Elbow-Room | Page 3

perhaps even while he submits
to an overpowering conviction that all life is tragic, to summon into
prominence those humorous phases of social existence which, as in the
best of artificial tragedies, are permitted to appear in real life as the foil
of that which is truly sorrowful. To depict events that are simply
amusing may not be the highest and best function of a writer; but if he
has a strong impulse to undertake such a task in the intervals of more
serious work, it may be that he performs a duty which is more obvious
because the common inclination of those who tell the story of human
life is to present that which is sad and terrible, and to lead-the reader,
whose soul has bitterness enough of its own, into contemplation of the
true or fictitious anguish of others.
At any rate, an attempt to show men and their actions in a purely
humorous aspect is justified by the facts of human life; and if fiction is,

for the most part, tragedy, there is reason why much of the remainder
should be devoted to fun. To laugh is to perform as divine a function as
to weep. Man, who was made only a little lower than the angels, is the
only animal to whom laughter is permitted. He is the sole earthly heir
of immortality, and he laughs. More than this, the process is healthful
to both mind and body, for it is the man who laughs with reason and
judgment who is the kindly, pure, cheerful and happy man.
It is in a village wherein there is elbow-room for the physical and
intellectual man that the characters in this book may be supposed to be,
to do and to suffer. It would be unfair to say that the reader can visit the
spot and meet face to face all these people who appear in the incidents
herein recorded, and it would be equally improper to assert that there is
naught written of them but veritable history. But it might perhaps be
urged that the individuals exist in less decided and grotesque forms,
and that the words and deeds attributed to them are less than wholly
improbable. And if any one shall consider it worth while to inquire
further concerning the matter, let him discover where may be found a
community which exists in such a locality as this that I will now
describe.
A hamlet set upon a hillside. The top a breezy elevation crowned with
foliage and commanding a view of matchless beauty. To the west,
beneath, a sea of verdure rolling away in mighty billows, which here
bear upon their crests a tiny wood, a diminutive dwelling, a flock of
sheep or a drove of cattle, and there sweep apparently almost over a
shadowy town which nestles between two of the emerald waves. Far,
far beyond the steeples which rise dimly from the distant town a range
of hills; beyond it still, a faint film of blue, the indistinct and misty
semblance of towering mountains.
To the north a lovely plain that rises a few miles away into a long low
ridge which forms the sharp and clear horizon. To the south and east a
narrow valley that is little more than a deep ravine, the sides of the
precipitous hills covered with forest to the brink of the stream, which
twists and turns at sharp angles like a wounded snake, shining as
burnished silver when one catches glimpses of it through the trees, and

playing an important part in a landscape which at brief distance seems
as wild and as unconscious of the presence of man as if it were a part of
the wilderness of Oregon rather than the adjunct of a busy town which
feels continually the stir and impulse of the huge city only a dozen
miles away.
He who descends from the top of the village hill will pass pretty
mansions set apart from their neighbors in leafy and flowery solitudes
wherein the most unsocial hermit might find elbow-room enough; he
will see little cottages which stand nearer to the roadside, as if they
shunned isolation and wished to share in the life that often fills the
highway in front of them. Farther down the houses become more
companionable; they cling together in groups with the barest possibility
of retaining their individuality, until at last the thoroughfare becomes a
street wherein small shops do their traffic in quite a spirited sort of a
way.
Clear down at the foot of the hill, by the brink of the sweet and placid
river, there are iron mills and factories and furnaces, whose chimneys
in the daytime pour out huge columns of black smoke, and from which
long tongues of crimson and bluish flame leap