Among the northern hills

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. THE PRIMEVAL FOREST I

II. A TROUT-STREAM 12

II

There are no streams in all the world more beautiful and grand than are the streams which flow down the ravines of the Franconia Mountains and out into the valleys. It is not to be denied that the State of New Hampshire, by its legislation or neglect of legislation, has reduced the value of the valley lands by destroying the beauty of these streams after they leave the mountain slopes. No one cares to build a country home on the bank of a river flowing with mush of saw-dust, unapproachable except by wading in soft, rotten wood, foul with drifting slab stuff and the waste of sawmills. To see water flowing in all the exhilaration of freedom you must go from the valley to the foot of the mountain, and meet the rivers where they come out from the forest. Or enter the forest high up on the mountain-side and find the spring brook, and follow it down the wild gorge through which it rushes, receiving constantly other streams, and growing into a torrent before it sweeps out on the level country and dies a miserable death, suddenly losing all spirit, vigor, life, and beauty in the mill-dam.

Pond Brook is the name of the stream which, flowing out of Echo Lake on the summit of Franconia Notch, wanders down through a dark ravine some four or five miles, always in primeval forest, until it emerges on the valley lands, and, after a mile of sunshine on fields and farms, is lost in Gale River. There are trout in Pond Brook, mostly small in the ravine, many large in the open country. Times are not now what they once were here. Time was when this brook was one of the finest trout-streams in the world. But times have changed. A large manufacturing village, six miles away, turns out on every Sunday morning in April and May scores of men with poles and lines, who reduce the trout to a comparatively small number. I have counted, on a Sunday morning, thirteen rods following one another within two hours along the bank where the brook meets the river.

Nevertheless, the angler who cares less for the number and size of his fish than for the surrounding joys which make trout-fishing so delightful will not fail to find his reward here, under the lofty slopes of Mount Lafayette, among the fields of Franconia Valley, than which no valley of America or Europe is more beautiful.

There are spots of ideal beauty all along the stream, where I have been accustomed to linger, and forget, and remember. There is one such spot where the river cuts under its left bank for ten or a dozen rods, while the other shore is a broad stretch of gravel. It flows swiftly, three or four feet deep under the high bank, on which various bushes hang in a dense mass of foliage. Then it spreads out over a wider bed of cobble-stones, making as it descends two superb curves of beauty ; then takes a straight course down a rushing rapid for ten or fifteen rods more. In this stretch of the stream I have, in the many years that I have fished Pond Brook, taken more trout and larger trout than in any other part of it. It is so open and free from trees and bushes on one shore, that you can use a fly rod with great comfort, and cover seventy or eighty feet with easy casting.

It was warm, though late in the season, when I sat down there, the other day. Golden -rod and asters made the fields bright; once in a while a Vanessa butterfly sailed along, and fluttered his chocolate-black wings with old-gold borders close under my eyes as he paused for a whiff of my cigar. The remains of a barbed-wire fence skirted the top of the bank, an example of the fast prevailing barbarism of the nineteenth century. There is no more barbaric custom in the history of mankind than the use of barbed wire to enclose fields. The express purpose is to hurt cattle. Without the hurting the barbs are useless, and plain wire would do as well. I have seen fine horses ruined by those abominations of modern fencing.

It was a day to sit lazily on the river-bank and look around and think. I took my fly-book from my pocket and hunted through its leaves for some fly which might possibly call up a trout in the rapid. As I turned over the leaves, somewhat listlessly, I found myself thinking of something far away in time and space. It was a very clear memory — or you might call it a vision, seen through the suns and the mists of more than a half-century. I saw another grassy meadow somewhat like this, and a stream not so large as this, winding its way through it.

On the bank, or on a knoll a little way from the bank, sat an old man and a very small boy. The man was a tall, slender man, with a stoop in his shoulders, long arms, long legs, long, thin, gray hair hanging over his checked shirt, blue eyes, a sharp nose, an equally sharp chin. Every minute particular of his dress and appearance came back to me distinctly. The boy was not yet five years old. But, young as he was, he was intensely interested in the instruction he was receiving. The old man was showing him the flies in his fly-book, telling him how he tied them, answering the innumerable questions of the little shaver whom he was teaching to take trout with the fly.

