Ch. 7: America's Defenceless Coasts - Page 2

dusk of an August
evening--how can such a man despair of the Republic, or descend
into the streets on voting days and mix cheerfully with "the
boys"?

No, it is the stranger--the homeless jackal of a stranger--whose
interest in the country is limited to his hotel-bill and a
railway-ticket, that can run from Dan to Beersheba, crying:--"All
is barren!"

Every good American wants a home--a pretty house and a little
piece of land of his very own; and every other good American
seems to get it.

It was when my gigantic intellect was grappling with this
question that I confirmed a discovery half made in the West. The
natives of most classes marry young--absurdly young. One of my
informants--not the twenty-two-year-old husband I met on Lake
Chautauqua--said that from twenty to twenty-four was about the
usual time for this folly. And when I asked whether the practice
was confined to the constitutionally improvident classes, he said
"No" very quickly. He said it was a general custom, and nobody
saw anything wrong with it.

"I guess, perhaps, very early marriage may account for a good
deal of the divorce," said he, reflectively.

Whereat I was silent. Their marriages and their divorces only
concern these people; and neither I travelling, nor you, who may
come after, have any right to make rude remarks about them.
Only--only coming from a land where a man begins to lightly turn
to thoughts of love not before he is thirty, I own that playing
at house-keeping before that age rather surprised me. Out in the
West, though, they marry, boys and girls, from sixteen upward,
and I have met more than one bride of fifteen--husband aged
twenty.

"When man and woman are agreed, what can the Kazi do?"

From those peaceful homes, and the envy they inspire (two trunks
and a walking-stick and a bit of pine forest in British Columbia
are not satisfactory, any way you look at them), I turned me to
the lake front of Buffalo, where the steamers bellow to the grain
elevators, and the locomotives yell to the coal-shutes, and the
canal barges jostle the lumber-raft half a mile long as it snakes
across the water in tow of a launch, and earth, and sky, and sea
alike are thick with smoke.

In the old days, before the railway ran into the city, all the
business quarters fringed the lake-shore where the traffic was
largest. To-day the business quarters have gone up-town to meet
the railroad; the lake traffic still exists, but you shall find a
narrow belt of red-brick desolation, broken windows, gap-toothed
doors, and streets where the grass grows between the crowded
wharves and the bustling city. To the lake front comes wheat