BY ELLA FARMAN.
UNLESS I take a long half mile circle, my daily walk to the post-office leads me down through an unsavory, wooden-built portion of town. I am obliged to pass several cheap groceries, which smell horribly of sauer-kraut and Limburg cheese, a restaurant steamy with Frenchy soups, a livery stable, besides two or three barns, and some gloomy, windowless, shut-up buildings, of whose use I haven’t the slightest idea.
Of course, when I go out in grand toilet, I take the half mile circle. But, being a business woman, and generally in a hurry, I usually go this short way in my short walking-dress and big parasol; and, probably, there is an indescribable expression to my nose, just as Mrs. Jack Graham says.
Well, one morning I was going down town in the greatest hurry. I was trying to walk so fast that I needn’t breathe once going by the Dutch groceries; and I was almost to the open space which looks away off to the sparkling river, and the distant park, and the forenoon sun,—I always take a good, long, sweet breath there, coming and going,—when my eye was caught by a remarkable group across the street.
Yes, during the night, evidently, while the town was asleep, there had been an arrival—strangers direct from the Sunny South.
And there the remarkable-looking strangers sat, in a row, along the narrow step of one of the mysterious buildings I have alluded to. They were sunning themselves with all the delightful carelessness of the experienced traveler. Though, evidently, they had been presented with the liberty of the city, it was just as evident that they didn’t care a fig for sightseeing—not a fig, either, for the inhabitants. All they asked of our town was its sunshine. They had selected the spot where they could get the most of it. Through the open space opposite the sun streamed broadly; and the side of a weather-colored building is so warm!
What a picture of dolce far niente, of “sweet-do-nothing,” it was! I stopped, hung my parasol over my shoulder,—there was a little too much sunshine for me,—and gazed at it.
“O, how you do love it! You bask like animals! That fullness of enjoyment is denied to us white-skins. What a visible absorption of luster and heat! You are the true lotus-eaters!”
The umber-colored creatures—I suppose they are as much warmer for being brown, as any brown surface is warmer than a white one. I never did see sunshine drank, and absorbed, and enjoyed as that was. It was a bit of Egypt and the Nile life. I could not bear to go on.