Sinners and Saints A Tour Across the States and Round Them, with Three Months Among the Mormons

To an insular traveller, it is a prodigiously long journey this, across the continent of America, but I found the journey a perpetual enjoyment. Even the dull country of the first hour's travelling had many points of interest for the stranger--scattered hamlets of wooden houses that were only joined together by straggling strings of cocks and hens; the others that seemed to have been trying to scramble over the hill and down the other side but were caught just as they got to the top and pinned down to the ground with lightning conductors; the others that had palings round them to keep them from running away, but had got on to piles as if they were stilts and intended (when no one was looking) to skip over the palings and go away; the others that had rows of dwarf fir-trees in front of them, through which they stared out of both their windows like a forward child affecting to be shy behind its fingers. These fir-trees are themselves very curious, for they give the country a half-cultivated appearance, and in some places make the hillsides and valleys look like immense cemeteries, and only waiting for the tombstones. Even the levels of flooded land and the scorched forests were of interest, as significant of a country still busy over its rudiments.

"All charcoal and puddles," said a fellow-traveller disparagingly; "I'm very glad we're going so fast through it."

Now for my own part I think it looks very uncivil of a train to go with a screech through a station without stopping, and I always wish I could say something in the way of an apology to the station-master for the train's bad manners. No doubt people who live in very small places get accustomed to trains rushing past their platforms without stopping even to say "By your leave." But at first it must be rather painful. At least I should think it was. On the other hand, the people "in the mofussil" (which is the Anglo-Indian for "all the country outside one's own town") did not pay much attention to our train. Everybody went about their several works for all the world as if we were not flashing by. Even the dogs trotted about indifferently, without even so much as noticing us, except occasionally some distant mongrel, who barked at the train as if it was a stray bullock, and smiled complacently upon the adjoining landscape when he found how thoroughly he had frightened it away.

There seemed to me a curious dearth of small wild life. The English "country" is so full of birds that all others seem, by comparison, birdles. Once, I saw a russet-winged hawk hovering over a copse of water-oak as if it saw something worth eating there; once, too, I saw a blue-bird brighten a clump of cedars. Now and again a vagabond crow drifted across the sky. But, as compared with Europe or parts of the East which I know best, bird-life was very scanty.

And presently Philadelphia came sliding along to meet us with a stately decorum of metalled roads and well-kept public grounds, and we stopped for the first of the twelve halts, worth calling such, which I had to make in the 3000 miles between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

How treacherously the trains in America start! There is no warning given, so far as an ordinary passenger can see, that the start is under contemplation, and it takes him by surprise. The American understands that "All aboard" means "If you don't jump up at once you'll be left behind." But to those accustomed to a "first" and a "second" and a "third" bell--and accustomed, too, not to get up even then until the guard has begged them as a personal favour to take their seats--the sudden departure of the American locomotive presents itself as a rather shabby sort of practical joke.

The quiet, unobtrusive scenery beyond Philadelphia is English in character, and would be still more so if there were hedges instead of railings. By the way, whenever reading biographical notices of distinguished Americans I have been surprised to find that so many of them at one time or other had "split rails" for a subsistence. But now that I have followed the "course of empire" West, I am not the least surprised. I only wonder that every American has not split rails, at one time or another, or, indeed, gone on doing it all his life. For how such a prodigious quantity of rails ever got split (even supposing distinguished men to have assisted in the industry in early life) passes my feeble comprehension. All the way from New York to Chicago there are on an average twenty lines of split rails running parallel with the railway track, in sight all at once! And after all, this is only one narrow strip across a gigantic continent. In fact, the two most prominent "natural features" of the landscape along this route are dwarf firs and split rails. But no writer on America has ever told me so. Nor have I ever been told of the curious misapprehension prevalent in the States as to the liberty of the subject in the British Isles.

In America, judging at any rate from the speech of "the average American," I find that there is a belief prevalent that the English nation "lies prostrate under the heel of a tyrant." What a shock to those who think thus, must have been that recent episode of the queen's pigs at Slough!

