English fiction -- 19th century; Short stories, English
The Professor took me out to see the sights, and lest I should be
further treated as a denominational missionary I wrapped myself in
tobacco smoke. This ensures respectful treatment at Chautauqua.
An amphitheatre capable of seating five thousand people is the
centre-point of the show. Here the lecturers lecture and the concerts
are held, and from here the avenues start. Each cottage is decorated
according to the taste of the owner, and is full of girls. The
verandahs are alive with them; they fill the sinuous walks; they hurry
from lecture to lecture, hatless, and three under one sunshade; they
retail little confidences walking arm-in-arm; they giggle for all the
world like uneducated maidens, and they walk about and row on the lake
with their very young men. The lectures are arranged to suit all
tastes. I got hold of one called "The Eschatology of Our Saviour." It
set itself to prove the length, breadth and temperature of Hell from
information garnered from the New Testament. I read it in the sunshine
under the trees, with these hundreds of pretty maidens pretending to
be busy all round; and it did not seem to match the landscape. Then
I studied the faces of the crowd. One-quarter were old and worn; the
balance were young, innocent, charming and frivolous. I wondered how
much they really knew or cared for the art side of Greek life, or the
Pope in the Middle Ages; and how much for the young men who walked with
them. Also what their ideas of Hell might be. We entered a place called
a museum (all the shows here are of an improving tendency), which had
evidently been brought together by feminine hands, so jumbled were the
exhibits. There was a facsimile of the Rosetta stone, with some printed
popular information; an Egyptian camel saddle, miscellaneous truck
from the Holy Land, another model of the same, photographs of Rome,
badly-blotched drawings of volcanic phenomena, the head of the pike
that John Brown took to Harper's Ferry that time his soul went marching
on, casts of doubtful value, and views of Chautauqua, all bundled
together without the faintest attempt at arrangement, and all very
badly labelled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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