Now, a proprietor's right to have his property managed according to his own ideas needs no emphasizing. The sad thing is that such proprietors should get hold of such property. It all comes, of course, of the modern vulgarization of wealth. Time was when even mere wealth was aristocratic, and its possession, more or less implied in its possessors the possession, too, of refinement and culture. The rich men of the past knew enough to encourage and support the finer arts of life, and were interested in maintaining high standards of public taste and feeling. Thus they were capable of sparing some of their wealth for investment in objects which brought them a finer kind of reward than the financial. Among other things, they understood and respected the dignity of literature, and would not have expected an editor to run a literary venture in the interests of the illiterate. The further degradation of the public taste was not then the avowed object of popular magazines. Indeed—strange as it sounds nowadays—it was rather the education than the degradation of the public taste at which the editor aimed, and in that aim he found the support of intelligent proprietors.

Today, however, all this is changed. Wealth has become democratic, and it is only here and there, in its traditional possessors, that it retains its traditional aristocracy of taste. As the commonest man can be a multi-millionaire, so the commonest man can own a magazine, and have it edited in the commonest fashion for the common good.

As a result, the editor's occupation, in the true sense, will soon be gone. There is, need one say, no lack today of men with real editorial individuality—but editorial individuality is the last thing the capitalist proprietors want. It is just that they are determined to stamp out. Therefore, your real editor must either swallow his pride and submit to ignorant dictation, or make way for the little band of automatic sorters of manuscript, which, as nine tailors make a man, nowadays constitute a sort of composite editor under the direction of the proprietor.

With the elimination of editorial individuality necessarily follows elimination of individuality in the magazine. More and more, every day, magazines are conforming to the same monotonous type; so that, except for name and cover, it is impossible to tell one magazine from another. Happily one or two—rari nantes in gurgito vasto—survive amid the democratic welter; and all who have at heart not only the interests of literature, but the true interests of the public taste, will pray that they will have the courage to maintain their distinction, unseduced by the moneyed voice of the mob—a distinction to which, after all, they have owed, and will continue to owe, their success. The names of these magazines will readily occur to the reader, and, as they occur, he cannot but reflect that it was just editorial individuality and a high standard of policy that made them what they are, and what, it is ardently to be hoped, they will still continue to be. Plutus and Demos are the worst possible editors for a magazine; and in the end, even, it is the best magazine that always makes the most money.



XII

THE SPIRIT OF THE OPEN

I often think, as I sit here in my green office in the woodland—too often diverted from some serious literary business with the moon or the morning stars, or a red squirrel who is the familiar spirit of my wood-pile, or having my thoughts carried out to sea by the river which runs so freshly and so truantly, with so strong a current of temptation, a hundred yards away from my window—I often think that the strong necessity that compelled me to do my work, to ply my pen and inkpot out here in the leafy, blue-eyed wilderness, instead of doing it by typewriter in some forty-two-storey building in the city, is one of those encouraging signs of the times which links one with the great brotherhood of men and women that have heard the call of the great god Pan, as he sits by the river—

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan! Piercing sweet by the river! Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!

And I go on thinking to this effect: that this impulse that has come to so many of us, and has, incidentally, wrought such a harmony in our lives, is something more than duck-shooting, trout-fishing, butterfly-collecting, or a sentimental passion for sunsets, but is indeed something not so very far removed from religion, romantic religion. At all events, it is something that makes us happy, and keeps us straight. That combination of results can only come by the satisfaction of the undeniable religious instinct in all of us: an instinct that seeks goodness, but seeks happiness too. Now, there are creeds by which you can be good without being happy; and creeds by which you can be happy without being good. But, perhaps, there is only one creed by which you can be both at once—the creed of the growing grass, and the blue sky and the running river, the creed of the dog-wood and the skunk-cabbage, the creed of the red-wing and the blue heron—the creed of the great god Pan.

Pan, being one of the oldest of the gods, might well, in an age eager for novelty, expect to be the latest fashion; but the revival of his worship is something far more than a mere vogue. It was rumoured, as, of course, we all know, early in the Christian era, that he was dead. The pilot Thomas, ran the legend, as told by Plutarch, sailing near Pascos, with a boatful of merchants, heard in the twilight a mighty voice calling from the land, bidding him proclaim to all the world that Pan was dead. "Pan is dead!"—three times ran the strange shuddering cry through the darkness, as though the very earth itself wailed the passing of the god.

But Pan, of course, could only die with the earth itself, and so long as the lichen and the moss keep quietly at their work on the grey boulder, and the lightning zigzags down through the hemlocks, and the arrowhead guards its waxen blossom in the streams; so long as the earth shakes with the thunder of hoofs, or pours out its heart in the song of the veery-thrush, or bares its bosom in the wild rose, so long will there be little chapels to Pan in the woodland—chapels on the lintels of which you shall read, as Virgil wrote: Happy is he who knows the rural gods, Pan, and old Sylvanus, and the sister nymphs.

It is strange to see how in every country, but more particularly in America and in England, the modern man is finding his religion as it was found by those first worshippers of the beautiful mystery of the visible universe, those who first caught glimpses of

Nymphs in the coppice, Naiads in the fountain, Gods on the craggy height and roaring sea.

First thoughts are proverbially the best; at all events, they are the bravest. And man's first thoughts of the world and the strangely romantic life he is suddenly called up, out of nothingness, to live, unconsulted, uninstructed, left to feel his way in the blinding radiance up into which he has been mysteriously thrust; those first thoughts of his are nowadays being corroborated in every direction by the last thoughts of the latest thinker. Mr. Jack London, one of Nature's own writers, one of those writers too, through whom the Future speaks, has given a name to this stirring of the human soul—"The Call of the Wild." Following his lead, others have written of "The Lure," of this and that in nature, and all mean the same thing: that the salvation of man is to be found on, and by means of, the green earth out of which he was born, and that, as there is no ill of his body which may not be healed by the magic juices of herb and flower, or the stern potency of minerals, so there is no sickness of his soul that may not be cured by the sound of the sea, the rustle of leaves, or the songs of birds.

Thirty or forty years ago the soul of the world was very sick. It had lost religion in a night of misunderstood "materialism," so-called. But since then that mere "matter" which seemed to eclipse the soul has grown strangely radiant to deep-seeing eyes, and, whereas then one had to doubt everything, dupes of superficial disillusionment, now there is no old dream that has not the look of coming true, no hope too wild and strange and beautiful to be confidently entertained. Even, if you wish to believe in fairies, science will hardly say you nay. Those dryads and fauns, which Keats saw "frightened away" by the prosaic times in which it was his misfortune to be alive and unrecognized, are trooping back in every American woodland, and the god whose name I have invoked has become more than ever

the leaven That spreading in this dull and clodded earth Gives it a touch ethereal.

His worship is all the more sincere because it is not self-conscious. If you were to tell the trout-fisher, or the duck-shooter, or the camper-out, that he is a worshipper of Pan, he would look at you in a kindly bewilderment. He would seem a little anxious about you, but it would be only a verbal misunderstanding. It would not take him long to realize that you were only putting in terms of a creed the intuitive and inarticulate faith of his heart. Perhaps the most convincing sign of this new-old faith in nature is the unconsciousness of the believer. He has no idea that he is believing or having faith in anything. He is simply loving the green earth and the blue sea, and the ways of birds and fish and animals; but he is so happy in his innocent, ignorant joy that he seems almost to shine with his happiness. There is, literally, a light about him—that light which edges with brightness all sincere action. The trout, or the wild duck, or the sea bass is only an innocent excuse to be alone with the Infinite. To be alone. To be afar. Men sail precarious craft in perilous waters for no reason they could tell of. They may think that trawling, or dredging, or whaling is the explanation: the real reason is the mystery we call the Sea.

Ostensibly, of course, the angler is a man who goes out to catch fish; yet there is a great difference between an angler and a fishmonger. Though the angler catches no fish, though his creel be empty as he returns home at evening, there is a curious happiness and peace about him which a mere fishmonger would be at a loss to explain. Fish, as I said, were merely an excuse; and, as he vainly waited for fish, without knowing it, he was learning the rhythm of the stream, and the silence of ferns was entering into his soul, and the calm and patience of meadows were dreamily becoming a part of him. Suddenly, too, in the silence, maybe he caught sight of a strange, hairy, masterful presence, sitting by the stream, whittling reeds, and blowing his breath into them here and there, and finally binding them together with rushes, till he had made out of the empty reeds and rushes an instrument that sang everything that can be sung and told you everything that can be told.

The sun on the hill forgot to die. And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly Came back to dream on the river.

Do you really think that the huntsman hunts only the deer? He, himself, doubtless thinks that the trophy of the antlers was all he went out into the woods to win. But there came a day to him when he missed the deer, and caught a glimpse instead of the divine huntress, Diana, high-buskined, short-kirtled, speeding with her hounds through the lonely woodland, and his thoughts ran no more on venison for that day.

