CORRESPONDENCE.
THE LLTXURY OF LOAFING.
[FROM A CORRESPONDENT.]
Rugby, Tennessee, September dOta. I TARE it I must have "written you frequent" (as they say here), at this time of year, in the last quarter-century on this theme, but, if you let me, should like to go back once more on the old lines. "Loafing as she should be taken" is likely, I fear, to become a lost art, though to my generation it is the one luxury. A country without good loafing-places is no longer a country for a self-respecting man in his second half-century. The rapid deterioration of our poor dear old England in this respect fills me with forebodings far more than the Irish Question, which we shall worry through on the lines so staunchly advocated by yon.
No fear of that, to my thinking ; but, alas ! great fear of our losing the power and the means of loafing. Time was when John Bull, in his own isle, was the best loafer in Christendom —(I may say in the world, the Turk and Otaheitan loafer doing nothing else, and he who does nothing but loaf loses the whole flavour of it)—and I can remember the time when at the seaside —for instance, Cromer, and inland, Betwys-y-Coed, Penygurd, and the like—the true loafer might be happy, gleaning "the harvest of a quiet eye," and far from any one who wanted to go anywhere or do anything in particular. The railway has come
to Cromer, and I hear that the guardian phalanx of Bructons, Hoares, Gurneys, and Barclays, all good loafers in the last generation, have thrown up the sponge and gone with the stream. I was at Betwys and Penygnrd last year, and at the former there were three or four long pleasure. vane meeting every train ; at the latter, three parties came in, in a few hours, to do Snowdon and get back to dinner at Capel Curig or Bethgellert. Indeed, I was sore to mark that even Henry Owen, landlord and guide, once a good loafer, has suc- cumbed. Over here it is still worse in the Atlantic States ; but this is a big country, in which oases must be left yet for many a long year for the loafer, of which this is one. It lies on a moun- tain plateau, seven miles from the station, to which a back goes twice daily to meet the morning and evening mails (once too often, perhaps, for the highest enjoyment of the loafer) ; but otherwise the outer world, its fidgets and its businesses, no more concern us than they did Cooper's jackdaw. I am conscious that regular work here must be done by some one, as daily meals at 7 a.m., and 12.10 and 6 p.m., never fail, with abundance of grapes and melons—the peaches, alas! were out off by frosts when the trees were in blossom. Bat beyond this, and the presence of a young Englishman in this house, who, in blue shirt and trousers, tends and milks the cows, and puts in six or eight hours' work a day at one thing or another in the neighbouring fields, there is nothing to remind one that this world doesn't go on by itself, at any rate in these autumn days. Almost every cottage, or shanty, as they call these attractive wooden houses, has a deep verandah (from which you get a view, over the forest, of the Southern range of mountains, with Pilot Knob for highest point), and, in the verandah, rocking-chairs and hammocks, in one or other of which a chatty host or hostess is almost sure to be found, enjoying air, view, rocking, and the indescribable depth of blue atmosphere which laps us all round. There is surely something very uplifting in finding the sky twice as far off as you know it at home. I felt this first on the Lower Danube and in Greece; but I doubt if Bulgarian or Greek heavens are as high as these. Every now and again, a merry group of young folk go by in waggon or on horseback ; but even they are loafers, as they have no object in view beyond enjoying one another's company, and possibly lunch or tea at the junction of the two mountain- streams, the only lion we have within a day's journey. Their parents may be found for the most part in and round the hotel, for they are wise enough to let the young ones knock about very much as they please, while they take their own ease in the verandahs or shady grounds of "The Tabard." That hostelry of historic name stands on an eminence next to this shanty, and my "loaf-brothers," when I get any, are generally saunterers from amongst its guests, and the one who comes ofteuest is perhaps the best loafer I have ever come across. He is a rancheman on the Rio Grande, and has been out here ever since he left Marlborough, some fourteen years ago. Since then I should think he has done as hard work as any man, in the long drives of two thousand miles which he used to make from Southern Texas up to Colorado or Kansas, before the railway came. Even now, I take it that for ten months in the year he covers more ground and exhausts more tissue than most men, which makes him such a model loafer when he gets away. Yesterday, for in- stance, he started after lunch from "The Tabard," three hundred yards off, under a sort of engagement, as definite as we make them, to spend the afternoon here. On the way he came across a hammock swinging unoccupied in the hotel grounds, and a volume of " Pendennis," and only arrived here after supper, in the superb starlight (the moon is objectionably late in rising just now), to smoke a pipe before bed-time. His experience of Western life is as racy as a volume of Bret Harte. Take the following, for instance :—At a prairie-town not far from his ranche, as distances go in the West, there is a State Court of First Instance, presided over by one Roy Bean, J.P., who is also the owner of the principal grocery. Some cowboys had been drinking at the grocery one night, with the result that one of them remained on the floor, but with sense enough left to lie on the side of the pocket where he kept his dollars. In the morning, it appeared that he had been "rolled "—Anglick turned over and his pocket picked—whereupon a Court was called to try a man on whom suspicion rested. Roy Bean sat on a barrel, swore in a jury, and then addressed the prisoner thus,—" Now, you give that man his money back." The culprit, who had sent for the lawyer of the place to defend him, hesitated for a moment, and then pulled out the money. "You treat this crowd," were Roy's next words ; and while "drinks round" were handed to the delighted cowboys at the prisoner's expense, Roy pulled out his watch and went on,—" You've got just five minutes to clear out of this town, and if ever you come in again, we'll hang you." The culprit made off just as his lawyer came up, who remonstrated with Roy, explaining that the proper coarse would have been to have heard the charge, committed the prisoner, and sent him to the county town for trial. "And go off sixty miles, and hang round with the boys [witnesses] for you to pull the skunk through and touch the dollars !" said Roy, scornfully ; whereupon the lawyer disappeared in pursuit of his client and unpaid fee.
It occurs to one to ask how much of the litigation of England might be saved if Judges of First Instance might open with Roy's formula,—" Now, you give that man his money back." I am bound to add that his practice is not without its seamy side. When the railway was making, two men came in from one of the gangs for a warrant. A brutal murder had been committed. Roy told his clerk (the boy in the grocery, he being no penman himself), to make out the paper, asking,—" Wot's the corpse's name ?" "Li Hong," was the reply. "Hold on !" shouted Roy to his clerk ; and then to the pursuers,—" Ef you ken find anything in them books," pointing to the two or three supplied by the State, "about kiln' a Chinaman, it ken go," and the pursuers had to travel on to the next fount of justice.
Please find room for one more, and I will promise to cut my next shorter. My " loaf-brother " heard it himself as he was leaving Texas, and laughed at it nearly all the way up. A group of cowboys at the station were discussing the problem of bow long the world would last if this drowth went on, the prevailing sentiment being that they would rather it worrated through somehow. A cowboy down on his luck here struck in,—" Wall, if the angel stood right thar," pointing across the room, "ready to sound, and looked across at me, I'd jest
say, Gabe 1 toot your old horn r " VACIIIM VIATOR.
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