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She had come down from school for blissful week-ends and holidays, and she and Randy had tramped over the hills and through the pine woods, finding wild-flowers in the spring, arbutus, flushing to beauty in its hidden bed, blood-root, hepatica, wind-flowers, violets in a purple glory; finding in the summer wild roses, dewberries, blackberries, bees and butterflies, the cool shade of the little groves, the shine and shimmer of the streams; finding in the fall a golden stillness and the redness of Virginia Creeper.
It is the common and the god-like law of life. The browsers, the biters, the barkers, the hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they share with us the gift of life, share with us the love of an ideal; strive like us like us are tempted to grow weary of the struggle to do well; like us receive at times unmerited refreshment, visitings of support, returns of courage; and are condemned like us to be crucified between that double law of the members and the will.
In the North "creeper-fishing" is akin to this method, but the creeper is the larva of the stone-fly, not a fly itself, and it is cast more like an ordinary fly and allowed to sink. Sometimes, however, the mature insect is used with equally good results. A few anglers still practise the old style of dapping or "dibbling" after the manner advised by Izaak Walton.
It was not very good, but we ate some, being ravenous. The method was simplicity itself two forked sticks in the ground, one across to hang the rabbit to and a fire beneath. It tasted rather smoky. In the afternoon we finished putting up the tepee, and Tish made a fishhook out of a hairpin and tied it to a strong creeper I had found. But we caught no fish.
The Virginia creeper, light as the flounces of a lady, went whirling upward, as if in a dance; the fallen giant trees were rich in hanging moss; laurel and jasmine appeared beyond the bubbling surface of long, green morass, where life of some kind seemed to turn over comfortably in the rising warmth, like sleepers in bed.
And Jack would join them late in the long afternoon for tea. On one of these occasions the affair was settled. Bragdon decided to do the figure out of doors in a corner of the ruined garden wall with a clustering festoon of purple creeper above and a narrow slit of sea in the distant background.
It is always a double pleasure to find a plodding, humdrum-seeming man with a poet's heart in his breast; and a little of the same delighted surprise is felt by every one, I imagine, when he learns for the first time that our little brown creeper is a singer. What life could possibly be more prosaic than his?
It was wonderful to see the skill with which he took advantage of the slightest irregularities of the bark or obliquity of the stem to aid his ascent, jerking the stiff creeper a few feet higher when he had found a firm hold for his bare foot.
Bright-colored old-fashioned flowers were growing in beds close to the house, and there was a pathway, bordered by box bushes, which led from the front door to a gateway in a stone wall which partly surrounded the green little yard. I had not noticed before the gateway or the stone wall, on which grew bitter-sweet vines and Virginia creeper.
As they passed overhead, the reflection of the lurid light on them was smitten earthwards, and passed with them, making everything it traversed clear as noon the lion on the swinging sign of the public-house just across the water, the delicate tracery of the church windows, the virginia creeper on my cottage porch.
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