Read Ebook: Travels on the Amazon by Wallace Alfred Russel

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Ebook has 750 lines and 36698 words, and 15 pages

He squinted shrewdly. "Dunno's yer kin, anyway, do ye?" was his reply.

He now led us into the kitchen. We saw the face of the old lady peering at us from the "butt'ry." A modern range was backed up against a huge, old-fashioned brick oven, no longer used. A copper pump, with a brass knob on the curved handle, stood at one end of the sink--"Goes ter the well," said Milt. The floor was of ancient, hardwood planking, now worn into polished ridges. A door led up a low step into the main house, which consisted, downstairs, of two rooms, dusty and disused, to the left, and two similar rooms, used as bedrooms, to the south , and a hall, where a staircase with carved rail led to the hall above, flanked by four chambers, each with its fireplace, too. Over the kitchen was a long, unfinished room easily converted into a servant's quarters. Secretly pleased beyond measure at the excellent preservation of the interior, I kept a discreet silence, and with an air of great wisdom began my inspection of the farm.

Twenty acres of the total thirty were on the side of the road with the house, and the lot was almost square--about three hundred yards to a side. Down along the brook the land had been considered worthless. South of the orchard it had grown to sugar maple for a brief space, then to young pine, evidently seedlings of some big trees now cut down, with a little tamarack swamp in the far corner. The pines again ran up the southern boundary from this swamp. The brook flowed cheerily below the orchard, wound amid the open grove of maples, and went with a little drop over green stones into the dusk of the pines. The rest of the land, which lay up a slope to a point a little west of the house and then extended along a level plateau, was either pasture or good average tillage, fairly heavy, with subsoil enough to hold the dressing. It had, however, I fancied, been neglected for many years, like the tumbling stone walls which bounded it, and which also enclosed a four or five acre hayfield occupying the entire southwestern corner of the lot, on the plateau. The professor, who married a summer estate as well as a motor car, confirmed me in this. Behind the barn, on the other side of the road, the rectangular ten-acre lot was rough second-growth timber by the brook, and cow pasture all up the slope and over the plateau.

Returning to the house, we took a sample of the water from the well for analysis. When I asked the old lady to boil the bottle and the cork first, I think they both decided I was mad.

"Now," said I, as I put the sample in my pocket, "if this water gets a clean bill of health, what do you want for the place?"

"What'll you give me?" said Milt.

"Look here," said I, "I'm a Yankee, too, and I can answer one question with another just as long as you can. What do you expect me to give you?"

The old man spat meditatively, and wiped his whiskers with the back of his hand.

"Pitt Perkins got 0 an acre for his place," said he.

"They get 0 a square foot on Wall Street in New York," I replied.

"And 'twon't grow corn, neither," said Milt, with his nearest approximation to a grin.

"It pastures lambs," put in the professor.

But Milt didn't look at him. He gazed meditatively at the motor. "So thet contraption cost ,000, did it?" he mused, as if to himself, "and 'twon't drop a calf, neither. How'd ,000 strike you?"

I took the bottle of well water from my pocket, and extended it toward him. "Here," I said, "there's no need for me to have this analyzed."

"Seven?" said he.

"Six?" said he.

"All right," said he, "didn't much want ter sell anyhow." And he pocketed the bottle.

I climbed into the car, and the professor walked in front and cranked it. The engine began to throb. The professor put on his gloves.

"Five," said Milt, "with the hoss an' two Jerseys an' all the wood in the shed."

He was standing in the road beside the modern motor car, a pathetic old figure to me, so like my grandfather in many ways, the last of an ancient order. Poverty, decay, was written on him, as on his farmstead.

"It's yours!" I cried.

I got out of the car again, and we made arrangements to meet in the village and put the deal through. Then I asked him the question which had been pressing from the first. "Why do you sell?"

He pointed toward a distant estate, with great chimneys and gables, crowning a hill. "This hain't my country no more," he said, with a kind of mournful dignity. "It's theirs, and theirs, and theirs. I'm too old ter l'arn ter lick boots an' run a farm fer another feller. I wuz brought up on corn bread, not shoe polish. I got a daughter out in York State, an' she'll take me in if I pay my board. I guess ,000 'll last me 'bout as long as my breath will. Yer got a good farm here--if yer can afford ter put some money back inter the soil."

