advertisements in the papers go to show that this sweeping list is no lie.  Atop of the fret and the stampede, the tingling self-consciousness of a new people makes them take a sort of perverted pride in the futile racket that sends up the death-rate—­a child’s delight in the blaze and the dust of the March of Progress.  Is it not ‘distinctively American’?  It is, and it is not.  If the cities were all America, as they pretend, fifty years would see the March of Progress brought to a standstill, as a locomotive is stopped by heated bearings....

Down in the meadow the mowing-machine has checked, and the horses are shaking themselves.  The last of the sunlight leaves the top of Monadnock, and four miles away Main Street lights her electric lamps.  It is band-night in Main Street, and the folks from Putney, from Marlboro’, from Guildford, and even New Fane will drive in their well-filled waggons to hear music and look at the Ex-President.  Over the shoulder of the meadow two men come up very slowly, their hats off and their arms swinging loosely at their sides.  They do not hurry, they have not hurried, and they never will hurry, for they are of country—­bankers of the flesh and blood of the ever bankrupt cities.  Their children may yet be pale summer boarders; as the boarders, city-bred weeds, may take over their farms.  From the plough to the pavement goes man, but to the plough he returns at last.

‘Going to supper?’

‘Ye-ep,’ very slowly across the wash of the uncut grass.

‘Say, that corncrib wants painting.’

‘’Do that when we get around to it.’

They go off through the dusk, without farewell or salutation steadily as their own steers.  And there are a few millions of them—­unhandy men to cross in their ways, set, silent, indirect in speech, and as impenetrable as that other Eastern fanner who is the bedrock of another land.  They do not appear in the city papers, they are not much heard in the streets, and they tell very little in the outsider’s estimate of America.

And they are the American.

LEAVES FROM A WINTER NOTE-BOOK

(1895)

We had walked abreast of the year from the very beginning, and that was when the first blood-root came up between the patches of April snow, while yet the big drift at the bottom of the meadow held fast.  In the shadow of the woods and under the blown pine-needles, clots of snow lay till far into May, but neither the season nor the flowers took any note of them, and, before we were well sure Winter had gone, the lackeys of my Lord Baltimore in their new liveries came to tell us that Summer was in the valley, and please might they nest at the bottom of the garden?