Maiden still the morn is, and strange she is, and secret, Her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells.

It was all so beautiful that an old thought came back to me that I often had as a child, when I used to be taken among mysterious mountains, for Summer holidays: Do people really live in such beautiful places all the year round? Do they live there just like ordinary people in towns, go about ordinary businesses, live ordinary lives? It seemed to me then, as it seems to me still, that such places should be kept sacred, like fairyland, or should, at least, be the background of high and romantic action, like the scenery in operas. To think of a valley so beautiful as that through which we were walking being put to any other use than that of beauty seems preposterous; but do you know what that beautiful valley was doing, while Colin and I were thus poetizing it, adoring its outlines and revelling in its tints? It was just quietly growing potatoes. Yes! we had mostly passed through the apple country. This garden of Eden, this Vale of Enna, was a great potato country. And we learned, too, that its inhabitants were by no means so pleased with beautiful Cohoctori Valley as we were. Here, we gathered, was another beautiful ne'er-do-well of Nature, too occupied with her good looks to be fit for much else than prinking herself out with wild-flowers, and falling into graceful attitudes before her mirror—and there were mirrors in plenty, many streams and willows, in Cohocton Valley; everywhere, for us, the mysterious charm of running water. Once this idle daughter of Ceres used to grow wheat, wheat "in great plenty," but now she could be persuaded to grow nothing but potatoes.

All this and much more we learned from a friend who drew up beside us in a buggy, as I was drinking from a gleaming thread of water gliding down a mossed conduit of hollowed tree-trunks into an old cauldron sunk into the hillside, and long since turned in ferns and lichen. Colin was seated near by making a sketch, as I drank.

"I wouldn't drink too much of that water, lads," said the friendly voice of the dapper little intelligent-faced man in the buggy.

What! not drink this fairy water?

"Why, you country folk are as afraid of fresh water as you are of fresh air," I answered, laughing.

"All right, it's up to you—but it's been a dry Summer, you know."

And then the little man's attention was taken by Colin.

"Sketching?" he asked, and then he said, half shyly, "Would you mind my taking a look how you do it?" and, climbing down from his buggy, he came and looked over Colin's shoulder. "I used to try my hand at it a bit when I was a boy, but those blamed trees always beat me ... don't bother you much, seemingly though," he added, as he watched Colin's pencil with the curiosity of a child.

"I've a little girl at home who does pretty well," he continued after a moment, "but you've certainly got her skinned. I wish she could see you doing it."

His delight in a form of skill which has always been as magical to me as it seemed to him, was charmingly boyish, and Colin turned over his sketch-book, and showed him the notes he had made as we went along. One of a stump fence particularly delighted him—those stump fences made out of the roots of pine trees set side by side, which had been a feature of the country some miles back, and which make such a weird impression on the landscape, like rows of gigantic black antlers, or many-armed Hindoo idols, or a horde of Zulus in fantastic war-gear drawn up in battle-array, or the blackened stumps of giants' teeth—Colin and I tried all those images and many more to express the curious weird effect of coming upon them in the midst of a green and smiling landscape.

"Well, lads," he said, after we had talked awhile, "I shall have to be going. But you've given me a great deal of pleasure. Can't I give you a lift in exchange? I guess there is room for the three of us."

Now Colin and I, on the occasion of our ride with the apple-farmer, awhile back, had held subtle casuistical debate on the legitimacy of men ostensibly, not to say ostentatiously, on foot to New York picking up chance rides in this way. The argument had gone into pursuit of very fine distinctions, and almost rivalled in its casuistry the famous old Duns Scotus—or was it Thomas Aquinas?—debate as to how many angels can dance on the point of a needle. Once we had come to a deadlock as to the kind of vehicle from which it was proper to accept such hospitality. Perhaps it was a Puritan scrupulousness in my blood that had made me take the stand that four-wheeled vehicles, such as wagons, hay-carts and the like, being slow-moving, were permissible, but that buggies, or any form of rapid two-wheeled vehicle, were not. To this Colin had retorted that, on that basis, a tally-ho would be all right, or even an automobile. So the argument had wrestled from side to side, and finally we had compromised.

We agreed that an occasional buggy would be within the vagabond law and that any vehicle, other, of course, than an automobile, which was not plying for hire—such as a trolley or a local train—might on occasion be gratefully climbed into.

