CHAPTER XIII

FELLOW WAYFARERS


With the morn our way still lay among apples and honey, hives and
orchards; a land of prosperous farms, sumptuous rolling downs, rich
woodland, sheep, more pigs, more apple-barrels and velvety sunshine. The
old ruined houses had ceased, and the country had taken on a more
generous, broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed aspect. Nature was preparing for
one of her big Promised Land effects. We were coming to the valley of the
Genesee River. We made a comparison of two kinds of prosperity in the
look of a landscape. Some villages and farms suggest smugness in their
prosperity. They have a model-farm, business-like, well-regulated,
up-to-date, company-financed air, suggesting such modern agricultural
terms as "ensilage," "irrigation" and "fertilizer." Other villages and
farms, while just as well-kept and well-to-do, have, so to say, a
something romantic about their prosperity, a bounteous, ruddy, golden-age
look about them, as though Nature herself had been the farmer and they
had ruddied and ripened out of her own unconscious abundance--the
difference between a row of modern box beehives and the old
thatched-cottage kind. The countryside of the Genesee valley has the
romantic prosperous look. Its farms and villages look like farms and
villages in picture-books, and the country folk we met seemed happy and
gay and kind, such as those one reads of in William Morris's romances of
the golden age. As from time to time we exchanged greetings with them, we
were struck with their comely health and blithe ways--particularly with
their fine teeth, as they laughed us the time of day, or stopped their