the tent that a thunderstorm
+would hurt, and splashed out into the river. There it lay in all its
+bright, swift beauty, and we stood a moment, looking, feeling the push of
+the water about our knees and the warmth of the sun on our shoulders.
+
+"It makes a difference, sleeping out in it all," I said. "You feel as if
+it belonged to you so much more. I quite own the river this morning, don't
+you?"
+
+"Quite. But not the bass in it. Bet you don't catch one!"
+
+"Bet I beat you!"
+
+"Bass, mind you. Sunfish don't count. You're always catching sunfish."
+
+"They count in the pan. But I'll beat you on bass. I know some places--"
+
+"Who doesn't? All right, go ahead!"
+
+We were off; Jonathan, as usual, wading up to his chest or perched on a
+bit of boulder above some dark, slick rapid; I preferring water not more
+than waist-deep, and not too far from shore to miss the responses of the
+wood-folk to my passing: soft flurries of wings; shy, half-suppressed
+peepings; quick warning notes; light footfalls, hopping or running or
+galloping; the snapping of twigs and the crushing of leaves. Some sounds
+tell me who the creature is,--the warning of the blue jay, the whirr of the
+big ruffed grouse, the thud of the bounding rabbit,--but many others leave
+me guessing, which is almost better. When a very big stick snaps, I always
+feel sure a deer is stealing away, though Jonathan assures me that a
+chewink can break twigs and "kick up a row generally," so that you'd swear
+it was nothing smaller than a wild bull.
+
+So we fished that day. When I caught a bass, which was seldom, I whooped
+and waved it at Jonathan, and when I caught a shiner, which was rather
+often, I waved it too, just to keep his mind occupied. Hours passed, and
+we met at a bend in the river where the deep water glides close to shore.
+
+"Hungry?" I asked.
+
+"Now you speak of it, yes."
+
+"Shall we go back?"
+
+"How can I tell? Now, if we only had that watch we'd know whether we ought
+to be hungry or not."
+
+"What does that matter, if we _are_ hungry? Besides, if you'd had a watch,
+you'd have had to carry it in your teeth. You know perfectly well you
+wouldn't have brought it, anyway."
+
+"Well--then, at least when we got back, we should have known whether we
+ought to have been hungry or not. Now we shall never know."
+
+"Never! Oh! Look there, Jonathan! We're going to catch it!" A sense of
+growing shadow in the air had made me look up, and there, back of the
+steep-rising woods, hung a blue-black cloud, with ragged edges crawling
+out into the brightness of the sky.
+
+"Sure enough! The bass'll bite now, if it really comes. Wait till the
+first drops, and see what you see."
+
+We had not long to wait. There came that sudden expectancy in the air and
+the trees, the strange pallor in the light, the chill sweep of wind gusts
+with warm pauses between. Then a few big drops splashed on the dusty,
+sun-baked stones about us.
+
+"Now! Wade right out there, to the edge of that ledge--don't slip over,
+it's deep. I'll go down a little way."
+
+I waded out carefully, and cast, in the smooth, dark water already
+beginning to be rain-pocked. It was surprisingly shivery, that storm wind!
+I glanced toward shore to look for shelter--I remembered an overhanging
+ledge of rock--then my line went taut! I forgot about shelter, forgot about
+being chilly; I knew it was a good bass.
+
+I got him in--too big to go through the hole in my creel--cast for
+another--and another--and yet another. The rain began to fall in sheets, and
+the wind nearly blew me over, but who could run away from such fishing?
+The surface of the river, deep blue-gray, seemed rising everywhere in
+little jets to meet the rain. Rapids, eddies, still waters, weedy edges,
+all looked alike; there were neither waves nor swirls nor glassy slicks,
+but all were roughly furry under the multitudinous assaults of the fierce
+rain-drops. The sky was mottled lead-color, the wind blew less strongly,
+but cold--cold. And under that water the bass were biting, my rod was
+bending double, my reel softly screaming as I gave line, and one after
+another I drew the fish alongside and dipped them out with my landing net.
+
+Then, as suddenly as they had begun, they stopped biting. I waited long
+minutes; nothing happened, and all at once I realized that I was very wet
+and very cold. Wading ashore, I saw Jonathan shivering along up the narrow
+beach toward me, his shoulders drawn in to half their natural spread, neck
+tucked in between his collar-bones, knees slightly bent.
+
+"You can't be cold?" I questioned as soon as he was near enough to hear me
+through the slash of the rain and wind.
+
+"No, of course not; are you?"
+
+We didn't discuss it, but ran up the bank to the rock-ledge and crouched
+under it, our teeth literally chattering.
+
+"Did you ever see such fishing?" I managed to stammer.
+
+"Great! But oh, _why_ didn't I bring the whiskey bottle?"
+
+"Let's run for camp! We can't be wetter."
+
+We crawled out into the rain again, and first sprinted and then
+dog-trotted along the river edge. No bird notes now in the woods beside
+us, no whirring of wings; only the rain sounds: soft swishings and
+drippings and gusty showerings, very different from the flat, flicking
+sounds when rain first starts in dry woods.
+
+Camp looked a little cheerless, but a blazing fire, started with dry stuff
+we had stowed inside the tent, changed things, and dry clothes changed
+them still more, and we sat within the tent flaps and ate ginger-snaps in
+great contentment of spirit while we waited for the rain to stop.
+
+It did stop, and very soon the fish were sizzling in the pan.
+
+"Of course, if we had a watch, now--" suggested Jonathan, as he carefully
+tucked under the pan little sticks of just the right length.
+
+"What should we know more than we do now--that we're hungry?" I asked.
+
+"Well, for one thing, we'd know what time it is," replied Jonathan
+tranquilly.
+
+"And for another we'd know whether it's dinner or supper I'm cooking," I
+supplemented. "But does it matter? You won't get anything different, no
+matter which it is--just fish is what you'll get. And pretty soon the sun
+will be out, and you can set up a stick and watch the shadow and make a
+sundial for yourself."
+
+"Oh, I don't really care which it is."
+
+"Do you suppose I don't know that! And meanwhile, you might cut the bread
+and make some toast,--there are some good embers on your side under the
+pan,--and I'll get the butter, and there we'll be."
+
+By the time the toast was made and the fish curling brownly away from the
+pan, the sun had indeed come out, at first pale and watery, then clear,
+and still high enough in the heavens to set the soaked earth steaming
+fragrantly with its heat. Odors of hemlock and wet earth mingled with
+odors of toast and fried fish.
+
+"Um-m! Smell it all!" I said. "What a lot we should miss if we didn't eat
+in the kitchen!"
+
+"Or cook in the dining-room--which?"
+
+"And hear that song sparrow! Doesn't it sound as if the rain had washed
+his song a little cleaner and clearer?"
+
+There followed the wonderful afterlight that a short, drenching rain
+leaves behind it--a hush of light, deeply pervasive and friendly. The
+sunshine slanted across the gleaming wet rocks in the river, lit up the
+rain-darkened trunks of the hemlocks, glinted on the low-hanging leaves,
+and flashed through the dripping edges of sagging fern fronds. As twilight
+came on, we canoed across to the side of the river where the road lay--the
+other side was steep and pathless woods--and walked down to the nearest
+farmhouse to buy eggs for the morning. Back again by the light of a
+low-hung moon, and across the dim water to our own island and the embers
+of our fire.
+
+"Oh, Jonathan! We never asked them what time it was!" I said. "I meant
+to--for your sake--I thought you'd sleep better if you knew."
+
+"Too bad! Probably I should have. I thought of it, of course, but was
+afraid that if I asked it would spoil your day."
+
+"It would take something pretty bad to spoil a day like this one," I said.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Two days later the weather turned still and warm, the bass refused to
+bite, and even the sunfish lay, shy or wary or indifferent, in their
+shallow, sunny pools, so we resolved to walk down the river to the
+post-office, four miles away, for possible mail. As we sat on the steps of
+the little store, looking it over,--"Here's news," said Jonathan; "Jack and
+Molly say they'll run up if we want them, day after to-morrow--up on the
+morning train, and back on the evening."
+
+"Good! Tell them to come along."
+
+"No--it's to-morrow--letter's been here since yesterday. I'll telegraph."
