The Gentleman from Everywhere Part 20

CHAPTER XXIX.

AMONG THE CLOUDS.

In the following May, 1896, I took a sky-sc.r.a.ping journey to the great states of Washington and Oregon. The climbing of Mt. Shasta and the Siskyo range by train presented sublime views that no language can even feebly describe. At the summits we were at least two miles in the air higher than the dome of the Ma.s.sachusetts State House. As we climbed, I could see from the window of the palace car, the two engines of our train puffing for all they were worth around the curves, far ahead.

We looked down from the narrow rim of the railroad, thousands of feet perpendicular upon foaming rivers dashing themselves into rainbows and cataracts against the everlasting boulders in their courses.

Here cascades, miles in length, came rushing down the mountainsides, shooting hundreds of feet into the air as they struck the giant rocks, and at one place we stopped for half an hour to drink from the soda springs pure, delicious soda water, huge geysers of it effervescing, scintillating, silvery in the sunbeams, caught in a rocky basin from which it is sent all over the world.

Above, the mighty Sacramento River has its source in a little spring, almost touching the stars--so emblematical of our human life, which begins in the infinite on high; is enveloped in a dust of earth; expands in its evolution into the angel back into the eternity from whence it came; for science reveals that the springs come from the clouds as dew and rain, run their courses, and by evaporation are taken back into their first home in the vapors of the heavens.

There are enormous log-shoots seeming like Jacob's ladder to reach from earth to heaven, and in which, the giants of the vast mountain forests are carried by water with almost lightning speed to the mills on the river; there the splendid snow-covered dome of Shasta gleams above the clouds like the great white throne described by St. John in Revelation.

Now come glimpses of little green valleys; here and there, a few small houses and flocks of sheep show that these cases are peopled "far from the maddening crowd's ign.o.ble strife."

These vast solitudes of forests are very impressive and solemn as the day of judgment; giant fir-trees, pines and spruces, beautifully clothed in perpetual green even to the lower dead limbs which nature has covered with a verdure of moss--like our dead hopes, blasted by the fires of adversity but made radiant by the fore-gleams of immortality. There the bright mistletoe is suspended from dead tree-tops, like beauteous crowns adorning the heads of those who have died rather than surrender to the low and base; there deep canyons, brilliant with the diamonds made by the sun from the scintillating drops from dashing torrents--so from the unseen heights come the dews of heaven to refresh those who walk by faith and not by sight "looking not at the things seen which are temporal, but at the things not seen which are eternal."

Here comes a dense white cloud of snow through the air, covering our train with a pearly shroud, through the rifts of which, far below, we have glimpses of lovely vales and white ranch-houses, smiling up at us, above the clouds.

Dearly beloved--all seems to say it becometh us, not to sorrow for the dead hopes, broken promises, and bitter disappointments of this mortal life, remembering that this is not our home, that we tarry here for a few fleeting days, that our true home is with the good beyond the infinite azure of the heavens, where dear ones are Waiting to welcome us to the endless rest and peace awaiting all who fight the good fight, and who keep themselves unspotted from the world.

At times, while the train was dashing along over the seemingly interminable plains, green and productive during the rainy season, but now parched and arid by the terrible heat, we were almost suffocated by the dense dust clouds, and well-nigh withered by the winds which seem to come from the very jaws of Dante's Inferno; then the shifting young cyclone would suddenly envelop us with chilling snows from Shasta, and so we oscillated like pendulums 'twixt torrid heats and arctic colds.

At last, almost dazed by the unspeakable, lightning-like, climatic transformations, the great iron steeds brought us to Portland, the metropolis of the great state of Oregon. Here, as in many places on the Pacific coast, people should be web-footed during the rainy season to escape the drowning, and iron clad during the dry season to escape the merciless peltings of the clouds of shot-like dust. The dampness in this valley, hemmed in by the now dripping, then brook covered mountains, is far from pleasant, and covers many of the buildings with unsightly mosses. In Washington and Oregon those who survive the climatic trials are a strong, energetic race, rapidly building up powerful empires in the great aggregation of states of our grandest nation the world has ever known.

The broad-minded, generous-hearted people of this great far west, make no distinctions as to s.e.x in apportioning their salaries for school work, and this, coupled with their numerous co-educational universities and normal schools, has given them an army of lady teachers and superintendents unequaled elsewhere in the world.

The county superintendents of schools are elected by the popular vote, and the women take to the stump-speaking and the usual kissing of voters' babies as naturally as ducks take to the water. Result,--the ladies secure the political plums, and the men are rapidly being driven to manual labor, their natural sphere of action, though not without vigorous kicking against the inevitable. These ex-men-superintendents b.u.t.tonhole you at every turn, reciting the outrages perpetrated upon them by their successful women compet.i.tors.

