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 WITH FEET TO THE 
 
 CHARLES M. SKINNER 
 
GIFT OF 
 A. F. Morrison 
 
WITH FEET 
 
 TO 
 THE EARTH 
 
BY CHARLES M. SKINNER 
 
 
 MYTHS AND LEGENDS 
 OF OUR OWN LAND 
 
 ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAVURES 
 
 Two volumes in a box. 12 mo. Buck- 
 ram, Gilt Top, Deckle Edges, $3.00 
 
GIFT OF 
 A,f\ Mo 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1897, 
 
 BY 
 J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY. 
 
TO MY BROTHERS 
 OTIS AND WILL 
 I DEDICATE THIS 
 BOOK IN MEMORY 
 OF THE PLEASANT 
 TRAMPS WE HAVE 
 TAKEN TOGETHER 
 
 M99M9 
 
Preft 
 
 ace 
 
 READER, you have warning that these 
 explorations promise little peril and 
 adventure ; and if you are fond of steady 
 going you may complain when you are 
 checked and asked to look at things, or, 
 worse, to think or talk about them. Yet, 
 because the road is always open, you need 
 not turn into the lanes and by-ways, unless 
 you are so minded. I hope that our jaunt 
 together may be made in good humor, even 
 when you disagree with me, as you are 
 sure to do sometimes, and that the little 
 outing wherein we shall ramble as much in 
 talk as with our feet may profit us both. 
 If I shall persuade you out of your room 
 
viii Preface 
 
 or office, be it for an hour, to taste air and 
 think away from aches and business, the 
 message in this my book will not have 
 gone out in vain. 
 
Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE WANDERER 7 
 
 REMINISCENT AND PERSONAL 20 
 
 SOME SAMPLE WALKS 35 
 
 PARTLY PRACTICAL 70 
 
 NIGHT-PROWLS IN THE STREETS 96 
 
 SOME HUMBUGS OF SCIENCE 117 
 
 A RUSTLER'S CONSCIENCE 141 
 
 SATISFACTION WITH THE COUNTRY 151 
 
 SOLITUDE AND COMPANY 167 
 
 AUTUMN SIGHTS AND MUSINGS 190 
 
The ffidnderer 
 
 SONS of Ishmael, scorn the pity that is 
 put upon you. Wanderers ? What 
 harm of that ? So long as you keep from 
 mischief and don't marry, you may as 
 well be wandering as sitting on door-steps. 
 Rolling stones, that gather no moss, are 
 sometimes bright and pleasing objects, and 
 it is when moss gets hold of it that a stone 
 decays. Tramps who idle are worse than 
 idlers who tramp. There are too many non- 
 producers, but there are too many others 
 who have no saving grace of vagrancy in 
 their souls. Their noses trace figures up 
 and down pages of ledgers ; they never 
 look out of a window ; they have forgotten 
 about natural happiness ; they live to ac- 
 cumulate, or to rub elbows with their kind, 
 or to improve the human race after their 
 private ideas. Air and earth are tonics to 
 body, mind, and morals. The man who is 
 
 7 
 
8 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 out of doors all the time may be rough, 
 but^his manhood js. sound. The mean peo- 
 ple, l&eAnisWsj ih : sharpers, the tyrants, 
 ^haye Jip . vagcom dispositions. Soldiers, 
 s*aiJo*sJ GGwt>by, JluiftbVnjien, hunters, fish- 
 ers, prospectors, wagoners, missionaries, 
 you find them good company, don't you? 
 Yet it is a company that may spoil in the 
 house. The man who has sky in his eye 
 has sunlight deeper in, and the green 
 things of earth make fertile tracts in his 
 head. It is a self-preservative instinct, a 
 means to health, a business against glooms, 
 that gets folks out of doors. Only since 
 we had furnaces and radiators instead of 
 fireplaces, only since we invented tene- 
 ments, only since yards, trees, and song- 
 birds were abolished in our cities, have we 
 taken to nervous dyspepsia, lame livers, 
 Bright's disease, neurosis, pessimism, pare- 
 sis, and corns. Bah ! Get away from 
 them all. Turn your steps to the country. 
 Improve your leisure with vagrancy. 
 
 When weather and disposition permit, r 
 the former does for eight months in the 
 year ; the latter ought to always, sprawl 
 
The Wanderer 9 
 
 on the grass, inhale its acid fragrance, note 
 the life that wriggles and scuttles beneath 
 it. If it is spring, see how the firstlings of 
 the year push through the earth, folded in 
 a spike to press the more subtly and safely, 
 some of them red and sober until they get 
 foothold, that animals who prey on vegeta- 
 tion may overlook them, some hiding be- 
 neath others. Plants when young have 
 frequent semblances to each other. They 
 are indeterminate because they want to 
 cheat the preying insect. Their primary 
 leaves give no hint of the completed plant. 
 When you first see jack-in-the-pulpit you 
 fancy that poison-ivy has put up spathes. 
 Then, look up. In early May the birch- 
 woods, seen towards the sun, show green 
 at its sweetest and most spiritual. The 
 palette does not contain this quality. 
 
 Thus to rest between earth and sky, the 
 sun ninety-three million miles over your 
 head and warming it, eight thousand miles 
 of rock beneath you, and life leaving dark- 
 ness to meet the sun, is to be yourself 
 penetrated by the vital currents that shape 
 creation out of chaos. Blood starts quicker 
 
10 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 in spring because of our physical and 
 mental sympathy with nature. Even in 
 the physical distress of summer heat one 
 feels the life-tides in the earth, the air. 
 The sun is the reason for them. Life mul- 
 tiplies as he is near. Antaeus-like, you are 
 vigorated, calmed, assured, and sane when 
 you touch the ground and bury your 
 anxieties beneath it Behold the stum- 
 blings of the new family of lady-bugs why 
 lady-birds ? in the catnip ; watch the 
 spiders setting their gins for flies ; see the 
 jewels on the insects that hum and toddle 
 through the herbage : their life is in your 
 veins ; it is common to us all. How little 
 suffices ! With Omar Khayyam, we realize 
 at these moments that bread and drink, a 
 book, a tree, a song, and love are all we need. 
 We envy millionaires in our bad and un- 
 productive hours. All their money cannot 
 buy the health and delight of this idleness 
 at the wayside, spent in chewing shreds of 
 bark and fancy. The best things are free 
 to all of us. Never be so purse-rich as to 
 refuse them. 
 
 As walking is the most economical, it is 
 
The Wanderer 1 1 
 
 the most neglected means of locomotion. 
 You can at least divert some time in your 
 vacations and holidays to this ancient and 
 not ignoble business. Away from town, 
 care-free, with a handful of needed prop- 
 erty, and staff and scrip, every prospect is 
 new, every day an adventure. Whether 
 your way lead through the well-attended 
 farms of New England, the fat gardens of 
 the Middle States, the ocean-like prairie, 
 the chaos of the Bad Lands, the splendors 
 of the mountains, or the enervating palm 
 lands of the South, whether you plod be- 
 side Rhine, Rhone, or Hudson, under the 
 green arches of Lincoln, across the wild, 
 sour moors of Yorkshire, or through the 
 lonely glens of Wales and Scotland, your 
 seeing will be your own, your impressions 
 will be fresh, you will learn, you will rejoice. 
 Foreign travel is not necessary. You 
 can walk to your town's edge and pace 
 some miles of country road in the gloam- 
 ing. It is a meditative season, that, and 
 the experience is wholesome after the day's 
 business. And if it does not frighten you 
 when trees and bushes gather for a jump, 
 
12 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 or whisper and snicker as you pass, you 
 may prolong your tramp into the starlight 
 and moonlight time. I have climbed hills 
 at midnight, in the snow, and the glory of 
 heaven rested on the earth and did not 
 wake it. For nature really sleeps at night, 
 as man, her offspring, does. The regular 
 motion of the wind is her breath. To be 
 awake is strange. The pranks of cities are 
 out of place in the country after sunset, 
 and it is there and then one is thrown 
 upon himself; then he must decide whether 
 stars and frogs are good or evil company ; 
 for the man who runs away from town to 
 escape himself finds himself when he 
 reaches the woods. He will gain on a hill- 
 top a power of soul-sight to look down on 
 the plain of life and trace the paths it is 
 well for men to tread, or his attention will 
 be taken with the cold and the briers. He 
 will grope about the roots of trees, finding 
 them made to fall over, or he will hear 
 symphonies among their leaves, and calls 
 to climb, to toss in their leafy hammocks, 
 to dream epics. 
 
 We but half desert our species when we 
 
The Wanderer 13 
 
 walk alone in the woods or by the sea, for 
 both the waves and the leaves are talking, 
 talking of durations and principles, not 
 the gossip of the corners. We think all 
 such speech mere sound, and that our own 
 babble is wiser. If only we could hear 
 true ! Rustling leaves, the gust, water's 
 plash and tumble, bird-songs, the cries of 
 brutes : these were prologues to the human 
 comedy and are its accompaniment. Per- 
 haps when men had a sense of smell as 
 keen as that of dogs they also knew how to 
 listen, and could read at least the temporal 
 meanings in this talk of the world. Does 
 the tree have the same speech whether it 
 is well or ill, dry or surfeited, growing or 
 dying ? And it is a fact about this speech. 
 The waves rise because a wind has come ; 
 that stirs because the sun has somewhere 
 baked the earth, and the hot air, rising, 
 leaves a vacuum that cooler air rushes in 
 
 to fill ; the sun has baked, because ? 
 
 And there is a sun, because ? Shall we 
 
 always express our relation to the outer 
 world by an interrogation point ? 
 
 Take your best self with you when you 
 
14 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 walk, for to divest the world of the per- 
 sonal factor in our understanding of it is 
 impossible. It must reflect us. And be 
 open to all impressions. Man is an animal 
 who can live more outside of himself than 
 the others can. Or, to reverse that propo- 
 sition, he can absorb the most into himself. 
 So full is nature of delight that we suffer a 
 kind of stun of plenitude in her company. 
 We are often surprised at the beauty re- 
 vealed in a familiar scene by a photograph. 
 We had looked along the same road, at the 
 same clump of wood, the same tangle of 
 wild flowers, and it had not seemed won- 
 derful. That is because equal beauty un- 
 folds around us in every direction, and our 
 eyes are not trained to the selective use 
 that is art. Yet, the sympathetic tramp 
 may be an artist with his eye. Why not ? 
 If we look with the unprejudiced minds of 
 children we are artists, in so far. 
 
 The trouble is, we know what ought to 
 be in a certain place, and we think we see 
 it ; but often we do not There are even 
 mathematic and mechanic falsities that are 
 aesthetic truths. When a horse is painted 
 
The Wanderer 15 
 
 in action as the photograph shows him he 
 moves less vigorously than he does when 
 all four legs are impossibly thrust out. 
 When the broad painter strikes out a tree, 
 puts in a figure, gives you a distant field 
 with a wipe of the brush, he is false to 
 detail, but true to effect. In music some 
 of the finest resolutions are from discord 
 into harmony, whereas, theoretically, there 
 should be no discord. Take the E that 
 sounds through the close of the " Siegfried 
 Idyl," sounds with the continuity and 
 depth of a distant sea. As the key modu- 
 lates into B and F# minor, so the bass 
 should change, but the result would be 
 petty, lifeless. The E tones on, defiant of 
 alterations in the melody, and the mind 
 rests on it, as it does on a firm base in 
 architecture. It is the breadth in art of 
 all kinds, the freedom, soundness, surety, 
 repose, that make it great. Littleness, fus- 
 siness, over-elaboration, are never caught 
 from the material world. 
 
 The great charm of nature is that it fits 
 itself to every one of our selves and every 
 one of our humors, and we thereby get a. 
 
l6 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 whimsey into our heads that it serves us, 
 an amusing idea. What do you suppose 
 nature thinks of men ? Looks up to them 
 as her perfect work, or down on them as 
 the most prying, meddlesome, troubling 
 children she has begotten ? She is full of 
 lessons for us : 
 
 Calm : no useless emotion or action for its 
 own sake ; this teaches security and repose. 
 
 Economy : adaptation of means to an 
 end without waste of energy, material, or 
 time ; this teaches us to avoid nerves, frit- 
 tering and unprepared action. 
 
 Constancy : each force, each element, 
 holding to its purpose ; this teaches pa- 
 tience, protection, love. 
 
 Evolution : everything working towards 
 the death of the unfit and the establish- 
 ment of higher, more self-sufficing forms ; 
 this teaches civilization. 
 
 One of its lessons is hard for us to learn, 
 for it is the lesson of modesty, or reserve. 
 There are men so made that they look 
 patronizingly over the mountains, the sea, 
 the prairies, the sky, all those symbols of 
 the infinite, and say, " How nice it is that 
 
The Wanderer 17 
 
 these things were created especially for 
 us !" For them ! little accidents of evolu- 
 tion ; insects of a day, bumbling over this 
 brief globe. Nay, truly, the bird, the bat, 
 the tree, the flower, have the same right, 
 cause, and purpose here as men. We are, 
 happily, come in time to enjoy this beauty 
 that is the world. If beauty is not seen, 
 strike your breast and cry Alack ! for you 
 are blind. True, there is no place for con- 
 stant happiness, but we neglect much hap- 
 piness because we will not stop to catch it, 
 or to let it catch us. It flashes on us out 
 of a bird-note, a glance at a hill-top, the 
 greeting of an eye. We are so busy we 
 may not indulge it, busy with our temporal 
 affairs, while eternities are everywhere in 
 sight and hearing. Neglect not these calls. 
 It may be a distant bell, a wind in the trees, 
 the uprising of a childish mood or memory : 
 if it summons to serenity and new life, no 
 business of the race is so urgent. It is use- 
 less to seek for happiness, or even for con- 
 tent But let them alone and they come 
 to you, like women. Even heroes find 
 that they must adapt themselves to the 
 
i8 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 world, for the steady old planet will not go 
 to them ; by jibing with it they gain its 
 tides and seasons. Let your walking be 
 wise by being sympathetic. 
 
 And this should hold in your walks among 
 men, no less than in the fields. One does 
 not know even a work of man, let alone 
 his heart or mind, any more than he knows 
 a phase of nature, unless he views it sym- 
 pathetically. It must be liked for more 
 than its intrinsic beauty if it is a work of 
 art : we must look at it as the result of a 
 self-enjoyment, a hope, a faith. Here is a 
 quaint old Chinese ink-pot. It may be of 
 the Kien Lung period, or it may not : that 
 does not matter. Through the crude deco- 
 ration I see delight in the work for its own 
 sake. There is more in this thoughtful 
 rounding than a wish to finish the job and 
 get the pay ; there is a pride in this sweet, 
 soft blue, fresh as the sky, and a trust that 
 its owner is going to like it. This lump of 
 baked clay is an individual expression : 
 simple, rustic, innocent. So must be all 
 art of its kind ; so, to an extent, must all 
 art be ; so is the essence of the art of see- 
 
The Wanderer 19 
 
 ing. It rests with us whether we see good 
 or ill ; but in order that we may see as 
 much good as possible, let us be as much 
 with, and of, what is fine, clean, patient, as 
 we can. Don't let the dinner bell stop us 
 from listening to the church bell, if the 
 latter has the more health and calm for us 
 in its sound or message. Don't neglect 
 sweet odors, bird-songs, fair views, and fair 
 faces because every one is urging the last 
 novel on us. Friend, be courageous so far 
 as to be yourself, always yourself, then 
 you will be near content and one among a 
 thousand. 
 
Reminiscent and Personal 
 
 A TRADITION in our family has it 
 that a strain of savagery was 
 brought into it by an ancestor who was 
 stolen by Indians in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, and who came back to the New 
 England settlements with a red wife. It is 
 a tradition liked by some of us, and pleads 
 heredity for our legs when, without warn- 
 ing, they carry us off to the woods, or up 
 on hill-tops, or out at unseemly hours, to 
 our own astonishment and protest, leaving 
 books unread, work undone, and people 
 waiting to scold us. When my brother and 
 I escape to the wilderness this ancestor 
 takes us in hand, pulls off most of our 
 clothes, ties moccasins on our feet, sets 
 us afloat in canoes, tips us overboard in 
 impish glee, acquaints us with deer and 
 other pretty citizens of the woods, makes 
 the earth and air sweet to us, and puts 
 20 
 
Reminiscent and Personal 21 
 
 health into our muscles. Indeed, so power- 
 fully does he persuade my brother that he 
 goes to his cabin in the dead of winter, 
 fishes with Indians on northern lakes, and 
 hangs his bare arms over clothes-lines to 
 roast in the sun, when he has nothing else 
 to do, hoping to get back to his original 
 brown. Is it any wonder that this sterling 
 old fellow has sent down his influence 
 through generations of his successors, and 
 that when we reach the forest we recognize 
 our home, howbeit vaguely ? 
 
 Nature ! Kind, though savage protector. 
 It never seems lonely where its spirit moves. 
 I own to a love for it, keen and real, and 
 find my best employments in its company. 
 In youth I remember hugging trees in the 
 woods, patting their bark and whispering to 
 them ; swinging in their branches, lying on 
 the turf beneath them and chewing grass, 
 no better a way of devouring nature than 
 we have in eating berries, but wilder. And 
 in a certain village there are codgers who 
 smile as I pass and whisper, " That's the 
 city feller that comes up here and goes 
 barefoot." I recall the looks of polite dis- 
 
22 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 may, amusement, and surprise that ap- 
 peared in the faces of a carriage party 
 when I was plodding along a White Moun- 
 tain road, swinging my brogans in my hand, 
 enjoying the warm velvet of the dust and 
 wincing at the shards that lay hid in it. A 
 grown-up who would walk in his naked 
 feet was, to their minds, a forbidden and 
 abhorrent person. Barbarians observe, with 
 grief, that even children go shod in the 
 country nowadays, whereas it is but thirty 
 years since shoes were worn by them only in 
 church and when the minister called. There 
 were scenes of suffering at those times, and 
 directly that the family had returned from 
 meeting, or the clergyman had eaten the 
 formal dinner and departed, the juvenile 
 contingent pulled off its shoes, which were 
 usually boots, and surged whooping into 
 the road to wriggle its toes in the sand. 
 Go barefoot now and then ; let your feet 
 breathe and know the taste of the earth. 
 
 Walking is not in the fashion that it 
 might be. We sit in a saddle and walk on 
 pedals. Excellent custom, too, but it is 
 not walking, and we must have good roads 
 
Reminiscent and Personal 23 
 
 or we are helpless on our bicycles. The 
 walker is free. He has no horse, either 
 of flesh or steel, to lodge, feed, oil, or brag 
 about, and, be it boulevard, path, or field, 
 he gets along just as well. Objectors to 
 the walk always say, " But you can get on 
 so much faster on a bicycle." Of course 
 you can. So you can on the cars. The 
 professional pedestrian trotting about a tan- 
 bark ring makes six hundred miles in a 
 week ; but is that walking ? No ; you must 
 walk with your eyes no less than with your 
 feet. To get there is less important than 
 to get what lies along the way. Some 
 walks of a mile mean more than others of 
 a hundred. As to the person who rides on 
 his "wheel" with handles down, head down, 
 back bent, legs kicking frantically, shed- 
 ding perspiration, exhaling anxiety, and 
 viewing only a cyclometer and gravel, why 
 doesn't he buy a treadmill and work it at 
 home ? I am no enemy of the bicycle ; I 
 am as fond of mine as I am of my horse 
 (I haven't any horse); but I believe it 
 should be used as a pleasure and a bene- 
 fit, not as a penance or a menace. 
 
24 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 I was ten or a dozen years old when I dis- 
 covered my legs. The parental consent 
 had been given to a salt-water swim, one 
 morning, in company with a naughty boy 
 of my own age, and after the swim the 
 other boy persuaded me into tramping with 
 him to a town where he used to live, be- 
 cause there we could have another swim, in 
 fresh water, and see a friend of his who 
 had a barrel of apples. The friend, by the 
 way, was not at home. I was barefooted, 
 we had no lunch, nor a penny to buy it 
 with ; we never once thought of the anxiety 
 our disappearance would cause at home, 
 and when we toiled up the steps of the 
 paternal mansions, dusty, empty, horribly 
 tired, at nine o'clock at night, we had cov- 
 ered between twenty and twenty-four miles 
 of road. Only then did we learn that we 
 had been nearly given up for drowned, and 
 our appearance caused such apparent re- 
 lief that we were allowed to have supper, 
 and the authorities forgot to spank us. 
 
 About that time, also, I did much tramp- 
 ing to fife and drum, for the war was on, 
 and no regiment marched for the front 
 
Reminiscent and Personal 25 
 
 from the camps around Boston, or came 
 back, without a throng of boys at its heels. 
 Through the school-house windows we 
 looked off on the tents dotting a hill a 
 mile away, and the call of bugles was heard 
 in the streets. The excitement of recruit- 
 ing and the movement of battalions were 
 incentives to activity, and the habit of walk- 
 ing was confirmed in many of us. Then 
 there were the Wednesday and Saturday 
 afternoons, sacred to theatrical matinees 
 and tramps, for in Eastern Massachusetts 
 the weekly holiday in schools had not been 
 introduced, and uneasy urchins got a doubt- 
 ful equivalent in the two half days named. 
 Those were times of exploration ; of haunt- 
 ing railroad stations to sniff at the smoke 
 of wood-fed locomotives and dream of 
 green places that they ran to ; of playing 
 hide-and-seek among casks and bales and 
 wrathful citizens on the wharves, sometimes 
 scampering up to a ship's round-top to look 
 off at the harbor, with its appeal to imag- 
 ination and adventure ; of playing battle 
 in the Revolutionary rampart overlooking 
 Charles River ; of studying pickled snakes 
 
26 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 and jelly-fish and inhaling the strong sci- 
 entific odor in Harvard's natural history 
 museum. Occasionally some of us would 
 go to hear Agassiz lecture on mollusks or 
 glaciers, for visitors were admitted to the 
 gallery, and his simplicity of words and 
 manner, his wise, genial face, his rapid 
 drawings, and his absolute command of his 
 subject fixed the attention of the youngest 
 listener. In my little cabinet is a speci- 
 men whose counterpart Professor Hitchcock 
 labelled, with admirable candor, "A Con- 
 cretion, or Something Else." Mine I took 
 to Agassiz and named its locality. He 
 turned it in his hand for a moment, smiled 
 pleasantly at the juvenile interest in such 
 a matter, and said, in a convincing tone, 
 " Concretion." From that moment I was 
 loyal to the faith that Professor Agassiz 
 knew more than any other man in the world. 
 In the field behind the museum we would 
 often find fragments of fossils, coral, and 
 strange creatures of the deep, the refuse of 
 the laboratories, which we took home with 
 solemn joy, as if their use by the scientist 
 had given to them a high distinction. 
 
Reminiscent and Personal 27 
 
 A few times in my rambles I found my- 
 self in East Cambridge, and, being recog- 
 nized, was most unfriendly punched ; for I 
 lived in Cambridgeport, and between the 
 boys of those two precincts abode a feud 
 of half a century's standing. Directly on 
 the dismissal of the school which I attended 
 the " Porters" assembled at the south, and 
 the "Pointers" moved a few hundred feet 
 toward their home in East Cambridge. 
 Both sides then collected ammunition 
 stones in summer, snowballs in winter 
 and kept up a nice, soothing riot until 
 hunger, darkness, parental summons, or 
 neighborhood interference dispersed the 
 armies. The Pointers sometimes artfully 
 retreated for a mile, so as to lure us among 
 their tenements, where they were sure of 
 the aid of certain brawny, hot-blooded rel- 
 atives, who pounced on us with cudgels 
 and shovels, and turned the tide of battle. 
 Probably not a school-boy within a mile of 
 the dividing line but had been hurt in 
 these almost daily conflicts. There were 
 but two policemen on duty at a time in 
 Cambridgeport then, and so long as too 
 
28 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 many windows were hot broken they pre- 
 ferred not to see these goings-on. And to 
 this day I have never learned the cause of 
 the enmity, though I think it was bred in 
 part from race dislikes, for the Porters were 
 Americans. 
 
 At one time young America walked with 
 a feverish energy. This was due to Ed- 
 ward Payson Weston. This remarkable 
 pedestrian walked from Portland to Chi- 
 cago in thirty days, and he passed through 
 my town, with a crowd of boys about 
 him, be sure. By following him out on 
 the old pike I discovered that I could walk 
 as fast as he, though not to Chicago. He 
 was fresh-faced, smooth-shaven, youthful, 
 lightly dressed, and he carried a little whip 
 with which he slapped his own legs now 
 and then. His march started a veritable 
 craze for walking, and it lasted two or three 
 years. These fads : what a corporate qual- 
 ity they show in the race ! How we follow 
 a leader ! Yet if they are good fads it 
 might as well be compliance as conquest, 
 so far as results and the multitude are con- 
 cerned. They beget competition, too, and 
 
Reminiscent and Personal 29 
 
 that is healthful. If all were content to go 
 only so fast and far as others, we should 
 still be mollusks. Victories are not final, 
 for we are in change. 
 
 Weston's influence was a good one in 
 the main, though it would have been better 
 if he had walked for some other purpose 
 than to win a wager. Some people who 
 had neglected their feet created bunions 
 on them in straining for records, and rode 
 more persistently than ever, after the fever 
 had run its course. I prided myself on 
 the ability to make six miles an hour, 
 "square heel and toe," and often beat the 
 horse cars. But all this was matter of 
 means, not the end. Pedestrianism lost 
 favor when it became a sport, and fagged 
 contestants ambled around a ring in a 
 great shed filled with the cheers and jeers 
 and smoke of betting men. 
 
