_Dear Editors:_ I took a walk along the Monocacy Creek on
Sunday afternoon and discovered clear water several miles
above town and a fine skating pond; but I suppose that you and
all of your subscribers will have to go to our enterprising
neighbor, Allentown, to find any well-kept ice to skate on
this Winter. Most people think that you boys can swim in
Nature's own water, skate on Nature's own ice, and roam in
Nature's own woods, but it is absolutely certain that your
elders must take some care and pains if you town boys are to
do any of these things. And yet, here in the East, children
are said to be brought up (implying care and pains) and hogs
are said to be raised (implying only feeding). I thank the
Lord that I was "raised" in the West where there are no such
false distinctions.
Your subscriber, S.
P.S.--As I came home covered with beggar-lice and cockle-burrs
I saw a ring of fire on South Mountain, an annual occurrence
which has been delayed a whole week this Autumn by a flourish
of posters in several languages offering One Hundred Dollars
Reward! S.
In these days of steam and electricity we boast of having conquered
nature. Well, we have got to domesticate nature before much else can
be accomplished in this country of ours. We have got to take care of
our brooks and our rivers, of our open lands and our wooded hills. We
have got to do it, and Bill would be better off if we took half of the
cost of his fine school to meet the expense of doing it. When I was a
boy I belonged to the Bander-log, but Bill belongs to another tribe,
the Rats, and there is nothing I would like so much to do as to turn
Pied Piper and lure the entire brood of Bethlehem boys and girls to
Friedensville[C] and into that awful chasm of crystal water to come
back no more, no, not even when an awakened civic consciousness had
made a park of the beautiful Monocacy meadows and converted the creek
into a chain, a regular Diamond Necklace of swimming holes. I beg the
garbage men's (not a printer's error for man's) pardon for speaking
of the beautiful Monocacy meadows. I refer to what has been and to
what might easily continue to be. As for the Diamond Necklace, that,
of course, would have to be above our gas works where the small stream
of pure tar now joins the main stream.
I know a small river in Kansas which is bordered by rich bottom lands
from one-half to one mile in width between beautifully scalloped
bluffs--where the upland prairie ends. In early days thick covering of
grass was everywhere, and the clear stream, teeming with life, wound
its way along a deep channel among scattered clusters of large walnut
trees and dense groves of elm and cotton wood, rippling here and there
over beds of rock. Now, however, every foot of ground, high and low,
is mellowed by the plow, and the last time I saw the once beautiful
valley of Wolf River it was as if the whole earth had melted with the
rains of June, such devastation of mud was there! Surely it requires
more than the plow to domesticate nature; indeed, since I have lived
between the coal-bearing Alleghenies and the sea, I have come to believe
that it may require more than the plow and the crowded iron furnace, such
pestilence of refuse and filth is here! {1}
I suppose that I am as familiar with the requirements of modern
industry as any man living, and as ready to tolerate everything that
is economically wise, but every day as I walk to and fro I see our
Monocacy Creek covered with a scum of tar, and in crossing the river
bridge I see a half mile long heap of rotting refuse serving the
Lehigh as a bank on the southern side; not all furnace refuse either
by any means, but nameless stinking stuff cast off by an indifferent
population and carelessly left in its very midst in one long
unprecedented panorama of putrescent ugliness! And when, on splendid
Autumn days, the nearby slopes of old South Mountain lift the eyes
into pure oblivion of these distressing things, I see again and again
a line of fire sweeping through the scanty woods. This I have seen
every Autumn since first I came to Bethlehem.
It is easy to speak in amusing hyperbole of garbage heaps and of
brooks befouled with tar, but to have seen one useless flourish
of posters on South Mountain in fifteen years! That is beyond any
possible touch of humor. It is indeed unfortunate that our river is
not fit for boys to swim in, and it is not, for I have tried it, and
I am not fastidious either, having lived an amphibious boyhood on
the banks of the muddiest river in the world; but it is a positive
disgrace that our river is not fit to look at, that it is good for
nothing whatever but to drink; much too good, one would think, for
people who protect the only stretch of woodland that is accessible to
their boys and girls by a mere flourish of posters!{2}
I was born in Kansas when its inhabitants were largely Indians,
and when its greatest resource was wild buffalo skins; and whatever
objection you may have to this description of my present home-place
between the coal-bearing Alleghenies and the sea, please do not
imagine that I have a sophisticated sentimentality towards the
Beauties of Nature! No, I am still enough of an Indian to think
chiefly of my belly when I look at a stretch of country. In the West
I like the suggestion of hog-and-hominy which spreads for miles and
miles beneath the sky, and here in the East I like the promise of
pillars of fire and smoke and I like the song of steam!
Bill's School and Mine! It may seem that I have said a great deal
about my school, and very little about Bill's. But what is Bill's
school? Surely, Bill's fine school-house and splendid teachers, and
Bill's good mother are not all there is to Bill's school. No, Bill's
school is as big as all Bethlehem, and in its bigger aspects it is
a bad school, bad because Bill has no opportunity to play as a boy
should play, and bad because Bill has no opportunity to work as a boy
should work.
"I b'en a-kindo musin', as the feller says", and I'm
About o' the conclusion that they ain't no better time,
When you come to cypher on it, than the times we used to know,
When we swore our first 'dog-gone-it' sorto solem'-like and low.
"You git my idy, do you?--LITTLE tads, you understand--
Jes' a wishin', thue and thue you, that you on'y was a MAN.
Yet here I am this minute, even forty, to a day,
And fergittin' all that's in it, wishin' jes the other way!"
I wonder if our Bill will "wish the other way" when he is a man?
Indeed, I wonder if he will ever BE a man. If we could only count on
that, Bill's school would not be our problem.