I Was Driven Back To The Cabin In The Late
Afternoon, And In The Evening Listened For Two Hours To
Abuse of
my own country, and to sweeping condemnations of all religionists
outside of the brotherhood of "Psalm-singers." It
Is jarring and
painful, yet I would say of Chalmers, as Dr. Holland says of
another: -
If ever I shall reach the home in heaven,
For whose dear rest I humbly hope and pray,
In the great company of the forgiven
I shall be sure to meet old Daniel Gray.
The night came without coolness, but at daylight on Monday
morning a fire was pleasant. You will now have some idea of my
surroundings. It is a moral, hard, unloving, unlovely,
unrelieved, unbeautified, grinding life. These people live in a
discomfort and lack of ease and refinement which seems only
possible to people of British stock. A "foreigner" fills his
cabin with ingenuities and elegancies, and a Hawaiian or South
Sea Islander makes his grass house both pretty and tasteful. Add
to my surroundings a mighty canyon, impassable both above and
below, and walls of mountains with an opening some miles off to
the vast prairie sea.[9]
[9] I have not curtailed this description of the roughness
of a Colorado settler's life, for, with the exceptions of the
disrepair and the Puritanism, it is a type of the hard,
unornamented existence with which I came almost universally in
contact during my subsequent residence in the Territory.
An English physician is settled about half a mile from here over
a hill. He is spoken of as holding "very extreme opinions."
Chalmers rails at him for being "a thick-skulled Englishman," for
being "fine, polished," etc. To say a man is "polished" here is
to give him a very bad name. He accuses him also of holding
views subversive of all morality. In spite of all this, I
thought he might possess a map, and I induced Mrs. C. to walk
over with me. She intended it as a formal morning call, but she
wore the inevitable sun-bonnet, and had her dress tied up as when
washing. It was not till I reached the gate that I remembered
that I was in my Hawaiian riding dress, and that I still wore the
spurs with which I had been trying a horse in the morning! The
house was in a grass valley which opened from the tremendous
canyon through which the river had cut its way. The Foot Hills,
with their terraces of flaming red rock, were glowing in the
sunset, and a pure green sky arched tenderly over a soft evening
scene. Used to the meanness and baldness of settlers' dwellings.
I was delighted to see that in this instance the usual log cabin
was only the lower floor of a small house, which bore a
delightful resemblance to a Swiss chalet. It stood in a
vegetable garden fertilized by an irrigating ditch, outside of
which were a barn and cowshed.
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