The So-called Human Race

“Ten pounds of flour?” … The Doctor would pause, scoop in hand; then, abruptly reminded of a bit of unfinished business at the warehouse, he would leave the flour trembling in the balance and shuffle off, while I perched on the counter and swung my heels, and discussed packs with Ted Wakeland, another pioneer, who, spitting vigorously, averred that packing grub through the brush was all right for an Indian, but no fit task for a white man. Through the open door I could see the gentle swells of the Big Water washing along the crescent of the beach and heaping the sand in curious little crescent ridges. The sun beat hotly on the board walk. There were faint sounds in the distance, from the Indian village up the shore and the fishing community across the bay. Life in this parish of the Northland drifted by like the fleece of summer’s sky.

“And three pounds of rice?”

The Doctor was back at the scales, and the weighing proceeded in leisurely and dignified fashion. Haste, truly, were unseemly. But at last the supplies were stowed in the brown pack, there were handshakings all round, and a word of advice from old heads, and I marched away with a singing heart.

Outfitting in the Doctor’s shop was an event, a ceremonial, a thing to be housed in memory along with camps and trails.

II. – THE RIVER

He who has known many rivers knows that every watercourse has an individuality, which is no more to be analyzed than the personality of one’s dearest friend. Two rivers may flow almost side by side for a hundred miles, separated only by a range of hills, and resemble each other no more than two women. You may admire the one, and grant it beauty and charm; but you will love the other, and dream of it, and desire infinite acquaintance of it.

These differences are too subtle for definition. Superficially, two rivers in the North Country are unlike only in this respect, that one has cut a deep valley through the hills and flows swiftly and shallowly to its sea, and the other has kept to the plateaus and drops leisurely by a series of cascades and short rapids, separated by long reaches of deep water. Otherwise their physical aspects coincide. The banks of archaic rock are covered with a thin soil which maintains so dense a tangle that the axe must clear a space for the smallest camp; their overhanging borders are of cedar and alder and puckerbush and osier; their waters are slightly colored by the juices of the swampland; following lines of minimum resistance, they twist gently or sharply every little way, and always to the voyager’s delight, for the eye is unprepared for a beautiful vista, as the ear for a sudden and exquisite modulation in music.

So winds the Delectable River —

“through hollow lands and hilly lands” —

idly where the vale spreads out, quickly where the hills close in; black and mysterious in the deep places, frank and golden in the shoal. In one romantic open, where the stream flows thinly over a long stretch of sand, the bed is of an almost luminous amber, as if its particles had imprisoned a little of the sunlight that had fallen on them through the unnumbered years.

The River was somewhat low when I dipped paddle in it, and the ooze at the marge was a continuous chronicle of woodland life. Moose and deer, bear and beaver, mink and fisher, all the creatures of the wild had contributed to the narrative. Even the water had its tale: a line of bubbles would show that a large animal, likely a moose, had crossed a few minutes before our canoes rounded the bend. There were glimpses of less wary game: ducks and herons set sail at the last moment, and partridges, perching close at hand, cocked their foolish heads as we went by; two otters sported on a bit of beach; trout leaped every rod of the way.

And never a sign of man or mark of man’s destructiveness; nor axe nor fire had harmed a single tree. A journey of unmarred delight through a valley of unending green.

III. – SMUDGE

“This,” you say, as you step from the canoe and help to fling the cargo ashore, “this looks like good camping ground.”

The place is more open than is usual, comparatively level, and a dozen feet above the river, which, brawling over a ledge, spreads into an attractive pool. The place also faces the west, where there is promise of a fine sunset; a number of large birches are in sight, and an abundance of balsam. “And,” you remark, stooping to untie the tent-bag, “there are not many flies.”

Instantly a mosquito sings in your ear, and as you still his song you recall a recent statement by the scientist Klein, that an insect’s wings flap four hundred times in a second. The mind does not readily grasp so rapid a motion, but you accept the figures on trust, as you accept the distances of interstellar spaces.