Thus it was that we hesitated a moment at the offer of our friend, a hesitancy we amused him by explaining as, presently, conscience-clear, we rattled with him through the hills. He was an interesting talker, a human-hearted, keen-minded man, and he had many more topics as well as potatoes. Besides, he was not in the potato business, but, as with our former friend, his beautiful business was apples. Still, he talked very entertainingly about potatoes; telling us, among other things, that, so friendly was the soil toward that particular vegetable that it yielded as much as a hundred to a hundred and fifty bushels to the acre, and that a fair-sized potato farm thereabouts, properly handled, would pay for itself in a year. I transcribe this information, not merely because I think that, among so many words, the reader is fairly entitled to expect some little information, but chiefly for the benefit of a friend of mine, the like of whom, no doubt, the reader counts among his acquaintances. The friend I mean has a mind so quaintly voracious of facts that, often when we have been dining together at one of the great hotels, he would speculate, say, looking round the room filled with eager diners, on how many clams are nightly consumed in New York City, or how many millions of fresh eggs New York requires each morning for breakfast. So when next I dine with him I will say, as he asks me about my trip:

"Do you know that in the Cohocton Valley they raise as much as one hundred to one hundred and fifty bushels of potatoes to the acre?" And he will say:

"You don't really mean to say so?"

I have in my private note-book much more such tabulated information which I picked up and hoarded for his entertainment, just as whenever a letter comes to me from abroad, I tear off the stamp and save it for a little girl I love.

But, as I said, our friend in the buggy was by no means limited to potatoes for his conversation. He was learned in the geography of the valley and told us how once the Cohocton River, now merely a decorative stream among willows, was once a serviceable waterway, how it was once busy with mills, and how men used to raft down it as far as Elmira.

But "the springs were drying up." I liked the mysterious sound of that, and still more his mysterious story of an undercurrent from the Great Lakes that runs beneath the valley. I seemed to hear the sound of its strange subterranean flow as he talked. Such is the fun of knowing so little about the world. The simplest fact out of a child's geography thus comes to one new and marvellous.

Well, we had to say good-bye at last to our friend at a cross-road, and we left him learnedly discussing the current prices of apples with a business acquaintance who had just driven up—Kings, Rambos, Baldwins, Greenings, and Spigs. And, by the way, in packing apples into barrels, you must always pack them—stems down. Be careful to remember that.



CHAPTER XVIII

A DITHYRAMBUS OF BUTTEEMILK

One discovery of some importance you make in walking the roads is the comparative rarity and exceeding preciousness of buttermilk. We had, as I said, caught up with Summer. Summer, need one say, is a thirsty companion, and the State seemed suddenly to have gone dry. We looked in vain for magic mirrors by the roadside, overhung with fairy grasses, littered with Autumn leaves, and skated over by nimble water-bugs. As our friend had said, the springs seemed to have dried up. Now and again we would hail with a great cry a friendly pump; once we came upon a cider-mill, but it was not working, and time and again we knocked and asked in vain for buttermilk. Sometimes, but not often, we found it. Once we met a genial old man just leaving his farm door, and told him that we were literally dying for a drink of buttermilk. Our expression seemed to tickle him.

"Well!" he said, laughing, "it shall never be said that two poor creatures passed my door, and died for lack of a glass of buttermilk," and he brought out a huge jug, for which he would accept nothing but our blessings. He seemed to take buttermilk lightly; but, one evening, we came upon another old farmer to whom buttermilk seemed a species of the water of life to be hoarded jealously and doled out in careful quantities at strictly market rates.

In town one imagines that country people give their buttermilk to the pigs. At any rate, they didn't give it to us. We paid that old man twenty cents, for we drank two glasses apiece. And first we had knocked at the farm door, and told our need to a pretty young woman, who answered, with some hesitancy, that she would call "father." She seemed to live in some awe of "father," as we well understood when a tall, raw-boned, stern, old man, of the caricature "Brother Jonathan" type, appeared grimly, making an iron sound with a great bunch of keys. On hearing our request, he said nothing, but, motioning to us to follow, stalked across the farmyard to a small building under a great elm-tree. There were two steps down to the door, and it had a mysterious appearance. It might have been a family vault, a dynamite magazine, or the Well at the World's End. It was the strong-room of the milk; and, when the grim old guardian of the dairy unlocked the door, with a sound of rusty locks and falling bolts, there, cool and cloistral, were the fragrant pans and bowls, the most sacred vessels of the farm.

"She bathed her body many a time In fountains filled with milk."

