The April showers touch with caressing fingers the chords of all things and bring music from them, each according to its kind. In the open forest under deciduous trees the dead leaves thrummed a ghostly dirge like that of the “Dead March in Saul.” Winter ghosts marched to it in solemn procession out of the woodland. Memories of sleet and deep snow, ice storm, and heartbreaking frost, tramped soggily in sullen procession over the misty ridge and on northward toward the barren lands to the north of Hudson’s Bay. Thrilling through this solemn march below I heard the laughing fantasia of young drops upon bourgeoning twigs above, dirge and ditty softening in distance to a mystic music, a rune of the ancient earth.
In the open pasture the tune changed again. It was there a chirpy crepitation that presaged all the tiny, cheerful insects whose songs will make May nights merry. These, no doubt, take their first music lessons from the patter of belated April showers on the grass roofs of their homes. But it was down on the pond margin that I found the most perfect music. Slender mists danced to it, fluttering softly up from the margin, swaying together in ecstasy, and floating away into a gray dreamland of delight. It was the same tune, with quaint, syncopated variations, that the budding twigs and the brown pasture grasses had given forth, but more sprightly and with a bell-like tinkle more clear and fresh than any other sound that can be made, this tintinnabulation of falling globules ringing against their kindred water.
Every drop danced into the air again on striking and in the mellow glow of an obscure twilight I could see the surface stippled with pearly light. Then through it all came a new song; the first soloist of the night, the first of his kind of the season, thrilling a long, dreamy, heart-stirring cadenza of happiness, the love call of the swamp tree frog.
With this passage, Packard traces the liminal world of winter becoming spring, as experienced at Ponkapoag Bog in Blue Hills State Reservation on the southern edge of Boston. What I find entrancing in this passage, and much of his work is his ability to blend fairly accurate natural history with an air of mystery, of faerie even. There is an old magic that haunts the edges of Packard’s woodland wanderings. Yes, there are frogs calling — but maybe, too, they are wood sprites humming an ancient melody. In that magical landscape, Packard shares about how he “could feel the happiness of the pasture shrubs.” Raindrops do not merely fall from clouds — they dance and sparkle and tap upon the leaves. This is a much more animate (and animated) vision of nature than many more scientifically inclined nature writers might suggest. He evokes wonder by entertaining just enough doubt about his experiences that he leaves a space for ancient magic to dwell and take root. For example, he writes about his time silently watching the goings-on in a bog that “As I sat quiet, hour after hour, in this miniature wilderness, I came to hear many a strange and unclassified sound that, for all I know, may have been fay or frog, banshee or bird.” Like an impressionist painter, Packard engages with the wetland not only with the objective gaze of scientist, but also with the soul of a poet and mythologist. The result is a world in which frog and fae commingle as one. It is a world, too, of the imaginative experiences of my own childhood. I recall walking through the woods behind my house and imagining all sorts of other worlds, from a path through Mirkwood in Middle Earth to a swamp at the time of the dinosaurs. Where a sapling was bent over by an ice storm, there would be a portal into another place, another landscape of my own creation, fecund with possibility.
This volume is one of four chronicling the seasons in Packard’s corner of Massachusetts. Taken together, their titles are “Woodland Paths” (spring); “Wild Pastures” (summer); “Wood Wanderings” (autumn); and “Wildwood Ways” (winter). This is the third volume I have obtained and chronicled in this blog. “Wood Wanderings has remained unobtainable in its original form; I have settled for a Kindle edition that I will read someday. I do have to say that Packard managed to choose four titles that are practically impossible to keep straight. And on Thriftbooks, where reprints of “Wood Wanderings” are sometimes sold, “0 people are interested in this title.”
Few people, too, appear interested in Winthrop Packard himself. He has no Wikipedia entry. The “Lit2Go” website provides his birth and death dates (1862 and 1943, respectively) and tersely sums him up in two sentences. The first claims that “Winthrop Packard is best known for his novels of the nature genre.” This is patently untrue; his books contain nature essays; they are most definitely not novels. The second sentence merely lists several titles he wrote. Fortunately, Praweb.com offers a slightly more extensive overview of his life. You can read more about Packard in my earlier blog post on his “Wild Pastures”.
