AMERICAN THUMB-PRINTS

In shorter form “The New England Woman” appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, and under other title and form “Up-to-Date Misogyny” and “Plagiarizing Humors of Benjamin Franklin” in The Bookman, which periodicals have courteously allowed republication

AMERICAN
THUMB-PRINTS
METTLE OF OUR
MEN AND WOMEN
BY
KATE STEPHENS

PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
1905

Copyright, 1905
By J. B. Lippincott Company
Published April, 1905
Electrotyped and Printed by
J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, U. S. A.

IN MOST LOVING MEMORY OF
MY FATHER
NELSON TIMOTHY STEPHENS
WHOSE RARE KNOWLEDGE OF MEN AND OF LAW
WHOSE SENSITIVENESS TO JUSTICE
HUMAN KINDLINESS
AND FINE DISDAIN FOR SELF-ADVERTISEMENT
ARE STILL CHERISHED BY THE NOBLE FOLK
AMONG WHOM HE SPENT
THE LAST YEARS OF HIS LIFE
AT WHOSE INSTANCE IN GREAT MEASURE
AND UPON WHOSE ADVICE
THE LAW SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY
SKETCHED IN THIS BOOK
WAS IN 1878
FOUNDED

CONTENTS

PURITANS OF THE WEST

Let nouther lufe of friend nor feir of fais,
Mufe zow to mank zour Message, or hald bak
Ane iot of zour Commissioun, ony wayis
Call ay quhite, quhite, and blak, that quhilk is blak.

First he descendit bot of linage small.
As commonly God usis for to call,
The sempill sort his summoundis til expres.
John Davidson

If it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this? Robert Louis Stevenson

PURITANS OF THE WEST

Of local phases of the American spirit, none has incited more discussion than that developed in Kansas. The notion that the citizens of the State are somewhat phrenetic in experimental meliorism; that they more than others fall into abnormal sympathies and are led by aberrations of the crowd—intoxications the mind receives in a congregation of men pitched to an emotional key—this notion long ago startled peoples more phlegmatic and less prone to social vagaries.

Closer consideration shows the Kansas populace distinctly simple in mental habit and independent in judgment. Yet their old-time Grangerism and Greenbackism, and their still later Prohibitionism, Populism, and stay law have caused that part of the world not so inclined to rainbow-chasing to ask who they as a people really are, and what psychopathy they suffer—to assert that they are dull, unthinking, or, at best, doctrinaire.

This judgment antedates our day, as we said. It was even so far back as in the time of Abraham Lincoln, when Kansas was not near the force, nor the promise of the force, it has since become. And it was in that earlier and poorer age of our country when folks queried a man’s suitability and preparedness for the senatorial office. Then when Senatorship fell to General James Lane, and some one questioned the Free-State fighter’s fitness for his duties, President Lincoln is said to have hit off the new Senator and the new State with “Good enough for Kansas!” and a shrug of his bony shoulders. Derogatory catchwords have had a knack at persisting since men first tried to get the upper hand of one another by ridicule, and the terse unsympathy and curl of the lip of Lincoln’s sayings have kept their use to our day.

One outsider, in explaining any new vagary of the Kansans, suggests, with sophomore ease, “The foreign element.” Another tells you, convicting himself of his own charge, “It is ignorance—away out there in the back woods.” “Bad laws,” another conclusively sets down. Opposed to all these surmises and guesses are the facts that in number and efficiency of schools Kansas ranks beyond many States, and that in illiteracy the commonwealth in the last census showed a percentage of 2.9—a figure below certain older States, say Massachusetts, with an illiterate percentage of 5.9, or New York, with 5.5. As to its early laws, they were framed in good measure by men and women[1] of New England blood—of that blood although their forebears may have pushed westward from the thin soil of New England three generations before the present Kansans were born. Again its citizens, except an inconsiderable and ineffective minority, are Americans in blood and tradition.

It is in truth in the fact last named, in the American birth of the people who gave, and still give, the State its fundamental key, that we are to find the causes of Kansas neologism and desire for experiment in every line that promises human betterment. It is a case of spiritual heir-at-law—the persistence of what the great ecclesiastical reactionist of our day has anathematized as “the American Spirit.” For each new ism the Kansans have pursued has been but another form and working in the popular brain of the amicus humani generis of the eighteenth-century Revolutionists, or, as the people of their time and since have put it, “liberty, equality, fraternity.”

Kansas was settled by Americans, American men and American women possessed by the one dominating idea of holding its territory and its wealth to themselves and their opinions. They went in first in the fifties with bayonets packed in Bible boxes. All along railways running towards their destination they had boarded trains with the future grasped close in hand, and sometimes they were singing Whittier’s lines:

“We go to rear a wall of men
On Freedom’s southern line,
And plant beside the cotton-tree
The rugged Northern pine!

In exalted mood they had chanted this hymn as their trains pulled into stations farther on in their journey, and the lengthening of the day told them they were daily westering with the sun. They had carried it in their hearts with Puritan aggressiveness, with Anglo-Saxon tenacity and sincerity, as their steamers paddled up the muddy current of the Missouri and their canvas-covered wagons creaked and rumbled over the sod, concealing then its motherhood of mighty crops of corn and wheat, upon which they were to build their home. They were enthusiasts even on a road beset with hostiles of the slave State to the east. Their enthusiasm worked out in two general lines, one the self-interest of building themselves a home—towns, schools, churches,—the other the idealism of the anti-slavery faith. They were founding a State which was within a few years to afford to northern forces in the struggle centring about slavery the highest percentage of soldiers of any commonwealth; and their spirit forecast the sequent fact that troops from the midst of their self-immolation would also record the highest percentage of deaths.

They came from many quarters to that territorial settlement of theirs, but the radical, recalcitrant stock which had nested in and peopled the northeastern coast of our country was in the notable majorities from Western States—from Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa; and from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania also. Some came, indeed, who could trace no descent from Puritan or Quaker or Huguenot forebear. But there was still the potent heirship of spirit.

To these men nature gave the gift of seeing their side of the then universal question. She added a living sympathy with workers, and an acute sense of the poverty and oppression which humanity at large is always suffering from those who take because they have power. A free discussion of slavery and their opposition to slave-holding had put this deep down in their hearts.

Each man of them—and each woman also—was in fixed principle and earnestness a pioneer, in pursuit of and dwelling in a world not yet before the eyes of flesh but sun-radiant to the eyes of the spirit—the ideal the pioneer must ever see—and holding the present and actual as but a mote in the beam from that central light.

From a more humorous point of view, each man was clearly a Knight of La Mancha stripped of the mediæval and Spanish trapping of his prototype. His Dulcinea—an unexampled combination of idealism and practicality—his much-enduring wife, upon whose frame and anxious-eyed face were stamped a yearning for the graces of life. Her fervor, with true woman strength, was ever persistent. “I always compose my poems best,” said one of the haler of these dames whose verses piped from a corner of the University town’s morning journal, “on wash-day and over the tub.”

These were the conditions of those men and women of the fifties and early sixties to less lifted, more fleshly souls. The old enthusiasm that lighted our race in 1620 and many sequent years in Massachusetts Bay, and the old devotion that led the Huguenots and other oppressed peoples to our Southern coasts and on “over the mountains,” were kindled afresh. And the old exaltation of the descendants of these many peoples—the uplifting that made way for and supported the act of the Fourth of July in 1776—rose anew. The flame of an idea was in the air heating and refining the grossest spirits—and the subtle forces of the Kansans’ vanguard were far from the grossest.

Once in their new home these men and women lived under circumstances a people has almost never thriven under—circumstances which would prey upon every fibre of calmness, repose, and sober-mindedness, and possibly in the end deprive their folk of consideration for the past and its judgments. “Govern the Kansas of 1855 and ’56!” exclaimed Governor Shannon years after that time. “You might as well have attempted to govern the devil in hell.” “Shall the Sabbath never immigrate,” cried a Massachusetts woman in 1855 in a letter to friends at home, “and the commandments too?”

Among this people was little presence of what men had wrought. As in the early settlements of our Atlantic seaboard, all was to be made, everything to be done, even to the hewing of logs for houses and digging of wells for water; and in Kansas pressure for energy and time was vastly increased over those earlier years by the seaboard. The draughting of laws for controlling a mixed population, with elements in it confessedly there for turbulence and bloodshed, was for a time secondary to shingle-making.

Such primitive efforts were more than a generation ago—in fact, fifty years. But the spirit with which those early comers inaugurated and carried on their settlement did not perish when the daily need of its support had passed away. It still abode as a descent of spirit, meaning an inheritance of spirit, a contagion of spirit, and to its characteristic features we can to-day as easily point—to its human sympathies and willingness for experiment—as to the persistence of a physical mark—the Bourbon nose in royal portraits, say, or the “Austrian lips” of the Hapsburg mouth. Its evidences are all about you when you are within the confines of the present-day Kansans, and you are reminded of the Puritanism which still subordinates to itself much that is alien in Massachusetts; or you think of the sturdy practicality of the early Dutch which still modifies New York; or you may go farther afield and recall the most persistent spirit of the Gauls of Cæsar, novis plerumque rebus student, which to our time has been the spirit of the Gauls of the Empire and of President Loubet.

The Kansan has still his human-heartedness and his willingness to experiment for better things. Exploded hypotheses in manufacture, farming, and other interests scattered in startling frequency over the vast acreage of his State, testify to these traits.

He has to this day kept his receptivity of mind. Even now he scorns a consideration for fine distinctions. He still loves a buoyant optimism. And for all these reasons he often and readily grants faith to the fellow who amuses him, who can talk loud and fast, who promises much, and who gets the most notices in his local dailies. He is like the author of Don Juan, inasmuch as he “wants a hero,” and at times he is willing to put up with as grievous a one as was foisted upon the poet. In the end, however, he has native bed-rock sense, and as his politics in their finality show, he commonly measures rascals aright. But in his active pursuit and process of finding them out he has offered himself a spectacle to less simple-minded, more sophisticated men.

Some years ago, in a grove of primeval oaks, elms, and black-walnuts neighboring the yellow Kaw and their University town, those settlers of early days held an old-time barbecue. The meeting fell in the gold and translucence of the September that glorifies that land. Great crowds of men and women came by rail and by wagon, and walking about in the shade, or in the purple clouds that rose from the trampings of many feet and stood gleaming in the sunshine, they were stretching hands to one another and crying each to some new-discovered, old acquaintance, “Is this you?” “How long is it now?” “Thirty-five years?” “You’ve prospered?” and such words as old soldiers would use having fought a great fight together—not for pelf or loot but for moral outcome—and had then lost one another for many a year.

Moving among them you would readily see signs of that “possession of the god” the Greeks meant when they said ἐνθουσιαμóς. Characteristic marks of it were at every turn. There was the mobile body—nervous, angular, expressive—and a skin of fine grain. There was the longish hair, matted, if very fine, in broad locks; if coarse, standing about the head in electric stiffness and confusion—the hair shown in the print of John Brown, in fact. There were eyes often saddened by the sleeplessness of the idealist—eyes with an uneasy glitter and a vision directed far away, as if not noting life, nor death, nor daily things near by, but fixed rather upon some startling shape on the horizon. The teeth were inclined to wedge-shape and set far apart. There was a firmly shut and finely curved mouth. “We make our own mouths,” says Dr. Holmes. About this people was smouldering fire which might leap into flame at any gust of mischance or oppression.

This describes the appearance in later decades of the corporate man of the fifties and early sixties—

“to whom was given
So much of earth, so much of heaven,
And such impetuous blood.”

A sky whose mystery and melancholy, whose solitary calm and elemental rage stimulate and depress even his penned and grazing cattle, has spread over him for more than a generation. With his intensity and his predisposition to a new contrat social he and his descendants have been subjected to Kansas heat, which at times marks more than one hundred in the shade, and to a frost that leaves the check of the thermometer far below zero. He and his children, cultivators of their rich soil, have been subject to off-years in wheat and corn. They have endured a period of agricultural depression prolonged because world-wide. They have been subject, too, to the manipulation of boomers.

Most lymphatic men—any Bœotian, in fact, but it is long before his fat bottom lands will make a Bœotian out of a Kansan—most lymphatic men ploughing, planting, and simply and honestly living would be affected to discontent by the thunder of booms and their kaleidoscopic deceit. Clever and sometimes unprincipled promoters representing more clever and unprincipled bond-sellers in Eastern counting-houses sought to incite speculation and lead the natural idealist by the glamour of town-building, and county-forming booms, railway and irrigation booms, and countless other projects.

They played with his virtuous foibles and fired his imagination. He gave himself, his time, his men, his horses, his implements for construction; his lands for right of way. He hewed his black walnuts and elms into sleepers, and sawed his bulky oaks for bridges. He called special elections and voted aid in bonds. He gave perpetual exemption from taxes. Rugged enthusiast that he was he gave whatever he had to give,—but first he gave faith and altruistic looking-out for the interests of the other man. Great popular works still abiding—cathedrals in Europe are perhaps the most noted—were put up by like kindling of the human spirit.

