Across The Plains

 

 

Contents

 

I.    Across The Plains

II.   The Old Pacific Capital

III.  Fontainebleau

IV.   Epilogue to "An Inland Voyage"

V.    Random Memories

VI.   Random Memories Continued

VII.  The Lantern-bearers

VIII. A Chapter on Dreams

IX.   Beggars

X.    Letter to a Young Gentleman

XI.   Pulvis et Umbra

XII.  A Christmas Sermon

 

 

 

CHAPTER I - ACROSS THE PLAINS

 

 

 

LEAVES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN EMIGRANT BETWEEN NEW YORK AND SAN

FRANCISCO

 

 

MONDAY. - It was, if I remember rightly, five o'clock when we were

all signalled to be present at the Ferry Depot of the railroad.  An

emigrant ship had arrived at New York on the Saturday night,

another on the Sunday morning, our own on Sunday afternoon, a

fourth early on Monday; and as there is no emigrant train on Sunday

a great part of the passengers from these four ships was

concentrated on the train by which I was to travel.  There was a

babel of bewildered men, women, and children.  The wretched little

booking-office, and the baggage-room, which was not much larger,

were crowded thick with emigrants, and were heavy and rank with the

atmosphere of dripping clothes.  Open carts full of bedding stood

by the half-hour in the rain.  The officials loaded each other with

recriminations.  A bearded, mildewed little man, whom I take to

have been an emigrant agent, was all over the place, his mouth full

of brimstone, blustering and interfering.  It was plain that the

whole system, if system there was, had utterly broken down under

the strain of so many passengers.

 

My own ticket was given me at once, and an oldish man, who

preserved his head in the midst of this turmoil, got my baggage

registered, and counselled me to stay quietly where I was till he

should give me the word to move.  I had taken along with me a small

valise, a knapsack, which I carried on my shoulders, and in the bag

of my railway rug the whole of BANCROFT'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED

STATES, in six fat volumes.  It was as much as I could carry with

convenience even for short distances, but it insured me plenty of

clothing, and the valise was at that moment, and often after,

useful for a stool.  I am sure I sat for an hour in the baggage-

room, and wretched enough it was; yet, when at last the word was

passed to me and I picked up my bundles and got under way, it was

only to exchange discomfort for downright misery and danger.

 

I followed the porters into a long shed reaching downhill from West

Street to the river.  It was dark, the wind blew clean through it

from end to end; and here I found a great block of passengers and

baggage, hundreds of one and tons of the other.  I feel I shall

have a difficulty to make myself believed; and certainly the scene

must have been exceptional, for it was too dangerous for daily

repetition.  It was a tight jam; there was no fair way through the

mingled mass of brute and living obstruction.  Into the upper

skirts of the crowd porters, infuriated by hurry and overwork,

clove their way with shouts.  I may say that we stood like sheep,

and that the porters charged among us like so many maddened sheep-

dogs; and I believe these men were no longer answerable for their

acts.  It mattered not what they were carrying, they drove straight

into the press, and when they could get no farther, blindly

discharged their barrowful.  With my own hand, for instance, I

saved the life of a child as it sat upon its mother's knee, she

sitting on a box; and since I heard of no accident, I must suppose

that there were many similar interpositions in the course of the

evening.  It will give some idea of the state of mind to which we

were reduced if I tell you that neither the porter nor the mother

of the child paid the least attention to my act.  It was not till

some time after that I understood what I had done myself, for to

ward off heavy boxes seemed at the moment a natural incident of

human life.  Cold, wet, clamour, dead opposition to progress, such

as one encounters in an evil dream, had utterly daunted the

spirits.  We had accepted this purgatory as a child accepts the

conditions of the world.  For my part, I shivered a little, and my

back ached wearily; but I believe I had neither a hope nor a fear,

and all the activities of my nature had become tributary to one

massive sensation of discomfort.

 

At length, and after how long an interval I hesitate to guess, the

crowd began to move, heavily straining through itself.  About the

same time some lamps were lighted, and threw a sudden flare over

the shed.  We were being filtered out into the river boat for

Jersey City.  You may imagine how slowly this filtering proceeded,

through the dense, choking crush, every one overladen with packages

or children, and yet under the necessity of fishing out his ticket

by the way; but it ended at length for me, and I found myself on

deck under a flimsy awning and with a trifle of elbow-room to

stretch and breathe in.  This was on the starboard; for the bulk of

the emigrants stuck hopelessly on the port side, by which we had

entered.  In vain the seamen shouted to them to move on, and

threatened them with shipwreck.  These poor people were under a

spell of stupor, and did not stir a foot.  It rained as heavily as

ever, but the wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls, not

without danger to a boat so badly ballasted as ours; and we crept

over the river in the darkness, trailing one paddle in the water

like a wounded duck, and passed ever and again by huge, illuminated

steamers running many knots, and heralding their approach by

strains of music.  The contrast between these pleasure embarkations

and our own grim vessel, with her list to port and her freight of

wet and silent emigrants, was of that glaring description which we

count too obvious for the purposes of art.

 

The landing at Jersey City was done in a stampede.  I had a fixed

sense of calamity, and to judge by conduct, the same persuasion was

common to us all.  A panic selfishness, like that produced by fear,

presided over the disorder of our landing.  People pushed, and

elbowed, and ran, their families following how they could. 

Children fell, and were picked up to be rewarded by a blow.  One

child, who had lost her parents, screamed steadily and with

increasing shrillness, as though verging towards a fit; an official

kept her by him, but no one else seemed so much as to remark her

distress; and I am ashamed to say that I ran among the rest.  I was

so weary that I had twice to make a halt and set down my bundles in

the hundred yards or so between the pier and the railway station,

so that I was quite wet by the time that I got under cover.  There

was no waiting-room, no refreshment room; the cars were locked; and

for at least another hour, or so it seemed, we had to camp upon the

draughty, gaslit platform.  I sat on my valise, too crushed to

observe my neighbours; but as they were all cold, and wet, and

weary, and driven stupidly crazy by the mismanagement to which we

had been subjected, I believe they can have been no happier than

myself.  I bought half-a-dozen oranges from a boy, for oranges and

nuts were the only refection to be had.  As only two of them had

even a pretence of juice, I threw the other four under the cars,

and beheld, as in a dream, grown people and children groping on the

track after my leavings.

 

At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly dejected, and far

from dry.  For my own part, I got out a clothes-brush, and brushed

my trousers as hard as I could till I had dried them and warmed my

blood into the bargain; but no one else, except my next neighbour

to whom I lent the brush, appeared to take the least precaution. 

As they were, they composed themselves to sleep.  I had seen the

lights of Philadelphia, and been twice ordered to change carriages

and twice countermanded, before I allowed myself to follow their

example.

 

TUESDAY. - When I awoke, it was already day; the train was standing

idle; I was in the last carriage, and, seeing some others strolling

to and fro about the lines, I opened the door and stepped forth, as

from a caravan by the wayside.  We were near no station, nor even,

as far as I could see, within reach of any signal.  A green, open,

undulating country stretched away upon all sides.  Locust trees and

a single field of Indian corn gave it a foreign grace and interest;

but the contours of the land were soft and English.  It was not

quite England, neither was it quite France; yet like enough either

to seem natural in my eyes.  And it was in the sky, and not upon

the earth, that I was surprised to find a change.  Explain it how

you may, and for my part I cannot explain it at all, the sun rises

with a different splendour in America and Europe.  There is more

clear gold and scarlet in our old country mornings; more purple,

brown, and smoky orange in those of the new.  It may be from habit,

but to me the coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the

latter; it has a duskier glory, and more nearly resembles sunset;

it seems to fit some subsequential, evening epoch of the world, as

though America were in fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from

the orient of Aurora and the springs of day.  I thought so then, by

the railroad side in Pennsylvania, and I have thought so a dozen

times since in far distant parts of the continent.  If it be an

illusion it is one very deeply rooted, and in which my eyesight is

accomplice.

 

Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and accompanying its

passage by the swift beating of a sort of chapel bell upon the

engine; and as it was for this we had been waiting, we were

summoned by the cry of "All aboard!" and went on again upon our

way.  The whole line, it appeared, was topsy-turvy; an accident at

midnight having thrown all the traffic hours into arrear.  We paid

for this in the flesh, for we had no meals all that day.  Fruit we

could buy upon the cars; and now and then we had a few minutes at

some station with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches for sale;

but we were so many and so ravenous that, though I tried at every

opportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow

my way to the counter.

 

Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer's day.  There

was not a cloud; the sunshine was baking; yet in the woody river

valleys among which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved a

sparkling freshness till late in the afternoon.  It had an inland

sweetness and variety to one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods,

rivers, and the delved earth.  These, though in so far a country,

were airs from home.  I stood on the platform by the hour; and as I

saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway

and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in

the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly on the

plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light

dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface,

I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who

had come into a rich estate.  And when I had asked the name of a

river from the brakesman, and heard that it was called the

Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of

the beauty of the land.  As when Adam with divine fitness named the

creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the

fancy.  That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining

river and desirable valley.

 

None can care for literature in itself who do not take a special

pleasure in the sound of names; and there is no part of the world

where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque

as the United States of America.  All times, races, and languages

have brought their contribution.  Pekin is in the same State with

Euclid, with Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky.  Chelsea, with its

London associations of red brick, Sloane Square, and the King's

Road, is own suburb to stately and primeval Memphis; there they

have their seat, translated names of cities, where the Mississippi

runs by Tennessee and Arkansas; and both, while I was crossing the

continent, lay, watched by armed men, in the horror and isolation

of a plague.  Old, red Manhattan lies, like an Indian arrowhead

under a steam factory, below anglified New York.  The names of the

States and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most

romantic vocables:  Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa,

Wyoming, Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a

nobler music for the ear:  a songful, tuneful land; and if the new

Homer shall arise from the Western continent, his verse will be

enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with the names of states

and cities that would strike the fancy in a business circular.

 

Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-room at Pittsburg. 

I had now under my charge a young and sprightly Dutch widow with

her children; these I was to watch over providentially for a

certain distance farther on the way; but as I found she was

furnished with a basket of eatables, I left her in the waiting-room

to seek a dinner for myself.  I mention this meal, not only because

it was the first of which I had partaken for about thirty hours,

but because it was the means of my first introduction to a coloured

gentleman.  He did me the honour to wait upon me after a fashion,

while I was eating; and with every word, look, and gesture marched

me farther into the country of surprise.  He was indeed strikingly

unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy Minstrels

of my youth.  Imagine a gentleman, certainly somewhat dark, but of

a pleasant warm hue, speaking English with a slight and rather odd

foreign accent, every inch a man of the world, and armed with

manners so patronisingly superior that I am at a loss to name their

parallel in England.  A butler perhaps rides as high over the

unbutlered, but then he sets you right with a reserve and a sort of

sighing patience which one is often moved to admire.  And again,

the abstract butler never stoops to familiarity.  But the coloured

gentleman will pass you a wink at a time; he is familiar like an

upper form boy to a fag; he unbends to you like Prince Hal with

Poins and Falstaff.  He makes himself at home and welcome.  Indeed,

I may say, this waiter behaved himself to me throughout that supper

much as, with us, a young, free, and not very self-respecting

master might behave to a good-looking chambermaid.  I had come

prepared to pity the poor negro, to put him at his ease, to prove

in a thousand condescensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice

of race; but I assure you I put my patronage away for another

occasion, and had the grace to be pleased with that result.

 

Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted him upon a point of

etiquette:  if one should offer to tip the American waiter? 

Certainly not, he told me.  Never.  It would not do.  They

considered themselves too highly to accept.  They would even resent

the offer.  As for him and me, we had enjoyed a very pleasant

conversation; he, in particular, had found much pleasure in my

society; I was a stranger; this was exactly one of those rare

conjunctures....  Without being very clear seeing, I can still

perceive the sun at noonday; and the coloured gentleman deftly

pocketed a quarter.

 

WEDNESDAY. - A little after midnight I convoyed my widow and

orphans on board the train; and morning found us far into Ohio. 

This had early been a favourite home of my imagination; I have

played at being in Ohio by the week, and enjoyed some capital sport

there with a dummy gun, my person being still unbreeched.  My

preference was founded on a work which appeared in CASSELL'S FAMILY

PAPER, and was read aloud to me by my nurse.  It narrated the

doings of one Custaloga, an Indian brave, who, in the last chapter,

very obligingly washed the paint off his face and became Sir

Reginald Somebody-or-other; a trick I never forgave him.  The idea

of a man being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be a

baronet, was one which my mind rejected.  It offended

verisimilitude, like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and

others to escape from uninhabited islands.

 

But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it.  We were now on those

great plains which stretch unbroken to the Rocky Mountains.  The

country was flat like Holland, but far from being dull.  All

through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, or for as much as I saw

of them from the train and in my waking moments, it was rich and

various, and breathed an elegance peculiar to itself.  The tall

corn pleased the eye; the trees were graceful in themselves, and

framed the plain into long, aerial vistas; and the clean, bright,

gardened townships spoke of country fare and pleasant summer

evenings on the stoop.  It was a sort of flat paradise; but, I am

afraid, not unfrequented by the devil.  That morning dawned with

such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill that was not

perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck home upon the

heart and seemed to travel with the blood.  Day came in with a

shudder.  White mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as

we see them more often on a lake; and though the sun had soon

dispersed and drunk them up, leaving an atmosphere of fever heat

and crystal pureness from horizon to horizon, the mists had still

been there, and we knew that this paradise was haunted by killing

damps and foul malaria.  The fences along the line bore but two

descriptions of advertisement; one to recommend tobaccos, and the

other to vaunt remedies against the ague.  At the point of day, and

while we were all in the grasp of that first chill, a native of the

state, who had got in at some way station, pronounced it, with a

doctoral air, "a fever and ague morning."

 

The Dutch widow was a person of some character.  She had conceived

at first sight a great aversion for the present writer, which she

was at no pains to conceal.  But being a woman of a practical

spirit, she made no difficulty about accepting my attentions, and

encouraged me to buy her children fruits and candies, to carry all

her parcels, and even to sleep upon the floor that she might profit

by my empty seat.  Nay, she was such a rattle by nature, and, so

powerfully moved to autobiographical talk, that she was forced, for

want of a better, to take me into confidence and tell me the story

of her life.  I heard about her late husband, who seemed to have

made his chief impression by taking her out pleasuring on Sundays. 

I could tell you her prospects, her hopes, the amount of her

fortune, the cost of her housekeeping by the week, and a variety of

particular matters that are not usually disclosed except to

friends.  At one station, she shook up her children to look at a

man on the platform and say if he were not like Mr. Z.; while to me

she explained how she had been keeping company with this Mr. Z.,

how far matters had proceeded, and how it was because of his

desistance that she was now travelling to the West.  Then, when I

was thus put in possession of the facts, she asked my judgment on

that type of manly beauty.  I admired it to her heart's content. 

She was not, I think, remarkably veracious in talk, but broidered

as fancy prompted, and built castles in the air out of her past;

yet she had that sort of candour, to keep me, in spite of all these

confidences, steadily aware of her aversion.  Her parting words

were ingeniously honest.  "I am sure," said she, "we all OUGHT to

be very much obliged to you."  I cannot pretend that she put me at

my ease; but I had a certain respect for such a genuine dislike.  A

poor nature would have slipped, in the course of these

familiarities, into a sort of worthless toleration for me.

 

We reached Chicago in the evening.  I was turned out of the cars,

bundled into an omnibus, and driven off through the streets to the

station of a different railroad.  Chicago seemed a great and gloomy

city.  I remember having subscribed, let us say sixpence, towards

its restoration at the period of the fire; and now when I beheld

street after street of ponderous houses and crowds of comfortable

burghers, I thought it would be a graceful act for the corporation

to refund that sixpence, or, at the least, to entertain me to a

cheerful dinner.  But there was no word of restitution.  I was that

city's benefactor, yet I was received in a third-class waiting-

room, and the best dinner I could get was a dish of ham and eggs at

my own expense.

 

I can safely say, I have never been so dog-tired as that night in

Chicago.  When it was time to start, I descended the platform like

a man in a dream.  It was a long train, lighted from end to end;

and car after car, as I came up with it, was not only filled but

overflowing.  My valise, my knapsack, my rug, with those six

ponderous tomes of Bancroft, weighed me double; I was hot,

feverish, painfully athirst; and there was a great darkness over

me, an internal darkness, not to be dispelled by gas.  When at last

I found an empty bench, I sank into it like a bundle of rags, the

world seemed to swim away into the distance, and my consciousness

dwindled within me to a mere pin's head, like a taper on a foggy

night.

 

When I came a little more to myself, I found that there had sat

down beside me a very cheerful, rosy little German gentleman,

somewhat gone in drink, who was talking away to me, nineteen to the

dozen, as they say.  I did my best to keep up the conversation; for

it seemed to me dimly as if something depended upon that.  I heard

him relate, among many other things, that there were pickpockets on

the train, who had already robbed a man of forty dollars and a

return ticket; but though I caught the words, I do not think I

properly understood the sense until next morning; and I believe I

replied at the time that I was very glad to hear it.  What else he

talked about I have no guess; I remember a gabbling sound of words,

his profuse gesticulation, and his smile, which was highly

explanatory:  but no more.  And I suppose I must have shown my

confusion very plainly; for, first, I saw him knit his brows at me

like one who has conceived a doubt; next, he tried me in German,

supposing perhaps that I was unfamiliar with the English tongue;

and finally, in despair, he rose and left me.  I felt chagrined;

but my fatigue was too crushing for delay, and, stretching myself

as far as that was possible upon the bench, I was received at once

into a dreamless stupor.

 

The little German gentleman was only going a little way into the

suburbs after a DINER FIN, and was bent on entertainment while the

journey lasted.  Having failed with me, he pitched next upon

another emigrant, who had come through from Canada, and was not one

jot less weary than myself.  Nay, even in a natural state, as I

found next morning when we scraped acquaintance, he was a heavy,

uncommunicative man.  After trying him on different topics, it

appears that the little German gentleman flounced into a temper,

swore an oath or two, and departed from that car in quest of

livelier society.  Poor little gentleman!  I suppose he thought an

emigrant should be a rollicking, free-hearted blade, with a flask

of foreign brandy and a long, comical story to beguile the moments

of digestion.

 

THURSDAY. - I suppose there must be a cycle in the fatigue of

travelling, for when I awoke next morning, I was entirely renewed

in spirits and ate a hearty breakfast of porridge, with sweet milk,

and coffee and hot cakes, at Burlington upon the Mississippi. 

