Hers is the enduring truth about Chicago; as against that set forth by Mr. Armour in “The Packers, the Private Car Lines, and the People.” Here she was, herself the very stuff of the eternal in literature, and forced to Fairyland for something to write about! Sheer nonsense. One need not take the wings of the morning to the uttermost sea, or make one’s bed in Hell for “copy.” Chicago will do—or Boston—or even Hingham.
To be, if to be only a stock or a stone, beast or bird or man, is to be a story, while to be any one of my neighbors is to be an epic.
The day we moved out here, before our goods arrived, a strangely youthful pair, far on in the eighties, struggled up the hill from the old farm below to greet us. He was clad in overalls and topcoat, and she in flowers, overflowing from both her arms, and in wild confusion on the gayest Easter bonnet that ever bloomed.
“How do you do, neighbors!” she began, extending her armfuls of glorious mountain laurel; “Mr. White and I bring you the welcome of the Hingham Hills”—Mr. White’s rough old hand grasping mine amid the blossoms.
“Why,” I cried, “I didn’t know the Hingham Hills could hold such a welcome. I have tramped the woods about here, but I never found a bunch of laurel.”
“Ah, you didn’t get into Valley Swamp! Mr. White and I will show you, won’t we, Georgie? We know where odes hang on hawthorns, don’t we? We are busy farmers, and you know what farming is; but we have never ploughed up our poetry-patch, have we, Georgie?”
They never had; nor much of their other ninety-six acres either—the whole farm a joyous riot of free verse: fences without line or meter: cattle running where they liked; the farm kit—a mowing machine, a sulky plough, and a stolid old grindstone—straying romantically about the shy sweet fields.
It was an ode of a carriage that the spoony old couple went to town in, with wheels dactylic on one side and iambic on the other, and so broken a line for a back spring that Mrs. White would slide into Mr. White’s lap without cæsura or even a punctuation mark to hinder.
I was at the village market one muddy March day, when Cupid and the old mare, neither wearing blinders, brought this chariot to the curb. Mr. White, descending to the street, reached up for Mrs. White, who, giving him both her hands, put out a dainty foot to the carriage-step and there poised, dismayed at the March mud. Instantly Mr. White, disengaging one hand, lifted a folded blanket from the seat, shot it grandly out across the mud, and with a bow as gallant as Sir Walter’s own, handed the dear old shoes unblemished to the shop.
Eighteen or eighty, it is just the same. Boston or Chicago or Hingham, it is just the same. White or red or yellow or black, it is just the same. The radium of romance is mixed with the slag of all our souls. Here is my colored neighbor down toward the village.