we were on our way to the yellow valley. we had been pushing against the wind, through the red march mud of a ploughed field. mud is a very good thing in its place, and if its place is not a ploughed field in march, i know of no better. but it does not encourage lightness of foot. at an especially big and burly gust of wind i stopped, turned my back for respite, and dropped into the lee of jonathan. wind is a good thing, too, in its place, but one does not care to drown in it.
"jonathan," i gasped, "this isn't spring; it's winter of the most furious description. let's reform the calendar and put up signs to warn the flowers. but i want my spring! i want it now!"
"well," said jonathan, "there it is. look!" and he pointed across the brush of the near fence line, where a meadow stretched away, brown with the stubble and matted tangle of[pg 39] last year's grass. halfway up the springy slope, in a little fold of the hillside, was a shimmer of green—vivid, wonderful.
i forgot the wind. "oh-h! think of being a cow now and eating that! eating spring itself!"
"if you were a cow," said jonathan, with the usual masculine command of applicable information, "they wouldn't let you eat it."
"they wouldn't! why not? does it make them sick?"
"no; crazy."
"crazy!"
"just that. crazy for grass. they won't touch hay any more, and there isn't enough grass for them—and there you are!"
"did you make that up as you went along, jonathan?"
"ask any farmer."
but i think i will not ask a farmer. he might say it was not true, and i like to think it is. i am sorry the cows cannot have their grass, but glad they have the good taste to refuse hay. i should, if i were a cow. not being one, i do not need an actual patch of green nibble to set me crazy. the smell of the[pg 40] earth after a thaw, a breath of soft air, a wave of delicious sweetness, in april, in march, in february,—when it comes in january i harden my heart and try not to notice,—this is enough to spoil me for the dry fodder of winter. hay may be good and wholesome, but i have had my taste of spring grass, and it is enough. that or nothing. no more hay for me!
what that strange sweetness of the early spring is i have never fully discovered. the fragrance of flowers is in it,—hepaticas, white violets, arbutus,—yet it is none of these. it comes before any of the flowers are even astir, when the arbutus buds are still tight little green points, when the hepaticas have scarcely pushed open their winter sheaths, while their soft little gray-furred heads are still tucked down snugly, like a bird's head under its wing. before even the snowdrops at our feet and the maples overhead have thought of blossoming, a soft breath may blow across our path filled with this wondrous fragrance. it is like a dream of may. one might believe the fairies were passing by.[pg 41]
for years i was completely baffled by it. but one march, in the farm orchard, i found out part of the secret. i was planting my sweet peas, when the well-remembered and bewildering fragrance blew across me. i sprang up and ran up the wind, and there, in the midst of the old orchard, i came upon an old apple tree just cut down by the thrift of jonathan's farmer, who has no silly weakness for old apple trees. the fresh-cut wood was moist with sap, and as i bent over it—ah, there it was! here were my hepaticas, my arbutus, here in the old apple tree! such a surprise! i sat down beside it to think it over. i was sorry it was cut down, but glad it had told me its secret before it was made into logs and piled in the woodshed. blazing in the fireplace it would tell me many things, but it might perhaps not have told me that.
and so i knew part of the secret. but only part. for the same fragrance has blown to me often where there were no orchards and no newly felled apple trees, and i have never, except this once, been able to trace it. if it is the flowing sap in all trees, why are not the[pg 42] spring woods full of it? but they are not full of it; it comes only now and then, with tantalizing capriciousness. do sound trees exhale it, certain kinds, when the sap starts, or must they have been cut or bruised, if not by the axe, perhaps by the winter winds and the ice storms? i do not know. i only know that when that breath of sweetness comes, it is the very breath of spring itself; it is the call of spring out of winter—spring grass.
when the call of the spring grass comes, there is always one spot that draws me with a special insistence, and every year we have much the same talk about it.
"jonathan," i say, "let's go to the yellow valley."
"why," says jonathan, "there will be more new birds up on the ridge."
"i don't care about new birds. the old ones do very well for me."
"and you might find the first hepaticas under indian rock."
"i know. we'll go there next."
"and if we went farther up the river, we might see some black duck."[pg 43]
"very likely; but i don't feel as if i particularly had to see black duck to-day."
"what do you have to see?"
