Read Ebook: The Mystery at Putnam Hall: The School Chums' Strange Discovery by Stratemeyer Edward

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AUTUMN 1

SPRING 79

A DAY IN JUNE 120

BERRY-TIME FELICITIES 147

RED LEAF DAYS 177

AMERICAN SKYLARKS 195

A QUIET MORNING 208

IN THE LANDAFF VALLEY 217

A VISIT TO MOUNT AGASSIZ 228

FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA

AUTUMN

"There did they dwell, As happy spirits as were ever seen; If but a bird, to keep them company, Or butterfly sate down, they were, I ween, As pleased as if the same had been a Maiden-queen."

WORDSWORTH.

Five or six hours of pleasant railway travel, up the course of one river valley after another,--the Merrimac, the Pemigewasset, the Baker, the Connecticut, and finally the Ammonoosuc,--not to forget the best hour of all, on the shores of Lake Winnipisaukee, the spacious blue water now lying full in the sun, now half concealed by a fringe of woods, with mountains and hills, Chocorua, Paugus, and the rest, shifting their places beyond it, appearing and disappearing as the train follows the winding track,--five or six hours of this delightful panoramic journey, and we leave the cars at Littleton. Then a few miles in a carriage up a long, steep hill through a glorious autumn-scented forest, the horses pausing for breath as one water-bar after another is surmounted, and we are at the height of land, where two or three highland farmers have cleared some rocky acres, built houses and painted them, and planted gardens and orchards. As we reach this happy clearing all the mountains stand facing us on the horizon, and below, between us and Lafayette, lies the valley of Franconia, toward which, again through stretches of forest, we rapidly descend. At the bottom of the way Gale River comes dancing to meet us, babbling among its boulders,--more boulders than water at this end of the summer heats,--in its cheerful uphill progress. Its uphill progress, I say, and repeat it; and if any reader disputes the word, then he has never been there and seen the water for himself, or else he is an unfortunate who has lost his child's heart , and no longer lives by faith in his own senses. On the spot I have called the attention of many to it, and they have every one agreed with me. Mountain rivers have attributes of their own; or, possibly, the mountains themselves lay some spell upon the running water or upon the beholder's eyesight. Be that as it may, Lafayette all the while draws nearer and nearer, we going one way and Gale River the other, until, after leaving the village houses behind us, we alight almost at its base. Solemn and magnificent, it is yet most companionable, standing thus in front of one's door, the first thing to be looked at in the morning, and the last at night.

And so it goes. In Franconia it must be a very bad half day indeed when we fail to stretch our legs with a five or six mile jaunt. I speak of those of us who foot it. The more ease-loving, or less uneasy members of the party, who keep their carriage, are naturally less independent of outside conditions. When it rains they amuse themselves indoors; a pitch of sensibleness which the rest of us may sometimes regard with a shade of envy, perhaps, though we have never admitted as much to each other, much less to any one else. To plod through the mud is more exhilarating than to sit before a fire; and we leave the question of reasonableness and animal comfort on one side. Time is short, and we decline to waste it on theoretical considerations.

Our company, as I say, is divided: carriage people and pedestrians, we may call them; or, if you like, drivers and footmen. The walkers are now no more than the others. Formerly--till this present autumn--they were three. Now, alas, one of them walks no longer on earth. The hills that knew him so well know him no more. The asters and goldenrods bloom, but he comes not to gather them. The maples redden, but he comes not to see them. Yet in a better and truer sense he is with us still; for we remember him, and continually talk of him. If we pass a sphagnum bog, we think how at this point he used to turn aside and put a few mosses into his box. Some professor in Germany, or a scholar in New Haven, had asked him to collect additional specimens. In those days of his sphagnum absorption we called him sometimes the "sphagnostic."

And indeed this whole beautiful hill country is his. How happy he was in it! I used sometimes to talk to him about the glories of our Southern mountains,--Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia; but he was never to be enticed away even in thought. "I think I shall never go out of New England again," he would answer, with a smile; and he never did, though in his youth he had traveled more widely than I am ever likely to do. The very roadsides here must miss him, and wonder why he no longer passes, with his botanical box slung over his shoulder and an opera-glass in his hand,--equally ready for a plant or a bird. He was always looking for something, and always finding it. With his happiness, his goodness, his gentle dignity, his philosophic temper, his knowledge of his own mind, his love of all things beautiful, he has made Franconia a dear place for all of us who knew him here.