His road was made ready for sleepers, and funds for purchasing iron he formally handed the promoters,—since which day purslane and smartweed and golden sunflowers have cloaked the serpentine grades which his own hands had advanced at the rate of more than a mile between each dawn and sunset.

One direct relation and force of these inflated plans to the Kansan have been that they often swerved and controlled the values of his land, and the prices of those commodities from which a soil-worker supports a family hungry, growing, and in need of his commonwealth’s great schools. And the man himself, poor futurist and striver after the idea, with a soul soaring heavenward and hands stained and torn with weed-pulling and corn-husking!—his ready faith, his tendency to seek a hero, his brushing aside of conservative intuition, his meliorism, his optimism, his receptivity to ideas, his dear humanness—in other words, his charm, his grace, his individuality, his Americanism—wrought him harm.

Our corporate man, loving, aspiring, working, waiting, started out with a nervous excitability already given. He was a man with a bee in his bonnet. He was seeking ideal conditions. Originally he was a reactionist against feudal bondage, the old bondage of human to human and of human to land. Later his soul took fire at the new bondage of human to wage and job. He would have every man and woman about him as free in person as he was in idea.

What wonder then that he or his descendent spirit in the midst of agricultural distress enacted a mortgage equity or stay law, and determined that that law should apply to mortgages in existence at the passage of the act! He it is of the all-embracing Populism, the out-reaching Prohibitionism, the husband-man-defensive Grangerism. Shall we not humanly expect him, and those suffering the contagion of his noble singleness, to clutch at plans for a social millennium? “Heaven is as easily reached from Kansas,” wrote an immigrant of 1855, “as from any other point.”

He values openly what the world in its heart knows is best, and like all idealists foreruns his time. The legend is always about him of how the men and women of the early fifties hitched their wagon to a star—and the stars in his infinity above are divinely luminous and clear. His meliorism—which would lead his fellows and then the whole world aright—is nothing if not magnificent.

But although he grubs up the wild rose and morning-glory, ploughing his mellow soil deep for settings of peach and grape, and supplants the beauty of the purple iris and prairie verbena with the practicalities of corn and wheat, he has yet to learn the moral effect of time and aggregation—that a moon’s cycle is not a millennium, a June wind fragrant with the honey of his white clover not all of his fair climate, and that a political colossus cannot stand when it has no more substantial feet than the yellow clay which washes and swirls in the river that waters his great State. In reality his excess of faith hinders the way to conditions his idealism has ever been seeking.

The Kansan is, after all, but a phase—a magnificent present-day example and striving—of the mighty democratic spirit which has been groping forward through centuries towards its ideal, the human race’s ideal of ideals. In his setting forth of the genius of his people for democracy and the tendency of his blood for experiment and reform—according to that advice to the Thessalonians of an avaunt courier of democracy, to prove all things and hold fast to that which is good—he is led at times upon miry, quaggy places and by the very largeness of his sympathies enticed upon quicksands which the social plummet of our day has not yet sounded.

THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.
Arthur Hugh Clough

No university has anywhere ever become a great influence, or anything but a school for children, which was not wholly or almost wholly in the hands of the faculty or teaching body. The faculty is the teaching body. If you have the right sort of faculty, you have a university though you have only a tent to lecture in. If, on the other hand, you try to make a university out of a board of sagacious business men acting as trustees, and treat the professors simply as “hired men,” bound to give the college so many hours a week, you may have a good school for youths, but you will get no enlightening influence or force out of it for the community at large.

A writer in The Nation, 1889

THE UNIVERSITY OF HESPERUS

During a great national struggle for human rights, Laurel Town was touched by the high seriousness which rises from sincerity to the idea of human liberty and the laying down of lives in defence of that idea. Its baptism and its early years were thus purely of the spirit.

A miniature burg, it snuggles upon broad, fat lands, semicircling the height that rises to the west. From the hill-top the tiny city is half-buried in green leaves. Looking beyond and to the middle distance of the landscape, you find rich bottoms of orchard and of corn, and the Tiber-yellow waters of a broad river running through their plenty.

First immigrants to this country—those who came in back in the fifties—discovered the hill’s likeness to the great Acropolis of Athens, and determined that upon it, as upon the heights of the ancient city of the golden grasshopper, the State’s most sacred temple should be built. Thus were inspired library and museum, laboratories and lecture-rooms, of the University of Hesperus, whose roofs are gleaming in the vivid air to-day just as in some ancient gem a diamond lying upon clustering gold sends shafts of light through foliations of red metal.

The brow of this hill beetles toward the south, but instead of the blue waters of the Saronic Gulf which Sophocles in jocund youth saw dancing far at sea, Hesperus students sight hills rolling to the horizon, and thickets of elms and poplars fringing Indian Creek, and instead of the Pentelic mountains in the northeast they catch the shimmering light of the green ledges and limestone crests of the northern edge of the valley the river has chiselled.

But how, you ask—thinking of the fervor of the immigrants of 1854 and ’55—how did this university come into being? In stirring and tentative times. The institution was first organized by Presbyterians, who later accepted a fate clearly foreordained, and sold to the Episcopalians. This branch of the church universal christened the educational infant Lawrence University, after a Boston merchant, who sent ten thousand dollars conditioned as a gift on a like subscription. The institution to this time was “on paper,” as these founders said of early towns—that is, a plan, a scheme, a possibility. It finally became the kernel of the University of Hesperus when the State accepted from Congress a grant of seventy-two square miles of land.

“There shall be two branches of the University,” the charter reads, “a male and a female branch.” In clearer English, the institution was to be open to men and women.

Seeds of the convictions which admitted women to instruction had long been germinating, even before the independence of women was practically denied by the great Reformation. The idea was in the mind of our race when we were north-of-Europe barbarians. It found sporadic expression all through our literature. It is back of Chaucer in annals of the people and later in such chroniclers as Holinshed. Bishop Burnet, historian of his “Own Time,” and also Fuller, he of the human “Worthies,” determined that “the sharpness of the wit and the suddenness of the conceits of women needed she-schools.” Later Mary Woolstonecraft wrote: “But I still insist that not only the virtue but the knowledge of the two sexes should be the same in nature, if not in degree, and that women, considered not only as moral but rational creatures, ought to endeavor to acquire human virtues by the same means as men, instead of being educated like a fanciful kind of half-being.” And that moral and prudent sampler, Hannah More, declared: “I call education not that which smothers a woman with accomplishments, but that which tends to confirm a firm and regular system of character.”

A score of the names of these fore-workers for human liberty are known to us. But the names that are not known!—the pathos of it! that we cannot, looking below from our rung in the ladder, tell the countless who have striven, and fallen striving, that we are here because they were there, and that to them, often unrecognized and unthanked, our opportunities are due. They foreran their times, and their struggle made ours possible.

“’Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!”

But the immediate thought or impulse to make our Western State institutions co-educational, to give to the daughters the collegiate leisure and learning of the sons—to whom or to what shall we trace this idea! They used to explain it in Hesperus by telling you, “The people about us are for the most part New Englanders in blood, you know, perhaps not one, certainly not more than two generations removed to more genial lands, and still retaining the rigor and tenacity and devotion to principle of that stock.” But one naturally answered this by saying, “In New England they did not in the fifties and sixties give their daughters the educational opportunities they gave their sons. In those decades there were attempts at women’s colleges outside New England, but none in the neighborhood of Williams, Dartmouth, Amherst, Harvard, or Yale.”

The better reason is the historic—noted in every movement of our Aryan race. In this is found what New England civilization has done, not in Hesperus alone, but in Wisconsin, in California, in Minnesota, and wherever else it has united with other forces, and lost the self-consciousness and self-complacency which in our generation are distinguishing and abiding traits upon its own granitic soil. Prejudices which eat energy and dwarf activity colonists have commonly left behind, whether they have entered the swift black ship of the sea or the canvas-covered wagon of the prairie. This was said of those who sailed westward and built up ancient Syracuse some twenty-six centuries agone, and it is true also of the colonists of these later days.

The drawing up of the charter of the University of Hesperus shows how humanly, simply, and freely State building may be done. Judge Chadwick, of Laurel Town, gives the candid narrative:

“In the spring of 1864 the Misses Chapin and Miss Elizabeth Watson, who had established a school here, and who were anxious that the University should be organized, besought Governor Robinson to see that it was done. He, or they (or perhaps but one of them), came to me and insisted that I should go to the capital and secure the passage of an act organizing the University. The session of the Legislature was near its close. I went to the capital. In the State library I hunted up the various charters of similar institutions, and taking the Michigan University charter for my guide, drafted the act to organize the University of the State.... Judge Emery was the member of the House.... I do not remember who was the Senator.... I gave the draft to Judge Emery, who introduced it into the house, and by suspension of the rules got it through. It went through the Senate in the same way, and was approved by the governor—Carney.”

But the seed of fire from which this University sprang in the days when men were fighting for unity, for an idea—this you cannot understand without a word about the brilliant essence that enwraps you in that land—Hesperus air and light. This ether no man can describe. It is as clear as a diamond of finest quality, and each infinitesimal particle has a thousand radiant facets. You think to take it in your hand. It is as intangible as a perfume, as illusive as the hopes of man’s ultimate perfection. The colors of liquid rose are hidden in it and the glow of gold, and it gives flame to the dullest matter. It glances upon a gray tree-trunk, and the trunk glitters in purple and silver-white. It is so limpid and dry that a hill or a bush, or a grazing sheep far away, stands out in clear relief. It vitalizes. It whispers of the infinite life of life. Like the sea, it presses upon you a consciousness of illimitability and immeasurable strength. It is “most pellucid air,” like that in which the chorus of the “Medea” says the Athenians were “ever delicately marching.”

It is as like the atmosphere of Italy as the sturdy peach-blossoms which redden Hesperus boughs in March are like the softer almond-flowers. The same indescribable grace and radiance are in both essences. But there are the Hesperus blizzards—vast rivers of icy air which sweep from upper currents and ensphere the softness and translucent loveliness of the earth with such frosts as are said to fill all heaven between the stars.

Under such dynamic skies young men and women have been gathering now these forty years—before the September equinox has fairly quenched the glow of summer heat. During a long æstivation a sun burning in an almost cloudless heaven has beaten upon them day by day. The glow has purified and expanded their skin, has loosened their joints, and clothed them in the supple body of the south. Through the darkness of the night ten thousand stars have shone above their slumbers, and wind voices out of space have phu-phy-phis-pered through secretive pines and rolled tz-tz-tz upon the leathery leaves of oaks. Such days and nights have been over them since the wild grape tossed its fragrant blossoms in damp ravines in the passion of May.

These students have come from all kinds of homes, from meagre town houses, from the plainest and most forlorn farm-houses, and from other houses laden and bursting with plenty—and plenty in Hesperus is always more plenty than plenty anywhere else. Many of these young people have been nurtured delicately, but a large number have doubtless tasted the bitterness of overwork and the struggle of life before their teens.

Perhaps their parents came to Hesperus newly wedded, or in the early years of married life with a brood of little children. If their coming was not in the stridulous cars of some Pacific or Santa Fé railway, then it was over the hard-packed soil in most picturesque of pioneer fashions—a huge canvas-covered wagon carrying the family cook-stove, beds, and apparel, and, under its creaking sides, kettles for boilers, pails for fetching water from the nearest run, and axes to cut wood for evening fires. Every article the family carried must answer some requirement or use. The horses, too, have their appointed tasks, for, the journey once accomplished, they will mark off the eighty acres the family are going to pre-empt, and afterwards pull the plough through the heavy malarious sod.

On the seat of the wagon the wife and mother, wrapped in extremes of cold in a patchwork quilt, at times nursed the baby, and in any case drove with a workmanlike hand. John Goodman was sometimes back with the collie, snapping his blacksnake at the cattle and urging them on. But oftenest father and mother were up in the seat, and boy and girl trooping behind in barefooted and bareheaded innocence, enjoying happy equality and that intimate contact with the cows which milky udders invite.

Now this, or some way like this, was the introduction of a quota of Hesperus men and women to their fat earth and electric atmosphere. It is therefore not to be wondered at that these young people come to their University with little of the glamour nourished by delicate environment and the graces of life. Their earliest years have been spent upon the bed-rock of nature wrestling with the hardest facts and barest realities. They have suffered the deprivations and the unutterable trials of patience and faith which the world over are the lot of pioneers; and they have had the returns of their courage. Every self-respecting man and boy has been, perhaps still is, expected to do the work of two men. Every woman and girl to whom the god of circumstance had not been kind must be ready to perform, alike and equally well, the duties of man or woman—whichever the hour dictated. “Hesperus,” says an unblushing old adage of the fifties—“Hesperus is heaven to men and dogs and hell to women and horses.”

