Do not fear that I shall corner you to make you listen to a tale of woe. The truth is that I often feel, in all sincerity, exceedingly sorry for you poor unfortunates who must listen to all the small talk and the skim-milk of conversation.
“I saw a smith stand with his hammer—thus, The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool, With open mouth swallowing a tailor’s news!”
It is so long since I have been able to chatter and play with words that I forget what people talk about. Some of them at least seem to have talked their tongues loose from their brains. I often ask intelligent people after this chatter what it was all about, and whether their brains were really working as they babbled on. Not one in ten can give any good reason for the conversation or remember twenty words of it. Do you wonder that we of the silence, seeing this waste of words, pick up our strong and enduring book and wander away with the great undying characters of history, rather thankful that we are not as other men, condemned to waste good time on such trivial exercise of ears and tongues?
That is the way we like to think about it, but there is a worm in this philosophy after all. I have reasoned things out in this way fifty times; the logic seems perfect, and yet my mind works back from my book to the story of John Armstrong and his New England farm.
John was a seedling, rooted in one of those Vermont hill farms. The Psalmist tells of a man who is like “a tree planted by the rivers of water”; such a tree puts its roots down until it becomes well-nigh impossible to pull them out of the earth. There had been a mortgage howling at the Armstrong door for generations. Not much beside family pride can be grown on these hillsides, and John would have spent his life cultivating it to the end, if his lungs hadn’t given out. The country doctor put it to him straight; it was stay on the hills and die, or go to the Western desert and probably live. In some way the love of life proved strongest. John bequeathed his share of the family pride to brother Henry and went to Arizona. There he lost the use of one lung, but filled his pockets with money. He secured a great tract of desert land, and one day the engineers turned the course of a mountain stream and spread it over John’s land. At home in Vermont the little streams tumbled down hill, played with a few mill wheels, gave drink to a few cows and sheep, and played on until they reached the river, to be finally lost in the ocean. In Arizona the river caused the desert to bloom with Alfalfa, and wheat, and orchards, thus turning the sand to gold.