TAKING A SIGHT AT RINGANDKNOCK.
(By Ruddier Stripling.)
After the roughness of the Atlantic, in which to my taste there is far too much water moving about, I stepped on to America with considerable relief. I was quite satisfied, after that excellent dinner, the first I had enjoyed since Liverpool slid away eastward, to walk aimlessly through the streets till I fell into the arms of a broad-shouldered, pug-nosed, Irish New York policeman. I remember no more till New York passed away on a sunny afternoon, and then I fell asleep again and slept till the brakeman, conductor, Pullman-car conductor, negro porter and newsboy somehow managed to pull me out into the midnight temperature of 80 below freezing. It was just like having one's head put under the pump, but it did not quite revive me, for I mistook my host in his sleigh for a walrus, and tried to harpoon him with my umbrella. After matters had been explained, we went off, at least I did, and never woke up till I fell out into a snow-drift, just as we turned a corner at our journey's end.
In the morning, I had some idea that the sky was a great sapphire, and that I was inside it, and that the fields were some sort of velvet or wool-work, going round and round with the sun rioting over them, whatever that may mean, till my head ached. I can't quite understand all this now, but it seemed a very picturesque, impressionist description when I wrote it. Then I went for a walk down Main Street. I think it is about 400 miles long, for I got nowhere near the end, but this was perhaps owing to my uncertainty as to which side was the pleasanter to walk on. At last I gave it up, and sat down on the side-walk. Now, the wisdom of Vermont, not being at all times equal to grasping all the problems of everybody else's life with delicacy, sometimes makes pathetic mistakes, and it did so in my ease. I explained to the policeman that I had been sitting up half the night on a wild horse in New Zealand, and had only just come over for the day, but it was all in vain.
The cell at Vermont was horribly uncomfortable. I dreamt that I was trying to boil snow in a thimble, to make maple syrup, and to swim on my head in deep water, with a life-belt tied to my ankles. There was another man there, and in the early morning he told me about Mastodons and Plesiosauri in a wood near the town, and how he caught them by the tails and photographed them; and also that Ringandknock, a mountain near, was mentioned by EMERSON in a verse, which I remembered, because he made "co-eval" rhyme with "extended." Only a truly great Philosopher could have done that.
It was all new and delightful; and it must have been true, because my informant was a quiet, slow-spoken man of the West, who refrained from laughing at me. I have met very few people who could do that. Next day all the idleness and trifling were at an end, and my friends conveyed me back to New York.