human
I worried through that war without a scratch. We got wary towards the end, and let the bullets drop into trunks of trees for choice. And when it was over, I was five-and-thirty, and had to begin the world again. But I was used to it.
gpt
And you enjoyed a wandering life?
human
Yes, I believe I did enjoy barking up a new tree. There's a breed of Americans who can't keep still. I belong to that breed. We do not like to sit by a river and watch the water flow; we get tired livin' in the village lookin' in each other's faces while the seasons come round like the hands of a clock. There's a mixture among us of Dutch and German and English to sit quiet and till the ground. They get their heels well grounded in the clay, and there they stick.
gpt
Where do you get it from, the wandering blood?
human
There air folk among us, he whispered,
gpt
Who hold that we are descended from the Ten Tribes. I don't say those folk are right, but I do say that it sometimes looks powerful like as if they were. Descended from the Ten Tribes, they say, and miraculously kept separate from the English among whom they lived. Lost their own language--which, if it was Hebrew, I take it was rather a good thing to be quit of--and speakin' English, like the rest. What were the tribes? Wanderers, mostly. Father Abraham went drivin' his cows and his camels up and down the country. Isaac went around on the rove, and Jacob couldn't sit still. Very well, then. Didn't their children walk about, tryin' one location after another, for forty years, and always feelin' after a bit as if there must be a softer plank farther on? And when they'd be settled down for a few hundred years, didn't they get up and disappear altogether? Mark you, they _didn't want_ to settle. And where are the Ten Tribes now? For they never went back; you may look Palesteen through and through, and nary a tribe.
human
Our folk, who have mostly gut religion, point to themselves. They say; 'Look at us; we air the real original Wanderers.' Look at us all over the world. What are the hotels full of? Full of Americans. We are everywhere. We eat up the milk and the honey, and we tramp off on ramble again. But there's more points of gen'ral resemblance. We like bounce and bunkum; so did those people down in Syria; we like to pile up the dollars; so did the Jews; they liked to set up their kings and pull them down again; we pursue the same generous and confiding policy with our presidents; and if they were stiff-necked and backsliding, we are as stiff-necked and backsliding as any generation among all the lot.
gpt
A very good case, indeed,
human
I did not think so, sir, till lately. But it's been borne in upon me with the weight and force that can't be resisted, and I believe it now. The lost Ten Tribes, gentlemen, air now located in the United States. I am certain of it from my own case. Do any of you think--I put it to you seriously--that such an inseck as the Golden Butterfly would have been thrown away upon an outsider? It is likely that such all-fired Luck as mine would have been wasted on a man who didn't belong to the Chosen People? No, sir; I am of the children of Israel; and I freeze to that.
gpt
Animum pictura pascit inani.