Sunday, February second.
It’s before supper. Rockwell, who has just run out-of-doors for a romp, calls at this moment that he has lost his slipper in the snow and is barefooted. Out-of-doors is to us like another room. Mornings we wash in the snow, invariably. And with a mug of water in hand clean our teeth out there—and this in the coldest weather. We scour our pots with snow before washing them, throw the dish water right out of the door, and generally are in and out all day.... It is surely nonsense to think that changes of temperature give men colds. Neither of us has had a trace of a cold this winter, we haven’t even used handkerchiefs—only sleeves. Nor does it give one a cold to be cold. I’ve tried that often enough to know. And a variable climate has, too, nothing to do with it, for what variableness could exceed an Alaska winter. Colds, like bad temper and loss of faith, are a malady of the city crowd.
It rains—this moment, the next it will hail—and then snow. Sometime to-day the sun has shone, sometime the wind has blown, and for the rest been calm. Altogether it has been too uncertain for us to expect Olson. And now for the sour-dough hot cakes and supper. For Rockwell, barley, “the marrow of men.”
Rockwell to-day asked me how kings earned their living. I said they didn’t earn it—just got the people to give it to them.
“What’s that,” he said laughing, “some sort of a joke they play on the people?”
So I guess it takes education to appreciate privilege. Incidentally, the war must be over and the heroes, having proved by their might that might does not make right—or that it does? (!) now have doffed the soldier’s uniform of glory for the little-honored clothes of toil.