The quiet, unobtrusive scenery beyond Philadelphia is English in character, and would be still more so if there were hedges instead of railings. By the way, whenever reading biographical notices of distinguished Americans I have been surprised to find that so many of them at one time or other had "split rails" for a subsistence. But now that I have followed the "course of empire" West, I am not the least surprised. I only wonder that every American has not split rails, at one time or another, or, indeed, gone on doing it all his life. For how such a prodigious quantity of rails ever got split (even supposing distinguished men to have assisted in the industry in early life) passes my feeble comprehension. All the way from New York to Chicago there are on an average twenty lines of split rails running parallel with the railway track, in sight all at once! And after all, this is only one narrow strip across a gigantic continent. In fact, the two most prominent "natural features" of the landscape along this route are dwarf firs and split rails. But no writer on America has ever told me so. Nor have I ever been told of the curious misapprehension prevalent in the States as to the liberty of the subject in the British Isles.
In America, judging at any rate from the speech of "the average American," I find that there is a belief prevalent that the English nation "lies prostrate under the heel of a tyrant." What a shock to those who think thus, must have been that recent episode of the queen's pigs at Slough!
Six swine and a calf belonging to her Majesty found themselves, the other day, impounded by the Slough magistrates for coming to market without a licence. Slough, from geographical circumstances over which it has no control, happens to be in Buckinghamshire, and this country has been declared "an infected district," so that the bailiff who brought his sovereign's pigs to market, without due authority to do so, transgressed the law. Two majesties thus came into collision over the calf, and that of the law prevailed. Such a constitutional triumph as this goes far to clear away the clouds that appeared to be gathered upon the political horizon, and the shadows of a despotic dictatorship which seemed to be falling across England begin to vanish. The written law, contained probably in a very dilapidated old copy in the possession of these rural magistrates, a dogs'-eared and, it may be, even a ragged volume, asserted itself supreme over a monarch's farmyard stock, and dared to break down that divinity which doth hedge a Sovereign's swine. There are some who say that in the British Isles men are losing their reverence for the law, and that justice wears two faces, one for the rich and another for the poor. They would have us believe that only the parasites of princes sit in high place, and that the scales of justice rise or fall according to the inclinations of the sceptre, with the obsequious regularity of the tides that wait upon the humours of the moon. But such an incident as this, when the Justices of Slough, those intrepid Hampdens, sate sternly in their places, and, fearless of Royal frowns and all the displeasure of Windsor, dispensed to the pigs, born in the purple, and to the calf that had lived so near a throne, the impartial retribution of a fine—with costs—gives a splendid refutation to these calumnies. Where shall we look in Republican history for such another incident? or where search for dauntless magistrates like those of Slough, who shut their eyes against the reflected glitter of a Court, who fined the Royal calf for risking the health of Hodge's miserable herd, and gave the costs against the Imperial pigs for travelling into Buckinghamshire without a licence? Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. There was no truckling here to borrowed majesty, no sycophant adulation of Royal ownership; but that fine old English spirit of courageous independence which has made tyrants impossible in our island and our law supreme. It was of no use before such men as these, the stout-hearted champions of equal justice, for the bailiff to plead manorial privilege, or to threaten the thunders of the House of Brunswick. They were as implacable as a bench of Rhadamanthuses, and gave these distinguished hogs the grim choice between paying a pound or going to one. Nor, to their credit be it said, did either bailiff, calf, or pigs exhibit resentment. On the contrary, they accepted judgment with that respectful acquiescence which characterizes our law-abiding race, and the swine turned without a murmur from the scene of their repulse, and trotted cheerfully before the bailiff out of Buckinghamshire back to Windsor.
The bailiff, no doubt, bethought him of the past, and wished the good old days of feudalism were back, when a King's pig was a better man than a Buckinghamshire magistrate. But if he did, he abstained from saying so. On the contrary, he paid his fine like a loyal subject, and gathering his innocent charges round him went forth, more in sorrow than in anger, from the presence of the magisterial champions of the public interests. The punished pigs, too, may have felt, perhaps, just a twinge of regret for the days when they roamed at will over the oak-grown shires, infecting each other as they chose, without any thought of Contagious Diseases Acts or vigilant justices. But they said nothing; and the spectacle of an upright stipendiary dispensing impartial justice to a law-abiding aristocracy was thus complete.
To return to my car. Beyond Philadelphia the country was waking up for Spring. The fields were all flushed with the first bright promise of harvest; blackbirds—reminding me of the Indian king-crows in their sliding manner of flight and the conspicuous way in which they use their tails as rudders—were flying about in sociable parties; and flocks of finches went jerking up the hill-sides by fits and starts after the fashion of these frivolous little folk.
A mica-schist (it may be gneiss) abounds along the railway track, and it occurred to me that I had never, except in India, seen this material used for the ornamentation of houses. Yet it is very beautiful. In the East they beat it up into a powder—some is white, some yellow—and after mixing it with weak lime and water, wash the walls with it, the result being a very effective although subdued sparkle, in some places silvery, in others golden.
Nearing Harrisburg the country begins to resemble upper Natal very strongly, and when we reached the Susquehanna, I could easily have believed that we were on the Mooi, on the borders of Zululand. But the superior majesty of the American river soon asserted itself, and I forgot the comparison altogether as I looked out on this truly noble stream, with the finely wooded hills leaning back from it on either side, as if to give its waters more spacious way.
And then Harrisburg, and the same stealthy departure of the train. But outside the station our having started was evident enough, for a horse that had been left to look after a buggy for a few minutes, took fright, and with three frantic kangaroo-leaps tried to take the conveyance whole over a wall. But failing in this, it careered away down the road with the balance of the buggy dangling in a draggle-tail sort of way behind it.
Nature works with so few ingredients that landscape repeats itself in every continent. For there is a limit, after all, to the combinations possible of water, mountain, plain, valley, and vegetation. This is strictly true, of course, only when we deal with things generically. Specific combinations go beyond arithmetic. But even with her species, Nature delights in singing over old songs and telling the tales she has already told. For instance here, after passing Harrisburg, is a wonderful glimpse of Naini Tal in the Indian hills—memorable for a terribly fatal landslip three years ago—with its oaks and rhododendrons and scattered pines. In the valleys the streams go tumbling along with willows on either bank, and here and there on the hillsides, shine white houses with orchards about them.
The houses men build for themselves when they are thinking only of shelter are ugly enough. Elegance, like the nightingale, is a creature of summer-time, when the hard-working months of the year are over and Nature sits in her drawing-room, so to speak, playing the fine lady, painting the roses and sweetening the peaches. But, ugly though they are, these scattered homesteads are by far the finest lines in all the great poem of this half-wild continent, and lend a grand significance to every passage in which they occur. And the pathos of it! Look at those two horses and a man driving a plough through that scrap of ground yonder. There is not another living object in view, though the eye covers enough ground for a European principality. Yet that man dares to challenge all this tremendous Nature! It is David before Goliath, before a whole wilderness of Goliaths, with a plough for a sling and a ploughshare for a pebble.