Ever
been in Bethlehem?"
We all had to own our neglect of this piece of travel; and Newton, after
a moment of silent forgiveness, said:
"Well, I don't know how it is now, but twenty-five or thirty years ago
it was the most interesting town in America. It wasn't the old Moravian
community that it had been twenty-five years before that, when none but
Moravians could buy property there; but it was like the Sun Hotel, and
just as that had grown round and over the old Sun Inn, the prosperous
manufacturing town, with its iron-foundries and zinc-foundries, and all
the rest of it, had grown round and over the original Moravian village.
If you wanted a breath of perfect strangeness, with an American quality
in it at the same time, you couldn't have gone to any place where you
could have had it on such terms as you could in Bethlehem. I can't begin
to go into details, but one thing was hearing German spoken everywhere
in the street: not the German of Germany, but the Pennsylvania German,
with its broad vowels and broken-down grammatical forms, and its English
vocables and interjections, which you caught in the sentences which came
to you, like _av coorse_, and _yes_ and _no_ for _ja_ and _nein_.
Pages:
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239