 Cigar smoke. That has a pedestrian 
 association for me, because, lest certain 
 deacons should discover and report the 
 offence to my family, I learned to smoke 
 at night in graveyards. My favorite ccme^ 
 tery was at the town's edge, where the 
 
30 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 'street lights stopped and open country 
 began. It was a long mile from home, 
 very unpopular after dark, and bound, 
 then, to be my property. During those 
 qualmy evenings I cannot recall a meeting 
 with any human creature, or any ghosts, 
 in fact, I remember that I did not see 
 ghosts, and when the moon shone on the 
 monuments and a scent of flowers filled 
 the air, the peace almost quieted my stom- 
 ach. Perhaps it would be for the health 
 of the world if smoking were only possible 
 among tombs. It would certainly be for 
 its economy. When I think it over, the 
 place seems the fittest in the world, con- 
 sidering the sort of cigars I began with. 
 
 In one of my tramps with a relative we 
 came upon a long, low building of sinister 
 aspect in a lonely field. Ordinarily a field 
 does not suggest loneliness, but this one 
 did. Perhaps the structure made it seem 
 dismal, it was so chill, so habitless, so un- 
 approached. Its doors stood open, some 
 of its windows had been knocked out, 
 weeds grew against it, dirt, dust, and 
 neglect had left their marks. A pigeon 
 
Reminiscent and Personal 31 
 
 flew from a port in the gable as we en- 
 tered. Inside it was drearier than without. 
 Near a rusted stove was a table with drugs 
 upon it, and a few rickety chairs. To right 
 and left were narrow rooms with beds, the 
 mattresses tumbled, straw bursting from 
 their seams, cups and bottles on the floor, 
 cobwebs in the door-way : a strange place. 
 Why, in its abandoned state, had it not 
 been stripped of its furniture ? It came to 
 us pleasantly that this was a pest-house. 
 It was. That night my relative, in a con- 
 siderable fright, informed me that he was 
 beginning to have small-pox, and he was 
 vaccinated next day, but I was not, and 
 no harm came to either of us from the 
 visit. Youth would be tame if it did not 
 take risks. 
 
 There is a symbolism in the ascent of 
 mountains that makes it an alluring per- 
 formance for civilized mankind. It typifies 
 our ambitions and aspirations ; to gain the 
 top is a reward of endeavor, and the longer 
 and harder the struggle the better the 
 view ; the climb is an assertion of man's 
 intended rule over the world, or a declara- 
 
32 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 tion of his love for it, according to his 
 nature ; and the victory is that of personal- 
 ity and will. One's grossness is ethereal- 
 ized ; he stands nearer to the sun, in a 
 purer air, farther from matter than in his 
 daily life, when from his pinnacle he sees 
 things in their larger aspect True, some 
 men will take a telescope with them to see 
 the hotel where they slept last night, and 
 the village where they will dine to-mor- 
 row ; but with more climbers it is the broad 
 effect, the fine exhilaration, the spiritual- 
 izing experience that they seek. There is 
 a reason for high spirits in high places : 
 the air is purer, there is more oxygen in 
 proportion to the quantity than in the 
 hollows where heavy gases linger, and deep 
 breathing aerates the blood until it spar- 
 kles. Dwellers on lands three thousand 
 feet higher than the sea have no excuse 
 for consumption, and seldom offer any. 
 In light air one breathes more strongly 
 than in heavy ; one has to in order to get 
 enough ; and the lungs are thus opened to 
 their depths, leaving no effete corners for 
 the storage of disease. People at sea-level 
 
Reminiscent and Personal 33 
 
 do not breathe : they gasp ; and millions 
 of them keep their windows closed at that 
 The Colorado miner inflates his lungs 
 about twice as far as he did when he was 
 a New York clerk. Such breathing ought 
 to make a superior race. Ergo, mankind 
 is well off on the mountains. 
 
 I guess " Robinson Crusoe" had some- 
 thing to do with it, for at the age of nine or 
 ten I had decided to be a hermit and live 
 either in a cave on the side of a mountain, 
 or on the summit in a two-story house con- 
 taining a natural history museum and a 
 gymnasium. In Vermont, where my sum- 
 mers were spent, I was overwhelmed with 
 opportunities. Being much of the time on 
 hill-tops, when I was neither picking ber- 
 ries nor swimming, but in all cases delay- 
 ing dinner and storing up trouble, it was 
 an aggravation that I could not decide 
 which of the various views was the finest. 
 Probably I did not propose to live on 
 scenery, yet there was no thought of a 
 farm, or garden, or firewood, or a water- 
 supply, or a piano. The climbing became 
 habitual ; it extended over the Catskills, 
 3 
 
34 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 the White Mountains, the Rockies, and the 
 Alps. And happy hours have been spent 
 on eyries above the world. If only our 
 lives could be lived on moral plateaus or 
 pinnacles ! But perhaps it would be hard 
 to keep alive there. 
 
 
Some Sample Walks 
 
 MY first real tour afoot was made in 
 the autumn, and ranged from 
 Hartford, Connecticut, to a village in 
 Northern Vermont, with side trips. The 
 expense was nine dollars, and I was per- 
 haps three weeks on the way, for I stopped 
 twice for little visits to friends and rela- 
 tives. It was the October of a great flood 
 in the Connecticut, and there was exhilara- 
 tion in the walk beside that river, swollen 
 to a sea, covering miles of meadow, filling 
 roads and streets, bearing in its onrush 
 bridges, fences, houses, timber, from up- 
 country. I recall that once a cock sailed 
 by, clinging to a pumpkin. Did he live to 
 crow over his journey, I wonder? 
 
 I set off at nine o'clock in the morning, 
 and my aim was to reach Holyoke that 
 night, thirty-four miles away, as one usu- 
 ally walks, or more usually rides. But the 
 
 35 
 
36 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 freshet had cut off such lengths of road 
 that I had trudged just forty miles when, 
 at nine o'clock that night, I stumbled in 
 at the door of my shelter. The last six or 
 eight miles of it were hard going. Next 
 morning I felt still worse about it, for my 
 muscles well-nigh refused to work for an 
 hour after I resumed my march. Climb- 
 ing over Mount Tom, they were soon lim- 
 bered, however, and by the second night 
 the soreness and stiffness were nearly gone. 
 Quaint taverns were my usual abiding- 
 places, and the rates were cheap enough 
 then : twenty-five cents each for meals and 
 lodgings, and fair, both of them, though 
 some folks do not care for pie for breakfast. 
 As I advanced up the river the damage 
 worked by the flood became more obvi- 
 ous : many structures were torn away, miles 
 of farm and pasture were buried under 
 gravel, green banks were gullied and worn 
 down, vegetation was destroyed, roads and 
 railroads had suffered untold injury. And 
 as we cut away our forests, destroying the 
 vegetable mould, that sponge which holds 
 the rain and melting snow, these freshets 
 
Some Sample Walks 37 
 
 will increase, while the summers will grow 
 more dry. Look at the fall of Spain that 
 followed the destruction of her woods, and 
 let us refrain from doing as she did. 
 
 Ah, but those mornings of crystal and 
 gold, with a tingle of frost in the air, a 
 glory in the oaks and maples, some last 
 notes of departing birds heard across the 
 fields ! Paradise was on earth again, at 
 sunrise. Swinging up the road, stick in 
 hand, meeting none but simple, kindly 
 people, whistling in exuberance of spirit, 
 what consummate joy there is in liberty ! 
 The sweet, historic old towns of Massachu- 
 setts, with their elm-shaded avenues : it is 
 a happy way through them. Brattleboro' : 
 I recall it less as an abiding-place for 
 human beings than as a splendor of au- 
 tumn color and a place where chestnuts 
 were plenty. Bellows Falls : there are real 
 falls in flood-time, and they have great 
 anger among the rocks. Then I turned to 
 the northwest, to an early haunt among the 
 mountains. 
 
 One never recovers from the glamour of 
 youth, in so far as it pertains to natural 
 
38 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 objects. The men who were giants in the 
 boy's imagination dwindle under the expe- 
 rience and criticism of advancing years, 
 until he finds them to have been a good 
 deal like himself, plus a trifle more of 
 energy or facility in one direction or an- 
 other ; the splendid air-castles he was to 
 occupy shrink and shrink until they assume 
 the meanly comfortable aspect of a two- 
 and-a-half-story house on a street not too 
 shabby ; the feats in war, discovery, states- 
 manship, and circus-riding to which fate 
 was going to call him are all being done 
 by somebody else by the time he is forty ; 
 but nature is ever kindly, and when he 
 goes to the home of his youth he looks 
 on it with the eye of childhood. World- 
 hardened, indeed, must that man be who 
 returns to the scenes of his heartiest and 
 most innocent pleasures without feeling 
 some echo of them in his heart. I brood 
 on the beauty of a stream in which I have 
 bathed and paddled at odd times from 
 babyhood, Black River. 
 
 There are several Black Rivers. It 
 oddly happens that each of my grand- 
 
Some Sample Walks 39 
 
 fathers lived beside one, though they were 
 in different States. The one I speak of now 
 is so small that not one in twenty of those 
 who pass it in a railroad train pay any 
 regard to it It rises east from Rutland, 
 and in a gracefully tortuous course of forty 
 miles or so reaches the Connecticut 
 Swollen though it is by accessions from 
 brooks, its volume is at no point imposing. 
 Perhaps its average breadth is thirty feet, 
 and while one can wade across it in some 
 places, there is no lack of swimming-holes 
 that the boys will point out to you, nor of 
 still pools near painted bridges where 
 suckers may be snared. Most of the time 
 it is a rapid little river, for it falls a thou- 
 sand feet, and its dark color is emphasized 
 by rings and ribbons of foam. When it 
 rains long, or the snow melts, look out for 
 it, because then it rises two or three fath- 
 oms at a leap, and whatever is in the way 
 of it must go, unless it is founded on a 
 rock. 
 
 Its sunny ovals, called Plymouth ponds, 
 were talked about years ago, when gold 
 was found there, as it is found there now ; 
 
40 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 but the stuff costs so much to extract that 
 when the laborers are paid and the expense 
 is set aside of separating it from the gravel, 
 the owner is lucky if he has enough left to 
 buy a cigar. Work has, therefore, been 
 fitful, and if anybody wants a gold-mine 
 he can probably get one cheap. No 
 doubt he can get more out of it than some 
 investors have made in Western mines. 
 Were the sands along Black River as care- 
 fully searched as they would be if it ran 
 out of the Rockies or Sierras, the precious 
 metal might be found in paying quantities. 
 The stream passes Ludlow, high and cool, 
 environed with mountains, and does some 
 turning of mill-wheels. It was a good 
 deal of a river once, and before the barriers 
 broke down to open its present channel it 
 was ponded just below here. 
 
 Tramp the shaded road that follows it to 
 Proctorsville, and in that lovely intervale 
 you stand in the bed of an ancient lake. 
 Geologist or not, you will look to see where, 
 ages ago, the lake drained off. This out- 
 let, known as the Gulf, is notably like the 
 notches of the White Mountains and cloves 
 
Some Sample Walks 41 
 
 of the Catskills. On either side the hills 
 sweep upward, almost vertically, but their 
 grimness is concealed in a copious forest 
 growth. Old landslides have narrowed the 
 valley between them, so that there is room 
 for a road and a rill and nothing more ; 
 and the gloom, the wildness, the silence of 
 the place, are impressive, even though one 
 has seen the Alps, the Rockies, and the 
 Selkirks. There is no house, nor fence, 
 nor field, and travellers go through it 
 swerving neither to right nor left for a 
 matter of two miles. Beside the rill ferns 
 grow to a man's height. 
 
 Returning to the present river, we dine 
 at the old Eagle tavern, its former bar still 
 a loitering-place for village worthies, and a 
 faint odor prevailing through it of genera- 
 tions of pipes. As its name denotes, Proc- 
 torsville was settled by the Proctors, an- 
 cestors of Redfield Proctor, governor of 
 Vermont, senator, secretary of war, and 
 owner of Rutland marble-quarries. The 
 little house where he was born stands in 
 the shaded village street, and another home 
 of the family is on the topmost of three 
 
42 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 gigantic steps, terraces that mark sub- 
 sidences in the lake. The founder of the 
 village, having put up his house, brought 
 his family to it on a bitter day of winter, 
 and on opening the door he found that 
 snow had drifted through a broken win- 
 dow. All was icy and comfortless, and he 
 turned as if to leave ; but his wife grasped 
 a broom and attacked the drift, saying, 
 " Please God, we will stay." And they 
 stayed. Another family, the Fletchers, like- 
 wise furnished a governor and a lieutenant- 
 governor to the State, and gave a library to 
 the township. From this hamlet have also 
 come a judge, a general, fifty soldiers of 
 the Union army, two or three millionaires, 
 several clergymen, physicians, and lawyers, 
 a State geologist, and sundry prosperous 
 merchants. 
 
 In Cavendish, the pretty village below, 
 Black River enters on the stormiest part of 
 its career. Cavendish Gorge is a wild place, 
 with walls sometimes vertical, sometimes 
 overhanging, choked with masses that have 
 cracked and fallen in flood-time, drift tim- 
 ber, in niches twenty feet above the water, 
 
Some Sample Walks 43 
 
 marking the spring risings. The spirit of 
 the place is stern, yet allayed by accidents 
 of loveliness. Moss grows rich in the moist 
 places, and ledges of decaying mica-schist 
 seam the ground with trails of powdered 
 silver. Here is the customary Lovers' 
 Leap, and it has its story. A man slipped 
 at the brink while prying stone for a fence 
 and went whirling into the depths. Cau- 
 tiously his friend crept to the edge and 
 looked over. "Are you hurt?" he called. 
 The fallen one had crept upon a slanting 
 rock out of the flood. He passed his 
 hands cautiously over his legs, then began 
 to explore his pockets more and more 
 rapidly, a look of alarm growing on his 
 face. At last he looked up and replied in 
 a grieved, deliberate tone, " I ain't hurt 
 much, but I'll be durned if I haven't lost 
 my jack-knife." 
 
 Singular features of these falls are the 
 pot-holes in the banks. These vary from 
 rotundas twenty feet across to little wells 
 that might almost be mistaken for drill- 
 holes. The former course of the river is 
 indicated in these carvings fifty feet above 
 
44 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 where it now runs. One has been roofed 
 by a fallen slab of rock, weighing hundreds 
 of tons, that has transformed it into a 
 cave. Fine moss in this cavern is hardly 
 visible as you look toward the light from 
 within, but it shines like a cat's eye when 
 you see it in the other direction. 
 
 As the open country is gained below the 
 falls, Mount Ascutney comes into sight at 
 the eastward : a stately pyramid cut from 
 the rest of the Green Mountains by miles 
 of rolling country ; a lonely, forest-wrapped 
 peak that drops its upset image into the 
 Connecticut It was a cold afternoon 
 when I climbed Ascutney. Ice draped the 
 rocks and trees near the top, but bear- 
 tracks on the path showed that the woods 
 had not lost their life. On the summit 
 were several surveyors, gloved and over- 
 coated, who were watching the flicker of 
 a mirror, tiny sun-sparks, away over on 
 Mount Kearsarge. This height, of some- 
 thing over three thousand three hundred 
 feet, is so isolated that it commands a glo- 
 rious view : the Connecticut below, Wind- 
 sor snuggling on its shore, the Green 
 
Some Sample Walks 45 
 
 Mountains hulking and napping along the 
 west, the arctic White Mountains in the 
 northeast. 
 
 Much cider was a-making, too, about 
 that time, and you could have your fill for 
 the asking, either in a glass or absorbed 
 through straws inserted at the bung-hole, 
 with refection of butternuts in the breathing 
 spaces : food and nectar of the gods. Pres- 
 ently snow came, and the Vermont roads 
 took on their six months' iniquity of rut 
 and mud. I had no overcoat. My shoes, 
 strong though they were, well pegged, 
 with rubber soles beneath the leather, a 
 futile device for long walks, began to 
 leak. I climbed and loitered no longer, 
 but made a dash, and reached my journey's 
 end as winter swooped upon the country. 
 
 There is no object of unusual interest in 
 this tramp. My detail is intended as a 
 hint that it is well to take by-roads. The 
 main roads are populous, expensive, hack- 
 neyed. Service is not free nor friendly, 
 but measured by what may be got out of 
 you. Town crowds, town pleasures, town 
 manners, town cooking, and worse than 
 
46 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 town prices confront you everywhere. In 
 the back country a more Arcadian condi- 
 tion exists. If it is people you wish to 
 see, you will find them more original and 
 transparent in the unspoiled hills than 
 among the hives of summer boarders and 
 the stylish hotels where honest country 
 folk are looked upon with amusement or 
 condescension. 
 
 If there is little wealth among the 
 farmers, there is little poverty ; if there is 
 narrow politics, there is never anarchy, and 
 no socialism other than the practical one 
 of mutual help and interest. Wages and 
 gains are small, and there is an anxiety 
 over pennies that surprises townsmen, who 
 are careless with their gettings. This 
 thrift is taught and practised and respected, 
 but standards of wealth are different from 
 those in town. From a village street, one 
 evening, I saw an old man in a little office, 
 a sort of bay-window, attached to his house. 
 He was bent over some papers and was 
 scratching earnestly with his pen, his work 
 lighted by one of those dismal oil lamps 
 that are peculiar to rural districts. A 
 
Some Sample Walks 47 
 
 farmer with whom I was talking followed 
 
 my look and explained, "That's old B . 
 
 They made him probate clerk. He's rich. 
 Why, I've known that feller to go into that 
 cubby-hole after supper and make two dol- 
 lars 'fore he went to bed." The earnest- 
 ness of the statement was convincing : the 
 two dollars were wealth. 
 
 In these villages, too, you meet the 
 shady lawyer. If he were taxed with 
 sharp practice, he would probably ask how 
 he was expected to live in such a place 
 if he didn't make trouble. Does a cow 
 stray into a garden and eat of the fruits 
 thereof ; is a boy bitten by a dog ; has a 
 horse kicked down a gate or nibbled a 
 shade tree ; has a man spoken or written 
 ill of a neighbor ; is the store-keeper in 
 arrears for that last lot of butter, or a cus- 
 tomer slow in paying the store-keeper for 
 the last ten pounds of it ; it is the lawyer 
 who is first to hear of it and advise a suit 
 Are the relations between two people 
 strained, he will try to strain them farther. 
 Is any simple transaction to be concluded, 
 he will surround it with perils and mys- 
 
48 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 teries, because he wants to draw up papers 
 about it. The lawyer in one New Eng- 
 land village you never find more than 
 one, and the neighbors often agree that he 
 is one too many used to profit when he 
 could by presenting bills for imaginary 
 services given to dead people. The heirs 
 or executors of the deceased would have 
 no proof or knowledge of such services, 
 but there was the bill, and the matter was 
 usually compromised. In one case a 
 claim for one hundred dollars was sent to 
 the son of a well-to-do villager almost 
 before the latter was in his coffin. The 
 son said to the lawyer, " Look here, Chip- 
 man ; you never did any work for my 
 father. He wouldn't have hired you, any- 
 way, if he'd wanted a lawyer. I won't pay 
 the bill. But, rather than be annoyed by 
 you, I'll give you five dollars." 
 
 "All right," replied the conscientious 
 attorney, and he receipted the paper. 
 
 There was a retired stage-driver who had 
 quite a little bank deposit, and who held 
 this lawyer's post-mortem accounts in fear. 
 "I hope," he grumbled, "that when it's 
 
Some Sample Walks 49 
 
 time to die, the Lord' 11 let Chipman go 
 fifteen minutes before I do." He had his 
 wish. 
 
 None the less, you find these fellows in 
 the front pews in church, because in a 
 rural community one gains social standing 
 from a deaconship and business from 
 social standing. They are pious men, 
 don't play poker, are temperate, swear 
 only in whispers, in the wood-shed, and 
 would scorn to steal openly. We shall 
 find, however, that genial faults are bet- 
 ter liked than austere virtues, that by 
 the same token straight conduct is ad- 
 mired, that a little obvious benefit in a 
 farm holds more satisfaction than a promise 
 of greater in a court. It is a queer freak 
 of my fancy that puts romance into the 
 dry, dull law. Perhaps it came from read- 
 ing " Bleak House ;" perhaps the inscruta- 
 bility of lawyers stirs the imagination ; they 
 seem to carry something ideal in their 
 function and behavior so long as they 
 keep silence. Ideals best prosper in em- 
 bodiment, and we do not have to show our 
 emotions. We are suspicious of those who 
 4 
 
50 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 clamor on the mourners' bench, especially 
 the Chipmans. Carlyle lived a tragedy in 
 feeling, because he had crippled his diges- 
 tion with a Scotch pipe, and life and 
 thought are one ; whereas other mortals 
 hold their peace and find life pleasanter 
 for a salt of imaginative romance ; and 
 there is more of this in the country than 
 people admit The books and papers 
 most read there prove it. This romance 
 of sentiment belongs to most of us, and is 
 a different matter from romance of experi- 
 ence, for that means hardship, risk, pov- 
 erty, labor, wide swings between success 
 and failure, and is better avoided by bald 
 persons of forty-five and maidens who wear 
 corkscrew curls. They know it worth 
 while to plod in this work-a-day world, for 
 sake of the ease and of immunity from 
 love-scrapes and changing the course of 
 empires, and they cultivate a hard sense 
 that makes bad business for attorneys-at- 
 law. In these rustic microcosms we find 
 that some human qualities take on the 
 small measure of the village, that the 
 people are poor and a trifle mean. But 
 
Some Sample Walks 51 
 
 they regulate their own affairs justly. The 
 rule of the poor is right It is the rule of 
 ignorance that is wrong. 
 
 Speaking of ignorance, it is one of the 
 things that make it hard to walk in certain 
 parts of the country which are naturally 
 attractive. There are the Big Smoky 
 Mountains, for example. What a glorious 
 region for a tramp ! But a journey through 
 them is like a journey in Alaska or Bolivia. 
 The roads are -vile ; often there is nothing 
 but a trail between the "settlemints," a 
 trail on which you meet shaggy men riding 
 on mules and oxen with a rifle and meal- 
 bag in front of them ; sallow, barefooted 
 women, with homespun or calico skirts 
 flapping against their legs, and their faces 
 half-concealed in grave cloths and sun- 
 bonnets ; plump girls smoking pipes and 
 boys carrying jugs of moonshine whis- 
 key. The houses are cabins, public ac- 
 commodations are few, cooking is a wallow 
 of melted pork, and strangers are "suspi- 
 cioned" as revenue officers. The grandeur 
 of the hills and the beauty of the rivers 
 have not lifted or broadened these people. 
 
52 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 They are religious, but they have few 
 schools. 
 
 Out in the Rockies you find a race of 
 men sharper, wiser, heartier, but it is new 
 land, and they have no time to build 
 roads, except to the mines. When they 
 have driveways half as good as their rail- 
 ways, when they emulate Switzerland in 
 the creation of comforts and conveniences 
 to draw the public, their mountain belt will 
 be a pedestrian's paradise. 
 
 The opposite of these mountain coun- 
 tries we find in the plains and prairies, 
 strong and new in their populace, partaking 
 of their bigness and freedom, but still 
 behind the age in their streets and turn- 
 pikes, which are often sloughs of despond. 
 If we want to walk in a flat country we 
 shall do better to take the East. Cape 
 Cod has an isolated character of its own, 
 but, like the rest of it, the roads are sand. 
 Long Island has level highways of mac- 
 adam, the joy of bicyclers. Except at its 
 eastern end, the scenery is commonplace, 
 though pleasant. Its older towns bear 
 names bestowed by the Montauk and 
 
Some Sample Walks 53 
 
 Shinnecock Indians, and when you hear 
 them you guess that their speech grew out 
 of the croaking of frogs and piping of tree- 
 toads. Listen : Quogue, Cutchogue, Pat- 
 chogue, Ponquogue, Aquebogue, Ronkon- 
 koma, Speonk, Sagg, Setauket, Islip, 
 Yaphank, Moriches, Amagansett, Man- 
 hasset, Commack, Peconic, Mattituck, 
 Mineola, Massapequa, Noyack, isn't it 
 like the evening chorus in the marshes? 
 And they have frogs there, too. But, oh, 
 they have one monster more awful in 
 imagination and reality than frogs, than 
 even the batrachian who snaps that double 
 bass string so loudly as we pass his haunt, 
 and that is the mosquito. 
 
 I have travelled with my head in a bag 
 of netting, my coat buttoned to my ears, 
 my hands flailing the clouds that snarled 
 about me, but with little avail ; yet in a 
 tramp to Montauk Point I passed the 
 dreaded Napeague beach in safety by 
 wading in the sea. The pests hovered at 
 the edge of the water, but seldom ventured 
 beyond the shore. Climbing, then, to the 
 windy moors of the point, that crumble to 
 
54 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 the ocean in bluffs of clay and gravel, I 
 left the mosquitoes behind me. 
 
 Our Catskills are a delightful region for 
 the walker, after the summer idlers have 
 gone. Their romantic cloves are never 
 finer than when draped in the red and 
 orange of October, when mists surge, vol- 
 canic, from the peaks, when the Hudson 
 valley becomes a floor of cloud, along 
 whose surface, as across ice-filled waters 
 of the Arctics, you look for a hundred 
 miles. The Adirondacks are more elusive, 
 and many are misled by the careless spread- 
 ing of that term across the dull, rolling 
 country to the west of the mountains where 
 rich men have bought immense estates, 
 and where people go to shed the blood 
 of harmless animals. Noble scenery and 
 many natural delights are to be had in 
 parts of the Adirondacks, while poor 
 roads, crowded inns, extortionate prices, 
 and restricted views enable one to leave 
 some other parts of them without a pang. 
 
