Rulledge looked round on the rest of us, with an air of acquiring merit from the Bostonian’s poetry, but Minver’s gravity was proof against the chance of mocking Rulledge, and I think we all felt alike. Wanhope seemed especially interested, though he said nothing.
“When I went home I told my wife about it as well as I could, but, though she entered into the spirit of it, she was rather preoccupied. The children had all wakened, as they did sometimes, in a body, and were storming joyfully around the rooms, as if it were Christmas; and she was trying to get them dressed. ‘Do tell them what Easter is like; they’ve never seen it kept before,’ she said; and I tried to do so, while I took a hand, as a young father will, and tried to get them into their clothes. I don’t think I dwelt much on the religious observance of the day, but I dug up some of my profane associations with it in early life, and told them about coloring eggs, and fighting them, and all that; there in New England, in those days, they had never seen or heard of such a thing as an Easter egg.
“I don’t think my reminiscences quieted them much. They were all on fire—the oldest hoy and girl, and the twins, and even the two-year-old that we called the baby—to go out and buy some eggs and get the landlord to let them color them in the hotel kitchen. I had a deal of ado to make them wait till after breakfast, but I managed, somehow; and when we had finished—it was a mighty good Pennsylvania breakfast, such as we could eat with impunity in those halcyon days: rich coffee, steak, sausage, eggs, applebutter, buckwheat cakes and maple syrup—we got their out-door togs on them, while they were all stamping and shouting round and had to be caught and overcoated, and fur-capped and hooded simultaneously, and managed to get them into the street together. Ever been in Bethlehem?”
We all had to own our neglect of this piece of travel; and Newton, after a moment of silent forgiveness, said:
“Well, I don’t know how it is now, but twenty-five or thirty years ago it was the most interesting town in America. It wasn’t the old Moravian community that it had been twenty-five years before that, when none but Moravians could buy property there; but it was like the Sun Hotel, and just as that had grown round and over the old Sun Inn, the prosperous manufacturing town, with its iron-foundries and zinc-foundries, and all the rest of it, had grown round and over the original Moravian village. If you wanted a breath of perfect strangeness, with an American quality in it at the same time, you couldn’t have gone to any place where you could have had it on such terms as you could in Bethlehem. I can’t begin to go into details, but one thing was hearing German spoken everywhere in the street: not the German of Germany, but the Pennsylvania German, with its broad vowels and broken-down grammatical forms, and its English vocables and interjections, which you caught in the sentences which came to you, like av coorse, and yes and no for ja and nein. There were stores where they spoke no English, and others where they made a specialty of it; and I suppose when we sallied out that bright Sunday morning, with the baby holding onto a hand of each of us between us, and the twins going in front with their brother and sister, we were almost as foreign as we should have been in a village on the Rhine or the Elbe.
“We got a little acquainted with the people, after awhile, and I heard some stories of the country folks that I thought were pretty good. One was about an old German farmer on whose land a prospecting metallurgist found zinc ore; the scientific man brought him the bright yellow button by which the zinc proved its existence in its union with copper, and the old fellow asked in an awestricken whisper: ‘Is it a gold-mine?’ ‘No, no. Guess again.’ ‘Then it’s a brass-mine!’ But before they began to find zinc there in the lovely Lehigh Valley—you can stand by an open zinc-mine and look down into it where the rock and earth are left standing, and you seem to be looking down into a range of sharp mountain peaks and pinnacles—it was the richest farming region in the whole fat State of Pennsylvania; and there was a young farmer who owned a vast tract of it, and who went to fetch home a young wife from Philadelphia way, somewhere. He drove there and back in his own buggy, and when he reached the top overlooking the valley, with his bride, he stopped his horse, and pointed with his whip. ‘There,’ he said, ‘as far as the sky is blue, it’s all ours!’ I thought that was fine.”
“Fine?” I couldn’t help bursting out; “it’s a stroke of poetry.”
Minver cut in: “The thrifty Acton making a note of it for future use in literature.”
“Eh!” Newton queried. “Oh! I don’t mind. You’re welcome to it, Mr. Acton. It’s a pity somebody shouldn’t use it, and of course I can’t.”
“Acton will send you a copy with the usual forty-per-cent. discount and ten off for cash,” the painter said.