Nature cruisings to the old home town and the Little Hill farm

Front matter

Boston Public Library

Do not write in this book or mark it with pen or pencil. Penalties for so doing are imposed by the Revised Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

This book was issued to the borrower on the date

Contents

Chapter Page I. The Background of aSummer Trip ....... 13

II. Our Village Fifty Years Ago............... 19 III. Up the Valley at Break of Day ............ 31 IV. Once More on the Old Frontier ........... 40 Vi! Apples from Home tf) Vora ior cease: 48 VIC The Study of; Trees. (0 coh cue) sein dist as 55 VII. Getting to Know the Maples............... 64 Vi Al Pew Days Of ces u aye retell ms We cone iris 72 IX. Going Home for Christmas ............... 79 X. Christmas at the Old Home, 1927.......... 85 XI. One More Christmas, 1928 ............... 92 AIT.) Che Ways of ‘Real Sport.) oo ee vier ci. 102

XIII. The Mother Bird and the Lease .......... 113 ALV./ Our Bighth Bloor Front) 0 ce ee 121 XV. From the High Tower Room .............. 130 XVI. In the Valley of the Muddy .............. 140 VELL ONY: DUCK MenGs reruns cn 2a ny ey il 146 XVIII. Another Winter with the Ducks .......... 155 XIX. The Coming of Spring to the Fenway ..... 164 XX. Getting Acquainted with the Fox-Sparrow .. 171 XXI. Some Incidents of the Migration .......... 178

Preface

“Our people must have another book of Cruisings,’”’ said the manager. “Especially is there a call for a volume made up of the nature cruisings and those dealing with the old home town. Put them together for the early fall.’”’ As this request, or order, came along the middle of August, there was not much time. But the material was at hand. For weal or woe what the editor does is caught and held fast in immovable type. His is the immortality of metal. It is a short-lived fame, for the foreman of the composing room always is clamoring to “‘throw it in.’’ The finest brain-children of the editor, fixed for the ages. in a substance far more enduring than paper, have to go into the melting pot to furnish metal for next week’s paper. The foreman can not have his place all cluttered up with accumulated Cruisings. But if we bring out a book, then he can have a field day. He can fill the pot full and fill her up again. He can get hold of metal enough to keep him still for a year. So to obey the manager and to please the foreman, I undertake this book.

Up under the roof, on the hottest 16th of August in forty years, the Madame and I began the task of reading, sorting and editing. In my last book I half apologized for permitting these articles written for the Christian Leader to find their way between covers. No such feeling moves me now. Rereading the work of a year or more, I am astounded by the knowledge I once had and by my prodigious industry. Like ‘“‘the little old woman whose skirts were cut to her knees while she slept,’’ I exclaim, “Can this be I!’ Evidently it can, for the dogs I love still know me. The articles do not seem so bad either. Reader, note how inevitably the most sensitive and modest become hard-boiled. and cocksure under the scourgings of the editorial task. So this book is sent forth with confidence. It ought to sell. The royalties should enable me to retire. Is it injudicious to drop this bit of a hint? If there be those who think there ought to: be another editor and that this editor should stick to Cruisings, let them try the experiment of buying many copies of this book at full list price and broadcasting its fame. The editor can not:

10 PREFACE honorably make any promises, but he assures gentle readers everywhere that he will view such experiments with sympathy. This much is sure, a man ought to be able to write his best when he deals with the old home town, the folks he loves, the great out of doors and the little things of his every-day life.

The chapters have all appeared in the Christian Leader, the official weekly journal of the Universalist Church, of which the author is the editor.

John van Schaick, Jr.

Boston, August 17, 1928,

WHERE THE BAND PLAYS IN THE OLD HOME TOWN

The Oid Home Town

' : ih _ ie.

