"I cannot precisely agree with you," said Clifford, courteously bowing
to the old gentleman, and at once taking up the clew of conversation
which the latter had proffered. "It had just occurred to me, on the
contrary, that this admirable invention of the railroad--with the vast
and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and
convenience--is destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and
fireside, and substitute something better."
"In the name of common-sense," asked the old gentleman rather testily,
"what can be better for a man than his own parlor and chimney-corner?"
"These things have not the merit which many good people attribute to
them," replied Clifford. "They may be said, in few and pithy words, to
have ill served a poor purpose. My impression is, that our wonderfully
increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to
bring us around again to the nomadic state. You are aware, my dear
sir,--you must have observed it in your own experience,--that all human
progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful
figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going
straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new
position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried
and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and
perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy
of the present and the future. To apply this truth to the topic now
under discussion. In the early epochs of our race, men dwelt in
temporary huts, of bowers of branches, as easily constructed as a
bird's-nest, and which they built,--if it should be called building,
when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made
with hands,--which Nature, we will say, assisted them to rear where
fruit abounded, where fish and game were plentiful, or, most
especially, where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier
shade than elsewhere, and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood,
and hill. This life possessed a charm which, ever since man quitted
it, has vanished from existence. And it typified something better than
itself. It had its drawbacks; such as hunger and thirst, inclement
weather, hot sunshine, and weary and foot-blistering marches over
barren and ugly tracts, that lay between the sites desirable for their
fertility and beauty. But in our ascending spiral, we escape all this.
These railroads--could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble
and the jar got rid of--are positively the greatest blessing that the
ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the
toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being
so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why,
therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily
be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life
in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as
easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,--in a better sense, wherever the
fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?"