He Is Not Much More Than A Hundred Years Ahead Of
The English In Design, Comfort, And Economy, And (This Is Most
Important) Labour-Saving Appliances In His House.
From Newport to San
Diego you will find the same thing to-day.
Last tribute of respect and admiration. One little brown house at the
end of an avenue is shuttered down, and a doctor's buggy stands before
it. On the door a large blue and white label says - ' Scarlet Fever.' Oh,
most excellent municipality of St. Paul. It is because of these little
things, and not by rowdying and racketing in public places, that a
nation becomes great and free and honoured. In the cars to-night they
will be talking wheat, girding at Minneapolis, and sneering at Duluth's
demand for twenty feet of water from Duluth to the Atlantic - matters of
no great moment compared with those streets and that label.
A day later.
'Five days ago there wasn't a foot of earth to see. It was just
naturally covered with snow,' says the conductor standing in the rear
car of the Great Northern train. He speaks as though the snow had hidden
something priceless. Here is the view: One railway track and a line of
staggering telegraph poles ending in a dot and a blur on the horizon. To
the left and right, a sweep as it were of the sea, one huge plain of
corn land waiting for the spring, dotted at rare intervals with wooden
farmhouses, patent self-reapers and binders almost as big as the houses,
ricks left over from last year's abundant harvest, and mottled here and
there with black patches to show that the early ploughing had begun. The
snow lies in a last few streaks and whirls by the track; from sky-line
to sky-line is black loam and prairie grass so dead that it seems as
though no one year's sun would waken it. This is the granary of the land
where the farmer who bears the burdens of the State - and who, therefore,
ascribes last year's bumper crop to the direct action of the McKinley
Bill - has, also, to bear the ghastly monotony of earth and sky. He keeps
his head, having many things to attend to, but his wife sometimes goes
mad as the women do in Vermont. There is little variety in Nature's big
wheat-field. They say that when the corn is in the ear, the wind,
chasing shadows across it for miles on miles, breeds as it were a
vertigo in those who must look and cannot turn their eyes away. And they
tell a nightmare story of a woman who lived with her husband for
fourteen years at an Army post in just such a land as this. Then they
were transferred to West Point, among the hills over the Hudson, and she
came to New York, but the terror of the tall houses grew upon her and
grew till she went down with brain fever, and the dread of her delirium
was that the terrible things would topple down and crush her. That is a
true story.
They work for harvest with steam-ploughs here. How could mere horses
face the endless furrows? And they attack the earth with toothed,
cogged, and spiked engines that would be monstrous in the shops, but
here are only speckles on the yellow grass. Even the locomotive is
cowed. A train of freight cars is passing along a line that comes out of
the blue and goes on till it meets the blue again. Elsewhere the train
would move off with a joyous, vibrant roar. Here it steals away down the
vista of the telegraph poles with an awed whisper - steals away and sinks
into the soil.
Then comes a town deep in black mud - a straggly, inch-thick plank town,
with dull red grain elevators. The open country refuses to be subdued
even for a few score rods. Each street ends in the illimitable open, and
it is as though the whole houseless, outside earth were racing through
it. Towards evening, under a gray sky, flies by an unframed picture of
desolation. In the foreground a farm wagon almost axle deep in mud, the
mire dripping from the slow-turning wheels as the man flogs the horses.
Behind him on a knoll of sodden soggy grass, fenced off by raw rails
from the landscape at large, are a knot of utterly uninterested citizens
who have flogged horses and raised wheat in their time, but to-day lie
under chipped and weather-worn wooden headstones. Surely burial here
must be more awful to the newly-made ghost than burial at sea.
There is more snow as we go north, and Nature is hard at work breaking
up the ground for the spring. The thaw has filled every depression with
a sullen gray-black spate, and out on the levels the water lies six
inches deep, in stretch upon stretch, as far as the eye can reach. Every
culvert is full, and the broken ice clicks against the wooden
pier-guards of the bridges. Somewhere in this flatness there is a
refreshing jingle of spurs along the cars, and a man of the Canadian
Mounted Police swaggers through with his black fur cap and the yellow
tab aside, his well-fitting overalls and his better set-up back. One
wants to shake hands with him because he is clean and does not slouch
nor spit, trims his hair, and walks as a man should. Then a
custom-house officer wants to know too much about cigars, whisky, and
Florida water. Her Majesty the Queen of England and Empress of India has
us in her keeping. Nothing has happened to the landscape, and Winnipeg,
which is, as it were, a centre of distribution for emigrants, stands up
to her knees in the water of the thaw. The year has turned in earnest,
and somebody is talking about the 'first ice-shove' at Montreal, 1300 or
1400 miles east.
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