I hummed to Colin; but I took care that the old man didn't hear me. And we agreed, as we went on again along the road, that he did right to guard well and charge well for so noble and so innocent a drink. Indeed, the old fellow's buttermilk was so good that I think it must have gone to my head. In no other way can I account for the following dithyrambic song:

_Let whoso will sing Bacchus' vine, We know a drink that's more divine;

'Tis white and innocent as doves, Fragrant and bosom-white as love's

White bosom on a Summer day, And fragrant as the hawthorn spray.

Let Dionysus and his crew, Garlanded, drain their fevered brew,

And in the orgiastic bowl Drug and besot the sacred soul;

This simple country cup we drain Knows not the ghosts of sin and pain,

No fates or furies follow him Who sips from its cream-mantled rim.

Yea! all his thoughts are country-sweet, And safe the walking of his feet,

However hard and long the way— With country sleep to end the day.

To drain this cup no man shall rue— The innocent madness of the dew

Who shall repent, or frenzy fine Of morning star, or the divine

Inebriation of the hours When May roofs in the world with flowers!

About this cup the swallows skim, And the low milking-star hangs dim

Across the meadows, and the moon Is near in heaven—the young moon;

And murmurs sweet of field and hill Loiter awhile, and all is still.

As in some chapel dear to Pan, The fair milk glimmers in the can,

And, in the silence cool and white, The cream mounts through the listening night;

And, all around the sleeping house, You hear the breathing of the cows,

And drowsy rattle of the chain, Till lo! the blue-eyed morn again_.



CHAPTER XIX

A GROWL ABOUT AMERICAN COUNTRY HOTELS

Though Colin and I had been walking but a very few days, after the first day or two it seemed as though we had been out on the road for weeks; as though, indeed, we had spent our lives in the open air; and it needed no more than our brief experience for us to realize what one so often reads of those who do actually live their lives out-of-doors, gypsies, sailors, cowboys and the like—how intolerable to them is a roof, and how literally they gasp for air and space in the confined walls of cities.

Bed in the bush with stars to see, Bread I dip in the river—

There's the life for a man like me, There's the life forever.

The only time of the day when our spirits began to fail was toward its close, when the shadows of supper and bed in some inclement inn began to fall over us, and we confessed to each other a positive sense of fear in our evening approach to the abodes of men. After a long, safe, care-free day, in the company of liberating prospects and sweet-breathed winds, there seemed a curious lurking menace in the most harmless village, as well as an unspeakable irksomeness in its inharmonious interruption of our mood. To emerge, saturated, body and soul, with the sweet scents and sounds and sights of a day's tramp, out of the meditative leafiness and spiritual temper of natural things, into the garishly lit street of some little provincial town, animated with the clumsy mirth of silly young country folks, aping so drearily the ribaldry, say, of Elmira, is a painful anticlimax to the spirit. Had it only been real Summer, instead of Indian Summer, we should, of course, have been real gypsies, and made our beds under the stars, but, as it was, we had no choice. Or, had we been walking in Europe ... yes, I am afraid the truth must out, and that our real dread at evening was—the American country hotel. With the best wish in the world, it is impossible to be enthusiastic over the American country hotel. How ironically the kindly old words used to come floating to me out of Shakespeare each evening as the shadows fell, and the lights came out in the windows—"to take mine ease at mine inn;" and assuredly it was on another planet that Shenstone wrote:

Whoe'er hath travelled life's dull round, Whate'er his fortunes may have been, Must sigh to think he still has found His warmest welcome at an inn.

Had Shenstone been writing in an American country hotel, his tune would probably have been more after this fashion: "A wonderful day has come to a dreary end in the most sepulchral of hotels, a mouldy, barn-like place, ill-lit, mildewed and unspeakably dismal. A comfortless room with two beds and two low-power electric lights, two stiff chairs, an uncompanionable sofa, and some ghastly pictures of simpering naked women. We have bought some candles, and made a candlestick out of a soap-dish. Colin is making the best of it with 'The Beloved Vagabond,' and I have drawn up one of the chairs to a table with a mottled marble top, and am writing this amid a gloom which you could cut with a knife, and which is so perfect of its kind as to be almost laughable. But for the mail, which we found with unutterable thankfulness at the post-office, I hardly dare think what would have happened to us, to what desperate extremities we might not have been driven, though even the possibilities of despair seem limited in this second-hand tomb of a town...."