Nes, t a ten th sO aes. eh ' f 45 4 ; { ; sat u a Oy ; r " ( ; } i “Hrs ra at Bp yet i) ade ' a see flat yt a | ee xy ea ; Wh Ak 4 Jase PK ‘Se od Me } %| , ; 1 A aa ai} My RGN es y &} ns ay Pe | 4 Se he 4 tm Py yA CA, ' ey tst ft “dA Li y at) | HEURES ; . 7” 4 / cin’ mote Io J ; oa — i t x re ¥ A h : : + At ih 9 ee

Ay oe 1 ly Eoces ie aie “4 Age a cai i ky NLD i A

; ¢ <} i sa a, ‘ aie (es > at ’ ; ’ Sis i ; OAT, Nv Sees by cn ; a ee ' Tile. Abed | ua ate i) . ' 1’? Oy i te hy F 5 Pug i ra) (q : i ye ee Ci ae HUN an eh aa | ' . 6a Cte a) 2 i Ly.) ‘ Lee ee Se ‘ 4 t a 4 } F 4 : \ 4 At iay 11 om KS ae : . +i, yA AUR De " is ir ! x i. ; ‘ ra Ry \ é i aM Nye) Me 4 ' Be ir itAS OM ( ay Leg aa if. : ja. RS, Ae en 5 ae ? f 1 AP a Ph at mag) 7 ao weit aR hs . Orme Fic ha nee) Y ; , ‘ ae ee a, rad ts OR a i ‘ o a 4 wd i ; : Mie hie a pes el PRG, ‘ eal ee i 7 Pa . oy. 7S We LA® i a ' J ed i 4 i” ‘ i | Pas \ rey oT ’ a “ 4 y . ‘Vupes P

Chapter I The Background Of A Summer Trip

HE hottest July third I ever knew on the road,” said the big jolly D. & H. conductor as we stood on the Albany platform the morning of the

Fourth. “I came out of Binghamton at 7 a. m. yesterday, and I was dripping wet before we had gone ten miles. I drew a tub of cold water when I got home and lay init. Then last night I took my car and drove out into the country for an hour and a half, cooled off, went to bed and slept like a top. So here I be ready for another red-hot Fourth.”’

That was about our experience in Boston. It was hotter getting home the night of the third than it had been before this year. Instead of going down to dinner as we had planned, we ate cold mixed fruit out of the ice box, ice cream which I went out to get, and left-overs. It was far better than a banquet. Then we took the last of the bread in the bread box and went down to the Fenway to sit on the grass and feed the baby ducks. All the babies were missing for a while, but twenty-five bedraggled looking mallards and blacks came around to see us and accept our offerings. The breeding season, the battles with water rats over their nests and babies, had been hard on them, and now moulting had started. We would hardly have known the glorious mallard males of the winter season. Luckily we hung on to some of the bread until the last moment, for just as we were going a mother mallard came around a bend of the Muddy swimming for all she was worth, with two babies cutting through the water in her wake like torpedo boats following a transport. The mother was unusually wild, but the babies came up boldly. How fast they can make their little feet go! With what speed they can dart for an insect or a crumb of bread! How gallantly they swim between huge old ducks that threaten to crush them or run them down! They are marvelously graceful, beautiful, little things. While the mother no longer had to grab food for them she did make furious rushes at ducks which got too near her babies, and gave to several jabs with her beak they will remember.

It was light after dinner for a long time and we read aloud. Lately we have picked up again “Nature Studies in Berkshire,” by John Coleman Adams. Here on the bank with the ducks around us under a red oak we read for the second time in two days his chapter, “Under the Maples.” The hot steaming July day in New York which he described, the contrast with a cool evening in his beloved Berkshire County, seemed to fit our mood. One can not turn back to the writings of Coleman Adams without realizing anew the beauty of his style. He was not strong on details. He was not a great naturalist, but he was a great nature lover. And best of all, he was a great soul. In “Under the Maples” we do not find out whether they were red maples, or Norway maples, or sugar maples, but we learn what the great trees had to say to Dr. Adams.

