Hallett Phillips
himself, who managed the party loved to play Indian hunter
without hunting so much as a fieldmouse; Iddings the geologist
was reduced to shooting only for the table, and the guileless
prattle of Billy Hofer alone taught the simple life. Compared
with the Rockies of 1871, the sense of wildness had vanished; one
saw no possible adventures except to break one's neck as in
chasing an aniseed fox. Only the more intelligent ponies scented
an occasional friendly and sociable bear.
When the party came out of the Yellowstone, Adams went on alone
to Seattle and Vancouver to inspect the last American railway
systems yet untried. They, too, offered little new learning, and
no sooner had he finished this debauch of Northwestern geography
than with desperate thirst for exhausting the American field, he
set out for Mexico and the Gulf, making a sweep of the Caribbean
and clearing up, in these six or eight months, at least twenty
thousand miles of American land and water.
He was beginning to think, when he got back to Washington in
April, 1895, that he knew enough about the edges of life --
tropical islands, mountain solitudes, archaic law, and retrograde
types. Infinitely more amusing and incomparably more picturesque
than civilization, they educated only artists, and, as one's
sixtieth year approached, the artist began to die; only a certain
intense cerebral restlessness survived which no longer responded
to sensual stimulants; one was driven from beauty to beauty as
though art were a trotting-match.
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