Chapter 55 - Page 2

do this. If we lift those people up, we have a right to lift
ourselves up nine or ten grades or so, at their expense. A few years ago
I spent several weeks at Tolz, in Bavaria. It is a Roman Catholic
region, and not even Benares is more deeply or pervasively or
intelligently devout. In my diary of those days I find this:

"We took a long drive yesterday around about the lovely country
roads. But it was a drive whose pleasure was damaged in a couple of
ways: by the dreadful shrines and by the shameful spectacle of gray
and venerable old grandmothers toiling in the fields. The shrines
were frequent along the roads--figures of the Saviour nailed to the
cross and streaming with blood from the wounds of the nails and the
thorns.

"When missionaries go from here do they find fault with the pagan
idols? I saw many women seventy and even eighty years old mowing
and binding in the fields, and pitchforking the loads into the
wagons."

I was in Austria later, and in Munich. In Munich I saw gray old women
pushing trucks up hill and down, long distances, trucks laden with
barrels of beer, incredible loads. In my Austrian diary I find this:

"In the fields I often see a woman and a cow harnessed to the plow,
and a man driving.

"In the public street of Marienbad to-day, I saw an old, bent,
gray-headed woman, in harness with a dog, drawing a laden sled over
bare dirt roads and bare pavements; and at his ease walked the
driver, smoking his pipe, a hale fellow not thirty years old."

Five or six years ago I bought an open boat, made a kind of a canvas
wagon-roof over the stern of it to shelter me from sun and rain; hired a
courier and a boatman, and made a twelve-day floating voyage down the
Rhone from Lake Bourget to Marseilles. In my diary of that trip I find
this entry. I was far down the Rhone then:

"Passing St. Etienne, 2:15 P.M. On a distant ridge inland, a tall
openwork structure commandingly situated, with a statue of the
Virgin standing on it. A devout country. All down this river,
wherever there is a crag there is a statue of the Virgin on it. I
believe I have seen a hundred of them. And yet, in many respects,
the peasantry seem to be mere pagans, and destitute of any
considerable degree of civilization.

" . . . . We reached a not very promising looking village about
4 o'clock, and I concluded to tie up for the day; munching fruit and
fogging the hood with pipe-smoke had grown monotonous; I could not
have the hood furled, because the floods of rain fell unceasingly.
The tavern was on the river bank, as is the custom. It was dull
there, and melancholy--nothing to do but look out of the window into
the drenching rain, and