Over the marshes at the hour of dusk when the bronze and topaz are quenched pa.s.ses the breath of foreboding. December acknowledges an unpitying fate-anything may happen. It is not the fireside month, softly white outdoors and candlelit within. Time of miracles, it stands expectant, and the thronging stars of the Christmas midnight wear a restless look. Rutted paths answer harshly to the step. Delayed snow is a menace in the air, but lands beyond the cities would be grateful should it hasten, bringing safety to the soil and winter peace. Yet snow is a betrayer, a sheet of paper upon which the feet of rabbit, mink, and fox write a guide to their dwellings and to the whole plan of their days.

Snow for Christmas there must be-on the lighted trees indoors, on our far-scattered, similar cards. But save as a convenience to the reindeer and a compliment to their driver, who cannot create his stocking stock unless he is s...o...b..und, and who must feel sadly languid as he tears through Florida heavens, city people would quite willingly manage with alum. Early in school life, however, comes the dangerous knowledge that nothing is so easy to draw as Christmas Eve: a white hillside, a path of one unchanging curve, a steeple or a chimney with smoke, a fir tree or a star. Thus snow eases art for the credulous who think it white.

Glittering under starlight, shadowed with purple, lemon, or deep blue as sunset turns to evening, taking on daffodil hues at noon, snow is harder to paint. Fretted with windy tracery and drawn out into streaming lines where the gale races along by a fence, snow is not, on Christmas greetings, permitted to be seen.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The first snowstorm of the year should be sent from Labrador on Christmas Eve and sprinkled impartially and ornamentally over all the land. Then, the Yule atmosphere once provided, the distribution should be confined to the rural clientele until the next December, for on streets the h.o.a.r frost is indeed like ashes. But why, in somber justice, should the far South pretend to holiday snow at all? Why not Christmas cards pranked with live oaks, alligators, lagoons, and other beauties of an Everglade scene-an inspiring escape from tradition and sentiment? For the antlered steeds must prance above hibiscus flowers as well as round the Pole. Yet it must seem dull to hang stockings by a fireplace that needs fire merely as a decoration and never to have loved a sleigh!

Abandoned, but still no downcast company, slanting corn shocks not honored with winter shelter stand patient sentinels in the field.

Abandoned they may seem, yet could you suddenly tip one over there would be a startled scurrying, for these are the choice snow-time residences of field mice, cottontails, weasels, and meadow moles-not, of course, together in harmony, but in their separate establishments. Let the blizzard come; it only makes warmer a house of cornstalks properly built, which bears, nevertheless, some of the dangers of a gingerbread home-pa.s.sing cows may feel tempted.

Vermilion heraldry of the wild rose is waved undimmed. Witch-hazel with her yellow blossoms, last flowers of the year, gazes upon the vanquished shrubs about her with a smile. Why, she will not even sow her seed until February! There is plenty of time for hardy petals.

Ma.s.sed against the stern horizon, the forest stands an unresponsive gray; entered, the twigs are seen sleek brown, dark red, and a fawn soft as the tan orchid. In towns December shows the iron mood. But in the open places, where pools of light and shadow lie, it is a water-color month, made fine with no gorgeous velvets of autumn, but hung with blending veils of dawn mist and of new snow, so that the subdued day rises in flushed, drifting vapors, like April's awakening, and when the sun comes, pale, we wonder that there is no summons in his light.

CHAPTER XIII.

LANDSCAPES SEEN IN DREAMS

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The painter of landscapes seen in dreams must be a memory that knows fantastic woods and faery seas all strange to the waking memory. Or else the artist is only a weariness with the day just past that gives us in sleep sight of the country which, so Mr. Maugham and other story-tellers say, is the real home that men may go their whole lives long without finding, because we are not always born at home, nor even brought up there, and we might for years be homesick for a land unseen. Once beheld, the recognition is instant, and in the foreign place begins a _vita nuova_-relief and an intensity of living never known before the new and familiar harbor came down to meet us at the sh.o.r.e. So sometimes it is in dreams. Recurrent and vivid, a scene of sheerest unreality will take on an earthly air, or landscapes flamboyantly exotic will hold the peace denied by every country it has been our daily fortune to know.

Dream landscapes come back again and again, as if they waited there forever, substantial, and we were the transient comers. Some, in ether dreams, shrink always from the same green waves, the same black, open mine, and two have now and then been found who saw on sleep journeys places that words repictured curiously alike. The fantasies may be patchwork of poems, plays, and paintings long forgotten, but when they rise in their compelling fusion they owe no debt to the lumber attic of the subconscious. The world they fashion is their own, and they do offer by their ethereal pathway a compensation for the insufficiencies of life.