Here Colin looks up with a wry smile and ironically quotes from the wisdom of Paragot: "What does it matter where the body finds itself, so long as the soul has its serene habitations?" This wail is too typical of most of our hotel experiences. As a rule we found the humble, cheaper hotels best, and, whenever we had a choice of two, chose the less pretentious.

Sometimes as, on entering a town or village, we asked some passer-by about the hotels, we would be looked over and somewhat doubtfully asked: "Do you want a two-dollar house?" And we soon learned to pocket our pride, and ask if there was not a cheaper house. Strange that people whose business is hospitality should be so inhospitable, and strange that the American travelling salesman, a companionable creature, not averse from comfort, should not have created a better condition of things. For the inn should be the natural harmonious close to the day, as much a part of the day's music as the setting sun. It should be the gratefully sought shelter from the homeless night, the sympathetic friend of hungry stomachs and dusty feet, the cozy jingle of social pipes and dreamy after-dinner talk, the abode of snowy beds for luxuriously aching limbs, lavendered sheets and pleasant dreams.

But, as people without any humour usually say, "A sense of humour helps under all circumstances"; and we managed to extract a great deal of fun out of the rigours of the American country hotel.

In one particularly inhospitable home of hospitality, for example, we found no little consolation from the directions printed over the very simple and familiar device for calling up the hotel desk. The device was nothing more remarkable than the button of an ordinary electric bell, which you were, in the usual way, to push once for bell-boy, twice for ice-water, three times for chambermaid, and so on. However, the hotel evidently regarded it as one of the marvels of advanced science and referred to it, in solemnly printed "rules" for its use, as no less than "The Emergency Drop Annunciator!" Angels of the Annunciation! what a heavenly phrase!

But this is an ill-tempered chapter—let us begin another.



CHAPTER XX

ONIONS, PIGS AND HICKORY-NUTS

One feature of the countryside in which from time to time we found innocent amusement was the blackboards placed outside farmhouses, on which are written, that is, "annunciated," the various products the farmer has for sale, such as apples, potatoes, honey, and so forth. On one occasion we read: "Get your horses' teeth floated here." There was no one to ask about what this mysterious proclamation meant. No doubt it was clear as daylight to the neighbours, but to us it still remains a mystery. Perhaps the reader knows what it meant. Then on another occasion we read: "Onions and Pigs For Sale." Why this curious collocation of onions and pigs? Colin suggested that, of course, the onions were to stuff the pigs with.

"And here's an idea," he continued. "Suppose we go in and buy a little suckling-pig and a string of onions. Then we will buy a yard of two of blue ribbon and tie it round the pig's neck, and you shall lead it along the road, weeping. I will walk behind it, with the onions, grinning from ear to ear. And when any one meets us, and asks the meaning of the strange procession, you will say: 'I am weeping because our little pig has to die!' And if any one says to me, 'Why are you grinning from ear to ear?' I shall answer, 'Because I am going to eat him. We are going to stuff him with onions at the next inn, and eat roast pig at the rising of the moon.'"

But we lacked courage to put our little joke into practice, fearing an insufficient appreciation of the fantastic in that particular region.

We were now making for Watkins, and had spent the night at Bradford, a particularly charming village almost lost amid the wooded hills of another lovely and spacious valley, through which we had lyrically walked the day before. Bradford is a real country village, and was already all in a darkness smelling of cows and apples, when we groped for it among the woods the evening before. At starting out next morning, we inquired the way to Watkins of a storekeeper standing at his shop-door. He was in conversation with an acquaintance, and our questions occasioned a lively argument as to which was the better of two roads. The acquaintance was for the road through "Pine Creek," and he added, with a grim smile, "I guess I should know; I've travelled it often enough with a heavy load behind"; and the recollection of the rough hills he had gone bumping over, all evidently fresh in his mind, seemed to give him a curious amusement. It transpired that he was an undertaker!

So we took the road to Pine Creek, but at the threshold of the village our fancy was taken by the particularly quaint white wooden meeting-house, surrounded on three sides with tie-up sheds for vehicles, each stall having a name affixed to it, like a pew: "P. Yawger," "A.W. Gillum," "Pastor," and so on. Here the pious of the district tied up their buggies while they went within to pray, and these sacred stalls made a quaint picture for the imagination of outlying farmers driving to meeting over the hills on Sabbath mornings.

It was a beautiful morning of veiled sunshine, so warm that some hardy crickets chirped faintly as we went along. Once a blue jay came and looked at us, and the squirrels whirred among the chestnuts and hickories, and the roadsides were so thickly strewn with fallen nuts that we made but slow progress, stopping all the time to fill our pockets.

