We provincials are immensely curious. Art, music, literature, politics—nothing that is of contemporaneous human interest is alien to us. If these things don’t come to us, we go to them. We are more truly representative of the American ideal than our metropolitan cousins, because (here I lay my head upon the block) we know more about, oh, so many things! We know vastly more about the United States, for one thing. We know what New York is thinking before New York herself knows it, because we visit the metropolis to find out. Sleeping-cars have no terrors for us, and a man who has never been west of Philadelphia seems to us a singularly benighted being. Those of our Western school-teachers who don’t see Europe for three hundred dollars every summer get at least as far East as Concord, to be photographed “by the rude bridge that arched the flood.”
That fine austerity which the voluble Westerner finds so smothering on the Boston and New York express is lost utterly at Pittsburg. From gentlemen cruising in day-coaches—dull wights who advertise their personal sanitation and literacy by the toothbrush and fountain-pen planted sturdily in their upper left-hand waistcoat pockets—one may learn the most prodigious facts and the philosophy thereof. “Sit over, brother; there’s hell to pay in the Balkans,” remarks the gentleman who boarded the interurban at Peru or Connersville, and who would just as lief discuss the Papacy or child labor, if revolutions are not to your liking.
In Boston a lady once expressed her surprise that I should be hastening home for Thanksgiving Day. This, she thought, was a New England festival. More recently I was asked by a Bostonian if I had ever heard of Paul Revere. Nothing is more delightful in us, I think, than our meekness before instruction. We strive to please; all we ask is “to be shown.”
Our greatest gain is in leisure and the opportunity to ponder and brood. In all these thousands of country towns live alert and shrewd students of affairs. Where your New Yorker scans headlines as he “commutes” homeward, the villager reaches his own fireside without being shot through a tube, and sits down and reads his newspaper thoroughly. When he repairs to the drug-store to abuse or praise the powers that be, his wife reads the paper, too. A United States Senator from a Middle Western State, making a campaign for renomination preliminary to the primaries, warned the people in rural communities against the newspaper and periodical press with its scandals and heresies. “Wait quietly by your firesides, undisturbed by these false teachings,” he said in effect; “then go to your primaries and vote as you have always voted.” His opponent won by thirty thousand,—the amiable answer of the little red school-house.
V
A few days ago I visited again my native town. On the slope where I played as a child I listened in vain for the mourning bugle; but on the college campus a bronze tablet commemorative of those sons of Wabash who had fought in the mighty war quickened the old impressions. The college buildings wear a look of age in the gathering dusk.
“Coldly, sadly descends
The autumn evening. The field
Strewn with its dank yellow drifts
Of withered leaves, and the elms,