Letters of Travel (1892-1913) Part 3

But the first touch of dry land makes the sea and all upon it unreal.

Five minutes after the traveller is on the C.P.R, train at Vancouver there is no romance of blue water, but another kind--the life of the train into which he comes to grow as into life aboard s.h.i.+p. A week on wheels turns a man into a part of the machine. He knows when the train will stop to water, wait for news of the trestle ahead, drop the dining-car, slip into a siding to let the West-bound mail go by, or yell through the thick night for an engine to help push up the bank. The snort, the snap and whine of the air-brakes have a meaning for him, and he learns to distinguish between noises--between the rattle of a loose lamp and the ugly rattle of small stones on a scarped embankment--between the 'Hoot! toot!' that scares wandering cows from the line, and the dry roar of the engine at the distance-signal. In England the railway came late into a settled country fenced round with the terrors of the law, and it has remained ever since just a little outside daily life--a thing to be respected. Here it strolls along, with its hands in its pockets and a straw in its mouth, on the heels of the rough-hewn trail or log road--a platformless, regulationless necessity; and it is treated even by sick persons and young children with a familiarity that sometimes affects the death-rate. There was a small maiden aged seven, who honoured our smoking compartment with her presence when other excitements failed, and it was she that said to the conductor, 'When do we change crews? I want to pick water-lilies--yellow ones.' A mere halt she knew would not suffice for her needs; but the regular fifteen-minute stop, when the red-painted tool-chest was taken off the rear car and a new gang came aboard. The big man bent down to little Impudence--'Want to pick lilies, eh? What would you do if the cars went on and took mama away, Sis?' 'Take the, next train,' she replied, 'and tell the conductor to send me to Brooklyn. I live there.'

'But s'pose he wouldn't?' 'He'd have to,' said Young America. 'I'd be a lost child.'

Now, from the province of Alberta to Brooklyn, U.S.A., may be three thousand miles. A great stretch of that distance is as new as the day before yesterday, and strewn with towns.h.i.+ps in every stage of growth from the city of one round house, two log huts, and a Chinese camp somewhere in the foot-hills of the Selkirks, to Winnipeg with her league-long main street and her warring newspapers. Just at present there is an epidemic of politics in Manitoba, and bra.s.s bands and notices of committee meetings are splashed about the towns. By reason of their closeness to the Stages they have caught the contagion of foul-mouthedness, and accusations of bribery, corruption, and evil-living are many. It is sweet to find a little baby-city, with only three men in it who can handle type, cursing and swearing across the illimitable levels for all the world as though it were a grown-up Christian centre.

All the new towns have their own wants to consider, and the first of these is a railway. If the town is on a line already, then a new line to tap the back country; but at all costs a line. For this it will sell its corrupted soul, and then be very indignant because the railway before which it has grovelled rides rough-shod over the place.

Each new town believes itself to be a possible Winnipeg until the glamour of the thing is a little worn off, and the local paper, sliding down the pole of Pride with the hind legs of despair, says defiantly: 'At least, a veterinary surgeon and a drug store would meet with encouragement in our midst, and it is a fact that five new buildings have been erected in our midst since the spring.' From a distance nothing is easier than to smile at this sort of thing, but he must have a cool head who can keep his pulse level when just such a wildcat town--ten houses, two churches, and a line of rails--gets 'on the boom,'