For a full hour we sat down with a couple of stones for nut-crackers, and forgot each other and everything else in the hypnotizing occupation of cracking hickory-nuts. And we told each other that thus do grown sad men become boys again, by a woodside, of an October morning, cracking hickory-nuts, the world well lost.



CHAPTER XXI

OCTOBER ROSES AND A YOUNG GIRL'S FACE

The undertaker was certainly right about the road. I think he must have had a flash of poetic insight into our taste in roads. This was not, as a rule, understood by the friendly country folk. Their ideas and ours as to what constituted a good road differed beyond the possibility of harmonizing. When they said that a road was good they meant that it was straight, level, and businesslike. When they said that a road was bad they meant that it was rugged, rambling and picturesque. So, to their bewilderment, whenever we had a choice of good or bad roads, we always chose the bad. And, to get at what we really wanted, we learned to inquire which was the worst road to such and such a place. That we knew would be the road for us. From their point of view, the road we were on was as bad as could be; but, as I said, the undertaker evidently understood us, and had sent us into a region of whimsically sudden hills and rock and wooded wilderness, a swart country of lonely, rugged uplands, with but a solitary house here and there for miles. It was resting at the top of one of these hard-won acclivities that we came upon—and remember that it was the middle of October—two wild roses blooming by the roadside. This seems a fact worthy the attention of botanical societies, and I still have the roses pressed for the inspection of the learned between the pages of my travelling copy of Hans Andersen's "Fairy Tales."

A fact additionally curious was that the bush on which the flowers grew seemed to be the only rose-bush in the region. We looked about us in vain to find another. How had that single rose-bush come to be, an uncompanioned exotic, in the rough society of pines and oaks and hickories, on a rocky hill-top swept by the North wind, and how had those frail, scented petals found strength and courage thus to bloom alone in the doorway of Winter? And, why, out of all the roses of the world, had these two been chosen, still, so late in the year, to hold up the tattered standard of Summer?

_Why, in the empty Autumn woods, And all the loss and end of things, Does one leaf linger on the tree; Why is it only one bird sings?

And why, across the aching field, Does one lone cricket chirrup on; Why one surviving butterfly, With all its bright companions gone?

And why, when faces all about Whiten and wither hour by hour, Does one old face bloom on so sweet, As young as when it was a flower_?

The same mystery was again presented to us a little farther along the road, as we stopped at a lone schoolhouse among the hills, the only house to be seen, and asked our way of the young schoolmarm. The door had been left half open, and, knocking, we had stepped into the almost empty schoolroom, with its portrait of Lincoln and a map of the United States. Three scholars sat there with their kindly-faced teacher, studying geography amid the silence of the hills, which the little room seemed to concentrate in a murmuring hush, like a shell. A little boy sat by himself a desk or two behind two young girls, and as we entered, and the studious faces looked up in surprise, we saw only the pure brows and the great spiritual eyes of the older girl, almost a woman, and we thought of the lonely roses we had found up on the hillside. Here was another rose blooming in the wilderness, a face lovely and beautiful as a spring reflecting the sky in the middle of a wood. How had she come there, that beautiful child-woman in the solitude? By what caprice of the strange law of the distribution of fair faces had she come to flower in this particular waste place of the earth?—for her face had surely come a long way, been blown blossom-wise on some far wandering wind, from realms of old beauty and romance, and it had the exiled look of all beautiful things. Could she be a plain farmer's daughter, indigenous to that stubborn soil? No, surely she was not that, and yet—how had she come to be there? But these were questions we could not put to the schoolmarm. We could only ask our road, and the prosaic possibilities of lunch in the neighbourhood, and go on our way. Nor could I press that rose among the pages of my book—but, as I write, I wonder if it is still making sweet that desolate spot, and still studying irrelevant geography in the silence of the hills.

However, we did learn something about our young human rose at a farmhouse a mile or so farther on. While a motherly housewife prepared us some lunch, all a-bustle with expectancy of an imminent inroad of harvesters due to thresh the corn, and liable to eat all before them, a sprightly young daughter, who attended the same school, and whom we had told about our call at the schoolhouse, entertained us with girlish gossip of the neighbourhood. So we learned that our fancies had not been so far wrong, but that our beautiful young face had indeed come from as far as France, the orphaned child of a French sailor and an English mother, come over the seas for a home with a farmer uncle near by. Strange are the destinies of beautiful faces. All the way from France to Pine Creek! Poor little world-wandered rose!

