AN OCTOBER RIDE
by Sarah Orne Jewett
It was a fine afternoon, just warm enough and just cool enough, and
I started off alone on horseback, though I do not know why I should
say alone when I find my horse such good company. She is called
Sheila, and she not only gratifies one's sense of beauty, but is
very interesting in her character, while her usefulness in this
world is beyond question. I grow more fond of her every week; we
have had so many capital good times together, and I am certain
that she is as much pleased as I when we start out for a run.
I do not say to every one that I always pronounce her name in German
fashion because she occasionally shies, but that is the truth. I do not
mind her shying, or a certain mysterious and apparently unprovoked jump,
with which she sometimes indulges herself, and no one else rides her, so
I think she does no harm, but I do not like the principle of allowing
her to be wicked, unrebuked and unhindered, and some day I shall give
my mind to admonishing this four-footed Princess of Thule, who seems at
present to consider herself at the top of royalty in this kingdom or any
other. I believe I should not like her half so well if she were tamer
and entirely and stupidly reliable; I glory in her good spirits and I
think she has a right to be proud and willful if she chooses. I am
proud myself of her quick eye and ear, her sure foot, and her slender,
handsome chestnut head. I look at her points of high breeding with
admiration, and I thank her heartily for all the pleasure she has given
me, and for what I am sure is a steadfast friendship between us,--and a
mutual understanding that rarely knows a disappointment or a mistake.
She is careful when I come home late through the shadowy, twilighted
woods, and I can hardly see my way; she forgets then all her little
tricks and capers, and is as steady as a clock with her tramp, tramp,
over the rough, dark country roads. I feel as if I had suddenly grown
a pair of wings when she fairly flies over the ground and the wind
whistles in my ears. There never was a time when she could not go a
little faster, but she is willing to go step by step through the close
woods, pushing her way through the branches, and stopping considerately
when a bough that will not bend tries to pull me off the saddle. And she
never goes away and leaves me when I dismount to get some flowers or a
drink of spring water, though sometimes she thinks what fun it would be.
I cannot speak of all her virtues for I have not learned them yet. We
are still new friends, for I have only ridden her two years and I feel
all the fascination of the first meeting every time I go out with her,
she is so unexpected in her ways; so amusing, so sensible, so brave,
and in every way so delightful a horse.
It was in October, and it was a fine day to look at, though some of the
great clouds that sailed through the sky were a little too heavy-looking
to promise good weather on the morrow, and over in the west (where the
wind was coming from) they were packed close together and looked gray
and wet. It might be cold and cloudy later, but that would not hinder my
ride; it is a capital way to keep warm, to come along a smooth bit of
road on the run, and I should have time at any rate to go the way I
wished, so Sheila trotted quickly through the gate and out of the
village. There was a flicker of color left on the oaks and maples, and
though it was not Indian-summer weather it was first cousin to it. I
took off my cap to let the wind blow through my hair; I had half a mind
to go down to the sea, but it was too late for that; there was no moon
to light me home. Sheila took the strip of smooth turf just at the side
of the road for her own highway, she tossed her head again and again
until I had my hand full of her thin, silky mane, and she gave quick
pulls at her bit and hurried little jumps ahead as if she expected me
already to pull the reins tight and steady her for a hard gallop. I
patted her and whistled at her, I was so glad to see her again and to be
out riding, and I gave her part of her reward to begin with, because I
knew she would earn it, and then we were on better terms than ever. She
has such a pretty way of turning her head to take the square lump of
sugar, and she never bit my fingers or dropped the sugar in her life.