The reader at home says, 'Yes, but it's all a lie.' It may be, but--did men lie about Denver, Leadville, Ballarat, Broken Hill, Portland, or Winnipeg twenty years ago--or Adelaide when town lots went begging within the memory of middle-aged men? Did they lie about Vancouver six years since, or Creede not twenty months gone? Hardly; and it is just this knowledge that leads the pa.s.ser-by to give ear to the wildest statements of the wildest towns. Anything is possible, especially among the Rockies where the minerals lie over and above the mining towns, the centres of ranching country, and the supply towns to the farming districts. There are literally scores upon scores of lakelets in the hills, buried in woods now, that before twenty years are run will be crowded summer resorts. You in England have no idea of what 'summering'

means in the States, and less of the amount of money that is spent on the yearly holiday. People have no more than just begun to discover the place called the Banff Hot Springs, two days west of Winnipeg.[1] In a little time they will know half-a-dozen spots not a day's ride from Montreal, and it is along that line that money will be made. In those days, too, wheat will be grown for the English market four hundred miles north of the present fields on the west side; and British Columbia, perhaps the loveliest land in the world next to New Zealand, will have her own line of six thousand ton steamers to Australia, and the British investor will no longer throw away his money on h.e.l.licat South American republics, or give it as a hostage to the States. He will keep it in the family as a wise man should. Then the towns that are to-day the only names in the wilderness, yes, and some of those places marked on the map as Hudson Bay Ports, will be cities, because--but it is hopeless to make people understand that actually and indeed, we _do_ possess an Empire of which Canada is only one portion--an Empire which is not bounded by election-returns on the North and Eastbourne riots on the South--an Empire that has not yet been scratched.

[Footnote 1: See pp. 187-188.]

Let us return to the new towns. Three times within one year did fortune come knocking to the door of a man I know. Once at Seattle, when that town was a gray blur after a fire; once at Tacoma, in the days when the steam-tram ran off the rails twice a week; and once at Spokane Falls.

But in the roar of the land-boom he did not hear her, and she went away leaving him only a tenderness akin to weakness for all new towns, and a desire, mercifully limited by lack of money, to gamble in every one of them. Of all the excitements that life offers there are few to be compared with the whirl of a red-hot boom; also it is strictly moral, because you _do_ fairly earn your 'unearned increment' by labour and perspiration and sitting up far into the night--by working like a fiend, as all pioneers must do. And consider all that is in it! The headlong stampede to the new place; the money dashed down like counters for merest daily bread; the arrival of the piled cars whence the raw material of a city--men, lumber, and s.h.i.+ngle--are shot on to the not yet nailed platform; the slas.h.i.+ng out and pegging down of roads across the blank face of the wilderness; the heaving up amid shouts and yells of the city's one electric light--a raw sizzling arc atop of an unbarked pine pole; the sweating, jostling mob at the sale of town-lots; the roar of 'Let the woman have it!' that stops all bidding when the one other woman in the place puts her price on a plot; the packed real-estate offices; the real-estate agents themselves, lost novelists of prodigious imagination; the gorgeous pink and blue map of the town, hung up in the bar-room, with every railroad from Portland to Portland meeting in its heart; the misspelled curse against 'this dam hole in the ground'

scrawled on the flank of a strayed freight-car by some man who had lost his money and gone away; the conferences at street corners of syndicates six hours established by men not twenty-five years old; the outspoken contempt for the next town, also 'on the boom,' and, therefore, utterly vile; the unceasing tramp of heavy feet on the board pavement, where stranger sometimes turns on stranger in an agony of conviction, and, shaking him by the shoulder, shouts in his ear, 'By G--d! Isn't it grand? Isn't it glorious? 'and last, the sleep of utterly worn-out men, three in each room of the shanty hotel: 'All meals two dollars. All drinks thirty-five cents. No was.h.i.+ng done here. The manager not responsible for anything.' Does the bald catalogue of these recitals leave you cold? It is possible; but it is also possible after three days in a new town to set the full half of a truck-load of archbishops fighting for corner lots as they never fought for mitre or crozier.

There is a contagion in a boom as irresistible as that of a panic in a theatre.

After a while things settle down, and then the carpenter, who is also an architect, can lay his bare arms across the bar and sell them to the highest bidder, for the houses are coming up like toadstools after rain.