In spite of the soft raiment in which the weather garbs itself to-day it is only three days ago that the great organ of the woods piped to the northerly wind as it breathed pedal notes through the pines and piped shrill in the chestnut twigs. And there was more than organ music. The white and red oaks, still holding fast to their brown leaves, gave forth the rattling of a million delicate castanets, and the wind drew like a soft bow across the finer strings of the birches so that all among slender twigs you heard this fine tone of a muted violin singing a little tender song of joy. For the trees were sadly weary of being frozen one day and thawed the next. They thought the real winter was at hand when the cold would be continuous and the snow deep. All we northern-bred folk love the real winter and feel defrauded of our birthright if we do not get it.
Strangest of all were the beeches. They have held the lower of their tan-pale leaves and with them have whispered of snow all winter long. Whatever the day, you had but to stand among them with closed eyes and you could hear the beech word for snow going tick, tick, tick, all about. It seemed as if flakes must be falling and hitting the leaves so plainly they spoke it. Now that the flakes were beginning the beeches never said a word, but just stood mute and watched it come and listened to the music of all the other trees. Or perhaps they listened to something finer yet. It was only in their enchanted silence that I thought I heard it. Now and then the wind held its breath and the oak leaf castanets ceased, and then for a second I would be sure of it; an elfin tinkle so crepuscular, so gossamer fine that it was less a sound than a thought, the ringing of snow crystal on snow crystal as the feathery flakes touched and separated in the frost-keen air. It surely was there and the beech trees heard it and stood breathless in solemn joy at the sound.
This is my third in an extensive number of nature books by Winthrop Packard (1862-1943) of Canton, Massachusetts. This is an example, too, of the need to read many books by the same author, if possible. The first two left me somewhat disenchanted with his nature sketches. But in Wildwood Ways, the enchantment is evident on every page. There is magic here, but always out of the corner of the eye, just beyond reach. Often, as in the passage above, it is a magic of sounds and silences. For all that Packard grounds his winter vignettes in scientific knowledge, he never quite discounts alternative explanations, ways of encountering nature rooted in myth and folklore. Yes, he seems to say, there is a scientific explanation here. But maybe, just maybe, there is more — wonder, beauty, awe. There is the way things are on the surface, and then something deeper — whisperings of trees, reflections of cosmic mysteries. His finest moments, without a doubt, are in an essay entitled “Thin Ice”. I will share the first portion below. The nebular hypothesis is the most widely-accepted explanation for the origin of our solar system; it was first proposed by in 1755 by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Toward midnight the pond fell asleep. All day long it had frolicked with the boisterous north wind, pretending to frown and turn black in the face when the cold shoulders of the gale bore down upon its surface, dimpling as the pressure left it and sparkling in brilliant glee as the low hung sun laughed across its ruffles. The wind went down with the sun, as north winds often do, and left a clear mirror stretching from shore to shore, and reflecting the cold yellow of the winter twilight.
As this chill twilight iced into the frozen purple of dusk, tremulous stars quivered into being out of the violet blackness of space. The nebular hypothesis is born again in the heavens each still winter night. It must have slipped thence into the mind of Kant as he stood in the growing dusk of some German December watching the violet-gray frost vapors of the frozen sky condense into the liquid radiance of early starlight, then tremble again into the crystalline glints of unknown suns whirling in majestic array through the full night along the myriad miles of interstellar space.
Standing on the water’s edge on such a night you realize that you are the very centre of a vast scintillating universe, for the stars shine with equal glory beneath your feet and above your head. The earth is forgotten. It has become transparent, and where before sunset gray sand lay beneath a half-inch of water at your toe-tips, you now gaze downward through infinite space to the nadir, the unchartered, unfathomable distance checked off every thousand million miles or so by unnamed constellations that blur into a milky way beneath your feet. The pond is very deep on still winter nights.
If you will take canoe and glide out into the centre the illusion is complete. There is no more earth nor do the waters under the earth remain; you float in the void of space with the Pleiades for your nearest neighbor and the pole star your only surety. In such situations only can you feel the full loom of the universe. The molecular theory is there stated with yourself as the one molecule at the centre of incomputability. It is a relief to shatter all this with a stroke of the paddle, shivering all the lower half of your incomputable universe into a quivering chaos, and as the shore looms black and uncertain in the bitter chill it is nevertheless good to see, for it is the homely earth coming back to you. You have had your last canoe trip of the year, but it has carried you far.