"nothing special. just plain spring."
that is the charm of the yellow valley. it offers no spectacular inducements, no bargain-counter attractions in the shape of new arrivals among the birds or flowers. one returns from it with no trophies of any kind, nothing to put down in one's notebook, if one keeps a notebook,—from which industry may i be forever preserved! but it is a place to go to and be quiet, which is good for us all, especially in the springtime, when there is so much going on in the world, and especially lately, since "nature study" has driven people into being so unceasingly busy when they are outdoors. opera-glasses and bird books have their place, no doubt, in the advance of mankind, but they often seem to me nothing but more machinery coming in between us and the real things. perhaps it was once true that when people went out to view "nature," they did not see enough. now, i fancy, they see too much; they cannot see the spring for the birds. their motto is that of rikki-tikki,[pg 44] the mongoose, "run and find out"—an excellent motto for a mongoose,—but for people on a spring ramble!
the unquenchable ardor of the bird lover, so called, fills me with dismay. one enthusiast, writing in a school journal, describes the difficulties of following up the birds: "often eyes all around one's head, with opera-glasses focused at each pair, would not suffice to keep the restless birds in view." if this is the ideal of the bird lover, it is not mine. i wonder she did not wish for extra pairs of legs to match each set of eyes and opera-glasses, and a divisible body, so that she might scamper off in sections after all these marvels. for myself, one pair of eyes gives me, i find, all the satisfaction and delight i know what to do with, and i cannot help feeling that, if i had more, i should have less. the same writer speaks of the "maddening" warbler notes. why maddening? because, forsooth, there are thirty warblers, and one cannot learn all their names. what a pity to be maddened by a little warbler! and about a matter of names, too. after all, the bird, the song, is the thing. and it seems a pity to carry the chasing of bird[pg 45] notes quite so far. they are meant, i feel sure, to be hearkened to in quietness of spirit, to be tasted delicately, as one would a wine. the life of the opera-glassed bird hunter, compared to mine, seems to me like the experience of a tea-taster compared to that of one who sits in cozy and irresponsible enjoyment of the cup her friend hands her.
and so there always comes a time in the spring when i must go to my yellow valley. a car ride, a walk on through plain little suburbs, a scramble across fields to a seldom-used railway track, a swing out along the ties, then off across more fields, over a little ridge, and—there! oh, the soft glory of color! we are at the west end of a miniature valley, full of afternoon sunlight slanting across a level blur of yellows and browns. on one side low brown hills enfold it, on the other runs a swift little river, whose steep farther bank is overhung with hemlocks and laurel in brightening spring green. it is a very tiny valley,—one could almost throw a stone across it,—and the whole bottom is filled with waving grass, waist-high, of a wonderful pale straw color; last year's grass, which the winter snows[pg 46] never seem to mat down, thick-set with the tall brown stalks of last year's goldenrod and mullein and primrose. the trees and bushes are dwarf oaks, with their old leafage still clinging in tawny masses, and willows, with their bunches of slim, yellow shoots. even the little river is yellow-brown, from the sand and pebbles and leaves of its bed, and the sun, as it slants down the length of the valley, wraps it in a warm, yellow haze.
i call the valley mine, for no one else seems to know it. the long grass is never cut, but left to wave its glory of yellow all through the fall and winter and spring. there is a little footpath running through it, but i never see any one on it. i often wonder who makes all the footpaths i know, where no one ever seems to pass. is it rabbits, or ghosts? whoever they may be, in this case they do not trouble me, and the valley is as much mine as though i had cut it out of a medi?val romance.
it is always very quiet here. at least it seems so, though full of sound, as the world always is. but its sounds are its own; perhaps that is the secret; the rustle of the oak leaves as the wind fumbles among them; the swish-swish[pg 47] of the long dry grasses, which can be heard only if one sits down in their midst, very still; the light, purling sounds of the river; the soft gush of water about some bending branch as its tip catches and drags in the shifting current. the winds lose a little of their fierceness as they drop into the valley, and they seem to have left behind them all the sounds of the outer world which they usually bear. if now and then they waft hitherward the long call of a locomotive, they soften it till it is only a dreamy reminder.
it is strange that in a spot so specially full of the tokens of last year's life,—the dry grasses, the old oak leaves not yet pushed off by the new buds,—where the only green is of the hemlocks and laurels that have weathered the winter,—it is strange that in such a spot one should feel the immanence of spring. perhaps it is the bluebird that does it. for it is the bluebird's valley as well as mine. there are other birds there, but not many, and it is the bluebird which best voices the spirit of the place. most birds in the spring imply an audience. the song sparrow, with the lift and the lilt of his song, sings to the[pg 48] universe; the red-wing calls to all the sunny world to be gleeful with him; the long-drawn sweetness of the meadowlark floats over broad meadows and wide horizons; the bobolink, in the tumbling eagerness of his jubilation, is for every one to hear. but the bluebird sings to himself. his gentle notes, not heard but overheard, are for those who listen softly. and in the yellow valley he is at home.
i am at home, too, and i find there something that i find nowhere else so well. its charm is in the simpleness of its appeal:—
"only the mightier movement sounds and passes,
only winds and rivers—"
i bring back from it a memory of sunshine and grass, bird notes and running water, the broad realities of nature. nay, more than a memory—a mood that holds—a certain poise of spirit that comes from a sense of the largeness and sweetness and sufficiency of the whole live, growing world. spring grass—the rare fragrance of the spring air—is the call. the yellow valley holds the answer.
