For a week thus we idled, now on the mountain, now in the meadow, while I, with my sketch-book and collecting-box, either whiled away the hours with my pencil, or left the unfinished work to pursue the tantalizing b.u.t.terfly, or search for unsuspecting caterpillars among the weeds and bushes.
[Ill.u.s.tration: SOME ART CONNOISSEURS.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: PROFESSOR WIGGLER.]
On a sprig of black alder I found one--the same little fellow as of old, afflicted with the peculiarities of all his progenitors. We used to call him "Professor Wiggler," owing to an hereditary nervous habit of wiggling his head from side to side when not otherwise employed. To this little humpbacked creature I am indebted for a great deal of past amus.e.m.e.nt. Distinctly I remember the whack-whack-whack on the inside of the old pasteboard box as the captive pets threatened to dash out their brains in their demonstrations at my approach. Professor Wiggler is really a most remarkable insect, as one might readily imagine from his scientific name, for in learned circles this individual is known as Mr.
Gramatophora Trisignata. He has many strange eccentricities. At each moult of the skin he retains the sh.e.l.l of his former head on a long vertical filament. Two or three thus acc.u.mulate, and, as a consequence, in his maturer years he looks up to the head he wore when he was a youngster, and ponders on the flight of time and the hollowness of earthly things, or perhaps congratulates himself on the increased contents of his present sh.e.l.l. When fully grown, he stops eating, and goes into a new business. Selecting a suitable twig, he gnaws a cylindrical hole to its centre and follows the pith, now and then backing out of the tunnel, and dropping the excavated material in the form of little b.a.l.l.s of sawdust. At length he emerges from the hollow, and again drawing himself in backward, spins a silken disk across the opening, and tints it with the color of the surrounding bark. Here he spends the winter, and comes out in a new spring suit in the following May. Only recently I had in my possession several of these twigs with their enclosed caterpillars, and in every one the color of the silken lid so closely matched the tint of the adjacent bark, although different in each, that several of my friends, even with the most careful scrutiny, failed to detect the deceptive spot. Whether the result of chance or of the instincts of the insect, I do not know; but certain it is that he paints with different colors under varying circ.u.mstances.
Insect-hunting had always been a pa.s.sion with me. Large collections of moths and b.u.t.terflies had many times acc.u.mulated under my hands, only to meet destruction through boyish inexperience; and even in childhood the love for the insect and the pa.s.sion for the pencil strove hard for the ascendency, and were only reconciled by a combination which filled my sketch-book with studies of insect life.
There was one inhabitant of our fields which had always been to me a never-failing source of entertainment. There he is, the gilded tyrant. I see him now swinging to and fro on his glistening nest of silken threads, his golden yellow form glowing in bold relief against the dark recess in the brambles. My sketch is left in the gra.s.s, and I am soon seated in front of the gossamer maze. A festive gra.s.shopper jumps up into my face, and makes a carom on the web. With a spasmodic snap of one hind leg he extricates it from its entanglement, and in another instant would fall from the meshes; but the agile spider is too quick for him.
With a movement so swift as almost to elude the eye, he draws from his body a silver cloud of floss, and with his long hind legs throws it over his captive. The head and tail of the gra.s.shopper are now further secured, after which the spider carefully straddles around the struggling insect, and bites off the other radiating webs in close proximity. The unlucky prey now hangs suspended across the opening. With business-like coolness his tormentor dangles himself from the edge of the torn web, and another cataract of glistening floss is thrown up and attached to the under side of the prisoner, after which he is turned round and round, as if on a spit. The stream of floss is carried from head to foot, and in less time than it takes to describe it the victim is wrapped in a silken winding-sheet, and soon meets his death from the poisoned fangs of his captor. Here is but one of the thousands of tragedies that are taking place every hour of the day in our fields.
