Such experiences must influence a child
born to them. A sandy soil, where nothing flourishes but weeds and evil
beasts of small dimensions, must breed different qualities in its human
offspring from one of those fat and fertile spots which the wit whom I
have once before noted described so happily that, if I quoted the
passage, its brilliancy would spoil one of my pages, as a diamond
breastpin sometimes kills the social effect of the wearer, who might have
passed for a gentleman without it. Your arid patch of earth should seem
to the natural birthplace of the leaner virtues and the abler vices,--of
temperance and the domestic proprieties on the one hand, with a tendency
to light weights in groceries and provisions, and to clandestine
abstraction from the person on the other, as opposed to the free
hospitality, the broadly planned burglaries, and the largely conceived
homicides of our rich Western alluvial regions. Yet Nature is never
wholly unkind. Economical as she was in my unparadised Eden, hard as it
was to make some of my floral houris unveil, still the damask roses
sweetened the June breezes, the bladed and plumed flower-de-luces
unfolded their close-wrapped cones, and larkspurs and lupins, lady's
delights,--plebeian manifestations of the pansy,--self-sowing marigolds,
hollyhocks, the forest flowers of two seasons, and the perennial lilacs
and syringas,--all whispered to' the winds blowing over them that some
caressing presence was around me.
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