Another long day's ride followed, with but one feature worthy of

remark.  At a place called Creston, a drunken man got in.  He was

aggressively friendly, but, according to English notions, not at

all unpresentable upon a train.  For one stage he eluded the notice

of the officials; but just as we were beginning to move out of the

next station, Cromwell by name, by came the conductor.  There was a

word or two of talk; and then the official had the man by the

shoulders, twitched him from his seat, marched him through the car,

and sent him flying on to the track.  It was done in three motions,

as exact as a piece of drill.  The train was still moving slowly,

although beginning to mend her pace, and the drunkard got his feet

without a fall.  He carried a red bundle, though not so red as his

cheeks; and he shook this menacingly in the air with one hand,

while the other stole behind him to the region of the kidneys.  It

was the first indication that I had come among revolvers, and I

observed it with some emotion.  The conductor stood on the steps

with one hand on his hip, looking back at him; and perhaps this

attitude imposed upon the creature, for he turned without further

ado, and went off staggering along the track towards Cromwell

followed by a peal of laughter from the cars.  They were speaking

English all about me, but I knew I was in a foreign land.

 

Twenty minutes before nine that night, we were deposited at the

Pacific Transfer Station near Council Bluffs, on the eastern bank

of the Missouri river.  Here we were to stay the night at a kind of

caravanserai, set apart for emigrants.  But I gave way to a thirst

for luxury, separated myself from my companions, and marched with

my effects into the Union Pacific Hotel.  A white clerk and a

coloured gentleman whom, in my plain European way, I should call

the boots, were installed behind a counter like bank tellers.  They

took my name, assigned me a number, and proceeded to deal with my

packages.  And here came the tug of war.  I wished to give up my

packages into safe keeping; but I did not wish to go to bed.  And

this, it appeared, was impossible in an American hotel.

 

It was, of course, some inane misunderstanding, and sprang from my

unfamiliarity with the language.  For although two nations use the

same words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by

the dictionary.  The business of life is not carried on by words,

but in set phrases, each with a special and almost a slang

signification.  Some international obscurity prevailed between me

and the coloured gentleman at Council Bluffs; so that what I was

asking, which seemed very natural to me, appeared to him a

monstrous exigency.  He refused, and that with the plainness of the

West.  This American manner of conducting matters of business is,

at first, highly unpalatable to the European.  When we approach a

man in the way of his calling, and for those services by which he

earns his bread, we consider him for the time being our hired

servant.  But in the American opinion, two gentlemen meet and have

a friendly talk with a view to exchanging favours if they shall

agree to please.  I know not which is the more convenient, nor even

which is the more truly courteous.  The English stiffness

unfortunately tends to be continued after the particular

transaction is at an end, and thus favours class separations.  But

on the other hand, these equalitarian plainnesses leave an open

field for the insolence of Jack-in-office.

 

I was nettled by the coloured gentleman's refusal, and unbuttoned

my wrath under the similitude of ironical submission.  I knew

nothing, I said, of the ways of American hotels; but I had no

desire to give trouble.  If there was nothing for it but to get to

bed immediately, let him say the word, and though it was not my

habit, I should cheerfully obey.

 

He burst into a shout of laughter.  "Ah!" said he, "you do not know

about America.  They are fine people in America.  Oh! you will like

them very well.  But you mustn't get mad.  I know what you want. 

You come along with me."

 

And issuing from behind the counter, and taking me by the arm like

an old acquaintance, he led me to the bar of the hotel.

 

"There," said he, pushing me from him by the shoulder, "go and have

a drink!"

 

 

THE EMIGRANT TRAIN

 

 

All this while I had been travelling by mixed trains, where I might

meet with Dutch widows and little German gentry fresh from table. 

I had been but a latent emigrant; now I was to be branded once

more, and put apart with my fellows.  It was about two in the

afternoon of Friday that I found myself in front of the Emigrant

House, with more than a hundred others, to be sorted and boxed for

the journey.  A white-haired official, with a stick under one arm,

and a list in the other hand, stood apart in front of us, and

called name after name in the tone of a command.  At each name you

would see a family gather up its brats and bundles and run for the

hindmost of the three cars that stood awaiting us, and I soon

concluded that this was to be set apart for the women and children. 

The second or central car, it turned out, was devoted to men

travelling alone, and the third to the Chinese.  The official was

easily moved to anger at the least delay; but the emigrants were

both quick at answering their names, and speedy in getting

themselves and their effects on board.

 

The families once housed, we men carried the second car without

ceremony by simultaneous assault.  I suppose the reader has some

notion of an American railroad-car, that long, narrow wooden box,

like a flat-roofed Noah's ark, with a stove and a convenience, one

at either end, a passage down the middle, and transverse benches

upon either hand.  Those destined for emigrants on the Union

Pacific are only remarkable for their extreme plainness, nothing

but wood entering in any part into their constitution, and for the

usual inefficacy of the lamps, which often went out and shed but a

dying glimmer even while they burned.  The benches are too short

for anything but a young child.  Where there is scarce elbow-room

for two to sit, there will not be space enough for one to lie. 

Hence the company, or rather, as it appears from certain bills

about the Transfer Station, the company's servants, have conceived

a plan for the better accommodation of travellers.  They prevail on

every two to chum together.  To each of the chums they sell a board

and three square cushions stuffed with straw, and covered with thin

cotton.  The benches can be made to face each other in pairs, for

the backs are reversible.  On the approach of night the boards are

laid from bench to bench, making a couch wide enough for two, and

long enough for a man of the middle height; and the chums lie down

side by side upon the cushions with the head to the conductor's van

and the feet to the engine.  When the train is full, of course this

plan is impossible, for there must not be more than one to every

bench, neither can it be carried out unless the chums agree.  It

was to bring about this last condition that our white-haired

official now bestirred himself.  He made a most active master of

ceremonies, introducing likely couples, and even guaranteeing the

amiability and honesty of each.  The greater the number of happy

couples the better for his pocket, for it was he who sold the raw

material of the beds.  His price for one board and three straw

cushions began with two dollars and a half; but before the train

left, and, I am sorry to say, long after I had purchased mine, it

had fallen to one dollar and a half.

 

The match-maker had a difficulty with me; perhaps, like some

ladies, I showed myself too eager for union at any price; but

certainly the first who was picked out to be my bedfellow, declined

the honour without thanks.  He was an old, heavy, slow-spoken man,

I think from Yankeeland, looked me all over with great timidity,

and then began to excuse himself in broken phrases.  He didn't know

the young man, he said.  The young man might be very honest, but

how was he to know that?  There was another young man whom he had

met already in the train; he guessed he was honest, and would

prefer to chum with him upon the whole.  All this without any sort

of excuse, as though I had been inanimate or absent.  I began to

tremble lest every one should refuse my company, and I be left

rejected.  But the next in turn was a tall, strapping, long-limbed,

small-headed, curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a soldierly

smartness in his manner.  To be exact, he had acquired it in the

navy.  But that was all one; he had at least been trained to

desperate resolves, so he accepted the match, and the white-haired

swindler pronounced the connubial benediction, and pocketed his

fees.

 

The rest of the afternoon was spent in making up the train.  I am

afraid to say how many baggage-waggons followed the engine,

certainly a score; then came the Chinese, then we, then the

families, and the rear was brought up by the conductor in what, if

I have it rightly, is called his caboose.  The class to which I

belonged was of course far the largest, and we ran over, so to

speak, to both sides; so that there were some Caucasians among the

Chinamen, and some bachelors among the families.  But our own car

was pure from admixture, save for one little boy of eight or nine

who had the whooping-cough.  At last, about six, the long train

crawled out of the Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri

river to Omaha, westward bound.

 

It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the cars.  There was

thunder in the air, which helped to keep us restless.  A man played

many airs upon the cornet, and none of them were much attended to,

until he came to "Home, sweet home."  It was truly strange to note

how the talk ceased at that, and the faces began to lengthen.  I

have no idea whether musically this air is to be considered good or

bad; but it belongs to that class of art which may be best

described as a brutal assault upon the feelings.  Pathos must be

relieved by dignity of treatment.  If you wallow naked in the

pathetic, like the author of "Home, sweet home," you make your

hearers weep in an unmanly fashion; and even while yet they are

moved, they despise themselves and hate the occasion of their

weakness.  It did not come to tears that night, for the experiment

was interrupted.  An elderly, hard-looking man, with a goatee beard

and about as much appearance of sentiment an you would expect from

a retired slaver, turned with a start and bade the performer stop

that "damned thing."  "I've heard about enough of that," he added;

"give us something about the good country we're going to."  A

murmur of adhesion ran round the car; the performer took the

instrument from his lips, laughed and nodded, and then struck into

a dancing measure; and, like a new Timotheus, stilled immediately

the emotion he had raised.

 

The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who

got off next evening at North Platte, stood together on the stern

platform, singing "The Sweet By-and-bye" with very tuneful voices;

the chums began to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the

business of the day were at an end.  But it was not so; for, the

train stopping at some station, the cars were instantly thronged

with the natives, wives and fathers, young men and maidens, some of

them in little more than nightgear, some with stable lanterns, and

all offering beds for sale.  Their charge began with twenty-five

cents a cushion, but fell, before the train went on again, to

fifteen, with the bed-board gratis, or less than one-fifth of what

I had paid for mine at the Transfer.  This is my contribution to

the economy of future emigrants.

 

A great personage on an American train is the newsboy.  He sells

books (such books!), papers, fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on

emigrant journeys, soap, towels, tin washing dishes, tin coffee

pitchers, coffee, tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash or

beans and bacon.  Early next morning the newsboy went around the

cars, and chumming on a more extended principle became the order of

the hour.  It requires but a copartnery of two to manage beds; but

washing and eating can be carried on most economically by a

syndicate of three.  I myself entered a little after sunrise into

articles of agreement, and became one of the firm of Pennsylvania,

Shakespeare, and Dubuque.  Shakespeare was my own nickname on the

cars; Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow; and Dubuque, the name of a

place in the State of Iowa, that of an amiable young fellow going

west to cure an asthma, and retarding his recovery by incessantly

chewing or smoking, and sometimes chewing and smoking together.  I

have never seen tobacco so sillily abused.  Shakespeare bought a

tin washing-dish, Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a brick of

soap.  The partners used these instruments, one after another,

according to the order of their first awaking; and when the firm

had finished there was no want of borrowers.  Each filled the tin

dish at the water filter opposite the stove, and retired with the

whole stock in trade to the platform of the car.  There he knelt

down, supporting himself by a shoulder against the woodwork or one

elbow crooked about the railing, and made a shift to wash his face

and neck and hands; a cold, an insufficient, and, if the train is

moving rapidly, a somewhat dangerous toilet.

 

On a similar division of expense, the firm of Pennsylvania,

Shakespeare, and Dubuque supplied themselves with coffee, sugar,

and necessary vessels; and their operations are a type of what went

on through all the cars.  Before the sun was up the stove would be

brightly burning; at the first station the natives would come on

board with milk and eggs and coffee cakes; and soon from end to end

the car would be filled with little parties breakfasting upon the

bed-boards.  It was the pleasantest hour of the day.

 

There were meals to be had, however, by the wayside:  a breakfast

in the morning, a dinner somewhere between eleven and two, and

supper from five to eight or nine at night.  We had rarely less

than twenty minutes for each; and if we had not spent many another

twenty minutes waiting for some express upon a side track among

miles of desert, we might have taken an hour to each repast and

arrived at San Francisco up to time.  For haste is not the foible

of an emigrant train.  It gets through on sufferance, running the

gauntlet among its more considerable brethren; should there be a

block, it is unhesitatingly sacrificed; and they cannot, in

consequence, predict the length of the passage within a day or so. 

Civility is the main comfort that you miss.  Equality, though

conceived very largely in America, does not extend so low down as

to an emigrant.  Thus in all other trains, a warning cry of  "All

aboard!" recalls the passengers to take their seats; but as soon as

I was alone with emigrants, and from the Transfer all the way to

San Francisco, I found this ceremony was pretermitted; the train

stole from the station without note of warning, and you had to keep

an eye upon it even while you ate.  The annoyance is considerable,

and the disrespect both wanton and petty.

 

Many conductors, again, will hold no communication with an

emigrant.  I asked a conductor one day at what time the train would

stop for dinner; as he made no answer I repeated the question, with

a like result; a third time I returned to the charge, and then

Jack-in-office looked me coolly in the face for several seconds and

turned ostentatiously away.  I believe he was half ashamed of his

brutality; for when another person made the same inquiry, although

he still refused the information, he condescended to answer, and

even to justify his reticence in a voice loud enough for me to

hear.  It was, he said, his principle not to tell people where they

were to dine; for one answer led to many other questions, as what

o'clock it was? or, how soon should we be there? and he could not

afford to be eternally worried.

 

As you are thus cut off from the superior authorities, a great deal

of your comfort depends on the character of the newsboy.  He has it

in his power indefinitely to better and brighten the emigrant's

lot.  The newsboy with whom we started from the Transfer was a

dark, bullying, contemptuous, insolent scoundrel, who treated us

like dogs.  Indeed, in his case, matters came nearly to a fight. 

It happened thus:  he was going his rounds through the cars with

some commodities for sale, and coming to a party who were at SEVEN-

UP or CASCINO (our two games), upon a bed-board, slung down a

cigar-box in the middle of the cards, knocking one man's hand to

the floor.  It was the last straw.  In a moment the whole party

were upon their feet, the cigars were upset, and he was ordered to

"get out of that directly, or he would get more than he reckoned

for." The fellow grumbled and muttered, but ended by making off,

and was less openly insulting in the future.  On the other hand,

the lad who rode with us in this capacity from Ogden to Sacramento

made himself the friend of all, and helped us with information,

attention, assistance, and a kind countenance.  He told us where

and when we should have our meals, and how long the train would

stop; kept seats at table for those who were delayed, and watched

that we should neither be left behind nor yet unnecessarily

hurried.  You, who live at home at ease, can hardly realise the

greatness of this service, even had it stood alone.  When I think

of that lad coming and going, train after train, with his bright

face and civil words, I see how easily a good man may become the

benefactor of his kind.  Perhaps he is discontented with himself,

perhaps troubled with ambitions; why, if he but knew it, he is a

hero of the old Greek stamp; and while he thinks he is only earning

a profit of a few cents, and that perhaps exorbitant, he is doing a

man's work, and bettering the world.

 

I must tell here an experience of mine with another newsboy.  I

tell it because it gives so good an example of that uncivil

kindness of the American, which is perhaps their most bewildering

character to one newly landed.  It was immediately after I had left

the emigrant train; and I am told I looked like a man at death's

door, so much had this long journey shaken me.  I sat at the end of

a car, and the catch being broken, and myself feverish and sick, I

had to hold the door open with my foot for the sake of air.  In

this attitude my leg debarred the newsboy from his box of

merchandise.  I made haste to let him pass when I observed that he

was coming; but I was busy with a book, and so once or twice he

came upon me unawares.  On these occasions he most rudely struck my

foot aside; and though I myself apologised, as if to show him the

way, he answered me never a word.  I chafed furiously, and I fear

the next time it would have come to words.  But suddenly I felt a

touch upon my shoulder, and a large juicy pear was put into my

hand.  It was the newsboy, who had observed that I was looking ill,

and so made me this present out of a tender heart.  For the rest of

the journey I was petted like a sick child; he lent me newspapers,

thus depriving himself of his legitimate profit on their sale, and

came repeatedly to sit by me and cheer me up.

 

 

THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA

 

 

It had thundered on the Friday night, but the sun rose on Saturday

without a cloud.  We were at sea - there is no other adequate

expression - on the plains of Nebraska.  I made my observatory on

the top of a fruit-waggon, and sat by the hour upon that perch to

spy about me, and to spy in vain for something new.  It was a world

almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth; front and

back, the line of railway stretched from horizon to horizon, like a

cue across a billiard-board; on either hand, the green plain ran

till it touched the skirts of heaven.  Along the track innumerable

wild sunflowers, no bigger than a crown-piece, bloomed in a

continuous flower-bed; grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at

all degrees of distance and diminution; and now and again we might

perceive a few dots beside the railroad which grew more and more

distinct as we drew nearer till they turned into wooden cabins, and

then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until they melted into their

surroundings, and we were once more alone upon the billiard-board. 

The train toiled over this infinity like a snail; and being the one

thing moving, it was wonderful what huge proportions it began to

assume in our regard.  It seemed miles in length, and either end of

it within but a step of the horizon.  Even my own body or my own

head seemed a great thing in that emptiness.  I note the feeling

the more readily as it is the contrary of what I have read of in

the experience of others.  Day and night, above the roar of the

train, our ears were kept busy with the incessant chirp of

grasshoppers - a noise like the winding up of countless clocks and

watches, which began after a while to seem proper to that land.

 

To one hurrying through by steam there was a certain exhilaration

in this spacious vacancy, this greatness of the air, this discovery

of the whole arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prison-line

of the horizon.  Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness

of those who passed by there in old days, at the foot's pace of

oxen, painfully urging their teams, and with no landmark but that

unattainable evening sun for which they steered, and which daily

fled them by an equal stride.  They had nothing, it would seem, to

overtake; nothing by which to reckon their advance; no sight for

repose or for encouragement; but stage after stage, only the dead

green waste under foot, and the mocking, fugitive horizon.  But the

eye, as I have been told, found differences even here; and at the

worst the emigrant came, by perseverance, to the end of his toil. 

It is the settlers, after all, at whom we have a right to marvel. 

Our consciousness, by which we live, is itself but the creature of

variety.  Upon what food does it subsist in such a land?  What

livelihood can repay a human creature for a life spent in this huge

sameness?  He is cut off from books, from news, from company, from

all that can relieve existence but the prosecution of his affairs. 

A sky full of stars is the most varied spectacle that he can hope. 

He may walk five miles and see nothing; ten, and it is as though he

had not moved; twenty, and still he is in the midst of the same

great level, and has approached no nearer to the one object within

view, the flat horizon which keeps pace with his advance.  We are

full at home of the question of agreeable wall-papers, and wise

people are of opinion that the temper may be quieted by sedative

surroundings.  But what is to be said of the Nebraskan settler? 

His is a wall-paper with a vengeance - one quarter of the universe

laid bare in all its gauntness.

 

His eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming concave of

the visible world; it quails before so vast an outlook, it is

tortured by distance; yet there is no rest or shelter till the man

runs into his cabin, and can repose his sight upon things near at

hand.  Hence, I am told, a sickness of the vision peculiar to these

empty plains.