Down in the lower part of the town on the edge of York, there is a
long tract of woodland, covering what is called the Rocky Hills; rough,
high land, that stretches along from beyond Agamenticus, near the sea,
to the upper part of Eliot, near the Piscataqua River. Standing on
Agamenticus, the woods seem to cover nearly the whole of the country as
far as one can see, and there is hardly a clearing to break this long
reach of forest of which I speak; there must be twenty miles of it in an
almost unbroken line. The roads cross it here and there, and one can
sometimes see small and lonely farms hiding away in the heart of it. The
trees are for the most part young growth of oak or pine, though I could
show you yet many a noble company of great pines that once would have
been marked with the king's arrow, and many a royal old oak which has
been overlooked in the search for ships' knees and plank for the navy
yard, and piles for the always shaky, up-hill and down, pleasant old
Portsmouth bridge. The part of these woods which I know best lies on
either side the already old new road to York on the Rocky Hills, and
here I often ride, or even take perilous rough drives through the
cart-paths, the wood roads which are busy thoroughfares in the winter,
and are silent and shady, narrowed by green branches and carpeted with
slender brakes, and seldom traveled over, except by me, all summer long.
It was a great surprise, or a succession of surprises, one summer, when
I found that every one of the old uneven tracks led to or at least led
by what had once been a clearing, and in old days must have been the
secluded home of some of the earliest adventurous farmers of this
region. It must have taken great courage, I think, to strike the first
blow of one's axe here in the woods, and it must have been a brave
certainty of one's perseverance that looked forward to the smooth field
which was to succeed the unfruitful wilderness. The farms were far
enough apart to be very lonely, and I suppose at first the cry of fierce
wild creatures in the forest was an every-day sound, and the Indians
stole like snakes through the bushes and crept from tree to tree about
the houses watching, begging, and plundering, over and over again. There
are some of these farms still occupied, where the land seems to have
become thoroughly civilized, but most of them were deserted long ago;
the people gave up the fight with such a persistent willfulness and
wildness of nature and went away to the village, or to find more
tractable soil and kindlier neighborhoods.
I do not know why it is these silent, forgotten places are so
delightful to me; there is one which I always call my farm, and it
was a long time after I knew it well before I could find out to whom
it had once belonged. In some strange way the place has become a
part of my world and to belong to my thoughts and my life.
I suppose every one can say, "I have a little kingdom where I give
laws." Each of us has truly a kingdom in thought, and a certain
spiritual possession. There are some gardens of mine where somebody
plants the seeds and pulls the weeds for me every year without my ever
taking a bit of trouble. I have trees and fields and woods and seas
and houses, I own a great deal of the world to think and plan and
dream about. The picture belongs most to the man who loves it best
and sees entirely its meaning. We can always have just as much as
we can take of things, and we can lay up as much treasure as we
please in the higher world of thought that can never be spoiled or
hindered by moth or rust, as lower and meaner wealth can be.
As for this farm of mine, I found it one day when I was coming through
the woods on horseback trying to strike a shorter way out into the main
road. I was pushing through some thick underbrush, and looking ahead I
noticed a good deal of clear sky as if there were an open place just
beyond, and presently I found myself on the edge of a clearing. There
was a straggling orchard of old apple-trees, the grass about them was
close and short like the wide door-yard of an old farm-house and into
this cleared space the little pines were growing on every side. The old
pines stood a little way back watching their children march in upon
their inheritance, as if they were ready to interfere and protect and
defend, if any trouble came. I could see that it would not be many
years, if they were left alone, before the green grass would be covered,
and the old apple-trees would grow mossy and die for lack of room and
sunlight in the midst of the young woods. It was a perfect acre of turf,
only here and there I could already see a cushion of juniper, or a tuft
of sweet fern or bayberry. I walked the horse about slowly, picking a
hard little yellow apple here and there from the boughs over my head,
and at last I found a cellar all grown over with grass, with not even a
bit of a crumbling brick to be seen in the hollow of it. No doubt there
were some underground. It was a very large cellar, twice as large as any
I had ever found before in any of these deserted places, in the woods or
out. And that told me at once that there had been a large house above
it, an unusual house for those old days; the family was either a large
one, or it had made for itself more than a merely sufficient covering
and shelter, with no inch of unnecessary room. I knew I was on very high
land, but the trees were so tall and close that I could not see beyond
them. The wind blew over pleasantly and it was a curiously protected
and hidden place, sheltered and quiet, with its one small crop of cider
apples dropping ungathered to the ground, and unharvested there, except
by hurrying black ants and sticky, witless little snails.
