The Call of the Cumberlands

George Lescott had known hospitality of many brands and degrees. He

had been the lionized celebrity in places of fashion. He had been the

guest of equally famous brother artists in the cities of two

hemispheres, and, since sincere painting had been his pole-star, he had

gone where his art's wanderlust beckoned. His most famous canvas,

perhaps, was his "Prayer Toward Mecca," which hangs in the

Metropolitan. It shows, with a power that holds the observer in a

compelling grip, the wonderful colors of a sunset across the desert.

One seems to feel the renewed life that comes to the caravan with the

welcome of the oasis. One seems to hear the grunting of the kneeling

camels and the stirring of the date palms. The Bedouins have spread

their prayer-rugs, and behind them burns the west. Lescott caught in

that, as he had caught in his mountain sketches, the broad spirit of

the thing. To paint that canvas, he had endured days of racking camel

-travel and burning heat and thirst. He had followed the lure of

transitory beauty to remote sections of the world. The present trip was

only one of many like it, which had brought him into touch with varying

peoples and distinctive types of life. He told himself that never had

he found men at once so crude and so courteous as these hosts, who,

facing personal perils, had still time and willingness to regard his

comfort.

They could not speak grammatically; they could hardly offer him the

necessities of life, yet they gave all they had, with a touch of

courtliness.

In a fabric soiled and threadbare, one may sometimes trace the

tarnished design that erstwhile ran in gold through a rich pattern.

Lescott could not but think of some fine old growth gone to seed and

decay, but still bearing at its crest a single beautiful blossom while

it held in its veins a poison.

Such a blossom was Sally. Her scarlet lips and sweet, grave eyes might

have been the inheritance gift of some remote ancestress whose feet,

instead of being bare and brown, had trod in high-heeled, satin

slippers. When Lord Fairfax governed the Province of Virginia, that

first Sally, in the stateliness of panniered brocades and powdered

hair, may have tripped a measure to the harpsichord or spinet. Certain

it is she trod with no more untrammeled grace than her wild descendant.

For the nation's most untamed and untaught fragment is, after all, an

unamalgamated stock of British and Scottish bronze, which now and then

strikes back to its beginning and sends forth a pure peal from its

corroded bell-metal. In all America is no other element whose blood is

so purely what the Nation's was at birth.