Worthy of Unstinted Praise
But they had a fine history. Stonewall Jackson, the hero of the flank movement, gained his great victories and his great reputation by the celerity of his movements, made possible by the familiarity of Southerners with horses. When pressed in battle the Russians could fall back sullenly and the Japanese unfamiliar with horses could not strike their flank nor cut off their retreat. The mastery of nations has sometimes come from the possession of horses. The amazing spread of Mohammedanism came from the same sort of ownership. The horse gave to Paul Revere and to Phil Sheridan their place in history. He was in their day the greatest factor in strategy and surprise. He is docile, affectionate, and capable of a deep and lasting attachment. He has a real craving for human notice. He dislikes to be left in a solitary position. Essentially by his very nature he must love something. It touches the heart to have a horse reach out his fore foot and begin to paw until his master assures him that he recognizes him. This is what the horse likes. I confess to a feeling of pride when, leaving him untied at the door, I have gone into a house and have heard him whinny for me to return when he might have gone off and left me. Although there were other persons all about he would neigh at my approach and turn his well-shaped head, full of character, with clear intelligent eyes of the speaking kind, toward me. Such a warm-blooded sensitive horse will always exhibit in ways of his own the friendly relations that exist between us.
Time Tries All Things
On revisiting the earth it is found that the owner of a high-stepper, threatened with speed, can now only lead a shame-faced kind of existence. If out in the daylight he feels like apologizing to every one he meets. This man used to electrify the street with his tallyho coach crowded with gaily dressed guests accompanied by a footman and a trumpeter, with a hitch of four noble grays showing by their arched necks and high knee action that they felt pride in belonging to a rich man. As in the case of the bicycle, the fashion changed abruptly. He had to load a lot of portable property into the carriage to get some poor relation to take the outfit for a gift. I find that a person can now buy a discarded silver-mounted harness for the cost of a halter and that the people today like an upholstered life. Gasoline spelled the doom of the horse and it must be said now that Dobbin's future never looked so uninviting.
There are four new experiences for which no description ever adequately prepares us, the view of a volcano in violent eruption, a visit to the home of cliff dwellers (prehistoric peoples who left their homes just as they used them), a walk on a moving glacier, and the first survey of the Grand Canyon. I was lifted off my feet by discovering, when talking with that college youngster and comparing things closely, that the five senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—have had another added to them. Each of those we named over uses a distinctive organ. The surface of the whole body contributes to the sense of touch. These are pointed out as the receiving agents of the mind which keeps her hidden seat and receives communication from the distant provinces of her empire. They put us in possession of just the information needed concerning external things. On revisiting the earth it is awakening to engage in controversy with the young scion of the college that I used to be, touching learning's last word. He believed that we had all the possible senses defined and numbered like the fingers on the hand and now comes the new sense of balance having the exact function we have been naming. I remember the moment and the place where I was made conscious of this sixth sense. I did not learn it. I had it. I had bought a bicycle. I had no teacher. I was sitting on it in the hall giving the animal a little gentle exercise. "Keep your balance. Employ what sense you have; you do not need to acquire it, use it." It is so with aviators. We call them bird men. They were born, like birds, with a certain innate sense of equilibrium. Birds find out when to go north and to go south and how to build and line their own nests and where to find their food and how to maintain themselves in the air. All this is in them. Nature takes care of that. A small child, learning to walk, shows that he has an instinctive faculty of adjustment and equipoise and tries early to get his little legs to support his position. An untutored lad when mounted thinks he is riding a horse, whereas the quadruped, knowing at once that the boy does not know anything about his business, allows him to simply balance himself while he gives him a ride. The boy voyages like an unballasted ship. He does not acquire a new sense; he follows his intuitions and all is well. A seed of grain would not differ from a dust speck or tiny pebble except for what it is, but it is yet to manifest by its inherent vitality. You would not know, looking at a boy, that he has this instinct of balance, but he has and he will find it and use it. As the pilgrim with his staff wends his way to Mecca, so I went to that place to meet that particular stripling. He was the youngster that was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found. I wanted to stay beside him much longer. His heart was young. He was fresh for his work.
The World a Wheel
The skeleton of a horse is given in an automobile catalogue. He is depicted as a fossil and the statement is made, These animals were used until about the year 1900. Every man, woman, and child in the state of South Dakota could be seated at one time in the automobiles owned by the people of that one state. Eighty per cent of those cars have been bought in the last two years. It seems like flying or ballooning after jolting for years in a heavy farm wagon, and what miles they were! The Dutch are economical of money, but have been very profuse of time. Their conveyances by sea or land have been slow and "Dutch speed" has grown into a proverb for tardiness, but now, with scarfs over their heads, Dutch women loll in the back seats of a Pierce-Arrow with, not the father, but a son, in the family to drive. While in my earlier life I had never dodged an automobile and I have never been injured by one except in my disposition, we are all unspeakably indebted to them for getting people out-of-doors and for contributing more to the temperance reformation than all the lectures in Christendom. The automobile enforces the same abstinence upon the people that the railroads require of engineers. Automobiles plainly show that the only place for saloons is that place Rev. William A. Sunday so graphically describes, and while our streets do not yet come up to the requirements of the boulevards of the New Jerusalem as described by St. John, yet we are done with those crossings at the street corners made up of granite stringers. Carriages had worn down the softer material just before and just after the granite crossings, so that if a person rode rapidly length-wise of the street he would jolt and bite his tongue at every intersection. These depressions in the road were called "Thank you, marms," because persons in passing each corner would forcibly be made to bow their heads, as if in expression of gratitude, to some imagined object. Another transformation has overtaken the community, changing its general appearance in some cases for the better, almost beyond recognition.
Pigs is Pigs
All barns in the towns are upon the market and dealers in lumber have opened a second-hand department where they dispose of what is left of the barns to farmers for the construction of granaries. Back to the farm applies now even to lumber. The horse, the cow, and the pig once formed a part of the family circle and how kindly and carefully were they provided for. The execrable back alley was conducted on the pig-sty basis. How slatternly the old back alley fence would look now that the parking system is adopted by neighbors. In earlier days the sumptuous houses were fenced or hedged always. After the old English idea the grounds were private. It remains now to have fences removed among denominations. They stand for the old time privacy and exclusiveness that once prevailed in business. Down south they forced business out into the open, requiring by ordinance that all employees shall be paid in the public square. The parking system proceeds upon the principle that a resident owes something to the town. The present ideal is to induce people not to shut the blinds or draw the shades when the house is lighted but to see in the evening how far each little candle can throw its beams.