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Page 34
"The Voyage of the Hoppergrass," by E.L. Pearson.
"People and Problems," by Fabian Franklin.
"Broken Stowage," by David W. Bone.
But most of all we thought, in a vague sentimental way, about that
pleasant Long Island country through which the engine was haling and
hallooing all those carloads of audacious commuters.
Only the other day we heard a wise man say that he did not care for
Long Island, because one has to travel through a number of
half-built suburbs before getting into real country. We felt, when
he said it, that it would be impossible for us to tell him how much
some of those growing suburbs mean to us, for we have lived in them.
There is not one of those little frame dwellings that doesn't give
us a thrill as we buzz past them. If you voyage from Brooklyn, as we
do, you will have noticed two stations (near Jamaica) called
Clarenceville and Morris Park. Now we have never got off at those
stations, though we intend to some day. But in those rows of small
houses and in sudden glimpses of modest tree-lined streets and
corner drug stores we can see something that we are not subtle
enough to express. We see it again in the scrap of green park by the
station at Queens, and in the brave little public library near the
same station--which we cannot see from the train, though we often
try to; but we know it is there, and probably the same kindly lady
librarian and the children borrowing books. We see it again--or we
did the other day--in a field at Mineola where a number of small
boys were flying kites in the warm, clean, softly perfumed air of a
July afternoon. We see it in the vivid rows of colour in the
florist's meadow at Floral Park. We don't know just what it is, but
over all that broad tract of hardworking suburbs there is a secret
spirit of practical and persevering decency that we somehow
associate with the soul of America.
We see it with the eye of a lover, and we know that it is good.
Having got as far as this, we took the trouble to count all the
words up to this point. The total is exactly 1100.
[Illustration]
SOME INNS
The other evening we went with Titania to a ramshackle country hotel
which calls itself _The Mansion House_, looking forward to a fine
robust meal. It was a transparent, sunny, cool evening, and when we
saw on the bill of fare _half broiled chicken_, we innocently
supposed that the word _half_ was an adjective modifying the
compound noun, _broiled-chicken_. Instead, to our sorrow and
disappointment, it proved to be an adverb modifying _broiled_ (we
hope we parse the matter correctly). At any rate, the wretched fowl
was blue and pallid, a little smoked on the exterior, raw and sinewy
within, and an affront to the whole profession of innkeeping.
Whereupon, in the days that followed, looking back at our fine mood
of expectancy as we entered that hostelry, and its pitiable collapse
when the miserable travesty of victuals was laid before us, we fell
to thinking about some of the inns we had known of old time where
we had feasted not without good heart.
To speak merely by sudden memory, for instance, there was the fine
old hotel in Burlington, Vermont--is it called the _Van Ness
House_?--where we remember a line of cane-bottomed chairs on a long
shady veranda, where one could look out and see the town simmering
in that waft of hot and dazzling sunshine that pours across Lake
Champlain in the late afternoon: and _The Black Lion_, Lavenham,
Suffolk; where (unless we confuse it with a pub in Bury St. Edmunds
where we had lunch), there was, in the hallway, a very fine old
engraving called "Pirates Decoying a Merchantman," in which one
pirate, dressed in woman's clothes, stood up above the bulwarks
waving for assistance, while the cutlassed ruffians crouched below
ready to do their bloody work when the other ship came near enough.
Nor have we forgotten _The Saracen's Head_, at Ware, whence we went
exploring down the little river Lea on Izaak Walton's trail; nor
_The Swan_ at Bibury in Gloucestershire, hard by that clear green
water the Colne; nor another _Swan_ at Tetsworth in Oxfordshire,
which one reaches after bicycling over the beechy slope of the
Chilterns, and where, in the narrow taproom, occurred the fabled
encounter between a Texas Rhodes Scholar logged with port wine and
seven Oxfordshire yokels who made merry over his power of carrying
the red blood of the grape.
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