“Tt seems,” he says, “‘as if the maples had imbibed something of the life and spirit of that race by whose homes they have grown lo these many ages. . . To be sure the maple is still associated with the forest, and so far has a suggestion of wild nature. But seen near the homes of man, sheltering his roof and shading his door yard, it sheds its wildness as a house dog sheds his wolfish traits.”

“Tf the pines,” he adds, “utter a deep contralto note, full of pathos and suggestions of the undying

TENE:

solemnities of the world, surely the voice of the maple is the stirring tenor breathing the lively song of action, the chant of good cheer and the prophecy of weal.”

In his preaching, his poems, his prose writings, we find expressed the same philosophy—action, good cheer, prophecy of weal.

“TI feel sorry for you,” said one of our friends, when he heard we were going off on a sleeper such a hot night. But really we got along very well. I did not wait for the music of the wheels—tap, tap, tap, tap— to lull me to sleep, but dropped off to the sound of firecrackers in the South Station. Only at Springfield did I wake for a moment, and then not again until we had been in Albany for over half an hour. The Madame did not do quite so well, asserting that with just a sheet she did not have enough over her, and with a blanket about ten times too much. Why not invent a blanket from which we can peel off just the weight we need?

Whatever discomforts the night had, we forgot them in the beauty of the ride up on the old D. & H. “toward Binghamton.” It is worth having a cold, wet June if a hot, sunny July is to follow, for the contrast is refreshing. In the cold and rain the grasses and wild flowers get their roots well down and then when growth starts it is both strong and thick. A cold spring makes a big hay crop. A cold spring, if not too cold, makes millions of wild-flowers and a thick growth of leaves on trees and bushes. We were traveling up in the time of roses—the New York State time of roses. Some of the dingy backyards along the D. & H. tracks leaving Albany were glorious with them. When we had passed the falls of the Normanskill and topped the rise, we found the meadows more wonderful than we had ever seen them. From an agricultural standpoint some of the things we saw were to be deprecated, but from an estheti standpoint the daisies and buttercups and black-eyed susans and wild parsnip in the clover and timothy grass added immensely to the beauty. After Altamont, when we began to climb up into the hills, we passed old pastures full of the sweet-brier of which we have such quantities at the little hill farm. On the steep banks of the railroad here and there and in many of the fields where soil was poorer, the ground was red with devil’s paintbrush. When we reached the upper levels and began to notice the sky stretching away northward to the Mohawk we saw that the day was fair, not a dazzling blue sky, but a faint blue sky, with filmy clouds and a heat haze all over it.

The birds did not exhibit theiaselves for us. Dogs and birds both lie low on a hot Fourth of J uly. The most striking birds we saw from the car windows were some red-winged blackbirds swaying up and down on the reeds of a swamp—a restful sight on a hot morning.

The hills, too, when we began to see them, blue and hazy in the distance, brought rest and healing. Just to look off at the blue hills makes such a trip worth while. Then when the country has associations the rest medicine becomes more potent. When to lush meadows in wide valleys, blue hills, old pastures, wooded roads and wooded heights, one adds memories of the old home and of childhood, cares fall off magically and ebbing youth comes back. When the train passes the county line and one senses that he is back in old Schoharie the eye drinks in everything greedily—shape, color, movement, people, animals. The first town one strikes in Schoharie County is Esperance. Somebody who knew French and had hope must have named it a century ago. When the train stops at Schoharie J unction, we always find ourselves on a curve near the junction of the Cobleskill and Schoharie Valleys, and we can look up the valley of the Cobleskill five or six miles to the hills of the old home town.

It is always with a swelling heart that the re-

- turning traveler who is “an exile from home” sees these hills. They look down on his native village. Over them he may have tramped in his boyhood and young manhood both winter and summer. On their heights he has lain on many a warm summer afternoon with dog and books. On them the eye of parents and brothers and sister rested too. Older generations, which he barely remembers, saw them and loved them.