He looked out over his fields and we looked mercifully into the motor. The professor backed the car around, and we said good-bye.

"Hope the bilin' kills all them bugs in the bottle," was the old man's final parting.

"Well!" I cried, as we spun down over the bridge at my brook, "I've got a country estate of my own! I've got a home! I've got freedom!"

"You've got stuck," said the professor. "He'd have taken ,000."

"It's a thousand dollars," replied my companion.

"Yes, to you," I answered. "You are a professor of economics. But to me it's nothing, for I'm an instructor in English."

"And the point is?"

"That I'm going back home!" I cried. And I took off my hat and let the April wind rush through my hair.

MY MONEY GOES AND MY FARMER COMES

Three days later I got a report on the water from a chemist in Springfield; it was pure. Meanwhile, I had decided to tap the town main, so it didn't make any difference, anyway. We ran the car back to Bentford, and I closed the deal, took an inventory of the farm implements and equipment which went with the place, made a few hasty arrangements for my permanent coming, and hastened back to college. There I remained only long enough to see that the faculty had a competent man to fill my unexpired term , to pack up my books, pictures, and furniture, to purchase a few necessary household goods, or what I thought were necessary, and to consult the college botanical department. Professor Grey of the department assigned his chief assistant at the gardens to my case. He took me to Boston, and, armed with my inventory, in one day he spent exactly 1 of my precious savings, while I gasped, helpless in my ignorance. He bought, it appeared to me, barrels of seeds, tons of fertilizers, thousands of wheel hoes for horse and man, millions of pruning saws and spraying machines, hotbed frames and sashes, tomato trellises, and I knew not what other nameless implements and impedimenta.

"There!" he cried, at 5 P.M. "Now you can make a beginning. You'll have to find out this summer what else you need. Probably you'll want to sink another 0 in the fall. I told 'em not to ship your small fruits--raspberries, etc.--till you ordered 'em to. You won't be ready for some weeks. The first thing you must do now is to hire a first-class farmer and call in a tree specialist. Meanwhile, I'll give you a batch of government bulletins on orchards, field crops, cattle, and the like. You'd better read 'em up right away."

"You're damn cheerful about it!" I cried. "You talk as if I were a millionaire, with nothing to do but read bulletins and spend money!"

"That's about all you will do, for the next twelve months," he grinned.

This was rather disconcerting. But the die was cast, and I came to a sudden realization that seven years of teaching the young idea how to punctuate isn't the best possible training for running a farm, and if I were to get out of my experiment with a whole skin I had got to turn to and be my own chief labourer, and hereafter my own purchaser, as well.

All that night I packed and planned, and the next morning I left college forever. I slipped away quietly, before the chapel bell had begun to ring, avoiding all tender good-byes. I had a stack of experiment station bulletins in my grip, and during the four hours I spent on the train my eyes never left their pages. Four hours is not enough to make a man a qualified agriculturist, but it is sufficient to make him humble. I had left college without any sentimental regrets, my head being too full of plans and projects. I arrived at Bentford without any sentimental enthusiasms, my head being too full of rules for pruning and spraying, for cover crops, for tuberculin tests, for soil renewal. I'm sorry to confess this, because in all the "back to the land" books I have read--especially the popular ones, and I want this one to be popular, for certain very obvious reasons--the hero has landed on his new-found acres with all kinds of fine emotions and superb sentiments. The city folks who read his book, sitting by their steam radiators in their ten by twelve flats, love to fancy these emotions, glow to these sentiments. But I, alas, for seven long years preached realism to my classes, and even now the chains are on me; I must tell the truth. I landed at Bentford station, hired a hack, and drove at once to my farm, and my first thought on alighting was this: "Good Lord, I never realized the frightful condition of that orchard! It will take me a solid week to save any of it, and I suppose I'll have to set out a lot of new trees besides. More expense!"

"It's a dollar up here," said the driver of the hack, in a mildly insidious voice.

