But dancing is the great national amusement in Altruria,
where it has not altogether lost its religious nature.
A sort of march in the temples is as much a part of
the worship as singing, and so dancing has been preserved
from the disgrace which it used to be in with serious
people among us. In the lovely afternoons you
see young people dancing in the meadows, and hear
them shouting in time to the music, while the older
men and women watch them from their seats in the shade.
Every sort of pleasure here is improvised, and as
you pass through a village the first thing you know
the young girls and young men start up in a sort of
girandole, and linking hands in an endless chain
stretch the figure along through the street and out
over the highway to the next village, and the next
and the next. The work has all been done in the
forenoon, and every one who chooses is at liberty
to join in the fun.
The villages are a good deal alike to a stranger,
and we knew what to expect there after a while, but
the country is perpetually varied, and the unexpected
is always happening in it. The old railroad-beds,
on which we travelled, are planted with fruit and
nut trees and flowering shrubs, and our progress is
through a fragrant bower that is practically endless,
except where it takes the shape of a colonnade near
the entrance of a village, with vines trained about
white pillars, and clusters of grapes (which are ripening
just now) hanging down. The change in the climate
created by cutting off the southeastern peninsula and
letting in the equatorial current, which was begun
under the first Altrurian president, with an unexpended
war-appropriation, and finished for what one of the
old capitalistic wars used to cost, is something perfectly
astonishing. Aristides says he told you something
about it in his speech at the White Mountains, but
you would never believe it without the evidence of
your senses. Whole regions to the southward, which
were nearest the pole and were sheeted with ice and
snow, with the temperature and vegetation of Labrador,
now have the climate of Italy; and the mountains,
which used to bear nothing but glaciers, are covered
with olive orchards and plantations of the delicious
coffee which they drink here. Aristides says
you could have the same results at home—no!
in the United States—by cutting
off the western shore of Alaska and letting in the
Japanese current; and it could be done at the cost
of any average war.
VI
But I must not get away from my personal experiences
in these international statistics. Sometimes,
when night overtakes us, we stop and camp beside the
road, and set about getting our supper of eggs and
bread and butter and cheese, or the fruits that are
ripening all round us. Since my experience with
that pullet I go meekly mushrooming in the fields
and pastures; and when I have set the mushrooms stewing
over an open fire, Aristides makes the coffee, and
Copyrights
Through the Eye of the Needle from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