And while we ate our lunch, the mother had a sad, beautiful story of a dead son and a mother's tears to tell us, too sacred to tell again. How many beautiful faces there are hidden about the world, and how many beautiful sad stories hidden in the broken hearts of mothers!



CHAPTER XXII

CONCERNING THE POPULAR TASTE IN SCENERY AND SOME HAPPY PEOPLE

We had somewhat scorned the idea of Watkins, as being one of Nature's show-places. In fact, Watkins Glen is, so to say, so nationally beautiful as latterly to have received a pension from the Government of the United States, which now undertakes the conservation of its fantastic chasms and waterfalls. Some one—I am inclined to think it was myself—once said that he never wished to go to Switzerland, because he feared that the Alps would be greasy with being climbed. I think it is clear what he meant. To one who loves Nature for himself, has his own discovering eyes for her multiform and many-mooded beauty, it is distasteful to have some excursionist effect of spectacular scenery labelled and thrust upon him with a showman's raptures; and, in revulsion from the hypocritical admiration of the vulgar, he turns to the less obvious and less melodramatic beauty of the natural world. The common eye can see Nature's beauty only in such melodramatic and sentimental forms—dizzy chasms, foaming waterfalls, snow-capped mountains and flagrant sunsets, just as it can realize Nature's wildness of heart only in a menagerie. That a squirrel or a meadow-lark, or even a guinea-pig, is just as wild as the wild beasts in a travelling circus is outside the comprehension of the vulgar, who really hunger after mere marvels, whatever they may be, and actually have no eyes for beauty at all.

Thus really sublime and grandiose effects of Nature are apt to lose their edge for us by over-popularization, as many of her scenes and moods have come to seem platitude from being over-painted. Niagara has suffered far more from the sentimental tourist and the landscape artist than from all the power-houses, and one has to make a strenuous effort of detachment from its excursionist associations to appreciate its sublimity.

Thus Colin and I discussed, in a somewhat bored way, whether we should trouble to visit the famous Watkins Glen, as we sat over supper in a Watkins hotel, one of the few really comfortable and cordial hotels we met in our wanderings, and we smiled to think what the natives would have made of our conversation. Two professional lovers of beauty calmly discussing whether it was worth while walking half a mile to see one of the natural, and national, wonders of America! Why, last season more than half a million visitors kodaked it, and wrote their names on the face of the rocks! However, a great natural effect holds its own against no little vulgarization, and Watkins Glen soon made us forget the trippers and the concrete footpaths and iron railings of the United States government, in the fantasies of its weirdly channelled gorge and mysterious busy water.

Watkins itself, despite its name, is sufficiently favoured by Nature to make an easy annual living, situated as it is at the south end of the beautiful Seneca Lake, and at the head of a nobly picturesque valley some twenty miles long, with a pretty river spreading out into flashing reed-grown flats, sheer cliffs and minor waterfalls, here and there a vineyard on the hillside, or the vivid green of celery trenches in the dark loam of the hollows, all the way to—Elmira! The river and the trolley run side by side the whole charming way, and, as you near Elmira, you come upon latticed barns that waft you the fragrance of drying tobacco-leaves, suspended longitudinally for the wind to play through. On the morning of our leaving Watkins, we had been roused a little earlier than usual by mirthful sounds in the street beneath our hotel windows. Light-hearted voices joking each other floated up to us, and some one out of the gladness of his heart was executing a spirited shake-down on the sidewalk—at six o'clock of a misty October morning. Looking out, we caught an endearing glimpse of the life of the most lovable of all professions. It was a theatrical company that had played a one-night stand at the local opera-house the evening before, and was now once more upon its wandering way. They had certainly been up till past midnight, but here they were, at six o'clock of the morning, merry as larks, gay as children, waiting for the Elmira trolley. Presently the car came clanging up, and alongside drew up a big float, containing baggage and rolls of scenery—all of which, to our astonishment, by some miracle of loading known only to baggagemen, was in a few moments stowed away into the waiting car. When the last property was shipped, the conductor rang his bell, by way of warning, and the whole group, like a flight of happy birds, climbed chattering into the car. "All aboard," called the conductor, once more ringing his bell, and off they went, leaving a trail of laughter in the morning air.

"'Beloved Vagabonds!'" said Colin, as we turned away, lonely, from our windows, with, I hardly know why, a suspicion of tears in our eyes.



