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<h2>CHAPTER XIX</h2> November’s moon is said to be the Indian’s Moon of Magic, but here the June moon is the wonder moon and “the moon of my delight.”  It sails resplendent in a luminous sky, pouring its brightness down on a lake that gleams like a silver shield.  Its beams rain down through the leaves in a drenching flood of light, to lie in shining pools on the mossy ground.  It illuminates the hidden nooks of the forest, it makes the stems of the birches look like slender columns of white marble, and the woods are so bright that half the flowers forget to shut their eyes, and stay wide open through the night.  Slender, tall irises stand like ghost flowers in the swamps; the thousand little bells of the false lily of the valley—the Canada May Flower—swing in the breezes that run along the ground, and on the low, south point of the island the rushes rattle stiffly and bow their heads as the wind passes over them.  They are the Equisetum, the Horsetail rush, known to the Pilgrim housewives as scouring rushes, with which they used to clean their pots and pans. Mary Blake tells me that she has used them and that the flinty, hollow stems are excellent kettle cleaners.  They do not suggest anything so prosaic here in the white moonlight—rather they make me think of small silver spears held upright in the hands of a fairy troop, the small, green yeomen of the forest, on guard through the white night. There is great rushing and scurrying in the underbrush, for the deer mice, the rabbits, and other small folk of the forest are awake and active.  The birds too are wakeful and chirp answers chirp from one nest to another all through the night. This is going to be a good bird year judging from the number of broken egg shells—blue, cream, speckled—that are cast from the nests to the ground.  There is a continuous sound of faint, wheezing cries, the voices of nestlings, begging for food. A pair of robins have plastered their mud nest on a beam of the porch roof, a red-eyed vireo has hung her birch bark cradle in a low bush under the kitchen window, some ph&oelig;bes have built on the lintel of the house door.  It seems impossible that so small a nest can hold so many squirming little bodies as must belong p. 202to all those upstretched, gaping yellow bills.  The parent ph&oelig;bes do not hesitate about telling me in good round terms just what they think of me when I go too near their home, but the robins do not scold me, they only go off to a bush and mourn.  The vireo cares not at all for anybody, but sits tranquil on her eggs and eyes me fearlessly. I have seen a whippoorwill’s nest, a thing, I am told, that few people ever find.  It lies on the ground under the shelter of cedar poles that serves John Beaulac for a wagon shed, and is so directly in the path of the horses’ hoofs that I wonder it has not been trampled into the mold.  John’s small daughter, Sallie May, led me to it, and, as we approached, a dark, slenderly trailing bird slid away through the underbrush, leaving her two furry balls of nestlings rolling helplessly on the dry leaves of their bed.  They were about half the size of young chickens and were covered with thick down of a red clay color that had so fiery and vital a glow that it made me think of live coals showing through the ashes.  We took one look and hurried away lest the whippoorwill mother should become frightened and forsake her nest, and two sweet and plaintive bird voices be lost from the evening chorus. At Beaulac’s, where I stopped on the homeward way, a lively discussion was going forward.  The Bishop of Ontario was coming to Sark, for the first time in many years, to hold service and to confirm, and there was much speculation about who would join the English Church. “I’m a goin’ to be a Catholic,” announced poor Ishmael, the half-wit, peering out from a dim nook behind the stove. “They tells me the priest kin cure the fits,” he went on, hopefully, “but he won’t do it fer you lessen you bees a Catholic, so I’m a goin’ to jine his church.” “I favors the Baptists, ef I favors any,” observed Bill Shelly, the frogger. Whereupon John Beaulac retorted cruelly, that “We’d ought to send fer the preacher quick and have Bill dipped right off the dock, clothes and all,” further explaining that the suggestion was made in view of Bill’s general appearance and his boast that he had not touched water since early in the previous summer, and then only because he had “fell in.” Bill, so far from being offended, took this witticism in excellent part, joining uproariously in the laugh that followed it. For the rest of that week, telephones were busy calling a congregation.  I was invited to drive to church in Mrs. Swanson’s spring wagon, and reached her farm by a devious route on the great day.  I rowed across the half mile that lies between the island and the nearest point of mainland and walked the wood trail from Drapeau’s to Foret’s.  