To me, as to all of us, it is dear also for its own sake. This season I returned to it alone,--with no walking mate, I mean to say. He was to join me later, but for eight or ten days I was to follow the road by myself. At night I must make my own forecast of the weather and lay out my own morrow.

The first day was one of the good ones, fair and still. As I came out upon the piazza before breakfast and looked up at Lafayette, a solitary vireo was phrasing sweetly from the bushes on one side of the house, and two or three vesper sparrows were remembering the summer from the open fields on the other side. It was the 22d of September, and by this time the birds knew how to appreciate a day of brightness and warmth.

Seeing them in such a mood, I determined to spend the forenoon in their society. I would take the road to Sinclair's Mills,--a woodsy jaunt, yet not too much in the forest, always birdy from one end to the other.

The forenoon was not without its tragedy, nevertheless. As I came out into the open, on my return from the river woods toward the Bethlehem road, a carriage stopped across the field; a man jumped out, gun in hand, ran up to an unoccupied house standing there by itself, with a tract of low meadow behind it, peeped cautiously round the corner, lifted his gun, leveled it upon something with the quickness of a practiced marksman, and fired. Then down the grassy slope he went on the run out of sight, and in a minute reappeared, holding a crow by its claw. He took the trophy into the carriage with him,--two ladies and a second man occupying the other seats,--and as I emerged from the pine wood, fifteen minutes afterward, I found it lying in the middle of the road. Its shining feathers would fly no more; but its death had brightened the day of some of the lords and ladies of creation. What happier fate could a crow ask for?

One of my first desires, this time , was to revisit Lonesome Lake, a romantic sheet of water lying deep in the wilderness on the back side of Mount Cannon, at an elevation of perhaps twenty-eight hundred feet, or something less than a thousand feet above the level of Profile Notch. One of its two owners, fortunately, is of our Franconia company; and when I spoke of my intention of visiting it again, he bade me drive up with his man, who would be going that way within a day or two. Late as the season was getting, he still went up to the lake once or twice a week, it appeared, keeping watch over the cabin, boat-house, and so forth. The plan suited my convenience perfectly. We drove to the foot of the bridle path, off the Notch road; the man put a saddle on the horse and rode up, and I followed on foot.

The climb is longer or shorter, as the climber may elect. A pedestrian would do it in thirty minutes, or a little less, I suppose; a nature-loving stroller may profitably be two hours about it. There must be at least a hundred trees along the path, which a sensitive man might be glad to stop and commune with: ancient birches, beeches, and spruces, any one of which, if it could talk, or rather if we had ears to hear it, would tell us things not to be read in any book. Hundreds of years many of the spruces must have stood there. Some of them, in all likelihood, were of a good height long before any white man set foot on this continent. Many of them were already old before they ever saw a paleface. What dwarfs and weaklings these restless creatures are, that once in a while come puffing up the hillside, halting every few minutes to get their breath and stare foolishly about! What murderer's curse is on them, that they have no home, no abiding-place, where they can stay and get their growth?

It is a precious and solemn stillness that falls upon a man in these lofty woods. Across the narrow pass, as he looks through the branches, are the long, rugged upper slopes of Lafayette, torn with slides and gashed into deep ravines. Far over his head soar the trees, tall, branchless trunks pushing upward and upward, seeking the sun. In their leafy tops the wind murmurs, and here and there a bird is stirring. Now a chickadee lisps, or a nuthatch calls to his fellow. Out of the tangled, round-leaved hobble-bushes underneath an occasional robin may start with a quick note of surprise, or a flock of white-throats or snowbirds will fly up one by one to gaze at the intruder. In one place I hear the faint smooth-voiced signals of a group of Swainson thrushes and the chuck of a hermit. A few siskins pass overhead, sounding their curious, long-drawn whistle, as if they were blowing through a fine-toothed comb. Further up, I stand still at the tapping of a woodpecker just before me. Yes, there he is, on a dead spruce. A sapsucker, I call him at the first glance. But I raise my glass. No, it is not a sapsucker, but a bird of one of the three-toed species; a male, for I see his yellow crown-patch. His back is black. And now, of a sudden, a second one joins him. I am in great luck. This is a bird I have never seen before except once, and that many years ago on Mount Washington, in Tuckerman's Ravine. The pair are gone too soon, and, patiently as I linger about the spot, I see no more of them. A pity they could not have broken silence. It is little we know of a bird or of a man till we hear him speak.

