When, for example, a neighbor approaches a
farmhouse on horseback he is asked not to "alight" or to "dismount" but to
"disembark," and he is invited not to "tie" his horse but to "moor" it. It
is as if they were still crying ever in their unconscious memories,
"Thalassa, Thalassa"; as if the very shells of speech still carried the
roar of the ocean which they who hold them to their ears have never seen.
If the language of the upper valley of the St. Lawrence and of the valley
of the Mississippi remembered as distinctly its origin we should
everywhere hear the plash of the oar in all the hospitality of their
settlements. But all such traces have disappeared, or all but disappeared,
in the Mississippi Valley. The only one that comes to me now, as possibly
of the old French days, is one which is preserved in an adage not at all
French but quite characteristic of the independent life that has occupied
the banks of all the rivers: "Paddle your own canoe." Yet even in the
space of one or two generations of agricultural life that, too, is
disappearing, supplanted by a synonymous phrase, borrowed of fields that
have entirely forgotten the primitive days, when men travelled only by
water and lived near the streams: "Hoe your own row.
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