Felipa and Christopher Discover America: One Star Differeth From Another Star

BEFORE Felipa was married, her world centred in the Shenandoah Valley and was bounded by the rest of Virginia.

When Christopher came for her out of the Kentucky Blue-Grass, her horizon lifted to include another state, and for the next twenty-five years, in Kentucky and Tennessee, in Illinois and on the Pacific Coast, she and Christopher explored the country. Everywhere they found beauty and made friends, but they are sure that if they should live in as many states as there are stars in the flag, in each they would discover a new America.

I

Their first home was in the Cumberland Mountains. The very guests at their wedding had reproached Christopher for taking Felipa to live ‘a hundred miles from nowhere, with nothing to do, nothing to see, and nobody to talk to.'

Christopher, certainly, found something to do, for he was manager of an independent coal-mining company, and the miners were native-born, landholders, and amenable to no law but their own. When ‘oak leaves the size of a squirrel’s ear’ dictated the time for corn planting, they were as apt as not to leave the mines and go to ploughing.

And ‘Nothing to do!’ thought Felipa, resentfully, as she struggled with her first housekeeping a hundred miles from a good market and three rough mountain miles from a country store. When the cook fell ill, life assumed the aspect of adventure, for Felipa’s knowledge of cooking was embryonic, and she had yet to learn that it was possible to keep house without making hot bread three times a day.

‘Nothing to see!’ Felipa wished that the friends who had caviled at Christopher’s choice could stand with her and see the panorama visible from the cabin porch. The cabin itself was a development — Felipa would have said a glorification, of Christopher’s own planning — of the pioneer log cabin. It was built of hewn pine logs; its floors and porches were of oak and the roof of hand-rived oaken clapboards. Broad porches ran the length of the house on both sides and were connected by the covered runway that Kentuckians call a dogtrot. Through this, as through a frame, could be seen, across the river that flowed at the foot of the cabin hill, heavily timbered mountains, wave on wave, prismatic through the year from the smoky violet haze of earliest spring to the crashing crimson of the fall. On their own hill they could find growth and bloom from February to November, and botanists came from afar to see the confluence of plant life in a region where flowers of North, East, South, and West found common ground.

‘Nobody to talk to!’ The Doves are sure that nowhere in the world is human intercourse more interesting or friendship more sincere than in the Appalachian Mountains. ‘ Everything here is real,’ said Felipa.

The life she had known in Virginia was genuine and simple. Wealth there was a social handicap rather than an advantage, for, at the time Felipa was growing up, it still carried with it the implication that something might have been withheld from the Confederacy. People were diligent in their several callings. Their English blood showed itself in the seriousness with which they took their sports, as well. But the real business of life, as Felipa had known it before her marriage, was reading and conversation.

Here in the Cumberlands, the greatest power in the community might be a man who did not know how to read. Speech itself was kept for use upon occasion. The recognized needs were food and shelter. The events were birth, mating, and death. Weather was a vital interest. The language of the locality was Elizabethan, the science Jacobean, the theology Cromwellian. History was stitched into quilts and woven into coverlids, just as it had been writ in tapestry in Queen Matilda’s day. Sometimes current history was sung by a strolling bard with a dulcimer who ‘followed ballat-making ’ as a trade and was welcome to bite, sup, and lodging for the news he brought, precisely as bards sang and were rewarded in Ireland when Spenser brought word of it to England before the Faerie Queene was written. All this persisted, though some of the young people went away to college and came home with altered speech and strange ideas, and though the short-line railroad that carried out the coal brought in a daily mail, and the county seat, only three miles away, made its contribution to the rich social life of the state and merged into the genial civilization of the Blue-Grass.