 Until recently the White Mountains 
 have not had the popularity they deserve, 
 except among New Englanders, who have 
 
Some Sample Walks 55 
 
 celebrated their glories for decades. They 
 lie in easy folds for the walker, since one 
 can see the best of them without that 
 return upon his track which to the hurried 
 is a disadvantage. Take boat over Lake 
 Winnepesaukee (excuse the sensible spell- 
 ing ; they usually write it, as they do not 
 pronounce it, Winnepeseogee) to Centre 
 Harbor, climb Red Hill, cross into the 
 Pemigewasset Valley, go northward, visit- 
 ing the Pool, the Flume, Echo Lake, the 
 Profile, scaling Bald Mountain and perhaps 
 Mount Lafayette, and passing on in the 
 shadow of vast precipices. Now turn east 
 through farms and burned woods, and 
 ascend the valley of the Ammonoosuc. 
 Go over to Jefferson and ascend Mount 
 Starr King. Cross a shoulder of the Presi- 
 dential range and go up Mount Washing- 
 ton, by carriage road if you are portly, or 
 by Tuckerman's Ravine if you are lithe and 
 delight in difficulties. Then descend by 
 the Crawford bridle-path, a glorious high- 
 way, a mile up in the air, along the tops 
 of the range, and so into the deep and 
 craggy Notch, viewing it for a memorable 
 
56 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 hour from the top of Mount Willard. 
 After this follow the Saco to North Con- 
 way, where you end your tour with a 
 lovely backward vista. Rudely explained, 
 your walk has extended around three sides 
 of a square. 
 
 This programme is given because it illus- 
 trates a good principle to follow in one's 
 tramps, that, namely, of securing a con- 
 stant crescendo of beauty and interest. In 
 this case Mount Washington is reserved 
 until almost the last, because it is greatest. 
 Speaking for myself, I find that it also 
 heightens the enjoyment of a pedestrian or 
 bicycle tour if every day sends me farther 
 from my starting-point. The excitement 
 has oozed when I face about and start for 
 home, so that it is usually more tolerable 
 to return by rail. Perhaps the reason for 
 this is that, as I usually go northward, the 
 return means a descent into heat and 
 humidity. Thoreau tells of an impulse 
 that seized him always to go southwest. 
 Do most of the Ishmaelites feel this migra- 
 tory instinct ? I do, but it sends me west 
 and north, never south. Perhaps if I were 
 
Some Sample Walks 57 
 
 in the west, and felt the continent to con- 
 quer, I should be impelled eastward ; but 
 at present I follow empire, and set my face 
 toward the setting sun, toward untravelled 
 spaces where the snow flies early. 
 
 One jaunt took me through the woods 
 about Walden Pond, region hallowed to 
 tramps for all time. And they were there : 
 Parched Perkins and Needham Neverwork 
 had bathed in Thoreau's lake, thereby 
 violating their traditions, and were even 
 shaving themselves. Is there something in 
 this region that stimulates the fancy as 
 other spots of earth do not, or do memories 
 of the Concord great turn our thoughts 
 from accustomed channels? The latter, 
 doubtless, for we find in the outer world 
 what we have in ourselves, and we are 
 thinking "Walden" when we visit the 
 water that the book was named for. After 
 losing myself delightedly among the woods, 
 I met Ralph Waldo Emerson, and rode 
 into Boston with him. A business episode 
 of a previous year was my excuse for an 
 introduction. Doubtless I bored the phi- 
 losopher, yet no sooner had I said, " I have 
 
58 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 just been on a pilgrimage to Thoreau's 
 stamping-ground," than he brightened and 
 beamed in the friendliest way and began 
 to chat without restraint. 
 
 Absolutely the simplest being, in his 
 talk and manner, that ever I met was 
 Emerson. The sweetness and purity of his 
 nature expressed themselves in his smile. 
 He showed from the car window where 
 Thoreau's hut had stood. " More like an 
 Indian," said he, speaking of the hermit, 
 "than a white man. He was free and 
 strange. If he found the sky clear when 
 he got up in the morning he might say, 
 'This is a good day to go to the White 
 Mountains,' and shut his door and trudge 
 off to the White Mountains just as he 
 would go to the spring for a drink. He 
 used to come up through the woods and 
 call on us without ceremony, and help 
 himself to any axe or spade or bucket that 
 he found on my premises, and would 
 keep it until he was through with it." A 
 reminiscent twinkle here. Thoreau was 
 neither romantic nor misanthropic, nor 
 was he unhappy. His nature had nothing 
 
Some Sample Walks 59 
 
 of the morbid or unhealthful, his sympa- 
 thies were fresh and keen, he was content 
 to be alone, yet he delighted in tramps 
 and boating trips with his college chums, 
 and would walk to Worcester to ask his 
 friend, Mr. Blake, to take a jaunt up-coun- 
 try to the mountains. For prying strangers 
 and supercilious people he lacked cour- 
 tesy. He disliked pretence of all kinds, 
 but restrained himself to reproof of wrong 
 and folly rather than enlarged his energies 
 as an active reformer. A creature of im- 
 pulses, he was still a hard worker, after his 
 fashion, wrote much in his cabin, and left 
 a chest of manuscript, but made next to 
 nothing by his writing. He did get a job 
 of surveying, now and then, and gave an 
 occasional lecture, and the few dollars that 
 he made in that way seemed to satisfy 
 him. Thus Mr. Emerson. 
 
 The sage was at that time beginning to 
 losr his memory, and when I asked him 
 the name of a mountain seen in the west 
 from Concord he shook his head slowly 
 with a shade of sadness in his look. "Ah," 
 said he, "you must not expect me to 
 
60 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 remember names of mountains, for it's as 
 much as I can do to remember the names 
 of men." 
 
 "Is it Wachusett?" I asked. 
 
 "Ah, that is it," he answered, with a 
 smile, as if he were glad to recover it. 
 During the trip I furtively watched his face 
 and wondered at the serenity that made it 
 beautiful. It was suffused by a peace that 
 seemed not to have known reverse. Some 
 women entered the car. He arose to 
 give his seat to them. I insisted that he 
 should remain, and that one of them 
 should take mine, and standing at the door 
 I could but remark the absorbed yet placid 
 air he wore as he looked through the 
 window at the flying landscape. His eyes 
 had great lucency, softness, and benignity. 
 Two ruddy farmers standing in the aisle 
 were discussing Schopenhauer. Truly this 
 was Concord. Arrived in Boston, I re- 
 called a phrase in one of Emerson's essays 
 in disparagement of handshaking, so that I 
 was for bowing a farewell and going about 
 my affairs, but he smiled again in his clear 
 and winning way and held out his hand, 
 
Some Sample Walks 61 
 
 which I clasped with the fervor of a disci- 
 ple. Something of the composure, but 
 much of the sunshine of summer abode in 
 that wonderful man. 
 
 One warm afternoon found me in the 
 quaint, rambling house of Joseph Jefferson 
 in Hohokus, New Jersey. This comedian, 
 most widely beloved of actors, drops the 
 manner of the stage as entirely in his home 
 as he does on the stage, and is the same 
 gentle, child-like man as "Joe" Jefferson 
 that he is as Rip Van Winkle, a character 
 that will never have another such expo- 
 nent. He has even a tang of the Van 
 Winkle speech, so long he has talked it. 
 At that time he had a studio in his barn, 
 where he used to paint landscapes as a 
 recreation, and there he received me in 
 his frank and hearty manner, appearing 
 to be as tickled as a boy when I praised 
 the picture of a Louisiana bayou on his 
 easel. His rules in pictorial art are worth 
 repeating : " strength without blackness, 
 form without hardness, suggestion without 
 vagueness, delicacy without weakness ;" 
 but they are rules that, consciously or 
 
62 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 otherwise, affect his acting, too. It is 
 easy to understand that such a man would 
 enjoy a tempered cheerfulness, even though 
 he confesses to a vein of melancholy, such 
 as you always find conjoined to humor. 
 Nature he loves, but solitude or gloom 
 frightens him. Poe and Chopin he abjures, 
 but Corot and Mendelssohn he admires. 
 Music moves him deeply, and he acts bet- 
 ter if his orchestra is in good form. He 
 thought of having his daughter play for 
 him while he painted, to stimulate his im- 
 agination, for all of his pictures are com- 
 posed ; none copied. Color, even on a 
 palette, delights him, especially golden 
 browns and purples. He criticised the 
 precisians in painting, the Ge"r6mes and 
 Bouguereaus, and said that for him land- 
 scape was the highest form of art, "the 
 fruits of our best thoughts. It is the last 
 to come, and as men do not go backward, 
 this proves it the best Until the time of 
 Turner and Constable men saw only each 
 other, but now they are beginning to un- 
 derstand that woods, fields, skies, and 
 rivers typify or express our purest senti- 
 
Some Sample Walks 63 
 
 ments. There must be a suggestion in the 
 landscape or it is not art My painting 
 has been useful to me in my acting, and 
 my acting helps to improve my pictures 
 by keeping my imagination fresh and 
 active. If the spring gets out of that, a 
 man's work becomes forced, although 
 there must be mental restraint ; the mind 
 must sit in judgment on the fancy when 
 necessary. A man is a crank when his 
 imagination runs away with him. What- 
 ever success I have had comes from self- 
 criticism, and a wish to profit by the criti- 
 cism of others. In acting it is not so easy 
 to change as it is in some other things, for 
 that is largely a matter of temperament, 
 and one cannot change his nature. In all 
 the arts we must be true and direct when 
 it comes to expression. In poetry, when 
 a writer enunciates a great truth, he tells it 
 in the fewest and shortest words. Shake- 
 speare traces the dust of Alexander till he 
 finds it stopping a bung-hole. If Long- 
 fellow had had to put ' bung-hole' into a 
 poem where would he have been? In 
 Shakespeare the thought comes as straight 
 
64 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 as a bullet" Surrounded by his family, 
 ftis friends, his pets, his porcelains, his 
 pictures, and his memories, with breezes 
 bearing perfume and bird-songs in at his 
 windows, this man who has swayed a 
 people to tears and laughter owned to 
 being happy. 
 
 In a jog through the Berkshires, splen- 
 dent in October, I turned a little aside 
 from my path to see the Shakers, and was 
 heartily won to them. Such plain, right- 
 eous folk it is a comfort to meet, " monks 
 and nuns without bolts and bars," as the 
 godly Elder Evans described them, and, 
 he might have added, without coldness or 
 acerbity. Though the men and women 
 live apart, they are brothers and sisters 
 and their interests are common. It was 
 Sunday when I entered Mount Lebanon 
 and heard the joyous chant and dance as I 
 passed the meeting-house. It was too late 
 to attend service, so I walked on to the 
 house of the North family, and was pres- 
 ently in talk with Elder Frederick Evans 
 and "Brother" Daniel Eraser, the latter a 
 cheery, ruddy man of nearly ninety, who 
 
Some Sample Walks 65 
 
 took me about to see the perfect order and 
 cleanliness of the farm, the barns, and the 
 buildings. These two men had lived away 
 from " the world" for thirty or forty years, 
 they had forsworn many of its alleged 
 pleasures, but their lives were crowned 
 with content, they were alert and strong 
 in body and mind ; their kindliness and 
 frankness took hold on me. While their 
 talk was earnest, it was humorous, genial, 
 and full of sense. Shakers are vegetarians, 
 but the fact that they are also bright, that 
 they sing and whistle a good deal, that 
 they do hard, steady work and enjoy ex- 
 ceptional health, seems to show that the 
 eating of flesh is a custom rather than a 
 need. Cancer, they tell me, is unknown 
 among them, and their lives exceed our 
 average by a decade. Daniel Fraser had 
 eaten no meat in thirty years, and had also 
 abstained from eggs, fish, milk, butter, 
 cheese, lard, spirits, tea, coffee, tobacco, 
 spices, saleratus, and soda. Farinaceous 
 foods, fruit, vegetables, and water were all 
 he needed. I testify to a remarkable 
 variety and toothsomeness in their fare, 
 5 
 
66 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 and if a new-comer feels a need of meat or 
 fish or eggs or tea or coffee, he can have 
 them. This absence of hard and fast rules 
 is a thing that draws one to the Shakers. 
 I had stopped for lunch in Hancock, an- 
 other Shaker village, and had confronted 
 this : cold beef, white and brown bread, 
 butter, rice, baked beans, potato cakes, 
 pickles, blackberry jam, ditto pie, apple 
 pie, milk, cream cheese, pot cheese, cake, 
 and doughnuts. Bill, twenty-five cents. 
 Only once did money go farther for me. 
 It was in the Catskills in their innocent 
 days, and I roused a native out of a nap to 
 get me a snack. He produced a wonder- 
 ful quantity of nutriment, and when I had 
 destroyed it and called for the reckoning, 
 he said he guessed he would have to tax 
 me about thirteen cents. 
 
 Shakers go plainly dressed. They frown 
 on ornament, although they cultivate 
 flowers, and their living rooms are com- 
 fortable and cheery. Cats and canaries 
 are the only animals to be seen about the 
 houses, the cats being tolerated because 
 they catch mice ; but the people do no 
 
Some Sample Walks 67 
 
 killing, unless it might be of rattlesnakes, 
 vermin, or mad dogs. Most of the mem- 
 bers of the community are in middle life 
 or beyond it, and to some of them Mount 
 Lebanon is a refuge from chills and anxi- 
 eties. They are owners of one of the finest 
 farms in the world, they have no dread as 
 to the future, no fear for the present, their 
 material needs are met, and their associ- 
 ates are men and women who are strangely 
 free from vice, sordidness, and sin. They 
 are spiritualists, believing that the souls of 
 the dead continue their activities on earth, 
 and Elder Evans solemnly assured me that 
 John the Baptist had been seen leading his 
 people in the dance, that peculiar cere- 
 mony whereby is typified the shaking out 
 of carnal things. 
 
 This was the only statement made in our 
 long talk that savored of oddity, for the 
 elder was broad-minded and practical. 
 Said he, "We do not take the Bible lit- 
 erally, for much of it is allegorical. The 
 true Bible is all Bibles, ours, the Koran, 
 the Talmud, the Bhagvat, the Zend Avesta, 
 the moral guides of all people. Our Bible 
 
68 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 is a book of the morals, philosophy, his- 
 tory, and pretty bad science of the Jews. 
 Our souls used to be tired within us when 
 the world's people came here and argued 
 about three gods in one, and the atone- 
 ment and those orthodox ideas. Shaker- 
 ism combines science, religion, and inspi- 
 ration. It is practical religion. We live 
 as families, each member doing his share 
 of work, all mutually helpful, we own all 
 things in common, we discountenance 
 war, we do not go to law, we do not 
 vote, we are celibates, we use only 'yea' 
 and 'nay' for affirmative and negative" 
 (they pronounce them "yee" and "nee"), 
 "we aim to be just, we do not swear, and 
 we keep clean. We believe in marriage, 
 but only for the continuance of the race. 
 All men cannot be Shakers, nor do we 
 wish them to be. With marriage came 
 private property, with that came wran- 
 gling, and with wrangling came war. Our 
 communism is that of Moses. Private 
 property in land a pernicious thing is 
 new. It is outrageous that one man should 
 absorb thousands of acres to himself. As 
 
 
 
Some Sample Walks 69 
 
 to the eating of flesh, it is needless, for all 
 its ingredients are in the soil. Beef con- 
 tains nothing that we do not find in vege- 
 tables. But animals have a right to their 
 lives, and I object to the murder." 
 
 The little burial-ground to which the 
 mortal relics of these people are com- 
 mitted is almost unmarked, and Daniel Fra- 
 ser asked the use of gravestones, for of what 
 honor and value was dust ? The lives 
 and deeds of men were not buried. There 
 are in this village a serenity, prosperity, 
 and health that to the tired man of cities 
 ought to be delightful. Do the Shakers 
 prove communism possible, except on a 
 religious basis ? Industrial and intellectual 
 brotherhoods have not thriven as they 
 should. Will men be as just and work as 
 hard for each other's material welfare as 
 they will to reach heaven ? I do not know. 
 I can only say that as communists the 
 Shakers have proved their right to be. 
 Said Elder Evans, since gathered to the 
 faithful, "This is an earthly heaven. I 
 could live here forever." 
 
Partly Practical 
 
 
 
 SHOULD any reader care to make a 
 journey afoot, I commend to him 
 these considerations : have a general plan, 
 but do not feel obliged to follow it slavishly, 
 for chance brings benefits that are worth 
 going aside to gain, while it interposes ob- 
 stacles that it is wasteful and foolish to 
 surmount. Don't climb a mountain or a 
 monument in a fog, or visit a waterfall when 
 August heats have dried it up, for the reason 
 that your schedule calls for these things. 
 Prepare yourself ahead with a few facts 
 about roads, taverns, show places, distances, 
 history, legends, and if you have a scientific 
 bent, geography, geology, mineralogy, and 
 botany. Every mile of the walk will then 
 have an interest denied to the man who is 
 intent on covering space or seeing the 
 hackneyed sights. Cautions are offered 
 a-plenty. A will tell you that there must 
 70 
 
Partly Practical 71 
 
 be no long walk, no starting directly after 
 meals, no delay in getting them, no rising 
 before a certain hour, no staying up after 
 a given time ; B holds that there should 
 be no walking at noon, no bathing, no this, 
 that, and the other ; but people who govern 
 their conduct with thirty-nine don'ts ought 
 to coddle themselves at home. The best 
 way is to walk when you please, go until 
 you are tired, eat what you like, as much 
 as you like, when you like, and drink much 
 or little, being timid only as to water, 
 which, in the country, is liable to cesspool 
 and barn-yard taints. Drink from springs 
 rather than wells and pools, and take milk 
 or cider when it is offered. It is a sug- 
 gestive fact that city people who succumb 
 to typhoid diseases in the fall have gen- 
 erally been drinking country water in the 
 summer. Your moss-covered bucket is a 
 rare conserver of microbes. 
 
 The tour afoot, to be successful, must be 
 individual, and you may count on frictions 
 and disagreements if you go in company. 
 As a relaxation the tour with a party is 
 most efficient. The pace is then accommo- 
 
72 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 dated to the slowest man, the weak or fat 
 one orders the wayside halts, the hungriest 
 fixes and prolongs the hours for meals ; so 
 the party is not likely to overwork. There 
 is always good nature, chaffing, story-tell- 
 ing, singing, and skylarking, with reading 
 aloud or card-playing in the evening, and 
 a trip like that will be pleasant in the reali- 
 zation, pleasant in the memory. If there 
 is a crank or obstructionist among you, he 
 drops out or submits to the wishes of the 
 rest. 
 
 Ah, but suppose you are the crank? 
 Then flock by yourself. Really, there is 
 not half so much to fear in walking alone, 
 or being alone, as the untried think there 
 is. The social habit has such a grip on 
 most of us that the idea of separation from 
 our kind carries with it a sort of terror. 
 If you have inner resources, however, you 
 find pretty good company without any one 
 to talk to. As you are sure to meet people 
 at the taverns and other stopping-places, 
 the hours of solitude on the highway are 
 hours of self-knowledge and self-develop- 
 ment ; you will laugh less than in company, 
 
 
Partly Practical 73 
 
 but will learn more ; you will study faces 
 less, but will gain truer notions of the im- 
 portance and beauty of the hills, woods, 
 waters, and wild life of the earth and air. 
 If some community of interest unites a 
 party, if all are sketchers, photographers, 
 entomologists, or footpads, it will be happier 
 than if each member is pulling in a different 
 way from the others ; but when a man is 
 his own party he can stop, go, sleep, daw- 
 dle, or hurry as the whim or the need 
 commands him. 
 
 And if one really intends to take a 
 pedestrian tour he might as well give over 
 the hope of company, for in ninety-nine 
 cases in a hundred he will find that some- 
 body has a lame leg or an engagement, 
 and the rest are for putting it off until he 
 is ready ; then, when he is prepared, an- 
 other one is so pressed by business that 
 he asks a farther postponement ; another 
 comes around with some ridiculous excuse 
 about getting married, and so the season 
 is wasted, and the affair goes over until 
 next year, in other words, forever. But 
 though the party of from three to a dozen 
 
74 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 is difficult, it is not so hard to find one 
 companion. If only the women would 
 stop wearing corsets and tight shoes and 
 carrying inordinate quantities of dry goods, 
 how much health and pleasure they would 
 gain from walks with their husbands and 
 brothers ! In England I have met mother, 
 father, daughters, and sons trudging along 
 the road together ; the men, to be sure, a 
 little unhappy, as they had to carry packs 
 for the women, but bearing up with smiling 
 fortitude. Agreement between two is 
 kept by little compromises and sacrifices, 
 whereas the difficulty of agreement among 
 more than two grows in geometrical ratio 
 as each new member is added to the party. 
 In a family outing it is different : the 
 daughter orders that. 
 
 After the trip is arranged comes the 
 question of outfit, and here a rigid economy 
 of weight must be practised. No black- 
 ing, no linen shirts, no frills, furbelows, or 
 superfluities. Supplies must be cut down 
 to the last ounce, always remembering that 
 they weigh four times as much at night as 
 in the morning. The knapsack was once 
 
Partly Practical 75 
 
 a popular carrier, but it is obsolete now, 
 except among the military and on excur- 
 sions into remote districts where food or 
 camp equipage must be carried. It is 
 awkward to reach, it tends to make the 
 wearer stoop, the straps bind and cut the 
 shoulders, it is conspicuous, and some 
 rustics will suppose it to be a peddler's 
 pack. Best of luggage-holders is a little 
 leather satchel with a strap by which to 
 hang it, and when the left shoulder tires it 
 can be shifted to the right. It can be 
 easily and quickly opened, draws no atten- 
 tion, is not clumsy ; in trains and boats it 
 can be tossed aside and replaced in an 
 instant ; it need be only half as large as a 
 knapsack, for one's actual wants are few. 
 In several trips, across Canada, through the 
 West and South, and in Europe, this was 
 my equipment : in my satchel I had a 
 light rubber coat, night-gown, shirt, hand- 
 kerchief, collar, buttons, comb, tooth-brush, 
 telescope cup, postal cards, map, and guide- 
 book. In my pockets were a knife, watch, 
 pencil, fountain pen, handkerchief, tooth- 
 picks, note-book, sketch-book, novel, and 
 
76 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 money, the latter if I was lucky. Add a 
 stick, more for company than support, and 
 you are independent, so long as you get 
 your meals. For dress, just old clothes 
 with a soft hat or cap, easy, broad-soled 
 shoes. Ready : go. 
 
 Of course, if there is a party there is a 
 certain advantage in the matter of adjust- 
 ing freight, since it may be divided. For 
 example, one man will carry the guide- 
 book, only one being needed for all ; an- 
 other will take a clothes-brush ; another a 
 jar of vaseline, useful to relieve chafing ; 
 another, who has gained the confidence of 
 his partners, is the guardian of a flask ; 
 and one carries shaving materials. While 
 I think of it, let me add that if you do 
 succeed in making up a party, have it 
 understood at the outset that each pays 
 his way. Nothing leads more easily to 
 extravagance and regret than the selfish- 
 ness that assumes on its own account the 
 regulation of expenses for the company, or 
 the careless good nature that would incur 
 penury by buying cigars and paying car 
 fare for every one. If it is agreed to 
 
Partly Practical 77 
 
 share evenly, one man may act as treasurer 
 and you can have a weekly or nightly 
 settlement. 
 
 Don't be separated from your tooth- 
 brush and overcoat. Keep them with 
 you, as you do your watch and money. 
 A company of four, myself one, wishing 
 to make the ascent of Mount Washington 
 by way of Tuckerman's Ravine, resolved 
 to send our satchels to the summit in the 
 stage that climbed up daily by the wagon 
 road. On reaching the hotel at the top 
 we found that the stage-driver had for- 
 gotten to leave them, and had taken them 
 to the foot of the mountain again. After 
 much telephoning it was understood that 
 they were to be sent, express, to the Willey 
 House. Next day we descended, by the 
 bridle-path, to that inn, and found that 
 they had not been left. More telephoning, 
 telegraphing, consultations with agents ; 
 finally, they were traced to the Crawford 
 House. We returned in our tracks and 
 recovered them. As my own pack weighed 
 but four or five pounds, it was absurd to 
 have it carried in a wagon. Express com- 
 
 
 
78 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 panics can do a service, however, if you 
 wish to keep supplied with fresh linen, or 
 if you want to shine in evening dress at the 
 hotels, or if it is needful to your pleasure 
 to destroy life with guns ; for a heavy 
 valise or trunk may be sent ahead, and 
 will await you at your hotel, if it is not in 
 some other man's hotel, or if you can get 
 into your own in the busy season. This 
 service is expensive, uncertain, and causes 
 delays, for in regions of much resort, 
 where the means of handling crowds are 
 still insufficient, baggage bides its time 
 until its owners are lodged, and annoying 
 swindles are permitted by hotel and livery 
 men and express companies. 
 
 One of the small frauds that need not 
 fret the walker is the hotel 'bus, that waits 
 for guests at railway stations. Nothing is 
 said about fare, and it is supposed that the 
 landlord who demands four dollars a day 
 for a cot in a corridor and three boarding^ 
 house meals will at least collect his vic^ 
 tims ; but, no : the driver assesses twenty- 
 five to fifty cents all around. This scheme 
 is sometimes practised : a free coach for the 
 
 
Partly Practical 79 
 
 Aramoosha House is at the station. The 
 house is eight minutes' walk from there. 
 The driver calls, " Get right in, gents. 
 Take you right up. No charge." You 
 get in and ride to the hotel, where the 
 clerk informs you, what the driver knew, 
 that there is not a room, a bed, a cot, or a 
 billiard-table left unclaimed. Then the 
 "free coach" driver pounces on you and 
 wants half a dollar, because you are going 
 to another house. 
 
