Both the weather and the country improved before I reached Williamsport. On the height of the road to Hughesville I had a grand view of the mountains and of the sky above them, saw displayed green hills and forested mountains, and great stretches of ploughed upland all dotted over with white heaps of fertiliser. And the sky above was a battle-scene, the sun and his angels having given battle and the clouds taking ranks like an army. Glad was I to see to eastward whole battalions in retreat.
I passed through fine forested land with great hemlocks, maples, and hickories. A brawling stream poured along through the dark wood, and as I walked beside it a sudden gleam of sunshine pierced the gloom of foliage, and lit up boles and wet banks and wet rocks and the crystal freshets of the stream. Of all weathers I like best convalescent weather, the getting sunny after much rain. On the Sunday on which I reached the city the open road was swept by fresh winds, all the birds were singing, every blade of grass was conscious of rain taken in and of the sun bringing out.
[Pg 162]
Williamsport I found to be a peaceful, provincial town, well kept in itself and surrounded by beautiful scenery. It was looking its best in the freshness and radiance of a May morning. On its many hundred bright green lawns that run down so graciously from pleasant urban villas to the roadway there was much white linen airing. Williamsport is an old lumbering town on a branch of the Susquehanna, and though that business has gone away, prosperity and happiness seem to have remained behind. There was a feeling of calmness that I had not experienced in other American cities, and I felt it would be pleasant to live there for a season.
I tramped down to Jersey Shore, and the night after my halcyon day at Williamsport a thunderstorm overtook me, shaking the old barn in which I slept and tearing away rafters and doors. I witnessed Lockhaven under depressing circumstances, but in any weather it must be an inferior town to Williamsport, though it is also an old point for lumbering on the Susquehanna.
The weather remained very rainy, and I was obliged to forsake the atrociously clayey high-road for the cinder track of the railway. In doing this I passed up into a fine hilly country along the valley of the Beech Creek. I came to Mapes (to rhyme with Shapes), but found it a name and no more. A shooting and fishing resort with one house in it. The Beech[Pg 163] Creek was a fine sight, running along the base of the embankment of the railway, carrying pine logs on its flood and racing the trains with them, roaring and rushing, the logs pointing, racing, turning, rolling, toppling, colliding, but always going forward, willy-nilly getting clear of every obstacle and galloping out of sight.
With one wet match I lighted a grand fire by the side of the line, and boiled my kettle and dried myself and chuckled. It might be going to rain more. I might be going to have a queer night, but for the time being I was having a splendid tea. It was a matter for consolation in the future that on the wettest possible day it was not difficult to light a fire with one match. The secret lies in having plenty of dry paper in your wallet; and I had a copy of a New York Sunday paper, which lasted me to light my fire all the way to Elkhart, Indiana, at least five hundred miles' tramping.
The district of Mapes is one of the most beauteous in the Alleghanies, or it was so this quiet evening. The summits of the mountains were obscured by mists, but up from the profound valleys the woods climbed, and the lovely tops of trees seemed like so many stepping-stones from the land up to cloudy heaven.
By the time I came to Monument it was dark. But a great glowing brick-kiln looked out into the[Pg 164] night, and there were houses with many lighted windows. I was directed to a workmen's boarding-house, and spent a night among miners, railway men, and brick-workers. The keeper of the establishment was doubtful whether he would have me, but thought there was "one feller on the third floor gone."
"What will be your charge?" I asked.
"Well," said he, "a won't charge ye anything for the bed, but the breakfast to-morrow morning will be twenty-five cents."
"My!" I thought, "here's something choice coming along in the shape of a bed."
It turned out to be four in a room and two in a bed, all sleeping in their clothes. There was even some doubt as to whether there was not a fifth coming.
One man was in bed already; I chose the unoccupied bed, and laid myself upon it in full tramping attire. You can imagine the state of sheets and quilts in a bed that brickmakers and soft-coal miners sleep in their clothes.
The man in bed was an Anglo-Saxon American. When I said I was from England he asked me if I had walked it all.
"I came by steamer of course to New York."
"How many days?"
"Eight."
"Weren't you afraid?" said he. "Quite out of sight of land no doubt? You wouldn't get me to go,[Pg 165] not for many thousand dollars. That Titanic was an affair, wasn't it. Fifteen hundred—straight to the bottom! I'd have shot myself had I been there."
"What do you work at here?"
"Brick-making."