It is one of the best things about a place like this that it gives a man a most unusual feeling of remoteness and isolation. To be here is not the same as to be in some equally wild and silent spot nearer to human habitations. The sense of the climb we have made, of the wilderness we have traversed, still folds us about. The fever and the fret, so constant with us as to be mostly unrealized or taken for the normal state of man, are for the moment gone, and peace settles upon the heart. For myself, at least, there is an unspeakable sweetness in such an hour. I could stay here, forever, I think, till I became a tree. That feeling I have often had,--a state of ravishment, a kind of absorption into the life of things about me. It will not last, and I know it will not; but it is like heaven, for the time it is on me,--a foretaste, perhaps, of the true Nirvana.

Yet to-day--so self-contradictory a creature is man--there were some things I missed. The dreamer was still a hobbyist, and the hobbyist had been in the Lonesome Lake woods before; and he wondered what had become of the crossbills. The common red ones were always here, I should have said, and on more than one visit I had found the rarer and lovelier white-winged species. Now, in all the forest chorus, not a crossbill's note was audible.

One day, bright like this, I was sitting at luncheon on the sunny stoop of the cabin, facing the water, when I caught a sudden glimpse of a white-wing, as I felt sure, about some small decaying gray logs on the edge of the lake just before me, the remains of a disused landing. The next moment the bird dropped out of sight between two of them. I sat motionless, glass in hand, and eyes fixed upon the spot where he had disappeared. I fancied he was at his bath. Minute after minute elapsed. There was no sign of him, and at last I left my seat and made my way stealthily down to the shore. Nothing rose. I tramped over the logs, with no result. It was like magic,--the work of some evil spirit. I began almost to believe that my eyes had been made the fools of the other senses. If I had seen a bird there, where in the name of reason could it have gone? It could not have dropped into the water, seeking winter quarters in the mud at the bottom, according to the notions of our old-time ornithologists!

Half an hour afterward, having finished my luncheon, I went into the woods along the path; and there, presently, I discovered a mixed flock of crossbills,--red ones and white-wings,--feeding so quietly that till now I had not suspected their presence. My waterside bird was doubtless among them; and doubtless my eyes had not been fixed upon the place of his disappearance quite so uninterruptedly as I had imagined. It was not the first time that such a thing had happened to me. How frequently have we all seen a bird dart into a bit of cover, and never come out! If we are watchful and clever, we are not the only ones.

Luck has no little to do with a bird-lover's success or failure in any particular walk. If we go and go, patience will have its wages; but if we can go but once or twice, we must take what Fortune sends, be it little or much. So it had been with me and the three-toed woodpeckers, that morning. I had chanced to arrive at that precise point in the path just at the moment when they chanced to alight upon that dead spruce,--one tree among a million. What had been there ten minutes before, and what came ten minutes after, I shall never know. So it was again on the descent, which I protracted as much as possible, for love of the woods and for the hope of what I might find in them. I was perhaps halfway down when I heard thrush calls near by: the whistle of an olive-back and the chuck of a hermit, both strongly characteristic, slight as they seem. I halted, of course, and on the instant some large bird flew past me and perched in full sight, only a few rods away. There he sat facing me, a barred owl, his black eyes staring straight into mine. How big and solemn they looked! Never tell me that the barred owl cannot see by daylight.

The thrushes had followed him. It was he, and not a human intruder, to whom they had been addressing themselves. Soon the owl flew a little further away , the thrushes still after him; and in a few minutes more he took wing again. This time several robins joined the hermit and the olive-back, and all hands disappeared up the mountain side. Probably the pursuers were largely reinforced as the chase proceeded, and I imagined the big fellow pretty thoroughly mobbed before he got safely away. Every small bird has his opinion of an owl.

What interested me as much as anything connected with the whole affair was the fact that the olive-back, even in his excitement, made use of nothing but his mellow staccato whistle, such as he employs against the most inoffensive of chance human disturbers. Like the chickadee, and perhaps some other birds, he is musical, and not over-emphatic, even in his anger.

Again and again I rested to admire the glory of Mount Lafayette, which loomed more grandly than ever, I was ready to declare, seen thus partially and from this point of vantage. Twice, at least, I had been on its summit in such a fall day,--once on the 1st of October, and again, the year afterward, on a date two days earlier. That October day was one of the fairest I ever knew, both in itself and in the pleasure it brought me.

For the next year's ascent, which I remember more in detail, we chose--a brother Franconian and myself--a morning when the tops of the mountains, as seen from the valley lands, were white with frost or snow. We wished to find out for ourselves which it was, and just how the mountain looked under such wintry conditions.

