Part 3 (1/2)

”That's a silo,” said Colin, pointing to a cylindrical tower at the end of a group of barns, from which came the sound of an engine surrounded by a group of men, occupied in feeding it with trusses of corn from a high-piled wagon. ”They are laying in fodder for the Winter.” Interesting agricultural observation!

In the surrounding fields the pumpkins, globes of golden orange, lay scattered among the wintry-looking corn-stalks.

”Bully subject for a picture!” said Colin.

Before we had gone very far, we did stop at a cottage standing at a puzzling corner of cross-roads, and asked the way, not to Versailles, indeed, but to--Dutch Hollow. We were answered by a good-humoured German voice belonging to an old dame, who seemed glad to have the lonely afternoon silence broken by human speech; and we were then, as often afterward, reminded that we were not so far away from Europe, after all; but that, indeed, in no small degree the American continent was the map of Europe bodily transported across the sea. For the present our way lay through Germany.

Dutch Hollow! The name told its own story, and it had appealed to our imaginations as we had come upon it on the map.

We had thought we should like to see how it looked written in trees and rocks and human habitations on the page of the landscape. And I may say that it was such fanciful considerations as this, rather than any more business-like manner of travel, that frequently determined the route of our essentially sentimental journey. If our way admitted of a choice of direction, we usually decided by the sound of the name of village or town. Thus the sound of ”Wales Center” had taken us, we were told, a mile or two out of our way; but what of that? We were not walking for a record, nor were we road-surveying, or following the automobile route to New York. In fact, we had deliberately avoided the gasoline route, choosing to be led by more rustic odours; and thus our wayward wayfaring cannot be offered in any sense as a guide for pedestrians who may come after us. Any one following our guidance would be as liable to arrive at the moon as at New York. In fact, we not infrequently inquired our way of a bird, or some friendly little dog that would come out to bark a companionable good day to us from a wayside porch.

As a matter of fact, I had inquired the way of the bluebird mentioned a little while back, and it may be of interest--to ornithological societies--to transcribe his answer:

_The way of dreams--the bluebird sang-- Is never hard to find So soon as you have really left The grown-up world behind;

So soon as you have come to see That what the others call Realities, for such as you, Are never real at all;

So soon as you have ceased to care What others say or do, And understand that they are they, And you--thank G.o.d--are you.

Then is your foot upon the path, Your journey well begun, And safe the road for you to tread, Moonlight or morning sun.

Pence of this world you shall not take, Yea! no provision heed; A wild-rose gathered in the wood Will buy you all you need.

Hungry, the birds shall bring you food, The bees their honey bring; And, thirsty, you the crystal drink Of an immortal spring.

For sleep, behold how deep and soft With moss the earth is spread, And all the trees of all the world Shall curtain round your bed.

Enchanted journey! that begins Nowhere, and nowhere ends, Seeking an ever-changing goal, Nowhither winds and wends.

For destination yonder flower, For business yonder bird; Aught better worth the travelling to I never saw or heard.

O long dream-travel of the soul!

First the green earth to tread-- And still yon other starry track To travel when you're dead_.

CHAPTER IX

DUTCH HOLLOW

The day had opened with a restless picturesque morning of gusty suns.h.i.+ne and rolling clouds. There was something rich and stormy and ominous in the air, and a soft rainy sense of solemn impending change, at once brilliant and mournful; a curious sense of intermingled death and birth, as of withered leaves and dreaming seeds being blown about together on their errands of decay and resurrection by the same breath of the unseen creative spirit. Incidentally it meant a rain-storm by evening, and its mysterious presage had prompted Colin to the furnis.h.i.+ng of our knapsacks with water-proof cloaks, which, as the afternoon wore on, seemed more and more a wise provision. But the rain still held off, contenting itself with threatening phantasmagoria of cloud, moulding and ma.s.sing like visible thunder in our wake. It seemed leisurely certain, however, of catching us before nightfall; and, sure enough, as the light began to thicken, and we stood admiring its mountainous magnificence--vast billows of plum-coloured gloom, hanging like doomsday over a stretch of haunted orchard--the great drops began to patter down.

Surely the sky is the greatest of all melodramatists. Nothing short of the cataclysmal end of the world could have provided drama to match the stupendous stage-setting of that stormy sky. All doom and destiny and wrath of avenging deities and days of judgment seemed concentrated in that frown of gigantic darkness. Beneath it the landscape seemed to grow livid as a corpse, and terror to fill with trembling the very trees and gra.s.ses. Oedipus and Orestes and King Lear rolled into one could hardly have accounted for that angry sky. Such a sky it must have been that carried doom to the cities of the plain. And, after all, it was only Colin and I innocently making haste to Dutch Hollow!

That Teutonic spot seemed hopelessly far away as the rain began to drive down and the horizon to open here and there in lurid slas.h.i.+ngs of stormy sunset; and when the road, which for some time had been one long descent, suddenly confronted us with a rough, perpendicular lane, overgrown with bushes, that seemed more like a cart-track to the stars than a sensible thoroughfare, we realized, with a certain indignant self-pity, that we were walking in real earnest, out in the night and the storm, far from human habitation.

”Nature cannot be so absurd,” said I, ”as to expect us to climb such a road on such an evening! She must surely have placed a comfortable inn in such a place as this, with ruddy windows of welcome, and a roaring fire and a hissing roast.” But, alas! our eyes scanned the streaming copses in vain--nothing in sight but trees, rain and a solitary saw-mill, where an old man on a ladder a.s.sured us in a broken singsong, like the Scandinavian of the Middle West, that indeed Nature did mean us to climb that hill, and that by that road only could we reach the Promised Land of supper and bed.