A Western Eden
You give up your home at the East, you bid good-bye to your old neighbors, and take the train, and after many days’ journey you arrive at a quiet depot, from which you take a wagon thirty miles through the wilderness, and reach your new place. You see a man seated on a wet log, in a swamp, and shaking with the fifteenth attack of chills and fever, and ask him who he is. He says: “I am a real estate agent, having in charge the property around here.” You ask him where the new depot is. He tells you that it has not yet been built, but no doubt will be if the company get their bill for the track through the next legislature. You ask him where the new city is laid out. He says, with chattering teeth: “If you will wait till this chill is off, I will show it to you on the map I have in my pocket.” You ask him where the capitalists are going to build their fine houses, and he says: “Somewhere along those lowlands out there by those woods, when the water has been drained off.” That night you sleep in the hut of the real estate agent, and though you pray for everybody else, you do not pray for me. Being more fortunate than many men who go out in such circumstances, you have money enough to get back, and you come to me, and out of breath in your indignation, you say: “You have swindled me out of everything. What do you mean in deceiving me about that Western property?” “Oh,” I reply, “that was all right; that was sentimentalism, and romance, and a joke. That’s the way they all talk!”
But more excusable would I be in such deception than you, O man, who by glow of words and personal magnetism induced a womanly soul into surroundings which you have taken no care to make attractive, so that she exchanged her father’s house for the dismal swamp of married experience—treeless, flowerless, shelterless, comfortless and godless. I would not be half so much to blame in cheating you out of a farm as you in cheating a woman out of the happiness of a lifetime.