No wonder that on such a night the pond, falling asleep for the long winter, dreams. A little after midnight it stirred uneasily in its sleep and a faint quiver ran across its surface. A laggard puff of the north wind that, straggling, had itself fallen asleep in the pine wood and waked again, was now hastening to catch up. The surface water had been below the freezing point for some time and with the slight wakening the dreams began to write themselves all along as if the little puff of wind were a pencil that drew the unformulated thoughts in ice crystals. Water lying absolutely still will often do this. Its temperature may go some degrees below the freezing point and it will still be unchanged. Stir it faintly and the ice crystals grow across it at the touch.
Strange to tell, too, the pond’s dreams at first were not of the vast universe that lay hollowed out beneath the sky and was repeated to the eye in its clear depths. Its dreams were of earth and warmth, of vaporous days and humid nights when never a frost chill touched its surface the long year through, and the record the little wind wrote in the ice crystals was of the growth of fern frond and palm and prehistoric plant life that grew in tropic luxuriance in the days when the pond was young.
These first bold, free-hand sketches touched crystal to crystal and joined, embossing a strange network of arabesques, plants drawn faithfully, animals of the coal age sketched in and suggested only, while all among the figures great and small was the plaided level of open water. This solidified, dreamless, about and under the decorations, and the pond was frozen in from shore to shore. Thus I found it the next morning, level and black under one of those sunrises which seem to shatter the great crystal of the still atmosphere into prisms. The cold has been frozen out of the sky, and in its place remains some strange vivific principle which is like an essence of immortality.
I close my eyes and I can imagine myself in that canoe, adrift in the cosmic ocean. Are the stars below me merely reflections, or has the Earth vanished? A brief motion of my paddle in the water grounds me again. But was what I experienced all smoke and mirrors, or was I glimpsing an underlying cosmic reality?
In other places, throughout the book, Packard evokes giants and goblins. I am confident he does not seriously consider their existence; rather, I suspect that they are stand-ins for the wonder and magic we can find in nature. They represent missing pieces of the story, ones science has not revealed to us — and possibly never will. Consider this encounter with the sounds made by an iced-over lake in the dead of winter:
In the whirligig of our New England winter weather the soft rain and strong south wind passed. Then the wind blew strong from the northwest and fair skies and low temperature prevailed for some days, welding the erstwhile softened ice into an elastic surface as resonant as tempered steel. Then came a still warm day in which we had the same increase of temperature under springlike skies as on that previous day. Yet the pond never uttered a word—audible to my listening human ears. Here were the conditions like those of the other message period, yet not a word was said. Even the soft haze which presaged another south blow filled the sky, so apparently nothing was wanted but the voice at the other end of the line. It was along in the evening that I heard the first call, followed rapidly by a great uproar, so that people heard it in their houses half a mile or more away. Immediately I looked up the thermometer. The temperature had not changed a degree for hours. Yet here were the primal forces telephoning back and forth to one another and fairly making the welkin ring with their hubbub. Surely wires were crossed somewhere on the ether waves, or else the tempers of the primal forces themselves were out of sorts.
I seemed to hear familiar words in their roarings, admonitions to get farther away from the transmitter, requests for strangers to get off the line and other little courtesies that pass current in the telephone booth; and so for a half-hour they kept it up. It was all very ghostly and disquieting and savoring of the superhuman to listen to it in the night and wonder what it was all about. At last one or the other giant hung up the receiver with a tremendous bang, and nothing more was to be heard but the mutterings of the other, grumbling about it in notes low and tremendously deep.
Before morning the wind was blowing a wild gale from the south, rain was pouring in torrents and we were evidently on the outer edge of a winter hurricane that had been well up the coast, perhaps as far as Nantucket, when the pond began to talk about it. No; I do not think changes in temperature have much to do with it. My explanation for the scientist is that these noises begin with a drop in the atmospheric pressure, a region of low barometer moving up in advance of the storm. Taking the pressure quite suddenly off the ice would start all the air imprisoned in solution beneath it to pushing upward for a chance to get away. No wonder it groans and whoops with all that wind in its wame.
But privately I am not so sure. We have so many sure-thing theories, and so much definite knowledge to-day that to-morrow is all discredited and cast aside leaving us groping for another theory, that it is just as easy to believe myself eavesdropping at telephone talk between giants. That particular night it sounded to me like Hercules on his way up from Hades with Cerberus under his arm and a bit over-anxious lest the deities fail to have the dog pound ready for him on arrival in the upper regions—but of course that’s pagan myth.
