Elbow-Room | Page 3

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 forth at night against the pitchy darkness of the sky. Here, as one whirls by in the train after nightfall, he may catch hurried glimpses of swarthy men, stripped to the waist, stirring the molten iron with their long levers or standing amid showers of sparks as the brilliant metal slips to and fro among the rollers that mould it into the forms of commerce. If upon a