At an election in a California town, one of these men sufferers, mistaking me for a voter, took me by a b.u.t.ton of my coat, and poured forth a tale of woe so long that, unable to endure it longer, I cut off the b.u.t.ton and fled. He did not notice my departure, and two hours later, there he was holding on to the b.u.t.ton, all alone, gesticulating frantically, and beseeching me to vote for him to save his wife and ten children from starvation. For aught I know, he has not missed me to this day; but is still sounding forth his wild appeals.

Should I describe fully all the wonderful scenes beheld by me in this wonderland, I should exhaust time and trench upon eternity. Suffice it to state that I returned to 'Frisco, fought a successful dictionary battle there, formed the acquaintance of many distinguished men, among them the great Irving Scott, who built the famous battleship Oregon.

He was president of the city school-board, head of the vast Union Iron Works, and besides performing many herculean labors, was stumping the state nightly in favor of the election of William McKinley to the presidency of the United States.

I was fairly driven from this city by the ferocious fleas, which seemed to render life almost unendurable in hovel and palace. I could get no rest day or night in many parts of the state, on account of the savage attacks of these unspeakable, insatiate biters, more terrible than an army with Gatling guns.

Crossing the beautiful bay in the floating palace ferry-boat, I was for a time enchanted with Highland Park, Oakland. In front, through a vista of Eucalyptus, oak and elm trees, appear the glistening waters of the famed inland sea; on the right are seen the domes and spires of Oakland, Alameda, and San Francisco; across the valley loom the mountains, in the rainy season green to their summits, on which rest the serene blue of the heavens, except when, the frequent fogs bury everything from sight. On one side of the house, at the same time, the trade winds from the Pacific chill you to your very bones, on the other side the burning heat is unbearable. Afar off the humble home of Joaquin Miller, poet of the Sierras, clearly appears.

There are many beautiful homes on this lofty hilltop, but they were all for sale at bargains, for their occupants have grown weary of the cloud bursts of the long dreary rainy season, then of the parching heats of the equally dreary dry season, when a pickaxe and crowbar are required to dig a potato unless you keep water running from the hose day and night. These people long to return to their old homes in New England where the varying seasons are not so monotonous.

I was invited to accompany a religious society on a week's camp in a romantic canyon; but I was glad I did not when they returned in a couple of days, narrating an adventure which daunted the stoutest hearts. On the second night of their camping, the men were aroused from sleep by the frightful screams from the women's tent; rushing out, they saw in the light of the great fire kept burning to frighten the wild-cats and mountain lions, a circle of venomous rattle-snakes, hissing like fiends and coiled for springing. The men fought desperately all night with shotguns and clubs. Life is scarcely worth the living with these demons, and their natural attendants, the horrible tarantulas.

CHAPTER x.x.x.

DISENCHANTED.--HOME AGAIN.

I had secured the adoption of our dictionaries in every county visited by me, and now the publishers desired me to remain on the Pacific coast permanently, without salary, relying on commissions on sales of their books made by me and my sub-agents by canva.s.sing, from house to house. This financial proposition was far from being alluring, for the laws enacted by a national democratic rule of four years had ruined many of the princ.i.p.al industries of this section, and the larger cities required a license fee of twenty dollars per week from all canva.s.sing agents. Many houses displayed large signs, "No book agents allowed here," and they kept ferocious dogs to enforce the rule. The majority of the people were poor; the rich were already supplied with dictionaries; and the schools would have no funds available with which to buy reference books for nearly a year. Competing agents had visited every house before my arrival on the coast, and I therefore resigned my worthless position, and took the Eastern agency for a Tonic Port which had, by its wonderful efficacy, delivered many from the horrors of nervous prostration, anaemia, and kindred diseases which afflict so many of the human race.

Another disenchantment,--another Eden becomes a Sahara. I had reached the Pacific coast just when the departing rainy season had left all nature fair as a poet's dream of love, and, vainly dreaming that this was perpetual, it seemed as if I would sigh for no other heaven. But the scorching heat and Siroccoes from the Mohave Desert followed close upon the rear-guard of the retreating, life-giving rain-clouds, and soon the lovely flowers died; the enchanting green gra.s.s withered; the soul of the beautiful vanished, and the suffocating dust storms buried the earth in a ghostly shroud, save where wealth was sufficient to bring the mountain streams for irrigation.

