Outings At Odd Times. Abbott Charles Conrad
the gyrinus – suddenly appeared, and a turtle, as if wondering what might be the cause of the commotion, thrust its head in the air, stared angrily at me, and returned to its hidden home. There was no dearth of life in the brook, yet this is a winter day. The ground is frozen, and the rattle of wagons upon the highway penetrates even to this remote recess in the deep woods.
As a child soon tires of one toy, so I longed, after an hour’s play, for a new field and other forms of life, and so much for serious study as that I might vary my amusement; but let not this apparent aimlessness be held unworthy of the rambler. Call it play, if you choose, but the incidents of such a day come back in bold relief when, with or without an effort, they are recalled. I have found it most fortunate that unconscious cerebation is so active when I wander about, toying, as here by the forest brook, with many forms of life. More than half the acts of every creature I meet are apparently meaningless at the moment of their occurrence, but their full significance is evident when in thought I wander a second time over the same ground. Scarcely regarded incidents come well to the fore and throw a flood of light upon what lacked at the time any evidence, on the creature’s part, of complicated thought.
Herein, I think, lies the secret of so much disappointment when some people – and they are many – wander in the fields. Filled with enthusiastic desire upon laying down the teeming pages of Thoreau and Burroughs, they expect to see with another’s eyes and appreciate with another’s brain. They see a bird, a mammal, or a host of butterflies, and then ask themselves upon the spot, Well! what of them? The bare fact of their presence is all that the minds of inexperienced ramblers encompass. The wild life they have met excites a passing thrill and they give no further heed to it. And it never occurs to many to recall the incidents. Being a bit disappointed then, why give heed to the subject later? On the contrary, if at the close of the day, in the hills and hollows of the blazing wood upon the andirons, if the walk was in winter, we picture the scenes of the recent ramble, these same birds or mammals, or whatsoever else we saw, will be seen again in a new light. Why those birds and not others were where we found them; why the field-mice or rabbits or a weasel were where we saw them or it, will become evident. The various features of every visited spot will be remembered; and the cheery blaze upon the hearth tells us, as it were, the story that could not be read when facing Nature’s open page. Some of us inveterate ramblers read more than others, when in the fields, but no one can afford to trust to this alone. To extract the whole truth, the past must be recalled again and again.
As I whiled away the time with the tenants of the brook, so I gave heed to every passing bird, and what a strange panorama, as one kind after another flitted by! The happy association of woods and water here, as it attracted me, drew them to the spot, yet no one loitered long. The busy brown tree-creeper traced the crannies of the wrinkled oaks; the nuthatches followed, and their complaining squeaks seemed expressive of disappointment that so little food was to be found. Was this true? Were these little birds really complaining? It certainly seemed so. But how treacherous is this impression of seeming so! Too often, I fear, the rambler is content with it and goes his way convinced that what was vaguely apparent was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing more nor less. I hold it probably true that if every bird which found itself too late was disposed to complain, there would be a vast deal more quarreling than actually occurs. How little contention there is in the bird-world! While it is true that birds of a feather flock together, it is equally so that widely different species also amicably associate, and flagrant is the act that calls for punishment. Better luck next time is the homely proverb that actuates all non-predatorial bird life.
But the merit of birds is their suggestiveness. Promptly following the nuthatches came the ever-welcome song-sparrow. It hopped, with springtide liveliness, among the dead leaves near the brook, and then, flying to a hazel bush near by, it sang that sweet song that not even the mocking-bird ventures to repeat. The woods vanished, and the old garden with its gooseberry hedge was before me. I was a wondering child again, listening and looking at the happy bird, happy as itself.
It is December, the day is cold, the trees are leafless, the ground frozen; but not a thought of all this had clouded my joy for half a day. There is the elixir of perpetual summer even in the woods in winter, and happy is he who can find it.
Old Almanacs
It is a dilapidated outbuilding now, and the merest ghost of its former self. Scarcely one of the many marked features of the old kitchen is left. The cavernous fireplace, the corner cupboard, the narrow box staircase, the heavy double doors, with their long strap hinges, the long narrow table by the south windows, have all been removed. And sad, too, to think that, one by one, the sturdy farmer folk that lived in and loved this now dark and dingy room have all passed away. For me, it is the Mecca to which I most fondly turn when indulging in retrospection. In and about it were passed many of those peculiarly happy days, the recollection of which grows brighter as the years roll by. From late autumn until spring, when for five months the nights were long, this kitchen was the favorite rendezvous, and conversation, rather than reading, the popular amusement. Not that there were no books in the house. There were fifty volumes, at least, in the old book-case, but I can not recall one in the hands of a reader. There are many of them now on my own shelves – Gibbon, Johnson, Goldsmith, Burns, and the journal of many a Quaker of colonial times. It would be unfair to say that books were unpopular, but rather that conversation was held in higher esteem. Then, certainly, every neighborhood had its characters, and their like has not been transmitted to the present generation. I saw the last of a native folk who had occupied my neighborhood since 1680. Now a new people, and as different as black from white, occupy the land; but during my early childhood, my grandfather’s help, like himself, had always lived in the neighborhood. They had been boys together, and little wonder that, when a day’s work was done, the evening should have been spent in reminiscent talk. The farmer was not off to his book at candle-light, and the “hands” left to their thoughts.
How glad, now, am I, that I caught, even in early youth, a glimpse of simpler times! In one way, however, the world has not changed; conversation continually turned upon the weather, and there was one book to which reference was often made and quite frequently consulted – the almanac. How plainly I can see my grandfather adjust his heavy-rimmed spectacles and turn to the record of the current month! “Yes, thee is right, Abijah; the moon changes in the forenoon.” Then the thin pamphlet was hung again in its place in the chimney corner. Hard-headed and alertly observant as were the farmers of fifty years ago, they all deferred to the almanac’s dictum. Men might say, perhaps, what they pleased; but if he who could write an almanac ventured to predict, who were they to dispute it? So they thought, and if snow had been foretold for the Fourth of July, they would have explained the reason why it did not come, and pity, not scorn, the prophet.
I do not know when the first almanac was hung in the chimney corner, but the custom, once started, continued to the end, and when the kitchen was dismantled, a great pile of “Poor Richards” were brought to light from a dark hole in the cavernous corner cupboard. The wisdom crowded upon those torn and tattered pages seems to have been lost, and the later generations were content, if I do not misunderstand them, with the commonplaces and predictions to which reference has been made. But with all their unquestioning reliance upon the almanac, the men who were daily out of doors were prophets unto themselves, and proud of the petty discoveries they claimed to have made. This it was that spiced their conversation and made the meeting of two or three in a cozy kitchen an attractive occurrence to young ears. I do not wonder that books were ignored, when every laboring man laid claim to peculiar knowledge, and, of course, formulated weather proverbs, the like of which have never got into print. For while the neighborhood had, like all others, its common stock of accepted “sayings,” not a man for miles around but had some two or three that he had framed for his own guidance. Every discussion teemed with “according to Joshua,” or “Jeremiah’s saying is,” but every man was largely a follower of himself. Looking backward, and studying my grandfather’s “help,” and even my farmer neighbors, I see, in the light of the present, that these men were both ignorant and wise; having a rich store of facts from which they drew illogical deductions.
Apropos of this, let me add that of a series of sixteen newspaper clippings, from papers published in October and November, 1889, fifteen of them were predictions of a winter of unusual severity in the Middle States. The one that maintained the coming of a mild