Very soon you discover that you were in error about the fewness of the flies. They are all there – mosquitoes, black-flies, deer-flies, and punkies, besides other species strictly vegetarian. So you drop the tent-bag and build a smudge. Experience has taught you to make a small but hot fire, and when this is well under way you kick open a rotted, moss-grown cedar and scoop up handfuls of damp mould. This, piled on and banked around the fire, provides a smudge that is continuous and effective. We built smudges morning, noon, and night. Whenever a halt was called, if only for five minutes, I reached mechanically for a strip of birchbark and a handful of twigs. At one camping place the ring of smudges suggested the magic fire circle in “Die Walküre.” Brunhilde lay in her tent, in a reek of smoke, while Wotan, in no humor for song, heaped vegetable tinder upon the defending fires. More than once the darkening forest and the steel-gray sky of a Canadian twilight have set me humming the motives of “The Ring,” and I shall always remember a pretty picture in an earlier cruise. “Jess” was a stable boy who drove our team to the point where roads ceased, and during a halt in the expedition this exuberant youth reclined upon a log, and with a pipe fashioned from a reed sought to imitate responsively the song of the white-throated sparrow. He looked for all the world like Siegfried in his forest.

“Smudge.” It is not a poetic word – mere mention of it would distress Mr. Yeats; but it is potent as “Sesame” to unlock the treasures of memory. And before the laggard Spring comes round again many of us will sigh for a whiff of yellow, acrid smoke, curling from a smoldering fire in the heart of the enchanted wood.

IV. – “BOGWAH.”

We have been paddling for more than an hour, through dark and slowly moving water. Two or three hundred yards has been the limit of the view ahead, as the stream swerves gracefully from the slightest rise of land, and flows now east, now north, now east, now south again. So long a stretch of navigable water is not common on the Delectable River, and we make the most of it, moving leisurely, and prisoning the everchanging picture with the imperfect camera of the eyes. Presently a too-familiar sound is heard above the dipping of the paddles, and the Indian at the stern announces, “Bogwah!” – which word in the tongue of the Chippewa signifies a shallow. And as we round the next bend we see the swifter water, the rocks in midstream, and the gently slanting line of treetops.

“Bogwah” spells work – dragging canoes over sandy and pebbly river-bottom, or unloading and carrying around the foam of perilous rapids. For compensation there is the pleasure of splashing ankle-deep and deeper in the cool current, and casting for trout in the “laughing shallow,” which I much prefer to the “dreaming pool.” They who choose it may fish from boat or ledge: for me, to wade and cast is the poetry of angling.

Assured that the “bogwah” before us extends for half a mile or more, we decide for luncheon, and the canoes are beached on an island, submerged in springtime, but at low water a heap of yellow sands. And I wish I might reconstruct for you the picture which memory too faintly outlines. Mere words will not do it, and yet one is impelled to try. “All literature,” says Mr. Arnold Bennett, in one of his stimulating essays, “is the expression of feeling, of passion, of emotion, caused by a sensation of the interestingness of life. What drives a historian to write history? Nothing but the overwhelming impression forced upon him by the survey of past times. He is forced into an attempt to reconstitute the picture for others.”

And so you are to imagine a marshy, brushy open, circular in shape, from which the hills and forest recede for a considerable distance, and into which a lazy brook comes to merge with the Delectable River; a place to which the moose travel in great numbers, as hoofmarks and cropped vegetation bear witness; a wild place, that must be wonderful in mist and moonlight. Now it is drenched with sunrays from a vaporless sky, and the white-throat is singing all around us – not the usual three sets of three notes, but seven triplets. Elsewhere on the River, days apart, I heard that prolonged melody, and although I have looked in the bird books for record of so sustained a song, I have not found it.

V. – FINE FEATHERS

There is a certain school of anglers that go about the business of fishing with much gravity. You should hear the Great Neal discourse of their profundities. Lacking that privilege, you may conceive a pair of these anglers met beside a river, seeking to discover which of the many insects flying about is preferred by the trout on that particular morning. There is disagreement, or there is lack of evidence. It is decided to catch a trout, eviscerate him, and obtain internal and indisputable evidence. For the cast any fly is used, and when the trout is opened it is learned that he has been feeding on a small black insect; whereupon our anglers tie a number of flies to resemble that insect, and proceed solemnly with their day’s work. Though the trout scorn their fine feathers, they will not fish with any fly.

