A Traveler from Altruria | Page 7

but ourselves had now
left the dining-room, and I saw the head-waiter eying us impatiently. I
pushed back my chair and said: "I'm sorry to seem to hurry you, but I
should like to show you a very pretty sunset effect we have here before
it is too dark. When we get back, I want to introduce you to a few of
my friends. Of course, I needn't tell you that there is a good deal of
curiosity about you, especially among the ladies."
"Yes, I found that the case in England, largely. It was the women who
cared most to meet me. I understand that in America society is
managed even more by women than it is in England."
"It's entirely in their hands," I said, with the satisfaction we all feel in
the fact. "We have no other leisure class. The richest men among us are
generally hard workers; devotion to business is the rule; but, as soon as
a man reaches the point where he can afford to pay for domestic service,
his wife and daughters expect to be released from it to the cultivation of
their minds and the enjoyment of social pleasures. It's quite right. That
is what makes them so delightful to foreigners. You must have heard
their praises chanted in England. The English find our men rather
stupid, I believe; but they think our women are charming."
"Yes, I was told that the wives of their nobility were sometimes
Americans," said the Altrurian. "The English think that you regard such

marriages as a great honor, and that they are very gratifying to your
national pride."
"Well, I suppose that is so in a measure," I confessed. "I imagine that it
will not be long before the English aristocracy derives as largely from
American millionaires as from kings' mistresses. Not," I added,
virtuously, "that we approve of aristocracy."
"No, I understand that," said the Altrurian. "I shall hope to get your
point of view in this matter more distinctly by-and-by. As yet, I'm a
little vague about it."
"I think I can gradually make it clear to you," I returned.

II
We left the hotel, and I began to walk my friend across the meadow
toward the lake. I wished him to see the reflection of the afterglow in
its still waters, with the noble lines of the mountain-range that glassed
itself there; the effect is one of the greatest charms of that lovely region,
the sojourn of the sweetest summer in the world, and I am always
impatient to show it to strangers.
We climbed the meadow wall and passed through a stretch of woods to
a path leading down to the shore, and, as we loitered along in the tender
gloom of the forest, the music of the hermit-thrushes rang all round us
like crystal bells, like silver flutes, like the drip of fountains, like the
choiring of still-eyed cherubim. We stopped from time to time and
listened, while the shy birds sang unseen in their covert of shadows; but
we did not speak till we emerged from the trees and suddenly stood
upon the naked knoll overlooking the lake.
Then I explained: "The woods used to come down to the shore here,
and we had their mystery and music to the water's edge; but last winter
the owner cut the timber off. It looks rather ragged now." I had to
recognize the fact, for I saw the Altrurian staring about him over the
clearing in a kind of horror. It was a squalid ruin, a graceless desolation,

which not even the pitying twilight could soften. The stumps showed
their hideous mutilation everywhere; the brush had been burned, and
the fires had scorched and blackened the lean soil of the hill-slope and
blasted it with sterility. A few weak saplings, withered by the flames,
drooped and straggled about; it would be a century before the forces of
nature could repair the waste.
"You say the owner did this?" said the Altrurian. "Who is the owner?"
"Well, it does seem too bad," I answered, evasively. "There has been a
good deal of feeling about it. The neighbors tried to buy him off before
he began the destruction, for they knew the value of the woods as an
attraction to summer-boarders; the city cottagers, of course, wanted to
save them, and together they offered for the land pretty nearly as much
as the timber was worth. But he had got it into his head that the land
here by the lake would sell for building lots if it was cleared, and he
could make money on that as well as on the trees; and so they had to go.
Of course, one might say that he was deficient in public spirit, but I
don't blame