Figs, Doves, Writers, Books

I finished pruning the fig tree. I don’t know how long it took, but I guess it to be around four hours, which includes cutting the brush into little pieces for the recycling bin. I did the work in three afternoon sessions. During the last session, I heard the sound of a mourning dove in flight, and looked up in time to see it winging its way north. A second later, or two at the most, it was out of sight. It must have been one of the few males that stay for the winter, while most of the others are in Mexico.

I’ve read ten chapters of Melville’s Typee. I’ve also read four of In Thackeray’s London, by Francis Hopkinson Smith. The author’s charcoal drawings, which aren’t printed in the book but tipped in and still in fine condition, are a warm, dreamy delight, ideally suited for his sooty surroundings. Smith was born in 1838 — the same year, if memory serves, as Henry Adams and John Muir. He died in 1915, two years after the publication of the book I’m reading. It says in Wikipedia that he built the foundation for the Statue of Liberty, and that he was a descendant of Francis Hopkinson, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

In 1914, Smith also published In Dickens’s London. From the little I’ve read thus far, it was obviously a great pleasure to him to visit and draw the haunts of these authors and their characters. All of them had remained alive and real to him.

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