St. Paul, Standing At The Barn-Door Of The Dakota And Minnesota
Granaries, Is All Things To All Men Except To Minneapolis, Eleven Miles
Away, Whom She Hates And By Whom She Is Patronised.
She calls herself
the capital of the North-West, the new North-West, and her citizens
wear, not only the tall silk hat of trade, but the soft slouch of the
West.
She talks in another tongue than the New Yorker, and - sure sign
that we are far across the continent - her papers argue with the San
Francisco ones over rate wars and the competition of railway companies.
St. Paul has been established many years, and if one were reckless
enough to go down to the business quarters one would hear all about her
and more also. But the residential parts of the town are the crown of
it. In common with scores of other cities, broad-crowned suburbs - using
the word in the English sense - that make the stranger jealous. You get
here what you do not get in the city - well-paved or asphalted roads,
planted with trees, and trim side-walks, studded with houses of
individuality, not boorishly fenced off from each other, but standing
each on its plot of well-kept turf running down to the pavement. It is
always Sunday in these streets of a morning. The cable-car has taken the
men down town to business, the children are at school, and the big dogs,
three and a third to each absent child, lie nosing the winter-killed
grass and wondering when the shoots will make it possible for a
gentleman to take his spring medicine. In the afternoon, the children on
tricycles stagger up and down the asphalt with due proportion of big
dogs at each wheel; the cable-cars coming up hill begin to drop the men
each at his own door - the door of the house that he builded for himself
(though the architect incited him to that vile little attic tower and
useless loggia), and, naturally enough, twilight brings the lovers
walking two by two along the very quiet ways. You can tell from the
houses almost the exact period at which they were built, whether in the
jig-saw days, when if behoved respectability to use unlovely turned
rails and pierced gable-ends, or during the Colonial craze, which means
white paint and fluted pillars, or in the latest domestic era, a most
pleasant mixture, that is, of stained shingles, hooded dormer-windows,
cunning verandas, and recessed doors. Seeing these things, one begins to
understand why the Americans visiting England are impressed with the old
and not with the new. He is not much more than a hundred years ahead of
the English in design, comfort, and economy, and (this is most
important) labour-saving appliances in his house. From Newport to San
Diego you will find the same thing to-day.
Last tribute of respect and admiration. One little brown house at the
end of an avenue is shuttered down, and a doctor's buggy stands before
it.
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