The same truth is true of all men who go out into the green, blue-eyed wilderness, whether they go there in pursuit of game or butterflies. They find something stranger and better than what they went out to seek, and, if they come home disappointed in the day's bag or catch, there is yet something in their eyes, and across their brows, a light of peace, an enchanted calm, which tells those who understand that they, at all events, have seen the great god Pan, and heard the music he can make out of the pipy hemlocks or the lonely pines.



XIII

AN OLD AMERICAN TOW-PATH

The charm of an old canal is one which every one seems to feel. Men who care nothing about ruined castles or Gothic cathedrals light up with romantic enthusiasm if you tell them of some old disused or seldom-used canal, grass-grown and tree-shaded, along which, hardly oftener than once a week, a leisurely barge—towed by an equally leisurely mule, with its fellow there on deck taking his rest, preparatory to his next eight-mile "shift"—sleepily dreams its way, presumably on some errand and to some destination, yet indeed hinting of no purpose or object other than its loitering passage through a summer afternoon. I have even heard millionaires express envy of the life lived by the little family hanging out its washing and smoking its pipe and cultivating its floating garden of nasturtiums and geraniums, with children playing and a house-dog to keep guard, all in that toy house of a dozen or so feet, whose foundations are played about by fishes, and whose sides are brushed by whispering reeds. But the charm of an old canal is perhaps yet more its own when even so tranquil a happening as the passage of a barge is no longer looked for, and the quiet water is called upon for no more arduous usefulness than the reflection of the willows or the ferrying across of summer clouds. Nature herself seems to wield a new peculiar spell in such association—old quarries, the rusting tramways choked with fern; forgotten mines with the wild vine twining tenderly about the old iron of dismantled pit-tackle, grown as green as itself with the summer rains; roads once dusty with haste over which only the moss and the trailing arbutus now leisurely travel. Wherever Nature is thus seen to be taking to herself, making her own, what man has first made and grown tired of, she is twice an enchantress, strangely combining in one charm the magic of a wistful, all but forgotten, past with her own sibyl-line mystery.

The symbol of that combined charm is that poppy of oblivion of which Sir Thomas Browne so movingly wrote: but, though along that old canal of which I am thinking and by which I walked a summer day, no poppies were growing, the freshest grass, the bluest flowers, the new-born rustling leafage of the innumerable trees, all alike seemed to whisper of forgetfulness, to be brooding, even thus in the very heyday of the mad young year, over time past. And this eloquently retrospective air of Nature made me realize, with something of the sense of discovery, how much of what we call antiquity is really a trick of Nature. She is as clever at the manufacture of antiques as some expert of "old masters." A little moss here and there, a network of ivy, a judicious use of ferns and grass, a careless display of weeds and wild flowers, and in twenty years Nature can make a modern building look as if it dated from the Norman Conquest. I came upon this reflection because, actually, my canal is not very old, though from the way it impressed me, and from the manner in which I have introduced it, the reader might well imagine it as old as Venice and no younger than Holland, and may find it as hard to believe as I did that its age is but some eighty years, and that it has its romantic being between Newark Bay and Phillipsburg, on the Delaware River.

One has always to be careful not to give too much importance to one's own associative fancies in regard to the names of places. To me, for instance, "Perth Amboy" has always had a romantic sound, and I believe that a certain majesty in the collocation of the two noble words would survive that visit to the place itself which I have been told is all that is necessary for disillusionment. On the other hand, for reasons less explainable, Hackensack, Paterson, Newark, and even Passaic are names that had touched me with no such romantic thrill. Wrongfully, no doubt, I had associated them with absurdity, anarchy, and railroads. Never having visited them, it was perhaps not surprising that I should not have associated them with such loveliness and luxury of Nature as I now unforgettably recall; and I cannot help feeling that in the case of places thus unfortunately named, Nature might well bring an action for damages, robbed as she thus undoubtedly is of a flock of worshippers.

At all events, I believe that my surprise and even incredulity will be understood when an artist friend of mine told me that by taking the Fort Lee ferry, and trolleying from the Palisades through Hackensack to Paterson, I might find—a dream canal. It was as though he had said that I had but to cross over to Hoboken to find the Well at the World's End. But it was true, for all that—quite fairy-tale true. It was one of those surprises of peace, deep, ancient peace, in America, of which there are many, and of which more needs to be told. I can conceive of no more suggestive and piquant contrast than that of the old canal gliding through water-lilies and spreading pastures, in the bosom of hills clothed with trees that scatter the sunshine or gather the darkness, the haunt of every bird that sings or flashes strange plumage and is gone, gliding past flowering rushes and blue dragon-flies, not

Flowing down to Camelot,

as one might well believe, but between Newark and Phillipsburg, touching Paterson midway with its dreaming hand.

Following my friend's directions, we had met at Paterson, and, desirous of finding our green pasture and still waters with the least possible delay, we took a trolley running in the Newark direction, and were presently dropped at a quaint, quiet little village called Little Falls, the last we were to see of the modern work-a-day world for several miles. A hundred yards or so beyond, and it is as though you had entered some secret green door into a pastoral dream-land. Great trees, like rustling walls of verdure, enclose an apparently endless roadway of gleaming water, a narrow strip of tow-path keeping it company, buttressed in from the surrounding fields with thickets of every species of bush and luxurious undergrowth, and starred with every summer flower.

Presently, by the side of the path, one comes to an object which seems romantically in keeping with the general character of the scene—a long block of stone, lying among the grasses and the wild geraniums, on which, as one nears it, one descries carved scroll-work and quaint, deep-cut lettering. Is it the tomb of dead lovers, the memorial of some great deed, or an altar to the genius loci? The willows whisper about it, and the great elms and maples sway and murmur no less impressively than if the inscription were in Latin of two thousand years ago. Nor is it in me to regret that the stone and its inscription, instead of celebrating the rural Pan, commemorate the men to whom I owe this lane of dreaming water and all its marginal green solitude: to wit—the "MORRIS CANAL AND BANKING CO., A.D. 1829," represented by its president, its cashier, its canal commissioner, and a score of other names of directors, engineers, and builders. Peace, therefore, to the souls of those dead directors, who, having only in mind their banking and engineering project, yet unconsciously wrought, nearly a century ago, so poetic a thing, and may their rest be lulled by such leafy murmurs and swaying of tendrilled shadows as all the day through stir and sway along the old canal!

A few yards beyond this monumental stone, there comes a great opening in the sky, a sense of depth and height and spacious freshness in the air, such as we feel on approaching the gorge of a great river; and in fact the canal has arrived at the Passaic and is about to be carried across it in a sort of long, wooden trough, supported by a noble bridge that might well pass for a genuine antique, owing to that collaborating hand of Nature which has filled the interstices of its massive masonry with fern, and so loosened it here and there that some of the canal escapes in long, ribbon-like cascades into the rocky bed of the river below. An aqueduct has always seemed to me, though it would be hard to say why, a most romantic thing. The idea of carrying running water across a bridge in this way—water which it is so hard to think of as imprisoned or controlled, and which, too, however shallow, one always associates with mysterious depth—the idea of thus carrying it across a valley high up in the air, so that one may look underneath it, underneath the bed in which it runs, and think of the fishes and the water-weeds and the waterbugs all being carried across with it, too—this, I confess, has always seemed to me engagingly marvellous. And I like, too, to think that the canal, whose daily business is to be a "common carrier" of others, thus occasionally tastes the luxury of being carried itself; as sometimes one sees on a freight car a new buggy, or automobile, or sometimes a locomotive, being luxuriously ridden along—as though out for a holiday—instead of riding others.

And talking of freight-cars, it came to me with a sense of illumination how different the word "Passaic" looks printed in white letters on the grey sides of grim produce-vans in begrimed procession, from the way it looks as it writes its name in wonderful white waterfalls, or murmurs it through corridors of that strange pillared and cake-shaped rock, amid the golden pomp of a perfect summer day. For a short distance the Passaic and the canal run side by side, but presently they part company, and mile after mile the canal seems to have the world to itself, once in a great while finding human companionship in a shingled cottage half hidden among willows, a sleepy brick-field run on principles as ancient as itself, shy little girls picking flowers on its banks, or saucy boys disporting themselves in the old swimming-hole; and

Sometimes an angler comes and drops his hook Within its hidden depths, and 'gainst a tree Leaning his rod, reads in some pleasant book, Forgetting soon his pride of fishery; And dreams or falls asleep, While curious fishes peep About his nibbled bait or scornfully Dart off and rise and leap.

Once a year, indeed, every one goes a-fishing along the old canal—men, women, boys, and girls. That is in spring, when the canal is emptied for repairs, the patching up of leaks, and so forth. Then the fish lie glittering in the shallow pools, as good as caught, and happy children go home with strings of sunfish,—"pumpkin-seeds" they call them,—cat-fish, and the like picturesque unprofitable spoils, while graver fisher-folk take count of pickerel and bream. This merry festival was over and gone, and the canal was all brimming with the lustral renewal of its waters, its depths flashing now and again with the passage of wary survivors of that spring battue.