But from whatever part of the State the students come to their University, he and she commonly come—they are not sent. The distinction is trite, but there is in it a vast difference. In many cases they have made the choice and way for themselves. They have earned money to pay their living while at school, and they expect, during the three, four, or five years they are in their intellectual Canaan, to spend vacations in work—in harvesting great wheat-fields of Philistia, or in some other honest bread-winning. They are so close to nature, and so radiantly strong in individuality, that no one of them, so far as rumor goes, has ever resorted to the commonest method of the Eastern impecunious collegian for filling his cob-webbed purse with gold. The nearest approach I know to such zeal was the instance of the student who slept (brave fellow) scot-free in an undertaker’s establishment. He answered that functionary’s night-bell. Then he earned half-dollars in rubbing up a coffin or washing the hearse; adding to these duties the care of a church, milking of cows, tending of furnaces, digging of flower-beds, beating of carpets, and any other job by which a strong and independent hand could win honest money for books and clothing and food. It was as true for him now as when Dekker, fellow-player with Shakespeare and “a high-flier of wit even against Ben Jonson himself”—to use Anthony à Wood’s phrase—when Dekker sang—

“Then he that patiently want’s burden bears,
No burden bears, but is a king, a king.
O sweet content, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace,
Honest labor bears a lovely face,
Then hey nonny, nonny; hey nonny, nonny.”

To one young man, whose course was preparing him for studies of Knox’s theology upon Knox’s own heath, a harvest of forty acres of wheat brought a competence, as this arithmetic will show: 40 × 50 × $0.50 = $1000. He planted, he said, in the early days of September, before leaving for college, and cut the grain after commencement in June. The blue-green blades barely peeped through the glebe during winter. When springtime came, and the hot sun shone upon the steaming earth, and the spirit of growth crept into the roots, an invalid father—the young planter being still in academic cassock—kept the fences up and vagrant cows from mowing the crop under their sweet breath. Other men often told of like ways of earning not only college bread but also college skittles.

Women students had commonly not so good a chance at wresting German lyrics or Plato’s idealism from a wheat-furrow. Report of such advantages at least never reached my ear. But this may be due to the fact that women are reticent about the means of their success, while men delight to dwell upon their former narrow circumstances and triumphant exit from such conditions.

Some Hesperus girl may have made money in hay, and indeed have made the hay as charmingly as Madame de Sévigné reports herself to have done—and certainly, in Hesperus conditions, without the episode of the recalcitrant footman which Mistress de Sévigné relates. Now and then a young woman did say that she was living during her studies on funds she herself had earned. One doughty maiden, “a vary parfit, gentil knight,” her face ruddy with healthy blood, her muscles firm and active—such a girl said one day, in extenuation of her lack of Greek composition, that “her duties had not permitted her to prepare it.”

“But that is your duty, to prepare it,” I answered. “Are you one of those students who never allow studies to interfere with ‘business’?”

“No,” she said, quickly; “but let me tell you how it happened. The boarding-house where I stay is kept by a friend of my mother. She offers me board if I will help her. So I get up at five in the morning and cook breakfast, and after I have cleaned up I come up here. In the afternoon I sweep and dust, and it takes me till nearly dark. The evening is the only time I have for preparing four studies.”

What became of this girl, you ask? She married a professor in an Eastern college.

It is well to reiterate, however, in order to convey no false impression of Hesperus sturdiness and self-reliance, that many, probably a majority, of the students were supported by their natural protectors. But it is clear that there is more self-maintenance—self-reliance in money matters—at the Hesperus University than in any college generally known in the East, and that the methods of obtaining self-succor are at times novel and resultant from an agricultural environment. In evidence that there are students more fortunate—one should rather say more moneyed, for the blessings of money are not always apparent to the inner eye—are the secret societies which flourish among both men and women. The club or society houses, for the furnishing of which carte blanche has been given the individual humanely known as interior decorator, see not infrequently courtesies from one Greek letter society to another, then and there kindly wives of the professors matronizing.[2]

An early introduction into the battle of life breeds in us humans practicality and utilitarianism. Most unfortunately it disillusions. It takes from the imaginativeness which charms and transfigures the early years of life. In the University of Hesperus one found the immediate fruit of this experience in the desire of the student, expressed before he was thoroughly within the college gates, of obtaining that which would be of immediate practical advantage to himself. He demanded what the Germans call brodstudien, and sometimes very little beyond the knowledge which he could convert into Minnesota wheat or some other iota of the material prosperity which surges from east to west and waxes on every side of our land. How strenuously one had to fight this great impulse! and against what overwhelming odds! It was a reacting of King Canute’s forbiddance to the sea, and, like that famous defeat, it had its humors.

You could see so plainly that this demon of practicality had been implanted by want, and privation, and a knowledge drunk with the mother’s milk, that the struggle of life on that untested soil was a struggle to live; you could see this so plainly that you often felt constrained to yield to its cry and urgency.

And the weapons at hand to fight it were so few! Materialism on every hand. And it was plain, also, that here was but an eddy in the wave—that the impulse toward brodstudien was undoubtedly but a groping forward in the great movement of the half-century that has endowed realschulen from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, and is perhaps but the beginning of the industrial conquest of the world—in its first endeavors necessarily crippled, over-zealous and impotent of best works.

Yet in the face of every concession there came anew to your conscience the conviction, haunting unceasingly, of the need of the idea in academic life, of the need of the love of study for its own sake, of a broader education of the sympathies, of greater activity in the intangible world of thought and feeling—desires of souls “hydroptic with a sacred thirst.” To these alone did it behoove us to concede, for through the spirit alone could the “high man” sustainedly lift up his heart—

“Still before living he’d learn how to live—
No end to learning.
Earn the means first—God surely will contrive
Use for our earning.

Others mistrust and say, ‘But time escapes,—
Live now or never!’
He said, ’What’s Time? leave Now for dogs and apes,
Man has Forever.’”

The ratio of Hesperus students who chose the old form of scholastic training, called through long centuries the Humanities, was some little time ago not more than one-fifth of those in the department of literature and arts. Since the number was so small—all departments would then hardly count five hundred students—the growth was favored of that most delightful feature of small-college life, friendship between instructor and undergraduate. Such offices often grew to significant proportions during a student’s four collegiate years. All genialities aided them; and nothing sinister hindered.

The young folks’ hearts were as warm as may be found upon any generous soil, and they held a sentiment of personal loyalty which one needed never to question. They went to their University, after such longing and eagerness, so thoroughly convinced that there was to be found the open sesame to whatever in their lives had been most unattainable, that their first attitude was not the critical, negative, which one notices in some universities deemed more fortunate, but the positive and receptive. If they did not find that which to their minds seemed best, had they not the inheritance of hope?—a devise which Hesperus earth and air entail upon all their children, and upon which all are most liberally nurtured.

Then the Hesperus youth had a defect, if one may so put it, that aided him materially to a friendly attitude with his instructors. He was, with rare exceptions, as devoid of reverence for conventional distinctions as a meadow-lark nesting in last year’s tumble-weed and thinking only of soaring and singing. In this, perhaps, is the main-spring of the reason why nearly every student, either through some inborn affinity or by election of studies, drifted into genial relations with some member of the faculty.

The pleasantest part of my day’s work used to be in the retirement of the Greek study and from eight to nine in the morning. Never a student of mine who did not come at that hour for some occasion or need. One man snatched the opportunity to read at sight a good part of the Odyssey. Another took up and discussed certain dialogues of Plato. Another who aimed at theological learning studied the Greek Testament and the “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.” Others came in to block out courses of work. Still others were preparing papers and gathering arguments, authorities, and data for debating societies and clubs.

In that hour, too, a sympathetic ear would hear many a personal history told with entire frankness and naïveté. One poor fellow had that defect of will which is mated at times with the humorous warmth which the Germans call gemüth, and the added pain of consciousness of his own weakness. Another clear-headed, muscular-handed, and ready youth measured his chances of getting wood to saw,—“just the exercise he needed, out of doors,”—horses to groom, and the city lamps to light, to earn the simple fare which he himself cooked. Many a pathetic story found tongue in that morning air, and times were when fate dropped no cap of recognition and granted no final victory. In hearing the details of hope deferred, of narrow estate and expansive ambition, you longed for the fabled Crœsus touch which turned want to plenty, or, more rationally, you projected a social order where the young and inapt should not suffer for the sins of others, but be within the sheltering arms of some sympathetic power.

There was the mildness of the chinook to this social blizzard, however, for groups moved even in the dewy hour of half-past eight toward the open door of the Greek lecture-room, laughing at the last college joke or secret society escapade, and forecasting who would be the next penitent before the council. Also certain youths and maids, between whom lay the engagement announced by a ring on the heart-finger—these one might see hanging over and fingering—

“Vor Liebe und Liebesweh”—

volumes lying upon my table, and in their eagerness and absorption of the world in two, dog-earing the golden edges of ever-living Theocritus. And why not? Such entanglements in the web of love oftenest differed in no way from the innocence and simplicity of the pristine Daphnes and Coras. They were living again, the Sicilian shepherd and shepherdess, and wandering in the eternally virid fields of youth. The skies and trees and waters were merely not of Trinacria. But Hesperus heavens omitted no degree of ardor.

And had you seen her, you would never have blamed the youth for loving the college maid. She has the charm abloom in the girlhood of every land, and most of all in this of ours. Physically she differs little from her sister in Eastern States. Her form is as willowy. She has, except in the case of foreign-born parents, the same elongated head and bright-glancing eye. Her skin sometimes lacks in fairness owing to the desiccating winds of the interior; but there is the same fineness of texture.

Power of minute observation and a vivacious self-reliance are characteristics of the girl of the University of Hesperus—and, indeed, of the girl throughout the West. She sees everything within her horizon. Nothing escapes her eye or disturbs her animated self-poise. She has not the Buddhistic self-contemplation the New England girl is apt to cultivate; nor is she given to talking about her sensations of body and moods of mind. I never heard her say she wanted to fall in love in order to study her sensations—as a Smith College alumna studying at Barnard once declared. She rarely pursues fads. Neither is she a fatalist. And she never thinks of doubting her capacity of correct conclusions upon data which she gathers with her own experience of eye and ear. From early years she has been a reasoner by the inductive method, and a believer in the equality and unsimilarity of men and women. Undeniably her mental tone is a result of the greater friction with the world which the girl of the West experiences in her fuller freedom. Conventionalism does not commonly overpower the individual—social lines are not so closely defined—in those States where people count by decades instead of by centuries.

And what is said of this University girl’s observing faculties is in nowise untrue of her brother’s. Nature, the most Socratic of all instructors and the pedagogue of least apparent method, seems actually to have taught him more than his sister, as, in fact, the physical universe is apt to teach its laws more clearly to the man than to the woman, even if she hath a clearer vision of the moral order. Perhaps the man’s duties knit him more closely to physical things.

With clear, far-seeing eyes—for plenty of oxygen has saved them from near-sightedness—a Hesperus boy will distinguish the species of hawk flying yonder in the sky, forming his judgment by the length of wing and color-bars across the tail. I have heard him comment on the tarsi of falcons which whirled over the roadway as he was driving, and from their appearance determine genus and species. He knows the note and flight of every bird. He will tell you what months the scarlet tanager whistles in the woods, why leaves curl into cups during droughts, and a thousand delicate facts which one who has never had the liberty of the bird and squirrel in nowise dreams of.

And why should he not? All beasts of the prairie and insects of the air are known to him as intimately as were the rising and setting stars to the old seafaring, star-led Greeks. During his summer the whip-poor-will has whistled in the shadow of the distant timber, and the hoot-owl has ghosted his sleep. He has wakened to the carol of the brown thrush and the yearning call of the mourning dove, as the dawn reached rosy fingers up the eastern sky.

He has risen to look upon endless rows of corn earing its milky kernels, and upon fields golden with nodding wheat-heads. And from the impenetrable centre of the tillage, when the brown stubble has stood like needles to his bare feet, he has heard the whiz of the cicada quivering in the heated air. The steam-thresher has then come panting and rumbling over the highway, and in the affairs of men the boy has made his first essay. He cuts the wires that bind the sheaves, or feeds the hopper, or catches the wheat, or forks away the yellow straw, or ties the golden kernels in sacks, or brings water to the choked and dusty men. He runs here and there for all industries.

Perhaps it is because of his association with such fundamentals of life that this boy has great grasp upon the physical world. In his very appearance one sees a life untaught in the schools of men. In looking at him there is nothing of which you are so often reminded as of a young cottonwood-tree. The tree and the boy somehow seem to have a kinship in structure, and to have been built by the same feeling upward of matter. And this perhaps he is—a broad-limbed, white-skinned, animalized, great-souled poplar, which in ages long past dreamed of red blood and a beating heart and power of moving over that fair earth—after the way that Heine’s fir-tree dreamed of the palm—and finally through this yearning became the honest boysoul and body which leaps from pure luxuriance of vigor, and runs and rides and breathes the vital air of Hesperus to-day.

