Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town Stephen Leacock (ready to read books TXT) đ
- Author: Stephen Leacock
Book online «Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town Stephen Leacock (ready to read books TXT) đ». Author Stephen Leacock
Mr. Smith, of course, said nothing. He didnât have toâ ânot for four yearsâ âand he knew it.
XII LâEnvoi. The Train to MariposaIt leaves the city every day about five oâclock in the evening, the train for Mariposa.
Strange that you did not know of it, though you come from the little townâ âor did, long years ago.
Odd that you never knew, in all these years, that the train was there every afternoon, puffing up steam in the city station, and that you might have boarded it any day and gone home. No, not âhomeââ âof course you couldnât call it âhomeâ now; âhomeâ means that big red sandstone house of yours in the costlier part of the city. âHomeâ means, in a way, this Mausoleum Club where you sometimes talk with me of the times that you had as a boy in Mariposa.
But of course âhomeâ would hardly be the word you would apply to the little town, unless perhaps, late at night, when youâd been sitting reading in a quiet corner somewhere such a book as the present one.
Naturally you donât know of the Mariposa train now. Years ago, when you first came to the city as a boy with your way to make, you knew of it well enough, only too well. The price of a ticket counted in those days, and though you knew of the train you couldnât take it, but sometimes from sheer homesickness you used to wander down to the station on a Friday afternoon after your work, and watch the Mariposa people getting on the train and wish that you could go.
Why, you knew that train at one time better, I suppose, than any other single thing in the city, and loved it too for the little town in the sunshine that it ran to.
Do you remember how when you first began to make money you used to plan that just as soon as you were rich, really rich, youâd go back home again to the little town and build a great big house with a fine verandahâ âno stint about it, the best that money could buy, planed lumber, every square foot of it, and a fine picket fence in front of it.
It was to be one of the grandest and finest houses that thought could conceive; much finer, in true reality, than that vast palace of sandstone with the porte-cochĂšre and the sweeping conservatories that you afterwards built in the costlier part of the city.
But if you have half forgotten Mariposa, and long since lost the way to it, you are only like the greater part of the men here in this Mausoleum Club in the city. Would you believe it that practically every one of them came from Mariposa once upon a time, and that there isnât one of them that doesnât sometimes dream in the dull quiet of the long evening here in the club, that some day he will go back and see the place.
They all do. Only theyâre half ashamed to own it.
Ask your neighbour there at the next table whether the partridge that they sometimes serve to you here can be compared for a moment to the birds that he and you, or he and someone else, used to shoot as boys in the spruce thickets along the lake. Ask him if he ever tasted duck that could for a moment be compared to the black ducks in the rice marsh along the Ossawippi. And as for fish, and fishingâ âno, donât ask him about that, for if he ever starts telling you of the chub they used to catch below the mill dam and the green bass that used to lie in the water-shadow of the rocks beside the Indianâs Island, not even the long dull evening in this club would be long enough for the telling of it.
But no wonder they donât know about the five oâclock train for Mariposa. Very few people know about it. Hundreds of them know that there is a train that goes out at five oâclock, but they mistake it. Ever so many of them think itâs just a suburban train. Lots of people that take it every day think itâs only the train to the golf grounds, but the joke is that after it passes out of the city and the suburbs and the golf grounds, it turns itself little by little into the Mariposa train, thundering and pounding towards the north with hemlock sparks pouring out into the darkness from the funnel of it.
Of course you canât tell it just at first. All those people that are crowding into it with golf clubs, and wearing knickerbockers and flat caps, would deceive anybody. That crowd of suburban people going home on commutation tickets and sometimes standing thick in the aisles, those are, of course, not Mariposa people. But look round a little bit and youâll find them easily enough. Here and there in the crowd those people with the clothes that are perfectly all right and yet look odd in some way, the women with the peculiar hats and theâ âwhat do you say?â âlast yearâs fashions? Ah yes, of course, that must be it.
Anyway, those are the Mariposa people all right enough. That man with the two-dollar panama and the glaring spectacles is one of the greatest judges that
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