With the subtleties of this school I have no sympathy. They might be of profit on waters that are much fished, but they are wasted on the wilderness, where the trout will rise to almost any lure. When I make an expedition I take along two or three dozen flies, for the mere pleasure of looking at them, and rearranging them in the fly-book; but I wet less than half a dozen. On the Delectable River we cast only when trout are needed for the frypan. You are to picture canoes drawn up on a sandbar, and a ribbon of black smoke curling from a strip of birch bark that marks the beginning of a fire. It is time to get the fish. So I set up my rod and walk upstream perhaps a hundred yards, casting on the current where it cuts under the farther bank. Almost every cast evokes a trout; this one takes the tail fly, a Silver Doctor, the next one strikes the Bucktail dropper; any other flies would serve. The largest fish is taken on my return, from under the stern of one of the canoes. Where trout are so plentiful and so unwary, there is no call for the preparatory work of the evisceration school of anglers.

My reason for using a dropper fly is not to offer the trout two counterfeit insects differing in shape or color; as commonly attached to the leader, the dropper swims with the tail fly. “Sir,” said the Great Neal, in the manner of Samuel Johnson, “when the dropper is properly attached, as I attach it, two aspects of the lure are presented to the fish, the one fly moving through the water, the other dancing an inch or so above. This, Sir, is how I tie it.”

And sitting at the Oracle’s feet, ye learn “all ye need to know.”

VI. – THALASSA!

Trails there are that one remembers from their beginnings to their ends, because of the variety and charm of the pictures offered along the way. Monotony marks the trails that fade from memory; they represent hours of marching through timber of a second growth, or skirting hills where dead sticks stand forlorn and only the fireweed blooms. Of rememberable roads the last stage of our journey to the Great Water is the one I have now in mind. It is the longest carry, two miles or less, sharply down hill, though less precipitate than the river, which, after many days of idling, now flings itself impatiently toward the shore. We linger where it makes its first great leap. Many have come thus far from the south, and, looking on the shallow pool beyond, have decided that there is no profit in going farther; or they have explored a bit and, encountering bogwah, have reached the same conclusion. Who would conjecture that past the shallows lie leagues of deep and winding waters, reserved by nature as a reward for the adventurer who counts a glimpse of the unknown worth all the labor of the day? We who have come from the headwaters know that nature has as wisely screened the river’s source. Where the lake ends is a forbidding tangle of water shrubs and timber; the outlet is an archipelago of sharp rocks, and the stream, if found, is seen to be small and turbulent.

The last carry keeps the Delectable River in view; foam, seen through the firs, marks its plunging flight. And then we draw away from it for a space, and cross an open thickly strewn with great stones, a sunlit place, where berries and a few flowers are privileged to exist. A little time is spent here in picking up the trail, which has spilled itself among the stones; then, the narrow footway regained, we drop as quickly as the river, and presently our feet touch sand. We break through a fringe of evergreens and cry out as the Greeks cried out when they saw the sea. The lake at last! —

The river, done with wandering,The silver, silent shore.

A LINE-O’-TYPE OR TWO

“Lord, what fools these mortals be.”

ARMS AND THE COLYUMI sing of arms and heroes, not becauseI’m thrilled by what these heroes do or die for:The Colyum’s readers think they make its laws,And I make out to give them what they cry for.And since they cry for stuff about the war,Since war at this safe distance not to them’s hell,I have to write of things that I abhor,And far, strange battlegrounds like Ypres and Przemysl.War is an almost perfect rime for bore;And, ’spite my readers (who have cursed and blessed me),Some day I’ll throw the war junk on the floor,And write of things that really interest me:Of books in running brooks, and wilding wings,Of music, stardust, children, casements givingOn seas unvext by wars, and other thingsThat help to make our brief life worth the living.I sing of arms and heroes, just becauseAll else is shadowed by that topic fearful;But I’ve a mind to chuck it [Loud applause],And tune my dollar harp to themes more cheerful.

Listen, Laura, Mary, Jessica, Dorothy, and other sweet singers! Gadder Roy, who is toiling over the pitcher-and-bowl circuit, wishes that some poet would do a lyric on that salvation of the traveler, Ham and Eggs. He doubts that it can be done by anybody who has not, time out of mind, scanned a greasy menu in a greasier hashery, and finally made it h. and e.

WE FEARED WE HAD STARTED SOMETHING

Sir: Should G. E. Thorpe’s typewritten communications carrying the suggestion GET/FAT precede or follow our communications which carry EAT/ME? E. A. T.