For this man was a renowned angler; and, like all genuine anglers, was kind to little children, and took great delight in teaching this one the gentle art. At that moment he was explaining that no one ought to tie a fly for trout on anything stouter than a single horse-hair. We had no silk-worm snells and leaders in those days. Nor had we silk lines. His line was made of horse-hair, five or six strands, tapering down to three and two and one. His rod was hickory, two lengths spliced. I do not remember the reel, but from later experiences I think it was a large, wooden, home-made reel. His lessons soon became practical.

The little boy took the rod in both hands, and began casting, or trying to cast. The perverse line behaved as it always behaves with beginners. The old man patiently disentangled it from mullentops and tussocks of grass, and with careful fingers extracted the hooks, now from his own shirt and now from the boy's. Once in a while the cast went out well, and the boy with delight obeyed the instructor, drawing, letting the flies go back on the current, drawing across, lifting the bobber and dancing it up on the ripples. And suddenly there was a rush at the tail fly. His little eyes were intently watching the cast, and the rush so startled him that he unconsciously jerked his rod and struck his first trout exactly as he should have struck him.

Then came the struggle. He wanted to lift that fish out with a swing; but the old man held him firmly by his right arm, and compelled him to handle the rod correctly. It was a marvel, has been always since that day a marvel, why that single horse-hair did not break. It held on the gentle spring of the hickory rod while the fish went under one bank and under the other, while he went down stream and the reel paid out and the boy trotted in the deep grass following the trout, and the old man kept firm grasp on the right arm of the little angler.

Yes, he was an angler then, and thereafter through all his life. He killed that trout, a half-pounder — he or the old man, who managed the rod by managing his arm. And when the trout lay on the grass they two sat down again and talked. Many and many a time after that they two sat on the grass by the brook-side and talked. The old man died long ago. But I have in my fly-book a reminder of him — two flies which he tied when he was very old. It was seeing them that brought back this memory as I sat in the sunshine.

While I read my fly-book after this fashion a grasshopper leaped on to the open page. I caught him, and I then caught three or four more, and threw them into the swift stream. They disappeared in the current; but in a moment, sixty feet down stream, I saw a small fish rise and swash the water as he seized two of them in succession.

So I stood up on the high grass-covered bank, and resumed fishing in fact instead of in fancy. I worked the water thoroughly, beginning with short casts and extending line till I had sixty or seventy feet out. Nothing rose. Then I paid out until the flies (I was using two) were more than a hundred feet away, swinging across and back, in and over the rushing water. I forgot that I was fishing, and watched the action of the flies, practising with them to make their actions life-like, thinking for the moment only that I was dancing flies on a running stream. Then I began to reel in line, and the tail fly flapped in the current close to the bowlders on my shore, while the upper fly, a small golden pheasant feather, hung loosely, swinging in the air three or four inches above the water. There was a trout under those rocks. He had seen those flies for several minutes, and what he had thought about them must be matter of conjecture. Perhaps he suspected them to be shams. Perhaps he was not in a feeding mood. Probably he was in that condition in which men often find themselves, comfortable and lazy, too much so to be easily induced to disturb himself. There are moral lessons to be learned in angling. Here was one. Temptation may be steadily withstood, but the moment of yielding comes like a flash. The price of successful resistance is eternal, unwavering, vigilant self-restraint. Something that was very life-like, a flutter of the wing, a gleam of light on the golden feath-

A TROUT-STREAM I 9

er, a doubling or outstretching of the hackle legs, a curve in the water through which he was looking — something caught the trout intellect, broke into the caution with which he had surrounded himself, and he went with a rush for that fly.

I, standing on the bank nearly a hundred feet up stream, and knowing nothing of the intellectual struggle going on in a trout's brain down there, was astonished and somewhat startled when a noble fish went into the air, sending a cloud of spray over the fly, and falling with his broad side on the hook. I had expected nothing so large.

Trout take the fly in various ways. They are skilful, by experience. In many instances, when the fly is on or near the water, the fish strikes it with his tail, and turns swiftly to seize it in his mouth. It is a charming sight to watch an insect passing over a shallow where trout are numerous near the mouth of a cold brook or on a broad rapid, and see the tails of the fish dash water at him. Often you may see, as flies light on the water, the broad tail of a large fish swash over one, and then the swirl as the head swings around and the mouth takes in the half-drowned fly. It is very common, therefore, when fishing with flies to hook fish through the tail fin. Often a fish throws his whole body over an insect.

