class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 22]"/>I regarded the new person with awe if he could do that.... In a way it was true. He was a leisurely-minded man, who knew what he was going to say before he spoke, had it correctly in mind. The product came forth edited. He called men by 'phone—names strange to me then that have become household names since—while we sat by smiling and silent in his little newspaper shop.... And those who came wanted to know if we drank, when they talked of renting their cottages; and if we were actors.

Not that we looked like actors, but it transpired that actor-folk had rented one of the cottages another year, and had sat up late and had not always clothed themselves continually full-length. Once, other actor people had motored down, and it was said that those on the back seats of the car had been rigid among beer-cases.

We were given the values and disadvantages of the East shore and also of the West shore, the town between.... Somehow we always turn to the East in our best moments and it was so this day.... We were directed to the house of a man who owned two little cottages just a mile from town. He was not well that day, but his boy went with us to show the cottages. That boy you shall be glad to know.

We walked together down the long lane, and I did not seem able to reach our guide's heart, so we were silent, but Penelope came between us. He would have been strange, indeed, had she failed.... I look back now from where I sit—to that long lane. I love it very much for it led to the very edge of a willowed bluff—to the end of the land. Erie brimmed before us. It led to a new life, too.

I had always disliked Erie—as one who lived in the Lake Country and chose his own. I approved mildly of St. Claire; Michigan awed me from a little boy's summer; Huron was familiar from another summer, but Erie heretofore had meant only something to be crossed—something shallow and petulant. Here she lay in the sunlight, with bars of orange light darkening to ocean blue, and one far sparkling line in the West. Then I knew that I had wronged her. She seemed not to mind, but leisurely to wait. We faced the South from the bluffs, and I thought of the stars from this vantage.... If a man built his house here, he could explain where he lived by the nearest map in a Japanese house, or in a Russian peasant's house, for Erie to them is as clear a name as Baikal or the Inland Sea is to us. I had heard Japanese children repeat the names of the Great Lakes. When you come to a shore like this you are at the end of the landscape. You must pause. Somehow I think—we are pausing still. One must pause to project a dream.

... For weeks there, in a little rented place, we were so happy that we hardly ventured to speak of it. We had expected so little, and had brought such weariness. Day after day unfolded in the very fulness of life, and the small flower-beds there on the stranger's land held the cosmic answer. All that summer Jupiter marked time across the southern heavens; and I shall never forget the sense of conquest in hiving the first swarm of bees. They had to be carried on a branch down a deep gulley, and several hundred feet beyond. Two-thirds of the huge cluster were in the air about me, before the super was lifted. Yet there was not a sting from the tens of thousands. We had the true thirst that year. Little things were enough; we were innocent, even of possession, and brought back to the good land all the sensitizing that the City had given. There were days in which we were so happy—that another summer of such life would have seemed too much to ask.

I had lived three weeks, when I remembered that formerly I read newspapers, and opened the nearest. The mystery and foreignness of it was as complete as the red fire of Antares that gleamed so balefully every night across the Lake—a hell of trials and jealousy and suicide, obscenity and passion. It all came up from the sheet to my nostrils like the smell of blood.

... There are men and women in town who are dying for the country; literally this is so, and such numbers of them that any one who lives apart from the crowds and calls forth guests from time to time, can find these sufferers among his little circle of friends. They come here for week-ends and freshen up like newly watered plants—turning back with set faces early Monday morning. I think of a flat of celery plants that have grown to the end of the nourishment of their crowded space, and begin to yellow and wither, sick of each other.... One does not say what one thinks. It is not a simple thing for those whose life and work is altogether identified with the crowded places, to uproot for roomy planting in the country. But the fact remains, many are dying to be free.

The City, intolerable as it is in itself—in its very nature against the growth of the body and soul of man after a certain time—is nevertheless the chief of those urging forces which shall bring us to simplicity and naturalness at the last. Manhood is built quite as much by learning to avoid evil as by cultivating the aspiration for the good.

Just as certainly as there are thousands suffering for the freedom of spaces, far advanced in a losing fight of vitality against the cruel tension of city life, there are whole races of men who have yet to meet and pass through this terrifying complication of the crowds, which brings a refining gained in no other way. All growth is a passage through hollows and over hills, though the journey regarded as a whole is an ascent.

A great leader of men who has never met the crowds face to face is inconceivable. He must have fought for life in the depths and pandemoniums, to achieve that excellence of equipment which makes men turn to him for his word and his strength. We are so made that none of us can remain sensitive to prolonged beauty; neither can we endure continuously the stifling hollows between the hills. Be very sure the year-round countryman does not see what you see coming tired and half-broken from the town; and those who are caught and maimed by the City cannot conceive their plight, as do you, returning to them again from the country replenished and refreshed.

The great names of trade have been country-bred boys, but it is equally true that the most successful farmers of to-day are men who have returned to Nature from the town, some of them having been driven to the last ditch physically and commanded to return or die. It is in the turnings of life that we bring a fresh eye to circumstances and events.

Probably in a nation of bad workmen, no work is so stupidly done as the farming. Great areas of land have merely been scratched. There are men within an hour's ride from here who plant corn in the same fields every year, and check it throughout in severing the lateral roots by deep cultivation. They and their fathers have planted corn, and yet they have not the remotest idea of what takes place in their fields during the long summer from the seedling to the full ear; and very rarely in the heart of the countryman is there room for rapture. Though they have the breadth of the horizon line and all the skies to breathe in, few men look up more seldom.

FOOTNOTES:

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BLUFF AND SHORE