 By all means accept the invitations you 
 will get from farmers driving on the high- 
 way, unless you have scruples against 
 riding, or a pride of feet. Our country 
 people have much native kindness, and 
 when they offer a seat they mean it, and 
 would be surprised, if not offended, by a 
 tender of payment. Once in England I 
 had a lift, though the wagoner took a tip. 
 On the Continent I not only had no offer 
 of a ride, but I never heard of any stranger 
 who did. It is not customary there to 
 do such things. A change to a carriage for 
 a couple of miles gives rest and diversity 
 to the day's programme, and a swapping 
 
8o With Feet to the Earth 
 
 of ideas with a shrewd Yankee will be 
 agreeable to both of you. 
 
 Now, as to washing. You will swim 
 and bathe often, and shake and brush your 
 clothing every night ; yet walking is a 
 dusty business, and you will require fre- 
 quent service from a laundry. Some ho- 
 tels are so well provided that you can have 
 clothing washed, dried, and ironed over- 
 night, and ready when you rise. In other 
 places where you are to stop for a day or 
 two, the work can be done better at more 
 leisure. You can wash small articles, like 
 handkerchiefs and stockings, at a pinch, 
 yourself. Stockings wear out so quickly 
 that it is not a bad idea to take about three 
 pairs of your oldest, and discard them as 
 they become ragged. Or, buy a pair at a 
 time of the cheapest kind and throw them 
 away as they are used up. Little jobs, 
 like mending, will usually be done for you 
 by servants at the inns ; for it is an odd 
 fact, in respect of hotels, that the more 
 you pay the less you get. There are 
 caravansaries in New York in which ten 
 dollars a day is the charge for a room, 
 
 V 
 
Partly Practical 81 
 
 without board. You want a fire in the 
 grate ? Fifty cents. A servant to carry a 
 message ? Fifty cents. A lamp to read 
 by ? Impossible. Ice-water ? Ten cents. 
 A hot-water bag at your feet ? Ten cents, 
 and also buy the bag. Information? 
 Ask a policeman. But in a country tav- 
 ern, where the charge is five dollars a 
 week with board, you can ask the land- 
 lady to sew on a button, borrow the land- 
 lord's slippers or the hostler's fishing-pole, 
 call for hot water to shave with, have a fire 
 in your room, get a parcel taken to the 
 station, have your mail brought in, have a 
 snack between meals, and there is no 
 thought of extra charge. 
 
 In Europe, where I flew exceeding light 
 of baggage, I resorted to this expedient to 
 save the carriage of an extra shirt : my 
 night-gown was pierced for collar buttons, 
 and I carried a detachable collar and scarf. 
 On the day when my shirt was in the wash 
 nobody who may have seen me in the 
 galleries or museums knew that I was so 
 nearly ready for bed. I am aware that 
 these hints will seem funny to people who 
 6 
 
82 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 have time and wealth a-plenty, but I ad- 
 dress myself just now to poor folks. Nat- 
 urally, I had a base of supplies, warm 
 clothes for the voyage, and all that, but it 
 was in London. I commend this practice 
 of securing a base. Here, it will be your 
 home ; abroad, it will be the capital of the 
 country you are visiting, or, if your trip is 
 hasty, London. The modern agency will 
 keep your steamer-chair and trunk (great 
 humbug having to pay for a seat when you 
 pay one hundred dollars for your passage, 
 and greater humbug having to give a 
 sovereign to a waiter who would have 
 brought your meals to you if you had 
 wanted any), will hold or forward letters, 
 receive books, photographs, and souvenirs 
 that you must send back to yourself when 
 your pockets are full, cash checks and 
 letters of credit, if you have things like 
 that, secure passage on trains and steamers, 
 and will be useful in many such ways. 
 
 A point to consider is the distance to be 
 covered in a daily march, and here you 
 find it an advantage to be alone. If your 
 associates are elderly and slow, they will 
 
Partly Practical 83 
 
 pull you back, while if they are young, 
 springy, and secretly resolved on outdoing 
 each other, what should be a tour of ob- 
 servation degenerates into a mere scramble, 
 and you end each day fagged and dis- 
 heartened. No rule can be made, because 
 weather and roads have much to do with 
 progress. Light rains need not stay you, 
 but mud will, and in this country the art 
 of road-making is in its infancy. In much 
 of the South the roads are as rude as the 
 people, and are often mere trails, impas- 
 sable for wagons. In one section, in 
 Eastern Tennessee, where I stretched my 
 legs a little, the only access from one 
 town to another was along a railroad track. 
 The roads of the prairie district are often 
 shameful : hog-wallows where wagons 
 break down and farmers lose more than 
 the price of decent highways through their 
 inability to get to market. Even in New 
 England one must prepare for hard going, 
 for the farmers, poor and unprogressive, 
 too often think that good roads are made 
 only for bicycles. Would that some of 
 those complaining gentry could be dropped 
 
 
84 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 down in England, France, or Switzerland 
 for a day. What they need is object 
 lessons. 
 
 But suppose the going to be fair, and a 
 man able to keep his feet moving through 
 some hours of sunshine, what might be his 
 daily stent? Perhaps twenty miles. He 
 may want to turn aside and botanize, or 
 enjoy a view, or swim, or climb a hill, or 
 chat with people at the tavern or farm- 
 house where he gets his lunch, so that he 
 will be content with fifteen. Or, he may 
 take a delight in his own strength, in con- 
 quering leagues of distance, and thirty 
 miles a day will not be too many. It is 
 Well to be comfortably tired ; that gives 
 appetite and sleep ; but the exhaustion of 
 overdoing may nearly cripple the traveller 
 for two or three days. The first stiffness 
 of the muscles must not scare him. If he 
 lounges about long after his first twenty- 
 five or thirty miles he will have to be 
 broken in all over again. If he will keep 
 moving on the second day it will hurt at 
 first, but by resting frequently and walk- 
 ing easily he will be in good condition 
 
Partly Practical 85 
 
 by night. The mistake made by green 
 walkers and climbers is that of allowing 
 their enthusiasm to run away with them at 
 the outset of the trip, and suffering from 
 stiff knees and sore muscles for days there- 
 after. I recall the wabbling legs and 
 pained expression of two friends who had 
 begun a hundred-mile tramp with light- 
 some gambols, and were presently glad to 
 get back to the cars. Looking sadly on 
 
 each other, one said, "C , we are a 
 
 pair of magnificent ruins." If you will do 
 walking to brag about, let it be at the 
 finish. 
 
 Belike, when you take your time, you 
 will rest for a day or two here and there. 
 Most travellers make for a city when they 
 would spoil an hour ; but even if one has 
 not to consider his pocket, even if he is not 
 called to the country for hunting, fishing, 
 botanizing, landscape, or any scientific or 
 artistic purpose, the quaintness of its people, 
 the interest of village architecture, tradi- 
 tions, or employments, will take hold on an 
 open mind. Rustic taverns may be dull 
 places as compared with city hotels, but as 
 
86 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 museums for the exhibit of human nature 
 they are superior. I never lounge before 
 the fire in the dim, smoky tap-room or 
 office of a tavern without finding the time 
 well spent. The big, slow, profane, hearty, 
 good-tempered farmers always have some- 
 thing to say worth the hearing, and their 
 grimy, uncouth selves are always worth 
 seeing. What queer phrases you hear ! 
 A wagoner dilating to his knot of hearers 
 on the " wuthlessness" of a hill family, 
 specifies, "And there was Uriah, lyin' up 
 to the house all day lappin' lightnin'." 
 Lightning is rum. They are not always 
 men of wide view, these agriculturists : in 
 Presbyterian districts they think ill of 
 Methodists, and in Republican townships 
 the Democrats are popularly believed to 
 be the devil's children. They do not 
 always see natural beauty, nor think so 
 highly of it as they do of the artificial. 
 They welcome any chance to get together, 
 be it to elect a school committee or to 
 inspect the prize pumpkins at the county 
 fair. It is well to see them with greased 
 locks, squeaky boots, and comfortless 
 
Partly Practical 87 
 
 clothes at church, and if there is anything 
 in the way of a show at the village hall, or 
 the Odd-Fellows' room, or the school-house, 
 attend it by all means, for the audience 
 will be the best part of it. 
 
 In nothing is the growth of taste in the 
 American people more obvious than in the 
 change in their social amusements, for 
 rustic delights must always be measurably 
 the same. The enjoyments of town, on 
 the contrary, being artificial, are capable 
 of improvement, and changes for the better 
 have been hastened by co-ordinate ad- 
 vances in building, lighting, heating, venti- 
 lation, plumbing, decoration, and mechan- 
 ism. Whether or not the theatre affords 
 as good an art as it did to our grand- 
 fathers, there is no question that it is a 
 brighter, pleasanter, safer, and more com- 
 fortable house than it was in their time ; 
 and even churches and schools may be 
 kept clean and warm without exciting a 
 dread lest this should be interfering with 
 the decrees of Providence. 
 
 Much is done toward getting town 
 folks out of their houses and into the air. 
 
88 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 Parks have been created, boulevards, 
 drive-ways, and bicycle paths extended, 
 shelters, baths, and band-stands erected, 
 summer towns have grown up on the 
 beaches, picnic groves and dancing pa- 
 vilions have multiplied, boats ply on urban 
 and suburban waters, train and trolley-car 
 are carrying people from the tenements to 
 places where they can gasp and drink beer. 
 To offset this lure into the open the shows 
 of town must be more picturesque, more 
 varied, more beautiful, more naughty, 
 sometimes. And, truly, the popular en- 
 tertainments in our American cities 
 saving only the drama would be melan- 
 choly curiosities if they could be revived. 
 There were the panoramas, gaudily painted 
 on canvas and impressively unrolled before 
 the multitude. They represented Arctic 
 explorations, scenes in the American wars, 
 the Irish lakes, the Mississippi. Who ever 
 hears of them to-day? It is doubtful if 
 one has been shown since the Centennial. 
 If they are in existence, you will find them 
 roaming through the farm districts. The 
 villages have advanced with the towns, but 
 
Partly Practical 89 
 
 slowly. They have minstrel shows, vari- 
 eties, concerts and the circus, and the 
 quack medicine vender with his banjo- 
 player and Indians, and the talented 
 "family," whose head is manager and 
 tenor singer ; materfamilias, soprano and 
 accompanist ; Miss Arvaletta, cornet solo- 
 ist; Master Jacob, violinist and clog- 
 dancer ; and Master James, aged six, elocu- 
 tionist. Oh, how they suffer in the 
 provinces, if only they knew it ! They are 
 about where the towns were thirty-five 
 years ago. Does anybody remember the 
 Peak family of bell-ringers, the Hutchinson 
 family of singers, the Rev. Mr. Fletcher, 
 first of the uncounted multitude of stere- 
 opticon lecturers, "Temperance" Dodge, 
 "That Comical Brown," Philip Phillips, 
 " the singing pilgrim," and all those people 
 who had star engagements and red-lettered 
 bills in the cities ? Their counterparts are 
 struggling precariously through the back- 
 woods. One entertainer who, in his day, 
 was nearly as well known as Booth, I came 
 upon recently in a village, where, with the 
 aid of two other singers and a manager, he 
 
go With Feet to the Earth 
 
 gave one of his " delightful and illustrious 
 evenings." As this was a poor place of 
 two or three hundred people, we asked 
 him why he did not go on to the next 
 town, four miles away, where he would 
 draw on a population of over a thou- 
 sand. "Oh, that's too big a place for us," 
 said he. 
 
 If there are no shows, if the tavern does 
 not sell liquor on the sly (thereby making 
 itself legal and unpopular), the cross-roads 
 grocery is sure to be open until nine 
 o'clock every evening, and the discussions 
 and prophecies on politics and agriculture 
 that are made by lean men with slouch 
 hats and chin beards, who sit the while on 
 counters and cracker-barrels, are not to be 
 lightly regarded. And, though you are of 
 a kind and disposing nature, you can have 
 no idea what a deal of good you do to 
 those people in supplying them with some- 
 thing to talk about Their discussions of 
 your business, when you are out of ear- 
 shot, and their direct questions about 
 yourself, your home, your engagements, 
 and your name, they don't often ask that, 
 
Partly Practical 91 
 
 because they learn it from the tavern reg- 
 ister, are not inspired by mere curiosity ; 
 they grow out of a yearning for more ex- 
 perience and understanding ; so don't be 
 huffy if they seem personal. As you 
 stride up the road the children will see you 
 and run to report to their parents and the 
 hired man, so that you will pass in review 
 before the household. Long after you are 
 out of sight the family will be considering 
 your case : 
 
 " Wonder if that could ha' been Eleazar 
 Ames's nephew he was expectin' from 
 Nashua." 
 
 " No ; he'd ha' sent a team for him, 
 wouldn't he?" 
 
 " Suppose he was one of them lightnin'- 
 rod agents? He had a bag." 
 
 " I don't hardly think so. I guess he's 
 sellin' books." 
 
 "Well, he won't sell any more 'Lives 
 of Distinguished Congressmen' in this 
 house ; now, that's a fact" 
 
 " Twouldn't be surprisin' if he was one 
 of those actor fellers lookin' for work." 
 
 "Why, sakes alive! I jest happen to 
 
92 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 remember that 'Bijah Spaulding is ex- 
 pectin' a new hand down to his blacksmith 
 shop, and that's who it is." 
 
 "Te-he! If it is, 'Bijah'll be figgerin' 
 on havin' him jine the Baptist church, and 
 I did hear he was Congregational himself." 
 
 Now aren't you glad you came? Think 
 what a refreshment you are to these parched 
 and eager questioners ! Sometimes they 
 overdo it a little. In my teens I met a 
 rustic who stared at me as I approached as 
 though never, in all his days, had he seen 
 so strange an object. The nearer I drew 
 the more his jaw fell, the larger grew his 
 pupils, the more he was mastered by sur- 
 prise. It was amusing, yet irritating. I 
 resolved on homoeopathic treatment. Slack- 
 ening pace, I regarded him with equal 
 amazement, my eyes widened, my mouth 
 fell open, my arms dangled weakly ; at 
 last I stopped and stared until my eyes 
 felt dry. This proceeding put the youth 
 into an ecstasy of astonishment ; his eyes 
 threatened to pop out of his head, and 
 wrens might have nested in his mouth. 
 Gradually a sense stole over him that 
 
Partly Practical 93 
 
 my performance might be disingenuous. 
 Twitches and gulps showed that he was 
 becoming lucid, and presently he regained 
 self-control with a start. He went in-doors 
 with his eyes behind him, and brooded 
 on this phenomenon for days, no doubt, 
 wondering how he had deserved such a 
 compliment. 
 
 Except the tramps and a few dogs, there 
 is nothing to create disquiet in the country, 
 and tramps merely infest the roads between 
 important towns ; you never see them in 
 remote hamlets, for they might find work 
 there. If you carry cash about you, it 
 may be secured in various pockets with 
 safety-pins. On a European tour I con- 
 verted my little wealth into gold and had 
 it sewed in a belt of double cotton flannel, 
 worn inside of my clothing. Each piece 
 was separated by a few stitches from its 
 neighbor, and its value was marked outside 
 in ink. And how soon it vanished ! 
 
 In choosing a time for walking, take, if 
 you can, the season you best like, though 
 it be in blazing August or shrill January. 
 It is well, however, to remember that in 
 
94 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 winter our roads are bad ; that in spring 
 they are worse ; that in summer one is in 
 danger of sunstroke. It is in autumn that 
 the roads are hardest ; then the air is 
 bracing, the summer revellers have gone 
 home, and the skies and woods are glorious. 
 Have you a knack for sketching ? Then 
 take a sketch-book with you. A camera 
 will do more and do it quicker, but it is 
 heavy, it implies plates, chemicals, and 
 dark rooms, while the sketch gives results 
 that the photograph cannot As you look 
 at the drawing in later years it all comes 
 back to you, because your attention was 
 vigorously applied to the subject. They 
 say that you will remember a view if 
 you look at it so long and steadily that 
 when you turn away you can still see it. 
 On the same principle the theme of the 
 drawing stays by you. You recall how 
 the rocks shone gray in the morning sun, 
 how the cloud-plumes swirled above the 
 hills, how the light danced on the brook, 
 and what a field of golden-rod spread be- 
 yond it ; you remember the freshness of 
 the breeze laden with odors from the bal- 
 
Partly Practical 95 
 
 sams, and you hear again the cool singing 
 of the water, the rustle of falling leaves, 
 and the airy whispering of the pines. 
 Every such memory is blessed. It as- 
 suages the hardness of city life. It gives 
 to you a healthful moment, and you bought 
 it with easy toil. 
 
Night-Prowls in the Streets 
 
 
 
 T^\ARKNESS is kind : it covers so much 
 JUr that is ugly. In the country it ob- 
 literates beauty ; but in the city, where 
 beauty must be shared on even terms, 
 at least, with harshness, we may well be 
 thankful for it. Night in the street is full 
 of suggestion, there is play for fancy in 
 dim vistas and half-seen objects, whereas 
 fancy retreats, appalled, before the porten- 
 tous spectacle that unfolds in the slums 
 and the platitudinous avenues and houses 
 of the well-to-do. At night a city is ro- 
 mantic and poetic. Its practical side dis- 
 appears with the sun, and under the celes- 
 tial and electric stars it is gay, emotional, 
 fantastic. It is almost laughable, this 
 mockery on their real selves that stony 
 streets and stony men take on in gaslight. 
 Perhaps cities are like their populace in 
 this : that they are always right senti- 
 96 
 
Night-Prowls in the Streets 97 
 
 mentally, whatever they are morally. You 
 know, Donizetti would beat his wife, then 
 cry over his improvisations at the piano. 
 Napoleon would see the slaughter of his 
 troops unmoved, but would weep at pathos 
 in a play. If emotions controlled us in- 
 stead of ambitions and appetites, how good 
 a few of us might be ! 
 
 Yet, we have only to turn in at the door- 
 way, and we have as good as a daylight 
 quantity of the trifling and unwise : people 
 dining, dicing, dancing, laughing, singing, 
 acting, after the fatigues of the day. Per- 
 haps they are more themselves than they 
 are at their desks and benches. It is worth 
 our while to prowl, if only to listen to the 
 sounds that come through windows : the 
 talk of company ; the crash of rifle-butts 
 on an armory floor ; the beating of mugs 
 on a table in a commers ; the wailing and 
 whining of two amateurs who suppose that 
 they are singing a duet ; the screechy mirth 
 of shop-girls at the ball of the McCabe 
 Association ; the strange snarl of a Chinese 
 fiddle in the back room of a laundry ; the 
 applause and racket as the political speaker 
 7 
 
98 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 in the hall concludes his remarks, beaming 
 with satisfaction that he has convinced a 
 lot of people who were already convinced ; 
 and hark ! the throbbing of an organ 
 and a chant, the Miserere. In all this light- 
 ness the conscience of the city is awake, 
 and hope still claims the hearts of men. 
 Heigh-ho ! Solemn themes get few listen- 
 ers, for not one remains on the sidewalk be- 
 fore the church, whereas a throng is forging 
 in at the brilliantly lighted theatre. Listen : 
 it is a loud, acid voice, and of a woman, 
 that holds the multitude in joyous trance : 
 
 "I went to Brogan's, Saturday night. 
 There I met Callahan. We got tight. 
 In came O'Brien along wit' his gang. 
 Callahan told him he'd better go hang. 
 O'Brien fetched Callahan one in the eye. 
 Says he, 'I'm onto you. You're my pie.' " 
 
 And so on. Some think it wit ; some 
 think it music ; some enjoy it with the 
 studious air of a critic, seeming to give 
 thought to it. There is no discrimination. 
 Among the hoi polloi " everything goes." 
 I wonder if the pleasures of good taste are 
 as keen as those of bad taste and no taste. 
 
Night-Prowls in the Streets 99 
 
 It seems almost pathetic, this variety show, 
 but perhaps we are the ones to be pitied 
 for not being able to like it. Even the 
 drama, most natural and human of the 
 arts in its intention, is the most artificial 
 among them in its form. 
 
 Back to the street again, with its roar 
 and glare, its throng of jostling people. 
 There is a different character in a night 
 crowd from that of the day. Timid and 
 conservative folk are afraid of the dark, as 
 if they were likely to tread on the tails of 
 cobras or dinosaurs on their door-steps ; so 
 the people of the street have something of 
 the gay, the reckless, the vicious. The 
 self-sufficient man always comes out with 
 the stars to caress his whiskers and watch 
 for admiration. A man is self-satisfied 
 when his personality is so insignificant that 
 his mind takes in the whole of it. Yet, 
 this self-complacency gives a certain au- 
 thority that is acknowledged by people who 
 have other things to think about, and who 
 step aside to let pomp have its stately 
 way, their instinct being to avoid rubbing 
 elbows with it. The vulgar and refined 
 
ioo With Feet to the Earth 
 
 are apt to be, not potentially, but tempera- 
 mentally divisible as positive and negative, 
 although our classing here is arbitrary, 
 since John, negative to James, is positive 
 to Samuel. 
 
 The positive is a daylight quality ; the 
 negative is nightly, quiet. Positive people 
 are everywhere praised and hated : they 
 work for their own good. The negative 
 work for the world's good, and may be 
 tricked. The lad of generous sentiments 
 but retiring way, unbaffled as yet by scorn, 
 not yet unstrung by the refusal of the 
 universe to answer his questions, thinks of 
 the good of all, even as incident to his 
 own happiness. He never lacks masters. 
 Napoleon is a positive type ; Christ a nega- 
 tive. We require a certain selfishness for 
 preservative purposes, but egoism is a nar- 
 row measure of a man. It is the altruistic 
 range he has that describes his largeness : 
 his loves, likes, works, and benefits. Few 
 suffice to themselves : a divine frenzy for 
 interference projects art, socialism, law, and 
 manners on the whole body of mankind ; 
 howbeit this altruism of the later centuries 
 
Night-Prowls iti^kt Stteets Voi 
 
 may be only an insitineV-tO rrtefge tji^iridi- 
 vidual into the whole, the part into the 
 entirety. When young we feel our per- 
 sonality and glory in it As we grow older 
 we see its indifferent consequence, the 
 inferiority of the part to the whole, while 
 making allowance for dominant individ- 
 uality. Assembled at a meeting, a dinner, 
 a play, a battle, we find the ego we had 
 vaunted to be no better than a thousand 
 others. Perhaps we are sorry at this ; per- 
 haps we are glad to be supported and 
 absorbed. 
 
 One charm of the night walk is its mys- 
 tery. We do not want facts thrown at us, 
 as if we were doing wrong, and they were 
 bricks. I suppose it is a little pride of 
 mind that makes us reserve some rights of 
 understanding and discovery, and a pride 
 of individuality that makes us wish to im- 
 press ourselves on what we see. Night is 
 a time for impressions rather than for the 
 getting of knowledge, although if we know 
 a good deal about something we are pretty 
 sure to see it ; not in its own light, perhaps, 
 but in ours. Unless our specialty is seeing, 
 

 to the Earth 
 
 , as in any de- 
 partment or function, "pays," we hurry 
 over the earth to find what was at our 
 elbow at home ; we go to the fields for 
 botanical study before we examine our 
 door-yards. White and Thoreau, the 
 master-watchers, kept to the confines of 
 their villages. What splendid effects are 
 never looked at ! Fog, swirling about the 
 fifteenth stories of office buildings ; sun- 
 sets ; stars ; northern lights ; we go to 
 Europe to see them ! One of the needs 
 of our restless age is content and familiarity 
 with what we have. Less general informa- 
 tion, less superficiality, some happy igno- 
 rance of integral calculus, could be endured 
 if we were stoutly grounded on a dozen 
 facts. 
 
 Which recalls me to my position that in 
 our night-rambles we are not after the 
 material, at least not the petty. For, as 
 we mature, we rebel against littleness and 
 detail. The large, the general, the essen- 
 tial, are what we want. We demand sim- 
 plicity and order in our pictures for 
 example, in our reading, our music, our 
 

 Night-Prowls in the Streets 103 
 
 architecture no less than in our way of 
 viewing the world and the men in it. 
 These are attributes of every good picture 
 painted, seen, or fancied. We find better 
 compositions in gaslight and moonlight 
 than in daytime, because detail is lost and 
 mass is compassed. So in our thinking 
 we cannot afford to put all facts into an 
 equal light, because not every fact is a 
 commanding fact. The sun of truth, too, 
 is so strong that we have to turn partly 
 from it when we see the world in its illumi- 
 nation. Our eyes are not yet the eyes of 
 eagles. We have not risen far beyond our 
 worldly pedestals. Yet to many, material 
 things are least Nature is not the same 
 in the eye of the scientist that it is in the 
 eye of the nature lover. To the one it is 
 as a man on the dissecting-table ; to the 
 other as the man erect and speaking. 
 Have we not been dissecting long enough? 
 We have never learned to put the cut 
 limbs back again and make a man. We 
 are interested in nature, less as a problem 
 or result in chemistry than as it reflects 
 ourselves, though he is a finer man who 
 
104 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 reflects nature. To live happily with it is 
 not so much a matter of knowledge as of 
 sympathy, which likewise qualifies us best 
 to live with men. 
 
