Maiden Voyages by Mary Morris Read Free Book Online

milkman.
    “Well now, so you be from the old country? Ay—you’ll see sights here, I guess.”
    “I hope I shall see many.”
    “That’s a fact. I expect your little place of an island don’t grow such dreadful fine corn as you sees here?”
    “It grows no corn at all, sir.”
    “Possible! no wonder, then, that we reads such awful stories in the papers of your poor people being starved to death.”
    “We have wheat, however.”
    “Ay, for your rich folks, but I calculate the poor seldom gets a belly full.”
    “You have certainly much greater abundance here.”
    “I expect so. Why they do say, that if a poor body contrives to be smart enough to scrape together a few dollars, that your King George always comes down upon ’em, and takes it all away. Don’t he?”
    “I do not remember hearing of such a transaction.”
    “I guess they be pretty close about it. Your papers ben’t like ourn, I reckon? Now we says and prints just what we likes.”
    “You spend a good deal of time in reading the newspapers.”
    “And I’d like you to tell me how we can spend it better. How should freemen spend their time, but looking after their government, and watching that them fellers as we gives offices to, doos their duty, and gives themselves no airs?”
    “But I sometimes think, sir, that your fences might be in more thorough repair, and your roads in better order, if less time was spent in politics.”
    “The Lord! to see how little you knows of a free country! Why, what’s the smoothness of a road, put against the freedom of a free-born American? And what does a broken zig-zag signify, comparable to knowing that the men what we have been pleased to send up to Congress, speaks handsome and straight, as we chooses they should?”
    “It is from a sense of duty, then, that you all go to the liquor store to read the papers?”
    “To be sure it is, and he’d be no true born American as didn’t. I don’t say that the father of a family should always be after liquor, but I do say that I’d rather have my son drunk three times in a week, than not look after the affairs of his country.”
    Our autumn walks were delightful; the sun ceased to scorch; the want of flowers was no longer peculiar to Ohio; and the trees took a colouring, which in richness, brillance, and variety, exceeded all description. I think it is the maple, or sugar-tree, that first sprinkles the forest with rich crimson; the beech follows, with all its harmony of golden tints, from pale yellow up to brightest orange. The dog-wood gives almostthe purple colour of the mulberry; the chestnut softens all with its frequent mass of delicate brown, and the sturdy oak carries its deep green into the very lap of winter. These tints are too bright for the landscape painter; the attempt to follow nature in an American autumn scene must be abortive. The colours are in reality extremely brilliant, but the medium through which they are seen increases the effect surprisingly. Of all the points in which America has the advantage of England, the one I felt most sensibly was the clearness and brightness of the atmosphere. By day and by night this exquisite purity of air gives tenfold beauty to every object. I could hardly believe the stars were the same; the Great Bear looked like a constellation of suns; and Jupiter justified all the fine things said of him in those beautiful lines, from I know not what spirited pen, beginning,
    I looked on thee, Jove! till my gaze
    Shrunk, smote by the pow’r of thy blaze.
    I always remarked that the first silver line of the moon’s crescent attracted the eye on the first day, in America, as strongly as it does here on the third. I observed another phenomenon in the crescent moon of that region, the cause of which I less understood. That appearance which Shakespeare describes as “the new moon, with the old moon in her lap,” and which I have heard ingeniously explained as the effect of
earth light
, was less visible there than