Now and then a skilful trout will leap into the air, mouth open, and engulf a fly in his throat.

This is an interesting sight when it occurs, for you will remember that looking from below the water into the air, unless the view be perpendicular, the line of vision is around a corner, along the angle of refraction of light. The insect is one, two, or more inches away from the straight line of vision, and if the fish leaps for the insect on the direct line of vision he will certainly miss him. Do trout learn by experience the principle of the refraction of light in passing through different mediums ?

I did not hook this trout. He hooked himself. As he fell on the fly the hook pierced the skin just below the adipose fin, close to the tail fin. If he had been hooked in the regular way, in his mouth, I should probably have lost him because of what next occurred. The grassy bank on which I was standing was some ten feet above the stream, cut away in the spring freshets so that the turf extended to the edge, and the earth mixed with loose stone sloped steeply down to the rapid, bordered here with round water -w r orn stones fallen from this crumbling bank. The trout found a moral lesson at the fly end of my tackle concerning temptation. I found another lesson at the other extreme of the tackle, the butt of my rod, " Let him that thinketh he standeth," etc.

As the fish leaped I suddenly stepped forward. The bank gave way like dry dust under my feet, and I sat down with a tremendous thud on the edge of the sod. No, not on it, but in it, for I went down through it first with a crush of earth and dust and stones ; then, as my heels dug through the loose material below, with a slow but sure descent which nothing could arrest. I had but one hand to use, for the rod was in my right hand, and that fish was fighting like a tiger on the line, and the reel was paying out, and there was not more than thirty feet of line left on it, and below that rapid was a hole full of brush, whence one could never hope to recover hooks, much less a large trout.

It was a bright day, with a clear sunshine glittering over the rapid. I remember distinctly how my high, black, water-proof boots shone as they descended into the glitter. The round stones continually gave w r ay under me, and I sat down lower, lower, lower in swift progression, until I was sitting up to my waist in the river, my rod by some mysterious instinct transferred from my right to my left hand, while with the former I was bracing myself against a bowlder which was only a few inches under water. But for that bowlder I should have rolled over and over in the current.

Standing up in a stream of water is not so easy as it may seem. Rising to your feet after sitting down in it is wholly another affair from getting up from the ground in the air. Without knowing it we stand, walk, sit up, move about, swing, and manage our bodies by a continual exertion of mind as well as muscle. A dead man cannot stand. A child must learn by experience to walk, and by slow practice acquire the use of the countless muscles, from head and eyes to feet and toes, which are essential to standing, walking, and running. All this experience we acquire in the air. In the water, where a pound of flesh no longer presses downward an avoirdupois pound, much of our atmospheric experience is useless. With a heavy medium like water around us, it is no easy thing to regain foothold once lost. This is why many persons are drowned in water in which, with due presence of mind, they could stand up on hard bottom and walk ashore.

I swung my feet down -stream, and secured a rough hold for my heels. Then I transferred my rod again to the right hand, felt that the fish was on the hook, worked my body into a firm position, gradually found good foothold, and at last stood up in the river. Then I waded across to the shallow gravel bottom on the other side, and began to wonder at the continued vigor of that trout. For I did not know where the hook had pierced him. A trout struck and held by the mouth in a rapid, with his head up - stream, is quickly controlled. The gills, which are the lungs, soon yield to the rush of the water. It was a long time before I got that fish. I don't know how long. He weighed a trifle over three pounds and a half — a fine fish for a mountain stream which a hundred anglers visit every spring.

Ill

The sun was nearing the horizon. The road ran close by the side of the river. It was a narrow road just there, and the river was but a small stream — a brooklet rather than a brook. But they call it the river, because far down the highland slopes, when it reaches the open country, having received all along its way supplies of water from thousands of springs, it is a river, turning the wheels of great mills, and, farther on, floating ships.

Here it ran between grassy banks, crossing and recrossing the road, which was not even bridged over it. But as we drove on it grew stronger, and when another road joined that on which we were driving another stream came in also, and thereafter the road was better and the stream was larger. Soon the slope which had been gentle on the open upland became more steep. Road and river entered the forest, and plunged downhill together. They never separated for miles, the wagon -track following every bend and angle of the torrent, until, at the foot of the long descent, both together came out on a broad valley.

