If one is not sick unto death, what more effectual medication can be found than the sun, and the south wind, and the all-embracing earth? The children of the poor are healthy, because they sprout out of the very dirt. The sun dispels humors, enriches the blood; and the winds execute a sanitary commission for these neglected ones. They live because they are of the earth—earthy. The experiment of training a race of attenuated cherubs in the shade, and making them martyrs to clean aprons and clean dickeys, is a failure. There is a vast amount of post mortem doggerel that never would have been written if the cherubs had only made dirt-pies, and had eaten freely of them. Observe the strong tendency in men, even of culture, to court the wildness and rude energy of savage life. Let one sleep on the ground, in a mild climate, for three months, and even the man who reads Homer is content, often, to sleep there the rest of his lifetime. It is better to tame the savage rather cautiously, and with some reserve, for if he be eliminated wholly, the best relations with Nature are broken off. Evermore we are seeking for something among books and pictures, and in the babblings of polite society, that we do not find. When the blood is thin, and the body has become spiritualized, then it is easy to ascend to the clouds, as balloons go up, and hold high discourse; while the world, under our feet, teeming with its myriad lives, pulsating even to the smallest dust, and all glorified, if we will behold it, is not taken into fellowship, its speech interpreted nor its remedial forces marshaled as friends, to back our halting and troubled humanity. It has taken almost six thousand years to find out that a handful of dry earth will heal the most cruel wound. In the day of our mortal hurt we do but go back to the earth, believing that in the ages to come we shall go forth again, eternally renewed.
There are islands in the Pacific where birds and beasts, and every living thing, are free from fear of, or even a suspicion of wrong, from man. But where civilization is introduced, there is a bridgeless gulf between us and all orders of existence beneath. There is a half-articulate protest coming up, that this thing called modern civilization is treacherous, cruel, and dishonest. For a century its evangels have proclaimed its mission of love. But humanity has wrestled with its own kind more fiercely than ever before. It is decent enough to kill each other, if done according to some conventional code. But it is vulgar to eat our enemies; and so the custom, in polite society, has fallen into disuse.
Is it a wonder that all animate nature is accusatory and suspicious? Little by little we win it back to our confidence. The birds that were silent and moody, because of our intrusion, give, after a while, little fragments of song, and hop down on the lower branches, holding inquisitory councils. A lizard runs along upon a fallen tree, each time getting a little nearer; he has the handsomest of eyes, but not a good facial expression; yet so lithe and nimble, and improves so on acquaintance that we shall soon be friends. Darting his tongue through an insect, he comes a little nearer, as though he would ask, "Do you take your prey in that way?" Two orioles have swung up their hammock to the swaying branch of a chestnut oak. They do not swing from the madrono, because its branches are too stiff and unyielding. They have been in trouble for half an hour. The robins were in trouble earlier in the day; a dozen of them went after a butcher-bird, and whipped him honestly and handsomely. There is a little brown owl, sitting on a dry limb, not a hundred yards off. He came into the world with a sort of antediluvian gravity that never bodes any good. If the solemn bird could only sing, he would allay suspicion at once. Never has a song-bird a bloody beak. Your solemn-visaged men of frigid propriety, out of whose joyless natures a song or a laugh never breaks, can thrust their talons into human prey, if but occasion only serve, as this owl will into some poor bird just at the going down of the sun.
The bees come and go sluggishly, either because there is an opiate in the sweets of the wild poppy, which flames on the hill-side, or because there is no winter season here demanding great reserves of honey. Nearly all of them turn vagabonds and robbers in this country. The line of departure is toward a redwood, which is dry at the top, a knot-hole evidently serving for ingress and egress. If their own stores fail, they will go to some tame hive and fight their more honest neighbors and plunder all their reserves. Even a bee-hive is no longer a symbol of lawful industry, since the bees have become knaves, and do not even rob in a chivalrous way. But they, in turn, will be despoiled by some vagabond who has carved his initials on every "suspected" tree hereabout. It is a world of reprisals after all. The strong prey upon the weak; and they, in turn, after passing virtuous resolutions of indignant dissent, spoil those who are weaker still. It is a hard necessity. But how can the fox do without the hare, the hawk without a thrush, or he without a beetle, or the beetle without his fly? Strong nations capture the weak; and there are weak and pitiful races of men, with no force or vitality to found nations and dynasties. These only wait to be plucked up by the stronger, as so much human rubbish waiting for flood and flame. High-breeding may degenerate races. Your thoroughbred cattle, however, take the premiums at the great fairs of the world. It is not necessary that the ancestral pedigree should be a long one. But so far as men and women are thoroughbred with respect to muscle and brain, will they, consciously or otherwise, carry with them the sceptre of dominion and conquest. They will crowd out inferior races, either by sheer force or by some trick of diplomacy. An Indian exchanging territory for blankets, or sending his arrow against an iron-clad, finds it a losing business always. We write him up handsomely in romances, but extinguish him cruelly with rifle and sabre.
There was a halo lingering about the dome of the old Mission Church, in the distance; its cross was glorified just before the sun rested its disk upon the ocean. The hard outlines of the mountains softened, and took on a purple hue; the white doves came down out of the clouds, and clustered about the gables; a light flickered like a fire-fly in the light-house half a league beyond the church, and another from a window of the farm-house near by. That skipper, wide off, may take his bearings from the light on the shore. But at night-fall, the wide-spreading roof is more hospitable that even this branching madrono. And there is no philosophy that could not be improved by June butter, redolent of white clover, with a supplement of cream half an inch thick.
A DAY ON THE LOS GATOS.