 

Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadae, summer and winter, cattle,

wife and family, the settler may create a full and various

existence.  One person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in

every way superior to her lot.  This was a woman who boarded us at

a way station, selling milk.  She was largely formed; her features

were more than comely; she had that great rarity - a fine

complexion which became her; and her eyes were kind, dark, and

steady.  She sold milk with patriarchal grace.  There was not a

line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice,

but spoke of an entire contentment with her life.  It would have

been fatuous arrogance to pity such a woman.  Yet the place where

she lived was to me almost ghastly.  Less than a dozen wooden

houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stood planted

along the railway lines.  Each stood apart in its own lot.  Each

opened direct off the billiard-board, as if it were a billiard-

board indeed, and these only models that had been set down upon it

ready made.  Her own, into which I looked, was clean but very

empty, and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire.  This

extreme newness, above all in so naked and flat a country, gives a

strong impression of artificiality.  With none of the litter and

discoloration of human life; with the paths unworn, and the houses

still sweating from the axe, such a settlement as this seems purely

scenic.  The mind is loth to accept it for a piece of reality; and

it seems incredible that life can go on with so few properties, or

the great child, man, find entertainment in so bare a playroom.

 

And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some points; or at

least it contained, as I passed through, one person incompletely

civilised.  At North Platte, where we supped that evening, one man

asked another to pass the milk-jug.  This other was well-dressed

and of what we should call a respectable appearance; a darkish man,

high spoken, eating as though he had some usage of society; but he

turned upon the first speaker with extraordinary vehemence of tone

-

 

"There's a waiter here!" he cried.

 

"I only asked you to pass the milk," explained the first.

 

Here is the retort verbatim -

 

"Pass!  Hell!  I'm not paid for that business; the waiter's paid

for it.  You should use civility at table, and, by God, I'll show

you how!"

 

The other man very wisely made no answer, and the bully went on

with his supper as though nothing had occurred.  It pleases me to

think that some day soon he will meet with one of his own kidney;

and that perhaps both may fall.

 

 

THE DESERT OF WYOMING

 

 

To cross such a plain is to grow homesick for the mountains.  I

longed for the Black Hills of Wyoming, which I knew we were soon to

enter, like an ice-bound whaler for the spring.  Alas! and it was a

worse country than the other.  All Sunday and Monday we travelled

through these sad mountains, or over the main ridge of the Rockies,

which is a fair match to them for misery of aspect.  Hour after

hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly world about our onward

path; tumbled boulders, cliffs that drearily imitate the shape of

monuments and fortifications - how drearily, how tamely, none can

tell who has not seen them; not a tree, not a patch of sward, not

one shapely or commanding mountain form; sage-brush, eternal sage-

brush; over all, the same weariful and gloomy colouring, grays

warming into brown, grays darkening towards black; and for sole

sign of life, here and there a few fleeing antelopes; here and

there, but at incredible intervals, a creek running in a canon. 

The plains have a grandeur of their own; but here there is nothing

but a contorted smallness.  Except for the air, which was light and

stimulating, there was not one good circumstance in that God-

forsaken land.

 

I had been suffering in my health a good deal all the way; and at

last, whether I was exhausted by my complaint or poisoned in some

wayside eating-house, the evening we left Laramie, I fell sick

outright.  That was a night which I shall not readily forget.  The

lamps did not go out; each made a faint shining in its own

neighbourhood, and the shadows were confounded together in the

long, hollow box of the car.  The sleepers lay in uneasy attitudes;

here two chums alongside, flat upon their backs like dead folk;

there a man sprawling on the floor, with his face upon his arm;

there another half seated with his head and shoulders on the bench. 

The most passive were continually and roughly shaken by the

movement of the train; others stirred, turned, or stretched out

their arms like children; it was surprising how many groaned and

murmured in their sleep; and as I passed to and fro, stepping

across the prostrate, and caught now a snore, now a gasp, now a

half-formed word, it gave me a measure of the worthlessness of rest

in that unresting vehicle.  Although it was chill, I was obliged to

open my window, for the degradation of the air soon became

intolerable to one who was awake and using the full supply of life. 

Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black, amorphous hills

shoot by unweariedly into our wake.  They that long for morning

have never longed for it more earnestly than I.

 

And yet when day came, it was to shine upon the same broken and

unsightly quarter of the world.  Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a

bird, or a river.  Only down the long, sterile canons, the train

shot hooting and awoke the resting echo.  That train was the one

piece of life in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one

spectacle fit to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature. 

And when I think how the railroad has been pushed through this

unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes, and now will bear

an emigrant for some 12 pounds from the Atlantic to the Golden

Gates; how at each stage of the construction, roaring, impromptu

cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then died

away again, and are now but wayside stations in the desert; how in

these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side

with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together

in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling

and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all

America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the "bad

medicine waggon" charioting his foes; and then when I go on to

remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in

frock coats, and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a

fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, as

if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in

which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends

of the world and all the degrees of social rank, and offered to

some great writer the busiest, the most extended, and the most

varied subject for an enduring literary work.  If it be romance, if

it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy

town to this?  But, alas! it is not these things that are necessary

- it is only Homer.

 

Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some god who conducts

us swiftly through these shades and by so many hidden perils. 

Thirst, hunger, the sleight and ferocity of Indians are all no more

feared, so lightly do we skim these horrible lands; as the gull,

who wings safely through the hurricane and past the shark.  Yet we

should not be forgetful of these hardships of the past; and to keep

the balance true, since I have complained of the trifling

discomforts of my journey, perhaps more than was enough, let me add

an original document.  It was not written by Homer, but by a boy of

eleven, long since dead, and is dated only twenty years ago.  I

shall punctuate, to make things clearer, but not change the

spelling.

 

"My dear Sister Mary, - I am afraid you will go nearly crazy when

you read my letter.  If Jerry" (the writer's eldest brother) "has

not written to you before now, you will be surprised to heare that

we are in California, and that poor Thomas" (another brother, of

fifteen) "is dead.  We started from - in July, with plenly of

provisions and too yoke oxen.  We went along very well till we got

within six or seven hundred miles of California, when the Indians

attacked us.  We found places where they had killed the emigrants. 

We had one passenger with us, too guns, and one revolver; so we ran

all the lead We had into bullets (and) hung the guns up in the

wagon so that we could get at them in a minit.  It was about two

o'clock in the afternoon; droave the cattel a little way; when a

prairie chicken alited a little way from the wagon.

 

"Jerry took out one of the guns to shoot it, and told Tom drive the

oxen.  Tom and I drove the oxen, and Jerry and the passenger went

on.  Then, after a little, I left Tom and caught up with Jerry and

the other man.  Jerry stopped Tom to come up; me and the man went

on and sit down by a little stream.  In a few minutes, we heard

some noise; then three shots (they all struck poor Tom, I suppose);

then they gave the war hoop, and as many as twenty of the redskins

came down upon us.  The three that shot Tom was hid by the side of

the road in the bushes.

 

"I thought the Tom and Jerry were shot; so I told the other man

that Tom and Jerry were dead, and that we had better try to escape,

if possible.  I had no shoes on; having a sore foot, I thought I

would not put them on.  The man and me run down the road, but We

was soon stopped by an Indian on a pony.  We then turend the other

way, and run up the side of the Mountain, and hid behind some cedar

trees, and stayed there till dark.  The Indians hunted all over

after us, and verry close to us, so close that we could here there

tomyhawks Jingle.  At dark the man and me started on, I stubing my

toes against sticks and stones.  We traveld on all night; and next

morning, just as it was getting gray, we saw something in the shape

of a man.  It layed Down in the grass.  We went up to it, and it

was Jerry.  He thought we ware Indians.  You can imagine how glad

he was to see me.  He thought we was all dead but him, and we

thought him and Tom was dead.  He had the gun that he took out of

the wagon to shoot the prairie Chicken; all he had was the load

that was in it.

 

"We traveld on till about eight o'clock, We caught up with one

wagon with too men with it.  We had traveld with them before one

day; we stopt and they Drove on; we knew that they was ahead of us,

unless they had been killed to.  My feet was so sore when we caught

up with them that I had to ride; I could not step.  We traveld on

for too days, when the men that owned the cattle said they would

(could) not drive them another inch.  We unyoked the oxen; we had

about seventy pounds of flour; we took it out and divided it into

four packs.  Each of the men took about 18 pounds apiece and a

blanket.  I carried a little bacon, dried meat, and little quilt; I

had in all about twelve pounds.  We had one pint of flour a day for

our alloyance.  Sometimes we made soup of it; sometimes we (made)

pancakes; and sometimes mixed it up with cold water and eat it that

way.  We traveld twelve or fourteen days.  The time came at last

when we should have to reach some place or starve.  We saw fresh

horse and cattle tracks.  The morning come, we scraped all the

flour out of the sack, mixed it up, and baked it into bread, and

made some soup, and eat everything we had.  We traveld on all day

without anything to eat, and that evening we Caught up with a sheep

train of eight wagons.  We traveld with them till we arrived at the

settlements; and know I am safe in California, and got to good

home, and going to school.

 

"Jerry is working in - .  It is a good country.  You can get from

50 to 60 and 75 Dollars for cooking.  Tell me all about the affairs

in the States, and how all the folks get along."

 

And so ends this artless narrative.  The little man was at school

again, God bless him, while his brother lay scalped upon the

deserts.

 

 

FELLOW-PASSENGERS

 

 

At Ogden we changed cars from the Union Pacific to the Central

Pacific line of railroad.  The change was doubly welcome; for,

first, we had better cars on the new line; and, second, those in

which we had been cooped for more than ninety hours had begun to

stink abominably.  Several yards away, as we returned, let us say

from dinner, our nostrils were assailed by rancid air.  I have

stood on a platform while the whole train was shunting; and as the

dwelling-cars drew near, there would come a whiff of pure

menagerie, only a little sourer, as from men instead of monkeys.  I

think we are human only in virtue of open windows.  Without fresh

air, you only require a bad heart, and a remarkable command of the

Queen's English, to become such another as Dean Swift; a kind of

leering, human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on mountains of

offence.  I do my best to keep my head the other way, and look for

the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-like business of

the emigrant train.  But one thing I must say, the car of the

Chinese was notably the least offensive.

 

The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice as high, and so

proportionally airier; they were freshly varnished, which gave us

all a sense of cleanliness an though we had bathed; the seats drew

out and joined in the centre, so that there was no more need for

bed boards; and there was an upper tier of berths which could be

closed by day and opened at night.

 

I had by this time some opportunity of seeing the people whom I was

among.  They were in rather marked contrast to the emigrants I had

met on board ship while crossing the Atlantic.  They were mostly

lumpish fellows, silent and noisy, a common combination; somewhat

sad, I should say, with an extraordinary poor taste in humour, and

little interest in their fellow-creatures beyond that of a cheap

and merely external curiosity.  If they heard a man's name and

business, they seemed to think they had the heart of that mystery;

but they were as eager to know that much as they were indifferent

to the rest.  Some of them were on nettles till they learned your

name was Dickson and you a journeyman baker; but beyond that,

whether you were Catholic or Mormon, dull or clever, fierce or

friendly, was all one to them.  Others who were not so stupid,

gossiped a little, and, I am bound to say, unkindly.  A favourite

witticism was for some lout to raise the alarm of  "All aboard!"

while the rest of us were dining, thus contributing his mite to the

general discomfort.  Such a one was always much applauded for his

high spirits.  When I was ill coming through Wyoming, I was

astonished - fresh from the eager humanity on board ship - to meet

with little but laughter.  One of the young men even amused himself

by incommoding me, as was then very easy; and that not from ill-

nature, but mere clodlike incapacity to think, for he expected me

to join the laugh.  I did so, but it was phantom merriment.  Later

on, a man from Kansas had three violent epileptic fits, and though,

of course, there were not wanting some to help him, it was rather

superstitious terror than sympathy that his case evoked among his

fellow-passengers.  "Oh, I hope he's not going to die!" cried a

woman; "it would be terrible to have a dead body!"  And there was a

very general movement to leave the man behind at the next station. 

This, by good fortune, the conductor negatived.

 

There was a good deal of story-telling in some quarters; in others,

little but silence.  In this society, more than any other that ever

I was in, it was the narrator alone who seemed to enjoy the

narrative.  It was rarely that any one listened for the listening. 

If he lent an ear to another man's story, it was because he was in

immediate want of a hearer for one of his own.  Food and the

progress of the train were the subjects most generally treated;

many joined to discuss these who otherwise would hold their

tongues.  One small knot had no better occupation than to worm out

of me my name; and the more they tried, the more obstinately fixed

I grew to baffle them.  They assailed me with artful questions and

insidious offers of correspondence in the future; but I was

perpetually on my guard, and parried their assaults with inward

laughter.  I am sure Dubuque would have given me ten dollars for

the secret.  He owed me far more, had he understood life, for thus

preserving him a lively interest throughout the journey.  I met one

of my fellow-passengers months after, driving a street tramway car

in San Francisco; and, as the joke was now out of season, told him

my name without subterfuge.  You never saw a man more chapfallen. 

But had my name been Demogorgon, after so prolonged a mystery he

had still been disappointed.

 

There were no emigrants direct from Europe - save one German family

and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one

reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles,

the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world,

mysterious race.  Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make

something great of the Cornish; for my part, I can make nothing of

them at all.  A division of races, older and more original than

that of Babel, keeps this close, esoteric family apart from

neighbouring Englishmen.  Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign

in my eyes.  This is one of the lessons of travel - that some of

the strangest races dwell next door to you at home.

 

The rest were all American born, but they came from almost every

quarter of that Continent.  All the States of the North had sent

out a fugitive to cross the plains with me.  From Virginia, from

Pennsylvania, from New York, from far western Iowa and Kansas, from

Maime that borders on the Canadas, and from the Canadas themselves

- some one or two were fleeing in quest of a better land and better

wages.  The talk in the train, like the talk I heard on the

steamer, ran upon hard times, short commons, and hope that moves

ever westward.  I thought of my shipful from Great Britain with a

feeling of despair.  They had come 3000 miles, and yet not far

enough.  Hard times bowed them out of the Clyde, and stood to

welcome them at Sandy Hook.  Where were they to go?  Pennsylvania,

Maine, Iowa, Kansas?  These were not places for immigration, but

for emigration, it appeared; not one of them, but I knew a man who

had lifted up his heel and left it for an ungrateful country.  And

it was still westward that they ran.  Hunger, you would have

thought, came out of the east like the sun, and the evening was

made of edible gold.  And, meantime, in the car in front of me,

were there not half a hundred emigrants from the opposite quarter? 

Hungry Europe and hungry China, each pouring from their gates in

search of provender, had here come face to face.  The two waves had

met; east and west had alike failed; the whole round world had been

prospected and condemned; there was no El Dorado anywhere; and till

one could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as well to stay patiently

at home.  Nor was there wanting another sign, at once more

picturesque and more disheartening; for, as we continued to steam

westward toward the land of gold, we were continually passing other

emigrant trains upon the journey east; and these were as crowded as

our own.  Had all these return voyagers made a fortune in the

mines?  Were they all bound for Paris, and to be in Rome by Easter? 

It would seem not, for, whenever we met them, the passengers ran on

the platform and cried to us through the windows, in a kind of

wailing chorus, to "come back."  On the plains of Nebraska, in the

mountains of Wyoming, it was still the same cry, and dismal to my

heart, "Come back!"  That was what we heard by the way "about the

good country we were going to."  And at that very hour the Sand-lot

of San Francisco was crowded with the unemployed, and the echo from

the other side of Market Street was repeating the rant of

demagogues.

 

If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages that men emigrate,

how many thousands would regret the bargain!  But wages, indeed,

are only one consideration out of many; for we are a race of

gipsies, and love change and travel for themselves.

 

 

DESPISED RACES

 

 

Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my fellow Caucasians

towards our companions in the Chinese car was the most stupid and

the worst.  They seemed never to have looked at them, listened to

them, or thought of them, but hated them A PRIORI.  The Mongols

were their enemies in that cruel and treacherous battle-field of

money.  They could work better and cheaper in half a hundred

industries, and hence there was no calumny too idle for the

Caucasians to repeat, and even to believe.  They declared them

hideous vermin, and affected a kind of choking in the throat when

they beheld them.  Now, as a matter of fact, the young Chinese man

is so like a large class of European women, that on raising my head

and suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable distance, I

have for an instant been deceived by the resemblance.  I do not say

it is the most attractive class of our women, but for all that many

a man's wife is less pleasantly favoured.  Again, my emigrants

declared that the Chinese were dirty.  I cannot say they were

clean, for that was impossible upon the journey; but in their

efforts after cleanliness they put the rest of us to shame.  We all

pigged and stewed in one infamy, wet our hands and faces for half a

minute daily on the platform, and were unashamed.  But the Chinese

never lost an opportunity, and you would see them washing their

feet - an act not dreamed of among ourselves - and going as far as

decency permitted to wash their whole bodies.  I may remark by the

way that the dirtier people are in their persons the more delicate

is their sense of modesty.  A clean man strips in a crowded

boathouse; but he who is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without

uncovering an inch of skin.  Lastly, these very foul and malodorous

Caucasians entertained the surprising illusion that it was the

Chinese waggon, and that alone, which stank.  I have said already

that it was the exceptions and notably the freshest of the three.

 

These judgments are typical of the feeling in all Western America. 

The Chinese are considered stupid, because they are imperfectly

acquainted with English.  They are held to be base, because their

dexterity and frugality enable them to underbid the lazy, luxurious

Caucasian.  They are said to be thieves; I am sure they have no

monopoly of that.  They are called cruel; the Anglo-Saxon and the

cheerful Irishman may each reflect before he bears the accusation. 

I am told, again, that they are of the race of river pirates, and

belong to the most despised and dangerous class in the Celestial

Empire.  But if this be so, what remarkable pirates have we here!

and what must be the virtues, the industry, the education, and the

intelligence of their superiors at home!

 

Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese that must go. 

Such is the cry.  It seems, after all, that no country is bound to

submit to immigration any more than to invasion; each is war to the

knife, and resistance to either but legitimate defence.  Yet we may

regret the free tradition of the republic, which loved to depict

herself with open arms, welcoming all unfortunates.  And certainly,

as a man who believes that he loves freedom, I may be excused some

bitterness when I find her sacred name misused in the contention. 

It was but the other day that I heard a vulgar fellow in the Sand-

lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco, roaring for arms and

butchery.  "At the call of Abraham Lincoln," said the orator, "ye

rose in the name of freedom to set free the negroes; can ye not

rise and liberate yourselves from a few dirty Mongolians?"

