# The Knickerbocker Gallery/Piseco

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Piseco.
By Rev. George W. Bethune, D.D
It is not long since that Hamilton County, with the whole region lying between the fertile slopes of the Mohawk and Lake Champlain, was known but as a vast, mountainous, cold tract, presenting the extreme contrast of a primeval forest, traversed only by the hunter of the deer, the bear, and the moose, Here and there an agricultural settler along its borders snatched a scanty harvest from the brief summer, and on the eastern side the lumberman pursued his wintry toil; but, once past the log-cabin of the one or the shanty of the other, it was literally a howling wilderness, where the yell of the wolf, the scream of the panther, and the laughter of the owl mingled with the roar of floods and the moanings of the winds through the tall hemlocks. Now the marvellous beauty of its scenery, more wildly grand than any other in North-America, diversified by many lakes of crystal purity and their foaming outlets, have been so often eloquently described by adventurous littérateurs in search of the picturesque, trout, and copy-money, that a tour through Racquette and the Saranac is getting to be well-nigh as readily undertaken as a trip to the Upper Nile. Even ladies have ventured a day or two within the shadows, and before long the solitary Indian, who lingers in the hunting-grounds of his fathers, or the moccasined woodsman, paddling his "birch," will be startled by flotillas gay with fashionable drapery, and listen, in wondering delight, to the songs of Verdi and Auber among the echoes of Blue Mountain. Lines of rival railways have already been traced through the gorges and along the streams; speculation has been busy with the timber-lots, and soon the glory of the forest, unbroken ​since time began until now, will be floating down the St. Lawrence and the Hudson, or whirled at the tail of the locomotive to the seaside. The most zealous utilitarian might sadden over the coming change, were it not that a century must go by before the industry of man, though that man be a Yankee, can strip the rocky heights of their ever-green luxuriance.
Following from the Mohawk side, and after crossing the hill which bounds that valley, the bank of the noble Sacondaga (beau-ideal of a trout river to an angler who is content to wade deeply for a free cast under the elms on pool or rapid) to the neat little inn of Francisco, and then crossing a spur of the mountain-range by a road rough as the bed of a torrent, the traveller will find himself gazing on the placid waters and rich shores of Lake Pleasant, named by no flattering tongue, for a more lovely scene has seldom greeted the eye of poet or artist; and, yet farther on, connected with it by a short strait, Round Lake sparkles like a bowl of silver wreathed with verdant garland. Here several dwellings, with one or two flourishing farms, are clustered about the county buildings, and a well-kept hotel opens its doors in welcome to a table spread with luxuries unknown among the dwellers on the plain. At the time when the incidents happened of which I am about to write, the explorer, if not accustomed to woodcraft, or bent upon adventure, tempted the difficulties of the way no farther; nor was he indisposed to linger, where, with comfort at night and plenty by day, he could win rich trophies for both rod and gun, or enjoy the beauty around him varying with dawn and evening, sunlight and cloud. But perseverance for two or three hours would bring him to another lake, the Piseco, far more lovely, at least in the judgment of one rendered perhaps partial by memories of happy days of many an early summer spent in contemplating its virgin charms, traversing its pure bosom and enjoying the society of a half-dozen kindred spirits, far from the dust of cities, the turmoil of trade, and the frivolities of artificial life.