“But of course that’s pagan myth.” But what does Packard really mean by this offhand remark? Is he asserting that the myth is nothing more than the silly imaginings of a bygone age, and ought to be discarded? Or is he instead with irony, echoing those around him while recognizing that the myths of the distant past offer other ways of seeing and describing the world around us? Certainly, Packard does not settle easily for the humdrum and quotidian. In one humorous section, he disparages a settler whose imagination extended no further than naming a small water body “Muddy Pond”:
The gravelly ridges of the woodland I tramped as I faced the golden sun again are singularly like waves of the sea. They roll here and rise to toppling pinnacles there and tumble about in a confusion that seems at once inextricable and as if it had in it some rude but unfathomed order. Surely as at sea every seventh wave is the highest; or is it the ninth, or the third? Just as at sea, the horizon is by no means a level line. Wave-strewn ridges shoulder up into it and now and then a peak lifts that is a cumulation of waves all rushing toward a common center through some obscure prompting of the surface pulsations. Sometimes at sea your ship rises on one of these aggregations of waves and you see yawning in front of it a veritable gulf; or the ship slips down into this gulf and the toppling pinnacle whelms it and the captain reports a tidal wave to the hydrographic office, if he is fortunate enough to reach it. So along my route southward the terminal and lateral moraines, drumlins, and kames rolled and toppled and leapt upward till they had swung me to a pinnacled ridge whence I looked down into a stanza from the Idylls of the King. Along a way like this once rode scornful and petulant Lynette, followed by great-hearted Gareth, newly knighted, on his first quest;
“Then, after one long slope was mounted, saw
Bowl-shaped, through tops of many thousand pines
A gloomy-gladed hollow slowly sink
To westward—in the deeps whereof a mere,
Round as the red eye of an eagle owl
Under the half-dead sunset glared;—”
That is the way Tennyson saw it, and the counterpart of the gulf, out of which looked the round-eyed mere, lay at my feet. Long years ago some first settler, lacking certainly Tennyson’s outlook, stupidly cognizant only of the worst that his prodding pole could stir up, named the wee gem of a lake “Muddy Pond.” Here surely was another man with eyes and no eyes. Round the margin’s lip, summer and winter, rolls the bronze green sphagnum, its delicate tips simulating shaggy forest growth of hoary pine and fir. Nestling in its gray-gold heart are the delicate pink wonder-orchids of late May, the callopogon and arethusa. Here the pitcher plant holds its purple-veined cups to the summer rain and traps the insects that slide down its velvety lip and may not climb again against this same velvet, become suddenly a spiny chevaux-de-frise. All about are set the wickets of the bog-hobble, the Nesæa verticillata, which in July will blossom into pink-purple flags—decorations, I dare say, of wood-goblins who play at cricket here on the soft turf of a midsummer-night’s tournament.
Of a summer day this tiny bowl is a mile-deep sapphire, holding the sky in its heart. When thunder clouds hang threatening over it, it is a black pearl with evanescent gleams of silver playing in its calm depths; and always the dense green of the swamp cedars that rim its golden bog-edge round are a setting of Alexandrite stone such as they mine in the heart of the Ceylon mountains, decked with lighter pencilings of chrysoprase and beryl. And some man, looking upon all this, saw only the mud beneath it! Probably he trotted the bog and only knew the wickets of the Nesæa verticillata were there because they tripped him. And I’ll warrant the goblins, sitting cross-legged in the deepest shadows of the cedars, waiting for midnight and their game, mocked him with elfin laughter—and all he heard was frogs.
For Packard, nature beckons us to engage with it through not only our physical senses but also our active imagination. He taps into myths and folktales to evoke landscapes in one chapter; in another, on a winter walk, he imagines himself made invisible by the snow; unseen, he observes the comical strutting of a ruffed grouse:
In woodland pathways where the trees were large enough on either side so that they did not bend beneath the snow and obstruct, all passage was noiseless; amongst shrubs and slender saplings it was almost impossible. The bent withes hobbled you, caught you breast high and hurled you back with elastic but unyielding force, throttled you and drowned you in avalanches of smothering white. To attempt to penetrate the thicket was like plunging into soft drifts where in the blinding white twilight you found yourself inexplicably held back by steel-like but invisible bonds, drifts where you felt the shivery touch of the cold fingers of winter magic changing you into a veritable snow man, and as such you emerged. It was more than baptism, it was total immersion, you were initiated into the order of the white woods and not even your heel was vulnerable…
Thus panoplied in white magic, my snowshoes making no sound on the fluffy floor of woodland paths, I felt that I might stalk invisible and unheeded in the wilderness world. The fern-seed of frost fronds had fallen upon my head in fairy grottos built by magic in a night. These had not been there before, they would not be there to-morrow. To-morrow, too, the magic might be gone, but for to-day I was to feel the chill joy of it.