There is a long, uncurving sea strand whose gray immensity of sands lies smooth for miles along the upper beach, but is feathered near the water by the stroking of little afterwaves, and draped unendingly with umber bands of kelp. Here as in no place seen the seaweed laces are edged with colors ground in unlighted depths, as if the tide cast carvings of lapis lazuli and feldspar up with the argent pebbles, and all the drifting algae are incrusted with yellow sh.e.l.ls. Sh.o.r.eward the palms climb up until they make a green horizon, and their unnatural fronds sink down again like green chiffon that veils the entrance to the pensive forest.

Vines with scented flowers as intangible as fog creep over root and trunk, and among them now and then with soundless foot and molten eye a leopard winds. Perpetual sunset wanes and glows behind the palms. There is never any wind. The violence of the ocean, the beasts, the tempest, is held in languorous leash while the treader of the sands goes on with unfelt steps toward rocks where the waters break importunate and sink moaning back. They hang black above a cave, and waves come in to prowl and snakes with scales like gems twine back and forth, glittering in the half light, with narcotic and effortless motion, until they with the rocks and all the scene fade.

A tiny stream, a pixy's river, slips from beneath a bowlder in a wood long known, and leads through thicket, glade, and clearing to a terrifying land, desolated by ancient fires and strewn with blackened stones and charred boughs. The place itself is athirst, and the dreamer kneels to drink. The tiny stream is dark, like a deep water, and bitter cold as if it flowed through ice. A staff thrust down cannot sound its depths. A finger's span across and bottomless! Nothing could dam its flow. Old embers at its borders are suddenly scattered when a gleaming hand parts the current and waves back toward the way just traced, but the flame-blasted firs have closed behind into a forbidding wall. Other pallid fingers rise from the portal of the abyss in warning gesture, but the narrow gulf opens underfoot.

There is a town where gay people in white dress promenade in a plaza shaded by orange trees, and they are always humming tunes. Little white streets lead to shuttered houses. A glory of buginvillaea overflows trellis and bower in splendid war with the hibiscus hedges and the dropping yellow fruit. Down the hill and over cobblestones, pursued by music and laughter, ministered to by odors of the lemon blossom, he whom sleep leads here may go toward a lake of fluent amethyst. The way is past the market place where brown women crouch by baskets of brilliant wares and venders of glistening lizards sit drowsily bent, and then at a step the forest dense and brooding is above him and its low boughs sweep the ripple of the lake. Immense leaves hang like curtains, and among them men with unquiet eyes move and hold monotoned speech while they hew sparkling rock into monstrous shapes. They are circling round a pit.

They cast in ornaments of opal and dark gold and garlands of venomous forest growths, gray and blood-red, tied with withered vines. Cries come from the pit, but the chant never stops.

Marching from a stronghold far up on a mountain of cedars, men in mail come at dusk with standards flickering crimson, fringed with gold, down to a valley full of blossomed iris where there is a wide pool with torches at its rim. Their flare streams out toward the circling cliffs.

Each marcher dips his silken flag into the quiet waters, and lights rise upon the battlements above as one by one all the black plumes are lost in the meadow's darkness and the torches burn low and fall into the pool.

A garden planted only with dark-red nasturtiums that lift for the dreamer's touch a flower's velvet cheek lies filmed with dew and fragrant as a noon breath from Ceylon spice groves. The miracle of color is spread along a hillside up to a high wall of great gray stones, and inside the gate is a house grown all over with grapevines, some borne down by blue cl.u.s.ters with shadowy bloom, some by cl.u.s.ters of topaz and ripe green. There is a pond among the gra.s.ses, where broad, wan lilies float, and purple pansies border all the walks. Very slowly the paneled door opens and the sun floods the central hall. It is hung with silver draperies, and an old woman stands there with a candle, mumbling and peering in a cataract of light.

CHAPTER XIV.

HIDING PLACES

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Childhood remembers a secret place-refuge, confessional, and couch of dreams-where through the years that bring the first bewildering hints of creation's loneliness he goes to hide and to rebuild the joyous world that every now and then is laid in flowery ruins beneath the trampling necessities of growing up. These little nooks where we confronted so many puzzles, wondered over incomprehension, and looked into the hard eyes of derision, abide caressingly for memory, who flies to them still from cities of dreadful light. The need for those small havens is lifelong. They are rarely at hand in later days, but no locked door and no walled chamber of the mind can take their place.