 

For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on

the Chinese.  Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had

begun to keep pigs.  Gun-powder and printing, which the other day

we imitated, and a school of manners which we never had the

delicacy so much as to desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-

past antiquity.  They walk the earth with us, but it seems they

must be of different clay.  They hear the clock strike the same

hour, yet surely of a different epoch.  They travel by steam

conveyance, yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and

superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course. 

Whatever is thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the

wry-eyed, spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round

Pekin; religions so old that our language looks a halfing boy

alongside; philosophy so wise that our best philosophers find

things therein to wonder at; all this travelled alongside of me for

thousands of miles over plain and mountain.  Heaven knows if we had

one common thought or fancy all that way, or whether our eyes,

which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the same world

out of the railway windows.  And when either of us turned his

thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must

there not have been in these pictures of the mind - when I beheld

that old, gray, castled city, high throned above the firth, with

the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over

all; and the man in the next car to me would conjure up some junks

and a pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with the same

affection, home.

 

Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavour of

the Chinese; and that, it is hardly necessary to say, was the noble

red man of old story - over whose own hereditary continent we had

been steaming all these days.  I saw no wild or independent Indian;

indeed, I hear that such avoid the neighbourhood of the train; but

now and again at way stations, a husband and wife and a few

children, disgracefully dressed out with the sweepings of

civilisation, came forth and stared upon the emigrants.  The silent

stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their

appearance, would have touched any thinking creature, but my

fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a truly Cockney

baseness.  I was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation.  We

should carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of our

forefathers' misconduct as we continue to profit by ourselves.

 

If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the

hearts of these poor tribes, who have been driven back and back,

step after step, their promised reservations torn from them one

after another as the States extended westward, until at length they

are shut up into these hideous mountain deserts of the centre - and

even there find themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out by

ruffianly diggers?  The eviction of the Cherokees (to name but an

instance), the extortion of Indian agents, the outrages of the

wicked, the ill-faith of all, nay, down to the ridicule of such

poor beings as were here with me upon the train, make up a chapter

of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some ways base

if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget.  These old, well-

founded, historical hatreds have a savour of nobility for the

independent.  That the Jew should not love the Christian, nor the

Irishman love the English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the

thought of the American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man;

rather, indeed, honourable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like

the race, and not personal to him who cherishes the indignation.

 

 

TO THE GOLDEN GATES

 

 

A little corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves no particular

impressions on the mind.  By an early hour on Wednesday morning we

stopped to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak, high-

lying plateau in Nevada.  The man who kept the station eating-house

was a Scot, and learning that I was the same, he grew very

friendly, and gave me some advice on the country I was now

entering.  "You see," said he, "I tell you this, because I come

from your country."  Hail, brither Scots!

 

His most important hint was on the moneys of this part of the

world.  There is something in the simplicity of a decimal coinage

which is revolting to the human mind; thus the French, in small

affairs, reckon strictly by halfpence; and you have to solve, by a

spasm of mental arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five,

or even a hundred halfpence.  In the Pacific States they have made

a bolder push for complexity, and settle their affairs by a coin

that no longer that no longer exists - the BIT, or old Mexican

real.  The supposed value of the bit is twelve and a half cents,

eight to the dollar.  When it comes to two bits, the quarter-dollar

stands for the required amount.  But how about an odd bit?  The

nearest coin to it is a dime, which is, short by a fifth.  That,

then, is called a SHORT bit.  If you have one, you lay it

triumphantly down, and save two and a half cents.  But if you have

not, and lay down a quarter, the bar-keeper or shopman calmly

tenders you a dime by way of change; and thus you have paid what is

called a LONG BIT, and lost two and a half cents, or even, by

comparison with a short bit, five cents.  In country places all

over the Pacific coast, nothing lower than a bit is ever asked or

taken, which vastly increases the cost of life; as even for a glass

of beer you must pay fivepence or sevenpence-halfpenny, as the case

may be.  You would say that this system of mutual robbery was as

broad as it was long; but I have discovered a plan to make it

broader, with which I here endow the public.  It is brief and

simple - radiantly simple.  There is one place where five cents are

recognised, and that is the post-office.  A quarter is only worth

two bits, a short and a long.  Whenever you have a quarter, go to

the post-office and buy five cents worth of postage-stamps; you

will receive in change two dimes, that is, two short bits.  The

purchasing power of your money is undiminished.  You can go and

have your two glasses of beer all the same; and you have made

yourself a present of five cents worth of postage-stamps into the

bargain.  Benjamin Franklin would have patted me on the head for

this discovery.

 

From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand,

horrible to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemed little

kindlier, and came by supper-time to Elko.  As we were standing,

after our manner, outside the station, I saw two men whip suddenly

from underneath the cars, and take to their heels across country. 

They were tramps, it appeared, who had been riding on the beams

since eleven of the night before; and several of my fellow-

passengers had already seen and conversed with them while we broke

our fast at Toano.  These land stowaways play a great part over

here in America, and I should have liked dearly to become

acquainted with them.

 

At Elko an odd circumstance befell me.  I was coming out from

supper, when I was stopped by a small, stout, ruddy man, followed

by two others taller and ruddier than himself.

 

"Excuse me, sir," he said, "but do you happen to be going on?"

 

I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to persuade me to desist

from that intention.  He had a situation to offer me, and if we

could come to terms, why, good and well.  "You see," he continued,

"I'm running a theatre here, and we're a little short in the

orchestra.  You're a musician, I guess?"

 

I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary acquaintance with "Auld

Lang Syne" and "The Wearing of the Green," I had no pretension

whatever to that style.  He seemed much put out of countenance; and

one of his taller companions asked him, on the nail, for five

dollars.

 

"You see, sir," added the latter to me, "he bet you were a

musician; I bet you weren't.  No offence, I hope?"

 

"None whatever," I said, and the two withdrew to the bar, where I

presume the debt was liquidated.

 

This little adventure woke bright hopes in my fellow-travellers,

who thought they had now come to a country where situations went a-

begging.  But I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith. 

Indeed, I am more than half persuaded it was but a feeler to decide

the bet.

 

Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for the best of all

reasons, that I remember no more than that we continued through

desolate and desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary.  But some

time after I had fallen asleep that night, I was awakened by one of

my companions.  It was in vain that I resisted.  A fire of

enthusiasm and whisky burned in his eyes; and he declared we were

in a new country, and I must come forth upon the platform and see

with my own eyes.  The train was then, in its patient way, standing

halted in a by-track.  It was a clear, moonlit night; but the

valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine direct, and only a

diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the blackness

of the pines.  A hoarse clamour filled the air; it was the

continuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the

mountains.  The air struck chill, but tasted good and vigorous in

the nostrils - a fine, dry, old mountain atmosphere.  I was dead

sleepy, but I returned to roost with a grateful mountain feeling at

my heart.

 

When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for a while to know if it

were day or night, for the illumination was unusual.  I sat up at

last, and found we were grading slowly downward through a long

snowshed; and suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were

swallowed into the next length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse

of a huge pine-forested ravine upon my left, a foaming river, and a

sky already coloured with the fires of dawn.  I am usually very

calm over the displays of nature; but you will scarce believe how

my heart leaped at this.  It was like meeting one's wife.  I had

come home again - home from unsightly deserts to the green and

habitable corners of the earth.  Every spire of pine along the

hill-top, every trouty pool along that mountain river, was more

dear to me than a blood relation.  Few people have praised God more

happily than I did.  And thenceforward, down by Blue Canon, Alta,

Dutch Flat, and all the old mining camps, through a sea of mountain

forests, dropping thousands of feet toward the far sea-level as we

went, not I only, but all the passengers on board, threw off their

sense of dirt and heat and weariness, and bawled like schoolboys,

and thronged with shining eyes upon the platform and became new

creatures within and without.  The sun no longer oppressed us with

heat, it only shone laughingly along the mountain-side, until we

were fain to laugh ourselves for glee.  At every turn we could see

farther into the land and our own happy futures.  At every town the

cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air, and

crowing for the new day and the new country.  For this was indeed

our destination; this was "the good country" we had been going to

so long.

 

By afternoon we were at Sacramento, the city of gardens in a plain

of corn; and the next day before the dawn we were lying to upon the

Oakland side of San Francisco Bay.  The day was breaking as we

crossed the ferry; the fog was rising over the citied hills of San

Francisco; the bay was perfect - not a ripple, scarce a stain, upon

its blue expanse; everything was waiting, breathless, for the sun. 

A spot of cloudy gold lit first upon the head of Tamalpais, and

then widened downward on its shapely shoulder; the air seemed to

awaken, and began to sparkle; and suddenly

 

"The tall hills Titan discovered,"

 

and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn, were

lit from end to end with summer daylight.

 

[1879.]

 

 

 

CHAPTER II - THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

 

 

 

THE WOODS AND THE PACIFIC

 

 

THE Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than

General Sherman to a bent fishing-hook; and the comparison, if less

important than the march through Georgia, still shows the eye of a

soldier for topography.  Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the

mouth of the Salinas river is at the middle of the bend; and

Monterey itself is cosily ensconced beside the barb.  Thus the

ancient capital of California faces across the bay, while the

Pacific Ocean, though hidden by low hills and forest, bombards her

left flank and rear with never-dying surf.  In front of the town,

the long line of sea-beach trends north and north-west, and then

westward to enclose the bay.  The waves which lap so quietly about

the jetties of Monterey grow louder and larger in the distance; you

can see the breakers leaping high and white by day; at night, the

outline of the shore is traced in transparent silver by the

moonlight and the flying foam; and from all round, even in quiet

weather, the distant, thrilling roar of the Pacific hangs over the

coast and the adjacent country like smoke above a battle.

 

These long beaches are enticing to the idle man.  It would be hard

to find a walk more solitary and at the same time more exciting to

the mind.  Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea. 

Sandpipers trot in and out by troops after the retiring waves,

trilling together in a chorus of infinitesimal song.  Strange sea-

tangles, new to the European eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes

a whole whale's carcase, white with carrion-gulls and poisoning the

wind, lie scattered here and there along the sands.  The waves come

in slowly, vast and green, curve their translucent necks, and burst

with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing and waning, up and down

the long key-board of the beach.  The foam of these great ruins

mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis, swiftly

fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker.  The

interest is perpetually fresh.  On no other coast that I know shall

you enjoy, in calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean's

greatness, such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees of

thunder in the sound.  The very air is more than usually salt by

this Homeric deep.

 

Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach.  Here and

there a lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts the birds and

hunters.  A rough, undergrowth partially conceals the sand.  The

crouching, hardy live-oaks flourish singly or in thickets - the

kind of wood for murderers to crawl among - and here and there the

skirts of the forest extend downward from the hills with a floor of

turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung with Spaniard's Beard. 

Through this quaint desert the railway cars drew near to Monterey

from the junction at Salinas City - though that and so many other

things are now for ever altered - and it was from here that you had

the first view of the old township lying in the sands, its white

windmills bickering in the chill, perpetual wind, and the first

fogs of the evening drawing drearily around it from the sea.

 

The one common note of all this country is the haunting presence of

the ocean.  A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up

into the inland canons; the roar of water dwells in the clean,

empty rooms of Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney; go where

you will, you have but to pause and listen to hear the voice of the

Pacific.  You pass out of the town to the south-west, and mount the

hill among pine-woods.  Glade, thicket, and grove surround you. 

You follow winding sandy tracks that lead nowhither.  You see a

deer; a multitude of quail arises.  But the sound of the sea still

follows you as you advance, like that of wind among the trees, only

harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at length you gain the

summit, out breaks on every hand and with freshened vigour that

same unending, distant, whispering rumble of the ocean; for now you

are on the top of Monterey peninsula, and the noise no longer only

mounts to you from behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz, but

from your right also, round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and

from down before you to the mouth of the Carmello river.  The whole

woodland is begirt with thundering surges.  The silence that

immediately surrounds you where you stand is not so much broken as

it is haunted by this distant, circling rumour.  It sets your

senses upon edge; you strain your attention; you are clearly and

unusually conscious of small sounds near at hand; you walk

listening like an Indian hunter; and that voice of the Pacific is a

sort of disquieting company to you in your walk.

 

When once I was in these woods I found it difficult to turn

homeward.  All woods lure a rambler onward; but in those of

Monterey it was the surf that particularly invited me to prolong my

walks.  I would push straight for the shore where I thought it to

be nearest.  Indeed, there was scarce a direction that would not,

sooner or later, have brought me forth on the Pacific.  The

emptiness of the woods gave me a sense of freedom and discovery in

these excursions.  I never in all my visits met but one man.  He

was a Mexican, very dark of hue, but smiling and fat, and he

carried an axe, though his true business at that moment was to seek

for straying cattle.  I asked him what o'clock it was, but he

seemed neither to know nor care; and when he in his turn asked me

for news of his cattle, I showed myself equally indifferent.  We

stood and smiled upon each other for a few seconds, and then turned

without a word and took our several ways across the forest.

 

One day - I shall never forget it - I had taken a trail that was

new to me.  After a while the woods began to open, the sea to sound

nearer hand.  I came upon a road, and, to my surprise, a stile.  A

step or two farther, and, without leaving the woods, I found myself

among trim houses.  I walked through street after street, parallel

and at right angles, paved with sward and dotted with trees, but

still undeniable streets, and each with its name posted at the

corner, as in a real town.  Facing down the main thoroughfare -

"Central Avenue," as it was ticketed - I saw an open-air temple,

with benches and sounding-board, as though for an orchestra.  The

houses were all tightly shuttered; there was no smoke, no sound but

of the waves, no moving thing.  I have never been in any place that

seemed so dreamlike.  Pompeii is all in a bustle with visitors, and

its antiquity and strangeness deceive the imagination; but this

town had plainly not been built above a year or two, and perhaps

had been deserted overnight.  Indeed, it was not so much like a

deserted town as like a scene upon the stage by daylight, and with

no one on the boards.  The barking of a dog led me at last to the

only house still occupied, where a Scotch pastor and his wife pass

the winter alone in this empty theatre.  The place was "The Pacific

Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside Resort."  Thither, in the warm

season, crowds come to enjoy a life of teetotalism, religion, and

flirtation, which I am willing to think blameless and agreeable.  

The neighbourhood at least is well selected.  The Pacific booms in

front.  Westward is Point Pinos, with the lighthouse in a

wilderness of sand, where you will find the lightkeeper playing the

piano, making models and bows and arrows, studying dawn and sunrise

in amateur oil-painting, and with a dozen other elegant pursuits

and interests to surprise his brave, old-country rivals.  To the

east, and still nearer, you will come upon a space of open down, a

hamlet, a haven among rocks, a world of surge and screaming sea-

gulls.  Such scenes are very similar in different climates; they

appear homely to the eyes of all; to me this was like a dozen spots

in Scotland.  And yet the boats that ride in the haven are of

strange outlandish design; and, if you walk into the hamlet, you

will behold costumes and faces and hear a tongue that are

unfamiliar to the memory.  The joss-stick burns, the opium pipe is

smoked, the floors are strewn with slips of coloured paper -

prayers, you would say, that had somehow missed their destination -

and a man guiding his upright pencil from right to left across the

sheet, writes home the news of Monterey to the Celestial Empire.

 

The woods and the Pacific rule between them the climate of this

seaboard region.  On the streets of Monterey, when the air does not

smell salt from the one, it will be blowing perfumed from the

resinous tree-tops of the other.  For days together a hot, dry air

will overhang the town, close as from an oven, yet healthful and

aromatic in the nostrils.  The cause is not far to seek, for the

woods are afire, and the hot wind is blowing from the hills.  These

fires are one of the great dangers of California.  I have seen from

Monterey as many as three at the same time, by day a cloud of

smoke, by night a red coal of conflagration in the distance.  A

little thing will start them, and, if the wind be favourable, they

gallop over miles of country faster than a horse.  The inhabitants

must turn out and work like demons, for it is not only the pleasant

groves that are destroyed; the climate and the soil are equally at

stake, and these fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry

up perennial fountains.  California has been a land of promise in

its time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftly to

perish, it may become, like Palestine, a land of desolation.

 

To visit the woods while they are languidly burning is a strange

piece of experience.  The fire passes through the underbrush at a

run.  Every here and there a tree flares up instantaneously from

root to summit, scattering tufts of flame, and is quenched, it

seems, as quickly.  But this last is only in semblance.  For after

this first squib-like conflagration of the dry moss and twigs,

there remains behind a deep-rooted and consuming fire in the very

entrails of the tree.  The resin of the pitch-pine is principally

condensed at the base of the bole and in the spreading roots. 

Thus, after the light, showy, skirmishing flames, which are only as

the match to the explosion, have already scampered down the wind

into the distance, the true harm is but beginning for this giant of

the woods.  You may approach the tree from one side, and see it

scorched indeed from top to bottom, but apparently survivor of the

peril.  Make the circuit, and there, on the other side of the

column, is a clear mass of living coal, spreading like an ulcer;

while underground, to their most extended fibre, the roots are

being eaten out by fire, and the smoke is rising through the

fissures to the surface.  A little while, and, without a nod of

warning, the huge pine-tree snaps off short across the ground and

falls prostrate with a crash.  Meanwhile the fire continues its

silent business; the roots are reduced to a fine ash; and long

afterwards, if you pass by, you will find the earth pierced with

radiating galleries, and preserving the design of all these

subterranean spurs, as though it were the mould for a new tree

instead of the print of an old one.  These pitch-pines of Monterey

are, with the single exception of the Monterey cypress, the most

fantastic of forest trees.  No words can give an idea of the

contortion of their growth; they might figure without change in a

circle of the nether hell as Dante pictured it; and at the rate at

which trees grow, and at which forest fires spring up and gallop

through the hills of California, we may look forward to a time when

there will not be one of them left standing in that land of their

nativity.  At least they have not so much to fear from the axe, but

perish by what may be called a natural although a violent death;

while it is man in his short-sighted greed that robs the country of

the nobler redwood.  Yet a little while and perhaps all the hills

of seaboard California may be as bald as Tamalpais.

