The Patriarch was kept away by a neighbor who had been seized with fits on Sunday, while fishing. The neighbor though mending physically, was in a state of apprehension. He demanded, with strong crying and tears, that the Patriarch pray with him. Late in the evening, as we were about the hearth, recovering from the lecture, my host returned from the sinner’s bed, the pride of priesthood in his step. He had established a contrite heart in his brother, though all the while frank with him about the doubtful efficacy of prayer in healing a body visited with just wrath.
Who would not have loved the six sons, when, at the Patriarch’s command, they drew into a circle around the family altar, with their small sister, and the gentle mother with her babe at her breast? It was an achievement to put the look of prayer into such flushed, wilful faces as those boys displayed. They followed their father with the devotion of an Ironside regiment as he lifted up his voice singing “The Son of God goes forth to War.” They rolled out other strenuous hymns. I thought they would sing through the book. I looked at the mother. I thanked God for her. She was the only woman in Florida who could cook. And her voice was honey. Her breast was ivory. The child was a pearl. Her whole aspect had the age and the youth of one of De Forest Brush’s austere American madonnas. The scripture lesson, selected not by chance, covered the adventures of Jacob at Bethel.
We afterwards knelt on the pine floor, our heads in the seats of the chairs. I peeped and observed the Patriarch with his chair almost in the fireplace. He ignored the heat. He shouted the name of the smallest boy, who answered the roll-call by praying: “Now I lay me down to sleep.” The father megaphoned for the next, and the next, with a like response. He called the girl’s name, but in a still small voice she lisped the Lord’s Prayer. As the older boys were reached, the prayers became individual, but containing fragments of “Now I lay me.” The mother petitioned for the soul of the youngest boy, not yet in a state of grace, for a sick cousin, and many a neighborhood cause. The father prayed twenty minutes, while the chair smoked. I forgot the chair at last when he voiced the petition that the stranger in the gates might have visitations on his lonely road, like Jacob at Bethel. Then a great appeal went up the chimney that the whole assembly might bear abundantly the fruits of the spirit. The fire leaped for joy. I knew that when the prayer appeared before the throne, it was still a tongue of flame.
Next morning I spent about seventy cents lecture money on a railway ticket, and tried to sleep past my destination, but the conductor woke me. He put me off in the Okefenokee swamp, just inside the Georgia line. The waters had more brass-bespangled ooze than in mid-Florida; the marsh weeds beneath were lustrous red. I crossed an interminable trestle over the Suwannee River. A fidgety bird was scolding from tie to tie. If the sky had been turned over and the azure boiled to a spoonful, you would have had the intense blue with which he was painted. If the caldron had been filled with sad clouds, and boiled to a black lump, you would have had my heart. Ungrateful, I had forgotten the Patriarch. I was lonely for I knew not what; maybe for my friend Edward Broderick, who had walked with me through central Florida, and had been called to New York by the industrial tyranny which the steel rails represented even here.
We two had taken the path beside the railway in the regions of Sanford and Tampa, walking in loose sand white as salt. An orange grove in twilight had been a sky of little moons. We had eaten not many oranges. They are expensive there. But we had stolen the souls of all we passed, and so had spoiled them for their owners. It had been an exquisite revenge.
We had seen swamps of parched palmettos set afire by wood-burning locomotives whose volcanic smoke-stacks are squat and wide, like those on the engines in grandmother’s third reader.
We had met Mr. Terrapin, Mr. Owl, Mrs. Cow, and Master Calf, all of them carved by the train-wheels, Mr. Buzzard sighing beside them. We had met Mr. Pig again at the cracker’s table, cooked by last year’s forest-fire, run over by last year’s train. But what had it mattered? For we together had had ears for the mocking-bird, and eyes for the moss-hung live oaks that mourn above the brown swamp waters.
We had met few men afoot, only two professional tramps, yet the path by the railway was clearly marked. Some Florida poet must celebrate the Roman directness of the railways embanked six feet above the swamp, going everywhere in regions that have no wagon-roads.
But wherever in our land there is a railway, there is a little path clinging to the embankment holding the United States in a network as real as that of the rolled steel,—a path wrought by the foot of the unsubdued. This path wanders back through history till it encounters Tramp Columbus, Tramp Dante, Tramp St. Francis, Tramp Buddha, and the rest of our masters.