I suppose my feeling toward this place was like that about a ruin, only
this seemed older than a ruin. I could not hear my horse's foot-falls,
and an apple startled me when it fell with a soft thud, and I watched
it roll a foot or two and then stop, as if it knew it never would have
anything more to do in the world. I remembered the Enchanted Palace and
the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, and it seemed as if I were on the way
to it, and this was a corner of that palace garden. The horse listened
and stood still, without a bit of restlessness, and when we heard the
far cry of a bird she looked round at me, as if she wished me to notice
that we were not alone in the world, after all. It was strange, to be
sure, that people had lived there, and had had a home where they were
busy, and where the fortunes of life had found them; that they had
followed out the law of existence in its succession of growth and
flourishing and failure and decay, within that steadily narrowing
circle of trees.
The relationship of untamed nature to what is tamed and cultivated is a
very curious and subtle thing to me; I do not know if every one feels
it so intensely. In the darkness of an early autumn evening I sometimes
find myself whistling a queer tune that chimes in with the crickets'
piping and the cries of the little creatures around me in the garden. I
have no thought of the rest of the world. I wonder what I am; there is a
strange self-consciousness, but I am only a part of one great existence
which is called nature. The life in me is a bit of all life, and where I
am happiest is where I find that which is next of kin to me, in friends,
or trees, or hills, or seas, or beside a flower, when I turn back more
than once to look into its face.
The world goes on year after year. We can use its forces, and shape
and mould them, and perfect this thing or that, but we cannot make new
forces; we only use the tools we find to carve the wood we find. There
is nothing new; we discover and combine and use. Here is the wild
fruit,--the same fruit at heart as that with which the gardener wins
his prize. The world is the same world. You find a diamond, but the
diamond was there a thousand years ago; you did not make it by finding
it. We grow spiritually, until we grasp some new great truth of God;
but it was always true, and waited for us until we came. What is there
new and strange in the world except ourselves! Our thoughts are our
own; God gives our life to us moment by moment, but He gives it to be
our own.
"Ye on your harps must lean to hear
A secret chord that mine will bear."
As I looked about me that day I saw the difference that men had made
slowly fading out of sight. It was like a dam in a river; when it is
once swept away the river goes on the same as before. The old patient,
sublime forces were there at work in their appointed way, but perhaps
by and by, when the apple-trees are gone and the cellar is only a rough
hollow in the woods, some one will again set aside these forces that
have worked unhindered, and will bring this corner of the world into a
new use and shape. What if we could stop or change forever the working
of these powers! But Nature repossesses herself surely of what we boldly
claim. The pyramids stand yet, it happens, but where are all those
cities that used also to stand in old Egypt, proud and strong, and
dating back beyond men's memories or traditions,--turned into sand again
and dust that is like all the rest of the desert, and blows about in the
wind? Yet there cannot be such a thing as life that is lost. The tree
falls and decays, in the dampness of the woods, and is part of the earth
under foot, but another tree is growing out of it; perhaps it is part of
its own life that is springing again from the part of it that died. God
must always be putting again to some use the life that is withdrawn; it
must live, because it is Life. There can be no confusion to God in this
wonderful world, the new birth of the immortal, the new forms of the
life that is from everlasting to everlasting, or the new way in which
it comes. But it is only God who can plan and order it all,--who is a
father to his children, and cares for the least of us. I thought of his
unbroken promises; the people who lived and died in that lonely place
knew Him, and the chain of events was fitted to their thoughts and
lives, for their development and education. The world was made for them,
and God keeps them yet; somewhere in his kingdom they are in their
places,--they are not lost; while the trees they left grow older, and
the young trees spring up, and the fields they cleared are being
covered over and turned into wild land again.