+
+As we tramped home we planned the day. "We'll meet them and all walk up
+together," said Jonathan.
+
+"We'd better catch some bass and leave them all hooked in a pool, ready
+for them to pull out," I added; "otherwise they may not catch any. And
+maybe you'd better meet them and I'll have dinner ready when you get
+back."
+
+"Nonsense! You come, and we'll all get dinner when we get back. That's
+what they're coming for--to see the whole thing."
+
+"But if it's late--they've got to get back for that down train."
+
+"Well--time enough."
+
+"Oh, Jonathan! What about catching that train?"
+
+"They'll have watches--watches that go."
+
+"But what about our meeting them? The train arrives at 10:15, they said.
+What does 10:15 look like in the sky, I wonder!"
+
+"Or rather, what does 8.45 look like? It takes an hour and a half to get
+there, counting crossing the river."
+
+"Yes--dear me! Well, Jonathan, we'll just have to get up early and go, and
+then wait."
+
+"Or else take our watch to the farmhouse and set it."
+
+"Jonathan, I will not! I'd rather start at daylight."
+
+Which was very nearly what we did. The morning opened with a sun obscured,
+and I felt sure it was stealing a march on us and would suddenly burst out
+upon us from a noonday sky. We breakfasted hastily, ferried across to
+shore, and set a swinging pace down the road. As we walked, the sun burned
+through the mist, and our shadows came out, dim, long things, striding
+with the exaggerated gait that shadows have, over the grassy banks to our
+right.
+
+"I think," said Jonathan, "it may be as late as seven o'clock, but perhaps
+it's only six."
+
+When we reached the station, the official clock registered 8.30. We
+strolled over to the store-and-post-office and got more letters--one from
+Molly and Jack saying thank you they'd come. "They don't entirely
+understand our mail system up here," said Jonathan. We got some
+ginger-cookies and some milk and had a second breakfast, and finally
+wandered back to the station to wait for the train. It came, bearing the
+expected two, and much friendliness. "Get our letter? There, Jack! He said
+you wouldn't, but I said you would. I made him send it ... four miles to
+walk? What fun!"
+
+It was fun, indeed, and all went well until after dinner, when
+Jack--saying, "Well, maybe we'd better be starting back for that
+train"--drew out his watch. He opened it, muttered something, put it to his
+ear, then began to wind it rapidly. He wound and wound. We all laughed.
+
+"Looks as if you hadn't remembered to wind it last night," said Jonathan,
+glancing at me.
+
+"I haven't done that in months, hang it! Give me the time, will you,
+Jonathan?" said Jack.
+
+"Sorry!" Jonathan was smiling genially. "Mine's run down too. It stopped
+at twenty-two minutes before five--A. M., I think."
+
+"What luck! And Molly didn't bring hers."
+
+"You told me not to," Molly flicked in.
+
+"So here we are," said Jonathan, "entirely without the time of day."
+
+"But plenty of real time all round us," I said. "Let's use it, and start."
+I avoided Jonathan's eye.
+
+We reached the station with an hour and ten minutes to spare--bought more
+ginger-cookies and more milk. As we sat eating them in the midst of the
+preternatural calm that marks a country railroad station outside of train
+times, Molly remarked brightly,--
+
+"Well, I don't see but we got on just as well without a watch, didn't we,
+Jack? Why do we need watches, anyway? Do _you_ see?" she turned to us.
+"Jack does everything by his watch--eats and breathes and sleeps by it--"
+
+Jack returned, watch in hand--he had been getting railroad time from the
+telegraph operator. "Want to set yours while you think of it?" he asked
+Jonathan.
+
+"Sorry--thank you--didn't bring it," said Jonathan.
+
+"By George, man, what'll you do?" Real consternation sounded in Jack's
+tones.
+
+"Oh, we'll get along somehow," said Jonathan. "You see, we don't have many
+engagements, except with the bass, and they never meet theirs, anyhow."
+
+When the train had gone, I said, "Jonathan, why didn't you tell them it
+was my whim?"
+
+"Oh, I just didn't," said Jonathan.
+
+As Jonathan had predicted, we did get along somehow--got along rather well,
+on the whole. There are, of course, some drawbacks to an unwatched life.
+You never want to start the next meal till you are hungry, and after that
+it takes one or two or three hours, as the case may be, to go back to camp
+and get the meal ready, and by that time you are almost hungrier than you
+like being. But except for this, and the little matter of meeting trains,
+it is rather pleasant to break away from the habit of watching the watch,
+and it was with real regret that, on the last night of our camp, we took
+our watch to the farmhouse to set it.
+
+"Run down, did it? Guess you forgot to wind it. Well--we do forget things
+sometimes, all of us do," the farmer's wife said comfortingly as she went
+to look at the clock. "Twenty minutes to seven, our clock says. It's apt
+to be fast, so I guess you won't miss any trains. Father he says he'd
+rather have a clock fast than slow any day, but it don't often get more
+than ten minutes wrong either way."
+
+And to us, after our two weeks of camp, ten minutes' error in a clock
+seemed indeed slight.
+
+"Jonathan," I said, as we walked back along the road, "I hate to go back
+to clock time. I like real time better."
+
+"You couldn't do so many things in a day," said Jonathan.
+
+"No--maybe not."
+
+"But maybe that wouldn't matter."
+
+"Maybe it wouldn't," I said.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   VIII
+
+
+                           The Ways of Griselda
+
+
+"Of course you don't know what her name is," I said, as we stood examining
+the sleek little black mare Jonathan had just brought up from the city.
+
+"No. Forgot to ask. Don't believe they'd have known anyway--one of a
+hundred or so."
+
+"Well, we'll name her again. Dear me--she's rather plain! Probably she's
+useful."
+
+"Hope so," said Jonathan. Then, stepping back a little, in a slightly
+grieved tone, "But I don't call her plain. Wait till she's groomed up--"
+
+"It's that droop of her neck--sort of patient--and the way she drops one of
+her hips--if they are hips."
+
+"But we want a horse to be patient."
+
+"Yes. I don't know that I care about having her _look_ so terribly much so
+as this. I think I'll call her Griselda."
+
+"Now, why Griselda?"
+
+"Why, don't you know? She was that patient creature, with the horrid
+husband who had to keep trying to see just how patient she was. It's a
+hateful story--enough to turn any one who brooded on it into a militant
+suffragette."
+
+"But you can't call a horse Griselda--not for common stable use, you know."
+
+"Call her 'Griz' for short. It does very well."
+
+Jonathan jeered a little, but in the family the name held. Our man Hiram
+said nothing, but I think in private he called her "Fan" or "Beauty" or
+"Lady," or some such regulation stable name.
+
+Called by any name, she pleased us, and she _was_ patient. She trotted
+peacefully up hill and down, she did her best at ploughing and haymaking
+and all the odd jobs that the farm supplied. She stood when we left her,
+with that same demure, almost overdone droop of the neck that I had first
+noticed. When I met Jonathan at the station, she stood with her nose
+against a snorting train, looking as if nothing could rouse her.
+
+"Good little horse you got there," remarked the station agent. "Where'd
+you find her?"
+
+"Oh, I picked her out of a bunch down in the city," said Jonathan
+casually. "I didn't think I knew much about horses, but I guess I was in
+luck this time."
+
+"Guess you know more about horses than you're sayin'." And Jonathan, thus
+pressed, admitted with suitable reluctance that he _had_ now and then been
+able to detect a good horse by his own observation.
+
+On the way home he openly congratulated himself on his find. "I really
+wasn't sure I knew how to pick out a horse," he remarked, in a glow of
+retrospective modesty, "but I certainly got a treasure this time."
+
+Griz had been with us about two weeks, and all went well. Then another
+horse was needed for farm work, and one was sent up--one Kit by name--a big,
+pleasant, rather stupid brown mare.
+
+"They do say two mares don't git on so well together as a mare 'n a
+horse," remarked Hiram.
+
+"But these are both such quiet creatures," I protested, to which Hiram
+made no answer. Hiram seldom made an answer unless fairly cornered into
+it.