The suns of midsummer, tempered by spruce boughs, flicker and play upon a broad-backed rock where fairy pools made by the late rain in its crannies are frequented by waxwing and woodp.e.c.k.e.r, even though an intruder sleeps upon that dryad's couch. Brakes and sweet fern crowd around it. Ta.s.seled alders are its curtains. Here one might be forever at rest. It is to such a place that rebel wishes turn when the early gra.s.s and clover thicken in the pastures or when the summer birds begin their slow recessional. The longing to lie upon a sun-warmed rock in the woods comes back desperately in April and October to them who once have known that place of healing and stillness.

Yellow bells from the wands of circling forsythia bushes drop into a deep hollow lined with velvet gra.s.s. Pale b.u.t.terflies of new-come May flutter among the dandelions that bejewel this emerald cup of Gaea, and sometimes drowsy wings are folded sleepily upon a gold rosette. Light beams pa.s.s and repa.s.s in jubilance over the gra.s.s blades. The sun is enchanted in the clear yellow of the flowers. Glints, movement, gayety, and withal peace and silence were in that place of exultant color and radiant life. It was a rare spot, and unvisited save by birds in quest of screening branches for their nests and perhaps by some one who hid there and always had to laugh before he left.

A round s.p.a.ce of soft sward is guarded by strawberry shrub and by the bridal-wreath spiraea that droops white branches lowly to the ground.

Here you could lie on a moonlit summer night, with arms outstretched and face pressed into the soft gra.s.s, and beneath your fingers you could feel the world turn on and on, immensely, soothingly, and everlastingly, the only sound the bats' wings above, or a baby robin protesting musically at the slowness of the night's divine pace. Here the smell of the sod is keen and sweet. Here dew would cool a throbbing brow. Here the undertones of earth vibrate through the body, and all its nerves, strung to intense perception, yet would be wrapped in persuasive peace.

An old balm-o'-Gilead tree, growing on a hillside, kindly lets down one mighty limb as pathway to a leafy hiding place incomparably remote and dimly lighted even at noon. The branches make an armchair far back against the trunk, and that glossy foliage, always cool, swishes like waves at low tide. The tree has much to tell, but never an intrusive word. You may sit there with a book or in the distracting company of secret happiness or tears, and it will ignore you courteously, going on about its daylong task of gathering greenness from the sun, and only from time to time touching your hand with an inquiring leaf. Sometimes a red squirrel looks in and departs in shocked fashion through the air.

Sometimes the sheep pa.s.s far below on their way home. But the refuge is secure, and the balm-o'-Gilead's cradling arms wait peacefully to hold an asking child.

A foamy brown brook that flashes and dallies, is captured and breaks free again, down along the mountain has been coaxed by some wood nymph to furnish sparkling water for her round rock bath. Dutifully it pours in every moment its curveting freshness, bringing now and then the tribute of a laurel leaf or a petal from some flower that bent too close. This bath is gemmed with glittering quartz and floored with red and white pebbles. Gray mosses broider it where the sun lies, and dark green where the water drips. The nymph has been at some pains to train the five-finger ivy and nightshade heavily all about, and the great brakes carpet the path her gleaming feet must tread at sunrise. Now at noon you may come there, troubling no living drapery, and dangle your feet over the moss into the dimpling coolness of that mountain pool. A trout might dart in, a red lizard appear upon a ledge, but nothing else.

The wild-cherry cl.u.s.ters hang within reach.

In the corner of a meadow where dispa.s.sionate cows graze and snort scornfully at the collie who comes to get them in the late afternoon stands a great red oak that has somehow inspired the gra.s.s underneath it to grow to tropic heights. But between two of its wandering ancient roots is short gra.s.s, woven with canary-flowered cinquefoil vines, and into this nook you may creep, screened by wind-ruffled blades beyond, and taste of the white wild strawberries that reach their eerie ripeness in the shade. A woodchuck may sit up and gaze at you across the barrier, or a bright-eyed chipmunk scuttle out on a limb for a better view. They leave you alone soon, and at twilight even the cow bell is quiet.

A balsam fir that grows on a bowlder leaning out halfway down a ravine hospitably spreads its aromatic boughs flat upon the rock, after the inviting manner of this slumber-giving Northern tree. The very breath of the hills is shed here. It is almost dark by day, and at night the stars show yellow above the upper firs. The wind goes murmuring between gray walls, and the sound of the stream, far down, comes vaguely save in the freshet month. This is the farthest hiding place of all. Only the daring would find the perilous way to its solitude.

CHAPTER XV.

THE PLAY OF LEAVES

[Ill.u.s.tration]

For fox and partridge, fawn and squirrel-all the wood dwellers that run or fly-youth, like the rest of life, is a time of stress and effort.