Admit all the narrowness of country life as compared with city, there is a depth to it often lacking in the cities. It is the more normal way to live. One is foolish who does not recognize breadth in the country and depth in the city, but the general proposition is sound that life spreads out more in the city and goes deeper down in the country. With all the insistence we are making in editorials, in contributions, everywhere, for breadth, we try to recognize that there is not anything really comparable to plumbing the depths.

Getting away from work and having a trip like this, one is able to scrutinize the work more carefully and appraise it more justly. Getting back to the old home town, the depths of feeling are stirred. One realizes better what parents, grandparents, even great grandparents (if he is as lucky as all that), neighbors, tradespeople, family friends and relatives did for him when he was growing up. It is a good thing to remember, and to let gratitude well up. It is a good thing to reflect on the solemn mystery of life— the accidents or chances or fates or Divine leading which brought ancestors into this particular valley, the power that was with them in their day, long in years, short in fact, and the guidance we ourselves have had.

One laughs quickly and tears start easily on the morning one comes back into the valley where he was born.

It is hard to feel patriotic when one is disgusted with the bombast or boasting of a cheap orator. It is easy to feel patriotic when one sees the flag hung out in all its beauty on the first house of his native village. Then with full heart he sings:

‘Land where my fathers died, Land of the Pilgrim’s pride, From every mountain side

Let freedom ring.”

The finer the love one has for his home, the better the love he has for the nation and for the entire human family to which we all belong.

Cobleskill, N. Y., July 4, 1928.

Chapter II Our Village Fifty Years Ago

HE editor of the Cobleskill (N. Y.) Times writes and requests an article on “Cobleskill Fifty Years Ago.”

As I was born November 18, 1878, I was only four years old half a century ago. Memory, however, goes back as far as that, for I recall the excitement of the ‘“‘Hayes-Tilden”’ campaign of ’76. More vividly I recall the torchlight processions of the ‘“‘Garfield- Arthur” and ‘“Hancock-English” contest of 1880 and the “Cleveland-Hendricks” and “Blaine-Logan”’ campaign of 1884. In the latter campaign I marched with a number of small boys as a rear guard of a long Cleveland procession, clad in little oilskin capes and carrying lanterns. A local merchant, Sigbert Bornstein, lined us up before we started and taught us a rhyme which we chanted as we marched: “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, is writing a book, way up in Maine.” This was considered highly derogatory to Blaine, but why I never knew. I was puzzled at the time and somewhat doubtful of the proceedings, and my doubt has increased with the years.

But I never had any doubt about Grover Cleveland. When he ran for President in 1884, he was Governor of New York State. The same fall my father ran for the State Senate and was elected. Cleveland went through our village on the Binghamton-Albany train late one afternoon during the campaign. I can still remember the feeling I had as my father came through the door of the rear car to the back platform of the train, followed by Cleveland, both tall, heavy men, and said: “Friends and Fellow Citizens, his

Excellency, the Honorable Grover Cleveland.” At that moment there came a veritable downpour of rain. William S. McIntosh, our neighbor, with long white beard, handed up an umbrella for Cleveland, and the Governor leaned down and shook hands with the crowd of hardy ones who braved the rain. Hundreds ran for the shelter of trees and buildings, but I never budged. I watched the great man while the rain soaked through my little shirt-waist and ran down my legs. As the train started he returned the McIntosh umbrella with a smile, and the crowd cheered.

Cleveland was elected President in November and inaugurated in March. Father, who also had been elected Senator, took his three little boys into Albany to see the Governor and President-elect. Daniel S. Lamont, Secretary to the President in the first Cleveland administration and Secretary of War in the second administration, sat in the big Executive Chamber at the State Capitol. He waved us on into the private offices—into one little room, no one there, into a second, also empty, into a third, and there sat the big man at the desk, a cheerful fire blazing in the fireplace. For some time he chatted with father about the Legislature, about Washington, about the reception the night before. “The first time I have opened my house to the ladies,” said the bachelor Governor. Then father presented us, Charles, John, Louis J., the Governor repeating the names, shaking each little hand with a quizzical smile, toying the while with his gold nose-glasses.

