Altho’ they sat amongst the scorners.
It is a curious experience, and one well worth trying, this ten days’ voyage. When you go on board at Liverpool, and look round at the first dinner, there are probably not half a dozen faces you ever saw before. By the time you walk out of the ship, bag in hand, on to the New York landing-place, there are scarcely half a dozen with» whom you have not a pleasant speaking acquaintance; while with a not inconsiderable number you feel (unless you have had singularly bad luck) as if you must have known them intimately for years, without having been aware of it. As you touch the land, the express men and hotel touts rush on you, and the spell is broken. The little society resolves itself at their touch into separate atoms, which are whirled away, without time to wish one another God-speed, into the turbulent ocean of New York life, never again to be gathered together as a society in this world, for worship, for food, or fun. “The present life of man, 0 king!” said a Saxon thane in Edwin’s Witenagemot, when they were consulting whether Augustine and his priests should be allowed to settle at Canterbury, “reminds me of one of your winter feasts where you sit with your thanes and counsellors. The hearth blazes in our midst, and a grateful heat is spread around, while storms of rain and snow are raging without. A little sparrow enters at one door and flies delighted around us, till it departs through the other. Such is the life of man, and we are as ignorant of the state which went before us as of that which will follow it. Things being so,” went on the thane, “I feel that if this new faith can give us more certainty, it deserves to be received,”—which last sentiment has, I allow, no bearing on the present subject, nor, perhaps you will say, has the rest of it. But somehow the old story came into my head so vividly as I was leaving the steamer, that I feel like tossing it on to your readers, to see what they can make of it; though I own, on looking at it again, I am not myself clear as to the interpretation, or whether I am the sparrow or the thane.
New York is more overwhelming than ever,—surely the most tremendous human mill on this planet; but I must not begin upon it at the end of a letter.
Life in Texas, Ranche on the Rio Grande, 16th September 1884.
It must be many years now (how they do shut up in these latter days like a telescope) since I confided to you in these columns the joy—not unmixed with reverence—of my first interview with that worthy small person (I am sure he must be a person) the tumble-bug of the U.S.A. I looked upon him in those days as on the whole the most industrious and athletic little creature it had ever been my privilege to encounter. I am obliged now to take most of that back, for to-day I have discovered that he isn’t a circumstance to his Mexican cousin on this side the Rio Grande. At any rate, the specimens I have met with here are not only bigger, but work half as hard again, and about twice as quick. I was sitting just now in the verandah in front of this ranche cabin, waiting for the horses to be saddled-up at the corral just below, and looking lazily, now eastward over the river and the wide Texan plains beyond, fading away in the haze till the horizon looked like the Atlantic in a calm, now westward to the jagged outline of the Sierra Nevada, gleaming in the sunshine sixty miles away, when I became aware of something moving at my feet. Looking down I found that it was a tumble-bug rolling a ball of dirt he had put together, till it was at least four times as big as himself, towards the rough stony descent just beyond the verandah, at a pace which fairly staggered me. In a few seconds he was across the floor, and in amongst the stones which lay thickly over the slope beyond. Here his troubles began. First he pushed his ball backwards over a big stone, on the further side of which it fell, and he with it, headlong—no, not headlong, stern foremost—some five inches, rolling over one another twice at the bottom. But he never quitted hold, and began pushing away merrily again without a moment’s pause. Then he ran the ball into a cul-de-sac between two stones, some inches high. After two or three dead heaves, which lifted the ball at least his own length up the side of the stones—and you must remember, to judge of the feat, that he was standing on his head to do it—he quitted hold, turned round, and looked at the situation. I am almost certain I saw him scratch his ear, or at least the side of his head, with his fore-claw. In a second or two he fixed on again with his hind-claws, pushed the ball out of the cul-de-sac, and continued his journey. If that bug didn’t put two and two together, by what process did he get out of that cul-de-sac? “Cogito, ergo sum.” Was I wrong in calling him a person? Well, I won’t trouble you further with particulars of his journey, but he ran his big ball into his hole under a mesquite-bush, 19 1/2 yards from the spot on the verandah where I first noticed him, in eleven minutes and a few seconds by my watch. I made a calculation before mounting that, comparing my bug with an average Mexican, five feet eight inches high, and weighing ten stone, the ball of dirt would be at least equal to a bale of cotton, eight feet in diameter, and weighing half a ton, which the man would have to push or carry 2 1/2 miles in eleven minutes, to equal the feat of his tiny fellow-citizen. In the depressed condition of Mexico, might not this enormous bug-power be utilised somehow for the benefit of the Republic?
I had barely finished my ciphering when I was called to horse, and in a few minutes was riding across a vast plain, nearly bare of grass in this drought, but dotted with mesquite-bushes, prickly pear, and other scrub, so that the general effect was still green. The riding was rough, as much loose stone lay about, and badgers’, “Jack Rabbits’” and other creatures’ holes abounded; but the small Mexican horse I rode was perfectly sure-footed, and I ambled along, swelling with pride at my quaint saddle, with pummel some eight inches high, and depending lasso, showing that for the time I was free of the honourable fraternity of “gentlemen cow-punchers.” Besides myself, our party consisted of the two ranche-men—an Englishman and an American, aged about thirty, old comrades on long drives 1000 miles away to the North, but now anchored on this glorious ranche on the Bio Grande—and a cowboy. The Englishman’s yellow hair was cropped close to his head, and his fair skin was burnt as red, I suppose, as skin will burn; the Marylander’s black hair was as closely cropped, and his skin burnt an equally deep brown. The cowboy, an English lad of about twenty, reconciled the two types, having managed to get his skin tanned a deep red, relieved by large dark brown freckles, from the midst of which his great blue eyes shone out in comical contrast. I fear—
The very mother that him bare,
She had not known her child.