While deeply interested in the closing scenes of this one, I suddenly become aware of a shadow pa.s.sing over the bushes. I turn my head, and meet the puzzled and pleasant gaze of Amos Shoopegg, as he stands there, hands in pockets, and milk-pail swinging from his wrist.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TYRANT OF THE FIELDS.]
"Wa"al, thar," he exclaims, banging down one brawny fist on his uplifted knee. "Buggin" agin, I swaow! Hain"t yeu got over thet yit? What yeu kin find so mighty fine in them "ere bugs beats me."
"Amos," I replied, "there"s a great deal more in these bugs than you imagine."
"A pleggy sight, I suppose," he resumed. "What specie o" critter ye got hold on naow?" and he stretched forward his fringed and weather-beaten neck, and peered over the brambles. "What is"t ye got thar--straddle-bug?" He came still nearer, and looked at the spider.
"Wa"al, darn my pictur ef "tain"t an old yeller-belly! P"r"aps you don"t know that them critters is pizen. Why, Eben Sanford"s gal got all chawed up by one on "em. Great Sneezer!" he exclaimed, taking three or four strides backward, with both hands uplifted. I had merely raised my hand and gently smoothed the spider.
"Wa"al," he continued, "yen kin rub "em daown ef yeu pleze; but fer _my_ part, I"d ruther keep off abaout a good spittin" distance"--which was the Shoopegg way of expressing a length of about fifteen feet. Amos was crossing lots for his "caow," he said; but in spite of his plea that the "old heiffer" was "bellerin"" like "Sam Hill," and was "gittin" "tarnal on-easy," I made him tarry sufficiently long to enable me to send him off a wiser man.
Amos Shoopegg is a type of a large cla.s.s of the native element of Hometown. Of course, "Shoopegg" is not his actual name. In the long line of his prided Puritan ancestry no one ever bore it before him. This is only an affectionate epithet given him by the village boys full twenty years ago, and it has stuck to him closer than a brother ever since, as those festive surnames always do. Nominally, Amos was a farmer. In summer he was one in fact, and could swing off as pretty a swath in haying as any man in town. But in the winter he changed his vocation, and became a disciple of the "waxed-end." All day long he could be seen, closeted with a little red-hot stove, plying his trade in his small, square shop, up near the old red school-house. Here he pounded on the big lapstone on his knees, or, with strap and foot-stick in position, punched and tugged around the edge of those marvellous brogans. He made slings and leather "suckers" for the boys, and furnished them with all the black-wax they could chew--or stow-away, to stick between the lining of their pockets. And the huge wooden shoe-pegs that he drove beneath his hammer were a sight to behold. The man who used his "cheap line of goods" might verily say he walked upon a wood-pile.
So they dubbed him "Shoe-peg," or "Shoop" for brevity. There are others among his neighbors who would furnish an inexhaustible source of study to the student of character. There"s old Rufus Fairchild, known as "Roof," a rotund specimen of rural jollity, his round face set in dishevelled locks of gray, with a twinkle in his eye and a good word for everybody. And there"s Father Tomlinson, who keeps the post-office down by the dam, as genial an old fellow as ever wrapped up his throat in a white stock. And I might almost continue the list indefinitely. But there is one I must especially mention; and, now that I think of it, he really should have headed the list, for he stands alone--or at least he does _sometimes_. If you are in search of the embodiment of typical Erin, you need go no farther; here he is. This individual represents another nationality which swells the population of Hometown--the hard-working laborers who toil in the great factory down in the glen, called "Satan"s Misery." The above personage is one of the best-hearted creatures in the town; but it is the old story, and the world to him is enclosed in the compa.s.s of a barrel-hoop. When last I saw him he was in an evident decline, but as I put my finger on his wrist I could still feel the pulsations of the whiskey coursing through his veins.
"Look here, my good fellow," I said to him one day, "why don"t you taper off a little? If you keep on in this way, you"ll be in your grave in less than a month. How would you like that?"