Felipa and Christopher learned from their mountain neighbors much that scholars delve to discover and much that city dwellers never know. Aunt Saphrony Lovelace, pausing on the cabin steps to fan her hot face with her sunbonnet, displayed the contents of her ‘yarb’ basket and told about ‘simples’ and ‘signatures’ and even whispered the very charm against burns that Mr. Pepys recorded in his diary ‘because it could do no harm.’ Nelse Combs stopped for a word with Christopher. ‘You’ve got mighty near every tree that will grow in this part of the country right on this hill,’ he commented. Long arms moving like a windmill, he pointed out pawpaw, sweet gum, slippery elm, blackjack, tulip poplar, big elm, linden, sycamore, red haw and black, dogwood and redbud, sassafras, hickory, beech, chestnut, chinquapin, oak, ash, and thorn. ‘Hit’s a plumb sorry man,’ said Nelse, ‘that can’t tell a tree by hits bark.’

The very children were Felipa’s teachers.

‘That-thar sharp-headed snake won’t hurt you,’ said a six-year-old. ‘Hit’s the blunt-headed ones that air p’ison.’

A tall old man stopped to sell Felipa a bread board and a dough tray. His wares were slung from his shoulders and he clattered like a Spanish donkey on a market day. ‘I come from about eight miles up the road,’ said Uncle Laharoy. ‘I have to do such little piddling work as this because I am the sickly one of thrins. The boys and me,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘will be eighty-four come November.’

A Federal judge, born in the county and self-taught, dropped in to tell delightful local anecdotes, but none that equaled one of his own young manhood; for, in the days before prohibition and before he thought of reading law, His Honor had kept a saloon at the county seat, an orderly little place where the state statutes were obeyed and its owner was well thought of as a Christian and a good citizen. But on a day he put up the shutters and nailed this notice on the door: ‘Having decided that selling whiskey is wrong, I have quit doing it.’

When the moon was full, Fillmore, the local ne’er-do-well, might saunter in with his fiddle, willing ‘to play the moon down and the sun up’ with old tunes. ‘Fillmore’s sorry, but he ain’t bad sorry,’ Lige Richards told Christopher. ‘He is just a man ruined by riches. Fillmore’s father fought in the war on the side of the Union, so his mother had her a pension. Furthermore, Fillmore had a sister that was a pauper idiot; so that was another seventy-five dollars comin’ in from the state every year. Fillmore had him a good horse to ride and he could buy store clothes and his mammy never made him work, because Fillmore was the youngest and he did n’t need to because of all that money. Ruined by riches, p’intblank.’

Against that story Christopher and Felipa set this bit of experience. Into the poverty of that section came a rush of wealth when somebody struck oil. People who had scratched the soil of rain-washed hills for corn enough to keep body and soul together became millionaires in a summer. In one such family the young people were troubled because nothing could keep their mother from doing the milking just as she had always done. Felipa was from the ’level country.’ She knew the ways of the world. Could she not influence their mother? Felipa might have spared her breath. ’Just because Tom Crabtree has got him a million dollars,’ said his wife, ‘is no reason I should let hired help spoil my cow’s teats.’

’People like that,’ said Christopher in contemplative mood, ‘have a kind of independence that most people in this country have forgotten all about. Poverty can’t daunt them and riches can’t move them. I reckon these Appalachian Americans that rank outsiders call “mountain whites” are the very sort of people that made this country in the first place, and, given half a chance, they may be the salvation of it yet.’

Not long after that conversation Felipa’s diary had this entry: ‘The dogwood is blooming a second time. It is very beautiful among the autumn colors, but the neighbors say, “When the dogwood blooms twice, it’s a sure token of bad luck."' The entry that follows says this: ‘The cabin has burned to the ground. There is a fault in the coal vein and the mines are shut down. Christopher is looking for a business opening somewhere else. But oh, how can we bear to go away!’

II

Their hazard of new fortunes took the Doves to that part of Tennessee whose thoroughfare is the Mississippi River and whose Mecca is Memphis.

‘I never saw such pretty people come out of such ugly houses,’ Felipa wrote home. ‘The houses arc tall, narrow frame houses perched on bluffs, with wooden steps going down to the sidewalks, but Christopher says the steps remind him of Jacob’s ladder — because of the angels ascending and descending.’

