Three Villages. William Dean Howells
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they are broken to walk very rapidly, and they have in perfection that gait which in the Southwest is called a lope. When they are first brought North they sell for prices ranging from $40 to $100. Their popularity has revived the sport, almost obsolete in the North, of horse-racing at Lexington, where I once saw a race between gentlemen riders, which had apparently called out the greater part of the population. We drove through miles of the small pine forest, which, growing up all over New England on the exhausted lands, gives such an impression of wildness; and came at last to a space in the woods where a track had been newly laid out in the white birch scrub, or newly recovered from it, and where we found everything prepared for the sport in due form. The riders gave us all the gayety of jockey dress, as well as the race, for our money; the ground was thronged with carriages and buggies; there was a tally-ho coach which had been driven out from Boston; and I went about bewildered at this transformation of my poor New England, and fearfully hoping there was nothing wicked in so much apparent enjoyment with no apparent useful purpose, till I heard myself indicated in a whisper as “one of the horsemen.” Then I desperately abandoned myself to the common dissipation, for it was idle to be better than one seemed.
These Texan horses, which are not quite the mustangs of the prairies, are ridden with high-pommelled, wooden-stirruped Mexican saddles; and when a party of young people dashed by the hotel in the twilight, it was with a picturesqueness which the pig-skin of Anglo-Saxon civilization fails to impart to a man. But let me not give the impression of mere pleasure-taking on the part of these cavaliers; they were students at law or medicine, or they were young men of business recreating themselves after the close application of a day in town; by and by, when they were married, they would content themselves with their cigars and their newspapers, and leave others to ride with pretty girls in the dusk of the eyening, or chase the flying tennis-ball on the whitewashed lawn. Except perhaps at Newport, or the New York clubs, one sees few men of leisure with us, and the example of these few is not one to make the Republic pine for that leisure class which the Old World finds indispensable to its government and refinement. Women of leisure we certainly have; they distinguish and adorn us everywhere, advancing (as we understand) the standard of dress abroad, and absorbing and diffusing ideas of taste and culture at home. Wherever the pianoforte penetrates, lovely woman lifts her fingers from the needle, the broom-handle, and the washboard, and places them on its keys, never again to be restored to those odious implements; she finds that she has a mind, and she makes her husband or her father pay for it; she begins to have aims, to draw, to model, to decorate, to lecture, and to render herself self-supporting by every expensive device. This alone is enough to keep the men of her family busy, and to prevent the commonwealth from lapsing into decay; the civic virtues fall naturally to the care of the trained patriots who are “inside politics” . . .
I perceive too late that by an infrangible chain of reasoning I have been proving that we too are governed and refined by a leisure class, and that there is only the trifling difference of sex between the American and the European aristocracies. At the same time I have got rather far away from Lexington, where life seemed to be still very unambitious and old-fashioned. I wish I could say that it was cheap; but this is not the case in the suburbs of any of our Atlantic cities. House rent is certainly less, but the railroad fares and the expressman's charges go far to equalize that with the city rate; about Boston the suburban taxes are sometimes greater than the city taxes; provisions and service are a little costlier, and unless one conforms quite strictly to the local standard of simplicity, one is apt to live quite as expensively as in town. It would cost as much to live with the same ease in Lexington as in Boston; that is to say, a third more than in London. But one is not obliged to live with “ease” there, and he may live in comfort for a reasonable sum. It struck me that the place had studied convenience scientifically, and that in a modest way it was entirely sufficient to itself, with its good schools, its admirable library, its well-kept streets and roads; its sociable little line of railroad connecting it with the city by ten or twelve trains a day; its well-stocked provision stores, and its variety of other shops. There cannot be many more than a thousand people in the village, including the Irish hamlet by the railroad side; but it is lighted with gas, and they are talking of water-works. I dare say they will soon have drainage and malaria.
The village of Lexington, however, is not one of those examples of rapid growth with which we like to astonish the world. I doubt if it can be more than twice as populous as when a hundred years ago it became the scene of the brief conflict which has made it memorable. Our hotel fronted the road along which the King's troops had marched in the twilight of the morning of April 19, 1775, and on which they retreated in the afternoon. The common where the encounter with the Provincials took place was but a minute's walk away, and with the relics of the library close at hand, we dwelt, as it were, in the midst of heroic memories. One pleasant forenoon, when the May had remitted its worst rigors, and nature was making the most, with birds and sunshine, of a respite from the east wind, we strolled up to the pretty green, and leaning upon the rail that encloses it, listened to the story of the fight from one who had all but been present in his careful and enthusiastic studies of its details.
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