Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB
[graphic]

ing the ground over and over, wondering but determined.

For quarter of an hour this keeps up, for half an hour, for three quarters.

"They must be here!" you exclaim for the tenth time. Yet where?

Old Lookout becomes disgusted with this fruitless, monotonous quest and disappears on affairs of his own. After a ten-minute search you round him up and get a little satisfaction from the deserved thrashing you administer. But you know you are wasting

[merged small][graphic][merged small]

precious time now; so finally your obstinate resolve capitulates. Returning past the spot where the covey vanished, you happen to swing out fifty feet more to

the right, through isolated grass tussocks standing in the water.

Suddenly, without warning, a quail gets up in front of the dog, not ten yards from

where you had looked so often. You miss him with both barrels, and this completes the upset of nerves already frayed. As you step forward, another bustles out from the tuft you're stepping on-and goes away unscathed. And, to complete your discomfiture, eight or ten get up all

stretched out in the grass, glad of a rest, but they come to life suddenly when a quail carcass drops beside them, and their eyes plead so for more that no one could resist a half-and-half division of the eatables.

"Four coveys and six birds in pocket! Frank, they're playing with us."

The reflection rankles so that pipes are scarcely lighted when you are off again, to the huge satisfaction of the dogs, who start out as if there had been no morning hunt at all.

As you tramp along the sandy road, Di suddenly stops right in the track. You work cautiously into the young sprouts: a huge Covey whirs up, bunched nicely. As the gun sounds, your doubting eyes see two birds drop to each barrel, but it takes Frank's confirmation to credit this phenomenon. In spite of urging, and "Dead bird-dead-find dead," repeated till your throat is tired, only three come to light; so you follow up the line of flight hoping to run across the "crippler" as well as to reduce the covey further.

[graphic]

A tall column of smoke from your chimney shows that Isham has been getting ready for your return.-Page 249.

around you at the report and look for another hiding-place. The rascals have played you a baffling trick, running sideways, in the opposite direction from their flight, as soon as they lit, and then lying close in the marsh.

The next covey is out in the open field; the dogs stand it, one from the north, the other from the south; it gets up wild when you are nearly forty yards away, and you manage with a lucky long shot to get one bird which drops right in front of Di-a proceeding so unusual that she is not rebuked for grabbing it and fetching before she is given the word. The singlers from this bunch prove so elusive that only one is flushed, in an unshootable thicket.

It is half past twelve, and lunch time. You find a shady spot (for the midday sun is actually hot), with a log for a back, the brown-paper parcels come out, and you review the morning over sandwiches, quail, cake, and apples. The dogs are

Nothing happens for a hundred yards or more; then Lookout comes to a point at a big, rotten, moss-covered log.

"That's that wounded bird: I told you we'd find him," exclaims Frank. Both dogs are fixed.

"Fetch him here, Lookout."

The big dog starts forward, noses eagerly along the log, leaps over, tests the other side.

"Fetch him out, sir."

With a whine of impatience, Look begins to scratch.

"He's there, sure. Fetch him." Wild scratches and yelps of ardor from Lookout, whose head is now buried under the log.

Still urging him, Frank tears at the rotten log with his fingers, and scoops out the dirt on the opposite side, in an effort to see under. In a moment his fingers meet Lookout's excavation; the excited dog sees something move, grabs it with his sharp teeth-and there is a human yell mingled with the canine noises.

"Bit me to the bone," mumbles Frank, and proceeds to show that if the parson, as his fellows call him, does not ordinarily "cuss," it's not because he doesn't know how.

Lookout pays not the least attention to Frank's remarks upon his ancestry or to your laughter; digging as if his life depended on it, whining, yelping, he presently makes a quick snap and drags out by the neck-a big, fat 'possum, who

grins and shams death. Even Frank forgets his finger for a moment in the excitement; and an old darky, who has been cutting wood near by, hastens up at the magic word ""Possum!" and grins wider than the animal when it is presented to him.

You get back to business; find half a dozen singlers and kill two; find another covey among close oak saplings which gets away untouched; and then get a dozen birds nicely broken down in the open woods and separated enough to flush by ones and twos. And here, where you should get your limit of fifteen without half trying, your shooting nerves go amuck: you score eight misses in five minutes-and start back for the wagon in a chastened frame of mind, only slightly relieved by jumping a big woodcock on the way and dropping him neatly.