+
+For two or three days after the new arrival nothing happened, so far as we
+knew, except that Griz always laid her ears back, and looked queer about
+her under lip, whenever Kit was led in or out of the stall next her, while
+Kit always huddled up close to her manger whenever Griz was led past her
+heels. Once or twice Griz slipped her halter in the stall, and Hiram said
+there was a place on Kit that looked as if she had been kicked, but when
+we scrutinized Griz, neck a-droop and eyes a-blink, we found it hard to
+think ill of her. Besides, Jonathan was now fairly committed to the
+opinion that he had "got a treasure this time." "Kit may have hurt herself
+lying down," he suggested, and again Hiram made no answer.
+
+Then one night, sometime during the very small, very dark, and very sleepy
+hours, we were awakened by awful sounds. "What is it? What _is_ it?" I
+gasped.
+
+Crash! Bang! Boom! The trampling of hoofs!--heavy, hollow pounding!--the
+tearing and splintering of wood!--all coming from the barn, though loud
+enough, indeed, to have come from the next room.
+
+Jonathan was up in an instant muttering, "Where are my rubber boots?--and
+my coat?"
+
+"Jonathan! _what_ a combination!"
+
+But he was gone, and I heard the snap of the lantern and the slam of the
+back door almost before the rocking-chair in the sitting-room that he had
+hit--and talked to--had stopped rocking. Then I heard him calling outside
+Hiram's window and then he ran past our window, out to the barn. I wished
+he had waited for Hiram, but I had an undercurrent of pleasure in hearing
+him run. Jonathan's theory is that there is never any hurry, and now and
+then I like to have this notion jolted up a little.
+
+Meanwhile the awful sounds had ceased. There was the rumble of the stable
+door, a pause, and Jonathan's voice in conversational tones. Next came the
+flashing of Hiram's lantern, and the _tromp, tromp, tromp_, in much
+quicker tempo than usual, of Hiram's heavy boots. Hiram's theory was a
+good deal like Jonathan's, so this also gave me pleasure. Finally, there
+came the flash of another lantern, and I recognized the quick, short step
+of Mrs. Hiram. I smiled to myself, picturing the meeting between her and
+Jonathan, for I knew just how Jonathan was costumed. In two minutes I
+heard her steps repassing, and in five minutes Jonathan returned. He was
+chuckling quietly.
+
+"I guess Griz got all she needed--didn't know either of 'em had so much
+spunk in 'em."
+
+"What happened?"
+
+"Don't know, exactly, but when I opened that door, there was Griz, just
+inside, no halter on, head down, meek as Moses, as far away from Kit's
+heels as she could get--she's got the mark of them on her leg and her
+flank."
+
+"Is she hurt?--or Kit?"
+
+"No, not so far as we can see, not to amount to anything--except maybe
+Griz's feelings."
+
+"And what about Mrs. Hiram's feelings?"
+
+Jonathan laughed aloud. "I was inside with Kit, and she called out to know
+if she could help."
+
+"And what did you say?"
+
+"I said, 'Not on your life.' "
+
+"So that was why she came back. Did you really say,'Not on your life,' or
+did you only imply it in your tone, while you actually said, 'No, thank
+you very much'?"
+
+"I really said it. At least, I don't remember conversations the way you
+do, but I didn't feel a bit like thanking anybody, and I don't believe I
+did."
+
+"Well, I wish I'd heard you. One misses a good deal--"
+
+"You can see the stable to-morrow. That'll keep. They must have had a time
+of it! The walls are marked and splintered as high as I can reach. And I
+don't believe Kit'll cringe when Griz passes her any more."
+
+"Of course you remember Hiram _said_ two mares didn't usually get on very
+well, and even when they're chosen by a good judge of horses--"
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+After that the two did get along peaceably enough, and Jonathan assured me
+that all horses had these little affairs. One day we drove over to the
+main street of the village on an errand.
+
+"Will she stand?" I questioned.
+
+"Better hitch her, perhaps," said Jonathan, getting out the rope. He
+snapped it into her bit-ring, then threw the other end around a post and
+started to make a half-hitch. But as he drew up the rope it was suddenly
+jerked out of his hand. He looked up and saw Griselda's patient head
+waving high above him on the end of an erect and rebellious neck, the
+hitch-rope waggling in loops and spirals in the air, and the whole outfit
+backing away from him with speed and decision. He was so astonished that
+he did nothing, and in a moment Griz had stopped backing and stood still,
+her head sagging gently, the rope dangling.
+
+"Well--I'll--be--" I didn't try to remember just what Jonathan said he would
+be, because it doesn't really matter. We both stared at Griz as if we had
+never seen her before. Griz looked at nothing in particular, she blinked
+long lashes over drowsy, dark eyes, and sagged one hip.
+
+"She's trying to make believe she didn't do it--but she did," I said.
+
+"Something must have startled her," said Jonathan, peering up and down the
+deserted street. Two roosters were crowing antiphonally in near-by yards,
+and a dog was barking somewhere far off.
+
+"What?" I said.
+
+"You never can tell, with a horse."
+
+"No, apparently not," I said, smiling to myself; and I added hastily, as I
+saw Jonathan go forward to her head, "_Don't_ try it again, please! I'll
+stay by her while you go in. _Please!_" For I had detected on Jonathan's
+face a look that I very well knew. It was the same expression he had worn
+that Sunday he led the calf to pasture. He made no answer, but stood
+examining the hitch-rope.
+
+"No use," he said, quietly releasing it and tossing its coil into the
+carriage, "It's too rotten. If it snapped, she'd be ruined."
+
+I breathed freer. I privately hoped that all the hitch-ropes at the farm
+were rotten.
+
+"Griz stands perfectly well without hitching," I said as we drove home,
+"Why do you force an issue?"
+
+"I didn't. She did. She's beaten me. If I don't hitch her now, she'll know
+she's master."
+
+"Oh, dear!" I sighed. "Let her _be_ master! Where's the harm? It's just
+your vanity."
+
+"Perhaps so," said Jonathan.
+
+When he agrees with me like that I know it's hopeless.
+
+The next night he wheeled in at the big gate bearing about his shoulders a
+coil of heavy rope.
+
+"It looks like a ship's cable," I said.
+
+"Yes," he responded, leaning his bicycle against his side, and swinging
+the coil over his head. "I want it for mooring purposes. Think it'll moor
+Griz?"
+
+"Jonathan!" I exclaimed, "you won't!"
+
+"Watch me," said Jonathan, and he proceeded to explain to me the working
+of the tackle.
+
+One end had a ring in it, and as nearly as I remember, the plan was to put
+the rope around her body, under what would be her arm-pits if she had
+arm-pits,--horses' joints are never called what one would expect, of
+course,--run the end through the ring, then forward between her legs and
+through the bit-ring.
+
+"Then, when she sets back, it cuts her in two," he concluded cheerfully.
+
+"But you don't _want_ her in two," I protested.
+
+"She won't set back," he responded; "at least, not more than once.
+To-morrow's Sunday; I'll have to hitch her at church."
+
+I hoped it would rain, so we needn't go, but we were having a drought and
+the morning dawned cloudless. We reached the church just on the last
+stroke of the bell. The women were all within; the men and boys lounging
+in the vestibule were turning reluctant feet to follow them.
+
+"You go right in," said Jonathan, "I'll be in soon."
+
+I turned to protest, but he was already driving round to the side, and a
+hush had fallen over the congregation within that made it embarrassing to
+call. Besides, one of the deacons stood holding open the door for me.
+
+I slipped into a pew near the back, with the apologetic feeling one often
+has in an old country church--a feeling that one is making the ghosts move
+along a little. They did move, of course,--probably ghosts are always
+polite when one really meets them,--and I sat down. Indeed, I was thinking
+very little of ghosts that day, or of the minister either. My ears were
+cocked to catch and interpret all the noises that came in through the open
+windows on my left. My eyes wandered in that direction, too, though the
+clear panes revealed nothing more exciting than flickering maple leaves
+and a sky filmed over by veils of cloud.
