“I really don’t know anything about them. I suppose there are certain national characteristics; several lakes in the Adirondacks are owned by people of that sort. I am told that there was an encampment of commercial travellers just off the borders of this property last year.”
“But I don’t understand. Your lines of caste are very marked, it has seemed to me. Why should the leisure class and the commercial traveller have the same tastes. It is very odd.”
But she refused to take the slightest interest in the subject, and that afternoon as I was walking to the lake of the water-lilies with Mr. N. I asked him for enlightenment.
“Oh, Eastern men are keen sportsmen,” he said. “That is to say, most—wherever there are mountains and woods and lakes. It is an instinct inherited from the old hunters and trappers—from the days when the settlers shot game for food and were as familiar with the wilderness as the farm. These settlers were the ancestors of men who are in all classes of life to-day. And you must remember that there is no ‘Continent’ to run over to for the yearly vacation. You can travel an immense distance here and pay a good deal of money only to hear a change of accent. But the forests of New York and Maine mean rest, reinvigoration, and the complete happiness of the sportsman. These men up here go in the woods every year as naturally as they keep their nose to the grindstone for the remaining ten or eleven months.
“And they are first-class sportsmen.”
“As good as any in England.”
“Men that—that—sell hats?”
“Carlisle is neither keener nor better.”
“Certainly your country is wonderfully interesting and sometimes I feel as if I were groping about in the neighbourhood of the true democracy. Do they also play golf?”
“They do, indeed.”