 We find in prowling at night a reversal 
 of many effects we are used to, a re- 
 versal as complete as that from light to 
 dark. This mass of masonry, three hun- 
 dred feet high, that by day seems to crush 
 the earth lo ! it is phantom architecture 
 now ; a cloud form beetling down from the 
 stars, and only a shade more tangible as it 
 descends into gaslight. Here is a row of 
 dwellings not yet roofed. By day it is 
 cheap. By night it is the walls of Troy. 
 Look along this avenue, where at noon the 
 ash-carts clatter and refuse blows into the 
 eyes : it is now a highway into fairy-land, 
 with a double row of white stars beaconing 
 the way. So the little square, so green, so 
 joyous in the sun, is now a space of blank- 
 ness and blackness, all its life of tree and 
 flower concealed or hinted merely in 
 crouching shapes and phosphor patches. 
 Distances are confused : the light twinkling 
 away up yonder, where the belated clerk 
 
Night-Prowls in the Streets 105 
 
 is working, might be at nearly any height 
 you please ; the turn of the street that you 
 know is half a mile beyond looks as if it 
 might be a league away. Especially are 
 these things baffling when the air is thick, 
 either with mist or snow. A fog obscures 
 rather than darkens in a town, for one has 
 less a sense of blackness, even in a London 
 "pea-soup," than he has in the small hours 
 of a clear winter morning. For a fog 
 soaks up light and diffuses it again faintly. 
 Along the Bay of Fundy the sailors talk 
 of " fog-eaters," which are spots of bright- 
 ness in the haze where the sun is striking 
 
 o 
 
 in. This lumination seems really to be 
 absorbed as its warmth takes up the cloud 
 that rests on the sea. So every lamp and 
 gas-jet makes a halo for itself, and before 
 we turn a corner we know where the street- 
 light is : the mist is aglow for yards about 
 it, as if from a conflagration, and walks, 
 walls, and tree-stems, being wet, reflect it, 
 too. On the Brooklyn bridge, on a thick 
 night, the shine of the green-globed lamps 
 is uncanny, while the red lights make a 
 mist of blood. 
 
io6 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 
 
 In Europe I made a practice of reaching 
 the cities after dark, gaining my first im- 
 pressions of them in the night. They are 
 dream towns in my memory, and the half 
 seen stays with me more securely than the 
 obvious. It is one of the delights of travel 
 that you do so much of it afterward, as 
 you sit before your fire or under your fig- 
 tree. Again I see the cathedral of Cologne 
 heaved, mountainous, above the roofs ; I sit 
 with Heidelberg students at their beer in 
 the Red Ox garden, watching the moon 
 through the Castle's ruined windows ; I 
 stumble through the winding alleys of 
 Mainz ; I hear the clamor of Seven Dials, 
 as I thread its maze of carts and jostle 
 cyprians and hucksters ; I lounge on the 
 Quay Malaquais, listening to the lap of the 
 Seine, watching its oily writhings, while the 
 hum and scum of Paris move dully here 
 and there ; I climb the hill of Lincoln 
 through streets three centuries old, and 
 Great Tom tolls midnight out of a cloud ; 
 the square of Antwerp glimmers as the 
 cathedral's silver voices sing the passing 
 of the time ; or it is in Lauterbrunnen that 
 
Night-Prowls in the Streets 107 
 
 I see the Jungfrau kindling while below is 
 waste of night : its snows, piled to the sky, 
 greening, yellowing, reddening, silvering, 
 to the unseen sun. 
 
 Because we forget what it is by day we 
 can value the town by night. Forgetful- 
 ness ! No less a precious privilege than 
 memory. 
 
 Hints of nature, too ; you find those in 
 the streets. Night-hawks and bats are 
 astir, moths are beating themselves to 
 death against the electric lights, the stars 
 are always within a few trillions of miles 
 of us ; the moon and sun are the same, 
 barring a little lack of clearness, as in the 
 country. None the less, one indulges a 
 love for nature in town under discourage- 
 ments as strong as he would suffer in culti- 
 vating a love for the city in the country. 
 Natural sights are glossed and glozed with 
 artifice ; sounds of birds and insects are but 
 faintly heard through the clatter and roar ; 
 smells of flowers and herbage must be 
 penetrating indeed to make themselves 
 felt through the fetor of the pave, the 
 reek of tenements, the smoke and fume of 
 
io8 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 factories ; and hardest of all is to gain 
 some sense of the stability, the calm, the 
 charm, that inhere in the earth and air and 
 water where men trouble neither. We 
 must guard against misunderstanding. 
 What we might swear by in the country 
 we must take with questionings in town. 
 For example : an April night falls warm, 
 succeeding a week of cool weather, and 
 from my door I hear what I believe is the 
 piping of frogs, the multitudinous, high- 
 pitched chorus of the spring. This sound 
 comes from the south, and a mile away in 
 that direction are ponds, filling old hollows 
 in the land. By reference to my Thoreau 
 I find that I am justified in supposing the 
 song to be a nocturne of these spry and 
 happy reptiles, for they sang in his day and 
 in his colder land a month earlier than I 
 happen to hear them now. I have often 
 heard them before ; there are no factories 
 or industries in that quarter to make the* 
 noise ; so why not say that they are frogs ? 
 Only because I hear a hum and clank far 
 up the street. Evidently a road-roller is 
 at work. And some ungreased portions 
 
Night-Prowls in the Streets 109 
 
 of the machine may cause the chippering 
 song. I have no doubt that it is the piping 
 of frogs, but in science or the courts such 
 testimony is not enough. In the country, 
 where, unfortunately, they are sparing of 
 the road-roller, there could be no room 
 for question. 
 
 Air is purer by night than by day, and 
 that is one offset to the heaviness of the 
 dark. Blessed is the stillness that bad 
 weather makes, especially snow. The 
 smell of fresh snow in the streets is nearly 
 as pungent as it is in the fields. These 
 muffled nights and these wild ones, both 
 keeping people in-doors and sending them 
 early to bed, are fine for reflective strolls. 
 We are teased into them if we go to the 
 window. It is so large, so full of mystery 
 out there, that you throw aside your work 
 and pull on your coat. We are entitled to 
 tire of our work, since it is finite. Nature 
 .we never fathom. It is always new, it is 
 always our refuge, it suggests, it gives 
 courage and energy. So we go out and 
 gather strength, and most likely waste a 
 part of the walk in making schemes for to- 
 
no With Feet to the Earth 
 
 morrow. Curious, our inability to live in 
 the present : always for something to 
 come, or because of something past. It 
 is a high price to pay for thought. It 
 is doubtful if the brutes would change 
 with us. 
 
 A jog from a heedless wayfarer arrests you 
 there, and you say, hotly, that brutes have 
 changed places with some of us. These 
 sudden jars do set one's temper bubbling. 
 But when they come it is discipline to put 
 yourself in the offender's place, to see what 
 his object was, if he had one ; and often 
 you calm down in a conviction that you 
 were as much in the way and the wrong as 
 he. Sometimes you find traces of yourself 
 in him when he is not to be forgiven, and 
 then disagreeable truth hurts our feelings 
 worse than slander, doesn't it? When lies 
 are told about us we are conscious of recti- 
 tude, and can afford to care nothing ; but 
 the ugly fact that we know or find to be 
 true stirs remorse, or conscience, and makes 
 our hearts ache. So we are punished ; for 
 hell is the bad that a man thinks of himself. 
 In proportion as he is irresponsible, through 
 
Night-Prowls in the Streets ill 
 
 hereditary disposition, for vice and crime, 
 his conscience is dulled. That is because 
 he deserves less hell than the man who 
 wilfully goes astray. 
 
 Are we always wrong, though, when we 
 think we are? How much of our sin is 
 against health and morals, and how much 
 against tradition and convention? Would 
 we not be startled if we could live so long 
 and thoroughly away from men that when 
 we returned we could see them as they are 
 and judge them fairly? Could we do it? 
 Not to be related to our fellows, that would 
 be hard, though the extent of the privation 
 would be commensurate with our lack of 
 self-resource. To be cut off from material 
 nature, that would imply a self-sufficiency 
 beyond experience, prophecy, or under- 
 standing. Yet, who knows? We may be 
 spiritualized into such pure essence as to 
 free ourselves from substance and subsist 
 as thought or being. There will be no sin 
 then. 
 
 Speaking of sin, I dreamed the other 
 night (I had a Welsh rarebit after the play), 
 and the dream was grewsome. I put it into 
 
112 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 this form it is pretty bad, I guess as a 
 freak in the Sanskrit mode, the which I 
 would like to see some one use who really 
 writes verse, for the oddity is that of rhyming 
 the first words of the lines : 
 
 Storm flames light the walls of the castle, stark and 
 
 hoar : 
 Form of power piled skyward by hands imbrued in 
 
 gore. 
 
 Mad shapes rush overhead on black and whistling wings ; 
 Bad things chatter in the dark. What is this that clings 
 Round my knees, lifting eyes that blaze through paper 
 
 face, 
 Crowned with sin, yet tempting? I ban your hellish 
 
 race ! 
 The cloud and smoke that pour from the broken postern 
 
 gate 
 
 Beshroud the forms of men whose race has met its fate. 
 Fast by a bier they moan and toss their arms above one's 
 
 head: 
 Last of their line. All's done. The creature's soul is 
 
 dead. 
 
 Night walking in town may be practice 
 for day walking in the country, for seeing 
 little at once we grow keen to see all. By 
 day the environment differs : things are 
 flung at your notice in the city ; in the 
 country they elude you. It is, then, a 
 
Night-Prowls in the Streets 113 
 
 more educative process to find them in the 
 fields than in the streets. It is a special 
 schooling, though. Some people see noth- 
 ing when they are in the fields ; they merely 
 want to go home. They are over-de- 
 veloped on the town side, anaemic on the 
 other. Those who go through the earlier 
 years of life without learning how to apply 
 themselves seldom gain a power of concen- 
 tration and success after middle age. Con- 
 tinuity makes their heads ache. The ability 
 to work and observe is as much to be 
 cultivated as temperance, truth-telling, and 
 good manners. Tramps lose the power to 
 support themselves, and people who are 
 brought up in the idleness of either poverty 
 or wealth commonly fail as earners of 
 wages or fame. They are not true friends 
 who merely flatter and indulge us : the 
 best are they who make us do our best. 
 
 And we want to enlarge within, that the 
 world may enlarge for us without. What? 
 Have I said it before ? I will not stop to 
 see, but there was a twinge of memory as 
 I set it down. Of the six hundred million 
 people who tramp and toddle about this 
 8 
 
114 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 planet every day, is any one so above or 
 below the average that he never repeats 
 himself, or thinks or says as others do ? Is 
 it conceivable that the same thoughts, the 
 same phrases, should not get themselves 
 published in half a dozen tongues? The 
 blessed Autocrat tells how he replied to a 
 feminine sympathizer in his pains of lecture 
 travel, " Yes, I am like the huma, the bird 
 that never alights, being always in the cars 
 as he is always on the wing ;' ' and meeting 
 her years after said exactly the same thing. 
 A few minutes later his memory flashed up 
 within him and he was covered with con- 
 fusion. Now, it was no stock phrase with 
 him. He had said it but twice in his life, 
 and undoubtedly the second meeting pro- 
 voked an unconscious cerebration about 
 the first, so that a subtle train of ideas led 
 to a mechanical repetition of the figure. 
 Queer fates befall one in this world : I 
 knew a boy who used to be spanked be- 
 cause he was so fat. 
 
 Well, we have been discoursing so fast 
 that we have not seen much, but remember, 
 in some quarters that is an advantage. If 
 
Night-Prowls in the Streets 115 
 
 nature is barred out in the day we get hints 
 of it out of the air at night. Even those 
 imps that whine and snicker among the 
 wires overhead bring messages from dis- 
 tricts that men have not "improved," and 
 that keep their wild look and wild music. 
 It is claimed that man improves nature 
 by his parks, his lawns, his high strains of 
 flowers and plants, his more speedy, more 
 milky, more hairy beasts, that he humanizes 
 nature, or tries to. As to any absolute in- 
 crease in worth or beauty, it needs some 
 impartial critic to say if, or no, this has 
 been gained. Where shall he be found? 
 When we find him we will ask him, seri- 
 ously, What are men for? What is life 
 for ? What is creation for ? 
 
 The clock tells us it is late, and our jaunt 
 must end. It is well to circumscribe these 
 tours now and again, to see what we can see 
 near home. Travel is most good when it 
 opens a man's eyes to what can be seen 
 without it. Thoreau made few reports on 
 Canada, Minnesota, and Staten Island, but 
 perhaps he saw his Massachusetts clearer 
 for those visits. One lesson of travel, then, 
 
li6 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 is to stop it : to centre rather than diffuse 
 ourselves. The sky broods with kindest 
 color and most constant tenderness over 
 that spot of earth that is sanctified to our 
 affections ; and so that we keep the watchful 
 eye and open heart, we shall find infinite 
 riches in a little room. It inspirits us to 
 know this. It assures us of the competence 
 and abundance of the world to meet the 
 wants of its children. 
 
Some Humbugs of Science 
 
 
 
 A SMATTERING of physical science, 
 such, at least, as relates to plants, 
 stones, birds, and insects, will be a great 
 help on a walk, especially if you go alone. 
 Yet, does not the mere joy of the thing 
 go to him who views nature as a spectacle 
 rather than as phenomena? to the artist 
 rather than to the scientist? If only 
 natural history could be a little more 
 humanized and popularized, but it will 
 be, one of these days. (This is going to 
 be a scolding chapter : I can tell by the 
 way it starts.) Some men are as stingy 
 with knowledge as some other men are 
 with money or work. For centuries it 
 has been the custom among them to build 
 fences of ceremony and dig moats of ob- 
 fuscation about any facts they may have 
 gained, in order to keep other people from 
 
 117 
 
ii8 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 sharing. It is a custom that makes other 
 people look up to them as higher beings, 
 maybe, and it is pleasant to be a high 
 being. This sort of humbug began with 
 the priests of Egypt and India. The man 
 who wanted to learn of them how much 
 were two and two ; what other parts of an 
 isosceles triangle were unequal to its base ; 
 and which end of a plant came up first, 
 had to go through a special course of 
 sprouts before these precious knowledges 
 could be imparted. What was called phi- 
 losophy and it wasn't was to be dis- 
 cussed only by people who had stumbled 
 around in dark rooms, been dangled over 
 pits by a rope around the waist, been 
 asked to meditate before skulls, been made 
 to jump through fire, and do all manner 
 of boyish things. After this maltreatment 
 they constituted an order of the illuminati 
 who were then allowed to have fun with 
 other candidates, and whose very existence 
 struck an awe into the breasts of their 
 fellow-citizens. 
 
 But this circusing of science was not 
 over in the ancient days. It was pro- 
 
Some Humbugs of Science 119 
 
 tracted through the Middle Ages by other 
 mysteries. If a man had discovered that 
 a cow had a backbone and an oyster had 
 none, he wrapped himself in the mantle of 
 a superior dignity and held aloof from 
 commoners. Occasionally the commoners 
 took him out and burned him, believing 
 that a man loaded with information like 
 that could have got it only from the devil, 
 who, through some peculiarly human pro- 
 cess of reasoning, seems to have acquired 
 a mortgage on whatever was pleasant and 
 profitable in this world. And even to-day 
 the scientists are making it hard for other 
 folks to share in their work, their knowl- 
 edge, and their discoveries. They have 
 built up a shibboleth peculiar to them- 
 selves, and until he has mastered it one 
 cannot learn from them. It is founded on 
 Latin and Greek, the same being dead, 
 and to most people unavailable. Thoreau 
 knew the gibberish as well as anybody, 
 yet he was moved to say, " The sciences 
 are protected from assault by a palisade or 
 chevaux-de-frise of technical terms ; so, 
 also, the learned man may ensconce him- 
 
120 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 self and conceal his little true knowledge 
 behind hard names." 
 
 Botany, for example, is a study that 
 would be a recreation if it were put into 
 English. Let us see what Gray says a 
 dandelion is : 
 
 " Taraxacum. Head many-flowered, 
 large, solitary on a slender hollow scape. 
 Involucre double, the outer of short 
 scales ; the inner of long, linear scales 
 erect in a single row. Achenes oblong- 
 ovate to fusiform, 4-5 ribbed, the ribs 
 roughened, the apex prolonged into a 
 very slender beak, bearing the copious 
 soft and white capillary pappus. Peren- 
 nials or biennials ; leaves radical, pin- 
 natifid or runcinate ; flowers yellow. T. 
 officinale. Smooth, or at first pubescent ; 
 outer involucre reflexed. Pastures and 
 fields everywhere. Indigenous forms occur 
 northward and in the Rocky Mountains. 
 April-September. After blossoming, the 
 inner involucre closes, and the slender 
 beak elongates and raises up the pappus 
 while the fruit is forming; the whole in- 
 volucre is then reflexed, exposing to the 
 
Some Humbugs of Science 12 1 
 
 wind the naked fruits, with the pappus dis- 
 played in an open globular head." 
 
 Few people quarrel with the foregoing 
 facts, because few people know, from those 
 statements, what the facts are. The defi- 
 nition can be read only in the light of a 
 special education, and without that, or a 
 dictionary, is unintelligible. Is there any 
 gain from treating the gladsome and hum- 
 ble dandelion as if it were one of the her- 
 metic mysteries? Let us see if it could 
 not be as easily described in common 
 speech, with, perhaps, some facts as well 
 worth printing as those about the achenes 
 and reflexed involucres : 
 
 Common dandelion. Taraxacum offi- 
 cinale. Named from the French dent de 
 lion, meaning lion's tooth. The notches 
 on its leaves faintly suggest lion's teeth. 
 Greek derivation, taraxis, in allusion to its 
 disquieting medicinal power. This mem- 
 ber of the composite family is of European 
 origin, but is now domesticated throughout 
 the north temperate zone, and is often seen 
 in the Arctic regions. It has not gained a 
 foothold in the southern hemisphere. The 
 
122 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 plant, which lives for two years, fixes itself 
 stoutly into the earth by a tough, parsnip- 
 like root, six to fourteen inches long, 
 which often projects a little from the 
 ground and sends out slight rootlets. The 
 leaves are green, dull of surface, three to 
 twelve inches long, an inch wide, radiate 
 from the top of the root, rise but little 
 above the ground, are sharply scolloped with 
 points turned towards the root. The flowers 
 spring from the centre of the whorl of 
 leaves. What appears like a single flower 
 is a head of one hundred and fifty bright 
 yellow blossoms held in a cup of dull 
 green sepals, the blossoms strap-shaped, 
 half an inch long and arranged in close 
 spirals. After insects have fertilized them 
 the sepals close over the head, and it re- 
 mains quiet for a week, ripening its seed. 
 Then the stem rises until in four or five 
 days it has lifted it from three to fifteen 
 inches above the surrounding grass, so that 
 the seed can be dispersed by the wind ; 
 for during its quiescence the cup has 
 become a cushion through the turning 
 backward of its edge ; each flower has 
 
Some Humbugs of Science 123 
 
 withered, but its pistil remains as an erect 
 white thread, an inch long, slightly winged 
 at the tip, its seed lightly embedded in the 
 white cushion. These pistils, which stand 
 out in all directions, so that they form a 
 fluffy ball, now act as parachutes and carry 
 the seed wherever the wind blows them. 
 During the first year the plant is said to 
 bear no flowers. It is hard to raise in 
 captivity, demands room and air, but is not 
 particular as to soil. As many as thirty 
 heads of flowers grow on a single plant. 
 It blooms all the year if snow is absent, 
 but chiefly from April to July, and again 
 from September to November. Seed-time 
 begins in May and is generally over in Oc- 
 tober, but I have seen what appeared to be 
 a dandelion-seed flying across a city park 
 on the 2 1st of March. Its young leaves 
 are eaten raw with oil and vinegar as a 
 salad, usually with lettuce, and the young 
 plants make excellent "greens," in spite 
 of a slight bitterness, if boiled and served 
 with mustard and vinegar. The dried 
 roots are roasted and ground as an adul- 
 terant for coffee, and during the war, when 
 
124 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 cheap substitutes were made for all manner 
 of high-priced things, "dandelion coffee" 
 was sold by grocers. The root contains a 
 bitter, crystallizable principle called tarax- 
 acin. Gathered in the autumn, this root 
 is boiled, and the infusion is used medi- 
 cinally as a diuretic, aperient, and tonic. 
 It acts on the liver, and is useful in dropsy 
 and dyspepsia, but is slow in operation. 
 Children have a pretty fancy for telling the 
 time by blowing against the globes of 
 down. As many seed as they find after 
 the third puff are supposed to mark the 
 hour : four seeds, four o'clock. It is also 
 blown upon to "find if mother wants us." 
 If all the seed are dispersed the parent is 
 in no anxiety. If any remain, it is the 
 child's duty to start for home. Seed 
 seldom remain. Children also weave the 
 flowers together in chains, but they do not 
 keep their brightness as daisies will. The 
 flower-stems are hollow, and when broken 
 exude a milky, bitterish sap. 
 
 So much for so much. A few terms, 
 like sepals, petals, pistils, stamens, and 
 pollen, must be kept because they are 
 
Some Humbugs of Science 125 
 
 common and simple, but more technicali- 
 ties than these are troublesome. And 
 botanies make a language all of their own. 
 Suppose, for instance, the unlearned, after 
 reading Gray's assertions about a dandelion, 
 turns to his glossary to see what an in- 
 volucre is. It proves to be a whorl of 
 bracts about a flower. What, then, is a 
 bract? He finds it to be the scale from 
 the axil of which a flower or its pedicel 
 proceeds. One has, therefore, to look up 
 axil and pedicel, and by that time he has 
 got away from involucres. Or, he wants 
 the definition of pappus, and finds it to be 
 the "modified calyx limb in compositae, 
 forming a crown of very various character 
 at the summit of the achene." So he must 
 hunt up compositae and achene. 
 
 And another common plant : The va- 
 riety of ambrosia that botanists called by 
 the distantly respectful name of A. arte- 
 misifolia L., but by every-day people 
 known as ragweed, also called in a few 
 localities hogweed, bitterweed, and Roman 
 wormwood, is recognizable, in spite of the 
 botanical description, and is one of the 
 
126 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 measures and certainties of June. It might 
 be improving to know what Artemis, or 
 Artemisia, had to do with it, and whether 
 the sponsor was the queen of Halicarnas- 
 sus, born B.C. 480, or the consort of Mauso- 
 lus of Caria, born one hundred and thirty 
 years later, or the goddess Artemis, who 
 never got herself born at all. " Coarse, 
 homely weeds" I find them called by 
 Gray, "the miserable ragweeds" by an- 
 other author ; yet a child suggests the 
 name of candelabra, " because they hold 
 their pretty green candles so straight." 
 Give a bad name to a plant or a dog, and 
 when it grows up it will not part from it. 
 Darlington says that " this worthless weed 
 occurs in most cultivated grounds, and is 
 usually abundant after a crop of wheat ; 
 but if the land be good the plant seems to 
 be smothered or choked out the next 
 season by the crop of clover and timothy. 
 It is always ready, however, like several 
 other coarse weeds, to make its appearance 
 whenever a grassy turf is broken up. The 
 curious anomaly of the flowers on the 
 terminal spikes being all pistillate is fre- 
 
Some Humbugs of Science 127 
 
 quently met with." But the same plant 
 may also bear sterile and fertile flowers on 
 different heads. 
 
 Thus much about this plant and more, 
 because I remember noting it as a child 
 and marking the beauty of its deep-cut 
 foliage ; enough like that of a young tomato 
 to make a green boy look twice at it, and 
 later, when a florist showed to me with 
 pride ^grevillea robusta from his hot-house, 
 it occurred to me that he was slow for not 
 doing as much for a greener, spryer plant 
 that was like it, the ragweed. I never 
 knew how they called it until I had grown 
 up, because such things are so common 
 that nobody cares for the name of them, 
 and because there is not in all literature, 
 so far as I know, any description which is 
 intelligible to the unscientific reader. I 
 am not fully convinced by Gray's as- 
 surance that the fertile flowers are " sessile 
 in the axil of leaves and bracts, at the base 
 of the racemes of sterile heads ; sterile in- 
 volucres flattish or top-shaped, of 7-12 
 scales united into a cup, containing 5~ 2 
 funnel-form staminate flowers with slender 
 
128 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 chaff intermixed or none," and more to a 
 similar purpose. Was the desperation of 
 Latin naming ever shown better than in 
 dubbing this genus ambrosia? That was 
 food for the gods. The pigs don't eat 
 this, I think, though Hamilton Gibson has 
 seen goldfinches and snow-birds eating its 
 seeds in winter. Sometime our botanies 
 will contain English equivalents, and there 
 will be a picture of every plant and flower, 
 the only way to identify a specimen, and 
 a cheap and easy way with our phototypic 
 processes. 
 
 I confess to a fondness for this sturdy 
 squatter of the road-side and vacant lots ; 
 it is such a frank, stout, self-possessed 
 creation. It wears no artificial graces, it 
 asks no favors, it is clean of parasites, and 
 say what you will, its fern-like leaves are 
 pretty. In sandy soil it has a stiff and 
 angular disposition of its arms, throwing 
 them out in star-like rays, while on richer 
 ground it rises to the dignity of a bush, 
 and if only it had flowers that you could 
 see two feet away, horticulturists would try 
 to improve the type. Wouldn't it be in- 
 
Some Humbugs of Science 129 
 
 teresting if it were cultivated in rows like 
 celery ? 
 
 A farmer in Kentucky says that when 
 hard pressed he cut ragweed for hay and 
 fed it to his stock, but it did not make 
 good milk or butter. John Burroughs, to 
 whom he told this, declares that there is 
 little complimentary to say about the rag- 
 weed, that it is the bane of asthmatic pa- 
 tients, and about the only one of our weeds 
 that follows the plough and harrow. " Ex- 
 cept that it is easily destroyed, I would 
 suspect it to be an immigrant from the 
 Old World." It is remarkable how stout 
 some of Europe's pests will grow after 
 transplanting. Take thistles, house-spar- 
 rows, monocles, anarchists, fleas, Tam- 
 many, St. Johnswort, and how much more 
 obnoxious they become on our free soil 
 than they ever dared to be at home ! But 
 we have to thank Europe for many lend- 
 ings, none the less. "The hateful toad- 
 flax," as Burroughs calls it, is one of the 
 cheeriest yet most modest of wild flowers, 
 and makes as good a bouquet as orchids 
 do. Strip this " butter and eggs" from the 
 9 
 
130 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 fields and something would surely be lack- 
 ing in our early summer landscape. 
 