"Arrah, begorra," he replied, with a look of hopeful resignation, "if I cud awnly be shure o" me gude skvare dthrink in the other wurrld, oi wudn"t moind."
The record of a single evening spent in the village store, with its rural jargon and homespun yarns, its odd vernacular and rustic gossip, would make a volume as rare and unique as the characters it would depict.
The store itself is a matchless picture in its way, and for variety in accessory is as rich as could be wished for. The low, murky ceiling, hung with all manner of earthly goods--scythes and rakes, boots and pails, in pendulous array; bottles and boxes, brooms and breast-pins, are here--in short, everything that heart could wish or thought suggest, from speckled calicoes to seven-cent sugar, or from a three-tined fork to a goose-yoke. Evening after evening, for an hour or so, I was tempted thither, until I found the week had gone. Sunday came again--Sunday in New England. The old bell swung on its wheel in the belfry, ringing out its call to devotion, and ere the echo had died in the recesses of the mountain beyond the still atmosphere reverberated with an answering peal from the little sister church in the valley below, as the scattered groups with strolling steps wend their way to "meeting," and the gay loads from Newborough go flitting by on the accustomed Sunday drive.
Monday dawned on Hometown. It found me up and doing. I had enjoyed one week of glorious loafing, but work was the programme for the next. I went to Draper"s Inn and engaged a horse and buggy "until further notice." "A spang-up team" he called it, and it would be up "in half a jiffy." We were waiting for it when it came, and what with our variety of luggage in the shape of canvases, color-boxes, hammocks, camp-seats, and easels, every bit of available s.p.a.ce in that buggy was well utilized. Before the clock has struck nine, we are spinning along down through the village, now past the store, now over the bridge, and turning to the right, we glide by the little post-office, as the kind face of Father Tomlinson nods a "good-bye" from the door-way.
A little farther, and we have left the little slope-roofed school-house in our path, and are soon ascending the long hill of Zoar, from which we look back four miles to the cliff and nestling town. In ten minutes more we approach the brow of a steep declivity, and the broad Housatonic opens up to view, winding off into the misty mountains in the distance.
There is now a drive of half a mile along the side of a wild mountain-slope, where mountain-laurels grow in wild profusion, and the rooty, overhanging banks are tufted with rich green moss, overgrown with checker-berries and arbutus. The river roars far down below us, and for a few minutes our eyes feast on as lovely an extent of varied New England landscape as is easily found. And yet this is only a short section of one of the many matchless drives that follow the course of this beautiful river around the borders of Hometown.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FAMILIAR FACES AT THE VILLAGE STORE.]
Suddenly we leave the stream as it glides away on an abrupt turn beneath the crescent of a rocky precipice, and before we have fairly lost the sound of the ripples we have arrived at our journey"s end. A pair of bars under an old b.u.t.ternut-tree mark the place. The carriage is backed to the side of the road, and the horse turned loose in the rocky meadow.
This is Joab Nichols"s "pasture lot," with fodder consisting princ.i.p.ally of huge boulders, hardhack, and spleenwort; to be sure, with a stray relish of "b.u.t.ter-and-eggs" here and there, and a thousand white saucers of wild carrot handy to go with them. One or two trips across the field bring all our luggage, and we are soon enjoying cool comfort in the hemlock shade of a fairy grotto. Above us the babbling brook bounds and splashes over mossy rocks, disappearing in a ma.s.s of creamy foam, from under which it eddies toward us only to plunge twenty feet into a miniature canon below. Again, yonder it bubbles into a whirling pool, where the bordering ferns bend and nod above its buoyant surface; and now gliding from view beneath the tangle of drooping boughs, it disappears only to burst forth once more in its merry song as it rushes over the rapids.
"I chatter, chatter as I go, To join the br.i.m.m.i.n.g river; For men may come and men may go, But I go on forever."