 

I have an interest of my own in these forest fires, for I came so

near to lynching on one occasion, that a braver man might have

retained a thrill from the experience.  I wished to be certain

whether it was the moss, that quaint funereal ornament of

Californian forests, which blazed up so rapidly when the flame

first touched the tree.  I suppose I must have been under the

influence of Satan, for instead of plucking off a piece for my

experiment what should I do but walk up to a great pine-tree in a

portion of the wood which had escaped so much as scorching, strike

a match, and apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels.  The

tree went off simply like a rocket; in three seconds it was a

roaring pillar of fire.  Close by I could hear the shouts of those

who were at work combating the original conflagration.  I could see

the waggon that had brought them tied to a live oak in a piece of

open; I could even catch the flash of an axe as it swung up through

the underwood into the sunlight.  Had any one observed the result

of my experiment my neck was literally not worth a pinch of snuff;

after a few minutes of passionate expostulation I should have been

run up to convenient bough.

 

To die for faction is a common evil;

But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.

 

I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day.  At night I

went out of town, and there was my own particular fire, quite

distinct from the other, and burning as I thought with even greater

vigour.

 

But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct and obvious

power upon the climate.  At sunset, for months together, vast, wet,

melancholy fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean.  From the

hill-top above Monterey the scene is often noble, although it is

always sad.  The upper air is still bright with sunlight; a glow

still rests upon the Gabelano Peak; but the fogs are in possession

of the lower levels; they crawl in scarves among the sandhills;

they float, a little higher, in clouds of a gigantic size and often

of a wild configuration; to the south, where they have struck the

seaward shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia, they double back

and spire up skyward like smoke.  Where their shadow touches,

colour dies out of the world.  The air grows chill and deadly as

they advance.  The trade-wind freshens, the trees begin to sigh,

and all the windmills in Monterey are whirling and creaking and

filling their cisterns with the brackish water of the sands.  It

takes but a little while till the invasion is complete.  The sea,

in its lighter order, has submerged the earth.  Monterey is

curtained in for the night in thick, wet, salt, and frigid clouds,

so to remain till day returns; and before the sun's rays they

slowly disperse and retreat in broken squadrons to the bosom of the

sea.  And yet often when the fog is thickest and most chill, a few

steps out of the town and up the slope, the night will be dry and

warm and full of inland perfume.

 

 

MEXICANS, AMERICANS, AND INDIANS

 

 

The history of Monterey has yet to be written.  Founded by Catholic

missionaries, a place of wise beneficence to Indians, a place of

arms, a Mexican capital continually wrested by one faction from

another, an American capital when the first House of

Representatives held its deliberations, and then falling lower and

lower from the capital of the State to the capital of a county, and

from that again, by the loss of its charter and town lands, to a

mere bankrupt village, its rise and decline is typical of that of

all Mexican institutions and even Mexican families in California.

 

Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the rapidity with

which the soil has changed-hands.  The Mexicans, you may say, are

all poor and landless, like their former capital; and yet both it

and they hold themselves apart and preserve their ancient customs

and something of their ancient air.

 

The town, when I was there, was a place of two or three streets,

economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes, which

were watercourses in the rainy season, and were, at all times, rent

up by fissures four or five feet deep.  There were no street

lights.  Short sections of wooden sidewalk only added to the

dangers of the night, for they were often high above the level of

the roadway, and no one could tell where they would be likely to

begin or end.  The houses were, for the most part, built of unbaked

adobe brick, many of them old for so new a country, some of very

elegant proportions, with low, spacious, shapely rooms, and walls

so thick that the heat of summer never dried them to the heart.  At

the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and a graveyard

smell began to hang about the lower floors; and diseases of the

chest are common and fatal among house-keeping people of either

sex.

 

There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where people

sat almost all day long playing cards.  The smallest excursion was

made on horseback.  You would scarcely ever see the main street

without a horse or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with

their Mexican housings.  It struck me oddly to come across some of

the CORNHILL illustrations to Mr. Blackmore's EREMA, and see all

the characters astride on English saddles.  As a matter of fact, an

English saddle is a rarity even in San Francisco, and, you may say,

a thing unknown in all the rest of California.  In a place so

exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you saw not only Mexican saddles

but true Vaquero riding - men always at the hand-gallop up hill and

down dale, and round the sharpest corner, urging their horses with

cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory spurs, checking them

dead with a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face in a square

yard.  The type of face and character of bearing are surprisingly

un-American.  The first ranged from something like the pure

Spanish, to something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure

Indian, although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of

either race in all the country.  As for the second, it was a matter

of perpetual surprise to find, in that world of absolutely

mannerless Americans, a people full of deportment, solemnly

courteous, and doing all things with grace and decorum.  In dress

they ran to colour and bright sashes.  Not even the most

Americanised could always resist the temptation to stick a red rose

into his hat-band.  Not even the most Americanised would descend to

wear the vile dress hat of civilisation.  Spanish was the language

of the streets.  It was difficult to get along without a word or

two of that language for an occasion.  The only communications in

which the population joined were with a view to amusement.  A

weekly public ball took place with great etiquette, in addition to

the numerous fandangoes in private houses.  There was a really fair

amateur brass band.  Night after night serenaders would be going

about the street, sometimes in a company and with several

instruments and voice together, sometimes severally, each guitar

before a different window.  It was a strange thing to lie awake in

nineteenth-century America, and hear the guitar accompany, and one

of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love-songs mount into the

night air, perhaps in a deep baritone, perhaps in that high-

pitched, pathetic, womanish alto which is so common among Mexican

men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear as something not

entirely human but altogether sad.

 

The town, then, was essentially and wholly Mexican; and yet almost

all the land in the neighbourhood was held by Americans, and it was

from the same class, numerically so small, that the principal

officials were selected.  This Mexican and that Mexican would

describe to you his old family estates, not one rood of which

remained to him.  You would ask him how that came about, and elicit

some tangled story back-foremost, from which you gathered that the

Americans had been greedy like designing men, and the Mexicans

greedy like children, but no other certain fact.  Their merits and

their faults contributed alike to the ruin of the former

landholders.  It is true they were improvident, and easily dazzled

with the sight of ready money; but they were gentlefolk besides,

and that in a way which curiously unfitted them to combat Yankee

craft.  Suppose they have a paper to sign, they would think it a

reflection on the other party to examine the terms with any great

minuteness; nay, suppose them to observe some doubtful clause, it

is ten to one they would refuse from delicacy to object to it.  I

know I am speaking within the mark, for I have seen such a case

occur, and the Mexican, in spite of the advice of his lawyer, has

signed the imperfect paper like a lamb.  To have spoken in the

matter, he said, above all to have let the other party guess that

he had seen a lawyer, would have "been like doubting his word." 

The scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who have been brought

up to understand all business as a competition in fraud, and

honesty itself to be a virtue which regards the carrying out but

not the creation of agreements.  This single unworldly trait will

account for much of that revolution of which we are speaking.  The

Mexicans have the name of being great swindlers, but certainly the

accusation cuts both ways.  In a contest of this sort, the entire

booty would scarcely have passed into the hands of the more

scupulous race.

 

Physically the Americans have triumphed; but it is not entirely

seen how far they have themselves been morally conquered.  This is,

of course, but a part of a part of an extraordinary problem now in

the course of being solved in the various States of the American

Union.  I am reminded of an anecdote.  Some years ago, at a great

sale of wine, all the odd lots were purchased by a grocer in a

small way in the old town of Edinburgh.  The agent had the

curiosity to visit him some time after and inquire what possible

use he could have for such material.  He was shown, by way of

answer, a huge vat where all the liquors, from humble Gladstone to

imperial Tokay, were fermenting together.  "And what," he asked,

"do you propose to call this?"  "I'm no very sure," replied the

grocer, "but I think it's going to turn out port."  In the older

Eastern States, I think we may say that this hotch-potch of races

in going to turn out English, or thereabout.  But the problem is

indefinitely varied in other zones.  The elements are differently

mingled in the south, in what we may call the Territorial belt and

in the group of States on the Pacific coast.  Above all, in these

last, we may look to see some monstrous hybrid - Whether good or

evil, who shall forecast? but certainly original and all their own. 

In my little restaurant at Monterey, we have sat down to table day

after day, a Frenchman, two Portuguese, an Italian, a Mexican, and

a Scotchman:  we had for common visitors an American from Illinois,

a nearly pure blood Indian woman, and a naturalised Chinese; and

from time to time a Switzer and a German came down from country

ranches for the night.  No wonder that the Pacific coast is a

foreign land to visitors from the Eastern States, for each race

contributes something of its own.  Even the despised Chinese have

taught the youth of California, none indeed of their virtues, but

the debasing use of opium.  And chief among these influences is

that of the Mexicans.

 

The Mexicans although in the State are out of it.  They still

preserve a sort of international independence, and keep their

affairs snug to themselves.  Only four or five years ago Vasquez,

the bandit, his troops being dispersed and the hunt too hot for him

in other parts of California, returned to his native Monterey, and

was seen publicly in her streets and saloons, fearing no man.  The

year that I was there, there occurred two reputed murders.  As the

Montereyans are exceptionally vile speakers of each other and of

every one behind his back, it is not possible for me to judge how

much truth there may have been in these reports; but in the one

case every one believed, and in the other some suspected, that

there had been foul play; and nobody dreamed for an instant of

taking the authorities into their counsel.  Now this is, of course,

characteristic enough of the Mexicans; but it is a noteworthy

feature that all the Americans in Monterey acquiesced without a

word in this inaction.  Even when I spoke to them upon the subject,

they seemed not to understand my surprise; they had forgotten the

traditions of their own race and upbringing, and become, in a word,

wholly Mexicanised.

 

Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money to speak of, rely almost

entirely in their business transactions upon each other's worthless

paper.  Pedro the penniless pays you with an I O U from the equally

penniless Miguel.  It is a sort of local currency by courtesy. 

Credit in these parts has passed into a superstition.  I have seen

a strong, violent man struggling for months to recover a debt, and

getting nothing but an exchange of waste paper.  The very

storekeepers are averse to asking for cash payments, and are more

surprised than pleased when they are offered.  They fear there must

be something under it, and that you mean to withdraw your custom

from them.  I have seen the enterprising chemist and stationer

begging me with fervour to let my account run on, although I had my

purse open in my hand; and partly from the commonness of the case,

partly from some remains of that generous old Mexican tradition

which made all men welcome to their tables, a person may be

notoriously both unwilling and unable to pay, and still find credit

for the necessaries of life in the stores of Monterey.  Now this

villainous habit of living upon "tick" has grown into Californian

nature.  I do not mean that the American and European storekeepers

of Monterey are as lax as Mexicans; I mean that American farmers in

many parts of the State expect unlimited credit, and profit by it

in the meanwhile, without a thought for consequences.  Jew

storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained from

this; they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and

keep him ever after as their bond-slave hopelessly grinding in the

mill.  So the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and except

that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may see Americans

bound in the same chains with which they themselves had formerly

bound the Mexican.  It seems as if certain sorts of follies, like

certain sorts of grain, were natural to the soil rather than to the

race that holds and tills it for the moment.

 

In the meantime, however, the Americans rule in Monterey County. 

The new county seat, Salinas City, in the bald, corn-bearing plain

under the Gabelano Peak, is a town of a purely American character. 

The land is held, for the most part, in those enormous tracts which

are another legacy of Mexican days, and form the present chief

danger and disgrace of California; and the holders are mostly of

American or British birth.  We have here in England no idea of the

troubles and inconveniences which flow from the existence of these

large landholders - land-thieves, land-sharks, or land-grabbers,

they are more commonly and plainly called.  Thus the townlands of

Monterey are all in the hands of a single man.  How they came there

is an obscure, vexatious question, and, rightly or wrongly, the man

is hated with a great hatred.  His life has been repeatedly in

danger.  Not very long ago, I was told, the stage was stopped and

examined three evenings in succession by disguised horsemen

thirsting for his blood.  A certain house on the Salinas road, they

say, he always passes in his buggy at full speed, for the squatter

sent him warning long ago.  But a year since he was publicly

pointed out for death by no less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney. 

Kearney is a man too well known in California, but a word of

explanation is required for English readers.  Originally an Irish

dray-man, he rose, by his command of bad language, to almost

dictatorial authority in the State; throned it there for six months

or so, his mouth full of oaths, gallowses, and conflagrations; was

first snuffed out last winter by Mr. Coleman, backed by his San

Francisco Vigilantes and three gatling guns; completed his own ruin

by throwing in his lot with the grotesque Green-backer party; and

had at last to be rescued by his old enemies, the police, out of

the hands of his rebellious followers.  It was while he was at the

top of his fortune that Kearney visited Monterey with his battle-

cry against Chinese labour, the railroad monopolists, and the land-

thieves; and his one articulate counsel to the Montereyans was to

"hang David Jacks."  Had the town been American, in my private

opinion, this would have been done years ago.  Land is a subject on

which there is no jesting in the West, and I have seen my friend

the lawyer drive out of Monterey to adjust a competition of titles

with the face of a captain going into battle and his Smith-and-

Wesson convenient to his hand.

 

On the ranche of another of these landholders you may find our old

friend, the truck system, in full operation.  Men live there, year

in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all

consumed in supplies.  The longer they remain in this desirable

service the deeper they will fall in debt - a burlesque injustice

in a new country, where labour should be precious, and one of those

typical instances which explains the prevailing discontent and the

success of the demagogue Kearney.

 

In a comparison between what was and what is in California, the

praisers of times past will fix upon the Indians of Carmel.  The

valley drained by the river so named is a true Californian valley,

bare, dotted with chaparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills. 

The Carmel runs by many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river,

loved by wading kine; and at last, as it is falling towards a

quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a ruined mission on a hill. 

From the mission church the eye embraces a great field of ocean,

and the ear is filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers

on the shore.  But the day of the Jesuit has gone by, the day of

the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left to care for the

converted savage.  The church is roofless and ruinous, sea-breezes

and sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine, daily

widening the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall.  As

an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary

architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim

to preservation from all thinking people; but neglect and abuse

have been its portion.  There is no sign of American interference,

save where a headboard has been torn from a grave to be a mark for

pistol bullets.  So it is with the Indians for whom it was erected. 

Their lands, I was told, are being yearly encroached upon by the

neighbouring American proprietor, and with that exception no man

troubles his head for the Indians of Carmel.  Only one day in the

year, the day before our Guy Fawkes, the PADRE drives over the hill

from Monterey; the little sacristy, which is the only covered

portion of the church, is filled with seats and decorated for the

service; the Indians troop together, their bright dresses

contrasting with their dark and melancholy faces; and there, among

a crowd of somewhat unsympathetic holiday-makers, you may hear God

served with perhaps more touching circumstances than in any other

temple under heaven.  An Indian, stone-blind and about eighty years

of age, conducts the singing; other Indians compose the choir; yet

they have the Gregorian music at their finger ends, and pronounce

the Latin so correctly that I could follow the meaning as they

sang.  The pronunciation was odd and nasal, the singing hurried and

staccato.  "In saecula saeculoho-horum," they went, with a vigorous

aspirate to every additional syllable.  I have never seen faces

more vividly lit up with joy than the faces of these Indian

singers.  It was to them not only the worship of God, nor an act by

which they recalled and commemorated better days, but was besides

an exercise of culture, where all they knew of art and letters was

united and expressed.  And it made a man's heart sorry for the good

fathers of yore who had taught them to dig and to reap, to read and

to sing, who had given them European mass-books which they still

preserve and study in their cottages, and who had now passed away

from all authority and influence in that land - to be succeeded by

greedy land-thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots.  So ugly a thing

may our Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear beside the doings of the

Society of Jesus.

 

But revolution in this world succeeds to revolution.  All that I

say in this paper is in a paulo-past tense.  The Monterey of last

year exists no longer.  A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by

the railway.  Three sets of diners sit down successively to table. 

Invaluable toilettes figure along the beach and between the live

oaks; and Monterey is advertised in the newspapers, and posted in

the waiting-rooms at railway stations, as a resort for wealth and

fashion.  Alas for the little town! it is not strong enough to

resist the influence of the flaunting caravanserai, and the poor,

quaint, penniless native gentlemen of Monterey must perish, like a

lower race, before the millionaire vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.

 

[1880]

 

 

 

CHAPTER III - FONTAINEBLEAU - VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS

 

 

 

I

 

 

THE charm of Fontainebleau is a thing apart.  It is a place that

people love even more than they admire.  The vigorous forest air,

the silence, the majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of

tumbled boulders, the great age and dignity of certain groves -

these are but ingredients, they are not the secret of the philtre. 

The place is sanative; the air, the light, the perfumes, and the

shapes of things concord in happy harmony.  The artist may be idle

and not fear the "blues."  He may dally with his life.  Mirth,

lyric mirth, and a vivacious classical contentment are of the very

essence of the better kind of art; and these, in that most smiling

forest, he has the chance to learn or to remember.  Even on the

plain of Biere, where the Angelus of Millet still tolls upon the

ear of fancy, a larger air, a higher heaven, something ancient and

healthy in the face of nature, purify the mind alike from dulness

and hysteria.  There is no place where the young are more gladly

conscious of their youth, or the old better contented with their

age.

 

The fact of its great and special beauty further recommends this

country to the artist.  The field was chosen by men in whose blood

there still raced some of the gleeful or solemn exultation of great

art - Millet who loved dignity like Michelangelo, Rousseau whose

modern brush was dipped in the glamour of the ancients.  It was

chosen before the day of that strange turn in the history of art,

of which we now perceive the culmination in impressionistic tales

and pictures - that voluntary aversion of the eye from all

speciously strong and beautiful effects - that disinterested love

of dulness which has set so many Peter Bells to paint the river-

side primrose.  It was then chosen for its proximity to Paris.  And

for the same cause, and by the force of tradition, the painter of

to-day continues to inhabit and to paint it.  There is in France

scenery incomparable for romance and harmony.  Provence, and the

valley of the Rhone from Vienne to Tarascon, are one succession of

masterpieces waiting for the brush.  The beauty is not merely

beauty; it tells, besides, a tale to the imagination, and surprises

while it charms.  Here you shall see castellated towns that would

befit the scenery of dreamland; streets that glow with colour like

cathedral windows; hills of the most exquisite proportions; flowers

of every precious colour, growing thick like grass.  All these, by

the grace of railway travel, are brought to the very door of the

modern painter; yet he does not seek them; he remains faithful to

Fontainebleau, to the eternal bridge of Gretz, to the watering-pot

cascade in Cernay valley.  Even Fontainebleau was chosen for him;

even in Fontainebleau he shrinks from what is sharply charactered. 

But one thing, at least, is certain, whatever he may choose to

paint and in whatever manner, it is good for the artist to dwell

among graceful shapes.  Fontainebleau, if it be but quiet scenery,

is classically graceful; and though the student may look for

different qualities, this quality, silently present, will educate

his hand and eye.