He asked about the rest of the family, and was told about the little sister at home. Our full quota of six had not yet been reached. ‘““Three boys and one girl,’ said the big man; “chow many sisters is that apiece?”’ That threw us all into dismay. I feared he wanted fractions, with which I was just getting acquainted. Charlie kicked the carpet and shifted from one leg to another. Louis looked stolidly ahead. Finally the Governor relieved our tension by saying, “A puzzle. Work it out.” As we left the office father said, “Why didn’t you speak up and tell him one sister apiece?” That was my first inkling of the answer. I was still working on fractions.

When Cleveland resigned as Governor, Hill, the Lieutenant-Governor, succeeded him. From that time on a rivalry grew up between the two men, and all Democratic politics were colored by it.

I speak of it here because it split our local community. Father took the Cleveland side and the local Democratic leaders in Cobleskill espoused the cause of Governor Hill. With all the memories of friendship and kindness in the Cobleskill of twenty-five and fifty years ago there come down the memories of the bitter enmities caused by these political divisions.

Republican-Democratic contests were tame in comparison to the Cleveland-Hill contests up in our county.

We were brought up on law and politics, but there were influences which kept us from becoming too narrow in our partisanship.

Mother, by marrying father, became a loyal Democrat, at least so far as father’s interests were concerned, but she never quite forgot that her father was a Republican. And we children never forgot it either. Grandfather’s was a home that was Exhibit A for Republicanism—grandfather, Uncle Stant as he grew up, and grandmother and the aunts also, in so far as they could be anything in those days. Besides, we heard about this one and that one among the young Republicans who took off their coats and helped roll up a big majority for father as a local candidate. Independency came as natural to us as breathing. And we have lived to see it become a dominating tendency in the politics of the entire country.

Along the line of school and church, I can go back almost as far as I can in politics. An awe-inspiring man named Boss was the first principal whom I can remember. I had no reason to fear him unless it was the way the other boys spoke about being ‘‘sent up to the principal.” He soon went, and an Irishman and Catholic named Burke came to our town as principal. Looking back now, it seems rather strange that a village almost exclusively Protestant should select a Catholic principal. Apparently the Board of Education took the broad, sensible position that they would get a good man no matter what his belief. Burke was a good man. He was a “driller.” Over and over again he would review what we had gone over. “Battle of Bannockburn,” he would almost shout. His long arm would shoot out and his index finger aim for my head, and I’d hear “You.” I can answer ‘1314’ as easily to-day as I could forty years ago. Burke made Robert Bruce live again for me. On my first trip to Scotland I went out of my way to visit Stirling Castle, Bannockburn and other memorials of Wallace and Bruce. Grover Cleveland appointed Principal Burke Superintendent of Indian Schools at Albuquerque, N. M., and our little school world was shaken to its foundation. Seeley, Snell and Ryan, who successively followed as principals, each made distinct contributions to the community, and the school always has had a standing which has attracted students from all the surrounding country.

I can not be too grateful for the religious influences about me in childhood. Here again the homes of two grandfathers, who were officers in the church and had family prayers, admirably supplemented our own home, which had Sunday newspapers and a rather liberal attitude toward Sabbath observance.

When I began to observe, Cobleskill had three churches, Methodist, Lutheran and Catholic. The Catholic burned and for some years I think ceased to exist. If masses were said in private houses I did not know about it.