Here in this wild retreat I have found my sylvan studio--shut in by fringed and fragrant evergreens, enlivened by the undergrowth of feathery fronds, and the shimmer of the beech, as the tracery of overhanging boughs trembles in the gentle breeze. Day after day finds us in this little paradise, and as one in luxurious hammock swings away the hours, now lost in fiction, now in short repose, or perhaps with busy needle fashions graceful figures in Kensington design, the canvas on the easel shows a fortnight"s constant care, and the palette changes to a keepsake of a sunny memory--a tinted souvenir.
For two weeks the gurgling brook sang to us in this wild retreat. As evening after evening closed in upon us, the unfinished pictures were stowed away in horizontal crevices between the rocks, and, with hammock still swinging in the trees, we left the gloom to the hooting owl, that evening after evening, with tremulous cry, proclaimed the twilight hour from the tall hemlock overhead. Ere long the murmuring Housatonic shimmers below us in the moonlight as we hurry on our homeward way, and the distant lights of Hometown are soon seen glimmering; through the evening mist. The old bridge now rumbles through the darkness its signal of our return, and the host of Draper"s Inn is seen awaiting us at the illumined door-way. A quiet, cosy supper, and in the rays of a gleaming lantern, held aloft to light our path, we follow our lengthening shadows to the old front gate. Repeat this day"s record fourteen times, and you have the sum of a happy experience, with but one drawback: it had an end--an end that would have left its reaction, were it not for the store of increased pleasure that awaited us for the few closing days of our pilgrimage--for me, at least, although in other scenes, its climax.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A SOUVENIR.]
Many like me are happy in the possession of a dear old homestead; but there are few, I ween, who enjoy the blessing of a double inheritance such as has been my lot--two homes which share my equal devotion, two homes without a choice; the one this beloved heirloom in Hometown, and the other--But you shall see. We shall be there soon, for the little satchel is packed, and the carriage awaits us at the gate. A drive of eighteen miles is before us--a beautiful series of pictures. Down through the village, past the old red mill and smithy, with its ringing anvil, and we are soon winding our way through a sombre glen. Presently we catch glimpses of the great rumbling factory, with its clouds of smoke and steam melting into the wooded mountain above. The old yellow bridge now creaks under our approach, and ere we are aware a sudden turn leads us out of a wilderness on to the sh.o.r.e of the beautiful Housatonic. For a few minutes the rushing water trickles through the wheels as over jolting stones our pony leads us through the ford, and, refreshed by the cool bath, makes a lively sally up the eastern bank.
For ten miles the Housatonic guides us around its winding curves through a path of ever-changing beauty, now shut in by the dense, dark evergreens, and again emerging into a bower of silvery beeches, where the roadway is carpeted with mottled shadows, and the dappled trunks flicker with the softened glints of sunlight. Here we come upon a sandy stretch where the road is sunken between two sloping banks thick-set with mulleins and sweet-fern, and overrun with creeping brambles. The stone-wall above is wreathed in trailing woodbine, and along its crest we see the swaying tips of wheat from the edge of the field just beyond; and here we pa.s.s a border of whortleberry bushes, laden with their fruit. Now it is a hazel thicket crowding close upon our wheels, and among the leaves we see the brown, tanned husks of the ripening nuts, almost ready for that troop of boys and girls that you may be sure are watching and waiting for them.
The old gray toll-bridge soon nears to view, with its two long spans and fantastic beams. Farther on, peering from its willows, stands the ruined cider-mill, with its long moss-grown lever jutting through the trees--an old-time haunt, now crumbling in decay. But we only catch a glimpse of it, for in a moment more we are shut in beneath another bower of beeches and white birches, where the road takes a steep ascent, and the rippling river sends up its sunny reflections among the leaves and tree-trunks.