Six swine and a calf belonging to her Majesty found themselves, the other day, impounded by the Slough magistrates for coming to market without a licence. Slough, from geographical circumstances over which it has no control, happens to be in Buckinghamshire, and this country has been declared "an infected district," so that the bailiff who brought his sovereign's pigs to market, without due authority to do so, transgressed the law. Two majesties thus came into collision over the calf, and that of the law prevailed. Such a constitutional triumph as this goes far to clear away the clouds that appeared to be gathered upon the political horizon, and the shadows of a despotic dictatorship which seemed to be falling across England begin to vanish. The written law, contained probably in a very dilapidated old copy in the possession of these rural magistrates, a dogs'-eared and, it may be, even a ragged volume, asserted itself supreme over a monarch's farmyard stock, and dared to break down that divinity which doth hedge a Sovereign's swine. There are some who say that in the British Isles men are losing their reverence for the law, and that justice wears two faces, one for the rich and another for the poor. They would have us believe that only the parasites of princes sit in high place, and that the scales of justice rise or fall according to the inclinations of the sceptre, with the obsequious regularity of the tides that wait upon the humours of the moon. But such an incident as this, when the Justices of Slough, those intrepid Hampdens, sate sternly in their places, and, fearless of Royal frowns and all the displeasure of Windsor, dispensed to the pigs, born in the purple, and to the calf that had lived so near a throne, the impartial retribution of a fine--with costs--gives a splendid refutation to these calumnies. Where shall we look in Republican history for such another incident? or where search for dauntless magistrates like those of Slough, who shut their eyes against the reflected glitter of a Court, who fined the Royal calf for risking the health of Hodge's miserable herd, and gave the costs against the Imperial pigs for travelling into Buckinghamshire without a licence? Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. There was no truckling here to borrowed majesty, no sycophant adulation of Royal ownership; but that fine old English spirit of courageous independence which has made tyrants impossible in our island and our law supreme. It was of no use before such men as these, the stout-hearted champions of equal justice, for the bailiff to plead manorial privilege, or to threaten the thunders of the House of Brunswick. They were as implacable as a bench of Rhadamanthuses, and gave these distinguished hogs the grim choice between paying a pound or going to one. Nor, to their credit be it said, did either bailiff, calf, or pigs exhibit resentment. On the contrary, they accepted judgment with that respectful acquiescence which characterizes our law-abiding race, and the swine turned without a murmur from the scene of their repulse, and trotted cheerfully before the bailiff out of Buckinghamshire back to Windsor.

The bailiff, no doubt, bethought him of the past, and wished the good old days of feudalism were back, when a King's pig was a better man than a Buckinghamshire magistrate. But if he did, he abstained from saying so. On the contrary, he paid his fine like a loyal subject, and gathering his innocent charges round him went forth, more in sorrow than in anger, from the presence of the magisterial champions of the public interests. The punished pigs, too, may have felt, perhaps, just a twinge of regret for the days when they roamed at will over the oak-grown shires, infecting each other as they chose, without any thought of Contagious Diseases Acts or vigilant justices. But they said nothing; and the spectacle of an upright stipendiary dispensing impartial justice to a law-abiding aristocracy was thus complete.

To return to my car. Beyond Philadelphia the country was waking up for Spring. The fields were all flushed with the first bright promise of harvest; blackbirds--reminding me of the Indian king-crows in their sliding manner of flight and the conspicuous way in which they use their tails as rudders--were flying about in sociable parties; and flocks of finches went jerking up the hill-sides by fits and starts after the fashion of these frivolous little folk.

A mica-schist (it may be gneiss) abounds along the railway track, and it occurred to me that I had never, except in India, seen this material used for the ornamentation of houses. Yet it is very beautiful. In the East they beat it up into a powder--some is white, some yellow--and after mixing it with weak lime and water, wash the walls with it, the result being a very effective although subdued sparkle, in some places silvery, in others golden.

Nearing Harrisburg the country begins to resemble upper Natal very strongly, and when we reached the Susquehanna, I could easily have believed that we were on the Mooi, on the borders of Zululand. But the superior majesty of the American river soon asserted itself, and I forgot the comparison altogether as I looked out on this truly noble stream, with the finely wooded hills leaning back from it on either side, as if to give its waters more spacious way.

And then Harrisburg, and the same stealthy departure of the train. But outside the station our having started was evident enough, for a horse that had been left to look after a buggy for a few minutes, took fright, and with three frantic kangaroo-leaps tried to take the conveyance whole over a wall. But failing in this, it careered away down the road with the balance of the buggy dangling in a draggle-tail sort of way behind it.

Nature works with so few ingredients that landscape repeats itself in every continent. For there is a limit, after all, to the combinations possible of water, mountain, plain, valley, and vegetation. This is strictly true, of course, only when we deal with things generically. Specific combinations go beyond arithmetic. But even with her species, Nature delights in singing over old songs and telling the tales she has already told. For instance here, after passing Harrisburg, is a wonderful glimpse of Naini Tal in the Indian hills--memorable for a terribly fatal landslip three years ago--with its oaks and rhododendrons and scattered pines. In the valleys the streams go tumbling along with willows on either bank, and here and there on the hillsides, shine white houses with orchards about them.