All the
Eastern cities own this fringe of elegance, but except in Chicago
nowhere is the fringe deeper or more heavily widened than in
Buffalo.
The American will go to a bad place because he cannot speak
English, and is proud of it; but he knows how to make a home for
himself and his mate, knows how to keep the grass green in front
of his veranda, and how to fullest use the mechanism of life - hot
water, gas, good bell-ropes, telephones, etc. His shops sell him
delightful household fitments at very moderate rates, and he is
encompassed with all manner of labor-saving appliances. This
does not prevent his wife and his daughter working themselves to
death over household drudgery; but the intention is good.
When you have seen the outside of a few hundred thousand of these
homes and the insides of a few score, you begin to understand why
the American (the respectable one) does not take a deep interest
in what they call "politics," and why he is so vaguely and
generally proud of the country that enables him to be so
comfortable. How can the owner of a dainty chalet, with
smoked-oak furniture, imitation Venetian tapestry curtains, hot
and cold water laid on, a bed of geraniums and hollyhocks, a baby
crawling down the veranda, and a self-acting twirly-whirly hose
gently hissing over the grass in the balmy dusk of an August
evening - how can such a man despair of the Republic, or descend
into the streets on voting days and mix cheerfully with "the
boys"?
No, it is the stranger - the homeless jackal of a stranger - whose
interest in the country is limited to his hotel-bill and a
railway-ticket, that can run from Dan to Beersheba, crying: - "All
is barren!"
Every good American wants a home - a pretty house and a little
piece of land of his very own; and every other good American
seems to get it.
It was when my gigantic intellect was grappling with this
question that I confirmed a discovery half made in the West. The
natives of most classes marry young - absurdly young. One of my
informants - not the twenty-two-year-old husband I met on Lake
Chautauqua - said that from twenty to twenty-four was about the
usual time for this folly. And when I asked whether the practice
was confined to the constitutionally improvident classes, he said
"No" very quickly. He said it was a general custom, and nobody
saw anything wrong with it.
"I guess, perhaps, very early marriage may account for a good
deal of the divorce," said he, reflectively.
Whereat I was silent. Their marriages and their divorces only
concern these people; and neither I travelling, nor you, who may
come after, have any right to make rude remarks about them.
Only - only coming from a land where a man begins to lightly turn
to thoughts of love not before he is thirty, I own that playing
at house-keeping before that age rather surprised me. Out in the
West, though, they marry, boys and girls, from sixteen upward,
and I have met more than one bride of fifteen - husband aged
twenty.
"When man and woman are agreed, what can the Kazi do?"
From those peaceful homes, and the envy they inspire (two trunks
and a walking-stick and a bit of pine forest in British Columbia
are not satisfactory, any way you look at them), I turned me to
the lake front of Buffalo, where the steamers bellow to the grain
elevators, and the locomotives yell to the coal-shutes, and the
canal barges jostle the lumber-raft half a mile long as it snakes
across the water in tow of a launch, and earth, and sky, and sea
alike are thick with smoke.
In the old days, before the railway ran into the city, all the
business quarters fringed the lake-shore where the traffic was
largest. To-day the business quarters have gone up-town to meet
the railroad; the lake traffic still exists, but you shall find a
narrow belt of red-brick desolation, broken windows, gap-toothed
doors, and streets where the grass grows between the crowded
wharves and the bustling city. To the lake front comes wheat
from Chicago, lumber, coal, and ore, and a large trade in cheap
excursionists.
It was my felicity to catch a grain steamer and an elevator
emptying that same steamer. The steamer might have been two
thousand tons burden. She was laden with wheat in bulk; from
stem to stern, thirteen feet deep, lay the clean, red wheat.
There was no twenty-five per cent dirt admixture about it at all.
It was wheat, fit for the grindstones as it lay. They manoeuvred
the fore-hatch of that steamer directly under an elevator - a
house of red tin a hundred and fifty feet high. Then they let
down into that fore-hatch a trunk as if it had been the trunk of
an elephant, but stiff, because it was a pipe of iron-champed
wood. And the trunk had a steel-shod nose to it, and contained
an endless chain of steel buckets.
Then the captain swore, raising his eyes to heaven, and a gruff
voice answered him from the place he swore at, and certain
machinery, also in the firmament, began to clack, and the
glittering, steel-shod nose of that trunk burrowed into the
wheat, and the wheat quivered and sunk upon the instant as water
sinks when the siphon sucks, because the steel buckets within the
trunk were flying upon their endless round, carrying away each
its appointed morsel of wheat.
The elevator was a Persian well wheel - a wheel squashed out thin
and cased in a pipe, a wheel driven not by bullocks, but by much
horse-power, licking up the grain at the rate of thou-sands of
bushels the hour.
