WHERE I MET MYSELF
I can thankfully say that I have been on earth twice, once walking on
air, when I graduated from college, and again when I, walking across the
College campus, with heart lifted up, tenderly recalling the past, saw
the jejune young hopeful that I used to be and sat down with him under a
birch, the queen of trees,--many savage nations worship trees,--and
debated for an hour with this young blonde, that I met, that I used to
be, this question, Which is better for the person graduating, the
opportunities which were lined up, reaching out their hands to us, that
we had, or the greater academic advantages which the students now enjoy.
I could not seem to make him see that the present advantages develop
opportunities which are quite as acceptable and fruitful as those that
in early days came to us ready-made.
_The Old and New_
Discussion over, this rather immature youngster, that I met, that I used
to be, rising up, I getting up, went down town, or perhaps more
properly, he went down town and I went with him. He found a man, I did
not so easily recognize, that was Sophomoric at about the same period
that he was and I experienced a bad quarter of an hour. The situation
had in it an uncomfortable pinch. I became self-conscious. I found
myself stammering and protesting the past. We had come upon a tall,
sparsely-haired, gray-bearded bent figure, with a smooth shiny head,
with furrows in his cheeks and forehead, having evidently, as Webster so
well said, come down to us from another generation. I knew that he was
of my age but I never dreamed that I was of his. This callow stripling
then started to show us around, and unlike Elihu, in the days of Job,
who apologized for showing his opinion, seeing he was so young, asserted
that once we were led by the clergy, then by lawyers, then by business
men, but that now everything pointed to a great revival of the college
and its influence in affairs. Then he stood right out apart and began to
plaster praise on his own institution. I thought that the young man
gestured too much, and I told him so, but he dramatically with open
mouthed vehemence of adoration told of her spirit, her fellowship. I
tried to use the soft pedal, suggesting that perhaps he had too many
exciting topics to discuss thus in public, and that we might later
adjourn to a restaurant where we could make an afternoon of it. But he
was in high spirits and made his talk like a young man who had the world
at an advantage. It was June in his personal history and the top tide of
his youthful happiness. That part of his existence was so satisfactory
to him that he liked to dwell upon it.
_Words Pale and Inadequate_
I kept noticing that I was much more interesting to this unripe young
sprig, who, I thought, had much to learn, and whose mind seemed like an
unweeded garden, than he was even to me, for I had seen him before,
while I had for him all the interest that is excited by a relic,
something designed by Providence to arrest attention, like those that
after a great convulsion of nature came out of their graves and went
into the city and appeared unto many.
Then this sappy, beardless representative of the rising generation that
I met, that I used to be, with the Aurora-spirit, had the effrontery to
ask me how it happened that a man had but one youth and then came age
and infirmity, while a college, like a nation, seems under favorable
administration to have a re-birth and a renewal of the vitality of youth
twice or even thrice. I thought that the excess of his knowledge was too
much for him and that he was cross examining me, and so side-stepping
the main issue, I stammered out something about the excessive beauty of
the classic town with embowered streets and sunny gardens, a sort of a
metropolis of education, the very capital of a little republic of
letters.
There seemed to be equality in all the competitions for the prizes of
student life, with no favors and yet no privilege denied. There was fair
play and all good feeling, with no caste of wealth, and no apology for
the laggard. Even when whipping up a little I flagged miserably in all
the conversation. This lad, in his leading strings, was an incomparable
gossip. I felt that he had a kind of genius for picking up news. Anyway
he used great liberality in the diffusion of it. He was I thought a
charitable reporter. While he had breathed the classic atmosphere of the
place, yet all the books he had to read had been dumped there, like a
sort of terminal moraine. For scholars today the whole stock would be
not only a curiosity, but a relic, being little else than folios on
serious subjects. They were books that must be reverenced, as members of
the eldest liturgical church would reverence the bones of the blessed
martyrs. I inquired, Do you participate in athletics? Yes, by dividing
cord wood into stove lengths, toying with the spade, coquetting with big
bundles of grain. Golf and basket ball were not in his day introduced
into the college curriculum. I thought he was flippant. I felt that
comparisons were odious, as some one must suffer when a comparison is
instituted. So I said with a good deal of voice, My Friend, hear me, I
am older than thou. Your question shows what your diploma cannot cover
nor absolve. Nobody thinks that you lack courage. I wish now that you
would try and be polite.
"_Far Away and Long Ago_"
So far from gratifying this wish, in another connection he put it right
up to me, that I was looking around with complaisance, as though it was
a college of this present size and appearance that I graduated from, but
that such was not the historic fact. It did not seem nice in the
stripling to move right out in the direction of ocular demonstration,
and make particular inquiry of me about the library and chapel and
training field and gymnasium that I used in that college that I
graduated from. His very impudence made him interesting to me. But I
wished he would cultivate more repose and serenity. He had sense enough
to know better but his resources in that direction were not immediately
available.
