“Huh!” was all he deigned to reply, as he shaved. Franklin, in his large tolerance of vagaries and mush, did not condescend to comment. I did not even win a smile. He was looking at the drugstore and the hardware store and an old man in a shapeless, baggy suit hobbling along on a cane.
“I like the country myself,” he said finally, “except I wouldn’t want to have to farm for a living.”
I could not help thinking of all the days we (I am referring to a part of our family) had lived in these small towns and how as a boy I used to wish and wish for so many things. The long trains going through! The people who went to Chicago, or Evansville, or Terre Haute, or Indianapolis! A place like Brazil, Indiana, a mere shabby coal town of three or four thousand population, seemed something wonderful. All the world was outside and I, sitting on our porch—front or back—or on the grass or under a tree, all alone, used to wonder and wonder. When would I go out into the world? Where would I go? What would I do? What see? And then sometimes the thought of my father and mother not being near any more—my mother being dead, perhaps—and my sisters and brothers scattered far and wide, and—I confess a little sadly even now—a lump would swell in my throat and I would be ready to cry.
A sentimentalist?
Indeed!
In a little while we were called to breakfast in a lovely, homely diningroom such as country hotels sometimes boast—a diningroom of an indescribable artlessness and crudity. It was so haphazard, so slung together of old yellow factory made furniture, chromos, lithographs, flychasers, five jar castors, ironstone “china,” and heaven only knows what else, that it was delightful. It was clean, yes; and sweet withal—very—just like so many of our honest, frank, kindly psalm singing Methodists and Baptists are. The father and mother were eating their breakfast here, at one table. The little fair haired hired girl—with no more qualification as a waitress than a Thibetan Llama—was waiting on table. The traveling men, one or two of them at every breakfast no doubt, were eating their fried ham and eggs or their fried steak, and their fried potatoes, and drinking unbelievable coffee or tea.
Dear, crude, asinine, illusioned Americans! How I love them! And the great fields from the Atlantic to the Pacific holding them all, and their dreams! How they rise, how they hurry, how they run under the sun! Here they are building a viaduct, there a great road, yonder plowing fields or sowing grain, their faces lit with eternal, futile hope of happiness. You can see them religiously tending store, religiously running a small-town country hotel, religiously mowing the grass, religiously driving shrewd bargains or thinking that much praying will carry them to heaven—the dear things!—and then among them are the bad men, the loafers, the people who chew tobacco and swear and go to the cities Saturday nights and “cut up” and don’t save their money!
Dear, dear, darling Yankee land—"my country tis"—when I think of you and all your ills and all your dreams and all your courage and your faith—I could cry over you, wringing my hands.
But you, you great men of brains—you plotters of treason, of taxes which are not honest, of burdens too heavy to be borne, beware! These be simple souls, my countrymen singing simple songs in childish ignorance and peace, dreaming sweet dreams of life and love and hope. Don’t awake them! Let them not once suspect, let them not faintly glimpse the great tricks and subterfuges by which they are led and harlequined and cheated; let them not know that their faith is nothing, their hope nothing, their love nothing—or you may see the bonfires of wrath alight—in the “evening dews and damp,” the camps of the hungry—the lifting aloft of the fatal stripes—red for blood and white for spirit and blue for dreams of man; the white drawn faces of earnest seeking souls carrying the symbols of their desire, the guns and mortars and shells of their dreams!
Remember Valley Forge! Remember Germantown; remember the Wilderness; remember Lookout Mountain! These will not be disappointed. Their faith is too deep—their hope too high. They will burn and slay, but the fires of their dreams will bring other dreams to make this old illusion seem true.