Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

By Marguerite Merington

INTO the slant of evening sun and shadow
Went one when first the gold lay on the leaf,
Yet I, to whom his being meant rejoicing,
I have no grief!

So beautiful his passing and prophetic,

As by it earth and spirit there were wed, That I, to whom his life of all meant living, Count not him dead!

UNCLE DAVID

By Leroy Milton Yale

ILLUSTRATIONS BY A. B. FROST

HROUGH the clear water showed the bright gravelly bottom between patches of streaming weeds. Overhead the alders, maples, and beeches reached out horizontal branches so low that we threaded our way oftener crouching than standing, guiding our baits--the fly was impossible as best we might. The boughs lifted and we raised our heads in freer space, a shaded steep bank on one side and a quick pool beneath. This," said the Doctor "isEnoch's Garden,' a favorite place of Uncle David's." It was a pretty nook, but Uncle David's name gave it a charm not its own.

[ocr errors]

To neither the Doctor nor to me was David an uncle after the flesh. As a lad he had come into the family of my grandmother and there remained as long as she lived.

Naturally he was "uncle" to me. But the avuncular element was so essential a part of his nature that, as years passed, he became the titular uncle of nearly every well-meaning boy or young man in the village. But to those of us who had a strain of sportsmanship in us he was more than that. Never have I known so keen a sportsman, who would take such pains to teach a child the craft of the fields and the

streams. It is not strange, then, that those boys, gray-haired themselves to-day, still see him before them with his gun or beside them stealing through the alders to the brookside.

My own first memory of Uncle David comes from sad days. Severe illness entered my father's house my elder sister died and I was badly hurt. David's faithful arms comforted my pains, and upon his shoulder I convalesced, soothed by the motion of his easy stride as he carried me to and fro. From that day we were friends.

That was a queer little seaside village in which we lived. Stretched along the water and climbing the hills behind, backed by woods and flanked by beaches and headlands, it was picturesque enough. The life of any New England village of that day seems quaint to us now, but this one had even then a repute for out-of-the-wayness. That is all gone. It resisted innovation well, even after it had come nigh. But fire on the one hand and the villas and improvements of "summer people" on the other have made old land-marks hard to find. Asphalt replaces sand, and trolleycars run in streets thrown up by the waves over places where I used to sail my little boats. But in that day-when Tyler was

[blocks in formation]

sea was the high-road of the people. They were in touch with all the earth, and had less need, perhaps, to feel the influence of what was near.

The house in which I was born, and in which I came to know Uncle David, was built just at the end of the Revolution, and had been rather a considerable one as things went there and then. It stood at a sharp curve of the village main street where it gave off a short branch, and not far from the convergence of the roads coming from several other villages and the country beyond. Its position gave it a view down quite a stretch of this village street, which, indeed, differed but little from the county road save in dustiness. This peculiarity in no wise deterred the villagers from placing their houses as closely as possible to the thoroughfare. This situation and the needless crowding of the houses were traditional. They have been explained as arising from the need of nearness for mutual protection in the early settling, which can hardly be the true explanation, since this village was not the earliest settlement of the region, and thereabouts whites and Indians had from the first lived in such amity that the latter refused to join Philip in his great uprising. Doubtless, it was an expression of the same desire for nearness which lines old country village streets with elbowing cottages. The demand may have been more intense in a community, most of whose strong men went down to the sea in ships, leaving the homes with only the safeguard of an orderly neighborhood.

In those palmy days of the whale-fishery, nearly every comfortable house bore evidence to the profitableness of the industry. Early years of voluntary exile and danger usually gave assurance of a middle life and age without undue toil. Besides the "blue-water sailors," many more, coasters, pilots, fishermen, got their living from the sea; and the whole atmosphere, physical and mental, smelt of the brine.

All this gave picturesqueness to the "properties" and a certain breadth of life in some directions. In the old houses local antiquities mingled with the spoils of the sea. In the hall-" front entry" it was called-hung side by side for decoration the spears and bows of the South Sea

For

and the disused staff of the tithing-man, war clubs and paddles ornate with Polynesian carving, and the speaking trumpet; and over all, in solemn state, the line of leathern fire-buckets emblazoned with gilding and the owner's name. Beyond, in the keeping-room, were strange Spanish-American things from "'t'other side o' land" and perhaps, as a patent of nobility, the grandfather's pilot branch, signed by John Hancock. Even the garret had this mixture of near and far. amid its usual treasures, the sage and the summer savory, the festoons of dried apples hanging from the powder-post beams, were chart-boxes, sextants, and quadrants; old bibles and high-shouldered gin bottles from Amsterdam, paints and toys from Canton. My cross-bow was made of the black bone of a Greenland whale, my long bow came from Roratonga and the pet goat from Pitcairn's Island. In the netted bag which swung beside the hammock one might find tapa of gay colors, corals and shells from the tropics, and great halibut hooks of wood and bone from the Northwest Coast, which we now call Alaska. The garret by itself was a course in geography.

Things moved more slowly then and we had traditional or actual touch with things which are now but history. We still cooked with the swinging crane over the open fire. Our meats were still roasted rather than baked. We planked our fish, and the great oven was solemnly heated for the weekly baking. One of my grandmothers could remember before the Revolution, and told me tales of happenings when she lived "on the frontier," at Buffalo. Many of my elder acquaintances had fought in the war of '12" and several had suffered the hardships. of Dartmoor. An aged relative still won shooting-matches with his old long gun, "Commodore," which in its earlier, flintlock days had done duty against British marauders. Nay, was not the mother of my other grandmother one of the three girls who in the night with auger and powder-horn blew up the village Libertypole to prevent its replacing a damaged spar upon a British war-vessel ?

