Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1907 (Heft 19))

PISGAH.



WHERE it happened, I shall not say. I mean to be the only
one to venture there again, some springtide, when I want to
forget that I am growing old—some springtide when the first
feathery green of the hornbeams is vivid against the enmisted
purple of the moist oak and chestnut forest, and when the slender, white
stems of the old-field birches each upholds a canopy of yellow catkins.
Again I shall go up the old, overgrown road, passing by the half-obliterated
cellar-hole, the three graves, and the rude well, at the time when the gnarled
old appletree is trying to open a handful of blossoms as a protest against the
general reversion to wilderness. Then I shall strike into the old charcoal-
burners' path, that still winds its elusive way upward, and then scramble up
through that same cleft in the rocks.
I shall not again drag a camera into these dim woodland aisles,
as I did late in the day, that year when I felt young, and for shadows, for-
sooth! It is the best things of life that we can not catch; that we may
not hold; that we dare not try to keep—lest we be separated from our
kind. The thrush knows the mysteries of such sanctified places, but
he dwells there apart; and when I enter for a moment, as in a temple too
vast for human creeds, I take off my everyday spiritual cap—or lid — but
I must be mindful to screw it down again ere I depart, lest the devil-
wagons of progress promptly immolate me, while I am beclouded by my
own vaporings.
But that year I went there with a camera, through the still bare chest-
nuts and the tasseling oaks. One soon steps as gently as he may; for the
beautiful budding laurels are rugged, and resent and resist other progress.
The grouse whirred up and away from their coverts, not so startled as I
who had flushed them. Then I fared on over a silent brown carpet, beneath
soughing scrub-pines, and down into a dell of dense hemlock, all green and
red-brown lights and shades. The fox that turned to look at me, ere he
silently disappeared among the low-sweeping boughs, was not redder than
the hemlock trunks where the late afternoon sun broke in on them. Peer-
ing through the branches, I saw a clear space, closed in by the hemlocks, big
and little, in an irregular circle, while near the center stood a goodly maple,
with low-hanging sprays thick with the coppery young leaves of May. On
a low gray rock in front of the gray maple bole sat a girl clad in warm-toned
gray, with hair of old copper, surely warmer even than the tone of the young
maple-leaves unfolding about her head. I stood still, for she had not seen
me. A cloud had passed over the sun, softening the light within these
mystic precincts. I braced my box against the hemlock heside me and gave
as long an exposure as I dared. She had not moved; but then I dropped
a plate-holder, with a clatter, and when I looked up again, the cloud had fled
from the sun, and the girl from her seat. The screen of boughs behind the
maple still swayed, surely. But I felt guilty, and I intruded no further. I
bore my plate home and developed eagerly, but found no girl on it, only a

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