Their own rented cottage was ‘out on the flats,’ a new and unfashionable suburb. Christopher’s new position gave him a precarious foothold with a public service corporation at a salary so small that only youth and daring would have attempted housekeeping at all.

The grocer at the corner was ready to give Felipa information and kindly counsel. ’I’ll send a washwoman around,’ he told her. ‘She does my wife’s washing, — takes the clothes Monday and brings them back Friday, — she can’t wear them so very long.’ A Southern byword, cryptic perhaps to outsiders, is ’Choose a housemaid who can wear your clothes and a washwoman who can’t.’

Felipa’s first caller was the nextdoor neighbor. She found Felipa in tears. Since she could not conceal them, Felipa explained. ‘Not one curtain is right,’ she said, ‘and Christopher made such careful measurements!’

‘And measured with a yardstick, I ’ll bet,’ said the newcomer. ‘The only way to measure window curtains is with a string. Have you got an extra thimble?’

Before Felipa could protest, the neighbor had mounted a stepladder. With her mouth full of pins, she ripped and basted and hung those curtains till, true to a line, they touched the sills.

Another early caller was the meatman. Down the street came a covered spring wagon, drawn by a hipshot mule with a bell on his collar and driven by a sallow man who chewed a snuff stick. In the back of the wagon was the carcass of a beef, covered with a reassuringly clean cloth. The driver drew rein at the Doves’ gate and told Felipa the rules of the game. ’I killed a cow to-day. The price is ten cents a pound from head to tail. Weigh on your scales or mine and pick your choice. Only thing is, I don’t give no advice.’

When the cottage was in order and the Doves had been seen in church, Jeffersonville society called. Though the newcomers were unintroduced, living in an unfashionable, almost a questionable part of town, on a barely perceptible income, people of good family in that Tennessee town recognized ‘quality.’ The aerial of the South worked, as it always works.

Christopher and Felipa will always think of Jeffersonville and springtime in a breath. In Kentucky, spring was barely astir in the mountains, and but just beginning to color the Blue-Grass, but these first callers in Tennessee came with roses in their hands and returned again with roots and cuttings for Felipa’s garden.

Invitations followed lavishly, and membership in The Club was proffered them. Up to that time Christopher and Felipa had maintained that the Episcopal Church and the Democratic Party were enough things to belong to, but they could not resist the flattery of that invitation, for The Club is to Jeffersonville what the Académie Française is to Paris. Its membership is narrowly restricted. According to its charter, at least every other meeting must be devoted to the study of Shakespeare. Each member must express an opinion at every meeting, and no member may be heard more than once. Absence from two consecutive meetings is ground for expulsion. Christopher, approving wholly, recalled a secret society of his boyhood, one of whose by-laws declared: ’Any member that stays away from a meeting will be dismembered.’

While Christopher enjoyed The Club’s rigidity, Felipa basked in the discovery that nothing in Jeffersonville began on time. Not even The Club, nor court, nor church. Christopher might fume, watch in hand, — ‘like a testy English squire,’ his wife told him, — but Felipa was soothed by a few unhurried minutes in the churchyard, while the minister’s fat baby sat on the church steps and greeted each parishioner by name. ‘Dood mornin’, Mr. S’acklett’; ‘How-do-dee-do, Mrs. Carter? How-do-dee-do, Old-Mrs. Carter?’ Felipa discovered that such a system has pitfalls when, going to her first afternoon bridge, she shyly planned to be a little late lest she be first-comer. She found, instead, an exasperated partner who had been penalized a hundred points for Felipa’s tardiness. Church, court, and club might flout the clock, but Jeffersonville took its cards seriously.

Under the pleasant flow of social life in their new home, the Doves caught glimpses of a darker undercurrent that sometimes puzzled them. Among its citizens were veterans of the Spanish War; later, it furnished more than its share of volunteers for the Great War; but the War between the States was to every man and woman in the community an event of yesterday — the omnipresent reason for to-day. This in itself was, to Christopher and Felipa, a natural state of things, but there was in the local state of mind an acerbity quite new to them.

