Year: 1873

Long Spanish leagues of elbow-room =
broad savannas and wide prairies for the
full play of lungs and muscles "a great
unwalled region where one can do pretty
much as he pleases "a joyful escape from
pent-up New England "a happy release
from these narrow, contracted boundaries
and cramping limitations IIeighho, come
let us break their bands a>under let US
lunatic, he that sitteth on the heights will
laugh at you. Tropical freedom is freedom
to lie hot-to reside where the air is hot and
the water is hot and the ground is hot and
the snakes are plenty and hot, and the peo-
pie few and hot. 1t is freedom TO be hot
Drained, hot-liycd hot-tempered, hot-spok-
en-, red-hot in politics and religion; in
fine to live hot and die hot, with the same
hot prospects for the future. | have run
from the sun in that tropical climate As
would from blazing hell, and under the
partial shelter of some old cabin or dry
brush fence have lain motionless as a dead
man for hours, hardly daring to breathe
lest | should dissolve with the excessive
heat Your siestas are broken by visions of
flying Serpents and the mad rush of flaming
comets-by dreams Of the final conflagra-
ton, mixed up with starry systems in
pyrotechnic dance, earthquakes rocking,
volcanoes spouting. and the whole heavens
rolling up like a surchargcd electrified
scroll


Ten thousand venomous insects are ever
buzzing in your ears - fire, fire, fire -
The tropical winds are simoons, the gentle
gales siroccos. the Tranquil calm is the hush
of the furnace in the glow Of white heat.


Tropical freedom is vicious license. What
becomes of the majestic river out oil It's
banks? Where would your fiery, impetu-
Gus Morgan take you if the curbed bit
should chance to drop from his ioaming
mouth


Freedom is an unutterably sweet, precious
thing. Paradise would be a prison with
out it. do not wonder at all that you get
nervous and beside yourself in the contcm-
plation of the inetlable subject.


| have known men before now to walk
right up to the cannon's mouth, belching
| forth shot and shell in their very faces, Tor
A taste of freedom have heard men shout
and praise freedom when it took them into
the thickest of the fight and cost them the
loss of both legs and both arms. But that
was not tropical freedom" 1t was the
real human born kind-the Arnold Win
| klereid. Ethan Allen and John Brown quail
ity. This - tropical freedom that has so
| influenced your Imagination IS only RED
pepper affair An avoidance OF checks ana
restraints? Must he You never heard OF
Judge Lynch Nero and Jefreys and
Wurts of Andersonville were angels OF ten
derness compared with Judge Lynch. Well
| this Beezebub is the patron fiend OF your
tropical freedom, who rules and relgns IN
all its concerns and if that don make a
first class pandemonium, without any OF
the Miltonic grandeurs to illuminate ITS
horrors, please inform me what does. sup
pose you do keep 4 fierce pack OF Cuban
| blood hounds, fee a score OF desperadoes,
turn YOUR house into an arsenal. carry a
heavy weight of revolyers and bowie knives
and put miles of fenced territory between
Won and the next neighbor. Alter
| all that, an incautious whisper, or
an incautious silence and that terrible
Judge Lynch comes stalking across your
fields, knocks you down with your own gun,
tears and mangles you with your own dogs,
and hangs YOU before your own door with
your own rope. That is tropical freedom.
the freedom to be the victim and sport oil
| devils or to be devil with deyils-freedom
to join band OF Ku klux and prove your