"Whilst you are yet afar off the farmer's wife standing on her threshold, espies you and takes you to be a hungry lion pawing the road and seeking whom you may devour. She calls to her husband and he peereth at you. Perchance she fetcheth down the ancient blunderbuss from the wall; but when you come closer and hail her in English she says to herself with relief, even with pleasure, 'It is a man,' one of the attractive male species. You ask for bread and milk,—oh yes she has it, and with a scared look still on her face, though transfigured with a mild gladness, she fetcheth you bread and milk and eggs; and then if you can pay her market price the scared look goes away entirely; and out of the goodness of her heart and the abundance of her pantry she addeth cookies and apple butter, and for these you pay nought—they are her favour. Don't ask her, however, to put you up for the night."
The tramp always has a hard time to get a night's lodging. A poor, weak, bedraggled Jew, whom I met shortly after the forty-eight hours' rain, told me that he had been all one night in the wet—his pedlar's pack had got ruined, he was suffering from pneumonia, and had thought that such weather meant sure death to him. He had tried every house in five towns and had been refused at every one. It was a sad comment on modern life.
In the Middle Ages, and in the days when Christianity meant more than it does now, the refusal of shelter was almost unheard of. And in peasant Russia to-day it would be considered a sin. An old pilgrim-tramp once said to me, "When we leave this world to get to Heaven we all have to go on tramp, and those find shelter there who sheltered wanderers here." But Americans will not be judged by that standard. The early Christians received strangers and often entertained angels unawares, but the modern American is afraid that in taking in a strange tramp he may be sheltering an outcast spirit. Once tramps were angels; now they are rebel-angels.
IX OVER THE ALLEGHANIES
Both the weather and the country improved before I reached Williamsport. On the height of the road to Hughesville I had a grand view of the mountains and of the sky above them, saw displayed green hills and forested mountains, and great stretches of ploughed upland all dotted over with white heaps of fertiliser. And the sky above was a battle-scene, the sun and his angels having given battle and the clouds taking ranks like an army. Glad was I to see to eastward whole battalions in retreat.
I passed through fine forested land with great hemlocks, maples, and hickories. A brawling stream poured along through the dark wood, and as I walked beside it a sudden gleam of sunshine pierced the gloom of foliage, and lit up boles and wet banks and wet rocks and the crystal freshets of the stream. Of all weathers I like best convalescent weather, the getting sunny after much rain. On the Sunday on which I reached the city the open road was swept by fresh winds, all the birds were singing, every blade of grass was conscious of rain taken in and of the sun bringing out.
Williamsport I found to be a peaceful, provincial town, well kept in itself and surrounded by beautiful scenery. It was looking its best in the freshness and radiance of a May morning. On its many hundred bright green lawns that run down so graciously from pleasant urban villas to the roadway there was much white linen airing. Williamsport is an old lumbering town on a branch of the Susquehanna, and though that business has gone away, prosperity and happiness seem to have remained behind. There was a feeling of calmness that I had not experienced in other American cities, and I felt it would be pleasant to live there for a season.