It is essential to the appreciation of an old canal that one should not expect it to provide excitement, that it be understood between it and its fellow-pilgrim that there is very little to say and nothing to record. Along the old tow-path you must be content with a few simple, elemental, mysterious things. To enter into its spirit you must be somewhat of a monastic turn of mind, and have spiritual affiliations, above all, with La Trappe. For the presiding muse of an old canal is Silence; yet, as at La Trappe, a silence far indeed from being a dumb silence, but a silence that contains all speech. My friend and I spoke hardly at all as we walked along, easily obedient to the spirit of the hour and the place. For there were so few of those little gossipy accidents and occurrences by the way that make those interruptions we call conversation, and such overwhelming golden-handed presences of sunlit woodlands, flashing water-meadows, shining, singing air, and distant purple hills—all the blowing, rippling, leafy glory and mighty laughter of a summer day—that we were glad enough to let the birds do such talking as Nature deemed necessary; and I seem never to have heard or seen so many birds, of so many varieties, as haunt that old canal.

As we chose our momentary camping-place under a buttonwood-tree, from out an exuberant swamp of yellow water-lilies and the rearing sword-blades of the coming cat-tail, a swamp blackbird, on his glossy black orange-tipped wings, flung us defiance with his long, keen, full, saucy note; and as we sat down under our buttonwood and spread upon the sward our pastoral meal, the veery-thrush—sadder and stranger than any nightingale—played for us, unseen, on an instrument like those old water-organs played on by the flow and ebb of the tide, a flute of silver in which some strange magician has somewhere hidden tears. I wondered, as he sang, if the veery was the thrush that, to Walt Whitman's fancy, "in the swamp in secluded recesses" mourned the death of Lincoln:

Solitary the thrush, The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, Sings to himself a song.

But when the veery had flown with his heart-break to some distant copse, two song-sparrows came to persuade us with their blithe melody that life was worth living, after all; and cheerful little domestic birds, like the jenny-wren and the chipping-sparrow, pecked about and put in between whiles their little chit-chat across the boughs, while the bobolink called to us like a comrade, and the phoebe-bird gave us a series of imitations, and the scarlet tanager and the wild canary put in a vivid appearance, to show what can be done with colour, though they have no song.

Yet, while one was grateful for such long, green silence as we found along that old canal, one could not help feeling how hard it would be to put into words an experience so infinite and yet so undramatic. Birds and birds, and trees and trees, and the long, silent water! Prose has seldom been adequate for such moments. So, as my friend and I took up our walk again, I sang him this little song of the Silence of the Way:

Silence, whose drowsy eyelids are soft leaves, And whose half-sleeping eyes are the blue flowers, On whose still breast the water-lily heaves, And all her speech the whisper of the showers.

Made of all things that in the water sway, The quiet reed kissing the arrowhead, The willows murmuring, all a summer day, "Silence"—sweet word, and ne'er so softly said

As here along this path of brooding peace, Where all things dream, and nothing else is done But all such gentle businesses as these Of leaves and rippling wind, and setting sun

Turning the stream to a long lane of gold, Where the young moon shall walk with feet of pearl, And, framed in sleeping lilies, fold on fold. Gaze at herself like any mortal girl.

But, after all, trees are perhaps the best expression of silence, massed as they are with the merest hint of movement, and breathing the merest suggestion of a sigh; and seldom have I seen such abundance and variety of trees as along our old canal—cedars and hemlocks and hickory dominating green slopes of rocky pasture, with here and there a clump of silver birches bent over with the strain of last year's snow; and all along, near by the water, beech and basswood, blue-gum and pin-oak, ash, and even chestnut flourishing still, in defiance of blight. Nor have I ever seen such sheets of water-lilies as starred the swampy thickets, in which elder and hazels and every conceivable bush and shrub and giant grass and cane make wildernesses pathless indeed save to the mink and the water-snake, and the imagination that would fain explore their glimmering recesses.

No, nothing except birds and trees, water-lilies and such like happenings, ever happens along the old canal; and our nearest to a human event was our meeting with a lonely, melancholy man, sitting near a moss-grown water-wheel, smoking a corn-cob pipe, and gazing wistfully across at the Ramapo Hills, over which great sunlit clouds were billowing and casting slow-moving shadows. Stopping, we passed him the time of day and inquired when the next barge was due. For answer he took a long draw at his corn-cob, and, taking his eyes for a moment from the landscape, said in a far-away manner that it might be due any time now, as the spring had come and gone, and implying, with a sort of sad humour in his eyes, that spring makes all things possible, brings all things back, even an old slow-moving barge along the old canal.

"What do they carry on the canal?" I asked the melancholy man, the romantic green hush and the gleaming water not irrelevantly flashing on my fancy that far-away immortal picture of the lily-maid of Astolat on her strange journey, with a letter in her hand for Lancelot.

"Coal," was his answer; and, again drawing at his corn-cob, he added, with a sad and understanding smile, "once in a great while." Like most melancholy men, he seemed to have brains, in his way, and to have no particular work on hand, except, like ourselves, to dream.

"Suppose," said I, "that a barge should come along, and need to be drawn up this 'plane'—would the old machinery work?" and I pointed to six hundred feet of sloping grass, down which a tramway stretches and a cable runs on little wheels—technically known, it appeared, as a "plane."

Then the honour of the ancient company for which he had once worked seemed to stir his blood, and he awakened to something like enthusiasm as he explained the antique, picturesque device by which it is still really possible for a barge to climb six hundred feet of grass and fern—drawn up in a long "cradle," instead of being raised by locks in the customary way.

Then he took us into the old building where, in the mossed and dripping darkness, we could discern the great water-wheels that work this fascinating piece of ancient engineering; and added that there would probably be a barge coming along in three or four days, if we should happen to be in the neighbourhood. He might have added that the old canal is one of the few places where "time and tide" wait for any one and everybody—but alas! on this occasion we could not wait for them.

Our walk was nearing its end when we came upon a pathetic reminder that, though the old canal is so far from being a stormy sea, there have been wrecks even in those quiet waters. In a backwater whispered over by willows and sung over by birds, a sort of water-side graveyard, eleven old barges were ingloriously rotting, unwept and unhonoured. The hulks of old men-of-war, forgotten as they may seem, have still their annual days of bunting and the salutes of cannon; but to these old servitors of peace come no such memorial recognitions.

"Unwept and unhonoured, may be," said I to my friend, "but they shall not go all unsung, though humble be the rhyme"; so here is the rhyme I affixed to an old nail on the mouldering side of the Janita C. Williams:

You who have done your work and asked no praise, Mouldering in these unhonoured waterways, Carrying but simple peace and quiet fire, Doing a small day's work for a small hire— You need not praise, nor guns, nor flags unfurled, Nor all such cloudy glories of the world; The laurel of a simple duty done Is the best laurel underneath the sun, Yet would two strangers passing by this spot Whisper, "Old boat—you are not all forgot!"



XIV

A MODERN SAINT FRANCIS

We were neither of us fox-hunting ourselves, but chanced both to be out on our morning walk and to be crossing a breezy Surrey common at the same moment, when the huntsmen and huntresses of the Slumberfold Hunt were blithely congregating for a day's run. A meet is always an attractive sight, and we had both come to a halt within a yard or two of each other, and stood watching the gallant company of fine ladies and gentlemen on their beautiful, impatient mounts, keeping up a prancing conversation, till the exciting moment should arrive when the cry would go up that the fox had been started, and the whole field would sweep away, a cataract of hounds, red-coats, riding habits, and dog-carts.

The moment came. The fox had been found in a spinney running down to Withy Brook, and his race for life had begun. With a happy shout, the hunt was up and off in a twinkling, and the stranger and I were left alone on the broad common.

I had scanned him furtively as he stood near me; a tall, slightly build man of about fifty, with perfectly white hair, and strangely gentle blue eyes. There was a curious, sad distinction over him, and he had watched the scene with a smile of blended humour and pity.

Turning to me, as we were left alone, and speaking almost as though to himself: "It is a strange sight," he said with a sigh. "I wonder if it seems as strange to you? Think of all those grown-up, so-called civilized people being so ferociously intent on chasing one poor little animal for its life—and feeling, when at last the huntsman holds up his poor brush, with absurd pride (if indeed the fox is not too sly for them), that they have really done something clever, in that with so many horses and dogs and so much noise, they have actually contrived to catch and kill one fox!"

"It is strange!" I said, for I had been thinking just that very thing.

"Of course, they always tell you," he continued, as we took the road together, "that the fox really enjoys being hunted, and that he feels his occupation gone if there are no hounds to track him, and finally to tear him to pieces. What wonderful stories human nature will tell itself in its own justification! Can one imagine any created thing enjoying being pursued for its life, with all that loud terror of men and horses and savage dogs at its heels? No doubt—if we can imagine even a fox so self-conscious—it would take a certain pride in its own cunning and skill, if the whole thing were a game; but a race with death is too deadly in earnest for a fox even to relish his own stratagems. Happily for the fox, it is probable that he does not feel so much for himself as some of us feel for him; but any one who knows the wild things knows too what terror they are capable of feeling, and how the fear of death is always with them. No! you may be sure that a fox prefers a cosy hen-roost to the finest run with the hounds ever made."

