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It was an important-looking village, with a fine old church and large churchyard in the heart of it, and two or three large brick-and-stone homesteads, with well-walled orchards and ornamental weathercocks, standing close upon the road, and lifting more imposing fronts than the rectory, which peeped from among the trees on the other side of the churchyard: a village which showed at once the summits of its social life, and told the practised eye that there was no great park and manor-house in the vicinity, but that there were several chiefs in Raveloe who could farm badly quite at their ease, drawing enough money from their bad farming, in those war times, to live in a rollicking fashion, and keep a jolly Christmas, Whitsun, and Easter tide.
She looked downward and outward upon one of those New York side streets that is precisely like forty other New York side streets: two unbroken lines of high-shouldered, narrow-chested brick-and-stone houses, rising in abrupt, straight cliffs; at the bottom of the canyon a narrow river of roadway with manholes and conduit covers dotting its channel intermittently like scattered stepping stones; and on either side wide, flat pavements, as though the stream had fallen to low-water mark and left bare its shallow banks.
The brick-and-stone court-house and jail and brightly painted Indian council-house and cottages rose in strong contrast against the green forest. Nearer the lake shore, in isolated dignity across a mile of common, stood Fort George, a dilapidated structure with wooden palisades and bastions.
Colonel Fiske, so far from slackening his pace to help his young guests out of their predicament, laughed loudly and cracked his whip over the horses' ears. They went up the long, curving driveway like a whirlwind, and drew up under the porte-cochère of a very large brick-and-stone house with another abrupt jerk which upset those in the sleigh who had succeeded in regaining their seats.
These brick-and-stone houses are the trenches. They may be hard to take. But back of them lies the country, and it's the country that's worth while. You found it over on the other side of the ward. For me don't mind if I haven't found it just yet." "Ain't you happy, sis?" says he. "No," says she, quiet like; "I'm not." He pats her on the back. "Get out of doors," says he.
There was houses there a row of them, all big, all of stone or brick; houses as big as the penitentiary in Wyoming and about as cheerful. We stopped right in front of a big brick-and-stone house, which had trees and flower beds and hedges all along; and says she: "Curly, how would you like to live in a house like that?"
For blocks the buildings lined off on either side, low, flimsy and hastily constructed mining-camp architecture, that gave way at abrupt intervals to tall and sightly brick-and-stone structures, built for the future metropolis rather than for the present camp.
Mounting the second rise, he saw another whom he knew. A quarter of a mile to his left, on the tiny porch of a lone adobe, sat Skeet under a hat, feet elevated to the porch railing, head turned in a listening attitude, as though heeding a call, or many calls, from the direction of a brick-and-stone structure to the southwest.
Here is an infinite brick-and-stone forest, stern, angular, almost leafless. Here is a vast, indistinguishable wilderness of flitting human shapes, not one of which takes half so much notice of you as a wild bush would. Speak to one; it answers without the slightest emotion, and passes on.
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