In this country, especially, the extreme heats that alternate with our cold winters, and, still more, the suicidal intensity with which the American follows his calling, render some relief necessary to mind, body, and heart; nor can any of us who live in towns pass from the ​exhaustions of one season to those of the next without some interval of change, and not suffer loss of physical vigor, intellectual force, and moral health. He who, in His wise goodness, has made us so "fearfully and wonderfully," never intended our material or spiritual structure for such constant excess. The birth-place of man was amidst trees, and herbage, and flowing waters. There are the works of God, and there, as to our early home, should we at times turn to freshen our being, and listen to the voice of Him who talked in Paradise with His children. It is not relaxation that we need. Our straining of nerve and thought, to say nothing of worse habits incident to our perverted modes of life, has already too much relaxed our faculties by recoil from the tension. What our nature demands is invigoration, a bracing of the frame, a quickening of the mind, an uplifting of the heart, an inhalation of fresh life from its original sources, that will enable us to grapple more strenuously with care, and duty, and temptation. This can not be gained in the crowded saloons of watering-places, or at the lordly country-seat, to which have been transferred the appliances of courtly gratification, or by rushing over the rapid rail, or on packed steamers, to haunts of hackneyed resorts, merely to say that we have made the fashionable tour. These give us no opportunity to think, no motive to repent and resolve anew. We are still fettered by conventionalities. The wearisome monotony of whirling excitements still sickens our aching brain. We must break away from the crowd. We must reach a spot where distance will give soberness to our view of our usual occupations, scenes where we can gather ideas, sentiments, and emotions, not from worldly dictation or even the page covered with other men's thoughts; where we can hold intercourse with our fellow-men who spend their days more simply; but, above all, where we can be alone with God among the works of His hands, and hear, answering to our own, the pulses of the Infinite Heart which fills the universe with truth and love. The student, long shut up within his library, and the servant of his race in religious or philanthropic offices, need such a change quite as much as men of business or pleasure. Books, precious as they are for enlargement of knowledge and instruction from the past, may be abused beyond their proper function. Classical, scholastic, and (in its ​general sense) sectarian forms, constrict and distort both the judgment and the feeling, What we proudly term analysis and system are too often but an arbitrary classification, under whose heads we, Procrustes-like, compress or stretch out truths which were never meant to take such exact or fixed shapes, but should be allowed confluence and commixture, losing, like the hues of nature, all rigidness of outline in harmony and kindred. What a world of labor have metaphysicians wasted, by forgetting that they are not mathematicians, and endeavoring to hew the "lively stones" into such shape as may be fixed in a building of their architecture! How near the materialist has the self-styled idealist come by such affectations! Too much learning, (the scoffer was right,) or, rather, learning too much by itself, will make a wise man mad, We may hide our souls from our own view by our parchments, and look out upon the world of humanity through obstinate hypotheses as false as gnarled windowpanes. Critics have done laughing at Wordsworth's early puerilities, but every close student feels the force of the Laker's exhortation:
Double indeed! deformed in mind as well as body.
Nor will it answer to attempt such recuperation by force of will alone. Accustomed to earnest occupation, we can not change the habit which has become a law to us. Though we leave office, counting-room, or library behind us, our calling will pursue us, and force our thoughts into their ordinary ruts. The man of business will be calculating his risks; the studious man working out his theories.
We can not shake the tormentor from the crupper, but must dismount from our hobby. We can rid ourselves of one pursuit only by adopting another—another lighter, less imperious; amusing, but not engrossing; releasing the mind, but not binding it again. We must have play instead of work; yet play that will be occupation. ​Hence the value which those sturdy, sober, untranscendental, unmedieval thinkers, the Scotch writers, have set upon field-sports and exercises which carry them out among the heather, over the mountain, and along the stream. Christopher North, (green be the turf above him!) "under canvas," was worth more as a philosopher, aye, as a philosopher, than any cobweb-spinning German, or backward-looking Oxonian that ever ignored common humanity and its every-day experience. Dyspepsia never soured his moral sentiments, and, content with the cheerful sun, he left twilight to owls and bats.