I had for a time reveled in the dreams which fleetingly haunt all mortals, that there I had found the lost Arcadia, where balmy zephyrs fan the brow into ecstasy forever; but, alas! After a brief respite I had, in that land which the real estate sharks called "Paradise,"

suffered more from alternating chilling winds and withering heat than ever before; one day sweltering in the thinnest of seersuckers, and perhaps the very next shivering in all the woolens I could command.

Without a shadow of regret or even a backward look, I bade farewell to the Pacific and returned to the Atlantic of my youth, until the day dawns and the shadows flee away.

I sojourned for some months in the cities of Richmond, Baltimore, Providence, and Philadelphia, endeavoring to impress upon the minds of the physicians the importance of prescribing my remedy, but with no glittering financial success, lingering for weeks in the last named city, on the very verge of the grave to which I was brought by the filthy water of that grotesquely misnamed "City of Brotherly Love."

I had been, in former years, the champion school-book agent of New England, and publishers had often told me that if I ever returned to this vocation, they would gladly employ me. I applied to one of these for a position, requesting a man who owed his success in business entirely to my friendly aid and instructions, to speak a good word for me, but he at once showed his grat.i.tude by securing the appointment for himself, being aided and abetted by an influential bald-headed man who hated me, simply because I had sent to him a friend who represented a hair restorer. Said bald-headed man had many reasons to, and had often claimed to be, a friend of mine; but was foolishly sensitive about his lack of hirsute adornment, and said I insulted him by referring to his billiard-ball caput. Truly, grat.i.tude is a lost art, and some friends immediately become enemies when they can secure from you no more plunder.

It is exceedingly difficult for a man who has pa.s.sed the "death line"

of the half century, to find a place where he can do good and get good; the hustling crowd of younger and stronger compet.i.tors push him to the wall or trample him beneath their feet, in the terrific scramble for the bare necessities of life. He drifts into the depressing occupation of book or life insurance agency, and at once every so-called friend, who pretended to worship him when he was prosperous, gives him the cold shoulder, and "poor devil" is the most complimentary epithet with which he is greeted.

a.n.a.logous with that wonderful Gulf Stream, once a myth, still a mystery, the strange current of human existence bears each and all of us with a strong, steady sweep from the tropic lands of sunny childhood, enameled with verdure and gaudy with bloom, through the temperate regions of manhood and womanhood, fruitful or fruitless as the case may be; on to the often frigid, lonely sh.o.r.es of old age, snow-crowned and ice-veined; and individual destinies seem to resemble the tangled drift on those broad gulf billows, strewn on barren beaches, stranded upon icebergs, some to be scorched under equatorial heats, some to perish by polar perils; a few to take root and flourish, building imperishable landmarks; and many to stagnate in the long inglorious rest of the Sarga.s.so Sea.

But really to the faithful soul nothing is lost; though the great prizes of earth are denied us, every heroic endeavor, every struggle to benefit the world sends treasures on high to our credit in the grand bank of heaven.

There are the thoughts that one by one died 'ere we gave them birth, The songs we tried in vain to sing, too sweet, too beautiful for earth.

No endeavor is in vain; Its reward is in the doing, And the rapture of pursuing, Is the prize the vanquished gain.

We are all conscious of these songs we have tried in vain to sing, and we are confident we will yet sing them when the bodily impediments are swept away, and, as the earthly shadows lengthen, as the chill winds of old age strengthen, we more and more appreciate the wonderful expression of this thought, in that sweetest of all poems of the minor key, called "The voiceless."

"We count the broken lyres that rest Where the sweet wailing singers slumber; But o'er the silent brother's breast, The wild flowers who will stoop to number.

"A few can touch the magic string, And noisy fame is proud to win them; Alas for those who never sing, But die with all their music in them.

"Not where Leucadian breezes sweep O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow; But where the glistening night dews weep O'er nameless sorrow's churchyard pillow.

"If singing breath or echoing chord To every hidden pang were given, What endless melodies were poured, As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven."

We have done our best according to the light that has been given; we will continue to do so until the end, and we are soothed and sustained by the inspiring thought so sweetly expressed by one of our greatest poets.

"I know not where G.o.d's islands lift Their fronded palms in air, I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care.

"And so beside the silent sea, I wait the m.u.f.fled oar: No harm from Him can come to me On ocean or on sh.o.r.e."

Only waiting till the angels Open wide the mystic gate, At whose feet I long have lingered, Weary, sad, and desolate; Even now I hear their footsteps, And their voices far away-- When they call me, I am waiting, Only waiting to obey.

AFTERMATH