: Travels on the Amazon by Wallace Alfred Russel - Natural history Amazon River Valley; Amazon River Valley Description and travel; Indians of South America Amazon River Valley

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THE IDYL OF TWIN FIRES

I BUY A FARM ON SIGHT

I was sitting at a late hour in my room above the college Yard, correcting daily themes. I had sat at a late hour in my room above the college Yard, correcting daily themes, for it seemed an interminable number of years--was it six or seven? I had no great love for it, certainly. Some men who go into teaching, and of course all men who become great teachers, do have a genuine love for their work. But I am afraid I was one of those unfortunates who take up teaching as a stop-gap, a means of livelihood while awaiting "wider opportunities." These opportunities in my case were to be the authorship of an epoch-making novel, or a great drama, or some similar masterpiece. I had been accredited with "brilliant promise" in my undergraduate days, and the college had taken me into the English department upon graduation.

Well, that was seven years ago. I was still correcting daily themes.

It was a warm night in early April. I had a touch of spring fever, and wrote vicious, sarcastic comments on the poor undergraduate pages of unexpressiveness before me, as through my open windows drifted up from the Yard a snatch of song from some returning theatre party. Most of these themes were hopeless. Your average man has no sense of literature. Moreover, by the time he reaches college it is too late to teach him even common, idiomatic expressiveness. That ought to be done in the secondary schools--and isn't. I toiled on. Near the bottom of the pile came the signature, James Robinson. I opened the sheet with relief. He was one of the few in the class with the real literary instinct--a lad from some nearby New England village who went home over Sunday and brought back unconscious records of his changing life there. I enjoyed the little drama, for I, too, had come from a suburban village, and knew the first bitter awakening to its narrowness.

I opened the theme, and this is what I read:

"The April sun has come at last, and the first warmth of it lays a benediction on the spirit, even as it tints the earth with green. Our barn door, standing open, framed a picture this morning between walls of golden hay--the soft rolling fields, the fringe of woodland beyond veiled with a haze of budding life, and then the far line of the hills. A horse stamped in the shadows; a hen strolled out upon the floor, cooting softly; there was a warm, earthy smell in the air, the distant church bell sounded pleasantly over the fields, and up the road I heard the rattle of Uncle Amos's carryall, bearing the family to meeting. The strife of learning, the pride of the intellect, the academic urge--where were they? I found myself wandering out from the barnyard into the fields, filled with a great longing to hold a plow in the furrow till tired out, and then to lie on my back in the sun and watch the lazy clouds."

So Robinson had spring fever, too! How it makes us turn back home! I made some flattering comment or other on the paper , and put it with the rest. Then I fell to dreaming. Home! I, John Upton, academic bachelor, had no home, no parents, no kith nor kin. I had my study lined with books, my little monastic bedroom behind it, my college position, and a shabby remnant of my old ambitions. The soft "coot, coot" of a hen picking up grain on the old barn floor! I closed my eyes in delicious memory--memory of my grandfather's farm down in Essex County. The sweet call of the village church bell came back to me, the drone of the preacher, the smell of lilacs outside, the stamp of an impatient horse in the horse sheds where liniment for man and beast was advertised on tin posters!

"Why don't I go back to it, and give up this grind?" I thought. Then, being an English instructor, I added learnedly, "and be a disciple of Rousseau!"

But God, as the hymn remarks, works in a mysterious way His wonders to perform. Waking with my flicker of resolution quite gone out, I met my chief in the English department who quite floored me by asking me if I could find the extra time--"without interfering with my academic duties"--to be a reader for a certain publishing house which had just consulted him about filling a vacancy. I told him frankly that if I got the job I might give up my present post and buy a farm, but as he didn't think anybody could live on a manuscript reader's salary, he laughed and didn't believe me, and two days later I had the job. It would be a secret to disclose my salary, but to a man who had been an English instructor in an American college for seven years, it looked good enough. Then came the Easter vacation.

Professor Farnsworth, of the economics department, had invited me on a motor trip for the holidays.

"As the Cheshire cat said to Alice," he explained, "it doesn't matter which way you go, if you don't much care where you are going to; and we don't, do we?"

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