Views like these led the little band of friends already spoken of to the Piseco, on whose romantic bank they had built a simple lodge, and whose waters abounded with several varieties of that aquatic family, whose charms inspired Davy, not less admirable as a moralist than an illustrator of natural science, to write his Salmonia. Some of them were shrewd and successful in business; some of them more given to books; one of them a preacher of Good News, who loved his work, called Chaplain, not without warrant, for his office was no sinecure; and all of them "honest, civil, and temperate," as all anglers should be, and as (according to Izaak Walton's infallible authority) all true anglers are. The lake is about seven miles long, and nearly a mile and a half wide. Several bays are curved out of the shore, the deepest, at the lower end, called from an Indian, the stories told of whose life might make the whole tradition apocryphal, had he not left his name, Girondicut (the spelling is uncertain) to the most exquisite part of the water. Some buildings, most of them abandoned to decay, show like a peaceful hamlet at the upper end, but are hidden by a wooded promontory from the lodge, before whose humble porch a clearod field, flourishing with corn and grass, slopes gently toward the lake. Everywhere else Nature is in her wildest grace or most sublime magnificence.
Up in the morning with the thrush, (the lark Piseco knows not, but the thrush is as early,) each in his well-trimmed boat, rowed by a sinewy woodsman, with a rod out over each side, the friends parted to troll in various directions, never so intent on their game as not to enjoy the shadows deep in the clear waters, or watch the mists, as ​rolling away they revealed the mountains piled in grand clusters, or stretching farther and farther, ridge over ridge, until their undulating lines were lost in the blue sky. Nay, if truth be told, many a finny prowler escaped the fate due to his murderous appetite, because the thoughts of the angler were wandering in delicious day-dreams, or aspiring gratefully to God, who has made our way to heaven lie through a world so beautiful. The sultry noon found them under the shadow of spreading birch trees, near a spring of icy coldness, where, after a rude but welcome meal, they were wont to recline on a bank carpeted by blossoming strawberry-vines, with the low dash of the rippling wave in their ear. Then it was that stories of the morning sport, innocuous jests, and, not seldom, grave yet pleasant discourse, sped the moments to the cooler hours when the boats were manned again, and they parted until the shadows fell: then another chat over the fragrant "cup that cheers, but not inebriates," and to sleep soundly and sweetly till the sun roused them to renewed gratifications. News of political strife, pressures in the money-market, or foreign wars, never penetrated those pure, peaceful solitudes. The nearest post-office was many miles away across the mountains, and tidings only of the beloved ones at home were allowed to come.
Those days are gone by, and the cheer of those friends will never be heard over those waters again. One, the most revered of all, sleeps in a holy grave, and his memory fades not in the hearts of his comrades; in other haunts of wild nature they greet each other with unabated affection; but for them Piseco is a word of memory, not of hope.
The Sabbath there had peculiar charms. No church-going bell rang through the woods, no decorated temple lifted its spire; but the hush of divine rest was upon all around, a sense of the Holy One rested on the spirit, the birds sang more sweetly, the dews of the morning shimmered more brightly, and the sounds of the forest were like the voice of psalms. As the day went on toward noon, the inhabitants, whose dwellings were scattered for miles around, some down the rocky paths, others in boats on the lake, singly or in companies, men, women, and little ones, might be seen ​drawing near to the lodge, where, when all assembled, they formed a respectful and willing congregation of perhaps fifty worshippers, and listened to the words of the preacher, who sought to lead them by the Gospel of the Cross through nature up to the God of grace. Such opportunities were rare for them; never, indeed, was a sermon heard there except on these occasions. The devout (for God the Saviour had a "few names" among them) "received the word with gladness;" all were attentive, and their visitors found, when joining with them in the primitive service, a religious power seldom felt in more ceremonious homage.
