"Oh, yes; I've seen them," he said; "not here, but out at the San Francisco Exposition. They had submarines and floating mines. They're big. They look like an old-fashioned white turnip, and they float under the water, and when a ship strikes one it blows up. An' they had a big buildin' out at the fair as big as that barn, and in the middle of it was a butter-making machine, and it could turn out more butter in an afternoon than I get off this place in a year. An' there was a Tower of Jewels 425 feet high, and it had 15,635 jewels on it from Persia. And they all shone in the sun. And they had flying machines, too. At night they put lights on 'em, and they went up in the air and turned somersaults over and over again. I wouldn't go up in one of 'em if you was to give me all that meadow land over there.
"After we left the fair we went up north through the spruce forests, and they tell me now that the government's sent 8,000 men up there to cut that spruce and put it into the flying machines, an' I suppose some of those trees I saw are up in the air now turning somersaults.
"We didn't stop agin till we got to Detroit. That's where they make the Fords, Tin Lizzies, they call 'em around here. But I always say, What difference does it make what they call 'em if they can do the work? I always say one of 'em's as good as a horse—as good as two horses. An' then we came back here and I've stuck around for a spell 'cause I think I've seen most everything there is."
By that time the real estate agent had fixed the tire, and we drove away. The man with the Sampson suspenders was looking rather contemptuously at his flock of sheep. They would never get to San Francisco.
I can't remember now just why we didn't buy Only Nine Hundred Dollars Down but somehow or other the decision of the council went against it. Our attention at present is fastened on a place over in New Jersey called One Man Farm Equipped. This, like so many of the attractive bargains in the advertisements, belongs to a widow. As the paragraph in the newspapers has it "Widow left alone will sell farm for $1,000 spot cash." E. thinks that delay in the matter may be fatal because of the cheapness of the price. "How can we tell," is the burden of her plaint, "that they will leave her alone?"
Romance and Reticence
Whenever a man remarks "I've had a mighty adventurous life, I have," we usually set him down as a former king of the Coney Island carnival or a recently returned delegate from an Elks' convention in Kansas City. It has been our somewhat bitter experience that the man who pictures himself as a great adventurer is almost invariably spurious. As a matter of fact, the rule holds good for great wits, great lovers and great drinkers. But it applies with particular pertinence to romantic folk.
A wise professor at Harvard once remarked that he didn't believe that the ancients realized that they were ancients. We have somewhat the same feeling about quaint people and romantic people and adventurous people.
Of course we must admit the existence in life and in literature of authentic but sophisticated romantic figures. Cyrano was one and, to a lesser extent, d'Artagnan. Porthos is on our side. But the best example we can remember is Huckleberry Finn. Tom Sawyer pictured himself as a romantic figure. Huck didn't. When Huck went a-wandering he thought it was because the store clothes the widow had given him were uncomfortable. It was actually another itch, but he did not know its name. This to our mind is the essence of true adventure. When a man comes to recognize romance he is in a position to bargain and parley. He is not the true adventurer. Things no longer just happen to him. He has to go out and seek them. He has lost his amateur standing.
Huck, who didn't know what it was all about, had much more exciting adventures than Tom and he was a more fascinating figure in the happening. Jim would also come into our category of true adventurers, and, to skip back a bit, Tom Jones is almost type perfect. Just so Sancho Panza seems to us more fundamentally romantic than Don Quixote, and we have always been more interested in what happened to Doctor Watson than in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock foresaw things—and that is fatal to romance.