FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51  
52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   >>  
s "Georgics." Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Locke's "Beloved Vagabond." Selections from R.L.S. Pater's "Marius the Epicurean." Alfred de Musset's "Premieres Poesies." Baedeker's "United States." Road Map of New York State. And, though my knapsack already weighed eighteen pounds, I could not resist the call of a cheap edition of Wordsworth in a drug-store at Warsaw, a charming little town embosomed among hills and orchards, where we arrived, dreamy with country air, at the end of the day. CHAPTER XIII FELLOW WAYFARERS With the morn our way still lay among apples and honey, hives and orchards; a land of prosperous farms, sumptuous rolling downs, rich woodland, sheep, more pigs, more apple-barrels and velvety sunshine. The old ruined houses had ceased, and the country had taken on a more generous, broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed aspect. Nature was preparing for one of her big Promised Land effects. We were coming to the valley of the Genesee River. We made a comparison of two kinds of prosperity in the look of a landscape. Some villages and farms suggest smugness in their prosperity. They have a model-farm, business-like, well-regulated, up-to-date, company-financed air, suggesting such modern agricultural terms as "ensilage," "irrigation" and "fertilizer." Other villages and farms, while just as well-kept and well-to-do, have, so to say, a something romantic about their prosperity, a bounteous, ruddy, golden-age look about them, as though Nature herself had been the farmer and they had ruddied and ripened out of her own unconscious abundance--the difference between a row of modern box beehives and the old thatched-cottage kind. The countryside of the Genesee valley has the romantic prosperous look. Its farms and villages look like farms and villages in picture-books, and the country folk we met seemed happy and gay and kind, such as those one reads of in William Morris's romances of the golden age. As from time to time we exchanged greetings with them, we were struck with their comely health and blithe ways--particularly with their fine teeth, as they laughed us the time of day, or stopped their wagons to gossip a moment with the two outlandish packmen--the very teeth one would expect in an apple-country. Perhaps they came of so much sweet commerce with apples! The possessor of a particularly fine display hailed us as he drove by in an empty wagon, at the tail of which trailed a
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51  
52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   >>  



Top keywords:

country

 

villages

 

prosperity

 

apples

 

prosperous

 
orchards
 

Genesee

 

modern

 

valley

 

romantic


Nature
 

golden

 

unconscious

 

difference

 

abundance

 

farmer

 

ruddied

 
ripened
 

picture

 

countryside


beehives

 

thatched

 

cottage

 

Sonnets

 

Beloved

 

irrigation

 
ensilage
 
fertilizer
 

suggesting

 
Marius

agricultural

 

Selections

 

Vagabond

 
bounteous
 

Perhaps

 

Georgics

 

expect

 

moment

 
outlandish
 

packmen


commerce

 

possessor

 

trailed

 

display

 

hailed

 

gossip

 
wagons
 
romances
 

Shakespeare

 

exchanged