But even with the strong-limbed physique which open-air life upbuilds, the Hesperus students have their full quota of nervousness. Elements in their lives induce it. First there is the almost infinite possibility of accomplishment for the ambitious and energetic—so little is done, so much needs to be. Again, temperature changes of their climate are most sudden and extreme. A third incentive to nervous excitation is the stimulant of their wonderful atmosphere, which is so exhilarating that dwellers upon the Hesperus plateau suffer somnolence under the air-pressure and equilibrium of the seaboard.

Unfortunately the students have until lately had nothing that could be called a gymnasium, in which they might counterpoise nerve-work with muscular action. At one time they endeavored to equip a modest building. In the Legislature, however, the average representative, the man who voted supplies, looked back upon his own boyhood, and, recalling that he never suffered indigestion while following the plough down the brown furrow, set his head against granting one dollar of the State’s supplies for the deed fool athletics; in fact, he lapsed for the moment into the mental condition of, say, a Tory of Tom Jones’s time or a hater of the oppressed races of to-day.

This one instance will possibly give a shadow of impression of the power base politics—reversions to conditions our race is evolving from—have had in Hesperus University life. The power was obtained in the beginning chiefly because of the University’s sources of financial support—appropriations by biennial Legislatures in which every item, the salary of each individual professor, was scanned, and talked over, and cut down to the lowest bread-and-water figure, first by the committee in charge of the budget and afterwards by the Legislature in full session. One instance alone illustrates. In the early spring of 1897, when the University estimate was before the Legislature for discussion and the dominating Populists were endeavoring to reduce its figure, a legislator sturdily insisted: “They’re too stingy down there at the University. They’re getting good salaries, and could spare a sum to some one who would undertake to put the appropriations through.” One thousand dollars was said to be “about the size of the job.” A cut of twenty per cent., generally speaking, upon already meagre salaries resulted to a faculty too blear-eyed politically and unbusiness-like to see its financial advantage. After two or three years the stipends were restored to their former humility, the Legislature possibly having become ashamed.

And in the make-up of the senatus academicus, or board of regents, thereby hangs, or there used to hang, much of doubt and many a political trick and quibble. It was a variation of the dream of the Texas delegate to the nominating convention—“The offices! That’s what we’re here for.” For if a Democratic governor were elected, he appointed from his party men to whom he was beholden in small favors. The members of the board were Democrats, that is, and were expected to guard the interests of their party. Or if the voters of Hesperus chose a Republican executive, he in turn had his abettors whom he wanted to dignify with an academic course for which there were no entrance examinations beyond faithfulness to party lines and party whips. It thus happened that the fitness of the man has not always been a prime consideration in his appointment. More often because he was somebody’s henchman, or somebody’s friend, the executive delighted to honor him.

These political features in the board of regents materially affected the faculty. For instance, if there were among the professors one who illustrated his lectures or class-room work by examples of the justice and reasonableness of free trade, he acted advisedly for his tenure if he lapsed into silence when the Republicans were in power. But if, on the other hand, he advocated protection instead of free trade, while the Democrats held State offices—which happened only by unusual fate—it was prudent for the professor to hold his tongue.

Upon every question of the day, and even in presenting conditions of life in ancient days, as, for instance, in Greece, the faculty were restrained, or at least threats were rendered. The petty politics of an agricultural democracy acted upon academic life in precisely the same way that autocracy and clericalism in Germany have affected its university faculties. In Hesperus professors have been dismissed without any excuse, apparent reason, or apology, because of a change of administration at the State capital and a hungry party’s coming into power. In various callings, or lines of life, the individual may be, nay, often is, wantonly sacrificed, but surely one of the saddest results of political shystering is the cheapening of the professor’s chair, and rendering that insecure for the permanence of which active life and its plums have been yielded.

Hinging immediately upon the political machine are the rights of and recognition of women in university government and pedagogic work. The fact that two or three women were the strenuous initiators of the institution has been forgotten, and no longer is there faith that

“The woman’s cause is man’s; they rise or sink Together.”

With all its coeducation, Hesperus has not yet evolved—as have New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Wisconsin—to women regents or trustees. The people have not yet awakened to the justice of demanding that, in a State institution open to young women as well as to young men, women as well as men shall be in its government and direction.

And within the brown walls of the institution a woman may not carry her learning to the supreme pedagogic end. “People ridicule learned women,” said clear-eyed Goethe, speaking for his world, the confines of which at times extend to and overlap our own, “and dislike even women who are well informed, probably because it is considered impolite to put so many ignorant men to shame.” Such a man—an ignorant man, one of the party appointees just now spoken of—when a woman was dismissed from the Greek chair some years ago, declared, “The place of women is naturally subordinate; we shall have no more women professors.” It was a pitiful aping of dead and gone academic prejudices. To this day, however, but one act—that rather an enforced one—has gainsaid his dictum. A woman has been appointed to the chair of French. It remains to be seen whether her salary is the same as that of the men doing work of equal grade and weight with her own.

“We cross the prairie as of old
The pilgrims crossed the sea,
To make the West, as they the East,
The homestead of the free”—

sang the men and women of the fifties as their train pulled out of Eastern stations and their steamboats paddled up the waters of the Big Muddy. But how often it happens that what one generation will die for, the next will hold of little value, or even in derision!

Not wholly independent of politics, not without the uses and abuses of politics, is a great corporation which one of necessity mentions because it has played no small part in Hesperus University life. In those portions of our country where the units of the Methodist church are segregate few know the gigantic secular power it possesses in the South and in the West. The perfection of its organization is like that of the Roman Catholic Church where it is longest at home, or like the unity of the Latter Day Saints in their centre, Utah. The Methodists in Hesperus far outnumber in membership and money any other denomination. They are tenacious of their power, as religious denominations have ever been, and aggressive in upbuilding schools of their own voice and foundation. The question, “What shall we do to keep on the good side of the Methodists?” was, therefore, not infrequently asked in Hesperus University politics. The answer was practical: “Make us Methodists. Bring Methodism to us to stop the antagonism of a powerful body.” Such a solving of the problem—for these reasons—was not high-minded; it was not moral courage. But it was thought politic—and it was done.

Some of the best elements of our day have been profoundly at work among the Methodists. Many of the denomination have been in the vanguard of the march to better things. But it is fair to the course of Hesperus University, which has sometimes halted, to say that sagacious vigor and a knowledge of the best—τὰ Βέλτιστα—were not in every case the claim to distinction of its Methodist head. “Aus Nichts,” says Fichte, “wird nimmer Etwas.” But mediocrity—or worse—did not always prevail. Under absolutely pure and true conditions a man would be chosen for his fitness to fill the office of Chancellor, no matter what his religious bias, unless, indeed, that bias marred his scholarship and access to men, and thus really became an element in his unfitness.

In a perspective of the University of Hesperus it is necessary to consider these various controlling forces as well as the spiritual light of its students. And yet to those who have faith in its growth in righteousness there is an ever-present fear. The greatness of the institution will be in inverse proportion to the reign of politics, materialism, and denominationalism in its councils, and the fear is that the people may not think straight and see clear in regard to this great fact. Upon spiritual lines alone can its spirit grow, and if an institution of the spirit is not great in the spirit, it is great in nothing.

Its vigor and vitality are of truth in its young men and women. One boy or one girl may differ from another in glory, but each comes trailing clouds of light, and of their loyalty and stout-heartedness and courage for taking life in hand too many pæans cannot be chanted, or too many triumphant ἰώ raised. They have been the reason for the existence of the institution now more than a generation. Their spiritual content is its strength, and is to be more clearly its strength when guidance of its affairs shall have come to their hands.

Their spiritual content, we say—it should reflect that life of theirs when heaven seems dropping from above to their earth underfoot—in addition to the labors and loves of men and women, a procession of joys from the February morning the cardinal first whistles “what cheer.”

While dog-tooth violets swing their bells in winds of early March bluebirds are singing. The red-bud blossoms, and robins carol from its branches. Then the mandrake, long honored in enchantment, opens its sour-sweet petals of wax. Crimson-capped woodpeckers test tree-trunks and chisel their round house with skilful carpentry. The meadow-lark whistles in mating joy. Purple violets carpet the open woods. Trees chlorophyl their leaves in the warm sun. The wild crab bursts in sea-shell pink, and sober orchards shake out ambrosial perfume. Soft, slumberous airs puff clouds across the sky, and daylight lingers long upon the western horizon. Summer is come in.

The cuckoo cries. The hermit thrush pipes from his dusky covert. Doves, whose aching cadences melt the human heart, house under leaves of grapevine and hatch twin eggs. Vast fields of clover bloom in red and white, and butterflies and bees intoxicate with honey swarm and flit in all-day ravaging. Vapors of earth rise in soft whirls and stand to sweeten reddening wheat and lancet leaves of growing corn.

Arcadia could hold nothing fairer, and the god Pan himself, less satyr and more soul than of old, may be waiting to meet you where some fallen cottonwood bridges a ravine and the red squirrel hunts his buried shagbarks.

There “life is sweet, brother. There’s day and night, brother, both sweet things; sun and moon and stars, brother, all sweet things. There’s likewise a wind on the heath.”

They have most brilliant suns. They breathe sparkling, lambent ether. They look daily upon elm and osage orange, oaks and locusts in summer so weighted with leaves that no light plays within the recess of branches. All the night winds sough through these dusky trees, while slender voices, countless as the little peoples of the earth, murmur in antiphonal chorus.

And above are the patient stars and Milky Way dropping vast fleeces of light upon our earth awhirl in the dear God’s Arms.

The West is large. That which would be true of a university in one part of its broad expanse might not be true of another institution of like foundation some distance away. And what might be said of a college or university independent of politics, would in nowise be averable of one pretty well controlled by that perplexing monitor.

Again, a fact which might be asserted of a college built up by some religious denomination might be radically false if claimed for one supported by the taxpayers of a great commonwealth, and hedged by sentiment and statute from the predominance of any ecclesiasticism.

You speak of the general characteristics of the University of Michigan, but these characteristics are not true of the little college down in Missouri, or Kentucky, or Ohio. Neither would the facts of life in some institutions in Chicago be at one with those of a thriving school where conditions are markedly kleinstädtisch.

In speaking of the West we must realize its vast territory and the varying characteristics of its people. Of what is here set down I am positive of its entire truth only so far as one institution is concerned, namely, the titulary—that is, the University of Hesperus—which recalleth the city bespoken in the Gospel according to Matthew—that it is set upon a hill and cannot be hid.

TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS

There was never in any age more money stirring, nor never more stir to get money. The Great Frost of January, 1608”

Women have seldom sufficient serious employment to silence their feelings: a round of little cares, or vain pursuits, frittering away all strength of mind and organs, they become naturally only objects of sense. Mary Wollstonecraft

You have too much respect upon the world:
They lose it that do buy it with much care.
Shakespeare

TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS

The Big Muddy built the fertile regions near its course. Dropping in warm low tides mellow soil gathered from upper lands, it pushed the flood of the sea farther and farther to the south. Non palma sine pulvere has been the song of its waters—no green will grow here without my mould.

It was at its wonder-work those millions of suns ago when the tiny three-toed horse browsed among the grasses of what is now Kansas. Its great years can be measured only by the dial of God. All the monstrosities of the eld of its birth it has survived, and like a knowing, sentient thing—a thinking, feeling thing—it has been expanding and contracting, doubling up and straightening out its tawny body, each one of its numberless centuries pushing its uncounted mouths farther toward the submerged mountains of the Antilles.

In its thaumaturgy it formed vast prairies and rolling lands. Upon its gently-packed earth forests shot up. Subterranean streams jetted limpid springs, which joined and grew to rivers open to the light of day. Above the heavens were broad and the horizon far away—as far as you outlook at sea when sky and earth melt to a gray, and you stand wondering where the bar of heaven begins and where the restless waters below.

Indians, autochthons, or, perchance, wanderers from Iberia, or Babylon, were here. Then white men came to the flat brown lands, and that they brought wives showed they meant to stay and build a commonwealth. The two raised hearthstones for their family, and barns for herds and flocks. They marked off fields and knotted them with fruit trees, and blanketed them with growing wheat, and embossed them in days of ripeness with haystacks such as the race of giants long since foregone might have built. In their rich cornfields they set up shocks which leaned wearily with their weight of golden kernels, or stood torn and troubled by cattle nosing for the sugary pulp. Such works their heaven saw and to-day sees, their air above entirely bright, beading and sparkling in its inverted cup through every moment of sunshine.

Over this land and its constant people icy northers, victorious in elemental conflicts far above the Rockies, rush swirling and sweeping. They snap tense, sapless branches and roll dried leaves and other ghosts of dead summer before their force. They pile their snows in the angles of the rail fence and upon the southern banks of ravines, and whistle for warmth through the key-holes and under the shrunken doors of farm-houses.