As we were looking around I observed that this young tyro was all the
time tipping his hat and bowing and scraping as often as a pretty face
came within the horizon, and so I knew that there was a way I could
divert his remarks from poor me, and that was to ask him outright about
the girls. I was astonished that I had not named them to the fledgling
before. I was amazed that I was capable of passing them by so long. He
said that there was nothing like them, that the air was favorable to
their elegance and charm, that there was no place of its size in that
state or in any other that could show fairer specimens of the various
kinds of feminine attractiveness. But in his talk on the comeliness of
the young ladies I noticed that he quoted from an actress who seems to
have said that three things are necessary for success on the stage,
vivacity, ability and beauty, and I told him that I could not be too
thankful that the stage of practical life did not insist on these rigid
requirements.
_Stepping Stones in Recent History_
It was a holiday within a holiday to traverse the town with this
lambkin. I came to the right place to squarely meet him. Here they
introduce people to themselves. This stripling that I used to be seemed
bent on hiring a horse and carriage to show me about. That was his only
idea of hospitality. On the best streets in town, he did not have far to
go, the livery stables were as convenient to the homes of the people as
the school-houses and churches. A very convenient location was near the
public library. His fear was that all the horses would be already taken
as there were a good many visitors in town. If the high steppers were
out we would find their keepers in more or less rickety arm chairs
tilted back against the side of a wall awaiting their return.
There are two panels placed side by side in the old palace at Potsdam.
The left contains Napoleon refusing the queenly Louise favorable terms
of peace at Tilsit, the right contains the nephew of that Napoleon
receiving notoriously hard terms from the son of the beautiful Louise at
Sedan. Entire shifts in history are vividly seen in companion pictures.
On the left is a picture of the horse with the caption, The Greatest
Pleasure-giver to Man. On the right is the picture of a Ford. All that a
man hath will he give in exchange for an automobile. The left exhibits
what God made, the right, what man made. No one living in the city will
look at a horse. He now shows that he feels that he is something left
over. Survey the specimens that remain, low-headed, tail-switching,
creatures, with an indolent air, shuffling gait, abject, pitiable
objects with mis-shapen, stumbling legs in front. No one doubts but that
it takes all day to go anywhere and return with these antique, stunted,
gaunt-ribbed, swollen-jointed, knock-kneed, piteous-eyed creatures that
now survive. Knowing the pleasure that young people once had in horses
and ponies, it seems odd to find that the rising generation has
almost forgotten their existence.
[Illustration: THE GREATEST PLEASURE GIVEN TO MAN]
_Worthy of Unstinted Praise_
But they had a fine history. Stonewall Jackson, the hero of the flank
movement, gained his great victories and his great reputation by the
celerity of his movements, made possible by the familiarity of
Southerners with horses. When pressed in battle the Russians could fall
back sullenly and the Japanese unfamiliar with horses could not strike
their flank nor cut off their retreat. The mastery of nations has
sometimes come from the possession of horses. The amazing spread of
Mohammedanism came from the same sort of ownership. The horse gave to
Paul Revere and to Phil Sheridan their place in history. He was in their
day the greatest factor in strategy and surprise. He is docile,
affectionate, and capable of a deep and lasting attachment. He has a
real craving for human notice. He dislikes to be left in a solitary
position. Essentially by his very nature he must love something. It
touches the heart to have a horse reach out his fore foot and begin to
paw until his master assures him that he recognizes him. This is what
the horse likes. I confess to a feeling of pride when, leaving him
untied at the door, I have gone into a house and have heard him whinny
for me to return when he might have gone off and left me. Although there
were other persons all about he would neigh at my approach and turn his
well-shaped head, full of character, with clear intelligent eyes of the
speaking kind, toward me. Such a warm-blooded sensitive horse will
always exhibit in ways of his own the friendly relations that exist
between us.
_Time Tries All Things_
On revisiting the earth it is found that the owner of a high-stepper,
threatened with speed, can now only lead a shame-faced kind of
existence. If out in the daylight he feels like apologizing to every one
he meets. This man used to electrify the street with his tallyho coach
crowded with gaily dressed guests accompanied by a footman and a
trumpeter, with a hitch of four noble grays showing by their arched
necks and high knee action that they felt pride in belonging to a rich
man. As in the case of the bicycle, the fashion changed abruptly. He had
to load a lot of portable property into the carriage to get some poor
relation to take the outfit for a gift. I find that a person can now buy
a discarded silver-mounted harness for the cost of a halter and that the
people today like an upholstered life. Gasoline spelled the doom of the
horse and it must be said now that Dobbin's future never looked so
uninviting.