+
+The moralists tell us that what we get out of any experience depends upon
+what we bring to it. What I brought to it that morning was a mind agog,
+attuned to receive these expected outside sounds. To all such sounds the
+service within was merely a background--a background which didn't know its
+place, since it kept pushing itself more or less importunately into the
+foreground. I sat there, of course, with perfect propriety of demeanor,
+but my reactions were something like this:--
+
+_Hymn 912_ ... seven stanzas! horrors! oh! _omit the 3d, 5th, and 6th_--well,
+I should hope so!... I can't hear a thing while this is going on!... He hasn't
+come in yet! _Scripture reading for to-day_--why can't he give us the
+passage and let us read it for ourselves?--well, his voice is rather high
+and uneven, I think I could make out Jonathan's through the loopholes in
+it.... There! What was that, I wonder! Sounded like shouting,--oh, why can't
+he talk softly! _Let us unite in prayer._ Ah! now we'll have a long, quiet
+time, anyway!... if only he wouldn't pray quite so loud! Why pray aloud at
+all, anyway? I like the Quaker way best: a good long strip of silence,
+where your thoughts can wash around in any fashion that--There!
+No--yes--no--it's just people going by on the road.... Maybe he's in the back
+of the church now, waiting for the close of the prayer. Seems as if I had
+to look.... Well, he isn't.... _For thy name's sake, amen._
+
+And then the collection, with an organ voluntary the while--now why an
+organ voluntary? Why not leave people to their thoughts some of the time?
+
+And at last, the sermon:--_The text to which I wish to call your attention
+this morning_--my attention, forsooth! My attention was otherwise occupied.
+Ah! A puff of warm, sweet air from behind me, and the soft, padding noise
+of the swinging doors, apprised me of an incomer. A cautious tread in the
+aisle--I moved along a little to make room.
+
+In a city church probably I should have thrown propriety to the winds and
+had the gist of the story out of him at once, but in a country church
+there are always such listening spaces,--the very pew-backs and cushions
+seem attentive, the hymnals creak in their racks, and the little stools
+cry out nervously when one barely touches them. It was too much for me. I
+was coerced into an outer semblance of decorum. However, I snatched a
+hasty glance at Jonathan's face. It was quite red and hot-looking, but
+calm, very calm, and I judged it to be the calm, not of defeat nor yet of
+settled militancy, but of triumph. I even thought I detected the flicker
+of a grin,--the mere atmospheric suggestion of a grin,--as if he felt the
+urgent if furtive appeal in my glance. At any rate, Jonathan was all
+right, that was clear. And as to Griz--whether she was still one mare or
+two half-mares--it didn't so much matter. And now for the sermon! I
+gathered myself to attend.
+
+As we stood up for the last hymn, I whispered, "How did it go?"
+
+"All right. She's hitched," was the answer.
+
+After church there was the usual stir of sociability, and when I emerged
+into the glare of the church steps, I saw Jonathan driving slowly around
+from the rear. Griz walked meekly, her head sagged, her eyes blinked.
+
+"Good quiet little horse you've got there," said a deacon over my
+shoulder; "don't get restless standing, the way some horses do."
+
+"Yes, she's very quiet," I said.
+
+I got in, and at last, as we drove off, the flood-gates of my impatience
+broke:--
+
+"Well?" I said,--"well?"
+
+"Well--" said Jonathan.
+
+"_Well? Tell_ me about it!"
+
+"I've told you. I hitched her."
+
+"How did you hitch her?"
+
+"Just the way I said I would."
+
+"Didn't she mind?"
+
+"Don't know."
+
+"Did she make a fuss?"
+
+"Not much."
+
+"What do you mean by much?"
+
+"Oh, she set back a little."
+
+"Do any harm?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Hurt herself?"
+
+"Guess not."
+
+"Jonathan, you drive me distracted--you have no more sense for a story--"
+
+"But there was nothing in particular--"
+
+"Now, Jonathan, if there was nothing in particular, _why_ didn't you get
+into church till the sermon was begun, and why were you so red and hot?"
+
+Jonathan smiled indulgently. "Why, of course, she didn't care about being
+hitched. I thought you knew that. But it was perfectly easy."
+
+And that was about all I could extract by the most artful questions. I
+took my revenge by telling Jonathan the deacon's compliment to Griz. "He
+said she didn't get restless standing, the way so many horses did. I
+thought of mentioning that you were a rather good judge of horses, in an
+amateur way, but then I thought it might seem like boasting, so I didn't."
+
+After that, of course, I didn't really deserve to hear the whole story,
+but the next night I happened to be in the hammock while Jonathan was
+talking to a neighbor at the front gate, and he was relating the incident
+with detail enough to have satisfied the most hungry gossip. Only thus did
+I learn that Bill Howard, who had wound the rope twice round the post to
+give himself a little leeway, was drawn right up to the post when she set
+back; that they had been afraid the headstall would tear off; that they
+had been rather nervous about the post, and other such little points,
+which I had not been clever enough to elicit by my questions.
+
+Now, why? Probably a man likes to tell a story when he likes to tell it. I
+find myself wondering how much Odysseus told Penelope about his adventures
+when she got him to herself for a good talk. Is it significant that his
+really long story was told to the King of the PhA|acians?
+
+As to Griz:--it would perhaps not be worth while to recount her subsequent
+history. It was a curious one, consisting of long stretches of continuous
+and ostentatious meekness, broken by sudden flare-ups which, after their
+occurrence, always seemed incredible. She never again "set back" when
+Jonathan was the one to hitch her, but this was a concession made to him
+personally, and had no effect on her general habits. We talked of changing
+her name, but could never manage it. We thought of selling her, but she
+was too valuable--most of the time. And when we finally parted from her our
+relief was deeply tinged with regret.
+
+I have sometimes wondered whether such flare-ups were not the natural and
+necessary means of recuperation from such depths of meekness. I have even
+wondered whether the original Griselda may not have--but this is not a
+dissertation on early Italian poetry, nor on the nature of women.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                    IX
+
+
+                           A Rowboat Pilgrimage
+
+
+We were glad that the plan of the rowboat cruise dawned upon us almost a
+year before it came to pass. We were the gainers by just that rich length
+of expectancy.
+
+For the joy that one gets from any cherished plan is always threefold:
+there is the joy of looking forward, the joy of the very doing, and the
+joy of remembering. They are all good, but only the last is eternal. The
+doing is hedged between limits, and its pleasures are often confused,
+overlaid with alien or accidental impressions. The joy of the forward look
+is pure and keen, but its bounds, too, are set. It begins at the moment
+when the first ray of the plan-idea dawns on one's mind, and it ends with
+the day of fulfillment. If the dawn begins long before the day, so much
+the better.
+
+It was early fall, and we had come in from a day by the river, where we
+had tramped miles up, to one of its infrequent bridges, and miles down on
+the other bank. Now we sat before the fire, talking it over.
+
+"If we only had a boat!" I said.
+
+"Boat! What do you want a boat for? You wouldn't want to sit in a boat all
+day."
+
+"Who said I would? But I want to get into it, and float off, and get out
+again somewhere else. That's my idea of a boat."
+
+"Oh, of course, a boat would be handy--"
+
+"Handy! You talk as if it was a buttonhook!"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well--of course it _is_ handy--as you call it--but a boat means such a lot
+of things--adventure, romance. When you're in a boat--a little boat--anything
+might happen."
+
+"Yes," said Jonathan, drawing the logs together, "that's just the way your
+family feels about it when you're young."
+
+Then we both laughed, and there was a reminiscent pause.
+
+"What became of your boat?" I asked finally.
+
+"Sold. You kept yours."
+
+"Yes. It's in the cellar, there at Nantucket. I could have it sent on."
+
+"Cost as much as to buy a new one."
+
+"A new one wouldn't be as good." I bristled a little. Any one who has
+owned a boat is very sensitive about its virtues.
+
+"How big?"
+
+"How should I know? A little boat--maybe twelve feet."
+
+"Two oars?"
+
+"Four."
+
+"Round bottom?"
+
+"Yes. She'd ride anything."
+
+"Well"--Jonathan suddenly expanded--"here's an idea now! How would you like
+to have it sent on to the mainland, and then row it the rest of the
+way--along the Rhode Island and Connecticut shores?"
+
+I sat straight up. "Jonathan! Let's do it now!"
+
+Jonathan chuckled. "My! What a hurry she's in!"
+
+"Well, let's!"
+
+"We couldn't. The boat will have to be overhauled first."