When once more upon a level, it is to look ahead through a long avenue of shade--a leafy canopy two miles in length--with only an occasional break to open up some charming bit of landscape across the water. In these two miles of umbrage you may see types of almost every tree that grows within the boundaries of New England. Old veteran beeches are here, their trunks disfigured with scars that once were names cut in the bark. Here are spots that look like half obliterated figures; and here are spreading hieroglyphs that tell, perhaps, of old-time vows plighted at the trysting-tree; and here"s a semblance of a heart, a broken heart indeed, if its present form be taken as a prophetic symbol.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ALONG THE HOUSATONIC.]
There are magnificent rock-maples too, and silver-maples that shake down their little swarms of winged seeds. Tulip-trees and spotted b.u.t.tonwoods grow side by side, and quivering aspens and white poplars are seen at every clearing. There are yellow birch-trunks frayed out with the wind, and great snake-like stems of grape-vine, that twist and writhe among the branches of the trees. There are hop hornbeams, and chestnuts, and--But there is no need to enumerate them all. Just think of every New England tree you ever knew, and add a score besides, and you will form a slight idea of the varied verdure that hems in this charming Housatonic drive, with its rocky roadside embroidered in trickling moss and fumitory; and rose-flowered mountain-raspberry growing so close upon the road that your pony takes a wayward nip, and plucks its blossomed tip as he pa.s.ses.
Now comes an open level, with wide, expansive views, where every turn upon the road brings its fresh surprise, as some new combination of hazy mountain landscape towers above the distant river bend; and the flitting cloud shadows lead their capricious, undulating chase across the wooded slopes. The roadsides here are full of everchanging beauties too, with their tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of ornamental sunflowers, their picturesque old fences, and their clumps of purple-berried poke-weed, with here and there a yellow patch of toad-flax, and aromatic tufts of tansy hugging close against the fence. Even that clambering screen of clematis that trails over the shrubbery yonder cannot hide the scattered tips of crimson that already have appeared among the sumach leaves.
There are a thousand things one meets upon a country ride or ramble which at the time are allowed to pa.s.s with but a glance. The eye is surfeited and the mind confused with the continual pageantry. But months afterward, in the reveries about our winter fires, they all come back to us, with the added charm of reminiscence; and whether it be a crystal spring among a bank of ferns, or a thistle-top with its fluttering b.u.t.terfly and inevitable b.u.mblebee rolling in the tufted blossom, or a squirrel running along a rail, or perhaps a rattling gra.s.shopper hovering in mid-air above the dusty road--no matter what, they all are welcome memories at our fireside, and draw our hearts still closer to the loveliness of nature.
This Housatonic road is rich in just such pastoral pictures. Two hours on such a course soon pa.s.s, when our pony whinnies at the welcome sight of the old log water-trough beyond--a landmark old and green when I was yet a boy, still nestling in its rocky bed, shadowed by the drooping hemlocks, still lavish with its overflowing bounty.
This benefactor by the way-side marks a turning-point in our journey, as we leave the grandeur of the Housatonic to pursue our way by the nooks and dingles of the wild Shepaug--a bubbling tributary whose happy waters sing of a varied experience. Now placid through the blossoming fields, now plunging down the precipice to ripple through a verdant valley, where, hemmed in at every turn, it seeks its only liberty beneath the rumbling of the old mill-wheels; and at last, ere it loses its ident.i.ty in the swelling tide, leaving a mischievous and tumultuous record as it pours through the rocky canon, and with surging, whirling volume carves huge caverns and fantastic statues in its ma.s.sive bed of stone. Even now through the dark forest beyond we can hear the m.u.f.fled roar, and for nearly a league farther as we ascend the long hill it comes to us in fitful whispers wafted on the changing breeze. Reaching the summit of this incline, we find ourselves on a hill-top wide and far-reaching, on right and left losing itself in wooded wold, while in front the level road diminishes to a point, surmounted by blue hills in the distance.