‘There is something I don’t understand,’ Christopher wrote his father, ‘about the way these Tennesseeans talk about the Yankees. They don’t speak of “our friends the enemy.” They don’t even cuss them sociably as “damn Yankees.”They call them “Yankatanks,”and everything they say about them sounds harsh and bitter.’

To this his father, late major in Morgan’s cavalry, C. S. A., replied: ‘My guess is that when your new friends talk about the Late Unpleasantness they hark back, not to the War, but to the Reconstruction. Let me know if I am right.’

He was. When the older people were satisfied that both Felipa and Christopher were children of Confederate veterans, they told the newcomers about Lost Village. Afterward they were taken on the twenty-mile drive along sandy roads and through pine woods to see the deserted town, as those who are permitted to visit a hidden shrine.

Whatever may be true of architecture in Jeffersonville, the houses in Lost Village are not ugly. Widewinged, cream-stuccoed, with broad verandahs and walled gardens, the old houses stand, empty and falling into ruins, deserted homes in a deserted village. The men born in those houses were killed or wounded and disabled in the War between the States. In Reconstruction times, life in that secluded place became too dangerous for women and children. Jeffersonville offered the comparative safety of a larger, less isolated place. One by one the old homes were abandoned till not one soul remained.

‘For forty years,’ said the old lady who told Felipa the story, ‘I have been homesick, twenty miles from home. We go out there — all who are left of the families that had to come away — on Memorial Day. We carry flowers, of course, but we hardly need to do it. The gardens are overrun with weeds, and the walls are falling down and smothering them, but the lilacs and syringas keep blooming anyway. And the little Southern rose, which some people call the York-and-Lancaster because its petals are both red and white, just makes a carpet all the summer long. It covers the Village like a Confederate flag.’

III

Christopher’s prompt promotion carried the Doves into foreign country. Christopher had lived in New York; a beloved literature gave Felipa a sense of kinship with New England; but for the Middle West they were quite unprepared.

Felipa’s first sense of strangeness came when, from an observation car, she looked up to a pale blue zenith utterly unlike the azure of Virginia skies. Her next impression was of the surprising cleanness of Oakville’s railway station. Spotless it stood in its parallelogram of nasturtiums and lobelias. Felipa was perversely homesick for the rusty stove, the ashes and tobacco juice, of a Southern way station. The group that waited on the platform, lacking the dark Negro faces that she had always seen in such a gathering, seemed pallid and incomplete.

As they drove to their new house, Felipa whispered, ‘When shall we get past the park? What is it — an Old Soldiers’ Home or something?’

Christopher felt like an old settler in the face of Felipa’s bewilderment, for he had been in Illinois a week. ‘No, Country Girl,’ he told her, ‘this is mighty near all of Oakville. These are people’s houses. They just don’t have fences.’ Felipa could not have been more astonished if Christopher had said as casually, ‘The houses don’t have walls.’

The cottage Christopher had rented sat fenceless in its strip of parking while its back yard swept away apparently unbounded to the boundless prairies. Their furniture stood uncrated in the rooms. ‘The Swede that handled our things,’ said Christopher, ‘charged four times as much as we pay the Negroes at home, and did six times as much.’

When Felipa began to arrange the rooms, she sat down in the middle of the floor, face to face with despair. The house was furnace-heated. Never before had Felipa seen a house without an open fire. ‘Without a fireplace,’ she thought chaotically, ‘the rooms have n’t any focus. There is nowhere to begin. Any piece of furniture might as well be anywhere as anywhere else.’