On one of those sacred days there came among the rest two young, graceful women, whose air and dress marked them as of a superior cultivation. Their modest voices enriched the trembling psalmody, and their countenances showed strong sympathy with the preacher's utterances. At the close of the worship, they made, through one of their neighbors, a request that the minister would pay a visit to their mother, who had been a long time ill, and was near death. A promise was readily given that he would do so the same day; but their home lay four miles distant, and a sudden storm forbade the attempt. The Monday morning shone brightly, though a heavy cloud at the west suggested precautions against a thunder-shower. The friends parted from the landing, each bent upon his purpose; but the chaplain's prow was turned on his mission of comfort to the sick. Had any prim amateurs of ecclesiastical conventionalities seen him with his broad-brimmed hat, necessary for shelter from the sun, a green veil thrown around it as defense from the mosquitoes near the shores, his heavy water-boots, and his whole garb chosen for aquatic exigences, (for, like Peter, he had girt his fisher's coat about him,) they would hardly have recognized his errand. But the associations of the scene with the Man of Nazareth and the Apostles by the Sea of Galilee, were in his soul, carrying him back to the primitive Christianity, and lifting him above the forms with which men have overlaid its simplicity. The boat flew over the placid waters in which lay mirrored the whole amphitheatre of the mountain-shores, green as an emerald. The wooded point hid the lodge on the one side, a swelling island the hamlet on the other. No trace of man was visible. The carol of ​birds came off from the land; now and then the exulting merriment of a loon rang out of the distance, and soon a soft, southern breeze, redolent of the spicy hemlock and cedar, rippled the surface. The Sabbath had transcended its ordinary hours, and shed its sweet blessing on the following day. His rods lay idly over the stern as the chaplain thought of the duty before him, and asked counsel of the Master, who "Himself bare our sicknesses and carried our sorrows." He remembered the disciples who said, "Lord, he whom thou lovest is sick;" and the gracious answer, "This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of Man might be glorified thereby."
It is not imagination merely that gives such power to the living oracles, when they come to us where the testimony of nature unites with the inspiration. It is the blessing of Jesus, who sought the wilderness, the shore, and the mountain-side to gain strength from communion with his Father. It was in such solitudes that our Example and Forerunner found courage for his trial and suffering. Religion is eminently social, but its seat is the heart of the individual believer, and, whatever be the advantage of Christian fellowship, the flame must be fed in private, personal converse with the Father of our spirits. He who has not been alone with God, can seldom find him in the crowded church.
A brief hour, briefer for these meditations, brought the keel of the boat to a gravelly nook, where the mouth of the inlet formed a little harbor. There, awaiting the chaplain's arrival, stood a tall, upright man, past the prime of life, who, with a style of courtesy evidently foreign, bared his gray head, and greeted his visitor by name as a friend.
"You have kindly come, sir, to see my poor wife; I thank you for it. She is now expecting you, for we heard the sound of your oars as you turned the island."
A rough stone house, built by a speculator of former days, stood on a knoll a little way from the stream, and the garden around it was trimmed with some taste. As they entered, the owner said:
"Welcome to the mountain dwelling of an old soldier! He (pointing to an engraved portrait of Blucher, wreathed with laurel ​leaves,) was my general, whose praise I once received as I lay wounded on the field of battle. I am a Prussian, Sir, and came to this country when my father-land had no farther use for my sword. I have not been successful in my peaceful life, and misfortune after misfortune drove me here, hoping to gather about us a few of my countrymen, and make a German home; but in that I was disappointed. The severe winters chilled their resolution, and now we are by ourselves. The few neighbors about us are not of our class, but they are kind and honest; and the world has nothing to tempt me back to it. I have one brave son at sea. My two daughters you saw yesterday. We had another, but she sleeps yonder."
He turned abruptly from the room. The chaplain, left to himself, observed about the apartment various articles of refinement and faded luxury, telling the story of more prosperous days. His subsequent acquaintance with the family confirmed his first impressions. Though not of high rank, they were educated, of gentle manners, and, though for years remote from cultivated society, preserved the amenities which now distinguished them. Only the father seemed to have suffered for want of occupation, and, not unlikely, from habits formed in camp, but now doubly dangerous in seclusion.
