As I sat one day by the side of my pleasant Susquehanna road, an oil-carrier met me, a gentle-voiced man in charge of four tons of kerosene and petrol, which his horses were dragging over the mountains from village to village and store to store. I was an opportunity to rest the horses, and the driver pulled up, relaxed his reins and entered into converse with me. Was I going far? Why was I tramping? What nationality was I? I told him what I was doing, and he said he would like to give up his job and do the same; he also was of British origin, though his mother was a German. He was a descendant of Sir Robert Downing. "There used to be many English about here," said he, "but they wore off." He went on to tell me what a wild district it had once been. His grandfather had shot a panther on the mountains. But there were no panthers now. The railways and the automobiles had frightened the wild things away. The change had come about very suddenly. He remembered when there were no telephone-poles along the road, but only road-poles. It used to be a posting-road, and a good one too; but now the automobiles had torn up all the surface, and no one would take any trouble about the needs of horse vehicles.
One hot noontide, on the road to Shippenville and Oil City, I was having luncheon when a very pleasant Swede came down the road carrying a bucket in his hand,—Mr. G. B. Olson, bossing a gang of workers on the highway. He was going down the hill to a special spring to draw water for his thirsty men, but he could hardly resist the smoke of my wayside fire, and he told me, as it seemed, his whole story. He had come to America in 1873, and had worked on a farm in Illinois before the great Chicago fire. He was twenty-four then, and was sixty-five now.
When he heard I was British he told me how he had come from Europe via Leith and Glasgow, and had been fifteen and a half days crossing the Atlantic.
"Have you ever been back to Sweden?" I asked.
"No, sirr, never."
"Are you content with America?"
"Yes, sirr; it's the finest country under the sun. It gives the working man a show."
"The Americans speak very kindly of your countrymen. They like them."
"Yes. We gave the Americans a good lift, we Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Germans, by settling the land when the rest of the colonists were running to the towns. We came in and did the rough pioneer work that had to be done if America was going to be more than a mushroom growth. Where would America be to-day if it were not for us in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa? You can't keep up big cities unless you've got plenty of men working in the background on the land."
The Swede went on to compliment me on my English. I spoke pretty clear for one who had been only three months in the country. He had met many British who spoke "very broken," especially Scotch. "I shouldn't have been able to understand them," said he, "but that I am a foreigner myself, and know what it is not to speak good."