A tavern gave me shelter, but presently the rain slackened and I made up my mind to push on to Williamsport in spite of the storm, for my letters were there; and once on the road with your mail definitely in view, you grow highly impatient of delays.
An hour's rain had worked great changes in the roads. Hard and dusty when I set out in the early morning, they were quagmires now and were running with muddy streams. The rain pelted my face and dripped through my ragged hat, and trickled down my back and washed into my boots. I was a dangerous-looking vagrant when I reached Hughesville at noon. I walked rapidly through the village street in some fear of arrest, but the storm had passed, and I soon learned the road to Williamsport by way of Hall's Landing.
Splashing wearily along the heavy roads with that awful load chafing my back, I knew vaguely that I was passing through an exceedingly rich and beautiful farming region, but my interest was all in the surest footing to be found, and it was with glad relief that late in the afternoon I stepped upon the solid pavements of the town.
I had been told, on the road, of a laborer's cottage in Church Street where cheap board and lodging could be had. From the post-office I readily found my way to this cottage, and was soon propped up in bed reading my letters, while the laborer's wife hung up my clothes to dry in the kitchen and put my boots under the stove.
In the morning all the brilliance of the clear, cold autumn had returned. It was such a day as seems to emerge renewed with fresh and ample vigor from the cleansing of a storm.
The streets presented a really singular picture. The town itself is the conventional American, provincial, manufacturing centre, with its business portion built up in "brick blocks," which are innocent of any attraction but utility. From this quarter it shades gradually, in one direction, into the workshops and cottages of the region of the proletariat, and in another into the wide, well-shaded avenues where are the somewhat ostentatious homes and churches of the well-to-do.
Long lines of booths now crowded the curves about the central public square and reached far down the communicating streets. In these booths the farming people of the surrounding country sold their fruits and garden vegetables, and butter and eggs and poultry; and white-aproned butchers spread their meats in tempting array. It was an Oriental bazaar in all but color and the highly pitched jabber of Eastern bargaining. But still more perfect as a reproduction of foreign scenes were the groups of women who, with colored shawls tied round their heads and falling about their shoulders, sat on the steps of public buildings with baskets of provisions about them and talked among themselves, and came to terms with customers in their oddly mixed vernacular.
It recalled at once the Platz of a German city thronged by peasant women on market days, only here, too, was a lack of color. The women were unmistakably Teutonic. All had the generous contour of countenance which approaches to a family likeness in a whole race of peasantry, but the red of the old country complexion had faded to our prevailing pallor.
In Spite of a large foreign element, or in virtue of it, I do not know which, the town itself is aggressively American. The fact that some hundreds of million feet of lumber come each year from its mills gives to it great importance as a lumber centre. And the good fortune of this form of industry the city certainly shows in its freedom from the usual begriming effects of manufacture on a large scale.