 Autumn is the time when the ragweed 
 becomes actually coarse, and then because 
 it has not learned to grow old gracefully. 
 It ages like a vagrant and grows seedy and 
 out at elbows, instead of venerable. There 
 are grace and pathos in trees and vines that 
 glow with October color, then, having spent 
 their last energy on beauty, drop their 
 leaves and sink to sleep ; but plants win 
 contumely that merely dry and break and 
 wither, that splash the fields with rust, even 
 when their summer aspect and demeanor 
 have been exemplary. Nobody has sung 
 of the ragweed, nobody has described it, 
 except botanically, nobody has painted it, 
 pressed it, put it into a hot-house, tried to 
 reform it, or sat in the shade of it and tried 
 to think large things about it. All-seeing 
 Thoreau does not mention it, and the phy- 
 sicians have not put it into the materia 
 medica. As the old woman in the country 
 does not dry or stew it with other "yarbs," 
 I surmise that she once boiled a quantity 
 into a tea and made some suffering patient 
 
Some Humbugs of Science 131 
 
 drink a pint of it for a cold, or measles, or 
 rheumatiz, thereby killing him and saving 
 him from ensuing doses of goldthread, 
 tansy, bloodroot, boneset, thoroughwort, and 
 other draughts that farmer lads remember 
 as bitter, blighting, burning, and abomi- 
 nable. I should not in the least wonder if 
 it were a poison. Birds and most insects 
 avoid it while growing, so it is one of the 
 few plants that look stoutly healthy all the 
 season. 
 
 But despite its raggedness in the fall, 
 there are ragweeds here and there of agree- 
 able color : a purple bronze. Once in a 
 while a knot of these will have quite a dis- 
 tinction in a field, yet more often they are 
 happenings in a dull and unkempt average. 
 Why one ragweed should have this autumnal 
 privilege and the one beside it should wither 
 and turn brown I have no more idea than 
 I have why, of two maples on the same 
 knoll, one will redden quicker and deeper 
 than its mate. The first frost leaves its 
 scorch on ragweed as soon as on anything 
 in the ground, and an early effect of this 
 cold is the disappearance of its leaves, espe- 
 
132 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 cially near the earth, the stems and seed 
 spikes thereupon becoming the drier, scraw- 
 nier, and more conspicuous. In fact, the au- 
 tumnal disappearance of many species is one 
 of the most puzzling things in nature. Here 
 they are to-day. To-morrow they have 
 vanished. The annuals have sown them- 
 selves and the others are in a chrysalis state 
 awaiting the spring and Christian names. 
 
 Scientists tell us that it is an advantage 
 to keep botany in Greek and Latin, so that 
 when they read foreign books they will 
 recognize the names, for they remain un- 
 changed by their surroundings. Nobody 
 asks them to destroy the names, nor to 
 refrain from their alleged recreations in 
 foreign literatures ; but why bar out the 
 rest of us, who have more than we can do 
 to keep up our English? Why chill the 
 thousands who aspire to know a jimson 
 when they see it, by setting them to look 
 for datura stramonium? Why not come 
 to an agreement on common names, as 
 they call them, and authorize them jointly 
 with the Linnaean ones ? At present they 
 give not one common name for a plant, 
 
Some Humbugs of Science 133 
 
 but four or five, as if trying to bring dis- 
 credit on the vernacular. 
 
 The zoologists are even worse, for the 
 simpler the form the more dreadful things 
 they call it, and a harmless little bug or 
 fish ignorantly wears a title as long as six 
 of itself. Does it worry these worthies 
 that man is called what he is, instead 
 of homo sapiens? (Sapiens, of course, in 
 honor of the scientists who so endowed 
 him.) The mineralogists have been fairly 
 sensible. The usual ending of ite and lite 
 in their names abbreviated from lithos, a 
 stone is harmonious rather than otherwise ; 
 but the geologists again plunge us into de- 
 spair with their conchological, ichthyologi- 
 cal, herpetological, ornithological, and ento- 
 mological six-jointers. Astronomers find it 
 easier for strange reasons to say alpha Cen- 
 tauri than A Centauri. Why not Swan A, 
 B, C, and so on, rather than alpha Cygni, 
 beta Cygni, and the rest of the mixed Greek 
 and Latin? Rather, why not abolish the 
 constellations, since not one of them has the 
 faintest semblance to the thing it is named 
 for? Classicism dies hard. So does humbug. 
 
134 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 But let us not resign hope, for several re- 
 forms have been worked in human affairs 
 through directness and plain dealing. Even 
 politics may be improved, some time. As 
 to reform in language (which ought to be 
 written phonetically), it is hardest of all, 
 because it takes such a consensus ; but in 
 English we have got rid of the u in color, 
 we spell jail as it sounds, instead of calling 
 it a gaol, and in German the eye-destroying 
 hair-lines are giving way to Roman type. 
 Our own tongue is superb in its opportuni- 
 ties for improvement. Some reforms have 
 been worked in our poetry. It has become 
 hard to understand, so that it is not much 
 read, but it has outgrown certain tricks of 
 its masters. One useful thing learned in the 
 last generation is that nature can go about 
 her business without advice or ordering. 
 Our older poets did not realize that. They 
 always began their work by telling nature 
 to do something that she was doing already. 
 The poet went out on his door-step and 
 said, "Roll on, silver moon," and, all of a 
 sudden, the moon continued to keep on as 
 if he had not said a word. Or, he rambled 
 
Some Humbugs of Science 135 
 
 down to the river and enjoined it to " Flow 
 gently, sweet Afton," and it flowed. Or, 
 maybe it was the sea, and he ordered it to 
 " Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, 
 roll," and the waves, obedient, kept coming 
 in. In fact, the poet was needlessly busy 
 superintending things. He told the sun to 
 rise, and mountains to stand still, and clouds 
 to float, and zephyrs to blow, and storms to 
 howl, and grass to grow, and flowers to be 
 fragrant, and birds to soar, and rain to fall. 
 Then he used to pump inspiration into him- 
 self at such a rate that you had to believe 
 he had not much of his own. When he 
 wished to write about the way the wind 
 blew on a hill in his neighborhood he would 
 call for his muse, so that all the public heard 
 him. "Come down, O muse," he shrieked ; 
 or, " Approach, O muse;" or, "Arise, O 
 muse ;" for it is a strange thing about her 
 that she was like policemen, in the respect 
 that she was never at hand when wanted. 
 Nowadays when a poet has anything to say, 
 he merely says it, and does not shift the 
 poverty of the saying upon a spirit that 
 hasn't the power to answer, female spirit, 
 
136 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 too. The only poetry in which these 
 screams for help seem at all permissible is 
 that of Greece and Rome, for in those 
 countries they pretended to believe in 
 muses. 
 
 And I sometimes become so rabid an 
 anarchist that I doubt the value of mathe- 
 matics. I take the basely practical ground 
 that I never knew a man clever at figures 
 who was brighter in any other way or had 
 quicker instincts and perceptions than his 
 neighbors. If the pressure in our schools 
 is increased, the children must be allowed 
 to choose their studies. Algebra and ge- 
 ometry have been crowded from the high 
 school into lower grades, and it has become 
 a practice to rank scholars more by mathe- 
 matics than by all other studies together. 
 A lad may be stupid in grammar, his com- 
 positions may be ridiculous, he may not 
 know the purpose of the Declaration of 
 Independence or the Constitution, he may 
 believe that the Lena River is in Patagonia, 
 he may not know the difference between a 
 vertebrate and a mollusk, an endogen and 
 an exogen, yet if he is quick at his exam- 
 
Some Humbugs of Science 137 
 
 pies he can pass. In a certain school a boy 
 can earn one hundred and fifty points in 
 arithmetic, while perfect spelling counts for 
 only twenty. Is it more important that a 
 person shall be able to write an intelligible 
 letter, or to know what part of three-six- 
 teenths is eight per cent, of six-fifths ? He 
 has daily use for other branches, and for 
 higher mathematics none, unless he is a 
 gauger, astronomer, or engineer. 
 
 Arithmetic has its use as discipline, like 
 other punishments, but the scholar profits 
 as much by his other studies, and it is 
 abominable that he should be kept back 
 in classes that are several years too small 
 for him, because he is unready in his sums. 
 Any study, followed persistently, has its 
 educative and enlarging force and value, 
 but mathematics have become a fetish in 
 the public schools, as have Greek and 
 Latin in the colleges. A moderate amount 
 of Greek and Latin is a good thing, for it 
 betters a man's knowledge of his own 
 tongue, and helps him to speak it purely, 
 as well as to acquire foreign language more 
 quickly ; but to grind away at dead authors 
 
138 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 for four years, painfully parsing and ana- 
 lyzing isn't there a waste? So with 
 figures : there are people to whom they 
 are not merely tiresome, but repellent ; 
 indeed, a fondness for them is constitu- 
 tional and cannot be induced. Lincoln, 
 Grant, Emerson, Franklin, Beecher, Steven- 
 son, the line could be spun over pages, 
 were men who had not mathematical minds. 
 They managed to be great Yet custom 
 says that only those children with a born 
 aptitude for figures shall obtain the higher 
 education. The boy or girl who will be- 
 come an engineer or closet astronomer is 
 rare, but thousands of our youth will take 
 to trade, art, the pulpit, law, medicine, 
 soldiering, the stage, music, writing, farm- 
 ing, employments in which it does not 
 matter a rap whether or no one can tell 
 the ratio of the square of one side of a 
 trapezoid to the squares of the other sides, 
 because they don't use trapezoids. Har- 
 vard professors have expressed surprise that 
 so many young men who offer themselves 
 at the entrance examinations write a vile 
 hand and cannot use the mother-tongue 
 
Some Humbugs of Science 139 
 
 with ease or certainty. Yet, they all know 
 algebra. I met a college graduate who 
 thought that the stars lay in the track of 
 the planets, and wondered why they never 
 bumped ! He had taken the whole course 
 in mathematical astronomy. 
 
 It is time to strip science of its affecta- 
 tions. If this is not done, if distasteful 
 studies are forced upon pupils naturally 
 eager for advancement, exact knowledge 
 may fail in esteem, and we may return to 
 the errant and speculative philosophy of a 
 prior century for intellectual training and 
 employment. It might be as well. 
 
 And here is where the gain of the tramp 
 comes in : that on the road one looks and 
 judges for himself; that while his training 
 may quicken his sight for things described 
 in the books, it will also make him ready 
 to detect error. He needs only to use 
 sense. What queer reasons they used to 
 give for fossils ! They were made by light- 
 ning, carved by water, engraved by men, 
 hardened by heat, anything, rather than 
 admit that they were the remains of 
 animals. 
 
140 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 We in America have been too well con- 
 tent to let such matters take care of them- 
 selves, and perhaps it was the fustian of 
 science that put it away from sympathy. 
 Educators, authors, investigators, artists, 
 all such were idealists ; they were of no 
 account in "business." Truly, the idealist 
 does have a hard time in this world. 
 "Yes," they tell him, "your schemes for 
 the diffusion of knowledge, the liberation 
 of slaves, the payment of public debts, 
 the arbitration of disputes, the permission 
 to animals to live, the purifying of politics, 
 are pretty, but they are not practical." 
 The practical view is the low view. If we 
 would stop trying to get as much money 
 as Vanderbilt, and try to get as much wit 
 as Emerson, as much liberty as Thoreau, 
 as much goodness as Thomas a Kempis, 
 there wouldn't be a better world to live in 
 than this. We may not be equal to the 
 task, nor framed for it ; but we can help 
 the cause of knowledge by looking every- 
 where for facts and setting them before the 
 world in plain speech, and help the cause of 
 wisdom by drawing inferences from them. 
 
A Rustler s Conscience 
 
 PEOPLE who go through the Yellow- 
 stone country nowaday know little 
 of what that trip meant before the time of 
 the railroad. Four of us made the jour- 
 ney : the Parson, Old Silurian, the Unsalted, 
 and the Tramp ; in other words, a city 
 clergyman, a professor of geology, a young 
 collegian, and myself. There was but an 
 apology for a road, and we had to get 
 down and pull logs out of the way to get 
 through. At one point we had no road 
 but a river-bed, and followed it through 
 a canon. At night we camped wherever 
 there was tent room, and the frost nipped 
 our toes through our blankets. "Toot," 
 our factotum, and "Al," his brother, 
 keeper, also, of the Coyote saloon in Boze- 
 man, were famous hunters, fishermen, and 
 cooks, steady drivers, astonishing drinkers, 
 and they liked to use bad language and 
 
 141 
 
142 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 relate unseemly narratives in order to see 
 the clergyman and the professor wince. 
 They claimed to have committed many 
 sins, but they never worried over them. 
 It was different with a "rustler" we met 
 out there. 
 
 After some days of heat and freezing 
 nights, some jolting and climbing and 
 struggling, much marvelling at hot springs 
 and geysers, some swimming to erase from 
 our backs the dents of rocks that had been 
 our beds, and daily tussles with mosquitoes, 
 it was like entering the land of Beulah to 
 descend to Yellowstone Lake, one of the 
 loveliest sheets of water in the world, and 
 to pitch our tent on the soft sward near its 
 shore. Dinner eaten, we trudged off to 
 Natural Bridge, near the lake's western 
 edge, a dike of travertine that had been 
 pierced and worn in long past centuries by 
 a stream, and that is wide enough for a 
 person to walk upon, from one side of the 
 ravine to the other. The passage is only 
 ten yards long, or thereabout, but there 
 is a drop of nearly a hundred feet to the 
 bottom if one makes a misstep, which he 
 
A Rustler's Conscience 143 
 
 need not do. We were lounging near this 
 arch on the northern side, when a tap of 
 hoofs and creak of leather made us look 
 up. A horseman had arrived on the 
 southern brink of the chasm, and evidently 
 wanted to cross. The meeting of men in 
 a wilderness is always excuse for a display 
 of interest and confidence. " Hi, there !" 
 shouted the new arrival. "Is there any 
 way to get over to your side ?" 
 
 "Yes, that bridge is safe, if you look 
 out for the hole in the middle of it." So 
 he came trotting on, driving a herd of 
 about twenty ponies before him, and having 
 drawn rein as he reached us, we had a bit 
 of talk together. Like many of the fron- 
 tiersmen he was restrained and quiet ; 
 browned and furrowed so by sun and wind 
 that he looked, at first glance, older than 
 he was, for he was at the verge of forty ; 
 an easy rider, rough in dress, bearded, 
 long-haired, unkempt ; and he had a doubt- 
 ful, questioning look in his eyes. The 
 usual revolver flapped in its case on his 
 thigh, a knife was in its sheath, a rifle lay 
 across his saddle, and from his belt hung 
 
144 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 a stick marked with eighteen or twenty 
 notches, " one notch for each day he had 
 been out," he said. The ponies of his 
 herd were small, rough-coated, not blooded 
 stock by any means, and were led by a 
 red horse with a bell. There were a couple 
 of colts. I noticed with surprise that two 
 of the horses were loaded with Indian 
 camp equipage, such as does not often 
 form a white man's outfit. A tent of 
 dressed buckskin decorated with Indian 
 pictures was strapped to the back of one 
 of the ponies. The man told us that he 
 had just come from Colorado, was going 
 to Montana to sell his horses, and wanted 
 to know where he could find pasturage and 
 water. We directed him to the grassy 
 opening, two or three miles distant, where 
 we had pitched our own camp, and on 
 returning, afoot, we found that he had 
 picketed his horses a few hundred yards 
 from us, and was preparing to spend the 
 night there. 
 
 When our supper was ready we hallooed 
 to him an invitation to come over and help 
 eat it, for a man who went long distances 
 
A Rustler's Conscience 145 
 
 in the West usually enjoyed little variety 
 in his bill of fare, and we fancied that our 
 fresh trout and our flapjacks with maple 
 syrup would give an agreeable surprise to 
 his stomach. He accepted (what traveller 
 would not?), and fell to his work with a 
 good appetite. After the meal he lit his 
 pipe, dropped wearily on the earth before 
 the fire and smoked for some minutes, 
 seeming to take comfort in our cheery talk, 
 but offering few remarks of his own and 
 replying with hardly more than mono- 
 syllables to our inquiries. When his pipe 
 was out he arose and left us abruptly, 
 striding across the meadow in the direction 
 of his horses. 
 
 Toot, who had watched him as he dis- 
 appeared in the twilight, said in a low 
 voice, " There's something wrong with that 
 rustler. What's he doing with the Injun 
 outfit ? And did you notice them ponies ? 
 That's pretty healthy talk to give a man 
 about driving such stock as that all the 
 way from Colorado to sell in Montana. 
 Ain't it? Them's Injun ponies, and you 
 bet he's played it low on an Injun some- 
 10 
 
146 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 where to get 'em. That's liable to make 
 trouble in this park." 
 
 We were inclined to jest at the sus- 
 picions of our guide, though he had lived 
 on the frontier from childhood, and had a 
 quick opinion that was often surprisingly 
 right, a result of trained observation or 
 instinct As we sat on the earth, gazing 
 into the blaze, listening to the voice of the 
 wind in the pines and the chiming and 
 patting of big and little waves on the 
 beach, another fire flickered at a distance : 
 two prospectors, travelling southward, had 
 stopped there for the night. While getting 
 their supper this happened : The rustler, 
 who should have been asleep in his blanket, 
 suddenly appeared before the younger of 
 the men with a knife pointed at his breast, 
 and in a menacing tone demanded, " What 
 did you tell those people" (indicating us) 
 "that I killed that Indian down at the 
 lake for?" 
 
 The one addressed looked quietly along 
 the knife-blade, then, with a quick move- 
 ment, whipped his pistol from its sheath 
 and levelled it between the man's eyes. 
 
A Rustler's Conscience 147 
 
 "Put that thing back," he said. And 
 the rustler put it back. 
 
 "Now," continued the prospector, "what 
 do you mean by coming here and talking 
 in that style? We've just come in and 
 haven't seen the people yonder." 
 
 "I mean," retorted the rustler, "that 
 you've been over there, you've seen them, 
 and you told them it was me that killed the 
 Indian they found by the lake." 
 
 " Never knew they had found an Indian 
 by the lake." 
 
 "Well, they did, and I'd like to know 
 why they can't let me alone about it. Why 
 are people always pointing at me and talk- 
 ing about me, and saying I did it?" 
 
 The prospector stared in surprise. "I 
 don't know," said he, "unless you did." 
 
 The rustler stamped his foot, tossed his 
 arms, then walked away, while the pros- 
 pectors, with surprise still on their faces, 
 came over to us to inquire what manner of 
 man he was with whom they had held this 
 interview. We did not know. 
 
 On the second morning after this incident 
 three of us set off afoot on the trail that 
 
148 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 leads by way of Mount Washburn and 
 Tower Falls to Mammoth Hot Springs, 
 leaving our guides to take the wagon by 
 the alleged road to this latter point, through 
 the geyser district. We had not been two 
 hours on the march before the sound of 
 horses was heard behind us, and we stood 
 aside to let them pass. A herd of Indian 
 ponies emerged from the shrubbery, and 
 behind them rode the rustler. A noble 
 forest lifting around us, the canon of the 
 Yellowstone yawning at our right, its terrors 
 half veiled in wondrous color, sweet air, 
 pure sky, and cheery sun made a joyous 
 harmony, and with it the glum, suspicious 
 figure of the rider was out of key. At 
 sight of us he pulled up sharply. " I want 
 to go to Gardiner," he said. 
 
 "That's where we are going," one of us 
 replied. 
 
 "Will this trail take me there?" 
 
 "Yes ; but if you will turn back and go 
 the other way, taking the first turn to the 
 right, you'll find a road. This is nothing 
 but a trail." 
 
 He was silent for a moment, then said, 
 
A Rustler's Conscience 149 
 
 as one who was half in sorrow, half in bit- 
 terness, "You're all against me, and you're 
 trying to get me wrong on this, but I can 
 find the trail in spite of you, I can find it." 
 And without further word he struck his 
 horse and bounded on, the ponies scam- 
 pering before him. A wearisome yet mag- 
 nificent walk of two days and a half, through 
 wilderness and over mountain-top, brought 
 us back to Mammoth Hot Springs just as 
 Toot drove in with our team, and, clamber- 
 ing into the wagon-seats, we resumed our 
 ride. How and where we passed him I do 
 not know, but during a halt soon after the 
 rustler came up from behind, and clattered 
 by with his ponies for the third time. 
 
 " Bozeman ?" he cried, pointing north- 
 ward. 
 
 "Yes," we answered. 
 
 The old doubt came into his face. " Til 
 find it in spite of you," he repeated. And 
 he galloped away, each horse marking his 
 course by puffs of dust that drifted up from 
 the sage brush like a volley smoke. Our 
 guide watched the retreating figure curi- 
 ously. Then he remarked, with noncha- 
 
150 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 lance, " That fellow's still got the Injun on 
 his mind. He's doing his best to get his 
 neck stretched by the time he gets back 
 among folks.'* 
 
 The man's deed was self-proclaimed. In 
 quarrel, possibly, but as likely with intent, 
 he had killed an Indian, taken his effects, 
 and hurried from the scene of his crime, 
 perhaps to avoid pursuit, perhaps to avoid 
 himself. Alone in the wilderness day after 
 day he had brooded on his act until it was 
 named to him in the whisper of leaves 
 and gurgle of waters, written on mountain 
 snows, painted in the sunset, re-enacted in 
 moving shadows of the forest ; when he 
 met his fellow-men again nature had told 
 them of it; so, men and nature he sus- 
 pected. The brand of Cain was stamped 
 upon his heart : with his own unwitting 
 hand he bared his breast and showed it 
 to us. I never saw him after. Was our 
 guide's prophecy fulfilled, I wonder ? 
 
Satisfaction with the Country 
 
 
 
 IF only we grown-ups had the child's 
 imagination the walls of cities would 
 not shut in upon our minds, however they 
 might keep us from walking and seeing. 
 Even then we must have known the coun- 
 try in youth to revive it in our memories 
 and build hopes upon it. We cannot 
 create much in our heads : we merely re- 
 arrange old material, and give out in pro- 
 portion as we have taken in. We took it 
 in through our ancestors, or it was cumu- 
 lative through them, maybe, for whence 
 did Emerson gather his might ? Anyway : 
 having seen the country in childhood, having 
 breathed and smelled it, having rolled in 
 its grass and snow and swung in its trees, 
 having eaten its fruits and drunk of its 
 springs, having been in touch with its spirit, 
 it is ours for aye, and we bless those healing 
 moments when in fancy we are miles from 
 
152 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 rattling pavements and the loud-speaking 
 throng. We are in the home of our youth, 
 or in that serene retreat that we promise 
 for our age, that ideal ; for all futures are 
 ideal, and unseen glories never fade. Our 
 feet may be in the market, but our vision 
 is among the hills. We live an idyl for 
 ten minutes. 
 
 Most of us are willing to live idyls, at 
 least, until we are a dozen years old. We 
 are measurably content till then. Yet, 
 while content has been best expressed by 
 youth, it should be a gain of later life, 
 when ambition is sated or given over, when 
 bulk and stiff joints incline one to easy- 
 chairs, when monotony has been discovered 
 in shows and sights, when the futility of 
 much struggle has been proved, when we 
 have learned that it is less in the outward 
 world than in ourselves that we are to find 
 rest and satisfaction. It is not to be denied 
 that there is a charm in stable things, and 
 there is a " love of security, of an habitually 
 undisputed standing ground or sleeping 
 place," that should have shown itself in 
 every man, though tenement-bred to the 
 
Satisfaction with the Country 153 
 
 third generation. Nothing is sadder than 
 what they tell us of the passing of the 
 home. It is not true, but it is melancholy 
 that it should even seem so. 
 
 For if civilization is more desirable than 
 barbarism (it is not sure that its softness 
 and barrenness are good for us), it is be- 
 cause it has been made by the owned 
 house, by securities that make content. 
 Years of effort ought to have that object in 
 view, that reaching of a sufficiency of some 
 sort, of money, or ways to do without it. 
 No doubt it is right that our years should 
 be forceful. It is no less a social than a 
 natural law. The elements are in motion 
 and fusion, the tree and the clam aspire, 
 and men cannot help their drift into diffi- 
 culties ; but when we have learned the 
 lesson of life, that there is no lesson, we 
 are entitled to an hour of ease in congenial 
 work. Few of the mass do the work they 
 like to do. Perhaps only the men in the 
 arts and professions are so employed, the 
 clerks, merchants, laborers, even farmers, 
 being what they are by force of circum- 
 stance. The trouble in getting content is 
 
154 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 that all want too much. Thoreau was a 
 wonder in that respect He required only 
 a place to sleep, a bit of plain food, plain 
 clothes, a few books, some pens and paper, 
 and liberty. Men had nothing more that 
 he needed, and nature met his other wants. 
 Ah, that problem of life : how easy to 
 solve before we know it ! The child is 
 more right than the man, and the man most 
 right who is still a child. For what does he 
 gain who loses his soul, and how many keep 
 their souls against the daily clutch of greed, 
 ambition, envy, appetite ? The child is 
 full of the wisdom of the All from which 
 he comes. He is above the trifles of grown- 
 up life. He eats and sleeps and plays and 
 sees, and if he is lent to the proper parents, 
 he has earth to walk on, blue, sweet air to 
 breathe, sun to brown him, birds to teach 
 him, shy, four-footed creatures to be his 
 mates, and trees, flowers, rocks, and waters 
 to put pictures, health, and gladness into 
 him. Thus conditioned he is content, and 
 content is wisdom. As we end the cycle 
 of life we return toward the beginning : we 
 realize that we have been wandering from 
 
Satisfaction with the Country 155 
 
 our chances, that our furious struggling 
 with books and machinery has not made 
 us happier, that every advance toward ease 
 and power has cost us a better comfort and 
 brought fresh difficulties ; so we go toward 
 simplicity again. They said that when we 
 were so perfectly served by steam and elec- 
 tricity as to need little work with our hands 
 and minds we would be freest and happiest ; 
 but contrast our eager, anxious state with 
 that of men in the last century. We spend 
 fewer hours in shops and offices, we climb, 
 walk, and row no more, for lifts and cars 
 and ferry-boats take us where we like, the 
 poorest of us lives as well in the matter of 
 creature comforts as the rich colonist used 
 to live, we have more common treasures 
 in parks, museums, and pictures, life and 
 property are better defended ; yet, where 
 is the fine old leisure of that other day? 
 Where do we get our air? Where are the 
 artists and artisans who never sell a thing 
 until it is done as well as they can do it? 
 Where is the country home ? Would to 
 heaven our children might have five years 
 among the hills ! They would seldom go 
 
156 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 back to town. Nature claims them, but 
 we deny her call. 
 
