A CATHEDRAL OF TREES
Jasper, Indiana
Jasper, the county seat, was another town of which I most heartily approved. It was beautiful, like the rest of this striking county. The court house, like most of those in this region and elsewhere, was new, but in this instance built with considerable taste and individuality—not a slavish copy—and set in a square at the intersection of four wide streets on a slight rise of ground, so that coming townward from any direction, and from a long way off, one could see it commanding one of these striking approaches. What a charming place in which to grow up, I thought!
Again, there was a river here, that selfsame Patoka of Princeton, and as we entered from the south, it provided some most interesting views, sylvan and delicate. Still once more there was a church here—St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic—which was a triumph of taste. Most Roman Catholic Churches, and for that matter every other denominational church in America, have enough spent on them to insure originality and charm in design, if only taste were not wanting—but taste, that priceless, inexpensive thing, is rarely ever present. They build and build, slavish copies of European models, usually of cathedrals, so that when one sees an original design it is like a breath of fresh air entering a stuffy room. This Church was built of a faintly greenish gray stone, and possessed a soaring, yet delicate bell tower at one corner. It stood on a considerable rise, in an open space and at right angles with a low flat brown convent or school, which gave its entrance way a plaza-like atmosphere. But for the fact that it was late and we were in a hurry, and it was locked, we would have entered, but we would have had to go for a key.
CHAPTER LVIII
FRENCH LICK
After passing through Jasper and Dubois Counties, where we had seen more good automobiles, good roads and brisk life than we had since the very best sections of northern Indiana and Ohio, our luck in roads left off. Around the courthouse square at Jasper we had seen machines of the best make, and parties of well to do people driving; but on our road to Kellerville and Norton and French Lick we passed nothing but rumbling wagons and some few, not very good, cars.
And now the landscape changed rapidly. I had always heard that Brown County, east of Monroe (the seat of our state university), was the roughest and most picturesque in the state, containing a hill, the highest in Indiana, of over five hundred feet! As a student I had walked there with a geologizing party, but if my memory served me correctly, it did not compare in picturesqueness with the region through which we were now making our way. Heights and depths are variable matters anyway, and the impression of something stupendous or amazingly precipitous which one can get from a region of comparatively low altitude depends on the arrangement of its miniature gorges and crevasses. Here in Orange County I had an impression of great hills and deep ravines and steep inclines which quite equalled anything we had seen. It suggested the vicinity of Stroudsburg in Pennsylvania, and as we sped along there were sudden drops down which we ground at breakneck speed, which quite took my breath away. It was a true and beautiful mountain country, becabined, lonely, for the most part bridgeless—and such roads! We bumped and jounced and floundered along. Now and again we were at the very bottom of a ravine, with lovely misty hills rising sheer above us. Again, we were on some seeming mountain side, the valleys falling sharply away from the road and showing some rocky rivulet at the bottom. More than once we shot the machine through a tumbling, sparkling, moonlit stream.
At the bottom of one ravine I saw a light, and we being very uncertain of our way, I climbed out at the gate and went up under some vines and bushes to knock at the door. Inside, since it was open, I beheld a quite metropolitan interior—craftsman furniture, a wall of well-built shelves loaded with books, a table strewn with magazines and papers, and the room lighted by a silk shaded lamp. When I knocked a short, stocky, legal looking youth of most precise manners and attire and a large pair of horn glasses on his nose, arose from a small secretary and came over.
“French Lick?” I inquired.
“About eighteen miles,” he replied. “You are on the right road.”