XII

CHEERED by the increasing light and a long spell of pleasant weather, “up March hill” we go, to use an old phrase which is still very much alive among us. The fields on every side remain in possession of our long winter, but in the shelter of the south wall of the house the short, dead grass of the farmhouse lawn is coloring through with the first tranquil green of the new year.

Beyond the pale fields, the evergreen forest is losing its winter austerity. Massed together on a pasture hill, the pines prepare the resinous, green-fleshed “candles” of new growth which will so suddenly burst forth just as our short-lived spring promises to turn to summer; the hemlocks, meanwhile, making ready their branchlet ends of yellow-green.

Winter may hold the chilly surface of our northern soil, but beneath the snow, and in the timeless dark below the frost, the forest is waking to the hunger of life, and the fine roots are asearch in the cold clays and the crumbles of granite and the mould.

The faith of the earth in itself never falters, and in the woods this is the secret and hidden season of the triumph of life. The fierce courtships of last autumn, the pursuits, the wooings, the escapes, reluctances, and yieldings, bear their fruit in this bleakness and light of early spring.

The red fox mothers her eager, sharp-nosed cubs whilst the male ranges our woodpaths to feed his mate and the milk hunger of the brood; the doe turns to her fawn and nuzzles it to its feet; the she-bear’s cubs, tiny as kittens when born in the earlier winter, shake off the strange half-life, half-sleep which they have shared with their mother and now begin to utter louder cries and tumble about in their caves in the vast woodlands of the north.

I think of all this when the sun goes down beyond the roof of my barn, and the woods darken against the bleak gold of the March sky. Behind that almost conspirational wall of young pines and the older pines above, what faith in life works with intensity towards life and the continuance of life. What tenderness there must be in that world without speech, what power of courage, sacrifice, and endurance. So goes on the life of the forest, and meanwhile great Orion slopes his shoulders to the west.

FARM DIARY

Smelting season on the salt rivers drawing to a close, what there is of ice growing day by day more unsure, and large floes breaking off with every tide. / Blue jays very noisy in their frontier world midway between the hayfields and the deep woods, and I often hear the sweet, bell-like note one associates with spring. / As the earth clears of snow, skunks emerge, and on warmish mornings after warmish nights, I often come upon the small, delicate tracks in the thin mud enclosing roadbed puddles. / Good farm-country Sunday dinner at a friend’s, chicken stew with dumplings, various fixings such as coleslaw and “sour dressing,” a mashed turnip dish baked in the oven with cheese and a noble choice between a pie of deer-meat mince and a pumpkin pie with a wavy crust. / Spring food-sales now being held in the various church basements, and Elizabeth provides us with a box of “brownies” of the blond, brown sugar kind which turn out to be rapturously good. / Wood and coal holding out unusually well, but I am glad that the living year is coming our way.

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There is only one test of any political scheme or adventure in government. It is the quality of the human being produced by the political order and by the way of life occasioned by that order. Such materialistic arithmetic as the amount of electric power sold, the number of motor cars produced, and the immense potential of this and that means nothing whatever. A truce to these materialistic puffings of a materialistic heaven as vulgar, tedious, and empty in its conception as anything ever held up to the inquiring spirit of man.

But the human being? There you are. Is that human being a conscious member of a community and willing to do his best by it, has he honesty and courage, the reasonable public good manners which keep the experiment on the way it should go, has he a proper sense of the human decencies and is he seized upon now and then by his birthright of natural gaiety; has the man his quality of manhood and decision and the woman her immense and mystical power?

“Man the measure of all things.” A good adage once the limits of its application are understood. Let’s have it again on a few doorways and temple pediments.