A ruffed grouse was the first woodland creature not to see me. I stalked around a white corner almost upon him and stood poised while he continued to weave his starry necklaces of footprints in festoons about the butts of scrubby oaks and wild-cherry shrubs. He too was barred from the denser tangle which he might wish to penetrate. He did not seem to be seeking food. Seemingly there was nothing under the scrub oaks that he could get. It was more as if, having breakfasted well, he now walked in meditation for a little, before starting in on the serious business of the day. He too was wearing his snowshoes, and they held him up in the soft snow fully as well as mine supported me. His feet that had been bare in autumn now had grown quills which helped support his weight but did not take away from the clean-cut, star-shaped impression of the toes. Rather they made lesser points between these four greater ones and added to the star-like appearance of the tracks.
I knew him for a male bird by the broad tufts of glossy black feathers with which his neck was adorned. It was the first week in February, but then Saint Valentine’s day comes on the fourteenth, and on this day, as all folklore—which right or wrong we must perforce believe—informs us, the birds choose their mates. My cock partridge must have been planning a love sonnet, weaving rhymes as he wove his trail in rhythmic curves that coquetted with one another as rhymes do. His head nodded the rhythm as his feet fell in the proper places. Now and then he bent forward in his walk as one does in deep meditation. If he had hands they would have been clasped behind his back when in this attitude, as his wings were. Again he lifted his head high, fluffed out those glossy black neck feathers and strutted. Here surely was a fine phrase that would reach the waiting heart of that mottled brown hen that was now quietly keeping by herself in some secluded corner of the wood. The thought threw out his chest, and those tail feathers that had folded slimly as he walked in pensive meditation spread and cocked fan-shaped. I half expected him to open his strong, pointed bill and gobble as a turkey does under similar circumstances. The demure placing of star after star in that necklace trail was broken by a little fantastic pas seul, from which he dropped suddenly on both feet, vaulted into the air, and whirred away down arcades of snowy whiteness and vanished. I don’t think he saw me. He was rushing to find the lady and recite that poem to her before he forgot it.
I could continue with even more passages from this small book. It has rekindled my desire to produce an anthology of these lesser-known nature writers. Certainly, my enthusiasm for reading additional works by Packard has been renewed by my encounter with his evocations of a Massachusetts winter — despite all that I have already read by so many others in a similar vein.
My copy of this volume bears a signature on the front endpaper: M.E. Webber, February 11, 1925. Unfortunately, without a first name or location, who this was will remain a mystery. All pages were free, so I can at least assume that he (or she) read the book before me.
Was it an accident, or intention, that caused Winthrop Packard to title this volume using his own initials for inspiration (just as he had with Woodland Paths the year before)? How much is Packard playing with the reader in these essays? Does he seek to evoke a magical element in nature as a rhetorical device pointing to the wonders of the everyday? Or does he genuinely believe in it? Is his “science skepticism” real, or merely feigned? Who is laughing at whom? I honestly don’t know for sure. All I can do is present what I have read and let readers decide for themselves.
Horace Lunt opened his Short Cuts and By-Paths by noting that “not much of scientific value has been demonstrated in these pages” — then went on to describe with scientific exactitude the nature of lichens, mosses, and invertebrates of the seashore. If his work is “not much of scientific value”, I am not sure what to make of Packard’s prose. His descriptions are pleasant (he has a keen eye for colors) and he has quite a bit of botanical knowledge. He demonstrates basic awareness of common butterflies and their behaviors. And when writing about Ponkapoag Pond in Blue Hills State Reservation south of Boston, he describes the process by which a pond becomes a bog and then a marsh and eventually a field. Yet when he shares the ways of the witch hazel shrub in his chapter “Brook Magic”, he veers away from science into folklore, where he seems more comfortable:
Pluck one of the [witch-hazel] nuts of a midsummer evening and look it in the face. Note the little shrewd pig eyes of the witch ingrown in it, the funny shrewish tip-tilted nose, the puffy cheeks and eyelids. See that slender horn in the forehead, the sure mark of the witch. No wonder that it has the name witch-hazel with such ways and such faces growing all over it at a time when most other trees and shrubs have but finished blossoming. But if you want further proof that the shrub harbors witches than you need but to examine its oval, wavy-toothed leaves just at this time of the year and see the little conical red witch-caps hung on them. There need be but little doubt that, sitting under it at midnight of a full moon, you may see the witch faces detach themselves from the limbs, put on these red caps and sail off across the great yellow disk. That such things are not seen oftener is that people are dull and go to bed instead of sitting out under the witch-hazel at midnight of a full moon.
