SIIELTEB. 
41 
rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the 
grass, unless where man has broken ground. 
It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions 
which the herd so diligently follow. The traveller who 
stops at the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, 
for the publicans presume him to be a Sardanapalus, 
and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he 
would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in 
the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on lux¬ 
ury than on safety and convenience, and it threatens 
without attaining these to become no better than a 
modern drawing room, with its divans, and ottomans, 
and sunshades, and a hundred other oriental things, 
which we are taking west with us, invented for the la¬ 
dies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the 
Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to 
know the names of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin 
and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet 
cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart 
with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy 
car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all 
the way. 
The very simplicity and nakedness of man’s life in 
the primitive ages imply this advantage at least, that 
they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he 
was refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated his 
journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this 
world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing 
the plains, or climbing the mountain tops. But lo! 
men have become the tools of their tools. The man 
who independently plucked the fruits when he was hun¬ 
gry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree 
for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as 