 

But, before all its other advantages - charm, loveliness, or

proximity to Paris - comes the great fact that it is already

colonised.  The institution of a painters' colony is a work of time

and tact.  The population must be conquered.  The innkeeper has to

be taught, and he soon learns, the lesson of unlimited credit; he

must be taught to welcome as a favoured guest a young gentleman in

a very greasy coat, and with little baggage beyond a box of colours

and a canvas; and he must learn to preserve his faith in customers

who will eat heartily and drink of the best, borrow money to buy

tobacco, and perhaps not pay a stiver for a year.  A colour

merchant has next to be attracted.  A certain vogue must be given

to the place, lest the painter, most gregarious of animals, should

find himself alone.  And no sooner are these first difficulties

overcome, than fresh perils spring up upon the other side; and the

bourgeois and the tourist are knocking at the gate.  This is the

crucial moment for the colony.  If these intruders gain a footing,

they not only banish freedom and amenity; pretty soon, by means of

their long purses, they will have undone the education of the

innkeeper; prices will rise and credit shorten; and the poor

painter must fare farther on and find another hamlet.  "Not here, O

Apollo!" will become his song.  Thus Trouville and, the other day,

St. Raphael were lost to the arts.  Curious and not always edifying

are the shifts that the French student uses to defend his lair;

like the cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken the waters of his

chosen pool; but at such a time and for so practical a purpose Mrs.

Grundy must allow him licence.  Where his own purse and credit are

not threatened, he will do the honours of his village generously. 

Any artist is made welcome, through whatever medium he may seek

expression; science is respected; even the idler, if he prove, as

he so rarely does, a gentleman, will soon begin to find himself at

home.  And when that essentially modern creature, the English or

American girl-student, began to walk calmly into his favourite inns

as if into a drawing-room at home, the French painter owned himself

defenceless; he submitted or he fled.  His French respectability,

quite as precise as ours, though covering different provinces of

life, recoiled aghast before the innovation.  But the girls were

painters; there was nothing to be done; and Barbizon, when I last

saw it and for the time at least, was practically ceded to the fair

invader.  Paterfamilias, on the other hand, the common tourist, the

holiday shopman, and the cheap young gentleman upon the spree, he

hounded from his villages with every circumstance of contumely.

 

This purely artistic society is excellent for the young artist. 

The lads are mostly fools; they hold the latest orthodoxy in its

crudeness; they are at that stage of education, for the most part,

when a man is too much occupied with style to be aware of the

necessity for any matter; and this, above all for the Englishman,

is excellent.  To work grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment,

to think of his material and nothing else, is, for awhile at least,

the king's highway of progress.  Here, in England, too many

painters and writers dwell dispersed, unshielded, among the

intelligent bourgeois.  These, when they are not merely

indifferent, prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence

of art.  And this is the lad's ruin.  For art is, first of all and

last of all, a trade.  The love of words and not a desire to

publish new discoveries, the love of form and not a novel reading

of historical events, mark the vocation of the writer and the

painter.  The arabesque, properly speaking, and even in literature,

is the first fancy of the artist; he first plays with his material

as a child plays with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a second

stage when he begins to use his pretty counters for the end of

representation.  In that, he must pause long and toil faithfully;

that is his apprenticeship; and it is only the few who will really

grow beyond it, and go forward, fully equipped, to do the business

of real art - to give life to abstractions and significance and

charm to facts.  In the meanwhile, let him dwell much among his

fellow-craftsmen.  They alone can take a serious interest in the

childish tasks and pitiful successes of these years.  They alone

can behold with equanimity this fingering of the dumb keyboard,

this polishing of empty sentences, this dull and literal painting

of dull and insignificant subjects.  Outsiders will spur him on. 

They will say, "Why do you not write a great book? paint a great

picture?"  If his guardian angel fail him, they may even persuade

him to the attempt, and, ten to one, his hand is coarsened and his

style falsified for life.

 

And this brings me to a warning.  The life of the apprentice to any

art is both unstrained and pleasing; it is strewn with small

successes in the midst of a career of failure, patiently supported;

the heaviest scholar is conscious of a certain progress; and if he

come not appreciably nearer to the art of Shakespeare, grows

letter-perfect in the domain of A-B, ab.  But the time comes when a

man should cease prelusory gymnastic, stand up, put a violence upon

his will, and, for better or worse, begin the business of creation. 

This evil day there is a tendency continually to postpone:  above

all with painters.  They have made so many studies that it has

become a habit; they make more, the walls of exhibitions blush with

them; and death finds these aged students still busy with their

horn-book.  This class of man finds a congenial home in artist

villages; in the slang of the English colony at Barbizon we used to

call them "Snoozers."  Continual returns to the city, the society

of men farther advanced, the study of great works, a sense of

humour or, if such a thing is to be had, a little religion or

philosophy, are the means of treatment.  It will be time enough to

think of curing the malady after it has been caught; for to catch

it is the very thing for which you seek that dream-land of the

painters' village.  "Snoozing" is a part of the artistic education;

and the rudiments must be learned stupidly, all else being

forgotten, as if they were an object in themselves.

 

Lastly, there is something, or there seems to be something, in the

very air of France that communicates the love of style.  Precision,

clarity, the cleanly and crafty employment of material, a grace in

the handling, apart from any value in the thought, seem to be

acquired by the mere residence; or if not acquired, become at least

the more appreciated.  The air of Paris is alive with this

technical inspiration.  And to leave that airy city and awake next

day upon the borders of the forest is but to change externals.  The

same spirit of dexterity and finish breathes from the long alleys

and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses that are still pretty

in their confusion, and the great plain that contrives to be

decorative in its emptiness.

 

 

II

 

 

In spite of its really considerable extent, the forest of

Fontainebleau is hardly anywhere tedious.  I know the whole western

side of it with what, I suppose, I may call thoroughness; well

enough at least to testify that there is no square mile without

some special character and charm.  Such quarters, for instance, as

the Long Rocher, the Bas-Breau, and the Reine Blanche, might be a

hundred miles apart; they have scarce a point in common beyond the

silence of the birds.  The two last are really conterminous; and in

both are tall and ancient trees that have outlived a thousand

political vicissitudes.  But in the one the great oaks prosper

placidly upon an even floor; they beshadow a great field; and the

air and the light are very free below their stretching boughs.  In

the other the trees find difficult footing; castles of white rock

lie tumbled one upon another, the foot slips, the crooked viper

slumbers, the moss clings in the crevice; and above it all the

great beech goes spiring and casting forth her arms, and, with a

grace beyond church architecture, canopies this rugged chaos. 

Meanwhile, dividing the two cantons, the broad white causeway of

the Paris road runs in an avenue:  a road conceived for pageantry

and for triumphal marches, an avenue for an army; but, its days of

glory over, it now lies grilling in the sun between cool groves,

and only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen

far away and faintly audible along its ample sweep.  A little upon

one side, and you find a district of sand and birch and boulder; a

little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and

heather; and close beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine

trees.  So artfully are the ingredients mingled.  Nor must it be

forgotten that, in all this part, you come continually forth upon a

hill-top, and behold the plain, northward and westward, like an

unrefulgent sea; nor that all day long the shadows keep changing;

and at last, to the red fires of sunset, night succeeds, and with

the night a new forest, full of whisper, gloom, and fragrance. 

There are few things more renovating than to leave Paris, the

lamplit arches of the Carrousel, and the long alignment of the

glittering streets, and to bathe the senses in this fragrant

darkness of the wood.

 

In this continual variety the mind is kept vividly alive.  It is a

changeful place to paint, a stirring place to live in.  As fast as

your foot carries you, you pass from scene to scene, each

vigorously painted in the colours of the sun, each endeared by that

hereditary spell of forests on the mind of man who still remembers

and salutes the ancient refuge of his race.

 

And yet the forest has been civilised throughout.  The most savage

corners bear a name, and have been cherished like antiquities; in

the most remote, Nature has prepared and balanced her effects as if

with conscious art; and man, with his guiding arrows of blue paint,

has countersigned the picture.  After your farthest wandering, you

are never surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue of highway,

to strike the centre point of branching alleys, or to find the

aqueduct trailing, thousand-footed, through the brush.  It is not a

wilderness; it is rather a preserve.  And, fitly enough, the centre

of the maze is not a hermit's cavern.  In the midst, a little

mirthful town lies sunlit, humming with the business of pleasure;

and the palace, breathing distinction and peopled by historic

names, stands smokeless among gardens.

 

Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was that of the harmless

humbug who called himself the hermit.  In a great tree, close by

the highroad, he had built himself a little cabin after the manner

of the Swiss Family Robinson; thither he mounted at night, by the

romantic aid of a rope ladder; and if dirt be any proof of

sincerity, the man was savage as a Sioux.  I had the pleasure of

his acquaintance; he appeared grossly stupid, not in his perfect

wits, and interested in nothing but small change; for that he had a

great avidity.  In the course of time he proved to be a chicken-

stealer, and vanished from his perch; and perhaps from the first he

was no true votary of forest freedom, but an ingenious,

theatrically-minded beggar, and his cabin in the tree was only

stock-in-trade to beg withal.  The choice of his position would

seem to indicate so much; for if in the forest there are no places

still to be discovered, there are many that have been forgotten,

and that lie unvisited.  There, to be sure, are the blue arrows

waiting to reconduct you, now blazed upon a tree, now posted in the

corner of a rock.  But your security from interruption is complete;

you might camp for weeks, if there were only water, and not a soul

suspect your presence; and if I may suppose the reader to have

committed some great crime and come to me for aid, I think I could

still find my way to a small cavern, fitted with a hearth and

chimney, where he might lie perfectly concealed.  A confederate

landscape-painter might daily supply him with food; for water, he

would have to make a nightly tramp as far as to the nearest pond;

and at last, when the hue and cry began to blow over, he might get

gently on the train at some side station, work round by a series of

junctions, and be quietly captured at the frontier.

 

Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a pleasure-ground, and

although, in favourable weather, and in the more celebrated

quarters, it literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of the

immunities and offers some of the repose of natural forests.  And

the solitary, although he must return at night to his frequented

inn, may yet pass the day with his own thoughts in the

companionable silence of the trees.  The demands of the imagination

vary; some can be alone in a back garden looked upon by windows;

others, like the ostrich, are content with a solitude that meets

the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to the very borders of

their desert, and are irritably conscious of a hunter's camp in an

adjacent county.  To these last, of course, Fontainebleau will seem

but an extended tea-garden:  a Rosherville on a by-day.  But to the

plain man it offers solitude:  an excellent thing in itself, and a

good whet for company.

 

 

III

 

 

I was for some time a consistent Barbizonian; ET EGO IN ARCADIA

VIXI, it was a pleasant season; and that noiseless hamlet lying

close among the borders of the wood is for me, as for so many

others, a green spot in memory.  The great Millet was just dead,

the green shutters of his modest house were closed; his daughters

were in mourning.  The date of my first visit was thus an epoch in

the history of art:  in a lesser way, it was an epoch in the

history of the Latin Quarter.  The PETIT CENACLE was dead and

buried; Murger and his crew of sponging vagabonds were all at rest

from their expedients; the tradition of their real life was nearly

lost; and the petrified legend of the VIE DE BOHEME had become a

sort of gospel, and still gave the cue to zealous imitators.  But

if the book be written in rose-water, the imitation was still

farther expurgated; honesty was the rule; the innkeepers gave, as I

have said, almost unlimited credit; they suffered the seediest

painter to depart, to take all his belongings, and to leave his

bill unpaid; and if they sometimes lost, it was by English and

Americans alone.  At the same time, the great influx of Anglo-

Saxons had begun to affect the life of the studious.  There had

been disputes; and, in one instance at least, the English and the

Americans had made common cause to prevent a cruel pleasantry.  It

would be well if nations and races could communicate their

qualities; but in practice when they look upon each other, they

have an eye to nothing but defects.  The Anglo-Saxon is essentially

dishonest; the French is devoid by nature of the principle that we

call "Fair Play."  The Frenchman marvelled at the scruples of his

guest, and, when that defender of innocence retired over-seas and

left his bills unpaid, he marvelled once again; the good and evil

were, in his eyes, part and parcel of the same eccentricity; a

shrug expressed his judgment upon both.

 

At Barbizon there was no master, no pontiff in the arts.  Palizzi

bore rule at Gretz - urbane, superior rule - his memory rich in

anecdotes of the great men of yore, his mind fertile in theories;

sceptical, composed, and venerable to the eye; and yet beneath

these outworks, all twittering with Italian superstition, his eye

scouting for omens, and the whole fabric of his manners giving way

on the appearance of a hunchback.  Cernay had Pelouse, the

admirable, placid Pelouse, smilingly critical of youth, who, when a

full-blown commercial traveller, suddenly threw down his samples,

bought a colour-box, and became the master whom we have all

admired.  Marlotte, for a central figure, boasted Olivier de Penne. 

Only Barbizon, since the death of Millet, was a headless

commonwealth.  Even its secondary lights, and those who in my day

made the stranger welcome, have since deserted it.  The good

Lachevre has departed, carrying his household gods; and long before

that Gaston Lafenestre was taken from our midst by an untimely

death.  He died before he had deserved success; it may be, he would

never have deserved it; but his kind, comely, modest countenance

still haunts the memory of all who knew him.  Another - whom I will

not name - has moved farther on, pursuing the strange Odyssey of

his decadence.  His days of royal favour had departed even then;

but he still retained, in his narrower life at Barbizon, a certain

stamp of conscious importance, hearty, friendly, filling the room,

the occupant of several chairs; nor had he yet ceased his losing

battle, still labouring upon great canvases that none would buy,

still waiting the return of fortune.  But these days also were too

good to last; and the former favourite of two sovereigns fled, if I

heard the truth, by night.  There was a time when he was counted a

great man, and Millet but a dauber; behold, how the whirligig of

time brings in his revenges!  To pity Millet is a piece of

arrogance; if life be hard for such resolute and pious spirits, it

is harder still for us, had we the wit to understand it; but we may

pity his unhappier rival, who, for no apparent merit, was raised to

opulence and momentary fame, and, through no apparent fault was

suffered step by step to sink again to nothing.  No misfortune can

exceed the bitterness of such back-foremost progress, even bravely

supported as it was; but to those also who were taken early from

the easel, a regret is due.  From all the young men of this period,

one stood out by the vigour of his promise; he was in the age of

fermentation, enamoured of eccentricities.  "Il faut faire de la

peinture nouvelle," was his watchword; but if time and experience

had continued his education, if he had been granted health to

return from these excursions to the steady and the central, I must

believe that the name of Hills had become famous.

 

Siron's inn, that excellent artists' barrack, was managed upon easy

principles.  At any hour of the night, when you returned from

wandering in the forest, you went to the billiard-room and helped

yourself to liquors, or descended to the cellar and returned laden

with beer or wine.  The Sirons were all locked in slumber; there

was none to check your inroads; only at the week's end a

computation was made, the gross sum was divided, and a varying

share set down to every lodger's name under the rubric:  ESTRATS. 

Upon the more long-suffering the larger tax was levied; and your

bill lengthened in a direct proportion to the easiness of your

disposition.  At any hour of the morning, again, you could get your

coffee or cold milk, and set forth into the forest.  The doves had

perhaps wakened you, fluttering into your chamber; and on the

threshold of the inn you were met by the aroma of the forest. 

Close by were the great aisles, the mossy boulders, the

interminable field of forest shadow.  There you were free to dream

and wander.  And at noon, and again at six o'clock, a good meal

awaited you on Siron's table.  The whole of your accommodation, set

aside that varying item of the ESTRALS, cost you five francs a day;

your bill was never offered you until you asked it; and if you were

out of luck's way, you might depart for where you pleased and leave

it pending.

 

 

IV

 

 

Theoretically, the house was open to all corners; practically, it

was a kind of club.  The guests protected themselves, and, in so

doing, they protected Siron.  Formal manners being laid aside,

essential courtesy was the more rigidly exacted; the new arrival

had to feel the pulse of the society; and a breach of its undefined

observances was promptly punished.  A man might be as plain, as

dull, as slovenly, as free of speech as he desired; but to a touch

of presumption or a word of hectoring these free Barbizonians were

as sensitive as a tea-party of maiden ladies.  I have seen people

driven forth from Barbizon; it would be difficult to say in words

what they had done, but they deserved their fate.  They had shown

themselves unworthy to enjoy these corporate freedoms; they had

pushed themselves; they had "made their head"; they wanted tact to

appreciate the "fine shades" of Barbizonian etiquette.  And once

they were condemned, the process of extrusion was ruthless in its

cruelty; after one evening with the formidable Bodmer, the Baily of

our commonwealth, the erring stranger was beheld no more; he rose

exceeding early the next day, and the first coach conveyed him from

the scene of his discomfiture.  These sentences of banishment were

never, in my knowledge, delivered against an artist; such would, I

believe, have been illegal; but the odd and pleasant fact is this,

that they were never needed.  Painters, sculptors, writers,

singers, I have seen all of these in Barbizon; and some were sulky,

and some blatant and inane; but one and all entered at once into

the spirit of the association.  This singular society is purely

French, a creature of French virtues, and possibly of French

defects.  It cannot be imitated by the English.  The roughness, the

impatience, the more obvious selfishness, and even the more ardent

friendships of the Anglo-Saxon, speedily dismember such a

commonwealth.  But this random gathering of young French painters,

with neither apparatus nor parade of government, yet kept the life

of the place upon a certain footing, insensibly imposed their

etiquette upon the docile, and by caustic speech enforced their

edicts against the unwelcome.  To think of it is to wonder the more

at the strange failure of their race upon the larger theatre.  This

inbred civility - to use the word in its completest meaning - this

natural and facile adjustment of contending liberties, seems all

that is required to make a governable nation and a just and

prosperous country.