 These numbing years in town spoil us 
 for the sane, true life of our fathers. 
 When we go into the country we do not 
 see its wealth of beauty, we do not know 
 that when we fling ourselves face down 
 among the weeds we have enough under 
 us to keep our eyes busy for a sixmonth, 
 we do not realize that serenity may soon 
 allay our vexations : we understand only 
 that there are no theatres, French cooks, or 
 
 ectric lights, that we may be a mile or 
 
 o from any other human being, that, 
 with nobody to talk to, we must even 
 think. Solitude, that is blessed to him who 
 can use it well, is a thing to terrify the cit. 
 
 In the innocence and first- handedness 
 of youth the longing to keep touch with 
 nature finds easiest expression, and Pope, 
 Cowley, Horatdf Herri ck, Jefferies, Tho- 
 reau, Burroughs, and their like said their 
 truest things or set their way most safely 
 when they were new in the world. I re^ 
 member with yearning the sense of arrival 
 at a true, fit place when, as a child, I 
 
Satisfaction with the Country 157 
 
 reached my grandfather's home in the 
 mountains on my summer vacation. School, 
 town, the world's affairs, these fell off 
 like husks and were forgotten, a great, 
 calm satisfaction was reflected from me over 
 the face of the world and back into my 
 eyes, the green terraces were sleek with 
 content, the brook sang a song of gladness, 
 the woods were whispering welcome, the 
 dear old crows laughed in their homely 
 way above the fields, and the undertone 
 and overtone of insect life completed a 
 major chord of happiness. Time might 
 stand still : things were well enough. 
 
 Commiserate with the one who has no 
 hours like these. Encourage him to dwell 
 with sentiment on his various flats and 
 boarding-houses, on the happy moments 
 spent in listening to the water as it rippled 
 into the kitchen sink, on the smell of the 
 janitor's corned beef, and garbage in the 
 basement, on the late and early sounds in 
 the street below, on the green of the gera- 
 niums on the fire-escape. Poor fellow !. 
 He has known some joy, but of home and 
 country he understands nothing. 
 
158 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 Now, I am not deriding human ties, nor 
 preaching their neglect, nor urging monk- 
 ish asperities. It is as easy to enjoy a 
 cultivated taste in the country as in town. 
 It should be easier, because there are fewer 
 dissonances and interruptions. There is 
 no reason why the farmer's library should 
 consist of a patent medicine almanac, why 
 the direst of Axminster carpets should 
 cover his floor, why his wall-paper should 
 be a convulsion of purple pagodas and 
 green roses, why his pictures should be 
 certificates of prizes at the county fair and 
 chromos published as advertisements by 
 millers and varnish-makers. Nor can he 
 be supported in his practice of shutting up 
 the parlor for company : a dark, musty 
 place he makes it, with its closed blinds, 
 its black hair-cloth furniture, its white 
 tidies, its gilded coffee-cups as shelf orna- 
 ments, its centre -table with the Bible, Mrs. 
 Hemans's poems, and the report of the 
 United States Agricultural Department for 
 1879 canonized upon it, and its wreath of 
 preserved flowers, used on the coffin of a 
 maiden aunt. In fact, the beauty that is 
 
Satisfaction with the Country 159 
 
 out of doors ought to have some reflection 
 in the house. Could we enlist Ruskins 
 enough to teach simple and sensible ideas 
 on beauty to our farmers ? Could we per- 
 suade them to stop shooting their best 
 friends, the birds ? Could we make them 
 see the superiority of way-side flowers to 
 bare, trim borders? 
 
 One of my dreams has been of a house 
 of art, founded deep in the needs and re- 
 spect of a people whose capacity for making 
 and translating beauty is surpassed by none. 
 From this house should radiate ennobling 
 influences toward every quarter, so that 
 hewers of wood and drawers of water round- 
 about would view it with pride and admira- 
 tion, and shape their course moderately by 
 its examples. It should be far from town. 
 That house should be a nursery to talent ; 
 a refuge to genius. Oh, yes, we all know 
 that some work is best done in the rush 
 and pressure of competition and need. 
 And we ought to know that some other 
 things are spoiled by just those conditions. 
 Fielding scratching at a belated manuscript 
 with a wet towel on his head has been 
 
160 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 cast up against us as an example. It 
 ought to be as a warning. He wrote sur- 
 prisingly well, but how much better and 
 how much more he might have written if 
 he had kept steady, taken his sleep, and 
 left off the towels ! To be sure, there are 
 certain who excuse their laziness on a 
 plea of meditating. Genius, they say, is 
 spasmodic, and an idea requires incuba- 
 tion. If they show results, well and good. 
 If at the end of years they are but just be- 
 ginning to concrete their idea, we may 
 dismiss them from the brotherhood. 
 
 But how much the world might gain in 
 truth and its sublimation which we call 
 beauty if those who work and seek to 
 make truth common might dwell apart 
 when the need was, and study, write, in- 
 vent, weave, draw, paint, model, carve, 
 etch, engrave, compose, shape metal, glass, 
 porcelain, and enamels, decorate, devise 
 costumes even, and plan gardens ! Ah, 
 many a man and woman has sighed for the 
 cloister or the silences of the mountains, 
 there to dream the dream to the full and 
 bring it thenceforth into being of marble, 
 
Satisfaction with the Country 161 
 
 canvas, music, or common human words. 
 They conceive a noble ideal, and have 
 begun to paint or write it, when bang, 
 bang at the door ! It is the wolf in the 
 form of the landlord. Or it is worse : 
 some frivolling time-waster with his batch 
 of social gossip. How can a symphony, a 
 poem, or a picture find its way into the 
 world with scare-wits and clutch-purses to 
 bar the exit ? 
 
 What we need in this day is a secular 
 monastery : a country house of art. If we 
 are to believe the sociologists and thera- 
 pists, the world is crowded and hustled, 
 the strain of business competition and 
 social rivalry is increasing, more and more 
 men have fallen into the way of working 
 for a wage, merely, so that their work lacks 
 care and thoroughness. But what is one 
 to do? The poverty of the artistic class 
 is traditional, inevitable. One cannot serve 
 two masters, and a combination of busi- 
 ness and art is rare indeed. By just so 
 much as a painter is a business man is he 
 the less of a painter. The world is full of 
 successful wrecks : makers of pot-boilers 
 ii 
 
162 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 who have killed their genius in the com- 
 mercializing of their work. The real artist 
 holds to his task and does his best through 
 thick and thin ; he lives on crusts and 
 color. Mediocrity pooh-poohs at this, but 
 it is true. I have known worth in rags, 
 and rejoice if I have helped to make it 
 known. But bitter is the time of waiting, 
 bitter the gnawing of an empty stomach, 
 bitter the derision of a cheap success. 
 
 Our millionaires give little to the public 
 from whom they derive their wealth, and 
 as they are millionaires because they are 
 Worldly, they frown on schemes that do 
 not promise cash dividends. Still, here 
 and there among them is some Pratt, some 
 Peabody, some Cooper, some Girard, 
 whose heart is as large as his purse, and 
 whose love is higher than his liking. Such 
 a man may be the founder of an art-house 
 in the future, for we can hardly suppose 
 any government so perfect, so delicate, that 
 it could be trusted with this boon. Or the 
 rich man may be the patron of the rising 
 artist, and pay himself for his advances out 
 of the artist's work. In this he will only 
 
Satisfaction with the Country 163 
 
 play the part of the daimios of Japan, the 
 feudal lords who were fathers to their 
 people, and whose interest, rather than 
 authority, brought the old art of that 
 nation to so fine a pass. Suppose the 
 case of a Japanese potter. His mind was 
 free to put upon his work, for his daimio 
 would see that he and his family suffered 
 no privation. He had only to prove him- 
 self trustworthy to make his time his own, 
 and he could experiment with pastes, 
 shapes, decorations, and glazes as much as 
 he pleased, destroying every failure and 
 working on and on until he had gained the 
 form and color that he wished. It is this 
 patience which comes of security, this 
 abolition of all sense of pressure and pass- 
 ing of time, that made the lacquers, swords, 
 embroideries, carvings, and bronzes of 
 Japan most perfect of their kind. Japan 
 has changed ; it is civilized ; and its arts 
 are falling to a Birmingham level. Only 
 in quiet, remoteness, leisure, and assurance 
 of material sufficiency can they be kept 
 from decay. Things will come right some 
 day, for the race is plodding forward ; but 
 
164 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 how many flowers are to be crushed under 
 its feet before it begins to appreciate their 
 beauty? And how many will still hold 
 themselves away from flowers, even as 
 things to walk on ? 
 
 The fact is, thousands know nothing 
 about the country, whether it is a desert 
 place or otherwise, and great mercy is 
 shown to children of the tenements when 
 they are sent there. While it means no 
 more to them, at the outset, than kind- 
 nesses and material comforts that they lack 
 at home, they must soon know it to be 
 friendly, and some of them never leave it 
 for the slums. What a revelation it must 
 be to these ragged, profane little scamps 
 to see the fields in their panoply of sum- 
 mer or in their fruitage of October ! Is 
 their sight, or instinct, true enough in 
 early spring to read the hint of life in the 
 woods, before the leaves are out, in the 
 subtle shine, the reddening, greening, yel- 
 lowing of young branches, even where, in 
 mass or distance, they seem dark? In 
 the poetic lucency of afternoon do they 
 spell romances out of their soft, blackish- 
 
Satisfaction with the Country 165 
 
 purple depths, color evading definition, 
 promising mystery, not livid, hinting at 
 life ? Are they drawn to those fastnesses ? 
 Is the stir of soul in the person as it was 
 in the race, so that dryads hide there for 
 him ? Always baffling, always consciously 
 holding silence over some secret, still the 
 woods are not unfriendly. 
 
 And as time passes and we gain insight, 
 nature surely lightens and grows tender. 
 To our clearing eyes, without the fancy of 
 youth, it does not make such pictures for 
 us as it did. The bunch of trees away 
 yonder on the hill is not a castle where 
 deeds of chivalry are acted ; the silver 
 shining of the cascade is not a door open- 
 ing to glories of fairy-land ; tree, rock, and 
 sky beget a high worth of their own, and 
 demand a maturer love and admiration. 
 Normal men grow cheery with advancing 
 years, when they touch nature often. It is 
 a curious and suggestive fact that the color 
 schemes of great painters clear, soften, and 
 rise in key as they grow older. Corot be- 
 gan with brown and ended with silver. The 
 first was of the earth ; heaven was in the 
 
166 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 second. Turner, Tryon, Troyon, Walker, 
 Thayer, Ranger, illustrate in their art a 
 kindred change. This is not a mere matter 
 of setting the palette : it proves the dawn 
 of spiritual sight upon the eye that has 
 been watching for it across the edge of the 
 material world. So soon as we, too, behold 
 that dawn, life, no less than nature, brightens 
 in it, and we know content. The right- 
 minded rustic is not a gloomy man. If it 
 comes to that, your pessimist, wherever you 
 find him, is a living denial of his faith. The 
 only consistent pessimist is a dead one. 
 
Solitude and Company 
 
 PERMISSION to see with your own 
 eyes and think your own thoughts is 
 what you get by being alone. To stop and 
 start when you like is something, too. In 
 company there is often a tendency to over- 
 do, the impact of a motion enduring longer 
 in a crowd than in the individual. In regi- 
 ments of our citizen soldiery one seldom 
 hears of a man dropping out on a march of 
 a dozen miles, though burdened with rifle 
 and accoutrements, and so unused to exer- 
 cise that a six-mile walk at other times 
 would be a feat. This organization, multi- 
 tude, and unity are a gain, so far as material 
 force is concerned, and although in one 
 sense a crowd is only as strong as its weakest 
 member, as a chain is as strong as its 
 weakest link, in another sense the less 
 effective is buoyed up and beyond himself 
 by the contagion of power. Combination, 
 
 167 
 
i68 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 which merges and subjugates the individual, 
 amazingly multiplies his force. In my teens 
 I had to do guard duty at a hanging. Half 
 of our company was detailed to keep order 
 among the rough, curious, not ill-natured 
 multitude outside. After the fall of the 
 drop the crowd made a rush at the fence, 
 threw it down and poured into the yard 
 around the jail. Our relief, sixteen in 
 number, stood near the door when this oc- 
 curred. On an order to charge bayonets 
 we turned the corner of the building and 
 swept upon the crowd with a yell. Waver- 
 ing for a second, the human deluge turned 
 square about and ebbed toward the street 
 again, screaming, struggling, strewing the 
 ground with hats, parasols, and baby car- 
 riages. The sixteen had dispersed a thou- 
 sand, and without causing any injuries to 
 speak of. It was authority against dis- 
 order ; organization against crude force. 
 Individually the sixteen were outmatched 
 by many sixteens in the mob, but the latter 
 had no cohesion. 
 
 Useful as cohesion is, socially, we should 
 not ask too much of it as individuals, al- 
 
Solitude and Company 169 
 
 though to cut loose from society as often 
 implies depravity as it does spiritual stout- 
 ness. One experiment in enforced vagrancy 
 makes me doubt if I have enough of either 
 to brag about. You can keep away from 
 humanity well enough when there is no 
 humanity to keep away from, when you 
 are hunting or prospecting in the moun- 
 tains, chopping in the forest, reaching the 
 north pole or rowing home from it ; but 
 to use the roads, to pass houses, shops, 
 churches, and bakeries, to be within touch 
 of civilization, yet to hold aloof and deny 
 yourself to it, or it to yourself, that takes 
 genius. 
 
 A man might school himself to be at 
 once a tramp and a philosopher, but Arid 
 Artemus and Pinguid Percy who rap at our 
 door for food, and wax wroth if they get 
 sandwiches instead of four-course dinners, 
 seldom discover in them the making of 
 philosophers. Thoreau and Diogenes were 
 nearer to this possibility, though I fancy 
 that Diogenes had a few shares of gilt- 
 edged stock to help him to take life so in- 
 differently, while Thoreau was not much of 
 
170 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 a tramp, as we understand the species, in- 
 asmuch as he wandered across lots, was 
 content without pie, rum, and tobacco, sel- 
 dom slept in other men's barns, and never 
 begged for money. Nature is to each man 
 a reflection of himself, and with empty 
 pockets and empty stomach he may find it 
 as hard to be entertained and instructed by 
 it as if he went into the road with an empty 
 head. 
 
 All the same, we need more solitude to 
 develop in our own way. We develop in 
 the ways of other people ; hence the con- 
 ventionality of towns. Our tour afoot, on 
 a bicycle, a-horseback, or in a carriage, that 
 is made alone, will prove to us what man- 
 ner of folks we are, and may surprise us. 
 If we are frightened and lorn at the first 
 day without society, but feel a little more 
 interest, confidence, and comfort on the 
 next, things are not going ill with us. By 
 the end of a week we shall have arrived at 
 comparative independence. We walk to 
 find out as much about ourselves as about 
 objects by the wayside, not to gain a self- 
 conscious knowledge, for that is morbid and 
 
Solitude and Company 171 
 
 intolerable, but facility in doing and think- 
 ing, the self-reliance of a wider resource. 
 And aptness with the hands is not enough : 
 aptness of mind is equally good for us. 
 Without in the least underrating the dig- 
 nity and importance of hand-work, real- 
 izing, too, the happiness and health that 
 come of it, I fancy an unspoken contempt 
 in some who work with their muscles for 
 men who work with their brains and nerves, 
 the intellectual and emotional element in 
 society, the scholars and artists ; yet it is 
 easier for the scholar to plough, to hammer, 
 to weave, to drill, than for those who do 
 such things to gain mental poise and ful- 
 ness, supposing that they lack it in the first 
 place, and that their minds are always nar- 
 rowly on the material fact ; so the scholar 
 may, in the end, be the more self-complete 
 of the two. Manual labor has its de^ 
 cided advantage, however, in the hours for 
 thought, study, and fancy that it gives to. 
 whoever will take them. While planing, 
 hammering, and hoeing, as while tramping, 
 the mind is at liberty for idyls or Iliads. 
 The lore of Edwards, Burritt, and Cobbett, 
 
172 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 the discoveries by Hugh Miller, the re- 
 searches of Ferguson, the poetry of Burns, 
 were easy and natural results of their work- 
 a-day business in shops and fields. 
 
 The charm of nature's company is that 
 it is always pure and sane, and it is the only 
 company that is never otherwise. It may 
 be gloomy, it may be terrifying, but it is 
 healthful, great, and lifting. One discovers 
 affinities and humanities in it ; even mathe- 
 matical accuracies and rhythms. We love 
 rhythm in the swing of the sea, the pulse of 
 the wind, the gait and flight of animals, but 
 it exists for the sight, no less, in the archi- 
 tectural recurrences of rock forms, as on the 
 Hudson palisades, in the columned forest, 
 the parallels of grass, the symmetry of 
 flowers, the ordering of the clouds. Trun- 
 dling homeward on the bicycle path, the 
 trees file past in the sunset with a lulling 
 effect, as of verse. Riding over a road in 
 twilight, the regular crescents of dark, left 
 by a joggling flood from a watering cart 
 and extending as far up the road as the 
 eye will carry, have this same quieting 
 effect of repetition, and joined with the 
 
Solitude and Company 173 
 
 stately march of the trees make the way a 
 music. 
 
 Where do we find these stimulants and 
 sedatives in town ? Europe is a little better 
 off than we are in artificial helps to spiritual 
 and intellectual life, for it has cathedrals. 
 We could spare all the slums of New York 
 for one vast, shadowy church where grave 
 spirits walked and hushed our turbulence. 
 We are so wondrous fond of artificial light, 
 and so delight in spectacles, that if we had 
 Ely or Lincoln in our country, the first 
 thing to do with it would be to fill its in- 
 side with arc lamps. We are resolved upon 
 it that nobody shall be alone, or quiet, for 
 a minute. Even music, which ought to be 
 a contemplative man's recreation, is enjoyed 
 in glare and heat and hubbub. Plead for 
 silence and shadow, and the audience re- 
 plies that opera and concerts are social 
 functions. How often you are told by these 
 people, as if in the effort to support that 
 position, "I like music, but I don't under- 
 stand it" ! They wouldn't say, " I like lan- 
 guage, but I don't understand it." Music 
 is a language of the emotions, and is to 
 
174 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 be understood by them, not by the in- 
 tellect. A temple of music what a glo- 
 rious heritage that had been ! A tem- 
 ple, grand, gothic, half dark, free from 
 garish color and glaring gaseliers, a holy 
 place where the advance agent cometh not, 
 where prime donne do not hate each other, 
 where managers neither bilk nor vaunt, 
 where men may meditate and purify theiru 
 selves ; a temple where art is worshipped, 
 not consciously, but where the best of 
 itself leaves its impress of blessing on the 
 receptive soul. We want a concert hall 
 where emotions can be felt without pub- 
 licity. Bare, squalid places, like our sea- 
 side pavilions, are aesthetically impossible. 
 You can't thrill with "the ride of the valkyr- 
 ies" nor weep for "Death and the Maiden" 
 (unless they play it so badly) in these dusty, 
 sun-dizened barns. European beach-chairs 
 might be good things in halls where the 
 music does not fit, because in them you are 
 in a sort of private box and can shrink from 
 the staring, over-dressed multitude and 
 put your mind on the orchestra. Color, 
 too, how large a part that might play ! 
 
Solitude and Company 175 
 
 How we might be warmed and contented 
 by it! 
 
 Solitude must have led me into the 
 thought of music, for of all the arts that 
 of harmony beguiles one most efficiently 
 to loneliness. We conjoin harps and her- 
 mits in tradition and poetry. The hermit 
 of Walden played on a flute as he rocked 
 on the water. If I lived in a cave I would 
 have a piano, a library, and a dog. Dogs, 
 and their fleas, come to me as naturally as 
 if I were raw meat. You ought to have 
 seen the dog I gathered in my Berkshire 
 tramp, Sassingers. He was couched in a 
 yard in Great Barrington a fine, big chap 
 looking as if he were waiting to be in- 
 vited. So I asked, " Old fellow, how 
 would you like to take a walk?" And he 
 said, with his tail, he would like it, and we 
 formed a partnership on the spot. I felt 
 as if I had stolen him, but a farmer re- 
 lieved my conscience on that point when 
 he told me that he had been wandering 
 about the place for a week. Sassingers 
 was mighty good company. He climbed 
 Monument Mountain and lay panting on 
 
176 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 the top while I enjoyed the view ; and he 
 enjoyed it, studying the terrible pitch-off, 
 where the Indian girl went down, with 
 more interest than he showed in the hills 
 that tumbled along the distance. Some 
 animals do not see far, and, indeed, I think 
 most quadrupeds are near-sighted. Their 
 hearing is better, but even there they are 
 not accurate, for I have known a dog to be 
 kept busy for a whole hour barking at the 
 echo of his own voice. He thought it was 
 a rival. Sassingers and I had several in- 
 structive conversations. He followed me 
 almost to the door of a tavern, where I 
 was to prime him royally with meats, and 
 disappeared under my nose. 
 
 Another dog, a wheezy veteran, adopted 
 me in the Catskills, and was always hump- 
 ing up at me to be scratched. Dogs have 
 a " fiddle spot" on their backs that when 
 rubbed or patted affects a sympathetic 
 nerve and makes them scratch at vacancy 
 with a hind leg. Cats have a similar place 
 at the base of the ear. Horses have it on 
 their backs and flanks, and one plug used 
 to wobble so in his hind legs when the 
 
Solitude and Company 177 
 
 currycomb went over this sensitive place 
 that he could hardly persuade himself not 
 to sit down. Cattle, too, like to have their 
 necks and heads rubbed, and one old 
 bull of my acquaintance used to bawl for 
 the comb every time he saw me. In the 
 early days of the railroad on the plains the 
 buffalo found the telegraph-poles to be 
 admirable scratching-posts. At first they 
 polished them, then tipped them over. 
 Cats stand more petting than do most 
 animals, and are always bunting against 
 the legs of chairs and people. In cold, 
 clear weather, as boys know, friction will 
 bring sparks out of a cat's fur, and if while; 
 you rub her back with one hand you offer 
 a knuckle of the other at her nose or ear, 
 you will feel the prick of the spark ; or, if 
 you hold her baby fashion, this pricking 
 will be felt in the hand that supports her- 
 hind legs. After this amusement you may 
 notice a burnt odor in the fur. And did I 
 see two blue flashes on our cat, Skimple- 
 jinks, as he went out into the snow on a 
 sharp night? A funny performance was 
 given by a pug one evening. She had 
 
178 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 crawled under a chair, and as she started 
 to come out her back scraped on a rung 
 of it This affected the sympathetic nerve, 
 and she began "fiddling" with great in- 
 dustry, first with one hind leg, then the 
 other, running her tongue over her nose, 
 as if to express her satisfaction ; and every 
 time she tried to get out the pressure 
 of the rung made her scratch with new 
 violence, so that several minutes passed be- 
 fore she could liberate herself. This back- 
 scratching appears to have some physio- 
 logical advantage. Poets are fond of it. 
 
 Animals do not invariably behave well 
 to strangers. I have been bitten by curs 
 on several occasions, once while riding on 
 a bicycle. Clubs and stones are fit re- 
 proofs for that kind of dogs, and the am- 
 monia gun is perfection ; but if you are 
 friendly with a dog he will usually treat 
 you with distinguished consideration. A 
 savage dog usually has a savage master, 
 who will upbraid you if you dislike to be 
 bitten. Once a mongrel assailed me as I 
 was returning from a review with a rifle 
 on my shoulder. His owner shouted over 
 
Solitude and Company 179 
 
 the fence, with a menacing glare in his 
 eye, " Don't you touch that dog. If you 
 do, by " 
 
 " Do you expect me to stand still here 
 and have him chew my legs?" I asked, in 
 a tone intended to be sarcastic ; and I did 
 not wait for his answer, but lunged at the 
 animal with the bayonet. It jabbed him 
 in the leg, and he ran away kiyi-ing. I 
 respect the affection that subsists between 
 a good dog and a good man, but an ill- 
 mannered hound represents a family that 
 does not deserve honor. 
 
 As most creatures treat you decently, 
 so, as you walk, let the living things alone. 
 If you will murder them, confess yourself 
 barbarian. Don't allege that ancient ex- 
 cuse of science, at all events. The bird's 
 feathers were all described and counted 
 centuries ago. Please leave him in the 
 tree to sing. The distance from the wood- 
 chuck's alisphenoid to his supra-occipital 
 has been measured and charted. Let him 
 make holiday. If this murder and suffer- 
 ing are to continue, in pretence of a ser- 
 vice to certain other animals called men, 
 
180 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 at least let the Society for the Prevention 
 of Cruelty to Animals name the amount 
 and frequency of the slaughters. A science 
 based on cruelty ? A truth learned through 
 torture and outrage ? How can we know 
 it for truth under such conditions ? We 
 know enough about the anatomy of ani- 
 mals. Let us study them living, for in 
 that form they are a hundred-fold more 
 interesting, more useful, more engaging, 
 than when dead. Let us have no more 
 shooting "for fun," and no more vivisec- 
 tion. The brutalizing of men by such 
 actions is worse, if possible, than the pain 
 endured by their victims. 
 