"But even if he should enjoy being hunted," I added, "the even stranger thing to me is that civilized men and women should enjoy hunting him."

"Isn't it strange?" answered my companion eagerly, his face lighting up at finding a sympathizer. "When will people realize that there is so much more fun in studying wild things than in killing them!..."

He stopped suddenly in his walk, to gather a small weed which had caught his quick eye by the roadside, and which he examined for a moment through a little pocket microscope which I noticed, hanging like an eyeglass round his neck, and which I learned afterward quite affectionately to associate with him. Then, as we walked on, he remarked:

"But, of course, we are yet very imperfectly civilized. Humanity is a lesson learned very slowly by the human race. Yet we are learning it by degrees, yes! we are learning it," and he threw out his long stride more emphatically—the stride of one accustomed to long daily tramps on the hills.

"Strange, that principle of cruelty in the universe!" he resumed, after a pause in which he had walked on in silence. "Very strange. To me it is the most mysterious of all things—though, I suppose, after all, it is no more mysterious than pity. When, I wonder, did pity begin? Who was the first human being to pity another? How strange he must have seemed to the others, how incomprehensible and ridiculous—not to say dangerous! There can be little doubt that he was promptly dispatched with stone axes as an enemy of a respectable murderous society."

"I expect," said I "that our friends the fox-hunters would take a similar view of our remarks on their sport."

"No doubt—and perhaps turn their hounds on us! A man hunt! 'Give me the hunting of man!' as a brutal young poet we know of recently sang."

"How different was the spirit of Emerson's old verse," I said:

"Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?... O be my friend, and teach me to be thine!"

"That is one of my mottoes!" cried my companion with evident pleasure. "Let us go and quote it to our fox-hunters!"

"I wonder how the fox is getting on," I said.

"If he is any sort of fox, he is safe enough as yet, we may be sure. They are wonderful creatures. It is not surprising that mankind has always looked upon Reynard as almost a human being—if not more—for there is something quite uncanny in his instincts, and the cool, calculating way in which he uses them. He is come and gone like a ghost. One moment you were sure you saw him clearly close by and the next he is gone—who knows where? He can run almost as swiftly as light, and as softly as a shadow; and in his wildest dash, what a sure judgment he has for the lie of the ground, how unerringly—and at a moment when a mistake is death—he selects his cover! How learned, too, he is in his knowledge of the countryside! There is not a dry ditch, or a water-course, or an old drain, or a hole in a bank for miles around that is not mysteriously set down in the map he carries in his graceful, clever head; and one need hardly say that all the suitable hiding-places in and around farm-yards are equally well known to him. Then withal he is so brave. How splendidly, when wearied out, and hopelessly tracked down, with the game quite up, he will turn on his pursuers, and die with his teeth fast in his enemy's throat!"

"I believe you are a fox-hunter in disguise," I laughed.

"Well, I have hunted as a boy," he said, "and I know something of what those red-coated gentlemen are feeling. But soon I got more interested in studying nature than killing it, and when I became a naturalist I ceased to be a hunter. You get to love the things so that it seems like killing little children. They come so close to you, are so beautiful and so clever; and sometimes there seems such a curious pathos about them. How any one can kill a deer with that woman's look in its eyes, I don't know. I should always expect the deer to change into a fairy princess, and die in my arms with the red blood running from her white breast. And pigeons, too, with their soft sunny coo all the summer afternoon, or the sudden lapping of sleepy wings round the chimneys—how can any one trap or shoot them with blood-curdling rapidity, and not expect to see ghosts!"

"Of course, there is this difference about the fox," I said, "that it is really in a sense born to be hunted. For not only is it a fierce hunter itself, but it would not be allowed to exist at all, so to say, unless it consented to being hunted. Like a gladiator it accepts a comfortable living for a certain time, on condition of its providing at last a spirited exhibition of dying. In other words, it is preserved entirely for the purpose of being hunted. It must accept life on that condition or be extirpated as destructive vermin by the plundered farmer. Life is sweet, after all, and to be a kind of protected highwayman of the poultry-yard, for a few sweet toothsome years, taking one's chances of being surely brought to book at last, may perhaps seem worth while."

"Yes! but how does your image of the protected gladiator reflect on those who protect him? There, of course, is the point. The gladiator, as you say, is willing to take his chances in exchange for fat living and idleness, as long as he lives. You may even say that his profession is good for him, develops fine qualities of mind even as well as body—but what of the people who crowd with blood-thirsty eagerness to watch those qualities exhibited in so tragic a fashion for their amusement? Do they gain any of his qualities of skill and courage, and strength and fearlessness in the face of death? No, they are merely brutalized by cruel excitement—and while they applaud his skill and admire his courage, they long most to watch him die. So—is it not?—with our friend the fox. The huntsman invariably compliments him on his spirit and his cunning, but what he wants is—the brush. He wants the excitement of hunting the living thing to its death; and, let huntsmen say what they will about the exhilaration of the horse exercise across country as being the main thing, they know better—and, if it be true, why don't they take it without the fox?"

"They do in America, as, of course, you know. There a man walks across country trailing a stick, at the end of which is a piece of cloth impregnated with some pungent scent which hounds love and mistake for the real thing."

"Hard on the poor hounds!" smiled my friend. "Even worse than a red herring. You could hardly blame the dogs if they mistook the man for Actaeon and tore him to pieces."

"And I suspect that the huntsmen are no better satisfied."

"Yet, as we were saying, if the secret spring of their sport is not the cruel delight of pursuing a living thing to its death, that American plan should serve all the purposes, and give all the satisfaction for which they claim to follow the hounds: the keen pleasure of a gallop across country, the excitement of its danger, the pluck and pride of taking a bad fence, and equally, too, the pleasure of watching the hounds cleverly at work with their mysterious gift of scent. All the same, I suspect there are few sportsmen who would not vote it a tame substitute. Without something being killed, the zest, the 'snap,' is gone. It is as depressing as a sham fight."

"Yes, that mysterious shedding of blood! what a part it has played in human history! Even religion countenances it, and war glorifies it. Men are never in higher spirits than when they are going to kill, or be killed themselves, or see something else killed. Tennyson's 'ape and tiger' die very hard in the tamest of us."

"Alas, indeed they do!" said my friend with a sigh. "But I do believe that they are dying none the less. Just of late there has been a reaction in favour of brute force, and people like you and me have been ridiculed as old-fashioned sentimentalists. But reaction is one of the laws of advance. Human progress always takes a step backwards after it has taken two forward. And so it must be here too. In the end, it is the highest type among men and nations that count, and the highest types among both today are those which show most humanity, shrink most from the infliction of pain. When one thinks of the horrible cruelties that were the legal punishment of criminals, even within the last two hundred years, and not merely brutal criminals, but also political offenders or so-called heretics—how every one thought it the natural and proper thing to break a man on the wheel for a difference of opinion, or torture him with hideous ingenuity into a better frame of mind, and how the pettiest larcenies were punished by death; it seems as if we of today, even the least sensitive of us, cannot belong to the same race—and it is impossible to deny that the heart of the world has grown softer and that pity is becoming more and more a natural instinct in human nature. I believe that some day it will have thrust out cruelty altogether, and that the voluntary infliction of pain upon another will be unknown. The idea of any one killing for pleasure will seem too preposterous to be believed, and soldiers and fox-hunters and pigeon-shooters will be spoken of as nowadays we speak of cannibals. But, of course, I am a dreamer," he concluded, his face shining with his gentle dream, as though he had been a veritable saint of the calendar.

"Yes, a dream," he added presently, "and yet—" In that "and yet" there was a world of invincible faith that made it impossible not to share his dream, even see it building before one's eyes—such is the magnetic power of a passionate personal conviction.

"Of course," he went on again, "we all know that 'nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal.' But because the fox runs off with the goose, or the hawk swoops down on the chicken, and 'yon whole little wood is a world of plunder and prey'—is that any reason why we should be content to plunder and prey too? And after all, the cruelty of Nature is only one-sided. There is lots of pity in Nature too. These strange little wild lives around us are not entirely bent on killing and eating each other. They know the tenderness of motherhood, the sweetness of building a home together, and I believe there is far more comradeship and mutual help amongst them than we know of. Yes, even in wild Nature there is a principle of love working no less than a principle of hate. Nature is not all-devouring and destroying. She is loving and building too. Nature is more constructive than destructive, and she is ever at work evolving and evolving a higher dream. Surely it is not for man, to whom, so far as we know, Nature has entrusted the working out of her finest impulses, and whom she has endowed with all the fairy apparatus of the soul; it is not for him, whose eyes—of all her children—Nature has opened, the one child she has taken into her confidence and to whom she has whispered her secret hopes and purposes; surely it is not for man voluntarily to deny his higher lot, and, because the wolf and he have come from the same great mother, say: 'I am no better than the wolf. Why should I not live the life of a wolf—and kill and devour like my brother?' Surely it is not for the cruel things in Nature to teach man cruelty—rather, if it were possible," and the saint smiled at his fancy, "would it be the mission of man to teach them kindness: rather should he preach pity to the hawk and peace between the panther and the bear. It is not the bad lessons of Nature, but the good, that are meant for man—though, as you must have noticed, man seldom appeals to the precedents of Nature except to excuse that in him which is Nature at her worst. When we say, 'it is only natural,' we almost invariably refer to that in Nature of which Nature herself has entrusted the refinement or the elimination to man. It is Nature's bad we copy, not Nature's good; and always we forget that we ourselves are a part of Nature—Nature's vicegerent, so to say, upon the earth—"

As we talked, we had been approaching a house built high among the heather, with windows looking over all the surrounding country. Presently, the saint stopped in front of it.