 

Our society, thus purged and guarded, was full of high spirits, of

laughter, and of the initiative of youth.  The few elder men who

joined us were still young at heart, and took the key from their

companions.  We returned from long stations in the fortifying air,

our blood renewed by the sunshine, our spirits refreshed by the

silence of the forest; the Babel of loud voices sounded good; we

fell to eat and play like the natural man; and in the high inn

chamber, panelled with indifferent pictures and lit by candles

guttering in the night air, the talk and laughter sounded far into

the night.  It was a good place and a good life for any naturally-

minded youth; better yet for the student of painting, and perhaps

best of all for the student of letters.  He, too, was saturated in

this atmosphere of style; he was shut out from the disturbing

currents of the world, he might forget that there existed other and

more pressing interests than that of art.  But, in such a place, it

was hardly possible to write; he could not drug his conscience,

like the painter, by the production of listless studies; he saw

himself idle among many who were apparently, and some who were

really, employed; and what with the impulse of increasing health

and the continual provocation of romantic scenes, he became

tormented with the desire to work.  He enjoyed a strenuous idleness

full of visions, hearty meals, long, sweltering walks, mirth among

companions; and still floating like music through his brain,

foresights of great works that Shakespeare might be proud to have

conceived, headless epics, glorious torsos of dramas, and words

that were alive with import.  So in youth, like Moses from the

mountain, we have sights of that House Beautiful of art which we

shall never enter.  They are dreams and unsubstantial; visions of

style that repose upon no base of human meaning; the last heart-

throbs of that excited amateur who has to die in all of us before

the artist can be born.  But they come to us in such a rainbow of

glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull and earthly in

comparison.  We were all artists; almost all in the age of

illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and walking to the

strains of some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if we were

happy!  But art, of whatever nature, is a kind mistress; and though

these dreams of youth fall by their own baselessness, others

succeed, graver and more substantial; the symptoms change, the

amiable malady endures; and still, at an equal distance, the House

Beautiful shines upon its hill-top.

 

 

V

 

 

Gretz lies out of the forest, down by the bright river.  It boasts

a mill, an ancient church, a castle, and a bridge of many

sterlings.  And the bridge is a piece of public property;

anonymously famous; beaming on the incurious dilettante from the

walls of a hundred exhibitions.  I have seen it in the Salon; I

have seen it in the Academy; I have seen it in the last French

Exposition, excellently done by Bloomer; in a black-and-white by

Mr. A. Henley, it once adorned this essay in the pages of the

MAGAZINE OF ART.  Long-suffering bridge!  And if you visit Gretz

to-morrow, you shall find another generation, camped at the bottom

of Chevillon's garden under their white umbrellas, and doggedly

painting it again.

 

The bridge taken for granted, Gretz is a less inspiring place than

Barbizon.  I give it the palm over Cernay.  There is something

ghastly in the great empty village square of Cernay, with the inn

tables standing in one corner, as though the stage were set for

rustic opera, and in the early morning all the painters breaking

their fast upon white wine under the windows of the villagers.  It

is vastly different to awake in Gretz, to go down the green inn-

garden, to find the river streaming through the bridge, and to see

the dawn begin across the poplared level.  The meals are laid in

the cool arbour, under fluttering leaves.  The splash of oars and

bathers, the bathing costumes out to dry, the trim canoes beside

the jetty, tell of a society that has an eye to pleasure.  There is

"something to do" at Gretz.  Perhaps, for that very reason, I can

recall no such enduring ardours, no such glories of exhilaration,

as among the solemn groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon.  This

"something to do" is a great enemy to joy; it is a way out of it;

you wreak your high spirits on some cut-and-dry employment, and

behold them gone!  But Gretz is a merry place after its kind: 

pretty to see, merry to inhabit.  The course of its pellucid river,

whether up or down, is full of gentle attractions for the

navigator:  islanded reed-mazes where, in autumn, the red berries

cluster; the mirrored and inverted images of trees, lilies, and

mills, and the foam and thunder of weirs.  And of all noble sweeps

of roadway, none is nobler, on a windy dusk, than the highroad to

Nemours between its lines of talking poplar.

 

But even Gretz is changed.  The old inn, long shored and trussed

and buttressed, fell at length under the mere weight of years, and

the place as it was is but a fading image in the memory of former

guests.  They, indeed, recall the ancient wooden stair; they recall

the rainy evening, the wide hearth, the blaze of the twig fire, and

the company that gathered round the pillar in the kitchen.  But the

material fabric is now dust; soon, with the last of its

inhabitants, its very memory shall follow; and they, in their turn,

shall suffer the same law, and, both in name and lineament, vanish

from the world of men.  "For remembrance of the old house' sake,"

as Pepys once quaintly put it, let me tell one story.  When the

tide of invasion swept over France, two foreign painters were left

stranded and penniless in Gretz; and there, until the war was over,

the Chevillons ungrudgingly harboured them.  It was difficult to

obtain supplies; but the two waifs were still welcome to the best,

sat down daily with the family to table, and at the due intervals

were supplied with clean napkins, which they scrupled to employ. 

Madame Chevillon observed the fact and reprimanded them.  But they

stood firm; eat they must, but having no money they would soil no

napkins.

 

 

VI

 

 

Nemours and Moret, for all they are so picturesque, have been

little visited by painters.  They are, indeed, too populous; they

have manners of their own, and might resist the drastic process of

colonisation.  Montigny has been somewhat strangely neglected, I

never knew it inhabited but once, when Will H. Low installed

himself there with a barrel of PIQUETTE, and entertained his

friends in a leafy trellis above the weir, in sight of the green

country and to the music of the falling water.  It was a most airy,

quaint, and pleasant place of residence, just too rustic to be

stagey; and from my memories of the place in general, and that

garden trellis in particular - at morning, visited by birds, or at

night, when the dew fell and the stars were of the party - I am

inclined to think perhaps too favourably of the future of Montigny. 

Chailly-en-Biere has outlived all things, and lies dustily

slumbering in the plain - the cemetery of itself.  The great road

remains to testify of its former bustle of postilions and carriage

bells; and, like memorial tablets, there still hang in the inn room

the paintings of a former generation, dead or decorated long ago. 

In my time, one man only, greatly daring, dwelt there.  From time

to time he would walk over to Barbizon like a shade revisiting the

glimpses of the moon, and after some communication with flesh and

blood return to his austere hermitage.  But even he, when I last

revisited the forest, had come to Barbizon for good, and closed the

roll of Chaillyites.  It may revive - but I much doubt it.  Acheres

and Recloses still wait a pioneer; Bourron is out of the question,

being merely Gretz over again, without the river, the bridge, or

the beauty; and of all the possible places on the western side,

Marlotte alone remains to be discussed.  I scarcely know Marlotte,

and, very likely for that reason, am not much in love with it.  It

seems a glaring and unsightly hamlet.  The inn of Mother Antonie is

unattractive; and its more reputable rival, though comfortable

enough, is commonplace.  Marlotte has a name; it is famous; if I

were the young painter I would leave it alone in its glory.

 

 

VII

 

 

These are the words of an old stager; and though time is a good

conservative in forest places, much may be untrue to-day.  Many of

us have passed Arcadian days there and moved on, but yet left a

portion of our souls behind us buried in the woods.  I would not

dig for these reliquiae; they are incommunicable treasures that

will not enrich the finder; and yet there may lie, interred below

great oaks or scattered along forest paths, stores of youth's

dynamite and dear remembrances.  And as one generation passes on

and renovates the field of tillage for the next, I entertain a

fancy that when the young men of to-day go forth into the forest

they shall find the air still vitalised by the spirits of their

predecessors, and, like those "unheard melodies" that are the

sweetest of all, the memory of our laughter shall still haunt the

field of trees.  Those merry voices that in woods call the wanderer

farther, those thrilling silences and whispers of the groves,

surely in Fontainebleau they must be vocal of me and my companions? 

We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our

delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a

legend.

 

One generation after another fall like honey-bees upon this

memorable forest, rifle its sweets, pack themselves with vital

memories, and when the theft is consummated depart again into life

richer, but poorer also.  The forest, indeed, they have possessed,

from that day forward it is theirs indissolubly, and they will

return to walk in it at night in the fondest of their dreams, and

use it for ever in their books and pictures.  Yet when they made

their packets, and put up their notes and sketches, something, it

should seem, had been forgotten.  A projection of themselves shall

appear to haunt unfriended these scenes of happiness, a natural

child of fancy, begotten and forgotten unawares.  Over the whole

field of our wanderings such fetches are still travelling like

indefatigable bagmen; but the imps of Fontainebleau, as of all

beloved spots, are very long of life, and memory is piously

unwilling to forget their orphanage.  If anywhere about that wood

you meet my airy bantling, greet him with tenderness.  He was a

pleasant lad, though now abandoned.  And when it comes to your own

turn to quit the forest, may you leave behind you such another; no

Antony or Werther, let us hope, no tearful whipster, but, as

becomes this not uncheerful and most active age in which we figure,

the child of happy hours.

 

No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many noble, that

has not been mirthfully conceived.

 

And no man, it may be added, was ever anything but a wet blanket

and a cross to his companions who boasted not a copious spirit of

enjoyment.  Whether as man or artist let the youth make haste to

Fontainebleau, and once there let him address himself to the spirit

of the place; he will learn more from exercise than from studies,

although both are necessary; and if he can get into his heart the

gaiety and inspiration of the woods he will have gone far to undo

the evil of his sketches.  A spirit once well strung up to the

concert-pitch of the primeval out-of-doors will hardly dare to

finish a study and magniloquently ticket it a picture.  The

incommunicable thrill of things, that is the tuning-fork by which

we test the flatness of our art.  Here it is that Nature teaches

and condemns, and still spurs up to further effort and new failure. 

Thus it is that she sets us blushing at our ignorant and tepid

works; and the more we find of these inspiring shocks the less

shall we be apt to love the literal in our productions.  In all

sciences and senses the letter kills; and to-day, when cackling

human geese express their ignorant condemnation of all studio

pictures, it is a lesson most useful to be learnt.  Let the young

painter go to Fontainebleau, and while he stupefies himself with

studies that teach him the mechanical side of his trade, let him

walk in the great air, and be a servant of mirth, and not pick and

botanise, but wait upon the moods of nature.  So he will learn - or

learn not to forget - the poetry of life and earth, which, when he

has acquired his track, will save him from joyless reproduction.

 

[1882.]

 

 

 

CHAPTER IV - EPILOGUE TO "AN INLAND VOYAGE"

 

 

 

THE country where they journeyed, that green, breezy valley of the

Loing, is one very attractive to cheerful and solitary people.  The

weather was superb; all night it thundered and lightened, and the

rain fell in sheets; by day, the heavens were cloudless, the sun

fervent, the air vigorous and pure.  They walked separate:  the

Cigarette plodding behind with some philosophy, the lean Arethusa

posting on ahead.  Thus each enjoyed his own reflections by the

way; each had perhaps time to tire of them before he met his

comrade at the designated inn; and the pleasures of society and

solitude combined to fill the day.  The Arethusa carried in his

knapsack the works of Charles of Orleans, and employed some of the

hours of travel in the concoction of English roundels.  In this

path, he must thus have preceded Mr. Lang, Mr. Dobson, Mr. Henley,

and all contemporary roundeleers; but for good reasons, he will be

the last to publish the result.  The Cigarette walked burthened

with a volume of Michelet.  And both these books, it will be seen,

played a part in the subsequent adventure.

 

The Arethusa was unwisely dressed.  He is no precisian in attire;

but by all accounts, he was never so ill-inspired as on that tramp;

having set forth indeed, upon a moment's notice, from the most

unfashionable spot in Europe, Barbizon.  On his head he wore a

smoking-cap of Indian work, the gold lace pitifully frayed and

tarnished.  A flannel shirt of an agreeable dark hue, which the

satirical called black; a light tweed coat made by a good English

tailor; ready-made cheap linen trousers and leathern gaiters

completed his array.  In person, he is exceptionally lean; and his

face is not, like those of happier mortals, a certificate.  For

years he could not pass a frontier or visit a bank without

suspicion; the police everywhere, but in his native city, looked

askance upon him; and (though I am sure it will not be credited) he

is actually denied admittance to the casino of Monte Carlo.  If you

will imagine him, dressed as above, stooping under his knapsack,

walking nearly five miles an hour with the folds of the ready-made

trousers fluttering about his spindle shanks, and still looking

eagerly round him as if in terror of pursuit - the figure, when

realised, is far from reassuring.  When Villon journeyed (perhaps

by the same pleasant valley) to his exile at Roussillon, I wonder

if he had not something of the same appearance.  Something of the

same preoccupation he had beyond a doubt, for he too must have

tinkered verses as he walked, with more success than his successor. 

And if he had anything like the same inspiring weather, the same

nights of uproar, men in armour rolling and resounding down the

stairs of heaven, the rain hissing on the village streets, the wild

bull's-eye of the storm flashing all night long into the bare inn-

chamber - the same sweet return of day, the same unfathomable blue

of noon, the same high-coloured, halcyon eves - and above all, if

he had anything like as good a comrade, anything like as keen a

relish for what he saw, and what he ate, and the rivers that he

bathed in, and the rubbish that he wrote, I would exchange estates

to-day with the poor exile, and count myself a gainer.

 

But there was another point of similarity between the two journeys,

for which the Arethusa was to pay dear:  both were gone upon in

days of incomplete security.  It was not long after the Franco-

Prussian war.  Swiftly as men forget, that country-side was still

alive with tales of uhlans, and outlying sentries, and hairbreadth

'scapes from the ignominious cord, and pleasant momentary

friendships between invader and invaded.  A year, at the most two

years later, you might have tramped all that country over and not

heard one anecdote.  And a year or two later, you would - if you

were a rather ill-looking young man in nondescript array - have

gone your rounds in greater safety; for along with more interesting

matter, the Prussian spy would have somewhat faded from men's

imaginations.

 

For all that, our voyager had got beyond Chateau Renard before he

was conscious of arousing wonder.  On the road between that place

and Chatillon-sur-Loing, however, he encountered a rural postman;

they fell together in talk, and spoke of a variety of subjects; but

through one and all, the postman was still visibly preoccupied, and

his eyes were faithful to the Arethusa's knapsack.  At last, with

mysterious roguishness, he inquired what it contained, and on being

answered, shook his head with kindly incredulity.  "NON," said he,

"NON, VOUS AVEZ DES PORTRAITS."  And then with a languishing

appeal, "VOYONS, show me the portraits!"  It was some little while

before the Arethusa, with a shout of laughter, recognised his

drift.  By portraits he meant indecent photographs; and in the

Arethusa, an austere and rising author, he thought to have

identified a pornographic colporteur.  When countryfolk in France

have made up their minds as to a person's calling, argument is

fruitless.  Along all the rest of the way, the postman piped and

fluted meltingly to get a sight of the collection; now he would

upbraid, now he would reason - "VOYONS, I will tell nobody"; then

he tried corruption, and insisted on paying for a glass of wine;

and, at last when their ways separated - "NON," said he, "CE N'EST

PAS BIEN DE VOTRE PART.  O NON, CE N'EST PAS BIEN."  And shaking

his head with quite a sentimental sense of injury, he departed

unrefreshed.

 

On certain little difficulties encountered by the Arethusa at

Chatillon-sur-Loing, I have not space to dwell; another Chatillon,

of grislier memory, looms too near at hand.  But the next day, in a

certain hamlet called La Jussiere, he stopped to drink a glass of

syrup in a very poor, bare drinking shop.  The hostess, a comely

woman, suckling a child, examined the traveller with kindly and

pitying eyes.  "You are not of this department?" she asked.  The

Arethusa told her he was English.  "Ah!" she said, surprised.  "We

have no English.  We have many Italians, however, and they do very

well; they do not complain of the people of hereabouts.  An

Englishman may do very well also; it will be something new."  Here

was a dark saying, over which the Arethusa pondered as he drank his

grenadine; but when he rose and asked what was to pay, the light

came upon him in a flash.  "O, POUR VOUS," replied the landlady, 

"a halfpenny!"  POUR VOUS?  By heaven, she took him for a beggar! 

He paid his halfpenny, feeling that it were ungracious to correct

her.  But when he was forth again upon the road, he became vexed in

spirit.  The conscience is no gentleman, he is a rabbinical fellow;

and his conscience told him he had stolen the syrup.

 

That night the travellers slept in Gien; the next day they passed

the river and set forth (severally, as their custom was) on a short

stage through the green plain upon the Berry side, to Chatillon-

sur-Loire.  It was the first day of the shooting; and the air rang

with the report of firearms and the admiring cries of sportsmen. 

Overhead the birds were in consternation, wheeling in clouds,

settling and re-arising.  And yet with all this bustle on either

hand, the road itself lay solitary.  The Arethusa smoked a pipe

beside a milestone, and I remember he laid down very exactly all he

was to do at Chatillon:  how he was to enjoy a cold plunge, to

change his shirt, and to await the Cigarette's arrival, in sublime

inaction, by the margin of the Loire.  Fired by these ideas, he

pushed the more rapidly forward, and came, early in the afternoon

and in a breathing heat, to the entering-in of that ill-fated town. 

Childe Roland to the dark tower came.

 

A polite gendarme threw his shadow on the path.

 

"MONSIEUR EST VOYAGEUR?" he asked.

 

And the Arethusa, strong in his innocence, forgetful of his vile

attire, replied - I had almost said with gaiety:  "So it would

appear."

 

 "His papers are in order?" said the gendarme.  And when the

Arethusa, with a slight change of voice, admitted he had none, he

was informed (politely enough) that he must appear before the

Commissary.

 

The Commissary sat at a table in his bedroom, stripped to the shirt

and trousers, but still copiously perspiring; and when he turned

upon the prisoner a large meaningless countenance, that was (like

Bardolph's) "all whelks and bubuckles," the dullest might have been

prepared for grief.  Here was a stupid man, sleepy with the heat

and fretful at the interruption, whom neither appeal nor argument

could reach.

 

THE COMMISSARY.  You have no papers?

 

THE ARETHUSA.  Not here.

 

THE COMMISSARY.  Why?

 

THE ARETHUSA.  I have left them behind in my valise.

 

THE COMMISSARY.  You know, however, that it is forbidden to

circulate without papers?

 

THE ARETHUSA.  Pardon me:  I am convinced of the contrary.  I am

here on my rights as an English subject by international treaty.

 

THE COMMISSARY (WITH SCORN).  You call yourself an Englishman?

 

THE ARETHUSA.  I do.

 

THE COMMISSARY.  Humph. - What is your trade?

 

THE ARETHUSA.  I am a Scotch advocate.

 

THE COMMISSARY (WITH SINGULAR ANNOYANCE).  A Scotch advocate!  Do

you then pretend to support yourself by that in this department?

 

The Arethusa modestly disclaimed the pretension.  The Commissary

had scored a point.

 

THE COMMISSARY.  Why, then, do you travel?

 

THE ARETHUSA.  I travel for pleasure.

 

THE COMMISSARY (POINTING TO THE KNAPSACK, AND WITH SUBLIME

INCREDULITY).  AVEC CA?  VOYEZ-VOUS, JE SUIS UN HOMME INTELLIGENT! 

(With that?  Look here, I am a person of intelligence!)