At a signal from another room, one of the daughters led the chaplain to the bedside of the sufferer. The father sat with his face averted, near an open window, through which came the laughing prattle of a child, and a half-idiot serving-woman looked in wonderingly across the threshold of an outer kitchen. The daughters, having raised their mother's head on a higher pillow, and affectionately smoothed her thin gray hair under the snow-white cap, withdrew to the other side of the bed. The chaplain placed his broad hat, with its green veil, on the little table, and sat silent for a while, not knowing how to begin, since, as yet, nothing had given him a clue to the woman's state of mind. She lay still and stone-like; her eyes were dry, with little "speculation" in them; her lips moved, but uttered no sound; and her hand, feebly stretched out, was cold and stiff. Her whole frame was worn to extreme thinness, and the color of her skin told that the seat of her disease was the liver.
​At length the chaplain, seeing that her soul was near its dread passage into the eternal future, said:
"I am sorry, my friend, to find you so very ill. You are soon to die."
"Yes."
"It is a fearful thing to die; are you not afraid?"
"No."
"But to go into the presence of God, our Judge, is a most solemn change."
"Yes."
"And are you not afraid?"
"No."
The preacher was confounded. The short answers, almost cold, without emotion, the glazed eye, the rigid countenance, caused him to doubt whether he had to contend with ignorance or insensibility. Anxious to rouse some feeling, if possible, to startle into some attention, as a physician applies the probe, he pushed severe declarations of certain judgment and the danger of impenitence, reminded her that Christ, the Saviour of the beileving, will be the Avenger of sin, and that "there is no work or device in the grave," but "as the tree falls, so it must lie." The tearless eye unwinkingly gazed on him, and no shrinking followed his keen surgery.
"Madam, you are going before God, and do you not fear?"
A faint smile stole struggling through her thin features, and a light, like a star twinkling under a deep shadow, was seen far within her eye, and pointing with her finger upward, she said, in a firm, low tone:
"Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him."
The chaplain bowed his head on the pillow and wept thanks. Here was no ignorant or callous soul, but a child of God, whose perfect love had cast out fear.
"Yes, Christian soul, you are not afraid of evil tidings; your heart is fixed, trusting in Him who went this way before you. Fear no evil; His rod and His staff, they will comfort you."
"Amen! blessed be His name," replied the dying believer. "It is true. I know in whom I have believed, and that He is able to ​keep what I have committed to Him. Because He hath been my Help, therefore under His wings do I rejoice."
It seemed now as if the fountain of her speech was unsealed, and, though no moisture was in her eyes, and the few drops which started out on her forehead were cold and clammy, and the worn lineaments had lost the power to smile, and she lay still as marble, yet, with a voice clear and unfaltering, she went on to testify her faith in Christ, and of the peace that filled her soul. A strength denied to her body came from within.
"Oh! sir, I thank you for coming; I thank God for sending you to me, like the angel to Hagar in the wilderness. I prayed for it. It is four long years since I heard the voice of a Christian minister, and all that time I prayed for one to hold the water of life to my lips once more. Now I know that He has heard me; blessed be His name!"
The preacher interrupted her to say that she had not been left alone by her God, who needed not man's lips to comfort his people.
"Alone! no, never alone! I have seen Him in His mighty works. I have heard Him in the storms of winter and in the summer winds. I had my Bible, His own holy word. His Spirit has been with me. But I thank Him for the voice of His commissioned servant, whose duty is to comfort His people.". . . . . . .
The reader of this imperfect sketch can have little idea of the eloquence, almost supernatural, pervaded by Scriptural language and imagery, with which she spoke. It was the soul triumphing over the fainting flesh; truth in its own energy, unaided by human expression; a voice of the dead, not sepulchral, but of one near the gate of heaven.
The chaplain knelt beside the bed and all the rest knelt with him; but there was more of thanks than petition in his prayer. The clouds that hung about the borders of eternity were so bright with the glory beyond, that sorrow and pain were forgotten as he gave utterance to the dying woman's memories and hopes, the memories of grace and the hopes of immortality that met together in her faithful heart. Nor need I add that his own gratitude was strong to the Good Shepherd, who had sent him to find this sheep among the mountains, ​not lost nor forgotten, but longing for a token of her Saviour's care.