"This is my house," he said. "Won't you come in and see me some time?—and, by the way, I am going to talk to some of the village children about the wild things, bird's nesting, and so forth, up at the schoolhouse on Thursday. I wish you'd come and help me. One's only hope is with the children. The grown-up are too far gone. Mind you come."

So we parted, and, as I walked across the hill homeward, haunted by that gentle face, I thought of Melampus, that old philosopher who loved the wild things so and had made such friends with them, that they had taught him their language and told him all their secrets:

With love exceeding a simple love of the things That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck; Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck; Or, bridled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball; Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook; The good physician, Melampus, loving them all, Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book.

As I dipped into the little thick-set wood that surrounds my house, something stood for a second in one of the openings, then was gone like a shadow. I was glad to think how full of bracken and hollows, and mysterious holes and corners of mossed and lichened safety was our old wood—for the shadow was a fox. I like to think it was the very fox we had been talking about come to find shelter with me—and, if he stole a meal out of our hen-roost, I gave it him before he asked it, with all the will in the world. I hope he chose a good fat hen, and not one of your tough old capons that sometimes come to table.



XV

THE LITTLE GHOST IN THE GARDEN

I don't know in what corner of the garden his busy little life now takes its everlasting rest. None of us had the courage to stand by, that summer morning, when Morris, our old negro man, buried him, and we felt sympathetic for Morris that the sad job should fall upon him, for Morris loved him just as we did. Perhaps if we had loved him less, more sentimentally than deeply, we should have indulged in some sort of appropriate ceremonial, and marked his grave with a little stone. But, as I have said, his grave, like that of the great prophet, is a secret to this day. None of us has ever asked Morris about it, and his grief has been as reticent as our own. I wondered the other night, as I walked the garden in a veiled moonlight, whether it was near the lotus-tanks he was lying—for I remembered how he would stand there, almost by the hour, watching the goldfish that we had engaged to protect us against mosquitoes, moving mysteriously under the shadows of the great flat leaves. In his short life he grew to understand much of this strange world, but he never got used to those goldfish; and often I have seen him, after a long wistful contemplation of them, turn away with a sort of half-frightened, puzzled bark, as though to say that he gave it up. Or, does he lie, I wonder, somewhere among the long grass of the salt-marsh, that borders our garden, and in perigee tides widens out into a lake. There indeed would be his appropriate country, for there was the happy hunting-ground through which in life he was never tired of roaming, in the inextinguishable hope of mink, and with the occasional certainty of a water-rat.

He had come to us almost as mysteriously as he went away; a fox-terrier puppy wandered out of the Infinite to the neighbourhood of our ice-box, one November morning, and now wandered back again. Technically, he was just graduating out of puppyhood, though, like the most charming human beings, he never really grew up, and remained, in behaviour and imagination, a puppy to the end. He was a dog of good breed and good manners, evidently with gentlemanly antecedents canine and human. There were those more learned in canine aristocracy than ourselves who said that his large leaf-like, but very becoming, ears meant a bar sinister somewhere in his pedigree, but to our eyes those only made him better-looking; and, for the rest of him, he was race—race nervous, sensitive, refined, and courageous—from the point of his all-searching nose to the end of his stub of a tail, which the conventional docking had seemed but to make the more expressive. We had already one dog in the family when he arrived, and two Maltese cats. With the cats he was never able to make friends, in spite of persistent well-intentioned efforts. It was evident to us that his advances were all made in the spirit of play, and from a desire of comradeship, the two crowning needs of his blithe sociable spirit. But the cats received them in an attitude of invincible distrust, of which his poor nose frequently bore the sorry signature. Yet they had become friendly enough with the other dog, an elderly setter, by name Teddy, whose calm, lordly, slow-moving ways were due to a combination of natural dignity, vast experience of life, and some rheumatism. As Teddy would sit philosophizing by the hearth of an evening, immovable and plunged in memories, yet alert on the instant to a footfall a quarter of a mile away, they would rub their sinuous smoke-grey bodies to and fro beneath his jaws, just as though he were a piece of furniture; and he would take as little notice of them as though he were the leg of the piano; though sometimes he would wag his tail gently to and fro, or rap it softly on the floor, as though appreciating the delicate attention.

* * * * *

Of Teddy's reception of the newcomer we had at first some slight misgiving, for, amiable as we have just seen him with his Maltese companions, and indeed as he is generally by nature, his is the amiability that comes of conscious power, and is his, so to say, by right of conquest; for of all neighbouring dogs he is the acknowledged king. The reverse of quarrelsome, the peace of his declining years has been won by much historical fighting, and his reputation among the dogs of his acquaintance is such that it is seldom necessary for him to assert his position. It is only some hapless stranger ignorant of his standing that will occasionally provoke him to a display of those fighting qualities he grows more and more reluctant to employ. Even with such he is comparatively merciful; stern, but never brutal. Usually all that is necessary is for him to look at them steadfastly for a few moments in a peculiar way. This seems to convince them that, after all, discretion is the better part, and slowly and sadly they turn around in a curious cowed way, and walk off, apparently too scared to run, with Teddy, like Fate, grimly at their heels, steadily "pointing" them off the premises. We were a little anxious, therefore, as to how Teddy would take our little terrier, with his fussy, youthful self-importance, and eternal restless poking into other folks' affairs. But Teddy, as we might have told ourselves, had had a long and varied experience of terriers, and had nothing to learn from us. Yet I have no doubt that, with his instinctive courtesy, he divined the wishes of the family in regard to the newcomer, and was, therefore, predisposed in his favour. This, however, did not save the evidently much overawed youngster from a stern and searching examination, the most trying part of which seemed to be that long, silent, hypnotizing contemplation of him, which is Teddy's way of asserting his dignity. The little dog visibly trembled beneath the great one's gaze, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, and his eyes wandering helplessly from side to side; and he seemed to be saying, in his dog way: "O yes! I know you are a very great and important personage—and I am only a poor little puppy of no importance. Only please let me go on living—and you will see how well I will behave." Teddy seemed to be satisfied that some such recognition and submission had been tendered him; so presently he wagged his tail, that had up till then been rigid as a ramrod, and not only the little terrier, but all of us, breathed again. Yet it was some time before Teddy would admit him into anything like what one might call intimacy, and premature attempts at gamesome familiarity were checked by the gathering thunder of a lazy growl that unmistakably bade the youngster keep his place. But real friendship eventually grew between them, on Teddy's side a sort of big-brother affectionate tutelage and guardianship, and on Puppy's—for, though we tried many, we never found any other satisfactory name for him but "Puppy"—a reverent admiration and watchful worshipping imitation. No great man was ever more anxiously copied by some slavish flatterer than that old sleepy carelessly-great setter by that eager, ambitious little terrier. The occasions when to bark and when not to bark, for example. One could actually see Puppy studying the old dog's face on doubtful occasions of the kind. Boiling over, as he visibly was, with the desire to bark his soul out, yet he could be seen unmistakably restraining himself, till Teddy, after some preliminary soliloquizing in deep undertones, had made up his mind that the suspicious shuffling-by of probably some inoffensive Italian workman demanded investigation, and lumberingly risen to his feet and made for the door. Then, like a bunch of firecrackers, Puppy was at the heels, all officious assistance, and the two would disappear like an old and a young thunderbolt into the resounding distance.

* * * * *

Teddy's friendship had seemed to be definitely won on an occasion which brought home to one the quaint resemblance between the codes and ways of dogs and those of schoolboys. When the winter came on, a rather severe one, it soon became evident that the little short-haired fellow suffered considerably from the cold. Out on walks, he was visibly shivering, though he made no fuss about it. So one of the angels in the house knitted for him a sort of woollen sweater buttoned down his neck and under his belly, and trimmed it with some white fur that gave it an exceedingly smart appearance. Teddy did not happen to be there when it was first tried on, and, for the moment, Puppy had to be content with our admiration, and his own vast sense of importance. Certainly, a more self-satisfied terrier never was than he who presently sped out, to air his new finery before an astonished neighbourhood. But alas! you should have seen him a few minutes afterwards. We had had the curiosity to stroll out to see how he had got on, and presently, in a bit of rocky woodland near by, we came upon a curious scene. In the midst of a clump of red cedars, three great dogs, our Teddy, a wicked old black retriever, and a bustling be-wigged and be-furred collie, stood in a circle round Puppy, seated on his haunches, trembling with fear, tongue lolling and eyes wandering, for all the world as though they were holding a court-martial, or, at all events, a hazing-party. The offence evidently lay with that dandified new sweater. One and another of the dogs smelt at it, then tugged at it in evident disgust; and, as each time Puppy made a move to get away, all girt him round with guttural thunder of disapproval, as much as to say: "Do you call that a thing for a manly dog to go around in? You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you miserable dandy."

