I Passed From Room To Room Without Meeting Any
One, Till I Came To What Seemed The Guests' Apartment, Which
Was
neat, and even had an air of refinement about it, and I was glad
to find a map against
The wall which would direct me on my
journey on the morrow. At length I heard a step in a distant
apartment, which was the first I had entered, and went to see if
the landlord had come in; but it proved to be only a child, one
of those whose voices I had heard, probably his son, and between
him and me stood in the doorway a large watch-dog, which growled
at me, and looked as if he would presently spring, but the boy
did not speak to him; and when I asked for a glass of water, he
briefly said, "It runs in the corner." So I took a mug from the
counter and went out of doors, and searched round the corner of
the house, but could find neither well nor spring, nor any water
but the stream which ran all along the front. I came back,
therefore, and, setting down the mug, asked the child if the
stream was good to drink; whereupon he seized the mug, and, going
to the corner of the room, where a cool spring which issued from
the mountain behind trickled through a pipe into the apartment,
filled it, and drank, and gave it to me empty again, and, calling
to the dog, rushed out of doors. Erelong some of the hired men
made their appearance, and drank at the spring, and lazily washed
themselves and combed their hair in silence, and some sat down as
if weary, and fell asleep in their seats. But all the while I
saw no women, though I sometimes heard a bustle in that part of
the house from which the spring came.
At length Rice himself came in, for it was now dark, with an
ox-whip in his hand, breathing hard, and he too soon settled down
into his seat not far from me, as if, now that his day's work was
done, he had no farther to travel, but only to digest his supper
at his leisure. When I asked him if he could give me a bed, he
said there was one ready, in such a tone as implied that I ought
to have known it, and the less said about that the better. So
far so good. And yet he continued to look at me as if he would
fain have me say something further like a traveller. I remarked,
that it was a wild and rugged country he inhabited, and worth
coming many miles to see. "Not so very rough neither," said he,
and appealed to his men to bear witness to the breadth and
smoothness of his fields, which consisted in all of one small
interval, and to the size of his crops; "and if we have some
hills," added he, "there's no better pasturage anywhere." I then
asked if this place was the one I had heard of, calling it by a
name I had seen on the map, or if it was a certain other; and he
answered, gruffly, that it was neither the one nor the other;
that he had settled it and cultivated it, and made it what it
was, and I could know nothing about it. Observing some guns and
other implements of hunting hanging on brackets around the room,
and his hounds now sleeping on the floor, I took occasion to
change the discourse, and inquired if there was much game in that
country, and he answered this question more graciously, having
some glimmering of my drift; but when I inquired if there were
any bears, he answered impatiently that he was no more in danger
of losing his sheep than his neighbors; he had tamed and
civilized that region. After a pause, thinking of my journey on
the morrow, and the few hours of daylight in that hollow and
mountainous country, which would require me to be on my way
betimes, I remarked that the day must be shorter by an hour there
than on the neighboring plains; at which he gruffly asked what I
knew about it, and affirmed that he had as much daylight as his
neighbors; he ventured to say, the days were longer there than
where I lived, as I should find if I stayed; that in some way, I
could not be expected to understand how, the sun came over the
mountains half an hour earlier, and stayed half an hour later
there than on the neighboring plains. And more of like sort he
said. He was, indeed, as rude as a fabled satyr. But I suffered
him to pass for what he was, - for why should I quarrel with
nature? - and was even pleased at the discovery of such a singular
natural phenomenon. I dealt with him as if to me all manners
were indifferent, and he had a sweet, wild way with him. I would
not question nature, and I would rather have him as he was than
as I would have him. For I had come up here not for sympathy, or
kindness, or society, but for novelty and adventure, and to see
what nature had produced here. I therefore did not repel his
rudeness, but quite innocently welcomed it all, and knew how to
appreciate it, as if I were reading in an old drama a part well
sustained. He was indeed a coarse and sensual man, and, as I
have said, uncivil, but he had his just quarrel with nature and
mankind, I have no doubt, only he had no artificial covering to
his ill-humors. He was earthy enough, but yet there was good
soil in him, and even a long-suffering Saxon probity at bottom.
If you could represent the case to him, he would not let the race
die out in him, like a red Indian.
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