"Lot of men?"
"Plenty of work. Two truck-loads of extra men coming to-morrow."
"Foreigners?"
"Italians."
I told him the story of a storm at sea with the exaggeration to which one is too prone when addressing simple souls. I rather harrowed him with an account of cook's enamel ware and kitchen things rolling about and jangling when every one was saying his prayers.
Presently I remarked irrelevantly, "My goodness! What a noise the frogs make here!"
"That's no noise," said he; "I'm going to sleep."
After a while his bedfellow came in and he, before turning in, got down on his knees in the narrow passage between the beds and prayed—I should say, a whole half-hour, talking half to himself, half-aloud. Whilst he was doing so my bedfellow came in, a tall, heavy, tired Pole, who looked neither to right nor left, but just clambered over me and lay down with his face to the wall and slept and snored.
It rained heavily all night, and next morning it[Pg 166] still poured. After a disreputably bad breakfast I sat on a chair at the door of the establishment and watched the thresh of the rain on two great pools beside a road of coal-dust, looked out at the lank grass, the tomato-can dump, the sodden refuse of the boarding-house, and away to the square red chimney of the brick factory belching forth black smoke.
"Say, stranger," said mine host, "I'm going to wade into that cave and hand out potatoes; will you take them from me?" This was the first time I had been called stranger in America, and it sounded pleasant in my ears.
About eleven o'clock in the morning the rain ceased, and I went on to the next point on the railway. The track climbed higher and higher, and I learned that on the morrow I should reach the top of the Alleghany Mountains—Snow Shoe Creek.
It was a fine walk to Orviston under the heavily clouded sky. The mountain sides were all a-leak with springs and trickling streams and cascades. There was an accompanying music of the racing Beech Creek on the one hand, and of the gushing rivulets on the other; but this would be swallowed up and lost every now and then in the uproar of the oncoming and passing freight train of coal; the appalling, hammering, affrighting freight train passing within two feet of me, taking my breath away with the thought of its power. How pleasant it was, though, to listen[Pg 167] to the rebirth of the music of the waters coming to the ear in the wind of the last trucks as they passed.
SLOVAKS WORKING ON THE LINE WITH PICK AND SHOVEL
"SLOVAKS WORKING ON THE LINE WITH PICK AND SHOVEL."
Orviston prides itself on its fire-bricks. The whole village is made of them, and the pavement as well, and every brick is stamped "Orviston," and is both a commodity and an advertisement.
After I had visited the village store for provisions I re-entered the railway enclosure, and read as I did so the following notice typical of America: "Cultivate the safety habit—if you see anything wrong report it to the man with the button."
I met the man with the button after I had walked a mile along the way; he was a Slovak, working on the line with pick and shovel, a tall, brawny Slav, and with him a rather tubby little chap of the same nationality.
"You haf no r?it on these l?ins," said the Slovak. "You go off. You are no railway man. What are you? Slavish?"
I replied in English, but on second thoughts went on in Russian. He understood, and was mollified at once. He was in America for the second time, they neither of them liked the old country. I photographed them as they stood—John Kresica and Paul Cipriela. They were unmarried men, and lived in a "boarding-house" in Orviston. They worked in a gang. Would I please send them a copy of the photograph? I agreed to do so; then, when I moved to go off the lines, the man with the button cried out, smiling:
[Pg 168]
"Hi! All-right, go ahead!"
I went on blithely. There was a change of weather in the afternoon. At one o'clock the sun lifted his arms and pulled apart the mist curtains at the zenith and disclosed himself—a miraculous apparition. The whole sky was cloudy, but the sun was shining. An apparition, the ghost of a sun, and then a reality—hot, light-pouring, cloud-dispersing. By two it was a hot summer day, at three there was not a cloud in the sky. What a change! It was clear that summer had progressed during the rain; insects of bright hues were on the wing, huge yellow-winged butterflies, crimson-thighed grasshoppers, green sun-beetles. A new-born butterfly settled three times on my sleeve; the fourth time I just caught him. I held him delicately between two fingers and let him go.
During a most exhilarating evening I tramped past houseless Panther and got to Cato at nightfall. Cato was a railway station of no pretensions; a broken-down shed with no door, no ticket offices, no porter. Passengers who wished to take a train had to wave a flag and trust to the eyesight of the engine-driver. For village, all that I could make out was a coal-bank, a shaft, and some heaps of o............