I had visited this farm of mine many times since that first day, but
since the last time I had been there I had found out, luckily, something
about its last tenant. An old lady whom I knew in the village had told
me that when she was a child she remembered another very old woman, who
used to live here all alone, far from any neighbors, and that one
afternoon she had come with her mother to see her. She remembered the
house very well; it was larger and better than most houses in the
region. Its owner was the last of her family; but why she lived alone,
or what became of her at last, or of her money or her goods, or who were
her relatives in the town, my friend did not know. She was a thrifty,
well-to-do old soul, a famous weaver and spinner, and she used to come
to the meeting-house at the Old Fields every Sunday, and sit by herself
in a square pew. Since I knew this, the last owner of my farm has become
very real to me, and I thought of her that day a great deal, and could
almost see her as she sat alone on her door-step in the twilight of a
summer evening, when the thrushes were calling in the woods; or going
down the hills to church, dressed in quaint fashion, with a little
sadness in her face as she thought of her lost companions and how she
did not use to go to church alone. And I pictured her funeral to myself,
and watched her carried away at last by the narrow road that wound
among the trees; and there was nobody left in the house after the
neighbors from the nearest farms had put it to rights, and had looked
over her treasures to their hearts' content. She must have been a
fearless woman, and one could not stay in such a place as this, year
in and year out, through the long days of summer and the long nights
of winter, unless she found herself good company.
I do not think I could find a worse avenue than that which leads to my
farm, I think sometimes there must have been an easier way out which I
have yet failed to discover, but it has its advantages, for the trees
are beautiful and stand close together, and I do not know such green
brakes anywhere as those which grow in the shadiest places. I came into
a well-trodden track after a while, which led into a small granite
quarry, and then I could go faster, and at last I reached a pasture wall
which was quickly left behind and I was only a little way from the main
road. There were a few young cattle scattered about in the pasture, and
some of them which were lying down got up in a hurry and stared at me
suspiciously as I rode along. It was very uneven ground, and I passed
some stiff, straight mullein stalks which stood apart together in a
hollow as if they wished to be alone. They always remind me of the
rigid old Scotch Covenanters, who used to gather themselves together in
companies, against the law, to worship God in some secret hollow of the
bleak hill-side. Even the smallest and youngest of the mulleins was a
Covenanter at heart; they had all put by their yellow flowers, and they
will stand there, gray and unbending, through the fall rains and winter
snows, to keep their places and praise God in their own fashion, and
they take great credit to themselves for doing it, I have no doubt, and
think it is far better to be a stern and respectable mullein than a
straying, idle clematis, that clings and wanders, and cannot bear wet
weather. I saw members of the congregation scattered through the pasture
and felt like telling them to hurry, for the long sermon had already
begun! But one ancient worthy, very late on his way to the meeting,
happened to stand in our way, and Sheila bit his dry head off, which
was a great pity.
After I was once on the high road it was not long before I found myself
in another part of the town altogether. It is great fun to ride about
the country; one rouses a great deal of interest; there seems to be
something exciting in the sight of a girl on horseback, and people who
pass you in wagons turn to look after you, though they never would take
the trouble if you were only walking. The country horses shy if you go
by them fast, and sometimes you stop to apologize. The boys will leave
anything to come and throw a stone at your horse. I think Sheila would
like to bite a boy, though sometimes she goes through her best paces
when she hears them hooting, as if she thought they were admiring her,
which I never allow myself to doubt. It is considered a much greater
compliment if you make a call on horseback than if you came afoot, but
carriage people are nothing in the country to what they are in the city.
I was on a good road and Sheila was trotting steadily, and I did not
look at the western sky behind me until I suddenly noticed that the air
had grown colder and the sun had been for a long time behind a cloud;
then I found there was going to be a shower, in a very little while,
too. I was in a thinly settled part of the town, and at first I could
not think of any shelter, until I remembered that not very far distant
there was an old house, with a long, sloping roof, which had formerly
been the parsonage of the north parish; there had once been a church
near by, to which most of the people came who lived in this upper part
of the town. It had been for many years the house of an old minister, of
widespread fame in his day; I had always heard of him from the elderly
people, and I had often thought I should like to go into his house, and
had looked at it with great interest, but until within a year or two
there had been people living there. I had even listened with pleasure
to a story of its being haunted, and this was a capital chance to take
a look at the old place, so I hurried toward it.