Three or four miles across the valley we could see the white tower of a church and a mass of elm-trees which hid the village. But we did not sro on to the village. For as we left the forest and came out on the plain we parted company with the stream, which wandered away in green meadows, while the road passed in front of a farm-house, standing among sheds and barns, all looking old and weather-worn, but all in good order.

The place had not changed in aspect since I drove up to the door of the old house forty odd years ago. The same stone-walls enclosed the fields, the same clematis vines ran over them, the same white spires of meadow-sweet stood up out of low green thickets, the same choke-cherry trees dangled their bunches of berries above them. The house was equally unchanged. And now, as I pulled up at the steps, the lapse of time was more difficult of realization when I saw an elderly man sitting on the little piazza. For just such a man, without coat or waistcoat or hat, with short gray beard and frizzly gray hair, sat there when I drove away from the house.

Of course, I said to myself, this is not my old host, Eleazar Thorn. He must have gone to the church-yard company years ago. Who can it be ?

"They tell me you keep travellers overnight once in a while," I said.

" Yes, we give 'em such as we've got," was the answer; "we don't keep tavern, but when anyone comes along that wants to stay with us, why we try to make 'em comfortable."

An hour or two later, sitting on the piazza with my host, whose name I had not yet learned, I asked: " What has become of the Thorn family that used to live here ?" He looked at me for a moment as if uncertain what to say ; then replied, " The old folks died long sence." "And Ezer?" I asked. Again he looked at me, now a little longer time, and at length said, " I'm Ezer ; but I don't remember you."

It is not worth while to relate how I reminded him of the time when, in company with an artist friend, I spent a week at the house, and of the urgent advice then given him to cultivate his evident talent with the pencil.

" Did you give it up entirely ?"

"I haven't drawn a picture for more'n forty year."

" Why did you give it up ?"

He turned his eyes away from me, let them rove over the country, looked now for an instant at one thing, then looked to another, and at last said: "Well, I don't know as there was any particular reason, only, you see, little Susie died, and there wasn't any one to make pictures for." There was no special emotion in his voice. It was a simple matter of fact in his history which he was relating. But when I remembered the old time, there was in his answer a certain pathos.

One evening, the first evening of our stay, we had come in from a long day's fishing, and, as we approached the house, found Ezer sitting on the piazza step, and by his side a little girl of six years old. He was a large-framed and somewhat uncouth boy or young man. His hands were large, roughened with farm-work, and burned with sunshine. She was a pretty child, with a great lot of curls hanging from a well-shaped head, and a pair of eyes whose beauty I remember through almost a half-century. He was making pictures for her. He had a sheet of brown paper, the wrapper from off some package, and a broad carpenter's pencil. They two were having a jolly time. He was making rapid sketches. When he began one she would lean over, and with her bright eyes follow the broad lines as they went hither and thither over and around one another, until suddenly she would shout, " It's a cow," or " It's a crow," or " It's a fish," and, clapping her hands with delight, exclaim, " Make me another, Ezer."

My companion, older than I, was an artist of fame in those days, and his work is not yet forgotten. You can see his pictures in galleries and read of him in books. He was greatly interested in the sketches made by the boy, and said that he had wonderful ability. He gave him hints, directions, instruction, and when he came away he said, " I shall be surprised if we do not one day hear more of that boy." But we did not. He never left the farm. The motive of the artist in him was only the love of the little one, his sister's child. When the child died the motive was gone forever.

Nevertheless, he was an artist, and a great artist. For, after all, there is but one accurate measure of merit in any work of art — namely, its success in accomplishing the purpose of its production. This principle is not understood as it should be. Whatever other ideas may be held as to the constituents of high art, the fact remains always that if the artist have a purpose in his work and that purpose is not accomplished, he has failed ; if it be accomplished, he has achieved success. The major part of criticism is wasted, because of neglect of this fundamental principle.