But winds and snows disappear, and again life leaps into pasture-land. A yellow light glowing between branches foreruns the green on brown stalk and tree. The meadow-lark lifts his buoyant note in the air, and the farmer clears his field and manures his furrow with sleepy bonfires and the ashes of dead stalks. Earth springs to vital show in slender grasses and rose-red verbena, and the pale canary of the bastard indigo.

In this great folkland of the Big Muddy, which is beyond praise in the ordinary phrase of men, there live alongside many other types, a peculiar man and woman. They are—to repeat, for clearness’ sake—only two of many types there indwelling, for it is true of these parts as was said of England in 1755: “You see more people in the roads than in all Europe, and more uneasy countenances than are to be found in the world besides.”

The man is seen in all our longitudes; the woman is rarely in any other milieu. She is a product of her city and town. The women of the country have ever before them queryings of the facts of life, the great lessons and slow processes of nature, the depth and feeling of country dwelling. But this city-woman suffers from shallowness and warp through her unknowledge of nature and the unsympathy with fellow humans that protection in bourgeois comfort engenders. She is inexperienced in the instructive adventure of the rich and the instructive suffering of the poor. The basis of her life is conventional.

The dollar to her eyes is apt to measure every value. Let us not forget that in the history of the world this is no new estimate. It was the ancient Sabine poet who advised “make money—honestly if we can, if not, dishonestly—only, make money.” “This is the money-got mechanic age,” cried Ben Jonson in Elizabeth’s day. And the poet of the “Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard” more than one hundred and fifty years ago wrote to his friend Wharton: “It is a foolish Thing that one can’t only not live as one pleases, but where and with whom one pleases, without Money.... Money is Liberty, and I fear money is Friendship too and Society, and almost every external Blessing.”

Lacking simplicity this woman is submerged in artificiality and false conceptions of life values. Her hair, often blondined and curled in fluffy ringlets, is filleted with gold-mounted combs above a countenance fine-featured and a trifle hardened. Her well-formed hands, even in daily comings and goings, are flashing with rings. She loves to turn the precious stones and watch them divide the light. These jewels are her first expression of accumulating wealth—these and the pelts of animals difficult to capture, and therefore costly. After obtaining these insignia of opulence she begins to long for a third—the gentle, inept riot and solitary Phorcides’s eye for seeing life which she calls “society.”

The voice is an unconscious index of one’s spiritual tone; hers is metallic. At times it is deep, with a masculine note and force. The gift of flexible English speech, belonging to her by the right of inheritance of every American—she is at times of the old American stock, but more often of foreign-born parents,—she is apt to wrap in stereotyped phrases or newspaper slang. In her bustling life, formed, stamped, and endowed in spirit by an iron-grooved, commercial world, she gives little consideration to use of the greatest of all instruments and the mightiest of all arts. She has not the instinct of attention to her mother tongue which marks women of fine breeding.

The best thing made by man—good books—she has little love for. The newspaper and to-day’s flimsy novel of adventure stand in their stead. There were times when her reading had the illuminating calm of Milton’s “Penseroso” and the buoyant freshness of Shakespeare’s comedies. But that was when the rosy morning of her life stood on the mountain-top of school-girl idealism and looked not at things near by, but afar—a period not long when compared to the jaded vacuity of later years.

To this shapely woman a writer is presented as “the highest paid lady-writer in the world.” The highest paid! Where, then, is literature, O Milton, with thy ten pounds for “Paradise Lost,” and eight more from Printer Simmons to thy widow! Where, O immortal writer of the simplicities of Wakefield, apprenticed in thy poverty to Publisher Newberry! Where, then, singer and gauger Robert Burns! “Learning,” says Thomas Fuller, in his “Holy States,” “learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.”

This woman is fair and seemly. When you look upon her you think how full of strength and well-knit is her body. You foresee her the mother of strong and supple children. She is graceful as she moves—a result of her freedom and a sign of her strength—and she is mistress of the occasion always. In this domination (the right of the domina) she has, even when unmarried and as early as in her teens, the poise and solidity of the matron. She scorns your supposition that she is not informed in every worldly line, and that the wavering hesitancy of the one who does not know could be hers. She rarely blushes, and is therefore a negative witness to Swift’s hard-cut apophthegm—

“A virtue but at second-hand;
They blush because they understand.”

Although conventional, she is often uninstructed in petty distinctions and laws which of late more and more growingly have manacled the hands, fettered the feet, and dwarfed the folk of our democracy; and which threaten that plasticity which, it is claimed, is the great characteristic of life. “It is quite possible,” says Clifford in his “Conditions of Mental Development,” “for conventional rules of action and conventional habits of thought to get such power that progress is impossible.... In the face of such danger it is not right to be proper.”

Secretly our St. Louis neighbor, like most women, subjects herself to

“the chill dread sneer
Conventional, the abject fear
Of form-transgressing freedom.”

Openly she often passes it by and remarks, rocking her chair a trifle uneasily, that she is as good as anybody else. For some unspoken reason you never ask her if every one else is as good as she. You recall what de Tocqueville wrote eighty years ago: “If I were asked to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that [American] people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply—to the superiority of their women.”

Of all so-called civilized women, she makes the greatest variation in her treatment of those of her own and those of the other sex. Toward women she is apt to be dull, splenetic, outspoken about what she esteems the faults of others. Even the weaknesses of her husband she analyzes to their friends—herein is a fertile source of divorce. Toward women, you observe, she is apt to be metallic, rattling, and uncharitable, or possibly over-social, relieving the peccant humors of her mind and attitudinizing upon what she esteems a man’s estimate of women—to please the sex she is not of. To men she is pert, flippant, witty, caustic, rapid, graceful, and gay. At times she amuses them and herself by slurring upon other women. She seems to leave it to the man to establish the spirit upon which the two shall meet; and by deft hand and turn and movement she is constantly suggesting her eternal variation from him. The woman is always chaste. It follows that marriages are many.

A not uncommon fruit of marriage vows is an application for divorce, which she estimates with such levity and mental smack that you would hesitate to bring a young girl to her presence.

“Has she applied, do you know?”

“Oh! they’ve separated.”

“On what grounds is she going to get it?”

“If she isn’t careful she’ll lose her case by seeing him too often.”

These are a few of many such sentences heard from her lips in public places.

Nothing higher than what an ordinary civil contract seeks seems to be sought in her marital affairs. She undoes the decree of old Pope Innocent III., to whom is ascribed the ordination of marriage as a function of his church and the claim of its sanctified indissolubility. In the light of her action marriage is truly and purely a civil contract, and devoid of that grace, resignation, forbearance, patience, tenderness, sweetness, and calm which make it truly religious.

She is strong, she is hopeful, she is ardent. She knows herself and her power—that it is of the flesh which aims at prettiness. The divine beauty of spirit in the countenance she does not know. In her midst Fra Angelico would find few sitters. Her religion, commonly that which in other ages passed from a propulsive, burning spirit to frozen formalism, is the crystallized precept of theologue and priest, the fundamental ecstasy and informing soul having long since departed. If she had a real religion she could not be what she is.

Those questions of our day that shove their gaunt visages into sympathetic minds she has little knowledge of, and little of that curiosity which leads to knowledge. The fashion of her gown and the weekly relays at the theatre are nearer to her heart, and to her thinking touch her more personally, than the moral miasmata and physical typhoids of her neighboring Poverty Flat. Both pests the adjustment of her household relations brings within her door. For her dwelling is commonly domesticked by dusky shapes upon whom also the real things of life sit lightly, to whom permanence and serious thought and work are rare. Their engagement is by the week, like that of pitiful vaudeville associates, and their performance as surpassingly shallow. They come upon their stage of work, veneer their little task with clever sleight of hand, and roll off to the supine inertness and inanity of their cabin.

This woman has therefore in her hands no feeling of the real relation and friendship that grow between mistress and maid who live the joys and sorrows of years together. By the less fortunate themselves, as well as by her own shallow skimming, her sympathies with the less fortunate are dwarfed. She looks upon her domestic as a serving sub-human animal, infinitely below herself, tolerated because of its menial performance, and barely possessed of the soul which her ecclesiastical tradition says is in every human form. In this deflection of her moral sense, can the hand of secular justice be punishing the wrong-doing of past centuries—the bringing in putrid slave-ships the captured, dazed, Eden-minded, animal-man—“the blameless Ethiopian”—to our shores?

She is born of fine material. When her nature is awry it is because of lack of right incentive. Old measures and life estimates are absurd to her quick senses, and none of the best of our modern values are put in their place. Her creed is wholly at variance with the facts of life to-day. If substantial instruction had entered the formative period of her life, there would have been no substance to project the darker parts of her shadow. Her nature is now ill-formed because of the misdirection of its elemental forces. She knows the tenor of her empire, and in truth and secretly she wonders how long her reign will endure.

“And therefore,” says Aristotle, in his Politics, “women and children must be trained by education with an eye to the state, if the virtues of either of them are supposed to make any difference in the virtue of the state. And they must make a difference, for children grow up to be citizens, and half the persons in a state are women.”

Abiding beside this overdressed woman is an underdressed man. His first striking quality is a certain sweet-natured patience—a result of his optimistic dwelling in the future. Not content with the present, and having forgotten the values of present-day simple life, he lives in a future of fictitious money values. “All human power,” he thinks, with Balzac, “is a compound of time and patience. Powerful beings will and wait.” He knows his power and he waits.

“It’s going to be worth a good deal.”

“In a few years, that’ll be a good thing.”

“Fifteen years from now it’ll sell for ten times its present value.”

People have called him deficient in imagination. Not since the old Greeks have there been such ideal seekers upon this golden nugget of our solar system which we call the earth; nor since the old Hellenes has there been such an idealistic people as that of which he is a part. In Elizabeth’s time, indeed, there was imaginative vigor similar to his. Then as now they were holding the earth in their hands and standing on the stars to view it as it whirled.

Instead of turning his fertile thought toward art or literature, he bends it first of all to material things. Schemes for developing land, for dredging rivers, for turning forests into lumber or railway ties, for putting up sky-scrapers facing four avenues; schemes for building and controlling transcontinental railways and interoceanic fleets; schemes for raising wheat by the million bushels and fattening cattle by hundreds of thousands; schemes for compressing air, gas, cotton, beef; for domestic and foreign mining; for irrigation; for oil borings—he brings his dynamic energy and resourcefulness to the evolution of all things but the human who is to be yoked to work out his plan.

In theory he is democratic and humane—for the future, after his interests in dividends shall have ceased. But his reckless exploiting of human life for the present, now growing more and more common by means of impersonal agents, is distinctly at war with our foundation, democratic ideas which hold one man’s life as good as another’s and which made his existence possible.

An essentially material basis of life turns his natural idealism into practical values and activities. He is an ideal practician, or rather a practical idealist.

His unnatural attitude toward to-day—that is, his futurity—and his inconsiderateness for to-day’s sunshine, put him in a false position, which bears the fruit of self-consciousness. Nature is not self-conscious. The primal man was not self-conscious. Self-consciousness implies pain; it means that a fellow-being is not at one with his surroundings; that extraneous, false, or hostile things are pushing him from his native status. If his pain, whether physical or spiritual, is eased, morbidness disappears.

In this man’s self-conscious habit he jumps at once to the conclusion that if you do not like his town you do not like him. Your taste is a personal affront. There is no logical connection, but he has a certain “defect of heat” which Dean Swift avers lies in men of the Anglo-Saxon type. The cordiality and open-handedness with which he first met you wanes. That he has one of the best of hearts, and one of the strongest of heads, you are sure. He inwardly has the same faith. He knows it as Achilles knew his own strength, and the knowledge gives him sometimes the leonine front which the son of silver-footed Thetis boasted. But your not recognizing the superiority of his physical and spiritual environment over all the world causes an irritation deeper than the epidermis—to the nerve-centres, in fact.

“What do you think!” he laughed, shaking burlily and plunging hands in pockets. “What do you think! The other day in Washington I met an Englishman, and when I told him the United States was the best country in the world, and the State I lived in the best State in the best country, and the town I lived in the best town in the best State, and the block my office was in the best block in the best town, and my office the best office in the best block——”

“And you the best man in the best office,” I interjected, to which he laughed a hearty affirmative.

“What do you think he said? Why, ‘Comfohtaable, awh! comfohtaable!’ I told him it was comfortable,—damned comfortable.”

This very Englishman, with that condescension of manner which at times we see foreigners assume, declared such mental individualization to be purely American. Vanity, audacity, and self-appreciation exist among all peoples, and even from the banks of the Isis we hear how the late Dr. Jowett averred, “I am the Master of Baliol College; Baliol is the first college in Oxford; Oxford is the first city in England; England is the first country in the world.”

United with the feeling of personal worth and independence in this citizen by the Big Muddy is, paradoxically, another characteristic—namely, a great tolerance. He could hardly expect tolerance himself if he did not extend it to another who may have opinions diametrically opposed to his own, is probably his attitude of mind. He is in his way a sort of embodiment of the spirit of our national constitution.