+
+"Oh, dear! I suppose so."
+
+"We could do it next spring, and go up the trout streams."
+
+"Think of that!" I murmured.
+
+"Or in September and get the shore hunting--the salt marshes."
+
+"Oh, which?--which?" Already I was following our course along curving
+beaches and amongst the yellow marshlands. But Jonathan's mind was working
+on more practical details.
+
+"Twelve feet, you said?"
+
+"About that."
+
+"Pretty close stowing for our dunnage--still--let's see--two guns--"
+
+"Or the rods, if we went in the spring."
+
+"And rubber coats, and blankets--"
+
+"Jonathan! Should we camp?"
+
+"Might have to."
+
+"Let's, anyway."
+
+"How does that coast-line run? Where's a map?"
+
+All we had were some railroad maps and an old school geography--just enough
+to tantalize us--but we fell upon them eagerly. It is curious what a change
+comes over these dumb bits of colored paper at such times. Every curve of
+the shore, every bay and headland came to life and spoke to us--called to
+us.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+We decided on the September plan, and for the next eleven months our
+casual talk was starred with inapropos remarks like these:--
+
+"Jonathan, I know we shall forget a can-opener."
+
+"Better write it down while you think of it. And have you put down a
+hatchet?"
+
+"The camera! It isn't on the list!"
+
+"Hang it! Those charts haven't come yet!"
+
+"What can we take to look respectable in when we go ashore?"
+
+Meanwhile the little boat was stirred out of its long sleep in the cellar,
+overhauled, and painted, and shipped to a port up in Narragansett Bay. And
+on the last day of August we found ourselves walking down through the
+little town. Following the instructions of wondering small boys, we came
+to a gate in a board fence, opened it and let ourselves into a typical New
+England seaport scene--a tiny garden, ablaze with sunshine and gorgeous
+with the yellows and lavenders of fall flowers, and a narrow brick path,
+under a grape-vine arch, leading down to the sand and the wharf and the
+sparkling blue waters of the bay. As we passed down through the garden, we
+saw a little boat, bottom up, dazzling white in the sun.
+
+"There it is!" I said, with a surge of reminiscent affection.
+
+"That little thing!" said Jonathan. "I thought you said twelve feet."
+
+"Well, isn't it? Anyway, I said _about_. And it's big enough."
+
+He was spanning its length with his hands.
+
+"Eleven foot six. Oh, I suppose she'll do. My boat was fourteen."
+
+"Now, don't be so patronizing about your boat. Wait till you see how mine
+behaves."
+
+He dropped the discussion and got her launched. Is there anything prettier
+than a pretty boat floating beside a dock!
+
+The next morning when we came down we found her half full of water.
+"She'll be all right now she's soaked up," said Jonathan, and we baled her
+dry and went off to get our stuff.
+
+I delayed to buy provisions, and when I came back I found Jonathan
+standing on the float surrounded by plunder of all sorts. He answered my
+hail rather solemnly.
+
+"See here! When this stuff's all stowed, where are we going to sit? That's
+what's worrying me."
+
+"Why, won't it go in?"
+
+"Go! It wouldn't go in two boats."
+
+I came down the plank. "Well, let's eliminate."
+
+We eliminated. We took out extra shoes and coats and "town clothes," we
+cut down as far as we dared, and expressed a big bundle home. The rest we
+got into two sailor's dunnage bags, one waterproof, the other nearly so,
+and one big water-tight metal box. Then there were the guns, and the
+provisions, and the charts in a long tin tube, and there was a lantern--a
+clumsy thing, which we lashed to a seat. It was always in the way and
+proved of very little use, but we thought we ought to take it.
+
+While we worked, some loungers gathered on the wharf above and watched us
+with that tolerant curiosity that loungers know so well how to assume. As
+we got in and took up our oars, one of them called out, "Now, if you only
+had a little motor there in the stern, you'd be all right."
+
+"Don't want one," said Jonathan.
+
+"What? Why not?"
+
+"Go too fast."
+
+"Eh? What say?"
+
+"Go--too--fast."
+
+"He heard you," I said, "but he can't believe you really said it."
+
+The oars fell into unison, there was the dip of their blades, the grating
+chunk of the rowlocks--_dip-ke-chunk, dip-ke-chunk_. As we fell into our
+stroke the little boat began to respond, the water swished at her bows and
+gurgled under her stern. The wharf fell away behind us, the houses back of
+it came into sight, then the wooded hills behind. The whole town began to
+draw together, with its church steeples as its centers.
+
+"She does go!" remarked Jonathan.
+
+"I told you! Look at us now! Look at that buoy!"
+
+_Dip-ke-chunk, dip-ke-chunk_--the red buoy swept by us and dropped into the
+blue background of dancing waves.
+
+"Are we really off? Is it really happening?" I said joyously.
+
+"Do you like it?" said Jonathan over his shoulder.
+
+"No. Do you?" To such unwisdom of speech do people come when they are
+happy.
+
+But there were circumstances to steady us.
+
+"What I'm wondering," said Jonathan, "is, what's going to happen next--when
+we get out there." He tilted his head toward the open bay, broad and
+windy, ahead of us. "There's some pretty interesting water out there
+beyond this lee."
+
+"Oh, she'll take it all right. It's no worse than Nantucket water. It
+couldn't be. You'll see."
+
+We did see. In half an hour we were in the middle of upper Narragansett
+Bay, trying to make a diagonal across it to the southwest, while the long
+rollers came in steadily from the south, broken by a nasty chop of peaked,
+whitecapped waves. We rowed carefully, our heads over our right shoulders,
+watching each wave as it came on, with broken comments:--
+
+"That's a good one coming--bring her up now--there--all right, now let her
+off again--hold her so--there's another coming--see?--that big one, the fifth,
+the fourth, away--row, now--we beat it--there it goes off astern--see it
+break! Here's another--look out for your oar--we can't afford to miss a
+stroke--oh, me! Did that wet you too? My right shoulder is soaked--my left
+isn't--now it is!"
+
+But half an hour of this sort of thing brought about two
+results--confidence in the little boat, which rode well in spite of her
+load, and confidence in each other's rowing. We found that the four oars
+worked together, our early training told, and we instinctively did the
+same things in each of the varied emergencies created by wind and wave.
+There was no need for orders, and our talk died down to an exclamation now
+and then at some especially big wave, or a laugh as one of us got a
+drenching from the white top of a foaming crest.
+
+It was not an easy day, that first one.... It seems, sometimes, as if there
+were little imps of malignity that hovered over one at the beginning of an
+undertaking--little brownies, using all their charms to try to turn one
+back, discouraged. If there be such, they had a good time with us that
+long afternoon. First they had said that we shouldn't load our boat. Then
+they sent us rough water. Then they set the boat a-leak.
+
+For leak it did. The soaking over night had done no good. It had, indeed,
+been "thoroughly overhauled" and pronounced seaworthy, but there was the
+water, too much to be accounted for as spray, swashing over the bottom
+boards, growing undeniably and most uncomfortably deeper. The imps made no
+offer to bale for us, so we had to do it ourselves, losing the much-needed
+power at the oars, while one of us set to work at the dip-and-toss,
+dip-and-toss motion so familiar to any one who has kept company with a
+small boat.
+
+"I wish my mother could see me now--" hummed Jonathan.
+
+"I wouldn't wish that."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"What would they all think of us if they could see us this minute?"
+
+"Just what they have thought for a long time."
+
+I laughed. "How true that is, teacher!" I said.
+
+Finding us still cheerful, the imps tried again.
+
+"Jonathan--do you know--I do believe--my rowlock socket is working loose."
+
+He cast a quick look over his shoulder without breaking stroke. Then he
+said a few words, explicit and powerful, about the man who had
+"overhauled" the boat. "He ought to be put out in it, in a sea like this,
+and left to row himself home."
+
+"Yes, of course, but instead, here we are. It won't last half an hour
+longer."
+
+It did not last ten minutes. There it hung, one screw pulled loose, the
+other barely holding.
+
+"Take my knife--you can get it out of my hip pocket--and try to set up that
+screw with the big blade."
+
+I did so, and pulled a few strokes. Then--"It's come out again. It's no
+use."