But we have gone a long way from Uncle David. Enoch's Garden" would never have recalled him; perhaps I may

[graphic][merged small]

have never even been an angler had not my grandmother removed with all her household to a still smaller and more rural village. Away from the sea, in a sense, it was, but not out of sight of it. Its men were in the main those who had beaten their cutting-in spades into ploughshares and their harpoons into scytheblades, and among them amusing reversions in type would occasionally occur, as when two farmers spied a whale and killed him with weapons made from the fireirons. Yet it was "a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills." The village itself stood upon the rolling plain where the hills fell off toward the great enclosed bodies of brackish water which were separated from the sea only by the beach. The greater part of its houses lay between two

VOL. XXX.-3

fine brooks which converged toward this basin, which had been their estuary when, in larger volume, they flowed from the wooded hills which the early settlers denuded with such restless and thoughtless energy..

Among these houses were some, my especial haunts, which were survivals of much earlier times. Houses from whose low ceilings the summer beams projected, in whose sitting-rooms the glass and china shone in the old corner buffet (bowfat it was pronounced), and in whose kitchens the tall spinning-wheel and knotting-reel stood ready for use and the click of the knitting-needle accentuated conversation. I well recall the acrobatic devices by which, on a visit to one of these houses, my cousin and I reached the summit of the dome of the feather-bed which sur

33

mounted the four-post bedstead. In the same house was an example of home industry quite strange to a boy bred in such a world-searching village as I have described. It was the valance to another four-poster, made of stout cream or Isabella colored linen embroidered in wools with flowers and sprigs of red and green and yellow. My aged relative, its owner,

assured me, with evident pride, that the flax had been grown, rotted, hatchelled, spun, woven, bleached, and embroidered in the house or on the place, while the wool had been growing, spinning, and dyeingequally a home product.

[ocr errors]

What better landfall could a boy desire than a grandmother's house in a land of brooks which harbored great trout and where it had not yet entered into the heart of man to refuse the freedom of fishing to anyone who respected the growing crops and did not trample the math? Best of all to have the guidance of Uncle David, who was a sportsman where sportsmen were few. A writer on angling-in "the thirties"-speaks of the trout in these very brooks: "In no place," he says, "however, do we remember to have seen them in such abundance, and it is perhaps from this very circumstance that they are held in so little estimation; neither has the pleasure of taking them ever entered into the minds of the people."

[ocr errors]

that the gut had replaced the horse-hair. As toys the guns were far more attractive. No arms were then made for small boys. They inherited the discarded flint-locks of their elders. But even these had their charms, and I learned to load, to prime, to pick the flint, and, when bigger, to hold the heavy old musket steady on the fence rail when it had flashed in the pan, while the by standing boys kept up illusive hope by exclaiming, "Hold her! hold her! she's a-goin'." But I was not allowed to play with Uncle David's double - barrelled gun of all work. In fact its eleven pounds of weight moderated my desire. My first practical experience was with an old-fashioned, light-butted rifle with heavy octagonal barrel. No breech-loading, metallic cartridge affair, that. In the kitchen skillet or an iron ladle the lead was melted. Each filling of the mould gave a round ball and a conical one- slug, we called it. The necks and inequalities were trimmed off by hand with a jack-knife. One of these balls was patched with an oiled rag and driven hard home upon the powder. David showed me a safe place by the mill-pond to fire. I was not proud of my target, but I was not gun-shy.

[graphic]

A Corner "Bowfat."-Page 33.

But before the brook was to me more than a place for childish sports, the sportsman's gear was familiar, we children being allowed to play with the various implements standing within reach. The angler's outfit was simple then. A rod of solid cane or of jointed hazel, a line without a reel, split shot or a bit of lead, and a hook. If the latter were a Limerick and snooded with gut it was a luxury. In fact we had the tackle of Father Izaak, save

[ocr errors]

Another early attempt I remember; this time with a light double-barrelled gun, but still with the fence-rail accompaniment. The little bird hopped about faster than I could adjust my aim. The report of the gun seemed to alarm him, but it brought to us two friends, and a walk begun with murderous intent was changed to one still sweet in memory. They were the doctor-father of him whom we left in Enoch's Garden-tall, erect, alert, handsome with the beauty of mature years, and his father, already bowed with age. The chat was of sports, the old man telling

[graphic][merged small]

of his early skill with the gun; the son, smilingly checking him lest he should seem to indulge in undignified boasting; David adding occasional humorous remarks, and the boy absorbing it all. Yes, and much more. For he then for the first time recognized the mysterious power of spring-time. The brown slopes across the broad basin of the brook were showing tints of green; on our bank the twigs were full of sap and the buds were swelling with impending foliage; the black birch-bark shone with better gloss and its taste was more pungent. In the basin itself, no longer flooded, the

brook wandered sometimes in several streams, sometimes in one, through swampy flats, over which hints of living things were shooting up, among which only the skunk-cabbage could be recognized, a harbinger of spring, which, despite its smell and repellent name, I have never since been able to see without a fulness in the throat.

In those days nearly every brook was well utilized for power, and each of the two streams flowing through the village had its chain of mill-ponds. The particular pond where the rifle-shooting occurred

« AnkstesnisTęsti »