We couldn't help reflecting that it was all very well for those great comfortable long-haired dogs to talk, naturally protected as they were from the cold. Yet that evidently cut no figure with them, and they went on sniffing and tugging and growling, till we thought our poor Puppy's eyes and tongue would drop out with fear. Yet, all the time, they seemed to be enjoying his plight, seemed to be smiling grimly together, wicked old experienced brutes as they were.

Presently the idea of the thing seemed to occur to Puppy, or out of his extremity a new soul was born within him, for suddenly an infinite disgust of his new foppery seemed to take possession of him too, and, regaining his courage, he turned savagely upon it, ripping it this way and that, and struggling with might and main to rid himself of the accursed thing. Presently he stood free, and barks of approval at once went up from his judges. He had come through his ordeal, and was once more a dog among dogs. Great was the rejoicing among his friends, and the occasion having been duly celebrated by joint destruction and contumely of the offending garment, Teddy and he returned home, friends for life.

* * * * *

It is to be feared that that friendship, deep and tender as it grew to be on both sides, perhaps particularly on Teddy's, was the indirect cause of Puppy's death. I have referred to Teddy's bark, and how he is not wont to waste it on trivial occasions, or without due thought. On the other hand, he is proud of it, and loves to practice it—just for its own sake, particularly on early mornings, when, however fine a bark it is, most of our neighbours would rather continue sleeping than wake up to listen to it. There is no doubt at all, for those who understand him, that it is a purely artistic bark. He means no harm to any one by it. When the milkman, his private enemy, comes at seven, the bark is quite different. This barking of Teddy's seems to be literally at nothing. Around five o'clock on summer mornings, he plants himself on a knob of rock overlooking the salt marsh and barks, possibly in honour of the rising sun, but with no other perceptible purpose. So have I heard men rise in the dawn to practice the cornet—but they were men, so they ran no risk of their lives. Teddy's practicing, however, has now been carried on for several years in the teeth of no little peril; and, had it not been for much human influence employed on his behalf, he would long since have antedated his little friend in Paradise. When that little friend, however, came to assist and emulate him in those morning recitals, adding to his bark an occasional—I am convinced purely playful—bite, I am inclined to think that a sentiment grew in the neighbourhood that one dog at a time was enough. At all events, Teddy still barks at dawn as of old, but our little Puppy barks no more.

Before the final quietus came to him, there were several occasions on which the Black dog, called Death, had almost caught him in his jaws. One there was in especial. He had, I believe, no hatred for any living thing save Italian workmen and automobiles. I have seen an Italian workman throw his pick-axe at him, and then take to his heels in grotesque flight. But the pick-axe missed him, as did many another clumsily hurled missile.

* * * * *

An automobile, however, on one occasion, came nearer its mark. Like every other dog that ever barked, particularly terriers, Puppy delighted to harass the feet of fast trotting horses, mockingly running ahead of them, barking with affected savagery, and by a miracle evading their on-coming hoofs—which to him, tiny thing as he was, must have seemed like trip-hammers pounding down from the sky. But horses understand such gaiety in terriers. They understand that it is only their foolish fun. Automobiles are different. They have no souls. They see nothing engaging in having their tires snapped at, as they whirl swiftly by; and, one day, after Puppy had flung himself in a fine fury at the tires of one of these soulless things, he gave a sharp yelp—"not cowardly!"—and lay a moment on the roadside. But only a moment; then he went limping off on his three sound legs, and hid himself away from all sympathy, in some unknown spot. It was in vain we called and sought him, and only after two days was he discovered, in the remotest corner of a great rocky cellar, determined apparently to die alone in an almost inaccessible privacy of wood and coal. Yet, when at last we persuaded him that life was still sweet and carried him upstairs into the great living-room, and the beautiful grandmother, who knows the sorrows of animals almost as the old Roman seer knew the languages of beasts and birds, had taken him in charge and made a cosy nest of comforters for him by the fire, and tempted his languid appetite—to which the very thought of bones was, of course, an offence—with warm, savory-smelling soup; then, he who had certainly been no coward—for his thigh was a cruel lump of pain which no human being would have kept so patiently to himself—became suddenly, like many human invalids, a perfect glutton of self-pity; and when we smoothed and patted him and told him how sorry we were, it was laughable, and almost uncanny, how he suddenly set up a sort of moaning talk to us, as much as to say that he certainly had had a pretty bad time, was really something of a hero, and deserved all the sympathy we would give him. So far as one can be sure about anything so mysterious as animals, I am sure that from then on he luxuriated in his little hospital by the fireside, and played upon the feelings of his beautiful nurse, and of his various solicitous visitors, with all the histrionic skill of the spoiled and petted convalescent. Suddenly, however, one day, he forgot his part. He heard some inspiring barking going on nearby—and, in a flash, his comforters were thrust aside, and he was off and away to join the fun. Then, of course, we knew that he was well again; though he still went briskly about his various business on three legs for several days.

His manner was quite different, however, the afternoon he had so evidently come home to die. There was no pose about the little forlorn figure, which, after a mysterious absence of two days, suddenly appeared, as we were taking tea on the veranda, already the very ghost of himself. Wearily he sought the cave of the beautiful grandmother's skirts, where, whenever he had had a scolding, he was wont always to take refuge—barking, fiercely, as from an inaccessible fortress, at his enemies.

* * * * *

But, this afternoon, there was evidently no bark in him, poor little fellow; everything about him said that he had just managed to crawl home to die. His brisk white coat seemed dank with cold dews, and there was something shadowy about him and strangely quiet. His eyes, always so alert, were strangely heavy and indifferent, yet questioning and somehow accusing. He seemed to be asking us why a little dog should suffer so, and what was going to happen to him, and what did it all mean. Alas! We could not tell him; and none of us dare say to each other that our little comrade in the mystery of life was going to die. But a silence fell over us all, and the beautiful grandmother took him into her care, and so well did her great and wise heart nurse him through the night that next morning it almost seemed as though we had been wrong; for a flash of his old spirit was in him again, and, though his little legs shook under him, it was plain that he wanted to try and be up at his day's work on the veranda, warning off the passer-by, or in the garden carrying on his eternal investigations, or farther afield in the councils and expeditions of his fellows. So we let him have his way, and for a while he seemed happier and stronger for the sunshine, and the old familiar scents and sounds. But the one little tired husky bark he gave at his old enemy, the Italian workman, passing by, would have broken your heart; and the effort he made with a bone, as he visited the well-remembered neighbourhood of the ice-box for the last time, was piteous beyond telling. Those sharp, strong teeth that once could bite and grind through anything could do nothing with it now. To lick it sadly with tired lips, in a sort of hopeless way, was all that was left; and there was really a look in his face as though he accepted this mortal defeat, as he lay down, evidently exhausted with his exertions, on a bank nearby. But once more his spirit seemed to revive, and he scrambled to his legs again and wearily crawled to the back of the house, where the beautiful grandmother loves to sit and look over the glittering salt-marsh in the summer afternoons.

* * * * *

Of course, he knew that she was there. She had been his best friend in this strange world. His last effort was naturally to be near her again. Almost he reached that kind cave of her skirts. Only another yard or two and he had been there. But the energy that had seemed irrepressible and everlasting had come to its end, and the little body had to give in at last, and lie down wearily once more with no life left but the love in its fading eyes.

There are some, I suppose, who may wonder how one can write about the death of a mere dog like this; and cannot understand how the death of a little terrier can make the world seem a lonelier place. But there are others, I know, who will scarce need telling, men and women with little ghosts of their own haunting their moonlit gardens; strange, appealing, faithful companions, kind little friendly beings that journeyed with them awhile the pilgrimage of the soul.

I often wonder if Teddy misses his little busy playfellow and disciple as we do; if, perhaps, as he barks over the marsh of a morning, he is sending him a message. He goes about the place with nonchalant greatness as of old, and the Maltese cats still rub their sinuous smoke-grey bodies to and fro beneath his jaws at evening. There is no sign of sorrow upon him. But he is old and very wise, and keeps strange knowledge to himself. So, who can say?



XVI

THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE

For the genuine lover of nature, as distinct from the connoisseur of dainty or spectacular "scenery," nature has always and everywhere some charm or satisfaction. He will find it no less—some say more—in winter than in summer, and I have little doubt that the great Alkali Desert is not entirely without its enthusiasts. The nature among which we spent our childhood is apt to have a lasting hold on us, in defiance of showier competition, and I suppose there is no land with soul so dead that it does not boast itself the fairest under heaven.

