New-York tribune., 1874-09-07
HOME AGAIN.

and the incoming tide OF tanned women Ia
linen busters, and children in worn-out sailor
suits, to set into the cabs and street-cars
People who have not left town simply to
avoid the heat, who have whim to know
what the year is in the ripe, generous beauty
of middle age, and who have money to indulge
their whims, linger until late October in their
country seats or mountain hiding-places; but
for the great majority of us the holiday Is
over. Tomorrow morning the milkman or
bakers bell will waken us instead of the
fiutter and chirp of the swallows in the chin
ney, or the melancholy pipe of the fsh-hawk
from its perch on the dead tree in the marsh
Mutton chops and doubtful butter will take
the place of mountain trout or SOFT
shell crabs on the breakfast table. Forth
we 90, not to brush the dew from
upland glades, but the dust from sun
baked Nicolson pavements. Instead OF the
moan of the sea. or the cry OF the white
winged gull, we are badgered by news6oys
and shoeblacks, and when we reach the office,
instead of Polly in her bathing-rig, face only
the lantern -jawed bookkeeper, his pen behind
his ear, or the chalky faced junior clerk, with
the morning mail. We feel remorseful
wrench within as we give them good-day; 1t
never occurred to us before that these poor
slaves could need holiday.
We ourselves have suffered a country change !;
the old hackneyed city sights come to us with
unfamiliar meanings and press home strange
suggestions. We slip out Of working traces
before half of the Office hours are over ana
fall into the sauntering gait of shady lanes In
Al &c DrooH,roy Iattar-parrlnr1
chants in their coupes, peanut women, beggars
are no longer Indifferent to our eye as bricks
in the pavement but become human beings
We find ourselves wondering what men and
women they would have made had circumstances
dealt differently with them. and fashionlng pro-
iects for their help as warm and vague as the
sunny, shifting September air about u.s. we
look down into the ill-smellng courts at the
idle women gossiping over the heaps or
ashes and pOtatO-skins, at the hOrdes OF chill
dren "born murdered" with the title to their
heritage of vice and vulgarity stamped on
every feature, and fall into a philanthrOpc
dream, in yhic!G. ;tncy Do 2me picturesque OBJ
iects-and we, Proydenc theoretically, aIa
for five minutes, courts, pawn-brokers' shops,
tenement houses with their airy snow OIL
futtering rags, and the inhabitants there
of are converted into an orderly Area
dia of virtuous, amiable, missionary-sup-
porting citizens. But the benevolent whim
fades away as fast as the Whit of harvests or
salt air which reaches us through the clear at
mosphere, and potato-skins and foul smells
and scolding hags are left.
Worse than all are the rank weeds which crop
up out of every lump of earth at the sewers or
obscure alley. They are, we fancy, coarse bur-
lesques of the queenly regalia of the Summer
yonder they mock the growths of meadow or
side just as these debauched and hun
cry human beings beara far off likeness to happy
and pure men and innocent women. AS we
go down the street the scent of these nauseat-
ing weeds goes with us; they seem to be
somehow more than anything else the type
and expression of the mass of unlucky
wretches about them. When our humor
is surly one we think the best
ending to both would be to be
under foot and out of life. But
in this idle golden September weather a
kindlier thought pushes this aside. Surely we
these purple jimson weeds, this
star-wort somewhere else
They grow where God meant them to grow
out in the clean country roads, up in the
high slaty hill-tOps. or down in the black
swampy bottoms, into features of the land
scape with an air modest yet bold in their
secure beauty. What would the royal
pageant of our Summer holiday have
been after all without weeds 7-without
the fern feathering old powders with
i'll h. Al.
from it, thousands of years ago, the wild car
rot whitening the hedges with its airy plume,
the great shoshony turning the mountain
sides into blaze of scarlet, MULLEN holding
the web of morning dew on its velvet leaf,
and the yellow heat of noon in its
cup, or this despised gutter weed,
covering every clay heap or pile of offal
in the country with its cheerful pure show
Of starry fowersi And as for these poor
wretches, without money or knowledge, we met
their twin brothers this August--farmers in
the far West - mountaineers in Tennessee.
They could not read or write more than these;
their food was as poor and their clothes as
coarse but they stood on the same level and
struck hands with the luckiest Of their fellow
men, being men that God had made with this
wide world and fresh air free about them, in
which to build their own future. Whatever
they lacked, two things were secure, their
own respect and that of the world.
We have vague conviction as we go down
the street grinding the weeds with our boot
heels which creep into our way, that some moral
lesson underlies these sights and scents. But
the warmth and glow of the September noon
silence and make idle even the city street, and
the moral lesson passes and is forgotten with
the odor of the yellow star-wort.
The tender, poetic, ideal language of young people