As I went in at the broken gate it seemed to me as if the house might
have been shut up and left to itself fifty years before, when the
minister died, so soon the grass grows up after men's footsteps have
worn it down, and the traces are lost of the daily touch and care of
their hands. The home lot was evidently part of a pasture, and the sheep
had nibbled close to the door-step, while tags of their long, spring
wool, washed clean by summer rains, were caught in the rose-bushes
near by.
It had been a very good house in its day, and had a dignity of its own,
holding its gray head high, as if it knew itself to be not merely a
farm-house, but a Parsonage. The roof looked as if the next winter's
weight of snow might break it in, and the window panes had been loosened
so much in their shaking frames that many of them had fallen out on the
north side of the house, and were lying on the long grass underneath,
blurred and thin but still unbroken. That was the last letter of the
house's death warrant, for now the rain could get in, and the crumbling
timbers must loose their hold of each other quickly. I had found a dry
corner of the old shed for the horse and left her there, looking most
ruefully over her shoulder after me as I hurried away, for the rain had
already begun to spatter down in earnest. I was not sorry when I found
that somebody had broken a pane of glass in the sidelight of the front
door, near the latch, and I was very pleased when I found that by
reaching through I could unfasten a great bolt and let myself in, as
perhaps some tramp in search of shelter had done before me. However, I
gave the blackened brass knocker a ceremonious rap or two, and I could
have told by the sound of it, if in no other way, that there was nobody
at home. I looked up to see a robin's nest on the cornice overhead, and
I had to push away the lilacs and a withered hop vine which were both
trying to cover up the door.
It gives one a strange feeling, I think, to go into an empty house so
old as this. It was so still there that the noise my footsteps made
startled me, and the floor creaked and cracked as if some one followed
me about. There was hardly a straw left or a bit of string or paper, but
the rooms were much worn, the bricks in the fire-places were burnt out,
rough and crumbling, and the doors were all worn smooth and round at the
edges. The best rooms were wainscoted, but up-stairs there was a long,
unfinished room with a little square window at each end, under the
sloping roof, and as I listened there to the rain I remembered that I
had once heard an old man say wistfully, that he had slept in just such
a "linter" chamber as this when he was a boy, and that he never could
sleep anywhere now so well as he used there while the rain fell on the
roof just over his bed.
Down-stairs I found a room which I knew must have been the study. It
was handsomely wainscoted, and the finish of it was even better than
that of the parlor. It must have been a most comfortable place, and
I fear the old parson was luxurious in his tastes and less ascetic,
perhaps, than the more puritanical members of his congregation
approved. There was a great fire-place with a broad hearth-stone,
where I think he may have made a mug of flip sometimes, and there
were several curious, narrow, little cupboards built into the wall
at either side, and over the fire-place itself two doors opened and
there were shelves inside, broader at the top as the chimney sloped
back. I saw some writing on one of these doors and went nearer to read
it. There was a date at the top, some time in 1802, and his reverence
had had a good quill pen and ink which bravely stood the test of time;
he must have been a tall man to have written so high. I thought it
might be some record of a great storm or other notable event in his
house or parish, but I was amused to find that he had written there
on the unpainted wood some valuable recipes for the medical treatment
of horses. "It is Useful for a Sprain--and For a Cough, Take of
Elecampane"--and so on. I hope he was not a hunting parson, but one
could hardly expect to find any reference to the early fathers or
federal head-ship in Adam on the cupboard door. I thought of the
stories I had heard of the old minister and felt very well acquainted
with him, though his books had been taken down and his fire was out,
and he himself had gone away. I was glad to think what a good,
faithful man he was, who spoke comfortable words to his people and
lived pleasantly with them in this quiet country place so many years.
There are old people living who have told me that nobody preaches
nowadays as he used to preach, and that he used to lift his hat to
everybody; that he liked a good dinner, and always was kind to the
poor.