+
+"We make blamed poor headway with one pair of oars," said Jonathan.
+
+He meditated.
+
+"Where are the screw-eyes?" he said after a moment.
+
+"Oh, good for you! They're in the metal box. I'll get them."
+
+I drew in my useless oars, turned about and cautiously wriggled up into
+the bow seat.
+
+"Look out for yourself! Don't bullfrog out over the bow. I can't hold her
+any steadier than this."
+
+"Oh, I'm all right."
+
+With one hand I gripped the gunwale, with the other I felt down into the
+box and finally fished out the required treasures. I worked my way back
+into my own seat and tried a screw-eye in the empty, rusted-out hole.
+
+"Does it bite?"
+
+"I don't know about biting, but it's going in beautifully--now it goes
+hard."
+
+"Perhaps I can give it a turn."
+
+"Perhaps you can't! Don't you stop rowing. If this boat wasn't held
+steady, she'd--I don't know what she wouldn't do."
+
+"If you stick something through the eye you can turn it."
+
+"Yes. I'll find something. Here's the can-opener. Grand! There! It's
+solid. Now I'll do the other one the same way. Hurrah for the screw-eyes!"
+
+"You thought of bringing them," said Jonathan magnanimously.
+
+"You thought of using them," said I, not to be outdone.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+And so again the imps were foiled. But they hung over us, they slapped us
+with spray, they tossed the whitecaps, jeering, at our heads, over our
+shoulders, into our laps. They put up the tides to tricks of eddies and
+back-currents, so that they hindered instead of helping, as by calculation
+they should have done. They laid invisible hands on our oars and dragged
+them down, or held them up as the wave raced by, so that we missed a
+stroke. Once, in the lee of an island, we paused to rest and unroll our
+chart and get our bearings, while the smooth rise and fall of the ground
+swell was all there was to remind us of the riot of water just outside.
+Then we were off again, and the imps had us. They were busy, those imps,
+all that long, windy, wave-tossed, wonderful day.
+
+For it was wonderful, and the imps were indeed frustrate, wholly
+frustrate. We pulled toward the quiet harbor that evening with aching
+muscles, hair and clothes matted with salt water, but spirits undaunted.
+Hungry, too, for we had not been able to do more than munch a few ship's
+biscuit while we rowed. Wind, tide, waves, all against us, boat leaking,
+oars disabled--and still--"Isn't it great!" we said, "great--great!"
+
+Dusk was closing in and lights began to blink along the western shore. We
+beached on a sandy point and asked our way,--where could we put up for the
+night? Children, barelegged, waded out around the boat, looking at us and
+our funny, laden craft, with curious eyes. Yes, they said, there was an
+inn, farther up the harbor, where we saw those lights--ten minutes' row,
+perhaps. We pulled off again, stiffly.
+
+"Tired?" said Jonathan. "I'll take her in."
+
+"Indeed you won't! Of course I'm tired, but I've got to do something to
+keep warm. And I want to get in. I want supper. They'll all be in bed if
+we don't hurry."
+
+Our tired muscles lent themselves mechanically to their work and the boat
+slid across the quiet waters of the moonlit harbor. The town lights grew
+bigger, wharves loomed above us, and soon we were gliding along under
+their shadow. The eddies from our oars went _lap-lap-lapping_ off among
+the great dark spiles and stirred up the keen smell of salt-soaked timbers
+and seaweed. Blindly groping, we found a rickety ladder, tied our boat and
+climbed stiffly up, and there we were on our feet again, feeling rather
+queer and stretchy after seven hours in our cramped quarters.
+
+Half an hour later we were sitting in the warm, clean kitchen of the old
+inn, and a kindly but mystified hostess was mothering us with eggs and ham
+and tea and pie and doughnuts and other things that a New England kitchen
+always contains. While we ate she sat and rocked energetically,
+questioning us with friendly curiosity and watching us with keen though
+benevolent eyes.
+
+"Rowed, did you? Jim!" calling back over her shoulder through a half-open
+door, "did you hear that? These folks have rowed all the way across the
+bay this afternoon--yes--rowed. What say? Yes, _she_ rowed, too. They say
+they're goin' on to-morrow, round Judith."
+
+"Say, now," she finally appealed to us in frank perplexity, "what're you
+doin' it for?"
+
+"We like it," said Jonathan peacefully.
+
+"Like it, do you? Well, now, if that don't beat all! Say--you know? I
+wouldn't do that, what you're doin', not if you paid me. Have another cup
+o' tea, do."
+
+The next morning she bade us good-bye with the air of entrusting us to
+that Providence which is known to have a special care for children and
+fools.
+
+In fact, through all the varying experiences of our cruise, one thing
+never varied. That was, the expression on the faces of the people we met.
+Wind and water and coast and birds all greeted us differently with each
+new day, but no matter how many new faces we met, we found in them always
+the same look--a look at once friendly and quizzical, the look one casts
+upon nice children for whose antics one is not responsible, the look one
+casts upon very small dogs. Why? Is it so odd a thing to like to row a
+little boat? If it had been a yacht, now, or even a motor-boat, the
+expression would have been different. Apparently the oars were what did
+it.
+
+On that particular morning, word of our doings must have got abroad, for
+as we stepped out on the brick sidewalk of the shady main street a little
+crowd was waiting for us. It was a funny procession:--Jonathan first, with
+the guns and the water-jug, then a boy with a wheelbarrow, on which were
+piled the two dunnage bags, the metal box, the lantern, the axe, the chart
+tube, and a few other things. An old man and some boys followed curiously,
+then I came, with two big baking-powder cans, very gorgeous because the
+red paper was not yet off them, full of provisions pressed on us by our
+friendly hostess. Tagging behind me, came an old woman, a big girl, and a
+half-dozen children. It was the kind of escort that usually attends the
+hand-organ and monkey on their infrequent visits.
+
+We loaded up the boat and pulled off, a little stiff but fairly fit after
+all. The group waved us off and then stood obviously talking us over. One
+of the men called after us, with a sudden inspiration, "Pity ye' hevn't
+got a _motor_ in there!"
+
+Though we didn't want to be a motor-boat, we were not above receiving
+courtesies from one, and when the Providence tacitly invoked by our
+hostess sent one chugging along up to us, with the proposal to take us in
+tow, we accepted with great contentment. The morning was not half over
+when we made our next landing, and looked up the captain who was to tow us
+"around Judith."
+
+For in the matter of Point Judith our friends and advisers had been
+unanimously firm. There should be a limit, they said, even to the
+foolishness of a holiday plan. With a light boat, we might have braved
+their disapproval, but loaded as we were, we decided to be prudent.
+
+"I'd hate to lose the guns," said Jonathan.
+
+"Yes, and the camera," I added.
+
+So we accepted the offer of a good friend's knockabout, and sailed around
+the dreaded Point with our little boat tailing behind at the end of her
+rope. We saw no water that we could not have met in her, but, as our
+friends did not fail to point out, that proved nothing whatever.
+
+At Stonington we were left once more to our little boat and our four oars,
+and there we pulled her up and caulked her.
+
+Strange, how we are always trying to avoid mishaps, and yet when they come
+we are so often glad of them! A leaky boat had not been in our plans, but
+if we could change that first wild row across the big bay, if we could cut
+out that leakiness, that puddling bottom, the difficult shifts of baling
+and rowing, would we? We would not. Again, as we look back over the days
+of our cruise, we could ill spare those hours of labor on the hot stretch
+of sunny beach between the wharves, where we bent half-blinded over the
+dazzling white boat, our spirits irritated, our fingers aching as they
+worked at the _push-push-push_ of the cotton waste between the strakes. We
+said hard words of the man who thought he had put our boat in order for
+us, and yet--if we could cut out those hours of grumbling toil, would we?
+We would not. For one thing, we should perhaps have missed the precious
+word of advice given us by a man who sat and watched us. He recommended us
+to put a little motor in the stern. He pointed out to us that rowing was
+pretty hard work. We said we liked it. His face wore the expression I have
+already described.
+
+We launched her again at dusk. Next morning Jonathan was a moment ahead of
+me on the wharf.
+
+"Any water in her?" I called, following hard.