Two miles on a pastoral hill-top, where golden-rod and tall spiraeas cl.u.s.ter along the lichen-covered walls, where orange-lilies gleam among the alders, with now and then a blazing group of b.u.t.terfly-plant or a dusty clump of milk-weed. The air is laden with the nut-like odor of the everlasting flowers all around us. The buzzing drum of the harvest-fly vibrates from every tree, and we hear the tinkling bell and lowing of the cattle in some neighboring field. Farther on, we look down from the edge of the plateau through the length of Happy Valley, with its winding stream, its barns and busy mills, its sunny homes glinting through the summer haze. On the left the lofty shadowed cliff known as "Steep-rock"
towers against the evening sky, and again we catch the murmuring whiffs of the rushing stream in its sweeping bend beneath the overhanging precipice. A sharp turn round a jutting hill-side, and I meet a prospect that quickens the heart and makes the eye grow dim. There beyond, three miles "as flies the laden bee," I linger on the welcome sight, as on its hill-top fair two steeples side by side betray the hidden town, my second home.
How lightly did I appreciate the fortunate journey when, twenty summers ago, I followed this road for the first time, when a boy of ten years, on my way to an unknown village, I looked across the landscape to the little spires on that distant hill! Little did I dream of the six years of unmixed happiness and precious experience that awaited me in that little Judea! I only knew that I was sadly quitting a happy home on my way to "boarding-school"--a school called the Snuggery, taught by a Mr.
Snug, in a little village named Snug Hamlet, about twenty miles from Hometown.
There are some experiences in the life of every one which, however truthful, cannot be told but to elicit the doubtful nod or the warning finger of incredulity. They were such experiences as these, however, that made up the sum of my early life in that happy refuge called in modern parlance a "boarding-school"--a name as empty, a word as weak and tame in its significance, as poverty itself; no doubt abundantly expressive in its ordinary application, but here it is a mockery and a satire. This is not a "boarding-school;" it is a _household_, whose memories moisten the eye and stir the soul; to which its scattered members through the fleeting years look back as to a neglected home, with father and mother dear, whom they long once more to meet as in the tenderness of boyhood days; a cherished remembrance which, like the "house upon a hill, cannot be hid," but sends abroad its light unto many hearts who in those early days sought the loving shelter; a bright star in the horizon of the past, a glow that ne"er grows dim, but only kindles and brightens with the flood of years. Yes, yes; I know it sounds like a dash of sentiment, but words of mine are feeble and impotent indeed when sought for the expression of an attachment so fond, of a love so deep.
Fifteen years ago, with a parting full of sorrow, I rode away from Snug Hamlet yonder in the village stage--a day that brought a depression that lingered long, and lingers still. Glowing, sunset-tinted fields glide by unnoticed now, as, with eyes intent on the distant hill, I look back through the lapse of time. A mile has gone without my knowing it, when a joyous laugh awakens me from my day-dreams. Two boys approach us on the road ahead, and, what might seem very strange to you, one wears a wooden boot-jack strung around his neck and dangling on his breast; but he carries his burden lightly and cheerfully. As they near the carriage I draw the rein, and they both pause by the roadside.
"Well, boys," I ask, "where do _you_ hail from?"
"We"re from the Snuggery, sir."
"I thought so," said I, with a laugh, in which they both joined. "But what are you doing with that boot-jack?"
"Oh, you see," said one, with a roguish smile, "Charlie and I were having a little tussle in the sitting-room, and he picked up Mr. Snug"s boot-jack in the corner and began to pummel me with it; and jest as we were having it the worst, and were rollin" on the floor, Mr. Snug came in and caught us in the job, and now we"re _payin"_ for it."
"How so?" I inquired, well knowing what would be the response.
"Oh, you see, Mr. Snug held a diagnosis over our remains, and said he thought we were suffering, for the want of a little exercise, and ordered us on a trip to Judd"s Bridge."
"And the boot-jack?"
"Oh, he said that Charlie might want to play with that some more on the way, and that he"d better fetch it along;" and with a mischievous snicker at his enc.u.mbered companion, he led him along the road in an hilarious race, while we enjoyed a hearty laugh at their expense.