The Piazza Tales | Page 3

the turned maple
woods in the broad basin below me, having lost their first vermilion tint,
dully smoked, like smouldering towns, when flames expire upon their
prey; and rumor had it, that this smokiness in the general air was not all
Indian summer--which was not used to be so sick a thing, however
mild--but, in great part, was blown from far-off forests, for weeks on
fire, in Vermont; so that no wonder the sky was ominous as Hecate's
cauldron--and two sportsmen, crossing a red stubble buck-wheat field,
seemed guilty Macbeth and foreboding Banquo; and the hermit-sun,
hutted in an Adullum cave, well towards the south, according to his
season, did little else but, by indirect reflection of narrow rays shot
down a Simplon pass among the clouds, just steadily paint one small,
round, strawberry mole upon the wan cheek of northwestern hills.

Signal as a candle. One spot of radiance, where all else was shade.
Fairies there, thought I; some haunted ring where fairies dance.
Time passed; and the following May, after a gentle shower upon the
mountains--a little shower islanded in misty seas of sunshine; such a
distant shower--and sometimes two, and three, and four of them, all
visible together in different parts--as I love to watch from the piazza,
instead of thunder storms, as I used to, which wrap old Greylock, like a
Sinai, till one thinks swart Moses must be climbing among scathed
hemlocks there; after, I say, that, gentle shower, I saw a rainbow,
resting its further end just where, in autumn, I had marked the mole.
Fairies there, thought I; remembering that rainbows bring out the
blooms, and that, if one can but get to the rainbow's end, his fortune is
made in a bag of gold. Yon rainbow's end, would I were there, thought
I. And none the less I wished it, for now first noticing what seemed
some sort of glen, or grotto, in the mountain side; at least, whatever it
was, viewed through the rainbow's medium, it glowed like the Potosi
mine. But a work-a-day neighbor said, no doubt it was but some old
barn--an abandoned one, its broadside beaten in, the acclivity its
background. But I, though I had never been there, I knew better.
A few days after, a cheery sunrise kindled a golden sparkle in the same
spot as before. The sparkle was of that vividness, it seemed as if it
could only come from glass. The building, then--if building, after all, it
was--could, at least, not be a barn, much less an abandoned one; stale
hay ten years musting in it. No; if aught built by mortal, it must be a
cottage; perhaps long vacant and dismantled, but this very spring
magically fitted up and glazed.
Again, one noon, in the same direction, I marked, over dimmed tops of
terraced foliage, a broader gleam, as of a silver buckler, held sunwards
over some croucher's head; which gleam, experience in like cases
taught, must come from a roof newly shingled. This, to me, made pretty
sure the recent occupancy of that far cot in fairy land.
Day after day, now, full of interest in my discovery, what time I could
spare from reading the Midsummer's Night Dream, and all about
Titania, wishfully I gazed off towards the hills; but in vain. Either
troops of shadows, an imperial guard, with slow pace and solemn,
defiled along the steeps; or, routed by pursuing light, fled broadcast
from east to west--old wars of Lucifer and Michael; or the mountains,

though unvexed by these mirrored sham fights in the sky, had an
atmosphere otherwise unfavorable for fairy views. I was sorry; the
more so, because I had to keep my chamber for some time after--which
chamber did not face those hills.
At length, when pretty well again, and sitting out, in the September
morning, upon the piazza, and thinking to myself, when, just after a
little flock of sheep, the farmer's banded children passed, a-nutting, and
said, "How sweet a day"--it was, after all, but what their fathers call a
weather-breeder--and, indeed, was become go sensitive through my
illness, as that I could not bear to look upon a Chinese creeper of my
adoption, and which, to my delight, climbing a post of the piazza, had
burst out in starry bloom, but now, if you removed the leaves a little,
showed millions of strange, cankerous worms, which, feeding upon
those blossoms, so shared their blessed hue, as to make it unblessed
evermore--worms, whose germs had doubtless lurked in the very bulb
which, so hopefully, I had planted: in this ingrate peevishness of my
weary convalescence, was I sitting there; when, suddenly looking off, I
saw the golden mountain-window, dazzling like a deep-sea dolphin.
Fairies there, thought I, once more; the queen of fairies at her