THE SLAV CHILDREN OF SNOW-SHOE CREEK.
Then, man came along, the engine-man with his endless, empty freight train and his bellowing, steaming engine howling through the valley. One after another eight freight trains, each about a quarter of a mile long, came grinding past me, going up to the collieries to take their daily loads of carbon. Somehow I did not object; it was new America, the America of to-day careering over the America of 1492, and had to be accepted.
But Snow Shoe gave me pause. When I arrived at the little slate-roofed mining settlement I found there was considerable excitement among the children there. A cow had just been cut to pieces by the last freight train. The driver had driven his train over the beast and on without a word of remark or a hesitation, and a farmer was complaining bitterly, but the children—young Americans, Russians, Ruthenians, Slovaks, the ones who have in their keeping the America of to-morrow—were sitting round the remains, helling and God-damning and asking me facetious questions. And that was the answer to what I had asked myself—What shall I see at Snow Shoe? What am I walking so far and so high for to see?
Snow Shoe was the dreariest possible mining settlement, and its inhabitants slouched about its coaly ways and in and out of the saloons. Scarcely any one could speak English, and the mines were worked almost exclusively by Poles and Slovaks. The highest point in the Alleghanies, a hand of earth stretched up to heaven, perhaps a maledictory hand.
X DECORATION DAY
America celebrates no "Whit-Monday," but has Decoration Day instead; a great national festival, when medals are pinned on to veterans, the soldiers of the War of North against South are remembered, and the graves of heroes are decorated with flags and flowers. On Decoration Day, and again later, on Independence Day, the whole populace ceases work in the name of America, and flocks the streets, sings national songs and hymns, goes on procession, fires salutes, listens to speeches. We British are just wildly glad to get free from toil when Whit-Monday and August Bank Holiday come round. We have no national or religious fervour on these days. We have even been known to flock happily to Hampstead and Epping Forest to the strains of "England's going down the Hill." Upon occasion the British can be clamorously patriotic, but only upon occasion. But the American citizen is, to use his own phrase, "crazy about America" all the while. The "days-off" that we get are not only off work, but off everything serious. The American still nurses the hope with which he came across the ocean, and he is enthusiastically attached to the republic he has made and the principles of that republic.
I spent Decoration Day at Clearfield, a little mining and agricultural town on the other side of the Alleghanies. I put up at a hotel for two or three days, and just gave myself to the town for the time. Early on the festival day I was out to see how the workaday world was taking things. All the shops were closed except the ice-cream soda bars and the fruiterers. There were flags on the banks and loungers on the streets. Young men were walking about with flags in their hat ribbons. The cycles and automobiles on the roadway had their wheels swathed with the stars and stripes. There were negroes and negresses standing endimanche's at street corners. Now and then a girl in white dress and white boots would trip from a house to a shop and back again. There was an air best expressed by the words of the song:
Go along and get yer ready,