+
+"Dry as a bone," he shouted back, exultant; but as I came up he added,
+with his usual conservatism, "of course we can't tell what she may do when
+she's loaded."
+
+But our work held. For the rest of the trip we had a dry boat, except for
+what came in over the sides.
+
+Now that we were in the home State, we got out our guns and hugged the
+shore closely, on the lookout for plover. We drifted sometimes, while we
+studied our maps for the location of the salt marshes. If we were lucky,
+we had broiled birds for luncheon or supper; if we were not, we had tinned
+stuff, which is distinctly inferior. When we spent the night at an inn, we
+breakfasted there, but most of our meals were eaten along the shore, or,
+best of all, on some island.
+
+"Can we find an island for lunch to-day, do you suppose?" I usually asked,
+as we dipped our oars in the morning.
+
+"Do you have to have an island for lunch?"
+
+"I love an island!" choosing to ignore the jest. "That's one of the best
+things about a boat--that it takes you to islands."
+
+"Now, why an island?"
+
+"You know as well as I do. An island means--oh, it means remoteness, it
+means quiet--possession; while you're on it, it's yours--you don't have
+every passer-by looking over your shoulder--you have a little world all to
+yourself."
+
+I could feel Jonathan's indulgent smile through the back of his head as he
+rowed.
+
+"Well, you know yourself," I argued. "Even a tiny bit of stone and earth,
+with moss on it, and a flower, out in the middle of a brook, looks
+different, somehow, from the same things on the bank. It _is_
+different--it's an island."
+
+And so we sought islands--sometimes little ones, all rocks, too little even
+to have collected driftwood for a fire, too little to have grown anything
+but wisps of beach-grass, low enough to be covered, perhaps, by the
+highest tides. Sometimes it was a larger island, big enough to have bushes
+on it, and beaches round its edges. One of these we remember as best of
+all. It lay a mile off shore, a long island, rocky at its ocean end and at
+its land end running out to a long slim line of curving beach. In the
+middle it rose to a plateau, thick-set with grass and goldenrod and bay
+bushes, from which floated the gay, sweet voices of song sparrows. Ah!
+There was an island for you! And we made a fire of driftwood, and cooked
+our luncheon, and lay back on the sand and drowsed, while the sea-gulls,
+millions of them, circled curiously over our heads, mewing and screaming
+as they dived and swooped, and behind us the notes of the song sparrows
+rose sweet.
+
+If we had had water enough in our jug, we should have camped there. We
+rowed away at last, slowly, loving it, and in our thoughts we still
+possess it. As it dropped astern I pulled in my oars and stood up to take
+its picture--no easy task, with the boat mounting and plunging among the
+swells. But I have my picture, its horizon line at a noticeable slant,
+reminiscent of my unsteady balance. It means little to other people, but
+to us it means the sweetness of sunshine and wind and water, the sweetness
+of grass and bird-notes, all breathed over by the spirit of solitude.
+
+Then it melted away--our island--into the waste of waters, and we turned to
+look toward the misty headlands beyond our bow. Where the marshlands were,
+we followed them closely, but where the shore was rocky, or, worse still,
+built up with summer cottages, we often made a straight course from
+headland to headland, keeping well out, often a mile or two, to avoid tide
+eddies. We liked the feeling of being far out, the shore a dark blue, the
+cottages little dots. But we liked it, too, when the headland before us
+grew large, its rocks and bushes stood out, and we could see the white rip
+off its point--a rip to be taken with some caution if we hoped to keep our
+cargo dry. And then, the rip passed, if the bay beyond curved in quiet and
+uninhabited, how we loved to turn and pull along close to shore, watching
+its beaches and sand-cliffs draw smoothly away beside our stern, or, best
+of all, pulling about and running in till our bow grated and we jumped to
+the wet beach and ran up the cliff to look about. Such moments bring in a
+peculiar way the thrill of discovery. It is one thing to go along a coast
+by land, and learn its ways so. It is a good thing. But it is quite
+another to fare over its waters and turn in upon it from without,
+surprising its secrets as from another world.
+
+But to do this, your boat must be a little one. As soon as you have a real
+keel, the case is altered. For a keel demands a special landing-place--a
+wharf--and a wharf means human habitation, and then--where is your thrill of
+discovery? Ah, no!--a little boat! And you can land anywhere, among rocks
+or in sandy shallows; you can explore the tide creeks and marshes and the
+little rivers; you can beach wherever you like, wherever the rippling
+waves themselves can go. A little boat for romance!
+
+A little boat, but a long cruise, as long as may be. To be sure, a boat
+and a bit of water anywhere is good. Even an errand across the pond and
+back may be a joy. But if you can, now and then, free yourself from the
+there-and-back habit, the reward is great. The joy of pilgrimage--of going,
+not there and back, but on, and on, and yet on--is a joy by itself. The
+thought that each night brings sleep in a new and unforeseen spot, with a
+new journey on the morrow, gives special flavor to the journeying.
+
+Not the least among the pleasures of the cruise were the night-camps. When
+the shore looked inviting, and harborage at an inn seemed doubtful, we
+pulled our boat above tide-water, turned her over and tilted her up on her
+side for a wind-break, and there we spent the night. The half-emptied
+dunnage bags were our pillows, the sand was our bed. Sand, to sleep on, is
+harder than one might suppose, but it is better than earth in being easily
+scooped out to suit one's needs. Indeed, even on a pneumatic mattress, I
+should hardly have slept much that first night. It was a new experience.
+The great world of waters was so close that it seemed, all night long,
+like a wonderful but ever importunate presence. The wind blew that night,
+too, and there was a low-scudding rack, and a half-smothered moon. As we
+rolled ourselves up in our blankets and rubber sheets and settled down, I
+looked out over the restless water.
+
+"The bay seems very full to-night--brimming," I said.
+
+"Not brimming over, though," said Jonathan.
+
+"I should hope not! But it does seem to me there are very few inches
+between it and our feet."
+
+"And the tide is still rising, of course," said Jonathan, by way of
+comfort.
+
+"Jonathan, I know just where high-tide mark is, and we're fully twelve
+inches above it."
+
+Silence.
+
+"Aren't we?"
+
+"Oh, was that a question?" murmured Jonathan. "Why, yes, I think we are at
+least that."
+
+"Of course, there are extra high tides sometimes."
+
+Silence.
+
+"Jonathan, do you know when they come?"
+
+"Not exactly."
+
+"Well, I don't care. I love it, anyway. Only it seems so much bigger and
+colder at night, the water does."
+
+At last I drowsed, waking now and then to raise my head and just glance
+down at those waves--they certainly sounded as if they were lapping the
+sand close by my ear. No, there they were, quite within bounds, fully
+twenty feet away from my toes. Of course it was all right. I slept again,
+and dreamed that the tide rose and rose; the waves ran merrily up the
+beach, ran up on both sides of us, closed in behind us. We were lying on a
+little sand island, and the waves nibbled at its edges--nibbled and nibbled
+and nibbled--the island was being nibbled up. This would never do! We must
+move! And I woke. _Ripple, ripple, swash!_ _ripple, ripple, swash!_ went
+the unconscious waves. As I raised my head I saw the pale beach stretching
+off under the moon-washed mists of middle night. Reassured, I sank back,
+and when I waked again the big sun was well above the rim of the waters
+and all the little waves were dancing and the wet curves of the beach were
+gleaming in the new day.
+
+The water was not always restless at night. The next time we camped we
+found a little harbor within a harbor, a crescent curve of fine white sand
+ending in a point of rock. In one of its clefts we made our fire and
+broiled our plover, ranging them on spits of bay so that they hung over
+the two edges of rock like people looking down into a miniature Grand
+CaA+-on. There were nine of them, fat and sputtering, and while they
+cooked, we made toast and arranged the camp. Then we had supper, and
+watched the red coals smouldering and the white moonlight filling the
+world with a radiance that put out the stars and brought the blue back to
+the sky. The little basin of the bay was quiet as a pool, the air was full
+of stillness, with now and then the hushed _flip-flip_ of a tiny wave that
+had somehow strayed in from the tumbling crowd outside.
+
+We slept well, but once Jonathan waked me. "Look!" he whispered, "White
+heron."