 Animals are closer to humanity than we 
 know. They reason. I have seen cats in 
 revery and dogs in study. They are bet- 
 ter than men, because they have longer 
 memories for benefits than for injuries. A 
 cat will return to you, purring, five minutes 
 after you have tweaked his tail. In our 
 latitude the only animals that misbehave 
 themselves are those that meet men. I 
 used to know a deer in Maine. His name 
 was J ames. Somebody had shot his parents, 
 
Solitude and Company 181 
 
 I think, because he joined a herd of cows 
 and became domestic, without anybody 
 asking him to. He would come around in 
 the evening to sozzle his nose in a pail of 
 milk, and no circus was half so funny as 
 his attempts to drink while he only knew 
 how to suck, for he was a nursing infant. 
 He would jam his head into the pail, get 
 the fluid up his nostrils, blow and dance 
 with appetite and vexation, and at last, 
 having sloshed a certain amount of milk 
 down his throat and spilled the rest over 
 the premises, would go to sleep in the 
 barn-yard with the other calves. James 
 may have been over-stimulated with fruit 
 and gingerbread, or he may have been 
 spanked too often for going into the house 
 without wiping his feet, for as his horns 
 increased he begat a temper. He was 
 especially likely to get behind you and 
 charge, so that you sat down tenderly 
 for several days afterward. A pet deer 
 once killed his master by cutting open his 
 abdomen, and I believe that something 
 sudden happened to James about that 
 time. 
 
182 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 This is not the usual disposition of the 
 deer, which is to have as little to do with 
 human kind as possible. Once, while canoe- 
 ing on a lonely lake, my brother and I 
 came behind a doe, knee-deep in the water 
 and feeding on lily-pads. As the wind was 
 blowing from her, half a gale of it, she did 
 not scent us, and the cautious dip of our 
 paddles was unheard in the lash and ripple 
 of the waves. Steadying the little craft by 
 a grip on a boulder, we waited, six feet 
 away, until she lazily waded about and 
 looked up. As she caught sight of us she 
 flinched, as under a blow, and stood braced, 
 yet transfixed. Her flanks quivered, her 
 eyes and nostrils were dilated. So we re- 
 mained for some moments, looking at each 
 other. At last, with a leap and a " whoof !" 
 of astonishment, she freed herself from the 
 spell and went bounding ashore and into 
 the woods. The bucks are prodigious 
 jumpers when they are startled or pur- 
 sued. Undergrowth and fallen trunks are 
 nothing to them, and they seldom catch 
 their horns in branches. While I will not 
 swear that I have seen one leap ten feet 
 
Solitude and Company 183 
 
 into the air, it is only because I did not 
 measure the distance. 
 
 Do you ever feel this leaping or flying 
 impulse ? You must have done so if you 
 have descended mountains afoot. Some- 
 thing equine or aquiline develops in a 
 man before large spaces. He wants to 
 fill them, to increase himself, to stamp 
 his feet into the earth and claim it. When 
 I weighed less than now there was a fear- 
 some delight for me in bounding down 
 hills, taking great leaps as I ran. That 
 gives one a mastery of the air : he becomes 
 a brother of eagles. It would not surprise 
 him to find that birds and bats were racing 
 with him. I have raced with sparrows on 
 a bicycle. Swift motion of your own 
 making or direction always has this thrill, 
 and you shout in the exultation of it. 
 Cowboys get their defiant yell from eagles 
 and peacocks. They resemble both. 
 
 While animals are generally select in 
 their tastes and object to our society, they 
 are surprisingly indifferent to us sometimes. 
 One genius claims that snakes, even rat- 
 tlers, may be made as tame and gentle as 
 
184 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 kittens. I have played with small ones 
 without putting them in much disquiet 
 A badger that I met in the Rocky Moun- 
 tains regarded me with some curiosity 
 while I sat on a stone and talked to him 
 in a low voice, in the hope of winning his 
 confidence, but after a while he concluded 
 that there was no profit in human ac- 
 quaintances, and he pattered off without 
 the least show of haste or nervousness. A 
 woodchuck, sunning himself on a fence, 
 refused to run as I approached, allowed 
 himself to be addressed at three feet of 
 distance, and even to be poked gently with 
 a stick, without other objection than a 
 look of surprise. Young birds I have 
 taken into my hands, although at first they 
 peck at one's fingers. A bird it appeared 
 to be a hawk, but was hardly bigger than 
 a robin invited me to fight him in the 
 Yellowstone country, and running on 
 before me (I had probably intruded near 
 his nest), turned back ever and anon to 
 shake his wings, make threatening lurches, 
 and hiss at me with a wide, red mouth, 
 strangely snake-like. 
 
Solitude and Company 185 
 
 . The oddest little fighter I ever met was 
 a mouse. On a chill, windy autumn even- 
 ing I stood on Mount Willard, looking 
 down into the White Mountain Notch, 
 absurd name for that stupendous chasm, 
 and absorbed in a view that has few equals, 
 even in our land of wonders. Red lights 
 played along the avalanches of Webster, 
 Chocorua's alp was thrust into a remote, 
 pale sky, the vast, dark bulk of the Presi- 
 dential range arose out of the forest across 
 the valley, and sheets of cloud, edged with 
 fire, unrolled above the head of fatal 
 Willey. The scene was stern, immense ; 
 yet, of a sudden, a mouse distracted atten- 
 tion from it. He ran out from the bushes, 
 perhaps in chase of something, and nearly 
 bumped into my feet On being driven 
 into a rocky triangle and cornered there 
 he exhibited a rage that was impish. He 
 danced on his hind legs, made rushes at 
 me, snapped his teeth viciously, and was 
 altogether surprising. For this exhibition 
 I rewarded him with a piece of bread and 
 left him to regain his calm. 
 
 It is wondrous easy to get acquainted 
 
i86 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 with insects, especially if you don't care to. 
 They are like some members of the human 
 family in that respect. But most of the 
 fear in which they are held is groundless. 
 Spiders, for instance : what a lot of false- 
 hood is told about them ! There is no 
 authentic case of death from spider-sting, 
 yet sensational newspapers bite several 
 people to death with spiders every year. 
 Latrodectus mactans, a long-legged spider 
 with red markings, is the only kind whose 
 bite is likely to make a sore. The domes- 
 tic centipede is less poisonous than the 
 mosquito, and the tarantula is no more 
 dangerous than the wasp. I have seen 
 grown men dodge the harmless dragon-fly, 
 and some were timid about moths. 
 
 One value of a scientific mind is that it 
 saves one from needless suffering and ap- 
 prehension from beetles and spooks. It 
 saves needless expense, too. A man in 
 my town spent several thousand dollars 
 developing mineral springs on Long Island. 
 There are none. There never will be, be- 
 cause the island is made of pebbles and 
 sand, glacial drift, and has no beds of 
 
Solitude and Company 187 
 
 mineral. This man took too much on 
 trust, and lacked an examining habit An- 
 other spent quite a sum in digging a deep 
 well, only to find that he could not pump 
 water from it, because a pump will suck 
 water for only thirty feet, as his book on 
 physics would have told him. It was a 
 different sort of mechanic who repaired a 
 pneumatic tube. This had become choked, 
 and to tear it to pieces would have been 
 troublesome and expensive ; so a pistol 
 was fired at one end and the echo was 
 timed. Knowing that sound moves eleven 
 hundred and forty-two feet a second, he 
 measured the place of the obstruction by 
 the time it took for sound to travel there 
 and back again, and the tube was opened 
 within a few feet of the arrested parcel. 
 
 I confess that this yarn sounds a little 
 like those tremendous moralities of early 
 Sunday-school literature ; but if not true it 
 is good enough to be. It may have been 
 told to incite the readers and listeners to 
 virtuous emulation, modern science being 
 somewhat dogmatic in its attitude, and 
 standing almost as a substitute for ethics. 
 
i88 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 This may be a wrong attitude, for submis- 
 sion to nature has its advantage no less 
 than mastery of it. They say we improve 
 with the positive or conquering mood. 
 But in that mood we close our intuitions 
 to the appeals and promptings of field and 
 sky and shut out happiness. The law of 
 compensation perhaps makes an average of 
 satisfaction in both cases, the mastering 
 and receptive. The attitude will depend 
 on the person, as nature, that deepens 
 egotism in one, destroys it in another. 
 Thoreau lived so much with nature that he 
 was the only man of his own acquaintance, 
 and why not make much of him ? Others 
 are so impressed by the great pageant that 
 they realize how small a part of it they are. 
 It is the positive and negative again. You 
 find it in letters. Some writers din away 
 on technic, working so much for expression 
 that they leave out things to be expressed. 
 There are subjective moments when elusive 
 nature comes to us with ideas and beauties 
 that are large and new, forecasting and 
 consoling better than words. They seldom 
 come to us in company. In fact, it is a 
 
Solitude and Company 189 
 
 quality of solitude that it is medicinal. 
 The hurt soul flies to it for consolations. 
 We draw lessons from the daily aspects of 
 nature. We see the hills cast off their 
 cloud and spell it abroad on the wind ; 
 and, seeing, profit : for the rising sun 
 turns all this vapor to a flame, and there is 
 glory where late were blue sorrow and cold 
 night. Our tears are dews that shine in 
 hope and faith. Who has not grieved can 
 wear no crown. Try to be patient when 
 the dark comes down. 
 
Autumn Sights and Musing 
 
 T TNHAPPY that lot of ours doomed 
 ft* to city living when our hearts are 
 in the woods and the echoes of bird and 
 brook songs sound across the babble of 
 the shop. But not quite hopeless while 
 the cars are running or bicycles can be 
 had on the instalment plan ; nor even 
 when we are tied up in our offices. We 
 can always look up, at any rate, and whoso 
 fails in that privilege neglects high conso- 
 lations. One man and he has dyspep- 
 sia, too believes that there will be no 
 ennui in heaven, because he could look at 
 the sky for billions of years without grow- 
 ing tired. Most beautiful and exhilarating 
 of all, perhaps, is the blue, the soft blue 
 of spring, the sadder blue of autumn, the 
 deep, strong, splendid blue of January ; 
 but a common curiosity seeks for shapes 
 and other colors. 
 190 
 
Autumn Sights and Musings 191 
 
 That range of clouds in the east, fifty 
 miles away, their peaks shining rosy in 
 the sunset, their capes and cliffs throw- 
 ing purple shadows on the walls behind, 
 some sad-colored vapors swimming past to 
 heighten their seeming fixity and likeness 
 to mountains, how gladly the eye cheats 
 the mind into a faith that these great 
 visions are to harden into rock and snow 
 and stay there for a rest and inspiration to 
 the race ! Not only are these creations of 
 the air and sun beautiful in themselves, but 
 they heighten the charm of landscape and 
 keep us interested in their constant change. 
 Mountains grow in picturesqueness when 
 they toss off their cloud blankets of a 
 morning, or fling off gray remnants that 
 smoke along their sides after a rain, lifting 
 out of the forests like the sign of a great 
 battle, until the peak seems to bombard 
 the plain. Crimson fires flash among the 
 Rockies and are quenched in a moment. 
 You start at their ferocity and recall Vesu- 
 vius ; but it is only the sunset, with thin air 
 to see it through. 
 
 Glooms stream pall-wise over the tops 
 
192 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 and around the corners of the Carolina 
 mountains. Curtains of gray wool rise 
 heavily from the Catskills and rank on 
 rank of painted trees come into view, 
 dramatic, Octobrean, magnificent On 
 Pike's Peak you shall see, on summer after- 
 noons, how clouds are spun out of the 
 lurking moisture of brooks and bogs, and 
 come flying up the eastern face, the slight 
 skein gathering weight and speed until it 
 whirls past you, a black, inverted cataract, 
 charged, mayhap, with lightning. Yester- 
 day the snows melted from the summit to 
 make those waters, and to-day they are 
 tossed back on the winds. And that eight- 
 mile tramp, high in air, that you took 
 alone, over the crests of the Presidential 
 range in the White Mountains, you will 
 always remember that, because the clouds 
 were carried in such bulks, so near your 
 head, and thickened into thunder-storms 
 at so many points, and you remembered, 
 as Mount Washington went under, how 
 many had lost their lives in that tall, cold, 
 stony wilderness. 
 
 And when you climbed the Wengern 
 
Autumn Sights and Musings 193 
 
 Alp, now vulgarized by a railroad, you lost 
 the whole Bernese Oberland under a fall 
 of cloud that steamed from the snow-fields 
 in a noon sun ; then, looking up to get the 
 bearings, you knew an instant of frank ter- 
 ror, for, falling out of the sky, a mile over- 
 head, was a mass of rock as big as St. 
 Paul's, only, it did not fall : it was a reve- 
 lation of the top of the Eiger, reeling 
 through a cloud-gap. You heard the roar 
 of an avalanche, turned away, and the 
 Eiger was gone again. 
 
 Mountains with narrow tops, like Camel's 
 Hump, in Vermont, are especially majestic 
 in a winter wind, for the dry snow whirls up 
 the windward face, then pours off into the 
 air in long, straight lines. The banner of 
 the gale is flung abroad, and the farmer, 
 looking up at it, thinks what a rush and 
 whistle it must make and hugs his fire. 
 But stranger still it is to stand under the 
 lee of a mountain of round summit and 
 see a cloud heaped up from the farther 
 side, everywhere moulding itself to the 
 mountain shape, though it is fifty to a hun- 
 dred feet thick. When sunshine strikes 
 13 
 
194 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 this cap of vapor you think of the icing of 
 a cake, but sometimes at a distance the 
 lighting of the mass turns it into an aureole, 
 the peak lying strong, couchant, compla- 
 cent, through this coronation. This phe- 
 nomenon is most usual on rainy mornings, 
 when the cloud cloaks cling to the cold, 
 wet peak and are outlined on the indigo 
 dark. 
 
 There is a unity of color in every season 
 that proves the artists to be right in their 
 theory of tone. In the country in winter 
 the earth is white and gray, in spring silver 
 and green, in summer green and blue, in 
 autumn brown. In autumn we lament the 
 fall of the leaf, but the universal fading has 
 a beauty of its own. It is not ghastly or 
 abhorrent, there is not even an odor of 
 decay, for October smells are rich and 
 spicy, and the flashes of red among the 
 maples, the violet glow on the distant 
 mountains, the purity of the sky, are the 
 sweeter for the russet in the weeds and 
 ferns. Leaves are wavering down to the 
 frost-singed turf, bird songs grow infre- 
 quent, stars of gold spread over the dank 
 
Autumn Sights and Musings 195 
 
 earth at the brook sides, spruce boughs 
 bear seeming nests that we find to be 
 heaps of needles dropped from the taller 
 pines, and on all the landscape rests the 
 still air of a finished work. Sleeping-time 
 has come to nature, and the fat, heavy- 
 eyed, tired-headed man from town may 
 share her rest. 
 
 Yet the crickets are still chirring, the red 
 wood salamander is trilling, bees are hum- 
 ming through the asters, and in quiet spots 
 the drone of flies cheats us into thinking 
 that we have been spoken to by soft 
 tongues, or that we have caught a note of 
 talk in a thicket where sweet-voiced girls 
 or gentle children are telling confidences. 
 There is a wonderful human quality in 
 these wood sounds. I suppose everybody 
 has heard the speech of flies' wings. It is 
 nearly as plain as those airy voices that 
 "syllable men's names" in solitude. 
 
 And a great delight in autumn is the 
 wind. Its paean, grand, solemn, yet with 
 an under-note of joy that comes of liberty, 
 is best heard on the edge of a wood, where 
 you can see the wide, waste space that it 
 
196 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 will fly to. It has more sheer vigor and 
 exhilaration when it gets upon a mountain 
 top ; but up there it seldom has anything 
 to fight, for it likes to wrestle, it enjoys cut- 
 ting itself against trees, wires, and fences, 
 as a horse on the last stretch of a race 
 takes whip and spur ; so it booms and 
 hisses among the weeds and rocks, and 
 swoops down the leeward slope to tussle 
 with the woods. But they love it, too, 
 even when it costs them, here and there, a 
 branch or a hatful of foliage, for they can 
 repair themselves. And to see the golden 
 rain of leaves at such a time is worth long 
 journeys. Every live man knows that the 
 world wakes when the wind blows. How 
 the clouds hurry and dance, the water ruf- 
 fles and leaps, the loose earth flies, and 
 trees wave their arms as if appealing to be 
 made foot-loose, that they, too, might be 
 as men, walking ! Failing that, the trees 
 clutch their toes the tighter into the ground 
 and thrash their limbs and bend and toss 
 their heads. Perhaps by exercise they 
 grow in height and grace, like other crea- 
 tures, as we know they do in muscle. The 
 
Autumn Sights and Musings 197 
 
 Olympic games are on when the wind is 
 up. 
 
 Nature encourages these contests ; exists 
 by them. Let the best win. That ambi- 
 tion to excel among men is a mere selfish 
 struggle for wealth and honor, not as in 
 trees and animals, for life. I have but a 
 temperate admiration for the average pub- 
 lic man, finding that in too many cases 
 public service makes for some manner of 
 private end. Devotion to nature, and to 
 men through nature, is always pure and 
 wholesome. We may rely on it that one 
 involves the other, for all nature cries out 
 against men escaping from her. If they 
 attempt it she brings them back with the 
 lash of passion, appetite, chill, or thirst. 
 She pursues like Nemesis and befriends 
 like God. Yet, we read, or feel, a slow 
 advance toward higher, abler forms in the 
 vision of beauty that the world daily puts 
 before us. Man's physical self is a sym- 
 bol of the trend of nature toward men- 
 tality. He is held by the feet to the 
 ground he sprang from, his vital and pro- 
 creative machinery are established next, 
 
198 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 but soaring over them is the head, dome, 
 and crown of the work, farthest from the 
 earth, holding in least bulk what is most 
 of value. 
 
 Water lets in a wondrous light and 
 charm to the dullest landscape. It makes 
 a glint of heaven on earth, and it pleasantly 
 assures us that things are not in fixity. In 
 the fall, when the dropping of foliage ex- 
 poses it more clearly from a distance, its 
 range of color is the range of the painter's 
 palette. From the snow of foam to the 
 ink of storm, it is all there. The lake is 
 gold in the sun, silver in the moon, saffron 
 in the dawning, turquoise at mid-day, pink, 
 orange, and crimson at evening, sapphire 
 in the twilight, and lapis lazuli after dark. 
 The ocean is gray, brown, green, blue, pur- 
 ple, in as many hours as there are colors. 
 Niagara holds the eye not less by its mass 
 and power than by the exquisite beryl of 
 its flood, a color that belongs to all the 
 fresh-water seas of this continent. In 
 some of our smaller lakes there is a sur- 
 prising clearness, the bottom being plainly 
 visible at a depth of thirty or forty feet, 
 
Autumn Sights and Musings 199 
 
 and in the Silver Spring of Florida at 
 eighty feet ; yet, in every case there is 
 local color : amber, green, brown, blue. 
 In some of the mountain countries where 
 the swiftness of streams erodes their banks 
 there is an earthy tinge to the water, while 
 autumn leaves, steeping in pools, darken 
 them like shadow. 
 
 By far the most gorgeous color I ever 
 saw in water is the blue of the hot springs 
 in the Yellowstone country. Despite the 
 crinkling of the surface and the steam that 
 drifts up from it, the water is singularly 
 limpid, and one may look far down their 
 stony throats as into a mass of most mag- 
 nificent sapphire, faintly tinged with green. 
 A clergyman looking long into one of these 
 pools was made almost ill by the force of 
 emotion stirred by it. It was like ex- 
 cessive perfume, or Chopin's music. Per- 
 haps the strict, clean life led by that man 
 made him the more sensitive to these 
 glories ; perhaps he found in the great 
 temple of nature the same harmonies, the 
 same symbols, the same truths, that he 
 preached at home. 
 
200 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 For color, form, and light, rocks, woods, 
 and waves, they preach, if only one will 
 listen. It is those who refuse to listen that 
 are so rough, so unmoved by the daily 
 pageant of the world. It is compensation 
 again, however, that makes them the easiest 
 victims of emotional morality, and some of 
 the strictest church people are those of the 
 ''mountains and the backwoods. They still 
 live in a past time and should be happy, 
 if they knew how. Doubt has not reached 
 them yet They do not know of the 
 changes that have gone through common 
 thought in these late years. In the cities 
 thought has become free and hard. Re^ 
 publican ideas rule. Science is dominant. 
 Yet the respect for goodness is shown in 
 the demand for it. Business hardly sup^ 
 ports itself in crooked ways, stealing is no 
 longer respectable, nor even a part of 
 politics. In the exact practice of our 
 thinking religion has become poetry, and 
 poetry is effete. There are more Chris^ 
 tian philosophers than Christians, more He- 
 brews than Jews, more Deists than Unita^ 
 rians, more good people than church-goers. 
 
Autumn Sights and Musings 201 
 
 There is impatience with forms that do not 
 dress a substance. With the Chadbands 
 and Pecksniffs these are heavy times. A 
 drunken priest is unfrocked as smartly as 
 a pickpocket is clapped into jail. Faith 
 without works is dead. 
 
 Yet the religious spirit is wider abroad 
 in this day than ever before. We do not 
 ask how much belief a man may have, nor 
 how far he endorses such and such a read- 
 ing of such and such a text, because we 
 heartily do not care. But we do hope that 
 he is honest in his business, good to his 
 family, votes for the public welfare, and 
 does not stagnate mentally. We try him 
 by practical tests. We praise his charity, 
 unless he gives to beggars, when we con- 
 demn him for his weakness and want of 
 sense in encouraging pauperism. We love 
 him for his kindness, unless he is better to 
 the erring than to the steadfast, when we 
 deplore a sentimental weakness in his char- 
 acter. But we cease to ask how he trans- 
 lates wvro<r, or if he remembers the Thirty- 
 nine Articles, or the Nicene Creed. He 
 may take the story of Adam in Eden as 
 
202 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 fact or figure : it is all one to us. The 
 man himself, not the faith he has, passes 
 under the world's judgment. 
 
 Strange, then, in this practical time, that 
 piety commands the same respect it had 
 in the Crusades. Yet not strange when we 
 consider. We may applaud the daring of 
 the iconoclast, we may demand that record 
 and tradition pass and make way for fact, 
 we may avouch the hopelessness of jibing 
 geology with the Mosaic books. Why? 
 Because by so doing we deem that we 
 encourage truth. And in the wide and 
 generous survey of our kind that we begin 
 to take, we realize that piety is also a step 
 to truth ; that the church is not a super- 
 stition, but an inquiry and a hope. In 
 whatever way this aspiration moves, in 
 voice or act or wish, it commands re- 
 spect and reverence. Beware that man 
 who sneers at piety. Help to unmask de- 
 ceit, fleer at the jobber and self-seeker 
 who has learned nothing but a mouth 
 humility in his church, but before the 
 spectacle of a soul repentant, earnest, as- 
 piring, thankful, resolute, uncover. Let 
 
Autumn Sights and Musings 203 
 
 us separate merit from the hypocrisy and 
 cant that pretend to it; then, whether it 
 go under the name of ethics or religion, or 
 even policy, our honor of it shall encourage 
 it to grow. None shall rob the sorrowing 
 and suffering of the comfort they find in 
 religion, and none shall mock at any yearn- 
 ing to be good because the prayer finds 
 easiest utterance in a churchly form. 
 
 Tradition agrees that the churchly is the 
 most perfect and dignified communion with 
 the soul of creation, but one may hear 
 farmers, soldiers, choppers, prospectors, 
 and other out-of-door people swearing 
 their prayers in right English when the 
 spirit is on them. The spirit that is erect 
 before its fellows and humble before the 
 powers : that spirit lives a prayer. We 
 may as safely look for moralities in our 
 door yards as to expect to find them, with 
 other felicities, on Saturn fifty years hence ; 
 yet, back or forward, whichever way we 
 throw our look, it is brighter than here and 
 now. In the desert world we cry as we 
 gaze on the heavenly hills, " We shall have 
 no pain there." Then we dare the heights 
 
204 With Feet to the Earth 
 
 and find rock, snow, and sand ; while back 
 in the plain our way is green : grass fed 
 with our blood and tears. 
 
 And now for a flight to the reddening 
 forest, for I take my vacation, of choice, 
 when the frosts nip and the summer 
 boarder has departed. The old duds come 
 out of the trunk, the grip that holds so 
 little, but enough, swings on my shoulder, 
 there is a ragged staff in hand, some 
 smoky miles are ahead ; then, a haven in 
 the mountains, and a hold, if not on happi- 
 ness, at least on facts. 
 
 None of your candy thoughts, none of 
 your laws and books. A place in the sun, 
 a stinking pipe, meat that a hunter cooks, 
 a sound of wind in the pines, mighty and 
 wide and deep, and water to drink, and 
 peaks to climb, and hemlock boughs for 
 sleep : that's what I want. For I weary of 
 art, I sicken of cant and whim. The earth 
 is right, I would live as true ; stout of 
 heart as of limb. Men are friends of a 
 day ; they don't outlast the hills : I leave 
 the town and its mob, heart -cold, surging 
 around the whirling mills whose hearts are 
 
Autumn Sights and Musings. 205 
 
 dust and the millstones gold. I love men 
 best in loving what makes them good. 
 Wrapped in a star-born calm, secure upon 
 the sod, to be man is meet in that grand 
 old wood. One knows himself, and God. 
 
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