CHAPTER XXIII

THE SUSQUEHANNA

Here for a while a shadow seemed to fall over our trip. No doubt it was the shadow of the great town we were approaching. Not that we have anything against Elmira, though possibly its embattled reformatory, frowning from the hillside, contributed its gloomy associations to our spirits. It was against towns in general that our gorge rose. Did our vagabond ethics necessitate our conscientiously tramping every foot of these "gritty paving-stones," we asked each other, as we entered upon a region of depressing suburbs, and we called a halt on the spot to discuss the point. The discussion was not long, and it was brought to a cheerful, demoralized end by the approach of the trolley, into which, regardless of right or wrong, we climbed with alacrity, not to alight till not only Elmira was left behind, but more weary suburbs, too, on the other side. That night, as old travellers phrase it, we lay at Waverly, on the frontier of Pennsylvania, a sad, dirty little town, grotesquely belying its romantic name, and only surpassed in squalor by the classically named Athens—beware, reader, of American towns named out of classical dictionaries! Here, however, our wanderings in the brick-and-mortar wilderness were to end, for by a long, romantic, old, covered bridge we crossed the Chemung River, and there once more, on the other side, was Nature, lovelier than ever, awaiting us. Not Dante, when he emerged from Hades and again beheld the stars, drew deeper breaths of escape than we, thus escaping from—Athens!

And soon we were to meet the Susquehanna—beautiful, broad-bosomed name, that has always haunted my imagination like the name of some beautiful savage princess—La belle sauvage. Susquehanna! What a southern opulence in the soft, seductive syllables! Yes, soon we were to meet the Susquehanna. Nor had we long to wait, and little did we suspect what our meeting with that beautiful river was to mean.

The Chemung, on whose east bank we were now walking, seemed a noble enough river, very broad and all the more picturesque for being shallow with the Summer drought; and its shining reaches and wooded banks lifted up our hearts. She, like ourselves, was on her way to join the Susquehanna, a mile or two below, and we said to ourselves, that, beautiful as the land had been through which we had already passed, we were now entering on a Nature of more heroic mould, mightier contours, and larger aspects. We were henceforth to walk in the company of great rivers: the Susquehanna, like some epic goddess, was to lead us to the Lehigh; the Blue Mountains were to bring us to the Delaware; and the uplands of Sullivan County were to bring us to—the lordly gates of the Hudson.

Our chests expanded as imagination luxuriated in the pictures it made. Our walk was only just beginning.



CHAPTER XXIV

AND UNEXPECTEDLY THE LAST

We had seen the two great rivers sweep into each other's arms in a broad glory of sunlit water, meeting at the bosky end of a wooded promontory, and yes! there was the Susquehanna glittering far beneath—the beautiful name I had so often seen and wondered about, painted on the sides of giant freight-cars! Yes, there was actually the great legendary river. It was a very warm, almost sultry noonday, more like midsummer than mid-October, and the river was almost blinding in its flashing beauty. Loosening our knapsacks, we called a halt and, leaning over the railing guarding the precipitous bank, luxuriated in the visionary scene. So high was the bank, and so broad the river, that we seemed lifted up into space, and the river, dreamily flowing beneath a gauze veil of heat-mist, seemed miles below us and drowsily unreal. Its course inshore was dotted with boulders, in the shadows of which we could see long ghostly fishes lazily gliding, and a mud-turtle, with a trail of little ones, slowly moving from rock to rock.

Suddenly Colin put his hand to his head, and swayed toward me, as though he were about to faint.

"I don't know what's the matter, old man," he said, "but I think I had better sit down a minute." And he sank by the roadside.

Unlike himself, he had been complaining of fatigue, and had seemed out of sorts for a day or two, but we had thought nothing of it; and, after resting a few minutes, he announced himself ready for the road again, but he looked very pale and walked with evident weariness. As a roadside cottage came in sight, "I wonder if they could give us a cup of tea," he said; "that would fix me up, I'm sure." So we knocked, and the door was opened by a pathetic shadow of an old woman, very poor and thin and weary-looking, who, although, as we presently learned, she was at the moment suffering from the recent loss of one eye, made us welcome and busied herself about tea, with an unselfish kindness that touched our hearts, and made us reflect on the angelic goodness of human nature—sometimes.

She looked anxiously, mother-like, at Colin, and persuaded him to lie down and rest awhile in her little parlour, and, while he rested, she and I talked and she told me how she had come by her blind eye—an odd, harmless-sounding cause. She had been looking up into one of her apple-trees, one day, a few weeks ago, and an apple had fallen and struck her in the eye. Such innocent means does Nature sometimes use for her cruel accidents of disease and death! Just an apple falling from a tree,—and you are blind! A fly stings you, on a Summer day, and you die.