THEY’RE OFF!

Sir: What position in your letter file, respecting the suggestions of GET/FAT, will my typewritten letters land, as they end thusly: “HEL/NO”? H. E. L.

SWEETLY INEFFECTIVE

Sir: Perhaps the reason my collection letters have so little effect lately is that these cheerless communications always conclude with JAM/JAR. J. A. M.

BUT APROPOS

Sir: All this GET/FAT excitement reminds me of the case, so old it’s probably new again, of one Simmons, who wrote letters for one Green, and signed them “Green, per Simmons.” W. S.

SORRY. THERE WERE SEVERAL IN LINE AHEAD OF YOU

Sir: I have been waiting, very patiently, for some one to inform you that the sincerity of A. L. Lewis, manager of the country elevator department of the Quaker Oats Company, is sometimes made questionable by the initials, ALL/GAS, appearing on his business correspondence. O. K.

THE SECOND POST[Received by a clothing company.]

Dear Sirs: I received the suits you sent me but in blue not gray as I said. Don’t try to send me your refuss, I am sending them back. I ain’t color blind or a jack ass, you shouldn’t treat me as that. I understand your wife is making coats for ladies now. Have her make one (dark) for my wife who is a stout 42 with a fer neck. Now send me what I asked for, the old woman is perticular. The trousers you sent wouldn’t slip over my head. Ever faithful, etc.

For Academy Ghost, or Familiar Spirit, P. D. Q. nominates Miss Bessie Spectre of Boston.

“The lake is partially frozen over and well filled with skaters.” – Janesville Gazette.

Three children sliding on the ice,Upon a summer’s day,As it fell out, they all fell in,The rest they ran away.Ma Goose.

There is plenty of snap to the department of mathematics in the Shortridge high school in Indianapolis. The head of the department is Walter G. Gingery.

Wedded, in Chicago, Otho Neer and Lucille Dimond. Fashion your own setting.

Oh, dear! Rollin Pease, the singer, is around again, reminding sundry readers of the difficulty of keeping them on a knife.

“THOSE FLAPJACKS OF BROWN’S.”(Postscriptum.)I’ll write no more verses – plague take ’em! —Court neither your smiles nor your frowns,If you’ll only please tell how to make ’em,Those flapjacks of Brown’s. D. W. A.Three cupfuls of flour will do nicely,And toss in a teaspoon of salt;Next add baking powder, preciselyTwo teaspoons, the stuff to exalt;Of sugar two tablespoons, heaping —(All spoons should be heaping, says Neal);Then mix it with strokes that are sweeping,And stir like the Deil.Three eggs. (Tho’ the missus may sputter,You’ll pay to her protest no heed.)A size-of-an-egg piece of butter,And milk as you happen to need.Now mix the whole mess with a beater;Don’t get it too thick or too thin.(And I pause to remark that this meterIs awkward as sin.)Of course there are touches that onlyA genius like Brown can impart;And genius is everywhere lonely,And no one but Brown has the art.I picture him stirring – a gentleExponent of modern Romance,With his shirttails, in style Oriental,Outside of his pants.THE DICTATERS

Sir: I have lost a year’s growth since I went into business in answering questions about the letters that appear after my communications – HAM/AND. H. A. M.

Letters from the vice-president of the Badger Talking Machine Company of Milwaukee are signed JAS/AK. What do you make of that, Watsonius?

The following was typed at the end of a letter received t’other day: “HEE/HA.”

Recurring to the dictaters, letters from the O’Meara Paper company of New York are tagged JEW/EM.

Irene, she works for David Meyer,Likes her job, not peeved a bit.But when she ends a letter sheMarks it with this sign, DAM/IT.Ferro.

Hint to students in the School of journalism: Always begin the description of a tumultuous scene by saying that it is indescribable, and then proceed to describe it until the telegraph editor chokes you off.

To our young friend who expects to operate a column: Lay off the item about Miss Hicks entertaining Carrie Dedbeete and Ima Proone; it is phony. But the wheeze about the “eternal revenue collector” is still good, and timely.

“I am a cub reporter,” writes W. H. D., “and am going to conduct a column in a few weeks, I think.” Zazzo? Well, you can’t do better than to start with the announcement that Puls & Puls are dentists in Sheboygan. And you might add that if the second Puls is a son the firm should be Puls & Fils.