There are four new experiences for which no description ever adequately
prepares us, the view of a volcano in violent eruption, a visit to the
home of cliff dwellers (prehistoric peoples who left their homes just as
they used them), a walk on a moving glacier, and the first survey of the
Grand Canyon. I was lifted off my feet by discovering, when talking with
that college youngster and comparing things closely, that the five
senses--sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch--have had another added
to them. Each of those we named over uses a distinctive organ. The
surface of the whole body contributes to the sense of touch. These are
pointed out as the receiving agents of the mind which keeps her hidden
seat and receives communication from the distant provinces of her
empire. They put us in possession of just the information needed
concerning external things. On revisiting the earth it is awakening to
engage in controversy with the young scion of the college that I used to
be, touching learning's last word. He believed that we had all the
possible senses defined and numbered like the fingers on the hand and
now comes the new sense of balance having the exact function we have
been naming. I remember the moment and the place where I was made
conscious of this sixth sense. I did not learn it. I had it. I had
bought a bicycle. I had no teacher. I was sitting on it in the hall
giving the animal a little gentle exercise. "Keep your balance. Employ
what sense you have; you do not need to acquire it, use it." It is so
with aviators. We call them bird men. They were born, like birds, with a
certain innate sense of equilibrium. Birds find out when to go north and
to go south and how to build and line their own nests and where to find
their food and how to maintain themselves in the air. All this is in
them. Nature takes care of that. A small child, learning to walk, shows
that he has an instinctive faculty of adjustment and equipoise and tries
early to get his little legs to support his position. An untutored lad
when mounted thinks he is riding a horse, whereas the quadruped, knowing
at once that the boy does not know anything about his business, allows
him to simply balance himself while he gives him a ride. The boy voyages
like an unballasted ship. He does not acquire a new sense; he follows
his intuitions and all is well. A seed of grain would not differ from a
dust speck or tiny pebble except for what it is, but it is yet to
manifest by its inherent vitality. You would not know, looking at a boy,
that he has this instinct of balance, but he has and he will find it and
use it. As the pilgrim with his staff wends his way to Mecca, so I went
to that place to meet that particular stripling. He was the youngster
that was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found. I wanted to
stay beside him much longer. His heart was young. He was fresh for his
work.
_The World a Wheel_
The skeleton of a horse is given in an automobile catalogue. He is
depicted as a fossil and the statement is made, These animals were used
until about the year 1900. Every man, woman, and child in the state of
South Dakota could be seated at one time in the automobiles owned by the
people of that one state. Eighty per cent of those cars have been bought
in the last two years. It seems like flying or ballooning after jolting
for years in a heavy farm wagon, and what miles they were! The Dutch are
economical of money, but have been very profuse of time. Their
conveyances by sea or land have been slow and "Dutch speed" has grown
into a proverb for tardiness, but now, with scarfs over their heads,
Dutch women loll in the back seats of a Pierce-Arrow with, not the
father, but a son, in the family to drive. While in my earlier life I
had never dodged an automobile and I have never been injured by one
except in my disposition, we are all unspeakably indebted to them for
getting people out-of-doors and for contributing more to the temperance
reformation than all the lectures in Christendom. The automobile
enforces the same abstinence upon the people that the railroads require
of engineers. Automobiles plainly show that the only place for saloons
is that place Rev. William A. Sunday so graphically describes, and while
our streets do not yet come up to the requirements of the boulevards of
the New Jerusalem as described by St. John, yet we are done with those
crossings at the street corners made up of granite stringers. Carriages
had worn down the softer material just before and just after the granite
crossings, so that if a person rode rapidly length-wise of the street he
would jolt and bite his tongue at every intersection. These depressions
in the road were called "Thank you, marms," because persons in passing
each corner would forcibly be made to bow their heads, as if in
expression of gratitude, to some imagined object. Another transformation
has overtaken the community, changing its general appearance in some
cases for the better, almost beyond recognition.
_Pigs is Pigs_
All barns in the towns are upon the market and dealers in lumber have
opened a second-hand department where they dispose of what is left of
the barns to farmers for the construction of granaries. Back to the farm
applies now even to lumber. The horse, the cow, and the pig once formed
a part of the family circle and how kindly and carefully were they
provided for. The execrable back alley was conducted on the pig-sty
basis. How slatternly the old back alley fence would look now that the
parking system is adopted by neighbors. In earlier days the sumptuous
houses were fenced or hedged always. After the old English idea the
grounds were private. It remains now to have fences removed among
denominations. They stand for the old time privacy and exclusiveness
that once prevailed in business. Down south they forced business out
into the open, requiring by ordinance that all employees shall be paid
in the public square. The parking system proceeds upon the principle
that a resident owes something to the town. The present ideal is to
induce people not to shut the blinds or draw the shades when the house
is lighted but to see in the evening how far each little candle can
throw its beams.