October Vagabonds

by Richard Le Gallienne

"Well, boys! out for a walk? It's easy seeing you're no tramps."

Colin's expression was a study in gratitude. The farmer was a fine, soldierly old fellow, who told me that he was half English, too, on his father's side.

"But my mother," he added, "was a good blue-bellied Yankee."

We lured him on to using that delightfully quaint expression again before we left him; and we also learned from him valuable information as to the possibilities of lunch farther along the road, for we were in a lonely district with no inns, and it was Sunday.

In regard to lunch, I suppose that in prosaically paying our way for bed and board as we fared along we fell short of the Arcadian theory of walking-tours in which the wayfarer, like a mendicant friar, takes toll of lunch and dinner from the hospitable farmer of sentimental legend, and sleeps for choice in barns, hayricks or hedgesides. Now, sleeping out of doors in October, if you have ever tried it, is a very different thing from sleeping out of doors in June, and as for rural hospitality—well, if you are of a sensitive constitution you shrink from obtruding yourself, an alien apparition, upon the embarrassed and embarrassing rural domesticities. Besides, to be quite honest, rural table-talk, except in Mr. Hardy's novels or pastoral poetry, is, to say the least, lacking in variety. Indeed, if the truth must be told, the conversation of country people, generally speaking, and an occasional, very occasional, character or oddity apart, is undeniably dull, and I hope it will not be imputed to me for hardness of heart that, after some long-winded colloquy or endless reminiscence, sententious and trivial, I have thought that Gray's famous line should really have been written—"the long and tedious annals of the poor."

But my heart smites me with ingratitude toward some kindly memories as I write that—memories of homely welcome, simple and touching and dignified. Surely I am not writing so of the genial farmer on whom we came one lunch hour as he was stripping corn in his yard.

"Missus," he called to the house a few yards away, "can you find any lunch for two good-looking fellows here?"

The housewife came to the door, scanned us for a second, and replied in the affirmative. As we sat down to table, our host bowed his head and said a simple grace for the bacon and cabbage, pumpkin-pie, cheese and tea we were about to receive; and the unexpected old-fashioned rite, too seldom encountered nowadays, came on me with a fresh beauty and impressiveness, which made me feel that its discontinuance is a real loss of gracious ritual in our lives, and perhaps even more. Thus this simple farmer's board seemed sensitively linked with the far-away beginnings of time. Of all our religious symbolism, the country gods and the gods of the hearth and the household seem actual, approachable presences, and the saying of grace before meat was a beautiful, fitting reminder of that mysterious, invisible care and sustenance of our lives, which no longer find any recognition in our daily routine: Above all, worship thou the gods, and bring great Ceres her yearly offerings.

Another such wayside meal and another old couple live touchingly in our memories. We were still in the broad, sun-swept valley of the Genesee, our road lying along the edge of the wide, reed-grown flats and water-meadows, bounded on the north by rolling hills. On our left hand, parallel with the road, ran a sort of willowed moat banked by a grass-grown causeway, a continuous narrow mound, somewhat higher than the surrounding country, and cut through here and there with grass-grown gullies, the whole suggesting primeval earthworks and excavations. So the old Roman roads run, grassy and haunted and choked with underbrush, in the lonelier country districts of England. We were curious as to the meaning of this causeway, and learned at length that here was all that remained of the old Genesee Canal. Thirty years ago, this moat had brimmed with water, and barges had plied their sleepy traffic between Dansville and Rochester. But the old order had changed, and a day had come when the dike had been cut through, the lazy water let out into the surrounding flats, and the old waterway left to the willows and the wild-flowers, the mink and the musk-rat. Only thirty years ago—yet to-day Nature has so completely taken it all back to herself that the hush of a long-vanished antiquity is upon it, and the turfy burial mound of some Hengist and Horsa could not be more silent.

This old fosse seemed to strike the somewhat forgotten, out-of-the-world note of the surrounding country. Picturesque to the eye, with bounteous green prospects and smooth, smiling hills, it was not, we were told, as prosperous as it looked. For some vague reason, the tides of agricultural prosperity had ebbed from that spacious sunlit vale. A handsome old trapper, who sat at his house door smoking his pipe and looking across the green flats, set down the cause to the passing of the canal. Ah, yes! it was possible for him, thirty years ago, to make the trip to Rochester and back by the canal, and bring home a good ten dollars; but now—well, every one in the valley was poor, except the man whose beehives we had seen on the hillside half-a-mile back. He had made no less than a thousand dollars out of his honey this last season. He was an old bachelor, too, like himself. There were no less than five bachelors in the valley—five old men without a woman to look after them.