The spectacle would have repaid us for a harder climb. A cold northwest wind had swept over the summit and coated everything it struck, foliage and rocks alike, with a thick frost , white as snow, but almost as hard as ice. The effect was strangely beautiful. A dwarf fir tree, for instance, would be snow white on one side and bright green on the other. As we looked along the sharp ridge running to the South Peak, so called , one slope was white, the other green. Summer and winter were divided by an inch.

"My heart leaps up when I behold An eagle in the sky."

On that point, as concerning the fine qualities of the cespitose blueberry, we were fully agreed.

Even in Franconia, however, most of our days are spent, not in mountain paths, but in the valley and lower hill roads. We keep out of the mountains partly because we love to look at them , and partly, perhaps, because the paths to their summits have seemed to fall out of repair, and even to become steeper, with the lapse of years. One of my good trips, this autumn, was over the road toward Littleton, and then back in the direction of Bethlehem as far as the end of the Indian Brook road. That, as I planned it, would be no more than six or seven miles, at the most, and there I was to be met by the driving members of the club, who would bring me home for the mid-day meal,--an altogether comfortable arrangement. It is good to have time to spare, so that one can dally along, fearful only of arriving at the end of the way too soon. Such was now my favored condition, and I made the most of it. If I crossed a brook, I stayed awhile to listen to it and moralize its song. If a flock of bluebirds and sparrows were twittering about a farmer's barn, I lingered a little to watch their doings. When a white-crowned sparrow or a partridge showed itself in the road in advance of me, that was reason enough for another halt. It is a pretty picture: a partridge caught unexpectedly in the open, its ruff erect, and its tail, fully spread, snapping nervously with every quick, furtive step. And the fine old trees in the Littleton hill woods were of themselves sufficient, on a warm day like this, to detain any one who was neither a worldling nor a man sent for the doctor. They detained me, at all events; and very glad I was to sit down more than once for a good season with them.

And so the hours passed. At the top of the road, in the clearing by the farms, I met a pale, straight-backed young fellow under a military hat. "You look like a man from Cuba or from Chickamauga," I ventured to say. "Chickamauga," he answered laconically, and marched on. Whether it was typhoid fever or simple "malaria" that had whitened his face there was no chance to inquire. He was munching an apple, which at that moment was also my own occupation. I had just stopped under a promising-looking tree, whose generous branches spilled their crop over the roadside wall,--excellent "common fruit," as Franconians say, mellow, but with a lively, ungrafted tang. Here in this sunny stretch of road were more of my small Grapta butterflies, and presently I came upon a splendid tortoise-shell . That I would certainly have captured had I been armed with a net. I had seen two like it the day before, to the surprise of my friends the carriage people, ardent entomological collectors, both of them. They had found not a single specimen the whole season through. "There are some advantages in beating out the miles on foot," I said to myself. I have never seen this strikingly handsome butterfly in Massachusetts, as I once did its rival in beauty, the banded purple ; and even here in the hill country it is never so common as to lose that precious bloom which rarity puts upon whatever it touches.

As I turned down the Bethlehem road, the valley and hill prospects on the left became increasingly beautiful. Here I passed hermit thrushes , a catbird or two, and a few ruby-crowned kinglets,--some of them singing,--and before long found myself within the limits of a rich man's red farm; fences, houses, barns, poultry coops, and the rest, all painted of the same deep color, as if to say, "All this is mine." I remembered the estate well, and have never grudged the owner of it his lordly possessions. I enjoy them, also, in my own way. He keeps his roads in apple-pie order, without meddling with their natural beauty , and is at pains to save his woods from the hands of the spoiler. "Please do not peel bark from the birch trees,"--so the signs read; and I say Amen. He has splendid flower gardens, too, and plants them well out upon the wayside for all men to enjoy. Long may it be before his soul is required of him.

My forenoon's walk was ended. Another turn in the road, and I saw the carriage before me, the driver minding the horses, and the passengers' seat vacant. The entomologists had gone into the woods looking for specimens, and there I joined them. They were in search of beetles, they said, and had no objection to my assistance; I had better look for decaying toadstools. This was easy work, I thought; but, as is always the way with my efforts at insect collecting, I could find nothing to the purpose. The best I could do was to bring mushrooms full of maggots , and what was desired was the beetles which the larvae turned into. Once I announced a small spider, but the bottle-holder said, No, it was not a spider, but a mite; and there was no disputing an expert, who had published a list of Franconia spiders,--one hundred and forty-nine species! However, it is a poor sort of man who cannot enjoy the sight of another's learning, and the exposure of his own ignorance. It was worth something to see a first-rate, thoroughly equipped "insectarian" at work and to hear her talk. I should have been proud even to hold one of her smaller phials, but they were all adjusted beyond the need, or even the comfortable possibility, of such assistance. There was nothing for it but to play the looker-on and listener. In that part I hope I was less of a failure.