Grandfather Shaver was a Methodist, and one of the most devout, tolerant, kindly men I ever knew. Mother was a Methodist, but not able to care for six children and go to church regularly, and impatient with some things in the Methodist rules and discipline. Her mother was a Lutheran until her marriage, and so we never could be partisans in any little temporary jealousies between the churches. Both father and mother insisted on our going to Sunday school regularly, but both scotched promptly the tendency to think that any one minister knew it all or any one church had all the light. Father’s father and mother lived on a farm, and were Dutch Reformed. They were honored and trusted in all the country round. That made us, as children, confident that the Dutch Reformed were good people too. When John G. Fagg, a young Dutch Reformed minister, just out of college, came to the village from Lawyersville and held services in the skating rink on Sunday afternoons, we went regularly for some time. Even father turned out for Fagg, contrary to his usual custom of going only on Thanksgiving Day, or at Easter or Commencement, or other special occasions.

Father would take Sunday for odd jobs around the place, a thing mother never objected to, unless the jobs were too much in the sight of people coming home from church. Village standards never permitted us to get out our playthings on Sunday or go on excursions, although I early imbibed the idea that “very quiet things” were all right in the sight of the Lord, and a special dispensation attached to hitching up “Bill,” the big bay horse, and driving over to Grandfather van Schaick’s at Sharon Hill for Sunday dinner.

When I began to understand “doctrine” I worried considerably over the possibility of father going to hell because he was not converted. Mother reassured me with the idea that if one were honest and paid his debts and tried to be a good neighbor it would carry him through. At any rate fears of that kind speedily evaporated. But I want to both laugh and cry when I remember that I ever worried that way about the rugged, upstanding man he was.

We never had any “heretical” literature. We never had any preachers in the town when I was growing up who were under suspicion for liberal views. And yet I did not grow up illiberal. As I look back it seems to me that the people who influenced me in church and Sunday school and day school and home must have been people of a liberal spirit, willing to live and let live, people who had views but who did not assume that they knew it all, or that anybody else did, for that matter. That there is a good God and that He cares for us, that prayer to Him is perfectly natural, that the way of Jesus is the way for us, and that ‘faith without works is dead because it standeth alone,’ some way or another got set in me deep down back in the Cobleskill of the eighties. College may have helped me clarify my thinking, but as I go back in memory I believe I got my fundamental ideas in Cobleskill.

The biggest thing that can happen to a growing boy religiously is not an experience in a revival meeting, but in some way or other to get his mind opened to the idea that all truth is sacred, that all comes from God, and that no one truth can possibly conflict with any other truth.

Such a boy eventually will see that what counts is not what a man thinks he thinks, but what deep down he really does think. He will get an insight which will enable him to look back of the Catholic mass or the Methodist prayer-meeting to the essential fact that here are people kneeling down before the same God, who can not be changed or hurt or increased or diminished by any words they use or fail to use about Him. Half the atheists come from people of narrow spirit insisting that some way or word or name or ceremony is necessary in order to be religious.

Both the Methodist church in Cobleskill, in which I grew up and got my first training, and the dignified old Lutheran church where I declaimed my high school graduating oration, are dear to me. And so are the other churches, the Baptist and Reformed, which have come in since my boyhood, and the Catholic also, from the memory of playmates and _ schoolfellows who went to mass and grew up good citizens of the community. This is not saying, “It does not matter what you believe.” It is saying, ‘“‘What you believe deep down inside and act on, matters much more than your creed.” It is also saying that ‘“‘people get drawn close to other people who ‘believe deep down inside’ what they themselves believe, whether the denominational labels they wear are the same or not.”

How did Cobleskill look to a little boy in a large yard on Grand Street, forty or fifty years ago? Nobody can answer that. All I can do is to tell a few things I remember.

The front horse-block and the back garden fence bounded the Hub of the Universe to that little boy— a Hub a little under an acre in size. Pindar’s Hill, the Picnic Woods just beyond, Main Street, Shanks Mountain, Sharon Hill and Carlisle and Albany were the high spots in the rest of the universe.