A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



worm. Presently we went in to supper with the 

 warning from Lize that we would have to take 

 what we could get. There was something inex 

 pressibly bright and inviting about the homeli 

 ness of that supper table, with its kerosene lamp 

 and blue shade, its mug of marigolds, its spotless 

 white cloth, and a certain simple bounty in the 

 great dish of steaming biscuit and superb roll of 

 sweet butter, to say nothing of the cold meat and 

 potatoes and the homely earthen teapot. The 

 old man held up his gnarled hands and mumbled 

 some hardly articulate words of thanks, and we 

 fell to as readily and easily as if we were in 

 a Bedouin tent and a kid had been killed 

 for us. 



I thought I detected in the curiosity of our 

 hosts a latent pity for persons who came from the 

 city, which was to them a place where men took 

 their lives in their hands and were always in 

 danger of jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge from 

 excess of excitement or to escape from the noise. 

 The old lady thought it must be awfully tedious 

 to be always on the hop, skip, and jump for fear 

 of being crushed by an electric car. She said she 

 always felt when she was in a crowd as if she had 

 the pleurisy coming on again, and there wasn t a 

 scrap of boneset in the county. Broadway to her 

 was like a bull-yard with a fence down, and the 

 old lady said this with a calm superiority as if she 

 were looking down on us through her spectacles 

 from some primitive Elysium. 



I really felt as if the Doctor s Scripture motto 

 170 



