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THE CLERK OF THE WOODS
THE CLERK OF THE WOODS
BY BRADFORD TORREY
“News of birds and blossoming.” Shelley.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1904
COPYRIGHT 1903 BY BRADFORD TORREY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published September, 1903
PREFATORY NOTE
The chapters of this book were written week by week for simultaneous publication in the “Evening Transcript” of Boston and the “Mail and Express” of New York, and were intended to be a kind of weekly chronicle of the course of events out-of-doors, as witnessed by a natural-historical observer. The title of the volume is the running title under which the articles were printed in the “Evening Transcript.” It was chosen as expressive of the modest purpose of the writer, whose business was not to be witty or wise, but simply to “keep the records.”
CONTENTS
THE CLERK OF THE WOODS
THE CLERK OF THE WOODS
A SHORT MONTH
May is the shortest month in the year. February is at least twice as long. For a month is like a movement of a symphony; and when we speak of the length of a piece of music we are not thinking of the number of notes in it, but of the time it takes to play them. May is a scherzo, and goes like the wind. Yesterday it was just beginning, and to-day it is almost done. “If we could only hold it back!” an outdoor friend of mine used to say. And I say so, too. At the most generous calculation I cannot have more than a hundred more of such months to hope for, and I wish the Master’s baton would not hurry the tempo. But who knows? Perhaps there will be another series of concerts, in a better music hall.
The world hereabout will never be more beautiful than it was eight or ten days ago, with the sugar maples and the Norway maples in bloom and the tall valley willows in young yellow-green leaf. And now forsythia is having its turn. How thick it is! I should not have believed it half so common. Every dooryard is bright with its sunny splendor. “Sunshine bush,” it deserves to be called, with no thought of disrespect for Mr. Forsyth, whoever he may have been. I look at the show while it lasts. In a week or two the bushes will all have gone out of commission, so to speak, till the year comes round again. Shrubs are much in the case of men and women; the amount of attention they receive depends mainly on the dress they happen to have on at the moment. In my next-door neighbor’s yard there is a forsythia bush, not exceptionally large or handsome, that gives me as much pleasure as one of those wonderful tulip beds of which the Boston city gardeners make so much account. Are a million tulips, all of one color, crowded tightly together and bordered by a row of other tulips, all of another color, really so much more beautiful than a hundred or two, of various tints, loosely and naturally disposed? I ask the question without answering it, though I could answer it easily enough, so far as my own taste is concerned.
Already there is much to admire in the wild garden. Spice-bush blossoms have come and gone, and now the misty shad-blow is beginning to whiten all the hedges and the borders of the wood, while sassafras trees have put forth pretty clusters of yellowish flowers for the few that will come out to see them. Sun-bright, cold-footed cowslips still hold their color along shaded brooks. “Marsh marigolds,” some critical people tell us we must call them. That is a good name, too; but the flowers are no more marigolds than cowslips, and with or without reason (partly, it may be, because my unregenerate nature resents the “must”), I like the word I was brought up with. Anemones and violets are becoming plentiful, and the first columbines already swing from the clefts of outcropping ledges. With them one is almost certain to find the saxifrage. The two are fast friends, though very unlike; the columbine drooping and swaying so gracefully, its honey-jars upside down, the saxifrage holding upright its cluster of tiny white cups, like so many wine-glasses on a tray. Both are children’s flowers,—an honorable class,—and have in themselves, to my apprehension, a kind of childish innocence and sweetness. If we picked no other blossoms, down in the Old Colony, we always picked these two—these and the nodding anemone and the pink lady’s-slipper.
This showy orchid, by the way, I was pleased a year ago to see in bloom side by side with the trailing arbutus. One was near the end of its flowering season, the other just at the beginning, but there they stood, within a few yards of each other. This was in the Franconia Notch, at the foot of Echo Lake, where plants bloom when they can, rather than according to any calendar known to down-country people; where within the space of a dozen yards you may see the dwarf cornel, for example, in all stages of growth; here, where a snowbank stayed late, just peeping out of the ground, and there, in a sunnier spot, already in full bloom.
In May the birds come home. This is really what makes the month so short. There is no time to see half that is going on. In this town alone it would take a score of good walkers, good lookers, and good listeners to welcome all the pretty creatures that will this month return from their winter’s exile. Some came in March, of course, and more in April; but now they are coming in troops. It is great fun to see them; a pleasure inexpressible to wake in the morning, as I did this morning (May 8), and still lying in bed, to hear the first breezy fifing of a Baltimore oriole, just back over night after an eight months’ absence. Birds must be lovers of home to continue living in a climate where life is possible to them only four months of the year.
