The Silverado Squatters | Page 8

to London-- most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a great
notion of the English taste.
In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient cultivation. It
was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no Johannisberg; yet the stirring
sunlight, and the growing vines, and the vats and bottles in the cavern,
made a pleasant music for the mind. Here, also, earth's cream was
being skimmed and garnered; and the London customers can taste, such
as it is, the tang of the earth in this green valley. So local, so
quintessential is a wine, that it seems the very birds in the verandah
might communicate a flavour, and that romantic cellar influence the
bottle next to be uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr.
Schram might mantle in the glass.
But these are but experiments. All things in this new land are moving
farther on: the wine-vats and the miner's blasting tools but picket for a
night, like Bedouin pavillions; and to-morrow, to fresh woods! This stir
of change and these perpetual echoes of the moving footfall, haunt the
land. Men move eternally, still chasing Fortune; and, fortune found,
still wander. As we drove back to Calistoga, the road lay empty of mere
passengers, but its green side was dotted with the camps of travelling
families: one cumbered with a great waggonful of household stuff,
settlers going to occupy a ranche they had taken up in Mendocino, or
perhaps Tehama County; another, a party in dust coats, men and
women, whom we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on
pleasure bent, with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their
hands to us as we drove by.

CHAPTER IV
--THE SCOT ABROAD

A few pages back, I wrote that a man belonged, in these days, to a
variety of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the others are

but pleasant infidelities. Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity except
upon the map. Two languages, many dialects, innumerable forms of
piety, and countless local patriotisms and prejudices, part us among
ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that great
continent of America. When I am at home, I feel a man from Glasgow
to be something like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a
foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail
from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made
affection joins us on the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse,
one Celtic, and another Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We have
it not among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with
English, or Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each
other's errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one
of us, something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly people.
Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most inscrutable.
There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with its rainy,
sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places,
black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking corn-lands; its
quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the
wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I
desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice
sing out, "Oh, why left I my hame?" and it seems at once as if no
beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good,
can repay me for my absence from my country. And though I think I
would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried
among good Scots clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on me with every
year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps. When I
forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning!
The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman. You must pay for
it in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth. You have to learn
the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you generally take to drink;
your youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder war against
society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been born,
for instance, in England. But somehow life is warmer and closer; the
hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine softer on the rainy
street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round
our hearts. An