Friday And Saturday Had Been Passably Cool, With Frosty
Nights, But On Saturday Night It Changed, And I Have Not Felt
Anything Like The Heat Of Sunday Since I Left New Zealand, Though
The Mercury Was Not Higher Than 91 Degrees.
It was sickening,
scorching, melting, unbearable, from the mere power of the sun's
rays.
It was an awful day, and seemed as if it would never come
to an end. The cabin, with its mud roof under the shade of the
trees, gave a little shelter, but it was occupied by the family,
and I longed for solitude. I took the Imitation of Christ, and
strolled up the canyon among the withered, crackling leaves, in
much dread of snakes, and lay down on a rough table which some
passing emigrant had left, and soon fell asleep. When I awoke it
was only noon. The sun looked wicked as it blazed like a white
magnesium light. A large tree-snake (quite harmless) hung from
the pine under which I had taken shelter, and looked as if it
were going to drop upon me. I was covered with black flies. The
air was full of a busy, noisy din of insects, and snakes,
locusts, wasps, flies, and grasshoppers were all rioting in the
torrid heat. Would the sublime philosophy of Thomas a Kempis,
I wondered, have given way under this? All day I seemed to hear
in mockery the clear laugh of the Hilo streams, and the drip of
Kona showers, and to see as in a mirage the perpetual Green of
windward Hawaii. I was driven back to the cabin in the late
afternoon, and in the evening listened for two hours to abuse of
my own country, and to sweeping condemnations of all religionists
outside of the brotherhood of "Psalm-singers." It is jarring and
painful, yet I would say of Chalmers, as Dr. Holland says of
another: -
If ever I shall reach the home in heaven,
For whose dear rest I humbly hope and pray,
In the great company of the forgiven
I shall be sure to meet old Daniel Gray.
The night came without coolness, but at daylight on Monday
morning a fire was pleasant. You will now have some idea of my
surroundings. It is a moral, hard, unloving, unlovely,
unrelieved, unbeautified, grinding life. These people live in a
discomfort and lack of ease and refinement which seems only
possible to people of British stock. A "foreigner" fills his
cabin with ingenuities and elegancies, and a Hawaiian or South
Sea Islander makes his grass house both pretty and tasteful. Add
to my surroundings a mighty canyon, impassable both above and
below, and walls of mountains with an opening some miles off to
the vast prairie sea.[9]
[9] I have not curtailed this description of the roughness
of a Colorado settler's life, for, with the exceptions of the
disrepair and the Puritanism, it is a type of the hard,
unornamented existence with which I came almost universally in
contact during my subsequent residence in the Territory.
An English physician is settled about half a mile from here over
a hill. He is spoken of as holding "very extreme opinions."
Chalmers rails at him for being "a thick-skulled Englishman," for
being "fine, polished," etc. To say a man is "polished" here is
to give him a very bad name. He accuses him also of holding
views subversive of all morality. In spite of all this, I
thought he might possess a map, and I induced Mrs. C. to walk
over with me. She intended it as a formal morning call, but she
wore the inevitable sun-bonnet, and had her dress tied up as when
washing. It was not till I reached the gate that I remembered
that I was in my Hawaiian riding dress, and that I still wore the
spurs with which I had been trying a horse in the morning! The
house was in a grass valley which opened from the tremendous
canyon through which the river had cut its way. The Foot Hills,
with their terraces of flaming red rock, were glowing in the
sunset, and a pure green sky arched tenderly over a soft evening
scene. Used to the meanness and baldness of settlers' dwellings.
I was delighted to see that in this instance the usual log cabin
was only the lower floor of a small house, which bore a
delightful resemblance to a Swiss chalet. It stood in a
vegetable garden fertilized by an irrigating ditch, outside of
which were a barn and cowshed. A young Swiss girl was bringing
the cows slowly home from the hill, an Englishwoman in a clean
print dress stood by the fence holding a baby, and a fine-looking
Englishman in a striped Garibaldi shirt, and trousers of the same
tucked into high boots, was shelling corn. As soon as Mrs.
Hughes spoke I felt she was truly a lady; and oh! how refreshing
her refined, courteous, graceful English manner was, as she
invited us into the house! The entrance was low, through a log
porch festooned and almost concealed by a "wild cucumber."
Inside, though plain and poor, the room looked a home, not like a
squatter's cabin. An old tin was completely covered by a
graceful clematis mixed with streamers of Virginia creeper, and
white muslin curtains, and above all two shelves of
admirably-chosen books, gave the room almost an air of elegance.
Why do I write almost? It was an oasis. It was barely three
weeks since I had left "the communion of educated men," and the
first tones of the voices of my host and hostess made me feel as
if I had been out of it for a year. Mrs. C. stayed an hour and a
half, and then went home to the cows, when we launched upon a sea
of congenial talk. They said they had not seen an educated lady
for two years, and pressed me to go and visit them.
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