IN SIGHT OF MONADNOCK.  ACROSS A CONTINENT.  THE EDGE OF THE EAST. OUR OVERSEAS MEN.  SOME EARTHQUAKES.  HALF-A-DOZEN PICTURES.  ‘CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS.’  ON ONE SIDE ONLY.  LEAVES FROM A WINTER NOTE-BOOK.

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IN SIGHT OF MONADNOCK

After the gloom of gray Atlantic weather, our ship came to America in a flood of winter sunshine that made unaccustomed eyelids blink, and the New Yorker, who is nothing if not modest, said, ’This isn’t a sample of our really fine days.  Wait until such and such times come, or go to such and a such a quarter of the city.’  We were content, and more than content, to drift aimlessly up and down the brilliant streets, wondering a little why the finest light should be wasted on the worst pavements in the world; to walk round and round Madison Square, because that was full of beautifully dressed babies playing counting-out games, or to gaze reverently at the broad-shouldered, pug-nosed Irish New York policemen.  Wherever we went there was the sun, lavish and unstinted, working nine hours a day, with the colour and the clean-cut lines of perspective that he makes.  That any one should dare to call this climate muggy, yea, even ‘subtropical,’ was a shock.  There came such a man, and he said, ’Go north if you want weather—­weather that is weather.  Go to New England.’  So New York passed away upon a sunny afternoon, with her roar and rattle, her complex smells, her triply over-heated rooms, and much too energetic inhabitants, while the train went north to the lands where the snow lay.  It came in one sweep—­almost, it seemed, in one turn of the wheels—­covering the winter-killed grass and turning the frozen ponds that looked so white under the shadow of lean trees into pools of ink.

As the light closed in, a little wooden town, white, cloaked, and dumb, slid past the windows, and the strong light of the car lamps fell upon a sleigh (the driver furred and muffled to his nose) turning the corner of a street.  Now the sleigh of a picture-book, however well one knows it, is altogether different from the thing in real life, a means of conveyance at a journey’s end; but it is well not to be over-curious in the matter, for the same American who has been telling you at length how he once followed a kilted Scots soldier from Chelsea to the Tower, out of pure wonder and curiosity at his bare knees and sporran, will laugh at your interest in ‘just a cutter.’

The staff of the train—­surely the great American nation would be lost if deprived of the ennobling society of brakeman, conductor, Pullman-car conductor, negro porter, and newsboy—­told pleasant tales, as they spread themselves at ease in the smoking compartments, of snowings up the line to Montreal, of desperate attacks—­four engines together and a snow-plough in front—­on drifts thirty feet high, and the pleasures of walking along the tops of goods wagons to brake a train, with the thermometer thirty below freezing.  ’It comes cheaper to kill men that way than to put air-brakes on freight-cars,’ said the brakeman.