But this largess of broad tolerance leaves him lacking a gift of the discriminating or critical judgment. The sense or feeling of quality—that which measures accurately spiritual and artistic values—his very breadth and practical largeness, his democracy, allow no growth to. A sensitive discrimination, the power of differentiation, is no natural endowment, but a result of training, mental elimination, comparison, association, and a dwelling in inherent spiritual values.

Through his worth and capacity in other directions he would have this quality if he “had time” and seclusion for thought. But his life makes it possible for an explosive and heated talker, a mouther of platitudinous phrase, to stand cheek by jowl in his esteem with a seer of elevation and limpid thoughtfulness. His estimate of even lighter publicities is tinctured by this defect—the theatrical, for instance, where a verdant girl, lavishing upon her ambition for the stage the money she inherited from a father’s patent syrup or pills, and an actress of genius and experience fall in his mind in the same category because a theatrical syndicate has equally advertised each.

What the result to politics of this indiscriminating and non-sagacious judgment, this lack of feeling for finer lines in character—mark, peculiar nature, as Plato means when he uses the word in the Phædrus—would be hard to estimate.

Although for the most part a private citizen absorbed in his own affairs, the holder of an office has to him a peculiar glamour. He is apt to fall into the thinking lines of writers of nameless editorials, who, forgetful of their own hidden effulgence, fillip at quiet folk as “parochial celebrities” and “small deer.” And yet he knows that he lives in an age of réclame, and that by the expenditure of a few dollars in direct or indirect advertisement a name may be set before more people than our forefathers numbered on the first Independence Day.

In his midst is a certain publicity of spirit, and in his estimation work undertaken in the sight of men is of a higher order than that done in the privacy of one’s closet. The active life is everything; the contemplative, nothing. Talking is better than writing—it so easily gives opportunity for the aggressive personality. For a young woman looking to support herself he advocated type-writing in a public office in preference to the retirement of nursery governess. When the girl drew back with the dread of publicity which results from the retired life of women, he exclaimed, “It’s all a question of whether you’ve got the courage to take the higher thing.”

If he is a fruit of self-cultivation, he enjoys talking of the viridity of his growth as well as these now purpler days. During early struggles he may have undergone suffering and privation. In that event, if his nature is narrow and hard, he has become narrower and harder, and his presence, like Quilp’s, shrivels and deadens every accretion save his interest. But when he is of the better sort of soil, adversity discovers the true metal, and misfortune gives him a sympathy, depth, and tenderness that charm you to all defects. You would migrate to his neighborhood to live in the light of his genial warmth. You think of the beautiful encomium Menelaus pronounced upon Patroclus—“He knew how to be kind to all men.”

Beyond all, he is open-eyed and open-eared. And above all he is affirmative; never negative. His intuition tells him it is affirmation that builds, and that Bacon says right—“it is the peculiar trait of the human intellect to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives.”

“Why do people buy and read such fool stuff as ‘Treasure Island’? I can’t see.”

“They read it for its story of adventure, and for its rare way of telling the story,” I ventured, in answer. “They read it for its style.”

“Style! Gemini! Style! I should smile! I can write a better book than that myself!”

“Then it might pay you as a business venture to set yourself about it.”

“It’s by a man named Stevenson, and he’s written other stories. Are they all as bad?”

Strange he should make such a criticism of Louis Stevenson, in literature pronouncedly the successful man. For success in the abstract, and successful men and women in the concrete—the word success is here used in its vulgar, popular sense, in reference to material advancement, not to ethical or spiritual development—he worships. Success is a chief god in his pantheon,—to have returns greater than one’s effort or worth deserve. Yet he believes with the author of Lorna Doone, “the excess of price over value is the true test of success in life.” None of us would think of saying Shakespeare was a success; or Milton; or John Brown; or Martin Luther. But Pope, with his clever money-making, we might call a success, as did Swift in 1728: “God bless you, whose great genius has not so transported you as to leave you to the constancy of mankind, for wealth is liberty, and liberty is a blessing fittest for a philosopher.”

The means to end, the processes by which the successful issue of a matter is gained, our neighbor of St. Louis tells you with a smile not to be finikin about. Many who have had success have not been. Look at all history, from Abraham to Joe Smith and Cecil Rhodes and many of our millionaires. He himself is not, he declares, but his acts often contradict his assertion. So long as a man, or a woman, “gets there,” it does not matter much how. “Work through a corporation or trust,” he tells you, and smiling at you with honest eyes, adds, “A corporation can do things the individual man would not.” The one who succeeds is the model; he is to be envied; he is the ideal the ancients sought—the happy man. Pass by noblesse oblige, human heartedness, elevation that would not stoop to exploit human labor, human need, and human sacrifice—that is, as corporations pass these qualities by.

In short, let us, in fact, and not by legend alone, have the character formerly ascribed by average English folk to the Yankee.

Assumption of excellence, he knows, goes far toward persuading people that you have it. There is not so great difference in people after all, this democrat believes. When one has every material privilege that will allow him to assume, that will hedge and fence his assumption about, he is pretty apt to succeed, he thinks, and be cried up as a man of extraordinary virtue, of taste, of attainment. In any success, commonly so-called, he asks little of the great marks by which a man should be judged. “He has done this.” “He has got that.” “He is clever,” he says. He rarely cries, “He is honest.” “He is true.”

Marriage he is not so apt as the brilliant woman beside him to consider impermanent. This is wholly a result of convention, for women, by their very nature and the conditions of married life, cling more closely to the permanence of the union.

In marital relations he has more liberty. When she asks him if she may, or in her phrase “can,” do so and so, and in rehearsing the matter says he “let her,” he accepts her homage and the servile status she voluntarily assumes. You exclaim that men for many centuries have been apt to do this. Entirely, if offered him by such an enchantress.

“If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How shall men grow?”

Toward women, with all his subtlety, he is possessed of a certain naïveté, which renders him a most agreeable companion, and much at the mercy of such associates.

On an express leaving St. Louis at nine of the morning and headed toward the East, two of these men were one day riding. A stretch of level land, encrusted in snow and flooded with sunshine glowing warm and yellow three weeks after the winter solstice, lengthened the way. By three in the afternoon the sight of the passengers was strained from the pulsation of the train, and reading gave place to lassitude.

“Say,” yawned one of the men, “do you think marriage is a failure?”

“Failure! failure!” answered the other. “The biggest kind of a success! Failure! Holy smoke! Why I’ve just married my third wife. Failure! It beats electric lights all hollow.”

“I don’ know,” answered the questioner, dyspeptically. “I don’ know. I go home every week or ten days. My wife isn’t glad to see me. I’m going home now. She won’t be glad. They think more of you when you’re not home so much.”

“Whee-u-u-u,” whistled number two.

With a holiday on his hands no man is more awkward. The secret of giving himself to enjoyment he does not know. His relaxation takes crudest form. Holiday enjoyment means in many cases sowing money in barbaric fashion, in every thinkable triviality that entails expense. That which he has bent every nerve toward getting, for which he has grown prematurely careworn, the possession of which vulgar philosophy counts the summa summarium of life, this he must scatter broadcast, not in the real things of art and literature and bettering the condition of the less fortunate, but in sordid pleasure and vacuous rushing hither and yon. It is his way of showing superiority to the cub who has not the money-making faculty, or who holds different ideas of the value of living. Upon such merrymaking he has been known to indulge in Homeric laughter over his own excess, and in tones heralds used in the days of Agamemnon. Physically he breathes deeper and is broader chested than many men; he has more voice, and he puts it out the top of the throat.

To watch the purple dog-tooth violet push up through dead leaves in March; to listen in his fragrant, sunlit spring to the song of the thrush or the delectable yearning of the mourning-dove; to know the quivering windflowers that freshen soil under oak and hickory—all this is to him as the yellow primrose to Peter Bell. There is no pleasure without an end—that end being money.

The blooded mare in his stable needs exercise and he likes not another to drive her lest she lose response to his voice and hand. But it is really a bore to drive; what interest is there in sitting in a wagon and going round and round? He must be doing something. He forgets the retaliation nature takes upon grooves in human life and that discountenancing of innocent pleasures is the first step toward dementia paralytica and the end of interest in his fair and buoyant world. He will probably die suddenly in middle age, for he is too extreme in expenditure of himself, and too small an eater of the honey of life. Honey-eaters have terrene permanence.

This man and woman are not disproportionate neighbors. What will be their record to the reading of Prince Posterity?

The lands that border the Big Muddy have more of the old American spirit than the extreme East. The proportions of the old American blood are there greater than upon the sea-coast, where Europeans of a tradition far different from the ideals and enthusiasms of our early comers have dropped and settled, and in such numbers that they can and do knit their old mental and social habits into a garment which is impervious to true American influences.

Our old American teachings!—for instance, the estimate of the greatness of work, the dignity of labor of any sort whatever—that, it was once claimed, was a great reason our republic existed to demonstrate to the world the dignity of work, of bodily exertion directed to some economic purpose, to produce use, adapt material things to living. “That citizen who lives without labor, verily how evil a man!”—’Αργὸος πολίτης χεῖνος ὡς χαχός γ’ ἀνήρ, and such sentiments as this of Euripides dominated our democracy.

But in our eastern sea-coast cities, what with the development of an idle, moneyed class, and the settling down of millions of immigrants, the European conception of work’s inherent ignobleness has grown to strong hold.

“Work is not a disgrace, but lack of work is a disgrace,” “Ἔργον δ ουδὲν ὄνειδος, αεργίη δέ τ’ ὄνειδος. And Hesiod’s words hold to the present day among genuine Americans.

Possibly with the great Middle West and its infinite “go,” optimism, and constructive breadth, and with such men and women as these types by the Big Muddy, the preservation of Americanism really lies—but it must be with their greater spiritualization and greater moral elevation for the future.

THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN

In order to give her praises a lustre and beauty peculiar and appropriate, I should have to run into the history of her life—a task requiring both more leisure and a richer vein. Thus much I have said in few words, according to my ability. But the truth is that the only true commender of this lady is time, which, so long a course as it has run, has produced nothing in this sex like her. Bacon, of Queen Elizabeth

Die Ehelosigkeit eines Theils des weiblichen Geschlechts ist in dem monogamischen Gesellschaftszustande eine nicht zu beseitigende statistische Nothwendigkeit. Gustave Schönberg

THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN

Throughout our fair country there has long been familiar, in actual life and in tradition, a corporate woman known as the New England woman.

When this woman landed upon American shores, some two hundred and fifty years ago, she was doubtless a hearty, even-minded, rosy-cheeked, full-fleshed English lass. Once here, however, in her physical and mental make-up, under pioneer conditions and influenced by our electric climate, a differentiation began, an unconscious individualizing of herself: this was far, far back in the time of the Pilgrim Mothers.

In this adaptation she developed certain characteristics which are weakly human, intensely feminine, and again passing the fables of saints in heroism and self-devotion. Just what these qualities were, and why they grew, is worth considering before—in the bustle of the twentieth century and its elements entirely foreign to her primitive and elevated spirit—she has passed from view and is quite forgotten.

In the cities of to-day she is an exotic. In the small towns she is hardly indigenous. Of her many homes, from the close-knit forests of Maine to the hot sands of Monterey, that community of villages which was formerly New England is her habitat. She has always been most at home in the narrow village of her forebears, where the church and school were in simpler days, and still at times are—even to our generation measuring only with Pactolian sands in its hour-glasses—the powers oftenest quoted and most revered. From these sources the larger part of herself, the part that does not live by bread alone, has been nourished.

It was in the quiet seclusion of the white homes of these villages that in past generations she gained her ideals of life. Such a home imposed what to women of the world at large might be inanity. But, with a self-limitation almost Greek, she saw within those clapboard walls things dearest to a woman’s soul,—a pure and sober family life, a husband’s protective spirit, the birth and growth of children, neighborly service—keenly dear to her—for all whose lives should come within touch of her active hands, and an old age guarded by the devotion of those to whom she had given her activities.

To this should be added another gift of the gods which this woman ever bore in mind with calmness—a secluded ground, shaded by hemlocks or willows, where should stand the headstone marking her dust, over which violets should blossom to freshening winds, and robin call to mate in the resurrection time of spring, and in the dim corners of which ghostly Indian pipes should rise from velvet mould to meet the summer’s fervency.

