And so we had been living the past, Salemina and I. But
“Early one morning,
Just as the day was dawning.”
my slumbering conscience rose in Puritan strength and asserted its rights to a hearing.
“Salemina,” said I, as I walked into her room, “this life that we are leading will not do for me any longer. I have been too much immersed in ruins. Last night in writing to a friend in New York I uttered the most disloyal and incendiary statements. I said that I would rather die than live without ruins of some kind; that America was so new, and crude, and spick and span, that it was obnoxious to any æsthetic soul; that our tendency to erect hideous public buildings and then keep them in repair afterwards would make us the butt of ridicule among future generations. I even proposed the founding of an American Ruin Company, Limited,—in which the stockholders should purchase favourably situated bits of land and erect picturesque ruins thereon. To be sure, I said, these ruins wouldn’t have any associations at first, but what of that? We have plenty of poets and romancers; we could manufacture suitable associations and fit them to the premises. At first, it is true, they might not fire the imagination; but after a few hundred years, in being crooned by mother to infant and handed down by father to son, they would mellow with age, as all legends do, and they would end by being hallowed by rising generations. I do not say they would be absolutely satisfactory from every standpoint, but I do say that they would be better than nothing.
“However,” I continued, “all this was last night, and I have had a change of heart this morning. Just on the borderland between sleeping and waking, I had a vision. I remembered that to-day would be Monday the 1st of September; that all over our beloved land schools would be opening and that your sister pedagogues would be doing your work for you in your absence. Also I remembered that I am the dishonourable but Honorary President of a Froebel Society of four hundred members, that it meets to-morrow, and that I can’t afford to send them a cable.”
“It is all true,” said Salemina. “It might have been said more briefly, but it is quite true.”
“Now, my dear, I am only a painter with an occasional excursion into educational fields, but you ought to be gathering stories of knowledge to lay at the feet of the masculine members of your School Board.”
“I ought, indeed!” sighed Salemina.
“Then let us begin!” I urged. “I want to be good to-day and you must be good with me. I never can be good alone and neither can you, and you know it. We will give up the lovely drive in the diligence; the luncheon at the French restaurant and those heavenly little Swiss cakes” (here Salemina was almost unmanned); “the concert on the great organ and all the other frivolous things we had intended; and we will make an educational pilgrimage to Yverdon. You may not remember, my dear,”—this was said severely because I saw that she meditated rebellion and was going to refuse any programme which didn’t include the Swiss cakes,—“you may not remember that Jean Henri Pestalozzi lived and taught in Yverdon. Your soul is so steeped in illusions; so submerged in the Lethean waters of the past; so emasculated by thrilling legends, paltry titles, and ruined castles, that you forget that Pestalozzi was the father of popular education and the sometime teacher of Froebel, our patron saint. When you return to your adored Boston, your faithful constituents in that and other suburbs of Salem, Massachusetts, will not ask you if you have seen the Castle of Chillon and the terrace of Corinne, but whether you went to Yverdon.”
Salemina gave one last fond look at the lake and picked up her Baedeker. She searched languidly in the Y’s and presently read in a monotonous, guide-book voice. “Um—um—um—yes, here it is, ‘Yverdon is sixty-one miles from Geneva, three hours forty minutes, on the way to Neuchâtel and Bâle.’ (Neuchâtel is the cheese place; I’d rather go there and we could take a bag of those Swiss cakes.) ‘It is on the southern bank of Lake Neuchâtel at the influx of the Orbe or Thiele. It occupies the site of the Roman town of Ebrodunum. The castle dates from the twelfth century and was occupied by Pestalozzi as a college.’”