I am writing this surrounded by a natural scene which I would not exchange for the Swiss lakes, yet I presume it is undeniable that Switzerland has a more universal reputation for natural beauty than Connecticut. It is, as we say, one of the show places of the earth. So Niagara Falls, the Grand Canon, the Rockies, and California generally lord it over America. Italy has such a reputation for beauty that it is almost unfair to expect her to live up to it. I once ventured to say that the Alps must be greasy with being climbed, and it says much for such stock pieces in nature's repertoire, that, in spite of all the wear and tear of sentimental travellers, the mock-admiration of generations, the batteries of amateur cameras, the Riviera, the English lakes, the Welsh mountains, the Highlands of Scotland, and other tourist-trodden classics of the picturesque, still remain haunts of beauty and joys forever. God's masterpieces do not easily wear out.

Every country does something supremely well, and England may be said to have a patent for a certain kind of scenery which Americans are the first to admire. English scenery has no more passionate pilgrim than the traveller from the United States, as the visitors' books of its various show-places voluminously attest. Perhaps it is not difficult, when one has lived in both countries, to understand why.

While America, apart from its impressive natural splendours, is rich also in idyllic and pastoral landscape, it has, as yet, but little "countryside." I say, as yet, because "the countryside," I think I am right in feeling, is not entirely a thing of nature's making, but rather a collaboration resulting from nature and man living so long in partnership together. In England, with which the word is peculiarly, if not exclusively, associated, God is not entirely to be credited with making the country. Man has for generations also done his share.

It is perhaps not without significance that the word "countryside" was not to be found in Webster's dictionary, till a recent edition. Originally, doubtless, it was used with reference to those rural districts in the vicinity of a town; as one might say the country side of the town. Not wild or solitary nature was meant, but nature humanized, made companionable by the presence and occupations of man; a nature which had made the winding highway, the farm, and the pasture, even the hamlet, with its church tower and its ancient inn, one with herself.

The American, speeding up to London from his landing either at Liverpool or Southampton, always exclaims on the gardenlike aspect, the deep, rich greenness of the landscape. It is not so much the specific evidences of cultivation, though those, of course, are plentifully present, but a general air of ripeness and order. Even the land not visible under cultivation suggests immemorial care and fertility. We feel that this land has been fought over and ploughed over, nibbled over by sheep, sown and reaped, planted and drained, walked over, hunted over, and very much beloved, for centuries. It is not fanciful to see in it a land to which its people have been stubbornly and tenderly devoted—still "Shakespeare's England," still his favoured "isle set in the silver sea."

As seen from the railway-carriage window, one is struck, too, by the comparative tidiness of the English landscape. There are few loose ends, and the outskirts of villages are not those distressing dump-heaps which they too often are in America. Yet there is no excessive air of trimness. The order and grooming seem a part of nature's processes. There is, too, a casual charm about the villages themselves, the graceful, accidental grouping of houses and gardens, which suggests growth rather than premeditation. The general harmony does not preclude, but rather comes of, the greatest variety of individual character.

Herein the English village strikingly differs from the typical New England village, where the charm comes of a prim uniformity, and individuality is made to give place to a general parking of lawns and shade-trees in rectangular blocks and avenues. A New England village suggests some large institution disposed in separate uniform buildings, placed on one level carpet of green, each with a definite number of trees, and the very sunlight portioned out into gleaming allotments. The effect gained is for me one of great charm—the charm of a vivid, exquisitely ordered, green silence, with a touch of monastic, or Quakerish, decorum. I would not have it otherwise, and I speak of it only to suggest by contrast the different, desultory charm of an old English village, where beauty has not been so much planned, as has just "occurred."

Of course, this is the natural result of the long occupation of the land. Each century in succession has had a hand in shaping the countryside to its present aspect, and English history is literally a living visible part of English scenery. Here the thirteenth century has left a church, here the fourteenth a castle, here the sixteenth, with its suppression of the monasteries, a ruined abbey. Here is an inn where Chaucer's pilgrims stopped on the way to Canterbury. Here, in a field covered over by a cow-shed, is a piece of tessellated pavement which was once the floor of an old country house occupied by one of Caesar's generals.

Those strange grassy mounds breaking the soft sky-line of the rolling South Downs are the tombs of Saxon chieftains, that rubble of stones at the top of yonder hill was once a British camp, and those curious ridges terracing yonder green slope mark the trenches of some prehistoric battlefield. All these in the process of time have become part and parcel of the English countryside, as necessary to its "English" character as its trees and its wild flowers.

How much, too, the English countryside owes for its beauty to the many old manor-houses, gabled and moated, with their quaint, mossy-walled gardens and great forestlike parks. Whatever we may think of the English territorial system as economics, its service to English scenery has been incalculable. Without English traditionalism we should hardly have had the English countryside.

The conservation of great estates, entailing a certain conservatism in the treatment of farm lands from generation to generation, and the upholding, too, of game-preserves, however obnoxious to the land reformer, have been all to the good of the nature-lover. We owe no little of the beauty of the English woodland to the English pheasant; and with the coming of land nationalization we may expect to see considerable changes in the English countryside. Meanwhile, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the feudalistic character of English landlordism, the Englishman enjoys a right of walking over his native land of which no capitalist can rob him. Hence results another charming feature of the English countryside—the footpaths you see everywhere winding over hill and dale, through field and coppice. The ancient rights of these are safeguarded to the people forever by statute no wealth can defy; and, let any nouveau riche of a landlord try to close one of them, and he has to reckon with one of the pluckiest and most persistent organizations of English John Hampdens, the society that makes the protection of these traditional pathways its particular care. So the rich man cannot lock up his trees and his woodland glades all for himself, but is compelled to share them to the extent of allowing the poorest pedestrian to walk through them—which is about all the rich man can do with them himself.

These footpaths, in conjunction with English lanes, have made the charm of walking tours in England proverbial. Certain counties particularly pride themselves on their lands. Surrey and Devonshire are the great rivals in this respect. We say "Surrey lanes" or "Devonshire lanes," as we speak of "Italian skies" or "Southern hospitality." Other counties—Warwickshire, for example—doubtless have lanes no less lovely, but Surrey and Devonshire have, so to say, got the decision; and, if an American traveller wants to see a typical English lane, he goes to Surrey or Devonshire, just as, if he wants a typical English pork-pie, he sends to Melton Mowbray.

And the English lane has come honestly by its reputation. You may be disappointed in Venice, but you will be hard to please if you are not caught by the spell of an English lane. Of course, you must not expect to feel that spell if you tear through it in a motor-car. It was made for the loiterer, as its whimsical twists and turns plainly show. If you are in a hurry, you had better keep to the king's highway, stretching swift and white on the king's business. The English lane was made for the leisurely meandering of cows to and from pasture, for the dreamy snail-pace of time-forgetting lovers, for children gathering primroses or wild strawberries, or for the knap-sacked wayfarer to whom time and space are no objects, whose destination is anywhere and nowhere, whose only clocks are the rising sun and the evening star, and to whom the way means more than the goal.

I should not have spoken of it as "made," for, when it is most characteristic, an English lane has no suggestion of ever having been man-made like other roads. It seems as much a natural feature as the woods or meadows through which it passes; and sometimes, as in Surrey, when it runs between high banks, tunnelling its way under green boughs, it seems more like an old river-bed than a road, whose sides nature has tapestried with ferns and flowers. Of all roads in the world it is the dreamer's road, luring on the wayfarer with perpetual romantic promise and surprise, winding on and on, one can well believe, into the very heart of fairy-land. Everything beautiful seems to be waiting for us somewhere in the turnings of an English lane.

Had I sat down to write of the English countryside two years ago, I should have done so with a certain amount of cautious skepticism. I should have said to myself: "You have not visited England for over ten years. Are you quite sure that your impressions of its natural beauties are not the rose-coloured exaggerations of memory? Are not time and distance lending their proverbial enchantment?" In fact, as I set sail to revisit England, the spring before last, it was in some such mood of anticipatory disillusion.

After all, I had said to myself, is not the English countryside the work of the English poets—the English spring, the English wild flowers, the English lark, the English nightingale, and so forth? That longing of Browning expressed in the lines,

O to be in England Now that April's there!

was, after all, the cry of a homesick versifier, thinking "Home Thoughts, from Abroad"; and are Herrick and Wordsworth quite to be trusted on the subject of daffodils?

Well, I am glad to have to own that my revisiting my native land resulted in an agreeable disappointment. With a critical American eye, jealously on my guard against sentimental superstition, I surveyed the English landscape and examined its various vaunted beauties and fascinations, as though making their acquaintance for the first time. No, my youthful raptures had not been at fault, and the poets were once more justified. The poets are seldom far wrong. If they see anything, it is usually there. If we cannot see it, too, it is the fault of our eyes.

