Indian Summer | Page 3

of the good which had befallen him,
and cowering within himself under the sting of wounded vanity, when
he received a letter from his elder brother suggesting that he should
come and see how he liked the architecture of Des Vaches. His brother

had been seven years at Des Vaches, where he had lands, and a
lead-mine, and a scheme for a railroad, and had lately added a daily
newspaper to his other enterprises. He had, in fact, added two
newspapers; for having unexpectedly and almost involuntarily become
the owner of the Des Vaches Republican, the fancy of building up a
great local journal seized him, and he bought the Wabash Valley
Democrat, uniting them under the name of the Democrat-Republican.
But he had trouble almost from the first with his editors, and he
naturally thought of the brother with a turn for writing who had been
running to waste for the last year or two in Europe. His real purpose
was to work Colville into the management of his paper when he invited
him to come out and look at the architecture of Des Vaches.
Colville went, because he was at that moment in the humour to go
anywhere, and because his money was running low, and he must begin
work somehow. He was still romantic enough to like the notion of the
place a little, because it bore the name given to it by the old French
voyageurs from a herd of buffalo cows which they had seen grazing on
the site of their camp there; but when he came to the place itself he did
not like it. He hated it; but he stayed, and as an architect was the last
thing any one wanted in Des Vaches since the jail and court-house had
been built, he became, half without his willing it, a newspaper man. He
learned in time to relish the humorous intimacy of the life about him;
and when it was decided that he was no fool--there were doubts,
growing out of his Eastern accent and the work of his New York tailor,
at first--he found himself the object of a pleasing popularity. In due
time he bought his brother out; he became very fond of newspaper life,
its constant excitements and its endless variety; and six weeks before
he sold his paper he would have scoffed at a prophecy of his return to
Europe for the resumption of any artistic purpose whatever. But here he
was, lounging on the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, whither he had come
with the intention of rubbing up his former studies, and of perhaps
getting back to put them in practice at New York ultimately. He had
said to himself before coming abroad that he was in no hurry; that he
should take it very easily--he had money enough for that; yet he would
keep architecture before him as an object, for he had lived long in a
community where every one was intensely occupied, and he

unconsciously paid to Des Vaches the tribute of feeling that an
objectless life was disgraceful to a man.
In the meantime he suffered keenly and at every moment the loss of the
occupation of which he had bereaved himself; in thinking of quite other
things, in talk of totally different matters, from the dreams of night, he
woke with a start to the realisation of the fact that he had no longer a
newspaper. He perceived now, as never before, that for fifteen years
almost every breath of his life had been drawn with reference to his
paper, and that without it he was in some sort lost, and, as it were,
extinct. A tide of ridiculous home-sickness, which was an expression of
this passionate regret for the life he had put behind him, rather than any
longing for Des Vaches, swept over him, and the first passages of a
letter to the Post-Democrat-Republican began to shape themselves in
his mind. He had always, when he left home for New York or
Washington, or for his few weeks of summer vacation on the Canadian
rivers or the New England coast, written back to his readers, in whom
he knew he could count upon quick sympathy in all he saw and felt,
and he now found himself addressing them with that frank familiarity
which comes to the journalist, in minor communities, from the habit of
print. He began by confessing to them the defeat of certain expectations
with which he had returned to Florence, and told them that they must
not look for anything like the ordinary letters of travel from him. But he
was not so singular in his attitude toward the place as he supposed; for
any tourist who comes to Florence with the old-fashioned expectation
of impressions will probably suffer a