When he rose from his knees, she thanked him again, but with more visible emotion than before, said:
"Sir, I doubt not God directed you here; and there is one favor more I have asked of Him and now ask through you. Three years ago my eldest daughter died in my arms, assured of rest, but leaving behind her a babe not two weeks old. 'Mother,' she said, just as she was dying, 'I leave my child with you to bring her to me in heaven. You will do it for Christ's sake, and mine, and hers, mother. And, mother, He has told us to give little children to Him in baptism. Dear mother, promise that my child shall be baptized.' I promised, and her spirit departed. Ever since, I have been praying and waiting for some minister to find his way to us, but in vain. More than once I heard of some who had come as far as Lake Pleasant, but none reached Piseco, and I almost feared that I should die and not be able to tell my child in heaven that the blessed water had been on her baby's face. Yet, even in this, God has been good to me. You will baptize my little one?"
How gladly the chaplain assented, may be readily imagined. The child was called in from her play on the grass-plat; her rosy, wondering face was gently washed, and her light brown hair parted on her forehead, and she stood, with her bare white feet, on a low bench by her grandmother's pillow. The grandfather filled an antique silver bowl with water, freshly dipped from a spring near the door. An old brass-clasped folio of Luther's Bible was laid open at the family record beside the water, the chaplain's broad hat on the other side. He thought not, and none thought of his coarse gray coat or his heavy boots. He was full of his sacred office, and the presence of the Invisible was upon him. The feeble woman, strengthened by love and faith, raised herself higher on the bed and put her wasted arm over the plump shoulders of the fair, blue-eyed child. The old man and his daughters, and the dull-witted servant at the kitchen-door, reverently standing, sobbed aloud; and, amidst the tears of all except her whose source of tears was dried up for ever, the chaplain recited the touching prayer of the Reformed Churches before the baptism of ​infants, and with the name of the departed mother breathed over her orphan, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, she was dedicated to God by water sprinkled three times on her sweet grave face. The grandfather handed a pen to the chaplain, but it was lightly pressed to trace the inscription, for the page was wet with the big drops that fell from the old man's eyes.
Many moments elapsed before the thanksgiving could be uttered, and then the happy saint joyfully exclaimed:
"Bless you, Sir! I bless God that he has granted me this grace before I die. Now I am ready to go to my child in heaven."
"My dear madam," answered the preacher, "it is, indeed, a blessed ordinance; but the child of prayers for two generations would not have missed the promise because of an impossibility on your part."
"No, no! the spirit is better than the form. She had the promise. I knew that she was in the covenant, but I wanted her in the fold."
The chaplain entered his boat. Never did lake, and mountain, and green shore look so beautiful, for they seemed all bathed with holy light; and that noon, when, with his friends reclining on the sward, he told the story of the baptism in the wilderness, their moistened eyes expressed their sympathy with his joy.
Heaven opened for the grandmother a few days afterward. The next year her Saviour took up her child's child in his arms, and the three were together among the angels. The grandfather lived but a short time. One of the daughters having married a farmer, moved, with her sister, down into the open country, where she also died in her young beauty. Of the two other members of the family, I have heard nothing since.
The old stone house still stands near the rushing inlet, but the storms beat through its broken windows. Rank weeds have over-run the garden, and brambles hide the spring near the kitchen door. Yet the path from the landing-place can be followed; and should any of my readers ever visit Piseco, now more accessible, but charming as ever, they can easily recognize the scene of my story. It is ever fresh and hallowed in my memory; for there I learned, by precious experience, that the good God never forgets those who trust in Him, and that, go where we will, we may carry His blessing with us to some heart thirsting for His word.