To be sure there are scientific men, grey-bearded entomologists, who will tell us that these little red caps are galls, the rearing-place of plant aphids, caused by the laying of the mother insect’s egg within the tissue of the leaf, but one might as well believe that the witches hang their hats on the witch-hazel over night as to believe that the laying of a minute egg in the tissue of a leaf could cause the plant to grow a witch hat.
No doubt these same wise men would explain to you that it is not possible to become invisible by sprinkling fern seed on your head during the dark of the moon and saying the right words, but did one of them ever try it?
It is appropriate that the witch-hazel should shade the portals through which the brook enters the glen at the foot of the pasture, for the path here enters you into a world of witchery where the glamour of the place will hold you long of a summer afternoon.
Winthrop Packard, what are you saying here? My first thought was that he was alluding to the seemingly magical facets of scientific explanations, but I wonder at that. There is another possibility, namely, that he longs to inhabit a world where magic still exists — evoking Donovan more than half a century later, “Still I hear facts, figures, and logic; fain would I hear lore, legend, and magic.” Is the scientist in Packard’s mind a wise interpreter of nature, or a bogeyman dispelling enchanting fancies in the light of empirical knowledge?
Packard is not quite done arguing with science, however serious or whimsical his remarks might be. In a later essay on “Some Butterfly Friends,” he speaks more directly about scientific knowledge. In the passage below, he engages in a flight of fancy before coming back to earth with a more viable explanation of pollination:
I do not know what the clethra which gleams in white in the dusk should need anything more than its own white beautfy to call the moth to its wooing. Perhaps it does not need more. Perhaps all this fine fragrance isbut the overflow of its soul’s delight at being young and chastely beautiful, and trembling in the ultra violet darkness on that delicious verge of life that waits the wooer. I half fancy that it is true of all perfume of flowers, that it is less a call to butterfly or bee to come to their winning than it is a radiation of delight from their own pure hearts at the dawning of the full joy of living. I am not always willing to take the word of the scientific investigator on these points as final. The scientists of the not very remote past have known so much that is not so!
It is possible that, just as a hunting dog picks up a scent that is strong in his nostrils and has no power in ours, so the flowers that we call scentless send out an odor too faintly fine for our senses, yet one that the antennae of moth or bee may entangle as it passes and hold for a certain clue. Perhaps the scents that are only faint to us carry far for the butterfly, but if so, and if flower perfumes are made only for the calling of insects, why need they be made so intoxicating to the human senses?
And there is a third possibility — that it is all just a game, these evocations of magic in pastures and streams, this poking at scientists. Just like the naming of his books — Wild Pastures, Woodland Paths. Still, at least his words, images, and imaginings make for fairly pleasant if somewhat insipid reading — an acceptable diversion for a long sultry summer afternoon. Oh — and the book cover is pretty, too.
Winthrop Packard is decidedly obscure, having thus far avoided an entry in Wikipedia. He lived from 1862 until 1943, and he wrote quite a few books in the “nature” genre. One source notes that he was also a lyricist and composer. Thanks to a newspaper obituary, I also know that Packard was secretary-treasurer of the Massachusetts Audobon Society and that he established and financed the Society’s first bird sanctuary (Moose Hill) in Sharon, Massachusetts in 1916. He graduated from MIT in 1885 and worked as a chemist in Boston. He somehow ended up in the newspaper business, becoming editor of the Canton Journal in 1894 and then switching to National Magazine, Youth’s Companion, and finally the Transcript. He was a member of an expedition to Alaska and Siberia in 1900. He married Alice Petrie and had four sons.
My copy of Wild Pastures is in superb shape; the cover looks practically new. It was signed by a previous owner, Ethel R. Ulrick (Ulrich?) on October 25th, 1911; she appears to have accomplished an even greater level of Internet obscurity than Packard.