Housekeeping presented new problems. The washing came in unironed. ‘You did n’t say washing-and-ironing,’ said the Swedish laundress. The Norwegian housemaid, obedient and without initiative, was the antithesis of the enterprising little Negroes Felipa had trained at home. ‘Africans had to live by their wits in the jungles during centuries when Scandinavian peasants were drilled in obedience to their masters,’ Christopher suggested; but Felipa found it hard to remember ethnological distinctions while instructing her housemaids.

Felipa’s pronunciation and vocabulary made telephoning impracticable and shopping hazardous. ‘Coal oil, a gallon bucket; half a dozen roasting ears; a peck of potatoes.’ The clerk at the general store read the list aloud. ’Give the lady kerosene, — a fourquart pail, — sweet corn, and spuds,’ called a customer from the front of the store. ‘I know what she means. My wife was born in the South.’

‘Some day,’ said Felipa to Christopher, ‘when some Dutch-SwedishYankee in this part of the country speaks of my “brogue" or your “dialect,” I’' going to fling my manners away and ask why they think their speech the standard and ours the corruption. Our ancestors were ruling England while theirs were hitched to the plough or living in a fen somewhere in Europe.’

‘Ease your mind, honey,’ Christopher chuckled, ‘but ease it at home. They think they are the standard and we think we are, so everybody ought to be happy. Middle-Westerners make me feel sort of peppered with grapeshot myself, but it’s not the first time the Yankees have had us under fire. And this time we are the invaders. Mind you that.’

Felipa’s letters to her mother disclosed her homesick bewilderment. ‘Everything here is upside down. Sunday, for instance. Lots of people don’t go to church. Most people do, of course, but some quite nice people don’t. All the standards seem different. Children are taught to save their money and keep their clothes clean as children at home are taught to mind their manners and speak the truth. I have the funniest time with callers. One of them asked me to-day, “What does your husband do?” I racked my brain for something Christopher does that would interest her. He plays golf . . . and chess ... he reads ... he goes to church ... he rides . . . dances like an angel. . . . What should I tell her? Christopher says she meant, “What does he do for a living — what is his business?” Is n’t it all queer?’

In answer to this letter, her wise mother wrote: ‘Don’t forget the Quaker story, Felipa. Perhaps your new friends think “thee is a little queer."'

Undoubtedly they did. Felipa made formal calls in the morning. In Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, people took naps in the afternoon. In Oakville, people did their own housework, and morning calls were intimate, or inconvenient. Felipa suggested rice as a substitute for potatoes at a church dinner. Rice, in Oakville, is served not as a vegetable but as a dessert. And once Felipa, invited for an evening party, went in the afternoon. Her defense was, and is, that her husband was not included in the invitation.

Felipa looks back on an attack of tonsilitis as one of the outstanding providences of her life. She thinks it a thousand pities that Carol Kennicott did n’t have tonsilitis when she was new in Gopher Prairie. Before that illness, Oakville people had been polite and tolerant. Now that Felipa needed them, kindnesses poured in. No tray came to her sick room without some neighbor’s gift — soups, jellies, custards, or broths. When Christopher opened the door in the morning, offerings from a neighbor’s garden lay on the threshold; at night when he came home, he might find a pie or a plate of doughnuts on the window sill.

Felipa emerged from that illness loving Oakville, eager to share its life and understand its ways. She has loved it ever since, treasuring its friendships and experiences — but she never entirely understood it.

Bred though she was to class distinctions, there were discriminations here that puzzled her. The Swedish element was strong in the population, influential in religious matters, dominant in politics, but socially it was rigorously segregated. Because she loved the Sagas, ancient and modern, Scandinavians were glamorous to Felipa; but she observed that the good smell of afternoon coffee identified the Oakville streets in which one did not call.

Oakville’s middle class was made up of retired farmers. Neither Christopher nor Felipa had ever known a farmer to retire. It appeared that in the corn belt farmers made enough money to retire on, and that, having accomplished this end, they sold their farms and came to town. ‘At home,’ commented Felipa, marveling, ‘nobody but the sheriff sells a home place.’