The men who do not build cheer those who do, in that building means backing your belief in your town--yours to you and peculiarly. Confound all other towns whatsoever. Behind the crowd of business men the weekly town paper plays as a stockwhip plays on a mob of cattle. There is honour, heaped, extravagant, imperial for the good--the employer of labour, the builder of stores, the spender of money; there is abuse, savage and outrageous, for the bad, the man who 'buys out of the town,'

the man who intends to go, the sitter on the fence; with persuasion and invitation in prose, verse, and zincograph for all that outside world which prefers to live in cities other than Ours.

Now the editor, as often as not, begins as a mercenary and ends as a patriot. This, too, is all of a piece with human nature. A few years later, if Providence is good, comes the return for judicious investment.

Perhaps the town has stood the test of boom, and that which was clapboard is now Milwaukee brick or dressed stone, vile in design but permanent. The shanty hotel is the Something House, with accommodation for two hundred guests. The manager who served you in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves as his own hotel clerk, is gorgeous in broadcloth, and needs to be reminded of the first meeting. Suburban villas more or less adorn the flats, from which the liveliest fancy (and fancy was free in the early days) hung back. Horse-cars jingle where the prairie schooner used to stick fast in the mud-hole, scooped to that end, opposite the saloon; and there is a Belt Electric Service paying fabulous dividends. Then, do you, feeling older than Methuselah and twice as important, go forth and patronise things in general, while the manager tells you exactly what sort of millionaire you would have been if you had 'stayed by the town.'

Or else--the bottom has tumbled out of the boom, and the town new made is dead--dead as a young man's corpse laid out in the morning. Success was not justified by success. Of ten thousand not three hundred remain, and these live in huts on the outskirts of the brick streets. The hotel, with its suites of musty rooms, is a big tomb; the factory chimneys are cold; the villas have no gla.s.s in them, and the fire-weed glows in the centre of the driveways, mocking the arrogant advertis.e.m.e.nts in the empty shops. There is nothing to do except to catch trout in the stream that was to have been defiled by the city sewage. A two-pounder lies fanning himself just in the cool of the main culvert, where the alders have crept up to the city wall. You pay your money and, more or less, you take your choice.

By the time that man has seen these things and a few others that go with a boom he may say that he has lived, and talk with his enemies in the gate. He has heard the Arabian Nights retold and knows the inward kernel of that romance, which some? little folk say is vanished. Here they lie in their false teeth, for Cortes is not dead, nor Drake, and Sir Philip Sidney dies every few months if you know where to look. The adventurers and captains courageous of old have only changed their dress a little and altered their employment to suit the world in which they move. Clive came down from Lobengula's country a few months ago protesting that there was an empire there, and finding very few that believed. Hastings studied a map of South Africa in a corrugated iron hut at Johannesburg ten years ago. Since then he has altered the map considerably to the advantage of the Empire, but the heart of the Empire is set on ballot-boxes and small lies. The ill.u.s.trious Don Quixote to-day lives on the north coast of Australia where he has found the treasure of a sunken Spanish galleon. Now and again he destroys black fellows who hide under his bed to spear him. Young Hawkins, with a still younger Boscawen for his second, was till last year chasing slave-dhows round Tajurrah; they have sent him now to the Zanzibar coast to be grilled into an admiral; and the valorous Sandoval has been holding the 'Republic' of Mexico by the throat any time these fourteen years gone.

The others, big men all and not very much afraid of responsibility, are selling horses, breaking trails, drinking sangaree, running railways beyond the timberline, swimming rivers, blowing up tree-stumps, and making cities where no cities were, in all the five quarters of the world. Only people will not believe this when you tell them. They are too near things and a great deal too well fed. So they say of the most cold-blooded realism: 'This is romance. How interesting!' And of over-handled, thumb-marked realism: 'This is indeed romance!' It is the next century that, looking over its own, will see the heroes of our time clearly.

Meantime this earth of ours--we hold a fair slice of it so far--is full of wonders and miracles and mysteries and marvels, and, in default, it is good to go up and down seeing and hearing tell of them all.

