smoke
three-quarters of it in a drenching rain.

For many years America was to me a sort of promised land; "westward the
march of empire holds its way"; the race is for the moment to the young;
what has been and what is we imperfectly and obscurely know; what is to
be yet lies beyond the flight of our imaginations. Greece, Rome, and
Judaea are gone by for ever, leaving to generations the legacy of their
accomplished work; China still endures, an old-inhabited house in the
brand-new city of nations; England has already declined, since she has
lost the States; and to these States, therefore, yet undeveloped, full
of dark possibilities, and grown, like another Eve, from one rib out of
the side of their own old land, the minds of young men in England turn
naturally at a certain hopeful period of their age. It will be hard for
an American to understand the spirit. But let him imagine a young man,
who shall have grown up in an old and rigid circle, following bygone
fashions and taught to distrust his own fresh instincts, and who now
suddenly hears of a family of cousins, all about his own age, who keep
house together by themselves and live far from restraint and tradition;
let him imagine this, and he will have some imperfect notion of the
sentiment with which spirited English youths turn to the thought of the
American Republic. It seems to them as if, out west, the war of life was
still conducted in the open air, and on free barbaric terms; as if it
had not yet been narrowed into parlours, nor begun to be conducted, like
some unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise, costume, forms of
procedure, and sad, senseless self-denial. Which of these two he
prefers, a man with any youth still left in him will decide rightly for
himself. He would rather be houseless than denied a pass-key; rather go
without food than partake of a stalled ox in stiff, respectable society;
rather be shot out of hand than direct his life according to the
dictates of the world.

He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws, the Puritan sourness, the
fierce, sordid appetite for dollars, or the dreary existence of country
towns. A few wild story-books which delighted his childhood form the
imaginative basis of his picture of America. In course of time, there is
added to this a great crowd of stimulating details--vast cities that
grow up as by enchantment; the birds, that have gone south in autumn,
returning with the spring to find thousands camped upo