You give up your home at the East, you bid good-bye to your old
neighbors, and take the train, and after many days' journey you arrive
at a quiet depot, from which you take a wagon thirty miles through the
wilderness, and reach your new place. You see a man seated on a wet
log, in a swamp, and shaking with the fifteenth attack of chills and
fever, and ask him who he is. He says: "I am a real estate agent,
having in charge the property around here." You ask him where the new
depot is. He tells you that it has not yet been built, but no doubt
will be if the company get their bill for the track through the next
legislature. You ask him where the new city is laid out. He says, with
chattering teeth: "If you will wait till this chill is off, I will
show it to you on the map I have in my pocket." You ask him where the
capitalists are going to build their fine houses, and he says:
"Somewhere along those lowlands out there by those woods, when the
water has been drained off." That night you sleep in the hut of the
real estate agent, and though you pray for everybody else, you do not
pray for me. Being more fortunate than many men who go out in such
circumstances, you have money enough to get back, and you come to me,
and out of breath in your indignation, you say: "You have swindled me
out of everything. What do you mean in deceiving me about that Western
property?" "Oh," I reply, "that was all right; that was
sentimentalism, and romance, and a joke. That's the way they all
talk!"
But more excusable would I be in such deception than you, O man, who
by glow of words and personal magnetism induced a womanly soul into
surroundings which you have taken no care to make attractive, so that
she exchanged her father's house for the dismal swamp of married
experience--treeless, flowerless, shelterless, comfortless and
godless. I would not be half so much to blame in cheating you out of a
farm as you in cheating a woman out of the happiness of a lifetime.