ON ONE SIDE ONLY

NEW OXFORD, U.S.A., _June-July_ 1892.

'The truth is,' said the man in the train, 'that we live in a tropical country for three months of the year, only we won't recognise. Look at this.' He handed over a long list of deaths from heat that enlivened the newspapers. All the cities where men live at breaking-strain were sending in their butcher-bills, and the papers of the cities, themselves apostles of the Gospel of Rush, were beseeching their readers to keep cool and not to overwork themselves while the hot wave was upon them.

The rivers were patched and barred with sun-dried pebbles; the logs and loggers were drought-bound somewhere up the Connecticut; and the gra.s.s at the side of the track was burned in a hundred places by the sparks from locomotives. Men--hatless, coatless, and gasping--lay in the shade of that station where only a few months ago the gla.s.s stood at 30 below zero. Now the readings were 98 degrees in the shade. Main Street--do you remember Main Street of a little village locked up in the snow this spring?[2]--had given up the business of life, and an American flag with some politician's name printed across the bottom hung down across the street as stiff as a board. There were men with fans and alpaca coats curled up in splint chairs in the verandah of the one hotel--among them an ex-President of the United States. He completed the impression that the furniture of the entire country had been turned out of doors for summer cleaning in the absence of all the inhabitants. Nothing looks so hopelessly 'ex' as a President 'returned to stores,' The stars and stripes signified that the Presidential Campaign had opened in Main Street--opened and shut up again. Politics evaporate at summer heat when all hands are busy with the last of the hay, and, as the formers put it, 'Vermont's bound to go Republican.' The custom of the land is to drag the scuffle and dust of an election over several months--to the improvement of business and manners; but the noise of that war comes faintly up the valley of the Connecticut and is lost among the fiddling of the locusts. Their music puts, as it were, a knife edge upon the heat of the day. In truth, it is a tropical country for the time being.

Thunder-storms prowl and growl round the belted hills, spit themselves away in a few drops of rain, and leave the air more dead than before. In the woods, where even the faithful springs are beginning to run low, the pines and balsams have thrown out all their fragrance upon the heat and wait for the wind to bring news of the rain. The clematis, wild carrot, and all the gipsy-flowers camped by sufferance between fence line and road net are masked in white dust, and the golden-rod of the pastures that are burned to flax-colour burns too like burnished bra.s.s. A pillar of dust on the long hog-back of the road across the hills shows where a team is lathering between farms, and the roofs of the wooden houses flicker in the haze of their own heat. Overhead the chicken-hawk is the only creature at work, and his shrill kite-like call sends the gaping chickens from the dust-bath in haste to their mothers. The red squirrel as usual feigns business of importance among the b.u.t.ternuts, but this is pure priggishness. When the pa.s.ser-by is gone he ceases chattering and climbs back to where the little breezes can stir his tail-plumes. From somewhere under the lazy fold of a meadow comes the drone of a mowing-machine among the hay--its _whurr-oo_ and the grunt of the tired horses.

[Footnote 2: See 'In Sight of Monadnock.']

Houses are only meant to eat and sleep in. The rest of life is lived at full length in the verandah. When traffic is brisk three whole teams will pa.s.s that verandah in one day, and it is necessary to exchange news about the weather and the prospects for oats. When oats are in there will be slack time on the farm, and the farmers will seriously think of doing the hundred things that they have let slide during the summer.

They will undertake this and that, 'when they get around to it.' The phrase translated is the exact equivalent to the _manana_ of the Spaniard, the _kul hojaiga_ of Upper India, the _yuros.h.i.+_ of the j.a.panese, and the long drawled _taihod_ of the Maori. The only person who 'gets around' in this weather is the summer boarder--the refugee from the burning cities of the Plain, and she is generally a woman. She walks, and botanizes, and kodaks, and strips the bark off the white birch to make blue-ribboned waste-paper baskets, and the farmer regards her with wonder. More does he wonder still at the city clerk in a blazer, who has two weeks' holiday in the year and, apparently, unlimited money, which he earns in the easiest possible way by 'sitting at a desk and writing,' The farmer's wife sees the fas.h.i.+ons of the summer boarder, and between them man and woman get a notion of the beauties of city life for which their children may live to blame them.

