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The age of the wise, in those astonishing eighteen-seventies, was succeeded by the age of the epigram, when someone was always expected to say something witty, and it was passed on, like a sporting tip, through widening circles. Such sayings as "I can resist everything but temptation" were much sought after. Common sense became piquant if reversed, and the good, plain man disappeared in laughter.
She lies on a bedstead which bears every mark of being one of a standard chamber-set in the early eighteen-seventies, and about her stand her husband and her sons and daughters and their wives and husbands, in the fashions of that day.
It is imaginable of Harte that this temperament defended him from any bitterness in the disappointment he may have shared with that simple American public which in the early eighteen-seventies expected any and everything of him in fiction and drama.
Hence it was that I found myself one day towards the end of the eighteen-seventies in a cell in the old Brompton Oratory arguing with Father Addis, who had been called by one of his flock to attempt my conversion to Roman Catholicism. The universe exists, said the father: somebody must have made it. If that somebody exists, said I, somebody must have made him.
I was named Judson, which had been my mother's name before she was married, so I was called Jud Pitcher; and when I was ten years old I knew every horse for a dozen miles around, and most of the dogs. It was September 16th, in the late eighteen-seventies, that I first clapped eyes on Track's End, in the Territory of Dakota. The name of the place has since been changed.
It is many years now since the American Girl began to engage the consciousness of the American novelist. Before the expansive period following the Civil War, in the later eighteen-sixties and the earlier eighteen-seventies, she had of course been his heroine, unless he went abroad for one in court circles, or back for one in the feudal ages.
Athenian and Florentine and Versailles types of political despotism have all proved highly favorable to the lucubrations of philosophers and men of letters who enjoyed the despot's approbation. For that matter, no scheme of life was ever better suited to meditation than an Indian reservation in the eighteen-seventies, with a Great Father in Washington to furnish blankets, flour, and tobacco.
It is imaginable of Harte that this temperament defended him from any bitterness in the disappointment he may have shared with that simple American public which in the early eighteen-seventies expected any and everything of him in fiction and drama.
James Ford Rhodes will explain to us American life as it was during the administrations of Jefferson or in the eighteen-fifties. Professor Turner will expound the significance of the frontier in American history. Mr. Henry James will portray with unrivalled psychological insight the Europeanized American of the eighteen-seventies and eighties.
No doubt people go to those places yet, but Florindo and Lindora have not been to any of them for so many summers that they can hardly realize them as still open: for them they were closed in the earliest of the eighteen-seventies.
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