LETTERS FROM AN OREGON RANCH
are no “no trespassing” signs for the unarmed intruder. Here, too, we are free from “the tyranny of clothes.” If one feels a sudden longing for a walk in the fresh air, no careful street toilet need be made in fear of critical eyes, as in a city, where, Thoreau says, “the houses are so arranged, in lanes and fronting one another, that every traveller has to run the gauntlet, and every man, woman, and child gets a lick at him.” Here, with rubber overshoes added to the in-door toilet and a shawl thrown over the head, one is equipped for the woods and fields, no eye beholding save those of the beasts of the fields and the fowls of the air; and their eyes are kind, not critical. One year of this free life in the Oregon hills, untrammelled by conventionalities, is better than “fifty years of Europe,” and when I leave these glorious solitudes it will be to enter “that low green tent whose curtain never outward swings.”
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