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Show I a ,. , T - ' i A Line o I ype or 1 wo - : ! ''Fay ce que voUras. DY B. L. T. The Back Trail. I. ? 4 0.3. Fork, bear right Sipn "Cv.rr.-ir.ln.cton.' "Cv.rr.-ir.ln.cton.' keeping left ac.uss sruaU iron brlQKe 9.2 into 5.u (Jor.en. Hotel on left. Straight on Autom.ooile Ulue Book. Straight on was the road to the valley of tha Swift river, in which vaie the iniet Bryant waa born; but, as I reiaad ai'ier a previous visit four years aco my pre-encrt pre-encrt in the noiciiborhood was due to a desire to look once more upon rny mrth-p!a.-e. the top of Gushen Hlii. In S.-pte:n-ber of I Itng.-rea scarcely five min utes. The day v.s.s one. it l::td i :i the hottest of the summer, and o? many other summers. The faintest of brt-ezr-s drifted over the hilltop, and I should have remained there till the mo ruins ; but prompted by sentiment I cont'.nuoi un lo WililameburjE, where my father was born and hts father before him. (inly a salamander sala-mander could have beon comfortable there on such a night, and the heat and a bud dinner extinguished for tho linie my interest in-terest In the place, from which I departed the following morning, "nor cast one longing, long-ing, lingering look behind." "People are sometimes blamed," says Anatole France, "for speaking of themselves. them-selves. Yt it is the subject which they treat of best. They are interested in It themselves, and they often make us share in that intoresit. There are, I know, wearisome confidences, but the bores who plague us by telling us their own historU-s completely overpower us when they relate those of other people. A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself." It may very well be thp.t the confidences which a glimpse of Goshen Hill has prompted are wearisome, more likely to overpower than the history of a character in fiction. And I am certain that I have feit more interest in the characters I have brief y evoked than in any of my own adventures. But this may be because every ono who writes fiction puts something some-thing of himself into all of his characters. Ho cannot do otherwise, much as he would like to. It would be very nice to step outside of one'e self and survey mankind man-kind from China to Peru, but no one has succeeded in doing this, not even, one may venture, that master of fiction, the-creator the-creator of the universe. The blazes along the Back Trail are faint and far between, and among tho faintest are those in Goshen. The home of my parents' was really New York City, whither I was removed a few weeks after my introduction to the world. To write interestingly about one's childhood, one ought to have had an Interesting childhood, child-hood, and mine, it seems to me, was the dullest imaginable, passed as it was in the wilderness of brick and stone which constituted Manhattan Island In the Black Walnut Period. My earliest years were spent in a really interesting section of the city, Greenwich Village. Macdougal alley, now the haunt of artists, who have converted con-verted stables into studios, was part of my playground; and Varick street, into which nil roads led why, that was the broadest and handsomest thoroughfare imaginable. There were then no Purple Cows, or Rabbit Holes, or other bohemian lairs, but even when I was nine or ten I sensed the difference between Greenwich Village and Yorkville, in which drab neighborhood my parents misguidedly established es-tablished themselves. I have always regretted re-gretted that I was not brought up amid country scenes. My childhood was defrauded de-frauded of trees. To be sure, there were trees in Centra! park, but these must have appeared to me like the trees of Stage-land. Stage-land. It was not until I was about eighteen, eight-een, when I went to live in Franklin county, Massachusetts, that I made acquaintance ac-quaintance of a real landscape; and it is to the sudden rovealment of the lovely New England countryside that I trace my never diminishing love of trees, especially es-pecially the pine. George Moore holds that the pine is not a tree at all, and you readily understand that a person of "his temperament would prefer a beech or an oak. One cannot kiss under a pine and then run and te!!, and Moore had to make "copy" of all his kisses. They made delightful de-lightful copy, but it was rather sever on the ladies. A week or so ago I met my friend the Doctor, and he remarked that he was on I the edge of starting for another vovage on the Delectable River. He added, with a malicious smile, "Don't you want to join me?" That was bad enough, but he went on to relate that last summer he discovered four new lakes, each as heau-tiful heau-tiful as the miracle-of loveliness to which Tawab the Indian led him some vears ago. I asked where the trail to these Jewels left the river, and as I asked memory unrolled the chart of the stream, from the small lake in which it headed to the great lake into which it debouched. Did I remember Tawab's portage? The trail began near there. Yes, I remembered that portage a mere lift around a jam of fallen trees. There was a wide, foam-flecked foam-flecked pool below the jam. and our camp was on the east bank, which was high, and the forest was more open than usual. There was no wind stirring, and the smoke from our fire rose as straight as the smoke from the bottle which the fisherman fisher-man in the Arabian Nights found in his net. But this was not a wood in which one might hope or fear to meet a Geni. Instead, one thought of the Valkyries riding by. under the steel-gray sky, streaked with the rose of a Canadian sunset, or of young Siegfried on his way to annihilate the dragon. The trees in Central park never suggested anything to me, except that I might lean against them while I buckled on mv skates. They must indeed have seemed mere "property" "prop-erty" trees, else when passing under them at night I should have peopled their shadows with the queer folk of the Grimm tales. My imagination was lively enough at the time. The mise en scene was at fault. My. school days must have been extremely ex-tremely commonplace, I remember so little lit-tle concerning them. I attended a public , school in East Fifty-seventh street, but ! the only other student that I recall was ! a tall, dark-haired youth who. at gradua- tion. recited "Horatiua at the Bririo-p." ! Yes, I remember the principal, an amiable Irishman, who snid "fut" when he obviously ob-viously meant "fgot." I was not unfamiliar un-familiar with the accent, for my mother's father was as Irish as Paddy's pig, and grandmother would have fitted nicely fnto the stage pictures of the Abbey theater. They were, however, town folk, living in Dublin; but what their manner of life was I have never thought to inquire. Nor do I know any more concerning my Massachusetts Massa-chusetts grandparents. They were. I believe, be-lieve, respectable, and so there never was even the promise of a rope's end to stimulate stimu-late curiosity. Genealogy (usually pronounced pro-nounced geneology) Is a noble science, and there are many eminent and worthy practitioners of it. Mr. James "Branch Cabell, for example, is an expert in supplying sup-plying family trees as John Wellington Wells was in supplying love philtres. Rut the family tree is the one species that does not encage my interest. All I know of mine, and care to know, Is that I am at the top, where there is plenty of sunlight. sun-light. If you are not "completely overpowered'' will you return with me, for a few more paragraphs, to the top of Goshen Hill and the modern dwelling on the site nf which once stood a farmhouse of the sort called rambling, and in a room of which farmhouse farm-house the writer of these rambling reminiscences remi-niscences first expressed his dissatisfaction dissatisfac-tion with the best and worst of all possible pos-sible worlds. |