The domain of art production is immensely wider and more grand than the domain of that which is called criticism. In the arrangement of this world and of mankind in it, the divine order is that art shall supply the wants, minister to the desires, gratify the wishes of men. Nature is God's gift, and art is equally his endowment. That is a very narrow, though it is a very common, belief that the purpose of high art is the product of works which accord with the ideas and please the tastes of a limited number of persons called educated people. The highest education in this world produces only a very little knowledge, and what is called cultivated taste is full of error, egotism, and ignorance. If we ever attain to the superior knowledge of the immortals we shall know how little we knew here, how feeble were our ideas of the beautiful, how rude and rough and graceless were the pictures and statues and poems and other works of our arts which some of us think ourselves able to pronounce immortal. The standards of merit which we shall then apply will not be such as we read about and try to apply here. And this, I think, is very certain : that when we look back at this life and its wants, its desires, and the small measure of supply to them which all our arts and artistic ability have furnished, we shall know that the standards we used were very untrustworthy. We shall see that everywhere have been artists accomplishing as great work, in unknown ways, as those artists whose names are famous. There have indeed been thousands of artists in every country for every one whose name is recorded. There have been Michael Angelos and Titians and Raphaels in almost every hamlet and village of the civilized world.

There was a little girl who died last winter in a farm-house over the mountains. It was a lonesome place, two miles from any other house, and in the deep snows of the winter practically inaccessible. The child suffered greatly for two months, lying on a bed in a small room off the kitchen. On the wall hung a cheap lithograph representing " The Guardian Angel." It was what you would call a wretched mess of color ; and when the mother showed it to me, telling the story, I confess that the angePs form and dress were to me suggestive of a cheap theatrical get-up, and the face was without expression. This was its beauty in my estimate.

But there was something in that picture which won the child's heart. In her severest pain she gained fortitude and calm by fixing her eyes on it. Through the nights she waited for morning, to see it when daylight came in at the window. She was sometimes overheard talking to it. To her vision and the soul to which the vision ministers, the angel was one of the messengers of a land where all things are full of light and love and ineffable beauty. The poor lithograph rose in that room to the rank of the Sistine Madonna, or the San Marco saints of Fra Angelico. When she went at last to join other little children in the joy of Paradise she took w r ith her innumerable holy and pure thoughts, a soul refined and much educated for the new life, by the miserable daub, as you and I would have called it, which to her was the perfection of beauty.

And it was as beautiful as any work of art ever made. Would you dare deny it to the child ? Will you argue it with her if you ever meet her ? The measure of beauty is in the mind that receives, not in any other mind.

Our own conceptions of beauty change, not only with education, but with conditions of mind. Raphael could not have painted a picture to win that child's admiration away from her lithographed angel in blue and red. Had the child lived she might have grown to admire the Transfiguration in the Vatican, and she might even have grown to admire Turner's blotches of mystery. There is no possibility of foreseeing what, in art production, we may be led to admire and enjoy by the circumstances and associations into which we are led. Nor is there any authority which can tell us what we ought to enjoy. The notion of some writers that there is such an authority, a standard of beauty, is simply a proposal to take away freedom from art purchase and production, and destroy its power.

The world for which that boy Eleazar worked was a small one, but he satisfied all its desires, gratified all its tastes, fulfilled all its imaginations. More no artist ever did. Jf you say that the great artist has greater thoughts than those of his race and age — a common saying, which sounds in idle words and has in it no intelligible truth — then he too, the farmer boy, had higher thoughts than he expressed with pencil. But of what value to you or to me or to any one are your imaginary " higher thoughts " of the artist if he cannot express them ? The world of art is a practical world. To all of us, in every station of life, come, sometimes often, overpowering thoughts, glimpses through mist and gloom of a higher life than we live ; conceptions, almost but not quite formed, of greater achievements, nobler works than we are doing. But if we do not realize them, whether we be only commonplace laborers in the ordinary ways of life, or whether we be artists with chisel or pencil, these amount to nothing for the practical work of benefiting or pleasing ourselves or others.

Sometimes it is said that time alone measures the merit of works of art ; that those which survive from generation to generation are the great works. This is a false notion. Often the greatest works have perished, having accomplished their purposes ; often the inferior have outlasted the changes of human tastes and fancies, and established for themselves the name of greatness. You will find this to be true : that many of those works of art which are most renowned, most talked of, and most written about, produce in reality very little impression on those who look at them now. They are rather curiosities, which must be seen because celebrated, but they produce little effect on the independent mind. This is eminently true of many renowned statues and paintings. Its truth can be seen when the galleries and museums in which these works are preserved are crowded with visitors, and you observe how few linger around these specific works. Nor is it in any degree probable that if you, not knowing their origin, could to-day see works of Zeuxis or Apelles, you would find in them anything to admire.