farm has a good cornfield, beans, pumpkins, and potatoes, besides “the woman’s” little patch of “garden truck.” A good many bees are kept, in colonies of gray hives under the apple trees.
The people who live on the farms are, I suppose, much like farm people everywhere. “Folks are folks”; yet, after being much with them, certain qualities impress themselves upon one’s notice as characteristic; they have a dry sense of humor, and quaint and whimsical ways of expressing it, and with this, a refinement of thought and speech that is almost fastidious; a fine reticence about the physical aspects of life such as is only found, I believe, in a strong race, a people drawing their vigor from deep and untainted springs. I often wonder whether there is another place in the world where women are sheltered from any possible coarseness of expression with such considerate delicacy as they find among the rough men on a New England farm.
The life is so hard, the hours so necessarily long, in our harsh climate, that small-natured persons too often become little more than machines. They get through their work, and they save every penny they can; and that is all. The Granges, however, are increasing a pleasant and wholesome social element which is beyond price, and all winter you meet sleighs full of rosy-cheeked families, driving to the Hall for Grange Meeting, or Sunday Meeting, or for the weekly dance.
Many of the farm people are large-minded enough to do their work well, and still keep above and on top of it; and some of these stand up in a sort of splendor. Their fibres have been seasoned in a life that calls for all a man’s powers. Their grave kind faces show that, living all their lives in one place, they have taken the longest of all journeys, and traveled deep into the un-map-able country of Life. I do not know how to write fittingly of some of these older farm people; wise enough to be simple, and deep-rooted as the trees that grow round them; so strong and attuned to their work that the burdens of others grow light in their presence, and life takes on its right and happier proportions when one is with them.
If the first impression of our country is its uniformity, the second and amazing one is its surprises, its secret places. The long ridges accentuate themselves suddenly into sharp slopes and steep cup-shaped valleys, covered with sweet-fern and juniper. The wooded hills are often full of hidden cliffs (rich gardens in themselves, they are so deep in ferns and moss), and quick brooks run through them, so that you are never long without the talk of one to keep you company. There are rocky glens, where you meet cold, sweet air, the ceaseless comforting of a waterfall, and moss on moss, to velvet depths of green.
The ridges rise and slope and rise again with general likeness, but two of them open amazingly to disclose the wide blue surface of our great River. We are rich in rivers, and never have to journey far to reach one, but I never can get quite used to the surprise of coming among the hills on this broad strong full-running stream, with gulls circling over it.
One thing sets us apart from other regions: our wonderful lakes. They lie all around us, so that from every hill-top you see their shining and gleaming. It is as if the worn mirror of the glacier had been splintered into a thousand shining fragments, and the common saying is that our State is more than half water. They are so many that we call them ponds, not lakes, whether they are two miles long, or ten, or twenty.[1] I have counted over nine hundred on the State map, and then given up counting. No one person could ever know them all; there still would be new “Lost Ponds” and “New Found Lakes.”
The greater part of them lie in the unbroken woods, but countless numbers are in open farming country. They run from great sunlit sheets with many islands to the most perfect tiny hidden forest jewels, places utterly lonely and apart, mirroring only the depths of the green woods.
Each “pond,” large or little, is a world in itself. You can almost believe that the moon looks down on each with different radiance, that the south wind has a special fragrance as it blows across each; and each one has some peculiar, intimate beauty; deep bays, lovely and secluded channels between wooded islands, or small curved beaches which shine between dark headlands, lit up now and then by a camp fire.
Hill after hill, round-shouldered ridge after ridge; low nearer the salt water, increasing very gradually in height till they form the wild amphitheatre of blue peaks in the northern part of the State; partly farming country, and greater part wooded; this is our countryside, and across it and in and out of the forests its countless lovely lakes shine and its great rivers thread their tranquil way to the sea.
[1] The legal distinction in our State is not between ponds and lakes, but between ponds and “Great Ponds.” All land-locked waters over ten acres in area are Great Ponds; in which the public have rights of fishing, ice-cutting, etc.
CHAPTER II—THE RIVER
Our river is one of the pair of kingly streams which traverse almost our entire State from north to south. The first twenty-five miles of its course, after leaving the great lake which it drains, is a tearing rapid between rocky walls: then follows perhaps a hundred miles of alternating falls and “dead water,” the falls being now fast taken up as water powers. It has eleven hundred feet to fall to reach the sea, and it does most of this in its first thirty miles.
The river’s course through part of our county is marked by a noticeable geological formation. For a space of fifteen miles, the greater and lesser tributary streams have broken their way down through the western ridge of the river valley in a succession of small chasms that are so many true mountain defiles in little. They have the sharp descents and extreme variety of slopes and counter-slopes, though with walls never more than a hundred and fifty feet high.
There are forty or fifty of these ravines, some nourishing strong brooks, some a mere trickle, or a stream of green marsh and ferns where water once ran. Acushticook, which threads the largest, is really a river, and Rollingdam, Bombahook, and Worromontogus are all powerful streams. Rollingdam follows a very private course, hidden in deep mossy woods for several miles. The ravine presently deepens and becomes more marked, descending in abrupt slopes, then narrows to a gorge, the rocky sides of which are covered with moss and ferns, nourished by spray. The brook runs through it in two or three short cascades, and falls sheer and white to a pool, twelve feet below.
Below our Town, the river sweeps on, steadily wider and nobler in expanse, till it reaches the place where five other rivers pour their streams into its waters, and it broadens into the sheet of Merrymeeting Bay, three miles from shore to shore.
Below the bay the channel narrows almost to a gorge. The sides are steep and rocky, crowned with black growth of fir and spruce, and through this space the swollen waters pour in great force. There are strong tide races, in which the river steamers reel and tremble, and below this there begins a perfect labyrinth of channels, some mere backwaters, some leading through intricate passages among a hundred fairy islands. There are cliffs, moss and fern-grown, and countless dark headlands. The islands are heavily wooded with characteristic evergreen growth, dense, fragrant, of a rich color, and they are ringed with cream-white granite above the sea-weed, where the blue water circles them.—And so down, till the first break of blue sea shows between the spruces.
We never feel cut off, or too far inland, having our river. The actual sea fog reaches us on a south wind, salt to the lips. Gulls come up all the way from the sea, and save for the winter months, there is hardly a day when you do not see four or five of them wheeling and circling; while twice or thrice in a lifetime a gale brings us Mother Carey’s chickens, scudding low, or else worn out and resting after the storm.
The river sleeps all