The savor of piccalilli in the making will recall to Felipa, through all the autumns of her life, the homes of Oakville’s ruling class, descendants of the York State people who, as pioneers, had taken up the rich prairie forties and built the town and loved it with a queer, jealous love. They had bequeathed to their children fertile acres, comfortable white frame houses, staunch furniture, sound principles, and the York State recipe for piccalilli. Above all they had endowed them with loyal affection for the town. In the South, the county is the unit, and the state the object of devotion. Felipa’s worst indiscretion was ‘trading’ in Chicago, and even, till her iniquity was brought home to her, shopping occasionally in the rival neighboring town.

The great event in Oakville was Chautauqua. Radios may supersede, and Carol Kennicott despise, this institution, but Oakville reveled in it. The little town supported its own Chautauqua, chose artists to its liking, and for ten days each year gave itself over to speeches, sermons, concerts, impersonations, political debates, physical training, nursery schools, icecream cones, and sawdust. Rows of tents sprang up, and housekeepers who knew no other vacation spent ten days on the grounds, renewing friendships, meeting distinguished people, and, in the August heat, absorbing a hundred interests to mull over when the long white winter shut them in.

Felipa, who had never seen anything like it, was completely captivated by a good Chautauqua with its winds from every quarter. ‘I think,’ commented Christopher, ‘you are getting ready to take out your naturalization papers.’

Nevertheless, when business called Christopher to the Far West, the Doves had nothing for it but to pull up stakes and leave.

IV

‘The Pacific Coast,’ said a friend aphoristically to Felipa, ‘is inhabited by enthusiastic men and homesick women.’

Christopher’s company was sending him to Oregon, and Felipa anxiously catechized the only person she knew who had ever lived so far from the Atlantic seaboard. ‘My own geography,’ said Felipa, ‘stops at the Rocky Mountains.’

Their families behaved as if Felipa and Christopher were going to round the Horn and might be met by hostile Indians. But, instead of scalping knives and a sense of exile, the Doves found welcome in the West. Elsewhere they had felt at best like onlookers, but, if one be American and white, the Pacific Coast exudes assurance that this is everybody’s country.

Moreover, Felipa will tell you, ‘the Doves have the luckiest misfortunes!’ An errant furniture car, she and Christopher assert, is, for introduction to the heart of a community, as good as an attack of tonsilitis. With incurable optimism they moved into their unfurnished house before their half car of furniture arrived. For seven weeks it was sidetracked somewhere between Illinois and Oregon, and, while Christopher haunted the freight offices and sent urgent telegrams, the Doves set up housekeeping in the West with two rented cots and a coal-oil stove.

Within twenty-four hours the neighbors on the east had sent in a couple of chairs and the neighbors on the west ’slipped in a pie.’ The housekeeper on the hill brought down a woolen comforter: ‘The days are warm, but you need lots of cover these nights.’ Cooking without utensils need not have daunted Felipa. The neighbors descried an opportunity to show what the West could do. Chinese pheasants, salmon, rainbow trout, marvelous jellies made of salal berries and Oregon grape and red high huckleberry, turned haphazard meals into Lucullan feasts. Even when Christmas came and still that car delayed its arrival, and Felipa began to be engloomed lest the greatgrandmother table and desk and corner cupboard might be really lost, their cottage was bright with splendid holly wreaths and the new, lustrous, broadleafed evergreens that made Felipa ache with desire to show them to the people at home. ‘And every leaf and twig,’ said Felipa, ‘comes from some brand-new friend.’

When, at long last, their furniture arrived and life grew orderly again, the Doves began to take their bearings and to explore most unfamiliar terrain. Their new home was in a university town, and Felipa declares that they came to the Pacific Coast expecting to find blanket Indians and the Wild West of the films, and discovered instead the Federal Government and the educational system of the United States.

