An Evening on the Cayuga

Here, Augustine! take this paper; I have read war news enough for to-day, and more than enough from that Aceldama of “Bull Run;” push off the boat, and let us have one hour’s blessed truce on the bosom of this bewitching lake. Leave the nightmare of news behind us. It is Saturday evening. The last parting kiss of the setting sun is making yonder hilltop blush. To-morrow’s Sabbath lies hid beyond those eastern forests. Trim the boat, and hand me an oar.

Our friend takes his place in the stern, and the little shallop floats like a swan over the water. A glassy wavelet flows away from the bow, and a little gurgle is heard under the rudder. This is the only sound that is audible except the tinkle of a bell that is wandering amid that herd of cows in the green pasture-ground beyond the road. The bell sounds livelier, for the barefooted boy is starting the full-uddered cows homeward for the milking. Somebody will have a luscious bowl of bread and milk to-night, fragrant and creamy, just such as my boyhood used to feast upon. I have sat since at the tables of Parisian hotels and of English mansions; but never have I tasted such flavors as were hidden in that porringer where the bread and milk combined the aroma of the new-ground grain and the sweetbreathed clover. I pity the unlucky fledgling of Fifth Avenue, who never feasted his childhood on a bowl of snow-white bread and newly-strained milk, eaten on the broad piazza of a shady farm-house. Midas has a splendid palace of freestone on Murray Hill, but he cannot “keep a dairy,” or regale himself with the “sincere milk” warm from the udder.

Look a momant at yonder group of cattle who are standing leg-deep in the shallow water of the lake under those sycamores, switching the cool drops over their backs with their tufted tails. It is a picture for Cuyp. A big farm-dog, with loud bark, dashes into the lake and hurries the loiterers on. The barefoot boy cracks his whip, (made of poplar bark.) and the procession is in motion again. The milking will be late to-night. Old-fashioned New England was wont to finish its week’s work and to fold up its cares by sunset on Saturday evening.

Now let us halt the boat a moment. Lift up the oar, and let the “musical pearls” trickle off into the water. Look down into the depths. It is not the green of Niagara and of Church’s cataract. It is not the blue of Lake Leman. It is a shade between both, and so clear that we can count the stripes on the backs of the perch that are swimming half-way to the bottom. A mile beyond us — where the salmon trout are taken with two hundred feet lines — the water is as dark and impenetrable as the Atlantic. Three miles of rowing will carry us across the lake to the shores of Seneca. From the point where our boat is floating, the bay of Aurora looks like a miniature Bay of Naples. Imagine the beautiful village to be Naples, and yonder Prospect Hill with its cottage-smoke rising from the summit to be Yesuvius, and you have the “glory of the Mediterranean” seen through the smaller end of a spy-glass. In all my life-wanderings, I have never seen a village as faultless and fair as yonder Aurora, which is just now bidding the lake good-night.

For half a mile the shore is lined with gardens and summer-houses. Behind them, the pointed gables of elegant villas rise through the trees; and the broad street is sentinelled with a regiment of elms and poplars. Up on the hillside, over the tree-tops, we can just catch a glimpse in the twilight of white objects gleaming among the foliage. That is the churchyard — death’s silent fold in which the dark-browed shepherd tends his sleeping flock. He unlooses not even the tenderest lamb until that morning when the resurrection-angel shall roll away the stones from the narrow door, and they that hear a greater Shepherd’s voice shall come forth. Two graves we can almost detect from this distance; in one of them sleeps the father of the village, in the other, the father of the hand that pens this simple sketch. Long years ago, on a summer morning, we can yet detect a group of weeping villagers gathered around this last-named grave, and among them a wondering child of four years old, who, with silent awe, leans over to gaze into a narrow pit that he fancies to be the gate into eternity. How vividly comes back that scene to us now — with its harsh grating of the descending coffin against the gravel, and the heavy sound of the descending clods upon the sleeper’s breast, and the rustle of departing footsteps through the rank grass of the church-yard. A few days after that scene, a sprig of myrtle was planted on that new-made mound, but five and thirty years have expanded it into a dark- green mantle that now covers a dozen graves in the neighborhood. “We always judge of the refinement of a town by its keeping of its cemetery. A well-inclosed, well-shaded, well-trimmed church-yard bespeaks a cultivated community. But heaven preserve us from living among a people who leave their own fathers and mothers to decay in a neglected sheep-pasture under a wilderness of broken stones and mullen-stalks! My native village, I am happy to see, “sets a watch” at the door of its sacred sepulchres.

The twilight deepens, as we row along the margin of lawn and gardens. That building which begins to show many lights is the village hotel, now occupied by wanderers from the city.

Among its guests is the most eminent sculptor who dwells on American soil. In his room he has now hanging the last and finest landscape of James Hart. We spent an hour before it to-day; it is a noon-day scene in the valley of the Housatonic. It was a pleasant thing to study a picture by Hart in company with Palmer. Inter arma silent artes. May returning peace soon again give employment to the chisel that produced the “Indian Maiden” and the “White Captive.”

Yonder comes the moon! There is a great fire kindling through the trees beyond the graveyard, and then a long bar of shimmering gold begins to lay itself across the waters. Voices float through the silvered air; a party of singers are in the boat that steals in and out among the shadows by the shore. When is music so bewitching as on the water of a placid lake on a moonlit evening? Listening to those mellow voices,

“My soul is an enchanted boat, Whi£h, like a sleeping swan, doth float Upon the silver waves of this sweet singing.’

We go back to the distant past on those strains.

We hear again sounds long silenced, and voices that have passed into the harmonies of the heavenly world. We hear a mother’s cradle-hymn. We listen to “Sweet Home” sung at the evening fireside. The grand old Sabbath airs — chanted in yonder church or the one that stood there before it — sound in our ears from lips now silent in the tomb. We hear again the dirge on which our griefs were borne up when we went out to bury our dead. Sing on, sweet minstrels! It is a fitting prelude to to-morrow’s Sabbath worship. And so when the Saturday evening of our life shall come, may voices sweeter yet than yours fall upon our dying ear, the prelude to celestial anthems that shall usher in the morning of an eternal day!

Aueora, July 27, 1861.