Under such conditions and in such homes she had her growth. The tasks that engaged her hands were many, for at all times she was indefatigable in what Plato calls women’s work, τὰ ἔνδον. She rose while it was yet night; she looked well to the ways of her household, and eat not the bread of idleness. In housekeeping—which in her conservative neighborhood and among her primary values meant, almost up to this hour, not directing nor helping hired people in heaviest labors, but rather all that the phrase implied in pioneer days—her energies were spent—herself cooking; herself spinning the thread and weaving, cutting out and sewing all family garments and household linen; herself preserving flesh, fish, and fruits. To this she added the making of yeast, candles, and soap for her household, their butter and cheese—perhaps also these foods for market sale—at times their cider, and even elderberry wine for their company, of as fine a color and distinguished a flavor as the gooseberry which the wife of immortal Dr. Primrose offered her guests. Abigail Adams herself testifies that she made her own soap, in her early days at Braintree, and chopped the wood with which she kindled her fires. In such accomplishments she was one of a great sisterhood, thousands of whom served before and thousands after her. These women rarely told such activities in their letters, and rarely, too, I think, to their diaries; for their fingers fitted a quill but awkwardly after a day with distaff or butter-moulding.

These duties were of the external world, mainly mechanical and routine, and they would have permitted her—an untiring materialist in all things workable by hands—to go many ways in the wanderings of thought, if grace, flexibility, and warmth had consorted with the Puritan idea of beauty. She had come to be an idealist in all things having to do with the spirit. Nevertheless, as things stood, she had but one mental path.

The powers about her were theocratic. They held in their hands her life and death in all physical things, and her life and death per omnia sæcula sæculorum. They held the right to whisper approval or to publish condemnation. Her eager, active spirit was fed by sermons and exhortations to self-examination. Nothing else was offered. On Sundays and at the prayer-meetings of mid-week she was warned by these teachers, to whom everybody yielded, to whom in her childhood she had been taught to drop a wayside courtesy, that she should ever be examining head and heart to escape everlasting hell-fire, and that she should endure so as to conduct her devoted life as to appease the anger of a God as vindictive as the very ecclesiasts themselves. No escape or reaction was possible.

The effect of all this upon a spirit so active, pliant, and sensitive is evident. The sole way open to her was the road to introspection—that narrow lane hedged with the trees of contemplative life to all suffering human kind.

Even those of the community whose life duties took them out in their world, and who were consequently more objective than women, even the men, under such conditions, grew self-examining to the degree of a proverb, “The bother with the Yankee is that he rubs badly at the juncture of the soul and body.”

In such a life as this first arose the subjective characteristics of the New England woman at which so many gibes have been written, so many flings spoken; at which so many burly sides have shaken with laughter ἄσβεστος. Like almost every dwarfed or distorted thing in the active practical world, “New England subjectivity” is a result of the shortsightedness of men, the assumption of authority of the strong over the weak, and the wrongs they have to advance self done one another.

Nowadays, in our more objective life, this accent of the ego is pronounced irritating. But God’s sequence is apt to be irritating.

The New England woman’s subjectivity is a result of what has been—the enslaving by environment, the control by circumstance, of a thing flexible, pliant, ductile—in this case a hypersensitive soul—and its endeavor to shape itself to lines and forms men in authority dictated.

Cut off from the larger world, this woman was forced into the smaller. Her mind must have field and exercise for its natural activity and constructiveness. Its native expression was in the great objective world of action and thought about action, the macrocosm; stunted and deprived of its birthright, it turned about and fed upon its subjective self, the microcosm.

Scattered far and wide over the granitic soil of New England there have been the women unmarried. Through the seafaring life of the men, through the adventures of the pioneer enchanting the hot-blooded and daring; through the coaxing away of sturdy youthful muscle by the call of the limitless fat lands to the west; through the siren voice of the cities; and also through the loss of men in war—that untellable misery—these less fortunate women—the unmarried—have in all New England life been many. All the rounding and relaxing grace and charm which lie between maid and man they knew only in brooding fancy. Love might spring, but its growth was rudimentary. Their life was not fulfilled. There were many such spinners.

These women, pertinacious at their tasks, dreamed dreams of what could never come to be. Lacking real things, they talked much of moods and sensations. Naturally they would have moods. Human nature will have its confidant, and naturally they talked to one another more freely than to their married sisters. Introspection plus introspection again. A life vacuous in external events and interrupted by no masculine practicality—where fluttering nerves were never counterpoised by steady muscle—afforded every development to subjective morbidity.

And expression of their religious life granted no outlet to these natures—no goodly work direct upon humankind. The Reformation, whatever magnificence it accomplished for the freedom of the intellect, denied liberty and individual choice to women. Puritanism was the child of the Reformation. Like all religions reacting from the degradations and abuses of the Middle Ages, for women it discountenanced community life. Not for active ends, nor of a certainty for contemplative, were women to hive together and live independent lives.

In her simple home, and by making the best of spare moments, the undirected impulse of the spinster produced penwipers for the heathen and slippers for the dominie. But there was, through all the long years of her life, no dignified, constructive, human expression for the childless and husbandless woman. Because of this lack a dynamo force for good was wasted for centuries, and tens of thousands of lives were blighted.

In New England her theology ruled, as we have said, with an iron and tyrannous hand. It published the axiom, and soon put it in men’s mouths, that the only outlet for women’s activities was marriage. No matter if truth to the loftiest ideals kept her single, a woman unmarried, from a Garden of Eden point of view and the pronunciamento of the average citizen, was not fulfilling the sole and only end for which he dogmatized women were made—she was not child-bearing.

In this great spinster class, dominated by such a voice, we may physiologically expect to find an excess of the neurotic altruistic type, women sickened and extremists, because their nature was unexpressed, unbalanced, and astray. They found a positive joy in self-negation and self-sacrifice, and evidenced in the perturbations and struggles of family life a patience, a dumb endurance, which the humanity about them, and even that of our later day, could not comprehend, and commonly translated into apathy or unsensitiveness. The legendary fervor and devotion of the saints of other days pale before their self-denying discipline.

But instead of gaining, as in the mediæval faith, the applause of contemporaries, and, as in those earlier days, inciting veneration and enthusiasm as a “holy person,” the modern sister lived in her small world very generally an upper servant in a married brother’s or sister’s family. Ibsen’s Pillar of Society, Karsten Bernick, in speaking of the self-effacing Martha, voices in our time the then prevailing sentiment, “You don’t suppose I let her want for anything. Oh, no; I think I may say I am a good brother. Of course, she lives with us and eats at our table; her salary is quite enough for her dress, and—what can a single woman want more?... You know, in a large house like ours, it is always well to have some steady-going person like her whom one can put to anything that may turn up.”

Not such estimates alone, but this woman heard reference to herself in many phrases turning upon her chastity. Her very classification in the current vernacular was based upon her condition of sex. And at last she witnessed for her class an economic designation, the essence of vulgarity and the consummation of insolence—“superfluous women;” that is, “unnecessary from being in excess of what is needed,” women who had not taken husbands, or had lived apart from men. The phrase recalls the use of the word “female”—meaning, “for thy more sweet understanding,” a woman—which grew in use with the Squire Westerns of the eighteenth century, and persisted even in decent mouths until Charles Lamb wrapped it in the cloth of gold of his essay on Modern Gallantry, and buried it forever from polite usage.

In another respect, also, this New England spinster grew into a being such as the world had not seen. It is difficult of explanation. Perhaps most easily said, it is this: she never by any motion or phrase suggested to a man her variation from him. All over the world women do this; unconsciously nearly always; in New England never. The expression of the woman has there been condemned as immodest, unwomanly, and with fierce invective; the expression of the man been lauded. Das Ewig-Weibliche must persist without confession of its existence. In the common conception, when among masculine comrades she should bear herself as a sexless sort of half-being, an hermaphroditic comrade, a weaker, unsexed creature, not markedly masculine, like her brother or the present golfing woman, and far from positively feminine.

All her ideals were masculine; that is, all concrete and human expression of an ideal life set before her was masculine. Her religion was wholly masculine, and God was always “He.” Her art in its later phases was at its height in the “Spectator” and “Tatler,” where the smirking belles who matched the bewigged beaux of Anne’s London are jeered at, and conviction is carried the woman reader that all her sex expressions are if not foul, fool, and sometimes both fool and foul.

In this non-recognition of a woman’s sex, its needs and expression in home and family life, and in the domination of masculine ideals, has been a loss of grace, facile touch in manner, vivacity, légèreté; in short, a want of clarity, delicacy, and feminine strength. To put the woman’s sex aside and suppress it was to emphasize spinster life—and increase it. It is this nullification of her sex traits that has led the world to say the New England woman is masculine, when the truth is she is most femininely feminine in everything but sex—where she is most femininely and self-effacingly it.

It is in this narrowness, this purity, simplicity, and sanctity, in this circumspection and misdirection, that we have the origin of the New England woman’s subjectivity, her unconscious self-consciousness, and that seeming hermaphroditic attitude that has attracted the attention of the world, caused its wonder, and led to its false judgment of her merit.

Social changes—a result of the Zeitgeist—within the last two generations have brought a broadening of the conception of the “sphere” of women. Puritan instincts have been dying. Rationalism has to a degree been taking their place. While, on the other hand,—one may say this quite apart from construing the galvanic twitchings of a revived mediævalism in ecclesiastic and other social affairs as real life—there have also come conceptions of the liberty and dignity of womanhood, independent or self-dependent, beyond those which prevailed in the nunnery world.

A popular feeling has been growing that a woman’s sphere is whatever she can do excellently. What effect this will have on social relations at large we cannot foresee. From such conditions another chivalry may spring! What irony of history if on New England soil!! Possibly, the custom that now pertains of paying women less than men for the same work, the habit in all businesses of giving women the drudging details,—necessary work, indeed, but that to which no reputation is affixed,—and giving to men the broader tasks in which there is contact with the world and the result of contact, growth, may ultimately react, just as out of injustice and brutalities centuries ago arose a chivalrous ideal and a knightly redresser.

The sparseness of wealth, the meagreness of material ideals, and the frugality, simplicity, and rusticity of New England life have never allowed a development of popular manners. Grace among the people has been interpreted theologically; never socially. Their geniality, like their sunshine, has always had a trace of the northeast wind—chilled by the Labrador current of their theology. Native wit has been put out by narrow duties. The conscience of their theology has been instinctively for segregation, never for social amalgamation. They are more solitary than gregarious.

We should expect, then, an abruptness of manner among those left to develop social genius—the women—even among those travelled and most generously educated. We should expect a degree of baldness and uncoveredness in their social processes, which possibly might be expressed by the polysyllable which her instructor wrote at the end of a Harvard Annex girl’s theme to express its literary quality, “unbuttoned”—unconsciously.

When you meet the New England woman, you see her placing you in her social scale. That in tailor-making you God may have used a yardstick different from the New England measure has not yet reached her consciousness; nor that the system of weights and measures of what Sir Leslie Stephen calls “the half-baked civilization of New England” may not prevail in all towns and countries. Should you chance not to fit any notch she has cut in her scale, she is apt to tell you this in a raucous, strident voice, with a schoolma’am air in delivery of her opinion. If she is untravelled and purely of New England surroundings, these qualities may be accented. She is undeniably frank and unquestionably truthful. At all times, in centuries past and to-day, she would scorn such lies as many women amazingly tell for amusement or petty self-defence.

It is evident that she is a good deal of a fatalist. This digression will illustrate: If you protest your belief that so far as this world’s estimate goes some great abilities have no fair expression, that in our streets we jostle mute inglorious Miltons; if you say you have known most profound and learned natures housed on a Kansas farm or in a New Mexico cañon; nay, if you aver your faith that here in New England men and women of genius are unnoticed because Messrs. Hue and Cry, voicing the windier, have not appreciated larger capacities, she will pityingly tell you that this larger talent is supposititious. If it were real, she continues, it must have risen to sight and attracted the eye of men. Her human knowledge is not usually deep nor her insight subtle, and she does not know that in saying this she is contradicting the law of literary history, that the producers of permanent intellectual wares are often not recognized by their contemporaries, nor run after by mammonish publishers. And at last, when you answer that the commonest question with our humankind is nourishment for the body, that ease and freedom from exhausting labor must forerun education, literature, art, she retorts that here is proof she is right: if these unrecognized worthies you instance had the gifts you name, they would be superior to mere physical wants.

If you have longanimity, you do not drive the generality closer; you drown your reflections in Sir Thomas Browne: “The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.... Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of time?”

Her narrow fatalism, united with the conservatism and aristocratic instincts common to all women from their retired life and ignorance of their kind, gives the New England woman a hedged sympathy with the proletarian struggle for freer existence. It may be lack of comprehension rather than lack of sympathy. She would cure by palliations, a leprosy by healing divers sores. At times you find her extolling the changes wrought in the condition of women during the last seventy years. She argues for the extension of education; her conservatism admits that. She may not draw the line of her radicalism even before enfranchisement. But the vaster field of the education of the human race by easier social conditions, by lifting out of money worship and egoism,—this has never been, she argues, and therefore strenuously insists it never will be.

Her civic spirit is Bostonesque. A town’s spirit is a moral and spiritual attitude impressed upon members of a community where events have engendered unity of sentiment, and it commonly subordinates individual idiosyncrasies.

