of the _Dead March_. For We, even We who share the
earth between us as no gods have ever shared it, we also are mortal in
the matter of our single selves. Will any one take the contract?

It was with these rambling notions that I arrived at the infinite peace
of the tiny township of Musquash on the Monongahela River. The clang and
tumult of Chicago belonged to another world. Imagine a rolling, wooded,
English landscape, under softest of blue skies, dotted at three-mile
intervals with fat little, quiet little villages, or aggressive little
manufacturing towns that the trees and the folds of the hills mercifully
prevented from betraying their presence. The golden-rod blazed in the
pastures against the green of the mulleins, and the cows picked their
way home through the twisted paths between the blackberry bushes. All
summer was on the orchards, and the apples--such apples as we dream of
when we eat the woolly imitations of Kashmir--were ripe and toothsome.
It was good to lie in a hammock with half-shut eyes, and, in the utter
stillness, to hear the apples dropping from the trees, and the tinkle of
the cowbells as the cows walked statelily down the main road of the
village. Everybody in that restful place seemed to have just as much as
he wanted; a house with all comfortable appliances, a big or little
verandah wherein to spend the day, a neatly shaved garden with a wild
wealth of flowers, some cows, and an orchard. Everybody knew everybody
else intimately, and what they did not know, the local daily paper--a
daily for a village of twelve hundred people!--supplied. There was a
court-house where justice was done, and a jail where some most enviable
prisoners lived, and there were four or five churches of four or five
denominations. Also it was impossible to buy openly any liquor in that
little paradise. But--and this is a very serious _but_--you could by
procuring a medical certificate get strong drinks from the chemist. That
is the drawback of prohibition. It makes a man who wants a drink a
shirker and a contriver, which things are not good for the soul of a
man, and presently, 'specially if he be young, causes him to believe
that he may just as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb; and the
end of that young man is not pretty. Nothing except a rattling fall will
persuade an average colt that a fence is not meant to be jumped over;
whereas if he be turned out into the open he learns to carry himself
with discretion. On