They have a short babyhood and little childhood. Once they begin to move they must take up for themselves the burden of those that prey and are preyed upon. They step from nest or den into a world in arms against them, and while they sensibly fail to worry over this, undoubtedly it complicates their fun. Baby foxes playing are winsome innocents, but they have become sly and wary while lambs, colts, and calves are still making themselves admirably ridiculous in fenced meadows. And neither hunter, hawk, nor wildcat makes allowances for the youth and inexperience of debutante game.

It is different with little leaves. They are as playful as kittens, with their dances, poses, flutters, their delicate bursts of glee. Unless involved with flowers, or with timber or real estate, they are safe, not alone in winter babyhood, but through spring and summer, that minister to them with baths of dew and rain and with the somnolent wine of the sun. Only when old age has brought weariness with winds and heat, and even with the drawing of sap, are they confronted by their enemy, frost.

You will say, caterpillars, forest fires, but they are the fault of man and an unantic.i.p.ated flaw in nature's plan for letting the leaves off easily. We brought foreign trees that had their own mysterious protection at home into lands where that immunity vanished, and so the chestnut has left us, and apple and rose are threatened by foes whom their mother had not foreseen. Were it not for man's mistakes the leaves would have had an outrageously gay time by comparison with the darkling lives of the creatures that move among them and beneath them.

All winter long in its leaf bud the baby tulip leaf drowses, curled up tight. It is completely ready to spring full formed into the light as soon as the frost line has been driven back by the triumphant lances of the sun, and there it dips and laughs and nods, and sometimes goes quite wild when a running breeze comes by at the hour wherein morning makes opals of July's heavy dew. The poplars, the maidenhair trees, shake out spangles then. The maples show their silver sides. Always the forest lives and breathes, but when the new leaves come it draws long, shuddering breaths of delight. Whoever has dwelt with trees knows how differently the small leaves of May talk from the draped and weighted boughs of August.

Stepping along the rustling wood road, you can hear the reveries of the leaves around you. They whisper and sigh in youth; they reach out to touch the friendly stranger's cheek. In summer they hang their patterned curtains tenderly about him, in a silence made vocal only by a teasing gale. In autumn they are loud beneath his tread. Snow alone can hush them. When they are voiceless they are dead at last, but already their successors, snugly cradled and blanketed with cotton, are being rocked to sleep upon the twigs.

The rippling, shimmering birch upon a wind-stroked hill talks with falling cadence, like a chant. The naiad willow, arching lowland brooks, speaks as water, very secretly. The oak could not be silent, with his story of many days to tell, and keeping his leaves throughout the snow time, his speech is perpetual. Only the pines and kindred evergreens are now and then melancholy, as if the new needles and leaves looked down upon the carpet below, forever thickened, of those whose hold grew faint. Leaves of cherry and apple, born into a world of tinted blossoms, are gay to the last. The sprays of locust leaves that keep their yellow-green until the sober tree flowers into cl.u.s.tered fragrance of white, arboreal sweet peas whisper by night and day of the bats and tree toads that dwell in their channeled and vine-loved bark. The sycamore's voice is cool-toned and light, but the mountain ash murmurs low, and low the beech.

Watching leaves adrift on November winds, there comes the memory of Stevenson's song of another ended life-of days they "lived the better part. April came to bloom and never dim December breathed its killing chill." But the tree that wore them, standing in stripped starkness that month-if stark means strong-shall enter dazzling splendors when the days of ice storms come. That miracle of lucent grayness, an elm in the morning sun, when every branch and every smallest twig is cased in ice outdoes its green enchantments of June. It is more beautiful than a tree of coral. It is the color of p.u.s.s.y willows made to shine. It is as gray as sunrise cobwebs on the gra.s.s, as starlight on dew. Its branches, tossed by January, clash sword on delicate sword, or, left quiet, the elm stands like a pensive dancer and swings against one another long strands of crystal beads. And in the city little ice-sheathed maples along an avenue, glistening under white arc lights, surpa.s.s the changing l.u.s.ters of gray enamel. Trees robed in ice are the very home of light, of fire frozen fast in water and turned pale.

Between the going and coming of the leaves the sky is background for the cunning lacework of twigs. Were it always May, we should never see how finely wrought is the loom upon which those leafy embroideries are woven. In autumn the design is more austere, the colors show more somber, but when the March branches flush with sap, and the buds, waking, put forth hesitant green fingers, that infinitely complex tracery of the twigs is a spring charm as moving as the perfume of the thorn. Outlined against a sunset, it foretells in beauty the months when the leaf chorus will sound with the birds'.