their nerves which are things no young man should know anything about;
and the friends of your friends go down with nervous prostration, and
the people overheard in the trains talk about their nerves and the
nerves of their relatives; and the little children must needs have their
nerves attended to ere their milk-teeth are shed, and the middle-aged
women and the middle-aged men have got them too, and the old men lose
the dignity of their age in an indecent restlessness, and the
advertisements in the papers go to show that this sweeping list is no
lie. Atop of the fret and the stampede, the tingling self-consciousness
of a new people makes them take a sort of perverted pride in the futile
racket that sends up the death-rate--a child's delight in the blaze and
the dust of the March of Progress. Is it not 'distinctively American'?
It is, and it is not. If the cities were all America, as they pretend,
fifty years would see the March of Progress brought to a standstill, as
a locomotive is stopped by heated bearings....

Down in the meadow the mowing-machine has checked, and the horses are
shaking themselves. The last of the sunlight leaves the top of
Monadnock, and four miles away Main Street lights her electric lamps. It
is band-night in Main Street, and the folks from Putney, from
Marlboro', from Guildford, and even New Fane will drive in their
well-filled waggons to hear music and look at the Ex-President. Over the
shoulder of the meadow two men come up very slowly, their hats off and
their arms swinging loosely at their sides. They do not hurry, they have
not hurried, and they never will hurry, for they are of country--bankers
of the flesh and blood of the ever bankrupt cities. Their children may
yet be pale summer boarders; as the boarders, city-bred weeds, may take
over their farms. From the plough to the pavement goes man, but to the
plough he returns at last.