There William’s motor boat was waiting to ferry me across the lake and up Blue Bay to the Swan-sons’ landing. Here also there was a flutter of excitement, for Susie Dove was going to be confirmed. Clarence Nutting too had wished to be of the class, but at the last moment it had been remembered that he had never been baptized.  As baptism must precede confirmation the Rector, amid the hurry and work of entertaining the Bishop and conveying him to and from the several churches where there were to be services, had been diligently striving to come up with Clarence to baptize him. But each time he searched for him Clarence was away, either in a distant field or over in the next township, and so the Rector never p. 205caught him, and when the service commenced poor Clarence sat humbly at the side of the church with the men, and could not come forward. There was no trouble about little Susie.  Her case was entirely clear.  Her new dress and white veil were spread forth on the spare room bed for display and admiration; her hair was plaited in innumerable tight pigtails as a prelude to subsequent frizzes. Susie looked quiet and subdued.  There was a frightened expression in her china-blue eyes.  She could eat no dinner, she could not even taste her pie, and soon she and Mrs. Swanson retired to dress.  On the way to church Susie sat silent, clutching her new Prayer Book in a moist and trembling hand.  On the homeward drive she confided to me that she had been very afraid of the Bishop. “I knew my Commandments,” she assured me, “but I was not so certain about the creed, and I was afeared lest the Bishop should ask me some hard questions.” Her face then was radiant.  The Bishop had been kind and had asked no one any hard questions, and so this little one had not been put to confusion. The church at Sark is old and falling to pieces but it looked lovely that day.  Each window sill held a plant in bloom, its tin can covered with gay, flowered wall paper—geraniums, fuchsias, patience plants—the ornaments of many a parlor.  Each window framed a picture of soft, rolling meadows, fruit trees in bloom, homesteads nestled in the hollows, and, over all, stretches of blue sky, flecked with wisps of floating vapor.  In the center of the church sat the group of ten or a dozen candidates for confirmation.  Through the misty veils their young faces looked out, awed and grave and very sweet.  There had been a great disappointment for little Mary Spellman, for her veil had not come from town with the rest.  She looked like a gentle little nun, with a square of plain white muslin laid over her flaxen head.  Most of these girls will not wear bridal dress at their weddings, so confirmation is the one great occasion in their lives when they can put on the dignity and the mystery of the veil. “Defend, O Lord, this thy child with thy heavenly grace”—The words seemed to reach me from a great way off, repeated each time the Bishop laid his hands on a bowed head.  p. 207The Bishop’s voice was kind, his tone gentle when, his sermon finished, he turned from the congregation to deliver his charge to the class.  I do not remember much of what he said, but I have not forgotten his manner.  It seemed to me, listening, that he must feel a peculiar tenderness for these little cut-off country parishes. After service I was led forward to be presented to his Lordship.  He said that he had heard of “the lady from the Southern States who was living alone at Many Islands.”  I could not help feeling that the Episcopal eye regarded me with a certain suspicion, as one not quite right in her mind—which supposition was, I fear, confirmed by my own behavior, for when Mrs. Rector said: “My Lord, I wish to present Miss X. to you,” the unaccustomed sound of the title, and my own total ignorance of the proper mode of addressing one called “My Lord,” gave me a foolish, flustered manner that must have betrayed me. We locked the silent church, stripped of its flowers and white-robed girls, and drove along the tree-shaded roads to the shore, where the motor boat was waiting.  The water was so still and so clear that we could see every rock and pebble lying a dozen feet below.  We passed over schools of big fish, bass and pickerel, hanging suspended in a crystal medium.  Between the sheer walls of the Loon Lake Portage the sun was going down in a lake of gold and the rocks were purple and red in its glow. I walked the home trail slowly, lingering in the falling dusk.  The odors of the cedars, hemlocks, and basswoods came to me mingled with the wet smell from the bogs and the perfume of the tiny twin trumpets of the partridge vine, twining the damp moss.  I came out of the dimness of the woods to the path worn along the grass of meadows starred all over with myriads of misty little globes, the seed heads of the dandelions.  I pushed the row boat off on the quiet water, and drifted while “the moth hour went from the fields.”  The sky was bright with the rising moon as I climbed the island path.  There was great scurrying of rabbits in the underbrush and away in the misty thickets the whippoorwills were calling. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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