At home, she and Christopher had had governesses and tutors until they went to boarding school. Neat brass plates on many doorways in Virginia towns mark private schools. The public schools had been called ‘free schools’ when they were children, and even now there is a lingering belief that the education of a gentleman’s children is not properly a public charge. In the Doves’ Western home, the grade schools were as much and as justifiable a pride as was the University; and Felipa — insatiable sight-seer in her new environment — visited them all. The teachers had difficulty in classifying a visitor who was neither parent, teacher, nor even maiden aunt, but Mrs. Dove’s ignorance of the publicschool system entertained and, possibly, refreshed them. Kindergarten methods in the early grades and manual training in higher classes delighted Felipa, for she was a whole-hearted Fröbelian, ignorant though she might be of other educational methods. In high school she was probably the last literate American to discover what she still describes as ‘a blasphemous thing called required reading.’ ’Christopher,’she reported indignantly, ‘the children are taught that it is a task to read great literature.’

‘It’s a big country, Felipa,’ Christopher reminded her, ‘a big country made up of many kinds of people, and the public-school system goes out after them all. Required reading gives the swine a chance to do some trampling, but it is a grand opportunity for pearl divers.’

At the University, generous professors and an indulgent and amused registrar let Felipa attend lectures to her heart’s content, but the registrar, at least, was frankly puzzled by the catholicity and the apparent aimlessness of her choice. When she was told that many of the students, probably a majority of them, entered the University because they believed a degree was necessary to success in business, Felipa was at first incredulous and then ablaze with anger.

‘I wish,’ she said, ‘they could know just one of the boys in the Appalachian Mountains who are willing to go hungry to get “that good rarnin’" ! Or that dear little Norwegian maid of ours who went to night school after her day’s work to learn about the stars “just for the gladness of knowing.” Schools, from kindergarten to university, are meant to feed divine hunger like that — not to help people to satisfy their belly need.’

‘They tell me Kipling is out of fashion,’ Christopher acknowledged her quotation. ‘The business motive seems to enter into everything out here. Just to-day I was talking politics with a Republican. I was trying to think of a polite way to say that I thought the Republican Party emphasized business advantage rather than principles of government, and bless Pat! if the fellow didn’t say, flat-footedly, himself, “I usually vote for what I think will be best for business. You Democrats are more visionary."'

‘Did you ever hear anything so disgusting in your life?’ said Felipa. ‘Is there any real difference, Christopher, between selling your vote for five dollars and selling it for “what is best for business"?'

‘Well, not by our code,’Christopher replied, ’but since we live where people seem to look at things differently I reckon we might as well try to understand their point of view.’

Indeed, while Felipa made her naïve discoveries in the field of education, Christopher found much food for thought in the Western state of mind as to the law. ‘You would be interested,’ he wrote his father, ‘in the working of the initiative and referendum. The people as a whole show remarkable sagacity as to the laws submitted to them, but there is a sort of cavalier treatment of law itself that comes, as nearly as I can make it out, from the plasticity under the system. Here is an incident of what I mean. At a commercial club dinner the other night the guest of honor made a speech that you, Strict Constructionist that you are, would have endorsed. His subject was our debt to the law on which our civilization rests and our inescapable duty of conserving it, obeying it, and amending it by orderly process and not otherwise. His hearers were so enthusiastic that it was immediately moved that the speaker be made an honorary member of the club. The chairman pointed out that, under the constitution of the club, this could not be done in just the proposed form, and suggested some verbal alteration in the motion that would make it legal. Instantly somebody sprang to his feet and said, “I move to waive the constitution!" And as a tribute to that speech on obedience to law they “waived the constitution” by acclamation.’

When Christopher, chortling, told that incident at home, Felipa reminded him that the newness of the country might have something to do with that state of mind. ‘It wasn’t very long ago, you remember,’ she said, ‘that the Constitution of the United States did n’t run in this latitude. The pioneers had to make their own laws, vary them to suit the occasion, and enforce them out of hand.

‘This part of the country really is brand-new, Christopher. One of the professors at the University was born in a covered wagon crossing the plains. And his mother is as pretty as a picture and as gay as a grig this minute. What this country really needs is servants.’