+
+I raised my head. There, quite near us in the shallow water, stood a great
+pale bird, motionless, on one long, slim leg, his oval body, long neck,
+head and bill clearly outlined against the bright water beyond. The mirror
+of the water reflected perfectly the soft outline, making a double
+creature, one above and one below, with that slim stem of leg between.
+
+I watched him until my neck grew tired. He never moved. Out beyond him,
+more dim, stood his mate, motionless too. Now and then they called to each
+other, with queer, harsh talk that made the stillness all the stiller when
+it closed in again.
+
+When we awoke, they were gone, but we found the heronry that morning on
+one of the oak-covered knolls that rise like islands out of the heart of
+the great salt marshes.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+All through the cruise, the big winds were with us more than we had
+expected. They gave us, for the most part, a right good time. For even in
+the partly protected Sound it is possible to stir up a sea rough enough to
+keep one busy. Each wave, as it came galloping up, was an antagonist to be
+dealt with. If we met it successfully, it galloped on, and left us none
+the worse for it. If we did not, it meant, perhaps, that its foaming white
+mane brushed our shoulders, or swept across our laps, or, worse still,
+drowned our guns. Once, indeed, we were threatened with something a little
+more serious. We were running down out of the Connecticut River, gliding
+smoothly over sleek water. It was delicious rowing, and the boat shot
+along swiftly. As we turned westward, it grew rougher, but we were paying
+no special heed to this when suddenly I became conscious of something dark
+over my right shoulder. I turned my head, and found myself looking up into
+the evil heart of a dull green breaker. I gasped, "Look out!" and dug my
+oar. Jonathan glanced, pulled, there was a moment of doubt, then the huge
+dark bulk was shouldering heavily away, off our starboard quarter. It was
+only the first of its ugly company. Through sheer carelessness, we had
+run, as it were, into an ambush--one of the worst bits of water on the
+Sound, where tide and river currents meet and wrangle. All around us were
+rearing, white-maned breakers, though the impression we got was less of
+their white manes than of their dark sides as they rose over us. Our
+problem was to meet each one fairly, and yet snatch every moment of
+respite to slant off toward the harborage inside the breakwaters. It took
+all our strength and all our skill, and all the resources of the good
+little boat. But we made it, after perhaps half an hour of stiff work.
+Then we rested, breathed, and went on. We did not talk much about it until
+we made camp that night. Then, as we sat looking out over the quiet water,
+I told Jonathan about the shadow over my shoulder.
+
+"It was like seeing a ghost," I said,--"no--more like feeling the hand of an
+enemy on your shoulder."
+
+"The Black Douglas," suggested Jonathan.
+
+"Yes. Talk about the scientific attitude--you've just got to personify
+things when they come at you like that. That wave had an expression--an
+ugly one. I don't wonder the Northmen felt as they did about the sea and
+the waves. They took it all personally--they had to!"
+
+"Were you frightened?" asked Jonathan.
+
+"No, of course not," I said, almost too promptly. Then I meditated--"I
+don't know what you'd call it--but I believe I understand now what people
+mean when they talk about their hearts going down into their boots."
+
+"Did yours?"
+
+"Why, not exactly--but--well--it certainly did feel suddenly very thick and
+heavy--as if it had dropped--perhaps an inch or two."
+
+"I believe," said Jonathan gently, "you might almost call that being
+frightened."
+
+"Yes, perhaps you might. Tell me--were you?"
+
+"I didn't like it--yes, I was anxious--and it made me tired to have been
+such a fool--the whole thing was absolutely unnecessary, if we'd looked up
+the charts carefully."
+
+"Or asked a few questions. But you know you hate to ask questions."
+
+"You could have asked them."
+
+"Well, anyway, aren't you glad it happened?"
+
+"Oh, of course; it was an experience."
+
+"Do you want to do it again?"
+
+"No"--he was emphatic--"not with that load."
+
+"Neither do I."
+
+If the winds sometimes wearied us a little, they helped us, too. We can
+never forget the evening we turned into the Thames River, making for the
+shelter of a friend's hospitable roof. We had battled most of that day
+with the diagonal onslaughts of a southeast gale, bringing with it the
+full swing of the ocean swell. It was easier than a southwester would have
+been, but that was the best that could be said for it.
+
+We passed the last buoy and turned our bow north. And suddenly, the great
+waves that had all day kept us on the defensive became our strong helpers.
+They took us up and swung us forward on our course with great sweeping
+rushes of motion. The tide was setting in, too, and with that and our oars
+we were going almost as fast as the waves themselves, so that when one
+picked us up, it swung us a long way before it left us. We learned to
+watch for each roller, wait till one came up astern, then pull with all
+our might so that we went swooping down its long slope, its crest at first
+just behind our stern, but drawing more and more under us, until it passed
+beyond our bow and dropped us in the trough to wait for the next giant. It
+was like going in a swing, but with the downward rush very long and swift,
+and the upward rise short and slow. How long it took us to make the two
+miles to our friend's dock we shall never know. Probably only a few
+minutes. But it was not an experience in time. We had a sense of being at
+one with the great primal forces of wind and water, and at one with them,
+not in their moments of poise, but in their moments of resistless power.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+After all, the only drawback to the cruise was that it was over too soon.
+When, in the quiet afternoon light of the last day, a familiar headland
+floated into view, my first feeling was one of joy; for beyond that
+headland, what friendly faces waited for us--faces turned even now,
+perhaps, toward the east for a first glimpse of our little boat. But hard
+after this, came a pang of regret--it was over, our water-pilgrimage, and I
+wanted it to go on.
+
+It was over. And yet, not really over after all. I sometimes think that
+pleasures ought to be valued according to whether they are over when they
+_are_ over, or not. "You cannot eat your cake and have it too." True, but
+that is because it is cake. There are other things which you can eat, and
+still have. And our rowboat cruise is one of these. It is over, and yet it
+is not over. It never will be. I can shut my eyes--indeed, I do not need
+even to shut them--and again I am under the open sky, I am afloat in the
+sun and the wind, with the waters all around me. I see again the
+surf-edged curves of the beaches, the lines of the sand-cliffs, the ragged
+horizon edge, cut and jagged by the waves. I feel the boat, I feel the
+oars, I am aware of the damp, pure night air, and the sounds of the waves
+ceaselessly breaking on the sand.
+
+It is not over. Its best things are still ours, and those things which
+were hardly pleasures then have become such now. As we remember our aching
+muscles and blistered hands, we smile. As we recall times of intense
+weariness, of irritation, of anxiety, we find ourselves lingering over
+them with enjoyment. For memory does something wonderful with experience.
+It is a poet, and life is its raw material. I know that our cruise was
+made up of minutes, of oar-strokes, so many that to count them would be
+weariness unending. But in my memory, these things are re-created. I see a
+boundless stretch of windy or peaceful waters. I see the endless line of
+misty coast. I see lovely islands, sleeping alone, waiting to be possessed
+by those who come. And I see a little, little boat, faring along the
+coast-lands, out to the islands, over the waters--going on, and on, and on.
+
+
+
+                                 THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                 COLOPHON
+
+
+                           The Riverside Press
+
+                        CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
+
+                                U . S . A
+
+
+
+
+
+                      APPENDIX A: EXTRA FRONT PAGES
+
+
+                         By Elisabeth Woodbridge
+
+                                 -------
+
+                          MORE JONATHAN PAPERS.
+                           THE JONATHAN PAPERS.
+
+                        HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+                           BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+
+
+                           More Jonathan Papers
+
+
+
+
+
+                                  ERRATA
+
+
+      Chapter VII
+      Changed camp is *4.38*--A.M. to camp is *4:38*--A.M.
+
+      Chapter VII
+      Changed arrives at *10.15*, they to arrives at *10:15*, they
+
+      Chapter VII
+      Changed What does *10.15* look to What does *10:15* look
+
+      Chapter VIII
+      Changed "Does it bite?  to "Does it bite?*"*
+
+      Chapter VIIII
+      Changed find something*,* Here's to find something*.* Here's
+
+      Chapter VIIII
+      Changed no matter *now* many to no matter *how* many
+
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MORE JONATHAN PAPERS***
+
+
+
+CREDITS
+
+
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