sunny lounging; yet stone walls in Marathon are built with uneven
vertical projections to discourage the sedentary. Nothing is more
delightful than a dog; but there are no dogs in Marathon. They are all
airedales or spaniels or mastiffs. If an ordinary dog should wag his
tail up our street the airedales would cut him dead. Bless me, Nature
herself has taken to the same insincerity. The landscape round Marathon
is lovely, but it has itself well in hand. The hills all pretend to be
gentle declivities. There is a beautiful little sheet of water,
reflecting the trailery of willows, a green salute to the eye. In a
robuster community it would be a swimming hole--but with us, an
ornamental lake. Only in one spot has Nature forgotten herself and been
so brusque and rough as to jut up a very sizable cliff. This is the
loveliest thing in Marathon: sunlight and shadow break and angle in
cubist magnificence among the oddly veined knobs and prisms of brown
stone. Yet this cliff or quarry is by common consent taboo among us. It
is our indelicacy, our indecency. Such "residences" as are near modestly
turn their kitchens toward it. Only the blacksmith and the gas tanks are
hardy enough to face this nakedness of Mother Earth--they, and excellent
Pat Lemon, Marathon's humblest and blackest citizen, who contemplates
that rugged and honest beauty as he tills his garden on the land
abandoned by squeamish burghers. That is our Aceldama, our Potter's
Field, only approached by the athletic, who keep their eyes from
Nature's indiscretion by vigorous sets of tennis in the purple shadow of
the cliff.

Life is queerly inverted in Marathon. Nature has been so bullied and
repressed that she fawns about us timidly. No well-conducted suburban
shrubbery would think of assuming autumn tints before the ladies have
got into their fall fashions. Indeed none of our chaste trees will even
shed their leaves while any one is watching; and they crouch modestly in