The spirit Boston presents includes a habit of mind apparently ratiocinative, but once safely housed in its ism incredulously conservative and persistently self-righteous—lacking flexibility. Within its limits it is as fixed as the outline of the Common. It has externally a concession and docility. It is polite and kind—but when its selfishness is pressing its greediness is of the usurious lender. In our generation it is marked by lack of imagination, originality, initiative. Having had its origin in Non-conformity, it has the habit of seeing what it is right for others to do to keep their house clean—pulling down its mouth when the rest of the world laughs, square-toeing when the rest trip lightly, straight-lacing when the other human is erring, but all the time carrying a heart under its east-wind stays, and eyes which have had a phenomenal vision for right and wrong doing—for others’ wrongdoing especially; yet withal holding under its sour gravity moral impulses of such import that they have leavened the life of our country to-day and rebuked and held in check easier, lighter, less profound, less illuminated, less star-striking ideals.

It is a spirit featured not unsimilarly to the Lenox landscape—safe, serene, inviting, unable in our day to produce great crop without the introduction of fresh material—and from like cause. A great glacier has pressed on both human spirit and patch of earth. But the sturdy, English bedrock of the immaterial foundation was not by the glacier of Puritanism so smoothed, triturated, and fertilized as was Berkshire soil by the pulverizing weight of its titanic ice flow.

This spirit is also idealistic outside its civic impulses,—referring constantly to the remote past or future,—and in its eyes the abstract is apt to be as real as the concrete. To this characteristic is due not only Emersonism and Alcottism—really old Platonism interpreted for the transcendental Yankee—but also that faith lately revivified, infinitely vulgarized, as logically distorted as the pneuma doctrine of the first century, and called “Christian Science.” The idealism of Emerson foreran the dollar-gathering idealism of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy as the lark of spring foreruns the maple worm.

This idealism oftenest takes religious phases—as in its Puritan origin—and in many instances in our day is content with crude expression. Of foregone days evidence is in an incomplete list—only twenty-five—of Brigham Young’s wives, some of whom bore such old New England patronymics as Angell, Adams, Ross, Lawrence, Bigelow, Snow, Folsom. May a fleeing of these women to Mormonism be explained by their impatience and heart-sickness at their unsexing social condition and religious spirit?—with the admitting to the great scheme of life and action but one sex and that the one to which their theocratic theologians belonged?

Speculations of pure philosophy this New England woman is inclined to fear as vicious. In dialectics she rests upon the glories of the innocuous transcendentalism of the nineteenth century forties. Exceptions to this rule are perhaps those veraciously called “occult;” for she will run to listen to the juggling logic and boasting rhetoric of Swamis Alphadananda and Betadananda and Gammadananda, and cluster about the audience-room of those dusky fakirs much as a swarm of bees flits in May. And like the bees, she deserts cells filled with honey for combs machine-made and wholly empty.

Illuminated by some factitious light, she will again go to unheard-of lengths in extenuating Shelley’s relations to his wives, and in explaining George Eliot’s marriage to her first husband. Here, and for at least once in her life, she combats convention and reasons upon natural grounds. “I don’t see the wickedness of Rudolph,” said one spinster, referring to the tragedy connecting a prince of Austria and a lady of the Vetchera family. “I don’t see why he shouldn’t have followed his heart. But I shouldn’t dare say that to any one else in Boston. Most of them think as I do, but they would all be shocked to have it said.”

“Consider the broad meaning of what you say. Let this instance become a universal law.”

“Still I believe every sensible man and woman applauds Rudolph’s independence.”

With whatsoever or whomsoever she is in sympathy this woman is apt to be a partisan. To husband, parents, and children there could be no more devoted adherent. Her conscience, developed by introspective and subjective pondering, has for her own actions abnormal size and activity. It is always alert, always busy, always prodding, and not infrequently sickened by its congested activity. Duty to those about her, and industry for the same beneficiaries, are watchwords of its strength; and to fail in a mote’s weight is to gain condemnation of two severest sorts—her own and the community’s. The opinion of the community in which she lives is her second almighty power.

In marriage she often exemplifies that saying of Euripides which Stobæus has preserved among the lavender-scented leaves of his Florilegium—“A sympathetic wife is a man’s best possession.” She has mental sympathy—a result of her tense nervous organization, her altruism in domestic life, her strong love, and her sense of duty, justice, and right.

In body she belongs to a people which has spent its physical force and depleted its vitality. She is slight. There is lack of adipose tissue, reserve force, throughout her frame. Her lungs are apt to be weak, waist normal, and hips undersized.

She is awkward in movement. Her climate has not allowed her relaxation, and the ease and curve of motion that more enervating air imparts. This is seen even in public. In walking she holds her elbows set in an angle, and sometimes she steps out in the tilt of the Cantabrigian man. In this is perhaps an unconscious imitation, a sympathetic copying, of an admirable norm; but it is graceless in petticoats. As she steps she knocks her skirt with her knees, and gives you the impression that her leg is crooked, that she does not lock her knee-joint. More often she toes in than out.

She has a marvellously delicate, brilliant, fine-grained skin. It is innocent of powder and purely natural. No beer in past generations has entered its making, and no port; also, little flesh. In New England it could not be said, as a London writer has coarsely put it, that a woman may be looked upon as an aggregate of so many beefsteaks.

Her eyes have a liquid purity and preternatural brightness; she is the child of γλαυχῶπις Athena, rather than of βοῶπις Hera, Pronuba, and ministress to women of more luxuriant flesh. The brown of her hair inclines to the ash shades.

Her features would in passport wording be called “regular.” The expression of her face when she lives in more prosperous communities, where salaries are and an assured future, is a stereotyped smile. In more uncertain life and less fortunate surroundings, her countenance shows a weariness of spirit and a homesickness for heaven that make your soul ache.

Her mind is too self-conscious on the one hand, and too set on lofty duties on the other, to allow much of coquetterie, or flirting, or a femininely accented camaraderie with men—such as the more elemental women of Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco, and New York enjoy. She is farthest possible from the luxuriant beauty of St. Louis who declared, “You bet! black-jack-diamond kind of a time!” when asked if she had enjoyed her social dash in Newport. This New England woman would, forsooth, take no dash in Aurovulgus. But falling by chance among vulgarities and iniquities, she guards against the defilement of her lips, for she loves a pure and clean usage of our facile English speech.

The old phase of the New England woman is passing. It is the hour for some poet to voice her threnody. Social conditions under which she developed are almost obliterated. She is already outnumbered in her own home by women of foreign blood, an ampler physique, a totally different religious conception, a far different conduct; and a less exalted ideal of life. Intermixtures will follow and racial lines gradually fade. In the end she will not be. Her passing is due to the unnumbered husbandless and the physical attenuation of the married—attenuation resulting from their spare and meagre diet, and, it is also claimed, from the excessive household labor of their mothers. More profoundly causative—in fact, inciting the above conditions—was the distorted morality and debilitating religion impressed upon her sensitive spirit. Mayhap in this present decay some Mœra is punishing that awful crime of self-sufficing ecclesiasticism. Her unproductivity—no matter from what reason, whether from physical necessity or a spirit-searching flight from the wrath of God—has been her death.

A NEW ENGLAND ABODE OF THE BLESSED

... ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρη
Ζεὺς Κρονίδης ποίησε δικαιότερον καὶ ἄρειον,
ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, ...
τοῖς δὲ δίχ’ ἀνθρώπων βίοτον καὶ ἤθε’ ὀπάσσας
Ζεὺς Κρονίδης κατένασσε πατὴρ ἐς πείρατα γαίης·
—χαὶ τοὶ μὲν ναίουσιν ἀκηδέα θυμὸν ἔχοντες
—ἐν μαχάρων νήσοισι παῤ Ὠχεανὸν βαθυδίνην,
—ὄλβιοι ἡρωες· τοῖσιν μελιηδέα καρπὸν
—τρςὶ ἔτεος θάλλοντα φέρει ζείδωρος ἄρουρα.
Hesiod

Under bloudie Diocletian ... a great number of Christians which were assembled togither to heare the word of life ... were slaine by the wicked pagans at Lichfield, whereof ... as you would say, The field of dead corpses. Holinshed

A NEW ENGLAND ABODE OF THE BLESSED

Upon the broad level of one of our Litchfield hills is—if we accept ancient legend—a veritable Island of the Blessed. There heroes fallen after strong fight enjoy rest forever.

The domination of unyielding law in the puny affairs of men—the unfathomableness of Mœra, the lot no man can escape—comes upon one afresh upon this hill-top. What clay we are in the hands of fate! “ἅπαντα τíχτει χθὼν πάλιν τε λαμβáνει,” cried Euripides—“all things the earth puts forth and takes again.”

But why should the efforts of men to build a human hive have here been wiped away—here where all nature is wholesome and in seeming unison with regulated human life? The air sparkles buoyantly up to your very eyes—and almost intoxicates you with its life and joy. Through its day-translucence crows cut their measured flight and brisker birds flitter, and when the young moon shines out of a warm west elegiac whippoorwills cry to the patient night.

Neither volcanic ashes nor flood, whirlwind nor earthquake—mere decay has here nullified men’s efforts for congregated life and work. The soil of the hill, porous and sandy, is of moderate fertility. Native oaks and chestnuts, slender birches and fragrant hemlocks, with undergrowths of coral-flowering laurel, clothe its slopes. Over its sandstone ledges brooks of soft water treble minor airs—before they go loitering among succulent grasses and spearmint and other thirsty brothers of the distant meadows.

Nearly two hundred years ago pioneers of a Roundhead, independent type—the type which led William of Orange across the Channel for preservation of that liberty which Englishmen for hundreds of years had spoken of as “antient”—such men broke this sod, till then untouched by axe or plough. They made clearings, and grouped their hand-hewn houses just where in cool mornings of summer they could see the mists roll up from their hill-locked pond to meet the rosy day; just where, when the sun sank behind the distant New York mountains, they could catch within their windows his last shaft of gold.

Here they laid their hearths and dwelt in primitive comfort. Their summers were unspeakably beautiful—and hard-working. Their autumns indescribably brilliant, hill-side and valley uniting to form a radiance God’s hand alone could hold. Their winters were of deep snows and cold winds and much cutting and burning of wood. The first voice of their virid spring came in the bird-calls of early March, when snow melted and sap mounted, and sugar maples ran syrup; when ploughs were sharpened, and steaming and patient oxen rested their sinews through the long, pious Sabbath.

Wandering over this village site, now of fenced-in fields, you find here and there a hearth and a few cobbles piled above it. The chimney-shaft has long since disappeared. You happen upon stone curbs, and look down to the dark waters of wells. You come upon bushes of old-fashioned, curled-petal, pink-sweet roses and snowy phlox, and upon tiger lilies flaunting odalisque faces before simple sweetbrier, and upon many another garden plant which “a handsome woman that had a fine hand”—as Izaak Walton said of her who made the trout fly—once set as border to her path. Possibly the very hand that planted these pinks held a bunch of their sweetness after it had grown waxen and cold. The pinks themselves are now choked by the pushing grass.

And along this line of gooseberry-bushes we trace a path from house to barn. Here was the fireplace. The square of small boulders yonder marks the barn foundation. Along this path the house-father bore at sunrise and sunset his pails of foaming milk. Under that elm spreading between living-room and barn little children of the family built pebble huts, in these rude confines cradling dolls which the mother had made from linen of her own weave, or the father whittled when snow had crusted the earth and made vain all his hauling and digging.

Those winters held genial hours. Nuts from the woods and cider from the orchard stood on the board near by. Home-grown wood blazed in the chimney; home-grown chestnuts, hidden in the ashes by busy children, popped to expectant hands; house-mothers sat with knitting and spinning, and the father and farm-men mended fittings and burnished tools for the spring work. Outside the stars glittered through a clear sky and the soundless earth below lay muffled in sleep.

Over yonder across the road was the village post-office, and not far away were stores of merchant supplies. But of these houses no vestige now remains. Where the post-house stood the earth is matted with ground-pine and gleaming with scarlet berries of the wintergreen. The wiping-out is as complete as that of the thousand trading-booths, long since turned to clay, of old Greek Mycenæ, or of the stalls of the ancient trading-folk dwelling between Jaffa and Jerusalem where Tell-ej-Jezari now lies.

The church of white clap-boards which these villagers used for praise and prayer—not a small temple—still abides. Many of the snowy houses of old New England worship pierce their luminous ether with graceful spires. But this meeting-house lifts a square, central bell-tower which now leans on one side as if weary with long standing. The old bell which summoned its people to their pews still hangs behind green blinds—a not unmusical town-crier. But use, life, good works have departed with those whom it exhorted to church duty, and in sympathy with all the human endeavor it once knew, but now fordone, in these days it never rings blithely, it can only be made to toll. Possibly it can only be made to toll because of the settling of its supporting tower. But the fact remains; and who knows if some wounded spirit may not be dwelling within its brazen curves, sick at heart with its passing and ineffective years?