"Шервуд Андерсен. Белый бедняк (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

fishing shack by the Mississippi River, Bidwell had already emerged out of
the hardships of pioneer days. On the farms that lay in the wide valley to
the north the timber had been cut away and the stumps had all been rooted
out of the ground by a generation of men that had passed. The soil was easy
to cultivate and had lost little of its virgin fertility. Two railroads,
the Lake Shore and Michigan Central--later a part of the great New York
Central System--and a less important coal-carrying road, called the
Wheeling and Lake Erie, ran through the town. Twenty-five hundred people
lived then in Bidwell. They were for the most part descendants of the
pioneers who had come into the country by boat through the Great Lakes or
by wagon roads over the mountains from the States of New York and
Pennsylvania.

The town stood on a sloping incline running up from the river, and the Lake
Shore and Michigan Central Railroad had its station on the river bank at
the foot of Main Street. The Wheeling Station was a mile away to the north.
It was to be reached by going over a bridge and along a piked road that
even then had begun to take on the semblance of a street. A dozen houses
had been built facing Turner's Pike and between these were berry fields and
an occasional orchard planted to cherry, peach or apple trees. A hard path
went down to the distant station beside the road, and in the evening this
path, wandering along under the branches of the fruit trees that extended
out over the farm fences, was a favorite walking place for lovers.

The small farms lying close about the town of Bidwell raised berries that
brought top prices in the two cities, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, reached by
its two railroads, and all of the people of the town who were not engaged
in one of the trades--in shoe making, carpentry, horse shoeing, house
painting or the like--or who did not belong to the small merchant and
professional classes, worked in summer on the land. On summer mornings,
men, women and children went into the fields. In the early spring when
planting went on and all through late May, June and early July when berries
and fruit began to ripen, every one was rushed with work and the streets
of the town were deserted. Every one went to the fields. Great hay wagons
loaded with children, laughing girls, and sedate women set out from Main
Street at dawn. Beside them walked tall boys, who pelted the girls with
green apples and cherries from the trees along the road, and men who went
along behind smoking their morning pipes and talking of the prevailing
prices of the products of their fields. In the town after they had gone a
Sabbath quiet prevailed. The merchants and clerks loitered in the shade of
the awnings before the doors of the stores, and only their wives and the
wives of the two or three rich men in town came to buy and to disturb their
discussions of horse racing, politics and religion.

In the evening when the wagons came home, Bidwell awoke. The tired berry
pickers walked home from the fields in the dust of the roads swinging their
dinner pails. The wagons creaked at their heels, piled high with boxes of
berries ready for shipment. In the stores after the evening meal crowds
gathered. Old men lit their pipes and sat gossiping along the curbing at
the edge of the sidewalks on Main Street; women with baskets on their arms