The enthusiastic pursuit of special knowledge, persisted in year after year, is a phenomenon as well worth study as the song and nesting habits of a thrush or a sparrow; and I gladly put myself to school, not only this forenoon, but as often as I found the opportunity. One day my mentor told me that she hoped she had discovered a new flea! She kept, as I knew, a couple of pet deer-mice, and it seemed that some almost microscopic fleas had left them for a bunch of cotton wherein the mice were accustomed to roll themselves up in the daytime. These minute creatures the entomologist had pounced upon, clapped into a bottle, and sent off straightway to the American flea specialist, who lived somewhere in Alabama. In a few days she should hear from him, and perhaps, if the species were undescribed, there would be a flea named in her honor.

"Yes, indeed, I know it," I answer her. An older member of the family, a --th cousin, carried off the prize many years ago, and the rest of us are left to get on as best we can, without the hope of such dignities. When I was in Florida I took pains to see the tree,--the family evergreen, we may call it. Though it is said to have an ill smell, it is handsome, and we count it an honor.

"But then, perhaps you would never have had a genus named for you, anyhow," the entomologist continues, still bent upon mischief.

And there we leave the matter. Let the shoemaker stick to his last. Some of us were not born to shine at badinage, or as collectors of beetles. For myself, in this bright September weather I have no ambitions. It is enough, I think, to be a follower of the road, breathing the breath of life and seeing the beauty of the world.

In the afternoon I took the Landaff Valley round, down the village street nearly to the junction of Gale River and Ham Branch, then up the Ham Branch Valley to a crossroad on the left, and so back to the road from the Profile Notch, and by that home again. The jaunt, which is one of our Franconia favorites, is peculiar for being substantially level; with no more uphill and downhill than would be included in a walk of the same distance--perhaps six miles--almost anywhere in southern New England.

The first thing a man is likely to notice as he passes the last of the village houses, and finds himself skirting the bank of Ham Branch , is the color of the water. Gale River is fresh from the hills, and ripples over its stony bed as clear as crystal. The branch, on the contrary, has been flowing for some time through a flat meadowy valley, where it has taken on a rich earthy hue, to which it might be natural to apply a less honorable sounding word, perhaps, if it were a question of some neutral stream, in whose character and reputation I felt no personal, friendly interest.

A little way up the valley we come to an ancient mill and a bridge; a new bridge it is now, but I remember an old one, and a fright that I once had upon it. With a fellow itinerant--a learned man, whose life was valuable--I stopped here to rest of a summer noon, and my companion, with an eye to shady comfort, clambered over the edge of the bridge and out upon a joist which projected over the stream. There he sat down with his back against a pillar and his legs stretched before him on the joist. He has a theory, concerning which I have heard him discourse more than once,--something in his own attitude suggesting the theme,--that when a man, after walking, "puts his feet up," he is acting not merely upon a natural impulse, but in accordance with a sound physiological principle; and in accordance with that principle he was acting now, as well as the circumstances of the case would permit. We chatted awhile; then he fell silent; and after a time I turned my head, and saw him clean gone in a doze. The seat was barely wide enough to hold him. What if he should move in his sleep, or start up suddenly on being awakened? I looked at the rocks below, and shivered. I dared not disturb him, and could only sit in a kind of stupid terror and wait for him to open his eyes. Happily his nap did not last long, and came to a quiet termination; so that the cause of science suffered no loss that day; but I can never go by the place without thinking of what might have happened.

Here, likewise, on an autumnal forenoon, two or three years ago, I had another memorable experience; nothing less than the song of a hermit thrush. It was in the season after bluebirds and hermits had been killed in such dreadful numbers by cold and snow at the South. I had scarcely seen a hermit all the year, and was approaching the bridge, of a pleasant late September morning, when I heard a thrush's voice. I stopped instantly. The note was repeated; and there the bird stood in a low roadside tree; the next minute he began singing in a kind of reminiscential half-voice,--the soul of a year's music distilled in a few drops of sound,--such as birds of many kinds so frequently drop into in the fall. That, too, I am sure to remember as often as I pass this way.

In truth, all my Franconia rambles ,--all my "Francony" rambles, I say, are by this time full of these miserly delights. It is really a gain, perhaps, that I make the round of them but once a year. Some things are wisely kept choice.

"Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare."

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