The blazer and the town-made gown are innocent recruiting sergeants for the city brigades; and since one man's profession is ever a mystery to his fellow, blazer and gown believe that the farmer must be happy and content. A summer resort is one of the thousand windows whence to watch the thousand aspects of life in the Atlantic States. Remember that between June and September it is the desire of all who can to get away from the big cities--not on account of wantonness, as people leave London--but because of actual heat. So they get away in their millions with their millions--the wives of the rich men for five clear months, the others for as long as they can; and, like drawing like, they make communities set by set, breed by breed, division by division, over the length and breadth of the land--from Maine and the upper reaches of the Saguenay, through the mountains and hot springs of half-a-dozen interior States, out and away to Sitka in steamers. Then they spend money on hotel bills, among ten thousand farms, on private companies who lease and stock land for sporting purposes, on yachts and canoes, bicycles, rods, chalets, cottages, reading circles, camps, tents, and all the luxuries they know. But the luxury of rest most of them do not know; and the telephone and telegraph are faithfully dragged after them, lest their men-folk should for a moment forget the ball and chain at foot.

For sadness with laughter at bottom there are few things to compare with the sight of a coat-less, muddy-booted, millionaire, his hat adorned with trout-flies, and a string of small fish in his hand, clawing wildly at the telephone of some back-of-beyond 'health resort.' Thus:

'h.e.l.lo! h.e.l.lo! Yes. Who's there? Oh, all right. Go ahead. Yes, it's me!

Hey, what? Repeat. Sold for _how_ much? Forty-four and a half? Repeat.

No! I _told_ you to hold on. What? What? _Who_ bought at that? Say, hold a minute. Cable the other side. No. Hold on. I'll come down. (_Business with watch_.) Tell Schaefer I'll see him to-morrow.' (_Over his shoulder to his wife, who wears half-hoop diamond rings at_ 10 A.M.) 'Lizzie, where's my grip? I've got to go down.'

And he goes down to eat in a hotel and sleep in his shut-up house. Men are as scarce at most of the summer places as they are in Indian hill-stations in late April. The women tell you that they can't get away, and if they did they would only be miserable to get back. Now whether this wholesale abandonment of husbands by wives is wholesome let those who know the beauties of the Anglo-Indian system settle for themselves.

That both men and women need rest very badly a glance at the crowded hotel tables makes plain--so plain, indeed, that the foreigner who has not been taught that fuss and worry are in themselves honourable wishes sometimes he could put the whole unrestful crowd to sleep for seventeen hours a day. I have inquired of not less than five hundred men and women in various parts of the States why they broke down and looked so gash.

And the men said: 'If you don't keep up with the procession in America you are left'; and the women smiled an evil smile and answered that no outsider yet had discovered the real cause of their worry and strain, or why their lives were arranged to work with the largest amount of friction in the shortest given time. Now, the men can be left to their own folly, but the cause of the women's trouble has been revealed to me.

It is the thing called 'Help' which is no help. In the mult.i.tude of presents that the American man has given to the American woman (for details see daily papers) he has forgotten or is unable to give her good servants, and that sordid trouble runs equally through the household of the millionaire or the flat of the small city man. 'Yes, it's easy enough to laugh,' said one woman pa.s.sionately, 'we are worn out, and our children are worn out too, and we're always worrying, I know it. What can we do? If you stay here you'll know that this is the land of all the luxuries and none of the necessities. You'll know and then you won't laugh. You'll know why women are said to take their husbands to boarding-houses and never have homes. You'll know what an Irish Catholic means. The men won't get up and attend to these things, but _we_ would.