 

The culprit remaining silent under this home thrust, the Commissary

relished his triumph for a while, and then demanded (like the

postman, but with what different expectations!) to see the contents

of the knapsack.  And here the Arethusa, not yet sufficiently awake

to his position, fell into a grave mistake.  There was little or no

furniture in the room except the Commissary's chair and table; and

to facilitate matters, the Arethusa (with all the innocence on

earth) leant the knapsack on a corner of the bed.  The Commissary

fairly bounded from his seat; his face and neck flushed past

purple, almost into blue; and he screamed to lay the desecrating

object on the floor.

 

The knapsack proved to contain a change of shirts, of shoes, of

socks, and of linen trousers, a small dressing-case, a piece of

soap in one of the shoes, two volumes of the COLLECTION JANNET

lettered POESIES DE CHARLES D'ORLEANS, a map, and a version book

containing divers notes in prose and the remarkable English

roundels of the voyager, still to this day unpublished:  the

Commissary of Chatillon is the only living man who has clapped an

eye on these artistic trifles.  He turned the assortment over with

a contumelious finger; it was plain from his daintiness that he

regarded the Arethusa and all his belongings as the very temple of

infection.  Still there was nothing suspicious about the map,

nothing really criminal except the roundels; as for Charles of

Orleans, to the ignorant mind of the prisoner, he seemed as good as

a certificate; and it was supposed the farce was nearly over.

 

The inquisitor resumed his seat.

 

THE COMMISSARY (AFTER A PAUSE).  EH BIEN, JE VAIS VOUS DIRE CE QUE

VOUS ETES.  VOUS ETES ALLEMAND ET VOUS VENEZ CHANTER A LA FOIRE. 

(Well, then, I will tell you what you are.  You are a German and

have come to sing at the fair.)

 

THE ARETHUSA.  Would you like to hear me sing?  I believe I could

convince you of the contrary.

 

THE COMMISSARY.  PAS DE PLAISANTERIE, MONSIEUR!

 

THE ARETHUSA.  Well, sir, oblige me at least by looking at this

book.  Here, I open it with my eyes shut.  Read one of these songs

- read this one - and tell me, you who are a man of intelligence,

if it would be possible to sing it at a fair?

 

THE COMMISSARY (CRITICALLY).  MAIS OUI.  TRES BIEN.

 

THE ARETHUSA.  COMMENT, MONSIEUR!  What!  But do you not observe it

is antique.  It is difficult to understand, even for you and me;

but for the audience at a fair, it would be meaningless.

 

THE COMMISSARY (TAKING A PEN).  ENFIN, IL FAUI EN FINIR.  What is

your name?

 

THE ARETHUSA (SPEAKING WITH THE SWALLOWING VIVACITY OF THE

ENGLISH).  Robert-Louis-Stev'ns'n.

 

THE COMMISSARY (AGHAST).  HE!  QUOI?

 

THE ARETHUSA (PERCEIVING AND IMPROVING HIS ADVANTAGE).  Rob'rt-

Lou's-Stev'ns'n.

 

THE COMMISSARY (AFTER SEVERAL CONFLICTS WITH HIS PEN).  EH BIEN, IL

FAUT SE PASSER DU NOM.  CA NE S'ECRIT PAS.  (Well, we must do

without the name:  it is unspellable.)

 

The above is a rough summary of this momentous conversation, in

which I have been chiefly careful to preserve the plums of the

Commissary; but the remainder of the scene, perhaps because of his

rising anger, has left but little definite in the memory of the

Arethusa.  The Commissary was not, I think, a practised literary

man; no sooner, at least, had he taken pen in hand and embarked on

the composition of the PROCES-VERBAL, than he became distinctly

more uncivil and began to show a predilection for that simplest of

all forms of repartee:  "You lie!"  Several times the Arethusa let

it pass, and then suddenly flared up, refused to accept more

insults or to answer further questions, defied the Commissary to do

his worst, and promised him, if he did, that he should bitterly

repent it.  Perhaps if he had worn this proud front from the first,

instead of beginning with a sense of entertainment and then going

on to argue, the thing might have turned otherwise; for even at

this eleventh hour the Commissary was visibly staggered.  But it

was too late; he had been challenged the PROCES-VERBAL was begun;

and he again squared his elbows over his writing, and the Arethusa

was led forth a prisoner.

 

A step or two down the hot road stood the gendarmerie.  Thither was

our unfortunate conducted, and there he was bidden to empty forth

the contents of his pockets.  A handkerchief, a pen, a pencil, a

pipe and tobacco, matches, and some ten francs of change:  that was

all.  Not a file, not a cipher, not a scrap of writing whether to

identify or to condemn.  The very gendarme was appalled before such

destitution.

 

"I regret," he said, "that I arrested you, for I see that you are

no VOYOU."  And he promised him every indulgence.

 

The Arethusa, thus encouraged, asked for his pipe.  That he was

told was impossible, but if he chewed, he might have some tobacco. 

He did not chew, however, and asked instead to have his

handkerchief.

 

"NON," said the gendarme.  "NOUS AVONS EU DES HISTOIRES DE GENS QUI

SE SONT PENDUS."  (No, we have had histories of people who hanged

themselves.)

 

"What," cried the Arethusa.  "And is it for that you refuse me my

handkerchief?  But see how much more easily I could hang myself in

my trousers!"

 

The man was struck by the novelty of the idea; but he stuck to his

colours, and only continued to repeat vague offers of service.

 

"At least," said the Arethusa, "be sure that you arrest my comrade;

he will follow me ere long on the same road, and you can tell him

by the sack upon his shoulders."

 

This promised, the prisoner was led round into the back court of

the building, a cellar door was opened, he was motioned down the

stair, and bolts grated and chains clanged behind his descending

person.

 

The philosophic and still more the imaginative mind is apt to

suppose itself prepared for any mortal accident.  Prison, among

other ills, was one that had been often faced by the undaunted

Arethusa.  Even as he went down the stairs, he was telling himself

that here was a famous occasion for a roundel, and that like the

committed linnets of the tuneful cavalier, he too would make his

prison musical.  I will tell the truth at once:  the roundel was

never written, or it should be printed in this place, to raise a

smile.  Two reasons interfered:  the first moral, the second

physical.

 

It is one of the curiosities of human nature, that although all men

are liars, they can none of them bear to be told so of themselves. 

To get and take the lie with equanimity is a stretch beyond the

stoic; and the Arethusa, who had been surfeited upon that insult,

was blazing inwardly with a white heat of smothered wrath.  But the

physical had also its part.  The cellar in which he was confined

was some feet underground, and it was only lighted by an unglazed,

narrow aperture high up in the wall and smothered in the leaves of

a green vine.  The walls were of naked masonry, the floor of bare

earth; by way of furniture there was an earthenware basin, a water-

jug, and a wooden bedstead with a blue-gray cloak for bedding.  To

be taken from the hot air of a summer's afternoon, the

reverberation of the road and the stir of rapid exercise, and

plunged into the gloom and damp of this receptacle for vagabonds,

struck an instant chill upon the Arethusa's blood.  Now see in how

small a matter a hardship may consist:  the floor was exceedingly

uneven underfoot, with the very spade-marks, I suppose, of the

labourers who dug the foundations of the barrack; and what with the

poor twilight and the irregular surface, walking was impossible. 

The caged author resisted for a good while; but the chill of the

place struck deeper and deeper; and at length, with such reluctance

as you may fancy, he was driven to climb upon the bed and wrap

himself in the public covering.  There, then, he lay upon the verge

of shivering, plunged in semi-darkness, wound in a garment whose

touch he dreaded like the plague, and (in a spirit far removed from

resignation) telling the roll of the insults he had just received. 

These are not circumstances favourable to the muse.

 

Meantime (to look at the upper surface where the sun was still

shining and the guns of sportsmen were still noisy through the

tufted plain) the Cigarette was drawing near at his more

philosophic pace.  In those days of liberty and health he was the

constant partner of the Arethusa, and had ample opportunity to

share in that gentleman's disfavour with the police.  Many a bitter

bowl had he partaken of with that disastrous comrade.  He was

himself a man born to float easily through life, his face and

manner artfully recommending him to all.  There was but one

suspicious circumstance he could not carry off, and that was his

companion.  He will not readily forget the Commissary in what is

ironically called the free town of Frankfort-on-the-Main ; nor the

Franco-Belgian frontier; nor the inn at La Fere; last, but not

least, he is pretty certain to remember Chatillon-sur-Loire.

 

At the town entry, the gendarme culled him like a wayside flower;

and a moment later, two persons, in a high state of surprise, were

confronted in the Commissary's office.  For if the Cigarette was

surprised to be arrested, the Commissary was no less taken aback by

the appearance and appointments of his captive.  Here was a man

about whom there could be no mistake:  a man of an unquestionable

and unassailable manner, in apple-pie order, dressed not with

neatness merely but elegance, ready with his passport, at a word,

and well supplied with money:  a man the Commissary would have

doffed his hat to on chance upon the highway; and this BEAU

CAVALIER unblushingly claimed the Arethusa for his comrade!  The

conclusion of the interview was foregone; of its humours, I

remember only one.  "Baronet?" demanded the magistrate, glancing up

from the passport.  "ALORS, MONSIEUR, VOUS ETES LE FIRS D'UN

BARON?"  And when the Cigarette (his one mistake throughout the

interview) denied the soft impeachment, "ALORS," from the

Commissary, "CE N'EST PAS VOTRE PASSEPORT!"  But these were

ineffectual thunders; he never dreamed of laying hands upon the

Cigarette; presently he fell into a mood of unrestrained

admiration, gloating over the contents of the knapsack, commanding

our friend's tailor.  Ah, what an honoured guest was the Commissary

entertaining! what suitable clothes he wore for the warm weather!

what beautiful maps, what an attractive work of history he carried

in his knapsack!  You are to understand there was now but one point

of difference between them:  what was to be done with the Arethusa?

the Cigarette demanding his release, the Commissary still claiming

him as the dungeon's own.  Now it chanced that the Cigarette had

passed some years of his life in Egypt, where he had made

acquaintance with two very bad things, cholera morbus and pashas;

and in the eye of the Commissary, as he fingered the volume of

Michelet, it seemed to our traveller there was something Turkish. 

I pass over this lightly; it is highly possible there was some

misunderstanding, highly possible that the Commissary (charmed with

his visitor) supposed the attraction to be mutual and took for an

act of growing friendship what the Cigarette himself regarded as a

bribe.  And at any rate, was there ever a bribe more singular than

an odd volume of Michelet's history?  The work was promised him for

the morrow, before our departure; and presently after, either

because he had his price, or to show that he was not the man to be

behind in friendly offices - "EH BIEN," he said, "JE SUPPOSE QU'IL

FAUT LAHER VOIRE CAMARADE."  And he tore up that feast of humour,

the unfinished PROCES-VERBAL.  Ah, if he had only torn up instead

the Arethusa's roundels!  There were many works burnt at

Alexandria, there are many treasured in the British Museum, that I

could better spare than the PROCES-VERBAL of Chatillon.  Poor

bubuckled Commissary!  I begin to be sorry that he never had his

Michelet:  perceiving in him fine human traits, a broad-based

stupidity, a gusto in his magisterial functions, a taste for

letters, a ready admiration for the admirable.  And if he did not

admire the Arethusa, he was not alone in that.

 

To the imprisoned one, shivering under the public covering, there

came suddenly a noise of bolts and chains.  He sprang to his feet,

ready to welcome a companion in calamity; and instead of that, the

door was flung wide, the friendly gendarme appeared above in the

strong daylight, and with a magnificent gesture (being probably a

student of the drama) - "VOUS ETES LIBRE!" he said.  None too soon

for the Arethusa.  I doubt if he had been half-an-hour imprisoned;

but by the watch in a man's brain (which was the only watch he

carried) he should have been eight times longer; and he passed

forth with ecstasy up the cellar stairs into the healing warmth of

the afternoon sun; and the breath of the earth came as sweet as a

cow's into his nostril; and he heard again (and could have laughed

for pleasure) the concord of delicate noises that we call the hum

of life.

 

And here it might be thought that my history ended; but not so,

this was an act-drop and not the curtain.  Upon what followed in

front of the barrack, since there was a lady in the case, I scruple

to expatiate.  The wife of the Marechal-des-logis was a handsome

woman, and yet the Arethusa was not sorry to be gone from her

society.  Something of her image, cool as a peach on that hot

afternoon, still lingers in his memory:  yet more of her

conversation.  "You have there a very fine parlour," said the poor

gentleman. - "Ah," said Madame la Marechale (des-logis), "you are

very well acquainted with such parlours!"  And you should have seen

with what a hard and scornful eye she measured the vagabond before

her!  I do not think he ever hated the Commissary; but before that

interview was at an end, he hated Madame la Marechale.  His passion

(as I am led to understand by one who was present) stood confessed

in a burning eye, a pale cheek, and a trembling utterance; Madame

meanwhile tasting the joys of the matador, goading him with barbed

words and staring him coldly down.

 

It was certainly good to be away from this lady, and better still

to sit down to an excellent dinner in the inn.  Here, too, the

despised travellers scraped acquaintance with their next neighbour,

a gentleman of these parts, returned from the day's sport, who had

the good taste to find pleasure in their society.  The dinner at an

end, the gentleman proposed the acquaintance should be ripened in

the cafe.

 

The cafe was crowded with sportsmen conclamantly explaining to each

other and the world the smallness of their bags.  About the centre

of the room, the Cigarette and the Arethusa sat with their new

acquaintance; a trio very well pleased, for the travellers (after

their late experience) were greedy of consideration, and their

sportsman rejoiced in a pair of patient listeners.  Suddenly the

glass door flew open with a crash; the Marechal-des-logis appeared

in the interval, gorgeously belted and befrogged, entered without

salutation, strode up the room with a clang of spurs and weapons,

and disappeared through a door at the far end.  Close at his heels

followed the Arethusa's gendarme of the afternoon, imitating, with

a nice shade of difference, the imperial bearing of his chief;

only, as he passed, he struck lightly with his open hand on the

shoulder of his late captive, and with that ringing, dramatic

utterance of which he had the secret - "SUIVEZ!" said he.

 

The arrest of the members, the oath of the Tennis Court, the

signing of the declaration of independence, Mark Antony's oration,

all the brave scenes of history, I conceive as having been not

unlike that evening in the cafe at Chatillon.  Terror breathed upon

the assembly.  A moment later, when the Arethusa had followed his

recaptors into the farther part of the house, the Cigarette found

himself alone with his coffee in a ring of empty chairs and tables,

all the lusty sportsmen huddled into corners, all their clamorous

voices hushed in whispering, all their eyes shooting at him

furtively as at a leper.

 

And the Arethusa?  Well, he had a long, sometimes a trying,

interview in the back kitchen.  The Marechal-des-logis, who was a

very handsome man, and I believe both intelligent and honest, had

no clear opinion on the case.  He thought the Commissary had done

wrong, but he did not wish to get his subordinates into trouble;

and he proposed this, that, and the other, to all of which the

Arethusa (with a growing sense of his position) demurred.

 

"In short," suggested the Arethusa, "you want to wash your hands of

further responsibility?  Well, then, let me go to Paris."

 

The Marechal-des-logis looked at his watch.

 

"You may leave," said he, "by the ten o'clock train for Paris."

 

And at noon the next day the travellers were telling their

misadventure in the dining-room at Siron's.

 

 

 

CHAPTER V - RANDOM MEMORIES

 

 

 

I. - THE COAST OF FIFE

 

 

MANY writers have vigorously described the pains of the first day

or the first night at school; to a boy of any enterprise, I

believe, they are more often agreeably exciting.  Misery - or at

least misery unrelieved - is confined to another period, to the

days of suspense and the "dreadful looking-for" of departure; when

the old life is running to an end, and the new life, with its new

interests, not yet begun:  and to the pain of an imminent parting,

there is added the unrest of a state of conscious pre-existence. 

The area railings, the beloved shop-window, the smell of semi-

suburban tanpits, the song of the church bells upon a Sunday, the

thin, high voices of compatriot children in a playing-field - what

a sudden, what an overpowering pathos breathes to him from each

familiar circumstance!  The assaults of sorrow come not from

within, as it seems to him, but from without.  I was proud and glad

to go to school; had I been let alone, I could have borne up like

any hero; but there was around me, in all my native town, a

conspiracy of lamentation:  "Poor little boy, he is going away -

unkind little boy, he is going to leave us"; so the unspoken

burthen followed me as I went, with yearning and reproach.  And at

length, one melancholy afternoon in the early autumn, and at a

place where it seems to me, looking back, it must be always autumn

and generally Sunday, there came suddenly upon the face of all I

saw - the long empty road, the lines of the tall houses, the church

upon the hill, the woody hillside garden - a look of such a

piercing sadness that my heart died; and seating myself on a door-

step, I shed tears of miserable sympathy.  A benevolent cat

cumbered me the while with consolations - we two were alone in all

that was visible of the London Road:  two poor waifs who had each

tasted sorrow - and she fawned upon the weeper, and gambolled for

his entertainment, watching the effect it seemed, with motherly

eyes.

 

For the sake of the cat, God bless her!  I confessed at home the

story of my weakness; and so it comes about that I owed a certain

journey, and the reader owes the present paper, to a cat in the

London Road.  It was judged, if I had thus brimmed over on the

public highway, some change of scene was (in the medical sense)

indicated; my father at the time was visiting the harbour lights of

Scotland; and it was decided he should take me along with him

around a portion of the shores of Fife; my first professional tour,

my first journey in the complete character of man, without the help

of petticoats.

 

The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province) may be observed by the

curious on the map, occupying a tongue of land between the firths

of Forth and Tay.  It may be continually seen from many parts of

Edinburgh (among the rest, from the windows of my father's house)

dying away into the distance and the easterly HAAR with one smoky

seaside town beyond another, or in winter printing on the gray

heaven some glittering hill-tops.  It has no beauty to recommend

it, being a low, sea-salted, wind-vexed promontory; trees very

rare, except (as common on the east coast) along the dens of

rivers; the fields well cultivated, I understand, but not lovely to

the eye.  It is of the coast I speak:  the interior may be the

garden of Eden.  History broods over that part of the world like

the easterly HAAR.  Even on the map, its long row of Gaelic place-

names bear testimony to an old and settled race.  Of these little

towns, posted along the shore as close as sedges, each with its bit

of harbour, its old weather-beaten church or public building, its

flavour of decayed prosperity and decaying fish, not one but has

its legend, quaint or tragic:  Dunfermline, in whose royal towers

the king may be still observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood-

red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith;

Aberdour, hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by