advertisements in the papers go to show that this sweeping
list is no lie. Atop of the fret and the stampede,
the tingling self-consciousness of a new people makes
them take a sort of perverted pride in the futile
racket that sends up the death-rate—a child’s
delight in the blaze and the dust of the March of
Progress. Is it not ‘distinctively American’?
It is, and it is not. If the cities were all America,
as they pretend, fifty years would see the March of
Progress brought to a standstill, as a locomotive
is stopped by heated bearings....
Down in the meadow the mowing-machine has checked,
and the horses are shaking themselves. The last
of the sunlight leaves the top of Monadnock, and four
miles away Main Street lights her electric lamps.
It is band-night in Main Street, and the folks from
Putney, from Marlboro’, from Guildford, and
even New Fane will drive in their well-filled waggons
to hear music and look at the Ex-President. Over
the shoulder of the meadow two men come up very slowly,
their hats off and their arms swinging loosely at
their sides. They do not hurry, they have not
hurried, and they never will hurry, for they are of
country—bankers of the flesh and blood
of the ever bankrupt cities. Their children may
yet be pale summer boarders; as the boarders, city-bred
weeds, may take over their farms. From the plough
to the pavement goes man, but to the plough he returns
at last.
‘Going to supper?’
‘Ye-ep,’ very slowly across the wash of
the uncut grass.
‘Say, that corncrib wants painting.’
‘’Do that when we get around to it.’
They go off through the dusk, without farewell or
salutation steadily as their own steers. And
there are a few millions of them—unhandy
men to cross in their ways, set, silent, indirect
in speech, and as impenetrable as that other Eastern
fanner who is the bedrock of another land. They
do not appear in the city papers, they are not much
heard in the streets, and they tell very little in
the outsider’s estimate of America.
And they are the American.
(1895)
We had walked abreast of the year from the very beginning,
and that was when the first blood-root came up between
the patches of April snow, while yet the big drift
at the bottom of the meadow held fast. In the
shadow of the woods and under the blown pine-needles,
clots of snow lay till far into May, but neither the
season nor the flowers took any note of them, and,
before we were well sure Winter had gone, the lackeys
of my Lord Baltimore in their new liveries came to
tell us that Summer was in the valley, and please
might they nest at the bottom of the garden?