Take the English hawthorn, for instance. As its fragrance is wafted to you from the bushes where it hangs like the fairest of white linen, you will hardly, I think, quarrel with its praises. Yet, though it is, if I am not mistaken, of rare occurrence in America, it is not absolutely necessary to go to England for the hawthorn. Any one who cares to go a-Maying along the banks of the Hudson, in the neighbourhood of Peekskill, will find it there. But for the primrose and the cowslip you must cross the sea; and, if you come upon such a wood as I strayed into, my last visit, you will count it worth the trip. It was literally carpeted with clumps of primroses and violets (violets that smell, too) so thickly massed together in the mossy turf that there was scarcely room to tread. There are no words rich or abundant enough to suggest the sense of innocent luxury brought one by such a natural Persian carpet of soft gold and dewy purple, at once so gorgeous and yet so gentle. In all this lavish loveliness of English wild flowers there is, indeed, a peculiar tenderness. The innocence of children seems to be in them, and the tenderness of lovers.

A lover would not tread A cowslip on the head—

How appropriately such lines come to mind as one carefully picks one's way down a green hillside yellow with cowslips, and breathing perhaps the most delicate of all flowery fragrances. Yet again, as we pass into another stretch of woodland, another profusion and another fragrance await us, the winey perfume and the spectral blue sheen of the wild hyacinth. As one comes upon stretches of these hyacinths in the woods, they seem at first glance like pools of blue water or fallen pieces of the sky. Here, for once, the poets are left behind, and, of them all, Shakespeare and Milton alone have come near to suggesting the loveliness, at once so spiritual and so warmly and sweetly of the earth, that belongs to English wild flowers. I know not if Sheffield steel still keeps its position among the eternal verities, but in an age when so many of one's cherished beliefs are threatened with the scrap-heap, I count it of no small importance to be able to retain one's faith in the English lark and English wild flowers.

But the English countryside is not all greenness and softness, blossomy lanes, moated granges, and idyllic villages. It by no means always suggests the gardener, the farmer, or the gamekeeper. It is rich, too, in wildness and solitude, in melancholy fens and lonely moorlands. To the American accustomed to the vast areas of his own enormous continent, it would come as a surprise to realize that a land far smaller than many of his States can in certain places give one so profound a sense of the wilderness. Yet I doubt if a man could feel lonelier anywhere in the world than on a Yorkshire moor or on Salisbury Plain.

After all, we are apt to forget that, even on the largest continent, we can see only a limited portion of the earth at once. When one is in the middle of Lake Erie we are as much out of sight of land, as impressed by the illusion of boundless water, as if we were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So, on Salisbury Plain, with nothing but rolling billows of close-cropped turf, springy and noiseless to the tread, as far as the eye can see, one feels as alone with the universe as in the middle of some Asian desert. In addition to the actual loneliness of the scene, and a silence broken only by the occasional tinkle of sheep-bells, as a flock moves like a fleecy cloud across the grass, is an imaginative loneliness induced by the overwhelming sense of boundless unrecorded time, the "dim-grey-grown ages," of which the mysterious boulders of Stonehenge are the voiceless witnesses. To experience this feeling to the full one should come upon an old Roman road in the twilight, grass-grown, choked with underbrush, but still running straight and clearly defined as when it shook to the tread of Roman legions. It is eery to follow one of these haunted roads, filled with the far-off thoughts and fancies it naturally evokes, and then suddenly to come out again into the world of today, as it joins the highway once more, and the lights of a wayside inn welcome us back to humanity, with perhaps a touring car standing at the door.

One need hardly say that the English wayside inn is as much a feature of the English countryside as the English hawthorn. Its praises have been the theme of essayists and poets for generations, and at its best there is a cosiness and cheer about it which warm the heart, as its quaintness and savour of past days keep alive the sense of romantic travel. There the spirit of ancient hospitality still survives, and, though the motor-car has replaced the stage-coach, that is, after all, but a detail, and the old, low-ceilinged rooms, the bay windows with their leaded panes, the tap-room with its shining vessels, the great kitchen, the solid English fare, the brass candlesticks at bedtime, and the lavendered sheets, still preserve the atmosphere of a novel by Fielding or an essay by Addison.

There still, as in Shakespeare's day, one can take one's ease at one's inn, as perhaps in the hostelries of no other land. It is the frequency and excellence of these English inns that make it charmingly possible to see England, as it is best seen, on foot or on a bicycle. It is not a country of isolated wonders, with long stretches of mere road between. Every mile counts for something. But, if the luxury of walking it with stick and knapsack is denied us, and we must needs see it by motor-car, we cannot fail to make one observation, that of the surprising variety of natural scenery packed in so small a space. Between Land's End and the Tweed the eye and the imagination have encountered every form of the picturesque. In an area some three hundred and fifty miles long by three hundred broad are contained the ruggedness of Cornwall, the idyllic softness of Devon, the dreamy solitudes of the South Downs, with their billowy, chalky contours, the agricultural fertility of Kent and Middlesex, the romantic woodlands and hilly pastures of Surrey, the melancholy fens of Lincolnshire, the broad, bosky levels of the midlands, the sudden wildness of Wales, with her mountains and glens, Yorkshire, with its grim, heather-clad moors, Westmoreland, with its fells and Wordsworthian "Lakes"; every note in the gamut of natural beauty has been struck, from honeysuckle prettiness to savage grandeur.

Yet, although all these contrasts are included in the English scene, it is not of solitude or grandeur that we think when we speak of the English countryside. They are the exceptions to the rule of a gentler, more humanized natural beauty, in which the village church and the ivy-clad ruin play their part. Perhaps some such formula as this would represent the typical scene that springs to the mind's eye with the phrase "the English countryside": a village green, with some geese stringing out across it. A straggle of quaint thatched cottages, roses climbing about the windows, and in front little, carefully kept gardens, with hollyhocks standing in rows, stocks and sweet-williams and such old-fashioned flowers. At one end of the village, rising out of a clump of yews, the mouldering church-tower, with mossy gravestones on one side and a trim rectory on the other. At the other end of the village a gabled inn, with a great stable-yard, busy with horses and waggons. Above the village, the slopes of gently rising pastures, intersected with footpaths and shadowed with woodlands. A little way out of the village, an old mill with a lilied mill-pond, a great, dripping water-wheel, and the murmur of the escaping stream. And winding on into the green, sun-steeped distance, the blossom-hung English lanes.



XVII

LONDON—CHANGING AND UNCHANGING

I find it an unexpectedly strange experience to be in London again after ten years in New York. I had no idea it could be so strange. Of course, there are men to whom one great city is as another—commercial travellers, impresarios, globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of these, I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as in Buda-Pesth, in Berlin as in Paris, and, while once I might have envied such plastic cosmopolitanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in London, that, were such an accomplishment mine, it had been impossible for me to feel as deeply as I do my brief reincarnation into a city and a country with which I was once so intimate, and which now seems so romantically strange, while remaining so poignantly familiar. The man who is at home everywhere has nowhere any home. My home was once this London—this England—in which I am writing; but nothing so much as being in London again could make me realize that my home now is New York, and how long and how instinctively, without knowing it, I have been an American. It is not indeed that I love New York and America more than I love London and England. In fact, London has never seemed so wonderful to me in the past as she has seemed during these days of my wistful momentary return to her strange great heart. But this very freshness of her marvel to one who once deemed that he knew her so well proves but the completeness of my spiritual acclimatization into another land. I seem to be seeing her face, hearing her voice, for the first time; while, all the while, my heart is full with unforgotten memories, and my eyes have scarce the hardihood to gaze with the decorum befitting the public streets on many a landmark of vanished hours. To find London almost as new and strange to me as New York once seemed when I first sighted her soaring morning towers, and yet to know her for an enchanted Ghost-Land; to be able to find my way through her streets—in spite of the new Kingsway and Aldwych!—with closed eyes, and yet to see her, it almost seems, for the first time: surely it is a curious, almost uncanny, experience.

Do I find London changed?—I am asked. I have been so busy in rediscovering what I had half-forgotten, in finding engaging novelties in things anciently familiar, that the question is one which I feel hardly competent to answer. For instance, I had all but forgotten that there was so noble a thing in the world as an old-fashioned English pork-pie. Yesterday I saw one in a window, with a thrill of recognition, that made a friend with whom I was walking think for a moment that I had seen a ghost. He knows nothing of the human heart who cannot realize how tremulous with ancient heart-break may seem an old-fashioned English pork-pie—after ten years in America.

And, again, how curiously novel and charming seemed the soft and courteous English voices—with or without aitches—all about one in the streets and in the shops—I had almost said the "stores." I am enamoured of the American accent, these many years, and—the calumny of superficial observation to the contrary—I will maintain, so far as my own experience goes, that there is as much courtesy broadcast in America as in any land; more, I am inclined to think than in France. Yet, for all that, that something or other in the English voice which I had heard long since and lost awhile smote me with a peculiar pleasure, and, though I like the comradely American "Cap" or "Professor," and am hoping soon to hear it again—yet the novelty of being addressed once more as "Sir" has had, I must own, a certain antiquarian charm.