I know a small river in Kansas which is bordered by rich bottom lands from one-half to one mile in width between beautifully scalloped bluffs—where the upland prairie ends. In early days thick covering of grass was everywhere, and the clear stream, teeming with life, wound its way along a deep channel among scattered clusters of large walnut trees and dense groves of elm and cotton wood, rippling here and there over beds of rock. Now, however, every foot of ground, high and low, is mellowed by the plow, and the last time I saw the once beautiful valley of Wolf River it was as if the whole earth had melted with the rains of June, such devastation of mud was there! Surely it requires more than the plow to domesticate nature; indeed, since I have lived between the coal-bearing Alleghenies and the sea, I have come to believe that it may require more than the plow and the crowded iron furnace, such pestilence of refuse and filth is here!
I suppose that I am as familiar with the requirements of modern industry as any man living, and as ready to tolerate everything that is economically wise, but every day as I walk to and fro I see our Monocacy Creek covered with a scum of tar, and in crossing the river bridge I see a half mile long heap of rotting refuse serving the Lehigh as a bank on the southern side; not all furnace refuse either by any means, but nameless stinking stuff cast off by an indifferent population and carelessly left in its very midst in one long unprecedented panorama of putrescent ugliness! And when, on splendid Autumn days, the nearby slopes of old South Mountain lift the eyes into pure oblivion of these distressing things, I see again and again a line of fire sweeping through the scanty woods. This I have seen every Autumn since first I came to Bethlehem.
It is easy to speak in amusing hyperbole of garbage heaps and of brooks befouled with tar, but to have seen one useless flourish of posters on South Mountain in fifteen years! That is beyond any possible touch of humor. It is indeed unfortunate that our river is not fit for boys to swim in, and it is not, for I have tried it, and I am not fastidious either, having lived an amphibious boyhood on the banks of the muddiest river in the world; but it is a positive disgrace that our river is not fit to look at, that it is good for nothing whatever but to drink; much too good, one would think, for people who protect the only stretch of woodland that is accessible to their boys and girls by a mere flourish of posters! I was born in Kansas when its inhabitants were largely Indians, and when its greatest resource was wild buffalo skins; and whatever objection you may have to this description of my present home-place between the coal-bearing Alleghenies and the sea, please do not imagine that I have a sophisticated sentimentality towards the Beauties of Nature! No, I am still enough of an Indian to think chiefly of my belly when I look at a stretch of country. In the West I like the suggestion of hog-and-hominy which spreads for miles and miles beneath the sky, and here in the East I like the promise of pillars of fire and smoke and I like the song of steam!
Bill's School and Mine! It may seem that I have said a great deal about my school, and very little about Bill's. But what is Bill's school? Surely, Bill's fine school-house and splendid teachers, and Bill's good mother are not all there is to Bill's school. No, Bill's school is as big as all Bethlehem, and in its bigger aspects it is a bad school, bad because Bill has no opportunity to play as a boy should play, and bad because Bill has no opportunity to work as a boy should work.
"I b'en a-kindo musin', as the feller says", and I'm
About o' the conclusion that they ain't no better time,
When you come to cypher on it, than the times we used to know,
When we swore our first 'dog-gone-it' sorto solem'-like and low.
"You git my idy, do you?—little tads, you understand—