here, either. But that don't seem to occur to them at the moment. We'll all stick together, of course.'
'I think I had best resign.' said I. 'You would find me no hand at pacifying a mother.'
'There are fathers also,' said Stuart. 'But individual parents are small trouble compared with a big split in public opinion. We've missed that so far, though.'
'Then why have judges? Why not a popular vote?' I inquired.
'Don't go back on us,' said Stuart. 'We are so few here. And you know education can't be democratic or where will good taste find itself? Eastman knows that much, at least.' And Stuart explained that Eastman was the head of the school and chairman of our committee. 'He is from Massachusetts, and his taste is good, but he is total abstinence. Won't allow any literature with the least smell of a drink in it, not even in the singing-class. Would not have 'Here's a health to King Charles' inside the door. Narrowing, that; as many of the finest classics speak of wine freely. Eastman is useful, but a crank. Now take 'Lochinvar.' We are to have it on strawberry night; but say! Eastman kicked about it. Told the kid to speak something else. Kid came to me, and I—'
A smile lurked for one instant in the corner of Stuart's eye, and disappeared again. Then he drew his arm through mine as we walked. 'You have never seen anything in your days like Sharon,' said he. 'You could not sit down by yourself and make such a thing up. Shakespeare might have, but he would have strained himself doing it. Well, Eastman says 'Lochinvar' will go in my expurgated version. Too bad Sir Walter cannot know. Ever read his Familiar Letters, Great grief! but he was a good man. Eastman stuck about that mention of wine. Remember? 'So now am I come with this lost love of mine To lead but one measure, drink one cup of wine.' 'Well,' thought I, 'Eastman would agree to water. Water and daughter would go, but is frequently used, and spoils the meter.' So I fiddled with my pencil down in the telegraph office, and I fixed the thing up. How's this? 'So now am I come with this beautiful maid To lead but one measure, drink one lemonade.'
Eastman accepts that. Says it's purer. Oh, it's not all sadness here!'
'How did you come to be in Sharon?' I asked my exotic acquaintance.
'Ah, how did I? How did all our crowd at the railroad? Somebody has got to sell tickets, somebody has got to run that hotel, and telegraphs have got to exist here. That's how we foreigners came. Many travellers change cars here, and one train usually misses the other, because the two companies do not love each other. You hear lots of language, especially in December. Eastern consumptives bound for southern California get left here, and drummers are also thick. Remarks range from 'How provoking!' to things I would not even say myself. So that big hotel and depot has to be kept running, and we fellows get a laugh now and then. Our lot is better than these people's.' He made a general gesture at Sharon.
'I should have thought it was worse,' said I. 'No, for we'll be transferred some day. These poor folks are shipwrecked. Though it is their own foolishness, all this.'
Again my eye followed as he indicated the town with a sweep of his hand; and from the town I looked to the four quarters of heaven. I may have seen across into Old Mexico. No sign labels the boundary; the vacuum of continent goes on, you might think, to Patagonia. Symptoms of neighboring Mexico basked on the sand heaps along Sharon's spacious avenues—little torpid, indecent gnomes in sashes and open rags, with crowning-steeple straw hats, and murder dozing in their small black eyes. They might have crawled from holes in the sand, or hatched out of brown cracked pods on some weeds that trailed through the broken bottles, the old shoes, and the wire fences. Outside these ramparts began the vacuum, white, gray, indigo, florescent, where all the year the sun shines. Not the semblance of any tree dances in the heat; only rocks and lumps of higher sand waver and dissolve and reappear in the shaking crystal of mirage. Not the scar of any river-bed furrows the void. A river there is, flowing somewhere out of the shiny violet mountains to the north, but it dies subterraneously on its way to Sharon, misses the town, and emerges thirty miles south across the sunlight in a shallow, futile lake, a cienaga, called Las Palomas. Then it evaporates into the ceaseless blue sky.
The water you get in Sharon is dragged by a herd of wind-wheels from the bowels of the sand. Over the town they turn and turn—Sharon's upper
