New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1873-09-11
things of late, and are not 80 easily fooled as
INDOORS AGAIN.

mer holiday was over for the majority of
New Workers., who came pouring back from
sea-beach and mountains at the rate of thirty
thousand day. few lucky idiers can yet
linger to watch the naples yellow and the
stubble fields bronze in tho hot September
moons and frosty nights, but to the most OF
us such acts of Natures drama are referred
uncertainty to the misty period when we chased
rabbits through the knee-deep SHOWS, or crowded
red and perspiring with our tin cups about the
cider-press which we had helped to fill. IL the
average American can spare fortnight out
of the year from Office or shop to improve his
digestion, give his muscles work, and study
Natures meanings, he thinks himself lucky
fellow. OF sunrises on the sea and thunder
storms in the mountains (Which to the cod
fisher or farmland are as commonplace
sights as bricks in the pavement to him),
he is apt to think, if he thinks of them at
all, as mysteries, about whose actual exist
ence even he is as doubtful as of the myths
of Aladdn's jewel palace or fairy girdles
around the world
When he took run this Summer up to the
Catskills or down to Long Branch, he pre-
pared exctedly to view these wonders as he
would take front box on Nilsson night.
He had, too lofty ideas of the purity and
ennobling influence of q country life. Ii he
struck into new paths, as was the case with
the great majority of holiday seekers this
Summer, and uneaIthed some primitive neigh
borhoOd where boarders were heretofore un-
known, he rejoiced in a newly-discovered
Arcadia, and expected to find with sunny
meadows, mountain torrents, and diet OF
salt pork and no vegetables, the virtues OF
Cincinnatus in every old farmer, and Maud
Muller in every farmers daughter. Why not
The one knew nothing of Rings, or bulls and
bears, and the other never heard of Worth,
or the vices of fashionable society. But
by the time he has stayed week, it
is ten chances to one that he is ready to
swear that his old farmer is an intolerable
bore and screw, with his long-winded yarns
about his neighbors and the miserable, petty
gains made by sharp practices in selling his
potatoes or pigs. AS for the Maud Muller,
has she not the latest fashion-plate on her
parlor table, and does she not drape her calico
gown precisely according to its pulls and
paniersR She shall discourse to him by the
hour, but only on the souring of her picked
beef or canned peaches. Her eyes "lOok out
with an innocent surprise" at the size OF
the piece of steak which he cuts for his
breakfast, and she will nip him in the allow
ance of sugar or tallow dips with shameless
ness of which no New-York boarding hOuse
keeper would be guilty.
Our Columbus comes back Disguised with
his discoveries of new regions in mind or
morals. He has great doubts as to whether
Natures seas or mountains were intended to
serve any other purpose than to furnish fish
and raise lumber and whether their healing
and elevating effects Oh the brain are not
wholly Pigment of the poets from David
down to Tennyson. Whether he is right or
wrong, at least he relishes Broadway better
and the talk of the men at clubs
and women at dinner, and after all
it is worth while to have great dis
tant illusions destroyed if it make US
more in love with the little which is near at
hand We shall gather back from Out-Of-doors
with some sense of compensation. If we do
not breathe the wind purified by the broad
Atlantic we have whiffs of news from all ma
tions every hour. The whole world waits to
talk to us over the breakfast table. We never
see the sun rise or look at his setting, know
a river only by a ferry-bOat; but we and these
people about us SIT as it were in the center of
things, where all the great currents of news,
politics, science, art, ebb and flow around us.
The perfection of material comfort, which
we are told makes the citizen sensual and
selfish, has exactly the opposite effect. For the
last month he has carried an abiding sense of
straw mattresses and fried bacon about with
him now, beds and meals come with the rest
of the unregarded blessed daylight. He does
not go into clamorous excitement when his
neighbor has the jaundice or ague never
offers to sit up with him; perhaps cannot be
trapped into going to funeral. Bat when
his friend Story dies, his lifelong chum,
he gravely falls back on certain truths and
trains of thought common to them both, so
much broader and deeper than any accident of
life or death that the change seems but of
passing moment. After another Summers ex-
perience, perhaps, he will begin to appreciate
the modern Cincinnatus and Maud Muller:
for the present let us be cOntented that he
has lost his poetic delusion about them and
finds sermons in 'New-York stones.
|
This is astonishing season for snakes They
are so abundant that editor need cry for them,
no newspaper be without them. The latest intel
Il n.