Our cub reporter friend, W. H. D., who expects to run a column presently, should not overlook the sure-fire wheeze, “Shoes shined on the inside.”

Still undiscouraged by the failure of his “shoes shined on the inside” wheeze to get by, the new contrib hopefully sends us the laundry slogan: “Don’t kill your wife. Let us do the dirty work.”

When all the world is safe for democracy, only the aristocracy of taste will remain, and this will cover the world. There is hardly a town so small that it does not contain at least one member. All races belong to it, and its passwords are accepted in every capital. Its mysteries are Rosicrucian to persons without taste. And no other aristocracy was ever, or ever will be, so closely and sympathetically knit together.

Whether Europe and Latin America like it or not, the Monroe Doctrine must and shall be preserved. You may remember the case of the man who was accused of being a traitor. It was charged that he had spoken as disrespectfully of the Monroe Doctrine as Jeffrey once spoke of the Equator. This the man denied vigorously. He avowed that he loved the Monroe Doctrine, that he was willing to fight for it, and, if necessary, to die for it. All he had said was that he didn’t know what it was about.

“There will be no speeches. The entire evening will be given over to entertainment.” – Duluth News-Tribune.

At least prohibition is a check on oratory.

We have just been talking to an optimist, whose nerves have been getting shaky. We fancy that a straw vote of the rocking-chair fleet on a sanitarium porch would show a preponderance of optimists. What brought them there? Worry, which is brother to optimism. We attribute our good health and reasonable amount of hair to the fact that we never flirted with optimism, except for a period of about five years, during which time we lost more hair than in all the years since.

May we again point out that pessimism is the only cheerful philosophy? The pessimist is not concerned over the so-called yellow peril – at least the pessimist who subscribes to the theory of the degradation of energy. Europe is losing its pep, but so is Asia. There may be a difference of degree, but not enough to keep one from sleeping soundly o’ nights. The twentieth or twenty-first century can not produce so energetic a gang as that which came out of Asia in the fifth century.

“If I had no duties,” said Dr. Johnson, “and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a postchaise with a pretty woman.” And we wonder whether the old boy, were he living now, would choose, instead, a Ford.

In time of freeze prepare for thaw. And no better advice can be given than Doc Robertson’s: “Keep your feet dry and your gutters open.”

There was an Irish meeting in Janesville the other night, and the press reported that “Garlic songs were sung.” And we recall another report of a lecture on Yeats and the Garlic Revival. Just a moment, while we take a look at the linotype keyboard…

THINGS WORTH KNOWING

Sir: A method of helping oneself to soda crackers, successfully employed by a traveling man, may be of interest to your boarding house readers. Slice off a small piece of butter, leaving it on the knife, then reach across the table and slap the cracker. V.

By the way, Bismarck had a solution of the Irish problem which may have been forgotten. He proposed that the Irish and the Dutch exchange countries. The Dutch, he said, would make a garden of Ireland. “And the Irish?” he was asked. “Oh,” he replied, “the Irish would neglect the dikes.”

A city is known by the newspapers it keeps. They reflect the tastes of the community, and if they are lacking in this or that it is because the community is lacking. And so it is voxpoppycock to complain that a newspaper is not what a small minority thinks it ought to be. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our journals, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Dissatisfaction with American newspapers began with the first one printed, and has been increasing steadily since. In another hundred years this dissatisfaction may develop into positive annoyance.

We tried to have a sign in Los Onglaze translated into French for the benefit of Lizy, the linotype operator who sets this column in Paris, and who says she has yet to get a laugh out of it, but two Frenchmen who tried their hand at it gave it up. Perhaps the compositor at the adjacent machine can randmacnally it for Lizy. Here is the enseigne:

“Flannels washed without shrinking in the rear.”

To the fair Murine: “Drink to me only with thine eyes.”

“Hosiery for Easter,” declares an enraptured ad writer in the Houston Post, “reaches new heights of loveliness.”

If the persons who parade around with placards announcing that this or that shop is “unfair” were to change the legend to read, “God is unfair,” they might get a sympathetic rise out of us. We might question the assertion that in creating men unequal the Creator was actuated by malice rather than a sense of humor, but we should not insist on the point.