I thought as I stood in the study, how many times he must have looked
out of the small-paned western windows across the fields, and how in
his later days he must have had a treasure of memories of the people
who had gone out of that room the better for his advice and consolation,
the people whom he had helped and taught and ruled. I could not imagine
that he ever angrily took his parishioners to task for their errors
of doctrine; indeed, it was not of his active youth and middle age that
I thought at all, but of the last of his life, when he sat here in the
sunshine of a winter afternoon, and the fire flickered and snapped on
the hearth, and he sat before it in his arm-chair with a brown old book
which he laid on his knee while he thought and dozed, and roused himself
presently to greet somebody who came in, a little awed at first, to talk
with him. It was a great thing to be a country minister in those old
days, and to be such a minister as he was; truly the priest and ruler
of his people. The times have changed, and the temporal power certainly
is taken away. The divine right of ministers is almost as little
believed in as that of kings, by many people; it is not possible for
the influence to be so great, the office and the man are both looked
at with less reverence. It is a pity that it should be so, but the
conservative people who like old-fashioned ways cannot tell where to
place all the blame. And it is very odd to think that these iconoclastic
and unpleasant new times of ours will, a little later, be called old
times, and that the children, when they are elderly people, will sigh
to have them back again.
I was very glad to see the old house, and I told myself a great many
stories there, as one cannot help doing in such a place. There must have
been so many things happen in so many long lives which were lived there;
people have come into the world and gone out of it again from those
square rooms with their little windows, and I believe if there are
ghosts who walk about in daylight I was only half deaf to their voices,
and heard much of what they tried to tell me that day. The rooms which
had looked empty at first were filled again with the old clergymen, who
met together with important looks and complacent dignity, and eager talk
about some minor point in theology that is yet unsettled; the awkward,
smiling couples, who came to be married; the mistress of the house, who
must have been a stately person in her day; the little children who,
under all their shyness, remembered the sugar-plums in the old parson's
pockets,--all these, and even the tall cane that must have stood in the
entry, were visible to my mind's eye. And I even heard a sermon from the
old preacher who died so long ago, on the beauty of a life well spent.
The rain fell steadily and there was no prospect of its stopping, though
I could see that the clouds were thinner and that it was only a shower.
In the kitchen I found an old chair which I pulled into the study, which
seemed more cheerful than the rest of the house, and then I remembered
that there were some bits of board in the kitchen also, and the
thought struck me that it would be good fun to make a fire in the old
fire-place. Everything seemed right about the chimney. I even went
up into the garret to look at it there, for I had no wish to set the
parsonage on fire, and I brought down a pile of old corn husks for
kindlings which I found on the garret floor. I built my fire carefully,
with two bricks for andirons, and when I lit it, it blazed up gayly, I
poked it and it crackled, and though I was very well contented there
alone I wished for some friend to keep me company, it was selfish to
have so much pleasure with no one to share it. The rain came faster than
ever against the windows, and the room would have been dark if it had
not been for my fire, which threw out a magnificent yellow light over
the old brown wood-work. I leaned back and watched the dry sticks fall
apart in red coals and thought I might have to spend the night there,
for if it were a storm and not a shower I was several miles from home,
and a late October rain is not like a warm one in June to fall upon
one's shoulders. I could hear the house leaking when it rained less
heavily, and the soot dropped down the chimney and great drops of water
came down, too, and spluttered in the fire. I thought what a merry thing
it would be if a party of young people ever had to take refuge there,
and I could almost see their faces and hear them laugh, though until
that minute they had been strangers to me.
But the shower was over at last, and my fire was out, and the last pale
shining of the sun came into the windows, and I looked out to see the
distant fields and woods all clear again in the late afternoon light. I
must hurry to get home before dark, so I raked up the ashes and left my
chair beside the fire-place, and shut and fastened the front door after
me, and went out to see what had become of my horse, shaking the dust
and cobwebs off my dress as I crossed the wet grass to the shed. The
rain had come through the broken roof and poor Sheila looked anxious
and hungry as if she thought I might have meant to leave her there till
morning in that dismal place. I offered her my apologies, but she made
even a shorter turn than usual when I had mounted, and we scurried off
down the road, spattering ourselves as we went. I hope the ghosts who
live in the parsonage watched me with friendly eyes, and I looked back
myself, to see a thin blue whiff of smoke still coming up from the great
chimney. I wondered who it was that had made the first fire there,--but
I think I shall have made the last.
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