XXXVIII

FROM the hilltop of the farm I now look forth on a landscape divided as a map might be into three colors, each with its domain. Within the girdle of our northern pines I see the blue of the September pond, the brown of uncut grassland, and everywhere the beautiful new green which has carpeted the fields whose hay was cut in summer when the sun was high. A mood and a quiet of autumn brood upon the land, and maples thrust out flaming branches from trees which have something of an end-of-summer air.

So cloudless and so glowing are the days, so warm and still the bright autumnal hours that we tend to forget what the sky to the northwest has stored away for us of bitter cold and “the treasures of the snow.” It is the night which brings the warning and the winter bell, the night ever more swiftly at hand, the night which with every hour rolls up its own pageant of winter from the east. One comes gratefully back to the kitchen from our autumnal nights, and throws a fresh billet on the fire.

Last night, soon after supper, I had to go down the road to see a neighbor, and when I returned to the farm, the full moon was rising through a dark which promised frost. Before the rising of the disk, a pool of light gathered above on a low, thin cloud, and glowingly brightened until the satellite itself appeared and rose above the woods. As the full orb cleared the earth I could see outlined upon its face, as if arranged there by some old-fashioned, romantic artist, the silhouetted height of a great ragged pine which crowns the ridge. It seemed to me as I stood there that some vibration or wave of night and life accompanied the overflowing and revelation of the moon, for I soon heard an owl cry in my woods and far away a dog barked from a farm on the other side.

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Because I have always had a kind of piety for the beauty and the mystery of the night, finding in that great starlit splendor a peace which day does not harbor and cannot give, I lingered outdoors and watched awhile. There would be a frost; it was growing bitterly cold. Presently I became aware of something very curious and beautiful to see. The surface of the pond being warmer than the frosty air which had so swiftly succeeded the pleasant warmth of the day, the moonlit waters were beginning to mist over and breathe forth moonlit wreaths and veils of vapor like a cauldron of ghosts such as an Indian hunter might tell about when he returned to his own people from the woods.

Burnished by the moon, its levels veiled with the vapor as it arose, the pond looked as motionless and cold as I have ever chanced to see it. It was not the pond in winter: it was the pond at some mysterious ending of an age in time. Higher and higher grew the towers of the mist, some rising to a level with the top of the farm hill—thin columns, transparent, moonlit, and showing through their beauty and ghostliness the one yellow light of a farm on the other side.

Nature has moods as well as forms and styles, and this was something in the eternally romantic. “But I had best cover the garden,” I thought again. “There will surely be a frost.”

FARM DIARY

My friend Paul Wilson gives me a chopping block such as I have long coveted for the farm. It is a strong, broad-based column of locust wood, and I can work at it comfortably without having to stoop over. / In a cornpatch by the road I come upon my neighbor Hudson Vannah and his helper Earl Baldwin, rooting up the rows of dead and withered plants and carrying away the stalks. The tractor suddenly backfires, and out of the pale field bursts a flock of blackbirds who take a grateful refuge in a nearby tree. A little later a grey squirrel passes us, running along the top of the boulder wall with a pale ear of corn held crosswise in his jaws. / A great basket of apples temporarily stored away in an unoccupied bedroom on the cold side gives the interior of the farm a pleasantly autumnal fragrance. / The migrating waterfowl are coming in large numbers to the pond, and in the quiet of sunrise I often hear the popping of guns from duck-blinds built on the shores of the shallow marshlands to the east of our bay. / Late in the afternoon with the sun scarce half an hour’s distance above the pines, and I heard a truck coming towards the house; it is Lawrence with a fine load of white birch and yellow birch for the great fireplace. / Elizabeth likes to be read to while darning socks, and we have just begun an old novel of Maine.

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The general term “Science” is very much with us these days, and I often find myself wondering if those who use it have much idea of what they mean. What is “Science” and more particularly, “a Science”? As I muse upon my own question, I am certain of one thing, to wit, that a share of our present troubles comes from our being led by the nose by a number of completely bogus sciences. Not all the king’s horses would get me to name them! To my mind, however, the pretensions to being “sciences” now being put forward by certain departments of knowledge have just about as much authority as the pretensions of phrenology or the scrying of tea leaves. It is to be noted, moreover, that the use of the scientific method does not make a study a “science.” My own definition? I stick to the hint given by Descartes—a science is a part of knowledge able at any time to consider its given realm and make with foreknowledge and certainty a prophecy concerning the working of its laws.