My Heart Has Bled For
Them As I Have Heard Them Squalling By The Hour Together In Agonies
Of Discontent And Dyspepsia.
Can it be, I wonder, that children
are happier when they are made to obey orders, and are sent
To bed
at six o'clock, than when allowed to regulate their own conduct;
that bread and milk are more favorable to laughter and soft,
childish ways than beef-steaks and pickles three times a day; that
an occasional whipping, even, will conduce to rosy cheeks? It is
an idea which I should never dare to broach to an American mother;
but I must confess that, after my travels on the Western Continent,
my opinions have a tendency in that direction. Beef-steaks and
pickles certainly produce smart little men and women. Let that be
taken for granted. But rosy laughter and winning, childish ways
are, I fancy, the produce of bread and milk. But there was a third
reason why traveling on these boats was not so pleasant as I had
expected. I could not get my fellow-travelers to talk to me. It
must be understood that our fellow-travelers were not generally of
that class which we Englishmen, in our pride, designate as
gentlemen and ladies. They were people, as I have said, in search
of new homes and new fortunes. But I protest that as such they
would have been, in those parts, much more agreeable as companions
to me than any gentlemen or any ladies, if only they would have
talked to me. I do not accuse them of any incivility. If
addressed, they answered me. If application was made by me for any
special information, trouble was taken to give it me. But I found
no aptitude, no wish for conversation - nay, even a disinclination
to converse. In the Western States I do not think that I was ever
addressed first by an American sitting next to me at table.
Indeed, I never held any conversation at a public table in the
West. I have sat in the same room with men for hours, and have not
had a word spoken to me. I have done my very best to break through
this ice, and have always failed. A Western American man is not a
talking man. He will sit for hours over a stove, with a cigar in
his mouth and his hat over his eyes, chewing the cud of reflection.
A dozen will sit together in the same way, and there shall not be a
dozen words spoken between them in an hour. With the women one's
chance of conversation is still worse. It seemed as though the
cares of the world had been too much for them, and that all talking
excepting as to business - demands, for instance, on the servants
for pickles for their children - had gone by the board. They were
generally hard, dry, and melancholy. I am speaking, of course, of
aged females - from five and twenty, perhaps, to thirty - who had
long since given up the amusements and levities of life.
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