If _we_ had female suffrage, we'd shut the door to _all_ the Irish and throw it open to _all_ the Chinese, and let the women have a little protection.' It was the cry of a soul worn thin with exasperation, but it was truth. To-day I do not laugh any more at the race that depends on inefficient helot races for its inefficient service. When next you, housekeeping in England, differ with the respectable, amiable, industrious sixteen-pound maid, who wears a cap and says 'Ma'am,'

remember the pauper labour of America--the wives of the sixty million kings who have no subjects. No man could get a thorough knowledge of the problem in one lifetime, but he could guess at the size and the import of it after he has descended into the arena and wrestled with the Swede and the Dane and the German and the unspeakable Celt. Then he perceives how good for the breed it must be that a man should thresh himself to pieces in naked compet.i.tion with his neighbour while his wife struggles unceasingly over primitive savagery in the kitchen. In India sometimes when a famine is at hand the life of the land starts up before your eyes in all its bareness and bitter stress. Here, in spite of the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs and the frillings, it refuses to be subdued and the clamour and the clatter of it are loud above all other sounds--as sometimes the thunder of disorganised engines stops conversations along the decks of a liner, and in the inquiring eyes of the pa.s.sengers you read the question--'This thing is made and paid to bear us to port quietly. Why does it not do so?' Only here, the rattle of the badly-put-together machine is always in the ears, though men and women run about with labour-saving appliances and gospels of 'power through repose,' tinkering and oiling and making more noise. The machine is new. Some day it is going to be the finest machine in the world. To the ranks of the amateur artificers, therefore, are added men with notebooks tapping at every nut and bolthead, fiddling with the glands, registering revolutions, and crying out from time to time that this or that is or is not 'distinctively American.' Meantime, men and women die unnecessarily in the wheels, and they are said to have fallen 'in the battle of life.'

The G.o.d Who sees us all die knows that there is far too much of that battle, but we do not, and so continue wors.h.i.+pping the knife that cuts and the wheel that breaks us, as blindly as the outcast sweeper wors.h.i.+ps Lal-Beg the Glorified Broom that is the incarnation of his craft. But the sweeper has sense enough not to kill himself, and to be proud of it, with sweeping.

A foreigner can do little good by talking of these things; for the same lean dry blood that breeds the fever of unrest breeds also the savage parochial pride that squeals under a steady stare or a pointed finger.

Among themselves the people of the Eastern cities admit that they and their womenfolk overwork grievously and go to pieces very readily, and that the consequences for the young stock are unpleasant indeed; but before the stranger they prefer to talk about the future of their mighty continent (which has nothing to do with the case) and to call aloud on Baal of the Dollars--to catalogue their lines, mines, telephones, banks, and cities, and all the other sh.e.l.ls, b.u.t.tons, and counters that they have made their G.o.ds over them. Now a nation does not progress upon its brain-pan, as some books would have us believe, but upon its belly as did the Serpent of old; and in the very long run the work of the brain comes to be gathered in by a slow-footed breed that have unimaginative stomachs and the nerves that know their place.

All this is very consoling from the alien's point of view. He perceives, with great comfort, that out of strain is bred impatience in the shape of a young bundle of nerves, who is about as undisciplined an imp as the earth can show. Out of impatience, grown up, habituated to violent and ugly talk, and the impatience and recklessness of his neighbours, is begotten lawlessness, encouraged by laziness and suppressed by violence when it becomes insupportable. Out of lawlessness is bred rebellion (and that fruit has been tasted once already), and out of rebellion comes profit to those who wait. He hears of the power of the People who, through rank slovenliness, neglect to see that their laws are soberly enforced from the beginning; and these People, not once or twice in a year, but many times within a month, go out in the open streets and, with a maximum waste of power and shouting, strangle other people with ropes.