Colin, rested and refreshed, we once more started on our way, but, bravely as he strode on, there was no disguising it—my blithe, happy-hearted companion was ill. Of course we both assured the other that it could be nothing, but privately our hearts sank with a vague fear we did not speak. At length, after a weary four miles, we reached Towanda.

"I'm afraid," said poor Colin, "I can walk no more to-day. Perhaps a good night's rest will make me all right." We found an inn, and while Colin threw himself, wearied, on his bed, I went out, not telling him, and sought a doctor.

"And you've been walking with this temperature?" said the learned man, when he had seated himself at Colin's bedside and felt his wrist. "Have you been drinking much water as you went along? ... H'm—it's been a very dry Summer, you know."

And the words of our friend in the buggy came back to us with sickening emphasis. O those innocent-looking fairy wells and magic mirrors by the road-side! And I thought, too, of the poor old blinded woman and the falling apple. Was Nature really like that?

And then the wise man's verdict fell on our ears like a doom.

"Take my advice, and don't walk any more, but catch the night train for New York."

Poor Colin! But there was no appeal.

The end of our trip had come, suddenly, unreasonably, stupidly, like this.

"So we've got to be shot into New York like a package through a tube, after all!" said Colin. "No lordly gates of the Hudson for us! What a fool I feel, to be the one to spoil our trip like this!"

And the tears glistened in our eyes, as we pressed each other's hand in that dreary inn bedroom, with the shadow of we knew not what for Colin over us—for our comradeship had been very good, day by day, together on the open road.

Our train did not go till midnight, so we had a long melancholy evening before us; but the doctor had given Colin some mysterious potion containing rest, and presently, as I sat by his side in the gray twilight, he fell into a deep sleep—a sleep, alas! of fire and wandering talk. It was pitiful to hear him, poor fellow—living over again in dreams the road we had travelled, or making pictures of the road he still dreamed ahead of us. Never before had I realized how entirely his soul was the soul of a painter—all pictures and colour.

"O my God!" he would suddenly exclaim, "did you ever see such blue in your life!" and then again, evidently referring to some particularly attractive effect in the phantasmagoria of his fever, "it's no use—you must let me stop and have a shot to get that, before it goes."

One place that seemed particularly to haunt him was—Mauch Chunk. He had been there before, and, as we had walked along, had often talked enthusiastically of it. "Wait till we get to Mauch Chunk," he said; "then the real fun will begin." And now, over and over again, he kept making pictures of Mauch Chunk, till I could have cried.

"Dramatic black rocks," he would murmur, "water rushing from the hills in every direction—clean-cut, vivid scenery—like theatres—the road runs by the side of a steel-blue river at the bottom of a chasm, and there is hardly room for it—the houses cling to the hillside like swallows' nests—here and there patches of fresh green grass gleam among the rocks, and, high up in the air on some dizzy ledge, there is a wild apple-tree in blossom—it is all black rocks and springs and moss and tumbling water—"

Then again his soul was evidently walking in the Blue Mountains, and several times he repeated a phrase of mine that had taken his fancy: "And now for the spacious corridors of the Highlands, and the lordly gates of the Hudson."

Then he would suddenly half awaken and turn to me, realizing the truth, and say:

"O our beautiful journey—to end like this!" and fall asleep again.

And once more I fell to thinking of fairy springs by the roadside, and apples falling innocently from the bough, and how the beautiful journey we call life might some day suddenly end like this, with half the beautiful road untravelled—the rest sleep and perchance dreams.

* * * * *

But Colin did not die. He is once more painting out in the sun, and next year we plan to stand again on that very spot by the Susquehanna, and watch the shadows of great fishes gliding through the dreamy water, and the mud-turtle with her trail of little ones moving from rock to rock—and then we shall strike out on the road again, just where we left off that October afternoon; but the reader need not be afraid—we shall not write a book about it.



ENVOI

_And now the merry way we took Is nothing but a printed book;

We would you had been really there, Out with us in the open air—

For, after all, the best of words Are but a poor exchange for birds.

Yet if, perchance, this book of ours Should sometimes make you think of flowers,

Orchards and barns and harvest wain, "It was not written all in vain—"

So authors used to make their bow, As, Gentle Reader, we do now_.

THE END