A WALK ALONG A RAILROAD 
IN. JUNE 
HE season was mid-June. The region was a 
| prairie. The place was a five-mile stretch of 
{ railroad running eastward, undeviatingly as the 
i flight of an arrow. Landing at a village in the 
early morning, with three hours to wait for my 
train, the out-of-doors challenged me to walk to 
the next hamlet; and, my custom being never 
to take a dare from nature if my employment 
will allow me leisure, | swung out right gayly 
to answer the challenge. The day was dustless, 
rains having sprinkled field and road and gardens 
quite recently; the skies were dimmed with a 
" veil of cloud not dense enough to obscure the 
sun nor to dim the blue completely, but enough to calm the sunlight into 
entire pleasantness for a walk like mine. A pleasant wind blew from 
the east and kept the track unhesitatingly as a locomotive, while I, with 
the butterflies and wild bees, drifted from side to side as flowers and 
grasses and tangle of vines invited me. 
Now, a railroad is what our friend Ruskin railed at with his delight- 
ful spleen; and the logic of his complaint was that the railroad stood 
_ for utility and John Ruskin stood for nature, and what John Ruskin 
stood for was what should be. Ruskin had all the sweet dogmatism 
and self-confidence of a little child. 1 like his love of field and flood; 
more still, I love it, but scarcely enjoy his vituperation, though put into 
English sweet enough to make even scolding charming, nor enjoy it at 
all when he raves against those modern appliances which have changed 
the economic world and us, from provincials into cosmopolites. And 
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