They are, he is told, law-abiding citizens who have executed 'the will of the people'; which is as though a man should leave his papers unsorted for a year and then smash his desk with an axe, crying, 'Am I not orderly?' He hears lawyers, otherwise sane and matured, defend this pig-jobbing murder on the grounds that 'the People stand behind the Law'--the law that they never administered. He sees a right, at present only half--but still half--conceded to antic.i.p.ate the law in one's own interests; and nervous impatience (always nerves) forejudging the suspect in gaol, the prisoner in the dock, and the award between nation and nation ere it is declared. He knows that the maxim in London, Yokohama, and Hongkong in doing business with the pure-bred American is to keep him waiting, for the reason that forced inaction frets the man to a lather, as standing in harness frets a half-broken horse. He comes across a thousand little peculiarities of speech, manner, and thought--matters of nerve and stomach developed by everlasting friction--and they are all just the least little bit in the world lawless. No more so than the restless clicking together of horns in a herd of restless cattle, but certainly no less. They are all good--good for those who wait.

On the other hand, to consider the matter more humanly, there are thousands of delightful men and women going to pieces for the pitiful reason that if they do not keep up with the procession, 'they are left.'

And they are left--in clothes that have no back to them, among mounds of smilax. And young men--chance-met in the streets, talk to you about their nerves which are things no young man should know anything about; and the friends of your friends go down with nervous prostration, and the people overheard in the trains talk about their nerves and the nerves of their relatives; and the little children must needs have their nerves attended to ere their milk-teeth are shed, and the middle-aged women and the middle-aged men have got them too, and the old men lose the dignity of their age in an indecent restlessness, and the advertis.e.m.e.nts in the papers go to show that this sweeping list is no lie. Atop of the fret and the stampede, the tingling self-consciousness of a new people makes them take a sort of perverted pride in the futile racket that sends up the death-rate--a child's delight in the blaze and the dust of the March of Progress. Is it not 'distinctively American'?

It is, and it is not. If the cities were all America, as they pretend, fifty years would see the March of Progress brought to a standstill, as a locomotive is stopped by heated bearings....

Down in the meadow the mowing-machine has checked, and the horses are shaking themselves. The last of the sunlight leaves the top of Monadnock, and four miles away Main Street lights her electric lamps. It is band-night in Main Street, and the folks from Putney, from Marlboro', from Guildford, and even New Fane will drive in their well-filled waggons to hear music and look at the Ex-President. Over the shoulder of the meadow two men come up very slowly, their hats off and their arms swinging loosely at their sides. They do not hurry, they have not hurried, and they never will hurry, for they are of country--bankers of the flesh and blood of the ever bankrupt cities. Their children may yet be pale summer boarders; as the boarders, city-bred weeds, may take over their farms. From the plough to the pavement goes man, but to the plough he returns at last.

'Going to supper?'

'Ye-ep,' very slowly across the wash of the uncut gra.s.s.

'Say, that corncrib wants painting.'

''Do that when we get around to it.'

They go off through the dusk, without farewell or salutation steadily as their own steers. And there are a few millions of them--unhandy men to cross in their ways, set, silent, indirect in speech, and as impenetrable as that other Eastern fanner who is the bedrock of another land. They do not appear in the city papers, they are not much heard in the streets, and they tell very little in the outsider's estimate of America.

And _they_ are the American.

LEAVES FROM A WINTER NOTE-BOOK

(1895)

We had walked abreast of the year from the very beginning, and that was when the first blood-root came up between the patches of April snow, while yet the big drift at the bottom of the meadow held fast. In the shadow of the woods and under the blown pine-needles, clots of snow lay till far into May, but neither the season nor the flowers took any note of them, and, before we were well sure Winter had gone, the lackeys of my Lord Baltimore in their new liveries came to tell us that Summer was in the valley, and please might they nest at the bottom of the garden?