I paid him brusquely, and he drove away. I stood in the middle of the road, my suitcase beside me, the long afternoon shadows coming down through my dilapidated orchard, and surveyed the scene. Milt Noble had gone. So had my enthusiasm. The house was bare and desolate. It hadn't been painted for twenty years, at the least, I decided. My trunks, which I had sent ahead by express, were standing disconsolately on the kitchen porch. Behind me I heard my horse stamping in the stable, and saw my two cows feeding in the pasture. A postcard from one Bert Temple, my nearest neighbour up the Slab City road, had informed me that he was milking them for me--and, I gathered, for the milk. Well, if he didn't, goodness knew who would! I never felt so lonely, so helpless, so hopeless, in my life.

There was tonic in that turn! Twenty of my acres, as I have said, lay on the south side of the road, surrounding the house. The other ten, behind the barn, were pasture. The old orchard in front of the house led down a slope half an acre in extent to the brook. That brook ran south close to the road which formed my eastern boundary, along the entire extent of the farm--some three hundred yards. At first it flowed through a wild tangle of weeds and wild flowers, then entered a grove of maples, then a stand of white pines, and finally burbled out into a swampy little grove of tamaracks. I walked down through the orchard, seeing again the white bench across the brook, against the roadside hedge, and seeing now tall iris flowers besides, and a lily pool--all "the sweetest delight of gardens," as Sir Thomas Browne mellifluously put it. As I followed the brook into the maples and then into the sudden hushed quiet of my little stand of pines, I thought how all this was mine--my own, to play with, to develop as a sculptor molds his clay, to walk in, to read in, to dream in. Think of owning even a half acre of pine woods, stillest and coolest of spots! I planned my path beside the brook as I went along, and my spirits rose like the songs of the sparrows from the roadside trees beyond.

The bulk of my farm lay to the south of the house, on a gentle slope which rose from the brook to a pasture plateau higher than the dwelling. Most of the slope had been cultivated, and some of it had been ploughed in the fall. I climbed westward, a hundred yards south of the house, over the rough ground, looked into the hayfield, and then continued along the wall of the hayfield, over ground evidently used as pasture, to my western boundary, where my acres met the cauliflower fields of my neighbour, Bert Temple.

A single great pine, with wide-spreading, storm-tossed branches, like a cedar of Lebanon, stood at the stone wall, just inside my land. The wall, indeed, ran almost over its roots, a pretty, gray, bramble-covered wall, so old that it looked like a work of nature. Beneath the lower limbs of the pine, and over the wall, one saw the blue mountains framed like a Japanese print. Standing off a way, however, the pine stood out sharply against the hills and the sky, a noble veteran, almost black.

Then and there I saw my book plate--a coloured woodcut, green and blue, with the pine in black on the key block!

Then I reflected how I stood on soil which must be made to pay me back in potatoes for the outlay, stood, as it were, on top of my practical problem--and dreamed of book plates!

If I live to be a hundred, I can never repay Bert Temple, artist in cauliflowers and best of friends in my hour of need. Bert and his wife took me in, treated me as a human, if helpless, fellow being, not as a "city man" to be fleeced, and gave me the best advice and the best supper a man ever had, meantime assuring me that my cows had been tested, and both were sound.

The supper came first. I hadn't eaten such a supper since grandmother died. There were brown bread Joes--only rival of Rhode Island Johnny cake for the title of the lost ambrosia of Olympus. They were so hot that the butter melted over them instantly, and crisp outside, with delicious, runny insides.

"Mrs. Temple," said I, "I haven't eaten brown bread Joes since I was a boy. I didn't know the secret existed any more."

Mrs. Temple beamed over her ample and calico-covered bosom. "You must hev come from Essex or Middlesex counties," she said, "if you've et brown bread Joes before."

"Essex!" she cried. "Well, well! I came from Georgetown. Bert, he's Middlesex. I dunno what we're doing out here in these ungodly, half York State mountains, but here we be, and the secret's with us."

"He'll ask yer a month, an' take , an' earn it all," Bert answered. "We'll walk deown an' see him neow, ef yer like."

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