The two dogs are tired out by the time we reach Kitty mule, and no wonder, for they have covered probably fifty to sev

enty-five miles, much of it at top speed. They can barely crawl up the side of the wagon, and need a helping hand to reach the inside, where they curl up in utter exhaustion.

With overcoats buttoned tight, laprobes, and a dog upon each wet foot pro

[graphic]

Homeward bound.

viding "animal heat," you traverse the long stretch homeward.

The sun sinks to the horizon and disappears in a glorious blaze of orange red. The pine-trees turn black and melt together, the taller ones standing silhouetted against the flaming sunset. The night cold creeps through all the wraps and feet become numb and blocky. And when through the dusk the bungalow lights shine out and a tall column of smoke from your chimney shows that Isham has been getting ready for your return, there was never a sight more welcome.

Then the sensuous joy of a bath before the blaze, and clean, light clothes and a well-earned drop of the "crather," and the ability to follow Chef Robert's wildest flights of culinary imagination. After which you relax into an easy chair before the living-room fire or join the bridge enthusiasts-with the satisfying consciousness that to-morrow is still another day.

[graphic][subsumed][merged small]

From the painting by Sargent, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
-See "The Field of Art," page 255.

THE POINT OF VIEW

'N the protests aroused by a recent attempt to remodel old hymns, one finds matter for wistful amusement, when one considers the nature of the protesters and the nature of hymns. Confidently adult, confidently agnostic, why should we care if A Little Exsome man tampers with our ancursion in a cient songs of sanctuary? Why Hymn-Book should we not regard as laudably scientific and logical this effort to renovate the hymn-book? But that is just the trouble, for hymns are not scientific and logical, and neither are we. It may have been decades since we have sung or heard a hymn, but we like to think that somewhere people are singing the old familiar words of our childhood. In pouring new terms into old tunes Professor Patton has not perceived the vital fact that a hymn to be a hymn must be a little obsolete.

The old hymns are the landmarks of our infancy, gracious and glamourous with memories. We do not wish old haunted rooms torn down to make place for socialist sanitation; we do not wish hoary trees clipped of excrescent but wonder-working imagery. To open the hymn-book and wander there at will is to evoke, as nothing else can do, the mystic mood of our childhood's faith. We have not forgotten the geography of that gentle land whence all the paths led skyward. It was there, rapt by its majesty, we watched Imperial Salem rise; there, breathing the incense of spiced breezes, we sailed to India's coral strand; there that our boisterous feet grew soft in stepping "by cool Siloam's shady rill," and our awed hearts were storm-swept by a vision of "crosscrowned Calvary." In that haunted domain was drama to quicken the pulse:

"Christian, dost thou see them

On the holy ground? How the troops of Midian

Prowl and prowl around?"

In that "sweet and blessed country," made mystical with music, heard melodies were sweet, but those unheard were sweeter. Can any power of poet or artist

[blocks in formation]

"What rush of alleluias

Fills all the earth and sky!

What ringing of a thousand harps
Bespeaks the triumph nigh!"

Where save in that blessed Bethlehem of our childhood's possession can we listen with the old throbbing Christmas joy when the herald angels sing? No, in that fair old land, we will allow no one to remove one stone of association builded out of the beauty of old words.

As a child would be careless of forgotten architects, so we are indifferent to the authorship of hymns. We attach certain names to the making of sacred song-Watts and Wesley, Heber and Havergal-but rarely examine with critical attention the characteristics of the groups belonging to each. Holy and humble men and women of God have composed our praises for us, and in the power of their words over our imaginations their personalities have been obliterated. An examination of the index of authors shows no name of literary reputation. Only one great poet ever contributed songs to the liturgy of worship, and that was David. One stops to ponder the reason, for it is not that our famous singers have been without faith. The authors of "Saul" and of "In Memoriam" were men of fervor as intense as that of Watts, yet neither Browning nor Tennyson ever wrote a hymn. A comparison of "Saul" with "The Son of God goes forth to war" might assist toward the explanation. The first expresses the religion of an adult, the second that of a child. Both types of religious expression are equally true and vital, they are merely different. Milton's "Hymn of the Nativity" and Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven" are great religious poems; they address themselves to adult intelligence, adult emotion, adult æsthetic sense. They differ in quality from hymns as poets differ from hymn-makers in their

« AnteriorContinuar »