MYSTERY OF AN ABANDONED ORCHARD 



BY J. OTIS SWIFT, AUTHOR OF "WOODLAND MAGIC 



THIS winter morning while the eves of the house 

 here in the Manor at Hastings-on-Hudson are 

 adrip with melting snow that fell during the night, 

 I want to take you over through the soft yellow sunshine 

 to the Grassy Sprain Valley and the old abandoned 

 orchards on the hillside above the Yonkers reservoir. 

 Though the ground is not frozen we have found a thin 

 veil of snow over the dun brown grass, like a heavy 

 frost, on many mornings lately. It will have evaporated 

 before the sun is well up. We go over through the 

 woods at Hudson Heights 

 and cross the mystic little 

 Nepperhan River, that 

 Washington Irving men- 

 tions, on the stepping stones 

 where the lady beeches lean 

 lovingly over. I wonder 

 how many generations of 

 lovers, American, Colonial 

 English, old Dutch, and 

 Algonquin, have crossed 

 over these smoothy worn 

 footstones? I don't know 

 why, but steppingstones in 

 a brook always make me 

 think of lovers and one 

 who has not forgotten how 

 lovers feel is a fit novitiate 

 to go out into the forests 

 for a day's ramble with that 

 oldest lover in the world, 

 Dame Nature. 



Back in that romantic age 

 before Christianity, when 

 nearly all the known world 

 worshipped Cybele, the god- 

 dess of Nature, who, under 

 many names, held sway over 

 the hearts and minds of men 

 from the shores of the Medi- 

 terranean bowl eastward across Asia Minor, they used to 

 picture the sweet girl goddess as sleeping the long winters 

 through guarded by the lions in her mountain caverns. 

 But I think we have learned a few things in these latter 

 centuries. For the forests never seem to me so redolent 

 of her entrancing personality as in the sleepy winter 

 time when the great tulips, sycamores, oaks', black birches 

 and red elms, their feet wrapped in warm leaves and 

 snow drifts, all the little baby shrubs tucked snugly in 

 like cherubs in their cradles, stand whispering and 

 gossiping and laughing together far and wide through 

 the forest. 



Then in the Spring, when patches of clean washed 

 dead brown leaves appear between the . deep woodland 



THE MYSTIC LITTLE NEPPERHAN RIVER WITH THE LADY 

 BEECHES LEANING OVER 



snows, and Cybele, her tawny hair flying over her 

 girlish bare shoulders, her light filmy robes drifting 

 about her lissom figure, comes dancing and laughing 

 through the forest calling all her little plant and big 

 tree folk to awake, we can see where her pink toes have 

 touched the brown sward lightly, have stirred the still 

 green Christmas ferns, by the trailing arbutus breaking 

 into pink, the hepaticas into delicate blue, and the spring 

 beauties into pinkish white. 



But by now we have passed the pro bono publico^ 



spring in the edge of the 

 wood and have torn our way 

 through the smilax, rasp- 

 berry, button-bush and snap- 

 wood of the Sprain Brook 

 bog and out into the old field 

 across which is the State 

 road. It is called the Sprain 

 Road and is bordered by a 

 crumbling stone wall, elo- 

 quent of backaches long for- 

 gotten. Poison ivy covered 

 with waxen gray berries, 

 woodbine knitting the lichen- 

 painted stones together, 

 blackcap raspberries, black- 

 berries on either side, bright 

 red dashes of color where 

 the black alder our local 

 holly lightens up the tan- 

 gle, and crawling grapevines 

 clamber over walls, fence- 

 rails and cedar bars. Some- 

 time before the Civil War 

 and how long ago that seems 

 now since we have seen our 

 boys come back from the 

 heroic fields of France this 

 was a prosperous farming 

 community. In the jungle 

 of half-grown sassafras, locust, black walnut and 

 sumachs, the larger walnuts were neatly tagged during 

 the war by the Yonkers Boy Scouts, there are old cellars 

 overgrown with weeds, raspberries, wild roses and 

 catbriar. 



As we step into one of them through the gaping South- 

 ern wall all the romance, melancholy and guessed-at 

 tragedy of uncovered Pompeii and Herculaneum sweep 

 over us. Who lived here? When did the creeping, 

 inexorable front trenches of the forest advance 

 across the brook and cultivated fields, and why? As 

 we stand here guessing, we stoop to scoop up a handful 

 of the crumbling mortar and ashes on the cellar floor 

 and come upon the economy of Mother Nature who 