Christopher, used to his wife’s conversational tergiversations, smoked placidly and waited for the connection.

‘Do you remember how surprised we were when we met people in Illinois who had automobiles and did n’t have cooks? Well, out here most of the faculty wives do their own washing. They say servants are simply not to be had.’

‘Serves them right,’ said Christopher. ‘They agitated for Chinese exclusion and then Japanese, and got it, and now they are trying to exclude the Filipinos. As for native-born Americans in the West, they are like the family of boys whose mother wished one of them had been a girl, but none of them would have been her. Plenty of people need servants, but nobody in this land of opportunity is willing to “be her."'

‘Well, somebody has to “be her" if this gorgeous Pacific Coast is ever to develop such a rich civilization as it ought,’ said Felipa, with conviction.

It was in the course of their sociological study of the West Coast that the Doves, three thousand miles from the District of Columbia, ‘discovered the Federal Government.’

‘At home,’ Christopher observed, ‘people inherit money, earn it, or do without. Here they expect the Government to do something about it — raise the tariff on lumber, build wooden ships, doctor the fishery laws, or something or other.’

In some guise, indeed, the Federal Government seemed the root of all business, all prosperity. At one end of the scale were the leading citizens, descendants of territorial officeholders, and at the other the new settlers who, barehanded, with grit and honest work were proving up a claim.

The Doves’ first drives carried them, before the town itself was out of sight, into Federal reserve land, park and forest. As they drove, on the wellbuilt government roads, through towering virgin timber, they thrilled with the familiar sense of landownership. All this splendor was their own. They held their hundred-millionth share of it in fee.

They stopped at a ranger’s cabin to ask directions. In the yard a small boy was playing with a black bear cub. ‘Cully found the little fellow caught in a trap with its paw broken,’ his mother explained. ‘It was trapped unlawfully and his father let Cully take it. He is making a pet out of it till we hear from Washington. But, son,’ she admonished the child, ‘you must n’t set your heart on it, like it belonged to you. You’ve got to remember that it’s the Government’s bear.’

Though men and manners in the West may be interesting, the dominating influence is the land itself. Out-ofdoors simply clamors for attention.

‘The scenery takes a great deal of time,’ Felipa wrote home. ‘Everything grows lavishly and keeps on growing at least eleven months of the year. It is just impossible to keep up with the procession of the flowers and do anything else, even if you specialize on wild flowers, as we do, and even though, as our neighbors say, “all you have to do to make a garden is stand on the back porch and throw the seeds out.” When the sun is shining and the snow-covered mountains are out, they simply bully you. It seems irreverent to give attention to little indoor interests when that gleaming splendor waits outside your windows.’

On a memorable day, friends came to take the Doves for a drive up the McKenzie River road. There had been a snowfall in the night and the Doves must see its beauties in perfection. Felipa and Christopher never ceased to marvel that, in their north-of-Boston latitude, whole winters may go by without a killing frost, and snowfall is so rare that when it comes the whole population turns out to enjoy it.

The McKenzie River rises among the glaciers of the Cascade Mountains and tumbles dowm its long course, milkwhite or green as chrysoprase. Leaping with rainbow trout, bordered with evergreens, overhung with ferns and wild flowers, it has new beauties for each month. Snowfall followed by sunshine, radiant everywhere, is almost intolerably splendid on the McKenzie River road. On that January day, broad-leafed evergreens held up snow and ice glare as if, on outspread hands, they offered diamonds. Fir trees sparkled with unimaginable radiancies.

The driver stopped the car where river, forest, and far-gleaming snowcapped mountains made the most breath-taking panorama. ‘Now admit, you Easterners,’ he said exultantly, ‘that you never saw beauty till to-day.’

Christopher gazed, enrapt and silent; but Felipa turned upon her host reproachful eyes. ‘Never saw beauty?’ she repeated. ‘Why, I was born in the Valley of Virginia!’