It is a gash of civilisation across the face of the
wilderness, and, like most deformities, it is displeasing to the eye.
Walking under such conditions is not stimulative. I miss the sense of
space and freedom I get in the streets of New York, where I know that I
can walk twenty miles north or twenty miles east without interference or
inconvenience. Give me either a mountain-top or Broadway. Suburban
vistas are pitifully cramped.
That day it had rained, and I should have been additionally glad to stay
indoors. But Mrs. Harrington is a fervent naturalist, and she insisted
on taking me out to look at the wild flowers and listen to the
bird-calls. Both of these branches of nature-study, I am convinced, call
for an intensity of sympathetic imagination that I am incapable of
developing; and especially the bird-calls. Concerning the latter, I
feel sure that a great deal of humbug is being said and written. I mean
to cast no reflections upon Harrington or his wife. The only occasions
on which I have known Harrington to deviate from the truth have been, as
I have already pointed out, in connection with his train-schedules.
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