t only two to bring you
home. Yet going to town is a luxury, coming home is a necessity. The
supply of grape juice seems almost unlimited, yet coal is to be had
catch-as-catch-can.

Another proof that Marathon is patrician at heart is that nothing is
known by its right name! The drug store is a "pharmacy," Sunday is "the
Sabbath," a house is a "residence," a debt is a "balance due on bill
rendered." A girls' school is a "young ladies' seminary," A Marathon man
is not drafted, he is "inducted into selective service." And the
railway station has a porte cochere (with the correct accent) instead of
a carriage entrance. A furnace is (how erroneously!) called a "heater."
Marathon people do not die--they "pass away." Even the cobbler, good
fellow, has caught the trick; he calls his shop the "Italo-American Shoe
Hospital."

This is an innocent masquerade! If Marathon prefers not to call a
flivver a flivver, I shall not expostulate. And yet this quaint
subterfuge should not be carried quite so far. Stone walls are made for
sunny lounging; yet stone walls in Marathon are built with uneven
vertical projections to discourage the sedentary. Nothing is more
delightful than a dog; but there are no dogs in Marathon. They are all
airedales or spaniels or mastiffs. If an ordinary dog should wag his
tail up our street the airedales would cut him dead. Bless me, Nature
herself has taken to the same insincerity. The landscape round Marathon
is lovely, but it has itself well in hand. The hills all pretend to be
gentle declivities. There is a beautiful little sheet of water,
reflecting the trailery of willows, a green salute to the eye. In a
robuster community it would be a swimming hole--but with us, an
ornamental lake. Only in one spot has Nature forgotten herself and been
so brusque and rough as to jut up a very sizable cliff. This is the
loveliest thing in Marathon: sunlight and shadow break and angle in
cubist magnificence among the oddly veined knobs and prisms of brown
stone. Yet this cliff or quarry is by common consent taboo among us. It
is our indelicacy, our indecency. Such "residences" as are near modestly
turn their kitchens toward it. Only the blacksmith and the gas tanks are
hardy enough to face this nakedness of Mother Earth--they, and excellent
Pat Lemon, Marathon's humblest and blackest citizen, who contemplates
that rugged and honest beauty as he tills his garden on the land
abandoned by squeamish burghers. That is our A